The Snail Shell

I am really inspired. This has happened before.

2012-01-23T03:56:00.000-08:00

This is part of a work in progress; I have a lot of ideas floating around and I'd like to track their progression over time.

Tourism is boring me. You can read more about that on my travel blog if you like. The thing is, I'm just not inclined to go see more buildings or natural sites or, hell, wonders of the world. Nor even to find the best coffee or beer.

I feel like I've just been consuming. Consuming food and drinks, consuming experiences. Traveling around the world to find the best experiences to consume.

Now, let me be clear that I don't see any moral wrong in this; I just see it as unfulfilling. I don't think that being The Best at consuming (either as a gourmet or as No Impact Man) will lead me to a life that I am satisfied with. Consuming seems to be just one part of life.

I've felt like this before at least once: after coming back from Maastricht. My five months there were some of the most carefree and debaucherous (though, really, still not very debaucherous) of my life. I got so fed up with consuming and excited about coming back and getting things done. What happened? I immediately made a few really productive changes to my life. Before I left, in December 2006, I was living in a basement, grumbling about academic and extracurricular commitments, bored with work and eating too much GoLean Crunch and soy milk. After I returned and made these changes, in August 2007, I was enjoying classes, drawing cartoons, living in an awesome orange room in a house owned by one of my best friends, beginning a great new relationship, researching fervently in a new lab, committing myself selectively to extracurriculars, and listening to The Knife. It was one of the best half-years of my life.

Let's (royal we) do this again. Let's begin a new career in a new town. But let's do it even better this time. Now that I know a bit more about how life works, perhaps I can recreate my life with a bit more wisdom. What are the parts to a fulfilling life, and how can I make those easy to achieve? I'll start with a "wish list" of floaty ideas, and see if I can then boil them down into concrete things to do.

- career, sure. Think I've spent enough time on this one. Grad school will be a challenge, and hopefully also a joy, but either way it'll be unpredictable enough that I don't know how to optimize it yet.
- eating right: some ideas include only buying food that cannot be immediately eaten, committing to three square meals and no snacks, or cultivating the joy of hunger that I've been working on. A less likely but still neat idea is refined-sugar teetotaling.
- exercising right: first, I will ride bikes everywhere, as usual. Second, though, I think just biking is not enough. I think I would like to do something else, something to work on all the parts of the body besides cardiovascular health and leg strength. I would like to fight people, like wrestling, because fighting requires strength and balance, and is fun. Perhaps the closest real-world analogue to this is a martial art? If so, which one? Finally, some yoga might help too.
- mental and spiritual health. Keep on meditating. Go on retreat sometimes. Do not lose the urge to get enlightened, and mindfully monitor the rest of my life, changing stuff if necessary.
- healthy social group. I've always been working on this. One thing that will help is the new less-judgmental attitude I'm developing. Maybe I should entertain more? I like throwing parties and hosting small gatherings; maybe I should invite more people more often with a cause. Some ideas include an album listening deal (like a film club but you listen to an album instead) and this creative circle thing I've tossed about but never done.
- dating. I should dedicate some energy to this.
- creating. As posted a couple posts ago, I think this is healthy, and I don't do it much. Also this. My current whim is that I want to start making some designs. Probably digital. Maybe try something like a Wacom tablet to do some drawing? Also, code more. This is very floaty, but I do want to find some time for, y'know, "hey, what if I could write a script to run my refrigerator for me?"
- serendipity. Make 20% of my life surprises that I don't like, so I keep growing. This feels like a cross-cutting concern, a way to do things instead of something else to do, and I don't know how to do it.
- listening to new music. I still like doing this, and it doesn't seem to fit anywhere else.

Why do the best things remind me of video games?

2012-01-11T08:20:00.000-08:00

I'll be going through Angkor Wat or Hampi or something, and I'll think "this is like a scene from Myst or Riven." My standard of excellence for instrumental music is the soundtrack from Final Fantasy games. Even a really good story is like one from a video game plot.

Why is this? It's like I've imprinted on old RPG's and puzzle games (FFVI, FFVII, FFX, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Baldur's Gate I/II, Diablo II, King's Quest V-VII, Loom). Playing one of these games is like watching a movie 20 times, so after that I'm really invested in the story and characters. Plus, I bet the interaction has something to do with it. I don't think most critics in their right mind would take Chrono Trigger over The Godfather, but I would. Strange!

Wait, wasn't this a blog about all sorts of Buddhism just a couple months ago?

2012-01-07T09:24:00.000-08:00

Maybe. I am still meditating, but not as much or as effectively as I was in September or October. The biggest reason is continued travel. Something different happens every day, and I have a lot of things that I must plan, so the likelihood of a free half hour to meditate is lower, and when it happens my mind is super full.

But I'm still on "half an hour most days", so there is hope. And while I'm not attaining any bhumis, jhanas, or other mental fireworks, I think I am noticing some subtle changes. Like my crazy day zipping around Bangalore to satisfy the whims of a few bureaucratic babus, when I really noticed my anxiety and frustration and didn't fight it all too much.

My mind is changing for the better! I could even tell a pretty good story about my life turning a corner. I feel like I've been cutting things out of my life, removing responsibilities, physical things, even relationships, to pare things down to a quite minimal life. Right now I don't really have to do much ever, and I would be pretty okay if I lost everything except my backpack.

But minimalism is not enough! Cut everything out, and then what? I used to think I wanted to create something big. Then I thought, naw, you only want to create something big if you're insecure and you want to be famous. But I think there's a difference. You only want to be famous if you're insecure and you want to be famous. You can dedicate yourself to creating something big, or something good, in an inspired, energizing way, rather than a sapping, fame-seeking way.

Here's hoping I can. Simplifying and cutting things out is easy; creating and building is the hard part. Ram asked me and Nicole what 2012 would be; maybe it's the year I start creating.

Related: creating is good, because "when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."
Also maybe related: in the past, I might have looked at this list and thought "geez, look at holier-than-thou here telling me all this impossible stuff to do." Now I'm kind of inspired.

More interesting things

2011-12-21T05:47:00.000-08:00

Email doesn't ruin real-world relationships. Facebook increases your social support a lot. The internet is good for you. This is good news.

Some stress is good for you. A lot of stress is bad, trauma is bad, but living in a perfect bubble world is bad too.

This post about tips to enjoy your vacation more is awesome. Science says: take a vacation of 3-6 days. Make the peak and the end awesome. Hang out with your family, particularly eating ice cream.
(am I becoming just a filter for Barking Up the Wrong Tree and Wired Frontal Cortex? ... maybe.)

Thought scraps

2011-12-07T02:48:00.001-08:00

"Things are as they are": this seems about the fourth thing you say after you live in a place for a while. First, "place X is great"; second, "place X is bad and here's why"; third, some subtler things about place X, that it's friendlier or colder or sleepier or grander or whatever; and fourth, "well, okay. Place X is place X." You stop generalizing. I feel like this is when intelligent conversation can start. (either that, or what I'm saying is "stop writing about places." Hmm, that doesn't seem right.)
Thoughts of an expat in Bishkek
A counterexample: an article about Bhutan that generalizes, and is annoying as a result.

So traveling is great, right, and especially after that post about world-curating, one might think I'm advocating a lot of traveling and a lot of randomness injected into your life. Why do I say only 20%? Because I think conventional wisdom is mostly correct: society progresses by abstracting and automating details like how to get water for the day. I couldn't do a lick of work here. Even, I think, if I lived here. But furthermore, if I lived here, I think my life would be poorer in a lot of ways. You can't get as good variety of music or movies, activities to do, organizations to join. Western life offers a nice lot of complexity, and I mean that in the positive, Csikszentmihalyi sense of "differentiated parts working together as one."

I like cricket. Time will tell if this is like stroopwafels, which I pretend to like while I'm there, or herring, which is actually great.

There's a different take on interruption here. In the US, you get stuff like "Never ask a busy person to lunch." Here, people I've met seem pretty much more okay with being interrupted.

Someone else who's figured out food. Orexin, I guess: sugar kills it, protein helps it, and it in turn helps us to be alert and have energy and so on. This drives me nuts. How does this fit in with everything else that the body does?
Also by Lehrer, but more convincing: I guess I should be chewing gum.

Living by yourself is pretty nice for us control-freaky types. I resonated pretty well with this article about an Indian lady being less stressed after losing her maid. It's hard to live in a place with someone else; you just feel like you're being watched, and that every move has to be right in some way. But perhaps this is just an extreme example of me curating my world!

Inspirations from a Creed music video

2011-12-07T02:47:00.001-08:00

Well, a live version of "My Sacrifice", to be exact. So Creed. They look kind of like meatheads. They have rather shaved heads that are smaller than their necks. They look like those guys you went to high school with.

Wait a minute. Why are they "those guys you went to high school with", and not "those guys you talk to every day"? Was high school the last time you interacted with a jock? Why is that, and is it a bad thing?

Why is that: it's because you curate your own world around yourself. You don't want to hang out with jocks, so you surround yourself with non-jocks. (This happens pretty easily: get a tech job and move to a hip neighborhood. If you run into a jock, just ignore him and hang out with your friends again.)

Is curating your own world a bad thing: Well... world-curating has some nice effects. You like the people around you, you don't get shoved into lockers, you can just start talking about Wizard People Dear Reader or Python or Sufjan Stevens whenever. I suppose the problem then is that we get worse at dealing with stuff that's not in our bubbles. You might have to deal with a jock someday, but your jock-skills will have atrophied.

Is curating your own world inevitable: maybe, yes. Almost by definition, we'll keep going for more of what we like and less of what we don't. The world will continue to supply us with the same, in higher quantities, for less money, and in more places. If I decide I'm tired of Delhi, I can flip on the A/C, find some Chinese or Italian or whatever food, tune in to my computer/phone/Kindle, and I'm in a climate-controlled, food-controlled, information-controlled bubble all of my choosing.

What's the answer? Maybe just not curating too much. If you refuse to curate your world, you'll just get random everything all the time. (It's like traveling in India: exciting, wearying, and impossible as a long-term lifestyle.) If you go for, say, 80% curated and 20% random, you'll get to mostly-enjoy a mostly-smooth life, while still inoculating yourself against all the tough stuff.

How can we inject 20% randomness into our carefully-curated lives? If you know the answer to that one, let me know.

Like a reverse Grinch, my heart just shrank three sizes

2011-12-01T02:25:00.001-08:00

I went out to get some change. I had only 500-rupee notes, and I owed a guy 44 for laundry. It's late at night, most things are closed, but there's a little ice cream shop across the way selling gourmet deluxe ice cream for 39 rupees. (it's only so expensive because it's on Park St. in Kolkata, which is sort of like Park Ave. in New York.) Well, it would get me some change, and it sounded kind of nice; I mean, I like ice cream.

And a beggar guy came up saying how he's trying to get food to feed his children, and I can go buy him the food, he doesn't want money, etc. His name is Sunil. Of course he's lying, but there's that little bluebird of doubt: maybe he's not. I'm in India; who knows. I can go buy him the food. I can see him get some food. I can hand over only enough money for the food. And it would also get me some change. This bird's voice was quite amplified by the fact that I was going to buy a scoop of gourmet ice cream. Suddenly that seemed rather trivial.

We pass some kids sleeping on the sidewalk, who Sunil says are his. And we walk to the place, it's a little run down 3-square-foot hovel where too many kids and adults are wolfing down dal and a couple dudes are cooking chapati over charcoal. And this is the point I don't know exactly how to manage, and therefore this is the point when I get screwed. There's a flurry of Hindi (Bengali?), and somehow Sunil has a bag of chapatis and says it's 150 rupees ($3). I balk, because 150 rupees could buy about five street meals. Of course, I want him to have about five street meals, or at least three, given that he has two kids. If he said one meal was 30 rupees, I'd give him 180 and say "get your kids breakfast tomorrow too." But it's just some chapati! So Sunil says "Oh, I forgot, the chicken" and soon he has also two clay containers that I assume contain chicken. This is still not even close to 150 rupees, but we're getting within my margin of error. I hand over 150 rupees.

Immediately I regret it. There is no way this cost 150 rupees; I'd say 50, tops. Therefore, I am conned somehow. At best, Sunil and his kids ate, and Sunil and the restaurant split the 100 extra rupees. At worst, Sunil just handed the chapatis and chicken back after I walked away, Sunil and the restaurant split 150 rupees, Sunil spent his half on cheap hash, and his kids still didn't eat.

Okay, of course I'm angry, and of course there's nothing I can do about it. Luckily it's only $3, but I feel used.

How can I prevent this in the future? The solution I'd like to adopt is, when approached by a beggar, to categorically yell angrily and move as if to hit him; perhaps this would convince some of them that not all white people are money bags, and that there might be some negative consequence to trying to run their scams. However, this solution is rather uncouth, as well as disastrous if someone is actually honest. I guess the best solution is to just categorically refuse beggars.

It's like an essay I was reading about people who are angry about new changes in video games. Instead of posting on forums about how awful the new change is, they should just stop playing. It doesn't get you any of the "satisfaction" of venting, but to vent and continue playing only signals that you don't really mind the new change. And nobody listens when you vent, and venting does nothing to you besides make your anger worse. Similarly, anything I do besides simply refusing beggars will only make things worse.

Okay okay, so it took me 25 years to learn that I shouldn't give money to beggars, okay, no kidding. Well, I've finally learned it! Sigh.

Another step towards eating ideal food

2011-11-28T01:01:00.001-08:00

http://gettingstronger.org/2011/11/obesity-starts-in-the-brain-2/

Long article, kind of tough to read, and he's proposing a new understanding of how our bodies work, and if I had a nickel for every time someone "figured it all out"...

But it ties together a lot of things that don't make sense with existing theories of how people eat, by dividing "fat" into "subcutaneous fat" (folds around your body) and "intra-abdominal fat" (beer belly). And they're largely caused by failures of insulin or leptin or both. (either not enough, or too much resistance.) And either way, cut out bad sugars and bad fats.

This is more appealing than mainstream diet notions (i.e. low fat), which are insane, and I don't trust corporations or the government to give me honest nutrition advice. This is also more appealing than the low-carb or paleo people, because it explains how most of the world eats mostly grains and doesn't die.

Downsides: he's mostly talking about obesity, while I'm looking for "how to eat best." Also he doesn't explain how fructose (fruit sugar) got to be "bad" for us. But it's an interesting batch of ideas that seem mostly sensible.

Google Reader Sweep

2011-11-20T01:50:00.000-08:00

I don't like to post a big list of "here are interesting things"; I'd rather formulate them into useful and easily-digested stories to make a coherent point. However, I haven't had time. So here are interesting things.

Carbs are good for test performance. First time in a while I've heard of carbs being good for anything.
What defines a good working life? What indeed. Maybe I'll post more about this.
Steve Jobs's Buddhist influences. Ooh aah. What is the sound of one hand unlocking an iphone. I guess I like to be contrary, but I'm a tiny bit sick of the Cult of Steve. I mean, really, some of his advice, and some of the "wise Steve" stories we tell, are self-fulfilling; the fact that Steve said "never settle" and ended up extraordinary doesn't mean that "never settle" is good advice. It's like a lottery winner saying "play the lottery." Also, he was a terrible jerk. Again: what defines a good working life? I don't think Steve Jobs is a role model here. And if he is, he's the one in a million.
I thought I was so clever reading this xkcd about maps, like "ooh I've got a Peters map, it's great, let's see what he has to say about that!" And then I got to the end, read up on explain xkcd, and realized I am an idiot. Hah!
Another bit about segmented/two-stage sleep: monks who did it basically found it unnatural and hard to get used to. They did dream/hallucinate a little more though. Given the limited support for two-stage sleep (basically three people, Wehr, Ekirch, and Gamble), I'm not so interested anymore.
Wow, Facebook is good for you. Or at least, it provides social support like people hoped it would, and doesn't isolate you like critics say.
We keep taking risks up to age 50. 50! I used to think that interesting life was over at 25, or 30, or 35, but I guess we keep on being awesome for a lot longer. (not to say that post-50 is not-awesome. indeed, 50 seems to me a good age to settle down a bit. spend more time improving or enjoying what you've got, rather than trying new stuff.)
Women are becoming the dominant sex, basically because we don't need men to lift heavy things or fight people so much anymore. Women are better at college. Furthermore, the numerical gender balance is tipping towards women too, and marriage is taking a hit. Fewer desirable men means men screw around and women don't want them. But this is okay: rather than "destroying marriage" or whatever, maybe we're returning marriage to a reasonable level of importance, down from the 1950s nuclear family obsession.
"the cultural fixation on the couple blinds us to the full web of relationships that sustain us on a daily basis. We are far more than whom we are (or aren’t) married to: we are also friends, grandparents, colleagues, cousins, and so on. To ignore the depth and complexities of these networks is to limit the full range of our emotional experiences."
Tangentially relatedly, but interesting on its own: obesity is caused by snacking. Not by poor people eating at McDonald's. Huh! This seems very counter-intuitive to me, but I can believe it. Incidentally, "only buy foods that require significant preparation" is pretty similar to "keep nothing immediately edible in my house", which I proposed a few weeks ago.

Whew! Man, I could talk about these for ages. Okay, off the computer now.

Movember; this is a great idea.

2011-11-11T07:28:00.001-08:00

Guess I'm late to this party (sorry, I'm in Nepal!), but http://mobro.co/dantasse ... it's at least a moderately important cause to me. (and the folks running this are genius.) If you'd care to give a few bucks, all the dudes in my family and I thank you.

Note that I have to look respectable to a border guard on the 19th. Luckily, my moustache still won't be visible then, so no big deal.

(also, sorry if I'm repeating myself on all the social networks! I wonder if there is a smarter way to do this.)

Progress is a steady stream of generating more wealth and sharing it more equally?

2011-11-08T01:54:00.000-08:00

From Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods":

"Many landowners also discovered that they sat on great seams of coal just at a time when coal was suddenly needed for industry. This ... did translate into gratifying heaps of lucre. ... All of this was in an age in which there was no income tax, no capital gains tax, no tax on dividends or interest- almost nothing to disturb the steady flow of money being banked."

Combine that with this: Americans are happier when the wealth is more evenly distributed. Not to mention, the poorest (/least "developed") countries are often the ones with the most inequality.

So why are our taxes on the rich not really high? Maybe because we fall under the last bit of that Wired article: we don't like a more even society, if we competed to earn our wealth. So our national ethical system values "fairness" too much? I guess the 53% guy (who is responding to the 99% people; btw I love this bunch of the 1%) makes this pretty clear. But as Max Udargo makes clear in his excellent response, you can say "those lazy bums don't deserve my money", but what do you gain? You just get a worse society than if you distribute the wealth more evenly. Everyone loses, because we insist on valuing fairness over harm-reduction.

I guess that's my argument for taxing the rich more. Throw it in with all the rest.

Well, besides my other argument, which is: I want to live in a world where kids don't yell "Give me money!" when I ride past.

Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English

2011-10-31T09:08:00.000-07:00

I just read this book, Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English. I got it because I had read Mindfulness in Plain English and it was very good. Also, Daniel Ingram recommended the author, Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, as someone who writes well about jhanas. (again, jhanas are states of high concentration, and concentration is one of the three practices to get you to enlightenment. The others are morality and insight.)

Some things I learned:

- I was pretty naive about how big a deal achieving even the first jhana is. Ingram made it sound easy. Gunaratana recommends at least an hour meditating skillfully, ideally longer sessions in a retreat setting, and notes that "most meditators practice in access concentration (a prerequisite to any jhana) for a good while before attaining jhana." So maybe I'm further away than I thought.

- However, I am pretty sure that I've achieved access concentration! The descriptions he gives sound a lot like what I felt in those two half-hour sessions towards the end of this past retreat: a strengthening of concentration, maybe slightly odd visions, maybe a feeling of lightness.

- However, I think I was "doing it wrong", in that I was trying to force it. I really wanted that concentrated state, and I just kinda tossed insight aside. Gunaratana makes it clear that you have to practice concentration mindfully or else you might develop "wrong concentration"- absorption without mindfulness. Wrong concentration is dangerous, because you might actually achieve some blissful states and get really wrapped up in them, and then you won't be able to develop insight because you're so attached to absorption.

- Thus, the kind of concentration I'm looking for is not "just concentrating a lot" or "becoming one with ____" where ____ is your breath or a candle or a clay disc or whatever.

- Given all this, I think I'm more at peace with the slow boat to enlightenment. Reading Ingram, I wanted to get enlightened in 5 years. Reading someone more mainstream like Gunaratana, I'm reminded how you can't really rush it; or, you can rush it, but by putting in the work, not by just wanting it to go faster. I could get enlightened in 5 years, but I'd have to spend a lot more time in retreats and daily practice. And I'm not a monk, nor do I currently want to be one.

Positive mental time travel

2011-10-28T08:49:00.000-07:00

Buddhism aside (whew! I do worry about this blog getting religious.), I read a thing about how people had the best moods when either their minds were on what they were doing, or they were engaged in "positive mental time travel": looking forward to good things in the future, or remembering nice things in the past.

I've been doing that a lot recently. It helped get through that retreat. It may not be what I should have been doing, but still. It also helps, say, when I'm cold, simultaneously lonely and sick of talking to people, and fighting spiders. In mental fantasy land, I've never fought with anyone, you're all radiant angels of goodness, and my life's future holds 8 months of joyful and fulfilling vacation followed by an equally marvelous career and life back at home.

I'm not going to debate whether this is a good strategy or not. (see? no Buddhism for now.) Let me just say one thing, though: thanks to you all for helping me to create such nice memories and things to look forward to!

Been killing spiders

2011-10-28T08:41:00.001-07:00

A bunch of them, recently. Sometimes I wonder if that's okay to do. I wonder this more whenever I read or think a lot about Buddhism, which is a lot recently. It is particularly awkward when there are spiders in my bathroom at a Buddhist retreat center.

See, in Buddhism, all life is sacred. They say don't kill any living beings, including bugs. They often have stories, too, about so-and-so monk who would catch flies and release them, unharmed, outdoors and how he accumulated such great karma or merit or whatever.

