Category: Books

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Invention vs. discovery

Mathematics has been a big part of my life since middle school, when, out of curiosity and with encouragement of my teacher, I became interested in solving mathematical puzzles and participating in inter-school competitions. Subsequently, it led me to studying applied math in the university and later doing research and teaching fluid mechanics as an engineering professor. Ironically, ever since research became my career, I somehow stopped being particularly curious about the mathematics itself, and started treating it as tool for doing my work.

About a year ago, I read book called “Is God a mathematician?“ by Mario Livio. It prompted me to think about math from less utilitarian and more philosophical perspective. A curious feature of math is that it can be considered both as a human creation (e.g., a language that is useful for performing calculations and expressing laws of physics) and as something existing on it’s own and what humans only discover (e.g., like the natural laws themselves). It seems that the latter aspect is definitely present, despite Albert Einstein’s belief that math is, essentially, a set of human-made tools. In 1960, Eugene Wigner, a Nobel laureate physicist, even wrote a paper in Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” which discussed precisely that – how it is possible that exercises in “pure” mathematics prompt post-factum discoveries of natural phenomena.

As a personal takeaway from reading Livio’s book, I feel a bit better about spending time thinking about mathematics per se without worrying whether it is particularly relevant for my field of research or whether a particular research question has already been answered. It is also kind of amusing to learn that even intellectual giants like Richard Feinmann went through a variation of this thinking process with surprising results, e.g. when he consciously decided to apply himself to re-tracing the steps of a well-known solution describing spinning plates that eventually lead to a Nobel-prize-level breakthrough.

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Self-determination theory in action

I’ve just finished listening to a good audiobook called “Indistractable” by Nir Eyal and Julie Li. Since I’ve started keeping track of what I read/listen to in a series of annual blog posts, I developed a personal criterion for the quality of the book based on whether it makes me want to read more on some of the topics it covers. in that sense, “Indistractible” is good because it pointed me towards several rabbit holes to explore. One of them is the self-determination theory (SDT) in psychology. It argues that for achieving optimal performance, in addition to (indeed, more than) the carrot-and-stick of external motivation, people need emotional nourishment in the form of autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Autonomy refers to agency – the ability to make independent decisions and take responsibility for their consequences.

Competence is the opportunity to become better at the activity.

Relatedness is the social aspect of the activity – it is the sense of appreciation of your achievement by other people.

My daughter told a story the other day that perfectly illustrated the SDT concept. She entered middle school this year, and they were having a get-together with other students during a recess, where everyone shared a talent they had. My daughter showed a combo of hip-hop moves that she’d been working on in a dance class outside of school. She was delighted that it was met with enthusiasm, particularly by older students. Clearly, she was quite happy about her hip-hop endeavours and was keen to keep exploring it further – thinking about getting together with other interested kids to learn new break-dance moves. It was just what SDT requited: she had autonomy (hip-hop was her activity of choice), competence (several years of practice) and relatedness (the other kids like this stuff and want to learn it).

I thought that perhaps by being conscious about the daily emotional diet, where autonomy, competence and relatedness of the mundane activities play a role of macro-nutrients, we could deliberately manufacture positive experiences like that, rather that occasionally stumbling upon them.

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Samurai Tales book

While browsing through my bookshelf, I stumbled on a book called “Samurai Tales” by Romulus Hillsborough. I bought this book at an airport, during one of my first trips to Japan. I read it then, during the flight, and found it to be a nice match for my interest in Japanese history and all things related to kendo, while unmistakably written for a by a foreigner. Incidentally, an advice for foreigners that I came across early on in my becoming fascinated with Japan and found to be absolutely essential for adjusting to living there – while being eager to adapt to the Japanese culture, do not try to “become Japanese”. First, this attempt would be doomed to failure by its objective impossibility, and second, being authentic (yet considerate to others) is perhaps the most valuable trait that allows one to bridge the cultural gap.

