Best Of Quora - 2012 45e18

in the brain? But what does it even mean to ask where "curiosity" is in the brain? What would an answer look like? According to one article: In study after study, scientists have found that the striatum lit up like an inferno of activity when people didn’t know exactly what was going to happen next, when they were on the verge of solving their mystery and hoped to be rewarded — it was more active then, in fact, than when people received their reward and had their curiosity satisfied. (http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/ article/item/wired_to_wonder/)

"So," you may ask, "what's wrong with that answer? That 219

seems reasonable and sound and very sciencey!" You just got brain-mesmerized! I can prove, with one statement, that this answer is wrong (if you're impatient, jump to point 2 at the bottom). So what is wrong with this explanation (he says, finally getting to the damned point)? I'll break both of these points down in detail later. 1. The question is phrased in such a way that it presumes

that "curiosity" is a singular thing. 2. The question presumes that a complex behavior or emo-

tion can be localized to a brain region or regions. There are several philosophical pitfalls packaged into the answer, such as the ontological commitment to the narrative of cognitive neuroscience and the cerebral localization of function. To be clear, what I'm not saying is that behaviors aren't in the brain. What I am saying is that the cerebral localization narrative is too simplistic. Let me break down these points. 1. Is curiosity a singular thing ? When you ask "where is curiosity in the brain," you assume that researchers can somehow isolate curiosity from other emotions and behaviors in a lab and dissect it apart. This is very, very difficult, if not impossible. Neuroimaging (almost always) relies on the notion of cognitive subtraction, which is a way of comparing your behavior or emotion of interest (curiosity) against some baseline state that is not curiosity. Or, as I say in my book chapter from The Mind and the Frontal Lobes: The underlying assumption in these studies is that activity in brain networks alters in a task-dependent manner that becomes evident after averaging many event-related responses and comparing those against a baseline condition. Deviations from this baseline reflect a change in the neuronal processing demands required to perform the task of interest.

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2. Can curiosity be localized to one brain region ? No, it cannot. Here's how I know: I've personally worked with people who have a severely damaged striatum. Know what? They still have curiostiy. If the striatum is where curiosity is in the brain, how can someone whose striata are gone still have curiosty? They cannot. Yet they do. Poof. Hypothesis disproved. Imagine asking, "Where is video located in my computer?" That doesn't make any sense. Your monitor is required to see the video. Your graphics card is required to render the video. The software is required to generate the code for the video. But the "video" isn't located anywhere in the computer. Now there's a subtlety here. It may be that people with damaged striata have curiosity impairments (whatever that means), which would agree with the fMRI study discussed in that link above, but it proves that the striatum is not where curiosity is in the brain. More technically: the striatum may be a critical part of a network of brain regions that curiosity behaviors, but that is different from saying that the striatum is where curiosity is. Or, as I say in my chapter: The cognitive subtraction method . . . provide[s] details of functional localization that can then be tested and corroborated using other methodologies, including lesion studies. The interpretation of these localization results is confounded, however, by a lack of clarity in what is meant for a "function" to be localized. For example, Young and colleagues (2000) noted that for a given function to be localizable, that function "must be capable of being considered both structurally and functionally discrete;" a property that the brain is incapable of assuming due to the intricate, large-scale neuronal interconnectivity. Thus, discussing behavioral functions outside of the context of the larger cortical and subcortical networks involved with that function is a poorly posed problem. Therefore, the scientific study of cognition requires detailed neuroanatomical and connectivity information to compliment functional activity findings.

Anyway, this prompted me to write a whole blog post with link to papers, etc. about this topic: http://blog.ketyov. 221

com/2011/01/how-to-be-neuroscientist.html. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-bradley-voytek

Life

Why do living things die? Paul King, Computational Neuroscientist, Software Entrepreneur It's not that living things die; it's that multicellular organisms die. But why? Every single-celled organism alive today has been in existence since life began over three billion years ago. This is because individual cells do not give birth, they divide. After cell division, the two cells that result are each as old as the single cell that preceded them. The cell does not become younger by dividing. (Although this may not be exactly true, see: [1].) Thus every cell in your body is over three billion years old. The strategy that multicellular organisms such as humans use to project themselves into the future is to create new cell colonies from a single undifferentiated cell rather than maintaining existing colonies indefinitely. The main reason is that reproduction is more flexible and robust than maintenance, and it provides a way of starting over with a "clean slate" and slightly different genes. Complex organisms accumulate billions of errors and problems over their lifetime. Most of these errors are fixed as fast as they happen, but life takes a toll and not all problems are reversible. Just as reinstalling Microsoft Windows every so often fixes accumulated system issues, so does generating a new organism every so often from a single cell. Given that biology has selected this strategy, evolution has optimized for producing the most successful offspring. Once the individual has reproduced, its only evolutionary role is to the success of its offspring. Aging longer is just not something evolution has had a reason to optimize. And in fact given limited environmental resources, the offspring often do 222

better if the older generation doesn't stay around forever competing with younger generations for scarce resources. In of what happens physiologically, there are two main contributors to aging. The first is the accumulation of biological defects. Viruses and disease take a toll even after healing; UV rays slowly but inevitably damage DNA; and proteins, cell structure, and the neurons which hold memories all degrade over time due to thermodynamic molecular disruptions and invasions by other species. The second is the aging process itself. The organism develops to maturity and ages in stages according to a genetically determined life plan. Muscles atrophy, bones brittle, and metabolism changes. But the life plan has never run more than eighty years until recently, and evolution only ever optimized the first forty years or so. So humans are in new territory that is poorly understood, and which evolution has never had a reason to fine tune. It may be possible to slow or stop some of the genetically determined aging processes. While this may not be good for an overpopulated planet, it is sure to be popular with those that can afford the medical intervention. Let's just hope the social security system holds out! [1] There is evidence that even in "symmetric" cell division,

one child cell may be slightly "younger" (less prone to death) than the other. See: Stewert EJ, et al (2005). Aging and death in an organism that reproduces by morphologically symmetric division. PLoS Biology. http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal. pbio.0030045 http://www.quora.com/l/boq-paul-king

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Economics

What are the economics of lying? Ben Golub, Economics Ph.D., Stanford [GSB] Summary Lying was one of the first issues to be studied by the founders of game theory — they focused on bluffing in one-shot poker as a basic model. The idea is that with some probability, you randomly play aggressively even though you have bad cards. With some positive probability, the other side folds when that happens, because you also play aggressively when you have good cards. This notion of mixed strategies as a way to create uncertainty in your opponent is a very fundamental notion in game theory. •

More modern theories have models of lying with many periods and can explain dynamic phenomena where an antagonistic type imitates the good type to "build credibility," then burns that reputation at an opportune time when he can benefit the most by deceiving the other player.

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Some innovative economic theorists believe that economists don't really have a good model of lying because in classic game theory nobody is ever truly deceived: they know the exact probability that the other side is not "telling the truth" and they just do the best they can under the circumstances. Modern research is trying to create models that involve "real deception," where people are genuinely led astray in their beliefs.

Longer version This is a wonderful question because the issue of deception brings out some of the best successes and the greatest flaws in economic theory — particularly game theory, the area in which lying has been studied most. The simplest and oldest notions of "deception" go back to the very beginnings of modern game theory. This paper 224

(http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tom/papers/poker1.pdf) discusses Borel's and von Neumann's models of two-person, zero-sum poker with bluffing, which were published in the 1930s. John Nash's 1950 dissertation (http://www.princeton. edu/mudd/news/faq/topics/Non-Cooperative_Games_Nash. pdf, scan of the original, page 32) contains a simple poker game in which agents can bluff, opening with some probability even when they have bad cards. Of course, there is nothing intrinsic in choosing to open that says, "I have good cards;" it is just an action in the game. And, in equilibrium, your opponent knows exactly what the probability is that you have a good hand when you "claim to." The reason that he can't completely disregard the claim is that you sometimes behave aggressively when you DO have a good hand. In these simple, static (one period) models of lying, the credibility of the bluff is ed by the possibility that it is not a bluff. The more modern literature has focused on dynamic (multi-period) models, in which one can tell more elaborate stories about "building and destroying credibility." One standard approach can be illustrated by a classic model introduced by Joel Sobel in the article "A Theory of Credibility" [Review of Economic Studies (1985) 52(4) pp. 557-573]. There are two agents: a king and a spy. The king is unsure about the motivations of the spy, who might want to help the king or might be a double agent whose motivations are exactly opposed to those of the king. Every month, a diplomatic issue comes up with its own level of importance. The spy observes what would be best for the king and advises an action (say, A or B). After the action, the king learns whether it was the right action to take. In equilibrium, a double agent builds credibility by giving the king good advice for a while. Then he advises the king to do the wrong thing for the king when a sufficiently important issue comes up. After that, the double agent has been outed, but has benefited in one high-stakes issue. This illustrates many of the standard ingredients in economic models of deception: •

Asymmetric information: at least one agent's "type" or motivation is unknown to the other(s). 225

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Pooling: certain types (spies in the example) behave like other types ("pool on the same action"), making it impossible for the opposite side (the king) to figure out who is who until one type (usually the "bad" type) reveals himself.

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Building reputation (for credibility, e.g.) and then burning it at an opportune time.

The study of such models has become a very active area in game theory. An excellent scholarly monograph on this field is Repeated Games and Reputations: Long Run Relationships by George Mailath and Larry Sameulson (http://www. amazon.com/Repeated-Games-Reptions-Long-Run-Relationships/dp/0195300793/) — but note that this is an advanced graduate textbook with lots of math. A final big-picture remark: in these game-theoretic models, nobody is actually being tricked. Agents have accurate beliefs about what the other side is doing (that's the definition of a Nash equilibrium) and are doing the best they can. Several innovative economic theorists at Stanford (Yossi Feinberg, Matt Jackson) have remarked that, for this reason, there isn't really a good model of lying in economics [1]. Real lying should involve the target being, at least potentially, an "unsuspecting victim" who really believes what he has been told. A recent paper that seems to move in this direction is by Ettinger and Jehiel ["A Theory of Deception", American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 2010, 2(1), pp. 1-20, http:// www.enpc.fr/ceras/jehiel/deception.pdf]. [1] Note, for example, that a usual justification for accurate

beliefs in equilibrium is that players have been playing this kind of game a lot, and have a sense for how often the truth matches the plain-language meaning of a particular statement. Maybe that's true when five people have been playing poker together for a long time. But important lies are often told "out of equilibrium," when there is no reason to believe that players have a good "read" of the likelihood that a claim is true. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-ben-golub 226

Mathematics

What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics? Anon •

You can answer many seemingly difficult questions quickly. But you are not very impressed by what can look like magic, because you know the trick. The trick is that your brain can quickly decide if question is answerable by one of a few powerful general purpose "machines" (e.g., continuity arguments, the correspondences between geometric and algebraic objects, linear algebra, ways to reduce the infinite to the finite through various forms of compactness) combined with specific facts you have learned about your area. The number of fundamental ideas and techniques that people use to solve problems is, perhaps surprisingly, pretty small — see http://www.tricki.org/tricki/ map for a partial list, maintained by Timothy Gowers.

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You are often confident that something is true long before you have an airtight proof for it (this happens especially often in geometry). The main reason is that you have a large catalogue of connections between concepts, and you can quickly intuit that if X were to be false, that would create tensions with other things you know to be true, so you are inclined to believe X is probably true to maintain the harmony of the conceptual space. It's not so much that you can imagine the situation perfectly, but you can quickly imagine many other things that are logically connected to it.

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You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep understanding of the problem you are studying. Indeed, when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem, and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main 227

skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion. More on this in the next few bullets. •

Your intuitive thinking about a problem is productive and usefully structured, wasting little time on being aimlessly puzzled. For example, when answering a question about a high-dimensional space (e.g., whether a certain kind of rotation of a five-dimensional object has a "fixed point" that does not move during the rotation), you do not spend much time straining to visualize those things that do not have obvious analogues in two and three dimensions. (Violating this principle is a huge source of frustration for beginning maths students who don't know that they shouldn't be straining to visualize things for which they don't seem to have the visualizing machinery.) Instead . . .

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When trying to understand a new thing, you automatically focus on very simple examples that are easy to think about, and then you leverage intuition about the examples into more impressive insights. For example, you might imagine two- and three-dimensional rotations that are analogous to the one you really care about, and think about whether they clearly do or don't have the desired property. Then you think about what was important to the examples and try to distill those ideas into symbols. Often, you see that the key idea in the symbolic manipulations doesn't depend on anything about two or three dimensions, and you know how to answer your hard question.

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As you get more mathematically advanced, the examples you consider easy are actually complex insights built up from many easier examples; the "simple case" you think about now took you two years to become comfortable with. But at any given stage, you do not strain to obtain a magical illumination about something intractable; you work to reduce it to the things that feel friendly.

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To me, the biggest misconception that non-mathematicians have about how mathematicians think is that there is some mysterious mental faculty that is used to crack

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a problem all at once. In reality, one can ever think only a few moves ahead, trying out possible attacks from one's arsenal on simple examples relating to the problem, trying to establish partial results, or looking to make analogies with other ideas one understands. This is the same way that one solves problems in one's first real maths courses in university and in competitions. What happens as you get more advanced is simply that the arsenal grows larger, the thinking gets somewhat faster due to practice, and you have more examples to try, perhaps making better guesses about what is likely to yield progress. Sometimes, during this process, a sudden insight comes, but it would not be possible without the painstaking groundwork (http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to-be-agenius-to-do-maths/). •

Indeed, most of the bullet points here summarize feelings familiar to many serious students of mathematics who are in the middle of their undergraduate careers; as you learn more mathematics, these experiences apply to "bigger" things but have the same fundamental flavor.

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You go up in abstraction, "higher and higher." The main object of study yesterday becomes just an example or a tiny part of what you are considering today. For example, in calculus classes you think about functions or curves. In functional analysis or algebraic geometry, you think of spaces whose points are functions or curves — that is, you "zoom out" so that every function is just a point in a space, surrounded by many other "nearby" functions. Using this kind of zooming out technique, you can say very complex things in short sentences — things that, if unpacked and said at the zoomed-in level, would take up pages. Abstracting and compressing in this way allows you to consider extremely complicated issues while using your limited memory and processing power.

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The particularly "abstract" or "technical" parts of many other subjects seem quite accessible because they boil down to maths you already know. You generally feel confident about your ability to learn most quantitative ideas and techniques. A theoretical physicist friend likes 229

to say, only partly in jest, that there should be books titled "______ for Mathematicians," where ______ is something generally believed to be difficult (quantum chemistry, general relativity, securities pricing, formal epistemology). Those books would be short and pithy, because many key concepts in those subjects are ones that mathematicians are well equipped to understand. Often, those parts can be explained more briefly and elegantly than they usually are if the explanation can assume a knowledge of maths and a facility with abstraction. •

Learning the domain-specific elements of a different field can still be hard — for instance, physical intuition and economic intuition seem to rely on tricks of the brain that are not learned through mathematical training alone. But the quantitative and logical techniques you sharpen as a mathematician allow you to take many shortcuts that make learning other fields easier, as long as you are willing to be humble and modify those mathematical habits that are not useful in the new field.

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You move easily between multiple seemingly very different ways of representing a problem. For example, most problems and concepts have more algebraic representations (closer in spirit to an algorithm) and more geometric ones (closer in spirit to a picture). You go back and forth between them naturally, using whichever one is more helpful at the moment.

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Indeed, some of the most powerful ideas in mathematics (e.g., duality, Galois theory, algebraic geometry, provide "dictionaries" for moving between "worlds" in ways that, ex ante, are very surprising. For example, Galois theory allows us to use our understanding of symmetries of shapes (e.g., rigid motions of an octagon) to understand why you can solve any fourth-degree polynomial equation in closed form, but not any fifth-degree polynomial equation. Once you know these threads between different parts of the universe, you can use them like wormholes to extricate yourself from a place where you would otherwise be stuck. The next two bullets expand on this.

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Spoiled by the power of your best tools, you tend to shy away from messy calculations or long, case-by-case arguments unless they are absolutely unavoidable. Mathematicians develop a powerful attachment to elegance and depth, which are in tension with, if not directly opposed to, mechanical calculation. Mathematicians will often spend days figuring out why a result follows easily from some very deep and general pattern that is already well-understood, rather than from a string of calculations. Indeed, you tend to choose problems motivated by how likely it is that there will be some "clean" insight in them, as opposed to a detailed but ultimately unenlightening proof by exhaustively enumerating a bunch of possibilities. (Nevertheless, detailed calculation of an example is often a crucial part of beginning to see what is really going on in a problem; and, depending on the field, some calculation often plays an essential role even in the best proof of a result.)

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In A Mathematician's Apology, (http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~mss/misc/A%20Mathematician's%20Apology.pdf, the most poetic book I know on what it is "like" to be a mathematician), G.H. Hardy wrote: "In both [these example] theorems (and in the theorems, of course, I include the proofs) there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy. The arguments take so odd and surprising a form; the weapons used seem so childishly simple when compared with the far-reaching results; but there is no escape from the conclusions. There are no complications of detail — one line of attack is enough in each case; and this is true too of the proofs of many much more difficult theorems, the full appreciation of which demands quite a high degree of technical proficiency. We do not want many ‘variations’ in the proof of a mathematical theorem: ‘enumeration of cases’, indeed, is one of the duller forms of mathematical argument. A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way." " . . . [A solution to a difficult chess problem] is quite genuine mathematics, and has its merits; but it is just that ‘proof by enu-

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meration of cases’ (and of cases which do not, at bottom, differ at all profoundly) which a real mathematician tends to despise." •

You develop a strong aesthetic preference for powerful and general ideas that connect hundreds of difficult questions, as opposed to resolutions of particular puzzles. Mathematicians don't really care about "the answer" to any particular question; even the most sought-after theorems, like Fermat's Last Theorem http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Fermat's_Last_Theorem, are only tantalizing because their difficulty tells us that we have to develop very good tools and understand very new things to have a shot at proving them. It is what we get in the process, and not the answer per se, that is the valuable thing. The accomplishment a mathematician seeks is finding a new dictionary or wormhole between different parts of the conceptual universe. As a result, many mathematicians do not focus on deriving the practical or computational implications of their studies (which can be a drawback of the hyper-abstract approach!); instead, they simply want to find the most powerful and general connections. Timothy Gowers has some interesting comments on this issue, and disagreements within the mathematical community about it (https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/2cultures.pdf.

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Understanding something abstract or proving that something is true becomes a task a lot like building something. You think: "First I will lay this foundation, then I will build this framework using these familiar pieces, but leave the walls to fill in later, then I will test the beams . . . " All these steps have mathematical analogues, and structuring things in a modular way allows you to spend several days thinking about something you do not understand without feeling lost or frustrated. (I should say, "without feeling unbearably lost and frustrated; some amount of these feelings is inevitable, but the key is to reduce them to a tolerable degree.)

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Andrew Wiles, who proved Fermat's Last Theorem, used an "exploring" metaphor: "Perhaps I can best describe my experience of doing mathemat-

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ics in of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of the mansion and it's completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it's all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes they're momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, they are the culmination of — and couldn't exist without — the many months of stumbling around in the dark that proceed them." (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/ andrew-wiles-fermat.html) •

In listening to a seminar or while reading a paper, you don't get stuck as much as you used to in youth because you are good at modularizing a conceptual space, taking certain calculations or arguments you don't understand as "black boxes," and considering their implications anyway. You can sometimes make statements you know are true and have good intuition for, without understanding all the details. You can often detect where the delicate or interesting part of something is based on only a very high-level explanation. (I first saw these phenomena highlighted by Ravi Vakil, who offers insightful advice on being a mathematics student: http://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/potentialstudents.html.)

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You are good at generating your own definitions and your own questions in thinking about some new kind of abstraction. One of the things one learns fairly late in a typical mathematical education (often only at the stage of starting to do research) is how to make good, useful definitions. Something I've reliably heard from people who know parts of mathematics well but never went on to be professional mathematicians (i.e., write articles about new mathematics for a living) is that they were good at proving difficult propositions that were stated in a textbook exercise, but would be lost if presented with a mathematical structure and asked to find and prove some interesting facts about 233

it. Concretely, the ability to do this amounts to being good at making definitions and, using the newly defined concepts, formulating precise results that other mathematicians find intriguing or enlightening. •

This kind of challenge is like being given a world and asked to find events in it that come together to form a good detective story. Unlike a more standard detective, you have to figure out what the "crime" (interesting question) might be; you'll you have to generate your own "clues" by building up deductively from the basic axioms. To do these things, you use analogies with other detective stories (mathematical theories) that you know and a taste for what is surprising or deep. How this process works is perhaps the most difficult aspect of mathematical work to describe precisely but also the thing that I would guess is the strongest thing that mathematicians have in common.

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You are easily annoyed by imprecision in talking about the quantitative or logical. This is mostly because you are trained to quickly think about counterexamples that make an imprecise claim seem obviously false.

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On the other hand, you are very comfortable with intentional imprecision or "hand-waving" in areas you know, because you know how to fill in the details. Terence Tao is very eloquent about this here (http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there%E2%80%99s-more-tomathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/):

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"[After learning to think rigorously, comes the] 'post-rigorous' stage, in which one has grown comfortable with all the rigorous foundations of one’s chosen field, and is now ready to revisit and refine one’s pre-rigorous intuition on the subject, but this time with the intuition solidly buttressed by rigorous theory. (For instance, in this stage one would be able to quickly and accurately perform computations in vector calculus by using analogies with scalar calculus, or informal and semi-rigorous use of infinitesimals, big-O notation, and so forth, and be able to convert all such calculations into a rigorous argument whenever required.) The emphasis is now on applications, intuition,

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and the 'big picture.' This stage usually occupies the late graduate years and beyond." In particular, an idea that took hours to understand correctly the first time ("for any arbitrarily small epsilon I can find a small delta so that this statement is true") becomes such a basic element of your later thinking that you don't give it conscious thought. •

Before wrapping up, it is worth mentioning that mathematicians are not immune to the limitations faced by most others. They are not typically intellectual superheroes. For instance, they often become resistant to new ideas and uncomfortable with ways of thinking (even about mathematics) that are not their own. They can be defensive about intellectual turf, dismissive of others, or petty in their disputes. Above, I have tried to summarize how the mathematical way of thinking feels and works at its best, without focusing on personality flaws of mathematicians or on the politics of various mathematical fields. These issues are worthy of their own long answers!

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You are humble about your knowledge because you are aware of how weak maths is, and you are comfortable with the fact that you can say nothing intelligent about most problems. There are only very few mathematical questions to which we have reasonably insightful answers. There are even fewer questions, obviously, to which any given mathematician can give a good answer. After two or three years of a standard university curriculum, a good maths undergraduate can effortlessly write down hundreds of mathematical questions to which the very best mathematicians could not venture even a tentative answer. (The theoretical computer scientist Richard Lipton lists some examples of potentially "deep" ignorance here: http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/12/26/mathematicalembarrassments/.) This makes it more comfortable to be stumped by most problems; a sense that you know roughly what questions are tractable and which are currently far beyond our abilities is humbling, but also frees you from being very intimidated, because you do know you are fa235

miliar with the most powerful apparatus we have for dealing with these kinds of problems. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-anon--5

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Movies & Television

Superheroes

Given our current technology and with the proper training, would it be possible for someone to become Batman? Mark Hughes, Screenwriter, Forbes Blogger I know everyone hates having a question answered with "it depends," but . . . It depends. WHICH Batman, the one in the current film franchise, the one from the current monthlies, the one from the Justice League, etc etc? I am going to make an assumption here, in order to best answer your question. We'll put aside the issue of Batman trained by ninjas in the films, or the question of whether in the comics Batman operates with sort-of-superpowers when interacting in stories alongside Superman and other such characters. By "become Batman," you mean the basic concept of Batman that we all could agree upon — a master of martial arts, of forensic and detective skills, of gymnastics, of science and chemistry, of history and geography, of the workings of organized crime, of criminal psychology and physiology, and a man with a suit offering protection against bullets and knives and electrocution but which allows him to move as fast as an 239

Olympian runner and acrobat. The simple answer is, no. Unless you really boil Batman down to a very diluted level as just a really strong, fast, good fighter who can jump far and with good street smarts plus an education in crime and psychology, and who wears a lot of armor and a mask. The genius of Batman is that it pretends to be realistic, it lets us convince ourselves that with enough money and training, we could become Batman, too. But it's still fantasy, it's just a fantasy that is more compelling and convincing and thus more fun. If you ed the military and became something like a Delta Force commando of the highest quality, while studying nights to get a double-major in criminal justice and psychology (with a minor in chemistry), then you might also have time to take weekend courses in detective work and get a P.I. license. Then, after probably ten years to reach all of those levels combined, you might be twenty-eight (if you started right out of high school) and would then need to maintain your physical level while getting a job as a police officer in order to learn real crime-solving and detective work on the streets and at crime scenes, to get the experience it would really take to be a master. Let's say you are so good it only takes you perhaps three years to become a top detective and expert in these regards — now you are thirty-one, and you just finished the most basic level of preparation you need to be an expert in just some of the most obvious fields required to match Batman. Now you have to quit the force, and develop a good cover story for yourself so nobody suspects that Batman might be the guy who is an expert in all of those fields Batman is a master at. You have to have made sure you lived your life never revealing your true feelings about crime and vigilantism etc, and in fact covering it up unless you want to be arrested as a suspect the first time Batman has been around town. You need to spend some time doing dry runs around town to find your way around rooftops and fire escapes, practice running around at night in the shadows and not being seen, and presumably start practicing using your ropes and grappling hooks and other equipment you need for nightly patrols. Do some dry runs, make final preparations in case of emergen240

cies, etc. And you need to have been investing money and amassing a fortune the entire time, because the technology you'll need to even get close to a real-world version of Batman will cost millions of dollars. So you've done that, and now you start spending the money to get an armored suit full of electronics to communicate with assistants and have night vision and so on. You need a base of operations, so you buy one of those old used missile silos the military sells (yeah, they really do that, and it's pretty cool inside them) and turn it into a secret headquarters for the computers and monitoring equipment and car and bike and other equipment you need for your vigilante life. Conservatively, you should probably be about thirty-two at this point. And you are only about to go out on your first night as Batman. Okay, it's taken longer than expected and been pretty hard, and honestly you are not quite as much a master of all fields as Batman, but at least you got the basics and are pretty well trained and smart and equipped. So off you go, looking to stop crime . . . . . . and you're looking. And looking. Oh, wait, you hear police sirens or you get a transmission from picking up the police radio calls, there's a domestic disturbance in progress . . . well, that's not really what Batman does, so you let that one go to the cops. Then you get another call about a robbery, ah ha! Finally Batman is going into action! You run across those rooftops, swing across to another roof — whoa crap, that was a lot more dangerous than it looks in the comics! But you're booking it, running flat out and probably hitting, what, a good ten miles per hour? Maybe less actually because of having to dodge things and stop at the edge of the roof to swing down again. Anyway, there you are, rooftop to rooftop, and it occurs to you that the cop cars are so far gone now that you barely hear the sirens. So you think, "Hmm, no wonder the real Batman has a car, this rooftop thing looks cool, but I'll never make it in time to stop a crime that isn't happening within a block or two." And you don't — make it in time, that is. The first few nights, you keep showing up and the robberies or shootings 241

or whatever are already over, and you realize that this makes sense because most reports about crimes are only after it happens, not while it's taking place. And you also that as a cop, you almost never just walked up or drove up accidentally right where a crime happened to taking place. In fact, you were just one of several thousand cops in your city, and most of you never just stumbled right across a significant crime in progress. By your second week, you are getting unhappy that 90% of the crimes you've even seen up-close are just pathetic junkies buying crack from another pathetic junkie selling drugs to his/her own habit. And nothing makes you feel LESS like Batman than scaring sad homeless crackheads. You tried to chase down a kid who you saw punch a lady and take her purse, but you can't really pursue that kind of thing by running on rooftops, you gotta do it the hard way by chasing him on foot down the sidewalk . . . in your full Batman costume, where everybody can see you. People are taking photos on cell-phones, and yep, there's a cop car at the intersection and he saw you, and now he has his lights on and it's YOU he's after. Great, you have to let the kid go so you can run down an alley and climb up a fire escape to the roof to get away. At last, week three, you get lucky — an armed robbery, right there across the street! You leap down onto the hood of their car, cape over the windshield just like in The Dark Knight Returns. And a teenage kid in the enger seat fires a shotgun though the windshield in panic, blasting your torso. You are wearing armor, though, haha! So it merely shreds your costume and knocks you off the car onto the street, but man that hurts! And it takes your breath away just long enough for the car to speed off. You get up, angry and just in time to see everyone taking your photo again and staring at your shredded outfit. Then the police come around the corner, and you run off again but this time you are injured because although the armor stopped the slug it still bruised you and broke a rib. You are fast, but not fast enough this time. The police draw their guns and order you to stop. You turn and grab for the smoke pellet on your belt to help hide your getaway, but unfortunately for you the cops see you reaching for something and open fire . . . and your suit's armor is already a 242

mess from the shotgun blast earlier. Uh oh. When you wake up in the ICU, your mask and costume are gone, you're in a lot of pain, but the doctors successfully removed the bullets and re-inflated your lung. The downside is the set of handcuffs trapping you in the bed. As a master detective, you can of course easily pick the lock on the cuffs to escape, but on the other hand, the staph infection you caught after surgery is pretty bad and you feel like s**t. So you wait until night to sneak out — except you fall asleep on your pain meds, and wake up the next morning to the police coming to pick you up and take you to the infirmary at the state prison. Where you will spend a month recuperating until they can transfer you to the county jail for your first court appearance. During which your only comment to the judge is, "I guess it's not really possible to become Batman." Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na! Batman! http://www.quora.com/l/boq-mark-hughes

The Dark Knight

In The Dark Knight, how did the Joker really get his scars? Mac Booker, I watch movies, collect them in the ol' brain, and call on them when needed. Whatever way he is claiming at any moment. As in the comics, the Joker regards the past as a mutable medium, which only exists insofar as it is ed, and the act of ing and forgetting is, in fact, creation and destruction. Was the Joker the leader of the Red Hood gang? A failed stand-up comic forced into crime by the gang he appeared to be leading? Did his wife die in an accident? Was she murdered by a corrupt cop? Did she exist at all? Because the Joker is able to forget and at will, the truth is whatever version of his backstory that he is ing at any moment, regardless of whether that history conflicts with what he ed yesterday. 243

In the words of Nietzsche: [Beasts] do not ; mankind does. Man is an historical animal, whose memories weigh down upon him. Happiness is forgetting, though ing is what gives man the ability to utilize lessons from the past in the present.

In some sense, the Joker is a Nietzchian ideal: a man with total control over both remethmbering and forgetting. This is what makes him a nemesis of the Batman: Bruce Wayne cannot forget anything. The deaths of his parents, of (in the comics) the second Robin, of (in the movie) his oldest friend, these memories and this history are the essential components of his character. Every action is motivated by memory and history he is unable or unwilling to escape. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-mac-booker

Actors and Actresses

How do actors' spouses feel about love scenes in film and TV? Marcus Geduld, Artistic Director, Folding Chair Classical Theatre, NYC (foldingchairtheatre.org) I'm a theatre director (with a tiny amount of experience in television), but I don't imagine the dynamics are much different in theatre than in film or television. Of course, different people feel differently, and there probably are some who get jealous. What I write here is based on my own experience and the experiences of the many couples I've worked with over the years. My wife is an actress. I have watched her make out on stage many times. Some of those have been plays that I've directed, and I've had the odd experience (which doesn't feel odd to me, but I can see how it would seem odd to an outsider) of directing her to kiss another actor more ionately. It's simply not a big deal, and I don't feel jealous. I feeling funny the first time, but the 900th time, in 244

rehearsal, you watch a kiss, it ceased to be very meaningful. There are a lot of factors that tend to make this stuff nobig-deal. First of all, everyone in the business understands, going in, that it's part of the business. It's not a surprise or anything. I work with an ensemble of actors, and I think, by now, most of them have played sex scenes together. No one cares. We joke about it. Second, it's almost never sexy. It's choreographed. You simply can't tell two actors to "go at it" and let them improvise. No one in the audience would see anything. Heads would be in the way, etc. It's even less romantic in the film world, where there are camera men in track suits and mics stuck all over the place. Even if the spouse wasn't there during rehearsal, he would know — just from being married to the actor — how unsexy this stuff is. (Once, when I was acting — long before I was married — I got to make out with an actress I was very attracted to. I was excited beforehand, but in the end it turned out to be totally un-titillating. It was by-the-numbers. Turn head, count to three, press lips together . . . ) Added to this, most people in the business, if they stay in the business, are very professional and have a good sense of humor about this stuff. It's rare for anyone to "pull anything" or to try to take advantage of a sex scene. Actors do their work and then quit. Which is not to say there isn't a fantasy element to it. If you're playing a bad guy, part of the fun is . . . getting to be the bad guy. To get to pretend you're blowing up the White House and have a blast doing it. And part of the fun of a sex scene is . . . making out with someone. I am sure my wife has enjoyed making out with some of her co-stars (and I know that she's suffered through others). That's human nature, and it doesn't make me jealous or uncomfortable. It would be odd if she hated every minute of it, wouldn’t it? The final piece of the puzzle is that theatre and film folks tend to be very liberal and pretty easy-going about sexual matters. That isn't a coded way of saying, "We're all swingers." We're not. But we're very far from being prudes, we're very touchy feely in general, and very used to make believe. Some245

one uncomfortable with this stuff isn't likely to go into acting or be married to an actor. I've noticed a lot of confusion between "actor" and "movie star." People are posting things suggesting that actors are willing to do all kinds of things for fame and money. Actors — as a whole — don't generally receive either fame or lots of money. With a few exceptions, acting is not a lucrative field. Yes, Tom Cruise makes millions, but less than 1% of actors are stars. If there's a scene in which Cruise goes to Starbucks, the guy behind the counter is just as much an actor as Cruise. If an actor is in the Screen Actor's Guild, and he's not famous, he's likely to earn union scale, which is about $800 a day. That's not bad, but note that most people in the union aren't working every day. There's a lot of competition, and too many people for the jobs available, so most actors spend a lot of time unemployed or working temp jobs between acting gigs. They are also not, for the most part, famous. No one re what the guy-behind-the-counter looks like. They're focusing on Tom Cruise. No one recognizes most actors when they walk down the street. (Actors can also make money from residuals — payments doled out each time, say, an episode of a TV show is aired. I have a friend who regularly appears on soaps and shows like "Law and Order." He's not a "background player." He has lines. He just posted on Facebook that he got four residual checks in the mail. Together, they total fifty cents.) It is true that when actors are young and just starting out, a lot of them are hoping to become stars. And such folks might kiss or have simulated sex in the hopes it will eventually lead to fame and fortune. But once actors have been plying their trade for years, they pretty much know that (unless it's already happened), they're not likely to become stars. I spend most of my like hanging out with actors, and I can promise you they don't all talk about "the big break" they're hoping for. Yet they still engage in screen kisses, and their spouses still watch them do this. My wife, for instance, is never likely to be rich or famous. She knows it. I know it. And yet I don't say, "If this isn't going to lead to you being a star, quit kissing 246

people!" Kissing on stage or film can sometimes be fun, but as I and others have posted here, it's usually not. To make sure the audience sees everything, it has to be tightly choreographed, which takes all the spontaneity out of it. If you don't believe this, try the following experiment with your partner: work out a bit of kissing choreography that is really tightly controlled: the kiss must take place for such-and-such angle and last for exactly X amount of seconds. Etc. Now do it over and over, while a friend watches you and stops you every time you deviate a tiny bit from the plan. So you might ask, if it's not going to lead to fame and fortune, and if it's not even all that much fun, why do people do it? And why do people's spouses put up with it? Actors — the ones who have realized they're unlikely to get rich or famous — do it because they consider themselves to be artists. They love their work (which is telling stories), and they take that work very seriously. To NOT kiss someone when it says to do it in the script would be unprofessional, as would be kissing in a half-assed way. It would be like a doctor refusing to see a patient or a waiter refusing to serve a patron. Most actors I know (and in a couple of decades in the business, I've met thousands) take their craft extremely seriously. (My wife was once in a show I was directing, and his character was supposed to be really attracted to hers, and yet he kept giving her these lame, chaste kisses. The entire cast and crew were pissed off at him. It felt as if he was letting us all down, making us all look bad by refusing to tell his part of the story.) And most of their spouses are also in the business, so they get it. The spouses that aren't in the business tend to get it, too. (Or those marriages don't last.) They understand that their husbands and wives are working hard (and with great integrity) and pride, and they their spouses in that effort. For some, it is disconcerting the first few times they see their husband or wife kiss a stranger. But people have an amazing capacity to adapt. The fiftieth time you see it, and note that your partner still stays with you, the kissing starts to seem pretty ordinary. Yes, there are celebrity marriages that fall apart. (This 247

happens much less often to non-celebrity actors. For them, the divorce rate seems to be about average.) This has little to do with the fact that they kiss other celebrities on stage or screen. It has much more to do with the way celebrities live their lives in general, which tends to involve constant travel (time away from spouses) and excessive money and power. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-marcus-geduld

