Got another bike, I am calling it James Murphy

Soma Smoothie ES. 2010. 60cm. Kept in great shape. It's big, it's light, drop bars, amazing parts. It's kinda perfect for everything I need, and I got a great deal on it from a nice guy named Jake.

Parts info:
Fork: Soma Classic Curve Road 57- Tange Infinity CrMo steel. This has a very long steer tube and a bunch of spacers. I kind of like it weirdly high, but I can always cut it down later if I want.
Shifters and derailleurs and brakes: Ultegra 6600 group. (Ultegra parts are usually on bikes that are way too nice for me.) 3x10 speeds. (You may think you only need 5 or 7 or 9 speeds; you're probably right, but for some reason, number of gears correlates with part quality these days.)
Cassette: 11-28 teeth. Wipperman chain, which I guess is a good German brand.
Wheels: Velocity Deep V Rims + Ultegra 660 Hubs. Handbuilt wheelset with wheelsmith DB spokes. Have I mentioned how this bike was a good deal and way too nice for me?
Tires: Continental GP4000 Tires
Handlebars, stem, seat post: Ritchey WCS Logic 2. 44cm wide bars (which seems to be wide enough for me), 90mm stem.
Saddle: Brooks Champion B17 Narrow.
It's almost too nice; I think I've overshot "good enough" and gotten up to "theft target." Oh well.
Ideas for the future: put on fatter tires (Jake recommends the 33mm Jack Brown from Rivendell), some center-pull road brakes (for longer reach), and bigger fenders.
Naming: James Murphy. This feels exactly like the kind of bike James Murphy would ride. Pretty cool, pretty fast, pretty trendy, but just a little gawky (e.g. the stack of spacers). A bike for someone who has kind of always wanted to be more "punk" than he is, but is actually a nerdy white guy from the suburbs hitting a new decade, and is okay with that. It's practical and sharp and fun.

On making lifelong commitments

Wow. Those are words I don't say very often.

I mean, ever. When have I ever made a lifelong commitment to anything? Almost never. I mean, I think I might have accidentally gotten confirmed in some kind of Christian church before I knew what I was doing; whatever. I cannot think of a single thing in my adult life that I've said, yep, I am pretty sure of this until I die.

Until Saturday. I asked Tati to marry me. She agreed.

This was staged ceremony, as we both knew we were going to, but I guess ceremony gives you a little bit of something to hang on to when you're jumping through huge flaming whole-life hoops. And a way to note that the flaming hoops are there and that you've passed through them. I just googled and read the whole wikipedia article on "liminality"; you should too, it's fascinating. But I digress.

Here are some things that I'm feeling:

- elation, that someone this wonderful thinks that I'm worth spending her life with. Geez, I'm kind of a curmudgeon already, and I'm only 28. But she's not only cool with it, but excited! And how amazing she is, too! She's endlessly optimistic, upbeat, brilliant, charismatic, beautiful, and full of love like few people I've ever met. Sorry to gush, internet, but lifelong commitments means I'm allowed to.

- thankfulness: that I found this wonderful person. That we are now walking in the glow of each other's majestic presence, and aren't even old yet. (Ana Ng is just clever and humorous, as "soul mates" are of course nonsense, and relationships are more built than found, but there's a significant amount of finding, and that person you find does have to want to build a relationship with you!) And I have so much empathy for people who think they won't ever find this person. I hope that this serves as a data point of "love is possible and worth it."

- excitement: the world is our oyster as few worlds have ever been for few people! We share goals; most notably, immediately, we're off to San Francisco in a couple weeks, to start our new careers as Value-Creating Winners in Tech Wonderland Disneyworld 2.0. (and/or, finish a PhD sometime. yes.) And that's just career-wise. Don't want to plan out our whole life, but we'll begin our odyssey, sail around the world, share the same space for a minute or two.

- optimism: there's some old quote I've lost in the sands of time, something like "you can look at this whole big mess of life and you really only get one choice: to say 'yes!' or 'nah.'" Tati, more than anyone I know, looks at life and says yes. And when I'm around, I'm saying yes too. She's got such a positive effect on me, and that makes me sure, as sure as I can ever be, that she and I will have a great life together.

- love: ok this is just a big catch all but sometimes you can't put more specific words on feelings, and that's okay.

*sigh* I have opinions, which correlate with Black Mirror episodes pretty well

I heard Black Mirror was totally the coolest, and it's not, but it's pretty great. I'd give it 4/5 stars. Minus two for being, in the words of my friend Beka, "gratuitous", which it kind of is. I mean, it turns the dystopia switch up to 11 sometimes. (S01E02, "15 Million Merits" in particular) But plus one for bringing up some pretty neat issues that I've not seen in a ton of shows.

ISSUE 1. Virtual violence

I wonder if our parents would ever have realistically imagined information to be a weapon. I mean, of course you could leak trade secrets or military secrets, but that's all movies. Nowadays, thanks to doxxing, identity theft, etc, it's a reality for everyone. Related: WikiLeaks screwing everyone who had the misfortune to be working at Sony. (Julian! It's harder to convince my parents that Snowden's a good guy when you're complicating the "leaking" story by doing stuff like this!)

