A couple thoughts from watching Dexter

(I'll only talk vaguely. I don't think reading this will make you enjoy the show less, but some might consider this post to contain mild spoilers. Consider yourself warned. I just finished Season 2. No spoilers from you either.)

It really feels like TV shows and movies have a contract with the audience. Especially in a morally-charged show like Dexter. (quick recap: our hero is a serial killer named Dexter. He's got these uncontrollable urges to kill, but he channels them into killing only murderers. He's also a cop.) Before any episode, I know that Dexter will not get killed, and I know that he will not get caught, and I know that he will not do anything ethically questionable (if you're okay with the premise in the first place).

I guess this comes from three places:
1. I know there are future episodes that I haven't seen yet, so the show can't end.
2. They go over the top to explain the "code" that Dexter follows. It seems like a pretty okay code ("only kill murderers") and he adheres to it ardently, so we're more comfortable accepting him as the hero.
3. ...?

I don't know what source 3 is, but I feel like there is something preventing the creators of the show from ever turning him into a villain, or even an ethically-questionable mostly-hero, or getting him caught by the FBI, or whatever. And I'd feel cheated if they did. Weird. I wonder if it's cultural, as we in America love a happy ending. And I wonder if anyone's consciously pandering to me. But I do like it.

Zen retreat thoughts

Mostly for posterity, so I can remember what I'm thinking at this point in my life.

1. I need to work on concentration first. (As opposed to insight/wisdom.) I read this from Daniel Ingram, got the same idea from S.N. Goenka (days 1-3 of the 10-day course are just concentration training), and now Niko at the Zen Center in Amsterdam agreed with what I was thinking there too.

I'm not sure how well I need to work on concentration, but I'm guessing that I should at least be able to follow my breath for an entire sit with not a huge effort.

There are two reasons I want to develop concentration: first, because I have to get good at that in order to work on insight; second, because I hear it's really pleasant once you get good at it; and third, because a couple of mental fireworks would convince me I'm not wasting my time.

I'm not sure what is the best way to develop concentration. Just trying again and again is about all I've got.

2. There are relative and ultimate benefits to meditation. Relative ones are the day-to-day things, like feeling less stressed. Ultimate benefits are things like "seeing reality as it truly is" and "becoming one with everything" that you can't really explain in words. I'm interested in both types of benefits. Lots of people are only interested in the relative ones. This is also fine.

However, I wish I could easily scan potential retreat/sitting groups by asking "are you interested in getting enlightened, or are you only interested in community and stress reduction and all the other relative benefits?" And I wish I could do this non-judgmentally. Hell, I'm now approaching 3 years of meditating daily or near-daily, with few mental fireworks to show for it, so I'm in no place to claim to be right about anything. It's possible that most people are slacking, but it's also possible that I'm a tad overenthusiastic and just following a bunch of nonsense anyway.


3. That said, I don't think I am. I think I've derived good relative benefits, and maybe I'll make more progress when life calms down a bit. When I hit some quantifiable benefits or mental fireworks, dear blog, I'll make sure to write them down.


4. Also with that said, props to the Zen Center in Amsterdam for letting me join them and making me feel welcome even though I don't do zen regularly.


5. Soto Zen does seem less strict than Rinzai Zen (like the Seattle Zen temple I went to a few times). Still a bit too much ceremony for my taste. But hell, ringing a bell is too much ceremony for my taste.


6. Sitting for 25 minutes, walking for 5 minutes, and repeating is easier than sitting for say an hour. I wonder if there are downsides. I was hoping to increase my daily practice to an hour, and maybe adding some walking would be a good way.

Selfs, improving life, and living longer

I guess this guy Bruce Hood wrote a book about how the "self" is an illusion, or rather, an emergent phenomenon. He explains it better than I can:
Short interview 1
Short interview 2
Throw this in with the likes of Daniel Dennett. I agree with this pretty hard. It seems hard for me to imagine how the "self" is anything other than an emergent phenomenon created by a lot of brain and body working together. I remember reading a good analogy, something like: a crab will build a shell around itself to keep itself safe, a human brain will build a self around itself to make it easier to process the world.

