Check it out, I 3d printed a thing

Our heater has a knob to turn it on or off. The knob broke. I went to a hardware store and an appliance store, and neither had ever heard of the brand ("Hammel"), even. So I printed a new one.





It works. It was only slightly difficult - I used Rhino to make the STL file (a little extruding shapes, boolean difference and union, I think that was about all I needed; difficulty level 4/10), then Makerbot's software to convert the STL to an X3G which our particular printer needed (Makerbot Replicator X2), and that was about it. Thanks to Ayman and Cati for help!

It's on Thingiverse too so if you have the same janky old heater you can print it yourself.

Suit Buying Options (especially in San Francisco)

Condensed summary of a friendsourced Facebook thread. Here are some options friends recommended for buying a suit in SF:

Indochino
Suit Supply
Thick as Thieves: online
River Island: online
Bonobos
Men's Wearhouse
Goodwill in the DC area because lots of rich politicsmen get rid of a ton of great suits around there
Some place where Tati got her dress (they offered me a discount)
These are all similar price range, $500-800 including tailoring.

(you can also fly to hong kong and get a bespoke suit for a couple hundred bucks, e.g. http://samstailor.com/, which I was really tempted to do.)

I ended up going to that place where Tati got her dress, Indochino, and Bonobos. Didn't go to Suit Supply b/c it's still not open- it's been "opening soon" in SF for approx forever.

That place where Tati got her dress, whose name I forget: is an old-school suit shop. Hugo Boss and stuff. Probably what you'd get at a department store too. Boring, limited styles, expensive. $895 for the one suit that looked kinda good. Skip it.
Bonobos had like one suit to try on. It was fine. Nothing great. Meh.
Indochino seemed pretty solid. They took all my measurements, gave me a million choices. So I bought a suit there.

Some things I learned:
1. your three main options are "off the rack", "made to measure", and "bespoke".
Off the rack is the worst. You just buy a suit. Then they tailor it, but they can only make minor changes.
Bespoke is the best. Some skilled tailor just makes you a suit from scratch, whatever style you want. Probably in the $2k range.
Made to measure is in the middle: suit is made from scratch, but it's to a pre-existing style. (which is fine; you and I are not style pioneers enough to be able to say what we want in a suit.) It's becoming more prevalent thanks to folks like Indochino doing new high-tech stuff. Used to be more expensive but now my Indochino was about the same price as an off-the-rack.

1.5. That said, the tailoring is probably even more important than the suit. Get a good tailor, especially if it's off-the-rack, don't just go to the Macy's etc tailor.
2. Color: Black is cool. Blue makes me look like a businessman. Light colors are not good on me because I have light skin. Pinstripes are for boring businessmen. Grey is ok but just less cool than black.
3. Fabric: Your suit should probably be wool. There's also linen for hot days but it's not as versatile, and it wrinkles. Cotton is starting to be a thing, but probably just get wool.
4. Vest: is not necessary, but it looks cool. And then you can wear the suit in 3 different ways: vest and jacket, just vest, just jacket. Works well with a two-button suit. (if you have a 3-button, you just don't even see the vest b/c your suit comes up higher.) Get 5 buttons - or 7, but 5 is just easier.
5. Buttons: get 2 or 3 or double-breasted, and probably 2. 3 is a little more old fashioned I think, and double-breasted tends to look better on guys who are a bit stouter than me. I guess 1 is also an option? But I think it looks weird.
6. Pants: don't get pleats. Cuffs are up to you, I don't like them, they're more traditional. You want the pants to break on your shoes just once. This means you can go higher and tighter or lower and looser. (either way they'll just hit your shoes once.) Lower and looser is more traditional and won't go out of style as much.
7. Lapels: you can get Notch or Points. Notch is cool. Points is more of a statement.
8. Pick Stitching: makes the suit look more custom, but less formal. We're getting down into the weeds here.
9. If you get it made to measure, you can customize a lot of weird stuff like jacket lining, personalization, etc. So that's nice.

