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The “Door Close” button

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

All elevators feature a “Door Close” button. To my surprise (although it is supposedly well-known), I found out about a year into using them that these buttons do absolutely nothing. Why is it? Perhaps some elevator manufacturer decided that having a button that forces the door to close leads to nothing but injury lawsuits. Perhaps the manufacturer doesn’t trust humans to decide when it is time to close the door. Either way, as a customer, I feel cheated. Either get rid of the button or make it work — otherwise I feel like you don’t trust me or respect me enough.

The fact that it took me a relatively long time to realize this speaks to an interesting phenomenon — apparently as my mind sought the cause-and-effect link between me pressing the button and the doors closing, it tricked me into thinking that there was indeed a strong enough correlation between these two events to raise no obvious suspicions…

While we’re at elevator doors: I noticed that many elevator doors are relatively unforgiving when it comes to my arms triggering the shutting doors to reopen. Just putting your arm in the door’s way is not enough; waving, or even relatively firm pressure on the doors doesn’t help. Of course, as my arm becomes lodged in the space between the door and the edge, the doors promptly reopen, but no sooner (I should figure out how much pressure is actually needed to force them to reopen). This also makes me think that elevator manufacturers don’t have much respect for their indirect customers.

Posted in technology, things everyone should do | No Comments »

Does anyone ever do [fill in the blank]?

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

There are a multitude of everyday opportunities to engage with people or institutions, but it’s very likely that nobody really does anymore. Here are some, with a suggestion for a miniproject for each.

  • “How is my driving? Call such and such number with compliments or complaints”. I doubt people actually call to complain, but they certainly don’t call to compliment. If you see a sticker like this, and the driver does something worth complimenting, call the number.
  • The inspection certificate for this elevator is located at the front desk. I bet nobody actually asks to see these. Do it next time you see a note like this in the elevator.
  • An “A” grade given to a New York City restaurant means that the restaurant had at most 13 sanitary violations. Which means it could have 13 sanitary violations! Call the NYC Department of Health and ask what these violations were for a restaurant of your choice.
  • Read an End User License Agreement. In its entirety. Of a single app. I dare you.
  • Movie credits always state that no animals were harmed in the production of the movie. Verify it (how does one even go about doing it?).

Posted in clever, lifehacks, miniproject, things everyone should do | No Comments »

What do you do?

Friday, August 19th, 2011

I imagine, some time in the future, my child asking me a very simple question.

What do you do, daddy?

How will I answer this question? How do I want to answer this question? Will I be comfortable explaining (and if so, will I be able to explain) the financial services industry, how it makes people in this world better?

Maybe that’s how we should decide what to do with our lives — if we can explain it to our children, it’s a good thing to do.

Posted in for reflection, purpose, reductions, things everyone should do | No Comments »

Maps Facing North, Part II

Friday, August 19th, 2011

Some time ago I wrote about why I think having navigation maps face north is superior to having them face in the direction of travel. Admittedly, one difficulty in such an arrangement is turning: it’s not always clear whether to turn left or right if the map is not facing the direction of your travel. Here is a good hack that can help you overcome this difficulty.

Suppose you arrive at a turning point:

Your navigation system (facing north) may show this, for example.

It’s not immediately obvious that you’re supposed to turn left, sharply. Here is what you can do: draw an imaginary line that specifies your current direction on the map, and place an imaginary steering wheel at the intersection. Now grab the real steering wheel at the point where the extended line meets an imaginary steering wheel, and turn towards the direction in which you’re heading, like this:

This is how you know which direction to turn in (and how much to turn!)

All you need to do is imagine overlaying the map onto your steering wheel, to know where to grab the steering wheel and how to turn it. The above method has the added benefit of letting you know how much to turn — the sharper the turn, the more you’ll have to rotate the steering wheel!

If you don’t care about the magnitude of the turn, just the direction, a simpler method is simply to turn the wheel in the direction defined by the arc drawn from the final direction to the original one, like this:

A simple way to figure out the direction of turn

In other words, simply imagine placing the map on the steering wheel, grab the wheel at a point where the final direction of travel intersects the steering wheel, and turn it towards the point of intersection of the original direction of travel and the steering wheel.

Try it, it’s really easy, and I know you’ve been antsy to switch the map to be displayed facing north!

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Pedestrians vs Bikes

Friday, August 19th, 2011

Ever since I started biking in Central Park, I’ve been formulating my opinion of pedestrians.

For one–I’m just going to get this off my chest–I am increasingly frustrated by pedestrians who think they are entitled to just cross the street and bikers will slow down for them. I think it has to do with the sense of entitlement mostly because of the mixture of stubbornness and madness displayed on their faces; but also–let’s face it–surely they wouldn’t have done the same for a large ass truck heading their way.

