The Natural

Clap your hands, say ‘yeah’, and hopefully your computer will respond.

I’ve said this before, but computer interaction has always proceeded through a metaphor. At times, that metaphor was language – and if you’re a developer or a sys. admin, it still is – typing commands into a black box and waiting to see a response. Later, that metaphor became the mouse and the graphical environment, translating physical actions into on-screen commands. And now, we are entranced by the touchscreen, and that almost real feeling of interacting with the pixels underneath of our fingertips.

We’ve always been constrained by these metaphors, in ways large and small, because they are defined by others and out of our control. But in a way they are also freeing: they are incredibly effective at managing the complexity of what a computer fundamentally is, and they limit us in such a way to channel our actions toward productive, rather than destructive work.

In an even greater sense, these metaphors for interaction give us a great deal of leverage: with a small amount of physical effort we can be massively creative. In the simplest sense, even, the tiny movements of my fingers and hands as I sit at a keyboard add up into a considerable corpus of text; saving those calories for the more important thinking process of my actions. Ad though many of these interactions require a considerable degree of precision and visual feedback – not ideal for certain disabilities, to be sure – the movements once learned are predictable and repeatable; that is to say, you always know how to perform a particular action, and you also know what a particular action will do.

---

The new kid on the block of human computer interaction is the Natural User Interface. You’ve seen it, somewhere, somehow: the Xbox Kinect, Siri, or the soon to be released Myo armband.

These systems heavily rely on high fidelity sensors, gesture recognition, and natural language/interaction processing. For one thing, that’s a lot of pipe for your inputs to travel through: which means a lot of pain points where things can go wrong, or, and this especially true on mobile devices where computation is typically offloaded to some faraway server, greatly increases the latency, and hence the frustration

But even ignoring everything else, just look at actual gestures needed to interact with these new systems. Waving your arm to select a control. Assuming a posture to perform a specific test. Asking a specific question to get a specific response. These actions are neither repeatable or reliable; you can’t be guaranteed to assume the same position every time, or ask the same question in the same way, nor can you expect the response of the system to be the same every time. By increasing the abstraction, the leverage has been oriented in the wrong way. A simple computing task now necessitates a grandiose, thought-out and complicated gesture. It’s hard to be productive when you have to remember the contortions or lines of inquest you need to generate a desired response from your computer.

Should we really be creating a system that makes us feel extravagant, or looks cool in a thirty-second YouTube clip? Or do we want a system that leverages our small actions to create something truly great?

Learned Inadequacy

From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.

Fast Co Design’s Phillip Batin recently wrote about adaptive user experience, centering on a remote control for a television. The main idea is that the interfaces a touchscreen remote and on-screen overlays present to you could adjust themselves according to the amount of experience you have had with the system. As you acclimate yourself and acquire “experience points” from your interactions, to use the gamer parlance Batin states the idea derived from, the remote adds additional controls to allow you to use the more advanced behaviors of the TV. It’s certainly an interesting and unique idea.

It also happens to be complete bullshit.

Batin confuses complexity with ability, stating that Internet connectivity and embedded applications have made “operating a television much more complicated than it ever has been before”. But the advances in TV capabilities aren’t to blame for the poor user experience and hopeless mess that interfaces found on the smart television sets. After all, a smart TV is far less complicated – in the true sense of the meaning, this time – than a phone or a tablet or a computer, and yet no one is clamoring to put training wheels on our iPads and laptops.

Nor should they. Because despite the complexity of bridging the gap between human intuition and computational capability, we still manage to be incredibly productive with our processors and screens. And the reason why is that a great many designers, developers, and engineers have spent a great deal of time working to get the interaction right. Adjusting the computer environment to better suit our spatial capabilities. Perfecting the physics of systems to align our expectations with how we view external reality. And most importantly perhaps, designing the controls we interact with so that we aren’t completely flummoxed by how the applications we use actually work.

Worst of all, this adaptive system does nothing to address the fact that the interface you are teaching is still a complete piece of shit. If you need a twelve-step program to learn how to properly interact with the interface you designed, it’s not your users’ inability to master complexity that’s the issue. It’s your inability to properly explain and guide them, in zero steps. An interface should properly express the capability of the system it acts as an intermediary for, not slowly dole out possibilities at a slow and stead pace.

This isn’t to say that adaptation as a whole is unwise. In fact, the very smart phones that we carry in our product are already adaptive to our abilities and to our needs. By having access to an app store, we can choose the interface for a task that suits our particular needs, rather than having a singular company tell us how to learn theirs.

The market allows individuals across the spectrum of capability to select the app and the interface they find most effective, and it allows the best design to be chosen by the users, rather than the company.

As always, capitalism wins.

Latency & Throughput

In engineering, there are two common ways to measure the efficacy of a system’s response. There is latency, the amount of time it takes for a single action to be completed from the moment it is requested, and there is throughput, the amount of work done over a given period of time. At first glance, these two metrics appear to just be two ways of measuring the same thing, and on a small-scale, that’s not inaccurate.

Where the two begin to diverge in not-so-subtle ways is under high scale demand. A restaurant during a busy lunchtime rush demonstrates the phenomenon well. There may be a long wait to be served your food – that’s a high latency system – but the restaurant is serving a large number of customers in a short period of time – that’s a high throughput system.

An ideal system, of course, is one where responses have low-latency but also high throughput, serving as many responses at once. But two are often in conflict. To maximize throughput, the system needs to be running near or at full capacity. To minimize latency though, the system has to have capacity available to respond; a hard thing to do if you are already running at full capacity.

---

There’s often conflict as to which metric to optimize toward, especially between the consumer and business relationship. Consumers take the viewpoint of an individual, and hence are interested in low-latency systems. They desire to complete their tasks as quickly as possible. Businesses, though, are optimized for throughput: they make the most money when they serve the most people in the least amount of time.

