Square Signals

An Anesthetic Default

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:09:00 -0700

I have this problem.

When I get home from work, I sit down on my couch and open my laptop. When I’m waiting for the next bus, I pull out my iPhone.

Then there’s the unconscious ritual: email, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr—maybe even Reddit if I’m not paying attention.

It’s not that I don’t do things. I do lots of things! But this is my default mode, my idle mode. The sink on the state machine graph. Some other force has to wrest me out of it.

What’s worse, in this mode, I’ll put off anything I see that might take thought. Hard email? Leave it. Long blog post? Send it to Instapaper. But yay, hooray: funny tweet, clever picture, keep it going, friendly email, don’t make me think.

How do I wish I idled? I’m not certain, but on a recent road trip, I realized to great alarm that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d pondered. Sure, I’d spend hours mulling problems I’d encountered in classes or life, but every thought was reactionary.

I hadn’t had a conversation with myself, found new questions to ask, really introspected.

No, I’m not condemning ubiquitous internet connections or Twitter or kids these days. It’s not about that. We used to blame TV for this, right? It’s not even always media: at school, I’d fill every spare hour with idle conversation. Sure, we need to have fun, and sure, some chats were enlightening, but since I was always surrounded by people, I spent absolutely no time inside my head.

Now I’m living alone for the first time in, well, ever. It feels utterly strange, and I have this primal urge to numb myself to the apartment’s stillness with lights, voices, stuff. I feel like I’m floating at the surface of this anesthetic sea, bobbing occasionally above for a breath of awareness.

So I’ve spent a lot of time recently with my eyes closed. I’m trying to keep the damn phone in my pocket. And you know what? It feels great.

Progressive Disclosure in Software Education

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:37:11 -0700

I’m not sure if it’s out of nostalgia or some weird sense of duty, but I spend a lot of time thinking about how to teach software engineering to kids. In honor of Whyday, let’s trap a few of those jumbled ideas in text.

“Which language do we teach?” That’s often the first question when putting together a class. It’s the wrong question to ask, but let’s take it as “which tools will underlie our curriculum?”

Three key areas form the base of the software knowledge pyramid:

Algorithmic thought: how do I say “which of these numbers is biggest?” Hm, I’ll need this maxSoFar variable, then for each number…
Syntax: how do I express these algorithms in some language the machine can be made to understand?
Realities of the system: why can’t I wait for that thread to end with while(1);? Why can’t I int *foo() { int x = 4; return &x; }?

Students struggle with C as a first language because they’re forced to learn all three of these areas at once. It’s too much material, too long before they can make anything.

I tried teaching kids Ruby to avoid realities of the system, but they still wasted too much time tripping over syntax.

Many say Scheme is the way to go: no syntax; no realities. But when I tried to teach out of SICP, I tripped on a critical zeroth area:

Inspiration: I have to care enough after thinking “maybe I should learn to code” to trudge through chapters of boring foundational work.

My first childhood project was a text-based adventure, but when I dangled that carrot in front of today’s kids, they were indifferent. Most had never opened a terminal before; they didn’t care about making stuff trapped in this foreign, backwards world.

That’s why projects like Kodu, Alice, and Scratch are so exciting: their output feels real. A beginners’ system is only compelling if a kid can make something his non-technical friends would want to have. When he shows off his creation—when he hears “wow, how did you do that?!”—then he’s inspired. Then he’s hooked.

On the other hand, this is what a child sees when starting Alice:

Leave the insane Java interface alone. It knows its shame. Instead, notice two things: first, the empty game world; second, the library of every available feature, ready to be dragged into place. Some would call this design A Feature. Yes, for some students, it can excite and reward a sense of exploration. But for others, I think it’s scary, a thousand piece puzzle of an empty sky.

Instead, consider The Incredible Machine. This puzzle asks: “Can you make all three guns fire?”

Most of the scene is in place. The goals are clear. A limited toolbox provides the pieces of the solution, but there are many ways to solve the puzzle. Each level is brief, so there’s frequent reward.

Over time, the player learns how each of the pieces works, and the puzzles get more complicated. The toolboxes include unnecessary pieces; the game rewards clever alternate solutions. Then finally, the kid can move to the sandbox, where an unlimited toolbox is at his disposal, and it’s his turn to challenge his friends.

What if this kind of progressive disclosure were applied to software education?

We’ve seen how rewards and structure affect learning. We’ve seen how social elements like achievements and cooperation keep players coming back. We’ve seen the sneaky power of games with implicit learning.

