EXISTENTIAL, PHILOSOPHY
Proposing a new form of media: Tab dumps.
A Longform Ode to 2020
The Existential Prelude
A piece of advice I want to adhere to more is to build in public. For too long, I horded ideas and plans that never came to fruition because there was no pressure. A small part of me had the impression that if I shared my ideas then they would be stolen from under my nose and executed. However, over time I have come to realise most ideas are better shared. Most folks want to help, or share their insights, or better still, work on the idea with you.
I also wanted to note that I will be writing more on Medium, but instead of trying to fit certain expectations, I’ll be writing for myself. As an exercise, I’m going to be pushing the boundaries of what I’m interested in, and see what internal progress comes of it.
The Great Tab Dump of 2020
I have a terrible habit of stacking up tabs on my iPhone — things friends and my team have sent me, random Medium articles that I found insightful and wanted to take action on at some indeterminate time in the future, and books I never got around to read. Eventually, the tab list gets so long that I never even return to them. Another category of tabs are the ones that I have read and enjoyed but are too good to relegate to the bottomless abyss of the bookmarks folder.
For 2021, I want to close out all my tabs and have a fresh start. The plan is to pair this with better browser discipline, and take some insightful action with the tabs I leave open for a while. Some of them have long comments, others will just be the link and a brief line. So, in the order they appear on my iPhone, here we go:
Bring your own plates. At some point in college, I became obsessed with sailing across Lake Michigan, in a boat that I was going to make myself. I was fresh off of watching Kon Tiki for the first time, and felt like there needed to be a release for that amount of inspiration. Right outside of my window was Lake Michigan, so the natural instinct was to live out my own adventure across it. While college had to come to an end at some point, my dream lives on. This link was from a guy called Jim Iverson, who wrote about his trip across the lake in a 24-foot boat with a Nissan 6hp motor onboard. My plan was to construct a faithful depiction of the Kon Tiki rafts — a balsa wood contraption featuring a hut. To be clear, I haven’t given up on these plans, but they’ve been temporarily put on hold as I work on my career. One summer, in the future!
The Demonata by Darren Shan. As a kid growing up in the 2000s UK, Darren Shan was a household name for The Darren Shan Saga, but really the books I enjoyed the most were his secondary series. It also boasts one of the coolest sleeves I can remember.
When Einstein Walked with Godel. A book involving Einstein and Godel, what could be more intellectually satisfying? I haven’t actually read it yet, so maybe doing that.
The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. I remember coming across this because I had watched a movie where some characters were using this book to understand the information about demons. I am not 100% sure what the plan was when I looked it up, but nevertheless, seems interesting.
The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter. I think I found this book last year even, when it first hit me that I was not 22 anymore, and actually needed to make this decade in my life count. Insightful, if a bit prolonged (probably better as a blogpost).
Pi-Hole: a Black Hole for Internet Advertisements. I was put onto this by a mentor who had somehow subverted his home-internet through a Raspberry Pi running this software, which eliminates adverstisements across the entire network.
80,000 Hours: How to Make a Difference with your Career. This idea really guided my decisions about what kind of work I want to get involved with, which drove Renoster and Snow Ranch.
Get a Financial Life. One of my major goals next year revolves around financial stability and setting up a plan on how I can handle the big financial events in life: retirement, buying a house and all the rest of it. This book is finally going to be read with that in mind.
The Raft of the Medusa. One of my fondest memories in college was attending lectures and making friendships with professors who were completely outside of my wheelhouse in terms of academics. It’s funny because I remember making jokes at the expense of Art History during freshman year as a gungho just-indoctrinated engineering student, and by senior year, I was sitting in on 18th century French Art twice a week for two hours at a time. At one of the sessions was about this pseudo-rivalry between Géricault and Delacroix, which led to a fascinating painting of The Raft of The Medusa. I think the best part was that it became my final paper for a different class on the Philosophy of Art.
PFRC Audio Library Development Roadmap. One of the things I quickly realised working on an audio technology is that keeping up with manufacturers in the field is very important. Small improvements in hardware precipitates down the flowchart and can save engineering effort at every subsequent stage.
