1. 17 September 2008

    In the Bubble

    John Thackara

    20 days ago

    Notes headed with the chapter they come from.

    On closer inspection however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car manufacturers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand—but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. “Out of control” is an ideology, not a fact. 5

    Lightness

    Apart from its impact on the wider economy, information technology is heavy in itself. It’s a heavy user of matter in all the hardware needed to run it. One of the hidden costs of the misnamed silicon age is the material and energy flows involved in the manufacture and use of microchips. It takes 1.7 kilograms of materials to make a microchip with 32 megabytes of random-access memory—a total 630 times the mass of the final product. The “fab” of a basic memory chip, and running it for the typical life span of a computer, eats up eight hundred times the chip’s weight in fossil fuel. Thousands of potentially toxic chemicals are used in the manufacturing process. 10

    One of the most startling pieces of information brought to light in Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins’s Natural Capitalism is that the amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer is close to four thousand times its weight on your lap. Fifteen to nineteen tons of energy and materials are consumed in the fabrication of one desktop computer. To compound matters: As well as being resource-greedy to make, information technology devices also have notoriously short lives. The average compact disc is used precisely once in its life, and every gram of material that goes into the production and consumption of a computer ends up rather quickly as an emission or as solid waste. 11

    The pièce de résistance in the extraordinary Natural Capitalism is that the amount of matter and energy wasted, or caused to be wasted, by the average North American consumer is roughly one million pounds a year: a “million pound backpack.” 12

    ELIMA, the Environmental Life Cycle information Management and Acquisition project. 13

    A lot of potentially weight-reducing research goes unreported. Environmental design information tends to be scattered and fragmented, and many eco-design tools and data that could help us remain hidden from view and underused. Kathalys, a research group in Holland, turns ecological footprints into design action points by measuting pressure on the environment in terms of everyday activities in the home—such as taking a shower. Taking just one shower in a top-of-the-range cubicle, Kathalys has discovered, consumes as much as thirty-five kilojoule-pounds in energy and two hundred litres of water. Kathalys is testing a mist shower that, combined with water and heat recycling, reduces those numbers tendolf, to five megajoule-pounds of heat and twenty litres of water. 15

    Buckminster Fuller I think designed a super–bathroom, of which a mist shower played it’s part. I’ve wanted one ever since. It just sounds awesome, and how hard can it be? Why aren’t they sold at Home Depot?

    TNS (The Natural Step), one of many “frameworks introduced to give us a better view of the big picture.”

    • Minimize the waste of matter and energy.
    • Reduce the movement and distribution of goods.
    • Use more people and less matter. 16

    …five types of capital enable us to deliver goods and services we need to sustain and improve the quality of our lives: natural, human, social, manufactured, and financial capital. 17

    It’s the accumulation of such tiny acts that weighs heavily on the planet. A relationship, or flow, or accumulation, or change, is by its nature invisible. An important new task of design is to make these behaviors and changes within systems intelligible. We need new ways to understand the morphology of systems—their dynamics, their “intelligence”: how they work, what stimulates them, how and why they change. 22

    We’ve embarked on an operation compared by Ezio Manzini to “changing the engines of an aircraft while in flight.” “It may appear a difficult task,” understates Manzini, “but consider this: during two centuries of innovation, until now, we have reduced the role of labour in production by even larger proportaions. We have done it before.” 23

    The Hanover Principles, prepared by William McDonough’s architecture firm. 25

    Shaking off out culture’s mechanical conception of the world, the idea of controllability, and our all-round anthropocentrism will be especially difficult. Writes Theodore Roszak: “Ecology, as the study of interconnectedness, has a psychological dimension—the transition from egocentrism, to ecocentrism. Copernicus took us out of the center of the solar system; we now need to take ourselves out of the center of the biosphere.” 26

    Mentions Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for a New Millennium, which looks interesting but I can’t find a copy or much of anything but passing references. 26

    Speed

    The acceleration of the speed of human population growth means that in a single human lifetime, the Earth may lost half of its living species, species that it took tens of millions of years for evolution to create through the process of speciation. 32

    the age of acceleration

    The Greeks, Levine explains had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos means absolute time: linear, chronological, and quantifiable. Kairos, however, means qualitative time—the time of opportunity, chance, and mischance. If you go to bed because the clock says 10:30, you are adhering to a chronological time sustem. if you go to sleep beacuse you’re tired, you are following kairological or event time. 33

    Thoreau: “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” 33

    The Kabyle people in Algeria, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu discovered, despise any semblance of haste in their social affairs and refer to the clock as “the devil’s mill.” 35

    Beethoven: “the usage of measured tempo made no sense in music.” 49

    Mobility

    La Transhumance 51

    Throughout the world […] 244 million containers are moving around, or standing in yards, or waiting to be delivered, at any one time. If all these containers were placed end to end, the line would stretch to the moon and back eight times. Their contents account for about 90 percent of all the world’s traded cargo by value. In other words, 85 percent of all the goods and materials in the world are not in factories or shops, but moving, or waiting to move—on the road, in the air, or on the sea. 55

    “There is far too little information in the so-called information age”, “we feel compelled to reduce all human knowledge and experience to symbolic form”, “Digitization speeds the flow of data, but impoverishes our lived experience.” 63

    “[The human brain] comprises the equivalent of one hundred billion squids linked together. Overall the human brain is the most complicated thin in the known universe—known, that is, to man, to itself.” —Edward O. Wilson.

    “Nature doesn’t commute to work.” 72

    Locality

    A sustainable city, Illich foresaw, has to be a working city, a city of encounter and interaction—not a city for passive participation in entertainment. Sustainable cities will be postspectacular. 76

    “Tourism—human circulation considered as consumption—is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.” Guy Debord wrote that more than forty years ago, in The Society of the Spectacle. […] Cultural attractions are like genetically modified food: bland, tasteless, and a threat to the ecosystem. 77

    A city full of people can now be seen as a live database, full of knowledge, time, and attention—incarnated by human beings—that any of us might use. Louis Kahn talked about the city as a “place of availabilities”; with wireless networks and search technologies, the potential becomes actual. 86

    Situation

    Our very sense of being is based on an experience of process, activity, and movement. We seem to find an image of our own existence in the changing lights of the natural world. Henry Plummer, 103

    Place is not given, it is made. Malcolm McCullough, 111

    Convivality

    The mortality rate of men with cardiovascular disease is inversely related to the level of social connectedness. 114

    “When people no longer have the need or desire to resolve their problems within the network of their own relationships, medicine becomes the alibi of a pathogenic society.” Illich concluded that we have thrust the bad things of life—old age, death, pain, and handicap—onto doctors so that families and society will not have to face them. 117

    Learning

    Learning is a complex, social, and multidimensional process that does not lend itself to being sent down a pipe—for example, from a website. Knowledge, understanding, wisdom—or “content,” if you must—are qualities one develops through time. They are not a thing one is sent. 135

    We might reject the narrow focus of much corporate education, but it’s partly our own fault as a society. We have filled the world with such unstable technology and clunky systems; these need to be looked after by people with limited horizons who do what they are told and don’t ask too many questions. 137

    Over-regimented teachers are forced to cram too much predetermined content into students who spend so much time learning that they have no time to think. It’s a downward spiral. The more important learning becomes, the more demands we put on teachers and students within rigidly organized institutions. 143

    Literacy

    Design is to make information digestible, not to keep it out. 162

    The body is our general medium for having a world; sight and movement are specific ways of entering into relationships with objects. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 171

    Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets. Ivan Illich, 180

    How much do we really know about the trash heaps, slums, and wars depicted by today’s imaging technologies? THese technologies are supposed to give us a clearer image—but by sanitizing the subject, they prevent us from knowing reality itself. 183

    Smartness

    We would not be here had not our ancestors rotted. All organisms are designed with the intention of being recycled. Learning from nature, this means we have to be careful about bond energies in materials and see that they can be broken down easily. Julian Vincent, 191

    Three thousand lines of code in an electric toothbrush? 195

    The world is already filled with hundreds of microprocessors for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Think of all those ATMs, ticket-cending machines, traffic lights, billboards, cellular phones, pagers, and cash registers. A new car from General Motors, contains $675 worth of steel and $2,500 worth of electronics. 198

    China is issuing all its citizens above the age of sixteen a smart card id? 201

    Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we are frighteningly inert. Donna Haraway (Cyborg Manifesto), 201

    Flow

    “partial solutions, continually produced” 214

    “We are all designers now” 226

  2. 19 August 2008

    Farewell, My Subaru

    49 days ago

    Journalist chronicles his transplantation into rural New Mexico with the goal of going green, almost cold–turkey. Solar electricity, water from a well, a veggie oil diesel truck conversion, goats chickens and a big garden. He even manages to find happiness and family. A good story.

    I’ve always wanted to try something like this. Particularly the computer nerd aspect of it: I’ll never pull a Thoreau so much as wait out for super–wifi that’ll let me bring an internet connection and solar powered computer paraphernalia into the sticks with me. The author has a website. Gotta figure out how to make that work. Overall a quick inspiring fun read.

  3. 25 April 2008

    Out the window.

    165 days ago

    I like to set my desk up right in front of a window. That way when I need to look away from the computer it’s a piece of cake—just stare out the window for a few seconds until I’m ready to dive back onto the desktop. My room in morris is on the second floor of a smallish white house. There’s an amply sized window facing north–east right in the middle across from the door. My desk sits there, my bed to the left and a lamp and chair to the right. The desk supports my laptop and whatever crap, plus an old, corked wine bottle with a few leaves of Epipremnum aureum (Devil’s Ivy) growing in it, terrarium–style.

    When I was in fifth grade for some reason I was big on plants. I worked out in the garden during the summer, read all kinds of books on all kinds of *–culture, and I eventually built up a nice little greenhouse where else but right in my room. I was particularly taken with orchids and bonsai trees, (which I couldn’t much afford but did with whatever money I earned working odd jobs and through gifts from my parents). I also liked messing around with my mom’s houseplants, making cuttings and that sort of thing and putting them in odd places. That’s where this this wine bottle comes from, it’s a few inches of pebbles that I spiked with fertilizer and water then stuck an ivy cutting into, which has thrived ever since. I’ve probably only uncorked the thing twice in the intervening years (10 or so? I think 9), new leaves have grown to replace those that die, making a nice cycle. It’s an efficient little atmospheric system. The coolest part is that I just made it, just thought that I should see if it’d work, could I just copy the idea of a terrarium? And I did.

