absonant

noodle

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 03:19:00 +0000

I just got back from a trip up to Boston, which was excellent. N left for Niger last Saturday, and not wanting to be a lone woman in the garden of Eden, I took to the north. All I can say is that my friends and family are wonderful.

After a long drive home, my todo list for the evening was: 1) unpack 2) go grocery shopping, 3) work out at the gym, and 4) do some work-type stuff (prepping for an HCI event tomorrow).

Number one has resulted in an explosion all over the living room. Number two involved dropping a 1 gallon glass bottle of apple juice in the apartment parking lot (I sense a pattern...). Number four I might put off until the morning.

Number three, though. Man, oh man. I'm not really a gym person. I've tried various things, but none of them have stuck thus far. The machines scare me. But! My cousin-in-law Rachael is totally amazing and got me to get over my phobia and try getting serious about working out at the gym. We're trading personal training for coding lessons, and it's awesome.

Tonight was my first night trying the workout she's given me, and whooaoao. I have a long way to go. My legs seem strong enough, what with all the walking and hiking I do, but everything else? I feel like a total noodle. For some of the machines I was like, "What do you mean you don't go any lighter than that?" And the machine responded, "Suck it up." Noodle. I haven't felt this kind of adrenaline for a long time, and I'm stoked. And laughing at myself, but still stoked.

Victor Love

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 05:38:00 +0000

Oh, Victor Love. This man was a joy to talk to, but his videos...exquisite.

little moment of compulsion #2

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:51:00 +0000

I have a favorite type of pencil. It's the Pentel Twist-Erase III with 0.9mm lead, preferably in black. I don't just like them, I hoard them. I have eight of them in a box hidden in the house, plus the one I use regularly. If I lose the one in current use, I'll take out a spare. If I find the one I've lost, I'll put the spare back. It's a good system.

N uses these pencils too, except he uses the 0.7mm ones (which I used to use--that's how we got them in the first place). At one point, he couldn't find any of his and wanted to break into my store. It's embarrassing in retrospect, but I had an emotional reaction and refused to let him have any. Even when I eventually conceded, I gave him the one dark blue one that I had.

I've hoarded them since high school. When we were in California, I found two packs of the 0.9mm version (totaling 4 pencils) unopened in my dresser. N claimed them as his, and I started fretting about how we were going to tell his pencils apart from my pencils, since each pack had one black and one blue.

In addition to the pencils themselves, I have spare erasers and lead for them that will last until doomsday. Come the apocalypse, or Pentel's bankruptcy, or the illegalization of mechanical pencils, I'll be prepared.

Faith and Apologetics

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 01:05:00 +0000

The Story of Vedanta, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Once in a tree there were two birds, one at the upper branch, serene, majestic and divine, and the other at a lower branch, restlessly pecking fruits, sometimes sweet sometimes bitter. Every time, when the restless bird ate a bitter fruit, it looked at the upper bird and climbed a branch up. This occurred a number of times and eventually the bird reached the topmost branch. There it was not able to differentiate itself from the divine bird, and then it learned that there was only one bird in the tree, the upper bird, which is described as divine, the real form of the other restless bird.

One thing that I have faith in is that I can be better than I am. I've learned a lot from past mistakes, and it's my hope that I can keep on learning. Thus there is some factual evidence in support of this faith, but not enough to prove it unequivocally to anyone, which is what makes it faith.

I feel that apologetics often gets a bad reputation, claiming that it's missing the point of faith or that it's focusing on the wrong things. But I wonder, is it possible to have faith without being apologist in some way? I don't think so.

My breed of apologetics tends to be inclined toward defending faith (and religion) as a mechanism for personal change and as a lens for understanding the world. While traditional apologetics focuses on more physical and historical truths, how is this side of apologetics much different? It's still defending faith with reason.

We're mostly rational creatures. Even though faith is supposed to be belief that is not based on proof, individuals still cite spiritual experiences as the reason for belief. I had this feeling at this time, thus this belief must be correct. Isn't that the basis of faith for most believers? I live this way and I appear to be blessed. Is this not the evidence, or "proof" that believers show themselves?

My question is: what role should faith and religion play in a society and for an individual? Teaching morality requires instilling faith in a system of rules, be it secular or religious. Likewise, coping with death and sorrow, and achieving other kinds of healing (e.g., getting over one's own mistakes or being wronged) requires faith. But all of these examples can be achieved without religion. Is the biggest distinction between religion and faith organization? Does that make religion just mass perpetuation of culture? I think to some extent yes, but there are lots of advantages to having an organized, unified community, which religion tends to provide.

