I am a huge sports fan, and around 5 years or so ago realized that I followed so many sports so closely yet really didn’t know boxing at all. Since that time I have spent a lot of time watching and reading about boxing, and basically the sport is on the decline due to a myriad of problems.

Here is Ring Magazine’s top 10 boxers of the 2000-2009 decade pound-for-pound (meaning: regardless of weight) list:

1. Manny Pacquiao
2. Floyd Mayweather
3. Bernard Hopkins
4. Joe Calzaghe
5. Juan Manuel Marquez
6. Winky Wright
7. Shane Mosley
8. Marco Antonio Barrera
9. Rafael Marquez
10. Israel Vasquez

So I ask the Wisdom for the People readers, how many of these boxers are you familiar with?

At breakfast with a couple students yesterday when this exchange occurred:

Female Student #1: So the VP had to come to my class yesterday. (meaning Vice Principal)

Me (attempting humor) : Joe Biden came to your class?

Student #1: I don’t even know who that is.

Me: Are you serious??

Female Student #2: That’s the guy who shot somebody in the face!

I had heard this before but never had a name attached (copied from wikipedia):

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule,the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Business management thinker Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; he developed the principle by observing that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.” Mathematically, where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants, there must be a number k between 50 and 100 such that k% is taken by (100 − k)% of the participants. k may vary from 50 (in the case of equal distribution) to nearly 100 (when a tiny number of participants account for almost all of the resource). There is nothing special about the number 80% mathematically, but many real systems have k somewhere around this region of intermediate imbalance in distribution.

For those who remember the shamwow remix I posted a couple months back that I found so catchy, enjoy another remix from DJ Steve Porter:

Using wordpress to host my blog I get a stats page that shows me where people who click on my blog come from.

I’ve recently noticed I’ve been getting a lot of hits from people typing “Oh Baby You Got What I Need” into search engines, likely due to a post I made about that song last May.

So I typed that into google just now and amazingly this blog comes up as the very first option to click on. Wisdom for the People is result 1 out of about 46,500,000.

Wisdom for the People, #1 in giving people what they need.

The Top Ten Grossing Movies of All Time (adjusted for ticket price inflation, domestic gross), courtesy of Entertainment Weekly:

1. Gone With the Wind $1.49 billion

2. Star Wars 1.31 billion

3. The Sound of Music 1.05 billion

4. E.T. 1.04 billion

5. The Ten Commandments 963 million

6. Titanic 943 million

7. Jaws 941 million

8. Doctor Zhivago 912 million

9. The Exorcist 813 million

10. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 801 million

I’ve only seen 5 of these movies.

I read this past week that the founder of Taco Bell died. I had never heard of him before, his name was Glen Bell, thus the name Taco Bell.

For some reason it had never occurred to me that it was named after someone. And if you told me it was named after someone, I probably would have guessed it was named after some guy whose first name was Taco.

I know lots of fast food restaurants have employees go through a basic “script” of sorts whenever you order, keeping that in mind I had this exchange at CiCis yesterday:

Me (after waiting around 30 seconds for someone to come to the register, I get out exactly $7.21 and put it on the counter because I know thats how much the buffet and drink cost)

Cashier: “Buffet and a drink?”

Me: “Yes” (as I slide over exact total before being told it is $7.21)

Cashier: “Are you familiar with our buffet?”

Me: Just stares at the cashier without saying anything…

Maybe I just expect too much from the world.

I greatly enjoy reading books, but often find myself buying a book that I hear is good but taking a long time to read it. I probably have 20 books on the bookshelf that I genuinely want to read but haven’t gotten around to.

Around three months ago I bought the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, read it quickly, and enjoyed it so much that I then went out over the past two months and bought his book Tipping Point and then bought Blink.

I can say with certainty that Gladwell is absolutely my favorite author right now, he appeals to the sociologist (or perhaps amateur psychologist) in me as he uses very interesting stories/case studies to interpret how success happens for certain seemingly extraordinary people in Outliers, why things become popular and how word spreads in Tipping Point, and how we make snap decisions in Blink. These may not sound that exciting how I describe them, but I simply can’t get enough of his books. I am both entertained but more importantly educated every page of Gladwell’s books.

I’d encourage anyone to check out any three of these books.

Movie making has reached its pinnacle: