If meaning in life is self-created,

if there's no "meaning of life" except what we create for ourselves,

could you just decide "the meaning of life is to be really good at Super Mario Bros", dedicate yourself fully to it, and be satisfied?

(I pose this argument as a straw man; it feels like there's something wrong with it. do help me figure out what it is.)

Vitamins

In fall 2006, I was having a tough time. Junior year, taking the hardest classes I had yet, and not really knocking them out of the park. I was living with some good friends, too, but it was a 4-person 2-bedroom apartment, which is still kind of stressful.

I used to take multivitamins. I noticed, at one point during fall 2006, that I had just about enough vitamins to last until the end of the semester. After that semester, in the spring, I would study abroad in the Netherlands, and I guess I figured that senior year would be good and I'd go find a great job or something, and pretty much everything would be fine if I just got through that one semester. Every day as I took my vitamin, I'd sort of muse about it being a little suffering pill. After I got through those, it'd all be golden.

The weird part of this story is that I was pretty much right. I studied in the Netherlands, it was pretty fun, I got a cool research gig and had one of my best summers, enjoyed senior year, rolled on to Google, got into grad school, bummed around the world, and it's all been fine. Until this year: work has been tough.

For kind of dumb reasons, I happen to have another bottle of multivitamins. I figured, might as well take them, as long as I've got them. And then I started forming the same story, about having a little bottle of suffering pills.

But you know what? Could be that vitamins are bad for you. So I'm throwing them out.

Things contracting a bit

Sometimes life expands, and you start a thousand new projects and buy some stuff and make new friends. Sometimes it contracts, and you tie up loose ends, get rid of things, clean house. Now is the latter for me.

At work, I'm getting into a worn groove. Not quite a rut, but a path that a lot of people have stomped down before me and that I'm learning how to walk in. Depth is nice; learning to become a class-A grunt in any line of work is useful. You get blinders, though, too. Everything you and your friends/coworkers do becomes just the standard way to do things. (I'm a little convinced that there are things we grad students are doing poorly, particularly the worrying.)

Otherwise, things are fine, I feel healthy physically, I even have a bit of leisure time to do nothing. I'm done with my bike and my radio show (for now), got fun social things to do but am avoiding adding work for the time being.

I've been dreaming a lot less, since I started here a year ago. My brain feels fuller. I'm not worried about not growing. I am sometimes worried that I'm not doing what's important. (Working on changing that.) I'm still not sure how anyone can be content, ever, pretty much period. I still feel like an eager, angry, and excited kid.

The bike lives!

Well, that was quick.

I spent a couple hours at Kraynick's today, and it's good to go! The last few parts (bottom bracket, cranks, chain, brake) all came together really easily.

Here are the parts (and this is as much for my future benefit as yours)

Eighth Inch Scrambler frame set: $150, includes frame, fork, seatpost/clamp, headset.

Frame: 59cm chromoly steel, horizontal dropouts

Fork: 1 1/8" chromoly

Headset: threadless

Seatpost/clamp: whatever, it works

Seat: Velo Plush something, I already had it around

Stem: $20, XLC adjustable A-head, it says: ø: 25.4mm, and 90mm 

Handlebars: $3 bargain-bin, plus some old grips I had lying around

Brake: $25 Shimano Sora BR-3400 (like this) dual-pivot side-pull brake, recessed mount. 

Brake lever: $3 bargain-bin mountain-bike-style

Brake cable and housing: $5

Bottom bracket: $26, Shimano UN55 68x107mm Square Taper

Crank set (includes sprocket): $34, 170 mm, 46 teeth, 1/8" steel chain ring
Another crank arm (non-drive-side) because the first one got rounded off after I didn't tighten it enough: $3

Pedals: $5, bargain-bin

Chain: 1/2x1/8" KMC Z410 BMX-style for internal gear hub/single speed, maybe $10

Wheels: $110, includes tubes and tires, 700c x 18mm freewheel/fixed (riding fixed now)

Lights: a couple little blinky things I had lying around
Lock bracket: $2 (to hold the lock on)

Total: $396, which is maybe about $96 more than I was planning to spend, but not terrible. Time invested is in the low tens of hours- maybe 20 or 30 if you count all the looking things up online.