S01E01 of Black Mirror took a unique take: terrorists leak a video to youtube that shows that they captured a princess, and they demand, for her release, that the prime minister have sex with a pig. (I told you the show was gratuitous.) If the video weren't massively public, there'd be less public pressure and the whole thing would kind of blow over. They cause a huge fiasco mostly by sending certain information to a certain place. Hmm.

ISSUE 2. Infinite punishment

If you believe that we might be able to upload our consciousness, that sounds great. Until a madman gets his hands on the technology, and decides to punish his enemies by virtually copying them each a million times and forcing them all to suffer for a million years. Or, the government decides that regular ol' punishment isn't bad enough, and that the bad guys should suffer more than that. The final episode (christmas special, really) takes on this theme, producing the best episode about consciousness-uploading that I've seen on TV in a long time. S02E02, "White Bear," looked at a similar issue.

Related: ADX prison in Colorado. Geez. I know some of you think "eh, screw em", especially when we're looking at our worst criminals: Ted Kaczynski, Eric Rudolph, Zacarias Moussaoui. But... I don't know, even with them, prison ought to be about rehabilitation, or at worst keeping the rest of us safe. Keep your bloodlust and revenge out of it.

Eh, I don't know why torture and inhumane prisons and whatever happens to our worst matters to me. There's tons of tragedies, shouldn't I focus on something worse? Yeah, I guess. But ... I dunno, Dostoevsky or someone: "You can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners." (or Jesus: "Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.") I mean, I feel like we should try to raise the floor of our society. Make the answer to "what's the worst that could happen to me?" not that bad. I don't see myself getting sent to ADX, but man, all prison here sounds awful, and it's easy to imagine being in a protest or something and, due to justice mistakes, getting sent to prison, and then the rest of my life goes off the rails. Whereas, if I got sent to prison in Denmark, ehh, I'd be able to bounce back.

Seoul: It Sure Does Have Cafes

A week in Seoul is sadly over! First I will say, Seoul is kind of the best. I saw a nice temple, a modern art museum, a couple parks, biked along the river, ate weird fish, and all that. The modern art museum had a big room full of strings hanging straight down from the ceiling which you could walk through. It was like a sea of strings. At Noryangjin fish market, one of the weird fishes (an octopus) was still twitching and crawling when we ate it. I also shopped, which seems to be the thing to do everywhere. No, I take it back, that's the #2 thing to do everywhere; the #1 thing is to hang out in cafes. I like doing that.

I will spend this paragraph justifying how and why I went to so many cafes, then I will talk about all the cafes. At first I thought, I should be sightseeing more. Then I thought, nah, I have like 3 days, and it's semi-vacation, I am going to do whatever I want, and what I want is mostly to hang around in cafes and read books. To be fair, hanging around in cafes doesn't stop you from doing anything else. It's pretty quick. And I saw at least as neat a slice of Seoul as you did.

Here are some of those cafes. (if you're not interested, you can just see all my photos here.)

DK1744, Hongdae: nothing super special, but the first place I got to off the train. They specialize in "Dutch" coffee, which AFAICT is just cold brew. Which means, if they ask you "hot or cold?" the answer is "cold", because "hot" just involves a microwave.

5 Extracts, Hongdae: super nice! Run by Choi Hyun Sun, 2011 Korean national champion barista, and I can't remember wonderful things about the siphon coffee (just very good, not national-champion level), but the space was inviting. I met the guy, a very nice fellow too. I mean, this is kind of like if you went to a Gordon Ramsay restaurant and it was mostly empty and he was just cooking your food and chatting. (but less swearing.)

Bau House, Hongdae: this is a dog cafe. In exchange for you buying an overpriced drink, you get to pet all the puppies! There are like 15 of them. Two corgis even!

Out of Africa, Samcheong-dong: Most places that advertise different drip coffees from different countries do a pretty good job. This one is an exception; I was told no drip coffee, and I ended up with a push-button-machine americano. But the garden was nice.

Coffee Factory, Samcheong-dong: oh, this is the place around Samcheong-dong that I was looking for. 4 floors of coffeeshop, beans that you can tell they'll be good by the smell. I'd be back here often. Forgot a picture, I guess.

Coffee Monster, Samseong: uh, yes. I mean, the coffee is fine, but I love this decor. "This is because origin of coffee was from another planet and delivered by aliens."

Ikovox Coffee (formerly Coffee Kitchen, I think), Garosu-gil: yes excellent yay. Mini chain; they also had a branch in the Coex conference center. Amazing coffee in the conference center! How lucky! Get the Brazil, it's wonderfully dark chocolate and just a touch smoky.

(by the way, LEC coffee is no longer in Garosu-gil, as of 2015.)

Novac Juice, Garosu-gil. With the cactuses. Not technically a coffee shop, but it was beautiful.

