2020 Week 8: Do the living outnumber the dead?

Life is busy, I over estimated my ability to find time to read this week, and have started but not finished several texts. I (correctly) sought professional advice for some minor tendon issues, and running is feeling much more comfortable with some specific rehab exercises. I met two researchers in cyber security, and it turns out in the UK there are fairly strict laws on signals interception which make their research difficult. In other news a Russian satellite is probably stalking a US spy satellite in orbit.

Things I wrote this week

No longer posts again this week. I’m working on summarising some books I’m reading.

Things to share this week

Do the living outnumber the dead?
The short answer is no. While the global population has grown rapidly, the current 7 billion is far fewer than half the estimated 100 billion who have ever lived. This sort of population growth estimation reminded me that the sum of the n-successive powers of two is less than 2 to the power (n+1), so if the population was consistently doubling within a lifespan, then there would be more people alive than had lived previously. There is a nice intuitive explanation of this;
Consider binary
Binary 1 is Decimal 1
Binary 10 is Decimal 2
Binary 100 is Decimal 4
Generalising; binary 1 followed by “n” zeros is expressing 2 to the power n
Intuitively; the smallest four digit number is always larger than the largest 3 digit number
I.e. 1000 > 111 (or 222 for base 3, or 999 for base 10)
So the sum of 1+10+100 is 111 in binary (or any other base) which is less than 1000, and so 2^n > {2^(n-1) + 2^(n-2) + … + 2^1 + 2^0}
(I will look up how to express mathematical formulas on my own blog in future)

Science was stranger in the 1960s
NASA funded a project involving humans trying to train dolphins to speak by living with them and injecting them with LSD. Covered by The Guardian and New Scientist. Details probably in this book (but I haven’t had a chance to check it out).

The following come from my (current) three biggest sources of lost time, YouTube, Unnecessary-Fitness-Reading, and Chess.

Elon Musk reminds me of the importance of minimalism in production
Quote: “The best part is no part, the best process is no process
Context: Musk gives MKBHD a tour of the Tesla Factory, and explains that removing unnecessary parts or processes from a product removes a risk of failure at no cost. In the case of Tesla, increasing production speed is a major issue, so eliminating unneeded steps leads to better manufacturing.

Strava makes more cool info-graphics
This time looking at motivation for running.

NBC covers boom in chess streaming
This article about e-sports sadly leaves out my favourite chess streamer, Jerry.

2020 Week 7: Curfew

This week, in several situations, I ran out of time. By not setting end times for experiments, training sessions, or social occasions, I find myself realising on reflection that I regularly continue longer than would have been optimal. Of course the future is unknown, but making an estimate of how much time I ought to spend before I start, and then evaluating the situation once that time has elapsed, should help me to fit more into each day. This week’s longer post on productivity is highly relevant.

Things I wrote this week

I finished a set of thoughts on how to get more life into the fixed amount of time each day, i.e. productivity. Eventually I’ll reorganise the homepage of this website to have pages dedicated to a few significant topics, and I suspect productivity will be one of them.

Things to share this week

Atmospheric Optics collates visual phenomena that occur due to the spontaneous formation of optical systems in the sky, a common example being rainbows. Thinking about ice halos reminds me of X-ray crystallography, perhaps the most famous example being Photo 51.

Emma Stoye of Nature collated scientific photos from January, including the tracks from the head-crab like robots I shared a couple weeks ago.

The UK brought forward its ban on cars that burn hydrocarbons to 2035, some good news for the climate. I suspect unrelatedly, Telsa shares broke $1000 (and continue to be the centre of reddit shenanigans).

Artist Simon Weckert walked around with a cart full of smartphones to trick google maps into plotting non-existent traffic jams. Whilst I find google maps traffic useful on the rare occasions when I drive, I find the “performance” of having a bright red cart full of smartphones intruding into live updating maps a cute reminder of the difference between reality and abstractions.

Photos from the week

Productivity Update February 2020

Motivation

I want to get more done. I constantly have unfinished to-do lists and projects I would like to take on, if only I had more time. Rather than simply aspiring to have more time (e.g. by living longer), it is equally valuable to do more living in the time I have. I see increasing productivity as converting time I feel is wasted into time I feel is useful, by either decreasing the time useful tasks take or removing tasks that are not useful. This post is a collection of things I have found to help with this, and areas where I am seeking to improve.

Things that I think work

Prioritise health

If I am mentally or physically unwell, my productivity rapidly decreases. Keep health as a priority. Assess it regularly, and take time to eat well, exercise, and sleep. Follow good hygiene practices. When ill, make recovery the single highest priority.

Hesitate less

Increasing productivity and focus first require that you actually start doing something productive. Whatever that is, learning, training, meeting people, or something else, I often find myself hesitating to start. Fears of failure may be reasonable or unreasonable, but not starting at all makes failure a certainty. Of course some projects are more risky; the costs are higher, the harms can be bigger, but generally the first few steps don’t require such a big commitment, and having started I will be in a better place to assess what can be done. Simply put, just start.

Solve what you need to do, not what is easy to do

The blue areas (important with known solutions and unimportant with unknown solutions) take care of themselves; things that are important and easy to do get done with much satisfaction and hard things not worth doing don’t ever get started. The trick is doing the important things that don’t have solutions yet. They’re so hard! It is frustrating to try and fail, and failure is likely since the solutions are unknown. It is much more attractive just keep working in my comfort zone of known solutions, even if they are unimportant at least they are easy. The more time I shift along the yellow arrow, the more productive I am.

Focus on what is important, and do not be distracted by what is easy. I think most people are familiar with a time when, rather than write a difficult essay, or make a difficult phone call, suddenly they were inspired to reorganise their desk or tidy their house (Tim Urban goes more into procrastination in this TED talk). I’ve lately been thinking about it in terms of the diagram above; trying to focus my attention away from the easy but unproductive tasks and towards harder but more useful tasks. A related concept comes from an anecdote about Warren Buffett advising Mike Flint about goal setting.

Example – Science
Easy Productive: Setting up experiment
Hard Productive: Interpreting experimental results
Easy Unproductive: Selecting nice colours for charts and plots
Hard Unproductive: Writing new spreadsheet software

Example – Writing
Easy Productive: Choosing a topic to write about
Hard Productive: Actually writing about the topic
Easy Unproductive: Selecting fonts, organising stationary
Hard Unproductive: Writing in an unknown language

Example – Fitness
Easy Productive: Signing up for a gym membership
Hard Productive: Actually using the gym membership
Easy Unproductive: Watching YouTube videos about how to exercise
Hard Unproductive: Making YouTube videos about how to exercise

Use technology effectively

Tim Ferris shared this article about how to use your iPhone productively. I was a little underwhelmed by the focus on apps and content to consume, rather than actual phone tweaks that help avoid distractions. Smart phones are powerful devices that can be highly detrimental for productivity. While I am certainly more productive with a suite of tools in my pocket at all times, I can also be distracted by the similarly immense collection of toys. Armies of clever people work to increase the amount of time users spend in their app or on their website, and they are often successful. Some things I have found useful:

Make your phone binary. Either it is a “toy” used for relaxation and entertainment or it is a “tool” to help you work more effectively. If it is a toy you don’t need it with you when you are working. If it is a tool then don’t install games or use it to browse content where the main purpose is to be entertained.

Put your phone in black and white. Screen technology creates images more vivid, and therefore more captivating, than reality. For the majority of useful functions, a phone doesn’t need a colour screen. Putting it in black and white makes it less attention grabbing.

Do one task at a time. Build a habit of telling yourself what task you are picking up your phone to perform, performing it, and putting the phone away again. Sending that text message doesn’t need to lead to browsing Instagram. Checking the bus timetable doesn’t need to lead to reading a news article.

