not quite an expert

Respectable smuggling

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As part of my meta-curation, I read articles recommended by The Browser. This week, The Browser recommended “The Peoples of America” by Rudyard William Lynch, best known for WhatifAltHist.

I initially found the article an interesting exploration of the influence of geography, ancestry, and ethnicity on American culture. However, I noticed something felt off. Lynch nods toward the fall of civilization due to degeneracy:

The Edenic California of the 20th century no longer exists, and has been replaced by a cross between Blade Runner and the degeneracy of ancient atheists’ multicultural Babylon or Rome. California is the story of a society that has everything—wealth, genius, perfect geography, strong political institutions, and military protection—brought down by the one thing it does not have: a functioning culture … . One of my good friends is a native Washingtonian and another an old stock Californian, and both feel that the places they grew up have now been irrevocably destroyed. They belonged to the old cowboy Western culture, while its new inhabitants are trying to build a post-Christian, post-Western, possibly transhumanist society, which we see manifest most clearly with Silicon Valley’s various strange ideologies.

My bucket hat destiny

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Before I travel, I should get a hat to protect my face and neck from the sun.

Since I managed to lose 2 Uniqlo baseball caps, this time I’ll try procuring a bucket hat, which should also protect my neck from the sun.

When I tried the Uniqlo bucket hat at the store, I saw a middle-aged Asian dad in the mirror 🤔🪣. I could imagine myself in incredible detail squinting under the sunlight over one of the Wonders of the World, discovering the camera button on the iPad is exactly where it was last time.

Big Things for Big Rooms

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Some psychology research suggests people tend to see larger works of art as better.¹ Large-scale works can evoke a sense of awe or importance. Size is such an important visual attribute that we process size pre-attentively. However, some additional psychology research suggests people can misattribute their preferences to meanings rather than size.

To my friends who describe themselves as not liking museums I suggest we go to the Metropolitan Museum, which houses such large-scale works as the Temple of Dendur and the choir screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid. A recent exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum, “Big Things for Big Rooms” takes this idea to the extreme. Sure, this pile of rocks seems basic. However, it’s a large pile of rocks in a museum, so it must be important.

Idealized religious bodies

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My biologist friend describes the ecosystem of human beliefs like an ecosystem of organisms - those with more fit characteristics will more likely survive and grow.

The National Museum of Asian Art has an exhibit about religious art from South Asia. In it, I noticed the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist art shared the concept of an enlightened state without form, taking form in the idealized bodies of religious figures. The enlightened state without form and the idealized bodies of religious figures both represent more fit characteristics of a human belief system.

Le Diplomate experience

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Based on these recommendations, I followed procuring Lost Sock and Small Planes coffee beans into Logan Circle. Then I followed the recommendation of my coworker friend into Le Diplomate, a French restaurant and neighborhood staple. I found each part of the meal interesting to discuss.

They seated me at a corner table near where the servers close out checks and gossip, less glamorous and more entertaining. Then they brought out their signature bread basket. I initially felt a base concern about the high carbs in the bread and the high fat in the butter; American nutritionism currently fixates on protein so much I can buy “protein water” at Target. However, recognizing the shortcomings of American nutritionism, I tried to enjoy the bread basket as a French person would, rather than as an American person wouldn’t.

Untetheredly deep thoughts about pizza strategy

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In business strategy, we frame a business as maximizing profit, derived from revenues - expenses. It can increase revenues with product differentiation, or decrease expenses with cost leadership. My strategy professor framed product differentiation and cost leadership as opposite ends of a spectrum of business strategy. However, I would unfold them as separate related features, with some frontier of how a business can allocate and trade off product differentiation and cost leadership.

Untethered

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Having left my previous job, not having decided my next job, I’m exploring the remaining Smithsonian museums, completing the sense untethered.

Last time I was exploring the Smithsonian museums, I was checking Slack and had to interrupt my exploration to handle issues as the only engineer on my project. This time I have no deadline except when the museums close. If I don’t see something today, I can see it tomorrow; if I don’t see something tomorrow, I can see it whatever day.

Ramping down III: what is happening now?

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We covered what happened (with me), now let’s cover what is happening (with me) now.

It happened so suddenly my friends worried how I was doing. I’m doing good. I put my WHOLE ASS (both cheeks! I did not half ass it!) into turning the situation around, and I have the post-midnight (la madrugada) Loom demo threads and the sleep diary to prove it. Even some extra shit - I called the managers from my previous team, and they couldn’t bail me out. I traded whatever embarrassment to have minimal regret.

Ramping down II: what happened?

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We covered what was happening (with the company), now let’s cover what happened (with me).

One of my favorite professors said “people join good companies, and leave bad managers”.

I joined my new team under a director whom my coworker friend (and ex-roommate) vouched for. That director soon left the company, citing toxic leadership. I can’t say I disagree.

So I got a new manager and skip manager (manager’s manager) whom I mixed poorly with. My manager and I mixed poorly on scope - a first-time manager, they optimistically accepted scope, while I tried to push back on scope. I couldn’t effectively negotiate scope without their support, so I laid out multiple times that I considered pushing back on scope a key part of my role. However, we never had a full discussion about our differences handling scope, and the issue festered. My skip manager clearly prioritized optics,¹ while I find myself mildly allergic to optics.

Ramping down I: what was happening?

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Upon leaving my company, I want to answer 3 questions:

What was happening (with the company)?
What happened (with me)?
What is happening (with me) now? This post covers the first question.

As a company grows, people have less visibility into each other’s work, so optics becomes more and more important. Previously I’ve defined optics in contrast to substance. While some optics can create value for the group, e.g. providing public project updates can keep the group on track, I find optics generally creates value for the individual over the group, e.g.

Marie Kondo's glass drawers and character development

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

To decorate my desk in the office, I got Marie Kondo’s stackable glass drawers. I went through some real hassle to get them. Since they had been discontinued, I couldn’t order them online. I had to order them from the Container Store in Staten Island, then get them picked up and delivered via Uber!

Why did I go through that hassle? Because I enjoy Marie Kondo’s “character development”.

In her essay about chadō, “the way of tea”, in Letter from Japan,¹ Kondo reflects:

Schlumped!

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ah, your old friend, the Monterey Jack chicken taquito from 7-Eleven.

You think you’re hot shit, then the week of annual performance reviews your Senior Director DMs you you need to “step up” and the Head of Product blows up your project.

So you work to pick up the pieces, and you find yourself near midnight unable to find a bag, holding your oily old friend in your bare hand, schlumped!

Concept albums

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Compared to many books I’ve read, the critically acclaimed concept albums Wallsocket and Magic, Alive! have less developed characters and less coherent narrative flows. So why do I listen to and enjoy these albums so much?

“The medium is the message”, Marshall McLuhan claims, or less strongly, “the medium shapes the message”, I claim. Detailed dialogue and exposition generally don’t make for compelling lyrics in music. However, music incorporates additional distinct channels - instrumentation, tempo, and volume, to name a few - that communicate meaning, and more broadly build a differently compelling story.

Korean slop bowl

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 42nd St next to Bryant Park, you can find the “slop bowl corridor”, a row of fast casual restaurants serving bowls you can customize with base, protein, toppings, and sauce. Often you rush your “slop bowl” back to your office desk to scarf down before your next meeting.

Wright iterations

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has an exhibit about the Wright brothers investigating how they, with relatively little formal training, became the first to achieve controlled, sustained, and powered flight.

The exhibit explains how the Wright brothers, starting from existing research, built multiple iterations of flying machines for realistic testing in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

However, in addition to those big iterations, the Wright brothers also conducted many more small iterations, using a wind tunnel to test hundreds of wing designs to optimize the forces operating on the wings.

Identity description

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How an organism describes itself can tell you a lot about that organism. For example, I idealize myself as earnest and rigorous, and I think I should be dating more!

With my previous lease expired and without an upcoming lease, I’m taking the opportunity to spend the week in the DC area. Touring Capitol Hill, I’ve seen how the US describes itself: a union of heterogeneous peoples.¹ We strive to support some of those peoples more. However, we disagree which of those peoples we should support more, and how. In general though, we recognize the historic struggle of Black and Indigenous Americans for their civil rights.

My precious pile of quail eggs

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A related story I enjoyed

At any hotpot I look for one thing: quail eggs. Their small size yields a wonderful texture - inside the al dente egg white, a generous core of silky egg yolk!

The last 2 times I got all-you-can-eat hotpot, I shocked and awed both groups of friends with my voracious quail egg consumption. By the time I lost count of my orders of quail eggs, the servers knew my every request would include quail eggs.

Reflections from a rough move

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve moved every year for the past 4 years. However, this move felt especially rough. After 3 days of packing, staying up until 4 AM, 5 AM, 6 AM, I had to call U-Haul to fix my reservation from Flushing to Park Slope.

Thank goodness I’d hired moving help to move my packed stuff into storage. I spent the day exhausted, napping in my friend’s sublet before stumbling my way through a delayed bus and a delayed flight back to Michigan in la madrugada.

Against E-prime

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been trying to follow E-prime in my writing since 2020. However, Wikipedia notes:

Some scholars claim that E-Prime can clarify thinking and strengthen writing, while others doubt its utility.

As a source for “others doubt its utility” Wikipedia links to “The Top Ten Arguments Against E-Prime”, which I finally made the time to read.

Following the posts of a now defunct E-prime forum archived here, I found the full text of French’s article, written for a 1992 symposium about the E-prime controversy. I’ll summarize:

Gowanus Open Studios

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On October 18, I went to Gowanus Open Studios, during which hundreds of artists in Gowanus open their studios to the public.

I felt a real high when the artist in fashion noted I clearly cared about fashion. Then I immediately felt a real low when I hugged the artist goodbye out of habit to meet up with my friend, only to re-enter the studio to meet up with that friend who walked in as I walked out.

Knowing good and bad coffee

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My dad unintentionally tested me in coffee again - this time with a bulk bag of coffee beans from Costco, from the dreaded Starbucks.

In tea‑drinking communities, people tell variations of this story that you must know bad tea to know good tea. From r/tea:

A lot of this reminds me of a weird story that I can’t remember the origin of. It comes down to a master tea farmer and his apprentice, and to start off his apprentice on training for tea tasting, he gives him the worse, most bitter tea. The apprentice is confused as to why he would do this, since they have access to the best tea they could think of. The master says “you cannot learn to appreciate the best of teas until you can appreciate the worst teas”

Principles for dress

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve started to dress better for others (for me). And since I deliberate and iterate¹ so intensely, I’ve also started to listen to a podcast about clothes.

In the episode “How To Dress” of Articles of Interest, the founder of Tibi lays out principles for how to dress, an enticing framing for a mind afflicted with Engineers’ Disease (ED).

After visiting Tibi’s flagship store in SoHo to read The Creative Pragmatist, the book behind the episode, I’d claim very few principles for dress generalize well across people and time. However, I’ve found these principles generalize pretty well, from most to least generalizable:

Bouquet for coffee II: arrangement

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Another subway ride and I brought the vase and micro dried bouquet to the office.¹ While I lost a few bits of sea lavender and larkspur to the underground, I managed to keep the vase and almost all of the bouquet intact.

Dried stems don’t need it, so I didn’t add water into my vase. However, without anything in the vase, the stems wouldn’t stay in place. I adjusted, and readjusted, and readjusted. And the more I adjusted, the more buds of sea lavender flaked, and the more blooms of larkspur broke.

Bouquet for coffee I: acquisition

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Upon visiting Manjul Coffee & Clothing, I got inspired to enjoy coffee via presentation.

I found the Kinto brand of drinkware, part of the larger sphere of Japanese luxuries which includes matcha, Uniqlo, and fruity whisky. Kinto also makes flower vases, including a few-stem vase so I don’t spend forever arranging stems like last time.

After buying the few-stem vase in NoLIta, I rode the subway, vase in hand, to Bushwick, where I found a florist offering mini dried bouquets. The florist and I admired the unique design of the vase, then worked together, considering color, structure, and texture, to make a micro dried bouquet of sea lavender and larkspur. Feeling either satisfied by our collaboration or eager to earn the future business of this few-stem vase weirdo, the florist gifted me the stems free of charge. I felt like the specialest, softest boi!

Water for coffee III: druggie

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

To measure ingredients for this Barista Hustle recipe, I needed a scale with 0.01g precision.

Through this Ultimate Guide to Milligram Scales, I found the AWS¹ Gemini-20. One helpful Redditor even validated the accuracy of the AWS Gemini-20, in r/drugs!

When I brought my 3-inch mini spoon for measuring additives (baking soda [sodium bicarbonate] and epsom salts [magnesium sulfate]), my coworker called it a “coke spoon”. I really started to feel like a druggie for coffee water.

Water for coffee II: scientist

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When the special filter jug arrived, I noticed the packaging touted how pure the jug would filter water. I suspect this product would appeal most to those who glorify pure water. However, pure water doesn’t mean better water.

Not only does pure water taste “off” without minerals, purified water lacks beneficial additives like fluoride, which reduces tooth decay.

I lean more scientific than woo-woo, so I’m using the special filter jug for a specific alternative purpose: achieving a precise level of hardness and alkalinity specified by this Barista Hustle recipe.

Water for coffee I: environmentalist

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by this video from James Hoffman:

I wanted to optimize water for brewing my coffee.

However, as Hoffman notes, buying bottles of water optimized for coffee leads to plastic waste. Since I actively try to reduce waste (e.g. buying used from eBay), I researched a “practical water setup” minimizing plastic waste: purifying water with a special filter jug, then remineralizing that purified water with a precise recipe. I bought the special filter jug used from eBay.

Overthinking coffee servers

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As I’ve been AeroPress-ing coffee for my teammates in the office, I’ve found pouring between mugs awkward, with much spillage of good good coffee.

So one night, post-midnight (la madrugada), I over-thought through 5 iterations of coffee servers.

I started with Hario’s glass coffee server. However, I’d be pressing into the glass, which another person reported had shattered with their AeroPress

Then I considered “heavy-duty” use cases. However, looking into a borosilicate Pyrex beakers, I found they would also shatter with the AeroPress.

Stale bean guilt

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I like to try a lot of whole-bean coffees. However, I don’t want to buy too much just to throw some away. So when visiting SF last year, upon discovering the Rainbow Grocery Cooperative sold whole-bean coffee from named roasters by weight rather than by bag, I made a day of it! I happily brought the haul (of mostly light-roast Ethiopian beans) all the way back to my office desk in NYC.

Getting steamed

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I got excited about buying my first good belt,¹ so I bought some nice button-down and button-up shirts. They came out of the dryer embarrassingly wrinkled. Like I tried playing it cool wearing one the next day, and a coworker explicitly noted how wrinkled my shirt looked!

To avoid owning too much stuff, like an iron, an ironing board, and all that, I researched a steamer to remove the wrinkles. Fortunately, I found the right model like new on eBay, so I ordered it, excited to steam away my problems.

Used on eBay

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve noted before to reduce, reuse, THEN recycle - in between reduce and reuse I buy open-box and used items, mostly from eBay, which has become the go-to marketplace for those items, though sometimes from Amazon for books and from Kaiyo for furniture.

Theoretically, buying open-box or used means 1 less new item produced, hence between reduce and reuse. It also makes me more aware of finding a good new home for items I don’t need anymore. For example, I sometimes give them away to people in my office I know would use them.

Crémant

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

You could buy Champagne, or for like half the price you could buy Crémant, made the same way from the same grapes grown just outside the Champagne region.

To almost anyone, they taste indistinguishable, and I’ve declared that subtlety bends toward classism. So why does Champagne command such a premium?

Branding, of course. In centuries past, Champagne became associated with royalty, a popular image for the emerging middle class. However, in the American spirit like early Webster promoting purpose over tradition, why would we pay more for association with such an anti-egalitarian concept as centuries-old royalty? Long live 22-buck Crémant!

Putting myself in a soapy situation

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last time I tried to copy an Aesop fragrance for myself, it didn’t go well. While shopping at Target, I examined the Dossier bottles and realized an entire secondary industry of copycat fragrances exists. I can buy instead of make copycats!

I first considered buying samples from The Essence Vault, though a legitimate review describes

None of them smelled anything like the originals, not even remotely close. … The projection is poor and they do not last very long, maybe 2-3 hours, not that you would want them to last any longer or have better projection.

Uniqlo x JW Anderson

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Why isn’t the toilet flushing? Maybe something clogged the pipes, or water pressure something something, maybe. You engineer software, not hardware; you can’t tell. You don’t know shit, so now you know shit water, plunging it over, and over, and over until the water level recedes into the porcelain throne. You think some of the literal doo-doo water splashed onto you. Though best not to think, best to wash your hands of the whole situation by filing an urgent maintenance request.

Maloya

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Maloya in Bushwick serves the “French-Créole” cuisine of Réunion Island. Established by the French as a plantation economy in the 17th century, Réunion Island (east of Madagascar) incorporates influences from enslaved laborers from East Africa and indentured laborers from India, China, and other parts of Asia. Today the language (Réunion Creole) and the food mix those influences.

From Maloya I enjoyed the camarons coco-vanille, the coconut milk-poached shrimp drawing from South and Southeast Asia, and the vanilla drawing from the heavy production of vanilla in that region of Africa along the Indian Ocean. In fact, we call it “Bourbon vanilla” because we originally called Réunion Island “Île Bourbon” around when it became the world’s leading vanilla producer. I enjoyed the camarons coco-vanille on the level of flavor, and on the level of philosophy, challenging the notion of “authentic”.

Staying off social media

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Though I’ve only seen light evidence that it undermines epistemics and mental health, I think social media moves faster than research and policy. I deliberately stay off social media: I don’t have an X (previously Twitter), Instagram, or TikTok account, and I don’t have the YouTube app on my phone.

I don’t see myself as a better person than other people because of this (as my friend accused). However, I do see myself as better than the counterfactual version of myself on social media. I remember my time on Facebook (before I deleted that account) as mostly rotting, similar to this description, and I can’t really point to anything meaningful I got out of it.

Markdown everywhere

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using Markdown more and more, not just for writing posts here, also for writing messages in Slack and writing documents in Notion.

As detailed in this article, Markdown emphasizes structure over presentation, which works well for my job in which I prioritize substance over optics. I consider the simple structure of Markdown a feature rather than a bug, since it takes effort to extract the substance and express something simply.

3 points about copying keys

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I got a surprising amount out of copying my friend’s keys while staying at their apartment. My friend has pointed out how I often structure my thoughts into 3 points:

1. ease

I didn’t even need to talk to someone to copy the keys. I just scanned the keys at a machine and that machine cut the key copies within minutes. As noted in this video, you can more easily “break” a physical key than a digital key, though you can less easily use a broken physical key than a broken digital key. However, you can get around digital keys in other ways.

Lightly scammed

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Leaving the office late, I bumped into some guy on the street. He picked his glasses up from the sidewalk, and showed me the crack in one of the lenses. Noting he didn’t have insurance, he insisted I give him cash to help pay for a replacement. His manner of speech and parted eyes (strabismus) suggested he had a minor disability.

I didn’t have the personality to simply brush the guy off, and I didn’t have the capability to immediately verify the cause of and fix for the crack. So I gave him 30 bucks from my wallet.

Outgrown, not yet

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It feels like you’ve outgrown your childhood home. You have to bend down to use the sink. You almost hit your head on your bedroom ceiling fan. And you have to bend your knees to lie comfortably on your mattress.

The morning of your flight out, your coffee tastes bitter and sour - your dad should’ve used the hand grinder you bought him. Your 生煎包 taste dry - your mom should’ve gelatinized the broth before pan-frying them. And your green beans taste bland - your dad should’ve added salt, which happens often. Samin Nosrat is rolling in her bed.

A/B test of grinding method

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today my dad served me coffee that tasted simultaneously too bitter and too sour.

We had used the same Aeropress; we had used the same boiled water, from the same water boiler with one setting; and we had even used the same coffee beans, from the bag I gave him for Father’s Day.

I realized we had unintentionally conducted an A/B test of grinding method.¹ I had used a burr grinder while he had used a blade (spice) grinder.

