I suppose it’s because while they know romance is not possible, they really want to believe that it is. Matchmaking is an altruistic move that propagates the illusion of what is ethereal through generations.
Archive for December, 2009
Why do people like to be matchmakers?
Friday, December 11th, 2009Being Blind, Kind Of
Thursday, December 10th, 2009For this past weekend’s miniproject, I decided to block all light from entering my eyes. I wanted to experience the world around me with one fewer sense, even if it was just for a few days. In addition to this, I wanted to see if I can help my eyesight get better. Apparently there has been some success in curing an eye condition that I have (called amblyopia) by blinding oneself for a short period of time. In my case specifically, the connection between my left eye and my brain never fully developed because when I was little, my left eye wasn’t as good as my right, and so i ended up relying heavily on my right eye to see. Blinding yourself fully for about one week, the theory goes, may “reboot” your brain and allow the weak neural connection to re-form. I may be able to see small and temporary improvement after just one weekend.
I went to sleep on Friday night wearing a special mask I made that doesn’t let any light through. I would wake up already not being able to see, which should be a good start of this experiment.
The first couple of hours have been interesting, to say the least. Things in general take much more time to do. Moving around the house is not that difficult, but I haven’t built up a mental model of the house (because I had been relying on my sense of sight all the time) so I would sometimes end up getting lost. It takes a while to feel your way through a point of reference that you recognize; if you don’t even know what room you’re in, seemingly easy solutions like tracing the walls doesn’t help.
Eating food is easier than I thought: I was able to microwave food (after solving a mini-challenge of figuring out where the respective buttons were, since they are contactless), make a sandwich, eat cereal and fruit and drink water.
Listening to TV was intriguing. I had to imagine what was going on simply based on what I was hearing. While most times it was doable, it was actually not effortless, comparable to reading a book. I enjoyed this different way of “watching” TV, but I just couldn’t do it for extended periods of time. It’s curious that losing a sense is a very efficient way of limiting–but not eradicating–one’s TV intake.
I thought I would have problems with typing because while I usually don’t look at the keyboard, I calibrate myself occasionally (and subconsciously) by glancing at where my hands are. I was worried that I would be off by one key often. Fortunately, thanks to the excellent accessibility feature of OS X and a mental model of the keyboard that I quickly established, helped me type as efficiently as when I was able to see. Keeping my palms on the laptop in a fixed location helped immensely.
Overall, I am very impressed by the accessibility feature in OS X. I’ve been able to use my computer for listening to music, reading and composing email, and writing. Apple has done a great job making the computer usable for the blind.
While it’s commonly thought that shutting off one sense makes the others more acute, at least in my case it was somewhat more complicated. I would say that I was able to perceive much more than before if I focused on a particular sense. For example, I would perceive sounds pretty much the same way as before blinding myself, but if I focused on a particular song or, say, noise in the kitchen, I was able to extract much more information from it. I could explore food with much more detail and expression than before; for example, I was able to tell the individual herbs that went into the chicken breading. I think an overall improvement of other senses is probably something that takes some time as your brain learns that it can no longer rely on the sense of sight; in the short term, the improvement of other senses during a focused effort is probably due to decreased information “noise” coming from the eyes.
Being blind also completely reshuffles what is easy and what is hard to do on a daily basis. I can receive phone calls but not make them; I don’t know what T-shirt I’m wearing. I am forced to process information much more slowly which means I can’t, for example, go through many blog posts but I’m enjoying listening to this audiobook because I can more easily create a visual representation of what is happening (the book was the Picture of Dorian Gray). Normally listening to audiobooks is somewhat painful to me — now I believe that it’s due to the “visual noise” effect.
This kind of visual sensory deprivation causes me to form certain images in my imagination, as if I was seeing them. They are usually just patterns that slowly transform into other patterns. I can’t see color yet (with the exception of a tiny blue speck of light I just saw surrounded by nothingness). This experience is uncannily like being in a dream (I also have difficulties distinguishing colors in my dreams).
