Gumption

Image via WikipediaHappy Holidays Ya'll!

Today I'd like to talk about a concept that has changed my life, it's called Gumption. I learned about it from the book 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', which I absolutely recommend to everyone. This book has everything; crazy plot, deep and original insight into philosophy, practical lessons for life, and on top of all of that it's a true story. Anyhow, this Gumption that he talks about in the book is a concept that really struck a chord with me. I'll try to briefly explain it and talk about how I use it in my own life to be efficient and effective.

Basically, gumption is the measure of how well you'll be able to tackle some big new obstacle in your life. If you're running low on gumption when you get home from work, cleaning that mess your kitchen might seem like an insurmountable mountain of work. If you're full of gumption, however, you'll be able to tackle that kitchen with gusto, or perhaps write that essay that you'd been dreading.

So gumption seems to be some kind of combination of your energy level, focus, enthusiasm, and probably a bunch of other important things. But in the book it's much more specific than that (but this explanation might not make sense to anyone who hasn't read it). Gumption is what allows you to undertake a task as an artisan would, with the care and focus that true quality require. When you do something while you have gumption you are working close to 'quality', which bridges the gap between the romantic and classical understanding of a task, allowing you to notice and deal with problems on a fundamentally subconscious level.

In the book the author uses the example of motorcycle maintenance. When he is working on his bike and he has gumption he is infinitely patient and observant. Troubleshooting problems with the bike can be incredibly frustrating, but in this state the problems present themselves to him in their own time and he is listening carefully enough to hear them.

The author then goes on to describe what he's learned about how gumption works, including activities that build up your reserve of gumption and 'gumption traps' that can deplete them. So for example you might get stuck on a problem in life and throw your hands up in despair, take a nap, and then come back and solve the problem with no problems at all. You snagged yourself on a gumption trap and then during the nap you built some back up.

Anyhow, after reading about this I felt as if the author had perfectly articulated exactly how I'd always operated. I have always had periods in my life or day where I am absurdly productive compared to other times (hence the name of this blog). People who know me well or are unfortunate enough to have lived with me understand the bizarre schedules I've created for myself in an effort to sync up up my periods of high productivity with doing what's most important. So for example at Caltech I picked up the habit of working on problem sets at 7am - this turned out to be when I was most focused and intelligent.

Nowadays I've realized that working on something you're personally passionate about and seeing progress in that area is one of the most rewarding things you can do in a day. That's why my new habit has been to always dedicate the first hour or two of my day to my own projects (web development lately). Doing something that I love and that makes me feel like I'm growing gives me a boost of energy and enthusiasm for the rest of the day that makes every day really wonderful. I find that rather than depleting my gumption, working on something I love actually increases it and allows me to accomplish more in the rest of my day.

Let me know if anyone thinks this whole concept of gumption resonates with them at all, I'm really curious if it's just me and the zen guy or if it's bigger than that.

Logical Proof of Spirit Stone Utility

I recently received a necklace as a gift. On it is a simple black stone made of Hermitite. Supposedly, this is a semi-precious spirit stone that grants the wearer confidence and power. As I’m sure you guys know, I’m something of a skeptic when it comes to spiritual issues; so if you think this trinket is just a hunk of rock with no special powers trust me when I say I was right with you. However, in rationalizing the wearing of my new gift I concocted a proof for why this baby works. Tremble before my logic, unbelievers.

1. Some people believe the stone has inherent magical powers to make the wearer more confident and powerful
2. Upon encountering someone wearing the stone, they will believe the wearer to be more confident and powerful
3. Because of their belief (whether it is true or not) they will act as though the wearer of the stone is more confident and powerful in social interactions.
4. Your confidence is based in part on what others think of you.

Conclusion: You are more confident and powerful if you wear the necklace.

I think there is an even simpler proof, but it’s circular.
1. You are as confident as you believe yourself to be
2. You believe wearing the necklace will make you more confident

Conclusion: You are more confident and powerful if you wear the necklace.

