This is the microblog of Soren Bjornstad.
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David Cain
points out
that this word is properly pronounced with a long I, /laɪvd/, to rhyme with
dived. This has been corrupted because lived with a short I is
a common word – the past tense of the verb to live. But if you stop to
think about it, this makes no sense semantically. The word short-lived
doesn't mean that something “lived shortly”, but that it had a life which was
short. It's not formed from the verb to live at all, but from the noun
life (plural lives, adjectival form lived with a long
I).
By comparison, if a cutlery set has eight knives, you could say it's
eight-knived; that doesn't mean that it has stabbed someone with a
knife eight times (past tense of to knife, which, anytime I've ever
heard it, would actually be rendered knifed). Or consider a playground
with a lot of slides. This is a many-slided playground – surely not a
*many-slid playground!
That said, I've never heard a single person say it this way; it's a losing
battle.
(Just to make things more confusing, well-lived is properly pronounced
with a short I, because here well is an adverb describing how the act of
living was done, rather than an adjective describing the life, as in
short-lived; you're not talking about a life that is “well”.)
Living in Uptown Minneapolis, I've often been puzzled by this:
Pretend Franklin Avenue is labeled “20th St,” as you learn to do if you live
here for any length of time, and you'll see that the streets are equally spaced
(an eighth of a mile apart), but 21st and 23rd are missing from the series.
Why isn't it Franklin Street, since Avenues normally go north-south
and Streets go east-west in Minneapolis? I haven't been able to figure this one
out. Usually when one appears to be named incorrectly, it's because it goes
through a ninety-degree turn at some point, like Washington Avenue, which runs
parallel to the streets downtown but goes north-south in North Minneapolis, or
Hennepin Avenue, which runs east-west in Northeast but goes north-south in
downtown and South Minneapolis. But Franklin doesn't make any turns anywhere
until it merges with University Ave in St. Paul, unless you count a tiny little dip
it does at the very west end to avoid the tip of the “finger” of Lake of the Isles.
This is part of the act described below, but they don't explain why:
A really irritating fact is that in most of St. Paul, Avenues run east-west
and Streets run north-south, exactly the opposite of Minneapolis. I don't
think this has anything to do with it, but you never know.
I was able to find
this MinnPost article,
which explains a good chunk of the puzzle. The streets were not numbered at all
until 1873, when an act was passed that attempted to normalize all the names – a
tricky undertaking, since the area around Minneapolis had grown pretty
haphazardly and there were adjacent communities that used the same street names.
The key is this:
“I don’t know where I live now,” complained a man named “Pushit” to the
Minneapolis Tribune before the new nomenclature took effect, “but a friend of
mine knows where he lives. He formerly lived on Grape Street, but now he lives
on Ninth Street west, and the next street to him is Twenty-First Street west.”
This particular friend’s confusing new address came into being because when
Grape became Franklin, Franklin also took the place of a 20th Street 10 blocks
north of Lake Street, or 30th, and the streets on either side were forced to
follow that system, however imperfectly. These were called “adjusters.” The
greatest evidence of these “adjusters” today is that, except for a few odd
stretches in Phillips, there are no 21st or 23rd Streets in South Minneapolis.
Those two were dropped because there were only eight blocks between Franklin
and Lake, where ten were required to make the system work.
The need for this “adjuster” is most obvious today when you look on the map at
how downtown, where the streets are twisted about 35 degrees from the cardinal
directions to align with the riverfront, transitions into South Minneapolis,
where the streets are a strict, evenly spaced north-south-east-west grid. It's a
little harder to see how this works nowadays since the construction of I-35W
left breaks in many of the streets there, but it's still visible:
Since these streets have to make a turn to align with the new shape of the grid
as they proceed south, geometry forces the realigned streets further east to
have lower numbers at the same latitude if the same number is maintained for the
entire length of the street.
You might conclude from this that Minneapolis is unusually poorly suited to
numbered streets, but actually this weirdness is remarkably invisible unless you
live in one of the neighborhoods right next to a discontinuity (like Pushit's
friend above, or Cedar-Riverside today; even Cedar-Riverside is probably less
confusing than you might think since it's penned in by highways and the area
across a highway feels discontinuous anyway). They did a surprisingly good job,
and I think the “south of Franklin Street, restart at 21st Street” (er, “skip
21st Street and restart at 22nd Street”) maneuver is a big part of the reason it
succeeds.
What's still not entirely clear to me is exactly why Lake Street was indexed to
30th Street, rather than 28th Street, which is what results in the missing
blocks; once you're south of Franklin Street there are no more angled streets to
screw up the numbering, and there are the same number of streets all the way
across. The article claims that Franklin Street took the place of a 20th Street
“10 blocks north of Lake Street,” but as they momentarily point out, there just
aren't 10 blocks in between old 20th Street/new Franklin Street and Lake Street,
there are 8! Maybe the streets were already numbered (incorrectly for the new
sequence) in that section? Or they wanted Lake Street to be a round number? Or
there were additional streets somewhere that figured into the calculation in
1873 that no longer exist today? Lake Street isn't mentioned at all in the
source material; I think it was outside of city limits at the time.
In Ventura Village, 21st Street and 23rd Street get a little cameo, cutting
through the middle of the eighth-mile-block pattern:
I don't know if these existed at the time. They're oddballs since they show up
at halfway intervals – maybe they're upgraded alleys? If they did, it's possible
they had keeping these in the sequence in mind.
I forgot to post this here when it actually came out. This is another
unscripted workflow video in which I take notes in RemNote (see also #4), this time focusing on an abstract bioethics and philosophy
of science paper. I focus on doing a bunch of Concept/Descriptor cards and
using portals to split the concepts over multiple sections.
“Grades are for separating the good students from the bad students”: I’m not
actually interested in doing this. What am I going to do, send the good
students to heaven and send the bad students to hell?
Adam Mastroianni, “I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a cop”
[rt][source]
Some of the better modern keyboard firmware comes with options to give each
key two separate actions: one when it's tapped, and one when it's held for
longer than a certain threshold value. Kinesis's firmware actually has a pretty
cruddy implementation of this that only lets you use it for certain functions
(no macros allowed, and doesn't work on letter keys) and adds latency, but I've
still found it remarkably handy. I have three of these mappings:
The left spacebar: This being a split keyboard, there are two spacebar keys which can be mapped separately. I've remapped my left spacebar to act as Backspace when tapped and Delete when held. The left thumb is one of your strongest fingers and is almost entirely unused on a standard layout (at least for most right-handed typists), and it's really nice not to have to move your whole hand to make a correction (especially if you're as sloppy a typist as I am). I did find after enabling this that I actually hit the spacebar with my left hand much more often than I thought I did, usually when I have my hand on the mouse (for example, to scroll down on a web page, or to add a missing word space after moving the cursor with the mouse), so I remapped Fn+Spacebar to activate the actual space; now I can still get the effect of a space with one hand by dropping my thumb and pinky into position. There is also the minor annoyance that you can't hold down Backspace to backspace a bunch of letters, but in most cases I use Ctrl+Backspace (or some vim magic if available) if I need to delete a lot of text, so I haven't found this as annoying as I expected. (You could also use the standard Backspace key for this. I wound up remapping mine to toggle between virtual desktops instead because I didn't use this feature enough.)
The Enter key: Tapping sends Enter, holding sends Ctrl+Enter. Ctrl+Enter is like a “stronger Enter” in a lot of applications (for instance, it often sends the message in chat or comment fields that accept Enter to create a new line), and I use it a ton, so it's convenient to be able to type it with one finger.
The Tab key: Tapping sends Tab, holding sends Escape. Since I use vim or vim mode all over the place, having a way to press Escape without moving my hand significantly is delightful.
If you've never used this feature before, know that you need to spend a while
tuning the threshold for how many milliseconds you have to hold down the key
before it switches to the “hold” action; the right value will depend on how
fast you type and the exact finger motions you use for each key. If you set it
too high, activating the hold action will slow you down (and if you have crappy
firmware like me, your keystrokes will all be visibly delayed). If you set it
too low, you'll accidentally activate the hold action when you mean to activate
the tap action, which is irritating at best and dangerous at worst (e.g.,
sending an unfinished message instead of adding a new line can be disastrous!).
A lesser-known issue with the clickiness of Cherry Blue MX keyswitches
I'm a huge fan of the Cherry MX
Blue mechanical keyboard switches for general typing; they have a low
enough activation force to feel very easy to type on but high enough that you
can rest your hands on the keyboard without pushing them accidentally, and they
make a delightful clicky noise that makes it easy to tell whether you've
activated the key or not, as well as making you sound like you're working.
They are pretty noisy, though. I only use this keyboard in my apartment, so
there's nobody to bother…but I've recently noticed that they regularly trigger
the mute warning in video call software when I start typing in the middle of a
call, sometimes with a passive-aggressive message like “Are you talking?” This
is actually really annoying because it often steals the focus from the window
where I'm typing and I have to go manually click in the appropriate field
again!
My evaporative humidifier hadn't been working very well: normally it's able to
put a whole tank of water into the air in about a day, and it had been three
days and the tank still wasn't empty. I was wondering if the wick had become
too hardened with minerals to suck up the water well.
So I reached behind to pull it out and take a look, and instead I found...
I did an informal study on my 13 years of Anki spaced-repetition history to
settle a team question at RemNote: is our “Anki SM-2” algorithm (and Anki’s
SM-2 algorithm itself) too aggressive when scheduling overdue cards? Somewhat
to my surprise, and also to my embarrassment because I’ve been defending the
current behavior without data for many years, the answer appears to be yes;
more specifically, the more overdue a card is, the more it overestimates how
much of a bonus that should give the card's interval.
I had a discussion with a colleague who's not a native English speaker some
months ago about the perfect tense and realized that I had actually had the
wrong impression of the distinction. The line I took exception to in what he
had asked me to read for style was something to the effect of, “We worked hard
for the last two months to bring you this update.” I pointed out that it should
be “we have worked” (or maybe continuous, “we have been working”), and I said
this was because “it's complete.”
He asked, “But wouldn't that mean we aren't going to work hard anymore?”