Well, it's a consistent enough teaching, anyway. At some point, you have to decide what's sacred. You have to draw a line and say "you can kill anything below this line, and nothing above this line." Modern secular Westerners draw that line right below humans. Buddhists draw that line below bugs (and above plants, I guess, even though those are alive also; maybe by "living", Buddhists mean "animate" or something). Vegetarians might draw the line below the animal kingdom but above bugs. Or below bugs. Whatever. And then there's also the debate about unborn babies/fetuses/lumps of cells: are they above the line? How can we answer this?

I like Ken Wilber's philosophy on this, based on a book of his that I read and half understood a while ago. The part I remembered is: "Honor complexity." Humans are above the line because we're so complex, particularly our brains. Bugs are just a few nerves and an exoskeleton: below the line. This solves a lot of dilemmas: you don't have to discuss consciousness, you don't have to worry about souls, you can neatly handle any new edge case. (new bacteria from Neptune? well, how complex is it?)

Side note: the part that will likely cheese a lot of people off is that it doesn't line up with old-fashioned definitions of "life". For example, anyone will agree that an ant is alive. But what about one of these supercomputer weather simulators, say. That's probably more complex than the ant; is it alive? is it sacred? (I personally take a bit of perverse pleasure in gleefully saying yes, it is more morally okay to kill an ant than a supercomputer.)

But anyway, if you're still with me, then we've got a philosophical metric of sacredness with no real-world way to measure it. I mean, we could measure computer vs. computer in a few ways (and even that is difficult), but how could we possibly compare the complexity of a supercomputer with, say, a rat's brain?

I don't know. All I know is, for right now I'm using that argument to rationalize going against all the Buddhist wisdom and killing spiders.

Life choices, if life weren't handed on a platter to us rich white Americans?

2011-10-25T04:26:00.000-07:00

I've kind of taken it for granted my entire life that working for money isn't a good idea, that things aren't worth worrying about, and that money won't buy happiness.

This all assumes that I'll always have enough money. What if I didn't? Suddenly, working for money becomes a viable and smart career option. Until you get to that diminishing returns point ($40k/yr? $60k?), one dollar equals one util!

Other luxuries include control over my time. I take flexible hours and vacation time for granted. At home I could pretty much choose to do whatever I want whenever I want. Traveling now, not quite as much (sometimes more than others). If I were working, and had a more restrictive job, even less.

Maybe I'll get enlightened instead of having kids.

2011-10-23T08:09:00.000-07:00

One question with undertaking a quest like "get enlightened" is: how do I plan to do this? I'm not prepared to give up my career. A healthy social life is, well, healthy, and I'm not prepared to give that up either. I'd like to get married someday. How will I find time to do all the things that everyone else does, and also get enlightened?

Here's an idea: not have kids.

Kids don't make you happier, for any definition of happier. I particularly don't think kids would make me happier. And one more enlightened being in the world is probably more beneficial in a grand sense than 2 or 3 more confused small people. I don't see much of a downside here.

(I want to put some disclaimer here that I know enlightenment is not a panacea, and then go on to describe all the ways that people who have achieved enlightenment are not automatically perfect radiant superman buddhas, but I said I'd stop blogging, so I'll have to save that for another time.)

Making the Best Life

2011-10-23T08:01:00.000-07:00

As I'm taking a year of life that is different than most life, I get a good chance to reflect on ways I want my next settled life (that is, my grad student life) to be. The difficult thing is that everything is different now, so I can't run experiments on diet, sleep, caffeine, etc, because of all the confounding factors. The nice thing is that I have a lot of time to figure out ideas and a lot of diverse experiences.

Some thoughts, and I'm open to everything from the profound to the mundane

- make sure there's a farmers' market near my house and at least one good coffeeshop. This has been nice in Seattle.
- keep biking. This is also good.
- meditation will probably still be in the morning. An hour would be a nice number. After sitting for an hour or more many times these past two weeks, I've jumped up to 45 minutes in the morning, which feels totally doable now. I'll work up from there.
- make a bunch of Indian food. Dishes/appliances I would like include a food processor and a big wok, or maybe a cast-iron skillet. (That's the best thing for a skillet, right? I'm cool with maintenance.)
- here's a thought: keep nothing immediately edible in my house. I've enjoyed staying a bit hungry, and if food always required me to work, I'd probably get back to 3 standard meals/day and feel pretty good.
- somehow limit, but not eliminate, drinking. Like Gerrit's "only drink in houses, not bars" idea.
- make sure my home desk setup works nicely. Big monitor, comfortable chair. Or standing desk?
- figure out something about sleep. Sleeping naturally always is nice, but it'd be good if it didn't take so long.

And one more thought, which probably deserves its own post (and then I'll quit blogging for tonight, promise).

My mental state and current meditation plan

2011-10-23T07:43:00.000-07:00

I'd say "plan of attack", but that doesn't sound right.

Two weeks ago, I was starting a 10-day meditation course, for over 90 hours of meditation. My previous total meditation experience is probably (1 year * average maybe 10 minutes/day) + (1 year * 20 min/day) + (1 month * 30 min/day) + (2 retreats = 20 hrs) = ~180 hours. So this retreat is half as much meditation as I've done ever. (now I've got 270 hours, so I'm 2.7% of an expert, if you ask Malcolm Gladwell!)

Given that, I figured I could make some real progress. I've just been amped up on descriptions of jhanas and stages of insight from Daniel Ingram, and he suggests attaining the first (samatha) jhana first. Two reasons: it's very blissful, which will make you want to meditate more, and once you're in this state, you can examine it for the characteristics of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and no-self, and go on to insight practice from there.

Sounded good to me. I'm not really sure how to get there, but I think you just concentrate hard. A point along the path to the first jhana is "access concentration", where you get the ability to concentrate on whatever you want for as long as you want. The ability to, say, concentrate on your breath for an hour and never let your mind wander.

What happened: Over the 10 days, I didn't experience anything that I'd consider a jhana. I had a couple times I concentrated on my breath for a good half hour without losing focus, and then had some mildly dreamy thoughts/visions, but I think that attaching special significance to those is is wishful thinking. On the other hand, I had a couple times I concentrated on my breath for a good half hour without losing focus, so that's a start. Both times occurred in the evening, 6-7pm, after a very light dinner and some tea.

So what now? I think keep on track with the concentration. Once I hit the first jhana (or maybe second; it sounds nice and easier to maintain) and can regularly get there, then I'll start back to insight/Vipassana practice. It feels weird to learn Goenka-style Vipassana and immediately drop it (and Mahasi Sayadaw-style Vipassana) and go for concentration, but it seems good for the two reasons above, and also so I can post "I hit something repeatable and definitely qualitatively different from my regular mind, therefore I'm not just wasting time sitting on pillows."

Goenka-style Vipassana meditation, and my reactions

2011-10-22T01:51:00.000-07:00

I spent 10 days at a Buddhist Vipassana meditation course led by S.N. Goenka. I've explained more about the course itself on my travel blog. Here I'll explain in more depth the teaching:

Proper living (/enlightenment) has 3 parts: Sila (morality), Samadhi (concentration), Panna ("pan-ya", with tildes on the n's. wisdom.) Sounds familiar.
Morality is just living your ordinary life well. Five precepts, etc. It's simple enough- we've been learning this our whole lives. Not to say it's easy, but it's more or less simple.
Concentration can be developed by a lot of meditative practices, including "Anapana" meditation, where you just focus on the feeling of your breath in the nose. Just focus on it. When your mind wanders, gently bring it back, non-judgmentally.
Wisdom can be developed by Vipassana meditation. In Goenka's teaching, Vipassana goes as follows: feel the sensations in your body, both the gross sensations (like pain in your knees) and the subtle ones (like just focus on your hands, right now, and after a few seconds you'll probably feel a little tingling, or maybe heartbeat-like pulsing.) Notice them, develop your awareness, and also develop your equanimity- don't react to them with clinging or aversion.
How does Vipassana meditation develop wisdom? You start to realize that you have no permanent independent "self"; you are constantly changing. Every sensation is something changing on a small level. Eventually you realize that everything is impermanent ("anitcha") and that will bring you to enlightenment.
Also, any attachment or aversion you develop is like a line you draw in a rock, or a "sankara", that lies deep within you. When you just notice all your sensations with equanimity, you stop generating new sankaras, and your old ones bubble up to the surface and get evaporated. When you evaporate all your sankaras, you'll be enlightened.

I mostly like his teachings. Here are things about the teachings that I like:

it's mostly in line with things I know about Buddhism.
the body-scanning technique is kind of like the Mahasi Sayadaw-style mind-scanning technique I'd been doing, but for the body instead of the mind. This is sort of easier, because you can go in a direction. Start at the top of the head and go down, start at the feet and go up. You can't really scan the whole mind.

But I have a few beefs. Here are some things I don't like, ordered from least crazy to most crazy:

solving your mind's problems through the body seems like the wrong way to do it. Like debugging software by examining the entire contents of memory. It might work sometimes, but usually it's just inefficient. But then, I am willing to concede that I might be wrong here.
plus, it's kinda boring. After I scan a couple times, I get bored.
he teaches his style of Vipassana as if it is the only way to do Vipassana. Obviously this is frustrating.
he keeps arguing against straw-man organized religions. "Vipassana is a technique, not an organized religion where you do this ritual and pray to that god and do this good deed and then you get rewarded after death." I think very few people would agree that their own religion is "do this ritual and pray to that god and do this good deed and then you get rewarded after death."
at some point he started talking about "kalapas", which are the tiniest particles, smaller than quarks, that make up matter. Apparently each kalapa has the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air. I'll stop here because you can probably sense my scowl.
he also liked to talk about the "law of nature", which I think had something to do with karma, in the sense of "if you do something bad, that will come back to bite you." Guys, this is false. Or he'd start off a story with "there's this guy who had a fortunate life due to some past karma..." Hey, sounds like "do this good deed and you get rewarded after death." (admittedly, he talked about karma sometimes in a non-wacky sense, like how if you generate anger towards someone, it hurts you too.)
that bit about the sankaras! That makes no sense! He offers no explanation as to how this happens, beyond some hand-wavey thing where I guess, e.g., you might develop anger towards someone, and then you'll get a sankara, and later it'll manifest itself as a pain in your foot. I don't know.
and then, after all this, he says "Buddhism is scientific!" ... Goenka-ji, it can be, but you're doing it wrong.

So you might get the idea that I thought the whole thing was crazy. Not so. Most of it actually made a lot of sense, and it was only about 10% talking, 90% meditating anyway. You don't go to this retreat to philosophize, you go to meditate. And now that I think about it, if you just skipped all the dharma talks after maybe day 4, you could have a really great retreat. (however, this is very frowned upon.)

And as Goenka said, if you are eating delicious kheer, and you find a cardamom seed that you don't like, then just leave it aside and eat the rest of the kheer. Eventually you may realize that you like cardamom too, and then you eat that bit. Or maybe not, also fine.

Buddhism has a 4th grader's understanding of alcohol

2011-10-21T10:52:00.001-07:00

Okay okay, 10 days without talking, and I love to talk. I have a lot of things to say. I am very limited by my internet connectivity, and the fact that I want to sleep. This is mildly frustrating. So I'll lead off with this thought because it's quick.

The Five Precepts in Buddhism are: don't kill, don't steal, don't lie, don't have sexual misconduct, and don't take intoxicants (including alcohol). Monks take these (along with a host of others). During retreats, non-monks take these too. Non-monks are further encouraged to take these precepts during normal times too. The first four are of course fine; who could disagree with those? But the fifth one seems a bit severe in our society. I've heard two reasons, and I can think of a third:

1. "When you drink, you become more likely to do all the other bad things." Or sometimes "a drunk person is like a madman" which is kind of like D.A.R.E.'s outlook on booze: you're either sober or drunk. I could see a precept against getting drunk, but against all drinking seems extreme. You can still control yourself.

2. "Continuity of mindfulness is important, so even getting mindless for a couple hours can really hurt your practice." Okay, this argument is more legit. Still, really? No breaks? What about when you're sleeping? And it's not like I'm mindful anywhere near 24/7 anyway...

3. Cultural factors. In Europe, say, everyone drinks sometimes. In India, it's rarer, and maybe back around Buddha's time, the only people who drank were the town drunks. So in this case, this precept seems out of place. (imagine if Buddhism started in Europe, and there was a precept against drinking tea!)

At any rate, could we replace it with "don't use intoxicants irresponsibly"? (or perhaps this is impossible and I just want to have my enlightenment and ~~eat~~ drink it too.)

Well, more grad apps submitted

2011-10-02T03:52:00.000-07:00

CMU HCII, MIT Media Lab, and the NSF and NDSEG fellowships. CMU and MIT were mostly done already, but the fellowships required me to write a bunch more essays. This was frustrating and a bit depressing, although I had two days I didn't know what else to do with anyway. I feel like the NSF app is all about diversity, and the NDSEG app at least hopes that maybe some part of your work might be defense-related, but it's worth applying anyway, I suppose. Getting one of these is the "golden ticket" that lets you study anywhere (because nobody has to worry about paying you, so, why not?), but not getting either is fine too.

Here's hoping! I'm not all too worried; something will turn out.

In other news, here's a snarky quote: I've been listening to the Dalai Lama talk about Buddhist stuff in the day, and I'm reading H.P. Lovecraft stories about Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Mi-Go, and the Great Old Ones at night. Learning about both worlds seems pretty similar.

What I mean by that: you can talk about Buddhism for ages without saying anything practical. Okay okay yes, we have emptiness, causality, suffering, and the four noble truths. Beyond that, we have Nagarjuna, Avalokiteshvara, Milarepa, Maitreya, the Eightfold Path, the Nine Understandings or something, Dharmadutta, Dharmakaya, Theravada, reincarnation, Karma, ... which are all either nice concepts or cultural baggage, but what do you do? I guess I just want to stop talking until I gain some wisdom and have something to talk about. (which doesn't explain why I went to hear some teachings. Oh well, check off HH on the celebrity sighting checklist.)

Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha

2011-09-23T01:15:00.000-07:00

I just finished a book about Buddhism that's been much more accessible and useful than any other book about Buddhism that I've read. It's called "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha" and it is by a guy named Daniel Ingram. He starts off by saying he is an arahat. Then he talks about the fundamentals of Buddhism a bit. Then he bashes pop-Buddhism pretty hard, saying it's often fluff and everyone is just there to "talk about feelings or whatever, dude" instead of actually get enlightened. Then (and this is the good part) he lays out maps of the path from here to enlightenment. I have learned so much. For example:

- there are 3 main things you should practice: morality (being good at the real world), concentration, and insight (aka mindfulness, aka non-duality, emptiness, or seeing things as they really are). These are all distinct practices. So if you want to get better at concentration, practice concentration. etc.

- there are about 8 levels you can achieve in concentration, called the jhanas. they are temporary states, and mostly blissful, although they all have their own distinct characteristics.

- there are about 16 levels you can be in in insight, called the nanas. they are not temporary; they are basically things you learn. the first 3 are somewhat ordinary but still useful realizations, the 4th ("arising and passing away") is super intense, 5-10 are the "dark night" (depressing/difficult), 11 is peaceful again, 12-15 involve actually getting a taste of nirvana. (16 is a bit of a review) When you hit 15 ("fruition"), you are a "stream enterer." Then you repeat this path a bunch of times, eventually becoming enlightened. (aka an arahat)

This is all probably more detail than you care to know, but it is super super interesting to me, because it means that:

- you or I can actually get enlightened, probably in a matter of years, not decades or lifetimes

- there is a map. it's not just sit, sit, sit, sit, bang enlightened. there are intermediate steps, and you'll know when you hit them.

It's encouraging to actually think "I could go for enlightenment." I may do just that. If I do, I'll try to blog my progress whenever I think I make concrete progress, as much as possible. If at any point it seems like I've gone off the deep end, please let me know, but I'll try to keep reading, talking, cross-referencing, and making sure not to get caught up in any nonsense.

I guess I just made a "best albums" list again.

2011-09-19T23:33:00.000-07:00

Here in India, everyone's car has a stereo, and they all have a little USB stick full of Indian mp3's plugged in. As I have a USB stick with me, I thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to create my own little stick in case I'm ever in a situation to show off some American music.

How to do so? I could ponder the perfect 200-song playlist forever, but to make life easier, I decided to just pick 10 albums that I like a lot and that would be good representatives for y'know American slightly-off-mainstream pop music, or whatever it is that I like. So it's not a "best of all time" list, but it's the closest I've come to doing that in a while. Here's what I came up with:

- Fiery Furnaces, Blueberry Boat
- Daft Punk, Discovery
- Cut Copy, In Ghost Colours
- Jens Lekman, Night Falls Over Kortedala
- Bloc Party, Silent Alarm
- The Knife, Silent Shout
- Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense
- Janelle Monae, The ArchAndroid
- LCD Soundsystem, The Sound of Silver
- Of Montreal, The Sunlandic Twins

Comments:
- Hissing Fauna is maybe better but I'd like to not scare anyone
- (that doesn't explain why Blueberry Boat and Silent Shout are on there, but those are two that would be there for sure if I WERE making a best-ever list)
- Stop Making Sense is not even close to the best Talking Heads album, but it might be the best Talking Heads album if you've never heard Talking Heads and were unlikely to again
- Janelle Monae's the only one to make the list since college. Maybe Talking Heads, I wasn't such a fanboy then. Still, it's a little past-heavy. (but not distant-past-heavy; no Weezer or Modest Mouse. I might have heard them too much.)

What if the universe were very small?

2011-08-25T20:32:00.000-07:00

Say, the size of our solar system. What would life be like then?

- almost no chance of ever finding life on other planets

- we'd have to take better care of the earth I guess; even if we colonize the moon and Mars, that's only another 0.35 earths worth of surface area. We'd run out of rocks to live on, and soon.

- things wouldn't seem so boundless. You wouldn't get to look into the night sky and pretend you're going to visit all those stars, like Han Solo.

- speaking of which: would we still have sci-fi with many different star systems? or would that idea just be inconceivable, or hard to visualize, kind of like sci-fi over many different universes is now?

What if the Earth were the only planet? We'd be done: all the space on the planet would be all the space there is! There would be no more anything! How would that affect the way we think?

Don't worry, I'm not trying to make a point here. Just try thinking as if that were true for a minute; it feels weirder than I would have thought.

Meditator's log, stardate 8/22/11

2011-08-22T12:33:00.000-07:00

Assuming I'm going to vanish into blissful nirvana in about 50 years, it'd be a good idea to leave behind some documentation. I guess I checked in for the first time about a year ago, so it's not a bad time to try again.

So I'm two years into daily practice now, starting at Burning Man 2009 with the BuddhaCamp, a group of Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhists, who I chanted with for a few months. After that I kinda did my own meditation thing for a year, inspired by the bits of zen and vipassana I'd picked up. For about January to July this year I've been guided by Ven. Dhammadinna, who runs Bodhiheart Sangha in Seattle along with Tenzin Jesse. Did my first retreat with them for three days in July. In August, I've just been keeping up the practice.

Some things I've noticed:
- I can sit quietly for 20-25 minutes, no problem, it is an easy thing, if I just let my mind wander.
- Meditating for 20-25 minutes, however, is still not easy. I'm talking about something along the lines of vipassana or insight or mindfulness meditation: focus on your breath, and note and know anything that comes up.
- Getting myself to sit down and meditate for 20-25 minutes is still not easy either.
- Sitting cross-legged like that for more than about a half hour in a day, as in a retreat setting, hurts my knees.
- I notice fairly regularly in real life when I am being not so mindful, or causing myself extra suffering. I can't do much about it usually, and I don't try to. Just note it and understand the feeling. And I don't get caught up in mental loops so much, like "argh I shouldn't feel this" or "why do I feel this" or whatever.
- Sometimes I'll be creating all these thoughts like "this is good" or "this is bad" and then there's a nagging doubt in my mind like "hey there's something else you should be thinking about here" but I lazily push it away.
- I feel pretty peaceful about the whole deal. I'm no longer looking too hard for external signals that I'm on the right track, because I realize that they will usually come too gradually to notice, and I trust that this is a good way to a better life.
- Similarly, I've disengaged it from my work a little bit. There's no sense trying to write software to help us be ... somehow mentally better ... before I actually have a better sense of what that means. So, when I'm working, it's less mysticism, more trying to focus on somewhat more concrete research tasks. Like designing for better focus/concentration/attention control.

This week's been a time warp.

2011-08-19T09:13:00.000-07:00

Here I am again, in my parents' house, riding bikes around Westlake, and filling out apps for colleges. What is this, 2003?

Here's a bit more time warp:

I grew up here.

I used to play baseball here. Sometimes I'd get lucky and it'd get rained out.

I was so psyched when this Rite Aid showed up down the street, because it was a place I could get to on my bike (back when my range was about a quarter mile), and I could buy a candy bar or something. Oh childhood.

For a bit of the present, here's the Westlake coffeeshop report:

- The Copper Cup in Bay Village is ~~great~~ closed.

- The Java Cafe is ~~not only great but also right near my house~~ closed.

- The Arabica in North Ridgeville is the only remaining semi-independent shop around. It's also crummy: bland coffee, wireless that doesn't work, no people, and a depressing rural-strip-mall setting.

- Starbucks at Crocker Park has no seating anymore. (They still have free wifi. ... for while you're waiting in line?)

- Starbucks in North Olmsted is actually pretty good. The only downside is that you have to take Lorain Road ("a little slice of hell" - my dad, I think) to get there.

- Starbucks inside Barnes & Noble is actually not a Starbucks, but a Barnes & Noble Cafe Serving Starbucks Coffee with Starbucks Logos (and not accepting Starbucks gift cards).

- Liquid Planet actually serves decent iced coffee for cheap, but it feels like a fast food place. And 90% of their smoothies are full of apple juice. (<-- check it out, not only coffee snobbery but sugar snobbery as well)

- Caribou! Now here's a winner. A warmish atmosphere, standing desks (!), and Eels on the stereo. Well, it was. Music's gone downhill in the past half hour.

