You're Not A Machine

Philippians 4:13: "I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me." Amen. But doing all things doesn't necessarily mean doing them all at once.

I CAN DO IT ALL! (NOW WHAT WAS I DOING?) Computers multitask well. People, not so much, according to Walter Kirn in The Atlantic, who cites research showing people who do multiple things at once accomplish their goals at the cost of focus and sanity -- something us TV news producers already know from years of control room experience.

Writes Kirn:

This is the great irony of multitasking—that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. (Fact, and one more reason the bubble will pop: A brain attempting to perform two tasks simultaneously will, because of all the back-and-forth stress, exhibit a substantial lag in information processing.)

I'm hearing you there, Mr. Kirn. Your Lightning Round editor recalls several incidents of toiling over a script on the newsroom computer when somebody walking out for the day bid me farewell and I responded "Bye" with a lag of at least five seconds. My mind was preoccupied with a word or a phrase on an LCD screen. Shame on me. On the other hand, my focus might not be as bad as I thought.

This leads us to multitasking's damage to etiquette, something we also knew already:

I've been fired, I’ve been insulted in front of co-workers, but the time I flew thousands of miles to meet a boss who spent our first and only hour together politely nodding at my proposals while thumbing out messages on a new device, whose existence neither of us acknowledged and whose screen he kept tilted so I couldn’t see it, still feels, five years later, like the low point of my career.

Many of us would burn to say something akin to Dustin Hoffman's line in Tootsie: "Hey, is my acting interfering with your talking?"

People can also put a dollar value on our attention division disorder:

Six hundred and fifty billion dollars. That’s what we might call our National Attention Deficit, according to Jonathan B. Spira, who’s the chief analyst at a business- research firm called Basex and has estimated the per annum cost to the economy of multitasking-induced disruptions. (He obtained the figure by surveying office workers across the country, who reported that some 28 percent of their time was wasted dealing with multitasking- related transitions and interruptions.)

That's about 2.5 hours in an average workday, meaning we only really work 5.5 hours a day instead of 8, and 27.5 hours a week instead of 40. It's enough to make you want to turn in the blackberry and laptop in exchange for a shirt saying "Leave me alone! I need to get something done!"

STICKIN' IT TO THE CAPITALIST MAN. Sink a bank, be a hero. Jérôme Kerviel, the French rogue trader who plunged Societe Generale into a $7 billion loss is now an Internet sensation, according to Charles Bremmer in TimesOnline:

After half a million Google searches yesterday, JK's admirers are singing his praises as "The Che Guevara of Finance", the "James Bond of the Soc Gen". The real JK may have lost his Facebook friends on the day of his arrest, but 11 new Jérôme Kerviels are on Facebook at the moment, with 30 groups in French and English. On one he has over 900 fans, many of whom proclaim their love for the clean-cut Breton whose pals called him Tom Cruise.

We suspect this has more about getting a few licks in on the French than it does actual fandom. Our bigger question remains why nobody seemed to learn anything from the exploits of Nick Leeson, who cratered Barings Bank in the 1990's with risky bets on derivatives. He later went on to write a book and see his story made into a movie. Where's his fan club?

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE. In another one of those tell-us-the-obvious studies, British and American researchers found middle-age really is depressing, regardless of nationality.

Reuters reports:

For men and women the probability of depression slowly builds and then peaks when people are in their forties -- a similar pattern found in 72 countries ranging from Albania to Zimbabwe, the researchers said.

They suggest we get depressed as we find out we're not going to reach many of our goals in life. Ron Paul's supporters ought to be going through that phase right about now.

LEND ME YOUR EAR. A pastor in Carlisle, PA is putting chaplains in local bars, hoping to minister to those who try to drown their troubles in drink.

From the AP:

The chaplains won’t preach against drinking or evangelize when the program starts at Market Cross Pub, organizer Chuck Kish said.

“We’re simply going to be there to help anybody who wants it. Sometimes people really just want somebody they can talk to who is not going to be judgmental, but be sympathetic,” he said.

And if they drive these barflies home, that's a miracle in itself.

PROUD TO SERVE, AND BE SERVED. A South Carolina Representative says if you're old enough to die for your country, you should be old enough to buy a drink in it.

From WYFF-TV:

Rep. Fletcher Smith has sponsored legislation that would allow service members younger than 21 to purchase alcohol if they show a military identification card to a bartender or store clerk.

You will recall the voting age was lowered to 18 using the same justification. We doubt this will boost recruiting numbers, but it could create a new market for fake service ID's, leading to the inevitable question from a skeptical bartender: "Is somebody else flying your F-18 home for you?"

CHEERS! A traffic officer in Manchester, England wrote a parking ticket -- and got applause from the crowd. The act wasn't as impressive as the car that was cited, as Autoblog reports:

In some countries, folks cheer at the sight of an exotic supercar, while in others they assume the driver is a (expletive deleted). In which camp would you think England falls? We'd have hoped the former, but the crowd has spoken, and they're saying otherwise. When an evidently obscenely wealthy driver parked his Bugatti Veyron in a loading bay in downtown Manchester, a traffic warden wrote him a ticket while a gathering crowd stood by and cheered her on.

And for an encore, your Lightning Round suggests the officer aim a radar gun down the Autobahn.