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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How do you know that you know?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Mac Java: are you kidding?

Jesus Christ. I just heard about Mac deprecating Java.

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

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

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

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

Fully externalizing memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Great idea of the day

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

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

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

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

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

Career is only one letter away from Careen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upsides: Enlightenment!

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

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

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

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

Clearing out my Google reader

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

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

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

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

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

Word games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More lucid oh boy

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

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

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

On my research blog here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

t-test on mood before and after grains:

t = -0.78694967152, p = 0.439345514713

t-test on energy before and after grains:

t = -0.961369818324, p = 0.346365085994

t-test on stomach before and after grains:

t = -1.98753017649, p = 0.0588975495116

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

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

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

mean = 2.86

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

mean = 3.15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Grains Experiment: my mood ~ my energy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucid dreamt again!

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

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

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

Live excitement-driven?

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

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

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

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

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

No Grains Experiment: so far inconclusive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen, Cat Stevens is seriously great.

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

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

Ski report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the meantime, hooray!

Phatic speech

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

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

And so ends the No Grains Experiment.

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

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

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

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

I am sick of bear and laundry jokes.

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

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

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

What stories do you tell yourself?

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

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

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

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

Ok Twitter for serious I guess

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm eating less grains.

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

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

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

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

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

- tea

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biceps: 10.5"

Thighs: 21"

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

Neck: 15"

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

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

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

Twitter and energy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More details later.

Hey, I'll be in Pittsburgh tonight

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Weirdsmas!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quirinius: but we'll all be forgotten anyway!

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

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

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

(75 to 100 years pass)

Dead Quirinius: booyah!

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

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

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

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

People vs. our memories of them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry from the Dream World

It's late and I ought to be sleeping, but I dreamed hella dreams last night, and I don't want to withhold this from the Internet:

I dreamed that I heard the most amazing hilarious profound poem and that I had to record it, and then I had a series of dreams in which I was trying to wake up and record it.  I managed to carry three fragments of it into the waking life.  I suppose there were a lot of missing parts, but I may never remember them, so I will just present the parts that I remember.

Let me also preface this by saying, it continues to amaze me how much my unconscious mind is:

- creative

- dumb as hell

- unfettered by notions of what does or doesn't make sense.

Okay, enough introductions.  Here it is.

"The Bees"

Humbling crumbly brumbly dumb bear.

Are you hungry hungry hungry?
What are you hungry
  hungry hungry
  hungry hungry
  hungry for?

Are you fighting?
What are you fighting
  fighting fighting
  fighting fighting
  fighting for?

Christmas songs that are allowed.

LENGTHY PREAMBLE: Are you a creator or a taster?

(this is of course a false dichotomy, but I imagine it's a good headline for this lengthy preamble.)

I've lately been seeing the world a lot in terms of creation and taste.  Taste is something that we all try to cultivate, and it's really kinda the opposite of creation: winnowing the cream from the chaff, or whatever.  If you have good taste in music, you're good at cutting down everything that you don't like, and (presumably) really savoring the stuff that you do like, but mostly you know what not to like.  Similarly with food or movies or whatever: if you "have good taste" it mostly means you don't like crummy stuff.

It's everyone's problem with hipsters: by cultivating taste so hard, they just end up sneering at everything.

Far better, I think, to just create a lot.  My best moments of taste, of explaining why Lady Gaga is an acceptable and praiseworthy pop culture icon while Katy Perry is not, or why "Feels" is better than "Merriweather Post Pavilion" despite what Pitchfork thinks, pale in comparison to even okay moments of creation.  Beertable and my door knocker, and even One Photo Every Minute despite its lackluster success, are the sort of things I'm proud of.

I really want to work "maintainer" into this, so we can group people into creators, maintainers, and destroyers, and thereby connect this to another grand concept that's been around since sorta the dawn of time, lending it some grain of Truth with a capital T.  More likely that this is all just nonsense, and I dreamt it all up so that I could proclaim myself a creator and tap into various cultural biases there.