Why not a game about making games?

Say one level is Checkers. But it’s broken: it lets you move cardinally, and not diagonally! Now fix it. The game’s pieces are already in place, and the necessary building blocks are provided in a toolbox.

Or: you’re playing a game with an impossible AI opponent. Change the rules so that you can win, but you only get to use these bits to do it. You get an achievement if you beat the AI with fewer changes.

Or: this level’s game is partially finished. How does it end? Share it with your friends!

Or: rule-changing bits have a spatial or temporal area of effect and must be earned or found; work together with friends in an online puzzle platformer wielding these programm-y “spells.”

One idea for framing the game: the whole world’s falling apart and broken, Lewis Carroll style. Everything’s backwards and incomplete, and the player is some kind of deity fighting the forces of entropy.

I don’t have the time or resources to make this thing, but it is fun to talk about. This progressive disclosure nugget is just one Idea, and I have a few more I’d like to toss around.

Particularly (since I’m a language nerd): what’s the language look like? I’ve been testing various systems by using them to make Settlers of Catan, Tetris, and Super Mario Bros, and I have some ideas at the intersection of visual, declarative, and event-driven programming, but that’s a topic I’ll leave until after further reading and experimentation.

Interested in discussing these topics? Please, write me.

Lifted out for visual brevity: a bonus appendix of further reading.

My explorations in this field have been led by invaluable discussions with Ken Ferry, Ian Henderson, Joe Osborn, Chris Parker, David Smith, and Patrick Thomson. Thanks guys, for the content of this and future related articles—and for putting up with this topic in every conversation for the last two months.

Screenshot of The Incredible Machine from MobyGames.

Introducing the Chord Torus

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:41:00 -0700

Dear RSS / Tumblr Dashboard readers: This article has a fair amount of special formatting and an audio clip; you may want to read it directly on my site.

Wait, don’t run! This musical honeycomb has fascinating properties.

I developed this thing as a tuning exercise for my old a cappella group with Mike Smith, Jon Napolitano, and Johannes Pulst-Korenberg. I doubt we’re the first to see it, but I ~~can’t~~ couldn’t¹ find any relevant papers, so.

Here’s an intervallic compass to help you orient yourself:

Pick any vertex on a hexagon, and the three neighboring tones form a valid major or minor triad. Because I’ve spelled every note with sharps to make the torus’s cyclic nature clear, these chords aren’t music-theory approved: C minor has E♭, not D♯. But they’re enharmonic.

You can move from any chord to any neighboring chord by moving just one note—a whole step if moving vertically; a half step if diagonally:

Moving like this, we’d wander a whiteboarded honeycomb as an exercise. Here’s what the above progression sounds like:

Your browser doesn’t support the tag, or else you’re viewing via an RSS reader or the Tumblr dashboard. Here’s the raw audio: Chord Progression.

But now you’re feeling betrayed, bereft. Where’s the torus here? I’m no 3D painter, so you’ll need a little imagination to assemble it.

We’ll use the figure at right.

Start by folding each green number onto its mate, forming a tube made of rings moving in major thirds.

Then do the same with the orange numbers, twisting the tube so that D connects to A and so on. You’ll form a donut that spirals around the circle of fifths as you trace its rim.

So? On this torus, distance corresponds directly to dissonance.

Take C. Here are the closest notes, in order of increasing distance:

F, G, G♯, E, A and D♯, making fourths, fifths, thirds, and sixths;
D, A♯, B and C♯, making seconds and sevenths;
and F♯, making a tritone.

You can break these groups down further if you realize that folding the torus distorted its distances, but even this naïve ordering is remarkable.

I should print giant glossy posters of this thing for music classrooms. I don’t know any other way to get an amateur choir to sing an improvised chord progression.

Update: Peter Schankman pointed me at the AXiS MIDI controllers, which use just this layout. They even have interactive demos.

AXiS also notes that standard chords have regular shapes, no matter the key.

They do seem to be missing dissonance increasing with distance, but that may be of interest only to math nerds like me.

Warily Eyeing the Unreliable State Machine

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:58:00 -0700

As this blog trundled along, coyly playing ignorant of its audience’s identity or interests, I’ve found myself pondering an architectural landmine whose vague bokeh have only just come into focus.

Sparkle’s own SUUpdater suffers from this problem. It’s long felt ugly to me, but I couldn’t pinpoint why until I ran across another class with this design at work and realized I’ve seen it often.

