Consider the Flea

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that as threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and put him at the head of the procession.

-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"

Priorities

"If there's something you can imagine that's even worse than wasting your life, if there's something you want that's more important than thirty [years], or if there are scarier things than a life of inconvenience, then you may have cause to attempt the impossible."

-Eliezer Yudkowsky

Success

A kinder, gentler philosophy of success - video from TED

The economics of suicide

The economics of suicide:

"after people attempt suicide and fail, their incomes increase by an average of 20.6 percent compared to peers who seriously contemplate suicide but never make an attempt. ...Once you attempt suicide you suddenly have access to lots of resources—medical care, psychiatric attention, familial love and concern—that were previously expensive or unavailable. ...psychological and familial resources become 'cheaper' after a suicide attempt: It is difficult to find free medical care when you are sad, but once you try to kill yourself, it's forced on you."

Hubs

Buffalo is a rust belt city. Long ago it was a hub of industry, near the Erie Canal, on the St. Lawrence Seaway and a major rail stop directly between Chicago and New York City. Buffalo hosted factories and grain elevators.

When Manufacturing left America, it left Buffalo.

Today Silicon valley is the business mecca of America, possibly of the world. There is no particular geography that lends itself to high tech business, but when one company after another starts up in an area, it becomes the easiest place to hire skilled workers, and the easiest place to find work if you have the right skills. With both employees and potential corporate partners flocking to northern California, it becomes difficult to justify starting a company anywhere else.

Any city would be challenged to turn itself into the next Silicon Valley. For Buffalo, a city challenged just to survive, it may seem impossible.

Despite this, there are advantages that our city could leverage to get a leg up in the climb out of obscurity. We have ready access to cheap hydroelectric power and we are already a world leader in the field of bioinformatics.

We still lack a diverse community of high tech workers. This is what Buffalo Hackerspaces can help remedy.

A Hackerspace is a combination of a community workshop and a social/educational venue. It allows people to pursue technical hobbies that they wouldn't have the resources to do otherwise. It gives people a place to share knowledge, collaborate on projects, and use expensive tools and equipment they would not otherwise have access to.

Besides the obvious benefit of potential advances and businesses growing directly out of the work done at the hackerspace, this is a very visible form of hi-tech community. Workers deciding where to relocate will see a place they can go to meet people with similar interests. Employers will see evidence of a pool of highly skilled workers. Recruiters will have another needed talking point for Buffalo.

This process has positive feedback. The more business is in a city, the more reasons other businesses and workers have to come here.

(friday...) Video: Charter cities

This Ted talk by Paul Romer on Charter cities is amazing. He talks about how to get damaging rules revised.

"We can't just tear down, We've got to find ways to build up as well."

Youth-led media

Youth-led media - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Youth-Led media is any effort created, planned, implemented, and reflected upon by young people in the form of media, including websites, newspapers, television shows and publications."

I occurs to me that by far the leading form of youth led media is online, but that it probably isn't normally recognized as youth-led media, even by the youth leading it.

Neuroscience and Education

What educators can learn from brain research: "As technology advances, new discoveries based on brain mapping are helping researchers understand how students learn. And those discoveries, in turn, are enriching and informing classroom practices in a growing number of schools."

Determination

There is a martial arts teaching that goes something like this:

To become a true master of a move, you must practice it 10,000 times.

• After 1,000 repetitions you have the basics.
• After 2,000 repetitions you are really good.
• After 3,000 repetitions you can perform the move perfectly.
• After 4,000 repetitions you start to get bored.
• After 5,000 repetitions you have no interest in the move anymore.
• After 6,000 repetitions you start to see the move in a different way.
• After 7,000 repetitions you expand on the move.
• After 8,000 repetitions you invent new variants.
• After 9,000 repetitions you have integrated the move into your arsenal.
• After 10,000 repetitions you no longer think of the move.

We have certainly written many more words in our lives, so if writing a word is the kata we are repeating then we have mastered it long ago. If writing a novel is the kata the I do not think any of us have a chance to master it.

But clearly there are masters of writing, even if they themselves stumble in mid novel. The kata writers are seeking to master is something in between a word and a novel.

When I was young, maybe 7 or 8, There was a patio in my back yard with basketball hoop. It was made of hexagonal patio tiles and they fascinated me. I knew that when I was grown and spectacularly wealthy, I would have a house with hexagonal patio tiles. I was a math nerd. I also had a brother two years older then me, a low growth rate and relatively little athletic skill. I was not competitive at basketball.

In fact I could barely dribble, but that was what I could do, and I wanted to prove I could do it a lot. I also knew that numbers had no limit. So I started dribbling, and counting my dribbles.