The answer to that, of course, is no, that's just not the impression a native
speaker gets from that sentence, but I couldn't square that fact with my
explanation, so I spent my next two showers thinking about this, and I realized
that my explanation was completely wrong. The distinction isn't about whether
the action is “complete” per se, but whether it continues uninterrupted
through the present moment. (If anything, I was backwards – the simple past
is arguably more complete than the present perfect since its action does not
continue through the present.) I came up with two interesting examples
demonstrating this.
(A) Life and death: correct tense is mutually exclusive.
I have lived for 27 years.
Correct:
So far 27 years of living have elapsed for me,
and I am still living at the present moment.
*I lived for 27 years.
Wrong: This statement is semantically invalid
in any plausible world except the afterlife,
because it implies the action does not continue through the present,
and thus that I'm now dead.
(It would be semantically valid to say instead,
“I lived in the United States for 27 years”;
this is different because one can cease to live in a place and still make statements.
But this would be factually incorrect for me
because I have always lived in the United States and still do.
I could also say “I have lived in the United States for 27 years”; see (B).)
Mozart lived for 35 years (viz., from 1756–91).
Correct: This is a true statement and grammatically correct.
Mozart has lived for 35 years.
Wrong: This statement, while grammatically and semantically acceptable,
is factually incorrect,
because it implies that Mozart is still living
and the 35 years under discussion are an uninterrupted range ending in 2023,
while in fact Mozart died about 230 years ago.
Mozart has been dead for 232 years.
Correct: This is a true statement and grammatically correct.
*Mozart was dead for 232 years.
Wrong:
Semantically invalid because this implies that he came back to life at some subsequent point;
either he's still alive now, or he was briefly resurrected and then he died again.
(Because death is permanent, it always continues until the present time
and thus requires the perfect tense.)
(B) Relationships: both simple past and present perfect are correct, but have completely different meanings.
Alice and I have been together for two years.
This means we're still dating:
that is, the statement also applies today
and has not stopped applying since the beginning of the two years.
(I could probably still say this if we had broken up and gotten back together,
but only if it was a relatively short period of time.)
Alice and I were together for two years.
This means we broke up (or she died).
That might have happened yesterday or 40 years ago,
but it was necessarily prior to today,
and some period in which we weren't together has intervened.
Because both (1) and (2) are acceptable, just with different meanings,
you can even combine them if the situation warrants:
Alice and I were together for two years.
Then we broke up over a disagreement about cheesecake.
After a couple of months, we realized what a stupid mistake that was.
Now we've been together for another year, and we're getting married next month.
(Hey, we need a happy ending after all these deaths.)
Because I can't leave well enough alone, and because I'm the kind of person who
researches some random weird topic and writes about it on the internet when
he's home sick, here's everything nobody ever told you about not just Plan B
(#83) but all the other standard emergency contraception
options as well. (Supplemental to previous: #2.)
Since this feed seems to have become a purveyor of contraception information
for no apparent reason (previously: #27, #12, #2), two mildly outrageous
things you probably didn't know about Plan B, the most popular version of the
“morning-after pill” in the US:
A dose typically costs $40–50…for a single pill containing 1.5 mg of
levonorgestrel (the amount in a few standard birth-control pills) in a box
with some instructions. The raw materials can't possibly cost more than $5,
but as with everything in healthcare, the market is screwy and
manufacturers can charge people stupid amounts of money for being unlucky
enough to need basic healthcare. (The article points out that people are
understandably unwilling to buy generics here; emergency contraception
doesn't seem like something to take a risk on! But the generics aren't much
cheaper anyway.)
For years, the packaging has contained a line indicating that Plan B
may prevent implantation of a fertilized egg...but there's never actually
been any evidence this was the case. Instead, the manufacturer added it in
a short-sighted political move to appease people who either didn't want it
on the market for moral reasons or argued that if there was even an
impossibly small chance it could happen, then it was causing abortions and
should be prohibited (since then, further research has improved the case
that it does not). Now many of even the most sex-positive and
pro-contraceptive people believe it actually does this. Sigh. (Dense but very interesting
paper on the history and ethics of this whole thing.)
Incidentally, in case you ever need to know for yourself or anyone else, as of
2013 anybody can walk into a US pharmacy and buy Plan B over-the-counter
without ID or consultation or any other hoops, regardless of gender or age.
I was recently reminded that I was in college when I realized that when you
hold hands, there are two distinct orientations and one person has to go
“under” and the other has to go “over.” Somehow, every previous time I had held
hands in my life – which I don't think was something I did unusually
uncommonly – I had gone “under” and the person I was holding hands with had
either naturally started “over,” or adjusted without saying anything or making
enough of a deal about it that I noticed.
It's fascinating to me how there are just so many random things to know in
life, which you don't learn automatically and which are so specific and
everyday that nobody writes them down or tries to teach them to you, and
because of that you can just completely miss one for years and years.
Zettelkasten musings on a rare and specific kind of personal relationship and
conversation in which everything you say is meaningful, relevant, enjoyable,
and, in the words of my source, “helps you become.” What characterizes these
relationships and how do you find them?
I think we tend to assume that a task being easy means it is neither urgent
nor important. Of course, this might be true, but in reality the difficulty of
the task says nothing about its urgency or importance. We may need to pay
special attention to easy items to ensure they are handled appropriately.
Commodification of attention is a system of organizational,
psychological, and financial innovations that enables one to make money and/or
curry favor by simply convincing people to spend time looking at things,
usually virtual ones. In this post, I explore a variety of modern problems,
especially social ones, I think COA is partially responsible for, including the
degradation of quality in web searches, many of the negative effects of social
media, smartphone addiction, and a decline in spontaneity and general freedom
of socialization, as well as how COVID plays into all of this.
This afternoon I was trying to watch TV with a friend, and whenever she tried
to select something on Netflix to watch, the Roku app crashed and we had to
start over again. After several repetitions, she handed the remote to me,
suggesting that the TV “didn't like her” and maybe I would have better luck. I
didn't, but I realized later that at the time, I think I actually legitimately
thought this sounded like a reasonable troubleshooting step!
As dumb as that sounds, we ended up “solving” the problem by going to Target
(which we wanted to do anyway) and coming back, then trying again. This time it
worked on the first try. It seems to me that this approach has an only
marginally larger space of reasonable causal explanations, and yet this one
worked.
I'm not sure what the lesson here is, except that software is terrible and I
have no idea how anything ever works at all.
In which the MPD does their job and I clean up blueberries left by a heroin addict
Last Saturday, I was busy at home all day, and when I stepped out to take out
my trash and go for a walk at around 4:00 in the afternoon, I noticed that my
car wasn't in its spot. That's pretty strange, I thought, where would I have
left it? It wasn't until I thought for a few more moments that I realized it
couldn't possibly have been me being an idiot and forgetting where I parked, as
it normally is; I'd gotten home after midnight and gone right into my apartment
and not left it since, and there was no conceivable reason I would have parked
anywhere than in my assigned spot. I hadn't been drinking or anything, and I
knew I'd driven home.
My upstairs neighbor still had a key from when I was in San Francisco earlier
this year (so she could move my car out of the way of the plows as needed), so
I texted her to ask if she'd moved it for some reason, but she definitely
hadn't. And there was no reason I would have been towed, and no tracks in the
fresh snow from a tow truck. Which seemingly left only the possibility it had
been stolen. This was all but confirmed when I noticed that two of my car's
floor mats had been left on the ground; obviously a tow driver wouldn't have
broken into my car and thrown out the floor mats before taking it!
After a frustrating 20 minutes of trying to find a non-emergency number that
was open over the weekend, I went ahead and called 911 and reported it stolen.
They took the details over the phone and someone from the police department
came out basically promptly (they were a few minutes later than expected, but
who isn't?) and was very nice and helpful.
Not only that, but they actually found my car Monday morning and brought it
into the impound lot. Granted, they didn't have a very hard time; whoever stole
it had abandoned it in the middle of the lane during rush hour at 50th and
Xerxes (a major intersection in SW Minneapolis).
On Thursday I spent a couple of hours cleaning out all the junk they left in
the car, which included, along with a bunch of trash and random items,
somewhere around eight used needles (they helpfully provided a portable sharps
container in the back seat, although it would have been rather more helpful had
they actually put the sharps in the sharps container; I guess that
would have made too much sense). There were also a bunch of spilled blueberries
on the floor, which doesn't exactly strike me as common junkie food! The car is
still at the body shop getting an inspection, a new bumper, and a thorough
cleaning, but it got away without much damage for a stolen car and I'll
hopefully have it back in a few days.
Surprisingly, they didn't actually steal anything that was inside the car
except for my dashcam (unsurprisingly; you'd have to be pretty dumb to leave a
live dashcam in a stolen car), the spare key I'd left inside the car by mistake
(obviously how they stole it; I must have inadvertently left the door unlocked
as well, on the day that this person decided to wander to the back of my
apartment building and try the doors on the parked cars, setting up a perfect
storm), and, bizarrely, my car's proof of registration and insurance. They
didn't even take the cash I'd left inside.
Anyway, my faith that the Minneapolis Police Department isn't completely
useless was slightly restored! Of course, it probably helps that I'm white…
In #47, in discussing Lowry Hill Park, I mentioned in
passing that Minneapolis used to have an extensive streetcar system that was
paved over in the mid-20th century.
This winter has turned our roads into a mess of potholes, probably due to an
unusual number of freeze-thaw cycles (to give you an idea of how bad it is, a
friend told me they saw a driver in front of them run over a pothole on the
I-94 onramp at Hennepin Avenue that gave such a big jolt that the airbags
deployed). In a discussion about the roads on the Minneapolis subreddit,
someone noted that damage at the intersection of Lake Street and Hennepin
Avenue had actually exposed the old tracks and brick roadbed that had been
paved over, so I took a little detour over there when I walked down to the bank
today, and sure enough:
Closeup taken from the other side while crossing (the brick is remarkably
well-preserved; I guess being sealed in by asphalt will do that):
In which ChatGPT does chord analysis not even wrong
A bluesy song I'm learning includes the following progression in the key of D
major:
D – F#7 – G – D – A – D
(Actually, I added the seventh because it sounded better with the mandolin's
sometimes-awkward voicing; it was a bare F# major in my source.)