These conflicts lead to a mismatch in expectations between customers and the businesses that serve them. It makes great financial sense for a restaurant to have a long wait to get a table, because it means the wait staff, kitchen, and most importantly, the cash register, are all operating at full capacity. But it makes for a poor experience for the restaurant patron, who must wait in agony for long periods of time before being served. Enough dissatisfaction spread over enough people, and that high throughput a restaurant once enjoyed could crumble.

---

I’ve kept my examples to the physical world for good reason, because capacity, especially in response to short-term spikes in demand, is essentially fixed. A restaurant cannot double in size to accommodate more tables, nor can an assembly line suddenly double production output to meet unanticipated demand.

With the Internet and web technologies, however, the story can be different, even if that isn’t necessarily always the case. With a wealth of real-time data depicting the demand of a service, it’s possible to anticipate sudden surges placed on a system. With smart caching, it’s incredibly easy to ensure the most requested information is set to be delivered as quickly as possible. And, most interestingly, companies now exist that can do real time scaling of web services, increasing the availability of connections to meet demand, and downsizing them when interest wanes.

The web has given us a dramatic ability to align previously counterproductive goals of companies and customers, allowing the form to optimize their resource expenditures, and the latter to minimize the time they spend waiting for a request. This alignment allows businesses to ensure their short-term goals of revenue and profit are met, while maintaining the long-term outlook of the company because users’ interests are satisfied.

Tidal Waves

I wonder how the Moon feels, always facing the Earth, never able to look away.

There are days when I feel as though the forces at play in life are ready to tear me asunder. Obligations at school mean I have to be at this place, at this time, doing a certain thing. Work demands an entirely different set of devotion, being at a desk staring into a screen and grinding on a programmatic problem. Projects, social demand, all of it, pulling at me to be at different places at different times.

Each celestial body in the solar system of our lives exerts its certain gravity upon us: sometimes, when our orbits are far apart, that influence is weak, allowing us more control of the moments of our lives. Other times, the grip these major external forces have on us is crushing, dictating the lock-step of what we do with our days.

And then there is us. Because despite sharing the orbit of massive external factors, we also have our own internal influences to pay heed to. At a basic level of course, this dictates the schedule of the day: when we sleep, when we get hungry, and of course, other rhythms our bodies demand upon us. But at a much higher level, our minds, our souls, often have much to say about what we want to be doing during a given day, or week, or month, or year. It’s why everyday around two in the afternoon I have an intense urge to put everything down that I’m working on and go outside and run, yet when I finally have time in the evening, my mind instead has moved on to other things. It’s why I have the curious urge to program from 10p–2a every night, rather than sleep. And it’s why writing has to be either the very first thing Ido in the morning, or the very last thing I do at night.

In a right world, in a just world, in a world where the tides responded to our whims, we could be the master of our own schedules, set our day to the quirks of our own clocks, and be productive in our own manner. But it isn’t feasible for us to do heads-down project work for our jobs at two in the morning, or put a hold on afternoon meetings to work out for an hour.

We are mostly beholden to the external schedules that are placed upon us. How do we make the most of it then? Do we try our best to adjust our own patterns? Do we except that the times we are demanded upon the most may not represent our best work? Do we take advantage of the times when we are on our best?

I really wish I knew.

Belief

A good idea, held too tightly.

Do you mind if I ask you a question?

When’s the last time someone calling you stupid and telling you what you believe is wrong has ever changed your mind?

Sure, it feels good to call some bigot a Nazi, explain in full detail why his religion and beliefs are not only antiquated, but so pig-headed and asinine that whatever deity he still foolishly clings to in this era of science and intellectualism would surely send him straight to hell for thinking that prejudicial rhetoric is somehow representative of the will of said higher power. But do you know what they call people who make fun of others for their beliefs? Plenty of words come to mind, but “intolerant asshole” is chief among them.

Prejudice doesn’t claim righteousness for one side or the other, because no matter the cause, persecution for one’s beliefs is just plain wrong. There are no right beliefs or wrong beliefs: there are only my beliefs and the beliefs that others hold that are contrary. And just as someone calling your pet valued cause petty or insignificant or morally, ethically, or scientifically wrong wont do much to change

You can’t sway someone by telling them why they are wrong. You have to do so by telling them why you are right.

Hoops

With the NCAA tournament about to tip off today, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to discuss an exceedingly relevant topic to basketball and tournaments: conditional probability and Bayes theorem.

Yes, I may be taking extreme ironic pleasure in mentioning basketball players in the same sentence as mathematical concepts, but whether regardless of whether our NCAA athletes can in fact even pass a math test does not somehow exclude them from the grasp of statistics.

So what the hell is the connection between probabilities and tournament performance? I’m quite sure you’ll regret that question in just a moment as we dive deep into concepts that only Nobel Laureates and bespectacled academics get worked up for.

Let’s start with a somewhat simple example. Let’s say we’ve flipped a coin ten times, and we’ve somehow managed to come up with heads for each outcome. If we flip the coin again, what are the odds that we’ll come up with heads yet again? This isn’t a trick question: your powers of deduction haven’t failed you, assuming that you have correctly answered 50 percent.

And why? Despite our incredible desire to somehow believe that the universe craves balance and must intervene on behalf of our fate-tempting coin, we’ve proven to the best of our abilities that this is not the case. Each flip is independent, and despite the incredible unlikelihood of flipping 10 heads in a row – over a one in a thousand chance – there is a fifty percent likelihood that the streak will continue, or bust. As much as we would like to hope and believe in some sort of fate, in an invisible hand guiding us, it all comes down to chance.

