Recent content in Posts on 1651
I haven’t written here in a year and a half, but let’s see if I can finish an entry in the few minutes before the babysitter leaves. I went to the doctor about a bout with my bad lungs, and in the waiting room the television was tuned to a segment on one of the major Japanese networks presenting archival footage from throughout the station’s history, mostly from the mid to late 20th century. It…
Cleaning the house every Saturday morning has become my de facto philosophizing time. At first it was just because of the rare chance to focus on a physical task while feeling relatively distant from concerns of more weighty projects. Then I began to associate the motions and rhythms of cleaning with deeper patterns of thought. Now the intellectual mode grasps the brain as soon as the hand grasps…
In meditation and mindfulness practice, we’re asked in a multitude of ways to stop identifying with our thoughts, at least for a moment. This is a pretty abstract thing to try to do, but I have found some metaphors that seem to help quite a bit. Tangible examples are coming up, but here’s the nerdy academic take first. The thing is: when we talk about thoughts in the mind, we’re talking about some…
Do you think I can complete this letter in one sitting? Let’s find out. I have absolutely dozens of half-finished letters sitting here, several of which I’m iterating piecemeal from time to time, in cracks of time amidst the four quests that define the main efforts of life right now. (Three quests about shifting the states of work, well-being, and parenting; circling around the big quest about…
If you’re anything like me, your brain does not summon up reasons to be proud without some delicate coaxing. It helps to keep a “done list” to complement your “to-do” list for the day, to acknowledge how much you’ve accomplished. This can change the character of a day from “what a bust” to “what an achievement”. But you also need it on a larger scale. When you genuinely reflect on the overwhelming…
This most powerful incantation may be my most important discovery of 2021. Any judgment you make, especially about yourself or your situation, must be in comparison to something else. Explicit or not, you hold some model to measure against. Let’s take an easy example up front, from my dear friend and Microcosmographia narrator Jon Bell. I have a tendency to complain about Apple software design and…
This incantation works to transmute outrage, melancholy, and general complainy crabbiness; into resoluteness, tranquility, and general reasonableness. It’s a bit of serenity prayer , a bit of five whys , a bit of zen, a bit of Jobs “saying no to 1,000 things”. This one has been hard to write about. The inner critic is a snarky Twitter account, always hunting for the most uncharitable possible…
One of my favorite moments in deep discussion with a dear friend is when the conversation seems to hit bedrock. Jon Bell and I talk quite a lot, and one thing we both love about the friendship is trying to understand the other person’s taste, especially when there’s a strong taste contrast between the two of us. While he explains DJ sets and hip-hop and standup comedy; I explain earnest, intimate…
There are a few commonsense exhortations that I have found that function like magic incantations, cutting through unhelpful thought patterns and wresting me back into a reasonable state of mind. I’d like to write about three of them in turn: What if you just didn’t? So what are you going to do about it? Okay, compared to what? The first comes from the article “ How To Talk To Girls On Twitter…
Hallon, I’m apparently joining a couple of friends like Sarah and Ash by, while not having intentionally and officially stopped sending letters, starting to send them again. I tend to believe that for maintaining resilience, your inherent character is less important than the systems you’ve put in place as a vehicle to weather the bizarre world we’ve grown around us. When challenges come, I hope to…
After ten years away, I reread Anathem by Neal Stephenson, a book I’d suspected might be my favorite novel. Now I can say that it is. It’s set in a culture of monastic mathematician-scientist-philosophers who retreat from society for one, ten, one hundred, or one thousand years at a time. They disconnect from the banalities and frivolties of the world to focus on long-term contemplation and study.…
I recently had my worldview forcefully re-centered by Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now . It vividly illustrates that the world is categorically far better than it has ever been, while also being ever more obviously in dire need of further improvement. An idea appearing at the end of it really knocked me over: the “global workspace” model of consciousness , and specifically the blackboard…
So we had a child. Two months in, I have a lot of feelings and hopes and thoughts about that. If you want the cute photos and sentimentality, I can add you to the Facebook group. If you want philosophy, read this letter! It’s remarkable how wise this tiny creature seems. Sometimes I really get the sense he knows things that I don’t. I’m excited to watch this wiggly little blob develop a mind, a…
I almost always feel worse after looking at Twitter anymore. Regardless of whatever other variables are involved, that’s the baseline; sticking around would require some serious justification. Some people I like use it as their main place to speak publicly, and I can have a little conversation with them there about things that they post. But I have only done this… four times in the past month.…
Celebrating Inbox Zero by lying on the couch listening to Curtain Call by haruka nakamura, I imagined a video documentary series about historical figures. Do it completely straight-faced, with no explanation of why Caravaggio is unperturbed by a camera crew watching him work on The Denial of St. Peter and interviewing him in between painting sessions. (Especially because now that I think of it,…
Do you meditate? I used to associate the practice with certain spiritual traditions or worldviews, and I got some moderately useful advice from books like The Zen Commandments and Waking Up. But I didn’t really develop a successful practice of my own until I read a certain theoretical cosmology book. Yeah! Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark is unequivocally the most interesting book I have…
How important do you think it is to be consistent? I think I assumed for a long time that of course a person should remain more or less the same person all of the time. But! Walt Whitman: Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) When something changes in yourself, it’s easy to think that you’re somehow “off” from normal. You write every day or…
What are your values? Yours individually, and those of your organizations and projects? I think identifying values works best if you can phrase both the value and its opposite as positives. Stated values should help you make decisions. Saying that you value “making great stuff” is meaningless, because it’ll never help you choose one course of action over another. Nobody would ever wonder,…
