Constrained Bliss Point

My DC housing search is rapidly coming to a close. I found a room in a row house on Riggs Place near DuPont Circle, and I’m in the process of making things official. It’s a quick walk to the DuPont metro station, and a similarly quick walk to the GUTS stop. My recent visits to the District have convinced me that DuPont is the place to be, and I’m pretty happy having found a reasonably-priced room.

The coolest part, though, is my landlord. Turns out she’s Jo Freeman, the well-known feminist, scholar, author, political scientist, and attorney — though I admit she was not well-known to me until I did some Googling. Judging from her Wikipedia article she has a pretty incredible past.

Random awesome people amaze me. I kind of want to read her books now: “At Berkeley in the Sixties: Education of an Activist, 1961-1965″ looks  particularly interesting. I’m going to consider her a fringe benefit of living in DC.

As a child I wondered where units came from — physical units, like amps or pounds or furlongs. I didn’t know what a volt was, and I had this desire to come up with another unit. For that, I needed a quantity that needs to be quantified, and soon discovered that all the good ones are taken.

All the easy ones, that is. But what about qualitative units, the ones that are hard or impossible to quantify? Like love, or happiness? I don’t know how to do it. I got this idea from a book I read: “Great Feuds in Science,” where the author suggests naming the unit of optimism a Leibniz. Because, I guess, Gottfried Leibniz was a really optimistic guy (and with a name like Gottfried, who wouldn’t be?).

So how do we attack the problem of qualitative units? Observability is one problem: one meter is the same length in any reasonable inertial reference frame, but one man’s happiness cannot be easily observed. But subjectivity looks like the biggest stumbling block. A unit of pleasure or pain has to mean the same thing to all people.

Here is my first proposed solution: massively better measuring techniques. And cyborg-quality computer chips in everyone’s head. Scientists first need to become experts at figuring out which brain chemicals make us happy, sad, angry, etc. Then they need to set up a scale based on relative proportions of brain chemicals or something. At last we’ll be able to make statements like “oh man, I am sixteen Leibniz’s optimistic about the future right now!”

I can’t wait.

As a loyal reader of Marginal Revolution, I enjoy Tyler and Alex’s “Markets in Everything” segment, where they point out all the cool and unexpected markets that spring up in every sort of circumstance. For example, markets in souls? Awesome.

But there aren’t really markets in everything. Sometimes there are market voids, or specific needs and wants consumers demand that markets don’t provide. Sensing a market void, I think I’ll attempt to elucidate these market voids as I see them.

Earlier this week I was in my local CVS looking for a birthday card for my step-mom. I found my way to the card aisle, more specifically the birthday card aisle (since there are a few card aisles), past the section of birthday cards for “someone special”, into the birthday-cards-for-females section. There was about half a row of cards just for all the ladies you could have in your life: moms, grandmas, daughters, cousins and aunts, mothers-in-law — but none for step-mothers.

Maybe step-mom birthday cards were there but I just couldn’t find them. Or maybe not enough step-sons go out to buy birthday cards. Perhaps the step-mom birthday cards were not in the section with the rest of the female family member birthday cards? It could be an oversight on my part, but I did scan that aisle at least twice.

I wound up going with a “someone special” card, in case you were wondering.

Living in a pretty little bubble for the summer, I’ve begun to miss the intellectual stimulation of being at a university surrounded by nerds. So, while I’d rather the summer not end too quickly, I am looking forward to being part of a horde of academics come Fall.

It struck me, talking to a friend from RPI, that the types of nerds I encounter at Georgetown will be markedly different from the nerds found at Rensselaer. While (I imagine) it will be easier to find econ nerds, I have a feeling that there will be far fewer techies. And, you know, internet geeks and movie buffs and mathematicians.

So I’m trying to develop a list of  “necessary topics for nerditry,” at least inasmuch as I myself define nerditry. Note that they are necessary conditions but not sufficient conditions, since there is a certain je ne sais quoi about nerds that can’t be defined. And I’m not looking for  “A nerd is X” or “A nerd does Y” either — think of this as: “if I wanted to emulate a nerd, what would I need to know?”

