One night, a few months ago, I was walking home alone. As my mind wandered, I decided to find the optimal way to walk between two points on a city grid. My hometown was not designed on a grid, so the shortest path between two points was usually clear. On a grid, however, there are many paths that are the same distance:
In my last post, I explained why widening roads isn’t a useful thing to do. I’d suggest reading that first if you haven’t, but the main takeaway was: in highly populated areas (where most people live), the amount of traffic will settle itself at the worst point where people still choose driving over alternatives, and thus is a function of human priority setting more than a function of road design. From here, I’m going to explain why I don’t expect autonomous cars to improve our lives.
This post is part one of a two-part post (part two) on why I am not looking forward to the future of autonomous cars. That opinion in itself is far from uncommon, but everyone else I’ve met who feels the same way has justified it with one or more of these three reasons:
As someone who prefers to get around by biking or walking, I tend to notice ways in which car-centric thinking makes things worse. A big one is in the layouts of towns and cities. In the recently-built suburbs of Oregon that I work in now, there are a few main roads that you spend most of your driving time on, and neighborhoods are divided so that they don’t connect main roads, or if they do it’s via a very convoluted path. This prevents rat-running which likely reduces traffic congestion, but it also forces walkers and bikers to take the main roads, which are almost always slower, as they’re not the direct route, and those not in cars are limited by distance, not speed limit. This design was made to accommodate driving, and in turn discourages human-powered transportation, by making it more difficult to do so. Cul-de-sacs have gotten an increasingly bad name over the past few years for the same reason. Even in cities, where disjoint neighborhoods and dead-end roads are much less common, the car-centric design still makes for longer commute distances, which is what I’m going to show here.
For the past four years, I’ve been experimenting with various types of fasting. When it comes to diet, I’ve found that there’s contradicting research for just about everything, so I like to incorporate different ideas and pay attention to how I feel as a result. I tend to think the body is pretty good at telling you what it does and doesn’t like – you just need to pay enough attention to notice. So this February, I decided to try out a more rigorous fasting regimen than I’ve ever done: only eat half of the days. For the most part, this worked out to eating every other day, but there were also a pair of 2-day fasts, each followed by 2 eating days. I’m glad I did it, and enough people have asked about it that I figured a post was in order. Here are the things I learned and observed over my month of only 14 eating days.
As a historically numbers-minded person, it has been quite a change over the past year for me to come to the realization that psychology is perhaps the most valuable subject I’ve learned in life. Sure, a computer science degree or an MD might be a path to high paying jobs, but psychology is valuable in just about every career, and, more importantly, life in general. Coming to realize the value of psychology made me think about psychological literacy as a form of capital that can be utilized to ones advantage in the free market, if one so chooses.
The calendar reset recently, and that often brings reflection on the past with it. This year I’ve been thinking about the changes I’ve made and lessons I’ve learned in the past few years that have had the most positive impact on my life. When doing an exercise like this, it can be tempting to point to the large changes, like moving to a new job or a new city. However, these are obviously harder to repeat or model new changes on, and often are more of an effect than a cause - the accumulation of many smaller changes. What I found to be the truly valuable changes were the ones that automated my personal decision making. This serves to avoid requiring willpower to make good choices, and frees up that mental energy to be used elsewhere.
Having gone through the search for housing three times in two locations in the years since graduating, I’ve picked up a few tips for choosing that are not often considered. Most people will look at the price, location, layout, appliances, and make a decision from there. While these are important factors, they are an incomplete look at how your new home will affect your life once you move. Here, I will explain the additional factors I now look for. Some points are framed around someone working a typical Monday-Friday daytime shift in the northern hemisphere, but the core ideas can easily be altered to apply more widely.