Monaspace

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From “Font activations”:

[N]ow words are everywhere treated as data, as numbers, and they are rarely printed at all. … Fonts perhaps become more salient as they become the only thing that people are expected to play with when it comes to words, once it is drilled into everyone that it is required for efficiency and political conformity to let machines do all the writing and the editing and the “thinking.”

Roundabout Method

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Yeah, I put the “mentalist” in “environmentalist”! So upon rethinking my cleaning supplies, I bought the concentrate, instead of the plastic bottle, of Method foaming hand soap. I already had a reusable soap dispenser from when I wanted to scent my own soap.

However, when I mixed the soap concentrate into my soap dispenser, it didn’t foam because I didn’t have a foaming soap dispenser. I felt like a soap dummy!

Hot yoga death

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I used to live across the street from a yoga studio offering unlimited classes for a fixed price per month. So I did so much yoga that the yoga instructor memorized the first 6 digits of the phone number I used to register for classes.

So when the person behind the counter of the new yoga studio asked if I’d done “this kind of yoga” before, I replied with humble hubris: “I’ve done yoga before”.

Edges of NYC

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The edges of New York City resemble the suburban sprawl I grew up in. After getting a New Haven style apizza, I walked toward the Metropolitan Avenue Bridge, seeking water. Along the stroad, the small specialty warehouses (refrigeration? truck repair? Thai food?) lifted my flickering awareness of long supply chains to the foreground.

Though we constructed these spaces for vehicles, not people, I ventured deeper until I encountered a perfect gate, with a chain lock to block intruders and a gap just big enough for me to squeeze through. And so I did, sliding my cold leftover apizza and warm gas station sparkling water beneath the gate to accompany me. Though the wholly rectangular waterway looked ugly, it felt beautiful, as if I had rebelled against suburbia.

Nostalgia for compromised flavors

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On top of taste, smell, and touch, memories and associations can influence of experience of flavor. This helps explain why some people have nostalgia or affection for flavors born out of compromise.

As I learned when I visited Driftaway Coffee, in the times of the British Raj, during the months of transport by sea from India to Europe, coffee absorbed the moisture and developed a musty flavor. When modern transportation reduced the time and humidity of transport, producers deliberately re-created those conditions, and thereby the musty flavor, along the Malabar coast of India during the monsoon months. And now we have Monsooned Malabar.

Senses of flavor

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

While reading How to Taste Coffee, I’ve learned that our experience of flavor comprises more than just the sense of taste. It also includes our sense of smell and touch!

For example, even though roasted coffee has almost no sugar, sweet-smelling aromatics, e.g. vanilla aromas, can create the perception of sweetness.

Also, temperature affects our sensitivity to sweet, savory (umami), and bitter tastes, hence ice cream tastes sweeter when melted.

Interestingly, certain “taste” sensations work through our touch receptors rather than our taste or smell receptors. The burning sensation of pungency (spiciness) and the drying sensation of astringency fall under “chemesthesis”.

Exactly what I want

Sat, 31 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

They produce so much content that I often find exactly what I want without knowing I wanted it. For example:

As it gets easier to produce content, even generate content (via prompts), I worry that I’ll get exactly what I want and not much else, missing out on content that would challenge me and expand my tastes.

Stranger like a friend

Sat, 24 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Exiting the subway, I saw someone who looked exactly like one of my closest friends. They had the same face, the same clothes, and the way they hunched over to dig through their backpack, I wanted to call out to my friend.

I saw the stranger like my friend, and I saw my friend like a stranger, with Circumstance in between. I wondered if they dreamed the same - a job thinking, not needing money, in a quiet home surrounded by more trees than people. However, I knew I wouldn’t know, and I moved on.

Justin? Who?

Sat, 17 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A coworker with an impressive resume casually invited me to their combined birthday party. Though the invite counter over 100 people going, I thought I should go, for the sake of maybe personal, more likely professional relationships.

To my surprise, they still lease houses large enough for 100+-people parties in prime Manhattan, and they filled this one with bulk packs of beer and hard seltzer and basically no furniture.

An ex-coworker, who left for a different startup, arrives. Though they have a common name, I still need a second to dig it up from my memory. I gradually enter their circle, and the ex-coworker, bottle of truth serum in hand, introduces everyone. The ex-coworker introduces me as “Justin, who I used to work with”.

Dating the same person

Sat, 10 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A date (who’d recently moved) asked me an out of context question: “So how’s dating in New York City?”

A bit surprised, I responded “In New York City, you can find anyone …” or any two, or any three, etc. " … if you search hard enough."

Though looking around the people close to me (around my age), I see most people dating the same kind of person, staying within the same race and class boundaries. In fairness, you generally want a long-term partner who really understands you, and someone from the same race and class more likely understands you.

The beauty of an ambiguous greeting

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I often deliberately greet people ambiguously: “What’ve you been up to?”

The ambiguity lets the other person direct the conversation toward what interests them. It also gives them an out: “Not much”.

Furthermore, the ambiguity gauges their levels of attention: “At work or outside of work?” Though different people want to share more or less about certain aspects of themselves, I try to create substantial space: “Both, either”.

Notes on tasting notes III: ambiguity

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In “How to Talk About Wine Like a Japanese Tea Master”, Ogasawara challenges:

[A]re you sure that when you say “It tastes like a peach” that every peach tastes the same, or everyone else tastes a peach the same way you do? Peaches are tough enough to pin down, but what about fuzzy figs and gushing oranges, candied cherries or Asian pears…

Instead of referring to categories of notes as I’ve suggested before, Ogasawara finds a high-minded alternative, emphasis on high:

Notes on tasting notes II: precision

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My coworker hosted a wine tasting with a group including me. For the first wine, we came up with specific notes like lychee and raspberry. Even though I wet the tip of my nose with the red wine, I couldn’t smell both lychee and raspberry, only lychee or raspberry. The hosting coworker wrote down many notes for their sommelier class.

For the second wine, the hosting coworker remarked, to controversy and my surprise, that once you discern a category of notes, you’re just selecting an instance for effect. For example, you discern stone fruit, so you could just select fresh peaches or baked apricots to evoke varying impressions.

Notes on tasting notes I: usefulness

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Drinking beverages with complex tastes brings me, and many others, great joy. Like wow, it tastes like this, and that, and a little like that?

However, making beverages with good complex tastes takes a lot of effort, so costs a lot of money. Before I pay the money,¹ I want to approximate the complex tastes. Tasting notes help that approximation.

Tasting notes matter more for categories of drinks² with complex and varied tastes. And they better approximate those tastes when referring to other consistent, well-known flavors. For example, I’d say this tea tastes like peach; I wouldn’t say this peach tastes like tea.

My keyboard stand (2025)

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sure, a sit-stand desk serves as the best “ergonomic keyboard”. Though what if I want to sport ergonomically limp wrists at my sit-stand desk?

Exploring the wider possibilities of keyboard stands, I found inspiration leveraging other existing systems for electronics, with tripod clamps and MagSafe connections.

Sure, clamping my split keyboard to my desk makes me look a lil crazy, like either a 0.5x or a 2x engineer. However, based on my calculations (0.5 * 0.5 + 0.5 * 2.0 = 1.25), I’ve become a 1.25x engineer in expectation.

Fish blossom at the probably-not end of the world

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“What are you thinking about?” I ask my coworker.

“How everything will get more expensive, because of the tariffs.” My coworker smacks me with a big, genuine answer.

“Well, better save up.” We laugh it off, save it for later because we should work now.

When I meet my coworker, a self-professed Eeyore, over the weekend, they worry about the times. It doesn’t feel like the end of the world. Though it doesn’t feel certain the world will go on, or more particularly, go on well.

Please just remove the feature flag

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Artificial intelligence (✨AI✨) philosophers think about artificial general intelligence (✨AGI✨), when ✨AI✨ becomes ✨super duper✨ capable, and ✨super duper✨ wild changes occur in society. Some credible philosophers think ✨AGI✨ will come in a few short years.

The last time I used ✨AI✨ to remove a fully enabled feature flag, it made 3 attempts:

In the first attempt, it replaced the feature flag enumeration value with a bunch of comment delimiters - I’d rather it delete the value, though fine - “oops, let me try again”
In the second attempt, it replaced the bunch of comment delimiters with a single comment delimiter - again I’d rather it delete the value, though fine - “oops, let me try again”
In the third attempt, it didn’t even show me what it did, it just gave up - “you’ll just have to do it yourself”

So I guess I’m still waiting for ✨AGI✨. Maybe it’ll come after mass self-driving cars.

Mad as a cucumber

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I had a cucumber dish that made me mad.

To avoid the long line at Ichiran, I diverted to Bites of Xian, and ordered the garlic cucumber.

Some bites tasted so sweet, like nasty candy, that it made me mad.

Other bites tasted so weirdly spicy, in my nose and in the back of my head, that it made me mad.

And they served the cucumber in such big, unwieldy chunks that it made me mad.

Biquinho peppers

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Have you had “biquinho peppers”? Probably not under that name.

The first time I had them, I was eating at Birdbox, a quirky fried chicken place serving sandwiches with the chicken claw sticking out (apparently an indication of quality). I remember the sandwich as pretty good, more expensive. However, I remember more the delicious red pepper drops. Tangy, yet not spicy, aromatic? Thoroughly enamored, I asked the cooks where they got them.

Reverse private label

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the case of private label, the buyer buys from the seller who has re-branded (i.e. re-packaged) goods supplied by an existing brand.

In an interesting reverse, I’ll call it a “reverse private label”, the buyer buys from the seller who supplies an existing brand. Note that in both cases, the buyer is trying to save by not paying for the existing brand.

I’ve done this a few times:

Buying from Reigning Champ, under CYC Design Corporation which also supplied Supreme
Buying from North Star Leather, which uses leather from S.B. Foot Tanning Company, a subsidiary and principal supplier of Red Wing Shoes which also supplied Carhartt
Buying from Acme Smoked Fish, which also supplied Russ & Daughters

Pickle Guys!

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I went to the last standing pickle store on Essex Street, The Pickle Guys. Upon entering the store, a crowd of barrels, then the eponymous Pickle Guys, greeted me.

The Pickle Guys don’t just sell pickles; they embody an ideal, reminiscent of the Village People (who sing the familiar YMCA song). Various flavors gather together. The Asian one! The black one! And the one whose slight lisp suggests he likes pickles (not just the ones they sell in the store)!

Insulating my pipe

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

No, “insulating my pipe”, not to be confused with “insulting my pipe”, doesn’t mean anything dirty.

People designed New York’s old steam heating system to encourage people to open their windows, even in the winter! However, I didn’t want to open my windows, because I didn’t want to let in the noise. And I couldn’t control the steam heating pipe running through my room; the building controlled it.

So I consulted my physics friend, who explained that proper pipe insulation would lower the rate of heat from the pipe into my room, thereby lowering the equilibrium temperature of the room.

The Threshold of my bedroom

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I want nice things - selfishly, to feel good; generously, to reduce waste. And it seems like Target’s private label brand Threshold consistently provides the right balance of quality and affordability for me. For example, their sheets got recommended by Wirecutter, which I’ve mentioned before as a good curation source.

So I got the Threshold blackout curtains, and when they arrived, they felt so good. Enveloped in their softness, I rushed to my bedroom to put them up. And in the privacy of my bedroom, I stroked them gently, admiring the color and texture with a quiet sigh…

No-tip anarchist tea, Oprah approved

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes I buy tea (or coffee) for the story, rather than for the taste. For example, when I visited Ann Arbor again, I bought Miss Kim x Zingerman’s Deli black tea.

Miss Kim stands out to me as one of the only no-tip (living wage) restaurants I’ve eaten at.¹ They actually belong to the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, started by Paul Saginaw and Ari Weinzweig (who studied anarchism and Russian history at the University of Michigan) and originally famous for their deli’s reuben sandwich. Today, you can see quotes on their wall from Obama, and more entertainingly, Oprah, who proclaimed “on a scale of 1 to 5…11”.

Woo-woo warriors and bio-hackers

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I won’t go gentle into that good night, if it’s the last thing I do. We all want to live long and well, though different people pursue that in wildly different ways.

On one side, we have the woo-woo warriors, who reject science and embrace energy crystals. Rather, they practice alternative medicine, including acupuncture, reiki, and magical space corn.

I can sympathize with disillusionment with scientific institutions, which have a history of unfair, un-scientific prejudice. However, I still consider the scientific method itself our best method for finding truths in the physical world.

Logarithmic happiness

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Social science research converses with itself. For example, you might’ve heard money doesn’t increase happiness past a certain point, or you might’ve heard the opposite that money continues to increase happiness. In a recent paper, Mellers negotiates these seemingly contradictory findings: money continues to increase happiness for some people.¹ Revolutionary.

Reading the paper more deeply, the log(income) part of its conclusion caught my attention. In computer science, we think of a O(log(n)) complexity algorithm as growing extremely slowly. For instance, binary search on 256 sorted items takes 8 comparisons, on 65,536 sorted items takes 16 comparisons, and on 4,294,967,296 sorted items takes 32 comparisons. Intuitively, to add happiness you would need to multiply your income.

My worst rice bowl

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My order of 1 chicken rice bowl went wrong beyond my imagination!

They didn’t have chicken, so substituted falafel
and they didn’t have yellow rice, so substituted white rice
and they threw in a complimentary reparatory sweet, though I wanted to avoid sweets
and they added a giant pickle, though I dislike pickles
and they packed it in a bag, though I asked for no bag to avoid waste
and the rice tasted blander than rice
and the hummus tasted bitter
and I lightly choked on the falafel

Despite this “fuck-ass” rice bowl, I still left a 15% tip - the service staff didn’t do anything wrong, or at least they didn’t do anything malicious. Then I left just a little mad.

Taste right or eat right

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I didn’t want to go to the ceviche restaurant that my mom suggested, because I wanted to have good taste, and it looked like a tourist trap. How does the restaurant have such a high average rating? Did they game reviews? And why does their online menu read like an advertisement?

However, tapas cost a lot for not that much food, so we go to the ceviche restaurant. Having eaten at so many restaurants, I can read a menu more deeply:

Surprise Cybertruck

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

While on vacation, our family got a rideshare in a surprise Cybertruck!

My mom speculated “must be expensive”, to which to driver replied “yeah, a little expensive”. Then with some real big mom energy, my mom hit him with “well, maybe just a little expensive for you”! The driver tried to recover by spouting some financial justifications, though by then I had already relayed the conversation to my friends.

My mom commented on the driver’s shyness afterward. Based on this anecdotal evidence, I’d read the buyer of a Cybertruck as trying to become less self-conscious;¹ the truck itself seems to perform worse than other trucks. So getting read as a passenger as trying to become less self-conscious made me very self-conscious. I spent the ride trying to focus inward rather than outward.

Unsolicited investment thots II: tax optimization

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Don’t deny it. You need money, to buy food, or more importantly, botch a wall shelf.¹ The Man wants to take it for roads or research or whatever. So, to keep as much of it as possible, you optimize your taxes. Greedy pig.

I’m not giving financial advice. I’m not giving tax advice. I’m merely giving unsolicited investment thots, to an imaginary audience that I’m assuming makes enough to invest long-term while covering reasonable expenses short-term.

Unsolicited investment thots I: index funds

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If I know you, chances are you have significant cash to spare. Agh, what a burden! What should you do with all that cash?

You can invest it, of course! Grow it, rather than let inflation make it worth less over time. Ride the market with index funds.

An index fund tracks an index, a specific basket of individual investments. For example, SPY (the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust) tracks the S&P 500 index, which comprises around 500 of the largest companies listed on US stock exchanges. When the S&P 500 grows 20%, SPY returns around 20%; when the S&P 500 shrinks 15%, SPY returns around -15%.

Inappropriate linorobot

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

To end 2021, my friend U wanted us to build an easy, simple self-driving vehicle. After settling on the linorobot, we just needed to procure parts:

Raspberry Pi
(Xbox) Kinect sensor
Some sort of chassis
Other parts

After days of planning and execution, we ended up with:

Look at it! Obscene!! It looks like a dildo!!!

U called it “scuffed”. However, I call it “fuck-ass”,¹ as in “WHY DID WE MAKE THIS FUCK-ASS DILDO BOT??!!”

Comparative tasting of protein bars

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

You wanted to eat more vegetables.

So you researched green powders - not the overpriced podcast one, the Hueligan one.

So you checked for BFCM sales - Huel doesn’t have one though GNC has BOGO-50% mix and match.

So you perused Barebells protein bar flavors - you must sample the local supply lest you get stuck with unsavory protein!

And so you end up at the airport Margaritaville, tolerated by the server who doesn’t need the table just yet, comparatively tasting bites of 5 protein bars:

Momofuku

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Over 300 restaurants into New York City, I’ve finally eaten at Momofuku Noodle Bar. I wanted it to taste good, because Momofuku Ko (now closed) introduced me to fine Asian food when I first visited the city, and because we could do with more focused, elevated Asian American food.

It did taste good, and disappointing. Perhaps the food couldn’t’ve lived up to the hype it’s built over the years. And perhaps I wanted to align with my Asian peers who found it over-hyped.

How many times?

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When I suffered insomnia, I thought of The End. Bipolar and somewhat delirious, I felt excited for The End of my insomnia, and I felt scared for The End of the lives of my beloved. I listened, to Japanese Breakfast’s mourning, and to John Green’s melancholy:

[H]ow many times then, really, do I get to look at a tree? 12,395? There has to be an exact number. Let’s just say it is 12,395. Absolutely, that is a lot, but it is not infinite, and anything less than infinite seems too measly a number and is not satisfactory.

Personal user guide

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

How can people best work with you? If you have a well-meaning organization, or at least team, you can tell them. Inspired by this example, a wrote a user guide about myself. It contains:

Styles of communication 💃🕺
Areas of strength 🦸
Opportunities for growth 💪
Paths of trust ⛓️
Methods of feedback 🪞
Views of success 🎗️

Fruits IV: tangerine

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In my workplace, I’ve adopted the tangerine as my symbol.¹ For example, I react to Slack messages with :shrugging-tangerine:, :thinking-tangerine:, and :approving-tangerine: generated from Google’s Emoji Kitchen. I’ve even presented to all hands with slides featuring tangerines!

Coworkers often wonder why tangerines. Well, I have a few reasons:

Accessible

Tangerines, like chocolates, represent the bounties of the global food trade. For a price nearly anyone can afford, I can enjoy the tangy and sweet juice of this orange treasure!

Journey of the airplane magazine

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have fond memories of the airplane magazine. In my most distinct memory of it, my sister and I actually brought a copy off of the plane, to browse in bed. Blowing past the articles, we admired and gawked at the fancy and quirky merchandise advertised inside. To us, those advertisements served as low fantasy, a conduit to imagine a lifestyle where not only did we need a multi-color pool light with different modes, we bought one on a plane!

Pun III: unreal tea

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been wanting to read briefly about the foundations of philosophy, including metaphysics (what exists), epistemics (what we know), and ethics (what we consider right).

At this point, I’ve become comfortable with eating alone. So today I, by myself with a book in hand, headed over to the Vietnamese restaurant near my apartment.

Mmm, mmm, mmm, some good eatin':

On my table, phở with bone marrow
On the table to my left, my stranger’s friend’s dad wouldn’t let the friend become a bartender like him
On the table to my right, my stranger’s friend is going through a physiosocial dry spell, in incredible detail

I had put down my very short introduction to metaphysics to tune into the un-real tea.

Pun II: fluke

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In my bardo between Google and Glean, I received a payout from Google for my unredeemed paid time off - literally thousands of dollars all at once. I saw it as a sign that I should vacation more,¹ and that I should treat myself.

So I went to the fanciest restaurant recommended to me, in New York City no less, which cost over $300 for the prix fixe menu. My grad student friends couldn’t afford the money, and my finance friends couldn’t afford the time (on a weekday), so I went as a party of one² to lightly menace the fine dining service staff.

Pun I: frankincense

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In one of our many hours-long calls, I was telling my friend about my attempt to mimic Hwyl: the motivation, and the mixing, and ultimately, the mess.

I felt like a mad scientist, or as I explained “this may become my Mindful Mommy Joker moment”. I had the essential oils: vetiver, cypress, and frankincense (the most expensive). However, I was roughly approximating the other listed ingredients, obscure fragrance chemicals like eugenol and d-limonene, with other essential oils I had on hand.

