Metablog

I just bought a MacBook. OS X is a pretty neat operating system, but compared to the hype I’ve been hearing about, I’m underwhelmed. Still, I’m happy with my purchase—I’m dual-booting with windows, and I’m going to use it as a work laptop. (I have to work in Windows, since I develop Windows applications using Windows-specific libraries and development tools.)

But I’ve found myself booting into OS X a lot more than I would have thought, because of one application I found that came with the system: Omni Outliner. Oh, man, I love this thing! For a long time, I’ve tried various ways to use outlines to help me organize my thoughts, using various sorts of outlining tools, including notepad, wordpad, Word, Emacs, and Keynote. All of them sucked. But this, this. This is what I need; it’s what I’ve always wanted! It’s what I would have written for myself at some unspecified point in the future.

I want a windows version. I need a windows version. I might be able to use OS X at home, (it would involve switching a program I’m working on to the other platform, and finding a good development environment for the mac and learning it,) but I simply can’t at work, and I want to use it at work. And, wouldn’t you know, there’s nothing like it for Windows. Well, there’s Keynote, and there’s the defunct, but now freeware, Ecco outliner. It’s too bad I have no idea how to do good text rendering and editing with C#, or I’d totally write my own.

So far I’ve used it to do a todo list, based on the whole 43 Folders, Getting Things Done type system. And so far I’ve had the same problem I’ve had with every other organization system I’ve ever tried—while it helps me get organized, it doesn’t help me fix my actual problem, which is not having the energy and motivation to actually do the things I need to do. I can sit there staring at the list of a fairly complete list all the tasks I think I have on my mind, and look at the next thing that I’d need to do on each, and still not find it in me to work on them. Well, at least having it all organized helps me feel a little less anxious about not doing it.

I’ve decided to learn shorthand. I’m going with a modified Gregg, Handywrite, that has more symbols to cover many vowel sounds and a couple consonant sounds missing from Gregg. It’s a phonetic system, not an alphabetic system, which means that there’s roughly one symbol per English phoneme (roughly, “sound”). Handywrite technically isn’t a shorthand, but a full phonemic writing system.

Basically, Handywrite is just a different way of writing normal text. It’s designed with the goal of speed—of having the simplest possible shape for each sound, and picked so that common sounds patterns are easy to write. I can only write about twenty or thirty words per minute with normal cursive writing, but with a shorthand system like Handywrite, I could get 80–100 words per minute, which is about the speed I type. This would make handwriting much more practical for me, making me able to comfortably take notes about things when I’m away from my computer, and much more easily take adequate notes in classes or meetings.

Shorthand systems look pretty wild written down. Here’s a sample, from the Handywrite page:

My handwriting is not that good. You may be surprised that the above images represent 24 words. They’re simpler than you’d expect based on the spelling of the word. I think part of it has to do with the spareness of the lines, and another part with all the extra letters that English uses to spell things that aren’t really needed. (One spelling reform proposal, Cut Spelng, achieves a much simpler spelling system solely by removing specific classes of redundancies and inconsistencies (with all other redundancies and inconsistencies being left in). Cut Spelng appears more spare and streamlined, like Gregg or Handywrite shorthand.

This post contains speculation that, even by bloggish standards, is unfounded. Get out your salt shaker. Or buy me access to some cogsci journals.

I’m going to publish this post even though it needs another hour or two of editing, and another fifty of researching, because it’s already getting close to the size where I’ll never finish it.

I’ve been working on my procrastination recently, and as a serendipitous side effect of my unusually consistent effort on it for the past couple weeks, I happened to have not spent as much time as usual practicing piano, reading blogs, watching TV, or playing video games or puzzle games (like Tetris or Sudoku). At the end of that time, I had an unusually productive two days at work, until around mid-afternoon of the second day, when I had finished all of my pressing work and decided to spend a few minutes playing Tetris—despite the fact that experience has taught me that the few minutes would turn into much longer.

