Bits and Paradoxes - #25

Breathing, Coffee, Backwards Bicycle...

When you get this in your inbox, time might be different. Just imagine a guy on a roof trying to make incoherent things resonant... Haha…

Hi,

I hope you're doing fine. I am writing this in the morning, under the sun enjoying a strong coffee (2nd cup right now) and listening to Lightnin' Hopkins Blues.

(Figure: Cup of coffee on a roof)

Yesterday (Friday), I reframed the whole wireless network in the house just to be able to sit under the sun and wander in the Internet-verse. It took ~2 hours to stabilize the network. I had to make some trade-offs for routers too: distance vs quality. I chose the distance.

My setup now has 3 routers superimposed without much loss. And there's one dedicated router just for myself to connect to for work hours.

Anyway, I hadn't been feeling productive the whole week (maybe the whole month) because of the health issues. I had a mild fever last Monday, plus a dental problem.

I advise everyone to take proper care of their teeth. It's the one thing that can cause trouble as you age.

This time, I don't have anything particular idea (theme?) in my mind, except I have restarted my breathing exercise: once in the morning and once in the night. I am getting a lot of anxiety attacks while thinking about grad schools (yup, the season has come), and "what's next" elements. So, these breathing exercises have really helped.

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#Reading

How Iceman Wim Hof Uncovered the Secrets to Our Health

Susan Casey | 23 min

This read allows us to peek into Wim Hof's life of being the "Iceman".

His endurance technique is getting a lot of traction because it surprisingly works. It's still a major mystery how it works, but “Deep Breathing” helps to pull in more oxygen. As a result, the whole body becomes oxygenated. <insert some biochemical jargon here>

The breathing technique followed by a cold shower/swimming helps to build endurance. It sedates your body's fight-or-flight response. The controlled breathing -- during the panic mode -- helps in stabilizing the metabolism and stress.

This breathing-through-stomach and taking cold showers really help. I have tried it myself in the past too. If you practice the breathing technique -- with long inhale and relaxed exhale -- it almost takes you to a meditative state. There's the feeling of calmness, almost high.

Also, you can follow this video too. It's helpful.

Also, weirdly I had watched this video of getting a “deeper voice” by breathing through the stomach.

Also, do watch VICE’s coverage on Wim Hof - The Superhuman World of Wim Hof: The Iceman

The rise of the non-expert expert

Vicki Boykis | 10 min

Today, with growing [[Programming Landscape]], you cannot have expertise in everything nor can risk yourself to be stuck in a single domain (or tool).

It has become a mesh that calls for more breadth than depth.

“Breadth vs depth” knowledge dilemma is shifting from knowing only a single tool towards knowing a handful of things.

In the past, technology stack was small, and expertise was concentrated on a few nerds/geeks. For harder problems, it was difficult to find solutions because of a lack of communication channels.

Now, the internet has grown so much. It is easier to find virtually anything which has enabled everyone to become an expert in their own ways.

Although you cannot learn everything, you can certainly find repetitive patterns in problems and their solutions.

Sure! You might not know to code in Java. Or Clojure. Or might not have a clue about the Django framework despite knowing Flask. But these seem secondary now. Strategies and design patterns are almost language-agnostic. What you learn from your niche domain are ways to approach a problem, and possibly find elegant solutions. That's the whole point of this read: pattern matching with your experience.

What distinguishes them now is breadth and, I think, the ability to discern patterns and carry them across multiple parts of a stack, multiple stacks, and multiple jobs working in multiple industries. We are all junior, now, in some part of the software stack. The real trick is knowing which part that is.

…to break down the systems and platforms to their core principles, to their ones and their zeros, and be able to reapply those principles elsewhere, is the new knowing the command line. (Oh, but you should also know the command line, too.)

A Letter to My Newborn Daughter

Lawrence Yeo | 7 min

This felt partially cute and partially deep.

Lawrence writes a letter to his newborn daughter with a theme of life being full of connections, surprises, needs/wants, emotions, curiosity, ups-and-downs...

What makes life interesting are its challenges, not its comforts. This is one of those funny things that will only make sense once you live through it.

How to enjoy coffee

Jessica Easto | 16 min

Smooth like chocolate or fruity like a berry, coffee has as many tastes as wine or beer – you just need to know your beans.

As an avid coffee drinker (lover?), I found this essay insightful. Like:

• Brewing time and temperature affect the quality of coffee.

  roasting at relatively low temperatures for a shorter amount of time tends to accentuate what I call coffee character, the unique flavours inherent in the bean itself and where it was grown – or its terroir, to borrow a term from wine

• There's a term called "Bean Belt" for the band of coffee-growing countries that fall between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.

• Coffee producers have historically been exploited, and even ‘fair trade’ prices – designed to protect farmers – often aren’t enough;

• Knowing the place of origin of the beans helps you to relate coffee with places.

• If you want to fully enjoy coffee, go for the bare minimum without added ingredients like milk and sugar. (My type of coffee…)

Taste thoughtfully. Coffee is complex by nature: a typical roasted coffee bean contains more than 800 different chemical compounds that contribute to flavour and aroma.

Can bacteria be killed by purely physical trauma?

StackExchange

A statistically verifiable result isn't observed. However, there's also a chance that bacteria will die under centrifuge.

According to one of the answers:

I recently collaborated on a project where initial interpretation of results was wrong simply because putting a glass slip over a sample to inspect it under a microscope caused around 10% of bacterial (B. subtilis) cells to die. Putting a small weight on the slip resulted in roughly 80kPa additional pressure applied and ~ 80% of the cells dying within 25 minutes. But 80% death rate won't do much to e.g. reduce risk of food poisoning - as long as there are nutrients, bacteria will regrow quickly.