Riding a fixed gear bike: a little weird! I'm nervous to go anywhere near as fast as I usually do. I have no idea if I'll be able to go on hills ever. For that matter, the following things are also weird: only one brake, skinny hard tires, no gears.

But the following things I love: no quick releases, pretty lightweight, the look of the thing (isn't it pretty?), almost no logos, and I know everything that went into it and how to fix a lot of it.

All it needs is a name! Taking suggestions.
EDIT: I think the best name, as suggested by someone on my kickball team (Tim, I think?), is Brian Eno. Because: A. it's minimalist and great, and B. what gets you more cred than a hand-made fixed gear bike named Brian Eno?
EDIT EDIT: Thanks also to my dad for the bike stand!

EDIT AGAIN:
wanted to catalog some important things I learned:
- to get the headset into the frame, use a headset press, without the bearings in it (which is obvious if you think about it, but you can smash the bearings if you don't think about it)
- when installing the bottom bracket, be careful when starting it so you don't cross-thread, and put anti-seize compound (which is like grease plus molybdenum bits) on it
- install the bottom bracket on the drive side first, and don't ride it if it starts to come loose!
- when installing the cranks, really crank them the heck in there (and then re-tighten it after every ride for the first couple hundred miles).
- you want the chain to be tight. Tighten the left axle nut (not sure what that's called), then pull the wheel into place while tightening the right one.
- don't take the tip off your crank puller and then try to use it :-/

Building a bicycle

This is far enough along that I'm confident that I'll end up a Guy Who Built A Bike and not a Guy Who Blogged About Building A Bike And Then Never Did It.

I'm building a bike! It is both easier and more complicated than I thought. Slightly more expensive than I thought, but not wildly. It is definitely more expensive than buying a bike.

I'm roughly following this guide. It'll be a fixed gear, 10% for cred and 90% because that seemed easiest. (although I got a cool wheel that has a fixed cog on one side and a freewheel on the other, so I could switch it if I wanted. the difference is that you can't coast on a fixed gear, and if you push the pedals backwards, it brakes; if you have a freewheel, it's just like any bike that you're used to, but only one speed.)

I've been getting a bunch of help from the guys at Kraynick's (Jerry Kraynick himself, and other folks who just happen to be in there fixing up bikes at the same time). Couldn't do it without them; like I said, it's kind of complicated. It's exciting, though! I'll post more when it's done.

Eat salads for breakfast

1. They are usually about the healthiest thing you can eat, so making a habit of eating a big one every day means that, over time, you'll get a ton more good healthy things into your body and less unhealthy things.
2. They are easy: buy a huge tub of greens for $5 and pile them with whatever you want on top in a giant bowl.
3. Relatedly, they help you use up whatever's in your fridge or pantry. Cheese, nuts, fruit, avocado, fish, whatever, pile it all on.
3. They're messy, with dressing flicking all over the place. All the more reason to eat them at home.
4. At home, too, it's easy to make your own dressing: 2 or 3 parts olive oil, 1 part vinegar, mix.
5. If you don't like salads, and you're half awake in the morning and rushing to get to work, you don't want to rush through something that's really tasty- just stuff some greens down. Then eat something more tasty and less healthy when you've got time to enjoy it.
6. If you do like salads, then hey, you get to eat a salad!

Falling asleep is really cool.

If you pay attention, you can watch your brain shut down. (or, better metaphor, "suspend", or more appropriately "do a bunch of things differently than it does when you're awake.") How neat is that?

You're having a train of thought and then you realize you can't remember what you were thinking about literally seconds ago. Not a clue. And then you're on to the next topic.

Also, the next topic is often really goofy. Leaps that you wouldn't ever think of when you're awake. Yeah, every so often someone discovers the benzene ring, but more often you just come up with a pretty entertaining nonsense story, and that's cool too.

You can see all this happening! (Until, all of a sudden, you can't anymore.) I think that's cool.

My Soylent experiments, or, don't try this at home.

You might have heard about Soylent, this drink made by a bunch of Y Combinator softwaremen who wanted to have an alternative to eating food. Supposedly it has all the nutrients you need to be healthy. Now, given my extended joking about Food Cube, I was naturally intrigued.

Plus, they made it sound pretty easy. Make a list of all the nutrients you need. Buy vitamins and stuff until you have all those nutrients. Blend them together.