This time, what caught my attention was the photo on the cover of the “Samurai Sketches” book. It’s the last portrait of Sakamoto Ryoma taken in 1885, just days before his assassination. The remarkable feature is how relaxed he looks. I realize of course that this is probably due to the slow shutter speed used in those times. Yet, the contrast between the national-scale turmoil of the Meiji Restoration period and the personal-scale tranquility that the key players of that drama were able to project, even if temporarily, is amazing. Somehow, when I initially read this book, I didn’t pay much attention to this aspect, being mostly engrossed in the excitement of the quintessential samurai saga of loyalty, individual bravery and martial arts. This time, I am looking forward to re-reading it from a different perspective.

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My 2021 reading list

Last year, I enjoyed writing about the books I read in 2020 and collecting my notes and takeaways. I decided to do it again just after the New Year, but as anything that doesn’t have a deadline, completing the list took quite a bit of time. I decided not to make separate posts on children’s books, fiction and non-fiction books, as I did last time, but I still organize the list below into these categories. I do this mainly because I consume these genres differently.

Note: The links below are affiliate links, so if you follow them to Amazon and buy something, I might get paid some money .

Children’s books:
Reading children’s books is our family time. We keep going a tradition of reading aloud to our daughter before bedtime, even though she is reading quite a bit on her own during the day as she grows older and develops her own interests. We pick a book, in paper format, that none of us has read before, so that discovering the story and the reading process itself becomes a shared experience.

1. “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” by J.K. Rowling
2. “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” by J.K. Rowling
3. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” by J.K. Rowling

We started reading this “Order of the Phoenix” last summer, during a trip to Tofino. Climbing into a bed with the thick tome after our daily surfing sessions quickly became a ritual. My wife and I would take turns reading aloud. When it was my turn to listen, I enjoyed allowing myself not to multitask and just followed the storyline. After coming back from vacation, we carried on reading after dinner, almost every day. This was a piece of the elusive “sabbatical mindset” that we were able to convert to a lasting lifestyle element. I think the Harry Potter series is nothing short of a masterpiece, but the most significant takeaway for me is about the reading experience. With these books, I re-discovered the joy of reading for its own sake, without directly aiming to learn something practical or to be productive in some way.

Fiction:
Most of these are e-books, which I read on a tablet or a phone, in tiny chunks of time throughout a typical day, plus one slightly longer chunk of time in the evening, as a wind-down routine.

4. “Fall or, Dodge in Hell” by Neal Stephenson.
I’ve been keen to follow the canon of Stephenson’s novels featuring Dodge or his relatives ever since being exposed to it through his “Cryptonomicon”. The “Fall” went very well with the children’s books by Rick Riordan popularizing Greek mythology, which my daughter was eagerly absorbing during the previous year. It is an intriguing thought exercise to ponder what might produce those kinds of myths in modern times or in the not-very-distant future.

5. “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson.
This is not the most recent piece of sci-if, so it’s eerie how far in advance Stephenson could spot things like Metaverse, cryptocurrencies (I was introduced to the concept in his “Cryptonomicon” several years ago) and AI. In “Snow Crash”, the description of the thought process of a “rat thing”, a cyborg security doggie based on a bullterrier, was particularly moving. I began to view my own dog, Bruno, differently after reading it. It would have been a worthwhile book to read just for that.

6. “Daemon” by Daniel Suarez.
I liked the “Snow Crash”, but wanted to read something more up-to-date, so I searched on Reddit for a book that would be similar to Stephenson’s “REAMDE”, which I read earlier and really enjoyed. “Daemon” came highly recommended, and it apparently had a cult following in tech circles. It definitely did not disappoint in terms of the fast pace and a good insight into the AI capabilities and limitations. I think this book came up as similar to “REAMDE” because both feature the interaction between the physical world and a multiplayer game simulation. But I also appreciate both of the books for their international crime drama/detective story flavour.