Both require an irrational condition – in the first proof someone needs to believe in magic powers, in the other you define confidence to be a snake-eating-its-own-tail kind of quality. I don’t think that’s really a problem though because people aren’t built to be rational, right?

Also, it looks cool, so that helps.

Blargh

Sorry I've been neglecting the blog everybody - I'm still trying to find a good way to incorporate it into my life.

I think the biggest hurdle for me right now is a little bit of perfectionism, it's really hard for me to write something worthy without drafting it out and revising it. Even more problematic is that whenever I try to write about something I'm passionate about I naturally want it to come out really well, so I spend way to much time on it and never finish. But apparently that's just the unique challenge of this medium, you've gotta just get it out there or it'll never happen. I have about 5 half finished posts just waiting for me to finish them, but there's always something else I should be doing... Anyhow I'll try to intersperse the more elaborate posts with less ambitious ones.

How do you guys make time for hobbies or other activities that aren't vital for your job/survival? I think I may have been on to something when I started waking up early so that I could focus on my hobby first thing in the morning, when I have the most focus and fewest distractions. That will lead me into another post I hope to do someday, which is on the concept of 'Gumption' that I picked up from the fantastic book 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'.

Beauty and the Geek?

What would you do if you got an email from the show Beauty and the Geek asking you to make a video to apply to the show? I'm somewhat torn.

Nature Vs. Nurture

Image via WikipediaEveryone is familiar with the great debate over how we are shaped as persons. Some believe that most of who we are is shaped by our experiences and actions - if you grow up in an aggressive environment you grow up to be aggressive. At the same time there is a large contingent of people who believe who we are is built into us, programmed into our genes. Take for example the studies of identical twins separated at birth who end up in the same careers and have the same exact food preferences.

The way I always felt was that each person was born with many inherent characteristics (aggressive or tame, smart or stupid, honest or duplicitous) but that events could shape the extent to which these natures would be expressed. I imagine a fast moving river as the person, it has a natural tendency to go in a certain direction but can be redirected for a time by obstacles (events in life) which can alter the course of the river. I suppose the whole debate boils down to how fast you think the river is moving. The course of a slow meandering river would be much easier to shape - ergo people aren't destined to be good or evil, the events of their life determine this.

Recent Studies have thrown a monkey wrench in all of this it seems. They've shown that gene expression within the brain can be effected by social cues in life. In birds, hearing a new song by a male from their species changed what parts of their DNA asserted itself. In bees, the presence of many foraging bees prevented the foraging gene from being expressed in young bees. Take away the adult foragers and suddenly some of the young bees become foragers - genetically!

Is there even a genetic person anymore? Do we all have the potential to be many different types of people, only waiting for events to dictate to us which one we should be? I feel cut adrift now, this takes away my neat little metaphor for human development.

And finally, does this throw into question commonly held notions about evolution? According to the theory lifting weights everyday and getting huge muscles won't imply that your kids will grow up to be muscle men. But if events in life effect gene expression, is it possible that changes of this kind could be inherited? Anyone out there know enough about biology to answer this one? Best response in the comments gets a prize. Not really.

I wake up in the dimness of my cabin and listen to the crash of the ocean outside. My watch tells me its 8am, but it feels like I slept till 12. I must be getting used to the lack of electricity, there’s really no reason to stay up when you can’t see anything. Walking out into the little porch I feel a welcome breeze after the stagnant air inside the cabin. I look out on what is easily the most beautiful view I’ve ever woken up to. After about 10 meters of jungle the ground drops away to the beach below, and off in the distance is Isla Burica – vast and untamed.