It should however be noted that it seems that high-pressure treatment is good enough to be semi-commonly used as the main sterilization for suitable foodstuffs - Current status and future trends of high-pressure processing in food industry reports high-pressure treatment to be FDA approved and USD 10 billion worth of food being treated as of 2015.

This was an interesting thread.

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#Watching

The Backwards Brain Bicycle

Smarter Every Day | 8 min

In this video, Destin tries to ride a bicycle that moves in the opposite direction than the handle's motion. That is, when you turn the handle towards the left, the bicycle turns towards the right.

It's bizarre that we can rarely ride such a bicycle even if we know how to ride a normal one.

It has something to do with [[Neuroplasticity]]. Destin takes 8 months to learn to ride the reverse bicycle. However, when he tries to ride the normal one again he fails weirdly. His neural circuits are rewired to ride the newer bicycle. Haha.

Unlike Destin, his son took 2 weeks to learn the same reverse bicycle. This is important. When you are young, the neural circuits are highly plastic.

An important lesson from this video is about our cognitive bias towards the things we feel comfortable with (or hardwired to do). Here, Destin was sure that he’d ride the backward bicycle easily. But then he couldn’t. It was difficult. Once you learn something, it's harder to let go of that knowledge…

The Mental Game of Python

Raymond Hettinger | Talk | 1 hr

If you work with thousands of developers, ranging from the experienced to the aspirational, you can see what patterns of thought seem to confer success. Raymond shares what he’s seen that works best for developing problem solving skills, learning how to learn, how to get unstuck, and reliable strategies for managing complexity. The talk includes live coding examples to make these ideas concrete.

This was fun to watch. Highly recommended.

Here, Raymond provides some strategies while solving problems through programming. Although he uses Python (him being the hardcore python developer), it can be applied to any language. I'd say it also applies to any type of problem-solving mental models.

Some of the strategies he presents are:

I) Chunk and alias

Abstract away complex things to decrease the cognitive load.

II) Solve a related but simpler problem

Do incremental development. You can't solve a complex problem in one go.

III) Build classes independently and let inheritance discover itself

Inheritance is widely misunderstood. In that, people think too hard to create an inheritance pattern beforehand. This leads to weird assumptions about the subs-classes which might even increase cognitive load.

Instead, don't stress too much about inhering behaviour/attributes. First, write classes normally and independently. And then see if there's anything common between those classes.

IV) Repeat tasks manually until patterns emerge. Then move to a function.

I think this fits nicely with incremental development.

Instead of trying to figure out (complex) patterns in the code beforehand, you could just write normally, manually. Eventually, you'd find repetitive patterns. Those repetitions can be separated into functions eventually. (See: DRY Principle)

Other strategies Raymond didn't get time to get into are:

• Consider OOP as a graph traversal problem.

• Separate ETL from analysis. Separate analysis from presentation.

• Verify type, verify size, view subset of data, and test a subset.

• Sets and dict groupings are primary tools for data analysis.

This talk also reminded me of another talk by James Powell: So you want to be a Python expert?

Share Market (Nepali narration)

GYANmandu | 16 min

I've been meaning to open a Demat account to invest in something. So, this video has really helped me to understand the situation here in Nepal.

The main focus here is in the Primary Market where companies open their share form for the first time.

The author also presents some misconceptions surrounding the Investing domain.

One misconception is that investment is a high-risk game. That's partially true if we look at a shorter period of time (say less than a year) where we are likely to see more downfall. However, long-term investment (say a period of 5 years) has an upward trend.

Another misconception is that you should have in-depth knowledge. Yes. You should. But it's not a necessity. You can just know enough to get started. A mediocre knowledge is also good. However, more knowledge is better I guess…

There are a lot of things to understand. I am still learning more.

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#Fragments

The Box

Story | Naval Ravikant

This is powerful.

“Who am I?” I ask.

“You are me,” says the box.

Music: Blind Willie Johnson - Dark was the night

This timeless piece is stored in [[Voyager Golden Record]] and probably will last forever (forever being 1000s of years).

The more I listen to it, the sadder it feels. If you imagine a space probe flying into the unknowns and this music as a backdrop, the insignificance of our existence starts to feel hauntingly beautiful…and yes…of course lonely…

The Voyager Golden Records are two phonograph records that were included aboard both Voyager spacecrafts launched in 1977. The records contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form who may find them. The records are a sort of time capsule. - Wikipedia

Recommendation: The Golden Record: Human Existence in 90 Minutes

Lightnin' Hopkins

I recently discovered Hopkins. I find his music mesmerizing.

Samuel John "Lightnin'" Hopkins was an American country blues singer, songwriter, guitarist and occasional pianist, from Centerville, Texas. Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 71 on its list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.

Listen to this, this, and this.

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Ending Thoughts

Currently, I am consuming (reading/exploring) these things (slow progress):

• Existentialism is a Humanism by Sartre

• Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework by Douglas Engelbart

• mindingourway.com

• Plus, (re)listening to some podcast involving Naval

That's all. Have “great” days ahead with the festival season.

For me, I am indifferent to festivals and celebrations. :)

Love,
Nish

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PS: There has been a DMCA takedown to youtube-dl. I am worried about playx I guess. Anyone who likes to have a serious discussion, I am available in this thread:

https://github.com/NISH1001/playx/issues/126