My fragrance

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A fragrance-making primer from the Institute for Art and Olfaction (IAO) got me excited to make another iteration of my Hwyl.

This iteration feels much more mine, not just in the sense/scents that I mixed. I drew more from the earnest and scientific spirit of the IAO rather than the pretentious spirit of Aesop.

On materials:

We believe, at the IAO, that nothing is inherently more valuable than anything else in this weird, wonderful, multiplicitous world. In other words, no one way of working is superior to another. However, we tend to encourage people to try everything, to work with both naturals AND synthetics, to make use of accords if they want to, but always be open to changing their minds.

The restaurants I'd make if I could

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Lately, I’ve eaten at a few restaurants, including Milu and Chiko, which feel like restaurants I’d make if I could. I’ve drawn out some common personally attractive features:

Elevated, not pretentious - someone (actually probably many people) put in the effort, and you can actually taste the difference (rather than politely claim to taste a difference)
Chinese American - the variety and history of the first and the abundance and experimentation of the latter (also close to home)
Focused (specialized) menu - I do love (and mostly prefer) when someone does a few products super well

On “if I could” - I’d want exit money before pursuing an industry with infamously low margins.

You're climbing up the wrong hill

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

You can imagine an optimization problem as a landscape, where higher elevation represents a better result, such as higher enjoyment. You often face so many possibilities that you can’t see much of the landscape. So as a simple heuristic, you might just keep heading higher until you reach a peak.

Obviously though, some peaks rise higher than others. Perhaps you’re climbing up the wrong hill, such as with:

Competition plain water - you (too) serious?
Tinned seafood - we have fresh seafood now!
“Healthier” “natural” sweeteners - probably better to get fewer sweets and more vegetables

Like gradient ascent/descent in machine learning practice, you should consider big changes over incremental improvements every once in a while.

Your code editor doesn't need notifications

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As a full-stack programmer, I’d like to use VS Code for my backend (Python) and frontend (TypeScript React).

I’d like to, if VS Code didn’t take seconds and a loading bar to follow code definitions in Python. My desire to depend on fewer tools takes a back seat to my desire to get the job done efficiently, hence why I moved from Spacemacs (Emacs) to VSpaceCode (VS Code) in the first place.

Mediocre small business ambivalence

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

While I characterized the first tea shop as woo-woo, I’d characterize the second as “mediocre small business”.

The shop had more types of tea than the number I think a shop can do well, given my penchant for hyperspecialization. When I asked to buy samples, the shopkeeper clarified that they sell minimum 2oz each type. I guessed that they wanted to force larger orders, and kept to myself that a larger tea purveyor would probably sell samples (at a premium per weight) to persuade new customers.

Magical space corn!

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I visited two tea shops today. Let me tell you about them!

The first, a seller of herbs and roots (I guess tea counts?), had real woo-woo energy. One patron asked if sage clears impurities, to bring to a wedding. In my head, I noted that if someone brought an herb to clear impurities to the celebration of my marriage, I’d feel insulted.

The jars of herbs and roots looked a bit stale, assuming dried goods get stale. So I looked in the back, where they were selling “magical space spray” derived from various plants. You know, like chamomile, chrysanthemum, or corn - magical space corn!

The only good supplements

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As Harvard Health Publishing clearly states:

Despite their iconic status, there is no evidence that multivitamins enhance health and well-being or prevent illness. … Supplements for prevention? It’s a disappointing scorecard.

In an area filled with snake oil, I require a higher threshold for belief. I need to understand how something works. The same article summarizes:

Most people stand to benefit from vitamin D, many from fiber, and some from fish oil.

Set up wall shelf, set up ssh

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I run a music server on my spare headless computer. However, after running for a few hours, especially after I suspend to disk, the music server needs to restart.

Previously, I would connect my headless computer to my projector and keyboard to run some commands. However, with my wall shelf up, and my projector up on it, that takes too much effort now.

So I set up ssh into my headless computer to run those same commands. Even seemingly unrelated projects influence each other in a shared space.

Comparative tasting

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

People generally have better relative judgement than absolute judgement.

For example, I could confidently tell you one island looks farther than the other, though could not confidently tell you the distance between any of the islands and me.

In fine beverages (coffee, tea, wine, etc.), you can use your relative judgement in comparative tasting to highlight tasting notes. For instance, this coffee tastes more fruity than the other; this tea tastes sweeter than the other.

Italian beef

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

You enter Al’s #1 Italian Beef to order Chicago’s third-most famous food, after deep dish pizza and that hot dog with the neon green relish and not ketchup.

You order a “combo”, which comes with a sausage below the thinly sliced beef, because you want to retort. To the annoying people who ask “does a hot dog count as a sandwich?”, you reverse “does this sandwich count as a hot dog?”.

Notes on Hampton Bays

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I spent the trip out of place: the only non-frat guy in the rented house, and the only East Asian guy at all. Well, if you don’t count the Buddha figures in the rented house; the Buddha lived in South Asia anyway.

After dinner, I didn’t join everyone else in the club. Instead, I finished Interior Chinatown in one sitting, engrossing myself further in living outside others’ expectations.

I carried out little quiet rebellions, not even rebellions, really: running along the roads clearly meant for just cars and entertaining McDonald’s in a house probably worth 7 figures.

Passionate for passion fruit: a surprise melancholic sequel!

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I did it. I found another case of the passion fruit-flavored Spindrift. Rather, I found 2 cases of it.

I had schemed for passion fruit-flavored Spindrift. I had signed up for a free trial of a grocery delivery service to get it delivered from Flushing. When I found out they wouldn’t deliver from Flushing, I offered a hefty 100% delivery fee to a friend stopping by Flushing.

I ended up making my own passion fruit syrup. However, seeing 2 whole cases of passion fruit Spindrift in front of me provoked an impulse to hoard. Surely, no one would appreciate this passion fruit Spindrift as much as me!

Passionate for passion fruit!

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I go through fruit phases. Previously, I had a real lychee moment; now I find myself passionate for passion fruit!

Besides the fun name, passion fruit epitomizes tart citrus flavor. In the office I down cans of passion fruit-flavored LaCroix; in the apartment I down cans of passion fruit-flavored Spindrift.

Or at least, I was downing Spindrift when I could find it! Their new passion fruit flavor now sells out before I can get my hands on it. Now I have to turn to alternative avenues for sour, sour passion fruit flavor.

Renting clothes

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone has principles of clothing, even if just “I want something cheap and comfortable enough (see satisficing)” or “I wear what I can”.

Under my current principles:

I start with quality basics in neutral colors
I finish with final touches in loud colors and patterns
I try not to spend more than an average person could splurge

To fulfill the second principle, I’ve started renting “statement pieces” from a service touting "[p]ersonal styling by experts and AI". “AI” here signals startup.

Rose absolute III: juice

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

After soaking the rose petals in ethanol, and filtering out the petals, I now have a jar of what looks like pee. I gotta concentrate the good good stuff in the pee jar to get a sufficiently potent rose adulterate.

In sufficient concentration, next to an open flame, ethanol will EXPLODE. A lil quirky, I know, I don’t like to EXPLODE. So I need to evaporate the ethanol without an open flame; I pull out my instant pot for the first time in weeks.

Hinge thots III: journal

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve started going on dates! My friend advised me, after we both read How to Not Die Alone, that you go on the first date just to figure out if you want to go on a second date. That mindset takes a lot of pressure off me.

That same book recommends reflecting on you and the other person after each date, so I started a dating journal. Following this template I found, each person in my dating journal has 3 sections:

Curating curation

Sat, 08 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

With online consumption, we have more choices than we can effectively individually evaluate. Recommendation algorithms can help. However, they reflect the oft-unknown biases and incentives of their creators, and often suffer homogeneity.

While you could just satisfice, my posts demonstrate that I don’t just simply satisfice. I use curators to navigate the vast space of online consumption.

I use curators so much, in fact, that I’ve curated curators:

specialized curators, like Sleep Like The Dead for mattresses
rigorous general curators, like Wirecutter
community-based curators, like Reddit

I’ve felt more efficient satisficing via curated curators.

Rose absolute II: adulterate

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I ended up buying 200-proof “food-grade” ethanol. “Food-grade” doesn’t mean you should drink it; it means un-denatured - typically alcohol comes denatured with bad-tasting mixins to discourage young children from consuming.

My friend and I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and with the amount of rose petals I’m using, I could expect a drop of rose absolute. With “mechanical losses” like some getting stuck to the side of the jar, a drop basically comes out to nothing! My ego can’t take that!

Rose absolute I: solvent extraction

Sat, 25 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s say you really want to smell the roses, like a concentrated BLAST of roses. Only a small portion of roses creates its smell, which you can extract into rose absolute.

You create rose absolute through a process known as solvent extraction. The solvent extracts the desired compounds, and after separating the solvent, you have the desired compounds.

To make solvent extraction more effective, we prefer a solvent that:

extracts more of the desired compounds
extracts less of the undesired compounds
separates easily from the desired compounds

For roses, I am using ethanol, in which the desired rose fragrance compounds easily dissolve,¹ and which evaporates at an easily achieved temperature (above room temperature).

Mourning my wall shelf

Sat, 18 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I spent so much time and effort making my wall shelf! Then I let it sit behind my couch for a few weeks. Finally, I put it up … and noticed it was taking my wall down!

The walls of my apartment just can’t support such a hefty wall shelf, and so I will donate it (i.e. its pieces?) to the public makerspace that enabled me make it in the first place.

Hwyl III: reflections

Sat, 11 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I finally made my copycat Hwyl! 3 reflections:

Basics get you to substance

In arts of smell and taste (tea, coffee, wine, cheese, perfume, etc.) you reach for “notes”, suggestions for what to expect.

You can keep the notes basic, and people will understand. For example, while mixing the essential oils, I was smelling for woodsy, citrusy, and floral notes, to balance them. Anyone with a working sense of smell would understand what those mean.

Ferris values choices

Sat, 04 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I like Rust, a lot:

I like Rust’s mascot, Ferris the crab. Ferris puns on Rust, and “Rustacean” (the term for a Rust enthusiast) puns on crustacean.

While scuttling around Ferris, I ran into Ferris’s creator’s website. On it, Ferris’s creator declares:

Company values are useless if they’re just generic good things anyone would want. A meaningful value is something whose opposite could be a different company’s value. True values are choices.

Hwyl II: optics

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I framed before that a product consists of function and aesthetics. Analogously, I frame a job consists of substance and optics. By “substance”, I mean a job does something useful, and by “optics”, I mean everything we could vary while maintaining the same substance, especially how someone appears to do a “better” job.

Heuristically, you can tell if a job has less substance if it has more optics.¹ Call me a philistine, I believe “high” fashion jobs have little substance because they have so much optics.

Hwyl I: aesthetics

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When you buy a product, you pay for function and aesthetics. By “function”, I mean the product does something useful, and by “aesthetics”, I mean everything we could vary while maintaining the same function, especially how the product appears.

I understand the distinction between function and aesthetics becomes hazy depending on people’s values. However, I wouldn’t consider it arbitrary. Some of it comes from the world - a world where people must eat, for example, about which I have a lot to say.

Hinge thots II: duty

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What do you owe to someone you’ve dated? Intuitively, you owe more the more you’ve dated. However, my friends have given me pretty different answers.

On one of my dates, the other person jumped onto the subway, took a bow, and announced “I don’t think it’ll work out.” “Oh! Ok…” We waved at each other, and they went off in the wrong direction.

I appreciated the honesty. However, I felt like we owed each other more, especially as I carried an entire picnic’s supplies home.¹

Hinge thots I: actual experience

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I finally created a dating app profile on Hinge! I had hesitated for so long because doing so requires confronting big questions like:

What do I even want?
How do I appear to others?
How do I compare to others?

Like I learned from woodworking, at some point you just have to try, rather than theorize. Actual experience will provide some answers.

Chili butter VI: recipe

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to write a perfect number of posts about chili butter, so I’ll complete the series of 6 (a perfect number!) posts with my recipe for chili butter:

replace oil with butter in this recipe, idk

Nice!

Chili butter V: Eurocentricity

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Do I feel guilty about praising French stuff like everyone else? Well, I’m writing a fifth post, so you bet I do.

In How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil writes:

Think of what you might be missing: those paper thin slices of jamón ibérico; that well-roasted pig …; that well-cooked polpo gallego …. If we were to stake longevity (accompanied by healthy and active life) solely on the prevailing diet … then Japanese eating has a slight edge, but an only slightly inferior outcome can be had by eating as they do in Valencia.

Chili butter IV: French butterfat

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Now that we’ve totally completely settled the topic of authenticity, what butter do I use for chili butter?

I bought these fancy Sichuanese chilies, I need fancy butter to match!

Well, French butter of course! As French cuisine personality Julia Child famously said, “With enough butter, anything is good”. French butter has a higher butterfat percentage by law. And the private label Wegmans French butter doesn’t cost too much.

Chili butter III: East Asian dairy

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My friend questioned the authenticity of chili butter made with Sichuanese chili.

In Japan, you can top takoyaki with loads of cheese. In Korea, you can stuff a corn dog with fish cake and cheese. In China, Pizza Hut did so well it spun off from the parent company.

The inauthentic ingredient of cheese, despite more upsetting to the Asian stomach, finds popularity altered for East Asia.

Chili butter II: against "authenticity"

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

People laud food as “authentic”. I do not.

To clarify, I do not condemn “authentic” foods; I just don’t consider “authenticity” a merit in itself.

Of course, we can point out the fraught boundaries of “authenticity”. However, let’s just assume we have a pretty-shared notion of “authenticity”.

Whatever merits lie behind authenticity we can consider over authenticity. For example, we may seek authentic foods to support the people who make them. We may also avoid inauthentic foods to express our distaste for one particular group taking from another. Then the merit lies in supporting those people, and the de-merit lies in that group taking from the other.

Chili butter I: importance

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Before I write about food yet again, I wanted to emphasize the importance of food.

We have to eat food, so food reflects the realities and eccentricities of our lives.

Folding Ideas provides a great example (4:05):

We can say a lot about food, and some of it matters. What I, not quite an expert, say, of course, does not.

Cough drop marketing vs. function

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I eat cough drops like candies, so I’ve thought more than most about cough drops.

Whenever I buy a significant product, I consider how much I’m paying for marketing versus function.

Ricola puts a lot of effort into marketing their mixture of herbs as effective. However, the label lists menthol as the active ingredient, and the herb mixture as an inactive ingredient. Many people have figured this out, enough for a class action lawsuit. Needless to say, I don’t buy Ricola.

Private label

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Every major grocery chain offers “private label” items, with their own brand packaged over goods produced by other unnamed companies.

You can peek into what companies produce private label items via recalls. Sargento recalls, and “coincidentally” Costco, Trader Joe’s, and Walmart also recall at the same time.

Private labeling constitutes a form of backward integration. Generally, major grocery chains take from producers and give to consumers, pocketing some for themselves, of course. As a producer, can you really afford to not appear on Walmart shelves?

Woodworking III: anti-router

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

While woodworking my own wall shelf, I also planned to router the back of the body of wood, so it would sit over the wall shelf bracket.

Unfortunately, the wood listed as thicker than the bracket actually measured as thick as the bracket, after I already bought it. I can’t router that! Well, not easily.

People don’t want quarter-inch drill bits. They want quarter-inch holes.

Similarly, I just needed an appropriately-shaped hole in the back of my piece of wood. I figured out with the public makerspace member that instead of routering, we could “anti-router.” They cut some of the extra wood to glue to the side, to hide the wall shelf bracket - much easier!

Woodworking II: eager mistakes

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

While woodworking my own wall shelf, I needed to drill large holes into the body of wood.

In the public makerspace, someone was helping me drill. On the fifth hole, we broke through the surface of the wood.

Oh no! The other guy looked a bit panicked.

Not me, though (after a second). I took this as an opportunity to learn about repairing wood.

People say you (should) learn from mistakes. Then we should feel eager about making mistakes in lower-stakes environments, like, you know, woodworking your own wall shelf.

Woodworking I: trial over over-theory

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I started woodworking a wall shelf! I’ve decided to record some lessons here.

I spent a good chunk of time theorizing about woodworking this shelf with my carpenter friend. However, at some point you have to actually try it out!

When I went to the public makerspace, the helpful member guided me to cut a scrap piece of wood (after I signed a waiver of liability of course!). I eyed the slight deviation of the cut from the marked line, and adjusted the line on my large, expensive piece of wood for the shelf. With that, I cut it exactly as intended.

Furniture, choose two

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve moved to New York! Now I need some furniture.

With furniture, consider:

Good price
Good quality
Good convenience

Now choose two.

I chose good price and good quality. I got used furniture, which requires navigating limited selection, and will take a few weeks to ship.

Before I Ramp up

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m recording my expectations and aspirations before I start at Ramp.

What I expect

Semi-lean startup semi-chaos
Fin+tech bro-dom

What I want

Friends among similar-ish peers
Fast career growth (I want to get recognized and promoted in 6-12 months)

What I don’t want

Unpredictable hours
Deep backend-only work

Third person singular simple present

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The product summary for my new electric shaver stand declares:

Select cleaning intensity to keep for optimal performance every day.

Ok, so do I have to select the cleaning intensity? Or does the stand select the cleaning intensity?

I thought I did, so I spent a while searching how I should select the cleaning intensity. Upon reading multiple product manuals, it turns out the stand does.

To clarify subject-less descriptions, you should use third person singular simple present:

Savvy stupid

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

At the Chicago “L” train station, a kindly Chinese grandma approached me, asking me to sign her petition, to end the Communist Party of China (CPC).

I can’t tell how how a petition would end the CPC. However, I can tell what organization someone like this would belong to. The same one that performs Shen Yun: the Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa.

On the back of the pamphlet, I spotted the website of The Epoch Times. Published by the Falun Gong, The Epoch Times has embraced far-right politics, peddling misinformation including anti-vaccine screeds. The Falun Gong have found a curious coalition in their fight against the CPC.

I moved 3 times in 2023

Sat, 16 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As the title declares. The first time, our lease expired and my roommate wanted to live in a different neighborhood. The second time, just one month later, I needed a better place to sleep than the second floor overlooking the highway. The third time, I took a job in another city.

The first time, I suffered chaos by my procrastination and permissiveness. By the third time, I learned to act and communicate early, and set clear expectations; my third move went as well as it could have (except one broken mug).

$0.10 Fix Vs. $300 Fix

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

(titled like a BuzzFeed video)

Just ask the basic questions, and act on the basic answers, and you’ll get surprisingly good results.

My AirPods Max were suffering terrible connectivity. Half of the time, when you put them on, they wouldn’t connect; and when you took them off, they wouldn’t re-connect. I had to keep resetting them.

When I took them to the Apple Store, the Genius told me it would cost $300 to repair them, with no warranty afterward. She straight up suggested to instead buy another one.

Brown croissants

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Do you know the story of croissants? One story goes:

[A] baker of the 17th century, working through the night at a time when his city (either Vienna in 1683 or Budapest in 1686) was under siege by the Turks, heard faint underground rumbling sounds which, on investigation, proved to be caused by a Turkish attempt to invade the city by tunneling under the walls. The tunnel was blown up. The baker asked no reward other than the exclusive right to bake crescent-shaped pastries commemorating the incident, the crescent being the symbol of Islam.

Airport theft

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In between jobs, I’ve been moving through a bunch of airports lately. So I’ve wondered - do airports have abnormally high or low rates of theft?

I could imagine airports have abnormally high rates of theft, because lots of people move through them with packed valuable baggage and stress, prime targets for thieves.

I could imagine airports have abnormally low rates of theft, because security checkpoints guard the boarding areas, discouraging thieves.

Bar joy

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I had an espresso flight at Starbucks. At risk (at certainty) of sounding like yet another coffee snob, I didn’t pick up any of the tasting notes. I only tasted “burnt”. People suggest tasting notes; some people suggest badly, or for mere marketing.

In Paris,¹ I dined at a wine bar. I watched as another patron sipped on a glass of wine, then brought home a bottle of it - the strong joy and sales tactic of trying before buying! I enjoy the same for coffee (beans roasted at a local coffee shop), and in rare cases, for tea!