The view is so nice, in fact, I decide to climb into the ideally placed hammock on the porch and enjoy it some more. After wiggling around for a minute I finally achieve the optimal position and sigh deeply as I put my hands behind my head, ready to do some serious relaxing. BAM! Something huge is attached to my face, right over my left eye. It’s heavy and hard, yet unpleasantly sticky at the same time – I can feel some of its legs caught in my hair. In a single fluid move that could only be described as incredibly manly; I leap out of the hammock, tear whatever it is off of my face, and let out a childish shriek that wakes Matt up. I stand on the jungle floor and try to calm myself. With adrenaline enhanced vision I see the ground seething; and I realize it’s covered with thousands of hermit crabs. What the hell did I get myself into? I’m deep deep in the jungle, hours away from anything resembling life as I know it. Bugs grow BIG here, and they apparently don’t like me. Once I assure Matt that I am not in fact dead we make our way into the jungle to the kitchen, where our host cooks us pancakes. I feel better.

Lessons from the Jungle

Hello again friends. I have returned from Panama without too much damage, and much to tell. What follows in this and some other posts are excerpts from my trip, please forgive the fact that I'm not a writer.


Just off of Dog Island in San Blas there is an old sunken ship. The coral has grown over it to the point where it looks like a bizarre alien craft, with large organic structures whose functions remain a mystery. Was that a radar dish or two ton piece of living rock? Diving down I notice a wide entrance to a chute that leads straight back up to the surface. The chute ends a few inches below the surface, so this new area I am in is effectively cut off from the outside. I float for a while, listening to the deafening crackle of the coral and watching fish dart in and out of the ship below. The isolation makes me feel like a disembodied observer watching a world untouched by mankind. At the same time the huge presence of the ship asserts itself, making me aware that this whole little world is shaped by the man-made monstrosity surrounding me. The cognitive dissonance of these two thoughts is unsettling, and after a time I dive back down to make my escape.

PANAMA

Image by 1981Adam via FlickrWell it looks like an epic journey is about to begin. Myself and three friends from Fairfield have decided to drop everything and head to Panama on Saturday. My expectations at this point are pretty vague... beaches, cloud forests, monkeys, horseback riding, surfing. We'll see if the impromptu vacation is as satisfying as a well planned out one. My guess is that it'll be even better because we haven't sunk so much time in trying to make it perfect.

It reminds me of the psychological experiment I read about where they measured people's happiness after eating ice cream. One group was presented with many flavors of ice cream while the other group was only given 3 different options. Guess who was happier in the end? Turns out having too much choice or agency over your situation can cause you to have more regrets when things don't turn out to be super awesome.

I'll probably be eating these words sometime next week when we're stuck in the middle of a foreign country with nobody who speaks our language and nowhere to sleep, but hopefully we'll make the best of it.

Any suggestions for what to do down there? Warnings? Leave 'em in the comments.

1st webapp

Image by Jayel Aheram via FlickrAs alluded to in my post explaining django, I've decided to cut my teeth on web development with a little program of my own design. After careful consideration of what to work on, I decided on the incredibly unoriginal idea of creating the ultimate to-do list. Everyone seems to have their own method for planning out their day - that or they zealously adhere to a system like GTD or RTM. This is of course incorrect, as my to do list system is far superior.

My ultimate goal with this application is quite modest - to convert everyone to my way of doing things. If for some reason this proves to be more difficult than expected, I will pursue the slightly less arrogant aim of creating something that I myself will actually want to use. Even if that is a failure I'll still learn a lot, so whatever.

These are the topics I'm going to have to really learn in order to build this thing:

• Interacting with a database - storing, retrieving, and updating the lists is pretty basic, but kinda important
• How to design the user interface - I'll start with getting the thing working in simple html and then try to pretty it up with css and see where it goes from there
• Handling users and accounts - possibly even exploring google app engine

And as a final incentive to learn, I've noticed that my dream to-do system is constantly in flux - so in order to keep my web application useful (to me) I'll need to really master everything so I can make changes quickly and easily.

So right now here is a rough outline of the features of my dream to-do web application:

• Tasks fall into major categories that can be user defined (right now for me I have work, job search, and personal).
• There should a master list (for each category) that persists between days, and at the beginning of each day you pull several items from this master list to populate your to-do list for that day.
  