    But back to that view. Out the window at my normal vantage there’s about 1/3 roof, the roof over the living room below that pops out from what I would assume was once an even smaller plain white house. Green shingles, with a very relaxed slope. Once or twice I’ve popped off the screen and hopped out there just to sit—but it really isn’t that nice a place to sit and read. The best part of the roof is the animals that run across it, birds and a squirrel every once in a while, going about their business with no idea I’m just on the other side of a pane of glass watching them. Until they notice me and scamper off. The house next door takes up a similar amount of space, it’s a big, boxy, light blue, vinyl–clad thing, well–proportioned but ugly. The front of of ends in a porch, which I liked until I walked onto it one day and realized it was not just faux–wood for the floor, but the railing was plastic made to look like it had been lathed and for gods sake, why?

    I like the roof being in my view, it’s very rule–of–thirds; I could stand the house getting out of there. If it was just a little smaller and older, to fit in with all the other houses on the block, I might not be so mad about it. But the real view is off to the left of big blue and above the green roof. It’s a mass of trees in the cumulative front yards of the houses next door. It lifts my view when I do look out the window so that my head tilts up and to the right, a good thinking pose. The first two trees clustered in the first yard (damn blue house) are thick pine trees of some sort, trunks worn orange in places, needles green even when snow blows (out here snow never just falls, it’s always horizontal). Behind it are a few big deciduous ones that fill out the treed portion of my window. At the far left is the street, just inside the street the sidewalk, where I can see bikes/people/cars going by (ordered by interestingness). Overall it’s a good view.

    The only reason I’m writing about it is that because today it’s been profoundly debased and contaminated. It’s snowing like a bitch. For a point of reference, it’s the 25th of april, 2008. This weekend I played in a soccer tournament on saturday, it was perfect weather—65º and sunny—I got a nice sunburn, and up until yesterday it’s hovered between 60 and 70 degrees. Very much springlike. For a couple of weeks now whenever the weather was looking up people have been joking about how a renegade snowstorm would blow through and fuck everything up. It isn’t funny anymore. The snow layer had already melted twice then reclaimed itself at the foot of everything when collectively we all knew it was finally gone for good. The thermometers hit 70º (and when I say thermometers, I expect you to understand that I mean a 100×250 pixel animation that slides on and off my computer screen when I hit a certain button with my right fourth finger, sends a few packets to the internet to ask another computer that receives dispatches from a network–connected thermometer someplace in or near the city of Morris, and can combine that temperature with a hopelessly abbreviated 7 day forecast), snow is gone for good. Nope. Yesterday I left for school at 10am, markedly enjoying the hot humid feeling I got: haven’t felt this for an awful long time, this is nice. All this week we’ve played soccer on our field, the big spacious grass one as opposed to the cramped plastic football field we’d been using while the field reconstituted itself after being swamped with the melting white stuff. But yesterday, the last day of practice, it was cold as a bitch with 30mph gusts of wind (this is after I’d remarked how nice it was at 10am). And this morning I biked to school at 10:30, just as I left it started to tinkle little crystals. Not snow, not rain, not slush, not hail. I couldn’t feel them falling, but I heard them hitting the ground. I was fine with that actually. But come time to leave the science building it had turned into snow, and by the next time I needed to go out of doors it was really blowing, at some point between snow and slush, coalescing on the ground into a half–ice–half–snow, thick and wet like I’d imagine a frozen cheesecake undergoing the process of thaw.

    Here I must digress, having just hit 1000 words in this stupid little rant. It’s been more than I week since a certain french paper was due, and I haven’t written a word of it (I did write a paragraph at one point, but deleted it). There’s something about springtime that keeps me from doing schoolwork, I noticed it last year and it’s hitting me equally hard this year, even though I’m sitting here looking up every 30 seconds as snow blows completely on the horizontal right outside the window. No good.

    The amazing thing about a real blizzard is that the snow blows omnidirectionally. You can walk however you want, but that shit is still going to smack you in the face. It might hit one side more than the other, but never does it just hit you in the back. It’s always going to get you in the mouth, nose, and eyes. It might be that snow is so much lighter than rain, then, just like in the vortexes you see in a wind tunnel, after the wind blows past an obstruction it whips around propelling snow into the only place I particularly mind the stuff.

    I biked back from the RFC—the farthest point on campus from my house—in the storm, through this pudding buildup of snow–slush and on my schwinn with 1.25” tires nonetheless. That was no good. I walked to class after that because I don’t have any glasses to shield my eyes while biking—the way there wasn’t so bad, but the trip back I couldn’t take it and after I was 1/4 the way home I just decided to sprint the last few blocks to get my poor self out of the cold. This isn’t how april is supposed to work. If april showers bring may flowers, I’m damn glad that I’m not one of the poor daffodils who dared to stick my sensitive green nub of a head out of the soil before this storm came along and frost–bit me to death. I, again, don’t think this is how april is supposed to work. But I don’t have anything to back me up except for the bitching of each and every person hit by this storm, so who knows. Maybe global warming should have been called global major–fuck–with–weather–patterns–the–world–over, that way people would never have sat back and thought: great, I’ll be able to grow oranges in the garden 10 years from now!

  4. 07 March 2008

    On Reinventing the Sacred

    215 days ago

    In my own life, I am finding that the symbol “God” used to mean the very creativity in the universe, and membership with all of life that we all share, and the planet we share, does in fact, bring a sweet and enlarging sense of joy, responsibility, and humility. How graced we are, not by a Creator Agent God, but by the staggering emergence of the universe, life, and human civilization, so much of it, it begins to appear, partially beyond natural law. So, since we do no t and cannot kinow, we live into Mystery. We need a sense larger of ourselves and too much of our current society where we are consumers, not citizens of the world. Stuart Kauffman, On Reinventing the Sacred

    Here’s exactly my stance on “religion/spirituality/belief/faith/whatever.” This is the stuff I think about in the shower. The other day I decided that the next time someone asks me about god, I’ll tell them to go out and look at a tree—honest to god look at the thing—then to come back and tell me about him/her/it.

    I’ve come to empathize with the idea of faith. I can’t really say understand, or comprehend, but I do know how feels. I don’t know whether its been gleaned from things I’ve read, done, heard, seen or dreamt. But there’s a part of me that resonates when I think of whatever it is that’s bigger than the world as we know it. It lies in the complexity of it all—just to try and think about it—in that I can understand the feeling that’s led so many to postulate the existence of an immaterial soul. Certain thoughts—dealing with the arching, distilled beauty of things—well up in a particular part of my chest, giving a breathless feeling, something palpable, between my sternum and heart—usually followed by me closing my eyes and taking a deep breath, letting it out with the all joy the world causes me.

    The people out there that aren’t religious don’t bother me the same as the people who are blindly religious. I find both tremendously lacking. I question following some “god” based upon what’s written about him in some 2000 year old, cobbled together work of fiction, having undergone translation and transcription millions of times. Not to say I don’t value the bible, or any other ancient and wonderful text—for that’s all it is. No different from the canon of Mythology formulated by nearly every culture, literate or no.

    And for those opposed to religion—just because none of the religions (yet?) known to man haven’t failed to fuck some things up en majuscule doesn’t mean that all similar notions should be expunged from our cultural arena. Ok, science is a belief system based on testable hypotheses, which can then be vindicated and ratified by experiments designed and executed. Of course there’s value in this, but I fail to see it leading us anywhere truly meaningful, other than down a rabbit–hole of empty technological innovation.

    Organized religion has given us plenty that’s beautiful, which to me is one great paradox: How can religion be deemed good or bad, glorified or villainized, when it’s done such meriting both? In some kind of revisionist tit-for-tat, would humanity as a whole give up Bach along with Christianity to prevent the crusades and the stagnation of materialistic investigation precipitated by its meteoric rise to dominion over the whole of Europe? And the same for science, would I give up the internet for the reclamation of the Dodo or the carrier pigeon?

    I could of course name off differences between religion and science, but when I step back I can’t help but see both as symmetrical, mirrored structures. The gap that exists between them arises from, as much as anything, each encampment’s respective incredulous disbelief in the other. I can’t wholeheartedly believe in either, but at the same time I agree with both. And what little I’ve found from this Stuart Kauffman incites that wonderful feeling when someone expressed something you swear you’d have said yourself if you possessed the equivalent amount of literacy; when the ideas that bounce around in one’s head at odd moments—never quite manifesting themselves into anything expressible, but supporting and reassuring other thoughts… Kauffman incites that wonderful feeling when these ideas are formulated and codified in the thoughts of somebody else, solidifying and rewarding my own beliefs.

  5. 29 February 2008

    Cellphone dilemma.

    221 days ago

    I have a problem with cellphones. The most I’m willing to carry in my pockets is a pen and sometimes my wallet, maybe a stick of chap. So I either: (a) leave my phone sitting in my room all the time, in which case I pay attention to it, but it’s never with me when I leave (and inevitably I either miss a call or want to make one). Or (b), I throw it into my backpack, on silent so as to not ring during class, and then leave it there for days, completely forgetting to check it, and, being on silent, it never reminds me to so do.

    If it’s at home and someone calls me, I either answer it (when I’m also home) or notice it chirping that I missed some amount of calls (when I do get home). But if it’s in my backpack and someone calls, although the damn phone is in all likelihood within reach of my person, I won’t answer it, and even more, I’ll completely forget about it for 3 days until I happen to both rummage through whatever pocket it’s lodged in and I can be bothered to take the energy to grab and check to see whether the damn phone has calls on it or has run out of battery yet.

    And I’d better say something about this leap day, because it’ll be 1460 days before I get another chance to.

