Phatic speech

Phatic speech is speech that exists to fulfill a social task, not to convey some meaning.  For example "what's up?" doesn't necessarily happen so that you can find out what's up.  Sometimes it's just a way to say "I acknowledge you."  Other phatic phrases can be for social grooming or making friends.

I think it would be cool if we had more phatic speech.  Like this:
Me: What's up?
You: How's it going?
Me: Four score and seven years ago,
You: Our fathers brought forth on this continent
Me: A new nation, conceived in liberty
You: And dedicated to the proposition
etc.
After you finish the Gettysburg Address, high fives are in order, and then you're instant friends.

And so ends the No Grains Experiment.

I decided to start eating grains again yesterday because I'm going skiing next week, and I'll probably eat some grains then, and if reintroducing grains weirded my stomach I'd rather that happen here than there.

Plus, 3 days of eating-grains-again data would be nice to have.  It's not much, but it's all I've got.

Anecdotal findings so far:
- not eating grains makes me feel rather healthy.
- not eating anything with added sugar would make me feel rather healthier.  I went with "well I'll try to minimize sugar" which ended up being a pretty ineffective way to minimize sugar.
- grains make me feel a little fuller.  (not in a good way.)
- a bit of the difficulty in making the switch is "what's the base of your meal?"  Replacing grains with spinach worked for a couple dishes.  Sometimes I'd eat fruit and/or nuts.  I'm trying to just stop worrying about having a staple that soaks up all the rest of the sauce.
- eating no grains is easy when you cook your own food.
- eating no grains is easy when you have a bountiful buffet of wonderful food available for you every day.
- eating "minimal added sugar" is easy when you cook your own food.
- eating "minimal added sugar" is hard when you have a bountiful buffet of wonderful food available for you every day.  Dessert is tempting (especially when it's interesting, ice cream, or italian).
- eating no grains is hard when you go out to eat.  At some restaurants, you cannot eat!  At most restaurants, you just have to be comfortable looking a little ridiculous.  I ate Indian with no rice.  It was good anyway.
- eating minimal added sugar is easy when you go out to eat.
- I feel better after eating healthier.  If I could just internalize that thought, and not divorce the immediate good taste from the 15-minutes-later heavy feeling, eating junk food would never be appealing.  Hmm.
- There was a specific warning in "the 4 hour body" about how thai curry without rice might give you gas.  Truth!  I wonder why.
- smashed frozen bananas + other smashed fruit (or peanut butter) is almost just straight up ice cream.  Seriously.  It'd probably be even better in a food processor.

's all for now.  More real findings after data happens.  First, anyone know stats?  Here are two analyses I'm thinking of doing:
- if each day had a "mood rating" or like my average mood for the day, track that in the 7 days before vs the 21 days of the study.  (like a T test or something?  Null hypothesis: mood before = mood after, uhh non-null hypothesis: mood after > mood before)
- see if there are correlations between mood and energy, stomach and energy, or stomach and mood (I guess run a linear regression?)
- and maybe rope sleep into this too; we'll see.
If I sound totally off base on any of these, do tell.

I am sick of bear and laundry jokes.

Bears: I thought it would be funny to cultivate an unreasonable fear.  I picked bears.  Not just fear of bears as in "they might eat me", but as in "they're plotting to take over the world."  I figured I'd learn to act in a pretty realistic way even, which would be actually funny.  Turns out I can't.  Whenever anyone says "bear", my neck swivels around and I try to make a "funny" comment about how bears will eat you.  And then I try to keep the conversation going by talking about how clever bears really are.  (this only got worse after I found out Stephen Colbert had the same joke.)

Laundry: It started out actually funny, I think.  Ram, Beej, and I were talking about laundry one time, and we started talking about how it takes a long time.  And then we kept talking about how it takes a long time.  And then, whenever someone would say "laundry", I'd go on to say how it takes a long time, and how you just don't understand because the thing is, laundry takes a long time.  Somehow, they've both moved on with their lives, and I'm still pestering all my friends about laundry taking a long time.

The end result of each is that I act obnoxious.  And they're traps: I can't ever actually speak about either one honestly, because that'd be a break of character.  So as of right now, I'm dropping the bear joke and the laundry joke.  Life's too short to tie myself to running gags that even I don't find humorous anymore.

What stories do you tell yourself?