Just in case you were wondering.

And as for the future, I will be glad to be at a university and able to concentrate on research, instead of trying to concentrate both on research and on getting into grad school. I've had a few great people helping me, so I'm confident.

Consuming Well

2011-08-15T19:16:00.000-07:00

It almost feels like a life stage: during the last three years, I learned to Consume Well. By "Consuming Well" I mean either consuming something that gives the most satisfaction or causes the least suffering. I learned the best local snacks (bluebird), uppers (victrola), and downers (stumbling monk). I started shopping maybe 75% at farmers' markets, and when I did eat meat, I ate sustainably fished or humanely-treated animals. I bought used furniture and smart brands of clothing and Seventh Generation toilet paper. I got to be a pretty good consumer. If I'd stayed on this path, I probably would have gotten good at wine.

But man, that is about steps one and two on the game of life! That's like learning how to be an artist by sharpening pencils really well! Consuming Well is like knowing the best brands of baseball bats: useful, sure, but only under certain circumstances, and it won't do the work for you.

I'm glad I've gotten better at Consuming Well. It's fun, and it helps bring people together. But I've been asking myself in many areas: can I create, or maintain, or improve here, instead of just consuming? And you too: can you move beyond Consuming Well?

The economy: super hosed, or just kind of hosed?

2011-08-11T12:35:00.000-07:00

On the super-hosed side, there's the fact that we have so much debt. What, we're going to cut 2 trillion dollars... over the next N years... leaving us still with 13 trillion dollars? Or is that optimistic even? And won't interest on these loans end up putting us back to 15 trillion? or worse?

On the just-kinda-hosed side, maybe if we ever get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, don't invade anywhere else, and fix the incentives in our medical system, that'd cut a large part of our budget. Maybe we could even spend some money on schools or something.

What got me thinking about this? Big systems. Seems like everyone should have to study software, economics, neuroscience, or something where there's a big goddamn system with a million billion interconnecting parts. Have you ever looked at a website and said "man, they just need to change this one thing; how hard can that be?!" The answer is sometimes "very hard." Most engineers understand this. The medical, financial, military-industrial, educational, political, etc. worlds, similarly, are big friggin' systems!

Not that an understanding of some big web app grants me magical knowledge of how to fix our medical system. Rather, an understanding of how hard it is to do stuff in a web app gives me at least an appreciation of why these are very hard problems.

(also was spurred on by this; I like his definition of "usury".)

The Definitive Seattle Guide to everything Seattlean that is in Seattle

2011-08-11T09:14:00.000-07:00

No better time to write the post than now. Here's a guide from a 3-year local who lived in Capitol Hill. Really, we all want lists, right?

Tourist things to do:
- Pike Place Market
- go hiking at Mt. Rainier! Or Olympic or Cascades NP as second and third choices. (requires car)
- well, explore some neighborhoods I guess
- get a copy of The Stranger and find things to do

Museums:
- the Wing Luke Asian-American museum is neat
- the rest are kinda hit and miss

Viewpoints:
- Kerry Park, sure
- the Bridge of Good Views (where I think Belmont becomes Lakeview, over I-5)
- University Bridge, looking West
- under Aurora Bridge, on the Burke-Gilman, looking East

Neighborhoods that are neat:
- Capitol Hill
- Fremont
- Ballard
- Georgetown
- the International District

Coffee:
- pour over coffee from Victrola
- espresso from Vivace
- acceptable substitute for either: Zoka or Stumptown
- only a slight step down: Herkimer or Seattle Coffee Works

Boooooooze:
- beer from the Stumbling Monk or Brouwer's
- locally brewed beer from Hale's or the Elysian
- classic cocktails, or interesting inventions from the bartender, at Needle and Thread (above Tavern Law), Knee High, or Zig Zag; all will be crowded, the first two require reservations
- less-crowded drinks for $8 instead of $12, particularly with citrus, at Sun Liquor

Food:
- vegetarian or take the parents to Cafe Flora
- Bibimbap at Kimchi Bistro
- Indian at Travelers'
- Ethiopian at Habesha
- Japanese at Tsukushinbo or nearby in the ID
- for fancy eats: go to Poppy, Quinn's, or ask someone else, because I stopped exploring this quite a while ago

Ice Cream:
- Bluebird in a regular cone or a cup; try half stout, half coffee
- Molly Moon's for a waffle cone

Quit Facebook and join Google+ already.

2011-08-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

A month and a half ago, I looked at Facebook vs Google+ pros/cons. What's changed since then?
- this chrome extension hides the red notification square.
- I've come around on the reshare thing; if you post a photo of yourself smoking pot on facebook you're as good as fired anyway.
- Huddles is frustratingly tricky, because I can't huddle you to make plans tonight, because I don't know if you get it. I'll still give it time to catch on.
- Instant Upload is surprisingly wonderful for sharing photos from your phone; still a little buggy though.

So updated comparison:

Google Plus:
- circles are great
- Huddle and Instant Upload could both be amazing
- you can export your data
- Google doesn't own any rights to your photos
- it's not Facebook

Facebook:
- avoids slight Picasa public->more public weirdness
- it's not Google

... meaning I'm not going to beat around the bush with "there are ups and downs to each" stuff any longer. G+ is a lot better. So (warning: psychological trick ahead) get on that, or get left behind.

Tunnel vision

2011-07-31T20:43:00.000-07:00

Lately I've felt very goal-oriented. I have a hard deadline to move out, so all the moving has to happen before then. So, too, does my work at UW, and the grad school apps are a little less timely but should still happen before I go to India. Plus, I'm leaving, so I'm not super inclined to expand my life in Seattle.

It's the opposite of the anything-is-fine exploratory expanding feeling. Pleasantly, I've had a bit of that (going-away party last night, and general Seattle summer tends to instill it), but otherwise I've been pretty laser-focused.

It's kind of neat in its own way. I feel productive often. I'm looking forward to expanding again too.

Emptiness!

2011-07-15T22:56:00.000-07:00

(I am posting this right after two more posts; if you're not RSS/Google Buzzing this, scroll down to read something a little less esoteric, and a little less me-standing-on-a-rock-and-repeating-myself)

I understand that Emptiness (with a capital E) is a big deal for Buddhists. If you get Emptiness right, if you fully understand it all down to your core instincts, then I think you have got pretty much everything under control. You might even get a badge for being "enlightened." If you are like me and just sort of maybe cognitively cold-brain understand it, then you have got a lot of work to do, so you are like 99.999% of the world.

Here is how I understand Emptiness: everything is just atoms.

Do you know Conway's Game of Life? Read up about it, or try it yourself. It's just a grid with a few simple rules. On every turn, every square with >3 black neighbors or <2 black neighbors turns white; every black square with 2 or 3 black neighbors stays black, and every white square with 3 black neighbors turns black. Draw some patterns, see what happens. (granted, it goes fast, so it can be hard to see.)

But draw this pattern:
ooo
o..
.o.
and click start, and it'll start flying across the screen! You've created a glider!

But the thing is, we call it a glider, but it's really not much of anything. There is no glider there; there are just black and white dots following the rules of the universe. "The glider" is empty of gliderness. It doesn't even make sense to talk about "the glider".

Everything is like that. Ultimately there is no "chairness" in the chair that I'm sitting on, there is no "Seattleness" in this city all around me, and there is no "me-ness" in me. We're all very big, very complicated gliders.

This is where some of my family members jump in and say "You've just argued away God. Any God, all gods, any divine anything, you're killing them. Isn't that depressing?" Ah, no! Sorry. I didn't mean to kill God! God is still there in all the wondrous emergent behavior that makes an imperial stout taste so satisfying, makes a friend care about you, makes a summer Seattle day feel like the best thing in the world. But to talk about these is like talking about gliders: they are just big collections of particles behaving according to the rules of the universe. The only thing we're arguing away is the illusion that there is "A ROSE" separate from the atoms that make up that rose.
(if you're interested, family, we could continue this offline.)

Anyway, this is all very satisfying really, because it means that any problems you have do not actually exist! You see this all the time: you're worried about some failure or something, but the thing you are so worried about is just a construct of your imagination. You can stop dealing with your problems by confronting them or suppressing them, and just let them dissolve at the root because they are not real.

(side notes: I have this book Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett, which I haven't read, but from what I hear about Dennett, I am pretty sure that anything I've said here, he will exactly say the same in that book, and better. (but then, it is a long book.) And while we're at it, Daniel Lemire posts this topical thing that pretty much says the same thing about brains: "sentience" is empty. Throw this in the "I agree a lot" camp, along with Wilber and Csikszentmihalyi.)

Instinct hacking

2011-07-15T22:24:00.000-07:00

I used to like soda. Then at some point I started to get this rather visceral feeling of sugary fuzz on my teeth after drinking it. Also, I get canker sores sometimes, and I started to feel like soda is this acid eating away at the hole in my mouth.

I've co-opted natural feelings of disgust to adapt a healthy behavior (not drinking soda). I don't think I even did this on purpose, but it has a nice effect, so might as well not change it.

Also, after reading something like this, I started feeling similarly icky about sitting. "As soon as you sit, electrical activity in your leg muscles shuts off. Calorie burning drops to 1 per minute. Enzymes that help break down fat drop 90%." etc. Something about the image of my body shutting down vs. chugging along as usual made me want to stand more. And since then I've been standing while I work maybe 50/50.

So this all makes me wonder:

1. what else could we instinct-hack, and how?

2. is there a more widely-used term for this that I don't know?

3. how can we be sure not to hack the wrong instincts? (e.g. what if you start to associate eating with gluttony? instant anorexia.)

(why am I thinking about it now? Buddhists are cool with instinct-hacking. For example, when you're constructing a habit, you can stick with it by associating certain feelings along with it: "I don't want to leave myself blameful for violating this". It brought it to the front of my mind.)

Three days at a retreat house and what I learned there

2011-07-15T21:52:00.000-07:00

Last weekend: first silent Buddhist retreat ever. Man man man I have like 3 posts worth about this. First, some very basic human thoughts:

1. my mind was waaaay on my regular life; it was very hard to disengage. (I wasn't even sure I wanted to.)
2. napping on a warm deck is really very good!
3. my knees hurt a lot when I meditate for more than about an hour a day (we sat about 3x30-40 min; not even that long, all retreats considered, but long enough that I was really not looking forward to it)
4. Buddhism would be great if it didn't have all that Buddhism in it. Particularly, I tend to tune out when a few things are mentioned:
a. reincarnation (although I might be sorta more understanding about this now, but that deserves another post)
b. HHDL (he's an awesome dude, who I'm excited to see teach in McLeod Ganj in October, but I am very wary whenever people start focusing on any particular humans. don't worry, he's still head and shoulders more awesome than the last guy-who-was-followed-by-a-group-I-was-affiliated-with)
c. Medicine Buddhas, recitations, pure lands, or indeed, anything "magical"; this also deserves to be in that post about reincarnation
5. you might be part of a community, even when you don't think you're part of a community; this is nice.
6. sleeping in a tent, I do not sleep as well as I do in a bed. (surprise!)
7. really, I spent a lot of the time wishing it were over and thinking I was missing the point (see: #1, #3, #4, and #6), but I've felt a lot better about the whole mindfulness-and-Buddhism thing since I've been back.

Some higher-level thoughts that are relatively self-contained:
- Buddhist ethics are consequentialist (whether an action is good or bad depends on its effects) in theory but more like virtue ethics (whether an action is good or bad depends on the character of whoever's doing it) in practice. Particularly, whether an action is good or bad depends on the effects on the mental states of all involved. This jives pretty well with me.
- Furthermore, we really don't know all the outcomes of our actions at all. But we think we do, and we catastrophize; we worry about worst case scenarios all the time. So... don't worry so much?
- If you just check in before you do anything and set your motivation, that is very powerful. (could we make software based on that perhaps?)

More to come, and soon!

Lifelapse!

2011-07-04T18:12:00.000-07:00

I love this app. Turn it on, put it in your shirt pocket, forget about it. It takes one photo every 30 seconds. On later iphones it can make a video on its own; on mine (an old 3G), it can just save the photos, and I can stitch them together using ffmpeg (specifically, ffmpeg -r 5 -f image2 -i IMG_%04d.JPG -r 20 new-vid.mpg; "-r 5" makes 5 frames/sec).

I did it the other day. The sorta cool thing is, you can see a video of my day. The really cool thing is, I can figure out everything I did that day, and how long it took! Here are estimates of my day, frame by frame:

0001-0010: computing

0011-0012: bathroom

0013-0155: computing

0156-0157: bathroom

0158-0304: computing

0305-0307: walking around apartment

0308-0310: bathroom

0311-0326: walking around apartment, maybe snacking, getting ready to leave

0327-0398: went for a walk, did some juggling, met another juggler

0399-0410: computing

0411-0420: bathroom

0421-0455: computing

0456-0457: walking around apartment

0458-0459: brushing teeth

0460-0522: nap

0523-0531: walking around apartment

0532-0542: computing

0543-0579: standing and computing

0580-0581: bathroom

0582-0614: biking

0615-0619: ordering coffee

0620-0852: computing at Stumptown

0853-0860: leaving Stumptown

0861-0868: biking to park

0869-0880: a little more juggling

0881-0888: biking home

0889-0921: cooking

0922-0961: eating, I think

0962-1012: standing and computing, I think

1013-1024: washing dishes, I think

1025-1197: standing and computing

1198-1223: biking to a bar

1224-1295: waiting outside because I misunderstood the arrival time they suggested

1296-1454: talking with friends or dancing, it gets hard to tell at this point

So in total:

computing: 11+143+147+12+35 = 348 = 174 min

standing and computing: 37+51+173 = 261 = 130.5 min

computing at Stumptown: 233 = 116.5 min

coffeeshop logistics: 5+8 = 13 = 6.5 min

bathroom: 2+2+3+10+2+2 = 21 = 10.5 min

biking: 33+8+8+26 = 75 = 37.5 min

walking and juggling and being outside: 72+12 = 84 = 42 min

walking around apartment/cooking/dishwashing: 3+16+2+9+33+12 = 75 = 37.5 min

nap: 63 = 31.5 min

eating dinner: 40 = 20 min

waiting outside bar: 72 = 36 min

in bar: 159 (until the camera cut off at 11:59) = 79.5 min

Total time I spent staring at a computer (it was a real get-things-done day): 421 min = 7 hours. Wow.

Total time I spent walking around and doing in-between things indoors: 44 min, not bad but not great

Biking and being outdoors: 115.5 min = almost 2 hours

... Not sure what to do with this data yet, but dang, that's cool!

I'm taking up juggling again.

2011-07-02T18:50:00.000-07:00

In high school, I juggled a fair bit with the St. Ignatius Circus Company. It was sort of fun. Like everything I did those days, I did it for pretty external reasons: extracurricular resume, social status, sweet summer job, third place world championship, etc. After high school, I juggled in the freshman talent show at college, and then not much for the next 7 years.

I've been starting again. Eight reasons:
1. gets me outside on these beautiful beautiful summer days (seriously guys, Seattle is the best place in the universe for half the year)
2. allows me to test habit formation
3. helps me build coordination (maybe?)
4. flow
5. deliberate practice
6. quantified selfing
7. meeting folks
8. to quote C. Thomas Durante, "it's something to do."

Let me first explain how I'm juggling, then I'll talk about a couple of those in a little more depth. I can juggle 3 balls in my sleep. I'd say I'm at the "eggs" level- I could go to the grocery store and juggle 3 eggs, no fear. I'm pretty good with 4- maybe the "oranges" level. A drop is likely enough that I wouldn't juggle 4 eggs, but I'd do oranges. With 5, I'm not at any grocery store level. I can usually get about 20 catches and then I drop or my pattern falls apart and I have to stop. So I'm working on 5 balls, only 5 balls.

Okay, #2, habit formation. I've slowly built up daily habits, slowly slowly, and (stop me if you've heard this before) the key is to do things slowly. I started meditating by sitting down for 5 minutes. I'm learning Hindi at the rate of three words a day. For juggling, I decided to start out with 10 minutes/day. It's easy, but that's the point. 5-10 minutes doing anything is generally enough to get me into the "hey this is kinda neat" stage, and I quit before I'm bored, so I kinda want to do it again tomorrow.

4. It's a test bed for flow. The canonical examples are chess and tennis players, right? They're so totally in the zone that time slows down, they're working hard but completely engaged, they're tossing out these beautiful chess moves or tennis shots, etc. Given that, I'm a little skeptical that something like our daily life can be flowy. If my job involves emailing a dude then reading some papers then writing some code etc... where's the "challenge matched to my ability", or the "instant feedback", or any of this flow-enabling stuff? I mean, I feel like our jobs involve 12 separate tasks, any one of which you could get good at, but all put together they form this sort of generally difficult mess.

5. I guess deliberate practice is in the same vein. Besides external goals, mastery makes things more fun. (and helps you get into flow.) So how do you master something? A lot of deliberate practice. What makes practice deliberate? (and is my juggling deliberate practice?)
- designed to improve performance (sort of. I'm kinda just juggling. If I had a coach or something, I suppose he'd point out particular things to work on and I'd improve faster. Oh well.)
- repeated a lot (daily!)
- continuous feedback (does dropping count?)
- it's demanding mentally (I concentrate pretty hard)
- it's hard (borderline. sometimes I'm just having fun.)
- it requires good goals (is "5 eggs" good? I'm in it for the fun, so I think that counts.)

6. God, I talk a lot! Okay, #6, quantification. Nice test bed for this too: every day I track two things: the number of catches on my first and my last run of the session. (I don't average or anything; I want to get consistently good. Really, maybe I should be measuring the number of catches on my worst run of the day or something, but just counting twice is easier.) I hope I'll have some sort of graph that goes up and to the right. That'll be encouraging.

7. Meeting folks-- perhaps in Asia. Juggling seems like it could cross even linguistic boundaries and provide reasons to start a halting conversation. (and heck, I don't play guitar.)

8. No, seriously, "it's something to do." I have cocktail party trouble sometimes: "what do you do for fun?" "uhh, I do research, and I plan a trip?" Juggling is at least a nice stupid human trick.

I guess all these reasons are pretty well encompassed by Matt Cutts's 4-minute Ted talk. 30-day trials sound like good ways to change your life slowly.

Search Engines are the Vacuum Cleaners of the 2000's

2011-07-01T14:33:00.000-07:00

Imagine you're a housewife. In 1900, you'd wait until your house got very dirty, you'd sweep for an hour, and then your house would be kinda clean. In 1980, you'd wait until your house got kinda dirty, you'd vacuum for an hour, and then your house would be very clean. Either way, you'd spend an hour vacuuming; the only difference is the standard of cleanliness that you're used to.

Now imagine you want to answer a question about, say, which malaria medication is best for you. In 1980, you'd have no idea, and you'd spend an hour looking (where? in health magazines at the library? I have no idea; most likely you'd offload this to your doctor, who would spend an hour looking) and you'd come up with kinda weak information ("my doctor heard of this one study where they said Doxycycline was pretty good"). In 2011, you'd spend an hour looking, and you'd come up with something like this. (reasonably good info, if I do say so myself)

In both cases, the time spent has not decreased, but the quality that you get has improved. The sneaky downside is that the quality you expect has also improved! We (at least I) can't deal with "kinda okay information" anymore- we always want something thorough and cross-referenced with reliable sources.

I think this is good. Certainly, for critical tasks, you want awesome information, just like you want an operating room to be absolutely spotless. But in our everyday lives, just as we should learn to deal with clean-but-not-sparkling houses so we don't spend our lives vacuuming, we should learn to deal with good-but-not-awesome information.

Googlebook vs Facebook

2011-06-30T11:33:00.000-07:00

Googlebook (ahem, "Google Plus") is out. I like it. It might actually let me quit Facebook. But it's not a toaster; I can't just choose one or the other based on how I'm feeling that day. If I were going to hardcore switch, I'd need to convince a bunch of people, and if I'm going to convince a bunch of people without fanboyism, I need to be honest about the pros and cons.

Googlebook pros/Facebook cons:
- Circles are really nice. It is intuitive how to share one thing with my CMU friends, one thing with my Seattle friends, and one thing with my family. Facebook has groups but they're not as much first class citizens.
- I could see Huddles (on the mobile app) being very useful. I've group-texted before and it's always been dumb.
- open data open data. I can get anything out of my Googlebook profile easily. I cannot get things out of my Facebook profile easily (if at all).
- wasn't there something about Facebook owning some weird rights to your photos or wall posts or something?
- I trust Google more than Facebook. Feel free to debate this; my opening volleys are the above two points. Furthermore, (warning: rhetorical trick ahead) nobody trusts Facebook more than Google.

Facebook pros/Googlebook cons:
- there's no bar above me on all Google properties reminding me of how many Facebook notifications I have. That's an attention splitter right there.
- your Picasa photos are in Googlebook. Particularly, those photos you posted a while ago on Picasa, which nobody ever looks at, are now right on your Google Profile, which is now as big as your Facebook Profile. Your public photos are "more public." That's going to go fine for most people, while some will have huge my-boss-saw-me-smoking-pot mistakes and complain about privacy. I think it's not a terrible change, but be careful!
- on Googlebook, if you share a picture of you smoking pot with your friend, your friend can reshare it with the world, unless you disable resharing. Again, not a killer, but it is a thing to learn.

Okay, that's what I can think off the top of my head. What am I forgetting?

EDIT: here's another thing: Some people are uncomfortable with Google owning all your information. As someone I spoke to recently said, "they already have my email, my calendar, etc, and now they have my social network too? Who knows if they start reading all my data and knowing where I'll be and when, etc etc" I guess in this case, an upside of Facebook is that it's not Google. And I can dig that: it's theoretically a lot easier to end up in "creepy integration" territory if you don't have to cross corporate lines. The best counter I have to this is that Facebook is trying to build the all-your-data empire too (e.g. fb messaging), and I'd much rather have Google do it than Facebook.

