Travel Writing
I wrote a lot about the experience of traveling with a 3 year old and an infant at this blog.
12/5/2021 - Sometimes
One of my favorite poets is David Whyte, who lives close by in the Puget Sound area. He speaks of life as a conversation between our expectations of the world and the world's expectations of us.
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.
9/22/2021 - Nothing Gold Can Stay
Today is the first day of autumn. I came across this Robert Frost poem today, "Nothing Gold Can Stay," and thought it worth sharing.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
9/16/2021 - Marcus Aurelius and Meditations
I recently read a modern translation of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. This is a classic of applied stoicism and it's odd reading the words of someone two millenia dead. Two insights from the reading. First, Aurelius wrote for himself - the collected 'books' read like journal entries. They are largely repetitive reminders with recurring themes - how everyone dies, how people should follow their nature, not to make more of what is. These words were reminders, I think, from Aurelius to himself - so he could help manage his demons, all the infighting, yearning for self-achievement, pressure that comes with such a high station. Even the greatest of us struggle.
Second, I was surprised that the common interpretation of stoic philosophy as a stiff upper lip and repressed emotion was not what I was left with from the reading. The focus on the impermanence of us all, reminders that even the greatest people of one’s generation are quickly forgotten as they pass, felt much more evolved, even spiritual. A reminder to make the time we have count in ways that matter, to hold oneself to goodness, because the deeds themselves don't matter.
9/14/2021 - Atomic Habits
A list of atomic habits. Meditation. Morning Pages. Running. Reading the Web. Free-form writing. Planning the day. Riffing on ideas for software products. Yoga. Messaging friends. Playing guitar. Learning a language. Writing code. Reading books. Healthy meals. Caffeine limits. Avoiding added sugar. Reading to my kids.
9/11/2021 - The Lamb Lied Down On Midi
As I get older I've been thinking more about what I want to leave behind in the world, the work that I want to do while I still have time and energy. I have been building on the idea that while most media aggregators take your time (as a monetization model,) it should be just as easy to help make people's time previously invested valuable back to them by distilling what they've told platforms about their interests. Then, a move can be made away from endless feeds and into wholesome, longer form information - presented to people in ways that help them learn and grow, instead of for generating ad dollars.
My father died a few years ago in 2018. His lifelong passion was music and he especially loved re-composing old prog rock Genesis songs. He shared the midi files he created on the web from the Lamb Lies Down album (the ghost of his blog remains at http://lldom.blogspot.com/.) I remember his long hours making those songs and inviting us to sit and listen to what he had made. It was his life's work, in a way. https://www.midi-karaoke.info/20e6dde9.en.html
9/6/2021 - Divergent Associations
Today I found a quick creativity test, called the Divergent Association Test (paper - https://www.pnas.org/content/118/25/e2022340118) It's pretty neat and only takes a couple minutes to take. You are tasked with typing a series of nouns that are as unrelated to one another as possible. The idea, I imagine, is that creative people see associations others do not, and therefore also can see how a series of things aren't associated with one another.
As I guessed, word embeddings power the semantic distance calculation between the words people enter, more precisely it uses GloVe:
Objectively measuring the relatedness of words is difficult, so as a proxy we look at how often the words are used together in similar contexts. We use the Common Crawl corpus, which contains thousands of different words across billions of webpages. Using [a word embedding] algorithm, we compute the distance (or relatedness) between the words; words such as “cat” and “dog” are often used close together and thus have smaller distances between them, while words such as “cat” and “book” would have greater distances. The total score is simply the average of these word distances: greater distances give a higher score.
This made me wonder if an even more constrained version of the 'test' could also be useful, like name the types of activities you like to do that are as different from one another as possible, as a way to generate ideas for learning how to do very different things.