I’m calling a class an Unreliable State Machine if:

External forces (notifications, I/O, callers, etc) cause it to change state.
After finishing (succeeding or failing), it can be restarted and reused.
Only some internal state persists when the machine is reused.

I hope an example will make this a little less opaque.

Sparkle’s SUUpdater is clearly a state machine, and it has a ton of internal state. You fire off an update; it transforms that internal state over some tree of operations. Then next time you fire off an update, some of that state is reset, and some of it is reused. And worse, you can ask it for that state anytime, even between updates.

I’ve got to remember to reset the check timer, while I’ve got to remember to persist any decisions the user’s made. And this Lovecraftian state machine has multiple entrance and exit points.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust myself to do the right things (including all the special cases) in all those places—and with good reason! I have a good track history of messing it up, and I’ve fixed enough bugs in others’ Unreliable State Machines to know they do too.

I’m not sure which Extreme Proper Noun Design Pattern should be applied here. Maybe it’s enough to make the machines single-use, returning a final state and created with the relevant bits next time.

All this nonsense just makes me want to give up code with side-effects altogether, but people tend to laugh at me when I tell them that.

Update: Jim Roepcke suggests the State pattern, which is a good solution, though I suspect it’d feel awkward unless class definition is light-weight. Instead of state classes, one could store sets of closures.

Ditch Day: Building "Sense"

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:33:00 -0700

Tumblr Dashboard reader: this one’s a doozie, and it’s full of videos. You’d like this post better if you read it on my site.

On my first Ditch Day, I rappelled down an aeronautics building, hunted live uranium with a Geiger counter, had a 300-bolt roman candle melee, and sent an Air Force officer to the emergency room.

So when senior year rolled around, I naturally wanted to top that.

Sometime in May each year, Caltech seniors ditch classes. That would be a typical college tradition, but things escalated.

While they were away, underclassmen pranked seniors’ deserted dorms. One found a car assembled in his room; another’s was turned into a swimming pool. So the seniors built elaborate “stacks” to keep underclassmen out: steel and concrete walls, booby traps, vicious puzzles, and the like.

Over the decades, Ditch Day has mutated. It’s now an opportunity for seniors to create an unforgettable adventure for the friends they’ll soon leave behind. It’s by far the most anticipated day of the year.

The date of Ditch Day is a highly-guarded secret (it’s always “tomorrow”), but it’s clearly imminent when alumni arrive in droves to help the harried seniors.

Oh, and we were harried. I’d been working on my stack, “Sense,” as my full-time job for weeks with my math-major accomplice, Mike Smith.

The day before, I papered campus with strange posters to stir up confusion and discussion. At dinner, each senior made a theatrical announcement about his stack; I got up and described an incredibly sketchy string of facts I found while looking into the posters: “You probably shouldn’t sign any waivers from these guys.”

The morning of Ditch Day, the underclassmen awoke to seniors pounding on their doors and screaming: “Wake up, frosh! It’s Ditch Day!” Our courtyard was full of prospective adventures, with the flyer at the top of this post advertising mine.

There were eight tabs on the bottom of that flyer. So what did those Techers find when they called that phone number?

Our plot was driven by “Mindvision Laboratories,” a suspiciously boring corporation whose experiments were recently shut down by the FDA. They were looking for volunteers to be… off the record. Things got fairly more sinister as the day progressed.

After an opening video and breakfast, our stackers went through a nine-hour series of experiments challenging their senses. I’d like to highlight a few of my favorites and show you how we made them.

Balance / Telepathy

Our stackers arrived on a secluded rooftop between two taller buildings and found huge steel pipes forming a mobile above their heads. The rods were anchored to the opposing rooftops and hung akilter just out of reach.

Each pipe had a mercury tilt switch mounted at its center. When all three were level, a relay opened, and an audio clue to their next location played over loudspeakers.

Of course, we didn’t give instructions, here or in any other experiment, so part of the puzzle was: what is the puzzle?

By carefully coordinating who grabbed the bars where, they balanced the mobile and got their next location. But it also made a great toy, even after Ditch Day was over. Here are some friends playing with it:

Your browser does not support the tag. Here’s the file.

My original plan for building this was along the lines of “Andy finds some rope, ties some overhand knots.” I mentioned it to a rock-climbing alumnus, who gently pointed out that the system is about 2,000 lbs under load and Andy let me teach you about ropes please.

Taste

I gave my stackers a Flip and told them to record their day. This is the hour they spent failing to solve this puzzle, compressed to two minutes:

Your browser does not support the tag. Here’s the file.

