I’ve been working on clarifying the approach and idea for the Polymath Podcast, which has caused reflection on a repeating set of topics. As I’ve been processing those topics in an attempt to distill them into an “overview” episode to kick things off, I’ve refined my thoughts on a few of them.

First is that I take a slightly broader view of the definition of “polymath” than many people seem to. It’s telling that many of the online discussions about being a polymath seem to center around a definition in the vicinity of “someone who knows everything”.

This shows up nearly immediately in the conversation, along with mentions of “Renaissance Man”, followed shortly by “Leonardo Da Vinci” and one of several people nominated as having been the “last person who could know everything”. Unfortunately, that series of predictable topical shifts is almost inevitably followed by either a declaration that being a polymath is impossible or a resignation to such a fate, depending on whether one considers oneself to be a polymath prior to the conversation.

The thing is, that the word comes from the Greek polymath?s, ?????????, meaning "having learned much". It doesn’t mean having learned everything. It’s actually a pretty ambiguous term, leaving it open to interpretation rather than some list of specific bodies of knowledge.

Beyond even that, these conversations always seem to put Da Vinci’s entire life into the “polymath” category. However, he clearly pursued a path of learning and exploration for his entire life. So, as a youth, he couldn’t have known even the definition of “everything” used in this context.

Further, he obviously didn’t know all of the stuff we’ve come to learn since his death. That makes the derivation’s definition make more sense to me than the colloquial one used in such arguments. It’s more about infinite curiosity and a lifelong quest to learn more and improve oneself.

By that definition, every one of the people usually brought up still qualifies. But, so do countless others. I consider myself a polymath in the same way I consider myself a software journeyman. It’s not a destination, it’s a path. There’s a huge difference between spending the day looking for a needle in a haystack and spending the day exploring a haystack and happening to find a needle.

The second of the topics is basically another branch of the “what is a polymath” conversation. When it doesn’t center on Renaissance gentlemen, literary canon and the extent to which the body of scientific knowledge exceeds the human memory capacity, it tends to find a topical home in an argument about “generalization” vs “specialization”.

It’s an argument I’ve been dragged into more than a few times myself. One of the problems with it is that I don’t think they’re actually antonyms.  They’re both relative terms. One person may consider my professional niche as “specializing” because I do work in information technology, building web applications on the x86/x64 PC platform while others would veto my membership in the “specialist” camp because I’ve done that work in PHP, Java, and C# on MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server, insisting that to *actually* specialize, I’d have to further refine my focus.

The other big problem with this oppositional thinking is that it presumes that one is better than the other, not that having both is often the recipe for greatest success. The “box” we often ask people to think outside of pretty much IS specialization and most generalists don’t need trite advice to see connections between disparate things.

Third and finally is the frequent citation of both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin. Both are trotted out, pointing out how both economics and evolution describe the march toward specialization. That’s followed with the “inevitable” conclusion that we must specialize or die.

Too bad that both of those disciplines also describe the benefits of “just enough” specialization and the pitfalls of going too far. The most obvious example to me is the human species itself. It’s clear that our widespread population distribution and our insistence on living in EVERY ecosystem on this planet makes it clear that if we’d been hyper-specialized to one ecosystem, things would be very different.

If we’d specialized to only be able to live in the Fertile Crescent, we’d have died off when much of that area turned to desert. The Inuit wouldn’t be hunting reindeer and surviving bitter cold. The people of the Himalayas wouldn’t be perfectly happy living in much thinner air than the rest of us.

Simply put, the capacity TO specialize requires generalization. They’re symbiotic. There’s a balance between them that’s necessary (though that balance can be societal and not made real in each and every person) in order to both survive and thrive.

If a mechanic in 1970 were to specialize in working on AMC cars, further working to become the #1 authority on performance tuning the Gremlin, he’d probably be well paid in 1978, but the 1980’s would have been fairly unpleasant.

That’s because while specialization makes the thriving work when the environment and conditions match the specialization, shifts in the ecosystem can result in disaster for that specialist. Imagine what happens to the giant panda if bamboo were to stop growing or the koala if eucalyptus were to die off because of a pesticide of some sort.

Compare that with the rabbit, the rat and tilapia (take a look at a film called Darwin’s Nightmare) for how survival and specialization/generalization relate.

