Another article about enlightenment

http://www.psychologytomorrowmagazine.com/inscapes-enlightenment-and-science/
more from the same guy: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/the-anxiety-of-the-long-distance-meditator/

More for my own reference than for posting to y'all. I keep running into this stuff, mindblowing (literally) stories with some kind of brain imaging, same characters (Shinzen Young, Daniel Ingram), a pretty reasonable story for why it's not more widespread (we're just getting into the age of really understanding things in the west that Buddhists have known for a while, appropriating them into our own language and culture). Then I go read Dharma Overground for a while, and then I get fed up because it's all so much talk.

Wow, when I put it like that, it sounds like crazy talk. Well, I'm not sure it all isn't. But it seems like the most reasonable conception of spiritual experiences that I've got going, so I'm half-skeptically running with it for now. Speaking of which, I'm going on a retreat the week after next (March 10-16) at Bhavana Society so maybe I'll have more direct experience to report then. But based on past experiences, don't count on it :P

A thought about the Olympics

Is this really what we want, as a celebration of world peace and togetherness and what have you? Rabid competitions, where bumping your leg once derails your four years of preparation? It's a spectacle, not of amazing sportspersonship, but of constantly tearing people down.

When I'm in charge of the world, we'll get all the athletes together and have them do some ski jumps and tricks, and after each one we'll point out what was so absolutely amazing about that trick. Or have the cross-country skiers race next to an average schlub so we can see how freakin' fast they are. Show why the speed skaters do that really fluid loping thing when it looks like they ought to be taking more steps. Show how much higher our athletes can jump compared to the last Olympics, or how much steeper moguls they can ski, or how much more accurately they can curl.

And no medals, and no nations. I realize we can't all get along on a day to day basis when there are important resources at stake, or cold wars, or snowdens, or whatever, but just for once, when we're all getting together to play sports, can we try to set a more collaborative tone instead of competing with other nations for the most gold coins? If I were an alien who saw this, I'd come back in a thousand years when we're a little more civilized.

What a year.

2013 hasn't been the easiest. The careful reader may note that I posted a lot less here in 2013 than most years. Work has been difficult: trying to figure out my place and succeed at something here. As it is, I'm kind of starting over now on a new thing. Which is exciting, because I feel like it might kind of work, and I kind of know how to do it.

On the other hand, I think that for each of the last 16 months, I thought "next month will be better". So not getting my hopes up too much yet.

Still, at least it hasn't been boring! At least I'm not under-challenged. I'm probably learning something and exploring and growing and meeting people and so on. It's the sort of thing that's easier to know in retrospect, probably.

Dealing with the way some part of my brain deals with video games

I started playing FTL (warning: takes about an hour to get into but then is very addictive). I've gone through this cycle with other games: addiction followed by quick burnout. I know that I do this; it's fine, I just make sure that I burn out quick and then get back to my regular life. At first I reasoned I just had to beat the end boss, and then I'd be done. And I was, for a few weeks.

But then I picked it up again for some reason, and this time I decided I had to unlock all the ships. This seemed fine, too, because I was unlocking them all pretty steadily, except the Crystal ship. (I used knowledge from the wiki and I figured this was fine because I was still the one playing the game.) But then I looked up how to unlock the Crystal ship, and realized it was orders of magnitude harder than the other ships. It'd be hours of grinding! But I couldn't just put the game down, not with a ship still unlocked.

Then I decided that it doesn't require skill to get the Crystal ship, just luck. You have to get to the right planets in the right order, and sometimes they just don't line up right. So when I found some other post where someone posted his save game file that would allow you to effectively cheat your way into the Crystal ship, I grabbed it and unlocked it.

Somehow, my brain was okay with that, even after it wasn't okay with just cheating from the beginning. And now that I've unlocked all the ships, I'm effectively done with it. (I don't have to, for example, get all the badges.) Good thing that, even though I couldn't rationalize quitting without getting the Crystal ship, I could rationalize cheating for the Crystal ship and then quitting.

What a mess to have a brain!

Bike #2: Frank Black

This is my bad weather bike. Batavus Navajo, classic Dutch style. I found it in my basement when I moved in. Not sure who it used to belong to (none of my roommates, current or recent past), so at this point, adverse possession or something, right?

