Inventing Yourself

How do you know whether you are fooling yourself? I was talking to a friend who strapped himself firmly to a schedule that's just as impossible as mine: studying full time and working full time. We were exchanging some life-saving "best practices" to keep ourselves afloat (and reasonably sane). One of the hardest parts of it all is motivation: how to keep it up and, maybe more importantly, how to just ignore yourself when motivation is low.

He said he used a "neutral agent" in his head that would dissect his every behavior and make a fool out of him when his dramatic / escapist / lazy / ... self would have a smashing idea, say, learning how to play the marimba or building that tree-house for his little niece. It sounds nice, the neutral agent, but I don't believe we can be neutral about ourselves. My "neutral agent" would, in any case, bring up only good arguments about tree-house building and marimba playing. How neutral is that neutral agent? I know I'm great at fooling myself because I know best what arguments will convince myself.

But who needs objectivity anyway? I'll just go for fiction instead and create a narrative that works. Penelope Trunk describes this perfectly: "Take, for example, the person who stops going to the gym for a month. A person who thinks of himself as someone who goes to the gym is more likely to start going again than someone who thinks of himself as a non-gym type."

Oliver Sacks writes about this too: "Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives - we are each of us unique."

More Bollywood Craze

And never mind it being dubbed in Russian (!):

Bollywood Fix

Remember this video? Turns out the original is from a very popular Bollywood movie, Disco Dancer:



And what else did I find on the soundtrack for that movie? M.I.A's Jimmy !!

Fat in Dry Matter: 43%. Thinking: 0%

The New York Times has a cool graph: "The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008." It's great to see how fairly synced we all are.

This made me smile though:

What Sarah Palin Would See If She'd See Russia From Her Home

Picture of a fumarole in Kamchatka.

Obeying The Machine

After spending too much time studying curricular courses instead of topics I really care about, my motivation has been low lately. And when my motivation is low, my self-discipline sends itself off a cliff. I caught myself throwing sideways glances at my computer screen every few minutes, eager to jump onto the next excuse to start an hour-long round trip through the web (that Growl-notification system isn't exactly helping. Who can resist the soft glow of a new mail / tweet?).

Something had to be done. And what is the only solution for a Gen-Y sucker enslaved by a computer? Right, a computer telling you to behave. I installed the application Concentrate, which allows you to make different environments (study / write / ...) blocking the website or applications of your choice for the time you set. I made my study-environment as austere as possible, with the exception of Wikipedia (what if I need to look something up for my studying).



Does it work? It does, although not in the way it is intended. Just knowing that I blocked myself out of all the fun stuff, I won't even go and look. No sideways glances anymore. Seems like I can't bear the thought of being reprimanded by a computer after all...

Radio Lab Is Tailor-Made To Suck You In

I've just discovered Radio Lab and I'm addicted already. This radio show / podcast about science, discovery, nature and life in general is so made for humans. Hmm, that's maybe a weird way of describing something. Or wait a minute, what's weird is that not more things are like that. Let me explain what I mean.

Radio Lab is great at telling stories. Humans love stories, everyone knows that. Our narrative brain often gets us into trouble, science-wise, because it makes us too keen on reading something into nothing. When we hear a plausible story, a lot of alarm bells are just ignored. Who cares about correlation-is-not-causality when something has a compelling beginning, middle and end?

And it gets worse, because for those amongst us who can fight a good plot line, they added something else in the mix: weird noises and funny voices. Humans love that even more. And if you were one of the rare ones still able to resist diving into the sweet river of unfolding events and remain firmly rooted in your critical mind, even you will have to succumb eventually.

Because on top of that, the hosts are so irresistibly silly that it makes you want to drag them through the ether and into the living room to kiss them on both cheeks (well, four cheeks, that will be, because there's two hosts). They ask the questions you feel like asking when you're sitting in a big lecture hall listening to some Very Important Professor or other, and all you can think is "WTF? This can't be real, right? It sounds so... [impossible / wrong / unnecessary / idiotic / revolting]" But of course you never ask those questions, and if you do, you "upsmart" them to make them better suited for an academic setting. Radio Lab doesn't quite seem to care about upsmarting, it only cares about curiosity. And what, after all, is more human?

Communal Living In Russia

My relationship with Russia has always been a bitter-sweet one, but has been turning downright sour lately. I've spent years learning Russian, visiting the country, devouring stacks of books about it - only to grow to resent Russia more and more.
Somewhere down the road, I must have lost that romantic feeling of "oh, how charming, a country where nothing really works".*

What I know of Soviet life, I learned from books: literary accounts of the hardships and cruelties of life in the Communist Utopia, but always told with - for literariness' sake - a wry smile and a misplaced nostalgia.

So the website Communal Living in Russia came as quite a shock. It describes itself as "an online ethnographic museum" and gives us an idea of what housing according to communist ideals really looked like. Well-documented with photos, videos, essays, testimonials and floor plans, it allows you to peek inside those statuesque Saint-Petersburg buildings. The contrast is often horrifying: who would have guessed these buildings...




...could look like this on the inside:





hiding details like:



I don't see anything even remotely romantic or sweet about this. Just bitter-sour.



*Russian writers themselves seem to be the biggest proponents of this view, as readers of Victor Yerofeyev's Moscow-Petushki know (Wikipedia and excerpts of the book online).

So Sad But So True

I used to read a lot of novels when I was younger. I can't read most anymore, because they don't have enough information in them.

From the fantastic Paul Graham.

Inspiration (Such A Soggy Title Must Have A Really Good Post To Make Up For It)

[Y]ou have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.

It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations. For example, if you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I can't draw." This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."

From Paul Graham's How To Do What You Love.