• When a task is entered the user also estimates the amount of time it will take to completion.
  
• When the to-do list for a day is created, it graphically shows how much total time you're dedicating to each category.
• (Edit) Make system work so that you only use the site once a day, you're not constantly going to the computer to add tasks and check them off - you print out a sheet once a day with space for adding stuff below
  

Here are some more features that I'd love to see but aren't quite as pressing (read: very unlikely to ever be implemented)

• Certain tasks could be grouped as a series. The second step in a multi-step task could remain hidden or partially obscured until the first step is completed
• Quick Task - App could display a timer and use an alarm to get you to focus on completing those really short tasks that end up taking way longer than they should.
  
• Simple way to control how the importance level of specific tasks can change with time
• Social website features - i.e. you can look up a vague task (like 'apply to college') and then you could import an actionable series of tasks that someone else has created and shared.

That's it for now, I'll keep you updated on my progress (this could take a while).

Oh yeah, and if you've never checked out Scribd.com, it's simply amazing what kind of textbooks and study guides you can find on there for free. Check it out.

The Charity Fallacy

Image via WikipediaI recently reread an old paper I wrote in a philosophy class that has had me in stuck in an infuriating loop thinking about our true motives when we act charitably. It was a paper examining Joel Feinberg’s essay that criticizes the concept of Psychological Egoism, which Feinberg defines as the belief that all desires have as their ultimate end self-interest. So for example, if I donate a ton of money to my local community center and they build a ‘James Raftery Center for Obese Orphans’ the fact that I get a building named after me and the respect of my peers makes my action self interested.

This may sound silly to you, but this line of thinking actually bothers me when I’m contemplating being charitable. For example, I decided yesterday that whenever I walked by someone collecting money on the street for the homeless or any other charity I would give them any spare change I had. Since I spend about an hour walking to and from Penn Station each day, this would ensure that I never had to carry around coins for very long. This seemed like a brilliant idea because making a rule like this would cause me to donate more than I normally would, it would keep my pockets nice and light, and it would ease my mind because I could feel like I was being a good person and not even have to think about it anymore! As far as a utilitarian is concerned, this would be a win all around.

However, the cynical psychological egoist in the back of my mind won’t stop nagging me. I keep thinking about how I’ll feel good about myself every time I hear “God bless you, sir” when I drop my change in the bucket, or the moral superiority I’ll feel to everyone around me who isn’t donating. Also, when debating whether or not it was a good rule to adopt, the only way I could evaluate it was by trying to imagine how great of a person someone would think I was if they were told about my rule! These are definitely not the kinds of generous intentions you’re supposed to have if you’re being charitable… (and that’s not even considering the crazy meta-smugness I’ll no doubt derive from writing a blog post about it!)

So is there any way to be charitable without getting too much self-gratification from it? Anonymous donation seems to be a good answer – but it doesn’t eliminate the self satisfaction you’d have (even if nobody else knows about it, it’s there) or the tax write-off. No, what we need is a Psychological Egoist Fund that takes money out of your bank account without you knowing it and donates that to charity. Naturally, our psychological egoist couldn’t sign himself up for this service, as that would make him feel too good about what he was doing! The best thing to do would obviously be to have friends or family secretly sign him up for the service somehow.

Alternatively, our poor psychological egoist could donate like normal, but feel so guilty about all of the selfish motives that giving was no longer pleasant. Hopefully that will take all the fun out of donating, which is of course the point.

The Internet is a Series of Tubes

No doubt if you’re reading this you’re more computer literate than our friend Senator Stevens or John McCain. But what do you really know about the glorious series of tubes that is the internet? For the past couple of months I’ve been on a self-education binge, so naturally I was troubled when I realized that I had absolutely no idea how a website works or how people build them. I must confess though, my interest in learning about web development is not purely academic. When I have my brilliant idea for a startup I want to be ready for it, and I don’t want to handcuff myself to being just another non-tech guy with an idea for a cool website (not that that doesn’t work for some people). Anyway, over the past two weeks I’ve devoured the free Django Book in an effort to understand the Django framework for web development. Consider me your personal plumber, and I’ll remove the porcelain toilet tank cover of the web and point out some of the major features.

