Twitter showed its worth when @ryansholin announced (at least, it was news to me in landlocked Bath) that Maverick’s – the annual big wave surfing event in Santa Cruz, Northern California — was convening this past weekend. The organisers called it last minute on Friday. All the young dudes rushed in to catch the notoriously huge Pacific west-by-north-west swell on Saturday.

Ryan, who blogs on the changing face of journalism, works for used to work for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, but recently moved to GateHouse Media, a large publisher of highly local print and online publications. Maverick’s is in his back yard. He pointed us to the Maverick’s website, where I spent enough time looking at 2006 wipeouts (see below) to end up with a headache. It didn’t take long.

Just in case you think I’m suffering from apostrophe failure, “Maverick’s” is short for “Maverick’s Point” — Maverick being a white-haired German Shepherd dog whose human surfing companion was reputedly one of the first to try the giant waves near Half Moon Bay back in the ’60s. The dog tried to swim out to join his surfing buddy, but the conditions were too treacherous and he had to be tied to the car bumper instead for his own safety.

Surfing heaven, sailing hell

I could not have cared less about surfing a few months ago. I’d seen crazy folks surfing mid-winter in Cornwall, desperately seeking even the tiniest waves in full wet-suits, while I stood (marginally less frozen and windswept) safely on shore. British surfing culture, such as I imagined it, left me cold; old surf-bum cliché mashed up with the with teenage surf fashion — who needed it?

It wasn’t that I didn’t have an affinity for the sea. I spent my twenties sailing a yacht most weekends and studying navigation on Tuesday evenings at night school in very non-coastal Parliament Hill, North London. I’m qualified as a Royal Yachting Association coastal skipper, hold the obligatory VHF radio operator’s licence, and can confirm that yachting in the home waters of the UK is indeed like standing in a cold shower tearing up £20 notes. Who needs that either, frankly?

Crucially, though, for a yachtsman, the place where land and sea meet when the wind is blowing onshore is a no-go area. The lea shore that is surfing heaven is the sailor’s total nightmare.

But last summer in Devon, my aversion to surfing changed. It was so wet on land in August that, having been rained on solidly in our camp site for several days, we thought we might just as well embrace our dampness and at least add the wind-protective qualities of neoprene. Courtesy of Loose-fit in Braunton (the world’s first carbon-neutral surf shop, they assure me), we invested in some state-of the-art suits and plunged into the foam at Saunton Sands, encouraged by the Loose-fit slogan: “Hang Loose in the Juice.” We were only on trashy bodyboards, purchased at the beach-side store, but it was surprisingly exhilarating. It transformed a holiday that would have otherwise been a washout.

Flush-through

As a non-scientist, what intrigues me about surfing and sailing, particularly when it comes to understanding and managing risk, is that they embrace and expand your knowledge of the non-linear. For instance, the Beaufort Scale for wind strength (which yachtsmen must learn to determine how much sail to carry, and what course to chart, and whether to go out at all) goes from 1 through to hurricane 12. But clearly a hurricane is not just twice as strong as Force 6; in fact, it’s at least three times the wind strength, and produces more than 4.5 times the wave size.

When I did a search of Art De Vany’s blog, as I’m wont to do when I want to understand something complex, it immediately threw up the insight that surfing is what de Vany describes as a “power law” activity. And that was what struck me when a large wave unexpectedly up-ended me (not for the last time), and I experienced the sensation that surfers call “flush-through” or “wash-thru”: when the ocean breaches the sea-defence that is your wet-suit’s collar and your nether regions get flooded with icy cold water, rendering you a human washing machine on a particularly vigorous rinse cycle.

Now, Ryan, at Invisible Inkling, talks a lot about the wave of change that is causing journalists and publishers to experience some of that metaphorical cullion-tightening wash-thru too. He urges journalists to re-skill, get blogging, Twittering and exploring social networks. Because newspaper circulations are falling, and revenue models that can guarantee the future of serious news-gathering are so far proving highly elusive.

Riding the wave

Putting these two things together reminded me of my own youthful Jeremiah pronouncements and specifically a now somewhat banal — but nonetheless prescient — observation I’d made in a meeting in 75 Wall Street way back in 1996, when I was London bureau chief for Knight-Ridder, and the idea of monopolising the Internets was just a twinkle in the young eyes of two 23-year-olds called Page and Brin.

I’d been summoned for meetings there with my fellow news managers to strategise the recovery of the Knight-Ridder international newswire that had spent several months passing through the uncertainty of an auction before being acquired from the Miami-based newspaper company (then still a thriving independent entity as one of the two largest publishers in the US) by venture capitalists.

I forget how many staff we lost precisely, but we were at least fully decimated. Fearful of acquisition by a competitor and enforced redundancy, so many had left seeking greater security, often with said competitors.

Private equity firm Welsh Carsen Anderson & Stowe, the firm that had bought us, had a bold strategy to overturn Reuters, Dow Jones-Telerate, and the emergent Bloomberg, and capitalize on a wave of financial market disintermediation by being the first company in the financial information industry to apply internet protocol. They acquired a bunch of information companies, ripped out their proprietary networks and technologies, and introduced standards.

