FRESH EYES

April 23rd, 2019

Digging into a problem can often result in an endless rut of unproductive stabs.  Hours are seemingly wasted banging a forehead against some issue that is unyielding.  This is one of the ways that work expands in pernicious ways.  Suddenly our time is up and we have to leave without a sense of accomplishment and productivity, attempting to comfort ourselves with the idea we’ll return with fresh eyes for the subject.

The next day we return and perhaps the answer is suddenly staring us in the face, or we have a mind to work on some other aspect of the project or problem.

How might we cultivate a perspective that is constantly trying to be on the lookout for such ruts and when identified, our perspective comes equipped with a mind to refresh itself.

This is a smaller example of an age old concern:  should I pivot in some way, or should I persevere?

But to persevere is like climbing a mountain – it is not done in one epic step, but hundreds or thousands of smaller steps.  Even if we are going in the wrong direction, the wrongness of the direction will not illuminate itself until we’ve gone far enough in that direction, which requires steps in that direction. 

We must make a distinction between actual activity and mere staring at a problem or perseverating over a problem.  A writer who stares at a screen for two hours is really no closer to putting a word on the page than during those first few seconds.  This is quite unlike someone who has been hiking in the wrong direction, who eventually when their destination is proving to be less and less likely in such a direction will consider a new direction of action. 

Having fresh eyes with regards to a problem is more about taking a new action, any action really, as opposed to wondering why past actions did not have the desired effect.  Fresh eyes is not really about new insight, it’s about a relaxed willingness to poke at some other aspect of the issue.  

It’s about exploration more than anything else.

We waste less time when we look out for times when we’ve been lulled into inaction, and find ourselves aimlessly pondering over some issue.  Best to get out of one’s own head and take some new action that will give our eyes something fresh to see.

This episode references Episode 372: The Expansion of Work, Episode 125: Rut, and Episode 72: Persevere vs. Pivot

THE EXPANSION OF WORK

April 22nd, 2019

Few are unfamiliar with the inconvenient phenomenon that occurs when we have a large interval of time to get something done.  Given just a few minutes, we may rush, and hurry, but ultimately we don’t feel too bad when we look at how little or how much we were able to accomplish.

“I only had a few minutes to do it, I don’t think it’s too bad considering.”

But give a few months for the project, or worse, a few years, and how much does our activity and thinking and attack of such a problem change?  Not only do we feel that there’s plenty of time to get it done, but our abilities from moment to moment are of a far different tenor than when we feel the crunch of time during some unexpected last-minute deadline, or even an emergency.

Few are unfamiliar with pulling an all-nighter – compressing the work of an assignment that was allotted several weeks of work into several tired frenzied hours.  What’s even more curious about the all-nighter is that we ultimately become far more productive with less energy, being increasingly sleep-deprived throughout the process.

We can even view the establishment of institutions as a way for certain work to expand.  For example there are institutions dedicated to solutions for different diseases.  We might wonder how such institutions would react if such bodies of investigation were given only a final year of action in order to accomplish the goal of eradicating such a disease?  Would business continue as usual or would the final time compression change anything about how all the people associated and supported by such an institution go about their goals?

We need not wonder about such a hypothetical cage on such a large institution.  We can play this game with ourselves. 

For example, we can all think of instances when a few minutes dangle useless before something happens. 

Oh I only have 10 minutes before work.  That’s not enough time to start something new.  As though the ‘starting’ of some new problem or goal requires a butter knife applied to a chunk of time, to spread out and settle into.  We can perhaps wonder instead: how much can I get done in just ten minutes?  What if I challenge myself? 

It’s interesting to watch how one’s thinking changes when pushed into a sprint.

Just as this mind was,

having been given just 10 minutes to write this episode.

What might you accomplish if you sprint during those odd patches of time that pepper the day, the week and the year?

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: ACTIVATION SEQUENCE - PART I

April 21st, 2019

After centuries of procrastination, Lucilius finally culled his circumstances and went out far into the northern wilderness to a small cabin that he’d fully stocked in preparation for a nine month period.  This was the time he’d imagined and planned he would write a magnum opus of sorts.  With all the trifles and paraphernalia of life out of the way, he could finally sit down and truly concentrate on the task that had been cooped up in his imagination for nearly eons.

To make the occasion even more momentous in his mind, he decided to trek the last 10 miles through rugged terrain, being dropped off by a Hoverjump™ at a clearing where began an endless stand of towering trees. 

