Link of the day: "The Cult of Genius"

I came across an interesting post at Cosmic Variance about hero worship in physics. I don't have anything against Feynman, but I think physicists should publicize other personalities. Feynman was a brash, outspoken genius. How about the quieter theorists and the hardworking expermimentalists? How about John Bahcall, a theorist who studied solar neutrinos when no one took him seriously? Bahcall proposed a solar neutrino experiment in 1964 and almost forty years later, solar neutrino experiments were awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize! I would just like to break the stereotype that physicists are either showmen (Feynman) or wacky and "bad at math" (Einstein) or study cosmology/particles (Hawking).

Link of the day: Colloqium talk on community-based data management

I learned about a really interesting talk via Dave Bacon's blog. Here Raghu Ramakrishman talks about the emergence of social websites (e.g. flickr, del.icio.us, etc) and how the future of the web may lie in leveraging community input to improve data extraction. In the beginning, we had the web which was just static text and pictures. Then Alta Vista and other search engines used anchor text to improve searching. After that, Google came up with the concept of page rank. By looking at the many levels of linkage and giving more reputable sources a higher weight, you can come up with the most relevant search result. The next step in the evolution of the web may be using the direct input of users (e.g. tags) to improve data extraction.

Ramakrishman has been doing research on a very small-scale example called DBLife. It is a site that tries to extract data about academic researchers in the field of databases. If you search for a particular researcher, DBLife will attempt to generate pictures of the researchers, his/her list of publications and talks, and other information. You (the user) can then submit input on whether you think the information is accurate. So Ramakrishman's great hope is that we can develop software that is easily maintained by a community of users, that it will be easy to abstract the underlying structure of DBLife and apply it to other communities like Hollywood (e.g. HollywoodLife). In other words, one could give the software to another community without them having to look at any code.

The video of the talk is available here.

Fonts for computer presentations

I prefer sans-serif fonts for presentations and I've been looking around for alternatives to the ubiquitous Arial. Here are two I like: Verdana (standard on most computers) and MgOpen Moderna (description, download).

Would you like to work in a treehouse?

Via Ramit Sethi, I found out about Inventionland. Here are some interesting pictures of their "corporate" headquarters. Yes, apparently it's a real company.

My backup/maintenance solution

I think I've finally figured out a good plan to maintain my computer and digital information.

1. Compressed backup of home computer at beginning of month onto a portable external hard drive (Seagate 100 GB notebook drive). Rotate several backup copies on the drive, deleting the oldest copy before writing a new copy. Bring drive home to do backup, then take drive off-site to another location away from home.
   
2. Compressed backup of home computer mid-month on a large-capacity external hard drive at home. Rotate several backup copies on the drive, deleting the oldest copy before writing a new copy. I currently have a rather small external hard drive and I'm thinking of replacing it with a Western Digital 500 GB My Book.
   
3. Once a week: run anti-virus and spyware programs and use rsync to a) backup/update work folders on a work server, b) backup/update pine mbox files from my university email account onto my home computer, and c) backup/update an uncompressed mirror of my home computer on the large-capacity external hard drive. I use ssh encryption when connecting to remote computers. The anti-virus/spyware check is a set of automated tasks (I just leave the computer on). The rsync process is handled by running a Windows batch file which calls a Cygwin shell script. Unfortunately, I can't automate this process because rsync needs my password to connect to remote servers; I'd rather not use SSH keys for hands-off password-less login.
   
4. Every two weeks, backup Gmail via POP access to Thunderbird and also backup information on del.icio.us, Backpack, and Yahoo Calendar.
   
5. Once a month, run ccleaner, chkdsk, and O&O defrag. I run chkdsk with a Windows batch file and manually run ccleaner and defrag (I like to do it by hand since they are sensitive tasks).
   

Retaliation never pays

I have learned that retaliation never pays, at least in hockey. During one game, I accidentally skated into another player on the opposing team (which should have resulted in a charging penalty.) However, the referee only saw the part where she shoved me back and instead she received a trip to the penalty box (despite screaming at the ref in protest.) In another game, I was rushing the offensive zone during a hard forecheck. While an opposing player and I were both chasing the puck in parallel, I shoved her (due to my excited aggressive state I suppose). She tried to push me back (mostly missing me) and ended up dropping her stick. I'm not trying to gloat about my cunning cleverness, but I did find it amusing that retaliation failed in both cases.

