Philosophistry

New Age healing is about to get a major scientific boost

2011-12-13T15:18:34-06:00

Really fascinating article in the New Yorker about recent advances in the study of placebos:

They have found, for example, that diazepam—more commonly known as Valium—has no discernible effect on anxiety unless a person knows he is taking it

Also:

This year, Harvard created an institute dedicated wholly to their study [of placebos], the Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter.

And:

In most cases, the larger the pill, the stronger the placebo effect. Two pills are better than one, and brand-name pills trump generics. Capsules are generally more effective than pills, and injections produce a more pronounced effect than either. There is even evidence to suggest that the color of medicine influences the way one responds to it: colored pills are more likely to relieve pain than white pills; blue pills help people sleep better than red pills; and green capsules are the best bet when it comes to anxiety medication

A takeaway I get from the article is that "healing is healing is healing." Whether it's shamanism, acupuncture, or Advil, it's still healing.

Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall, but I recommend checking out the New Yorker app on your iPad or picking up an issue at the library.

Do you believe in Astrology or not?

2011-12-13T14:38:11-06:00

Someone asked me whether I believe in Astrology or not. I do and I don't, but considering I created a tarot and a palm reading app, I figured I had to at least throw him a (New Age) bone. This is what I had to say:

The season in which a plant blooms has a lot to do with how it will develop for the rest of it's life. Likewise, shouldn't the same be true for humans? Possibly even more so considering how complex and social we are.

Figuring out the most electable Republican candidate using Intrade

2011-12-04T15:09:20-06:00

Intrade is a futures market where people bet real money on the likelihood of real-world events, like political outcomes. It's eerily accurate, and I follow it obsessively to get a real gauge on the changing fortunes of political candidates.

Today, I wondered if it's possible to use a basic conditional probability formula to determine which Republican candidate is most likely to beat Obama IF they win the Republican nomination. In other words, which candidate is the most "electable."

The formula I used is the following:

In layman's terms, the "probability of A given B" is equal to the "probability of A and B" divided by the "probability of just B." So to apply this to Intrade, treat A and B as winning the general election, and B as just winning the nomination. So you take the probability that a candidate will win the general election and divide it by the probability that they will win the Republican nomination. Following this formula, here's what I came up with:

The results make sense in a way. Jon Huntsman is very competent, gaffe-proof, scandal-free, and has major crossover appeal. Ron Paul also has crossover appeal it seems; whenever I present quotes from Ron Paul to my liberal friends they generally respond favorably.

Gingrich vs. Romney is interesting. I think while Romney may have more crossover appeal, he is too much like Obama (thanks to the hinging of Romneycare to Obamacare), and so whatever appeal he might get, Obama will have already siphoned it.

Gingrinch, on the other hand, is polarizing, and so if Republican sentiment is more positive than Democratic sentiment, he will be the one to seize it during the general election.

Should you kill bad guys in your dreams?

2011-12-02T11:26:03-06:00

(photo source)

Should you kill bad guys in your dreams? Sure, why not? They're not alive right? Well, you really only have two bases for this belief. One is that in your dreams, you remember having woken up before from a similar loopy world. You remember being in a place where there is no evidence of a dream world anywhere. And so you think to yourself, "I'll snap out of this, and none of it will exist anymore, therefore it's not real." So, you're 100% confident you can take down muggers or whoever you want with no regret. After all, there will be no material consequences in your waking world.

The second basis is that your dream world is fantastical and subject to your imagination, further proof it's not real. But lets deconstruct that. Its fantastical relative to our waking world, but why should that lead us to favor the waking world more? Isn't a world that is rigidly governed by rules, like the laws of physics, more insane than one without. In fact, it drives physicists to insane deductions to try to make it all unify and fit together. It drives us religiously insanse because we look around and think, "Wow, look at this order and perfection, its got to have been designed by some infinite genius." And then we kill each other over who is more right about the true nature of this genius, when really we're masking our own insecurities about these conclusions.

Also, so what if our dreams are subject to our imaginations? That's just another way of saying they're subject to our will. But isn't our waking world also subject to our will in a way. What if there is more of our waking world that is subject to our will than our brains let us believe. What if we have a neurochemical process that dopes us into forgetting the true extent of our influence. Evolutionarily, that'd make sense, since it'd help us from feeling burdened by responsibilty and guilt.

So the next time you decide to stab those monsters in your sleep, think twice. Or wake up.

Do animals have epiphanies in their dreams?

2011-12-02T11:23:50-06:00

(image source)

Oftentimes I have dreams where I think I'm much smarter than I really am. In them, I sometimes believe I've discovered the perfect story for the next Great American Novel. I can see all the characters, themes, and plotlines intersect into a joyous epiphany of literary wonderment. Then when I wake up, and try to write it all down, and it comes out as nonsensical spaghetti. It truly is a humbling moment.

Which makes me think, that since animals dream, do they have similar moments of epiphany? Does the female lion sleep and dream of talking to the father of her children, explaining in detail why she had to kick him out? Does she imagine herself standing upright and dancing with her friends? Does she see herself building a palace out of sticks for her children? Instead, she wakes up, in a bad mood, and swipes someone in the face.

The waking world is a dream world that is consistent enough for our psychic appetites

2011-12-02T11:22:05-06:00

(image source)

What if our dreams are tentative realities, and that choosing not to wake up is how we decide to keep them.

The discovery of quantum mechanics and the infinite multverse theory have become fodder for dream theorists. Perhaps dreams are samples of those infinite permutations of alternative universes, and when we wake up, that's really just the so-called "observation" that forces a choice of a world that is logically consistent, i.e. now, this, Earth, you in your job and objects that obey gravity.

Should've never woken up in the first place...

2011-12-02T11:20:41-06:00

(image source)

I woke up and thought to myself, "Man, I slept really well." Then I realized I was dreaming, woke up again, and to my dismay, realized I actually hadn't.

What was life like before life?

