Steve Jobs

A marvelous story. A good book; certainly best executed when it drilled down to it’s namesake. And a misaligned ending - just one chapter too long. Steve’s book, just like his life, should have ended in climax, not denoument. Disappointing, but in precisely the way a biography about him should be. “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.” Couldn’t agree more.

Very highly recommended.

New Look, Old School OR Going Analogue Like Every Other Goddamn Hipster

“What do you mean PowerPoint presentation? You want a goddamn high-tech lecture? Give me a piece of chalk and a dusty piece of slate, you pretentious engineer!” -Overheard at math departments around the country.

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As an astute, OCD-possessed visitor of these pages,1 you’ll no doubt notice that a lot has changed on this site – typography, colour, and my personal favourite, a very large, chunky header, a throw back to the reason this site is named the way it is.

I think that when it comes to making things, it isn’t the monumental changes that hold people back from greatness; it’s the tiny little things that peck away at our occipital lobes, constantly reminding us that something is wrong, but never quite bubbling to the forground exactly what that thing is. The devil is in the details, the difference maker between accomplishing what your meant to accomplish, what you feel you’re meant to do. It’s about finding that optimal path, stripping away every little bit of what bothers you, finding what direction you’re meant to travel, and on what tread, so you can focus on what you’re meant to do.

It’s about finding focus. It’s about finding meaning. It’s about details.

So I’ve changed things up onsite here; fall cleaning if you will. Making some changes that I think will let me enjoy posting here more thoroughly, and hopefully make visiting more enjoyable. While I don’t think the prior configuration was awful by any means, I just felt it wasn’t me; it was somebody else’s vision of what my writing should be displayed as. In the back of my head, there was something saying that this was not how my writing should be presented.

This is. For now at least.

In keeping in line with the old wedding adage 2 I’vealso gone entirely old-school with the way I write and organize in my life; from the posts on this site to my note-taking for my classes. It’s extremely refreshing, and honestly an absolute joy, to see the barely-contained curvatures of my writing. There’s just no real comparison between the mechanical act of typing on a keyboard and the fluidity of putting thought into ink, the click and clack of the segregated letters versus the swoosh and scratch of unified words.

I think it’s simple really. Donate to your local Sierra Club. Pick up a set of comp notebooks and one hell of a good pen. And get unstuck.

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1. You have been here before, right? ↩

2. Something borrowed? Every quote at the start of my writing. Something blue? Well, close enough. ↩

Paleo & Vices

“Grok want Coca-Cola.” - (Wishful) Rough translation first words of Homo Sapiens sapiens.

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I’ve been (slowly) converting to the Paleo diet/lifestyle/whatever the heck you want to call it for about six weeks now. For the most part it’s been spectacular - I’ve been feeling far healthier, far more energetic, and I’ve trimmed down rather significantly because of it 1.

For those that aren’t aware of what Paleo is, I’ve linked to a site that has a fairly comprehensive list of links to get one acquainted and started with understanding what “Paleo” actually means. In my attempt to butcher its description, Paleo is at it’s heart a set of broad and far-ranging lifestyle choices and changes that one implements in order to make your lifestyle more similar to the environment our paleolithic ancestors toiled and evolved in. The most prominent of these changes is food, which is where I’ve started, but the movement encompasses exercise – with an emphasis on dynamic weightlifting and sprints over long-distance runs – as well as hygiene – lukewarm showers, no sunscreen, and all-natural cleansers – and even finds its way into clothing for the die-hards2.

On the food front specifically, Paleo is often described as the “Hunter-Gatherer Diet”. What that means to those of us who have never lived a nomadic lifestyle is that the nutrition plan puts an emphasis on obtaining Calories3 from proteins and fats as opposed to carbohydrates as most nutrition plans, including the USDA recommend. Sugar, whether refined or in high-dose, high-glycemic index foods such as nectarines, is a definite no-no, as it is in most “Low-Carb”4 diets. The difference between Paleo and other “low-carb” diets such as Atkins is that it doesn’t de-emphasize the role of plant matter in the paleolithic diet – after all they did ocassionally gather while “Hunter-Gather”ing – and instead completely cuts out whole wheat and gluten-containing products of any kind, often a source of cheating on carbohydrate intake of other popular diets. The issue with gluten is that many humans show a remarkable sensitivity to it, but, because it is so pervasive in our diets, we attribute this chronic irritation to other factors.