Quote of the day: Why are we as a people worth saving?

An excerpt of a speech by Commander William Adama (TV miniseries pilot for Battlestar Galactica) on the occasion of Galactica's retirement:

We fought the Cylons to save ourselves from extinction, but we never answered the question... why? Why are we as a people worth saving? Look at us. We tell ourselves we're noble, intelligent creatures. Children of the Lords of Kobol. But we'll still let people go to bed hungry because it costs too much to feed the poor... we still commit murder for greed or spite or jealousy... and we visit all of our sins upon our children. We refuse to take responsibility for what we've done. Like we did with the Cylons. We decided to play god, create life. When that life turned against us, we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it really wasn't our fault, not really. You cannot play god, then wash your hands of the things that you've created. Sooner or later, the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore.

Living consciously

I recently read Steve Pavlina's post on gratitude. It reminded me of the concept "to live consciously." It isn't enough to live, we have to want to live and know why. I define so-called living as mere survival: bumbling about our jobs, perfunctorily greeting acquaintances, mindlessly surfing the net or watching television. I haven't read much about living consciously, but I will offer my own interpretation based on my own experiences. I believe to live consciously is to think about every action you do and why you do it, to examine that action in the larger fabric of your life, to never treat anything as merely routine. "Why am I friends with so and so?" "Why am I not very nice to so and so?" "Why am I not putting 100% effort into my creative work?" "Why do I like doing X so much?" "Why do I keep procrastinating?" On multiple occasions, I have heard the idea "most people are only using a tiny fraction of their brain." That refers to what you are missing out on if you don't live consciously. Living consciously requires constant introspection. It's hard work, but don't we all want to enjoy a full experience of life? Kind of like living our lives in color instead of black and white (watch the movie "Pleasantville").

I realize now that lifehacking and GTD are systems with the idea of living consciously at their core. It is very naturally to adopt the principle of living consciously if you're a GTD practitioner. It is very easy to get distracted by the minutiae of life -- and that is why you should do your weekly reviews!!

Some other links on living consciously: a book by the same name, Steve Pavlina's own essay on the topic.

Tech: Subversion, WinSCP, and DVD backup

I wanted to share some software knowledge I've gained recently.

First, I learned how to use Subversion. It is a really nice piece of software, open source, multi-platform and supposedly better than CVS. On Windows, I use the GUI client Tortoise SVN which emulates subversion commands in the explorer window.

Second, I can finally do file synchronization (at least between a local Windows machine and a remote machine). The SFTP client, WinSCP, has synchronization built-in. It's pretty self-explanatory and there is the nice option for previewing the synchronization and tweaking it before it occurs.

I also learned how to DVD backup (note: I am backing up DVDs I own, not copying DVDs and distributing them) by reading this concise tutorial. You can make a backup DVD of your original or even save the original .iso file on your hard drive. The only tricky issues are 1) (possibly) needing to break DVD encryption and 2) (possibly) needing to compress the image of the original so it can fit on a DVD-R. Note the last problem might be solved if you use a higher capacity disc like HD-DVD/Blu-Ray and/or dual-layer.

Link of the day: "Can't Get No Satisfaction"

I found a really interesting article about burnout in the New York magazine (via 43Folders), which ties in nicely with one of my previous posts. The basic idea is that burnout is caused by the "gap between expectation and reward," or on the flip side, "happiness is reality divided by expectation."

Here's an thought-provoking quote:

“In seminary,” he suddenly says, “I did a bit of depth psychology.” DeGarmo had never studied it before. He was assigned Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and found himself beguiled by Carl Jung’s theories about the opposing parts of our personalities. “I remember Jung saying that the general trajectory of your life is to work to your strength in your younger life, going great guns to establish yourself at whatever you’re doing,” he continues. “But at some point in midlife, the other part of your personality—the feminine instead of masculine, or whatever other opposing trait—is looking for expression. And if you don’t allow it to express itself, you’re not, in effect, going to become a whole person. Brittle is the word he uses.”