Quality Archives - Page 11 of 19

The Free Throw Nobody Wants to Shoot

Rick Barry shot his free throws underhand. Sports Illustrated called him “the second-best free throw shooter of all time (90.0%, behind only Mark Price’s 90.4%).” Barry offered to teach the method to Shaquille O’Neal. O’Neal answered: “I would shoot negative percentage before I shot like that.” Barry recalled: “He said it wasn’t good for his image.”

Wilt Chamberlain shot underhand in the 1961–62 season. He made 61 percent of his free throws, the best season of his career. He also shot underhand in the game where he scored 100 points. He made 28 free throws and missed 4. The next season he gave up the method. In his autobiography he wrote that the shot made him “look silly” and “like a sissy.”

The underhand shot produces results, but few players use it. Asked why, Bill Pearson, who played for Wisconsin in the 1970s, gave a short answer: “Because it’s ugly.”

The Fosbury Flop

In the 1960s a young Oregon high jumper, Dick Fosbury, began going over the bar backward. A reporter for the Medford Mail-Tribune wrote that he looked like a fish flopping in a boat. A Los Angeles doctor sent him a letter: “For the good of young Americans, you should stop this ridiculous attack on the bar.”

Fosbury kept the method. In a 2014 interview he explained why: “My results were getting better.” At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City he cleared 2.24 meters, or 7 feet 4¼ inches. He won the gold medal and set an Olympic record. By the next Olympics, 28 of the 40 high jumpers used his technique.

Winning Ugly

The American tennis player Brad Gilbert called his book Winning Ugly: Mental Warfare in Tennis. It was written with Steve Jamison and carries a copyright date of 1993. Gilbert reached No. 4 in the world “with mediocre technique but a razor-sharp mind,” as one tennis site put it. In the book Gilbert told readers to “play better tennis without better strokes.”

In 1994 Andre Agassi hired Gilbert as his coach. Agassi was struggling with a wrist injury. Twelve months later he was No. 1 in the world. Agassi said: “Brad made me believe I could beat anyone.” In 2013 the publisher called the book “the bible of tennis instruction books for countless players worldwide.”

The Mailbox

In April 1970 an oxygen tank exploded on Apollo 13, and the crew had to use the lunar module as a lifeboat. Carbon dioxide began to build up. The spare filters from the command module were square, and the lunar module needed round ones.

Engineers on the ground designed and tested an adapter made from plastic bags, cardboard from the flight plan cover, a spacesuit hose and duct tape. NASA calls it “the mailbox.” The engineer who led the work, Ed Smylie, explained it in a 2021 documentary: “If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape.”

In his NASA oral history he said: “It was pretty straightforward, even though we got a lot of publicity for it …” He added that “a mechanical engineering sophomore in college could have come up with it.”

The Little Shop of Horrors

In December 1959 Roger Corman shot the interiors of The Little Shop of Horrors in two days, on a standing set at the old Chaplin Studios. The actors were hired for one week, three days of rehearsal and two of shooting. Exterior scenes took four more evenings. The film cost less than $30,000 and earned back its cost.

Corman titled his memoir How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. “I had never thought of myself as doing Great Art,” he said. “I felt I was working as a craftsman.” Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese worked for him early in their careers. In 2009 he received an honorary Academy Award.

Semi-Homemade

In October 2003 the Food Network launched Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee. Lee’s rule is to use “70 percent packaged products and 30 percent fresh ingredients.” One profile explained the idea: “it takes some of the complexity out of cooking, allowing even the busiest person to find time to cook at home.” The show ran for 15 seasons. In 2012 Lee won a Daytime Emmy as a culinary host.

Maximizers and Satisficers

In 2002 the Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz and five colleagues published a study of “maximizers,” who look for the best option, and “satisficers,” who stop at good enough. Across seven samples they found “negative correlations between maximization and happiness” and “positive correlations between maximization and depression.” In one study, maximizers were “more sensitive to regret.”

In his book The Paradox of Choice, Schwartz wrote: “To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough …” In a 2014 Reddit Q&A, he gave short advice: “‘Good enough’ is almost always good enough.” The Atlantic quoted it in 2015.

The Good Enough Revolution

In 2009 Wired magazine published “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine.” It opened with the Flip Ultra video camera. The Flip was “stripped-down” and cost $150. A midpriced Sony camcorder cost $800. The Flip sold more than a million units in its first year. By 2009 it held 17 percent of the U.S. camcorder market.

The writer, Robert Capps, argued that buyers now valued three things: “ease of use, continuous availability, and low price.” To get them, “they’ll happily sacrifice power and features.”

One Dollar for Two

The American civil engineer Arthur M. Wellington wrote a book on how to lay out railroads, The Economic Theory of the Location of Railways. In its introduction he wrote that engineering is “rather the art of not constructing.” Then he defined it “rudely but not inaptly.” It is “the art of doing that well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion.”

Wellington was editor and part owner of Engineering News. He died in 1895. His idea is still repeated in a shorter form: “An engineer can do for a dollar what any fool can do for two.”

Good Enough Quality

In 1997 the software tester James Bach published “Good Enough Quality: Beyond the Buzzword” in the magazine Computer. To call something good enough, he wrote, you must agree with four claims. The first three are “It has sufficient benefits,” “It has no critical problems,” and “The benefits sufficiently outweigh the problems.” The fourth is “In the present situation, and all things considered, further improvement would be more harmful than helpful.”

Bach rejected the idea of “the minimum quality that you can get away with.” He wrote: “Good Enough has nothing to do with mediocrity.” His example was Microsoft, which “knows how to ship with the right bugs.” Bach’s testing company is called Satisfice, Inc.