Many things in life, though, do not share this property of independence. In fact, most of the events we experience are heavily conditioned on events that have occurred before; fate rarely strikes us across the forehead with chance. Your grades in a class are largely influenced by the grades you receive in all your classes prior. You going to a particular school or getting a job in a particular city are all based heavily on the experiences that have shaped you up to that point. Conditional probability and Bayes rule both boil down to a rather simple adage:

Past performance is a good predictor of future results.

This of course, is the link to the March Madness tournament. Preseason rankings, margins of victory, injuries, even where the games are being held all influence the expected outcomes of the games. If you’re interested in one such model of all these factors, check out Nate Silver’s bracket, and his more detailed explanation of the pick process. And yes, if you’re wondering, that is the same Nate Silver who correctly predicted every single major election outcome last November. Sadly, basketball productions are harder to reliably divine.

Where conditional probability really starts to throw its weight around is when the tournament actually starts. A 16-seed has a statistical impossibility to win the tournament when the field is 64, but if you already know that they’ve made it to the Final Four, the odds are drastically different. They’ll still undoubtedly be the underdog, but the odds are much more manageable.

Does any of this really help you make last-minute picks? Not in the slightest. But it is a reminder that math can sometimes be interesting, informative, and influential.

The Fulcrum

Thinking’s hard enough without letting physics get in the way.

Every idea has three acts: creation, transmission, and action. All ideas are born in the same place, erupting from our minds: sometimes violently, without provocation and in an instant, and other times through coercion, over the course of long periods of time. An idea is nothing as long it is trapped in the bony prison of our skulls though; it must be transmitted, over nervous tissue, and out, out, out, where the third act can be performed. Because an idea thought and an idea sent is still an idea wasted if it cannot be acted upon.

Every idea has three acts: this is true in micro- and macrocosms. The idea to grab hold of my pen comes slowly, then all at once, it is transmitted to the muscles, poised and ready, down and through my left arm, and the action is carried out. The idea for a piece leaps forth, it is transmitted through my fingers into the keyboard where digital bits represent it, and the action? That’s on you, dear reader, to keep your eyes moving, left-right left-right, downward toward the bottom of your screen.

Every idea has three acts: therefore every idea can be manipulated, transformed, amplified, or extinguished in three different places. The three places were not created equally, however. We have little control over our creative process; creating an idea is a function of inputs and environment, but with so many inputs and so much within an environment – and given how little sway we have over either of these – interfering in the process is a tall order. Intervening in the third act, in action, is a difficult proposition, too. Biology has gotten very good at following orders, velocity being the main decider in whether a species thrives or becomes extinct: when given a command, a muscle’s action is immediate.

With the exposition and denoument eliminated, that leaves the crescendo as the only opportunity in which to intercede; Shakespeare would have it no other way. Here our idea is data, superflous and external as it travels from the internal representation in our minds to a concrete representation in reality. Here is where the plot thickens, the antagonist is revealed, fate intervenes.

This is where the interface goes, and this is where we have the opportunity to royally screw up, with choice and design. We often have a great deal of choice as to what we use to transmit our idea, and even more freedom in the design of that transducer. So why make it hard on ourselves? We’ve had the ability to slide a stick along glass and replicate the writing of a human hand for decades now. We’ve had the ability to wave our hands at cameras, or monitor our muscles as we contort our arms, for near as long.

So why do we insist on a keyboard and mouse? Metaphors that they are, we sometimes lose meaning of we are actually tring to accomplish. And yet, they make such great transducers because of how little effort they require. No need to pantomime dribbling and shooting a hoop to convey that I’m talking about basketball; I can hit 10 keys, my hands nearly motionary, and accomplish the same thing.

We seem to place such value in novelty in these no methods of conducting our thoughts that we forget that the whole point of an interface is to make transmission as easy and information-dense as possible. We must’ve known this at one point; if not, we’d still be pantomiming to one another, with no language to speak of. Now, instead, our new mthods of interaction ask us to amplify our intention in order to be heard in the first place. Wouldn’t it be more ideal in reverse, amplifying what we say in order for ideas to be better heard. It would seem that we’re doing it wrong and in reverse.

Is the keyboaard the best way to facilitate communication? Hardly. but it does exactly what a fulcrum should do: leverage our existing experience to make lifting the load far easier.

A Comment, if I May

Interrupting your regularly scheduled programming for just a moment.

This Sunday night I introduced a new feature to the site: Letters to the Editor. I wanted to spend a few minutes explaining the addition and why this route was chosen specifically.

First, the what: Letter to the Editor is a simple form letter for sending your follow-up, rebuttals, corrections, etc. You fill out the form, click send, and I get a letter in my inbox to read. I’m making a commitment to read every piece I may or may not receive, and if I think the thoughts expressed are particularly interesting and informative, I may use the letter as a jumping off point for a post, and I’ll also publish the entire letter in full, separate from any commentary I may have on it. Even if I don’t write an entire piece, I may still do the latter, especially if it’s well-written. So please, make my life easier and write well when you write in.

But hold on a second: this is the Internet. What the hell are we doing using this time-intensive process when I could save a lot of work for both parties and just add comments to the site? Allow me to explain.

Commentary

Origin stories are fairly uninteresting, but I think it’s important to know where I come from as a writer/editor, so I’ll try to keep it brief as possible. I grew and honed much of my writing skill, if you can call it that, working as an editor of the Commentary section for my high school newspaper, in what seems like far too long ago (granted, it was only little over four years). If ever there was a good place to become a good critic and an even better editor, I think high school is certainly in the upper echelons: there’s really no other place where you find such a breadth of ability, personality, and grammatical grasp than in that four year period.

One of my major responsibilities for the paper was handling all the replies and responses we received. We wouldn’t have a reply every issue, but with some regularity we’d receive a well thought-out letter about a story we had run in a previous issue. I’d be responsible for selecting a letter to run, if we ever received multiple for an issue, trim, with approval from the author, to make sure the letter fit on the page (this was dead-tree publication, remember), editing for grammar, and writing any rebuttal the staff may want to run with the piece.

