Time and transport

The first five months of this year were very hard for me. I worked too much, worried too much, and ended up getting sick. I decided to take measures to stop this.

Of course, measures, like new year’s resolutions (which I never make), tend to be too abstract: stress less, have more time, enjoy more. Yes, of course, but saying it does nothing. One thing that has been helping, though, is that I’ve been very tired. Not really able to drive myself to exhaustion right now. But little by little, I’m getting my energy back.

The best thing I’ve done so far is to change my commute. For over a month, I’ve been taking either the company shuttle, or the public bus, to work. For both, my stop in Seattle is a 15 min. walk from home, and my stop in Redmond is a 15 min. walk from my building. Door to door, then, it’s 50 to 80 minutes, compared to 25 to 135 minutes when driving. I don’t understand how a small city like Seattle can have such traffic jams.

That’s why I used to drive: choosing my departure times carefully , it was much quicker than taking the bus. But driving makes it too easy to become engulfed in work. Arriving home at a late time, after having had no exercise for the whole day, only to get some dinner, and continue to work. Hell. Now, taking the bus, I walk for an hour every day, and that helps me relax. I’m using the time in the bus to read or nap. I’ve finally started catching up with my pile of unread books, after months of neglect.
It’s funny that this tiny difference in my commute is having a big impact on my whole week. I should have known, though: walking is my preferred way to think. It probably has something to do with feeding my brain new images. Perhaps.

Please like me

I’ve been reading the book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, in an effort to get myself back to shape after mental exhaustion. Very often, I get into the same situation when inquiring into areas where I’m ignorant: I buy a well liked popularization book. Almost always, I end up disappointed. Why does the book dumb down the concepts? Why the profusion of silly jokes? Why the pop culture references?

I discuss this topic with friends now and then. The conventional wisdom is that the authors of these books use these tricks to draw the audience in, to make the subject more digestible and appealing. I think the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Take the aforementioned book, for instance. In a particular section, it states that research shows attention and learning increase when subjects are supplemented with examples. Throughout the book, there are plenty of examples to illustrate particular points. The author is being coherent, then.

But many of those examples are so silly, they detract from the information. When explaining that a memory is located in the same area of the brain that processed the initial perception, the author gives the example of the Charlton Heston movie Planet of the Apes. You see, Charlton Heston’s space ship lands in what looks like a distant planet ruled by apes. At the end of the movie, he discovers he is in Earth, in the future, after humanity has finally succeeded in destroying itself. Ah yes, this explains how memories are in the same place they originated. Same place, future time. Get it now? Charlton Heston, man. Of course! Without this superfluous piece of information, you’d be lost. Just like Charlton Heston was in that planet.

Does this example seem silly to you too? I don’t know many people who share my contempt for silliness in popular science books. But back to the conventional wisdom on popularization books. My theory is that the authors are less concerned with making the subject digestible than with making friends. They want to show that they are nice, smart, funny guys, and that their book is relevant to you (buy it!). It is insecurity, and narcissism that disguises itself as populism and humility. It seems to me a particularly American disease. In Europe, of course, we suffer from elitism and obscurantism. I don’t know which of the two tendencies I prefer.

Maybe I’m wrong, of course. Maybe there are many people with a genuine interest in science, who would never read a book with diagrams, drawings, numbers, but truly love those silly pop culture references. These people’s romance with science seems a star-cross’d one indeed.

Photos from Utah, Virginia and DC

It will be a while before we pool and geo-tag our photos to make the official albums.
In the mean time, here are albums with the shots from my camera:
Bryce Canyon hike
Virginia and Washington, before the wedding

More Seattle skies from the balcony

What I work on

I generally do not to write about work in this blog, but it is the first time that I can point to some publicly available software to which I have contributed.

If you catch any news on Bing: that’s the group I work in.

As to my personal contribution: it reminds me a bit of that scene in The Ten Commandments where Charlton Heston is building a monument city for his father, and watches an obelisk fall into place, then says:

Put a thousand slaves to clear the sand off the base of the obelisk

By which I mean I’m one of the slaves removing the sand, not Charlton Heston.