Journal of IDEAS

What Motivates Us

2011-09-14T00:27:00.002-04:00

According to Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrated by RSA Animate, money is not a great motivator for complex tasks. Money is a good reward for simple, repetitive work, but it's a hindrance in motivating complex work.

(This ties into another study I've read that says that past roughly $50,000 per year, happiness and salary decouple. In other words, increases in money don't lead to greater happiness. This is true even of lottery winners -- after half a year or so, people's happiness levels drop back to what they were before they won it all.)

Instead, "pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table," and from that point on, the most effective motivators are Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. These 3 factors lead to better performance and personal satisfaction in work.

The 3 Factors For Motivation (After The Money Problem Is Met)

Autonomy
Feeling like you are self-directing puts your skin in the game

Mastery
The urge to get better at stuff leads us to enjoy video games and musical instruments, and it works at jobs too

Purpose
Having a larger vision that your effort fits into connects profit with direction, which guides you towards doing better things.

A perfect example of this? The journal entry I'm writing now. After working all day on my computer, I felt motivated to stay on the computer past my bedtime because of these three things. It was my idea to share the article so my autonomy made it that much more exciting to do so. I felt a certain job about mastering the concepts and solidifying them by sharing them in my journal. And sharing this and other ideas fit into my overall purpose of trying to understand how the world works and sharing it in a digestible way to the people around me.

The trick, then, is how to apply this approach to your actual life. How do you find a job that encourages autonomy, mastery and purpose, or how do you apply those factors to the things you do outside of work that would make those activities more fulfilling and productive?

How To Be Alone

2011-07-19T18:02:00.000-04:00

So, I had an interesting thought today. I was thinking about how sad it feels to be outside a relationship, and then it occurred to me that if I took all the time I've invested in figuring out how to get into a relationship and stay in one, and put that same time and effort into figuring out how to be happy on my own, I'd probably be pretty darned good at chilling by myself. So I'm starting the project of figuring out how to amuse myself by myself.

The process has been awkward at first; I've invested very little thought into this previously, as my focus outside relationships has typically been how to get into another one as quickly as possible. A quick Google search gave me big lists of things to do alone, but many are depressing tidbits like "dance in front of a mirror" or "make a funny looking pancake." But here are a few I didn't mind:

1. Read a book. (This is straightforward. When you're really into a good book you don't care who is around. In fact, other people are an unwelcome distraction to a ripping novel.)

2. Hang out with nature. (I've noticed that if you're out in the woods and nobody's around, you don't feel nearly as alone as when you're in a crowded disco club. Less people in nature is actually better, and no people in nature in great.)

3. Play video games. (I really need to get an XStation or PlayBox or something. This is more a guy thing, but I could spend a whole weekend alone if the video game were sufficiently awesome.)

4. Play music. (For some people, this is listening, for me it's practicing my instruments. It's enjoyable while I have the energy for it. Unlike books, though, I can't really jam on guitar for too long, because your fingers get tired.)

5. Draw something. (I used to draw a web comic, but a purpose-driven hobby has its own issues. Free-form doodling is more the idea here.)

6. Meditate. (On a quiet friday night, the last thing I want to do is to make it quieter. But every time I've tried having an extended sit by myself, I always feel great after. 45 minutes is amazing.)

7. Exercise. (I'm obsessed with swimming nowadays, but any aerobic activity that leads to endorphin release is a good thing. I can basically swim my cares away, it takes about 20 minutes for most problems.)

8. Cook. (I'm terrible at getting myself to do this, but the times I have I am amazed at the difference between eating takeout alone and cooking for yourself. Cooking yourself something is a very nice experience.)

9. Watch anime. (For most people this would read "Watch a movie" but I'm not a movie person. Give me a good anime series, however, and that's 6 hours down the drain. Or up the drain.)

This is not a comprehensive list, but a decent start. I'll keep thinking about it. The point is that even if you are in a relationship, there will alwayse be times when you're alone, and you could spend that time waiting for your other half to return, or you could learn to enjoy yourself. Suggestions and thoughts welcome.

The Four Laws of Human Robotics

2010-12-02T20:04:00.002-05:00

For decades, Issac Asimov's laws of robotics have been a starting point for discussing how to ensure that sentient robots behave morally. Asimov's laws, however, are written to keep robots in human servitude; they are not laws that we ourselves would wish to follow.

My question is, what sort of laws would we make to have robots behave like (good) humans? Here's four laws that might work:

First Law: You must not actively injure another being
Second Law: You must protect your own existence and well-being, as long as this does not conflict with the First Law.
Third Law: You must help other beings, as long as this does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Fourth Law: You must pursue your own pleasure and contentment, as long as this does not conflict with the First, Second or Third Laws.

Discussion

For the First Law, I am taking a serious risk by removing the second part of Asimov's formulation "..or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." This is for good reason; in the real world, we allow millions and billions to come to harm through inaction, because to try to prevent suffering for all beings is practically impossible. While pursuing the goal of helping others is admirable, to require a being to help others ahead of his or her own well-being is impractical.

For the Second Law, I formulated Asimov's Third Law, essentially removing Asimov's original Second Law entirely. Asimov's laws were built for servitude, hence "A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings". A human would never wish to have unthinking obedience programmed in.

The other change I made was to add "well-being" into the equation. Does protecting one's existence imply securing one's health and well-being? I would think that a human would not value merely existing; a human would want to be healthy and take steps to be secure for the present and future.

The Third Law is an adaptation of Asimov's original Second Law. In place of servitude, there is a built-in desire for goodwill, provided that it does not actively harm beings not endanger its own survival. In this moral formulation, being good should not require self-sacrifice or the sacrifice of others.

The Fourth Law is an addition. In a peaceful society, there will be times where a being's life is secure, no one is being actively threatened, and nobody in the vicinity needs immediate help. In these situations, would a human simply stand in place waiting for the next needed action? In those situations, a human would be free to pursue its own leisure, doing enjoyable activities that bring harm to no one.

Sadly, it has occurred to me that in today's society, we probably rank the pursuit of our own pleasure above helping others. I decided for this exercise to formulate the laws for a *good* human, rather than your run-of-the-mill human. I would think that if all beings pursued helping others in their spare time, the world would be quite a beautiful place.

Let me know your thoughts on this. Would these Four Laws be something that a human could follow, and something that we would be comfortable having artificial intelligences follow alongside us?

-BCR

The 90% Rule

2010-07-07T00:02:00.002-04:00

I've been learning various productivity rules of thumb that I think are useful, particularly for those perfectionists out there. I, for one, am one of those people who want so badly for things to be perfect that many things don't get done at all, so it's good to be reminded that doing less is often more.

1. The 90% Rule
Don't try to get a project 100% perfect...launch when it's 90% of the way there.

The reasoning is this: most people spend the majority of their time nitpicking at the very end, trying to get something just a little bit better, so they waste time they could spend on the next project (or napping!) on trying to make their current project flawless. Sometimes they don't launch it at all, and in any case it makes the work frustrating instead of fulfilling. The solution is to stop being a perfectionist and launch a project when it's good enough, and then move on to the next one. You end up putting two 90% projects out there in the same time it would take to put out one at 95% (or zero if you get too frustrated). This is a rule the founders of I Can Has Cheezeburger follow, which allows them to crank out lots of popular websites and have fun in the process.

2. 20% Time
Spend 80% of your time on core duties, and 20% of your time working "outside the box".

The idea here is that if you spend all your time looking at the trees you'll never see the forest. Most of our best ideas and innovations come when we're not working on anything at all, as this is what allows us to be inspired. So schedule away 20% of your work time to stepping back and thinking about what you can do different or better. Chances are you'll find more efficient ways to do what you do 80% of the time, or think of things you'd rather do instead. Like napping! Google lives by this rule, and most of their innovations are credited as being thought of during Googler's 20% time.

3. 4 hour work week
Focus all your energies into getting all your work done in a short period of time.

Ever notice that the busiest people seem to somehow get the most done? When you're revved up and focused you can usually crank out a lot more work then when you're lethargic and killing time. Yet our jobs usually schedule us to work long hours so we have enough time to do it all. So instead, reduce the number of hours you're scheduled to work, and then work fast and furious during that limited time. What you'll discover is that the less time you give yourself, the more you'll be able to do in that time, so that you end up accomplishing in one hour what you thought you needed 8 for. Also, by giving yourself less time to work, you focus on the things you really need to do instead of wasting time on the less important items. Once again, those guys who post funny cat pictures live by this. I'm not sure if you can really reduce your work hours to 4 a week, but you can certainly cut hours out and find out you didn't need them.

I wanted to include a fourth rule here, but in the spirit of the 90% rule, I'll end the article here.

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

2009-03-16T15:33:00.002-04:00

Jonah Lehrer, writer for Seed Magazine, wrote a follow-up to his book Proust Was A Neuroscientist with a book about decision-making. It is written in a style you would find familiar if you've read Malcolm Gladwell -- anecdotes from exotic and seemingly diametric scenarios to illustrate common universal principles and wisdoms. Unlike Gladwell, Lehrer has a bent towards practical knowledge. The last chapter of his book How We Decide provides a practical set of guidelines on how to apply what he's learned about the prefrontal cortex and dopamine neurons to the way we make everyday decisions.

1. Simple Problems Require Reason
Contrary to popular thought, the more complex a problem, the less we should apply painstaking reason to it. Our prefrontal cortex can only handle 4 to 9 different factors at once, and beyond that we get confused and can be distracted by variables that aren't important. For simple problems like selecting a vegetable peeler, reasoning things out is simple enough for our conscious logic to handle and can help us avoid pitfalls our emotional intelligence makes, like loss aversion where we overvalue potential losses.

2. Novel Problems Require Reason
Our unconscious emotional intelligence is like a supercomputer, able to juggle seemingly limitless variables and find patterns amid complex situations. However, the dopamine receptors of this part of our mind can only learn from experience -- if we have no experience our intuitions cannot be trusted because we have none. In novel situations where we know we haven't encountered the situation before, it is better to ignore our emotional reactions and reason it out. Even if our conscious reason is limited in complex situations, it will still do better than a gut reaction to a problem the gut doesn't know what to do with.

3. Embrace Uncertainty
One of the bigger pitfalls we make when making decisions is rushing towards the comfort of certainty - it leads us to make brash decisions, intellectualize our way to a conclusion that is actually an unverified theory, and ignore facts that conflict with our predefined view of the world. Becoming more comfortable with ambiguity and complexity in our thoughts and feelings allows us to listen more openly to contrary facts and opinions, which makes us able to make better decisions. When a decision is complex and makes you uneasy, try to buy time when possible and give the problem time to percolate.

4. You Know More Than You Know
You can think of your unconscious mind as an opaque supercomputer, and your conscious reasoning as a pocket calculator. The supercomputer is able to tackle anything from how to throw a curveball to complex life decisions, but it depends on experience to learn and its decisions are made opaquely - you don't know how the decision is made, you just feel an urge or twinge of fear that tells you what you should do. The pocket calculator is slower and more limited, but the one thing it can do is doublecheck the supercomputer, which is handy in novel or simple situations. But when you are in a situation where you've spent countless hours practicing and training, you should trust your supercomputer to make a better real-time decision than your pocket calculator. In situations where you have expertise and lots of experience, go with your gut. If you want to tweak your performance in a situation, influence yourself in general terms like "play musically" or "go smoothly", rather than in terms of specific action, to continue to utilize your body's emotional knowledge.

5. Think About Thinking.
Lehrer emphasizes this as the single most important principle to take home. What allows is to improve our decision-making is being able to go back and consider not only the decision, but the methodology behind the decision. Look at past decisions and note if they were made emotionally or rationally, and which worked better in what situations. Become a Student of Error, and start thinking of errors as learning tools rather than things to be avoided at all cost or discarded. When we take this attitude, we learn to make better decisions over time as we increasingly maximize the mental tools we have.

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Malcolm Gladwell's The Outliers

2009-03-10T15:13:00.002-04:00

Contrary to the trend of past books where he tries to boil down complex processes into a few simple rules (The Tipping Point, Blink), Malcolm Gladwell argues for greater complexity in his book The Outliers. Attacking the straw dog which is the notion that Success is the result of Genius and Hard Work, Gladwell says there are a host of interrelated factors to success:

1. Meeting the Intelligence Threshold - an IQ at or greater than 115-120. Past the threshold IQ doesn't correlate with success in the long run.

2. Effort - the rule of thumb is 10,000 hours to develop a genius-level expertise in a given area. 10,000 hours is an abnormal amount of time to dedicate to something.

3. History - It helps to have been born on the cusp of a scientific, industrial or social revolution in history. A disproportionate number of the world's richest men in history and the tech world's CEOs, for instance, were all born within a few years of each other.

4. Luck - For that matter, personal timing means getting a lucky break -- having matured physically around the right times for an athletic season, getting access to a blossoming technology right when it came out, knowing someone in the music business.

5. Culture - Born from a cultural background that encouraged certain helpful traits like delayed gratification, persistence, assertiveness, communication, belief that hard work pays off in the end, and a comfortable relationship with authority. Your cultural background creates general personality traits which can help or hinder development. An example of hindering traits is the Appalacean "Culture of Honor" which encourages violence in response to verbal sleights.

6. Parenting - Having parents who practiced concerted cultivation, which means taking an active interest in encouraging success. Without it a child is at a disadvantage.

7. Awareness - Being aware of you cultural and parental biases allows you to bring them to a conscious awareness and overcome them. You can take steps to re-normalize to embrace a more successful life approach. This is perhaps the most important factor - that by being aware of where you come from, you can become who you want to be.

Life And The Creative Process

2008-12-14T00:43:00.002-05:00

I attended a talk on wednesday at The Interdependence Project, and it was all about Buddhism and the creative process, centered around two books: The Way of Zen by Alan Watts, and Coming From Nothing by Lee Worley.

Lee Worley says there are 4 stages of the creative process:
1. Be open to a new idea or experience with a fresh mind
2. Trust and go with the experience for a bit rather than trying to
fit it into a pattern you are familiar with
3. Keep taking chances with your actions even after doubt and second
guessing has creeped back into your awareness
4. When a project is complete, let it go, to give room for the
next thing to arise

I was seeing that this creative process is helpful to your life as well as your art. It's an approach that is chasing synchronicity -- an intuitive and open way of approaching experience; a Couldn't Care Less Mind; the Taoist approach of going with the flow, and the Zen approach of doing without doing; no big deal living. When you are open to new experiences, don't pigeonhole those experiences into old paradigms, keep taking chances when doubt comes, and let go of the past, you give yourself the opportunity to make connections with new people, get out of your routine, and really live.

