One of the quotes that stood out to me was this one from a teacher of Ms. Portman:

“I’ve taught at Harvard, Dartmouth and Vassar, and I’ve had the privilege of teaching a lot of very bright kids…there are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.”

She didn’t take a single thing for granted. Here’s someone who had the start of a fantastic career and a clear road to stardom. The most natural thing to do with her academics would be to just coast. Or hire a private tutor to complete high school, like many underage celebrities do. But she didn’t do that. She pushed forward and accomplished as much as she could. She even published in a peer-reviewed journal while at Harvard (giving her an Erdős–Bacon number of 7).

She’s not alone though; many celebrities are incredibly smart, driven people off the screen as well. James Franco, nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in 127 Hours, apparently wasn’t satisfied with his film career and reenrolled at UCLA in 2006, receiving permission to take up to 61 (!) credit hours (as opposed to the normal 19) while still acting. He graduated in 2008 with a 3.5 GPA and moved to New York to simultaneously attend graduate school at Columbia University’s MFA writing program, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking, and Brooklyn College for fiction writing. Naturally, he also occasionally committed to North Carolina’s Warren Wilson College for poetry. He received his MFA from Columbia and is now a PhD student at Yale and planning on attending the Rhode Island School of Design as well.

How depressing

I could go on…check out Dolph Lundgren or Mayim Bialik (now playing Dr. Farah Fowler on the hit sitcom The Big Bang Theory).

These people had already arrived in one sense. They had every reason to relax and just enjoy their success in their field, but they didn’t. They kept pressing forward, learning new things, reinventing themselves.

This is a lesson I constantly have to remind myself of. (Warning: egotistical statement coming up)  I’m not a big success yet, but I’m doing OK. In the last five years I’ve seen my income more than quadruple and earned the freedom to work when and where I want, on what I want. And I’m in the process of separating my time from my income. But sometimes I catch myself slowing down, subconsciously thinking that I’ve arrived somehow. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As the Apostle Paul said:

“I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

Paul is obviously not talking about his career here, but this isn’t taking his words out of context. I think that being on guard against complacency is a principle to be applied to every area of life. It’s a constant danger that we have to be aware of.

On the other hand, where does contentment fit in? There’s a lot to be said for being grateful for what you have, instead of always striving to have more. There must be a sense of balance in terms of striving to be our best and not holding ourselves to an impossible standard; we should be proud of our accomplishments if we worked hard and did our best. So where is the line between contentment and complacency?

After some reflection, I think the difference is in the distinction between what we have and who we are. None of us are perfect, so while we shouldn’t beat ourselves for our limitations, neither should we be satisfied with them. We should always be pushing ourselves to new challenges and opportunities for growth, whether that’s taking a full-time course load at an Ivy League school while being cast in an Academy Award nominated performance, or just applying for that management position that’s just a little outside our comfort zone.

Just keep pushing forward and never be afraid to reinvent yourself. Who knows what your wikipedia entry might read someday?

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I don’t remember reading much before I was probably 6 or 7 years old. I’m sure I had to read for school, but I just don’t remember doing it for fun. However, sometime around that age, I discovered the Hardy Boys, and I’ve been a voracious reader ever since. The adventure and mystery that the books conveyed enthralled me, despite what proved to be pretty terrible writing in retrospect. I remember following my parents around grocery and department stores with my nose in a book, and earning tons of free personal pan pizzas from Pizza Hut through their Book It! program.

However, the Hardy Boys didn’t have a huge impact on my life outside of pure entertainment. Yes, my friends and I started detective agencies to solve crimes and mysteries (“The Case of the Missing Hairbrush!”), but I didn’t grow up wanting to be a private detective or anything.

Then I discovered the Tom Swift, Jr. series. Written in the same breathless, overly-adverbed, gratuitously exclamation-pointed style as the Hardy Boys (“The flames are getting too close to the rocket!”, Tom cried breathlessly!), the series was written from 1954 – 1971 and detailed the adventures of 18-year-old boy genius inventor Tom and his all-American chums. Reading them now is pure comic delight, but at the time, they drew me into a world where technology made anything possible. Despite being only 18, Tom had virtually endless resources at his disposal, thanks to his father’s ownership of Swift Enterprises, a multi-national conglomerate. Tom routinely built submarines, cars, rockets, time machines, and other devices that would be groundbreaking today, let alone five decades ago. Travel to the deepest parts of the ocean and the outer reaches of the solar system was all in a day’s work for Tom.

It seems silly now, due largely to the horrible quality of the writing and the near-total disconnect from scientific realities, but the series had a profound impact on my interests and goals for life. Much of my love for technology and business can both be traced back to my love of this book series. Tom’s multidisciplinary approach to solving problems with science and technology inspired me, and the idea of having a large conglomerate that dabbles in many areas of technology still interests me to this day. The fact that people like Elon Musk are actually doing it encourages me.

