If you stop doing something, you get worse at it. Last fall, I stopped writing for myself every day. I’m tring to get back to it now. I’m finding it harder to stich together thoughts and sentences. Typing—outside the context of my day job—feels weird. My writing has lost its voice—at least for now.
\n", "date_published": "2023-01-26T12:46:48-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2023/01/26/if-you-stop.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/09/20/chess-is-just.html", "title": "Chess is just poker now", "content_html": "The chess cheating scandal du jour is puzzling and fascinating. Matteo Wong’s article in The Atlantic does not really unpack the issue, but instead provide some depth into how computers have changed the game over the past 25 years:
\n\n\nWhat once seemed magical became calculable; where one could rely on intuition came to require rigorous memorization and training with a machine. Chess, once poetic and philosophical, was acquiring elements of a spelling bee: a battle of preparation, a measure of hours invested.
\n
It is interesting, though understandable from a technological standpoint, that the concern in the 1990s was that a person might help the computer engine cheat. Today, conversely, the concern is that a computer engine (combined with some spycraft tech, it must be said) might help person cheat.
\n", "date_published": "2022-09-20T10:58:32-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/09/20/chess-is-just.html", "tags": ["Chess","Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/09/15/tableau-is-a.html", "content_html": "Tableau is a very powerful data visualization tool. The more I use it, though, the weirder it is to me from a UI standpoint.  I find it both easier and harder to use that it’s nearest competitor, Microsoft Power BI.
\n", "date_published": "2022-09-15T10:56:26-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/09/15/tableau-is-a.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/28/my-writing-as.html", "content_html": "My writing as a child:
\n\n\nWhy use a small word when a big word will do?
\n
My writing as an adult:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2022-07-28T08:29:44-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/28/my-writing-as.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/27/i-dont-need.html", "content_html": "Why use a big word when a small word will do?
\n
I don’t need a better notes app. I need to take better notes.
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-27T11:15:14-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/27/i-dont-need.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/07/12/everything-takes-longer.html", "title": "Everything takes longer to do than I expect", "content_html": "A miser knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I feel that way sometimes about the people tracking my time at work. The thing is, they don’t bother me about how long it takes me to do my work. I bother me about it.1
\nA constant source of frustration for me is that everything I do takes longer than I expect it to. This is true whether I am doing something for the first time or the hundredth. I try to build it into my time estimates, but it is often impossible to guess how much time may be wasted on overcoming a technical setback. Most of my coworkers don’t have technical setbacks, per se. They are working primarily in Excel and Word rather than creating databases queries and analytical scripts. Consequently, they don’t understand how difficult it is for me to make time estimates. I can’t possibly create an accurate estimate of how much time I could lose to a bug I created, some analytical framework not working as promised, or the speed of a database or a network share being far slower than expected.
\nIt also bothers me that it takes me the same amount of time to do a lot of my work as it did ten years ago. It isn’t because I haven’t gotten better at my work; the quality of my work is better, but adding that level of quality takes more time than doing the work in a slapdash, non-repeatable, non-controlled way. This kind of thing is true in my hobbies, as well. I can’t solve Sudoku puzzles or crosswords must faster than I could years ago. While solving quickly isn’t necessarily the point of doing puzzles, it makes me feel that I have plateaued in my abilities and possible cannot get any better.
\nI suppose, as I have gotten older, I have learned to be considerate and to care about quality over speed. Unfortunately, the world, I am afraid, still values the glib and quick over the thoughtful and slow.
\nOn Independence Day, we Americans celebrate throwing off the yoke of tyranny of the British Crown and declaring that we, and all people, have certain inalienable rights under natural law.
\nThe Supreme Court has made a mockery of this idea in its recent decision Dobbs v. Jackson. Now we are being led to believe that our natural rights are not natural at all. Instead, they depend on national tradition—specifically what the Supreme Court majority deems to be national tradition.
\nI refuse to believe that our rights should depend on the whims of a small group of unelected officials. It’s not much better than living under a monarchy.
\n", "date_published": "2022-07-04T12:13:14-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/07/04/dependence-day.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/04/30/annual-reviews-are.html", "title": "Annual Reviews Are a Terrible Way to Evaluate Employees", "content_html": "Of course, on the weekend I have to write my annual self-evaluation essay for work, I read this article in the Wall Street Journal by Marcus Buckhingham. He spells out the problems with the annual review process:
\n\n\nThe failings of the annual performance review fall into three broad buckets:
\nThey are too infrequent. They are dehumanizing. They are irrelevant to real-world performance.
\n
For years I have complained to my “performance advisors” about the absurdity of the annual review process. Part of the problem is that goals—even SMART goals—are often unachievable because priorities, projects, and clients change over time. Another problem is that too much time is spent ranking employees, which leads to an outside focus on areas of improvement. Not enough time is spent highlighting areas of strength. Imagine how empowering a performance review would be if it was focused on what employees are good at and on finding ways to let them do those things even more.
\nI thought this detail, from deep in the article, was especially well-observed:
\n\n\nWorkers want attention, not feedback, and mostly attention on where they’ve shown glimpses of something good, and how they might show more of them.
\n
Over the past two years I have cultivated a much better attitude about performance reviews. I believe that the managers at the various companies I have worked at want to do the right thing with performance reviews, and are doing the best they can with the tools they have available. I think the problem is that the wrong tools are being used—and have been being used, for my whole career, at every place I worked. The reason for that is that how performance reviews are performed has been baked into general workplace culture. It’s pretty much the same everywhere; blame the MBAs and management experts who developed the general processes and the ideas behind them, I guess1. No annual review process I have been a part of tries to break out of that mold and define a new culture.
\nIn general, employers should help their employees develop their strengths and allow them to spend more time on them. It’s true that various weaknesses can and should be improved with training, coaching, and experience. In many cases, however, greater gains can be had in letting employees drop those areas of weakness and concentrate instead on further developing their areas of strength. That approach would develop the kind of employees that companies in my field want to hire: specialists with unique, world-class skills. In the market for workers, that’s what’s valuable. Why strive hard to become average in your areas of weakness when you could spend equal effort to become truly great at something?
\nI’m an MBA with a concentration in management. Maybe I’m part of the problem. ↩︎
\nLeo Laporte, on this week’s MacBreak Weekly podcast, said that he is going to start calling Elon Musk an oligarch rather than a billionaire. I found that very interesting.
\nFor some reason, we reserve the word “oligarch” for very rich, powerful men in Russia, but I think it may be an apt term for any billionaire. Having that much money certainly grants a person outsized authority and autonomy. Each company Elon Musk owns controlling stake in must feel to him like a fiefdom in which he can do whatever he wants.
\n“Oligarch” has a pejorative connotation, which gives me pause when I think of applying it to a wide selection of people. However, I think the stink of it is deserved even for the billionaires that we like. People cannot accumulate wealth at such an unimaginable scale without having some form of moral stain on their characters.
\n", "date_published": "2022-04-27T20:45:33-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/04/27/all-billionaires-are.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/04/26/when-i-used.html", "title": "When I used Mac OS 8", "content_html": "Seeing Mac OS 8 emulated in a web browser today brings back some pleasant memories of my years as a Mac tech in college. Most of the machines I worked on for that job ran OS 8 or OS 8.5, which to my Windows-centric mind were beautiful and fun to work on.1
\nFor two years, I worked in the theatre building with one of my best friends. We were in charge of keeping the theatre professors’ computers—and almost all of the computers in student areas, working. That entailed defragging hard drives, installing productivity software, setting up backups, installing RAM, replacing laptop keyboards, performing OS upgrades, and so on.
\nWhen I first got the job, I had never even used a Mac before. The only Apple computers I had ever touched at that point were the Apple II and Apple IIGS in my middle school and high school, which I had used almost entirely for word processing. I would not have gotten the job if my friend had not vouched for me during the interview process. It turned out that my experience messing around with Windows software (warez mostly, at the time) and reinstalling Windows every six months after inevitably bogged down, made me somewhat overqualified. If anything, fixing problems on a Mac was a lot easier than fixing similar problems on my PC.
\nMy friend and I—and eventually a third person who I only met a few times—whipped the theatre building’s computers into shape within about a year. In my last year of college, the job became a make-work job for me. I set my own hours and did largely whatever I wanted to. People approved of my work, but a lot of it probably didn’t need to be done.
\nThat year, I spent many hours working in FileMaker Pro to build a sophisticated inventory system for the theatre’s hardware and software. I was a bit obsessive about it. Some nights I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking too much about solving programming- or database design problems. Well after midnight, I would get out of bed, walk across campus to the theater building, find my way inside2, and program in my little office for hours.
\nMeeting those theatre students—most of whom I would never have crossed paths with if not for this job—was one of the pleasures of working there. I remember that grad students were especially friendly and chill; they seemed like students from a completely different school than the competitive, stressful one I attended. The best part of the job, though, by far, was that I got comped two tickets to every show at the theater—whether they were student productions or professional ones. I went to every single show, which otherwise would have been far outside of my budget, and loved almost all of them. The experience kicked off a life-long love of theater…and of Macs, too, of course.
\nA few of the older Mac in the building ran the last version of System 7 and had monochrome monitors. Even then they seemed like relics. Still, I learned a lot about Hypercard on them, so I have a soft spot for them, too. ↩︎
\nAfter hours, the theatre building was always locked. If you worked there, though, you knew how to get in. Even after midnight, there were often students doing theatre work inside, and none of them were supposed to be there, either. ↩︎
\nI realize now that I’m writing my blog for my children. A body of work—even a body of an unimportant, inconsequential work—is a better thing to leave behind than nothing at all.
\n", "date_published": "2022-04-24T20:37:03-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/04/24/i-realize-now.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/04/19/a-hastily-built.html", "title": "A hastily built presentation is better than nothing", "content_html": "Last year I told myself that if I have the opportunity to present to somebody, I will always create some visual aids to complement what I say. It’s an easy way to differentiate myself from my peers, who rarely make slide decks unless they are training clients. It also shows that I’m well-organized and a structured thinker.
\nI found out today that I can build a good-enough slide deck in about ten minutes and present it right afterward. Half an hour before a team teleconference today, I was asked to present on a technology topic to my team. I said yes, then dropped everything for about ten minutes to create a brief slideshow on a technical topic of my choosing. I decided to share with my group how I started using Python to automate data validation. Because I am the only Python user in the group—which is not a technical group—the idea was entirely new to them. This allowed me to keep my presentation brief and high-level, while still being informative.
\nI normally spend many hours working a slide deck. Much of that time spent brainstorming visual designs, arranging objects to build diagrams, and revising slides to make them more concise and more visually appealing. Today, I had no time for any of that. Instead, I turned to PowerPoint’s Design Ideas feature, which automatically formatted my text and the one image I imported (the Python logo) into six presentable slides. I selected a theme with a dark background and light text—which is the opposite of our company’s slide template—to make everything pop. Then I finished up by changing a couple of the PowerPoint SmartArt shapes from what Design Ideas had applied. The result was inferior to the slide decks I painstakingly assemble, but it was far better than nothing, and nothing was my competition, after all.
\nI hope that showing good presentation skills time after time will help me move up into a more senior position eventually. It’s just one thing I’m working on to get there.
\n", "date_published": "2022-04-19T21:21:12-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/04/19/a-hastily-built.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/04/15/chateau-picard.html", "title": "Chateau Picard", "content_html": "When I was a kid, I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation. One thing that I remember is that Captain Picard—in some future timeline, at least—retires to his family’s vineyard in France. It was a place that looked pleasant but terribly boring. It was far afield from the exotic, exciting locales that his starship captain career brought him to.
\nI always wondered why someone with such an exciting life would end up someplace so boring. Now that I’m older, I get it. I fantasize about spending my old age (which is still a long way off) with my wife in a pleasant, quiet, and otherwise unremarkable New England town—the kind of place that was abhorrently dull to me when I was younger.
\n", "date_published": "2022-04-15T20:44:11-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/04/15/chateau-picard.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/04/14/be-excellent-to.html", "title": "Be excellent to each other", "content_html": "Tonight I had deep conversations with my wife and (later on) with my half-sister. They were rewarding, but they have exhausted the part of my brain that likes to write meaningful, or at least useful, blog posts. I guess my message to the world today is: be excellent to each other, even when it’s hard.
\n", "date_published": "2022-04-14T22:14:54-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/04/14/be-excellent-to.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/04/09/my-daughter-is.html", "content_html": "My daughter is turning 10 next month, and we are finally getting her some “older-kid” gifts. I just ordered her a pair of HomePod minis to use as a stereo pair in her room. I think she is going to love them. Someday she will play something other than Taylor Swift on them, too.
\n", "date_published": "2022-04-09T21:24:53-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/04/09/my-daughter-is.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/04/08/my-wife-and.html", "content_html": "My wife and I just ran lines with my daughter for a skit she is working on for her acting class. It was kind of hilarious to act with her. I am either a terrific actor or a terrible ham. I can’t tell which, but I think my wife thinks it is the latter. 😅
\n", "date_published": "2022-04-08T21:38:28-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/04/08/my-wife-and.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/04/05/the-reward-for.html", "title": "The reward for doing good work", "content_html": "At the start of my career I learned an important lesson: The reward for doing good work is always more work. That often works in your favor. As you advance in your career, you move from doing many simple, repetitive tasks to solving fewer, more complex, and more interesting problems. In general, my experience bears this out—but not always.
\nIn my first real job, I was a software developer in a small group within a large company. I started out knowing very little about how to do my job other than the programming fundamentals I picked up in A.P. Computer Science. However, I was smart and driven; I worked very hard and eventually became the best and most knowledgable programmer in my group—at least when it came to web and database development. For my effort, I was award with promotions and raises 1, but the nature of my work actually got worse instead of better.
\nBecause I was so good at figuring out how other people’s code worked, troubleshooting, and fixing the hardest-to-fix bugs, those became my primary responsibilities as a programmer. I was no longer writing small systems from scratch or developing clean architectures. Instead, I had two roles. First, I was the Sherlock Holmes of diagnosing and fixing coding problems for other members of my team. Second, I was in charge of the technical side of large software integration projects. These are projects that involve bringing in code from people outside the company and making it work on our company’s systems. In both of these roles, I spent many hours a day wrangling with other people’s messy, awful codebases. In the end, my projects were successful, which was rewarding, but a lot of the day-to-day work was mind-meltingly difficult and unsatisfying.
\nI had moved from performing lots of simple tasks well to solving more complex—but not more interesting—problems. Sometimes I think that work, programming, and life works out that way.
\nDon’t get too excited. I was always underpaid in those roles. At the time, I liked what I was doing, and lacked the confidence and the vision to take the risks necessary to switch companies in pursuit of a higher salary. ↩︎
\nI can’t seem to read books lately. It’s hard for me to even watch TV shows. I wonder if my attention span is shot.
\n", "date_published": "2022-04-03T18:54:33-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/04/03/i-cant-seem.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/03/29/try-telling-memento.html", "title": "Try telling Memento Mori to a five-year-old", "content_html": "My five-year-old son just realized that he, and everyone he knows, will die someday. It has lead to unexpected, devastating dinner conversations the past two evenings.
\nI don’t know why he started thinking about it. Out of nowhere, he started asking questions about death at dinner last night. At the time, my daughter and I had just started talking about Beethoven. I had looked up the composer’s Wikipedia entry and was reciting when he was born and when he died. Suddenly, my son—who knows that batteries die, that plants die, and even that animals die—asked in a shocked voice, “Why did he die?” Within a second, his lips started to quiver and he started to cry. A dozen other questions followed, none of them we were prepared to answer at a family dinner on a school night.
\nMy daughter went through this same emotional journey four or five years ago. For her, it was precipitated by the death of my father, who was the first close family member to die since was born. She couldn’t understand why her Grampa was gone, and quickly became terrified that she would die, too. These thoughts scared her so much that she was afraid to fall asleep; my wife or I had to stay with her night after night in her bed to comfort her. We had a lot of talks about death with her to help her understand what it means and to begrudgingly accept it. Of course we told her the pleasant half-truths that death only happens to very old people and is nothing she needs to worry about for a long, long time.
\nMy son has surprisingly practical concerns about death. Last night, he didn’t ask usb “Will I die?” He figured that out on his own and asked instead, “When will I die?” Tonight he asked us, with eyes wide with alarm, “Where will I go when I die?” My wife and I tried to explain to him that no one really knows, or that he would return to wherever he was before he was born. Those answers only made him more scared. Upon hearing them, he suddenly realized that he might not die in the same place as us or his sister, and became loudly distraught that he might end up somewhere where he couldn’t get to us anymore.
\nHe then asked when my wife and I, are going to die. That did not bother me. When he asked when his sister was going to die, I teared up because it seemed unimaginable. Finally, before we could steer him to another, far lighter, topic of discussion, he became concerned, to the point of tears, that he is too big or too small to “fit” there—whatever that means. It astounds me that the physical dimensions of the afterlife—or whatever he imagines it to be—are what my little boy is worried about tonight.
\nAll of my son’s thoughts and ideas about death have come, as far as we know, from his own imagination. No one close to him has died recently. We don’t talk about death much at all in our family; it is kind of taboo in our day-to-day conversations. Reflecting back on the past few weeks, however, I realize that he may have overheard the adults in the family discussing the untimely death of our rabbi’s husband, which occurred a week or so ago and understandably made us all very sad. We tried not to discuss it in front of our children—who did not really know the man—so that we would not upset them. Perhaps my son overheard us anyway.
\nIt took my daughter a long time to come to terms with the idea that she is going to die someday. I am expecting my son to follow in her footsteps. He will probably have occasional nightmares about death—or at least have trouble falling asleep with worry about it. While it makes me sad to see my son start to go through this phase—and it has certainly led to some difficult dinner conversations—I know that he, like my daughter, is an emotionally healthy kid and will be fine. I expect him to think about death some more, talk about it with us, and become more emotionally mature through the process. He’s going to get through this; we all do.
\nIt is quite a burden to understand that you, someday, are going to die. I wish I could ease that burden for my children, but I am wise enough to know that I cannot.
\n", "date_published": "2022-03-29T23:09:11-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/03/29/try-telling-memento.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/03/26/one-thing-that.html", "content_html": "One thing that I learned about this year in chess that I never thought about is this:
\nFor grandmasters, sportsmanship is resigning when your opponent will clearly win. For novices, sportsmanship is playing out the game and allowing your opponent to checkmate you even if it is inevitable.
\n", "date_published": "2022-03-26T16:22:19-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/03/26/one-thing-that.html", "tags": ["Chess","Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/03/21/is-increased-productivity.html", "title": "Is increased productivity worth the increase in stress?", "content_html": "I think about productivity a lot. I wrote up my productivity system about nine years ago. I created todo.txt apps for iOS and macOS. I have strong feelings about how to stay productive. Because of all this, when I don’t feel especially productive, I stress myself out about it more than I think I should. I even stress out when I feel like I have had a productive day but think that it took me too long to do that work. Instead of feeling good, I end up feeling bad. Instead of feeling like I moved ahead, I feel like I fell further behind. This happens to me all the time. It makes me wonder if all of my thought and hard work trying to eke out more productivity is worth it.