Pixar Animation Studios

Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production? Oren Jacob, Associate Technical Director, TS2 I'm the Oren Jacob in the video about the lost footage (https:// www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EL_ g0tyaIeE). Hopefully, I can offer some first person color commentary about the video that might serve to answer the questions here. Note, after twenty years at the studio, I left Pixar last year to start ToyTalk (www.toytalk.com), so this answer hasn't gone through any PR filtering, it's straight from my foggy memory of those events back in the late 90s. First, it wasn't multiple terabytes of information. Neither all the rendered frames, nor all the data necessary to render those frames in animation, model, shaders, set, and lighting data files were that size back then. A week prior to driving across the bridge in a last ditch attempt to recover the show (depicted pretty accurately in the video) we had restored the film from backups within fortyeight hours of the /bin/rm -r -f *, run some validation tests, rendered frames, somehow got good pictures back and no errors, and invited the crew back to start working. It took another several days of the entire crew working on that initial restoral to really understand that the restoral was, in fact, incomplete and corrupt. Ack. At that point, we sent everyone home again and had the come-to-Jesus meeting where we all collectively realized that our backup software wasn't dishing 248

up errors properly (a full disk situation was masking them, if my memory serves), our validation software also wasn't dishing up errors properly (that was written very hastily, and without a clean state to start from, was missing several important error conditions), and several other factors were compounding our lack of concrete, verifiable information. The only prospect then was to roll back about two months to the last full backup that we thought might work. In that meeting, Galyn mentioned she might have a copy at her house. So we went home to get that machine, and you can watch the video for how that went . . . With Galyn's machine now back in the building, we duped that data immediately, then set about the task of trying to and validate this tree, which we thought might be about two weeks old. We compared Galyn's restoral with a much older one (from two months prior) and couldn't determine a clear winner, there were too many inconsistencies. So, instead, we set about the task of assembling what effectively amounted to a new source tree, by hand, one file at a time. The total number of files involved was well into the six figures, but we'll round down to 100,000 for the sake of the rest of this discussion to make the math easier. We identified the files that hadn't changed between the two, and took those straight away. Then there were the files that were on Galyn's but not on the older one; we took Galyn's and assumed they were new. Then there were files that were on the older one but not on Galyn's; we put those in the "hand check" pile, since it is unusual for files to be deleted within a production source tree, and we were suspicious of those deletions. Then there were the files that were different across the two backups, those also went into the "hand check" pile along with any files that were touched more recently than Galyn's version. Given that, we had something like 70,000 files that we felt good about, and we poured those into a new source tree. For the remaining 30,000 files, it was all hands on deck. We checked things across three partially complete, partially correct trees . . . the two month old full backup (A), Galyn's (B, which we thought was the best one), and another cobbled together tree (C) from the stray files left around from 249

failed renders, backup directories on animator's machines, some heads of source history that were left untouched, verbose test renders, and other random stuff we could find via NFS elsewhere in the building. We invited a select few of the crew back to work straight from Friday to Monday morning. We took rolling shifts to sleep and eat and kept plowing through, file by file, comparing each of the files in the "to be checked" list from A, B, and C, doing the best to and validate them, one at a time, by looking at them in xdiff. In the end, human eyes scanned, read, understood, looked for weirdness, and made a decision on something like 30,000 files that weekend. Having taken our best guesses at those suspect files, we assembled a new master of Toy Story 2. Many source histories were lost as a result, but we had the best version we could pull together. We invited the crew back, and started working again. Every shot went through a test render, and surprisingly, only a dozen or so failed. I know full well that the following statement will likely blow people's heads up, but the truth is that more than several percentage points of the show (as measured in numbers of files) were never recovered at all. So how could Toy Story 2 work at all? We don't know. The frames were rendering (other than that dozen shots), so we just carried on, fixed those shots, and charged ahead. At that point, there was nothing more that could be done. And then, some months later, Pixar rewrote the film from almost the ground up, and we made Toy Story 2 again. That rewritten film was the one you saw in theatres and that you can watch now on BluRay. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-oren-jacob

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Movie Making

How do directors conceive and think through monster and action scenes? JJ Abrams, Writer-Director Every scene has its own unique requirements. This is true whether it's a comedic scene, a still scene, or a busy scene, a scene that's all in-camera vs. one that requires visual effects and CGI. As you break down a scene with increasing resolution, the first thing to do is figure out what you want the sequence to be and how it serves the story. Once you figure out what the scene is supposed to do, your mind races trying to figure out what would be cool. In a sequence with a creature, first and foremost you want to approach it from as visceral a place as possible. You need to figure out what the endgame of the sequence is. Once you figure that out and what you're going to do, then the fun becomes how you are going to do it. You often begin to come up with a sequence, but what you discover is that a dozen shots that you thought were critical are actually superfluous. Part of what works is sketching it out, either yourself or with a storyboard artist. In of visual effects shots, you need to really be as practical as you are inspired. Which means you need to be able to tell the crew: what we need to build, what we're going to shoot live, what we're going to do in-camera, which scenes are going to be entirely CG, which are going to be filmed in CG, where we're going to create sets, where we're going to be creating a piece of the creature physically with special effects, etc. A monster scene is like a magic trick; you're saying "I want to put a Testarossa on the stage, I want to cover it with a cloth, and I want to rip the cloth away, and I want there to be a '67 VW bug." Once you know what effect you are trying to achieve, then you start getting into the the mechanics and

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working backwards, deconstructing the scene in your head. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-jj-abrams

The Godfather, Part II

Why does one of the goons trying to kill Frank Pentangelli in the bar say, “Michael Corleone says, ‘Hello’”? Richard Stern, Curious There are a lot of theories about that line. One theory posits that that the entire murder was staged by Hyman Roth and the Rosatos to turn Frankie and deliver a star witness to the FBI. Another supposes that Michael indeed did turn on Frankie and hand him over to the Rosatos, fearing that he would disrupt the deal with Hyman Roth by continuing to antagonize them. Yet another maintains that it was simply a gaffe — and that the line should have been read “Tell Michael Corleone (WE or I) says, ‘Hello’” meaning that the hitman believes Michael has already been assassinated or soon will be, and Frankie will say hello to him shortly in hell. I find none of these particularly satisfying. They all feel a little too flimsy for such a meticulously crafted film. Instead, I prefer to think that the goal of the Rosatos was to indeed kill Frankie. The line was delivered as a final insult. “Michael Corleone says, ‘Hello’" is a taunt. The Rosatos believe Michael is a sap, easily being controlled by Hyman Roth, and by association, the Rosatos themselves. Michael is weak and easily manipulated in their eyes. He's in their pocket. Frankie's loyalty to Michael is misguided and now has cost him his life. Frankie, by chance, survives the assassination attempt. He doesn't believe Michael tried to kill him literally, but he 252

believes Michael's lack of power has left him exposed on the street. As such, he turns to the FBI for protection. It is only when Michael arrives at the Senate hearing with Frankie's brother, Frankie recognizes that Michael not only has power, but is ruthless enough to use it. Not even the US government could protect Frankie (and his family) from Michael's vengeance. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-richard-stern

Jeopardy !

What is it like to be a contestant on Jeopardy! ? Neville Fogarty, Back-to-School Week contestant, 2000 Short answer: A lot of fun! Long answer: Okay, I can't stress this enough — it is really a lot of fun. I was on Jeopardy! in 2000, and I'm writing this in 2011 — I'm nearly twice as old now as I was then, so my memory may be a little fuzzy. Also, that I was a kid, so your Jeopardy! experience may vary. I'm just going to tackle what I recall about my trip to Southern California — no audition remarks. Go West I was flown (coach) with my parents from Bush Intercontinental (Houston) to Los Angeles to stay at the magnificent Beverly Hilton Hotel. At the time, the hotel was owned by Jeopardy! creator Merv Griffin. There's a shot in the promo for the hotel at the end of each show (back then) with the hotel's swimming pool in it — I quickly discovered that everything looks bigger on TV. There was some star-studded gala taking place at the hotel in the evening. The most famous person I saw was some woman dressed up as Lucille Ball (in turn playing Lucy Ricardo) trying to get in and get autographs.

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To the Studio Each tape date, one week's worth of episodes are recorded in two sessions. The morning session is Monday – Wednesday; the afternoon is Thursday and Friday (this is true for other shows, too). The nine of us taping in the morning (plus the alternate) were picked up in a bus and brought to the Sony Pictures Studio where the show is filmed. We were taken to the green room, where there were snacks galore! We also met again with the casting team and some producers to go over some final legal business (mostly standards and practices stuff). We then went on a tour of the set, checking out the video wall, Alex's podium, and the contestant lecterns. Just like the hotel swimming pool, the set is much smaller than it looks on television. Fact: At the bottom of Alex's podium, there was a ball that looks like it's made of marble, but it was actually made of cardboard. I learned this by giving it a little kick and then being chastised. Making a Mockery of It We also played a mock game in order to get used to playing in the studio. The first players up (myself included) got to sign their names in and played the first half of a Jeopardy game with a contestant coordinator as the host. This gives you a fifteen clue chance to get used to the timing of the lockout system, picking clues off the board, and looking at the score readout. I explicitly a Comic Strip category in my part of the mock game, where you had to identify characters based on their pictures. I responded, "Who are Sally Brown and Linus van Pelt?" to one clue, and the producers seemed surprised that someone would add in their last names. Everyone else had a go, too, finishing up the game. We were then seated together on one side off the audience, away from our families (no cheating!) and told that we wouldn't learn who our opponents would be until right before our games. From the Sidelines They picked the first three contestants, and I wasn't one of them, so I stayed in the stands with the other kids. The first three contestants disappeared back to the green room, and the regular audience came out and filled in the studio. When 254

taping began, Alex & Johnny were there, live & in person. It's difficult to watch it all at once in person — you've got the clues, which are shown to the audience on monitors on the sides of the set, as well as Alex and the contestants to watch. It's right nice having it edited down when you watch it on TV! At commercial breaks, which are really taken to give everyone a little break in the action (water, bathroom, and the judges can review rulings) the contestants were quickly moved to directortype chairs on the set and had their make-up touched up. Alex would come answer questions from the audience. I can't stress the following enough: Alex Trebek is a smart, nice, funny and humble guy. (Or at least he was with us kids around.) We also played along in the audience — they read you the riot act about not shouting out answers (S&P again), but people were clearly whispering the correct responses — and not just us kids. They told us to stop once or twice, but didn't seem to really mind, because on stage, it's hard to hear the audience. We also found out that the second & third place parting gifts would be be computers, and that everyone — including the winners — would receive trips to Universal Studios Orlando. I was twelve — this was exciting! And in the blink of an eye, Monday's game was done. My Turn They announced the second game's players — and I was included! We were off in a flash to have make-up done in the green room and to get ready to go on. Then everything was just like you saw it one YouTube. Almost. I'd like to share some things that you don't see at home that we see in the studio, as well as what was going through my mind while playing — spoilers ahead! Contestant's Cut Right out the gate, I was having a hard time ringing in. When you play along at home (make sure to follow the rules to watching Jeopardy with other people!), you can respond to every question you like. On the program, you are up against two really smart people — my game was no exception. As a general rule, all three contestants know the answer to the first three clues in most categories. (The exceptions tend to be the 255

arts and sport.) This means that you are fighting via buzzer alone against two contestants for more than half of the game. This gets really frustrating really fast. In the commercial breaks, we shot "Hometown Howdies" to be aired on our local stations and took pictures with Alex — for promos and for keepsakes. Yes, I have a Jeopardy! picture frame. Three clues stand out in my mind in this game. First is the clue delivered by Bill Nye, which involved the worst Schwarzenegger impression I've ever seen. It's no wonder none of us came up with the correct response of "What's the terminator?" Two other clues were things that I had actually discussed with my parents in the days preceding the show. In order to get to LA, we flew over Roswell, a correct response. Mom had also mentioned Prince William's birthday, and I had been all, "Who cares?" I should've. For Final, you are given as much time as you like to make your wager; they even gave us pen and paper in case we needed it. I didn't — it was a moment of ballsiness and the knowledge that if you don't come in first, you don't keep your cash. The End ? Again, as quickly as it had started, it was over. I hardly the third game. When the second batch of kids arrived, we all took a photo together with Alex in front of the video wall. We also all got Jeopardy! prize packs (a copy of the home game & the like) that had also been awarded to audience as door prizes. We headed back to the hotel, and that was that. There was a little sightseeing that evening (we ran into a girl from the first episode taped), but other than that, nothing crazy. It was a lot of fun, but it goes by really fast! http://www.quora.com/l/boq-neville-fogarty

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Screenwriting

How do screenwriters feel about bad reviews, in particular claims of formulaic writing? Sean Hood, Professional screenwriter and director (See wikipedia or IMDB). Graduate of USC's School of Cinematic Arts, and currently an instructor there. Critics, being writers themselves, love to target the screenwriter when they write vicious reviews. I know that the original spec script for "Bad Teacher" was extremely well-received by readers, agents, and executives across Hollywood, but I can guarantee that Anthony Lane did not read that spec script and is basing his pan of the script on what he saw on screen. This can be very frustrating for the writer if s/he had much of their original script changed during production and post. (For example, my brother, Brendan Hood, has had scathing reviews for a horror movie he wrote called They. Although he got sole credit for the film, every single word was rewritten by a team of subsequent writers, producers, and even PA's on set. The result was that he got called a "talentless screenwriter," based on a film that he actually didn't write.) Though I am an avid reader of the New Yorker, I think Anthony Lane is an annoying critic. Every review of a Hollywood film he writes can be summarized as follows: Here are all the numerous ways that I, Anthony Lane, am so, so, SO much more clever and sophisticated than the movie I am reviewing and the people who made it. What is frustrating for screenwriters and movie fans is not that this isn't true. Anthony Lane IS far more clever and sophisticated than the movies he reviews. But, why the hell is he reviewing "Bad Teacher" in the first place? Is it any surprise that "Bad Teacher" doesn't have a title worthy of Raymond Chandler? Or that some of the scenes are derivative and that these scenes are not as well executed as those in classics like "Cool Hand Luke?" From a screenwriter and filmmaker's perspective, this 257

kind of review is lazy and self-indulgent. "Bad Teacher" will be reviewed by tens of thousands of people on the internet, and no reader of the New Yorker needs Mr. Lane to trash it, except to participate in intellectual and cinematic snobbery. What Anthony Lane does well is find smaller films, independent and foreign films, like “The Names of Love,” which he buries later in the article. This is the kind of movie that has no advertising budget, but is perfect for readers of the New Yorker, who may be interested in seeing a film with higher creative ambitions than "Bad Teacher." I think most screenwriters wish that professional critics would focus on finding these hidden gems, and use their platform to help them get seen. By highlighting mainstream films in reviews that do little more than state the obvious and blame the screenwriter, critics like Anthony Lane only make it harder for filmmakers and screenwriters to get quality scripts made. As for myself, I have suffered numerous "bad reviews" for movies I've had my name on. For example: •

Halloween: Resurrection — "Screenwriters Larry Brand and Sean Hood churn out the cliches with such lifeless predictability you can practically hear the cogs grinding."

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The Crow: Wicked Prayer — "It is just like the first one — if the first one had been written by a room full of meanspirited six-year-olds with a finger-paint budget of $12.00."

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Fear Itself: Echoes — "This entire episode must have extremely easy on the lazy screenwriter Sean Hood (whose previous credits include various installments of the Halloween, Cube, and The Crow franchises, plus an uncredited rewrite on Cursed, which, as one of the saddest werewolf movies in recent memory, hardly endears him to me) since all he had to do was write half of it and then copy and paste whole scenes and lines of dialogue and just change the character names . . . his writing has so little ambition behind it, it's sad."

Again, what's really frustrating for me, and many screenwriters, when we get reviews like this is that, from the point of view of the finished product, they are accurate. Those three projects turned out every bit as badly as the reviewers de258

scribed. One wants to say, "But it was better in the script!" or say "They didn't shoot what I wrote!" or "I was just the script doctor! It's not my fault." But ultimately, as part of the "creative team" responsible for those turkeys, I have grin and bear it. For my most recent film, Conan the Barbarian, I got some of the most deliciously bad reviews of my screenwriting career. •

"The few good elements are dwarfed by a generic, nonsensical plot and shoddy storytelling."

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"Non-stop blood-and-guts action aimed at game boys and emotionally stunted lovers of adolescent fantasy . . . There is no purpose to the film other than random blood splattering amid scenes of bondage, primitive savagery and S&M eroticism. It is empty of story or character."

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"The very fact no attempt is made to hide the over-acted performances and under-developed storyline will sit perfectly fine with fans of this kind of junk." (On Rotten Tomatoes, that was one of the "positive" reviews.)

So how do I "feel" about having worked on one of the most critically ridiculed movies of the year? I had enormous fun working on Conan, and I've got a very thick skin. I'm confident enough in my own work to know that I write well, and I've accepted the fact that the filmmaking process is collaborative, frustrating, and often unfair: setting up the screenwriter to take the fall. That's okay. I can take the heat. It's worth it. Ultimately, I get hired again and again to write movies based on the screenplays I've written that have gone unproduced. These scripts often get rave "reviews" from the executives and producers who read them, along with condolences, "too bad that didn't get made. It's just fantastic, but female leads, dramas and period films are just hard. They don't make their money back. But, we love your writing and we'd like to hire you to write Children of The Corn Part 36." I have no delusions that I'm a screenwriting genius. I'm a "genre hack" (as chronicled in my blog genrehacks.com) and I'm an artsy, eccentric indie filmmaker. But when given 259

the opportunity, I write well-structured stories with complex characters who make surprising choices. What "bad reviews" remind me of, is that in Hollywood, I rarely get the opportunity. To snarky and clever professional reviews, I say stop shooting fish in a barrel, and go find well-written, but smaller, films and direct people to see them. To jaded, cynical fan boys, I say stop rewarding "formulaic" films by buying tickets to see them, and ignoring films that are far better. Search out and find those ambitious and well-written movies that may not have a big star or swollen digital effects budget. Screenwriters want to get original, ambitious, and entertaining movies up on the screen. Help us do that! This is what I think about when I get bad reviews. P.S. I can't imagine that Mr. Lane, himself read this, but I was pleased that on a week in which he could have trashed Conan, Spy Kids, or Fright Night, he chose to highlight the intriguing smaller film "Higher Ground." Let's hope he sticks to that pattern, and meanwhile I will daydream about a day I get to make more little movies more like this one: http:// fortunatoprocopio.com/video02e.html. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-sean-hood

Movie Making

What determines whether an actor is cast in a part in Hollywood? Ashton Kutcher, I'm an actor and producer of film and TV Talent, experience, relationships, directors, awards, and financial risk reduction. Talent is subjective (after all, I've been accused by some of having very little) but you have to have some level of showmanship. That being said, some of the best actors I know have a hard time finding work. Experience is key. Back ground in theater, improv troops, and formal training is very helpful. The director and studio 260

want to know you you have a history of showing up and being good. Relationships - Film making is a collaboration, and we all enjoy working with people we know and like. Catching a break is often times built on someone that knows you and believes in you giving you a shot. Directors are key. The top directors in the business call the shots when it comes to casting. They either see you in the part or they don't. One shot with the right director in the right film can launch somebody. Agents sell hard based on whom you've worked with. Awards - one role with recognition can be all it takes. Finance - At the end of the day, it's show BUSINESS. Every studio has a list of actors based on Historical box office, domestic and foreign. Generally, they are trying to hedge their financial investment. There is a common model that is used where the studio or financier presell packages in foreign territories based on talent commitments. The more production budget they can offset the more confident they feel about moving forward. This is why some people who may not appear to be big stars in the states continue to work. They have big foreign value. It's all about B.O. HITS. You can be in a POS flick but if it makes money, you continue to work. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-ashton-kutcher

261

Politics

U.S. Presidential Elections

How early do politicians and presidential political campaigns begin quietly promising/planning cabinet seats and vice president positions? Jennifer Miller, Field Staffer, Vice Presidential Selection researcher, PA Deputy Press Secretary, Bill Clinton and Clinton/Gore (1992); NH Press Secretary, Clinton/Gore (1996); Vice Presidential Selection, Al Gore (2000); Senior Advisor to the Deputy Chair, Democratic National Committee (2000) A few subjective thoughts, then my personal experiences: •

The percentage of time a presidential candidate spends planning his/her DC fantasy team is likely inversely proportionate to the odds of him/her ever having the opportunity to make those nominations.

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At least in modern times, candidates do not promise the VP nomination, BUT that does not mean that wannabe Veeps never HEAR a promise amid effusive praise soliciting their loyalty. (With her tenuous grasp of facts, can't 263

you imagine Michele Bachmann interpreting that she's been promised the slot?) •

It is likely that candidates (or their top aides) make vague overtures about (former) rivals serving in Cabinet-level posts, without committing to anything.

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Consideration is easier process-wise when a potential VP nominee has been a primary rival: the campaign already has amassed meticulous opposition research files. Likewise, when short-listed for VP, statewide officials usually turn over similarly cataloged materials about themselves, which would have been compiled to predict and combat negative campaigns at home.

In 1992, Bill Clinton's VP selection team formed in early May, about two months before his July 9 announcement with Al Gore (which came only a couple days after the formal ask, and one week before the Democratic National Convention). The process had several stages: •

Clinton publicly named three experienced leaders (Warren Christopher, Vernon Jordan, and Madeline Kunin) who oversaw the process, fielded input, and consulted with people who had advised previous Democratic nominees.

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When our research group first met, we received a pretty long list of potential nominees. At least half a dozen names came with assignments to write a five or six page memo, and the rest started with one or two page memos. (As the youngest person and only non-attorney, I did not write any of the the long memos, and mostly conducted research as assigned by other full-time team .)

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Over the following weeks, names were added and deleted, and some moved up from the lower tier. Higher tier names called for deeper research from Lexis-Nexis (dialup) and the Library of Congress. It was 1992.

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Once there was a serious short list, non-staff teams of attorneys ed the vetting process — interviews in the field, scanning of every document imaginable (including medical records), analysis of every public writing, and finally a one-on-one interview with Clinton.

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•

At least one potential short-lister declined consideration (and vetting), though we continued with some odd public record review in case the decision changed. At least one person wrongly told the press s/he was on the "short list," and we held interviews in the field out of respect.

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Our team had no leaks. To this day, I have never read a book or news article that got all of the facts right.

Two days after the general election (that is, Thursday, November 5), President-elect Clinton named Christopher and Jordan the heads of his transition team. They soon assigned the same group of us to Cabinet Selection, with two wonderful new leaders and a team which rapidly expanded. This time, I led a handful of non-lawyer researchers, managed the data and assignments, and organized the files and memos. I still have a copy of the (pre-WWW) research manual I created . . . and probably should not still have the all of the name tabs from the filing cabinet dividers. To answer the question more directly: •

No Cabinet assignment was pre-determined. Multiple people were considered for every position.

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Quite a few top White House positions and sub-Cabinet nominations were considered in the same process, and the same batches of memos.

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Soon-to-be Secretary of State Christopher did not know we were preparing materials about him until they were ready to go to President-elect Clinton (Thanksgiving weekend 1992). Nothing had been promised to him.

I worked on VP selection again in 2000, secretly and parttime while an associate at a DC law firm. (Yes, it killed my billable hours.) Unlike in 1992, there was no full-time research team, as Al Gore had more time to make a decision — the process began slowly in April 2000, and the Democratic National Convention did not take place until August. Many of the same people were involved as in 1992 (including selection process head Christopher and some of the short-list vetting team attorneys). Some of my most memorable life experiences and impor265

tant personal relationships developed because of how seriously most potential presidents take decisions about running mates and Cabinet . That said, I cannot fathom how the McCain team approached VP selection in 2008. If they had a similar process in place, it must have been pushed aside by pressure from pollsters and political advisers. The Sarah Palin record/family/temperament surprises would have been known internally, and removed her from consideration when viewed as a complete picture. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-jennifer-miller

Air Force One

What's it like to fly on Air Force One? Peter Marquez, Space policy geek. It's awesome. I only got to fly on her once. The staff is amazing, and after flying on AF1, you will NEVER want to fly commercial again. The experience starts before you even get on the plane. You are transported from the White House to Andrews, and you get to drive right up to the airplane and leave the vehicle and walk up into the plane. (Only the president and his close staff get the Marine 1 transport to Andrews.) It's very comfortable: huge seats, desks and tables for working. A full conference room with flat screens and video teleconferencing capability. There's a computer room with Internet access. One of the greatest things about AF1 has nothing to do with the aircraft itself, it's the people that make AF1 run. All of the AF1 staff appear to really enjoy their jobs, and they take great pride in their work. It definitely appeared that none of them took this great opportunity for granted. They are also well-versed in the history of AF1 and can tell you stories about all the previous AF1s. 266

The trip I was on was very short. We were flying from DC to Kennedy Space Center for a speech President Obama was giving. During the flight, I had been helping to work and rework a speech the President was about to give. He kept coming out of his cabin with more edits and changes. After another round of edits from the boss, an attendant looked at me and asked if I needed anything. I jokingly said, "Yes, a nice strong drink. Preferably a single malt," (it was about nine or ten in the morning). Without pausing the attendant asks, "What brand and what year?" I had to tell him I was joking. In addition to my colleagues and a few of Congress, we also had Buzz Aldrin on the flight. Dr. Aldrin was seated next to me at our table and he starts to get a bit fidgety, he looks around, and he says, "You wanna go take a look around?" So I stop working for a minute and Dr. Aldrin and I start checking out AF1. We make it over to the stairs that lead to the upper deck and cockpit and one of the staff asks if we want to head upstairs and check out the cockpit. Dr. Aldrin got a big smile on his face and looked at me. We were both smiling like little kids. Did we want to see the cockpit of AF1? Seriously? You have to ask? So Dr. Aldrin and I make it up to the flight deck and all of the Air Force officers are in awe of this moon walker and here's Buzz Aldrin happy as a little kid because he's hanging out in the cockpit of AF1. Dr. Aldrin goes into the cockpit, and I stand outside of it with my head sticking through the doorway. So here I am, essentially a nobody and I'm hanging out in the cockpit of AF1, with the pilots, while AF1 is in flight, and I'm with Buzz Aldrin. Somewhere back in time, the ten year old version of me was saying, "You have got to be kidding me . . . " It was way too short of a flight. But just a couple of more interesting bits. First, as we started to descend, I instinctively went back to my seat and buckled up. But I noticed a lot of the other "frequent flyers" were still up and walking around. So I asked one of them, "When are we supposed to sit down?" They just kind of laughed at my "noob question" and said something to the ef267

fect of "You don't really have to sit down at all, just watch how the pilot lands this thing." So people were still up and walking around as the plane landed. For someone who had only flown commercial, it was a fascinating to me for some reason. Sure enough, the pilot put her down like a feather and came to a gentle stop. Second, we landed on the space shuttle runway. Another thing that blew my mind. Of course we were going to an event at Kennedy Space Center so the closest runway is the space shuttle runway, but landing in AF1 on the space shuttle runway was more mind blowing then not having to sit down during landing. Finally, you get a bill for the food you eat on AF1 (this may be the only thing AF1 has in common with United). Since you are eating a meal on AF1 you are doing so at taxpayer expense. This means you have to reimburse the government for whatever you ate. That's completely fair and the right thing to do but it's something you wouldn't immediately consider when flying on AF1. So about a week after my AF1 flight, I got a bill sent to me for the lunch I ate on AF1. That bill made for a great souvenir. So to paraphrase philosopher Ferris Bueller: "It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend . . . " I forgot one more thing, if you make a phone call from AF1, it's routed through a couple of operators who sit up on the flight deck. They make the outgoing call for you, and then they connect you to the person once they make the call. The cool part is that when they call person for you they say something to the effect of (my memory is a bit fuzzy here), "This is Air Force One, we have a call from <whatever your name is> can you hold while I connect you?" I think just receiving a call from AF1 would be amazing. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-peter-marquez

268

1968 U.S. Presidential Election

What if Richard Nixon had won the 1960 Presidential election? How would history have been different? David Hood, If I were a fruit, I'd be a cookie An interesting question for sure! This is the stuff that come to mind in no real order. But really after '76 all bets are off. Positives •

Vietnam would not have happened for the U.S., as Nixon would have continued the previous istrations policies that he was part of creating.

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Watergate would not have happened because Nixon would have been the standard barrier for the party. In the 70s, Reagan was in the wings and things were changing, feeding his paranoia.

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Perhaps connecting with China would have happened sooner, blunting some of the negative affects of China's rise because it would have been more staged.

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I don't think the Bay of Pigs would have happened at all, but rather just a continuation of trying to engage Cuba while slowly isolating it, which Nixon was instrumental in setting up in 1959.

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Reagan becomes president in '68 instead of '80, thanks to Ford/Nixon being out of the way. This makes his presidency drastically different due to a totally different set of circumstances and being in much better health with a much different group of people around him.

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Goldwater never happens in '64.

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The Democrats don’t have a credible chance to take the White House until '76, but likely have considerable power in Congress if not outright majorities led by the Kenne269

dy's. Due to this, I think Nixon, and later Reagan, move forward with robust legislation on Civil Rights because it brings the Democrats to the table on other issues. •

Both Bobby and Jack Kennedy are never assassinated because they don't get into the position to be real targets during the turmoil of the era.

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The Bush dynasty is unlikely because if Reagan wins in '68 he likely picks a different VP, probably Rockefeller, to balance his ticket

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The Cold War ends sooner without all the proxy fights happening. I can see Nixon and later Reagan using China as a proxy to kill the USSR either via military action or economic action.

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The Supreme Court looks radically different today.

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There is never the political will to overturn our banking and investment regulations.

Neutral •

Ford never becomes president, maybe Senator but not President.

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Due to a likely second term for Nixon, LBJ never becomes President either, as he would have been too ill in '68 to run.

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Our history is drastically different after '76, to the point that it is unrecognizable.

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Either Bobby or Ted Kennedy is elected president in '76 with either Carter or Jerry Brown as VP.

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Ross Perot possibly becomes president as a Republican in the 1980's.

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I think both Clinton and Gore still happen; just much differently.

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Negative •

Jack Kennedy never becomes President and the country has to watch as he has to leave the Senate and die a horrible death from Addison's disease or complications from it.

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Marilyn Monroe never reaches the level of notoriety she had because there is no scandal with JFK and no "happy birthday" event. She probably still takes her own life at some point though.

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Both Medicaid and HMO's never happen, likely resulting in us being a backwater of medical science.

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Though there are many gains for civil rights, the Black Power movement is crushed, resulting in those gains not really meaning anything to average folks for a long time.

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We probably never go to the moon, space, yes . . . moon, no.

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Due to its more robust involvement in the Cold War, China rises and overshadows us faster, if not handled well, that could be very bad.

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Due to there being no Vietnam, we still have a draft that can be used at any time instead of the ghost of one that we have now.