Turn your phone off. When you don’t need your phone, turn it off. Notice how often you pick it up and stare at a blank screen, and put it back into your pocket. If what you need to do isn’t worth waiting a few seconds for the phone to start up, it probably isn’t worth doing at all.

Avoid vanity

Time spent checking social media is not particularly useful, but time spent looking at your own content is especially not useful. I learned that in the early days of LinkedIn, 25-35% of clicks were people looking at their own profile. The speculated reason for this, with some evidence, is vanity. I can certainly feel the urge to check posts for likes, retweets, kudos, etc. It is validating to have people consume your content and approve it. It is also not worth checking repeatedly. The few minutes many times a day adds up to a meaningful amount, the interruption disrupts flow, and the emotions (envy, insecurity, and even the validation from being “liked”) are broadly negative.

Multitask appropriately

Multitasking in some situations can boost productivity, and in others just slow things down. Learn what tasks go well together for you, and which ones shouldn’t go together. I am sure this varies significantly

An example of good multitasking:
Listening to the news while doing steady state exercising. Not every training session should be hard, often I have less intense, putting-in-the-miles work outs. This is a great time to catch up on news.

An example of bad multitasking:
Listening to music while writing. I enjoy it, but changes in songs, and particularly interesting lyrics, tend more often to disrupt my train of thought than to drown out distractions.

Define “possible” honestly

Motivation matters. Setting the bar too high for what level of productivity I want to achieve, or putting too many things on a to-do list, leads to failure, and that failure can sap away confidence and motivation to do more. Be realistic with what can be achieved, keep the ego in check, and when things become overwhelming take time to pause, cut back, and start again with a lighter load.

Things I haven’t worked out

Consume content carefully

I read slowly, and I suspect inefficiently. There is so much content being produced at such an incredible rate, I find myself “tab hoarding”, filling hard drives with PDFs, trying to skim academic papers that I forget immediately, and buying books faster than I finish them. I think the problem is needing to be selective, and to learn to not be “completionist” in my reading, but rather focus on finding things that sit comfortably in my Zone of Proximal Development, and skipping things in a text that I already know, or are well beyond my grasp.

Keep in touch

I am still not good at keeping in touch with friends. I lose time I could be using to catch up with them (via a plethora of communication platforms) fretting about how much I have failed to meet my own expectations on frequency of correspondence. I suppose this is because I am not good at selecting which relationships I ought to prioritise, and effectively let random encounters define which people I spend time with. In not wanting to leave anyone out, I leave everyone out.

Long term goals

Finally, and most challenging to me, finding a major goal to unify my interests, my work, and my hobbies, so that the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts. I lack direction, and this means that many projects I begin and abandon which might not otherwise have been wastes of time, become so.

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2020 Week 6: Fragile

A satisfying week of ratcheting up my output. Some long but interesting experiments at ONI, catching up on reading, a couple of social evenings, and the most intense week of training since September 2019. That said, I’ve been feeling a little fragile. My physical and mental health are both good. I’m happy with what I’m getting done each day but have caught myself with muddled thoughts here and there. Particularly, I am worrying about illness and injury a little more this week. A couple observations on this:
1. The news of coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan is causing alarm, but people are generally much less concerned about familiar diseases such as influenza. In the case of a far away outbreak, I can follow the advice that after taking reasonable precautions (e.g. washing hands before eating) it is foolish to worry about the possibility of getting sick (there is no need to suffer before the actual illness starts). I was not able to follow this advice when a different viral outbreak occurred in my social circle. I am vaccinated, and so very likely immune, but knowing I have been exposed directly it is difficult to silence my paranoia.
2. I have been recovering from a running injury, relatively minor but still the most significant injury I have had to date. I am left feeling much more vulnerable than I did before my injury, even though I ought to have been following the same injury preventing exercises either way. I let the idea of being particularly resilient become entwined with my identity, and having that misplaced belief confronted is emotionally challenging.

Things I wrote this week

The irony is not lost that I continue to delay a piece on productivity. I’m also writing about The Fated Sky (link to publisher and extract) which I finished reading this weekend.