\n", "date_published": "2022-03-21T23:02:26-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/03/21/is-increased-productivity.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/03/15/all-i-know.html", "title": "All I know is that I don’t want to create a paper maché volcano", "content_html": "I want to help my daughter do a science fair project and create a fancy 3-fold poster for her elementary school’s science fair next month. I like the idea of making oobleck (a.k.a. “slime”) with cornstarch and water and doing some simple experiments with it. I think it would be a lot of fun. I wonder if it is too basic for fourth grade, but I expect it would be OK. I think that learning the format of creating an experiment and presenting it in poster form is a lot more important than the impressiveness of the experiment.
\n", "date_published": "2022-03-15T11:01:18-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/03/15/all-i-know.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/03/07/i-am-thankful.html", "content_html": "I am thankful for sun, warm weather, and my home office loudspeakers this morning. It’s going to be a good day.
\n", "date_published": "2022-03-07T09:56:10-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/03/07/i-am-thankful.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/03/03/advice-for-giving.html", "title": "Advice for giving effective presentations", "content_html": "I gave a coworker some advice for giving effective presentations today. I told her some things worth remembering:
\nMy little corner of Micro.blog has not had much to say about the invasion of Ukraine. This is probably a good thing, because it provides me a respite from grim news and unsubstantiated reports from the front lines. If I still had a Twitter timeline to scroll through, I’m certain that it would be full of performative, meaningless platitudes1, and strident back-and-forth arguments from people who (like me) have no bearing on the outcome of the conflict about what should be done about it.
\nAll I can say right now is that the war is very upsetting to me and the news and commentary about it over the past two weeks (starting before the invasion) have been driving me crazy. Reading news reports and scrolling through social media has been especially disquieting to me. I know not everything I see is true. A lot of it is likely to be propaganda from one side of the conflict or the other. The internet is the best disinformation vehicle the world has ever created, and it is not only being used by Russia, it’s being used by Ukraine and everyone else, too. Ukraine may not be doing as well in this war as some of the video clips I have seen would lead me to believe.
\nUkrainians are fighting a just war against an invading force, which makes taking sides in the conflict morally simple. Ukraine clearly does not deserve Putin’s incursion, and has put up a brave and savvy fight so far against it. It is easy to get caught up in how exciting and seemingly effective their defiance is, and to cheer them on in their defense of their democracy. But war is not an action movie. That it started already makes it a tragedy, and no matter the outcome it will end as an even greater one. The scrappy, virtuous underdogs may lose the fight. Their allies’ aide may be insufficient. Their charismatic leader may be killed. The two sides may broker a peace after heavy losses, and leave nothing meaningful resolved. Whatever the outcome is, I think we are all the worse for it.
\nYou may think this post is one. It is my personal reflection on the news, not a statement that I think is meaningful to anyone else or will advance a specific cause. ↩︎
\nRecently, I converted all of my (very old) academic writing from outdated document formats (WordStar and Microsoft Word 6) to more future-proof formats: either Markdown or OpenDocument format (.odt). While I did not re-read every essay I ever wrote for school during this process, I did notice something in my files that surprised me: From my junior year of high school to my final semester of grad school, I created outlines—full sentence outlines1—for all of my papers that were over a few pages in length. I had forgotten that I used that type of outline for more than two important projects in my academic career: my first English thesis project and my last.
\nI was first taught (i.e., forced to use) a sentence outline in high school. It was a requirement of my grade 10 English thesis project, which was a 10-page research and literary criticism paper. At the time, I understood how to create high-level outlines pretty well, but could not understand why I would create an outline that contained full sentences of the essay I was trying to write. I figured that if I could write a sentence outline for an essay, I could just as easily (or more easily) write the essay itself. In grade 10, that is precisely what I did: I wrote the essay and then split apart every paragraph and every sentence into a hierarchical outline. In doing so, I learned almost nothing.
\nFor my final English thesis project, my senior honors thesis in English at Brandeis University, I resorted to a sentence outline to solve my writer’s block. It was a year-long, independent study project, and my thesis advisor—who mostly told me that despite my anxiety I was doing fine—was not terribly helpful or available. Understandably, I lacked direction. I had no idea how to write a big, scary, and academically significant 80-100 page essay. When I sat down to write, I would either produce a jumbled mess of thoughts and quotations that did not fit together, or I would compose a coherent paragraph that I could not connect to anything else I wrote. As my senior year went by, I felt as if I was falling further and further behind my brilliant, thesis-writing peers. Counterintuitively (or understandably, depending on how you look at it), this feeling of dread led me to procrastinate instead of write.
\nIn the early spring, I realized that if I created an outline, I could work on my big, scary thesis essay without actually writing it. To that end, I split the work that had been going nowhere into two Word documents: (1) a simple, high-level outline that consisted of just a few headings at the start; and (2) an unorganized junk drawer of ideas and quotations from my source material. Outlining quickly became a productive form of procrastination for me. Instead of writing my essay, I would pluck out ideas from my junk-drawer document and drop them into the outline. From there, I would change these ideas, move them around, flesh them out, add to them, or delete them, all without committing to their precise wording or location. Because these ideas were all sentences or block quotes, my outline necessarily became a sentence outline.
\nUsing keyboard shortcuts I no longer remember, I collapsed sections and paragraphs of my thesis outline and moved them up and down to organize my ideas, and I shifted individual sentences up and down to make my arguments clearer and easier to understand. Because I was avoiding the writing phase of my project, I avoided gluing my sentences together with logical-, narrative-, or stylistic flow until I felt sure they were in the right place in the document and in the right order in their paragraph. Doing so took some time to get used to, but granted me a feeling of tremendous freedom as I worked out the essay’s high-level structure and the fleshed out the arguments I was advancing within it.
\nI didn’t realize until I was finalizing my thesis—when my outline was a 100-page outline full of section headings, topic sentences, and body sentences organized into paragraph-level nodes—that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do. I had organized my research and my findings in a format that was incredibly flexible, and I was constantly revising it and shaping it into something coherent. By accident, I had finally learned why a sentence outline is useful: It explodes an essay into individual thoughts that are physically separate2 and logically atomic3. Doing so makes it easier to evaluate each one independently and—with a good word processor—to quickly group, ungroup, reorder, and move them into place.
\nIn the end, I never wrote my thesis paper. Instead, over the course of a few months, I wrote a sentence outline. I converted it to a manuscript only a day or two before I turned in the final draft. My only edits to it, in manuscript form, were related to applying Word styles to the various paragraphs and adding a title page. The final draft must have been pretty good because it was awarded the Doris Brewer Cohen Award for best senior honors undergraduate thesis in the humanities at Brandeis University.
\nI went to business school after college, and did not have to write nearly as many long papers to earn my M.B.A. as I did to earn my undergraduate English degree. Despite the small number of major papers I wrote, and despite not remembering the writing process I followed for them, I discovered that I wrote sentence outlines for each one.
\nAfter grad school, almost all of my long-form writing has been technical writing for work. While I do not have any old drafts lying around, I recall using outlines extensively to plan and structure my work, but I never again used sentence outlines to draft and perfect it. One reason for that may be that I used different software to write with: mostly plaintext editors, rarely Word (not until I had a first draft nearly completed), and never a dedicated outliner like OmniOutliner. Another reason is that much of my technical writing had to fit into pre-existing document templates that already consisted of many short sections laid out in a specific, required order.
\nAfter discovering my longer-than-remembered history of using sentence outlines, and reminiscing about the senior honors thesis project on which I mastered the use of them, I now wonder if I should go back to using them for my larger writing projects.
\nI have been doing fairly well at work this month, but I feel kind of terrible about it. I feel like I am falling short in terms of productivity every day. Part of it is that I have been spending a lot more time managing than doing. I am keeping abreast of what my team needs, at the expense of getting my own tasks completed.
\nI probably won’t be able to prioritize my tasks as well as I would like to for the next two of three months. To regain some feeling of control, however, I will go back to a technique that I have often employed when I am unsure of myself: starting each work day with a journal entry in which I list my priorities for the day.
\n", "date_published": "2022-02-28T09:55:44-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/02/28/priorities.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/02/24/the-poet.html", "title": "The Poet", "content_html": "The poet often sits upon the edge of reason, testing the waters of both sides with both his hyperactive poet-senses and his nightmarishly sluggish normal-senses. Treading both sides for a time, he realizes both of these seas are just as cold and just as briny, but the one just beyond reason is far deeper. With this, he dives in, drinking deep, closing his eyes beneath the surface, coughing up the salt when he bobs up for air.
\nThe internal battle begins between the all-knowing and the not-caring, between divulging too many secrets and sharing too little of what he knows; it promises to rend him in two. This is the curse of the poet. And that of the saint. To see so much, and know so little, and yet grasp an understanding far beyond the rest of the world.
\nAt his worst, the poet sits high up above the world and showers his insight down upon it. At his best, he sits high above the world and pulls the rest of it up to him.
\n", "date_published": "2022-02-24T09:00:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/02/24/the-poet.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/02/16/a-big-success.html", "content_html": "A big success is made up of many smaller ones. A coworker reminded me of that today, and I really needed to hear it.
\n", "date_published": "2022-02-16T18:16:41-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/02/16/a-big-success.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/02/15/the-thin-veneer.html", "title": "The Thin Veneer of Modernity", "content_html": "Modernity is a thin veneer over thousands of years of baser and humbler human history. Almost everything we take for granted today—like electricity, telecommunications, antibiotics, vaccines, knowledge of the internals of the atom, an understanding of DNA, the discovery of plate tectonics, limited space travel, microchips, complex computer modeling, the internet, and so on—was invented or discovered within the span of two or three lifetimes.
\nWhen I was a little kid, some of the things I was taught in science class had only been discovered or agreed upon within the past twenty years. A lot more things, such as nuclear energy and weapons, had been invented or discovered in the prior fifty years. As a six-year-old first-grader in the 1980s, fifty years ago may as well have been five-hundred; I couldn’t understand how new everything was around me. For instance, I didn’t realize that my dad had been born before the atomic bomb had been invented. Just today I learned that he was born even before helicopters, which he helped manufacture throughout most of his career, were invented.
\nIt is absolutely astonishing to be alive at such a time, when the past hundred years or so invented nearly everything around us, and we expect new scientific discoveries and new inventions practically every week. It is also very troubling that humans, after only such a short time enjoying the fruits of our ingenuity, seem to be unable to focus on and solve the climate crisis that modernity caused. I fear that thousands of years of baser and humbler human history could return to us at some point in the future if we do not learn to work together to preserve our planet.
\n", "date_published": "2022-02-15T22:40:44-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/02/15/the-thin-veneer.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/02/14/the-tower-of.html", "title": "The Tower of Babel", "content_html": "When I first started work as a systems analyst I knew nothing about business and nothing specific about systems, but I knew a lot about language. I realized early on in my career that technical and non-technical people approach problems so differently that they are, in many cases, not even speaking the same language. In meetings between the business team and the IT team, I would always either start the meeting, or steer the meeting toward, defining common terms for both sides to use to talk about the problem. It is a tactic I still employ a lot to this day, especially when people seem confused about what the problem is or when the conversation isn’t going anywhere.
\n", "date_published": "2022-02-14T20:46:32-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/02/14/the-tower-of.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/02/06/everybody-wishes-to.html", "title": "Everybody wishes to be seen and heard", "content_html": "At some point, everyone wishes to be seen and heard. Giving people the attention and consideration they deserve takes focus, patience, and a commitment to preserving their dignity.
\nSometimes the person wanting to be seen and heard is a victim; other times that person is a bully. It can be very difficult to see and hear them both.
\n", "date_published": "2022-02-06T22:32:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/02/06/everybody-wishes-to.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/02/04/memory-selects-the.html", "title": "Memory selects the wrong things", "content_html": "The worst part of memory is its selectiveness. I can remember, in excruciating detail, every embarrassing moment, every incidence of social awkwardness, every chance I should have taken but didn’t, every blunder or pratfall, every mistake on an important exam, every poorly written paper, every taunt hurled at me, and every dressing down I ever received. I wish I could say that I remember all the successes and great things in my life just as vividly, but it simply is not true.
\nFrom what I gather, the way my mind works is entirely normal. I wonder if all it takes to remember all the winning moments in life just as well as the embarrassing ones is to make the effort to do so. For some reason—human nature, I always figured—it feels much harder to celebrate the wins than to mull over the losses.
\n", "date_published": "2022-02-04T22:33:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/02/04/memory-selects-the.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/02/03/strong-punctuation-preferences.html", "title": "Strong punctuation preferences", "content_html": "One thing I never planned for in adulthood is developing a strong preference for trailing punctuation to remain outside of quotation marks1 unless the period, comma, or other punctuation mark itself is being quoted. I wonder if the people I work with, who read my emails and technical writing every day, think I don’t know how quotations marks are supposed to work in American English2. No one has ever called me out on it. Either they don’t know that trailing punctuation is supposed to go inside quotation marks in most cases, they don’t care about it, or they don’t notice it at all.
\nWhen I find myself struggling to be creative or productive, I always think of a story I read in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. It was about a rower who was pulled out to sea one evening by the ocean tide. He rowed and rowed all night and kept being pulled farther and father from land by the ebbing tide. In the morning, however, the direction of the tide reversed, and he was pushed back to the shore to safety.
\nI remember this story so vividly because I had to write a very short essay about the book in my A.P. English class. We had to answer three specific questions about the book in one paragraph each. The teacher stressed how important it was for this assignment to be brief; only one page and three paragraphs.
\nI chose to answer the last question by writing about the story of the rower. Unfortunately, my explanation of the rower’s story stretched to two whole paragraphs, making my essay far longer than the one-page limit. At that time in my life, I had no idea how to pare down my writing even if it meant cutting parts of it I liked. I agonized over how to cut it down, but decided, uneasily, to turn it in as it was, despite it exceeding the one-page limit.
\nHappily, my overlong essay was a big success. I may have I understood the story of the rower better than even the teacher did, because the day after I turned it in he began the class but projecting my essay—all two pages of it—onto the classroom’s pull-down screen, and asking the whole class to read it. He seemed genuinely touched by it, too.
\nThis evening I pulled the essay out of my archives to reproduce below. The last two paragraphs are about the rower. I think about the ideas expressed in them on a weekly basis to this day.
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2022-01-23T22:57:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/01/23/the-writing-life.html", "tags": ["Journal","Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/01/22/on-having-nothing.html", "title": "On having nothing to say", "content_html": "An Approach to The Writing Life by Annie Dillard (20th century [1980s])
\nMichael Descy
\nAP English
\n10/26/95
\nA main theme of Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life is the importance of overcoming all the difficulties faced in the fulfillment of one’s dreams. The life of a writer can be dark and lonely, demanding much introspection and many late nights alone with an unruly manuscript. The writing process itself is difficult beyond most people’s conceptions. It is so harrowing, so haphazard, and so time consuming that most people that have one burning idea for a particular novel or story are never able to actually follow through its capitalization. Most never really even start, and the few who do often form such an attachment to their work, because it was so hard for them to accomplish, they will not allow themselves to alter it in any way, even to tie up loose ends or discard the beginnings of dropped themes and plot turns. Thus, their piece is never perfected; their dream is left to waste. Despite all these trials, however, writing is a very rewarding activity. Writing is like a passion eating at you, an aching, a hunger that can kill if not satiated. Only persistence, slogging through the murk and endless toil of the process, will enable one to fulfill his dream.
\nA dominant tone of the work can be described as enthusiastic. Dillard is intense as she explains the writing process. She describes writing in exhilarating terms, comparing it to playing tennis, lion taming, and stunt flying. Her metaphors are powerful, zesty. She shows your work as a line of words pulsing through your bloodstream and shooting across the universe. She tells us committing a vision to paper is a futile fight with the jealous, tyrannical page, the forces of time and matter working against you. Her chapters are choppy, broken down into many vignettes and tiny observations. There is a break on almost every page. They are so frequent each seems to be a gasp of breath between her quickly blurted images.
\nA strong scene that feels as though it will provide a good doorway for thoughtful attention to an important aspect of the work is the story of Ferrar Burn, which her painter friend, Paul Glenn, told her. One evening, years ago, Ferrar Burn caught sight of an eight-foot log of Alaska cedar floating out in the channel by his house. It was high tide, the water slack, so he rowed out, tied the log to his little eight-foot pram, and proceeded to tow it in. The tide turned, however, catching him, pulling him farther and farther out to sea. But Burn kept rowing against the tide, stubbornly, obstinately towards his house. He strained against it all night to little avail. When the tide finally changed the next morning, it finally pushed the still-rowing Ferrar Burn back home.
\nThis scene connects very well to the aforementioned theme. Through persistence against terrible odds, the rower Burn was finally able to succeed. Had he given up, stopped rowing, he would have drifted so far out to sea that the tide change which eventually pulled him back in would not have helped him. A writer too must pull against opposing forces to accomplish his or her goal. There is much about the process that pushes people away. Most would just assume go along with the tide, take the easy route, and be led far away from their dream. But the few with the dogged insistence to stick with their craft, pull through their troubles, and never lose sight of their objectives are able to ride out the tough times and sail swiftly and smoothly through the good times. These few are steeply rewarded in the end. Their prize: accomplishment of a dream.
\n
I have been having trouble lately coming up with something to say each day on my blog. I am feeling somewhat uninspired. This lack of spark probably stems from spending many hours this past week (far more than usual) writing software. The many hours spent programming have taxed my brain so much that the acts of writing, doing chores, or doing my other day-job work have felt exhausting and unrewarding for the past few days.
\nThe reason I have a blog is that I want to write every day, even when it feels impossible to put anything down, even when I feel I have nothing to say, and even if nobody else reads it. My goal is to practice explaining my ideas and opinions, developing ideas, and telling stories. Doing it every day is important to me because I have given up my creative endeavors too easily in the past. Stories seem impossible to end. A good song seems impossible to write. A buggy app seems impossible to fix. No one really cares about the things I create anyway, so why bother finishing them?
\nI have a different mindset now. A blog is never “finished” so I can’t fail at completing it. Conversely, a blog post is very short, so it is easy to finish. More importantly, it no longer matters to me if anyone else reads it. If someone does read one of my posts and leaves me a comment on Micro.blog, I am very flattered, but it doesn’t really matter. The blog is a kata. Practicing the forms is key. Nothing matters more.
\n", "date_published": "2022-01-22T23:41:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/01/22/on-having-nothing.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/01/19/how-old-is.html", "title": "How Old is Your Brain?", "content_html": "Back in 2006, I bought a Nintendo DS and was fanatical about the game Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day. It was a game that promised to make you mentally sharper, as long as you did solved simple cognitive training puzzles every day.
