Mental Exoskeletons

What the hell does Mental Exoskeletons mean, anyway?

2008-12-11T13:17:00.000-08:00

As you can see, the name of this blog is Mental Exoskeletons. I didn't choose it at random. Mental Exoskeletons is the name I give to the information design principals I use to create software. As the name implies, it centers around creating systems that do the work my mind would do, if other limitations didn't get in the way.

These limitations fall into several categories.

1) Long-term memory. In a perfect world, I'd have perfect recall and efficient indexing of every event of my life, the full text of everything I've ever read, and the nuances of every thought I've ever had. Sadly, that's not the case. But I can make strategic choices of what to save. I decided that having a record of every URL I'd visited would be a very useful aid to memory. To do this, I wrote a Firefox plugin that relayed the URLs I visited to my server, and some code that formatted them, added some metadata, and saved them into Amazon's SimpleDB. Since then, I've discovered Google Web History, which does the same thing if you have the Google Toolbar installed, or use Google Chrome. I'll get around to making my version publicly available at some point, for people who don't want to give all that data to Google for whatever reason. A similarly useful application would be a searchable list of every phone number I've ever dialed. As I like to say -- not entirely joking -- the NSA has access to this data, why don't I?

2) The things I forget to remember. If I could remember to do all the things I want to remember to do, I'd be the most productive and yet, most relaxed person alive. I certainly would have been a better student, better employee and all-around better member of any organization I've ever been a part of. I've had a raging case of ADHD for most of the last 34 years, which makes traditional memory aids - Franklin Planners, paper to-do lists, etc - less than optimal, because I forget to carry them with me, or to take them out of my pockets before washing my jeans. What I need is a mental exoskeleton, a trivially-easy way to file ideas, topics for further research and to-do list items while I'm away from a computer, and to have them dropped back into my consciousness when I'm in a better position to deal with them. I've got some ideas of how such a system would work, but I'll save that for a case study down the road (hopefully soon, and after I've had the chance to build it, so I can show concrete details.)

3) IO bandwidth exceeded. There's a lot of useful data in the world which I can't access, process and output into action fast enough to make it worthwhile, or without turning it into a full-time job. One example is stock analysis. I have a fairly simple to explain, but computationally non-trivial value investing algorithm which was taught to me by Arnold Van Den Berg. It takes about 10 minutes per stock to process it manually. I could easily spend three or four hours a day running it for every publicly traded stock that reported earnings that day or which had a large enough percentage change to potentially move it into interesting-to-buy territory. I don't have time to do that. A system that automatically grabbed the new data, ran the numbers and dumped the results into my email would be a classic example of a mental exoskeleton - on-going processing jobs that I only want to see the results of in extraordinary circumstances. Another example is the bus and trolley system San Francisco. All the data on bus locations and arrival times is available via the web, but without the ability to calculate all the nearby stops, read 30 webpages and do a couple hundred simple arithmetic problems in my head inside two or three minutes, I can't choose the fastest route between any two points with any kind of accuracy. This is the problem I'm currently working on, and I hope to have a prototype publicly available in the next few days.

There are numerous other categories, but these explain the concept. They're not just programs that make things faster or feasible, they're ways of taking a desire for data, collecting and processing it outside the realm of my present mental focus, and giving it back to me when I'm ready to receive new data and act on it. And now, it's time to get back to hacking.

Busy, Busy

2008-11-19T18:48:00.000-08:00

I've been busy this last week, working on a personal software project I hope to be able to announce soon. This one's been sitting on the back burner for five months, and I'm in a sprint to get it finished so that I can move on to new projects. More information soon, I promise.

In the mean time, a quick discussion about food. I've been playing with sundried tomatoes quite a bit recently. I've come to this point from several directions. One is simply that they're an ingredient I haven't used much. I tend to go through phases of trying a bunch of ideas with a new ingredient before it finally settles into it's long-term place in my repertoire. Another is that they don't require much energy for shipping or storage. I don't think the food-miles concept is the end-all-be-all of ethical eating, but I like low-energy things in general. Energy is just going to get more expensive, and aside from that, using more energy than you need to is just poor design. Lastly, I like the idea of eating in-season. That's ultimately where a local cuisine comes from -- you make do with what you have available, when it's available. So if you want tomatoes in the dead of winter, you have two options, canned or dried. I know all about canned, so I'm playing with dried.

(I've got some experiments planned for mid-Winter bouillabaisse and mid-Winter chili. You can expect a full report on both.)

For tonight, however, I'm trying my hand at pasta sauce. It's turned out quite nicely.

(Note: all amounts are approximate and to taste. Experimentation and honing your instincts is two-thirds of the fun.)

1 cheap cut of beef, maybe 12 cubic inches, diced ($1.00)
.85 oz (1/4 3.5 oz pack) sundried tomatoes, julienned ($0.75)
1/4 cup chopped purple onion ($0.25)
2 cloves garlic ($0.10)
1/2 teaspoon each dried oregano, thyme, and basil ($0.15 combined)
2 teaspoons Better than Bullion beef reduction ($0.20)
2 or 3 dashes of olive oil ($0.25)
parmesan cheese to taste (in my case, about $0.60)
1/4 pound dried fettucini ($0.50)

In a skillet of chef's pan, saute the minced beef in olive oil until cooked through and browned. Add onions and garlic with a little salt and cook until the onions are translucent. Add tomatoes, beef reduction, herbs, and enough water to almost cover. Simmer on medium-low heat for one hour, replenishing water as necessary. When the hour is almost up, allow water to evaporate to concentrate the flavors. Pour over pasta and grate on the cheese.

