Category Archives: Idle Speculation

Rotation and Other Metaphors

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

Today, I noticed that I seem to write a lot about rotation. It seems to come to be ‘naturally’, or at least from something far back in my past[1].

It feels like it might have originally come from discussions of Chirality, somewhere back in high school. Like the concept of Gm1m2/r^2 migrating to Cq1q2/r^2[2], or basing the Bohr model of the atom on the model of the solar system.

A lot of what I write has to do with how I ‘rotate in’ possible solutions to try to fit them with the problem I’m working on. As far as I know, the brain doesn’t actually work like this. I could see a generalized model of computing developing two sections of nerves, one which displayed a problem, one which displayed possible solutions, each in their firing patterns. I wonder if this happens.

While we’re trying to fit possible solutions to this problem, let’s consider other possible metaphors from the ‘ball and stick’ molecular model[3].

– Hinge rotations, like a pendulum, or the dangling COOH on a long-chain carboxylic acid
– Spring action, like atoms in an N2(g) molecule moving towards and away from each other.
– Triangle and higher order into and out of plane rotations/vibrations/translations

Note that all of these can change based on the conditions:
– Temperature
– Water or non-water nearby
– Salts or other charged ions near or far away
– How hydrophilic or hydrophobic parts of the adjoining environment are
– Van der Waals forces

The blog posts which inspired this one:

BOF VI: The Chemist in me:
Multidimensional Word and Sentence Rotation
Solution Rotation

[1] Perhaps this explains why I was so excited about Dinosaur Rotation!

[2]I was lucky enough to see Douglas Hofstadter speak about ‘Analogies in Physics‘. His best work is probably ‘Godel, Escher, Bach‘, which talks about natural and artificial intelligence, the incompleteness theorem, music, and art.

[3]I owe much or all of my intuition here to my time spent rotating[4] through the Ponder Lab at WashU. They work on one of the few world class molecular modeling software programs, Tinker. When I was there, Tinker worked by modeling molecules as balls & sticks, with various rotational and vibrational modes.

[4]Ha!

Brain Normalization, Bicycles, and Privilege

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts

The brain is good at many things. Previously I’ve talked about how the brain is good at being lazy.

One corollary of this is that the brain is very good at normalizing your experiences of whatever difficulties you are experiencing.

This can be a very good thing, if for example you are trying to accomplish a task while subject to indescribable pain. But it can be a bad thing when you assume that everyone else’s problems are just as difficult as yours.

For illustration, I’m going to use my favourite analogy, which while imperfect, I think showcases the relevant concepts.

Bicycles, headwinds, and tailwinds:

Most of you reading this have ridden a bicycle at some point. If you have ever commuted by bicycle, you will know that headwinds are the bane of your existence[1].

But you might never notice a tailwind, if you have one. Headwinds are very noticeable, because you have to actively fight through them. Tailwinds are much more subtle, you might notice that you’re less tired after a trip, or that it was faster. It’s very easy to ascribe that to you feeling more energetic that day, or just feeling more fit.

Now imagine that on your route each morning, you have a tailwind. You don’t notice it, you just end up at work each day slightly happier than you would otherwise. Now imagine another person who travels in a different direction each morning, which gives them a headwind. Having never experienced a headwind, you might say “oh, you just need to increase your pedal cadence until you become more fit”.

This is your privilege speaking. This person is just as fit or perhaps more fit than you. Your brain has normalized your experience. You just think you understand because you also have problems which feel just as difficult to you.

[1]This is especially fun if ‘downtown’ is by a large body of water, and dwellings are ‘uptown’. You will get an onshore breeze in the morning (blowing inland) as you’re commuting downtown, and then an offshore breeze (blowing towards the body of water) in the evening, as you’re commuting home. Headwinds for everyone!

How do you Want to Remap Your Brain Today?

Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts

Every time you do something, you are making a choice about how you want to map your brain. A few times might not make much of a difference, but eventually you will start seeing the world differently. During the 1890s, psychologist George M. Stratton found that after about 5 days of wearing reversing glasses, his brain started to see the world upside down.

Every time you make a choice about what you do today, you bring your brain a little closer to remapping itself, or reinforcing the remapping that it is still there. This is a lot of why habits can be so difficult to break.

Confounding many of your efforts is the fact that your brain tries to be as lazy as possible, all the time.

You may experience this as the article above, as changing your walking gait under different conditions, or as many do, as your brain sliding away from a difficult problem and distracting you with something else.

If you want to get better at these things, you have to train yourself to marshal and to guard what I call ‘proactive energy[1]’. My personal theory is that this is why hobbies and doing something you love are so powerful. When I was singing with TNL, we would talk about ‘The Inner Game‘, and tactics for interacting with yourself, to getting out of your own way and letting yourself succeed.

But we never would have gotten there if we hadn’t so desperately wanted so sing well. Because we loved the singing so much, and wanted to succeed so badly, we overcame a number of internal obstacles. We could then use these tactics we learned to help us do so many other, more mundane things.

Somewhat similar to how engineering school is often great training for pushing yourself to your limits, and learning how to deal with sleep deprivation[2].

But back to our original question: “How do you want to remap your brain today?” Every choice you make is a brain remapping choice, where you will get better at the things you do.

The corollary is that if you do things you love to do, you will get better at them, and then want to get better at them, perhaps enough to learn more about yourself and remap your brain even a little bit more consciously.

[1] Christine Miserandino has an excellent essay: ‘The Spoon Theory‘, which talks about the difficulties of living with a chronic illness or disability, and how difficult it can be to have limited resources of this type. She uses ‘spoons’ as a proxy for the amount of mental energy someone has at the beginning of the day. Wikipedia link.

Surplus and Corruption

Economics, Idle Speculation

Today, I was reading about declarations and non-declarations of war in the United States, and changes in law surrounding them.

Many people have bemoaned that as the American Empire has progressed, more and more war powers have been invested in the executive branch, with congress doing little to nothing to try to stop it. In a way, this is a form of corruption, corruption being where someone does not appropriately discharge their fiduciary duty because they will personally gain.

To me, it seems that corruption inevitably arises from surplus. They are two sides of the same coin, like encryption and compression*.

The theory goes that when a eventually-to-be-powerful** country is in its infancy, people like Cincinnatus*** and Washington are more willing to give up power and sacrifice self for the good of the tribe.

As the empire becomes more wealthy, things start to change. There is more surplus, so there is not as much a need for leaders to go back to tend to the farm. The people who are more prone to self sacrifice for the greater good seem to not acquire power for one or more of many reasons.

Perhaps self sacrifice is not encouraged as they are growing up, as the society is too affluent to require it. Perhaps they have it worn away by many years of anti-socialization, the lure of personal wealth is too great, or perhaps it is just not necessary for the empire to do so. The power brokers just don’t see the point in giving up useful power to someone to fix the problem unless the situation is dire.

For the Romans, one of the main counterbalances for this was supposed to be the Tribune of the Plebs. What is the counterbalance supposed to be now? The press? Popular opinion? The conscience of politicians****?

I see the fundamental problem is that all of these require active intervention to solve the problem. There is no concept of ‘fail safe’. The closest I’ve seen is from ‘Yes, Prime Minister‘, where the theory is that the civil service tries to damp out wild swings in popular and political opinion, and tries to run the country stably and competently. This is perhaps combined with the theory that whichever organization is more stable lasts longer, and therefore wins. If you’re a stable democracy or republic, you just need to wait until other countries go through disruptive changes to go in and get what you want*****.

I’m not saying it’s good. I’m just saying it’s what happens. And the survivors tend to write the history books.