\nFor several months I played it daily, for five minutes or so, before I watched TV or played a more conventional video game. I told everybody about it. My best friend was a fan, too. After several weeks, I became blazingly fast at most of its puzzles, which included performing simple arithmetic, memorization, and doing a Stroop Color and Word Test. (The Stroop test was the hardest for me, due in no small part to my red/green color-blindness.) At the time, I thought that the daily training was making me smarter. Aside from being able to calculate restaurant tips more quickly, however, I noticed no other intellectual gains.
\nAfter some time, I stopped playing Brain Age—at least the brain training part. I had read that it didn’t really improve your cognitive abilities, and had come to the same conclusion myself by that point. Despite that conclusion, I still believe that playing games can make you smarter. That’s why I picked up Sudoku (which was included in Brain Age), the New York Times crossword puzzle, and, more recently, chess. I also do computer programming as a hobby, which is a little like playing a game against the compiler sometimes.
\nI play all these games to stave off what I fear is inevitable in my old age: mental decline. It think it is inevitable because I watched it happen to my father. At the tail end of his career (he worked until age 75), his mind started slipping away, little by little. I thought it was because he no longer had challenging work to do. Eventually, he developed dementia, and it became clear that the cause was medical in nature.
\nI realize now that I played Brain Age at the very start of his decline. Perhaps it was the trigger. I also realize that I still want there to be something I can do—mentally, that is—so that I don’t end up with the same fate.
\n", "date_published": "2022-01-19T22:37:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/01/19/how-old-is.html", "tags": ["Journal","Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/01/08/a-miracle.html", "title": "A miracle", "content_html": "Digital media is a miracle. It is infinitely reproducible with no loss of quality. The internet and all the devices we have make sharing digital media less expensive, on a marginal basis, than was possible via any other technology that came before it. We have invented a way to make some resources—like art and entertainment—effectively unlimited and nearly free.
\nWe take it for granted now, and moneyed interests are busy trying to dismantle it with blockchains as I write this, but I think we should all step back sometime and consider how incredible and wonderful it is. The miracle of digital media isn’t that it can be made finite; it is that it is infinite. We should embrace that miracle rather than try to replace it with something mundane.
\n", "date_published": "2022-01-08T23:25:54-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/01/08/a-miracle.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2022/01/06/web.html", "title": "web3", "content_html": "I advised a colleague today to research web3, because I think it may be the most interesting InsurTech technology of the year. I don’t think that glomming cryptocurrency and smart contracts onto the web is a good use of technology at all. The idea is especially dubious, and that is the reason it is interesting to me. I honestly think that web3, along with the cryptocurrencies that make it possible, are based on a long con.
\nWeb3 appears to be something to make cryptocurrencies, which are useless—except as a speculative asset or a way to pay the criminals who ransomware-attacked you—useful. Web3 will require you to have a digital wallet to pay for and log into any website with a web3-type paywall. The rest of web3 is just another name for smart contracts, which—as far as I can tell—are an interesting idea that has not caught on very well in real-world applications.
\nPerhaps the scope of both my research and my imagination is too narrow, but I don’t think web3 is going anywhere outside the venture capital community, at least not for a very long time.
\n", "date_published": "2022-01-06T22:17:32-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2022/01/06/web.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/12/31/that-which-can.html", "content_html": "“That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” —Christopher Hitchens
\n", "date_published": "2021-12-31T01:38:35-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/12/31/that-which-can.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/12/26/the-audience-wants.html", "title": "The audience wants you to succeed", "content_html": "I don’t get nervous speaking in front of people. I never have. The main reason is that I firmly believe that the audience wants you to succeed. And, if you don’t succeed, the audience will generally forgive you. Just show them respect at every step, and things will go fine.
\n", "date_published": "2021-12-26T13:43:29-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/12/26/the-audience-wants.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/12/09/maybe-its-just.html", "title": "Maybe It's Just a Product Nobody Wants", "content_html": "I love how Matt Birchler compares crypto to BitTorrent in his latest blog post, “Maybe It’s Just a Product Nobody Wants”:
\n\n\nI don’t think crypto is going to disappear, by the way. I think it will always have a place in the world, but much like bittorrent before it, it was new & exciting, people tried to use it for basically everything, and then it settled into being used for, well, nothing for most people. Blockchains likely have a more prominent future, but there’s a lot of spaghetti being thrown at walls right now, and I think very little of it will stick because it’s not actually making better products.
\n
I’m a crypto skeptic who thinks a lot about blockchain for work-related reasons. I dislike blockchain technologies because I think that, in the real world, they would fail to eliminate trusted intermediaries in financial transactions. Establishing trust without intermediaries is the whole point of blockchain.
\nI believe people and businesses are too risk-averse to do away with intermediaries like governments (who offer useful things like a legal system and deposit insurance) and the technology providers, agents, and brokers who make business work today. If crypto really takes off, and the old intermediaries are pushed out, I think that new intermediaries will pop up to fill in the gaps left behind. That future—blockchain with trusted intermediaries—is no better than what we have now, and is in many ways worse.
\n", "date_published": "2021-12-09T00:20:41-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/12/09/maybe-its-just.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech","News"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/12/07/i-wonder-what.html", "content_html": "I wonder what specifically happened this week to make “web3” a topic on every tech news site and every tech podcast I listen to.
\n", "date_published": "2021-12-07T09:52:05-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/12/07/i-wonder-what.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/12/04/the-elliptical-machine.html", "content_html": "The elliptical machine and the treadmill stand proudly in my basement like dusty monuments from a forgotten age.
\n", "date_published": "2021-12-04T10:59:38-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/12/04/the-elliptical-machine.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/11/26/stephen-sondheim.html", "title": "Stephen Sondheim", "content_html": "Stephen Sondheim died today. The world has lost a titan. My wife and I were lucky enough to see him sit for a long interview at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers a few years ago. He was sharp and witty and gracious, and we learned a lot. It is no surprise when an old man dies, but our minds are spinning nonetheless. At least he was able to live a long, productive life.
\n", "date_published": "2021-11-26T23:35:16-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/11/26/stephen-sondheim.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/11/18/the-stevenote.html", "title": "The Stevenote", "content_html": "My wife teaches a public speaking course, and from time to time we talk about what examples of public speaking would be good for her students to watch. While we go through the usual speeches by luminaries such as President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and also pick apart the speeches of politicians of our day, I always argue that, if you want to learn public speaking, you could do a lot worse than viewing and analyzing Steve Jobs’s many famous product launches. So much has been made of Steve Jobs’s keynotes that there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to them: Stevenote. He was a mesmerizing presenter.
\nI still think about how he unveiled the iPhone, which everyone in the audience at the time expected and knew would be a cell phone, but had no idea would be, well, the iPhone. He knew what the audience expected, and faked them out through the first half of his presentation about it. He said “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products” which upended the audience’s expectations. He repeated what those devices were—“An iPod, a Phone, and an Internet communicator”—as icons for those three things spun around on the big screen behind him, until the audience was laughing. Then he said, “are you getting it?” and people cheered as they realized that he was talking about a single product.
\nThe thing that is amazing, re-watching the presentation, is that it is full of jokes, like the image of an iPod with a telephone rotary dial instead of a click wheel. It’s also amazing how Steve Jobs was able to sound so natural, even though he never ad-libs and never flubs a word. He extremely well rehearsed, and he made what he did look easy.
\nI like to think that he was genuinely excited about what he presented, and that is a key factor I have tried to bring to my own presentations. I’m not able to present anything as fascinating as the iPhone to my peers, but I have the creative freedom to come up with my own ideas when I made a presentation, and I can certainly be excited about them. The way I see it is that I present ideas, not just facts. Ideas are propulsive in ways that facts are not. Connecting ideas together is exciting—at least if done in such a way that you can keep the audience interested. Humor and surprise are effective tools to do so, as Steve Jobs so often demonstrated.
\n", "date_published": "2021-11-18T21:39:26-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/11/18/the-stevenote.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/11/14/why-do-americans.html", "title": "Why do Americans work so hard?", "content_html": "Two reasons:
\nIn college, one of my humanities professors, Prof. Klein, told me that genius is being able to look at the same things everybody else does but see something different. She told me a story to illustrate:
\nOne time she had company at her house—a friend and her kids—and they needed to find a place for three little kids to sleep for the night. There was only one bed, but it was a queen-sized bed, which she thought would only suit up to two people. The friend, however, knew right away that it would work. The friend realized that, because kids are short and small, they could be fit onto the bed, just not in the normal, expected way. The friend put three pillows on one side of the bed, arranged down the long way. Then she adjusted the sheet and blanket so they opened up on the side of the bed where she had put the pillows. Then the three kids slept in that bed, arranged sideways, and had plenty of room.
\nI always appreciated the simplicity of this story.
\n", "date_published": "2021-11-10T22:11:33-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/11/10/genius.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/11/08/inflation-and-stock.html", "title": "Inflation and stock market highs", "content_html": "One of the disheartening but more interesting things you learn in business school is that most of the growth in the stock market can be attributed to inflation. That’s why I’m not that excited that my retirement portfolio has been growing quickly lately as the stock markets keep reaching new highs. I know that there’s a catch. Those dollars aren’t worth as much, and that’s part of the reason that markets are rising.
\n", "date_published": "2021-11-08T14:53:24-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/11/08/inflation-and-stock.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/11/03/the-new-jersey.html", "content_html": "The New Jersey governor’s election is certainly a nail-biter! Maybe Phil Murphy will pull out a win after all. I can’t help thinking, though, that there is no good reason any statewide election should be this close.
\n![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/2098/2021/965657a4cf.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2021-11-03T10:48:17-04:00",
"url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/11/03/the-new-jersey.html",
"tags": ["Thoughts"]
},
{
"id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/11/02/new-jersey-polls.html",
"title": "New Jersey Polls",
"content_html": "If, after enjoying double-digit leads in Monmouth University and Fairleigh Dickinson polls last week, Murphy loses the New Jersey gubernatorial race (which seems pretty likely right now), the pollsters deserve to be roundly criticized, once again, for relying on unrepresentative sampling or making incorrect assumptions in their production modeling. Campaigns rely on these polls to gauge the impact of their efforts, and voters see large leads in the polls as an excuse to stay home, as their votes are not needed for their candidate to win.
\n", "date_published": "2021-11-02T22:20:27-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/11/02/new-jersey-polls.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/11/01/sen-manchin-says.html", "title": "Sen. Manchin says he's not ready to back Biden's $1.75 trillion budget package", "content_html": "Barbara Sprunt reports for NPR today:
\n\n\nSen. Joe Manchin has announced he cannot yet support the $1.75 trillion framework for President Biden’s social spending package that congressional Democrats were hoping to push through this week.
\n“I will not support a bill that is this consequential without thoroughly understanding the impact that it will have on our national debt, our economy and, most importantly, all of our American people," the West Virginia Democrat said in a statement Monday afternoon.
\n
I feel like she could have written this article any day this year, since Joe Biden was inaugurated. Sen. Joe Manchin is destined to be the Joe Lieberman of 2021. Like Lieberman, who killed the ACA’s “public option” to protect his insurance company donors in Connecticut, Manchin will be responsible for neutering the most impactful legislation since the ACA, all because of a price tag that is (1) going to be spread out over a decade; (2) will represent a tiny percentage of GDP over that period; and (3) has been cut in half since this spring. Point 1 is just the standard Republican talking points about any kind of spending that isn’t a tax cut.
\nThis rigamarole has gone so long that I don’t think the Democrats can reach him with any kind of progressive legislation. It is dangerous to anger him too much over this, too, because he could flip parties, and then the Democrats would lose the Senate. Overall, he is an untrustworthy person to negotiate with. As for the similarly “centrist” Kyrsten Sinema, she is at a whole other level of incomprehensibility, and could still be a spoiler to the Democrats even if Manchin eventually agrees to some bill. Neither one of them are fighting for anything of value for their constituents. I would be surprised if they remain in office after their next elections, no matter what they do from this point forward. It’s hyperbole, of course, but I want to say: “Never has so much been lost for so little gain.”
\n", "date_published": "2021-11-01T20:35:08-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/11/01/sen-manchin-says.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/30/you-are-not.html", "title": "You are not how others perceive you", "content_html": "In America, we could all unite politically, but only if we all decided to be Republicans. That is what happened, briefly, after 9/11. It could never have gone the other way; there is no way we could all put down our differences and become Democrats for a while. That is by design. For as long as I have been alive, Republicans have defined what Democrats are. To them, Democrats are many horrible things, but they are primarily unpatriotic, ineffectual, and toxic. (To be honest, there are also racist and homophobic stereotypes thrown in, too.) Many Republicans would gladly vote for a dog over a Democrat, mainly because right-wing messaging has tarnished the party label completely and relentlessly in a large portion of the country for decades.
\nI have been a Democrat all my life. Even I find it incredibly hard to define what a Democrat is without relying on terms and caricatures invented my Republicans. I don’t think most people understand that they have the same blind spot. I see it all the time in news articles, opinion essays, blog posts and tweets. I see most people using the language of Republicans defining what Democrats are. I see some people who are disheartened with Republican politicians or policies refuse on principle to see Democrats as sensible alternatives. I want to say to those authors: You don’t really know what a Democrat is because it has been defined by the opposing party for its own benefit.
\nI think Democrats—even most Democratic politicians—believe in their own bad press, too, because it has been so pervasive over my lifetime that it is part of American culture and ideology. I want to say to these people: You are not how others perceive you; you are what you do.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-30T21:03:13-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/30/you-are-not.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/26/on-the-divine.html", "title": "On the divine right of kings", "content_html": "One thing I certainly do not believe in is the divine right of kings. When considering why this is, I originally thought it was because I am American, and come from a country whose founders rejected the monarchy. But that can’t be it. Americans love monarchies, especially the British one. I realized that my feelings about it go deeper, and distract from my enjoyment of the fairy tale movies and stories my kids consume, which very frequently include princes and princesses whose right to wealth and power is never questioned.
\nPeople can accrue power in various ways: being strong, wise, skillful, or charismatic are just a few. However, I think that there is limit to how much power these positive traits would give a person. They could lead a clan, but not a kingdom. To exert power over a kingdom requires ruthlessness, egoism, and violence.
\nI believe that, at the dawn of history and before, ancient kings and pharaohs accrued their power over others through conquest. They didn’t earn their land. They took it. They didn’t earn their wealth. They stole it. They didn’t earn the subservience of their followers. They forced it.
\nThis line of thought leads me to believe that all modern nations could trace themselves back to powerful people who stole their wealth from others. Furthermore, they used their power to invent religions and rules of thumb—such as hereditary monarchy and the divine right of kings—to justify and perpetuate their position at the top of society.
\nTo this day, these ideas still have appeal and currency. We don’t question them, even those of us who live in democratic republics. To believe someone is a prince, you have to believe in princes.
\nI don’t believe in princes anymore. Nor kings, nor queens, nor princesses. These are just people who, by chance of birth, benefitted from ancient theft and conquest, and perpetuate the myth that they deserve it.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-26T21:24:49-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/26/on-the-divine.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/25/sex-education-but.html", "title": "Sex education, but not the TV show this time", "content_html": "The latest controversy in my area is another type of fight between conservative parent activist groups and school boards. This time it is not about mask requirements, but about sex education. Two things specifically rile the shouting class this time: (1) Masturbation exists, and (2) so do LGBTQ+ people.
\nApparently, there are enough prudes out there to give the school superintendents hell about teaching about masturbation in schools (grade 3-5 specifically, in my case). I’m not talking about teaching how to masturbate, or about teaching that masturbation is a normal, natural thing for people to do, or even teaching that mutual masturbation can be an alternative to sexual intercourse that is far less likely to lead to pregnancy. I’m talking about even saying the word masturbation or writing it down.
\nThe elementary school superintendent emailed everybody in town to clarify that masturbation is not included in my town’s 3rd-to-5th grade sex-ed at all, and proved it by excerpting parts of the curriculum. So all the bother over it, in my town at least, was just noise created by busybodies and crackpots. It is embarrassing to me that sex-ed can’t cover the one thing that the kids, by fifth grade, are probably already doing, and at least tell them it is OK. Instead, they will learn—from each other mostly—to feel ashamed about it.
\nLBGTQ+ material is also not part of the curriculum, which is terrible. LGBTQ+ people exist, which is not contingent on whether certain parents or people don’t like it or approve of it. Some of the students in every school are LGBTQ+, and they deserve to learn that they are not alone, not weird, have resources available to them if they need them, and deserve to be treated with respect. There was so much homophobia when I came of age (the late 1980s) that, if I had thought I was gay, it would have been devestating to me. And, at the time, I thought of myself as very progressive about homosexuality—I figured out myself that homosexuals must be born that way. If I came of age and discovered that I was gay, bi, or whatever, I would have needed some support from grown-ups and authority figures, and probably would have had no better place to get it than from school.
\nI would agree that grade 3 is too early to broach these topic and that grade 4 may be too early for most kids. However, grade 5 is the latest that these topics should be introduced, because that is when most of the kids will need help understanding them. Sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity are all things that teens and adults have to deal with all the time. To sweep some of it under the rug because prudish or religious people think they are improper just underserves our kids and perpetuates the persecution of non-cis, non-straight people.
\nYou could argue that sex education should be handled at home, by parents, and that schools should keep out of it, or only focus on its biological aspects. That may sound reasonable, but it really isn’t. While I agree that parents should educate their children about sex—like my wife and I will—to arm them with information and to help them through puberty without developing unnecessary shame or body horror. The thing is, a lot of parents don’t—and those are the ones who are most vocal right now. We should not let them dictate how much or how little will be taught to all of our kids about the facts of life.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-25T20:34:50-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/25/sex-education-but.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/21/saying-something-old.html", "title": "Saying something old, but saying it better", "content_html": "I have thought so many Big Thoughts about the InsurTech presentation I am working on that I have come full circle. I realized today that what I have built thus far contains pretty much the same information and ideas as my prior presentations on the topic, going back four or five years.
\nI think my current presentations slides and speaker notes are much better, and that the talk will be have better focus and clarity, but I am surprised at how much I want to say seems to be recycled from what I already had thought about the topic.
\nI started off trying to say something new. I hope that saying something old, but saying it better, counts for more than I think.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-21T21:23:17-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/21/saying-something-old.html", "tags": ["Journal","Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/19/a-cluttered-life.html", "title": "A Cluttered Life: Middle-Class Abundance", "content_html": "This video from University of California Television hit close to home (literally) for me:
\n\n\nFollow a team of UCLA anthropologists as they venture into the stuffed-to-capacity homes of dual income, middle-class American families in order to truly understand the food, toys, and clutter…
\n
Watching this video was like watching a newsmagazine segment about my own house.
