An open letter to my future self

It may already be too late. The rigidity of custom and the tyranny of experience may already make the point of this letter moot by the time you read it, but I write nonetheless in the hope that such is not the case, that your mind is still open to persuasive and something beyond self-serving rationalizations masquerading as unbiased reason.

Look around you. With each day, the new world progresses and those of the old world scream more about the base nature of the latest changes. How before — it’s never quite clear when this was, but assuredly not today — Things Were Better. Television had a more wholesome approach, music was created by actual musicians and not greedy producers, shots in a movie lasted longer than 50 milliseconds, and everything wasn’t commercialized. People had to communicate face-to-face, and they were patient enough to actually wait for things. Politicians had more of a sense of patriotism or honor or duty. Children obeyed their parents. Sex meant something.

Have I made my point? No? I’m talking about the perpetual love affair with the great past that so many people have. I used to just think that it was a personality thing; that there were some accustomed to dynamism who welcomed change with open arms, and that there were others forever wed to the status quo. And while I still believe that appreciation for change is a characteristic unevenly distributed across the population, I no longer think it’s something we typically hold onto as we age. Its natural course is to be diminished in the aged, regardless of philosophy or politics.

Let me be blunt: With every passing day beyond some point in adolescence, humans tend to become less open to change. We are still, on the whole, comfortable with whatever changes that took place while we were coming of age. But the next round, the ones welcomed by those even just five years our junior, we greet with indifference, skepticism or outright hostility.

Why? I don’t know. I have some hypotheses, united by their common lack of evidence, the most obvious of which I will here assert for lack of a realistic alternative. It may prove to have an evolutionary advantage to wish to keep the world as it was when we originally ascended into adulthood, for our skills will be best developed for the technologies of that time; our vocabulary most tuned to that day’s vernacular; our worldly conceptions formed by that period’s prevailing events and beliefs.

But none of the above justifies stemming the tide of progress. An affinity for traditional sex-based divisions of labor does not make denying women’s entry into the workforce acceptable. Comfort with segregated schools doesn’t legitimize their continued existence. And being accustomed to traditional conceptions of marriage is a vestige of the past, not a basis for denying gay people equal rights.

But, you are almost certainly thinking to yourself, surely there is a large difference between desegregation and the crass nature of today’s television, right? And of course you are correct: Obviously not all change can be legitimately called social progress, and not all progressions are of equal importance. There are in fact immense differences. But the groundwork for the most significant social progress is laid gradually over time, much of it by supposedly “crass” cultural artifacts. When The Simpsons first hit the airwaves in the early nineties, many predicted the downfall of Western civilization. Twenty years later, the show has proven to be a groundbreaking and important piece of American culture. The fringe has a tendency to become the mainstream which with time can become venerated. Think jazz or rock music.

So why am I writing this letter? To encourage you — no, to implore you — to fight the all too natural tendency to become obstinate and stuck in your ways and to dismiss the culture and values of the day in favor of those nurtured in your youth. What terrifies me is that no amount of rational persuasion will be enough to convince you, my future self, to buck the trend and remain a friend of modernity. But I have never subscribed to the idea that we are not ultimately in control of our own fates, and thus still hold out hope that somehow, in at least some small way, this letter will have an effect, and that it will help you live a long life, waking each day with eyes open to wonder and a mind open to change.

Life Optimization, Or, Brief Thoughts On What Has And Has Not Worked In Improving My Day-to-Day Life

Five minutes of cleaning is actually a lot. Long ago, I asked myself, “why does my room get messy?” I hypothesized a number of potential explanations — the natural increase in entropy of a given system, when things are “put away” they are necessarily not available for use and this creates an unstable equilibrium, etc, etc — and started an in-depth analysis of this problem. This was actually intended to be a full-blown blog post. As usual, I got distracted by something else and left the post in a half-finished state, where it remains nearly two years later.

A few months ago I decided to make a conscious effort to spend five minutes every day cleaning my room. I’ve found that this actually works remarkably well, to the point that my room is almost always in a clean or nearly clean state. This is partly because my room is small, but it’s also because five minutes of “straightening up” — e.g., making your bed, recycling old papers, putting books back on shelves, putting dirty laundry in a hamper — is actually quite a lot. I still haven’t finished my theoretical framework of orderliness, but my room sure is a lot cleaner.