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Because our banking and investment regulations stay mostly intact, the huge growth we saw in the 1990s is not possible. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-david-hood

271

U.S. Immigration

Should highly skilled international students (including Bachelors, Masters, Doctorate) be given Green Cards? Craig Montuori, Study it, live it, and love it. The short answer is yes. Yes, we should grant more highlyskilled, highly-educated immigrants green cards. For purely selfish American reasons, the answer is yes. Highly skilled immigrants are productive, net-positive of American society, just like highly skilled Americans. This country has a certain median production per capita, and anything that increases that median means more economic growth for America. More economic growth means more and better opportunities for native-born Americans. Take Amit Aharoni as an example; Israeli-born, Stanford GSB-education, StartupChile alumnus. By November '11, through his company Cruisewise, he had created nine jobs held by Americans in San Francisco, had raised over $1.6M in funding. His visa rejected, Amit left for Canada, continuing to run his SF-based company from Vancouver via Skype. ABC picked up his story and boom, Amit got a visa. Amit's Cruisewise is now up to sixteen employees in SF as the company continues to grow and prosper. I'll leave the pure statistics to folks like the Kauffman Foundation or Vivek Wadhwa, but this set of immigrants contribute much more to America than they consume. By partnering with Americans to found and grow jobs-creating companies, the country benefits from their success. With a single missing founder — like Elon Musk of South Africa — PayPal might not have succeeded and grown into the success story it has. Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook told a story last August about an extremely skilled developer from the UK. His visa application was denied, and since the developer was so talented, Facebook simply hired a team of ten in the UK to 272

him. The office those people worked in needed to be cleaned, it needed office supplies. All of that secondary spending and all of those jobs were a direct loss to the American economy because that one visa was rejected. The question becomes who decides what highly skilled means. Current proposals range from simply stapling a green card to the diploma of any foreign graduate to only for technical (STEM) PhDs. Many VCs who are facilitators for the success of entrepreneurs and interested in growing a stronger entrepreneurial community have spoken out in : •

http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/06/mr-feld-goesto-dc-again-to-talk-about-innovation.html

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http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/06/the-chorus-for-immigration-reform-grows-louder.html

Some actual bills have been proposed in the US Congress containing STEM Green Card provisions; most require that the graduate get a job in a technical field rather than explicitly spelling out a path where jobs creators can also qualify: •

Startup Act (2.0), S.1965/S.3217

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SMART Jobs Act, S.3192

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STAR Act, S.3185

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STAPLE Act, H.R.399

Other proposals, like Startup Visa, require more initiative — separate from but usually correlated with higher education — to create something economically valuable to the country in order to qualify for the visa and convert it to a green card. Whether through academic research, industrial manufacturing, or entrepreneurial disruption, these are the people who will work with highly-skilled, driven Americans to help create the future. There is no cap to success in a world where we acknowledge that we can grow the economic pie; more ingredients simply leads to more success. And I'm a selfish guy. I want that success to be American; no matter her country of birth, if she's building the future, I want it to be built here. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-craig-montuori 273

Economics

What are the chances of a debt crisis on the scale of Greece hitting the United States? Paul Ryan, Chairman, House Budget Committee Ultimately, a Greek debt crisis is possible here in the U.S., although it's not imminent, but if we keep going down the path we're on, that kind of situation could come to this country. As a country, we currently borrow forty two cents out of every dollar we spend and, left unchecked, this amount will only continue to grow until it becomes unsustainable. The goal of the Path to Prosperity, the House-ed budget proposal, is to solve our nation's fiscal challenges now, on our own , rather than confront them during a looming debt crisis like we currently see in Greece. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-paul-ryan

274

Prison Life

Murder

What does it feel like to murder someone? Tommy Winfrey, inmate San Quentin State Prison Without a doubt, this is probably the most personal question I think I could ever answer. This is a question I have been asking myself for a very long time now and just now coming to grips with the answers I have found. To say my answer is complex and that I am going to have difficulties expressing exactly how I have felt and still feel about murdering someone is an understatement. I guess the beginning would be the best place to start. When I took another man’s life, I was just nineteen years old. Looking back now, I can honestly say I felt immense peer pressure to go through with the murder. I felt like I would be seen as a weak punk if I let another man get over on me. I was a drug dealer, and I felt I had a reputation to uphold. I can see all this now, but at the time I could see none of this. I realize now I was in a very bad place in life back then. I was in the midst of a serious drug addiction. I felt worthless and unworthy of love, so in return, I placed little value on my life or on the life of anyone else. All of these feelings combined, made feel so powerless in life, I lashed out. My lashing out cost another human his life. I am ashamed 277

to it it, but at the time I felt a great weight was lifted off my shoulders when I pulled the trigger. I felt like I had finally stood up for myself. I was completely irrational. I realize now it is like my friend David Monroe always says, “Hurt people hurt people.” I was really hurting, and I didn’t know how to ask for help. I continued to justify my actions for a long time, but somewhere deep inside, I have always known that there was never any justice in taking someone’s life. itting to myself I was feeling scared, lonely, unworthy of love and respect was just too hard. Also, by itting these feelings of mine, I would also have to come to grips with what I really did, and how I affected the world. This was a hard prospect for me, but I am finally there over fifteen years later. Now I feel sadness over murdering someone. I feel I have robbed my victim’s family of the most precious thing in life. I feel immense sorrow for this. I feel I have robbed my family out of truly ever knowing me. I feel like I have inspired fear in my community. I feel that I have done the world a great disservice, and that I owe a debt that I can never fully repay. I am full of guilt and shame over my actions. Without a doubt, deciding to murder someone was the worst mistake of my life. I don’t believe I even possess the right words to fully express how it feels to murder someone, but I can say, I never want anyone else to feel the way I do. All communications between inmates and external channels are facilitated by approved volunteers since inmates do not have access to the internet. This program with Quora is part of The Last Mile San Quentin. Twitter: @TLM. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-tommy-winfrey

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San Quentin State Prison

Do inmates in San Quentin have access to computers and the Internet? What kind of access? James Houston, inmate San Quentin I came to prison when Motorola’s first flip phone was the phone to have. People still depended on land lines, and you could find a phone booth with no trouble. As you know, things have changed since then. I laughing at a guy for burning some bologna in a microwave until I found out he had been incarcerated twenty years, and it was his first time using one. I have never been on the internet although I hear there is something for everyone on the internet. In San Quentin for an inmate, there is no legal access to the internet. If you work as a clerk, you can work on a computer for job related purposes. In the library, there are three computers designated for inmates to practice our typing skills. We can’t print anything out, though. Then there are about five more computers for researching legal issues. These computers don’t have internet access. The computers inmates are allowed to use are basically modern typewriters when it comes to what you can do on them. Then think about eight computers in a library that serves a population of around 2,500 men. Most people can’t imagine life without the internet or their mobile phones. I am trying to imagine life with them where I can send real-time messages, photos, my resume, and job applications. Thinking about all I have to learn can be overwhelming at times. Hopefully in the near future, this issue will be addressed. I think becoming computer literate can help lower the recidivism rate. All communications between inmates and external channels are facilitated by approved volunteers since inmates do not have access to the internet. This program with Quora is part of The Last Mile San Quentin. Twitter: @TLM. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-james-houston 279

Incarceration

What does the first day of a 5+ year prison sentence feel like? Kenyatta Leal, inmate San Quentin State Prison I my first day because it was my worst day. I was sentenced to life in prison on September 25, 1995, and about a week later was transferred from the San Diego County Jail to RJ Donovan Prison for intake into the state prison system. The morning of my transfer, a deputy came to my cell and told me that I was “catching the chain” to the pen. I had just made it to sleep as my cellmate and I had stayed up late playing chess and talking. He was a nineteen-year-old first-termer headed to the t with a life sentence, and every night he would ask me a gang of questions about prison life. I felt compelled to answer his questions in as much detail as possible, because I knew he didn't understand the danger he was headed into and he needed all the help he could get. As I got myself together, my cellmate sat up on his bunk, wrapped his arms around his knees and watched me like a child would watch a parent. My heart went out to the little dude because he needed more guidance that I ever could give him. I started to remind him of some of the things we had talked about, but the deputy came back to get me. He told me to state my name and booking number, then turn around and cuff up. I complied and when I turned back around to cuff up, my cellmate was sitting there crying. I will never forget that look of hopelessness on his face, and I can only imagine the look on mine. I told him to keep his head up, and I walked down the stairs with the deputy. Right then I said a prayer for that kid, because as bad as my situation was, he was someone who had it far worse than me. We got to the holding cell and there were about twenty others waiting to catch the chain also. They call it catching the chain because we're all chained together as we go to the pen. The single file chain of men made its way outside, and it felt good to walk around a bit and breathe in that crisp morning air. As we loaded onto the bus, the deputies unchained 280

us from each other, but we were left shackled at the waist and ankles. No one said a word on the bus, and my heart was beating so hard I could hear it. The ride to Donovan took all of twenty minutes as the prison is literally within eye sight of the county facility from which I was transferred. The sun was just coming up as we pulled into R&R (Receiving & Release) at Donovan. I couldn't wait to get out of those handcuffs and leg irons; being shackled up like that is something I could never get used to. As soon as we walked into R&R, I saw someone I knew from the county jail and he was all smiles as he asked me how much time I had. When I told him twenty-five years to life, his eyes got big and he took a step back, as if I had some kind of virus he didn't want to catch. His response surprised me. First it made me feel nervous, then worried that everyone else would respond to me the same way. He didn't know what to say and neither did I. I tried to ease the awkwardness of the moment with small talk about my appeal but no matter what I said, I couldn't escape the growing despair in my gut; and that was only the first day. We made it out of R&R around noon and got back on the bus to go to “four yard.” We pulled up next to building 16 and unloaded straight into the dayroom. Once inside, we walked into a gauntlet of correctional officers who immediately started yelling and telling us to shut the f*** up and not ask them for anything because we had nothing coming. After an intense thirty minutes, we all had to sit and wait to be interviewed by the gang coordinator. While we waited, I heard familiar voices of people I knew who had caught the chain before me, asking if I needed anything. At that point, I was so depressed and downtrodden that I didn’t respond verbally. I just shook my head. After my interview, I walked upstairs to the cell where I’d spend the rest of the first day of a life sentence. I stepped inside and the sound of the cold steel door slamming behind me ricocheted around inside my skull, making me dizzy. I just stood there in shock. I wanting to scream but when I opened my mouth nothing but sobs came out. I was devastated. I heard people calling my name on the tier but I couldn’t speak. I closed my eyes hoping to find some relief, but 281

what I saw in my mind’s eye were all of the horrible choices I made and the faces of the people that I hurt in the process. I thought about the times when I coulda, woulda, shoulda taken action to stop this nightmare from happening, but it was way too late. Looking back, it was as if I was on a runaway train to prison, and every choice I made accelerated my imminent arrival. When I finally opened my eyes and looked around the filthy cell, there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. I felt like the most worthless piece of crap ever known to mankind. My life had just hit rock bottom and I couldn’t see any way up or out. That was by far the worst moment of the worst day of my entire life. All communications between inmates and external channels are facilitated by approved volunteers since inmates do not have access to the internet. This program with Quora is part of The Last Mile San Quentin. Twitter: @TLM. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-kenyatta-leal

Incarceration

What did it feel like when the gavel dropped in court with the verdict and how have you changed your life behind bars since then? David Monroe, inmate San Quentin So often, we waste our time trying to get even with those who have hurt us in some way, completely ignoring those who have helped us in some way. I had made this mistake so many times in my life that it became a normal function. I became so consumed by the negative things in my life that I disregarded anything positive. All I could think about was that I was poor, hurt, and didn’t have a father. I forgot that I was smart, loved, and still had a mother. I didn’t realize this until I was sitting in juvenile court 282

waiting to hear whether or not I would be tried as an adult for murder. With my mother sitting behind me in the courtroom, I was shackled and forced to look straight ahead. I wanted so bad to look back and tell her that I loved her. They wouldn’t let me. Reality started setting in that everything I had done was not just affecting me, but my family as well. Then the judge said, “Mr. Monroe, you are a cold-blooded murderer and have no remorse for human life. For that reason, I am trying you as an adult and sending you to prison for the rest of your life.” My whole body went numb and I felt paralyzed with fear as the words vibrated off my eardrum. As horrific as these words were to me, the most terrifying thing I have ever heard in my life was not words at all. It was the scream that came out of my mother’s mouth when she realized that she had lost her son. I had spent my childhood convincing myself that my life was “f--- up” and that no one loved me. Yes, my life wasn’t the best, but that scream came from her soul. That scream told me that she loved me so much that she would never be the same without me. That scream told me that I was loved and cared about more than I could ever know. That scream changed my life. I knew that I had to change the things I was doing, my attitude, and the way I viewed things. This was not an easy thing to do! I was only fifteen years old and still very immature. Nevertheless, the seed was planted! I once read “The only people to get even with are those who’ve helped you.” So despite all of the bad things in my life, for once I was going to get even with someone who was there for me and loved me unconditionally . . . my mom. There is no greater feeling in the world than making someone you love and care about proud of you! While I will never forget the terrifying sound of her scream, hearing her tell me, “I’m so proud of you son,” has only motivated me to keep growing and doing amazing things despite my circumstances. And trust me, this place is full of people who will get on your nerves, push your buttons, and tempt you to throw all of your hard work away. But none of them are more important than me going home to my family and being free. It is extremely hard for me to write about stuff like this 283

because it means that I have to relive the pain and fear all over again. However, I do it so that just one of you may reflect on and rethink the direction of your life or the things you may be doing so that you don’t have to make the same mistakes. I ask you, are ten negative things more important than one positive? Are ten haters more important than one friend or family member that loves and s you? All communications between inmates and external channels are facilitated by approved volunteers since inmates do not have access to the internet. This program with Quora is part of The Last Mile San Quentin. @TLM http://www.quora.com/l/boq-david-monroe

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Sports

Olympic Games

What is it like to be an Olympic athlete after winning (or not winning) the Olympics? Peter Cipollone, 2004 champ. I competed in rowing as the coxswain of the USA men's eightoared crew in Sydney (2000) and Athens (2004). Because rowing is held during the first week of the Games, rowers have the entire second week to experience the fun part of the Olympics. Having a medal, or not, makes a big difference in how that goes. In 2000, we were heavily favored to win. We imploded and finished 5th. That second week was very difficult. We were like ghosts haunting the greatest celebration of amateur sport on earth. We would go to parties — at least the ones where we could get in — and watch what seemed like absolutely everyone else having the time of their lives. We quietly wondered what might have been. We slept a lot and scrapped for tickets to other events. Grown men cried. That was the worst moment of my sports career. For years afterward, our meltdown in Sydney was the the last thing I thought about before I fell asleep and the first thing on my mind when I got up. Thinking about it now still stings. My teammates are also my closest friends. For some, that was 287

their last chance. We will never get that back, and we all live with it every day. In 2004, we were a dark horse, but by then, my mindset on racing had changed quite a bit. I wanted to finish my career with a personal best performance. If I could do that, the medal would take care of itself. In our medal race, we absolutely nailed it and won the gold. From the moment we crossed the finish line, the difference between Athens and Sydney could not have been more stark. We had just achieved the dream of our youth, accompanied by all the expected things: going to the medal stand, seeing our flag go up, singing our national anthem, fighting back a tear or two, celebrating with our families and friends, getting back to our house and finding 200 emails waiting with subjects like, "CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!" and "OMG", even though it was not yet 6 am back home. And then the second week began. NBC called. They wanted us on the Today Show. They liked us and invited us back later in the week. The Wall Street Journal asked if I would write an article about the experience. We did a top-ten list for Letterman. While we were waiting for the cameramen, wrestler Rulon Gardner picked me up with one hand. We did not even need to be on the lists for parties. We skipped the line and flashed our medals at the door. Huge entourage wants to come in, too? No problem. Feel like jumping up on the stage with the band? Do it! Stage dive the crowd? That's cool, too. Global sponsors called to ask if we might attend a breakfast and answer a few questions for a fat honorarium. With pleasure. We were just getting back from a party somewhere and breakfast with people genuinely excited about the Olympics sounded fun. Everywhere we went, it was a celebration. An official who looked quite like me introduced himself with stories of how random people were congratulating him and asking for his autograph. We got a picture together with him wearing the medal. People on the street would stop us and ask if their children could see the medal. That was the best. With two days to go, I stopped sleeping. I had total fear of missing out. I visited with my friends from other countries. Who knew if we would ever see one another again? We just 288

tried to experience as much of it as possible. We were not ghosts anymore. In the years since Athens, that medal has changed my life in ways too numerous to count. And they are all good. http:// www.quora.com/l/boq-peter-cipollone

Olympic Games

Do Olympic or competitive swimmers ever pee in the pool? Carly Geehr, former USA Swimming National Team Member Disclaimer: This is about to get into TMI territory, but hey, I'm just answering the question . . . Nearly 100% of elite competitive swimmers pee in the pool. Regularly. Some deny it, some proudly embrace it, but everyone does. The more interesting question is *when* does said peeing happen? •

Just about the only time you can get away with peeing during a race is during a breaststroke pullout. You spend enough time gliding that if you really gotta go, you probably could. Otherwise, you're too tense and too, well, busy to even think about peeing.

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Before a race is an interesting time. It depends on the meet and to some extent the color of the pool deck. I kid you not. You always try to pee before you swim, but sometimes your body defies logic and finds a way to refill your bladder just to spite you. Adrenaline and nerves wreak havoc on your system, and I knew tons of other swimmers that always, regardless of prior planning, had to pee right before a race. What to do if you're desperate? Well, it's not uncommon to splash yourself before you climb up on the blocks, so that extra liquid on yourself and the pool deck 289

affords you an interesting opportunity. (I'll let you finish the rest of that thought.) •

Warmup/practice - totally free reign. As a swimmer, you just have to accept that you're swimming in pee. I had a teammate that would sit on the wall and announce "I'm peeing!" which was . . . disgusting . . . but at least she warned us. I'm sure I've swum directly behind people who were just letting it all out.

As to the underwater cameras catching it — even if Olympic swimmers peed during their races, which they don't — there's just no way. The only way you can really tell if someone's peeing in the pool is if they announce it to you or they're really dehydrated/sitting in one spot while they go. It diffuses pretty quickly, and if you're moving, it diffuses even faster. (Never been in a pool where they use those chemicals that makes pee turn bright colors, but have always wondered . . . ) http://www.quora.com/l/boq-carly-geehr

NBA Season 2012–13

Why is Jeremy Lin so turnoverprone and how can he fix this? Daryl Morey, GM Houston Rockets •

Many of Jeremy's turnovers are charges. These are the best turnovers to have, as not only do charges mean that you are being aggressive as a player (when good things often happen), but also turnover charges are not "live ball" turnovers where teams get a higher expected value possession the other way. For example, in our opening Detroit game, Jeremy had no "bad " turnovers. They were all charges or off the dribble. Compare his lack of any bad turnovers to his twelve "high quality" es in the game (es he made that set up high percentage offense for others).

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This leads into my next point, which is that Jeremy's es were the best in the league last year in the percentage that led to high quality offense. This is a fancy way of saying that when he makes a risky , it is usually for a high reward, so his bad turnovers, when he has them, are not as bad as for other guards, as his average possession efficiency remains higher.

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Finally, most young guards who are going to be very good start as high turnover players in college and in their early seasons in the pros and get better throughout their career. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-daryl-morey

Jeremy Lin

What's it like to play on the same basketball team as Jeremy Lin? Drew Housman, Guard, Harvard Basketball, Class of 2009 Up until about halfway through the 08-09 season, it was like having any other teammate. Then we played BC a few days after they had upset North Carolina, the number one team in the country at the time. No one thought we had a chance. The only other time I played BC was my freshman year, and we got blasted by 30. We showed up at BC feeling confident as a team, but I think Jeremy was feeling a little something extra. He torched them from start to finish. It felt like he stole every and hit every jumper. They simply had no answer for him. The team played well as a whole, but Jeremy was clearly the reason we won the game. We were chanting his name on the shuttle ride home, never imagining that a sold out Madison Square Garden would be doing the same thing a few years later. He had been the best player on our team for a while, but that game was the first time he showed that he could have been the best player on an ACC team. That is kind of amazing for an Ivy League guy. 291

Overall, he is the best teammate you could ask for. Humble, works hard and plays hard. I can't say I'm that surprised to see what he is doing in the league. His ability to rise to the occasion is uncanny. He did it in high school, winning the state championship over the favored Mater Dei by making big plays in the 4th, he did it in college whenever he played a BCS school (except for Stanford his sophomore year, but that was a disaster across the board), and he is now doing it at the highest level possible. He might have a rough night against Columbia, but against UConn on national TV? 30 points in a near upset. It is really impressive when someone raises his level of play every time the pressure mounts. Also, during the 4th quarter of the Nets game, the announcer kept saying that Jeremy looked exhausted. What he doesn't know is that Jeremy always looks like that. He would appear to be dead tired after five minutes of warmups. No one really knew why, but no one really cared because he would always come out and put in work for forty minutes. •

I have a distinct memory of the first real action he saw as a freshman. He found our big guy for a layup by throwing a no-look that I would never have attempted. His first year was rocky, but he showed flashes of potential.

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He became exceptional at elevating for his jump shot, noticing that the opposing bigs had turned their backs, and firing a to our big guy for a layup. It got to the point where opposing forwards would be more worried about that than getting into rebounding position.

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He is not "deceptively" quick like people keep saying. He is just super quick, straight up. And athleticism is not just about your bench press and your vertical. He has more than enough lateral quickness, coordination, body control, and instincts to make up for what he might lack in the more traditional athletic categories.

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I was always more of a Madden guy, but from limited experience and word of mouth I gathered he was excellent at Halo. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-drew-housman

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UEFA Euro 2012

What makes the Spanish national football team so dominant right now? Hung Lee, Cultural Anthropologist & Startup Recruiter They have invented a new way of playing the game. Tiki-taka isn't just a pleasing-to-the-eye brand of attacking football, it is so radical an evolution of the possession game that it's turned into a revolutionary way to play it. Here are a few key concepts about this Spanish team that most commentators — at least English pundits — don't seem to understand. 1. Spain defends by keeping the ball. The defensive statistics of this Spanish team are incredible — they conceded only one goal in Euro 2012 and only a total of six across the last three major tournaments — that's nineteen tournament games in total. This is an unheard of achievement that even the most renowned defensive sides in history have not come close to. And yet Spain has very few genuinely destructive players, or even players whose primary role in the team is to defend — to tackle, to head, to block. The Spanish have simply worked out that there is only one ball on the pitch, and if you have it, then only your team can score. And so they have ball players throughout the side, even to the extent of playing six midfielders, and defenders who were once midfielders, in defensive positions. They do not carry a single player who cannot play with the ball to his feet and be part of a network that can be trusted to circulate the ball and utterly dominate possession. Spain regularly 'out possesses' their opponents at unheard of ratios as high as 60–70%. This means that the opposition routinely has less than half the game to score and win. 2. Spain does not play the contested ball. An English commentator exclaimed during the recent tourna293

ment 'it's almost as if Spain does not want corners!' He could not quite believe his own words, as corners are perceived by almost every other football team in the world (apart from Barcelona, naturally) as an excellent offensive opportunity. But what the commentator said was actually true. Spain does indeed not want corners because they see not an opportunity to score a goal but rather a threat to something they prize more — possession of the ball. Just as you cannot concede a goal when you have the ball, Spain has understood that you can only score one when you do have it. So they keep the ball at all costs, even if that means foregoing a (poor) goal scoring opportunity. In a corner situation, the most obvious outcome is a contested ball — players from both teams would rise to meet it, and either side, depending on the timing of the jump, has a reasonable chance of getting the ball. For Spain, these odds are not good enough, and they would prefer to retain possession in order to create another chance with better odds in a later phase. This results in the Spanish often being accused of wanting to 'walk the ball' into the net, an accusation based on the assumption that Spanish team are populated purely by artists who want to score only aesthetically pleasing goals. This is a wrong characterization. Spain is populated by mathematicians, who have worked out, as professional gamblers at any casino might, how to play the percentages, and that you'll actually win more games by taking less chances. You simply need better chances. 3. Spain does not shoot unless they have a very good chance of scoring the goal. Spain often wins 1-0. They do not do this, as the Italians might, by scoring first and expertly defending a lead, or as the English might, by battling through ninety minutes of constant turnover and winning it through superior morale. They do it by selecting only great opportunities to attempt to score. You will rarely see Spain score a goal from a long distance shot, and they actually take very few shots from outside the eighteen yard box. This is because a low percentage shot is just another way of losing possession of the ball. Even as the 294

Spanish are tiki-taka-ing their way in your penalty box, their primary concern is thinking about possession and not to lose it, rather than to necessarily score a goal in that phase of play. Spain would happily make dozens of short es to get into the penalty box, only to take another dozen to leave it again, if it mean't retaining the ball and being patient for the right opportunity to score. The English — and to be fair, almost everyone else — would 'force' it if given a similar situation, and maybe or maybe not score, maybe or maybe not lose possession in the attempt of doing so. Spain simply does not tolerate this element of chance. Let's be clear: this is a remarkable Spanish team but there is more science behind what they do than people realise. They have simply realised a truth that every other nation seems to have forgotten — that there is only one ball on the pitch, and if you have it, you cannot lose. And so they have geared their entire team around possessing the ball to the extent of selecting personnel whose predominant ability is ing and possessing it, irrespective of what position they nominally play on the field. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-hung-lee

NFL

How effective would sumo wrestlers be as NFL linemen? John DeMarchi, Have intensely followed the draft for 25 years; have attended 16 NFL Drafts; longtime football fan. Fascinating question, and a good one. Only forty two sumos on the globe can compete at makuuchi level — sumo's top level. The rest of sumo works sort of like baseball, with a minor league system featuring six tiers and a total of about six hundred and thirty wrestlers. So to be a sumo "pro," you can't be a slug. You have to be a huge, powerful, explosive, low-center-of-gravity athlete, 295

with exceptional balance and short-area quickness, and rare toughness. Every one of those skills/attributes is a positive for an NFL offensive or defensive lineman. It's also why some college heavyweight wrestlers succeed as NFL lineman — the skill set translates. Let's take the top forty two sumos (makuuchi). Could any of them make it as an NFL lineman? Could a sumo make it as an NFL Defensive End? No chance — they would lack the top end speed to succeed. Though a sumo could absolutely sink butt, stack the point, and anchor against the run, I'd have to question whether any sumo would have the speed and lateral mobility necessary to burst upfield, dip his shoulder and redirect to a quarterback as a DE needs to do thirty to forty times a game. I'd question whether a sumo could consistently counter and string moves together in open space at NFL speed. Endurance is also a huge problem for the sumo; a typical DE needs to play sixty to seventy downs per game. I doubt a four to five hundred pound sumo could handle that workload. A sumo is NOT going to be J.J. Watt, who plays three-technique DE (between offensive guard and tackle, or five-technique DE (outside offensive tackle's outside shoulder) like say, Mario Williams. Can't see it. But at defensive tackle, especially nose tackle, my answer is . . . maybe. The job of a nose tackle is to tie up two offensive blockers (usually the guard and center); the ability to be an immovable object who occupies space sounds a lot like . . . key attributes of a sumo. One can debate whether a sumo would have the upper body strength necessary to play nose tackle — I'm not sure sumos bench press upwards of four hundred and fifty pounds — but for quickness, size and lower body power, it's possible a sumo could play the nose. Plus, most nose tackles are two-down players, who come off the field in obvious ing situations. That means, the sumo would need to survive thirty to forty snaps a game. That could be doable. As a 4-3 defensive tackle, I'd say no, since one-gappers in that scheme need much more speed and mobility than sumos have. In other words, with top strength training, could a sumo be Ted Washington, Kris Jenkins, or Paul Soloai type player? 296

Maybe. But a penetrating 4-3 tackle like a Warren Sapp or Kyle Williams? No way. On offense, I can't see a sumo offensive tackle — definitely not a blindside left tackle, but not even a right tackle, either. There is way too much space to cover for an NFL tackle against speedy rushing DEs and OLBs, and the sumo simply lacks the top end speed and frankly, height in many cases (the average NFL offensive tackle is 6-5), to succeed. Put it this way — if DeMarcus Ware comes off the corner, can a sumo block him? If JPP bursts upfield then counters back inside, can a sumo jam him? I cannot see that happening. But at offensive guard or center, again, girth, power in space, and lower body explosion would be huge attributes. No, I can't see a four hundred pound sumo pulling guard; yes, I could see a four hundred pound sumo drive-blocking guard. Again, he would need top-strength training, but essentially, a sumo COULD be a bigger (Niners OG) Mike Iupati-type player — a mauler. The key issue isn't so much run blocking on the first level (vs. defensive line); it's whether the sumo could get to the second level and block linebackers in the run game, and whether the sumo has the mobility and quickness to handle speed rushers in the ing game. Again, the other issue is that an offensive lineman typically plays 95-100% of the offensive snaps. Could a sumo survive that, from a pure endurance standpoint? Questionable — since that's not what a sumo trains for, typically. For example, Nate Newton — a multiple Pro Bowler for Dallas at OG — had a sumo type physique. But he also had rare feet and the ability to locate and crush people in space. I can't see a Larry Allen-type sumo — none of them would be that fluid in space — but could a sumo's understanding of balance and leverage enable him to succeed at NFL guard or center? Maybe. Mike Williams of the Redskins is around a three hundred fifty five pound guard, so it isn't unprecedented. The three biggest lies in the NFL are height, weight, and speed. But it is RARE for players over three hundred and seventy five pounds to be drafted and productive in the NFL. The heaviest player drafted in NFL history was Buffalo seventh rounder Leslie Michael Jasper, three hundred and ninety four 297

pounds, two years ago — he is now in Arena football. OG Jamie Nails was drafted at three hundred eighty seven pounds by the Bills about fifteen years ago, and he played decent ball for Buffalo and Miami — but only after slimming down to three hundred and fifty five pounds. OT Aaron Gibson went around three hundred and eighty pounds when the Lions drafted him in the 1990s, but he ate his way out of the league. OT Mike Williams of the Bills was in the three hundred and sixty five to seventy five pound range; he bombed as a tackle, and played guard at thirty six, eventually. OT Leonard Davis tipped the scales at around three hundred and seventy pounds on draft day; he also had to move inside to guard to make it in the NFL. Most NFL plays take three to four seconds. I have no doubt a sumo could gain leverage, and maybe even win the initial one to two seconds on a confrontation; the challenge is, could he sustain, and deal with counter-move (especially lateral one) and the speed on the NFL game after his initial strike? Unclear. On defense, the big men always play inside; occasionally, a guy like Ted ("Mount") Washington plays really well at a listed weight of three hundred and thirty five pounds, and actual weight of around four hundred pounds, but it is not common. Fridge Perry was listed at three hundred and sixty pounds — he also played in the three hundred and seventy five to four hundred range for a lot of his career. But typically, DTs are in the three hundred to three hundred and thirty pound range, and nose tackle go three hundred and twenty to three hundred and sixty or so. Here is where I DO think a sumo could make it — as a situational (max fifteen to twenty downs a game) two-gap, nose tackle who could not be moved in the run game. Granted, the sumo is not going to have any rush skills, save maybe a bull rush. But because of the sumo's understanding of leverage, his mass, his balance, and his explosive lower body power, he would be a load to move inside for any offensive lineman (assuming again, the sumo committed to an upperbody weight regimen training typical for the NFL). Five more points. 298

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Don't underrate the sumo's ability to use his hands — especially to hold — which, though illegal, is vitally important to offensive line success. For those unfamiliar with sumo moves, there is a list of sixty moves sumos have used to end matches since 2000, about twelve of which are the key sumo moves — http://www.sumotalk.com/rules.htm. Hand punch is a big deal in sumo — just as it is in the NFL.

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Don't underrate the sumo's ability to train, and the rigorous discipline and drive it takes to succeed at the elite sumo level. A pro sumo would likely be VERY coachable, and could probably pick up NFL blocking or run-stuffing techniques pretty quickly. You give a makuuchi to say, Dallas OL coach Hudson Houck for one to two years, and I would not bet against that guy being at least a useful situation player. Sumos pick up technique astonishingly well.

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Don't underrate the sumo's balance. Consider that to win a sumo grappling match, a wrestler must force his opponent to step out of the ring, OR force his opponent to touch the ground with any part of his body other than the bottom of his feet. Sumos are exceptional athletes at leverage; that is a crucial skill for NFL intterior lineman.

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Don't underrate the sumo's toughness. These are four to five hundred pound men who pummel and slam into each other at speed WITHOUT PADDING OR EQUIPMENT. That toughness translates exceptionally well to NFL positional requirements. Rugby players have made it in the NFL (albeit primarily as kickers so far). Why not sumos?

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Sumos are athletes; they are not just big, fat guys. These athletes have great quickness, especially on initial strikes and blows; that also translates well to the type of interior line they would see in the NFL.

Overall, I don't think a four hundred plus pound sumo could make it in the NFL as an every-down player. But as a situational player (goal line; short yardage; etc.), I could absolutely see it. Anyone who re three hundred and sixty plus pound William "Refrigerator" Perry scoring in Su299

per Bowl XX will know what I am saying. Could a three hundred and fifty to four hundred pound sumo make it as a full-time guard, or nose tackle? Would love to see one of the makuuchi try it. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-john-demarchi

World Wrestling Entertainment

Is wrestling fake? Anon Things that are predetermined or fake The match duration, main moves, finishing moves and outcome are predetermined. The major events of a match are planned and discussed beforehand, and so is the outcome. Some major events are definitely planned — for instance, someone might interfere in a match just as the bad guy, or 'heel,' is about to lose. The duration of the match is also predetermined, and the time is kept by the referee. If you time the matches on, say, WWE, you might notice that there are broadly five, fifteen, and twenty five minute matches. The referee is not just a neutral bystander. The referee keeps track of time and tells wrestlers when to wrap up a match. He also helps communicate things between wrestlers, and assists in the overall story by "accidentally" getting bumped into during the course of a match, so that the bad guy or "heel" can cheat. Sometimes, when a wrestler wants things to get a bit bloody, the referee may slip a razor to him to cut himself (and collect it back later). At the same time, the referee needs to keep within the illusion of rulekeeping (disqualifications, count-outs, pinfalls). Lastly, the referee has the full discretion to stop a match if one of the wrestlers is seriously injured, and he has to balance this discretion with the show's need to follow the scripted narrative. Much (but not all) of a wrestling match is spontaneous. Wrestlers "call spots" to each other, ie, instruct each other 300

about moves they will give or want to receive. Usually this is discreet, though occasionally one might be able to hear or spot it on TV. Selling, or exaggerating moves. Some moves, like the "stunner" and the "cutter", are not particularly painful for the receiving wrestler and he is the one who has to 'sell' it to make it look convincing. You might see wrestlers jump a couple of feet away after getting a chop or an uppercut — some 'sell' more than others. The powerhouse wrestlers, of course, deliberately "no sell" moves. If you don't 'sell' right, it looks bad. Wrestlers protecting each other. You will find that high flying moves almost always hit their target, and in fact it can be quite obvious in a few cases that the receiving wrestlers open their arms and bodies to 'catch' the attacking wrestler. Wrestlers help each other out in potentially dangerous moves by, for instance, tapping the receiving wrestler when he is about to execute the move (the 'DDT'), or by releasing the arms of the receiving wrestler so he can protect his face and head upon impact with the mat (Triple H's 'Pedigree'). Very large, or powerful wrestlers must protect opponents, for instance, by not putting all his weight on the receiving wrestler in high-impact moves. Wrestlers protecting themselves. Wrestlers will brace themselves for impact, for instance, by falling in a certain way or using their hands and knees to cushion an impact so they don't hit their heads. In some potentially dangerous moves, like the Undertaker's tombstone piledriver, you can actually see the receiving wrestler literally hugging the attacking wrestler tightly as a precaution. The dangerous part of the tombstone piledriver here is that the attacking wrestler (wearing black) might lose his grip on an opponent (wearing white) who is suspended upside down with no protection to his head. Done correctly, the receiving wrestler actually does not impact the ground at all. His long hair and the speed of the movement disguises the fact that receiving wrestler's head is above the attacking wrestler's knees. Wrestlers assisting each other. Like Brian says, although wrestlers are very strong and able to carry much more than their own body weight, many moves still require the assis301

tance of the receiver. The 'chokeslam,' for instance, often requires the receiving wrestler to bend his knees and kick off the ground a bit. Wrestlers hating each other. Of course they (usually) don't hate each other all that much. The strange thing about wrestling is that you have to both hit the opponent and protect him, which compounds the already complex working dynamic between wrestlers who travel with each other two hundred days in a year in the WWE's case. Punching / hitting with hands. Wrestlers don't punch each other like boxers do. They seldom hit each other with the knuckles of their fists, but with the back of the hand, or the wrist, or some part of the hand/arm that is less sharp than the knuckle. They are very restrained in this way, but a good wrestler will know how to disguise this restraint with his body language or with his hitting 'technique.' Stamping. Punches make little sound. Wrestlers stamp their feet on the ground as they snap into a punch to generate what sounds like an impressive, audible punch. But it's their feet. A good wrestler will know how to make this stamping look natural and look necessary for gaining momentum. Things that are real Taking a bump (how wrestlers fall). Wrestlers actually take a bit more pain than they have to. When the wrestler takes a "back bump," he is actually slamming himself on the mat with more force than he has to. The mats are rigged with microphones to amplify the sound, but those can only go so far. Chair and table shots. They're not fake props. The steel chairs are really steel chairs. In some cases, some props like tables may be pre-cut, but this is so that they break in a predictable fashion and therefore not injure the wrestler with unexpected splinters. The pain. The mats aren't concrete, but they're not mattresses either. There is some padding, but it doesn't save the wrestlers from feeling sore all week long. It hurts when you slam onto the mat. It hurts when you're whipped into a metal railing, steel steps, hit by a chair, a belt, a ring bell, a 2-by-4. The soreness. People forget that while the top MMA fighters and boxers only fight a handful of times a year (if 302

that). Those fights are brutal, but leave enough time for the body to recuperate. WWE wrestlers tour two hundred days in the year. The biggest WWE stars may wrestle three or four times a week (Raw, Smackdown, and at least one untelevised house show), in addition to media commitments and travelling time (which can amount to twenty to forty hours — the WWE travels to almost every continent on the planet). Most wrestlers go through the entire year sore or suffering from a nagging pain that never goes away. A few, like Edge and Shawn Michaels, have suffered well-documented back problems. Edge had to retire in his prime to avoid spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair. The athleticism. Many people disparage WWE wrestlers as actors, but pro-wrestling requires a great deal of athleticism. Many of the WWE's roster, past and present, are athletes in their own right. Kurt Angle was a Olympic gold medalist, and of the current roster, Alberto Del Rio has a background as an MMA fighter and a gold medalist in GrecoRoman wrestling at the Pan-American games. A few others have excellent amateur backgrounds — Jack Swagger was a two-time All-American. The concussions. Concussions are well documented in wrestling. Many promotions like the WWE no longer allow chair shots on the head due to the very real effects on health. You don't need to be hit on the head to have a concussion. When you are dealing with wrestlers in the 100-200 kg (or 200-400 lbs) range, one can get a concussion from the most innocuous of wrestling moves. The wrestler often continues wrestling through a concussion. Depending on his level of awareness, his opponent(s) often improvise a finish. In this link (http://www.wrestlinginc.com/wi/news/2012/0818/555395/ kurt-angle/), Kurt Angle talks about how Triple H and The Rock improvised a finish when he suffered a concussion during a triple threat match involving the three. Submission moves. Some submission holds are for show. The "sleeper" is usually meant for the wrestlers to rest and 'call spots' for the rest of the match. It is perfect because the wrestlers get to be within whispering distance of each other. They call spots, of course, after hiding or angling their mouths away from the cameras. The common feature of al303

most all submission moves is that they meant to be adjustable (ie, can be loosened a bit) and have a few exit spots to allow the receiver to counter the move. However, many submission moves genuinely hurt (like Bret Hart's 'sharpshooter'). Many of the submission moves you see on the WWE are borrowed from "real" sports like MMA and jiujitsu — such as the arm trap triangle choke or the gogoplata. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-anon--6

304

Technology

Startups

What does it feel like to be the CEO of a start-up? Paul DeJoe, Least valuable person Ecquire.com Very tough to sleep most nights of the week. Weekends don't mean anything to you anymore. Closing a round of financing is not a relief. It means more people are depending on you to turn their investment into twenty times what they gave you. It's very difficult to "turn it off." But at the same time, television, movies, and vacations become so boring to you when your company's future might be sitting in your inbox or in the results of a new A/B test you decide to run. You feel guilty when you're doing something you like doing outside of the company. Only through years of wrestling with this internal fight do you recognize how the word "balance" is an art that is just as important as any other skill set you could ever hope to have. You begin to see how valuable creativity is and that you must think differently not only to win, but to see the biggest opportunity. You recognize that you get your best ideas when you're not staring at a screen. You see immediate returns on healthy distractions. You start to respect the Duck. Paddle like hell under the water, but be smooth and calm on top where everyone can see you. You learn the hard way that if you lose your cool, you lose. 307