I have no perception of time (ironically, I caught myself actually wearing a watch all day) or any sense of how dark it is. Even though my friend told me what time it was, I hadn’t internalized that the sun had already set. I had this strange feeling that it’s early afternoon most of the day. Overall, I’d say that time moves much faster than normally.
After the first few hours have passed I moved on from being in awe to wanting to be effective. I quickly began to look for objects around me that helped me quickly orient myself. For example, I used the carpet in my room as a reference area — I know, for example that as I follow the carpet along its perimeter I will be moving around the room and at any instant I will have a good mental image of what’s around me.
I find edges much more important than shapes; edges are something that i can trail; shapes lose their intricacies when all you have is two hands moving in three dimensions somewhat coarsely. Connections between objects and their function become much more important than their form.
Day two.
My morning routine took significantly less time than yesterday. This time I’ve been using my other senses more to orient myself in the space. For example, I’d listen to the ceiling fan and based on my perception of where I was relative to it, I was able to move around the room faster. I think I’m also slowly memorizing some distances, for example the distance in steps between my bed and the bathroom. I’m not doing it consciously but obviously in the absence of visual stimuli I have to find accurate and reliable substitutes.
My dreams were richer, fuller, but I haven’t noticed any difference between how I used to dream before the experiment and now. Writing is tougher: perhaps it’s because I’m a visual thinker and not seeing the body of the text I’ve just written makes it difficult to create structure. Writing when blind, even with my computer speaking every word as I type it, is more like on-the-fly storytelling than story construction. The only difference is that I can take my time — as a result the prose is more expressive, flows more naturally, is easier to listen, but has holes in structure.
I’ve worked out some tricks to help me get through the day. When pouring liquids, I put my finger in the container so I can feel the level of liquid and not let it overflow. Similarly, I’d check with my finger whether I put enough toothpaste on the toothbrush. I pour the shampoo slowly on my hand and try to figure out how much of it I poured based on the cold feeling that shampoo has on the palm of my hand.
I think I fidget much more now, again probably due to sensory deprivation.
The most challenging, but also the most remarkable difference is in how I process information. Without the sense of sight, all processing is linear: I have immediate access to the last few words, or bars (if writing music), and the rest has to be filled by my brain. Instead of focusing on structure, I need to think about flow — one thought transforming into another; one world blending into another. I produce much less, but what I produce is richer because it has to stand on its own, be engaging at all times. It’s stateless.
Making music was a great experience — in fact, I think I will continue to experiment with music when blind. I’d find myself not to cling to the same keys as I always do. Recording music is tricky but other than that I felt much more creative. Perhaps, if you don’t see the white and black keys, you start focusing on what’s behind them rather than on them.
Naturally, I am more aware of what is where now. While previously my brain could be lazy (it didn’t have to compose elaborate models of the room and objects within it, because all it took to know was a quick glance), now the cost of gathering information is relatively high: I have to look around and feel my way around so I remember much more. I know where all the articles of clothing are in my room. I know what’s on the night stand, in order from left to right. I remember where I put things.
Going about my life was fairly easy when everything around me was in my control. But when things changed and I wasn’t aware of them, I found it fairly difficult to adjust. For example when some dishes were rearranged, it took me a long while to re-adjust. After I’d noticed the world is different from my model of it, I would have to rebuild my model.
I found it pretty easy to interact with other people. In fact, the lack of visual “noise” meant that I could engage much more in what the other person was saying. I remember these conversations better now.
I took my blinds off on Monday morning. There was no “epiphany”; I also wasn’t bothered by light. Curiously, my right eye (the good one) exhibited similar problems as my left one has always had. This was temporary, but I think it means that the “reboot” theory might actually work — the brain weakened the connection to my right eye. It hadn’t been weakened enough to eliminate the bias, but it was a good start.
While the moment immediately following the regaining of sight wasn’t spectacular, the following thirty minutes were… surreal, to say the least. I felt a little out of it, as it the world around me had undergone some strange transformation while I was away. Perhaps that’s what (temporarily) regaining depth perception feels like (I have non because of amblyopia).