Visible checklists are the only ones that matter. If you want to get yourself to do something, make it hard to ignore and even harder to forget. This is one of the many things I use my whiteboard for: My notes/goals/lists live as large letters on my wall, visible from my bed. A note on my computer or phone will quickly be forgotten or lost; a note on my wall will greet me when I wake. (Note that this doesn’t mean every habit you put on a readily visible checklist will automatically be picked up. This worked great for making sure to floss every day without fail, but my results were less impressive for making sure to exercise — perhaps my new taekwondo class will change things?!)

One (or two) habits at a time. When I come up with six or seven new habits to acquire, I’m likely to fail at most or even all of them. If you’re serious about making changes, concentrate on one or two things; if after a week or two those are going well, add a third or fourth.

Don’t be afraid to experiment. For those of us who spend way too much time in our heads, it’s easy to forget just how powerful real-world experimentation is, or even that things can, like, be empirically verified. If you find yourself daydreaming about what the “ideal” method for doing xyz is, try to come up with something that you can try that might be part of that ideal system or which is simply good enough. If it succeeds, great. If it fails, you’ve an idea for your next hypothesis to test — or at least more data to daydream about.

Everything I need to know I learned from eavesdropping on my boss

I learned a tremendous amount from overhearing my boss’s phone conversations at my first “real” (post-college) job. Tone, style, vocabulary, phrasing. How to cold-call a researcher, how to finesse a funding relationship, how to dance backwards from committing yourself to an undesired collaboration.

All of which is to say, I’m in general agreement with Megan Hustad:

The office phone call, properly overheard, is really the cheapest, easiest way to transmit institutional knowledge.

Which is why, these days, I try to make sure my younger collegues can overhear my most important conversations. They’ll learn more from that than almost anything I can teach them directly.

The Nerd Handbook

Excellent post over at Rands in Response about understanding the nerd mentality:

A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.

Guilty.

Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head. It’s the end of the day and you and your nerd are hanging out on the couch. The TV is off. There isn’t a computer anywhere nearby and you’re giving your nerd the daily debrief. “Spent an hour at the post office trying to ship that package to your mom, and then I went down to that bistro — you know — the one next the flower shop, and it’s closed. Can you believe that?”

And your nerd says, “Cool”.

Cool? What’s cool? The business closing? The package? How is any of it cool? None of it’s cool. Actually, all of it might be cool, but your nerd doesn’t believe any of what you’re saying is relevant. This is what he heard, “Spent an hour at the post office blah blah blah…”

You can be rightfully pissed off by this behavior — it’s simply rude — but seriously, I’m trying to help here. Your nerd’s insatiable quest for information and The High has tweaked his brain in an interesting way. For any given piece of incoming information, your nerd is making a lightning fast assessment: relevant or not relevant? Relevance means that the incoming information fits into the system of things your nerd currently cares about. Expect active involvement from your nerd when you trip the relevance flag. If you trip the irrelevance flag, look for verbal punctuation announcing his judgment of irrelevance. It’s the word your nerd says when he’s not listening and it’s always the same. My word is “Cool”, and when you hear “Cool”, I’m not listening.

No comment, other than to say my preferred response is “OK” rather than “cool.”

Well, color me naive

Doing the same thing all the time is boring. All my life, I’ve chosen jobs in part to ensure I’d have enough variety. But I never thought about the impact on pilots or doctors of the way their jobs have gotten routinized.

[T]here are many, many areas of life where routinization is imposed in order to lower cost and raise overall quality — and it often has a detrimental effect on the job satisfaction of the people performing the work.

Some examples: airlines moving from hub-and-spoke to shuttle models, so their flight crews now spend all day every day flying back and forth from Indianapolis to Chicago; hospitals insisting that one physician perform all of a certain type of procedure, in response to AMA findings linking quality to volumes; programmers forced to use frameworks and purchased third-party tools instead of writing everything from scratch.

Does all this stuff save money and improve the quality of outcomes? Absolutely. And it also takes even the most skilled individuals down a path of stultifying boredom and repetition.

(That’s jen in comments at 11D)

And of course, it’s not just people at the top of their professions — doing the same thing all the time is tiring for flight attendents and operating-room assistants, too.

New design

Even the exceedingly dull reader will note that I have made some changes to the site. The most obvious of course is that I’ve goofed around a bit with the site’s general look, for no reason other than that I had a lot of important things to get done, and so I needed a way to delay doing them. Dinking around with Unschooled’s CSS proved to be a nice distraction, and as a bonus I can even feel mildly accomplished because I have something to show for my effort. A special thanks to Six for helping sculpt the new look, and for debugging a few nasty CSS issues.