*A lot of the math is the same, they use entropy in very similar ways. Look it up! 😀

**There are all sorts of theories of why countries become powerful. I don’t think there’s any consensus about this, and in general they do terrible things on their way up, but this is outside the scope.

***I didn’t know this is where Cincinnati, Ohio got its name!

****Vetinari would remind you that ‘politician’ comes from ‘polis’, implying that they have as much a stake in the city as anyone else.

*****There are many recent colonial examples, if you want them.

How do you math?

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Nostalgia, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

In an earlier post, I was talking about ‘friendly triangles’ as an example of unconscious things that inform my interactions with problems and math. Today, I wanted to talk about some other aspects of solving math problems that I didn’t notice I did until I had to teach mental math*, a number of years a.

I was trying to describe mental math, when I noticed all of the little assumptions I made, all the little tricks that I used to make math and mental math easier and more likely to end up correct**.

Some of these tricks were:
– The curve on the bottom of the lower case ‘t’, so it didn’t look like a ‘+’ sign
– Curved ‘x’, I’m guessing so it doesn’t look like a multiplication symbol (this one is lost to the mists of history for me
– Lining up equals signs
– Being very conscious of only having one equality per line
– Friendly triangles (1,1,sqrt(2), 1,2,sqrt(3), 3,4,5)
– Looking for radii of circles in geometry problems
– Various methods for making sure that I always itemized all of the permutations or combinations***

Once I noticed that I was doing these tricks, it was a matter of figuring out which were useful enough to spend my students’ time on. Many of them would probably be most usefully conveyed by demonstration in passing, like the way a painting instructor would demonstrate brush stroke by example.

Knowing then what I know now, I might have tried to help them come up with rules for each type of situation, but in hindsight, it’s probably best I didn’t****. What I do remember is teaching geometry problems with the advice ‘draw a big picture*****’, and ‘label everything you know or can figure out’, which feels like sound advice for solving all sorts of problems.

To this day, it’s probably why all my notebooks are slightly-larger-than-larger blank sketch pads.

*To adults, as part of standardized testing preparation.

**I remember being one of those school math students who did really well overall, but was constantly doing ‘stupid mistakes’, where I would drop a sign, or reverse something/etc… I think I compensated for this be extra checking and all the little tricks I’ll be talking about above. Or have already talked about above, it you’re reading the footnotes after all of the post.

***I actually learned this

****I don’t actually remember what I told them. I seem to recall it was just a bunch of working through problems.

*****Thanks prof. Collins!

What is the Difference Between a Duck?: Mu Jokes and Mental Push Hands

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Nostalgia, Puns, Words!

UPDATE: While I was writing this, this blog passed 1000 page views since I started counting on Dec 29th! You people are awesome!

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Yesterday, I briefly touched on the concept of ‘the space between meaning’.

One way to demonstrate this concept is with a Mu-joke (not really an anti-joke*):

Q: What is the difference between a duck**?

A: One of its legs are both the same!

The goal here is to say some words which sound not too much like nonsense, such that the listener really tries to understand.

Like a good pun, you want to draw the listener in by making things the correct level of ‘difficult to understand’. Too easy, the listener groans and moves on. Too difficult, the listener times out and moves on. (Note that this changes with each individual audience member. If ever there was an argument for (education) streaming, this is it. 😀 )

By analogy, you want your Mu-joke to make the listener feel like they would understand it if they ‘just tried a little harder’.

Also, a good Mu-joke will play with language and parts of speech, the goal being to make the listener more aware of the structure and inner meaning of what they are saying and what is being said around them. Normally, the word ‘between’ refers to two things, but we are using it to refer to one object, a duck. This gives the listener a mental ‘cache miss‘ or ‘branch misprediction‘ error, and it can throw them off balance as they try to reassemble their mental model of the conversation.

This trick can be used in a ‘Mental Push Hands***’ competition. I have fond memories of doing this with MC as we reshelved books at the library in high school. I suspect many of the best debaters use variants of this, and the best politicians have well-developed defenses against these kinds of tactics.