END LENGTHY PREAMBLE; commence main post:

Despite all that, and how I like to create things blah blah, I heard some Christmas songs in the Trader's Joe last night, and remembered how I am a great destroyer of Christmas music.  Up until this year I was convinced that all Christmas songs should perish, except for 13: The Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack and You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.  However, maybe I should be a little less humbuggy; some other ones are nice too (only when performed traditionally, and not melodramatically):

- O Come O Come Emmanuel
- O Holy Night
- God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
- Good King Wenceslas

... okay, I'm spent.  Well, we're up to 17, anyway.

Nothing bad ever happens ever.

Great trip to the SF Bay Area this past week!  It was for work, but it was hell of great, because:

- Chrome Web Store launch event!  Okay, so I didn't actually contribute code to this release, but it was my team's release, and all is well, so that's great.  Also they talked a lot about Chrome itself (still getting faster and awesomer) and Chrome OS.  My former team, Chrome Sync, got great coverage, and further press in this video (the Chrome leads have a great dry sense of humor).  At any rate, it actually did get me re-excited about my job.  That's nice.
- A good chance to visit old friends.  It is nice when your job will send you to visit old friends.
- Winchester Mystery House.  WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE.  Okay, seriously, it's just a big house with the wonkiest architecture.  But boy is it wonky.
- Korean noodles and Indian ice cream.  The Bay area has Seattle beat for ethnic food.  (I mean Seattle proper; I'm sure you could get equally good food if you included everything within 30 miles of Seattle in any direction.  The Bay area is huge.)
- got to meet the client Extensions team.  Cool folks!
- go-karts with the team.  Surprisingly fun.  Skidding around corners and stuff; felt like real-life Mario kart.
- I stayed in the Mission in SF.  I like it.  It's a neighborhood I could probably live in.
- Ritual Coffee Roasters makes good stuff.
- I continue to be thankful for my commute, especially my half-hour bike commute to Seattle.  The Bay area is huge.
- In an uncharacteristic but awesome move I picked up this box of useless things at the Google store.  I am pretty excited about them.

What's your phone number?

I got a call from Little Nipper's Pizza, saying he had my pizza, and didn't I order something?  I remembered that my Google Voice number is a 412 (Pittsburgh) number.  I said "I'm sorry, I think you have the wrong number."
Him: What's your phone number?
Me: (about to say 440-... but paused instead, because this is where the recognition kicked in.)
Him: I dialed 412-(something something), isn't that your number?
Me: uh...
Him: (frustrated) Well, what's your number??
Me: Wait- it's 412-5-uh, 3-2- uh
Him: ah, nevermind. (hangs up)

Because, you see, I know my Pittsburgh number as being 412-5-then the first 6 letters of my name.  Har!

In other news, so in my completely entirely unbiased view, Chrome is The Best browser, but Firefox just got hella more awesome:
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/12/03/meet-the-newest-and-cutest-mozillians/

Well, that was surprisingly easy.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jdnnkcoalggjhgceidekjfbcbbkpegbb

I am not such a fan of procrastination.

For some reason, I have done it more recently.  Maybe this is because I've had to do things on my computer that are hard on a couple different axes.  Most of the things have just been email anxiety (like sending emails to professors out of the blue- eep!), some of them are the difficulties of trying to spin up one job (research) while the other one (err my real job) has fried my brain all day, some of them are just other logistics like buying plane tickets.  If this is the case, it's not an easy problem to solve.

Maybe this is because procrastination has gotten easier thanks to Google Reader, The Facebook, and Twitter.  I'm not sure this is the case, because I feel like I just want some information to eat.  I got into Hacker News for a while until I quit that, and now I go to the Stranger when I want some more info.  So I could quit the Facebook or something, but then I'd just snarf up more info elsewhere.

Maybe the trick is to take my hard problems more seriously.  When I say "I need to email this professor, because maybe our researches will overlap and we could meet and talk about ideas or something", I should treat it as if I were going to do 20 push-ups.  Not easy.  But doesn't really take that long, and better to just meet it head on.

But man, this is the kind of thing that's tough, because you don't even know you've lost the fight until it's over.  As I was writing this, I suppressed an urge to check my email once- if I had waited a half second, a little ctrl-T and bam, my brain is scattered between this post and gmail.  It's as if I need a mindfulness Chrome theme or something, that instead of displaying a shiny new tab page, says "WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO NOW" and then freezes for 5 seconds before I can continue.

Hey, that's a neat idea.