notion parallax » life

graphing legend status

Ben — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 04:18:44 +0000

I’ve just finished doing a 31 day challenge of doing 31 Bikram yoga classes in August. It was pretty hard going, especially about 3/4 of the way through when I was just feeling tired all the time, but in the last week it seemed to get a lot easier as I could feel it coming to an end. I liked the arbitrary nature of the challenge, no good reason for doing it other than because it was there.

I got a nice little certificate with a gold star (the first gold star that I’ve got since I was about 7 I think), and a feeling of “Ah, no need to go to yoga tomorrow!”. The certificate claims that I’m now a “total legend”, yay! I tracked what I was eating and how much work I was doing on Daily Burn, and it was pretty fun watching the graph. (The spiky bit at the end is me doing doubles every other day for a week.) I’m pretty sceptical of the accuracy, but the trends were useful. There was something really motivating about watching the graph, and I think that it might well be a generally useful thing to do.

Which Leads me to my next arbitrary challenge. I’m going to ease off the yoga this month, and work on my maths with the Khan academy.

I’ll pick some other random target next month, or maybe even sooner.

Other than sore shoulders, doing that much yoga has left me feeling pretty positive in general; oddly not in a “woo isn’t everything awesome” kind of way. but in a “shit happens” kind of way. Upon accepting that shit happens I can now work on letting the bad shit fly past me, and hold on tight to the good shit. My memory is pretty terrible so I’m going to try and fill it with maths and good memories, there isn’t space for the bad ones.

What else isn’t a con?

Ben — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 04:31:26 +0000

A few weeks ago I got sick of being constantly sore after exercise and I bought some protein powder from some nice french chaps in Kings Cross. I’d always thought of it as a massive con, but miraculously I felt fine the next day after an epic gym session, so I kept going, and I’ve felt great after everything I’ve done since.

Whilst this sounds like a ringing endorsement of the wonders of nutritional supplements, really it is a combined shriek of frustration and an a big ah-ha moment. It all leaves me thinking “well if this isn’t a con, then what else isn’t a con too?” I’ve had a few suggestions, with “Jesus” being the most worrying (If that’s all real then I’m stuffed!)

We talked about this recently at the Sydney Less Wrong meetup, and one guy admitted to discovering that he’d been tying his shoelaces wrong all his life. We didn’t manage to work out a way to find out how to tell if your brain is lying to you about non-cons and things that you are telling yourself that you are doing right, but are really doing wrong. I’m starting to really distrust my brain.

What else isn’t a con? Any suggestions? I don’t want to miss out any more on the good stuff.

nerdy videos

Ben — Mon, 09 May 2011 09:42:40 +0000

Being a bit of a massive nerd I’ve amassed a few music videos that I like to watch when I’m in a particular mood.

And just for good measure; a sea shanty.

Canyon pics

Ben — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 11:50:44 +0000

Canyon pics, posted with vodpod

Here’s some pics from the trip to the Blue Mountains.

I had an earlyish start, I decided at about 3:30 that the 10 to 4 train was far too early. The 10 to 7 was still full of partied out kids on their way home. I got a puncture on the way to the canyon carpark, so walked my bike a few km, and then dived into the bushes. The walk in really explained why the canyon was only ‘discovered’ in the 60s, there’s some dense bush, followed by a trickle of water. That then becomes a slimy fall/ wet cliff, and it’s only once you’ve got down past that that the canyon proper starts.

As far as I can tell canyoning is really about getting down a tight gorge with water flowing down it, whilst staying as dry as possible and avoiding getting dunked at the end of abseils.

I didn’t actually do the grand canyon as I got onto the way out trail by mistake, and was out before I’d noticed!

It’s the normal, obvious type of claustrophobic, and it doesn’t seem to lend itself to having big or introspective thoughts, but it is fun. I’d imagine that it’d be much more fun as a group.

kettle

Ben — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 10:53:40 +0000

This is something I’d meant to post a really long time ago but got distracted by having to, well, do stuff. We’ve got a pretty normal looking kettle, and when you fill it up it feels like you fill it for a pretty normal amount of time, but I was interested to see how much we were actually putting into it (I was reading Sustainable energy without the hot air at the time, so it all makes sense).

It turns out that we were putting about three times as much water as we needed to to make two mugs of tea. What this little experiment did show was that one of the jars that tomato paste comes in is just right for two mugs of tea, so the jar lives by the kettle now.

I’m back, I’ll try not to go away again.

Ben — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 12:15:06 +0000

In the dying months of my Major Study I pretty much stopped posting. I blame too much time alone in my shed!

As you might imagine, in 8 months quite a lot has happened, and I’ve had quite a lot of thoughts that need to be written down and explored. I’m going to make an effort to get some of them down here over the next few weeks. I’m now living in Sydney, working for BVN Architecture as their computational designer, although I have a wonderful amount of freedom to define what that actually means. I’ve been blogging some of the projects internally and I’ll try and get some of them publicly visible as soon as I can. In the meantime here’s a project that I’ve been working on with two computer scientists at the University of Sydney: http://blog.bvn-usyd.com/ . It has some pretty heavy duty posts in there, but even if you just look at the pictures you might well learn something! (I certainly am!)

iProcrastinate

Ben — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 10:36:32 +0000

I procrastinate a lot, but these days I feel that enforced procrastination is getting in the way of my creative faffing (I might write more about what I mean by that soon)

Have a read of the article that goes with this cartoon.

where should I live?

