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Showing posts from October, 2018

The Fourteen-Hour Thing

I was in a piano lesson lately, and at one point my teacher launched into a story about her college days. There are individual practice rooms on the second floor of Smith Memorial Hall, and she told me that when she was practicing for her major recitals, she would go up to one of those rooms in the morning, practice for fourteen hours, then go home and take a nap before coming back. And here I thought one hour counted as a long practice time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Anyways, I got to thinking. Fourteen hours? I mean, I knew my piano teacher was intense, but that comment raised her intensity to a whole new level. My immediate thought was ok, a fourteen hour work day is illegal. That should apply to playing your instrument. What beasts are we fighting with?  My second thought was, dang. I guess that’s what passion is. I mean, isn’t that what we are all searching for? Something that we are willing to spend fourteen hours a day pursuing, something that makes us willing to go without sleep and ph

Surgeons and Dead Guys and Gender Biases (except maybe not)

Have you ever heard this riddle? “A father and son are in a car crash. The father dies. The son is rushed to the hospital, but right before he receives an operation, the surgeon exclaims, ‘I can’t operate on that boy, he’s my son!’ How is this possible?” The answer to this riddle is that the surgeon is the boy’s mother . (Highlight that when you’re ready). I was maybe seven when I first heard this riddle. Nine years have passed since then, in which I have developed ideas of gender norms that I did not have at seven. Unfortunately, this means I did not have a chance to ponder the answer to this riddle at a more mature point in my life, so I have no idea whether I would have guessed that the surgeon is the mom. Up until recently, I actually assumed that most people had heard this riddle as well. I was wrong. I came across an article that sparked my interest. In the article, it mentions the results of an experiment done pertaining to this riddle. Several groups of around 100-2