I think it's interesting to note that teaching religion requires apologetics, because you can't teach without justification and reason.

Gumboots and Ensemble ACJW

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 19:34:00 +0000

N and I had the chance last week to see Ensemble ACJW. One of the pieces they performed was Gumboots by David Bruce (embedded below), which floored both of us. I had never seen a bass clarinet before, and N declared it "the most awesome instrument." We also had the chance to see one of the violinists' strings break, with a graceful recovery; the cellist said, "There are times to break a string. This was not one of them." It just meant we got to hear the movement over again: "There's no way to start in the middle of that movement. For those of you who couldn't wait for it to be over, oh well." The whole performance was fantastic.

recovery

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:55:00 +0000

I just finished my last class for the semester. Whoooew. After three years off school, it hit hard. I'll still be doing a bit of research for the next little bit, but I'm also going to plan my garden, take a trip to Boston, clean the house, read like mad, paint, sew...you name it. This here brain is tired. Speaking of which, a nap is in order; my sleep deficit is high.

tailspin

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 03:55:00 +0000

The semester is ending, and I've been working too much. I took a problem set home over Christmas, worked on projects on the airplane, and have been buried since we returned (just before the new year). I don't mind the occasional day or two of stress, but several weeks in a row is painful.

Right now feels like a winter dawn--the sky is starting to brighten almost imperceptibly, but it's going to be freaking cold for a long while before the sun actually gets here.

ces booth babes

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:33:00 +0000

Women and "booth babes" at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2012: this features a few options on using women as advertisement. I was shocked that the women legitimately in the field weren't more upset by it. I would have given them a few stinging quotes for the record.

Some highlights I transcribed...

CEA CEO: "Sometimes it is a little old school, but it does work. People are naturally want to go to what they consider pretty. So your effort to try and get a story based on booth babes which is decreasing rather rapidly in [?]industry and say that somehow sexism and balancing[?], it's cute but it's frankly irrelevant in my view." A) A man with a talent for speaking, to be sure. B) Irrelevant? What a jerk. I mean, to tell a reporter that their story isn't worth telling is mean all by itself, but things like this are important. This IS sexism.

Models 1&2: "Specifically for CES, I don't think that having hired models working at a booth deters women because it's not like a car show or something where you would dress really scantily clad" [cuts to booth babe with 6 inches of bare midriff] "We're still, you know, in business attire..." [cuts to woman in pictured above] "...pretty much covered up and I don't think it's so over-the-top that women feel like they can't approach us, either. It's not extremely obvious that we're hired models..." [cuts to woman in mock shower in essentially a towel, except with a revealing slit down the whole thing] "...as it would be at a car show or something like that where there's girls..." [cuts to a pair of girls in yard-wide ostrich feather headpieces] "...laying on the hood of a car."

Models 3&4: "We've worked many different types of shows, a lot of them are technology-type conventions. There's women that are into it, just I don't know any really *laughs* that choose, you know, the tech world, so to say, over shopping or cooking or something like that...or taking care of kids or whatever." Wow. Just...wow.

little moment of compulsion #1*

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:54:00 +0000

N and I buy plain white printer paper by the box. We use it for everything from grocery lists to problem sets; I'll spare you the enumeration. At any given time, we have one ream open at home, sitting on a shelf somewhere. When N opens a new ream, he rips it open like kid opening a present, which makes me twitch a little because we tend to keep it in the packaging as we use it up. On the other hand, I open them up like someone's great aunt who is going to re-use the wrapping paper. I wouldn't blame him if he twitched back.

We finished up a ream this week, and I was the one to need paper first, so I got to open the next one. Not only did I carefully unstick the glue, I decided that I needed to tuck the flaps back in so that the opening of the packaging was flush with the paper itself; usually we just leave them to stick out. Tucking them in is so much cleaner. To do so, you have to separate the overhang into four sections, one for each side. I almost whipped out a pair of scissors to help me do this, be decided that that would be going too far.

*This obviously wasn't my first compulsive moment of all time, but I felt like has the potential for a series of posts.

fiction or nonfiction?

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:31:00 +0000

In looking for something in the recent issue of The Friend, I came across the the article "Fiction or Nonfiction?", all about a little girl's struggle with whether or not the Book of Mormon belonged in the Nonfiction section, which she decided it did.

