Somashekaracharya Gunasagara Bhaskaracharya

Maxims of François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680):

• “An extraordinary Haste to discharge an Obligation is a Sort of Ingratitude.”
• “Did we not flatter ourselves, the Flattery of others could never hurt us.”
• “Before we passionately desire a Thing, we should examine into the Happiness of its Possessor.”
• “Few Men are able to know all the Ill they do.”
• “Fortune never seems so blind to any as to those on whom she bestows no Favours.”
• “Happiness is in the Taste, not in the Thing; and we are made happy by possessing what we love, not what others think lovely.”
• “Men may boast of their great Actions; but they are oftner the Effects of Chance, than of Design.”
• “The Glory of great Men ought always to be rated according to the Means used to acquire it.”
• “We should manage our Fortune as our Constitution; enjoy it when good, have Patience when ’tis bad, and never apply violent Remedies but in Cases of Necessity.”
• “We bear, all of us, the Misfortunes of other People with heroic Constancy.”
• “Whatever great Advantages Nature can give, she can’t without Fortune’s Concurrence make Heroes.”

And “Hope, deceitful as it is, carries us thro’ Life agreeably enough.”

The post Insight appeared first on Futility Closet.

The aluminum soda can is a humble testament to the power and scope of human ingenuity. If that sounds like hyperbole, you should watch this video, which features eleven solid minutes of engineering explanation and is not boring for even a second.

More science/engineering programming like this please...I feel like if this would have been on PBS or Discovery, it would have lasted twice as long and communicated half the information. For a chaser, you can watch a detailed making-of from an aluminum can manufacturing company:

(via devour)

David Brooks asks: what does life look like when you stop focusing so much on resume building and external achievement and spend more time working on your morality and inner character?

It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral -- whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?

We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.

But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.

This essay is adapted from Brooks' newest book, The Road to Character, which is out tomorrow.

From Evan Puschak, aka The Nerdwriter, comes an entertaining analysis of Jacques-Louis David's neoclassical masterpiece, The Death of Socrates.

The Death of Socrates is on display at the Met here in NYC. From the Met's catalogue entry:

In 399 B.C., having been accused by the Athenian government of impiety and of corrupting young people with his teachings, the philosopher Socrates was tried, found guilty, and offered the choice of renouncing his beliefs or drinking the cup of hemlock. He died willingly for the principles he held dear. Here he gestures toward the cup, points toward the heavens, and discourses on the immortality of the soul. The picture, with its stoic theme, has been described as David's most perfect neoclassical statement.

The artist consulted Plato's "Phaedo" and a variety of sources including Diderot's treatise on dramatic poetry and works by the poet André Chenier. The pose of Plato, the figure seated in profile at the foot of the bed (who was not actually present at the scene), was reportedly inspired by the English novelist Richardson. The printmaker and publisher John Boydell, writing to Sir Joshua Reynolds, called The Death of Socrates "the greatest effort of art since the Sistine Chapel and the stanze of Raphael," further observing that the painting "would have done honour to Athens at the time of Pericles."

Here's a bigger view of the painting, which you'll want to pore over once you've watched the video. (via ★interesting)

“What would you like me to play?” he asked.

“Anything you like,” I said.

As he considered my vague request, the bells on his bow gently shook. He had personally crafted the instrument in his hand. It was a Ravanhatha, the oldest enduring ancestor of the violin.

He then nodded, closed his eyes and began to play. The strains were familiar. It was a song I had heard before. It was a song I loved.

Kesariya baalam aao ni
Padhaaro mhare des

(Listen to him play)

It was a song that welcomed a beloved guest to a storied land. A land of soil so golden, and skies so silver. A land of colour, vigour, and strength. A land known as Rajasthan.

The man opened his eyes as the song came to an end.

“Welcome,” he said.

—

People in Rajasthan (Part 1 of 26)

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In 1983, the BBC aired a six-part series called Fun to Imagine with a simple premise: put physicist Richard Feynman in front of a camera and have him explain everyday things. In this clip from one of the episodes, Feynman explains in very simple terms what fire is:

So good. Watch the whole thing...it seems like you get the gist about 2 minutes in, but that's only half the story. See also Feynman explaining rubber bands, how trains go around curves, and how magnets work.

I loved every opinionated moment of this interview with Fran Lebowitz about fashion. Where do I even start? Some choice bits:

Yoga pants are ruining women.

Shirts don't go bad, they're not peaches.

I feel very strongly that almost the entire city has copied my glasses.

