A recent discussion reminded me of a crowd-sourced trivia game that I built a few years ago. It’s very simple: anyone can add questions labeled with a category, and when you play, each “card” has 5 questions on it. You can play it on your own, but it’s more fun with a group. Just like with Trivia Pursuit, one person or team is answering and another is reading the card. You can let the answerer pick a category, and then read them the question.

I put a password access on it, to keep the spam bots out. Like it says in the message: username is “play”, password is “now”. Try it out:

Play Now

There’s some elegance in the implementation. The questions you’ve written are saved in your session, so you can get a list of them and edit them. The questions you’ve answered are there too, so you won’t get the same question twice. Let me know if you have a use for it or want more features!

A poem that contributes to the Epic of Gilgamesh offers this advice:

Let your belly be full,
  enjoy yourself always by day and by night!
Make merry each day,
  dance and play day and night!
Let your clothes be clean,
  let your head be washed, may you bathe in water!
Gaze on the child who holds your hand,
  let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace!

And here is what Ecclesiastics tells us to do:

Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy and drink thy wine with a merry heart….
Let thy garments be always white, and let thy head not lack ointment.
Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of thy life.

These two have been paired before– it was an introduction to the Epic that laid it out for me as I have here. But two elements missing, which do not change the meaning but add some needed nuance.

In the Epic, the wise woman, Shiduri, is admonishing Gilgamesh to do his duty as a king, not to live like a fool. Gilgamesh has been wandering around dirty and ragged– like a fool– looking for immortality. But he is told:

  when the gods created mankind,
death they dispensed to mankind,
  life they kept for themselves.

In the quote Ecclesiastics, the ellipsis is hiding “for God now accepteth thy works.”, and the passage continues:

for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labor which thou takest under the sun.
Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge; nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

This is about death and about duty. To live joyfully not as simpletons, but as kings.

It brings to mind one more ancient poem:

As long as you live, shine,
Let nothing grieve you beyond measure.
For your life is short,
And time will claim its tribute.

I have a feeling that 2014 will be the best year yet.

For new years this year, I’ve made a new toy for you all to play with!

It’s a way to annotate the web, and then to see everyone else’s annotations like tapping into a vast community of viewers. You can add comments or draw on top of the pages.

Check it out: WebPen

There are a lot of pages that still mess it up though– either which manage to break my proxy (or break under my proxy), or where there just aren’t decent elements to attach the comments to.

So, I’m interested in hearing about bugs, but I’m also not too worried about them. I just want to get it so that it’s fun to use. Let me know what you think!

The solution to climate change, many economists and engineers say, is low cost renewable power. The moment clean energy can undercut dirty, we’ll be saved. When this argument is used to delay other action on the climate, I think it’s horribly misguided: the time to wait for a new technology passed a decade ago.

But I’ve also been generally skeptical that such a technology will be discovered in the next 50 years. Scientific American this month gave me a new reason to hope: computer-driven material design. Just now, we have the computing power to model the full quantum-mechanical behaviors of (non-organic) materials, but we can automatically screen *all known* materials for the necessary properties. I think we’ll identify a break-through photovoltaic (or similar) in the next 10 years, and it will be global by 2040.

Climate change, on the scale we’re dealing with now, will be over.

But the big problems will remain:

• Environmental damage: We will continue to destroy the planet directly, and probably do it at a faster scale with the cheaper power, unless we can find a way to value nature.
• Conflict: We will have a greater capacity for destruction, unless we have can greatly improve our international institutions for communication and resolution.
• Inequality: Until we manage to disentangle having a job from having a livelihood, cheap energy won’t mean a post-scarcity existence for anyone.

The global scale and deep social drivers of climate change provide an incredible opportunity to set things up right. Without it, becoming a more enlightened global civilization might be a lot tougher.

After nearly three weeks in the Bay area, I feel like I’ve finally arrived. My three month sublet in Oakland started today. After shuttling between friends couches, relatives’ guest bedrooms, and airbnb rooms, I can call a place my own.

The search for an apartment wasn’t easy, but it sounds like it could have been worse. My budget is severely constrained, since Flame and I need to pay for our NY apartment too. So I responded to almost every applicable ad on craigslist (east bay, $400 – $800/month, not requiring a female) for a few weeks, and only two posters got back to me. Eventually, this was the only option, but I think it’s going to be fine.

The place is an odd mix of luxury and squalor. It’s three blocks from the BART, but everyone cringes when I tell them it’s the Fruitvale stop. It was one of the cheapest rooms available, and yet it’s a full one-bedroom to myself. The apartment has no microwave (but a nice stove), no wifi (what’s tethering for?), no trashcan (which I can remedy), and no evidence so far of hot water (which I can handle). After I sealed the deal, the guy subletting to me stopped me on my way out, and said, “So, you know, the guy upstairs is crazy. If he gets violent, you’re best off just leaving.”

But that all said, I’m happy to have a home.

I’ve been learning more about being organized since transitioning to full-time independent research a few months ago. I wanted to write down a few things I’ve learned about organizing one’s time. I have notes on how to organize a startup or a seminar, but this is less domain-specific. It’s about behaviors that ensure that (1) important things are attended to, and (2) that attention is effective and advancing. This is not a recipe for a healthy life. It might be healthier than the unorganized life of a similar level of demands, but what organization does is allow you to be effective, not stress-free. And beware: effectiveness can breed demands.

For some people, it’s important in what space, or hour, or community one’s work is done. My approaches do not require those, though those features can support and multiply the results.