I have long been a proponent of finding time throughout the day for the mind to be unoccupied. This serves as a preventive measure against entertainment addiction, and allows the mind to wander and come up with some of its best thoughts. While eating dinner a little while back, I had a thought that piqued the interest of my mechanical engineering-trained mind: what actually happens to foods as we chew them that causes them to break down? More technically, what is the failure mode, or modes, of foods when we eat them? Following that meal, I began paying more attention to my chewing than I’m sure most people ever will, in an attempt to find my answer. I came up with the following five modes of failure, which turned out to be a pretty good crash course on solid mechanics – the study of how solids react to loading.
You can often hear the world of nature and the world of business described with the same clichés: "dog eat dog", "survival of the fittest", etc. These clichés are simplifications of the theory* of evolution, so it follows that perhaps evolution could be applied to business, and not just nature.
As is the case with many people, I probably spent more time than I should have playing the card game War as a child. Also like many others, I stopped playing once I realized there was no strategy or skill involved at all. But now, many years later, I am here to tell you that I was wrong, and War does have a strategy.
As the days get hotter here in the Northern Hemisphere, I become more inclined to put ice in my morning coffee as an additional means of staying cool. Doing so this past week led me to realize an interesting point about putting ice into drinks that aren’t water: Initially, the more ice you put into the drink, the more watered down it gets, but after a certain maximum point, adding more ice actually makes your drink less watered down. In fact, theoretically, you could put enough ice in to not water your drink down at all.
In a previous post, I made my best argument for why the 45 lb weight plate shouldn’t exist. I actually had to cut that post up because it got too long; this post is the second part of my weight plate analysis. The last post was about what plate weights should exist, while this one will deal with choosing weights among the ones that do exist. This will come in two parts. First, I’ll consider the case where you have an effectively infinite supply of weight plates, like at a gym, and figure out which of the standard set of 2.5, 5, 10, 25, 35, and 45 lb plates are the most and least useful.
I am a big advocate of alternative energy, and I plan on installing solar panels and/or a backyard wind turbine as soon as I buy a home. I drive a hybrid car, and bike or walk instead whenever practical. I mow my lawn with a push reel mower, and I use bar soap, bar laundry detergent and a reusable water bottle to minimize plastic consumption. But please, don’t call me an environmentalist.
By now, we are already well into March, and you know what that means: watching NCAA basketball and simultaneously enjoying the madness and stressing out about how poorly your bracket is doing. To provide some perspective for the large portion of us who have chronically bad brackets, I looked at how many possible outcomes there are, and related that back to various things.
The first time I stepped foot in a gym, I wondered why it used 45 lb as the heaviest plate weight (some have a 100 lb plate, but those are not nearly as standard as the 45 lb plate). I would have expected it to be a 50 lb plate, to make calculations simpler.
I’ve decided to dedicate my first year post-graduation to figuring out all the important life skills and strategies that you don’t learn in school. Recently I have been fixating on budgets, which lead me to consider convenience costs. Most people are probably familiar with the idea of convenience cost – things are more expensive when they are prepared for you, delivered to you, etc. It’s important because it’s how the businesses that provide the convenience are able to make a profit. However, at some point you have to determine when the added convenience isn’t worth the cost. In digging deeper, I found convenience costs to be a case of diminishing returns.
I'm a pretty big fan of a summer road trip, and at this point, I've seen a lot of the best roads America has to offer. I've driven across the country twice, with other shorter road trips mixed in. Here's my list of the ten most beautiful roads I've been on.
As one of my past blog posts would attest to, I am not afraid to be unconventional, so long as I don’t think it’ll be a hindrance. Today, I will explain a few of the things I do on a regular basis that often draw comments from others for being “weird.” I put that in quotes because, while they are unconventional, they are actually conscious decisions that I feel are well founded. I will explain these below, in increasing unusualness.
One day this past week was the first time this season that I had to scrape frost off my windshield. Anyone who’s seen how my hands react to cold air would know that I naturally wanted to spend as little time out in the brisk morning air as possible. When I pulled into the parking lot at my office, I, for the first time ever, really thought about what spot would afford me the shortest walk into the office. Like many, I had always naturally gravitated to what I thought was the closest spot, but until this past week I did not realize that I had been doing a pretty poor job of minimizing my walk from the car to the destination. Upon this realization, I started looking at the parking patterns of others and realized they make the same mistake I always did.