I'm opposed to the true/false binary for religious texts, and most bookstores and libraries agree with me. They tend to have their own section, usually somewhere between cookbooks and biographies, saddled alongside opinion books. Why? I'm sure that in part they don't want to offend parties that believe that they are "fiction" or "nonfiction," but I also believe that it's because truth isn't so simple.

Take a look at art. Do we categorize art as true or false? Not really. There are photographs and videos, which are "true" and can be used as legal evidence, but they can be edited and altered, and people can act. Portraits are pretty close to representing reality, and have long been used for genealogical purposes and identifying criminals. Even still, there is freedom for artistic expression in the representation of truth. Landscapes and still-lifes fall into the same category--based on reality, but altered somewhat. What about cubism? Surrealism? The pieces are true to the artist's intent, certainly, and that's their purpose.

Now back to writing. Where does poetry fall? And are journals fiction or nonfiction? Every person has a bias in telling their own story. There are things we don't see or understand from our singleton perspective. And on top of that, we are natural storytellers, making up reasons for why we feel a certain way, even if a reason is simply created to justify a feeling. So even if the individuals narrating the Book of Mormon really existed, they were still writing down their perspectives and they wouldn't have been all-knowing.

Religious texts exist on a plane of spirituality, not a plane of history. Their purpose is to expand the mind, and draw closer to the divine. The intersect history somewhat, to be sure, as do all things. And we can project them onto the plane of history and learn from the projection, but in the end, they don't live there. Things can be good and meaningful on either side of the true/false nonfiction/fiction classification system, but not everything needs to be classified that way in the first place.

It's common for folks at church to say that they know the Book of Mormon is true. We'll, I don't know that it's true. I know that it's good and meaningful. It teaches me about the divine and about humanity. Joseph Smith has a famous quote, "I told the brethren, that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book." Here, I take "correct" to mean morally correct, not historically, and frankly, I'd rather have the former than the latter. We can wonder and worry about its origins, tiptoeing around top-hats and seer stones or analyzing native american anthropology, but in the end the real question is: does its narrative help me in my journey to be the person I want to be?

2011 year summary

noreply@blogger.com (ajb) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 16:36:00 +0000

This holiday season has been more crazed than usual, what with finals after the break. Nobody seems to think this is a good idea, but the schedule remains as is.

And now it's new year's eve and I get to look back at the things I've done this year. Maybe that will motivate me to work harder through finals, you never know.

Books I read East of Eden, The Poisonwood Bible, Sarah's Key, and started the Song of Ice and Fire series, getting through the first two books and am currently halfway through the third. I've been reading War and Peace, The Handmaid's Tale, and On Food and Cooking, but haven't finished them yet. And then there's academic reading, but I'll spare you.

Food I discovered swiss chard, kale, and belgian endives. How could I live so long without knowing swiss chard? Tragedy. I also cooked a bunch of seafood for the first time: scallops, swordfish, shrimp, clams, and muscles. And I roasted a turkey totally on my own--another first. Parsnip is on my list of things to try for next year.

Lifestyle N and I moved into smaller apt (N estimates 5/8 the size of our old place) and got rid of some stuff on the way. I've been going through maniacal bursts of cleaning/organizing to get rid of more stuff we don't need. I started my conversion to the GTD system and am using Omnifocus. It's not perfect, but it helps. I also quit facebook for most of the year, reactivating my account only recently. I might deactivate it again soon, but we'll see. Oh yeah, I also started grad school.

Misc N and I usually watch a single TV episode a day as together downtime. This year, we've worked through Modern Family, Merlin, a good chunk of Star Trek TNG (in order), The Good Wife, and maybe a few others. I also started and finished 2 paintings (sold one!) and have three in progress. I made a quilt for my recently born nephew. And there was the garden project over the summer. N and I went to a family reunion in Colorado, spent Christmas in California, and went up to Boston to see family, but that was the extent of our traveling this year.

And next year will bring some good things too. No resolutions, or abstract or specific. Just studying for now.

What should computers be able to do?

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 02:21:00 +0000

I've been thinking about what I'd like computers to be able to do. I'd like to be able to say (or type, or somehow communicate) the following things to a computer and for it to magically give me good responses.

- I'd like to buy a Christmas present for my friend <name>. What are some good ideas?
- I'm really tired and want to watch a light movie. Show me some options.
- I need a book that will last me for a month-long trip. Non-fiction, preferably.
- My favorite dress was ruined, what's a good replacement?
- I'd like to try a new hobby, what might I like?
- I have five minutes before my interviewer calls. Give me something distracting.
- I'm taking <name> out to dinner, where might they like to go? Romantic but not pricey.