The slightly more subtle change is that I’ve integrated Twitter using Twitter Tools by Alex King. This means that whenever I post to Twitter, a post on Unschooled will automatically be generated. Similarly, if I post a new entry on Unschooled, a link to it will be posted to Twitter. (Thus if you want to always be the first to know when I post a new entry on Unschooled, you can start following me on Twitter.)

These changes were made largely as an experiment. I have developed a hypothesis that goes something like this: Posting a blog entry — no matter how short — is psychologically heavy, while posting a tweet is very lightweight. Think e-mail (heavy — oh lord do I hate e-mail at the moment) vs. a Facebook wallpost (light — who doesn’t have time to post on his friend’s wall?).

The result should be a significant increase in the number of (very) short posts, and business-as-usual in terms of the frequency of longer posts.

Let’s see what happens.

iPhone first impressions

Yesterday afternoon I took off from work early to go stand in line for four hours to get my grubby little hands on an iPhone, a device I’ve been waiting for in one form or another for nearly eight years.

Because I can’t stand to stay away from it for too long, this post will be in the form of an off-the-top-of-my-head list of thoughts about this beautiful — beautiful — device:

Waiting in line and then purchasing two 8GB iPhones (one for me, one for my sister) at the Fifth Ave. Apple Store was perhaps the most pleasant and exciting buying experience of my life. I say experience because the entire thing felt like a spectacle: dozens of companies showed up to jump on the bandwagon and advertise their wares. I got a free fan, buttons, a keychain, slick info packets about everything from recycling your old phone to social networks trying to tie themselves to the iPhone, bottled water and lemonade.

While standing in line I watched a near pornographic campaign video for Giuliani be shot 15 feet in front of me. My guess is that if you google “Rudy girl” within the next couple weeks you’ll see what I’m talking about. Also, listen for man in the background yelling “vote Ron Paul.” That’s me.

I was interviewed three times. Once by a young woman doing competitive market research for LG (she’s going to call in a few weeks to see how I like my iPhone). Once by a Yahoo! Tech blogger (who said her press contacts put the number of iPhones at the Fifth Ave. store at 2,000). And once by a Fox News (barf) woman from the Geraldo show. They grabbed me right after I emerged from the store to the cheers and high-fives of dozens of Apple employees (they cheered everyone — not just me — but I suspect they may have sensed my enthusiasm).

Everyone in line was awesome. I lucked out and ended up next to a true Apple diehard and we reminisced about the days of the Apple II.

I was terrified walking home with two iPhones in tow and a beautiful Apple iPhone bag that screamed “mug me!” I stopped by the vendors at Columbus Circle and they were kind enough to give me some less inviting plastic bags to cover my loot up with.

I cannot explain how giddy I was and still am, though I imagine my roommates who saw my face when I walked in the door have a decent idea. My full experience was delayed a bit when the iTunes activation got stuck trying to talk to Apple’s servers (which I believe were trying to talk to AT&T’s, which according to the forums I read last night were hammered in the activation process.) I went to bed last night around 2:30 with a non-activated iPhone.

I naturally arose shortly after 6am this morning and immediately hopped out of bed and had my phone activated inside of a minute. Aside from the hiccups last night, it was a glorious activation process with no annoying salesperson in sight.

This phone is stunningly, achingly, painfully gorgeous. It is the single best designed piece of consumer electronics I have ever owned. This puts the all three Playstations, all iPods, Tivo, the Wii, the PSP, the DS and all the others to shame. Undoubtedly, the iPhone lives up to the hype.

The EDGE network is not nearly as bad as I expected it to be. Word is that the speed was bumped to 270 kbps in major metropolitan areas yesterday right before the launch. The wifi access I hawk from my neighbors is painfully slow sometimes, so right now my fastest net connection in my apartment is on my phone. Weird.

I browsed my favorite blogs, posted on a Facebook wall, checked Gmail. Everything just worked (though I was only able to view Google Docs — no dice with editing them).

There are a million little touches that make you smile. If you get an e-mail with a link to a YouTube video, clicking on it doesn’t open YouTube.com in Safari but instead starts streaming the video in the built-in YouTube player. Deleting e-mail messages is done through a “swipe” gesture that feels like “crossing out” the message. Visual Voicemail rocks. Text messages pop up while you’re on the phone in a delightfully friendly and helpful manner.

Battery life. I’ve been running this pretty hard (browsing the web, e-mail, long phone calls, listening to music, watching videos) for the last 4+ hours and it still shows over half the battery remaining.