Dry...clean. These words don't go together. Wet clean -- that is how you clean. I can't even imagine the things they do at the drycleaner. I don't want to know.

I have to say that one of the biggest changes in my lifetime, is the phenomenon of men wearing shorts. Men never wore shorts when I was young. There are few things I would rather see less, to tell you the truth. I'd just as soon see someone coming toward me with a hand grenade. This is one of the worst changes, by far. It's disgusting. To have to sit next to grown men on the subway in the summer, and they're wearing shorts? It's repulsive. They look ridiculous, like children, and I can't take them seriously.

Now people need special costumes to ride bicycles. I mean, a helmet, what, are you an astronaut??

Of course, more people should wear overcoats than those damned down jackets. Please. Are you skiing, or are you walking across the street? If you're not an arctic explorer, dress like a human being.

I, myself, am deeply superficial.

Feeling good about an outfit is the point at which that outfit finally becomes good.

So good.

Here's The Economist's obituary of Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore.

Among a number of 20th-century luminaries asked by the Wall Street Journal in 1999 to pick the most influential invention of the millennium, he alone shunned the printing press, electricity, the internal combustion engine and the internet and chose the air-conditioner. He explained that, before air-con, people living in the tropics were at a disadvantage because the heat and humidity damaged the quality of their work.

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Ok, Pluto fans. They evicted Pluto from our solar system's planetary pantheon, but a NASA mission launched in 2006 is nearing the dwarf planet with its cameras. We'll soon have photos of Pluto that are much more high resolution than we currently have, which means scientists will need names for all the new geographic features. The Our Pluto site has been set up to help suggest and vote on names for these features. Naming themes include historic explorers, travelers to the underworld, and scientists and engineers. Go vote! (via slate)

Most people have a mental model of computation based on the Turing machine. The computer does one operation at a time. For example, maybe it adds two numbers and outputs the result.

In truth, most modern processor cores are superscalar. They execute several instructions per CPU cycle (e.g., 4 instructions). That is above and beyond the fact that many processors have several cores.

Programmers should care about superscalarity because it impacts performance significantly. For example, consider an array of integers. You can compute the gaps between the integers, y[i+1]=x[i+1]-x[i], faster than you can recover the original values from the gaps, x[i+1]=y[i+1]+x[i]. That is because the processor can compute several gaps at once whereas it needs to recover the values in sequence (e.g., x[i] before x[i+1]).

Superscalar execution is truly a wonderful piece of technology. It is amazing that our processors can reorder and regroup instructions without causing any bugs. And though you should be aware of it, it is mostly transparent: there is no need to rewrite your code to benefit from it.

There is another great modern feature that programmers need to be aware of: most modern processors support SIMD instructions. Instead of, say, adding two numbers, they can add two vectors of integers together. Recent Intel processors can add eight 32-bit integers using one instruction (vpaddd).

It is even better than it sounds: SIMD instructions are superscalar too… so that your processor could possibly add, say, sixteen 32-bit integers in one CPU cycle by executing two instructions at once. And it might yet squeeze a couple of other instructions, in the same CPU cycle!

Vectorization is handy to process images, graphics, arrays of data, and so on. However, unlike superscalar execution, vectorization does not come for free. The processor will not vectorize the computation for you. Thankfully, compilers and interpreters do their best to leverage SIMD instructions.

However, we are not yet at the point where compilers will rewrite your algorithms for you. If your algorithm does not takes into account vectorization, it may not be possible for the compiler to help you in this regard.

An important problem when working with databases or search engines is the computation of the intersection between sorted arrays. For example, given {1, 2, 10, 32} and {2, 3, 32}, you want {2, 32}.

If you assume that you are interested in arrays having about the same length, there are clever SIMD algorithms to compute the intersection. Ilya Katsov describes an elegant approach for 32-bit integers. If your integers fit in 16 bits, Schlegel et al. have similar algorithms using special string comparison functions available on Intel processors.

These algorithms are efficient, as long as the two input arrays have similar length… But life is not so easy. In many typical applications, you frequently need to compute the intersection between arrays having vastly different lengths. Maybe one array contains a hundred integers and the other one thousand. In such cases, you should fall back on a standard intersection algorithm based on a binary search (a technique sometimes called “galloping”).