Bardo goals

Sat, 11 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I originally wanted to call them “limbo goals”. However, “bardo”, the period between death and rebirth, feels more precise.

I’ve died at Glean, and I’ve yet to rebirth at Ramp. In between, I have time to think about, and hopefully move toward, how I want to live.

In my final week at Glean, I asked many of my coworkers what they would do with a few weeks not needing to work. Travel, see friends, sure. Most interestingly, some emphasized the philosophical importance of doing nothing.

You're only famous when you're dead

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I put in my 2-week notice. And suddenly, everyone wanted to chat.

I don’t feel salty, though. I feel grateful, and a bit baffled, by the sheer number of people with whom I’ve connected while working at Glean.

And I feel genuinely uplifted by the many people who’ve told me that they’ve liked working with me, and they’ve liked me.

Bittersweet the notion that this era of me is coming to an end.

Anti-brands

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

MUJI explains itself:

Mujirushi Ryohin, MUJI in Japanese, translates as “no-brand quality goods.”

Theoretically, an item cost = (cost of production) + (cost of logistics) + (cost of brand). So a “no-brand” item should have higher quality per cost. However, no item I can buy has no brand; I know where I’m buying it, which affects how much I’d pay.

So I call these “anti-brands”, brands with spare presentation suggesting focus on production. The Ordinary has a similar spiel. While they don’t seem like they’re marketing to you, they’re marketing to you through alternative messaging. I find myself averse to in-your-face brands, so that alternative messaging works on me.

Mass-boutique collabs

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I like to consume “mass-boutique” collaborations between a mass market player and a boutique player. The mass market player brings the scale to offer lower prices, and the boutique player brings the expertise/aesthetics. For example:

Uniqlo U - mass market Uniqlo + boutique Christophe Lemaire
Massdrop x Sennheiser HD 6XX - mass market (Mass)Drop + boutique Sennheiser, just don’t call it HD 650 for legal/branding reasons

You could even consider private labels a form of mass-boutique collaboration, though I’ll write about that another day.

Airlines IV: cards

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Even with all that price discrimination, airlines don’t make most of their money from fares. Instead, they make more money on their credit cards.

When you spend on those cards to earn miles, airlines earn a small percentage of that transaction. Airlines depend on credit card revenues so much that they’ve adjusted their fares and rewards (miles) programs to optimize for it.

Airlines III: skiplagged

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

If price discriminating on board still doesn’t satisfy you, you can also price discriminate based on route. People will pay more to travel between certain cities, so you can charge more for those cities.

So much so that I can fly direct from San Francisco to Detroit for around $500, and fly indirect from San Francisco to Cincinnati, stopping in Detroit first, for around $150. You can find these “hidden-city fares” on Skiplagged, though you risk losing checked-in baggage and getting banned from airlines.

Airlines II: peanuts

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Instead of dividing your flight into classes, you could also strip your base ticket experience bare and nickel-and-dime your customers for everything from faster check-in to carry-on luggage to in-flight Wi-Fi.

We call these “peanut airlines” because you fly for “peanuts”, and get only peanuts on board. If you’ve flown Spirit Airlines, with plane tickets sometimes cheaper than train tickets, you’ve flown on a peanut airline.

Airlines I: classes

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Airlines engage in price discrimination to get as much money as they can from customers. This includes multiple strategies, most obviously classes of tickets.

For customers who want to (or can only afford to) pay less, you can get a basic economy ticket, without refunds, exchanges, nor seat assignment.

And on the opposite end, for customers who can pay more (often on their company’s dime), you can get a business class ticket, with big seats, big thanks, and big contempt for the riffraff behind (i.e. below) you.

Fruits III: persimmon

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In high school, I played clarinet and listened primarily to classical music (and EDM). Then in my freshman internship I grew sick of it, and sought out new music.

The first album that spoke to me came from Japanese Breakfast. In her debut album Psychopomp, and later in her memoir Crying in H Mart, she details her mother’s death from cancer: the love, the loss, and the yearning. I re-listen and re-read in hard times.

Fruits II: (sucker for) passion fruit

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As I walked out of the store today, I found that I’ve become more than just a fan for passion fruit; I’ve become a sucker for passion fruit:

In fruit form, I buy
In water form, I buy
In pulp form, I buy
In chocolate form, I buy
In tea tasting notes, I buy
Even for $35, in coffee tasting notes, I buy!

While I enjoy seeing passion fruit become more mainstream, I no longer just buy every passion fruit variation I see!

Fruits I: (dry farmed) early girl tomato

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I have eaten (or drunk) at over 300 restaurants in San Francisco, and soon the same in New York City.¹ While NYC has more people so more variety at more times, SF has the freshness of California, which produces over half of the fruits and vegetables in the US.

The last 2 times I’ve visited SF, I’ve procured dry farmed early girl tomatoes to make a beautiful tomato sauce, based on this simple recipe by Marcella Hazan.

Good apologies

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Most people don’t communicate well, and by extension most people don’t apologize well.

A bad apology, a selfish apology, downplays the impact and throws out excuses, in an attempt to make the apologizer feel better. However, if you hurt me, you don’t get to dictate how it affected me, and I don’t really care about why it happened.

A good apology, a generous one, understands or explores the impact and moves to mitigate it going forward. It takes more, and it gives more.

4 states

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Four Corners Monument marks the “quadripoint” where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet. If you stretch yourself out, you can place a limb in each state.

In my mind, I’m playing a solo game of Twister, a limb contorted into each state of Stupid, Bold, Idiosyncratic, and Proficient.

A curated selection of wall art from Za Pizza

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

ZABLAZZZKING

Our artist, anonymous perhaps to avoid the cops, has helpfully drawn a weed leaf. You can tell by the excessive enthusiasm that they have probably never actually smoked weed.

“The Daddy Special”

Yes, I can tell this refers to some pizza topping combination. No, it did not help to exclaim “Daddy’s full”.

Za 피자 (Pizza)

The artist clarifies “피자 means pizza. It’s Korean.” Hmph, very redundant. Almost like a young child with English as a second language. Almost.

老板 (Laoban), dumplings

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I 老板

My mother asserts in name.

My sister and I share the same middle name “Guo”, my mother’s maiden name, which she kept even after coming to the United States.

My father calls my mother “老板”, which he translates as “boss”, of the household.

II Laoban

In my corner store, I spotted Laoban Dumplings on sale. The brand translates Laoban as “boss”, of the dumpling shop.

I thought of the Chinatown restauranters who fed me when I wasn’t sleeping well, and got sick of Trader Joe’s frozen foods.

Hyperspecialization

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I get my oolong tea from one purveyor (Song Tea), and my Japanese tea from another (Kettl).

I get my tinned fish from one restaurant (The Anchovy Bar), and my oysters from another (Hog Island Oyster Co.).

My taste, and the modern American economy it seems, rewards getting really, really good at something really, really specific.

However, does this hyperspecialization impede us from the joys and value of mixing specialties?

Hon Wasabi

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

At Saru Sushi Bar, you can order the “Hon Wasabi”. Demonstrating that “food and menus are uniquely challenging to translate”, I find this translation both incompetent and functional.

If “Hon” just means “True”, you could just call it “True Wasabi”. It reminds me of “Just according to keikaku. (Translator’s note: keikaku means plan)

However, if you want to communicate that this “Hon Wasabi” won’t taste like other “wasabi” your customers have had before. And you don’t want to explain that “wasabi” in the US probably contains just horseradish powder and food dye, calling it “Hon Wasabi” does the trick!

Locked out in sight

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Did you know my apartment building’s clubhouse doors auto-lock around midnight? I learned that after coming back from the restroom, tugging, pulling, YANKING at all doors till my hands and arms became sore.

I could SEE my backpack and laptop. And while staring at them INDIGNANTLY, I put them in lost mode. Then I went to sleep, trying to forget about it.

I forced myself to wake up early the next morning. And after waving to the janitor, I, relieved, retrieved my stuff.

San Francisco Bahn Mi

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Preparation

1 bottle of vinegar from the Safeway you only go to at night with the homeless people
1 cucumber from Gus’s Community Market, purveyor of fine and un-fine SF brands

Try to figure out how to use a mandoline slicer
Slice the entire cucumber super thin
Almost slice your finger
Mix with vinegar in one of your mason jars, of which you now have a menacing amount

Base

1 slice of milk bread from Breadbelly
1 glob of mayo from the cheapest brand, because you probably won’t use it all anyway
(Optional) 1 drop of sweat from biking to Breadbelly

Cover one side of the bread with mayo
Toast for 3 minutes - weirdly soft??
Toast for 3 more minutes - burnt black!!

Toppings

1 slab of country pâté from Maison Nico
A bunch of cilantro leaves
A few slices of pickled cucumber

Cover the burnt side of the bread with pâté, wondering how to pronounce French words
Top with cilantro leaves, recalling that time you put cilantro in boba tea in front of your coworkers - you no longer work there
Forget about your (now suspiciously old) pickled red onions and layer with pickled cucumber slices

Meat

1 or 2 or whatever slices of whatever meat you have laying around

Just finish up the sandwich and eat it, you over-the-top bih

Birthday backpack chase

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This year, I celebrated my birthday by chasing my backpack!

Don’t worry, I also had a party and brunch over the weekend.

I left my backpack on the bench and got on the 5:50 northbound train. Grasping my empty shoulders, I found out only after the train started moving.

At the next station, I took the 6:16 southbound train back. As I eyed the bags of others, I slowly realized someone had taken my backpack!

A sleepy earnestness

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, in the face of a brutal insomnia that reduced me to less than 6 hours of sleep per day, I asked my friend how to sleep.

A few months before, this friend had discovered a tumor in their brain. The tumor had distorted their sleep cycle enough to intrigue a panel of researchers.

I got some sleep and health advice from my friend. More importantly, I gained perspective.

The melancholies of helping an old Chinese man get back to Oakland

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The distanced melancholy of not knowing your mother tongue, the native language of your mother, your father, and most of your family
The vicarious melancholy of seeing someone live in a region spoken and written primarily alien
The selfish melancholy of “losing” an hour, because you don’t have 100% confidence this person will find help otherwise, and missing your scheduled exercise class
The fearful melancholy of becoming more dependent on others as you age
The vain melancholy of wanting to publicize your act, and thinking a truly good person would not
The yearning melancholy of wanting to know more of the colliding half-stranger, waving bye as you go your unknown ways

A day by your self

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

To be alone is to be entirely your self. Well, as much as an individual constitutes a self.

(You can bike 6 miles to consume an unusual pastry. And screw it, follow that up with a frivolous coffee flight and museum visit.

(You can quietly seethe at the golf course you have to walk through, and the European’s sculpture of Le Chinois, the Chinese man.

(And you can walk to the beach and take pictures of amazingly ugly rocks. And the backs of strangers clearly having a moment from embarrassing angles.

Lunch and dinner faces

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I wear separate faces for lunch and dinner.

My lunch face orders “请来一磅鸡腿”

My dinner face inquires “which pâté would work well in a sandwich?”

My lunch face devours the fried chicken drumettes indiscriminately, lukewarm flesh and ligament altogether.

My dinner face requests to re-heat the tepid seasonal quiche, carefully sectioning with a fork and knife.

My lunch face roams the streets, crunching and tossing the bones in front of God and everyone.

Fight-or-flight bit

Sat, 27 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Doing a bit can activate your fight-or-flight response.

Fight - look your manager in the eye on the last day of your internship and bite into a banana unpeeled - CRONCH.

Flight - run through the kind-of restricted area of the public garden, and to the horror of the kindly approaching family and your new shoes, step in a covered puddle - SPLOOSH.

Really fun either way.

7-Eleven taquitos

Sat, 20 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Tonight, for the first time in years, I ate another 7-Eleven taquito - monterey jack, the objectively superior flavor.

$1.50 - more expensive than I remember, though it tasted exactly the same.

I’ve eaten so much fancy - expensive, sometimes delicious, food since then. However, no matter how many omakases, or fusion burritos, or “celebrations of sungold tomatoes” I consume, I still come back to the 7-Eleven taquito. In fact, in time, in memory, after a late night, after a long flight, I embody the 7-Eleven taquito more than any fancy food. And that feels good. Actually, not good, right, except in my stomach.

Chinatown at the farmers market

Sat, 13 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend I went to the farmers market in the United Nations Plaza. I noticed something unexpected - almost all of the other customers came from Chinatown!

To understand why, you must understand Chinatown. As I learned in Cool Gray City of Love:

Chinatown serves as one of the last places poor people can afford to live in San Francisco.
Chinatown houses a lot of elderly people aging in place.

By that combination, you find a lot of Chinatown grandparents hungry for cheap produce. And they shop enthusiastically at the farmers market, just never at the trendy (i.e. more expensive) stands.

Smart plug hammer

Sat, 06 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

You can turn any “dumb” electrical device into a “smart” one by plugging it into a smart plug. Then you can automatically schedule turning it on and off.

However, to a person with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Instead of solving the problem with my noisy refrigerator, I just set the refrigerator to turn off around when I expect to sleep and wake up. And now, stuck with a “smart” half-solution, I end up trying to ignore the noisy refrigerator during the day.

Evolutionary intelligence

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Today my friend explained a surprisingly simple evolutionary theory of intelligence.

Organisms evolve to face the challenges of their environment. At the same time, evolution pressures to keep solutions broad and simple, in order to conserve resources. Animal intelligence, especially human intelligence, addresses an extremely broad set of challenges with relatively little genetic complexity. Fascinating!

Though one wonders about the evolutionary future of humans, whose most pressing challenges seem to come from human forces, rather than natural environmental ones (if there exists a distinction).

Hello Sleep

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As I researched more on CBT-I, I came across a new book by behavioral sleep medicine specialist Dr. Jade Wu: Hello Sleep: The Science and Art of Overcoming Insomnia Without Medications.

I didn’t want to unnecessarily add to my growing backlog of books to read, so I looked at the book preview.

I’ve never felt so seen and called out by a book at the same time! The prologue “Sleep Is a Friend, Not an Engineering Problem” tells the story of Kate, a software engineer with insomnia obsessing over sleep data. I, of course, saw myself in Kate.

My scariest bike ride

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

After visiting my friend in the southern part of the Mission in SF, Google Maps directed me to the scariest bike ride I’ve ever taken.

In the dead of night, the trip began by passing under the highway on the highway. I learned, in my futile search for bike lane markings not there, that this road did not have room for me.¹ With the lights of the cars behind me, I felt the real fear of getting run over.

CBT-I

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) aims to reduce symptoms of various mental health conditions. Connecting thoughts, emotions, and behavior, CBT aims to reshape negative (patterns of) thoughts and emotions to reduce negative behaviors.

People often know CBT as treating depression and anxiety disorders. However, one form, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), aims to treat insomnia. This fits with my previous description of insomnia as a behavioral disorder.

CBT-I represents the most effective, scientifically supported treatment¹ we have for insomnia. The American College of Physicians recommends CBT-I as the first-line treatment for chronic insomnia. In general (at least as I, not-quite-an-expert, understand CBT-I), we want to:

The 3 Ps of insomnia

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Since I’ve been experiencing insomnia, I thought I’d share the helpful things I’ve learned about insomnia.

For many people, insomnia represents a behavior, rather than purely physiological, disorder. Under a behavioral model of insomnia, we can imagine insomnia going through 3 Ps.

Predisposition

Certain people have a predisposition for insomnia. These predisposing factors can range from personal, e.g. internalizing unrealistic expectations about sleep, to environmental, e.g. living in a noisy place. Note these predisposing factors (thankfully) don’t automatically determine you will experience insomnia; they simply increase the chances you might experience insomnia, if you encounter the subsequent Ps.

Moving chaos 7: lingering insomnia

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Though I had moved out of the noisy unit, I was still waking up at 5 or 6 AM.

In hindsight, it would make sense that the month in the noisy unit would linger within me, as a mild insomnia. However, I catastrophized my new quieter unit was disrupting my sleep. My anxiety triggered a vicious cycle, making my sleep worse and worse.

It surprises me how quickly and deeply mental disorder re-shaped my experience and perspective. At one point, I even considered breaking my lease (again, except in this case early termination would cost 2 months’ rent), and moving to the Middle of Nowhere.

Moving chaos 6: Spacemacs mover

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This time, I hired a mover to move my stuff. Somehow, I found the one mover who also uses Spacemacs, a particular community configuration of Emacs.

Unprompted, the mover told me about Free Software, Lisp machines, and Richard Stallman. I had only told other people about these topics; it felt almost surreal to have someone tell me, doubly so my mover!

My mover went to UC Berkeley, and had to drop out due to immigration issues. I felt a real kinship, and that mere circumstance kept us in wildly different conditions. So for the first time, I left a 5-star review, and tipped over a hundred dollars.

Moving chaos 5: moving again

Sat, 11 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I liked my new apartment, except the landmine I tripped on.

My bedroom overlooked the street, right off the highway into the roundabout. And every day, independent of when I went to sleep, I would wake up around 5 or 6 AM. I was getting only 5 or 6 hours of sleep most days.

2 weeks in, I had had enough. I tried earplugs, and a white noise machine. Yet I could still hear the street, haunting me, taunting me.

Sichuanese chili oil

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Sichuanese chili oil, 红油, has a beautiful texture, fragrance, color, and flavor.

Traditional Sichuanese chili oil uses rapeseed oil, 菜籽油, as a base. With its high adhesive quality, the oil better clings to your food, making it easier to appreciate.

As the oil mixes with the chilis, Mala Market describes three distinct phases:

The first pour-over at the highest oil temperature extrudes or “forces out” the smoky-fragrant chili aroma (增香, zēng xiāng). The second pour at a middle temperature draws out the attractive red color of the oil (提色, tí sè). The third and last pour at the lowest temperature preserves the spice of the chilis.

COVID lonely

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I done caught COVID! I tested positive for the first time, three years after the pandemic started.

I spent this week mostly alone. My roommate is still gradually moving in, and for everyone’s well-being I didn’t go to the office, and canceled my plans with friends.

I recently read The Lonely Stories, a collection of essays covering the complexities of loneliness. One of the essays related the writer’s experience at the beginning of the pandemic. While it made me grateful for the relatively disease-free path I’ve had since then, it also reminded me of the intense feelings of loneliness that come with COVID.

Home in the Design District

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As I walk through the Design District of San Francisco, which houses many interior design showrooms, I see parts of homes. I see shiny model kitchens and bathrooms, even elaborate lamps. However, I don’t see “homes.”

I don’t see “homes,” because I know no one is really using these kitchens, bathrooms, nor lamps right now. They currently serve as display and merchandise.

I realize then that my intuitive idea of “home” involves people living. It includes relationships and behaviors, not just stuff - something to keep in mind as I make my “home” in my new place.

Indignant biking

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

To bike regularly in San Francisco, you must glance at death.

Last weekend, I learned that helmets don’t really help bikers if they seriously crash with a car. I also almost crashed twice, while in the bike lane.

The first time, a car swung open its door into my bike lane. I braked quickly enough to avoid a serious collision. Yet I still bumped my hand against the door. The driver and I checked with each other, found nothing concerning, and both brushed it off.

Mocktails

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“Mocktails” refers to non-alcoholic drinks mocking alcoholic cocktail drinks. I don’t like the term “mocktails.”

“Mocktails” implies a natural, superior alcoholic and an imitation, inferior non-alcoholic. However, non-alcoholic drinks have some advantage of flavor and flexibility. Alcohol tastes bitter and burns your throat, because your body recognizes it as toxic; non-alcoholic drinks don’t have to “overcome” that taste hurdle. And most people aren’t trying to get sch-wasted on a workday; they could then drink something non-alcoholic without guilt.

Moving chaos 4: getting new stuff

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Since I had to dump my old table and couch (I didn’t like them that much anyway, since I got them free from my friend moving out when I was moving in), I had to get new ones for my new place.

When you furnish or remodel, you want three properties:

Good quality
Good price
Good timing

You can choose two. If you want good quality quickly, pay up. If want good quality cheap, wait. And if you want cheap quickly, go to Ikea.¹

Moving chaos 3: unloading strategically

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

To avoid some of the burden I experienced loading my stuff into storage, I booked a mover to drop off and later pick up my U-Box at my new place.