Anyway, just thought it was interesting how much it impacted me. We talk a lot about being careful what our kids watch on TV, and I think that’s a good thing. But we should also consider carefully what they read and the future impact it might have.

PS – If you enjoyed the Tom Swift, Jr. books, you should check out the Rick Brant series. It was written around the same time, but the science is more realistic and the writing is much better.

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As a kid, I was fascinated by electronics and I used to take apart pretty much anything that used electricity, from blenders to VCRs to calculators. To my parents credit, they they weren’t really upset about the taking things apart, though sometimes my inability to put things back together annoyed them. At any rate, just like with programming, I kind of forgot about this through high school and college.

Well, I recently decided to play around with some electronics again, because I’m interested in how I might be able to leverage my programming skills in the “real world”. So I started poking around online trying to figure out where to start. I know almost nothing about this world anymore, but I quickly became aware of a popular, neat little programmable microcontroller called the Arduino.

Basically, this is a small device a few inches square that you can plug into your computer and program in a language very similar to C. The board has a bunch of Input / Output pins that you can use to read data off of, or control devices and components. So for a very simple example, you could use a pin with a light sensor to measure when it gets dark, and then use another pin to control a light that starts blinking once it’s dark.

Anyway, I found this little Arduino kit from the awesome folks at Sparkfun, so I went ahead and ordered it. Today, I spent about an hour playing with it and writing my first tiny program, which makes an LED fade in and out in a loop.

What’s bizarre is that it’s so much fun. I mean, I’ve built large, complex websites with tens of thousands of lines of code that use a dozen different languages, frameworks, and technologies. So how come writing 6 lines of code to make a stupid little LED blink makes me grin like an idiot?

UPDATE: It’s been brought to my attention that this post is disappointingly light on content and substance, and after some careful reflection, I agree. So here’s a more in-depth review of the Arduino Inventor’s Kit from Sparkfun. This is intended largely for technical people who haven’t played with electronics much, but are interested in getting started. Let me know if there’s other things I can cover in more depth.

What the kit comes with

The box that came in the mail from Sparkfun was small, but there’s quite an array of components in there to play with. You can find a complete list here, but it basically includes everything you need to start creating digital circuits and programming them with your computer. They’ve included a variety of sensors, LEDs, a motor, a buzzer, etc. And of course, once you learn how to control all these components, you can start swapping them out for the more interesting components available out there, like LCDs, GPS units, wireless transceivers, cameras, etc.

The heart of the kit is the Arduino Uno itself, along with a breadboard that you use to prototype your circuits. So if you’re worried because you don’t know how to solder, don’t be (though it’s a good skill to have for more advanced projects). There’s a handy plastic base to stick both the breadboard and Arduino to, which makes it a lot easier to run jumpers back and forth without pulling them out accidentally.

Most importantly, the kit comes with a 36-page guide with about a dozen introductory projects you can create. Each project includes step-by-step instructions, circuit and breadboard diagrams, a list of troubleshooting tips, and some variations you can try out. As far as I can tell, they make no assumptions about previous knowledge, so it’s pretty easy to jump in and start building.

How you use it

If you’ve never built any electronics projects before, it might seem intimidating, but it’s actually pretty straightforward (largely thanks to the folks who put this kit together). Building the circuits consists of identifying the proper components and wiring everything up with the included jumpers (wires) and breadboard. Once you have everything plugged in, it’s time for the fun part: controlling it with code.

The Arduino comes with a USB port so you can just plug it directly into your computer, which is also how it draws its power (it’s also got a power port). The Arduino folks have provided a simple IDE that runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux, and lets your write, compile and upload your programs to the board. The language used is a variant of Wiring, and is similar to C++. I didn’t have any issues modifying and extending the example code without looking up a reference. I’m sure more complex programs will change that, but it’s hardly intimidating.

Once you’ve written your program and compiled it without getting any errors, it’s time to upload to the board. Just hit the upload button and wait a few seconds. The TX/RX lights on the board will flash, and then if you’ve done everything correctly, the board will start running your program. Arduino programs run in a loop until the power to the board is removed, so you can be mesmerized by your LED fading in and out for hours

What you can do with it

What can’t you make with it? The Arduino might seem like a toy, but it’s actually a pretty powerful little chip and I was surprised at the depth of some of the projects out there. Everything from UAVs to robots to weather stations to breathalyzers. For more inspiration, check out these links.

What I plan to make

That’s half the fun: I don’t know yet! I definitely want to try playing with some little robotics projects, maybe create a rolling robot with collision avoidance, line following, etc. Another thing that I’d absolutely love to explore is the quadcopter thing; there are some quad projects out there that leverage the Arduino, so I think that’d be a good place to start. I’d love to play with more automation stuff though, like autopilot, navigation, etc. I’d really like to play with some more advanced things like room mapping, voice and face recognition, etc. But I suspect a lot of that will require more power than the Arduino can handle. That’s ok; it’s a great place to start dipping my toes into electronics. I can build Johnny-5 later.