But back to ‘the space between meaning’. It is the space in your head where you are comfortable with ‘between’ referring to any number of things, where you are comfortable with ‘both’ referring to one thing.

It is a space I enjoy, and I hope you can help put me there. 😀

*Anti-jokes are not quite what I mean. They seem to be defined online as jokes with a standard leadup and an opposite-ish punchline. Many of the punchlines seem to take a ‘standard’ punching-down joke and subvert it. Funny, interesting, useful, but not what I’m taking about.

**I first saw this joke in one of those ‘choose-your-own-adventure-rpg’ books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grailquest. Probably my favourite series in the genre.

***I learned ‘Push Hands’ as a martial arts balance exercise. You plant your feet and touch palms with your opponent. The object is to make your opponent move one of their feet without moving yours. For me, it was all about being as flexible as possible while trying to find my opponent’s inflexibilities.

Focusing Meetings

Agile, Idle Speculation, Organizing Systems, Software Development, Thoughts on Thoughts

What kinds of meetings do you actually need in an organization? I don’t really know the answer to this. What I do know are the meetings that work for me on an ongoing basis. I would call my process ‘Scrum-like’, in that I think it takes the best features of Scrum, but I’m sure I’m not doing it exactly by-the-book.

1) Daily 5-minute standups. When I say ‘5 minutes’, I mean 5 minutes. I have said much more on this here: http://nayrb.org/~blog/2016/01/15/the-5-minute-standup/ They keep people up to date, and should spawn whatever conversations you need to keep things flowing

2) Bi-weekly* planning and retrospective meetings. You may be able to get this down to 1 hour every two weeks for both if your team is well defined and has been working together for a while. You may need an hour each plus one hour for backlog grooming every two weeks. Again, depending on how defined the work is that your team is doing, YMMV.

3) One-on-one weekly meetings with each of your direct reports. Long term, probably the most important of any of these. This is where you find what is actually happening, how your people are actually feeling. ‘Managing Humans’ by Michael Lopp has multiple chapters on this. Fundamentally, you want to establish trust with your reports. This includes listening, asking them about what they want (both now and in the future), followed by more listening, then following up to actually get them what they want and need as much as you can.

4) Broadcast meetings. I’m talking about town halls, other meetings where you want to get news out to a lot of people quickly. Best to keep these reasonably short, and choose your most interesting public speakers. If you have a CEO that can hold a room and answer questions, this is a great opportunity for them to shine. Many of these meetings can be avoided by a fanout leading to 30s announcements by leads in your daily standups (or email).

5) This last category is more fuzzy. It includes all those meetings outside your regular schedule. These are generally a mix of long term planning meetings (vision/strategy/etc…), short term planning meetings (figuring out what we’re doing with this project so we can make it into bite-sized tickets), and unblocking meetings (this project is behind, these people disagree, this thing you want us to do is physically impossible, etc…).

It is this fuzziness that that can be the death of a meeting. The first four types have pretty defined schedules and agendas**. This last type is pretty free form. Here are some things we’ve found that help:

A) Make sure the meeting is ‘Ready’

In Agile, there is the concept of a ticket being ‘Ready’, where before someone starts work on something, that something has to reach a certain level of definition. Generally, this would include things like ‘Acceptance Critera’ (how you know it’s done), and a ‘Why’, ‘What’, and some idea of ‘How’ you are going to do it***.

For our meetings, we had a pretty simple of ‘Ready’:
– Someone is in charge of running the meeting
– The meeting has a stated purpose
– The meeting has an agenda

B) Make sure the person**** in charge of running the meeting can run a meeting

This generally means:
– They are familiar and can follow the purpose and agenda described above
– They can tell when a conversation is going off topic or over time
– They can bring the conversation back

This last point can be as simple as ‘in the interest of time’. Having a written agenda on a whiteboard or flipchart can help a lot with this. If you include time allotments, this will give your meeting runner something to point to to get people back on track.