Things to share this week

Donald Knuth and getting to the bottom of things
Knuth is a legendary computer scientist, and as well as writing The Art of Computer Programming, he also wrote the dialogue Surreal Numbers, or Surreal numbers: how two ex-students turned on to pure mathematics and found total happiness: a mathematical novelette. I recently learned that he does not use email, as he explains here:
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.
I find this inspirational in several ways: I aspire to find a passion that allows me to focus so clearly on the one goal. I would love to have the opportunity to pursue that passion so single mindedly as to not need the convenience of email to “stay on top of things”. I would love to reach expertise where others go out of their way to reach me despite not using email.

The Dalek Game
While opening too many tabs writing about The Fated Sky, I came across Kathleen Jennings illustrations of Daleks, based on a game played by replacing words in titles with the iconic Dr Who villains. Related; I look forward to trying Blurb Wars next time I’m with some creative people.

Functional Threshold Power
FTP is the maximum power output that a person can transfer (e.g. to a bike or rowing machine) continuously for an hour, and is a common measure of cardiovascular endurance amongst cyclists. I’ve been looking at this set of charts about FTP, and it is humbling to see myself on the left tail of the distribution. Some relevant literature from Nature.

Photos from the week

Rare winter sunshine on the river Thames

2020 Week 5: Mountain Motivation

Week 5 sees the end of January 2020, and momentum building both in work and play as I accelerate away from the holiday season. I have been reminded in multiple ways that qualities we celebrate and often treat as innate, such as intelligence, strength, and courage, are developed through practice rather than fixed at birth. It is inspiring and motivating to see others grow. On a trivial note, today’s date is a palindrome 2020-02-02 (ISO 8601 format).

Things I wrote this week

I attended the Banff Moutain Film Festival when it toured in Oxford, and my thoughts are in this post.

I finished an overdue race report on the 2019 Blenheim Palace Half Marathon.

Things to share this week

Transparency and Teamwork
I’ve been chatting with some friends at work about transparency, and a famous example of extreme transparency in an organisation comes from Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater. A Summary and Table of Life Principles is provided as a free excerpt from his book. On the same topic, I’m still coming back to and digesting Google’s project Aristotle, described in this piece from the New York Times.

19,547 Calories
Kilian Jornet is a professional athlete who enjoys going up mountains. Last year he skied non stop for 24 hours and managed to gain 23 km in elevation, or nearly three “Everest”s. Doing this required nearly 20,000 kcal (as estimated by Strava), so refuelling would take 37 Big Macs (it actually surprised me how low that number is).

Physical Training Update

I am hoping to break 3 hours for the marathon in 2020, but training has been delayed by an Achilles injury. Rest was the right approach, and I’ve tried to substitute indoor rowing and indoor cycling as low impact alternatives for endurance training. It has been satisfying to see the numbers for weekly “Relative Effort” (based on heart rate) on Strava go up, but as I resume running this hasn’t translated well into speed over ground.

It is frustrating to have to hold back and turn down opportunities to train with friends. It is teaching me the importance of focusing on long term goals to make smarter choices in individual sessions. I’ve also been thinking about this TED talk about the importance of training “easy”. I tend to train “hard” every workout, but this may be less effective the fitter I become. When new to running, race-pace and training-pace can be the same thing, but as fitness increases maximum effort sessions take more recovery time and are more likely to result in injury. Some hard sessions are necessary, but not every session can nor should feel hard.

I’ve also learned that for indoor rowers, power into the machine (watts) is proportional to speed cubed, rather than squared as I would have guessed. That is, an additional 50 W of power brings a 500 m split time of 2:31.8 s/500 m (or 100 W) down to 2:12.6 (19.2 seconds faster), but the next 50 W increment only saves 12.1 seconds more, then 8.6 s, then 6.5 s, until halving the split to 1:15.9 (i.e. doubling the speed) requires 8 times more power at 800 W.

Photos from the Week: