2019 Week 26: 6 Month Review

Short version: After attempting (and failing) to write a blog post each week for the past 6 months, I look back on those posts and reflect.

Long version:

Identity and Expectation

A realisation occurred to me whilst thinking about the unfinished drafts for this blog. Fitness, particularly competitive fitness, is not a core part of my identity, and so it does not threaten my ego to post slow times on parkrun. By being comfortable running slowly, I run more, and in running more, I run faster. Being comfortable with being a slow runner makes me a faster runner. The ability to understand difficult concepts, and to communicate effectively, is a core part of my identity. This means being unable to understand difficult concepts, and being unable to write well, does hurt my ego. If I am insecure about these aspects, I read fewer scientific papers, I write fewer blog posts, and the result is I do not improve in these areas. The lack of progress makes me more insecure, and a cycle of procrastination begins.

The solution, therefore, is to be comfortable with not understanding, or in the case of this blog, to be comfortable writing poorly. The purpose I have identified, in attempting to write each week rather than each time I have something interesting or insightful, is a need to practice writing regularly, not a need to demonstrate the skill of writing. To be able to write more regularly, I need to stay true to that purpose, and not be swayed my the desire to be interesting, insightful, or demonstrate a level of skill I have yet to achieve.

With that in mind I post this unfinished, and hope to take time when I am up to date to examine the first 25 posts of 2019, and identify what I have done well, and what I need to improve on, as I focus my efforts on more regular content in the 26 posts to come.

Posts I liked:

The short summaries of papers from Week 8 was fun to write, but regrettably shallow. Although not a weekly blog post, I was happy with my comprehensive first race report. Writing about diet and alcohol had a real effect in my life; it made it easier to hold myself to my decision in the face of perceived social pressure. I got stuck for a while trying to write about video games, but overcoming that was useful to me in understanding my relationship with that form of entertainment. Week 15’s Minimalism felt reasonably cohesive.

Posts I did not like:

The most common mistake I see in my writing is the use of unnecessarily complex sentences. Phrases like “much of the time” instead of “often”. I would guess the reasons for this are 1) a lack of consideration and technique, 2) attempting to be precise for fear of being misunderstood and 3) an affectation in order to appear intelligent. Ultimately the goal of writing is to communicate. To be succinct first requires the ideas themselves to be coherent, and testing my ideas by attempting to write about them has helped me think more clearly. In a limited time, some ideas never become coherent, and the resulting posts are much weaker. For example, in Week 21 I didn’t understand my own conclusions about marriage or Romania, and so I feel the writing suffered. The book report in Week 7 was never written, and I cannot help but feel a tinge of shame when I think about it.

Photos from the Week

2019 Week 25: Advice

Short version: Taking advice is not an easy skill to master. I ought to listen to the advice itself rather than assume its validity based on the person offering it.

Long version:

Advice

I have a bad habit when taking advice. I find it very difficult to listen when the advice comes from someone who does not follow that advice themselves. This is a sort of reverse authority bias, whereby I ignore good information that ought to be taken on it’s own merit. An intuitive example is the sporting one, a coach might study the tactics and strategy of a game, know their players and those of the opposition, the biomechanics of the body, and about nutrition and rehabilitation, and yet be themselves at a poor level of fitness. Thereby they might espouse accurate, useful, and ultimately critical advice, whilst being a terrible player themselves. Sport is also a good example of my bias at the group level, as often it takes skill in the activity to earn enough respect to be in a position to offer advice.

Further, I can find myself confronting the person giving me advice if I feel they are not being consistent to the underlying principle. This often comes across as confrontational, which is not how one should approach an offer of help (of which giving advice is a type). Even if it is not a direct confrontation, by challenging the person I distract myself away from considering the advice, and how it might address my own inadequacies. Seen from this perspective the motivation to react this way is obvious: it is much more comfortable to see someone elses weaknesses than our own. Conversely, once accepted and understood, it is only our own weaknesses that we are able to correct.

Confidence vs. Persistence

I am learning from the beginners rowing course, that while being confident is helpful (it prevents unnecessary hesitation, lowers stress, and makes the whole process more enjoyable), persistence (actual time practicing a skill, making it automatic) helps more.