Was it a lot of work for something that may not have had a lot of value? Possibly; we were devoting space to a reply to a piece that only a portion of our readership may have originally read, and if they hadn’t, they’d have little ability to read it now. Maybe that meant this was wasted space.

And yet, it also kept us honest to our writing, just knowing there was a possibility for our work to be publicly critiqued. And it also meant that an alternative opinion could be heard, rather than a mostly singular viewpoint from the editorials that we regularly published.

A Comment on Comments

But even if there is value in having a means to send in feedback, it doesn’t explain why comments can’t be used to accomplish this.

First, let’s get this out of the way: comments and commenting platforms are ugly. Just head to a controversial article on any site, and you’ll quickly lose faith in humanity. Most commenting systems are designed in such a way that it’s incredibly easy together ailed from the original intent - providing meaningful feedback about an article or editorial - to engage in a partisan debate with other vocal opinion holders. Reply threads, upvoting, mentioning, all of it contribute to engaging in fighting amongst each other rather than discourse about the topic. It’s a real shit show.

What it really boils down to is full editorial control. I actively want thoughtful opinion on my site, because. It makes my writing, and my argument, my opinion, my think, better, and it makes for a more interesting read. But I also have ownership over every word, letter, and pixel on this site. And as long as that is the case, I will be incredibly protective of what I publish. Is that controlling and dictatorial? Yeah. I also happen to believe that it makes for the best reader experience. Feel free to write in if you disagree.

A Final Comment

I’m not so arrogant to believe that having a Letter to the Editor section is the best way to engage in discussion on a particular site, or even if it is the right choice in my particular case. Heading to a separate section of the site, and filling in additional sections of a form raises the barrier to entry in no small way. There’s knowledge, too, that what you right may never see the light of day. Without a doubt, these are real deterrents.

I can certainly argue that these barriers make sure that only the best opinions, and the most thought-out arguments, will find their way to me. But no matter what, there will be great opinions, additional information, and just plain interesting conversation that will be missed out on simply because of the extra trouble.

For the moment though, I think that risk is worth taking.

Serve the Servants

Teaching the new dog old tricks.

Do you find it odd when computer programs go out of your way to teach you how to use them? Sometimes it’s a walkthrough, showing the expected interactions and how to produce the effect you want. Other times it will be a tutorial, where you complete a simple example to get acquainted with features and controls.

The most euphemistic of them all, of course, is the “training” that some complex apps will ask for. Ostensibly, it’s so the computer can learn what to expect from you, but more accurately, the one being trained is you, to act in the way the program can understand you.

Of course, on the other end of the spectrum is the blank screen with nothing more than a blinking cursor. The only way to learn how to do anything is to start typing and hope you don’t enter a command that makes the world self destruct. Or for that matter, digitize you into an artificial world where your father has been imprisoned.

---

Computing has always been constrained by the interface and inputs available to the people that use them. And the massive leaps that happen within computing are defined by drastic changes to the input. Punch cards came first, which gave way to text input, which gave way to a graphical paradigm, which has recently given away to touch interface. But the fundamental problem still exists: interaction with a computer is based on metaphors, not true manipulation. We conform our output to the expectations of the systems we use. We are on the cusp of new modalities, too: speech, gestures, augmented reality. While they open up new modes of interaction, they are still a metaphorical interaction.

But is this the only we we must interact with computers? That question certainly warrants future discussion.

Inertia

An object in motion stays in motion, and an object at rest stays at rest.

There are days – and I must admit that they come far too often – when the mass, the gravity of upcoming stuff is so great that not even the greatest exertion could move any of it, at all. When the sheer amount of force, of time, of effort and planning just to get something important moving shuts down not just the project, but everything else at hand. A sinking pit that drags everything down into it, the will to start anything, the desire to be anything, the belief that anything could hope to move again. There are days when that same unmoving feeling is used as a protective barrier, to stave away defeat, to stay rooted in the face of overwhelming opposition.

There are days, too, when action cannot be stopped. Like an ambulance careening down the street, it clears everything from it’s path; it’s all you can do to get out of the way. There are days when you can use the wake this caterwauling emergency vehicle makes to breeze through the gridlock of obstructions that were previously in your way. And, there are days when that very same ambulance keeps you pulled over, mired down.

In either case, inertia can be such a limiting factor in our lives. In the form of immovable object, or an unstoppable force, inertia can drag us down, can keep us standing right where we belong, can pull us along to where we need to be, or make us flee in the opposite direction.

---

The inertia I find most fearful are the unmovable barriers. When something is moving, even in the opposite direction of where I want to be, I can at the very least act: move out of the way, or push back against it, or be valiantly flattened, or at the very least run as fast as I can. Action, even when it is the wrong action, at the very least gives the illusion of purpose.

The towering walls of static inertia, on the other hand, often make me crumble. It’s a fear of the unknown – what will it take to overcome, what amount of time, what skills, what tools, what secrets have those that have come before me used? What’s worse still, is that I find these barriers are all too common in the world; we are shaped by the things in life we cannot hope to move. These walls engender inaction, inaction gives rise to despair, and despair gives rise to inertia within yourself.

---

And yet, if we choose not to accept inaction, there are ways to overcome those boundaries we find ourselves facing down. Willpower cannot move mountains, but it can stir our hearts into action, or give us the strength we didn’t know we had to move the obstruction we didn’t know could be lifted. Sometimes, it’s as simple as asking the fit person the right question; other times it’s putting the fulcrum in the right place and applying the right force; others, still, it’s taking the winding path around whatever is in our way, our having the courage to make our own route. Perhaps most important though, is to recognize that not all objects can be moved. Instead, we must wait for time to erode the boulders that block us.

The world around us exists as barriers, large and small. They come into our lives, out of chance, or from our choices, or from others before us intent on stopping progress.