The first mover I booked didn’t answer my six attempts to contact. Having learned to cut my losses earlier, I canceled that booking.

The next mover I booked answered immediately, and offered to also unload my stuff into my apartment for some extra cash. I took them on the offer.

Moving chaos 2: storing my stuff

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

While finding a place with my second roommate candidate, I needed to store my stuff for about a month.

I booked my first storage service a week ahead of time. The day before, I got a call from the warehouse: the historic rainfall had damaged their storage units. They couldn’t offer the storage service till after my lease expired. So I had to cancel my order.

Then I booked my second storage service. When I called to schedule the drop-off and pick-up of the storage unit, the customer service representative told me we would need a permit from the City of San Francisco. How long would that take? 7 business days. I did not have 7 business days before my lease expired. So I had to cancel my order, again!

Moving chaos 1: finding a roommate

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My previous roommate wanted to move into a studio apartment; they recently started dating more seriously. When I was first moving into San Francisco, I was working for a huge company and found them through the internal roommate spreadsheet. Now I needed to search for a new roommate through other public channels.

Facebook served this search fine enough. Though the public Facebook roommate search groups suffer from botspam, enough people use them that I found two compatible roommate candidates.

Return to Ann Arbor

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I revisited Ann Arbor, the town of my undergraduate years.

Besides the nostalgia for cheap eats, behind the sense of the same, different, I confronted lost opportunities.

I saw the same buildings, with the same names, without access. I had 4 years to explore museums, concerts, and hidden corners, and instead I learned the parking lot outside my apartment window.

I don’t regret my time in Ann Arbor; I regret not adding a few small final touches. Acting within my sphere of influence, I have taken the spirit of exploration with me to San Francisco - most weeks I find another piece of the city.

How to read today

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I just finished reading How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. Originally published in 1940, the book has aged surprisingly well, save for a few antiquated passages.

Since 1940, the Internet has radically changed how we read. Websites and search engines have largely replaced physical media. And against this unprecedentedly large collection of digital media, their advice, that different pieces deserve different amounts/levels of your time and effort, rings even more true.

Recipe for Airport Egg Salad Sandwiches

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Start with a uniquely textured bread.

You want a color between white and whole grain bread, so both people who prefer the taste of white and people who prefer the health of whole grain will feel slightly confused. You also want the texture of plastic, to scare your eater into thinking they forgot to remove a layer of packaging.

Take some egg, and mash it into an unrecognizable paste.

Most “chefs” and “cooks” and “normal people” would recommend leaving a bit of variance in texture. Those same idiots would also suggest diced celery or onion for crunch, or, you know salt. Clearly, they have not received the luxurious grace of Airport Egg Salad Sandwich God.

I focused so hard I ended up in San Jose!

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In December, the Caltrain is running on a modified (reduced) schedule due to construction. Oh well, I’ll just have to time my commute more precisely.

In some stations, including mine in Palo Alto, both lines, northbound to San Francisco and southbound to San Jose, are temporarily using the same track. Oh well, I’ll just have to check which track and cross under.

Friday night, after a particularly long day, I’m finally heading back from Palo Alto to San Francisco. I appreciate the train over a car because I can zone out. Put on my noise-canceling headphones, and meditate, read, or just, you know, splay out like a crime scene. Today, a particularly longer day, I’ve pulled out my laptop to wrap up some code.

Sidegrading your audio

Sat, 03 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I watch Steve Guttenberg for the crustiness. The lack of polish suggests an authenticity, an honesty. If audio equipment ever did have a past golden age, Steve embodies it.

As with every Black Friday, I considered buying new audio equipment. In the video above, Steve recommends getting something drastically different. Rather than spending progressively more upgrading the same type of setup, try a different setup. In my case, instead of upgrading my bookshelf speakers, I got an entry-level record player.

Stories from the community table

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Some busy restaurants employ a community table, an efficient setup for small parties and walk-ins who don’t mind sitting next to strangers to reduce wait times.

The first time I sat at a community table, I was trying to get a lobstah roll at Neptune Oyster in Bahston. After a short introduction, the guy next to me asked, without prompting, “have you heard of crypto?” He then told me his dad took out a couple thousand dollars on his mom’s credit card to “invest” in cryptocurrencies. That money disappeared in a flash, and his parents have separated. I changed the topic, silently thanking some divine force I wasn’t being sold cryptocurrencies at the community table.

Consuming experiences

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

“Buy experiences, not things”, so goes the popular advice. Things, after a short-lived honeymoon period, will quickly come to disappoint you. Experiences, by their short-livedness, will not.

A notable body of research supports this, though as with many (trendy) social science findings, I’d test intuitively and tentatively, waiting to see if the theory reproduces and generalizes.

Under this guidance, I have consumed many new experiences. I have traveled to see friends in different cities, for example. I treasure those times.

The season's worst trench coat look

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

March 2019, the University of Michigan had a shooter scare. As fear spread throughout the student body, I rushed back to my apartment, and plugged into the frantic network of texts warning people to stay clear of central campus.

One group text I still remember today: people spotted a suspicious figure in a trench coat running across one of the main streets.

The University didn’t actually have a shooter. The sounds of “gunshots” actually came from a sorority popping balloons.

From Emacs to VS Code

Sat, 05 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I switched from Emacs to VS Code as my primary text editor. For those who knew me well, this represents a significant change.

I: Eclipse eclipsed

For my first in-person¹ programming course, I used Eclipse. Slow and mangled by a maze of menus, Eclipse made my laptop scream and boil. I asked my friend U for another editor to use.

II: Vim, then Emacs, then Emacs-Vim

U suggested I use Vim. To make sure I properly used Vim, U disabled the arrow keys in favor or hjkl, the Vim convention for moving around. Instead of learning to use hjkl, I learned to dislike Vim, and asked U for yet another option.

Experience, interpretation, experience

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Philosophies as broad as Buddhism to Stoicism separate experience from interpretation. For example, you may experience someone looking at you, and you may interpret that look to mean attraction, or hatred, or nothing at all. Though we often share interpretation, the separation from experience emphasizes choice: we choose how we interpret our experiences.

In turn, our interpretation creates another experience. Depending on how you interpreted the look from the previous example, you would feel and act differently. This forms a loose cycle between experience and interpretation.

Fired

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Truthfully, I did not transition my mindset between roles fast enough, at least in the eyes of my manager (and their manager). 6 weeks into my job, my manager sat me down, and told me to shape up or get out.

My manager acknowledged that the start-up life did not fit everyone - something I had heard before, though never hit quite as hard as then. They (honestly quite insultingly) offered that I could leave the company with no hard feelings.¹

Work and boundaries

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My first job out of college, I worked for Google during the pandemic. Both those taught me to set boundaries between my professional work and my other interests. I learned to remove distracting work apps from my phone; I learned to not feel guilty stopping early some days; I learned to get back to it tomorrow, or later.

My next job, my current job, at Glean forced me to reset those boundaries. I keep Slack on my phone in case of outages and late-night questions; I stay past 8 hours every day I go to the office; I finish up day of, even in the night.

SF Fog Week

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today, I biked to the Presidio Tunnel Tops to see the SF Fleet Week air show. Over 4 miles of biking the hills of San Francisco, silently cursing American city design, my body, and the car owners driving past me, and I get there, out of breath, raggedy, and ready. I felt so pumped to see planes, and I looked up.

I saw fog, and only fog, for the next half-hour or so. I heard planes, as if to taunt me. Just like I heard fireworks on July 4th.

Uncle Roger

Sat, 01 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I’ve been watching a lot of Uncle Roger videos. The videos follow the Asian Uncle Roger character watching non-Asian people cook Asian dishes, bemoaning how incorrectly or badly the non-Asian person is cooking the Asian dish.

The videos stand out to me for their relatability. The character reminds me of the ups and downs of growing up with Asian parents, and more relevantly for this post, the flaccid attempts at Asian-ish dishes that peppered my growing up in suburban Michigan.

Yoga at 1.1x speed

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, as a mindful mommy, I’ve been going on my 30-day Yoga Journey, a free yoga video series on YouTube. Those who remember I used to listen to music at 1.4x speed will suspect I don’t follow along at regular speed. Indeed, I’m sprinting along the path of my journey at 1.1x speed.

Yes, at first it felt almost sacrilegious to me too. I want you to cast aside your initial judgement, though, and re-consider the arguments I presented in my post about music at 1.4x speed. As consumers of media, we have the power of interpretation - to reproduce the media in our own way. That includes on a TV or on a phone, in a quiet apartment or in a noisy bar, and yes, at a slower or at a faster speed than 1.0x.

Just because you don't understand it ...

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As I peruse the grocery store shelves, “health” foods bombard me: manuka honey, goji berries, kava, to name a few.

These “health” foods testify to America’s fraught relationship with food. Soda companies have lobbied a balanced diet can include regularly drinking tens of grams of sugar; now they sell sugar-free diet soda. Fad diets, often questionable or contradictory, now line our magazines and our un-skippable ads. Poverty now increases your chances of both hunger and obesity.

Chinese sushi

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Before starting my new job, I visited my sister in Michigan. The week before, her toilet had clogged, spewing ew water across her room’s floor. I brushed off the smell, happy to see my sister again for the first time in months.

The week after, I went to a fancy schmancy sushi restaurant in New York City. They accompanied one of the dishes with fancy schmancy custom kombucha. As I sipped, the scent reminded me of my sister’s room.

Mindful mommy

Sat, 03 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I decided to buy a few essential oils. Quite simply, I like the smell, and they function well as a flexible perfume.

I started by visiting a local store to figure out what scents I liked. Self-conscious, I noticed all other customers comprised young women.

Back in my place, I compared essential oil brands and diagnosed a serious infection of multi-level marketing (MLM). MLM sellers exploit disproportionately vulnerable (poor, socially restricted) women under the guise of starting your own business. So serious the infection, one brand had a page “Compare to MLMs”, which made me pretty uncomfortable about the business of essential oils.

Human taquito

Sat, 27 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

You know those mattress-in-a-box companies like Casper or Purple that ship mattresses directly to consumers? Taking advantage of their generous return policies, I ordered 3 mattresses in boxes my senior year, just after winter break.

Each of these mattresses they sent compressed in a giant plastic bag, so suddenly I had a gigantic pile of plastic. Rather than try to recycle the plastic, I kept it beside my bed, to … I don’t know … admire.

Oh no! I talk about my diet

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The best regimen comprises what you can and will actually do sustainably. This applies to education, exercise, and diet.

My diet currently consists of 3 rules:

Only eat when hungry, rather than when strongly emotional or when encountering free food (in, say, the office microkitchen).
Eat with time and attention, instead of shoving food down my gullet while multitasking on my phone.
Avoid sugar, though don’t expect to completely remove it.

Suburbia

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m traveling the 2 weeks in between jobs, to Boston, Chicago, and New York City to see friends. In between, I’ve stopped by my hometown.

I grew up in the suburbs outside Detroit. “Metro Detroit” we’d say, so people would vaguely know where. Surprisingly, Madonna graduated from my high school. Of it, she said:

When I went to high school, we moved to a suburb that was all white. And we were, a bit, living above of our means. … I just felt like I was with rich people, and I wasn’t and I felt out of place. And I felt like they were members of country clubs and they had manicures and they wore nice clothes and I didn’t fit in. … Have you ever been to Rochester Hills, Michigan? … I just didn’t want to go back. I can’t be around basic, provincial-thinking people.

Meat culture

Sat, 06 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Our food system constitutes one of humanity’s greatest impacts on the earth. Consider a simple tomato: greenhouses, irrigation, pesticides, fertilizers, pickers, processors, storers, shippers, merchandisers, stockers, and finally cookers. Revel in the effort it takes so you can make a mediocre spaghetti sauce.

Kitchen animosity aside, we observe that since animals spend so much energy unrelated to final human consumption, plant foods on average boast multiple times more energy-efficient production than animal meats.¹ Ignoring the energy initially created by photosynthesis in plants, overwhelmingly the energy spent in our food system comes from fossil fuels. We could, all else held equal, significantly reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by consuming more plant foods instead of meat.

Making eye contact with strangers

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In more individualist, less power-distant cultures, eye contact usually signals interpersonal connection. Of course, this depends on context and person; the spread based on context and person spans far wider than the distance between cultural averages.

That considered, eye contact holds surprisingly broad and deep power over people.

During my freshman year, my upperclassman mentor gave me feedback that I made basically no eye contact in conversation. I started to make more eye contact while talking.

A race against flushing my money down the toilet

Sat, 23 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Normally, the time before a flight affords me nothing. However, this time I remembered my limited purpose flexible spending account (LPFSA).

Your LPFSA expires when you leave your current employer. In other words, I have 2 hours to spend $500, fast!

Ok, let’s see what I can spend it on. Vision and dental.

Crap, I need to catch the subway to the airport.

Ok, glasses. I can buy some from Warby Parker online using my LPFSA debit card. Wait, my old account has the email @jgjin.com. I lost that domain a while ago.

Airport limbo

Sat, 16 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Have you experienced limbo? Or rather the airport food court.

Once through security, the airport before flights represents a rare broad space where you don’t have to do anything. At the same time, you can do many things, and most luxuriously, nothing.

Nothing, I don’t find much room for nothing. Nothing can really help you think, or process. What you do during nothing lays bare your defaults. Wrangle your children? Potato about? Eat? For me, I’m catching up on writing.

III: Recruitment and transition

Sat, 09 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I have applied to 13 companies.

I dipped my toes into recruiting with a first round of 3 companies: Roblox, Patreon, and Crosswire. They had reached out to me, and I mixed my interest in them with an interest in practicing interviewing. To my delight, I got offers from all 3. However, I turned them down, Roblox and Patreon too mature and Crosswire too early for my taste. The last one I declined nervously, knowing I would not have any standing offers for a while.

II: Unwellness and resilience

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I emerged from senior year into closed doors. Over the course of the global pandemic, I worked for Google as a Software Engineer. Two opposites stand out from this time: unwellness and resilience.

At first, I couldn’t even refer to the COVID-19 pandemic by name: not “corona”, instead a “crown”; the “Inside Times”. Isolated, insulated, I cried and thought of death. Overwhelmed by It All (et al.), I traveled to 7 cities in 7 weeks, and cried again.

I: Competence

Sat, 25 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Since high school, I have seen myself as 1. good at computer stuff, and 2. getting good at people stuff.¹ Hence I pursued a dual degree in computer science and business administration.

My sophomore summer, I interned as a Software Engineer at Google, and I turned that into an Associate Product Manager (APM) Internship junior summer. Noting the prestige of the APM program, I saw myself as a Product Manager, in the intersection of computer and people stuff.

Lychee and lime

Sat, 18 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I dream of lychee and lime. I dream of a floral sweet accentuated by a tangy sour.

Last week I biked to Japantown in search of lychees, leaving with only a consolation of lychee-flavored soda. Determined, I called a fruit store in the Mission, and to my joy, they had stocked lychees just the day before.

Lightly heaving from biking a few miles, I bought 24 little red gems. 12 I submerged in neutral vodka to make extract, and the other 12 in water and sugar to make syrup.

Rose extract

Sat, 11 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today I bought roses from Trader Joe’s. The cashier probably thought I was buying them for my girlfriend.

I don’t have a girlfriend. I chopped the heads off the roses, and flayed the petals into a glass bottle, to drown in cheap vodka.

If that description doesn’t make it clear, I’m making rose extract. To mix with lychee in sparkling water.

Apples and moons

Sat, 04 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

What type of apple do you like the most? When I visited Seattle, I took a bite of the semi-famous Cosmic Crisp. Sweet, tangy, crispy, until very recently the Cosmic Crisp represented my favorite apple. This week I journeyed to the Berkeley Bowl to continue my Apple Quest.

After getting off the BART, I biked over to The Cheese Board Collective, a semi-famous pizzeria lauded by a stranger I met drunk at a party. I ordered myself a whole pizza and a rose lemonade in a fancy glass bottle, and parked on the edge of the outdoor seating. Donning the semi-famous Chicago Lean to not dirty my white shirt, I faced the road to watch people zip by against the backdrop of California’s hills.

Golden Era

Sat, 28 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I claimed before that “Food and stories form the easiest and most common way to share culture.” For Buddhism and proximate ways of life, the first manifests in veganism.

In between Civic Center and Tenderloin in San Francisco lies Golden Era Vegan Restaurant. Followers of Supreme Master Ching Hai run the restaurant, so as Eater warns, “while the food is indeed delicious, folks uncomfortable with religious propaganda should probably steer clear.”

Raised Roman Catholic, Hai followed a Buddhist monk for a few years. Then denied entrance to his monastery on the basis of gender, she moved to India to study different religions. This explains why Hai’s “way of the Light and Sound through the Quan Yin Method” mixes Christian, Buddhist (from which it takes veganism), and Hindu ideas. Christians mad, Buddhists mad, Hindus not clear.

Instrumental and terminal

Sat, 21 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We can characterize goals as either “instrumental” or “terminal.” We care about instrumental goals in support of others, and about terminal goals in themselves. For example, the instrumental goal of figuring out whether seaweed counts as a plant supports the terminal goal of understanding the natural world.

The distinction between instrumental and terminal depends on perspective, where broader perspectives bias toward instrumental. A hard drive has a terminal goal of storing and loading data. More broadly, a computer has an instrumental goal of storing and loading data to support a terminal goal of performing useful computation. More broadly, a person with a computer has an instrumental goal of performing useful computation to support an instrumental goal of figuring our whether seaweed counts as a plant to support a terminal goal of understanding the natural world.

叫化鸡

Sat, 14 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The idea of “kaiserkrainer” reminds me of emperor’s chicken, more commonly known as 叫化鸡, beggar’s chicken. You cook this dish by wrapping the chicken in clay and lotus leaves. Various folktales explain this cooking method. In one version, the beggar stole the chicken from the emperor and used this method to avoid attracting attention. In another, the emperor, to stay in touch with the struggles of the people, dined with a beggar, and enjoyed the chicken so much he added it to the imperial menu. In yet another, the emperor, born a peasant, added his favorite childhood dish to the imperial menu.

Käsekrainer

Sat, 07 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In Germany, they have this famous hot dog called the “kaiserkrainer” - “kaiser” meaning emperor and “krainer” meaning sausage. Stuffed with cheese and decorated generously with ketchup and mustard, a bite will joyfully stain your shirt, leaving a messy reminder of your indulgence. I had a kaiserkrainer during my trip to Europe in college.

Or maybe I didn’t. Searching online, I don’t really see a “kaiserkrainer.” Google Search corrects me toward Kaiserslautern, a city in Germany. Did I hallucinate this royal sausage?

生煎包

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Two foods defined my year-plus social distancing: sriracha mayo and 生煎包.

Sriracha mayo

In sriracha mayo, I found simplicity and control. Sriracha mayo only has two ingredients; you guessed it: sriracha and mayo. On days defined by You haven’t done anything, I could reflect Well at least I made sriracha mayo. Plop a white glob into a bowl, squirt over it a layer of red, and BAM! Well at least I made sriracha mayo.

Emerging adulthood

Sat, 23 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Emerging adulthood describes the period of life emerging from the stability of adolescence toward the stability of adulthood. In-stability marks this transition, changing homes, jobs, and relationships.

Uncertainty has become the greatest feature of my emerging adulthood, excitement and fear for what I will find. However, the global pandemic has formed the most notable feature. I emerged into closed doors - shuttering businesses, social distancing, and mass protests.

I wonder, and worry, that I have grown stunted, that emerging from the chrysalis into such a world has clipped my wings. And yet, it continues.

Computing sequential games: solution

Sat, 16 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

In my last post, we represented a sequential game of complete and perfect information as a trie. In this post, let’s solve that game!

Setup

Let’s assume the following:

The players act economically rational; they care only to maximize their own utility/payoff.
No two possible combinations of moves yield the same exact utility/payoff for the same player.

With these assumptions, our sequential game of complete and perfect information must have a single deterministic outcome. To reach this outcome, we can use backward induction, from game theory.

Computing sequential games: representation

Sat, 09 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Let’s solve a sequential game of complete and perfect information with computers! First, let’s define such a game. Then, let’s describe how to represent such a game with computers. Later, we’ll describe an algorithm to solve such a game.

