Work hard for 45 minutes, then take a break

By John Brown | February 12, 2012 - 1:33 am |February 12, 2012 On Writing

My first semester in college I earned a GPA of, ta dum, 0.68. How do you earn such amazing grades? Well, I’ll tell you: the super secret strategy is to get an F in everything except ballroom dance. In that you get an A.

I couldn’t squeeze any juice out of my textbooks, but I sure could fox trot.

And I wasn’t partying. Dope and beer bongs were never for me. I wasn’t skipping class. I was lugging this huge valise around with every textbook I had. I think it weighed something like forty pounds. I was stitting in classes looking studious and taking notes. Well, except for physics which started early. 7:30 a.m. if I recall. What kind of a nut job takes a class at 7:30 a.m.? I did. I tried really hard to stay awake. I know I saw the professor shoot a gorilla with a tennis ball once. But the rest of the time I was in la la land catching z’s.

A 0.68, and I was in the honors program.

Obviously, I didn’t know how to go about learning. I’m glad the university didn’t give up on me. They put me on probation and told me I had to take a class on studying. A class on how to take the reponsibility for learning into my own tentacles. A class that shared techniques that actually helped.

One of the techniques was taking breaks. You were to work hard for 30 or 45 or 50 minutes and then take a break. Why? Well, because studies had shown that someone who, for example, was going to study for two hours could learn more by taking a ten or fifteen minute break in the middle than someone who worked the whole two hours. Spending more time on studying actually meant you learned less.

I’ve found this method applies to more than just reading textbooks. It also applies to writing. My practice is to set a time for 45-50 minutes. My goal is to write as hard and fast during that period as I can. To be totally focused on the task at hand. And then, when the timer dings, to literally get up out of my chair, walk about, and take a break. Then come back at the top of the next hour and start another 45 minute session.

But I’m not the only one doing this. A lot of folks use this method. Author Annie Bellet writes about her use of it in The Quest for Productivity and shares some of the reasons why it helps her. Read what she says there. If you haven’t done a 45/15 or 48/12 session, give it a go. See if you don’t actually get more done in less time.

Oh, btw, as for my grades, not only did I NOT drop out (or get kicked out) and become a hobo living in a trailer by the river, I ended up getting a 3.8 in my masters of accounting program. I think it’s safe to say I figured that school thing out. 🙂

Brown’s Breakfast Burrito, The Way Back

By John Brown | February 7, 2012 - 12:53 pm |February 8, 2012 John's Reviews - books, movies, whatever

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The Way Back

GULag is the acronym for the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems in the early 1900’s. In Romanized Russian that’s “Glavnoye upravlyeniye ispravityel’no-trudovih lagyeryey i koloniy” which means “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies.” The term “Gulag” quickly morphed to represent the camps themselves, which housed a wide range of convicts and many political prisoners. It’s also come to stand for the repressive Soviet system with its arrests, interrogations, transport in unheated cattle cars, forced labor, destruction of families, years spent in exile, and early and unnecessary deaths.

The Gulag was a meat grinder. An estimated 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953.

Some of those camps were in Siberia, one of the most remote and harsh places on earth. Sawomir Rawicz was one of those who claimed to have escaped such a camp in Siberia. He wrote about it and his subsequent 4,000-mile walk to freedom in India in The Long Walk. That story inspired Peter Weir to write and direct The Way Back, which tells the story of a group of men who attempt to escape out of Siberia, across the Mongolian wastes, and into India.

The film stars Ed Harris (who is interesting in anything he does), Colin Farrel (also starred in Ondine), Mark Strong (the villain in Sherlock Holmes), Saoirse Ronan (the fabulous lead in Hanna), and Jim Sturgess (the boyfriend in One Day). One of the group is an outright murderer. The others are all political dissidents—a teacher, priest, businessman, artist, etc. I found the performances honest and believable. But it wasn’t just the characters–the screenwriters subtly used syntax and word choice to transport the viewer.

But more important than the believability were the various tensions and stories contained within the escape plot. Each of the men, and the lone girl, has a story, and the film gives space for the stories to be told. As for the lone girl: Ronan was amazing in Hannah. She’s amazing here. Furthermore, the role she played here leavened the whole film with something it wouldn’t have had otherwise.

The story will surprise you, make you shed a tear, think, and laugh. When you’re finished, you’ll talk about it. It’s that kind of a film. If you like dramas with action and suspense, I think you’ll like this film.

As always, use KidsInMind.com to see if it contains things you might find objectionable.

Brown’s Breakfast Burrito

How about a meal that’s so good you’ll want to slow way down to savor each bite? A breakfast that will keep you full until lunch? A tasty repast that isn’t loaded with mind-numbing calories? Let me suggest the John Brown breakfast burrito. It’s full of succulent umami, bursts of piquant pepper, healthy mushrooms, and lots of filling protein. And it only takes about 10 minutes to prepare. The recipe below makes one burrito. Scale it up to feed more.

VEGGIES

1/4^th red bell pepper, chopped into small pieces
½ to 1 cup of mushrooms, sliced
Dash of thyme

EGGS

2 eggs (120 calories)
1 T milk or half-and-half
Salt
Pepper
Dash paprika
Dash garlic powder
Dash onion powder

THE REST

Pam cooking spray
1 tortilla (150 calories)
1 ounce of Jimmy Dean Premium Pork sausage (90 calories)

If you don’t have one of the spices, don’t freak out. It will still taste great. But the spices really take it to the next level. Here are the instructions.