221B, Samseong: Sherlock themed, but not good. Like, both things Beka and I got were undrinkably sweet, and it was uncomfortably silent and empty. Not recommended.

Coffee Libre: Best of the best. This was a little kiosk inside a big cathedral building (but like a new cathedral, not an old pretty one), and it still made the most memorable coffee of the trip: almondy and cantaloupe, a little fuller body than I'm used to... oh, and he made it on Aeropress. Huh! Maybe I *am* missing something about Aeropress. (note that this is one of ~4 locations, the others are bigger and probably nicer.)

Hakrim Coffee, Daehangno: super cool. Old fashioned, classical music and old photos. Coffee's ok, but great atmosphere.

Analog Coffee, aka Samseong Coffee Bokkneunjib (roaster), Samseong: speaking of great old-fashioned atmosphere, this place is awesome. Old records on the walls, and also great beans from all over the world. Plus, the lady is so friendly that, when I accidentally almost left without paying, she apologized to me and gave me a free pie. My friends were convinced that she was hitting on me.

Terarosa Coffee, at Coex: the second best coffee spot in the Coex center. Wah! We are spoiled for choice. Nice spacious place too, and they sell a bunch of coffee gear. Sprung for one of their COE offerings, which was super worth it.

Not pictured: Sedona Coffee, the *third* best place at Coex.

May Island, Gangnam station area: coffeeshop (meh) and library! It was *the most pleasant* place to sit quietly and work. Full of books. Nicely lit, good desks. What you can do: person1cup, wifi, book, no talk. What you can not do: external food, no out, mobile, skinship.

Coffee Gallery, Gangnam station area: well, also nice, but at this point nothing to write home about. Casual shop, decent beans.

And that is (mostly) all the coffee I drank in Seoul! I surely could have kept going. I quite enjoyed this.

Oh ok here are the rest of my pictures that tell the rest of the story, those are probably more interesting to you anyway.

A few neat links

Before They - a portrait of shrinking tribes worldwide

Requesting all the photos the DHS has of you - hah, kind of neat.

Antibiotics in meat are really bad, yes, still, let's stop this

How flavor drives nutrition: very cool. Nutrition and flavor are both getting worse, and this is not a coincidence.

Let them eat privilege- huh. Should we stop castigating ourselves for being in the 5% and start looking to where all the money is going? Hint: yes. And it's the super rich. Related, what's this about the estate tax? What the hell? How is abolishing the estate tax a good idea At All? Is this just bald faced plutocracy, sold to Americans as "conservatism"? How many Republican voters vote against their own economic interests because they've accepted some convoluted story of how "it's good for America"?

Rewire, filter bubbles, international news, and so on

I'm reading this book now, Rewire by Ethan Zuckerman.
Overall, totally dig it. He's pushing cosmopolitanism, the idea that we can be "citizens of the world", taking into account our responsibility and connectedness to each other.

He started this "Global Voices" site a few years ago, trying to offer views from bloggers worldwide. It's pretty cool, but as he notes, not enough. It's hard for me to care about what happens in Gabon. But in an age of SARS and Arab Spring, we kind of need to. At least, someone needs to.

Some useful concepts or other notes:

Hallin's spheres: the center is consensus, that's easy, we all agree. Next is the sphere of legitimate debate. Outside that is the sphere of deviance: ideas so ridiculous that no one seriously thinks them. This is the goal of revolutionaries and rabble rousers: to move ideas from the sphere of deviance into the sphere of legitimate debate. This is of course a double edged sword: it's good that, say, gay marriage and marijuana legalization made that leap; it's, you know, existentially dangerous that global warming has.

(Also, choice quote from cartoonist Ted Rall: "'no one seriously thinks' is brutarian to the point of Orwellian.") P86

How news works now: Galtung and Runge's "news values": short time frames, moral unambiguousness, unexpectedness, and reflection of preconceptions.

Apparently, of all newspapers in the US, only the NY Times, LA times, Washington Post, and WSJ still have substantial foreign bureaus?!

Goals of Global Voices: filtering, translating, contextualizing. Making good-enough translation transparent, enabling bridge figures, and engineering serendipity.

Human Libraries. Rent a person and talk for a while to learn things from their perspective. Awesome. P196

Community by arbitrary structure. Birth days of the week in Ghana. Livejournal birth month groups.

Discovery by breadth first search. Ish. "Impressionism? Might as well start with Monet. If not, Renoir. Now you have at least a sense of whether you like impressionism. Want to try Haitian food? Go to these top 3 popular Haitian places." The Dave Arnold algorithm (named after his friend). Where are the top 3 places for people who live in Greenfield? There's a lot of connection to cities here: people experience more serendipity in cities. How can we make online services more conducive to this? P228

Also, writing this on a tablet is awfully limiting. Ow. If you find any of this interesting, let's talk in person.