“Don’t get lost,”  the car said as Lucilius took a long carbon-fiber spear from the cargo hold and gripped the door to swing it shut, forgetting from old habit, knowing the car was totally capable of managing it’s own doors.

Lucilius looked into the darkness between the thick trees. 

“It’s been awhile,” he said turning back to address the car, “but I think I can still find my way.”

“Well,” the car said, “I’m still well within range of your ThoughtCode©, so I’m on standby if you ever need me.” 

Lucilius winked at the skin of the car as he closed the door, knowing the car’s Visiskin® had the best vision rendering of all the car’s instruments.

“Mind working on that entropy problem for me while I’m gone?”

“Ha, very funny,” the car said. 

The vehicle silently began to rise and called out to Lucilius, “Look forward to reading what you come up with – enjoy!”  The vehicle ascended quicker into the morning sky, then, revving it’s quantum engines, it zipped through the high Cirrus clouds, splashing the thin whips in fantastic feathered directions.

Lucilius smiled after the trusty friend and turned to the woods and began to tramp into the darkness. 

Before long the air of the forest infusing his lungs and the particular silences that greeted him between breathes and footfalls, and the light that filtered between canopy crowns began to awaken within Lucilius an older form of him.  An atavistic system of thought flickered to life and spread throughout his brain, seeing not rocks and roots as rocks and roots but as a seamless fabric that even his counter-balancing hands, and spear, and feet were woven into.  His internal voice slowly dimmed and then lost it’s language altogether until he was again only a piece of the forest moving through itself. 

Each obstacle was not a hindrance, only a movement of hands and legs, climbing over gargantuan fallen trunks of trees, grasping roots latticed along the sides of enormous boulders.  There was no need for safe consideration, of landing on a twisted ankle or grip grasped slipping.  The staccato of thought, made even more rigid by the punctuation of language eroded away to a pure invitation from the moment.

He silently moved up a ridge, from rock to bare root and grew slower, sensing as the moment bloomed anew.  Moving slower and slower as he approached the top of the ridge, he stopped before breaching the sight of what lay beyond and listened.  His eyes closed and his head swiveled, his ears tilted, searching for soft ricochets of sound.  He ceased to move, tasting the damp air, his attention leaving any mind he had and travelling through those subtle and tiny sounds over the ridge, becoming what he imagined, knowing all the while he was within distance of his destination, knowing he had time to field dress and quarter and pay tribute.

Lucilius stayed this way for minutes, totally relaxed and without moving, his skin having gone dry, his heartbeat slow and his breath a mere open door. 

In a single unbroken moment, he lifted himself and launched the spear at the antlered deer grazing a patch of forest flowers.

ZEN AND THE GOLDILOCKS FALLACY

April 20th, 2019

Earth is hypothesized to be in some kind of ‘Goldilocks Zone’.  It’s not too hot as is the case with Venus which demonstrates a total runaway Greenhouse effect, and not too cold as with frozen Neptune.  Although probably not necessary, it’s also fairly amazing that the size and distance of both the sun and the moon create objects of equal size in our skies, making lunar and solar eclipses possible.

The conditions described by the size and heat of the sun and our distance from that star that create the ‘Goldilocks Zone’.

We should keep in mind the sly double use of the word ‘condition’.  For example, it’s the conditions in which we find ourselves that condition how we perform.

As with the sun and the Earth, we can also say that the Earth has been conditioned into its current form by it’s distance from the sun and the effect it has at that distance.

We can think of this even more literally.  If we find ourselves on a beach surrounded by friends and family, with refreshments all around and just the perfect temperature and nothing in recent pressing memory to worry us, than chances are the conditions are ripe to relax.  If however we find ourselves being chased down a dark alley, we might say that the conditions are not ripe for relaxation.  On the contrary, the circumstance is conditioning us to be alert and very active.

But unlike the Earth or Venus or Neptune, none of which explicitly chose their spot in the solar system, we as people have a bidirectional relationship with our conditions.  Not only do our circumstances condition us, but we can condition our circumstances to better suit our hypotheses about how to live a better life.

A trivial example is someone who’s current station in life requires them to sleep in late, as is the case with shift workers.  And yet, the condition this creates, i.e. sleeping when the sun is up and our circumstance is flooded with light, has terrible effects on the quality of a person’s sleep.  Such a person, however, can fashion or buy some black-out curtains, and like Hamlet, create an artificial night, which creates conditions that are more hospitable to the phenomenon of good sleep.