\nMy house is a mess, my kids won’t pick up their toys and have taken over the entire house, and I spend so much tome tidying the same few messes every day that I can’t seem to move forward on any projects that would actually make my home better.
\nIt turns out that I am not alone, and that the problems I have with my living space are uniquely American and uniquely modern. My wife and I are trying to crack this problem, and talked about it at length tonight. We are going to try a couple new things to crack it, though I am not sure they will work.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-19T23:04:22-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/19/a-cluttered-life.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/16/popularism.html", "title": "Popularism", "content_html": "I learned about something new today from three separate podcasts I listened to, and a New York Times article I stumbled upon: popularism. It’s an idea that David Shor wrote about that apparently boils down to this: To win voters, Democrats should talk about what is popular rather than focus on racial tensions, identity politics, and calls to dramatically alter government and social systems (“defund the police,” for example, would be out).
\nWhat I wondered about this idea is this: Who determines what is popular? What if what is popular is not good? Plenty of popular ideas are amoral and destructive. Isn’t having principles, and now bowing to public pressure, valued in American politics, too? Or is that just posturing?
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-16T20:16:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/16/popularism.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/11/sex-education.html", "title": "📺 Sex Education", "content_html": "My wife and I have been watching Sex Education season three. True to its title, the show actually does weave sex education into its stories and strives to impart sensible information to its audience.
\nIn one of the episodes, a trans student acts completely confused about which of the two sex–specific (boys and girls) sex education classes that the school’s new, conservative principal set up that they should attend. Because the trans character is new to the show, this scene seemed like a zeitgeisty political statement that the show’s writers crammed in, rather than a story beat that grew organically out of the characters and themes of the show.
\nIn this scene, I thought that the trans character was being obtuse. After all, gender isn’t sex. Bodily organs are not identities. I would imagine a transgender person would understand that better than I would. I thought that the character should just go to one class or the other without making a political statement about it. I’m sure the character could just blow off the class without coming to any harm.
\nMy wife and I discussed this scene after the episode was over. I was annoyed by the scene’s apparent politicism, but came to a conclusion about it that probably aligns with the trans character’s thoughts: Segregated boy/girl sex-ed is pointlessly gendered. Bodies have sexual organs, both external and internal. It would be good to know how they work, whichever ones you have. In fact, because of this, it makes sense to teach everybody, all together, how everybody’s sexual organs work and how reproduction works, too (pregnancy, childbirth, the whole thing). Perhaps that isn’t done because kids are too immature to handle it. I bet, though, that it isn’t done because adults are too embarrassed to do it.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-11T20:18:58-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/11/sex-education.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","TV"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/10/in-praise-of.html", "title": "In Praise of Folly", "content_html": "One of the more memorable books I read in college was assigned to me in comparative literature class: Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly. It is an exploration of human folly, written during the Renaissance by Erasmus, who was a philosopher and theologian, as an elaborate inside joke for his friend, Sir Thomas More. Folly is personified as a particularly vain goddess who praises herself (which is itself folly) for all of the great joys and accidental discoveries that folly brings to our lives.
\nIt was memorable to me because, while folly is ubiquitous, it was something that was almost never well explored in my English-major coursework. (It was discussed in my Shakespeare courses when it came to Bottom and Fallstaff, but that is about it.) Little did I know when I was a twenty-year-old college student that understanding and appreciating that I, too, would be capable or folly, succumb to folly, and see folly in others on a daily basis. Life experience, far more than schooling, has taught me that folly is inevitable and inescapable in life, for both good and for ill. As Erasmus’s essay cheekily suggests, if folly is inevitable, you might as well find something to enjoy in it.
\nMy folly, as a very young adult reading Erasmus for the first time, was thinking that adult life, which I was heading into apace, was going to make sense once I got there.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-10T21:35:13-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/10/in-praise-of.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/09/iso.html", "title": "ISO 2145", "content_html": "I never knew there was an ISO standard for numbering document sections. I kind of love it and kind of hate it.
\nI am the sort of person who developed a deep preference for the ISO 8601 date format, so it may be inevitable that I end up adopting it.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-09T17:42:25-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/09/iso.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/07/a-boring-dystopia.html", "title": "A boring dystopia", "content_html": "One of my favorite subreddit names is “a boring dystopia”. It is certainly not one of my favorite subreddits to browse—it is too depressing for that honor—but its name perfectly catches the zeitgeist. So many bad things happening right now are so dreadfully mundane that we don’t even want to think about them.
\nOne aspect of our boring dystopia lately has been the failure of global supply chains to keep up with demand. Derek Thompson wrote about this in The Atlantic this week:
\n\n\nThe U.S. economy isn’t yet experiencing a downturn akin to the 1970s period of stagflation. This is something different, and quite strange. Americans are settling into a new phase of the pandemic economy, in which GDP is growing but we’re also suffering from a dearth of a shocking array of things—test kits, car parts, semiconductors, ships, shipping containers, workers. This is the Everything Shortage.
\nThe Everything Shortage is not the result of one big bottleneck in, say, Vietnamese factories or the American trucking industry. We are running low on supplies of all kinds due to a veritable hydra of bottlenecks.
\n
There is a shortage in the labor market, resource shortages, shipping problems, and all other sorts of problems due to the COVID pandemic and to climate change. It seems as if all the just-in-time logistics I learned in business school stopped working all at once. People still want to buy things, which is a silver lining economically speaking, but we are all having trouble getting a bunch of different things. The global supply system is no longer working.
\nI can’t get certain products for my family on a daily basis. I am thankful I don’t need a car or a refrigerator because the wait times in them are very long right now. It is yet another terribly boring way that it feels absolutely insane to be alive today. Due to climate change, I think supply line shortages and delays are going to get worse before they get better.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-07T19:44:49-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/07/a-boring-dystopia.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/05/why-did-i.html", "title": "Why did I let that in?", "content_html": "This morning, I just had to click on a news story about somebody’s kid who tragically died of COVID. This evening I just had to listen to a podcast about the Supreme Court’s capricious behavior and what lies ahead in its term. These things didn’t teach me anything, or give me any insights I didn’t already had. Instead they leached me of energy.
\nNow, when I read an article or listen to a podcast that I know, going in will make me upset, or sad, or depressed, and inevitably does make me upset, or sad, or depressed, I find myself asking myself, automatically, “Why did I let that in?” The emphasis in my internal self-admonishment has recently moved from that to in, and I don’t really know why. I suppose that I have conceded to myself that I cannot avoid the daily torrent of news, gossip, hot takes, and both-sides-isms that pervades the internet. Even if I did avoid them myself, my family members bring them to me eventually, because we are all tapped into it. The trick I want to learn is to be able to observe all the frightful noise of each day’s media storm, but not dwell on it and let it bother me. Whether it bounces off me or passes through me, I don’t want to let it in anymore.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-05T21:25:24-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/05/why-did-i.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/04/tough-conversations.html", "title": "Tough conversations", "content_html": "My daughter learned about slavery and the Civil War today in school. We talked about both—mostly slavery—over dinner. Needless to say, it was a heavy conversation—the first of many about race, racism, and the cracks in the foundation of our country. My daughter was, rightly, very shaken up about what we told her.
\nIt made me think of when I first learned about slavery in detail, when I was in high school. I had two American history teachers who covered slavery. One taught us that slavery was wrong, but also taught us that slaves were not beaten and tortured like popular culture had taught us, because—and this is gross—slaves were expensive and slaveowners wouldn’t want to destroy their investment in them. He would have us believe that most slaves were treated fairly well for economic reasons. I don’t think my teacher was a racist, but he drank the racist Kool-Aid: The Lost Cause apologists’ dismissal, “Sure, slavery was bad, but that was in the past. We fixed it. It wasn’t even that bad if you really think about it. Anyway, it’s over now. We don’t have to feel bad about it anymore.”
\nI remember discussing slavery in his class in the context of moral relativism. (Moral realism was a huge school of thought in the nineties.) We debated how to judge people, like the Founding Fathers, who expressed high ideals about the dignity of humanity while, at the same time, they owned slaves. Is it fair to judge historical figures by today’s standards? These are important discussions to have in a history class. Back then I wanted to believe that these historical figures should be judged only by the standards of their time, both because I wanted them to remain my heroes, and because it seemed unfair to hold them to a standard that they might not have been even aware of.
\nMy other American history teacher stated to the class that slavery is morally wrong, across all time and across all cultures. He minced no words about it: there is no moral relativism when it came to slavery. It’s always wrong to subjugate others. Some things are simply verboten; it doesn’t matter what the society accepts or believes, or what the reasons are behind it. Even if we believe that most slaves were not subjected to frequent physical violence, as the other history teacher claimed, and even if we somehow believe slaver were treated very well, it does not forgive their subjugation, for that is psychological torture and is simply wrong. It doesn’t matter even if society deems such a thing acceptable; people should know innately that certain things are wrong.
\nHis simple lesson was the one that stuck with me. It has colored my thoughts about justice ever since. Moral relativism has certain clear limits. From him I learned that we could judge historical figures by their standards and our own. We don’t have to choose, and it doesn’t even make sense to choose. There are people who created my country who did great and terrible things. To understand them, you have to scrutinize them fully as humans, warts and all.
\nMy parents never talked cogently to me about race when I was growing up. I picked up what they, and everyone else, thought about race slowly and organically. It didn’t help that I grew up in a preponderously white and Catholic area of Connecticut. We, as a region, had some kind of race panic over school desegregation (Scheff v. O’Niell) while I was in high school. I thought then that people’s concern was mostly about differences in class between the cities and the suburbs. Now I know I was naive. White people didn’t want their kids to mix with black kids, just like in Boston. I remember everybody being angry about the issue, but nothing ever happened that affected me or my town’s schools, as far as I know.
\nIt wasn’t until I was an adult that I lived and worked in multi-racial settings. I learned a lot about how similar we all are.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-04T23:00:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/04/tough-conversations.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/03/dont-mistake-domainspecific.html", "content_html": "Don’t mistake domain-specific knowledge for intellect.
\nWhile you’re at it, don’t compare yourself to other people.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-03T20:06:30-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/03/dont-mistake-domainspecific.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/02/gratitude.html", "title": "Gratitude", "content_html": "Today, to thank my in-laws for all the help they give to my family (which is a lot), I cooked them a nice dinner—chili and cornbread, which they love—and my daughter wrote them a thank-you note for the various nice things they do for her. I am trying to teach my children to express gratitude. I’m not sure that part was completely successful, but we all had a great time.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-02T21:03:52-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/02/gratitude.html", "tags": ["Journal","Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/02/you-are-not.html", "title": "You are not your work", "content_html": "I have two seemingly conflicting ideas in my mind right now:
\nAnnie Dillard wrote, “how you spend your days is how you spend your lives.” That thought has guided me since I read that, in an A.P. English class my senior year of high school.
\nAction defines who you really are, but I have learned that it does not always inform who you think you are.
\nWhen meeting somebody new, It have always hated the question, “What do you do?” The question really means, “What is your job?” The answer leads to value judgments about the other person: wealth, intelligence, privilege, and so on. It is unfair and reductive. I am not my job. Knowing what I do for a living doesn’t say that much about what I do in life.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-02T20:38:04-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/02/you-are-not.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/10/01/the-story-is.html", "title": "The story is less important than the telling", "content_html": "Today I listened to a lecture that Stephen Fry gave to Nokia Bell Labs a few years ago. He told stories about Pandora’s Box, about the invention of chess, about how doubling grains of rice on each square of a chessboard will eventually lead to counts of rice grains larger than the number of atoms in the known universe, about the founding of Intel, and so on. Stephen Fry’s stories were old, familiar, and, many of them, not literally true—but he connected them together to his ideas about technology and its effect on humanity in ways that were central to his thesis. The overall effect was very compelling to me.
\nOne of the greatest things in life is to hear or read a good story, well told. When a storyteller tells multiple stories, makes connections between them, and links them to new stories and new ideas in an entirely new context, then something new and extraordinary can result from it: One can share new ideas, new ways of thinking, and easier ways for people to remember these ideas and ways of thinking. The stories can be fun and memorable. The connections between them can be intellectually or emotionally exciting.
\nThere are far fewer good stories in the world than ways to tell them. Rather than worry about retelling a familiar tale, find an effective way to tell it, and mine it for ideas and themes that can connect to the story that you want to tell, or to the topic you want to speak about. Narratives are important because they are entertaining and memorable. Facts, when contextualized by being included in or linked to a narrative, are far more memorable than dry recitations of data. Connections between different stories and ideas are the most valuable thing you can communicate, because they are the hardest to come up with, and not everybody makes them on their own. The power of connection is to recontextualize something—or everything—in the audience’s mind.
\n", "date_published": "2021-10-01T19:53:05-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/10/01/the-story-is.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/30/perfectionism-or-why.html", "title": "Perfectionism, or why I blog now", "content_html": "One reason I decided to publish something (even something short, as long as it is creative) to a blog every day was to help me get over the perfectionism that has limited my creative output so much over the years.
\nI don’t publish because my writing or even my thoughts are “done”. I publish because it is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. That’s what I do. I do this every day.
\nI write for myself. I am gladdened that a few people on Micro.blog read what I write sometimes. I don’t expect it. It is a bonus. I don’t have an agenda, and therefore am not seeking out an audience. However, if I didn’t publish my little essays as blog posts, they would always be drafts, and would never be done.
\nMoreover, they wouldn’t be out there on the vast internet for some curious person to discover someday. My words, mundane as they may be sometimes, might help somebody out of a tough emotional spot, or get them to understand something a little bit better. They are my small, insignificant gifts to the world. I don’t care if the world accepts them or not; it’s what I have to give.
\nThis blog post is probably not my best one. I’m not the first person to think that writing every day, with the necessary element of publishing it, is a worthwhile and rewarding exercise for the mind. I’m sure that, if I searched the web, one could find hundreds or thousands more posts just like it. That does not diminish its value to me. This is my blog post. These are my immediate thoughts—today. And if I have not expressed them perfectly, well, tomorrow is another chance to do so.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-30T18:04:27-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/30/perfectionism-or-why.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/29/sense-memory.html", "title": "Sense memory", "content_html": "Every year, when the air starts to get chilly, I flash back to this sense memory:
\n\n\nI am four years old, sitting atop a hay bale in front of a farm stand with my kindergarten class, drinking apple cider and eating a white powdered donut.
\n
I can still taste the apple cider—sharp, sweet, with a distinctive bite because, as I would later figure out, it was turning hard. I can still see the bright white of the sugar on the donut and smell the hay that scratched my skin when I kicked my legs over the side of the bale. These foods, and the whole experience, were new to me. Every bit of it was surprising and delightful.
\nTo this day, the taste of that cider is especially vivid in my mind. Nothing I have tasted since has ever matched that first sip of cider.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-29T19:58:20-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/29/sense-memory.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/28/material-obsessions.html", "title": "Material obsessions", "content_html": "I have two collections that I love but cannot justify: high-end headphones (each is sub-$500, but still really expensive and good) and mechanical keyboards (each is $240 or less). It took ten years to build up these collections, so the embarrassing amount of money I have spent is spread out over a long, long period. I was wondering today if people who spend a lot more than I do on vacations do so because they forego (and don’t care about) material objects like pricy headphones and keyboards.
\nGetting into these “hobbies” (if buying stuff can be called a hobby) was entirely accidental. I’m part of a product review program where I can occasionally select products I like for no money up front, and then only pay taxes on their value months later. I got my first taste of better headphones and better keyboards through that program, essentially through the luck of the draw. (I’m not in charge of which products become available for me to review.) If not for that, I probably would have no other headphones other than my AirPods, and would probably have a $100 Microsoft or Logitech keyboard that I would have to replace (because of wear) every year or two.
\nI think I am finally nearing “endgame” in both of these categories. I have fantastic headphones of nearly every type (dynamic and planar magnetic, open-back and closed-back, Bluetooth and wired), and they cover every situation, that I need. Similarly, I have mechanical keyboards for all of my computers, have tried a bunch of different key switches (clicky, tactile, and linear), and have even bought a “weird” ortholinear board that I never thought I would ever want until a couple months ago. Any new keyboard purchases are going to be about fixing something that is broken (my wonderful and unacceptably buggy Durgod tenkeyless) or trying out a different type of keyswitch on my new, hot-swappable ortholinear board. At least I hope that will be the case. Collecting more and more of these objects sometimes feels like an obsession, and is not something I want to keep doing forever.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-28T21:14:54-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/28/material-obsessions.html", "tags": ["Audiophile","Thoughts","Keyboards"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/27/what-do-people.html", "title": "What do people actually do at work all day?", "content_html": "I have worked from home for more than half of my career. I’m no stranger to working in an office, but I find myself wondering what people actually do at work all day. I always imagine that my coworkers are more focused on their tasks than I am, or more driven to earn a promotion, or more highly structured in their approach to managing their work than I am.
\nI’m pretty sure, though, that that can’t be, because no one I have ever worked with in person was much more focused that I was, with the exception of one or two workaholic bosses I’ve had. Those guys loved their job in ways I couldn’t replicate—at least that’s what I thought—and that drove them to work well into the evenings every day, after I was ready to go home.
\nMy last office-job experience was mostly great, but there was a lot of gossip, walking around, waiting for elevators, waiting for meetings to begin, going out to grab a coffee, and so on. Half of my day was spent on actual work, even though I spent almost the entire day with my team, doing the same things they were doing. When I worked from home on that job, I got a lot more done, even though I would take break to make my coffee or put a load of laundry in the washing machine.
\nMy job today is different than any of the office-based ones. It is more fluid and unpredictable in nature; every day is different than the last, and some of my projects are vastly different from others. The sands are always shifting beneath my feet. I would prefer my job to be more predictable, for my mental health, more than anything. I think that it is probably anxiety more than anything else that makes me think, pretty frequently, that I’m not working hard enough, or as hard as my peers, or that it took me too much time to do a certain task I was asked to do.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-27T21:20:21-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/27/what-do-people.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/26/i-am-nearing.html", "content_html": "I am nearing 2,000 posts on my micro.blog, which is about 1,950 more posts than I have made on any other blog I started in the past. Do any micro.bloggers know how I could generate any stats, like word count, about my blog?
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-26T21:28:28-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/26/i-am-nearing.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/26/a-chemical-hunger.html", "title": "A Chemical Hunger", "content_html": "I have been fascinated by this anonymously published paper/series of articles about the obesity epidemic. Part I, covering mysteries about obesity that I did and did not know about, drew me in. The authors’ thesis, which isn’t presented until Part III, is that chemical contaminants are the primary cause of the epidemic (not why individuals gain weight, but why obesity in entire populations increased dramatically since 1980). I’m not sure I buy that, but it is an interesting argument to consider that I had not previously given any weight to.