Levels of complexity (in the real world)

In CS school, we learned about computational complexity (and if you start tuning out you can just skip to the next paragraph). Some algorithms take "linear time" - an amount of time roughly equal to the data that you have. So if you have n pieces of data, computing on them will take about n units of time. (and if your data size doubles, it'll take twice as long.) Some take "quadratic time" - so if your data size doubles, it'll take 4 times as long. Some take "exponential time", like 2^n, so if your data set gets *just one piece bigger*, the program will take twice as long. (and of course you could fill in any other function; some things take n^3 time, or log(n) time, or whatever.) So you want to do as many algorithms that are "linear time" or "logarithmic time" (n, or log(n)) if possible, and avoid things that are quadratic if you can, and really avoid anything that takes exponential time.

In the real world, I feel like you get different kinds of complexity:
- problems with helpers
- neutral problems
- problems with adversaries
I am just making these up, this is not an official distinction or terms or anything.

Problems with helpers: these are great, and easy, and fun! Even if you don't do great, your thing will get done. An example: if you're a bigwig executive, and you can ask your secretary to book a plane ticket. Your secretary knows your preferences, they know all the billing info, all you do is tell them where/when you want to go. Another example: scheduling dinner with some friends. Even if you accidentally say the wrong place or time, you can call your friends and say "oops, I meant this other day", and they'll probably either arrange other things in their schedule to make it, or else just not make it and it's fine.

Neutral problems: kind of like you vs. the machine. Example: doing the laundry. Kind of difficult sometimes (and takes a long time), and if you put it on the wrong settings it'll mess up your clothes but (at least supposedly) you have all the information you need.

Problems with adversaries: these seem simple but turn out to be difficult because you have to account for all the ways your adversary *could* thwart you. Example: selling tickets online. The core thing is simple, but you have to account for the fact that some people might wire up some bots to grab all the tickets in one second and then scalp them, so it gets difficult. Or, counting votes. Simple process! But you ideally want to set it up so that even if you have one corrupt vote counter, the whole election won't be stolen.

Software tends to have adversaries, which is why most "simple" apps tend to take forever to build. Same with everything legal.

Seeing complex situations through one point of view

It feels like we, as humans, are not capable of processing certain questions above a certain level of complexity. For example, "should you be allowed to carry a gun in public?"

Some people say, "well, imagine a bad guy, who gets a gun illegally anyway, and opens fire on a bunch of good people; if one of those good people had a gun, they could shoot him back and save lots of lives!"

Sure. But you're taking a laser view into a complex system. We don't know what happens to everyone else in the scene (or everyone outside the scene), how often the shooting-him-back works, or even how often this situation would happen at all.

Similarly, you see one person on welfare buying a steak, you figure they're all living the high life. So you propose a bunch of new laws to stop this exact case (with a bunch of collateral damage). It's like balancing on a tightrope, and you start to notice that your left side is a little too high, so you have someone hand you a 50-lb weight in your left hand.

Service Design is a neat new concept (or maybe old, I lose 10 designer-cred points because I wasn't into it before it was cool) from designers where they at least try to give you a structured way to look at all the people in these situations. Most of the benefit, I think, comes from writing them all down on paper and arranging them in a diagram. At least you have to think about them all and consider more than one laser view in your response to a situation.

Eh, it's not perfect. But showing me a diagram would at least convince me more than your one-laser-view argument.

Pebble Scrabble Watch Faces

Three Letter Words

Two Letter Words

These were what I really wanted to do when I made Pokemon Watch. (I mean, besides have cute pokemons on my wrist.) Now I have words on my wrist, flashing by one a minute, so I can eventually pull out something sweet like "dap" or "uts" and dazzle all my opponents. Or, compete competently with Real Scrabble People.

Pain points:
- finding the damn list of 3 letter words.
- editing the dictionary so it's small and concise, so definitions (mostly) fit.
- dealing with only having 24kb of memory. I mean, I can't even load the whole dictionary into memory! I have to break it up into 4 separate chunks! This took me hours! Because:
- C is Hard. what do you mean, "split on whitespace" isn't implemented? really?! where did that segfault happen? do I have to get out my log statements again? and to top it all off,
- debugging is slow. Like 1-2 minutes edit-test-debug. Sometimes longer if my phone and watch and internet weren't cooperating. and we're ETDing dozens of times because all I know is "something broke." UGH BLAH.

Oh yeah, code's on Github. (three letters) (two letters)

Some thoughts about ISIS and war

Hey. Okay. If you want to get angrier, read this: 7 Reasons America Is Stuck in Never-Ending War. It's on Mother Jones, so those of you who prefer Fox News can brush it off as some wacko liberal, I suppose. If you're still here, here are some facts I would like to pull out of it:
1. we are apparently always at war.
2. war's really horrifying but you and I never even experience it, except in movies, so we can sort of tolerate it.
3. "Support Our Troops" is a really clever move by hawks. I won't argue that each individual soldier is a bad person; they're probably great. I mean, the soldiers I know are totally solid dudes. (I don't know any female soldiers.) So if I condemn war, I have to pull this awkward dodge like "yeah but I support our troops." It's like the part-for-the-whole fallacy or something; if I say "I oppose this war", then the response is "ok, so which soldier is the bad one?" Maybe none of them! The system can lead to unfortunate outcomes even if every part is doing the right thing. (the software engineers among you will agree on how true this is."
4. privatization of war (like privatization of prisons) really messes up incentives. Now we have a bunch of people who are going to actively campaign for more war, because it makes them more money.

