Writing

Memento Mori. In English, this Latin phrase means something like “remember that you must die”, or “Remember Death”. The Stoic philosophers were big pushers of this idea as the core insight of a daily meditation practice. Are you worried that there are things you’re going to regret about your life when you die? What if you died today? It is absolutely certain that you are going to die; you might as well sit down each morning and imagine it. Do any regrets flare up about your day, or your life? ...

I’ve had an odd, intellectual fever dream going for years now; I’d like to learn enough advanced math and physics to make my way through Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality, and not just understand it, but feel in my bones what it’s like to intuitively get our current best guess about how reality works. (If you haven’t heard of this book, or Roger Penrose, go check out the Amazon reviews, then listen to Penrose’s appearance on “The Portal“ podcast. He allegedly wrote this tour of all modern physics as a popular science book, but Penrose is so mis-calibrated, or optimistic, about non-Penrosian math ability that physics and math professors routinely flame out.) ...

Barry Green’s The Inner Game of Music is a lovely book about music, and practice, and the strange psychological battle that doing anything difficult and creative seems to require. Early in the book he lays out a very simple framework for how to think about why it’s so hard to learn new things and make progress on seemingly clear goals. Imagine two small people living in your head. One is named “Self Two”. Self Two is a cherub, an almost helplessly creative little kid, the source of every “what if” and impulse you’ve had to build and share anything. ...

I hope you’re all doing well during these strange times of quarantine and uncertainty. I’ve been passing the time by playing my guitar, and the experience has generated a few insights that I think are worth sharing. First, some background, then the nuggets. I played as a teenager for a few years, and had a fairly cramped relationship with music. I was good, technically, but I didn’t have much feel for music, and compensated for this by learning really difficult solo jazz arrangements of songs I didn’t listen to, like Autumn Leaves or Lullaby of Birdland. I can still feel the prickling shame and performance anxiety I’d feel at big family gatherings when my uncle or mom would ask me to play something. A test! And I had no repertoire that was fun for anyone else, no chords, no ability to lift myself or anyone else up with music. ...

I feel like I’m never going to publish this damned thing… so here it is, in bullet point form. Maybe I’ll tidy it up some day. Niwot’s Challenge, a very fun race out in South Platte. Jason invited me to this damned thing last week… Text from Jason: “Free Sat?” All I could find was this one race report from Erik Sanders: https://gearjunkie.com/colorado-ultra-mountain-race-niwots-challenge Prep for the Infinity Loop later this summer. Race details, what does it entail… I’m totally detached from how hard it might be. “It’s only 45 miles”, says Jenna. ...

Well, I can honestly say, now, close to a year after the event, that I don’t remember this event in the furious detail that characterizes my usual race reports. How lucky! We’re not supposed to talk about the Niwot’s Challenge at all. I ran this race in 2019 for the second time, finishing in 27 hours and 17 minutes with Matt Fackrell and Jason Antin, my long-time collaborator on such beauties as “The Rainier Infinity Loop!” and the quite absurd “Tahoe 200, 2018 edition”. We ran a good portion of the race with Todd Salzer; Todd guided us through the first two loops, but unfortunately didn’t finish the 2019 edition. I know he’ll be back in 2020, this year. ...

A 1-act sketch via Apple Pencil, for your viewing pleasure. Happy to link to further references or sketch this out in more detail — let me know in the comments if this is illuminating. Check it out below, or click here for a direct image link to stare at a big version in the browser.

I had a hard time with this book; it showed up in the TED book club mailing months ago, and I went into my reading primed to love the message, which is concise and persuasive… but maybe so persuasive on its own that the book feels like 300 pages of filler. David Brooks’s “The Second Mountain” is about the sense he’s developed, later in his life, that our lives play out on a landscape populated by peaks whose summits, we’re told, offer peace, happiness, alleviation from the anxiety of modern life. If you get to the top, earn the PhD, become CEO, you can stop. ...

I wanted to share some of the intuition I’ve been developing around complex numbers; some of the resources that have been helpful, for understanding why anyone would come up with an idea like , the square root of -1, and then build an entire number system on top of it. History My knowledge of the history here is probably at the level of a Just-So Story; still, I’ve been finding it helpful to have some vague idea of why folks started developing some area of mathematics before digging into the details, so I’ll pass on what I’ve got to you. ...

In my ongoing quest to lay a more solid foundation for this new, strange life as a machine learning “researcher”, I’ve been going through various foundational concepts and ideas and trying to build up rock solid intuitions that I can lean on for years. (Why the hell didn’t I do this back in school??) Entropy is my latest obsession - thermodynamic entropy, and information entropy, and the ways in which these two things are similar. ...