But inertia doesn’t exist to stop us. It exists to make sure that the right people overcome the right things.

Out With the Trash

All good ideas are recycled, stolen, or rescued from the landfill.

Not too long ago I was having a discussion with my advisor about a hypothetical experiment. Earlier that day, we had been sitting in on a journal club, and near the end we had moved on to what next possible steps researchers could take to enhance the findings. I had made a suggestion, innocuous enough,and it had been debated for a bit before the focus shifted elsewhere.

But after the meeting had been adjourned, my advisor had pulled me aside and told me he thought my proposal was quite insightful (humble brag, I know), and in fact a group had done just that study. He gave me a link to the article, and suggested I read it before we met for our regular meeting so we could discuss that.

I decided to do just that. In between classes, I looked up the article and started to read. About a page or so into it – no small feat with an academic paper – I came to a rather abrupt realization: I had read this article several years ago, and this very experiment I had just hours ago believed to have sprung forth in inspiration had in fact begun as some vague half-remembered reading.

When I began my discussion with my advisor that afternoon, I told him exactly that: that this idea I had supposedly had was instead nothing more than me recalling the details of what I’d read. And then I told him my greater fear: that all my ideas were exactly like this.

---

This isn’t to stay that stealing inspiration is not without benefit. If you’re an engineer looking to learn how to design a well-built machine, there’s no better way to start than take a part a well-built machine that already exists. As a writer, I consume the material of other authors far greater than myself, in the hope that I can at the very least adequately imitate them. And if you’re trying to make it as a web developer, the best way to get started is to view the source on some gorgeous websites and then get cranking to imitate them as best you can.

Stealing, imitation, reverse-engineering, whatever you deign to call it works because it shows you not only how to make, but how to what you make goes together. In the process of stealing the ideas of others we gain insight into the decisions that need to be made in the act of creation, and how those around us chose to solve the design problems at hand.

Stealing can be great, sure; but what I fear is that in the murky depths of poor memory I go from recognition of a great idea that came before me to an idea I sprung forth from myself. I fear that whatever great ideas I have aren’t ideas at all, but memories of great things that I’ve forgotten and re-remembered, this time without the attribution. I fear that every thought that I have comes not from within, but is instead some hollow echo of a thing I once knew.

---

And what of that conversation, with my advisor? After he had heard me tell my terror, he smiled. He told me that it didn’t really matter. What was the difference, between a good debate about a paper giving you the spark of a new idea, or a recollection of one you had already read? And who’s to say that you wouldn’t have had exactly that thought, even if you hadn’t read about it before. And finally he said, even with all of that, what is really important is that you can articulate why, that you can understand, why this sort of succession of experiments needs to take place, why A gives rise to B.

And of course he’s absolutely right. It doesn’t matter where our thoughts, our ideas come from. We don’t stand on the shoulders of giants. We stand atop mountains of past experience. All the trash, all the treasure, is lying beneath our feet, waiting to be found and brought back into the light of dy and thought of anew.

Razor

You’re afraid of making mistakes. Don’t be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young, I shoved my ignorance in people’s faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.

What does it mean to be finely honed? Being sharp is important, sure, but it’s not enough. A hatchet can have a fine edge, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be found in the operating room. Precision, too, is key; the blade needs to go where you tell it to, every time, lest you leave some lasting knick in a place you didn’t intend.

But what does it mean to be finely honed? A blade only becomes sharp by being ground against a dull stone. Imagine that: two blunt objects colliding to make a fine point. Then to be honed is not merely a state, but a process: an act of little by little grinding away what’s of no use to produce an ever-sharpening point.

An ongoing process, at that, for the same action that has sharpened the tool – contact, with dull obstructions – now makes it dull once again. To be honed is this continual act, of sharpening the blade to fine edge, dulling as it’s made use of in the world, and returning to the grind stone anew.

---

In life, too, we are razors: we hone ourselves through what we learn and believe, we become dull as we discover how much else there is to know, and we return to our grindstones, determined to whittle away the little flecks of matter that have taken away our edge. We do so by colliding ourselves with what we know, and with what we don’t, in the hopes that through contact we shape ourselves into an ever finer point.

Naturally this can’t be done alone. Just as a blade isn’t sharpened to be left in a block, never to touch the roast, our sharpening must be brought into the world, lest we let our skills dull from disuse. And it is not merely enough to bring our sharpness out on display; feigning precision isn’t the goal. We must actively demonstrate our misuse of the tools we have cultivated.

Ignorance, hypocrisy, these aren’t traits to avoid. They are a necessity in order to grow, and learn, and become aware of what better things there are to be, and beliefs to believe. Without recognizing our ignorance, how could we learn what we did not yet have the insight to know? Without brandishing our hypocrisy, how can we overturn our once foolishly-held beliefs and turn to a better frame of mind?

Recognize that failures, missteps, faulty judgements, can be used as stepping stones to greater success. Our beliefs, ideas, thoughts, actions, must come into contacts with those of others’ so that our blunt instrument may serve us better.

---

We fear being seen as ignorant, our hypocritical, or foolish from our youth, or age. But where’s the harm in saying, “I hadn’t thought of that”, or “That’s something I didn’t know”? There’s no use fearing being wrong, and there’s no use avoiding wrong at the expense of silent ignorance or dissent.

The only thing worth fearing is that you’ve become the stone, rather than the blade.

The Metric System

You only improve what you measure. But what to measure, and what to improve?

Metrics are the name of the game nowadays. Interaction tracking, A/B tests, user feedback, all of it to better shape the things we use and love. We’ve gotten quite good at the collection - most of it is automatic, watching our every action within a system and silently recording the decisions. It’s a giant snare of complexity. Yes, we’re quite good at raking in information. What we’re still struggling with is making sense of it all.