Fox News readers, you can tune back in now! This feels at least relatively non-partisan to me:
A Thrive/Survive Theory of the Political Spectrum
So if you agree with this, then the conservative/hawk POV is that "we are really on the edge of extinction and we gotta fight back hard." Zombie apocalypse. The liberal/dove POV is "everything is wonderful, no problems." Utopia. Neither is true, but if you take the hawk POV, war seems to make a lot more sense.

Anyway, read this: What ISIS Really Wants
Super interesting! ISIS is not like "the next Al-Qaeda"; ISIS is a full on cult. This makes it appealing to some (giving people a purpose really draws them in) but

The conclusion I draw from these articles is this: ISIS is a terrible cult, but like most cults, they'll eventually self-destruct. (Also, if we were to attack them now, we could really make things worse.) So can we try chilling out the warring a little bit?

How To Buy A Bike If You Don't Usually Buy Bikes

Been thinking about this and figured it'd be worth writing up. In this guide I assume:
- you want to buy a bike to get around town, a couple miles at a time, nothing big
- you maybe don't have a bike now, or just have something now that you don't really like for whatever reason
- you don't know from bikes
- you're not currently interested in learning how to repair stuff
- maybe you're a little intimidated by bike shops, maybe not

1. Look at your budget. This may fall into ~4 categories:
- nothing or like $50: find your local build-a-bike workshop (Free Ride in Pittsburgh, Bike Kitchen in SF maybe) and learn to put a bike together or repair one. It'll likely be kind of a junker, but you'll learn a lot and it might be fun. Or else scour craigslist, buy whatever you can get, ride it, pitch it when it falls apart. (this is obviously not ideal, but maybe this is where you are. you can still ride a bike! don't listen to judgey assholes.)

- $200 or $300: you can get something decent and used. Scour Craigslist for a bike that even kind of fits you. A hybrid or commuter bike is ideal, as it will be both sorta-fast and sorta-comfortable, but you can't be too picky. Or, if you have a shop nearby that sells used bikes, check it out. Thick Bikes in Pittsburgh is good I hear. Or Bicycle Heaven. Do not buy a bike from Walmart or Target or Dick's; every part on those is terrible and it will probably fall apart faster than a used bike.

Above this range, look at the money you have available, and then subtract at least $150 because you need to buy extras (explained more later).

- $500: this is when it starts getting good, as you're in the new-bike range. Go to a local bike shop (again, not Walmart or Target or Dick's; REI is ok but an actual local bike shop is better, I'll explain why). Check the few shops near you, and ideally look for somewhere that specializes in people like you, that is, people who just want to ride around town (Iron City Bikes is my favorite here, or Pedal Revolution or Valencia Cycles in SF). If it's full of super-fancy pro bikes, that's not awesome, but may still work (Top Gear is my example here. But they're friendly and I like them too; they're just a little higher-end). If the people are friendly, that's good too. Ask them for a hybrid bike. Buy the cheapest one that you like.

- $1000: now you can consider fancier stuff. Same strategy as the $500 tier but you can just consider more bikes. Up until the $1000 level, whatever upgrades you pay for are probably worth it.

- above that: don't spend that much on your first bike. Buy a $400 hybrid or an $800 cross, make sure it's worth it to you, and then upgrade from there.

2. What kind of bike? I present to you, the Dan Tasse Bike Scale:

(click for bigger)

Probably a "fitness hybrid" (middle of this scale). Not super heavy, but not uncomfortable. Good range of gears for going up and down hill. Pretty cheap. For the second bike, you can decide if you want something lighter (then go up to a #1 or #2) or cushier (go to a #4 or #5) but start with a #3, Fitness Hybrid. Some examples are Trek 7.2, Specialized Sirrus, Norco Indie 4, Kona Dew; other good brands include Cannondale, Giant, Jamis... basically, whatever your bike store has is probably good. (incidentally, here's a good article about buying hybrid bikes.)

If you're a little more fit or want something that you can occasionally take for long rides, go up to a cyclocross or touring bike. (this will also cost a few hundred extra dollars, but you'll get better stuff; there's just not much available for $400-500 in cross bikes.) If you are a little unsure about biking, don't have to carry your bike up stairs, and live in a flat place, you might try a comfort hybrid. Or a "city" or "Dutch" bike - the kind you'd see in Amsterdam or Copenhagen. These are more comfortable, you sit upright almost like a chair. Downside is that they're heavy, which sucks if you need to carry them ever or go uphill a lot. Plus, the "comfort hybrids" are ugly. (city/dutch bikes, OTOH, tend to look cool.)