Having been gluten-free for nearly six weeks now, and having, to my dismay5, having relapsed on occasion, I can say that the absence of gluten, and in it’s abrupt return, the effect is drastic. Never has such a simple change had such a quick and measurable outcome; the difference being gluten-free is leaps and bounds. What may be even more remarkable is that as I’ve avoided the typical sugar-overloads that modern life presents daily, I’ve quickly been desensitized, and what once was an appealing treat – a doughnut, perhaps – now is borderline repulsive with it’s obvious over sweetness, even without tasting it.

So what’s the issue in turning full Paleo, nutritionally at least? There was one thing that the nomadic man of yore did not account for when refining his palate for future geneartions – that he would one day invent Coca-Cola. Were it not for this vice, chances are high I’d be toting a wooden club and living in a cave.

After all, progress is progress; perhaps I should more appropriately title my particular subset “Polar Bear Paleo.”

Refreshing.

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1. That isn’t to say that I started eating Paleo to lose weight; in fact, that’s decidedly not a goal of this choice. I attribute it instead to a by-product of getting rid of most of the junk I used to eat. ↩

2. You can sure as hell bet they aren’t opposed to leather goods. ↩

3. Yes it should be capitalised; a Calorie is one thousand calories. ↩

4. I say “Low Carb” because Paleo isn’t antithetical to a moderately high carbohydrate diet consisting of starchy plants such as yams; the issue is in eating food our digestive systems have evolved to process, unlike gluten-containing grains and legumes. ↩

5. Such is college life, unfortunately, that one rarely declines free food, poison or not. ↩

Failure, OR How I Stopped and Learned to Love the Bomb

“Do I look all rancid and clotted? You look at me, Jack. Eh? Look, eh? And I drink a lot of water, you know. I’m what you might call a water man, Jack - that’s what I am. And I can swear to you, my boy, swear to you, that there’s nothing wrong with my bodily fluids. Not a thing, Jackie.” -Dr. Strangelove

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Sometimes the only possible thing one can do is hop on to that atomic bomb and ride it off into the sunset.1 All dramatics aside, the truth is that acceptance is the hardest thing one can do, because it means coming to terms with the way things are, rather than the way they could, should, or even would be, had it not been for some leap of faith, some alternate choice, some thing that didn’t go the way it did.

Acceptance is hard. Acceptance because of failure is even harder, because often it implies failure, it implies that you struggled to bring about some result, and now you’re stuck with whatever shitty outcome that you’ve worked so hard to change, to avoid. Acceptance, is ultimately, riding that atom bomb into the sunset, cowboy hat on, determined to give them “Rooskies “ what-for.

So I’ve accepted that I won’t be entering a prototype into the James Dyson contest this year. In doing so I don’t hang my head in defeat, or wave a little white flag, or give a little encouragement speech of how I did my best to succeed. Because the truth is that I set myself up for failure. The timeline I gave myself was untenable and simply not structured to the way I, regrettably, begrudgingly, operate: in bouts of activity interspersed with lulls in action, rather than a structured, orderly fashion. And I really didn’t play the cards I was dealt; my design was, in my opinion, an interesting one, but the implementation of it was difficult to achieve, for lack of tools and machine-shop access.

Most importantly though, my heart wasn’t in it. I was intrigued, and certainly excited to produce something unique, something original, but my heart was wandering elsewhere. Indeed that’s what did this whole project in: my curiosity slowly waned, and instead of feeling a distilled sense of excitement to be building something, my mind wandered to other things.

