The Incidental Economist

Good morning, Aaron!!

Love your blog, have been receiving a daily feed for a couple of years (and have written to you previously), I frequently forward the feed to the Medical Director in our department and sometimes other docs in our hospital.

I have a couple of ideas, hobbies I enjoy, one I have shared with my family!

The easy to share one is making mosaics it can be simple: buy a small table at a yard sale or craft store, buy some ceramic tiles, take out your frustration with a hammer on the tiles, glue them to the table, apply grout. Bingo, a place to put plants in front of the window. Easy one for kids to share with you!

Or you can buy bags of beautiful colored glass squares and a nipper tool ($20), transfer an image onto the table top or a custom cut piece of plywood, nip the glass tiles as needed, glue, grout. My family makes large animal or object shapes (in the 1.5 – 2 ft range): an elephant, parrot, sun, cat, etc., their Dad made a Last Supper including 24kt gold glass tiles for parts. Beautiful wall art! There are some simply gorgeous books of mosaics for inspiration and, as you know, mosaics last nearly forever! Here’s a site to show you glass tile options: https://mosaicartsupply.com/

The other that is fun is metal work. Your local art/community college probably offers basic metalworking classes to get you started. You can’t mess up metal: cut, fold, hammer, bend, etch, paint, solder, melt, form, rivet, layer, pierce (that is making designs by cutting out bits), mount things on it, use it as frame for jewels or objects (photos, dominoes, whatever). If you like tools, metalwork is the ultimate, you can buy zillions of specialty tools. Yes, much more expensive and intense, more difficult to share with kids, but totally absorbing.

I look forward to reading about your 2017 skills, whatever you choose!!

Thank you and have a Happy New Year!

Kim

On electronics, get your HAM radio license and build a radio

Dear Aaron,

You have left out a skill that seems to me particularly relevant and that is an athletic one that supports healthy aging. I think that averaging 8 hours a week in exercise is a good goal but that a sport which can be done for the rest of your life is also a worthwhile goal. Two sports that require skill and meet that requirement are indoor rock climbing and the martial art, Wing Chun. I am sure that there are others but many of the common one are ruled out as being too repetitive, subject to certain injuries, inconsistent with certain weaknesses (bad knees, etc.) or too strenuous for a lifelong activity. Some others such as walking do not have a skill component so they don’t meet your criteria.

Jack

For a kick starter for meditation, you could try ugc.futurelearn.com. Their course, Mindfulness for Wellbeing and Peak Performance, could easily be completed in two months. It’s taught by two professors and includes both discussion and practice. I completed it and have continued daily meditation for more than six months. It’s a regular offering at their site and is free.

Dancing, but only if your wife will join you. Ballroom, country or Latin depending on your musical taste and availability of dance venues.

Helps with the physical fitness stuff and also helps keep the mental strong.

Where to start? Your school’s phys ed department might have classes or know reasonably priced studios. I don’t think you’re ready for senior citizen center, but they might be open to young fellows like you.

Then again, this would probably be better as a side goal while working on a more bookish goal or two.

What about a physical activity? For example skiing/snowboarding/stand up paddleboard/indoor rock climbing? It might be a good way to balance the two months of baking experimentation!

You should learn to meditate, use taped guidance for visualization at first, it makes it easier. I have meditated all my life (40+ years). It will do much more than relax you, it will change your perspective on life if you stick with it.

Since I have been reading daily for years but have never written, let me say since I am now writing thank you for all the great information over the years.

Fascinating ideas-some things to consider. The recorder is a great instrument, relatively easy to learn and very easy to put ensembles together to play with other people which is the point of music anyway.

Book worth considering for your cooking is “The food lab- better home cooking through science” by J. Kanji Lopez-Alt. Once you know the science you can figure the rest out…

Resource regarding meditation is “Parami-ways to cross life’s floods” by Ajahn Suitto, free downloadable PDF.

Looking forward to hearing how your year plays out.

