The honeybee conjecture

Published September 20, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 20

More than 2,000 years ago, Marcus Terentius Varro, a roman citizen, proposed an answer, which ever since has been called “The Honeybee Conjecture.” He thought that if we better understood, there would be an elegant reason for what we see. “The Honeybee Conjecture” is an example of mathematics unlocking a mystery of nature.

~ Shane Parrish from, The Honeybee Conjecture: What Is It About Bees And Hexagons?

slip:4ufowa4.

Every once in a while, you will have the chance to be alive when a multi-thousand-year old mystery is solved. Humans are awesome. Mathematics for the win. *drops mic*

ɕ

The Munger Two Step

Published September 18, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 18

While most of us make decisions daily, few of us have a useful framework for thinking that protects us when making decisions. We’re going to explore Munger’s two-step process for making effective decisions and reducing human misjudgment.

~ Shane Parrish from, The Munger Two Step

slip:4ufomu2.

Some day I hope to write something as useful at the post I’ve linked to above. I do not hold hope for ever writing anything as directly useful as what Munger had to say, quoted and referred to in the post linked above.

There’s so much wisdom—how to make decisions without losing your shit is life-critical… right up there with knowing how to breath… There’s so much wisdown in that post about predictions and unknown-unknowns and making decisions with uncertain information.

Also, in the realm of unknown-unknowns: I’m sure you believe you know how to breath. Pop quiz: Take a pause and imagine you’re giving a lecture to a bunch of aliens who breath through gills… I’ll wait. How’d you do? Still 100% certain you know how to breath?

I’m not trying to preach to you about, “you don’t know how to breath!” I’m trying to show you—by asking rhetorically about something you certainly do a lot—that “knowing” is really hard.

And all of your deciding stands atop your knowing.

ɕ

Why we all need philosophy

Published September 17, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 17  ·  

Philosophy is, therefore, undismissable for the simple reason that it encompasses all of conscious experience. To criticize philosophy, you must rely on some degree of philosophy. To shit on systematic frameworks of understanding, you must generate a systematic framework of understanding.

~ Mark Manson from, Why We All Need Philosophy

slip:4umawy1.

Irreverant as usual, but—as is also often the case with Manson—an insightful look at why you are already doing philosophy.

Years ago, when I said, “screw this I’m starting,” and tried to get Philosophy wrapped around my brain… Years ago, one of the most profitable things I ever did was subscribe to a little podcast called Philosophy Bites. And then listen to all of them. I’m still not an ivory-tower armchair philosopher, but there’s a crap-ton fewer unknown-unknowns.

ɕ

Do less

Published September 16, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 16  ·  

“If you seek tranquility, do less.” Or (more accurately) do what’s essential—what the logos of a social being requires, and in the requisite way. Which brings a double satisfaction: To do less, better. Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?”

~ Marcus Aurelius

slip:4a274.

World’s Largest Audio-Visual Archive

Published September 15, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 15  ·  

After decades of technology breakthroughs, it brings a smile to my face to think that a vinyl or lacquer platter with mechanically implanted grooves is still, by far, our longest-lived audio format.

~ Kevin Kelly from, World’s Largest Audio-Visual Archive – Long Now

slip:4ulowo1.

Digital storage is ephemeral. That hard drive you copied everything onto and tossed on a shelf? …it’s only ten years before you should no longer trust it to have everything still retrievable, exactly as you wrote it. Home-writable CD-ROMs and DVDs? …they’re about the same: 10 years. Heck, I have audio CDs from the 80s where the commercial-grade coating has failed, and I had to repurchase the albums to get a fresh CD to ‘rip’ when I lost my music collection once back in the 00’s.

I’m definitely not bashing on technology—I’m not a Luddite calling for a return to clay tablets… On the other hand, guess what really lasts? Stone, baby. Clay. Papyrus even.

What I’m saying is that we currently do not have any set-it-and-forget-it digital storage. Instead, you need to be thinking about MOVage—not STORage—keeping your digital files moving forward from copy to copy, from medium to medium.