Organization is about time and enumeration. Everything takes time, and being able to predict the amount of time is key. Work takes time: I allot 40-60 hours to it, and rarely let it take more than that. Relationships take time: About 40 waking hours seems to be a sweet spot for me, including meals and handling unplanned situations. With time for sleep and grooming, that leaves about 20 hours for everything else. I apply my organization to the work hours and most of the everything else hours.

By “enumeration”, I mean identifying distinct tasks, specifying priorities amongst them, and allocating time for them. I am best at predicting programming tasks: how many elements and sub-elements I need, how long each will take to build or to understand and make operational someone else’s work, and how much time I can expect to lose with bugs and dead-ends. The idea is similar elsewhere.

Here are the principles that seem generally applicable across the systems:

1. Use a technology that is both easy and available. Both physical and electronic technologies (and combinations) work fine. I’ve used note cards, note pads, printed schedules, physical mnemonics, spreadsheets, and plenty of websites. Currently, my system involves a note book, workflowy, google calendar, and an electronic translation of a previous notecard system.

2. Set priorities seasonally. Decide on 4 – 20 projects (depending on how much time you have, and how much time you want to give each), and enshrine those as your current priorities, at least for the portion of your time you’re organizing.

3. For projects that you want to “complete” and require time to get there, construct a schedule of deliverables. Treat each project like a class and write a syllabus for that class.

4. Recognize when a system is no longer functioning and replace it. I have used dozens of systems of organizing my time and enumerating priorities, and one thing I’ve learned is that most systems have a decay rate. The decay rate is related to how “unnatural” it allows you to be. I don’t know if we should be making systems that allow us to be unnatural, but they seem to satisfy other natural drives.

5. Respond to most emails once per day (unless it’s part of your job to respond, in which case just avoid responding to personal emails). Avoid checking email/IM/texts/blogs except at designated times.

6. Add ideas that you can’t deal with immediately to a list. Those ideas might become priorities for later seasons.

7. “Decompression” is insidious. 5 minutes seems healthy. But for me, if it involves brain candy, like blogs or video, it can take hours and leave me dissatisfied. Better to combine it with something else: reading or walking seem to work best.

We all know that climate change is happening. And we (humanity) are causing it. The future will be tough, with drier wells, fewer resources, lower crop yields, more extreme weather events, and flooded cities. It’s even worse for other species: we’re causing one of the greatest extinctions in the world’s history. And polar bears can’t afford air conditioning.

But very little of the problem for other species is climate change, per se. Plenty of species are ill-adapted for a warmer world, and but that’s not why they’re going extinct. We’re destroying the Amazon far faster than drought is. When the oceans rise, animals won’t mind moving inland, and in most places it will happen slowly enough for plants to do the same. Human settlements are in the way of these migrations, but that’s not the climate’s fault.

In the history of Earth, this kind of climate change is normal. For most of the past billion years, the Earth has been 10 degrees C warmer, and CO2 has been multiple times greater than currently. In fact, in that time it’s only been this cold four times. All our carbon emissions are just accelerating our exit from the present ice age.

The past warmer climates have been more arid with large deserts, but not entirely inhospitable. The last one was the time of the great lizards. It only took 65 million years for human kind to evolve from rats: the natural world will recover from this extinction and adapt, and it will do it pretty quickly. Earth has another good 4 billion years in it, so there’s plenty of time.

So why should the ecocentrist worry about climate change? Because, unfortunately for most species, human kind and its descendents probably aren’t going to die in this extinction. The anthropocene will continue, and the coordinated effects of humanity will be global. Worse, the effects of our lack of coordination will be global. Climate change is a coordination problem. If we could all just agree, we could solve it tomorrow.

The effects of carbon emissions will unfold over millennia, but now is the time that we decide what global coordination looks like. We have arrived in a new world of global communication, at least amongst one of our species. Climate change is just the first of many case studies in global coordination that we will encounter.

Climate change is both a natural consequence of our situation, and the shared experience that we need to confront. It will take all of our ingenuity, commitment, and wisdom to handle it, because we are really trying to figure out how to handle ourselves. This exercise will help define who we are as a mature global civilization, and our descendents will learn from it for millions of years.

I want to start a youtube serial soap opera, as a vast allegory for the great debates in philosophy. Each character would represent some fundamental philo-religo-cultural perspective on life, and (in TNG style) each episode could be interpreted as a dialogue across history about some big question, although that isn’t what it would look like on the surface.

Each scene in a good soap operas represents less a segment of a story than a twist. Dewey is furious at Eve for cheating on him, but in their fight learns that Paul, an old friend, is about to die. A few scenes later, Eve is talking to Diane about how to save her marriage, only for Diane to accidentally reveal that she had an affair with Dewey. Paul talks to Dewey in his hospital bed, but in place of the carefree guy Dewey knew, Paul has become bitter and mis-remembers his past with Dewey.

Now think of the unexpected twists of philosophical learning– take the question of the soul. Dewey presumes a duality between the body and the soul, but Eve shows him that if so the mind is a part of the body. Eve believes that that people are only particles, but Diane raises the question of free will. Free will requires an agent, but Paul throws that into confusion with a vision of a multi-part soul.

Over the course of the series, Dewey dualism will reach feverish heights, in part to placate Eve’s empiricism, until Eve has a baby (science). Paul might represent monotheism, and vacillate between conservative and socialist ideals. Diane would be the naturalist, believing in equal parts freedom and protection, and transition from believe in many gods to one all-present goddess.

“It is thought that the peculiar merit of Democracy lies in this: that it gives every man a chance to pursue his own ends. The reverse is true. The merit lies in the assumption imposed upon every man that he shall serve his fellow men. This is by the law of his being.” – John Jay Chapman

Found this in my book on the Old Rich in America. Now in Seattle for a wedding which takes this kind of democracy to heart.