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Why We Need to Change the Concept of Time — Immediately.

Today is my birthday, and my annual reminder of how much I dislike the concept of time.

Truth is, time is unfair. When I see someone wearing a watch, I don’t see someone with punctuality in mind. I see someone slowly counting down the seconds until the grave.

What is a day, after all? It’s a very strange segment [1. Do we divide anything else by 365?] of a larger year, which we define as the time it takes for the Earth to circle the sun. And if you’re like me, you can’t get enough reminders that the Earth is spinning blindly at 67,000 miles per hour through a vast and unknowable universe.

Point is, I’m just not a fan of time, especially on birthdays, when it serves to remind me that I’m getting both older and no closer to figuring anything out. Human years are so scarce; if we’re lucky, we get 70 or 80 years to live, and that just doesn’t seem like enough.

What I wish was that there was a way to make time seem less scarce [2. This, in itself, is a pretty strange thought, because time is infinite. What I really mean to say is that I mean to make my available time less scarce, though I’m not sure when I became so possessive about it.]. So I’m proposing here, on May 16, 2010, that we adjust our notions of time.

The human attention span is, depending on which Google source you trust, somewhere between five seconds and 20 minutes. 150 years ago, the Lincoln-Douglas debates lasted anywhere from five to seven hours at a time. Today, those debates would be reduced to mere soundbites, because our attention spans are shrinking. Who has time for five hours of political discourse? Hell, who has time for any political debate involving more than a few bullet points?

In the 2010, we have more distractions than ever, and we’re as easily distracted as ever.

But if that’s the case, then why are our standard units of time not adjusting to our shorter attention spans?

Let me put this another way: when Andrew Carnegie died, he was worth $475 million. But $475 million in 1919 isn’t worth what it is today. Luckily, we’ve got tools to compare the dollar from 1919 to today’s dollar. [3. In today’s money, Carnegie’s fortune would be in the billions.]

We adjust to each age. When humans got taller, we raised the height of our doors. When people got fatter, we widened the space in the supermarket aisles. A news cycle used to last months. Now it lasts hours. We constantly recalibrate to what’s happening now.

But we still allow time to remain constant. I don’t think that’s fair.

If a piece of paper can become more or less valuable over the course of time, then, well, why can’t time, too?

The best part is, there’s some precedent for this.

Abraham lived to be 175. His wife, Sarah, continued to have kids well into her hundreds. Biblical time clearly didn’t use our rigid time structure.

So what’s stopping us [4. Besides common sense] from altering our concept of time? I’m okay with seconds and minutes and hours — anything that can measure the length of a YouTube video seems like it should stay — and I’ve got no problem with sun-up-to-sun-down days. But why shouldn’t we alter our concept of years? Does any modern human have the capacity to actually pay attention to something for an entire year?

How’s this sound: let’s decree that each season is considered a year. The modern calendar year gets split into fours, so today, I’d have just turned 92 — and I’d still be entering my prime.

What happens to everyone else?

Dick Clark becomes four times as valuable. Gyms get four times the number of resolution-related membership drives. Champagne companies see four times the rate of sales.

And best yet: wasting a year doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, because there are so many more of them to waste. Sure, it’s just a way to trick the brain into believing that we’re not screwing around as much as we really are.

But it’s working.

Our concept of time is changing. It’s time to make it official, I think.

When I die, I want my rabbi to be able to say, “Here lies Dan Oshinsky, who died at the age of 375.” The crowd will nod appreciatively. Honestly, who’d believe that a man so old could have accomplished so little?

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When Suggesting That a French Man Needs to Move Lands You on New York Sports Talk Radio.

Posterized.

The first thought was that I was being pranked. Sure, I’d just written a fairly controversial column about why the Spurs should trade Tony Parker for Kens5.com. It had generated quite a few hits on our website, and I’d gotten plenty of e-mail feedback from readers about it.

But a radio station in New York City calling to ask if they could chat about the column? That’s a first.

And yet, I made my Big Apple debut on ESPN 1050 Wednesday night, talking with Bill Daughtry about, of all things, San Antonio Spurs basketball. And for a full 10 minutes. For loyal danoshinsky.com readers who missed it live, I’ve recaptured it below. Next week, I hope to land 20 minutes talking all things Matt Bonner on a morning show in Milwaukee.

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You Are Not a Supernetworker. (Sorry.)


About a month ago, I started writing a blog post that I never finished. It was about Dunbar’s Number, which explains a simple human limitation: we can only really care about so many people. Dunbar puts a limit on it: 150.