  6. 09 February 2008

    untitled 54

    241 days ago

    I love watching a white sky diffuse to blue. The moment it happens. Whether the wind is blowing the clouds off or the sun burning them up, there’s a point where you start to see the open sky peering down at you. Looking back up into it, it’s as if some wonderful understanding has just been reached. The feeling wears off awful fast. I could stand to spend more time watching the sky.

    —

    I’d taken a crummy mountain bike that’d been sitting unused on campus for as long as I could remember, unlocked. I rationalized that with no rider, someone must’ve just left it, and if anything I was doing everyone a favor getting the eyesore out of there. I bought a new chain for it, stripped off the derailleurs which had rusted unusable along with the chain variously fixed it up in different ways. I found a good chain length and set the thing up as a single speed, chain around the big cog in front and second smallest in back. It was a high gear ratio, and fun to ride. I didn’t need to mess around on snow or ice, the tires with thick with good tread, which is nice.

    I probably got two or so months of riding out of it when the front cog completely failed, bent in half. (What one hand gives, another may take away.) I don’t know if it was just crummy metal combined with cold or somehow the chain wasn’t running straight enough, but it was unfortunate. I liked the bare-bones, even if I had to stand up and pound at the pedals until I almost couldn’t anymore to get up the hill on the way back from town. So I went back to my Schwinn, which runs far smoother and takes half as much pedal cranking (because of wheel diameter and tire thickness maybe?), but with super-bald and thin hard tires it’s an exercise in balance and skids to ride in the winter.

    —

    The other night there was a spaghetti dinner benefit for a fellow in the athletic department who came down with cancer recently. Held at the Legion, it was a demonstration of small town cohesiveness. Huge amounts of people showed up. All the teams had to come and help out, I was debating whether or not to go. Both my roommates were, so why shouldn’t I. I really was impressed at how many people were there. Hundreds of people had to have showed up, the line bent back and forth all through the bar from 5:30-7:00, and the spaghetti got dished out faster then we could heat up the 6 or so pots to cook it. It was fun to help out.

    I burned two of my fingers pretty bad. I was doing odd jobs, cooking the spaghetti was one of them. I wasn’t exactly cautious around the stove (which was huge and burned gas, as I wish mine did) reaching back and forth above 7-inch blue flames to move pots around and throw spaghetti in. But I got burned thanks to a bad pot-holder. On my right pointer and middle fingers, while carrying some cooked noodles over to the strainer. So now I have a blister that’s inflated to about the size of half a marble sticking out of pointer, and I popped the blister on my middle finger before someone told me that was a bad thing to do. But it was probably three times the size.

    —

    Epiphanies last night:

    A guy I know through a few friends somehow knows me by a photo he saw while in Florida, before he came up to Morris, on the school website. Something to do with cookies. I never heard about this picture, I thought they had to make me sign something before they get to use my ugly mug on their website. But I kind of want to find it.

    Another guy who now goes to morris, unbeknownst to me, remembered me from our soccer team in 5th/6th grade. (The Arroz!) Which is awesome. I wouldn’t have ever placed him there, but once he did it for me it brought back good memories. That makes 3 of us who ended up going to morris, though only the two of us were there to talk about it. I really have no idea how he could have marked me other than by my name, but it’s amazing to think that I look close enough now to myself as a 13 year-old.

    Whether or not you like the song: it’s darn cool when an entire room full of people sing along to Journey. Don’t stop believing indeed.

  7. 02 December 2007

    310 days ago

    … je me suis apercu que de tout temps j’ai ete obsede par l’impossibilite de me rendre compte de certaines actions ou pensees soudaines de l’homme sans l’hypothese de l’intervention d’une force mechante exterieure de lui.

    I realized that I’ve always been obsessed with my inability to understand certain abrupt actions or thoughts of man without hypothesizing the intervention of some malicious force acting outside of him.

    Charles Baudelaire on the Devil

  8. 19 November 2007

    ...

    324 days ago

    Not being able to get to sleep proves to be what it takes to get me to write here for once.

    Things I should probably mention.

    • Soccer got done a few weeks ago, in our second year we won the conference tournament. It was nice. I started all the games and played through most of them, all in all it was a good season. For the first while I played defensive mid and stopper, then one of our outside defenders broke his leg (:() and the lineup got rejiggered and I spent a few games at forward then got kicked back to outside D. I made a good joke in the locker room after one of our games: the first half wasn’t our best effort and they outshot us, we hardly got anything up in their box. The second half we did lots better and put away a few goals for the win. We were in the locker room and coach was telling us about how we did a good job of turning it around. I’d been playing forward first half, and moved back to defense after that. I’m pretty sure I lost my forward spot for cracking about how with me up top we got outshot and with me at defense we held their shots down and our more offensive-minded players scored the goals. Which is too bad, even though I don’t have any idea what I was doing at forward, I though it was pretty fun. It’s the only spot that I’ve never really played.

    It’s pretty demanding really, practice 6 days a week for about 3 months. A quick look at fidness, where I mark down all the workouts/practices that I do, shows 80+ of them in the past 4 months, 68 in the past 3, somewhere between those two is how much stuff we did during season. Lots of it.

    • I haven’t really taken any pictures at all lately. I usually like to, but for some reason I only do so when I can sort of go off somewhere with taking pictures especially in mind. I wish that I’d always keep a camera close at hand and snap things whenever I see them, but so far not the case. A week or so ago I took a camera with to my two classes, and on my way to the second class I saw a cool picture of an electrical box in a doorway, but couldn’t get pass the ‘take camera out of pocket, remove lens cap, turn on, wait 5 seconds for lens to pop out, frame up shot, click, realize that auto mode didn’t do a good job, twiddle dumb little knob and try again a few times until I get a shot I’m happy with’ threshold and so I just walked on by. Same exact thing leaving the same class, in almost the same spot there was who I assumed to bed a grandma with two little girls wondrously handling the science building’s big pet snake. I framed the picture in my head as I walked, camera bulging out of my jeans pocket, but couldn’t muster what it takes to pull it out and snap one.

    I think my problem is a mixture of the camera being a pain to pull out for one shot and put back in, and me being over-shy. It takes long enough to get out and warm up that in all likelihood by the time I was ready to snap one of these girls they’d be looking funny at me, or at least I’m afraid that they would be. Maybe the camera ‘not being good enough’ is just manifestation of my timidity to take photos of everyday life. If I go on a hike or a bike ride with taking pictures in mind I don’t have any problems, but otherwise I’m too embarrassed to pull it out and take pictures. I’m not sure that I want to look like the camera dork – as much as I do like taking pictures, the whole thing with everyone always carrying around their little digital cameras (at least to social events) and snapping plethoras of meaningless (as far as my appreciation of photography goes) shots and uploading them en-masse to facebook puts me off. Something I ought to get over, but definitely a sign that I worry more than I should about the stupid little ways I behave.

    • Speaking of which, I should figure out sociality. I really haven’t ever spent much of my energy on/around other people. I’m not sure whether it’s that I just don’t have much interest in them or they don’t have much interest in me. Look into my phone and I you’d see I haven’t made/received a call in a week. I’ve been around people and done plenty of hanging out, but mostly it’s at stuff organized by others that I’m tangential to. Soccer, watching movies with my roommates and friends (both theirs and mine), going out to eat. I don’t want to sound all whiny, but it just seems like I have a hard time connecting directly with other people. Or they with me. A general trend in all the Relationships (capital r) I’ve been in has been about one good month, then a somewhat sudden loss of contact resulting in frustration on the other side leading to her breaking up with me. I can just sit around all night never quite making the effort to pick out someone to call and call them to see what they’re up to and invite them over. I’ve never had much of an ability to do this.

    The thing is, I’m just as happy in the moment to sit around alone and read or compute or listen to music or do whatever. But then the next day I feel like I’m shutting myself out, or talking to people on monday about what they did that weekend I make motion that next weekend I’ll go do the same sort of stuff, but then (at least recently) I don’t, I just end up sitting around. I don’t know if my social skills are underdeveloped, I’m all too shy, or what. I’m definitely introverted, but I don’t know about shy. There’s definitely a moment where I reach comfort level in different social situations, before which I’m quiet, borderline silent, but fairly outgoing once I’m past that. Who knows, internet be my therapist.

    • Monk is probably due back on the air soon. I feel that my love for the show is wearing down steadily as it works through it’s seventh or eighth season, but I’m excited for it being on again. Same with the Office – shows need to learn how to end before the come sputtering to an end. Scrubs is in the same boat, great to good and I haven’t even watched any of season 7. Arrested Development is still the king of all TV shows I’m pretty sure that it’s a good thing it got dropped after 3 seasons. I’ve been watching lots of Curb Your Enthusiasm since soccer ended, at the hotel in duluth we caught an episode and I convinced the other guys to watch it and it got me to download seasons 1-3 and tear through the first 2 in maybe a week. I identify all to much with Larry David in the show.

    Maybe in writing all this I’ve bored myself enough that I’ll be able to lay down and knock out.

    • Addendum: I think it was friday night I spend like 2 hours looking through research on LSD and thinking that I’d quit drinking the alcohol. As far as drugs go I’ve never been particularly motivated, be it caffeine (had a half cup of root beer on saturday, made me sick to my stomach), alcohol, medication, illegal, or whatever. But something about LSD turns my head, I’d actually be tempted to try it if only I (a) knew where to get it and (b) didn’t have to be scared as to whether or not it was actually lysergic acid diethylamide and not just some toxic edible paper. I did in fact drink a little later that night, but in my Biological Psychology class we’ve been going through psychopharmacology and trying to think about how the brain works is really creepy.

    I have a friend messing with neural networks for his senior sem, and just thinking about how those work and mimic the stuff that goes on up in our head (as we understand it) is really funny (my head hasn’t quite figured them out). Lately whenever I have to close my eyes to try and remember something that’s doesn’t just surface I get this cool imagination of how my mind works, it’s sort of like a gyroscope with a few different concentric spherical rings sliding around different axes in concert until their intersection hits the memory and it comes back to me. I don’t know why, but I’ve felt or imagined or used it as an external model for recall of facts now on multiple occasions and it might just stick. And really bedtime. In the same class I have a test tomorrow that I haven’t really studied much for and I was meaning to go to bed at 11, wake up at 7 and get some good studying in along with a nice leisurely monday morning. Now it’s 2am.