You always ask yourself if you are changing The World in a good way. Are people's lives better for having known you? You are creative, and when you have an idea, it has no filter before it becomes a reality. This feeling is why you can't do anything else. You start to see that the word "entrepreneur" is a personality. It's difficult to talk to your friends that are not risking the same things you are because they are content with not pushing themselves or putting it all out there in the public with the likelihood of failure staring at them everyday. You start to turn a lot of your conversations with relatives into how they might exploit opportunities for profit. Those close to you will view your focus as something completely different because they don't understand. You don't blame them. They can't understand if they haven't done it themselves. It's why you will gravitate towards other entrepreneurs. You will find reward in helping other entrepreneurs. Your job is to create a vision, a culture, to get the right people on the bus and to inspire. When you look around at a team that believes in the vision as much as you do and trusts you will do the right thing all the time, it's a feeling that can't be explained. The exponential productivity from great people will always amaze you. It's why finding the right team is the most difficult thing you will do but the most important. This learning will affect your life significantly. You will not settle for things anymore because you will see what is possible when you hold out for the best and push to find people that are the best. You don't have a problem anymore being honest with people about not cutting it. You start to see that you're a leader, and you have to lead or you can't be involved with it at all. You turn down acquisition offers because you need to run the show, you feel like your team is the best in the world, and you can do anything with hard work. Quitting is not an option. You have to be willing to sleep in your car and laugh about it. You have to be able to laugh at many things, because when you think of the worse things in the world that could happen to your company, they will happen. Imagine working for something for two years and then having to throw it out completely because you see one day that it's wrong. You 308

realize that if your team is having fun and can always laugh, you won't die, and in fact, the opposite will happen: you will learn to love the journey and look forward to what you do everyday, even at the lowest times. You'll hear not to get too low when things are bad and not to get too high when things are good, and you'll even give that advice. But you'll never take it, because being in the middle all the time isn't exciting, and an even keel is never worth missing out on something worth celebrating. You'll become addicted to finding the hardest challenges because there's a direct relationship between how difficult something is and the euphoria of a feeling when you do the impossible. You realize that it was much more fun when you didn't have money, and that money might be the worse thing you could have as a personal goal. If you're lucky enough to genuinely feel this way, it is a surreal feeling that is the closest thing to peace, because you realize it's the challenges and the work that you love. Your currencies are freedom, autonomy, responsibility, and recognition. Those happen to be the same currencies of the people you want around you. You feel like a parent to your customers in that they will never realize how much you love them, and they validate that you are not crazy. You want to hug every one of them. They mean the world to you. You learn the most about yourself, more than any other vocation, as an entrepreneur. You learn what you do when you get punched in the face many, many times. You learn what you do when no one is looking and when no one would find out. You learn that you are bad at many things, lucky if you're good at a handful of things, and the only thing you can ever be great at is being yourself, which is why you can never compromise it. You learn how power and recognition can be addicting and see how they could corrupt so many. You become incredibly grateful for the times that things were going as bad as they possibly could. Most people won't get to see this in any other calling. When things are really bad, there are people that come running to help and don't think twice about it. Tal Raviv, Gary Smith, Joe Reyes, Toan Dang, Vincent Cheung, Eric Elinow, Abe Marciano are some of them. I will forever be in their debt, and I could never repay 309

them nor would they want or expect to be repaid. You begin to realize that in life, the luckiest people in the world only get one shot at being a part of something great. Knowing this helps you make sense of your commitment. Of all the things said though, it's exciting. Every day is different and so exciting. Even when it's bad, it's exciting. Knowing that your decisions will not only affect you but many others also is a weight that I would rather have any day than the weight of not controlling my future. That's why I could not do anything else. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-paul-dejoe

1995-2000 Dot-Com Bubble

What factors led to the bursting of the Internet bubble of the late 1990s? Steve Case, Co-founder of AOL; now Chairman of Case Foundation and Revolution (Zipcar, LivingSocial, Exclusive Resorts, Everyday Health, Revolution Money, Miraval, etc) The Internet went through some fairly predictable phases. The first was a research phase (the 70s), when some forward thinkers were working on early research projects for what was then called videotex, teletext, 2-way TV, etc. These were experiments in labs as consumers did not have PCs or any practical way to access these services. Futurists like Alvin Toffler wrote about the notion of an "electronic cottage" (he wrote The Third Wave in 1979), but it was considered a piein-the-sky prediction. Next was the pioneering phase (early 80s to early 90s), when a relatively small number of people were trying to build interactive services, but it was an uphill battle. Few people used them (and the Internet itself was still limited to government/educational institutions — indeed, it was illegal to use 310

it for commercial purposes). The conventional wisdom was that the market would always be limited to hackers/hobbyists. AOL was the first "Internet" company (it was actually called an "online services" or "interactive services" company at the time) to go public, and I on the road show (in 1992) explaining why we thought this would be a large market someday. Given we had been in business seven years and had less than 200,000 s, most were skeptical. Suddenly, interest in the Internet took off and we entered a growth phase (mid-90s). A lot of factors contributed to this: consumers started buying PCs in large numbers, PCs started shipping with pre-installed modems, network costs dropped sharply, making access more affordable, software was developed to improve ease of use for mainstream s, the World Wide Web emerged, the first wave of start-ups were developed, etc. Suddenly, a market that had been nascent for more than a decade was showing signs of life. As an example, AOL went from 200,000 s to 1 million in a two year period. This sudden surge in interest led to the hype phase (late 90s), when people came out of the woodwork to be part of the Internet gold rush. Hundreds of companies were started, and everybody wanted to invest. Valuations shot up. Me-too companies became prevalent. Crazy ideas that had no business model and no realistic chance of success were viewed as the next big thing. As millions of people decided to go online virtually overnight, companies like AOL expanded rapidly. We were literally getting America online, adding 1 million new s every month or two. Our market value soared, from $70 million at the time of the 1992 IPO to $150 billion in early 2000. Not surprisingly, this hype phase was followed by despair (early 2000s). Some called this the Internet's nuclear winter. Investors ran from the sector and valuations plummeted. Some companies lost 99% of their market value in a matter of months. Dozens went bankrupt. The sector went from being the hottest thing on Wall Street to being cold. New companies could not raise start-up capital. Most people thought the Internet as a ing fad. That then led to a recovery phase (mid 2000s). Some of the companies started in the hype phase built large franchises 311

(Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, etc), and a handful of newer companies got traction (Google, in particular). This was a slower, steadier, saner period of growth. Investors tended to be selective, betting on the winners that survived the bust that were consolidating their positions. Now we appear to be in a boom phase again. The success of social media (Facebook in particular) and more recently social commerce (Groupon and LivingSocial) has reminded people of how quickly large, profitable, valuable franchises can be built. As a result, there is once again a rush to invest. This will inevitably lead to many disappointments, but the difference now vs. a decade ago is that companies have real business models, significant revenues, etc. Valuations are likely to move up — or down — quickly, but the underlying businesses are for the most part pretty stable. This cycle — hope, hype, despair, rebound, etc — has been interesting to watch (and live through) over the past 25+ years. It is is worth pointing out though that what happened with the Internet is not unique to the Internet — the cycles just happened a little faster. Most significant inventions and industries (cars, etc) have undergone similar transitions. Success seems to require a mix of ion, perspective, and perseverance. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-steve-case

Instagram

What was the genesis of Instagram? Kevin Systrom, CEO, co-founder First off, we have to say that we never expected the overwhelming response that we've seen. We went from literally a handful of s to the #1 free photography app in a matter of hours. But as my cofounder Mike Krieger likes to say, Instagram is an app that only took eight weeks to build and ship, but was a product of over a year of work. 312

The story starts when I worked at Nextstop. While I was there working in marketing, I started doing more and more engineering at night on simple ideas that helped me learn how to program (I don't have any formal CS degree or training). One of these ideas was combining elements of Foursquare (check-ins) with elements of Mafia Wars (hence the name Burbn). I figured I could build a prototype of the idea in HTML5 and get it to some friends. Those friends ended up using the prototype without any branding elements or design at all. I spent weekends working on improving the prototype for my friends. At a party for the Hunch folks, I ran into a bunch of people who would basically make starting Burbn a reality. At that party were two people from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. I showed the prototype, and we decided we'd meet up for coffee to talk about it. After the first meeting, I decided to take the dive and leave my job to go solo and see if Burbn could be a company. Within two weeks of leaving, I raised $500k from both Baseline and Andreessen Horowitz, and started work on finding a team. Mike Krieger and I started talking and he decided he liked the idea of helping start the company. Once he ed, we took a step back and looked at the product as it stood. By this time, we had built Burbn into a (private) really neat HTML5 mobile web app that let you: Check in to locations, Make plans (future check-ins), Earn points for hanging out with friends, Post pictures, and much more. We decided that if we were going to build a company, we wanted to focus on being really good at one thing. We saw mobile photos as an awesome opportunity to try out some new ideas. We spent one week prototyping a version that focused solely on photos. It was pretty awful. So we went back to creating a native version of Burbn. We actually got an entire version of Burbn done as an iPhone app, but it felt cluttered, and overrun with features. It was really difficult to decide to start from scratch, but we went out on a limb, and basically cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities. What remained was Instagram. (We renamed because we felt it better captured what you were doing — an instant telegram of sorts. It also sounded camera-y). So eight weeks later, we gave it to our friends, beta tested, 313

bug fixed, etc. and then we decided it was ready to ship. We've got a long road ahead of us, but we're encouraged by the adoption and usage that has far exceeded our bets pre-launch. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-kevin-systrom

Video Games

Am I missing out by not playing any video or console games? David Cole, Designer at Quora Reasons why you might not be missing out: You consider art or recreation a waste of time in general. If you believe this, then you can toss video games into the same pile with novels, films, sports, hiking, and chess. I don't think there's any way around this, some people just want to feel productive with everything they do. You lack the capacity to derive meaning from video games. I don't think there's a category of art where I haven't connected to at least one piece (opera, maybe?) but I'd bet there are people for whom this is true. If you've given the form an earnest try and got nothing from it, I wouldn't blame ya for shrugging it off in favor of art you do find meaningful. You don't want to deal with learning or skill-based challenge in your art. Games are exceptional from other forms of art in that they often require skill to get through, or at least a learning period around the input methods. This can be alienating, and I don't blame people for being turned off by this. We've developed input and mechanical tropes (the platformer, the first person shooter) to help smooth out the learning curve, but you still need to learn one before you can play the rest. If this doesn't describe you, it might just be a function of misconception or inexperience: 314

You think video games lack artistic or recreational capacity. You're mistaken. We're witnessing the birth and rapid evolution of a brand new art form, dense with new expressive faculty. To be alive right now and choose to ignore this strikes me as a shame. You think video games require a lot more of your time relative to other forms of art and recreation. Many of the games that get the most outside attention (Skyrim, Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto) also happen to be massive time sinks. Good games can be found at any length imaginable from a few minutes (age) to a few hours (Portal) to the more typical fifteen to twenty hours for your mainstream, large budget games. These are no less a time sink than a novel. You haven't played a video game you connected with. I'd bet this is the case for most people who dismiss video games. There's this myth of the "gamer," or that people who play games are a specific kind of person. Movie goers and book readers do not have an equivalent identity. This is problematic: people feel like they're either inside or outside the world of games. In reality, games are more diverse than people think, as are the people who play them. If you don't want a game that requires hand-eye coordination and action-based challenges, you can play sim games, or turn based strategy games. Within the interactive fiction and experimental "art" game communities you can find games that lack challenge entirely. Because it's a medium in constant evolution and experimentation, it's hard to dabble and understand what's out there. If you really are wondering if there's a game out there for you, consider asking a friend with diverse gaming tastes what they might recommend. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-david-cole

315

Steve Jobs

Why did Steve Jobs choose not to effectively treat his cancer? Ramzi Amri, MD/PhD Candidate, MGH Surgical Oncology I hesitated a long time before addressing this topic. To avoid any risks of bias, let me start by stating that all the details on Jobs' specific case are based on secondary sources, albeit from reliable sources in the media. I write this on a personal title, I do not pretend to know anything about the case on a personal level, and I never participated in the care of Mr. Jobs. I base all my cancer figures on sources from biomedical research known to me. I respect the privacy of, and in no way wish to offend, anyone mourning his ing. I have the profoundest respect for Mr. Jobs and his legacy, but I feel that in the spirit of his progressive view of the world, learning from his case is an appropriate way to look back on the facts concerning his life and legacy. I have done a year and a half of research on the type of tumor that affected Steve Jobs as a medical student in Amsterdam and have some strong opinions on his case, not only as an irer of his work, but also as a cancer researcher who has the impression that his disease course has been far from optimal. Let me cut to the chase: Mr. Jobs allegedly chose to undergo all sorts of alternative treatment options before opting for conventional medicine. This was, of course, a freedom he had all the rights to take, but given the circumstances, it seems sound to assume that Mr. Jobs' choice for alternative medicine could have led to an unnecessarily early death. Again, please understand that I have no knowledge of the specific case, I'm just trying to give insights on his a priori odds of cure. These are independent of his case and mere indicators that somehow his case turned for the worse when it statistically was improbable. What made this happen will remain in the domain of speculations. We're here to see if his 316

therapeutic choices are possibly what made this happen. First, let me clarify a few things about his disease: Neuroendocrine tumors are far less deadly than "ordinary" pancreatic cancer. The big confusion in the media is that Jobs had pancreatic cancer. Though his tumor might have originated in his pancreas, we're not speaking of the dreaded pancreatic adenocarcinoma that has such a horrible prognosis and makes up for 95% of pancreatic tumors. Jobs is cited to have said himself that he had an islet-cell tumor, which is a colloquially used, less accurate name for the other 5% of pancreatic tumors, so-called neuroendocrine tumors. Neuroendocrine tumors are relatively mild forms of cancer. Gastroenteropancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumors (GEPNET's) are a range of tumors that mostly keep their original function, producing endocrine hormones. The disadvantage of that is the havoc they wreak on the body due to all sorts of hormonal imbalances caused by the hormones they produce. On the other hand, the level of differentiation is a strong indicator of how aggressive a tumor is: the better a tumor is differentiated e.g. keeps the features of its originator, the least invasive and prone to metastasis it is. Just to illustrate how mild these tumors can be: •

As many as 10% of autopsied persons in the general population have been reported to have one of these without ever having had any symptoms during their life.

•

Up to 30% of detected GEP-NETs are so well-differentiated they're strictly not cancers. I have even come across an article where insulinomas, the most common type of GEP-NETs were benign in 90% of the cases.

•

If treated appropriately and in time, most people won't die from the cancer itself. In my series of patients, for many subtypes, the survival rate was as high as 100% over a decade.

Neuroendocrine tumors caught in time can be treated just by surgically removing the tumor. 317

This is a relatively low-risk treatment that — especially compared to chemo and radiation — has negligible disadvantages. In many cases, a simple enucleation (just cutting out the tumor with a safe margin around it) is enough and leaves no residual side-effects. Now, about this specific case: Jobs had many favorable factors that indicate an early surgical treatment could have been curative. •

Mr. Jobs said himself that they caught the tumor early. Early in GEP-NETs means in many cases that surgically removing the primary tumor without additional removal of organs is a curative with a low chance or recurrence.

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The tumor was located at a relatively clement site, the pancreas.

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The tumor was allegedly an insulinoma, one of the best treatable subtypes of GEP-NETs.

•

The tumor was probably well-differentiated. Mr. Jobs spoke of a hormonal imbalance, this points to a tumor that keeps its endocrine function, which is an general indicator of good differentiation. Well-differentiated tumors are less prone to metastasize and grow rapidly.

See table linked to below for a comprehensive illustration of the numbers I'm referring to, I chose an article from The Annals of Oncology as a source as it's one of the few papers freely accessible for everyone interested to read the full article: http:// annonc.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/9/1794. . . . but not treating the most innocent cancer can still cause it to go seriously bad. I'm currently reviewing hundreds of colon cancer cases, and about 25% of them start with a patient that comes with a history of polyps. Polyps are small benign little growths in the lining of the intestine. They are absolutely harmless at first, yet slowly but surely, over years, they lose more and more of the above mentioned "differentiation" and some eventually turn to a malign colon cancer. In fact, it is supposed that all colon cancers start as a polyp. These 25% had polyps removed, but were unlucky enough that between two colonoscopies, some other polyp found the 318

time to grow into a real cancer. That's also why screening — and going there on time — is so important. This illustrates also why leaving even the most innocent malign tumor to grow is just a foolish thing to do — a ticking time bomb. Jobs was a hippie back in the day, and a conventional medicine skeptic now. His reaction to the disease gave the disease time to spread. Many mainstream media, including CNN, stated that Mr. Jobs might have spent as long as two years without proper (conventional) treatment. While Mr. Jobs was trying all sorts of alternative mumbojumbo I won't even bother to go through as their failure is now sadly irrefutably proven, his tumor grew, and grew, and grew . . . . . . and then it somehow grew beyond control. •

Jobs waited so long before seeking normal treatment that he had to undergo a Whipple procedure, losing his pancreas and whole duodenum in 2004. This was the first alarming sign that his disease had progressed beyond a compact primary to at least a tumor so large his Pancreas and duodenum could not be saved.

•

Jobs seemingly waited long enough for the disease revealed to have spread extensively to his liver. The only reason he'd have a transplant after a GEP-NET would be that the tumor invaded all major parts of the liver, which takes a considerable amount of time. Years, in most neuroendocrine tumors. It could be that this happened before his diagnosis, but the risk grows exponentially with time.

•

We then saw the tumor slowly draining the life out him. It was a horrible thing to see him lose weight and slowly turn into a skin and bones form of himself.

Yet it seems that even during this recurrent phase, Mr. Jobs opted to dedicate his time to Apple as the disease progressed, instead of opting for chemotherapy or any other conventional treatment. As for the "Why?" question: Every patient has another view of his or her disease and 319

the priorities for the treatment, or how much suffering and risk they're ready to endure as a trade-off for a higher chance of getting cured. For most people, the trust in their doctor's intention to treat them is near-absolute. We encourage patients to inform themselves on the subject and stimulate personal choices, but the extent to which people can go through all the technicalities and the enormous pile of medical evidence is limited not only by the level of understanding of this specialist knowledge, but also simply by the sheer time it takes to inform oneself about this. Now Mr. Jobs always was a free thinker, a strong believer in spirituality, a vegetarian, and a known skeptic of conventional medicine. He chose to reject conventional medicine altogether for a while. He's not alone in that. We come across many people like this, and we all know someone in our midst that uses homeopathy or has this known fear of anything "chemical" (to those I always say that everything is chemical, if you think dihydrogen oxide sounds scary you should stop drinking water). Individual freedom of thought and choice is a cornerstone of our modern society, and the medical world makes no exception. It's always an ethical puzzle if a patient chooses alternative treatment that we know from fact will not work. Yet, as long as the person is mentally sane, we cannot force them to choose a working treatment, even if it means their death. Sadly, even for one of the greatest personalities of the last hundred years, there will be no exception, and badly treated cancer is just as deadly for him as for anyone else . . . http://www.quora.com/l/boq-ramzi-amri

320

Steve Jobs

What are the best stories about people randomly meeting Steve Jobs? Tim Smith, Principal, Applied Design Group I dated for years a young woman whose father was Steve Jobs's neighbor in Palo Alto. I thus found myself in the neighborhood often, at dinners, or parties, etc. We would see the Jobs come and go – they have a “normal” house, no gates, no guards, no high fences, not even a big lot. Often, leaving a party at my girlfriend’s house late at night, I would drive past their house and you would actually see Steve sometimes, working on a Mac. One afternoon I attended a party, driving an old Sunbeam Alpine sports car I had the misfortune to own at the time. After the party, I started the Alpine, pulled away from the curb, and – as classic British sports cars will oft do – the electrical system blinked out and I coasted gracefully to a stop, directly in front of the Jobs’ driveway. Their cars weren’t there, which was a relief to me, because I was sure they would consider me some weird stalker. So I got out, popped the hood and tried to quick-fix the electrical to at least move further away – and call AAA. Within about fifteen minutes, of course, I heard two cars pull in behind me, and into the Jobs’ driveway – the Jobs were home. I huddled under the hood of the Alpine and hoped they wouldn’t notice – although I was the only other car on the street. They went inside, with kids, thankfully, without saying anything. So I closed the hood and prepared to walk back next door to my girlfriend’s parents house to call AAA. As I was putting my jacket on, I heard a call from across the street behind me – the Jobs’ driveway – “British or Italian?” It was Jobs’s lovely wife Laurene. “British,” I said, “and acting like it.” “You want a beer?” she said. I tried to decline (shocked I guess at first), but she insisted, said, “You’re not going anywhere,” and walked back in the house – only to re321

turn with two bottles of beer. I was determined not to let on that I knew exactly who I was talking to – I was so afraid of being cast a stalker – but the scene was already getting weird for me, standing by my broken car having a beer with Steve Jobs’s wife. So, it got weirder. “You know, we have a friend who knows all about these Sunbeams. We should call him.” I begged her not to, that I’d call AAA and be on my way. She left her beer and went back in the house for a minute, only to return saying, “They’re on their way out, but said they would drop by to take a look.” By this point, I am fully resigned to whatever story is going to play out. It was starting to dawn on me that these were not just Silicon Valley elite – they were real people, just helping a poor guy out. It was just unexpected, given what you might think about people like this: it would have been so easy for them to just ignore me. Or call the police. Within about fifteen minutes, a very long, very black car I won’t identify pulled up and – Felini could not have directed this – a handsome gentleman in (I think) a tuxedo, and a beautifully formally dressed wife emerged, to examine my car. This was Laurene’s friend, the Sunbeam mechanic. I protested, all was ignored. The tuxedoed man (who to this day I have no idea who he was – I’ll call him James Bond) took off his jacket, opened the hood of my car, and commenced to fishing around inside, while we all visited amicably. So Steve comes out. At which point – being an irer of Jobs for many years – I guess I knew was inevitable, and I both dreaded and anticipated it. He ambled over. I think he had a beer too. And asked what was going on. He was ed by one of the kids. The Jobs made small talk and joked with their friends – dressed to the nines, repairing my car – while I politely thanked them over and over and tried not to throw up at the insanity of the scene. And then of course, it got even weirder, or funnier, depending on whether you were me or not. James Bond told someone to try to crank the car. I was talking with Laurene, so Jobs actually sits down in the Alpine and tries to crank it – with his kid sitting behind him. To no 322

avail. So I have to stop here – it’s a Kodak moment – something you want to . It’s a beautiful Fall evening in Palo Alto. Your car’s broken. A formally dressed close friend of Steve Jobs is under the hood working on your engine. You are talking with Steve’s absolutely lovely and down-to-earth wife. Steve is in the car, with his kid, trying to crank it. That’s the moment. You don’t often get close to people like the Jobs, much less in a ridiculous situation like this, where you realize that they are just really good people. They’re normal, funny, charitable, real people. Not the people the press talks about. Steve is not the maniacal business and design despot the media loves to portray – well he is, but not always. These were real, nice, people. But still Steve Jobs. The car didn’t start. James Bond got his tuxedo back together, apologized to me (!) for not being able to fix it. Said it was the electrical (of course). They said their goodbyes and departed in their giant, silent black car. Steve said something like “piece of shit” as he got out, and walked back into the house. Classic Steve – he was right. Laurene said, “Come inside and use the phone.” Still rolling with it at this point, I followed her into the house, stepping over the dirty laundry you find in everyone’s real house and into the kitchen where she pointed me to a phone with god knows how many lines on it. I called AAA, thanked Laurene profusely (for the 50th time), and left quietly. I never acknowledged I had any idea who they were. A week later, I dropped a six pack of beer off at the Jobs’ door, with a note saying thanks. Like anyone would have done, I guess. I’m an Apple follower. I own a fair amount of Apple stock. You can’t avoid the public persona and reputation of Steve Jobs – the media stories. But, as with the other vignettes some have posted, we don’t hear about or appreciate the personal side of Jobs and his family. They deserve their privacy, and it must be hard to maintain I’m sure, but the flip side of that is that most never see how frankly normal they are. I purchased the bio that came out last fall, but have not started it. I hope that, on balance, it is as much about what a decent, probably brilliant, real, caring individual Steve Jobs was: a husband, 323

father, neighbor – and CEO. Tortured probably, in his brilliance. I saw him in his most personal element – family and friends – around a broken down car in Palo Alto one night, just by chance. I was lucky – and I was delighted. It’s one of my fondest memories. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-tim-smith

Silicon Valley Company Culture

Which of the Hogwarts Houses does each of the Gang of Four companies correspond to? Peter Clark Amazon - Gryffindor Gryffindor believes in bravery, daring, and nerve. Amazon, a company that sold books online, bravely decided to risk eating into their own business with their marketplace offerings (which many speculated would be the downfall of Amazon), they have displayed great bravery in keeping the pedal to the floor with their Amazon Web Services, a service vastly out of the traditional ecommerce Amazon brand. Amazon has also repeatedly shown remarkable nerve to governments, companies, and s. From revoking books from the Amazon Kindle, to revoking free shipping to American states that wanted to charge them additional costs, and flying in the face of record labels to offer their cloud offerings for hosted music. The Gryffindor element is fire, and a great fuel for fire is wood which you can find in the Amazon rainforest. Facebook - Hufflepuff Facebook thrives on an environment of hard work on their product, loyalty both from s and employees (active Facebook s use the service every day), and being non-judge324

mental. Which of the other three companies do you think would not just , but encourage, applications that allowed you to throw sheep at your friends? Hufflepuff is an inclusive house, and this resonates with various cultural jokes that bounce around the walls of Facebook, from hoodies with cryptic logos, to in-jokes on Quora. Additionally, a famous Hufflepuff student, Cedric Diggory, was played by Robert Pattison, who is famous (to muggles) for his role in the Twilight trilogy, and guess what one of the most popular Facebook pages is? The Twilight Trilogy. (16M fans!) Google - Ravenclaw Like Ravenclaw, Google values intelligence and knowledge. Ravenclaw was founded by the Grey Lady, who was killed for fleeing her lover and refusing to see him again, parallels could be drawn between this, and Larry Page replacing Eric Schmidt as CEO, who had ed Larry and Sergey, and essentially replaced them as CEO pre-IPO. In addition to all this, this is the only Harry Potter house where you answer a question to enter the common room — which other company would you ever use to answer questions? Apple - Slytherin Most people paint Slytherin with a broad stroke of being evil. Some elements of Slytherin are evil, and others parts are labelled evil but perhaps simply overly ambitious. Nothing could describe Apple better. Slytherin values ambition, cunning, and resourcefulness in their students. Apple has shown the most ambition (the most valued internet company and fastest growing company in the world), the most cunning (doing business deals then pulling them at the last moment due to CEOs blabbing, incredible utilization of already existing technology with good marketing to sell to s) and has shown resourcefulness only typically demonstrated in the most brilliant entrepreneurs — from the Apple Stores, to the iPad Smart Covers, to the sheer "cool" of how their employees carry themselves:"We're Apple. We don't wear suits. We don't even own suits.” The Slytherin colours are green and silver. Apples are 325

green; Macs are silver. The Slytherin element is water, which is utilized in Apple's ground breaking aluminium laser cutting technique displayed in all of their products. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-peter-clark

326

Women

Physical Appearance

What does it feel like to be an unattractive woman? Anne K. Halsall, extraordinaire I'd like to answer this, not because I feel I am unattractive, but because at various points in my life, I have been treated as such and I want to share honestly and openly what that experience was like. To provide some background, I have struggled with my weight since I was a young child, and was more or less always the heaviest girl in my peer groups at school. My family did not have a lot of money, meaning that I didn't get nice haircuts or highlights, makeup, or fashionable clothing and accessories. And finally, I was a nerdy tomboy who actively shunned the idea that appearance matters. I preferred sweatpants to jeans and didn't have the first clue about how to dress myself or do my hair (which was always tangled and frizzy). Later on in my life, some of these issues got straightened out, but I remained awkward and extremely overweight until my mid-20s. Therefore, I've experienced both the "ugly girl at school" and the "unattractive woman" sides of things. Childhood and Youth This was honestly the hardest. Children can be cruel and overt 329

in their treatment of social misfits. I was teased mercilessly, especially by the attractive "popular kids," on an ongoing basis from as early as first grade. Here are just a few things that happened to me in grade school and middle school: •

One boy sent me a fake love letter, which I unfortunately believed was true until the punchline was delivered to me in front of a group of other kids.

•

My assigned seatmate on the bus made me sit in the aisle because I was "too fat" to sit on the seat and regularly poured soda into my hair on the 45-minute long drive to school.

•

I was only allowed to be friends with other unattractive people, which actually worked out because they were often the nicest and funniest kids. One pretty but awkward girl I was friends with took a chance to promote her social status by ditching me publicly at recess. It made perfect sense; she was too pretty for the ugly kids' group.

•

I only got valentine's day cards from the teachers.

•

I had crushes on people but knew that I could never be the object of someone else's affection. I went to school dances alone, if at all. I didn't exchange cute "if you like me, check this box" notes. I didn't go to boy/girl parties and giggle about "making out" the next day.

•

I learned to be okay with spending a lot of time alone. Being an unattractive girl doesn't just make it hard to get a date. It makes it hard to make friends at all, especially in the tweens when a lot of the other girls are very focused on appearance.

Young Adulthood Things do improve as you get older. The teasing stops (mostly) as it becomes socially unacceptable to mock someone for their appearance or weight. But in some ways, this makes it harder to cope with. You know people are judging you and treating you differently in subtle ways, but since they're nice about it, it's harder to just ignore them or put up walls.

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•

People are simply nicer to attractive women. If you go out with a cute friend, you can see this painfully clearly. This isn't to say that people are mean to unattractive women; they aren't. It's more like you're invisible.

•

You can't shop at a lot of normal stores. Many don't carry plus-sizes, so you have to go to special stores for larger women.

•

You don't get hit on, you don't get people asking for your number, you don't get people buying you drinks, you don't get much attention of any kind really.

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You date online, and you get used to people telling you they just aren't attracted to you.

•

It's easier to be platonic friends with men because there's little chance they'll end up sexually or romantically interested in you.

•

You get used to people giving you unsolicited advice about your health and/or appearance. If you're fat or ugly, you just aren't working hard enough at being otherwise.

•

You either feel ashamed of how you look or you learn to not care.

•

People don't take pictures of you. Honestly. I know it sounds weird, but I have very few pictures of myself from the time when I was seriously overweight.

The Good While it can be extremely traumatic to go through the experiences I've described here, there is actually a silver lining to it all. Attractive women are treated well primarily because we as a society objectify them. In a way, you get to dodge that bullet. It hurts to feel invisible to the world, but it's also liberating. You are free to simply exist as a person, and if you are able to make the most of that, it can be a great opportunity for spiritual growth. The other big upside is that you have likely developed a good personality and/or career in order to cope with the social downsides of being unattractive. Combine this with the fact that age, money, and time can go a long way towards 331

making you more attractive, and you will almost certainly end up at an advantage later on in your life. Natural beauty fades, of course, but intelligence, empathy, wit, and kindness last forever. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-anne-k-halsall

Pick-Up Artists

Why are women so negative about the “picking up women” school of thought? Gayle Laakmann McDowell, I read things I became negative about it because of what I saw it do to guys. When I first learned about it, I was mostly just intrigued. I ended up learning a bunch about it. I read The Game (which I still think is a really interesting book) and ended up meeting a lot of people who were in the Pick-up Artist (PUA) Community (not a goal — it just happened). I even ended up helping out with one of their weekend seminars, to be a "female test dummy" essentially. Far from the stereotype of sleazy guys who want one night stands, 24 of the 25 guys in the class were just awkward, nerdy guys who just wanted a girlfriend (the 25th wanted to bring home a girl for a threesome with his girlfriend). But that's not the instruction of these classes. The classes are about getting laid, not getting a girlfriend. This was my first big hint that something was wrong. There was a mismatch. They were taking guys who wanted girlfriends and teaching them how to pick up girls in bars. How many relationships do you know of that started in bars? Do you know any? If you want a girlfriend, go sign up for an online dating site. Start dating! Statistically speaking, bars don't work. And then there was the instruction itself. 332

The problem is that what works for one person doesn't work for everyone — not all guys, and not on all girls. They were telling guys things like: •

Touch a girl when she talks to you.

•

Criticize a girl (sorry, I mean "neg").

•

When a girl seems uninterested, she's just playing games.

•

Don't talk about "real" topics, like education and your job. They're too "boring."

•

No woman is out of your league.