---

So let’s talk about Lift.

Lift is a nifty little social/ productivity hybrid app that I recently have taken a liking to. It lets me keep track of all the habits that I’d like to build, giving me some reinforcement as I build up a count over a week, and track my long-term progress as well. There’s also a social aspect, allowing comments and “props” to your progress, and the progress of others who are working towards the same goals.

In a recent app update, the developers shared some of their data that influenced one of the changes they made to the interface:

[P]eople check in to habits at a rate that’s six times greater than they give props and sixty times greater than they leave comments.

Knowing that data is extremely informative in directing product revisions. So the lovely people at Lift took this insight and came to a perfectly valid conclusion: habit check-ins are what most users want to do with the app. And then they used that conclusion as a basis for changes to the app to make the check-in process be as frictionless and enjoyable process.

There’s a fork in the road in all of this though, because between the data and the design decision, an important assumption was made: that little conclusion that that the fine folks at Lift came to. But it’s not the only possible one. I, for example, check-ins happen more often than other activity because “props” and comments are difficult actions for users to perform, or users don’t understand why they would want to give them in the first place.

And even if the conclusion was correct, and it is very much so in the realm of possibility that it could be, there is still the question of whether making what users already actively do – nearly to the point of exclusion of all other actions in the app – is in line with what the overall goals of the app are aiming for. This app is designed to put users on track with habits through positive reinforcement, and if the designers and developers thought that “props” and comments were an important enough part of that positive feedback to design, implement and test in the first place, does it really do justice to the vision of the app to further bury these interactions beneath the “frictionless” check-ins?

---

Obsession for the truth drives us into this collection craze; we want to know what works, and what doesn’t so we can make the best things. And so we collect, and we analyze, and we conclude. But having numbers to back up reasoning doesn’t necessarily make your logic any better or worse; it just gives more weight to whatever decision you do eventually settle on and that inertia may make it harder to change course at a later date.

By all means, let data inform your decisions. But don’t forget that design isn’t about making the most well-supported decisions. It’s about making the right ones for your users, your company, and your vision.

Don’t let the facts that are steer you away from the future you hope to be.

Cycles of Attention

I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.

My interest in Congress and U.S. government – truly, the only thing in the whole of the process that I find the slightest bit interesting – lies exclusively in the reelection cycle. The minute after being sworn it seems, senators, president, congressmen and women especially, go to work ensuring their incumbency. Fundraising, lobbyist appeasement, voting for a future ballot count rather than on character or principle, all of it is in service to wind up in the exact same spot, two or four or six years later.

There are parallels to this in the software engineering realm as well. Scrum cycles, sprints, all varieties and flavors of iterative development all focus on these small turnovers, making small changes that can fit within the scope of the time-box so you can wind up, all over again, at the start of another cycle, ready to make more small changes.

Corporations, second son and citizen of this great nation, are no more immune to this orbit. The shareholder demands, the stock price expectations, and the desire to see quarter after quarter of meeting or exceeding projections of analysts causes decisions to be made causes expectations to be made causes more demands to be made.

There are things in this world that have cycles of attention. We don’t like to complain when they serve the purpose of making sure the right people (and only our right people, of course) stay in power. We don’t complain when they keep adding whiz-bang features to the apps we keep in our pockets. And we certainly don’t complain when they grow our retirement nest egg.

---

Positive feedback can be a good thing. Positive feedback is a good thing. It keeps us alive in innumerable and unimaginable ways.

But there is also a great danger to incentivizing the wrong things in the feedback loop, or when the the feedback loop becomes corrupted to serve an entirely different purpose. The election cycle wasn’t meant to keep congressmen campaigning every day, but rather that to ensure that constituents remained satisfied with their elected representative. What started as a good and proper feedback loop for good governance has devolved into a way to make sure those in power remain in power until death do them part.

Once this cycle has aligned itself around the feedback, what can you do? What incentive does a House member have to back a bill that would benefit the health and safety of his constituents, but is currently unpopular in his district? What incentive does a software company have to spend a good long while implementing security on their platform when there are all these glittering features in a pile, just waiting to be built? What incentive does a company have to embark on a strategy that may initially eat into it’s bottom line but ultimately grow the company?

I’m not saying that congressmen or software engineers or companies don’t do these things; in fact, against better judgement, they still often will. But these cycles of attention make the choice difficult by incentivizing the wrong things.

---

How do we incentivize what’s right? Can we incentivize what’s right? Do we know what right is? That’s a judgment call that neither you, nor I, nor anyone, are qualified to make for the rest of the world.

Maybe instead we can pull ourselves out of the cycle.

Before it turns into a death spiral.

Why Are You Here

Have you ever stopped and thought to yourself just why and how you got to where you are?

On such occasions as when I do, there are moments when I think that I’ve been brought to the here and now and the who that I am by good fortune and a strong breeze. And I seize up with fear – I’ve spent all this time letting myself be awash at sea, without a port of calling.

There’s nothing wrong with being adrift, but there is everything wrong with not choosing whether or not you are drifting. The same is true for having a bullseye to aim for; if that particular target isn’t what you’ve aimed yourself for, or if the wood behind your arrowhead isn’t your will, your drive, then you are doing yourself a great disservice every moment you continue along that path.

Every action, conversation, decision, is an expression of who you are and who you want to be. Which means that everything you do should be in service of whatever conscious choice you makes to define yourself. Why not let yourself, not fate, be the biggest actor in shaping who you are, and why you are here.

Out, Out, Out

Should anyone be so inclined, they could come into my office and rifle through the drawers and cabinets. And on such an occasion, they would find a box overflowing with notebooks and notecards. And on every page, and every card, there’s often little more than a word or two, often so hastily scribbled that it’s nearly illegible.