Nerds need to be familiar with at least one and preferably many esoteric academic topics very well. So the first condition isn’t a particular topic, it’s any topic, provided you can speak with authority and are actually interested in it. Next you need to know a bunch of trivia. Again the particular topic isn’t important, though movie quotes and internet memes are sure bets. A nerd should be comfortable with maths. If someone starts talking about sets or normal distributions or Laplace transforms, you should know what they’re saying. Maths provide a useful language for discussion, much like economics, so learning the terminology of your nerd group is vital.

I suppose all nerds are different. I wonder if a set of necessary conditions for nerditry could ever be formulated. This is harder than I had anticipated.

Anyone who talks to me for more than five or ten minutes knows that I’m serious about being organized. My hipster PDA is almost certainly at my side when I’m out and about. I am a disciple of David Allen and the Getting Things Done gospel he preaches. I myself have taken up the calling of preaching; if you’re around me too long, expect an ear full about how great GTD is.

I’m not going to pontificate now, though (not too much anyway). If you’re interested, the book is a fantastic read, A+++ Would Buy Again Great Shipping. Anyone who is an organization junkie needs a copy.

For the uninitiated, one facet of GTD is lists — and lots of them. If you’re not comfortable creating, maintaining, and tracking lists, you’re going to have issues wrapping your head around GTD. One list you’ll come back to a lot is your Projects List, where (surprise!) you keep all your projects. A project in GTD is very broadly defined: anything in your world you have committed to changing, that isn’t currently the way it should be, is a project. Some of my current projects include “Get new running shoes”, “Plan Boston weekend trip”, and “Get reimbursed for eye glasses”.

Essentially these are all the things I’m juggling at one time. The balls I need to keep in the air, if you will, or the plates I have to keep spinning. One thing that impresses me about GTD is the sheer number of projects I can be working on at once. Right now I have 46 items on my Projects List. I never had such precise numbers before I started using GTD, but I have a hunch I could juggle maybe ten things at once, and likely fewer if they were big things. Too many blips on my radar screen and I would stop dropping the ball, plates would stop spinning, and stress ensued.

Now that happens rarely, if ever. If you feel like you want to get control of your life, David Allen has something to teach you.

My little sister Christina is hanging out in Europe for the forseeable future. She’s doing a study abroad in Italy starting in the fall, and for the summer she’s kicking around London.

She’s keeping a blag chronicling  her adventures. I hear it may have a video portion soon. Check it out.

I am a nerd for grammar, among other things. I think English has somewhat complex grammatical rules for a reason, and that systematic mistakes in usage should not be tolerated. I’ve prided myself on knowing the corner cases of language ever since I became self-aware.

For example, farther and further are mostly interchangeable, but they are subtly different. For example, farther should be used with measures of distance, whereas further is for measures of degree or time; further is also used as the comparative form of far. Although Wiktionary tells me that experts have never made a fuss about this distinction, I tend to err on the side of grammar nerditry.

Songs are different than regular usage, though. Grammatical constraints are often relaxed or broken for artistic effect or because of the exigency of other types of constraints. It used to irk me when artists would use the improper form of lay or lie in their songs, until I thought of how weird it would sound to use the correct form. At the same time, I have the utmost respect for artists who navigate treacherous grammatical straits properly and elegantly.

Quick grammar lesson: to lay is transitive, as in “I lay the book down on the table.” To lie is intransitive, as in “I lie down on the couch to take a nap.” The confusion arises because the past tense of lie is lay. I lie / I lay / I had lain. I lay / I laid / I had laid. I’ll try not to judge you for getting this wrong.

A recent example is The Bird & The Bee’s Love Letter to Japan: “and now, all my heart I will lay down precisely at your feet”. The present tense of to lay. The transitive one. Perfect.

Late last Monday night I was alerted by my friend Jon Brandvein of his acquisition of tickets to the Daily Show (with Jon Stewart, of course). The tickets were for two days later, that Wednesday. Being unemployed and currently living with my parents, I was able to take advantage of this immense opportunity.