The problem here is that touching can be flirty, but it can also be really creepy when the touching isn't natural. And when you're telling an awkward, nerdy guy who has no idea how to flirt "okay, now, touch a girl here," it's almost always creepy. (Personally, I don't like random guys at bars touching me. It makes me really uncomfortable.) And then you're telling the guy to criticize the girl, which is just plain mean. And then, when the girl isn't interested, the guy is now being told, "Oh, she's just trying to play games with you." He doesn't back off. Eww. And all of this is ridiculous because sometimes, the girl is out of your league, or at least just isn't interested. I'm 5'9 and I'm just not going to go home with a guy who is 5'3, goes by the nickname "Snake" (seriously?!?), overweight, pimply, and won't just answer a direct question about what he does for a living. But he keeps pursuing because, well, "I'm just playing games with him." I'm trying to see if he es some test, apparently. These are the sort of repeated interactions I had with guys in the PUA community, and why I got turned against it. Once upon a time, this guy might have been a perfectly normal but nerdy guy, who could have dated online, met someone nice, got married, and been perfectly happy. PUA instruction turns awkward, nerdy guys who just want a girlfriend into creepy guys who harass and insult women. And that's not okay! PUA instruction teaches guys these mechanical ways of 333

interacting with women which don't really work and totally fails to recognize that every woman is different. Some women just won't go home with you. Sorry. Maybe it's because she's out of your league. Or maybe she's just not interested in you. Or maybe she just doesn't go home with random dudes from bars. The words coming out of a women's mouth? It's not all a game. You can have actual conversations with us. When I say, "What do you do for a living?" it's because I actually care. Because I'm looking for someone to build a relationship with, and someone with no career goals is not a good match for me. Answer the question. Conversation is not all a giant game. When I'm not interested, it's because I'm not interested. Not because I'm putting some sort of girl test in front of you. So that's why I'm against it. Because, beyond just giving men the courage to approach women, the instruction is harmful to the guys. Some of my friends who were involved in the community got out of it okay, but they were probably more normally adjusted to start with. Another friend, well, he got his taste of one night stands and "can't understand the point of girlfriend." And other guys I've met are so uncomfortable to be around that, well, we never really became friends. http:// www.quora.com/l/boq-gayle-laakmann-mcdowell

334

Attractiveness

As a young woman, how can I shake the feeling that being goodlooking is the primary thing that males will acknowledge and praise my existence for? Shannon Larson, I think a radical feminist viewpoint adds value to many discussions. Your concern is justified. You cannot shake that feeling because it is, to a large degree, correct. You can, however, take steps to drown it out. Male attention is natural, but it's only because our society was built and is still structured as a patriarchy that the lust factor is what defines a woman's worth, not just romantically, but often socially and economically, as well. We are living a man's world. Its institutions are built according to men's priorities. That's why being good-looking is so important for females. There have been cultures where women are used as currency. That's in our cultural DNA. Trafficking of women and girls is a current problem in the US. Attractive women literally have high economic worth, as a commodity. The one thing that men have in common is a desire for women (unless they're gay or asexual, in which case for much of recent history they were under extreme pressure to suck it up and still wed and impregnate women, which probably made them angry, bitter, and resentful, which is probably even worse for women). That is a major basis of male camaraderie. Men rule the institutions of this world. Being acknowledged and praised by men is very important. It's often how you're hired and promoted. You can't just shake off how men view you. That's how entrenched power views you. This is why qualifying as an object for male lust is so important to your success. In a world structured by men's pref335

erences, one of the easiest ways to succeed is by adhering to those preferences, gaining their favor, holding their attention, thereby lessening the annoyance of a woman encroaching on male territory. A handful of enlightened men doesn't outweigh the majority, who don't work to change the system in the name of altruism, especially since that would expose themselves to more competition. That's too selfless to be universally practiced. That effort that can better be spent advancing their own career. Everyone, male and female alike, is indoctrinated into the male-centered paradigm. As a girl, how many times were you told that you were "beautiful," by your mother and father or by male and female strangers? How many times was your brother praised so highly for his appearance? Instead of receiving beauty praise, how many times did people compliment you as "smart" or "hard-working"? Were you told that you're going to have to "fight off the boys" or that you'll a family one day? This is how you were trained to expect praise primarily for your appearance. Miss America is judged on dazzling smiles and good looks. This beauty is innate value that cannot be easily altered and steadily degrades over time. By contrast, Mr. Universe (which doesn't have anything close to the same audience) is about muscles, which can be judged more objectively and which men have to work hard to get and can build over time. This is how you were trained to evaluate other women by their appearance. A female's looks are what matters, and their grading is subjective. No woman can be entirely confident that she is attractive to every man. She has to stay on her toes, working to continually improve her beauty while nature steadily undermines it. Women decline in value as they age, "losing their figure." Professional accomplishments rarely outweigh a sagging butt. A mark of success is a wife who does Pilates, not a wife with a high-powered career. A woman should have a "great figure" and a "great ass." This is often how she gets approval from females, as well as 336

males. Hot-or-not is how we are taught to evaluate women. There are individual exceptions, but the herd mentality is to value hotness above all else. It is the primary way society judges women. For example, a woman having a "great personality" is slang for being undesirable. No man is congratulated for having a girlfriend/wife with a "great personality." It is impossible for a woman to be praised for having a "great personality." For a sad honest picture of society, ask a sweet, smart, funny, heavy woman about her love life. Then consider the fact that in my high school, there was a girl who abused laxatives over the summer to lose a lot of weight. Everyone knew this, but she looked hot. Her dating life took off. Hotness outweighs bulimia. Enough with the problem. Let's look at solutions: You need to live much of your life in an echo chamber of positive messages. Stop consuming mainstream culture. Turn off the TV. Rarely watch movies. Don't listen to pop music. Don't read magazines. Once you start paying close attention to how women are portrayed, these media will lose much of their appeal, anyway. There is a clear message that hotness is a woman's primary worth. One of the greatest tragedies of American (and increasingly so, global) society is the fact that our culture is manufactured by lovers of buxom, bronzed, Botoxed, bottle-blonde bimbos. (Even if women are intelligent, they won't be rewarded for displaying it. It's irrelevant that Shakira is in MENSA.) Hollywood is the most extreme example of praising females almost exclusively for their looks. A female can earn an acting award, but extreme hotness is a prerequisite to even being considered. Build your social world around common-interest niches. There is a broad spectrum of how much emphasis people place on attractiveness, so on a personal level, you have hopes of finding a respectful partner and true friends who value you for who you are, not how you look. 337

Make friends with gamers. Make friends on Quora. Make friends organizing a project you feel ionate about. a book group. You could also step off into a counterculture. Looks won't become unimportant, but there will be a better balance. Creativity and intellectual depth are what will get you praise from everyone. Don't compare your looks to other women. This is a competition in which we all lose. Beauty is subjective. There will always be someone more beautiful than you, and in someone else's eyes, there will always be someone more beautiful than she. There will always be women, like Helen Mirren, who look amazing as they age, and if you consider them the competition, you will feel like a loser. Don't hang out with vain women. Limit your conversations about clothes, jewelry, makeup, etc. Don't talk to people who sound like Cosmo. Don't gossip about other people's love lives. Date a man who calls you smart/determined/whateverpositive-adjective-applies-to-you way more than he calls you beautiful/pretty/hot. This problem goes far beyond dating, but this is a great place to start. Find female mentors, especially ones old enough to have degraded in fertility appeal. The majority of the workforce is still male-dominated. You need someone to turn to when you realize you didn't get invited to a meeting because the salesman who called it spent half the time talking about sleeping with women. Don't work too hard on a "perfect" appearance. Dress to express something other than a desire for beauty. Dress to be professional, fun, crazy, artsy, comfortable, sporty, classy. Pay homage to a certain place, time, person, or film. Don't necessarily focus on hotness, which will come along with confidence and happiness anyway. Don't worry if something isn't super-flattering if you love it. I have this bright, colorful full skirt that doesn't flatter my wide hips but looks amazing blowing in the wind. That's my favorite thing to wear. 338

Focus on flattering your coloring, which will stay constant, instead of wearing shorts with words that draw attention to your perky butt, which you will lose. When you work out, focus on getting stronger and healthier, not hotter. Don't worry about making yourself look flawless with makeup. Everyone has flaws. If you still want to wear makeup, play up your favorite features and experiment with color. Shrug off comments on your appearance. A stranger saying, "Hi, gorgeous," doesn't matter. Don't act like it does. Since you do have to process it, interpret it as meaning you look happy today. Be aware of negative stereotypes of women and don't exhibit them around male colleagues. Masculinity is strong, and femininity is weak. Those are the house rules. Don't undermine your professional image with the power brokers. Maintain your non-beauty value. Work to succeed according to your own values. That's how you circumvent the house rules. Mother Teresa didn't have to be hot. The bad news is that you're not going to be able to change the broader picture, and you will not be able to totally shake this feeling because that is the way the world is. When you're featured in an article on female gamers, the number one question many men will have is whether you're hot. When you're walking down the road, men will evaluate your ass when they drive by and let you know if you ed their lust assessment. Those are experiences you can't avoid. You've just got to write them off as haters (woman-haters, to be more specific) and rise above it. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-shannon-larson

339

Women in Technology

What is it like to be a woman working in the tech industry? Rebekah Cox, I've been working since I was 15. Being a woman in the tech industry is awesome if you love technology enough to push through the more difficult parts. Right off the bat, a disclaimer: It's very difficult to answer this question broadly. Not all experiences are the same. However, I can share my personal experience because it might contribute to some larger themes. So, here's my answer . . . an answer from a product designer who has spent over a decade building products and has spent the last four years building products and managing people in Silicon Valley[1]. ACT 1 - UNFORTUNATE REALITY The Environment Is Generally Rough Girls are raised differently than boys. Not all girls and not all boys are raised the same, obviously, but on average, girls are more sheltered than boys in their formative years. Girls are typically raised with kid gloves and rarely receive the hard, direct, and tough of their male counterparts. This is important because the technical environment is tough and has been built on a foundation of direct , and there are very established and elaborate structures that facilitate nerd trash talk. So, if you enter this environment as a woman without any sort of agenda or understanding of this culture, the first thing you find is that if you actually say something, the most likely reaction is for a guy to verbally hit you directly in the face. To the guys, this is perfectly normal, expected, and encouraged behavior, but to women this is completely out of nowhere and extremely discouraging. As a technical woman, this is your introduction, and the first thing you have to learn is how to get back up and walk right back into a situation where the likelihood of getting punished for participating is one. How you choose to react to this[2] determines the rest of your career in technology. If it's too painful, you'll retreat to management, if you can tough 340

it out, your career will be limited because the very tools you develop to survive have other social consequences[3]. You Generally Feel Alone Because the environment is so rough and generally hostile, the women who can navigate it are a very small, select group[4]. It's rare to encounter another woman and even rarer to encounter another technical woman. Overall, it's awesome to encounter other women because while you grow accustomed to quirks of a room full of men (the jostling, the chest beating, the pissing contests, the egos, etc.), it does get old. When another woman is thrown into that mix, you get to avoid the old script and reevaluate the dynamic so it's more interesting. However, you and everyone else is accustomed to women in the facilitator manager role, not in the making technical decisions role. Typically your collaborative and directional contributions almost always fare better than your technical contributions. If you pay attention to those social cues, you may start to subtly pull yourself out of the rough and tumble technical decision making and retreat into the facilitation role. If you ignore the social cues, you have to assert yourself aggressively into the technical conversation[5] and take some lumps. If you choose that aggressive path, you will be even more alone because those likely less technical women in the room with you don't have the expertise to back you up. ACT II - FORTUNATE REALITY You Have Access to Opportunities (You Are NOT Actually Alone) Even the aforementioned nerd trash talk is actually a useful tool that can help you. The reason that culture exists is to make everyone in the group better. The fact that you are getting hit in the face means that someone is either wrong, and you can hit back with a correct answer or that you are wrong and someone is letting you know that directly. Sticking that out means you are learning in an accelerated environment with instant correction. Furthermore, if you stick around long enough, you can find people who aren't completely insecure and are confident 341

enough to not resort to insults to assert themselves. Those people make the tough environment actually tolerable. If you can help each other, then you can establish a safer zone to talk through ideas. And since those more secure people are typically so secure because they are really, really good, you can find yourself in an informational jet-stream. Opportunities also exist in the form of help from others pushing you forward and help in the form of others who don't let you get away with anything. Help might be treating you like everyone else. Help might be from the powerful women who may not make the perfect guidepost but are available and will make time for you. For me personally, a huge turning point was working at Quora. I realizing how the founders had trusted me with this incredible challenge involved with taking responsibility for building Quora's product and interface. It was the first time I was able to take responsibility directly, which is a remarkable opportunity. Results Matter and Are Powerful The technology world isn't a perfect meritocracy, but it's close enough and awesome results do matter. Whatever barrier is in front of you, an amazing product that gets traction will cut through it. The same is true for an awesome abstraction that boasts a 50% speed improvement or generates elegant code that enables future efficiency. The absence of an outright block means that making something great can open many closed doors. Just knowing that is possible is very encouraging. Additionally, if you push through the crap and have major contributions to make, no one is going to be able to ignore your results, nor will they want to. At the end of the day, everyone in technology wants to turn a dollar into ten and then into a thousand; it's essentially a culture built on hope and results. The barriers to entry are pretty low and inexpensive. Start building, learn JavaScript, publish thoughts, all of these building blocks are readily accessible. Use them. Get results. People will give you money to get more results. Being a Woman in Tech Is a Competitive Advantage Developing new technologies is about oscillating from extreme focus (for deg and programming and building) to 342

wide open creative exploration (in order to understand people and their motivations as well as their problems). As a woman thinking about these complex issues, you have a rich and deep understanding around details like safety and privacy but also around tone and cooperative communication and gathering . You also have this ability to obsess about the details[6] others may ignorantly avoid. That's not even the faintest outline of the unique characteristics women bring. When half of all consumers are women, being able to tap into those women to use your product is obviously huge. Not enough women capitalize on this advantage, but that doesn't make it less meaningful. ACT III - CONCLUSION Technology Is Awesome Being a woman in technology means being surrounded by amazing technology and crazy smart and ambitious people all the time. Being a technical woman means being able to in on the fun and building things for people as a path toward making their lives better. How awesome is that? [1] Additional context: There are a lot of overlapping yet ul-

timately distinct cultures in SV right now. There is the founder culture and within that there are established founders and so-called founders of products that are even more likely to fail. There are run-of-the-mill engineers and so-called 10x engineers. There are designers and product managers, each with its own 10x variety. There are people who speak at conferences and are good at promoting themselves and there are people who are actually extremely talented and fly under the radar completely. On top of that there's what the press cares about and the press cares about founders and sometimes managers. There are precious few women founders, and of that small subset, they are generally not established founders with proven successes who are also technical. (I can only think of one woman who has founded a company that had a chance of succeeding, and she's amazing and talented and impressive but not technical.) As a result, most articles that are written about women are almost always exclusively about women in tech who are managers (prod343

uct or professional), not specifically technical women. So you read about these managers, but then you also read these regular calls for more women in tech and how none exist and you look around thinking, "Hello! Right here! C'mon! WTF?" Now, to be fair, sometimes the women written about are also somewhat technical in that they have taken CS classes but anyone who is actively technical knows that a few CS classes are not the same as being in the trenches and building a product hands-on. This context is important, because as a technical woman, you are looking for something to cling to and determine how you fit in to the larger ecosystem. But because the larger ecosystem is nearly totally empty when it comes to role models, you have to look either at men or closer to home at the women in your immediate vicinity who are probably not technical. The women who are actually ambitious enough to potentially make it in tech as technical women look at this landscape and every signal derails her from that technical path because the vicious cycle encourages her to chase only the most viable channels. Chief among them: management. [2] If you are lucky, you will encounter people (men and wom-

en) who are caring enough to help you in deal with this in exactly two ways: i) They encourage you to keep going and ii) they hold you to the same high standard as everyone else. If you are unlucky, you will encounter people (men and women) who validate your worst fears and allow you to give up. [3] There's another dimension, which is the girls club versus

boys club which is situated on top of this mess. The girls club is very different than the boys club. Entirely different rules apply and if you've spent any amount of time optimizing to fit into the boys club, it will not transfer to the girls club. The girls club is full of managers, not engineers. s, not builders. All the tools that allow you to survive the boys club as a technical woman become these huge liabilities in the girls club. You are seen as too rough, too aloof, and too disinterested (because you actually probably are). In my case, I am also seen as having far 344

too many sharp edges, being too mean, etc. That's all true but not without purpose. [4] You're also constantly looking to other women for some-

one to model yourself after. Because the set of available candidates is so limited, it's really hard to find someone you feel comfortable with having as a guidepost. So, you basically either choose a man to model after or cobble something together from fragments of women. A frankinmodel is usually always bad because the traits that make a product or professional manager successful are different from those that make a technical founder successful. [5] The worst part for me personally was a stage where

I was behind. I didn't touch a computer until I was in college. My male counterparts, however, had been programming actively for years before I even navigated the filesystem. But there is something far more treacherous than losing from being behind: it's not being considered a competitor. When you are strapped with low expectations, it's easy for you to start believing those are true. People are also sometimes quick to validate your low expectations and even performance. In college, I had this racquetball class. The first thing the coach did was divide the group into boys and girls. The boys played against other boys and girls played against other girls. After a few weeks of this arrangement, I was destroying the other girls. Eventually, the coach allowed me to play against the guys and even the worst guy promptly destroyed me. They hit the ball way harder than the girls and the play was very physical and intimidating. On the final day of class in the final match, I lost by only a couple points. By that time, I had finally started to hone a new strategy: I couldn't compete on speed or power, so I competed on finesse. That meant skating the ball along a wall and giving the guys less of an opportunity to hit the ball with any amount of power. I felt pretty good about getting to that point, but upset that I didn't have an entire term of play at the guy's level. Had I started earlier and had my competition been tougher, I bet I would have won a few. 345

[6] I have this trick where if I start to obsess about something

that doesn't actually matter, I'll try to divert that attention to obsessing about something to make the product better. That obsession breeds focus, and when directed productively toward real problems, awesome results can sometimes be generated. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-rebekah-cox

Women in Technology

What advice would seasoned women in tech give to younger girls deciding to make a tech career for themselves? Nora Mullaney, Software Engineer at Facebook Working in the tech industry is awesome. You get to go out and build the future every day. In spite of what you might think, giving the paucity of females in tech, it's a pretty good place for women to work: •

It's got one of the smallest income gender gaps (I believe it's about 96% vs. an average of 70%).

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The pay is generous (at least for software engineers).

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It tends to be relatively flexible, in of when you work.

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It's very easy to work remotely.

Another great thing about working in technology is that it's very easy to mix in other interests. If you are ionate about music or sports or biology or charity, you are likely to be able to find a tech company that's working in that space.

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Advice (which mostly applies to both genders): •

The best way to learn in the tech field is to jump in and build things, so you should go ahead and do that as much as possible.

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Don't be intimidated by those who seem to know more than you. It's very easy to techno-babble at someone and seem intelligent. Never be afraid to ask questions if you don't understand something. It's a great way to learn. If the person you ask can't/won't explain, it's likely he/she doesn't really understand.

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Sadly, you will likely run into some sexism. Don't let it get you down. One of the nice things about engineering is that you can usually prove an idea is better by building it. Don't be afraid to ignore nay-sayers and just go for it.

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Choose your environments/companies well. They may vary a lot in how things are run. I prefer meritocracies, for avoiding sexism and experience-ism. Web companies are fun because they usually have a very fast release cycle. The most important thing is to work on something that you're interested in and ionate about. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-nora-mullaney

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The United States

9/11

What did it feel like to be inside the World Trade Center at the time of the 9/11 attacks? Ashton Lee, world's crossroad I was living and working at the World Trade Center on that day, and this is what I . I was a consultant at the time, and my office was in Tower Two on the 43rd floor. I had a meeting that morning that was cancelled just the night before. When the first plane struck, I was on the 18th floor, not yet at my office, and I looking at a nearby digital clock that read 8:46am. You could feel the building shake, and it was scary, not because the building moved, but to the degree that it did. I was used to working on the higher floors of both towers, and the Twin Towers were made to sway and move ever so slightly. You could sometimes feel it just a little during periods of heavy wind. But this time it was different. This was not caused by wind; it was a sudden jolt. I looked outside the window and saw what I thought was a piece of metal flying by. My heart and my mind raced. Strange to say this now, but I felt VERY ALIVE, while a deep and sudden fear also crept over me. Fear was soon replaced by a driving need to act. My body 349

was full of adrenaline, and my mind was factoring over different scenarios within what must have been a few eye blinks. I recalled seeing a cable show a few weeks back that talked about how the towers were built, their structural make up, and particularly their height. I recalled the narrative saying the buildings were so tall that if they were to tip over, it would hit or shake New Jersey, I don't recall the exact words, but the meaning stuck with me. It became a dominant thought in my head. I ran for the stairs. I was not the only one. I could hear someone shout that there was a fire. It became very crowded, but the exit at this early time was still orderly. A small crowd started congregating outside the Marriott WTC, which was situated right between the two main towers of the World Trade Center area connecting the two buildings. People were dismayed and trying to figure out what was going on. Across the street was the Hudson River. My mind was still in worst case scenario mode; I thought if anything really happened to the buildings here it would be safer by the water than close to the buildings, and I imagined myself jumping in to prepare myself mentally. I looked around, people were not moving. Even worse, joggers and nearby pedestrians were heading TOWARD the buildings to see what the commotion was about. I thought, this is madness! I shouted as loud as I could, "If this building falls it will hit New Jersey! Run!" A lady screamed. I then started running toward the waters of the Hudson alongside Northern Battery Park, and others did too. I just wanted to get away far enough to assess the situation from a position of safety. And I kept running. Looking back, I could see dark smoke start to form; it wasn't a good sign. The fear came back, but so did the need to act. It was still early, and the mobile phone networks had not yet jammed up. I called my sister to let her know that I was ok, that she may see New York in the news, but that I was not in the towers, more importantly that I loved everyone and that she should relay this message to our family and especially my mom. I needed to get off the island, that was my dominant thought. I headed toward Chelsea Piers, to the ferries I knew 350

were there. Still seeing more people heading toward the commotion, I yelled at them, that I just came from there, and that they were headed in the wrong direction. Madness. When I got to the ferries, I ran into another friend of mine who ran over from midtown, Times Square. We were there early enough where people had not caught up with what was going on, we still had to wait in line and pay for the ferry crossing. I was on the ferry in the Hudson River when the first tower fell . . . It was gut-wrenching and surreal. The darkness of the smoke started to envelop the sky. People were crying, trying to call their loved ones, asking questions. A friend of mine would recall to me getting out of the subway stop for the WTC after 9am, while I was still running. He told me it was an image out of hell. He could see people jumping out of the buildings, everywhere there was a mad scramble by that time to get out. I can't fully fathom what his experience must have been like nor would I want to. Was our country being attacked? No one knew. My friend and I decided that we needed to go somewhere far away, away from big buildings but with solid communication networks, and food supplies. His girlfriend at the time went to Yale University, and I thought there was a certain degree of safety within a closed area like a university in a small town. So that became our destination. Close enough to reach yet, far enough to regroup. When we reached Jersey, we found a private car. She charged us 300USD or so, cash only. I went to the ATM, came back, and paid. As we drove further north, the skyline behind us became more and more enveloped in black smoke. It was like a scene out of a movie, that's what I was thinking. Phone lines were jammed up by this time. I would later reconnect with family and friends over email from the Yale campus. I turned on the news. The world, our world, my own world; nothing would ever quite be the same. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-ashton-lee

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Asian Americans

What does it mean to be Asian American? Marq Hwang, the Ill-informed Like all stories about Americans, it's kind of long. It's kind of confusedly muddled. It's kind of wonderful. It's a story about loss, about disconnection. Traditions are the first to go. Born here, raised here, half a world away, your parents try to keep as many as they can, but it's a losing battle. What holiday is this? 추석? Well, we're not going over there. Mom's too tired to make the traditional foods, whatever they are, so let's just go out to dinner. Maybe call 할머니. Then, later in the year, maybe the next, you fly home, across the Great Flat Ocean, and you visit the shrine of your ancestors. How many 절 do I do? Am I even doing it right? Am I spelling it right? My knees are getting tired. Why prostrate myself to these ancestors I've never met, whose gaze of my life is so distant, clouded by time and space, whose memory I can't even conjure? The language is the next to go. You have a fight with your mom about going to homecoming. You want to go. You don't know why, exactly, since you don't care much for the football team. You're angry all the time. Angry because they get all the funding. Angry because all the 'traditions' that come so naturally to others, you don't know about. Angry because the white girl you kinda like and want to go with can trace her family back to the first settlers, and you don't know anything past the hint that your grandfather might have been in the Resistance. Angry because of hormones. Your mom yells at you, demanding you study. That you stay home and spend time with your visiting relatives. She shouts in Korean at you. And instead of shouting back in Korean, you yell back in English. You slam the door to your room, cursing in English. Years later, in a college class you picked because you thought it would be cake, you realize the only Korean you know comes from the few movies you watch, what you learned at home, and how you 352

order at restaurants. You barely . The ties are the last to go. You rarely speak to your relatives unless you visit or call, the distance becoming more than just geographical. You try to keep up with them on Facebook, but you hide parts of your life because you don't know how they'd react. Even your mom gets in on the gig, saying that it would be best if they didn't know some things. You dream of living back in your ancestral homeland, but reality reminds you that it would probably only be fun for a little while, before you want to come home, here, to the Americas. It's a story about gain, about building. When your roots are loose, the first thing you do is to put new ones down. You end up in a place you find rather agreeable. You make friends, build your own 'extended' family. You let your best friends' families 'adopt' you, and you bring your own to their Thanksgivings, their Christmases, their Seders. You get hurt when these friends move away, but you eventually realize that wherever they settle, you have carte blanche to visit them, to make new roots someplace new. When your knowledge of your ancestral culture is fractured, the first thing you do is try to create one. You do this by voraciously reading up on your own. You still don't all the details, but you go through the motions, hoping that there's some meaning there. You read up on others', and you discover ones that you never knew existed. You fall in with the nerds, the punks, the gays, the outcasts. You pick up their slang, their argot, their mannerisms. You move on, sometimes, after you get bored, but they're always a part of you, and you make your own. And when your traditions are hazy and gone, you make new ones. Your Christmases are now spent with your family, watching bad movies like Jingle All the Way. You always block time out at the major holidays to visit your best friends. When you're sick, you always order out from that same Korean restaurant that makes 짬뽕. Is that what your relatives eat when they're feeling sick? No? You don't care. It makes you feel better. Every birthday, you invite your friends out to a Korean restaurant, and put what little Korean you still to good use, and on theirs, you learn how to wrap 353

gifts in 風呂敷. It's Japanese, actually, but you don't care, and neither do they — it's elegant, and beautiful. It's a story about bridges, about synthesis. At potlucks, you're the one everyone's curious about. You bring dishes that are usually a little bit interesting, outside of the norm. Risotto, but what's that flavor? You used miso as the broth? Amazing. These dumplings? Chorizo and scallions? Wow. They come to you after hearing about the Korean taco stands, and you go together, to everyone's enjoyment. You hear about this amazing phở place, or a brand new place that serves fufu and melon seed soup, and you drag your friends along. Sometimes you answer questions. What exactly is that Gangnam Style he's singing about? Why is the North so weird? Is the internet there really better? And even though you preface your answers with a little bit of uncertainty, you muddle through. They're just as interested as you are, maybe more so. But you're interested in what your Romanian friends' experiences were when Ceaușescu fell, and you ask. You want to know what your friends from Zimbabwe eat. You want to see this 'Austin' that your Texan friends rave about. And everyone understands each other more. You've flitted in and out of various subcultures and groups. Your facility with English is top-notch. You've experienced all these new things now, sampled from various plates and listened to all sorts of songs. So you take all these things home with you; you take your mama out all night, and you show her all these things you've done, that you've learned. You see her eyes open, like Sokath's, and she understands this place in a new way, a way she never has, as a native, as an American. It's a story, like every other story. When I first sat down to write this, I thought a little bit about writing about the little things that trip one up every day. The assumption that we're foreigners. The stereotypes and the suspicion that hangs over us whether we pretend to ignore it or not. But that's not the story. That's not what it means to be Asian American. To be Asian American, you start to real354

ize that you put more and more of yourself in the American category, and you view the Asian as a slight spin, like Irish, Newyorican, German. You know that while you could in the old country, for a little while, you grew up with a few too many cheeseburgers and cokes, a taste for grits, and a soft spot for Country Pop that you keep deep in the closet, deeper, probably, than the affection you have for really bad action movies like The Expendables. You know you're too loud, abrasive, and obnoxious to be anything but American, too proud, and maybe even a too little knee-jerk patriotic. You can talk shit about America, because it's yours. Those people in other countries can't. And you know that no matter how others see you, it doesn't really matter. Your blood might have come from overseas, but your heart started beating here. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-marq-hwang

New York City

Why is NYC so great? Matt Schiavenza, Live it and love it Where to start? As someone who grew up elsewhere and has lived and traveled on three continents, I can attest that New York is indeed a wonderfully special place. Here's why: •

New York is the quintessential urban experience in our contemporary world. A century ago, it was London. A century from now, it could well be Shanghai or Mumbai, Sao Paolo or Lagos. But New York, for our time and place, is the world's capital. While this may seem a spurious reason to vouch for a city's greatness, New York's role as the "center of the world" is something you can almost feel. The political, financial, and cultural institutions based in this city attract talented and ambitious people from all over the world. (And would attract even more if the US had a sensible immigration policy, but I digress . . . ) In no other place I can think of, save London, can you find people at 355

the pinnacle of their profession in such a small geographical radius. It's an extraordinary privilege to be so close to so many interesting people. •

The density and the diversity. New York City is, by far, the densest city in the United States — and that includes the outer boroughs. Manhattan alone is one of the densest urban areas in the world, especially in the developed world. (The only comparable place I've been in the so-called 'first world' is Hong Kong, which is a whole other story). People think of Manhattan as a rich person's territory — justifiably — but bear in mind that there's Harlem, and Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights, as well as a multitude of areas with a lot of working-class and middle-class people. Because of this geographic compression and a flat-rate subway, New York's various populations mix and mingle more than those in many other cities. In Los Angeles, the wealthy of Beverly Hills do not identify with the poor of Compton. In New York, both the wealthy and the poor recognize each others as part of the same basic polity. As a result, despite the extraordinary wealth and snobbery you can encounter in New York, people are more tolerant of others simply due to the incredible density. Is there still bigotry? Of course. But New Yorkers, to me, treat each other better than almost anyone else I've ever met. Laugh all you want, but I believe it completely.

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The range of occupations. I grew up in the Bay Area, which I still regard as America's most beautiful and livable metropolitan area. But culturally, the Bay Area is still dominated to a large extent by the tech sector, which can be a little . . . lame . . . if you're not into it. Los Angeles, too, sucks in people who want to work in the entertainment industry, while Washington DC is a magnet for political/government types. These places are great in their own ways, but it can be hard to get away from it all when you want to. In New York, simply due to its sheer size, no one industry predominates. Finance is a huge business here, but it's remarkably easy to avoid ever dealing with Wall Street types if you don't want to. There are theater nerds, literary nerds, music nerds, and all else, but the

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occupational diversity in New York keeps anyone from operating too much inside a particular bubble. Perhaps most importantly, people choose to live in New York because they want to live in New York, not because they have to in order to get work in a particular industry. Half the people you meet in Washington DC, I'd argue, would move to New York in a heartbeat if their job allowed them to. •

Fun on any budget. Yes, rents in New York are really expensive. But (shhhh . . . ), here's a little secret. You can have a great time here without spending a lot of money. The subway, which runs 24/7, costs $2.25 a ticket and goes just about everywhere. There are millions of cheap places to eat, ranging from delis to ethnic dives to classic diners, and there are supermarkets everywhere for when you want to cook. If you're clever and creative, you can get massive discounts on typically pricey cultural items (theater tickets, concert tickets, etc.). Most importantly, just walking around outside is entertainment enough and doesn't cost you a thing. When I hear of people complaining about how they can't afford to have fun, I shake my head. The sky is the limit, obviously, when it comes to how much you can spend if you'd like. But when it comes down to it, anyone with a bit of creativity and savvy can have a great time in the city on a very limited budget.

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Walk, walk, walk. New York is the best walking city in the United States and one of the very best in the world. The "grid" system in Manhattan makes it idiot-proof (for people like me who lack a good sense of direction), and there are so many places to see that you'll never get bored. There are also pedestrian-friendly parks everywhere (Riverside, Central, Prospect) and a waterfront which can be very pleasant to stroll down when the weather cooperates. Can't afford a gym hip? Buy a good pair of walking shoes and explore the city. It's good for your mind and soul.

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Convenience. In New York, you can get any kind of food delivered to your door at any hour of the day. I exaggerate, but just slightly. Just about every major musical act, theater act, book reading, and other event will through 357

town on its way around the country, or world. Need to go to the company headquarters? It's probably in New York. •

Beauty. San Francisco is more beautiful, not to mention Paris and Rome and probably Istanbul and Barcelona, too. But New York has its fair share of beauty, beginning with gorgeous brownstone buildings, skyscrapers like the Empire State Building, and the year-long magnificence of Central Park. On a more prurient level, there is also no shortage of beautiful people to gawk at, especially on a warm day.

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Welcoming. Someone once described New York to me as the world's most exclusive club that literally anyone can . You don't have to have been born in New York to be a "New Yorker." If you know how to order a sandwich, negotiate the subway, not block the sidewalk, talk about real estate to strangers, laugh about Post headlines, complain about the weather, exercise basic taxi etiquette, tip properly, help a stranger with directions, and stop to cheer the Meetles in the Times Square subway stop, you're a New Yorker. It doesn't matter if you're originally from Lahore or Santo Domingo or Hamburg or Addis Ababa, or if you've been in the city for two years or your whole life. New York can be intimidating to the uninitiated, sure. But once you get settled, learn your way around, you'll see life here for what it really is: a gift. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-matt-schiavenza

Visiting New York City

What are good tips for hailing a taxi in Manhattan? Max Cohen, BFA, MBA, CAB, Web Visionary I drive a yellow cab. Here are some tips to the tourist, the New Yorker, and the tourist that thinks he's a New Yorker. 358

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Don't wait till we are ing you to throw up your hail. We need to see you in advance so we can get over to you.

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Get off that curb. It's okay, baby, this is NYC — don't be afraid. Stand in the street. Hang off the curb. Ignore those oncoming cars, they'll move . . . (maybe). Just , everyone's on the sidewalk: the masses, mailboxes, streetlights, homeless people, halal stands, cell phone case stands, overflowing trash bins, and red light cameras (Houston and Chrystie, I will get you!). If you want a cab, make yourself SEEN!

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Go to a gas station between 4 and 5 a.m. or p.m. The shifts end at five, and cabbies need to fill up before they go in. There are only ten or twelve gas stations in Manhattan. Eight of them are on the West Side on 10th Ave. Take your pick.

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Lexington Avenue from 30th down to 23rd St. has the largest concentration of Indian restaurants in the city. I like curry in a hurry.

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Bond St. between Bowery and Lafayette is a major shift change spot for private drivers that don't work for a garage. You will always find a ride when the shifts change from day to night.

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If you're downtown, stand on the uptown side. If you're uptown, stand on the downtown side. This is regardless of where you are actually going.

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Don't look shady. This applies to all races. There is no other group of workers that work harder at a more dangerous job so crucial to the survival of NYC and without health insurance. We carry a large amount of cash on us and are easy targets. If you look like trouble, we're going to keep driving.

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Let your girl do the hailing.

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Don't look like you're going to throw up.

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Don't stand with the large group of people you're going to ask to illegally jam in my cab.

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Don't stand at the base of a bridge (particularly the Williamsburg Bridge). There's nowhere to pull over safely to pick you up, and if we're going over the bridge we probably already have engers.

For more, please check out my website: www.thingsiseefrommycab.com. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-max-cohen

Lincoln Assassination

How likely would Abraham Lincoln be to survive his wounds today? Laszlo B. Tamas, Many years spent covering Level 1 and 2 trauma centers as a surgeon. Without a CT scan and detailed neurological examination, it's hard to say definitively what internal brain injuries Lincoln sustained when he was shot. And when it comes to the brain, "God is indeed in the details." But there are a few lines of thinking that should be strongly considered: 1. By any measure, this injury was an absolute mess! The

bullet was big, shattered into smaller projectiles inside the brain, and also drove sharp pieces of skull into parts of the brain. It is wrong to think of just the "bullet trajectory" when assessing the damage it caused. 2. Bullets cause shock waves. Even at low velocity (for a

bullet), a projectile ing through the brain will have a shock wave around its path which will injure brain areas well outside its strict trajectory. Just one example is how Lincoln's right eye was protruding out of the skull, even though the bullet did not injure it directly. Again, the "trajectory" is far from the only injury caused. 3. There was blood in and around much of the brain. Lin-

coln's autopsy report mentions injury to the lateral (trans360

verse) venous sinus — one of the few brain structures that can cause exsanguinating hemorrhage. It also notes blood in both lateral ventricles, subarachnoid spaces all over the brain convexities, and widespread hemorrhage and contusion within the brain substance itself. This blood can lead to many potentially lethal things, including tentorial herniation, ischemia with vasospasm and stroke, and of course severe brain swelling. 4. The brainstem was affected right from the start. You don't

have to see a CT scan or autopsy to know if the brainstem is injured (directly or indirectly), if it doesn't work right. The description of the first doctor at the scene mentioned that Lincoln was not breathing, and one pupil was dilated (the latter a clear and unequivocal sign of dysfunction of the third cranial nerve or the upper brainstem, from where it comes). Unfortunately, the second doctor described the enlarged pupil being the right one (it's extremely unlikely to have been one and then the other — one of the doctors was probably mistaken as to the side). By three hours after injury, both pupils were fixed and dilated, and Lincoln showed extensor (decerebrate) posturing — again, all signs of profound brainstem dysfunction (but not yet brain death, though pretty close to it). 5. Most of Lincoln's brain injuries were "primary." What

therapies we have for brain injury have to do with fighting secondary processes: swelling and edema, ischemia, herniation and such. We have little to offer someone whose primary injury to deep brain structures is already severe right from the start. The brainstem signs Lincoln was witnessed to have within minutes (seconds?) of his injury prove that most of his coma was from primary injury. It is this primary injury that largely determines the grim prognosis. The following website has good info about what witnesses saw: http://www.galenpress.com/extras/extra29.htm Neither of the two people quoted in another answer — Thomas Scalea and Blaine Houmes — is a neurosurgeon (or neurologist), so I'm not sure they have a "feel" for the issues the way a neurosurgeon who sees brain injury all the time 361

would (though Houmes has become an expert on this question). So it's not surprising that, for example, Scalea omits hemiplegia as an expected outcome if Lincoln had survived (of course he would have been hemiplegic!). Also, Scalea seems to have a very optimistic view of what modern techniques can offer in cases of massive brain swelling, which Lincoln must definitely have had. Yes — we have more things we can throw at brain swelling these days, but that doesn't mean they are very successful. No, modern treatment would not have saved Lincoln. I rest my case. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-laszlo-b-tamas

RMS Titanic

How could the sinking of the Titanic have been prevented? Chris O'Regan, amateur. 1. Titanic could have been constructed with a double hull.