Siri is a great step toward intelligent responses, but there are still lots of limits. The technology needs to know about lots of different things it doesn't really consider right now. Your moods, preferences, present company (and their moods/preference), and even current location or time of day. I think sufficient data exists, even if it isn't public--think about Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Netflix, Amazon wishlists and browsing history, and browsing history in general. We could use bookmark information, email, blogs, and on top of that, users are usually more than happy to answer questionnaires...people love exploring themselves. Hunch is a great example of a recommendation system for everything, but I think I want a system that's a mash-up between Hunch and Siri.

I'm trying to define the bounds of this system in my head. What should it be capable of and what is too much? I know what I would want it to do, but I don't know what other people might want to use it for. So this is my question to you: what would you like to ask a computer that it can't currently answer? Can you give me example queries?

Woman's Day

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 03:45:00 +0000

This week we got the final notice that N's subscription to Woman's Day had expired (we got another notice last week too). Neither of us have ever even opened a Woman's Day in the grocery store, let alone subscribed, so it's either a marketing tactic or a mistake. Either way, it cracks me up.

Also, why call a lifestyle magazine "Woman's Day"? I'd imagine that there's very little woman-specific information in it, and while their audience is probably mostly women, they could target a larger subset of the population by simply changing the name.

paper and pixels

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:58:00 +0000

My gut reaction to new devices is "don't need it."[1] E-readers, smartphones, tablets, whatever. Don't need it. My seminar on the future of the book has changed that a little. I can now see the place for digital books, and would actually love to have a good color e-ink (not LCD) reader for pdfs and one-time reads. The system isn't set up to work the way I want to use it, though. Supposedly you can use your public library to gain access to ebooks, but even our huge library doesn't have access to the digital versions of anything on my reading list. I'm not paying anything for something I'll read once, even if it's cheaper because it's digital. And Amazon is still missing a lot of stuff. So no e-reader for me for now. The for now is the concession I've made.

One thing that came up in class was the advantages and disadvantages of each form. I got in a match with my professor, each of us claiming that we could list five things off the top of our heads why one form was better than another (he's a digital advocate, I'm dedicated to bound). We didn't actually list five each, but I wanted to make those lists for comparison, so here they are. The advantages of bound books will only decrease with time, but these my current top five.

Advantages of Digital Books
- easily searchable
- more ergonomic to use (due to a lightweight and balanced form)
- conducive to a minimalist lifestyle (fewer physical things to manage)
- easier to travel with (smaller/lighter)
- instant access to one's entire personal collection and also to purchasable content

Advantages of Bound Books
- superior random access [2]
- cheaper (due to libraries/borrowing/sharing and buying used) [3]
- easier to consume from multiple vendors
- more accessible interface (no manual, forums, or help needed)
- apocalypse-proof (or able to withstand long-term power-loss/reduction)

I have no idea what is more stainable. On the one hand, bound books mean paper, which means harvesting trees. On the other, we have rare metals (and thus probably fair-trade issues), but also electricity consumption.

I don't think I'll ever go all-digital, but who knows. Even art books might be addressable eventually. The biggest hurdle will be converting my preexisting collection of bound books into digital books. And sharing. I need to be able to share my books without having folks borrow my entire library (i.e. the device).

It basically comes down to cost. I'm not willing to re-buy everything I have nor am I willing to pay 10 to 20x more for a slight increase in convenience. I could deal with everything else if I could get any book for $0.50, which is the standard cost of paperbacks at library used-book sales. Heck, I'd be willing to pay the hardback $1. But as long as the alternative to borrowing a book from the library is to pay an insane amount, I'll stick with my bound books. They need to market books on the app cost scale for real viability; most books should be under a couple of dollars.

[1] Right now, anyway. I used to be a huge gadget person--I had a PDA in middle school, even though that's obviously not something a middle-schooler needs. Shall we schedule hanging out in the quad for 3:10pm?

[2] With digital books, there's no good way to hold a finger in one place and flip to another, nor is there a good mechanism for flipping through the book to find non-text.