Or should you fall back? In a recent paper, SIMD Compression and the Intersection of Sorted Integers, we demonstrate the power of a very simple idea to design better intersection algorithms. Suppose that you are given the number 5 and you want to know whether it appears in the list {1,2,4,6,7,8,15,16}. You can try to do it by binary search, or do a sequential scan… or better yet, you can do it with a simple vectorized algorithm:

• First represent your single number as a vector made entirely of this value: 5 becomes {5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5}. Intel processors can do this operation very quickly with one instruction.
• Compare the two vectors {5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5} and {1,2,4,6,7,8,15,16} using one instruction. That is, you can check eight equalities at once cheaply. In this instance, I would get {false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false}. It remains to check whether the resulting vector contains a true value which can be done using yet another instruction.

With this simple idea, we can accelerate a range of intersection algorithms with SIMD instructions. In our paper, we show that, on practical and realistic problems, you can double the speed of the state-of-the-art.

To learn more, you can grab our paper and check out our C++ code.

Reference:

Further reading: Efficient Intersections of compressed posting lists thanks to SIMD instructions by Leonid Boytsov.

In 1794, at Strasbourg, the French Hussar François Fournier-Sarlovèze challenged a young man to a duel and killed him. When his fellow officer Pierre Dupont de l’Étang denied him entrance to a ball on the eve of the funeral, the fiery Fournier challenged him to a duel. The two fought with swords, and Fournier was wounded.

When he had recovered he challenged Dupont to a second duel, and wounded him. In their third meeting each inflicted a slight wound on the other. Finally the two agreed to a private war that would continue until one of them confessed that he was beaten or “satisfied.” They even drew up a contract:

1. Every time that Dupont and Fournier shall be a hundred miles from each other they will each approach from a distance to meet sword in hand.
2. Should one of the contracting parties be prevented by service duties, he who is free must travel the entire distance, so as to reconcile the obligations of service with the demands of the present treaty.
3. No excuse whatever, excepting those resulting from military obligations, will be admitted.
4. The present being a bona fide treaty, no alteration can be made to the conditions agreed upon by the contracting parties.

Over the ensuing 19 years the two fought at least 30 duels, each eventually rising to the rank of general. Finally, after a particularly savage meeting in Switzerland in 1813, in which Dupont ran his sword through Fournier’s neck, Dupont explained that he would be married soon and wanted to conclude the matter with a pistol duel in a nearby wood. Dupont twice tricked his opponent into firing at empty clothing, then advanced on him with pistols primed and claimed his victory. In The Duel, Robert Baldick writes, “Thus ended after a total period of nineteen years, the longest, friendliest and most mobile duel in history.”

(This story is so absurdly romantic that I doubted whether it happened at all, but every source I can find confirms at least the essentials. Joseph Conrad found an account of the rivalry in a provincial newspaper and turned it into his 1908 short story “The Duel,” and Ridley Scott turned Conrad’s story into the 1977 film The Duellists. I’ll keep digging.)

Draw a right triangle whose legs a and b each measure 1. Draw d and e to complete a unit square. Clearly d + e = 2.

Now if we cut a “step” into the square as shown, then f + h = 1 and g + i = 1, so the total length of the “staircase” is still 2. Cut still finer steps and j + k + l + m + n + o + p + q is likewise 2.

And so on: The more finely we cut the steps, the more closely their shape approximates that of the original triangle’s diagonal. Yet the total length of the stairstep shape remains 2, the sum of its horizontal and vertical elements. At the limit, then, it would seem that c must measure 2 … but we know that the length of a unit square’s diagonal is the square root of 2. Where is the error?

(Thanks, Alex.)

interturb
v. to disturb by interrupting

In late 1908 Douglas Mawson, Alastair Mackay, and Edgeworth David left Ernest Shackleton’s party in hopes of discovering the location of the South Magnetic Pole. On Dec. 11, while Mackay left the camp to reconnoiter, David prepared to sketch the mountains and Mawson retired into the tent to work on his camera equipment:

I was busy changing photographic plates in the only place where it could be done — inside the sleeping bag. … Soon after I had done up the bag, having got safely inside, I heard a voice from outside — a gentle voice — calling:

‘Mawson, Mawson.’

‘Hullo!’ said I.

‘Oh, you’re in the bag changing plates, are you?’

‘Yes, Professor.’

There was a silence for some time. Then I heard the Professor calling in a louder tone:

‘Mawson!’

I answered again. Well the Professor heard by the sound I was still in the bag, so he said:

‘Oh, still changing plates, are you?’

‘Yes.’

More silence for some time. After a minute, in a rather loud and anxious tone:

‘Mawson!’

