A thought about Happiness by way of Math Contests

I swear I'll stop talking about Happiness soon. It's getting annoying, even to me. Anyway, the topic of this post: Everyone wants to know about Happiness these days. But when people talk about Happiness, they're talking about a lot of different things.

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A long diversion into high school math contests:

Back in high school, there were math contests. You might have had them too. We had the OML (6 tests x 30 min), the CML (5 x 30 min), the OCTM (1 x 60 min?), and then the big one, the AMC (1 x 90 min?).

Each test had its own little flavor. The OMLs were the most popular, because they were just a half hour and I think most teachers gave you bonus points if you took them. Each test had 6 questions, 2 easy, 2 medium, 2 hard. Your school's score for each test was the top 5 students' scores that day, so as long as we had 5 6's, we were golden. Your personal score was your total along all 6 tests. We had a guy named Orest who got a 36 my junior year, I think; the math teachers were pretty excited. (to be fair, some of us kids probably were too, but it's high school math contests, so you always had to play it cool, like you were just taking them for the extra credit and didn't really care.) Anyway, at the end of the year, our school would get a little plaque that said "#9 in the state" or whatever. Or did we win that one a lot? Maybe we got #1 in the state a couple years, I don't remember.

The CML was just like the OML but really nobody cared.

The OCTM was even better: you had to take it on a Saturday! Of course I did, because I was a dork, and about 30 other students ended up going because they were dorks or were getting extra credit. But it was cool, because invariably like 5 of us would do pretty well, so we got to go to the OHMIO, which was in Columbus on another Saturday. (why did I think this was fun? oh right, high school, basing my self worth on mathematical ability. (and you know other stuff but really on mathematical ability)) The OHMIO actually was kinda fun though, because I'd get to hang out with all the senior math guys, some of whom I thought were cool, and we'd all joke about how we didn't care about this dumb contest. (clearly we, y'know, dragged ourselves to Columbus on a Saturday just to show how much we didn't care.)

(interlude interlude. At this point in the story, I realized I haven't mentioned an important character: the B-man. He was that math teacher who wrangled all the math kids to the math contests. He also taught the advanced calculus classes, and his classroom was called "the Math Factory". Naturally, he was this intense, motivated, Stand and Deliver-type inspirational Math Guy who spurred us all into love of all things numbers, right? Nope. He was very disorganized, not good at teaching, terrible at keeping order in class, likable but out of it, nutty professor. Oh the B-man stories I could tell... but that's another post. Or series of posts.)

And then there was the GDOTA (Grand Daddy Of Them All): the AMC. You got to get out of your first two classes one day to take the AMC, so that was popular too. 25 questions, multiple choice, where each is 6 points if you get it right, 2 if you leave it blank, and 0 if you get it wrong. 90 minutes. You could take the AMC 10 if you were in 9th or 10th grade, or the AMC 12 if you were in any grade. Also, you could take it twice (the AMC A or B). If you did well on the AMC, you could take the AIME, and that was a trip: 3 hours, 15 questions, each answer is a number between 1 and 999. And then I guess if you did well on the AMC and the AIME combined, you could go to super math camp where they prepare you to duke it out against the Soviets or something at the International Math Olympiad, which is 6 hours, 5 questions.

Nobody from our school ever went on to the IMO; that's crazy talk. What super nerds those guys must be! ... but we all kinda, or at least I kinda, wanted to be the first. And one year I got hella close! I remember I got a 136 on the AMC 12 B, and I think a 9 on the AIME, so my total score was (136 + 9 * 10) = 226, and the cutoff for being a Friggin' Righteous Mathstronaut was 236. I was so proud that year! But besides my winning the AMC school champ's prize, I didn't really tell anyone.

So, no Math Uber-champs from our school. But we'd have 5 or 10 kids take the AIME every year, and this one was a real treat. We'd get out of our first like 5 classes one day, sit around in the School Board room with its fancy wood table and leather chairs (private high school...), one of the teachers would bring donuts, and we'd sorta rack our brains for an hour, sit around for 119 minutes, and then pick out random numbers to guess right before the time ran out. I mean, this test was hard.

Anyway, why do I tell you about all this? Well, 1. because it's interesting. What a weird, cool, nerdy, nervous subculture we had! There were clearly a few Math Guys, and we'd all take these math contests that were pretty fun, but we'd never admit to them being fun. Or maybe some of us were just there to get out of class, I don't know, but I at least quite enjoyed them. We'd celebrate our OML victories, but only a little bit; we'd never all go out together or meet up at any time besides math contests. The B-man really enjoyed all this, and he'd do stuff like get OML sweatshirts printed (no lies), but his enthusiasm wasn't contagious. Well, maybe a little bit. But the whole thing was a little warped-- repressed nerdy math kids taking math contests so the Grown-Ups can give us gold stars and we can further develop our identities as "just the smart kids".

But 2. because I actually have a point out of all of this. Okay. So I'd always notice on the statewide scores for Ohio math tests (any of these, but particularly the AMC), I'd find my name, and it'd be in the top 100 or whatever somewhere, and always a bit above it would be this other kid, Jason Juang. I never met him, I don't know why I picked out his name, but kid was good at math. Even on the tests I did well on, I'd go up the list a bit, and there he was. This bugged me! I'd always say, man, if only I were as smart as that guy. I could win statewide contests, instead of just school-wide. I'd be actually smart, not just kinda smart.

(in my super-year when I fell just shy of math stardom, I did beat him on the AMC 12 B. But he beat me on the AMC 12 A. Meh.)

Anyway, I don't know why his name popped into my head this morning, but I got to wondering, what's he up to now? (I might have googled him. err, creepy? yes. sorry. ooh, I hope my pagerank is high enough that this post shows up when he googles himself. Hi Jason!)

Uhh, me-being-creepy aside, I got to thinking, what do I mean by "what's he up to now?" I wonder that about people sometimes, and it's never really clear what I'm wondering. I guess it'd be kinda interesting to look back at my 6th grade class, say, and see who's the most rich and famous, but I don't even care. It'd also be kinda interesting to gawk at who totally burned out, but again, I even more don't care.

It'd be really interesting to go back and see who's the happiest.

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And here's where I get back into my original post. Happiness. Everyone's talking about it, and I think we just have a big issue of word choice failure. There's a lot of things people talk about when they talk about Happiness, especially these days. Shooting for "happiness" has become like shooting for "goodness"- almost a tautology. Of course you want to be happy, because you define "happy" as the thing you want to be.

There's experienced happiness, and there's remembered happiness. Daniel Kahneman gave a great TED talk (is there any other kind?) about this. People think vacations are better than they actually are, because when they remember vacations, they only remember the good parts. Which do you want, happiness seeker? Do you want to maximize experienced happiness or remembered happiness?

How about fulfillment? Maybe I'll be happy today if I play video games all day. But tomorrow, I'll feel like I wasted today, and that will make me unhappy indeed.

There's comfort, too, and I think this is what this post ("you can either be happy or interesting") is all about. I don't buy the "you can either be happy or interesting" argument. (Penelope Trunk would then say "then you must not be interesting. interesting people don't mind that they can't be happy." But that's some kind of logical fallacy, some reductio-ad-you-can't-argue-with-me circularity. Assuming the consequent?) You can be either comfortable or interesting, maybe. And comfort is nice; even Kahneman above says, if you want experiential happiness, spend time with people you like. Easy enough.

And then there's mindfulness, or transcendence, or whatever it is that supermonks have. I bet Matthieu Ricard (another 20-min TED talk, sorry) isn't "happy" the same way I'm "happy" when I go to the pub with some friends. In fact, it's demonstrably not the same: delta waves, left prefrontal cortex, n'at.

So there's a few, to get started:

• Experienced happiness
• Remembered happiness
• Transcendence
• Comfort
• Fulfillment

Or, maybe some are subcategories of others: experienced happiness includes comfort and transcendence, remembered happiness includes fulfillment.

What am I leaving out? Help me out here. And which of these is most worth pursuing? Ah, now that's a good question.

Finally, while we're still talking about this, I'll leave you with another talk, this one by Srikumar Rao, in which he posits that unhappiness comes from concentrating on the results of something; happiness results from enjoying the process. Nothing really new, at least to me, but it's fun to watch because he's really into it.

Oh snap, No Impact Man!

Question: am I using my big ol' noggin to help the world in a meaningful way?

Point: what I do is useful, because though I am but a cog in a big machine, I am helping make Chrome, which is very fast and makes the internet better by pushing for faster better more standards-based websites, and more internet makes things better for everyone! You know, like those farmers in Africa who can look up information about crops on their phones now.

Counterpoint: http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2010/03/progress.html

Let's duke it out, but first let me diverge and talk about Buddha for a while. I saw a talk by Thanissaro Bhikkhu yesterday where he talked about questions and answers with the Buddha. A lot of people asked the Buddha a lot of questions, and were often confused by his answers. Most people answer questions one way: categorically, but the Buddha answered questions 4 ways:

1. categorical answers, like "yes" or "no".

2. analytical answers, which take a little explanation, or breaking it down into cases.

3. answering the question with more questions

4. just not answering the question, or the "mu!" answer

The Buddha didn't pick from these at random; he did whatever would be most skillful. And you can see this makes sense, and you get questions like this in daily life. Examples:

1. categorical: if you said "does 2+2=4?" I'd say yes. Done.