Each student got a box of four gels, and each gel had three of the primary flavors: salt, sugar, acid, spice, and bitterness. Every box had an exact twin, and pairings corresponded to letters on a grid. When anagrammed, the letters spelled out the next location.

What about the clues they were reading? We didn’t give any instructions, but we left Remedial Envelopes stamped with “open by” times so they wouldn’t get too far behind—they had a full day ahead!

The gels were simply agar and food coloring, flavored with salt, sugar, vinegar, jalapeño, and orange peel. They were meant to be vile, but I still think these guys were being wusses about it.

Hearing

This one took place in the dark, so there are no good photos, but I’ll narrate it from the students’ perspective:

They arrived in a conference room dimly lit by a desk lamp. A sign read simply: “Hearing.” Two dozen speakers were mounted on the walls, ceiling, and furniture. Each had a button taped to it.

After some confusion, someone pressed a button. Suddenly, the light went out, it was pitch black, and the Ride of the Valkyries started playing out of one speaker.

That song is played by enormous speakers at 7:00 AM every finals week, and it’s not allowed to be played any other time. Techers have a rather violent ingrained reaction to it.

They scrambled in the dark, randomly pressing buttons until someone hit the one on the Ride’s speaker. Silence—then all the speakers started loudly playing snippets of Bach fugues, at random offsets and rapidly shifting volumes.

One speaker also played the Ride. After a few seconds, they all shouted “MISSED!” The stackers pressed more buttons, but the room kept yelling “WRONG! Seven to go.”

Eventually they figured out the challenge: they needed to hit the button on the speaker playing the Ride before it moved after a few seconds, seven times in a row. That required a great deal of coordination in a pitch black, very loud room full of hazardous rolling chairs.

The whole thing was run by a script on a computer with five sound cards. Coordinating 24 independent audio channels was… exciting. The buttons were connected to a USB keycoder.

How’d I have the computer turn off the desk lamp? I carefully placed the power strip’s switch in front of the CD drive and made it eject.

I used almost 1,500 feet of double- and triple-conductor wire for this room, but it was all worth it for this very sweet note they left me:

Your browser does not support the tag. Here’s the file.

Pain

This puzzle’s footage makes me giggle with disconcerting glee:

Your browser does not support the tag. Here’s the file.

Some of the pairs of nails were connected to 15 volts. When the stackers colored in the live grid squares, they got a location:

There are so many more stories—including the one where I made them take unlabeled pills (miraculin!) in a dank maintenance room—but I’ll stop here to save some of those virtual trees I’m chopping down.

So that evening, awake for 41 hours, all I could think was: “I wanna do it again!” My kids are gonna have the coolest birthday parties.

Balance/Telepathy photo by Michelle Hasier.
Video and flyer photo by Ilya Nepomnyashchiy.

Dr. Seuss: the Interhovse

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 19:56:00 -0700

I might have mentioned before that I live with a bunch of crazy people in Blacker Hovse. It’s kind of like a frat, I guess—just a lot nerdier.

Every year, we spend weeks building an elaborate party. This year’s was themed around Dr. Seuss and began at the edge of our lounge’s outdoor balcony, a couple dozen feet above the courtyard below.

In the air above it was the dance floor, spanning a multiple-level treehouse and colorful staircases which separated the heights.

My modest glass can only go so far in capturing the size of this construction, but at least I can show you some of the art, which covered basically every vertical surface at the party.

There are more photos, if you’re interested.

My part in all this nonsense? I made Alinea-style dry caramel shots, and, with the help of my friend transglutaminase, some Roast Beast:

It’s this sort of thing that will make me really miss Caltech.

Meet the Tempest Prognosticator

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:44:00 -0800

I’d like to introduce you to a superior olde-timey invention: the tempest prognosticator.

The prognosticator is essentially a very ornate leech-powered barometer created by George Merryweather in 1850.

Apparently, leeches become agitated as storms approach. The Doctor imprisoned a leech in each of twelve bottles; a whale-bone attached to a central bell is hung from the top. When the leeches climbed up the bottles, the bell would ring. The idea: if the bell rings incessantly, there’s probably a storm coming.

Supposedly, the prognosticator does actually work to some extent. But given that mercury barometers were invented in the seventeenth century, I’m not sure why the good Doctor bothered. I like to think it’s just a manifestation of the mad science archetype.

One more thing: as if this device’s name weren’t already wonderful enough, it was originally introduced as “An Atmospheric Electromagnetic Telegraph, conducted by Animal Instinct.”