A short time ago, while attempting to improve my eating habits, I decided to start by thinking of the foods I knew of that were both healthy and delicious. Like any sane person on the sixth day of a 95+ degree heat wave, I immediately thought of watermelon. Seriously, I eat enough watermelon that I often wonder if I could stop drinking water and still stay hydrated.
In mechanics, if an object does not move over time it is said to be in equilibrium. There are three different types of equilibrium: stable, neutral, and unstable. Stable equilibrium means if you move it then it will return to its original spot, like a swing. Neutral equilibrium means if you move it then it will stay where you move it, like rolling a ball a quarter turn on flat ground. Finally, unstable equilibrium means if you move it then it will continue to move away from its equilibrium point, like tipping over a domino. Today I will explain why I feel success is an unstable equilibrium, give examples of such, and explain why this makes consistency a crucial trait.
This post is about a saying that I play along with when it’s said, but deep down always wished didn’t exist. I’m referring to the mnemonic device “Lefty-Loosey, Righty-Tighty.” For those unaware, it is a trick to remember which way to twist something like a screw or valve in order to loosen or tighten it. However, I can tell you for sure that simply moving a screw right will not make it tighten.
This is a strange behavior that I noticed in myself first, then I allowed people I was walking with to lead the way and noticed it generally applied to them as well. As with most things on this blog, I do not have enough data to make confident conclusions on this matter; I’m simply sharing what I’ve noticed in my observations.
I have decided to start a small series of blog posts about irrational things people say or do. These aren’t particularly problematic things, just oddities I’ve noticed over time and never really understood. The first one is when people wear sunglasses.
An increasingly common discussion in America today is how we can create an economy where everyone can earn a living wage. Some of the common suggestions are a higher minimum wage and higher taxes on the top earners. Different economic models could suggest positive or negative outcomes from these ideas, but regardless of how effective they might be, I feel there is a deeper problem that they fail to address.
Today I am going to share some coveted information of mine – my secrets to navigating traffic as quickly as possible. None of these methods are proven, but my anecdotal evidence is convincing enough to me to share my strategies. I recall a time this summer when I was driving on an LA highway, never exceeding the speed limit, and one car passed me four different times because the driver would speed by me at about 15 mph faster than me and then I would pass him each time the traffic slowed, as it’s known to do often in LA.
Previously, I talked about how I am not a fan of the aux cord, and today I have another modern technology that I feel can become detrimental. Oddly enough, this is also related to cars: GPS. I once was at an event of about 80 people. Everyone was flown into the nearest airport and given a rental car to get to the venue. One speaker began by asking who used a GPS to get to the venue. I had not, and looked around to see if anyone else hadn’t, but I couldn’t find a single one. Here is the worst part: the directions from the airport to the venue consisted of two turns. Two turns required 98.75% of the people there to turn on their GPS.
I have long dreamt of being an inventor-someone who comes up with something new, whether it is a product or a way of doing something. This is what attracted me to engineering, and I try to bring this dream into reality in every situation I can. I feel that the most difficult part of promoting change is coming up with the idea of what should be changed. The implementation can be figured out by applying principles learned in textbooks and classrooms, but the idea requires a special skill. I have worked over the past few years to hone this skill. The obvious first step is to consciously look at everything you do keeping in mind to seek opportunities for improvement.
Like most people my age, I have an aux cord in my car. However, several months ago I implemented a ban of its use except for during the rare occasion when there are no radio stations to be found. The last time the aux cord was resurrected from my glove box was on a cross-country road trip this past summer when we lost signal in the middle of the Rocky Mountains.
About a month ago I was talking with a few friends of mine and mentioned a thought that had come to me a few days before, which I named the “Musical Pareto Front”. Upon my explanation, one of them suggested I make a blog to share thoughts like these. Naturally, I decided that should be what my first post is about.