In all, I felt empowered to do some of the things I was able to do before, and was impressed to be able to get more from some others. However, I wasn’t as productive as normally. True, part of it was the fact that I’ve only been blind for two days — I am sure that people who are actually blind have perfected the routines that took me an hour to do. It’s also not at all certain whether that loss in productivity more than repaid itself in the higher quality of the work I came up with during those two days.
Uncharted Territory
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009I have several recurring dreams. One such dream places me back at home, in my home town. I am on a routine trip, say to the grocery store. Suddenly I deviate from the path I always take and find myself taking one I’ve never taken. It is that path that reveals mystical, magical areas of my town to me, areas that clearly exist only in my imagination–for example, suddenly a path I take to the grocery story becomes a narrow passage on the side of the mountain that suddenly appears next to my house. My imagination goes wild, conjuring up places taken from some kind of fable, splicing them into my dream. While such fantastic places clearly are fake, I can’t be sure in the dream because technically I’ve never taken that path.
I think this recurring dream highlights my fascination with unchartered territory, especially places in close proximity to well-known and frequently-visited areas. It’s almost as if my mind wanted these areas to be full of mystery.
I think it’s a natrual response to the world getting smaller. It’s now easy for me to fly all over the world; any two places on Earth are at most twenty-four hours apart, yet there is still so much I haven’t explored, even five hundred yards from my childhood home.
I go back home every year and sometimes am tempted by following one of those alternative paths from my dreams. But I quickly stop, knowing deep inside that I’ll be disppointed if I do so. If I prove to myself that there is nothing out-of-the-ordinary there, where will the mystery, the magic go? With nowhere to go, it will disappear. And life without magic is an uninspiring life.
The most shocking example of unchartered territory is probably my apartment block itself. I live on the eighth floor of a Communist-era block: back in the ’50s, a marvel of engineering and a perfect example of socialism manifesting itself through homogenization and utilitarian mass production; now a dark, ugly reminder of the depressing times that’s way past its effective lifetime and thus unsafe; then–the Burj’s (al-Buruuj) of their times; now–embarrassing pimples in the skyline that desperately wants to be innocent enough.
I have lived in the building for most of my adolescent life, yet I have never taken the elevator past my floor. Not once. The top floor–one I’ve never been to–with its access to the roof, and the terminal stop for the elevator, has only (but prominently) featured in my dreams. For instance, I would frequently dream of mistakenly taking the elevator to the tenth floor. Every time I did, something fantastic happened–for example, the elevator wouldn’t stop and simply blew through the roof (in a puzzling, rather than scary, kind of way); or I’d never actually get to the tenth floor, yet always get closer and closer to it. Or the elevator would suddenly start moving sideways. There were dozens of variations, one for each recurrence of the dream. They weren’t frightening; I remember being intrigued and overwhelmed, like Alice in Wonderland.
They were, however, respectful of the Magic. The tension in the elevator cables made a distinctive set of sounds as the elevator crawled from the ground floor to the eighth (in a kind of signature unique to this elevator). Obviously, the symphony is unfinished; I don’t know the last two bars of it. None of the dreams ever dared complete it for me; the sounds are like a key to the unchartered territory that I never obtained.
There is an animated short that reflects the spirit of my feeling like nothing else; it is one of the shorts of Animatrix, called Beyond. In it, a child discovers a “bug” (the whole world is a computer simulation–there, I spoiled Matrix for you) in his neighborhood that causes the laws of physics to cease to apply momentarily, warps time and space, and allows cause and effect relationship to be violated. It’s a clever way to describe magic. In the short, the bug is corrected; everything goes back to norm. But we can’t stop feeling disappointed, even though we knew it was all unreal.
Will I ever ride to the top floor of my building? Never. Not because I’m afraid, but because if I do, there will be no unchartered territory. The magic will be gone; hefty reality will set in instead. And I find it rather convenient to have an infinite repository of magic two floors above my apartment.