2011-11-27T16:32:43-06:00

A new picture is being formed of an Earth that was a giant mega-organism called LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor). LUCA is what came before single-celled bactera and complex eukayrotes (which became animals and plants). The idea is that the primordial soup of Earth was a giant melange of mostly non-working levers and gears (proteins, etc.), but dotted with some functional and self-sustaining loops of chemical factories. Genes were traded freely, there wasn't really competition yet between organisms, and the concept of a membrane hadn't solidified yet. In other words, it was a free-for-all mixture of automata and pseudo-automata waiting to develop enough patterns and templates to create the building blocks for more complex life.

This is how I visualize the precursors to life:

(From Conway's Game of Life)

(The Blue Ball Machine)

Fake 3D films score 13% lower on Rotten Tomatoes

2011-11-27T15:49:05-06:00

I run RealOrFake3D.com, a site that delineates "real" 3D films that were shot with 3D cameras, from "fake" 3D films that were up-converted to 3D in post-processing. I decided to take all the 2011 films that have been released, check their Rotten Tomatoes score, and see if I could find a pattern.

And to no surprise, fake 3D films scored lower, with an average of 46%, versus a 59% average for real 3D films. Here's the data:

Fake 3D films are contributing to the death of 3D. It's almost like the studios focus test their films, find out they're poor, then decide to up-convert to 3D to recuperate their expected losses.

Apparently James Cameron is going to pull out some special tricks for the re-release of Titanic in 3D, but you can't just magically extrapolate content from one eye to the other. There will always be an authenticity gap between real and fake 3D films, and I think moviegoers sense this intuitively.

What was it like to live among giants?

2011-11-27T15:16:12-06:00

(From the Bellagio Conservatory & Botanical Gardens)

Recently, I found myself staring in wonderment at these large horses made of leaves. It reminded me of being a child, feeling like a dwarf in the land of giants. It also reminded me that our ancestors lived among giant animals, and most likely rode horses as large as the ones I was looking at.

Here's bones of another giant animal our ancestors lived among:

(mega sloth bones from North America)

Which got me thinking, that a large arc of human history was about the destruction of giants. We spent much of our evolutionary history over-hunting large animals to extinction. We started out living in fear of the large ones, only to then develop tools and know-how to destroy them. This continued to the point until humans were finally in charge of the animal kingdom.

But recently, starting from around the invention of farming 10,000 years ago, we have found ourselves again in the land of giants. We've created structures and machines much larger than us. We've created societies and governments that have the power to destroy us at their will. Whereas before we were concerned about giant sloths or mammoths trampling our terrain, we are now afraid of cars hitting us or our infrastructure (electricity, sewage) breaking down and crippling us.

Which makes me wonder, will we ever again be the biggest kid on the block? Will the individual ever feel totally self-posessed? Was that period when there were no giants above humans just a transitory period of dominance on the way to us being forever dominated by our own creations?

The Pliability of Life: Salmon crossing a road and a bipedal dog

2011-11-23T15:10:41-06:00

What is the anatomical basis of inspiration?

2011-11-22T08:01:19-06:00

Terence McKenna, who is probably our most recent incarnation of Timothy Leary (or maybe he transcends Leary), had this interesting, imaginative thought about the history of Earth that mixes quantum physics, Christianity and alternative histories. It's a truly brilliant, inspired speculation. But what's interesting to me is the nature of inspired thought.

He said the idea came to him over the span of 15 seconds on a psychedelic trip he had recently.

What is a trip? Why is it that on trips, people often report these extremely profound experiences. But when people bring along a pen and paper, what they write down usually doesn't hold up later.

Or what about when we wake up from a "mind-blowing" dream. I've had dreams recently where I thought I had constructed the plot for the next Great American novel. But as I scribbled it down furiously upon waking, it seemed to lose it's magic.

Or what about when you're enraptured in a deep conversation with a friend. My friend Guru and I have often gotten into long digressions (1-2 hour long) on the phone, spanning all manner of topics including religion, evolution, history, sociology, interpersonal relations, and so on. I suggested we record our conversations one time, and after we did, the recording just didn't really sound that interesting.

I have a meta-memory of these experiences where I remember myself remembering how profound these ideas were. What is that measure of profundity? Is a willful desire for profound thought necessary to even have them? is it a numbers game (i.e. you have a hundred so-called profound thoughts, but only one is actually profound)? Where does it come from?

It seems to come from a similar part of the mind as insanity. Often, the clinically committed will ramble on with vividly constructed logic and supporting evidence, and it sounds like it's on the verge of being a profound insight. If it's related to insanity, then it sort of makes sense that ingesting psychoactive substances would induce the same effect, since psychoactive sort of make you temporarily insane.

New Project: Read On Wiki

2011-11-21T16:39:35-06:00

I've been really interested in personal information visualization. Heck, that's a big aspect of this blog, with the colored timeline that I have on the home page. I've expanded on this idea on a new project I'm cooking up called Read on Wiki.

Read on Wiki lets you create timelines of your browsing history on wikipedia. The tagline is, "You can tell a lot about a person by what they [Read on Wiki]pedia."

Ever been frustrated with trying to find work that you like?

2011-11-13T15:34:56-06:00

I just posted two letters from my upcoming book Dear Charlotte. One is from 2006, and pertains to a simple trick I used to get myself unstuck in the job hunt:

The next day, I got an email saying I got the job, and my mood did a 180. I started to see the positive. I kept thinking back to that list of sorted jobs, and I kept wondering, "What if there's a reason for all this? What if there's a reason this job was at the top of the list?" Then it dawned on me, that maybe by throwing myself into this formula, of just picking the most interesting kind of work at any given moment, I'm subconsciously walking down the road to a fulfilling career

The other letter is from the end of 2007 and pertains to my thought process after I ended my short-lived career in the video games industry:

I've taken so long to quit this job because I'm afraid that this is it. If this job--this "perfect" job--can't make me happy, then what job will ever make me happy? Am I doomed to non-employment because I hate everything? I keep having self-doubts, and I keep hearing my dad's words, "If you initially don't like something, you can learn to like it."

If scientific discovery is inevitable, do scientists live meaningful lives?