Caffeine fast complete!

2011-06-27T14:08:00.000-07:00

I had always figured that, since I pretty reliably drink about 150mg caffeine/day (5 cups of tea, 1.5 cups of coffee, or some combination, and yes numbers vary a lot depending on who you ask), I was probably building up some sort of tolerance. I'm not sure how this tolerance manifests, but at least a part of it is that you get more adenosine receptors.

(layman's attempted explanation: when adenosine binds to receptors, you get sleepier. caffeine prevents adenosine from binding to receptors by binding to those receptors itself. but if you drink caffeine every day, the body compensates by making more adenosine receptors, so drinking the same amount of caffeine just returns you to your original non-caffeine baseline.)

I read this blog post and was intrigued to hear that it only takes 5 days of complete caffeine abstention to return to adenosine normality*. He didn't cite sources there, but Wikipedia corroborates. ("withdrawal symptoms... usually last from one to five days, representing the time required for the number of adenosine receptors in the brain to revert to "normal" levels") So I tried it.
*Arvind later clarified: tolerance may not be gone, but after 5 days you can function normally, at least. Not entirely sure what he means, or when tolerance does completely go away.

The results: On day 2, I felt kind of can't-concentrate-crummy. Day 3 was a little slow, days 4-5 were pretty normal. This could just be the result of other work issues, and the fact that days 4-5 were a weekend. And now I'm drinking coffee again for the first time, and I feel wonderful as usual. So, no big results, except that now I guess I have normal levels of adenosine receptors again. Not for long!

Live life as if it were a game you chose to play.

2011-06-21T14:33:00.000-07:00

Normative Heuristic Microethic #3.

I'll try not to say much here, because Sebastian Deterding says it better. Flip through the entire presentation; the first bit just sounds like gamification research (and does a pretty good job of explaining the whole "field"), but the payoff to your life and mine comes at the end.

When I was a kid, I had to mow the lawn every week. Not a game: not fun. Once I was feeling creative so I mowed everything but a happy face, leaving the design in the yard. I wouldn't have admitted it, but it was kind of fun. Sometimes when I go back to my parents' house, I decide to mow the lawn, maybe to do something nice for them or get some fresh air. I decide it's a game: it's fun again.

What if I had a flexible enough mind that, whenever someone said "you must do X", I would immediately transform that into "I'm going to play this game"? I'm not sure how this fits in with my other rules of life, but whenever I decide something's a game, it usually turns out better.

Particularly seek fucking awesome experiences.

2011-06-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

or, Normative Heuristic Microethic #2. And dear family: I'm allowed to swear on the internet if I'm just copying someone else's phrase. (that's Ben Rubin, founder of Zeo.)

Penelope Trunk writes about how some people seek happiness while others seek interestingness. (I'd substitute the word "contentment" for "happiness.") Sounds the same as Barry Schwartz citing Herb Simon about how people are maximizers or satisficers.

I always thought I was a maximizer. Then I tried satisficing for a few years, trying to build a comfortable life in Seattle. (I can only tell that I was doing this in retrospect; I never set out to say "I'm going to satisfice now!") Now I'm pretty sure I'm a maximizer through and through, mostly because I've felt more happy and alive with my current plans (travel around Asia and grad school, both of which are pretty maximizey) than I have in a while.

Tim Ferriss writes about how it's easier to pursue an incredible goal (win a worldwide weightlifting competition) than a realistic goal (complete a marathon). Maybe that's for everyone, maybe it's only for maximizers, but either way I think it's for me.

Avoid cravings. Seek opportunities.

2011-06-19T15:26:00.000-07:00

Or, "normative heuristic microethics, part 1." You can skip the next paragraph if you want.

I'm searching for something. I think that doing good things will improve my life, and doing bad things will make it worse.
Ethics is the philosophy of right and wrong.
Normative ethics is about how to decide what's right and what's wrong.
But I don't really care about Right and Wrong. I'm not often confronted with the chance to bump a guy onto a train track to divert a trolley car to save 5 lives, or the chance to go to war or not. So let's just cut it down to things about my individual life, and call it Normative Microethics.
And even then, my ideal ethical philosophy would likely involve making some huge calculation at every turn: what are the odds that this will turn out like X or like Y, what are the payoffs if it does so, etc. This calculation is usually incredibly impossible to do in real life; I don't care about how to calculate it, because I'll never be able to. I'd like to know some heuristics. Hence, Normative Heuristic Microethics.

Basically, I'd like to develop a set of good rules to live by. (I think of them more as "tastes"; whatever.)

Buddhism has been helpful in this; I feel like (at least some) Buddhists have the right idea about a lot of things. WWBD? I think he'd say something about reducing cravings.

Now, before we go any farther, let me just say one thing: Buddhism is not about renouncing all desires. Say it with me: Buddhism is not about renouncing all desires. Buddhism is about renouncing the desires that hurt you if you don't get them: the cravings. Addicted to drugs? Pining over that girl or guy who doesn't care about you? Love your new car so much that it would kill you if anything happened to it? These are cravings. But if you kind of like cake and don't overeat it, or you get excited about X-Men movies (but it doesn't cause you pain when a new one is cancelled), or you love and appreciate your family, these are fine desires.

That's kind of a half definition, though. "Avoid cravings" tells you what not to do. And especially when we're talking real-world decisions here, I want to know what TO do too. Here's my hypothesis: seek opportunities, where by "opportunities" I mean "those fine desires." Seek out things that make you happy if they turn out well, and don't bother you when they don't. At work, I hear about so many exciting ideas that I want someone to research them all. If one doesn't turn out, there's always another. Traveling, I generally want to get from point A to point B, but if I don't, the detour is generally all the better. This seems a promising attitude to have about life in general.

I don't like feeling helpless.

2011-06-15T18:47:00.000-07:00

And I don't like UPS.

If you send me a package via UPS, here is what will happen: I won't be here, because I don't stay in my house all day. They'll leave a door tag with a checkmark in box B, "The sender required a signature at the time of delivery."

(I'm not sure why it's always box B. I can't imagine all senders always pay for signature delivery. If they could have checked box A, "Your written authorization is required to leave package(s)", that would be fine; I'd sign the tag and they could leave it tomorrow. It might always be B because I'm in an urban area and we're all thieves here.)

I have a few options, most of which are not really options:
1. Stay home all day tomorrow. I've tried this before, and it results in me feeling like a prisoner in my house. It's terrible. Once I ducked out for literally an hour, right around the corner, for a cup of coffee, and put a note on the door asking UPS politely to leave the package or call me. I came back to find "Can't leave package. No phone." scrawled on the note.
2. Ask a neighbor to stay home. I don't know my neighbors beyond their names and saying hi; I'm not going to ask THEM to be prisoners in THEIR houses.
3. Ship it to my office. I don't have an office.
4. Ask them to hold it at the UPS main dropoff location, pick it up on my bike. This is about 5 miles south of downtown; at least a half hour bike ride in the opposite direction of everywhere else I ever go, through industrial wasteland, and that's if it's a small enough package that I can take it on my bike. Net cost: 1 hour.
5. Ask them to hold it at the main dropoff location, take a bus. Net cost: 2 hours and $4.50.
6. Just let it get returned to sender, ask them to resend it via USPS. I've tried this twice; once the company put up a big fuss and eventually agreed (but I discovered option 7 first so didn't end up following through), and once the company re-sent it two months later, again via UPS. Also, this is dumb. Also, it's not handled by websites or phone tree forms, so I have to talk to a human, so net cost: about 15 aggravating minutes, and my package gets delivered two months late.
7. Ask them to deliver it to the local UPS store. This is the same in their eyes as if I had asked them to deliver it to another arbitrary location; it's as if UPS and The UPS Store were separate companies. UPS charges me $4 for an address change, and The UPS Store charges me $5. Net cost: $9.

Nowadays I just do #7, paying $9 extra in shipping on stuff costing as little as $50. It's bad. But it's not the end of the world, though, which is why I'm intrigued by how angry this whole thing makes me feel. It's like yell-curses-around-my-(empty-)house angry, which is pretty much worse than anything else. Is it just that I really have no other stressors in my life of Riley? (could be.) Or is it that powerlessness angers me much more than most other stressors, and UPS is almost the only place I feel powerless?

Finally, is there a solution to this? I try to calm down and think rationally, but all I can think of is $9 (or worse: an hour of my life) going away for a totally avoidable reason.

No-meat experiment results: wow.

2011-06-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

So I did the no-grains experiment a couple times, and I generally found that eating no grains made my stomach feel a little better. After taking out all the possible extraneous factors, it was a small positive effect, but not quite statistically significant.

I wondered, am I just feeling better because I'm thinking about my food a little more? So I went for another experiment: vegetarianism. This was not as difficult, as I've been used to eating not much meat, but eating no meat altogether made me think a bit. So I went almost a month, eating meat only once. (couldn't resist the opportunity to try a pig's foot at a Taiwanese place with my friends Will and Jing. FWIW, it was really good.)

Here are the results. Again, these values are arbitrary 1-5 ratings of how good my stomach felt, recorded whenever I remembered to do so.

Average stomach values when I was vegetarian:
['2.33', '3.00', '3.43', '2.00', '3.20', '2.71', '2.32', '2.50', '2.50', '3.00', '3.17', '3.14', '3.00', '2.33', '2.33', '3.00', '3.40', '3.14', '3.33', '3.33', '2.67', '3.17', '2.50', '3.33', '3.17', '3.00', '2.67']
Mean: 2.87710940708

Average stomach values when I was not vegetarian:
['2.88', '3.14', '2.37', '3.21', '2.70', '1.64', '3.14', '2.95', '2.53', '3.43', '3.00', '2.62', '4.00', '3.33', '3.11', '3.00', '3.43', '3.00', '2.68', '2.68', '3.42', '3.29', '3.33', '3.12', '3.50', '2.56', '2.83', '3.70', '2.80', '2.88', '3.00', '3.35', '3.36', '3.00', '2.80', '3.00', '3.36', '3.80', '3.56', '3.00', '2.83', '3.52', '2.66', '2.22', '2.78', '2.78', '4.00', '2.25', '2.50', '3.11', '3.80', '3.25', '2.62', '3.55', '3.20', '3.60', '3.81', '2.83', '3.60', '3.30', '3.51', '2.80', '3.22', '2.92', '3.51', '3.38', '2.83', '3.64', '3.71', '3.74', '3.00', '3.43', '2.70', '3.19', '3.08', '2.69', '3.68', '3.43', '2.86', '3.00', '3.37', '2.44', '2.29', '3.24', '2.29', '3.44', '3.00', '3.12', '3.14', '2.70', '3.00', '3.12', '3.77', '2.25', '2.20', '3.40', '3.27','2.89', '2.00', '3.34', '2.77', '2.93', '2.83', '2.90', '2.47', '3.67', '3.85', '2.60', '3.71', '3.00', '3.33', '3.22', '3.00', '2.99', '3.12', '2.70', '3.71', '2.92', '2.84', '2.65', '3.00', '3.38', '2.60', '3.14', '3.29', '3.16', '3.81', '2.36', '3.27', '3.30', '3.40', '2.62', '2.88']
Mean: 3.07318849872
t = -2.13426416275, p = 0.0343639577132

Huh! So being vegetarian makes my stomach feel a little worse!

Skippable side note: I did travel during some of the vegetarian time. Rerunning the data omitting those values, it comes out the same.

Average stomach value when I was vegetarian: 2.84902728756

Average stomach value when I was not vegetarian: 3.07318849872

t = -2.18353942908, p = 0.0305296553454

Side note that might be relevant: I've been recording fewer data points than I used to.

Number of ratings per day when I was vegetarian: 5.22222222222

Number of ratings per day when I was not vegetarian: 7.92481203008

t = -4.99546061942, p = 0.00000154006168467

Side note that also may be relevant: my mood ratings (which I've been tracking similarly) are almost significantly different as well. This could strengthen the "eat meat" conclusion, or it could be that I've been a little bit down the last couple weeks.

Average mood value when I was vegetarian: 3.33179694171

Average mood value when I was not vegetarian: 3.49920969731

t = -1.95361169902, p = 0.052513305171

Combined conclusions: if I combine my stomach ratings from the two no-grains experiments, my average rating is 3.26375. So by eating meat and not grains, I could ostensibly go from 2.87 to 3.26, an increase of 0.39. How significant is 0.39?
Well, I've been collecting data for 160 days. One day had an average value below 2, two days were above 4. The standard deviation is 0.43. So 0.39 is a pretty good jump; I could go from an average day to a day that is better than 2/3 of days. Hmm. I think I'll start eating (non-factory-farmed) meat again, and stop eating grains when it's convenient.

Attention and coffee (unrelated)

2011-06-10T14:29:00.000-07:00

(although a well-researched post about the effects of coffee on attention would be really interesting. Someone go write that.)

How much is your attention worth? Furthermore, how much is your friends' attention worth?

I just heard about the Indie Games Summer Six-pack, which is $10, or $5 if you share on Facebook. So they're proposing that a shout out on Facebook is worth $5. I'm guessing this is roughly equivalent to a tweet, so let's talk about tweets because they're easier to think about than the 27897489 ways you can "share" or "like" or comment or whatever on Facebook. And let's talk about pretty benign things like indie games; we're not talking about paying someone to tweet racial slurs or political stuff or whatever. Is a benign advertising tweet worth $5?

I mean, clearly there is a price on tweets, even for folks like me who hate this attention-frittering spam. If you paid me $1000, I would tweet your benign advertisement. Probably for $100. Probably not for $5. I don't know where this thought goes, but it's kind of exciting, or maybe terrible, to know that celebrity endorsements are here on a micro-scale, and we are all micro-celebrities.

Topic switch, and now I'm on to copying down bits of my life to remember later, and in particular coffee. I spend a lot of time now in coffeeshops. Mostly the Victrola on Pike. Somehow it's better than working at home. Big and airy, full of people, and I can't really do much besides work. (oh, and fritter away time on the internet. whoops.)

I drink pour-over coffee (it's like a machine makes, but they pour hot water over the grounds while you wait, and the temperature and weight of grounds are precisely controlled). For the first time, I could taste the difference between different coffees. I'm developing a bit of a taste for coffee here. It's cheaper than wine, and you can drink it by yourself. I think I like rich chocolatey South American coffee best, but African fruity winey coffees are nice too.

I pay $3 for the coffee and leave a $1 tip. And maybe I go there 3x/week. That's about $50/month, or $600/year. But I'm getting an office, a morale boost, a caffeine boost, and an education for my taste buds.

Doubt, Uncertainty, and Fear

2011-06-08T00:30:00.000-07:00

It's terrible marketing, and it's also all of the challenges in my life right now.

Doubt: meditation. I was all "why have I done this for two years without noticing any benefit? and why should I keep doing it?" The only answer I could come up with was "faith". This bugged me.

Rewind eight years and I'm a clever little snot meeting up after class with the best theologians at St. Ignatius High School. (my teachers, I mean.) I think I was honestly searching for something to believe in, although I might have been trying to be smart. We went through all the arguments for and against some divine something, and I fell pretty quickly on the "for" side of that. But then I said "well, what about Christianity? why should I dedicate my life to this Jesus fellow instead of any other wiseman?" and their responses boiled down to "he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven." That is a slam dunk argument if it is true! But given the ambiguities with early Bible history and folks' tendencies to worship (npi) their heroes until they're larger than life (npi), I wasn't convinced. The next line of defense was "well, of course you can't prove Jesus is God; you have to have faith." I can deal with faith in people, or institutions, or whatever, that have earned my faith, but making the leap from Jesus being a wise and good guy to that pretty astronomical legend, well, that bugged me too.

(it didn't help that this was popular on the radio about that time.)

So what's the difference? How is my current *ahem* faith in meditation better than my childhood faith in Jesus? I think to get at that, you have to take the Buddhism out of it. Faith in reincarnation, say, seems about on par with faith that Jesus is God. But faith in developing a stronger, happier, more fulfilled mind through meditation seems pretty believable even for the skepitickest skeptic.

At any rate, I'm back at it, plugging away no matter how futile it might seem.

Uncertainty: my work! I'm working on a short javascript sorta-game to test a hypothesis that just learning can be fun, if it is well structured. My timeline is: finish game by June 15, iterate until June 30, do some tests by July 15, have results and write paper by July 31. I am not sure if I can hit any of those deadlines. I'm not sure if I'll get any results if I do.

I guess the good life here lies in savoring the uncertainty. That's what I wanted, right? To work on newfangled things that might or might not work? Try them, see if they work! That is the fun of it all! It is good to remind myself of that.

Oh, and Fear: well, that comes from getting lost three miles into a snow-covered forest at midnight last weekend. Hah!

Two contradictions, one answered, and two questions, all unrelated.

2011-06-01T13:31:00.000-07:00

Contradiction 1: it's better to be mindful of what you're doing, but the way to adopt a better behavior is to automate it.

Interlude 1: apparently I post about "mindfulness" all the time now. Well, deal with it, I guess.

Contradiction 2: being overly proud is obnoxious, but having high self-esteem is beneficial in just about everything all the time.
Answer to contradiction 2: focus instead on self-compassion.

Question 1: You keep up with movies and TV; why not music? (proposed answer: social pressures, plus we never take time out to just listen to a CD.)

Question 2: Why is "addiction" a negative feature in drugs, but a positive one in software?

I like San Francisco.

2011-06-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

It's a nice place to walk around. I like the Mission, both hipster-Mission (16th and Valencia) and Hispanic-Mission (24th). (is it okay to say "Hispanic"?)

There is good coffee. I was just introduced to Philz, which I would instantly recommend to anyone who thinks all coffee tastes the same. They have 15 different blends; I like the Ambrosia. Then I had perhaps the hippest coffee I've ever had, at Sightglass. It cost $5.25, the point-of-sale machine was an ipad, everyone around me had awesome beards and jeans, and it might have been the first time I've ever been the fattest dude in the room. But hey, the coffee was on par with Victrola's, which is saying something, because they've got the home-field advantage. (and their coffee is really good.)

There is good ice cream. Yeah yeah, Bi-rite rocks, but man, Humphrey Slocombe is it. Peanut butter curry and Secret breakfast (bourbon and cornflakes) might be the most flavors I've had in one bowl.

I guess I'm lunch-tweeting. I got to thinking, y'know how reading and then reflecting helps you remember what you read better? I wonder if consciously lunch-tweeting would improve both my sense of taste and my mindfulness of what I eat.

Anyway, back to San Francisco. I'm thinking of living there, if I were to end up at Stanford. The commute would be really hard. 20 minute bike ride, hour train, 15 minute bike ride, and $6.50... each way. Maybe if I lived closer to the Caltrain station? But I was underwhelmed by SoMa and Dogpatch; they both have a cool warehousey charm but it feels like it'd be isolating to live there. (SFer? tell me if I'm wrong.) And Potrero Hill is close to the 22nd street station on a map, but it's on a huge hill.

A quarter century!

2011-05-26T17:03:00.000-07:00

I'm 25. That means I've lived 25 years. Hah! I've still got my piece on the game board of life, and it's doing pretty all right.

If life were a day, I'd be in late-stage sleep, probably heavy on the REM and dreaming wildly. If life were Star Wars, I'd be half done with Gungans, although only a quarter done with Hayden Christensen. If life were the career of the Talking Heads, I would be just about to release "More Songs About Buildings and Food".

I'm leaving Seattle in just over two months, and the US in just over three. In the next year, I will hopefully experience the following:
- visiting all you wonderful family and friends before I go
- the world's tallest mountains and a lot of Buddhism

- submitting papers to top-tier academic conferences

- plants that eat bugs
- one of the world's biggest tennis tournaments
- underground cities and stuff
- at least one country that y'all think is super dangerous

- admission into at least one grad school that I'm excited about

- a crater that is continually on fire

After that, I'll get paid a scholar's stipend to write some programs that I want to write, to find out things that I want to find out, and occasionally hang out at big ol' intellectual fandangoes with other like-minded sorts.

""Well," said Pooh, "what I like best -- " and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called." That's the moment I'm living in right now: the moment of excitement, and boy it is great.

But it's not the whole thing. Over the next quarter of my life, I hope that I can balance that excitement with more focus, mindfulness, and compassion. I think these are the most important skills to develop, and I still feel like a fool! But that's fine; after two years of regular learning-stuff school, I was a second grader.

Anyway, it's tempting to say "well, look at my life about to start; the best is yet to come!" but that reduces life to a set of achievements, sets myself up for potential failure, and discounts the truth that the best is right now. As they say: Thank you for everything, I have no complaints whatsoever.

We all know everything.

2011-05-25T19:04:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the Internet, we all know all the facts. When you learn something, you're just decreasing the lookup time.

Sometimes this is useless. I don't think it'll ever be important for me to know Abraham Lincoln's birthday. If I did need to know it, I could spend 30 seconds looking it up.

Sometimes this is moderately useful. I could look up a recipe for lasagna every time I want to make it, or I could just memorize it. It'd be a little easier to make.

Sometimes this is very useful: knowing a programming language inside and out will save you so much time. If you have to look up documentation for every line of code, it'll take you hours instead of minutes.

Sometimes it's crucial. Being able to speak a language is qualitatively different from having to look up every word, conjugation, and grammatical rule. Even more so with physical tasks: knowing how to swing a baseball bat vs. knowing all the things you should do when you swing a bat. But either way, you're not making something out of nothing, you're just decreasing the lookup time of existing facts.

I'm thinking we should just stop teaching the first two cases, and optimize for learning the "very useful" and "crucial" cases. Interestingly, I'm also thinking that learning the "very useful" and "crucial" things is more fun.

Seligman: talk about PERMA, not "happiness"

2011-05-18T14:28:00.000-07:00

Martin Seligman is partially responsible for everyone talking about "happiness" today. But he's also sick of people just hand-waving about it. From the article:

"He has also created his own acronym, Perma, for what he defines as the five crucial elements of well-being, each pursued for its own sake: positive emotion, engagement (the feeling of being lost in a task), relationships, meaning and accomplishment."

