Not the Best

I want to be the best, in everything that I do. I try to always push myself, which is great, but this competitive spirit isn't always a good thing. I've been learning recently that an unbalanced competitive spirit can have a bunch of terrible side effects. It can cause:

• Jealousy for the success of others.
• A tendency to seek disadvantages for others.
• Condescending behavior in order to discourage others.
• Unnecessary frustration when you're not at your best.

All of these things can also lead to passive aggressive behavior. Passive aggression is a way of internalizing these effects, sinking deeper into them, while putting up a front of being above them. Passive aggressive behavior puts you on a pedestal, by acknowledging that you could sink to jealousy, or frustration, or anything else — but you're "better than that". If you can actually rise above these things, there is no need to explicitly acknowledge your progress.

A great example of passive aggressive behavior is providing positive sentiments after a negative statement. Telling someone you would appreciate it if they changed their behavior, and following it up with "thanks!" is one way of pushing the point that you're "better than that," and you're not "really frustrated," when in fact you're trying to mask your frustration. Better responses include: not saying anything and letting it go, or stating clearly, without any masking, how you feel. If it feels like you're exposed and your frustration is out in the open, you're probably doing it right.

An unbalanced desire to "be the best" can also cause an unwillingness towards empathic behavior. In order to have empathy for others, you need to join them where they are, and relate to their state of mind. This requires a loss of ego, and a loss of pride. Instead, the oposite behavior is chosen: the competitive person becomes sarcastic, or offers outlandish advice, or attempts to make the problem seem insignificant or trivial. I don't think I'm very sarcastic, but I regularly offer outlandish advice when people come to me with problems. Sometimes it's an effective for dealing with your own problems, but it doesn't always mean the same thing in the form of advice.

Sarcasm is maybe the most dangerous of these responses. When someone hears sarcasm, the first reaction is disbelief; that the statement sounds ridiculous. Then, they're forced into a reversal of their understanding, where they accept the true intention of the speaker. Sarcasm forces the person hearing it into the mindset of the person speaking it. This is key: sarcasm is a shield against empathy. With sarcasm, you reject the validity of another person's situation and instead force them to empathize with you.

I'm still learning these lessons, but right now they're informed by a healthy dose of criticism from a variety of open source software developers, and exactly one failed romance.

Non-Metamer Monochromes

Monochromatic paintings have a tradition going back to the early 1900s, exemplified by Malevich and Rodchenko, and later by Rauschenberg.

I'd like to produce a series of monochromes that uses a single non-metamer. By non-metamer, I mean a color that has the same frequency spectrum as the color being replicated. For example, the green of a leaf, the blue of the sky, or the red of a sunset. Instead of just resembling these colors, various paints would be analyzed for their spectral response and mixed in the correct proportions so they precisely recreated these colors.

Popularity Machine

1. Collect a bunch of used disposable cameras (at least 20).
2. Wire simple timers (555s, 4093 RC oscillator) to the flash.
3. Deploy them in a crowded room during a party.

Piece for ESP

1. Focus on the idea, "odd numbers".
2. Continue focusing, and roll a die.
3. If the outcome is odd, today is a day for ESP!
4. Do this each day, and keep a running tally of your results.
5. If the outcome keeps moving towards "odd", this life is a life for ESP!
6. Or you need new dice.

Piece for Facebook

1. Register a Facebook account.
2. Friend request only your real-life best friend.
3. Confirm every person who sends you a friend request.
4. That real-life best friend is not allowed to answer your request.

The TSA is Everywhere

The Transportation Security Administration oversees all checked baggage traveling through American airports. When they check bags they leave little notes behind.

I'd like to make tons of copies of these notes and leave them all around the country in unexpected places. Or, maybe it would be best to pick one location (e.g., a university) and really inundate that location.

Irregular Copy/Paste Behaviors

Whenever I hit "Ctrl-C" I get this feeling that something is now on the clipboard. Not just an impression, but as if I'm carrying it on my chest. As though my body has started to compensate in the physical for something that is virtual. It doesn't disappear until I hit "Ctrl-V".