Catch yourself feeling insecure.  Ask yourself why.  Tell yourself a different story.  Start to feel better.

Example: I'm in a room full of people, some of whom I kinda know, some of whom I don't know at all.  Sometimes conversations dissolve or whatever, and I'm standing around sort of awkwardly.  I feel bad.  Why?  Because at some level I'm imagining someone watching and mocking me.  I'm saying "well I'm inherently awkward, of course nobody wants to talk to me."  This is a story.  It is not objective truth.  We all tell ourselves stories, and it's hard to turn it off.  But as long as I'm constantly telling myself a story, why not at least make it a good one?

I think for many social cases I'll replace this voice with a younger cousin, like 4 years younger.  Younger cousins always think older cousins are the coolest dudes on the block.  (at least I do.)  Say I'm standing around awkwardly; younger cousin doesn't even see that.  He just sees older cousin Dan hobnobbing with awesome folks, because of course he is also an awesome folk.

So look out for this.  There's more than one way to view most situations.  You're probably unconsciously picking the pessimistic one.

Ok Twitter for serious I guess

The short: if I know you in person, and/or you'd like to hear things like "Hey Cat Stevens is really good" (more on that later) or "I like this particular blend of coffee at Victrola" or "I just saw a hat wearing a dog", follow @sedatesnail.
If I don't know you in person, and/or you'd like to hear things like "Huh, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is involved in attention AND smell" or "git rebase --onto rocks the casbah" or "I wonder why nobody's studied the effects of lycopene on social networking", follow @dantasse.

The reasoning:  AFAICT, there are two main uses of Twitter: to stay up to speed in your professional field, and to microblog about what you had for lunch.  It's not that my "lunch" posts are super private, but it's just that nobody would want to read them.  And given that we're all drowning in information these days, I want to try not to make people's lives worse.

I'm drinking the last of the Darjeeling tea I brought back from India

... almost two years ago.  I've still got some Nilgiri and Assam.  I guess it's like they say: when you run out of tea from your last trip to India, it's time to go back to India.  (nobody says this.)

Week One of Eating Weird: feels pretty good!  I've eaten grains just once, when I was out for sushi with coworkers.  I feel like I'm eating a lot of meat, but I think that's just because I used to eat not much meat.  And getting it all at the farmers' market hasn't been a problem, it just means I have to go to the farmers' market, which is only a bus ride away.

I don't know if I've felt consistently better.  The data will show that at the end of the experiment.  I do know that it feels good to think of myself as someone who only eats healthy things.  (And defining "healthy" things beforehand has helped me be sure that I only eat "healthy" things.)  I guess that's a possible confounding factor, and if this works, I should try eating "healthy" things with a different definition of "healthy" after the experiment's over to see if I just get some energy from thinking about myself as healthy.

Also, buying and cooking farmers' market meat is fun, not going to lie.  It's like new levels on a video game: more to explore.  I'm not going to tackle the "will I eat meat or not" question until after the experiment.

Drinking Weird: well, on this plan, no beer.  But I didn't want to stop drinking entirely, as that might confound my results too, so I've been drinking wine a bit.  Actually I kind of like it!  I had a Syrah for the first time that I remember (ok ok noob ok) and it was pretty good, and I could distinguish it from "average red wine taste".  Also I had a Malbec, also good.  I could rather grow to like this.  But it does make me hella sleepy.

Unrelatedly, low-level evil: buried in the terms of service: "All lift ticket products are non-transferable and non-refundable. When you purchase lift tickets, you will automatically be enrolled in the Vail Resorts "Peaks" loyalty program, at no cost to you. You will receive program information by standard mail and will be offered the chance to decline."  NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.  The fact that this is bad, but not bad enough to make me not buy a ticket, cheeses me the hell off.  I guess what gets me is that it's very low-level evil, but it is unquestionably evil.  So few things are unquestionably good or unquestionably evil these days!  When we find one, shouldn't we by god do something about it?

And speaking of which, I think I'll try single-spacing after periods. Apparently it's Just Correct.

I'm eating less grains.

I'd like more energy.  I'd like to feel good stomach-wise all the time.  I imagine this would help me with life in general.

I think, and write, a lot about what foods would be maximally beneficial to eat.  I haven't done much about it... until now!  I've been tracking my energy, stomach feeling, and mood for the last couple weeks.  I plan to make a dietary shift and see how these things go.