2011-11-07T13:22:36-06:00

A question I always have about working in technology/science is, What counts as a meaningful contribution? Because its easy to see that there's an inevitability to invention. Even if Einstein didn't figure out E=mc², someone else would have. Perhaps you could argue that the meaningful part is that he was an American, and that his science helped us win the war, which was a meaningful outcome. Or perhaps, even if someone else came up with the theory of relativity, it may have been decades later, and so Einstein gave us a 30 to 50-year headstart on scientific progress, and those extra years may be meaningful. Or the fact that he invented it makes him a role model, which is meaningful if you consider the higher number of children wanting to become scientists.

But these are all definitions of meaningfulness that are tangential to the actual discovery of the theory. Einstein's is a rare case, but I often wonder about the meaningfulness of smaller technological innovations, like the Internet, which also seem inevitable. The web browser, for example, was going to happen the year it happened, regardless of who made it or where it was made.

Steve Jobs makes for an interesting case study, because while there was an inevitability to the personal computer, or mp3 players, or touchscreen smartphones, there doesn't seem an inevitability to the way that Jobs made those products. Without Jobs, there may still be no awesome mp3 player, no phone that people love, and no easily usable operating system.

"What can I do or create, that if I wasn't born, would never happen?"

That's what I ask myself when I wonder about the meaning of what I do. I think there's a simpler, more colloquial expression that encapsulates the same idea: "make a difference."

(See Malcolm Gladwell's review of the Steve Jobs biography)

Relevant Books

Five Takeaways from Three Memoirists

2011-10-27T18:40:31-06:00

To help promote my upcoming book, Dear Charlotte, I'm blogging about writing tips and ideas. My first post is Five Takeaways from Three Memoirists:

I have the good fortune of living in a city with a massive book festival that comes by every year (The Texas Book Festival in Austin, TX). Last Saturday, I sat in on a session titled, "Memoir: When to Tell the Story," which was perfect because my new book is very much like a memoir. The panel included three esteemed authors with published memoirs, and I made mental notes of common themes.

Dear Charlotte Book, Coming Soon!

2011-10-09T17:00:32-06:00

Today I finished the first draft of my first book! I've been trying to write this for years, but only recently did I find the right format to carry it all the way. The title is Dear Charlotte: A Life of Self-Improvement. It's written as a series of letters to my friend Charlotte, who gave me my first self-help book when I was 14 years old. While these letters weren't actually written at the time that they're dated, the stories in them are real and describe my 15-year journey through self-improvement—for better or for worse. It comprises 80 letters so far, chronicling nearly the same number of human behavioral experiments, mediated by popular self-help books (like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People), self-help practices (like meditation), and many of my own unique approaches. It's got nearly 40,000 words so far, which will probably amount to 200 pages. I will be posting preview excerpts soon, but for now, I just wanted to share this milestone with you.

Lottery Numbers from Tarot Cards

2011-10-03T19:43:16-06:00

In order to help promote Tarot Pro for the iPhone, I created a free site for generating lotto numbers using Tarot Cards.

My other lottery number site, Timecube Lottery makes me a decent chunk of change per month, so I figured why not try doing the same for Tarot, which is a much bigger market.

Reverie on music streaming and YouTube

2011-08-29T13:10:32-06:00

I posted on Twitter the other day an observation, that all I've been listening to is Spotify and Pandora lately. That means all my music listening is streaming now. In some ways, this is not profound, because people go through stretches of only listening to the radio, which is streaming.

I think there was a point when owning an album was a big deal. It was an artifact to behold. You spent hard-earned money on it, and you just looked at the cover art while listening to it. This carried over to music piracy a little, and finding a download link to a full album gave you a little hit of triumph. This was a hold-over from the purchase-music days. By now, though, there's no accomplishment at all to music piracy. Just YouTube it. Just Google it. Just torrent it. Maybe the album is dead. Or it was dead 10 years ago, when Napster broke everything down for everybody.

But what I really want to highlight is when my friend Dusty and I played Spotify-tennis. I picked a song that I knew we both liked, then he followed up with a song similar to it. Then I followed with another song, and so on and so forth, like we were DJs. What's nice is that we were drawing from a shared box of vinyl, i.e. the entire Spotify catalog. We came up with some beautiful stretches of 80s/90s music of high pitched singers, like Madonna's "Lucky Star" or Kim Wilde's "Kids in America".

I wonder, though, how much of the Spotify-tennis was inspired by listening to so much Pandora. Listening to Pandora, in a way, is like floating down a stream of music. You don't know what bends or turns it will take, but you're curious. Or maybe it's more like a Markov (?) chain, where each new iteration feeds back into the system as a whole to change the chain going forward. I like the idea of upvoting your way down the rabbit hole. When you seed a station on Pandora, after 2-3 upvotes over 15 minutes, you get to the core of what musical itch you didn't know you were trying to scratch in the first place.

Which leads me to what I really want to talk about, which is this impromptu video play list I constructed at a party on Friday. There were five of us on couches at my friend's house, drinking wine around a TV with a Mac Mini, and it was 10pm. For some reason, I just wanted to stay in, while I could tell the group had a destiny of eventually going to a house party or a club or something. So I did my best to draw people into YouTube, and I plucked out video after video from my years-long memory of YouTube videos I've seen, all with music, and all interesting or notable in some way. I think if you're of a certain inclination, you will really enjoy watching these videos:

Anita O'Day (from Jazz on a Summer's Day)

Sandie Shaw - "Always Something There to Remind Me"

Wang Chung - "Dance Hall Days"

Elton John - "Border Song" (earliest surviving performance of Elton John)

"Walk it Out" (to Bob Fosse choreography)

Cocorosie - "Hairnet Paradise"

"Crazy" (Theremin version)

Chatroulette (Merton)

Chatroulette (Ben Folds)

"Womanizer" (ASL music video)

"You're So Gay" (ASL music video)

In a way, this list is a big giant ode to the medium of the Internet clip. It starts out with how great it is at ressurrecting old footage (Sandie Shaw, Elton John). It provides a platform for really creative remixes, drawing from vastly different sources (old variety show dance numbers and recent rap music in "Walk it Out"). It gives a platform for super-niche, rare, but wondrous and raw amateur performance (Cocorosie). More remixes (Theremin "Crazy" version).

