Links 2017-06-18

Stuff I found interesting over this week.
Your mileage may vary

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170612-why-you-should-manage-your-energy-not-your-time

http://www.raptitude.com/2017/06/want-more-time-get-rid-of-the-easiest-way-to-spend-it/

https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2017/06/kill-your-old-ideas-so-you-can-be-more-creative/

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/technology/one-way-to-fix-uber-think-twice-before-using-it.html

https://electrek.co/2017/06/02/elon-musk-tesla-injury-factory/

https://medium.com/@heyjohnsexton/how-i-got-out-of-idea-debt-124d3cdc4031

Feynman notebook

I'm tackling calculus, with Silvanus Thompson's Calculus Made Easy. A subject that I entirely detested, but have since found beauty in. But learning is hard.

Cal Newport has a blog post about a study hack method called Feynman's notebook. The idea is simple: translate your growing knowledge of something hard into a concrete form and you’re more likely to keep investing the mental energy needed to keep learning

A notebook with handwritten notes has sprung up. THINGS I DON'T KNOW ABOUT. Indeed.

Weekends & mindfulness

This weekend, for the first time in a while, we spent the time doing family things - binge watching some shows, eating, teasing one another, laughing, catching up on sleep, reading and enjoying one another's company (until we got on one another's nerves!). The weekend still has an hour or so left in it, and the house is calm.

I also did something that seems terrifying - I uninstalled most social media apps from my phone. Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn (why do I still have that?). Given that I seem to be checking one or the other for unmentionable periods of time, including as soon as I wake up, or just before falling asleep, this purge is well warranted.  I'm going to give it a shot, anyways. Given my experience (& failure) with these sort of experiments, I'm trying it out one day at a time.

Being mindful.

Creaking bones

Last week, my wife insisted that I spend 45 minutes with her at the community exercise program on Monday morning. She's been going a few weeks now, & says it's been awesome, so why don't I give it a try?

I get lot of exercise - focused very much around my fingers: scrolling across the screen on my mobile or typing on a keyboard, for most of the day. This year, as I slide into an age demographic that's properly considered middle aged, the disconnect between how my mind feels about my body, & how my body responds to such feelings couldn't be more clear.

I work from home on Mondays, so I could manage this time. I let my wife convince me that going to this was a good idea. Many people come along, she said. Most of them are like you & me, have had no proper exercise, or the time to get any of it either - children, partners, dogs & life in general tend to get in the way. My wife, the rock upon which our family's structure rests, has for the first time in over a decade been able to actually get some time to herself, after both kids get bundled off to school.

Trusting as I am of my wife, I signed up for this last week. The sign-up page required my physical metrics, & in the 'why' section, I selected "would like to get a few kilos off my frame".

Nothing could prepare me for this morning though. My wife was right. There were many people, sure. Young, old, shapely, shapeless. Something seemed a bit out of place though: THERE WERE NO MEN! When the session finally began, one other male, a retired gent who looked about 65, joined the group.

Everything after that was a blur. We warmed up, did several reps of exercises, cooled down, & got home. As I'm typing this out, even the bones on my fingers are hurting.

BUT:
The 45 minutes of exercise went by quickly.
I've been exceptionally productive all day today, getting through most of the tasks I'd set out for myself.
And for the first time, I'm actually feeling good after having done some exercise that wasn't something other than walking.

Will do this again next week.

Learning anew

How much I hated the rote learning of formulas, especially when it came to trigonometry & calculus!

For one, I didn't understand why it was remotely useful for those of us who'd taken up accounting / commerce as our primary learning area (no, we couldn't do double degrees - one was bad enough!) Worse still, was the (now apparent) lack of understanding of some teachers themselves, in so far as being unable to explicitly tie the things we were learning to something in the visible world.
There was neither the intrinsic motivation to learn, nor did it seem relevant or important to just get on with it, & get an intuition for it.