  9. 14 September 2007

    Free Books

    389 days ago

    Walking through the student center, I saw that the annual library book sale. I’d meant to stop by sometime, but I didn’t have my wallet. I bought a few books at the sale last year (25¢ per) and it was a good deal.

    Apparently this year for the last hour of the two-day sale, none of books cost anything.

    I discovered this after walking by on my way home, deciding that I had time to spare, and turning around to go back. When I was about 30 feet away from the door, a guy said something loudly about free books and started trotting there.

    Here’s a list of the books I bought, in order of their physical size.

    • Minnesota Sings, Cooperative Song Service. An old songbook with traditional songs and hymns. This is printed by 4H, I grabbed it because it has a lot of songs that are in the book at Danebod (I can’t remember what it’s called), which means it’s probably got some good other stuff.
    • How to breathe right, Edward Lankow. ©1918. In 5/6th grade class our teacher would spend time teaching us to breathe deeply, to relax. I adapted the breathing style, breathing slow and deep ever since without really thinking about it. What better skill to master than the one you use nonstop, that keeps you alive?
    • The philosophy of existence, Gabriel Marcel. ©1954. Had me at the cover: simple white capitals set into bright red. A french contemporary of Sartre, coming at the same general subject (existentialism) from somewhere else (according to the back cover, red printed on white).
    • Evolution and religion, Problems in american civilization (Readings selected by the department of american studies, Amherst College). ©1957. The cover again, but a before-its-time look into the science v. religion arena.
    • The uses of the past, Herbert Muller. ©1952. History, an overlook of the major ancient civilizations.
    • The combined spanish method, Albert de Tornos. ©1867, reprinted 1943. I’ve wanted to learn spanish lately. We’ll see.
    • Language for men of affairs, Vol 2, Business Writing, James Melvin Lee. ©1920. This one had a nice worn hardcover that caught my eye. And c’mon, Language for men of affairs? I was sold.
    • A logical approach to discrete math, David Gries, Fred B. Schneider. I took 1302 From Elena with a huge, new agey textbook that had zen-like stacked rocks on the cover. My friend took it last year from Nic with a littler gray book with a theorem1 on the cover, and their class looked shitloads harder (also more interesting) than mine was. This is that book, I figured it was worth picking up.
    • Victorian ceramic tiles, Julian Barnard. ©1972. Hopefully worth it for the pictures. Hardcover, 175 pages, let’s hope I like ceramic tiles that much.

    Coming to the checkout for a bag to carry all this stuff in the ladies running the place said that they wanted to give kids a chance to build their bookshelves. They looked at the books I had and told me to go back and get more. I said I didn’t want to go overboard, and these were what caught my eye.

    1 Here’s the cover, merci à amazon

  10. 31 July 2007

    Out of Control

    Kevin Kelly

    435 days ago

    Out of Control, Kevin Kelly

    An interesting, slightly dated look at the future of technology from Kevin Kelly. Published in 1994, it has good reason to be lagging behind, and although it’s somewhat optimistic predictions haven’t fully propagated, for all I know they seem to still be accurate of the sorts of things that are out there, just starting to happen on the fringes of technology and computer science. A fun read, the kind that makes you wonder what you’re doing building dumb little websites when there’s fun shit like evolutionary computing happening…

    We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves Norbert Weiner, 20

    Patterns of cells, surely. Cells made up of patterns of DNA, made up of patterns of nucleotides, made up of patterns of molecules, made up of patterns of atoms, made up of various electrons, protons, and neutrons, of which protons and neutrons are in turn made up of something, we don’t quite exactly know yet. And that’s just jumping down the rabbit hole at the cellular level – skipping larger human subsystems. And you can go from individual up as well, to an immediate peer group, then local, regional, national, global… Where does the line get drawn? To us it’s at the individual level. To ants and bees it’s very likely above that level, colony or hive. Makes you wonder whether there are any organisms that can feel and understand and manipulate the workings of different sub-organisms within themselves?

    Much more likely, says [Daniel] Dennett, is that “meaning emerges from distributed interaction of lots of little things, no one of which can mean a damn thing.” A whole bunch of decentralized modules produce raw and often contradictory parts – a possible word here, a speculative word there. “But out of the mess, not entirely coordinated, in fact largely competitive, what emerges is a speech act.” 43

    I like this notion. I’ve always felt that the aggregation of everything in the world creates all the meaning, as opposed to some god creating all meaning in the world. Pantheism, I don’t exactly know what to call it. But it’s the only spiritual idea that really sticks for me, that makes me wide-eyed in contemplation of what the world really is.

    “To think is to act, and to act is to think,” said Heinz von Foerster, gadfly of the 1950s cybernetic movement. “There is no life without movement.” 49

    Left on its own, without a direct link to “outside,” a brainy network takes its own machinations as reality. A mind cannot possibly consider anything beyond what it can measure or calculate; without a body it can only consider itself. 52

    And here I am sitting on my ass, writing about a book I read. Sometimes I wish I’d actually do something big, but it hasn’t quite happened yet.

    When reduced to essentials, life is very close to a computational function. For a number of years, Ed Fredkin, a maverick thinker once associated with MIT, has been spinning out a heretical theory that the universe is a computer. Not metaphorically like a computer, but that matter and energy are forms of information processing of the same general class as the type of information processing that goes on inside a Macintosh. Fredkin disbelieves in the solidity of atoms and says flatly that “the most concrete thing in the world is information.” 107

    Going back to the first quote, it just depends on where you draw the lines. From far above, absolutely. When you bring the line down to an individual level that individual acts absolutely nothing like a computer, but its constituent parts (the nucleic acids) do. Drop it down to their level, and they don’t, but here I lost out because I really have no idea what levels are below them and how they work.

    Where does self come from? The perplexing answer suggested by cybernetics is: it emerges from itself. It cannot appear any other way. Brian Goodwin, an evolutionary biologist, told reporter Roger Lewin, “The organism is the cause and effect of itself, its own intrinsic order and organization. Natural selection isn’t the cause of organism. Genes don’t cause organisms. There are no causes of organisms. Organisms are self causing agencies.” Self, therefore, is an auto-conspired form. It emerges to transcend itself, just as a long snake swallowing its own ail because Uroborus, the mythical loop. 124

    This also resonates at a spiritual level for me. Up along with meaning emerging from small distributed parts it’s always something that’s sort of sat right behind my actual conscious thoughts, me being able to sit there and know it’s back there but never pull it out and twist it around to think about it. It’s the spirit. That the sum of the parts is somehow greater than the parts themselves. Divide me out into carbon and whatever other atoms and I’m no longer me, I’ve lost my self/identity/soul whatever. Not that I ever physically possessed anything other than those atoms. But in concert they made me more than just themselves, and that’s tremendous.

    Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve out machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living. 165

    John Perry Barlow, 184. (Barlowettes, consider me I don’t know what, but a little impressed. Maybe some combination of you being cute and me having a science-man crush upon your father lead me to an undeserved idea of your merits. I would just like for you to know we may be near in age, depending on how recently certain sites prominently mentioning your ages have been updated. I also understand how I have revealed myself to be a total creep by just making this note, but it’s not like I’ll ever meet you or you’ll ever read this anyway. Take that.)

    Teilhard de Chardin, 201

    There are many reasons to create. But what we create is always a world. I believe we may be unable to create anything less. We can create hurriedly, in fragments, in thumbnail sketches, and streams of consciousness, but always we are filling in an unfinished world of out own. […] In essence, every creative act is no more or less than the reenactment of the Creation. 236

    Or, we may be very surprised to find that nothing unifies the selection criteria. It may be that any highly evolved form is beautiful. We find beauty in all biological creatures, although individual people have individual favorites. My suspicion is that the beauty of nature resides in the process of getting there by evolution and by the important fact that the form must work biologically as a whole. 276

    This is a tremendous notion.

    Ethology, study of animal behavior, 323

    Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more – it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforth bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow – this is what evolution is. Theodosius Dobzhansky, 363

    Where other people see the hand of God, we see evolution. Bob Crosby, 363

    Evolution as a Religion, Mary Midgley 364

    Postdarwinism suggests that other forces are at work in evolution in the long run. These lawful mechanisms of change reorganize life into new fitnesses. These unseen dynamics extend the Library in which natural selection may operate. These deepened evolution need not be any more mystical that natural selection is. Think of each dynamic – symbiosis, directed mutation, saltataionism, self-organization – as a mechanism that will foster evolutionary innovation over the long term in complement to Darwin’s ruthless selection. 371

    This is the first place that I’ve ever heard that there may be more to it than just Darwin. I figure that we as humans really don’t know anything all of our science is just crude approximation of whatever forces actually permeate the universe, good enough to do cool shit like fly airplanes and make computers, but bad enough to make us dangerously overestimate our merits as a race of beings. But although I haven’t taken that many biology courses, I’m surprised that the notion of post-darwinism hasn’t popped up for me sooner.

    Hall found some directed variations so complex they required the mutation of two genes simultaneously. He called that “the improbable stacked on top of the highly unlikely.” 375

    Walter Fontana, coproducing (lap game) mathematical functions 395. The idea of a set of functions interacting with each other in such a way that there is no clear, direct causation from one to the next, but they’re all tied together. Self organizing. Some system just pops into existence from any number of parts. A -> B -> C -> A. Everything depends on the next thing. I can’t find much on the web about Fontana, but he’s a part of an eponymous lab at Harvard, so he must be doing all right.

    “If you write something about this,” Kauffman says softly, “make sure you say that this is only something crazy that people are thinking about. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if somehow there are laws that make laws that make laws, so that the universe is, in John Wheeler’s words, something that is looking in at itself!? The universe posts its own rules and emerges out of a self-consistent thing. Maybe that’s not impossible, this notion that quarks and gluons and atoms and elementary particles have invented the laws by which they transform one another.” 398

    Yep, that’s fascinating too. God is everything somehow working together to what end nobody has any idea.