2. analytical: if you asked me "is it sunny today?" I couldn't just say "yes" or "no"; I could say "if you mean "was it sunny this morning" then yes, if you mean "is it sunny now" then no."

3. more questions: if you said "hey Dan, what kind of knife should I buy?" I'd say "do you mean for the kitchen, or for juggling?" and next "if you mean for the kitchen, do you want a cheap knife or an expensive knife? and what kind of knives do you already have?"

4. mu!: if you said something nonsensical, like "do colorless green ideas sleep furiously?", that would not merit answering. Or like "hey, what's the best way to dismember a corpse?" It would probably be best for all involved if I didn't answer that.

(for the record, draw and quarter. cut at joints, not through bones. duh.)

The Buddha is such a pragmatist! It's kind of weird that it's even considered a religion. At all points, he's just trying to get people enlightened (/in a higher mental state/happier), in the most logical, straightforward, and effective way. It's kind of weird that there are scientists or engineers out there who are not Buddhists.

Anyway, No Impact Man vs. me working at Google. I was going to say "well, my point above wins." Then I was going to be all mopey and be like "yeah, but does it really? I mean, internet is nice and all but I should be feeding starving children." Then I was going to be like "look I learned cool things from the Buddha; this question does not have a categorical answer." But I think ultimately I just posted about two unrelated things, and my point above wins.

(or at least, to worry about it, at this point in time, would not be skillful.)

Call me Thomas Jefferson?

I was listening to a thing on the radio about health care. They also mentioned the bank bailout. From what I understand, the bank bailout will go down in history as a big "huh?" because everyone did dumb reckless greedy things, got away with them, and then the government paid them a lot of money. Similarly with healthcare, some corporations are greedy with health things, a small (but not tiny) percent of the population gets quite screwed over, a larger percent of the population gets a bit screwed over, and a large percent of the population is doing okay, so for the most part we're saying "meh" and getting on with it.

I just got a card game called Dominion, where you buy cards with gold, and some cards do useful things, and some cards just give you "victory points". You keep drawing cards and you reshuffle your deck when it's empty, so it's worthwhile to get good cards, because you'll see them again a few times. At the end of the game, the person with the most victory points wins, but in the meantime, they don't do anything, so you don't want to buy them too early. Otherwise, it's possible to get into a state where you can never do anything because all you draw are these victory point cards that don't do anything.

It might be that bureaucracy increases too much when you try to govern 300 million people democratically. It might also be that different parts of the country want different things.

What if we were 50 countries instead? Arranged sort of like the EU, where a few administrative things (currency, passport control) were handled by a big governing body, but otherwise the states are free to go their separate ways?

The potential administrative benefits are huge. Stuff like health care is still tricky, but say, gay marriage? Apparently we as a country keep wasting time on that. Washington could quit messing around with "civil unions" or whatever, go ahead and all-out legalize it, and move on to more difficult questions. Utah could ban it and turn itself into a Mormonocracy. Whatever. (don't get me wrong; this would be terrible for Utah, and whatever gay people live in Utah. But I can't imagine things are all that pleasant for them now, right? And maybe pressure, trade agreements, etc from neighboring countries could convince them to give everyone equal rights, more than a weak bloated federal government...)

Instead of one country with a few mega-media corporations, we'd have more reasonable media focused on local issues. Wal-mart would have a bunch of new problems to deal with. We'd be able to develop our own local cultures more, instead of being one uniform McDonaldized lump. And we'd be a lot more fun to visit.

Also the states should be redistributed like this map because it's neat.

Today, I have more important things to do, like moving, so I should get to that. Point is, Dominion is a pretty sweet game. Also, while I'm here, the Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is flat-out excellent. It's a crazy hodgepodge, plots and acting going everywhere, but visually stunning and incredibly enjoyable nonetheless, and maybe even the better for it. I like it the way I like Dresden Codak or Blueberry Boat. You'll like it if you like wonder.

I tracked my happiness.

http://www.trackyourhappiness.org

You sign up, they send you a couple texts or emails (or twitters) every day, you record how happy you are and answer some other questions. After you've done 50, they stop, and you can look at your happiness report and see what makes you happy.

SUPER DISCLAIMERS: you can't actually find what makes you happy. At best you could find correlations. Also, 50 is a small amount of data points for some of these things (like "happiness by location"). And there's a little bit of sampling bias because you don't always respond exactly when you get the text (although you should).

All that said, here are some graphs I found not terribly surprising (the y-axis is always happiness):

Happiness by day of week:

I'm a little happier on weekends. And Thursdays.

Happiness vs. Productivity

Looks like a strong correlation! That sounds right, too. Whatever I'm doing, I like being productive.

Happiness vs. whether I want to and/or have to do what I'm doing:

Surprise! I like doing things I want to do. I don't like doing things I don't want to do. Whether I have to do it doesn't really make a difference.

Okay, those were not super exciting. Here are some that are interesting, though:

Happiness vs. focus

I would have thought that focus would make me happier, but I guess not! How do I explain this? Maybe I don't know what focus really is. When I think I'm focusing, I'm not reporting it right. I don't actually get into deep focus much.

Happiness vs. hours of sleep:

Doesn't seem to matter. (also apparently I slept for 20 hours one day. data entry!) However:

Happiness vs. sleep quality:

Seems to have a slight positive correlation. Although I could just be imagining things, or it's not statistically significant, or happiness causes good sleep instead of vice versa, or any number of things.

Anyway, this is the coolest thing I've seen on the internet in a while! I've often found myself wanting something like this, and luckily, Matt Killingsworth and Visnu Pitiyanuvath are making it happen! Thanks much to them.

Other things on the internet that have intrigued, annoyed, fascinated, elated, bothered, or bamboozled me:

Networking feels icky. It feels like you're using some mind games (like "people like you better if they meet you in person" or whatever) to get ahead. I don't want to think about "how this relationship will benefit me" with people. It just immediately feels slimy. Maybe there's nothing really wrong with it; we're all doing it at some level, even if it's just "this relationship will benefit me because I'll have a new friend." I'll withhold judgment for now, especially because networking is kinda fun when it works.

Amen. Give me real prices all day long. If poor people can't afford to live, we should fight poverty, not give everyone artificially cheap prices now at the expense of the future.

I dig Umair Haque. I dig Google. This is often difficult, because he takes time out of his column to give Google a light bashing every so often. His is one of the "Google used to be good but they're slacking" voices, which I disagree with, but I'm glad it's out there to keep up honest. Anyway, Google Buzz. I think I actually like it, because if I can start reading that instead of Twitter, then my life is a little simpler. I'm not sure though; it might be a complication. If I can read that instead of Facebook, my life is a lot simpler! And I do enjoy the map view.

Hot cha! I was going to blog this article about how travelers pick tomato juice more often, but it wasn't enough for a full post; soon enough, this article about how travelers pick ginger ale more often came along. The tomato juice is particularly uncanny: I used to do that myself, and I did notice other people picked it a lot too. Ginger ale was a close second. In my old age, I've switched to sparkling water. I like to drink something unusual; it makes the flight more of an occasion. Because no matter where I'm going, or how tired I am, or if the guy next to me asks to use my legroom to store his suitcase (true story), I'm still flying through the air. Incredibly.

Happy Lent!

I guess today is Ash Wednesday! Christian readers will note that this means today is the start of Lent, which is the season of 40 days (plus 6 sundays because they "don't count" or something; thus 46 days) before Easter.

Christian readers might also take this opportunity to give up something for Lent, as a bit of a sacrifice while we prepare to see Jesus Friggin' Christ rise from the friggin' dead! And also not eat meat on Fridays, although fish is okay because the pope said so once upon a time. Young Dan Tasse would take this opportunity to quite enjoy Fridays because it meant cheese pizza! (modern readers are urged not to miss the spirit of the law.)

Limburgers (and a lot of people worldwide) might take the opportunity to have a hangover today, as it's the day after five days (whoa) of Carnival. Take down the Mooswief n'at.

Modern lapsed Christians who are searching for the best life possible, however, might take this opportunity to do some life-hacking. The traditional Christian deal is to "give something up for Lent", which sometimes sounds like "sacrifice something and suffer for a while so God will smile upon you," but I offer you another viewpoint: you can make any one positive change in your life. 46 days is a perfect amount of time to start a habit. Whatever it is, start it now, and by Easter, it'll be second nature. Furthermore, you'll have a billion people worldwide starting their good habits with you.

But let's do this right! Lay down the law so you can follow it. For example, I'm giving up sweets. I must first define "sweets", or else I will cut corners everywhere... I'd like to say "no refined sugar", as one of my coworkers does (this is badass), but then I'd have to stop cooking Japanese, as everything has a little sugar or mirin or something. So how about this: no more than trace amounts of refined sugars. (okay, "trace" is still not defined, but let's not be too picky here.) And I'm going to say "no breaks", although sometimes Christians run the "you can have this thing you're giving up on Sundays because they don't count" rule. It's up to you: I know that I'll do better by just drawing a hard line, but if you know that you do better when you can allow yourself one sweet a week (or whatever), that's fine; do what works for you. Don't phrase it like "I'll cheat once a week" or "I'll break the rules once a week", though, as this terminology will make you feel like you're failing.

