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.