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Yuval Levin on EconTalk

I'm not familiar with Yuval Levin (I don't even remember his previous appearance on EconTalk, which I must have heard), but he was on EconTalk recently talking about his new book. The book sounds interesting enough, and if I had room on my to-read shelf for it, I'd probably add it, but I don't so I won't. But the bits of conversation that emerged centered around three things that really stuck with me. First was the idea of formative institutions. One view of people is that children know what' … (Continued)

The Paradox of Pain

I'm currently about six months into Invisalign. It took about a week to rewire my brain from feeling that it was weird to be wearing the aligners, to it being weird not to wear them. Now, I actually start to feel a little on-edge when I can't get somewhere to brush and put the trays back in. And things definitely seem to be moving in the right direction. So far so good. One thing I was told early on by one of the non-certified assistants at the orthodontist's office is that a common pattern … (Continued)

Why do hackathons work?

Reading about Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, both histories emphasize that part of the successful R&D formula is hiring the best minds you can, giving them resources, and then leaving them alone to follow their curiosity wherever it goes. (Expect that they produce something, but not what or when.) The closing chapters of "Range" by David Epstein echo this as well. Hyper-specialization is a trap. Great results in the lab can be achieved by recognizing promising people, bringing them into your lab, an … (Continued)

The world that C, Unix, and C++ Built

It is difficult to comprehend what modern computers would look like without Bell Labs. In some abstract way I was aware of this, but reading Kernighan's new Unix history/memoir really hit that home when he talked about Bjarne Stroustrup developing C++ while he too worked at Bell Labs. Stroupstrup's name and the fact that he invented C++ was lodged deep in my brain from my high school AP Computer Science class where it was just one of those factoids in the textbook that was bolded to indicate th … (Continued)

Gains in Computer Hardware

From Unix: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan As an example of how computing hardware has become cheaper and more powerful over the years, a 1978 PWB paper by Ted Dolotta and Mashey described the development environment, which supported over a thousand users: "By most measures, it is the largest known Unix installation in the world." It ran on a network of 7 PDP-11's with a total of 3.3 megabytes of primary memory and 2 gigabytes of disk. That's about one thousandth of a typical lapt … (Continued)

Attention Spans and Perfection

Excerpts from an interview with Tom West and Tracy Kidder, three years after the publication of The Soul of a New Machine: West: If somebody walks into your office after five minutes of staring at a sheet of paper and asks: "Should we make this register sixteen bits wide or thirty-two bits wide?" you know the answer to this question if you have been through it over and over and over again. So you can tell him the answer, and he goes back and puts it in. The he sits around for another five m … (Continued)

Trust and Risk

"Trust is risk, and risk avoidance is the name of the game in business." Tom West quoted in The Soul of a New Machine (p.131), by Tracy Kidder. The business always wants to avoid risk. The hidden downside to this is that low-risk businesses also tend to be very un-trusting. This is dissatisfying to people who value autonomy. If you insist on low-risk, eventually they remove themselves from your labor pool.

Recent Adventures in Plumbing

Don't ever neglect an opportunity to learn something, even if it doesn't seem all that relevant right now. Two or three months ago, the metal rod that lifted the stopper in our master bedroom sink rusted away so the drain was permanently closed. So we fished out the stopper and set it aside, but that left a big hole in the sink, perfect for dropping things into. So, figuring it couldn't be that hard, I watched some YouTube videos, got the parts from Lowe's, and set to replacing the drain and st … (Continued)

SteerMouse and the Logitech G604

Steph and I are in the middle of the process of moving (big moving day is the day after tomorrow) and so it's been a long week of work, eat takeout, pack until bedtime. People talk about how you have more stuff than you think in your house when you go to pack, and for better or worse I will say that we have about as much stuff as I thought we would have, it just takes a long time to pack  it all. But one bright spot this week has been SteerMouse adding support for the Logitech … (Continued)

USPSA and Friendship Distance

At dinner last night, the topic came up again about how I've gotten a great deal of satisfaction out of shooting USPSA, but that I've never really made friends (in the "hang out and drink beer together"/"help you move"/"bail you out of jail" way) through USPSA. I've met lots of interesting USPSA people and had good internet conversations, but that only goes so far. All of the shooting friends that I've made were made shooting either IDPA or Parrish's Action Pistol matches. … (Continued)

Reputation and Resilience

If your reputation can't absorb a few blows, it wasn't worth anything in the first place. Ryan Holiday, Ego Is The Enemy It's so tempting to think that your reputation is fragile. You feel like you spent years building it up, and then someone posts something negative about you. More people pile on. People you've never heard of before, who just enjoy the bandwagon of hate. People so empty that they have to keep busy pointing out the flaws of others to avoid facing their own. Meanwhile, … (Continued)

Improving Reading

I wouldn't call myself a voracious reader, but I try to spend 30 minutes each day doing serious, dedicated reading. Not reading to pass the time while I wait for my food at a restaurant or scrolling through my RSS reader after dinner. Sitting in a comfortable chair, with my phone out of reach, a book in my hand, a notebook within reach, with nothing else to do, for half an houror more. I am also in a never-ending experiment with different ways to take notes on books in a way that gives me the b … (Continued)

Fixing the Door

Tonight's project was a lesson in the problem not being what you thought it was. A few months ago, the front door started "catching" when we went to close the deadbolt. You had to pull the door tight to get the deadbolt to close smoothly. I thought it might just be the house settling or the door frame shifting, but Steph pointed out the house is almost 20 years old. It shouldn't be settling that much anymore. Regardless, I set out the other night to pull the deadbolt apart and see what I could … (Continued)

Areas of Influence

The smaller area you try to improve, the more effect and influence you can have. You are a tiny sliver of your country, but you are a tenth of your team at work, a quarter of your family, and one half of your marriage. You are also, of course, 100% of your own self.

On Moderation

As you move about on the internet, on each page, ask yourself "Who moderates this?" If it's someone's Twitter feed, that person doesn't just moderate it, they directly control it. Every tweet is either written by them or retweeted by them. But if you click one of their tweets and Twitter shows you the responses, who moderates those? Nobody. Literally. Even the person who originally posted the tweet, unless they block the person that replied, has no control of the content shown just below to … (Continued)