Other references: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2013/09/25/good-fitted-suit-visual/
http://sartorialsin.tumblr.com/

Merry Christmas! Let's talk about music.

Great year for music! In my humble opinion.

Let's start off with the mild disappointment of the year: Purity Ring, Another Eternity. Merely a great pop album. Lost a lot of Shrines's weird Grimm charm.

Top N Albums that didn't come out this year but I just first listened to them now:

5. Qualité Motel, Motel Califorña: Silly fun electro pop from Montreal. Lots of guest stars including Mrs. Paintbrush on the excellent Grandfarceur.

4. Nicolas Jaar, Space is Only Noise: great for traveling and feeling out of place.
3. Flying Lotus, You're Dead!: Progressive jazz hip-hop psychedelic techno. I don't know. It feels a little like a bad drug trip probably feels.

2. OM, Advaitic Songs: my favorite doomy/meditative metal I've heard yet. Also dug Sunn O))) and would like to hear more like this.

1. Bleachers, Strange Desire: if all emo-pop were this slick, polished, and unembarrassing, I would have listened to a lot of different stuff in the late 90s.

Top N Albums that did come out this year:

7. David Bowie, Blackstar
Ok, it's not actually out, but watch this video and tell me you don't want to see the sci-fi full-length movie this must have been based on. If The Next Day was his return to form but not groundbreaking, I feel like Blackstar will be the one that is groundbreaking. We can all hope.

6. Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly
This is the next Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, in that it's sprawlingly epic and catchy enough that it deserves a place on everyone's list. By King Kunta I was sold enough to listen to the rest of it deeper, and it makes me think.

5. Jlin, Dark Energy
This is a late addition and I'm not sure how it'll hold up, but it's a pretty consistent techno-nightmare that I'm really digging. After Guantanamo, you'll know if you're drawn in or just not into it.

4. FKA Twigs, M3LL155X EP
On her first album I didn't get her. But that's because she didn't fit naturally into any of my boxes. She's doing the Knife-ish creepy spectacle better than anyone else I've seen today. "Now hold that pose for me" is as weirdly spine-tingling as anything I've heard. Oh, and that video.

3. MADE IN HEIGHTS, Without My Enemy What Would I Do
The fact that this isn't my #1 pop album speaks to how great this year's music was. They pull off the sort of charming-silly bedroom pop, but it's minimalist, crystal clear and finely crafted. Start at the beginning; if you like DEATH then strap in and enjoy the dreamy, catchy ride.

2. CHVRCHES, Every Open Eye
This too: if all emo-pop were this slick, polished, and unembarrassing, I would have listened to a lot of different stuff in the late 90s. It's as earnest as anything, down to letting the dude sing a couple songs even though he's way outmatched, and as a result has a few duds, but especially tracks 1, 2, 3, and 5 are The Best to sing while biking downhill.

1. Grimes, Art Angels
This is where she proves that she is the pop star of our age. Over the first 6 tracks you go from epic symphonic overture to top-40 to aggressive Taiwanese hip-hop back to top-40 to... whatever Kill v. Maim is. Like, I want to say something about gender stereotypes, and how she's this baby-voiced girl, totally unassuming, expert at all parts of songwriting and production, and I would not want to mess with her.

Here's some things I'm feeling

(disclaimer: not an interesting-to-read post, probably, more of a log-for-logging's-sake.)

Weirdly bored? Like, I finish work and I don't know what to do with myself? And then I'm reading internet things and when anything is longer than a short info snack, I get bored and flip it off? As if I have less ability to concentrate than usual, even on fun things.

Caffeine-tolerant. I'm finally feeling like I can't really think until I drink one cup, and don't really get going until two. That's not awesome.

Socially tired. I want to go home and sleep more.

Negative. I realized the other day we saw the new Star Wars and came out and talked about it and I was the only one really poking holes in how great it was. (upon further reflection, Kylo Ren wasn't really that bad, guys.)

I am not super proud of these. (I'm not really ashamed, either, it's just like I have a cold or something, so I feel not-100% mentally-emotionally-socially.) I suppose it's a good time for a Christmas break, then!