Sometimes, when I'm about to hit "Ctrl-C", the weight becomes more apparent and I remember that there is something already on the clipboard that I haven't pasted yet. I'll paste it where intended and get back to copying.

Could we subvert this phenomena? What if pasting was non-linear, and whenever you hit "Ctrl-V" something from, perhaps, 5 copies ago appeared? Sometimes the last copy would appear as well, but most of the time it would be other copies.

Not that this would be useful in any everyday situation (though it could be) — it would be more of a catharsis.

Timekeeping

Throughout history it's been necessary for time to be standardized into units and moments. As we continue developing approaches to personalized information presentation and representation-independent communication, we can start making up our own units. What habits of mind would change if one person worked on a 30 "hour" day, and another on a 10 "hour" day, corresponding to units that were intuitively meaningful to those individuals?

Would we be more effective at time management if we divided time into more meaningful units? Whoever decided that the optimal length for a lecture is quantized in units of hours?

Edit: As generally happens, I'm simultaneously out of my league and describing central questions to entire disciplines. See "The culture of time and space" by Stephen Kern for an introduction to the history of timekeeping.

Misunderstanding Viewgraphs

Edward Tufte is probably best known for his disdain of Powerpoint. I noticed an article where he criticizes NASA on their use of the application, "Engineering by Viewgraphs", and before I had the chance to read the article, an alternate presentation mode came to mind.

Imagine an interactive mind map with automatic summaries generated continuously for various levels of detail. This would separate the content of the presentation from the presentation itself: the content is the map — its nodes, connections, scribbles, images and graphs — and the presentation is a path through it. This solves the problem of "unnecessarily deep hierarchies" needing to be continually restated, as the listeners will be aware of the "position" of the presentation at every moment. It would aide the clarity of a presentation, by forcing a reasonable order on the presenter (clarity could even be determined algorithmically based on connectivity, and possible presentations could be suggested from the map). If the listeners have personal access to the presentation as it was running, this overcomes the "linearity" problem. And, of course, the "low resolution" problem is solved by the textual LOD engine. I would expect this to ease the preparation process as well — I'm sure plenty of people already work non-linearly when preparing slides, writing out the next few slide titles before filling out their points. Group presentations would be enhanced as well by agreeing on the initial structure and allowing each person to contribute higher resolution information to the final presentation.

In case someone ends up making this, a few minor recommendations come to mind:

• The textual LOD must have smooth transitions. Choppy resizing (as was popular with JavaScript + DIVs not so long ago) would be really distracting.
• Instead of equally zooming into everything, it would be better to zoom more into the focus than things on the border (in order to retain a sense of location).
• "Every slide is a node" is a copout analogy. I see nodes with more amorphous shapes that can be molded and reframed as needed (e.g.: multiple nodes occupying the screen at once).

Anyway, this is not what Tufte's article was about...

The Problem of Corruption

Imagine a jail filled with prisoners of different psychological makeup. They vary from one to another in many dimensions, but let's assume everyone can be rated on a single dimension: goodness. And we'll make one more assumption: good people inspire good in others, and evil people inspire evil in others (to the degree which they are good/evil). The problem: is it possible to organize the activities of the prisoners so that the overall goodness of the jail is increased over time?

If we imagine this situation as isomorphic to some other better-studied phenomena, say, heat distribution, the answer is obvious: there's no solution. Imagine each prisoner as a hot object (heat corresponds to goodness). there's no way of organizing the interaction of the objects to produce more heat than was initially available.

Some possible hopes for our prisoners:

• There may be some way of bringing outside sources (i.e., society at large) into jails to shift the curve for the best.
• Because psychology is more complex than a goodness value, perhaps the effect of interaction is not symmetric, and goodness inspires more goodness then evil inspires evil? If we add another dimension to the problem, say extroversion and introversion, maybe this would allow us to augment interaction beneficially?
• Perhaps the jail system can be subdivided into different tiers of goodness, and the best from each would slowly be moved to the next level? Group behavior may provide unexpected side effects.