9/2/2021 - Strategies for generating ideas
I've started a creative exercise where I take a few minutes to think up a few new tech startup ideas per day, mostly based on the criteria of my own interest in them or things I think would be fun to build. After a few days of doing this, I've had to come up with strategies for generating ideas when I'm stumped. It's not too hard to think of these strategies. A few I came up with are: cruise Product Hunt and make tangents of the top daily launches, make a list of attributes of startups (industries, markets, core tech) and combine them randomly, or just think of what you think about through the course of the day and what you wish you had to help you. The most surprising thing about this exercise is that I thought I was bad at idea generation (I don't usually think this way,) but once I tried it has been easier to do than I thought. But are they good ideas? Well...
8/31/2021 - The Future of Internet Privacy - who knows?
What is happening on the web in terms of privacy? Something, yet it's unclear exactly what - given different tech giants are competing on the outcome, according to Benedict Evans with Understanding Privacy. Apple (device), Google (browser), Facebook (as an aggregating site) are all competing on how the world of privacy evolves as tracking across the web changes. There is general agreement that 3rd party cookies are bad for privacy and these need to evolve, but different ways to solve the problem - no cookies at all, cohorts, or on-device tracking. Also, there is no good definition of privacy, one from Steve Jobs apparently was that privacy meant informed consent from the user to track. Mine might be that information about my behavior online or on device is not taken and stored on a PII level in any 3rd party device, without explicitly being part of a user notice (which I guess is the GDPR cookie mess.) But extend this further - ISPs sell your web history, after all.
8/30/2021 - Seasons and what succeeds
As the fall rolls in it brings a distinct feeling. The summer's ending is an end to leisure, time off, longer days, and we shift to cooler clothes, darker evenings. I wonder whether the natural changes in the passing of the seasons makes certain endeavors more suitable. Is the start of the school year a good example of something that makes sense to start in the fall?
The easiest examples are related to food which comes in seasons. Planting in the spring, and harvest in the fall. Take a break and conserve energy in the winter. But society is much more complex than the food cycle. We have rituals that are timed throughout the year, but it would be easy to simply assume these could be conventional or too obviously tied to a yearly event - spring cleaning, the solstices, etc.
A question to ask might be which societal behaviors over the next three months could impact efforts and how.
8/28/2021 - A description of Seattle
Today we had some family guests in town and it had been awhile since we to show people around Seattle, our home for the last 11 years. What story of the city to tell? Seattle is corporate, booming, progressive. It is full of neighborhoods of (mostly, still) single family homes with commercial centers. It has beautiful parks and lakes and beaches and trees and views of mountains. There is wonderful Asian food. What was logs and airplanes, has become tech, but also Starbucks and Costco. Buildings are going up everywhere. It is an expensive place to live. People take the mask thing too seriously and storekeepers will promptly tell you to put it on even if you are drinking from a smoothie. Outside of the city, though, you quickly start to see big trucks and open carry. The summers are beautiful, and it rarely gets hot, but the change in climate means heat spells and smoky Augusts.
8/25/2021 - Restore, don't shame
I've decided to start a little writing project where I type in a couple of paragraphs.
Today I was reading A Different Way to Respond When Kids Do Something Wrong from the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, which Dacher Keltner founded.
Justice is a problem in the world, since retribution in kind and degree clearly makes things worse. We don't have 'eye for an eye' punishment for good reason. But so does shaming and blaming, as it misses out at a chance for healing between people as well as a chance to help the person learn the lesson about whatever transgression was made.
In the article, from the lens of parenting, it emphasizes restorative practices instead of punishments and blame. This emphasis allows the person to own up to the wrong and do what needs to be done to make things right. With freedom is this space, ‘this is what I’d do differently’ can become like a contract. There were a few pointers for talking to your kids, like using feeling based statements, I feel X when you do Y, thinking positively about the child while upset, and "forming a family circle, one member speaks at a time, everyone listens from the heart."
I liked the acknowledgment that practicing this requires some awareness when you are angry, and transforming it into sympathy - while maintaining the focus on correcting the behavior.