About living longer: 1. Work hard at a meaningful career. 2. Get married maybe- if you'll be good at it. 3. Connect with and help others. 4. Be extroverted, optimistic, and easygoing. #2 is probably the most interesting. I have few (maybe zero?) role models who are old, never-married, non-clergy, and reasonable people. This is puzzling. (course, I don't know that many old people in general.)

Daily and weekly habit recommendations for a better life. Some things I could work on daily: getting out in nature, exercising consistently, expressing gratitude, challenging myself systematically, laughing, and touching people (snicker, okay). To work on weekly: generally reflecting. Work-wise, personally, I ought to set aside time to reflect on the past week and plan for the next one. And maybe I ought to play music.

Google Reader sweep

1. A couple of thoughts about how to live better. Mostly it's context. Design your world in advance to help you be as good as possible in the moment.
2. One tip on how to live happier: every day write three good things that happened and why. I've been interested in adding something like this into a daily routine. Feels like a very low time investment for a lot of reward.
3. Also, how to live longer (note particularly that feeling connected to others is super important.) (Another hint: fasting.) I'd like to live to 200. I'd settle for 100 if the world in 50 years is the same as today (but it'll be twice as good, hence my goal of 200). Really, I'd just like to live until we can upload ourselves. Food-wise, fasting and calorie restriction sound like the surest bets; otherwise, active social life seems like a big one. I'll think about this more when I'm back in a stable life.
4. Compiling evidence that sitting is one of the things that is killing us the most: The Atlantic, NY Times. To do: see how many studies these folks are all citing. The hypothesis is compelling: believable, actionable, and big payoffs.
5. Why don't Americans walk more? I found this interesting for a number of reasons. Pondering why "walking" has become something you think about doing instead of something you just do, talking with pedestrian modelers, and only a little bit of preaching to the choir about walkability.
6. How do you decide what things to memorize, and what things to outsource memorization? Here's one answer: will it help you survive the zombie apocalypse? I don't buy it; there are plenty of things that I want to memorize that don't pass this bar. For example, recipes: it is so much easier to cook something without looking at a paper every minute.
7. Guy says he got back to 20/20 (and better) without glasses. I'm not super interested right now, because it becomes something he has to maintain, so it feels like a less perfect abstraction than just wearing contacts.
8. How do you stay on top of the scientific literature? This is something I'll have to get good at.
9. Carl Bielefeldt at Stanford explains how meditation only recently has gained traction among non-monks.

Steve Jobs

I read his biography. I am struck by a few things:

1. We really venerate him in nerd circles, but he was in many ways not a good person. I mean that he was not skillful at creating a good life. And the really striking thing is that a lot of his failings just seem so childish!

2. I'm sold on Apples again. (I mean, before reading the book.) My next computer will be a Mac. The thing that I keep getting convinced of is that, to build a good product in this world, you need one person to own it. Maybe there can be about two other people working on it too. The more people get added to a project (at least, the more people that make design decisions) the dumber it gets.

3. We both went to India. Times change. Back then you could visit "the guru of most of the hippie movement." I guess back then you also could more easily get dysentery. Places like Manali and Nainital were kinda unknown, not busy holiday spots. Also, back then you also didn't have an internet connection, and you couldn't be, say, blogging while you're on vacation.

That's the mildly worrying thing: I don't know if I'll ever find a place so remote, either physically or internet-ly. I wonder if I'm missing something.

4. "Sculley confided that on vacations he went to the Left Bank in Paris to draw in his sketchbook; if he hadn't become a businessman, he would be an artist. Jobs replied that if he weren't working with computers, he could see himself as a poet in Paris."
Come on! Dear world, get some new artistic ideals! There are other creative places besides Paris! And there are other creative people besides artists!

5. "I think the issue is empathy- the capacity for empathy is lacking." I wonder if he'd be diagnosed as a psychopath. (hmm... wikipedia says no psychiatric organization authorizes a diagnosis of psychopathy.)

6. Jobs to Rupert Murdoch: "You're blowing it with Fox News. The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you've cast your lot with the destructive people."
Right on! Not only about Fox News in particular, but about a constructive-destructive axis in the world. It's not always PC to point it out, but sometimes some people are genuinely working to build up and some are tearing down.

How to live better next time

Almost four years ago I started a new career in a new town. Now I'm doing it again. The last one worked out pretty okay, but I can do better this time. Examples:

- In Seattle, I aspired to live minimalistically, in terms of stuff. I would avoid acquiring most things, mostly because I'd have to move them someday. This was usually smart, but led to me not getting some things I'd quite like and be able to use. (also because of white person eco-guilt, which I now realize I carried too far.)