This is a clear-cut example where the conditions are in direct conflict with biology.  But most circumstances are not so much in conflict with our biological systems as they are in conflict with our opinions and perspectives.

Orienting one’s physical circumstances to best optimize conditions for physical and biological health is not terribly difficult and there is endless advice about these realms in order to get ideas to experiment with new behaviors and conditions that will work best for a given individual.

However, outside of these straight-forward physical conditions, many face unwinnable battles due to constraints of opinion and mentality.

This arena is perhaps most ripe for reconditioning because so much more is possible within the realm of thought and imagination than in the physical world.  This is perhaps a blessing and a curse, but to focus on the blessing is to nullify the ways in which it can be a curse.

We can, for example, imagine Goldilocks walking into that fateful cabin to find only one bowl of porridge that isn’t just right, but is perhaps too hot.  How might Goldilocks react to this situation?  Would she get bent out of shape and cry at her misfortune?  Or would she still see the fortune in such a circumstance and simply patiently wait for the porridge to cool?  Are we best to only hunt for the perfect circumstances?  Or should we also hunt around in our minds for the ideal way to look at any circumstance?

We can likewise imagine if Goldilocks had found a bowl of porridge too cold, would she have cried about it? Or would she have wondered if it’s possible to enjoy cold porridge anyhow? 

Indeed just about anything tastes good if you’re hungry enough,

but that,

is a different condition.

SUMMONING THE SPELL

April 19th, 2019

The phrase and directive ‘Learn to code’ has taken on a strangely weaponized role in recent times.  For some it is a situational cure-all that is lobbed at those who find their situations becoming less stable, and for those on the other side of the fence, it is a perhaps a grandiose display of intelligence and status.  Neither on each side of this invisible fence inevitably benefits from such a relationship as no one enjoys a billboard-with-an-answer thrown in their face, and those tossing such billboards almost never see their “suggestions” followed to efficacy.   It is a good example of trying to conquer a companion in dialogue as opposed to fruitfully exploring whatever common ground might have a chance of existing between two such companions.   

The effect is akin to an enemy placed safely atop a castle wall yelling down that it is safe to enter their castle.  Emotionally the prospect is imbued with impending slaughter, and yet the plain truth is that anyone arguing a point wants their companion in dialogue to join them in the same perspective, peacefully.   This failure of dialogue, however, has almost nothing to do with the subject in question – coding – and everything to do with the lazy and ineffective ways people speak to one another.

What is more fascinating than this idiosyncrasy of the times is just how much magic exists within the realms of code.  To be sure, this is not some high and mighty agreement with those who lob their ‘learn to code’ bombs at others.  This is solely intended for the non-coder, as there do not seem to be many approachable and effective descriptions to light up the imagination of the non-coder.

Magic might seem like a hyperbolic and optimistic word to use here, but the intent is quite literal.  The closest analogy that computer coding has outside of it’s own realm is the world of magical realism and fantasy, where there exist all manner of subtle systems within such worlds were things that are impossible in our reality can actually manifest.

For those familiar with the world of J.K. Rowling’s writing, a function or block of code has an eerie if not straight up fantastic similarity to the spells that are studied, creatively and meticulously practiced and employed within her realms of imaginary and magical worlds.  Within her epic series children spend years studying and practicing these spells in order to make things appear out of nowhere and disappear or move, mutate and do the bidding of their invokers.  Perhaps the only downfall of such an analogy is that within J.K. Rowling’s fantasy world a person’s blood in large part determines their talent and ability to perform such magic.    Carried through the analogy to the real-world example of coding, this easily looks like the arguments and declarations about intelligence that surround the #learntocode debacle.  This is easily a slippery slope that can counter-productively slide into a literal discussion about blood in the real world that we see in the fantasy novels.  But the more productive avenue of such a subject requires backing away from such a mutually destructive precipice in order to build bridges.  As is poignantly evoked in the culmination of J.K. Rowling’s series: an attacker only ends up hurting their own prospects while those comfortable enough in their own skin to realize that initiating an attack is frivolous end up having more stand peacefully by their welcoming side.

The worlds of such fantasy like those created by J.K. Rowling captured the imaginations of millions if not billions, while the worlds coming to life by the magic of code actually are the imaginations of such builders.