There may have been a few of my fellow students who innately understood it in relation to their technical interests, but I strongly suspect they cared about as much as I did, which was very little.

A couple of weeks ago, Rasmus Baath, a researcher, tweeted a link to a 100+ year old Calculus text book, which he followed up by tweeting that his one post that went viral was a book on maths, not cats! I was curious why that may have been so, & spent a little time looking for the pdf of the book that is now clearly out of copyright, & therefore freely available.

Two pages in, & I was hooked. I mean, how could you not be, when the book is titled: "Being a very simple-est introduction to those beautiful methods of reckoning which are generally called by the terrifying names of the differential calculus and the integral calculus by the RFS".

The quote on the next page simply states: "What one fool can do, another can" (Ancient Simian proverb)

The prologue is even more relevant: "To deliver you from the preliminary terrors, which chokes off most (kids) from even attempting to learn how to calculate", with a lucid explanations about the dreadful symbols for differentiating & integrating!

I've now spent at least a good few hours of my time learning about the fascinating teaching style of the author, a man named Silvanus Thompson! I know he'd have gotten an incredible amount of needling from the boys he'd have taught (if my classmates were any reflection of the cruelty reserved for teachers). I'm grateful that he took the time to write as he has, & that the book is still available.  I know it is, because I bought a used copy off one of my favourite online bookseller.

Learning

My 10 year old taught me to do somersaults in the pool today. She was chuffed I could do it after drinking the pool a few times :)
And then she taught me how to do back-flips.  I learnt that too. Much harder than the somersaults. I'm sore, and tired. And pleased. And very happy.

She was a good teacher. I may have been an okay student. Should ask her when she wakes up in the morning.

Stuff

Your house is a just a pile of stuff with a cover over it - George Carlin

A google search for decluttering brought up 1.9m results.  There's links to creative ways to declutter your home, decluttering secrets from professional organisers, what not to do when decluttering, how to cut clutter from your home, decluttering your home AND your head & even questions whether the cult-like rise of decluttering is even healthy!  

Turns out that simply buying less shit (stuff?) isn't an option even worth considering. And lest I sound like I'm on some moral high ground, here's an inventory of the stuff that's on my desk alone!

• Two monitors
• A wireless modem
• A webcam
• Three speakers
• Two camera battery chargers 
• A laser pointer
• 5 USB sticks
• 11 Calligraphy pen holders
• 15 bottles of ink
• 12 bottles of gouache colors
•  A lamp
• A clock
• 3 Photoframes
• A mug full of pens (20?)
• Lens cleaning liquid
• A laptop
• Headphones
• Toastmaster magazines
• A dictionary
• A thesaurus
• 6 other books
• A remote
• A mobile phone
• An in-tray with stuff I don't want to look at just yet
• A keyboard
• A mouse
• A mousepad

When I tell my kids they have far too many toys (or anything else), I'm reminded that I can't preach what i don't practice. 

The last few days have been spent cleaning out stuff that was most likely a spontaneous purchase. Three garbage bin pickups, a council cleanout booking, two recycle bin pickups, & some stuff we'll never use given away to friends who have some use for it- all in the last three weeks. There's still an enormous amount of stuff that will continue to depart our household over the course of the year, but I have no doubt other stuff will take its place.

Memorial

Time flies.

It's two weeks into the New Year. That means enough time has passed for a large number of New Year Resolutions to have been broken.

Late nights, broken internet connections & general busyness around the house has been my excuse for the last week.

But it's no longer last week.

**********************

15 years ago this day, my grandpa passed away.
I loved him dearly.
A kind man. He made my childhood memorable.
With stories of his childhood. Tales of tigers & elephants where he grew up.
Taught me how to enjoy a coffee. To this day, dipping a rusk into a hot mug of coffee is still the best for me.

I miss you Aba.

Breakthrough

The sun's out today. After four days of incessant rain.

As I ran up the stairs to the train station, I stopped in my tracks (pun intended).  A magical sight - a rainbow that suddenly became two rainbows. I pulled out my phone & snapped this picture up, just as it started to drizzle again.