The stretch on Chatroulette to me really is the pinnacle of what I think this medium is great for. For all the criticism people have of reality TV shows, the unscripted filming of amateurs has an art to it, and I think that art hits all the right numbers in those two Chatroulette videos. Those are all real people, all unscripted, and it provides us something that you simply can't sit down and just invent. It has to happen spontaneously.

And the last two I just threw in there because they're interesting to me. You didn't even know ASL music videos existed before this. Now you do. That's so often the reaction you get when watching a YouTube video emailed to you, "I didn't know this existed."

(I want to add an extra coda here. It pains me a little to sing the praises of YouTube. Each time I've blogged about it, the service reached yet another milestone. But at their first milestone, when they were looking to hire their first employee, I turned them down.)

Lucid Dreaming

2011-08-24T13:29:24-06:00

I'm writing a book about my journey through self-improvement. It chronicles around 70 notable instances, written as imagined letters to my friend Charlotte. Charlotte gave me Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People when I was 14, and that pretty much got me started on a life-long quest for personal betterment. Here's a letter I wrote today.

Date: July 22, 2003
Age: 21
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Subject: Lucid Dreaming

Hi Charlotte, so I'm back to Stanford after all. I'm living off-campus in my own apartment and taking summer courses to make up for the quarters I missed. I think the tipping point for my decision happened around my birthday in April, when I was withdrawing some cash and chatting with an attractive bank teller. She then asks me, "What do you do?" and the best response I could think of at the time was, "Nothing." So after six months of floundering at home and arguing with my parents, I realized that the easiest way to get rid of social pressure is to just finish school.

This summer in Palo Alto has been a trip. There's hardly anybody I know out here, so I'm mostly just watching movies. The most interesting one I saw recently is The Waking Life, which is about lucid dreaming. Lucid dreams are ones where you become aware that you're dreaming, which then enables you to control them. In lucid dreams, you essentially have a Star Trek holodeck at your disposal. All your fantasies materialize right there in super high definition. Everything feels as real as when you're awake. And when you do wake up, your memories of what just happened are so vivid, that you often can't distinguish them from memories in your real life.

It turns out there's a whole subcommunity with tried-and-true techniques for inducing lucid dreams. My favorite technique is the one that involves dream triggers. What you do is write down your dreams every morning, and then afterwards try to find common, recurring motifs. For example, I often see blue birds when I'm dreaming. Then, you commit to asking yourself a question every time you see your dream trigger (whether in real life or while dreaming). The question is simply, "Am I dreaming?" and if you are, excellent, you can start flying or you can morph the landscape or you can have tea with Einstein or whatever you want.

Because of my committment to this technique, my dream world is blurring into my waking world. I'll often find myself biking around Palo Alto and I'll spot a blue bird. I then ask myself if I'm dreaming, and half of the time I realize I am, after which my bike lifts off and I'm flying into the sky and on my way to a psychedelic adventure. The other half of the time, it turns out I'm here on planet Earth, and life goes on as usual. Which is such a strange pattern to have in your life. To be walking around, going about your business, and then regularly find yourself slipping away from it into an imaginarium.

So many people--many of whom work in the Bay Area--are toiling away at building virtual reality machines, trying to reach that Holy Grail where we can just plug into a fantasy world. But little do they know we have an all-natural tool, right our disposal, available to us every night of every day.

- Phil

Quantity, not quality, the factor in creative success

2011-05-15T16:25:51-06:00

Malcolm Gladwell writing in the New Yorker (subscription-only) makes the case that it's quantity, not quality, that distinguishes the successful creatives. The article is behind a paywall, but here's the good excerpt:

The psychologist Dean Simonton argues that this fecundity is often at the heart of what distinguishes the truly gifted. The difference between Bach and his forgotten peers isn't necessarily that he had a better ratio of hits to misses. The difference is that the mediocre might have a dozen ideas, while Bach, in his lifetime, created more than a thousand full-fledged musical compositions. A genius is a genius, Simonton maintains, because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great. "Quality", Simonton writes, is a "probabilistic function of quantity."

Simonton's point is that there is nothing neat and efficient about creativity. "The more successes there are," he says, "the more failures there are as well"—meaning that the person who had far more ideas than the rest of us will have far more bad ideas than the rest of us, too. This is why managing the creative process is so difficult. The making of the classic Rolling Stones album "Exile on Main Street" was an ordeal, Keith Richards writes in his new memoir, because the band had too many ideas. It had to fight from under an avalanche of mediocrity: "Head in the Toilet Blues," "Leather Jackets," "Windmill," "I Was Just a Country Boy," "Bent Green Needles," "Labour Pains," and "Pommes de Terre"—the last of which Richards explains with apologetic, "Well, we were in France at the time."

At one point, Richards quotes a friend, Jim Dickinson, remembering the origins of the song "Brown Sugar":

I watched Mick write the lyrics....He wrote it down as fast as he could move his hand. I'd never seen anything like it. He had one of those yellow legal pads, and he'd write a verse a page, just write a verse and then turn the page, and when he had three pages filled, they started to cut it. It was amazing.

Richards goes on to marvel, "It's unbelievable how prolific he was." Then he writes, "Sometimes you'd wonder how to turn the fucking tap off. The odd times he would come out with so many lyrics, you're crowding the airwaves, boy." Richards clearly saw himself as the creative steward of the Rolling Stones (only in a rock-and-roll band, by the way, can someone like Keith Richards perceive himself as the responsible one), and he came to understand that one of the hardest and most crucial prats of his job was to "turn the fucking tap off," to rein in Mick Jagger's incredible creative energy.

Oftentimes I've been hampered by worrying about whether this piece or another will become great, often at the expense of reducing how much I write. I think I've had it backwards.

Why HBO's Treme is more relevant than ever

2011-05-14T23:59:36-06:00

If this is going to be the century of disasters, then HBO's TV series Treme is the most honest preview of what life will be like.