Plus, it was a mess when I found it. It's not awesome now, but I've done a couple of key things:
- unstuck the seat post (and it was really rusted in there. The fix eventually involved taking the wheels and seat off, attaching a vise to the seat post, and turning the whole frame around it. Thanks to John at Kraynick's for help. If you ever have your seat post out of your bike, take this opportunity to grease the heck out of it!)
- replace the brake pads (these were "cantilever brakes", which are new to me. not too tricky, though.)
- remove a couple of European bike things: a wheel lock and a dynamo/generator/front light thing. The first is neat because you can lock your bike, low-security but quickly and easily. The second is neat because gathers power from the rotation of your front wheel, meaning you are powering your light by yourself! I had both of these on my bike in Maastricht (as did most people), and they were nice. I removed these from this bike here because they were broken. Took a little brute force; thanks to a couple random folks at Kraynick's.
- add one key European bike thing: fenders. It's so much nicer to get where you're going without being covered in rain/snow and ruining your clothes, especially for a bad weather bike. Most people in Maastricht had these too. They should come pre-installed for city/hybrid/commuter bikes. They're so good.

There are minor but important differences between Dutch and US bikes. I mean, this thing was all tricked out for the average person to ride around town. No lycra here. Plus, the handlebars are really high, so you're sitting upright like an average person, not a speed racer. Here, you bike if you're "a biker"; there, you bike if you're a person.

So why's it called Frank Black? Because it's a little grungy, and I ride this bike when (wait for it)... "it is time for stormy weather."

Donating money: a brain dump for 2013

Why donate anything?
We who earn USD can make a lot of difference for people abroad
We in tech (and non-tech folks too) sometimes have more money than we need
It seems like the best cost-benefit tradeoff to make the world a better place

Your possible objections:
I can't be sure I'm doing any good.
That's definitely valid; here I mostly hand it over to GiveWell, who vets their organizations pretty thoroughly. In the end, it is all a bet, but giving to a well-researched organization seems a good enough bet for me.
I don't have time to research anywhere to donate.
Here again I point to GiveWell, who seems thoughtful enough for me, and I usually just donate to their organizations. They're interested in doing the most total good for your dollar; it's sort of utilitarian. If you're into that sort of thing, I like them; if you're not, I'd argue that maybe you should be. (related: how personal should your giving be?)
I don't have money yet, but I will someday. (this likely applies to many of my HCI student friends.)
That's fair. Especially if you're a student. Anything you donate now will be dwarfed by your future donations. (with corporate matching, maybe.) In that case, view your current donations primarily as a way to build a habit. Donate some percentage of your annual income. (or, donate some percentage of your income minus some basic level of living expenses. keep that level constant as your income grows.) If you start donating 1% now, that is a not-insignificant chunk, which will become a huge chunk in the future.
I don't have money yet, and never will.
That's fine too. Don't donate, then. There's no imperative here. For you, it may not be the easiest way to make the world a better place.
I didn't plan for it in this year's budget.
That's fine. Start next year. Pick your target amount, parcel it out week by week. If you make $25k, and you want to donate 1%, that's $250, which is just $5/week. Put cash in an envelope. (seriously!) Or use whatever money management system works for you; I'm not getting into how you should organize your life.
I don't think it's a good way to help the world.
Fine argument. Perhaps you believe that we'd be better off with a free-market utopia or something. I disagree with you, but let's take that offline. The point is, if you donate money to a well-researched organization, even if you haven't done The Best, you have still probably done some good, given the state of the world right now.
It doesn't fit with my current schema of how I manage my money or my life.
This is actually a great point, because it's really probably the biggest reason not to donate. To which I say, it's a pretty arbitrary decision; you can make it a part of your life whenever you want. Why not start now?

Where I'm donating this year:
20% to Kiva to help their operating costs. This is because I've been lending money through Kiva for years, and don't usually donate to help them. Kiva (and all microfinance) might not actually help alleviate poverty. Might even promote unhealthy capitalism in the long run, in that Kiva's organizations are making money off of their clients, and their clients in turn are setting up businesses. Not sure the world needs to be more based on setting up businesses.
On the other hand, microloans do help people smooth out money issues and repayment rates are high, which implies they're not just setting up a huge cycle of debt.
So I'm kind of ambivalent about this, but like I said, I've been lending money through them for years, so my consistency bias in addition to the pluses outweigh the minuses.
80% to GiveDirectly, GiveWell's top rated charity this year, which is also being matched by Good Ventures.