I thought there was something up, but could not tell what he was after. I was getting rather tired of it and called out:

‘Hullo. What is it? What can I do?’

‘Well, Mawson, I am in a rather dangerous position. I am really hanging on by my fingers to the edge of a crevasse, and I don’t think I can hold on much longer. I shall have to trouble you to come out and assist me.’

I came out rather quicker than I can say. There was the Professor, just his head showing and hanging on to the edge of a dangerous crevasse.

David later explained, “I had scarcely gone more than six yards from the tent, when the lid of a crevasse suddenly collapsed under me. I only saved myself from going right down by throwing my arms out and staying myself on the snow lid on either side.”

Mawson helped him out, and David began his sketching. The party reached the pole in January.

A ghost co-authored a mathematics paper in 1990. When Pierre Cartier edited a Festschrift in honor of Alexander Grothendieck’s 60th birthday, Robert Thomas contributed an article that was co-signed by his recently deceased friend Thomas Trobaugh. He explained:

The first author must state that his coauthor and close friend, Tom Trobaugh, quite intelligent, singularly original, and inordinately generous, killed himself consequent to endogenous depression. Ninety-four days later, in my dream, Tom’s simulacrum remarked, ‘The direct limit characterization of perfect complexes shows that they extend, just as one extends a coherent sheaf.’ Awaking with a start, I knew this idea had to be wrong, since some perfect complexes have a non-vanishing K₀ obstruction to extension. I had worked on this problem for 3 years, and saw this approach to be hopeless. But Tom’s simulacrum had been so insistent, I knew he wouldn’t let me sleep undisturbed until I had worked out the argument and could point to the gap. This work quickly led to the key results of this paper. To Tom, I could have explained why he must be listed as a coauthor.

Thomason himself died suddenly five years later of diabetic shock, at age 43. Perhaps the two are working again together somewhere.

(Robert Thomason and Thomas Trobaugh, “Higher Algebraic K-Theory of Schemes and of Derived Categories,” in P. Cartier et al., eds., The Grothendieck Festschrift Volume III, 1990.)

The theme music for the British television series Inspector Morse starts with a motif based on the Morse code for the word Morse:

-- --- ·-· ··· ·

“It was just a little in-joke,” composer Barrington Pheloung told Essex Life & Countryside in 2001. “I put his name at the beginning and then it recurred all the way through.”

Encouraged, he carried the idea into subsequent episodes. “Sometimes I got a bit cheeky and spelled out the killer’s name in the episode. In the episode ‘WHOK,’ which was a bit of an enigma, the culprit was called Earle. So he got plastered all over the orchestra.” When viewers caught on to this, occasionally he’d insert another character’s name to fool them.

And sometimes he’d give them the slip entirely. When the episode aired in which the detective was due to reveal his first name, 20 million people tuned in to listen for clues in the music, and a national newspaper enlisted the Royal College of Signalling to decipher the notes. They found nothing. (The inspector’s name is Endeavour.)

(Thanks, Dave.)

UPDATE: In the same spirit, the theme to the 1970s British sitcom Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em (below) spells out the series’ title in Morse code (minus the apostrophes). (Thanks, Nick.)

In a lecture given in 1924, German mathematician David Hilbert introduced the idea of the paradox of the Grand Hotel, which might help you wrap your head around the concept of infinity. (Spoiler alert: it probably won't help...that's the paradox.) In his book One Two Three... Infinity, George Gamow describes Hilbert's paradox:

Let us imagine a hotel with a finite number of rooms, and assume that all the rooms are occupied. A new guest arrives and asks for a room. "Sorry," says the proprietor, "but all the rooms are occupied." Now let us imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and all the rooms are occupied. To this hotel, too, comes a new guest and asks for a room.

"But of course!" exclaims the proprietor, and he moves the person previously occupying room N1 into room N2, the person from room N2 into room N3, the person from room N3 into room N4, and so on.... And the new customer receives room N1, which became free as the result of these transpositions.

Let us imagine now a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, all taken up, and an infinite number of new guests who come in and ask for rooms.

"Certainly, gentlemen," says the proprietor, "just wait a minute."

He moves the occupant of N1 into N2, the occupant of N2 into N4, and occupant of N3 into N6, and so on, and so on...

Now all odd-numbered rooms became free and the infinite of new guests can easily be accommodated in them.