In general, I found myself being less and less patient with pedestrians (I do, however, try to differentiate between those who just don’t pay attention and those who jaywalk to spite me). I used to slow down, later just swerve to avoid them. Now I’m pushing it more and more, engaging in this terrible game of chicken. I think, deeply, nobody wants to be run over by a cyclist (while the cyclist would definitely be injured and the bike damaged, the damage to the pedestrian is greater by simple laws of physics and the pedestrians must–let’s hope–understand that intuitively).

Crosswalks are interesting in Central Park. While they are accompanied by traffic lights, both pedestrians and cyclists seem to ignore them by and large. My take on this is very simple: a crosswalk gives the cyclists the obligation to be more careful (it’s like a flashing amber light for regular traffic). A crosswalk with the walk signal for pedestrians gives the pedestrians right of way, by which I mean a pedestrian should feel to be in control of his or her pace in crossing the intersection in order to cross safely. In other words, a pedestrian should not have to hurry half way through the intersection because otherwise a racing cyclist hits him or her; a pedestrian should be allowed to slow down or speed up. The pedestrian is in control. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the cyclist needs to stop at the crosswalk. So long as the cyclist ensures he or she is not on a collision course (with adequate buffer to account for a reasonable change in the pedestrian’s behavior), he or she can cycle through the intersection even when the pedestrian has a walk signal.

This rule is symmetric, of course. A cross with the don’t walk signal for pedestrians gives cyclists the right of way. A cyclist should not have to swerve or slow down in order to avoid hitting a pedestrian, but a pedestrian is welcome to cross if he or she is careful not to get in the way of a cyclist, taking into account a reasonable change in the cyclist’s behavior.

I like this rule because it’s unambiguous and efficient (it’s impractical for all cyclists and pedestrians alike to stop at all such crosswalks). Similarly, it does give the pedestrian a slight edge (cyclists must be careful around crosswalks) which seems fair given the prevalent opinion about relative rights of pedestrians, cyclists, and motor vehicle operators.

Now, if only I got everyone to listen to me and actually behave accordingly…

Posted in The Daily Badness, human nature, reductions, things everyone should do | 1 Comment »

A Different Way to Teach Exact Sciences

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

…Inexactly.

When I was at school, there was this time period when I found physics incredibly fun and interesting, and a time period when I found it painful and dull. Of course, the moments with experiments were by far more engaging than the moments with mathematics and equations, but I’m actually just thinking at the latter part — there were times when the formulas were beautifully simple and the results satisfying, and times when the calculations felt like drudgery, there were a plethora of formulae which I couldn’t intuit, and even the result didn’t “click” with me intuitively.

I attribute a large part of this lack of excitement over physics to excessive focus on algebra and symbolic manipulations. I consider myself fairly good at algebra, but I feel that even I would have benefited more from my physics tuition if I had thought of it less as an exercise pure math and more as a systemization of the physical world. I am not advocating for making physics less conceptual — quite the opposite — I want kids to understand that all things are connected, and that there are really very few rules that govern the world; that there is a kind of beauty to physics. I just don’t want to conflate this with a college dose of pure mathematics.

What is it precisely that I am advocating for?

What if we change the way we teach physics (and, while we’re at it, all exact sciences) to focus not on forcing kids to memorize all the formulas, which end up being derivatives of one another (but we don’t have the tools or the sophistication to know it), but on having them answer questions about the physical world by teaching them the few simple rules and equipping them with the tools to compute the answer, sacrificing the symbols along the way? In other words, I want to teach kids as few formulas as possible, instead showing them how they can transform these formulas numerically and compute the answer.

What I am proposing is no small matter. It means teaching the kids the concept of calculus (but without the heavy algebra behind it), and having them apply it in problems. Yes, they would be able to (numerically) integrate before they learned about exact solutions to quadratic equations, but why is this necessarily something to avoid?

I believe this would work for a number of reasons. First, while in the absence of sophisticated tools, checking the algebra was really the only fair way to evaluate students, these days we can follow the kids’ thought process even without any symbols. It is also satisfying to arrive at a tangible answer as both an apt metaphor for physics as a way to answer questions about the world, and something one can have an intuitive reaction to (“5″ is a much better answer to have an intuitive reaction to than “x^2+1, at 2″). It also decouples physics as an experimental science where theories are put in place and tested, from the mathematics behind the theories that can be daunting and distracting from the main point. And while I believe that symbolic manipulation is a great skill that drastically improves ones cognitive abilities, we still have mathematics that will teach it to the kids. And imagine the “aha” moment that kids will have once they realize that what they have been doing in math, transforming all these expressions, coming up with closed form solutions and exact answers, can enrich everything they have been doing in physics — using numerical calculus in application of a few very simple rules to arrive at the answers to problems.