The rules to Contact

This is the best game that you can play without any physical things. It is hard to explain but easy to play. So, channeling Aaron Tarnow, I will try to optimize my explanation of these rules. Here is a first cut:

Alice is the Wordmaster. Alice has a Master Word in her mind. Alice tells Bob, Carol, and Diane the first letter of the Master Word. Bob, Carol, and Diane offer challenges to Alice, in the form of a clue, that can be anything. (example: Alice's word starts with C. Bob says "here's a challenge: my favorite food.")

Alice gets as many guesses as she wants. ("Cabbage?" "nope." "Celery!" "nope.") If she ever guesses it right, the challenge is defused and nothing happens.

Meanwhile, Carol and Diane, if they know the answer to Bob's challenge, they say "Contact." If not, they just don't do anything.

If Alice can't get it right and gives up, she goes "3, 2, 1, contact" and then immediately Bob and everyone who has Contacted says the word at the same time.

If they all match, then the challengers win and Alice says the next letter of her Master Word. If any do not match (or if nobody Contacted), the challenge is defused and nothing happens.

All challenges must begin with the letters of the Master Word that have been revealed so far. If a challenge ever has Alice's secret Master Word as the answer, the person who offered it is the new Word Master.

What class AM I?

Back in 2008, I graduated and got a job making $80,000/year. This makes me a pretty lucky fellow, for sure! But how lucky? This was around the time that "The 99%" and "The 1%" started to become popular, and I saw a lot of people taking photos saying "We are the 1%, we stand with the 99%" and I thought I should do that too.

Wow, not at all! I was one of The 30%, maybe. Even given a lot of other factors that made life easier for me (no dependents, raises, bonuses, etc), there's no way I was close to The 1%.

This is not good, for a lot of reasons.

1. I left a ton of money on the table. Google told me the offer was non-negotiable, but everything's negotiable, especially if you have competing offers. You are doing nobody a favor by not negotiating, except a few thousand dollars stay in the company's coffers. That few thousand is pocket change to them and a real difference to you.

There was a successful anti-trust case over this. Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. were making a ton of money by fixing employees' wages and agreeing not to compete. This is classic corporation vs. employees labor dynamics.

And I didn't know that. Watch something like Silicon Valley and you'll see caricatures of millions of dollars being thrown around at socially awkward children. I thought I was the new elite. I wasn't; I was the new labor.

2. That fat salary is not as much as it sounds like. Consider a tech employee making $80k in San Francisco. She wants an apartment. That costs $3000/month. $80k after taxes = $55k - $3000/month = $19k. Which is not peanuts, but it's hard to save money and start building wealth on that much income. (If she lived on the Peninsula, she might get by on $2500/month, but then she will need a car, which costs on average $6000/year, exactly eating up the savings.)

I guess my point is, I thought I was the new Upper Class. But I may have been the new Working Class. Certainly the new Middle Class. And that changes a lot of things about how you look at the world.

Everyone in America thinks they are just inches away from being a multi-millionaire. This is the only reason I can think of that anyone still votes for low taxes on the rich; we all assume we are basically them. Friends, even tech friends: most of you are not.

Grandy and Grandpa

Lost a couple of the greats these last couple of months. Here's a handful of thoughts.

So they started a family - they had 6 kids. Four of them had 2 kids, and one had 4. You can't give them full credit for each grandkid, but give them half, and they're directly responsible for adding 12 people to the human race (and counting!)
- is that the story of the 20th century? Going from 1 billion to 7 billion? Is this a one time blip? Like, we're going to level off at 9 or 10 billion (or have a pretty bad time), so this kind of multiplying won't keep happening for generations.
- is that arguably a good strategy for making a mark on the world?
- they made a great impact on their world. ("their world" being their family and friends.) Arguably not a huge impact on the Whole World - they didn't cure cancer or whatever. I am coming around to the idea that that is ok. Hmm.