\nI was interested this that work because I am struggling with my weight again due to the pandemic. Since January 2020, when reading the news from Wuhan caused me to have a a panic attack about the coming pandemic (I was right, unfortunately). When COVID panic hit the US, and the store shelves were bare, businesses and sports leagues were shutting down, and we were afraid to leave our houses, I started to eat sweets or drink beer (just one a day) as a way to cope with the uncertainty and stress.
\nI gave up the beer last September, but giving up sweets entirely has been impossible for me thus far. Sugar is a habit I have given up several times in my life, but I always go back to it when I am feeling very bad, like if I get sick or if stressful situations last too long. The pandemic has basically never stopped being stressful for me or my family. Dealing with that stress takes a ton of energy away from me, and I end up eating extra food—sweet food—for the boost of energy it gives me. I feel a chemical dependence on it now that is stronger than I recall it being at any point in my life. I want to give it up, and am trying to find the mental resolve to do so this week.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-26T21:07:48-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/26/a-chemical-hunger.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/25/im-not-great.html", "title": "I’m not great at weekends.", "content_html": "Today I did too many chores, then did way too little of anything, and ended up eating too much ice cream this evening.
\nI should give myself a break because our plans for today were canceled at the last minute. Still, I wish I could wake up on the weekend and just have fun, or at the very least take up the unstructured time I sometimes have on a Saturday or Sunday and do something productive with it. I have tons of writing projects on my hands, and did not work on any of it today.
\nI did bake bread and cook chicken noodle soup for my family, so the day wasn’t a total loss. Hopefully I use tomorrow in a more worthwhile way.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-25T19:55:03-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/25/im-not-great.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/21/he-who-buys.html", "content_html": "“He who buys what he does not need steals from himself."—Swedish proverb.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-21T10:49:58-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/21/he-who-buys.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/20/the-conservative-mindset.html", "title": "The conservative mindset", "content_html": "I characterize the mindset of American conservatives—specifically the ones who are blasé or antipathetic toward anti-COVID measures such as vaccines and face-masks—thusly:
\n\n\nBad things happen to other people. That is, until they happen to me.
\n
Oddly enough, that is also my progressive-but-not-lunatic-fringe-liberal mindset. I figure that it is more healthy to assume I will probably be all right, given the precautions I take, rather than to expect the worst and be anxious about it all the time. (I’ve already done that about COVID for a solid year or more.) I prepare for the worst, so that I can protect myself and my family as best I can, but I assume the worst won’t happen to me.
\nI admit that new information, such as learning that breakthrough infections are a thing and that the are new COVID cases in my daughter’s school and my wife’s school every day or so, shakes this mindset quite a bit sometimes. COVID is like a specter that is constantly moving closer.
\nBased on the COVID-related stress I am still dealing with on a daily basis, this healthy-when-I-apply-it attitude is all I have to keep me going. I know I am whistling past the graveyard. I know the Angel of Death will not pass over my house forever. I know I am waiting for the other shoe to drop. But for now, the thought that “bad things happen to other people” is getting me from mini-crisis to mini-crisis without completely losing my mind.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-20T21:12:16-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/20/the-conservative-mindset.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/17/the-importance-of.html", "title": "The importance of a classical education", "content_html": "Viewing this wonderful lecture on the importance of a classical education made me wonder if I had, or did not have, a classical education. I read a lot of great works, struggled a lot with deep reading, philosophy, and trying to understand the human condition, but I have many, many gaps in my reading and education, too. Reading Ulysses for the first time lately has truly impressed these shortcomings on me. I miss many allusions to classic and Christian thought, not to mention Irish history and geography.
\nFor much of my life, my cynical mind has been more interested in the lies that make the world than in the truths that make the world. I am trying to reverse that balance now. Earlier this year, I made a decision to return to reading classic literature almost exclusively—even at a snail’s pace, and even if I struggle to understand it—to improve both my education and my outlook on life. I think it has been a worthwhile journey thus far, but I have far, far to go. It is a journey that ends only when I do.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-17T16:13:40-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/17/the-importance-of.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/16/move-slow-and.html", "content_html": "Move slow and fix things.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-16T12:15:47-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/16/move-slow-and.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/16/grace-is-accepting.html", "content_html": "Grace is accepting others’ limitations. Humility is accepting your own.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-16T08:55:11-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/16/grace-is-accepting.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/15/wisdom-is-neither.html", "content_html": "Wisdom is neither quickness nor intellect. It is seeing the world how it really is.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-15T17:37:53-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/15/wisdom-is-neither.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/13/i-need-laundry.html", "title": "I need laundry folding TV", "content_html": "I can’t clean my office because I’m too busy to do anything with it all day, even though I am working in there, and at the end of the day I don’t want to be in there anymore. I have been thinking that I should break up the mess into chunks, box part of it each day, and organize the box while I watch TV. The problem is, I don’t really watch TV much anymore. When I do, it’s usually “good” TV that I have to pay attention to. I no longer have mindless TV shows that are good to kind-of pay attention to while folding laundry. When I was younger and lived alone, I always had sitcoms and sports on that I didn’t really care about, but were good distractions while I was puttering with something or doing light choses. That took up a huge part of my evenings. Now that I have a family, all of that is gone—mostly for the better—but I think I need a little of it back in my life sometimes.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-13T21:42:59-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/13/i-need-laundry.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","TV"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/12/a-good-skill.html", "title": "A good skill to know in case society collapses", "content_html": "I got my first job when I was sixteen. I was a dishwasher at a restaurant for about half of summer. Soon after I started, my mom wanted me to tell my grandfather about my new job. She was proud of me for getting a job, even though it was a job with low status and poor pay. My grandfather had worked as a short order cook and a baker for most of his life, so he was well-versed in working in a kitchen.
\nWhen I told him about the dishwashing job, what he said back to me was really strange. He said, “That’s great. Washing dishes is a good skill to know in case society collapses and machines won’t work anymore.” It was out of character for him to say something so cynical, and it pretty much stopped the conversation in its tracks.
\nNow it is over 25 years later, and I wonder, as I listen to podcasts dissecting news, technology, and podcasts as I wash dishes in my house four times a day: Is society going to collapse? Is climate change the thing that does us all in? Are we, as a species, extinguishing all of the natural resources we need to survive? How long is it going to take for things to start falling apart because of it? Maybe not as long as I would like it to be.
\nIf that is how society collapses, perhaps machines will be the only things left that will be able to wash dishes. In that case, my dishwashing skills will not be useful after all.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-12T20:57:44-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/12/a-good-skill.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/07/another-humbling-thought.html", "title": "Another humbling thought", "content_html": "We are all replaceable. That is written into our biology. Our social and economic structures reflect it, too.
\nWe are all unique. A human life is irreplaceable. But a human is replaceable.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-07T10:28:42-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/07/another-humbling-thought.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/07/humbling-thoughts.html", "title": "Humbling thoughts", "content_html": "You don’t have to be smart to be right.
\nJust because you are smart doesn’t mean you’re right.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-07T08:47:19-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/07/humbling-thoughts.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/06/rosh-hashanah.html", "title": "Rosh Hashanah", "content_html": "L’Shana tova for all those who celebrate. Let’s hope for a better year ahead.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-06T20:34:22-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/06/rosh-hashanah.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/05/bias-doesnt-make.html", "title": "Bias doesn’t make sense. That’s why it is bias.", "content_html": "When I was in business school, back in the early aughts, I did a team presentation project on the topic of the male/female wage gap. To this day, I am embarrassed at my work on this project. I was young, hard-working, and idealistic, but I was unknowingly naive to the world and think I got it all wrong.
\nAt the time, I worked at an insurance company, and there was a huge number of women in the departments I worked with at manager and director levels. I was just starting out in my career, so I was lower in rank than almost every woman I worked with, too. That may have clouded my thinking a bit, because I lacked the perspective of someone who worked in a more exclusively male-dominated work culture. I didn’t see how women were treated at other workplaces.
\nTo prepare for our project, which was a group presentation, I did a lot of reading on the wage gap issue. It didn’t make sense to me that it could exist. I could understand if compensation amounts averaged out with a gap between male and female average wages, but I thought there had to be a sensible reason for that. It must come down to things like the type of job taken, the number of hours worked per week, the number of overtime hours worked, employee performance, and on asking for a higher salary when applying for a job. The literature I read on the subject supported that, conditionally, but was noncommittal about whether a wage gap really existed, and about what the average male and female wage numbers actually reflected.
\nMy main logical argument against the wage gap actually meaning that there was a male/female bias in the workplace, was that if women made less money for a particular job than men, I, as a rational employer, would predominantly hire women for that job, to save money on labor. That isn’t happening; therefore, the gender pay gap did not really exist. My project team was mostly young corporate women. They agreed with me. We didn’t even really argue about it, though I remember acting a little embarrassed about the conclusion I had come to when I presented it to them. We presented on the topic based on my conclusion, and otherwise had a successful, if uneventful, presentation to our class.
\nThe problem is, my idea of rational hiring decisions does not reflect how the world works. People make hiring decisions—and all kinds of other decisions—for reasons that don’t make rational sense at all. At the heart of these decisions are preferences, and preferences are largely affected by bias. Bias is, essentially, a preference that can’t be adequately explained. Put another way, bias just doesn’t make sense. No sense can be made from it because it doesn’t depend on sense.
\nI came to this conclusion shortly after my team completed that project. I have thought a lot about it since. The thought of it pops into my head unexpectedly sometimes, like the memory of a time I sang the wrong line of a song in the high school musical, in front of everybody on closing night, and it crowds out memory of the rest of my performance, across all the performances, where I made no mistakes. It’s easy to dwell on the times you get things wrong, I suppose. At least in this case I learned something.
\nNow that I am older and have more experience with and exposure to the world, I notice that bias is everywhere. Bias is the sort of thought virus that nibbles away at logic and replaces it with something that feels more right or more comfortable to the thinker or decider. You do not choose to be biased; if anything, bias, soaked up from the society around them, chooses you.
\nSince I made that business school presentation years ago, my conclusion on the topic has completely reversed. Bias must affect hiring decisions and wages to the detriment of traditionally underserved or discriminated against groups of people, including women, because it affects everything else. Moreover, you can’t go looking for it with logic, because bias is inherently illogical.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-05T16:05:58-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/05/bias-doesnt-make.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/04/teaching-ya-lit.html", "title": "Teaching YA Lit in High School English Class", "content_html": "In the 1990s, the old guard of educators—mainly white men like Harold Bloom—decried the decline and of the Western canon. In general, the Harold Blooms of the world lost that argument. High school reading lists today are far more diverse and are—as my high school English teachers feared—diluted in quality. The classics have been pared back, to make way for new ideas and more diverse voices.
\nCase in point: my wife is teaching The Hunger Games to high school juniors this school year. I have read The Hunger Games and could probably craft a few lessons based on its material, but I don’t think of it as literature; it’s a fun Y.A. beach read devoid of subtext. The dilution in quality is not a function of the increase in diversity. It’s a function of trying to hold kids’ attention.
\nI think it must be possible to make classic literature interesting and relevant to high school students. That said, it is a challenge I do not face.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-04T19:07:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/04/teaching-ya-lit.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/09/01/vulnerability.html", "title": "Vulnerability", "content_html": "Vulnerability is a new ideal masculine trait. Being open, honest about, and comfortable with your flaws is nontraditional, unexpected, and disarming.
\nBut that isn’t vulnerability. It’s invulnerability. You need to be tremendously self-assured to take social risks and not be flummoxed if things do not go your way.
\n", "date_published": "2021-09-01T20:20:53-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/09/01/vulnerability.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/08/31/the-philosopher-next.html", "title": "The philosopher next door", "content_html": "When I was in college, I longed not to be learned but to be wise. I was learning rapidly, and soaking up new ideas all the time. I was making connections between all sorts of different systems of thought and culture. I thought I had human nature all figured out.
\nI was, however, wise enough at the time to know that I would be foolish to consider myself wise. That paradox never really resolves itself. The moment you think yourself wise, you have made a fool of yourself. Go ahead…try it, then wait a while.
\nStill, I must have shot my mouth off about how wise I was, because some people thought I was wise, and would ask me to help them sort out problems in their personal or academic lives. I was foolish enough back then to try to help them.
\nNow that I am middle-aged and raising two children with my wife, I feel both smarter and more foolish than ever. It is hard to feel wise when you can’t get your kids to do the simplest things most of the time. I find people–even the ones I am closest to–to be, at turns, more predictable and more inscrutable than ever. It is much easier to predict what people will do than it is to understand why.
\nWhat does it really mean to be wise? It’s certainly different than being smart, clever, or quick–though all those things don’t hurt. Being wise is about seeing the big picture, especially when those around you have lost sight of it, and using that viewpoint to help others help themselves.
\n", "date_published": "2021-08-31T21:24:44-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/08/31/the-philosopher-next.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/08/30/i-have-a.html", "title": "I have a voice but nothing to say", "content_html": "I can write. I always could.
\nIn high school, I wrote cogently and forcefully, like someone who read the up-Ed pages of two newspapers every day. Unlike most of my peers I had figured out how to revise and shape text—how to edit out hedging and weasel words and unfinished thoughts. Essay structure and organization fascinated me.
\nIn college I wrote passionately with explosive figurative language. I wrote and put on a play: a farce poking fun a dorm life at my school. My seniors honors theses had jokes in them and won awards. My prose was called “airtight” in creative writing class.
\nAs a young adult, I thought I might write professionally. I wrote four or five nights a week, at the local library, after work and dinner were done. I worked on short stories and screenplays that, sadly, didn’t end up going anywhere.
\nWriting was a lonely hobby for me. I had no community. I lived in the suburbs and didn’t think I could even find a writing community near me. I envied friends who lived in cities and could join writing classes or groups. The worst part of it was that I couldn’t figure out how to create interesting plots. I could write stories, but I had no stories to tell. I have no gift for plots—only for telling. Eventually I stopped writing entirely, in favor of business school and other things.
\nSo, I can write. I have a voice. But I don’t have much to say. I never know what to write about. I lack ideas, which is frustrating when I have the ability (perhaps the gift) to shape and communicate them clearly.
\nRecently, I decided to write and publish…something, maybe something small, maybe a whole essay…every day, to force myself to think, write, revise, and publish even when the ideas don’t come. I think that the activity will help me get over whatever block or self-editing has been standing in the way of my writing endeavors for so long.
\n", "date_published": "2021-08-30T20:32:44-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/08/30/i-have-a.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/08/27/what-do-you.html", "title": "What do you do? I help people.", "content_html": "I always used to dread meeting new people. They always asked “what do you do?” And what I do (for work, naturally) has mostly been nebulous and boring and unglamorous.
\nWhen I worked in corporate systems, I was too young to be an interesting (read: rich) tech nerd. When I worked in management consulting, no one really knew what that meant, and neither did I. When I worked in internal audit, no one wanted to hear about it. (Let’s just say people like to complain about auditors.)
\nFor much of my career I’ve had the same kind of job: an ill-defined amalgam of consultant, auditor, and regulatory examiner. When I met someone new, we would be inevitably get into conversations like this:
\n“Do you work in insurance?”
\n“No; not really.”
\n“Do you work in audit?”
\n“No; not really.”
\n“Do you work for the state?”
\n“No; not really.”
\nYou would basically need a weeklong seminar in an absurdly dull hotel conference center to understand what we do at my company and why it is important. It is technical. It is dull. It involves financial solvency (yawn). It involves close reading of legislation that even the legislators probably don’t understand.
\nRecently, I figured out a better way to express what I do: I help regulators make sure insurance companies are doing what they are supposed to do. That simple, vague explanation seems to be the best one I have come up with yet. Insurance may be dull, but it has the benefit of being, well, hated by a lot of people. Everyone wants to make sure insurance companies they are customers of do what they are supposed to do.
\nI think the best answer to “what do you do?” is always “I help people.” Because if you don’t help people, then what purpose is there to anything you do.
\n", "date_published": "2021-08-27T20:20:36-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/08/27/what-do-you.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/08/23/the-reason-we.html", "title": "The reason we should study literature", "content_html": "In college, I studied literature. What I learned about literature is that history, religion, and general knowledge are all wrapped up in narrative. So are our memories. We are the story we tell ourselves, as individuals, as nations, as peoples. Narrative is memory, and sometimes the narrator is an untrustworthy one.
\nI learned a lot about literature there, but I missed the important lesson: Why do we study literature? To learn empathy.
\nLack of empathy is a fundamental problem in our society. Blame social media. Blame political polarization. Blame whatever you want. You could argue that society fractured in large part because we no longer share a common literature. We don’t read the foundational texts that, in part, make up our culture. We don’t read the foundational texts that make up other cultures—which may just help us understand other people. In school, whatever books we do read, that are “taught” to us, are dissected and analyzed, but not often enough put back together again and connected to anything real.
\nI think literature should be taught to teach empathy to students. Students should be told that is what it is for, and stories should be compared to real life events—not just personal experience, which is limited—as much as possible. We should think about making connections to ourselves and others, not just about connections between texts and ourselves.
\n", "date_published": "2021-08-23T19:23:12-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/08/23/the-reason-we.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/08/22/it-doesnt-matter.html", "title": "It doesn’t matter if it’s good. It matters that it’s yours.", "content_html": "When I was in high school, I was a guitar teacher. I was probably a terrible guitar teacher, but it wasn’t a job I wanted, it was a job I kind of couldn’t get out of. I had only one student, the son of a very nice teacher at my high school. After school in the drafting classroom, my student and I would listen to music he liked and try to transcribe it and learn how to play it.
\nSeveral times he asked me a question as we puzzled through a guitar solo: “There’s no way I’m ever going to be as good as Jimmi Hendrix, so why should I even bother playing at all?” I answered: “It doesn’t matter if it’s good. It matters that it’s yours. It matters that you did it, and it reflect what you as a person were feeling at the time.”
\nMaybe you can’t be as good at guitar as Jimmi Hendrix was, but you can be your best self at whatever you put yourself to: poetry, songwriting, fiction, musicianship, business, charity. The list goes on.
\n", "date_published": "2021-08-22T13:54:07-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/08/22/it-doesnt-matter.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/08/21/controls.html", "title": "Controls", "content_html": "To err is human. To forgive, divine. But to have a good chance to detect and correct mistakes, you need controls. That’s what I have learned in my audit career.
\nA control helps you understand if a transaction or business process completed completely, correctly, and timely. It is designed to answer the auditor’s most probing question: “How do you know?”
\nThe term itself is jargon, and isn’t widely understood outside of accounting, finance, audit, and compliance circles—unless you are pulled into an audit of some kind as a subject matter expert. One of my bosses used to say all the time, as a joking impersonation of management, “What is a control?” (It would be silly to say that joke killed, but we all got it.)
\nOf course “control” has a slightly different meaning in everyday language. I think most people want control over their lives: freedom, autonomy, and independence; and also, somewhat paradoxically, stability and predictability. As societal norms and expectations shift, and political, environmental and economic pressures escalate, the present feels more and more uncertain over time—it is literally out of control. As a counterweight to that, a lot of people long for strong leaders who promise to exert control by force of will, or just by force—in other words, authoritarian control.