Get one that fits you. Try it out. Ask the bike shop worker if it fits you. Trust them.

3. This is a good time to talk about dealing with your local bike shop.

Why even buy from them? Why not just get a cheap one at walmart or online? A few reasons, and that article I linked to above deals with them well.

- You want to make sure your bike is good quality (walmart's will not be)

- You want to be sure it's safe every time you leave the place (and if you assemble it yourself for the first time, it likely will not be)

- You'll need repairs and maintenance every few months, so it's good to start building a relationship.

And because there are people recommending stuff you don't know much about, there are two ways you can go about this: always trusting them, or never trusting them. The one you should pick is "always trust them." Bike repair is not a lucrative career; they're not in it for the money. 99% of them (at a local bike shop) are in it because they like bikes. They are not trying to screw you. If they recommend something, it's probably worth it.

4. Buy extra stuff too.

Necessities:

- standing pump ($40-60)

- helmet ($40-60) - the cheapest one is fine; make sure it fits

- chain lube ($10) - just ask

- front (white) and rear (red) lights (probably $30 total; get the cheapest set that uses AA or AAA batteries because they're easier to replace. don't splurge, because someone will steal them.)

- lock: $30-60 - just make sure it's a U-lock. Cable locks are easier to cut. If your bike is $500, you probably don't need to go real heavy duty (esp if you don't live in NY or SF) but it's up to you. I find it convenient to store this in the lock bracket that comes with the lock; if you ask the bike shop folks, they'll probably attach this for free, it's pretty simple.

Really really recommended:

- fenders + installation ($40?) this is only not necessary if you only ride when it's dry, or live in a very dry place. They are so worth it, both for your clothes and for the bike's maintenance (grime spraying all over your bike is not great). Let the bike shop folks install them; they're a pain.

5. Maintain it.

Pump it up about once a week.

Lube the chain about once every couple weeks. (ask the bike shop worker if you are not sure how.)

When you feel the brakes getting less powerful, and you've already tweaked the barrel adjusters by your brake levers, or approx every 4 months of constant riding, bring it in to the bike shop for a brake pad replacement (probably $30). And then ask them too if anything else looks like it's worth fixing; wheel truing is common (esp if you hit a lot of potholes) but probably just do whatever else they recommend too.

Stop tying people's self-worth to achievement, particularly intellectual

Okay, goddamn, the thing that I was trying to say before in point 9 two posts ago is way better described by Scott Alexander here. (albeit in many more words)

He must be a really exceptionally hardworking writer. :P

Pokemon Watch

File this under "fun class/side projects." A watch that shows one Pokemon per minute instead of a numerical minute. (no hour hand.)

Memory Palaces are a great way to remember a list of things. Take the rooms in your house, associate each one with an item, and then “walk through” your house to remember all the items. But I only have ~5 rooms, and that’s being generous – what if I want to remember, say, 60 things? It’d be great to have a go-to list of 60 things that I could just pull up whenever and use them as loci for whatever list.

Enter Pokemon. These little critters (there are over 750 now) are unique, distinctive, named, and numbered. Learning the first 60 would give me a pretty universal memory-palace list. Furthermore, they’re chunked into groups of 2-3 (Bulbasaur evolves into Ivysaur evolves into Venusaur), and I still remember some characteristics of them from the Pokemon video game when I was a kid, making for even easier learning. And they’re cute.

Screenshots:
2:17pm, or 2:Pidgeotto, if you will.
2:19 is now 2:Rattata.

More info on some hacking around to fit 60 144x144 images in the watch here. Code’s here. Images are from http://www.marriland.com, for example http://www.marriland.com/forums/updates-and-announcements/featured-weekly-poll/444268-poll-6-which-is-your-favorite-kanto-starter. Code includes uPNG port from Matthew Hungerford:https://github.com/mhungerford/png_demo, which is itself derived from LodePNG version 20100808, by Lode Vandevenne and Sean Middleditch.

links dump

I know nobody else reads posts like these but I kind of want to save them/mentally catalogue all these links I've been saving:

History

1. The Forgotten History of How Automakers Invented "Jaywalking" - this is fascinating, surprising, and frustrating.

Current Things

2. Ok, first things first, Vote More on net neutrality. (by "vote more" I mean "yeah you can only vote once, but email your congressperson to make your voice heard more, and call them for even more.")

3. Also about cities: the world's not urbanizing, it's suburbanizing. This is the sort of thing that galvanizes me towards some kind of life mission: use BIG DATA to make these emerging megacities more like cities, less like megasuburbs (with all their flaws), and just generally overall not terrible.

4. On Charlie Hebdo: the murders were an atrocity; as the magazine does satire, it walks the line of good taste and occasionally crosses over, but was not a racist piece of trash and we should not jump on it as one; we should be allowed to draw pictures of Mohammed, we should avoid doing so because we're nice people but if we do it should not cause a bigger stink than if someone graffitis "Jesus sucks" or "the Dharma is a bunch of poo" on the side of a 7-11; most terrorists are not Muslims, but the ones who are doing so are really strategic and doing a good job of "sharpening the contradictions", and as a result the French should do what the Norwegians did after Breivik: nothing. Mourn the dead and don't overreact. (don't remember the name Breivik? He was that guy who shot ~80 kids on an island a couple years ago. that's right, not a celebrity.)