I hope this review was useful to you, and if you have any curiosity or interest in electronics and programmable microcontrollers, I encourage you to check out the Sparkfun Inventor’s Kit for Arduino. It’s the most fun I’ve had programming in awhile.

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While accessible in the sense that it’s not aimed at the professional mathematician, I’ve found that the book is very challenging in some areas. I’m going through at a slow pace, perhaps 10-15 pages per day, and really trying to grok the concepts, but it’s tough. I took calculus, linear algebra, and statistics in college, but there’s still a lot of deep concepts here that I haven’t been exposed to. More than that, the concepts are presented from a much more theoretical basis than they were in college, which tended more towards applied math than pure math.

At any rate, if you enjoy math and you’re considering diving into some advanced study but you’re not sure where to start, I recommend The Princeton Companion to Mathematics. It’s challenging, but rewarding, and if nothing else, you’ll probably get a sense for those areas of math that you don’t enjoy.

While I’m on the subject, I would absolutely love to find books like this for other fields, like engineering, physics, biology, etc. If you know of any really comprehensive overview books for other fields of science and engineering, please share in the comments.

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I know a lot of Christians who believe in what’s termed “Young Earth Creationism” (YEC), which is the belief that Genesis refers to a literal 6-day creation period, and that the universe and all that’s in it is around 6000 – 7000 years old. This figure is arrived at by adding up genealogies in the Bible and the estimated life-spans of each person in those lists, which span from Adam to Jesus.

How does this view fare in the scientific community? Here’s a great description that I found:

“A statement by 68 national and international science academies lists the following as facts, established by numerous observations and independently-derived experimental results from a multitude of scientific disciplines, without any contradiction from scientific evidence: that the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old and has shown continuing change; that life appeared on Earth at least 2.5 billion years ago, and has subsequently taken many forms, all of which continue to evolve; and that the genetic code of all organisms living today, including humans, clearly indicates their common primordial origin.”

Read that paragraph again, slowly, and think about what it means.

Essentially, it means that in 2010, we have an incredible bounty of evidence across a multitude of disciplines, leading to a near-universal scientific consensus that:

1. The age of the earth / universe is many orders of magnitude larger than 6000 years.
2. Life has been on the planet for at least 2.5 billion years.
3. Evolution is responsible for all of the varieties of life that we see on the planet.

When I was growing up and attending Christian schools, the attitude that my teachers and textbooks had was that YEC is real and accepted by real scientists, and oh yeah, there are some fringe scientists who believe in evolution and that the earth is really old, but they’re crazy and you don’t need to pay any attention to them. Imagine my surprise when I got out of the Christian bubble and discovered that the opposite is actually true.

So far as I can tell, what’s happening is that some Christians (certainly not all) have taken a very narrow view of how a small piece of Scripture should be interpreted, and have spent the last 150 years furiously denying copious amounts of scientific evidence that contradict that interpretation. Some will be quick to remind me that Evolution is “just a theory”, that there are holes in the explanation, that there’s evidence for YEC, etc. But those are serious distortions of the truth, which is that virtually all working scientists in relevant fields subscribe to some variation of the old earth / evolution philosophy. While many questions remain about the exact nature and mechanisms of evolution over the last 4.5 billion years on this planet, we have an incredible amount of evidence pointing to the fact that it DID happen. So much evidence, in fact, that a serious survey of even a little of it will convince you that either YEC is utterly ridiculous, or God created the world in such a way to make it look utterly ridiculous to test our faith. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We come to the crux of the issue: does science inform your faith and your interpretation of Scripture, or does your faith and your interpretation of Scripture inform your science? These are two different approaches to looking at the world, with vastly important consequences, but they’re asymmetrical, in terms of the definitions on each side of the equation. I’ll explain what I mean.

Science is supposed to be an objective search for the truth. Obviously, since science is practiced by humans and we’re flawed, it’s never perfectly objective, but that’s what it is supposed to be. Scientific inquiry is a method of examining the evidence and coming to a conclusion based on that evidence, regardless of whether you like it. At its best, science follows the evidence to its conclusion, wherever that is.

But religion and science are not just a different approach to the same thing. Religions do not search for the truth, at least primarily. They offer it. They claim to already have the truth, not to be on a search for it.

My current approach is that science informs my interpretation of scripture and my faith. That is to say, if I were presented by overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence from multiple scientific fields that everything I believe is wrong, I hope that I would be able to change my beliefs. Why spend your life living something you have no reason to believe in? As Paul said, if our faith is in vain, we are to be pitied above all men.