C) Have plans for action items

– Assign action items

Often, this is the role of the meeting runner (chairperson, really), but could be some other person in the room with the gravitas/authority to persuade/compel people to do the required/decided on things.

– Track action items and follow up if necessary

You want the follow up assignments to be in a place where everyone in the meeting can track their progress (whatever ticketing system you have is ideal, or perhaps whatever wiki system your organization uses).

– Avoid a further meeting on this topic

Depending on your particular participants, someone may need to be assigned to follow up, or it could be ‘homework’ for the next meeting. Ideally, you want to make these meetings as infrequent as possible, so subsuming the action items into your regular ticketing and tracking system is ideal and obviates the need for a specific follow-up meeting.

And that’s it! If you follow these simple steps, your meetings should be much more focused and productive!

Let me know what you think in the comments (as well as if you want me to delve deeper into parts of this).

*I say bi-weekly because we do two week sprints. YMMV.

**If you want me to talk more about agendas for planning meetings, retros, one-on-ones, and broadcast meetings, I can do so, but this is out of scope.

***The exact contents of this definition of ‘Ready’ are generally defined on a team-by-team basis.

****There are a bunch of specific skills here which are out of scope. Comment if you want more on this.

The Luxury of ‘Picking Your Battles’

Economics, Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts

“He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious.”
– Sun Tzu

Choosing which battles you fight and do not fight has been a cornerstone of strategy probably for as long has strategy has existed. One can look at the history of military strategy* as a sequence of wrestling** matches writ large, with each of the opponents trying to force the other to fight on their terms.

More recently, the strategy of ‘Picking your battles’ has been applied to many other, more mundane confrontations. When someone accosts you on the street, when the phone company charges you two dollars extra, when that person bumps into you in the supermarket.

And this makes sense. You don’t want to go through your life fighting or arguing with everyone all the time.

But what if you don’t have a choice?

What if every time you walk downtown near your office by yourself, people make sexual comments about you? What if you’re never selected for a job interview because of your name? What if every time you express yourself online, you receive death threats?

Yes, you could avoid doing all those things, or you could do them and simply endure, but is that really picking your battles? You’re having wars of attrition waged against you every day.

Huge parts of the modern reading of ‘pick your battles’ implies that you can win some, or some substantial portion of them.

If you can’t win most, or even any of them, can you really be said to be ‘picking your battles’?

Having battles that you can win is a privilege. Choosing which battles to fight is a privilege. Even choosing which battles to choose from is a privilege.

A privilege that not everyone has.

*This is assuming they knew what they were doing…History is rife with examples of belligerent parties who did not know what they were doing***.

**Perhaps more ‘push hands’ than wrestling…

***Of course, this is often difficult to know with certainty, as the victors generally write the history books…

It takes privilege to be able to do this…

The Power of Godzilla

Fiction, Idle Speculation, Science!

The waves existed, as they have since the Earth had oceans and spun enough to displace them. It has been said that the quest of the waves is to travel all the way around the world, and that erosion of rocks is their slow and patient way to achieve this. Some say that they are opposed by the forces of fire and earth, who combine to make volcanoes, or to move plates, to create mountains and more land. But this is a story of a smaller disturbance…

The surface waves felt a new object coming up from below. The object reached the air, and the waves lapped around it, trying in their patient way to erode it, to continue on their traveling quest. The waves noticed that the object was green, not in the green way of tropical waves, but the green of an algal bloom out of balance. It had spikes, a crest, but the waves could no longer crest it, as it was rising further out of the water. A round head emerged, eyes open even underwater, showing that this creature was at home in salt water. This creature was larger, much larger than the largest of the underwater singers that the waves loved to listen to as they swam the oceans. The waves especially loved the large underwater singers because they would surface to take air, and sometimes even play with the waves, but that is another story, for now the green creature was emerging from the water.