Treme (pron: treh-MAY) is a drama about life in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I know, that doesn't sound like the most interesting premise, given that the Hurricane was six years ago, and that since then there have been the BP Oil Spill, the Haiti Earthquake, the Japanese Nuclear Incident, and the Tsunami. (i.e. there is some disaster fatigue). However, I believe the show is more relevant than ever right now.

First, you have to understand that Treme is written and produced by David Simon who created The Wire. The Wire has been hailed by many critics as the best TV show ever. The Wire is a procedural crime drama, but because of it's realism, it's nearly a documentary of The War on Drugs and its effects on everybody in touches. I know, that too doesn't sound that interesting of a premise, but the realism in the show is so deep that it will change your politics, even if you're a liberal. The show takes many different threads, from the police department, to the projects, to the mobster board room, to the City Hall, and shows how they're all connected. The feeling you are left with is reminiscent of watching Syriana, where you get this "ah-hah" moment as you behold the entire machine and it's inner-workings all-at-once, and you think to yourself, "I understand."

Likewise with Treme, it's just one realistic slice after another of the lives of different people living in New Orleans. You come away feeling like you understand what it would be like if a natural disaster were to run through your hometown. And rather than being some action-packed, racy Lord of the Flies carnival, where you have brother fighting brother in the chaos of a storm, the show takes place three months after Katrina, when people of all walks of life are trying to rebuild their lives.

This show is more relevant than ever right now, because I think this summer is going to be a big one for natural disasters. It's only the middle of May, and we've had three historic natural disasters this year in the US: 300+ tornadoes in the Midwest, a million+ acres of land on fire in West Texas, and the Mississippi River flooding. This summer will be really hot, possibly the hottest ever, as nine of the warmest years on record for the world have been in the last decade. The other night, 60 mph winds shook my building, while weather warnings told me to stay away from windows.

So what is life like after a natural disaster? I'll let you watch the show and draw your own conclusions. My current takeaways are that relationships matter a whole lot more and so does having good insurance. I'm working on both.

Two cents on Osama's death

2011-05-13T18:47:37-06:00

When people ask me what I think about Bin Laden getting whacked, I say two things and leave it at that. The first thing I say is simply that death is grim. I don't say that we shouldn't celebrate Bin Laden's death, but that it's simply a grim topic. While there's been a natural excitement in me to scarf down all the news articles and details about it, I don't feel the urge to run out in the streets with a flag. I can tell my body is enjoying the release of this man's soul, but I don't feel morally right celebrating it.

The second thing I mention is a scene I saw on television three days after the announcement. President Obama was giving an address at the Wounded Soldier's Ride, and in front of him were about thirty vets with missing legs or arms, on modified bikes ready to ride. As Obama spoke, they stood there motionless, and I felt an enormous sense of pride. For years they've seen this part of their body missing while the national sentiment has had somewhat of an ambivalent feeling toward the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now I'm not going to suggest that Osama's death alone justifies all the effort we put in, but I really enjoyed that moment, knowing that they could look at their wounds with unambiguous pride.

Do men and women really give advice differently?

2011-05-11T16:20:58-06:00

I have a gripe with the way we talk about male/female differences. An oft-repeated theme from Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus is how men like to solve problems while as women like to be heard. That to me, translates as men like to get things done while as women want to talk themselves to death. I always react to this as as presenting women as weak.

Disputing this idea offers a good lesson in how to give advice to anybody, regardless of gender. Both men and women want solutions and both men and women want to be heard. But more importantly, they want something in the middle, which is just a sound board.

This occurred to me when I was griping about work to a friend. Half my motivation for griping was to hear the way in which I talked about the problem. My thoughts had been bottled up and distorted for a week, and placing it in the medium of conversation helped filter and distill my mind. My second motivation was to simply get her reaction. If she reacted sourly, which she did, then I'd know my thinking was off-base. Her body tensed and she took a shrill tone of voice, which gave me pause about how I was handling the problem. However, she then proceeded to just talk about how she would handle it. I thought to myself, "You've barely even heard all the crucial details, how can you even know what to do next?" I would've preferred if she simply gave soft advice, maybe asking questions that started with "What if..." or "What happened when you tried..." Fortunately, we had to leave, and I was spared from what felt was going to be a lecture. She protested, "But I didn't give you any advice yet" and I responded, "Trust me, I've already gotten a lot out of this."

I think half of why we confide with friends is because talking is thinking. We also do it to get a reaction from someone who is not knee-deep in the same problem. Also, nobody wants to be told what to do. Both men and women have pride and want to own the solutions to their problems.

How to get rid of excuses and start meditating

2011-05-10T02:03:33-06:00

One of the most common questions I get from my post on the benefits of meditation is, "How do I stay committed to meditation?" The common excuse is, "Who has the time?" I usually counter with, "Well, who has time to exercise?" Arguably, meditation, which is a form of mental exercise, is more important than physical exercise. I started meditating 15 weeks ago, and since then, I haven't missed a single day's 30-minute session. I'm confident that I will be a lifelong meditator, and here's how I became this way.

Know what to expect

In exercise you can see muscles grow and fat disappear. But in meditation what do you see? I read a study showing that just eight weeks of daily meditation will increase gray matter densities in parts of the brain associated with empathy, stress-regulation, self-awareness, etc. Furthermore, the participants meditated for only an average of 27 minutes each day. I had read meditation studies before, but this was the first time I saw one laid out so specifically. This is a key lesson from the book Flow, about the need to have clear measurements and feedback. While I can't afford an MR scan, the study gave me confidence that all I had to do was duplicate those specific inputs (8 weeks x 27 minutes daily), and the output should be a relaxed, livelier, and happier new me.

Visualize how your program will play out

I then forwarded this study to a couple friends, and they suggested we form a group and try it on ourselves. Instead of jumping onboard immediately, though, I waffled for 24 hours. It turns out that those 24 hours were the most crucial in enhancing my commitment. In that time period, I reflected on my previous attempts at meditation. Why didn't I stick with it then? Why would this time be any different? So I visualized myself in the coming weeks taking the time, every morning to meditate. I tried to anticipate what scheduling challenges I would encounter, and how I would mitigate them. I mentally made room in my life for 30 minutes, every day, for eight weeks of just sitting.