So I gave it a try. A run to the local GNC, a couple of things off the internet, and a big spreadsheet, and I had Homemade Soylent Version 1. It included whey protein, maltodextrin, olive oil, salt, a multivitamin, potassium chloride, monosodium phosphate, iron, fiber, calcium plus magnesium, and potassium gluconate. I'd tell you the proportions, but I don't recommend trying it.

It was awful. I made a 2500-calorie batch of it, drank 1/3 of it for breakfast, and felt sick all morning. I couldn't even think. It felt like I'd eaten a rock. After about half a day (and a couple trips to the bathroom) I could live like a normal human again. Whoops.

So I tried again. (naturally.) Same ingredients, different proportions: more fiber (25g), less calcium magnesium (think I had a little too much before), less maltodextrin and protein powder (for less overall drink), less iron (18mg is just the RDA for women. for men, it's 8mg).

I've almost made it through 1/3 of a day's supply now, and I don't quite feel sick. I don't feel particularly well, though, either. Plus, the thing is quite noxious. I am having a hard time drinking it, and I'm a guy who likes almost any food. I am guessing that a bunch of people who try this are going to find that, like me, they care about taste and texture more than they thought.

Still, though, good luck to them! Since I bought the ingredients, both the canonical example recipe (as made by the folks who are manufacturing Soylent) and the multitude of other recipes (as found on their forums) have evolved quite a bit, so it's likely that I'm just doing it wrong. But because every bad recipe means a day of drinking gross nonsense, I'm not inclined to experiment further.

(I did preorder a weeks' supply of the "official" stuff, though! I'll let you know how that turns out.)

Makin' T-shirts

... is surprisingly easy.
1. print your design.
2. tape it to a non-corrugated cardboard. Tape a sheet of acetate (or "Dura-lar" - another plastic sheet thing) on top of it. Cut it out with an exacto knife.
3. tape the plastic sheet to a shirt. Paint on it with fabric paint.

Things to watch for:
- you might need some sticky-tack to stick the plastic to the shirt so it doesn't lift up.
- dab with the paintbrush, don't brush. Spongey brushes work pretty well.
- make sure your design works as a stencil. You might have to add some "bridges". Also, try to stay away from anything super-intricate
- if you cut some letters freehand, they'll look super jagged and sort of violent. This may or may not be what you're going for.

Without further ado, shirts 1 and 2:

 

(there is no punchline to this one.)

(this one is only punchline.)

Everything is broken and can never be fixed?

I got to talking with a friend about, uh, the state of the world, and she asked at one point, what's my take? At this point, it's something like pessimism. Here's why (and I'll constrain this mostly to the US here, just to make the conversation manageable, but of course many of these are worldwide).

We have a lot of huge problems. Environmental problems: global warming, water shortage, deforestation, extinction, smog, fracking, Pacific trash islands. Economic problems: shrinking middle class, unaffordability of school, constant unemployment, whatever. Health problems: obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer. Political insanity, the war on drugs, the current US war-of-the-week against some country where the people are a different color and maybe have oil or communism, widespread creationism, same old crime, racism, misogyny, bee colony collapse. Oh, and now PRISM!

We don't have tools to deal with them. How do we deal with big problems?
- Technology. The smallpox vaccine stopped smallpox.
- Economics. Let the markets solve it! We've made things more efficient; affluent US people can now buy food and ipods.
- Laws. Now there are no laws against black people voting; there will hopefully soon be no laws against gay people marrying.
- Social action. MLK or Gandhi.

None of these work against threats that are complicated, slow, and devastating. Let's narrow the conversation even further to global warming (not because it's our only problem, but just so I'm not ranting for days). I guess renewable energy cheaper than coal would be a partial technological cure, but we're not there yet and I don't know if we will be before the temperatures rise catastrophically. Economic cures lead to nonsense like carbon offsets; does anyone trust "the invisible hand" to magically stop global warming too? Our laws are toothless (Kyoto etc) and there's no crucial moment that we'll all band together, no enemy to fight against, no one leader who will persuade us to do anything until it's too late.

