Two things were discussed in some depth today with Travis. Our long term goals, and the fact that we both think our writing is shit.

On the first, we share the desire for financial independence (ten million) by the time we’re 30 - the reach goal is by 27. Opens ourselves up to full freedom and the ability to move forward on the big pursuits of our lives. Furthermore for me, I hold the desire to master a scientific or technical field and contribute to it meaningfully in some way. And to build something, create something. That’s about it. We just need to build something.

On writing, there was an interesting post in the NY Times Magazine a while back written by its editor, Hugo Lindgren

Essentially, the article rants about how Hugo never dreamed that he would end up as an editor for so many years - it was at best a temporary job before he wrote the Next Great American Novel (or TV show...

Recently I came to the conclusion that quite possibly my most creative and ingenious accomplishments have been realized in the pursuit of free and cheap stuff. A ‘sweet deal’, as I’ve been told is my trademark catchphrase.

As I came to this epiphany, I did a broad tally of the worth of all the free and extremely cheap shit I’ve gotten, and the overall value is comfortably into the five figures.

That comes contrary to the popular belief even I myself have held that generally scrounging up good deals one little thing at a time isn’t really that much of a money-saver – it’s far more worthwhile just to keep a minimalistic profile and have good spending habits.

It seems to generally follow the Pareto principle, with the vast majority of the earnings/savings coming from a few particularly sweet deals.

I think this may, perhaps, be an exploration into why the 80% of effort that contributes...

Many impressive things have been done in the name of religion, but I stumbled upon one of the most striking the other day. For 40 years, one Russian family of five had voluntarily cut off all human contact and lived in isolation in the frigidly cold taiga. Karp Lykov, the patriarch of the family, had been an Old Believer and when the Old Believers were persecuted in the 1930s, he decided that rather than renounce his religion he would escape into the taiga along with his wife and two children.

They eked out a bleak existence for over 40 years before being rediscovered by a team of Russian scientists. Karp’s wife died of starvation just years into their exile, and by the time they had been found again they were primarily subsisting off potatoes, rye, and hemp seeds as they had long lost the ability to cook food after their metal pots had rusted beyond use.

Shortly after contact all but...

I love being able to write whatever the hell I want. Today’s post is a motley collection of questions I’ve sporadically been recording in Evernote. This began at the Science World in Vancouver I’m fairly certain.

It’s mostly going to be an exposition on how ignorant I am of physics and science at large. If anyone has answers I’d love to learn them.

9/24/12 Questions:

• Why does light move?
• Why does water have waves?
• How are photons created?
• Why does light travel at exactly the speed it does and what causes that?
• How does light carry/transmit information in a fiber optic cable?
• Why are plants green? Why do they prefer to reflect green light?
• Why do plants turn brown from green? (wrote these questions without access to the internets)
• How do clouds form?
• How does rain occur?
• How does a combustion engine work?
• Why do trees invest in many small leaves and why do some choose small leaves...

This continues a general trend I have on writing about what’s presently pertinent in my life. This week’s ending post, hence, can be about nothing other than procrastination, as that’s all I managed to do this week.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon this

And just a bit before that, I stumbled on this when Aaron died

I’ve always been pretty sensitive about my productivity and have had a lifelong habit of procrastination, but after the great work last week this week came as a total shock to me. With the help of drawkcab, weekly goals, and no more video games or TV, I had started to believe that I was on an upward trend and that there would be no real reason or inclination to procrastinate in the future.

For one reason or other, I was wrong. Grossly wrong, really. Until today, and only for a fraction of today, I’ve managed to accomplish almost nothing this week.

At first I thought it...

For the past 13 days I’ve been doing spaced repetition studying as part of my learning regimen on Drawkcab.

I’ve been exposed to SRS before - I used SuperMemo for a brief period of time back at Harvard, but was unable to stick with it and found the amount of time necessary for inputting flash cards to be too great of a barrier to entry for me. The learning curve for simply using the software was quite steep as well.

While I will extoll the magnificence that is SRS, I won’t go into much detail about the reasoning behind the methodology. For that, check out SuperMemo and Derek Sivers’ post

Some things have changed since the last time I’ve crossed paths with SRS, and some things haven’t. It still takes inordinately long to input flashcards (spent over 5 hours today editing Tynan’s Japanese deck), but the process has been made inexpressably more streamlined and simple by Anki’s note...

I’ve only been off my sleep schedule once this week, and that was yesterday. I stayed up until 3am reading this one thread

It chronicles the life of sk8r_rat as a ‘streetie’ in Australia over the span of six years, starting from when she was 17 in 2005 through to the end of 2010.

Apparently she left home because her twin sister would beat her every morning and the psychological torment of having to interact with her sister all day at school, work and home while pretending nothing was wrong and being unable to tell anyone else in her family about it under the belief that they wouldn’t believe her.

She first tried staying with friends, until she wore out her stay after about two months. Then she went to a camp which lasted for a week, but was unfortunately kicked out at the end after the director called home and her mother denied the domestic violence and claimed she could come home...

So two things related today only entirely incidentally by the color blue.

First thing is the Blue Eyed Islanders Puzzle, which I first chanced upon a year or two ago at xkcd and then here at Terry Tao’s site

I promptly proceeded to give up on the puzzle and read the solution, be thoroughly impressed by it, and forget it.

While reading ahead last week in Spivak, I noticed that problem 27 in Chapter 2 was almost exactly the same thing, albeit with a different scenario regarding math professors who resign from their posts once they become aware of errors in their published works and one visiting professor who is out to get revenge on all of the other professors for not offering his a position at the university. Kind of awesome.

In any case, this caused me to revisit the puzzle, and this time attempt to solve it in earnest (since I had entirely forgotten the solution, as so far as my...

It’s been almost half a year since I began tracking my daily progress and this past year has flown by without much pause for reflection, so I figured now’s a fairly good time to delineate some of the thoughts I’ve been forming in my mind.

First, a reflection on forming new habits and discipline. I’ve been able to make tremendously more progress on forming new habits/ending detrimental old ones since having set in place the pivotal foundational structure of drawkcab. Having weekly goals and daily progress reports has helped immensely in keeping me accountable, even when no one’s watching. The threat of having to donate money to the BGEA has also kept me rather limber on my toes, though I believe I’ve contributed at least $90 to their coffers, and quite possibly $110.

There are quite a few examples of things I’ve been able to pick up and maintain that I’ve previously attempted to pick...