[3] One thing that weighs on me is that a shift to digital books makes reading more privileged, at least as currently implemented. Sure, free ebooks are great, but most of the free ones are epub, which Kindle doesn't support. So do you forgo Amazon's selection and go for a Nook? How about an iPad with apps to do everything for $500? Laptops are cheaper. I'm pitching my Occupy eBooklandia tent.

the Birth Order Book

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:58:00 +0000

I've started attending a book club with ladies from my church. The song's familiar for many book of the clubs out there: it's not officially church-y, that's just how it spread. I figured that it would be good to know folks outside of the church-context, especially since a lot of them seem like really interesting and fun people and also that I've been really busy wrangling the little ones on Sundays so I don't have much time to get to know anyone.

November's meeting was the first one I attended, and I decided to drop in last minute since I had already read the book (Ender's Game). And then we just met for December (Sarah's Key). The meetings tend to be a good mix of philosophy and social chat, and I'm enjoying the personalities present. Up next for January is The Birth Order Book. Breaks the "possessive-noun object" trend, such a shame.

Frankly, I'm hesitant. Most of my leisure reading is fiction, and when it's not, I stick to science, history, religion, philosophy, and how-to books, keeping my distance (for the most part) from self-help, opinion, politics, or relationship-type books. Anything where the author feels the need to publish with "Dr." in front of his or her name sends off a red flag. Also, anything with the author's picture on the cover, unless it's an autobiography. Red flags, I tell you.

As humans, we already compartmentalize the world. We put people in gender boxes, race boxes, religion boxes, political affiliation boxes, etc.. Boxes help us organize the world and determine how to act. If I'm explaining my work to someone, I'll say different things depending on if I'm talking to an academic peer or if I'm talking to a family member; they'll have different prior knowledge and levels of interest. But if I stack up all of the boxes for one person, it's still a rough approximation of who they are.

The biggest danger in boxifying things is framing it in terms of causality. So-and-so is this way because of this box. That's not true. If it were, all people in that box would have that characteristic. That's the definition of causality. Boxifying things is all about correlation, or rough approximations. It's useful because it gives us a rough approximation of a person or situation and we can hash out the details from there. Stopping at the box level is shallow because the boxes never get all the details. (The Birth Order Book's subtitle is "Why You Are the Way You Are." That's causal language. It makes me grumpy.)

So...right...back to birth order. I think I'm hesitant in part because I don't generally know things about people's birth order. That's not something you can get just by looking at a person, nor is it something that comes up early on in conversation. The people for whom I know their birth order I already know fairly well. Adding a birth order box to my approximation of them would do absolutely nothing. It's a lossy representation.

A more practical problem I have with this book is that it's hard to get my hands on. Neither the university nor the huge public library have it. I'm not going to buy it. I might just read some studies on birth order instead, since the psychology literature is more appealing to me than mass-marketed pseudo-psychology books. Yes, I'm a snob. Maybe it's because I'm the eldest child.

If anyone from book club reads this, don't kill me. Write a comment instead. I'd love to hear why I'm wrong.

chocolate cake for two

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 03:56:00 +0000

I've been making mini desserts recently, to have just one serving for both N and myself so we wouldn't overdo it. I can down an entire chocolate cake all by myself in a few hours--my mother can testify. Last night I made lime custard tarts, but tonight was a tiny chocolate cake.

Chocolate Cake for Two

18 g cocoa powder
56 g boiling water
56 g sugar
1 egg

1 t vanilla
1 T butter, softened
50 g flour
1/4 t baking soda

Whisk the cocoa and boiling water until smooth; mix in sugar. Mix in egg when cooled a little. Kneed together butter and remaining dry ingredients (flour and soda) until butter is fully incorporated. Add dry/butter mixture to wet mixture, mixing until smooth. Bake at 350 in an approximately 5in diamater ramekin or souffle dish until springy when pressed. (I used a 16oz CorningWare dish.)

I made a chocolate whipped cream (heavy cream, vanilla, sugar, cocoa powder) to frost it and topped with dark chocolate crumbs.

...and we ate it so fast, I couldn't take a pretty picture of the tasty guts tumbling out.

ants and plants

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 01:19:00 +0000

I was watering some under-loved plants tonight, when lo! an ant colony swarmed out of one of my kitchen plants. I spied a large winged one. A queen? Certainly; it had the characteristic enlarged abdomen. There were lots of tiny ones with wings too. But then I saw a second huge one. Two queens? That seemed a little strange. Then a third. And a fourth. I began to doubt my queen-ant identification skills. This was a tiny pot, too.