    Are the laws of the universe evolvable? If the laws governing the universe arose from within the universe, might they be susceptible to the forces of self-adjustment? Perhaps the very foundational laws upholding all sensible laws are in flex. Are we playing in a game where all the rules are constantly being rewritten? 460

  11. 13 June 2007

    Huh?

    483 days ago

    • I don’t get how waiters can get away with putting so much ice in the water they give you. I’m anti-ice in my beverages. All it does is dilute the flavor of whatever you’re drinking (water excepted) and make your teeth hurt (water included). But fricking restaurants, they fill their cups half beverage, half ice, and as soon as you finish up the water, they pour out the sides of their pitchers until you have a cup full of ice with a few sips of water between them. I was at dinner tonight and the first pour was from a water jug up by the cash register, it’s a pretty laid back café sort of place, and the waitress who came by did a good job the first few refills. (I drink gobs of water, like 7 glasses if I’m sitting at the kind of meal where you actually sit, and don’t just chow then leave.) But then the ice came in, and dammit. I’d feel like an asshole asking for water without ice. A week or so ago I seriously thought about it. The biggest problem is once I finish the water, whenever my cup is empty and I don’t have food to eat, I go to town on the cubes themselves, crunching and eating them. I’m sure these aren’t exactly what you might call table manners. Also probably not what you would call comfortable on the mouth/teeth/throat. Freezing actually, but I’m thirsty and because you’ve wasted such a large percentage of the volume of my cup on ice, an expanded solid form of a liquid that really would help to dispatch my thirst, dammed that I have to waste my jaw muscles and internal body heat returning it to its more digestible fluid form.
    • The cardigans, Love me Love me Lovefool I believe. Jim sang it in the office a few episodes back from where I’m at now (season three, a few episodes before the merger, to annoy Karen who was squeaking her chair), and just 15 minutes ago a kid I talked to once or twice last year at school who’s now the new DJ at the current who works the 11pm-5am shift weeknights just played the song giving me the energy to first sing along in a faux falsetto that I didn’t know I had and then come down here to write about it. I looked for the song in my iTunes, no luck, but darn that’s a good song.
    • Toga/sarong/whatever you want to call draping yourself in cloth and calling it clothing. I sleep up a ladder in a loft. I have huge street facing windows in my second floor room. I sleep naked for the most part. I hate closing the shades on my windows, I’m very much against closed shades. This causes problems when I want to get up and down the ladder, in and out of bed. Laying in bed I’m not at all worried, I’m pretty sure the line of view is oblique enough if it exists at all that nobody will ever see me, but parading up and down the ladder bothers me a bit. The other day I discovered that up in bed I’m already draped in a sheet: as opposed to finding my underwear, figuring out how to get it ready to put on, putting it on, turning over and making my way down the ladder; I can just roll myself up in the sheet somehow and pop on down totally covered. It’s awesome. I wish I lived somewhere like India or Africa where people actually dressed like this. Simple and elegant, just turn the cloth around you a time or two and tuck it into itself and the friction will keep it there. I’m not quite to going around the house like that yet, but for rolling out of bed saturday morning and lounging for a while, it’s great.
    • Freakin’ a it’s hot out. I bike to and from work most days, 10 miles each way. It’s overall enjoyable, though it does take a lot out of me energy wise. The worse part is the sweat that builds up on my face as I go, it’s never bad, doesn’t drip too much, just a thin film. But as soon as I get off the bike the aerodynamic forces that kept the sweat out of my eyes for the duration of the riding vanish, leaving a not insignificant amount of runny salt no place to go but into my eyes. Ouch.
    • In reference to my second point here, I hate people who claim guilty pleasures. The average uptight music head (think hipster radio DJ) wouldn’t be caught anywhere near certain songs, but the absolute worst thing is when the same fellow plays one of the same songs with some mocking words beforehand, admitting the tastelessness of the song and yet claiming it can somehow bypass his impeccable musical taste. Just admit you think it’s a good song and like it, fuck what all your dolled up friends with nothing better to do than judge one another based on their musical tastes think and will think of you.

  12. 05 May 2007

    There's a reason you have no friends

    521 days ago

    And it’s that you listen to Wierd Al. I can understand it if you’re still in middle school I guess (I sort of liked Amish Paradise, but then I also sort of like Gangsta’s paradise, this is where I forgive middle schoolers for their taste in music). That white and nerdy song may have been cute the first time you heard it. But shit, the guy isn’t funny and he sure as hell is annoying. You lose even more points if you think that white and nerdy makes you, being both of these adjectives, approach anywhere near the lower bound of cool.

    The other day at dinner I was eating mildly spicy food, enough so that my nose started getting a bit watery (you know how it is with spice). Suddenly I manage to get a chunk of something stuck in the top-back of my throat, almost up into my nasal passageway. I half choke, half cough, half sneeze all at the same time (a 150% violent bodily contortion). Unhappy things came to be, but damn was it funny, and really not all that disgusting; plus we were done eating.

    Managed another of these the other day, full moon and clear sky, though a little chilly. Just sat out by the river for a while, good choice. Didn’t manage any pictures though, the camera kept to itself.

    Last day of classes for this year, and I’m glad they’re over. Classes should be shorter than 16 weeks because I wouldn’t have expected it, but I’m sick to death of almost all of mine. I’ve been taking Software Design and Development, Révolution, Romantisme, Modernité, Calc 1, French Fairy Tales and the Fantastic, and Tap Dance. None of them really bothered me until the last week or two, but have been a full-on pain within that period. I don’t know why, maybe because the weather turned to about perfect then. But I’m all done but for a mathematica project and a french paper, of which the latter I’ll try to play my cards right and wiggle out of because it’s obviously a meaningless assignment the professor just gave us the last day of class to follow the syllabus. I’ve re-ignited my hatred for math, my calc class not being at all hard but just grinding me up and down in the worst way possible. I don’t know what my deal is with math, but it has something to do with my ability to grasp abstraction very well but apply it tremendously poorly (arithmetic errors out the wazoo, make a computer do it for me).

    To cap it all off. The other day at breakfast I wanted two muffins, no potato cubes. The guy asks “any potato cubes?” As I reject the potato cubes I wave my right hand across and out in the air. The guy makes fun of me: “These are not the droids you’re looking for.” He wins.

  13. 27 April 2007

    529 days ago

    Spend the years of learning squandering
    Courage for the years of wandering
    Through a world politely turning
    From the loutishness of learning.

    Gnome, Samuel Beckett

  14. 18 April 2007

    School, springtime

    538 days ago

    It’s been beautiful outside the past few days and I’ve been lapping it up. 65 degree days with blue skies and light breezes make school plenty hard to put up with though. I sat down in my third two hour class yesterday only to get up and leave and sit outside the rest of the afternoon. I made it to all three of my classes today, but the third was rough. Here’s me falling asleep:

    (I told the iMac to capture an iSight image every 15 minutes along with a screenshot. So far only one kid dialing up internet porn.) Here’s all that I could do to keep awake:

    The puzzle widget is another great one to tile across the 1900×1200 screen, but you have to go through and click each one to make them move, and it chews up an unfair amount of processor to have so many little windows constantly drawing themselves in the background.

    To make things worse, I have a french paper due consecutively last friday, this morning, and tomorrow at 1pm for which I haven’t yet been able to get a paragraph out. I’ve read patches of four different books (not to mention at least as much on the web) for inspiration. Although I have a topic that pulls me in (at least in theory), I still can’t bring any words out. We’ll see how this goes.

  15. 01 April 2007

    Web usage

    555 days ago

    About 6 months ago now I whipped up bowsah, a cute little app to scrape my web browser’s history file into a database and a surrounding rails app to munge the data.

    So far it’s come in handy a few times for me searching for something I knew I’d seen on the web but couldn’t find, but mostly serves to measure how much time I actually spend on the internet. Here’s the past 24 weeks, equal to 164 days or ~5.5 months.

    A few stats:

    • First page counted: 2006-10-20, 164 days ago
    • Page visits counted: 43119
    • Average 262 pages/day
    • Sites counted: 3521
    • 3 biggest days (pages/day): 557 (2006-12-19), 556 (2006-12-10), 548 (2006-10-22)

    Is this too much? It may well be – but I don’t know. I’ve always used the computer lots, whether it was playing games when I was younger or reading lots of shit on the internet nowadays. I’m glad that I don’t spend all day watching TV or playing World of Warcraft, but could probably stand to see the honest-to-god light of day a bit more often or maybe even spend more time with actual people…

  16. 23 March 2007

    You get what you wish for

    564 days ago

    So my favorite mysterious phenomenon is when just as you begin to wonder about when something will happen, it happens. Someone has wandered off into another room, and just as you wonder where they’re at, poof, they walk back to wherever you were wondering about them. This has happened like 5 times tonight. It’s great fun, and it just culminated my night (it having now become the next day) with me finishing a paragraph of my reading and thinking something along the lines of: is it seven o’clock? no, couldn’t be 7. man, it must be almost seven…. The next thing to happen was delightful in the most, because I have my powerbook set to speak the time at every hour, and just as my mind settled down and turned to look at the clock, my computer spoke (System voice: Vicki): It’s 7 o’clock.

    A few general observations:

    • This cannot be willingly put to use. With even the slightest thought of trying to force something to happen by emulating the above series of events, you’ve already fucked it up and you’re only deluding yourself now.
    • Often the effects don’t come around until the thing to take place is mentioned aloud. As soon as it’s asked when/whether someone was indeed coming over, they appear in the doorway. You can wonder to yourself however often you want with no result, but once expressed aloud between concerned parties: poof.
    • At soccer practice, running sprints, I have an uncanny anticipation of when the hand will drop to give the start. I can get a pretty good jump on everyone else, so much so that they think I’m cheating (I may be a bit, but my jumps are never flagrantly early: I don’t get much more than a step on the rest, but I do consistently get a good step). It seems to be a related sense, just in clearing my mind and not thinking about anything all the sudden I know just before it happens that the signal is about to be given.
    • This is all very likely just a case of positive reinforcement. Ie: I make stupid predictions like this all the time, but the failed predictions are utterly forgettable, while the uncannily accurate ones give me a warm fuzzy feeling and stick around in my mind. But still, you can’t diss the warm fuzzies. Then again for all I know, I’m a psychic.