So no Dyson Award acceptance speech this year - a shame really, because I have been feverishly working on my public speaking. But just because the impetus for this blog has disappeared doesn’t mean nothing remains. Truthfully, I think this is the beginning, because there is no longer a confinement as to what I feel I should focus on. Instead, I have the opportunity to discuss my real interests and pursue what my heart happens to be in.

I hope you’ll stay tuned. I can tell you I’m working on some interesting things, and, perhaps more importantly, I’m joined by others who can impose some sort of structure onto my flighty thoughts. More on that as it becomes available. In the meantime though, and over the next few days and weeks, I’d like to talk about design as it applies to software, publishing, and the electronic era. I hope you enjoy.

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1. You have seen this movie, haven’t you? ↩

This Is Why I Write

The truth is I don’t do it for you. Nor do I do it to make money, nor for widely acclaimed fame, or to impress a beautiful girl. That isn’t to say I don’t hope you thoroughly enjoy my writing. That isn’t to say I would happy if my writing made me millions of dollars. That isn’t to say I would be upset if my writing made me famous. And I certainly would love it if my writing impressed a gorgeous woman.

But that’s not why I do this. I do it for me.

I think a lot of beginning writers have the highest of aspirations. Having read the Hemingways, the Twains, the Kings, they believe that by penning a few words, they can touch the hearts of millions. But writing doesn’t work that way.

Do yourself a favor, and have an audience of one. And when you think you’ve changed your own heart, expand your audience to two. And if you can successfully manage two, millions will follow.

We can only know others by knowing ourselves.

THE JAMES DYSON AWARD PT II: THE SOLUTION

For those who haven’t followed along from the very beginning, this web log is ultimately, in the short term at least, about producing a design solution to be entered into the James Dyson Award competition. For the past two weeks I’ve been deliberating and deciding on what problem I believe is worth solving, and what my plan of action will be for the next sixty days of the competition. Today is a follow up to yesterday’s discussion about the a problem worth solving; for those that missed it, here it is in it’s entirety.

-SM

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“How do we localize water usage to individual regions, communities, and, ultimately, households?”

This is very much a problem exclusive, and some ways endemic, to the latter 20^th and 21^st century. In the bygone BCs a civilization could not exist without proximity to a source of water. Even the mighty Roman Empire, with their labyrinthine aqueducts, rarely constructed their cities more than spitting distance from a body of water. It just wasn’t possible to live more than a few miles from that most precious of liquids.

No longer the case. With the power of internal combustion and flight now at our disposal, entire countries are now free to import their water in bulk. Take the UAE. In it’s decadence, it imports it’s water from Southeast Asia, among other more local venues, not just to provide drinking water, but to grow food and enjoy year-round indoor skiing, quite possibly the most decadent thing a desert nation could ever aim for (Hoth on Tatooine. And yes, that is another Star Wars reference).

Yes, it’s a fucking desert.

Unfortunately, it’s a little ambitious to try to alter the course of an entire country from such wasteful and permanently detrimental water usage. There are, however, much more manageable methods of localizing water usage. And the inspiration comes from something as simple as a soda fountain.

We typically consume our pop through one of two means - by purchasing it in “bulk” at the grocery in cans or bottles, or at our favorite restaurant where it’s typically dispensed from a soda fountain. But soda fountains aren’t just magically connected to two liter bottles of beverage and dispense on command, staying fizzy all the while. As anyone who’s sipped on soda dispensed past prime, the drink is mixed – flavoring, water, and carbonation – entirely on site; and when the flavoring runs out before it’s replaced, you end up with less than stellar pop. The entirety of water usage is localized to the fountain; Coke or Pepsi or whomever need only supply the proprietary flavoring and the carbon dioxide necessary to carbonate the beverage, cutting down massively on transportation strain, because, after all, Pop is still mostly just water.

Why can’t we decompose our household consumption in a similar manner? I don’t mean to suggest we put a soda fountain in every person’s kitchen. But what if we could modularize pop cans, so that, just as soft drink companies do commercially, we are provided with pre-dispensed amounts of flavoring and carbonation and add the water ourselves?