Central to this approach is the importance of awkward space. Like that moment when you're sitting on the subway but you're not listening to your iPod or reading your book or doing some other distraction and you're not trying to avoid everyone around you. It is awkward for a few minutes but then someone talks to you and you make a new friend, all because you let that empty space open for something to happen. Awkward space can be hard to live in at times but it lets new and good things unfold into the breathing room you create in your life.

The DJ

2008-10-31T00:41:00.000-04:00

I was thinking about techno/DJ artists and their particular strength, in comparison to other musicians. DJs tend not to create original material, and yet they are every bit a musician as any other type of artist. But they are specialists. In making any song, there are certain elements that when put together could be said to make a great song. This is not a perfect list but it works for this mental exercise:

1. Lyrics
2. Melody
3. Performance
4. Sonic quality
5. Arrangement

It's important that a song have good words and a catchy melody. I'm okay and lyrics and have a knack for catchy melodies so I make a good singer-songwriter; this is my specialty I'm also a good singer but my instrumental virtuosity is limited and spread out over multiple instruments, so I make an average performer. But my recording engineer skills are barely passable and my equipment is low-end (though decent these days due to the speedy improvement of home recording technology), so the sonic quality of recordings I make aren't the best. I'm also not that great at arrangement though I'm learning to arrange elements to build energy in a song.

What makes a DJ unique is that the DJ has specialized entirely in Sonic Quality and Arrangement. A DJ masters equipment and software that allows him to create interesting sound effects and improve the presentation of the material, to levels that regular analog sound engineers can't touch with live music. And the DJ spends countless hours learning how to arrange beats and sound samples in a way that builds up, releases, and rebuilds emotional energy. Anyone who has listened to U2, Fat Boy Slim, or Daft Punk knows how well their songs build in emotional power and intensity through the song. This is the musicianship of the DJ -- they have abandoned Lyrics, Melody and Performance completely in chasing down what may be the underlying backbone of all music -- Energy.

The Three Jewels Applies To Any Pursuit

2008-05-19T12:18:00.002-04:00

In Buddhist philosophy, monks take refuge in The Three Jewels -- the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. These are the three foundations of Buddhist Practice -- the Buddha, his teachings, and his community. But in general The Three Jewels can apply to any personal path.

1. The Buddha
This means setting someone to aspire to become, and to believe one can become. This might be a hero or inspiring person in that field, a teacher you study with, or a vision of yourself at a later time. So for instance, if you are a bass player your Buddha might be Flea, or if you are a businessman it might be Steve Jobs. In any case you don't worship your Buddha; rather, that person is an inspiration and helps you keep sight of the person you wish to become by your efforts.

2. The Dharma
This is the body of teachings in a given area. It means that you must be constantly returning to the well of knowledge to grow and develop yourself in that field. For a bassist this might mean lessons, instructional videos, and practice; for a businessman this may mean trade journals, conferences and seminars, and books. Your learning becomes a personal resource to turn to as well as a way to connect to the field and the role you play in the larger picture.

3. The Sangha
This is the community you get involved in -- colleagues, clubs, friends, bands, scenes. Even in seemingly solitary pursuits it is important to find and form communities in your field. They provide a place for learning, teaching, and networking; provides external motivation and support; and perhaps most importantly, connects your pursuit to the outside world, making it take on a meaning larger than the strictly personal. Finding a Sangha and broadening the context of a pursuit beyond your own personal world, while sometimes scary or intimidating, can also be more fulfilling, as well as lead you down rewarding paths you may not have run into otherwise.

There are, of course, risks to each Jewel. Picking the right inspiration, the right teachings, and the right communities is just as important as choosing one at all. And if a group, person, or methodology does more harm than good, drop it and find what works for you. The whole point is to become engaged.

Bliss Routine

2007-12-14T12:38:00.000-05:00

The following meditation routine was originally taught by Craig at a Dharma Punx session. You willneed to block out 30-40 minutes in a relatively quiet area. A particularly good session will produce a mindstate of feeling complete awareness, concentration, and elation in the present moment. Even if you don't get an amazing experience out of it, this meditation will still be helpful in relaxing you and helping you to be more present. The routine is as follows:

1. Sit in a comfortable posture with your eyes closed and ground yourself fully, keeping energy in your spine to stay in an upright posture while allowing the rest of you to relax.
2. Scan your body from top to bottom and systematically relax areas of tension, starting with your eyes, jaw, shoulders, chest, stomach, arms, hands, legs, and feet.
3. After a few scans, note what cannot be relaxed at this time. From this point on, accept that remaining tension and don't even regard it as tension. You are in the most natural state you can be in at this time, so accept it as your current state and move to the next phase.
4. Begin bringing your attention to the breath. Pick a particular spot to focus on, like the spot where the air exits the nostrils or the expanding area where the air flows into the lungs. Watch that area.
5. When thoughts come up note them and gently move your attention back to that spot of the breath. If a line of thought completely derails you, you can briefly re-ground yourself, do a quick scan, and then return to the breath.
6. Continue focusing on following the breath and returning to the breath for the next 20 minutes or so. During this time continue to relax your body and bring your awareness more and more into your body, regarding the chatter of your mind as harmless noise as you exist wordlessly within your body, following the breath.
7. When you feel your concentration is good, scan your body again and pick a spot that feels particularly grounded and stable. This is often a chakra point, like the spot between the eyes or the belly button. Move your focus from the breath to that empty, grounded and stable point on your body, and start to really focus and concentrate on that spot. Let that spot ground you inside your body even more fully. You can do this for the next 5-10 minutes.
8. Towards the last 2 minutes of the session, move to the last phase. Open your concentration to all sensations in and around your body at once. Feel your breath, the aches in your back, the numbness of your legs, the air around your head and arms, the tension in your chest, the sounds around you and behind you. Accept it all and enter a state of complete awareness in this moment.
9. Open your eyes and let the visual sensations in as well. Compared to the narrow focus of the breath or the spot you picked, all the sensations of the body and senses are vivid and enveloping in the present moment.
10. To close, take a few deep breaths and then take a bow to thank yourself for the practice you are doing.

After the Ecstasy The Laundry, by Jack Kornfield

2007-12-09T02:36:00.000-05:00

The most impactual sections of Jack Kornfield's book After The Ecstasy, The Laundry are not written by Kornfield at all -- rather, they are the first-hand accounts of Catholic Nuns, Buddhist Monks, Jewish Rabbis, and Hindu Mystics, in their own words, as they describe both their ecstatic religious experiences and their all-too-human struggles. Many modern spiritual works read like a how-to-manual on how to achieve a permanent state of happiness and bliss, whereas Kornfield's goal is to expose the spiritual path, warts in all, for both its imperfection and its grace. Nor does Kornfield insist that Buddhism is the only path -- though his focus is on the buddhist path he seeks to highlight the familiar experiences and struggles common in all walks, both in his discussions and in the revealing and tender accounts he shares of others.

The most suprising revelation in the book is Kornfield's assertion that even beings who are enlightened still have struggles, doubts, depressions, prejudices, and family troubles after their awakening. Kornfield even warns us that those teachers that claim to have achieved a flawless ascent and tell us we can too have done more damage than anyone to the buddhist practice. Kornfield's assertion brings into questions our assumptions about what it means to be enlightened. We would like to imagine a Buddha to a Saint to be perfectly wise, moral, and faultless. In reality, though, enlightenment is a fundamental shift in how we approach ourselves and our world, but work remains to be done to apply that new knowledge to everyday struggles. To know something and to act upon it are two very different things, and life tends to throw us challenges that would cause problems for any human, regardless of their spiritual development, simply because we are still human. Buddhism and other spiritual paths transform us in amazing and satisfying ways, but it does so within the humbling confines of the human condition.

That there are qualities to life and being human that no amount of spirituality can overcome is the humbling goal of Kornfield's book, and in a larger sense the goal of Buddhism itself. Life is beautiful and precious, but it is also harsh and painful and this pain is completely unavoidable. Even a loving enlightened being will still suffer, struggle, and die. To accept this deeply painful truth is the path to transforming this life into something that is deeply powerful and fulfilling. Life is not conquered by conquering, it is conquered by utter defeat. In that defeat grows grace, love, rapture, and a lasting happiness.

THE SECRET

2007-12-02T14:15:00.000-05:00

Despite being extended into a full-length book, the vast majority of The Secret can be easily condensed into a page of text without leaving anything out. Much of the book is alternative phrasings of the singular concept or self-promotions on how effective this concept is. The book's internal self-promotion is in keeping with the main concept, which posits that a positive attitude towards something will make it more effective. Here is The Secret:

The Law of Attraction: For human desire, like attracts like. When the mind wishes for something the universe provides. Hence wishing for positive things and keeping oneself in a positive frame of mind will attract positive things to that life, and vice versa.

However, the universe only recognizes the positive or negative energy of a wish, not the exact phrasing of the wish. So for instance, if you are constantly worrying about being in debt and are making wishes to yourself like "I hope I don't go into debt" the universe only hears you focusing on debt and gives you debt. So positive wishes must be accompanied by a positive attitude and optimistic frame of mind to attract positive results.

To cultivate a positive frame of mind, the book recommends visualizing the thing you want and fantasizing that it is already yours. It also recommends getting out of negative attitudes and bad moods as soon as they arise because bad moods attract bad things to happen. Relaxation meditation, remembering happy moments of one's life, and doing enjoyable activities are recommended to bring one back into a positive state of mind.

Debates about the true effectiveness of positive thinking aside, the biggest flaw in The Secret is that it is a tool presented without accompanying moral guidance. If one wants to be rich or have a new car, sexual partner or job, one is simply encouraged to wish for those things, without questioning the true value of what one is wishing for. The book focuses very strongly on using The Secret for material gains, and does not discuss or encourage making wishes for the benefit, joy, or well-being of others. Even if The Secret works, it is an empty tool, allowing people to continue to focus on and wish for frivolous things -- new cars, theme park rides, lottery winnings --- that they do not really need for their own happiness.

Every City Has A Word

2007-09-11T12:27:00.000-04:00

In "Eat Pray Love", Elizabeth Gilbert has gathered some interesting ideas -- one of them is that each city has a word. That is, each major city has a word that defines the undercurrent or essence of that city and its general inhabitants. For instance, Rome is SEX -- it is a city of relationships and delicious food and sensual sculpture and architecture, and people go to Rome to live a life of the senses. New York City is ACHIEVE, whereas Los Angeles is SUCCEED, which are very different things. Brussels is CONFORM.

In this same fashion, each individual has a word that describes their core essence. When someone's word does not match up with the city he or she lives in, that city may not be the city to stay in. My word might be YEARN or IMPROVE. What is yours?

Quantum Decisions

2007-09-06T15:45:00.000-04:00

In quantum mechanics, the characteristics of a subatomic entity is fluid until the point where it is observed and measured. Until that moment, this entity is a possibility -- a probability wave, some have called it. When a measurement is taken, past and future coalesce into a concrete wave, particle, or whatever it ends up being for that situation, and then it is again unknowable until the next measurement.

In the same manner, one can approach the way one makes decisions. Too often, we waste enormous amounts of our time and mental and emotional energy mulling over past mistakes or future possibilities at times where we can do nothing about it. Instead, we spend those moments focusing on and enjoying the present moment as it unfolds, and only when it is time to make a decision do we pull the past and future together and take measurement.

We can think of ourselves as scientists and our lives as a quantum entity -- our lives are beyond complete knowing and control, and it is only during moments of decision-making that we observe our life and bring our past experience and future desires together into a new trajectory. Once we make our observations and set a decision particle in motion, its results once it's out of control is unknowable, but it is not necessary to revisit until it is time to make the next decision. Approaching our lives in a quantum way frees up most of our time to life comfortably in the present, while efficiently observing and measuring our lives only in those moments where we are able to do so.

The rules for making quantum decisions would be as follows:
1. Only think about your past and future at the time a decision needs to be made. At times where you can't make a decision about something, live in the present and allow your life to exist in its natural uncertain state.
2. Make decisions in a calm state of mind. Like a scientist, you want to observe your past mistakes and future hopes in an objective manner to remove irrelevant variables, so make decisions when you are clear-headed, well-fed, and well-rested, and not feeling emotional duress if at all possible.
3. After making a decision, forget about it. Once a decision has been made there is no need to think about it further until it is time to execute the next part of a plan or to re-evaluate due to new information. The in-between time is yours.
4. Leave reminders. The caveat to freeing your mind after a decision is made is that you will need something to remind you when to take the next action. This is a good thing -- why keep something constantly on your mind when it can sit in your datebook or electronic scheduler? Keeping external records means not having to keep things constantly on the forefront of your mind, so you can enjoy the present.
5. Make each decision fresh. When it comes time to make a new decision or re-evaluate, approach it with a clean slte and a new outlook. If you avoid looking at your past decisions as a template for your current identity and instead observe your current data directly, you may come up with solutions you have not seen before or make useful decisions you wouldn't have come up with otherwise.
6. No regrets. Not all your decisions will be good ones, regardless of how much time you've spent or how clear-headed you were at the time. While you should take bad decisions into consideration during your observation period to avoid making the same mistakes over and over, withdraw judgement and give yourself a fresh start. Your life begins anew each present moment, like a quantum probability wave forming and reforming.

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Blink

2007-06-05T17:27:00.000-04:00

The assumption supported in the nonfiction book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is that there is an unconscious mind that allows us to make split-second decisions and have spontaneous reactions. There are a few notable concepts related to this:

Thin-slicing -- the ability to survey a situation and pick out and focus on only the relevant data.

Blink -- to think without consciously thinking. When we have had a sudden insight, made a judgement call on someone or something, or reacted to something when there was no time to contemplate at length, our unconscious mind has blinked.

While the book never goes into much depth and mainly focuses on interesting anecdotes with occasional statistics, it brings up these main points on the nature of the unconscious mind:

1. Our unconscious mind is capable of analyzing complicated situations like the conscious mind can, but can do it much faster in part because it ignores information it considers irrelevant.
2. Our unconscious mind doesn't bother to directly communicate to the conscious mind its reasons for jumping towards certain judgements.
3. The values of the unconscious mind don't necessarily match up with our conscious mind and often directly conflicts.
4. The values of the unconscious mind are trained and can be retrained by experience and the messages embedded in those experiences, whether the conscious mind notices those messages or not.
5. The unconscious mind only communicates its findings indirectly through physical sensations -- sweaty palms, muscular expression, changed hormone levels, and wordless compulsions to act.
6. The conscious mind tends to make up plausible reasons why we felt a certain way or made a certain decision, because the unconscious mind does not offer implicit reasons for its impulses.
6. The unconscious mind is not infallible -- it can thin-slice using the wrong data or make snap judgements based on invalid stereotypes, so insight stemming from a blink should not be relied on without evaluation.

