At times, Fourth Wave innovations verge into the realm of obsession, making you wonder how much real difference all of this precision makes to a cup of coffee. At the end (or beginning) of the day, coffee is a ritual. More than mere caffeine delivery, these technologies enable a multi-faceted sensory experience. Exploring the complexity of its flavors and aromas has transformed coffee from an article of consumption into an open-ended object of scientific and aesthetic experimentation.
Sleep – Techniques to fall asleep when you have trouble sleeping
These are from Hacker news discussion on Sleep.
Count back from 1,000 to 0
I went through a period where I’d wake up about 2-3 hours after going to bed and couldn’t get back to sleep for most of the night.
I used a related technique to help. I count backwards from 1000, and force myself to keep my eyes closed. It’s a task that takes just enough brainpower that it’s hard to do on autopilot while my mind drifts to something else. If I do wander off I just go back to counting whatever number I remember.
It’s been almost totally successful in the 2 months I’ve been doing it.
Count and subtract
My sister once taught me a small trick to calm myself down when I was anxious but had no idea what I was anxious about: Count down from a random 3-digit number, subtracting 7 at each count. (e.g. 794, 787, 780, 773, …) Do it until I drift away and lose track, unable to continue.It works. I guess it’s kind of in that “takes just enough brainpower” league. This takes more brain power than simply counting down though, and I’m not sure if this actually helps one falling asleep…Another technique I derived from this is to do a countdown in the foreign language I was learning. Several years ago it was in English, and right now it’s in Japanese. It also takes more brain power than counting down in my mother tongue, with the additional benefit of getting a little bit of practice. Killing two birds with one stone I guess :p
Listen to audio book and yoga nidra
I’m pretty high on the neurotic scale. Two things that have helped me immensely:
1) I turn on an audio book that I love and know well with a 30 minute sleep timer. Recently this is the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It doesn’t keep me awake because I already know the story well. But it keeps my mind occupied enough to avoid the rumination. Podcasts don’t work for me because it’s new material.
2) Guided Yoga Nidra in bed. This involves a long sequence of instructions to notice and relax individual areas of the body. Thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinkie finger, front of the hand, back of the hand, wrist, and so on. This keeps the mind occupied and also helps release tension.
Box breathing
There is an amazing trick that I now use almost every time I want to sleep: the 4-7-8 breathing method. I don’t remember using it and not falling asleep in less than 5 minutes, whatever the stress I was in.
Focused relaxation
I discovered profoundly relaxing and deep sleep by doing this routine.1. Lie on my back on the bed. Place my hands beside my torso, palms facing down. Keep my legs straight, but free and relaxed.2. Close my eyes and focus my attention on the region between my eyebrows.3. Relax my breathing and make it regular and slow.4. Actively imagine my stress and anxiety to be a form of fluid, filled in my body and then imagine it evaporating from my finger tips.I do this for about 30 minutes everyday, and the days I do it, I have no recollection of my sleep. I mean, no dreams, no moving about, nothing.I also found that this form of sleep, makes me absolutely refreshed even if I sleep for only 5 to 6 hours.
Violence settle issues
“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” – Issac Asimov.
I think about that one a lot whenever I’m angry. I tell myself that I may be angry, but I will not let myself be incompetent.
chiguayante
“Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never settles anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.”
Lt. Col. Jean V. Dubois (via Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers)
Link to power concedes nothing.
Mothers
A short story in three short paragraphs. Beautiful. I got this from reddit thread sharing book quotes. Nothing else there felt as wonderful as this passage.
Carsten Jensen, “We, The Drowned”
“We said goodbye to our mothers. They’d been around all our lives, but we’d never properly seen them. They’d been bent over washing tubs or cooking pots, their faces red and swollen from heat and steam, holding everything together while our fathers were away at sea, and nodding off every night on the kitchen chair, with a darning needle in hand. It was their endurance and exhaustion we knew, rather than them. And we never asked them for anything because we didn’t want to bother them.
That was how we showed our love: with silence.
Their eyes were always red. In the morning, when they woke us up, it was from stove smoke. And in the evening, when they said good night to us, still dressed, it was from exhaustion. And sometimes it was from crying over someone who would never come home again. Ask us about the color of a mother’s eyes, and we’d reply, “They’re not brown. They aren’t green. They’re neither blue nor gray. They’re red.” That’s what we’d say.