Websites that are interesting these days are dynamic pages that do way more than displaying static content (Although there is a special place in my heart for a simple html page with an under construction .gif). The magic behind all of the functionality in modern websites lies in the programming that has gone on behind the scenes. Django is a framework for web development built on the programming language called Python, and it consists of three parts: urls, views, and templates.

Urls are everything that comes after the .com up at the top of your browser. Django takes this string of characters and figures out what program is supposed to run. When you make your website, you create a list containing each url you want to exist, and pair it with a program (called a view) to run whenever that url is visited.

Views are the real meat of your website. This is where you get to manipulate data, make calculations, and do all the things that make your website interesting. They get their information from the url that called them and from the information stored in the website’s database (a big file somewhere) and then do whatever it is they’re supposed to do.

Templates generate what the user sees when they visit a website. When a view is all done with its calculations, it calls a template and gives it the information for the template to dress up. The template is just an html document with a bunch of blanks in it that get filled in with the output of the views. Django takes the answers, fills in the blanks, and then sends the document to the browser to display.

So here's an example:

1. You navigate to www.example.com/welcome/', Django sees ‘/welcome/’ and runs the program ‘my_welcome_view’
2. ‘my_welcome_view’ looks up what user just logged on and saves the name ‘James’ for later
3. The template ‘Welcome to the site {{ name }}’ becomes ‘Welcome to the site James’ and shows up in your browser.

The brilliance of this is probably not clear from my incredibly brief explanation, but the people who made Django set everything up this way for a good reason – to promote the philosophies of ‘loose coupling’ and ‘don’t repeat yourself’. Each component of the website is separated from the other two as much as possible. This makes it easy to create the website and keeps you sane when you’re making changes to it later. For example, if you decide to change the url of a particular part of your website, simply change it while smiling to yourself because you know you didn’t screw up the views or templates associated with it. Similarly, you can change a view or swap out a template without making a mess in other areas.

It also reduces having to write the same code in different places, since you can write one view that gets used with more than one url or have flexible templates that can be used in many places.

The final cool thing about working in Django and Python is that they are both designed so that you can iterate your website quickly. Python doesn’t need to be compiled and there is an interactive interpreter so you can play around and try little pieces of code without any trouble. Django takes this even further by providing you with a development web server that instantly reflects changes you make to your website. This means as soon as I add a piece to my site I can switch over to my browser and see what it looks like.

If you want to know more check out the fantastic book or drop me a line. Also stay tuned for my details on the first website I’m going to make in Django.

Welcome

Image via Wikipedia

Welcome to my blog everyone. A quick disclaimer - this blog is NOT about hypomania, which is a symptom of bipolar disorder and cyclothymia! I have not been diagnosed with either of these serious disorders and do not want to make light of them, so apologies to anyone I offend.

Hypomania - \ˌhī-pə-ˈmā-nē-ə, -nyə\ - literally below mania.

People with hypomania are generally perceived as being energetic, euphoric, overflowing with new ideas, and sometimes highly confident and charismatic, and unlike full-blown mania, they are sufficiently capable of coherent thought and action to participate in everyday activities. A person in the state of hypomania might be immune to fear and doubt and have little social inhibition. They may talk to strangers easily, offer solutions to problems, and find pleasure in small activities. (Wikipedia)

In life I have many interests and obsessions, often jumping from one to another. These jumps are usually accompanied by a state of mind that seems remarkably like hypomania. This blog is my attempt to record my wanderings and share them with you. Perhaps it will create some structure to my random walk, or help me locate kindred spirits and people with the similar obsessions. Expect to hear a lot about technology, entrepreneurship, and science - with a smattering of politics, finance, and anything else I worth writing about.