By the time I got to the platform, it was already beginning to fade away. Moments later, it was gone.
For those three minutes, it was a surreal view.

The day's been much brighter today.
The world looks much greener.
Challenges that were insurmountable seem to have been washed away..

Pendulum waves

An old video of pendulum waves - Randomness still shows some pattern.

"Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and (seemingly) random motion."

Pick any one pendulum & try to focus on just its movement.

Soliloquy

How do we know when we're having a conversation?
Does it require the presence of another person?
Does it require them to actively participate? To speak? and/or listen?
How do we know they're listening? That what we've said has been heard?

Trying to get the kids out of bed this morning (the dreary weather continues) got me thinking about this.
I knew they were awake because I could hear them whispering amongst themselves.
Singing out a cheery "good-morning kids" got me no respnose.
Calling out each one by name from the hall got me no response.
Raising my voice got no response.

Make a blog entry online is a similar challenge.
The motivation to write is so I can get these thoughts out of my head & into the ether.
However, rarely (never) has anyone replied to anything I've written.

The kids spoke to me when they were ready.
I guess the same is true here too.

Nostalgia

Always take the weather with you.. - Crowded House

It's been bucketing down for the last 24 hours. The forecast says two more days of this. There have been flash floods reported, and half the extended holiday period for some people is now guaranteed to be spent indoors.

The weather is making me nostalgic about my pre-teen years. 

The smell of freshly deep fried jackfruit papads.

The sound of rain lashing on clay tile roof. 

The mesmerising patterns of water flowing off the roof onto the ground, leaving tiny conical impressions on the soft red soil.

Card & board games with my sister.

Curling up on a bench with a rug & a hot cup of milk.

More often with a grown-up kind of book that would take days to read at regular pace.

The nights would be spent in the light of a flickering candle or a kerosene lamp, hearing stories from our parents about their childhood.

Occasionally having my grandparents would be over. Grandma would tell us tales about the house she grew up in, which was the house we were living in at the time. Pets around the house. A mini dairy farm. Wild animals roaming freely at the periphery of the compound. A tiger or leopard occasionally making off with one of the animals.   Stories about lightning strikes as we looked out at the not yet dead coconut tree in the front yard. And stories about the tenants who lived in the now damaged huts.

Exploring the rooms in the (what seemed like) enormous house, a portion of which were strictly off-limits to us children.

Off-limits not because of the treasures they contained (they did), but because of structural damage to the walls.

It was a magical time because there was so much to do even when you were stuck indoors, without a radio, or a TV or an internet connection.

Somehow, as we grow older, that magic is lost.

The rains become an inconvenience.

We get drenched. Roofs leak. Things get wet. Sometimes to the point of being unusable.

Transport services are delayed.

We can't get to our important / urgent meetings on time. Or without looking like we just got out of the shower.

Clothes don’t dry as fast. And perfume can't / won't suppress the smell of damp clothes.

Some type of screens provide a distraction. Rarely does the power go out.

Sometimes, we are reminded that we aren't in control.

All those memories came flooding as I watched Mother Nature showering (or drowning) her children with unrequited liquid love. 

Renewal

There's something about the change of one (or perhaps two, & once in my lifetime, 4) digits of the calendar that urges most of us to make promises to ourselves.  They tend to be well intentioned promises - lose weight, eat better, love more, live more, do something crazy ad infinitum.

I've done this for as many years as I can consciously remember. It seems like a peer-pressure thing - I'd get asked what my new year resolutions were. The person doing the questioning would usually have a dozen of his/her own that they wanted to share. Not to be outdone, I'd make up a bunch of my own, with about as much hope of achievement as a wisp of smoke in a hurricane.

As I grow older though, I find myself making tweaks to my ongoing plans & systems.  As Scott Adams says, a system is better than a goal  - it's more likely that I will achieve what motivated me to set the system in place in the first place.