I wasn't, and am still not, sure how to describe the function of the F#
dominant seventh. When you play it, you can hear that it plainly leads into the
G, which makes some sense to me given that it's built on the seventh scale
degree of G and thus acts sort of like a V7/V (D7) would, but I can't quite put
a name on it. (I initially suspected tritone
substitution, but the relationship is off by a whole step.) In a major key,
it doesn't make sense to talk about the seventh scale degree being major, so it
must be getting borrowed from some other scale or have some funky name or
principle all its own. Please enlighten me if you know!
Anyhow, as part of my search, I decided to see how ChatGPT would do at chord
analysis. Here's what I got:
This actually wasn't a horribly bad first attempt; my initial prediction
before looking at the notes was also that the chord was a V/V or something
similar. But when I pointed out that this couldn't be correct because the V in
D major is A, and F# is separated from A by a major sixth, it produced this
delightfully confident nonsense:
10/10 on matching the form of a harmonic analysis, 0/10 on forming a logical argument.
For my whole life, I have strongly disliked iced tea.
This wouldn't be particularly weird, except that I love hot tea
and drink probably 4–6 cups on a typical day.
Iced tea, even high-quality brewed iced tea,
tastes gross and bitter and sometimes even makes me gag.
I think there might be something funny going on here
where most people's perception of tea strength
scales differently based on temperature than mine.
Ordinarily people brew iced tea around twice as strong as hot tea
because tastes are perceived more weakly when food is cold.
Maybe I should try some iced-tea brewing experiments
at different intermediate strengths
and see if it ever starts tasting good?
Possibly related: I dislike hot drinks that contain alcohol
even though I like most cold or room-temperature alcoholic beverages,
including strong spirits –
the alcohol taste feels quite overpowering in hot drinks.
I'm not sure how this fits into that picture, though,
since the iced tea/hot tea divide would suggest
that I notice temperature-based strength differences
less than the average person,
while this would seemingly suggest more.
Ever wonder why hand dryers take such a long time to warm up? Turns
out…they don't, as xkcd pointed
out this week. Hand dryers work by encouraging the water to evaporate from
your hands. When water evaporates off something, it cools rapidly – think about
what happens when you climb out of a bath or pool. (This is also how both
sweating and swamp
coolers dissipate heat.) In the case of hand dryers, this cooling effect is
strong enough to make the jet feel cold even though it's actually quite hot –
until your hands are nearly dry, just in time to make you grumble about how it
only managed to get nice and hot when you were already done drying your hands.
I still didn't quite believe this, but you can try this one at home! Grab a
hair dryer, set it down sideways on a flat surface with something behind it to
prevent it from jet-propelling itself across the table (or, better yet, enlist
a fellow householder to hold it, then switch places and enlighten them with
this demo), and get just one of your hands wet. Then switch it on at the
highest and hottest setting. Sure enough, mine reaches full power – hot enough
to be painful on a closely placed dry hand – within 5 seconds after a cold
start, yet still feels cold on the wet hand.
Come to think of it, I've been low-grade puzzled for years about why my hair
dryer only sometimes seems to take forever to heat up. Once you know
all this, of course, the answer is as blatantly obvious as it was mysterious
before: sometimes my hair is wetter when I start drying it, which makes it feel
colder for longer.
I'm sure some of y'all think this is obvious and are laughing at the rest of
us now, to which I can only say, this xkcd appears to be autobiographical, and
if Randall Monroe, a former NASA engineer and author of bestselling silly
physics books, only recently figured this out, it can't be that
obvious, can it?
Metaphor is an experimental new kind of
search engine based on an LLM. Rather than typing in keywords describing what
you're looking for, you pretend you already have the link you want and are
sending it to a friend, and write a brief introduction explaining what it is.
Then it supplies a list of predictions for what link you might be talking about.
This works surprisingly well. I find it especially useful if I am thinking of an
article I know exists somewhere on the web, but can't remember what it was
called; it's challenging to find effective keywords for a traditional search
engine in this case, but usually easy to describe the article in enough detail
that Metaphor can find it.
The other day I was on a first date
and we were talking about our experiences of the early COVID-19 pandemic,
and I mentioned that I had used much of my excessive free time to write
a textbook called Grok TiddlyWiki.
Naturally, she asked what TiddlyWiki was,
and I realized, somewhat to my alarm, that I had no effective way to explain it.
If anyone in the entire world
should be able to give a good elevator pitch for TiddlyWiki,
surely it ought to be me,
seeing as I recently spent a year and a half writing a book to teach people how to use it!
My first reach was “Notion, but more customizable,”
but she hadn't heard of Notion,
so that didn't help at all,
and this seems like a cop-out anyway;
it just moves the question to, what the heck is Notion, actually?
Once you get over the immediate absurdity of the fact that
I just wrote a book about this tool and I still can't concisely explain what it is,
that this is challenging isn't actually all that surprising:
a general problem with researching, developing, and promoting
tools for thought like TiddlyWiki
is that they
don't wow.
That is, because the really revolutionary ones allow you to think in new ways,
the problem of understanding why the tool is useful
and the problem of learning the tool
are necessarily intertwined;
without the habits of thought developed by learning and using the tool,
the tool in some way can't make sense.
(Paul Graham popularized this line of thought back in 2001
when he wrote about Blub programmers.)
This said, surely I can at least do better than “Notion, but more customizable.”
A good start is the front page of Grok itself:
TiddlyWiki is a human-shaped tool for organizing information and taking notes. It stores and relates information in a non-linear but structured way, just like your brain, and it doesn't forget things.
It's helpful to add some use cases, like I do a bit lower down:
People use TiddlyWiki for keeping notes at their jobs, collecting their ideas, keeping track of what they read, drafting books, building static websites, storing recipes, managing genealogical databases, planning tabletop role-playing campaigns, and much more.
The big problem here is that, reading this description,
you still don't know anything
about how one uses TiddlyWiki to do this.
This is not really a problem for Grok TiddlyWiki,
since the entire rest of the book is about this,
but it's a big problem if you're trying to educate and/or hook
people who aren't already interested.
It's like we've explained what a car is
but not talked about how one uses the steering wheel
and pedals to make it move around.
If you've never heard of a car or seen someone drive one,
it's going to be tough to imagine someone using one without those details,
and I find it's difficult to understand the value or purpose of software
if you can't imagine the experience of using it.
Here's my best shot at a version that incorporates most of the ideas above.
It starts by comparing to a tool almost everyone will know,
but doesn't rely on that comparison;
it incorporates the “human-shaped” idea
and the example use cases,
and it tries to give a picture of the actions one takes
when working with a TiddlyWiki.
Its biggest weakness is that it tends on the formal and dense side.
I feel like I should be spending many more days on this problem;
it's hard to imagine how the field of tools for thought in general
is going to succeed unless we find a way to explain why it's important!
TiddlyWiki is a tool that helps you think in new ways
by extending the fundamental ideas of the spreadsheet
so that they work effectively with long-form prose.
Information in TiddlyWiki has a flexible structure,
so you can match the shape of your content within the wiki
to the way you think about it.
Things can be organized strictly,
in tables like a spreadsheet
or in hierarchies like an outline,
or loosely, in webs of related components with nebulous relationships,
and you can show the same data in different formats at different times.
You split your facts and ideas into little pieces called tiddlers
(much like rows of a spreadsheet)
and the tiddlers into fields (much like columns),
then add links and tags to describe the relationships between tiddlers.
Then you can use custom formulas and formatting options
to search, filter, sort,
answer questions about the relationships between things,
and change the appearance of your wiki to look like almost anything at all.
The amount of flexibility TiddlyWiki affords makes it challenging to learn or even explain
– you have to develop a few new ways of thinking to make effective use of the tool –
so that's what my book is designed to help with.
I use my primary TiddlyWiki as a sort of topically organized journal,
keeping track of things I've learned about myself, my life, and the world
in a form where I can easily build on previous insights.
I love this diagram of a ferry speeding away while the person holds out their
watch with a balled fist. It looks like they're trying to dive onto the distant
ferry or something (Angel Island):
As we all know, once you turn 18, you immediately become totally responsible
and would never do anything illegal with spray paint or Sharpies (Muni M line):
And when children gather, it's “congregating”. When adults gather, it's “loitering” and illegal (Nob Hill):
Non-binary people, just come right in (Mendocino Botanical Gardens):
Wouldn't want to offend the trash (Nob Hill):
Above the toilet at a group house in Berkeley. Dreadful spelling and grammar
aside, I'm so confused by “whenever possib”. Did the person who wrote this
forget to finish the word, or figure everyone would get it even though it
didn't fit? When would it not be possible to avoid flushing kitchen paper
towels down the toilet? When would it be considered possible in
America to avoid flushing toilet paper down the toilet?
I tried to go for a walk on the beach today. I did not think to check the wind
speed, which turned out to be 30mph gusting to 55mph. The Pacific was looking
pretty majestic, but I basically got low-pressure sandblasted as I walked
along. I also planned to take a shortcut through what looked on Google Maps
like a public park but turned out to be a heavily fenced private golf course,
and ended up having to walk along the median of a four-lane highway and then
vault over a jersey barrier to get to the beach (there wasn't too much traffic
and it felt pretty safe, but it wasn't exactly pleasant!).
You know it's windy when your windsockponytail sits at the side of your
head pointing forward:
(This is my “trying not to lose my balance in the wind or have dust blown in
my eyes” face.)
I didn't realize I needed this until I found the option and tried it out of
curiosity. Frequently, what you want to know when you check the time and date
is really how long you have until the next thing you need to do. This option
inconspicuously shows the name and time of the next item on your calendar (or
the current item, if it's in progress, as you can see here) next to the date.
You can configure this by long-pressing in the middle of the lock screen,
tapping “Customize”, then the lock screen thumbnail, then the date, and
selecting the “Next Event” widget.