It didn't take me long to realize that I could dribble faster than I could say large numbers, so I started saying only the ones place, and only saying the value of the tens place when it changed. one two three four five six seven eight nine ninety one two three four five six seven eight nine hundred one two three....

It also didn't take me long to realize that the lower I dribbled, the faster I could go, And when you're dribbling that low to the ground, the basketball barely moves in relation to it's size, and you could slowly rotate it in any direction just by dribbling offset sightly to that side.

Even dribbling that fast I wanted a bigger record than I could get in one sitting. I had to remember my count from day to day so I tried to stop at round numbers or numbers with a pattern to them.

I still remember the last number I stopped counting at: thirteen thousand one hundred thirty one, or as the mnemonic I used at the time 1 3 1 3 1.

So I guess I know how to dribble, and I also know how to count. And that's probably the closest experience I have to learning something in the style of a repetitive kata.

Friday Video

Coffee Shop Business

As seen on CNN: An online locally oriented site TheDigitel.com is run out of a coffee shop by one previously unemployed man.

This makes it look easy to do with no budget, but it doesn't talk server expenses or advertising. The site uses Drupal to organize the pages, Drupal is free, but I wonder what other expenses the site has that the CNN report didn't cover.

Kanban Process

A Kanban system uses a limited number of physical tokens to match utilization to the natural limits of a process.
A video of David Anderson talking about how to use Kanban for agile software development.

No Solution

Let's talk about Ben:

"He just found it incredibly difficult to grasp reading at school, his reading age was well below average. When he got homework I had to help him read it and when he sat his Sats tests at 11 (in English, maths and science) he had to have someone read the questions to him."
"I initially thought he was dyslexic and took him to be tested but, because he could not read very well, the test did not work and they could not determine whether he was or was not."

This is an example of a failure in education. The root cause of this failure is a system that developed over time based on the limited knowledge of leaders decades or centuries ago. When we hear about Ben's problem this way it seems intractable, the kind of problems that might take years to resolve or work around. Indeed, one might conclude that there is no solution and that he is simply not able to keep up.

How coloured lenses helped Ben read

It turns out that he had a condition called scotopic sensitivity which is thought to affect half of all children with learning difficulties. This is clearly a huge problem with a cheap and simple solution, but the educational system could not have been designed to deal with an illness that wasn't known centuries or decades before. This might be forgiveable, except that it can't adapt because it wasn't designed to react appropriately to a student having trouble.

There is a well defined formal process for failure and segmentation based on past performance, but no similarly entrenched process for prioritizing and seeking out the cause of the difficulties. If you've failed to do what it takes to teach a child to read, having someone read his tests to him is in no way fair to him.

New Laptop review

This morning I installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on a refurbished EEEpc 900A. The OS it came with was not very good: Most of the updates weren't working, There was 70MB of free storage (yes, MegaBytes) and it just clearly wasn't intended for a power user. The only way to get to a terminal was ctrl-t, and the window that came up just wasn't user friendly.

One nice app that was included was stellarium, a deceptively simple desktop starmap. I've wanted to learn constellations and star names better, and stellarium is a perfect tool for that, plus tracking all the planets, and zooming close enough to see the movement of their moons. It's not a technological breakthrough, but it's a perfect kind of pocket guide and I think it suits the netbook form factor very well.

But it's also available in the stellarium package for ubuntu, so ubuntu is what I used.

I'm happy to say that what I got was more of the same high quality I've come to expect from ubuntu. After installing some of my favorites apps, and uninstalling a few others, I have a small and light computer with a very easy to use launcher and a full screen windowing system. (and yes you can switch to a regular window manager, but so far I haven't felt the need to.)

The other issue which worried me about modern netbooks was heat. This laptop does not get hot. It's warm when you touch it with your hand, but not at all uncomfortable the way most other laptops tend to be. I'm surprised it even requires a fan.

Grid Beam Building System

The Grid Beam Building System Has got to be the best and simplest attempts I have seen at a realistic building system for adults. It's simply some square beams of metal or wood with regularly spaced holes drilled through, and some bolts.

This makes it relatively cheap and easy to manufacture the basic components. Somewhere in this project is the potential for a simple business making and selling kits.

"One of the questions I often get especially from non-builders is why do we drill all the holes in Grid beam if only some of them are used? The answer is, without all of the holes, it has no future. Every traditional machine has a useful lifespan before it is obsolete or worn out. Then it is either buried in the earth or melted and reshaped into more one use stuff. Grid beam is different in that it is extremely repairable and if you do want to take it apart, all the component parts including the Grid beam is ready for a new life solving yet another problem."