WCAS already owned what it claimed was the world’s largest private intranet, contested only at that time by Hewlett Packard. After buying us, WCAS tried to buy that doyenne of early internet adopters, Compuserve, too. They had the blessing of — and not a small amount of investment from — the world’s largest banks and pension funds. At one point Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong was our official spokesman. Continue reading ‘the maverick’s story’

Rather guiltily I was nursing a sense of schadenfreude when England were 2-0 behind against Croatia on Wednesday. And I was not at all anxious ahead of the earlier Israel v Russia match, which Russia had to lose (apparently unlikely, but it did happen) for England to stand a chance of qualifying for the 2008 European Championships (ie by beating Croatia). So England are out, and the manager Steve McClaren has been kicked into touch.

I don’t follow football so closely to judge whether this a fair comment on McClaren, and wish him no ill. In any event, as the Croatia game wore on, my nationalism was asserting itself, hoping for a reversal of the reversal. It came and went, England clawed back two goals and all too inevitably, it seemed, conceded a third.

But the reason for my mixed emotions was that I was secretly hoping that if McClaren went, the job would go to Aston Villa manager Martin O’Neill, even though he’s ruled himself out today, it appears. The reason for my enthusiasm was simple. He once quoted William Goldman’s famous line: Continue reading ‘nobody knows anything (football version)’

Blogging orthodoxy seems to dictate that short posts of regular frequency represent the best strategy for maintaining a loyal readership. But here at the Knackered Hack we just keep “doing the opposite,” to quote Scott Page and Seinfeld’s George Costanza. It has indeed been a long time since the last (very short) post about memory. Sorry about that. It was not that I forgot — I’m not that dogmatic.

In a nutshell, I’ve been away. And a little busy. And also thinking hard. Now I’m back, both literally and metaphysically. So, “normal” service can now resume. But please be prepared for wide variations in post length, frequency and variety, and possibly more inclusions of pictures and other things to delight your limbic, as I get more of a handle on this Web 2.0 malarkey. Rather than a woeful lack of structure and organisation, I would frame this as a necessary preservation of playfulness and spontaneity in what might otherwise become a predictable yet likely unreadable blog.

Even less frequent a blogger is Nassim Taleb, the Knackered Hack’s favourite interviewee. He does not really have a blog in the terms understood above, but you can go here to see what he had to say about the current credit crunch. He is more regular with his home page notes, where he has an interesting item about fruits and their sweetness. (Hat tip to Paul Wilmott, whose company hosts the Taleb “blog”, while it is Art de Vany who highlights the discussion on the history of sweetness in fruits.)

In a future post I’m going to write about figs, which is connected with what Taleb is talking about. Here is a picture that includes figs, just to be going along with. Underneath all the basil is some parma ham – a delightful partner to fig.

Meanwhile, de Vany says this in response to Taleb:-

The process for producing sweetness and tenderness is selective breeding, as you [Taleb] note, and selection for neotony, the retention of juvenile traits in the adult. Ah, it seems that is true of people these days as well. Many fail to achieve adulthood. On the other hand, humans evolved a form of neotony and retain their juvenile traits of playfulness and pleasure longer than chimps and other animals. It was an advantage for our large-brained, highly social species to retain aspects of youthfulness.”

Prior to this comment, de Vany’s emphasis on play has been having a quite profound effect on Knackered Hack thinking, and much of the Knackered Family’s time away from blogging has been spent head-scratching on that particular issue. Lots more on that in future posts. And, of course, de Vany is echoed in a slightly different context by today’s news, reported in a letter to the Daily Telegraph by a group of scientists, educationists, authors, and other advocates about toxic childhood and the declining quality of children’s play in the UK.

Compelling examples [of research supporting this view] have included Unicef’s alarming finding that Britain’s children are amongst the unhappiest in the developed world, and the children’s charity NCH’s report of an explosion in children’s clinically diagnosable mental health problems.

We believe that a key factor in this disturbing trend is the marked decline over the last 15 years in children’s play. Play – particularly outdoor, unstructured, loosely supervised play – appears to be vital to children’s all-round health and well-being.”

Behavioural economists have shown that we overestimate how much gym time we will use when signing up for monthly or annual health club membership; we’d be better off paying for individual sessions.

That’s certainly my experience. I was a member of a gym behind Fleet Street for a number of years, and never lifted a single weight. Membership was subsidised (modestly), but this was not complete profligacy, or an egregious triumph of hope over experience; the purpose of my membership was really to use the showers. My exercise regime involved riding a bike to work 130 miles a week in all weathers, so access to a shower was mandatory. I rode flat out, had no concept of rest and recovery, and would end up knackered, or — more scientifically — suffering from overtraining syndrome.

The idea of modulating effort and choosing to have rest days never crossed my mind — the mutant puritan gene at work. Progressively, after riding home from 12-hour days late in the evening following frequently pointless conference calls with New York head office, all the benefits of this excercise started to go into reverse. Continue reading ‘gym fees require heavy lifting’