Now in San Francisco for the month, this weekend I rented a car and did a road
trip north on Highway 1 to Fort Bragg, a beautiful drive. I brought with me and
listened to (multiple times) all the albums of Gillian Welch, who I recently
rediscovered. As funny as it sounds to say this since this was only five years
ago, I think I wasn't old enough to appreciate it when I heard it for the first
time, just after graduating college.
(Although most of the music they make together is under the name “Gillian
Welch”, Welch's partner David Rawlings is as essential a part of it as she is;
they write the songs together and he plays lead guitar and sings harmony on
everything.)
What I love about Welch and Rawlings – and the reason I think I wasn't
old enough to get it before – is that they tell the story of life just
like it is. They neither sugarcoat things nor tell unmitigated tragedies; their
songs are almost universally about suffering and loss and struggle, often
severe, and yet somewhere there's always a tinge of solace and redemption,
often so subtle and implied that you can't figure out where it comes from, but
you feel it, a testament to the fact that despite all this, people manage to
make life not just tolerable but very worth living. There are certainly no
promises, but there is hope.
In recent years their arrangements have been sparse, usually just their voices
and two guitars, occasionally a little mandolin or banjo or percussion; it
sounds like two people sitting on their porch picking, except they're insanely
good. Musicians will know these simple arrangements are not the easiest but the
hardest to get right, because there's nowhere to hide the mistakes. But the two
of them are so perfectly in sync that there aren't any mistakes to hide. Their
voices even blend so well that sometimes I don't immediately notice Rawlings
has come in, even though he's singing different notes!
I think their finest work so far is The
Harrow and the Harvest, published in 2011. The epitome of everything
I've said above is the track “Hard
Times”, which borrows the title from Stephen Foster but takes the sentiment
in a totally different direction. Instead of being comfortable and sparing a
thought for those worse off than them, the characters are in the thick of it,
dealing with the hard times, and they don't presume to ask for hard times to
“come again no more,” but simply promise themselves that the hard times “won't rule
their minds no more.” Yet the ploughman, very relatably, fails to take his own
advice, falling victim to modernization and ceasing his refrain, even as the
audience is exhorted to celebrate in the midst of it one more time.
In #11, I was searching for terminology related to:
...a pattern I've started noticing, in which someone wants to achieve a
particular goal A, or likes a particular process or activity in total, but is
incapable of, scared of, or strongly dislikes a necessary component or step of
that goal/process/activity A′, creating an infuriating tension and an
obstacle to progress.
While I still don't have a clean word I like for it (but thanks to those who
have sent suggestions and interesting notes!), I noticed that David Cain has
the following enlightening diagram describing more or less this phenomenon in
his “How
Mindfulness Creates Freedom”:
The greener an area, the more desirable it is. Sometimes, to get to the green A
territory, you have to pass through some less-green A' territory.
Topic: A way to describe being happy to do something only if others want to do it
Situation (based on a true story): Three friends, Alice, Bob, and
Charlie, are planning on meeting up, but there is heavy snow. Alice writes to
say she can't make it because her street hasn't been plowed yet and her car
doesn't have enough clearance to drive through the snow. Bob and Charlie thus
learn the roads are probably going to be a real pain to venture out on, and
Alice can't make it, so they start to consider canceling, but aren't sure. Bob
thinks he would enjoy going if Charlie still actively wants to meet up, but
doesn't want to bother if they both feel this way.
Is there a concise way to describe Bob's attitude?
Near misses:
Abilene paradox:
In this one, everyone actively believes they would prefer not to go,
and agrees only because they (wrongly) believe others want to.
In my example, Bob believes he would legitimately enjoy going
as long as Charlie really wants to be there.
Responsive desire (mildly NSFW):
Too specific and doesn't quite capture
the dependence on another person's attitude.
Suggestions
D.K.
2023-01-08 05:06
Call Bob's attitude "socially conditioned (partial) intent".
"Conditioned" comes from "conditional" rather than e.g. "classical conditioning".
I occasionally offer awards to internet strangers who send me recommendations I love.
If I am so moved, your choice of:
$10 USD sent via PayPal
a personal thank-you note via snail mail
grab a drink with me sometime you're in Minneapolis (or I'm near you) and talk about the recommendation or anything else
Gratitude and brownie points awarded in all circumstances!
The remarkable compounding of small amounts of time
The average city dweller spends around four months of their life waiting at
red lights.
If this sounds impossible, here's the math: suppose you average about five
minutes a day waiting at various red lights. (That's probably eight average
lights' worth of waiting? I definitely wait at more some days, but then there
are days I don't go much of anywhere since I work from home, so this seems
about right. I'd expect it to be more for people who have significant commutes.
If you take the subway or grade-separated light rail most of the time, you get
to skip most of the red lights, but then you wait for your train to arrive
instead.) That makes 1,825 minutes per year. Then we'll say you spend 60 years
of your life in the city and traveling around regularly (this is probably an
underestimate), for 109,500 total minutes spent at red lights. Divide by 60
again for hours, and by 16 for waking hours per day, and you get 114 waking
days spent waiting, or just under four months.
Five minutes a day doesn't seem like much of a commitment. But actually it's a
huge one. You can get a lot done in five minutes a day if you're
consistent.
You can also waste an enormous amount of time in five minutes a day if you're not
doing something worthwhile with it. (Exercise for the reader: can you do
something interesting while waiting at red lights?)
Rule of thumb: 15 minutes a day is 1/60 of your time. If you spend
15 minutes daily for a year, you will have spent 6 days (or 12 full-time
work days) total; for 60 years, 1 year total.
Even in a rather feminist-ideology-saturated 2022, it's quite rare for
straight women to ask out straight men. People of all genders seem to agree
this is silly, then shrug and keep doing exactly the same thing.
It struck me recently that there is at least one reason that
expecting one clearly defined person in any potential pairing to be in charge
of expressing interest could be functionally useful. Consider that it's quite
common for two people to actually be quite interested in becoming friends, but
for nobody to ever make a move because they're kind of shy and figure the other
person, presumably with better social skills, would do so if they were
interested. But when one person has reason to expect that the other will
not make the first move even if they're interested, there's much
stronger motivation for them to act. My suspicion is that significantly more
low-level-interest situations turn into dates under the current expectations
than would without them.
I'm not sure if that's worth it (especially because sometimes people don't
realize they're interested until another person expresses interest), but it's
certainly interesting. This is part of a constellation of struggles playing out
in today's world, between having social rules that are unnecessarily limiting
and/or don't work for some people, and having so few rules that people don't
know what to do. I expect to write more about this later.
I had to reboot my printer the other day, and it decided not to come back on
after I turned it off. Pressing the power button did nothing, unplugging it and
plugging it back in did nothing, and so on.
After trying unsuccessfully to start it several times over a few days, I was
on the point of deciding it had crapped out on me and buying a new printer, but
was stubborn enough to try wading through some terrible troubleshooting advice
on the internet first. After several useless attempts, I found someone who
recommended unplugging the printer, removing the paper tray, and plugging it
back in. Astoundingly, this somehow worked – the printer came on normally again
and works as well as always (which is “not that well,” since it's a
consumer-grade printer, but I'll take what I can get).
This reminds me of the time my monitor stopped working and I took it apart to
see if anything was obviously wrong. I couldn't find anything, so I put it back
together and on a whim plugged it in again. It worked again, and continued
working for another 5 years. There was one extra screw that I couldn't find a
place for, so I dubbed that the “screw of malfunctioning” and threw it away.
I seem to have accidentally created a tradition of recording a song or two for
the internet at the end of every year. Two love songs on the mandolin this
year: “Pretty Saro” and “Tell Me True.”
I'll be in/around San Francisco from January 22 to February 20 (working days,
exploring evenings and weekends). I have never been to the West Coast before.
If you're nearby and want to meet up, or you have something to recommend to me,
shoot me an email or reply below! I have very few plans at the moment.
Suggestions
I occasionally offer awards to internet strangers who send me recommendations I love.
If I am so moved, your choice of:
$10 USD sent via PayPal
a personal thank-you note via snail mail
grab a drink with me sometime you're in Minneapolis (or I'm near you) and talk about the recommendation or anything else
Gratitude and brownie points awarded in all circumstances!
Traffic Control Hall of Shame: sign overload and combined YIELD and STOP signs
Among the most confusing intersections I've ever seen:
These train tracks in Southwest Minneapolis (Linden Hills, next to Lake
Harriet) are used only for a low-speed
tourist attraction, so there are no crossing arms, and they put a YIELD
sign in front of them. So far so good. But then there's an intersection
immediately after it, with not even enough space to stop your car past
the tracks…and cross traffic has a STOP sign. But only on the right, not on the
left, because that street is one-way. Plus there's the post on the corner with
4 extra signs that draw away your attention and can block your view of the STOP
sign if you look over there while you're in your car.
Of course, this isn't technically wrong – the YIELD sign is only
meant to apply to the train tracks, and then there is no sign controlling the
actual intersection, so you can go through and cross traffic has to stop for
you. But it's confusing as heck and they definitely should have picked a
different approach.
What happened to me, coming up to the intersection from the direction the
camera is looking: I yielded to (nonexistent) rail traffic, then started across
the tracks and was about to go through the intersection when I saw someone
coming from the right and went “Whoa, I had a YIELD sign!” and slammed on the
brakes, only to see they had a STOP sign. I had to walk back and look at the
intersection again after I parked to figure out what happened.
I stopped updating on new stuff because I got busy, including a new and very
important thing covering several weeks that I don't want to share with the
internet. Hoping to get back to regular updates here shortly!
Someone needs to invent a hand gesture for driving that means “I know you
thought that was polite, but it was actually rude, cut it out.” There are times
when you can't really flip someone off or act affronted because they weren't
trying to be rude (so they would just conclude you're rude instead of
realizing they did something wrong), but if you wave or even do nothing,
they'll continue to think they're being nice.
The number-one use case would be when people yield even though they aren't
supposed to, creating unnecessary confusion, but now that I've had this idea, I
keep finding other moments I'd like to use it!
This 30-minute video provides a fantastic and accessible overview of the
limitations of provability and decidability, including self-referential
paradoxes, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, and the halting problem. Highly
recommended, even if you're familiar with some or all of these ideas.
Today I helped supervise a bunch of high-schoolers at an overnight youth event
at my church, which I have not done before. This was equal parts chaos and fun
and consisted mostly of (1) staying up until 2 AM and (2) telling the kids not
to touch things that weren't theirs, break things, or disappear on us.
I felt about 15 years younger (in a good way) when I found myself and the
youth director (the only adults there) lying on the floor in sleeping bags in
the dark at 1:30 AM talking. The only difference was that we were talking about
getting older instead of high-school gossip!
Gratuitous pedantic note on the newness of this experience: I was
technically a chaperone once before, at an event where anyone over 18 had
to be registered as one and I was 18 years and 2 months. But this feels
like claiming you've been to a country because you connected through an
international airport there; technically you were on the ground
within the country's borders, but realistically, for any reason you might
care about whether you had been there, it makes no sense to count it. Very
different experience this time.
Today I went to the state park and historic site at Fort Snelling, located
next to the airport just southeast of Minneapolis, at the confluence of the
Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers.
First I hiked a couple of miles. The trails were nice, many running next to
one of the rivers, and I'll definitely come back here; the only major drawback
is that it's pretty noisy, as it's right next to both the airport and several
major highways. Indeed, the historic area was almost demolished for Highway 5 –
after public outcry, they ended up routing the highway through a tunnel
underneath it instead. (A substantial part of Fort Snelling was demolished for
the airport as well, but it was an area with very little historic value, made
up mostly of barracks for temporary residents who were going through training
or processing, some of them made of little more than tar paper on frames.)
Because it's midwinter, a lot of the historic site was closed, including the
main fort building, but the side museum was open, with a number of volunteers
doing little presentations. Normally I find people talking to me in museums
really annoying, because the exhibits are designed to be self-paced and then
you're forced to context-switch all the time between a carefully designed
exhibit and some random person who's telling you stuff. But these folks were
good and the exhibits were actually pretty boring without them, so I ended up
appreciating it (special shout-out to the woman who had just started yesterday
but was already able to talk in great detail for 20 minutes to me and two other
people about the complete chronology and function of the buildings on an
unlabeled birds-eye diorama of the fort).
I'll have to stop back up next summer to see the rest; they just redid the
whole place a couple of years ago and all of it is supposed to be really good.
The other night I dreamed that I was at a public restroom which required me to
create an account in order to use the toilet. This seems like the epitome of
technological bureaucracy in 2022, and is entirely believable!
I missed yesterday because I was busy working and writing a bunch of stuff in
my Zettelkasten, but today I got back on the bandwagon with a visit to a little
tiny tea store which I've passed by a few times and never gone into. You just
stand in front of the counter and tell the lady what you're interested in, and
she finds something to recommend and sells it to you.
I haven't actually tried the tea yet (I would do it now, but I don't need more
caffeine at 10:30 pm), so I'll come back and update this when I have a report
on whether it's any good! (I'm guessing loose tea from a store that sells only
tea and that's about $0.50 per cup is going to be pretty good, but you never
know.)
While I was writing examples for the on-line help of a new feature of Dreamdir, Copilot (quite
remarkably) recognized what I was trying to do with the rather hackish awk
pattern patsplit($4, arr, /,/) == 1 { print $0 } (split a string
on commas, and use this operation's return value, informing us how many splits
were made and thus how many commas were in the line, to decide whether to show
the line or not – completely ignoring the actual split values). It even drily
noted that “this is a contrived example,” which it certainly is!
Only, it's not quite right! The return value of patsplit
here is 1 not if there is exactly one person in the column, but if there are
exactly two people in the column, because there would be no comma at all, and
hence zero splits, if there was only a single comma-separated value. It's
interesting that it made exactly the sort of mistake that a human programmer
would make here – I didn't even notice the error until I actually ran the
command and looked at the output to be sure I hadn't made any syntax errors.
Indeed, there's no particular reason awk would have to return 0 if
there are no splits; it could easily have chosen to define the return value as
the number of elements in the resulting array, in which case Copilot's
explanation would be right; it just doesn't. (0 does have the benefit that the
return value becomes falsy if the delimiter wasn't found, though, which could
be convenient on occasion.)
Incidentally, the { print $0 } isn't actually necessary: if an
awk program consists of only one pattern with no body, the body is assumed
to be { print $0 }. I left it in here in case people reading
the examples don't know this!)
Today I went for a walk in the Lowry Hill neighborhood, as prompted by a nifty
iPhone app called Randonautica which I use occasionally. This lets you select a
radius around your current location, then randomly picks a spot you're supposed
to go explore somewhere within it (using some amusingly woo-woo method).
Inevitably, you find something interesting in the area it instructs you to
visit, not of course because its “method” actually knows where interesting
things are, but because interesting things are all around us, and we usually
aren't paying attention.
There was a surprisingly nice view of the skyline right at the spot it pointed
me to, although my phone camera didn't do the best job of capturing it:
On the way back, I went through Thomas Lowry Park, named after the streetcar
magnate who made huge contributions to Minneapolis's transportation system (the
streetcar tracks have been long since paved over, to the eternal regret of
Minneapolis urbanists). I had not been there before, and had read the other day
that it has a fountain made up of a series of cascading pools. Presumably these
are them, though it was a wee bit cold for any fountain action today:
And a little further on, in the middle of some really cool historic apartment
blocks, was this nifty carved lamppost in front of a random house:
Today there's a winter storm warning, so I'm not going anywhere. Instead I
made a really intense mushroom barley soup from an amazing soup cookbook called
Dairy Hollow House Soup and Bread, written by a woman named (I kid you
not) Crescent Dragonwagon. It's
undoubtedly the richest vegan soup I've ever had – mixed dried forest
mushrooms, button mushrooms, white wine, the typical soup vegetables (including
parsnip for that little bit of bitter zest!) and a homemade roasted vegetable
stock with extra mushroom stems.
Every recipe from the book I've tried is good, but many of them are quite a
production – being recipes they make at Dragonwagon's inn's restaurant, it's
rare to find one with fewer than fifteen ingredients, and there are usually lots
of steps. This one had 19, and one of them was the stock, which itself had 10.
But if you don't think vegetable broth is good, this one will change your mind!
I would have happily sipped a cup of it if I hadn't needed all of it for the
soup. Totally worth it.
I'm a mushroom lover, so this recipe couldn't really be bad. It came out a
little sweeter than I would have preferred though – next time I'm going to try
a very dry wine instead of the medium-dry the recipe called for. (It could be
partly the fault of the vegetable stock I chose, which is a touch sweet because
the veggies are caramelized.) Met expectations overall, though it only scores
that low because I have high expectations of the cookbook.
When I started working from home (permanently, post-pandemic-restrictions), I
had originally planned to go work somewhere else for part of the day
most days. As of yesterday, I had somehow managed to do that exactly
zero days on which I was otherwise based in my home office. While I'm
introverted enough that I don't get lonely from being at home all day as long
as I go hang out with other people a couple of times a week, it's definitely
still better for me to get out of my apartment most days, so I'm planning to
try out a bunch of nearby spots I could work and hopefully find a couple that I
can become a regular at.
One problem with working away from home is that there are some tasks I can do
way more effectively at my desk, with two 24-inch monitors, access to four
different computers running different operating systems, and a whole office
setup. I know what tasks I can do well with just my laptop, but I've often done
a bad job of block-scheduling them. So in some sense, this will be a
task-management experiment as much as a place experiment. (I do have a handy
portable 15-inch monitor that folds up to the size of a laptop and can be used
as a second screen, but I think it's a bit too nerdy to set up at a table in a
coffee shop! You also kind of have to set up an external keyboard and mouse too
if you want to run dual monitors without wrecking your ergonomics, which makes
it even more impractical.)
In the interest of not allowing a bunch of internet strangers to trivially
triangulate my exact home address, I won't say too much about exactly what
these places are or where they are in relation to me, but I'll drop in a
little. The coffee shop I tried today (I had been once, but not to work, and
before I actually lived in Minneapolis) somehow felt simultaneously really nice
and not quite the right vibe for me. I could imagine getting used to it, but
I'm not sure about it at this point either.
When I joined Costco last December, the guy at the customer service desk read
my address and told me I had to try Bogart's Doughnut Co., which isn't actually
that close to my apartment but was apparently his main association with Uptown.
It's right on the way from my apartment to church, but I've never stopped, so
today I did on my way home and got their brown-butter-glazed doughnut, which I
was told was the classic. It wasn't, in my opinion, astoundingly good,
as I had been made to believe from the way he and another woman there talked
about it, but it was solidly excellent and I'll definitely go back if I'm
craving a doughnut.
In the afternoon I went to the Foshay Tower downtown and went up to the museum
and observation deck. I only saw four other people, on a holiday weekend, so
the observation deck must be unusually unpopular for one situated in a major
city; it's certainly odd that the way to go up is to walk into the hotel and
ask at the front desk to pay $9 for an elevator key card (they even make you
sign on the screen, on a line that says “I agree to pay all room charges and
incidentals”).
The story of the tower, and Foshay himself, is fascinating, but I was a little
underwhelmed by the museum as a museum. It lacks any kind of clearly presented
story, and has only a couple of small slips of paper written by the curator, so
that you have to read all the newspaper articles and artifacts yourself and try
to draw your own conclusions, something which is difficult to do reliably given
that some of the articles are nearly a century old and you don't know what
motivations the writers might have had. I'm still unclear, for example, on
exactly to what extent Foshay's company was a Ponzi scheme; he clearly lied
about where the dividends he was giving out were coming from, but it seems like
he also had a real business that would have been profitable sooner or later?