My ringer is set to “Old Phone,” which sounds exactly as you would want it to. It’s a pleasant, tasteful, traditional phone ring.

The keyboard, which I was more than a little nervous about, is I think ultimately going to be a non-issue. The first five minutes were frustrating. The next ten were a little better. After an hour, it started to feel decent. My prediction? Within a week I won’t even think about it.

One revelation I hadn’t really thought about before — and which I still have yet to truly internalize — is that I now have Wikipedia in my pocket. Take a moment to think about that. I suspect this is one of those things that seems cool at first but can’t be fully understood until the ramifications begin to manifest themselves. And it’s not just Wikipedia, I’ve got the entire web — the REAL web, not some “junior” version — in my pocket. I have near-instant access to the largest store of human knowledge ever compiled.

Too good not to post

One of the better policy initiatives I’ve seen in recent months:

Steve Ahlenius, president of the McAllen Chamber of Commerce, sent out an e-mail to 140 media outlets nationwide Tuesday morning with the subject line: “McAllen, Texas calls for wall around Washington D.C.”

“We feel the need to protect ourselves from bad legislation, bad ideas and a waste of tax money,” Ahlenius wrote.

“A wall around their homes and businesses will give the legislators and Washington bureaucrats a better understanding of what kind of message this action will send.

“Let’s see if they decide to climb over it, tunnel under it, or walk over it.”

Link to complete article (Found via Cato @ Liberty).

In translation

I used to think about translation as something mechanical, like a computer. You feed in some words, it spits out some other words. Simple as that. And a bad translation was one that strayed too far from the original, one where the translator tried to get fancy and introduce his own ideas.^[1]

Then I actually learned a foreign language. Blast went a few assumptions, namely:

• Every English word has its equivalent in other languages.
• The best way to get the audience to understand is to literally translate each separate word.
• Translation is pretty much the same, no matter who does it.

Later, in a last-minute scramble to locate a reading for a wedding, I found a collection of Pablo Neruda’s work. Each poem was printed in Spanish on one page, English on the facing page. I was so relieved to find a reading that was loving but not sappy, passionate without being inappropriate, that I hardly glanced at the other books I’d brought home from the library.

Weeks later, I went to return them and came across the same poem again in another anthology. But this English version was uglier, clunkier. This guy clearly doesn’t have as light a touch, I thought. And then I realized that I was thinking of the translator as a poet.

The more closely I looked, the more I was astonished at the variation in translations, not just style but quality.

Consider this line:
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.
(Pablo Neruda, Cien sonetos de amor, Sonnet XVII)

It can be translated as prosaic:
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.^[2]

or more formal:
so close that your eyes grow heavy when I tire.^[3]

It can focus on the emotion:
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.^[4]

or take flight into the fanciful:
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.^[5]

It all depends on the translator – her background, her skill, her understanding of the world the poet came from. If she likes him she may translate him sympathetically; if she is contemptuous of his politics she may slash at his naiveté. If she is not well educated her own vocabulary may be impoverished. If she is ignorant of his circumstances she may mistake his tone, reading honest devotion for sarcasm, or vice versa.

So now I’m wondering why no one has published a collection that includes poems in their original language, followed by three or four different translations for contrast. Perhaps this already exists, and I am not aware of it. A quick search found an apparently defunct website of a newsletter that invited readers’ translations of a chosen poem.

The community of professional translators must be fairly small. If a book like this exists, it is probably marketed just to this audience. Which is a shame, because it seems like something that would be a good discusson-starter even in a beginner-level language class. And of course there are probably other people like me, who would read something like that for fun.

Suggestions and speculation welcome.

1. “His or her” is awkward, and so I vary pronouns at random. Please do not interpret this as sexism, feminism, or any other ism.
   ↩
2. (Translator unknown.) ↩
3. (Translator David Short.) ↩
4. (Translator Stephen Mitchell, Into the Garden; Harper Perennial, 1993.) ↩
5. (Translator Mark Eisner, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems; City Lights Books, 2004.) ↩

The importance of environmental design (why whiteboards are awesome)

By environmental design, I do not mean environmental engineering or anything related with environmentalism. Rather, I want to talk about designing our environment — that is, the physical world in which we live — to make our lives better.

I have not traditionally put much thought into designing my living space. Sure, I set up my room nicely (both functionally and to a lesser extent aesthetically), but prior to the last year, I had never thought about how much my environment impacts my productivity and happiness.