On July 1st I traveled into NYC, ostensibly to stand in a queue on 11th Avenue for half the day, but really to see Jon Stewart. Past the airport-like security into the studio, it was surreal. Jon Stewart is an actual real person, who dresses very nicely, and is maybe even more hilarious in real life. The show is live-taped, so during the commercials he confers with his helper people about Really Important Things. Jon’s hand-off to Stephen Colbert does indeed happen live at the end, and they shoot the breeze before the actual live taping part. At first, though, you can’t tell that they’re just conversing, because it is so effing hilarious.

Additionally they confiscated my hipster PDA. I didn’t get the memo that notes were prohibited, though in retrospect that makes perfect sense. I do remember that during the first commercial break Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” played, and Coldplay’s “Clocks” was the second commercial break. Also I was totally that guy live-tweeting standing in line for tickets.

Epic win all around. A+++++ Would Buy Again Great Shipping for the Daily Show.

I am glad that nowadays I don’t need to download TV shows illegally in order to catch up when I miss an episode. To my knowledge most shows are available streaming online from whoever is lucky enough to own their respective distribution rights. Not only is firing up a web browser easier than torrenting, but I feel good that I’m doing The Right Thing. Studios can make some money from advertising, and the ads are shorter than commercials. And I can watch whenever I want. Nice and easy.

Except studios don’t want to make my life easy. Fox and ABC are not interested in making me happy. I used to be a die-hard fanatic of House and Grey’s Anatomy. I did not miss an episode until my senior year class schedule got really crazy, when the opportunity cost of my time became too much. “I will catch up on these shows later,” I thought. “After all, they are available for free online from the good folks over at Fox and ABC.”

No. Never bank on the goodness of TV studios. They are self-interested profit-maximizing vampires. After I realized that the episodes available for both House and Grey’s were restricted to the first in season five, and the last few of the same season, my dreams of catching up were defenestrated. I guess I’ll have to go back to illegal downloads, or wait until I have Netflix to catch up.

Why would pissing me off be in any studio’s best interest? It can’t be because of technical issues, since the previous episodes must have been taped and posted earlier, but then taken down. The issue must be economic. Studios are trying to get me to substitute TV-over-internets for a more lucrative medium, like TV-over-TV or TV-over-DVD. I hope they did their cost-benefit analysis carefully. Weighing foregone internet ad revenue against 1) the number of people who would then download the shows and 2) the number of people who would buy DVDs or watch it on reruns on TV, I guess they decided that they’d make more money making peoples’ lives difficult. My inclination is that they’re wrong: those watching TV online are disproportionately young, who are probably more likely to download illegally rather than have the money to spend on DVDs.

Well, good for them. As it stands I probably won’t be catching up on House or Grey’s any time soon, which means next season they’ll both have one fewer viewer (hehe, inadvertant rhyming). Pissing off your customers probably isn’t the best business model.

Society does a pretty good job of separating the Haves from the Have-Nots. But the rest of us — that is, for those of us who are not anthropomorphisms of the whole of society –  need mechanisms to do this excluding.

Let’s say you’re putting on a concert. You need ways to separate the people who paid vastly more for their tickets (otherwise price discrimination breaks down). Bouncers and signs are good mechanisms. The signs can say something like “VIP ONLY”. So, without the bouncers, you could think something like “Hey, I’m very important, so I guess this area is for me,” or alternately, “Screw whoever put this sign here, I’m going in.”

The best exclusion criteria are arbitrary. “Danger! Do Not Enter” signs are pretty awesome, especially if you put them in front of somewhere even more awesome, and even more especially when the area is not dangerous. That way the only people who would enter are those who are undeterred by such signs. This trait is surely correlated with awesomeness, leading to selection bias against lame people.

In general it’s best to be a law-abiding citizen, but sometimes rules are meant to be broken. The most important skill here is to know which rules should be followed, at what time and in what context, and which should be cast into the heart of Mt. Doom. Wikipedia agrees with me.