kowen

This reminds me of the movie/book 'The Peaceful Warrior' by Dan Miller (... there's never _nothing_ going on!)

There are two distinct 'incubation' type behaviors that I have observed - one is the internal thinking that you describe in this essay (showers, running, walks, yoga, or just sitting on the edge of a cliff and looking at the world).

The second type of incubation behavior is a type of 'prattling on'. Doodling, drawing mind maps, morning pages, stream of consciousness, etc.

Mind you - mind maps can be used very constructively, but sometimes it's just a type of brain dump.

I find that the second type of processing is useful when my mind is so full that I get stuck in an idle loop: nothing useful coming out at all; a cross between analysis paralysis and broken record.

I can't speak for anyone other than myself, naturally, but I was a very vocal Linux user until I got my first macbook and didn't have to google X-server error messages every time I did an upgrade. Getting various flavors of linux working was always exciting... and challenging and sometimes extremely frustrating. I think I never got the video card working properly on my last laptop.

So what I like about the Mac is OS X and all the handy *nix based tools that are still available to me, all packaged in a nice and slick package where stuff just works.

To counter anecdotes with more anecdotes, I went to a code camp a few weeks ago, and there was an overwhelming number of laptops running Microsoft OS's. When I pulled out my mac book pro one guy actually commented on it. I saw one other person with a Mac -- it was dual-booting Windows XP.

Of course, I couldn't tell you how many of the participants are open source contributors.

My dirty secret is that I haven't remapped Vim's control keys. I make up for it by moving around my searching a lot more than by using hjkl.

After the first few months I tried suggesting to people that they should try dvorak, but mostly they just look at me like I'm an alien, so I kind of stopped. My mom actually tried it though - that was pretty cool (even though she decided not to make the switch).

I lived and worked in Norway for several years, and each year I received a pre-filled tax return from the government. If I recall correctly, I had three choices:

- Send a PIN code by mobile phone which acted as a digital signature to file "as is"

- Log in to central location on the Internet and click a button to file "as is"

- Sign it and send it in.

If I needed to make adjustments, then only the third option was viable (I only had to do that once).

It literally took me less than 5 minutes to verify and send in. Fairly painless - the only pain being in the amount of taxes I paid, Norway being a socialist country, and all.

The resistance from third party tax preparation companies and software providers reminds me of the Parable of the Broken Window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

You're right - that's the one.

I've heard great things about language immersion.

There is an American actress - can't remember her name - she speaks fluent French. I saw her in a French movie and spent half the movie trying to place her face. It turns out that she went to a bilingual school French/English.

Interesting!

Three of my siblings are bi-lingual Russian/English. At first they mixed things up terribly, but after their Russian grandmother spent a year with them they were suddenly able to completely separate the two. Grandma doesn't speak a word of English, whereas both parents speak both languages, so we speculated that what they were doing was 'the easiest thing that works'.

When I speak in Norwegian I toss in English words all the time (because I can get away with it - all Norwegians seem to speak English). In French I don't leak English into it. In English, I rarely (if ever) slip Norwegian or French into it.

Where I really get into trouble is when I'm in a conversation with Norwegians, French, and English-speakers at the same time, because I end up trying to translate Norwegian to French, French to English, etc, and end up speaking the wrong language to pretty much everyone involved.

I studied German for 4 years in school, and am far from fluent. I can painfully pick out details in a newspaper article, and can usually figure out if people are talking about soccer or food or whatever.

On the other hand, I'm fluent in French, and learned that in France, not in school.

In my experience, school wasn't a very efficient medium for learning languages.

According to The Complete Meat Cookbook, meat has been bred to be a lot more lean in the past decades.

I suspect that if we went back to the diet before there was fast-food, people would be eating more flavorful (a.k.a. fatty) meat than lean meat.

Taubes' take on the caloric balance equation (thermodynamic law) is fascinating.

Change in energy stores = Energy intake – Energy expenditure

According to my biochemistry professor in college, this had one - and only one - interpretation: The change in energy stores is controlled by energy intake and energy expenditure. The right side of the equation controls the left side of the equation. Also, there was an implied "just eat less and exercise more" (that energy intake and expenditure are independent variables).

But Taubes suggests that the causation could be reversed, and that energy intake and expenditure are dependent variables. In other words, a metabolic change could cause a change in energy stores, and energy intake and expenditure would change to match.