This TED video created by Jeff Dekofsky explains that there are similar strategies for finding space in such a hotel for infinite numbers of infinite groups of people and even infinite amounts of infinite numbers of infinite groups of people (and so on, and so on...) and is very much worth watching:

(via brain pickings)

Jessamyn West writes about the nuts and bolts of dealing with the death of her techie dad, including wresting control from the hidden computer controlling his house and digitally impersonating him to use his apps and cancel cable.

My dad's retirement home was not quite so high tech but it was designed to provide a certain level of creature comforts with minimal inputs from him. Set it and forget it. An X-10 system turned most of the lights on and off on a schedule. Some of this was pretty straightforward "Turn on the porch lights after dark." and some was a bit more esoteric "Turn off the office lights at 10 pm so that I'll know it's time for bed." He knew the ruleset. I did not. I'd be working on an article or reading a book and suddenly be plunged into total darkness. I'd poke at some wall switches that would sometimes turn the lights back on.

The system was controlled by a laptop. The laptop died. I removed the hard drive to get at the config files. This project went on a lengthy To Do list and never rose to the top. The lights kept turning on and off. Over time their schedules got out of sync. The driveway lights would stay on for days. The porch lights would never come on, or turn on at 6:15 pm and then off at 6:27. Sometimes they'd just blink on and off and we'd be all "Did you see that?" My sister and I kept lists, tried to discern patterns. I pulled the switches off the walls, only to find that they were just stuck on with tape, with no actual wires underneath. Somewhere in some wall there was a transmitter sending out signals that only the lights could hear.

It's oddly comforting that even in the digital age, our loved ones can still haunt us from their graves.

From the Physics arXiv Blog, a list of paradoxes in modern cosmological physics, i.e. areas where theory and observation disagree, sometimes by a whopping 120 orders of magnitude.

Perhaps the most dramatic, and potentially most important, of these paradoxes comes from the idea that the universe is expanding, one of the great successes of modern cosmology. It is based on a number of different observations.

The first is that other galaxies are all moving away from us. The evidence for this is that light from these galaxies is red-shifted. And the greater the distance, the bigger this red-shift.

Astrophysicists interpret this as evidence that more distant galaxies are travelling away from us more quickly. Indeed, the most recent evidence is that the expansion is accelerating.

What's curious about this expansion is that space, and the vacuum associated with it, must somehow be created in this process. And yet how this can occur is not at all clear. "The creation of space is a new cosmological phenomenon, which has not been tested yet in physical laboratory," says Baryshev.

What's more, there is an energy associated with any given volume of the universe. If that volume increases, the inescapable conclusion is that this energy must increase as well. And yet physicists generally think that energy creation is forbidden.

Baryshev quotes the British cosmologist, Ted Harrison, on this topic: "The conclusion, whether we like it or not, is obvious: energy in the universe is not conserved," says Harrison.

This is a problem that cosmologists are well aware of. And yet ask them about it and they shuffle their feet and stare at the ground. Clearly, any theorist who can solve this paradox will have a bright future in cosmology.

Luckily, these paradoxes are an opportunity to do some great science.

When Tim Urban recently began researching artificial intelligence, what he discovered affected him so much that he wrote a deep two-part dive on The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence and Our Immortality or Extinction.

An AI system at a certain level -- let's say human village idiot -- is programmed with the goal of improving its own intelligence. Once it does, it's smarter -- maybe at this point it's at Einstein's level -- so now when it works to improve its intelligence, with an Einstein-level intellect, it has an easier time and it can make bigger leaps. These leaps make it much smarter than any human, allowing it to make even bigger leaps. As the leaps grow larger and happen more rapidly, the AGI soars upwards in intelligence and soon reaches the superintelligent level of an ASI system. This is called an Intelligence Explosion, and it's the ultimate example of The Law of Accelerating Returns.

There is some debate about how soon AI will reach human-level general intelligence -- the median year on a survey of hundreds of scientists about when they believed we'd be more likely than not to have reached AGI was 2040 -- that's only 25 years from now, which doesn't sound that huge until you consider that many of the thinkers in this field think it's likely that the progression from AGI to ASI happens very quickly. Like -- this could happen:

It takes decades for the first AI system to reach low-level general intelligence, but it finally happens. A computer is able understand the world around it as well as a human four-year-old. Suddenly, within an hour of hitting that milestone, the system pumps out the grand theory of physics that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics, something no human has been able to definitively do. 90 minutes after that, the AI has become an ASI, 170,000 times more intelligent than a human.

Superintelligence of that magnitude is not something we can remotely grasp, any more than a bumblebee can wrap its head around Keynesian Economics. In our world, smart means a 130 IQ and stupid means an 85 IQ -- we don't have a word for an IQ of 12,952.

