I took advantage of being at a very dark-sky location (Mt. Washington skiing resort on Vancouver Island) to observe the planet Mercury at it’s greatest Eastern elongation, right after the sunset. Being the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury is notoriously difficult to see. Today, it reached its widest separation of 18.7 degrees east of the Sun.
I walked outside of our chalet in the Alpine Village and could easily see the bright planet right above the tree tops, just as predicted by my astronomy app (see below). I didn’t have any camera besides my iPhone or even a tripod, but still was able to take the above hand-held photo, thanks to Apple’s magic of computational photography.
There, Mercury is the bright dot in the lower right, just above the tree line. Well above it, on a nearly-vertical line, are the two brightest stars in the constellation of Aries, the Ram – the orange giant Hamal (“the lamb” in Arabic), whose diameter is 15 times the Sun’s, and slightly dimmer Sheratan below it. The brightest dot in the upper left of the picture is Jupiter.
Through a telescope, Mercury would have exhibited a half-illuminated waning phase, but I was happy enough to see it with the naked eye, on its best-looking day of the year and under some of the best local viewing conditions.
I’ve been listening to an audiobook called “Make It Stick” by Peter C. Brown et al. In the past, I’ve come across to references to this work on educational methodologies and underlying psychological principles in my work as a university professor. I even recorded a video note to my students on the so-called curve of forgetting (see below). This time, I stumbled upon a review of this book in the “Perpetual Chess” podcast and decided to listen to the entire thing. It certainly doesn’t disappoint in terms of the academic soundness of the presented ideas and a good mix of psychological principles and practical takeaways. As I listen to it, I am constantly tempted to ask my daughter to listen to some parts that relate to study skills in the hopes that she would be able to use these techniques for herself. I actually did so the other day and, in the spirit of what is argued in the book, even asked her to summarize what she learned in her own words. I probably used up quite a bit of my parenting credit with her, as she obliged. I am not sure if that was in any way productive, but for what it’s worth, here is my own summary of that part (advice for students) that we listened to together:
Embrace the fact that effective learning is challenging. Self-quizzing as the main study technique is very effective.
Practice, i.e. retrieving the learned information from memory, is most effective if it is spaced in time and interleaved. Spacing means that instead of long continuous practice sessions that immediately follow the introduction of the new material, we should allow some between the sessions in order to some amount of forgetting to take place. The effort of trying to recall the information makes it stick better. Interleaving means that several topics/subjects/skills are better studied together, rather than in blocks of similar examples/problems. This approach models real-life situations, where identification of the types of problems is necessary. Spacing and interleaving are so called “desirable difficulties“, and they subjectively do not feel as effective as massed practice. One needs to “trust the system”, though, to benefit from it.
Elaboration is an effective technique for reflecting on the learned material. It means formulating the concepts in your own words and using analogies with already-familiar concepts (e.g., warming your hands on a cup of coffee as an example of thermal conduction).
One thing I noticed as a result of this exercise is that my “spaced repetition” video needs a footnote that it is not re-reading of the material that is beneficial, but self-quizzing of it.
Every time I travel and have a chance to live in a new place for an extended period of time, I appreciate how quiet our little cul-de-sac in Victoria is. During our last stay in Paris during my sabbatical, our apartment was on the ground floor, and the entrance from the street led directly to the living room, or séjour, as our Parisian friends called it. When people outside would sit on the steps leading to our door (I suppose, that was a convenient place to sit on the relatively lively street) and have a conversation, it would sound as if they were sitting inside and talking to us. As much as it was nice to have a chance to listen to some native French speakers, it made us appreciate the relative silence of our usual suburban living. Funny enough, the sound insulation in our Paris dwelling was so marginal that it worked, or rather didn’t, both ways. When my daughter or I would start playing violin (being very diligent students) the people outside would often leave, not because of our poor skills (I hope), but because the music would interfere with their conversation. Another evidence of the power of the music.
Yesterday, our daughter invited my wife and me to visit her after-school robotics club. I was quite impressed by how her teacher handled the problems that the students encountered while working on their codes and mechanical designs. When they reported a problem, he would ask a variation of this question: “What element do you think needs to be changed?” I think this question is incredibly powerful, because it simultaneously encourages the students to do two things: to critically analyze the current state of the project and to identify the next specific step in the solution.
For example, my daughter was writing a code for her Lego EV3-based robot to undergo a mission consisting of driving to a specific spot on the table while avoiding the specified boundaries, performing a 720-degree turn while keeping one wheel inside the target spot and returning back to the starting area. She had trouble with returning back to the base, but with the above prompt from the teacher was able to identify the problematic lite in her code – the robot was turning a bit too much during one of the turns on the way back – and to fix it. Another student was having an issue with the design of his robot – it was getting stuck on its way to the target spot. The same question helped him to realize that the wheels were catching on the base, and the solution was quickly found.
I would certainly like to borrow this question for my own use – in the interactions with my students in the courses I teach and in the lab, with my daughter (helping her to solve the problem at hand without offering a ready-made solution) and directed to myself as a means of teasing out a constructive way forward in whatever I do without being overly critical for the apparent failure of the current state of affairs (the question asks to think about one specific aspect to be changed, not the worthiness of the entire project).
I’ve been thinking about how much we value things made for us by someone special. Two of such things are on top of the mind for me personally (probably because they are sitting on my desk right in front of me).
One is a small leather wallet made by a long-time friend, who is a wife of my shodo (Japanese calligraphy) teacher. She has always amazed me with her curiosity in learning various crafts and ability to execute them at a very high level and with tremendous attention to detail. There is also a 5 yen (go-en) coin that she put inside the wallet as a symbol of friendship, and which I always keep there.
Another special thing is a wooden caster for my coffee mug. It was made by my daughter about a year ago. She used a wood-burner to engrave a cute coded love message for me, which always makes me smile. Later, I tried to reciprocate in kind and made a desk decoration for my daughter with some of the things that were on my mind – symbols of ancient Greek cardinal virtues. Curiously, the word “cardinal” is derived from the Greek “cardo” – meaning “heart” or “hinge”. I particularly like a poetic interpretation that the practice of the cardinal virtues is the hinge on which hangs the door to the good life.
I noticed that in many books mindfulness is described as an opposite of being disconnected from the present moment and being lost in thoughts about the past or the future. More specifically, what is meant there is ruminating on regrets about the past or worrying about the future. I am wondering, though, whether reminiscence about the past is necessary a negative thing. For example, mentally reliving a happy memory could potentially be a nice stress relief, if nothing else. There is also a potential argument for regrets in general sometimes serving as a useful learning tool.
But I wonder if a positive case could be made for something in between these two kinds of past-dwelling. For example, considering that the definition of nostalgia is “sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations,” I think that feeling nostalgic implies feeling happy and sad at the same time. I also wonder if then, by definition, every person has something to feel nostalgic about . After all, most people probably have something with happy personal associations that is now in the past.
What do I feel nostalgic about? I certainly don’t leave with the constant feeling of nostalgia, but if I dig for it, it would probably have to be the time when I practiced kendo, or, even earlier, aikido. I miss the sense of awe of participating in something so deeply rooted in a foreign and fascinating tradition and of being aware of the formative effect of the practice on my life.
These are the kinds of thoughts I am having when present moment awareness proves elusive.
Continuing our family tradition of reading physical, hardcopy books before bed, we started reading the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Those were my favourite reads when I was growing up, and the one-volume collection of “all four novels and fifty-six adventure” was the first book that my wife and I bought for ourselves when we were graduate students. It took me some time to find this massive tome in the bookcase, and we started from the beginning – “A Study in Scarlet.”
Both my daughter and I enjoyed the description of how Dr. Watson got introduced to Sherlock Holmes’ extraordinary deductive abilities. There is one episode early in the book, though, where Holmes describes his approach to accumulating knowledge, with which I don’t completely agree (in my defence, neither does Dr. Watson, i.e., presumably, Doyle himself). There, Watson is astonished that Holmes didn’t know about the heliocentric model of the solar system, and that he was intent on forgetting it as soon as possible after learning about it. Here is how Holmes justified it:
” “You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance , therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” “
This is a compelling argument, but I suspect that the assumption about the rigidity of the boundaries of one’s brain-attic is wrong, particularly in the modern times. Perhaps, another, more up-to-date analogy is with the contents of the Photos app on a smartphone. Certainly, you could max out the memory if you take a ton of useless pictures and videos, but you can also upgrade your cloud storage or even the phone itself. And the AI-based search algorithms continually improve, to the point that the suggested compilations of “memories” rival those put together by humans. So the danger of not being able to retrieve useful information is not particularly great. Also, even without computer-augmented mental abilities, collecting broad information trains memory, if nothing else. Improved memory, in turn, increases our capacity to accumulate more information and, possibly, convert it to knowledge.
Incidentally, I’ve learned that Doyle himself was quite a bit more of a renaissance man than his most famous character, although even Holmes was an amateur violinist. In addition to being world-famous as a writer, Doyle had a successful medical carrier and was an accomplished athlete (footballer, golfer, boxer, skier and one of the first bodybuilding enthusiasts) and an amateur, but serious and successful, architect. I don’t think that this impressive lists of pursuits and accomplishments would have been possible if he had limited his interests and studies to medicine, which was his intended profession early on.
In defense of Sherlock Holmes’ approach, I think thatbeing selective about what to learn and what to ignore probably protected him from falling victim to the Dunning-Krueger effect. That’s a cognitive bias, where we overestimate or abilities due to limited competence in a particular domain. In other words, we often theorize or even act without knowing enough to even realize that we don’t know enough about what we are doing. For example, like me talking about cognitive psychology because of my interest in it but without any systematic knowledge of the field.
During the past Holiday season, motivated by helping my daughter to set up her new virtual reality (VR) headset, I’ve noticed my own renewed interest in computer games, and I must say that I am quite happy about it. In the past, I’d been fascinated both by the gaming technology and the deep storytelling aspects of some of the best games. However, gradually, I came to see gaming as such a profound waste of time that I somehow managed to convince myself that I didn’t enjoy it anymore.
Well, I am happy to report that this is not true. In fact, I think I can quite easily rationalize that gaming (in moderation, of course, etc., etc.) is good for you, or at least for me. Seriously though, I do believe that it healthy to have something in your life that you do in small amounts and without expecting any recognition for your efforts. This idea reminds me of the book I read last year called “The Little Book of Ikigai” by Ken Mogi. Whether it could be called ikigai in the lofty sense of the word, like something that gives a meaning to life, or not, but solving puzzles is a fundamentally fascinating activity, and it is even more so in VR!
In the spirit of keeping a tradition of publishing a list of books that I’ve read outside of work in the past year, here is the list for 2023. I believe in active reading, that is, taking notes on what I learn in the process, even if that relates to the writing style, the genre, the authors, etc. I am not always diligent with the note-taking, but I am always glad when I am in the retrospect.
Note: The links below are affiliate links, so if you follow them to Amazon and buy something, I might get paid some money.
I really like the high-tech thriller genre and also find the bio of Suarez inspiring. He is a tech consultant turned author. Makes me wonder whether I need permission to do the same. Maybe, the first thing I need is discipline to write more regularly.
Something about the benefits of vulnerability. I remember that it did resonate, but don’t recall in what way exactly. The unrealistic expectations that the society puts on us – something along these lines.
I came across this book by browsing Daniel Pink’s website. It explores the analogy between innovations in social groups and organizations and phase transitions in physical systems. Dynamic equilibrium of strong bonds and entropy – need separation of the phases, but also an easy flow of information between them. Analogy with franchises and original films. One of the core messages: Equally love your soldiers (who are running the franchises) and artists (who are creating the original ideas).
A reminder of the gap between the events that happen around us and our reactions to them. Critique of the “positive thinking” approach.
A neat discussion of our relation to the older generation. We think in terms of “us vs. them” and fear losing individuality, but our past experience points to the opposite – we gain individuality as we age.
Short, but sweet. I liked the concept of classifying the regrets into one of the four main categories: foundational, boldness, ethics, connection. Anticipating a future regret can be productive, if it would fall into one f these categories. If not, it’s better to be a “satisfiser” and make a quick decision.
Thinking is for doing, feeling is for thinking. When dealing with a regret, self-disclose, exercise self-compassion (think what you would say to a friend in a similar situation) and use self-distancing (talk to yourself in a third person).
The concept of jumping to the “second curve” of once life trajectory, once the performance starts to decline.
Utilize the accumulated crystallized intelligence once the fluid intelligence begins to fade.
Need of shedding the attachment to success, which is rooted in the fear of failure, in order make jumping onto the second curve easier. Good read.
“What you do is what you are” by Dan Horowitz (audio).
Values and virtues are not the same. Values are what you believe, and virtues are what you do. If you don’t do what you believe, you won’t become what you’d like to be.
This book was good, if a bit short. I like the idea of optimizing the personal well-being on the timescale of the day, instead of the lifestyle. This approach can probably create problems related to planning and discipline if applied beyond reason, but it certainly help with small decisions, which accumulate for a larger affect. Tom Rath also wrote “Eat, sleep move” (which I haven’t read). He refers to it in this book, and the title is self-explanatory – prioritize healthy eating, exercise and sleep on the daily basis. Over-arching thesis of the book, though is that applying effort and resources to increase well-being of other people is more beneficial for you than directly aiming at maximizing your own happiness.
“Can’t hurt me” by David Goggins (audio).
Another Navy SEAL – inspired read. This one is a memoir, which is a bit of a different read for me. It’s is difficult to fill Jocko Williks’ shoes in this genre, though. I dropped the book at the third chapter – the bogus claims and inconsistencies are too difficult to ignore. Paraphrasing Thoreau, what the author doesn’t say shouts so loudly in my ears, I cannot hear what he is saying. In retrospect, I rarely have such negative impressions of books as of this one.
In the modern society, playfulness is almost automatically associated with something opposite of a serious endeavour, but this is a mistake. Playfulness has serious consequences on our health and productivity, both individually and in groups. It is obviously important for children in terms of teaching them the value of risk-taking, social interactions, etc., but it is also important for adults in terms of stress management, promoting creativity and developing social skills. This book is preaching to the converted, but I enjoyed it.
“Stealing fire” by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal (audio).
This book points out the importance of altered states of consciousness for peak performance, particularly by groups of people. I find the attempts to support the arguments by numbers laughable – they would be ridiculously easy to pick apart by any critic with a functioning pre-frontal cortex. Incidentally, it is over-riding the activity of this part of the brain that is apparently needed for transcending the individuality and achieving the extasis – tapping into the hive mind. I am admittedly not a fan of the hive model of the future humankind. It is certainly fascinating what can be achieved by a hive mentality, but somehow the prospect of forgoing the free will completely while keeping the creativity doesn’t sit well with me. According to the authors, forward-thinking individuals are taking the excursions over the artificial fences erected by the society (the “pales” of the Church, the Body and the State) to take advantage of the altered states of consciousness. Perhaps, they are right, and we just don’t notice it, just like we don’t want to admit that we are becoming cyborgs by wearing eyeglasses, prosthetic devices or wearable electronics. For what it’s worth, I also do drink coffee every day, and it probably does something to my consciousness (hopefully, good things mostly).
“Thinking, fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman (audio).
I was familiar with the main ideas in this book, as they’ve been re-told by other authors, but the writing is very good. It shows why Kahneman is a Nobel laureate.
I liked the idea of the importance of introducing names to concepts that would otherwise be collections of properties and facts, e.g., “System 1” and “System 2” of the fast and slow thinking, respectively. It is easier for people to relate to agents, i.e. characters with names and assumed traits and personalities, than to sets of properties. It is also important for the names to me short, because the more information we need to keep in our short-term memory while pronouncing the name the less is our capacity for thinking.
“Four thousand weeks” by Oliver Burkeman (audio).
An excellent summary of the author’s experience with reviewing the vast literature on the finite nature of human life and its relationship with time. For me, one of the practical takeaways is limiting the number of the “on the go” projects to a maximum of three for any given day in order to avoid the feeling of overwhelm.
An entertaining discussion of the common key messages from the significant philosophical and religious works of the past, including the limitations of the specific ideas. I liked the discussion of the stoics in particular, with an added twist of the balance between striving to improve your external conditions and to accept them, while focussing on managing your internal reactions.
A nice collection of rule-of-thumb principles for improving physical quality of life based on a wide, if not scientifically rigorous, literature survey. Useful takeways for me personally: tackle all three components listed in the title of the book simultaneously, because they are closely related and avoid long periods of inactivity during the day.
Upon listening to this book, I found many examples of ikigai in my own various activities. Building gunpla is a particularly good example – you start small and don’t expect any particular success or recognition for your efforts. It is truly an autotelic activity.
This isn’t rally a book, but rather a collection of recordings, probably lectures, by Csikszentmihalyi himself. It is different from his book “Flow: The psychology of optimal experience“, which one of my all-time favourite reads, but it covers the same concepts. It certainly hasn’t been a waste of time to listen to it. Csikszentmihalyi is a great speaker, and listening to this book confirmed to me that it is great to listen to the author reading their own works, whenever there is an opportunity. You receive a clear sense of what the intended emphasis is, and this added emotional content makes the material easier to internalise, if nothing else.
I am glad I picked up an audio version, because this book is huge! I like Isaacson’s biographies, and this one did not disappoint. Musk is a polarising character, but the book itself made me think about some questions, on which I would typically fall into one of the two distinct camps, without much consideration. Those are “Does it actually take a somewhat sociopathic individual to inflict a major change on the society?” and “Is it ok to be a jerk in some areas of your life if you are doing wonderful things in another?” Upon consideration, I think my personal answers to these questions are “Very likely” and “No”.
I didn’t write any notes on this book as I was listening to it, and now I am struggling to recall what I’ve learned from it. This observation is probably saying something about the book by itself.
I’ve been a huge fan of Arnold since my teen years, and this book is my favourite of the year. I really enjoyed that it was read by Arnold himself, and it did’t disappoint in terms of the content as well. I found the autobiographical take interesting and Schwarzenegger’s approach to the various challenges that he faced throughout his life quite motivating. There are certain parallels with Jocko Willink’s no-nonsense ability to focus and a good balance between privacy and vulnerability. I will seriously consider re-listening to this book in the future.
I came back to this series on Stoics and the cardinal virtues after a break (it gets repetitive after a while), and found that I missed it and Holiday’s style of presenting it.
This book is, technically, the first one in the series on the four cardinal virtues (courage, temperance, justice and wisdom), but I listened to it after the “Discipline is destiny”, mostly for the sake of completeness. I am ready for another break from the Stoics now.
Last summer in Paris, I saw, almost by chance, the sculpture by Giuseppe Penone called “L’Arbre des voyelles”, or “The tree of vowels.” I wasn’t specifically planning on visiting it, but it was marked as a point of interest on Google Maps, and I was curious to see what it was. It is located in the Tuillleries garden, in the somewhat wilder and greener part of the park. As the name suggests, it’s a sculpture of a tree. It is incredibly realistic, despite being mage of bronze. As I later learned upon doing some reading, Penone used a 30-meter uprooted oak tree as a model, eventually casting it in bronze. The bronze tree looks like it really belongs in the garden. In fact, my first thought was that it could have been easily replaced by the original tree without any loss of artistic value. But then, of course, provoking this kind of thoughts was probably the artist’s intention.
Regarding the deeper meaning, when I was looking at the sculpture, I was focussed on the roots and completely missed the significance of the five branches. At the points where the branches touch the ground, there were planted five different species of oak trees. So the significance of the artwork (or at least one of the points it conveys) is to show the role of human creativity in the evolution of the environment.
Initially, I also didn’t understand the significance of the name of the sculpture, but reading about it later, learned that the roots apparently resemble the vowels A, E, I, O, U. Penone mentioned that he was inspired by the hypothetical alphabet of the druids. On the other hand, these letters are also associated with the famous sonnet “Voyelles,” written by Arthur Rimbaud in 1871. (I read it on the Internet, so it must be true!)
For what it’s worth, it’s a nice association. Here is the original sonnet:
Voyelles
A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes:
A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles,
Golfes d’ombre; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes,
Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d’ombelles;
I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles
Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes;
U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
Paix des pâtis semés d’animaux, paix des rides
Que l’alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux;
O, suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges,
Silences traversés des Mondes et des Anges:
—O l’Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux!
Here is a English translation by Oliver Bernard: (“Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems (1962)”):
Vowels
A Black, E white, I red, U green, O blue : vowels,
I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:
A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies
Which buzz around cruel smells,
Gulfs of shadow; E, whiteness of vapours and of tents,
Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cow-parsley;
I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips In anger or in the raptures of penitence;
U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas,
The peace of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of the furrows
Which alchemy prints on broad studious foreheads;
O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds,
Silences crossed by Worlds and by Angels:
O the Omega, the violet ray of Her Eyes!
And I also liked this translation into Russian by Nikolai Gumilev:
Гласные
А — черно, бело — Е, У — зелено, О — сине,
И — красно… Я хочу открыть рождение гласных.
А — траурный корсет под стаей мух ужасных,
Роящихся вокруг как в падали иль в тине,
Мир мрака; Е — покой тумана над пустыней,
Дрожание цветов, взлет ледников опасных.
И — пурпур, сгустком кровь, улыбка губ прекрасных
В их ярости иль в их безумье пред святыней.
У — дивные круги морей зеленоватых,
Луг, пестрый от зверья, покой морщин, измятых
Алхимией на лбах задумчивых людей.
О — звона медного глухое окончанье,
Кометой, ангелом пронзенное молчанье,
Омега, луч Её сиреневых очей.