My routine changed in the last two weeks of 2015 - I switched off my computers for most of the waking day, focusing on doing physical things. Helping my wife with her garden. Repairing & restoring stuff. Reading a book. Talking to the kids. Playing games. Reading an occasional blog on my phone. Restricting the intake of food & drink during a season devoted to excesses. Sleeping longer (& not wearing a fitbit to monitor it). Noticing my thoughts. Writing longer entries in my journal. Reading old journal entries. Rearranging. Cleaning. Discarding. Rearranging. Redecorating. Reliving old memories.

  

And in the midst of all this, I remembered a decision I made a while ago to stop posting to this blog. I had forced myself to post every day, & did so meticulously for a year. Then ennui set in. It seemed like a pointless exercise. So I stopped. The posts were links to stuff I read & found interesting. But there wasn't much I had written.

Writing is cathartic for me. I write in my journals, or on blank sheets of paper. I use a fountain pen. There's an element of control. My arm moves. The ink flows out. Words are formed. Ideas come to life. Or die.  Resolutions happen at that moment for me. The act of writing things down.

Different context, but "Stop writing everything down" are among the lyrics of a Leonard Cohen song that's playing in the background as I wrote those last six words. 

Human? Or Chimpanzee?

Five judges in a New York court rule chimpanzees don't fit definition of a "legal person" http://t.co/lfYsJjWBw5 pic.twitter.com/9Sk7a8Di34
— Guardian Australia (@GuardianAus) December 5, 2014

The events occurring (as they have been since whenever) across the supposed "developed"  or "first world" countries give sufficient cause to think that the judges are mistaken.
After all, chimpanzees do kill their own species. Not very different in that sense, are we?

Everything's amazing, and yet everything's mundane

Progress is how the miraculous becomes mundane. Many of our ancestors would have given limbs for the privilege of seeing what’s on the other side of our window shades in the sky. Glad all we need is to give up our cynicism about flying.

from a blog post by the inimitable Doc Searls. 

Very often, I forget that if only I stop staring at some screen or book I'm engrossed in & look up, something fascinating is happening all around me. Whether it is people's conversations, or Nature's thandava, something always is happening. The mere fact that I can type this on some plastic-y object, & things magically appear on a screen that's glowing, & with the push of a button, all 12 of my blog readers can see my thoughts - isn't that miraculous?  

What other miracles have I missed today because I'm so busy pretending to be the center of the universe? What have you missed?

Bonus link: Everything's amazing, but nobody's happy

Finding a voice in public

I've never forgotten the first time I did it.

I was in in year 3, & apparently the teacher thought me the brightest kid in class. I'd changed schools that year (& had failed in at least two subjects in the previous class, so how that happened remains a mystery to me).

Being the 'brightest' automatically meant that you were selected for any competitions - debates, speech contests, sports etc. I was terrible at sports and not much better at anything else, although I loved reading & math.  I got selected for a speech contest. I don't remember what my subject was. But I do remember standing on a stage that seemed twenty feet above the ground, looking at an ocean of people I did not know, freezing up, forgetting every word of what my mom had helped me prepare & rehearse. The worst part was being booed off the stage by a sea of cruel faces, most of who were just as old as I was.

I remember my fateful decision that day to never, ever get in front of a crowd to speak again.  It has had nearly catastrophic consequences.

Fast forward to the 2000's. I discovered Toastmasters through a series of co-incidences, found the love of my life who was the daughter of my mentor, gave up Toastmasters for half a decade as life got in the way, rejoined it when I moved countries, & have nearly gotten over the fear of talking to most crowds, however big or small.

Nearly, I said.

I've been reading/ listening to a lot of blog posts & podcasts of late, & have been wondering why I've not really done things that I'm rather reluctant to do because of those voices in my head.  One of them is doing presentations/ public speaking at work. Talk (pun intended) of coincidences  - an opportunity arose to host the monthly team meeting, & I found myself thinking about a particular podcast, & volunteering when no one else in the room wanted to. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do.