Man, they really friggin' did it! Born to coal miners and ... I forget what Grandy's parents did. But they came up to Cleveland, defended the country, owned a house, had a bunch of kids, who all went on to become doctors or lawyers or equally successful things, who now have their own families - like, that is not necessarily our dream today - we don't say "ok, you had a family and a house, therefore a great life" - but to them it was! and they did it!

We all know the male history of our family more than the female history. I know Giuseppe Tassi came from Offida, Italy; I don't know where Mary came from. Mary... Nucci? Something like that. And Grandy's parents - the Warcabas - beats me. I imagine this is not an isolated case. I imagine part of that is because of the name. I hope that this doesn't happen to our kids as much; I want them to know Tati's history as much as mine. Also, naming strategies for kids. This will be interesting.

I barely even knew what Grandpa did. Grandy didn't have a job outside the home (five kids is work enough.) He was an HR director for Hauserman Inc, which made movable interior walls. Huh. Every company out there, every office or factory you pass, like Fortney and Weygandt Inc which I sometimes pass on the way to my parents' house, has people doing all sorts of various things, and they all have big ol' families like this. Sonder.

I'll miss 'em! It was nice growing up with them around. They were always super excited to see Cheryl and me, and we them. Even when we started rolling our eyes and saying stuff like "man, they really love the Old Country Buffet, don't they"... there's a deep current of love under there that we knew and appreciated.

(The Mission/Lawrenceville/Capitol Hill) isn't dead. It's changing.

This NY times editorial is maybe the first one in the last five years that includes musings about New York or San Francisco neighborhoods that I'm glad I've read.

In short: you think the city/neighborhood/whatever was best at some imaginary time in the past, probably when you were young and cool and an "insider", whatever that means. (It probably includes a small circle of close friends and a rich circle of diverse secondary friends, and probably a connection to some kind of arts scene that's too obscure to google.)

See also Midnight in Paris; see also everyone who travels who wants to see "the real London/SF/Mumbai, not the tourist stuff", who probably just wants to feel like an insider there.

Look, I remember when Ritual Coffee in the Mission was a kinda dark place you could work on laptops. I remember when Capitol Hill had a Museum of the Mysteries and Bailey/Coy Books, and Coca Cafe in Lawrenceville was a new trendy thing. This all places me "back in the day", and maybe "way past back in the day", depending on who you are. Now they are not quite that anymore! Now on Valencia you can buy $5 coffee and $5000 furniture. That Capitol Hill apartment that had no doorbell so I rigged up a shoe connected to a string, it costs twice as much now.

But in the Mission you can still buy some good books, eat great Mexican food, see a tabla master in concert, join a secret society, discuss philosophy or play Magic cards over okay Turkish coffee, get a sweet haircut, see an underground arts fair or a street carnival, etc etc. It's changing, sure, but A. change happens slowly, and B. it's not always bad.

Maybe all our money now is going not to rich suburbs or rich fat cat neighborhoods (your Pac Heightses and Midtown Manhattans, right?) but rich yet active mid-city dense neighborhoods. That's not without its problems - we have to figure out how to avoid pushing out lower-income people, and how the lower-income people who do get pushed out don't end up in awful underfunded sprawled-out suburbs - but it's a better vision than white flight, anyway. Eh, we're trying.

Got doored today

door (v): to open your car door and hit a biker who is riding by

Luckily it wasn't bad, just some cuts and scrapes. I was riding between the parked cars and the driving cars, and some kids opened the doors of a driving car.

Some things that I want to say about this:

This does not mean biking is dangerous. I was lane splitting. This is where you ride between lanes of (usually stopped) cars. I don't recommend it for a beginner. You can just as easily bike without lane splitting.

However, biking should be safer. As usual. In particular, we should teach drivers about bikers and "dooring", and teach the Dutch door-opening thing where you open the door with hand that's farther from the door so it makes you turn around and look out the window by default.

Lane splitting (for bicycles, in stopped traffic, at least) is legal. At least, I'm pretty sure. I'm more sure in California than in Pennsylvania, but either way, I'd like to know some info if you've got it. It should be, anyway. Decongests the road and is normally reasonably safe. Besides, if you argue against lane splitting, you better not argue that bikers should get off the road and stop blocking traffic. We're all trying to reduce congestion.