Side notes:
I was thinking about setting up a "gift matching" thing myself, where I'd match y'all's gifts up to $x, but it struck me as dishonest for a couple reasons:
1. I was prepared to donate $x anyway, so I'm either lying about the matching, or I'm withholding money that I would otherwise donate
2. We both kind of get too much credit. I get to say "I helped raise $2x", and you do too, but we each only raised $x.
More on gift matching.

What are your other questions or objections?

Best albums I heard in 2013, and my #1's not Yeezus

It's only a tinge of iconoclasm, and mostly that I just don't really want to listen to it a lot. Anyway, I'd sooner put MBDTF on my 2013 top 10 list, because that album is good enough to time travel; Yeezus is great but not my favorite.

Overall, I was a little disappointed by 2013 music. A lot of my favorites seemed like evolutions, perfections of an existing thing, rather than a new thing. Still, some favorites:

CHVRCHES - The Bones of What You Believe - like this, this is a really good attempt at making a perfect pop album. I was debating whether this was one of The Greats. I don't quite think so, but it's close.

James Blake - Overgrown - I played Retrograde on the radio and was entranced. Think I looped it pretty continuously for about a week. Someone on the internet wrote "Put Thom Yorke in 2099 and you have James Blake." Not a terrible description.

Mrs. Paintbrush - Duke 2 - This is Jackson from Grand Buffet. You haven't heard it yet? You must be wearing glasses made of bullshit! (also, buy it.)

Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City - a million websites will tell you why this is good better than I. It's not light and airy like their debut, but it's pretty deep in that I still want to hear it. A lot of feelings. Standouts include Step and Everlasting Arms.

Grimes - Visions - okay this is 2012 but deserves to be on another Best Of list. Might be one of The Greats.

What was very good but not quite my favorite:

Haim - Days Are Gone - feels like it's from the 80's. Starting off the record with Falling is pretty electric; I was convinced I was going to hear another one of The Greats. The rest of the record didn't quite live up to it, though Forever and the title track came close. And then can we talk about "My Song 5"? More of that please.

Lorde - Pure Heroine - Put this a half step below CHVRCHES as my favorite atmospheric female-fronted pop album with standout singles. It feels like a pop album produced by The xx.

Alt-J - An Awesome Wave - Thanks to these guys for doing something a little different in a pop album! Maybe it's just that the main guy's voice is a little weird.

The Knife - Shaking the Habitual - Look, Kanye followed up his epic genre-defining masterpiece with something abrasive and weird, and everyone loved it! Why has everyone snubbed this one? Whatever, it's got its high points (most of the actual songs) and the rest of it is, well, too weird, but I'd rather have too weird than not weird enough.

Daft Punk - Random Access Memories - Okay you love this too, and Get Lucky is the best all around mainstream pop song since Crazy (or maybe Hey Ya!), let's move on, but play Contact one more time first. Yes!

Julia Holter - Loud City Song - Atmospheric concept album that I ought to listen to again.

Janelle Monae - the Electric Lady - not quite up to her first record, but a pretty fun concept album with some great dancy bits. Especially QUEEN and Dance Apocalyptic. I even liked the interludes, and that's rare. I did not like, well, the slow songs.
Jai Paul - self titled bootlegged/unofficially released album - I take back what I said about 2013 being boring; this is great. It might even go in the "favorites" above, but I haven't had enough time. "Listening to a Jai Paul song sounds like a tuning into a pirate radio station being broadcast directly from someone’s brain." Avalanches meets Yeasayer?

What was apparently way older than 2013 but I liked a lot:

Elsiane - Hybrid - RIYL Bjork

Tune-Yards - WhoKill - exuberant weird vocals. Bizness is so joyful. And the line "So sorry but you only stood half a chance/ now it's over and they're walking all over you" from My Country (at 1:23) is so perfect.

David Bowie - Station to Station - and give Low another listen, while you're at it.

Talking Heads - Naked - maligned last album, actually pretty solid, especially Blind.