7. “FreedomTM” by Daniel Suarez.
Strictly speaking, I finished reading this book in 2022, but this is a direct sequel to the “Daemon”, which I liked so much that I simply had to get it right away. Besides, it’s taken me so long to compile this reading list that the exact timeline of when I read what starts to be less relevant. “FreedomTM” probably cannot stand on its own, without reading the “Daemon” first. It is still very good, although not as overwhelmingly excellent as the “Daemon”. The grand ideas of the societal pivot towards integration with the distributed algorithm are introduced a bit heavy-handedly, in my opinion. I also found the concept of the protagonists of the “Daemon” suddenly embracing their former deadly foe a bit hard to digest initially. Upon consideration, though, I agree with Suarez that such course of events is possible and even plausible, and that it’s definitely worth exploring. It’s just difficult to handle the story on the scale of the humankind with the same elegance as it was dome on the scale of individuals in the “Daemon”. Incidentally, it appears that these are the only two books written by the author, and it is remarkable that the debut has been such a hit, considering his wide-ranging accomplishments outside of literature.

Non-fiction:
I mostly consume (hesitate to say “read”) books in this category in an audio format. I listen to them while walking the dog or driving to pick up my daughter from school. I do this because these are the books that I wouldn’t have had time to read otherwise. The exception are chess books. I read those in an electronic format on my iPad, with a chess app opened in a second window, so that I can follow the examples and variations by moving the pieces. This is more efficient than using a physical chessboard, but is still a bit cumbersome. In the future, I’d like to try the Forward Chess app, where the chessboard functionality is integrated with an e-reader. Ben Johnson of the Perpetual Chess podcast (another thing I regularly listen to on my dog walks) often mentions it as a very convenient reading mode.

8. “Atomic Habits” by James Clear (audio).
In a sea of self-help productivity books, this one is a fundamentally great one. It is one of the only two books that I re-read (rather, re-listened). There are many practical suggestions in the book, but the one I found particularly useful as a takeaway is the importance of temporal and spatial consistency in habit formation. It is easier to form new positive habits (or drop old bad ones) in a new place. It is also easier to exercise, journal, etc. at the same time of the day.

9. “Beginners” by Tom Vanderbilt (audio).
I heard about this book on the Perpetual Chess podcast. The author describes his experiences in starting a series of completely new and unrated hobbies. What resonated with me is that he began some of them to accompany his young daughter, which I’ve also been doing, in my case, with violin-playing. A take-home point for me was that it is not alway necessary to justify what you do in terms of some material benefit, as long as the activity itself is fulfilling.
“A gulf was opening. Unless you were a professional, you were a mere dilettante or an “amateur.” And what did this loaded word originally signify? “To love,” derived from the French aimer. With the increasing specialization of knowledge and professionalization of everyday life, suddenly being delighted by something, or loving something, was seen as vaguely disreputable.”
Vanderbilt also quotes a surfer, who speaks about adult beginners – something like the iconic scene from “Point Break”, where Keanu Reeves’ character is condescendingly told that it is late to start surfing at his age. He said that the experience of adult beginners in surfing depends on their goals. If they are aiming at excellence – it’s a path of frustration and injuries. But it is quite possible to enjoy surfing over many years if one doesn’t strive to be one of the best surfers out there.

10. “Simple Chess” by Michael Stean.
This is one of the best practical chess book I’ve read so far (disclaimer: I haven’t read that many yet). The emphasis is on positional concepts with the implications that brilliant combinations naturally emerge from superior positions, to paraphrase Fischer.

11. “The Moves that Matter” by Jonathan Rowson (audio).
This is more of an autobiography than a chess book. Rowson is a philosopher, in addition to being a Grandmaster, and his writing is funny and insightful. This particular book gives a unique perspective on balancing (or attempting to balance) professional chess aspirations with life outside the sport. Chess losses are quite devastating psychologically, regardless of one’s level. It is necessary to digest them from a positive perspective of learning in order to be able to maintain motivation and learn. At he same time, the purely competitive aspect is always there as well. Rowson recalls an episode when he lost a match at a tournament and half-jokingly said to a fellow Grandmaster that “it was a good lesson,” to which the other person said: “It’s time to stop learning and to teach them a lesson.” It’s brutal, and adopting this ruthless mentality apparently didn’t work in the long run for the author, in terms of spurring him to continue full-tilt with the pro chess career. It seems that many top players are quite unhappy on the personal level.

