Apparently so.

Some people with too much time on their hands set up microwaves to play a holiday tune.

Christmas reading from the blogosphere (or my blogroll, in any case):

• The Guardian has a Christmas travel quiz (via Liberty and Power).
• Edward Feser recommends some light reading in theology.

I’ll post more as it comes up, I suppose.

In much the same way as his other books, Outliers uses the latest psychological research, blended with extensive interviews, anecdotes and historical examples, to make a counterintuitive or interesting statement about how we think and act. In this case, Gladwell’s thesis is that when we look at successful people, we overstate the role their individual effort and ability played in their success and understate the cultural, demographic and other advantages that worked in their favor. As Crispin Sartwell pointed out, though, Gladwell never does a good job of defining “success”; and he exaggerates the individualism of the conventional wisdom in order to draw a contrast to his own ideas.

Nonetheless, in his unfailingly readable and enjoyable style, Gladwell goes through myriad examples to show what makes outliers outliers. Parading a series of phenomena from the psychological literature and substantiating each with lots of anecdotes, he highlights relative age (the slightly older and bigger kids on the junior teams become better by orders of magnitude due to selection, and skew the birthdates of all professional teams), the rule that 10,000 hours of practice are required to be really good at something, the limits of predicting success by IQ and the effects of lower-class and middle-class parenting styles. After this parade of opportunity advantages, we see a few examples of successful lawyers and businessmen and the demographic coincidences and lucky breaks they benefited from.

The second part of Outliers is focused on cultural legacies, another Powerpoint-friendly term that comes close to straddling the line between legitimate generalizations and outright stereotypes. Here he essentially says that the primary reason for the 1990 Avianca crash was that the pilots were Colombian; this at first takes the reader aback a little, but as he explains it it makes more sense. Colombians are generally more deferential to authority, for cultural reasons, and thus the pilots were not assertive or clear enough in dealing with air-traffic control.

Likewise, Gladwell uses culture and history to attempt to explain why, on international math tests, East Asia beats the West handily. The Easterners are from a culture accustomed to growing rice, he points out, which requires a great deal more hard work than wheat growing does; since, as Gladwell shows, math skills require persistence and work more than they do innate ability, those raised in a culture of year-round labor-intensive work would be expected to outperform those raised in a culture of seasonal less-labor-intensive work. Linguistic factors are also relevant: the Chinese rendering of numbers (with monosyllabic digits and place value) is simpler than that of most European languages, making basic mental arithmetic much easier.

Yet at the end of it, the reader is left a bit puzzled. Sure, Outliers has explained the smaller ideas it said it would explain: what the Beatles and Bill Gates have in common, why Asians are good at math, and so on. Sure, it has shown that it is hard to untangle anyone from his origins, his advantages and his luck; but we already knew that. The purpose—showing the context of success and applying it—is only partially fulfilled. Outliers lacks the real comprehensive and thought-provoking theories of Blink and The Tipping Point.

That said, however, there is a lot of merit to Outliers outside of the trivia and interesting stories. The next time you see a story about someone’s rapid rise from nowhere to great power, great riches, great life or excellence in any form, look for small advantages and opportunities; for it is never talent alone that makes outliers what they are.

[While it is a bit late now, both in terms of the extreme proximity to Christmas and the lack of proximity to the book's release, I recommend Outliers as a gift for someone who is interested in reading these sort of things.]

The shoe hurled at President George W. Bush has sent sales soaring at the Turkish maker as orders pour in from Iraq, the U.S. and Iran.

The brown, thick-soled “Model 271” may soon be renamed “The Bush Shoe” or “Bye-Bye Bush,” Ramazan Baydan, who owns the Istanbul-based producer Baydan Ayakkabicilik San. & Tic., said in a telephone interview today.

“We’ve been selling these shoes for years but, thanks to Bush, orders are flying in like crazy,” he said. “We’ve even hired an agency to look at television advertising.”

Apparently everyone wants the shoe; perhaps it is in case Bush visits their town.

Baydan has received orders for 300,000 pairs of the shoes since the attack, more than four times the number his company sold each year since the model was introduced in 1999. The company plans to employ 100 more staff to meet demand, he said.

Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok.

According to Detective Randy Stevens, the child unlocked at door in his nearby home, escaped and managed to cross a multi-lane street to reach the store.

Child Protective Services claimed thet oversight of the child during a review of the incident. The boy will be allowed to stay with relatives, but not his parents during the CPS review period.

At a press conference in Baghdad, President Bush demonstrated his ability to duck two shoes thrown at close range. (via AntiWar.com)