There is no technical infeasibility to this solution. We merely design an aluminum pop can top that houses the flavoring and CO₂ cartridge, and screws into to a reusable aluminum housing. It can even keep the pop tab for novelty and to start the mixing/carbonation. Is this a practical solution? I think so. IS it implementable? Let’s find out. Follow-up in a week and I’ll have a theoretical model in place.

Until then, sláinte.

-SM

THE JAMES DYSON AWARD PT I: THE PROBLEM

For those who haven’t followed along from the very beginning, this web log is ultimately, in the short term at least, about producing a design solution to be entered into the James Dyson Award competition. For the past two weeks I’ve been deliberating and deciding on what problem I believe is worth solving, and what my plan of action will be for the next sixty days of the competition. This will be a short discussion about the former of the two; I hope to broach the latter in a follow-up tomorrow.

-SM

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Bottled Water.

I certainly cringe at the phrase, at it’s subtle oxymoronic tendencies, just as canned heat, or “fresh-squeezed orange juice from concentrate” has done before it. The fact is, though, bottled water has solved a lot of problems. It’s allowed disaster relief efforts to bring safe and clean water to afflicted areas. It’s made it possible for city folk like myself to drink water that actually tastes good. And it’s brought convenience to drinking, storing, and transporting water with such completeness that it’s hard to imagine a time in the future where water won’t exist locked up in its plastic prison.

But this entrapment of life’s most essential of necessities has brought with it its own slew of problems. Once drained of fluid, the clear carcass of these vessels becomes utter un-biodegradable; centuries will pass before the transparent sheen of these bottles erode into the wind, and it may take longer still for the compounds themselves to return to their prior, unaltered state. Even recycled, the amount of energy required to reshape, re-pour, and remold a plastic bottle is an astronomical cost. Transportation costs are staggering as well; trucks loaded with the most abundant of molecules on the earth are no lightweights, and the exhaust they create further pollutes are sky and ultimately makes the clean water we so desperately crave even more scarce. Even worse, our massive export of water to and from countries that are either scarce or abundant in the resource may forever be changing the landscape of our water supplies – after all, Fiji only has so much water to give before it’s turned into Tatooine. Complete with seedy space-bars, I hope.

So how do we solve bottled water? There’s been a huge resurgence in the last few years that has attempted to tackle the problem in a variety of ways. Brita and others have made it incredibly simple to have clean, tasty drinking water right from the tap. An outpouring of new aluminum, eco-friendly bottles have made transportation of water reusable, environmental, and incredibly simple. Sadly though, this hasn’t alleviated the fundamental axis on which bottled water is so universally enjoyed – convenience. For all the ease of use that the Brita filter and the aluminum bottle bring, they still don’t compare to the pre-filtered, pre-bottled ease that plastic packaging offers.

In the end, bottled water is an impossible problem. Because we can’t compete with convenience, because we can’t fight against the fundamentals of human nature.

But though solving bottled water presents itself as impossible, this doesn’t mean that we can’t solve the problems that bottled water creates. Is it solvable to make the Cretaceous-casings that our bottled water are currently bound in not so harmful to our environment? Absolutely; and currently great work is being done in the production of biodegradable plastics. Unfortunately, with little more than a “my First Chemistry Set” at my disposal, I’ll leave the petro-chemical tinkering to those with the proper equipment. And what of alleviating the strain that transporting these billions of gallons in planes, trains, and automobiles? Again great work is being done in that area, but it is certainly beyond the scope of one man and one summer to replace internal combustion, or improve aerodynamics of vehicles, or whatever other efficiency boost is currently planned.

So what does that leave us? A very fundamental, poignant question to a serious problem:

“How do we localize water usage to individual regions, communities, and, ultimately, households?”

This is the question we must ask ourselves. And this is what I’d like to leave you with, until tomorrow, when I do my best to lay out precisely how we can solve this problem.