What I want to teach my children
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009- I want to teach them to appreciate beauty
- I want to show them that giving can be more rewarding than receiving
- I want them to understand a connection between cause and effect
- I want them to understand what a trade-off is
- I want them to have ample means to express their creativity
- I want to empower them to solve problems and answer questions they may come up with
- I want to help them see connections between seemingly unrelated things by reducing them to concepts; I want them to understand “abstraction”
- I want to teach them to be ambitious, strive for mastery, and have learning goals (not performance goals)
- I want them to understand how to set goals
- I want them to be able to define and express their preferences
- I want them to be able to read people
- I want them to ask difficult questions
- From other sources:
- How to focus intently on a problem until it’s solved
- The benefit of postponing short-term satisfaction in exchange for long-term success
- How to read critically
- The power of being able to lead groups of peers without receiving clear delegated authority
- An understanding of the extraordinary power of the scientific method, in just about any situation or endeavor
- How to persuasively present ideas in multiple forms, especially in writing and before a group
- Project management. Self-management and the management of ideas, projects and people
- Personal finance. Understanding the truth about money and debt and leverage
- An insatiable desire (and the ability) to learn more. Forever
- Most of all, the self-reliance that comes from understanding that relentless hard work can be applied to solve problems worth solving
Specifically here are some things I want to do with them:
- I will read poetry to them
- I will ask them to periodically donate something they’ve earned (or something they own)
- I will reward them for asking why, especially in succession
- I will encourage them to make something out of nothing (papercraft, kitchen chemistry experiments)
- I will teach them a second language as early as possible
- I will ask them to describe things, events and thoughts to me
- I will encourage them to write fiction
- Teach your kid to read
- 50 Dangerous Things you should let your kid do
- Awards don’t work–don’t couple chores with money!
- They should learn Chinese
- Learn the history of the Universe (bighistory)
- Elimination communication
- Wireless, biosensor baby pajamas
The evolution of the todo list
Monday, December 7th, 2009Being somewhat OCD, I keep the concept of a todo list close to my heart. I’ve gone through several dozen iterations of an excellent todo list and what I have arrived at works very well for me; I want to share some of the design decisions I’ve made in the past, since I’m sure that if you’re just as passionate about keeping track of things to do, you probably came across the same problems as I did.
I wrote my first todo list when I was in fourth grade (I was about 10 years old). I found the concept really useful in staying organized and keeping on top of tasks. I think the perfectionist in me hated forgetting things (most of us have a dislike of forgetting things–this is related to our irrational preference for the preservation of options) so I added a safety net for my memory early on in my life (also, as a youngster, I would tend to forget things really easily).
The todo list started as a collection of subjects for which the teach assigned homework. I would write three-letter abbreviations out on a small 2.5″ by 2.5″ of paper, squeezing Monday through Wednesday on one page and the rest of the week on another. The first lesson I learned was to write in a small, regular type so that things could fit on a small piece of paper that I could take with me anywhere.
Soon I realized that it’s better to attach the tasks to the day they are due (or the day before, to be precise) rather than the day they were assigned. This pushed Monday through Thursday on one page and the weekend on another (since I ended up doing most of the task on weekends).
At some point the list was enhanced to include items not related to homework: for example, I wanted to find a new wallpaper for my computer’s desktop, or finish a particular computer program or a game I was working on. Most of the things I had listed at this point were tasks–they were specific and achievable in the frame of one week. When I added longer-term items (for example, books that
I was supposed to read over a semester), I’d separate them visually from all other items with a different color. Finally, I started using icons to represent frequently-listed tasks, partly for increased efficiency, partly because I liked having a system that only I understood.
When I was 16, I went to high school in London. My tasks slowly amalgamated into goals, small and big; particularly as I started listing things I wanted to achieve for self-improvement. This was also the first time that I separated short-term things from long-term things: the latter was one large sheet of paper that I kept in my drawer; the former became post-it notes (yes! I discovered post-it notes!). This was mostly also due to efficiency — I didn’t want to keep copying the same items over and over again from one week’s post-it note to the other.
