Code Words by John Biesnecker

No excuses

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 00:00:00 PST

So, I've been a bit remiss in writing here. Things have been happening (baby!), and I've been wrapped up in work and other projects. But now Github allows you to directly create new files on Github and commit them to a repository (which means I can write posts without even opening terminal!), so there is no excuse not to update more frequently (not that I had any real excuses before, but that's beside the point).

I don't have anything specific to write about right now, but I do have a short list of topics that have been taking my attention lately, and which will likely spawn some posts in the future:

Math
Haskell
Education
Parenting
Baseball

Especially the first two.

I hope December is treating everyone out there well.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 00:00:00 PDT

Really, the excerpt blurb says it all. Big things are coming, stay tuned.

Cardinals 9, Nationals 7

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:00:00 PDT

One of my favorite memories of the last few years was Game 6 of the 2011 World Series. I was listening to it along with a bunch of coworkers (it was played during the morning in Shanghai). The extra innings ran so far into lunch that we had to go, but we listened to it on my phone as we walked to the restaurant. We were crossing a bridge over the Suzhou River when Freese hit the triple to tie the game. The 11th inning home run happened while we were eating, and many beers were consumed. It was an incredible experience, to be surrounded by friends and going through that emotional roller coaster.

It's what baseball is all about.

The NLDS is not the World Series, but this is the most fun I've been since that day last October. I just spent the last 15 minutes rocking back and forth on my couch with my hands to my face muttering "just hit the fucking ball, Cardinals, just hit the fucking ball."

And oh did they hit the ball.

Looking forward to San Francisco.

GO CARDINALS!

Personal MBA: Deep Survival

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 00:00:00 PDT

This was a fantastic book. Put bluntly, it's a book about when shit goes wrong, and how to prepare for and deal with it. Perhaps not explicitly about business, but physical survival and your business / career survival are managed by many of the same instincts, so it's certainly applicable.

It helps that the stories are so absolutely engrossing.

Positive Mental Attitude

For me, the most instructive part of the book was around how important keeping a positive mental attitude was, regardless of how bad your situation is. Keep believing that you can make it through whatever hardship you're enduring. Keep believing that you'll be found, no matter how lost you are. Because that's the choice that you 100% control — you can either sit down and die, or you can keep your cool, keep going, and give yourself a chance at survival. The power of self-talk is astounding — we've all been in a situation where you convince yourself that you're screwed, and then guess what? You end up screwed. It's not rocket science to connect those two.

Your model of reality is broken

One of the more gripping stories in the book was about mountain climbers and how climbers that were tied together but not tied off to a fixed anchor had (perhaps unwittingly) entered into a suicide pact — if any of the climbers feel more than a few feet, the energy that was in the system would far exceed the energy that the other climbers could arrest, and they would all fall together.

Deep Survival is filled with stories like this, in which the actors grossly underestimate the danger that they're in, largely because their mental model of the world doesn't actually model reality, and they get themselves into situations from which they cannot easily escape, and for which they are not prepared.

I fell into this trap when I first attempted to run my own business — parts that I expected to be hard (like finding customers) were relatively easy, but parts that I expected to be easy (or didn't even consider, like maintaining motivation while working alone) were very, very hard, to the point that I gave up and found a job. On the upside, I didn't die, so now my mental model of what it's like to run my own business is more complete, and I'm pretty sure I'll do a better job of it.

Live to fight another day

A final good lesson from the book is that sunk costs can literally kill you. Sometimes it's better to give up and live to fight another day — literally or figuratively — than to push past the limits of common sense.

The worries of parenting with technology

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:00:00 PDT

I just read Cory Doctorow's essay Jack and the interstalk: why the computer is not a scary monster and I found myself nodding my head in agreement.

Being a parent in the 21st century, I worry about my toddler's screen time – and struggle with the temptation to let the TV or laptop be my babysitter while I get through my morning email. Being a writer, I yearn to share stories with my two-year-old.

I can't claim to have found the answer to all this, but I think we're evolving something that's really working for us – a mix of technology, storytelling, play and (admittedly) a little electronic babysitting that let's me get to at least some of my email before breakfast time.

My son and I follow a similar routine of exploring online for interesting things (these days, mostly Youtube videos of rockets launching), talking about them, playing around with them when we play together (I'm still not sure what the difference between a Will Airplane and a Will Rocket is — they both look like him running around with his arms swept back making wooshing noises — but I've been assured there's a difference), and then sometimes (but no more than about an hour a day, generally in the slow hour before teeth brushing and story time) handing him over to the electronic babysitters (their names are Diego and Dora) so that mom and dad can have a little down time before going to sleep.