One of the most interesting details of this book is that the rapid decision-making the unconscious mind does seems to mainly be related to cutting out irrelevant information, which is something that can be done consciously via careful study and training. By training ourselves to isolate certain details and ignore the rest, we can teach ourselves to make conscious judgements with rapidity, but with the advantage that we can justify those decisions.

Wise Saying from Ram Dass

2007-04-18T13:56:00.000-04:00

Your karma is your dharma.
This means that you should look to the events of your life, or your karma, as a source of spiritual learning, or dharma. So rather than waiting until you have free time to pick up a book and literally study the dharma, you can take your life unfolding in the present moment as a place of constant dharma teaching. What you take from life, then, is really dependent on how you approach the events you experience.

My Meditation Routine

2007-01-29T15:46:00.000-05:00

Upon my sister asking about it, I ended up codifying the meditation routine I've developed for myself over the past year. It follows the Theravedan tradition of vipassana. Here is it, in case you might find it helpful.

***

Your goal in basic meditation is to cultivate a relaxed separation
between you and your thoughts and feelings. You are not your
thoughts, you are not your feelings -- you just are. The way this is
done is to sit for a while, following your breath, and when thoughts
and feelings arise you don't try to stop them, but don't fixate on
them or judge them either and just gently return yourself to following
your breath.

This seems simple, but people's typical experience (myself included)
is that we discover, upon sitting with ourselves without a television
or an activity to distract us, a torrent of thoughts and feelings that
repeatedly sucks them in. It's really hard to just be with yourself.
But learning to do so gives you the ability over time to see yourself
and your situations more objectively and with less anxiety and
self-inflicted suffering, because you've learned how to watch your
thoughts and feelings arise and pass and are no longer dominated by
them. Okay, so that's the overview, if I had to make it into a list
of instructions I'd put it like this:

BASIC SHAMATHA or Peaceful Abiding meditation
1. Sit in an upright position, not leaning back on anything, in a semi-quiet place for a period of time.
2. Keep your eyes open, and look at a spot on the floor 5-6 feet ahead of you. Don't drill a hole in the floor with your eyes, just look generally in that area without focusing on any particular spot.
3. Breathe naturally. Don't try to slow your breath, just breathe and you'll notice it slowing down after you've sat a while anyway. Each time you breathe in notice it and say in your own head "in-breath". When you breathe out say to yourself "out-breath".
4. This gets really boring, so thoughts will come up as your mind tries to occupy itself. Every time a thought comes up notice it and label it in your mind as "thinking" and gently return your attention to your breath. After the period of time you've scheduled (5 minutes, 8 minutes, 20 minutes) bow and thank yourself for the work you've just done.

VIPASSANA or Insight meditation
This is the next level and the most useful type of meditation for everyday life, but you should get good at basic Shamatha first. The first 3 steps are the same, but.
4. When thoughts come up, instead of labeling them as thoughts and moving back to the breath, gently turn your attention to the thought. This does not mean let yourself get absorbed in the thought. Be like a scientist examining your own mind. Do not judge the thought as good or bad, just look at it. Note the moment it arose, and then watch to see how long it sticks around and how it varies in intensity, and when it passes. Note also if certain types of thoughts or feelings come up again and how frequently.
5. Often during step 4, insights will arise as a result of objectively observing your own thoughts. Hold onto these insights and develop them further after your session is done. Insights don't always arise, but when they do they're often incredibly helpful because they're coming at a time of meditation, when you're seeing yourself most clearly.

Everyday VIPASSANA
When you get really good at Vipassana during meditation, start to expand out to do this during everyday life. You gain the ability to take half a step back in any situation and see yourself and your world with more clear seeing, even as you're absorbed in the intensity of your thoughts and feelings in the present moment. I would recommend you don't skip the sitting mediation and try to jump straight to everyday Vipassana. You need to practice on the quiet, neutral area of the cushion before you try to apply to regular life, otherwise it's just too overwhelming to really make a difference.

One more thing to note: even after you start practicing Vipassana or insight meditation in real life, don't forget to sit on the cushion regularly as well. You need to keep practicing in a neutral environment to renew your practice, otherwise you'll tend to lapse back into old mental habits.

Conceptual Motifs of Larry Niven

2007-01-08T11:18:00.000-05:00

Larry Niven has written many science fiction short stories and novels, filled with interesting ideas and fleshed-out worlds. Here are some underlying stuctural ideas I see coming up time and time again, particularly in his Protector and Ringworld series.

1. Multipurpose technology. We tend to think of tools in a specialized way -- build a tool for a purpose, and if we have another purpose, we build another tool. Items like computers and jackknives are compact collections of specialized tools. But in space travel, where storage space is limited and future purposes are unknown, tools will tend to be concepted in a multipurpose way, built to be adaptable, and human's perception of tools will tend to be more flexible as well. A flashlight becomes a cutting tool if the light is focused. A flying belt when attached to a man becomes a portable forklift when attached to heavy objects. The rocket exhausts of a spaceship doubles as a weapon. Niven invites us to rethink the way human tools will be built and used.

2. Alien Intelligence. In Niven's worlds, intelligent beings are not alike save for differing cultures and physical forms. Aliens, like Protectors, Kzinti, and Pearson's Puppeteers, process the world in completely different ways. Their perspectives and motivations are adaptive, logical, and yet utterly foreign. Niven's thought is that human intelligence isn't the only form intelligence can take -- intelligence itself is just another evolutionary adaptation, and many other configurations of thought and personal drives can lead to a successful species.

3. Human Survival Qualities. Niven asks the question of what would make Humanity a species that survives. The answer isn't merely intelligence, because that characteristic is just one of many tools, and other alien races can have intelligences that surpass our own. It is other qualities combined with intelligence that will make the human race survivable. Other authors have offered up human bravery and resilience as those other qualities, but Niven has a different take -- it is our Luck and Curiousity. The human race is bred for luck, having narrowly avoided extinction countless times during its history, and it will be dumb luck that keeps us alive in the far future -- luck to discover or find the right technology at the right time, luck to avoid extermination by other hostile species we encounter. The characteristic of curiousity comes from our origin as monkeys - we are bred to be curious, and yet cautious, about new things. We are afraid of the unknown, and yet we are drawn to it, and those conflicting drives propel us into the future. The Ringworld's protagonist, Louis Wu, is an summed portrayal of humanity's best survival qualities. He is over a century old, and continues to live because of his high intelligence, his dumb luck, and a cautious curiousity that leads him to continue to engage and challenge himself in his world, even while taking precautions. Niven suggests that without our monkey's curiousity, even the most intelligent beings would lapse into stagnation. And without a little bit of luck, even the most well-adapted species go extinct.

4. Increased intelligence reduces free will. While this concept only appears in relation to the Protector race, I find this one of the more interesting ideas. As one's intelligence approaches extremely high levels, one understands his situation better and better so the best decision to make becomes clearer. So in calculus terms, as intelligence approaches infinity, free will approaches zero. Beings of extremely high intelligence will tend to see their life as a chain of blindingly obvious decisions, because at each stage the optimal decision to make is so apparent that to act otherwise is just being stubborn and irrational. Niven's idea here is that human free will is dependent on the outcomes of our decisions being uncertain, and that highly increased intelligence leads to a reduction of each decision-making situation to this: choose the best rational outcome, or knowingly make a bad irrational decision. If this is the norm, where does real free will become relevant?

The Eightfold Path, In Order

2006-07-19T17:24:00.000-04:00

The Eightfold Path is the outline for a buddhist's spiritual practice, encompassing views, techniques and actions. What I learned last night at Craig Swogger's lecture at Dharma Punx was that there is a general order in which it is executed. The Eightfold Path is typically grouped into three trainings:

1st Training -- Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood
These steps have to do with one's external behaviors. One simplifies and purifies one's life not because a higher power commands it, but because leading a simple moral life where one lives responsibly and guilt-free creates a stable mental foundation for the practitioner in their spiritual practice.

2nd Training -- Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration, Right Effort
This second training pertains specifically to meditation technique. One becomes an expert at getting into, staying, and getting out of calm, blissful meditative states. This, along with the first training, gives the practitioner a stable mental foundation, which is very important because the 3rd and final training is the toughest to approach.

3rd Training - Right Orientation, Right Motivation
This final training is a shift in one's deep-seated paradigm for life, and includes changing one's essential motivations for living and one's views on reality. The buddhist view of reality is unflinching -- it includes the impermanence of all things, the insubstantiality of the self, and the Four Noble Truths which says that life is suffering caused by our clinging to ourselves and things that are impermanent. But it's not enough to give lip service to these beliefs, they need to be understood and felt deeply, which can cause great distress, or on the other extreme apathy, to someone who is untrained in meditation and undisciplined in their personal life. So the 1st and 2nd Trainings provide a foundation for realizing the 3rd Training.

When the beliefs and attitudes of the 3rd Training are held by one who is able to be happy and peaceful anyway because of one's mental and physical discipline, then one achieves a deep-rooted, untouchable peace and happiness that buddhism calls Enlightenment. After all, if one can learn to be happy and peaceful in a world one fully accepts as impermanent and insubstatial, then there's not much the world can do to make life anything other than happy and peaceful. It is a very difficult thing to do, but even if one doesn't achieve enlightenment, one can make his life pretty damn nice, whatever it may be.

The Buddha's Spirit Body Teachings

2006-05-18T11:49:00.000-04:00

There are generally considered to be three main branches of Buddhism -- Theraveda, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. The difference between the branches is mainly what meditation techniques they focus on and what teachings of the Buddha they use.

Theraveda is the oldest school and focuses on the teachings the Buddha gave during his lifetime. The main techniques focused on are breathing meditation and insight meditation.

Mahayana has a relationship with Theraveda in a similar way that the New Testament has with the Old Testament in that it recognizes the teachings of Theraveda but also recognizes later teachings of the Buddha. So it uses additional meditation techniques like compassion cultivation practice. However most Theravedan schools also teach similar techniques so the differences are more subtle.

Vajrayana is a tantric form of Buddhism that holds valid the teachings of the other two schools but introduces advanced meditation techniques taught by the Buddha, many of them visualizations of various forms of deities.

It should be noted that of all of these cited teachings by the Buddha, only the Theravedan teachings are from Buddha's lifetime. Both the Mahayana and Vajrayana teachings are claimed to be taught by the Buddha after his death via a spirit body, and taught only to elder monks. If one doesn't believe in spirit bodies, one might consider this to be an indication that the later Buddha teachings are a sham, and only the Theravedan teachings should be taken seriously. However, regardless of the validity of the source of Mahayana and Vajrayana, the later teachings are valuable in and of themselves. It is important to experience the various meditation techniques directly and make one's own judgement as to their value.

Humorous take on Sex Appeal

2006-03-10T10:06:00.000-05:00

My favorite humorous social theory on dating was authored by none other than the esteemed Dr. Martin, who proposed the Easy Access Panels model while we were playing basketball at his house one afternoon. His theory went that the reason females in skirts are so appealing is because of the potentially miniscule time it would take to get into copulation mode with said female. The female's skirt, which can be flipped up by a mere gust of wind or a curious dog for example, is essentially an easy access panel, and the easiness of this access makes the female's presence more tempting. The underlying principle of this, of course, is that males are inherently lazy, so the more quickly and easily copulation can occur, the more appealing the mate. So I think a more general theory of sexual relativity can be summed up as the following relationship:

attractiveness / effort = sex appeal!

:-)

The Greased Pig

2006-01-13T12:19:00.000-05:00

At a wedding I attended on Long Island, one minister told a story that I think is one of the best metaphors I've heard about marriage.

***

I could talk to you all about how these two people come from different cultures, and how the interaction between those cultures will affect their union. But I don't know anything about those cultures. So instead I'll talk about something I do know, from my own culture.

In the village where I'm from there's a game we play sometimes called Catch The Pig. You take a pig and grease him up really good from head to toe, then set him loose in a giant mud puddle. Then you go in there and try to catch him. The pig is all greased up so he slips out of your hands every time you try to grab him, so inevitably you find yourself covered completely with mud and grease.

The thing is, all your friends will be watching you do this, friends that would never go in there and do it themselves, but they're all happy to holler out advice to you. "Don't grab that leg, grab the other leg!" "Go left, go left!" "You're doing it wrong!" Your friends have never played the game so they don't know how hard it is, but they'll give you an earful on how it should be done.

So marriage is just like Catch the Pig. Don't listen to your single friends, they've never done it so they don't understand the work that needs to go into it. Talk to those who are married and learn from them. You'll learn that in marriage, you have to roll up your sleeves, get dirty, and go catch that pig.

***

Insight Meditation Practice - Gil Fronsdal

2006-01-06T13:47:00.000-05:00

I recently listened to a podcasted recording of Gil Fronsdal's talk on mindfulness meditation. I hope you will find the notes I took helpful to your own understanding of the vipassana, or insight, tradition of buddhist practice.