The driver was nice. You hear a lot of horror stories about bikers getting hit by jerks or people who vanish. I've been hit twice in Pittsburgh now, both minor, and the drivers were both really nice and communicative by texts later. I think this is the norm.

If you hit a person, give them a minute. Saying "are you okay?" a lot is kinda counterproductive. I don't want to say "yes" because of insurance/legal reasons ("sorry, insurance won't pay your medical bills, you said you were okay.") but  you're basically asking me to make you feel better. There's nothing you can really do (unless you have first aid supplies), so just chill out for a second and let me collect my thoughts and survey my body and bike parts. Even then, I probably won't tell you "I'm okay" (even if I probably am). But I appreciate you stopping and hanging out for a minute. My adrenaline's going nuts here.

Foes Without Faces

Read this great post. I agree with it so much, and also with the blog's title. ("almost no one is evil. almost everything is broken.")

Man, you put a face on something, and it's so easy for us to pulverize it into the ground. Osama Bin Laden is a great example; I mean, he was like The Hardest to find, and it still took us, what, 10 years? That's nothing.

OTOH, global warming is going to totally F up the world and kill wayyyy more people than islamic extremists. But it doesn't have a face, so we can't kill it.

Maybe we need some Dr. Badguy, some Osama Hitler Jr., to come out of hiding like a comic book mastermind, unveil how global warming was his grand plan all along, and reveal that he feeds on atmospheric carbon and the only way we can kill him is to cut emissions 75%. You better believe we would get on that, right quick.

Bhimdatta (Formerly Mahendranagar)

One of the shadiest stops on my India-Nepal-Bhutan part of the trip was in the town of Mahendranagar. Nepal border town on the far west side of the country. After a long bus ride and a pretty decently long border crossing (not because of lines, but because you had to walk about a mile between where India ends and Nepal begins), I got in as the sun was going down, and after dark there were not a lot of lights. Asking around a bit, I got taken to the first "hotel" - a dark house with a dank room, with who knows what lurking in its shadows. My second attempt was a little better - ugly and fluorescent, but the bathroom that I expected to fail miserably actually worked, and the bugs that I expected to see were nowhere to be found. So, ok. The next morning I woke up at 4am, had the weirdest bitter-lime-sugar tea, and hopped on a bus for about a million hours.

I just learned that Mahendranagar has been renamed Bhimdatta. This is a little weird. I don't know why I feel any kinship with the place at all - I guess my TF-IDF for it is just higher than most places. Like, I spent a day in Agra, but anyone who's gone to India has spent a day in Agra... but I spent 12 hours in Mahendranagar, and nobody's been to Mahendranagar.

And then the more I talk about it, the more I feel like y'all might accuse me of trying to grab traveler cred. And you might be right. That's why I'm blogging it to this limited audience instead of Facebooking it. But much like I like to talk about a particularly good batch of coffee beans, I find it hard to disentangle cred-seeking from honest fascination sometimes. Like, in the age of the internet, we can get anything instantly. But we probably won't get a slice of Mahendranagar.

And so I care about Mahendranagar, and I feel like I'm losing a little tiny thing of memory now that it's renamed Bhimdatta. And I don't mind, I'm not saying something is right or wrong (in contrast to 98% of the internet, including my posts), just kind of... poignantly watching things change, I guess.

Art is a dialogue with the artist(s)

... is a pretentious-sounding thing I've kept hearing myself thinking recently.

When you're watching a movie, reading a book, playing a game, you know there are certain rules. Like, if the main character is in a dangerous situation 15 minutes into the movie, you know they're not going to die, because you know the movie is 2 hours long. Or if the story's pretty coherent and then there's a super-trippy unbelievable situation, you can imagine that it'll turn out to be a dream. If you're playing Final Fantasy XXVIII, and you see a treasure chest, I mean, open it. Take everything that's not nailed down. If you're Link, break all the pots; some will have a rupee inside.

