This was sent to me per it’s title:

How not to collaborate with a biostatistician

(http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6878253/)

“We always use 3 patients…”

How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience would have achieved success?
— Elbert Hubbard

Time for another (grant inspired) Hubbard quote.  Well, two, actually if you count the title.

aka expertise.

I meant to dig up the Tiger Woods Nike commercial for a random example of skill expertise and happened to run across it randomly today.

Never mind that kid, he’s a piker.  This yoyo demonstration is aptly titled, “if yo-yos were sexy, this would be Brad Pitt.”

Note that he’s older than the kid in the Stronger Yoyo video and therefore has been able to invest the 10 years or 10,000 hours required to achieve international-competition level expertise.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
—Aristotle

Stolen semi-shamelessly from Graybiel (2008) Annual Review of Neuroscience that has several fairly excellent habit quotes in the first page margin.

I feel compelled to note that this Graybiel review is not quite as awesomely titled as her 2005 review: “The basal ganglia: learning new tricks and loving it”

An old favorite about expertise from youtube, yoy-ing:

Stronger yoyo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSm0VgGwBSo)

It’s supposed to take 10,000 hours to develop “real” expertise, but the kid above doesn’t seem like he’s been alive long enough.  Or maybe he’s not actually a real expert, my friend who used to juggle professionally says yo-yo tricks aren’t really that hard.  He pointed this out to me, though:

Diablo juggling (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZTfy3Oe2b4)

Which appears to reflect fairly extraordinary skill at a certain kind of juggling.  What he’s doing is even harder than it looks.  My friend tried to teach me to use the Diablo recently and it’s hard just to get it spinning in the first place.

These are good basal ganglia expertise/practice demonstrations, though.  There’s no way that an explicit explanation of what to do is going to let you do any of these tricks.