While I was reading this, I kept thinking about two other posts Urban wrote: The Fermi Paradox (in that human-built AI could be humanity's own Great Filter) and From 1,000,000 to Graham's Number (how the process of the speed and intelligence of computers could fold in on itself to get unimaginably fast and powerful).

Watch as farmer Derek Klingenberg calls his cattle in by playing Lorde's Royals on his trombone.

I can't tell if this is the perfect Monday video or the perfect Friday video. Maybe I'll post it again on Friday and we'll compare. (via the esteemed surgeon and writer @atul_gawande)

The origin of the word idiot is “one’s own,” the same root as idiom. So originally an idiot was someone in his own world, someone who takes no outside input. The historical meaning carries over to some degree: When you see a smart person do something idiotic, it’s usually because he’s acting alone.

The opposite of an idiot would not be someone who is wise, but someone who takes too much outside input, someone who passively lets others make all his decisions or who puts every decision to a vote.

An idiot lives only in his own world; the opposite of an idiot has no world of his own. Both are foolish, but I think the Internet encourages more of the latter kind of foolishness. It’s not turning people into idiots, it’s turning them into the opposite.

Roger Schank is a famous computer science professor. His take on lectures is just brilliant:

We still have lectures for one main reason. They are the lazy person’s approach to education. Both lectures and listeners agree that neither of them wants to do much work. Real work, and real doing, and real conversation, is all that matters for learning, but education is really not about learning.

A video of the output of an ASCII fluid dynamics simulator.

Sloshy! (via waxy)

This is the rope seal securing the doors of Tutankhamun's tomb, unbroken for more than 3200 years until shortly after Harry Burton took this photo in 1923. A description from National Geographic:

Still intact in 1923 after 32 centuries, rope secures the doors to the second of four nested shrines in Tutankhamun's burial chamber. The necropolis seal -- depicting captives on their knees and Anubis, the jackal god of the dead -- remains unbroken, a sign that Tut's mummy lies undisturbed inside.

How did the rope last for so long? Rare Historical Photos explains:

Rope is one of the fundamental human technologies. Archaeologists have found two-ply ropes going back 28,000 years. Egyptians were the first documented civilization to use specialized tools to make rope. One key why the rope lasted so long wasn't the rope itself, it was the aridity of the air in the desert. It dries out and preserves things. Another key is oxygen deprivation. Tombs are sealed to the outside. Bacteria can break things down as long as they have oxygen, but then they effectively suffocate. It's not uncommon to find rope, wooden carvings, cloth, organic dyes, etc. in Egyptian pyramids and tombs that wouldn't have survived elsewhere in the world.

You’re going to have a conversation.

Great.

Ideally, this is going to be an effective conversation. You have a topic you want to discuss that will likely result in a decision or two. You are confident in your version of the truth and you feel no matter what happens in this conversation, you’ll be able to adapt.

Problem is, there is another person in this conversation and from the moment they open their mouth, it’s no longer just about the topic, the conversation is now about how we are having it.

Meeting Creatures

This is an article about basic conversation mechanics. It’s not about what motivates the person sitting across from you, it’s about some of the quirks you’ll encounter as the conversation occurs.

I have a series of mostly embarrassing articles from the mid-00’s that talk about the different types of folks that are going to show up in your meetings. Don’t read these articles. They are simplistic and embarrassing because they judge and they judge simplistically.

The following list of mechanics is presented mostly sans judgement. I’ve attempted to capture these different styles and quirks to both alert you to their existence and to give you an objective opinion about their intent.

For the sake of simplicity, I’m going assume that your hypothetical conversation is regarding a mostly non-controversial topic. Both parties are on equal footing and no one is likely to lose their shit. This is an average no-frills conversation.

Let’s start with:

The Can’t Finishers This particular conversation quirk occurs when the person sitting across the table appears to be unable to complete their thought. They clearly make their point again and again and again. There is a spectrum to the Can’t Finisher. On one end we have the ones who are such good communicators that you can’t really tell they are unable to finish for some time. On the other end, we have the folks who are repeating themselves, word for word, after a minute.

The Can’t Finisher behavior, I’ve found, is situational and I know this because I have this quirk. When I’m spiraling on the same point, it either means I don’t feel I’ve expressed myself clearly and/or the other party hasn’t non-verbally acknowledged my point, yet.