If it's a big-budget Hollywood movie, you can expect a happy ending. If it's a Bollywood movie, it goes even farther: you know the star-crossed lovers are going to get together. Shakespearean tragedy? Not gonna be so happy. Game of Thrones episode: someone you love is going to die.

Which is why I've been loving it more when artists break these rules, or at least threaten to. Like in Psycho, when they (spoilers but not really b/c you know the shower scene) kill off the "main character" half an hour in.

A recent favorite has been the game Undertale, which looks like a Final Fantasy-ish game circa 1997, but keeps screwing with you. You meet a monster you can fight, or befriend! But then you get to a boss battle, and surely I've got to kill them, right? Nah, turns out you can befriend them too. Here's a minigame in which a robot jokes with you. Then threatens to kill you! But doesn't actually kill you. You've got to kill King Asgore and escape from Monster World before he steals your soul! Don't you?

And even deeper, the game's creator(s), mostly Toby Fox, keep this dialogue going on many levels. I know that I don't have to keep re-re-re-saving, because few things are impossible to recover from. I sure am spending a lot of time walking backwards, aren't I? Nope, there's a boatman willing to help me shortcut some of this, cool. Spend 1000 gold to send a minor character to college? They'll just laugh at me, right? Nah, you get something out of it. But it won't really change anything if I befriend or kill these bosses, right? ... there's not like whole other levels, right? It's a comedy game, not a tragedy or horror game, right?

Anyway, back to work, but check it out. It's like 5 hrs for a playthrough, worth playing through at least twice.

Things we Snake People have learned wrong

by "snake people" I mean "millennials"

This is not an exhaustive list.

1. "Finding a good relationship is a search problem."
It's not. I was reading this article, and while there are some good points in there, it's based on at least a partial misunderstanding of relationships. Finding a life partner is maybe like half a search problem. And then half a building problem: you found someone in the top N percent, who's good enough, and open to growth, and you together build a great relationship from there.

2. "Finding your career is a search problem."
Again, maybe like half a search problem. I might not ever be happy in a bunch of jobs. But there are a ton of jobs that I'd be at least good enough in, and the thing to do is just start building. Starting a new job usually sucks for a few months, and starting a new career sucks for a few years. You're at the bottom of the totem pole, you can't make any decisions that matter, and that's fine because you don't know how to make good decisions!

3. "You can do anything."
I feel like, if you tell 100 babies this, you'll get 1 superstar something, and 99 people who are average but feel like failures. If you tell 100 babies "you'll probably drive a truck or something", then you'll get 100 average babies who feel like successes. And maybe a superstar baby anyway! I don't know.

4. Oh yeah the whole "follow your dreams don't worry about the money" shtick, right, there's that.

More better cities?

As Detroit goes, so goes the nation

Rich young people are getting it; they're moving to San Francisco and New York and Boston and Seattle and DC and Portland and like four other cities. Ok, cool. Thanks, other rich young people; we all understand that driving everywhere is crummy, and we like to be close to "things that are happening." Now what?

If prices in cities just get really high, and poor people (and disproportionately minorities) get forced out to the suburbs, we have an even worse problem than the old days of White Flight: all the rich white people are here, and all the poor nonwhite people are there, but now the poor nonwhite people are not even close to public transit or services or anything else; they're dependent on the car now too, but all the rich young people have left cars behind. I mean, we should continue to improve suburbs; make them walkable livable places. But just due to geography, we may not be able to.

Maybe the solution is for people to move back to some less-marquee cities. Move back to central Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, I dunno, Nashville, Topeka, whatever's nearby. Do we lose them in all the fuss about these beautiful San Franciscos? I mean, maybe there's not enough space in SF for everyone who wants to move to SF. (SF's dumb zoning and height issues aside.) But if Boise or Cincinnati or Tallahassee were more appealing to live in, maybe they wouldn't have to?

It's a question I'm kind of interested in; we don't need more guides for "what's good in SF" or sweet apps for SF dwellers. But maybe we do for Clevelanders.