The technology to construct double hulls was available: SS Great Eastern had been launched with a complete double hull over fifty years earlier, in 1858. In a classic failure of risk management, Titanic's manufacturers, alongside with most shipbuilders at the time, considered a full double hull an unnecessary expense, being satisfied with a double bottom instead. This all changed after the disaster, with liners everywhere being refitted with full double hulls. Suddenly the expense didn't seem to matter so much. 2. The quality of the riveting and steel plates could have

been better. In the present day, ship plates are welded together using oxyacetelene torches. This technology was unvailable in Titanic's time. Instead, Titanic's overlapping steel hull plates were held together by rivets that were hammered in by hand. Most of the rivets were steel, 362

but some were made of wrought iron; according to some, the rivets were poor-quality and contained large amounts of slag. The actual holing of the ship was caused when she dragged over the surface of the iceberg, with the berg snapping or popping the rivets along the hull, allowing water to enter in between the hull plates. The hull plates themselves are alleged to have not been strong enough, with signs of stress fracturing; but this is disputed. 3. The ship's watertight bulkheads could have been extended

and fully sealed to reduce the risk of flooding. Titanic was constructed with transverse bulkheads (i.e. walls) to divide the ship into sixteen watertight compartments, which could be sealed off with doors operated either manually or remotely from the bridge. So far, so good. However, the bulkheads didn't extend up the height of all decks, and weren't sealed at the top. So while flooding could be safely be contained if only a small number of compartments were flooded, if too many flooded, water would reach over the top of the bulkheads and flood the rest of the compartments until the ship sank. The designer of the ship, Thomas Andrews, was on board and consulted by Captain Smith immediately after the iceberg was hit. He quickly realised that with five compartments flooded thanks to the iceberg dragging along the ship, the flooding could not be contained and the ship would eventually sink. His calculations convinced Smith to begin evacuations and therefore probably saved lives. Bulkhead design on subsequent ships would be improved as a result of the disaster. 4. Captain Smith could have responded to the numerous ice

warnings the ship received by slowing down or stopping completely and waiting for daylight. Titanic was radioed several times by several different ships to warn of large amounts of ice in the area. Titanic acknowledged these warnings, but continued to cruise ahead at full speed. Captain Smith did respond to the warnings; he changed the ship's course to be more southerly, and he posted lookouts to watch specifically for icebergs. One of those lookouts did in fact spot the iceberg, but not with enough time to avoid a collision, since it was a moonless night 363

and Titanic was travelling at around twenty knots, close to her maximum speed. This might seem insane to us now, but enger liners had a very strict schedule to keep, and ships of her size and construction weren't considered to be vulnerable to icebergs (the 1997 movie implied Titanic was trying to break a speed record at the behest of J. Bruce Ismay, but that is fictional). 5. The wireless (i.e. radio) operators could have ed on

the ice warnings with more urgency. One incident in particular became notorious. The nearest ship to the Titanic before she sank was SS Californian; her captain had decided the ice was so bad that he would stop and try to resume the journey at first light. Californian's wireless operator signalled to Titanic about this. Unfortunately, that message came right at the time that Senior Wireless Operator Jack Phillips was attempting to get through a backlog of enger messages he hadn't been able to send off earlier (because the set had been broken earlier and Titanic hadn't been in range of the nearest wireless station, Cape Race, Newfoundland). Californian's signal broke in over the top of Phillip's broadcast (these were wireless spark-gap transmitters that used morse code; signals couldn't be tuned out) and was very loud in his headphones because the ships were so close. Phillips angrily replied, "Shut up! Shut up! I'm working Cape Race!" Although this was not the only warning Titanic received, it happened less than ten minutes before the collision, so it might possibly have made a difference if Phillips had been paying more attention and had relayed it promptly to the bridge. A warning before that, from SS Mesaba, had not gone up to the bridge because Phillips was busy processing the enger messages. 6. Finally, once the iceberg had been spotted, the officer on

watch, First Officer William Murdoch, could have reacted differently in trying to avoid a collision. Some have suggested that Titanic should have not attempted a course change and simply steamed over the top of the iceberg; I highly doubt this would have helped. But one thing that might have helped is if he hadn't ordered "Full Astern (i.e. 364

reverse)" as he attempted to steer around the berg. Ships of the period did not have a throttle accessible on the bridge; instead, orders to change speed or direction were relayed to the engine room by a device known as an engine room telegraph (the famous circular brass contraption). Once the message was received at the engine room, the engineers had to spend a few moments getting the ship's enormous engines to respond and switch to reverse (the steering gear, as well, took time to respond as the steampowered rudder moved into position). If the Titanic had not been slowing down as she approached the iceberg but instead continuing at full speed, she might have been more maneuverable, able to turn harder and avoid the iceberg entirely. But this is speculation: there was only a very short amount of time (around forty seconds) for Murdoch and the engine room to react, and something else could easily have gone wrong. There are plenty of other things that could have been done to make the sinking less calamitous when it did happen (for example, the ship needed more lifeboats), but these are the main things that could have made a difference prior to the collision itself. Once the hull had been breached across more than four compartments, which happened immediately after the iceberg struck, the ship was doomed. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-chris-oregan

Hipsters

What do hipsters know that I don't know? Anon Hipsters know that culture makes progress, and they celebrate that fact. This knowledge leads to actions that can make them appear pretentious, fickle, and lazy, when hipsters' approach to culture is actually more democratic, consistent, and 365

diligent — and, therefore, better — than that of their "nonhipster" counterparts. The three most widely cited hipster flaws are, in fact, signs of vibrant cultural consumption: •

Elitism. As the previous answers make clear, hipster taste tends toward the obscure. Almost every question pertaining to hipsters includes a jab at their penchant for liking things that "you haven't heard of." But did you ever consider that this perspective might be a result of your shortcomings, not theirs? I can guarantee that hipsters are familiar with both popular and underground culture, yet they overwhelmingly prefer the latter. You, on the other hand, only know the former. Hipsters have given everything a chance, and have settled on niches they consider superior (usually rightly so). You are afraid to venture outside the cozy confines of mainstream media. Who is the elitist in this situation?

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Capriciousness. Everyone values novelty in some aspects of their lives. Nobody wants to watch the same movie every night, or use the same computer until the day they die. This is because novelty broadens our knowledge base and makes us more productive. So what's wrong with actively seeking novelty in music, art, film, and literature? Maybe it is inefficient to dwell on works that repeat last year's conventions, as progress in any area of society requires us to reject clichés. Maybe hipsters' ion for the "new" is much healthier than your complacency.

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Laziness. Hipsters are often bashed for being consumers, rather than producers. But people forget that consumers are an integral part of any functioning economy. Hipsters limit their consumption of material goods, living five to a flat, shopping at thrift stores, and drinking cheap beer. But they provide a much-needed boost to the cultural sphere by eagerly buying records, going to concerts, and attending gallery openings. They represent what we could use more of in every area of society: critical, informed consumers who don't buy into something because "everyone else is doing it," but because they genuinely think it is better.

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Therefore, hipsters know about a lot of things that you haven't heard of. But that should be considered a feature, not a flaw. And what's perceived as elitism is actually a public good. Hipsters tried to tell you, but you refused to listen. If this seems like an outspoken defense of hipsters, that's because it is. To be clear, I don't accept this label for myself, nor would most people identify me as a hipster. I don't wear hipster clothes, live in a hipster neighborhood, or work at a typical hipster job (or lack thereof). At the same time, I strongly identify with hipster culture. I listen to "indie" music, read Continental philosophy, and watch foreign films. In fact, my cultural knowledge puts most of my outwardly hipster friends to shame. But I don't seek out new media to impress others, as many would assume. I do it because I derive far more enjoyment and intellectual stimulation from "non-mainstream" culture. You could, too, if you knew what the hipsters know. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-anon--7

Burning Man

What facts about Burning Man do virgin burners not believe until they go? Ben Newman, Better for it. •

That the dust will find its way into everything.

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That your parents and the parents of your friends represent such a tiny fraction of all the possible kinds of adulthood.

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The extent to which advertising and the notion that everyone is “selling something” permeate American society.

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Just how radical the concept of “radical self-reliance” is, and how terminally, obliviously, contentedly dependent most of society are. 367

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How much more thought you could have put into your costumes.

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How much more deeply you could be invested in everything that you do.

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That the hours you spend waiting in line at the gates could be pure anticipatory glee, if only you knew what was waiting for you.

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That a piece of art could make you want to quit your job and spend your life with a welding torch.

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That boredom is always your fault.

http://www.quora.com/l/boq-ben-newman

American Culture

Why does the USA insist on doing things differently than the majority of other developed nations? Gary Teal, Republican America doesn't insist on doing anything differently. We just do whatever the hell we want because we grew up in a world where we didn't know, and didn't need to know, what anyone else was doing. From Columbus to the turn of the twentieth century, we weren't isolationist, we were isolated. Of course, we imported our language from England and most of our culture from Europe, but it's amazing how much we had to figure out on our own. When someone had the idea to build the Erie Canal, there were no civil engineers living in America, so a couple of judges laid it out. Obviously there are a million stories like that one, and just as obviously, it didn't mean that they did a better job than the dike builders in Holland. It's just that Americans waded into problems with little or no reference to how things were done outside the US. I don't want to exaggerate this effect; people continued to immigrate to the US and read books printed in England. But we were solving problems on our own even while others were doing the same work else368

where. In some cases, like heavier than air flight or automobiles, everyone in America knows who was first in the world, and everyone in Europe knows who was first in the world, but the names aren't the same. We did in fact implement many technological innovations on a wide scale before other countries and have suffered a bit on the bleeding edge for our troubles. We have 110 volt power in the US, and we're stuck with it perhaps forever, but the rest of the world was able to wire for 220, which is more efficient. We laid a kabillion miles of copper cable for telephone communication and other countries will skip that for the most part. By the time we finally engaged in world affairs in the twentieth century, we were already so large that we just didn't need much of anything in the way of manufactured goods or technology from outside the US. Shipping wasn't yet cheap, and services had to be done locally, so we traded with our small neighbor to the north and our underdeveloped neighbor to the south, but mostly didn't think very often about either of them any more than we did Siam. After World War II, the US underwent a two decade boom time unprecedented in human history. Our population and wealth grew to a point where we became even more selfsufficient than before, even as we were coming in with more of the world. In of many manufactured goods, we're different from the rest of the world not because everything we have is better, but because we form a large enough market to any given product. I think TVs are even now measured in inches all over the world, right? I am not sure anybody makes TVs in the US any more, but we're a big market and our influence is still felt. Being isolated and self-centered sounds awful, and in of a good intellectual education about the world, it is. But it was an outgrowth not of a bad attitude, or a superior attitude, but simple self-sufficiency. Americans often didn't speak a second language, especially in the second half of the twentieth century. French and German people spoke two or three in most cases. Was that because the Americans are jerks and the Europeans are well-educated and urbane? Of course not. It's because an American could live an entire lifetime in 369

the US and never come across anybody who didn't speak his language. Of course this extended to cultural issues as well; no need to understand how or when to bow or why to not eat with one's left hand, if you literally never encountered anyone who had different customs than you. I believe this is all changing finally. Very nearly everyone you know can talk to any person anywhere on the planet now. (The cellphone statistic on Wikipedia is 80% of the world's seven billion people.) Many of us can see pictures or video taken by our friends, made just for us, on the other side of the planet either minutes ago or even streaming live. A larger and larger percentage of Americans know someone who is from another country or someone now living outside the US. Our doughboys saw gay Paree, but now our soldiers are coming home with a thorough familiarity with nations that their fathers and mothers pretty much didn't know existed. Will Americans seize the opportunity to learn about other cultures via all our new technology? Yes and no. As everyone in the world gets closer, we'll learn about the world but the world will also learn . To some extent, it is inevitable that virtually everyone on the grid will know at least one language among Chinese, Hindi, or English, and frankly, I'm betting on English as an almost universal language at some point in the lifetimes of my grandchildren. It's not because the US is imposing our language on anyone. We have an attractive culture (which is very different from, if not the opposite of, sophisticated culture). We have created a great deal of music and film that is available in English all over the world. If you want to consume those products, you'll end up learning some English. What language will Americans need to learn? Well, I'm glad we're offering our children a wider variety than old standbys Spanish and French (though I'm sorry we don't very often teach Latin, which gives you such a head start in five languages plus English itself), and we certainly are making strides, at least at better schools, with a broad range of offerings that emphasize Mandarin but include Arabic at many schools. (I don't hear much about Americans learning Hindi, though.) Still, an American can live without knowing another language, and that is the minimum test. An Italian or a Brazilian will find it much harder to be part of world trade and 370

travel and culture if they don't learn a second language. C'est la vie. Many Americans won't learn a second language. Tant pis. Please let me make it clear that no matter how jingoistic I might sound, there is no country which I would not want to live in for a month, and if I could be safe and dry, for a year. (I grew up in West Texas and just don't want to live for months on end in a rainy jungle with bugs everywhere. Sorry, Seattle.) I've mentioned it more than once, so you can guess already that I have a very special place in my heart for India, where I went on my honeymoon, and have been twice since. Of all the places I've seen, India is where you can be farthest from America (I've never been to China). And of course you may know that it was not difficult for us to visit ten cities in India with ten different languages and — this is something that Americans don't appreciate the difficulty of — ten alphabets. (I know there are similarities but learning the first one is hard.) So I could spend thirty years in New Delhi and not understand everything I want to know, and then drive two hours west and start all over in Rajasthan. You run out of thirty year blocks of time pretty quickly; I'm quite likely on my last such block. I would literally burst into tears if I somehow learned that I would never see Paris again, or that I would never see Tokyo or Rio for the first time. And yet, I do believe in an American Exceptionalism that flows in great part from our system of government. I know there's an accepted and specific scholarly definition for that term, but I think it's fair to point out that exceptional does not mean "uniquely and permanently superior to all" in the vernacular. It means "really, really good." I believe the Communist Lovecraft was right, and that the US had some unique advantages that freed us from some of the historical problems that Communism was a response to. I don't believe that it should be taken to mean that the US has any supernaturally guided mission to lead the world as a political force. But the ideas that made American exceptional are ideas that other countries will find advantageous if and when they do adopt them. We set a good example. There is a future just ahead in which fifty nations are just as rich and safe and comfortable and well educated as we are today, and some day a world 371

where virtually everyone is as rich and safe and comfortable and well educated as we are today. I think it's stunning that such a young nation as ours is operating under the world's oldest constitution. This is not to say that our constitution would work this well in any other nation, but it has worked extremely well for us. Capitalism has worked for us. The Rule of Law has worked for us. And a culture of transparency has worked for us. We should be proud of our multiculturalism, and it may be this, if anything, that teaches us the value of learning more about the various cultures of our family's (often multiple) origins and those of our neighbors. In each of these areas, we started with more of an ideal than a reality, and in each case we make progress decade by decade. None of these things is uniquely American at all. It's a political disaster if or when they get labeled as American ideas, because each developing country should want their own version of these concepts, not the American concept of them. While I think we are doing very well compared to most countries, my own definition of American Exceptionalism includes actively working to help any country who wants the help reach the same level. Our exceptionalism is not measured in a way that implies that we will always be better than the rest of the world. It means that we're closer to our own ideals. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-gary-teal

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Work Advice

Recruiting

What do recruiters look for in a resume at first glance? Ambra Nykol, Recruiter @ LivingSocial, Google, Expedia, & for Microsoft I think this varies from recruiter to recruiter and also depends on the role for which you're applying. For one, I don't look through stacks of resumes anymore. I hate paper. I do everything online. But I'll highlight briefly how I personally absorb a resume. I should preface this by saying that I primarily recruit for senior-level individuals. In my past life, I was a campus recruiter, and you read resumes of new grads a bit differently since experience is less of a factor. I'll address how I read a mid- to senior-level resume: •

Most recent role - I'm generally trying to figure out what this person's current status is and why they might even be interested in a new role. Are they laid off? Did they get fired? Have they only been in their role for a few months? Is their most recent experience relevant to the position for which I'm hiring?

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Company recognition - Not even gonna lie. I am a company snob. It's not even that I think certain companies are better than others (although some are). It's purely a 375

matter of how quickly can I assign a frame of reference. This is often more difficult to do when a candidate has only worked for obscure companies I've never heard of. When I can't assign company recognition, it just means I have to read the resume a little deeper, which usually isn't an issue, unless it's poorly formatted and wrought with spelling errors in which case . . . you lost my interest. •

Overall experience - Is there a career progression? Do they have increasing levels of responsibility? Do the titles make sense? Do the responsibilities listed therein match what I'm looking for.

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Keyword search - Do they have the specific experience for the role I'm hiring for? I Command + F the crap out of resumes. On any given day, I'm searching for things like Ruby on Rails, Mule, Business Intelligence, MBA, Consulting, POS, Cisco, Javascript, and seriously, anything you can think of.

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Gaps - I don't mind gaps so long as there's a sufficient explanation. Oh, you took three years off to raise your children? Fine by me, and might I add, I bow down. You tried your hand at starting your own company and failed miserably? Very impressive! Gap sufficiently explained. Whatever it is, just say it. It's the absence of an explanation that makes me wonder.

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Personal web presence - This includes personal domains, Twitter handle, GitHub contributions, dribbble , or anything a candidate has chosen to list. Two out of three times, I almost always click through to a candidate's website or twitter . It's one of my favorite parts of recruiting. Random aside: I care less about what people say on Twitter and more about who is following you and who you follow. So much insight gained by seeing who values your thoughts.

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General logistics - Location, Eligibility to work in the US

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Overall organization - This includes spelling, grammar, ease of use, ability to clearly present ideas.

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Total time it takes me to do all of above: < 30 seconds*

*Note: I will likely later read the resume far more in depth, but only if I already know I like the candidate. It takes me less than a minute to fully digest a resume and flag that person for follow up. I read a resume pretty thoroughly once I know I will be speaking to that person on the phone. But I will not thoroughly read a resume of someone who did not the above categories. Things I rarely pay attention to •

Education - In the last month alone having viewed hundreds of resumes, I honestly don't looking at this section once. When I used to exclusively recruit MBAs, this was one of the first things I looked for because I was generally looking for top tier b-schools. When I used to be a campus tech recruiter, I immediately checked for top CS schools. But outside of my old campus recruiting days, I am not often looking at the education. I think this is because at the level I generally hire, it's the least of what I'm looking for. Experience is king. I can think of a few exceptions where perhaps a hiring manager wanted a certain pedigree, but that's happening less and less, I find. I will also add that this changes drastically by industry and company. I currently work in tech, but I've also worked in management consulting and education is huge in consulting. I'll also add that some tech companies care more about education than others — take Google or Facebook for example (I'm using big companies just for name recognition).

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Fancy Formatting - There are exceptions here. I say this with the caveat that I LOVE a creatively formatted resume. LOVE. In fact, on Pinterest, I've started collecting beautifully presented resumes. However, it's important to keep in mind that if you're applying to a position online, whether it's a PDF or not, most companies' applicant tracking systems parse your resume for information and convert it to pure text as the most immediate viewing format. Recruiters don't often see how awesome your resume is. The original file is usually there for us, but most re377

cruiters aren't clicking through to that. If you're going to do something fun with your resume, I recommend having a clean text resume as well whenever possible so it doesn't come through our system looking wonky. Also, if the formatting is important, always send in PDF. Nine times out of ten, if I genuinely like a candidate and all I have is a text resume, I'll ask them to send me the prettier version for when I present them to a hiring manager. •

Uncomfortably personal details - There are legal reasons here. I learn to tune out certain things like marital status, family status (whether or not a person has children), reference to health or medical issues/triumphs, personal photos). Including things like this is common in CVs in other countries, but it seriously makes me uncomfortable when people include photos with their resumes. If I want to see what you look like, I'll stalk you on LinkedIn . . . and maybe other places. Can't confirm that.

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Cover letters - I abhor them and rarely read them. Most of my recruiting colleagues agree, but I know there are still recruiters that do. I find that a lot of candidates don't even send them anymore (Hallelujah). If you're going to send one, that puppy better be darn good. I'm of the mind that most companies that request cover letters only do so to weed out the people who haven't bothered to read the directions.

Things I wish more people would do •

Bring personality into the resume - We recruiters are staring at these missives all day long. Throw a joke in there somewhere for goodness sake. Talk about how much you love Nutella (I have this in my own personal resume). If you're a rockstar, throw some cheeky self-deprecation in there if you can do so elegantly. I think it's important to keep the work experience details as professional as possible, but trust me, there are ways to have fun with it. I love an easter egg buried in a resume . . . figuratively speaking.

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Include URLs for other web presences - nuff said. And within your comfortability of course. I get it. I don't want

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professional acquaintances to see my Facebook page either. •

List key personal projects - I ask this in almost every phone interview I do. "What kind of stuff are you working on in your free time?" I am always inspired by this. Also shows me that you have ion for your field beyond your 9-5 (ha, ha, like those even exist anymore).

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Use color and lovely typography

Things I wish people would stop doing •

Using MS Word's resume templates - Period.

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Writing resumes in first person - Exceptions made for people who do it cleverly.

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Allowing their resume to be a ridiculous number of pages - Unless you are a college professor with multiple published works, you do not need an 8+ page resume. That is not impressive; that is obnoxious. Condense that bad boy, s'il vous plait. Also, I do not care that you worked at Burger King in 1988. I mean, good for you, but no; not relevant.

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Mixing up first person and third person or present tense and past tense - Pick a voice, pick a tense, and then stick with it. I suggest third person and past tense.

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Listing an objective at the top of the resume - Dude, seriously? This isn't 1992.

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Mailing, faxing, or hand-delivering paper resumes - immediate disqualification. Do not go.

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Sending resumes addressed to the CEO that end up on my desk unopened - This is a gross generalization here and exceptions are made for smaller companies, but um, CEOs don't read resumes — not the first . Also see above re: paper resumes. P.S. We laugh at people who do this.

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Exaggerating titles and responsibilities — Eventually the truth comes out. 379

(All of the above does not apply if you're Tristan Walker or exude ridiculous amounts of awesomeness) That is all. I know, this is more information than you ever wanted to know. Sorry. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-ambra-nykol

Product Management

What distinguishes the top 1% of product managers from the top 10%? Ian McAllister, I lead unusual projects at Amazon The top 10% of product managers excel at a few of these things. The top 1% excel at most or all of them: •

Think big - A 1% PM's thinking won't be constrained by the resources available to them today or today's market environment. They'll describe large disruptive opportunities and develop concrete plans for how to take advantage of them.

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Communicate - A 1% PM can make a case that is impossible to refute or ignore. They'll use data appropriately, when available, but they'll also tap into other biases, beliefs, and triggers that can convince the powers that be to part with headcount, money, or other resources and then get out of the way.

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Simplify - A 1% PM knows how to get 80% of the value out of any feature or project with 20% of the effort. They do so repeatedly, launching more and achieving compounding effects for the product or business.

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Prioritize - A 1% PM knows how to sequence projects. They balance quick wins vs. platform investments appropriately. They balance offense and defense projects appropriately. Offense projects are ones that grow the business. Defense projects are ones that protect and remove drag on

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the business (operations, reducing technical debt, fixing bugs, etc.). •

Forecast and measure - A 1% PM is able to forecast the approximate benefit of a project and can do so efficiently by applying past experience and leveraging comparable benchmarks. They also measure benefit once projects are launched and factor those learnings into their future prioritization and forecasts.

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Execute - A 1% PM grinds it out. They do whatever is necessary to ship. They recognize no specific bounds to the scope of their role. As necessary, they recruit, they produce buttons, they do bizdev, they escalate, they tussle with internal counsel . . .

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Understand technical trade-offs - A 1% PM does not need to have a CS degree. They do need to be able to roughly understand the technical complexity of the features they put on the backlog, without any costing input from devs. They should partner with devs to make the right technical trade-offs (i.e. compromise).

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Understand good design - A 1% PM doesn't have to be a designer, but they should appreciate great design and be able to distinguish it from good design. They should also be able to articulate the difference to their design counterparts, or at least articulate directions to pursue to go from good to great.

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Write effective copy - A 1% PM should be able to write concise copy that gets the job done. They should understand that each additional word they write dilutes the value of the previous ones. They should spend time and energy trying to find the perfect words for key copy (button labels, nav, calls-to-action, etc.), not just words that will suffice.

I'm not sure I've ever met a 1% PM, certainly not one that I identified as such prior to hiring. Instead of trying to hire one, you're better off trying to hire a 10% PM who strives to develop and improve along these dimensions. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-ian-mcallister 381

Productivity

How can you increase your productivity on your side projects at the end of the day when you’re tired from work/college? Kah Keng Tay, Quora Engineer I try to minimize startup and switching costs, in other words, the time it takes to get started working on the side project. This way, even if I only have a few minutes to work on it before I turn in for the night, I can still do something useful. Also, I try to make each opportunity count. These are hard to come by, and so it is good not to waste any single minute. This boils down to me doing some or all of the following: •

Keeping as much state persistent across sessions as possible. I leave all my editors, browser windows, etc exactly the way they are so I can pick up and resume where I left off. This means I usually never shut down my computer, preferring to put it to sleep or standby where possible.

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Having a quick and painless to-do list. I used to do this in a text file but I've recently started to use Evernote for this. Then, when secondary tasks crop up that are not central to what I'm doing right now, I'll put them on the list and work on them later.

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Biting off only what can be chewed. Related to above, I make sure I tackle only what seems reasonably possible within the time I have. If I took on too big a task and didn't manage to finish, and only got back to it a few days later, I would have forgotten by then some of the reasons why I did things in a certain way. This would cost me time that is spent rethinking and refactoring my design unnecessarily.

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Prioritizing tasks according to what is important (or interesting if I'm not feeling particularly inspired). This goes in line with making each opportunity count. In down-

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time, I would transfer some of the tasks in the lightweight list into something more persistent for issue tracking and prioritizing. I found Trac with a Git or Mercurial plugin to be pretty useful for this purpose, and it helps me to keep focused with the big picture in mind. •

Having near-term milestones. These are helpful to stay motivated and give you some pressure to keep on-track with your goals. I think it's easiest to just have a single feature in mind and a fixed date that you want it finished, and use that to inform your decision making.

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Deserializing in advance mentally. The concept of serialization in computer science refers to storing state in a form that can be persisted. In the case of a side project, between the times you get to work on it, your ideas and thoughts often live in your biologically memory, probably in medium- to long-term storage. I've found that it takes time to get all that back into the forefront of your thinking and creative process, but it's a waste if that time could be spent actually working on your project. Instead, I'll spend my commute doing that deserialization, mentally getting ready a list of things I'd be able to do right away once I get home.

Some of the above are also pretty applicable to regular work, so it's good for general productivity if they become habits. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-kah-keng-tay

Management

How do you fire an employee that just isn't good enough? Michael O. Church, NYC machine learning functional programmer, writer, and game designer. The best employees are multipliers who make others more productive, and next are the adders (workhorses). Subtractors are the good-faith incompetents who cost more than they 383

bring. Dividers are the worst kind of problem employee; they bring the whole team (or company) down. Right now, it sounds like he's a subtracter. He's not a bad person, and he's not doing substantial harm, but he's worth less than he costs (including communication overhead). Dividers: fire them immediately. Don't wait a day. Prefer severance over a "performance improvement plan" (PIP). Severance is cheaper than having a fired employee come into work for two months while you build a case. People tend to be averse to writing packages for bad employees, as if they're "rewarding failure," but this is business and it's not the place for that kind of emotion. Pay the go-away fee, but fire dividers as soon as you can. A divider can easily cost you ten thousand dollars per day in damaged morale and internal friction. Subtractors: good-faith employees who just aren't producing more than they cost. You're losing money on them, but in small amounts. If you can turn them into adders, try to do so. Most people start out new jobs as subtractors, and the problem may be project/person fit rather than the employee. Find mentors, move them around, and give them chances as long as (a) you can afford to do so and (b) they remain basically decent (i.e. they're trying to do good work). This "not very bright" guy might surprise you if you change the context. I've seen that happen. When you turn a subtractor into an adder, what you get is a very loyal employee; someone who was well-mentored and learned a lot. Three years later, you might have a bona fide multiplier. I've seen it happen. You really need to ask yourself, "Is he hurting anyone?" If the only loss is that you're paying $100k per year for $80klevel work, then he's probably not an existential threat to your company. You should "manage him out" (i.e. find a way to convince him to leave with his dignity intact) eventually if you see no hope of improving, but don't be rash about it and don't be a dick. People talk. Whatever you do, don't use a formal "performance improvement plan" (PIP). Everyone knows what it means when a manager starts "documenting." This process turns a subtractor into a divider instantly. If you see no alternative to letting the person go, then you should prefer severance over the PIP. 384

HR departments like PIPs because they "save money" on severance payments, but the reality is that they externalize the cost to the team, making HR look good but forcing (a) managers to conduct a kangaroo court, (b) the team to deal with a walking-dead employee, and (c) the employee to decipher whether it's an honest PIP (rare) or firing papers; because in the latter, he should be treating the PIP period as severance (since a PIP usually means there will be no severance; that's why the CYA papers exist) and putting his entire effort into his job search. Writing a package. Have an attorney draft it. Include non-disparagement, non-litigation, and non-disclosure of the contract's existence. Offer to let him represent himself as employed during the search for the next job. If this is a goodfaith subtractor, offer a positive reference. If he's a divider and you truly believe he's toxic, stick to name and dates. By the way, it's never worth it to give a bad reference. Defamation lawsuits are usually less of an issue than wrongful termination suits, but the latter come down to "he-said/she-said," and the company usually gets the benefit of the doubt, but loses it the second a bad reference comes into play. Giving a bad reference can literally cost you millions of dollars. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-michael-o-church

Business

What are telltale signs that you’re working at a “sinking ship” company? Michael Wolfe, Four startups and counting. Large Company Edition •

New opportunities are framed in of how they impact the existing legacy businesses, not how they impact the customer and the future. 385

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Mediocre employees are not fired since you can't recruit better ones anyway.

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You benchmark against your direct (mediocre) peers instead of the disruptive entrants in your market.

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Your co-workers roll their eyes at Facebook, Twitter, cloud services, iPhones, about how they are for children and your customers will never trust their business to them.

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You spend more time talking about how you are going to make the quarter than you do about long-term growth.

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Cross-functional committees are formed to solve problems that would have been solved already if the people responsible for them were any good.

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Management consultants are brought in to solve problems that would have been solved already if the people responsible for them were any good.

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All problems can be solved with more budget (not better people or better decisions).

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Acquired companies disintegrate after they regress to the mean of the rest of the company.

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The CFO spends 95% of his time looking for places to spend less money and 5% looking for new investment opportunities.

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The HR department thinks their job is istration, not leadership.

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All technology decisions go through a centralized IT bottleneck steering committee.

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IT sends out a memo that says anyone using unauthorized cloud services will be fired.

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You have a Chief Strategy Officer.

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You don't have a recruiting playbook.

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People argue over offices.

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When risky, innovative projects are cancelled, the people working on them are laid off, thus getting richly punished for their risk-taking.

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Spending and hiring decisions are "approved" by an entity outside of your group, even if they are within existing budget.

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The company shuts down over the holidays just to get vacation off of the books.

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No one can answer, "Why work here?" except to talk about the dental plan.

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Executives are shuffled around the company to new roles, but outsiders don't ever seem to be brought in to raise the bar.

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When executives quit, their next in lines are automatically promoted to their bosses' jobs, even if they weren't that great and there would have been better candidates elsewhere.

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Each employee has a rationale for why, "I'm glad I don't have to work at Facebook/Twitter/Goldman."

Small Company Edition •

You "rehearse" for board meetings.

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When pressured on the business by employees, CEO always starts with, "I need you to stay focused on . . . "

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You have more than one MBA on the team.

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You have a Chief Strategy Officer.

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Your CTO just came out of a PhD program.

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Your CEO sells instead of listens.

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You have a launch party, and no customers attend.

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Customers hate the product and vision, so the sales guy is fired.

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You are not told the of the last funding round (5x liquidation preference?).

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You never hear how much cash you have in the bank or see board meeting notes.

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You complain about how the customers "just don't get it" and aren't "visionary."

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Your CEO says revenue is coming in in two weeks, just after he gets a meeting with the buyer, negotiates price, gets it approved, agrees on , writes up up contracts, negotiates them, signs them, and invoices the customer on net 30 .

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You add features because board want them.

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Your CEO calls himself a "visionary" in his bio.

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The CEO keeps everything secret because, "That is how Apple does it."

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The CEO approves all of the design decisions because, "That is how Apple does it."

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You are selling a platform.

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Co-founder agrees to bring in experienced execs, but thinks they will report to him.

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You are selling to schools, hospitals, or non-profits.

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You are commercializing a technology.

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Your value proposition is that you help workers break down organizational barriers and work cross-functionally.

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Your business model assume you will become one of the seven websites that the average visits every day.

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Your site is going to be ad-ed, and you have fifteen hundred s.

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CEO avoids eye .

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It gets really quiet.

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You get free lunch but have no customers.

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Your free lunch is taken away.

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You get asked, "How much do you really need to live on?"

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You get a pay cut. Your co-worker disappears.

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Your CEO still doesn't make eye .

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You get laid off and become a creditor to the company because they didn't reimburse your last five expense reports.

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The company declines to buy your unvested shares back.

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The liquidation yields five Aeron chairs and an espresso machine, and Ashton Kutcher's stock is senior to yours. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-michael-wolfe

Career Advice

How do you know when it’s time to leave your current company and move on? Edmond Lau, Quora Engineer A number of red flags should cause you to reconsider your position at your current company, including: •

being compensated unfairly.

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being mistreated, undervalued, or disrespected.

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disagreeing with the fundamental strategy or practices of the company and not being in a position to change them.

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failing to get along with your manager and your teammates.

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failing to fit in with the company culture.

These types of reasons aren't too hard to identify and provide concrete justifications for trying something new. It's also time to leave when your learning rate at your job tapers off and starts to plateau. This is a much more subtle reason for leaving that's harder for people to recognize but likely affects a much larger group of people. Transitioning to another team or company provides an opportunity to switch to a different learning curve and to accelerate your learning. Paying attention to your learning rate is important in general but particularly important for young professionals. 389

Learning is an investment in yourself for the future. It also compounds — knowledge not only begets knowledge, but more knowledge gives you a foundation upon which to gain knowledge even faster. This is why most people learn more in college than they did in high school and more in high school than they did in earlier years. Ideally, out of college, you should set yourself up to learn even more than before. Palantir co-founder Stephen Cohen captures the importance of the compounding effects of learning, in an argument for why college graduates ought to work at startups instead of established companies [1]: If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that intelligence is compounding, the cost of that missing long-term compounding is enormous. They’re not giving you the best opportunity of your life. Then a scary thing can happen: You might realize one day that you’ve lost your competitive edge. You won’t be the best anymore. You won’t be able to fall in love with new stuff. Things are cushy where you are. You get complacent and stall.

Startups might not be for everyone, but the message about not shortchanging your intellectual growth rate still applies. What about a ion for what you're working on? A strong ion and excitement in your company mission or in what you're doing is critical to sustaining a steep learning curve. ion and meaningful work supply the motivation for long-term learning [2] and allow you to stay in a state of flow more often. Mihayli Csikszentmihalyi, one of the world's leading researchers in positive psychology, developed the theory of "flow," a state where you enjoy what you're doing so much that you don't even notice the age of time, and found that more flow generally leads to more happiness [3]. It's hard to stay motivated to learn or to enter a state of flow in the long run unless you believe in and enjoy what you do, and it's also hard not to be getting better if you love what you're doing. Assessing your learning rate first requires identifying the many different types of learning can happen on a job: 390

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Technical learning specific to your job function. For a software engineering position, for example, this might include things like learning a new language, getting familiar with new tools, improving your ability to design new systems, etc. Getting better at these skills makes you more proficient as an individual contributor.

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Prioritization skills. Oftentimes, there are tens or hundreds of things that you could be working on that might generate value. Figuring out the highest leverage activity that generates the most value for the least amount of work at any given point is hard, but it's probably the single most valuable lesson you can learn professionally [4].

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Execution. Learning how to or how not to build and deliver a great product or service and how to do it consistently and on time takes practice.

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Mentorship / management skills. The faster an organization grows, the sooner you become a more senior member of the team. Seniority provides opportunities to mentor or manage other teammates, to shape the company culture and values that develop, and to influence the direction of the team.

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Team leadership skills. The skills needed to make a team function effectively differ from those needed to be productively as an individual. How should milestones be organized? How do you coordinate effectively and minimize communication overhead? How do you make sure a team gels?