\nThe problem is that all leaders, both good and bad, know that it is easier to assert that things are correct rather than to actually correct them. In the business world, the same kind of situation applies. An executive can say that a company is doing everything it can in certain areas, but without controls and transparency, there is no way to know if such a statement is true.
\nOn an individual basis, we can’t control everything that happens in our lives. What we can do, however, on an everyday personal level, is to implement the controls (in the audit sense) over what we do and the decisions we make. These can be gaurdrails and double-checks as simple as The Golden Rule and Measure Twice, Cut Once. Just ask yourself sometimes: How do you know if what you’re doing is right?
\n", "date_published": "2021-08-21T14:45:21-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/08/21/controls.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/08/12/i-am-at.html", "content_html": "I am at the point I my vacation where I am contemplating how I can be a better person after I return home.
\n", "date_published": "2021-08-12T18:02:30-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/08/12/i-am-at.html", "tags": ["Journal","Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/08/09/lies-i-tell.html", "title": "Lies I tell myself, vacation edition", "content_html": "One of the lies I told myself when I packed for vacation is that I would spend more time writing and coding (for fun) each day. My MacBook has sat in a box in the closet, unused for all but one evening. I did not expect:
\nI am OK with this. I am resting and recuperating. I am also studying James Joyce fairly seriously late at night, which is something I would not have attempted during non-vacation time. I don’t have to churn out essays and source code to be productive.
\n", "date_published": "2021-08-09T12:06:26-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/08/09/lies-i-tell.html", "tags": ["Journal","Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/08/04/monuments-to-a.html", "title": "Monuments to a Loser, or the Second Lost Cause", "content_html": "One frequent and inescapable sight on the rural roads of New Hampshire is the Trump campaign sign. In every town, there are Trump campaign signs flanking the ends of driveways. Huge Trump/Pence billboards are proudly hoisted over the signs for legitimate businesses, presumably by the owners themselves. Trump flags—and the occasional anti-Biden flag—hang limply from the front of houses; some of them are accompanied by the MAGA battle flag: the black-and-blue parody of the Stars and Stripes. This is unusual. Trump lost almost a year ago. In every other election I have lived through, all the campaign signs came down in short order. But in 2021, in every town I drive through, I pass by monument after monument to the loser.
\nCelebrating a win for too long is gauche and sad. Mourning a loss, however old, is noble. This is especially true when that loss neatly dovetails into an even greater loss that the MAGA movement clearly draws its inspiration from: The Lost Cause. They both stem from the very same great lies: “this [thing I don’t like] isn’t fair” and “my humiliation is your humiliation.”
\nIt is too soon to know if The Big Lie will have the weight and longevity of The Lost Cause. It seems likely, though, that The Big Lie will simply get folded into The Lost Cause, remembered as yet another indignity in a long line. In that way, it can last, essentially, forever.
\nThose Trump campaign signs can stay up forever, too, even after the former president runs again in 2024, retires from public life, or dies. I think that it would be a mistake to extend sympathy to the sore losers who leave them there, because what they believe—that they were cheated by a clean democratic election—undermines the American ideals of representative democracy, equal protection, and law and order.
\nThe Big Lie is not going away, at least not anytime soon. It has embedded itself as the base of the Republican platform. You will see politicians run on it in 2022. The mid-term elections are going to be rough, and will merely set the table for the circus that will be the next presidential election season. We are in for a difficult couple of years ahead.
\n", "date_published": "2021-08-04T22:45:41-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/08/04/monuments-to-a.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/29/procrastination.html", "title": "Procrastination", "content_html": "Procrastination is just a fancy word for avoidance.
\nSocially, it is acceptable to procrastinate. After all, everyone does it sometimes. This makes it easy to not even think about why you are procrastinating.
\nConversely, it is not normally acceptable to avoid something or someone. It smacks of cowardice, and almost no one wants to be considered a coward.
\nThink about that when you know you are procrastinating on certain tasks. Ask yourself: What am I avoiding? What am I afraid of?
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-29T18:52:48-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/29/procrastination.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/28/who-here-wouldnt.html", "content_html": "Who here wouldn’t want to buy a “I’m really big on Micro.blog” T-shirt? 😀
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-28T21:18:34-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/28/who-here-wouldnt.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/27/one-syllable.html", "title": "One syllable", "content_html": "An exchange between myself and my wife, about someone else we know:
\nHer: It’s hard to say no to her.
\nMe: No it’s not. It’s two letters. One syllable. Simple. Done.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-27T19:43:50-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/27/one-syllable.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/25/the-workation.html", "title": "The Work-ation", "content_html": "It’s a uniquely American thing, I have read, to work while on vacation. I have had to, as recently as last year. Some of my coworkers were reading, reviewing, and revising work papers and memos while on vacation last week. My vacation this year hasn’t technically started yet, but I am now in my family’s summer-vacation spot, my in-law’s lake house, primed to report in for remote work in the morning.
\nNext week, for me, is planned full-time, remote work, while on vacation with my family. I hope to have no unplanned work time after next week, when my vacation-proper finally begins. That kind of thing has happened in the past, and it could happen again this year.
\nI feel guilty each year for taking off two weeks with my family and finagling a weeks’ worth of remote work to tack onto it. It seems near impossible and nigh immoral to take off such an extravagant length of time from work. The idea is coming entirely from my own head at this point; no one explicitly tells me I’m doing something wrong, but it certainly feels like I am. I also wonder if my vacations are taking away from my opportunities for promotions, raises, or bonuses. In the end, it is more important to me to spend vacation time with my family, even though it feels like I am stealing that time from work.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-25T15:27:10-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/25/the-workation.html", "tags": ["Journal","Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/21/the-doubleentry-bookkeeping.html", "title": "The double-entry bookkeeping system and the tyranny of spreadsheets", "content_html": "If there is one thing I would like my kids to learn from me, it is that one of the greatest, most impactful human inventions of all time is the double-entry bookkeeping system for accounting. If my son or daughter ever throws that term out in class when a teacher is writing a list of inventions on the board, there may be some “ums” and blank stares in the classroom, but I would be very proud.
\nTim Harford reminds us of how important the double-entry system is, and of the system’s historical origin, in his essay “The Tyranny of Spreadsheets”:
\n\n\nIn the late 1300s, the need for a solid system for accounts was evident in the outbursts of one man in particular, an Italian textile merchant named Francesco di Marco Datini. Poor Datini was surrounded by fools.
\n“You cannot see a crow in a bowlful of milk!” he berated one associate. “You could lose your way from your nose to your mouth!” he chided another.
\nIris Origo’s vivid book The Merchant of Prato describes Datini’s everyday life and explains his problem: keeping track of everything in a complicated world.
\n
Some of us have always needed to keep track of everything. The knock-on effect of accountancy, going back to antiquity, is that someone wrote down what people owned and traded, what was abundant and what was rare, and even what came from where. Because of that, we have been able to learn the languages and numeric systems people wrote with, and what people valued, how they traded, and much more, in cultures that have long since passed away. It isn’t all because of the double-entry system in particular, but I think it is pretty interesting nonetheless.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-21T21:34:38-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/21/the-doubleentry-bookkeeping.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/20/call-a-spade.html", "title": "Call a spade a spade", "content_html": "When I was a kid writing essays for school, I always peppered my writing with big, fancy words in places that small, simple words would do. In part, I was showing off my big vocabulary to my teachers. For the most part, though, I was afraid to use the small, simple words because I thought of them as childish. I figured that small, simple words would make my writing seem small (as in insignificant) and simple (as in simplistic) as well. Of course, now I see that as folly. An argument that is simply stated is easier to understand, and thus more convincing, than one delivered in showy, but less comprehensible, language. While there are some glorious, complex words that I would never want to do without—incarnadine, mellifluous, loquacious, raconteur, elixir, donnybrook—I would never want an argument I write to hinge upon them.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-20T21:40:58-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/20/call-a-spade.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/19/love-is-an.html", "title": "Love is an action you must repeat ceaselessly.", "content_html": "I read this quote years ago in a novel called The Gargoyle that fundamentally changed my life:
\n\n\nLove is an action you must repeat ceaselessly.
\n—Andrew Davidson
\n
Love is an emotion that does not meaningfully exist unless it is expressed through action. Actions are governed by choice. Thus, to act with love is a choice you have to make every day, many times a day. It doesn’t matter how you feel: love is what you do.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-19T20:54:24-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/19/love-is-an.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/18/you-are-the.html", "content_html": "You are the story you tell to yourself. Make it a good one.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-18T17:07:30-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/18/you-are-the.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/17/failure-is-a.html", "title": "Failure is a great teacher, but it is not the only teacher.", "content_html": "It is popular now to lionize failure. Both fictional stories (thematically) and nonfictional accounts (explicitly) praise failure as a stepladder to greatness. It makes sense. Failure is a great teacher. It teaches us what does not work. It teaches us what we need to do better, and what we need to work harder on. It teaches us what our limitations are, and prods us into further developing our strengths.
\nWhile this is, in some way, timeless wisdom, the overt emphasis on it in the business book, personal productivity, and self-help space is relatively new. Our idols in business—wildly successful, and sometimes unimaginably wealthy, people—now regularly explain that they arrived at whatever monumental success they are famous for only after navigating a bumpy road potholed with failures all along the way. They tell stories about companies they started that went under, or products they developed that never found a market, or ideas they had that did not work with as much or more pride and excitement as when they talk about what actually did work for them. They talk about failure almost like it is success. They prod us to consider failure as the best learning opportunity—something to embrace rather than fear.
\nWell, sure, if you can handle it. For most people, it is a privilege to be able to fail. You have to be able to weather the storm. Not everyone can. It takes resources, like money and the right friends. It takes mental wherewithal, like good mental health (or, in some cases, psychopathy) provides. It takes opportunity, which for normal people often comes down to luck. Not everyone has those things. Not everyone who falls down can pick herself back up again. Sometimes a door closes and another one does not open up.
\nWhen serial entrepreneurs, angel investors, or CEOs wax on about their failures, be wary. Their discussion of past failures may be instructional, but it is also a showy way to appear humble. It disguises the privilege one often needs to survive failure without economic, emotional, or reputational humiliation.
\nMoney and connections help some people fail upward. Their unsuccessful companies don’t liquidate; they get bought by other companies. They don’t go bankrupt when a business venture fails, but their employees lose their jobs and their investors take a hit. These exits are not failures; they are minor successes—at least for the owner or entrepreneur. The road to their success is not paved with failure. It actually is paved with minor success after minor success.
\nSo don’t believe it when sometime tells you that experiencing failure is the only way to learn how to succeed. That simply is not true. Failure is a great teacher, but it is not the only teacher.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-17T08:54:32-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/17/failure-is-a.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/16/the-coddling-of.html", "title": "The Coddling of the American Mind", "content_html": "I think about education a lot, not only because I have kids, but also because my wife is a high school teacher, and I like to help her think up lessons. If I were a teacher, I would challenge my students to think really hard, to question what they have been told, and to go beyond the material and create new thoughts of their own based on what we discuss in class. My wife tells me that my level of instruction would suit some grad students, maybe, but not high school students, and presumably not undergrads either. That is dispiriting to me, but she would know better than I—she knows teens and young adults and intimately knows the educational system they are put through. Through her, I’m pretty aware that high school is not quite as I remembered it. Overall, it seems dumbed down compared to what I went through: loftier goals with lower expectations for achieving them.
\nI had figured that college was just the same as I remembered it—and thus would be very difficult for high school students to cope in, academically—but I am now not so sure about that. A few weeks ago, I read Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s Atlantic article “The Coddling of the American Mind.” It riled me up. I had seen Mr. Haidt sometime earlier discuss his thesis about the decline of thought on college campuses in favor of “safetyism” on Real Time with Bill Maher, and found it both compelling and dispiriting. I listened to one of his lectures on YouTube and thought about it quite for a while.
\nI went to Brandeis University—one of the schools mentioned in Lukianoff’s and Haidt’s article—in the 1990s. I remember that one of the main themes of my instruction there was that I should expect to be challenged and to confront new and potentially uncomfortable ideas. We, as a student body, we asked—explicitly—to learn about, discuss, and work through new ideas together. It wasn’t supposed to be easy. It was supposed to be difficult. Difficulty was the whole point. Open debate was how it worked. That was liberal arts scholarship—and I’m pretty sure college campuses were thought to be politically-correct, liberal romper rooms even then, so maybe even I got the watered-down version. Is the academic culture I came up in gone now, in favor of a focus on comfort and mollify action at the expense of debate and rigor?
\nLately, I have wondered how it really is on college campuses. How much of this worry, put in me by some of the things I read and see, is about someone else’s hysteria about changing cultural and social norms? Are the stories about wokeness, safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and call-out culture that I have seen on the Internet and in The New York Times the norm, or exceptions to the norm? What kind of story would make it all the way to me? Only the exceptional ones, I think. Maybe freedom of thought at college campus isn’t as constrained as I have been led to believe. I suppose I will find out when I explore this issue further, or years down the line when my kids are ready to look for the colleges they will attend.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-16T11:24:52-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/16/the-coddling-of.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/13/too-smart.html", "title": "Too Smart", "content_html": "I enjoyed reading Morgan Housel’s blog post on the Collaborate Fund blog. The ideas in the post are some that I want to explore in my blog, too. All these items are direct quotations from the post:
\nThese are important ideas worth looking into and thinking about. An idea from another outside source—the Make Me Smart podcast—came to mind when I read the post: “None of us is as smart as all of us.” (I just learned that the Internet attributes that quote to Kenneth H. Blanchard.)
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-13T18:46:38-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/13/too-smart.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/11/you-really-need.html", "content_html": "I saw this article by Caitlin Flanagan on Om Malik’s blog. It’s a fun read if, like me, you’ve been through the quitting Twitter part she goes through.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-11T15:46:05-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/11/you-really-need.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/11/preference-vs-duty.html", "title": "Preference vs. duty", "content_html": "What you would prefer to do isn’t the same as what you would be willing to do. I think that distinction gets lost a lot if times in interpersonal relationships. If you ask for one and then ask for the other, don’t be surprised if the answer changes.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-11T12:16:03-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/11/preference-vs-duty.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/07/just-be-yourselfor.html", "title": "Just be yourself...or not", "content_html": "When I was in fourth grade, my family moved to the town across the river. The move was not traumatic, but it was socially isolating. We had to move out of our old house three months before our new house was finished being built. We ended up as the only tenants in an apartment complex across town from where we used to live. For the fall, I went to my old elementary school and saw my old neighborhood friends and familiar classmates during the day, but I saw no one my age outside of school during the week or on weekends. Besides my parents, I saw no one on nights and weekends.
\nAs an only child, I could keep my own company. I watched a lot of TV that fall. I played a lot of Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt. By Christmas, I was so bored that I actually mastered playing Gyromite with R.O.B. the Robot, which is a game that is both preposterously difficult (I mean, look at this) and equally unrewarding.
\nOn New Year’s Day we moved into our new house, which was newly built in in a new, single-road housing development that was not yet completed. The house was both awesome—so big! so new!—and lonely. It inhabited the unfinished end of the street; half our neighbors were empty lots. We didn’t have streetlights or mailboxes. Our front yard had no trees, no grass, and no bushes; it was a sea of straw, strewn over frozen mud. My best friend for the first week was the little TV in my room that I watched while my parents unpacked their things.
\nStarting over at school, and making what friends I could in my new, very small neighborhood—especially after months of social isolation—was tough. I would ask my parents how to make new friends in my new town, where the kids all dressed differently, talked differently, and cared about different things than the kids I was friends with in my prior life. How do you start talking to someone you don’t know without coming across like an idiot?
\nThey would say, wisely, “just be yourself.” That was pretty much the only advice I ever got growing up about how to act, how to fit in, and how to be comfortable in new social situations. It is terrible advice.
\nWhen I moved to a new town, I didn’t need to “be myself.” I needed to change myself: to become someone flexible enough to adapt to my new situation, to meet new people halfway, to be more open to taking chances, and to care less about every moment that didn’t go so well. It took me a long time to figure that out, but I did. I adjusted. I made friends. I found my people. It took a long time, and over that time I changed myself into a person far more comfortable with who I was and who I wasn’t.
\n“Just be yourself” doesn’t mean “just be yourself.” It means don’t hate yourself. Truly. For every inch of “don’t change yourself to fit in” in those words, there is a mile of “put yourself out there, and don’t let yourself feel destroyed if it doesn’t work out.” Try, and try again, but don’t hate yourself when you fail to make a connection or have to put your foot in your mouth. Don’t hate yourself when you don’t measure up, don’t fit in, and don’t succeed.
\nSo, when you face a new challenge in life, don’t be yourself. Be better.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-07T23:33:36-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/07/just-be-yourselfor.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/06/the-hourglass.html", "title": "The hourglass", "content_html": "Life experience has a definite shape to it. Time isn’t a straight line.
\nIt’s a funnel.
\nWell, really, it’s an hourglass.
\nThe future is infinite. The past is infinite. The present, however, is really, really small.
\nRight now is the ultimate pinch point. You can only do so much. You have a tiny amount of time. You have a finite amount of attention. Now is the time. Now is your time.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-06T13:39:13-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/06/the-hourglass.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/05/what-does-america.html", "title": "What does America mean to me?", "content_html": "I find myself thinking this, on the fifth of July, after enduring with fusillade after fusillade of illegal fireworks, and thrum of dance music blaring from several neighbors’ backyard parties, and the thump, thump, thump of basslines permeating every barrier between them and my family until almost midnight last night. (Let’s just say my kids don’t sleep on July 4th.)
\nWhat does America mean to me?
\nIt is a promise to do better, to try harder, to fight for justice and freedom, and to stand up again after being knocked down. It is a promise that is very, very hard to keep—one most often observed in its breach.
\nWhat has America actually been to me? All this noise around me, for years and years and years, drowning out the voices and the actions of serious, thoughtful people. I am one of the privileged few, but I too am lost and bewildered in my own country, by my own country.
\nAmerica needs to be better, and for that, Americans need to act better. To start, we must demand better of each other.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-05T14:57:25-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/05/what-does-america.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/04/what-im-looking.html", "title": "What I’m looking for in an open source project repo", "content_html": "When the Micro.blog client apps were open-sourced, I reviewed the Github repos for the two I use most (the iOS app and the macOS app). I wondered if I could contribute something to the projects—probably something small, like more hardware keyboard shortcuts or an enhancement to how the post editor works. I wasn’t sure if that would be welcome, based on the brief “About the open source project…” verbiage in the REAMDE, and based on (1) the very old, but open, issues in the iOS repo, and (2) seeing no issues in the macOS repo.