Now, there was nothing particularly unusual about my deciding to play Tetris; after all, I am working on my procrastination. But I noticed something quite unusual when I started. I felt a head rush, and a strong one. It was like five shots of espresso, all at once. (Minus the jitteriness.) Now, I’ve never taken cocaine, but I imagine it would feel the same way. I take stimulants for my ADHD, and the feeling was the same, but stronger and immediate.

And it hits me—Tetris gives me a dopamine rush. Of course! That’s why it’s addictive! It’s the same mechanism behind food and sex and cocaine and meth and nicotine!

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Also called “dynamic inconsistency” or “time inconsistency”. This is the feature of the human brain that is responsible for impulse purchases, dieters’ ice-cream binges, the difficulty of quitting smoking, and the tendency for people not to save for retirement. The common feature is that people value a little pleasure today more than they do a lot of pleasure in a month. (My experience is that ADHD exacerbates this, but can’t back up the feeling with hard evidence.)

One fascinating thing about this cognitive “feature” is that people usually don’t realize they have it. And even when they do realize it to some extent, they often still fail to plan as if they had it. How often do people take into account that they will almost certainly have moments of weakness when planning exercise routines or diets? (This actually another bias itself: the bias blind spot.) We’re in denial about this basic, important feature of our minds.

(Read on to see how to practically compensate for this.)

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Now, I have dreams like everyone else. And I have shortages of will like everyone else. But I want to make up for them. When I decide that to start sleeping well, I need to exercise every day, I need a figure out a way to make sure that I exercise every day, considering myself in the future as a person with different desires and interests. I need to figure out how to make myself do these things. I need to figure out how to decide, when I know it’s time to exercise but I’m in the middle of responding to this really interesting post or making great progress on this new feature (or, just last night, finishing a book it took me from 7 PM to 1 AM to read), whether the lost momentum of the activity that was being interrupted will be made up for by being better rested tomorrow. How much do I lose by not spending quite as much time learning new random things and forming new mental connections?

The point has been made (I forget where—maybe Paul Graham?) that you shouldn’t let yourself get too caught up by doing errands and chores, because most things really can wait, and you should be lazier with certain things (or more willing to subcontract them) so that you can be busier with the more important things. Act like your time is valuable. But I think I have the opposite problem. I simply don’t know when to make myself take care of myself and my surroundings, let alone make consistent progress toward any genuine accomplishment, without feeling, desperately, like I’m missing out on something important.

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Mel (my new blogcrush) links to this neat paper on learning and pedagogy styles. If the authors are to be believed (and I don’t have the expertise to evaluate their claims) then the reason I got a B in physics was that there weren’t nearly enough examples for me to follow before I started working through problems on my own. Which makes a lot of sense to me.

The mechanism, apparently, is that while searching for the solution to a problem, we use up so much of our cognitive resources that we don’t have any left over for remembering how we solved the problem, or getting better at solving those problems. That is, when searching for a solution using unfamiliar techniques. Once those techniques are thoroughly learned, then it’s actually more effective to learn by solving problems than to follow along with solutions. But before one is skilled with that, trying to solve problems is, basically, a waste of time.

If I could apply all of the knowledge in that paper, I could probably do a lot better in school than I did last time around.

Go read the paper—it’s good. Here’s the abstract:

Evidence for the superiority of guided instruction is explained in the context of our knowledge of human cognitive architecture, expert-novice differences, and cognitive load. While unguided or minimally-guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing, the point is made that these approaches ignore both the structures that constitute human cognitive architecture and evidence from empirical studies over the past half century that consistently indicate that minimally-guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than instructional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning process. The advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide ‘internal’ guidance. Recent developments in instructional research and instructional design models that support guidance during instruction are briefly described.

I’ve just started working on my first really substantial lisp application. It’s going to be the application described in this old post. I’m using CLX and writing my own midi library using device IO to /dev/snd/midi0 (on Linux, of course—using the midi ports on Windows is about a million times harder).