At various points in your career, you'll value these skills differently and should seek out opportunities that develop the skills you value. All of these skills are mostly generalizable beyond your job at your current company. You take those skills and experiences with you to your next job. There's also a type of learning that's important for career success but that is less transferable to other companies. And that's institutional learning on how to function well within the specific processes defined at the company: how to get the approval of key gatekeepers for decisions, how to get projects you believe in prioritized on the roap, how to nego391

tiate for more resources for your team given the company's resource allocation process, etc. Some amount of this is necessary to do well, and some of the negotation and persuasion skills will help in the future, but to the extent that much of this learning deals with the particular bureacracy or process that you need to deal with, it's significantly less valuable than other types of learning. When you first a company, the learning curve usually starts really steep (hopefully, if you've made a good choice). You're immersed in new technologies, in a new product, and on a new team, and there are opportunities to learn along multiple dimensions. When I first ed Google right out of college, I learned a lot in my first six months there. Google's done a great job with their GoogleEDU training materials. I soaked in all the codelabs that discussed why core abstractions existed and how they worked. I studied programming style guides to learn best industry practices. I read design docs about search indexing and other scalable engineering systems being built internally. I learned to build and ship something seen by tens to hundreds of millions of people per day on google.com. Your learning rate might decrease due to organizational issues (maybe processes have become too bureaucratic and limit your ability to iterate and launch quickly) or due to maintenance issues where the team doesn't grow quickly enough to scale with the complexity of the product. The second makes it hard for you to switch projects and work on new things. Warning flags for me at Google started to appear when I realized that many projects either had no concrete launch paths or depended on non-transparent approval processes over which I had little visibility or control. Being able to launch products was important to the extent that I wanted to learn how to build great products, and quick, iterative is a necessary foundation for learning. When I projected what I could accomplish and reasonably launch by staying an additional year, I didn't feel satisfied, so I left. There was certainly more I could have learned by staying — I could have dug into the internals of more major systems — but my rate of learning no longer mirrored what I encountered when I first started. 392

I similarly left Ooyala when I felt that my own learning rate at the company began to plateau. While I was there, I learned about building and selling an enterprise product, the intricacies of flash video and analytics, project estimation and team organization, and more. I left when it became clear to me that I could learn much more on engineering and on building a product by ing a smaller and faster-growing team. A contributing factor that I only discovered after working at Ooyala for a while was that I wasn't nearly as excited and motivated to work on an enterprise product as I was to work on a consumer product that I would actually use everyday. Having worked at Quora for two years, I'm happy that I'm still continuously learning new things at a good rate [5, 6], and it certainly helps that the product itself is also so learning-focused. When I interned at Microsoft the summer of my junior year in college, I received a good piece of advice secondhand from a friend's mentor: always re-examine and reflect on where you are in your career at least every two years. Even if you're perfectly happy with your job, the exercise forces you to check that you are actually enjoying your work and learning on the job rather than just being comfortable. [1] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21437840885/pe-

ter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-5-notes-essay [2] http://qr.ae/1vcv2 [3] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly

Csikszentmihalyi, 2008. [4] http://qr.ae/1vcnu [5] http://qr.ae/1vctP [6] http://qr.ae/1vct9

http://www.quora.com/l/boq-edmond-lau

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Personal Experience

Trains

What is it like to be in a train crash? Faisal Abid, Software Engineer, Entrepreneur and Author Being in a train crash is a very interesting experience. It’s the scariest thing that I've been through, and the most enlightening. Let me start off by describing how it was scary. Sam Beck and I were coming back to Toronto from Niagara Falls when, about twenty minutes or so into the journey, the train bounced and started to tilt sideways. This is one of those feelings I won't ever forget. The train probably took less than ten seconds to tip over, but for me, those ten seconds felt like ten hours. Since I was sitting on the right side, the same side the train was tipping over to, people, luggage, and, even worse, laptops came flying into me. While I have no idea how far the train skidded on its side, it also felt like it wasn't going to end. It kept violently shaking till it finally came to a stop. Once it stopped, that's when things went from worse to ugly. Once the train stopped, things went quiet for a second. Then the panic started, people started to cry for help, I turned 395

around after managing to stand up and saw that some people really got banged up badly. I'm not going to elaborate on the injuries out of respect for their privacy, but there was quite a lot of blood and people panicking thinking they were going to die. What made matters worse was when the entire train car started to fill with smoke/gas. This was THE scariest moment of my life. Why? It's one thing to die suddenly in a train crash, it's another thing to think that your cabin is being filled with something that is going to explode, and you're just waiting for death. Why couldn't we have just gone out the emergency windows or exits? All the emergency windows on the right side were blocked by the ground, and there was no way to go through the exits on the left side — which was now our roof — because the chairs were crazy unstable with metal sticking out of them. Plus, none of us could actually reach that high or climb ourselves up. Soon we heard from one of the people in charge that the ambulance and firefighters are on their way. But that wait felt like forever. What happened during those moments is very interesting. First, everyone who wasn't injured started to help out the people in need. Either by telling them everything is going to be okay, or getting them to a safer area. Second, there seemed to be a small community that formed. We got to know each other, not personally, but there was this connection that formed, and we knew that whatever happened, we were not going to let anything happen to anyone on that train. Once the firefighters came, they broke in through the top corner of the train and came in. I've never actually seen firefighters up close, so it was kinda cool. These guys looked like 'Gears of War' characters, huge with crazy equipment and awesome professionalism. They came in and got right to business. They went to the injured people, they made sure they were safe, and got the people who were able to help them out. One of the hardest things to do was leave the train from the other side. Since there were quite a few injured people who could not have been taken out right away, we had to un396

fortunately go over them and the paramedics that were also in the train helping them. Going over them was hard, it felt like a disaster movie, where every step you took, you had to make sure the seat wasn't just going to give in and send you falling and breaking a leg or something. We eventually got out of there and were rushed by paramedics who gave us full medical evaluation. We waited in a bus till the authorities told us it was okay to go home, and we basically took a subway home. Nothing dramatic, nothing crazy compared to what we just went through. How it was enlightening: During the months before the crash, I was going through a very hard phase because of my first startup. We were battling every day with the possibility of us failing, and I took it harder than anyone else. After all, I had dropped out of school to follow my ion, and it looked like I was going to be a loser for the rest of my life because of my failed startup. Then the train crash happened, and something changed in me. To paraphrase, I saw that life is short; I could be dead tomorrow. I realized that rather than worrying about failure and what people will think of me, I should just focus on what I do, do it to the best of my ability, and keep persisting. If I fail (which my startup did), then great — I am still breathing, and that means I could start my next one (which I've done). I won't say I've become someone amazing who is super productive all the time, but I have become more mature and more responsible. I know what to do, I know what to focus on. I know not to worry about what people will think of me, because at the end of the day when I die, it won’t make a difference what they thought, the only thing that will matter is what I've accomplished. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-faisal-abid

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Scientology

What is it like to leave the Church of Scientology? Flemming Funch, Ex-Scientologist, declared Suppressive Person (excommunicated) in 1982. OT16. It is usually very hard and takes a long time. I was kicked out, excommunicated, and declared a "suppressive person" in 1982. Yet, at the time, I didn't agree, and I tried hard to be taken back. It wasn't before about a year later that I realized that I was much better outside that organization, and I wouldn't want to ever be a member of it again. At that time, I was essentially still a Scientologist, just one that had disagreements with the way the organization was run. It took me another number of years to get over that and consider myself an ex-scientologist. Leaving the organization and leaving the subject are two different things, but typically tightly interwoven. One is afraid of leaving the oppressive cultish organization because one is afraid of letting go of that whole manner of thinking and that body of material which is Scientology. I could talk for hours about my experiences, so it is hard to put into a brief message. Leaving the Church of Scientology is probably similar in many ways to leaving any other allencoming religious type of organization. You know, one where most of your friends and family are , and so are your business partners, your employers, etc. Where it guides what books you read, how you interpret the news, how you plan things, which things you plan on doing, etc. It is so all-pervasive that it is very hard to leave. If you do, you have to come up with new ways of doing almost everything. And if the tradition in that organization or religion is to shun people who leave, all the worse, you have to find new friends, maybe even a new family. The escape velocity is very high. You really need to gather yourself together to leave. Or you have to be thrown out quite forcefully before you really leave. But ultimately, it is very freeing to leave an organization that tries to control your thinking. It can be a very healthy 398

process to sort out for yourself what you actually think is true and how you want to think and feel. The more the subject you're leaving has pretended to have the answer to everything, the longer it takes to sort through. But it is worth it. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-flemming-funch

Kidnapping and Ransom

What is it like to be kidnapped? Anon I was kidnapped eight years ago, and it changed me forever. It's an experience you wouldn't want to wish on your worst enemy. Thankfully, I wasn't harmed physically, so I can't imagine what the experience is like for others. I was out with my mom running some errands, and we returned home at night around nine in the evening. In our part of the world, it's common to have a guard (ours was unarmed) because robberies are common, kidnappings aren't. The gate was opened by a stranger wearing a guard's uniform — later we found out it was one of the kidnappers who had beaten up the guard and was wearing his uniform. There were three others, and we found them in the house pointing a gun at my dad's head — his hands were tied, and I can never forget the look on his face and his body language (total helplessness). The four home invaders/robbers (at that point we didn’t know this was a kidnapping) stayed at our place for the next eight hours, ransacking the place and grabbing anything that caught their attention (for example they took gold cufflinks). They were heavily armed and had an AK47 and a couple of pistols. They also had some kind of drug in a vial and a syringe which they said they were going to use on me if I didn't cooperate (that's what they used on our guard after beating him up). At the end, closer to day break, they let us know that they didn't find enough in the house and were going to take me with them for ransom. They let me change, and I said one of 399

the most painful goodbyes to my parents — basically we were prepared to not see each other in this world ever again. The kidnappers got in one of the cars (the one without GPS tracking) and drove about three to four hours. They made me promise to close my eyes otherwise they would drug me. We got to a "safe house" in a rural area at the end of the journey where they had more weapons and food etc. Here they separated into two groups with two of them taking me on a motorbike while the rest took our car. This was the start of a very dangerous part of the journey . . . I was sandwiched between the two guys, the guy behind me had the AK47 between us . . . definitely a very blunt/ hard implied threat. Shortly after we took off from the safe house, they got very tense, saying that a group of rivals was on the way to kill them. We basically sped through roads, markets, and other areas, which added to the stress. At different points, we had to take refuge in fruit orchards and fields to "evade" this group coming after them. By evening, we got to another safe house in a rural area. I could see villagers and other people around, and it became evident that they knew what was going on and that they wouldn't help. They were either afraid of these guys or were in on the take. The other two who took our car came back by evening, also a bit shaken up. They had encountered the police, and our car had been banged up a bit because it had fallen into a canal. I'm a Muslim and have strong faith, so I had been praying and reciting the Quran, which seemed to unsettle them a bit. I had also talked to my parents once, and they let me know that they'd asked someone to pray at the Holy Mosque in Mecca and Medina. I also let them know about this. All of this info (the people following us on the bike, the car accident, and the praying) definitely got to them, and I think they made a decision to get a ransom as soon as possible and let me go. They were a superstitious bunch and at some level, they were trying to justify what they were doing in a rational way. They also itted they knew the local police and had been arrested before. They had paid them off and escaped more than once, and the AK47 was a police issue. They also were a professional bunch and had killed and kidnapped 400

many people before in other cities. I got to spend the night with them, but the next morning they had arranged to meet my dad for the ransom. They drove with me to the pick up point and let me go. In the end, I am thankful to God that I got away — I think my faith and our concept of Karma/Fate helped me through this ordeal. But it has left a scar — life will never be the same again. It was hard to trust anyone for a while — I went into a shell. Even today, I look at people lurking in shadows suspiciously, lock all the doors in the house, etc. But that feeling of being safe in my own home is gone. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-anon--8

Drug Addiction

What does it feel like to be addicted to drugs? Dan Holliday, Please pull around to the second window. Stages. Everything comes in stages. I was always such a prude. No, not a sex prude, but a drug/ alcohol prude as a kid. My best friend and I (in fact, my entire circle of friends) were pretty snooty about any addictive substances. I made it through high school without ever touching tobacco or any "street drugs." I refusing to take pain killers after surgery. I didn't drink that much (though, I don't ever deny having drunk alcohol in high school). Generally, I was well-focused in that regard. I seeing the stoners in high school and laughing at them and calling them losers. I wondering what, WHAT!, in the hell were they thinking. How messed up can you get? I made it through early adulthood. I ed my twentyfirst birthday and still only drank ("only" meaning that I drank on weekends, but not much beyond). Never drugs. I watched some guys do drugs and just wondered what the hell they were thinking. Seriously, one time I watched guys smoke 401

some weed, and I got all nervous and had to leave a party. I just didn't touch any drugs. Twenty-first year. Twenty-second year. And then my twenty-third year. I was living in Key West. I started drinking heavily. See, KW doesn't really have that much to do beyond ocean stuff and night life. I really partied a lot. And tons of guys were popping these newish pills called "Ex" (they called it that in Key West) and it seemed so easy and they really seemed to enjoy the stuff. But the thought of it just made me shudder. I didn't do drugs. And damn, I kept thinking about how much fun it looked like they were having. So, my friend at the time (a lady I still talk to who, herself, has moved well beyond that era) was sort of in a relationship with some French Canadians living in the Keys who had a whole "business" going that was focused just on ecstasy. And you have to , the US Federal Government at this time hadn't even caught up with the stuff; it was still something like Schedule 2 or 3. It was not a high priority. And given how it didn't seem to have any weird side effects, I finally gave in to the curiosity and asked to buy a pill†. That was a big deal. The big night came, and I took it. Tick tock, tick tock. Nothing. Another hour went by and nothing. Damn, and by the time we realized that it was not going to happen, there weren't anymore connections. Shit. What a waste of fifteen bucks!! Worked for everybody else, just not me. So, the next weekend came and we were prepared: TWO PILLS!!! We did that shit right and popped the pill right as I got to the club (I'm actually getting jittery thinking about it now). Tick tock. Tick tock. Nothing. "GODDAMN MAN! You must have an iron metabolism. No worry. We came prepared. Second pill . . . CRUSHED! Now open up. This'll be a little gross buddy, but it's sure to . . . " Alllkkkkk! Splattt! Clakk! Grulp. Ugh. Oh, holy mother, there's nothing that can describe the horror, the absolute gagreflex-inducing, hellish, bitternesss of a crushed up pill of ecstasy in the mouth. Aspirin doesn't even come close. That shit was horrible. 402

Then suddenly after swallowing the crushed-up deathtasting powder, it hit me. "Wait a second, even a crushed-up pill of Ex can't hit you that fast. Oh SHIT! That's the first pill kicking in. OH GODDAMN, DAN! You gotta hold on buddy because when the second dose kicks in, you're gonna be in for a hell of a night." This is why I'm still an addict. This is why I will be "in recovery" for the remainder of my life. As I type this answer, an answer I've had marked to answer for a while, my eyes are dilating and my hands are shuddering so much that I have to get up and take a break. My right leg has been bouncing on the floor so hard and so fast that my boyfriend had to walk into the office to find out what the pounding was . . . He knows. He knows me well. He knows this emotional force emanating from me right now like coronal flares. He hates it and wisely fears it because conversations about this subject should induce horror or shame or fear, but this specific drug and conversations thereabout always inspire poetic, fantastical, whimsical language in me of joy and excitement that aren't in line with the reality that was, with the reality that I make myself in order to remind me that the reality and the memories were always worlds apart. NOTHING about this isn't exciting right now. That's something he rightly fears, though having never seen the addict. I've been clean for eleven years. From that moment in time, from that moment forward for the next four years and four months and three days, I was a barely functioning (and rarely functioning) drug addict. I didn't stop. Every weekend for the next four years was spent on some kind of drug, culminating in the last year of my life spent endlessly on drugs and at times without a home. But we're not there yet. We're at the fun stage where no problems seem to be caused by the drug. Only good times. And that night was a really good time. The intensity of pleasure and joy and connection I felt with those people in that minute was profound. That's what MDMA does. I know it's history. The Dan Holliday who spouts proudly his knowledge of history existed back then as well as today. 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine was invented a long time ago. In fact, it's celebrating its one hundred year an403

niversary this year, 2012. Invented in as a test drug for treating psychological issues, it is highly "empathogenic," meaning that it just makes you a happy, cuddly, loving person while you're on it. I've witnessed, live, many closed, shy, homophobic, hateful, angry people turn about and confront their inner hangups about things and become the happiest people I ever knew. Ecstasy just has that effect. You cannot hate on that shit. And I used and used. I burned through thousands . . . oh so many thousands of dollars over the next few years. Night after night, week after week. The intervening two-ish years are unimportant because they were all repeats of the same night over and over again. Until I met Luke. No, his name isn't Luke. It could be Tommy or Jake or Omar or Juan. But we're calling him Luke because his name really isn't important. Luke was a good guy, I mean it. A heart of gold, but just misguided as I was at that time. Luke was, well, he was my dream guy: very attractive, friendly, gay friendly in fact, and totally straight. We were instantly friends. Luke was well ahead of me in self-destructiveness, and he'd had a love affair with meth and coke for a while. Ever wonder how a person who "fears" a thing can instantly break down their barriers stopping them from doing that "thing"? Lust. I don't know a single person on earth who hasn't engaged in the stupidest shit over lust, and I lusted after Luke. Luke's all I thought about. On our second night hanging out, we went to a gay bar and Luke did something that utterly melted my heart and — from that moment on — made me completely infatuated with him . . . addicted to him in ways more powerful than drugs. At the club, I could see that he was a bit loopy. Heart beating faster than it should. The pulsing being visible in the way he was breathing and the veins in his neck. I was curious, so I asked. Without a second thought, he grabbed my hand and put it on his chest to feel his heart. Pounding. Pounding. Pounding. Nothing about that powerful of a heartbeat is safe. A goddamned battering ram pushing through his rib cage. It's been thirteen years since that day. Humans have been born and entered puberty. A global war on terror has come 404

and nearly gone. Millions of lives have entered and left the Earth. Regimes have changed and taken the course of history with them. Thirteen years is a long time. But I . I every person in the bar, what I was wearing, what he was wearing, the music, our drinks, the looks (Luke always got lots of looks), the conversation, and his face. I call that a "crystal moment" (appropriately coincidental considering the subject matter). I felt his heart through his chest, and every muscle on his chest. Luke didn't think about what he was doing and had no clue what I was really feeling. He was just a guy, but my hand on his chest feeling his heart beat made me completely enslaved from that moment on. Luke, beautiful Luke, was on meth that night. I wasn't far behind. The next day, we snorted crystal together.‡ A week later, we did coke. Within a few months, I had lied to my wealthy grandfather and convinced him to send me a sizable chunk of change. All of which was spent on drugs. Huge Christmas gifts came in from the same grandfather (by "huge," I mean: new car or down payments on houses, big). All of it spent on drugs. All of it spent on Luke. And then the money started running out, and I'd lost my job and I'd moved out of my one stable friend's house (who was, himself, extremely worried about me). I'd stopped talking with my family. I'd stopped eating right. I started losing weight. Weeknights and weekends were spent "casually" using meth, while spending the entire weekend at raves or after hours night clubs in Phoenix that catered to drug s. I was there, and it was so exciting. Then, somewhere along the way, the ecstasy stopped being as fun, and I'd switched to "just coke and meth" (because I didn't want that drunk feeling). And along the way, I'd stopped parachuting meth (putting a few grains in a wad of toilet paper or napkin and swallowing it like a pill). I'd switched to smoking it out of a pipe. And along the way, I'd begun using (not going to spell it out) alternate methods to make income and pay for my addiction. And I wasn't one of those stupid drug addicts in denial. I knew full well I was addicted and itted and talked about it. I laughed about it. I made art about it. I wrote poems about 405

it. I was never in denial, I just didn't care. And then I lost my house. And then I lost my car. And then I had to start sleeping on a buddy's couch because I had nowhere else to go. My friend, Luke, stopped being my friend and like a shot in the head, I spiraled out of control. It took YEARS to it that I was in love with Luke, but not then, I was in denial (about a great deal). I started completely numbing myself with more and more meth. I smoked a full 8-ball a day (8th of an ounce — enough to keep an ordinary person strung out for a week). I'd lost all my friends. My apartment had been robbed long ago and all my good shit was stolen, so I couldn't sell that. And everything, EVERYTHING was just completely lost. FUBAR. Even my last friend, the guy whose couch I'd been sleeping on, had had enough of me. I was so emotional (drug emotions are like being severely bipolar — indistinguishable, in fact). I was up and down. I was insane and incorrigible. I was alone and on the verge of just killing myself. It was so painful. I wanting out and not knowing how; trapped in a world of drugs, drug selling, and the caramel river of one pointless day oozing into the next, without enough velocity to crush me against the rocks, but not solid enough for me to get a grip and swim to shore. People were looking for me. I owed money. Goddamn, I owed so much money to so many people. Death was the quickest and easiest way out. I'd spent my last relationship. I had nothing left, and the years that I should have spent doing something of value were spent doing nothing of any worth and so, having no recourse, I'd decided that I was just going to kill myself. And I called my dad to say goodbye. We hadn't spoken in years. Three-ish years. I was certain he'd written me off. I was always more than the black sheep; the pink sheep, of the family. I never fell in line. I never ever feared being different, and I didn't have a problem making other people suffer for me being different; so what would he care if I was gone? Biology. So many people make so much of biology. My dad who raised me was not my biological father. At something like 406

when I was a month old, my mother left my biological father. At something like when I was nine months old, my mother met my dad and as far as both of them tell me, I instantly considered him my dad. The other guy wasn't around, and when he finally showed his face, I'd already bonded with my dad. The other guy was just a sperm donor. My dad was there through it all. When I was attacked by dogs, he stayed with me through the surgeries. When we were in a car accident and my mother was killed, he was our rock. When I struggled in my early teen years with letting go of my mother, he held out and gave love to this irascible, splenetic teenage boy. And while he wasn't a perfect dad (and who the hell gets to put that kind of pressure on father? How dare I make that demand as a kid, as if I could ever do better), he was a great dad to a less than great kid. Biology. And so much is made of biology, like our connections are defined by chemical similarities within our cells and not by shared experiences and shared pains and time-well-spent together. In my head, I'd convinced myself that I wasn't "really one of his," that he'd written me off. He wouldn't care. Why would he, after all I've done? He had his "real" kids (and never did he ever, EVER make that distinction between any of us). None of you have any clue what it means to know what a dad is until you've pushed that relationship so far; sullied it; cursed it; insulted it; belittled it; lied to it; used it; pissed and shit on it; defiled it in ways that rightly IT SHOULD NOT BE THERE, that rightly you should have been left rotting in a ditch for what you'd done . . . only to turn around and find a granite block of unmovable, unbending, unstoppable love . . . and arms wrapped so tightly around you that for the first time in years, you realize you were never alone and that you'd never fall. And my dad caught me before I hit the ground. †† I kept a journal for a period of four years of my life throughout my drug use — yeah, VERY Basketball Diaries — and I tracked with intricate detail the pills I took. First pill was a "Pink Elephant." 407

‡‡ Burn? BURN!? Oh my. You have no idea. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-dan-holliday

Alcoholism

What is it like to be an alcoholic? Karen Opas, Editor, writer, & clumsy typist What's it like to be an alcoholic? At first, it's great. Truly, truly wonderful. A few glasses of the magic potion and suddenly I was relaxed, happy, having fun, and supremely confident. Alcohol answered something in me. It took away my everypresent anxiety. I could be in the moment. I was thirteen the first time I experienced just how sublime being drunk could be. I could drink a lot (comparatively) without showing it. At fifteen, I was at a bush party where a girlfriend was raped by her date — she was so drunk that she couldn't fight him off — and I judging her for getting so drunk, rather than sympathizing. I turned seventeen and finished high school at the same time. My father told me I could no longer live in the family home. I went on a drunken tour of Europe for a few months and then moved to Banff, where I worked, drank, and drugged. By my seventeenth summer, I was drinking three to four bottles of wine at least five times a week and taking speed to prevent blackouts. But drinking was still fun. I was with a young, beautiful, and hard partying crowd. What I did was normal in context. There were some bad hangovers, a few guys I slept with that I regretted, and a night in the drunk tank when the RCMP found me literally crawling home in skirt and t-shirt in mid-January (think it was about -25 Celsius that night) and I was too drunk to tell them were I lived. They probably saved my life (or at least a few fingers and toes). A couple of years later, my friends were leaving Banff, giving up the partying and heading to university, careers,marriage, mortgages, kids, and all the grown up stuff. 408

And some of them were suggesting that I might be partying a bit too hard. I dismissed them as boring a-holes. But life in a ski town wasn't so much fun anymore, so I went to university. In order to make the money to go there, I headed up to Yellowknife to tend bar at the Gold Range. The way the patrons drank made my drinking seem the epitome of restraint. So, I was able to tell myself that I didn't have a drinking problem. When I started university, I got a part-time job serving tables at the bar where the CFL and NHL players partied. Once again, my drinking and drug habits seemed pretty normal. I dated a player (who would later be booted out of the league for his coke use) who liked that "I could keep up with him." I told myself that I didn't have a problem with drinking because I only drank when I was with other people, so I was a social drinker. REAL alcoholics drank alone — but I had groups of "friends" who lived by different clocks. I could always find people to drink with. I was twenty-one and drinking was still, mostly, fun. I was getting great grades. But there were warning signs; people I wouldn't hang out with because they were boring (didn't drink more than a glass or two on weeknights), classes I missed because I was too hungover to make it in, I had to borrow money to pay rent and bills, because I was spending my earnings and savings on booze and drugs. Time ed; I dropped out of university because, I told myself, "I don't want this." Actually, I was failing that semester because I was drinking and drugging so heavily that I couldn't do course work or exams. So then, like countless alcoholics before and since, I decided that the problem wasn't me, it was where I lived. So I moved. But no matter where you go, there you are. I was able to stop doing coke and speed in my new town, but my drinking got even heavier to compensate. Oh, and drinking no longer worked its old magic. I had to drink so as not to go crazy, but it didn't make me feel good, it didn't fill me with warmth and good cheer. It had become a dreary necessity. Drinking pretty much took over my life. I had a few friends who drank as hard as I did. We prided ourselves on it and thought the rest of the world were boring sheep with no sense of adventure. I did things I was ashamed of. Maybe 409

not the stuff you might be ashamed of — sex was as meaningless as drinking a glass of water by then — but stealing from friends and convincing myself it wasn't theft, that they owed me or would want me to have it. I was best woman at a childhood friend's wedding, and I didn't show up for the ceremony. I had gotten drunk the night before and, truthfully, didn't want to stand up and watch someone be happy and move forward in life. I coveted happiness and hated everyone else for having a better life than I did. I hated myself even more. And the only thing I knew how to do was pick up a bottle. Alcoholism is lonely. Even when you are surrounded by people, you don't feel the connection. Even when those people really love you. Because you think they love the mask you are holding up to the world, not the real you, not the worm inside that is your core self. And I drank even harder to get rid of that realization. Being an alcoholic is tedious and fearful. I lived in fear of being found out, and I had to plan every activity to make sure that there was access to alcohol. I'd show up at parties and drop a bottle of wine on the table. Then I'd head to the bathroom and stash a bottle of scotch inside the toilet tank so that I didn't have to worry about running out of booze. And people wouldn't know just how much I was drinking. Over a decade later, I still know the closing hours of all the liquor stores in Vancouver! Twice, during the last five years of my drinking, I managed to stop for about a month. But the entire time, there was a hamster wheel in my head, one that kept repeating, "I am not drinking. I am not drinking." The only thing I thought about was booze. And how horrible it was not to be drinking any. I can tell a lot of funny stories about my drinking years. But most of the time I was scared, alone, angry, and bored. I knew the future that was coming was a bad one. And then I had that moment of clarity. I almost choked to death on my own vomit, and I realized that I would die if I kept drinking and that I didn't want to die like this. The long process of recovery began. Recovery is amazing and it is brutal. I had to grow up and become a whole person, so that I didn't try and fill the black hole at my core with booze, drugs, sex, drama, 410

and all the other distractions I had used. Growing up isn't easy, especially when you are twenty years behind the curve. But it is possible, as long as I put in the daily work. Today, I have a wonderful sober life with great friends, a marriage full of fun and love, interesting, meaningful work, and a comfy home. And I believe that I could lose everything if I decide to pick up a drink again. Maybe that belief is wrong, but I've seen friends who started drinking again be just as bad or worse as they had been in a very short time and their family, careers, and bank s disappeared. Sometimes people ask me if I couldn't just have one glass of wine, how do I know that I would have the same problems with booze after all these years? I usually answer with this, "If you could play a slot machine that might reward you with a small payout, say $20, but if you got the wrong combination your right thumb got chopped off, would you do it?" Nobody's ever said they'd play those odds. And neither will I. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-karen-opas

Asperger Syndrome

What does it feel like to have Asperger's Syndrome? Alex K. Chen, InquilineKea/Simfish You have absolutely zero social intuition (and not just that — but you don't even notice the social cues that allow you to develop that social intuition). As a result, every social situation feels like a potentially awkward situation where you don't know what to do or say (especially when it's so hard to enjoy the things that other people enjoy — and forcing yourself to enjoy what they enjoy doesn't work at all either). It feels like you can only get social interaction through academia, asking questions, trolling/creating drama, attention whoring, playing computer games, or eavesdropping/stalking. So normally, I just end up studying or reading most of the 411

time — even when I'm in parties. With that all said, the survival techniques I've used to interact with people have gone a long way over the years. In most normal social situations, for example, I simply don't know what to do other than ask questions. But this survival tactic has caused me to develop such a strong talent in asking questions that I've asked more questions than anyone else on Quora and on many other forums. I'm also known for my questions in Academia too (especially in academic conferences) — I guess all the practice in asking questions has gotten to the point that I my questions made a sufficiently strong impression on a number of professors, and that skill did make me win a top student fellowship at a certain university. Nonetheless, we can often only rely on unnatural ways of getting information (especially the type of "hidden" social information that you can't get from reading a book or website), and some neurotypicals object to the covert ways that we sometimes use to get that information. Nothing gets me angrier at humanity than the objections they use against how we try to obtain that hidden social information, but *shrug* I guess it's part of life. The other thing is that it's often profoundly isolating to realize that almost no one in the world is going to fully appreciate the obsession that you have with your particular set of interests (and with the particular details about your interests, too). No — not even people in Academia (nor other Aspies for that matter) will appreciate the particular ways that you're obsessed with your interests. And the truth is that us Aspies also probably aren't ever going to be able to appreciate the interests of neurotypicals in the ways they carry out their interests. So the end result is that many of us prefer doing things by ourselves. Unless we're playing multiplayer computer games. Oftentimes, people in computer games (like Starcraft II) actually appreciate the fine details of things in Aspie-like detail. This definitely happened when I played Age of Empires II, although I ultimately suck at multiplayer games so I quit competitive multiplayer. With that all said, the Internet allows us to broadcast the details of our interests that we're most obsessed with, and we can *at least* theorize of the theoretical possibility that there might be someone out there who 412

appreciates things in the same ways that we appreciate them. Oftentimes, I get along particularly well with foreign students, since being an Aspie is surprisingly similar to being a foreign student in your own country. As long as the foreign students don't have a bunch of other foreign students to hang out with, at least. With foreign students, it's okay if a situation is awkward. People, even those who really like me, always try to keep some distance from me. I definitely notice it, and it often hurts. It has sometimes gotten me angry at the entirety of humanity in the past. But I don't know — at least Academia keeps you sufficiently busy that you always manage to find someone else so that you'll forget your anger at people who ignore you. I've actually noticed that a number of Aspies can often become prolific trolls as well — since trolling is often one of the only ways they can get people to enjoy their presence (and it often works, quite well, too!). It's much easier to get someone to actually laugh at something you say or do (and for a legit reason too) by trolling than by doing something else. Most Aspies seem to troll in a way different from that of most neurotypicals, but it's hard to describe. It often does feel profoundly isolating, but as Simon Baron-Cohen once said on edge.org, the Internet is super-liberating for all of us. For me in particular, I guess I can usually be okay since I have the combination of Internet and Academia. One thing I'm known for doing is posting sprees of threads, questions, or status updates. I have almost no intuition for whether or not people will actually like my content (and the most-followed/liked items often surprise me), so I end up with a very low signal to noise ratio on many of my questions/status updates. And we certainly do appreciate the recognition that a lot of people on the Internet and in educational institutions that people have for Aspies. I used to use Asperger's Syndrome as an excuse for everything, but I no longer use it very much because I started feeling ASHAMED of doing that, because having Asperger's doesn't always excuse us from at least trying to understand others a bit more. Nonetheless, I've learned that even when I do try to understand others more, I'll still be 413

different, and unfortunately, there's no way around that, so maybe I'll just have to mention it to others. At least a lot of people do try to accommodate themselves to us Aspies, even though we'll probably never be close to anyone (but over Academia/the Internet, that's okay). I also have ADD, so *that* often makes certain aspects of ASD more "severe." I don't know how to describe it yet. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-alex-k-chen

Asperger Syndrome

What is it like to be in a relationship with someone who has Asperger's? Laura Copeland, had some relationships Heartbreaking. I went to high school in the least glamorous part of California, in a rural town with no shortage of dairy farms, meth labs, and Pontiac GTOs sporting 20-inch rims. I was the only nerd for miles and miles, I thought, until I met Aaron Smith. Aaron was 6'2", blue-eyed, well-read, and willing to play Scrabble with me for six hours straight without a break. His cerebral traits alone would've made me putty in his hands, but I would soon discover that Aaron had scissorhands, useless for playing with putty. Most days Aaron sat in the back of our French class, staring out a tiny window in the door. He didn't speak unless called on, and then he'd respond with some brilliant comment to show he wasn't missing any class discussion. Aaron came and left the second the bell rang, so I never saw him up-close, not until the end of the quarter, when we sat next to each other for a midterm in the computer lab. I finished early and glanced at his screen: He was finished, too, and had a web browser open to LiveJournal. Intrigued that someone else had an on the site — and wasn't afraid, 414

like I was, of using it in front of our peers — I committed his name to memory and looked it up when I got home. His entries were long and lovely, full of eloquent thoughts on philosophy and literature and a bucket-list wish to live in Asia. I left a flattering comment identifying myself, and then I added the screen name in Aaron's profile to my AIM buddy list. Before long we were chatting all the time, late into the night, and playing marathon Scrabble games online. I grew to value him as a person with whom I could talk about real things, like Isaac Asimov and Ayn Rand and whether happiness was all an illusion (yes, my new friend said, and we can't be trusted to measure our own). In a place where it seemed nobody else knew what books were, I'd found my kindred spirit in Aaron. Our online closeness never parlayed into a friendship at school, though. One of us would say hi when the other walked into the room, and sometimes we'd wave to each other in the halls, but I was too shy to talk to him at length in person, and French was our only period together. The rest of Aaron's day was spent in a portable classroom with the kid who had Down syndrome and a girl I knew from art class who was always writing letters to her father in prison. Aaron didn't show any signs of a broken home life or an intellectual disability — quite the opposite, actually — so I never thought to ask what the deal was with the separate class. I just assumed he was there for some behavioral issue. Maybe he did drugs. Both of us skipped our senior year and left for college early, and thanks to late-starting schedules, we were staying up chatting even later. I started hinting that we should meet up the next time we were both back home, like in real life, at my favorite hole-in-the-wall coffee shop. Several months had ed since graduation, and I missed the guy. "No, I don't drink coffee," he typed. "Me either, but this place has a really good drink with little candy-bar bits. It doesn't even taste like coffee." "Why would you order coffee if it doesn't taste like coffee?" "Or you could get tea or whatever," I wrote back. "It'd just be fun to hang out." I had these scuffles with him every now and again. They 415

didn't deter my pursuit. To put it crudely, I knew I was Aaron's only opportunity to get laid — intellectual teenage guys are still teenage guys, and in my experience driven by one thing — so I figured he must just be playing hard to get. Eventually, I got him to commit to meeting me for tea. It was a warm fall day, so I laid out my beat-up board on one of the patio tables on the wrap-around porch at Queen Bean. I was happy to see Aaron when he walked up, and even happier when his Scrabble skills proved just as polished in person. Neither of us said much after some initial catching up — plus some shit-talking on my part, which Aaron never reciprocated — but I was actually relieved that there wasn't any pressure to keep a constant conversation going. I'm always a bit suspicious of people who are excessively chatty. Plus, I had to pay close attention during our games, or my inevitable loss would be even more shameful. At one point, another regular at the cafe recognized me, and she came over to say hi and check out the game. Aaron apparently felt no need to be friendly to my other friend. He just sat there, solemnly staring, and offered only the slightest and awkwardest smile when I made introductions. My other friend would later ask who Aaron was, exactly, because he seemed, um, kinda weird. But I was weird, too, in my own way. Isn't everyone? Aaron's awkwardness didn't faze me, and it didn't change the fact that he was hot, smart, had an excellent memory for little things I told him, and seemed entertained by the god-awful crazy shit I wrote in my Livejournal. He'd memorized the minutiae from my day-to-day life, and that meant more to me than his grace with strangers. It also meant he liked me, right? Maybe he was just uncomfortable at cafes. "I'm feeling kinda stir-crazy, sitting here this long," I said after he'd beaten me at a second game. "What about you?" "No," Aaron said. "I'm not stir-crazy." We had half a dozen exchanges like this before I decided to lead the horse to water and directly assert what I'd been hinting: that we go back to his place. OK, he said. I followed him there in my own car and spent most of the drive secondguessing myself. Was I being too pushy? The sun had set in the ten minutes it took us to get there, 416

and it was dark by the time we pulled up to the small duplex Aaron shared with his mother (another thing we had in common: I lived in close quarters with a single mom, too). Mrs. Smith was a mystery shopper, Aaron told me as he unlocked the door, and wouldn't be back for a while. The living room was dark, with low ceilings and wall-towall bookshelves. A futon, covered in lint and too small for someone Aaron's height, was left open in the middle of the room. The frame dug into my pant legs when I sat down. Aaron never took a seat, preferring instead to pace. These are my books, he told me, fingering their spines and pulling out a few, one at a time. Most were scifi novels, and he recounted their plots in painful detail. You'd like this one, he said. He said it about every book he showed me, indiscriminately, even though he knew I didn't care for the genre. This went on for a couple hours. I waited and waited for something more to happen, but nothing ever did, not even when I got him, walked over to him, stood close and tried to will my friend out of his shell. I didn't just want to hook up; I would've taken emotional closeness, too, even the platonic kind that grows from discussing shared life experiences. I tried taking the lead again — what kind of music do you like? what do you want to do after college? — but Aaron would deflect my questions with one-word answers and go back to talking about the books. He didn't listen to music, he said. But this one, this book, it's really great, he said. When was he going to stop talking about the books? Even a bookseller at a bookshop would've at least asked what brought me into the store that day. The more Aaron talked, the more I was broken down by self-doubt: I'm not this guy's intellectual equal, after all. I'm not pretty enough. I spend too much time online, and now I've lost the art of interacting with live human beings. I left, crestfallen, when he was holding Of Men and Monsters in his hands and telling me about a society where the humans had turned into vermin living in the walls of monster's houses. I'm an average-looking girl, maybe a little above-average, but certainly not some goddess who can get any guy she wants. My night with Aaron wasn't a disaster because we didn't hook up — that would've been normal and OK. It was a disaster be417

cause I felt like I was hanging out alone. I would've preferred he reject me. Trainwreck dates are often described as ones where the couple "had no chemistry," but a more accurate description is to say that they had bad chemistry. They aren't the same. With Aaron, there really was no chemistry. And that void, that unknowing — it's much harder to swallow than rejection. A few days after we hung out, when we were back to chatting on AIM, I learned that our evening together had been one of his more favorable social encounters. He typed, "When you were at my house, did you want me to kiss you?" Had I been twenty-seven, not seventeen, I would've explained to him — in plain language — that, yes, when a girl invites herself over, a girl who talks to you for hours online more nights than not, she wants you to kiss her. But I didn't say it. I backed my way out of the conversation and didn't talk to him again. Bitch move? Maybe. I have more empathy now. Back then I was in college, where well-read guys ran rampant. I didn't need the uphill battle. A couple years ago, out of the blue, Aaron sent me this: I hope this is still your e-mail address. You know, I've discovered that overall I don't really like writing all that much. It sometimes depresses me. So I guess we have less in common than I first thought when we talked back in high school. Yeah, in fact a lot has changed, but I still wanted to catch up. I don't know what's happened when we've tried to talk before — I'm sure I did something wrong — but if you'd like to start corresponding again, I've just rediscovered e-mail. I'm including a picture of Nami from One Piece, because she reminds me of you every time I see her.