But many seem to take the opposite view. In particular, the YEC crowd seems to believe that a strict literal interpretation of Scripture trumps science and what we can see about the world. Essentially, their position is that if the Bible says 1 + 1 = 3, then they will believe that 1 + 1 = 3, and they will twist their interpretation of reality to match that belief. Regardless of whether I think that’s intellectually dishonest or foolish or whatever, it brings me back to my title: why do you believe the Bible is true in the first place?

There are many religions in the world, and they all think they’re the true religion, and they all have scriptures of their own that say that they’re the only true religion, etc. So why do you believe the Bible over any of those others? And more importantly, could anything change your mind? If you read through the Bible and literally everything you read was completely different from what you see in reality, would you still believe it? And if so, why?

I’m not looking for deep theological answers or answers based on emotion. Most of the people I know who subscribe to YEC didn’t go to seminary, and it’s doubtful that they have a deep theological reason for their beliefs, which is fine. And if the only answer you can come up with is that you know in your heart that it’s true, I wish you the best, but that’s worthless to me.

I’m primarily looking for answers from people who believe in that the earth is 6000-7000 years old and that it was created in six literal 24-hour periods. Why do you believe the Bible is true? And not just true in the abstract, but true down the last word, to the point that you’re willing to dismiss the vast scientific consensus on YEC because you believe that if your paper Bible, translated to English thousands of years after the original words were written, has the word “day” printed there, it was exactly 24 hours?

Help me understand.

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And that’s depressing.

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So it almost seems as if the development of culture stems from isolation and the resulting asymmetries of information. For example, the technologies of warfare developed in parallel in different parts of the world , and often when those cultures collided in battle, one force had an overwhelming advantage because their technology had taken a different path and was far superior. Improvement to society of any kind, whether scientific, medical, military, political etc. might take centuries to reach another culture.

Contrast this with today: virtually any improvement or development can spread around the world in a matter of weeks or months. Fashion, art, and political changes now also reach a global audience, influencing cultures around the world. Driven by the Internet, globalization, increasing democratization, and increasing use of English worldwide, we now enjoy a global spread of information that takes hours instead of centuries. Over time, will this process result in the gradual homogenization of culture?

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(Side note: I also found a pretty humorous video that might help you snap out of it and realize how much time you waste avoiding just getting stuff done.)

Procrastination seems to be the weak link in the GTD method. David Allen apparently assumes that we don’t get stuff done because we’re not clear on what we should do next, or because we don’t have a solid system for processing inputs and so forth. While I think that’s a big part of it, I also think that a big reason we don’t get stuff done is that we don’t want to do it. I can put all of my projects into GTD (and I do) and I can categorize them endlessly by context, level of effort, dependencies, etc, etc, but at the end of the day, I’m putting some of that stuff off because I just do NOT want to do it.

In addition to the techniques they gave in the book, I would add two more that I’ve found have worked for me:

1. Commit to things by a certain date when others are depending on you to have it done. Guilt can be a powerful motivator.
2. Replace motivation with blind habit.

#2 is something I’ve talked about before. It’s worked well for me to replace certain motivational needs with blind habits, like exercising or keeping my life semi-organized, but most of the examples given in the article are for one-off things like school projects or reports for work. How do habits help in those situations? Maybe having a habit to work on XX every day for 30 mins, where XX is whatever you’re supposed to be working on? Maybe having a habit to start something every Thursday that you’ve been putting off? What do you think?

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I was also very excited to learn that they’re looking for volunteers to help with all aspects of the museum, including hands-on stuff with at the aquarium. If you’re rescue diver certified, you can even be a volunteer diver to help feed the animals, clean the glass, etc. I’m not rescue certified yet, but I definitely will look into it.

I didn’t bring my camera, but here’s a Flickr group that has some good photos…enjoy!

http://flickr.com/groups/calacademy/pool/

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I can see four main reasons that this would be a hugely positive thing:

• Pregnancy is hard on a mother’s body. Childbirth is worse. Skip them both.
• Safer environment for the fetus
• Allows women unable to carry their own child to still have kids
• It’s a lot more convenient and less painful

I think one of the biggest benefits is the last one. Who says that having kids should be a miserable experience? And I’m sure that many women would choose to give birth the “natural” way, just as many women currently choose to forgo the benefits and advances of modern science and medical technology. That doesn’t mean the rest of us should.

To be clear, I wouldn’t be in favor of this if it wasn’t as safe (roughly) or safer than natural gestation. And I think that pod-babies should have the same rights as natural babies, meaning that you shouldn’t be allowed to unplug the thing if you change your mind after a few months. But if the method can be made safe and we can enact the proper ethical and legal policies, then bring on the pod-babies.

Am I crazy? Is this treating humans as commodities? Tell me in the comments.

Note: that’s a picture of the WinePod, in case you’re wondering.

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