And keep it up after Easter! I'm not advocating temporary asceticism here, because that's temporary. Do something that you'll be proud to continue. I think after Easter I'll allow myself one sweet per week, because birthday cake and stuff.

Rock on, and start something new! Your habits are your life, make them good. I invite you to start one along with me; we can check in however often, if you'd like, and I'll keep you honest. (and please, do the same for me.)

How much is your friendship worth?

I had a funny experience the other day when I was trying to buy a plane ticket to visit my friend Ram in Thailand. My friend Julie booked a ticket too, and we were going to be on the same flight, but then I found another one that was literally $500 cheaper. $500!

I hemmed and hawed. I had previously told her I'd book the same flight, but I wondered, would she mind if I took the $500? I'm going to spend a week in Thailand with her; surely there's nothing we could talk about in 20 hours on a plane that we couldn't catch up on in Thailand. Furthermore, we'd be taking different flights back anyway. And what do you do on a plane anyway, sleep?

But I'm sort of insensitive sometimes, so I didn't know if this was one of those cases where I was being totally a jerk for even considering it. I have money; isn't a good experience with a friend (or a so-so experience; we're on a plane after all) worth more than money? And, I don't know, landing in Thailand at midnight is undoubtedly bewildering and confusing (if landing in Delhi is any indication); would we be better off facing the madness together? If I asked her, would she be offended that I insinuated that our friendship maybe wasn't worth $500?

Of course our friendship is worth more than $500! I'd say $550. Maybe even $600. ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Of course our friendship is worth more than $500! A true friendship is priceless.

But there's the thing: it's priceless, but it's not infinitely valuable. If I had to spend $10000 extra to fly on the same flight as her, well, obviously I wouldn't. So does that mean 20 hours of friendship is worth less than $10k? Does my hemming and hawing mean 20 hours of friendship is worth less than $500? Maybe there's marginal utility: if I hadn't seen her in years, the first hour would be worth a lot, the second maybe a little less, and so on, until we're sick of each other and the next hour is worthless. But no, even then, you start putting prices on hours you spend with someone, and it just all feels wrong.

I guess it's just orthogonal. You can't make that judgment. It's like if someone said "you can have doubled smelling power if you agree to never say the letter "J"." It's incomputable. You can't hope to make the best choice in this case. Just make one and deal with it. (duh, right? guess I passed this voight-kampff test.)

Anyway, in this case, hilarious conclusion, I tried to book the cheaper flight, and it didn't exist. Curse you Travelocity/Expedia! So now we're on the same flight, and I almost didn't have to tell her that our friendship is worth less than $500. ... oops.

PS. oh by the way, did I mention I'm going to Thailand?

A talk by Shinzen Young, about which I am all jazzed

This guy Shinzen Young came to Google in California and gave a talk. I watched his talk on a video-conference. I have since begun meditating twice daily.

It was a talk about meditation. I encourage you to watch it online. But that's an hour, so if you'd rather, I took notes, I will try to make them into real sentences so you can read them here:

You try to meditate, to focus on the physical sense of your breath. You'll get distracted. What distracts you? Internal self-talk, external sounds, internal mental images, external sights, internal emotions and feelings (let's call this "feel"), external physical discomforts (call this "touch"). 6 aspects: internal and external, 3 main senses. (smell/taste are kind of different anyway, and you can blend them in with touch.)

If you meditate a lot, what happens?

- early on, you'll have a sobering event where you realize how distracted you really are.

- soon you get good at focusing on your breath. This is easily generalizable: you'll be good at focusing on anything.

- you get a taste of a highly concentrated state

- then this highly concentrated state expands: deeper (more powerful) and broader (into more parts of your life)

This is super magically incredible. This is an awesome state. Anything you do will be more subjectively fulfilling, and you'll be more objectively good at it. This state has names: Samadhi (Buddhism), Recollection (Christianity), Kavanah (???) (Judaism), Zikkur (???) (Islam).

Eventually, a figure/ground reversal happens. Before, there's your life, and meditation is a thing that you do. After, there's meditation, and your life is just this thing that you do. This is like that concentrated state all the time. You're never bored again, because you're always "in the zone." (or high, even) You get twice as much life, not because you live longer, but you live twice as concentrated/twice as big.

As your concentration grows, your senses expand, and you get some epiphanies. It's like looking through a microscope; you learn things deeper within you, and broader, about everyone.

You also notice suffering, and that physical discomfort and the experience of suffering due to that discomfort are not the same. Suffering = pain * your resistance to that pain. It's like electricity, even, V = I * R. Similarly with pleasure: you hold on to it and get attached to it, and in this way you have this "resistance" to pleasure as well. Fulfillment = pleasure / resistance (or attachment). The inverse of this resistance is called equanimity, and that grows along with concentration.

You'll also get increased sensory clarity, and a sense of how your identity comes into being moment by moment. You can monitor your internal talk/image/feel, just as you can right now monitor your external world. And you'll notice that when you have none of the three, you cease to exist. Noting these things and their change is a big deal in Buddhism.

So what about Buddhism, why Buddhism? Well, it's not a big distinction; most meditative traditions have these concepts of concentration and equanimity. Buddhism's focus in this sensory clarity and noticing your moment-by-moment existence is rather unique. It's also called "mindfulness". You realize that your "identity" is paradoxical; that it only exists sometimes, and that it's a home you can leave and come back to. Call this an elastic/paradoxical/enlightened identity.

Back to practicality. So you want to meditate: how should you do it? Well, most practices are roughly equally ineffective. They totally work, but they take years. So, go to it. Interestingly, Young's ideal is a world where meditation is obsolete. Technology and knowledge get us to a point where enlightenment becomes much more attainable for anyone, even without practicing for 50 years, so more people can get in on the spiritual path.

A closing paraphrase: "Take me or anyone who's meditated for 40 years and give them the following choice: a lifetime of ordinary pleasure, or one day with a meditator's consciousness. Any meditator will pick the latter."

End talk, and these are Dan's ideas again, not Shinzen's. Why did this get me so excited? Well, it sounds awesome, right? But it's not just that; anyone can promise you 72 virgins or eternity in Best Heaven or whatever. The thing is: this is all worldly, it's doable (half hour a day?), it offers incremental benefits as you progress, and most importantly, I believe it. I believe it because it's entirely reasonable and consistent with everything else I've heard about meditation.

Practical note: if you want to meditate, I think it's pretty simple: sit down and focus on your breath. On the feeling of it in your nose. Your consciousness will inevitably wander, each time just gently bring it back- no worries, you're not a bad meditator, just focus on your breath again. Set a timer, try 10 minutes at first, or even 5. If it stops being enjoyable, do it less. I like Mindfulness in Plain English if you want a book.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go meditate.

Flat hunting

I am doing this now. Hunting for an apartment of my own. This is fun and stressful!

Three big general points:

- it's the biggest chunk of money I have to spend. If you rent a place for $700/month for a year, that's $8400! A price difference of $50 is really a price difference of $600! I don't spend that kind of money often!

- it's a difficult decision. Most things these days are not decisions really. Most things you buy, like groceries, are just commodities; I figure out where I can get the best food (one simple decision with only a couple factors, and I've made it already), and then just go there. It's often a question of "can you afford it?" and then "how much do you want?" Like skiing: a lift ticket costs $60/day, take it or leave it, for as many days as you'd like. But apartment hunting has so many variables!

- there are a lot of variables, so a good first step is to divine the most important variables, and figure out how to make a decision in the face of so many of them.

Some variables usually don't change, but when they do, they're whoppers! Like bugs: if you have bugs I will not rent your place. But no places I'm looking at have bugs. These are easy variables to deal with, because they are just gates. It only gets tricky if they don't become gates: I'd like to have my own bathroom, but if sharing a bathroom meant I could have a super sweet place for cheap, would I share one? (this hasn't come up, just hypothetical.)

Some variables don't actually matter, like square feet. A place is as big as it feels, not as big as the number says. Still, it helps calibrate, because maybe one place feels bigger when you look at it, but then feels smaller later.

Some variables matter surprisingly a lot! What if you have a nice view and you can see far away? I don't remember where, but I read a study once where that is a big deal for your outlook on life.

And a lot of variables you probably wouldn't even think about until later. Blocks to a grocery store? (where they sell real food, not a mini mart.) Mine is 3, and it's awesome. If I need something, it's not a deal to go get it. What if that were 6? Well, instead of a 10-minute jaunt, now it's 20, which could mess with the timing of other things that were cooking.

Here are all the variables I have thought of:

How the place feels, guest policy, total price (incl utilities), bike storage, view, counter space, outdoor common areas, laundry on-site (24/7 access?), noise, bugs, whether the manager seems cool, dishwasher, garbage disposal.

It would be nice if I could set up a big equation to tell which apartment I should get. Alas, this doesn't scale; I only have to make this decision once a year at most, and my equation is different from everyone else's.

And what the heck. Throwing equations to the wind and making slightly emotional decisions keeps life interesting, anyway.

Finally, some specifics on my situation: I am liking to stay in my neighborhood, Capitol Hill, because it is a good distance from work, close to friends, relatively close to almost everything, and also full of weird people. I'm interested in group housing or some other idealistic thing, but haven't found many openings. So I think a studio is it. (unless you, dear reader, know an awesome flat or house somewhere...)