The observation deck was fun, but you do have to temper your expectations a
bit since you're on the thirty-second story smack in the middle of a downtown
that has quite a few taller buildings. You get a great close-up view of the
buildings around you that you couldn't easily get from any nearby public space,
and there are some gaps where you can see quite a long way, including a decent
look at the skyline of St. Paul, but if there's a specific area of the city
you're hoping to glimpse, or you want a panoramic overview, you're likely to be
disappointed. I couldn't see into my own neighborhood at all; the AT&T Tower
prevents you from seeing anything to the east of Lake of the Isles and west of
Nicollet or so. Also, the telescopes at the corners were a nice touch, but a
couple of them were so dirty they were basically useless.
For an hour and $9, it was totally worth it, and I'd definitely recommend it
to guests.
On Saturday, the weather was gorgeous and I rode the bus downtown and tried to
visit Water Power Park and maybe read for a while. This is (apparently; as you
will soon see I have not yet been there) a projection into the Mississippi
River in downtown Minneapolis near the Upper St. Anthony Locks where you can
relax and look out on the water. The park was, however, closed for unspecified
maintenance activities, despite showing as open on Google Maps. Fortunately, I
had had the idea of combining it with starting on the opposite side of the
river and walking across the Stone Arch Bridge, which is a historic rail bridge
connecting the former mills on the west side of the river to the mainline on
the east side, so the trip wasn't wasted.
The whole area is beautiful and I can't believe I haven't been yet. I grabbed
this picture of the skyline and the (being renovated) Central Avenue bridge
from the point where I tried unsuccessfully to enter Water Power Park. The Stone
Arch Bridge is not visible, but is off a few hundred yards to the left.
On the way back, I stopped at a used bookstore that's less than three blocks
from my apartment but which I've never been in, partly because it's only open
on Saturdays and Sundays, and bought a big stack of books. I'm not sure how
fast the inventory rotates, so I'll have to check back in a couple of months to
see how often it's worth going.
In my reflections on living in Minneapolis for a year (see post immediately
below), I noted that I want to try doing more different things, and generally
drawing more samples across all areas of my life. In the last year, I've done
about as many things around me and gotten to know about as many places as I
would have in any of the smaller towns I've lived, which makes it seem like I'm
not taking full advantage of the opportunities I have here. The new things I've
gotten have been mostly minor, like being able to attend concerts fifteen
minutes' drive from my home instead of an hour; I'm not sure I've even gone to
a whole lot more of them than I otherwise would have.
The world is a really interesting place with a lot of people, places, and
activities in it, and living in a city means you get a bunch of those things
packed together closely enough that you have more of them available than you'll
ever be able to explore within thirty minutes' travel. I'm not saying that I
need to aggressively try to do everything I possibly can, constantly for the
rest of my life, but especially being only around a third of the way through my
expected lifespan, it seems like I should be exploring more than I am.
In an attempt to adjust for this, I'm going to try to do something new every
day until the end of the year. At that point, I'll evaluate and see if I want
to continue this, maybe in some altered form. I'm not only going to count
events or places in the city, though I expect many of the items to fit in
there; I'll also count things like cooking a new recipe or meeting someone new
online. I won't, however, count reading books, visiting websites, or anything
that I would likely already have done without this project.
To keep myself honest, I'm going to write something here every day about what
I did under the “New Stuff Experiment” tag.
The McCollough
effect is the creepiest perceptual phenomenon I know of. By staring at
gratings made up of horizontal and vertical lines interspersed with red and
green bars, you start to see images of the same gratings separated by pure
white as having pinkish and reddish tints.
So far, this seems like a pretty normal afterimage demonstration, except that
the colors are the same instead of inverted. Here's the weird part: if you do
this some day, and then you put it away and come back in several
months, you still see the same illusion without doing the
induction again! (I just did a several-months-out test. It worked as
advertised.) Somehow the simple expedient of looking at some colored images for
a couple of minutes can create lasting changes in your visual perception. (If
you find this scary, know that retesting yourself repeatedly over a short
period of time will eradicate the effect; whatever adaptation occurred will
promptly undo itself once you can give your brain enough new input showing that
it's really white.)
Phenomena like this seem to me to provide tantalizing clues of a world – and
a human consciousness – that's vastly weirder and more interesting than we can
imagine.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the
Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced
by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which
states that this has already happened.
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Just you put good stuff into the universe and most of the time the universe will return good stuff to you. And even if it doesn't, you should still be enjoying it.
David Heinemeier Hansson, “You can either buy attention or earn it”
[rt][source]
I've been using my own little desktop bookmark manager called
RabbitMark for about 8 years now, and I finally got a chance to clean
it up and publish it. If you save a lot of bookmarks and are looking for a good
solution to keep them under control, check it out!
If anyone knows of a more annoying everyday occurrence than missing a bus
because the bus left the stop before the scheduled time, I'd like to hear about
it.
This is the best treatment I've ever found of this age-old and extremely
complicated question. Rather than try to simplify, it lists out all of the
considerations involved and shows how to crunch the numbers to see what
actually makes sense for your situation.
When I was in sixth grade, I, like many people, was tricked into believing
that metaphors were some kind of obscure figure found mostly in fancy poetry.
Nowadays, I believe that metaphors are the most important – and simultaneously
among the most unrecognized – cognitive tools available to humanity.
How do you learn things? By relating them to things you already know. When you
learn an unfamiliar concept, you find a concept you're familiar with, pretend
they're the same thing, and then add corrections for the things that you notice
actually aren't the same. Similarly, even once you know things, you often
reduce problems to easier ones or ideas to ones you're more comfortable with.
This happens both linguistically (the most traditional use of the word
metaphor) and conceptually.
Incidentally, I also believe this is a prime reason that fiction and friends
(legend, anecdote, etc.) are effective tools for communicating truth, or, on
the flip side, for creating untrue and/or maladaptive beliefs. Nonfiction is
honest about its metaphors, which makes it easy for the reader to accept or
reject them. Fiction just creates them and lets your brain make its own
connections while you aren't looking. Fiction is also free to use much more
creative metaphors, which are more powerful and harder to predict the effects
of.
Much smarter people than me have explored these ideas in much more detail
(perhaps most notably Julian Jaynes; the
Conceptual
metaphor article on Wikipedia provides an interesting overview of some
modern ideas), so I won't blab on any longer, but I was struck today by how
undertaught this fundamental feature of the world is and wanted to make sure my
readers had thought about this at some point!
Gnomish scrollkeepers, in my roguelike, are mischievous little creatures
generated with 1–3 magical scrolls that do irritating things. A balance problem
created by this (not that the game is far enough along to have meaningful
balance yet!) is that if one doesn't find a use for all of its scrolls before
you kill it, you get to pick up the extras, and if a lot of scrollkeepers show
up, you get more scrolls than you probably should. To counter this, I decided
to make scrollkeepers have a chance of successfully lighting their scrolls on
fire as they died, to avoid their species' magic getting out and all.
As I started adding images to this microblog, I realized I had a problem:
since the entire thing is a single page, after a while the page was going to
start downloading dozens or eventually maybe hundreds of images every
time someone browsed to it, most of which the reader would never look at unless
they decided to go through the archives for all of time – hardly the
lightweight site I'm aspiring to create. I could have written some JavaScript
to load them when the reader came to them, but this also seemed ugly and not in
keeping with the philosophy of the site.
Happily, it turns out HTML5 added an image attribute,
loading="lazy", that causes exactly the right behavior here. The
precise way the browser decides when to load images is up to the browser, but
essentially it grabs the images for only the first couple of screens of
content, and then as you scroll down it starts pre-requesting images that are
1–2 screens away. So unless you start scrolling really fast or have a really
slow network connection, you'll never know the images aren't being loaded
up-front, they'll just be there when they scroll into view.
This is supported on all
major browsers except Internet Explorer, and if you're still using Internet
Exploder in 2022 for anything except an old and broken enterprise website,
I'm gonna say you deserve to download a bunch of useless images.
At choir rehearsal last night, we started Michael Praetorius's
“Psallite”,
which contained the temporarily puzzling Latin phrase:
Christo Dei filio…puerulo iacenti in praesepio!
Which the Latin-reading part of my brain decided to interpret as “baby Jesus,
thrown into a manger.” (It would actually have to be throwing, present
tense, and it would be more idiomatic to use the accusative for
praesepium when motion is involved, but my brain glossed over this in
its attempt to make sense of this silly reading.) I spent the next ten minutes
with an image of someone chucking a baby across the room into a manger as if
throwing a balled-up piece of paper into a wastebasket running through my head.
It was only when I got back to my dictionary that I finally realized I had made
the classic mistake of confusing iacio, to throw, and iaceo,
to lie (mnemonic: the lowercase letter i looks sort of like a person
standing up). But in looking at the dictionary entry, I also realized I had
arguably only been half wrong! The two words are closely related in both meaning
and etymology; iaceo is an intransitive and
stative counterpart of
iacio. The sense is that when something is thrown or cast down, it
ends up lying where it was cast. Which makes a neat metaphor: Jesus was sent
forth, down from heaven, to lie in the aforementioned manger.
In full:
Psallite unigenito Christo Dei filio, Redemptori Domino, puerulo iacenti in praesepio!
Sing to the only-begotten son of God, the Christ, the Redeemer, the Lord, the little baby boy lying in a manger!
About a year ago, I was at the Land's End outlet in Bloomington and went into
the fitting room to try on a shirt. I learned that Land's End was hiring, and
was evidently in particular need of taller staff who use the whole mirror:
Yesterday I was back at the same store and found this in the fitting room, on
the opposite wall from the mirror:
I'm not sure why it's funny that they fixed their mistake, but somehow the
moved, peeling sign is just as funny to me as the first picture!
More Obvious Contraception Nonsense: In the United States, it's illegal to
manufacture or import a condom larger than 5.5 inches in circumference at the
base – a size which is too small to properly fit as much as 10% of men. In
addition to being uncomfortable, condoms that are too small are substantially
more likely to break. Congrats to the FDA. (Previously: #12, #2.)
Polish is a quality of excellent products created by style, attention to
detail, and an uncompromising insistence on doing exactly what is supposed to
be done the best it can be done. It's about getting all of the details right in
a way that creates a great impression. More on my definition of the concept at
the link.
