There goes the coveted vampire vote

via

In a failed attempt to seem more like regular folks, Mitt Romney says:

“I mean, I like the Twilight series. I thought it was fun,” Romney said. 

That would normally be a sufficient occasion to stop and ponder on the candidacy of our man Mitt. But he kept going:

“I don’t like vampires personally, I don’t know any, but you know my granddaughter was reading it and I thought, ‘Well this looks like fun,’ so I read that.”

Holeee crap. There are several possible explanations here, and Steve Benen delivers the conventional wisdom:

One can almost see the gears shifting in Romney’s mind, as if he’s thinking, “Wait, will social conservatitves throw a fit if I like tween vampire fiction? Maybe I should mention that I don’t like vampires. But will that make it sound as if I know vampires? Maybe I should mention I don’t know any.”

But if we take the statement at face value, Mitt Romney believes that vampires are real enough that he could know and/or like one. 

This is actually scary. If Mitt Romney believes in vampires, maybe we should too!

The horrible truth

... is that I need to spend less time playing games, and more time doing my freakin' work of choice:

The curious thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals" - musicians who could float effortlessly to the top while practising a fraction of the time that their peers did. Nor could they find "grinds", people who worked harder than everyone else and yet just didn't have what it takes to break into the top ranks. Their research suggested that once you have enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. What's more, the people at the very top don't just work much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

"In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers [!], ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals [!!!]" writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, "this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years... No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery." | The Guardian, via Daring Fireball |

Related: How does one accumulate 10,000 hours of being a master criminal?