Also, pricing seems like a pretty normal distribution. (with pretty low kurtosis.) All things included, it seems a Capitol Hill studio will run you $700-800/month. Now you know.

DST is surprisingly complicated when you look at it in detail.

Countries that do observe DST may begin and end DST on different dates AND those dates can change from year to year.

Tell me about it, right? ... well at least I've never had to use VSS. Oh god.

Screw this, I'm going to go program some blinky lights and push buttons. All within good ol' America/Los_Angeles.

(... aaaaand this post made sense to like six people.)

Vive le Suisse?

Hey. Apparently I'm going to the Olympics. This is pretty fantastic. I live in Seattle, which is pretty close to Vancouver, but when my dad suggested "hey why don't you go to the olympics?" I said "nah it will be a huge crowded mess" because I am such an oldman! Given the choice, I tend to go home. Catie, however goes big. In this case she is of course right, because it's the Olympics.

But you can't go to the Olympics and not see any Olympics! So we have tickets to a thing. Specifically, hockey. More specifically, qualifying rounds women's hockey. Even more specifically, Sweden vs. Switzerland.

I've never seen a women's hockey game! In fact, it's been forever since I've seen any hockey games. I think it involves some face-offs, and maybe icing, and occasionally a penalty box. (do female hockeyers fight? I remember being mildly traumatized as a child when two hockeyers just ripped off their gloves and started punching each other.)

And Sweden vs. Switzerland? I've never been to the former, and I've had one mediocre experience in the latter. They're both supposed to be wonderful though. And I really digged my time in Austria and Germany, and they're pretty close, right, so I'm thinking Switzerland it is. I must learn some French hockey cheers. Like "I hope you score a goal" or "good face-off!" or "it was pretty lucky you did not get called for icing there."

I'm moving, but by god I'm staying in the same neighborhood.

or, Sometimes (not often) the antidote for programming is more programming, or, I have a button that does ANYTHING!

I was feeling crummy tonight because I couldn't get anything to work at work, and I had the evening free to do a thing I want to do. One of the things I had wanted to do was string together a bunch of software to make a thing that lets you talk to your phone. After my dismal failure to do anything other than stare all gaggley-like at various documentations last time I tried that, I was in no mood to do so again.

Another thing I wanted to do is make a button that talks to my computer. And yet another thing I had wanted to do was check out Metrix Create Space, a place with a neat idea that is four blocks away from me. A plan for this evening materialized.

But how do you go into a place where people know how to do electronics, and say "hey I want to do some electronics I think?" ... well, just like that. There were only a couple people there, and I went in and talked to Morgan, the guy running the shop, and outlined my plan. "I want to make... a button... that I can press... that will do something on my computer?" He knew exactly what I needed: an Arduino, a mini bread board, some wires and buttons and resistors.

Three hours later, I had it fully working. I press this button, it runs a script that opens a text file and inputs the current time. Remarkable! Right now I can maybe soon use it to track sleep schedules. In the future I can use it to do anything! This is super exciting.

So big thanks to Metrix for being awesome super cool and wonderful (and I can do electronics without ever having to go to radio shack!), to the folks behind Arduino for making a cool thing that is really easy to use and only $40, to the folks behind Processing for making a really great and simple language that I can't wait to explore more, and to Morgan for all the help.

I think what happened is the Belgian beer absorbed all my confusion and floated away.

I woke up at 6 AM this morning. I think this is because I drank a lot of Belgian-style beer last night. It was pretty fab. 30-some brewers from the area brought their weird, inventive, delicious small-batch Belgian beers. Particularly big ups to Issaquah Brewhouse Polywog Grand Cru, Anacortes Sour Brown, Elysian Toro Oro Yerba Mate Tripel, and Scuttlebutt 777 Tripel. Yeah, I know you probably don't live here and even if you do you probably won't find these; I'm writing them down as much for my reference as yours.

Oh yeah and then I juggled beer glasses in exchange for waffles for me and friends. Being an odd hero once in a while is really a wonderfully fun thing. I'm kind of embarrassed to be so excited about this but it was quite the high point of my week.

So! This morning. 6AM, can't get back to sleep, and I'm excited, and I'm excited about work. Why? (hangovers are not usually exciting.) Here's why: because I've found a slightly smaller niche. Now, as Cal Newport of Study Hacks will tell you, being a generalist is difficult, not fun, and not worth it. Specialize, specialize, specialize; get an A+++ (or an "A*", not to be confused with the search algorithm) in one thing, not an A- in 5 things. If you're looking for an engineer to build you a user interface, you won't want a "software engineer" who can kinda do anything okay; you'll want a "UI engineer" who builds sweet user interfaces but doesn't have as much experience in backendy things.

Thus, I declare myself a UI engineer. Now, this is not because I'm looking to pump up my resume or look for another group or job (far from it!), but I think that by doing so, I can continue to focus in one direction instead of getting 5% knowledge of 20 different things. I'll get more expertise in that area, and get to the "I know how to do this" stage faster, which is really the goal here anyway.

Why did I not decide this before? I thought it wasn't legit. In school I was never drawn to robots or graphics or like finance or anything. So I went for AI/machine learning and then natural language processing, but it turns out math really doesn't turn me on either. I just like to make programs! That people can use! I was never convinced that that was a good answer, though. Everyone likes that, right? Well, I'm thinking now that "making programs for people to use" is exactly the Human-computer interaction/user interface engineering that has a whole master's program at CMU dedicated to it. That's pretty legit.

Also I think I was confused, or just afraid to jump in. If I work primarily on UI's, maybe I'll miss fun I could be having with ... data processing! Or database management, or production systems, or machine learning or stats or ... but I don't think it's likely. And maybe I do, maybe I change course. Life goes on.

Anyway, I think UI work fits with my other likings: I like to see the effect of what I do quickly, I like the value to be measured in "how slick it is", not "how many QPS it sends to which backend servers", and I like making something happen the first 10 times, not the next 999,990 times. (This may be heresy at Google. But hey, even The Goog needs people to put frontends on those megalithic MapReduces.)

And what if making sweet UI's isn't my passion? Read more Study Hacks; whether it's truly my passion doesn't matter. In fact, it's a nonsense question. There is no magic "passion" out there for me to find someday; there's only what I construct for myself. And it's also true that when I'm better at something, I enjoy it more. So that's my goal at work: get into UI work as much as possible, learn how to make it great, and become the Jeff Dean of UI engineering.

(any nudges/book recommendations/class ideas would be gladly accepted! note that I'm talking UI engineering, not UI design (...yet.))

Really? I'm a... ?

So I'm looking for religions, learning about religions, practicing religions, right? And my current one has been Nichiren Buddhism. I've blogged about it a couple times, but a quick refresher: it's a relatively recent form of Buddhism (~700 yrs old) started by this guy Nichiren, who read all the Buddhist teachings and discovered/realized/decided that the Lotus Sutra was the important one. The Buddha (supposedly) said "All the other teachings until now were nice, but they're not the total real deal; this is it." And so Nichiren teaches that the thing to do, the way to practice, is to chant "Nam Myoho Renge Kyo" (loosely, "I dedicate myself to the Lotus Sutra, or the universal law of cause and effect"). In this way, you'll call out your own Buddha-nature, your best self, and achieve your goals and get all enlightened.

I like it, for the most part. Chanting, meditating, whatever, it's all a daily practice, and specific enough that I've been able to keep it up daily for about 4 months now. Their philosophy is a little vague, but nothing they believe in is distasteful to me. It's down to earth and easy to follow: you don't chant to clear your mind or get rid of suffering, you chant to achieve your goals. (you can even chant for a new car if you want. the idea, I think, is that in the course of chanting for a new car, you'll realize that it's not really a car you wanted. or maybe you do actually need a car, because you need to get to work or something, in which case, why not chant for a car?) As such, it's even psychologically explainable. (your chanting aligns your mind in one direction, which is probably the best way to achieve anything.)

But something isn't sitting quite right with me. The philosophy is not just vague, it's floaty. I feel like I can argue any one position or another with these folks, and eventually we'll just get back to "you have to bring out your own buddha nature, be the best you, and then you'll do fine at everything." Or you just say "chant nam myoho renge kyo" and you're always right. It feels churchy, like old Methodist church I used to go to: there's a lot of emphasis on community over substance, and I just feel kind of silly sometimes. (and silly along with everyone else, not silly in my own way; that's another topic I guess) It's rather connected to political and worldly things; there's this Soka Gakkai (an organization of Nichiren Buddhists) and a political party called New Komeito, and Nichiren Buddhists ~= Soka Gakkai ~= New Komeito. Not to mention the weird cult of personality around the president of the Soka Gakkai, Daisaku Ikeda.

But the overarching theme of this weirdness didn't hit me until I came across a mention of Nichiren in "Hitching Rides with Buddha" by Will Ferguson (great funny travelogue book, I'm a fan), where he labels Nichiren with the f-word. No, not that f-word... worse. And I realized that he's right... I've been following a religion... that's f-- fuh--

Fundamentalist?!