Rankmaniac 2010: the Game!

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:57:36 -0800

Rankmaniac 2010: the Game!:

I made a game for you with my friends Daniel and Chris. It looks like:

It’s fun, but it’s also for science. How, you ask?

First, we’re capturing players’ results (time and tags needed) to learn which movie tags are most useful.

Second, we’re trying to win a silly Googlebombing contest on the term “rankmaniac 2010,” and we figured that we’d do it by making some interesting content rather than by using dirty SEO tricks.

So if you like the game, thank us by linking to it. Because Caltech needs to beat Carnegie Mellon. We don’t have football; we have this.

“As We May Think”

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 10:45:00 -0800

“As We May Think”:

This 1945 essay in The Atlantic Monthly is eerily prescient of the way the web works today, albeit via microfilm cameras and projectors.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

Vannevar Bush wrote this piece while director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development—the office which had just successfully completed the Manhattan Project.

Besides its proposal for the “memex” device itself, this essay riveted me because it so cleverly described a fundamental difference between books and our brains. On paper, information is necessarily linear: essentially, it’s an organized listing of facts. But your brain doesn’t store information that way. It’s associative.

That’s why we can find information on Wikipedia (and the web in general) so effectively: it’s organized more like our brains.

"We used to play Motherboard Roulette, where we’d take five–second turns with a soldering iron..."

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:50:50 -0800

“We used to play Motherboard Roulette, where we’d take five–second turns with a soldering iron trying to knock out a running computer. Of course, we’d agree on a few off-limit areas first. They used to last a few rounds! Man, they don’t make motherboards like they used to.”

- Matthew Maurer, a Caltech CS major; paraphrased.

Time Travel by the Numbers

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:25:00 -0800

So, you’ve got one of those time travel boxes from Primer, you go back in time, and now there’s two of you. But wait, what about mass conservation? The universe is now like 75kg more massive! We may be time-traveling, but we can’t go violating the rules willy-nilly.

My Caltech physicist buddy Chris figured out how much power those boxes would take to make a new 75kg person in 8 hours.

In units of Nagasaki explosions: 2.4 Hz.

Well-done but fork-tender?

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 22:28:00 -0800

I’m home for the holidays in St. Louis, it’s frickin’ cold, and that means it’s time for rich comfort food!

The first thing you should know: short ribs are one of my greatest weaknesses. So I picked some up, and as I looked around for new braising ideas, I started wondering why braises are ever tender given that we’re cooking them at a simmer—or even a boil! Order a well-done steak, and that’ll be inedibly tough at a mere 160°.

Thankfully, Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking knows all:

Under 120°: water’s inside muscle cells. The meat is slick and chewy.
120°–140°: myosin coagulates, squeezing water out of the cell and into the sheaths surrounding muscle fibers. Now your meat is “juicy.”
140°–150°: collagen denatures and shrinks, squeezing water out of the fibers and onto your pan. Now your meat is dry and dense.
160°+: collagen starts melting into gelatin, adding succulence. The fibers it held together will now fall apart easily.

So your meat can seem tender because it’s full of juice when you bite into it (120–140°), or it can seem tender because the dry, stiff fibers fall apart easily and ooze velvety gelatin (160°+).

Tough meats like short ribs are full of collagen and other connective tissues, so they’ll only be tender at the higher temperature. “Tender” meats like filet don’t have much collagen, so they won’t produce gelatin at high temperatures. They’ll just be dry.

Boiling your braise will just make the fibers tougher, so braise at a low simmer. That’ll still dissolve the collagen, though it’ll take longer.

Other braising tenderness tips: cool the meat in its braising liquid, and it will reabsorb some lost fluid. Slice the meat across the “grain” of muscle fibers, so the fibers in each bite are short.

Of course, if you cook your short ribs sous vide at 133° for long enough, the collagen will still melt, and your meat will still be rare.

Work Dilation

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:10:00 -0800

Maybe you’ve heard of Parkinson’s Law:

Work expands so as to fill the time allotted.

Jim Boyk, my very wise piano teacher, recently shared his converse:

Work contracts so as not to overflow the time allotted.

To provide a little experimental data, Jim told me the story of an emeritus Caltech math professor we’ll call John.

When John was just a little professor, his mother noticed him spending many hours toiling inefficiently on his homework, so she enacted an unorthodox restriction: he could only work for one hour a night.