12. “Do the work” by Steven Pressfield (audio)
Pressfield’s “The War of Art” is a highly-regraded and popular take on procrastination in creative endeavours – what he refers to as “resistance”. I read it before and quite liked it. So I downloaded this book looking forward to more insight, but it was largely disappointing. This was a very short listen – seems like a recap of a blog article. So my take-home message from this particular book is to avoid short blurbs like this in the future. I am all for publishing half-baked ideas in order to develop them and let them mature, but a book is a wrong medium for this, in my opinion.

13. “Beyond Order” by Jordan B. Peterson (audio)
I liked Peterson’s controversial-to-the-point-of-almost-being-obnoxious “12 Rules for Life”, where he made a case for combatting chaos and establishing order in various aspects of one’s life. So I was intrigued of how he would present the alternative, if not opposite, view and argue for the benefits of a wide view on life. Here is an idea from the book: It’s good to accept your position as a beginner (when you are a beginner in a certain field). With it comes a certain lack of responsibility, which is liberating. But today’s beginner is tomorrow’s master, so we should treat beginners with respect, even if these beginners are ourselves. Also, true communication occurs only among peers, so it is good to be in the middle of a hierarchy in whatever field you happen to be operating.

14. “Logical Chess: Move by Move” by Irving Chernev.
This has been my favourite book. It’s a collection of classic games, where rationale of literally every move on both sides of the board is explained. I’d like to think that it helped me shape the general direction of my own thinking during various phases of the game. I also heard of a more modern “move-by-move” book by Nigel Short, which I am definitely going to look up.

15. “Essentialism” by Greg McKeown (audio)
I often pick up ideas for books to read from the podcasts I listen to. This book is a good example. I liked McKeown’s interview on the Tim Ferris Show and subsequently went to listen to his own podcast. The funny thing is that beyond the obvious (perhaps, in retrospect) idea that simplifying your life is good for you, it’s difficult for me to remember a particularly useful bit or tactic I learned from it. Yet, McKeown’s podcast is the one I still return to from time to time. I have the impression that his personal values are fairly consistent with what he writes.

16. “Effortless” by Greg McKeown (audio)
Evidently, I liked “Essentialism” enough to pick the next book by the same author immediately after I finished it. Here, McKeown addresses a common conundrum where even after defining the “essential” things in life one is faced with impossibly too many of them to tackle. Again, if this book provided an answer as to what to do in that situation, I don’t recall what it was. That probably should tell me something about this line of books in particular and perhaps this genre of self-help literature in general (that it is quite useless). Nevertheless, I remember that I really did enjoy listening to them.

17. “Stillness is the Key” by Ryan Holiday (audio)
I like listening to Holiday’s interviews because of his public speaking skills. I find his opinions a bit strong, but he is consistent, just like McKeown above. This book is from a series where he popularizes the stoic philosophy.

18. “Lives of the Stoics” by Ryan Holiday (audio)
I knew that it was unlikely that I would ever find time to read a scholarly work on stoics, so Holiday’s pop culture take on the most famous biographies was just the right mix of new material and entertainment.

19. “Bird by bird” by Anne Lamott (audio)
A beautiful case for doing the work on large projects in small chunks. The book’s title refers to a case where the author’s brother was given advice to tackle a large essay on local birds in small chunks, i.e. bird by bird, instead of being paralyzed by the magnitude of the whole project.

20. “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership” by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman and Kaley Klemp (audio)
Clearly, fifteen is too many commitments for me to hold in my head, but the most tactically-useful point I remember is to periodically check throughout the day whether I am “above or below the line” in terms of my attitude towards things that are currently on my plate or the situation I am in.

21. “Make Time” by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (audio)
Technically, I listened to this book before, but I re-listened to it again in 2021, and this fact tells something by itself. I found it quite positive and comforting somehow. Maybe, it’s a false comfort of believing that you can be in control of your time. Nevertheless, I like the idea of defining a single “highlight” for each day and treating all other things that you manage or have to do as a bonus. The single highlight give you something to look forward to in the short term, and it also lets you declare a victory after it’s accomplished. Perhaps more important than the tactical suggestions in this book was the list of recommended books at the end of it, which defined the rest of my reading for the yer. Jake and John commented on each of their favourite books in a couple of sentences, distilling their main points (kind of what I am attempting here).