The move to post-it notes also forced me to keep everything on one page. This ended up being a good thing: I was realizing that I’m a hypervisual person–being able to grasp the entire week at once allowed me to get things done more efficiently (this is also why I prefer restaurants that display all the entrees on one page).
At some point in my senior year in college I finally moved to have an electronic form of my todo list. I held out for quite a long time, because the act of writing out my tasks seemed to make a longer lasting impression on me than typing them out. But through behavioral change I slowly got used to referring to my todo list on a computer. I worked out a few rules that made such a system possible: having the list open at all times (so that I would never lose sight of what I was doing–this also forced me to keep the list small), using simple formatting (I stuck with plain text notes formatted with tabs; simple formatting allowed me not to lose sight of the tasks, allowed me to edit the list very quickly, and made the list very compact). I worked out very efficient (“cryptic” to some) terms to denote tasks.
It was then that I started to think about the effectiveness of my strategy to get things done (mind you, that was back in the day, before someone decided to write a book about these commonsensical things and made a lot of money) as opposed to just the efficiency of the representation. It became more important to have a system that helped me achieve the things rather than a system that allowed me to write them down quickly. This is where a lot of the experimentation happened. I thought a lot about what makes me motivated and while most of the motivation is independent of the protocol for keeping track of goals and tasks, I found a fairly significant variability between which system I used and how effective I was at getting things done.
I toyed with an idea of a kind of game I’d play with myself, a kind of system where I’d reward myself for getting stuff done. I didn’t really need any exogenous incentive–earning virtual “points” was all that I needed (perhaps it’s because I’m a conceptual thinker, or perhaps because I’m a nerd). I’d assign myself points for every task, and the number of points was proportional to how “important” the task was. I would set goals for, say, a month. I went even more crazy than that, coming up with a number of point thresholds, exceeding each of which would give me a different “rank” (it’s incredible how much fun a kid can have with nothing but pen and paper). Recently I dropped any kind of scoring system because I noticed that I by and large knew how well I was doing and keeping track of my score became less of a factor in motivating me — in other words I realized that the desire to get things done had to come from something else than how many points I got for the day.
I also experimented with the timeframe for my short-term todo list. At that point I still had two lists: a short-term one and a long-term one, and every time I came up with a new instance of the former one I’d consult the latter. For about a year I changed the frequency of the short-term list to be biweekly but I found that a frequency of one week is optimal — the list needed to include at least one weekend (otherwise it wouldn’t be all that useful since I do get a lot of the stuff done over the weekend–the weekend is also a “buffer” for overflow work); but if it included more than one I would end up feel too complacent on the first weekend and postpone everything to the second one.
About three years ago I came up with a framework for a high-level structure of the todo lists that I had by and large accepted and tried to follow: I listed things which I wanted to do every day (for example, get up to speed on the blogs that I was following; or go jogging) in a kind of “checklist”. Generic todo items would follow, at first scattered arbitrarily throughout the week. Specific events had dates attached to them. I had a separate file that listed events happening on a particular date if they were more than a week away, to not litter my todo list too much.
I went back and forth on whether I should explicitly include the daily tasks on my list or not. At first I thought that by including them I would be more incentivized to do them every day. At the end updating them ended up just wasting my time so instead, my short-term list now has a list of these things to remind me what I have to do every day, but I don’t keep track of whether I actually do.
Finally came the iPhone and for the first time since I switched to a computer-based todo list I could carry the lists with me at all times. It was great as I no longer had to email myself notes (or keep them in some separate
container and then get them out of my iPhone). I’m still pretty adamant on keeping the notes as simple and unformatted as possible and accessible from anywhere so I wanted to stick to text files. Fortunately I found an app called SyncBook which did exactly what I wanted it to do — it allowed me to sync a folder of text files between my computer and the iPhone and–most importantly–it allowed me to edit the text files on the iPhone (there are several good apps that work in a similar fashion — take a look at Evernote if you don’t need the notes to be text files and don’t mind slightly bigger overhead, or just sync native Notes if you don’t mind Marker Felt. There are also apps that allow you to edit richer documents if you do care about the formatting).