5. I support voluntary euthanasia/assisted suicide. (what's the best term for this?) Slate Star Codex is a rare blog that I stumbled on that is not particularly about anything, but I think it's really smart, wise, and worth reading it anyway. Here's his article about voluntary euthanasia/assisted suicide.

6. Where should we spend money to Help The World The Most? I always point to Givewell, and yeah, their approach seems pretty good. Another answer I'd accept: fix the US government. One way we can help fix the government is to fix the lobbying system. The wiseguys at Cards Against Humanity sent a bunch of money to try to do that. (and some jokes at politicians' expense; for the record, these clowns are 11/14 Republican, and I hate that we have to pick Republican or Democrat only but stuff like this is why Democrats are usually the lesser of two evils. okay okay some of these are just one-liners of dumb things they said, but some are indicative of deeper issues.)

7. Taxes: wait, we might actually raise taxes on the 1%? This sounds like a great idea. Also, Elizabeth Warren running for president does too.

8. A metapoint about all current events is offered by this great Cowbirds in Love comic. News (including internet news, maybe especially internet) throws us through this tumbler (NPI) of ignorance-rage-ignorance again.

Personal Life

9. Doing a startup, even if it's the successful "work 80 hour weeks but get rich in 5 years" kind, might leave you kind of emotionally and developmentally stunted. Similarly, grad school. So doing grad school as the not-80-hour-weeks way feels like the least likely to make me Einstein/Larry-and-Sergey but more likely to have a better life.

But here's the thing! It's not like I can choose work 80 hours and be Einstein or work 40 hours and be a boring but happy guy. Being Einstein probably happens if you find your niche, enjoy it, get awesome at it, and get lucky too. So don't worry that you're "choosing not to be Einstein." Do you, and hope for the best. At least that's the life philosophy I'm following now.

We need a word for this: taxes on "not worrying about it"

Cleveland installed red light/speed cameras. You speed, or you go through a red light a fraction of a second too late, and it takes a picture of your license plate and mails you a ticket. Ugh. (they then voted them down or something, cool, whatever.)

One friend, half-jokingly, said he supported red-light cameras because he knows where they all are and can avoid them. In effect, the city put in a tax on drivers that you can avoid (and therefore benefit from) if you do extra mental work to study the traffic maps.

This should have a name. Similar things:

- Ryanair. If you fly with them, you have to check a special box *not* to buy BS insurance, you have to carry on your bag (or maybe check it or whatever, depending on the day), you have to print your boarding pass ahead of time or pay $40, etc etc.

- Mail-in rebates. A bottle of wine is $15, or $10 after rebate, so they can advertise $10 but still make $15 because most people won't fill in the rebate.

- Credit card juggling for miles. (not carrying a balance, I mean signing up for cards to get the 40k miles bonus and then ditching the card.) I make a few hundred bucks worth a year doing this, but it does mean I have to monitor a few cards so I don't end up paying a bunch of annual fees.

If you have lots of free time and/or are good at organizing, you can easily do all of this. If not, you are taxed. This needs a name. "Simplicity Tax"?

(it probably goes without saying that I think most of these are monstrosities.)

Been getting a little grumpy on the internet

Grumpy in general, I guess, due in part to the internet.

You know how Fox News and CNN are our parents' generation's hate machine? They show bad news 24/7 and get you mad at who you should be mad at. I think Facebook and Twitter are that for our generation. Yeah, there's the occasional conversation, but when you look at people talking about things in the world, a lot of it is echo chamber or "someone did something bad once."

Maybe it's a result of quality of attention. You're not going to pay good attention to Facebook; you're going to give it half-focused strung-out attention. Maybe I need to be doing less of that in general. (see, for example, the fact that I never blog anymore; feels like I have fewer deep thoughts.)

Oh, and Merry Christmas, y'all.

Saying "Let's keep this a calm and logical argument" is itself part of the argument.

"An open letter to privileged people who play devil's advocate". If you see that this is on a site called "feministing.com" and immediately close it, then, unfortunately, you are one of the people that this is written for. Not sure how to fix this here, but it's a good article, please read it? :-/

This is particularly salient after the Mike Brown and Eric Garner cases. Some people's reaction to this might be something along these lines:
"A cop killed an innocent black guy. That doesn't happen in the world that I know. A bunch of people are angry about it. That's kind of unfortunate and annoying - I have enough problems in my life without having to confront some new police racism thing - and now they're rioting too? argh. Anyway, I kind of have to dismiss this, because I don't have time to actually process it, and I can't really believe it's real. But people are angry about it, so I've got to couch it in a well-thought-out logical argument. Let's see, I can pick out particular of Mike Brown's case where it's ambivalent whether he might have attacked Darren Wilson or something. Garner... uh, yeah, that was bad, but just an isolated bad cop."