Defining the game

A sequential game of complete and perfect information has 3 obvious features:

Sequential means players make moves separately in order
Complete information means players know everyone’s outcomes
Perfect information means players know everyone’s (possible and played) moves

Representing the game

In mathematical notation, say we have n players. Player i (i between 1 and n, inclusive) plays i-th in the sequence and has c_i choices, i.e. possible moves. We can represent all possible combinations of moves as n-tuples of the form (m_0, m_1, …, m_n), where m_i denotes the move the i-th player made and falls between 1 and c_i, inclusive.

Trie-d chords

Sat, 02 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post, I explained the notion of “chords.” English words analogize to “chords” of Latin letters. And as it turns out, thinking of English words as “chords” gives us a useful way to approach common problems involving English words.

Suppose you wanted to check if a “word” (sequence of Latin letters) exists in a dictionary. Naively, you could go through every entry in the dictionary. Clearly, this would take unpleasantly long for extremely large dictionaries.

Chords

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When I play guitar, the notes A, C, and E form the A minor chord. The notes A, C#, and E form the A major chord.

When I type on my stenotype keyboard, the chord HAOEL pressed simultaneously forms “heel.” The chord HAEL pressed simultaneously forms “heal.”

When I write Chinese, the simplified Han characters 花 and 园 form the segment 花园, meaning garden. The characters 花 and 椒 form the segment 花椒, meaning Sichuan peppercorn.

Look at all those links to other posts! I’ve started to notice the idea of “chords” across domains. You can combine notes, keys, characters, whatever you’d like to call them, to form distinct meanings.

Sunflowers

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I

Until I started school, I slept in my parents’ room. As I swim through the depths of my mind for memories of that time, I see sunflowers. Rather, a painting of sunflowers hanging on the bedroom wall.

I remember finding it strange the different directions the flowers face. I learned sunflowers face the sun.

In truth, sunflowers follow the sun only in their youth. Before blooming, they follow to gather more sunlight for photosynthesis. And shortly after blooming, they follow to gather warmth for pollination. Once mature, however, they stop moving, giving up sunlight and warmth to face their own direction.

Reasons to cook

Sat, 12 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Since moving to San Francisco, I’ve cooked fewer times than I can count with my left hand. This seems strange for someone who cares enough about cooking to write about it.

Realizing how little I’ve cooked recently, I wanted to briefly survey why people cook, why I haven’t, and why I’d cook more.

Reasons other people cook (and why I haven’t)

Economic necessity

The labor of cooking costs money, and if you can do it yourself, you can save that money.¹ Many people cannot afford to pay someone else to cook for them, because they need to save that money to cover the cost of necessities. Others may still find cooking worthwhile, because they can invest that saved money in a more financially prosperous future.

Confidences and certainties

Sat, 05 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When working together, people often demand of us two seemingly contradictory qualities: confidence and humility. At first glance, an excess of confidence will undermine humility, and an excess of humility will undermine confidence. Supposedly, you should strive for a balance, in the middle.

I propose a more precise description for your consideration. We can have certainty and confidence, and we can have them in ability, process, and outcome.

Certainty stems from determining what to measure, how to measure it, and finally measuring it. We can measure quantitatively, e.g. money, and qualitatively, e.g. honest and constructive feedback from peers.

Stenotype

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When building a keyboard, you make a lot of choices.

Organizationally, how many keys,¹ and do we align² or stagger them?

Structurally, does the keyboard split (one side per hand), and do we need a wire?

Compositionally, what can we take apart (and replace), and what materials do the parts contain?

However, perhaps the most meaningful choice we can make centers around function. What happens when we press keys?

You know the QWERTY layout; you may even know the Dvorak layout. However, your keyboard does more than just send characters. It also handles “modifiers”: shift, control, alt/option, super/windows/command. Your keyboard can interpret and send combinations of keys, e.g. shift+f = F or control+C.

Out of belonging

Sat, 19 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

During my visit to Mountain View, I stumbled upon a satellite building. In it, I found

the chill of abandoned space: chairs and chairs and chairs: boxes in boxes in boxes: and a handicap door button out of belonging:

This button belongs on the wall, not the floor! Seeing it out of its normal context provoked the question of belonging within me. Do I find myself out of belonging?

Perhaps more kindly, like a traveler lingering aimlessly in the limbo of an airport lounge, we can see the button as in between belongings. In that way, I’ve never related to a button so hard.

The Ship of Mountain View

Sat, 12 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Summer 2019, I stayed in a “tech hostel,” a massively shared house with over 20 people, including one guy living out of his car.

This week, I visited for the first time in years. What I remember most: “the same, different.”

I recognized the buildings in which I worked, the restaurants downtown in which I ate. Yet along the bike path, I witnessed alien structures, mystified by the hues of sunset and later the dark of night as I biked from the office to the hostel.

Sunk cost and "free"

Sat, 05 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I paid $159 for a 1-year bikeshare membership. In San Francisco, most trips I want to take stay within 2 miles one way, so this membership’s free 45-minute rides work out well.

When deciding how to get around SF, one might naturally ask:

Since I paid for this bikeshare membership, should I take a free bike ride, or the public transport?

In economic terms, however, we should ask a different way.

My hair parts

Sat, 29 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My hair parts left.

In middle school, I looked in the mirror, felt self-conscious, and with a comb decided.

My hair parts left.

Through high school and college, I sustained the habit.

My hair parts left.

In the Inside Times, my mom refused to go to a barber. She cut my hair and I told her.

My hair parts left.

The first week I moved to San Francisco, I went to a fancy barber, and I explained.

Sweat the big stuff

Sat, 22 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today I met someone who told me they finessed their credit card benefits to save up to a few hundred dollars on food and transportation during their move. When I asked how much they were paying for their new place, they revealed a monthly rent about $1000 more than mine (after splitting with my roommate).

When trying to optimize money, sweat the big stuff. For most people, that breaks down to 2 foci: rent and income. Saving on rent or growing your income can translate to many, many meals, rides, and hangouts. And certainly to me it seems more efficient when accounting for time spent optimizing.

A Bay baptism

Sat, 15 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I have finally moved to San Francisco, one and a half years later than expected.

People attach resolutions to transitions. On top of moving, I have welcomed in the New Year. And after a stagnant year, I have a heaping barrel of resolutions.

When I landed, the Waters of Bay baptized me: from now on, “not quite an expert” has died, and you may call me “Super Expert”!

I’ll learn 1 new language, make 20 new friends, visit 300 museums, attend 4000 conferences, and lose 50000 pounds! Just you wait! New year, new city, new me.

I cried annotations

Sat, 08 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Because my parents cried, the saddest I could remember, and I loved them so much
Because my parents suffocated me, made me scared they wouldn’t let me go

In early 2020, my mom went to visit family in China. When the Virus hit, she booked a flight home. When the Virus spread, she moved her flight one day earlier. She arrived home the day travel closed between China and the US, for a long time.

I cried

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I cried

Because my parents cried, the saddest I could remember, and I loved them so much
Because my parents suffocated me, made me scared they wouldn’t let me go

Because I couldn’t go anywhere, the Virus locked me Inside
Because I couldn’t move on, to the next place, to the next stage

Because I feared death, coming mid-paragraph, putting an End
Because I feared life, of how I would live and live on

Vent beads

Sat, 25 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As a child, I looked at a heating vent in the floor of my house and thought I can pour water down that. And so I did. Gathering water from the bathroom sink into my cup, I delicately poured water down the heating vent and walked away, proud of my achievement.

A few days later, I discovered a glossy bead near the heating vent. The vent had left me a gift of appreciation! In a feat of logic straight from Alice in Wonderland, I reasoned pouring water down the vent created this bead. So naturally, I poured more water down the vent.

Bottlehead Crack

Sat, 18 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

For Cyber Monday, I ended up purchasing the Bottlehead Crack, a DIY headphones amplifier targeted at high impedance headphones like the Sennheiser HD 6XX I already owned. In this post, I’d like to break down why.

Optimizing seller perspective

I think of price from the seller’s perspective as the sum of

cost of inputs + cost of logistics + value of performance + value of marketing + value of usability

Assuming, I cannot control the cost of inputs nor logistics, if I hold the price constant and want to maximize the value of performance, I would “diminish” the value of marketing and usability.

On the joys and perils of a profane name

Sat, 11 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Coq

Coq provides an interactive theorem prover for proofs about programming languages and other computer systems. Coq plays on the name of creator Thierry Coquand, puns on the Calculus of Constructions (CoC) Coquand was working on before, and follows the French tradition of naming tools after animals (coq meaning rooster in French).

This year, the Coq team announced it would receive proposals to rename Coq. “Testimonies from people who experienced harassment or awkward situations [and] reports about students (notably women) who ended up not learning / using Coq because of its name” spurred this effort. The announcement goes so far as to assert “[t]he only thing that is clear at this point is that we cannot just ignore the issue [of the name Coq] and do nothing.” The wiki documents a significant effort to change the name, paragraphs of advantages and disadvantages plus another page dedicated to the implications of changing the name.

Comparing audio equipment

Sat, 04 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This week, while shopping for a new headphones amp, I’ve been looking for “best” headphones amps. This begs the question: how do we best compare audio equipment?

Resolution vs. profile

Okay, so obviously on a high level the “best” audio equipment produces the “best” audio. However, what constitutes “best” audio turns out much more challenging than you might expect.

An easy (and in my not-quite-an-expert opinion, bad) definition of “best” audio relates to resolution. You could say the “best” audio equipment setup utilizes the most and loses the least music “information” in producing audio. However, as I covered in a previous post:

Searching product spaces

Sat, 27 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

For Black Friday and Cyber Monday (which I’ll abbreviate BFCM from now on), lots of American sellers are offering significant discounts. To take advantage of the sales, every BFCM, I try to get one nice thing for myself. The past few years, I’ve gotten one nice piece of audio equipment. I’ll discuss the topic of audio in a later post; for this post I wanted to briefly describe 3 practical strategies for BFCM shopping.

Kerry Park

Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

From Kerry Park, you can witness a magnificent view of Seattle.

The first time I went, I put on Nurture by Porter Robinson. I felt a deep catharsis swell within me: the loneliness of staying in a city where I knew no one, the fear of a future already rattled by circumstances unforeseen, the satisfaction of the freedom to explore and change.

I went again, during my week in Seattle. The second time I bought a pack of sparkling water. I was feeling social, or quirky, and had this admittedly unusual fantasy of offering a drink to a stranger over an inspiring landscape.

Lobster rolls

Sat, 13 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I: Lobster

I’ve spent the past 2 weeks in the Boston area. In my time around Boston, I’ve had 3 lobster rolls: one at James Hook & Co., one at Saltie Girl, and one at Neptune Oyster. 3 lobster rolls in, I sure feel like I ate lobster and butter and bread.¹

By which I mean I found the rolls good, not mind-blowing. In retrospect, I kind of regret how much I paid for the lobster rolls. I tried 3 times to change my perception of lobster, and I’ve ended up confirming I just don’t have the taste others have for it.

Sitting in a chair

Sat, 06 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I spent one elementary school summer at a Wayne State University youth camp building Lego robotics. Since both my parents worked full-time, the camp doubled as a daycare. After all the other kids got picked up, I would follow the counselor to some office to wait for my dad.

I didn’t like sitting still in some boring, stuffy office. I fidgeted, shook, whatever children do outside the bounds of adult manners.

Why do you play (music)?

Sat, 30 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I asked my friend, while they were playing their recently bought guitar.

For romantic others

My friend thought it romantic to serenade a partner with a ballad on the guitar. Many a sappy love song come originally or well arranged for an acoustic guitar.

For platonic others

I jokingly asked if they wanted to annoy others at parties by playing guitar. Though in an intimate setting, two or three people, I like the idea of singing along together with a guitar. At the same time, I feel shy enough about singing that I don’t know if I could muster the will.

Why do you play (games)?

Sat, 23 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

During the Inside Times, I spent a lot of time in my small hometown. To pass the time, to cope, I played a lot of Warframe, roughly 1000 hours over the past year, in fact. That averages out to around 3 hours per day. Wow.

Warframe doesn’t have much difficulty. I would characterize the gameplay as just satisfying enough, and certainly plentiful enough, to capture your attention in loop for a long while (roughly 1000 hours, apparently). When I wanted to flow through boredom and trouble without really straining, I would load up Warframe.

Great leaders

Sat, 16 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Do you believe in great leaders? I don’t mean that rhetorically.

Often we describe great events with respect to great individuals: the reign of queens like Victoria, the breakthroughs of inventors like Einstein.

The alternative, that great events evolve from great systems, can scare me. Systems seem further from my control; systems introduce luck and misfortune and randomness.

Imagine a great leader and a flock of idiots. That convinces me that great individuals do not suffice to produce great results. Yet also imagine great groups competing through mutually exclusive causes. The interaction, the collaboration, matters.

🎃

Sat, 09 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Week 1

I’m staying at a friend’s place. I bought a smol orange pumpkin for decoration. I plop it onto their bedside table.

J: Did you buy a pumpkin?

not quite an expert: What do you mean?

J: The pumpkin beside my bed.

not quite an expert: Where did you get that pumpkin?

J: 🤨

not quite an expert: 🙂

Week 2

I bought a smol white pumpkin. I replace the smol orange pumpkin, hiding it in my bag.

CJK segmentation

Sat, 02 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Let’s return to the Unicode Standard from the last post:

Programmers do not expect the characters c, h, a, and t alone to tell us whether chat is a French word for cat or an English word meaning informal talk. … Similarly, the Han characters are often combined to “spell” words whose meaning may not be evident from the constituent characters. For example, the two characters “to cut” and “hand” mean “postage stamp”" in Japanese, but the compound may appear to be nonsense to a speaker of Chinese or Korean.

CJK fonts

Sat, 25 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

You may wonder, based on my previous post, how Unicode handles when the same Han character gets written differently in different languages. Writing evolves over time, so can we represent the same Han character with the same Unicode code point across languages? Unicode answers:

Even where there are substantial variations in the standard way of writing a character from locale to locale, if the fundamental identity of the character is not in question, then a single character is encoded in Unicode. … It is well-recognized that the Han characters involved are the same, even when used in different countries to write different languages. … There are occasional instances of unified characters whose typical Chinese glyph and typical Japanese glyph are distinct enough that the Chinese glyph will be unfamiliar to the typical Japanese reader, e.g., 直 U+76F4. … Where a distinction in style needs to be made (for example, Chinese-style vs. Japanese-style glyphs in the same document), appropriate fonts should be applied to the specific text as needed.

Language carries history

Sat, 18 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

To demonstrate language carries history, I’ll use Unicode.

Unicode

First, what “Unicode”? Unicode defines encoding characters (formally, graphemes, a minimally distinctive unit of writing), including letters, symbols, and emoji 😮. Unicode covers most of the world’s writing systems, and nearly all web pages use Unicode (UTF-8).

Unicode provides a unique code point, a number, for each character. For example, the (decimal) number 75, 0b01001011 in binary, represents the uppercase K. Computers represent data in binary, so essentially Unicode provides a mapping from binary data to characters.

叉燒包

Sat, 11 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This week I’m staying near San Francisco’s Chinatown. I woke up with a craving for 叉燒包, so I headed to the closest Chinese bakery.

Translation

叉燒包 has pinyin chā shāo bāo. On menus, I often see it romanized “char siu bao.” However, most often I see it translated as “BBQ pork bun.”

I don’t like the name “BBQ pork bun.” I like 叉燒, and I don’t really like American barbeque. 叉燒 has a sweet flavor (from honey) and red color (red fermented bean curd, red food coloring) though, so for the benefit of people not familiar, e.g. non-Asian customers, “BBQ pork bun” provides an efficient approximation.

Serving tea

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

In my last post, I ended up defining tea as:

Tea is a beverage made by steeping (a perceptible level of) the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant (possibly mixed with other ingredients, often other plants) in water.

Despite a fairly thorough process to arrive as this definition, I think this definition still doesn’t fully capture the significance of tea. Particularly with food and drink, significance can come from how we consume. To demonstrate this, let’s describe three ways to serve tea, from practical to ceremonial.

What is tea?

Sat, 28 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Let’s start with a strict definition:

Tea is a beverage made by steeping the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant in hot water.

Like when I talked about meat, this definition bothers me. Let’s expand it.

Water temperature

Do we have to steep the leaves in hot water? Instinctually, you might say we have to use boiling water. However, people often advise using less-than-boiling water for high quality green tea, e.g. 80 degrees Celsius or lower for matcha. In fact, “a few tea masters in Japan [even] suggest that the optimal way to prepare matcha is with cool water” to maximize the umami.

QWERTY again

Sat, 21 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Last time I posted about QWERTY, I alluded to the ubiquity of the QWERTY layout. By default, laptop and phone keyboards come in the QWERTY layout, which they inherit from the typewriter. How, then, did the QWERTY layout become the standard for typewriters, and later keyboards? The answer comes down to business and education.

Business

In 1886, three former Remington employees purchased the typewriter business from Remington. Then in 1893, Seamans’ company merged with four other typewriter manufacturers to form the trust Union Typewriter Company. With the manufacturer of the Remington Standard machine biggest among the trust, and the trust biggest among the typewriters market, QWERTY, the layout of the Remington Standard machine, became the standard layout for typewriters.

Dvorak

Sat, 14 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

In my last post, I noted “the QWERTY layout does NOT prioritize the comfort of the human hand.” This did not escape the attention of August Dvorak, who in the 1930s created the Dvorak layout:

Dvorak designed the layout to overcome the awkwardness perceived of the QWERTY layout, specifically that common letter combinations require too much movement, especially by the left hand and weaker fingers, in the QWERTY layout. Dvorak claimed the new layout would lead to faster typing with less stress on the hands and wrists. Let’s investigate.

QWERTY

Sat, 07 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Unless you’ve explicitly chosen NOT to, you’re probably typing on a QWERTY keyboard. Starting from the Q key, read each right-adjacent letter: Q W E R T Y, a QWERTY keyboard.

Why does the QWERTY layout arrange letters as it does?

History

Christopher Latham Sholes first filed for a typewriting patent in 1867. The first model built by Sholes had alphabetically arranged keys:

- 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
 2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M

Over the next few years, Sholes iterated on the arrangement of keys. For example, an 1873 prototype has an almost-QWERTY layout, from what I can tell in the picture, roughly:

Lady Bird

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

“Please, please come home.”

As the Delta variant grew, so did my mom’s worry. She could not sleep, stressing over me in Seattle. And so she texted, begging.

“Come home now. You can do whatever you want at home. Please, please come home.”

When I did not respond immediately, she called, texted and called until my throat ran sore.

I did not want to go. I remembered having to wait a week to open packages. I remembered a yelling match over eating a stem of basil unwashed. I remembered a fork doused in boiling water till the plastic melted away from the rest of the handle.

Danger! Water gun!

Sat, 24 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

You know water guns. I don’t need to explain water guns. If you don’t, re-read the name, a gun that shoots water.

Safety

Children like shooting things. Shockingly, parents don’t like their children getting shot. Therefore, parents buy their children water guns to play with. We normally distinguish a water gun by its safety.

Danger

A few days ago, I read an article about a protester shooting a water gun at the Olympic torch. I found this incredibly interesting. Because in that moment, the water gun presented arguably more danger than a traditional gun. It really highlights how power and danger can arise contextually.

Pizza puffs

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Have you tried Chicago’s least iconic iconic food? I’m talking about the pizza puff.

Pizza puffs

What does a pizza puff entail? Well, imagine a hot pocket but better. This may seem blasphemous (as a former “hot pocket fiend” [my friends can attest], I understand). However, I personally could fulfill all my hot pocket hankerings with a pizza puff, while I could not fulfill all of my pizza puff hankerings with a hot pocket.

The last mile

Sat, 10 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

How did my trip from the airport to the hotel cost nearly as much as my trip from Detroit to Chicago?

Last mile travel

In transportation, the “last mile” refers to the final leg of a route. Last mile travel stands out as the least efficient: the least distance per cost and the least distance per time. This holds true because of how we design our transportation systems.