OK, now that I’ve been enough of a downer to bring up the extinction of pandas and koalas, I want to finish on a lighter note.

For the tone of the podcast, rather than trying to decide whether one needs to be Da Vinci in order to be a polymath, I’d like to shift away from him and the rest of the canonical examples and toward the one that always comes to mind for me: The Doctor. From the TV show Doctor Who.

If you aren’t a fan, The Doctor is a 900+ year old Time Lord who travels with a companion in a space-and-time ship called the TARDIS. The Doctor has traveled the depth and breadth of the Universe and the vastness of time. He has staggering knowledge of alien cultures, technology, literature, etc.

But, seeing the entirety of space and time in front of him, he, better than we, knows that it’s not even remotely possible to know everything.

Despite that, The Doctor has that spark of infinite curiosity, constantly saying things like, “Huh, that’s never happened before.”  and “Don’t know what we’re going to do, but we’ll figure it out” with a joy and zest that’s infectious.

He doesn’t seek out knowledge and experience as though there’s some cosmic scoreboard out there where someone’s keeping track of whether he knows it “all” yet or not. He learns and seeks out new experiences simply for the joy inherent in the process. Most importantly, he doesn’t take himself nearly as seriously as most of the participants of the conversations I’ve read on these topics.

It’s that approach to life that I want the podcast to be about and is how I try to approach life and learning. I am far more likely to say, “Ooh. Now THAT’s interesting” than “Will this be on the test?”. More likely to say, “Did you ever wonder?” than “Why do you know that?”.

If this sounds like paradise to you, the show’s likely to work for you. That’s both as a listener and I’m still looking for a co-host or 2. Now, I’m going to go because I’ve got 28 tabs open in Firefox full of interesting stuff to be read.

Dave Slusher recently took on a topic that I've been bothered by as well. He pointed out how often people flatly state how long a podcast "should" be and how seldom that's based on anything other than their own interactions with podcasts.

Basically, people who have a 30 minute commute insist that they should all be about 30 minutes. Those who listen in short segments throughout the day often want them in 5-10 minute chunks.

This is something I see often and is pretty much arguing from anecdote. It drives me nuts. It happens whenever you use just yourself, a couple of people or a small subset of the population at large and act as though its representational of the entire group. Unfortunately, on the modern web, you can get what *seems* like a big group and think you're looking at a good sample. 10,000 people on the web is NOT necessarily representative of the whole.

I saw it again today when someone posted "the" 7 levels of site revenue.. He put Adsense as the lowest level. However, because he included his revenue per 1000 page views (CPM), lots of people reacted just like I did. See, he stated that Adsense only generates $1 per 1000 page views.

I actually had to read that twice because of how far off that is from the numbers I've seen. Of course, my numbers aren't representative either, but I'm not claiming they are. However, I've seen more than once where someone was told not to bother with Adsense because of those kinds of numbers.

This is all a problem because of something I'm guilty of as well. It's a technique for commanding authority when you make statements. You just remove all of the indications of doubt. "I think X is the best way to do Y" becomes "X is the best way to do Y", "My results with program Z was to net 123" becomes "Program Z nets 123".

Basically, when you just state your opinion as fact, most people will just accept it. That's hugely powerful and terribly dangerous. However, if you just insert the disclaimers into those statements, you can take them with the appropriate grain of salt.

In the case of Adsense numbers, pretty much *everything* you hear is anecdote. Google prohibits sharing the exact numbers you earn and aren't sharing any aggregate data with the public. As a result, everyone who is making proclamations about how much money people are making is pretty much basing it off of the few people they've talked to. That's highly likely to be a group of people in a very similar target niche or similar demographic, etc.

On the podcasting side, the entire podcasting market consists of early adopters at the moment. Basing long term format decisions on anecdotes at this point is pure folly. Consider how different TV is today from what it looked like 20 or 30 years ago.

As I've been putting together slides to spark discussion on Saturday for the RESTful web development session at MinneBar, I've been going back through a bunch of my bookmarks related to giving presentations, writing and communication.

In those links was a set of video clips from Ira Glass. For those who don't know, Ira Glass is the guy behind the radio show, This American Life, which has recently branched out into TV on Showtime with the same approach.