And anyway, it reminded me that I never did publicize the neat parentheses macros I’ve been using to make programming in Lisp with Emacs easier. It works a lot like Eclipse does—when you type an open paren, it inserts the close paren. Then when you type the close paren, it simply moves the cursor past what it had inserted before. That way, if you move around with the cursor, your parens are all still in balance. It doesn’t work perfectly. Typing unmatched parens in strings becomes annoying. And surrounding an existing form(s) in a new form, while easy, isn’t entirely intuitive. What happens is that if the cursor is at an open paren when you type another open paren, it puts another closing paren after the form and puts a space after the open paren you inserted. If you don’t want that to happen, you can type a space before typing the open paren. If you want to grab more than just the one form (or if you’re not right in front of a form or want to grab it anyway) you can type Ctrl+N before the open paren and it will enclose the next N forms. Finally, typing a Ctrl+0 before typing “(” will remove the pair of parentheses at the cursor. Also a bit awkward, but better than nothing.

I’ve found that this makes using Lisp much nicer. Source after the break. Continue reading »

I’m going to try to start doing some personal development. I found Steve Pavlina’s blog (I forget how) and started reading about self-discipline, which is a big weakness of mine. I suck at it. My main problem, I suppose, is consistently doing the things I need to do to keep myself in peak performance. Things like eating well, and consistently, exercising consistently, and sleeping consistently. I’m going to start out by committing for 30 days to get up (right away) at the same time every day. I almost started this morning, but my alarm was set for 8 AM instead of 7 AM, like I want. (I’ll probably push it to 6:30 after a while.) And if that starts to work out for me, I might try polyphasic sleep. (If I decide to do that and succeed, according to Steve I’ll be “one incredible human being”. We’ll see how that goes.) I imagine that once I’m being quite productive with my 14-16 hour day (and that might even go up a bit after I stop sleeping in) I’ll still feel that I don’t have enough time to get everything done that I want done. I have so many projects! And so little discipline (and later, time) with which to do them!

I think my biggest worry is increasing my self-discipline. What metric should I use to gauge progress? If discipline is like a muscle that gets tired when it’s used, then do I need to track all of the different things I do that use up discipline? How quickly should I add in new things?

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And how to live with them

In the last apartment I lived in, I had a few neighbors who like to play music. The music they liked to play had repetitive bass parts. When music passes through walls, the only part that makes it is the bass part. Thus, the part I heard was repetetive and annoying. (I don’t think they were even playing it that loud—the apartments just had thin walls.)

Of course, I talked to them about it, but it didn’t really fix the problem. So I just had to live with it. Until, one day, I figured out how to cover up that annoying sound, using white noise. Now, when neighbors play annoying music, I don’t have to listen to it for a second. The noise I play is not loud, not at all distracting, and while it’s worse than silence, compared to the annoyance of a neighbor’s bass beat, it’s a huge relief. Instructions below.

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An idea for a way to sculpt music

I am a musician. I play the piano. I don’t play as much anymore, because my wrists are not amenable to such abuse. (My technique sucks. I blame one of my teachers.) I also program computers. My wrists don’t complain as much about this. (If you spend more than a quarter of your programming time at the computer actually pressing keys or moving the mouse around, you’re doing something wrong.)

I think the root of my enjoyment, for both of these, is taking pleasure in creating complex, beautiful things. And yet, I’ve always enjoyed programming more. Why? Because while coding well takes coordination and practice, the end result is an object. And an object that can be improved, more and more, each time you work on it. Whereas with piano, the coordination and practice are an integral part of the end result. The result is a performance, and each performance has mistakes and problems. With every new performance, you get thousands of new chances to make mistakes. The only way to improve a performance is to practice it, over and over and over, until the number of mistakes goes down to something managable. (Even if you get all the notes right, you always make mistakes. Good pianists can intentionally produce around two dozen different loudness levels, and can tell the difference between a note hit at the right time, and a note hit a tenth of a second too soon or too late.) Code is perfectable, and permanent. A performance is not. Working on code, you’re always doing new things. You don’t repeat yourself more than necessary. Once you get something right, it’s right. Working on a performance, you’re slowly training an obstinate and inattentive nervous system to do something replicable.

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