Statistic for Experimenters. Designing experiments for field testing is a complex task made more convoluted by the endless array of variables to keep track of. When I was driving around the wilds of Africa in a jeep with rangers, wielding a MacBook, it was almost impossible to make coherent on-the-fly design decisions, and that led to some data issues. In the second run, this book was actually pretty useful to develop better processes in the lab first.
Moral Foundations, Jonathan Haidt. A moral philosophy professor sent me this as something to check out, I have yet to get around to it.
Kellogg Consulting Club, Case book and Interview guide. After having several friends apply for consulting companies, I was curious what exactly it is that they were prepping. It turns out, this is exactly the kind of thing industrial engineering prepares you for.
When academics become data scientists:
A Probabilistic Approach to Deploying Disaster Response Network. I am a big fan of reading scientific papers to push my projects forward. During senior year, we had a project to build a useful tool for the American Red Cross to identify improvements in their response to new disasters. This paper proved useful in showing the thought behind tradeoffs in performance and interconnectedness within tech infrastructure, which in turn helped us understand which variables were important in building our models.
Holt-Winters method with Python. During a class about logistics, I found myself bored to death by the lecturer’s style, so I started trying to productively procrastinate. The Holt-Winter’s Method is a way to smooth out exponential time series forecasting, and so I started devising a fake luxury goods marketplace scenario with several simulated buyers, and a seller who had to compute the demand into the future using different methods and order sufficient stock. Depending on the method used, the seller would either have enough stock or not, so that was more pragmatic spend of my 80 minutes.
Python for Power System Analysis. For some reason, I am super interested in system development and load analysis. An example of this is in power grids, which induce loadshedding or rolling blackout to ensure the overall efficacy and resilience of the system. Despite the fancy words, this leaves millions of people without power for large swathes of their day, since loadshedding must be distributed across the system, it can occur during critical business hours. Coupled with typically lower GDP per capita, it means people who already have less, get hit hard. The first step to working on any problem is understanding it, and there seems to be no better way to understand something hands-on than Python.
Six easy ways to run your jupyter notebook in the cloud. To be frank, none of them really do it for me. I think AWS EC2 + Streamlit is probably the way to go.
Philosophy and Art. “Philosophy, science and art differ principally according to their subject-matter and also the means by which they reflect, transform and express it. In a certain sense, art, like philosophy, reflects reality in its relation to man, and depicts man, his spiritual world, and the relations between individuals in their interaction with the world.” A friend asked me the difference between philosophy and art, and while that might take a thesis to answer, it did lead me to this pretty interesting webpage which has Karl Marx as its web-icon.
One Hundred Years of Solitude. While I haven’t read this book either, I think I discovered it when investigating the magical realism genre after rewatching Narcos again. I was confused because there was not anything particularly magical in Narcos as you follow the journey of Pablo, but it did lead me to this book, and maybe that’s the magic.
The Technium: 68 bits of Unsolicited Advice. Kevin Kelly remains one of the most interesting people I have heard about in modern times, way back on the Tim Ferriss Podcast. Which, incidentally, is worth a listen. Also, under no circumstances should you start a land war in Asia!
A Lodging of Wayfaring Men. I think reading the books that inspire people you find interesting, is a good way to understand their motivations and unravel the philosophy behind their decision making. When I read American Kingpin earlier this year, this book was brought up as a founding principle on which The Silk Road was based.
Gear I Hold Dear: My Compass. REI gear review + 20 years. I thought this was a endearing and well-put together piece about a man and his gear.
The Startup Gold Mine. I first heard of Neil Soni from the Made You Think podcast, and since then have enjoyed his takes on philosophy, the engineering process and various books they cover on podcasts.
My 10 Commandments for Makers. Adam Savage was a childhood hero of mine on Mythbusters, always pushing the envelope on engineering, science and whimsy. I recently discovered his YouTube channel, where he seems to have expounded massively in content over lockdown.
Avodocs. Free legal documents for startups, which I haven’t used yet because of an ongoing Rocket Lawyer subscription. But I suppose free is better, so I might have to make the switch soon.