This feels more meaningful. Did he forget anything? It's worthwhile to note that there's nothing that explicitly says "meditation", which might be a problem if you're, say, interested in meditating. I think the meditator's response is that meditation increases all of these. Mindfulness can increase positive emotion, concentration leads to engagement, meditators are good with people, maybe they find some big ultimate meaning, and maybe less of accomplishment but purifying your mind is good for something.

At any rate, I like this article.

Is motorcycling dumb?

2011-05-15T21:21:00.000-07:00

I just passed my motorcycle test. I wish I had asked about statistics on motorcycle safety during the class. I found this and this and this, all of which make it seem like motorcycling is indeed much more dangerous than car driving. Perhaps an order of magnitude more dangerous!

But drawing facts relevant to me out of this is hard! Here are at least four good reasons (and I may repeat some of them) that make it seem not totally absurd for me to ride motorcycles:
1. I am not into sport bikes
1. I am not into dirt bikes
1. I am not into really any kind of fast bikes
1. I pretty much want to ride a moped at like 40 mph tops on country roads
2. actually I just want to ride a moped in Asia
a. maybe that makes things dangerous, because Asia (particularly India) is insane
b. however, maybe that makes things safer, as they are much much more used to motorcycles there than here, and the biggest danger here is cars not seeing you (citation needed)
c. I am not ruling out ever motorcycling in the States, but if I did that I would have to consider more safety statistics more
3. okay okay I don't drink and drive obv (this is apparently even a bigger contributor to motorcycle accidents than car accidents)
4. I just took a motorcycler safety course
1. but really, I am just not interested in fast bikes. I am encouraged by this:
"Not all powered two wheelers have the same level of risk. The relative risk of being killed per hundred million vehicle kilometres overall in 1988 when comparing motorbikes to cars was 8.4, and for bikes and pedal cycles, 2.9. However, the relative risk for mopeds which may be used by a different user group at lower speeds was 2.3 when compared to cars, and 0.9 when compared to pedal cycles, making them favourable by comparison."
And I already ride bicycles, so I'm not increasing my risk. (which leads to: is bicycling dangerous? well, this is per mile, so my 2 mile bike commute is much safer than a driver's 10 mile commute.)

Conclusions:
- mopedding/motorcycling slowly as an occasional hobby (say, in Asia) is not absurd
- mopedding as a daily commute is reasonably dangerous (like bicycling), so I will take care and get all the gear and wrap myself in day-glo if that situation enters my future
- riding a real motorcycle on highways and stuff occasionally may not be absurd (again, I am not interested in this, don't worry, Mom and Dad)
- riding a real motorcycle fast as a daily commute, or riding anything faster/fancier, is probably Actually Dangerous (unless you are a real pro)

Well, I've found a career.

2011-05-13T23:52:00.000-07:00

Just got back from Vancouver and CHI, the biggest human-computer interaction conference. My research blog has a list of some papers I found cool. But more importantly for this blog, I loved the experience.

About 8 of us drove up from the UW Ubicomp Lab in a van. We stayed for 4 days, and each day involved 4 90-minute 4-talk sessions. Super cool stuff. I don't think a single session passed where I was bored by the talks. "Human-computer interaction" apparently does mean what I hoped it meant, which is "Anything where a person uses a computer, come on guys, let's make this all better." It's a bit generalist: it seems like people study "Computers + X" and learn a lot about X. Which is wonderful! Sure, you could study databases or something and squeeze out 4% more efficiency from some algorithm... or you could apply a computer to something that didn't previously have any computers and gain 100% more efficiency! Or solve problems that nobody else knew existed, or they knew they existed and had no idea how to solve them!

Between and after the sessions, of course, was massive standing eating drinking talking, which I understand is referred to as "networking". And here's the other thing: I like the people. I could see myself working with a lot of them in the future. So that's great.

Finally, I felt like I could hack it! There are hard problems, but I wouldn't mind tackling them, which means I could solve them. I feel like I can really make it in the academic world.

Okay, enough talk; time to go actually make it in the academic world. Cancel that; time to sleep so I can go learn how to motorcycle tomorrow. Woo!

No-grains experiment 2

2011-05-07T16:01:00.000-07:00

Well, I wanted to try it again, so I went for the last week and a half, almost 2 weeks, without eating grains. Got a bit more data. Plus I've been tracking this stuff non stop since the beginning of the year. So here's what I came up with, comparing every day I've eaten grains with every day that I haven't:

stomach with grains: ['3.10', '2.92', '2.78', '2.83', '2.36', '3.10', '2.75', '3.29', '3.12', '3.34', '2.87', '3.50', '3.60', '3.71', '3.00', '3.67', '3.25', '2.53', '3.00', '4.00', '3.44', '3.28', '2.33', '3.22', '3.81', '2.82', '2.71', '3.46', '2.40', '2.82', '2.84', '2.94', '3.09', '2.83', '3.60', '3.60', '2.91', '3.55', '3.00', '3.12', '2.75', '2.77', '2.81', '2.33', '3.22', '3.22', '2.75', '2.86', '3.14', '3.29', '3.00', '3.12', '3.14', '3.20', '3.00', '3.36', '3.33', '3.40', '3.71', '3.34', '3.40', '2.82', '2.71', '3.00', '3.29', '3.21', '3.17', '2.67', '3.50', '2.40', '2.80', '3.81', '3.08', '3.42', '3.56', '2.88', '3.50', '2.86', '2.84', '3.38', '3.24', '2.88', '2.29', '2.89', '2.84', '3.12', '2.00', '2.20', '2.75', '1.91', '2.33', '2.67', '2.43']
mean = 3.03
stomach without grains: ['3.33', '3.67', '2.89', '3.37', '3.31', '3.60', '3.00', '2.87', '2.59', '2.80', '2.92', '3.11', '3.22', '3.63', '3.47', '3.29', '2.89', '2.67', '3.30', '2.88', '3.87', '3.80', '3.85', '4.00', '3.57', '3.22', '2.70', '3.30', '3.59', '3.18']
mean = 3.26

t-test on stomach before and after grains:

t = -2.67446580787, p = 0.00851982121181

So there we go! Going grain-free very probably helps my stomach feel better! If going grain-free didn't help my stomach, there is only a 0.8% chance that the means would be this different.

However, there are complicating factors:

- travel days. On travel days stomachs are weirder.

- Google days. I used to be getting gourmet meals 3x/day, and now I have to fend for myself.

So let's ignore the travel days:

t-test on stomach before and after grains:

t = -2.23123617479, p = 0.0277911206015

stomach with grains: mean = 3.09

stomach without grains: mean = 3.26

Still significant.

How about only comparing days after I left Google?

t-test on stomach before and after grains:

t = -1.06189037683, p = 0.294500544066

stomach with grains: (daily averages omitted)

mean = 3.13

stomach without grains: (daily averages omitted)

mean = 3.26

No significant effect.

Did Google just make my stomach worse? Let's compare all the days while I was still at Google to all the days after I left.

t-test on stomach before and after Google:

t = 1.00310288377, p = 0.317813018172

stomach while I was still at Google: (daily averages omitted)

mean = 3.11

stomach post-Google: (daily averages omitted)

mean = 3.03

Nah, looks like the gourmet meals were nice after all. (or at least, probably no real effect either way.)

So I'm guessing that, all other things being equal, grain-free makes my stomach feel slightly better. It appears to have an effect, but it's a small one. And I don't have enough data from post-Google no-travel life to show statistical significance yet.

Indeed, what WILL we do without our vanities?

2011-05-06T23:45:00.000-07:00

I thought that bit was just the best few sentences I'd heard in a long while. But it's stuck with me, digging up an old question I still haven't answered:

What would you do if you didn't do what you do? or, more concretely,
Should I bring a computer on my travels?

In the one corner, we have most of the world, Csikszentmihalyi, and Wilber: get more complex. Do the things you do, do them well, integrate them with your being. In the other corner, we have ascetics. (well, they're wrong, anyway.)

Here's an answer I kind of like: keep spinning all those plates that you're spinning, but take periodic breaks from your vanities, check in, regroup, make sure you want to be spinning them all.

From "A Journey in Ladakh" by Andrew Harvey

2011-05-06T17:01:00.000-07:00

"You must write and I must be a guide. It is our svaha, our nature. Perhaps next time we will be luckier, less condemned to our different vanities. I will talk less and you will carry no big black notebooks, full of illegible writing."
"What will we do without our vanities?"
"We will drink. We will see visions. We will heal the sick and bring love and calm to the mad and evil. We will play cards all night and not need to sleep. We will walk on water in front of a hundred thousand cameras, to refute all materialists for ever."

---

I'm two days away from heading to CHI 2011 in Vancouver. This will be a thing.

I've been measuring time I work, defined as actual time concentrating and creating (not answering emails or blogging or whatever). It's much less than I'd think: 4 hours on a good day.

Today, for example, 5pm and I've done zero hours so far. Yesterday I did zero hours. You know what takes up a lot of mental energy? Trying to impress people. It's important to remember not to spend time doing that.

I am having remarkably high quality experience today.

2011-05-01T14:48:00.000-07:00

It's not that the things I'm doing are special, but the experience of doing them just feels relatively wonderful.

I slept like an incredible rock last night. 9:48, and a Wakemate score of 100. Perfect 100! My previous high over the past 4 months was something like 87.

As I was just walking across a bridge, listening to Kanye West's "Lost in the World" (I was surprised to find I really like this album), feeling the sunny warmth and marveling at all the cars going underneath! I rather had a moment. I must have confused people walking the opposite direction, because for some reason I was smiling really a lot. I tried to tone it down so it wouldn't be creepy. It felt different than regular life, like I was on a drug or something. Kind of like a couple times biking in Pittsburgh, and I'm sure some other times that I haven't remembered.

Consuming well

2011-04-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

I tend to draw a line between consumptive and productive pleasures. You can get enjoyment out of eating an ice cream sundae, watching a movie, or painting a painting, but I feel like the first two are very different from the last. Obviously there's the effect (after one you have a beautiful artwork, and after the other you have less money and more ice cream in your body) but it also just feels weaker. Anyone can eat a food and have fun, but to paint and have fun you have to work at it. Get into a flow state, not just a passive consumption state.

I'm still reading "The Evolving Self", which posits that the way to ... happiness? improvement? general goodness? ... is to cultivate "complexity", in which you become a creature of many parts that work together as a unified whole. Differentiate and integrate. Being highly evolved is better, and being highly evolved means being complex. Sounds like Ken Wilber. And I still pretty much agree with it.

(aside: "complexity" is a loaded word; I wish he had picked something else, because by "complex" he doesn't mean "complicated". I like simplicity. But I think I like the simplicity of a very well-made watch: a lot going on, but it's easy to use and all the abstractions are hidden from you. This watch would be a very complex thing, but still simple, not complicated.)

Consumptive pleasures often don't increase complexity. Productive ones often do. But I think the key is the "often"; sometimes you can consume something in a way that adds complexity. And I guess, given that we consume anyway, might as well consume in complex ways.

Case in point: Jonah Lehrer (Radiolab! That's what he's on.) recently wrote a post about why it's worth being an oenophile, even though cheap wine regularly beats expensive wine in blind taste tests. Take away the blindness, let people see the price tag, and expensive wine always wins. So if you don't know wine, your enjoyment goes up with price. But if you do, you can start to pick out other good things in the wine besides the price. That's complex consumption.

I still think it's a siren's call: there are only a few steps from "complex consumption can improve your life" to "you can just sip wine all day, get a job as a sommelier, live the easy life, and it'll be great". But there's nothing basically wrong with connoisseurship.

Okay, we already knew this, right? Sheesh. tl;dr: nothing to see here.

Nah check it out, HERE is a business card

2011-04-28T14:50:00.000-07:00

Okay I guess one last blog/buzz about business cards.

There it is. Woo!

How to make one yourself:
1. Find a QR code generator. I like this one because it lets you set error correction levels.
2. Set error correction as high as possible (that is, it'll have more dots, some of which are redundant in case some fool smudges or tears or writes all over the middle of it.)
3. Input what you want to pop up when someone scans it. If you want the code to represent just a bit of text or a URL, fine. But if you want more structured data (like a bunch of contact info) you can use specially formatted strings. Here's a guide to the types. And if you want contact info in particular, you can use the MECARD format (details here). So, for example, the text embedded in that QR code is:
MECARD:N:Tasse,Dan;;;EMAIL:dan.tasse@gmail.com;URL:http://www.dantasse.com;
(kinda think some of those ;'s are unnecessary)
4. Write all over the middle of it. Seriously, just in Paint or GIMP or something.
5. Make sure it still works.
Here's another person's guide that says the same things.

I would really love your feedback on my business card.

2011-04-27T16:18:00.000-07:00

I'm going to a conference for the first time ever. I will probably meet a lot of people. Maybe I would like some of them to remember me. So I made a business card.

Quick:
- what's my email address?
- what are you thinking about?
- intrigued or annoyed?

Also, I am particularly interested in your thoughts on:
- font choice. IANAFN, but I like fonts sometimes. I basically want the feel of just writing this in courier, but I don't want people to think I'm a computer-cluster linux-kernel-hacker long-hair nerd-rager. I considered Futura (but it was too art-deco retro or something), Frutiger (less interesting and I couldn't find it for download in 5 minutes), Gill Sans (for some reason I thought it was associated with macs?), and Yanone Kaffeesatz (too narrow to fill the space). I went with Droid Sans, as it seemed at least as good as anything else to my untrained eye, and it might subtly make people think Android. If they do think Android, that's good; I dig Android (and Google)'s philosophy (obviously), and anything I do will probably involve using Android a lot.

- spacing between "dan" and "tasse". I was going to try to make it a half-space or something, squash the words together a bit, because otherwise people might wonder "is it dan_tasse@gmail or something?" but that was not trivial to do, so I skipped it.

- spacing and borders in general. Anything look too close or far from the borders of the card? (note that it will not have a border; if you see a double line around it, that's an artifact of blogger)

- should I leave off the twitter? I use it wayyy less than gmail, and right now all it does is post when I blog a new research blog. But I'd like to start using it for research/business/etc more, as it seems a good tool for that.

Cleveland, you spoil me!

2011-04-25T14:50:00.000-07:00

Every time I touch down in CLE, I spend a week surrounded by people who love me. Okay, of course, going home to visit family and friends is nice. Dear Future Dan (one of the main readers of this blog): remember this week, it was really great!

Dear all the other readers of this blog: you are probably less interested in my reminiscing about family-and-friends-time. So instead, I'll point out some great things about Cleveland that you might get a chance to experience someday if you're lucky enough to visit here:

- theater at the Hanna, where my parents and I saw Two Gentlemen of Verona, and despite the play being generally not an awesome Shakespeare play, the performance was really well done!

- dinner at Lola, where now-famous chef Michael Symon got his start (I think?). Anyway, calf heart: surprisingly not weird, and surprisingly good. And pork belly too. Wow. (vegetarians beware.)

- drinks at the Velvet Tango Room, okay this place was kinda underwhelming when I live so close to Sun Liquor, Tavern Law, and Zig Zag, but it's at least in the same league, albeit more expensive.

- whoops forgot a drink in the middle at the Paganfest promotional show at Maple Grove in Maple Heights. Sometimes these things happen. Cleveland!

- 30+ kinds of olive oil and balsamic vinegar at the Olive Scene, and lunch at Tartine, in Rocky River. Check out the Olive Scene. Disclaimer: friends' parents own it. But it's great.

- another great lunch, this time at some bar I don't remember but it was on TV or something, I don't know these things it was tasty

- still got to stop at the West Side Market, which is still also wonderful.

I mean, this is right out of an airplane magazine "36 hours in Cleveland" deal. There is a lot going on there. I think I will not dump on Cleveland so much. It's got a lot of issues (cars cars cars) but it also has a lot to offer. I like to think about the latter. (more on that later!)

EDIT: whoops, I guess I didn't click Publish when I wrote this? So I published it later. Editing the date now to fit it back within the squiggly-wiggly timey-wimey continuum. (btw, new Who season: super great!)

Hot brain, cold brain

2011-04-23T11:49:00.000-07:00

Cold brain = the part of you that thinks like a computer.

Hot brain = emotions, gut feelings, instincts, procedural memory, the stuff that guides your actions.

Is there a better term for this? If not, I'm going to start using the terms "hot brain"/"cold brain" a lot. It really concisely describes something I often want to talk about. For example, it's easy to learn in your cold brain that smoking causes cancer and that you should quit smoking. But it's hard to convince your hot brain, which is why quitting smoking is hard. Or, it's easy to learn vocabulary in a foreign language (cold brain) but hard to come up with it as you speak (hot brain).

And if you like barbecue chips, maybe you also like barbecue sauce.

2011-04-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

So here I rail against people using their phones when they're hanging out with friends. (in general with the "multitasking is bad" thing.) And then I'm at a bar, and I realize I could help settle a dispute between some other friends, but I don't remember what exactly the dispute is. So I pull out my phone and Twitter and go to see what it was. My friends who I'm with mock me a little bit. I go "yeah, you're right" and put it away (but not before seeing what the dispute was).

Then I find my bit of data and go to report it back to said friends (the ones who aren't there)... by pulling out my phone and firing up the Twitter again. I am again mocked. This time I really deserve it.

All I'm saying is, don't judge people.

What drives you?

2011-04-19T11:06:00.000-07:00

- need? Do you do the things you do because you must in order to survive?
- guilt?
- duty? (you feel like you have to, for one reason or another)
- compulsion/automaticity?
- excitement?
- ... mindfulness?

In case you can't tell, I'm trying to set up a progression or hierarchy, kind of like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. (Maybe this is the same thing.)

At any rate, I've recently gone rather a lot to a compulsion and excitement driven life. I take all the "dumb things I gotta do" and put them in a compulsion queue (like put things on my desk, or messages in my inbox; I'll clean them out eventually because I have a compulsion to clean things), and the rest of the time I spend on exciting things.

It feels like they all have relative values: A need-driven life is probably not great. A guilt-driven life is also terrible. I'm not sure about duty and compulsion. Excitement is pretty good, and whatever drives a monk on a mountain (supreme consciousness?) is probably the best.

I used to live pretty guilt-driven. It was behind a lot of my "environmentalism"; I felt like a Bad Rich White Person for pretty much trashing everything unconsciously, so I'd try to "minimize my footprint" left and right. I don't really get any big kicks out of composting, but it makes me feel less bad.

This is why I'm not sold on environmentalism now: what's behind it? If you really enjoy it, rock on! If it's a negligible cost, well, that's fine. But if you're making your life worse to reduce your waste from 84 units to 82... I kinda think we'd all be better off if you redirected your energy into something positive instead. And I mean "positive" in the sense that the question you're answering should be "how can I make _____ more good?" instead of "how can I make _____ less bad?"

And while I'm prescribing how you should live your life (pff!): quit living so duty-driven. But that's for another post.

Edit: I should say, too, that while this was spurred on by a conversation with Beej and Becky, I don't mean to snipe at them from the internet. I think we had this debate about the value of reducing your footprint and agreed to disagree; I'm posting it to record my thoughts at this point in time, and also to maybe provoke a further conversation if y'all want. (And also to tell everyone on the internet how to live their lives.)

Recording things for the future

2011-04-17T10:24:00.000-07:00

I've got a couple of projects I'm working on now. Both are mobile apps.

I think I'll try standing desks some more. I'm intrigued. Some of my Google coworkers liked them. I came across this article. And I haven't heard anyone say they're bad.

Actually I got that article from this article (p1) (p2). Man! I guess I will also:
- brush my teeth before meals, or way after them
- cool down my showers to lukewarm, and work on getting down to cold (this has other benefits, including helping me be happier at hotels/guesthouses/hostels that don't have hot water. makes me generally lower-maintenance. that is nice.)
- try to squat. hope not to fall over.
These all seem easy to implement and no-downside. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

More difficult to implement although probably helpful:
- always sleep enough (I'm working on this still) and sleep with the seasons (just infeasible)
- always stomach breathe
So I will not commit to either of these.

Mihaly, don't let me down!

2011-04-08T23:53:00.000-07:00

Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is one of the more influential books in my life. So I got The Evolving Self, Csikszentmihalyi's follow-up book. I am a chapter and a half in and already I have strong feelings about it.

The premise so far is: in this third millennium, we've mostly realized that the ol' Christian God sitting on a cloud with angels (or Greek Gods on Olympus or whatever) is false, but we're still searching for meaning and "happiness", whatever that means. Mihaly, I am with you so far!

But then, page 15: "But evolution has introduced a buffer between determining forces and human action. ... consciousness enables those who use it to disengage themselves occasionally from the pressure of relentless drives so as to make their own decisions."

What? How? Who are "those who use it"? How do they have a choice to "disengage themselves"?

On page 23 I'm back with him. He cuts through the "homunculus" image, in which we're each governed by a little man in our head who pulls the levers, and then cuts through the "traffic cop" image, where we're each governed by a bunch of signals but there's one guy saying which signals win. "Instead, consciousness is more like a magnetic field, an aura, or a harmonic tone resulting from the myriad separate sensations collecting in the brain."

So my question is: Mihaly, do we have souls? "Divine spark" or determinism? (or determinism + quantum/whatever randomness, which is just as good as determinism) I don't see a third path. You seem to say determinism, that consciousness is just a word that we use to talk about our minds the same way we say a computer "has vision", that there is not even any "we" to talk about "our minds", but you seem uncomfortable actually saying it.

Other minor quibbles:

Page 19: "The only value that all human beings can readily share is the continuation of life on earth."

... err, I don't share that. If all the existing humans just stopped having kids and eventually died out, as far as I'm concerned, that would be pretty okay. (modulo a few rough years for the last few living ones.)

By page 33, he's talking about how our minds are generally chaotic and unhappy when we have "free time"; we always want to accomplish the next goal. Then he says "There is a reasonable evolutionary explanation for this condition, too. If we could be contented just sitting by ourselves and thinking pleasant thoughts, who would be out chasing the saber-toothed tiger?"... doing that pop-cultural evolutionary thinking thing, where you dream up some explanation for how something could have been an evolutionary benefit and then conclude that it was an evolutionary benefit.