ɕ

Pseudo-Depth

Published September 14, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 14

The bottom line is that if you’re intrigued by depth, give real depth a try, by which I mean giving yourself at least two or three hours with zero distractions. Let the hard task sink in and marinate. Push through the initial barrier of boredom and get to a point where your brain can do what it’s probably increasingly craving in our distracted world: to think deeply.

~ Cal Newport from, Deep Habits: The Danger of Pseudo-Depth – Cal Newport

slip:4ucabo35.

My mind loves to wander off. It often wanders off to familiar ideas. Ever have a small burr on a finger nail? You fiddle with it slightly, scuffing it with another nail. Some thoughts feel like that in my mind. Not a problem exactly—not bad enough that I’m going to get up for the nail file. But, none the less, there is this idea yet again. My fascination with rock climbing is one such idea. Why, exactly, does climbing fascinate me? I’ve spend many a CPU cycle recursively interrogating this question.

Upon reading Newport’s post, I find it has pointed me in a direction I’d not previously seen: Is it the deep focus found within the pursuit of rock climbing which draws me to it?

ɕ

The meaning at a given moment

Published September 13, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 13  ·  

What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?”

~ Viktor Frankl

slip:4a423.

Preoccupied with work

Published September 10, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 10  ·  

They are always preoccupied with work so that they may be in position to live better; they spend life in making provision for life. Their plans are designed for the future, but procrastination is the greatest waste of life. It robs us of each day as it comes, and extorts the present from us on promises of the future. Expectancy is the greatest impediment to living: In anticipation of tomorrow it loses today.

~ Seneca

slip:4a416.

Common sense

Published September 9, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 9

It’s easier for Artist Today to post to Medium than it is to build her own site so Artist Tomorrow has a place to live when yet another publishing platform dies or becomes watered down by crap. It takes hard work and conviction to build your own thing — and it takes relationships, which are greater investments than ad dollars.

~ Steven Pressfield from, What It Takes: Common Sense

slip:4useco1.

I’m nobody. Nobody’s asking me why I’m not posting on Medium. Although, come to think of it, people do ask me why I don’t post on LinkedIn, and some people ask why I left Facebook… Anyway, you didn’t ask, but you’re still reading.

Truth be told, all the problems come from you, the aggregate readers (viewers, etc.) on the Internet. You have avoided doing the slightly-harder-than-droolingly-easy work of finding and following the things you care about. It’s easy to open an account on feedbin.com and to start following what you want to read. (And if something doesn’t play well with FeedBin, then it’s not actually on the open Internet and I encourage you to shun and shame it.) If you actively follow the things you care about, (using the Internet and software of course,) then you don’t need the middlemen; you don’t need the search engines and the social platforms.

Aside: Exactly ZERO percent of the stuff I share and talk about on this blog is discovered by search engines or social networks. (Just checked, and I have 485 things queued up as “that’s interesting, I should read it more carefully and look into it.” It was 486, until I created this post.) The kernels are found through my actively following many hundreds of different things. I receive exactly ZERO email newsletters [that’s a lie, I route a precious few into FeedBin :] Sure, I may go down search engine or social network rabbit holes learning more. But the things I care about I follow intentionally.

Once you start following things, you might even grow to love those things. One day you’ll realize that you even value those things so much that you voluntarily throw some money at them to support their work.

ɕ

Tracking without judging

Published September 8, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 8  ·  

What has worked better is tracking behavior without particularly striving to change it. Rather than drawing a “good enough” line and striving to meet it, you commit only to tracking the relevant numbers -– dollars spent, calories consumed, miles walked, pages read. What you discover is that simply knowing this data changes what you want to do, so that you’re not constantly fighting with yourself. You don’t need to depend on winning endless should/shouldn’t battles in order to change.

~ David Cain from, The Myth of Grit and Determination

slip:4urate13.

