my friend richard feynman

http://www.ted.com/talks/leonard_susskind_my_friend_richard_feynman.html

a little reminder to myself

back cover of the last issue of the whole earth catalog

workaholism

Our culture celebrates the idea of the workaholic. We hear about people burning the midnight oil. They pull all-nighters and sleep at the office. It's considered a badge of honor to kill yourself over a project. No amount of work is too much work.


Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it's stupid. Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.


Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn't sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes - and it will - it'll hit that much harder.


Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.


They even create crises. They don't look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime. They enjoy feeling like heroes. They create problems (often unwittingly) just so they can get off on working more.


Workaholics make the people who don't stay late feel inadequate for "merely" working reasonable hours. That leads to guilt and poor morale all around. Plus, it leads to an ass-in-seat mentality - people stay late out of obligation, even if they aren't really being productive.


If all you do is work, you're unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what's worth extra effort and what's not. And you wind up just plain tired. No one makes sharp decisions when tired.


In the end, workaholics don't actually accomplish more than nonworkaholics. They may claim to be perfectionists, but that just means they're wasting time fixating on inconsequential details instead of moving on to the next task.


Workaholics aren't heroes. They don't save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.

- chapter from a book called "rework"

'nuff said.

physics flashback

like many college graduates a few years removed from the excess, debauchery, and delusion that is the prototypical, modern american college experience, i often wonder whether/hope that my choice of major in school contributed something positive to my personal development.

my official record labels my undergraduate program of study as "engineering physics". without delving into uninteresting details, essentially, this was one of those interdisciplinary programs created for independent-minded (read: flailing) learners that do not really know what they want. practically, the choices i made in my program turned it into a physics degree with no lab experience, sprinkled with chemistry, electrical engineering, and computer science. for the present and near future the only aspect that has provided me with any commonly recognizable utility, as far as my career goes, is computer science.

recently, i cannot help but think that this is a shame. after all, i learned a lot of cool things about electromagnetism, optics, solid-state physics, and quantum mechanics. and for about a month or two after my last physics course, i actually remembered something. i once had grand delusions of being a theoretical physicist - of being able to look at a white board of equations and elicit within myself that fleeting awe that comes when one temporarily internalizes the beauty and symmetry of the pithy scaffolding that underlies existence.

but that path is not meant for me. the mathematical virtuosity that is required to perform in that venue eludes me. all i have now are bits and pieces that are recalled when i stumble across a complex idea in a physics article or signal processing paper.

but i do remember the feeling i had when i experienced one mesmerizing derivation during one of my last days in a physics course. it came from the rock star of a physicist dung-hai lee, who itamar and i had the fortune of taking our second semester of quantum mechanics with.

i consider it the pinnacle of my life as a mediocre physics student - deriving electromagnetism from the non-relativistic schrödinger equation of a particle moving in empty space.

the author of the linked text does an admirable job of recapturing the awe i felt at the time. somehow, by starting with the most basic equation in quantum mechanics - one that communicates no information about electromagnetism - and applying a physically meaningless (allowable) transformation (known as a gauge transformation) using purely mathematical logic, one ends up implying the existence of electromagnetism! what?!

the universe is crazy beautiful, and i suppose having the opportunity to truly experience that weirdness on some personal level is something - even though it is also nothing.

pale blue dot

this picture of earth (its the bright white pixel) was taken by voyager 1 on february 14, 1990 at the suggestion of carl sagan as it was traveling through the outer reaches of our solar system and about to leave our neighborhood.

carl sagan later recorded his thoughts on the image and articulated, among others, these beautiful words...

consider again at that dot. that's here. that's home. that's us. on it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

the aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species - lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

the earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

when i think about the glory of my insignificance, it makes me smile :- )

vesuvan doppelganger

i still pat myself on the back about it to this day.

i once traded a friend a wall of brambles for a vesuvan doppelganger - yes, that's right - a fucking vesuvan doppelganger!!

but i digress...well actually, no i don't digress; i haven't even presented a cohesive thought yet so i can't possibly have digressed...phew! you see, i have this problem of getting sidetracked and veering off the main point when i talk - fortunately i don't have that problem when i write..............allow me to congress...

i grew up in a idyllic neighborhood surrounded by several boys all around my age. as i think back, i realize that we did not really have anything in common. this fact is probably why i haven't had a meaningful interaction with any of them since middle school. well that and they were all assholes.

that might be overstating the point, let us just say that every kid in the neighborhood grew up with the knowledge that in any social context involving more than two of us, anyone of us was liable to be viciously stabbed in the back if it meant that there was social capital to be gained from the act.

say what you will about julius caesar, at least brutus had the decency to actually stab him in the back. tragedy my ass - that troglodyte got out easy. also, we did have one thing in common, we all hated to lose to each other. baseball, basketball, madden, mario kart, capture the flag, hockey, pogs, baseball card collections, and my personal favorite - magic cards! although i used to consider these kids my friends, i have now had the fortune of real friends and i know the good, old neighborhood crew for what they were - amicable combatants (most of the time).

besides simply being an enormously fun game, magic cards in particular provides two distinct paths to demeaning and demoralizing one's friends. there is the classic beat down 1v1 stylie, involving the disarming and humiliation of one's opponent by objectively proving that every decision that they made in constructing their deck was a poor one; and then there is the cold-blooded trade, involving trading a friend a card of questionable value in return for pure gold.

even though you probably have no idea what it means because you actually had a life when you were in the fifth grade, allow me to present the vital stats of the trade involved.

vesuvan doppelganger

card type: creature
creature type: shapeshifter
power/toughness: */*
casting cost: 3
card text: upon summoning, doppelganger acquires all characteristics except color of any one creature in play on either side; any creature enchantments on the original creature are not copied. during controller's upkeep, doppelganger may take on the characteristics of a different creature in play instead. doppelganger may continue to copy a creature even after that creature leaves play, but if it switches it won't be able to switch back.

wall of brambles

card type: creature
creature type: plant wall
power/toughness: 2/3
casting cost: 2
card text: : regenerates.

so, to reestablish the situation - i had a wall of brambles and my "friend" had a vesuvan doppelganger. you do not understand anything about these vital stats that i just wrote - fine. but i think that you do notice something about these two cards even though you are a complete newbie - the description for a vesuvan doppelganger is complicated - the description for a wall of brambles is a bit simpler.

you see, i screwed my amicable combatant because i looked at the vesuvan doppelganger and realized that there was a good chance that he did not know what the card text meant (you most likely have no idea what the card text means either - but trust me, it is sweet). in magic, a complicated description often does not a valuable card make - and i screwed him - hard. the wall of brambles is a decent card - but most expert players would never waste a spot in a deck for one. a vesuvan doppelganger however, can be the basis of a kick-ass deck.

am i immoral for allowing my friend to make this trade with me?

What Privacy?

Has it ever occurred to you that you don't know your friends as well as you think? Well, now the internet has the answer. A website called spokeo can now with a simple search fill you in on what you're missing. Here check me out. And by things that you might be missing I mean address, household, facebook pics, approximate credit score, home value, income, age etc. Ok, so that might not be the most valuable thing for improving friendships. But it might be really valuable for people who wanna sell me shit.

Meanwhile Facebook is pulling another one of it's patented "We've changed our privacy policies and you have no clue what's going on" moves. Frankly, I don't trust them and I'm not exactly sure why.

Am I being silly here? Is this all part of the natural and desirable spread of information? Or is the complete commodification of self and society? Who actually stands to gain from all of this?