The recommendations that we get fall ridiculously short. Apparently, if everyone lived my lifestyle, it'd take 4.81 earths to support us. If I recycle all my tin cans, carpool whenever possible, and buy organic food, maybe it'd get down to 4.7. People! This is not going to cut it! It's going to take technology, economics, laws, AND social action if we want to get down to 1 earth, and I don't see us using any of them.

I don't mean to just rant, but rather to ask: how do we live our lives and deal with this? The best answer I've come to is to do the little fixes, recycle my tin cans and carpool, and otherwise ignore it all. Enjoy the results of the life lottery that made me an upper middle class white male. Is there an answer that's less asinine or grim?

Home distilling

I like rakia/schnapps/slivovitz/fruit brandy. I thought it'd be fun to make some.

However, turns out it's illegal. Which means that you can't really have an above-the-board operation, which means dependable information is harder to find.

However, you can buy a still kit, which is not a still, so it's not illegal.

However, that requires some heavy soldering or a plumber's torch.

(This guy seems to have useful info too.)

Making fruit wine (or even just beer) would probably be fun too, but the end product is not as exciting, so maybe I won't for now. Still (NPI), maybe these links would be useful to other would-be home distillers. Or, more likely, to me in the future.

SF inequality, time overestimation, Soylent, sending money

"In California, there isn't a conflict between being a capitalist and a liberal." "The companies here are more than just playgrounds, they’re enclaves." I more or less agree with this.

How people spend their time. This is so interesting because we never get this data. The only data we get is data about how we feel like we're spending our time. "how we think we spend our time has little to do with reality. We wildly overestimate time devoted to housework. We underestimate time devoted to sleep."
"people who claimed their “usual” workweeks were longer than 75 hours were off, on average, by about 25 hours. You can guess in which direction. Those who claimed that a “usual” workweek was 65-74 hours were off by close to 20 hours. Those claiming a 55-64 hour workweek were still about 10 hours north of the truth. Subtracting these errors, you can see that most people top out at fewer than 60 work hours per week."
So, ignore the workaholics, reject stress culture, work 40 hours. 50 if you must.

Soylent discussions remain fun. (quick recap: guy makes smoothie full of vitamins, eats nothing else for 3 months, says it's awesome.) At first glance it sounds terrible, but hear him out; I think he reasons pretty well about all the weirdness involved. I tried to make it once, felt like I'd eaten a rock all morning, haven't tried again yet. But you can order some official Soylent from these folks on their kickstarter. Of course I did.

Send money with Gmail. Is Google finally bringing payments into the future? Where I can send you some money for free? I think so. (Also try Venmo, which works too.) If you want to get in on the gmail-send-money beta, let me know, I'll send you a penny.

Ireland reminds me of New Zealand

It's beautiful and humble. I spent a couple days at a Buddhist center, thinking I'd get some sort of concentration or mental clarity; can't say for sure that I came away with either of those, but I had a relaxing couple of days. Nice folks.

Then I spent a little over a day in Dublin. Like Wellington, NZ, it's compact and walkable, doesn't have a ton of huge attractions, but has a lot of great places to drink liquid drugs. (infrequent readers of this blog: I mean coffee and beer.) It feels like it's really trying to redevelop itself as both a friendly place to visit and a new techy city. I mean this in a good way; to my eyes, as a humble visitor, it's working.

A real live panopticon!

Howth cliffs, nearby.

More photos here!

Small town and big city England

I've been in Oxford with my friends Daniel and Killian for the past week. It's been pretty low key. Yesterday, for example, I read a book in a coffeeshop and then we went to a pub for dinner. Earlier, I took a final exam for one of my classes on my laptop sitting in Radcliffe Camera. If you're looking for great adventures, perhaps you should look up past Dan. (or future Dan.) Present Dan is happy to take a bit of relaxation time with good friends.

We've had some small adventures. Oxford punting:

London bridging:

(Can I just point out that I'm still jealous of Londoners for getting to live in London? We got to hang out in Hoxton/Shoreditch a little bit, which was relatively rad, and hit up all the bookstores/comic shops/spots I've enjoyed before, which was also rad; a taste of cool neighborhoods that we immediately have to turn around and leave! Argh! I'd move there for the bikes/coffee/bikes and coffee culture alone.)