I believe this is true with one important caveat: The value you are tracking must be close to the actions. Allow me to explain…

If you track your weight, this will have little effect: When I pick up a cupcake, the scale is nowhere near—if I could think, “don’t eat the cupcake because weight loss,” then I wouldn’t be tracking my weight trying to affect my weight loss. But, “if I read for a few minutes now I can then mark off—right now—that I did some reading today. So, tracking, “ate more veggies,” works… or, “did something active,”…

Anyway, that’s been my experience. ymmv :)

ɕ

He who is asked

Published September 7, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 7  ·  

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by being responsible.

~ Viktor Frankl

slip:4a426.

Time spent organizing my time

Published September 6, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 6

Something organized people don’t often talk about is how much time they spend organizing their time.

~ Cal Newport from, Spend More Time Managing Your Time – Cal Newport

slip:4ucabo36.

Guilty as charged, Your Honor! So today, something a little lighter than usual—I think?—with a few snapshots of how much time I spend organizing my time.

It is an exceedingly rare morning that I don’t spend about half an hour planning out the day. This little block of time begins with “surfacing:” Ducking into all the many online mediums where I am present, and—this is very hard—not engaging, but skimming over things to see what rises to a level of getting my attention today. Many productivity sources and guides suggest doing this at night, at the end of your day, but that does not work for me.

Every Monday I take an “administrative day”—the entire day. I stuff the day full of all the random things of life. Any errands to run, laundry, lawn mowing if I can, bookkeeping (literal banking and accounting and such). I do my best to resist doing any real work. I do anything like changing the bed linen, or high dusting the house, or stacking firewood, or changing a flat tire on my bike, …anything that I would consider “not important” …except of course if I never got around to doing it, then it’s a critical disaster …that’s “administrative day” stuff. This isn’t exactly time spent on organizing, but still.

I use sophisticated planning/project-tracking software, called OmniFocus, to manage a lot of stuff. (Things from recurring daily things, to true projects that have many steps and milestones and due dates.) Every two weeks—on an Admin Day!—I spend about an hour just going through every nook and cranny of my OmniFocus. (If you’ve read Getting Things Done, this is part of the review process.) I tend to ruthlessly delete stuff in an effort to combat my incessant tendency to take new things on.

At least once a month—again, on an Admin Day—I do the same sort of “look through every nook and cranny” review of the Basecamp system that is used for one of the companies I’m part of. Sometimes I can do that in 5 minutes, sometimes I’ll spend hours on it.

At the least organized end of the spectrum, (yes, my time spent managing my time comes in a spectrum of how organized it is,) I often—maybe twice per month this happens—will go off, (as in “off the deep end,”) and outline some project that I’m considering doing. I’ll whip out my favorite outliner, OmniOutliner, and do a brain dump of some project. This can take from 5 minutes to an hour or more depending on what I’m thinking about. Quite often, I’ll then simply set aside some awesome idea that I don’t have the time to execute, or the resources to have it done under my direction. I used to think this was wasted time, but it is the only way I can get things off my mind: When it pops up later, I either think, “I already did all the thinking,” or I go back to the outline and tinker some more. (What remains, forever, is just to squash the recurring lizard-brain fear of missing out by not executing the project.)

So let’s see, how much time is all of that combined? I’m awake 16 hours a day, but realistically, only half that time could ever be used to some specific end. So 8 hours a day of “self-directable life”. 1 out of 7 days is an Admin Day… 1/7 ~ 0.1428… The rest of that stuff might—maaaaaaybe, but probably not—eat a second day’s worth of each week . . . 2/7 ~ 0.2857…

So in response to how much time do I spend managing my time? I’ll say:

15 to 30% of my entire available life.

ɕ

Nearly ripped my heart out

Published September 5, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 5

Depending on how well you know me, you’ll have differing ideas about how much of a “softie” I am. I’ll be clear: I’m a big softie; all bark and no bite.

Here on the ‘ol blog—3,000 posts is coming up fast—I don’t normally bother even mentioning entertainment—”tv” colloquially… Well, I just finished watching Halt and Catch Fire (originally from AMC, but streaming on Netflix.)