\nI “know” Manton because I have been listening to his podcast with Daniel Jalkut for years (which is where I learned about Micro.blog), so I think of him as thoughtful, considerate, and certainly not as unfriendly. But I did not actually expect him to open source the apps when he did, and I figure that her has a business to run and may not be ready for a bunch of user requests on client apps that he may be happy enough with already. Manton saw my prior post about the apps and commented on it: “I wrote that README quickly and should expand on it…”
\nIn true blogging fashion, I am responding to his comment with this blog post, with the aim to be helpful to Manton as he thinks about how to expand on the README he wrote.
\nTwo things, really. Can I report an issue? And, can I contribute?
\nIdeally the issues list will be kept current and will tie to development efforts (bug fixes and enhancements) going forward. Very old issues that the maintainer no longer wants worked on will be closed. Issues that the maintainer is interested in will be labeled “help wanted”, “good for beginners”, etc.
\nThe maintainer should say in the README how user-reported issues will be addressed. It is OK to state that the maintainer does not plan to consider some or all feature requests from users. It is best to be open and realistic about how the project will operate.
\nI always look for a CONTRIBUTING document or section in the README to learn whether or not the maintainer will accept pull requests, and if possible, how that process should work. Is opening an issue, then resolving it with a pull request later on, the right way or the wrong way to go about it? I have worked with maintainers who preferred that approach, to solicit conversation, and have worked with others who preferred the code change to come first and the discussion afterward.
\nAlso, it is OK if the maintainer is not going to accept pull requests; I would rather know up front.
\nI think it is perfectly OK if the way a project is maintained changes over time. Not every decision made on day one has to be carried out forever. As a potential contributor, I just like to know what I might expect if I approached the maintainer now.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-04T22:08:33-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/04/what-im-looking.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/04/reading-the-news.html", "title": "Reading the news is a waste of time", "content_html": "On Thursday I configured NextDNS to block (for my personal devices only) news.google.com. Google News has been my Internet obsession since it debuted in 2002. It is not a healthy one. Whenever my mind gets lost for a second, I find myself opening a browser tab and checking Google News to see…what’s new, I guess. Sometimes I close Google News out of disgust or boredom and then, almost immediately, open it up again.
\nWhy do I do this? What am I searching for? What is going on in my mind?
\nReading the news seems like a worthwhile activity—something a thoughtful, intelligent person would do—but I am pretty sure that most of the time it isn’t. I think that news sites and cable networks exploit the part of our brains that are always scanning for threats and opportunities, as part of our survival instincts. In Paleolithic times, knowing if the tribe across the river is friendly or hostile, knowing where the good game is and where the predators are, and knowing what foods might kill you were all important to survival. All of that information is relevant and timely.
\nBut that’s not what I get from Google News. I rarely learn about anything nearby that could possibly affect me. I usually learn about national affairs, faraway disasters, or (more recently) some else’s social media-published outrage about these things. It’s hard to say that provides me much benefit at all. So, for the time being, I’m turning it off. The news will still be there when I need it, but not packaged in such a way that hooks me and makes me feel virtuous for being hooked on it.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-04T13:53:50-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/04/reading-the-news.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/07/02/on-opensourcing-the.html", "title": "On open-sourcing the Micro.blog client apps", "content_html": "This week @manton open-sourced the iOS and macOS Micro.blog apps. I think that is a great move in general, but it is not one of the things I require in the software I use. I never felt that comfortable when, a while ago now, I read users’ blog posts expressing anger or dismay that the client apps were not open-sourced. (Let’s put aside, for now, that what makes Micro.blog work is the server-side code.)
\nAs a paying customer, and as a developer myself, I don’t think Manton and his team are obligated to share their client source code with me. I don’t think anyone is. If they want to, that’s great—but it is no guarantee that the client app itself will be better, more secure, more feature-rich, or even have a future many years from now. Heck, it doesn’t even look likely that Micro.blog will accept pull requests, so it is unclear whether open-sourcing it will change its development direction or iteration time at all. I’m not complaining about that, though. Maintaining an open source project/community and running a successful blog hosting business are almost entirely orthogonal to each other. Open source doesn’t really give me added comfort that an app I love or depend on will be there for me forever, because nothing is forever, even open-source software projects.
\nAs a computer user and enthusiast, I used to care a lot more that I do now about free, libre, and open-source software. My primary reason was that I thought I could trust it more than closed source software. It is harder to hide malware, tracking, and obvious security flaws when the code is publicly viewable. History has shown that not to be entirely true. Remember Heartbleed? That incident showed us that widely used libraries may be maintained by only one or two people, and their source code can contain bugs and security flaws that go unnoticed for years, because no one is actually looking at the source code.
\nMy secondary reason for preferring open-source software was more theoretical, but larger in scope and more exciting to me: open-source software can be a more practical and a better use of humanity’s programming resources. That’s because one of the great, unfulfilled promises of computer science is the ability to solve a certain problem once and for all, for everybody. Open source utilities, like the Unix command line tools, and open-source libraries, like OpenSSL, theoretically could make this happen. But it didn’t happen, at least not fully. We spend a lot of time, collectively, solving the same software problems over and over again. We may approach these problems in new ways, with new languages, and on new platforms. But in the end, we are repeating ourselves. Imagine where we could be if we didn’t keep repeat ourselves!
\nI actually think that most of the repetition is the inevitable result of human nature. Humans are curious; we want to know how something works, and how to do it ourselves. Humans are also prideful: we think “I can do the same thing, but better.” Most importantly, humans need to learn; each of us is born knowing nothing, and must learn extensively from our forebears to push our collective knowledge out just a little further.
\nIn the end, what is most useful to me about Micro.blog open-sourcing its codebase is that I can look at it and learn from it. That could be very helpful. Long ago, I was interested in creating a dead-simple iOS app (extension, widget, whatever) for Micropub posting. Eventually, well before this week, Micro.blog open-sourced its Snippets library, which would have made writing such an app much easier. Now, with the client app also open sourced, I could review its code to see (presumably) how to call, configure, and use the Snippets library in an iOS app. That is even more useful than the Snippets library alone.
\nNow that the Micro.blog client app source code is free and open, maybe I could use some of it to help me build that little utility app now. In the same vein, maybe someone else could use much more of that source code and build a better, more feature-rich client app based on it. Maybe the Micro.blog app is a solved problem, and no one has to solve it again (at least until Apple stops supporting the frameworks it is based on), and a hundred other Micropub-blogging-based small businesses could spring up, all using a common client app. Who knows? That possibility is a risk to Manton and Micro.blog, but it is also a gift to the greater world.
\nThanks, @manton, @cheesemaker, and @jean (are there others at Micro.blog?) for all the work you do.
\n", "date_published": "2021-07-02T22:24:16-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/07/02/on-opensourcing-the.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/06/30/on-bullies-or.html", "title": "On bullies, or why I have character", "content_html": "I often joke with people that I am not as nice as my wife is. It’s a self-deprecating remark, but I do mean it. I am a nice person, just not as nice as my wife is.
\nI’m not as nice because I was bullied for most of my childhood. I never got beaten up (though I did get into fights), and I was never afraid to go to school (though it was a gauntlet and a crucible), but I was picked on mercilessly, incessantly, and for everything—my name, my weight, my glasses, and most of all for being smart.
\nWhen I was a young adult, I would say that the bullying led me to develop character—and, man, I wish I didn’t have character! As a middle-aged adult, I find myself wondering what that bullying really taught me. I think, in a huge way, it taught me to distrust people—especially people my own age. It taught me not to take what people said to me at face value, because venomous words are often preceded by honeyed ones. It taught me that others may switch from allies to enemies when the social situation changes, like when the bullies enter the scene.
\nOne of my triumphs in life was when I finally made the bullying stop. After years of trying different things—there is a lot of well-meaning advice for the bullied out there to follow—what finally made the bullying stop was a 30-second conversation I had with one of my bullies, in the back of a classroom on the first day of seventh grade. After being on the receiving end of some stupid taunt, I had had enough. I turned to the kid, looked him in the eye, and said to him: “You can say whatever you want to me. You can call me whatever names you want. But you can never hurt me. You can never change my mind about myself, no matter what you do.”
\nFor some reason I still can’t figure out, the name calling, the taunting, and the scapegoating stopped overnight—not just from that one kid; from everybody. I didn’t become popular or anything, but I was mentally strong, and everyone knew it. The bullies just stopped bullying me. I was no longer a social pariah. I made a lot of new friends that year. Even some of the kids who picked on me even became my friends before the school year was through.
\nThat single exchange, by itself, probably did not cause the bullying to stop. Asserting that I was mentally stronger than my bullies probably would not have worked unless it were really true. It was the last of a series of defenses I developed over the years. It was the strongest one, but I may not have developed it if I hadn’t developed others before it, like wit, determination, and resilience.
\nBullying has shaped me to be someone who, as I have been told, does not suffer fools gladly. It has made me wary of people and likely to question others’ intentions, which is a great skill in political situations and in some professional situations, but it isn’t that useful for socializing at a picnic. It has also shaped me into someone who has tremendous sympathy for the downtrodden, quiet underdogs of the world. I can empathize with the pain of others. I know that true friends are rare and precious. I know that inner strength is hard won.
\nI also know that I am not as nice as other people, because other people were not as nice to me. So I try, really hard, to be nice, even when it is difficult, because people deserve better than I got when I was a kid.
\n", "date_published": "2021-06-30T21:45:42-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/06/30/on-bullies-or.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/06/29/the-cut.html", "title": "The Cut", "content_html": "I have recently finished crafting a slideshow, and writing a talk to go with it, that is the best one I have ever done, probably by a mile. I spent hundreds of hours this year watching talks on YouTube (both good and bad ones), watching instructional videos on speaking and on creating effective visual presentations, and trying new slide design techniques (and throwing out all the things I tried that didn’t work). I tried really hard to push myself out of my PowerPoint design rut. I thought I was good at presenting before, but now I think I have really leveled up. I have internalized a lot of the lessons I learned this year.
\nThe most visually impressive, most engaging, most well written talk that I have ever created is due to my bosses tomorrow. It is complete. It would make for a great 80 minute talk. But it has to be cut, and maybe cut down by half. It was momentarily agonizing to learn this today, but I am trying to think positively about it, because I have learned the right way to cut (iteratively, though rehearsals and timing of sections) and I know how to not cut the meat out of the presentation (because I wrote down the main idea of each section, so it wouldn’t get lost in an edit). I can do it. I just wish I didn’t have to.
\nNo matter what, though, I’m going to be proud of what I built, and I’m going to seek out more opportunities to present in the future. I am good at it. I put in the work to be even better at it. And maybe with enough practice I can be great at it.
\n", "date_published": "2021-06-29T20:54:04-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/06/29/the-cut.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/06/25/trying-to-change.html", "title": "Trying to change my mindset", "content_html": "My work week has overflowed with head-desk moments, turnarounds, and setbacks. It has been frustrating beyond belief. It’s not often that I experience big parts of my work projects blowing up in my face, especially for unexpected reasons. Fortunately, all the problems I am facing are technology-related, not interpersonal, and can, I think, be solved by doing something I, by nature, kind of hate doing: asking for help.
\nI am trying to change my mindset from “I can’t do this anymore” to “I can do this. I may need help. And it may take longer than expected.” It sounds simple, but it really isn’t. For whatever reason, whatever I picked up from the self-help and coaching industries over the years taught me a misleading lesson about personal achievement, which basically boils down to “it’s mind over matter.” But sometimes, the problem really is matter—the external roadblocks, rather than the internal ones. At least, that’s what I think about this week’s challenge. If I can’t remove those roadblocks myself, then maybe someone else can help me.
\n", "date_published": "2021-06-25T16:40:24-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/06/25/trying-to-change.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/06/24/all-speech-is.html", "title": "All speech is persuasive speech", "content_html": "My wife teaches speech, debate, and dramatic arts to high school students. I love it when she asks me to help her with her lesson plans, because it gives me the chance to take a subject that she has to teach, however uninteresting it may seem (especially if you’ve taught it for 10+ years in a row), and blow it up into something that is the foundation of everything.
\nHere’s an exchange we had this spring:
\nMe: What’s the curriculum?
\nHer: Persuasive speech.
\nMe: All speech is persuasive speech.
\nHer: That’s not helpful.
\nMe: But it’s true!
\nI always encourage her to start new topics with audacious statements that demand defending. I’m not sure if she ever does, but I think it is important to tie everything you learn about writing and speaking with the fundamental forces that drive communication.
\nIn another life, I would have ended up teaching English at some level, too. I think I would make an excellent high school teach for one or two very smart kids, and a potentially disastrous one for everyone else.
\n", "date_published": "2021-06-24T18:33:36-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/06/24/all-speech-is.html", "tags": ["Journal","Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/06/22/why-do-we.html", "title": "Why do we begin emails with “Dear so-and-so”?", "content_html": "I write a lot of email at work. Almost every one I write starts with “Hi, <name>.” It seems perfectly normal, until you realize that every email client already includes that in the “To” field above the body of the message. The reader knows her own name, and it is written on the screen in the “To” field next to her email address. Why do I write it again in the body of the email? Why do I do this 50 times every workday? Why do I do this even though I think it is redundant?
\nSimple: Because I think that everyone’s favorite word is their own name. Everyone likes to see it. It’s subtle flattery to include it atop the body of every email message. Whenever I think I should just stop my habit of typing it, I remind myself of this and keep going with it, because I think in the end it is worthwhile.
\n", "date_published": "2021-06-22T17:09:13-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/06/22/why-do-we.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/06/21/the-bad-guy.html", "title": "The bad guy thinks he’s the good guy", "content_html": "One of the best lessons that literature has taught me is that the bad guy thinks he’s the good guy. In more abstract terms, the villain thinks she is the hero of her own story. That is what drives villains, and that is what makes them dangerous.
\nSometimes, as in real life, the villain may in fact be the hero of his own story, because the story as we know it isn’t over, and it isn’t about what we thought it was about. Any narrative can have a counter narrative. Every comedy might be someone else’s tragedy.
\nAll of this is true in life as it is in art.
\nThere are real villains in the real world, and we need real heroes to face them. But there are a lot of false villains in our lives that we also face. These false villains may be people we are mad at momentarily, people we are close to who frustrate us, people who shun us, people who are indifferent to us, and so on. These false villains may also be ourselves—the fears and doubts that hold us back, the shames we keep secret from ourselves, and the pasts that we cannot change.
\nWe must be careful not to think of these false villains as the real ones. Not all stories need a hero to resolve them. When we play the hero, we may unknowingly be playing the villain instead.
\n", "date_published": "2021-06-21T12:00:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/06/21/the-bad-guy.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/06/20/problems-and-questions.html", "title": "Problems and questions: a Father’s Day post", "content_html": "I am teaching my daughter how to solve problems. Math problems.
\nI find or think up challenging math problems for her (she is a third grader), and, to make them more fun, I rewrite them to include mention of her friends and family, favorite characters, and favorite things. We work through them together before bedtime. It’s fun, and we both get a lot out of it.
\nI always close our math session by asking her a question. The questions I ask are meant to spark introspection and, I hope, foster self-worth: What is something you like about yourself? What is something you like to do? What is something are you good at? What are some things people you like have in common?
\nThe questions I want her to ask in life—when learning new things, when engaging with people, and when confronting political forces in the world—are the big, probing kind: What is this all about? Why is it important? What does that even mean? How do you know?
\nThese are simple questions, but they carry a lot of weight when asked earnestly, and also when asked recursively to get to the bottom of something. They are at the forefront of my mind all the time (especially how do you know?) because I believe they are at the heart of thoughtful inquiry. (They may also be at the heart of skepticism or even a healthy distrust, but that is something for me to unpack later.)
\nAs a father, I have no idea how to teach her to ask these questions. How do you teach someone to not be afraid to ask these questions? How do you teach someone to not get upset at the answers? How do you teach someone to deal with indifference, rejection, or even malice? I don’t know. I can only ask her big questions enough times for her to get used to them.
\nAs she grows older and more confident, the other big questions I want her to ask are: What can I do? and Why not me? Those questions are even harder to ask, harder to answer, and I certainly don’t have the right answers to them. Part of the my journey through fatherhood is to try to figure them out.
\n", "date_published": "2021-06-20T00:01:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/06/20/problems-and-questions.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/06/18/this-is-me.html", "title": "This is me showing up", "content_html": "Seth Godin says that everyone should have a blog. Moreover, everyone who has a blog should blog daily, primarily because it reinforces the idea that the important thing about it is to show up, every day, day after day, and actually do it. Well, this is showing up. I’m here.
\nI’m thinking about how I can be better at everything I do. I’m trying to build myself up, brick by brick, after whatever the heck happened to me during the COVID-19 pandemic. (One weird thing I noticed is that I have started to prefix the pandemic with a descriptor. It’s as if I imagine we will need to differentiate between several.) I am teaching myself new things. I am taking more chances. I am talking to more people. I am trying harder to focus on what is vital.
\nThe effort has been paying off; at first slowly, and now more quickly every week. I think, as the weeks keep going by, I will seek out more opportunities to do good things, to grow, and to connect with the world again.
\n", "date_published": "2021-06-18T16:25:03-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/06/18/this-is-me.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/06/15/one-my-my.html", "content_html": "One of my heart’s dull aches is my memory of driving up the Maine coastline with my parents every year in my childhood. I did not always appreciate those trips back then, but they are etched into my mind indelibly. I just have to think about it and I can feel the cool breeze in my face, smell the salt air, and see the black rocks at the edge of the water and the glint of sun off the waves. I long to go back someday.
\n", "date_published": "2021-06-15T10:43:46-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/06/15/one-my-my.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/06/09/many-people-have.html", "title": "Many People Have a Vivid ‘Mind’s Eye,’ While Others Have None at All", "content_html": "I have been following stories about aphantasia with interest because I am 99% sure I have it. Carl Zimmer reports in The New York Times:
\n\n\nDr. Adam Zeman didn’t give much thought to the mind’s eye until he met someone who didn’t have one. In 2005, the British neurologist saw a patient who said that a minor surgical procedure had taken away his ability to conjure images.
\nOver the 16 years since that first patient, Dr. Zeman and his colleagues have heard from more than 12,000 people who say they don’t have any such mental camera. The scientists estimate that tens of millions of people share the condition, which they’ve named aphantasia, and millions more experience extraordinarily strong mental imagery, called hyperphantasia.
\n
When I read a book, I never think about what the characters look like, or what the scenery is.
\nWhen I think, it’s all words. Torrents and torrent of words.
\nI don’t have the best visual memory for people or places, though I have good spatial awareness.
\nI think I can form mental images, or at least simulacra of them (wireframes, maybe). I mean, I did pretty well in organic chemistry in college, which is a subject that is, in part, about visualizing the rotation of irregularly shaped molecules. I don’t think I saw them in my mind’s eye, though. Not really. It was long ago, so I can’t remember reliably, but I probably figured out a different way to do it.