But thanks to Facebook and Twitter, we’re more easily connected to others than ever before. You don’t need a giant Rolodex anymore, just an active news feed and the latest version of TweetDeck. So I started wondering: I’ve got a few hundred Facebook fans and a few hundred Twitter followers. And that’s on top of my normal, Dunbar-defined circle.

I may not be a Supertasker, but could I be some sort of Supernetworker?

The résumé-deflating answer I came up with was, No, I’m not a Supernetworker, and neither are you. See, Dunbar’s theory creates circles, starting with your innermost circle of friends and expanding until you reach that outer circle of passive acquaintances.

Think of it this way: the inner circles will end up at your wedding. The outer circles might get a Christmas card (or maybe a Facebook birthday wall post). Social networking might bring you a few hundred or a few thousand additional connections, but the majority will remain in that outer circle — or beyond.

The irony is, you might engage them regularly — but you can’t really care about them on the level that Dunbar’s describing. [1. The closest thing I’ve heard of to a Supernetworker is Politico’s Mike Allen — who the New York Times describes as a one-man networking machine. He engages a huge network of contacts on a regular basis. But his closest friends also apparently don’t even know where Allen lives. So I’m not sure he’s the healthiest example of a normal human.]

But I was hugely impressed to see a media outlet finally discuss the ramifications of social networking on Dunbar’s Number. It came in a Guardian piece that actually asked Robin Dunbar what he thought of his number’s role in the world of social networks.

I asked Dunbar if he saw anything in the evolution of online networks to suggest that the next stage might extend our social horizons in any meaningful way.

“The question really is,” he said, “does the technology open up the quality of your social interaction to any great extent, and the answer to that question is, so far: not really.”

Exactly. But that doesn’t mean these connections are worthless. As Clay Shirky points out in the same piece:

“What these games and applications do,” he says, “is extend and churn the edges of our network, which is often how new ideas are brought into it.”

So add those friends on Facebook. Connect with others on Twitter. They probably won’t be coming to your wedding, and they might not even end up on your Christmas card list.

But if you’re smart, those fringe circles might just help you create something that your circle of 150 never would have thought of.

You don’t have to be a Supernetworker. You just have to be a good listener.

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Why I Have Clearly Not Asked for God’s Help While Blogging.

What follows is a brief thought about the nature of God. It is not a serious thought. I hope you do not find it blasphemous. — Dan

I have recently begun to consider the idea that if there a God, he is probably not very good at multitasking.

I’ll direct you to this recent study, which suggested the existence of a rare group of humans known as “supertaskers.” They’re not just capable of multitasking; they actually perform better when doing so.

About 1 in 40 — or 2.5 percent of humans — have such skills, the study found.

But these guys are the outliers. Which brought me to an unusual thought: man was created in God’s image, or so certain books suggest. But if 97.5 percent of mankind is incapable of properly multitasking, then by the transitive property, can’t we assume that God probably isn’t a very good multitasker either?

Which brings me to another thought: if God is present in every aspect of our lives — and certainly, there seem to be more than a handful of athletes who believe in God’s willingness to take part in a post pattern — how does he juggle it all if he’s so average at multitasking?

¶¶¶

I put the question to a friend of mine today. We were on the front nine of some hacker course in Austin, Texas, and my friend was working on a precision slice that usually isn’t found outside a 10-piece knife set infomercial.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said after knocking consecutive shots into the pond.

“You sure you want him here for this?” I asked.

I gave my friend the rundown. Look: God’s a busy guy. He’s trying to balance the cosmos. His divinity might not even be able to solve the matter of Inbox Zero. He doesn’t care about your short game, and he probably shouldn’t.

“So?” my friend said.

Well, let’s suppose that God spent most of his time just watching over humanity, I said. But in a very limited way, he’d take an interest in you. You’d get to choose one aspect of your life, one thing that you do regularly, and God would play a role in it. You wouldn’t be superhuman in that one thing. But you’d know that when you took on that task, you’d have a bit of divine protection.

“So God could be present on the golf course?”

Yes.

“Or when I play Facebook Scrabble?”

You’d be wasting it, but yeah, sure.

“Or in the bedroom?”

You got a girl you’re trying to impress?

And that’s when it really began.

¶¶¶

The immediate instinct, under this God-as-a-Genie-with-one-wish-to-grant concept, is to go for something big. Ask God to keep watch when you’re playing poker. Or when you’re shooting those championship-winning free throws. Or when you’re looking for luck with the ladies. Ask for one of these, and you’re asking for God to give you house money to play with in Vegas.

But then there’s a secondary thought: What if you could better use your divine intervention? I’m talking about the kind of intervention that gets tossed around at Sunday School: Dear God, help me find courage. Dear God, help me comfort the sick. Dear God, please make me sick so I can leave this sermon early.