Start with your veggies. Spray pan with Pam and sauté peppers for two minutes on medium high heat. Add mushrooms. Give them a spray of Pam and dash with salt. Cover until the mushrooms sweat (release their water).
Next is the sausage. While mushrooms are cooking, start your sausage frying.
Finish veggies. Uncover mushrooms. Just before you finish them, sprinkle with a dash of thyme. When the spice becomes fragrant (its smell rises up in delicious glory from the pan), remove the veggies from the pan and cover to keep them warm.
Cook eggs. Turn heat down to medium low. Beat eggs, milk, salt, pepper, paprika, garlic powder, and onion powder. Spray pan you used for veggies with Pam, then cook your scrambled eggs on medium low heat, stirring and scraping the whole time. And keep it on medium low—no browning or burning of eggs allowed! Cook until the eggs glisten with the last bits of moisture. Remember: you don’t want dry desert eggs. You want soft succulent ones.
Assemble the glorious concoction. Put the veggies, scrambled eggs, and sausage in your tortilla and wrap it up smartly. (What does “smartly” mean? I don’t know, but it sounded good, didn’t it?)
Go to heaven and return singing. This means you eat your breakfast burrito, but you do it savoring each bite. This is food meant to be enjoyed, not gobbled.

As for calories, I estimate about 360 for the main ingredients. Veggies really don’t count in my book. Come on! Nobody gained weight eating turnips. But I’ll round it up to 400 just to be safe. Add in a glass of water and a piece of fruit and you’ve got a 450 calorie breakfast that starts your day off with delight, gratitude, and the joy of redemption. It could also make those you cook for kneel down upon the floor in well-deserved homage. And that’s always a nice thing for the cook.

Believe In Me, Cyber War

By John Brown | January 24, 2012 - 8:55 am |January 24, 2012 News - updates on books, events, appearances, etc.

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A Man and a Team of Girls

Back in 1964, Jim Keith took a job at an Oklahoma high school to coach boy’s basketball. But when he arrived, the administrators changed their minds and gave his job to someone else. Keith’s contract didn’t specify which gender he’d coach, just that he’d coach. So they switched him to the girls. Keith was extremely disappointed. Who wanted to coach girls when it was the boys who played real ball? Especially when Keith was supposed to be head coach. Keith tried to get the promised position back, except the girls he coached had other things in store for him. Harold Keith, Jim’s brother, wrote a novel based on what happened. That novel was made into a movie in 2006 called Believe In Me.

Now, we all know the plot line of sports movies: a losing underdog of a team rises up to win. It’s predictable, right? But we could say that of all crime shows as well—in this episode investigators discover a crime and figure out who did it! Wow, what a shocker. We could say it of all romantic comedies as well—in this movie a couple at odds gets together. No way! We could say it of lots of stories. And yet we love these stories anyway. Why?

Because the characters suck us in. Because the story tellers do such a good job with the particular details we forget we’re watching a movie or reading a book. We forget to think about the ending. Furthermore, the stories are often about more than just winning games. And so we worry about these people who have become real to us and focus on their immediate situation. At least, that’s what happens when the story tellers do a good job.

And Robert Collector, who both wrote and directed the film, did a great job with Believe In Me. Now, I don’t know how accurate the film’s depiction of five-on-five play is; I believe the girl basketball teams of that era played six-on-six. But that’s a niggling technical detail. Besides, the movie isn’t about technique anyway. It’s about a man and a group of country girls who have to face difficult obstacles, not so much on the court, but off it. If you have girls or like sports at all, I think you’ll love this movie.

Cyber War

I recently reviewed America The Vulnerable which explained how exposed we are as individuals, corporations, and a country to cyber crime, cyber espionage (both state and corporate), and cyber attacks. Of all the cyber threats we face as individuals and a nation, the least likely is an all out cyber war. But just because it’s less likely that doesn’t mean the threat isn’t real. Especially since cyber warfare has been in use since the 1990’s. We used cyber weapons openly in the gulf war in 2003, knocking out Iraqi air defenses. Israel used them to own Syria’s air defenses when bombing their clandestine nuclear site in 2007. Russia used them against Estonia in 2008 and Georgia in 2009 on a variety of targets, bringing many critical systems to a halt. In 2010, somebody, most likely the US or Israel, developed the Stuxnet worm to sabotage the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz in Iran. China has already conducted trial runs of cyber attacks on the US and has planted logic bombs and trap doors to activate in the future.

In Cyber War, Richard Clarke shares his insights into what cyber war is, how cyber weapons work, and how vulnerable we are as a nation. He discusses the cyber warriors (hackers) we now employ in the US military, and how a cyber war is like and unlike other wars. In the second half of the book, he discusses the factors that have created our current vulnerability, how to set up a defense, and what we need to think about when conducting a cyber war.

And Clarke knows his stuff. He worked for the State Department during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush appointed him to chair the Counter-terrorism Security Group and to a seat on the United States National Security Council. President Bill Clinton retained Clarke and in 1998 promoted him to be the national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection, and counterterrorism, the chief counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council. President George W. Bush kept him in the same position and later made him special adviser to the president on cyber security.

The thing I liked most about the book is that in addition to describing cool cyber war weapons, threats, and incidents, Clarke examines answers to many critical questions. For example, how can we set up a defense without the government becoming a 1984 nightmare? Would arms agreements work in cyber space? (No.) How do you prevent a cyber war from turning into a kinetic (guns and troops) war? How do you attack your enemy when it’s sometimes hard to know who launched the attack in the first place? He discusses these and many more questions.

The book does have one fault. Clarke has an obvious axe to grind with the Bush administration, and can’t help but make snide and irritating comments whenever he brings them up. The good news is that those spots are few and far between. If you want an excellent introduction into how cyber weapons are used and will likely be used in the future, you’ll want to read this book.