It seems to be working. There was a period when we let him watch more cartoons than he does now, but we cut them back a bit and saw a favorable response — after a week or so of complaining that he wanted to watch cartoons, he stopped whining and started making up his own games, in which mom and dad are now obliged to take part (I spent the better part of an hour playing the "Jellyfish Eats Blankie" game yesterday). They're quirky and strange and totally self-generated, which is fantastic.

Every parent I know worries about the instantaneously mesmerizing nature of screens for kids, especially little kids. I've heard experts advise that kids be kept away from screens until the age of three or four, or even later, but that's not very realistic — at least not in our house, where the two adults do a substantial amount of work, socialising, and play from home on laptops or consoles.

My wife in particular worries that he doesn't show much interest in coloring (though he does like playing through mazes) or reading (though pre-sleep story time is sacrosanct, and woe be to the parent who suggests that tonight mommy and daddy are tired and let's only read one book instead of two). I'm not, mostly because I watch him run in circles for several hours a day and think that he's just that sort of kid, the type that would rather play in the dirt with rocks and bugs and friends than pick up a book and idle away an afternoon. My wife and I are both the latter, but I was a little boy once, too, and at least I recognize it. Where the angst comes in, though, is at the thought that because he spends time using technology — staring at screens, I think my wife would say — he's not actively participating in other mental activities.

Sometimes I think she has a point. He's clearly less active when he's watching Dora or Diego than he is when he's running around outside, or making up one of his own games. That said, he's learning from those shows, too — yesterday, out of the blue, he asked me if a puma could kill a lion (I'm pretty sure there's a Diego episode where they have to sneak by pumas) — I don't know, living in urban Shanghai, if I would have ever taught him about pumas.

Then there are games. I grew up with video games — I had an Atari 7200, and then (a couple years after everyone, it seemed, much to my chagrin), an NES. My wife very much did not (I don't think she played her first video game until she was in college). We have ... differing views on their value. She sees them as a total waste of time, whereas I think that they can be a waste of time, but that they can also impart useful information. My son and I play a tower defense game together on my iPad, and a whole lot of his concept of money comes from understanding that you need more money to buy bigger and better guns to stop the bad guys — knowledge that he shows when we go to the store and he understands how money works. It's certainly not the way that I learned how money works (which was probably just by following my dad to the store every day for years and years and years), but it works. It is the wrong way to do it? Is Angry Birds the wrong way to teach him about angles and velocity and gravity?

I don't know. I don't think so, but I don't know.

You only get one shot at raising a child, and you love them so goddamn much you want to scream, so there's some tension when you worry that what you're doing may harm them in the long run. I don't think that it's particularly practical to raise your children in the "natural way" — which seems to mean "the way kids were raised in the 1950s," despite that being basically as far from the paleolithic Serengeti as 21st century urban China is — but then you look at yourself and you look at your parents and thing "hm, well, they didn't turn out so bad." There aren't many similar models for this new paradigm (my generation, born in the 1980s, might be a start, but there's no comparing then and now in terms of technological pervasiveness).

So what can you do?

I don't really know, but what we're doing — and what all parents throughout the ages do, I supposed, when faced with change — is try to strike a balance. We make sure he gets all the outside time he can handle, and he has his own iPad (I couldn't deal with grubby four-year old prints on mine anymore, so I got a new one and he got mine). We push him towards educational games, and keep his room stocked with real, physical toys (a small joy has been how quickly he took to playing with Legos, my favorite toy from childhood). Will is going to live in a world of incredible, pervasive technology, so teaching him to use it now is also imparting a life skill, so we're not cocooning him, but we're also not letting him cocoon himself indoors and experience life through a lens and a screen.

It's a balance and it's hard, but so is everything else about raising a kid.

Personal MBA: Driven

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:00:00 PDT

This book, written by a pair of Harvard Business School professors, was a little more academic and dry than some of the other books that I've read, but the core theory presented — that humans possess four fundamental drives, and that it is the interaction of those drives that separates us from both other animals and the now extinct hominid species we competed with for dominance of the planet — is an interesting one (though the authors admit repeatedly that more experimentation needs to be done in order to validate the theory), and can be used as a framework through which to view human endeavors.