- I looked at time like money. I was a time miser. There was a pretty high bar for me to spend my precious time on something. But time doesn't work like money. Time works like... music. Like a constant stream of music coming out of your mouth. It'll happen no matter what, it's just up to you whether you make it sound good or not.

- I didn't appreciate physical good feelings. I rode my bike because it's the best way to get around. I didn't play any sports or lift weights or anything because they're mentally boring, and because modern society has made the word "exercise" so goddamn depressing. But you know what? Endorphins feel great. If we had a drug that made you feel like you do after a good run or bike, it would be popular/illegal. I didn't appreciate the good side of physical activity; I just avoided it because sometimes it's a little unpleasant.
(interesting side note: what if we could market physical activity as if it were a drug? sure, it's got unpleasant side effects in that you have to work hard, but alcohol has unpleasant side effects in hangovers, and people drink all the time.)

- I tried to minimize my job. I took the Google job in part because of the "great work-life balance." Sure, I never had to work more than maybe a 45-hour week. But I'm not sure anymore that this is a good way to look at your work. Aggressively segregating your work from your life can make you think you don't like your work. Then it becomes a Dilbert job.

Do you see the pattern? In all these cases, I've been defining my life negatively, saying "I don't want to do that" and then cutting it out. Far better to decide what I want to do, and arrange my life so I can do it. And do more: try more stuff for longer and don't quit because of discomfort.

I'm going to CMU again.

Yes! I wanted to come back to the states and try something new, get into a bigger pond, really get out and expand my life, throw off the shackles of the past, onwards and upwards, and my search has brought me to... Carnegie Mellon University. If you'd asked me a month ago, I would have said that CMU was maybe my #3 choice (out of 4), but after the visits, that's how my gut feeling went*. I feel good about this, meaning I don't think I've been unduly biased by any of the many biases I must have towards these places.

So as of this fall, until 2017 or 2018, I'll be a PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at CMU. Looking forward to this!

Now, though, time for me to hop a plane to Sofia, Bulgaria. More details on my travel blog. See you in the States again in July!

*and then here are the reasons that my cold rational brain has come up with to support my gut decision:

Research: is number one. Great profs, great students, lots of cool projects. They and UW seem like the top two places for HCI research, so it's good to be in this crew. Sure, maybe other cities might be bigger ponds in the "city" sense, but CMU is at the top of the game, research-wise. And (importantly) I've found a great potential advisor, as well as talking with other profs doing stuff I like.

The school itself: I want to study HCI, not CS. I like how my classes will be probably 4 CS, 4 HCI, one design, and one behavioral-science, instead of 10 CS. They feel like they've got a big family feel, all the profs care about the students and vice versa. Great atmosphere.

Students: very cool. Coming from CMU CS undergrad, I was not expecting this. They live reasonable lives, probably decorate their houses better than me, hang out a lot, have fun, work hard and play hard, etc.

City: Pittsburgh is smaller than Seattle. I'd wanted to move to a bigger city. So why Pittsburgh again?

- it's got history (which I didn't think mattered, but it means it's got a lot of flavor too, which is subtly important)
- it's still on the up and up. In 50 years I'll be able to say "Pittsburgh is cool now but I liked their earlier stuff better."

- some googling led me not to fear the Aikido problem (if I decide to try some new thing like say Aikido, will there be a studio nearby?)

- sounds like third wave coffeeshops have landed so y'know we're set there

- it's not super far from 90% of the people I know (I have some friends in Seattle and a few others on the West Coast and otherwise from Seattle I am flying 5+ hours to see anybody, which means I am not doing it.)

- it's cheap. never hurts.

Reasons I should have gone to UW instead:
- they have a bunch of cool, enthusiastic professors in the area I'm interested in
- I mean, their students are really cool too
- Microsoft Research is right next door
- skiing, mountains, air that smells nice, etc.

Links links

40 hour work weeks are actually better all around than longer ones.

Academics: going to publish a paper? Check if that journal supports you keeping an archive version yourself with SHERPA/RoMEO. (yes, it is terrifying that some journals don't let you do this. also, it is less useful for my field, because it's all conferences. still, I guess HCI folks write journal articles sometimes, so check on that!)