Nami is a busty anime character with short orange hair. No resemblance, but the picture at least cleared up the mystery of whether Aaron found me attractive. Since his address was now in my s list, he showed up as a suggested friend on Facebook. He has a master's in history now and lives in Japan, teaching English as an expat 418

in a country where he doesn't speak the language. I flicked through his photo albums, which look like what you get back when you develop the party-favor disposable cameras from a wedding that had an open bar — random shots of found objects, except without any shots of faces. Hundreds and hundreds of pictures spanning several years and not a single one contains another person. And the photos of Aaron, they're all self-portraits: his reflection in a car window, in a puddle on the sidewalk, in the mirror at a barbershop; his head in front of some Japanese tourist trap, his arm outstretched to fit everything in the frame. Where are his friends? Did he never get a girlfriend? Why was there never anyone around to take Aaron's picture? I'm a journalist, and last year I interviewed a man with Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS) who has lost his ability to speak, swallow, or move any body part but his eyes. He speaks through an optically controlled computer, blinking out a letter at a time, like Stephen Hawking does with his cheek. I never get scared of interviewing someone, but I was terrified of interviewing him. Minutes after I arrived, though, the man's charm and humor had disarmed my nerves. Rather than wanting to leave, I wanted more time with him. The computer voice, the whooshing of the ventilator, the aide in the room, the delay before his replies — it all fades into the background and a warmth breaks through and you can feel who he is. It's no different than talking to anyone else. Aaron has boundless advantages over a person in the late stages of ALS. He can change the volume and tone of his voice, laugh, crinkle his face, punctuate his sentences with hand gestures. He can tear across the room and give you a hug or a high-five or a slap on the ass. But you still can't feel who he is. Talking to him is worlds different from talking to anyone else. He's trapped in ice without a pick. Despite what he said about losing interest in writing, Aaron still does it — hard habit to break — on a Wordpress blog that, bless his heart, shows up on the first page of search results for anyone who Googles his name. I spent a couple hours recently working my way back through the archives, just like I had ten years ago when I found his Livejournal. He's still a 419

good writer, gifted at churning out honest prose. On his new blog, in between blunt descriptions of a new nephew (who "came out of [Aaron's] sister's insides") and a night at the bar (he still hasn't discovered his tolerance for alcohol), I found a painful nugget of truth, a revealing two sentences on his failed attempts at dating. I read it and realized that, if given the option of being paralyzed in midlife from ALS or reaching old age with an autism spectrum disorder, I'd have to think hard before picking. I don't know why I'm like this, my old friend wrote. It's like I'm deaf to a dog-whistle everyone else can hear. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-laura-copeland

Family and Families

What does it feel like to have your sibling die? John Clover, one day Pretty miserable. My sister died at the age of eighteen when I was sixteen. She was attending her first semester of college majoring in Psychology at Florida State University when she came down with mono. She came home to recover and due to her weakened immune system she ended up with viral pneumonia. I only some bits so they may not fit together (I still the date she died as different from her official date of death among other things), but as her symptoms worsened, my parents ed her doctor on a Friday, who said to wait until Monday to come in, since the symptoms of the pneumonia were much the same as those of the mono. My sister died before she could get to the doctor. I my parents coming into my bedroom at night and waking me up, saying "Rebecca isn't breathing!" Like a good Boy Scout, I was always prepared. I stormed 420

down the stairs, and went through the procedures I was certified for. My sister was on the floor next to the couch where she had been sleeping. There was fluid in her airway, I cleared it and began R. I told my parents to call 911 and continued until the paramedics arrived. I the stain on the floor next to her head where I cleared her airway, and worrying about who would clean it up so my parents wouldn't have to see it. I the sound the air made as it left her lungs, like a balloon emptying out. There was no resistance, no life. There seemed to be a glimmer of hope when the paramedics attempted to revive her with shock paddles, but I think this was just wishful thinking. We got in our car and followed them to the hospital where after a short time we were moved to a grievance room where we got to wait for a doctor to tell us what we already knew. It was hell to wait. We were brought to see her body and told to collect any of her jewelry. It was the world's worst goodbye, even worse for my other two sisters who were out of town and not able to be present. I had dreams she was still there, I would wake up thinking she was in the next room. I fantasized that she had been kidnapped, and one day she would come back and we'd be reunited. I one of the last things I did for my sister and it makes me happy. She was hungry and weak from being sick, and I made her Kraft Mac and Cheese and she liked it. I'm really glad that by sheer luck I wasn't a dick little brother and that time, I made an effort to help her out. I didn't cry and I didn't talk to anyone about my feelings. She died in December of 1996, and I the first time I cried was when I was driving to my friend's house and Hale-Bopp was near perihelion (around Feb/April 1997), and Lighting Crashes by Live was on the radio. I pulled over and looked out my window at the comet, and cried. I still can't listen to that song. I pulled myself together and went to my friend's house and didn't cry again for I don't know how long. Everything changed. My mom started taking medication (it helped), my dad 421

took anger management classes and started giving very awkward hugs, as if he hadn't been properly trained on when and how to deliver affection (he wasn't unaffectionate before, but apparently he must have been instructed that he was doing it wrong and he should instead be hugging people, it felt awkward and alien, almost funny at first). He's greatly improved since then. I was conscious of how I was suddenly treated differently and most of the time I tried to make a conscious effort not to take advantage of it. It was very easy to take advantage of the situation, even by accident, and that made me feel even more guilty, here I was making my life easier by taking advantage of the miserable situation that my sister died. I got away with being a pretty bad student because of my "situation," and it wasn't my situation that was the problem it was that I was a pretty crappy student. I stopped going to Boy Scouts because I felt really awkward being around my peers, like it was easier to avoid them than to make them feel obligated to console me or to try to relate. I regret this. Every year I age, every new job I take, or adventure I go on, I wonder what my sister would have been doing, two years ahead of me. I like to think of her that way. My family read her diary from college, and I refused to read it. I knew there were entries she made in it about doing drugs and drinking as a freshman, and I didn't want to her that way. She was the cheerleader who looked out for her nerdy little brother and introduced him to Paula Abdul and Michael Jackson. (All my sisters introduced me to their favorite music, perhaps trying to convince me to pick a side, and to this day I still love it all). Every day, and in everything I do, I ask myself if she would be proud, if she would say, "Wow, John, that's awesome!" It's a burden, but it's also a great driving force, it makes me live my life. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-john-clover

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Wealthy People and Families

What's it like to come from a billion-dollar family? John H. Hillman, V, sorry about the Roman numeral. In my case it is pretty normal. To be clear, I am not "of the wealth" that flows through my family, I benefit from a minor tributary of the original fortune. I am not a poor person by any means, and I am super grateful for my family history, tradition, and the regional respect given towards us. Something that not only I, but the patriarch and matriarch Hillmans, have always tried to repay. The reality is: the city that helped us, comes first. Without giving a full family history — which has already been done way better than I could — the gist of it is: I had a relative seven or eight generations ago who did very well cooking iron in Kentucky/Tennessee in the 1850s. A generation continued that success though the U.S. Civil War with some pitfalls until around the 1900s when some southerner Hillmans traveled to a city which was a perfect fit for industrial steel revolution: Pittsburgh. When the U.S. steel industry began to slump beginning in the 1960s my great-uncle Henry diversified into many things, notably an early Kleiner Perkins investment, international real estate, and others. I believe he has been on the Forbes 400 since the first list, though I may be wrong. The rest can be found via Google. How does it feel for me? Aside from knowing that I come from solid stock, which I try to live up to, I have constant reminders such as the Hillman Library, which was named after my great-grandfather and is the main library of the University of Pittsburgh. The question I most often hear about that building is: "Don't you like, own a library or something?" Other than that there is The Hillman Cancer Center, which is a fantastic facility, every once in awhile, I have misguided people thanking me because their cancer was "cured." I don't like that at all, it makes me feel uncomfortable. The Hillman Center for Future Generation Technologies part of Carnegie Mellon University is cool-looking (inside and out) and is a 423

great partnership with Gates and CMU, but not something the average person cares about, including me. Then there are things like Hillman Hall of Minerals and Gems, part of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History that are so amazing, but also made me feel awkward as a first grader visiting with my school. Kids can be tough. I could name over fifty other really important buildings/endowments/things our family's success has benefited, but most people don't care. And it can all be found without me telling you. I have great friends. I can't clarify that enough. They are all lifelong friends who know me well. It isn't like I have hangers-on or people who want to be in my life because of a perceived wealth, though I believe others in my family might have that problem. Every month, I get a stranger that says "Hey, are you related to the Hillmans . . . ?" or something like that. Basically I just go with the flow. I am modest, live a modest life, and it's all just fun and respect. Respect for my family and respect for people that are interested in "us." When I think of my family's fortunes I think of how much has been given back to Pittsburgh, and that is mainly how I identify with it. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-john-h-hillman-v

Intelligence

What does it feel like to be stupid? Anon The following is a very unusual of a true but unusual experience: I had an arterial problem for a couple of years, which reduced blood supply to my heart and brain and depleted B vitamins from my nerves (to keep the heart in good repair). Although there is some vagueness as to the mechanisms, this made me forgetful, slow, and easily overwhelmed. In short, I felt like I was stupid compared to what I was used to, and I was. 424

It was frightening at first because I knew something wasn't right, but didn't know what, and very worrying for my career because I was simply not very good any more. However, once I got used to it and resigned myself, it was great. Even though I knew I had a worrying illness, I was happy as a pig in mud. I no longer had the arrogance of being frustrated with slow people, I abandoned many projects, which reduced a lot of stress, I could enjoy films without knowing what would happen (my nickname before this used to be 'comic book guy' if you get the reference), and I became amazingly laid back and happy-go-lucky. I got on with people much better. I developed much more respect for one of my friends in particular who I always considered slow — it turned out he is much deeper than I thought, I just never had the patience to notice before. You could say I had more time to look around. The world just made more sense. The only negative, apart from struggling to perform at work, and having to write everything down, was that I no longer found sci-fi interesting — it just didn't seem important. (I'm not joking, although it sounds like a cliché.) Eventually after more physical and life threatening symptoms developed, I got the right tests and they found my arteries were blocked up (two out of three of my main coronary arteries 100% blocked — they couldn't work out why I was alive — it later turned out that I had unusually good peripheral circulation from my intense cycling). I've since had stents to open up the arteries again and made a full recovery. After a year or so, I am almost as 'clever' as I used to be, although I tend to ignore distractions more than I used to and focus on a smaller number of projects. I'm still more laid back than I used to be though, and have more patience with people. Most people still find me more socially competent. I also enjoy sci-fi again. So an unusual perspective, from a fairly unusual circumstance, but that's what it feels like to be be stupid when you used to be fairly bright. In some ways, it was a great learning experience, although obviously in other ways it is a life changing fact I have to live with. Not many people get to walk about in other peoples shoes, and then pick up where they left off. Plus it's obviously nice to still be alive. 425

In short, I would say that the frustration of dealing with slower people is worse than being one of the slower people, even if you know you are slow. Obviously most people who are relatively slow don't know it, but I think I've glimpsed how they experience the world. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-anon--9

attractiveness

What does it feel like to be both very physically beautiful and very academically intelligent? Anon Being intelligent and attractive is a continuous test of character. It's incredibly tempting to rely on your looks to get you places, and you have to make and adhere to a firm decision of not taking that ticket because you can. It's also really lonely. You can't really complain about it to anyone because to do so, you'd have to break the unspoken convention of never acknowledging your own beauty. Even when writing this answer, I found myself wishing I could share it with friends but knowing that to do so would be socially unacceptable. When you're pretty, people mock you if you say anything negative about your looks, but they would find you stuck-up and intolerable if you actually itted that you knew people found you attractive. How it affects your childhood If you have siblings, no matter how smart you are, you are "the pretty one." Your sister is jealous but you don't realize that's why she says things about how she's so much smarter than you are and that your parents think you're dumb in comparison. You grow up learning that looks matter a lot. My immigrant grandparent was prouder of my looks than my education, which was a startling truth to discover. All of your 426

teachers love you and you can't really empathize with the students whom they don't like. How it affects your schooling My working style may not be perfect but I am very hard-working. I'm proud of both my looks and my mind but doubt each of them in different ways. For my looks, I try to not dwell on them as much as possible. I care about dressing well and never appearing like a slob but I'm disappointed in myself when I spend too much time in a mirror or too much time thinking about a compliment I've received. When I was younger, I really didn't understand why people seemed to find me so attractive — I didn't fit the Barbie conventions of beauty that I was familiar with. In some ways it was almost easier back then, because I felt insecure about my appearance like all of my peers and considered their remarks on how jealous they were of me to be insincere. When I grew out of my adolescence, I finally started to understand that in some objective way, I was very attractive to some non-zero portion of society. Even though I still don't think of myself as beautiful in my heart-of-hearts, I've finally acknowledged to myself that I am to other people. Although this realization sounds very coming-of-age-y and like something you should congratulate me on ("You're no longer an insecure teenager who has body image issues!") it actually led to a lot of the self-doubt about my intelligence. Before, I struggled with the usual questions about how smart I was — was it just because I worked really hard? — but now I had new doubts. Was I only getting good grades because I was pretty? Did my teachers like me more because I had a great smile? How much did I really deserve my A+'s? My ission to a prestigious university made me unreasonably happy. There was no photo of me attached to the application — this was my moment to feel validated. The paranoid voice in your head whispers of letters of recommendation and grades and how they could be influenced by your attractiveness but you are deaf to them. In college, there are occasional awkward moments with your TAs (I was lucky enough to never have anything too egregious with a professor). One TA for a lab told me that I 427

had been going to do something that I shouldn't have and he had called my name to tell me to stop, but when I turned with a smile, he was kind of blindsided and let me carry on. I don't know how common this is though. How it affects you personally I alluded to this in the introduction, but having both looks and brains forces you to make a choice early on about how much you should use each to your advantage. I chose to develop my brain and try to the best of my ability ignore the effect that my appearance had on others. One thing I had to do after making that decision was figure out where to draw the line in of what kind of help and favors it's acceptable to accept and what kind are not. Pretty people have the advantage of others liking being around them and not having to repay any favors, as if their presence is enough. I wasn't able to help whether or not the people helping me were attracted to me or not but I did try and behave as much as possible like I didn't take their help for granted. For me, this meant that whenever a classmate helped me with my work or to understand the material, I made sure to do something to show my gratitude, whether it be by baking them cookies or by helping them with homework for another class. How it affects you intellectually Being intelligent and attractive can cause more pain than you realize. It's like the difference between humans and other animals, in that only we know that we'll someday die and dwell upon that. Similarly, as an intelligent person, I am fully aware of the fact that my beauty is ephemeral. In some ways, you look forward to being freed from the stifling weight of constantly worrying about your looks and how much your personal/intellectual merit has gotten you in life versus your looks. But mostly, you're afraid. I've never known a life of being unattractive to other people. I have no idea how much I've been living a "charmed life" or not because of them. I redouble my resolve to cultivate a mind so bright and a soul so light that even without my looks, I will be of value to my friends, family, and the world at large. 428

How it affects you professionally More than they do for your college acceptances, a lot of people assume that you've gotten the position at the awesome company you're at in large part because of your appearance. These aren't even just strangers — when I was offered a job at a dream company, my friends' justification for it was that my future boss had a crush on me. Although I played it off like it was a joke, that was a devastating blow. I was pretty angry that they said and thought that AND that they felt like it was perfectly acceptable to say, too. I wanted to remind them that I had been invited to interview at the company before they had any idea of what I looked like. One of my friends is the child of a very, very successful parent. He and I would talk ing his parents' connections to get his foot in the door for things. His philosophy was that although it wasn't elegant, it wasn't unthinkable. He believed that because anyone else in his place would do the same, it wasn't reprehensible for him to do so. I've occasionally thought about that and if the same should apply to looks. So far, to the best of my conscious ability, I have avoided wielding my attractiveness as a tool for job-hunting. How it affects you socially Being both attractive and intelligent is a never-ending source of stress in high school. You wade between the popular crowd and the honors kids. It's an uneasy time, because your nerdy friends desperately despise your popular friends for having everything they think they want and your popular friends forget your nerdy friends even exist. Your popular friends are fun to be with because it's nice to not stand out too much. When you're only one pretty face in a group of pretty faces, you belong. But, you can't really party and date the quarterback if you want to do well in your classes and you really do want to do well in your classes. So, slowly, you drift to the smart kids side. You really count on your grades to give you a sense of worth, because you earned them in a way that you can never say of your looks. Post high school, your mixture of looks and intelligence can still cause social pain. I had a roommate in college who once offhandedly told me that she would never introduce me 429

to a guy she liked before they started dating. The strange thing was that she meant it as a compliment of sorts — that she thought he'd never fall for her if he met me first. But really, that made me feel pretty awful. Nobody wants to unintentionally be the type of person that anyone is afraid to introduce their crush or significant other to. Likewise, it can be pretty tough to have close guy friends who have girlfriends. No matter how uninterested either/both of you are, the girlfriend feels threatened by your presence in his life. You hate causing strife, so you learn to back off as soon as one of your friends starts dating someone seriously. How it affects you romantically In of your love life, being both attractive and intelligent heavily influences both who/how you date and your outlook on dating in general. Every pretty girl, intelligent or not, is used to the oafs who try to hit on them. The difference between the smart and pretty and the not smart but pretty is that the former attract more of the intelligent, nerdy guys. These guys are usually more well-intentioned than their oafish counterparts. They don't mean to make you uncomfortable with their spontaneous compliments. But some of them are less direct about what they want. We all know about these so-called "nice guys" who believe that they're being unfairly friend zoned. I suspect that these guys are, more often than not, guys of slightly above to vastly above average intelligence and as such, are drawn to the pretty and smart women. That means that we get to deal with them often. Smart and attractive guys can be really hard to find and sometimes you have to compromise. I made the choice, more subconsciously than not, to optimize for intelligence in guys that I date rather than hotness. I've idly wondered if maybe the best guys for smart, beautiful women to date aren't actually the rich and successful ones. Only they can really potentially understand what it's like to fear that you are loved for something other than your sparkling personality. Every now and then, you find a real gem of a boyfriend. He acts as though he's pulled the winning lottery ticket by catching a smart and beautiful girlfriend and is slow to take that for granted. Although you're pleased that he thinks you're 430

beautiful, you occasionally have nagging doubts about how much he likes you for your looks versus your personality/intelligence. ("I mostly believe that he thinks I'm smart but would he date me if I weren't pretty too?") It's enough to make you a little paranoid and treat dating more cautiously than your other friends. If a boyfriend didn't find me attractive, I'd be upset, but it's also of vital importance to me that he believe me to be very intelligent. This quotation in Ethan Hein's answer is very apt: "As a female friend of mine once told me, 'The pretty ones want to be told they're smart, and the smart ones want to be told they're pretty.'" This is a tough question to answer, like many of the other questions about personal experiences, because I don't know any other reality, but I gave it a fair shot. At the end of the day, we really want you (you, as in, anyone whose opinion we respect and trust) to find us to be intelligent. Most of the compliments that I treasure the most are the ones which had something to do with my brain — a colleague who told me that he found my analysis to be incredibly insightful, a former classmate who mentioned my "brilliance" — these are the ones I hold dear. Most of the time, being attractive and intelligent is a very positive experience but I hope my answer gave you a peek into some of the less easy-to-guess aspects of this experience. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-anon--10

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unattractiveness

What does it feel like to be unattractive and desired by none? Anon It's been truly awful. I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of life. I topped out a bit over 5' tall. As a male, that's the kiss of death. Unlike other forms of unattractiveness, there's nothing I can do about it. If you're overweight, you can try going to the gym. Women who are concerned about their chest can get that fixed. If you're a jackass, you can pretend to be nice for as long as it's necessary. If you can't get an erection, just check your email. It's just completely capricious and unfair. If I were female, it wouldn't be an issue at all. I can't think of a comparable issue for women. It's also something that was largely out of my control. I'm smart, fairly well off financially, interesting, well-traveled, loyal and extremely generous . . . but all that hasn't been able to overcome my height. The research shows that unless I become a millionaire, I'm pretty much out of luck. If I could spend $500,000 to become 5'10", I'd do it without thinking twice. Being short is a triple whammy because it affects two other things that women value: confidence and clothes. While I try to be confident, it is hard when you haven't had a lot of success. Buying clothes is a real challenge and even with some tailoring I have to wear clothes that are too big for me. I one speed dating event where a woman spent the whole ten minutes with me filing her nails and doing her make up. I wasn't interested in her anyway, but geez. How hard is it to be polite for ten minutes? It feels like I have no choices, and I know that on a few occasions, I've continued to pursue things that weren't great because, hey, there was at least a bit of interest. Note to self: an atheist dating someone in seminary is not a good idea. In a weird way, it's an invisible thing, despite being a completely visible thing. My friends (male and female) will make 432

jokes about short men in front of me. While they wouldn't make such comments about race, sexuality, etc., it seems perfectly socially acceptable to mock short men. Hollywood regularly mocks short men and perpetuates negative stereotypes, despite the fact that many of Hollywood's leading men and other celebrities are short (Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman, Jon Stewart, George Stephanopoulos). There's also a lack of , because my friends don't see the issue. "It's all in your head." Undoubtedly, rejection after rejection does take its toll on your psyche. I've tried going to therapy. Obviously, no amount of therapy can make me taller. But it also hasn't helped because there's just no relatability. There are groups for just about everything, but I haven't been able to find any for my challenges. In watching the outpouring of for bullied homosexuals, I can't help but think, "Why isn't anyone ing me?" (And, yes, I do the bullied homosexuals.) At least a couple of times in my life, guy friends have deserted me. As best as I've been able to tell it's because they felt I was hurting their game. A female friend once told me that it was kind of like winning the lottery. She meant that I had to keep playing. But sometimes it does feel like my odds are like playing Powerball, which are a lot less than getting struck by lightning. I sometimes get the sense that women, including attractive women, will let themselves get close to me because they don't consider that I could possibly be interested in them. That ends up being even more crushing. I also get to hear female friends go on about what jerks all men are, how they cheat, aren't trustworthy, etc. and I see the jerks that women are willing to tolerate. That really grates on me. Being an unattractive man is especially hard because men are the ones expected to make the first move. This means constantly being subjected to rejection. Outside the dating world, it just seems like things are much easier for others. I can't quantify it, but it's a feeling that sticks with me. People seem less willing to help unattractive people. I'm reminded of the 30 Rock episodes with Jon Hamm, where people fall all over each other to do things 433

for him because he's attractive. Even moderately attractive female friends have expectations of what people will do for them that go way beyond what I would expect people to do for me. This isn't a case of getting what you give. I've been very generous to others, both with time and money. I've learned not to expect that others would do for me what I would do for them. When I'm at parties with friends who have kids, it's pretty common to hear them cooing about how big their kids have gotten. I know it's not anything directly about me, but it's a constant reinforcement of how important size is in our culture. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-anon--11

Sex

What's it like to pay for sex on a regular basis? Anon I'm in a good position to answer this as I've probably seen around a hundred plus hookers since I was a teenager. I'm not proud of that, but not ashamed either. It is what it is. What's it like to pay for sex on a regular basis? Hmmm. Disappointing. Thrilling. Painful. Fun. Abnormal. Pleasurable. Isolating. Eventually, boring. I was always of the school of thought that paying for it was more honest than sleazing on/trying to impress a girl all night in some sticky-floored nightclub with a dozen other guys all doing the same just to get into her pants. It always seemed undignified to me. Paying for the pleasure always seemed like playing on a more open and level playing field. The nature of the encounter was explicit — no pretense or flirting was necessary. To liken paying for sex as charity on my part would of course be ludicrous, but there was always a part of me that liked the fact that I could get what I wanted, and in return, they would be able to pay their rent, bills, what434

ever. Sometimes it really does seem like a win-win situation. I meeting some beautiful girls, full of personality, although those memories are always memories half-buried in the dank recesses of my long-term recall. If I could kid myself that all of the great times I had weren't about money, and didn't have the clock counting down in the background, then I could conceivably find myself grinning from ear-to-ear every day. But I can't, and along with those factors, the thing that most tarnishes my memories of my most ionate nights (sounds corny, but I can't think of how else to describe them) is that they were had when I was at my lowest ebb, broken-up, grieving, alone (I've been fighting clinical depression for the last seven years). "Sex is the last refuge of the miserable," Quentin Crisp said. All of my good nights were bittersweet. And of course you get attached to some of them, love their foreign accent, their pep, their seemingly indefatigable lust for life and pleasure. Italian, South African, Czech, Hungarian, Brazilian, Spanish, Jamaican, Chinese, French, Ethiopian, Swedish — all a phone call away. I a wonderful brothel in my hometown just a twenty minute bus ride away from my home that had a procession of lovely, petite girls that were fun to talk to and great in the sack (the petite part was important as I'm on the shorter side myself). The atmosphere was very sex-positive, almost communal. And I guess that's what helps to give the illusion of love — their availability. If you're lucky, they'll leave you with something to think about too, some little pearl of wisdom, some kind of reassurance, something with some little nugget of truth to it. I telling one woman that she should work as a counselor, not a prostitute, after I had opened up to her about how I was feeling about my car crash of a life and after she had given me some helpful words of advice. She was in her forties, Italian, and had kids. She turned round to me and said, "I am what I am and my life is my life." It was one of the most powerful things I had ever heard. A simple acceptance of her life without anxiety or judgement. You'd have to be pretty desperate to fall in love with them — at least, within the context of how you meet them — but a young man like me can cherish and love those words and those kinds of encounters that seem fraught with some greater significance brought about through shared 435

feelings of being lost in an uncertain world. Actually, I always valued that as much as the sex. The connection, the conversation. I often never felt much different from the girls I was meeting. There was something wonderful about being able to be completely naked, physically and mentally, with someone lying across the bed from you, with no fear of judgement, or recriminations. BUT, the last few encounters I've had have been awful, for reasons I won't go into here. The universe telling me to give it up, maybe. And I should. I should because I want to pursue a career in the medical field; I have aspirations to be a solid citizen — to grow out of being a idle denizen. I should because it hurts. It's probably the most spiritually damaging activity you could engage in, and I always wondered how these girls could be so tough to stand it. Prostitution demeans the punter and the working girl in almost equal measure. Like others have said, it's not real intimacy. There were many times when I would feel so dirty afterwards, many times when I knew the girl hated my guts, when I had knocked on their doors at three in the morning and got them out of bed, when I knew they missed their home country, their family. I know I can leave this habit behind me, and I do know that I can't do this forever — the finer, more noble things in life now require more of my attention. I watched Steve McQueen's film "Shame" the other day and started sobbing uncontrollably as everything Michael Fassbender's character went through was instantly recognizable and relatable to me. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-anon--12

Weddings

What does it feel like to cancel your wedding? Anon I met Stephen when I was at University. A few years older than myself, he was a junior doctor at the local hospital 436

(friend of a friend type thing). I was bowled over by what I thought was his charm and sophistication; I later came to realize that he was manipulative and cold but more of that later. He had a relatively privileged upbringing as the only child of older parents who made sacrifices (enormous sacrifices, really), whilst I was the younger of two children in a family where my dad had made a reasonable amount of money from his own business. I was somewhat naive and thought he was 'so special' when I saw him in his open top sports car. He did all of the things that I thought of as 'exotic' (windsurfing, skiing, flying lessons) and he seemed to have an aura around him that attracted a circle of followers. For some unknown reason, he turned his attention to me. In hindsight, I wonder if it coincided with me arriving at a cricket match with my brother in a (borrowed) Porsche. I was wooed in classic fashion, flowers, poems, grand romantic gestures etc. You name it, he did it. I can't begin to explain how flattering it was. He asked me to marry him after three months; he telephoned my dad to ask for his permission. Some friends thought I was mad, but I told them that he was the love of my life. It was only later I learnt that he had asked my dad for money towards the engagement ring because I wanted an expensive one (this wasn't true and he certainly didn't spend the amount he had 'borrowed'). The wedding was booked for the following September, again hindsight would suggest an undue haste. Only the best was good enough for Stephen; my parents had suggested a local hotel, but he pushed for a five star hotel in a stately home. The guest list grew and grew, two hundred guests to a four course meal after the wedding, with another three hundred in the evening. A string quartet, a live band, a photographer from London because anybody local was too 'provincial' for him. I was complicit in all of this, swept along in the 'excitement.' Of course, my dad was picking up the bill for all of this. And 'all of this' was (grotesquely) expensive. The meal alone was just over £100 per head. The champagne had to be vin437

tage, the flowers needed to be 'better than anyone else's.' I started to feel uneasy about four months before the 'big day.' There was nothing specific, but I started to have doubts about him. We had been to collect his new car from the garage, and I saw the way he spoke to the salesman and I felt shame. This was particularly relevant to me because my dad was 'a used car salesman' as Stephen put it! The fact that my dad owned several garages that were successful and the fact that my dad was paying for everything didn't seem to occur to him. My uneasiness and unhappiness grew, I lost weight (a lot of it), I didn't sleep; I was drinking more than I should. I finally made my decision three days (yes, three days) before the wedding. I told my dad first. You need to know my dad was from working class stock, self-made man, down to earth etc he looked me up and down, touched my hair, hugged me, and said, "Better now than afterwards." If only my mum had been so understanding. She said I had 'brought shame on the family!' I told Stephen, he looked at me coldly and said I had 'humiliated' him. Which I had probably, but never once did he tell me he loved me, he didn't cry (like I was doing). The next couple of days ed in a blur, my dad's secretary (Janet — I'll love her forever) took over cancelling everything. My mum didn't speak to me. At all. My dad gave me some cash, and my brother drove me to a rented cottage in Devon, and I spent a week wandering along the coast, crying. My mum didn't speak to me for about three months; even now she wears a pinched expression when she looks at me sometimes. One of my friends told me that she had never liked him; she thought he was 'rude with a sense of entitlement.' You asked how it felt to cancel a wedding: it felt awful. It still feels awful. It isn't about the money, which my dad lost (although I feel tremendous guilt), it's about my feelings of letting people down. I've cried again writing this; I don't know why I got swept away by the event . . . the romance of it perhaps. I do know that not marrying him was the right decision. 438

I just did it too late. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-anon--13

Heroism

What is the most heroic thing you have ever done? Drew Young Shin, Cardiology for kids I ate a cockroach. This requires an explanation. While a trainee as a pediatric cardiologist during my rotation in the cardiac ICU, I met a stoic twelve-year-old girl (her fictitious name will be Tammy) diagnosed with heart condition called dilated cardiomyopathy. The heart muscle was weakened to the point where it no longer could sustain the needs of the body without the of continuous infusions of powerful medications. There was no other option: she needed a heart transplant. She was stuck in the ICU, mostly bed-bound, waiting for a new heart. Depending on where you are in the United States, the average wait period for a matched kid-sized heart to become available for donation is five to six months. For many patients, it's simply too long, and some die waiting. When I met Tammy, she was emaciated, weakened, depressed, and well into her third month of hospitalization with no word of an available heart. She struggled as an adolescent would — frustrated with life, isolated from her friends, literally plugged into pumps and IV bags, and surrounded by rotating physicians and probing medical students. I couldn't help but to notice that her room was her metaphorical aquarium, cage, even prison cell. erby ICU staff would constantly walk by, some would take the time to peer in, a minority would walk in, but mostly to examine her or drop off her meals. I overheard a cardiology fellow joke to another, referring to Tammy as the "mascot" of the cardiac ICU given her extensive length of hospitalization. I'm not entirely sure she didn't overhear it 439

as well. Her view from inside to outside must have solidified the feeling: healthy people laughing, interacting, going home to family and friends. Tammy's response was to be severely withdrawn. Emotionally shutdown. When I was assigned to her, I tried to connect with her, but could not get any traction. I was nervous as a new trainee, and my goal really was not to screw up her medical treatment plan. But recognizing her depression, I did consult child psychiatry to help her during this time. I stopped by her bedside multiple times throughout the day to chat, specifically avoiding medical jargon. During the first few weeks, I ended up mostly speaking to her mother, as she stayed withdrawn. After some time, through subtle probing, I discovered one of her favorite TV shows was "Fear Factor" — a reality based TV show that puts contestants through extreme challenges. I started watching the show so that we had something in common to talk about. I had the idea to bring "Fear Factor" to the Cardiac ICU. After convincing several of my colleagues, nurses and even the ICU attending to participate, we set up daily challenges for the medical staff to go through, very much in a Fear Factor manner. Wheelchair races, who-would-toleratethe-biggest-IV-needle, etc. I could tell Tammy was instantly interested. She looked forward to the next challenges. My challenges for her were mostly physical (as a secret agenda to get her rehabilitated: transplant recipients do far better when they are better conditioned). Her interest grew, and she started coming up with challenges of her own. "Put an NG tube in your nose!" (she had one), "Drink the nasty Colace!" (she had to, too). Her mother commented to me that for the first time in a long time, she's smiling. It was a fateful Saturday morning, when I came in for my call, I found both Tammy and her mother sporting an evil grin. They had procured a cockroach to ingest as the next challenge. Everyone instantly refused to partake in this one. So did I. Towards the afternoon, it looked like this challenge was going to be a bust. Tammy was by nature a stoic girl, but I could tell she was more than disappointed. Fearing we would lose the momentum of her new found spirit for life, I 440

mustered up the stomach to entertain the notion. I looked at the dead ghastly thing with as much of a poker face as I could gather. When I said I would try, Tammy giggled with so much delight that I knew there was no turning back. I could not break her already broken heart. I'll spare you the details of the act itself, but I could see a look of gleeful horror yet immense satisfaction on her face while I was holding my nose and chewing. She clapped with vigor after the unimaginable deed was done. The nurses looked at me with disgust. My colleagues avoided me. But I had the joy of that girl for a few minutes, and it was worth it. That evening, when I was rounding, she was getting ready for bed. I checked in on her vitals and all was stable. I said goodnight, to which she replied, "Thank you for today." For some reason, the way she said it completely warmed my heart. Early next morning, our team received a call that a heart was available. She received a heart transplant that very day. She sailed through her operation and was discharged to the ward then home shortly thereafter. A few weeks later, I received a photo from her in her Tae Kwon Do uniform — noticeably fuller than her previous emaciated self and . . . healthy. In her note, she said "Thanks for being my hero." Her clinical course was marred with complications and near death experiences. At one point, I was performing R on her. A second time, I electrically shocked her for a malignant arrhythmia — both times averting certain death. But I am confident that her hero reference had nothing to do with that. It was all simply because I ate a goddamn cockroach. But it changed my perspective on what it means to "care" for a patient and how to have a meaningful impact as a physician. http://www.quora.com/l/boq-drew-young-shin

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