I flooded the plant to make sure the ants stayed out, then wiped them up, ensuring the demise of the might-be-queens in particular. Ants are among the insects that I have no qualms about killing indiscriminately when they enter my living space. (Spiders and moths get some warm words as I remove them, usually informing them that N will kill them if they don't leave. And even bees, wasps, and flies get ushered out with moderate politeness. Though after recently discussing Ender's game in my first book club meeting, I still felt a little guilty about potentially having destroyed a whole colony of ants.) After wiping the ants up like crumbs, I set to work learning about the varieties of ants. Turns out, unless you get these guys under the microscope or you're a professional, it's near impossible to identify a common household ant. Oh well.

So my final guess on the queens is that they just hadn't matured fully. Else why would there be four of them? All I hope is that the ants don't make their way into my brand new lavender plant, a birthday gift from my mother-in-law, which is currently being pampered out of its mind. The other plants might be jealous, but they get watered more now, so they shouldn't complain. Trickle down economics, baby. Tee-hee.

we are the 100%

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:21:00 +0000

Honestly, I'm a bit tired of the "we are the 99%" and/or "occupy ____."

I think that there are a lot of good ideas and moving stories, but the lack of organization just kind of irks me. I'm not going to take a stand with someone, friend or stranger, unless I have a compelling reason. And a group of people? I'm not going to join a mass of folk without it declaring a clear set of goals or ideals. Maybe I'm a persnickety list-maker, but I just don't get it. It feels like herd mentality.

My life is pretty good right now; I might be singing a different tune if I were hugely in debt, grappling with medical issues or otherwise had life in disarray. Despite life's goodness, I like to think that I'm a survivor by nature, doing what I need to do, even if life is hard. [Tangent: Hunger Games is next on the reading list.] And if I'm not a survivor, I'm at least an optimist, focusing on the good things. Everyone has a breaking point though, and to me the 99%/occupy movement seems to be declaring that most people are close to breaking, if not already there. Part of me is skeptical, thinking that folks might be exaggerating, but part of me knows that I'm really lucky and that there are lots of folk out there dealing with a lot of unpleasant stuff.

So, in the spirit of sharing 99%-style, here's some info about my life. As a household, my husband and I are above the 50% mark of Americans [2] by income. We're both in graduate school and attend the same name-recognized school. We're in the youngest 20% of Americans, including the lowest 10% being children/adolescents ages 14 and under [3]. It seems ridiculous to me that we're over the 50% income mark given that we're both at the start of our careers and still in school. We have retirement and savings accounts, and are able to donate money as we see fit. Our health coverage isn't great, but since we're healthy, it doesn't matter much for now. I am worried about health coverage for the possibility of having kids at some point; I'd like the birth process and pediatric stuff to be well covered.

My problems are very, well, insignificant next to issues of starvation or vaccination. There's still pretty small next to eviction or massive debt. I feel like I have 1%'er problems, even though I'm in the 99%. I feel like a lot of people in the 99% have this same magnitude of problems, and that income is not a good metric for separating the privileged from the struggling. I think that's part of why the whole thing irks me: it's including me when I shouldn't be included.

[1] per this article by the WSJ
[2] internationally, it's a whole 'nother ballgame
[3] I did this with rough approximation, given the percentages listed here.

sporadic obsessions

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:25:00 +0000

This totally describes my life. Except instead of Dragon Ball Z, it was Sailor Moon.

my ideal tech setup

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:35:00 +0000

Currently, I have a razor cell phone, a 13" Macbook pro, and an iMac at the office. I video chat with my family more than I call them, but it's nice to have the phone for emergencies or when I don't have internet access. I use my laptop at home and when traveling, for both work as well as personal stuff, and I love having a big screen at the office. A desktop also forces me to work for extended periods of time. When I worked only on my laptop, I'd be tempted to close it and go home early, thinking that I could just pick up where I left off, which rarely happened. When I do need to work remotely, I can just ssh into my work machine and or grab whatever I need with scp.

The biggest gap in my current setup is a touch-screen type device that would be useful for reading papers or digital books. I'm not one to give up my paper books, but a lot of libraries, public and private, now distribute content digitally. Here's the hitch: I don't want to have just another gadget. Even if it's useful, I feel like so much technology overlaps already that an iPad/Kindle/Nook would be silly given that I already have so many things.

Here's the setup I really want:

1) A mobile device. I could make phone calls with a wireless earpiece or do video chat on this. I could read PDFs and other digital media easily without feeling like I'm using a traditional laptop. I could check/write emails, work on programing projects, and do other typing intensive tasks easily and for long periods. Imagine as if a Macbook Air and an iPad made a baby--this is that device.

