To me, this disparity of evident motives is the most parsimonious way of evaluating the respective merits of opposing sides in any debate. If one side has no evident self-interested agenda beyond truth or fairness or the public good, that’s the side you should probably be listening to. Climate-change alarmists seem motivated either by evidence (in the case of the few people who actually know what they’re talking about—climatologists and geologists) or by faith in scientific consensus; climate change deniers seem motivated either by naked, mercenary self-interest (in the case of the oil industry and its flacks) or by a more general hostility toward inconvenient data (in the case of the Fox watchership). Gun advocates’ fervid idealism in defense of the Second Amendment reminds me of the uncharacteristically teary-eyed patriotic sentiment with which pornographers cite the First. Yeah clearly firearms are protected, in some sense, under the Constitution, as is freedom of expression. As a cartoonist and a writer, I’m kind of a First Amendment hard-liner. But in all honesty I have to wonder whether, if Alexander Hamilton or James Madison were to hear about the mass execution of schoolchildren in Massachusetts or happened to catch Busty Backdoor Nurses on hotel-room cable, they’d agree that this is just what they were envisioning.

— Tim Kreider

I try not to talk politics on this site, mostly because I’m convinced that writing about politics on the Internet is a waste of your time and mine. This is exactly, however, why I want to link to Tim Kreider, who is not only a far, far better writer than I, but also writes about these topics in a fair-handed way that few ever do, while leaving ample room for debate and counterargument. Tim’s cartoons are often not as fair-handed, but that’s the nature of cartooning as a medium. See, for example, the artwork that opens up his piece.

All politics is a give-and-take discussion, and the entire thing falls apart when nobody, but nobody, is willing to step out of the ideological pit they’ve dug themselves into. This is no more apparent than in debates such as gun control, abortion, and any other argument where rights are to be given and or taken away. So much of this is viewed as a zero-sum game, and so precious little of it is. This is yet another reason why I don’t post political stuff on Sanspoint—I don’t want to get dragged into the debate, launching volleys from my ideological foxhole, and causing collateral damage to my readers who don’t want to get involved either.

No matter where you stand on guns, and I’m not telling you my stance, read Tim’s essay. It’s not just good political writing, it’s good writing. I feel the need to link to it from that alone. Its subject matter is almost secondary.

Have you heard about the Quantified Self movement? Basically, it’s a subculture of people who use gizmos and gadgets to keep track of what they do every day: what they eat, how they feel, how much they sleep, and how much they move around. The motivation for such obsessive data collection about yourself is a little nebulous to me, but I see the benefits when this tracking is done with a personal goal in mind. Tracking your food and your exercise is great if you’re trying to get fit and lose weight, which is something geeks like me tend to struggle with.

There’s a number of gizmos and gadgets that attempt to cash in on this trend. They come in all shapes and sizes… well, they come in little things you wear around your wrist, or little things you clip onto your belt. They’re also not cheap. A Fitbit, which is the most well known of these devices, will set you back $100 for baseline model. [1] That’s a little pricey, but for a densely packed bit of sensors and gyros, it doesn’t seem grossly out of line.

However, we already carry a device with all the gyroscopes, accelerometers, GPS receivers and other sensors needed to track our every movement: our smartphone. [2] Moves is a free app for the iPhone that promises to tell you exactly how much moving you’ve done each day. It’s capable of tracking how much you walk, run, and bike, as well as knowing when you’re traveling by car or train. It knows where you stop off, how long you’re there, and how much you’ve moved around while there. And it shows it all in a nice, attractive “Storyline” interface. [You can see mine here.](http://www.flickr.com/photos/sanspoint/8451508673/)

Moves is not the first application I’ve used to track my movements. For a while, I used MotionX Sleep, which also, yes, tracks your sleep. I ditched MotionX’s app because it crammed way too many features into an app. Navigating it was an absolute pain, and its sleep tracking paled in comparison to Sleep Cycle. Moves is a much simpler application, and therefore much easier to use. (Also, it’s icon is a lot nicer.)

It’s absolutely dead simple to use. Install the app, launch it, and go about your day. It runs in the background through some magical API that I presume to be undocumented, and uses the iPhone’s array of sensors to determine, roughly, where you are, how fast you’re traveling, and when you stop. If you’re anal about this sort of thing, and I am, you can even identify the places you’ve stopped off at. It comes with “Home,” “Work,” and “School” as basic, pre-populated options, and can pull a list of nearby places from Foursquare as well. You can view where you were during the day on a map, with green lines for walking, purple lines for running, blue for biking, gray for transit, and little bubbles for your various stops along the way.

Naturally, all this tracking means that your iPhone will be using sensors typically left off, and that means it’ll be using more battery. Moves promises that you’ll be able to get a whole day’s use out of your phone if you charge it fully at night. This seems to hold out, though the battery on my 4S dropped precipitously on a recent bus ride down to Philadelphia—so much so, that I turned the tracking off. However, I typically keep my phone plugged in at my desk, so I don’t have to worry about battery drainage anyway.