It's true: they're fundamentalist Buddhists. Selectively tossing out most of the original teachings? check. Super welcoming to everyone and easy to follow? check. Has megachurches, including one in Seattle? check. (I've been there. It seats like 1000.) Evangelical? check. (Catie noted this when I mentioned that one of Nichiren Buddhism's goals is "Kosen-rufu", defined loosely as "world peace by the spreading of Nichiren Buddhism"; I kinda laughed it off and have mostly ignored the whole kosen-rufu deal) Aforementioned cult of personality? check.

So what? So ultimately it's not my one true path. Well, I hardly expected to find the one religion that would be.

And here's the thing: it's not that bad. Sure, fundamentalist Christianity tends to be terrifying, fundamentalist Islam more so, but this variety of fundamentalist Buddhism? It's as far left as most any religion I know, there aren't weird rules where you can't drink or smoke or dance on Sundays, they don't hate on gay people or Jews or anyone else. (heck, they're up-front about the fact that you could probably be Buddhist and some other religion at the same time.) The religion has drastically improved the lives of many people in the group.

So rock on, Nichiren Buddhists. I'll probably slowly fall out of the group here; I like the people, the beliefs are just a little bit off for me right now. Careful where you go (especially with politics, evangelism, and that guy Daisaku), but overall, I'm more with you than against you.

The Life Pursuit, and this is not about Belle and Sebastian

(but sometimes I pick up lyrics or song and want to say them a lot, but in such a way that people know that i'm referencing something. Like "everything in its right place." or "I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying!")

Okay, I've been posting angsty stuff about "aah my life's purpose" etc. Here's the deal. I want to progress spiritually. How to do so? Well, if you want to learn math, you take a math class, read a math book, do math problems. I want to learn spirit, grand truths, eternal oneness, how to avoid suffering, my own buddha-nature, how to follow god perfectly, and the non-duality of all things. That leaves me with three questions:

1. What's the path? (what's the book, and where do I take a class?)

2. How do I practice it? (what are the "math problems"?)

3. Do I have to go sit on a mountain for 12 years?

As for #1, well, I'm on A path right now, whether or not it's The Best. I would like to know that it's a pretty good path, because what if I'm trying to get 100% there but at this rate I'll only achieve 2% per decade? (numbers are ridiculous, but bear with me; some paths are slower than others and will not result in reasonable change in my lifetime, so it's worth considering...) #2 is perhaps the most immediately interesting. (And #3, well, hopefully not. I guess #1 and #2 will determine that.)

So about #2. A practice! Doing something every day will change your life more than doing a big thing once. But what to do? Some people do prayer, some do mindfulness meditation, compassion meditation, chanting, yoga, weeding the garden, whatever. Any of these would probably be fine. But I want the essential kernel of the practice, not the husk of accumulated baggage. I want Christian mysticism without all the creeds and bible verses and catechism and stuff, Buddhism without the six this and twelve that and ten something else. (not that those are useless, just that I don't want to spend my daily ritual praying to saints for intervention with angry God or other paradigms I don't believe in.)

For example, maybe I'd do some meditation. And it's been shown that saying positive things about yourself out loud has a positive mental effect, so why not also do a few repetitions of a few key sentences? Furthermore, the dual n-back task helps your mind as well, increases your working memory, etc. Why not include that as part of the daily practice? It's all part of the same package: improving your mind, improving your life.

(for those who say that I'm confusing "mind" and "soul", I offer willpower as an example. Here is a thing that can be improved by mental practice, that most of us would consider in the domain of "soul". Maybe mind and soul are not so different. But this is a debate for another day.)

Anyway, what am I forgetting? Any suggestions to help me evolve my basic practice? I'm sort of brainstorming right now, but who knows, maybe I'll make up my own little daily religious/mental thing. What do you do daily that improves your life?

Too caught up in goals?

I'd really like to have a real spiritual experience. You know, like Zen dudes talk about: all of a sudden you get it, you're sitting on a rock staring at a tree and you become one with the universe or whatever. I've read accounts of such things. That would really let me know I'm on the right track, and that this enlightenment/spiritual-development thing is really worth pursuing. (I know, blessed are those who have believed but not seen, doubting Thomas, etc, but bear with me.)

I'd also like to be a cool uncle. Like that uncle who is crazy and goes on fantastic adventures and has tons of weird stories. The kind of guy who just went and did his own thing, bucked the system, etc. Like Tom Robbins, if Tom Robbins were your uncle.

Is this bad? On one hand, having goals is good. On the other hand, probably every Zen (or other religion) master ever would hit me with a stick; you don't do religion so you can get high. And you don't travel so that people will think you're cool. On the first hand again, most of my other goals are negative (don't want to be a boringman, cubicleman, suburbanman, etc) and I feel like a positive goal is more better than a negative goal. Back to the second hand again: yeah but they're bad goals. Plus, what about no-attachments? I am somewhat attached to these goals: if you said I could never achieve either, I would be pretty sad.

Maybe that's it: keep the goals, lose the attachment. Easier said than done! But it's a start.

Other things: I watched Rushmore last night and enjoyed the heck out of it, and I'm developing quite a taste for biscotti.

Overload overload overload.

I got to reading this book by this guy. A Brief History of Everything, by Ken Wilber. Please forgive him for the big picture of his noggin on the cover.

It's very good! There are so many cool ideas running through it, we'd be here for days. Among them (simplified blah blah):

- everything is a holon; that is, a whole and a part of some other whole

- holons are arranged in a hierarchy: atoms make molecules, molecules make cells, cells make humans, etc

- things that are higher up in the hierarchy are more "conscious"- frogs more than worms, worms more than dirt, humans more than apes, etc

- there are 4 quadrants of ... the universe... interior/exterior and single/collective. So say there's a newborn baby who has a brain that cannot tell the difference between what is itself and what is not itself. Exterior/singularly, we can talk about what bits of brain and neurons it has. But you could study all the neurons all day and not understand what it means to that baby. Interior/singularly, the baby has certain emotions along with that. (like examining a computer program's code, and what it's doing to the memory and disk etc, vs talking about what the program is actually doing in a meaningful sense) Similarly, there are collective sides to both things: what happens when a bunch of babies have a bunch of brains like this, and what does that mean?

- you can call these quadrants "I", "We", "It", and "Its". (or you can lump it and its together and just call them together "it". It's external, objective reality.)

- society has, since the Enlightenment/Age of Reason just forgotten about "I" and "we" and focused only on "it". The brain and neurons is all there is; don't worry about what that means to the person who's experiencing it. This is a problem.

- personal mental and spiritual development are the same, along a spectrum. You go through these stages as a kid: distinguishing between you and not-you, becoming able to imagine what it's like to be other people, focusing on first only yourself, then on other people in your group, then on all people worldwide, and then if you keep climbing this ladder you'll hit a few states that we today would call "spiritual"... where you focus on all of nature, and eventually on the non-duality of everything.

These are all cool, especially the last! But it's a lot to take in. Two questions:

1. How do I remember it, how do I make sure it doesn't just linger in my mind for a week or a year and then disappear, leaving me back where I've started? This is frustrating; it seems like, to get better at these things, I'd have to study them as if a class at school. But I have a full-time job and thus not much energy to "take a class" too.

2. Should I even remember it? Is he right? Is this book just a bunch of nonsense? This is even more frustrating. Of course, I google it and the first things that come up are a few critiques. It's like figuring out the truth in law or politics or computer science or anything else! Gah!

I answer myself: don't worry about it, take a step back, chill out. But that seems to be my response to everything these days, which leads to nothing ever changing. And maybe I'll spontaneously Get Enlightened someday at this rate, but I don't think so.

Boy, it'd be nice if, y'know, understanding the universe, true happiness, enlightenment were easy, eh?

So much internet!

When you have a bunch of blogs you're subscribed to and you go away for a few days, stuff piles up! And then, because I am crazy, I feel like I have to read through it all, even though I'd really like to be reading books instead but the internet sucks my brains out. So if I'm going to get all scatterbrained, the least I can do is pick out the best of the stuff and put it up here for you to read too. The later ones are better:

A short bit about Avatar and I think also about tourism (very quick)

The Hardest Language! That's interesting. (also quick)

I could buy this argument about soy being bad for you (medium quickness)

Every Day the Same Dream (a little less quick but still pretty quick)

Penultimately, People in Order (three minutes but worth it. I like #40.)

And if you'd like a shout out for a blog to read, I am liking Study Hacks more and more.

Lists dovetailing into other lists: comics, phones, Cranium

Number of comics in the good-old-fashioned dead-tree newspaper here in Cleveland today that are about trying to party on new year's but going to sleep early: 6.

What does that tell us?

- dead-tree comic writers are old

- their comics are really really really not funny ever

- they are so out of ideas

- newspapers are truly on their way out

- oh my god traditional comics are so bad (Get Fuzzy and maybe Frazz excepted)

- quit reading newspapers, get on the internet, and by the way get an Android phone; it is now better than the iphone*

BUT ALSO

- you should do what you want on New Year's; partying for the sake of partying is just as lame as buying christmas presents for the sake of buying christmas presents.

* so I've got an Android phone now. And I like it better than the iphone. I'm biased because I work for Google and the open Android Market is better ideologically than the apple-approved App Store. But in case those reasons do not convince you:

- the hardware is just as good as the iphone's

- driving directions is maybe the killer app; it is literally a Garmin

- haptic response (it shakes a little when you press a button)

- voice-powered everything

- i've already found a game I'm hooked onto (Robo Defense)

I think the tides are turning, and these are the first days that android > iphone. As more developers make more android apps, this will only get better. New phone? Make it an Android.