Hubs

In many transportation systems, many routes significantly overlap. For example, many people travel from the Detroit area to the Chicago area each day. With limited resources, you optimize by building hubs near the points of significant overlap. By selecting hubs this way, we can take advantage of economies of scale for legs between hubs. So many people travel Detroit to Chicago that airlines can offer cheap flights between DTW and ORD multiple times per day.

Ergonomic keyboards

Sat, 03 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I want you to sit or stand. Now, hold your left arm up with your right arm (like you’re aiming an arm cannon on your left arm), and relax your left arm as much as possible.

If you followed the instructions correctly, your left hand should hang limp, slightly downward. In order to raise your left hand, you have to strain your left wrist just a little bit. In ergonomics, you call this extension.

Cream tea

Sat, 26 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Have you ever had cream tea? Contrary to the name, you don’t put cream in the tea. Cream tea consists of tea, clotted cream,¹ scones, and jam; you actually eat the named cream with the scones.

Variation

Traditional servings of cream tea vary between counties of England.

In Cornwall, you:

1. Split the scone into halves.

2. Spread jam onto the halves.

3. Spread clotted cream onto the halves.

Audiophilia: resolution vs. profile

Sat, 19 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Take these two side-by-side images of The Great Wave off Kanagawa: One of them has the resolution 3858x2592 pixels, the other 1929x1296 pixels (scaled back up to 3858x2592 for comparison). Can you tell them apart?

I can’t. If you can, I bet you have to look really close to notice a difference. If I take a 12x12 sample of each’s bottom-left corner (and scale it up), you cal tell the difference: The left side has the lower resolution.

Versioning and unbundling

Sat, 12 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A continuation of this post

Introduction

Let’s talk about some non-hurdle means of price discrimination. For a definition of price discrimination and hurdles, see the previous post.

Versioning

In versioning, the seller offers different versions of the same product at different prices. Going back to airlines, airlines offer a business-class version of tickets and an economy-class version of tickets.

Now hold on, arguably, “different versions of the same product” could just mean “different products.” A seller offering “different products” doesn’t exactly break new ground. In practical terms, versioning involves:

Price discrimination

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Continued in this post

Introduction

People value the same products differently. Therefore, they will pay more or less for the same products. How, then, as a seller of products, do you make the most money? You try to charge people as close to the best price you can get from them.

Simplified example

Let’s say you sell Lorems. Lorems cost $2 each to make, and only three people care about buying Lorems: Alpha, Beta, and Omega. Alpha will pay up to $10; Beta will pay up to $5, and Omega will pay up to $1.

Michelangelo / Pontormo

Sat, 29 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I

Michelangelo did not want to paint the Sistine Chapel. Yet Pope Julius II insisted. In 1508 Italy, one could not refuse the pope, so Michelangelo had to paint the Sistine Chapel.

Hoping to get the Chapel over with, Michelangelo sought assistants. Art historian Giorgio Vasari recalls he even brought Aristotile, among five other painters, to Rome in hopes of assisting the frescoes. Aristot i le the painter, not Aristotle the Greek philosopher, unfortunately (no time shenanigans here). Unable to find suitable candidates, Michelangelo painted nearly the whole ceiling himself.

Not yours to share

Sat, 22 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I

Freshman year I lived in a dorm suite with 4 other freshmen. Our suite had enough space to set up a TV and Wii U, so A, a friend also studying the same year at the school of business, would regularly come over to smoke weed and play Super Smash Bros. A pretty good time overall - I remember betting 2 whole wafers I could beat A 1-on-1 without losing any of my 3 lives, a loss from which I have yet to recover.

Satisficing

Sat, 15 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Today I shopped for a plain white t-shirt. My requirements:

plain
white
t-shirt

All in all, pretty simple. So how in the everloving world did I spend 2+ hours buying plain white t-shirts?

Buying online

Buying basically anything online represents a hard problem.

First, you face a staggering amount of candidates. Search for lotions or cables or shirts and you’ll find yourself trekking through an endless jungle of prices, styles, and brands.

I dreamt of class once more

Sat, 08 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t recall dreaming about school that often. However, this dream seemed separate from any recurring theme or motif.

In this dream, I was attending a prestigious English course. To my surprise, the teacher announced a vocab quiz. For each word, we had to remember its “run time” as a grade. For example, the word “apocryphal” had a “run time” of C– (remember dreams don’t have to make sense).

I had not studied for the quiz, so I had no idea of the run times of the words. Did “zoological” have a run time of B+ or B (the answer, of course, A-)? Stuck shooting in the dark, I didn’t even get to put down enough answers.

I dreamt of missing class

Sat, 01 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

again. I commonly dream about school, I guess because school had dictated my life for so long. When I miss class in these dreams, I don’t miss one class. I discover I had some class all along, and I have missed all classes so far.

What a silly fear, obviously. In the waking world I would never fully and repeatedly forget an entire class. However, the dream world doesn’t have to make sense. In fact, it rarely does.

An ode to 6

Sat, 24 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

6 is a ✨perfect number✨, the sum of its (positive) proper divisors. 1 + 2 + 3 = 6.

Any Mersenne prime m, when substituted into m (m + 1) / 2 will yield a ✨perfect number✨, as foretold by Euclid and Euler. The founder of geometry, and the founder of so many things they had to start naming them after the second founder, united after two millennia.

6, though, is special among ✨perfect numbers✨. It also equals the product of its proper divisors. 1 * 2 * 3 = 6. It divides evenly into halves and thirds.

Why Aristotle?

Sat, 17 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Recently I read this article about friendship in the Atlantic. In it, Arthur Brooks writes:

According to [Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics], friendships exist along a kind of ladder. At the bottom rung—where emotional bonds are weakest and the happiness benefits are lowest—are friendships based on utility to each other in work or social life. … At the highest level are friendships of virtue, or what Aristotle called “perfect friendship.” These friendships are pursued for their own sake, and not instrumental to anything else.

Small touches

Sat, 10 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I haven’t been cooking as much as I would like lately. To fill that gap, I’ve been watching videos from the emmymade channel:

Go to 6:04 and watch for 15 seconds. No really, I’ll wait. These words won’t disappear when you’re not looking.

Snow boots

Did you see that? When Emmy walked out of the shot, the camera focused on the snow boots, helpfully labeled “snow boots.”

imprecise words

Sat, 03 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

no set of words, arranged in any order, can make you feel the exact way I do

not even “I,” my past self, and “you,” my future self

good words, however, will get you to understand

understand, not feel, the sensations and emotions

yet those good words may not do good

some sensations and emotions I do not want to understand

at least not yet

Configuring my new Mac III: zsh / kitty

Sat, 27 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

A command-line interface (CLI) lets you run lower-level operations (“commands”) quickly and flexibly. For example, suppose I have 1000 .txt files that I wanted to rename only if they contain the word “banana” or “onion” (ignoring case, so “Onion” and “Banana” included). I can simply run

$ grep -l -i "banana|onion" | rename -s ".txt" "_with_food.txt"

If you do deep computer-y stuff often, you could probably benefit from learning to use CLI.¹

What is meat?

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Let’s start with a widely accepted definition:

Meat is animal flesh eaten as food.

Does that definition bother you? It bothers me.

Imprecise

I cook meat (as defined above) often; I eat meat even more often. Yet in neither case do I tend to think about meat as animal flesh. In fact, I would rather not think of the meat as animal flesh; that thought upsets me.

Unintuitive boundaries

This definition of meat includes fried spider and excludes Impossible Burger, a binary that very much contradicts my intuition. How can burgers and sashimi and the aforementioned fried spider fall under the same umbrella, yet Impossible Burger gets left in the rain?¹

A mistaken, corrected, still simplified history of English

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Mistaken

In my head I have the extremely loose timeline:

Some centuries ago, the English colonized America; a few centuries later those colonists declared independence and became the United States of America.

From that timeline, I thought:

In an effort to establish their own identity, Americans invented new spellings, e.g. “colour” became “color” and “centre” became “center.”

as well I thought:

Further in that effort, Americans reformed their accents, most noticeably going hard on the /r/s after vowels, “hard” not “hahd.”

The auto industry

Sat, 06 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I

The auto industry has employed my mom for most of her career. For as long as I can remember, she’s worked for General Motors.

My junior year, the CEO of General Motors spoke to my class. As I thanked Mary Barra, I thought of how hard my mom worked to give me these opportunities. Then I called my mom to thank her for … everything. I stayed through the tears until I could find all the words for her.

Beatrice / Digi

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Content warning: transphobia, mental illness

Introduction

I used to watch a YouTube channel, Digibro, focused on anime analysis. I enjoyed the content on Digibro for its incredible critical detail, e.g. this 50 000+ words, 4+ hours video essay “The Asterisk War Sucks”. Some time around May 2020, I noticed the channel name and narrator voice changed, and found this tweet:

Thinking about going femme and changing my name to Diginee and branding myself as anitube’s big sister

Is seaweed a plant?

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I was eating seaweed salad and this question occured to me.

What is “seaweed”?

Seaweed refers to (many species of) multicellular marine algae, where according to me (not quite an expert), algae means “not necessarily plant.”¹

For simplicity, let’s focus on edible seaweed, which falls into 3 common groups:²

green algae, such as green caviar (a.k.a. sea grapes)
red algae, such as nori (of sushi fame)
brown algae, such as kombu (of miso soup fame)

What is “plant”?

You might’ve heard of the kingdom Plantae. Like I, you might’ve thought Plantae (“ooh, Latin, look at me”) had a precise, generally accepted definition. Well, you can take that thought, that temptation of a straightforward answer, and throw it in the trash.

The relative non-importance of color

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Quick! Describe this! When asked to describe something, our minds jump quickly to visual information. A basic visual description will include color and brightness. For instance, I would say the image contains “a bright yellow, green, and blue bird with dark patches.” Formally, brightness we call “luminance” or “luma.” Independent of luminance, color we call “chrominance” or “chroma.”

JPEG compression

As it turns out, humans have finer spatial sensitivity to luminance than to chrominance. As a practical example, let’s take the JPEG compression process.

Medium nudges expression

Sat, 06 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A continuation of this post

Introduction

In the previous post linked above, I introduced the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and proposed that the hypothesis applied to both natural and technical languages. This time, I want to expand that idea, that rules and structure influence thinking, to the medium itself.

“The medium is the message”

In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, media theorist Marshall McLuhan proposes that the nature of the medium carries greater importance than the content of its messages. For example, the medium of electric light, independent of content, carries the importance of enabling clear and easily shapable visual expression in the dark.

Configuring my new Mac II: Firefox

Sat, 30 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

For most users, the web browser connects the computer to everything else. For compatibility, availability, and reliability, more and more apps are moving into the web browser. You, or at least I, send messages, edit documents, and watch videos from a browser.

Choosing a browser

Unless you have a niche use case, most browsers will work well enough. In practical terms, it suffices to only consider switching browsers when you notice something wrong with your browser. Otherwise, you might switch browsers if you discover some features you didn’t know about before. For the latter,¹ I’ve compiled a list of features/extensions not built into browsers.

(Technical) language nudges thought

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Continued in this post

Introduction

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the structure of a language influences the cognition of its speaker. Now, before we proceed, I caution that “there is probably no single linguistic idea that is more prone to exaggeration and mis-application than the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.’” Let’s see an example.

Whodunit?

In English, you would tend to say “They broke the vase,” whereas in Spanish you would more tend to say “El jarrón se rompió” (example), which literally translates to “the vase broke itself” (paywall).

Configuring my new (new) Mac I: Homebrew

Sat, 16 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

In this series of posts I’d like to walk through the process of configuring my new Mac to

help out anyone else configuring their Mac
interrogate and reflect on the decisions I make during configuration
provide a stable reference to conveniently come back to if needed

Package managers

Like mobile app stores, package managers provide a single place to manage installing, updating, and removing programs. Package managers, however, tend to have more of a open-source, power user connotation. Coming from Arch Linux, I like and prefer to use a package manager.

JANK™

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The laws of nature dictate that whenever I, your beloved not-quite-an-expert, get a new computer JANK™ ensues.

As I mentioned recently, my previous laptop stopped charging. Before you ask, I would like to know why it stopped charging as well. I didn’t dunk it into a swimming pool; it just suddenly stopped charging.

To replace it, I bought an HP Envy x360. And within the first week, the Wi-Fi stopped working. Not as in it had trouble connecting from time to time. This new laptop straight up would not even scan for networks.

PuPu

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Today, I’d like to introduce you to PuPu. Not poo poo, PuPu with the letter u represents the contagious nature of arbitrariness.

For example, let’s say I wanted to estimate how many metal cans you eat per week. I claim

You eat exactly 1 metal can per hour (completely arbitrary).
Each day has 24 hours (true).
Each week has 7 days (true).

Therefore, I would estimate you eat exactly 1 * 24 * 7 = 168 metal cans per week.

Confessions of a recent Mac convert

Sat, 26 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

In high school. I wanted to become a computer person. Sure, I had dabbled with HTML/CSS before. However, in my mind a computer person had 3 things:

proficiency in a real programming language
a powerful laptop
strong opinions

Already a Holder of Strong Opinions, I eagerly pulled up an online Python class on Udacity. Armed with the free time of spring and summer break, I charged through the class at a pace of one day per one week’s worth of material. Soon enough, I could write cool (i.e. badly structured, generally useless, really just all-around non-Pythonic) Python programs!

I, we, you

Sat, 19 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I

vacillate between festering and taking the opportunity to improve myself. Today, I woke up from a 3 hour nap at 9 PM,¹ and did a full workout (a rarity before the Inside Times).

I generally know what I should and shouldn’t do for my well-being. Knowing has not made the difference; whether I can draw energy from my often mysterious well resolves the split.

Recently, I have seen myself frequently in the eyes of others, more specifically in the limbo before the video call. Such impressions, negative or not, have driven my attempts to make more of the Inside Times.

Haircut

Sat, 12 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Today, my mom cut my hair for the third time this year.

Or perhaps the fourth? Fifth? Since the start of the Inside Times, I’ve found it hard to count, well…many things.

Through comb, scissor, clipper, trimmer, my mom sculpted my unruly hair.

“When I was young, your grandma told me to learn to cut hair.”

I remembered my trip to China roughly 10 years ago. We paid the barber only a few dollars.

100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars

Sat, 05 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

First, a relevant video link. No, your eyes don’t deceive you. The 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollar note represents a curiosity in fiat money and hyperinflation.

Fiat money

From the lens of economics, money serves as a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. In plain terms, this means money serves as a persistent, comparable amount of value that enables people to easily trade valuable items.

Historically, people made money out of intrinsically valuable materials, such as gold. We call this commodity money. However, making commodity money at scale becomes difficult because of material limitations. The world only has so much gold, and mining it takes a lot of effort.

Color, from objective to subjective

Sat, 28 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Objective

Let’s start with an objective definition of color:

Colors represent a visible range of frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, wherein visible refers to electromagnetic radiation which can get caught by the eye and interpreted by the brain.

Subjective

Upon examination, this definition doesn’t exhibit objectivity at all! In particular, let’s interrogate “can get caught by the eye and interpreted by the brain.” Other species, from birds to bees, can “see” ultraviolet light, which lies outside the human-visible range. Even within our own species, colorblind and otherwise visually impaired people don’t perceive the same range of the electromagnetic spectrum; blind people don’t perceive any of that range.

My room

Sat, 21 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Today I woke up to cloudy weather. Properly isolated and rather aimless, I cleaned my room.

A transition, an interrogation

In the beginning, I slept in my parents’ room. Once I grew old enough, I moved into my own room. And once my grandparents moved out, I moved into my sister’s old room.

As a result of shifting spaces, this room belonged (belongs?) to more than me. As I rummaged through the cracks, I found DVDs in a language that often escapes me (Mandarin, my grandparents’?), notes in another’s handwriting (my sister’s?), and CDs in genres outside my taste (my parents’?). I wouldn’t call these things “mine,” yet I felt sad throwing them away, as if simply their company meant something to me.

Making time

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Like me, you probably have a list of background to-dos that you want to eventually get around to. They range in importance from big passion projects to small decoration ideas. However, it often seems you just don’t have enough time for them. You have work or classes. This week you have an appointment for this or preparation for that, so next week probably works better. Or maybe you don’t feel you can set aside a long enough chunk of time to really commit to this to-do.

Outside the sphere of influence

Sat, 07 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Some might recognize this as the Serenity Prayer. Often reworded from churches to Alcoholics Anonymous, I have reproduced the version I have heard the most.

Sphere of influence

Imagine a wide space of things that matter to you. In this space live 3 types of things:

Deep dab-tastrophe

Sat, 31 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Memes live through curious stages. After entering the mainstream, memes sometimes re-surface ironically, as if to meme on of their own mainstream-ness. After Clinton dabbed on The Ellen Show, dabbing did just that.

For those of you not familiar with dabbing, or specifically deep dabbing:

In the summer of 2019, I lived in a massively shared house with over 20 other people. Yes, over 20 others. One day, we decided to venture to the local public park to play Ultimate Frisbee, the Official Sport of Frat and Tech Bros.

5 Rs for the environment

Sat, 24 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

When I moved out of my college apartment this year, I realized just how much junk I had. Looking at the boxes full of stuff I didn’t even want anymore, I resolved to follow the 5 environmental Rs more thoroughly. You’ve most likely heard of them as a triplet: reduce, reuse, recycle. However, I prefer to add two more: refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose, recycle.

Note the order: earlier Rs generally yield greater impact, so you should consider them first.

The smoking backup

Sat, 17 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Story time, buckos.

Flashback to freshman year, a time when people could go out without weighing the risk toward public health. Remember outside?

I had entered the Nesbitt Room, a public study room where you pretended to get work done while listening to math students complain. On one hand, “my math classes have too much work!” On the other hand, “my non-math classes have too little math!”

Hoping to make progress on my EECS project, I busted out my trusty laptop and started to “work.” My laptop had been bothering me for the past week. The bottom case had came loose, and the resistance to pushing it back into place indicated something had bent or shifted inside. However, “don’t fix what ain’t broke,” I reasoned, since I could still use my laptop without issue. Oh how wrong, this excuse!

Post-modernism and irony

Sat, 10 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Inspiration

Post-modernism

Post-modernism rejects universal truth and grand narrative. Instead, post-modernism poses meaning as only contextual. For example, a post-modernist might claim there doesn’t exist a god or gods who gives every person meaning, and there doesn’t exist any set of morals or values that apply to all groups of people.

Context managers in Python classes

Sat, 03 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Context managers in Python allow us to easily manage opening and closing resources. However, sometimes we want to define classes that use these context managers, in which case the with statement construct will not work.

Synchronous example

Consider a class that manages data from multiple files:

class DataManager:
 def __init__(self, input_file_names, output_file_name):
 self.inputs = list(
 map(lambda input_file_name: open(input_file_name, "r"),
 input_file_names))
 self.output = open(output_file_name, "w")
 ...

In this form, we open and fail to close the files. See “Why do we need to close, anyway?” from this post for reasons we should always close opened resources like files.

lol something matters

Sat, 26 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I: A Marketing 300 lecture

In the winter of 2019, I took MKT 300 as required by my business degree. The research interests of the professor, Dr. Carolyn Yoon, lived in the intersection of neuroscience and marketing.¹

Within her interests, how does presentation affect people’s ability to internalize the message of an informational campaign (e.g. PSA debunking myths)? In one lecture, Professor Yoon provided an example that really piqued my interest: a CDC poster of facts and myths regarding the flu vaccine. Professor Yoon explained that after a while, the “false” or “not” component of the message sometimes faded away, potentially backfiring on the attempt to clear falsehoods.

RBG

Sat, 19 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Ruth Bader Ginsburg died yesterday. The Court, already precariously balanced, has tipped away from me. In witness, I have finally registered to vote.

Four views on Microwave Cooking for One

Sat, 12 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

From the Amazon listing:

Fast, easy, and economical, the recipes in Microwave Cooking for One are ideal for individuals, whether they live alone or share busy modern households. From breakfast through dinner, fresh, delicious meals can be prepared to satisfy personal tastes without wasted food, overheated kitchens, or messy clean-up.