22. “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin (audio)
This was the first book I picked up from Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky’s list in “Make time”. This is a “stunt non-fiction” book, where the author undertakes to do something for year and reports on her experience. I’ve listened to Gretchen’s podcast before, and what I find inspiring in it, as well as in this book, is the unapologetic fun she is apparently having through exploring various life hacks. The concept that you don’t have to be an expert in a field to be explore it is liberating. Apparently, all that’s required for reaping most of the benefits is curiosity and enjoying the process of exploration itself.

23. “How to Have a Good Day” by Caroline Webb (audio)
This book to me was a more systematic follow-up to Gretchen Rubin’s somewhat haphazard (but extremely well-presented and uplifting) account of various psychological techniques. This book is certainly more dry than “The Happiness Project”, but what it lacks in fluidity, it compensates in scientific foundation and depth of explanation of the underlying principles. It is still very readable, though, and I certainly enjoyed it. The takeaway that I remember most readily is that your expectations of an event shape how it will actually unfold and what affect it will have, at least from your subjective standpoint. An example Caroline gives is that if you expect a business meeting to be boring and unproductive, you will find evidences supporting this expectation both during the meeting and in retrospect. The same exact meeting could be viewed in a different light by someone, whose expectations of it were positive to begin with.

24. “The Power of Moments” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (audio)
I believe, the main idea here is that our lives are disproportionally influenced by relatively short, but significant, events. These formative moments (e.g. weddings, job interviews, etc.) are worth planning for. Moreover, it is worth planning small moments that would have a positive effects into each day. I really like this suggestion and think that it has lot of potential for improving the quality of life. As with everything, though, consistency and disciplines are the key. In other words, it is easier said than done.

25. “Mindset” by Carol S. Dweck (audio)
Fixed mindset vs. Growth mindset – as parents, my wife and I have been exposed to these concepts pretty much continuously since our daughter entered school. Teachers here in Canada, as well as in Italy, where we were on sabbatical when our daughter was in Kindergarten, made references to them all the time. Carol Dweck is the one who coined the fixed/growth mindset terminology and popularized it through this book. In my opinion, it is quite excellent and actually goes deeper than treating your failures as stepping stones to future success. For me personally, reminding myself of the growth mindset principles allows me to increase complexity of the things I do (and thus to increase the proportion of time spent in a flow state, following Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s principles) without being crushed by the inherent frustrations of learning chess, violin, painting and academic research.

26. “A Guide to the Good Life” by William B. Irvine (audio)
This is another modern take on stoicism. The main idea is that attaining tranquility is a worthy life goal, and that methodically identifying sources of distress in our life and dealing with them is a feasible strategy both for the long and short time horizons. This read is different from Ryan Holiday’s take on the subject, and I am glad I came across it. There are certainly many things that resonate with my own perspective.

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Curiouser and curiouser!

I’ve been listening to an audiobook called “Conscious” by Annaka Harris, and this is definitely the most thought-provoking read I’ve had in a while. She discusses many concepts that are completely new to me, and yet I realize that I’ve been bumping into them many times before in various areas of my work and personal interests.

One of them is panpsychism (from Greek ‘pan’ – ‘all’ and ‘psyche’ – ‘soul’). This is a philosophical theory that postulates that consciousness is a fundamental property, and that everything in the universe possesses it. This idea has a distinctly religious undertone, but upon closer examination, it turns out that it is, in fact, one of the simplest and therefore plausible solutions to the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”. The problem is explaining how consciousness comes into existence in a collection of matter that didn’t have consciousness initially. This problem is called “hard” to distinguish it form the “easy” problems of explaining the mechanisms of existing conscious processes and studying how the brains of animals work, etc.