Coming up for air every now and then

I've been working a lot recently. Right now it's for 3 CHI papers. CHI is a big conference in our field, so we kinda submit everything we're working on to it. This is a minor problem because it's all the deadlines happening at once.

Funny things:
- when I was a first-year student, I couldn't imagine how these older students were always submitting like 5 papers to everything. The answer: it's mostly a lot of resubmits of things that have been rejected before :P Of the three, one is new (from summer work) one is half-new (half from a rejected paper from Ubicomp in the spring) and one is old (last summer work). And we just had a summer, which is kinda the only time you can work uninterrupted. So... if any newer students are reading this, worrying about how to make even one paper, let alone three... don't worry about it.

- I kind of feel a little bit excited to have this be *the most important thing I could be doing* - and the chance to finish three projects if all goes well! (that is a low chance. but I can finish at least some project, hopefully.)

- But that's definitely my #2 feeling about all this; mostly it's just a lot of work, especially writing-work, which is kinda the hardest kind.

- Why is writing the hardest? It's not the actual putting-words-down-on-paper, it's all the work that has to happen to put all the words down. Like, in the "related work" sections, you have to read a lot before you can write. In the "method" section, well, you have to write the code and analyze the data, and then go back and read through it all to remember what you did. For "results" you probably have to do some stats and make some charts and graphs. This all takes a while. So while we gripe about writing, it's really just the 100%-finishing everything that was 85% finished before.

- I like the first 85% better than the last 15%. Eh.

- When you step back a bit, all our papers are a bit silly, this whole thing is a bit silly. I've been trying to feel Sisyphus, like the happy-Sisyphus, like whatever magic Camus works to make Sisyphus a positive/fulfilled/noble fellow. I guess as it applies here: keep pushing the rock, don't look up to see how much more mountain there is to go.

Driving your elephant

Here's a model (more info) that I thought was an old Buddhist thing but is actually just from Jonathan Haidt, like a number of other cool things (like Moral Foundations Theory, and a fun test about it here). Anyway, it's been a useful model for me.

You've got an elephant (your impulsive, emotional self) and a rider (the cool, calm, rational self). You can't really control the elephant, but you can learn about the elephant and steering it the right way. The elephant is much stronger, so learning to work with the elephant is way more valuable than just trying to ignore it.

I guess when people say something is hard, they mean it's an environment that's hard to drive your elephant in. Grad school is hard like that. It's full of a lot of things that aren't really problems, but will spook your elephant. (Your paper got rejected! These senior researchers think you're a fool! Your work is meaningless!) If you get better at calming down the elephant, even if you just slowly plod along forward, you'll do fine.

Bernie Sanders and #BlackLivesMatter

As I understand it, Bernie Sanders held a rally in Seattle, some Black Lives Matter protesters stormed the stage before his speech and took the mic, said some stuff and had a 4.5-minutes of silence for all the black people who have been killed ... by police since Ferguson? ... and then Sanders did not go on to speak. That's about all I know. I like this article about it, by Pramila Jayapal, a lot. But since I have a place I can blog too, I will.

White people: the BLM protestors are right. (see point #1 in the article I linked above.)

BLM protestors: huh, maybe this worked. Got a lot of people talking. Maybe it didn't: alienate the people rooting for the most radical candidate out there. Shoot, this seems the best I've seen from any candidate so far. See point #5 in Jayapal's article above. How can we call people in as we call them out?

Ms. Jayapal: "But in the end, if we want to win for ALL of us on racial, economic, and social justice issues, we need multiple sets of tactics, working together. Some are disruptive tactics. Some are loving tactics. Some are truth-telling tactics. Some can only be taken on by white people. Some can only be taken on by people of color."

What are those tactics? What can I do? (not saying I will do them, because I'm trying hard enough to work on my work and stay sane otherwise. but I'm curious what I ought to/can be doing here. maybe talking about it on the internet is part of it.)

Bloggin' about Political Correctness cause I don't want to argue this on facebook

I mean, that term is too loaded. It's either Bad (if you're republican) or Good (if you're not). Obv I think Good is closer to the truth, but it's more complicated.