    Addendum, 5 days later: Playing pool today one of my balls was sitting right on the edge of the corner pocket waiting to get knocked in. Before the other guy hit his shot I told the ball that it wasn’t going in. It didn’t. I was up next, and only needed to knock in one ball to win. I told the ball in question that it was done for, out loud, in exactly the spirit of this post, without thinking about it or anything. I hit, knocked the blue ball but missed. Both the cue ball and I think it was the 4 bounced off the walls for a while (I always hit way too hard). I’ll try to describe this well: blue was coming back towards the original pocket, but you could tell it was an inch or two off. Happily, white was coming back on a different trajectory, and the two hit maybe 5 inches and 45º out from the pocket, sending blue one on it’s way.

  17. 22 February 2007

    Hopped up

    593 days ago

    So I’m generally averse to putting shit into my body. I eat fairly healthy and don’t drink much other than water1. It’s not like I’m on a diet or anything, it’s just that what feels good going into my stomach happens to not be the caustic shit that comes wrapped all up in plastic. So pop is definitely off my list of approved beverages, every once in a while I’ll drink it if it’s the only thing offered – but even then I’d rather scrounge a glass from somewhere and fill it up with tap water. Most meals I eat in a cafeteria with 24 different kinds of pop, and in the last year I can count how many cups of the sugary, bubbly stuff I managed to drink on one hand.

    So saturday night someone gave me a few sips of their heavily-diluted super-caffeinated beverage (I believe the shit was called Rockstsar?) I couldn’t have had more then three sips, not even gulps, a very small amount. I’d played in a soccer tournament that day, 3 games each about 40 minutes long. I was exhausted2, to say the least. But the shit snapped me right up, and I got back and chilled until 5am without getting all that tired.

    I didn’t think anything of it. I had figured that I’d crash as soon as I got back, not sit around for 6 hours, but chalk it up to interesting people maybe. A day or two before this eating at a local cafe, someone ordered a Dr. Pepper3 and I wanted one, but had already ordered my water. Again, I usually don’t want to have anything to do with cola, so I took note of this and decided that sometime I’d get a cup of pop from the cafeteria.

    Usually when I’m about to grab anything chock full of carbonic acid my stomach turns and I go for another beverage. I don’t know if it’s a psychological or metabolic aversion, but there sure is an aversion. But yesterday at dinner that initial revulsion wasn’t there, at least in a high enough degree to turn me away. It’d been long enough since I’d used the pop dispenser though that I tried to find the little level you pull4, I had to look a second time to find the thing that says ‘Push here.’

    So I get out to the cafeteria and through the course of my meal drink one cup of Dr. and two of water. The stuff isn’t that bad, but there’s no way I’d prefer it to water. It’s sort of slimy going down, and you can feel it more than you should be able to once it’s sitting down there in you. But I forgot about it after dinner, it didn’t ruin my day or anything.

    Then all the sudden I’m up all night. I didn’t really get tired. For some reason I’d been trying as hard as I could to put off a french paper: beyond just diddling around the internet, I was over the top here. It was 12 before I even started working, and a diversion or two later I didn’t start writing the paper until 2 or so (I’d put down a few notes and read through some interesting sources before). So there was a bit of need to cruise through, but it was surprisingly easy. As mentioned earlier I won’t drink coffee, so it’s not like I’m popping pills to keep awake and get this paper done. I ate two bananas and a granola bar along with a few stale candy canes. I took my breaks, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world to not get this rough draft done in time, but sleep wasn’t coming to me.

    Once more I didn’t take the caffeine5 into account, I had better things to think about. It’s only now that I’m wondering about this shit – can I really be so sensitive to caffeine that 12oz of soda will kick me through an all-nighter? I don’t think this is a bad thing, but I have at least one friend who drinks at least 10 times that on a daily basis. People who have a more than two cups of coffee through the day are probably getting up there as well6. That freaks me out. When their normal levels of energy are coming from however many grams of 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6(3H,7H)-dione, it makes you wonder how they can get up in the morning. The average young male drinks 870 cans of the shit a year7. That’s 2.3 a day, 16 a week, etc. Me never drinking any means that someone out there drinks twice that. Scary shit.

    1 Juice here and there, I’ve never drank milk, coffee tastes like dirt, tea/cocoa are way more work and not that much better than water…

    2 The only reason I wasn’t asleep is that we were driving back and the guy said that I have to stay awake sitting shotgun to make sure we didn’t all die…

    3 (my favorite when it comes to pop)

    4 The water comes out of a lemonade nozzle or something, there’s a little push lever on the side that makes it flow.

    5 I got knocked out on this word in a spelling bee once, it just came back to me a week or two ago when my little brother won the Bee for his school district. Still can’t quite spell it.

    6 Coffee has 3-5 times as much caffeine by volume as soda.

    7 America’s Other Drinking Problem

  18. 22 December 2006

    Quick Semester Review

    655 days ago

    I finished my nth semester in college today, didn’t have too bad a time. In the past I’ve been a bit apoplectic when it comes to school, but I think that that’s working it’s way out of my system. It’s not like I’m depressed about school – it’s a plenty good time living in a little mini-real-life situation with a bunch of kids the same age as you. Having a real soccer team was a plus from last year, although club soccer was plenty fun there was a bit of discipline missing. I’m pretty much ignoring how much money it costs and whether or not paying it is rational, but my cursory investigations into that haven’t blown me away with fear or anything. Most of all I figure that I can graduate in 3 years (spring 08) and put up with it until then.

    Soccer

    I played on the newly started school team. I’m no superstar when it comes to playing, but I am the kid who’s played his whole life and just has fun. I started at left back and had a pretty good season, although it was long and cold: colder in october than in november, and our season went all way through october; we had a few practices while it was snowing. I had a good time, it was a few orders of magnitude more commitment than playing on the club team last year. But it’s nice that I show up at the school and they decide to start a program. We competed with all the teams in our division, but we didn’t too well with winning, coming in below 5 and above 2. I think there’s a good base to go from next year, we’ll see how that goes.

    English 3021 – Language and Grammar

    An interesting one, looking at english in how it works now and it’s history from the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes jumping the channel from mainland europe. I’d already been finicky with language usage, I just really hope that this class doesn’t start me off yelling at friends/strangers about using I vs me or that vs which or stupid crap like that. I can handle doing it to family, but friends just seems like stretching it and complete strangers beyond tolerable.

    Computers 3501 – Algorithms and Computability

    Here’s one of those classes that just didn’t quite work for me. I’m not expecting to fail or anything: on the first two exams I managed 95%, I should have done just fine with the labs, but I probably only turned in half the homework. I’m not sure what my deal was, but it’s nice to know that within the class there are plenty others in the same boat as me. Interesting subject matter, but just the way in which it came across sort of hurt my head and my sense of how school should work. I don’t know, last year in a class with the same professor I’d judiciously do the homework each night before it was do I just couldn’t this year.

    Honors – Some ridiculous title about progress and history that I cannot remember

    An interesting class, a bit of a survey in history and literature and ideas of time/progress. Lots of exposure to fun new ideas, a couple of books to read and lots of excerpts. I don’t know about the honors program at my school, I hate the elitist notion of me being any more honorable than anyone else, but I think that the program gives me a shot at taking some classes I wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

    Political Philosophy

    I just decided one day last year I wanted to take this upper level philosophy course. I’m fickle like that. Without much background in either politics or philosophy I was swimming upriver, but don’t think I did terribly. Fun ideas once more, what more can you ask for. I’d rather earn a D in a tough course than an A in fluff. I also shouldn’t have a D, I did better than that.

    Computers – Seminar 1

    Pretty much a fluff course, we had to do a ~30 minute presentation on something about computers and write a 2 page paper on something else about computers. And show up once a week to watch everyone else’s presentation. I did my presentation on human computer interaction from a historical point of view, looking back at some cool shit, and had a good time making it. Homework should always be fun like that.

  19. 02 December 2006

    Holding Doors

    675 days ago

    Something about it bugs me. I don’t know what it is in the gesture, maybe an archaic indication of inferiority, a ‘ladies first’ sort of thing. Maybe an indignant I really can handle the door on my own. Maybe a feeling that nobody should be inconveniencing themselves at my expense, however small their gesture. A look over the shoulder and a pop to keep the door open is what I do, and all that I’d expect from anyone else. It’s not like I ignore that someone is right there behind me or don’t watch out for other people. Every once in a while I’ll even wait a second for a stranger who isn’t right behind, but a few seconds. Even then holding the door as they walk through is just too much for me, I’ll let go and move on to allow their passage over the threshold.

    But whenever someone holds the door for me (today it was a certain biologist super-blogger), provided that it’s a double door (common in chilly minnesota), I’ll hold the second door for them. And I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but there’s always a ‘take that’ smirk on my face. Just desserts. I’ll show you and your all too polite ways.

  20. 30 November 2006

    The Nature of Order Book 2: The Process of Creating Life

    Christopher Alexander

    677 days ago

    Architects are much too concerned with the design of the world (its static structure), and not yet concerned enough with the design of the generative processes that create the world (its dynamic structure). 4

    Real kindness is something quite different, something valuable in itself. It is a true process, not guided by the the grasp for a goal, but guided by the minute-to-minute necessity of caring, dynamically, for the feelings and well-being of another. This is not trivial, but deep; sincerely related to human feeling; and not predictable in its end-result, because the end-result is not a goal. Unlike the goal-oriented picture, which is imposed intellectually on our substance as persons, real kindness is a process true to our essential human instinct and to our knowledge of what it means to be a person. But the machine-age view showed a process like kindness as being oriented toward a goal, just as every machine too has its purpose — it’s goal, what it is intended to produce. 9

    The Principle of Least Action, 37: The principle says that the evolution of any dynamic system will always follow the path of least work.