Pointing at potholes:

Hanging out in shady places:

Next week I'm staying at this retreat center in Ireland. I'll be out of contact Saturday night until Wednesday. (as if I need to head to rural Ireland to go a few days without internet!)

Went to Paris.

I was there for the past week. Mostly for a conference (CHI 2013, which I will likely post about soon on my research blog), but also some sightseeing. Here are some thoughts.

Everything is six stories tall.

View from our AirBnB

This is nice. It gives you the density of a world capital, without imposing skyscraper districts where everything is lobbies.

The bakeries are generally all they're cracked up to be. I'm not sure on the over/under of what percent of food I ate was pastries. 50%?

I hadn't scoffed at this thing yet. Good thing I got a chance.

Found some good coffee. Coutume is a favorite. Black Market's also solid.

Exactly what it sounds like

Uh, it actually is a good place to go with an SO? Things are generally rather pretty, the restaurants we went to had good atmospheres, dudes played accordions in the subways, etc. We saw people making out in public more than in most places.

Okay, I'm in Oxford, England now, will be there a week, and then go somewhere else. 

Empathy and stress

My friend Ram writes a great bit about the weird paradox where three Americans dying is a catastrophe, but dozens of (innocent) Afghanis dying due to drone strikes is business as usual. Is it weird that this is my first reaction, not only to Boston but also to Newtown? (that, and that we should stop reading the news at all.) Ram points at a need to increase our sense of empathy somehow. It's like the old proverb about someone throwing babies in the stream to drown, and how we're downstream fishing babies out instead of stopping the thrower. Except we're not even fishing them out, we're just kind of seeing dead babies and gnashing our teeth over and over.

"It's very, very difficult to be a dick to someone when you understand that you are dealing with a thinking, feeling being with little wishes and big miseries much like yours."

On the other hand, it's been unfortunately easy for me to be a dick to everyone recently, and I blame it on stress. I realize that's a little like saying the air is polluted because it's full of pollutants. That's how it feels; I'm under a little haze and can't really be myself because I'm trying to breathe a lot.

What stresses us? Especially, what stresses us that I might be able to do a damn thing about? (and here I'm drawing on a lot of recent posts from Alex Soojung-Kim Pang; his blog has resonated a lot recently)
Words With Friends - interesting post from Amy Bruckman
Texting - I guess increased stress as well as antisocialness
Imperfect abstractions - yes indeed
And what can we do about it? Mildly intrigued by continuing reports of using heart rate variability to detect (and thereby provide feedback and lower) stress.

Expansive and narrow time

I've noticed two very distinct feelings. One is the "expansive" feeling: "the world is out before me, I can do anything I want, the day is mine, and I'm relaxed." One is the "narrow" feeling: "there's a deadline coming up, I'm head down, chugging through whatever I'm doing." This is not a post about how expansive time is good and narrow time is bad. They're both kind of fun, in different ways. Narrow time has the benefit of feeling more focused and more adrenaline-driven. I often feel "flow"y in narrow time.

But it seems like they should be more balanced! Some time to feel crunched and making progress, some time to feel relaxed and thinking of ideas. Seems like it'd make me both a better researcher, and a better and happier human being. My April challenge (only check email twice a day) is pointed in this direction. And meditation helps a little, I think.

I wonder how else we can create more expansive time in our lives. Any ideas?

April plan: just check email twice a day

I sort of missed March in terms of monthly goals. As a look back, here's how they're going now:
Oct/Nov: don't snap at people. 100% integrated into my life. I feel pretty good about this.
Dec: draw something every day. Drew 24/31 days in December. I have not drawn something since December. Fun exercise, not a new habit.
Jan: Meditate: I meditated 29/31 days in January. Has it become a habit? Well, I'm still trying at it. I'm about 50% these days. It is really hard to convince myself that I should spend 20 minutes doing that. My life feels too full again. How can we get back those Seattle weekends where I had nothing planned, or taking off work and forgetting about it?
Feb/Mar: Paleo eating: Successfully completed this one for 28 days, plus a week, and then figured it wasn't worth it (see recent blog posts). It was probably a beneficial change overall; paleo is not totally wrong, just not totally right either. Some things have stuck with me. "Breakfast salads" is one, and I think I eat less grains overall now, which is good.
Also, unrelated to paleo, somewhere in here I got in the habit of eating no added sugar except Saturday. Still doing well with that one. Okay, let's call that "February" and say paleo is March. Whatever. Either way, it's a pretty good one.

