Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Update

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021

So after a few weeks in the new role and having been paid I can now call myself a junior developer. I'm really enjoying writing code, learning, seeing how some bigger projects are managed and how teams work together. There's a heap for me to learn still and seeing the skill difference between our lead dev and what I can do inspires me that I have so much room to grow.

Life wise I'm settling into new routines, now that I'm getting a feel for work requirements. Running and gym back on the schedule.

There's more I can write about, but ultimately right now I just feel happy. Things aren't perfect and I'm improving parts of my life, but for the first time in years I feel like I'm on the right path forwards

New career. More updates?

Friday, February 26th, 2021

In the 13 years I've had this domain and blog I've only made a handful of updates. Reading back on them all I was generally happy with what I wrote, I just needed to keep it up. Part of the reason I didn't was being stuck in job that wasn't challenging me to learn, to grow and improve.

I recently resigned from my position at the university and soon to be starting in a new role working in tech. It's a massive change and will involve working from home. With this new opportunity comes a clean slate for a whole lot of automatic habits to develop.

I don't know if this attempt at blogging will be any more successful than the last, and there may be some limitations of what I'm allowed to write. I'll have to check with my boss (or set the posts to hidden)

Test GPX post

Wednesday, August 12th, 2020

Hello

Download file: Antsy_for_Anstey_Trail_Run_.gpx

Habits

Wednesday, February 5th, 2020

Over the last 7 years, and longer in particular I've been interested in developing a curated selection of habits that will help me achieve my long term goals and become the kind of person I want to be. Initially when I first started out, I often made a joke. I wish I had root access to my brain

Of course, even if I did have root access, I'm likely to be a dumb user and accidentally modify or delete something critical to keeping me alive. 'BRTH.BIN', why is it taking up so many resources, let's just kill that process. So as nice as it would be to just modify a few variables and lines of code in my brain to make me like running or want to eat or read more, I'll have to go about it the hard way.

The science of habit formation can be summed up as force yourself to do something enough times that you can eventually do it without thinking or effort. There's more to it than that of course. I listened to a few audiobooks, The power of habit, by Charles Duhigg and Atomic Habits by James Clear to learn the terminology of what I was trying to apply.

For any habit, there's 3 components that make it a habit, the cue, the routine and the reward. The cue is often a contextual reminder or trigger that starts your brain on the path to performing a routine. It might be something as simple as when you sit down to watch TV, you grab a bag of chips. The routine is the automatic behaviours that occur once the contextual cue is triggered. The reward comes from your brain releasing dopamine from eating tasty chips and watching TV.

For many of us, we're unconsciously repeating a lot of behaviours and developing habits that we're unaware of. A good example given to me in a change seminar once was, count up the number of items of clothing you have in your wardrobe and do some back of the envelope math as to how many combinations of outfits you can put together with that. It ranges in the low thousands to millions. Realistically you're not choosing from a million outfits, you would typically have some habits or routines that automate the choices for you. Check the weather, it's hot, so let's eliminate any heavy or full sleeved clothing and aim for shorts. These clothes are formal, but we're not going to a formal event, etc. Much of this is completely automatic. You may be consciously aware of some of the choices you make, but your brain is doing the heavy lifting automatically to rule things out.

Now that we know habits are triggered by cues, how do we recognise them? It's easy for us in moments of contemplation to consider that we're going to cut down on the snacks, but they are just moments. We need some way to disconnect the parliament of ideas that represents your consciousness and the thoughts inside your brain. Like a way to view a process monitor on a computer. How do we hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE in real life?

Turns out there is a way to do that too, it takes practice. Called mindfulness. I'll go into more detail about it in a different post, but it involves turning your attention inwards to the sensations of your body just existing and just focusing on different parts of your body like an attention flashlight. By practising mindfulness it develops the cognitive tool you require to have a momentary pause before any habit routine starts. It doesn't mean you'll change that routine straight away, there's been a number of times where I'd be driving, have the thought I'm about to go get a pizza or I could do something else. I would get the pizza anyway, but the thought was acting as a momentary interrupt to allow me to choose a different routine if I wanted.

So now we know that to build or modify a habit, we have to identify the cue, the routine and the reward, and we also know that to be present when the cue triggers we should practice mindfulness.

To drive home how much we are creatures of habit and how challenging it can be to be mindful. Consider that when you commute to or from work if you're driving, it's pretty much completely automatic. Your conscious awareness is not paying a lot of attention, your brain will not retain the memories unless there's something unique about the journey. We'll often take the same route, even if a faster one might open up because it's easier for our brains to follow cue, routine and reward of an existing habit.

When I wrote about the paradox of existence years ago I briefly touched on this part. Our brains are optimisation machines, they will come up with ways to conserve energy for themselves and the body they drive by forming these habit pathways that can fire easily. It becomes an efficient use of energy. Sadly this efficiency means we can develop habits that aren't in line with our long term goals, because the habits are short term efficient.

So in summary, if you have long term goals you want to achieve, then you need to curate a set of habits that will help you achieve them. So I have a goal of running a marathon. I could put on my running shoes and just start running, but that will likely end in failure. I considered that a marathon runner has some habits I'll need to develop first. Primarily that a marathon runner is going to run most days of the week some shorter distance. I can barely run 5 km at the moment, but if I build the habit of running 3 or 4 times a week, then as my body adjusts to make this habit and routine easier, that distance will increase.

Set goals, then identify habits to help you achieve them, then work on building those habits and the rest will fall into place.

