7 posts from June 2007

From this month's Ann Arbor Observer:

"Green roofs may be a quintessential Ann Arbor phenomenon. Like hybrid cars, they combine environmentalism with cool technology. Plus, they're a little bit on the fringe."

I hate this place.

I should elaborate. I dislike it when places are full of themselves. Places that are often full of themselves include, in no particular order:

The SF Bay Area
Washington, D.C.
Russia
Ann Arbor

I really think Ann Arbor has the least going for it.

It would be fun to collect examples of civic smugness. I'm not sure how to distinguish it from baseless pride and self-confidence. Maybe I'm being a bit of a grinch.

When I was much younger, I worried intensely about my memory--that it would one day fill up, that it would be distorted, and so on. Without good memory, how could we improve ourselves? Wouldn't we end up in repeating patterns of learning fact B, correcting, forgetting fact A, correcting, and forgetting fact B again? Memory limits the difficulty of the problems we can solve. Already in my research, I find myself forgetting and relearning the same information. What if I were able to retain 1000 facts instead of 200 and survey all of them at once? I'm sure I could develop much better solutions. This is why so many problems need multiple people working on them. (The problem of self-development usually gets only one person, however, with occasional assistance from good friends and therapists! It's in much worse shape.)

I was flipping through an old New Yorker last night and stumbled on an article ("Remember This?") on the research of Gordon Bell. Bell is trying to develop apps for cataloguing life very thoroughly. He wears a gadget that photographs most people he meets. He records many of his conversations. One of the problems he faces is in accessing the stored information--another researcher has his computer learn which kinds of photographs from his personal database would be most meaningful to show. Bell suggests that it would be useful if computers could also learn to make observations--"You haven't seen X in several years." (This feature would be brilliant with my pdf organizer, Papers. I forget what I read a year ago.)

This sounds a little neurotic, but I've this sneaking suspicion that I'm limited in my ability to change by the fact that I can't synthesize my personal history very well. I probably have a distorted image of who I was. How lame not to have data to test models. One resorts to... public heuristics or local models.

Software like this is so exciting. My favorite line from the article is at the very end: Bell says, "Your aspirations go up with every tool. You've got all this new content there and you want to use it, but there's always this problem of wanting more." Finding intuitive and efficient organizational systems--and learning what to delegate to them--will be a major challenge for me, I think.

I wish I could go on a proper hike now.

This speech by John Doerr is one of the most moving talks on climate change that I have ever heard.

Making energy conservation politically and economically palatable is difficult. Ideas?

He mentioned carbon offsets--I had forgotten about those. Last I heard, there was some discrepancy among estimates of CO2 footprints. That's what I'll research next.

I've become very, very interested in earning money lately. I sold my iSight on craigslist for a small profit and am trying to get rid of a few other electronics. A few weeks ago, I discovered Prosper while researching sites like Kiva. I'm convinced development should be extremely profitable, currently Kiva doesn't support interest on loans. Prosper is different. I invested my first $200 today at an average 27% interest (~24% after taxes + management). I should probably put the profits toward Kiva, but I'm also concerned about saving for retirement--it's damn hard for me to put money away with my stipend. But arrgh, can anyone tell me whether it's better for the world to invest now rather than later? How much should I give? The world is so damn chaotic and nonlinear. My models break down!

If you seriously think you'll invest in Prosper, let me know. I didn't have the heart to put the link on the site, but there's a way we could both make money from a referral. Ack, okay, dammit, here. Honestly, the reason I like Prosper is that it helps people. Citigroup could stand some competition. Earning money is also fun. Really fun.

Funny that it's always the TED talks that get me fired up enough to blog. Here, "fired up" means positively inspired, which is a nice contrast. In the past few days I've been very frustrated with the global status quo. I won't deny my frustration with the world is positively linked to trouble with my research... but that doesn't mean these nagging concerns are baseless! (Throw me a bone! It's fun!)

There's a post on MetaFilter asking a darn good question: What can I do to lead a more environmentally conscious lifestyle? There are a lot of answers, which is reassuring. Most of them strike me as off the point, which is depressing. The good responses: do donate money to good causes, focus on your CO2 footprint, and try to develop a sense of priorities. Bad: farmers markets, water bottles.

This small site appears a repository for one kind of complaint from me, so I needn't bother making it in full again--but why am I in Michigan? Will my education here offset my crazy CO2 usage? Will all this fretting about our rate of adaptation result in mitigation that genuinely improves people's lives? I want to believe that material standards of living make a difference. Maybe they don't. Maybe we're all better off reproducing freely, even if some future generation suffers enormously. I just don't know how to measure happiness and suffering. I don't begin to understand my own happiness and suffering.

Aesthetics are tricky. My brief Christian education makes me wary of them. But I love good lines. I love color. I stayed up until 4:30 a.m. on Monday night looking at beautiful furniture online. I love, love, love nice spaces and interesting patterns. I will spend more money on pretty sheets than plain ones. This money could've gone to people who need medicine/vitamins/education/etc. Enormous guilt. I don't know how to balance these competing desires.

The people speak very fairly about aesthetics are Virginia Postrel, and, just now on TED, Stefan Sagmeister. Keats doesn't cut it.

Are there any psychologists who are making progress here? I remember the subjective well-being and per capita GDP plot I saw in The Atlantic--that was reassuring (positive correlation, if you couldn't guess). But at what prevalence of malaria infections can I spend more time on interior design? Zero, I'd say. And yet I really, really like pretty things. Fortunately, global dynamics can be lovely to study too.

Now James Howard Kunstler on suburbia. I love the internet. Woof.