Kitsune Maison compilation 14 - dance pop, low on depth but quite sugary. Maybe I should get some of the others. Friends's I'm His Girl (Jake Bullitt Remix) stands out.

Uakti and Philip Glass - Aguas de Amazonia - this year I started tackling my to-listen queue from both directions. A long time ago, my uncle Jim recommended this to me, and I just tracked it down. Nice atmospheric.

Bad memes

Networking. All-nighter. If you're saying these words, you're probably doing something wrong.

People have been meeting each other for ages, making friends, and getting jobs from people they know. But when we start talking about "networking", this common practice becomes something that instills fear. (which in turn makes it harder.)

Similarly, you shouldn't "pull an all-nighter" for pretty much any reason. But it's become a thing among students (and maybe others in high-pressure jobs), so people do it, and talk about doing it. Even the fact that the word exists legitimizes it. If you talk about how you didn't "pull an all-nighter", maybe you're saying "well, I slept 4 hours", which, due to the anchoring effect of "all nighter", feels legitimate even though it's terrible. And you're still contributing to the existence of the concept "all-nighter". It's like "don't think of an elephant" - for better or worse, you start thinking of elephants.

For a harmless example, look at "planking." It's kind of funny. But now that some people started "planking", it's a thing, and for better or worse you might find yourself planking sometime.

But imagine if instead of "planking", we talked about "pebbling", where "pebbling" means "throwing pebbles at someone you don't like." This is going to have mildly negative consequences. Some kids will pebble some people. Adults will overreact and ban pebbling or something. It'll be a whole flap just because a word exists.

So, I guess, all this garbage about what goofy words the OED is adding actually matters. Be careful what words you use? Stop talking about all-nighters? (Linguists, I bet you've known this for ages. Maybe I'm just rediscovering the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the idea that memes are powerful?)

A mild case of Holiday YOLO

From The Scotsman newspaper today: "This emerging group of middle-aged thrill-seekers is increasingly driven by the phenomenon of "holiday YOLO" (you only live once)..."

So I spent three days with my wonderful friends Daniel and Killian tromping around these hills and castles. I mean, exactly what I had hoped. I'd heard that the Highlands are great and saw some nice pictures of this town called Ullapool, so we stayed there. So good!

We drove in one direction (har) and found a thing to climb. Then we found some castles and islands. In the other direction, we found this gorge. We also found Sigur Ros landscapes and haunted hotels. We drank a lot of tea and looked at sheep. We even found a weasel.

they are getting married in a few months and this photo better show up somewhere there

weasel right in the center there

Here is a tip: if you listen to new music while driving through someplace particularly stirring, you'll make great associations. Even if it's Katy Perry. (for the record, I blame Killian.)

Then I went to a conference called UIST in St. Andrews. Also great! Beautiful old ruined town, great place for a conference, stayed at a cool little B&B, saw a lot of cool technology, talked to great people, got some ideas. I will write more about that in my research focused blog.

bagpipers right in the center there

I quite like this place! Wouldn't mind living there for a spell. Everyone we met was so friendly, the scones and whiskey are good, and just like I hoped, there are hills and wind and ruined castles everywhere. More realistically, wouldn't mind biking around it, with or without a motor.

more photos, if you are so inclined

If meaning in life is self-created,

if there's no "meaning of life" except what we create for ourselves,

could you just decide "the meaning of life is to be really good at Super Mario Bros", dedicate yourself fully to it, and be satisfied?

(I pose this argument as a straw man; it feels like there's something wrong with it. do help me figure out what it is.)

Vitamins

In fall 2006, I was having a tough time. Junior year, taking the hardest classes I had yet, and not really knocking them out of the park. I was living with some good friends, too, but it was a 4-person 2-bedroom apartment, which is still kind of stressful.

I used to take multivitamins. I noticed, at one point during fall 2006, that I had just about enough vitamins to last until the end of the semester. After that semester, in the spring, I would study abroad in the Netherlands, and I guess I figured that senior year would be good and I'd go find a great job or something, and pretty much everything would be fine if I just got through that one semester. Every day as I took my vitamin, I'd sort of muse about it being a little suffering pill. After I got through those, it'd all be golden.

The weird part of this story is that I was pretty much right. I studied in the Netherlands, it was pretty fun, I got a cool research gig and had one of my best summers, enjoyed senior year, rolled on to Google, got into grad school, bummed around the world, and it's all been fine. Until this year: work has been tough.

For kind of dumb reasons, I happen to have another bottle of multivitamins. I figured, might as well take them, as long as I've got them. And then I started forming the same story, about having a little bottle of suffering pills.

But you know what? Could be that vitamins are bad for you. So I'm throwing them out.

Things contracting a bit

Sometimes life expands, and you start a thousand new projects and buy some stuff and make new friends. Sometimes it contracts, and you tie up loose ends, get rid of things, clean house. Now is the latter for me.

At work, I'm getting into a worn groove. Not quite a rut, but a path that a lot of people have stomped down before me and that I'm learning how to walk in. Depth is nice; learning to become a class-A grunt in any line of work is useful. You get blinders, though, too. Everything you and your friends/coworkers do becomes just the standard way to do things. (I'm a little convinced that there are things we grad students are doing poorly, particularly the worrying.)

Otherwise, things are fine, I feel healthy physically, I even have a bit of leisure time to do nothing. I'm done with my bike and my radio show (for now), got fun social things to do but am avoiding adding work for the time being.

I've been dreaming a lot less, since I started here a year ago. My brain feels fuller. I'm not worried about not growing. I am sometimes worried that I'm not doing what's important. (Working on changing that.) I'm still not sure how anyone can be content, ever, pretty much period. I still feel like an eager, angry, and excited kid.

The bike lives!

Well, that was quick.

I spent a couple hours at Kraynick's today, and it's good to go! The last few parts (bottom bracket, cranks, chain, brake) all came together really easily.

Here are the parts (and this is as much for my future benefit as yours)

Eighth Inch Scrambler frame set: $150, includes frame, fork, seatpost/clamp, headset.

Frame: 59cm chromoly steel, horizontal dropouts

Fork: 1 1/8" chromoly

Headset: threadless

Seatpost/clamp: whatever, it works

Seat: Velo Plush something, I already had it around

Stem: $20, XLC adjustable A-head, it says: ø: 25.4mm, and 90mm 

Handlebars: $3 bargain-bin, plus some old grips I had lying around

Brake: $25 Shimano Sora BR-3400 (like this) dual-pivot side-pull brake, recessed mount. 

Brake lever: $3 bargain-bin mountain-bike-style

Brake cable and housing: $5

Bottom bracket: $26, Shimano UN55 68x107mm Square Taper

Crank set (includes sprocket): $34, 170 mm, 46 teeth, 1/8" steel chain ring
Another crank arm (non-drive-side) because the first one got rounded off after I didn't tighten it enough: $3

Pedals: $5, bargain-bin

Chain: 1/2x1/8" KMC Z410 BMX-style for internal gear hub/single speed, maybe $10

Wheels: $110, includes tubes and tires, 700c x 18mm freewheel/fixed (riding fixed now)

Lights: a couple little blinky things I had lying around
Lock bracket: $2 (to hold the lock on)

Total: $396, which is maybe about $96 more than I was planning to spend, but not terrible. Time invested is in the low tens of hours- maybe 20 or 30 if you count all the looking things up online.

Riding a fixed gear bike: a little weird! I'm nervous to go anywhere near as fast as I usually do. I have no idea if I'll be able to go on hills ever. For that matter, the following things are also weird: only one brake, skinny hard tires, no gears.

But the following things I love: no quick releases, pretty lightweight, the look of the thing (isn't it pretty?), almost no logos, and I know everything that went into it and how to fix a lot of it.

All it needs is a name! Taking suggestions.
EDIT: I think the best name, as suggested by someone on my kickball team (Tim, I think?), is Brian Eno. Because: A. it's minimalist and great, and B. what gets you more cred than a hand-made fixed gear bike named Brian Eno?
EDIT EDIT: Thanks also to my dad for the bike stand!