Both shows are all about telling compelling stories. After you've listened to or watched a few episodes, you'll likely experience the surreal disconnect of finding yourself amazed that you're so interested in a story that *shouldn't* be that interesting. Recently, someone sat down with Ira Glass and asked him the right questions, to get him to explain, in some GREAT detail, what it is that makes for that compelling storytelling experience.

While I definitely have a LONG way to go to integrate the principles he describes, these 4 video clips are something everyone who produces creative or communication content needs to watch. The things he says, resonate and match up really well with my experience.

I especially liked his discussion of the gap between taste and your skills. That's one of the things that's kept me from getting back to working on the podcast. He's right, though, that you just have to power through until that gap closes. I'm thinking I may need to retool the podcast a bit after the conference and see if I can get that thing back on track.

At any rate, give these a look. You won't regret it.

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I've been using an iRiver MP3 player and a stereo Giant Squid microphone for recording meetings and some in person discussions destined for some eventual podcast episode. It was a nice, compact setup that I could just keep in a jacket pocket.

I took it to Washington DC in November (and actually had some audio of the tours we went on stored on it). I packed it in my bag for the return trip and checked the bag. When we got home, I discovered the wonderful little note from the TSA baggage folks that they had inspected my bag. Unfortunately, someone on their end also apparently decided that my bag was a better source of an MP3 player than their local Best Buy. The bag contained no trace of the iRiver or the attached microphones.

The really sad part is that I'm willing to bet the person that took it thought the Giant Squid mics were actually headphones, so those really decent microphones (worth more than the iRiver) are probably in the trash somewhere.

At any rate, I've been looking for what I can use to replace the setup ever since. An obvious choice would have been a straight replacement. However, all of the iRivers that had the right microphone inputs have been discontinued. Given my aversion to using eBay (mostly due to the fact I won't go within 100 miles of Paypal), and not wanting to rely on discontinued technology for my podcast going forward, I rejected that option.

I looked at Minidisc recorders and more sophisticated portable recorders. The Minidisc setups bothered me because they record in their own format on discs that only work with that technology. The other portable recorders generally record in WAV or MP3 format and use either Compact Flash/SD, etc. or a hard drive. That appealed to me, but the $500-600 price tags, most decidedly did not.

I looked around casually for a while, thinking that I'd use any money I got for Christmas to buy this. With the holidays over, I started thinking about it again. Then, last week, the Yahoo Group for podcasters erupted in yet another argument about this exact technology choice. In the midst of the arguing about iRiver vs. Minidisc, Stephen Eley mentioned the Zoom H4, which I remembered seeing back in October on Gizmodo.

So, I took a closer look at it. This thing is loaded. First was the built-in stereo microphones (though that makes this thing look like a taser) plus 2 combo mic input jacks (XLR and 1/4inch). I don't want to *need* an external microphone, but I *do* have them. This blend is really nice.

Then I started reading through the features like a built-in mixer, that it can serve as an external sound card, a tripod mount, runs on AA batteries or an AC adapter, included windscreen, etc. and the fact that it came in under $300.

I ordered one from zZounds and it came yesterday. Digging through the manual, it's clear that this thing has more features than I'm likely to use in the next 2 years. That is to say, I already love it. It's clearly one of the best bang-for-the-buck gadgets in portable audio. Unfortunately, it's going to be 3 more weeks before I can buy an SD card for it without the impulse tax on it.

I'll be trying it out tomorrow at breakfast and we'll see how well it does recording during the meal and conversation.

Well, it took me a couple of weeks from recording the conversation to actually putting it out on the site this morning before leaving for work, but it is finally up. This is the first podcast I recorded with the split channel setup in PowerGramo. This simultaneously let me fix some things that have been a problem in the past, including noise from the side of the conversation where the person is being silent and overlap due to cellphone lag and caused some problems of its own. I spent too much time trying to fix stuff and probably missed glaring problems while getting lost in the minutae.

It also wasn't as easy to cut this conversation down as others have been. In other episodes, I've just cut whole 20 minute segments out because it made sense. In this one, I cut out 30 of the original 60 minutes in lots of 1 minute chunks and 3-10 second slices. I'm much happier with many of the new bits, but still want to make improvements on future episodes. I also need a better way to end these recordings. It's all just a process and I'll just keep moving on.

Episode 7 of The Glass is Too Big is an interview with Dave Gray, who is the CEO of XPLANE, the visual thinking company.

Show Notes or Download the MP3