That (amazingly!) translates to: if you are losing weight you are likely to be less hungry and likely to have more energy. Or perhaps, if your metabolic state is such that you are losing weight, your hunger will adjust to match your activity level. Or even, if you're burning fat, you will only eat to make up for what you aren't getting from stored fuel.

It makes sense to think that if your energy stores are releasing fuel into the blood stream you would be less hungry (I'm assuming that hunger signals are a function of available fuel to some extent).

Naturally, we eat for nutrition as well as fuel, so I suppose it can't all be broken into thermodynamics, but it's an interesting way of thinking about it!

Git helped us out a lot in that it tracks content, not files. So where one person might do some cleanup that included renaming some files, and another might make some changes to the same files our previous source control system either choked or just ignored the changes.

Also, we were spending a very large amount of time waiting for merges to complete. Minutes. Lots of them. Git is lightning fast, and we spend a lot less cycles waiting (or context switching).

Someone is trying to make up for that, it would seem:

"Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail" by Danica McKellar

and by the same author: Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who's Boss

From what I've read they don't avoid vegetables aside from nightshades.

Interesting! When I was eating 5-6 meals a day it was perfectly healthy - all home-cooked, organic, with good (free-range, grass fed) meat. I was exhausted all the time, and hungry every few hours, and was thinking about food all the time.

I speculate that maybe I eat less now than the daily requirements on occasion. I have a large amount of fuel stored, which seems to be easily accessible these days (to judge from the rate at which it is being consumed, anyhow).

Perhaps when my weight has normalized I'll get hungry more often.

I can't remember the percentages that Taubes suggests.

Personally, I solve it by replacing carbs with fat - but without actually measuring. I just eat plenty of flavorful food (and drench my veggies in butter).

Mark Sisson has written about fats in the diet here: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/saturated-fat-healthy/

The general idea floating around on his forum seems to be "when in doubt, eat more fat".

I believe that in Norway in addition to stiff fines, you will lose your drivers license if you are caught driving 25 km/h above the speed limit, whether you are rich or not.

I read Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories" 4 months ago, which had me curious enough to experiment. http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Scienc...

The book is a meta study of the research done on the so-called metabolic disorders (obesity, diabetes, heart disease). The research doesn't talk about evolution and cavemen, but rather health markers, hormones, and metabolic processes.

I've been eating a less -ahem- tribal version of this for 4 months, and the results have been pretty remarkable (if entirely anecdotal).

I have lost a large amount of weight, my skin and hair are much improved, my digestive functions have normalized after a lifetime of trouble, and I'm no longer tired all the time.

I haven't been sick since I started, but 4 months isn't exactly long enough to suggest anything in that respect.

What I do differently from the tribal version in the article is 1) I don't exercise (yeah, I know, evil, but I just don't feel like it yet) 2) I eat tomatoes and cheese and cream 3) I don't fast; I eat whenever I'm hungry. Interestingly, I'm only hungry about twice a day now, rather than 5 or 6 times a day which was the norm for me before I started this experiment 4) I'm super relaxed (pragmatic?) about the whole thing. I haven't seen the light or anything like that, I've simply had some really good results with very little effort.

There is a blog at http://www.marksdailyapple.com which has plenty of interesting articles, as well, but the Gary Taubes book is the closest thing I've found to proven health benefits.

Yes, it seems like some companies have a culture of emergency and heroism in a self-reinforcing loop.

It is terrifying to watch an imagined emergency be solved in such a way as to cause a proper emergency.

I did morning pages (long hand) for a while, and while the process certainly was interesting and helpful, most of it was garbage, trite, uninteresting, and truly boring. Any interesting pieces would have required rewrite/cleanup before being anything close to publishable.

I was actually going to try it, but I simply do not have a facebook account, and have no intention of getting one. I kind of get that one might want to avoid writing all the authentication stuff, though.

Out of curiosity, what would I see when clicking on this link if I had a Facebook account?

The first thing that caught my attention was the bit about "U.S. born".

In the USA it is illegal to ask about country of origin (as well as age, gender, religious beliefs, marital status).

I've heard of hiring managers discarding CVs outright if they contain information that is illegal to ask about, though I have no idea what the practices at Google are.

Recommended reading: "Land the Tech Job You Love" by Andy Lester, published by The Pragmatic Bookshelf.