Ben — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:24:05 +0000

I’ve got a new job in england, it’s for three months, and it involves moving about a bit. I’m in a bit of a quandry about where I should live.

I need to be in London, Cambridge and Farnborough, although I don’t really know how much as I’ll be working from home a bit too, and the splits are undecided so far.

I’m going to start school again back in Oxford at the end of September, and then I’ll live there, but for the next three months I’m floating a bit.

Oxford

If I live in Oxford, it’s simple as I don’t need to move again in a few months time, but there is the complication of actually going and finding a place to live.

I could also get my stuff out of storage.

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Lyminge

Apart from the comedy name, this is where my mum lives. It’s not actually much further from the three places I need to go than oxford is. I could pay my mum some rent, which would make my karma healthier, but I couldn’t get my things out of storage.

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London

I love living in london, but I also love having + numbers on bank statements. I could get a Camelot place, but I have no idea how long that’d take. I couldn’t get my stuff out of storage.

It’s an hour to Farnborough, an hour and a half to Cambridge.

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Does anyone have a any ideas?

multi literacy

Ben — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:45:25 +0000

There was some discussion last night about spatial literacy, and how it was affected by signage etc. We managed to largely avoid getting into tedious 90s discussions about how spaces should be designed so that they didn’t need it, and then that was it – our grapefruit/wine mix propelled us off onto another tangent and all was forgotten.

Then today I was walking through the park thinking about exactly what it is that I do, or would like to do (I’m still no closer to an answer on that one), and the word literacy came up again, but this time in a totally different context.

I was thinking about improving people’s technical literacy, and then realising that ‘technical’ was probably the wrong word to use, and that the right one is still a long way off a, subject for another day perhaps, but also that literacy as a general concept was a bit of a mystery to me.

On the surface it looks simple – the ability to read something, but this gets complicated by the fact that reading is so tightly associated with text.

However, you often hear people talking about ‘reading a drawing’ or ‘reading the mood in the room’ so reading must be a more widespread ability.

In ‘Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom‘, a paper about Russell Ackoff’s taxonomy of content of the human mind there is a staging between data, the raw stuff that comes in from our senses, up to wisdom, which can roughly be though of as the sum of a persons experiences up to that point (real or imagined). I’d posit the acton of reading to cover the first three of these steps, data [gathering], information [interpretation into 'thoughts'], and knowledge [storage, at least temporarily].

So in my imagined situation where I walk into the bar room just after another man, and he exchanges a few heated words with some others in the bar, and then turns and locks the door.

In my reading of this situation, I ought to get out of there as soon as I can, as there is goign to be a full on wild west brawl, but what steps am I going through?

Data, is me looking around and seeing the two opposing factions, and hearing their sounds. It’s tempting to say that I’d be hearing their words, and their tone, but these are a higher level of processing over and above the raw data coming from my ears and eyes.

The information stage would be be turning that raw signal into things like words and shapes, but I still haven’t ascribed meanings to them.

Now that I have that information, I can start to turn it into knowledge. The process doesn’t require any great proccesing to happen in the brain, but more just a job of matching up the prexisting symbols from my experiences, with the new inputs ready for to take the next step of understanding them.

For me, that is as far as reading goes. I’ve often read whole pages of text and come away with no recolection of what that text was actually about. So I’m not convinced that it’s necesary for there to be a level of understanding to be included in the reading process. However, I consider the concept of literacy to require that extra step of understanding.

To explain this, lest assume that I’m still standing up, halfway to the bar when the aforementioned situation unfolds arround me. In a microsecond, the first three steps happen, this is me reading the situation, and then I start to understand that this is a very bad place to be if I want to keep all my teeth. Now I can act on this and start running as fast as I can toward the back door of the bar!

Assuming that the back door is unlocked and I make it out alive, then I can add that experience to my wisdom, the store of situations and symbols to search against next time.

I’m not totally convinced by reading and literacy, being slightly different, but my gut feeling is that literacy is asscribed a slightly higher status than just reading. One can be highly literate, but it’s not often said that one is a good reader (after the age of about 8). So i’m going to stick with it for the moment, and hopefully it’ll make deciding on my grand direction a little easier!

“Oh, is that it? I was expecting something really flashy”

Ben — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 01:34:44 +0000

My new laptop is finally here, and it’s exactly what I wanted, it’s made of tanks, it’s pretty light, and it’s really boring! so somewhere in me, the littel kid is slightly upset that it isn’t increadably ‘cool’, but what’s really cool is beiang about to work for 3 hours in the bright sunshine in the brisbane botanic gardens, and then watch a film on my flight home. It’s great to be able to work in cafe’s, there is, in some sort of perverse way, less distraction in cafes than there is in my office. I’d imagine that it’s something to do with my ADHD brain that needs some white noise to take the edge off my distractability. Now I can write stuff on my own time, I’ll put up some stuff about what I’m working on at the moment over the next few days.