Being on the receiving end of the Can’t Finisher is frustrating because, yes, you got the point the first or second time, but we’re circling back to the fourth version of the same point which means it’s time for…

The Interrupter This conversational behavior is much more prevalent in larger groups of people where folks are jockeying to interject themselves into the conversation, but it happens in one on ones, as well.

You’re halfway through your point and the Interrupter just jumps in mid-sentence. It seem rude, but there are truly artistic Interrupters on the planet. These masters interrupt you mid-thought and you don’t even notice. They have the ability to detect that you’ve said just enough, they intuitively know precisely how and where to interrupt you, and they meaningfully carry on the flow of the conversation. It’s kind’a conversationally gorgeous.

The volatile version of the Interrupter is exactly what you think. They awkwardly jump in mid-word and just start talking. You haven’t remotely finished your thought and here they are talking about a point they can’t fully understand because you haven’t made it.

The Interrupter is enthusiasm. That is what I hear in an interruption. The thing we’re talking about is exciting me, so, well, I’m going to start talking.

You have a choice when interrupted and you need to make it immediately: Are you going to be interrupted or not? Is your point established enough to weather this interruption? Is this a serial Interrupter who needs to check their enthusiasm?

It’s a quick, instinctive call and if you make the call, you re-interrupt, “I’m sorry. I’ve got one more thing to say…”, you continue, and you finish with a redirect back to the Interruptor, “Please continue,” and then this guy shows up…

The Long Pauser A good conversation has flow. Points are being traded back and forth, clarifications are made, and resolution appears to be imminent. You make one more point, verbally hand-off back to the other party, and…

And…

And…

Nothing.

I kind’a love the Long Pauser. They take the time to determine what they have to say before they open their mouth and they will wait as long as necessary before they continue. I had a former boss who would pause for up to 30 awkward seconds while she was considering her point. The first time it happened, 15 seconds in, I wondered, Is the meeting over?

In a world full of people who can’t shut up, the Long Pauser considers. He is processing, he is compiling, and until he’s done, it’s nice and quiet. There is a political version of the Long Pauser who uses this move to seize authority of the conversation, but the healthy Long Pauser is saving everyone time by only saying what is considered and necessary and they are rarely…

The Restater Another trait I have. The Restater says exactly the same thing you just said. Seems odd, but I’ll explain. You just said something of magnitude, complexity, or truth with significant consequences. The details matter, so I say, “Let me make sure I heard you right.”

Conversations at work are often contractual. We are going to agree to X and before I’m committing to this agreement, I’m going to make sure that I understand the terms and conditions of our accord.

Listen carefully as I restate because I really don’t want to be…

The What I Believer If the Restater’s intent is understanding, the What I Believer’s intent is shaping. They are taking what you just said and restating the facts to suit what they believe and not what you said.

Now, in this judgement-free article, I believe What I Believers are doing is not malicious, they are just applying their lens to the conversation. But they may or may not be aware they are doing this, which is why I pay careful attention when what I said starts being restated. The conclusion, decision, or social contract that we’re coming to is being built with each phrase and nod of the head. Your responsibility in this conversation is the correct interpretation of both party’s thoughts and facts because misinterpreted and altered facts – once confirmed – are just facts.

There’s an important variant of the What I Believer that doesn’t actually know what they believe because they are…

The Brainstormer Another Rands trait. You’ve landed a compelling point and I can sense its value, but I don’t have a response, yet, so, well, I start talking and I don’t really know what I think, yet, but your point – so great… it needs immediate words and I have words.

The Brainstormer figures out what they think by talking. The problem with Brainstormers is if they’re in a position of power or are compelling speakers, the brainstorming might sound a lot like the truth or a decision rather than the current version of the thoughts.

I do this so much that I’ve learned to declare when we’re entering the brainstorming portion of the conversation. This declaration makes it clear that I reserve the right to change my point of view at will and take nothing as the truth.

For the record, brainstorming is my favorite part of any conversation. We’re jamming on the topic at hand and that means all portions of our brains are fully engaged and we have absolutely no need for…

The Finisher Conversations can be a healthy competition. Rather than a decision, we might be working to find the truth of a thing. People and their agendas swirl around a company like weather and part of your job is not just understanding, but predicting that social weather.

In these fact comparison conversations, the Finisher is the person who, well, likes to finish the conversation. She likes to have the final word. Perhaps it’s power thing, but I’m not here to judge, I’m here to listen. The Finisher isn’t a Restater, but someone who is going to make sure no matter how the conversation is flowing, she is going to have the last word.

