Author: admin

I wonder whether we could look at the general concept of “happiness” in terms of variance. Maybe happiness is not a question of whether we are feeling up or down, but rather the size of our emotional range.

If you are always in the same mood, things can get boring. On the other hand, if you have out of control mood swings, things can get scary, or even dangerous.

I suspect there is an optimal emotional variance that gives us maximum satisfaction in life. But maybe it’s even more complicated than that.

Rather than a single value of emotional variance, maybe what we need is variation in our emotional range. Sometimes we need to retreat into a calm emotional monotone, and other times we need things to get just a little wild and crazy.

So maybe it’s not about optimizing for emotional variance. Maybe it’s about optimizing for variance of emotional variance.

Hmm. Maybe I’ll look into that more when I’m in the right mood.

Today I walked into a jewelry shop. The shop owner was very friendly.

I suspect he was happy for the business. These days I am guess anybody in retail is glad for the business.

We said our hellos, and then he told me they were running a special today. “Oh, really?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said pleasantly. “Half off all earrings. If you buy one earring, you get the other one for free.”

It took me a moment to realize it was a joke. But then I laughed, because somehow it struck me as very funny.

I thought about that poor man, all day in his shop day after day, in the midst of a pandemic, just waiting for a customer to come in. And I wondered how many times today he had occasion to try that joke out on somebody.

I hope he had the opportunity to tell it many times.

Today I was on a Zoom call with seven other faculty members. We were working together on a research proposal for the National Science Foundation on ways to improve online communication.

At one point, a faculty member suggested that he and one or two others form a breakout room, so they could work together on a particular part of the proposal. Someone else said “I know how to create breakout rooms in Zoom. I’ll do it.”

About a minute later I got an alert on my screen inviting me to the breakout room. “How nice,” I thought. “The two of them want me to join them in working on that part of the proposal.” So I clicked “accept”.

I immediately found myself in the Zoom breakout room, along with all of the other faculty members. Every one of us had received the invitation, and every one of us had clicked “accept”. We had simply moved the entire meeting from one place on Zoom to another.

When we realized where we were, we all started laughing. Somebody suggested that we send the NSF a video of what had just happened. That would surely convince them, if anything would, that more research is needed.

In yesterday’s post I talked about how I memorized the 50 United States in alphabetical order. At the time I didn’t know that I was using a method to remember them all.

But today I realized that I get through them without missing any by employing a mnemonic. It’s not a very sophisticated mnenonic. I just impose enough structure so that I don’t end up missing any of the 50 states.

In my head I see a table that looks like this:

A A A A C	C C D F G	H I I I I	K K L M M	M M M M M	M N N N N	N N N N O	O O P R S	S T T U V	V W W W W

 
The letters are the initials of the 50 states. The first five states — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas and California — are in the first column, and so on, all the way to Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming in the last column.

I see this table in my head when I go through the states in order. I remember the states in groups of five, and it works like a charm.

The funny thing is that I didn’t do any of this on purpose. The table just showed up by itself when I set about memorizing the 50 states in alphabetical order.

So I guess you could call it an accidental mnemonic. I wonder how often something like that happens.

Last night I had trouble sleeping, so I decided to memorize the 50 United States in alphabetical order. It was something I had always meant to do, and there is no time like the present.

It was challenging yet refreshing to do this without resorting to the internet. It’s a kind of game you can play while just lying in bed.

It took me a while to remember them all, but keeping them in alphabetical order in my head definitely helped. I knew, at least, that when they added up to fifty, they were all there.

Now that can recite the state names in alphabetcal order, I want to learn for sure where they are on the map. For that I may need to cheat and look at the internet. Or maybe — crazy thought — in a book.

I have been thinking about how systems work together in non obvious ways. When you trace how two or more systems work together, you start to see patterns.

To take just one example among many, consider fresh food in your house. What allows you to have fresh food at home?

At least two different systems work together to make this happen. Either one alone would not be sufficient.

The electrical grid makes it possible for you to have a refrigerator. To you it’s very simple. You just plug in your fridge and voila!

But behind the scenes there is a complex system of distribution and delivery, developed and refined over many decades.

But that is not sufficient. The food needs to get to your house. Which it does, of course, by car or truck.

Seems simple enough. But behind that car or truck is an incredibly complex system of roads, highways, gas stations, oil fields, and a million little details that make personal transportation possible.

The next time you take a fresh container of milk out of your fridge, you might give a moment of thanks for technological systems that work together.

In the future we’ll put on our glasses
And enter a land of delight
A place filled with magical robots
That work for us all day and night
We are in for a magical future
Of that much we all can agree
Yet I think that the most useful robots
Will be robots that we’ll never see

I have the iPad Pro, and the fancy Apple Pencil. It’s a very impressive platform, if a little expensive. I’ve also got all sorts of cool drawing software that makes great use of that platform.

But I still use an old fashioned pencil. Specifically, I use inexpensive disposable mechanical #2 pencils from BIC. You can get them on-line in packs of 40 for about $13.

I find that I can draw better with a pencil than with any computer-based platform so far devised. There is just something about the analog physicality of it that affords me greater control.

I wonder whether we will ever get to the point where I will stop using real pencils, the way most people long ago stopped using a mechanical typewriter. I am certainly not opposed to making the transition. I just want something that feels as good to draw with as my trusty disposable BIC pencils. 🙂

When you and I meet in a coffee shop to chat over a cup of coffee, I think of you as “here”. But if you pick up the phone and call me, I think of you as “there”.

A Zoom call falls into the latter category. Everyone else on the call is “there”. The difference between someone being “here” and someone being “there” is very profound and intuitive.

Will technology ever advance for the point where someone who is far away feels like they are “here”? That question, in a nutshell, describes much of the research that my colleagues and I are working on.

When we get there, I will definitely let you know here. 🙂

Today we had a Zoom meeting to talk about a research proposal to replace things like Zoom meetings with something better. I really want there to be something better, and am eager to work on that, but in order to make that happen we need, ironically, to have Zoom meetings.

I guess it’s kind of like working on the invention of the typewriter by writing down your ideas with a quill pen. A quill pen is far from perfect, but it’s a lot better than nothing.