Tidbits on software, music, food, design, and life.
Adopting new habits is hard! What a shame: New Year’s resolutions could represent such a bright spark of optimism. Instead, they’re a clichéd punchline on the futility of human will. Certainly, my own past attempts have deserved those jokes! But in 2017, I shifted strategies and successfully built four new habits (of five attempted): piano practice, internetless mornings, carbless workdays, and…
When we’re in execution mode, we swim in signs of our progress. A day’s work stands crisply in some endless checklist: four problems solved; three features added; check and check. Am I on track? Did I have a good day? Typical productivity advice applies: set goals; track progress; triage tasks. A checklist makes the day’s grade clear enough. Working in this mode, it’s easy to feel satisfied at the…
Science developed out of philosophy. Before we had Copernicus’s planetary tables or Newton’s equations of motion, we had Aristotle’s rhetoric. That medieval natural philosophy was wrong, but it still made useful predictions. I’ve spent my career making things in the worlds of consumer products and education, and in both domains, I’ve observed a common failure mode in decision-making: an overriding…
Imagine that you’ve just moved to a new city. Whenever you need to go somewhere, you ask a special machine how to get there. But it doesn’t show you a map: it tells you to take twenty steps, turn left, go forward a hundred steps, etc. When you step outside, you’re blindfolded, so you can’t observe street names or other landmarks, but after years of traveling this way, you always arrive safely and…
I recently spoke with some kids from a high school with an impressive engineering curriculum. Classes in mechanical, electrical, biological, and software engineering—the mind boggles! I told them my (enormously contrasting) story: how my high school had no engineering curriculum at all, a math and science curriculum by name only; how I couldn’t find any adult engineering mentors in my area;…
When I was a kid, I spent much of my time making video games. Then I devoted my early teenaged afternoons to making an app for making art for video games. Now I make tools which can (among other things) help make apps for making art for video games. My goals have shifted away from games over the years, but I still consider the same metaphor that excited me in eighth grade: that of leverage .…
Need I remind you: the human race now sends robots to Mars. That is a thing we do! We derive that absurd capability from generations of previous epistemological revolutions which we compound and extend to create new marvels. I like to picture the tower of abstractions that enable this kind of progress. If you looked closely, you’d see its struts form an intimidating (and not altogether…
Some folks have ethical objections to eating meat, but no one seems to mind savaging a carrot. Why? Both fish and ficus are living organisms, after all. I doubt vegetarians consider taxonomic kingdoms when making moral judgments: the decision comes more intuitively. Douglas Hofstadter suggests that many are judging the presence of consciousness, a sense of self-hood, “inner light.” He…
People list plenty of reasons why kids should learn how computers work. They could automate repetitive tasks; they’d be empowered to create in all kinds of media; they’d learn powerful new problem solving approaches. That last point (so innocent seeming!) has gripped my imagination most thoroughly: a mastery of abstraction offers stupendous power in practically every endeavor. But…
Abstractions empower and accelerate. As usefully encapsulated nuggets of understanding, the creation of novel abstractions drives a field’s progress, but their invention is possible only with deep understanding of present ideas. So I declare: if we are to master a field, we must accept none of its abstractions as magic. Rather, we should yoke them as automations of what we already…
Chords sound rotten on an out-of-tune piano. I’ve written about why we think that might be : harmonics of the detuned lower notes end up a small distance from those of the upper notes, rather than directly overlapping them. My piano was tuned this weekend. Playing it after the technician had left, the sound’s transformation startled me: how rich and powerful my piano had suddenly…
I spend my life building abstractions and automating processes. It’s (literally) my job, yes; but my head’s always whirring away to that end. Say I’m tackling some piano piece. I transform the score’s markings into musical language. I reify that musical language into instructions: “play this key here ,” “increase in volume,” etc. I execute those…
In the first chapter of The Beginning of Infinity , David Deutsch writes: The role of experiment and observation is to choose between existing theories, not to be the source of new ones. I have the most fun attacking questions with no satisfying theories in sight . So: how can we generate novel theories for a problem? It’s critical to recognize that the creation of a hypothesis demands a…
In advice given to prospective students, my former piano teacher, James Boyk, suggests : I’m not the teacher you want if you want to be passively turned into a pianist and musician instead of actively turning yourself into one. This statement so concisely and wonderfully conveys my position on education and self-improvement. Its attitude absolutely informs the celebration of cognizance in my…
This past weekend I encountered the following sales pitch for an industrial food service product: “are you ready to execute your soup program with excellence?” Corporatese hilarity set momentarily aside, I derived inexplicable comfort from the vision of a mythical fast food franchise owner—ardent and passionate about every aspect of his business—who, reeling with the possibilities of…
After learning how to season food correctly, homemade stock is the single best thing anyone can do for his cooking. A stock is a liquid extraction of complementary flavors, a broad palette upon which sharper splashes of color may be painted. Stock is about balance and intensity of flavor. Making a mushroom sauce? If you were to just purée some cooked mushrooms, the isolated flavor would taste…
Why does a perfect fifth sound so satisfying when a brash tritone is just a half step away? It seems we have a physiological correlate to these psychological effects. As sounds arrive, the basilar membrane vibrates like an oblong drum head, stimulating tiny hair cells attached to nerves. Each hair cell corresponds to a perceived frequency, working like little band-pass filters . One hair cell will…
I am emphatically not an audiophile. My home contains neither $500 ethernet cables nor “ acoustic isolation platforms .” I am absolutely not here to convince you that vinyl recordings sound inherently better than the same data on CD. But: there is one absolutely irrefutable advantage to many modern vinyl releases, and that virtue has nothing at all to do with the medium. It’s the…
Meet Practica Musica , an electronic tutor for music theory and ear training. Let’s not talk about its aesthetics; instead, I’ll use it to focus a couple topics broadly relevant in education. From brush strokes to big picture Practica Musica features a massive collection of interactive activities, organized by goal and ordered along appropriate difficulty curves. A few examples…
In the Vatican Museums, alongside myriad sculptures of gods, emperors, and scholars, stands this old fisherman. His singular presence among these great figures places this sculpture’s significance firmly in its statement rather than its subject. Given that the portrait took months or even years to create, the artist clearly felt some ferocious drive to immortalize an ordinary man—perhaps to…