On the other hand, some people's reaction to Brown and Garner might be something like "Raaaaaaaaaaarrgghh!"

In our society, the super-logical argument is privileged. The "raaargh" argument is dismissed as "emotional", "simple", etc. But sometimes we need the "raaargh" response. If you're arguing something "just because you want to get to the bottom of it", or you find yourself trying to pick holes in stories that a lot of your friends are arguing and you're not even sure why you're doing it anymore, maybe stop it. In being calm and logical, you are already adding a voice to the argument, and it's usually the voice of things not changing.

(appropriate analogy: think about why we shouldn't "teach the controversy" about evolution/god in science classes. "but what if--" no. this does not deserve kids' time.)

We need a word for this:

Implementing a general rule that causes a lot of bad edge cases.

For example: in India, there's a rule that you can't leave and come back into the country within two months on a tourist visa. This is ostensibly to prevent terrorism, but it sometimes causes a lot of annoyance for regular tourists like me. (they've since amended it to exclude tourism to neighboring countries; whatever.)

In programming, we'd call it a bug. Then we'd fix the code so it is more complicated but hopefully works fine. At any rate, the more the world gets bigger and more global, the more general rules we get, which means the exceptions get more common, which leads to either super-complicated rules (the IRS approach) or lots of people getting screwed (or both).

It's a common thing. I think we could talk about it better if there were a word for it. (or is there one that I just can't think of?)

Vitamin B12 has made my canker sores better

Check this the hell out. Internet browsing plus real data making a positive change in my life. tl;dr: I used to get canker sores a lot, then I started taking B12 daily, and now they are much less bad.

Long version: since I've been a kid, I got canker sores in my mouth pretty often. They are painful. One day last year I started tracking them. Then one day this year I was browsing the internet and saw this great infographic about supplements. I noticed there's a study about vitamin B12 helping canker sores. So I bought some B12 and kept tracking.

Every day I recorded how bad my sores were, from 0 (no sores) to 10 (terrible). Here's a graph:

Darker red = worse. Also, if it's light gray, that means I recorded data and I had no sores; if it's white, I didn't record data. Got lazy a bit. Y'know. The day I started taking B12 was June 14 2014, so in the bottom row, about midway through.

Then I compared average badness per day. In 2013 it was 1.8. In early 2014 (pre-B12) it was 3.4. After I started B12, it was 0.9. T-tested pre-B12 vs post-B12, and it was y'know significant P < .0000 etc but that's kind of BS because for so many reasons I can't use a T-test here (data's not normal).

Also, there are many data sins of different magnitudes here: collecting data on arbitrary periods each year (both starting with a sore), ignoring seasonality, using colors that we probably don't perceive linearly, scoring differently at the ends (e.g. 2 means I have a tender spot but no sore, so I really don't mind) etc.

But! There's theoretical backing too: I asked my dentist if B12 should help canker sores. He said, oh yeah, whole B complex is great for that kind of thing. Well dang, why didn't anyone tell me? But anyway, now I know, and now you know too. At least for me, seems to be working.

Thing about Ferguson I copied from Facebook

Ok I guess I talk about much more trivial things all the time, and it's enough of an issue that I better say a thing on Ferguson, so the few who are not in my echo chamber (older relatives?) might get a taste of what their 28yo white male privileged Facebook Friend thinks.

The one thing we as a nation, and particularly the sub-nation of white privileged people, have to learn here from Ferguson is that racism is alive and well here in America.

But bear with me! The word "racist" (and "racism") have become so toxic that you might have even written me off as an "angry liberal" even when I just said the word "racism". Please don't. I'm not trying to say that there are *bad people* being *purely evil*. It's just that we're dealing with a lot of broken systems, and the first step to fixing any problem is to acknowledge that it exists.

Here are some ways it is working:
- white cop shoots unarmed black teenager, gets not even indicted.
- said white cop gets $400k+ in "legal fund" donations - for what? he's not even on trial. Google "darren wilson fund".
- media coverage of teenager focuses on how he maybe smoked weed sometimes and might have stolen cigars, not the fact that he is an innocent human being whose life matters. Google "he was no angel".
- media coverage of aftermath focuses on "rioting" and "looting", while ignoring 3 things: 1. white "riots" are just as often called "celebrations", 2. looting is not the same as murder, 3. the over-the-top terrifying police-military response.
- you might not be able to imagine anything from their perspective. Google "why it's so hard for whites to understand ferguson."
- some people get caught up in the particulars of the case. Particulars of this case don't change the systemic issue. Getting caught up in the particulars is like saying "well, but look at that one game the Cavs won last year, see, they didn't need Lebron."
- there may be more but I should get back to work. Uh, I guess it may be good to google "respectability politics."

edit: ok, so anyway, those who would quibble over particulars of the Mike Brown case, now there's Eric Garner, so point is, institutional racism exists.