Sometimes when I lose my overwhelming unflinching optimism, I get down on the idea of "raising awareness." Great, I know about Joseph Kony now, but I will do nothing about it. Going viral on Facebook might or might not mean anything in the real world. I guess KONY 2012 did something; we're sending some troops in now? But that feels like a pithy response to appease voters, not a rational consideration of what needs to be done. Furthermore, it reinforces the belief that nothing happens unless we rich powerful Americans buy stuff and send in the army.

Here's an article about neat office projects that starts off with a pretty good recap of why sitting is bad for you. This stuff intrigues me because it feels like a plausible win-all-at-once thing: tweak your exercise routine to get 10% fitter, force yourself to exercise more to get 40% fitter, or just use a standing desk and get 100% fitter! (Numbers made up.) Plus, it's mentally easier; no need to force yourself to do something you don't like.

Grad schools: and then there were two.

Done all the visits! They were all great. For each school, I'd rather do a PhD there than not do a PhD there. And for each city, I'd rather live there than not. But I've got to decide...

I think it's UW or CMU. (Which is weird, right. Ask me a month or six months ago and I'd say I want to try something new! I want an adventure! ... I feel a bit like Harrison, but also feel pretty confident that CMU or UW would be the best choice.)

Why not Georgia Tech or Toronto? Ask me in an email, I guess; anything I say to the internet in general could be misinterpreted negatively. They're both awesome schools.

UW CSE is organizationally more traditional: it's a Department of Computer Science and Engineering, within which there are a bunch of great HCI people. But the HCI faculty are mostly a bit younger, and really inspiring. Microsoft Research is right next door, and interning is super common (there and elsewhere). Their graduates win all sorts of awards. Their recent grads (since, say, 2007) are about 55% industry, 23% faculty, 20% postdoc.

Surprising good thing: I had more than one really inspiring conversation about grad school and research while I was there, both with students and faculty. Very idealistic, very pure scientific motives. This is, I think, a good sign in a grad school.

CMU HCII is organizationally more innovative: it's the Charles Xavier academy for HCI researchers. There are about 20 faculty and 40 students, all working on HCI primarily. So instead of learning all about computer science theory and systems and stuff, you learn some CS, some design, some behavioral science, some general HCI research methods. Something like half their graduates have gone straight to faculty jobs (which is unheard-of; faculty jobs are really hard to get). They steamroll through conferences: I think they have the most papers at each of CHI, Ubicomp, and UIST. (though UW is not far behind.) Their grads are 20% industry, 44% faculty, 26% postdoc.

Surprising good thing: it's like a big family! Everyone knows, and supports, everyone (faculty and students). They go to conferences together, have parties together, even buy houses together. And (surprisingly for CMU) I found them all wonderfully charming, with only an endearing touch of CMU weirdness. (we arrive at a party and I'm greeted with "hi! talk to me." "what?" "tell me something!" "uhh... er, what do you want to know?" "you're terrible at this!" Oh, CMU!)

But more important than any of this, I suppose, are the particular faculty and students. I've talked a few times with most likely advisors at each school, and I'd love to work with them both.

To do still: make lists of other profs at each school and their specialties, make lists of students to make sure I remember the atmospheres pretty equally, send some emails, sit quietly and think a lot, and sit quietly without thinking a lot.

Negotiating grad schools with my subconscious

I'm deciding where to go to grad school, right, and where to spend the next 5-6 years of my life. It's a tough choice with a lot of factors. Our slow sequential rational minds are not great at processing these huge multi-dimensional choices, but luckily we've got these built-in hacks called "emotions". They're capable of doing massive processing, but they're tricky! For example, the weather has a big impact on which school you attend. Also, I like feeling accepted by people I respect. So I've got to understand what my emotions are telling me and then decide which ones to listen to.

Here's what I'm thinking:

Georgia Tech
Pros:

• The wearable computing contextual computing lab (and neighboring BCI lab). When I heard about magic piano gloves, I was ready to sign on the dotted line right there.
• The other students visiting along with me had mostly done something else before coming back to grad school. Of course I'm biased, but I think that's a good sign.
• Atlanta's cooler than I expected.