And now they’ve come down alongside the wharf to say goodbye. But between us, there’s silence. Their eyes pierce us.
“Come back,” their stare pleads. “Don’t leave us.”
But we won’t be coming back. We want out. We want to get away. Our mother sticks a knife in our heart when we say goodbye on the wharf. And we stick a knife in hers when we go. And that’s how we’re connected: through the hurt we inflict on one another.”
Practice first, study later
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16557644
I had the same question when I wanted to learn C++. I was already quite practiced at Java and had written C and had read books on C++ off and on for years, but I still could not program in C++.
So I got a copy of Stroustrup “The C++ Programming Language” and started to do his exercises, but the author clearly had never done them himself, some were quite long and tedious and did not teach me anything (never put exercises in a book that you have never done), so I gave up on doing his exercises.
In my exasperation I just made up my own exercises: I just started at the beginning of the book and for each feature the book mentioned I wrote a little program that used it. The book said you can throw any kind of object, including, say, an int, so I wrote a program to throw and catch an int. I have never done that before or since, but I did it. I wrote a little program for every feature of the language. It was incredibly tedious, but it worked.
I also compiled every program with two C++ compilers and ran them and compared the difference. Many of my little programs did different things in the two compilers (!). I coded for 10 hours a day for two weeks; when I was done, I could code in C++, I could think in C++. Don’t despair if it takes you longer: recall that I was already an experienced programmer.
SECRET SAUCE HERE: The key here was to actually write the program even if I was sure I had nothing to learn from it because the feature in question was so conceptually simple: you think you know something, but then when you go to actually type it in, you find out whether know it was well as you thought you did. The tiny improvements you make while doing this copy-check-repeat feedback loop is the essence of learning the skill.
Note that no mistake is too small to be worth correcting. It is critical to not say you have passed the exercise until you can produce the result exactly and reliably, as a matter of course. If you just wrote a program and it was easy, then hide it and write it again.
At one point I was embarrassed that I could not write makefiles, so instead of copying them and hacking on them, every time I needed one I wrote it from scratch; now I am a master of gnumake. I repeatedly write fizz-buzz, binary search, heapsort, hashtables, etc. over and over, just to make sure I can do it correctly and without effort.
One of Richard Feynman’s wives left him, legally accusing him of spousal abuse because he did too much calculus: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/may/15/quantum-man-…
‘He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens,” Bell complained to a divorce judge. “He did calculus while driving, while sitting in the living room and while lying in bed at night.’
Ben Franklin describes using this method in his autobiography of how he taught himself to write. He dropped out of second grade and ended up as one of the best writers in American history (not to mention scientist, statesman, engineer, etc.) He says he found writing he liked and practiced copying it and then checking that he had copied it correctly; see his autobiography for more.
Woz used this method to teach himself how to build computers: he had the designs of computers from Silicon Valley firms and he just practiced rote copying the designs over and over.
I tell you this as a former graduate student in Mathematics at Berkeley: The secret to learning is not reading a bunch of abstract ideas. The secret is just running a huge number of examples through your brain; your brain then abstracts them for you. There is no need to study a bunch of abstract rules. After you have learned the skill this way, doing a “master class” with an expert where you return to what you have learned and examine it, think about it, refactor it, can also be helpful. However do this after you have the skill. The standard advice in Zen practice is the same: “practice first, study later”.
If you think that this cannot possibly work, then think of how you learned to speak your native language; did someone explain the rules of the grammar to you as a baby, or did you just rote imitate it? Non-native speakers of English have asked me why a feature of English is the way that it is or what the rule is for a certain situation in English. I tell them I have no idea.
Our school system lies to you completely. LEARNING A SKILL IS NOT ABOUT THE CONCEPTS, IT IS ABOUT ROTE MINDLESS IMITATION UNTIL YOUR BRAIN HAS INTERNALIZED THE IDIOMS. Your brain cannot memorize the massive amount of detail in all of the examples, so it must abstract them into idioms; once it has done that, you simply have the skill and you do not even know how you do it yourself. How exactly do you approach a door and open it? If you think you know, then please explain it to the teams of people at places like MIT who are trying to build a robot that can do that, because it is very complex. You do it and you do not even know how. But you can do it.
Publii – Open-Source CMS for Static Website
https://getpublii.com/ is a static site generator which has a GUI and can be run locally. Others like Hugo and Jekyll are command line.
Alien Eyes 