And then there’s the last thought: What if you could take it just a little bit further? If God can’t be present in every little thing you do, why not just choose one little thing that you do every day?

What if God could be present during your rush hour commute? (Finally, a practical reason to have a “God is my co-pilot” bumper sticker.) What if God could keep you engaged during those dull moments in your day? (When waiting in a dentist’s office, God could deliver the manna that is Men’s Health magazine.) What if God could help you be on time for meetings? (He might be a watchmaker anyway.) Why not ask God to be present in the kitchen? (Just smile and nod when someone tells you, “These fudge brownies are just heavenly.”)

¶¶¶

I’m not saying this theory of divine assistance is for everyone. What I am saying is this:

The next time you’re 130 yards out and deciding between a 9-iron and pitching wedge, ask yourself whether or not you really want the Almighty as your caddy. Besides, he might be able to spot a triple-word score in Facebook Scrabble that you’d never be able to see.

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@danoshinsky, Revised.

Maybe this shouldn’t come as a surprise, as I have sent out upwards of 3,000 tweets, but I actually like Twitter. It’s one of the first things I check in the morning. It’s one of my best sources of political and sports news. It’s where I go to find time-wasters and, occasionally, good news stories to report on.

But I’ve been thinking for a few months about how I use Twitter, and it’s a bit selfish. I use it for a lot of things — it’s my RSS reader, my scanner for breaking news and my serendipity-generator — but I don’t think I’m putting enough back into Twitter.

A few months ago, I blogged about the idea of using specific days of the week to tweet about various things, but that idea quickly passed. I wasn’t ready to commit to a Twitter schedule.

I came back to the idea this week, though, about being a bit more targeted in my tweets. What’s the purpose of @danoshinsky? What am I delivering?

Here’s what I’ve come up with:

My Twitter day should be like any good story: it needs a definite beginning and a definite end. So I’ll experiment with this:

-My first tweet of the day will be a bit of morning inspiration. It might be a quote or a YouTube video or a link to an article. But it’ll be a thought for the day.

-My last tweet of the day will be a closing thought. It’ll be an observation, maybe something wise that I’ve learned or heard that day.

The stuff in the middle — interesting links and retweets — will stay pretty much the same. I’ll try to send out 3-6 of those a day. They’ll be interesting things that I’ve read or seen.

As usual: I’ll try to keep the personal stuff to an absolute minimum. I don’t have a smartphone, so you won’t be seeing too many Twitpics out of me. And only a handful of people really want to read my live play-by-play of sporting events. I’ll avoid it, if at all possible.

Your thoughts would be appreciated, either below in the comments or with an @ reply to @danoshinsky.

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What Journalists Can Learn From Greg Gumbel.

At some point today, you will probably be watching college basketball. Your favorite team will be playing, and it’ll be a good game — maybe even a great game.

And then, for reasons unexplainable, this man will appear on your screen.

You will go nuts at the sight of this man’s face. He’s interrupted your game for no good reason, you’ll say, and there’s no amount of TiVo-ing that can make him go away.

Meanwhile, I, too, will go nuts, because I love Greg Gumbel.

Actually, it’s not that I love Greg Gumbel. It’s that I love what he represents: the Live Look-In.

You can argue for the ESPN Bottomline or the First-and-10 line. I think the Live Look-In [1. And its NFL cousin, the Red Zone Channel] is the greatest sports invention of all time.

That’s why it’s the focus of the latest installment of “What Can Journalists Learn From….”

Be User-Friendly: I am a college basketball nut. I love college basketball. But more than anything, I love a great finish to a college basketball game.

CBS knows that their target audience is, essentially, me, the college basketball crazy who’d give up a month of Sundays to get the first day of the NCAA Tournament off work. So instead of making me work to find the best games, they just do it for me. Back at mission control, they’re monitoring all the action, and when something great happens in a game, they have Greg Gumbel deliver it to me. It’s college basketball nirvana — on demand. Except that I don’t even have to ask for it; I just know that if there’s a great finish going on, CBS will bring it to me. It’s the most user-friendly experience on TV.

Even better: I have placed my full faith in CBS to do exactly this. I trust them completely. My brand loyalty towards CBS college basketball is basically unbreakable, and I think most college basketball fans feel the same way. The experience of March Madness on CBS is that good.

Deliver the Best Content Available: There’s nothing in sports quite like the adrenaline rush of three or four NCAA Tournament games all coming down to the wire at once. Thanks to the Live Look-Ins, you’ll get to watch all of them. Better yet: if you’re watching a blowout, CBS will automatically switch you over to the best game available. You’ll never watch the tournament and worry that someone else is watching a better game than you. If it’s good, it’ll be on your TV. CBS filters out all the bad content and just gives me what I’m interested in: great basketball.