2) A desktop/server. All my projects and digital media are hosted here. I can ssh in from my mobile device. It has a large screen that makes my daily work easy. It's powerful enough to do computation on large data sets.

Just two things. The second one already exists, but the first one doesn't. My bet is that it will sometime soonish, and when it does, I'll be ready.

11, 11, 11!

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:07:00 +0000

Eleven is my favorite number. I should have planned a party for today or something. Instead, I might just go read The Eleventh Hour, cut edible things into eleven pieces, and other such nonsense.

another gratitude list

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 02:05:00 +0000

I've been off balance lately--my fuse has been short and I've been feeling generally entitled. Like everyone, I constantly walk the line of being respectful of others and protective of my own needs. I don't want to be a push-over, but I don't want to be mean either. Sometimes I fall one way, sometimes the other, but falling on the selfish end always feels worse, and that's where I've been of late. There's nothing like a bit of gratitude to put things in perspective and help restore balance. Plus, it's November, so here goes.

Some things I'm grateful for, in no particular order and with no particular organization:
- Daylight savings time that gets me on an earlier schedule without any effort
- A bouquet of beautifully smelling roses currently sitting on our kitchen table

- N takes care of the dishes almost all of the time, even when I wreak havoc in the kitchen.

- I can walk everywhere I need to go regularly, except the grocery store.

- Access to essentially every book I'd ever want to read (big local library + the university/ILL)

- I have the freedom to set my own hours and determine my own projects.
- Work/school is really enjoyable and fulfilling for me. (Related, but distinct from above.)
- All of my basic needs are easily met. (And will be for the foreseeable future; life is stable.)
- I have friends, family, and communities (school and church) that support me.
- Most of the people I love (as in philía) are in good health and are generally happy.

25 hours

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:13:00 +0000

N made the observation last night as we were going to bed that I had a 25-hour day for my 25th birthday. Hurrah for daylight savings time!

spiced orange juice

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 03:04:00 +0000

Tonight, N felt like a hot dessert-y drink and I felt like something light and fruity. We didn't have any apple juice for cider, so I decided to make a spiced orange juice and was pleasantly surprised.

I heated the following in a pot until it was just a little too hot to drink comfortably--I'd rather serve a drink like this too hot over too cold.

2 mugfulls of orange juice

1.5 tablespoon heavy cream

1 teaspoon vanilla

honey, sugar or any sweetener to taste (I did a mix of honey and truvia)

1 teaspoon ground cloves

priorities, virtues, goals, and then some

noreply@blogger.com (ajbc) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 01:32:00 +0000

Fair warning: a long, detailed post.

It's fall break and I've been using the extra time to catch up on a bunch of different things. One of which is getting more organized. I read most of the GTD book this summer, and there have been a bunch of lists floating around. I've plowed through a bunch of goals--basically, I'm getting closer to my optimally productive state. Of late, however, I've felt the need to take a step back, so I'm going to pull from GTD and hash out my "priorities." (Why the quotes will be addressed later.) I'm doing this on my blog instead of on paper because it forces me to 1) generalize, 2) be reasonable, and 3) be clear. But back to the priorities...to use the altitude analogy from the book, we have six levels:

• 50,000+ feet: Life
• 40,000 feet: Three to five-year vision
• 30,000 feet: One to two-year goals
• 20,000 feet: Areas of responsibility
• 10,000 feet: Current projects
• Runway: Current actions

The last two items--current actions and projects--are too numerous and detailed for this post, so we'll start with my areas of responsibility, which are basically just categories for organizing my projects.

• Academic
• Research
  • Classes
  • Administrative
• Personal
  • Domestic
  • Hobbies
• Church
  • Social (including family)

Next: my one to two year goals. I want to pass my generals. I want a good summer internship this summer and the next. N and I were thinking of starting to have kids after I pass generals, so I guess that would be in this category: plan for children. I want to have published at least one paper as first author, maybe two. I want to successfully save tomato seeds from my garden. I want to make at least one more quilt. I want to start grinding my own wheat. I want to do lots of stuff, but you get the picture.

The three to five year vision? I want to have at least one kid and have strong, loving family relationships. I want to finish grad school in five years and be looking for a job (or have one already). I want to be minimalist enough that moving anywhere in the world wouldn't be a hard logistical problem. I want to a host of skills or stores of knowledge of homestead variety: beekeeping, butchering chickens, making cheese, gardening, preserving, and various from-scratch baking skills. I want to have enough money for downpayment on a house. I want to have written my Russian historical fiction novel. Again, lots of stuff.