EDIT AGAIN:
wanted to catalog some important things I learned:
- to get the headset into the frame, use a headset press, without the bearings in it (which is obvious if you think about it, but you can smash the bearings if you don't think about it)
- when installing the bottom bracket, be careful when starting it so you don't cross-thread, and put anti-seize compound (which is like grease plus molybdenum bits) on it
- install the bottom bracket on the drive side first, and don't ride it if it starts to come loose!
- when installing the cranks, really crank them the heck in there (and then re-tighten it after every ride for the first couple hundred miles).
- you want the chain to be tight. Tighten the left axle nut (not sure what that's called), then pull the wheel into place while tightening the right one.
- don't take the tip off your crank puller and then try to use it :-/

Building a bicycle

This is far enough along that I'm confident that I'll end up a Guy Who Built A Bike and not a Guy Who Blogged About Building A Bike And Then Never Did It.

I'm building a bike! It is both easier and more complicated than I thought. Slightly more expensive than I thought, but not wildly. It is definitely more expensive than buying a bike.

I'm roughly following this guide. It'll be a fixed gear, 10% for cred and 90% because that seemed easiest. (although I got a cool wheel that has a fixed cog on one side and a freewheel on the other, so I could switch it if I wanted. the difference is that you can't coast on a fixed gear, and if you push the pedals backwards, it brakes; if you have a freewheel, it's just like any bike that you're used to, but only one speed.)

I've been getting a bunch of help from the guys at Kraynick's (Jerry Kraynick himself, and other folks who just happen to be in there fixing up bikes at the same time). Couldn't do it without them; like I said, it's kind of complicated. It's exciting, though! I'll post more when it's done.

Eat salads for breakfast

1. They are usually about the healthiest thing you can eat, so making a habit of eating a big one every day means that, over time, you'll get a ton more good healthy things into your body and less unhealthy things.
2. They are easy: buy a huge tub of greens for $5 and pile them with whatever you want on top in a giant bowl.
3. Relatedly, they help you use up whatever's in your fridge or pantry. Cheese, nuts, fruit, avocado, fish, whatever, pile it all on.
3. They're messy, with dressing flicking all over the place. All the more reason to eat them at home.
4. At home, too, it's easy to make your own dressing: 2 or 3 parts olive oil, 1 part vinegar, mix.
5. If you don't like salads, and you're half awake in the morning and rushing to get to work, you don't want to rush through something that's really tasty- just stuff some greens down. Then eat something more tasty and less healthy when you've got time to enjoy it.
6. If you do like salads, then hey, you get to eat a salad!

Falling asleep is really cool.

If you pay attention, you can watch your brain shut down. (or, better metaphor, "suspend", or more appropriately "do a bunch of things differently than it does when you're awake.") How neat is that?

You're having a train of thought and then you realize you can't remember what you were thinking about literally seconds ago. Not a clue. And then you're on to the next topic.

Also, the next topic is often really goofy. Leaps that you wouldn't ever think of when you're awake. Yeah, every so often someone discovers the benzene ring, but more often you just come up with a pretty entertaining nonsense story, and that's cool too.

You can see all this happening! (Until, all of a sudden, you can't anymore.) I think that's cool.

My Soylent experiments, or, don't try this at home.

You might have heard about Soylent, this drink made by a bunch of Y Combinator softwaremen who wanted to have an alternative to eating food. Supposedly it has all the nutrients you need to be healthy. Now, given my extended joking about Food Cube, I was naturally intrigued.

Plus, they made it sound pretty easy. Make a list of all the nutrients you need. Buy vitamins and stuff until you have all those nutrients. Blend them together.

So I gave it a try. A run to the local GNC, a couple of things off the internet, and a big spreadsheet, and I had Homemade Soylent Version 1. It included whey protein, maltodextrin, olive oil, salt, a multivitamin, potassium chloride, monosodium phosphate, iron, fiber, calcium plus magnesium, and potassium gluconate. I'd tell you the proportions, but I don't recommend trying it.

It was awful. I made a 2500-calorie batch of it, drank 1/3 of it for breakfast, and felt sick all morning. I couldn't even think. It felt like I'd eaten a rock. After about half a day (and a couple trips to the bathroom) I could live like a normal human again. Whoops.

So I tried again. (naturally.) Same ingredients, different proportions: more fiber (25g), less calcium magnesium (think I had a little too much before), less maltodextrin and protein powder (for less overall drink), less iron (18mg is just the RDA for women. for men, it's 8mg).

I've almost made it through 1/3 of a day's supply now, and I don't quite feel sick. I don't feel particularly well, though, either. Plus, the thing is quite noxious. I am having a hard time drinking it, and I'm a guy who likes almost any food. I am guessing that a bunch of people who try this are going to find that, like me, they care about taste and texture more than they thought.