There’s no reason why that pile exists other than sentimentality. On the rare occasion that they later hold any real or lasting value, the words, and the attached thoughts that go with them, are digitized and filed away. The cards are little more than a little monument to all the bad ideas I have. What is important is the act itself, of excavating thoughts as they come out of your mind. Set them aside, and instead of worrying that they’ll disappear, leaving you forever wondering of their worth, you’ll rest easy knowing the one hundred terrible ideas you had can be tossed away.

You have great things to do and great thoughts to think. Get the ideas, all of them, out, into the open, and let them thrive or wither on their own accord.

Aspect Ratio

Two weeks, too few.

Two weeks. Two weeks?

When I was first introduced to the scrum method and the product sprints that came along with it, that was my first reaction. Coming from an industry that has a timescale of years to market, two weeks for a product update and launch was more than just a blink of an eye; how could anything get accomplished.

Then I spent those two weeks updating and shipping a product. There is a surreal intensity of focus when you know there is a two week deadline to getting every last piece of functionality complete. But I also find myself throwing out perfectly good ideas because they couldn’t be implemented with the time at hand. The issue only worsened as the deadline approached; major pieces had to be clobbered together instead of truly designed and engineered because the clock was running.

---

There are trade offs to make when it comes to partitioning time and energy. I like to think of it like a box. If you’ve given yourself limited time to complete a project, you’ve got yourself a small box, and you can only throw in tasks that are so large; at the end of the day, the box has to close. If you’ve given yourself more time to do something, great! There’s a larger box instead. But there will always only be so many things that can fit.

It gets more complicated than that though, because not all tasks were created equal. Some things you’d like to do may depend on research you need to do first, so you’ve got to throw that in – and there goes even more of your time – before you can throw in what you really want to accomplish. Or maybe you have to wait on someone else to finish something before you can move forward. Sure, you can throw in that task, but if what you’re waiting on just doesn’t get done, all you’ll do is end up taking up space that you could use some other way.

In the end, that box of stuff you have has suddenly turned in to a puzzle, one where you often don’t know which pieces fit together or where they belong until long after they’ve been thrown in to your box.

Oh, let’s not forget, the longer you sit there and think about how to fit everything into that volume of space, remember that all the while it’s shrinking.

---

How do you escape this struggle of having two many things and not enough time to do them in? Of course the simple answer is to find yourself a bigger box that’s simple enough to do if you have nothing else to worry about; but when is life ever worry-free? Often times there are clients demanding deliverables, there are assembly lines waiting for a fix, there are budgets and bosses all conspiring to keep your box as small as possible, and smaller still. There are times when you need to be an advocate for your own time, yet there’s only so much more time you can claim before the rest of the world takes notice.

The real value, though, is found when you start to take apart all the amorphous, ill-defined tasks and projects that you need to fit inside your box and break them down into smaller and smaller components. You’ll gain two immensely important things: 1, you’ll start to get a more accurate assessment of how much time and space you really need, and 2, you find that these bite-sized pieces can be packed more densely. You may find that breaking things apart gives you a larger volume of Inge you need to do than when you started with, but you’ll also find that more of these pieces can fit together in your box.

---

Still, that says nothing for the box that’s too small to fit the one thing you need to get done in the time you have. And that’s the real concern; if you time-box your product development and your design, you necessarily limit what you can make to whatever horizons you’ve set for yourself.

A sprint cycle means two weeks of hard work, of stress, and perhaps occasional misery, but there is the gratification of having a finished work at the end of the sprint to show for it. But what of all the great things that take four weeks, or four years to build? Small steps of success can sometimes leave no room for giant leaps of greatness.

Autofocus

It’s never as simple as just pressing a button.

The middle of a semester is usually when the feeling hits. The lack of control over anything that happens during the day. The running from class to project meeting, to class again, to the library to start an assignment, to home for a minute only to realize there’s no food left in the house, back to the classroom one last time before heading home, for real this time, hopefully not spending the whole night catching up for tomorrow.

When everything is a project waiting to blow up, it’s hard not to become a demolition expert. How can you not come to love the rush of adrenaline as you finish something at the last minute – I know it’s not monster trucks or an NRA convention, but sometimes life can only be as exciting as finishing a paper on foreign trade policy minutes before it’s due.

Inevitably though, I do come to the realization that being suited up for defusing crises left and right is a sham, just a little bit of theater and drama that dresses up the fact that I’ve given any sense of control of what happens in my day. And once I realize that I’ve become an automaton, the real questions come next. What have I missed? What am I doing that I shouldn’t be? What if everything I am doing is leading towards the wrong thing? Have I eaten at all in the last two days?

---

High school, college – for better or worse, the first twenty-two or so years of our lives teach us how to sprint to the next deadline. Test next week, better spend the night before studying the facts and equations. Homework’s due today, so don’t forget to finish, or start it even, in the class right before it.

Real life – and let’s be honest here, I can only speculate because I’ve lived no more a real life than any other disillusioned college senior – doesn’t come at you with a stack of tasks to complete and semester-long work periods. Are you, am I, prepared to work for five years on a labor of love before it comes to fruition? Are we even truly prepared for anything longer than a week, or a day, or an overnight session spent in the library?

We limit ourselves with these short-term horizons. For the past four years, at the beginning of every semester, I remind myself of the importance of being planful, of the importance of preparing for the inevitable peaks and valleys in the amount of work there will be. And without a doubt, not a week later I’m barely able to keep five minutes ahead of what’s next. Homework assignments done left untouched for a week, before being hastily completed the morning before submission. Tests are prepared for by spending the night prior re-reading the auto-pilot notes scribbled down during the times I actually attended class. Papers and projects get lip service until there’s a looming deadline, in the name of needing “pressure” in order to get anything done.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that college encourages this behavior, but there are certainly exceedingly few consequences for adopting a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants attitude. forgive the narcissism, but anyone with a moderate intellect and a coffee maker can succeed with little more than the next day’s agenda. Spend the day in classes, and spend the night getting ready for the next day’s classes. Rinse and repeat.