I learned a little bit of piano as a child, then played basically never for
about 15 years, aside from plonking out a few notes while practicing some other
instrument or figuring out a chord progression. After moving apartments
recently, I finally found space for an electric piano, and I'm starting to play
a little bit again.
I've noticed several interesting things as a result. First, it's surprising
how much I remember; I was worried that, for instance, I might have to relearn
how to simultaneously read treble and bass clef, but the moment I sat down I
had no trouble with this. I'm not sure I've lost much skill at all (not that I
had a whole lot to speak of to begin with; my age was in high single digits
when I last practiced).
The more curious thing to me is that the difficulty of piano, as a beginner to
intermediate player, is completely different from that of most other
instruments, in two ways: First, it is quite difficult to play all of the
correct notes even in a simple piece with a reasonable tempo; on most
instruments, playing the right notes is fairly trivial with even a small amount
of skill, unless you're playing something virtuosic. Second, once you do manage
to play all of the correct notes, it usually sounds quite good without having
to do much else (except perhaps push the pedal a few times, which doesn't
really require practice for simple pieces once you've learned how to do it
once). Of course you can continue to improve your articulation and dynamics and
so on for a lifetime, but so long as you can hit the right notes, you can
accompany yourself or someone else and not be embarrassed.
Contrast this with, say, the violin, where someone with a couple of weeks of
practice can easily play any melody and hit the correct notes (albeit out of
tune), but will still sound like a dying cat for probably months.
Much of the difficulty of hitting the right notes on the piano is down to
multitasking. There are just a lot more of them, to start with. And then
there's combining two hands doing different things. Playing with one hand
alone, I might have to stop and work out a few fingerings and land my fingers
in the right place, but this tends to be straightforward; it takes a little bit
of practice, but it isn't usually difficult. But as soon as I put two
hands together – even when the rhythms are basically aligned, or with straight
half notes in the bass – suddenly I start making all kinds of mistakes I
wouldn't have made before.
Lastly, at my skill level, practicing is very rewarding: I can go from being
completely unable to play something simple to sounding quite good in just a
couple of days. This is hard to achieve on any other instrument I've played.
Many people seem to recommend making an outline, or some kind of prepared
description of what one is going to write, before starting to write it.
This has never worked for me. I've tried many times, because it seems
like it ought to be helpful, and many people say it helps keep them focused,
but I've never found it helpful. In fact, I'm rarely able to make a useful
outline to begin with, and that has always made me feel like a sloppy thinker –
but I seem to get good results flying by the seat of my pants, and it's hard to
argue with results.
As I was refilling the soap dispenser in my bathroom this morning, I suddenly
identified the fundamental problem for me: the way I normally write, I don't
know what I think about a topic, and thus what I want to say about it, until I
finish writing – and not just a few words about each of the ideas of that
topic, the actual, final form. If I already knew what I was going to say, in
many cases I wouldn't bother to write it (it's handy that writing can be so
easily shared and both help other people and generate new connections for the
author, but the main reason I write is to figure out what I think). So too,
there wouldn't be much point in outlining anyway, because if I already knew
what I was going to say, why not just…write it down?
Or put another way, it almost never happens that I sit down to write
something and don't end up getting up from the keyboard thinking something
substantially different – and much more expansive – than I did when I sat down;
and this is true even when I am pretty sure I know what I think. I certainly
did not, for example, expect this post to be seven paragraphs long, or to talk
about my penchant for leaving sentences unfinished or the way people are taught
to write in school; I only discovered many of the important ideas here as I
started describing my soap-dispenser revelation.
If I'm writing something much longer than an essay, I do routinely note down
ideas that I think I want to include later so that I don't forget about them.
But I wouldn't call this an outline; it's more like a to-do list,
because I don't make any attempt to figure out how the structure fits together
at this point, and I'm not necessarily planning to include all of the ideas. I
also, in writing of all lengths, often leave sentences hanging and unfinished
and go write something different on another line or in another paragraph, when
I suddenly think of a new idea I should mention. In a way this is kind
of like outlining in that I leave placeholders for things I want to expand
later. But unlike traditional outlines, it encourages iterating in place,
rather than trying to get the structure right the first time without any
details. Here's an example of an earlier version of this post:
This whole thing strikes me as a manifestation of the
waterfall writing process problem,
where the way one is encouraged or required to write actively discourages
changing one's mind or restructuring one's argument later. The way people are
taught to write in school targets, essentially, content-farm writing, rather
than writing that follows natural curiosity and leads to real insights and
worthwhile output (I would call this creative writing, but that's an
established term that means something different).
Maybe I'm just weird here? I do seem to think in language more naturally and
preferentially than some people.
GitHub Copilot is often
stupid, making incredibly basic mistakes like referencing variables that don't
exist (I'm surprised they haven't figured out how to integrate it with the IDE
autocomplete – although maybe it does and the model just likes to ignore it
sometimes). At other times, it instantly figures things out that a human would
need some significant domain knowledge to work out, to the point that it's hard
to believe it's just a fancy language model.
In my roguelike recently, moving up against the edge of the map was doing
nothing. I wanted to add a message that said “You are at the edge of the world”
when you did this. Here's what I got after adding a conditional for whether
there is no adjacent tile in the specified direction:
(Incidentally, my experience has been that Copilot works noticeably better
with Python than with TypeScript. I suspect this is because I use docstrings
extensively in Python and it's remarkably good at interpreting them.)
I sometimes find myself wanting a “required optional” type in MyPy or
TypeScript. That is, the variable can be either null or some type, but the code
shouldn't compile if there's no way for the parameter or return type to be
non-null; there has to be some code path in which it could have a value (to
figure this out without actually running the code, a true
Optional[T] would have to be illegal to assign to a
RequiredOptional[T], but a RequiredOptional[T] could
be assigned to an Optional[T] – this is nothing new, just as a
T can be assigned to an Optional[T] but an
Optional[T] can't be assigned to a T).
Here's a recent example of an error this could catch: I'm working on writing a
toy roguelike, and a common need throughout is for various NPCs to move around.
To handle this, I have functions called travel behaviors that are
assigned to each NPC and can be changed at any time; the behavior function is
called to determine where the NPC should move. Here's a generic one that tries
to move to a specific tile:
def travel_towards_target(
soul: Soul,
target: Tile,
when_target_reached: Callable[[Soul], Optional[Tile]]
) -> Optional[Tile]:
if soul.tile == target:
return when_target_reached(soul)
path = shortest_path(soul.tile, target)
return path[0] if shortest_path is not None else None
When the NPC gets a move, it (the soul parameter) tries to move
to the next tile along the shortest path from its current tile to the target
tile. If the target is unreachable, it returns None to indicate it
won't move at all (in reality we'd probably also want to change behaviors here,
but this is an example). This results in a return type of
Optional[Tile], that is, either a Tile or
None (Python's null value).
Of course, without some intervention, when an NPC reached the target tile, it
would just get stuck there forever, so if it's already there, a callback
function when_target_reached() is called. This function resets the
NPC's travel behavior in some way, perhaps shows the player a message, and then
returns the first action it's going to take under the new behavior (since it
still has a turn). It does this by calling swap_travel_behavior(),
which both changes the travel behavior function and returns it so that
we can call it once immediately to get this turn's action.
This is clearly wrong, and not just because I obviously forgot a statement. It
doesn't make any sense for the body of this function to be incapable of
returning anything other than None; if that was what I had wanted,
I would have just set the return type to None. In other words, the
return type of this function should be not “either a Tile or
None, or both”, as it currently is, but specifically
both, a union of None and something else
(Optional[Tile] being essentially an alias of Union[Tile,
None]), with both possibilities obtainable from the code inside the
behavior function.
However, as far as I'm aware, there's no way to define such a type, which
means this (actually fairly common) error can never be caught by the type
checker. This is, I suppose, a more general limitation of unions; in both MyPy
and TypeScript they're implicitly covariant as return types.
Ultimately, though, I doubt this would actually be a worthwhile feature! It's
already
hard enough to think about nullable types without adding a different kind of
nullable type, and I suspect in most places this kind of checking would be
perceived as overly pedantic rather than helpful. (Witness PowerShell's
“empty null.”
Choice quote: “There is one special type of $null that acts
differently than the others.”)
My small urban grocery store doesn't carry the kind of sponges I like, so I
ordered a $20 box of them on Amazon. Yesterday I got a message indicating that
they were unable to deliver the sponges – the kind you get when the package
requires a signature and you aren't there. Then today, they came back while I
was out, and the driver called me to ask where he should leave it, as if it was
some expensive piece of equipment that would get stolen and create a disaster
if it was left out.
When I got back and opened the box, I found it was double-boxed, with
twenty-four air packs around the inner box, to protect the fragile sponges from
breaking.
One of the best minor quality-of-life upgrades I've found lately has been
buying a physical volume knob for my desktop computer. I ran the outputs for my
headphones and my stereo system through a splitter switch, then through the
volume knob on the way to the computer's output, so the volume knob can be used
to adjust both outputs without having to unplug and reconnect anything. The
knob is vastly superior to my previous methods (press a fiddly button on a
remote control a gazillion times for the stereo, and go click on the audio icon
in the system tray for the headphones; my keyboard doesn't have volume
controls).
The upper-right box is a USB switch that I use to disconnect the power to my
webcam when I'm not working, to make sure nobody can see and hear in my
living room at off hours accidentally. I used putty to easily affix all the
controls to the desk so they don't slide around.
This whole setup was about $75, which might seem a little steep, but I'm
playing music, podcasts, work calls, or something else through the computer
pretty much anytime I'm in my office or kitchen (which also covers large
portions of my off hours), and I often have to adjust the volume multiple times
an hour, so it's approximately $0 per annoyance point removed once you multiply
it out over a few weeks.
In a series of daring experiments, Lockheed test pilots (wearing parachutes and with the doors open!) deliberately flew an Electra at maximum speed into the strongest turbulence they could find, in the wake of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, while a specialized device vibrated the wings, and then pulled up sharply in an attempt to get the wings to break off.
“Physics Strikes Back: The Crashes of Braniff Flight 542 and Northwest Orient Flight 710”
[rt][source]
I'm a convert to the new style of
braidedcable
that's become popular lately.