Coming to terms with the panpsychism becomes less intellectually challenging if one starts thinking about the defining features of a conscious, or even alive, system. Once it becomes apparent that properties like ability to react to or communicate with an environment are not sufficiently good criteria for drawing the line between natural systems that have consciousness and those that do not, it becomes apparent that it is indeed logical to grant the possibility of consciousness (although not human-like consciousness) to systems like plants, single-cell organisms and, taken to the extreme, subatomic particles. I really liked how Annaka Harris gradually by firmly walks the readers through this reasoning process, without dumbing it down and without over-protecting it from the inherent logical challenges. Once you consider that plants and animals are not as different as we intuitively consider them to be in terms of their ability to remember (i.e. collect, store and recall information) and react to the environment, these and other properties that can be considered indicators of consciousness (even if each one of them does not qualify to be the defining property) can be propagated all the way down to the subatomic levels of matter. The consciousness is a matter of matter, as one playful quote in the book states.

This rabbit hole goes incredibly deep. Donald Hoffmann, for example, argues that panpsychism actually takes realism too seriously by granting the subatomic particles, and indeed the spacetime reality, too much of a fundamental role in the structure of the universe. To continue borrowing expressions from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, things become curiouser and curiouser!

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Acknowledging the difficulties

I often joke to my students that little children teach us a lot about fluid mechanics. Of course, parenting teaches many other useful things too, mostly, I find, in terms of communication skills. One particularly useful observation is neatly summarized by Gretchen Rubin in her inspiring book “The Happiness Project”. She makes a point that children are looking for acknowledgement of their frustrations and negative emotions more often than for actual help with the task or the situation that causes them. Following up the validation of the reality of the negative emotion and the subjective difficulty of the situation with a constructive suggestion is, of course, the best practice. For example, if a child is upset, because she cannot put on socks by herself, saying to her something like: “Putting on socks can certainly be tricky; why don’t you try pulling on the heal instead of the top” would be more helpful than dismissing the child’s frustration with “Come on, this is just putting on a sock! How hard can it be?”

What is even more interesting is that acknowledging the difficulty of a problem even makes adults more likely to persevere with it, rather than abandoning it in frustration. Probably, the prospective of feeling a certain pride for completing something challenging serves as a reward for sticking with the task. It’s another Jedi mind trick to play on the students (or on myself), I suppose.

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Mind tricks for focus

There is a saying that anything worth doing is worth doing slowly. Certainly, there is a lot to be said about being able to focus on the details of the process, instead of rushing through it under the threat of a deadline or even under the awareness of the fact the the might be better spent doing something else. I’ve come across a technique for tricking myself into a more methodical working mode in a book “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin. She describes using a mantra “I am in jail” when working on a side project like setting up a website for a blog. The idea is to invoke a state of mind where it seems alright to spend as much time on the task at hand because there is nothing better to do at the moment and you have all the he time in the world to do it. It seems like simplistic mind trick to play on myself, but I find it surprisingly effective.

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How to read books

Ready for battle. Stll life with chess pieces.

“I have never met a person I admired who did not read more books than I did.”
Kevin Kelly , “99 Additional Bits of Unsolicited Advice“

It seems easy to suggest that one needs to read books in order to become more knowledgeable and, generally, a well-rounded person. But these days, “reading” can mean many things, from turning the pages of physical paper volumes to listening to audiobooks to watching instructional videos online. Of course, movies and books have coexisted for years, but nowadays the boundaries between the media become blurred. The amount of content available is also remarkably huge. It actually makes it difficult to digest the information effectively. The over-abundance of material in almost any field makes the experience of learning similar to drinking from a fire hose.

Take chess, for example. As far as hobbies go, there is an incredible amount of literature available for those who want to learn the finer points of the game or to teach it to others. Reading chess books, particularly collections of annotated games of masters has been traditionally viewed as a necessary, and perhaps the most efficient, training method. Anders Ericsson, the author of “Peak”, who introduced the proverbial 10,000-hour rule, identified reading and playing through annotated games as the common and defining practice method of top chess masters. But similar to other fields, chess books come in a variety of forms. As far as analyzing positions, reading from a paper book and setting them up on a physical board sounds like a horrendous waste of time, when interactive versions of the same books can be read and played through on any electronic device. E-versions of chess books not only save time, but also, perhaps more importantly, allow us to read and practice almost everywhere, in small chunks of time throughout the day, since we constantly carry our smartphones anyway.