About three months ago I settled on a final design for my todo lists. I like it because
- It’s simple–there is minimal overhead; I only need to update pretty much one word when I complete a task (or want to add a new one)
- The important information, and only the important information is with me at all times–I have the todo list open on my computer, and when I’m away from my computer I have it on my iPhone. Syncing is as easy as pressing one button in SyncBook, and I can sync over the local network, which is great (I can do it anywhere around the house)
- My todo list is organized in a three-tier structure: day, week, month, which is a natural structure to think about tasks
- week (a short term list) enumerates all days of the week with things which I have to do that day. It also has a general “grab bag” of items which I simply have to do at some point in the week. Finally it has a list of items which are my daily tasks (I don’t repeat them for every day) and a list of items which are my weekly tasks. All the daily and weekly tasks derive from my goals. Finally, it contains a list of problems in my life that I want to solve in order of how anxious they make me.
- thisMonth enumerates all items which I’m supposed to do at some point in the month. I also include longer term periodic things such as what books to read and what miniprojects to do. Every week I take some items from this list and put them in the week list.
- nextMonth enumerates all items which I’m supposed to do next month. Every month I move them to the thisMonth list.
- calendar which contains all events with dates attached to them. I tried to use something like iCal but I like the flexibility of specifying indeterminate times (e.g. some time in the latter half of January) and I found the existing interfaces of iCal insufficient
- All the items are available offline — I hate not being to access something because it’s online, or having to deal with slow web-based interfaces. Changing a status of an item takes me a couple of seconds at most
- It’s short–the short term list consists is a text file measuring 20 rows and at most 50 characters in a row (so it can fit on one page on my iPhone). All thanks to efficient representation of todo items — there’s no need to be verbose since I remember most things that I’m supposed to do given a short prompt. For example, I know that “nprAlarm” is a task to set my computer up so that it wakes me up every morning by playing the live podcast of WNYC.
- It’s fast–syncing is fast, editing is fast, viewing is fast. Moving items from one list to another is fast.
- All my goals are represented in one form or another on the short term list. That way I’m constantly reminded of what I’m supposed to be doing and how it connects to my goals.
Of course, this framework is just one of many and which framework works for you depends very much on your personality and what makes you tick. I do, however, encourage you to follow a few principles:
- Have a list. Some people say that having a list is bad because you stop relying on your memory. I solve this problem by training my memory in other ways (e.g. with Brain Challenge). Don’t conflate training with work
- Experiment. Switch things around. A kind of “evolutionary” process–an informed random walk–allows you to find the most effective system
- Keep it simple. Complicated lists end up wasting time and detract from actually getting stuff done
- Keep it available. You never know when you have some time to knock something off the list, and you never know when you want to add something to the list
- Keep it flexible. After all, we think in free-form way, not in a highly structured way, especially when we go about our daily activities and let our mind wander
Sunrise and Sunset
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009I knew since I was ten (we had quite a comprehensive curriculum at school) that the shortest day of the year falls on December 22nd. What I didn’t ponder until very recently was whether it was also the day of the latest sunrise (and, consequently, the earliest sunset).
While it may seem like a natural consequence of December 22nd being the shortest day, it doesn’t necessarily have to be true. If we model the time of sunrise and of sunset as two sine waves, a(t) = A sin(t+α)+K and b(t) = B sin(t+β)+L such that t0 minimizes the difference (we can drop the constants):
B sin(t+β) – A sin(t+α)
This means that
d(b(t)-a(t))/dt = 0 at t0 => B cos(t0+β) – A cos(t0+α) = 0
We need to show that this equality may hold (for some values of α, β, A and B) even if one of the waves is not minimized at t0. Let
da(t)/dt = P ≠ 0 at t0 => A cos(t0+α) = P
B cos(t0+β) = A cos(t0+α) = P
cos(t0+β) = P/B, -A/B<=P/B<=A/B
We can always find some values of A and B such that P/B is between -1 and 1, and hence the equation will be satisfied for some values of t0 and β.