For April I was thinking something about the "checking" habit. I feel like I'm always just "getting things done", always sprinting, always rushing toward another deadline. This is silly; my deadlines are not that many. I need to do something to calm this impulse and let me feel more expansive.
Also, from RescueTime, I know that my weekly time spent on email has ranged between 8-11 hours per week over the last few weeks. That's a bit nuts.
So I'm thinking the plan for April is: just check email twice a day. It's concrete and measurable, it's simple, and it would probably be helpful. (so if you want to reach me with a quick turnaround, call or text me.)

(if this post seems annoyingly self-congratulatory, sorry about that. hey, this is the internet, where we constantly curate our image by presenting the best versions of ourselves, right?)

Paleo Stats

I computed some stats. To be fair, I did a bunch of statistical hooey that went like this: I recorded a 1-5 value whenever I felt like it for my stomach, energy, and mood. Then I basically averaged them together to get an average value for the day, then I averaged all the days together. (comparing a month of eating paleo to a month of eating whatever.) ZQ values are Zeo-computed "sleep efficiency" or some such (more hooey); at least "minutes sleep" is a real value.

p-values are for independent samples t-tests (statistical hooey x3); non-reported ones are unremarkable.

stomach with paleo: mean = 3.26
stomach non-paleo: mean = 3.08
p = 0.07

energy with paleo: mean = 2.90
energy non-paleo: mean = 2.90

mood with paleo: mean = 3.04
mood non-paleo: mean = 3.29
p = 0.08

ZQ with paleo: mean = 82.32
ZQ non-paleo: mean = 86.46

minutes sleep with paleo: mean = 455.45
minutes sleep non-paleo: mean = 445.23

Another big non-result! Add to my just-thinking-about-it non-results. Also add a few awkward questions that I still have with paleo folks:

- how do you know 10,000 years isn't long enough to evolve?

- I mean, if we evolved the "digesting milk" gene, for example, how is it fair to say that we're "not evolved" to drink milk?

- a paleo diet would include carrots and kale and rutabagas and coconuts and chicken and buffalo and salmon and seal fat. There is no caveman who ever ate all of that.

- the guy who wrote Wheat Belly is nuts.

- how do you know it's not just that paleo causes people to snack less, or eat less, or eat fewer carbs, or eat less sugar, or eat less processed food?

- if we should "eat what our ancestors eat", why do we pick the 10k-200k-years-ago people, and not the million-years-ago people? Why not eat like monkeys?

So there seems to be no good reason to continue to mess around with eating paleo. Except that it does cause a lot of good long-term health shifts: less processed food, less sugar, less white flour, even less (I am sorry to say this word) carbs. I'll probably keep some variation of it in my diet (like my ongoing "no added sugar except Saturdays") but drop the nitty gritty particulars of Paleo and the story behind it.

Paleo'd

Done with that! Spent four solid weeks paleo eating, and here's what I can say just from the ever-unreliable introspection:
- it didn't make my life wayyyy better
- it didn't make my life wayyyy worse
- I had to cook a lot more, and particularly I had to cook a lot more meat. This was difficult for me, but a fun learning experience. I discovered things like short ribs, lamb shanks, chicken thighs, flank steak, pork shoulder; braising, casserole roasting, broiling; interesting stuff!
- I did feel a little healthier after eating a meal without grains, mostly because everything is real nutritious food. It's all some vegetable or meat, no filler. So I ate as much as I want (which is a lot) and didn't really feel overstuffed like I do sometimes with grains.
- eating out was not really that hard; most places have something that you can make paleo. Sometimes you have to be a little creative and order two appetizers instead of a dinner, say.
- special occasions were hard. I couldn't really invite friends out for a beer, or an ice cream, or a waffle, or really any celebratory consumable. I started drinking the occasional liquor (under the flimsy argument that "I mean, the grain's all fermented away anyway") for social situations when I couldn't really opt for a wine.
- uh, I was kind of depressed a month ago and am not now. But I don't think that's because of the food.

Stats to follow! Sometime. Going to Cleveland and Miami in the next couple days. I am not trying to avoid grains or dairy or beans or anything there.