By doing this, I also foresaw my initial excitement waning and excuses increasing. I then set out to defeat each excuse one-by-one.

Get rid of excuses

I don't have the time
If you can make time for the gym, you can make time for meditation. I spend an average of one-and-a-half hours every other day running and lifting weights. And since mental health is more important to total well-being that physical health, then clearly I can justify a half-hour for meditation.

It's a waste of time
Continuing on the exercise idea, I realized I live in a city that reveres working out. When you see people jogging and biking every day, you get conditioned into having positive associations about exercise. I imagine 95% of Austinites at the very least feel like they should be exercising. So what I had to do was condition myself to revere meditation. To do this, I visualized friends who were balanced, centered, and confident. I asked myself, "Wouldn't it be great to be as calm as so-and-so? Wouldn't it great to always respond with as much equipoise as so-and-so does?"

What's the point?
The words you use in your self-talk make a big difference. Our Western culture has little associated with the word "meditation." So I re-labeled it according to values that are already a part of my life. So instead of thinking about "meditation practice," I think about reducing neuroses, reducing overthinking, and achieving peace-of-mind and centeredness.

This is dumb
Another technique is to consider all the famous people who've meditated. I Googled around and discovered that classic figures like Einstein, Edison, Mozart and Wordsworth all practiced some form of meditation. Meditation can't be that dumb if these people sought it out.

I don't have the time (again)
What you quickly realize is how much time you save by meditating. So much time is wasted overanalyzing things. And so much time is wasted in recovering from those overanalyses. You will more than make up for the time you spend meditating when you minimize overthinking.

Join a group

After I felt confident my excuses were quieted, I joined my friends in meditating. We formed a Facebook group to share articles and support each other. We created a Google spreadsheet to tick off each day we meditated. Again, drawing from concepts in Flow, the spreadsheet provided a convenient visual representation of my progress. Seeing that column of consistent checkmarks grow was satisfying and motivating. Also the knowledge that others were watching my progress made me work harder to keep up.

Much has been written about the power of social reinforcement when it comes to commitment, and I believe the key is to join a small group of friends you highly respect. So consider a group of three close friends, like I did, as opposed to a group with whom you have weak ties.

Maintain your confidence

Another trick is at the beginning of each session, I close my eyes and evaluate my attitude toward meditation in general. Is my attitude positive? If not, then what are my excuses and how can I undo them? This daily attitude check is crucial to keeping consistent.

I also think beginning meditators often lose touch because they're unsure of the validity of their practice. This is why I picked up two meditation books, Wherever You Are There You Are and Mindfulness in Plain English (free online) so that I can compare and contrast their viewpoints. Although I'm not yet an expert on meditation, I've synthesized enough from various sources to have a sense of what meditation canon is about. You don't want to be sitting there asking yourself, "Am I doing it right?"

Just like with any disciplined habit, your meta-meditations are just as important as your actual meditations. This is especially true early on, as you transform from someone without the habit to someone with. If you can keep up meditating consistently for eight weeks, I guarantee you will keep it up for a very long time.

(Photo credit: Einar Einarsson Kvaran)

Thor and the future of 3D films

2011-05-09T03:01:43-06:00

Heimdall wishing he was filmed in native 3D

A year ago, I created RealOrFake3D.com as part of the backlash against poorly-done 3D movies. This was around the time Clash of the Titans came out, which performed poorly in the US and was slammed critics (28% on Rotten Tomatoes). Most of the reviews said it was worse in 3D, as the surreal pop-up book effects and in-your-face swords and doodads were a distraction. That's what happens when you film a movie in 2D and rush it overseas to be converted to 3D. You need two eyes worth of content from two cameras to really get that native 3D film feel. You need to imagine the film from the ground-up for a 3D-theater.

Disgusted with the 3D-conversion movement, I researched all upcoming movies and made a list separating the ones that were shot natively with 3D cameras and the ones that weren't. I've been updating the list for a year now, and I've noticed some trends. Last year, the ratio between real to fake 3D movies was roughly 1-to-1. This year, the real 3D films outnumber the fake ones 3-to-1. And so it almost seems like there's a trend toward a future with no 3D conversions. This is what I believed until I saw Thor. Thor is the biggest 3D wool-pulled-over-your-eyes. This movie will signify when Hollywood finally got 3D conversions right, and by right I mean horribly wrong for moviegoers.

Go watch Thor and alternate closing each eye, and you'll see that the distance between near and far objects stays the same. For example, a tree in the background that's a foot on-screen to the left of Natalie Portman's face is the same distance away in both eyes. Which is smart. The artists weren't aggressive in their 3D conversion. They skipped extruding challenging features, like the human body or faces, and instead tweaked landscapes and towers, stuff that was already set on simple backgrounds. In many of the motion-blurred shots, the 3D was faked by rapidly alternating the streaks between each eye so you can't notice any errors. Also, atmospheric effects, like snow, were added in 3D to scenes that were otherwise flat, so that the audience consistently feels like they're in a 3D movie.

So instead of trying to pretend that it's the real deal, the filmmakers give you just enough 3D to make you forget you spent the extra bucks for it, but not so much that you notice the flaws. The result is a $66 million opening weekend, a 78% on Rotten Tomatoes, and few critics talking about the 3D. This is a big win for Hollywood.

The problem is that it's still a waste of money for the consumer. The 3D did not add anything to the moviegoing experience. I got no heightened sense of atmosphere, which is a shame considering how gorgeous the Norse home of Asgard was, with its golden spires and iridescent cosmic bridges. Also, a good native 3D film will make the screen feel twice as large because of how much more immersed you feel. For Thor, however, the opposite was true, as I felt a desire to dive in and inhabit the space, only to be pushed away by the flatness of most of the scenes.

So will this mean more fake 3D films in the future? I don't know. On the one hand, the stigma from Clash already set the wheels in motion to abandon the practice. On the other hand, I just saw a rash of German 3D Blu-Rays re-releases (like Dune and Running Man) slip under the radar, as if Hollywood is market-testing conversions to see if they can get extra money from old hits. And oddly enough, the sequel to Clash, Wrath of the Titans will be converted to 3D after all.