Photos from the Week

2019 Week 24: Vitamins

Short version: Vitamins are important, but confusing. I am learning to row.

Long version:

Vital Amines

The discovery of chemicals needed to sustain animals (including humans) other than minerals (e.g. salt) and the three macro-nutrients (protein, carbohydrates, and fats) is described in this paper. The term vitamins itself was coined by Casimir Funk who formed the portmanteau from Vital Amines. Particularly interesting to me was learning that the advent of the highly useful germ theory of disease led to the assumption that conditions caused by vitamin deficits (e.g. scurvy) were also caused by unknown pathogens, resulting in debates around the existence of these other nutritional compounds. The Wikipedia list of vitamins gives some chemical and medical insight into vitamins. Historically it seems that improvements in chemical extraction, purification, and structural determination led to the intermediate letter based classification we still use today, despite a more precise chemical understanding of these compounds having been achieved.

Also, multivitamins probably don’t do anything useful. Although, in the UK Vitamin D supplementation is useful in certain circumstances, especially winter.

Learning to Row

I am learning to row with City of Oxford Rowing Club. This was the second week of the six week beginners program, and below are photos of our second outing.

Photos from the Week

2019 Week 23: Yams

Short version: Waitrose is getting rid of some of their packaging, but didn’t stock yams.

Long version:

British Supermarkets

The United Kingdom has a much more diverse supermarket landscape than the Australian duopoly I grew up with. The British landscape is tiered, with M&S and Waitrose as the expensive, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Tesco as the middle, and Aldi, Iceland, and Lidl as the cheaper options. In my shopping there is a noticeable contrast in the demographic of the customers at Waitrose compared with Aldi, both on Oxford’s Botley Road. I suspect this is a product of the price differences appealing to different socio-economic classes. The data, however, suggests the difference is small.

The photo from the week is of Waitrose’s “Unpacked” campaign around removing packaging from their stores. Reducing waste is commendable, and the campaign has been successful in encouraging me to purchase more items from Waitrose. However on visiting many of the independent grocery stores on Cowley Road I realised that “Unpacked” is actually the default way of selling goods, rather than an “innovation”.

Yams

I tried cooking yams this week, as part of a larger project to improve my cooking by working through a single cookbook (written by the team of the former London restaurant Food for Thought).

The first problem was that I didn’t actually know what a yam is. The wikipedia page offers a disambiguation. This raises the question as to why a tuber produced primarily in equatorial regions would be popular in the UK. The ready availability of carribean food in general (of which yams are a component) in the UK is partially due to the Windrush generation. Finally a pop culture note: Kendrick Lamar’s yams are “authenticity, sex, and drugs“.

粽子

This Friday was the Dragon Boat Festival ( 端午节 ). My quest for yams brought me to some Chinese supermarkets here in Oxford and the presence of banana leaf wrapped rice (粽子) reminded me of the traditional Chinese holiday, and the story of Qu Yuan (屈原).

Photo from the Week

2019 Week 22: Street Art, Pride, Rowing

Short version: A colourful week, beginning with a day in Bucharest before returning from Romania to Oxford, where the streets were lively with Oxford Pride and Summer Eights.

Long version:

Street Art

Graffiti is a part of most urban environments (perhaps for as long as urban environments have existed) and continues to be seen by some as a blight and others as beautiful. When I first studied art, I remember the compulsion to learn the physical details of individual works, their historical contexts, and how they were and have since been interpreted. More recently I’ve tried more to focus on how I react to art emotionally, to try and build better awareness of my own feelings. In short, I enjoyed the street art in Bucharest.

Oxford Pride

Oxford held a pride parade. It feels like the community in Oxford is progressive on the issues of gender and sexuality, students seem pretty welcoming and rainbow flags fly throughout the year. Of course even in a progressive community it can be difficult to be in a sexual or gender minority, so demonstrations of support and solidarity serve a beneficial purpose.

Rowing

Summer eights ran again, finishing on Saturday. Bumps racing, and the ancillary traditions (such as competition between colleges over quality of Pimm’s), are strange from an outsider’s perspective, but I am inspired by the actual rowing to seek an opportunity to try it. Competition results can be seen here.

Photos from the Week