Cons:

• The "Aikido problem": if I decide to try some new thing (say, Aikido), will there be a studio nearby? If it's driving distance, I won't stick with it. I want an atmosphere where growth is not only possible but actively enabled; does Atlanta have that?

UW

Pros:

• I feel like family already.
• They are so tight with Microsoft Research, Intel, Google, and y'know other companies too.
• I met a lot of fervent supporters. People who, if you asked them to rate their time at UW on a 1-5, would say 5.
• And I had a couple of think-really-big conversations. Students and profs interested in big important work, not just publishing papers. I think their heads are on straight.

Cons:

• I'm not really looking forward to going back to Seattle, oddly, and I'm not sure why. The rain or something? The homogeneous Stuff-White-People-Like-ness?

U of Toronto

Pros:

• The prof I'd work with seems very sharp, enthusiastic, flexible, and interested in growing his lab.
• Toronto is an amazing city. I like it so much. And U of T is right downtown.

Cons:

• HCI is not such a focus there as it is at CMU, GA Tech, and UW. (doesn't mean there's not cool stuff going on. but CMU/GA Tech have whole schools for HCI, and UW has a big group.)
• I met a couple of folks who might rate their time there as a 2.

CMU

Pros:

• There's a whole school dedicated to HCI; the class mix is different than I'd get elsewhere (for better or worse).
• I have a few friends in Pittsburgh. Plus, Pittsburgh is cool and cheap.

Cons:

• I'd feel a little weird being back at CMU, too, and I'm not sure why.

To be continued!

More interesting things on the internet

Some studies, mostly from Richard Wiseman via Eric Barker, about people that I find maybe useful:
Smelling rosemary makes you smarter?
Owning a dog (not a cat) is apparently really really good for your stress levels. Bummer, because I don't want to own a dog. Maybe watching them on Youtube is just as good.
Selective attention seems like a good thing. Maybe I should buy a lab coat.
Swearing (at the beginning or end of a speech) is fucking magical.
Sleep more! It helps willpower. I've been recommended this book too, and I'm looking forward to it.
Put a mirror in your kitchen, put a plant in your office, and touch people on the arm.
We can do conversation better. Here are 27 specific ways.
Your name matters a lot. Helps to have a positive name, especially one that starts with A or B, and good initials. If you'll excuse me for a moment, I'm going to wander into absurd territory now and wonder if my initials, DJT, have made me more likely to be a college DJ. My sister and mom are both CAT; seems appropriate!

Got too far into absurd territory? Remember, it's easy to manipulate stats! More importantly, it's hard not to manipulate stats. You want some effect to happen, so you'll subconsciously do all sorts of tricks to get a statistically significant result. Even worse, stats will be buried deep in any paper you read (or might not appear at all). The burden is on us, researchers, to not do this!

Back to the real world- nah, hold up, let's stay in somewhat speculative territory for a while. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) sounds like a silver bullet for quick easy flow. However, with any brain silver bullets, lots of caveats: might not be the same thing, might have side effects, might only work on some tasks, might completely fry your brain. It feels to me like trying to repair your car's engine wearing boxing gloves. But the greedy futurist in me is excited.

Okay, real world. What should you do? Something difficult. Something that you'd like on your tombstone. Something productive.

A new site urging publishers to open up their damn academic journals: Who Needs Access? You Need Access.

Introverts and extroverts: I like this, because I feel similar. But what makes someone an introvert, and not just shy or unconfident? I don't know, and until I get a straight answer to that, I'm going to be a little tentative when I talk about introverts. It feels a little like nerd-pride: "I like Star Wars and that makes me different and that's okay!" is better than "I like Star Wars and that makes me different and I'm ashamed!" but it's less good than not feeling the need to assert that you like Star Wars in the first place.

Learning that pain is not suffering by investigating the pain. This feels like connoisseurship. I think if I started talking about being a pain connoisseur, people would look at me funny, but that feels like a good way to learn how to deal with pain (both physical and psychological).

How do you get over phobias?

I'm viscerally afraid of bugs and needles. Seeing a bug (a big one, a stingy one, or a cockroach inside) makes my blood run cold. Seeing a needle or needly blood (drops of blood, surgical cuts, large quantities, etc) makes me lightheaded and faint. This is a little bit limiting in everyday life: bugs go from nuisances to really bad events, and getting a shot becomes an ordeal. I'd like to be free of both phobias, particularly the needle one.