But on the plus side:

Page 40: "We think like computers whenever we think like computers. But certainly this particular function represents only a small aspect of how we think." This is a pretty concise way to talk about an idea that's been buzzing in my head for a while.

Mihaly, man, you're pushing all my buttons! In great and frustrating ways! If the determinism-or-not question remains an issue, I may get kinda annoyed. However, I have high hopes that you'll either pick a side or reveal to me some new side to that debate, or else we'll just put it aside and talk about more specific things.

Continuing with the Buddhism, I had some good meditation two days ago

2011-04-07T12:04:00.000-07:00

I think I got a taste of what mindfulness tastes like. My main focus was my rising and falling stomach. I caught most every thought that came up (and there were a LOT of them) and said "okay, that's 'planning'" or "worrying" or "being excited" (a lot of them were "excited" because I was all like "oh man I'm finally doing meditation right*") or whatever, and then I saw them as if they were photos in a slide show, they'd go to the right and soon fade.

This lasted maybe a few minutes. But I think I learned a few things:
1. what it feels like to "do it right*"
2. how important it is, really, to be gentle with yourself the whole time, really; this feels more likely than anything else to get you somewhere.
3. how easy it is, once you've done it right*, to get super attached to reproducing that same state**

* I know I know, all meditation is good, it's not right/wrong/etc, no seriously, the rest of this meditation I've been doing (and maybe any meditation that you're doing that seems unproductive) is not wrong

** okay I want to keep this post short so I won't go into any more detail, but whenever I read a book about meditation and it talks about some of the more advanced mental states, it's really interesting. maybe I'll talk about this later.

It's about to get real Buddhist up in here, but don't worry, I'll talk about girls too so at least that's interesting

2011-04-04T23:34:00.000-07:00

First, short thought: when you are not-doing, that too is a thing you are doing. You cannot do more or less. All you can do is redirect energy from one thing to another. Hmm. This is a half-formed thought; let's let it bake while exploring:

A longer thought. A section I liked in Noble Truth #2 part 2 of "Dancing with Life" by Philip Moffitt.:

"How do you know that you know?"

So he's talking about how to avoid clinging/addiction/unhelpful desires, and a student says "It seems to me that I have let loose of clinging... but then a little voice of doubt inside me asks 'How do I know that I am not just in denial of my clinging and am fooling myself?'"
Moffitt answers: if you've actually abandoned clinging to a thing, you'll feel it, in three ways.
1. You experience a distinct felt sense of spaciousness, well-being, and lightness. Depending on your nature, you will feel it more strongly in either your body or your mind.
2. You have a felt sense that something is over and that something new awaits you.
3. When you reflect back, you can see how your clinging was making a bad situation worse.

Let's look at things that I used to desire that I've not been desiring much (like these) and see if I'm abandoning clinging or just shoving it under the rug!
1. Being known as a master chef. I cooked some in college. Some people said I cooked well. It went to my head, I got the idea that I wanted people to think I was a super cook. Today, I don't really care.
- spaciousness/lightness: sure! it's nice to just make food to stay alive, and explore new things for fun!
- something is over, something new awaits: in a sense, yeah. I'm not sure what new awaits, but I guess "cooking with anxiety" has been replaced by "cooking and enjoying it more."
- clinging was making a bad situation worse: I think so. I used to think real hard, like think till I explode, or at least get real anxious, about what to cook.
Verdict: probably mostly abandoned clinging. Hooray!

2. Food advocacy. I used to think I would be some sort of social crusader, particularly in the area of food. Funny how little I think about it now.
- lightness: yes. well, it's one less thing to worry about.
- old thing out, new thing in: also yes. Now I concentrate on one cause, which is my work. It will help the world. Good enough for me.
- bad situation worse: yeah. I couldn't really do anything about it, or I wasn't willing to put in the time to do anything about it. So all my food advocacy thinking was just making me feel bad.
Verdict: also abandoned clinging. Also hooray! (note that these hoorays are completely unclingy hoorays. of course.)

3. Being a musician. I used to want to be a musician. Like a guitarist, like a cool guy, but I didn't want to play guitar because everyone does. So I figured I'd play trombone a lot. Like a cool guy. I do not have time or energy to play trombone. I suppose I'm not a cool guy.
I'll skip the details, but it feels like a weight lifted. Another clinging gone. Check me out, I'm practically in a cave on a mountain already.

4. Meeting a nice lady friend. I just have not had any inclination to try to do this for the past few months! I did a bit last year, but nothing worked out very easily, and I became busy with other things. So have I transcended even the desire to go on dates? It would help on that becoming-a-monk thing.
- lightness: not really. I guess not dating means one less thing to do, but dating wasn't a burden.
- old thing out, new thing in: nope. It's not like that energy translates into more energy for something else.
- this desire was making a bad situation worse: well, no.
Verdict: not abandoned! Just pushed under the rug. Well, that is not ideal.

5. Languages. I keep saying I want to learn languages, and then I keep not learning languages.
(moment of reflection)
Okay, well I still want to learn languages. I guess I'm not very effective at abandoning OR denying this one yet.

No Mac Java: are you kidding?

2011-03-24T11:20:00.000-07:00

Jesus Christ. I just heard about Mac deprecating Java.

Java is English. Not the best language, but a pretty okay language that a lot of the world (like Android and, recently, InPulse) speaks pretty well. Shutting out English is misguided at best and a calculated ploy at worst.

I find myself sometimes trying to articulate to non-programmers why Mac is increasingly evil and why my next computer will be Linux, and the best I can come up with is: As the Apple programming world becomes more separate from the rest of the programming world, developers will increasingly have to choose between learning Apple/iPhone/iPad and everything else. Apple entices users to its walled garden with shiny toys. Apple entices developers to its walled garden by having lots of users. (especially lots of rich users.)

And once developers are Apple wizards (at the expense of their non-Apple skills), they're at Apple's mercy. They have to play by the rules of the App Store, like it or not. They have to deal with ridiculous languages and frameworks, no matter how they change, like it or not. And so, consumers: with Apple you get shiny toys in the short term, but in the long term developers gets stifled, squeezed and bled dry. And then nobody wins except a certain black-turtlenecked figurehead.

God damn. I'm so glad that I've spent the past 2.5 years working for a company that is actually making the world a better place.

Fully externalizing memory

2011-03-13T15:52:00.000-07:00

Thoughts in your head exist in a wonderful state. Each thought is like a whole tree of spindly little branches and leaves connecting to other thoughts and providing context. When you write down a thought or bookmark a site, it's like just getting the trunk.

Sometimes you can get more. When I write down a thing to do on a future date on my calendar, it's accessible in a nice state. If I take a photo of a memory, it's often easier to remember the full context of the memory than it is if I just write it down. But you can never get the full memory tree.

But you do get two benefits from externalizing memory. First, (semi-)permanence. Especially when it's in The Cloud. My blog will last at least as long as Google. (maybe longer, if I back it up myself too.) This is useful even in the short term: the other day, I forgot that I blogged this article, and then I found it again, and now I'm starting a new post based on EEGs and wakefulness.

Anyway, the second benefit to externalizing memory is the ability to quit worrying about it. Working memory is crucial to everything, and tiny (that old "7 +/- 2"). Say I have "remember to do this thing next Saturday" holding up one chunk of memory, now I'm down to 6 +/- 2. Losing a chunk of working memory is like losing a finger. So I write it down on Google Calendar, tell it to email me a reminder, and then I get my finger back.

So I feel like I'm down a few fingers. Here are some things I'd like to externalize:

- Instead of worrying about "creating jobs" and making more work, let's use our prosperity to work less. Or redefine "work". Hell yes! I imagine a world where people work because they want to, not because they need to survive. Post-scarcity world. I'm pretty friggin' lucky enough to live there now. What happens when everyone does? Could the US, big as it is, survive this transition? Could any country?

- I continue to dig Alex Pang's Contemplative Computing blog. Quote from the Buddha: "The Buddha's laboratory was himself, and he generalized his findings to cover all human beings." Follow the link to "program of weight loss"; it's pretty good. Well researched, yet readable, and touches on a lot of things I'm interested in.

- Another link off that, this time to "What Actually Was the Stone Age Diet?", maybe the best explanation of "caveman/paleo/etc" diets. It's somewhat professional, remarkably free of histrionics, not affiliated with anyone who wants to sell his own book, and boils down to:
1. There was no one "Stone Age Diet." Over the last couple hundred thousand years, humans ate roots and berries and meat, or cooked roots and tubers, or a wide range of plants and some meat, or a ton of meat.
2. The only things that we certainly haven't eaten for more than ~5000 years are cereal grains and milk.
3. Even then, we don't know how long it takes our body to adapt to a new diet.
My conclusions remain mostly the same: I'm not interested in counting carbs vs. proteins, but I remain open to the possibility that grains aren't awesome for us. Still gotta run that next experiment. (my plans are to do this in April, when my life has stabilized a bit.)

- arg side note on food which is disappointing because I had a great segue to get back into talking about self-monitoring. I don't know where or why I picked up Josh Whiton's blog in my Google Reader, but it's great. He talks about food here; I'm intrigued. (he just wrote about monks too. Always cool.)

- arg arg side note about monks: if I were that 93 year old 70-year monk, I feel like I'd be sort of upset about my life! I'm sure he's not. But still! This is why I'm feeling the "worldly AND monkly success" path instead of the "mountaintop" one. (possibly I am brilliant; more likely I am too naive and restless.)

- okay back to self monitoring/experimenting. It's hitting the mainstream. Also led me to Seth Roberts, who might be crazy (ad hominem alert!), but has written some stuff that's inspiring about research I care about anyway.

- incidentally, Readability is a breath of fresh air in the smoggy Beijing of the internet.

Cross posting my Goodreads: How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

2011-03-09T20:44:00.000-08:00

Here's the link, and I provide it so that you can friend me if you also use Goodreads.

I won't do this often either, but my modes of putting info on the internet are a bit fragmented: when I read a book, I post about it in Goodreads, but when I get to thinking, I blog. When I read a book and it gets me thinking, that's a pickle.

So I read this book (free pdf/kindlebook/etc! time management book from 1910 England!) and here's what it got me thinking:

This guy is quite a baller. "What I suggest is that at six o'clock you look facts in the face and admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know)..." "'I hate all the arts!' you say. My dear sir, I respect you more and more." and a lot more badass quotes that I forgot to write down.

But also, he's an example that proves that this "lifestyle design" or even "time management" stuff wasn't born yesterday. He's writing this for the common middle-class you or me, who wishes to "accomplish something outside [his] formal programme." He points out how, in 1910, a bunch of people went to work, came home, and twiddled away their time, while growing upset that they're wasting their lives.

His solution, part 1, is to set aside 90 minutes 3x/week and dedicate them to learning in depth about something. Literature if you like (poetry, not novels); other arts if you don't; or just a sense of in-depth knowledge and wonder in all things. The whole thing smacks of being very English: "Just Try Harder!" But at the same time, there are a lot of Buddhist undertones:
"You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose."
"When you leave your house, concentrate your mind on a subject (no matter what, to begin with). You will not have gone ten yards before your mind has skipped away under your very eyes and is larking round the corner with another subject. Bring it back by the scruff of the neck. Ere you have reached the station you will have brought it back about forty times. Do not despair. Continue."
"The most important of all perceptions is the continual perception of cause and effect- in other words, the perception of the continuous development of the universe"
"Let the pace of the first lap be even absurdly slow, but let it be as regular as possible."

It's a spot of enlightened jelly wrapped in a doughnut of stiff-upper-lip. Well, better than most Englishness, which doesn't even have the jelly.

Great idea of the day

2011-03-09T14:47:00.000-08:00

Quick: name a tablet computer! Name 3! (err, Galaxy Tab, Xoom, grumble grumble Ipad)
Say you tell me that I should get a Vortex Nebula tablet. I've never heard of Vortex Nebula tablets. Immediately I know that this is either:
- a very new tablet
- a specialized tablet (and I'd expect you to give more reasoning as to why I would like it particularly)
- a bad recommendation

Okay, now name a cognitive architecture. I can think of one, ACT-R, and it helps that my undergrad Cog Sci advisor at CMU was its inventor, and that I spent a summer working on tools based on it.

I'm not currently working with cognitive architectures. But say I wanted to get into the field. You can imagine how it'd be useful to have this sense of "what's kinda standard" before I start.

Why do I know "what's kinda standard" in tablets, but not in cognitive architectures? I'm going to guess it's advertising. Even though they're totally brain dead and content free, ads for these things are around you all the time, so you get to know at least what the mainstream is using.

So here's the great idea: you have Adblock in your browser, right? What if, instead of removing ads, it just replaced each ad with the title of a paper you care about instead? (specifically, you give it a field, and it throws in paper names in that field, randomly according to how often they're cited, say. or author names.) You'd get to absorb useful names instead of ads! Instant sense of "what's kinda standard"!

Career is only one letter away from Careen

2011-03-07T20:19:00.000-08:00

Life can go all sorts of ways! Here are a few I'm thinking of, in descending order of preference.

1. the Dynamo. Love your job. Do something interesting, get expert at it, rock around the clock. Examples: Herb Simon, Cal Newport, anyone who works at a nonprofit. Sometimes these people are academics or doctors. They're always driven.

Upsides: you're Making A Difference. It's widely socially accepted. If you're an expert, you probably won't have trouble making money. The hours you're at work are wonderful.

Downsides: work might consume your life. Family and friends will require some effort. Unless you really work on developing your attention, mindfulness, and compassion, you might become a one-dimensional scatterbrained pencilhead. Also, the academic life is not easy.

2. the New Rich. Examples: Tim Ferriss, Chris Guillebeau, any number of bloggers and internet businessmen. Make some money somehow. Do it using the least effort possible. (beat the system a bit maybe.) Now that you have enough money to survive comfortably, spend the rest of your time pursuing any passion you want.

Upsides: how does this not sound great? This, not the 40-hours-for-40-years grind, is the standard of the new world. You still get to be your own boss. Making A Difference is overrated anyway.

Downsides: other people might try to drag you down. It's not as easy as it sounds. The hours you spend at work might be crummy. You might wonder why you're selling Pokemon Beanie Babies instead of Making A Difference. You have to keep up your personal development in your free time, because what is life if you're not somehow learning?

3. the Mercenary. Examples: a couple friends I won't name b/c y'know the internet. Travel around, get a job, make some money, quit your job, live for a while, when you're out of money get another job.

Upsides: as a softwareman, this is totally feasible. It's like plan #2 except when you're not working, you're totally not working.

Downsides: you might spend your life implementing a points-and-badges system for someone's social Web 2.0 AJAX mobile local foursquare twitter blatz. You have to lie to others because not liking your job is generally socially frowned upon. If you start to take it too seriously, you may have to lie to yourself to stay sane.

4. the Monk. Examples: some travel bloggers I guess? Oh and maybe the Buddha but that was like 2600 years ago. Whether you actually become a monk or just start wandering for a long time is up to you. This is always a remote possibility that I will probably never have the guts to actually pull off.

Upsides: Enlightenment!

Downsides: don't be an idiot. (honestly. I don't mean this sarcastically. It's a legit choice, at least for a while. But you'd have to take extra care not to be an idiot.)

5. other kinds of specialized lives. Like say you're a lawyer; you'll undoubtedly have different paths than this. Or a field linguist or a veterinarian or whatever.

6. the 40x40. Put in your 40-hour work week for 40 years. Make a lot of money doing something you don't like. Get a gold watch when you retire.

Anyway, there is no great wisdom here besides that I like to organize things and give them names. I'm trying out Career Plan #1 right now; I feel like I could definitely hit it in the academic world. If it doesn't work out, let's give 2, 3, or 4 a try. I wonder if there are any big categories I'm missing.

Clearing out my Google reader

2011-03-05T17:43:00.000-08:00

Somehow, even though I spend all my time staring at fluorescent rectangles, there's not enough time to organize and output all my thoughts. Here are four.

First, Tim Bray posts about making money in mobile, concluding that yeah, making money selling apps is tough, but there's a lot of other ways to make a ton of money here, and we have no idea how big this market will end up being. He links to Anil Dash's post about running "lifestyle businesses" on the web. My thoughts: this is awesome. This is really great. It supports the idea that, should my research dreams not work out, I could potentially support myself by doing internet things for myself without going crazy.

I've been wanting to write this post about speaking D-list languages for years. If you speak Spanish, and you meet another Spanish speaker, great, you can communicate. But if you speak y'know Ukrainian or something, and you meet another Ukrainian speaker: instant friends! This is most of why I want to learn Dutch. Also, it applies to more than languages: if your favorite food is pizza, and someone else's favorite food is pizza, meh. But hey, if you like herring, let me know, because then we are chums.

Tim Bray again! About input. I agree. Wish I could vomit words into a computer faster. Particularly when doing things like transcribing a dream journal. (one of my coworkers' responses to this was: 90 WPM isn't fast enough for you? Nope.)

I follow a lot of blogs about "lifestyle design or whatever." I find them exciting. And it's great to think that a lot of people are sculpting their own lives in this Internet Age of Change All the Time, instead of just falling into predictable (damaging) ruts. The downside is that a lot of times this overlaps with "making money on the internet" in sort of annoying ways. (and, god forbid, "social media.") So I'm excited to hear about this change-of-mind from one of these lifestyle-design-or-whatever bloggers.

Word games

2011-02-28T20:03:00.001-08:00

So there are "board games". Unfortunately, when you say "board games", somehow Scrabble, Monopoly, Settlers, Risk, Bang!, Betrayal, and Catch Phrase all get lumped into this same category. This makes it hard to disambiguate sometimes. I think there should be at least 4 very different categories:

1. Party Games: Catch Phrase, Identity Crisis, Scattergories, and I guess Cranium and Apples to Apples
2. Card Games: Bang, Bohnanza, maybe even Dominion
3. Strategy Games: Settlers, Puerto Rico, Agricola
Now these are on a pretty easy axis: complication (aka nerdiness). Puerto Rico is good to play with your programmer bros, Catch Phrase is good to play with 12 random people at a party and/or your family. And that's the defining characteristic of each category. The card/board distinction seems somewhat coincidental (although maybe not but I'll get into this later).

But the fourth category is word games: Scrabble, Boggle, Bananagrams, Snatch It. The defining characteristic of these games is that they depend on how well you've memorized the English dictionary. And in how many forms you've memorized it: can you come up with an 8-letter word that starts with W? How about a 5 letter word that includes C, A, T, and 2 other letters? (and how quickly?) And because these games are so focused on this one skill, it's hard to place them accurately on the complication axis. Some really nerdy folks don't like them, some totally non-nerdy folks do.

(I like them a lot. They make me feel flowy, and like I'm really honing a skill. If strategy board games are like weightlifting and party games are like running, word games are like pole vaulting. Or learning a language.)

So if the question is "do you like board games?" I think my best answer is "yeah, I'm about a 2.2 on the complication scale, and I love word games." Incidentally, if you ever want to play word games, I'm down.

Wow, lucid 4, in which I have a somewhat ominous and disappointing convo with Mr. Rogers

2011-02-26T23:05:00.000-08:00

A day after lucid dream 3 (so, night before last) came lucid dream 4. A day! As with programming, rapid iteration == fun.

In this one, I realized I was lucid, and looked at my hands. They didn't look quite right; one of my thumbs was half gone. So I thought "that's not right", and the thumb disappeared completely. I thought "that's still not right," and it reappeared fully. Nice.

Then I said, okay, I want to meet some dream people again. But this whole lucid dreaming thing is still a little freaky, so... who should I see? How about the least freaky person ever: Mr. Rogers. So I said "I'll close my eyes, and when I open them, Mr. Rogers will be here." No luck. Again. Still no luck. I "realized" that of course that won't work, I should go to Mr. Rogers's house. So I said I'd close my eyes, open them, and be at Mr. Rogers's house. Success! I think.

I don't know what Mr. Rogers's house looks like. Maybe this was it. And when Mr. Rogers came to the door, he didn't look or act just like Mr. Rogers from the show- but then, of course he's a little different when he's not on TV. Here's how our conversation went:

Me: Who are you?
Him: Mr. Rogers.
Me: What do you represent?
Him: (no response)
Me: (thinking, well, here he is, might as well get some advice. but I didn't plan any questions in the waking life. so...) Okay, what should I do about my career?
Him: (still no response)
Me: What should I be?
Him: Well, you could always be a carbonmaker.
Me: a what?
Him: a carbonmaker.
Me: huh?
Him: well, you wanted some prescient advice, there it is. (in the tone of "ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.")
Me: okay... what about the ladies? (I think I meant "should I get married someday?" although I might have just been asking Mr. Rogers how to pick up chicks, which is hilarious.)
Him: I don't know what to tell you, I'm single.
Me: what? I thought you were married.
Him (and this I remember is an exact quote): I have no hope for you, boy.

Afterthought: I don't feel totally in control of lucid-me, which is why I still come up with random stuff sometimes. For the record, both lucid-me and the subconscious Mr. Rogers that I conjured up are great. Also, after this dream I felt a little dumb, like I just forced some random situation and then filled in the blanks with the way I think Mr. Rogers would act, and I asked stupid questions and got stupid answers. I think, next dream, I'll do a bit more looking around, and play with the dream world that I get, instead of deciding which dream world I want.

More lucid oh boy

2011-02-24T12:29:00.000-08:00

- I was flying around the galaxy, until I realized I wanted to talk to some people, so I said "the great thing about all these stars and galaxies is that they're really... a pizza!" Then I was standing on a planets-and-stars carpet in a basement. (of course by "pizza" I meant "carpet".)
- I met a person! I got to talk to him! There were a bunch of us dancing in a circle, singing a song, until I said to one youngish fellow with a terrible bowl haircut, "Wait. Who are you? What do you represent?" I wrote down who he said he was (don't remember now), I didn't remember what he represented, and then I said "do you have a name?" and he said no.
- my heart started beating really hard and I woke up.