Moves does exactly what it advertises,[3] and it does so at a price point that makes no sense to me whatsoever. It’s not perfect. When it loses the GPS signal as I go into the subway each morning, it suddenly tracks me a good mile and a half northeast of my subway station before realizing I’m on the train. You can attempt to reclassify the paths on the map, but do so at your own peril. Trying it with my walk to the station today ended up with Moves thinking I either walked the whole subway trip, or rode the subway from my building door straight to the office door and now I can’t change it back.

Still, for the price, especially compared to a Fitbit or a Jawbone Up, Nike FuelBand, or all the other tracking gizmos out on the market, Moves is a perfectly valid alternative and an absolute steal. It could be even better if they added a little alert to say “Hey, you’ve been sitting at your desk for an hour. Go take a walk,” which is a feature I miss from MotionX Sleep. Integration with RunKeeper, Fitocracy, MyFitnessPal, or any of the other iPhone fitness tracking apps would be a nice bonus, too, but that’s not so much gilding the lily as it is dipping the lily in solid gold, and covering it with diamonds. If you want or need a way to track your own movements, own an iPhone, and don’t feel like buying another piece of hardware, Moves is exactly what you should get.

Deciding to blog daily comes with a cost. It’s another thing on top of a job, a personal life, a social life and a podcast. I knew I had to quit something to make it all work. So, I quit my novel. Maybe I’ll take it up again, in time, but quitting the damn thing was the best choice I could make. Without the huge, unfinished, nebulous project of a long-form piece of fiction hanging over my head, I freed up a great deal of mental energy better spent on projects with a more concrete deadline and payoff. Like this one.

Sometimes, you have to quit. In my own experience, knowing when it’s time to quit comes well after the actual time to quit. I started work on my novel in December of 2008. At last check, it clocked in at about 40,000 words of incomplete first draft. It’s been a sporadic process of inspiration, manic typing, burnout, recovery, inspiration, manic typing, burnout… and diminishing returns. If its not going to get done any time soon, and I don’t want to do it any more, why even think about it? Dump it.

Quitting things is far too often seen as a failure, unless you’re talking about quitting something that is obviously bad for you like binge drinking, or heroin. Even then, the folks who still do those bad things will likely look at you with scorn. Writing a novel isn’t like doing heroin, but it’s damaging in its own way. As Dorothy Parker said, “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” She should know.

The reason we associate quitters with failure is that quitting is often seen as, like failure, a permanent state. We tend to associate quitting as a concept with things like walking off the job or dropping out of school. Rare is the company that’ll rehire you after quitting, even on the best of terms, and we know what happens to kids who drop out of school. Even though the culture is filled with stories of quitters who go back and pick up where they left off, we view them as outliers, and question their plausibly. How many times has Homer Simpson quit the power plant, anyway?

If you’re looking to quit a project, know that it doesn’t have to be permanent. You can start it again when you’re ready—if you’re ready. There’s a lot to be said for commitment, but as much as that’s valued, quitting should be valued as well. It’s another form of commitment, re-evaluating your life and focusing on a new priority. For me, it’s daily writing for an audience. For you, maybe you should quit your blog and write a novel. Maybe quit designing websites and learn iOS programming. Quit basketball, and take up baseball—or not. If the returns of what you’re doing are diminishing, dropping it for another thing may be the ticket. If it doesn’t work, you can try your old thing again with renewed vigor. What do you have to lose?

For four years, I lived across the street from a bar that specialized in craft beers and in whiskies. [1] During their first Whiskey Week, and the assistance of Kevin and Brian, the regular bartenders, I developed an appreciation for Bourbon and Scotch that has only continued to develop. After all, whiskey is an intimidating thing to appreciate. Cheap whiskies can be harsh, good whiskies can be expensive. There’s many styles, many price levels, many whiskey cocktails, and a lot to learn. I don’t claim to be an expert on the stuff, but I know what I like, and am eager to try new whiskies.

So, when I was invited to take part on a scotch tasting sponsored by The Glenlivet, I jumped at the chance. Scotch whisky is a complicated drink, and the few I’ve had I’ve enjoyed—preferring the peaty Islay single-malts [2] to blended, or less peaty single malts, but free whiskey is free whisky. The event began with a bar pouring glasses of the 12-Year, which I drank neat. It was great to have after walking in from a cold, winter evening in Manhattan. After three glasses, we were taken in for a proper seated tasting. We were kept in suspense by a twenty or so minute presentation on the history of The Glenlivet, and an overview of Scotch whisky and how to drink it, including stuff about tasting and top notes.