The head was emerging from the waves. As the eyes passed, the waves saw that they were in pain. The waves did not like seeing creatures in pain. But they did not understand. So they watched, and waited, in their endlessly patient way.

A neck, arms, a torso emerged, then finally legs and a tail. The creature, now walking, still in pain, was walking towards the shore. The waves could see the small hairless creatures fleeing from the green creature. Sirens from the land. Screams of pain from the beast.

Doctor Kayama’s team was ready. They had analyzed all the recordings from the creature, and decoded a language they hoped to use to communicate with the beast. They rushed to the power station nearest the beach, as that was where the beast always attacked. They had increased the defenses and the walls, but it was never enough.

[The pain, the pain, the pain!] the beast cried. [Make it stop!]

It was now or never. Setting the speakers to maximum power, the team roared their own broadcast.

[What is the pain? Why do you always attack us?]

[The pain! The Noise! Why do you make that noise?!?]

[What is the noise?]

But it was too late. The beast had reached the power plant and was destroying the generators, as it had so many times before.

Reduced to battery power, the team only had enough power for a few more words:

[Why do you do this?]

The beast seemed to be calming down, or was it? It turned towards the broadcast, but instead of stomping, it stopped and roared:

[It is your electrons, you make them vibrate at 180 Maakktars. It causes so much pain! Why do you not vibrate them at 216 Maakktars like the other side of the island?]

The team spoke into their translator “What do you mean Maakktars?”, but it was too late. They were out of power.

The beast, seemingly no longer in pain, plodded back to the waves, who were much happier to see it now, as it always wanted to play on the way below the surface.

The beast played with the waves for a time, then started to sink beneath, to return from wherever it came. The legs and tail were the first to sink below the surface, then the torso, the arms, and the head, its eyes now serene.

Last to sink below the waves was the crest. As it sunk below the waves, it created a small whirlpool, which, in time, became waves who re-embarked on their endless quest to travel around the world.

Hat tip: https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/40nb1o/wpafter_destroying_tokyo_yet_again_godzilla/

Analysis: Fractional Home Ownership

Analysis, Economics, Idle Speculation

EDIT: This post got the most feedback ever (other than the immediately preceding one about facebooking pictures of your kids). It turns out that all you need to do to get lots of comments is to make a post with an incorrect and not-completely-thought-out graph, and everyone eagerly posts corrections and ideas. (It was actually a really fun discussion… 😀 )

I’ve followed up here:

Analysis: Fractional Home Ownership II

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So, one of my former students just started a company doing fractional home ownership. Their theory is that there’s some middle ground between fully renting and fully owning property that they’d like to facilitate. Here’s why I think they might be right:

This is your standard engineering/product/tradeoff/price-features/etc graph that people/your customers are used to.

House_Ownership

What they’re suggesting is that the graph is really only populated at the edges* (with condominiums allowing lesser monetary costs with a reduction of ownership).

Airbnb and Uber/Lyft have monetized the space for unused housing and vehicle resources. Fractional and micro lending have started to do this for banking. Why not do this for the actual ownership of property?

People have been jointly owning property since there was the concept of property. The difference now is that we can do it in smaller tranches, and perhaps we can streamline the legal process. I think this streamlining is what will make the most difference. Condos are the closest we have in the consumer market (REITs are somewhat similar, but don’t let you own a part of the dwelling you actually live in).

It feels like there’s somewhere where this will make sense/take off, and it will have to do with the ratio between rent prices and ownership prices. A larger difference between these would give a larger space for partial ownership to work.

However, it feels like it needs a simple(r) set of easily enforceable rules, with benefits and reasons to comply for those buying and selling. I don’t know what these are yet, but I do know that all of the rules about condos are there for a reason, so it’ll have to be a really innovative contract to incentivize everyone to comply.

*Yes, I know that ownership is not absolute, but within the scope of this post, the space to the left of the graph is unreachable.