By the way — it would be a sin to not recommend what I believe to be by far the most engaging, satisfying, and challenging physics textbook I have ever read: Motion Mountain. I wish I had had read it much earlier than I did (at 25). Motion Mountain is epic, in all the possible meanings of this word. Instead of focusing on hard math, it does its best to show me what physics is all about — the side of it that I was never shown in class. Its problems make me think (never recall), and, while you need to have a degree to take full advantage of it, I believe you can reach for it at an early age. In fact, it’s these “layers” that make the book so fascinating.

Go and read it now.

Posted in art, funny, things everyone should do | No Comments »

Being Young

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

Many people who are older than me gave me this piece of advice:

Take advantage of being young, especially a year or so after college. You have very few obligations and commitments, and you can devote large chunks of time on whatever moves you, whatever you are passionate about. Take risks, do things you’ve never done because the next good opportunity for that will be a few decades later and even then, you won’t want to take as many risks and you will not be in as good a physical and intellectual shape.

Posted in for reflection, pointers, things everyone should do | No Comments »

Comparisons vs Absolutes

Sunday, May 15th, 2011

I make this mistake all the time. Instead of thinking of myself on an absolute scale, having standards that depend solely on what I think is right and wrong, acceptable and not acceptable, good and inadequate, I constantly compare myself to other people.

I guess it’s human nature, to see what’s around us and compare. After all, a comparison is a much easier operation to carry out than an absolute assessment — the latter requires a good mapping from reality to something more abstract while the former is simple pattern matching. But there are many problems with comparing myself to others: I may end up spending a lot of energy on something that is irrelevant to what matters to me; I don’t utilize people I compare myself to to help provide me leverage (just like they should use me to get leverage) and instead end up doing things inefficiently–double-doing either explicitly or implicitly through lack of information; I may also think I’m done (if the comparison tells me so) while in fact be far from achieving whatever goal I need to achieve.

I wish I thought of absolutes rather than in terms of comparisons.

Posted in comparisons, for reflection, human nature, things everyone should do | No Comments »

Picking the Right Image Format

Monday, May 9th, 2011

I am fairly particular with some things that other people may consider very small. Maybe it’s about a principle, maybe it’s OCD-ness. One thing I absolutely can’t stand is images in an inappropriate file format. Let me explain.

Pretty much all of technology can be characterized by one word: tradeoffs. There is no free lunch, and any decision in technology comes with its pros and cons. Specifically, images can be represented in a number of different formats, each of which has certain properties, and thus pros and cons. In fact, the fact that there are still multiple formats means quite naturally that one format isn’t appropriate for all use cases.

For all intents and purposes, there are four formats you will see images in.

  • Raw formats — such as BMP — describe the image precisely, pixel by pixel. While this may seem superior, it’s stupid. Images usually have very little entropy and saving them verbatim simply wastes space, especially now where computers and even cell phones are fast enough to render any non-raw format instantaneously
  • Lossy formats — such as JPEG — are an efficient way to store an image but they are lossy. The images, when loaded are not faithful representations of the original. With JPEGs it’s possible to define the size-quality tradeoff but even with the highest possible setting, JPEGs have certain artifacts that make it unsuitable for images which are logos, patterns, graphs and diagrams, and text. I absolutely cannot stand artifact-laden JPEGs only because somebody did not know enough about computers (or didn’t care enough) to pick a different file format. Please don’t do it ever again.
  • Lossless compressed formats — such as PNG or GIF — represent the image faithfully but require much less space than a raw image. You should not use these if you’re trying to encode a photograph or highly detailed picture, because it has enough entropy, but for anything Web related, for text, and for most screenshots, you should always, always use these. Specifically, please use PNGs. GIFs are a proprietary and limited format that I hope will get out of fashion very soon (GIFs do not allow a high enough color depth for today’s standards, or good transparency).

Please use the right image format.

Posted in The Daily Badness, art, comparisons, technology, things everyone should do | No Comments »

KEEP LOOKING

Monday, May 9th, 2011

We find comfort in light. There is ample symbolism that gives light an undoubtedly positive meaning — the light leading to an Afterlife, light as serenity, peace (have you ever seen any peace symbol that was surrounded by darkness?), energy, goodness.

But there is something better than light. It’s the twilight; it’s the knowledge that the light is there somewhere, it just needs to be found. The anticipation of light gives us hope and keeps us going.

In ancient mythology, there is a concept of Paradise Lost, mankind’s fall from grace. But in my view, Paradise is not really lost. Man did not fail or screw up. Instead, Man was shown a glimpse of Paradise, and then told to earn it. Without seeing it in the first place, Man would never feel incentivized to keep looking for it.

In a way, what makes us human is our desire to keep looking. We are always aiming for the next great thing. Progress is just a disguise for mankind’s search of answers to the infinite stream of questions. It doesn’t matter how many questions are left. It doesn’t matter where and when Paradise will be found. We’ll keep looking — that’s all that matters.

Posted in for reflection, principles, purpose, reductions, things everyone should do | 2 Comments »

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