---

There is no easy button for life. Nor is there some crystal ball for us to divine what one of the thousand things we could be doing at any one moment will pay off the most down the line. We don’t have the luxury of some algorithm telling us when the most important part of the picture is clear and sharp. We have to make that distinction ourselves

It’s certainly possible to sit back and be led, by the tasks before us, by the dates and times and events that show up on our calendar. But a great thing rarely gets its start by being pencilled in for an hour-long appointment, or by being assigned by a professor or manager. Great things happen when we take control of our lens and do some adjustments to get what matters into focus.

What do we really learn in college? I hear a lot of things, from a lot of smart people, and the best of them amount to this: college is a little badge you can wear that tells the world that you can, in fact, complete a project. It may not be a labor of love, or a labor at all, but it is four or so years spent working towards a singular goal.

Life’s tough, but even so, sometimes it’s better to take off the demolition suit and get a real grip on the world around you.

The Nerve

Four in the morning courage? How about fifteen-minute resolve.

Courage isn’t the right word.

Courage isn’t the wrong word either. Courage certainly has its place in life. When you’re thrown into a lion’s den, for example. Or fighting the 7-foot-tall champion of an invading army armed with nothing but a slingshot. Courage is awfully useful then.

Still, courage isn’t what you necessarily want or need to be a first-world success. It doesn’t take courage, for example, to wait until the last night before a paper is due, and then spend the next six hours sleepless and mainlining caffeine in order to finish aforementioned paper. It doesn’t take courage to spend fifteen minutes, or hours, or days, banging your head against the wall to trying to build a wearable body monitoring system. And if I may be so bold as to be self-indulgent for just a moment, it doesn’t take courage to find an hour every day to write and publish to a website.

In situations like these, you need the nerve.

---

The nerve is a much more subtle thing than the oft-heralded courage. The nerve is not accompanied by boldness or bravado. Instead, having the nerve is most needed to accomplish the most ordinary of things, the things in our lives that don’t require war-paint or battle cries, but are instead fought in our mind. The nerve wages it’s battles against inertia, against entropy; staying at the keyboard for another fifteen minutes versus the allure of the couch, the remote, the pint of ben & Jerry’s in the freezer.

It certainly isn’t brave or courageous to sit at a keyboard and write lines of code or paragraphs, to spend the night teaching yourself something new instead of sleeping like a normal human being. But it does take resolve. It does take nerve. Because afterward, after a day of gathering up the nerve to write 500 not-quite-terrible words, the only thing that remains is the knowledge that tomorrow you’ll come back and do it all over again. After a week, there’s nothing but knowing that another week of more of the same is in store. A month. A year. A lifetime.

It takes a lot more than courage to wake up every day and do more or less the exact same thing you did the day before, knowing full well that you may fail just as badly as you did yesterday.

---

Courage is great when you’re hunting for dragons. Courage is great for that moments in your life when you need to make a last stand. But the nerve is what you want when you need to make an every day stand. It takes the nerve to do something incredibly ordinary. And it takes a hell of a lot of nerve to take a whole lot of ordinary and turn it into something extraordinary.

The Aperture

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

If you’ve ever worked with a camera that doesn’t come attached to a pocket sized computer and the Internet, you probably know a little something about the aperture; and even if your photography experience is exclusively through Instagram, Mother Nature has lovingly provided two of them for you, only she deigned to call them pupils instead. An aperture is just a adjustable opening, limiting the amount of light that makes it through the lens and to the film, or the sensor, or your retina.

When it’s bright out, and there’s enough light to go around, the aperture can be set any way you’d like; make it a tiny pinhole for a wide depth of field, or open it up for a really shallow focus.

But when it gets dark out, when it’s too dim for the film or the sensor, there isn’t much of a choice: open up the aperture all the way, and narrow your plane of focus as much as possible, lest your photos turn into a blurry or unlit mess.

---

When things get crazy at work or at school, and I go heads down on some project that’s eating up all my mental cycles, my plane of focus narrows as well. Most emails are avoided, or outright deleted immediately. Most text messages, IMs, Facebook pokes, and whatever other silly methods of contact my friends try to us go unanswered. Most of the news I normally read goes un-viewed. Most of the other things that I normally do in my life go undone.

Did you catch that? Because there is an important qualifier, buried in there: “most”. Because some emails are important enough to read and reply to. Some texts are important enough to respond to. Some news is still important enough to read. Some things are important enough not to let go undone.

---

When it comes undone, what departs? When you find yourself too busy to do all the things you normally do in a day, what do you keep around, and what do you decide can be put off? Whether you know it or not, when you limit the time you have available to accomplish the things you want to do, you’re also making a judgement about what’s most important in your life. You’ve narrowed your focus, and with it, you’ve cut out everything, whether consciously or otherwise, that you don’t believe is important enough to devote time or attention to.

What we let stay tells us a lot about ourselves. Do we keep our social network addictions, sneaking peeks of our updates as we power through the all-nighter on some godawful engineering project? Do we instead blow off some steam by playing the latest edition of Angry Birds? Or perhaps instead we cannot possibly let a text go unanswered for more than five seconds.

---

Eventually, busy – the real, dire consequences, must-get-this-done kind of busy – passes. What then? Do all the distractions, all the mental drains that we declared were not important enough to us just a moment ago, come flooding back in, as if we decided to demolish the dam we just recently built?

There is certainly value in distraction. And even more so, there is certainly concern that what we decide is important when our time is precious may not be the right things cut is it so much to at the very least stop and ask ourselves about the value of what we leave behind.

Our time and attention are so precious. If it wasn’t worth having under pressure, what’s the use of having it around when we’re no longer under the gun?