View I

Microwave Cooking for One represents the height of laziness! You can’t bother yourself with preparing a proper meal; you can’t even bring yourself to talk to the delivery driver. You filth! You, utter, utter, filth! For once, get out of your bed or off of your couch. For once, stop binging your favorite show for the tenth time and do something! No, shoving three things into the microwave doesn’t count. Did you do the thing I asked you to do two days ago? No? Of course you didnt.

Punch up, not down

Sat, 05 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Let’s start with 2 observations:

Our words affect others.
We can control our words.

It follows that we should control our words to have the desired effect on other people. Abstractly, we should say things that promote good and avoid harm.

Jokes

People often use jokes to express contentious or controversial ideas with less risk. Personally, I find myself more inclined to watch a stand-up embedded with political themes than read an explicitly political essay, though sometimes I will find the space for the latter.

Vampires

Sat, 29 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Vampires have occupied popular culture for quite a while, so I figured figuring out what they might mean deserved some of my attention.

Symbols

Authors use symbols to imbue their writing with meaning. Symbolism, however, rarely amounts to just “X stands for Y.”

Take, for example, Frankenstein’s monster. Famous monsters in literature and film often reflect the anxieties of writers and audiences in their time. In this case, Frankenstein’s monster evokes fears of what science might reveal in contrast to faith. However, Frankenstein’s monster appeals to many other ideas, such as themes of creation and internal vs. external.

async Python tips

Sat, 22 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

When you live on the edge, you get cut! async came to Python rather recently, so I’ve been “cut” using it quite a few times. If you want to get started with async Python, I have a few tips:

await every async, except one.
async can include non-async. Non-async cannot include async.
You cannot interchange async and non-async constructs.

Tip 1

An async def function actually returns something known as a coroutine. To run a coroutine, you must either:

async Python

Sat, 15 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Often, hardware I/O bottlenecks a program’s latency, thoroughput, and/or run time. That is, file and network actions slow down the program most significantly. A program often consists of many independent file and network actions. In those cases, Python gives us the async construct for running the actions asynchronously.

Syntax

In general, async Python programming involves adding the keyword async in front of the non-asynchronous version. Instead of def, use async def. Instead of with, use async with. Finally, instead of for, use async for.

Context managers in Python

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

In programming, we often need to manage resources that “open” and “close.” As a simple example, you might open a file, read its contents, then close it.

However, when dealing with complicated paths of logic, we may find it difficult to reason about manually closing every open resource. Consider:

import json


def get_json_data(json_file_name):
 # we must eventually close this opened file
 json_file = open(json_file_name, "r+")

 try:
 json_data = json.load(json_file)
 except json.JSONDecodeError as decode_err:
 # close here
 json_file.close()
 raise ValueError(
 f"{json_file_name} does not contain valid JSON: {str(decode_err)}")

 if "error" in json_data:
 # close here
 json_file.close()
 raise KeyError(
 f"JSON data contains \"error\" key with value \"{json_data['error']}\""
 )

 if "status" in json_data:
 status = json_data["status"]
 if status != "new":
 # close here
 json_file.close()
 raise ValueError(
 "JSON data contains \"status\" key with value "
 f"\"{json_data['status']}\", while value \"new\" expected")

 try:
 validate(json_data)

 json_data["status"] = "old"
 # overwrite json_file contents with status "old"
 json_file.seek(0)
 json_file.truncate()
 json.dump(json_data, json_file)

 # close here
 json_file.close()
 return json_data

 except KeyError as validation_error:
 # close here
 json_file.close()
 raise KeyError(
 f"JSON data validation failed on key {str(validation_error)}")

 # close here
 json_file.close()
 raise KeyError("JSON data does not contain \"status\" key")

Viewing this example code from just a high level, we can notice that properly dealing with the complicated paths of logic involves many calls to close the opened file.

E-prime and precise language

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

When we use the verb to be we can mean a lot of things, including, but not limited to:

Identity: “I am Steve.”
Inclusion/exclusion: “The tomato is a fruit.”
Predication: “They are excellent.”
Existence: “There is a reason.”
Location: “She is there.”

To be, or not to be

The versatile roles to be plays can lead to ambiguity. For example, if I say “this food is good,” what do I really mean?

Dynamic identity

Sat, 25 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

A ship leaves on a long journey, spanning years and continents. Over the course of this journey, every part of the ship, including the crew, is replaced. When the ship finally returns to the first port it left, is it the same ship?

The philosophically savvy will recognize this question as the ship of Theseus, first proposed as a thought experiment thousands of years ago. You can substitute the ship for basically any object, even yourself, and ask: is it still the same?

Don't cut too deep with Occam's razor

Sat, 18 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Just a quick diversion to something I find interesting.

Occam’s razor

Occam’s razor states the simplest explanation is most probable. Let’s see an example.

Lemonade

It’s a hot, hazy summer day. To give yourself something to do, you decide to make some lemonade. You gather the sugar, the pan, the pitcher…wait! Where are the lemons? They’re not on the counter where you usually put them. Out of the many possibilities, let’s consider 3:

Conditional probability and the gambler's fallacy

Sat, 11 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I’ve been playing a lot of Warframe. In the game, loot is dropped according to predefined probabilities,¹ so I’ve brushed up on my statistics.

Conditional probability

Formally, with events A and B, the probability of A knowing B has already occurred equals the probability A and B occur together divided by the probability B occurs with or without A. Let’s see an example.

Bird watching example

Last week, you went bird watching with your good friend Sam at Bird Park. You know there are exactly 100 birds in Bird Park, including 50 doves. 40 of those 50 doves are green, and the remaining 10 are yellow.

Beauty and style

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

A quick post on a useful distinction.

Beauty

Beauty is socially defined. What is beautiful is almost always exclusive, like being young or rich. Imagine a runway model.

Style

Style is individually defined. You can be stylish at any age, at any level of wealth, no matter the circumstances of your birth. Imagine a drag queen.

Conclusion

I am still trying to find my style.

Partial reinforcement and addictive games

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I’ve been gaming a lot recently, so this has been on my mind.

Reinforcement and punishment

In operant conditioning, behavior is modified with reinforcement and punishment. Reinforcement and punishment are defined pretty much exactly as you would intuit:

Reinforcement uses a pleasant result to encourage behavior.
Punishment uses an unpleasant result to discourage behavior.

In formal terms, both reinforcement and punishment can be “positive” or “negative.” Note “positive” and “negative” do not refer to goodness. Here, by “positive” we mean “giving,” and by “negative” we mean “taking away.” Positive reinforcement gives a pleasant stimulus; negative reinforcement takes away an unpleasant stimulus.

So, you wanna get into mechanical keyboards, eh?

Sat, 20 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Well, do you? Because I’ve got a guide from someone who’s not quite an expert: me!

Step 1: Reconsider

Like most hobbies, mechanical keyboards take time and money. A nice mechanical keyboard could cost you a few hundred dollars. And with the time it takes you to form an opinion on mechanical keyboards, you could instead form an opinion on folding origami, or painting, or cooking with onions.

Mechanical keyboards are probably most useful for people in technology or technology-adjacent careers.

Diegesis is not an excuse

Sat, 13 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Look at the big word in the title!

What is diegesis?

First, the elephant in the room: what does it mean?

For the non-critics in the audience, diegesis refers to details within the universe of the story. This is in contrast to details within our universe.

For example, suppose you are reading Things Fall Apart. The character Okonkwo’s exile is diegetic; it happens within the story. On the other hand, the novel’s first publication year of 1958 is non-diegetic; it happens outside the story.

A very, very light introduction to security continued for a final time

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A continuation of this post

Introduction

In the previous post we described how to make the process of establishing confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity more efficient. Now let’s put in some finishing touches.

Primer: “you gotta’ trust someone”

In any system, you have to trust someone. When paying with a credit card, you trust the payment provider. When sending mail, you trust the postal service. When cooking food, you trust the grocer. The list goes on.

A very, very light introduction to security continued again

Sat, 30 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A continuation of this post

Continued in this post

Introduction

In the previous post we described the basic process of how to achieve the 3 desired outcomes of security:

Confidentiality: only the sender(s) and the receiver(s) can understand the message.
Authenticity: the receiver(s) can verify the identity of the sender(s).
Integrity: the receiver(s) can verify the message was not altered from its original content.

Now let’s add efficiency considerations.

Primer: security trade-offs

A good rule of thumb is increasing security decreases usability. For example, putting your favorite pants into a locked safe with an unknown code makes them very secure against theft, and very hard to wear.

A very, very light introduction to security continued

Sat, 23 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A continuation of this post

Continued in this post

Introduction

In a previous post we defined 3 desired outcomes of security:

Confidentiality: only the sender(s) and the receiver(s) can understand the message.
Authenticity: the receiver(s) can verify the identity of the sender(s).
Integrity: the receiver(s) can verify the message was not altered from its original content.

That post covered how to achieve confidentiality. In this post, we’ll cover authenticity and integrity.

Let's actually build a random Spotify album selector!

Sat, 16 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A continuation of this post

Introduction

Okay, for real this time. I’m going to do it in Rust because I like Rust. Code is available in a GitHub repo for reference, and I’ll be linking files where I can.

We’re going to cover a lot of technologies (including a pretty large tour of Rust), so get ready! Here’s a preview of what we’ll end up covering:

Installing Rust
Cargo
Rocket
OAuth
Rust types (enums, structs, and traits)
Environment variables (.env)
serde
Pagination APIs
Caches
Concurrency (for HTTP asynchronousness)
Options and Results
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Dynamic web content
HTML templating
Deployment
Debugging
Optimizing web content

Installing Rust

Installing Rust is easy (on non-Windows systems). In terminal, run:

Let's build a random Spotify album selector!

Sat, 09 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Continued in this post

Introduction

You read the title; let’s do it!

Meta-goals

I have 2 main goals for this post:

Describe the process of making something.
Write some code! I’ve been itching to code for a while.

So how do (should¹) we make something?

Audience

Let’s start with the most basic, perhaps most important question:

Who’s this for, anyway?

How you answer this question strongly influences every step of making something. Different audiences have wildly different needs, behaviors, and environments. For example, making food for newborn babies is vastly different than making food for 30-something adults. A newborn baby needs food that can be digested without chewing; the 30-something makes their own decisions on where and when to consume food.

A very, very light introduction to security

Sat, 02 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Continued in this post

Introduction

They say the best way to learn something is to explain it to a 5-year-old (or some other beginner). So let’s explain security!

Desired outcomes

In security, we want to create 3 outcomes:

Confidentiality

Only the sender(s) and the receiver(s) can understand the message. For example, if you sent your coworker an invite to lunch, neither your boss nor the government could see the invite.

Jupyter, and collaborative filtering continued

Sat, 25 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A continuation of this post

Introduction

I came across an interesting Atlantic article recently.¹ tl;dr: Wolfram and Jupyter notebooks allow us to express research, especially research involving programming, more precisely and reproducibly than traditional paper papers. Of course, durability is a concern with Wolfram and Jupyter notebooks. However, I wanted to make an honest effort of Jupyter notebooks in this post.

The Jupyter bazaar

In his famous 1997 essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, Eric Steven Raymond contrasts two development models:

Hand-over-hand locking with the RAII pattern

Sat, 18 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Let’s start by explaining locks (mutexes), hand-over-hand locking, and RAII. Then we’ll provide some sample code to accomplish hand-over-hand locking with the RAII pattern.

Mutexes, a.k.a. locks

In concurrent programming, a common method for protecting shared resources between threads is using a mutex¹, or lock. For everyday concurrent programming, there are 2 types of mutexes we care about:

Regular mutexes

The regular mutex supports two main operations: lock and unlock. Once a thread locks the mutex, any other call to lock the mutex is blocked until that thread calls unlock. This way, threads can prevent other threads from accessing or modifying a shared resource until the first-locking thread is done with the shared resource.

Collaborative filtering

Sat, 11 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Continued in this post

Introduction

Collaborative filtering is an important problem in recommender systems. These recommender systems form the basis of some of the largest products today: search (Google), marketplace (Amazon), and content (Netflix, YouTube) products all rely on some form of recommender system.

Collaborative filtering types

Collaborative filtering comes in 2 main types: memory-based and model-based. Memory-based models employ user and item data, described in detail in the next section, to form recommendations. Model-based techniques, outside the scope of this post, encompass all other deep (neural network) and shallow models used to form recommendations.

Voting continued

Sat, 04 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A continuation of this post

Because I wanted to combine the themes of people and programming, I wrote a short Python script to calculate and visualize outcomes of the different voting schemes described in my last post.

This script is available in this public Github repo. It provides a detailed example of how different voting schemes can lead to different outcomes in the example directory.

Voting, and system design matters

Sat, 28 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Continued in this post

Introduction

In the United States, we use plurality (winner-takes-all) voting. However, this is just one of multiple single-winner voting systems that exist. Other voting systems include:

Instant-runoff voting
Approval voting
Borda count voting
Positive-negative voting

A review of plurality voting

In a plurality voting system, the candidate with the most votes wins. Plurality voting is generally the most simple system. However, this simplicity is not always a virtue. The minimum number of votes a candidate needs to win under plurality voting is:

Institutions defined (by me, not quite an expert), and employment is a market

Sat, 21 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

As a society, we use 5 broad classes of institutions: hierarchies, democracies, markets, self-organization, and algorithms. Let us start with a basic question:

What is a system?

A system is

a collection of individuals,
interactions between them, and
relationships influencing those interactions.

Take the computer system I am currently running:

A collection of individuals: processor, memory, battery, keyboard, screen, etc.

Note these individuals are not necessarily atomic. For example, memory could be broken down into volatile (DRAM, or just RAM for most people) and non-volatile (SSD, a.k.a. “disk” or “hard drive”) memory, or keyboard could be broken down into individual buttons (though the usefulness of a keyboard with only one button is suspect).

A crown of vignettes

Sat, 14 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Part 1: Not with a bang but a whimper

Due to the outbreak, classes have been moved online and Commencement has been canceled. I understand why. I know that among all that people are experiencing now, I am closer to the zenith than the nadir. Yet I feel an undeniable disappointment, a sadness with being denied the catharsis of a proper end to my formal education.

Part 2: Crisis on service

The consequences of the outbreak for me are small compared to for others. The most affected are service workers, losing jobs and, of those who still have one, working even more than normal to meet the needs of the crisis. Especially in the US, we tend to treat service workers (in contrast to knowledge workers) not great. If you’re using a delivery service like me (I don’t want to pass anything to my parents), make sure to leave an extra, extra large tip.

Let's go on a peppercorn adventure!

Sat, 07 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I bought a (nice) pepper mill (because my last one broke)!

Green peppercorns

The unripe fruit of the black pepper plant, often sold brined.

In a few years, will look back on some of things they said recently and cringe.

Red peppercorns

The mature fruit of the plant, rarely sold as is.

Unironically enjoys fine wine.

Black peppercorns

The dried unripe fruit of the plant.

Your reliable, friendly coworker who’s going to get promoted before you.

I don't like polenta, and I miss my kitchen

Sat, 29 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This week I’m back at my parents’¹ house. For dinner, I cooked some shrimp and vegetables with polenta.

Part 1: I don’t like polenta

The first comment my mom made as I scooped the polenta into a bowl was that it did not look very appetizing. To be honest, I don’t care much for polenta either.

The one thing I can remember from the first time I tried polenta was the woman who sat next to me. “I love polenta,” the woman declared, nostalgia glittering in her eyes. I could tell she had fond memories of polenta, because the polenta I tasted was flavorless mush. That, or the chef had a vendetta against my taste buds.

The unique challenge of different instruments

Sat, 22 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I recently started learning guitar. Depending on if you count the voice as an instrument (for this post I don’t), and ignoring the brief period where I tried to learn bass clarinet, the guitar will be the third instrument I have learned. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to describe the different challenges that come with playing each instrument without pictures.

Piano

I started piano when I was 6 because I saw my older sister play the piano. As a shy child, the piano helped me open up to performing in front of others.

Gold and feathers: a story of bad units

Sat, 15 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Which weighs more, a ton of feathers or a ton of gold? Your System 1 might immediately intuit that gold is heavier, while your System 2 would probably reason that a ton of anything weighs the same: a ton. The full answer, as you might guess by this post’s existence, is more complicated.

A ton of tons

Living in the United States, a ton means 2000 pounds to me. However, there are at least 3 common definitions of ton used today:

The onion saga continues

Sat, 08 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A continuation of this post

Caramelized shallots

Because you think you’re better than onions.

Step 1

Peel the shallots that you got from grocery delivery because you couldn’t be bothered, you capitalist.

Step 2

Cry in front of your roommate.

Step 3

Put 3/4 of a stick of butter in the pan. Pretend you didn’t see what you just did. Try to cover up your crime by covering it with shallots. The shallots absorb the butter. You will never be able to hide your shame.

Generators in Python: "good lazy"

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Generators are functions that behave like iterators. They allow us to evaluate values only as we need them (“lazily evaluate”, or “lazy evaluation”).

A basic generator

Your basic generator has the following structure:

def generator_name(args...):
 ...
 while <we can still generate values>:
 yield <next value>
 ...

Let’s look at a basic generator:

def jumping_integers(start, end, jump=1):
 """Starting at given value, return jumped integers until end, exclusive."""
 integer = start
 while integer < end:
 yield integer
 integer += jump

Attentive programmers will notice this looks a lot like range, particularly xrange in Python 2 and range in Python 3. Indeed, if we test the generator we just wrote:

Restricting the solution space can restrict the benefits of group decision-making

Sat, 25 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

For complex and difficult decisions, institutions often employ groups to make those decisions. For example, legal systems employ juries and companies employ hiring committees. Institutions prefer these groups because they are (hopefully) less likely to have inappropriate biases and because they draw from a wider pool of knowledge and information than individual members. Here’s an interesting idea: no matter the characteristics of the problem, a restricted solution space can restrict these previously mentioned benefits. Let us consider an example.

Music at 1.4x speed

Sat, 18 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

For a few years, I listened to music at 1.4x (not 1.3x, not 1.5x, exactly 1.4x) speed. When I told this to other people, their reactions ranged from “whatever” to “what?” to “WHATTT???”. I thought it would be interesting to go over some conversations, with varying degrees of convincingness, I encountered with the “WHATTT???” people.

Not convincing (to me)

“You’re not respecting the artists’ intentions!”

This argument can be broken down into 2 components that are not convincing to me:

Onions and lies

Sat, 11 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Continued in this post

Introduction

I recently started cooking again. While my cooking schedule deserves its own post, this post was inspired by one particular recipe. From the recipe for Caprese burgers:

Caramelize Onion and Toast Buns

Place a large non-stick pan over medium heat and add 2 tsp. olive oil. Add onion to hot pan and stir occasionally until browned. 10-13 minutes. …

As much as I liked this recipe, this is a lie, a persistent one, at that. There’s no way an onion will properly caramelize in such short time.

A loose collection of thoughts on food

Sat, 04 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Happy New Year! To welcome in the new decade, I’ve decided to write about food. Apparently, the thing we need to live is somewhat important, so have a loose collection of thoughts on food.

Food isn’t accessible

Tens of millions of Americans live in “food deserts”: areas, particularly urban areas, which lack access to affordable and nutritious food. For these people, it is harder to follow a nutritious diet, especially since cheaper less nutritious options like fast food tend to be much more accessible to them. Food justice advocate Karen Washington prefers the term “food apartheid,” which highlights how the conversation and the consequences are often divided along racial lines. Not only do black people tend to live in these “deserts,” for decades, governmental farm subsidies have disproportionately flowed to white farmers.

Elm, or my first time with pure functional

Sat, 28 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

The Pomodoro Technique employs roughly 30-minute cycles, 25 minutes working on a task then 5 minutes taking a break, to get work done. Unfortunately, some tasks, particularly programming, involve a state of flow which would get interrupted by 30-minute cycles. The simpler Flow Time Technique allows for flow by relaxing the 25-/5-minute constraint in favor of deciding on your own when to take breaks.

I wanted to create a tool to help me practice the Flow Time Technique. I also wanted to learn a new programming language. So I wrote an Elm application to help me practice the Flow Time Technique. In case you’re interested, the Flow Time Technique tool I wrote is available at flow-time.xyz, with code on Github.