Wild Wonderful World. I love finding nature organisations like this through Instagram who are also trying to promote wildlife conservation.
How your Safari can contribute to a Sustainable Africa. Again by Wild Wonderful World, this piece really highlights the good ecotourists can do by spending their resources in respectful and productive ways. COVID has really highlighted how vulnerable this industry can be to the global climate, and many tourist areas are massively struggling to stay afloat amid a lack of travel.
From Bubble to Bubble. Interesting story about a guy who goes from being a startup bro in San Francisco to moving to Provo, Utah and finding out that political boundaries and stereotypes have become extreme in the media portrayals more than in reality. Go figure, but refreshing tone. «I’m told by Unsplash that the photo above is in/around Provo».
Almanac: fastest doc editor ever built. I haven’t had a change to examine this in too much detail, but sounds interesting.
The Economics of Fundraising Galas. It’s funny how much energy goes into fundraising events for nonprofits that don’t lead to productive changes in the world.
The Tibetan Book of the Living and Dying.
“Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity — but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our “biography,” our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards… It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?”
TXDPS Motorcycle and Moped licenses. I was looking into getting a motorcycle for the impending move to Texas, until a friend mentioned this would be a useful way to increasing my chances of dying on the highway. This, coupled with moving downtown and in walking-distance to most things, means I’ll be resolutely closing this tab.
Hieronymus Bosch. Boy, could old Bosch paint — I wish I had known about him when I was reading Dante’s Inferno, the triptych work really fits the three-part journey he embarks on. Somehow I was put onto this by a random conversation on Hinge, but sometimes inspiration strikes from the unlikeliest of places.
Leon Trotsky. I don’t recall how I ran into this guy, it may actually be because a TV show used his quote “The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end”. Regardless, he seems to have lived a very full life as a Russian Marxist revolutionary, despite being written out of the history books by Stalin. Interesting chap.
Finding your tribe. Brevity appreciated.
Otta.com. Connecting startup jobs with job searchers. Dead simple.
Hebbia.ai. Shared by a pal, apparently a AI-powered search function. Pretty cool, but I don’t use Chrome. Develop for Safari or pass!
Techstars TNC. TNC are one of the most wholesome organisations I have had the pleasure of knowing and working with.
Ultralight: the Zen Habits Guide to Travelling Light. Leo Babauta was one of the first bloggers I started to follow online, and he has managed to blend zen into every part of his life, including travelling. Since 2016, I’ve been on a mission to remove superfluous material possessions from my life if they do not bring me joy. Leo seems to make a whole lifestyle out of this, which is admirable.
Jumpstart AI training with NGC pretrained models: One thing I want to spend more time on in 2021 is learning data science. I haven’t spent much time since April diving into the mathematics, and it’s something glossed over most online courses these days. However, having an intuitive grasp of the fundamentals is much better than knowing the cheapest implementation.
Snatch (2000). Imagine an early 2000s London version of Oceans Eleven, then make it dark, grimy and the criminal underworld, but keep some of the main cast (Brad Pitt, Benicio del Toro).
EPL — English Premier League. Somehow, Man Utd has clawed their way from 16th to 2nd with a game in hand. GGMU!
Levenshetein Distance: super interesting idea about how to identify the difference between two sets of characters. First came across it in a data science class the same week COVID shut down the Chicagoland area, so the homework became moot and I didn’t find a chance to get back and investigate it further. Something to return to in 2021!
And finally, last and least:
Memes about 2020:
Incidentally, if anyone thinks that 2020 was the worst year ever, I would refer them to this article I came across earlier in the year.
In summary, there was a buuunch of books (both read and yet-to-read), intriguing artists, revolutionaries, bloggers and the various wonderful applications of philosophy, industrial engineering and data science.
That about concludes The Great Tab Dump of 2020. Now my poor iPhone’s RAM will be freed up from the struggle of reloading 94 tabs everytime I restart my phone.
Here’s a much brighter year (and fewer tabs) in 2021! 🎉