Bad 1: using racial slurs (obv)

Bad 2: using insensitive words like "illegals" or "retarded" that we haven't yet elevated to the level of Really Bad Word, or other sort of language that indicates racist thoughts

Bad 3: "postman" instead of "postal worker" or other sort of uninclusive language

But like, these are different levels of badness. I feel like if your uncle starts dropping n-bombs, you should be like "dude. don't say that." But if he does a thing that is Bad 2 or Bad 3, don't jump all over him. Use the right word, and if he asks you about it, explain why in as non-confrontational and non-superior a way as possible.

If people have deep-seated racist/sexist/*ist beliefs, you're not going to change their mind by saying "that one word is bad" - they're likely to think you're just being "politically correct." And the cartoonish stereotype of PC is of course silly. Even though the sentiments behind PC are totally correct and most people who "hate political correctness" really mean "Can't things just be simple like they used to be back in the good old days?" without realizing that the good old days weren't so good for everyone.

Someone Did Something Bad Somewhere: Stop It.

We need a word for this. Articles where it's not a wider issue, but just one person doing one bad thing, and everyone freaks the hell out because it's easy or socially appropriate to. See: that guy who shot Cecil the lion, that pizzeria in Indiana somewhere who said they wouldn't serve a gay wedding, #HasJustineLandedYet.

Used to be, these headlines were just annoying noise on a slow news day, but now these cases end up with people's lives... drastically changed, if not totally ruined. For doing a crummy thing (or sometimes even just misunderstood; Justine Sacco's tweet about AIDS was just a joke misinterpreted by people she never intended, without context), in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"SDSBS" is the best I've got now. Example:

Facebook friend posts "hey this guy punched a puppy! how terrible! (link)"
Response: "SDSBS, move along."
OP: "oh yeah, sorry."

I don't know. It's a clunky term, but it'd be nice to have some shorthand for "stop sharing this."

But why us?

From today's Eat That Read This:

"""

A Squirrel Hill resident wrote in to the PG to bemoan the fact that residents of the Penn Plaza Apartments in East Liberty are being evicted, concluding with "I feel sad and ashamed for every displaced person. Shame on us!" But why us? How about shame on LG Realty Advisors and the Gumberg family, who are directly responsible for forcing out these residents? This isn't some mysterious, invisible-hand-of-gentrification force at work--it's a decision made by several wealthy strip mall men who make up LG Realty Advisors' executive team: Lawrence N. Gumberg, President. Brian D. Gumberg, Principal. Zachary L. Gumberg, Principal. John W. King, Vice President of Operations. James F. Ayers, Vice President of Property Management. Dermot J. Morrin, Controller.

"""

In fact, every eviction is the result of a decision made by (someone). That someone is not usually as cartoonishly awful as LG Realty Advisors, who judging by their own website make terrible garbage buildings. (Note that these are the Autozone folks.) Reframing it as the fault of "those whole-foods-and-lattes yuppies" is a really clever ploy by landowners.

You may argue: yeah, but look at the Gumbergs' side of the thing. (which is difficult, because they're not telling it, but anyway.) They've got this property that's now bringing in $x/year and could be bringing in $2x. Meanwhile, taxes are rising. Are they supposed to leave money on the table?

Yes. Deal with it. If we treated real estate a little bit less like a commodity, you'd know going into it that you're going to have tenants for a long time, and as long as they keep paying you rent, they're more or less entitled to stay in their homes. If we speculate on pork bellies, the worst case is we eat a little less bacon; if we speculate on houses, innocent people get forced out of their homes.

(and yes, people staying in their homes is a public good; building a community is hard enough already, and especially hard if you can't afford a car or live in a neighborhood without good transit. add in forced moves, and it's surprising that anyone knows anyone anymore.)

So I guess I mean, I'm talking a longer term change in the way we think about property: I want less speculation. If it happens overnight, then in this case, LG Realty would get screwed. They bought in thinking that property was a commodity, and now they're stuck holding a bag with all these restrictions. (I'm fine with that, but I could see how others might not be.) It could also be a more gradual change too, I guess.