Honestly, I don’t need to be told how to drink whiskey. Or whisky. I’d argue that most of the people in the room knew about the fruity, floral, spicy, and smokey notes common to Scotches, and since Glenlivet’s barley is unsmoked, it was almost a waste of time to discuss it. Besides which, describing the taste of a spirit is an exercise in subjectivity. If you’ve ever read a spirit review where someone talks about “notes of prunes, tannin, and burning rubber in the finish,” and another of the same one mentions a completely different set of flavors, you’d understand. Everyone tastes different things when they drink a whiskey.

In either case, after the talk ended, I got a chance to taste a dram each of the 12-Year, 15-Year, and 18-Year Whiskys, both with, and without water. [3] They were all good whiskys for Speyside whisky. Sadly, I added a little too much water when tasting the 15-Year, and it fell apart—exactly what the guy overseeing the tasting warned us about. Having had three glasses of the 12-Year already, I didn’t get any surprises from that. The 18-Year, however, brought a tear to my eye. Spicy on the front, smooth in the finish, and absolutely incredible. I didn’t get much of a difference when tasting the 18-Year with water, but I was suitably impressed.

With some of my favorite writers and podcasters waxing rhapsodic about Old-Fashioneds, I think it’s important to step back and enjoy the base spirit. Whiskey, in almost all its forms, is a wonderful substance to be savored and enjoyed. If you’re whiskey-curious, The Kitchn has a great, simple guide that’ll help you develop your palate for the stuff. Try as many styles as you can find and afford. There’s bound to be something up your alley.

According to the Center for College Affordability (PDF), “The number of college graduates is expected to grow by 19 million, while the number of jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree is expected to grow by fewer than 7 million.” This means that “We are expected to create nearly three new college graduates for every new job requiring such an education.” This leads to massive amounts of underemployment, outstanding student loans, and a waste of a generation.

Typically, when articles like these get thrown around, there’s wags who pop up and say “Well, what did you expect if you went to school for Underwater Basketweaving, with a minor in Gender Studies! If you wanted a job after college, you should have majored in STEM.” Never mind that a STEM degree is no guarantee of success either. As someone who studied Computer Science, yet has a degree in English, lines like that make my eye twitch. Not all of us are cut out to be programmers, mathematicians, engineers, or the like. Higher mathematics makes my brain shit itself, as I learned the hard way. I found the study of literature and writing to be a much more rewarding experience, and I studied it knowing full well the difficulties that would come with having a BA instead of a BS.

Still, the implicit question in these reports and the retorts, is if college is valuable at all. The STEM-types think that college is valuable for learning hard skills, and that’s true to a point. When you’re learning electrical engineering or studying the hard sciences, college has distinct advantages over learning by yourself including access to equipment. Outside of those fields, the value of college becomes more abstract.

Plenty has been written about the death of Liberal Arts, and I’m not going to repeat it. However, I will point out that the practical benefit of any good Liberal Arts program is teaching a student how to communicate—especially in writing. A good Liberal Arts program also teaches a student how to think critically, to formulate an argument and defend that argument with facts—or at least with citations. I’ve joked to friends that getting a degree in English is learning to write papers about books you never finished reading. This is an exaggeration, but the point of literature classes is typically more than appreciating the book—it’s using the book as a tool to teach writing and argumentative skills.

Of course, writing and argumentative skills are not going to get you a job. My advice for anyone who wants to consider studying anything in Liberal Arts is to also learn some hard skills, preferably technology skills, as well. I taught myself how to build websites, how to make WordPress themes, and how to do some basic audio editing. More importantly, I used these skills as part of my hobbies, building a small portfolio of things I could point to and say “Although my work experience and education don’t reflect this, I know how to do these things, and here’s proof.” Even in the world of technology and programming Github is becoming the new résumé. A stamped piece of paper doesn’t say you know how to do x, a body of work says it.

Here’s the thing: college was never a guarantee to begin with. The idea that college is simply getting your ticket punch is no longer true, and I doubt it ever was. Putting in four years (or more) only shows two things to a prospective employer: that you can apply yourself to something, and that you can finish something. Having that to your name is a benefit, but it’s not—and never has been—enough. College can punch your ticket, but increasingly, you’ll still have to pay your dues working something unrelated to your major, or even area of interest, while you build up experience, skills, and maturity.

Yes, it’s hard to even get a job these days, I admit it. I’ve lived it. But, they do exist, even if it means taking something below your level. After college, I worked a full-time telemarketing job, and later a clerical job with the local government. Neither used the skills I learned in college, and the latter only required a high school education. I’m not saying to flip burgers, unless that’s all you can find, but something is better than nothing while you teach yourself something practical.

There’s still a value to college, but that value has changed. College is either the place you go to learn hard, practical skills, or the place you go to get soft skills while teaching yourself another skill. It is not for everyone. A college education is not a requirement if you want to become an iron worker, an artist, or a programmer. You can go to school, you can apprentice, or you can teach yourself. If you feel like college is the best option, however, do yourself a favor, and do it on the cheap. Get scholarships, go to a state school or a community college, stay local, and live at home. Student loan debt will cripple your aspirations far more effectively than a terrible job market.