Rant

My Mother

When I was a boy, I remember the amazing bedtime stories my mom would tell me about ancient times in Korea, about monks and wisemen and sorcerers. She was a remarkable storyteller and teacher. Half the time, I wasn’t sure if she was just making stuff up. I tried testing her by asking her to retell stories (to identify inconsistencies) but I don’t think I actually cared about keeping score. The stories were that good. She taught me how to grow vegetables, how to use an abacus, how to roller skate, how to write cursive letters, how to draw a face, how to invent games from string. She did this without the internet.

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Sphex Ichneumoneus

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Sphex is the colloquial name of a particular kind of digger wasp. Daniel Dennett effectively uses this wasp’s burrowing routine to show how, even basic examinations of animal behavior can lead us right to the doorstep of causal determinism: the belief that everything (ie: particle systems, wasp brains, human courtship rituals, the universe) can be explained as states of affairs, resulting from some previous state(s) of affairs in a purely mechanistic fashion. When a causally deterministic outlook is applied to questions of agency, free will, and consciousness, the implications pile up fast. Some interesting explorations of this issue can be found in popular shows like Devs [FX] and West World [HBO].

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Corona Virus Dispatch from NYC, Day 378: Fully Vaccinated against Corona

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On Friday March 26, I received the second injection of the Pfizer vaccine at a Brooklyn health center on Clarkson Street. The appointment was automatically scheduled on the day of my first shot. There was just one complication: I didn’t bring my dumb card. And apparently, there is a black market for these things.

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The Presumption of Savagery

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The week after George Floyd was killed by a police officer, I was sitting on my stoop, chatting with my neighbor. She’s a retired FDNY ladder chief in her sixties. She grew up here in Bedstuy. Our homes share a party wall and fence line. Before the virus, when the weather was nice, I’d often see her carrying supplies back and forth from her house next door to her two other properties, less than a quarter mile away. She’s a grandmother, a home owner, a real estate investor, and restaurant owner. She is black. And she said something that day that took me by surprise.

Daily Work consecrated in Routines (and a Dockerfile!)

Daily Work consecrated in Routines (and a Dockerfile!)

Over the course of 2 or so years, I’ve reached a point of attention exhaustion – thanks to a firehose of requests, reminders, alerts, pings, and messages coming at me from a variety of digital doodads – the sum total of which has diminished my ability to focus; to be able to discern what is very important versus somewhat important, versus not-at-all important. I intend to rehabilitate my concentration by establishing a rock solid routine that emphasizes working deeply in areas/problems that elicit my highest possible contribution. The first iteration of that routine is described below.

Corona Virus Dispatch from NYC, Day 232: The Zeigarnik Effect

The Zeigarnik effect is the name given to a psychological/cognitive phenomenon whereby a person’s ability to carry out a task measurably diminishes as a result of the residual interference of an unfinished task. For me, this takes the form of: memories, words, proper nouns, metaphors, stories my daughters tell me, possible inventions, badly composed news headlines, product taglines, tacky song lyrics, or just the words I hear coming out of the mouths of people around me. But I have a countermeasure: Evernote Lists.

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Corona Virus Dispatch from NYC, Day 139

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It’s been 139 days since the official start of New York City's covid-19 lockdown. Unlike a lot of people, I have access to a Crossfit Rig in my back yard. About a week ago, I started making it a point to track some of my foundational strength benchmarks – rope climbing, muscle-ups, and pullups. The last 2 were for the orphans and BLM.

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Corona Virus Dispatch from NYC, Day 14: Gratitude

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I don’t think being grateful is one of the default configurations of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. It has to be activated somehow — compelled. Some people are compelled more intensely, and with greater frequency than others: refugees, combat veterans, cancer survivors. Those of us who habitually experience low levels of suffering meander through life with the default configuration, getting by with a game plan that takes us from point a to point b along a path of least resistance. But occasionally, people in this category (habitual non-sufferers) bang up against a moment of real suffering — and not of the lowercase ‘s’ variety such as getting stuck with the middle seat on a flight from JFK to LAX. I’m talking about discovering that your daughter has just been shot, or that your family’s apartment building is about to receive incoming artillery.