What dietary shift?  Good question.  Here are some things I believe might have some degree of truth:
- Michael Pollan suggests eating more leaves and less seeds is a good idea because of the balance between omega-3 and omega 6 fatty acids.  Leaves have more omega-3, seeds more omega-6.
- There's this "paleo" thing.  Here's Wikipedia.  The idea is that evolution moves slowly, and we've only been using agriculture for 10k years, so a lot of recent post-agricultural foods are new to our bodies, so we can't digest them very well.
- A lot of people hate gluten a lot.  It sort of makes sense, if you subscribe to the whole paleo thing; grain has only been eaten recently.  Also, grain has changed a lot even more recently.
- This book called "The 4 hour body" by Tim Ferriss, which I've been reading, recommends a type of low-carb something.  (it's a kind of neat book.  yeah it's a lose-weight-gain-muscle book, among other things, but it's from a pretty nerdy perspective so I can relate to it and trust it a bit.)
- Nobody says "eat more grains."

So what am I eating?  Some sort of paleo.  Specifically, I will definitely eat these:
- colorful vegetables, as much as possible
- grass-fed meat and fish from the farmers' market.
- good eggs.  (from the farmers' market, or failing that, the most expensive eggs that say "omega-3" on the carton.)
- good fats, including grass-fed butter, olive oil, and probably all sorts of other trendy oils

- fermented things like tempeh, sauerkraut, kimchi, and yogurt

- tea

These are a little controversial but I will probably eat them:
- fruit.  I think, when you start cutting out fruit, you get out of "what caveman ate" territory and into "low carb" territory.
- some starchy vegetables like sunchokes and sweet potatoes; I'm not sure if these are cavemanish or not, but the consensus seems to be "they're good for you"
- milk, as whole and raw as possible; paleo folks seem to be okay with it even though a caveman wouldn't squeeze some udders.  Not sure if this is consistent, but I can deal.  Anyway, I'm already pretending to be glutarded, let's not be lactarded as well.

- nuts; they are seeds, but also generally agreed that they're healthy

- wine
- coffee; let's not be crazy here either
These are a little controversial and I will probably not eat them if I can get around it:
- beans; low-carbers would like these, but they're not very cavemanly or leafy.  They're definitely seeds.
- tofu; it's still beans.
- regular potatoes, everyone says they're like grains, I'm not sure if that makes sense outside Atkins-land but I can live without potatoes pretty easily anyway
- beer (it's only 3 weeks)
Totally not eating:
- grains
- sugars
- you know all that other bad processed stuff okay

And should I just cut back on grains, or cut them out entirely?  I'm interested in the cut-them-out-entirely approach.  Two reasons:  I hear convincing posts like this one, and I tend to be kinda all-or-nothing.  I'll probably eventually go to "cut back on grains", but for the 3-week experiment, it'll be easier to just categorically reject them.

But I won't only track self-reported variables.  For argument's sake, I'll also track weight and a few key measurements.  I'd like to track body fat percentage, as it seems more useful, but the 7 ways to do that listed in "The 4-hour body" all require scheduling an appointment (meh) or buying a multi-hundred-dollar device.

So here are my pretty rough measurements: (hooray for 1. being young, and 2. being a dude, so I don't feel any insecurity about posting these sorts of things online)
Weight: 151 lbs.
Stomach at navel: 32"

Biceps: 10.5"

Thighs: 21"

Hips at widest part: 36.5" (I don't really know what this means.  Butt?  It's the sort of squeeze point for my lower body I guess: if I were in a hole with circumference 36.4" I would be kind of stuck, and it would be at my butt, so that's what I measured.)

Neck: 15"

Body fat using US Navy method: 12.08%
Body fat using some random website: 17.22%
Using some other random website: 15%
Well perhaps trying to measure body fat percentage using just measurements is kind of silly anyway.  I'm not too fussed about it.

Which brings us to the conclusion: it's all an experiment.  Let's see how my average mood/stomach/energy goes in the next few weeks.  If physical measurements improve too, great!

Finally, disclaimer about comments: Nutrition is something that everyone has a lot of very strong mostly-hand-wavey opinions about.  I am not trying to say that these changes that I'm making are good for everyone.  I don't even know if they're good for me.  I'm interested to debate a little bit, but I reserve the right to stop talking and "agree to disagree"* at any point.
*That is the second time I've said "agree to disagree" in three days.  That makes me sad.

Twitter and energy

On that note, I guess I'll start Twittering again.  No reason not to; like every other internet thing, it's only as bad as you make it.  And I only read it for a couple minutes a day, so I'd be better off optimizing my Google Reader time 10% than optimizing my Twittering 90%.

Not sure about personal/professional.  It used to be all personal, but I think it'd be nice to have a professional Twitter too, so I could follow other researchers, and so I could say "Ooh here's an interesting idea" or "I just published this paper, check it out" or whatever.  I think I'll keep it personal, and I can add a professional one later if necessary.

At any rate: if you follow me, I can guarantee / you won't find nobody else like me.

(side note: oh shit, actually the lyric is "if you want to leave I can guarantee you won't find nobody else like me", which is even creepier.  dear uncle kracker: "follow me" is what a prophet says, not a guy trying to win a lady.  this'll likely be one of those moments when our grandkids are like "wtf 2000's" and we'll say "sorry, dunno.")

Anyway, about that optimizing my Google Reader time 10%: I would like more energy.  I took a class at Google called "Managing your energy", and it's stuck with me more than I would have thought.  The premise: it's not that you don't have enough time to do everything that you want, it's that you don't have enough energy.  (here's a good summary.)  Think about the times that you're high energy and positive: you can do anything.  You'll make a to-do list and then knock them all off, one by one.  But when you're out of energy, you'll watch TV or surf the internet.

They (a group called the Energy Project, but I won't link to them because their site sucks) say there are a few kinds of energy: physical, mental, emotional, and I guess you could say spiritual.  Without getting into too much detail, they build on each other like a pyramid.  I'm doing okay on all levels, but not rocking any of them, so I'd like to start with the physical and work up.  2011: the year I have more energy.

One thing I like about this approach: it's abundance-based, not scarcity-based.  Managing your time is saying "I have X hours, and they are slipping away slowly, so I better grab on to them and squeeze out all the time I can".  Managing your energy is like building things with bricks.  It adds and multiplies.  If you take more time to do another thing, it might give you more energy instead of taking it away.

More details later.

Hey, I'll be in Pittsburgh tonight

And I don't really have any broadcast channel besides this blog.  I guess this is what Twitter is for.  Anyway, I'll be at Aaron's party; perhaps I will see you there.  Otherwise, want to hang out?

I thought I had a neat idea there with "let's abolish morality"

but it turns out that what I really mean is basically "I like consequentialism, not deontology."  (I've read about one whole paragraph of each of those articles.)

But argh!  Life is so much harder when you look at everything as good or bad!

(skippable elaboration: external morality is just a heuristic, right?  it's like when a kid says "why shouldn't you shoplift a candy bar?", you could say
- "well, then the store owner is out $1, and then it makes it harder for him to keep the store in business, and he might have to fire his workers, then they're out of jobs so they can't buy things, so other stores go out of business; it's got negative economic effects" or
- "if I steal, other people think it might be okay to steal, and store owners will get suspicious, and this creates a world of lies which I don't want to live in" and then explain the tragedy of the commons or
- "I might get caught and the chance of me getting caught times the badness of getting caught is more than $1", and explain how expected value works or
- "stealing is wrong."
In the adult case, it's even worse, because you don't even know the effects.  In either case, appeal to external morality is the quickest way to figure out "should I do X or Y?".  It's often a necessary hack, but it's still a hack.  And when you forget that it's just a hack, you start thinking "he loaded the dishwasher WRONG" or "she said the WRONG thing" and when people wrong you that really hurts!  But you're not really wronged in any grand true way, and because it's so minor, it's better to think about it as if you weren't even wronged.)

Urgh!  Deontologists stress me out!  Then I am reminded of a bit in "The Size of the World" by Jeff Greenwald in which his friend Sally comes to a great realization that, though she tries to be accepting of everything, she doesn't accept it when others don't accept things.  It's played for a bit of laughs in the book, but it's a lesson I'd do well to learn.

Happy Weirdsmas!

Urgh okay I want to write a post about "can we get rid of so-called objectivity in cases of taste and see what happens?" and furthermore "can we get rid of morality and see what happens?", but that is kind of heavy, so instead I'll point out a few things that are really pleasantly droll about our Most Favorite of Favorite Days.

1. Stockings.  Okay, first of all, hanging up your sock to get presents has always been kind of silly, but okay, whatever.  But we don't even use real stockings, we use these fake things that are way bigger than feet and have a Santa stitched on them.

2. "Santa exists" jokes.  Santa Claus might be the biggest and best secular meme.  How did we, as a society, all manage to play the exact same trick on our kids?  It wouldn't even work if we all played different tricks.  Somehow we've all agreed that this red-suited dude is Santa and that is that.  I guess, once we've taken the work to establish this, we adults might as well milk this joke for all it's worth.  Well, it's only marginally more annoying than talking about the weather.

3. Quirinius.  I can imagine Quirinius being next in line to be governor of Syria.

Quirinius: but father I don't want to be governor!

His Dad: shut up I want this family to be famous for all time.

Quirinius: but we'll all be forgotten anyway!

Dad: no, the prophecy says that you will be remembered for thousands of years.  I wonder how.  That reminds me, you've got to get to work fighting those Marmaridae.  That will probably be what makes you famous.  Or maybe your campaign against the Homonadenses.  Perhaps you should concentrate on rectoring Gaius Caesar; when he is emperor, he'll surely reward you kindly.

Quirinius: I dunno, those all seem so meaningless.  I feel like I'll probably just be a footnote in history.

Dad: Son, if that's how you feel, you should get to work being the best footnote in history you can.

(75 to 100 years pass)

Dead Quirinius: booyah!

4. For some reason, my grandma can't find Wintergreen Lifesavers in Florida.  Those are like The Lifesavers.  That's like saying you can find pizzas but no red sauce: possible, but what kind of weird world exists in Florida?

5. Ded Moroz.  Why are we stuck with fat ol' Santa instead of this badass?

6. "Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays": why is this an issue?  "Christmas" fanatics: regardless of what you think about Christianity and state celebrations etc, "Happy Holidays" might just mean "Happy Christmas And New Year's."  "Holidays" fanatics: Christmas is kind of cultural, it's a holiday, it's not a day of hating on anyone, so don't worry about it.  And Hanukkah and Kwanzaa: this is so goofy!  It'd be like if the US were run by Buddhists, and they decided to have Buddhaday, but it happened to be on the Feast Day of St. Stephen and Lars Ulrich's birthday, so they celebrated Buddhaday, St. Stephen's Day, and Ulrichday, to appeal to the majority Buddhists as well as the minority Christians and the Danish.  Nevermind that most Christians are indifferent to St. Stephen, and Lars Ulrich is a clown.
But, ok, Christmahanukwanza jokes are about as funny as airline food, so let's move on.

7. "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus": "Santa Baby" is a goddamn ridiculous song, but at least if you accept one conceit (Santa is a sexy desirable man) it makes sense.  To be able to reconcile "ISMKSC" with our world, we'd have to accept that: A. Santa is a sexy desirable man, B. he's makin' out with random ladies after sneaking into their houses, and C. seeing your mom smoochin' (and ticklin') another dude is not only acceptable, but also cute (nay, precious) enough to deserve a song on a Mitch Miller album.

People vs. our memories of them

I was reading "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch, and you know how it goes, he tells amazing stories about his life and all these lessons he's learned, because he's dying of pancreatic cancer at 43 or something. It's really inspiring, both the book and the lecture itself- look it up, it's everywhere.  He was pretty much sainted afterwards, which is awkward, because saying "this person, as a whole, is great" implies that other people as a whole are bad, or at least not great.

There are stories in there that portray him as this superhero, this modern techie ubermensch who created the CMU ETC and Alice with his bare hands, while stopping by along the way to work at Disney and act in Star Trek and play football and complete all of his childhood dreams.  And yet, parts of the book hint at the fact that he might not actually be Jesus #2.  Take his living situation as a young professor: a $450/month attic apartment with a card table and chairs.  Now, I thought this a cool trait, but others saw it as him refusing to grow up.  Or an incident in which he pours soda on his car seat to demonstrate to his niece and nephew that people are more important than things: awesome, or just kind of preachy and dumb?  And those are the ones that he mentions; you'd imagine there are a lot of situations where he was kind of a jerk.

So what?  Well, I guess the thing I've taken from it is: don't get so hung up on whether Randy Pausch was a good or bad guy.  It's a book of his lessons, after all, not a book in which he tries to prove he's a great guy.

And on maybe the same note, I saved this article a long time ago because it pretty perfectly captures my two thoughts on Facebook (which thoughts are apparently important to have these days):
1. Zuckerberg is wrong because he thinks we are each no more than one self.  He wants a world without privacy, where privacy is unnecessary, where your grandparents see you drunk at parties but they understand because they used to get drunk at parties too.  This idea is flawed because we will always have at least two selves: public and private.  At least until mind-reading exists.
2. Zuckerberg is wrong because he thinks we each must be a self.  A large part of Facebook is explicitly "branding" yourself.  Creating a concept.  And we each must have one concept of ourselves that we throw out to the world.  How else will you get famous?

On an even further note: you can easily distance your current self from your past self.  "Oh, that was just something I did as a kid."  You can even distance yourself from your last-year self: "I've learned a lot since then."  Can you distance yourself from your yesterday self?  Can you distance yourself from your five-minutes-ago self?  And why not?

What I'm getting at is: self is an illusion, right?

Even more tangentially, I'm glad someone coined the phrase "spiritual materialism." (end of paragraph 2.)  It's a bit of a trap I could fall into by posting "deep" things here.  "look at me, my blog is all spiritual and stuff."  I'm really just interested in throwing some ideas out there and maybe sparking some discussions later.  I'm sorry if it comes across as spiritual materialism.

I'd sort of like to remember what my life is like now.

That's most of the reason I blog ever, right?

Here are some things:
- I work.  It is alternately fun and frustrating and scary.  Fun because I am writing code that I know how to write.  Frustrating and scary because I am sort of leading development of a server, and I have no idea how to lead a software project, so I feel like I'm spinning a lot.  (about once every two weeks, I have to organize a list of "all the things we need to do."  This list started out very useless, and with every iteration becomes closer to useful.)

- I've gone to a Rinzai Zen temple three times now, which means that there's at least sorta a chance that I might keep doing it, which means it might be worth writing about here.  It's... different.  Rinzai is the more rigorous of the two main Zen branches (the other being Soto), and Zen is one of the bigger branches of Mahayana Buddhism, and Mahayana is one of two main branches of Buddhism.  Rinzai is the branch that does the koans ("what is the sound of one hand clapping?" etc) but only for advanced students.  Anyway, it's intense: you just sit, totally still, concentrating on your breathing, for 25 minutes, twice in a row.  It's super quiet.  I'm intrigued; I don't know if the rigor will tire me out, or if it will continue to bring me back because I'll feel like I'm making more progress.  It's like playing a video game on a higher difficulty level.

- I still feel like I'm not very good at meditation on the lowest level.  I'm doing okay on the physical side; sitting for 20 minutes no longer fazes me.  (although my lower back tires out quickly, which makes me hunch, and sometimes I get real sleepy.)  The mental side is still a mess, though; thoughts all over the place.  I'm not ashamed, but I'm frustrated.

- I cook.  But it's just whatever the farmer's market has, stir-fried, roasted, or simmered.  So I'm not learning much more Thai right now, just repeating familiar methods.  This is fine.

- I'm becoming much more interested in self-experimentation.  I'm maintaining a journal of dreams and emotions; don't know what I'll do with that, but it's something.  It's convinced me that I can actually stick to a routine and get some meaningful data, so I'm not wasting money or energy by investing in self-experimentation tools.  So I got a watch that I'll try to program, I ordered a Wakemate to learn more about how I sleep, and I want to get an Emotiv EPOC developer kit or a NeuroSky MindSet, because that could really help my research, but I figure better to play with my existing toys before buying new ones.

- I've been hanging out with the Seattle Couchsurfing crowd.  In addition to hosting surfers, it's a bit of a social group, and they're pretty cool.  (I've signed up to host a couple people too.)  I just started showing up out of the blue, and they've been very welcoming.  This is nice.  I certainly appreciate my closer friends, but I've been looking for a bit wider experience for some time now.

- I'm gearing up to leave Google, start research, and travel.  I told my team about my plans.  They're all very very cool about it.  It's amazing how supportive everyone at the company has been.  I'm going to be full time at Google for January, part time for February and March while I start at UW, then full time at UW starting in April.

- Christmas is in a week!  I'm quite looking forward to going back home and seeing my family.  I'm in Cleveland Dec 24 to Jan 2.

And this is not a big deal right now but it came up and I'm posting so here we go: three interesting posts about certain drugs.  The food/drug/herb distinction keeps seeming more and more fake.  (from grade school: what is a drug?  anything you put in your body that has an effect, besides food.  what is food?  well, you know, it's food! I'm glad I didn't know more logic as a kid; I might have been a real brat.)

Poetry from the Dream World

It's late and I ought to be sleeping, but I dreamed hella dreams last night, and I don't want to withhold this from the Internet:

I dreamed that I heard the most amazing hilarious profound poem and that I had to record it, and then I had a series of dreams in which I was trying to wake up and record it.  I managed to carry three fragments of it into the waking life.  I suppose there were a lot of missing parts, but I may never remember them, so I will just present the parts that I remember.

Let me also preface this by saying, it continues to amaze me how much my unconscious mind is:

- creative

- dumb as hell

- unfettered by notions of what does or doesn't make sense.

Okay, enough introductions.  Here it is.

"The Bees"

Humbling crumbly brumbly dumb bear.

Are you hungry hungry hungry?
What are you hungry
  hungry hungry
  hungry hungry
  hungry for?

Are you fighting?
What are you fighting
  fighting fighting
  fighting fighting
  fighting for?

Christmas songs that are allowed.

LENGTHY PREAMBLE: Are you a creator or a taster?

(this is of course a false dichotomy, but I imagine it's a good headline for this lengthy preamble.)

I've lately been seeing the world a lot in terms of creation and taste.  Taste is something that we all try to cultivate, and it's really kinda the opposite of creation: winnowing the cream from the chaff, or whatever.  If you have good taste in music, you're good at cutting down everything that you don't like, and (presumably) really savoring the stuff that you do like, but mostly you know what not to like.  Similarly with food or movies or whatever: if you "have good taste" it mostly means you don't like crummy stuff.

It's everyone's problem with hipsters: by cultivating taste so hard, they just end up sneering at everything.

Far better, I think, to just create a lot.  My best moments of taste, of explaining why Lady Gaga is an acceptable and praiseworthy pop culture icon while Katy Perry is not, or why "Feels" is better than "Merriweather Post Pavilion" despite what Pitchfork thinks, pale in comparison to even okay moments of creation.  Beertable and my door knocker, and even One Photo Every Minute despite its lackluster success, are the sort of things I'm proud of.

I really want to work "maintainer" into this, so we can group people into creators, maintainers, and destroyers, and thereby connect this to another grand concept that's been around since sorta the dawn of time, lending it some grain of Truth with a capital T.  More likely that this is all just nonsense, and I dreamt it all up so that I could proclaim myself a creator and tap into various cultural biases there.

END LENGTHY PREAMBLE; commence main post:

Despite all that, and how I like to create things blah blah, I heard some Christmas songs in the Trader's Joe last night, and remembered how I am a great destroyer of Christmas music.  Up until this year I was convinced that all Christmas songs should perish, except for 13: The Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack and You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.  However, maybe I should be a little less humbuggy; some other ones are nice too (only when performed traditionally, and not melodramatically):

- O Come O Come Emmanuel
- O Holy Night
- God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
- Good King Wenceslas

... okay, I'm spent.  Well, we're up to 17, anyway.

Nothing bad ever happens ever.

Great trip to the SF Bay Area this past week!  It was for work, but it was hell of great, because:

- Chrome Web Store launch event!  Okay, so I didn't actually contribute code to this release, but it was my team's release, and all is well, so that's great.  Also they talked a lot about Chrome itself (still getting faster and awesomer) and Chrome OS.  My former team, Chrome Sync, got great coverage, and further press in this video (the Chrome leads have a great dry sense of humor).  At any rate, it actually did get me re-excited about my job.  That's nice.
- A good chance to visit old friends.  It is nice when your job will send you to visit old friends.
- Winchester Mystery House.  WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE.  Okay, seriously, it's just a big house with the wonkiest architecture.  But boy is it wonky.
- Korean noodles and Indian ice cream.  The Bay area has Seattle beat for ethnic food.  (I mean Seattle proper; I'm sure you could get equally good food if you included everything within 30 miles of Seattle in any direction.  The Bay area is huge.)
- got to meet the client Extensions team.  Cool folks!
- go-karts with the team.  Surprisingly fun.  Skidding around corners and stuff; felt like real-life Mario kart.
- I stayed in the Mission in SF.  I like it.  It's a neighborhood I could probably live in.
- Ritual Coffee Roasters makes good stuff.
- I continue to be thankful for my commute, especially my half-hour bike commute to Seattle.  The Bay area is huge.
- In an uncharacteristic but awesome move I picked up this box of useless things at the Google store.  I am pretty excited about them.

What's your phone number?

I got a call from Little Nipper's Pizza, saying he had my pizza, and didn't I order something?  I remembered that my Google Voice number is a 412 (Pittsburgh) number.  I said "I'm sorry, I think you have the wrong number."
Him: What's your phone number?
Me: (about to say 440-... but paused instead, because this is where the recognition kicked in.)
Him: I dialed 412-(something something), isn't that your number?
Me: uh...
Him: (frustrated) Well, what's your number??
Me: Wait- it's 412-5-uh, 3-2- uh
Him: ah, nevermind. (hangs up)

Because, you see, I know my Pittsburgh number as being 412-5-then the first 6 letters of my name.  Har!

In other news, so in my completely entirely unbiased view, Chrome is The Best browser, but Firefox just got hella more awesome:
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/12/03/meet-the-newest-and-cutest-mozillians/

Well, that was surprisingly easy.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jdnnkcoalggjhgceidekjfbcbbkpegbb

I am not such a fan of procrastination.

For some reason, I have done it more recently.  Maybe this is because I've had to do things on my computer that are hard on a couple different axes.  Most of the things have just been email anxiety (like sending emails to professors out of the blue- eep!), some of them are the difficulties of trying to spin up one job (research) while the other one (err my real job) has fried my brain all day, some of them are just other logistics like buying plane tickets.  If this is the case, it's not an easy problem to solve.

Maybe this is because procrastination has gotten easier thanks to Google Reader, The Facebook, and Twitter.  I'm not sure this is the case, because I feel like I just want some information to eat.  I got into Hacker News for a while until I quit that, and now I go to the Stranger when I want some more info.  So I could quit the Facebook or something, but then I'd just snarf up more info elsewhere.

Maybe the trick is to take my hard problems more seriously.  When I say "I need to email this professor, because maybe our researches will overlap and we could meet and talk about ideas or something", I should treat it as if I were going to do 20 push-ups.  Not easy.  But doesn't really take that long, and better to just meet it head on.

But man, this is the kind of thing that's tough, because you don't even know you've lost the fight until it's over.  As I was writing this, I suppressed an urge to check my email once- if I had waited a half second, a little ctrl-T and bam, my brain is scattered between this post and gmail.  It's as if I need a mindfulness Chrome theme or something, that instead of displaying a shiny new tab page, says "WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO NOW" and then freezes for 5 seconds before I can continue.

Hey, that's a neat idea.

Why the big suit?

I was going to jam this into the last post, but it deserves its own.

Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads is wonderful.

To be fair, I'm super biased, because I sweat David Byrne pretty hard.  But let me continue to make an argument that you should watch it.

- Although it's a concert film, nearly every song changes things up a bit.
- No encore.
- The second half is remarkably better than the first, even.
- The whitest kids you know + former members of Parliament Funkadelic.
- The feel is kind of creepy spooky.  Roger Ebert says shades of Metropolis.  Take that as you will, but there are definitely moments that make you double-take.  You're in a place where a floor lamp appears center stage and is danced with, where a crew guy walks around creating huge shadows with a big light, where words like "facelift" and "sandwich" appear on giant monitor screens.  It's half music, half Gilliam or Aronofsky movie.
- Towards the end, it introduces you to the Tom Tom Club, Tina Weymouth (bass) and Chris Frantz's (drums) side project.  And reminds you how good they are!  And weird in their own way, which is the best kind of weird.  I'll link to Genius of Love here, but it has maximum impact after your mind has been blown by a dozen tracks of the Talking Heads.
- But let me just say one thing: David Byrne is the one who continues to resonate with me.  He's in his goddamn utmost rock star prime here, but his persona is not one who's in control.  (Does this not, or did this not, resonate with you when you are/were 24?)  He's confused, jittery, spastic.  He's vulnerable, supported only by a drum machine, in Psycho Killer.  He's creepy in Swamp, boneless in Life During Wartime, and lost in a darn big suit in Girlfriend Is Better.  And he is unparalleled in Once in a Lifetime.

Watch it.  At least so we can talk about how great it is.