Dream people! There are dream people! They act meaningfully!

More data about my life; this time it's sleep.

2011-02-22T17:02:00.000-08:00

On my research blog here.

Somewhat interesting! No linear correlation between how long I slept and how awake I feel. Nor between the WakeMate score and how awake I feel. Hmm.

EDIT: actually, there is something interesting. There's a correlation between how awake I feel when I wake up, and how awake I feel all day. Well, that's not super interesting, but it's something.

The big no-grains results! Plus, relearning stats, continued.

2011-02-21T14:49:00.000-08:00

Let's assume we only care about the "stomach" variable. I have 9 days where I ate grains, and 19 days where I ate no grains. On each day I have a number that says how well my stomach felt, on average, during the day. I would like to know if my average stomach feeling is the same or not the same on grains days vs. non-grains days.

(let's assume that there's no weirdness where grains makes your stomach feel worse for the next 2 weeks or something. In fact, let's forget about the fact that these are time series data at all. This might be a minor or a major statistical transgression, I don't know.)

I think the test to use here is a Student's t-test (AKA just "t-test"). Particularly, an independent 2-sample t-test with equal variances (assumed) and unequal sample sizes. (side note: I also remembered z-tests and ANOVAs, and it looks like:

- a z-test is a simpler test that you can use when you're just trying to know if a sample that you've taken is significantly different from the group as a whole. For example, if I knew my "stomach" value for every day of my life (or even if I just knew the mean and standard deviation), I could use a z-test to tell if those 19 no-grains days were unusually high/low stomach-value days compared to all 9038 days of my life.

- an ANOVA is a generalization of the t-test. Specifically, the one-way ANOVA is something you can use to compare >2 means. For example, if I tried "no grains" for two weeks, then "no meat" for two weeks, then "no coffee or peanuts" for two weeks (clearly this would be the hardest), I could compare my stomach value for all of those.

- if "ANOVA" wasn't scary enough, there's also things called "ANCOVA" and "MANOVA"; the latter makes me snicker every time.)

Okay! Let's do some t-testing! In one corner, the stomach (, mood, energy) values of my grains days. In the other corner, the stomach (, mood, energy) values of my no-grains days. Which Is Bigger?

t-test on mood before and after grains:

t = -0.78694967152, p = 0.439345514713

t-test on energy before and after grains:

t = -0.961369818324, p = 0.346365085994

t-test on stomach before and after grains:

t = -1.98753017649, p = 0.0588975495116

Again, the p-value is the one that tells you if there's anything going on. Small p-value means there's a small chance that this effect could have happened by chance. Looks like I can't say anything about whether grains effect my mood or energy. But p=0.058 is pretty small! (traditionally 0.05 is the threshold for caring about p-values, at least in psych) And surprisingly so. I couldn't have told you that from the graph.

Let's look at the data again: (check it out, I'm learning python string formatting)

stomach with grains: ['3.10', '2.92', '2.78', '2.83', '2.36', '2.75', '3.29']

mean = 2.86

stomach without grains: ['3.33', '3.67', '2.89', '3.37', '3.31', '3.60', '3.00', '2.87', '2.59', '2.80', '2.92', '3.11', '3.22', '3.63', '3.47', '3.29', '2.89', '2.67']

mean = 3.15

Huh! That is interesting. Now before you jump to conclusions, note a few things:

- this is self reported, not double blind, not even single blind. (although in this case I'm the experimenter and the subject, so single blind = double blind; and it'd be really hard to make this experiment blind.)

- data was gathered "as I feel like it" AKA whenever I use my phone.

- I cut out 3 days' worth of data because they each had only one sample.

- "days" were split at midnight, even though I usually had one or two points after midnight; I should probably split them at about 3 or 4AM.

- I didn't just cut out grains. I also minimized added sugar (how well? dunno) and added more meat.

- p = 0.058. That's really borderline significant. It could just be a fluke.

- I didn't say what I'd look for before doing the experiment. Why is this such a big deal? Well, p=0.058 means that even if grains didn't matter, 5.8% of the time such an effect could have happened just by chance. Which means that if I tracked 20 variables, I'd find one that "looked significant".

But hey, exploratory pilot study: super success! I think that my energy and my mood are pretty similar, and I think that maybe grains make my stomach feel worse although I'd need to study it again to tell for sure. Very cool!

No Grains Experiment: my mood ~ my energy

2011-02-21T01:09:00.000-08:00

Linear regression between mood and energy
mood = 0.825810375087 * energy + -0.0729595387559
r=0.758294792793, p=1.88373127793e-06, stderr=0.13663099386

Linear regression between energy and stomach
energy = 0.258583651008 * stomach + 2.34871983188
r=0.304880567838, p=0.107798798334, stderr=0.155454941953

Linear regression between stomach and mood
stomach = 0.339858387287 * mood + 2.29632783485
r=0.313914641094, p=0.0972479087456, stderr=0.197823185145

I was tracking 3 variables: how energetic I feel, how my mood is in general, and how my stomach feels. I figured they'd either all be independent (because those seem like they could be independent) or they'd all be strongly correlated (because I enter them at the same time, and they're all 1-5, so if I'm hitting 3 for the first one, say, I'm more likely to hit 3 for the second one.)

Surprisingly, it looks like there's a strong correlation between mood and energy, but only a pretty weak correlation between energy and stomach or stomach and mood. I'm maybe half confident that I'm interpreting that right, but if so, then that means that the more energized I am, the better mood I'll be in. That makes sense to me. I like being energized. I don't get into high-energy negative states (like anger) very much; if I'm high-energy, I'm likely feeling pretty positive. And optimizing the state of my stomach: maybe not even worth it! (I mean, for "feeling good" reasons. Optimizing the state of my stomach might have good long-term health implications, say.)

(that's mood on the x-axis, energy on the y-axis, each data point is one day, sorry this graph is weak, I'm learning here)

Still more stats to follow! (including, y'know, the important ones, where I figure out whether no-grains is worth it at all)

Happiness again, but I'll try to keep it grounded.

2011-02-19T17:34:00.000-08:00

I've come across two sources since my last post about happiness that make me want to discuss it more:
1. "The Geography of Bliss" by Eric Weiner.
2. Google Buzz comments from the last post. (thanks, Daniel, Gerrit, and Dan!)

So there are at least two meanings of "happiness." One is kinda "any good thing in your life" and therefore it's about as vague as "goodness". I'll call this meaning "big-H Happiness." Another meaning might be, as Daniel suggested, "a pleasant and optimistic mood that comes from things going right and not wrong." I'll call that one "contentment". (is that fair?) Fulfillment is yet another kind of happiness.

BUDDHIST ASIDE: contentment is not at all Happiness. Seems like you maximize contentment by avoiding suffering, while if you're Buddhist, you maximize Happiness by knowing the 4 noble truths, being superbly mindful, and ultimately ending suffering. END BUDDHIST ASIDE

SINGULARITARIAN ASIDE: ultimately all suffering comes from the set-in-stone fact that we all must eventually die. Someday that fact may not be set in stone anymore. This is a much longer debate, but if we find a way to become immortal, can we find a way to avoid suffering forever? Does the end of death mean the end of the need for Buddhism? END SINGULARITARIAN ASIDE

Back to the main point: there are many kinds of happiness. Eric Weiner starts his book with a quest: to search for happiness. He visits the Netherlands, Thailand, Bhutan, Qatar, Iceland, and others, all "happy" places by one measure or another, to see if he can recognize any common threads between them.
Now actually, I think I'm behind this plan. At first, it sounds absurd, like searching for "goodness", but I guess it's also like searching for "beauty", and the latter sounds like a good plan for a series of travels. Go to the Louvre, the MOMA, the Sagrada Familia, Fallingwater, Costa Rica, Grindelwald, and everywhere in between, and try to see what beauty is. This is an absurdly ambitious task, sure, and the search for happiness even more ambitious, but what the heck. It's a book.
But still, it's a search for happiness; I don't think he's very sure what he's looking for. Nevertheless, it's entertaining. And despite all my predictable grumbling about "he's not finding the right KIND of HAPPINESS", he has some good points:

- About the Swiss: he doesn't know if they're "happy"; "content" is more like it. But that's not quite it either. "We have far more words to describe unpleasant emotional states than pleasant ones. (And this is the case with all languages, not just English.)"

- About Bhutan and Gross National Happiness: "John Ralston Saul, the Canadian philosopher, describes Gross National Happiness as a brilliant trick. 'What it does is go "Snap!" and changes the discourse. Suddenly you're talking about something else.'"
I find this very appealing. Often changing the conversation is the best way to get what you want.

- "In the west and in the United States especially, we try to eliminate the need for compromise. Cars have personal climate controls, mattresses have personal firmness levels... If we no longer must compromise on the easy stuff, like mattresses, then what about the truly important issues? Compromise is a skill, and like all skills it atrophies from lack of use."
Also s/compromise/suffering/g. (that means "substitute 'suffering' for 'compromise'".) Stop trying to eliminate suffering/compromise, and just get better at dealing with it. A portion of your happiness cross-training regimen.

Lucid dreamt again!

2011-02-19T16:07:00.000-08:00

Notes from this time:
- Looking at your hands or feet to stabilize the dream really worked. It felt like they came into focus, and I was able to stay lucid for a couple minutes after, instead of just waking up.
- I kept trying to convince some friends that it was a dream. They were pretty unresponsive. Then I kept asking them "so hey, we can do anything, go anywhere, what do you want to do?" and nobody came up with much. Eventually one of them said "I don't know... Gala?" (we all understood that Gala was some magical fantasy land that you fly to. Sadly, we didn't make it there.)
- I wonder why I kept asking them what they wanted to do, instead of just doing it myself. My goal this time was to talk to a dream-person, ask them who they were or what they represented. Somehow I didn't get around to it.

- I wasn't very lucid, and it didn't last very long.

- flying worked sort of like I expected, which is to say, it worked when I was confident that it was working, and I sort of struggled or lowered when I was less confident. Somehow I decided that pedaling like a bike was the way to fly. It worked well enough; it wasn't this euphoric effortless flying, but it was very nice. Things soon faded to black.
- After things faded to black, I was in a little bit of itunes-visualizer land for a minute. (what kind of minute?) It was nice and pretty exciting, but I was a little disappointed because I knew I was on my way back to the waking world.
- The most exciting thing, I think, is that I lucid-dreamt again, which is the second time in about as many weeks, which means it's unlikely that the other was a fluke, and more likely that I'll be able to do it more.

Live excitement-driven?

2011-02-14T20:13:00.000-08:00

God, here I am talking about a Tim Ferriss book again. Whatever. The deal was "buy the 4-hour body, get the 4-hour workweek pdf free," so I got both. 4HWW is actually more interesting, as I don't want to lose weight or gain muscle, and that's what most of 4HB is about. (course, I don't really want to make an automated web-based business either, and that's what most of 4HWW is about, but whatever.)

Nevertheless, there are nuggets that have stuck with me, and one of the biggies is when he's talking about happiness. Ferriss says people are always talking about happiness, but that's like saying you want "good" food; it's true, but it doesn't give you any guidelines as to how to get there. Hey, I'm listening; this is something I think quite a bit. His answer is: talk about excitement instead. Don't search for happiness, search for excitement. (see quote #4 here)

I like it! I may adopt that as a motto or guideline or whatever. When you're excited, all the little stuff doesn't matter. Life is fun, in pretty much every way. You get to move mountains, because you gain energy from your work instead of spending it.

On the other hand, there's another newfangled internet hero: Cal Newport, who argues that it's not about finding work that excites you, but about enjoying the work you have. He does have, well, 3000 years of meditative history, as well as the entire religion that I most believe in, behind him. Well. That's hard to argue with.

Or maybe we have a false dichotomy. Enjoy the work you have, and seek out new work that excites you? I guess that makes sense. I don't know, if I had to pick sides, the excitement thing is really tempting. I may think more about this later but I have some purple potatoes burning in the oven.

No Grains Experiment: so far inconclusive.

2011-02-12T16:08:00.000-08:00

So I've managed to graph my personal data of the last month, and here are some preliminary results. On days 9-27 I ate no grains; on days 3-8 and 28-31 I ate grains.

(charts created using Google Chart API)
It seems unlikely that there's any difference in any variable. I have good days and bad days either way. Fair enough. I'd like to do some Real Actual Stats (tm) on this data. Either way, cool to see! More info coming soon enough...

I know other people's dreams are boring, but come on folks, this one was lucid!

2011-02-08T00:04:00.000-08:00

It happened the night before last. First, some background: I'm reading "Lucid Dreaming" by Robert Waggoner, and it's seriously fantastic. It's a different world. I'm not sure how far down the rabbit hole I go, but at least far enough to want to know more. I've picked up some tips, and this dream provided a smorgasbord of opportunities to try them out. Some notes:

- I was most certainly lucid. I said to a friend,"this is a dream!" It didn't happen from reality testing; it just seemed rather spontaneous. I caught a coin in mid-air, then I realized I was dreaming.
- I had enough presence of mind to remember things from the waking world. That's good, because:
- the first thing I did was to start spinning, as that's supposed to prolong lucid dreams. Sure did. However, I also closed my eyes, which put me into a black zone kind of like floating through space. I wondered if the dream was going to end, but luckily, it didn't, and I ended up in:
- vivid vivid land by the sea. If I had to compare it to somewhere, it'd be Dinosaur Land from Mario World, if it had been rendered by the artists who did Riven.
- I remembered that profound things had happened to Waggoner after he stopped trying to do stuff and said "hey dream, show me something important!" so I tried the same a few times. No luck.
- However, I saw a FedEx office building, and I didn't know what to do. I said "Hey dream, should I go in?" and a light flashed above the door. This may be the coolest event of the dream. I feel like I directly communicated with my subconscious. Like there's another guy in my head creating a movie for me to watch.
- I met a couple people from real life, but they were silent and didn't do much, like cardboard cutouts. I didn't particularly try to engage them.
- I feel like I slipped out of lucidity at one point. It started to feel like a regular dream.
- However, then I had the control to say "I want to see my family" and I did. They were kind of floating in space. I couldn't even see them clearly, but I felt very deeply grateful to them. This has happened before.
- I had a false awakening. I "woke up" in my childhood home, in my bunkbeds, trying to write down the dream, but a friend kept talking to me. Then I woke up for serious.
- I felt wonderful for the entire next day.

All just as this book (and everything else I've ever read about lucid dreaming) has said. Wow. I can't wait for it to happen again.

Listen, Cat Stevens is seriously great.

2011-02-07T23:15:00.000-08:00

I thought he was just another of those old dudes my dad had records of. He's a singer-songwriter. He was active in the 70's. Both of those are strikes in my book. But like the Beatles (and yes, I think I can talk about Cat and the Beatles in the same sentence), Cat is actually worth listening to today.

Positive characteristics of Cat Stevens:
- he makes acoustic-guitary songs that sound nice.
- he makes rolling-piano songs that sound nice.
- his lyrics are mystical in a couple different ways. Take Katmandu for something that sounds South-Asian (oh okay maybe it's just because he's talking about Katmandu), or Into White for something that sounds sorta Anglo-mythological (or maybe this is just me), or Lady D'Arbanville for a medieval chivalry sound.
- interesting career arc! Pop star at 18, tuberculosis, then a few epic albums at 22-24, got more experimental and progressive, deteriorated musically and got tired of the life, converted to Islam at 29, changed his name to Yusuf Islam, and vanished from the music scene. Recorded his next studio album, as Yusuf Islam, 30 years later.
- speaking of progressive, I really like his album "Foreigner", which features an 18-minute track on side 1, which culminates in this like bossanova or samba or whatever old-fashioney bit that apparently people think Coldplay copied? Whatever; it's great. I love a good multi-part suite. Given that I already find him a bit mystical, I will give him a lot of leeway to record such a thing.
- speaking of suites, can we talk for a moment about how good the first half of Janelle Monae's The ArchAndroid is? Seriously, this whole disc is good, but tracks like 2-7 (particularly 2-4) are like no opener I've heard for a while!
- okay, focus. This post is about Cat Stevens. Oh, speaking of copying, apparently the Flaming Lips' Fight Test is just Cat's Father and Son; they somewhat sheepishly admitted as much.
- anyway. Cat Stevens. Good stuff.

Ski report

2011-02-04T23:52:00.000-08:00

days skied at vail/beaver creek, Colorado: 4
vertical feet: over 75000
free chocolate chip cookies ingested: 3 (two at beaver "not roughing it" creek, one on airplane)
degrees below zero it was while we skied on tuesday: 15
degrees below zero it was while we skied on wednesday: 20
injuries: 1 (a burn on my wrist)
hot tubbed in -15 degree weather: yep
pub trivias won: 1
money saved by bringing tea bags on the mountain: $11.25
resourcefulness of pete and kelly: 173
generosity of pete and kelly: 746
german cities powered: only 13
amount pete and I talked about code on the mountain: nonzero
moguls enjoyed: at least half of them
and now I will interrupt this list format to talk about moguls.

Moguls are these big bumps (ranging in size from a breadbox to a subaru) that appear on ski hills after some snow falls and a bunch of people ski on them. If the resort runs their big grooming machines over the mountain, it flattens all the moguls.

Moguls make skiing more difficult. Small ski areas tend to groom most of their hills. Large resorts groom maybe half? As a result, you really only get to ski moguls at big resorts. And moguls are awful when they're icy anyway.

Moguls demand different technique. On a groomed hill, you can ski in big loping turns. But on moguls, these bumps are in the way, so you have to make these tight little turns. Here's an example. (I mean, minus the crazy jumps.)

Anyway, every time I ski (all like 3 or 4 days each year), I get frustrated that I'm not good at moguls, and I try to ski them anyway, and I feel kind of clumsy. But I think I've finally gotten good enough that I enjoy an average mogul hill, can make it down safely, and if it's kinda shallow or has nice snow or I'm just really on, I can have a lot of fun in it. I can ski moguls and look pretty good. And before you accuse me of shallowness, let me substitute "experience flow" for "look pretty good."

That's really what I'm trying to do, anyway: experience flow. I've been worrying "I'm not improving at skiing" and then meta-worrying "why am I worrying about how good I am at skiing?" and that's the answer. At low skill, it's fun, at high skill it's fun, and in between it's a sometimes-boring plateau. So finally, I think I'm past that plateau.

TODO(dantasse): think about how this applies to other parts of my life, and if I've learned anything about perseverance from this experience.

In the meantime, hooray!

Phatic speech

2011-01-29T14:22:00.000-08:00

Phatic speech is speech that exists to fulfill a social task, not to convey some meaning. For example "what's up?" doesn't necessarily happen so that you can find out what's up. Sometimes it's just a way to say "I acknowledge you." Other phatic phrases can be for social grooming or making friends.

I think it would be cool if we had more phatic speech. Like this:
Me: What's up?
You: How's it going?
Me: Four score and seven years ago,
You: Our fathers brought forth on this continent
Me: A new nation, conceived in liberty
You: And dedicated to the proposition
etc.
After you finish the Gettysburg Address, high fives are in order, and then you're instant friends.

And so ends the No Grains Experiment.

2011-01-29T14:15:00.000-08:00

I decided to start eating grains again yesterday because I'm going skiing next week, and I'll probably eat some grains then, and if reintroducing grains weirded my stomach I'd rather that happen here than there.

Plus, 3 days of eating-grains-again data would be nice to have. It's not much, but it's all I've got.

Anecdotal findings so far:
- not eating grains makes me feel rather healthy.
- not eating anything with added sugar would make me feel rather healthier. I went with "well I'll try to minimize sugar" which ended up being a pretty ineffective way to minimize sugar.
- grains make me feel a little fuller. (not in a good way.)
- a bit of the difficulty in making the switch is "what's the base of your meal?" Replacing grains with spinach worked for a couple dishes. Sometimes I'd eat fruit and/or nuts. I'm trying to just stop worrying about having a staple that soaks up all the rest of the sauce.
- eating no grains is easy when you cook your own food.
- eating no grains is easy when you have a bountiful buffet of wonderful food available for you every day.
- eating "minimal added sugar" is easy when you cook your own food.
- eating "minimal added sugar" is hard when you have a bountiful buffet of wonderful food available for you every day. Dessert is tempting (especially when it's interesting, ice cream, or italian).
- eating no grains is hard when you go out to eat. At some restaurants, you cannot eat! At most restaurants, you just have to be comfortable looking a little ridiculous. I ate Indian with no rice. It was good anyway.
- eating minimal added sugar is easy when you go out to eat.
- I feel better after eating healthier. If I could just internalize that thought, and not divorce the immediate good taste from the 15-minutes-later heavy feeling, eating junk food would never be appealing. Hmm.
- There was a specific warning in "the 4 hour body" about how thai curry without rice might give you gas. Truth! I wonder why.
- smashed frozen bananas + other smashed fruit (or peanut butter) is almost just straight up ice cream. Seriously. It'd probably be even better in a food processor.

's all for now. More real findings after data happens. First, anyone know stats? Here are two analyses I'm thinking of doing:
- if each day had a "mood rating" or like my average mood for the day, track that in the 7 days before vs the 21 days of the study. (like a T test or something? Null hypothesis: mood before = mood after, uhh non-null hypothesis: mood after > mood before)
- see if there are correlations between mood and energy, stomach and energy, or stomach and mood (I guess run a linear regression?)
- and maybe rope sleep into this too; we'll see.
If I sound totally off base on any of these, do tell.

I am sick of bear and laundry jokes.

2011-01-26T00:04:00.000-08:00

Bears: I thought it would be funny to cultivate an unreasonable fear. I picked bears. Not just fear of bears as in "they might eat me", but as in "they're plotting to take over the world." I figured I'd learn to act in a pretty realistic way even, which would be actually funny. Turns out I can't. Whenever anyone says "bear", my neck swivels around and I try to make a "funny" comment about how bears will eat you. And then I try to keep the conversation going by talking about how clever bears really are. (this only got worse after I found out Stephen Colbert had the same joke.)