Still, though, good luck to them! Since I bought the ingredients, both the canonical example recipe (as made by the folks who are manufacturing Soylent) and the multitude of other recipes (as found on their forums) have evolved quite a bit, so it's likely that I'm just doing it wrong. But because every bad recipe means a day of drinking gross nonsense, I'm not inclined to experiment further.

(I did preorder a weeks' supply of the "official" stuff, though! I'll let you know how that turns out.)

Makin' T-shirts

... is surprisingly easy.
1. print your design.
2. tape it to a non-corrugated cardboard. Tape a sheet of acetate (or "Dura-lar" - another plastic sheet thing) on top of it. Cut it out with an exacto knife.
3. tape the plastic sheet to a shirt. Paint on it with fabric paint.

Things to watch for:
- you might need some sticky-tack to stick the plastic to the shirt so it doesn't lift up.
- dab with the paintbrush, don't brush. Spongey brushes work pretty well.
- make sure your design works as a stencil. You might have to add some "bridges". Also, try to stay away from anything super-intricate
- if you cut some letters freehand, they'll look super jagged and sort of violent. This may or may not be what you're going for.

Without further ado, shirts 1 and 2:

 

(there is no punchline to this one.)

(this one is only punchline.)

Everything is broken and can never be fixed?

I got to talking with a friend about, uh, the state of the world, and she asked at one point, what's my take? At this point, it's something like pessimism. Here's why (and I'll constrain this mostly to the US here, just to make the conversation manageable, but of course many of these are worldwide).

We have a lot of huge problems. Environmental problems: global warming, water shortage, deforestation, extinction, smog, fracking, Pacific trash islands. Economic problems: shrinking middle class, unaffordability of school, constant unemployment, whatever. Health problems: obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer. Political insanity, the war on drugs, the current US war-of-the-week against some country where the people are a different color and maybe have oil or communism, widespread creationism, same old crime, racism, misogyny, bee colony collapse. Oh, and now PRISM!

We don't have tools to deal with them. How do we deal with big problems?
- Technology. The smallpox vaccine stopped smallpox.
- Economics. Let the markets solve it! We've made things more efficient; affluent US people can now buy food and ipods.
- Laws. Now there are no laws against black people voting; there will hopefully soon be no laws against gay people marrying.
- Social action. MLK or Gandhi.

None of these work against threats that are complicated, slow, and devastating. Let's narrow the conversation even further to global warming (not because it's our only problem, but just so I'm not ranting for days). I guess renewable energy cheaper than coal would be a partial technological cure, but we're not there yet and I don't know if we will be before the temperatures rise catastrophically. Economic cures lead to nonsense like carbon offsets; does anyone trust "the invisible hand" to magically stop global warming too? Our laws are toothless (Kyoto etc) and there's no crucial moment that we'll all band together, no enemy to fight against, no one leader who will persuade us to do anything until it's too late.

The recommendations that we get fall ridiculously short. Apparently, if everyone lived my lifestyle, it'd take 4.81 earths to support us. If I recycle all my tin cans, carpool whenever possible, and buy organic food, maybe it'd get down to 4.7. People! This is not going to cut it! It's going to take technology, economics, laws, AND social action if we want to get down to 1 earth, and I don't see us using any of them.

I don't mean to just rant, but rather to ask: how do we live our lives and deal with this? The best answer I've come to is to do the little fixes, recycle my tin cans and carpool, and otherwise ignore it all. Enjoy the results of the life lottery that made me an upper middle class white male. Is there an answer that's less asinine or grim?

Home distilling

I like rakia/schnapps/slivovitz/fruit brandy. I thought it'd be fun to make some.

However, turns out it's illegal. Which means that you can't really have an above-the-board operation, which means dependable information is harder to find.

However, you can buy a still kit, which is not a still, so it's not illegal.

However, that requires some heavy soldering or a plumber's torch.

(This guy seems to have useful info too.)

Making fruit wine (or even just beer) would probably be fun too, but the end product is not as exciting, so maybe I won't for now. Still (NPI), maybe these links would be useful to other would-be home distillers. Or, more likely, to me in the future.