How can I do this? Should I jump in and just get a big dose of it, or should I wade into the water slowly? Is it impossible, and should I just avoid needles as much as possible? Or is there a fourth option? (hypnosis? meditation? ... iron deficiency?)

Due to my experience with needles, I think jumping in might not work. I tried to give blood twice and fainted or almost fainted each time. Last time I had blood drawn for a doctor's appointment, it had the same effect.

Due to my experience with bugs, I think wading in slowly might work. India helped, especially the retreat where our bathroom usually had one large spider in it. The spiders didn't move much and they never came into our bedroom, so I could see a spider every day and get to be more or less okay with it. Roaches still freak me out, but I now know that I can see one without a house being infested, so it's not the end of the world. So I'm thinking, little bits of exposure to bugs will help me overcome my fear of bugs. And my bug phobia is not so bad anyway.

So I'm thinking about wading in. Maybe by watching Dexter. But it's tough; a full episode makes me lightheaded. Do you, dear reader, have any tips?

Watchin' movies on planes that could have been better except for dumb folk wisdom

or, "Dan gets mad at pop culture twice."

Limitless. Well, this one was actually not bad. It's fun. Guy finds drug that makes him mental Superman.
First: "You know how we only use 10% of our brain? This drug lets us use 100%." Can we stop this? It's just silly.
Second: the guy was a burnt out loser, but after he takes the drug, he tells his girlfriend "It's okay now. I'm back." She says "Who's back?" "I am." "That's not you. That's the drug." Can we stop this too? It's voodoo, tribal folk myths, the idea that you have some magic "life force" or identity, and when you take a drug, that magic life force leaves you and the drug possesses you. Reminds me of D.A.R.E.

In Time. This movie was actually awful. But such a good premise: in the future, time is the currency. When you turn 25, you stop aging, and instead you get a clock with one year on it; when it expires, you die. You can buy/sell/trade time. So the rich people live for thousands of years, and the poor people just try to scrape together enough time-currency to survive another day.
The problem: "We're not meant to live forever." This is kind of the bias behind the whole film, and it's never defended or discussed, it's just accepted as a given.

On the other hand, one movie that gets it right: Moneyball. Statistics work. Just like in the real world. But they don't magically predict the future 100% of the time, just on average. Again, just like the real world.

A movie I didn't get: Scarface. But then, I didn't get The Godfather either.
A movie that was pretty good, and god bless them for trying something different and pulling it off: The Artist.
A movie that's hella cute: My Neighbor Totoro. Also, I have a new answer for "if you had to get a pet, what would you get?"

Link blasts

I don't know if anyone likes these posts, but at the very least, it's a good list of things I found interesting once and might want to find again.

A lot of people are up in arms about academic publishing recently, and for good reason. It's a huge scam. Publishers like Elsevier (the current scapegoat, the McDonalds of the academic publishing industry) create journals. Scientists send papers in to these journals (often at a cost to the scientist). The journal sends each article out to other scientists to peer-review. Then the reviewers decide which ones go in the journal, and then the journal charges people $20/article to read them, or sells subscriptions to university libraries for thousands of dollars. Notice that, in this whole description, the journal is doing nothing useful that the internet cannot do, but it's raking in obscene amounts of money from underfunded universities and poor students. Here's a bit more about it. Note to self: look into the state of this in 6 months or so, when I start actually researching.

Diversity is not about color anymore. Urban/rural is a bigger divide than white/brown/black. I have more in common with a Bangalore software engineer than a Western Washington farmer. Haves/Have-nots is an even bigger divide.

"Unplug your machines on Sunday" is a useful solution to the "information overload" problem, but it's not the whole answer. To me it feels like meditating for half an hour a day: a great start, but if you're not living mindfully the other 23.5 hours, it's only a start. Also, this article does a good job of laying out at least 5 of the main issues that we tend to unfairly lump together into "technology overload." Multitasking, Fear of Missing Out, Disconnection from the real world, Information Overload, and "The Shallows".

Connecting with people, one silly and pre-rehearsed sentence at a time. "That's a nice dog." Brings a surprisingly nice jolt! He attributes it to oxytocin; whether it is or not, it's a pretty nice feeling, and good on him for this effort.