Now, maybe it’s the fact that I basically lived through what the show is about. Maybe it’s because, you know, I was the Wizard behind the curtain who built those things and lived through those creations and wrote the code and pulled the wires and bent stuff until it caught fire. Maybe it’s because I’m getting up there in years. Maybe it’s because the thing just had to fucking end on Peter Gabriel’s, Solsbury Hill. Maybe because 30 years ago I made some life-long friends listening to that music… Maybe it’s because I still believe I’ve not accomplished anything and absolutely understand the pull… Or maybe it was just Gordon’s words…

Or maybe I’m not conveying the feeling at all.

…but perhaps—just maybe—you’ve caught a glimmer of apprehension…

So.

What are you gonna’ do with that, Craig?

And hey, what are you going to do next?

ɕ

The span we live is small

Published September 4, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 4  ·  

Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small—small as the corner of the Earth in which we live it. Small as even the greatest renown, passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead.

~ Marcus Aurelius

slip:4a176.

The science of hitting

Published September 3, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 3

The book contained a very interesting picture, of himself at-bat with the strike zone broke into 77 individual squares.

~ Shane Parrish from, The Hidden Edge: What Baseball’s Greatest Hitter Can Teach Us About Decision-Making

slip:4ufoma2.

I’m not a huge baseball fan, but I know enough to be impressed by what Ted Williams managed to do. I’ve had enough balls pitched at me, that the idea of even being able to know in a split second exactly where the baseball is going to be— …just click through and look at the graphic already. :)

What intrigued me about his idea of knowing—in real time, to the inch—what to literally swing at is the power of saying no writ explicitly and at high speed. I’m often thinking or talking about focus; talking about saying no to the right things to make space for the important yeses. But I’d never thought about intentionally practicing making the decision more quickly.

ɕ

Start where you are

Published September 2, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 2

If you’re trying to get to the beautiful lake or beach and you’re caught in the weeds, ignoring the weeds and their constraints will produce nothing but desperation and angst. You first need to know what weeds you’re in, and how to get unhooked from them.

~ David Allen from, Starting with where you are, not where you should be – Getting Things Done®

slip:4ugesa1.

Of course this insight is blindingly obvious once you see it.

…and I distinctly remember what it was like when I hadn’t yet seen it. I can’t quite put my finger on an exact year, but I remember a feeling—or rather a few feelings and things which kept happening to me:

I was often late.
I was often tired.
I was often bored
…and then suddenly realized I’d forgotten to do something that I had felt was important.
Chaos.
Disorder.

ɕ

Difficulties to be overcome

Published September 1, 2020  ·  All posts on Sep 1  ·  

Oh, how blessed young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and beginning in life. I shall never cease to be grateful for three and half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome, all along the way.

~ John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

slip:4a418.

25 years?

Published August 31, 2020  ·  All posts on Aug 31  ·  

Twenty five years ago today [edit: August 25, 1995], Microsoft released Windows 95. It was undoubtedly a technical leap forward, but its biggest, most lasting impacts are about how it changed popular culture’s relationship to technology.

~ Anil Dash, from What Windows 95 Changed – Anil Dash

slip:4uaiwa2.

I had completely forgotten about Windows 95; I certainly never knew the specific date of its release. It certainly was a big deal at the time—not because I or the people I worked with used it, but because we were running an Internet Service Provider and our customers used it. So we had to know how to support it.

At the time we were in the midst of creating an “ezine.” It’s probably hard to explain how cutting edge this was—bear in mind that Wired started in ’93. (We had started publishing an online “magazine” in December ’94.) I’m bragging, sure, but also just trying to give you the context of the jaw-droppingly old web page I’m about to link you to.

Here’s my tongue-in-cheek article about drawing the short straw and having to go buy a copy of Windows 95 for our office: In a Plain Brown Wrapper, Please.

Granted, we moved that entire web site once when we sold the domain it was on along with the Internet Service Provider. But otherwise, those are literally, 25-year-old web pages.

ɕ