Meditator's log, stardate 8/22/11

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

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

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

This week's been a time warp.

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

Here's a bit more time warp:

I grew up here.

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

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

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

- The Copper Cup in Bay Village is great closed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just in case you were wondering.

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

Consuming Well

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Definitive Seattle Guide to everything Seattlean that is in Seattle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quit Facebook and join Google+ already.

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

So updated comparison:

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

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

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

Tunnel vision

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

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

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

Emptiness!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instinct hacking

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

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

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

So this all makes me wonder:

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

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

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

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

Three days at a retreat house and what I learned there

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

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

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

More to come, and soon!

Lifelapse!

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

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

0001-0010: computing

0011-0012: bathroom

0013-0155: computing

0156-0157: bathroom

0158-0304: computing

0305-0307: walking around apartment

0308-0310: bathroom

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

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

0399-0410: computing

0411-0420: bathroom

0421-0455: computing

0456-0457: walking around apartment

0458-0459: brushing teeth

0460-0522: nap

0523-0531: walking around apartment

0532-0542: computing

0543-0579: standing and computing

0580-0581: bathroom

0582-0614: biking

0615-0619: ordering coffee

0620-0852: computing at Stumptown

0853-0860: leaving Stumptown

0861-0868: biking to park

0869-0880: a little more juggling

0881-0888: biking home

0889-0921: cooking

0922-0961: eating, I think

0962-1012: standing and computing, I think

1013-1024: washing dishes, I think

1025-1197: standing and computing

1198-1223: biking to a bar

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

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

So in total:

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

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

computing at Stumptown: 233 = 116.5 min

coffeeshop logistics: 5+8 = 13 = 6.5 min

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

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

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

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

nap: 63 = 31.5 min

eating dinner: 40 = 20 min

waiting outside bar: 72 = 36 min

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

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

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

Biking and being outdoors: 115.5 min = almost 2 hours

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

I'm taking up juggling again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Search Engines are the Vacuum Cleaners of the 2000's

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

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

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

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

Googlebook vs Facebook

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

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

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

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


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

Caffeine fast complete!

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

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

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

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

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

Normative Heuristic Microethic #3.

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

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

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

Particularly seek fucking awesome experiences.

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

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

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

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

Avoid cravings. Seek opportunities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't like feeling helpless.

And I don't like UPS.

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

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

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

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

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

No-meat experiment results: wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Average stomach value when I was vegetarian: 2.84902728756

Average stomach value when I was not vegetarian: 3.07318849872

t = -2.18353942908, p = 0.0305296553454

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

Number of ratings per day when I was vegetarian: 5.22222222222

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

t = -4.99546061942, p = 0.00000154006168467

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

Average mood value when I was vegetarian: 3.33179694171

Average mood value when I was not vegetarian: 3.49920969731

t = -1.95361169902, p = 0.052513305171

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

Attention and coffee (unrelated)

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

Doubt, Uncertainty, and Fear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I like San Francisco.

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

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

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

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

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

A quarter century!

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

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

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

- submitting papers to top-tier academic conferences

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

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

- a crater that is continually on fire

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

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

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

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

We all know everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seligman: talk about PERMA, not "happiness"

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

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

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

At any rate, I like this article.

Is motorcycling dumb?

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

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

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

Well, I've found a career.

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

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

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

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

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

No-grains experiment 2

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


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

t-test on stomach before and after grains:

t = -2.67446580787, p = 0.00851982121181

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

However, there are complicating factors:

- travel days. On travel days stomachs are weirder.

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

So let's ignore the travel days:

t-test on stomach before and after grains:

t = -2.23123617479, p = 0.0277911206015

stomach with grains: mean = 3.09

stomach without grains: mean = 3.26

Still significant.

How about only comparing days after I left Google?

t-test on stomach before and after grains:

t = -1.06189037683, p = 0.294500544066

stomach with grains: (daily averages omitted)

mean = 3.13

stomach without grains: (daily averages omitted)

mean = 3.26

No significant effect.

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

t-test on stomach before and after Google:

t = 1.00310288377, p = 0.317813018172

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

mean = 3.11

stomach post-Google: (daily averages omitted)

mean = 3.03

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

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

Indeed, what WILL we do without our vanities?

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

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

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

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

From "A Journey in Ladakh" by Andrew Harvey

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

---

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

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

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

I am having remarkably high quality experience today.

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

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

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

Consuming well

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nah check it out, HERE is a business card

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

There it is. Woo!

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

I would really love your feedback on my business card.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cleveland, you spoil me!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hot brain, cold brain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What drives you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recording things for the future

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

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

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

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

Mihaly, don't let me down!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other minor quibbles:

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

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

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

But on the plus side:

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

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

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

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.