Don’t Make It Hard For Your Audience to Share: Here’s a bit of a twist on Clay Shirky’s sharing lecture from South by Southwest Interactive.

We love to share information and ideas. But nothing compares to the experience of shared emotion.

Which brings me to Drew Nicholas, and this shot from the 2003 NCAA Tournament.

I remember where I was (my living room) when he made that shot. I remember who I was with (my dad and my buddy, Shoe) and what I spent the next 20 minutes doing (jumping up and down uncontrollably). Across my block, I remember hearing what sounded like the entire neighborhood explode in cheers. There’s shared emotion, and then there’s ‘HOLY CRAP DID HE JUST MAKE THAT!!!’ kind of shared emotion.

As a Maryland fan, that shot’s one of my favorite NCAA Tournament moments, so you can imagine how I felt when I found out that AT&T had produced a 30-second ad featuring that shot for this year’s tournament. The ad shows a half-dozen fans, watching the game at home, online and on their cell phones, and they’re all going completely nuts. [3. There’s also the flip side: fans of the losing team, UNC-Wilmington, are still mildly traumatized by the incident.]

What’s incredible about that moment, looking back, is that it wasn’t just the entire state of Maryland watching. At that moment, every CBS station in the country had cut to the Maryland game. It wasn’t quite the audience of the moon landing, but when Nicholas hit that shot, America was watching.

Without the Live Look-In — if, like most sporting events, the highlight had been seen only regionally, and only the highlight played nationally — would anyone outside of D.C. even remember Drew Nicholas’ shot?

But the power of that memory isn’t in the shot. It’s in the knowledge that millions shared that buzzer beater with me. Great moments deserve to be shared — and good journalists will find ways to share them as widely and simply as possible.

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My Scoreboard.

Soon, I found myself keeping score. About to graduate, aimless, preparing for joblessness and possessing a degree worth about as much as the paper it was printed on, I realized — belatedly — that I wasn’t exactly a modern guarantee of potential.

I started searching for something tangible, something worthwhile to get me through my remaining months at school. As a college basketball obsessant, it’s no surprise that the end of the NCAA Tournament had something to do with it. With the games over, I felt a sense of emptiness. During the Tournament, a one-too-many-beers promise to follow a favorite team had suddenly turned into a road trip. (Dude, we’re going to Phoenix!) I had goals and aspirations and dreams. Most importantly, I had more games to watch.

But the Tournament ended, my team lost, Phoenix turned out to be a hell of a drive — who knew? — and I was facing the unthinkable: graduation. So it came to be that out of a month of non-stop basketball watching, I started keeping score.

It was innocent enough at first. I decided that I’d make up goals to distract me from my life as a writer of failed cover letters. These daily goals were my way of staying sane, of finding blips of success hidden amongst routine.

I started with a small one: every day, make someone laugh really hard. I wasn’t going to make milk come out anyone’s nose — you’d be surprised how rarely one sees college students consuming milk in public — but I could try. Do it once a day, and I could enjoy the scoreboard at the end of the night: Dan 1, Failure 0.

I liked coming out on the winning end so much that I added more categories to my day. The points started trending upwards, the scoreboard spinning like an odometer on a cross-country trip (to, please God, anywhere other than Phoenix). Being thankful for little things wasn’t hard; I could rack up a dozen points a day doing that. Being punctual was even easier. Soon, I was running up the score. 5-0, 10-0, 20-0.

It only got worse from there. I had started out seeking moral victories and joy in day-to-day moments, but the high from those little wins faded faster with each day. I craved even bigger wins.

In one day, I decided to start being more spontaneous and to start speaking Spanish more often. But I abused the system. Getting a haircut at a barbershop run by Spanish-speakers and discussing mullets fit both requirements. Or: Look! I’m ordering a chalupa without sour cream!

I decided to stop skipping breakfast, and I was earning easy points there, until I decided that I wanted to start sleeping later, which meant that I wasn’t waking up early to eat breakfast anymore. But the scoreboard took no notice. I’d only ever created one rule: complete the category and earn the point. There was no penalty for breaking the rules, because there really weren’t any rules.

The points piled on. I had created my own metrics for success, and by my own best standards, I’d become wildly successful.

With so many paths to success, I’d guaranteed myself blowout victories with each new day. I’d been giving myself points for reading books, for creating esoteric theories, for watching new movies, for blogging, for napping — all at odds! — but the scores kept going up, and it didn’t matter how hollow my victories had become. I found myself saying odd things in the morning, like, “Right here, in this moment, this is where the day will be won.” When had I started talking like a member of the Roundtable? When had I become obsessed with winning?