The four drives are the drive to acquire, the drive to bond, the drive to learn, and the drive to defend. This is somewhat in conflict with the economic model of rational actors doing everything they can to maximize self-interest (that is, doing everything they can to satisfy the drive to acquire). An important part of the theory is that each of the four drives are independent, so that they sometimes (and often over the very most important of things) come into conflict, forcing us to make conscious choices about which drive to satisfy. It is this conflict, and the need for conscious consideration of pros and cons before deciding which course to take, that largely separates us from all other animals (even our closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, show only the very simplest bonding and learning drives, the efficacy of which are quickly eclipsed by human toddlers).

Given that the book was written by HBS professors, it's little surprise that knowledge of the four drives can be directly applied back to business. A company both must ensure that the jobs it provides employees help them fulfill their drives — an example cited in the book was how industrial factory jobs reduce humans to automatons on the assembly line, making it impossible for those workers to meet their drive to learn — and that it creates products that help its customers fulfill theirs.

This book, in concert with the last two books, really makes me question any model that relies on people being rational, self-interested actors. If it is provable that, in a wide variety of circumstances, people make decisions that are clearly not in their best interests, then how can a model that relies on such non-existent behavior accurately model the behavior of one or more people? Obviously its simpler mathematically to assume that people do the one right thing instead of one of the myriad of wrong things, but if it doesn't product valid results, who cares? Maybe there's something about the way that the simpler models work across populations that I'm missing — and I'd love if anyone out there can explain it to me! — but until I get better information I'm going to be very wary of such models and any information generated from them.

More reading: an interview with the authors.

2012 in books (part 7)

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 PDT

Over the last two weeks, I've read more than I have at any time since university. Though the reading material is driven by the Personal MBA reading list, the motivation to read has been building up throughout the year, in no small part because I set what in January felt like a very ambitious goal (there's something to be said about this whole setting difficult but achievable goals thing, isn't there?).

There was a period in the middle of the year when I was worried that I wasn't going to make it. I had just started a new (interesting! stressful!) job, and the amount of reading I felt like I was able to do plummeted. After a busy couple of months of travel, though, I adjusted my schedule enough to get reading back into the mix, and over the last few months I've slowly ditched all other forms of "individual leisure" (TV, video games, etc.), and have focused on reading.

The results have been fantastic, and now I'm ready to start a new challenge, which I'll detail shortly.

For now, though, the 10 books that pushed me over my goal of 52 books in 2012:

Rework by by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (271 pages)
Results Without Authority by Tom Kendrick (240 pages)
Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows (240 pages)
48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers (452 pages)
The Power of Less by Leo Babauta (204 pages)
Go It Alone! by Bruce Judson (240 pages)
Thinking Statistically by Uri Bram (46 pages)
Bargaining for Advantage by G. Richard Shell (324 pages)
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (511 pages)
Brain Rules (322 pages)

Running statistics

Days: 277
Books: 52
Pages: 16555
Books / Week: 1.31
Pages / Week: 418.36

What's amazing about this is how little reading per day it actually ends up being — 52 books in just under 40 weeks turns out to be about 60 pages per day, a number that even relatively slow readers can manage in about an hour. Even the last couple of weeks have only been about 178 pages/day, which I can do in well under two hours most of the time. Given the amount of television most people watch (not to mention idle web surfing — my personal favorite time waster), managing a book every two days or so really isn't all that much of a challenge time-wise. It's just a matter of priorities.

Personal MBA: Brain Rules

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 00:00:00 PDT

I read Brain Rules not long after it was released in 2009, and enjoyed it immensely. Having just come off of reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, Brain Rules was a relatively fast read, but the points it makes (in the form of the 12 rules, and how those rules impact our lives) are worth refreshing (and now I'm tempted to read Brain Rules for Baby before Oliver is born).

The twelve rules can be seen here. While all of them are obviously worth considering (understanding how the hardware that underlies everything we are works is always worth it), here are my favorite, and some reactions.

Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power

I think this is something that we all know intellectually, but it's worth reading again and again until the message gets through. One of the major reasons for my recent focus on goals is that I want to get in shape, and one of the major reasons for that (second only to the very important "have a longer and higher quality life" motivation) is that I want to improve my cognitive abilities. As a knowledge worker, a more capable brain is a more valuable tool, and since my office job doesn't lend itself to any intrinsic exercise, I need to make sure that I get enough outside of the workplace.

Rule #5: Repeat to remember

As longtime readers will know, I'm very interested in spaced repetition and its implications. This rule and the next are basically about the spacing effect and spaced repetition, and how it works to build memory. Though I've lost some of the fervor I used to have about the topic, I still believe that proper application of the spacing effect (several possible approaches are presented by the author) could revolutionize education.

Rule #8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way

Needless to say, this is a good reminder to chill the fuck out every once in a while and turn off the adrenalin and cortisol pumps. Not only is it bad for your body, it's bad for your brain, too.

Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers

This rule has a special place in my heart. My most important and enjoyable job is being the father of a precocious little boy (soon to be a pair of little boys), and figuring out how to keep alive the joy he finds in discovering and learning new things as he faces more and more of the world is a task I take very seriously. I really do believe that play and exploration are at the heart of what makes us human, and by far the best way to learn about the world, whether you're 4 or 40.

Personal MBA: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:00:00 PDT

This is book #9 of 99 that I've read as part of my Personal MBA. Read my intro to the mission, or check out what else I have done on my Personal MBA tracking page.

Book 9/99: Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

There are three certainties in life:

Death.
Taxes.
Any book about modern cognitive psychology is a total mindfuck.

Thinking, Fast and Slow did not disappoint. The book was broken down into three sections that built on one another. The first was about two systems for thinking — appropriately named System 1 and System 2 — and how they work. System 1 is the subconscious, automatic, fast thinking mind that makes connections, identifies threats and surprises, and raises issues that the slower, System 2 mind has to put effort into dealing with. However, because System 1 largely wants to create a coherent view of the world, it uses a variety of shortcuts that don't always result in optimum (or even logical) answers. This is compounded by the inherent laziness of System 2, which is often more than willing to take System 1's off-the-cuff answers as they are provided, and not dig any deeper. The result is that our intuition can lead us astray in many ways, some of which are disastrous.

The second section is about Econs — the rational actors that play a central role in modern economic theory — and Humans — the slightly irrational, System 1-ruled apes that actually run this planet. The differences between what is rational and correct (the Econ answer) and what makes sense to Humans can be large, and impact an extremely wide variety of topics in our daily lives (from how marketing messages are crafted to the appeal of libertarianism (the government never has to intervene in an Econ's life because the Econ is 100% rational, but unfortunately Humans are not even remotely close to 100% rational)).

The final section, and perhaps the most interesting for me, is about our two selves — the experiencing self and the remembering self. Despite every moment of our actual lives being conducting by our experiencing self, it is our remembering self that we are most concerned about. "All's well that ends well," perhaps — the end of an experience is more important than it should be, and it is the end that will likely be the core of the memory about the event that is formed. People consistently make choices that sacrifice the well-being of the experiencing self in order to provide better stories for their remembering selves.

Again, total mindfuck, and absolutely fascinating. I've thought a bit about how utilizing System 1's priming could help create new habits (associating good food and exercising with good things, and bad food and laziness with bad things, for instance), and how to schedule meetings so that they end on a high note, thereby giving the remembering self a better story to tell itself about the meeting later. Understanding more about how the brain works can only help to optimize behavior, even if most of the fallacies that it is constructed on aren't consciously conquerable.

Making goals reality

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 00:00:00 PDT

It should come as no surprise to friends and followers that I have a problem carrying through with plans. I have lots of good ideas, and the best of intentions, but I seem to lack the determination and perseverance that is required to see those ideas through to completion. Though I tend to make light of it with others, it's a problem that has concerned me for some time now, and one that I've spent more than a little time and effort in solving, thus far to little avail.

While reading The Power of Less last week I was inspired to try a simpler approach to creating good habits, with the aim to use those habits to realize my goals. Instead of a large, relatively abstract goal like "lose weight," I'm aiming to create a series of beneficial habits — "exercise more," "no snacking," "no fast food," etc. — that will inevitably lead to the goal while moving just slow enough that my animal brain doesn't realize what's going on and throw all sorts of negative emotions in the road to slow the change down.

The process for creating a habit is a simple one, carried out over one month.

Select a habit for the [30-day Power of Less] challenge.
Write down your plan.
Post your goal publicly.
Report on your progress daily.
Celebrate your new habit!

Choosing a habit is relatively simple — for this month I'm going to commit to exercising 20 minutes per day. The linked page also takes care of Steps #2 and #3, and as I fill it in Step #4 will be taken care of as well. Finally, at the end of the month, assuming that I keep the habit up, I can take Step #5 and (publicly) celebrate the new habit with a wrap-up post.

It's simple and, hopefully, foolproof (though I'm just the sort of fool that would test that assumption).

In the same spirit as my Personal MBA challenge, I've created a holding page for habit goal missions. Only time will tell if this approach will finally rid me of the desire to quit halfway and start all over again (later, after having lost everyone I gained in the previous attempt, of course), but I feel good about it. At least having a system to fall back into, as lightweight as it is, when problems arise is comforting, and should make for higher success rates than just winging it and praying would deliver.

Wish me luck!