They're definitely more expensive, and until these came along,
I'd never seen any benefit in buying anything
but the cheapest available cable –
most of the high-end cables have been sold with marketing gimmicks
instead of improvements anyone would ever notice.
But these look better and last longer than traditional cables.
They tangle much less easily,
and they're less susceptible to electromagnetic interference
(though I can't say I've ever had trouble with interference on a cable in my home,
even a 20-foot audio cable).
Give them a try next time you see one as an option!
Three Microsoft engineers and three Apple engineers are taking a train to a
conference. At the ticket office, the three Microsoft engineers each buy a
ticket as usual, but the Apple engineers, after conferring for a moment to
decide how minimalist they can be, only buy one ticket among the three of them.
The Microsoft engineers ask, “How are three people going to travel on one
ticket?”
“Watch and you'll see,” say the Apple engineers.
So they board their train, the Microsoft engineers take their seats, and the
Apple engineers squeeze into a restroom. The train starts moving, and shortly
the conductor comes through the train taking tickets. When he arrives at the
door of the restroom where the Apple engineers are hiding, he stops and knocks
on the door and says, “Ticket, please!” One of the Apple engineers opens the
door a tiny crack and hands the conductor the ticket.
The Microsoft engineers are watching this and think it's pretty brilliant, so
as usual they decide to copy it on the way back. But this time the Apple
engineers don't buy any tickets at all.
“How are three people going to travel without a ticket?” the Microsoft
engineers ask.
“Watch and you'll see,” the Apple engineers say.
So they board the return train, the Microsoft engineers squeeze into a
restroom, and the Apple engineers squeeze into another restroom further down
the train. The train starts moving, and one of the Apple engineers comes out of
the restroom, walks to the restroom where the Microsoft engineers are hiding,
knocks on the door, and says, “Ticket, please!”
Back from a week alone at a lakeside off-grid cabin in northern Minnesota (no
electricity or running water, but with gaslights, a wood stove, and a hand pump
in the kitchen drawing mostly palatable water, the only thing I missed was a
hot shower on the cold days). Passed the time hiking, rowing, thinking, and
reading by the fire. Aside from relaxing and enjoying the outdoors, I find that
in today's world, I can't disconnect enough during my daily life to get all the
reflecting I need done, so it's important to wander off out of reach of my
notifications and daily life and do that. More thoughts on boredom-conducive
contexts in my Zettelkasten.
I wish I could tell a funny story here,
but almost nothing unexpected happened, good or bad.
That means the trip served its purpose, I suppose.
Figures expressed in percentages are ubiquitous, and interpreting and doing
calculations with them is an important part of the basic mathematical literacy
useful in everyday life. Yet few points of arithmetic are as confusing and full
of traps for the unwary as percentages. I recently got fed up with being unable
to think clearly about percentages myself, so I figured I’d write this article
to force myself to understand them completely. Hopefully it will help you, too!
Postscript and counterpoint to my contraceptives article (see #2): as this article highlights, the primary cause of
“condom failure” is not using one. To be clear, this doesn't
contradict anything I said in my article; I was then and am now in favor of
using condoms, ceteris paribus, and the 98% perfect-use effectiveness
rate this article crows about is not so great once you multiply it out over
many years (which is the focus of my article). I think most people who
regularly have sex that could result in someone getting (unintentionally)
pregnant should use something more effective instead of or in addition to
condoms, if practical. Nevertheless, this article epitomizes a broadly
important point, that, in this realm as in the rest of life, most people leave
shockingly easy gains on the table; simply, you know, using the condoms at
all will reduce your chances of unintended pregnancy well past those of an
average person.
Topic: A word or phrase for this maladaptive pattern of motivation
I'm searching for a concise way to describe a pattern I've started noticing, in
which someone wants to achieve a particular goal A, or likes a particular
process or activity in total, but is incapable of, scared of, or strongly
dislikes a necessary component or step of that goal/process/activity A′,
creating an infuriating tension and an obstacle to progress.
For example:
Alice joined a fantasy football league for the first time last year.
She enjoyed it, but really didn't like the research and draft process.
She's not sure if she can get herself to go through it again,
so she might not play this year.
Bob really wants to get married and start a family, but he hates dating,
so he's struggling to make any progress.
Carol is considering accepting a promotion
and would like to continue climbing the ladder,
but she doesn't want a particular responsibility
that's an integral part of the next step.
She consequently has major qualms about accepting,
but also can't stand turning it down.
This could conceivably be phrased as an emotional condition of the person, or
as an attribute of step A′: Alice, Bob, and Carol are experiencing
________ —or— The draft is a ________ for Alice's enjoyment of
fantasy football.
This concept is distinct from laziness in that the reason is much
more deep-seated than not wanting to put in work; it's not that the task
requires more effort or time than one wants to expend, it's that it's somehow
distasteful. It's closer to akrasia, in which one acts against one's
better judgment or will, but different in that there are two distinct
components to the mystery concept; in akrasia one knows one should do A and
doesn't want to do it, while here one knows one should do A and actively
wants to do it, perhaps desperately, but doesn't want to do A′, which
is a necessary component or dependency of A.
Is there an existing term or concept representing this idea or something
close to it? Or can you think of a clever way to describe it?
Suggestions
I occasionally offer awards to internet strangers who send me recommendations I love.
If I am so moved, your choice of:
$10 USD sent via PayPal
a personal thank-you note via snail mail
grab a drink with me sometime you're in Minneapolis (or I'm near you) and talk about the recommendation or anything else
Gratitude and brownie points awarded in all circumstances!
I'm fascinated by fiction about or involving telepathy or sharing of
consciousness between characters, especially when used creatively or to
enjoy/strengthen a relationship with someone. Looking for leads on
more stories fitting this description!
Doesn't have to be exclusively humans, can also involve supernatural beings,
aliens, alters, computers, or something weirder I haven't imagined yet; but the
motivations of at least one participant should ideally be recognizable as
human-ish. I'm hoping for a significant part of the story to involve the
personal experience and/or interpersonal or sociological consequences of such
capabilities/contacts. Stories merely including the trope in some corner are
probably not what I'm looking for.
A few examples:
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
(people have animal-formed companions called daemons
who are mentally linked to their humans)
Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut
(Wilbur and Eliza are fraternal twins who are mentally disabled when apart,
but explosive geniuses when they are close enough to share their minds)
Inception, Christopher Nolan
(people can share their dream worlds with others)
Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman
(people can temporarily join John Malkovich inside his head)
(Not sure about Ender's Game. I've only read the first novel, which
hints at interesting ideas but doesn't yield up much on the personal experience
or interpersonal/sociological consequences; the consequences for the plot of
the Buggers'/Formics' collective consciousness are also entirely predictable.
Is there enough in later books to be worth reading with this theme in mind? If
so, which ones?)
Suggestions
Dave
2022-09-27 17:42
Heinlein's "juvenile" SF novel _Time for the Stars_ is very much centered around telepathy between twins. The story takes a rather, uh, surprising turn by the end - also driven by telepathy...and Heinlein's proclivities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_for_the_Stars
The indy comic book series _Elfquest_ features telepathy ("sending") between specific elven characters and their animal companions. The series may seem dated, but I re-read it pretty recently I think the story has held up extremely well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfquest
The Pinis have also made Elfquest free to read online:
https://elfquest.com/read/digitalEQ.html
Hannes
2022-10-20 12:34
I quite enjoyed Mother of Learning which features a variety of mental communications. Don't want to spoiler anything, but there is an extensive wiki, if you are interested in the concepts primarily and don't want to read 800k words. IMO it's worth it though.
There is no secret math. The biggest mistake people make with statistics is to
distrust their intuition. In reality, once you do all the math, the things that
seemed like they’d be problems are in fact problems. If anything, the math just
turns up more things to worry about.
“The Cathedral of Statistical Control”, Dynomight
[rt][source]
Pro tip: don't start a date by insulting the other person's interests
(this may also end the date). Also, I've spent a grand total of ten hours in
New York, most of them asleep, and I was able to pinpoint 35th Street and 8th
Avenue on Google Maps in fifteen seconds.
As explained in the popular consciousness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, some things
are more or less evenly distributed and you can think about them in averages,
while other things are very unevenly distributed, to the point where only the
outliers matter. Kuhn usefully terms these “light-tailed” and “heavy-tailed”
distributions and points out that many if not most of the important
distributions in an individual’s life are heavy-tailed (jobs, romantic
relationships, business ideas, leisure activities, etc.). Then he explores
strategies for improving your chances of obtaining a good outcome from
heavy-tailed distributions in your life.
One way I often like to think about behavioral questions is this: if everyone
followed in these footsteps, would it make the whole organization (or community)
overall better or worse?
Sophie Alpert, “Yak Shaving and Fixing”
[rt][source]
I find it is often helpful to watch
experts do things, whether they explain their thought process or not. In
this video, I make some spaced-repetition flashcards in RemNote and explain why
I'm making the choices I'm making.
Most people don't have an intuitive understanding of how small risks add up over time.
When sex, bad statistics, and bad public-health messaging are thrown into the mix,
people end up making bad decisions.
In this article, spreadsheet simulator, and demo video,
we explore the chances of unintended pregnancy over a person's lifetime
– which are almost certainly higher than you think if you're never looked into it –
and what you can do to reduce them.
(I got interested in this topic on a whim after reading a history of AIDS
had me thinking constantly about sexual health messaging for about a solid week.)
Since I quit regularly using most social media, I haven't missed the ads or
political screaming one bit, but I have found I miss being able to easily share
random interesting things with the world. I'm hoping to resolve this and
recapture a bit of the energy of Web 1.0 by posting on a simple website
instead; perhaps a few people will still be interested enough to follow a
website or RSS feed (remember those? I still use them!). This weekend, I wrote
a tiny, likable
tool called attopublish to manage the posts, and I'll tweak it as needed.
attopublish will also be available as an open-source tool sooner or later for
anyone who's interested.
(Humans: Comment spam bots usually only try submitting the bottommost form on the page. Don't fill this one out -- it won't go anywhere.)
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