We can also take a short route and recall that a linear combination of two sine waves of the same frequency but not necessarily the same phase is still a sine wave. Its phase is a function of the difference in phases of the two waves. The value of t0 that minimizes the resulting wave is not necessarily going to minimize any of the two input waves because the three phases are different (and not different by a multiple of π).
In fact, if you look at the sunrise and sunset times in Connecticut around this December, the shortest day, unsurprisingly, falls on December 22nd, but the latest sunrise is on January 4th 2010 and the earliest sunset is on December 8th.
This is great news–it means that starting on December 8th (and not the 22nd), it will finally start getting darker later and later!
Ringtones
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009I have two issues with them; they are kind of on the opposite ends of a spectrum.
- Why do so many people use the same ringtone? I’d say that a ringtone allows one to express one’s individuality much more than any other customizable element in a mobile phone — yes, this includes all those fancy cell phone covers. After all, everyone around you hears your ringtone. I somewhat understand when an incredibly popular phone has very few options for, say, the sound of an incoming text message but most phones these days allow you to make your ringtone out of pretty much anything.
- Which brings me to another point — why do so many people use such terrible ringtones? A good ringtone is recognizable, or at least melodic, consists of relatively few isolated frequencies (including any kind of speech in a ringtone is a terrible idea–I do not understand why so many people don’t get this–is my sense of æsthetic just so different?), and simply not be obnoxious. If your ringtone sounds like a grumbling 80-year old pissed off because you just threw him in a really deep well with a bunch of snakes and TNT, you’d better find a better one.
The magic of discovery
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009There is something… magical about making discoveries. It’s one of those very fundamental, profound pleasures that stay with us throughout our life. We never really get tired of discovering things.
One of the most powerful and overwhelming feelings I’ve had as a child was the feeling of finding something unique around my house. Usually these were small things–things other people threw out of their window that landed on the playground I’d spend a lot of time in. They were small gears that were once part of some machine, or tiny tiles used in kitchen walls. There were toy cars that some reckless child threw out of a balcony. Of course, from a rational, adult perspective I shouldn’t have been collecting these things–God knows who handled them before and how they handled them–but we’re talking about a matter of passion here. And since I knew my mom would yell at me for being unhygienic or something (being a pessimist she would come up with all those diseases I could contract by playing with my treasures), they were my little secrets. Something I found and something only I am aware of.
I felt that way because of the sense of ownership I had for the little item I just found. I think this is the most incredible thing about discoveries–the discoverer is almost always the owner of the discovered (even if it’s a more abstract kind of ownership, for example, in form of gaining immortality as the discoverer or something precious). For example, the first dream I ever remember was one in which I found a camera — a nice one at that, an SLR (I didn’t even know what an SLR was, it just looked professional) — and I hid it on the side of my tiny little bed. When I woke up, I looked but couldn’t find the camera. The fact that it made me sad for a minute there meant that I had no intrinsic conception of the difference between a dream and reality, whereas I certainly was aware of the significance of discovery.
As we get older we don’t get any less overwhelmed. The pride of discovery is still there, but the discovery becomes more conceptual. Think about all the times you discovered a great book in a bookstore and felt really good about it. Or all the times you discovered how to put all the Lego bricks together without the user guide. I’d claim that the moment when you solve a problem is a kind of discovery (the aha moment; the kind of epiphany that Gregory House has every week).
Even today I get a warm and fuzzy feeling when I discover a fact that surprises me. Today the feeling is accompanied with a sense of relief: the world is not so small after all; there’s still things to learn, things that lie there hidden just waiting for us to uncover them. And while it’s not too likely we’ll tuck them away in a gap between our bed and the wall, we still feel like we own our discovery.
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