For example, last fall, a suitemate and I came up with the idea of purchasing a whiteboard for our suite’s common area. We thought it would be a fun and useful way to collaborate on our many problem sets.^[1] The idea percolated in our minds until one day we broke down, went to Staples, and purchased a whiteboard and the necessary accoutrements.

To say that the board was a success would be an understatement. It worked out so well, in fact, that we shortly thereafter purchased a second board, and then a third.^[2]

What did we use the boards for?

First and foremost, they performed even better than expected at helping us with our original goal of collaborating on problem sets. The boards enabled us to offload our thinking into a shared space — a commons — which meant quite literally that multiple people could work on a given problem simultaneously. It also meant problems could be put on the board, ignored (or at least not actively worked on) for a bit, and then resumed.

Compare this to doing problem sets alone, on a piece of graph paper. With graph paper, when you’re not working on your problem set, the problems are not in view — they’re in your backpack, desk drawer or, most likely, on your floor. In any case, you’re unlikely to glance at them when you’re eating or chatting with friends. But if the problem exists on a whiteboard just next to your breakfast/lunch/dinner table, in the room where you and your friends spend 75% of your time at home, you’re bound to gaze upon it from time to time. Chances are also that at some point you — or one of your friends — will have a breakthrough. And when you do, there will be no delay before you can start working again.

That last point is key: Whiteboards operate in realtime and thus have no “startup time” — i.e., there’s no pause between when you want to start working and when you can actually start working. The few things that might actually slow you down, like not being able to find a marker, can be eliminated with a little thoughtful design.^[3]

The boards didn’t just give us a way to do our homework together, though. They actually helped us learn the material more thoroughly, by keeping our work visually in front of us, and by facilitating the social connections that helped cement our new knowledge. They also served as a mechanism for my friends and me to share information that was not directly related to our course work: My friend Spencer taught me some of the basic mathematics behind Western music, and the boards have been used more than once to parse Arabic and Latin sentences.

But the boards’ usefulness did not end there. Over the past months, they have, among other things, served as an oversized message board (I’m at the library. Want to grab dinner at 7:30?); an ad hoc grocery list; and aided in the development of a theory of how best to pick up strangers.

As the above examples suggest, the dry-erase boards became wholly integrated into our daily lives.^[4] Here’s why I think they worked so well — and were adopted so quickly.

First, as I hope I have illustrated above, the boards were genuinely useful. This may seem painfully obvious but I still think it’s worth stating: Things that are useful will get used.

Second, they were right there, so we didn’t have to go out of our way to use them. How many times have you found a new website or downloaded a cool new program, only to find that a week later you’ve forgotten that it even exists?

I think there are two primary lessons to be learned here.

The first lesson is that our environments facilitate our thinking much more than we tend to think they do.^[5]

The second lesson I will sum up in the form of a new law:

Nicholas’s law of technological adoption:

The rate of adoption of a new technology is directly related to its utility and inversely related to how much effort it takes to incorporate it into your established workflow.^[6]

I’m curious to hear what people think of all this.

1. Keep in mind that I am, along with all of the people with whom I live, presently in engineering school. We don’t write response papers or essays; we do problem sets. For better or worse, we live and breathe problem sets. I should also note that for the majority of our classes, collaboration is not only permitted but actively encouraged by our professors.↩
2. In the interest of full disclosure, I should acknowledge that the acquisition of the third board was driven as much out of my near obsessive desire for symmetry as it was out of actual need.↩
3. Early this semester, with the purchase of the third whiteboard, I got an extra set of markers that were magnetized. A friend noticed that they stuck rather well to our rooms’ metal doorframes. Ever since, I have kept a marker or two on my doorframe. Now, when I have a thought in my room and want to work it out on the dry-erase board, I mindlessly grab a marker on my way out to the lounge and I’m ready to go.↩
4. This has become something of a problem. I now frequently find myself looking for the nearest whiteboard (or reaching into my pocket for an erasable marker) when I want to explain something to someone. The problem is that this happens even when I’m places that rarely have publicly accessible whiteboards, like a restaurant or train station.↩
5. Variations on this theme have been studied for some time. The American psychologist J. J. Gibson wrote about the importance of environmental factors in shaping our thinking decades ago. I guess I’m more than a little late to the party.↩
6. As an example of this on a large scale, think about how quickly Facebook went from being non-existent to utterly pervasive. In a matter of months, it became part of the daily routine of millions of people and the sixth-most-visited site in the US. Imagine the possibilities if we could build a grassroots activist network with the same rapidity.↩