Erasing memories. Don't say "Eternal Sunshine." I think that if this ever works on people, the effects will be so complicated. We imagine "okay, I'll just forget when that bully hit me last week", but that's like saying "I'll just have Google forget that 'person' and 'human' are synonyms."

Who is Sam Harris, and how have I just heard of him twice with a week?
First: Fireplaces are actually really bad for you. And we're not good at taking our folk beliefs and figuring out which are accurate and which are not.
Second: This makes Brazilian Jiu-jitsu sound really appealing to learn. Also, it is neat that the question "what is the best method of fighting?" has an answer: a mix of western boxing, Thai boxing, Greco-Roman wrestling, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, depending on how far you are from your opponent.

Think I saw this a while ago but forgot about it: Toxoplasma gondii messes with us in lots of subtle ways. Same way that certain parasites make bugs climb grass so that birds can eat them more easily. Cool!

One man's experiences with various nootropics. (These are safe, legal drugs.)

UMD seminar about the future of Human-Computer Interaction. "The future of HCI" is a wide topic; looks like they break it down into crowdsourcing, input, personal informatics, and "cyborg". Interested to see what they pick to read, especially as those seem to me to be four of the most interesting parts of HCI.

"You don't want that thing; you want the experience of getting what you want"

This thought has been running through my head a lot recently. (Anyone know the actual quote?)

Think about the first time you had vodka. It probably tasted like hell because it was cheap, but then it made you feel nice afterwards. Pretty soon, that became a default: every weekend you could have some cheap vodka at a college party, so it lost some mystique. The experience of wanting something and getting it became lessened. Perhaps you then desired tastier vodka, so when you upgraded to Smirnoff it felt like a luxury again. Maybe you then got a job and started making money, so you could buy Smirnoff whenever you wanted. But then you didn't get the experience of wanting something and getting it; you just got the experience of getting something. Lost its appeal again. Maybe you moved up to fancier vodka. Maybe you buy Grey Goose, even though I bet you money you don't actually like the taste better!

Creating desires so you can fulfill them. Weird, right? Well, and not very productive either. I'm wondering what happens when you hit consumptive singularity, or whatever: when your whole life is just an exceedingly elaborate series of fulfilling desires. (and I'm not just talking stupid hedonism: these desires could include a loving family, career success, whatever.) Probably feels great. Hmm.

I think if I continued this post, I'd just hit Buddhism 101. Whoops. The original and useful point I'm trying to make is this: occasionally examine your life, and notice where you're just desiring the experience of wanting something and getting it.

Albums where the last song is the best

1. Sgt. Pepper's (A Day in the Life)
2. The Bends (Street Spirit (fade out))
3. Speaking in Tongues (This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody))
4. John Henry by They Might Be Giants (The End of the Tour)
5. Z by My Morning Jacket (Dondante)
6. Bitter Tea by the Fiery Furnaces (Benton Harbor Blues, well, kind of)
EDIT: 7. Daisies of the Galaxy by Eels (Mr. E's Beautiful Blues)

What else?

ps. like how I didn't list who made Speaking in Tongues, because of course you already know it, just as well as you know Sgt. Pepper's and The Bends?

Scarcity makes people worse

I am thinking that almost all instances of people being awesome occur in situations of plenty, and almost all instances of people being crummy occur in situations of scarcity. Scarcity activates the circuit that says "I gotta get mine before it's all gone". Money, food, status, time; next time someone's getting testy or worse, look for what is scarce. See if you can alleviate it. Also, learn from that instance and see how you can avoid this being scarce in the future.

I am really inspired. This has happened before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do the best things remind me of video games?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More interesting things

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

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

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

Thought scraps

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspirations from a Creed music video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like a reverse Grinch, my heart just shrank three sizes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another step towards eating ideal food

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

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

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

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

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

Google Reader Sweep

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

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

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

Movember; this is a great idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English

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

Some things I learned:

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

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

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

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

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

Positive mental time travel

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

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

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

Been killing spiders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I'll get enlightened instead of having kids.

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

Here's an idea: not have kids.

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

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

Making the Best Life

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

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

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

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

My mental state and current meditation plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goenka-style Vipassana meditation, and my reactions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buddhism has a 4th grader's understanding of alcohol

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, more grad apps submitted

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

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

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

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

Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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