The Tinkered Thinking platform, for example, can be thought of quite literally as a unique spell that has been meticulously constructed in accordance to the rules and laws of a couple programming languages, and each time someone invokes the title of this spell which is literally www.tinkeredthinking.com, this spell comes to life inside of a robot located somewhere in Ohio and then that live spell shoots out into the world through all sorts of various channels in order to present a person with the results of such an invoked spell. 

Make no mistake: the writer relaying these thoughts was once so suspicious, ignorant and distrustful of technology that said writer did not have a phone for years and wrote laboriously using a typewriter from the 1930’s.

One aspect of such nostalgia that seems to elude the nostalgic person is that the older time in focus is often best evidenced and practiced through the technology that was then the state of the art.

In the early 1930’s a Smith & Corona typewriter was state of the art.  With regards to expressing thoughts, it was the fastest and most efficient avenue for the imagination to pour out into the real world.  But note the innumerable limitations of a typewriter.  One is simply that you cannot express any kind of graphical form other than the letters that are quite literally hardcoded into it’s design.  A person cannot really render a 3D model of an imagined object in the way a CAD program can today. 

We can then think of the emergence of the radio as an even faster way for the thoughts of those speaking on the radio to more quickly pour out into the real world.  And now with the emergence of the internet, nearly anyone can pour their imagination out into reality to all sorts of degrees, as is evidenced by the fact that this website is read and listened to by people all over the world, extending far beyond the reach of all political leaders in bygone times that had to rely on radio. 

One thing that’s been cooped up in the imaginative realms where Tinkered Thinking originated is the recent change that has occurred with the landing page.  Now when the Tinkered Thinking ‘spell’ is cast, the whole thing does not light up at once.  Only the most important thing immediately greets the one who invokes this spell, namely the most recent episode.  Then the name slowly emerges from nowhere and then the borders slide in to construct the familiar framework.  As mentioned, this was imagined long before the spells to make it happen where tinkered into existence.

However, we are easily jaded.  When something doesn’t work right, when something freezes or fails to function the way we want.  It bodes well to remember that the delete key did not exist on the typewriter, but we forget what a boon it is to tap delete every time our fingers fumble a letter.  It’s even more important to remember that the state of the art is constantly evolving, or rather in this case, the state of the magic itself is constantly trying to iterate towards something new; and that trend, if we extrapolate backwards from computers back to radio and typewriters to pens then quills to the first and most basic technology which is language, the trend seems to be towards a faster and more efficient way to bring our imagination to life.

Could anything more accurately capture the core of what fantasy fiction attempts to do? 

In the worlds of J.K. Rowling a wand is waved and things pop into existence.  Today a few buttons are pressed and things emerge into existence.  We can even hit a few buttons and have J.K. Rowling’s world pop into existence before our very eyes.

Analogy between the world of coding and J.K. Rowling’s magical world also suffers an identical problem regarding education.  J.K. Rowling’s world reflects a school system where things are studied and memorized and practiced, this is unfortunate because it fails to elicit the most powerful forms of learning, namely things like curiosity, or the way in which our mind tinkers with things, iterating our efforts, not from a text book but from a far more efficient mechanism within our minds that allows us to figure things out, which brings us to a central tenant of computer programming.

As Chris Pines once wrote: “Computer programming is not about what you know, it’s about what you can figure out.”

But we might sub-out ‘computer programming’ in this quote with all manner of other things.  Our lives can be viewed as a giant compilation of things we need to figure out or problem solve.  Painting a painting has less to do with art history or memorizing techniques as much as it has to do with a willingness to try something new.  The same might be said for fiction writing or designing a more efficient rocket engine, or trying a new skateboard move that currently only exists in the imagination.  Chris Pines’ quote is not exclusive to computer programing, indeed, the observation taps into a foundational principle of what it means to be alive.

We can all imagine a better world.  It’s certainly a mistake to think it used to be better during some nostalgic time.  It’s an equal mistake to think it will be handed to us.  The most promising strategy to bring that better, imagined world to fruition in the real one is to invoke the same strategy that allows coders to bring things to life on the screen, or writers to bring things to life on a page – it’s best to try and

figure it out.

Just as Tinkered Thinking will continue to tinker

and figure out how

to get you to think

a little more effectively,

for it’s those initial realms of thought and imagination that produce the best seeds for growing a better world.

This episode references Episode 157: Conquer or Concur.