Yet the physical aspect of the game still has value. For my nine-years-old daughter, for example, it is the the wooden pieces themselves, setting up and moving them on the board, what provides motivation to play. To my daughter, chess is not an intellectual practice or a philosophical model of human life. It is simply a board game. Of course, once you start doing anything, it is much easier to continue. She also enjoys solving “mate in one” puzzles from László Polgár’s enormous collection called “Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games“. It is a physical paper book, which  in combination with a physical board and pieces provides  just the right  pace that prevents information overload for someone, who takes her her first steps.

Beyond hobbies or entertainment, e.g., in the area of academic learning, reading books have conventionally been the way to acquire new information. In my experience, recent forced transition to remote teaching resulted in an abundance of online material in the form of recorded lectures, examples, tutorials, course notes, etc. Like in chess, the  most effective type of practice is  the one you can sustain regularly. So if you are taking a university course and going through a textbook with a highlighter is not your thing, chances are there are video lectures that you can watch as a change of pace, if nothing else.

In the context of learning, an important thing is that reading needs to be active in order to be effective. This means taking notes. Ideally, you would paraphrase and summarize what you’ve read, but even copying passages verbatim is substantially better than doing nothing. This goes back to well-established concept in education that actively engaging with information is necessary for transforming it to knowledge. Interestingly, how exactly you do it doesn’t matter much, statistically speaking. So taking notes is an easy way of accomplishing that.

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Minimal effective dose

I’ve been a fan of a personal productivity tactic referred to by Robert Boice as brief regular session, or BRS for short. His research on work patterns of university professors from different disciplines shows that those who wait for large, uninterrupted chunks of time to do their academic work (mostly, writing) tend to be less successful according to various more-or-less objective metrics (ability to obtain tenure, publish highly-cited papers, etc.) Instead, a more effective strategy is to make regular, even if microscopic, progress by working in BRSs. This approach fits nicely with the idea of starting and stopping the work sessions before you are subjectively ready, but it flies in the face of another compelling tactic that calls for long, uninterrupted periods of time for doing deep work, which was popularized by Cal Newport. Newport defines deep work as a challenging activity, for which you are uniquely qualified.

I really like Newport’s uninterrupted deep work idea, but find the BRS approach more practical in terms of making consistent progress and avoiding procrastination. I think that there is a caveat to it, though: depending on the type of work, there is a lower limit for how brief a BRS can be. In other words, there is a minimum amount of time that I need to spend on task in order to make any progress. For example, when I am editing videos, either for classes that I teach or simply for fun, documenting the games that we play with my daughter (like the one below), I need to spend a finite chunk of time of watching raw footage, defining the cut-in and -out points and placing at least several clips together in the timeline. If I don’t do at least that much in a given editing session, I would effectively need to start from scratch the next time.

Finding this minimal effective dose for different types of work is generally not easy. In some cases, you might enjoy the activity so much, that you would enter the state of flow, where you literally lose the sense of time and blow through the time limit you might have set for yourself. A flow state, or more specifically, maximizing the time spent in a flow state, of course, is the goal, so if it happens regularly, there is certainly nothing to complain about.

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Traditional house-elf roles

A gadget I’ve been enjoying over the past week is a robotic vacuum Roomba. In fact our entire family has been having fun with it. My daughter aptly named it Dobby, after the house-elf from “Harry Potter”. I find it particularly ironic in the context of the recent International Women’s Day. I was looking online at some old Soviet postcards celebrating the 8th of March and came across this one (see below). A rough translation of the verse is that giving this kind of robot as a present for your spouse (it says “wife” specifically – in case there were any doubts that this is from pre-PC days) would stop nagging in the household, making life easier for everyone.

In the “Harry Potter”, incidentally, Hermione Granger advocated for liberation of house-elves from oppression by the wizarding society by founding S.P.E.W. – Society for the Promotion of Elfish Wellfare. She originally wanted to call the organization “Stop the Outrageous Abuse of Our Fellow Magical Creatures and Campaign for a Change in Their Legal Status,” but the name would not fit on a badge.

So happy house-robot day, everybody! Oh, and don’t forget to join S.P.E.W.!