Leslie

Learning a new skill often requires regular practice over a prolonged period of time. In particular, learning to knit, draw, speak a new language, and play an instrument will all be very time consuming; likely more than 2 months. And I’m not talking about mastery, but just having enough basic skills down to decide if you like the activity or not. I would include cooking as that’s something you’re probably doing regularly anyway so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to practice. You could make learning a language easier if you chose a constructed language that’s intended to be easy to learn such as Esperanto or Toki Pona, but otherwise plan on needing several hundred hours to know enough to be able to use the language. I think you should pick one between an instrument, knitting, and drawing. With respect to drawing, I would recommend that you consider using charcoal, paint, or a graphics tablet rather than just pencil and paper. Drawing textures with a pencil is very time consuming, but can often be done very quickly with any of the other options. Pencils are mainly useful for learning to quickly outline a person, animal, or object.

“Based on my experience I would put the total hours necessary to reach a B2 level in most languages is around 400 to 600 hours.”
http://www.fluentin3months.com/hours-to-learn-a-language/

If you decide to pick meditation and learning an instrument, then I would recommend studying meditation first as meditation will help you with independent motor control which will make it easier for you to avoid excess strain while playing which is a key skill in playing music.

Cooking is fairly easy once you know how long it takes to cook any given thing and what spices to use. I personally don’t like using just salt and pepper, and I enjoy different flavors so I just open the spice closet and pick out whatever at any given time.

Some spices have very strong, particular flavors (like Dill, or Rosemary) and so you need to know what does what. Soy sauce is great for color and salt, so no need to add any seasoned salt or all-spice combinations with salt. Watch out on how much salt you use.

Watching Food Network will give you some ideas, and it’s a great alternative to cable news which is really depressing. Sometimes I just search for recipes via ingredient and get some ideas. It’s no foul to follow a recipe, because you have to start somewhere! But learn from it and find inspiration to make other tasty things.

If it’s been a while since you studied it, how about refreshing your knowledge of mathematics? It’s been 40 years since I studied calculus (not much use of it in otolaryngology) and now that I’m retired I’m using Khan Academy to learn some of the basics again..

For cooking/baking I recommend Cook’s Illustrated “The Science of Good Cooking.”

Here’s a great series of YouTube videos to learn knitting: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCeNvY_XCBbswNkOwvuFYsQ

Something I’ve been doing in 2016 is learning how to repair rather than replace household appliances and electronics – there’s a YouTube video for (almost) anything you want to learn!

I highly recommend knitting as a great way to de-stress while also creating something useful. It’s a “slow” art however somone cant be in a hurry to complete something. The art itself ranges from simple stitches and patterns to infinitely complex stitching, colorwork and patterns. It uses the mind in creative, mathematical and Zen ways. So this isn’t a new suggestion but a confirmation of one of the posssibilites you mentioned.

I’ve really enjoyed your Learn Something New posts, so much so that my partner and I are going to try something similar this year! Thank you for coming up with the idea and sharing your learning process in these posts.

I’m a lifelong knitter and am really happy to hear you’ll be diving in! I’d recommend Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, alias The Yarn Harlot, who does a superb job both of explaining technical first principles for making hats, socks, scarves, etc. and communicating something bigger about the knitting community.
-> For the technical first principles, I’d recommend chapters 3-8 of her book, Knitting Rules– probably something to go to later in the month, after you’ve learned the basic stitches.
-> For insights on the knitting community/lifestyle (and a lot of laughter), her collection of essays, Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter, is wonderful.

Best of luck in your writing, teaching, treating, and knitting!

If you are going to do a language via Rosetta Stone, you probably want one with relatively simple grammar. I tried Russian and the version my library offered (no book) offered no explanation for the grammar. Given that, in Russian, there are 3 genders, 6 cases, as well as singular and plural, there are lots of forms of nouns to use correctly — very hard to master without a book. The verbs are funky, too.

for drawing – go with ZENTANGLE… a method where you learn how to draw little patterns step-by-step and then you can take off from there. It’s really fun and simple and addicting