Laundry: It started out actually funny, I think. Ram, Beej, and I were talking about laundry one time, and we started talking about how it takes a long time. And then we kept talking about how it takes a long time. And then, whenever someone would say "laundry", I'd go on to say how it takes a long time, and how you just don't understand because the thing is, laundry takes a long time. Somehow, they've both moved on with their lives, and I'm still pestering all my friends about laundry taking a long time.

The end result of each is that I act obnoxious. And they're traps: I can't ever actually speak about either one honestly, because that'd be a break of character. So as of right now, I'm dropping the bear joke and the laundry joke. Life's too short to tie myself to running gags that even I don't find humorous anymore.

What stories do you tell yourself?

2011-01-22T22:12:00.000-08:00

Catch yourself feeling insecure. Ask yourself why. Tell yourself a different story. Start to feel better.

Example: I'm in a room full of people, some of whom I kinda know, some of whom I don't know at all. Sometimes conversations dissolve or whatever, and I'm standing around sort of awkwardly. I feel bad. Why? Because at some level I'm imagining someone watching and mocking me. I'm saying "well I'm inherently awkward, of course nobody wants to talk to me." This is a story. It is not objective truth. We all tell ourselves stories, and it's hard to turn it off. But as long as I'm constantly telling myself a story, why not at least make it a good one?

I think for many social cases I'll replace this voice with a younger cousin, like 4 years younger. Younger cousins always think older cousins are the coolest dudes on the block. (at least I do.) Say I'm standing around awkwardly; younger cousin doesn't even see that. He just sees older cousin Dan hobnobbing with awesome folks, because of course he is also an awesome folk.

So look out for this. There's more than one way to view most situations. You're probably unconsciously picking the pessimistic one.

Ok Twitter for serious I guess

2011-01-19T22:42:00.000-08:00

The short: if I know you in person, and/or you'd like to hear things like "Hey Cat Stevens is really good" (more on that later) or "I like this particular blend of coffee at Victrola" or "I just saw a hat wearing a dog", follow @sedatesnail.
If I don't know you in person, and/or you'd like to hear things like "Huh, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is involved in attention AND smell" or "git rebase --onto rocks the casbah" or "I wonder why nobody's studied the effects of lycopene on social networking", follow @dantasse.

The reasoning: AFAICT, there are two main uses of Twitter: to stay up to speed in your professional field, and to microblog about what you had for lunch. It's not that my "lunch" posts are super private, but it's just that nobody would want to read them. And given that we're all drowning in information these days, I want to try not to make people's lives worse.

I'm drinking the last of the Darjeeling tea I brought back from India

2011-01-16T13:40:00.000-08:00

... almost two years ago. I've still got some Nilgiri and Assam. I guess it's like they say: when you run out of tea from your last trip to India, it's time to go back to India. (nobody says this.)

Week One of Eating Weird: feels pretty good! I've eaten grains just once, when I was out for sushi with coworkers. I feel like I'm eating a lot of meat, but I think that's just because I used to eat not much meat. And getting it all at the farmers' market hasn't been a problem, it just means I have to go to the farmers' market, which is only a bus ride away.

I don't know if I've felt consistently better. The data will show that at the end of the experiment. I do know that it feels good to think of myself as someone who only eats healthy things. (And defining "healthy" things beforehand has helped me be sure that I only eat "healthy" things.) I guess that's a possible confounding factor, and if this works, I should try eating "healthy" things with a different definition of "healthy" after the experiment's over to see if I just get some energy from thinking about myself as healthy.

Also, buying and cooking farmers' market meat is fun, not going to lie. It's like new levels on a video game: more to explore. I'm not going to tackle the "will I eat meat or not" question until after the experiment.

Drinking Weird: well, on this plan, no beer. But I didn't want to stop drinking entirely, as that might confound my results too, so I've been drinking wine a bit. Actually I kind of like it! I had a Syrah for the first time that I remember (ok ok noob ok) and it was pretty good, and I could distinguish it from "average red wine taste". Also I had a Malbec, also good. I could rather grow to like this. But it does make me hella sleepy.

Unrelatedly, low-level evil: buried in the terms of service: "All lift ticket products are non-transferable and non-refundable. When you purchase lift tickets, you will automatically be enrolled in the Vail Resorts "Peaks" loyalty program, at no cost to you. You will receive program information by standard mail and will be offered the chance to decline." NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. The fact that this is bad, but not bad enough to make me not buy a ticket, cheeses me the hell off. I guess what gets me is that it's very low-level evil, but it is unquestionably evil. So few things are unquestionably good or unquestionably evil these days! When we find one, shouldn't we by god do something about it?

And speaking of which, I think I'll try single-spacing after periods. Apparently it's Just Correct.

I'm eating less grains.

2011-01-09T13:55:00.000-08:00

I'd like more energy. I'd like to feel good stomach-wise all the time. I imagine this would help me with life in general.

I think, and write, a lot about what foods would be maximally beneficial to eat. I haven't done much about it... until now! I've been tracking my energy, stomach feeling, and mood for the last couple weeks. I plan to make a dietary shift and see how these things go.

What dietary shift? Good question. Here are some things I believe might have some degree of truth:
- Michael Pollan suggests eating more leaves and less seeds is a good idea because of the balance between omega-3 and omega 6 fatty acids. Leaves have more omega-3, seeds more omega-6.
- There's this "paleo" thing. Here's Wikipedia. The idea is that evolution moves slowly, and we've only been using agriculture for 10k years, so a lot of recent post-agricultural foods are new to our bodies, so we can't digest them very well.
- A lot of people hate gluten a lot. It sort of makes sense, if you subscribe to the whole paleo thing; grain has only been eaten recently. Also, grain has changed a lot even more recently.
- This book called "The 4 hour body" by Tim Ferriss, which I've been reading, recommends a type of low-carb something. (it's a kind of neat book. yeah it's a lose-weight-gain-muscle book, among other things, but it's from a pretty nerdy perspective so I can relate to it and trust it a bit.)
- Nobody says "eat more grains."

So what am I eating? Some sort of paleo. Specifically, I will definitely eat these:
- colorful vegetables, as much as possible
- grass-fed meat and fish from the farmers' market.
- good eggs. (from the farmers' market, or failing that, the most expensive eggs that say "omega-3" on the carton.)
- good fats, including grass-fed butter, olive oil, and probably all sorts of other trendy oils

- fermented things like tempeh, sauerkraut, kimchi, and yogurt

- tea

These are a little controversial but I will probably eat them:
- fruit. I think, when you start cutting out fruit, you get out of "what caveman ate" territory and into "low carb" territory.
- some starchy vegetables like sunchokes and sweet potatoes; I'm not sure if these are cavemanish or not, but the consensus seems to be "they're good for you"
- milk, as whole and raw as possible; paleo folks seem to be okay with it even though a caveman wouldn't squeeze some udders. Not sure if this is consistent, but I can deal. Anyway, I'm already pretending to be glutarded, let's not be lactarded as well.

- nuts; they are seeds, but also generally agreed that they're healthy

- wine
- coffee; let's not be crazy here either
These are a little controversial and I will probably not eat them if I can get around it:
- beans; low-carbers would like these, but they're not very cavemanly or leafy. They're definitely seeds.
- tofu; it's still beans.
- regular potatoes, everyone says they're like grains, I'm not sure if that makes sense outside Atkins-land but I can live without potatoes pretty easily anyway
- beer (it's only 3 weeks)
Totally not eating:
- grains
- sugars
- you know all that other bad processed stuff okay

And should I just cut back on grains, or cut them out entirely? I'm interested in the cut-them-out-entirely approach. Two reasons: I hear convincing posts like this one, and I tend to be kinda all-or-nothing. I'll probably eventually go to "cut back on grains", but for the 3-week experiment, it'll be easier to just categorically reject them.

But I won't only track self-reported variables. For argument's sake, I'll also track weight and a few key measurements. I'd like to track body fat percentage, as it seems more useful, but the 7 ways to do that listed in "The 4-hour body" all require scheduling an appointment (meh) or buying a multi-hundred-dollar device.

So here are my pretty rough measurements: (hooray for 1. being young, and 2. being a dude, so I don't feel any insecurity about posting these sorts of things online)
Weight: 151 lbs.
Stomach at navel: 32"

Biceps: 10.5"

Thighs: 21"

Hips at widest part: 36.5" (I don't really know what this means. Butt? It's the sort of squeeze point for my lower body I guess: if I were in a hole with circumference 36.4" I would be kind of stuck, and it would be at my butt, so that's what I measured.)

Neck: 15"

Body fat using US Navy method: 12.08%
Body fat using some random website: 17.22%
Using some other random website: 15%
Well perhaps trying to measure body fat percentage using just measurements is kind of silly anyway. I'm not too fussed about it.

Which brings us to the conclusion: it's all an experiment. Let's see how my average mood/stomach/energy goes in the next few weeks. If physical measurements improve too, great!

Finally, disclaimer about comments: Nutrition is something that everyone has a lot of very strong mostly-hand-wavey opinions about. I am not trying to say that these changes that I'm making are good for everyone. I don't even know if they're good for me. I'm interested to debate a little bit, but I reserve the right to stop talking and "agree to disagree"* at any point.
*That is the second time I've said "agree to disagree" in three days. That makes me sad.

Twitter and energy

2011-01-03T10:43:00.000-08:00

On that note, I guess I'll start Twittering again. No reason not to; like every other internet thing, it's only as bad as you make it. And I only read it for a couple minutes a day, so I'd be better off optimizing my Google Reader time 10% than optimizing my Twittering 90%.

Not sure about personal/professional. It used to be all personal, but I think it'd be nice to have a professional Twitter too, so I could follow other researchers, and so I could say "Ooh here's an interesting idea" or "I just published this paper, check it out" or whatever. I think I'll keep it personal, and I can add a professional one later if necessary.

At any rate: if you follow me, I can guarantee / you won't find nobody else like me.

(side note: oh shit, actually the lyric is "if you want to leave I can guarantee you won't find nobody else like me", which is even creepier. dear uncle kracker: "follow me" is what a prophet says, not a guy trying to win a lady. this'll likely be one of those moments when our grandkids are like "wtf 2000's" and we'll say "sorry, dunno.")

Anyway, about that optimizing my Google Reader time 10%: I would like more energy. I took a class at Google called "Managing your energy", and it's stuck with me more than I would have thought. The premise: it's not that you don't have enough time to do everything that you want, it's that you don't have enough energy. (here's a good summary.) Think about the times that you're high energy and positive: you can do anything. You'll make a to-do list and then knock them all off, one by one. But when you're out of energy, you'll watch TV or surf the internet.

They (a group called the Energy Project, but I won't link to them because their site sucks) say there are a few kinds of energy: physical, mental, emotional, and I guess you could say spiritual. Without getting into too much detail, they build on each other like a pyramid. I'm doing okay on all levels, but not rocking any of them, so I'd like to start with the physical and work up. 2011: the year I have more energy.

One thing I like about this approach: it's abundance-based, not scarcity-based. Managing your time is saying "I have X hours, and they are slipping away slowly, so I better grab on to them and squeeze out all the time I can". Managing your energy is like building things with bricks. It adds and multiplies. If you take more time to do another thing, it might give you more energy instead of taking it away.

More details later.

Hey, I'll be in Pittsburgh tonight

2010-12-31T08:33:00.000-08:00

And I don't really have any broadcast channel besides this blog. I guess this is what Twitter is for. Anyway, I'll be at Aaron's party; perhaps I will see you there. Otherwise, want to hang out?

I thought I had a neat idea there with "let's abolish morality"

2010-12-28T20:37:00.000-08:00

but it turns out that what I really mean is basically "I like consequentialism, not deontology." (I've read about one whole paragraph of each of those articles.)

But argh! Life is so much harder when you look at everything as good or bad!

(skippable elaboration: external morality is just a heuristic, right? it's like when a kid says "why shouldn't you shoplift a candy bar?", you could say
- "well, then the store owner is out $1, and then it makes it harder for him to keep the store in business, and he might have to fire his workers, then they're out of jobs so they can't buy things, so other stores go out of business; it's got negative economic effects" or
- "if I steal, other people think it might be okay to steal, and store owners will get suspicious, and this creates a world of lies which I don't want to live in" and then explain the tragedy of the commons or
- "I might get caught and the chance of me getting caught times the badness of getting caught is more than $1", and explain how expected value works or
- "stealing is wrong."
In the adult case, it's even worse, because you don't even know the effects. In either case, appeal to external morality is the quickest way to figure out "should I do X or Y?". It's often a necessary hack, but it's still a hack. And when you forget that it's just a hack, you start thinking "he loaded the dishwasher WRONG" or "she said the WRONG thing" and when people wrong you that really hurts! But you're not really wronged in any grand true way, and because it's so minor, it's better to think about it as if you weren't even wronged.)

Urgh! Deontologists stress me out! Then I am reminded of a bit in "The Size of the World" by Jeff Greenwald in which his friend Sally comes to a great realization that, though she tries to be accepting of everything, she doesn't accept it when others don't accept things. It's played for a bit of laughs in the book, but it's a lesson I'd do well to learn.

Happy Weirdsmas!

2010-12-26T17:29:00.000-08:00

Urgh okay I want to write a post about "can we get rid of so-called objectivity in cases of taste and see what happens?" and furthermore "can we get rid of morality and see what happens?", but that is kind of heavy, so instead I'll point out a few things that are really pleasantly droll about our Most Favorite of Favorite Days.

1. Stockings. Okay, first of all, hanging up your sock to get presents has always been kind of silly, but okay, whatever. But we don't even use real stockings, we use these fake things that are way bigger than feet and have a Santa stitched on them.

2. "Santa exists" jokes. Santa Claus might be the biggest and best secular meme. How did we, as a society, all manage to play the exact same trick on our kids? It wouldn't even work if we all played different tricks. Somehow we've all agreed that this red-suited dude is Santa and that is that. I guess, once we've taken the work to establish this, we adults might as well milk this joke for all it's worth. Well, it's only marginally more annoying than talking about the weather.

3. Quirinius. I can imagine Quirinius being next in line to be governor of Syria.

Quirinius: but father I don't want to be governor!

His Dad: shut up I want this family to be famous for all time.

Quirinius: but we'll all be forgotten anyway!

Dad: no, the prophecy says that you will be remembered for thousands of years. I wonder how. That reminds me, you've got to get to work fighting those Marmaridae. That will probably be what makes you famous. Or maybe your campaign against the Homonadenses. Perhaps you should concentrate on rectoring Gaius Caesar; when he is emperor, he'll surely reward you kindly.

Quirinius: I dunno, those all seem so meaningless. I feel like I'll probably just be a footnote in history.

Dad: Son, if that's how you feel, you should get to work being the best footnote in history you can.

(75 to 100 years pass)

Dead Quirinius: booyah!

4. For some reason, my grandma can't find Wintergreen Lifesavers in Florida. Those are like The Lifesavers. That's like saying you can find pizzas but no red sauce: possible, but what kind of weird world exists in Florida?

5. Ded Moroz. Why are we stuck with fat ol' Santa instead of this badass?

6. "Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays": why is this an issue? "Christmas" fanatics: regardless of what you think about Christianity and state celebrations etc, "Happy Holidays" might just mean "Happy Christmas And New Year's." "Holidays" fanatics: Christmas is kind of cultural, it's a holiday, it's not a day of hating on anyone, so don't worry about it. And Hanukkah and Kwanzaa: this is so goofy! It'd be like if the US were run by Buddhists, and they decided to have Buddhaday, but it happened to be on the Feast Day of St. Stephen and Lars Ulrich's birthday, so they celebrated Buddhaday, St. Stephen's Day, and Ulrichday, to appeal to the majority Buddhists as well as the minority Christians and the Danish. Nevermind that most Christians are indifferent to St. Stephen, and Lars Ulrich is a clown.
But, ok, Christmahanukwanza jokes are about as funny as airline food, so let's move on.

7. "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus": "Santa Baby" is a goddamn ridiculous song, but at least if you accept one conceit (Santa is a sexy desirable man) it makes sense. To be able to reconcile "ISMKSC" with our world, we'd have to accept that: A. Santa is a sexy desirable man, B. he's makin' out with random ladies after sneaking into their houses, and C. seeing your mom smoochin' (and ticklin') another dude is not only acceptable, but also cute (nay, precious) enough to deserve a song on a Mitch Miller album.

People vs. our memories of them

2010-12-19T17:00:00.000-08:00

I was reading "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch, and you know how it goes, he tells amazing stories about his life and all these lessons he's learned, because he's dying of pancreatic cancer at 43 or something. It's really inspiring, both the book and the lecture itself- look it up, it's everywhere. He was pretty much sainted afterwards, which is awkward, because saying "this person, as a whole, is great" implies that other people as a whole are bad, or at least not great.

There are stories in there that portray him as this superhero, this modern techie ubermensch who created the CMU ETC and Alice with his bare hands, while stopping by along the way to work at Disney and act in Star Trek and play football and complete all of his childhood dreams. And yet, parts of the book hint at the fact that he might not actually be Jesus #2. Take his living situation as a young professor: a $450/month attic apartment with a card table and chairs. Now, I thought this a cool trait, but others saw it as him refusing to grow up. Or an incident in which he pours soda on his car seat to demonstrate to his niece and nephew that people are more important than things: awesome, or just kind of preachy and dumb? And those are the ones that he mentions; you'd imagine there are a lot of situations where he was kind of a jerk.

So what? Well, I guess the thing I've taken from it is: don't get so hung up on whether Randy Pausch was a good or bad guy. It's a book of his lessons, after all, not a book in which he tries to prove he's a great guy.

And on maybe the same note, I saved this article a long time ago because it pretty perfectly captures my two thoughts on Facebook (which thoughts are apparently important to have these days):
1. Zuckerberg is wrong because he thinks we are each no more than one self. He wants a world without privacy, where privacy is unnecessary, where your grandparents see you drunk at parties but they understand because they used to get drunk at parties too. This idea is flawed because we will always have at least two selves: public and private. At least until mind-reading exists.
2. Zuckerberg is wrong because he thinks we each must be a self. A large part of Facebook is explicitly "branding" yourself. Creating a concept. And we each must have one concept of ourselves that we throw out to the world. How else will you get famous?

On an even further note: you can easily distance your current self from your past self. "Oh, that was just something I did as a kid." You can even distance yourself from your last-year self: "I've learned a lot since then." Can you distance yourself from your yesterday self? Can you distance yourself from your five-minutes-ago self? And why not?

What I'm getting at is: self is an illusion, right?

Even more tangentially, I'm glad someone coined the phrase "spiritual materialism." (end of paragraph 2.) It's a bit of a trap I could fall into by posting "deep" things here. "look at me, my blog is all spiritual and stuff." I'm really just interested in throwing some ideas out there and maybe sparking some discussions later. I'm sorry if it comes across as spiritual materialism.

I'd sort of like to remember what my life is like now.

2010-12-19T13:28:00.000-08:00

That's most of the reason I blog ever, right?

Here are some things:
- I work. It is alternately fun and frustrating and scary. Fun because I am writing code that I know how to write. Frustrating and scary because I am sort of leading development of a server, and I have no idea how to lead a software project, so I feel like I'm spinning a lot. (about once every two weeks, I have to organize a list of "all the things we need to do." This list started out very useless, and with every iteration becomes closer to useful.)

- I've gone to a Rinzai Zen temple three times now, which means that there's at least sorta a chance that I might keep doing it, which means it might be worth writing about here. It's... different. Rinzai is the more rigorous of the two main Zen branches (the other being Soto), and Zen is one of the bigger branches of Mahayana Buddhism, and Mahayana is one of two main branches of Buddhism. Rinzai is the branch that does the koans ("what is the sound of one hand clapping?" etc) but only for advanced students. Anyway, it's intense: you just sit, totally still, concentrating on your breathing, for 25 minutes, twice in a row. It's super quiet. I'm intrigued; I don't know if the rigor will tire me out, or if it will continue to bring me back because I'll feel like I'm making more progress. It's like playing a video game on a higher difficulty level.

- I still feel like I'm not very good at meditation on the lowest level. I'm doing okay on the physical side; sitting for 20 minutes no longer fazes me. (although my lower back tires out quickly, which makes me hunch, and sometimes I get real sleepy.) The mental side is still a mess, though; thoughts all over the place. I'm not ashamed, but I'm frustrated.

- I cook. But it's just whatever the farmer's market has, stir-fried, roasted, or simmered. So I'm not learning much more Thai right now, just repeating familiar methods. This is fine.

- I'm becoming much more interested in self-experimentation. I'm maintaining a journal of dreams and emotions; don't know what I'll do with that, but it's something. It's convinced me that I can actually stick to a routine and get some meaningful data, so I'm not wasting money or energy by investing in self-experimentation tools. So I got a watch that I'll try to program, I ordered a Wakemate to learn more about how I sleep, and I want to get an Emotiv EPOC developer kit or a NeuroSky MindSet, because that could really help my research, but I figure better to play with my existing toys before buying new ones.

- I've been hanging out with the Seattle Couchsurfing crowd. In addition to hosting surfers, it's a bit of a social group, and they're pretty cool. (I've signed up to host a couple people too.) I just started showing up out of the blue, and they've been very welcoming. This is nice. I certainly appreciate my closer friends, but I've been looking for a bit wider experience for some time now.

- I'm gearing up to leave Google, start research, and travel. I told my team about my plans. They're all very very cool about it. It's amazing how supportive everyone at the company has been. I'm going to be full time at Google for January, part time for February and March while I start at UW, then full time at UW starting in April.

- Christmas is in a week! I'm quite looking forward to going back home and seeing my family. I'm in Cleveland Dec 24 to Jan 2.

And this is not a big deal right now but it came up and I'm posting so here we go: three interesting posts about certain drugs. The food/drug/herb distinction keeps seeming more and more fake. (from grade school: what is a drug? anything you put in your body that has an effect, besides food. what is food? well, you know, it's food! I'm glad I didn't know more logic as a kid; I might have been a real brat.)