Routine and habit are, I believe, the only reliable tools for improving yourself and your situation. I think they tried to convince me of this in grade school, but it didn’t work. Someone recognized the power of this idea and thought, we need to make sure kids get this! If we equip them with the power of good habits, we’ll empower an entire generation to reach their true potential! (I spent a long…
In February I had an evening that made me think, as long as I can experience something like this at least once per year, then life is going well. It’s been hard to write about, for fear of disenchanting the preternatural memory. But I did it. Here’s The Story About The Evening I Had Tokyo; Daikanyama. A shmancier area than I am used to, where I stumble across the impossibly hip T-Site bookstore…
Sketching is the cental activity of design, but it doesn’t always have to be sketching pictures. I really like roughing out text outlines to make sense of a complicated problem. In this approach, once you understand what you want to make possible, then you can worry about drawing a picture of it. An approach I’ve lately found to work well for improving a software experience involves separating the…
How often do you consciously evaluate the direction of your life? For some folks it’s today, once a year. For a good while my answer was “never”. If I was forced to by some major event, I’d think about where I was headed just long enough to reach a reasonable answer, then get back to fulfilling my active projects. The project was the coarsest unit of aspiration on my mind — Write a chapter. Ship…
I’m working through my music library in chronological order , which has been a thrilling rediscovery of my favorite music in its original context. When 1975 came around, I asked Siri to cue up a Soft Machine album and the resulting failure was another fascinating lesson in interaction design, in the spirit of my original Siri Teaches Interaction Design post. Let’s dissect it! The oldest user…
Jon, My partner in UX Launchpad, put his prodigious design insight and experience into a post about why undo has been demoted in mobile interfaces . I tend to agree that for designers, just complaining is not going far enough — we should try to understand why smart people designed the system the way it is, and whether there really is a better way. All while being realistic about all of the…
Hello, friends. Remember me? I’ve been in a weird place lately. Some of it is that I’ve been busy, sure. But I’ve also just been a quieter person for a while. My personality changes in waves. Sometimes I think that of course people want to read weird emails from me. Other times I think that’s utterly absurd. Lots of things in life actually started to make a lot more sense when I stopped believing…
I recently finished the book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom. It’s a history of the quest to create superhuman artificial intelligence and a survey of how things may go when we finally manage it. The whole thing is surreally hilarious in that it takes a lot of absurd science-fiction scenarios very, very seriously. Like, what if we set up an AI at a factory to maximize…
Time for another one of this series. It seemed appropriate, since I have been thinking about 3D Touch and the Apple Pencil and the other interactions introduced this morning. I am all in favor of 3D Touch, which at long last adds some nuance to the Pictures Under Glass experience of Multi-Touch devices. To be honest I was kind of hoping that when we got pressure sensitivity, we would have the…
Do you have a system for managing your time? Since 2005 I’ve used a personal variant of Getting Things Done to manage my work. That changed my life. If you’ve been meaning to read the book (or reread it) you can actually get its core concepts in 15 minutes . But a work management system isn’t the same as a time management system. Even if you know which projects are important to do, and even if…
Have you ever had something crappy that you made get really popular? A while back, while waiting for the bath to fill up, I made a quick video to demonstrate a problem in iOS that wasn’t present in earlier versions. It was pretty rough, but it got the point across. For whatever reason, this video got picked up by Daring Fireball, iMore, 9to5Mac, and quite a lot of people on Twitter and Reddit.…
How about that technology? Always getting better in miraculous new ways, while somehow remaining frustrating enough that those of us who make it suspect we’re doing it all wrong. Of course all design is made of compromises, and it’s absurd to think that we could be getting it perfectly right all the time. But I do think it’s valuable to pay attention to where we’re putting our efforts, and what…
Can I just complain for a second? I know that software is hard, but when software messes up my music-listening experience in ways that used to work just fine, I become an irrational customer. Today before leaving the house I told my iPhone to download Presto by RUSH. It responded by putting a little iPhone badge in the corner of the album art, as if “downloaded” were some kind of unusual state…
How much do you love emoji? I used to really hate ‘em. In 2002 I lived in Tokyo, and used an AU phone that felt like the future. But it drove me crazy that the cell providers in Japan had abused standards for their own gain by creating a bunch of mutually-incompatible encoding extensions to add these silly images to emails and web pages. It caused all sorts of problems when sending messages…
Do you like the band RUSH? I have been super into them since I was like 12. Lately I have been thinking about the documentary that came with the limited edition of their 2007 album Snakes and Arrows. It introduces their producer Nick Raskulinecz, who they liked quite a lot for bringing his own vision and ideas to the project, and for pushing them to make each song idea into the best possible…
Pretty tired today! I am trying segmented sleep again, and am not quite used to it yet. But I have an old email here that I sent to my dear friend Jon Bell , and I think some more folks might be interested in it. So the main text today is a lightly edited version of that! You know I like to make jokes about how I’ve found “the difference between you and me”. You’re a screen-toucher, and I’m not.…
Do you know Bret Victor? He’s a universally well-regarded thinker on the topic of how humans work and learn with technology. A lot of smart people consider his Inventing on Principle to be one of the best talks of all time for people who, like, make things, or… do things. I got to see him speak about Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction at Edward Tufte’s See Think Design Produce seminar. His…
Thank you for signing up. I’m not sure yet precisely what this newsletter is going to become, but for a while now I’ve been feeling the need for a Twitter-like way to say stuff to the world that isn’t Twitter. For now I am just gonna type and see what happens. Nickd’s recent letter Escape from Hashtagistan , and the links therein, are probably what finally convinced me, but there have been several…