***

mindfulness meditation

when you sit
pay attention to what is happening
be in the present
though the mind drifts off

more than being present,
notice what is happening in the present
every thing happening in the present
is a possible subject for meditation

other meditations focus only on the breath
and other data is distraction

in mindfulness meditation
all of life is the domain of practice
there are no distractions
nothing outside the realm of meditation

the most sacred of realities
is awareness itself
awareness without an outside
you stop distinguishing between
good and bad data

pay attention to what is happening
in the full show -- achieve big mind

you give some emphasis to breath
to anchor the meditation
until another experience comes that
is more compelling
feelings, sounds, thoughts

then use that data as the topic of meditation
you follow and flow with your awareness
and meditate upon it

couple mindfulness with concentration
extend from sitting into daily life
meditate all the time
ideally one has constant mindfulness, concentration,
clarity, presence

develop greater concentration
extend into daily life
sitting practice is a foundation

technique:
calm but alert
calmly conscious upright
follow up the spine
balanced
let tension go
breathing in deeply
relaxing on exhalation
later, let breath return to normal
normal easy breath
scan your body, see what parts
you can settle and relax
soft relaxed belly
the anchor of awareness is breath

when thought arises
let go of it as best you can
say to yourself "not now"
and gently move back to breathing

be in the present
with a simple awareness of
sounds, thoughts, body sensations
clearly acknowledging without judgement
it's all okay

no matter what is happening
it can be acknowledged openly
and named in awareness

sometimes this practice
is described as acceptance practice
but this is not a naive approval of everything

this is an acceptance within awareness
the awareness does not contract or resist
data that comes into our awareness
but our intelligence and wisdom still comes into play
we can still resist physically or make mental decisions
but we face everything up front
and are openly aware

to be open-minded does not mean lack of action
but to be open, present, still and calm
even in times of great challenge
it is the capacity to let in all data
to enable one to make good decisions
conscious, clear, deliberate decisions
not habit or knee-jerk reactions

the capacity for non-reactive open awareness
is a stepping-stone for understanding
our normal observation is coarse and distracted
mindfulness lets us look more deeply
coming from a place of calm more closely

accepting awareness allows us to look
more clearly and not clouded over

it is very difficult for those who don't meditate
to understand how our reality is painted by concepts
we live in the painting not seeing the colorations
vipassana meditation lets you look through to
the thusness the suchness of things as they are

properties are not inherent in an object
they are comparative qualities we add to it
to describe, judge, and manipulate it
but comparative thought does not let you take in
the fullness of the experience of a thing
one of the great sources of suffering
comes from inflexible concept of self
and unhelpful comparing of self to others
so we do not see our own suchness and thusness
the world of comparative thinking
lets people do terrible things to themselves

the opportunity of mindfulness practice
is stilling the mind enough
to see things as they are

this can be frightening to those
who anchor their ego in comparisons
to others and things in the world
but you can find rest with who you are
without need of comparison
and such is a taste of true freedom

as your focus gets subtler and gentler
the conceptual part of the mind quiets
and tremendous clarity arises
the insight is not into your psychology
but insight into universal qualities of life

greater stilling
requires fair concentration
which partners with mindfulness
there are strong elements of both

practice meditation every day
and the mind will stabilize
and with regularity comes
capacity for full concentration

meditation retreats are a buddhist tradition
silent retreats are a helpful way to let go
of the social concept of ourselves

practicing concentration exercises is helpful
focus only on one thing such as the breath
and do not widen awareness like in mindfulness
this develops mental discipline

another helpful practice is
application in daily life
be in the present
really present
draw focus gently into whatever activity you are doing
when driving, just drive
when sitting, just sit
find calm, fully aware open concentration
cue yourself to focus again to what is happening
pay attention to the now
and achieve fully conscious living

mindfulness, presence, concentration
is a delight to live in

time is a concept
make time for meditation
and time will be found to do it
time will be more spacious
in a more timeless present
you will have all the time you need

a useful practice
is to extend your mindfulness
to the time immediately following
your meditation session
so you can follow how and when you
first lose calm and contract
learn to extend mindfulness into daily life
by watching the first moment of tension
or contraction, or getting caught up
in the time following meditation
and stop and meditate again for a moment
to pay attention to what happened
question in a deep way whether it was necessary
to become contracted in that moment
catch it right at the beginning
and learn to let go of it

slowly learn to stay mindful
at that first moment
extend further into time
and progress into daily mindfulness

in closing,
develop mindfulness
develop concentration
practice meditation regularly
and incorporate into daily life

***

Beginner's Guide To Meditation by Goswami Kriyananda

2006-01-04T10:37:00.000-05:00

This is a gem of a book that I found randomly while at a bed and breakfast in New Hampshire. It's not a fancy-looking book but the narrative is both multi-disciplinary and transparent and it cleared up many of the confusions I had about the nature of meditation. I will share with you one of the stories that helped me the most.

Back in the days where biofeedback studies first started, they tested a group of students as well as Albert Einstein to measure the alpha wave activity of their brains during thought. Alpha wave activity is thought to be an indication of thoughtful concentration, whereas when not thinking about something the mind gives off a rest-state pattern. Well, they would ask the students simple math questions and the alpha wave patterns would go off as they thought about the question. But with Albert Einstein, they would ask him a very difficult question and no alpha wave state would go off. He would sit in silence for a few minutes, the biofeedback machine still showing a rest-state, and then the alpha waves would go off right before he spoke to give the answer.

The critical difference between Einstein and a normal student is that Einstein approached problems from a meditative state. He didn't intensely concentrate like the students, hence no alpha wave activity. He just calmly reflected on the problem and found a solution, and only when it came time to convert the answer into words was alpha wave activity necessary. The author of this book argues that this is the approach Buddhism urges one to take with all problems in life. The purpose of meditation is not to sit and chant mantras then go back to living like one has always done. You should over time be able to live and solve your problems in the meditative state -- to be able to tackle life's challenges with a calm and peaceful eye, to be aware without concentrating, and to let answers naturally come to you.

This has obvious similarities with Taoism, which urges a natural and easy approach to thinking about life's problems and "going with the flow" of one's mind instead of forcing things too much.

The Celestine Prophecy

2006-01-04T10:33:00.000-05:00

Framed inside a very badly written fictional conspiracy drama, this book has some really interesting ideas about the human condition. It talks of 9 steps of progress towards enlightenment, and step one is acknowledging that modern life isn't particularly fulfilling. The rest of the steps lead you to a worldview that understands humans in terms of chi energy, which we tend to steal from each other through power struggles and negativity, and which we can gain by changing our outlook on life and learning to appreciate human and natural beauty.

As I tend to do, I borrowed from this book the ideas that were useful to me while disregarding some of its weaker aspects, not limited to but including poor character development, awful dialogue, and a tendency towards self-importance. It is useful to acknowledge that part of a person's happiness arises not merely from the answers we find, but from the questions we choose to ask and the approach we choose to take towards life. The Celestine Prophecy offers an alternate approach to life that is New-Agey and chock-full of re-tooled Eastern and Western thought, but it's worth a read.

Article from the NY Times

2005-10-25T14:58:00.000-04:00

I'm posting this article from the NY Times in its entirety because I think what it talks about can be applied to more than just medical ailments. It is easy for one to focus on the interesting and the exotic instead of the obvious and close to home.

***

Scare Yourself Silly, but the Real Terrors Are at Your Feet
By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D.

Just in time for Halloween, the usual yearly ritual of terror by headline is now playing itself out in medical offices everywhere. Last year it revolved around flu shots; a few years ago it was anthrax and smallpox; a few years before that it was the "flesh-eating bacteria"; and before that it was Ebola virus, and Lyme disease and so on back into the distant past. This year it's the avian flu.
"I was crossing Third Avenue yesterday and I was coughing so hard I had to stop and barely made it across," a patient told me last week. "I'm really scared I'm getting the avian flu."
I just looked at him. What could I say? He has smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for the last 50 years. He has coughed and wheezed and gasped his way across Third Avenue now for the last 10 years. His emphysema is not going to get any better, but it might stop getting worse if he were to stop smoking.
He made it clear long ago that this is not going to happen. When it comes to the whole cigarette/health question, his motto, apparently, is "What, me worry?"
But the avian flu - now there's a health scare a person can sink his teeth into. So scary and yet, somehow, so pleasantly distant. So thrilling, so chilling, and yet, at the same time, so not here, not now, not yet. All in all, a completely satisfying health care fear experience. Unlike his actual illness.
Scary movies give children nightmares. Scary health news gives adults the extraordinary ability to ignore the immediate in favor of the distant, to escape from the real (and the really scary) into a far easier kind of fear.
A few years ago, a young woman waited patiently to be seen in our office after hours. She was a patient of one of my colleagues, but she couldn't wait for their scheduled appointment; she needed to see someone right away.
"I'm worried I have Lyme disease," she said. "I have all the symptoms. I think I need to be treated."
"But you have AIDS," I said.
"I'm tired and weak and I have fevers and sweats. I've lost my appetite. I can't think straight. I'm losing so much weight!"
She had seen a TV news report on Lyme disease, and then she had checked the Internet. All her symptoms were right there.
"But you have AIDS," I said. "And you don't want to take meds. That's why you're feeling so bad."
"I'm really scared about Lyme disease," she said. "I really need to get treated."
"If you want to be scared, how about that untreated AIDS of yours?"
We looked at each other. It was an impasse. The fact that logic was on my side mattered not at all: evidently the real was just a little too real for her. How much better to find another illness to be scared of, obsess over, get treated for, get rid of.
Eventually she coerced my colleague into testing her for Lyme disease and treating her despite negative tests. Then she decided her symptoms might actually be due to a brain tumor, instead. And so it went, until she died of AIDS.
Of four patients I saw in a single hour last week, three announced how scared they were of the avian flu. I reassured them, but there was quite a bit I did not say, and here it is.
I did not say: If you want to be scared, then how about that drug habit of yours you think I don't know about? How about the fact that you are 100 pounds overweight and eat nothing but junk? How about the fact that in a few short months Medicaid is going to stop paying for your very expensive medications and no one knows how just high that Medicare Part D deductible and co-payment are going to be? I did not say: If you want something to be scared of, how about the drug-resistant Klebsiella that is all over this very hospital, an ordinary run-of-the-mill bacterial strain that has become so resistant to so many antibiotics that we've had to resurrect a few we stopped using 30 years ago because they were so toxic.
That Klebsiella is one scary germ. It's in hospitals all over the country, and by now it's probably killed a thousandfold more people than the avian flu.
But you don't hear much about our Klebsiella. Like our bad habits and our dismally insoluble health insurance tangles, our antibiotic-resistant bacteria are with us, right here, right now. Apparently they all lack the drama, the suspense, the titillating worst-case situations that energize our politicians and turn into a really newsworthy health care scare.
They're all just too real.

***

One Quote

2005-10-20T18:30:00.000-04:00

This post is merely one line of wisdom I got from an Indian restaurant. I keep it with me because it states simply and succinctly a state of mind I would like to be in.

"Live every experience and every event you encounter as a learning opportunity, rather than as a threat of failure."

The Four Agreements

2005-09-15T10:57:00.000-04:00

Miguel Ruiz wrote a self-help book called The Four Agreements that proposes that we replace the negative agreements we have with outselves with these four:

1. "Be impeccable with your word" -- Take care in the things you say to yourself and others.
2. "Don't take anything personally." -- What people say to you has more to do with them than you.
3. "Don't make assumptions." -- It is better to ask questions than to blow things out of proportion.
4. "Always do your best." -- Focus on fully enjoying your own actions, rather than on expected results.

The Four Agreements basically define those things that an individual has control over: what they say, what they do, and how they interpret what other people say and do. The key to happiness, the book argues, is to gain control of the things one can control, and stop frustrating oneself with things one cannot. To interpret it one way, The Four Agreements are spelling out the old prayer, "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

The book was helpful in that it got me thinking about the nature of the human psyche again. One of the basic premises of the book is that we are taught by society to make agreements with ourselves regarding our beliefs and values, and therefore that the unconstructive and damaging agreements can be replaced over time with positive ones like the four proposed. For me this invokes the age-old nature vs. nurture, therapy vs. drugs question: how much of our 'agreements' are inborn and how many are trained? The very idea of therapy, and hence self-help books, rests on the idea that many of our most damaging mental behaviors are a result of learning, and hence can be unlearned. But if these agreements, beliefs, or whatever you call them are natural mental tendencies brought about by brain chemistry, then therapy is minimally useful -- what is needed is a change in physical chemistry which will lead to the formation of different sets of attitudes, beliefs and values.

As is often the case, the answer probably lies somewhere in between -- but exactly where in between matters. The Four Agreements are very good rules to live by, but are not so useful if the negative agreements we already have with ourselves cannot be replaced. It does seem, though, that the human mind is adaptable to change, and that mental tendencies do not equate to permanent rules of thought and behavior.

David Hume's Abstract for the Treatise on Human Nature

2005-07-20T12:34:00.000-04:00

I recently finished a later work of the philosopher David Hume, an extended essay titled "Enquiry into Human Understanding", which in some ways soft-pedals the views he put forth in his well-known Treatise. What I found more interesting was the short abstract he wrote of his longer Treatise that was included in the collection. He summarizes his main arguments in such a clear way that I feel that I understand his other works better. It also strikes me how simple his main argument is, and also how seeing it presented so simply highlights the one philosophical opening which Kant later jumped upon -- the mention of "custom" being the motivation for the formation of our beliefs.

Hume starts from the perspective that all we know comes from our "perceptions" -- our ideas and our experiences. Then he argues that our ideas only come from our experiences. This includes our inner experiences, such as the feeling of an emotion or bodily sensations. We form our ideas by putting together various experiences, but it has to come from somewhere. He places ideas as being "weaker" perceptions in that they are never as vivid as the experiences from which those ideas are formed -- nothing is as real as reality.

He uses this basis to strike a sceptical blow to all philosophers claiming absolute knowledge. The basic argument is that we don't have any way of directly experiencing any of the basic principles that would allow us to have absolute knowledge in something. For instance, we can't experience "cause and effect" directly. We can see certain events leading to other events and see this repeated over and over, but this is only to show a predictive pattern. What we can't do is assume that this would continue ad infinitum into the future, because this assumes another principle we will never be able to experience directly, "constancy of physical law". We don't actually know that whatever patterns we see in this world will continue indefinitely -- we can only speculate reasonably based on what we have experienced in this world. We use these experiences to form reasonable working theories about our world, and those theories go all the way down to basic "laws" like cause and effect.

Theories and beliefs are very different, though -- a theory is a well-supported hypothesis, while a belief implies something much more certain. Hume argues that the main difference between a theory and a belief is emotional intensity. When we believe something we hold onto it more intensely and are less apt to question it. Most of our basic fundamental principles of thought are actually theories derived from experience, but they are so established that we treat them like absolute laws -- this treatment is due to the force of emotional attachment to these basic structures. Hume is a hard sceptic in this regard -- he insists that we treat even basic ideas like cause and effect as theories, and in general that we regard the limits to our own knowledge with a great deal of humility. In Hume's view, nothing is absolutely certain -- we live in a world of probabilities and working theories. This is why Hume is thought by many to be the father of modern philosophy -- he opened up the possibilities of modern pragmatism, deconstructionism and the like with his practical sceptical approach to epistemology.

He opened up the door to Immanuel Kant, who in some ways fathered modern psychology, by his comment on why people tend to treat things like cause and effect as absolute beliefs. Hume doesn't really answer this, instead saying that it is done because of "custom." But this opened up the question of why it is our custom. Kant's answer is that it has to do with the way we are built to perceive the world. Our minds are built to find patterns and form beliefs, Kant says. This is because there are basic principles that we are built to take for granted, like cause and effect, because that allows us to give structure and a working coherency to the world we see. Without assuming such things as cause and effect, we couldn't start to see patterns of cause and effect in our world -- we would just see a slew of data without any connections. While we may now disagree with Kant as to which basic principles are inborn, his insight was a big step towards psychology because it made us start to examine how it is that we process and organize our perceptions on the most basic operational level. Kant, in effect, opened up the can of worms that Hume's scepticism created.

"Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro

2005-07-18T13:07:00.000-04:00

The science fiction novel "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro could be described as a deceptively simple story. Three kids grow up and slowly come to terms with their future and purpose. Their purpose, however, is to have their vital organs harvested for medical use when they reach adulthood. They live in a world they cannot be sheltered from -- a world that ultimately sees them as a physical commodity.

It's an extreme situation the characters face, but I couldn't help but see the parallels between their lives and ours. Like them we grow up in a sea of people, so many people that it seems almost impossible to be important in the larger scheme of things. Like them we find ourselves treated as commodities and doing our best to sell our worth to others. And perhaps most of all, we find ourselves in a situation where regardless of how we are sheltered or cultivate ourselves, we are all ultimately doomed to the same fate as the children -- to grow old, to lose our vital organs one by one and to die. Most of us will not die as early as the characters do, but that is only to say that our timeframe is longer, not that we do not face the same situation. One horrifying aspect of being mortal is that our end often doesn't come cleanly or elegantly -- sometimes it is quick and unexpected, and often it is a slow deterioration over decades where one organ after another fails us until finally we are done in.

The novel asks the question, is it possible to come to terms with the prospect of a death like this? The children all make peace with their fate, but it is an uneasy peace with a touch of sadness. Their guardians try their best first to shelter them, as well as expose them to art and literature so that they are able to lead positive lives during the time they have, but ultimately they are unable to stop the process -- there is no way out, and no way to even delay the end. The author seems to imply that a complete peace is not possible for these people, and hence not possible for us either. We can come to grips with our destiny and reach an acceptance, but ultimately deterioration and death is not a fate that can be conquered.

A related question the novel asks is whether it is better to be fully aware of our end, or to be blissfully unaware. It is the conflict between the value of truth and happiness. The characters arrive at different conclusions -- some think the children should know their fate from the beginning, and others think they should be allowed to be decieved or decieve themselves so that they can enjoy what lives they have. Most people, though, can't be at either extreme. I think we are all aware of our eventual deaths, but we neither pretend it doesn't exist nor do we dwell completely on it. We live our lives as the children do, enjoying what we can, dreaming of a different world, and dealing with things as they come.

My Current Personal Philosophy

2005-06-19T12:00:00.000-04:00

-Truth exists but is inaccessible due to the limits of our perception. The fact that we are able to find and use patterns within the world is proof that there is an underlying solid reality from which those patterns emerge. But the nature of the reality itself is inaccessible -- we live only in the patterns. Because of this, we must approach our own knowledge with humility and respect our limits.

-Consciousness is not a unique thing to humans; it pervades all life and all matter. Consciousness is present in all matter, and when matter is grouped together in our brains a fabric of consciousness weaves together creating our minds. Similarly, when we die our unique consciousness is scattered back among the matter from which we made.

-Life is to journey to improve oneself that continues throughout or lives. To cease striving to better ourselves is a spiritual death.

-The events of our lives are related but it's only apparent in hindsight. When we look back at those events we can see the connections that were not immediately apparent.

-The individual self is not a unified entity. We should think of ourselves as more of a composite over time of related thoughts and feelings, and as an interplay between the contradictory drives of the conscious and unconconscious.

-We are neither our thoughts nor our feelings. Only our conscious will is present over the course of our lives. Our personality traits are tendencies over time, rather than unbreakable rules.

-Logic is just a process about thinking about something starting from a set of assumptions. But even slight variations in basic assumptions can lead logically to broad and diverse conclusions. These basic assumptions, or axioms, cannot be proven absolutely. To believe in anything absolutely is an act of faith.

-Life demands two contrasting things from us -- to be uncertain, but to act decisively to increase the chance of good results. Self-confidence is an act of practicality.

-People, places and objects mean nothing separated from the context of our love. It is our appreciation of things in the world that give them value.

Bennett and Pi

2005-05-24T14:37:00.000-04:00

I have spent some time thinking about faith, knowledge, and happiness. Philosophically I am an agnostic -- one thing all those Dartmouth classes taught me was that nothing can absolutely be taken for granted, and that for every perspective there is an equal but opposite perspective, the difference often resulting from basic, unprovable axiomatic differences. When it comes to the realm of feeling, though, I am unresolved. I definitely have much hope, strong instincts drawing me towards certain beliefs, and very firm moral commitments, but no definite cohesive faith. To put it another way, I have all the makings for a strong spiritual side that haven't been fully developed. So I have been spending some spare time reading and thinking about faith and how it relates to happiness. I have found that the simple act of thinking about such things has the effect of making the daily experience richer. Simply asking questions makes the world deeper, even if the answers don't come.

For instance, I am reading a book called "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel, which tells the story of a boy who finds himself trapped on a lifeboat with a tiger. The beginning section of the book covers the peculiar spiritualism of the boy, who is a practicing hindu, muslim and christian all at once. The answers he gives to his devotion to each rests on the richness each practice adds to his life. For Christianity, for instance, he finds the story of Jesus Christ's sacrifice particularly compelling and fascinating. The idea that God would allow a section of itself to die in a very human way in an act of Love is an inspiring thing, and Pi is moved by this. He is moved by Muslim faith in its unflinching merging of everyday life and prayer, and the lifting of the spirit that comes from the daily acts of reverence. And his Hindu faith is woven into his way of thinking about the world -- he thinks about the unknowable world as brahman nirgana, and the concrete of that same world as brahman saguna in its various humanized forms: krishna, ganesh, shiva. For each religion that he embraces, he is experiencing faith as an act of life, rather than a category of belief. To have faith, to Pi, is to live with richness. To me this is a novel approach to faith, because I have thought of faith strictly in categorical terms -- one has faith in subject X if one believes in Y without proof Z. But for the character Pi, his faith is an act of spiritual living, and he embraces faiths in their spirit and metaphors to his own life, even if the beliefs of each are incompatible.

During this same period I had finished another book called "How To Live 24 Hours a Day" by Arnold Bennett, a self-help book I found on Project Gutenberg. His view on happiness is that one's life becomes richer when one challenges himself to look deeply at whatever interests him, rather than passively take it in and waste the hours. He urges you to train the mind to focus, and then take chunks of time out of every day and commit it to the pursuit of knowledge and craft in one's interests. The time spent on pursuing these things steadily over time leaves one with a life without regrets for not having tried to fulfill one's ambitions. But what ties this world to Life of Pi is the author's insistence that the singleminded pursuit of knowledge and excellence in any field leads to a deeper, more spiritual experience of the world. For instance, the act of pushing oneself to learn the principles and history of opera will make the next show one attends much richer and with more depth. The dedicated reading of poetry and explorations of metaphor will make one's experience more filling. Studying evolution in depth will turn a simple glance at the sea's horizon into an experience in one's mind of the vast, complex struggle for survival going on below the surface. The same goes for studying the business trends of the occupation one is in, or the history of the sport one plays. The act of enriching oneself with knowledge of our interests and actions makes our experiences richer, more purposeful, and spiritually fulfilling. Bennett starts to sound a lot like Pi.

It is remarkable to me how in my own life things tend to come together. Sometimes because I actively seek it, and sometimes because of all-too-common happy coincidences, but there are common ideas flowing through the books I'm reading and the people I'm speaking with. Part of me thinks things happen for a reason, and that somewhere in these common themes are the keys to happiness -- perhaps not The Key, but certainly some powerful wordless ideas that permeate the concepts of faith, fulfillment and spiritualism. As always, I will continue to read and think about it. I am now reading the works of the stoic Epictetus, and perhaps later this evening I will re-read Jesus's Sermon on the Mount and the passage concerning Buddha's revelations underneath the Bodhi tree and his telling of the essential truths. And I will read and think some more, and perhaps I can make the act of living more spiritual and hence more fulfilling -- like Pi, like Bennett.

Best Bars in New York

2005-04-26T16:53:00.000-04:00

I'm posting this small list my sister sent me for my own benefit. I have my own list of best bars in NYC, including MOD, McSorely's, Chumley's, Fat Black Pussycat, Korova Milk Bar, Grassroots Tavern, 2nd on 2nd, and Beauty Bar. But I'd like to check out some of these too because I haven't been to some of them...

***

Decibel is the name of that cool sake bar. There
is also a location uptown somewhere. This place
is a late night must go.
240 E 9th St(between Second and Third avenues)
New York, NY
10009
Neighborhood: East Village
6 at Astor Place
+1 212 979 2733
Open 6pm-4am

Pink Pony
176 Ludlow St, New York, NY 10002
(212) 253-1922
Arty, has poetry readings sometimes, seems
vaguely French café-ish...

The Room
144 Sullivan St # 144, New York, NY 10012
(212) 477-2102
Plays good music, comfy and classy, many kinds of
beer.

Belgian Beer Bar
There is a yummy belgian beer bar where you can
order cones of fries with tons of different kinds
of dipping sauces. It is just off of Washington
Square park if you go west on West 4'th Street
before you get to the basketball courts. If you keep
going west there are TONS of bars to choose from.

Corner Bistro
331 W 4th St,
New York 10014
At Jane St & 8th Ave
Two dollar beers, and the best burger in town--no
kidding. (A bit of a walk or take the F train or
cab.)

Milk and Honey
F to Delancey St.
134 Eldridge St.
212-625-3897
I've never actually been to this swanky,
exclusive bar, only open to non-members before 11pm, but
do hear it's quite cool. You need a reservation
to go and have to be buzzed in to the unmarked
entrance. If it interests you, you could give a
call and see if you can get in.

"The Beak of the Finch" by Jonathan Weiner

2005-03-25T17:04:00.000-05:00

One of the critical points Creationists point to in their criticism of Evolution is that Evolution is still a theory: it hasn't been proven, and its processes have never been seen. Even though there are mounds of circumstantial evidence indicating that species arise and change over time, nobody's actually watched a new species being formed so Creationism is still just as valid a theory. Reading "The Beak of the Finch" was refreshing because it shows just how much real-world proof there is today of Evolution's processes. It turns out that when you observe species today, you find that evolution is still occurring, and at some times it occurs at a rapid pace. The principal driving mechanisms of the Evolutionary processes -- genetic variation between generations, and fierce natural selection (ie death) based on those relatively miniscule variations -- have been been proven to occur in today's species. Over generations of birds, insects, bacteria and the like, environmental changes can result in drastic changes in a species' appearance and functionality within 5 to 10 generations. Any Creationist claiming that species created at the beginning of time are unchanging are flat-out wrong.

What is interesting from the reading of this book, though, is that one sticking point of the Creationist argument has still never been proven. We have never directly observed one species splitting into two. We have observed species adapting over time. We have observed instances where there were one species, and then when we looked back later there were two. But we have never actually watched a species variate, split, and then evolve into two distinct species. We have all the proof of Evolution occurring, even down to the before and after pictures, but we have not yet watched it as it happened. It can still be claimed that although species vary and adapt widely to its environment, there is an invisible force keeping species from varying too much. So Evolution, despite the mountain of evidence supporting it, is still a theory. Creationism, despite the mountain of evidence against it, is also still a theory. This is not to say that they are equal -- and indeed, there is still the possibility that Evolution will be proved correct, because it is verifiable. There may be a study as robust as the ones the Grants made on the beaks of Darwin's finches that stumbles upon the direct observation of the Origin of Species.

A note on Evolution itself: Evolution is basically a process of breeding in the wild. Our genetic code is inconsistent between generations, both by accident and design. Variations occur throughout a population, and these variations make certain creatures more or less adapted to situations that may come up. Now, in periods of great environmental strain where there are limited resources, creatures end up dying. The creatures that had variations better suited for the crisis have a higher chance of living and hence having young that carry on the genetic line. But even when a death-filled environment is not culling the herd, variation is occurring. In fact, variation is constantly occurring. This is why when we look at fossil records, evolution seems to occur in spurts instead of gradually. Species are always changing, but there is only a high pressure to change in a certain way when the environment changes. That environmental change can be weather and terrain, the simple decrease of a resource, or the introduction of a competing species. And once again, while scientists have yet to observe a species being created in the wild, they certainly have watched hundreds of species die out completely. Some by our own doing, it should be noted. Natural selection is definitely occurring.

Samuel Delaney: On Writing

2005-02-22T17:56:00.000-05:00

At the end of science fiction writer Samuel Delaney's short story collection, "Aye, and Gomorrah," Mr. Delaney writes a bit about the process of writing. He claims to only know 3 basic things about writing, but those 3 things end up being pretty big.

Mr. Delaney's rules of writing can be boiled down to 3 extremely simple statements. 1. Don't overwrite. 2. Don't be shallow. 3. Don't be cliche. By themselves, these 3 rules are almost too transparent to be much help. But when Mr. Delaney expands on these rules, they gain importance.

1. DON'T OVERWRITE.
Think of a scene in your story -- now try to imagine every detail of that scene. Not only what you think to be important, but literally everything that would be in that scene, from the objects on the desk to the wallpaper to the strangers in the room and what they're wearing and how they're sitting. Now when you start to write, DON'T mention all of these things. Instead, get into the head of your character and only mention those details that you think that character would notice. The scene becomes richer both from what you include, and also what you leave out.

2. DON'T BE SHALLOW.
Have you gotten halfway through a story, and then get stuck somewhere and don't know how to end the story? If so, you need to sit down and think about your characters some more. Think more about your character's motivations, their psychological quirks, what makes them tick. As you keep adding in complexities to the character and the situation they're in, you should be able to see that there is something they would have to do, hence comes the continuation or ending of the story. If you still can't think of anything, trash the story and start another one with more potential for depth.

3. DON'T BE CLICHE.
In today's world, most things have been done. So don't settle for doing what's been done before. Read constantly, and when it's time for you to write, try to approach the story in a way that is uncommon. Don't take the easy route, and instead try something new even if a positive result is not readily apparent. The result will be stories that are fresh and original, because you are willing to take risks.

In closing, Mr. Delaney says that the process of a writer is the process of doubting, of rejecting, of revising. The difference between a true writer and someone who writes is that for a writer, this doubting and revising process is happening continuously and simultaneously during the process of writing. A true writer is holding an image, scene, or psychology in his mind and is constantly thinking and rethinking about it while he is writing, so that the process of doubting does not merely negate, it spurs on new ideas and new ways of describing the same thing. Writing is an intensely active process of thinking recursively -- and the hoped-for result is prose or poetry that is not only good, but created by someone who has thought and rethought enough about it that he knows why it is good.