The Finisher is a reminder that there is status in a conversation. You might be the boss, you might be the person with authority over the matter, or you might be the person who needs a critical piece of information. The Finisher’s finishing is telling you how they see themselves relative to the matter at hand. While what they finish with might not matter the fact they feel compelled to finish is interesting.

The Art of Listening

Talk with me for a bit and you’ll notice I say “But um” a lot. Now that I hear myself saying it, each “But um” stands out like a verbal sore thumb, but um, I use those two annoying useless words for a important reason. I want our conversation to flow or I’m in the middle of thought and need just a smidge of a second to gather my next thought. “But um” is my verbal punctuation that is somewhere between an ellipses and an em-dash.

Conversations between humans have a dynamic structure that is unique to both you and the person sitting across from you. This article only documents a handful of the interesting ways we construct the flows of conversations. What you need to understand is that within our habits and quirks there is an entirely different set of information that affects the conversation, but you must listen… you must listen hard to the pauses, the shapes of phrases, the quirks, and the way they are exchanged.

Listen long enough and you’ll hear an entirely different conversation.

Alastair Humphreys writes about making his living as an adventurer. But really, this advice works for anyone who wants to turn their hobby into a job. For instance, this list of reasons he's an adventurer is pretty much why I did the same thing with kottke.org almost 10 years ago.

- I love almost every aspect of what I do.

- I love being self-employed: the freedom and the responsibility and the pressure.

- I think I'm probably now un-employable.

- I love being creative.

- I appreciate that building a profile helps generate exciting opportunities. (And I have come to accept -- though not enjoy -- the weird world of relentless self-promotion that being a career adventurer requires. I remain uncomfortable with people praising me more than I deserve, and I continue to get very angry and upset with the inevitable haters that your self-promotion will attract.)

Notice I don't mention "going on adventures", because there are loads of ways to do that in life. Don't become a career adventurer solely because you want to go off on fun trips. There's easier ways to do that.

That third point is a real double-edged sword. I can't imagine what other job I would be even remotely qualified for other than this one. Feels like walking a tightrope without a safety net sometimes. (via @polarben)

From eHistory, a time lapse view from 1776 to the present day of how the US government systematically took land from Native Americans through treaties and executive orders that were rarely honored for long.

There's a companion piece at Aeon by Claudio Saunt as well as an interactive version of the map featured in the video.

The final assault on indigenous land tenure, lasting roughly from the mid-19th century to 1890, was rapid and murderous. (In the 20th century, the fight moved from the battlefield to the courts, where it continues to this day.) After John Sutter discovered gold in California's Central Valley in 1848, colonists launched slaving expeditions against native peoples in the region. 'That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between races, until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected,' the state's first governor instructed the legislature in 1851.

In the Great Plains, the US Army conducted a war of attrition, with success measured in the quantity of tipis burned, food supplies destroyed, and horse herds slaughtered. The result was a series of massacres: the Bear River Massacre in southern Idaho (1863), the Sand Creek Massacre in eastern Colorado (1864), the Washita Massacre in western Oklahoma (1868), and a host of others. In Florida in the 1850s, US troops waded through the Everglades in pursuit of the last holdouts among the Seminole peoples, who had once controlled much of the Florida peninsula. In short, in the mid-19th century, Americans were still fighting to reduce if not to eliminate the continent's original residents.

FYI, it's always a good rule of thumb to not read comments on YouTube, but in this case you really really shouldn't read the comments on this video unless you want a bunch of reasons why it was ok for Europeans to drive Native Americans to the brink of total genocide.

Here's a map showing when slavery was abolished in North and South America:

Surprising, right? Along with Cuba, Brazil, and Puerto Rico, the United States was among the last nations in the Americas to abolish slavery. Americans like to think of ourselves as freedom-loving, progressive, and more "evolved" than other countries, particularly those in the "third world" (what a loaded term that is), but this map shows differently.

It's tempting to dismiss American attitudes toward slavery as something that happened long ago. Except for, you know, the whole Civil Rights Movement and the ongoing racism against African Americans in the US. And there are also many respects in which the US is currently less free, less progressive, and less evolved than some less industrialized nations, e.g. on things like gun control, murder rate, use of the death penalty, prison population, healthcare, and anti-science views (evolution, vaccines). So maybe the lag in abolishing slavery shouldn't be so surprising, particularly because it was so lucrative and the only thing Americans have historically cared more about than freedom is money. (via civil war memory)