\nTo me, it is interesting to learn that some people “see” mental images easily and think in an incredibly visual manner, because that is not the way I experience anything.
\n", "date_published": "2021-06-09T15:51:48-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/06/09/many-people-have.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","News"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/06/08/climate-change.html", "title": "🔥 Climate change 🔥", "content_html": "My region’s climate has changed significantly in my lifetime, and, seemingly to me, more quickly than before in the past ten years. It is dismaying. Here are some of my observations of it from this week:
\nIt has been over 90ºF every day since late last week, and it is only early June. Ninety degrees is not just hot for June here: it is hot for summer.
\nMy daughter’s elementary school has two early release days in a row this week, due to excessive heat. I have heard of such things happening in the South, but never where I have lived (New Jersey now, New England before that).
\nPeople (including my family) don’t have our kids play outside that much because is too hot, and the air quality too bad, to do so.
\nI saw more people exercising after dark (after 9 PM) yesterday than I did out during the daytime.
\nMicro Camp sounds like it will be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I’ll be traveling during it, so I won’t be able to attend.
\n", "date_published": "2021-05-28T14:38:41-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/05/28/micro-camp-sounds.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/05/20/plasticity-of-mind.html", "title": "Plasticity of Mind, or Lack Thereof", "content_html": "This week, I programmed for many, many hours. Often when I do this, while I wait for builds to complete or unit tests to execute, I pick up my Rubik’s Cube and solve it (or scramble it, if it is already solved). For the past three days, I could not solve my Rubik’s Cube anymore. I couldn’t remember how to do it, and I kept making mistakes even in the earlier portions of my solve. I worried that I had forgotten how to do it overnight, and the implications of that scared me.
\nFortunately, I solved the cube again today again without an issue. It was a great relief. I think that I was so deep into technical problems for so long that I lost the plasticity of mind I usually have.
\n", "date_published": "2021-05-20T16:23:53-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/05/20/plasticity-of-mind.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/04/13/siri-reveals-apple.html", "title": "Siri Reveals Apple Event Planned for Tuesday, April 20", "content_html": "I’m assuming that somebody’s job, every day, is to wake up in the morning and ask Siri “When is the next Apple Event?” I’m glad I didn’t try to change careers back in 2009 or 2011 (when I thought of it) and get into tech journalism.
\n", "date_published": "2021-04-13T08:57:22-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/04/13/siri-reveals-apple.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Apple"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/04/09/james-hoffmans-aeropress.html", "title": "James Hoffman’s AeroPress video", "content_html": "Last year when I was looking for something soothing to watch on YouTube, I came across James Hoffmann’s many videos about coffee, coffee machines, coffee products, and so on. I have watched a ton of them, mostly because I like his voice and demeanor. His latest video is about the AeroPress, which I have used for many, many years. I actually learned something new from it: People use the funnel, which is meant to help put your coffee grounds into the press without making a mess, to brew coffee into cups with mouths too small for the bottom of the AeroPress. I have to try that! He also states in the video that the AeroPress is easy to make good coffee from, but is difficult to master. I actually put very little effort into my AeroPress use—far less than I used to when I first starting using it. I have found that my AeroPress brewing technique, no matter how sloppy or lazy, doesn’t seem to affect my coffee all that much. It prefer not stressing about it anymore.
\n", "date_published": "2021-04-09T16:00:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/04/09/james-hoffmans-aeropress.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/04/08/i-both-wish.html", "content_html": "I both wish that I could give up coffee and that I could drink twelve cups of it a day. 🤷♂️
\n", "date_published": "2021-04-08T20:03:34-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/04/08/i-both-wish.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/03/24/people-on-linkedin.html", "content_html": "People on LinkedIn still use a lot of #hashtags non-ironically. Who are they tagging content for?
\n", "date_published": "2021-03-24T13:33:41-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/03/24/people-on-linkedin.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/03/15/the-covidversary.html", "title": "The COVID-versary", "content_html": "I guess, based on the occurrence of a President Biden speech, that this week marks the one-year anniversary of COVID-19 in the United States. To me, the baleful presence of COVID-19 has been around for what feels like much, much longer—so long that I can’t even remember it clearly.
\nMy COVID panic started in early January, when we thought the disease was only in Wuhan. In America, for a couple weeks at least, it still seemed likely that the disease would never leave China, much like H1N1 and SARS never made a big impact here. For almost three months my mental state caromed between what I think of now as irrational fear and rational fear. I could see the whole year of 2020 play out in my imagination, way before my friends and family could see what was coming, but I could do nothing to stop it, and I could do almost nothing to protect my family from it. All those feelings felt very real and very debilitating, even when almost no one else around me was feeling them.
\nI had about two months of angst about COVID before it actually hit around here. The last time I went out with friends and family was, I think, on March 14, 2020. We went to see a musical and when out to eat at a crowded restaurant afterward. It was really hard for me to feel comfortable the entire time, but I didn’t want to let everybody down because I was concerned about a pandemic that hadn’t hit our area yet. Less than a week later, my entire family was on lockdown.
\nBack in January, February, and early March 2020, it didn’t help me at all to have known about the scope and length and shape of prior pandemics, like the Spanish Flu, which I know, from reading family letters, killed a bunch of people in my extended family about a hundred years ago. It didn’t help me at all to know what I should do and buy to prepare for it. It didn’t help me at all that I am smart enough to think for myself and to scrutinize, with a pretty good understanding of the relevant science and statistics, the information and advice experts were providing to us. All of these things just made me feel more uncertain and more cynical about what was going on.
\nA year later, I am feeling more hopeful. I have the vaccine after all, and am probably (but not definitely) immune to COVID 18. But my county is still at extremely high risk level. The numbers are still higher than they were last year when all of us were in a panic. Despite that, all the states, even blue states like mine, are reopening rapidly and throwing caution to the wind, when it would be more prudent to do so more gradually. It makes me nervous that we are giving the virus a chance to circulate long enough to adapt resistance to our vaccines.
\nI was early in being scared of COVID, and I may be late in getting over that fear. I just hope that, when I look forward from today, whatever fear I feel is merely anxiety over things that will not play out, rather than the accurate foresight into the future that I had late last winter.
\n", "date_published": "2021-03-15T22:31:10-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/03/15/the-covidversary.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","News"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/03/15/im-probably-being.html", "content_html": "I’m probably being a climate-change alarmist right now, but I think we have never had such frequent windstorms in New Jersey as we have had this winter.
\n", "date_published": "2021-03-15T10:29:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/03/15/im-probably-being.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/03/05/i-realized-today.html", "content_html": "I realized today that part of my job is writing a short, really boring book about how I do my job. That, indeed, is the life of an auditor.
\n", "date_published": "2021-03-05T16:26:23-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/03/05/i-realized-today.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/02/16/trust.html", "title": "Trust", "content_html": "Trust relies on three things:
\nI heard this breakdown on a podcast episode earlier this week, and loved the idea so much that I hastily dictated a note to Siri about it (I was in my car at the time), but I can’t recall which podcast I heard it on or who said it. I found an analogous summary of the idea on the Wiley Online Library site, in an abstract about a chapter of the book Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior: Indispensable Knowledge for Evidence‐Based Management, Second Edition:
\n\n\nThis chapter focuses on using the concepts of ability, benevolence, and integrity as a means of increasing trust. Ability, benevolence, and integrity are the most critical facets of trustworthiness. They foster a sense of trust in the leader by followers. Ability reflects the knowledge, skills, and aptitudes of a leader, in both technical areas and general management competencies. Benevolence and integrity are aspects of the leader’s character, and require more time and attention on the part of followers before they can be reliably judged. In order to increase trust, leaders need to take steps to increase their ability, build their benevolence, and demonstrate their integrity. Leaders can do so on a follower‐by‐follower basis, but can also take steps to create a culture of trustworthiness within their organizations.
\n
Breaking down concepts like “trust”—which seem innately understood and obvious—into component parts can be very powerful. It gives you a way “in” when it comes to solving problems dependent on that concept.
\n", "date_published": "2021-02-16T12:01:13-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/02/16/trust.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2021/01/07/when-american-carnage.html", "title": "When “American Carnage” is the Tone at the Top", "content_html": "I was having a pretty good day yesterday, full of minor but meaningful personal and professional accomplishments, and then all hell broke loose in Washington, DC. I pushed the news of it away as best I could, so I am less informed than I otherwise would be, but I am sad, angry, and ashamed nonetheless.
\nPer Philip Rucker in The Washington Post:
\n\n\nThe “American carnage” that Donald Trump vowed to end at the dawn of his presidency was revived in terrifying, treacherous form at its sunset Wednesday, as Trump made a fiery last stand and incited his supporters to storm and sack the U.S. Capitol as part of an attempted coup.
\n
I don’t even know how to comment on this event without seeming glib, but I feel compelled to say something anyway.
\nI am, by trade, an auditor. One thing auditors are trained to investigate is called “tone at the top,” which represents the values expressed by the top management of a company which are expected from everyone who reports up to them.
\nAfter auditing for years, I have discovered that “tone at the top” is almost everything you need to know about an organization to get an idea how well and how ethically it is operated. Ethics and decency from the top of an organization really do trickle down all the way to the bottom and permeate it entirely. Moreover, they are strongly indicative of the organization’s solvency—its ability to hold together as a going concern over time.
\nWhen the “tone at the top” is selfish, vain, petty, petulant, aggrieved, unethical, amoral, and violent—as Trump’s has been—that tone trickles down to the whole organization, and pollutes the thoughts and corrupts the actions of the people within it. Unfortunately in this case, the “organization” is not just the Executive Branch, not just the federal government, and not just the Republican Party: it is the entire United States of America. What’s more, because the U.S. is a vastly influential country, the corruption and willful deceit at the head of it spills over into the rest of the world.
\nI feel like I have known this from the beginning—before the slow-moving coup even started—because I understood what the “tone at the top” was, and knew that it was vitally important. Knowing this, sadly, is not enough, because in a democracy a majority of people need to know this for things to turn out better. Being able to know this, like being able to discern the “tone at the top” as a new auditor, is a rare gift. It requires a trait that is not easily acquired, but is so difficult to teach and to learn that it is often considered to be innate: shrewdness.
\nThat’s because “tone at the top” isn’t always as blatantly obvious as Trump’s vitriolic tweets and shambolic rally speeches. Understanding what the “tone at the top” really is, it requires a combination of healthy skepticism, decent powers of observation, and the knowledge of how things are supposed to work. You have to understand both context and subtext; subtext is much harder to grasp than context, but is often the more important to the two. You have to interpret people’s words and actions, and compare them to each other to see if the actions follow the words. You also have to have some kind of ethical foundation—which may be laws of the state, societal norms, or virtue ethics— on which to base your conclusions.
\nThe human mind has evolved to do a lot of this analysis automatically. Consider that establishing whether you trust another person is, and always has been, an essential part of human interaction. But, like a lot of thought processes that are largely automatic, many times mental shortcuts are taken and the wrong choice is made. To be able to second-guess these automatic thought processes takes intellect, some degree of guidance, and a willingness to think a little harder.
\nI would not be surprised to learn that many of the people trying to unlawfully overturn the election—not counting the elected officials who are operating out of cynical self-interest—really do think they are making an ethical decision, and really do think they are doing the right thing. They just trusted the wrong person, or made the wrong decision about voting for or supporting, because they lack the shrewdness and imagination to discern that the “tone at the top” really does matter, and that bad words from a lazy president really will lead to riots in the streets.
\n", "date_published": "2021-01-07T15:50:56-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2021/01/07/when-american-carnage.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","News"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/12/22/how-can-there.html", "content_html": "How can there be no emoji for “idiot?" 🤯
\n", "date_published": "2020-12-22T14:26:58-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/12/22/how-can-there.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2020/04/07/neutron-stars-are.html", "content_html": "Neutron stars are so strange. I was recently trying to explain them to my daughter, who just got really interested in black holes and cosmology. I wonder if she would be able to follow Randal Monroe’s explainer in the New York Times today.
\n", "date_published": "2020-04-07T10:34:54-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2020/04/07/neutron-stars-are.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2019/02/12/time-flies-like.html", "content_html": "“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” There is actually a Wikipedia page about this phrase!
\n", "date_published": "2019-02-12T16:30:22-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2019/02/12/time-flies-like.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/02/03/i-realized-recently.html", "content_html": "I realized recently that Google’s killing of Google Reader made me never trust them again as a customer. They launch and then kill too many products. I still use Search, Gmail, and AdWords, but when it to comes to Android, Home, Assistant, and so on, I am out.
\n", "date_published": "2018-02-03T00:33:02-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/02/02/i-realized-recently.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/01/22/am-i-the.html", "content_html": "Am I the only one who kept thinking “Jake Jortles”* during the Pats/Jags game tonight? 🏈 (* Jason Mendoza’s assumed identity in the latest episode of “The Good Place”)
\n", "date_published": "2018-01-21T20:43:13-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/01/21/am-i-the.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","TV"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/01/16/slate-pushed-a.html", "content_html": "Slate pushed a redesign today. I used to love Slate, but I’m afraid I aged out of its target audience or it drifted away from me, because it doesn’t seem as smart to me anymore. I still love the Political Gabfest though.
\n", "date_published": "2018-01-16T10:59:01-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/01/16/slate-pushed-a.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/01/14/what-a-clinic.html", "content_html": "What a clinic the Patriots ran against the Titans tonight. 🏈
\n", "date_published": "2018-01-14T00:48:23-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/01/13/what-a-clinic.html", "tags": ["Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/01/05/in.html", "content_html": "Here are my top three divergent punctuation preferences, compared to everybody I have ever worked with:
\nAlways use the Oxford comma, for clarity and consistency.
\nPunctuation belongs outside quotation marks (British style).
\nOne thing to do when you’re supposed to be writing is to fuss about your writing environment.
\nChoosing the perfect writing font is a classic way to procrastinate—but it is not a waste of time. Fonts are important. A good font is not only highly legible, it also conveys a subliminal emotional effect on the reader. Naturally, it follows that it will also have similar effects on the writer. A good font will make you feel better while you are writing—maybe because you can read it more easily, or because you find elements of it, its curves or serifs, aesthetically pleasing. Whatever the reason, picking a font that is pleasing can have a profound effect on your writing.
\nFor me, as a writer and programmer who began typing text on a computer in the 1980s, I gravitate toward monospaced fonts. Every character in a monospaced font has the same width. This is useful in programming or for data files, because, in those uses, you often want to align columns of text. It is not useful at all in typesetting books, of course; text laid out in monospace fonts looks primitive and wide-open. Primitive and wide-open, however, are perfect attributes for text that I am writing, breaking apart, moving around, and recombining. Writing in monospaced fonts is, on a subconscious level, freeing. It helps me feel like nothing in my text is set in stone.
\nWhether the font is monospaced or proportional is only part of what is important. Other things matter, too: the shapes of the characters; whether they have serifs or not; whether some look identical to others (l vs. 1, or O vs. 0, for example); and so on.
\nBeyond that, some fonts render better on screen than others. For example, Verdana and Georgia were commissioned by Microsoft specifically to be look good, clear, and legible on screens, rather than on paper. This was revolutionary at the time, as was their free-to-use licensing. Consequently, these two fonts were adopted almost everywhere on the web for a while. Georgia is still one of the eight font options in Apple’s iBooks ebook reader.
\nYour particular display and operating system have a lot to do with what font looks good. In general, displays are much higher resolution and much higher quality now than when Verdana and Consolas were invented. As you might expect, this means that all all scalable fonts look better on modern, high-resolution displays. Still, some fonts will look much sharper than others on some displays. For example, on my Dell 27” 4K display for my work machine, a Windows 10 laptop, Consolas looks the best for the terminal and any coding I am doing, and Sax Mono looks better for writing actual documents. These fonts don’t offer similar advantages to me on my Mac or on iOS, however. They look fine, but they really pop for me on my work machine.
\nThere are tons of monospaced fonts available. Here are a handful that I have used over the years, with the platform I used them on in parentheses. I recommend trying them in your text editor, especially the newer ones listed at the bottom.
\nThese are listed in the order in which I have adopted them. I tend to use only a few at a time, depending on which one looks best on my hardware and software at the moment. Below, I highlight two of my favorite, very much related, fonts for writing these days: Plex and iA Writer Duospace.
\nIBM released Plex, an open source font that will be used in all of IBM’s published materials going forward, in late 2017. It isn’t the only open source font that’s free for anyone to download and use, but it is a really good one. Plex Mono, its monospaced variant, looks fantastic on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Its edges are crisp, and the stroke has a consistent width; it looks like the lines fit just right in the pixel grid that makes up the screen.
\nThe iOS development company iA took IBM’s Plex Mono and tweaked it a little bit to make it even better, in their opinion, for writing. They kept the font monospaced except for M’s and W’s. It’s a pretty simple change, but a lot of thought went into it. iA Writer’s article about this process is absolutely fascinating—I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
\nThe resultant font, iA Writer Duospace, looks great on my MacBook Pro. I prefer Plex Mono on my iPad and iPhone, though. There is something about the wider W and M that looks different in the two platforms. It could just be that my iOS screens are a lot smaller, and width is at a greater premium. It could also just be that I prefer my letters to line up vertically, especially when my text is constrained to a narrow column.
\nFor now, I am very happy writing in Plex and iA Writer Duo on my Apple devices. I still happily use SaxMono and Consolas on the PC for writing notes and coding, though Plex Mono is starting to creep into use for my todo.txt file and in other places. Every year or two I look for something better, but I probably won’t change from these four main fonts until I get new hardware, which could change how everything is rendered, but that is probably a long way off.
\n", "date_published": "2018-01-04T00:00:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/01/03/picking-a-great.html", "tags": ["Plaintext","Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2018/01/03/i-like-tweetbothttpstapbotscomtweetbot.html", "content_html": "I like TweetBot a lot more than I like Twitter.
\n", "date_published": "2018-01-03T00:35:55-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2018/01/02/i-like-tweetbothttpstapbotscomtweetbot.html", "tags": ["Thoughts","Tech"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2017/12/26/and-when-they.html", "content_html": "And when they say that all is lost\nAll is not lost, all is not lost\nAnd when they say that all is lost\nAll is not lost, no all is not lost at all
\n—OK Go\n“All Is Not Lost”\nVideo
\n", "date_published": "2017-12-25T21:40:36-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2017/12/25/and-when-they.html", "tags": ["Audiophile","Thoughts"] }, { "id": "http://mjdescy.micro.blog/2017/12/22/so-much-of.html", "content_html": "So much of all programming, and really all work in general, is developing a common vocabulary, and after that, common goals. That is most of the work in a lot of the projects I work on.
\n", "date_published": "2017-12-22T12:16:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.mjdescy.me/2017/12/22/so-much-of.html", "tags": ["Coding","Thoughts"] } ] }![flag](\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Lives_Matter#/media/File:Thin_Blue_Line_Flag_(United_States).svg\"){kind=link}