Life? I want a happy, healthy family (or at least as happy and healthy as possible given whatever circumstances we will have). I want my family to be supportive, open, and loving. I want to not have things I don't need. I want to be organized. I always want to have some form (or multiple forms) of creative expression as a hobby. I want to be generous but financially stable. I want to own land, and try my hand at some form of homesteading: raise my own chickens, waterfowl, or sheep, keep bees, have an orchard, tend a garden...these are all options, though I probably won't get to do them all. I want a satisfying career: I could go into industry or academia, but I would also be happy making homesteading a full-time occupation. Whatever I choose, I want to love what I do.

Now that I've gone over the GTD version of my "priorities," I wanted to explain why I put that term in quotes. The premise behind setting priorities is setting an order of precedence. Theoretically, everything I listed as goals above, no matter what the level, should come over anything else, all other things being equal. Life is rarely that clear-cut, though. Setting priorities as described above leaves me with more questions like "how do I prioritize things within my goals?" There's the classic example of women who want to have both a family and a career--how do they choose when to put what first?

At the end of last year, I created some themes instead of specific new year's resolutions (the last one is new). These address some of the issues of simple goals because they define a set of precedence rules.

• Physical over Virtual
• Creative over Consumptive
• Independence over Reliance
• Community over Isolation
• Simplicity over Clutter
• Stimulated over Numbed
• Appropriate Use and Reuse over Waste
• Thoughtful over Instinctual

When making daily decisions, people rarely consult their list of goals. Likewise, I rarely consult my themes, but they're there to help give me guidance when I have the time or feel the need to sit back and ponder the bigger picture. They also help evaluate the merit of simple goals. I'm doing both of these things right now.

I've also given some thought to virtues. There is the famous example of Benjamin Franklin's list of virtues, as well a lists from various religions and philosophies. I've tried making lists of virtues, but they all come down to two things: treating others well, and improving oneself. I feel that the first category is my first priority, over all else: love, charity, kindness...it's all kinda the same. It leads to altruism and universality, mindfulness, justice, honesty, and respect. It's the golden rule.

The second category is includes things like moderation (which in turn includes temperance and restraint), order, cleanliness, frugality, industry, tranquility, patience, knowledge. Even still, some things like patience are on the border with the first category.

But even though love for others is my first priority, sometimes I must do things for myself. Doing things for myself can enable me to help others, but I also just have a drive to take care of myself, so the first and second ordering isn't really strict. In fact, I can frame my entire life as taking care of myself:

• take care of self
  • physically
  • sleep
  • nutrition/appropriate diet
  • hydration
  • medical health
• preventative care
• other treatment as needed
  • be in shape:
  • strength
  • balance/dexterity
  • flexibility
  • cardio
  • grooming/hygiene
  • mental health
  • mediation/prayer
  • organized life
• all projects personal and academic/work under control
• clean, tidy, and aesthetically pleasing environment
• able to provide or have access all things listed here, combined with a sense of being in control
  • healthy relationships
  • spouse
  • family
  • friends
  • work
• church community
  • sense of morality and acting accordingly (includes activism and various opinions)
• fair trade, treating people equitably, giving to international aid, gender equality, etc.
  • have projects/purpose/a way to productively spend my time
• have good outlets/hobbies/secondary ways to spend time

You can see similarities between the various framings of priorities, virtues, and goals. They're just different ways to look at the same thing: all the complexities of an individual life.

Take any one facet of a life, like my urge to do homesteading-type activities. It's a hobby under the GTD system, possibly growing into something larger over time. In the priorities system, it's a manifestation of independence and arguably a few others. Under the virtues system, it's something to hone my personal virtues, like industry, or something to keep me mentally healthy by having a productive way to spend my time. You could make a slew of arguments to describe this impulse under any of the systems.

Given all this, what's the point? Priorities, virtues, and goals are just different ways of measuring or articulating our desires. Too often do I fall prey to the mental trap of trying to put everything in its appropriate little box; it's a kind of game. Sometimes it's useful, though; going through this exercise helped me gain motivation for the things I need to do this week, even this month. But where do I go from here? I get back to getting things done, appreciating as much as I can of the world, and living my values or accomplishing my goals or however else I want to frame it.

Well, that was a pretty elaborate life pep-talk.