And speaking of games, I will list reasons that Cranium is not a good board game:

- most of the time is waiting. You sit out half the time or more (when it's not your turn). This is the good ol' American Risk-Monopoly-Clue model, and as we all know, it quite sucks.

- even in the time that is not waiting, you spend a lot of time reading instructions. 4 colors times 4 types of card per color = 16 games to learn. Even if you know them, other people don't, so you must explain them all. Compare that to Pictionary, where you pull a card and you know what to do immediately.

- the roll-and-move structure is flawed. You feel screwed by a random god when someone rolls a purple and jumps you.

- the inner-track-outer-track is terribly flawed! Given that you win the card, say, 80% of the time, what other game gives you such an easy way to lose big instantly? Miss your first question on the first brain, get on the outer track, and well I guess maybe you might win the next game. (I've heard that later Cranium editions have skipped the outer track, so I guess they've fixed this one.)

- the brain-in-the-center win condition feels like molasses. Oh hey I got all the way around, I'm going to win! ... in four turns, maybe. Bleh!

- as I've mentioned, you win the card 80% of the time. So when you lose it, it feels really bad. And some cards are orders of magnitude harder than others, so sometimes you will randomly lose.

- Charades and Pictionary are roughly equivalent games. Trivial pursuit is not; figuring out the answer to a question is less fun than acting a charade. "Word worm" is also not. Spelling bee? Really? Are you saying it's as much fun for a team to pick one person to spell a word, as it is to draw and guess a Pictionary?

- the cards are dated, already. I am 23 years old. If a game is going to come in hip flashy colors, but still have songs and actors from before I was born, that is a flaw. Thrice in the last game with me, my sister, my mom, and my uncle, we had to skip a card because it was too old. Are families supposed to play this? How will the kids have a chance?

- the clay goes stale. Don't make a perishable game. Didn't we learn from The Grape Escape?

- finally, it takes a long time.

Boy, I did not think I could actually come up with this many reasons. Err, have fun playing Cranium at your New Year's parties tonight! (for the record, if you're looking for better games: Catch Phrase, Time's Up/Identity Crisis, uhh Pictionary or Charades, and if you like word games then Bananagrams or of course Boggle.)

How To Get Awesome, or, those "my brain is a computer" jokes are not at all jokes.

Happy blahblah! Christmas has passed, and as long as you didn't spend the weekend drinken de kerstman onder tafel, you're ready for the New Year. Perhaps you'll make resolutions. But you know those don't work, so perhaps you'll make resolutions knowing that they won't work. Or perhaps you're sick of pessimism, so you're convincing yourself that this is the year that your resolutions will work, and you're making a resolution to keep your resolutions.

Here's my challenge to you: make ONE resolution. You can keep one resolution. You probably can't keep ten or five or three resolutions. Why not? The same reason you can bench press 100 lbs but not 200 or 1000 lbs. Start small. Stay small, until it's second nature. Even do something that's not even that meaningful, but do it! Your willpower is limited, and it's not because you're a bad dude. It's because your brain is subject to the same chemicals etc as the rest of ours.

Super interesting, right? Even willpower, this very "human" thing, is sorta just a basic mechanistic thing that is controlled by your brain.

Also this is neat: a map of how remote places are. Enjoy your days, I'm feeling pretty happy and excited about life, thank you for everything, etc. I have a cold so I may go nap.

You weren't there that day for the Naming of Things

Naming things at work is hard. I mean, and at home, and everywhere. Say I'm working on a project to resize videos (to pick some random thing out of the air)- what should I call it? Video Resizer? Video Shrinker? I'm sure these are both taken. Or if it were an XML parser, or whatever: I'm sure every single configuration of the words "xml", "parser", "interpreter", "understander", etc is also taken. It gets worse when you have to name every class you write, every binary you make, every concept you think about ("this project frings the glorbs. no, it doesn't really fring them, it first slarfs them and then it frings them, so it's really a GlorbSlarferAndFringer").

The internet hit this problem with domain names, kind of. And links. A temporary solution: everyone uses url-shortened links. Instead of "hey go to (long website name)" it's "go to this bitly link". What if we did the same thing at work? Every project, every idea, every time you need an abstract name for something simple, you just pick a short, recognizable word with no attachments. I need a binary to connect to this DB and slurp out this information and send it to a server somewhere? Call it "Whortle". I'm sure there's nothing at work called "whortle." How about something to read in a feed of some data and compute some thing for each account? "Polyrhythm". Then there's a globally-accessible dictionary somewhere that tells you what these things mean.

Better yet, invent a set of nonsense words. Or use Pokemons.

Oll Raigth!

I've realized two things recently, and the second is more fun than the first:

1. My whole complicated relationship with Christmas? It's not really some high and mighty deal against consumerism or mindless waste or whatever (although those are bad too). It's really just because Christmas is complicated, and I don't want more complications in my life. Receiving presents is nice, but it doesn't make up for the difficult process of buying presents, so I'd rather do neither. Similarly, a nice gemutlich Christmas atmosphere is nice, but it's not worth the struggle to decorate for Christmas (and own so many more things), so I would not like to do that.

Which is not to say it's not worth it to go all out to do hard things. Quite the contrary; it is SO worth it to go all out to do hard things, even if it's only because they are hard! I just want to do them on my own terms: I'll create a nice atmosphere in my house, but it's for a flaming wine party or a dinner with friends, and mostly achieved through food and drink. If someone else wants to decorate, that's great, but that's their task. In this sense, I'd put in the effort to do something cool, but I'd enjoy it, instead of being forced into it by custom. Christmas rolls around and I am forced into someone else's idea of a task.

So, no worries, I'll play along in the presents-buying game a little bit. Still, simplicity simplicity simplicity! That is what I would like for Christmas.

2. This is a most genius thing: Prisencolinen sinainciusol. Yeah it's worth your four minutes. I'm not even sure whether it's funny or terrifying! But any way you slice it, it's undoubtedly the single best song with one chord, constant 4-square beats, and a structure of "verse chant verse chant harmonica-solo". A+!

EDIT: oh geez, I forgot to even mention WHY this was so great: it's fake-English gibberish. This Italian guy wrote this song, not in English, but to sound like English.

Ouvrrrrrir

I was riding my bike, listening to French tapes, and I totally rolled an R! Like all casually, back of the throat sort of French-style R rolling, not the helicopter tongue-flapping front of the mouth R rolling that takes about twelve seconds. Least, I think I did it right; it sounded pretty good. This just goes to show that I, and you, can learn to do almost anything, and that all it takes is a little bit of regular practice.

It's going to be a good day.

Bluetooth for my phone?

Bluetooth is hilarious. First of all, there's the game "Bluetooth or crazy?", which is almost as fun as "moose or fox?". Second, there's the linguistic usage of Bluetooth, where it has become an aspect of your phone instead of a separate thing: you get "bluetooth for your phone", you don't get "a bluetooth headset to use with your phone." It'd be like your phone getting super-calling-powers or x-ray vision or something; all of a sudden, your phone "has bluetooth."

Language geekery and sidewalk games aside, I'm interested to know what a Bluetooth headset can actually do. In my mind, it's this totally-programmable other interface to your phone; basically a headphone and microphone, minus a cord.

Here's what I want: I want to be Captain Picard. I want to be walking around, and then just say "Computer: call someone" or "Computer: make a note. I had a thought just now that I want to save for later" or even "Computer: run this python script that I wrote." And then the computer (which is sleeping) would turn on when it heard its name, and do the thing for me. And I'd like the computer to be able to contact me, too; ring a bell or something. And by "computer", I mean my iphone. Or maybe android phone, because I'm sure it's more customizable.

Any of you ever played or hacked around with a Bluetooth earpiece? Can a Bluetooth do this all for me? Is there something better than a Bluetooth that I should be using? Will I become a "bluetooth AND crazy"? Time will tell. Either way, within the next five years, I will be pretty disappointed if I can't say "computer, make it so."

A little heavy philosophy for a Sunday

Okay, question 1. Is the world deterministic?

Answer 1. Yes. Neurons in my brain fire based on which chemicals they get which is from some other neuron, these things happened because atoms interacted in some way, the way in which they interact is prescribed by how physics works, etc. If the universe were to start over again right now, with the same starting conditions, it would end up the exact same way.

Do you agree? I do. And this is way more than a theoretical blahblah. It's super relevant, because it means that I don't have any say in what I do right now! It's all just physics in my brain! The same way that a cockroach seeks darkness because its few neurons fired, I "think" because my many neurons fired. Furthermore, there's not even any "I"! Wow. Now I sort of understand the whole "the world is all one, you're just a wave in the ocean," etc.

(Straw-man: What about radioactive atoms? They decay randomly!
Daniel: okay, fine, random, same as deterministic; the point is, I don't have a say in it all.)

Wow! Let me know what you think, and I'll continue this train of thought next post.

I was looking for some stuff

and I stumbled upon this essay by Paul Graham. I think it pretty well captures my view of stuff, but of course he says it better than I could. Two main points:

1. Having lots of stuff is not very good!

subpoint 1a. Stuff is not valuable.

subpoint 1b. Stuff in fact has negative value because then you have to think about it a lot.