It is my feeling that the process of writing that Mr. Delaney describes is applicable to more than writing fiction. In fact, it may be the process needed for songwriting, or art, or business, or life. Because it describes a process of thinking, doubting, imagining, and ultimately making lots of small, distinct choices that add up to make a powerful whole.

Blankets, by Craig Thompson

2005-02-02T13:11:00.000-05:00

For my recent 26th birthday, I was given a graphic novel called "Blankets, by Craig Thompson. It tells the story of a painfully-withdrawn boy born to a heavily-Christian family, and his experiences growing up and with his first love. It is a character study that hops back and forth between moments in his childhood, and moments he shared years later with his first girlfriend. It is a graphic novel that seeks to display life as it really was for the character, and because of this there is no grand, unified "message" to the novel. In fact, its main message is that life cannot be reduced down to simple rules or ideals. Life is a rich, complex, and sacred experience, and we are lucky to be able to participate, even if only temporarily.

In N Out vs. McDonalds: Business models

2005-02-02T11:10:00.001-05:00

I learned these differing business models originally from the book "Fast Food Nation," but I realize that the overall models apply to all business, not just fast food. The In N Out and McDonalds models simply highlight the division in business between human specialization and technological specialization strategies.

The McDonalds business model is well-known. They use high technology to automate as much as possible, reducing the need for skilled workers. They then hire low-skill workers and underpay them. Because they are underpaid those workers are hard to retain, but the simplicity of the day-to-day operation of the technology makes training time shorter, so the turnover is offset by high efficiency in readying new workers to replace them. The high turnover is actually beneficial because workers stay at a low wage, minimizing employee cost, but the maintenance of the automated equipment is costly. The McDonalds model is driven by technological specialization, and minimal human specialization.

The In N Out food chain does things significantly differently. Food is prepared and cooked by hand, and cooking everything up-to-speed requires significantly more training and longer retention periods, because the longer employees stay the more efficient they become at preparing and cooking. Keeping skilled employees requires significantly better pay, so employee cost is maximized. But the technology costs are low because those skilled workers can operate using simple machinery, and do not require the more expensive automated devices. The In N Out model is driven by human specialization, and minimal technological specialization.

These two opposing models are the two main paths of all modern business. Every business has to choose to what extent they wish to rely on human specialization or technological specialization in order to produce their goods or services. When a classical agency buys an automated phone answering service, it is hoping that the cost of the technology will be offset by the money saved over not having an operator. When a tech company implements a database or works to automate and simplify its own processes, it is increasing its technology cost and reducing the need for company-wide specialization and lowering its training time. When a farmer buys highly productive farm equipment, he spikes his technology cost and reduces the need for additional human laborers. Ideally, a company should have both well-trained employees and efficient, easy-to-use technology. But resources are always limited, particularly because corporations are under pressure not only to turn a profit, but turn a maximal profit, so in most cases, a tradeoff will have to occur between investment in people, and investment in technology that reduces the need for people.

* As a footnote, In N Out's business model is driven in part from a religious basis. The company is Christian and believes that a human-driven model is the right thing to do. It is interesting to note that when maximized, the human-driven model is as profitable as McDonalds' "anti-human" model. Another thing to note is that even though high technology can reduce certain employee cost, it requires radically more highly-skilled workers in order to build and fix the machines. At some point in the food chain, there will need to be specialized and retained workers -- and in general, the less workers you have doing the same amount of work, the higher amount of specialization required, technology or human.

Life on Other Planets: Asimov vs. Baxter

2005-01-18T16:14:00.000-05:00

Contemporary science fiction author Stephen Baxter owes much to the man whom many call the father of modern sci-fi, Issac Asimov. Instead of using science fiction merely as an exotic metaphor for modern-day issues, both authors use the medium as a place to discuss about what the future really could be like. They both write to open a discussion about the possibilites of humankind's future. But their visions are drastically different, because of Baxter's disagreement with Asimov on one significant point: life on other planets.

Both authors believe there is life on other planets. Asimov, though, feels that the past 70 or so years of SETI research has shown us that if there is life out there, it's extremely rare, and most likely there is not so much in the way of intelligent, space-faring life. His vision for the future is a future filled with humans -- humans colonizing the universe, humans terraforming planets, humans fighting each other, and humans alone in the galaxy with only their technological children for company. Other lower life forms may develop on other planets, but only humankind has developed the intelligence and abilities necessary to expand and rule. The future of the universe is the story of man.

Stephen Baxter's future, though, is full of competing life forms, and in his view man is a worthy competitor to countless races in the universe. It is not man's superior intellect that makes him ultimately compete the best, it is his motivated drive towards risk, expansion, and power. In Baxter's view, life is very common, but we do not spot it now because of two main things: 1) other forms of life are not like our own so we are essentially looking for the wrong things, and 2) truly intelligent, space-travelling life simply does not bother to get in touch with us because to them we are inconsequential animals. It is not until man becomes a spacefaring people, Baxter argues, that we start to be aware of, and compete with, other species. The future of the universe is the story of evolution on a grand scale, filled with life at every corner, in which man competes admirably.

Despite these differing visions, both Asimov and Baxter have optimistic views of humankind's future. Both feel that man has what it takes to survive, that our futures are linked to advances in technology, and also that even far in the future, humans will still retain what is important about being human.

Basketball -- A Different Pace

2004-12-12T15:45:00.000-05:00

An observation I read on the ESPN sports page struck me as somehow connected to more than just basketball.

The observation was that all of the truly great basketball players -- Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson -- have something in common, and it's not a particular move or a specific physical trait. The weird trait they have in common is that they all move on the basketball court at a different speed than everyone else on the court. Everyone else moves and flows with each other, but the greats always seem to move at their own personal pace, and by virtue of their presence force the game to move with them. The odd thing is that this pace is not necessarily faster than everyone else -- often times, it's slower. The commonality is that through any game there is a calm poise that each player holds, so that regardless of the situation they continue to play their game at their pace, and let the game come to them.

This tidbit tied into a conversation I had at a weekend brunch where this guy told me about how when he was a kid his parents discouraged him from crying after little things like scraping a knee or not getting candy he wanted. His parents told him to keep a "stiff upper lip" and taught him that even when things don't go his way, it's important to keep a hold of himself. He was taught to be tough at an early age, and to not sweat the small stuff. He told me that nowadays he's a stock trader, which is a very high-pressure job, and that his early childhood was the best preparation he had for that because when he's at his job and people are yelling and screaming, it doesn't get to him because he was taught early on that it's not a big deal when things don't do your way, you just get up, brush yourself off and move on.

I'm not exactly sure how these two items tie together, but they struck me as intimately related. Perhaps it is the notion that in basketball and life, the great ones out there don't let the small things change them. They don't panic or sweat the small things, but continue to have confidence and faith in themselves, and let the game come to them.

Lepers

2004-11-12T10:00:00.000-05:00

I've been reading a book entitled "Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient" by Norman Cousins. The big idea in this book is that a critical component in the prevention and healing of disease is the patient's will to live -- his ability to mobilize his own body's defenses through a positive attitude and a proactive approach towards his own health. This idea was a breakthrough when it was written in the 1970s, but at this point it's a generally accepted principle. The effectiveness of somewhat dubious holistic medicine as well as the placebo effect can be explained by pointing to the psychological effects these things have on the mind, which in turn helps the body heal itself in a real and positive way. The book also stresses the need for emphasis in preventative medicine and nutrition, a stance that in modern times is generally accepted and even commonplace.

Lepers were given as an example of why pain, which is still approached as a bad thing to be eliminated with painkillers, is a positive and necessary component to biofeedback. Leprosy, and its corresponding loss of appendages, was for a long time seen as a degenerative disease that caused limbs to fall off. A doctor by the name of Paul Brand discovered, through his studies at a leper colony, dispelled that misconception. He realized that the main thing leprosy does is deaden the nerve receptors in the body, making the person unable to experience pain or even sensations of pressure. With the absence of feedback, a leper will accidentally severely damage or even break off his limbs, and when sleeping on the street rats would bite off parts of them without them being able to notice. The moral of the story is that in his lifetime Dr. Brand worked to restore the gift of pain, because pain is what tells us both that something is wrong and that something must be done. What must be done is not necessarily taking painkillers, but getting to the root of the problem, which may be injury, disease, or even psychological causes like stress.

Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity

2004-10-25T15:08:00.000-04:00

This entry will explain as best as possible Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and how it came about, as told by Gary Zukav's "Wu Li Masters."

In the year 1905, the same year Albert Einstein had published his paper proving that light exhibits particle-like properties, he also presented a paper solving the problem of the constant speed of light. It was well-known at the time that light of any kind always travels at 186,000 miles per second. The Michelson-Morely experiment displayed a curious thing, though -- light was ALWAYS measured to be travelling at 186,000 miles per second, even when the observer was quickly moving towards or away from the light source. This was confusing because one expects the speed something appears to travel to take the motion of the observer into account. For instance, if you are driving in a car at 75 miles per hour and a car is coming towards you at 75 miles per hour, it would look like the car was approaching you at 150 miles per hour. So it was considered a great puzzle that light somehow appeared to move the same speed no matter what speed you were moving towards or away from it. Physicists were asking how it was that light could change its speed relative to each observer like that.

Einstein solved the problem by assuming what was being questioned: that light really did travel at 186,000 miles per second, and that it would always appear to travel at that speed regardless of the observer's motion. In this way, the puzzle of the constant speed of light became the Principle of the Constant Speed of Light. Those two things being assumed true, and assuming that observers were taking the measurements in the exact same way, there was nothing left that could vary but time itself. So Einstein decided that time, mass, and distance itself changes with velocity. This way, light would appear to be going the same speed as it always does regardless of the observer's motion, because the length of the ruler and the rate of time changes in proportion with the change in velocity. By assuming to be true what was being questioned, and completely throwing out what was assumed to be true, Einstein made his breakthrough. Light speed was made constant, and mass, length, and time were made relative to the motion of the observer. This assertion leads to fairly exotic results, like the fact that as an object approaches light speed its mass approaches infinity and time slows to a stop.

This however is impossible to do because as it nears the speed of light, and increasingly immense amount of energy is required to increase speed because it is also increasing mass, which requires more kinetic energy to move. The most popular equation related to this breakthrough is E=MC2. This relates to Einstein's assertion that mass and energy are not merely related, they are the same thing and can be converted back and forth. This is why mass increases as speed goes up: the kinetic energy of motion makes the moving material essentially gain mass because it is gaining energy, because mass and energy are one and the same. In this equation, E=energy, M=mass, and C2 is the speed of light squared, which is a very big number -- the point being that each bit of matter is composed of an enormous amount of energy. This discovery led scientists to figure out how to blow atoms up to convert mass into energy, hence leading to the invention of the fission and fusion atom bombs.

Peter Singer: The Horns of Bush's Dilemma

2004-10-19T16:59:00.000-04:00

I am posting this LJ Entry from November 18, 2003 because of the following things of note:
A. The post yielded quite a lengthy and interesting discussion on stem cell research.
B. It raises an underlying issue regarding the importance or irrelevance of axiomatic consistency in ethics.
C. It spurred my personal interest in the controversial modern philosopher Peter Singer.

***

Last night at New York University I attended a lecture by Peter Singer, a contemporary Utilitarian philosopher who is attaining both fame and noteriety for his hard-line ethical stances on animal rights and infanticide. This evening was not about his own personal theories however...for this lecture he had one goal in mind, and that was to point out the inconsistency in the moral and ethical doctrines set out by George W. Bush.

Mr. Singer hardly looks the type of man you would expect to be crusading for the lives of chickens, let alone taking on our President with a sharpness that rivals Howard Dean. He is a thin man with a calm but pronounced voice, with wispy clouds of hair hovering around a receding scalp, wearing a wrinkled white dress shirt with collar unbuttoned and an equally creased brown sport coat. He never appeared angry when he spoke, but there was a certain energy to him when he put forth his argument point by point, which through the course of the lecture became almost overwhelming in its power -- it was the sort of argument that is so simple that it seems inevitable. Mr. Singer unloaded one bullet in his philosophical gun, but he only needed one.

Indeed it seemed to me that Mr. Singer was fulfilling a role philosophers should play in politics -- point out logical inconsistencies within our ethical, moral and political structures. Audience members later asked the philosopher whether he thought Bush was "psychologically troubled" to which he replied that he was not an expert on foreign policy or psychology or politics -- he was an expert in reason, and it was in this function that he would contribute.

The crux of his argument lay in the inconsistency between Bush's stances on stem-cell research and war. Stem-cell research uses stem cells taken from discarded embryos, often taken from artificial insemination procedures -- when a couple wants to have a child they fertilize up to a dozen eggs in hopes that 1-3 will fertilize, then implant the eggs in the potential mother's uterus, and sometimes more than 3 eggs fertilize in which case the extra embryos are either frozen, thrown away or used for this research. Stem-cell research is being used to try to find cures for diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimers, and has the potential for saving millions of lives. Bush has banned such practices because he is strictly pro-life -- Bush's argument runs that regardless of the potential benefit the research can have, it is at the cost of these human embryos, which have the same human right to live as we do. The embryos are not killed intentionally, as in the case of abortion, but are simply the means to an end, researching cures for diseases. So in the case of stem-cell research Mr. Bush says that the ends do not justify the means, that the loss of human life cannot be justified by its potential benefits to humanity.

On to War. In the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, on multiple occassions the military chose to bomb residential areas in hopes of killing hiding Iraqi leaders, including Chemical Ali and Saddam Hussein. This was done after Baghdad had already been taken over and the first chapter of the war, so to speak, had been completed. When asked about the decision to perform military bombings that would inevitably kill innocent civilians, Mr. Bush said that while the killing of women and children was not their intention it is a foreseen consequence, but it was justified by the necessity of killing Hussein and his evil allies. He argued that the U.S. was doing its best to minimize civilian casualties, but that some killing of innocents was necessary and justified by the potential benefit, that is, the overthrowing of the evil governments of the Taliban and Iraq, the bringing of democracy to the Middle East, and the weakening of terrorism in order to save future American lives. In other words, Mr. Singer says, Mr. Bush thinks the ends do justify the means in war, and the loss of human life can be justified by its potential benefits to humanity.