    Under these circumstances, as layer upon layer of smooth unfolding takes place, what develops is a system of centers which is stronger, crustier, and more imbricated, and in which the centers (at first hundreds, then thousands, or tens of thousands) all reinforce and intensify each other. 65

    This, I believe, is an essential model which teaches us the real meaning of living structure, and which shows us these phenomena as naturally existing phenomena of beauty which will occur without effort in any world where the wholeness is allowed to unfold smoothly and truthfully, without disturbing previously existing centers. Once this is clear, we shall then have a vision of the world in which the world itself — all of it — animals, plants, mountains, rivers, buildings, roads, terraces, rooms, and windows — is part of a single system and a single way of understanding. 83

    Thus the world has entered a new phase. What is made, what is built now, what develops in the world, is governed by images and rules. It is no longer automatically governed by the existing wholeness. It is now governed by what we decide. 109

    The essence of successful unfolding is that form develops step by step, and that the building as a whole then emerges, coherent, organized. The success if this process depends, always, on sequence. A building design can unfold successfully only when its features “crystallize out” in a proper order. 129

    It goes on like that. It is not complicated, not pretentious, but simple and obvious. It is just common sense. 130

    Thus what I have referred to as the “rough, rambling” quality of so much that is good in the environment, comes from the light-hearted yet profound adaptation which such a simple stepwise process encourages, and which a more formal or controlled design process cannot achieve. 171

    Instead of using plans, design, and so on, I shall argue that we must instead use generative processes. Generative processes tell us what to do, what actions to take, step by step, to make buildings and building designs unfold beautifully, rather than detailed drawings which tell us what the end-result is supposed to be. 176

    *All* the well-ordered complex systems we know in the world, all those anyway that we view as highly successful, are generated structures, not fabricated structures. 180

    The step-by-step approach works. The all-or-nothing approach does not work. THis is the secret of biological evolution. During the course of evolution, the adaptation of the thousands and millions of variables that must occur to make one successful organism happens step-by-step, essentially one gene at a time. That is what makes evolution possible. It would be impossible for nature to “design” a system as complex as any organism all at once. 237

    Butterfly effect, 241: If we examine a complex natural system evolving, each next stage of its evolution depends on its previous stage. Mechanistic 19th-century science created a thought-model in which the next stage would be easily predictable from the previous stage. But it turns out that the world is not like the mechanical thought-model. More sophisticated discoveries have made it clear that in a complex system the next stage is dependent on the current configuration of the whole, which in turn may depend on subtle minutiae in the history of the previous wholes, so “reave-like” that there is no way to predict the path of the emerging system accurately ahead of time.

    To create a living world, successfully, we must again find ways of making all building processes move forward in this experimental, responsive fashion. That on thing alone, as a kind of bedrock for all design and all planning and all building, will change the world. 246

    What steps do you take, in what order? The most basic instruction I can give you as a guide for a living process, is that you move with certainty. That means, you take small steps, one at a time, deciding only what you know. You try never to take a step which is a guess or a “why don’t we try this?” Large scale trial-and-error, shots in the dark, simply do not work. Rather, you move by slow, small decisions, deciding one thing, getting sure about it, and then moving on.

    ...

    When I say that you should move in small decisions, I do not mean that the decisions should be small in physical scale. Rather, I mean that the content of each decision should be limited to a particular subject, to some feature of the design, disconnected from other matters, and floating, to an extent, by itself. 258

    We should run through the possibilities very fast, and reject most of them. If we do accept one, we should accept it, reluctantly, only when we finally encounter something for which no good reason presents itself to reject it, which appears genuinely wonderful to us, and which demonstrably makes the feeling of the whole become more profound. 258

    The crux of every design process lies in finding the generative sequence for that design, and making sure that sequence is the right one for the job. [...]

    Another way of saying the same thing is to observe that for many people, perhaps the most difficult thing of all in understanding living process, and in getting a proper sequence for the unfolding of the whole, is reconciling oneself to the idea of doing one thing at a time. 317

    It is only in its uniqueness to unique conditions, made necessary by find adaptation, that anything takes on living form. This is true to such an extent that if the structure of uniqueness at every part does not occur within a structure, we can be sure that it is not an unfolded whole, not a living structure at all. 324

    Just make it nice at every spot. 337

    In any living process, or any process of design or making, the way forward, the next step which is more structure-enhancing, is that step which most intensifies the feeling of the emerging whole. 371

    What matters is that the building — the room, the canyon, the paingting, the ornament, the garden — as they are created, send profound feeling back towards us. 372

    What I am saying then, is that before making anything, large or small, and before each step in the process of making it — before each step — we must be able to feel its emotional substance. 383

    The idea that a building becomes more “organic” if it has a more complex form, even when based on notions of the interior organization, is almost always wrong. 422

    Simplicity: making the essential in life come forward, and allowing the inessential to be laid aside. 462

    To understand the idea that the symmetries in a structure are “just right,” consider, for example, the flow of electricity in two parallel wires. Other things being equal, the current will flow equally in the two wires. Why is this? If we want to, we can invoke some rule like Ohm’s law or the principle of least action, to show why the wires carry the same current. But the deepest explanation, the most profound one, is simply this: There is no reason for the two wires to carry different currents, because the situation is symmetrical. Therefore, they carry the same current. In the absence of any reason, thing distribute themselves symmetrically. Asymmetries occur only where there are reasons powerful enough to generate them. 472

    ...the lack of need for “image,” again makes it possible for people to do just what is required, and nothing else. 478

    In the 20th century we assumed that to be simple is to use drastic geometric shapes lacking in structure. Yet nature teaches us that what is truly simple — a waterfall say — is vastly complex — as a structure — and yet vastly simple in its essence. Thus we must strive for something which is utterly simple, in the sense that there is nothing unwanted there, nothing extra. At the same time we know that if we succeed in being truly simple, we reach a find filigree of level upon levels in which every part is unique, each adapted to the one unique spot in the world where it lies. 489

    Frederick Taylor, mentioned 515.

    The traditional process of the architect then, what is it? [...] Making, designing, building, helping. 560

    The idea that feeling itself can become both criterion and instrument – that what is done, no matter how large or how small, can become personal, connected to the personal self of all human beings – and that this process then opens the door to a new form of society. That is truly revolutionary. That can shake the world. 567

    What I do know, and am certain of, is that the society of the future, the long future of men and women on our planet, will – must – inevitably be carried forward by this kind of process which allows the nourishment of the individual to happen at the same time that vast, and highly technical developments occur. 569

    It is the vision of a future living Earth that draws me on. Inspired by a throughly new view of structure, feuled by a view which sees living process as the origin of all life, this allows us to contemplate, for the first time, the idea that one day such living process will cover and completely generate, in biological fashion, the natural and human-made and built environment that we may ultimately learn to call our living Earth. 570

  21. 20 November 2006

    687 days ago

    You have noted the calming effect that the experience of cute things has on you. Beauty has the same effect, perhaps even more so, since too much cuteness can be grating, whereas the beautiful seems never to tire us. This calming aspect is key, many think, to the importance of beauty. Friedrich Schiller said that “the inevitable effect of the beautiful is freedom from passions.” Some things make us happy by satisfying our desires (a chocolate bar, the Leafs scoring), but beauty doesn’t work this way. This makes the experience of beauty special in a consumer-oriented culture. It isn’t only that negative images stress us; even the things that make us happy involve stress, since we spend so much time and energy trying to (a) figure out exactly what we desire and (b) obtain that. Beautiful things, in contrast, make us happy in and of themselves. Beauty can actually remove us from our desires, taking us beyond our personal wants and calming the spirit.

    Glenn Parsons

  22. 31 October 2006

    707 days ago

    Life at the limit

    The classic what is life without strife taken to extremes: indescribable gratification from a near death experience.

    And what I can tell you is that, on both occasions, I felt an intense and unmediated sense of peace and rightness, something oceanic and pure and heartbreakingly simple. Here, at what I had every reason to believe was the very limit of a life I generally consciously experienced as a disappointment, I had somehow broken free into something so far beyond beauty that language doesn’t have the tools to convey it.

    I can’t say to have ever come near death, but the sensation resonates with me a bunch. The tumble while skiing or playing soccer, the best kind is when you just explode into the ground and bounce right back up.

    Tonight I also managed to come across this quote, with which I wholeheartedly agree.

    The great object of life is sensation — to feel that we exist, even though in pain. It is this ‘craving void’ which drives us to gaming — to battle, to travel — to intemperate, but keenly felt, pursuits of any description, whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment. Lord Byron, via here then here after a google)

    A few things that come to mind:

    • I was on skis, jumping off a real sharp edge in a jeep trail, through where the lift came through some trees. I had the few seconds to relax while I floated in the sky, but I just biffed the landing, hit the hill on my side, somehow bounced right back up onto my feet as if nothing happened, and took off. The worst thing about falling down while skiing is that the people on the lift saw you, you don’t know who they were, but you do know that they’re laughing their ass off at you. And whatever dashing lines you were making that run just end in a puff of snow. But my sister behind me was impressed at how cool it’d looked. So imagine whoever was on the lift, they must have been impressed.
    • Riding my bike along a new, dark, asphalt path, on my way down a hill. There’s a 90º bend with dust/dirt covering it – not a good recipe. I really was cruising, and before I knew what’d happened my bike had slid out from beneath me and I plowed head-first into the asphalt before sliding a few feet. Luckily I’ve made falling down an important part of my day to day routine ever since I was a kid, so I managed to catch myself, popped right back up, and came out of it with sore palms and a bit of a scrape on my shoulder. A friend was riding right behind me and seemed pretty worried, but all I thought was: I really shouldn’t just be laying here, so I got up. Worrying about how I should’ve maybe been wearing a helmet or could have possibly rode the break a bit harder always comes afterward.
    • Driving on a gray day, the sky had been losing slush and there was a bit of it on the road (again with the curves and the slipping). I was coming onto the freeway via a cloverleaf. 100 feet before the meter lights I started fishtailing. Did probably 4 good swerves. Managed to stay on the road, and somehow the car came right back under control just as it went between the poles with the meter lights mounted on them. That car could have gone off the road and tumbled down into one the ponds to the side of the interchange easy; it should have at least nicked one of the meters a bit. I’m glad it didn’t.