2. Point #1 is not some grand truth.

Stuff these days is like dirt used to be. You kinda need some stuff (to build a mud hut or something) but if you have too much it's kind of bad. But if you're all "I don't like to have a lot of dirt", it's not some revolutionary idea and you're not automatically an enlightened hero. It's just true, and then you get on with your life.

Aaaaa too much!

Too Much #1: Information.

I think the main problem in my work is ... well, I don't know what it is! It's something between boredom and lack of concentration. Let's call it "frazzlement". Today I was working for a long time on a thing that took between 2 and 10 minutes to compile. I'd set it to go and then for 5 minutes I'd think about it a little bit and read the internet a little bit. 5 minutes later, I couldn't even remember what I was doing. Entirely frazzled. You can imagine, after a day of this, I'm fried to a crisp. My head is just spinning.

Those of you who have greater mental focus than I are probably nodding and saying "he needs to meditate more". Likely yes. (Check it out: I'm at a constant approx 2x10min per day! But it's chanting, which is maybe a little different?)

Anyway, tomorrow I will try an experiment: I will not read the internet at all. Even if it means I miss a Beartato.

Too Much #2: Food.

When I'm frazzled/bored, I snack on things, to the point where I can tell that my body is not super happy. I think that any degree of mental focus would help me with that. I'm not sure how to back up my assertion about this, because I am too frazzled to structure my argument well. Maybe tomorrow's experiment will bear fruit. If not, perhaps I will experiment with adding some for real meditation to the chanting. (or replacing it!)

Too Much #3: Worrying About Christmas.

Uhh here's the deal: I'm terrible at Christmas. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to the environment, to poor sweatshopmen, to rich unhappy people, to recently-bankrupt people, to hedonic treadmill runners and burned-out I-bankers, to priests and penguins, to oldmen who are wondering just why our society is so flashy and weird nowadays, for participating in this vicious cycle of consumerism. And I'm sorry to my family, to my friends, to tradition-lovers and genuine goodwill gift-givers, to retailers who want to make a living and parents who want a little magic for their kids, for worrying so much about the whole thing.

What's my beef with Christmas? It's not on the "giving" side, because I can control that. The only way the giving would be bad would be if I felt pressured to give someone something that I didn't want to, and I don't ever. It's on the "receiving" side; I don't want to receive a bunch of stuff. Why not? Is it the clutter factor? I can deal with that; give stuff away, etc. Is it the environment factor? Sure, but then, I do much worse things and much better things. Saying "my Christmas presents are killing the environment" is like saying "those four times I've smoked hookah in my life are killing my lungs". Is it the fact that people are giving their money to big soulless sweatshoppy corporations? Yeah, maybe, whatever, but goddammit, it's their money. It's not my responsibility, nor my right, to make them spend it fairly/locally/responsibly/etc.

So I hereby am resolving to try not to worry about Christmas presents at all this year. (did I say this last year too? if so, I re-resolve.) I'll buy you a present that I want to buy you. You can buy me one you want to buy me. Or not, that's fine too. Really. Honestly.

Too Much #4: computers today.

I do not want to count the number of hours I've spent staring at a computer screen today. Ow my eyes! Good night.

Widening the corridors and adding more lanes

Hey! It's that time again, when my music on my digital music playing device is all old. Because I get bored faster than an averageman, I want to seek out some new stuff now.

My musical tastes have remained largely unchanged for a few years: indie pop, with a good deal of electricity, happiness, and inventiveness. When I listed my top 10 most favorite albums over a year ago, they were: Animal Collective, Of Montreal, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Broken Social Scene, the Knife, Arcade Fire, The Go! Team, The Fiery Furnaces, Of Montreal, and Architecture in Helsinki. If I remade the list today, it would probably be about the same. Maybe I would try to squeeze a Talking Heads album in there.

Can you recommend me something that is not that genre? Perhaps you like an entirely different genre: the hip hops or the technoes or the country or the blues or the experimental jazz. Maybe it's 18th-century harpsichord music or 5th-century Gregorian chants, or West African djembe, or Finnish seal-hunting war cries! Whatever it is, I am throwing down this pledge: you name me up to two albums (and/or copy or give them to me, that would be particularly delightful, but just the names is fine too) and I will give them a good honest listening-to.

I can also return the favor if you'd like.

Comically bad service: united airlines.

Good morning. It is 6:30 am. Did I mention it's 6:30 am? Oh my god it's 6:30 am.

Uhhhhhhh...

So I'm flying on United Airlines on January 5. You may be aware that this is in the future. Quite a ways, in fact. So I signed up for "United flight alerts" or whatever so that they can call me if my flight gets delayed. I don't usually, but I figure, well I guess I will want to know if my flight changes.

I get a phone call at 6:30 am. I go straight from deep sleep to high alert, because I am on call right now for work. There is a possibility that an automated system from some unknown phone number will call me and say "wake up, Dan, time to fix Google!" Aaah, the call is from an unknown phone number! And it's a mechanized voice saying "fix Google"... oh wait, no it's not. It's United Airlines, saying there's a schedule change to my upcoming flight. ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff-- I didn't mean to type those f's, I am just so tired my finger fell on them and I couldn't pick it back up.

united airlines what is it! i am not flying within 24 hours. it is not acceptable that you are calling me at 6 am when it is not urgent urgent urgent. aaargh
but I guess I'm awake, I might as well figure out when the flight is. I'm listening, automated system, when is it? "please call United at 1-800-..." what? you're making me call you to find out when it is? aargh I will check online.
Online: what's your frequent flyer # and password? here. No, wrong password, okay, there. On the itinerary: "there has been a schedule change. please call united." Argh! You can't just tell me here what it used to be and what it is now? gggggg

Okay I call United. I tried to zero out their system by saying "operator" in my I-am-tired voice. It tricked me! "Before we can connect you to an operator, we need to know what this is about. Is it about arrivals and departures, frequent flyer, ..." it even got me playing that game for a while, before I realize "I'm still fighting with a menu even though I said "operator!"" So I groan again. Operator. Oh please.

A nice Indian lady answers, and I'm like "do not take this out on her do not take this out on her do not take this out on her" so I'm about to start a reasonable request but unfortunately the first thing out of my mouth is "It's 6 AM where I live and this system has just woken me up" and so whatever, now she's in for my whole sad story whether either of us wanted me to tell her. luckily it is a short story: "The system said call United to find out what my schedule change is."
her: "first of all I want to apologize that this system has woken you up, it's an automated system that just keeps calling people" etc
me: "okay, right, file a bug because this is unacceptable." (did she think I'd just say "oh well, those rascally computers"?)
her: "let me look it up, what's your confirmation number?"
me: "K-X-Q-F-I-HATE-UNITED"
her: "okay. while it's loading, would you be interested in something something rental car?"
At this point I bust out laughing. Somehow I manage to sputter: "No! I am-- I am-- very mad right now! And you're trying to sell me something--" "I'm sorry sir--" "No! No thanks. No rental cars. Oh my geez."*
her: "okay. your flight change is: " and she describes the change. My flight is getting moved back FOUR MINUTES. And so is the connecting flight! I cannot imagine who would care about this!
me: (laughs and tries to make up for being an angryman on the phone, because that's a lame thing to do), "okay, sorry to take this out on you, goodbye, have a nice morning, or evening"
her: "okay, thanks. yeah, it's evening."

* the frustrating thing about interacting with people on scripts is that you have to be on a script too. I'm sure there's something on her flowchart that says "you may only respond with apologies and restatements of the question. you may not move on with this conversation until the customer says specifically 'yes I want a rental car' or 'no I do not want a rental car'."

Anyway, everyone knows United Airlines is the Worst Company, unless maybe it's US Airways, and yet we'll probably keep flying them and cursing them because they own the airplanes. So it's not even worth cursing them out here, or trying to convince you that they're terrible, so, two points only:

There's something poignant, or whatever the right word is, oh my god I'm tired, about this huge brutal system annoying me in Seattle and making her put up with annoyed people in India.
and
Did she really try to sell me a rental car?!

There's not one quotable Fiery Furnaces lyric for this title

And there are a lot of Fiery Furnaces lyrics.

I just got back from their concert. Ah! So good! It entirely held my attention the whole time, even though I know most of their music. I guess part of that is because it's at breakneck speed all the time. And sputtered lyrics too fast for the music, and loud and skronky, with meters that don't make sense and stuff. I mean, it's not even enjoyable to listen to. But something about them is really quite incredible; something between their lyrics and their musicality and their prolificacy and their straight up weirdness. Don't get me wrong, they can make a nice tune like anyone (see "Evergreen", say) but sometimes they just rocket into the far reaches of the world ("Borneo") or the seas ("Blueberry Boat" and "Quay Cur"), there's magic ("Duplexes of the Dead") and bizarre religious practices ("Staring at the Steeple") and and and ... Vietnamese telephone ministries and tropical ice-lands and the Garfield El and ... I could go on all night but I'm tired. Listen to them! I recommend "Blueberry Boat" (of course...) and "Bitter Tea".