In retrospect, the only thing I'd change is the amount of pasta I used -- the sauce could easily accommodate 50% more. I'm not that hungry tonight, but it'd make an excellent main course for two people, assuming a salad, bread and wine.

Beaver Moon

2008-11-12T17:34:00.000-08:00

The full moon this month occurs in the early hours of tomorrow morning, which happens to be my birthday. I couldn't remember the last time that happened, so I looked it up. I was fifteen. I had better enjoy this one as well. The next time the moon will be full on my birthday, I'll be 72.

Where the Heart Is

2008-11-11T14:59:00.000-08:00

I think a lot about housing these days, but it isn't something I've always been interested in. I've attempted to bootstrap several ventures, and run the numbers on dozens more, and when working out projected cash flows, estimated revenues and committed expenses, I kept coming back to the fact that housing accounts for at least 2/3rds of what I have to spend each month, regardless of where I am (unless I want to move back to Angleton, Texas and live with my parents.) I know how to eat decently on $20 a week, my car is long paid for and gets good milage, all my other costs can be dropped to near nothing, but not housing. Even living with roommates, my cost of a warm, clean place to sleep and shower has run between $20 and $35 dollars per day, every day, since the day I left college and started paying my own rent.

That kind of money adds up fast when you're trying to build something out of nothing but your own time and skills. I'm willing to work hard for other people, but it's not something I want to do for the rest of my life. I have too many interesting ideas of my own to spend my life working on someone else's.

The upshot is that I've spent a lot of time over the last 8 years or so trying to find creative ways out of that trap. It's something I expect to blog about a lot, but I want to start with some ground-level principles that have come to inform my thinking.

1) Small is beautiful.

Small is beautiful because small is cheap, and because small forces you to be creative due to the built-in limits. (Much like the best thing that ever happened to my writing skills was taking Don Becker's Social Contract Theory at UT lo these many years ago. My jaw nearly hit the desk when he explained that the first paper was a three page paper. Three pages maximum.) I love the small living space displays at Ikea for the same reason.

I wasn't always enamored of small spaces, minimalist design or owning few things. I was an instinctual packrat for most of my life. I'm a historian by temperament and training. I love books. I love old, well-crafted things (the Western Electric 500, for instance), and I collected them with a near-religious passion for most of by boyhood. I was on a mission to save them from people who didn't appreciate them and would happily pitch them in the trash without looking back. My personal archives and library were sources of pride and backaches every time I had to move.

So what changed? Well, my life took several unexpected turns in rapid succession and I ended up moving to California with nothing more than would fit in my car. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. My sense of self-identification was forced to reform without reference to any particular geography -- I'm a 7th Generation Texan, I'm never going to define myself by the fact that I live anywhere else, sure as hell not California -- or any particular set of possessions. My books didn't fit in the car, so they didn't come with me. After the shock wore off, I began to place more value on the freedom that came with traveling light than I did on the possessions that had previously weighed me down.

2) Permanence is an illusion

In Earthship Volume 2, Mike Reynolds makes the very valid point that most people buy a house, spend 30 years paying for it, then die. That observation brings up several interesting questions. Is it possible to design a house doesn't cost half a lifetime's wages to build and maintain, but that performs as well and lasts as long as one that does? Can you build a house that can be disassembled when you're done with it, and the parts used to build something else (in the spirit of William McDonough and Michael Braungart's Cradle to Cradle theory)?

3) Beauty is Truth, and Truth Beauty

You'll spend literally half of the hours of your life in your home, and it will be your biggest committed expense. It can be your greatest source of stress or well-being, according to how you interact with it. Design, fund, and build accordingly. Focus on what makes you happy. I love to cook and take long showers. If I was building a house tomorrow, 4/5s of it would be bathroom and kitchen.

That's the basics for now. I'm sure I'll talk more about this in the future.

First Post/Day of the Rest of My Life.

2008-11-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to start blogging on a regular basis for a couple of years now, and what better occasion than my first full day of unemployment? I intend for this blog to be an ongoing record of my thoughts; thus, it will be predominantly about food, financial markets, design, and the challenges which I foresee the future presenting us with.

Today, we start with food - specifically, my lunch.

Pasta with olive oil and good cheese has long been my staple comfort food - tasty, cheap and satisfying, and a great base for further experimentation. About a year ago, I split a pepperoncini and salami pizza in the Mission with my friend Steven Hazel. The flavor combination was excellent, but while I usually keep a jar of pepperoncini in the house for the quick capacaisin hit, I almost never have salami. I picked up some at random at the store the other day, so I decided to give salami and pepperoncini pasta a shot. The verdict: Excellent.

Recipie:

3/4 inch diameter stack of fettuccine ($0.40-0.50)

.5 cubic inch nub of asiago that needed to be used up (domestic, maybe $0.25)

slightly more than that of parmesan (Reggiano, maybe $0.35)

1 inch length of 1.5 inches diameter salami, diced (no real idea, let's say $0.50)

two large pepperoncini, julienned ($0.10, tops)

splash of extra-virgin olive oil ($0.05)

The result was a delicious lunch that set me back $1.75, at the outside. The price calculation is important to me, both because I enjoy the challenge of living well on very little money, and because I'll be living on the largesse of the State of California for the foreseeable future.