So the future for 3D films is once again murky. Who knows, maybe things will change after Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Martin Scorsese's upcoming Hugo Cabret. It will be up to directors who are willing to push the limits of what 3D can do, before we can really take it seriously.

How 15 minutes saved me $1,000 in car insurance

2011-03-28T23:42:55-06:00

I never thought I'd say this, but I love Texas. Texas is the only state that has pay "by the mile" auto insurance. For the Texas minimum plus collision coverage I just bought, I'm paying $100 to cover 1,000 miles via MileMeter. Ever since I've been riding my bicycle to work, I've been driving my car an average of 20 miles a week, which comes to 520 miles for a 6-month period. And now that I'm on a metered insurance, I bet I'll even drive less. That means for the entire year, I'll pay no more than $200. Previously, I was paying about $1,200 through GEICO.

The sign-up process for MileMeter was super-simple. From start-to-finish it took me 10 minutes. All you have to do is take a photo with both your driver's license and odometer in the same shot.

Are there any catches? Well, unlike GEICO, MileMeter's claims office isn't open 24 hours a day. However, unlike GEICO, their complaint index is 0, whereas GEICO's is 1.52. That means GEICO has a 52% higher rate than the average auto insurance company for justified complaints into the Texas Department of Insurance. MileMeter didn't have any complaints in 2009. (Granted, they only had 317 insured that year).

And overall the company just feels right. Check out this New York Times video of the founder discussing the early days of the company. Cool fact: they got early funding from Amazon, which has been known to invest in companies that gel with their unstated mission of excellent customer service (i.e. Zappos).

I don't work for MileMeter, but I love reporting on great user experiences, especially when it comes to transportation. I've also been an avid fan of Car2go in Austin, which provides cheap pay-as-you-go carsharing. With MileMeter, Car2go, and my trusty bicycle, I feel like I'm truly living out the future of transportation.

The title of this post says 15 minutes. It took me 10 minutes to sign up for MileMeter and 5 minutes to cancel GEICO. To GEICO's credit, canceling was really easy.

The Big Wait: Trying not to get stressed-out for SXSW

2011-03-06T20:14:10-06:00

"Life is what happens while you're waiting for moments that never come."

I've been thinking about that quote lately as SXSW fever picks up here in Austin. The whole town turns into a giant carnival. It's interesting having a front row seat as a resident, but it's even more interesting being inside the head of someone in the high-tech software industry. Among tech starters, there is this pervasive chase. You have a desire to see your company and product on TechCrunch. You desire to one day get bought out by Google. Or even better, to one day reject an offer from Google so you can IPO for something bigger. This is the Big Wait in the tech community. The wait for the Big Win.

While there is the Big Wait, there are smaller Waits that occur in the life of a tech starter. You have conventions peppered throughout the year. You have CES or you have some start-up expo or some VC pitch or some YCombinator demo. SXSW is a big one, and if I close my eyes for a second I can visualize all my comrades in Silicon Valley clocking in on a Sunday night, under flourescent lights, trying to get more headway on their deadlines. If they don't, their President or VP or whoever will look like a fool on demoday during their panel, and The World Will End.

This mindset is inculcated early, in the Computer Science departments at the best universities across the country. In the Computer Science program at Stanford for example, you have no life, and you're often required to pull all-nighters. At the time I was a student, the major required 114 units to finish (while the average major was about 65), and their units are about twice as demanding as ordinary units in terms of time committment. The psycology of those students is that if they can ace this program, or if they can hack it as a CS major at Stanford, then that'll bring them one step closer to some tech-titan-holy-grail-riding-down-Sand-Hill-Road-in-a-Lotus-buying-a-mega-condo-in-Pac-Heights-not-having-to-work-for-my-rest-of-my-life.

Despite all the open talk about how passionate these programmers are about their products, I have to remind myself that it's just a proxy fight for a paper chase. It's so easy to get intoxicated in the seemingly perfect blend between your love of programming and the rapid results you get. But that shouldn't become your whole life. I like to say that I'm immersed in technology, but not consumed by it. But the fact is, I am consumed by my work. I wake up at 4am thinking about some feature that if I just got done right that minute, my product would improve by leaps and bounds and I'll get one step closer to The Dream.

But this weekend I'm being good. I've got a billion features I could get done for SXSW to make The Sweetest Impact Ever, but I'm not. Lately I've been meditating on the thought that my work-habits have slowly made me become like Them. By Them, I'm referring to the legion of clones that arrive for SXSW. You can't notice that they're clones just by looking at them. After all, the SXSW fashion is all about throwing an individualized dash of hipster in with your geek. No, what makes you a clone is when you and your buzzwords are one and the same.

Living and breathing this stuff is revered in the tech culture. But I have to remind myself it's not a life.

I found the quote from The Wire. Jimmy comes in to work on the weekend, and Lester has some wise words for him:

What's it like getting your DNA results back from 23andMe

2011-02-23T01:30:39-06:00

I have in my inbox an email from 23andMe with the subject line, "Your Genetic Profile is Ready." I was planning on going to bed, but now I can't, knowing this email is sitting here. I've been waiting for this for 6-8 weeks, which is how long they said it would take to process my DNA sample and conduct a genetic profile. Supposedly this will tell me if I have any genetic defects that may lead me to die early. I know, it sounds morbid. And to think, I asked this for a Christmas present. But I'm not that worried. My friend got his profile a week ago, and it only told him funny, but forgettable stuff, along the lines that he might have an allergy to rosemary. But still, I'm a little anxious, and I want to capture my state of mind before and after opening this email.

Rewind back to mid-December, and this friend mentioned off-hand that he was going to get his DNA profiled for $100. My first thought was, "Cool, I want that!" and the timing was perfect since my parents had asked me what I wanted for Christmas. When I visited them for the holidays, I mentioned I wanted my DNA examined, and then they looked at me funny. "Are you sure you want that. Not clothes or anything?" my mom asked. And for the first time I actually considered the downsides to it. If I had some hidden terminal genetic defect, would I want to know? I told my parents I'd sleep on it.