John naturally thought his mother had become tyrannically anti-educational, and he struggled to finish his work in the time allotted. But he got more and more done each night until finally, he could do it all in an hour! Now he could spend all that extra time bettering himself in other ways—or just having fun.

Anyway, Jim told me I needed to be practicing way more efficiently, so he limited part of my work to 15 minutes a day (down from perhaps 30 or 45) and tasked me to even more done in that time.

So I started keeping a detailed log of my practice. Time records help me find my big time sinks, and notes keep me focused on the few measures that need work when I return the next day. I really do get more done now in half or a third the time!

I tried this idea on my finals, which just ended. Like most Caltech students, I’ll often end up spending all day “writing” a paper with nothing but a blank page to show for it until 2:00 AM. For my two final papers, I gave myself four hours to finish a first draft, and for once, I actually got them done in a reasonable timeframe.

Obviously, we do have hard limits at some point, but I’ve realized that I’m really bad at guessing where mine are.

Final Edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:24:41 -0800

Final Edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper:

Richard Rodriguez’s thoughtful essay has broader scope than its title might suggest: it mourns not only the decline of newspapers in general but also the loss of community in modern cities and the increasing “me”-ness of our generation.

It’s so full of disarming points, in fact, that this side-thought (not even a whole paragraph dedicated to it!) has kept my cogs spinning for days:

We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fiction”—Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.—two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry.

How do you decide which books to read or which movies to see? These things used to live and die by critical reviews, but now we see what Twitter thinks. Or just take the average. What used to matter was the authority of the reviewer: we trusted this one over the other because he was a reputable source.

Now when we’re picking from YouTube search results, we watch the videos with the most views, or with the highest ratings. But then look at the comments: you’re trusting these people’s opinions? Really?

Say you’re shopping for t-shirts on Amazon. “Showing 1 - 24 of 27,015 Results.” Your sorting options: price, newness, and average customer rating. The highest-reviewed shirt? Hanes Beefy-Tee—a.k.a. paper bag: the shirt.

When it comes to subjective details, does democratization of taste really make sense?

Here goes…

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:07:00 -0800

Exciting news: I’m joining the UIKit team at Apple.

With luck, this won’t mean I’m disappearing into an interminable void.

At a Secret Santa event, I got the oddest “pizza...

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:26:48 -0800

At a Secret Santa event, I got the oddest “pizza cutter” I’ve ever seen.

Idle Creativity

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:51:07 -0800

I’m not sure where the pros get their mojo, but for me, creativity is a background process.

I don’t sit around in brow-furrowed rumination, trying to think of great ideas or something really clever to say. No—I’m eating a sandwich, and suddenly: “holy crap, that cat should have a rocket-propelled scratching post!” I just can’t control that kind of brilliance.

When work piles up, my brain doesn’t have any idle cycles. It jumps directly from one task to another, so there’s no background processing. No creativity! And it feels like all the color and life has been sucked out of the world.

I don’t mind being stressed or doing lots of work or losing sleep, but I’ve been noticing that I’m a boring person when it happens!

"Finding Focus While Trying to Work"

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:51:53 -0700

"Finding Focus While Trying to Work":

Michael Angeles provides insightful techniques for focusing during a work day at a computer one click away from social networking and other distractions. The photo at left is by Caterina Fake from a whiteboard at Hunch.

He suggests reducing noise by turning off email and Twitter except for a few appointed times; RSS digestion services like Fever and Tabbloid to limit subscription weight; and a low threshold for unsubscription.

For focus, Michael likes having his computer nag (I might suggest Concentrate); having only one app visible at a time; and getting away from the computer when it’s architecture or thinking time.

I’ve been experimenting with a few of these suggestions for the past couple months, and I think it’s been helping. I feel like I’ve got so little time and so much I want to do that I need to fight for every minute of lucidity!

"chopped," Your Personal Iron Chef-Style Randomizer

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:28:00 -0700

"chopped," Your Personal Iron Chef-Style Randomizer :

chopped is very clever little site by Michael Hoy. It’s like Iron Chef but 5-way. More constraints do make it easier, especially if you split the results into multiple courses.

Recently, a door appeared in Blacker’s courtyard here at...

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:03:00 -0700

Recently, a door appeared in Blacker’s courtyard here at Caltech. In particular: a rotating darkroom door. Excellent for fort-building and frosh-trapping.

It’s a pretty common pastime here to root through the fruitful dumpsters at Caltech’s physical plant; other recent findings include: a GeForce 5-series video card, a caster-mounted concession stand, and a giant box full of toaster ovens.