But I just diverged into why their recordings are great. I can't tell you why their live show was great. It was objectively not great listening. But it was like memorizing the dictionary, and then someone picking out a dozen great words. Every time I'd understand what they were playing, it was like "oh hey I remember that song". Also, they're crazy. Matthew Friedberger, the guitarist and main songwriter, didn't say almost anything the whole time, until he urged us to give a "hip hip hooray" for the drummer and the bassist. Eleanor Friedberger, his sister, sort of blankly stared while rambling out way too many lyrics for the syllables she had. And there was this crazy dude in the audience who kept putting up three fingers, then two fingers, then three fingers, as if this was a common dance move.

A+, ladies and gentlemen. A show well played. Off to bed.

All over the place.

I've heard a lot of advice about how to find your true calling etc, and most of it is very sensible, and along the lines of: "find something that you think might be your true calling, and try it." But I'm a little scatterbrained. Every week I find a bunch more things that I think "oh hey this would be very cool"- whether they're software, somewhat related to software, or completely off the wall. My question: how do you find the time to do them all? Lest you say "stop thinking about doing something and do something", I am, in at least three areas: work, cooking, and languages. Perhaps that's all there is; keep trying and it'll work out. At least I'm fairly certain that it will involve computers, cooking, and/or travel.

Unrelatedly, I'd like to repost a couple things from my friend Aditya's blog, because I think they're very cool and you might like them too:

David Foster Wallace's commencement address to Kenyon in 2005, because what's more inspiring than a commencement address? Also, the idea that "your liberal arts education has given you the ability to decide what to think"... fascinating! Talking about deciding what to think approaches psychology, and then in turn philosophy and spirituality.

And then here's a thing about mindfulness, from a psychological point of view. So there are two modes your mind can be in, narrative and direct, and those who meditate (or practice, commune with God, pray, train their minds) often can distinguish between the two modes more often. Sometimes I wish I read more psychology so I would learn more of this kind of stuff! Also, the scope of this drives me nuts: how does this fit in with all the million other theories of the brain?

Furthermore, and unrelatedly once again, while I'm thinking about scope, I was wondering the other day if scope is the main thing that makes programming difficult. And by "scope" I mean "holding all these scopes, and what words mean what in which places, in your mind." I could make a long example but I'm tired, so I'll just say "ponder this." Like I said, all over the place.

What I like about places, by induction.

In Bratislava, there's a guy who sells real Soviet pins and badges and awards. His shop is the size of a closet. He's somewhere in the old town, but he's hard to find, because streets are all twisty there. His hours are more or less unpredictable. My friend Vic alerted me to his existence; I finally found him the last day I was there. I bought two pins: one was an award for "best lawyer", one for "best builder," and spent the trip back wondering which one my dad would like better.

There's an area of Tokyo called the "Golden Gai." Not quite secret (it's in the Lonely Planet) but it felt like it. There were a bunch of bars with room for about 8 people each. Most of them were closed. In the center of skyscraper city (near Shinjuku I think?) this little city block of old-looking sorta-shabby little old houses still survives. Thanks to Ram, we both had a great time there. And some terrible drinks. (Pickled ume in a drink? Really?)

London! You might be stumbling around right smack in the center of your Underground map, by like Holborn and Covent Garden, and you might find yourself in a place called "Neal's Yard," and all of a sudden the London grayness (or rather, "greyness") vanishes and you're in this flowery colorful courtyard! With vegan hippie restaurants and stuff! Maybe this is a well-known place even, but I did not at all know it, and I dug it for its unexpectedness.

In Boston, there's an alley with a ton of pictures of saints. I guess if you get there at the right time, a guy who lives there will come out and talk to you about them. 's about all I know.

But these places might help me answer a question that always has confounded me: what do I want when I travel? I mean, authenticity, of course. Seeing a place like the locals do. Real connections with people. But there's two things about that: 1. I don't know how, and I don't know anyone who knows how, to do it well in a short time; and 2. I can't shake the feeling that it's a little gawky-weird*. So in lieu of, and in addition to that, we have experiences like the four above.

* so I don't really want to get into this, but it seems a little weird, like imperialistic even, to talk like this about "the locals". Who are you, that they'll want to hang out with you? Sheesh. Granted, if someone met me in Seattle, and wanted to talk to me about what it's like to live in Seattle, I'd be thrilled and honored! But I can't help feeling so very white everywhere I go, and that my desire to, say, strike up a conversation with a guy at a roadside stand in India would be met with confusion at best. Maybe this is just my insecurity talking, and this is kind of a discussion for another time. Anyway...

What do these four experiences have in common? They're awesome, they're unique, and they're hidden. It's sort of like why I'd rather live in Pittsburgh than in New York City. If you meet someone in some random place and start talking about Pittsburgh, it's great! If you're from New York, well, sure, everyone's been to New York. If I talk to you about the Eiffel Tower, because we both saw it and it is big and stuff, meh. But if you also saw that dude in Bratislava, and talked to him in broken English about Soviet prizes, then we have a connection.

But it's not just for the talking-about-it that I like these things. There's something more there, and I can't quite put my finger on it. Something like "I am seeing this, and not many other people are, and it's amazing. I have discovered an untouched corner in the world. Neat."

So! You should come visit me. I'll try to show you some hidden parts of Seattle. And then I'll come visit you, and you show me the awesome hidden parts of your city. This will be so much better than going up in the Space Needle.

EDIT: I forgot, I wanted to include this in the discussion. I hope I find a Toynbee Tile someday.

Webcomics evolution wonder! Absolutely hooray for this!

Sorry, I'm just further scattering your brain, and not contributing anything useful but but but but (deep breath) this is so good.

Okay, so you know Dinosaur Comics.

And you know Garfield Minus Garfield.

Stop for a moment if you don't know Dinosaur Comics or Garfield Minus Garfield. You gotta know these. They're both genius. Read a bunch. Okay, now you may continue:

T-Rex is Lonely Comics.

SUPER YES. I am glad that the world of webcomics has come to this. It's entirely a webcomics inside joke. I feel like this must be how like Mondrian felt or something, when he just took some existing art and broke it down to its bare fundamentals and he's like "hey this is a tree" and everyone else is like "what are you doing." You look at T-Rex is Lonely Comics and you're like "what the hell" but it's SO GOOD because you know the backstory...

HOLD UP it just got better. I didn't realize they were munged from EXISTING DINOSAUR COMICS.

THIS IS SO GOOD.

Daylight Savings Time Happened, and Overreading

Last night was apparently Fall Back night, of the "spring forward fall back" variety.

Time zones don't make any sense. You know? (pardon me if I've ranted this to you before. (they're particularly irksome to me due to a year-long bug at work. anyway:) Why is it that we all have to have the privilege of waking up at 8AM and going to sleep at midnight? Why can't we just say, okay, UTC (or GMT for you non-time-zone-wonks) is it, and maybe in Britain the sun rises at 6AM and sets at 8PM, but in EST it rises at 1AM and sets at 3PM, and here in PST it rises at 10PM and sets at 12 "noon". No worries, you'd get used to it.

Supposedly they exist to make the trains work. What?! That's the most nonsense: the only thing time zones could to trains is screw them up. Instead of "I'm arriving in Cleveland at 5pm" I'd have to say "I'm arriving in Cleveland at 5pm my time; that's 8pm your time"; and good grief if I'm in America talking to someone in India about a train in Europe. And yeah, they make extra complication in software, which is almost always bad.

And now Daylight Savings Time too, which makes things even worse. Longer evenings for farmers etc, and now we just like it because it's nice in the summer; whatever. All it really ever does is make us miss church one more Sunday every year. (of course I never reminded my parents.)

So what happens last night? DST happens. And because my only clocks are my phone and my computer, thanks to the internet, I don't even notice. Wow! Maybe technology can save us after all! (although it really feels like a band-aid instead of fixing the bug, which is also almost always bad.)

End topic one. Begin topic two. Dan's prediction of the day: information is the new food.

Remember back in the day, like all of human history until like 100 years ago for some countries, it was always a struggle to get enough food? And now we have so much food all the time, and we're just going on this raging bender and making ourselves sick? Look at information: until like 10 years ago, it was a struggle to get enough information, and now we have so much information all the time, and we're just taking it in, more and more.

After a point, I stop comprehending and appreciating. Reading RSS feeds does this for sure: I just click through and read them all because they're there. I often couldn't tell you what I just read. It's a kinda icky pattern; whenever I'm at a computer and not totally immediately gratified, I check my email, and if there's nothing there, I check my google reader. At the end of any given day, especially a work day, my mind feels all strung-out and awful. Sort of like overeating.

Diabetes is on the rise; how's ADD?

There are more parallels too: used to be that everyone made a little information/media: they told stories around the campfire or whatever. Then corporations got in the game and a bunch of Americans stopped making information and started watching TV. Nowadays, everyone can generate media again. Same as food: everyone used to cook, then everyone bought fast food, now people are realizing that's a bad idea and starting to make their own food again. There's junk information (say, People magazine, reality TV, arguably video games) just like there's junk food.

Subtopics for further discussion:
- where does Google fit in? Am I working for tomorrow's McDonald's? (I think not; if anything, I'm working for tomorrow's super-grocery-store. and while the farmer's market is better than the grocery store, the grocery store is sure better than the convenience mart, or no food at all.)
- would adjusting our information intake fix most of our scattered 21st-century brains, just like adjusting our food intake would fix most of our messed-up 21st-century bodies?
- has anyone else thought this?