Then graduation came closer — first weeks away, then days, then looking back as I crossed the dais — and I wasn’t any closer to getting a job. But I’d still been finishing my day completely convinced that I’d spent it well. I was a success, but only in a world in which I controlled the definition of success.

A few weeks after graduation, I was lucky enough to take a job that I actually wanted. Everyone wanted to know: how much money would I be making? In a world where success can’t be easily measured, salary seems like the simplest way to understand value. But I’m not sure that’s what really constitutes success.

I’d like to think my daily scorekeeping — at least my initial efforts — came close to defining two key measures of success: chasing ambition and building a better community (one in which, I’d hope, success can be further nurtured). But I’ve started to realize that we can’t attach a number to success, and we probably shouldn’t try to.

So I’ve stopped keeping score. When I make a friend laugh, I’m not declaring it a personal victory. Happiness isn’t tied to some internalized competition. I’m not winning, but I feel sane.

Though part of me still thinks that I’d need a scoreboard to know for sure.

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A Eulogy for Dexter, the Boykin Spaniel.

Like many people who I refer to as aunts and uncles, my Aunt Lois and Uncle Bobby aren’t actually related to me. They did, however, have the unfortunate privilege of living across the street from my family when I was growing up, and they had the poor sense to engage my mother in regular conversation. At some point, they were granted familial status, though I’m not sure exactly when.

In the time that they lived on Pollard Road, they had two dogs — one of whom I was apparently quite fond of, though he died before I’d even learned to walk — and another, named Dexter. Unlike all the other dogs in the neighborhood, all pure-bred from well-known lineages, Dexter was a Boykin Spaniel. Before he came to live with Aunt Lois and Uncle Bobby, he’d come from a long line of South Carolinian hunting dogs. Judging by Dexter’s ability to chase but never capture neighborhood squirrels, we didn’t think much of South Carolinian hunters.

Sometime around middle school, Uncle Bobby and Aunt Lois started wintering in Arizona, and they asked us to take care of Dexter. My mother, naturally, was delighted. I’m not sure what it was about Dexter, but she loved him. I’d always guessed it was Dexter’s coat, long and brown and curly, with the kind of poof not seen outside of one of my dad’s high school photo albums.

Dexter would stay with us for a few weeks at a time in the winter. Aunt Lois would drop off Dexter and his doggy bed, and then he would immediately decide to instead take up residence on our couch. He’d arrive smelling like an Herbal Essences commercial — Aunt Lois liked to pamper Dexter at a place called Bone-jour, a salon for suburban yuppies and their puppies — and he’d leave smelling of mud and filth and the salt that they use to de-ice roads. Mom loved Dexter, even when he smelled, and even though she usually made my dad walk him on the coldest days in winter.

Dexter died when I was in high school, and afterward, my mother was as sad as I can ever remember her being. I guess I don’t really remember how Aunt Lois and Uncle Bobby felt about his death; we often joked that Dexter had been “bark mitzvahed,” but we didn’t sit shiva for him after he died [1. UPDATE: Aunt Lois and Uncle Bobby have written in to say that, yes, they did sit shiva, though there may not have been a full minion present.].

I haven’t thought too much about Dexter since, but today, my boss sent me down to take some photos at a local dog show. It’s about what you’d expect from a dog show in Texas: there was an American flag hanging over the premises, but it only had about 23 stars on it. The dogs at the show were enormous, which seemed to explain why I had one of the only non-RVs in the parking lot.

They had about eight large rings set up inside, with dogs parading around each. I stopped by a ring of small dogs, then taller ones that looked like miniature llamas. I rounded over to a ring in the back, where three brown dogs with floppy ears were being judged. I heard a voice.

“They’re Boykin Spaniels.”

I looked up from my behind my camera. A woman at a judging table was looking at me and pointing to an official dog show program.

“They’re Boykin Spaniels,” she said again, now pointing to the ring.

I looked back at the dogs. The middle of the three was being coddled by his owner. The dog had those floppy ears that hung like the flaps on a Russian man’s winter hat. He had that shaggy coat. And he had this brown ring around his pupils, just like Dexter.

I looked back at the woman. “I know,” I told her. “I used to have one just like them.”

She seemed surprised, and I asked her where the dogs were from. She placed her thumb over one of the dog’s names. I didn’t see the name, just his home state:

South Carolina.

I looked back at the middle dog, and I wondered whether or not he’d ever been quick enough to catch a squirrel.

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