You need, for God’s sake, a decent chef’s knife. No con foisted on the general public is so atrocious, so wrongheaded, or so widely believed as the one that tells you you need a full set of specialized cutlery in various sizes. I wish sometimes I could go through the kitchens of amateur cooks everywhere just throwing knives out from their drawers – all those medium-size ‘utility’ knives, those useless serrated things you see advertised on TV, all that hard-to-sharpen stainless-steel garbage, those ineptly designed slicers – not one of the damn things could cut a tomato. Please believe me, here’s all you will ever need in the knife department: ONE good chef’s knife, as large as is comfortable for your hand.

Brand name? Okay, most talented amateurs get a boner buying one of the old-school professional high-carbon stainless knives from Germany or Austria, like a Henkel or Wusthof, and those are fine knives, if heavy. High carbon makes them slightly easier to sharpen, and stainless keeps them from getting stained and corroded. They look awfully good in the knife case at the store, too, and you send the message to your guests when flashing a hundred-dollar hunk of Solingen steel that you take your cooking seriously.

But do you really need something so heavy? So expensive? So difficult to maintain (which you probably won’t)? Unless you are really and truly going to spend fifteen minutes every couple of days working that blade on an oiled carborundum stone, followed by careful honing on a diamond steel, I’d forgo the Germans.

Most of the professionals I know have for years been retiring their Wusthofs and replacing them with the lightweight, easy-to-sharpen and relatively inexpensive vanadium steel Global knives, a very good Japanese product which has – in addition to its many other fine qualities – the added attraction of looking really cool.

Global makes a lot of knives in different sizes, so what do you need? One chef’s knife. This should cut just about anything you might work with, from a shallot to a watermelon, an onion to a sirloin strip.

Don’t Sit Up Straight

Sitting with your torso flexed 135 degrees from your legs — halfway between bolt upright and flat on your back — is best for your spine, even though you’ll have a tendency to slide off your chair, say a team led by Waseem Bashir of the University of Alberta Hospital in Canada.

On the basis of MRIs, the researchers say the 135-degree position is better than sitting upright or leaning forward. 32% of people in the UK spend more than 10 hours seated, and half don’t leave their desks even to have lunch.

The setting: Desert Storm, during General Barry McCaffrey’s 24th Mechanized Infantry Division’s run to the Euphrates River. It was raining heavily, and one M1 managed to get stuck in a mud hole and could not be extracted. With the rest of their unit moving on, the crew of the stuck tank waited for a recovery vehicle to pull them out.

Suddenly, as they were waiting, three Iraqi T-72 tanks came over a hill and charged the mud-bogged tank. One T-72 fired a high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) round that hit the frontal turret armor of the M1, but did no damage. At this point, the crew of the M1, though still stuck, fired a 120mm armor-piercing round at the attacking tank. The round penetrated the T-72’s turret, blowing it off into the air. By this time, the second T-72 had also fired a HEAT round at the M1. That also hit the front of the turret, and did no damage. The M1 immediately dispatched this T-72 with another 120mm round.

After that, the third and now last T-72 fired a 125mm armor-piercing round at the M1 from a range of 400 meters. This only grooved the front armor plate. Seeing that continued action did not have much of a future, the crew of the last T-72 decided to run for cover. Spying a nearby sand berm, the Iraqis darted behind it, thinking they would be safe there. Back in the M1, the crew saw through the Thermal Imaging Sight (TIS) the hot plume of the T-72’s engine exhaust spewing up from behind the berm. Aiming carefully through the TIS, the M1’s crew fired a third 120mm round through the berm, into the tank, destroying it.

By this time, as you might imagine, the crewmen of the M1 were getting extremely agitated and making this fact known to anyone who would listen over the radio net. Help in the form of another M1-equipped unit arrived shortly afterwards, and they began trying to extract the stuck M1 from the mud hole. Unfortunately, the Abrams was really and truly stuck. And despite the efforts of two M88 tank-recovery vehicles, the tank would not come loose.

Ordered to abandon the stuck Abrams, the other M1s began to fire their own 120mm guns in an attempt to destroy it. The first two rounds failed to penetrate the armor of the mud-bound tank. When a third round was fired from a favorable angle, it finally penetrated the outer skin of the turret, causing the stored ammunition to detonate. But rather than destroying the M1, the blast was vented upwards through a blowout panel, and the onboard fire-suppression system snuffed out the fire before it could do any real damage to the electronic systems in the crew compartment.

By this time, further M88 recovery vehicles arrived. Along with the two earlier M88s, they finally managed to pull the tank out of the mud. Upon examination, the M1 was found to be operational, with only the sights out of alignment from the blast of the ammunition cooking off. The M1 was taken back to the divisional repair yard, where the damaged turret was removed and replaced, and the tank returned to action.

Why I Returned My iPad

The brilliance of the iPad is that it’s the anytime-anywhere computer. On the subway. In the hall waiting for the elevator. In a car on the way to the airport. Any free moment becomes a potential iPad moment.

…

So why is this a problem? It sounds like I was super-productive. Every extra minute, I was either producing or consuming.

But something — more than just sleep, though that’s critical too — is lost in the busyness. Something too valuable to lose.

Boredom.

Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.

My best ideas come to me when I am unproductive. When I am running but not listening to my iPod. When I am sitting, doing nothing, waiting for someone. When I am lying in bed as my mind wanders before falling to sleep. These “wasted” moments, moments not filled with anything in particular, are vital.

They are the moments in which we, often unconsciously, organize our minds, make sense of our lives, and connect the dots. They’re the moments in which we talk to ourselves. And listen.

To lose those moments, to replace them with tasks and efficiency, is a mistake. What’s worse is that we don’t just lose them. We actively throw them away.