Now you'd think I'd draw from philosophy to make my decision, but instead I drew from short-cut responses. My response was, "Screw it, why not." I almost viewed it like you would a fire walk. In a fire walk, you're informed that it won't harm you, but you're scared anyway. The only way through is to tell yourself, "Screw it, I'm doing it anyway." Likewise, I want to believe that knowledge and information, while possibly scary, are ultimately harmless. I read a study showing that depressed people often have more realistic perceptions of reality than happy people, and so perhaps that implies it's better to stay in the dark. But my response is that the pursuit of reality makes me happy. I want to be happy in spite of reality.

And so as I'm typing this blog post in one window, in the next window is the email with my results. I could just delete it right now and forget about it. But no, I stand by my initial sentiment. I want to know. So here goes. Opening the email... now.

"I should have recorded a reaction video," is the first thing that comes to mind. There is the biggest WTF expression on my face right now. The first thing that hits me is the report on elevated disease risks. I see five items on the page, but the names are all blurry because I'm afraid to read them and there is a distracting link above. It says, "You have one locked report waiting for you, do you want to unlock it?" You damned right I do. Then it says, "Unlocking report.... the report is about Parkinson's Disease. Do you want to see your results?" What do you think?? But then I click again, and alas, there is nothing unusual about my risk profile for it.

After that little heart attack, I go back and process the names of the five diseases that I have an elevated risk for. And you know what, it's not bad. First of all, my risks are only, in the worst case, 1.90x the average risk. And second of all, the five diseases paint a picture of what I imagine old age to be like anyway, with random problems flaring up. These things won't affect me until thirty years from now, so who knows what advances to medicine will happen in that time frame. Plus, the website provides information on how to prevent those diseases and/or mitigate the diseases through early diagnosis.

And now I'm starting to feel good. I'm actually having fun with the site. I click under "Carrier Status," and there's nothing interesting, just the phrase, "Variant Absent" repeated over and over again, which is good. I then look under "Drug Response," and it says there's an increased sensitivity to Warfarin, which is a blood thinning drug. Cool, good to know. I click on "Traits," and it has some random assessments. For example, it says that I'm a "Likely Sprinter," which jives with the fact I did cross-country in High School. However, I don't really run anymore, so it's kind of a useless analysis. It's still a fun read, though, like getting a palm or tarot reading.

There's a link for "Maternal Line" and "Paternal Line." I click on "Maternal Line," and it shows a map of my Maternal Haplogroup. Apparently this report thinks my mom has a lot of Native American in her bloodline. My mom was born in Philippines, and there is some light coloring there, but all of North America is colored the most. There is, though, some coloring in China and Malaysia. My mom claims Chinese heritage, and Filipinos have a lot of Polynesian traits, so perhaps this is correct. I then visit the "Paternal Line" page and that is spot on, with lots of color in India and Europe. My dad was born in a Western part of India which has historically been a cross-roads of cultures.

So now I'm just clicking around aimlessly, lost in an infoviz jungle, and ultimately glad I bought this. In hindsight, this is a convenient judgment because I didn't discover something that would kill me in ten years. But the odds of anybody discovering a surprise like this is too low to be worried about. The $100 was well-spent if it means an early diagnosis for any of these diseases. Plus, since I have a 1-year subscription to their service, they'll update it with new disease risks as they're discovered.

And just like that, I'm through the fire walk. The information about what would kill me ultimately did not kill me.

Why is Scientology so successful?

2011-02-20T12:46:57-06:00

There's a really interesting article in the New Yorker about Scientology. The focus is on Paul Haggis, probably the most successful writer in Hollywood, who left the Church a few years ago and is becoming increasingly vocal about why he left.

But if the foreground of the article is about the vile and inauthentic practices of Scientology, the background is its success story. How is it that, in the age of Google, when people can easily learn about problems in the Church, that Scientology is still growing? My belief is that it's suceeding because it works for many people, and it does so by repackaging cognitive therapy, alternative medicine, and even some bits of meditation, into a traditional religious apparatus.

If I had to do an informal word cloud on the article, I'd put the word "auditing" on top. The process of auditing, from what little I know about it, sounds very similar to cognitive therapy. The point of an auditing session is to sit down and think about a negative stimulus, and remember a time before when you didn't feel that way. You keep doing this until the negative stimulus ceases to have a hold on you. In other words, you continually revise your perception of the negative stimulus until you cease to perceive it in a negative way. This is essentially what happens in cognitive therapy. But instead of calling it "auditing," cognitive therapists call it disputing, where you dispute distorted perceptions about your life.

Another common word I read is "Clear," which sounds like the clear-headed feeling you're supposed to get from meditation. The goal of Scientology is to be Clear. Scientologists plug into an E-meter, which is essentially a polygraph, which is also essentially a measure for stress, anxiety, and tension. I imagine that being plugged into that, and watching a dial swing up and down, becomes a form of measured meditation. If the dial is down for a long period of time, you've achieved some long period of relaxation. This would probably be the same effect you'd see if you plugged an E-meter to a meditating monk.

And as for alternative medicine, the Scientology way for treating sickness is to use the power of thought combined with vitamins and supplements. There is a segment in the article talking about a 5-hour-long sauna treatment combined with high amounts of niacin that's supposed to cleanse toxins from your body. Paul Haggis said that he never felt better in his life than when he did this. Actress Kristie Alley reportedly got cured of her cocaine addiction through this process, and she says that she'd be dead if it wasn't for it. Other adherents report similar physical awakenings that remind me of stories I've seen posted on herbal remedy forums.

Paul Haggis says that what initially drew him to Scientology was his attraction to the underdog. Scientology presents itself as fighting Big Pharma and the APA (American Psychological Association), and their conspirational words resonate to a lot of people who are skeptical about glossy-eyed interpretations of modern medical and psychological advancement. But for all of Scientology's talk about how psychiatrists are evil, the use of auditing and E-meters is its own distilled version of psychotherapy. And when it comes to medicine, if you dabble in terms like niacin or "cleansing toxins," then you can't tell me you're not practicing a form of medicine on yourself.