I'm fortunate that I have built some really strong relationships at my workplace. As soon as I told them what foolhardiness I had embarked upon, I had some incredible support from my friends at work. I came up with a few of my own ideas & my colleagues were happy to suggest theirs too. The leaders were also really supportive, despite my reservations about doing this.

One of those podcasters / blog posters that have really kicked my ass into gear has been James Altucher. I messaged James on Twitter, telling him just that.

I was awestruck when James replied back, asking how the event went, & reminding me to breathe from my diaphragm, not my chest! He probably has already forgotten his simple act, but that did incredible things to my confidence when I was beginning to think that I'd bitten off more than I could chew.

The meeting went well, & while I was still nervous & a bit out of sorts, I've been getting feedback from a few who attended the meeting about how fresh it was, & that it was the first time they thought it was a worthwhile use of their time. Wow!

And thank you again, James.  I think I've found some courage to raise my voice in public again.

Not tongue tied: An elevator experience

What do you do when you get into an elevator at work, & don't really know who the one other person in there is?

My usual reaction (and one that I've been consciously trying to overcome) is to whip out the phone, & stare at the screen (I've done it even when I've run out of battery).

For the last few weeks, I've made a conscious effort to talk, even if it is something mundane like the weather (and the weather has been anything but mundane lately).

Happened again, yesterday.   He was responsive, had no phone in his hand either! We chatted and got out the same floor. 

And only when we parted did I realise that the reason he looked so familiar was because I'd seen his picture so many times. 

I hope to be as calm when conversing with anyone as I was yesterday when chatting away with the CEO.

A good reminder. Again.

I wrote this quote out this morning. A quick check on my favourite quote researcher  and it appears that this quote has been wrongly attributed to several other people, most prominently Maya Angelou. Documentary evidence unearthed by the Quote Investigator identifies Carl W. Bruehner as the originator in 1971.

I also did something quite out of the ordinary for me. I made a few copies of this & shared it with a few senior leaders at work that I was in a meeting with. Who knows what impact it may have? Regardless, I think as a communicator (aren't we all??), it is important to remember the emotional valence of our words & actions.

 photo posted by Neil (@pointedpen) on Nov 11, 2014 at 11:39am PST

What does "focus" really mean?

I regularly have days that I can't seem to find focus. 

It is a struggle because my day job requires me to complete certain tasks whether I am focused or not.  

It's on days like these that motivation levels drop off a cliff. 

It seemed like today was one of those days.  To make things worse, I had a lunch that didn't do any help for my energy levels.

So I did what I'd not done in a long time. Took my laptop & notebook, walked outside the building I normally work in, & sat outside. Took a deep breath. Actually, quite a few. Took in the view. Of people smoking in a corner, chatting away over coffee. Eating solitary late lunches, hunched over their phones. The weather looking ominous, the dark clouds gathering to drop their heavy load any minute now. 

And in the next 30 minutes, I got done the three crucial things I was unable to focus on since the morning. 

Leo Babauta had a blog post a while ago on this subject a few months a year ago. About Finding Focus.  If you'd rather not click that link, here's a summary:

Now sit there with your task. Dive in. Don’t allow yourself to be distracted.
You’ll have the urge to go check something. That’s a nice urge — just watch it and smile. Don’t act on the urge. Just smile. Now go back to what you chose to do.
Do it for 10 minutes, however long you feel is pushing the boundaries of what’s comfortable for a little bit.
Then give yourself a nice reward: ...
Now go back.
Repeat. With a smile.

 It worked.

Energy levels & food: an observation

Aaargh... 

The joy of being aware of something is that it also brings silly things in sharp focus. 

Rice, mongolian beef curry & schezwan chicken for lunch. 

A great recipe for drowsiness. 

And also an opportunity to sit outside & enjoy the weather while working on an important task. 

Back to work.