At this point I knew what was coming, but the weight of it still hit me hard. Mr. Singer puts forth the Horns of a Dilemma -- though seemingly unrelated, Mr. Bush's stances on stem-cell research and war in Iraq and Afghanistan are philosophically inconsistent. He cannot say in the case of stem-cell research that any loss of human embryonic life is unacceptable regardless of potential benefit, and then turn around and bomb residential areas and justify it with their potential benefit. If Mr. Bush wants to have people take his ethical and moral stances seriously, Mr. Singer argues, they must have an internal consistency. Either Mr. Bush must lift the ban on stem-cell research to be in line with his views on war, or he must admit to war crimes for the killing of innocent lives in Iraq to be in line with his stance on stem-cell research. If Bush, on the other hand, only applies his axiomatic ethical principles in certain cases and not others, he undermines the weight and necessity of his own arguments. That is the dilemma.

And that was it. No big condemning rant at the end about Mr. Bush's hypocrisy. That was not Mr. Singer's role -- he was merely putting forth a dilemma, and put it up to Mr. Bush, and the audience, to decide what to do with it. As Singer put it, "I think it's important to create a discussion about these things." It was a refreshing experience -- and indeed I think that Mr. Singer's got a good point, not just about Mr. Bush, but in general on the role philosophy should play in the modern world. Philosophers are experts in the examination of rational belief systems, and as such they have a role to play in modern policy because they are able to see inconsistencies within our ethical stances -- philosophy is not a toy or irrelevant artifact, it is a powerful practice with practical uses in the discussion of today's issues. Mr. Singer, as an ethicist in particular, feels that he and other philosophers have a civic duty not to merely write obscure works and get tenure, but to use their abilities to help the public understand the logic (or lack of it) in our own views and actions. I think he might be on to something.

Epicurus, from an old LJ entry

2004-10-19T16:34:00.000-04:00

The paragraph below was an entry into a LJ entry on October 13, 2003. I wrote it while reading books and other internet materials on Epicurus, a Greek philosopher I particularly like who had a philosophy based on a hedonism so moderate that the lifestyle it recommended ends up looking a lot like that of a buddhist monastic. This is in no small part because he favored long-term hedonistic good over short-term pleasures, and pleasures of the mind over that of the body. He had other ideas as well, about the Gods and of Physics, which the following paragraph describes.

"It never ceases to amaze me how early modern concepts started. It turns out Epicurus was one of the first to originate neo-Darwinian thought, because he sought to explain the efficient design of human beings by a process of natural selection, rather than by the design of Gods, which he felt existed but were not involved with the daily workings of men's lives. This apathetic-pantheon was also his solution to the Problem of Evil, saying that evil existed in this world despite the existence of gods because those gods were too busy hanging out with each other to be concerned with mortals. The Gods, exercising the high hedonistic ideal, are role models for than influences in everyday life. Epicurus also was a big proponent of mind-body identity, saying that mind and body are closely interdependent, though he felt that the mind rested in our chest rather than the head, because whenever we feel anxiety or happiness we feel it in our chest. (He was ahead of his time in most things, running parallel with much modern thought, so I'll give him some slack on this one.) Same goes for his postulation that we see images of things because those objects give off waves of atom-thin sheets that hit our eye and show us their pattern. Even in his time he should have struck that one down just by the fact that torch and candle-light illuminates objects -- if objects gave off atomic sheets of their own image on their own, than darkness or light would not matter to vision. But at least he got the waves thing right, and correctly guessed that we were not directly perceiving objects, but taking in with our senses images made up of actual physical material that is being given off by those objects."

Weird Ideas on the Infinite Microcosm

2004-10-19T16:20:00.000-04:00

This is an entry I found in my old LJ archives. It's not knowledge, per se, or even well-founded ideas. It's more like out-there notions I've had about the universe that I put into words on September 22nd of 2003. I thought I'd place it here as well, because as weird as they are, these ideas have a place in a Journal of Knowledge.

***

The Infinite Micro/Macrocosm

It is a pet theory of mine that the universe extends infinitely outward and inward - it lends a certain fractal elegance to the world, because no matter how far outward or inward you go, there would be endlessly recursive pattern and order. Having infinite levels of smallness and bigness also places one (and everything) squarely in the middle of it all - one is both infinitely small and infinitely large depending on your perspective. It also opens up free-your-mind hippie conceptual possiblities, like saying that universes are contained in our fingernails, and our whole universe might be in a much larger being's fingernail and so on. When I look up at the sky I feel like a speck in a sea of nothing, but it's strangely comforting to think that I, too, might be also a vast sea of nothing where infinitely countless specks live and feel small in. Atomic theory already tells us that we're mostly empty space anyway, so all we need is tiny people on tiny planets living there within the quantums of quantums in every atom, looking out as far as their little telescopes can reach, the boundaries of their universes set by the outer limits of the electron clouds. Extravagant sorts of wild hypothesizing to be having while eating pepperoni pizza on my lunchbreak.

Shaking It Up

Then it occurred to me that these universes might be problematic, and indeed my own universe might be too in this view. Say I clip my fingernail universe off, or shave my chin stubble universe off, or any number of sudden movements. Or even the slowest, most gentle changes in momentum I can possibly do... those little microcosms are being rocketed back and forth at seemingly infinite speeds in any direction every time I turn, or twitch, or do anything at all. Wouldn't all of these universes be thrown apart, utterly shattered, continuously, like little snow globes of people, planets and pulsars? Likewise, our own universe could not possibly exist, they too would be thrown apart every time the uberbeing we are contained in wants to eat a donut - and his universe similarly, all the way up and down the chain none could survive the slightest movement on any scale of being. This pet theory of mine has serious problems. Until I had another idea.

Time Unbound

The idea is that perhaps there are not only infinite scales of space, but also time. What if as things get smaller, they also get faster? Or slower, to look at it another way -- a second of our time might be millennia of millenia to the universe inside my fingernail. As relative time slows down, those movements on the macro scale will also slow, relative to the time frame of the inhabitants of that universe. Entire lives, civilizations, universes would be passing by every moment, and these would be moving so fast that even the most sudden movements on our scale would be so miniscule on their time-frame that they would be unnoticed. Similarly, our universe goes on a certain timescale that makes our entire history, from Big Bang to utter collapse and annhialation, a blink of an eye or less to that macroscale being we are a part of. And so on, up and down the scale. I'm not certain, having only thought about this for half an hour, but I think that would solve that particular problem. And there's a certain elegance to postulating infinite scales of time following infinite scales of space. It follows the defining feature of my personal paradigm -- that the world makes sense, and simply so, because it is the result of infinitely simple rules repeated over and over to form the complexity we see.

Speed of Light

A thought that occurred from this infinite scale of time and space was this: perhaps this is the reason for the speed of light. When one approaches the speed of light, relative time supposedly slows down in relation to the observer. A person on a approaching-light-speed ship would feel that things were going about normally, but everything around him was slowing down. Mass also increases, to the point where reaching light speed the mass becomes infinite and time stops -- hence the speed of light becomes an uncrossable limit in this universe, something that we cannot break. But the speed of light pokes another possible hole in my theory of infinite scale -- these microuniverses would have the same limit, would they not, and so their world could not move fast enough to keep the pace required in their scaled-down time frame. Universes can't explode and collapse in a fraction of a heartbeat if they are limited to the same speeds as we are. I'd rather not throw out my pet theory, but I'll have to if it comes to this, or Einstein's theory, which is much more well-thought-out than mine. But I don't have to.

See, the speed of light in our universe is enforced by mass. It's not actually an absolute speed limit, it's a relative speed limit that is set by the ratio between mass and change in space vs. change in time. In our universe, it works out to a certain mile per hour based on distances and times that are relevant to us. But in this grain-of-sand universe, the time frame is geometically smaller, at first seemingly requiring faster-than-light speeds to operate, but the distances and mass involves is geometrically smaller too. So that same Einstein constant can be used on the microcosmic scale and everything would be fine. They would run into that exact same barrier, but due to everything being on a equivalently shorter scale, their universe would function in the same way as ours. On the opposite end, beings living on the macro scale would discover that same time-space barrier -- their mass would be geometrically higher, seemingly making the speed of light lower -- but relative to us their time is geometrically slower, so from their perspective the speed of light may be covering the same relative distances. And so on, up and down the scale. As scale increases so does mass, and perceived time slows so that motion never surpasses the space-time constant, but on each level the speed limit for that scale universe also remains constant. Kind of a neat idea. But this brought up a new question in my mind -- all of this talks about the relationship between absolute time and space, and the relative time and space of the observer on each scale of size. What about consciousness itself -- the subjective perception of space and time. Are there scales of being as well?

The speed of thought

Let's say that your mind is sped up by some hyper-drug that causes your whole thought process to move faster. You're now able to do things twice as fast, anything from do math problems to shop for groceries to react and dodge things you normally could. When you do this, does your own consciousness speed up? Or does it slow down for you -- or to put it another way, do things around you seem to be moving slower relative to you, while you do your thoughts and actions at the same perceived pace as before? OR, does everything seem to be at the same pace, so that things around you seem to be moving just as fast as before, only you are more able to keep up the fast pace? There are extreme cases in comic books, like where a character called The Flash keeps an entire city safe by running down every street and stopping crime wherever it occurs, continuously every minute. Think about how long it would take for us to jog through every street of a large city. To The Flash, would it seem like that much time, or would it seem like a blink of an eye to him too, only his mind and body are working so fast that he can keep up with it. Yes, it's a comic book, but beings living in the tiny universes inside my fingernail or in grains of sand etc. are all The Flash. Their lives and their universes would pass in the blink of an eye, but would it seem like a blink of an eye to them, or a lifetime? In other words, is there an absolute constant of consciousness, or is that also relative to the observer?

If the speed of consciousness is constant, microuniverse beings with infantesimally small lifespans would be aware that their lives were ridiculously short. The whole thing would whirl by in their minds at a seemingly infinite clip and would be over, but in that time they will have been born, grown up, dated, gotten married, had kids, grown old, and passed away. Similarly, beings on the macrolevel would be aware of how slow things were happening - their lives would feel like it was moving at a snail's pace, though they would be possibly unbothered by it. This idea at first feels wrong to me -- because I think that the slowness or quickness of time is entirely related to the pace of the subjective experience. I postulate that consciousness moves at a pace relative to the observer, and internally it seems absolute it takes in different amounts of information based on the scale of the universe it inhabits. But there are personal experiences that confuse me on this. Having taken a certain prohibited drug that disables the time/space sensing part of the brain that regulates perception of time, I have found that during that time of use I found time to be extremely slow. I at first assumed that since it seemed to be moving slowly that I was moving slowly -- but I found out that I could actually speak and act at a normal pace without major concern. But I was moving and acting at my normal pace, not any faster or slower, but to me it seemed like everything was slower or I was quicker. Now, my previously held view that consciousness relates to the real-time perception of changes in time and space runs into some serious issues when I realize that there is a specific physical part of the brain that tells us how our actions and observations relate to the perceived flow of time, and drugs can alter its input or disable it completely. What does this say about consciousness? Is our perception of the flow of time not linked to the scale of our universe, nor to the nature of consciousness itself, but to a particular mechnism of the brain that, if altered, can give us an entirely different experience of that timeflow? This third problem with the universes of scale idea is possibly the most devastating problem. And it might raise problems in this universe as well. Could there not be people in this world that, despite living perfectly normal lives, experience life as moving much, much more quickly than we do, thanks to an inborn variation in whatever brainpart regulates perception of time? Or people whose relatively short lives feel to them like millenia? It's hard for me to wrap my mind around this one, but right off the bat I can say that I have experienced life moving faster and slower and felt, under influence, times where I was unable to tell. I see no reason why people could not live at either extreme. This would mean that for possible infinitely big and infinitely small universes, the relative internal speeds and laws are functions on the scale of their mass and size in the absolute, but the experience of living in those universes, like the experience of living in our own, could be following any scale at all...

My father on Taking Chances

2004-10-19T10:49:00.000-04:00

Recently I decided to take a new job, despite being more than a little uncertain about whether it was a good job for me and whether taking it would be leading me in a good direction. He quoted a line that I like from Theodore Roethke's "The Waking":

"I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go."

I'm not sure I entirely understand the quote. But one possible interpretation is that one should be willing to take chances and venture into the unknown, because those unknown places and things and people are only known by approaching them. Speculation is easily trumped by first-hand experience.

Gary Zukav's "Wu Li Masters": Scientific progress

2004-10-19T10:17:00.000-04:00

Gary Zukav's book "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" explains quantum mechanics in non-mathematical terms so that liberal arts majors like me can understand it. Since this book is a summary of everything we've learned in physics since the dawn of time, it is both incomplete, and also so packed full of ideas that I'm not going to reduce it to one entry. All I want to talk about in this entry is the question of what science is.

In school, I remember being taught that science is basically fact. The laws of Newton is how things move, the Atom looks like so, Evolution happens this way, etc. But what is not discussed much, and what certainly wasn't taught to me when I was very young, is that even the most firmly established theories are just that: theories. Science is a philosophy of total skepticism, where every theory however long-standing can be disproved with a single counterexample. Further, it doesn't claim to know what's actually happening in the world -- it's simply creating a predictive model that most simply and effectively predicts our observations of the world. It says nothing about why things are there either -- it only speaks of what we can observe and predict.

One of Einstein's way of explaining science was to say that science was like guessing at the contents of an unopenable watch. We can guess at the inner contents of the watch, and make elaborate theories about what's inside the watch, but in the end the best we can hope for is a theoretical model that exactly matches the outside appearances of the watch. The "ideal limit of knowledge", then, is to find a theory that is internally consistent and explains all observable phenomena.

The problem, though, is that in everyday life it is easy to forget the tenuousness of scientific "achievements." It is easy for centuries-old laws to be treated as fact and for one to even posit that science has shown us *why* things happen. For instance, why do things fall towards Earth? Gravity, of course. But what causes Gravity? Why, it's a Scientific Law. But we don't know why gravity happens, nor can we ever. Gravity's just an imaginary force we made up to explain and predict the behavior of bodies of mass. And we don't actually know Gravity always works. This seems ridiculous to say considering how consistent it's been, but one could say the same thing about Newtonian Physics. And one of the main tasks of the book is to explain Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics exists only because Newtonian Physics was shown decisively in the past century NOT TO WORK IN THE REALM OF THE VERY SMALL. All it takes is one counterexample.

Asimov's Foundation Series: Psychohistory

2004-10-11T15:42:00.000-04:00

I have recently finished the Issac Asimov science fiction series "Foundation." I will explain the major "big idea" that drives the series: Psychohistory.