    But doing that kind of thing really does feel good, afterwards. It’s great to cheat, if not death, some other significant hurt or embarrassment. It’s the wonder of turning a bad situation into a good one; of coming out of the fire without getting burned; of proving that you really are all that. Or you’re at least enough of it to get lucky and look back onto some experience and know that it really shouldn’t have turned out the way it did, but for your supreme skills, or luck.

    But I don’t know, things get creepy when people go looking for this kind of thrill. Where do adrenaline sports like skydiving or base jumping turn into dysfunction; into self mutilation and the like? Adam Greenfield again:

    What I don’t buy is the coupling [...] of the sought-for ego-dissolution to the sensation of bodily violence. The latter, I’d argue, is immaterial, a distraction, the worst sort of red herring. What’s crucial is letting go of control.

    And he wraps it up better than I’d have been able to. It’s that something else – luck, god, circumstance – has caused disaster, and the same chose to spare us from whatever should have been the consequence.

    via Kjell Olsen707 days ago

  23. 06 October 2006

    Moonlight ride

    732 days ago

    So tonight wasn’t just a beautiful, 65º night and a full moon. It was also a harvest moon, and probably the last big moon before things start getting to be freezing around here. Cool I thought, I bet that I could get a good bike ride in.

    I wasn’t sure whether there would be enough light, but there was plenty. I went around the pomme de terre loop, which I think comes in at about 7 miles, and was probably out for an hour.

    Best thing I’ve done in a while. I don’t know if it was the novelty of biking through the country in the dark or the perfect weather or the absolute silence (but for my bike, which just purrs, and the wind) or what, but I got that sense of euphoria that rises through your whole torso and into your throat, where you just can’t keep from smiling.

    At one point I came around a bend and startled a pair of deer in a field off to my right, they took off along the path (which was following a road) and I got to chase them for a few hundred yards.

    I took a few photos, and might just have to head back out tomorrow.

  24. 03 October 2006

    Moments

    735 days ago

    So the other night in a moment of its own, I was thinking how things can happen in no time and all and just get burned into memory. Sometimes things just crystalize, give a stronger feeling than most things. From the last week or two here are a few good moments:

    • Last minute game winner – We’d scored the first goal (third minute), only to be equalized sometime in the middle of the game. It was getting near the end, and there was that frantic up and down pace to the game, when our center mid hit a high shot over the goalie and right under the bar into the side netting. It was our third win in a row, and a well earned one.
    • Chris Thile on the mandolin – Overall the whole song is great, 8 guys on stage at Merlefest playing bluegrass. But the moment I’m getting at is from 2:40 to 3:10 in the video. I just keep coming back and watching it, and every time it just builds until the chords end his run so emphatically and everyone cheers and the guy is up on stage just glowing and smiling. Good stuff.
    • Cramping up – So apparently I don’t drink enough water1, two times now I’ve had cramps while playing a soccer game. The first time was maybe a month ago, and I started noticing what I thought were cramps, or involuntary spasms of my calf. I waited a bit to see if they would go away, they didn’t, so I called for a quick sub. But the second time there were about 12 minutes left, I’d played the entire game so far and we were fighting a 0-0 tie. I went up for a header, and came back down with my calf just locked, flexed as hard as it could be how it had been a few seconds ago as it pushed me into the air. My toe was pointed straight down, I couldn’t move my foot at all. I was conflicted for a few seconds until I just went down, and my calf didn’t relax for what seemed like forever. It took someone bending my foot back and forcibly relaxing the thing. I think it was the first time I’d gone down in a soccer game without being able to get right up, the trainer had to come on and everything. The calf still hurts. (The second half ended 0-0 and I went back in for two 10 minute overtime periods. And played ~80 minutes of the following day’s game.) But that was a mean 30-40 seconds when the thing was stuck, scary as heck.
    • Biking – My bike had been getting a bit out of control. Screws were loose causing parts to rattle around, the pedals creaked each time around, and something on the gears in back was squeaking. I cleaned the whole thing up, oiled it well. Nothing sounds better then the noise of a good bike whirring while you pedal.
    • Cigarettes – Generally I’m no asshole, but out and about the other night someone pulled out a cigarette. Before they could light it I’d snatched it from their fingers, thrown it onto the sidewalk, and stomped on it. I don’t remember who it was, but I’m pretty sure they were smiling (the cigarette wasn’t theirs).

    1 I probably drink at least 96oz. per day. I keep a nalgene in my room and drink it’s 32oz at least twice a day, plus whatever I drink at meals or at practice or while out and about. I don’t drink coffee, pop, or any other diuretic either, so I’m thinking that it should be enough. But this is supposedly where these cramps are coming from.

  25. 24 September 2006

    744 days ago

    Stoicism

    Here’s me.

    Kjell Olsen744 days ago

  26. 22 June 2006

    Tail chasing

    838 days ago

    So I had something I was going to write down here.

    But then I decided no way was I going to write it from the web interface, all the sudden I should be above that! Needless to say, 35 minutes later the posting from textmate won’t work, and whatever I was going to say has left me.

    I do remember that it had to do with the ginger cookies I ate just before brushing my teeth, and the color of my spit afterwards. Maybe we’re all better off for the obstruction.

  27. 21 May 2006

    wtf?

    870 days ago

    I’m a bit disappointed that the above has slinked it’s way into my daily vocabulary. I’ve been a bit resistant to these internet neologisms for awhile1. Twice today it’s come up while I’ve been talking to myself thinking, which I think is a bit much. I wasn’t even sitting at a computer either time. zomg.

    I used the truncation of words pretty heavily as a kid, along with never capitalizing anything and omitting nearly every requisite punctuator from my online talk, but kicked the habit hard and fast. It’s been years, and now I think they’re creeping back. But at least it’s with a holier than thou penchant for cynicism this time.

    1 Times the following have appeared in all of this site: omg: 0, lol: 0, wtf: 1. And that’s in ~three years.

  28. 16 May 2006

    Things I hate

    875 days ago

    (Part of an ongoing series)

    • Vanilla Mint toothpaste.
    • Losing something and yet knowing it’s just barely where you can’t find it.
    • When the guy on the radio goes over the songs he just played and you really wish that you’d heard the one he played right before you turned the thing on (2x today!).
    • Having a dry patch in the back of your throat that makes you cough.
    • Driving cars on freeways at rush hour.

  29. 12 May 2006

    How are things?

    879 days ago

    Good. They say it’s summertime, but it’s rainy and cold (45

  30. 29 April 2006

    Things I hate

    892 days ago

    • Breathing audibly: There’s nothing more annoying than breathing above a certain noise level. I’m not talking about yawning or sighing or anything, just breathing loud enough that I can hear you while sitting a reasonable distance away. And not just a few times, but for a sustained period. Can you even think over that sound? I sure can’t.
    • Making noise while you walk: Along the same lines above. Flip Flops really get me. Try walking behind someone flip flopping along and not wanting to kill them. Esp. on linoleum or concrete. Also shoulder bags hanging too far down the back and thumping against the leg at each step. Multipliers for the amount of jingly shit (buttons, coins) you have on/in the bag.

    These things are annoying. Breathing and walking are things you just do – they shouldn’t make noise. I can’t imagine what things would be like if I couldn’t ever get away from my own noises.

    I can’t really think of anything to call this sort of noise, but the things that characterize it are it’s being completely unnecessary (breathing through a stuffed up nose would cause the first) and fairly prevalent.

    Somehow related to my abhorrence of this kind of noise (especially when it’s attributable to fashion) is my hate of people who never take their iPod out of their ears. Can’t you just enjoy the five minute walk between engagements? What do you have against the sound of the wind or the chirping of birds?

    Don’t get me wrong, I love the iPod like any good apple devotee. I’d venture to guess I’ve had an iPod longer than most1, but it won’t often get pulled out until I’m on a bus or something for 30+ minutes. Those earbuds2 don’t make you look that cool, and can you really enjoy music when just listening in 5 minute bursts?

    1 I got mine when it was a nerdy thing to have, not a fashion statement. My first iPod was a 2nd generation (with the circle buttons above the wheel) and I got it 3+ years ago. I’m not exactly sure, but way before I got this website.

    2 I’m quite tempted to get a pair of nondescript black buds because I’m embarrassed that fashion has appropriated my nerdy apple goodness for it’s own nefarious purpose. But mine work just fine, and there’s no way I’d spend money to join some fashion trend, much less surrender to one.

  31. 20 April 2006

    Man do I

    901 days ago

    I just noticed that I’d started a few of my last posts with the word ‘Man.’

    Man. Man do I think that’s a bit weird. I didn’t notice it until just now, much less think about how I did it. I think this whole flipping blogging thing is getting to my head. I write school papers, and start to get mad when any of my paragraphs are too long. I use the informal first person. But hey, I like it.

    In related news, Paul Graham nailed one of the main reasons I (think I) ever started having a website, and also why I haven’t just given up on this place yet.

    I’m trying to keep a light touch (I’ve resolved more then you’d care to know in the past months to stop talking about politics, haven’t quite figured that out), and my speculations about how the world works are in a different file, although I’ve been meaning for them to start going here.

  32. 10 April 2006

    Posturing

    911 days ago

    Man do I hate it when people act fake. By acting fake, I mean doing anything I don’t like. I’m just an asshole, and I need to justify my not liking people somehow.

    But the thing that gets me most, aside from fashion in general, is when someone drops their voice to answer the phone. Talk normal, for christ sake.

    THANKS.

  33. 04 April 2006

    5'9, 159

    917 days ago

    I had a physical this morning, and never can remember my height or weight, so there they are. Nothing is out of order, but apparently my left pupil is bigger then my right. There wasn’t even any protein or blood in my urine sample.

  34. 14 March 2006

    Mumblings

    938 days ago

    I got picked to fill out a survey for my school, 15 minutes of button clicking. The quick reflection on college it provided wasn’t a bad one, and here’s what I put in the comments box after it was all said and done:

    I’m no big fan of “school,” and really only came to college for lack of anything better to do. I consider myself an ardent self learner and value skills learned independently and on my own time tremendously (probably because they so outweigh those I’ve experienced within school). School just hasn’t ever bee