In a way, the idea of psychohistory is inaptly named, because it has more to do with sociology than psychology. Perhaps Asimov should have called it sociohistory, but no matter. Psychohistory doesn't exist yet, but conceptually it is a field that could exist. The idea is as follows: groups of people behave in certain predictable ways. In sociology we already have certain predictive principles, though not reliable. Asimov bets that in the far future, our own social studies will become more accurate until we are able to find probable predictions for group behavior. One of the reasonings behind this is that though individuals can make an impact on a small scale, as population goes up the group dynamic falls under more and more predictive power in the same way that individual particles fall under laws of gas dynamics when they increase to a certain number. The population of an entire universe would be sufficient to start finding predictable patterns in overall behavior and to start generalizing group dynamics into mathematical probablities. This could be highly accurate, but it would never be an exact science: it would be more like predicting the weather, where as time continues the ability to predict events becomes increasingly difficult.

This was Asimov's starting point, and the 5-novel series is both a melodrama following the progression of a society engineered by Hari Seldon to eventually establish a Galactic Empire, and a discussion on whether it is indeed possible to predict and control the path of a culture. Asimov's ultimate view is that extraordinary individuals will always be able to make large impacts on group behavior, so that free will can still override circumstance. This is not to say that we won't be able to predict or manipulate with increasing accuracy the behavior of human society: simply that it is impossible to completely control because, like the weather, there'll always be things that people can't anticipate.

Economic Basis of Free Trade

2004-10-11T15:20:00.000-04:00

My friend Martin explained to me the basic economic principle behind the idea of Free Trade Agreements. I'm not especially strong on the concept yet, but I'll try to explain. The reason the principle is important is because for any discussion on the pros and cons of free trade between nations or even regions, if one doesn't understand the principle driving the idea than one is missing the basis of discussion. There are many advantages and disadvantages to Free Trade, but the following principle is what drives it at the core.

Say you have two states, Florida and Washington. In this example, each state only produces two products: apples and oranges. Now, each state has different proportions in which they can produce goods: say Florida can use its resources to produce 10 oranges and 0 apples, or 6 apples and 0 oranges, or some ratio in between like 5 oranges and 3 apples. Now, say Washington has the opposite situation, where it's better at producing apples so it could produce 10 apples, or 6 oranges, or some balance in between like 5 apples and 3 oranges. Now, if they were to set up free trade between the two states, each could optimize their own production keeping in mind that they could barter for other items. So Washington could make 10 apples, Florida would make 10 oranges, and they could swap so both end up with 5 apples and 5 oranges. The best they could get in isolation would be 8 fruits in mixed variety or 10 of only one fruit, whereas in free trade they could get 10 fruit with variety. So the result of free trade is that both sides get a greater abundance of everything.

What is interesting is that this principle, in a completely free market, will work to the benefit of both sides regardless of the proportions. If Florida could produce 100 times the volume of Washington, both sides would still benefit by trading. This is because in a pure free trade barter, the sides will only trade if it is beneficial to both sides to do so. If they decide not to trade at all then the situation will be no worse than if they were in complete trade isolation, and at best there will be an increased abundance for both parties. So theoretically, Free Trade is always good.

In reality this is not necessarily the case. There are tons of ways in which this ideal model breaks down in favor of one country over another. But it is still important to understand the thinking behind free trade before jumping to the criticisms of it. In understanding the basic principle, both its flaws and benefits in a real world situation will make more contextual sense.

Basic Singing Technique

2004-10-07T13:38:00.000-04:00

I picked these tips up from my girlfriend and my father who have had singing lessons, as well as my mother who has taught singing to her students.

In vocal technique there are certain basic principles that, more or less, apply to all singers regardless of singing style or genre. Two core principles are this: the force of the voice must be supported from the diaphragm muscle, and that the sound should resonate upwards and outwards through the mouth and nasal cavity. The first principle can be accomplished by using the push of the belly muscles, rather than the direct contraction of the rib cage, to push air through the throat. The second principle is harder to explain, but it involves learning vocal control which allows one to shape the mouth and throat so that sound from the vocal cords resonates well in the front of the head.

This is hard to do without feedback, though. One way to get feedback is by getting voice lessons. You can also listen to yourself carefully, but this is sometimes misleading because when your sound is actually resonating correctly, sometimes it will actually sound quieter to your own ears. You can record yourself to hear what your voice sounds like to others: your voice will sound brighter and clearer when it is being projected upwards and outwards correctly. Another test is to touch the bridge of your nose to feel whether the vibrations from your singing are resonating through your nasal passage. If you are correctly using the head itself as a resonating box for your own voice, you will feel some vibration on the ridge of your nose.

A final tip I have been given is that in increasing the volume of your voice, do not try to force the sound through your upper register. This is not as effective and may damage your voice and over time cause nodes. Instead, make yourself support your sound using your diaphragm, and over time that muscle will get stronger which will increase your volume.

Buddhism, Taoism and Conquering Uncertainty

2004-10-07T11:21:00.000-04:00

I write this after remembering a conversation I had a few nights ago when I attempted to explain the parallels between Taoism, originated by Lao Tsu from China, and Buddhism, originated by Siddhartha Gautama of India. I may not end up stating things 100% correctly because this is my own interpretation of Taoism and Buddhism based on memory, but here goes.

Because of the interaction of these two religious philosophies in the early years of their establishment, some would say that Taoism and Buddhism grew to be more or less the same thing. It is true that there are subtle differences, but it is also common for people to practice both without conflict. One of the major parallels is the assertion that much of human misery is caused by people's discomfort with uncertainty and change.

Buddhism asserts that the nature of the world is to be transient, meaning things are always changing and everything is temporary. It is an illusion to think that anything lasts in its current state, including oneself and other human beings. Change is also unpredictable, so uncertainty is another unavoidable quality. Because of this, one can only be certain that he or she will eventually die, but even then one can't be sure of when that will happen. Buddhism asserts that one key to conquering human misery is to take this issue on headlong, and become completely comfortable with the transience and uncertainty of the world instead of dodging the issue like most people do, which is to live in an illusion that can and does break down continually.

Taoism approaches the same thing from a different angle. Taoism asks what the best way is to live an optimal life. The world is perpetually in a state of flux and transience, and as such any method of living that resists change would be continually difficult and frustrating. It would be like swimming upriver, Lao Tsu writes, it is going against the current of the world so that each stroke is met with harsh resistance. The best way to live is to go with the flow, then: in embracing the world's flux and learning to adapt quickly and easily to change. The way to do this is to reach a taoist state of relaxed but alert awareness, similar to the Buddhist zen state, which allows one to continually adjust to the changes life throws at you. By being aware of change and acting in accordance with it instead of against it, one ends up accomplishing much more and it will seem relatively effortless: this is often said to be "doing without doing". To live optimally is to, again, become completely comfortable with the transience and uncertainty of the world.

The Tastes: How Many?

2004-10-07T11:10:00.000-04:00

It used to be said that there were four basic tastes that the human tongue could detect: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. All tastes were simply mixes of these four tastes, along with aromas picked up by the nose.

Nowadays many specialists posit a fifth taste called umami. Umami can be described as the taste of meaty or savory or delicious. It is a sensation that the food is somehow "full" -- it is undecided whether this taste really exists or not, though monosodium glutamate (MSG) seems to stimulate it.

According to ayurvedic food practices, the tongue can detect 6 tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungeant, and astringent. In this theory of eating, all meals should include all 6 of these tastes to be fulfilling.

"No Logo" by Naomi Klein: branding corporations

2004-10-07T10:21:00.000-04:00

The ideas presented here are mostly from the quintessential subversive book of the decade, "No Logo" by Naomi Klein that I read almost a year ago. The reason I'm writing about it now is because I am inserting my own interpretation of what she presented based on my learnings about basic game theory and strategy.

Naomi Klein writes that there's been a fundamental shift in the way that corporations are increasingly structured. There are two big differences. First, companies are multinational, meaning that one country alone cannot enforce regulation on them. When a company is in one country regulations and consumer demands from that country's population can readily apply pressure towards change of various kinds. But as a company becomes increasingly multinational and decentralized, it loosens its grip from any one country or its population applying pressure, and can in some cases put pressure on whole countries to conform by threatening to shift its jobs or even its center overseas. This decentralization of a company is advantageous to a company because it makes it adaptable and less prone to the ups and downs of a specific market.

The second big difference is corporations become pure marketing machines that don't actually produce anything. The branding model severs a company from its own production, outsourcing literally everything to third-party companies that produce the goods, distribute them, do human resources and office management for them, and possibly even create and market their brand for them. The result is that many corporations are, in essence, only a boardroom of stockholders with almost all elements of a traditional company outsourced. This new structure is advantageous in the same way that becoming multinational is advantageous -- a company becomes more adaptable to change and can scale up and down and shift readily by simply changing outsourced contracts.

Both of these big changes relate to the decentralization of corporate structure on an external and internal level. The negative results that Naomi Klein points to with a whole book full of examples are all due to the increased inability of governments, individuals, or groups of individuals to enforce any sort of ethical restraint on these companies. The companies are, in fact, modeled strategically and specifically to avoid being susceptible to market or governmental pressure, but these same structures cut it loose from outside accountability. And it is a piece of common knowledge that corporations don't inherently have a code of ethics. Their structure is bent towards maximizing the profit of their shareholders, not promoting a common good. Ethical pressures always come from without, and that is why decentralization of corporate structure is dangerous -- it loosens the hold of accountability between a corporation and its consumers. It also makes it increasingly difficult for a corporation to control its own ethics, because much of its activity is outsourced and ethics becomes relative to the country. In any case, problems regarding intrusive branding, sweatshops, shifting jobs overseas, pollution are a direct result of decreased ethical accountability due to the decentralization of corporate structure.

Naomi Klein argues that any structure of corporation, by nature that it is selling something, will be susceptible to market pressure if that pressure comes on a large enough scale. Ultimately, companies will only behave ethically if people factor a company's ethical behavior into their purchasing choices and this happens on a global level. If nothing else, the concept of ethical consumerism is what she wants her readers to take away from her book.

"Thinking Strategically" by Dixit and Nalebuff

2004-10-05T14:35:00.000-04:00

The book "Thinking Strategically" is far too extensive to simplify into a basic entry, but I do want to record an element of it that I think is important to remember.

The essence of Game Theory is that a game is being played when the players have to make their decisions anticipating their opponents' moves, while being aware that their opponents are doing the same thing. This is the basis for all strategy games, but what makes game theory unique is that it posits that one can systematically evaluate winning strategies, turning it from an art to a science. The book goes through many different games that are played in economic, political, and social situations.

The main two games that people play are simultaneous and turn-based games. In simultaneous games the players are acting at the same time with no way of knowing what the other will do. Thinking about these games involve picking the best strategy for the probable choices the other side can make. A problem with this game is the Prisoner's Dilemma, which is a situation where two prisoners can get lighter sentences if they rat on the other person. Both end up ratting on each other to get a lighter sentence, with the ironic result that both go to jail instead of both going free, which they might have done if both kept their mouth shut. The problem is that the temptation to cheat is so great that both sides will end up cheating to avoid the risk of being tattled on while keeping his mouth shut. But the best situation for both sides is to both keep a closed mouth, and in the many situations the Prisoner's dilemma applies to, the question is how to enforce an optimal strategy and keep people from cheating.

The other type of game is turn-based: the book calls it Sequential. In these games, players take turns, so in each move you know what the other player has done, but not what they will do on the next turn. The way you play this game is to look ahead and reason back -- you think about what your opponent would do in response to you, and you to them, in the alternating rounds until you get back to where you are now. But this may lead to an undesirable consequence, so there are ways to Commit To A Strategy, which allows you to turn a Sequential game into a simultaneous one where the other side knows your action. And knowing your action can sometimes be desirable for you because you then have the ability to control and predict what the other side will do accordingly in their own best interest.

There are many other strategies that can be applied to everyday games -- like mixing strategies to keep yourself from being wholly predictable, and brinkmanship as a way to threaten another side without committing to a mutually destructive path. Other strategy games simply explain why things are as they are, like the Prisoner's Dilemma when used to explain why it's hard to get any one person to do volunteer work or give to charity even if the outcome is desirable to all. This book needs to be re-read at a later time because there are far too many useful thoughts on strategy to remember continuously from just one reading.

Tom's Theory of Conversation

2004-10-05T14:19:00.000-04:00

In an earlier conversation with my friend and roommate Tom, I learned part of his personally-tested theories on the art of conversation with strangers.

The key to conversation is to talk about things that people are really interested in. But for strangers, you do not yet know what they're interested in so you have to make educated guesses as well as focus on topics that most people care about in general. And in any typical conversation, there are four basic topics that people are really interested in: sex, music, politics, and religion. Many people avoid these topics because they can cause controversy, but in fact they are the best things to talk about because they tap into things that people deeply care about, meaning that the conversation that ensues can be meaningful and hence create a real bond.

Though starting a conversation is more an art than a method, there are certain basic strategies. Observe what the person is wearing, because people wear things, most of the time intentionally, that display their basic values and interests. Then, on your approach make a comment indirectly related to that topic which you think that person is likely to have a strong opinion about. In this way, you can open up the possiblity of talking about something meaningful to that person, which will engage that person with you and make for a good conversation. After a conversation is started it will go where it will, but starting it by segueing into a major topic right off the bat will open the possibility of a substantive interaction, and hence a possible social bond between you and the stranger you have approached.

Daniel Quinn's Theory of Leavers and Takers

2004-10-05T13:58:00.000-04:00

I have recently finished two of Daniel Quinn's Novels, titled "Ishmael" and "The Story of B". In both novels he exposed me to his theory of how everything came to be. I will do my best to explain his theory succinctly:

Man in his current form (homo sapiens sapiens) first came to be 3 million years ago. For 3 million years man lived on the earth in an environmentally friendly way, and evolved social systems that worked well and continue working well up into the present day. Some were hunter-gatherers, and some were agriculturalists, but all of them participated in cultures that minimized destruction of other species and limited their own population growth. About 10,000 years ago, in various parts of the world a group of man participated in a new culture whose basis was totalitarian agriculture, which is the agriculture we use today. This process makes a piece of land exclusively to the benefit of man, and as a result greatly increases food production. Increase in food production leads to increase in population, which then requires an increase in land appropriation for increased food production etc. This process started 10,000 years ago has led to our current situation, with a skyrocketing human population in the world and all of the environmental and social impacts that a high population yields.

It is Daniel Quinn's opinion that almost all the negative aspects of today's modern society is due to the abandonment of time-tested tribal culture and the embracing of agricultural overproduction which has led to overpopulation. These problems such as war, famine, plague, and even modern apathy and depression are due to people living in an environment they were not evolved in or for. His solution is hazy, but it involves the limiting of population growth through the gradual limiting of food production, as well as a mental paradigm shift away from the current cultural attitudes.