I'm back

Thursday, January 16th, 2020

So after a 7 year hiatus. I've decided to once again attempt to maintain the habit of regularly updating this blog. A lot has changed for me since I last posted, so there's a lot for me to discuss. Additionally having read all of my older posts there's some topics I'm going to revisit with a bit more work.

Upcoming topics will include mental health, Python, data science, productivity, board games as well as some researched posts about a topic of interest.

My primary audience is still myself, but hopefully this will also serve a secondary audience of potential employers and close friends. I do enjoy writing longer content. Facebook is not an ideal outlet for longer content because the audience for that content tends to want shorter attention snacks. I have been posting on reddit some longer answers to things, so clearly I have some desire for an audience. The best option to go forward is to practice my writing by giving myself deadlines and targets for posts as well as sticking to a schedule to build a habit.

There will be more to come. I've added this blog as a long term project I plan to work on, so now it will get scheduled in my weekly and monthly planning to spend time on it

A thought about cities

Wednesday, June 19th, 2013

So one of the things on my mind is about cities and towns. Specifically, why do we always try and organically grow and modify a city to support a larger and larger population.

An alternative solution to overcrowding and overpopulation is to design a city from ground up to function and support a population of x  +/- y.  The city should be self sustaining. The total population x is the ideal number of inhabitants for the city, the ratios of population to roads, cars, health services, police services, legal services etc. The city however can accommodate some fluctuations in population as it's unlikely that birth and immigration rates will match death and emigration rates and this would be represented by y.

Ideally you want the population to remain at the same level with minor fluctuations indefinitely. So this means that we'd need to do some calculations on average life spans of citizens and average birth rates. The problem I suspect is that of the 4 factors affecting population, there's no way to easily directly control them all. It would be unethical to make people die sooner, so that option is out. People will naturally want to have children, so that's good, but there's no easy way to tell people that you must have a certain number of children (besides financial incentives or disincentives). All research seems to indicate that the average number of children goes down as education increases anyway. So effectively it would be necessary to control the population through immigration and emigration. Immigration presents challenges, firstly this city needs to have some qualities that make it more attractive than a different city. Employment opportunities, different laws, certain industries. Secondly, emigration can come one of two ways, either by the existence of a more desirable city for certain denizens, or forcefully by enacting laws and effectively kicking people out of the city. Kicking people out is unlikely to be looked upon kindly by anyone, so it's not really an option either.

So this leads me to my conclusion for now. How is it possible to maintain a stable population in an ideal city when the 4 factors affecting the population cannot be easily controlled, and the feedback for changes that can be made take years to realise.

TikZ

Tuesday, June 18th, 2013

So short update.

I've been playing around with LaTeX quite a lot. I'm really liking it's capability for producing and organising documents. What I've discovered is that figures created in LaTeX using TikZ are actually very good. Ideally I'd like all my figures done in TikZ in time, I know it's possible to draw them in powerpoint or inkscape but that often means that making a small change can be a bit trickier. It also means that symmetry and having objects placed efficiently and neatly together is a lot more work.

Enter TikZEdt. It is a WYSISWYG editor that also produces the code required for the TikZ figure

That is all for now.

 

Now with Random_Percentage% more LaTeX

Monday, June 3rd, 2013

So I'm teaching myself LaTeX which means it's taking me a while to update my blog because I don't want to just do a regular update if it doesn't include some fancy LaTeX stuff. Unfortunately, the formatting between what I'd use in something like writelatex.com. I haven't mastered it yet.

So I had some issues with my glasses. Fortunately got them eventually, was a long story. Currently fending off an annoying cold.

Just wanted to make an update.

 

Efficiency

Tuesday, May 7th, 2013

Ok, so I installed a math plugin based on LaTeX so I can type equations. The added bonus is I'll get to teach myself how to use them.

The purpose of this is so I can make things look a bit neater. So onto efficiency.

I've been thinking about efficiency my entire life, always applying it to various tasks, like driving, working, walking, eating, exercise. The problem is, that there's so many ways to define it. The most common and general definition is

Where maximum output is defined as some maximum achievable quantity. The energy efficiency of an engine say could be

So naturally, I strive to be efficient in most things I do. When I spend money, I calculate the dollar per hour entertainment value for purchases, I evaluate the efficiency of my work output and spending.

So relating this to the main point, is that governments and oppositions always claim to be able to increase the efficiency of the public service and cut costs. Now I'm sure everyone has their own horror stories about how inefficient their visit to Centrelink or Medicare was, but on the whole, these organisations have been streamlined quite a lot. It's not usually the end of line workers that are terribly inefficient anyway. So how do we define efficiency for government spending?

Obviously, everyone wants their tax dollars to be spent well and not wasted, but where it gets interesting is that these people themselves are probably no more efficient than the government when it comes to spending. Take for example, a bottle of shampoo. Suppose it costs $10 and is a generous 1 litre volume. That gives a cost of 1 cent per mL. Now, most people have trouble getting the last few bits out of the shampoo bottle. There might be 10 or 20 mLs leftover that are just too difficult to extract, it's possible to do it but the time it takes is not worth it, so we accept  some waste. The efficiency in this case is about 99.8% which is a high number. Food wastage is probably much lower, on every plate there might be 5% left, or if you get too full you can often leave about 10 to 50% of a meal. Sometimes it might be saved and eaten again later, but it could be thrown out. A mobile phone contract that includes some dollar value of free calls and messages, many people would not extract full value or efficiency out of that as well.

The point I'm trying to illustrate, is that people are inefficient, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just there's a lack of realisation that the government is made up from people too, so all these inefficiencies add up. So next time someone complains about government wastage, point out that they probably equally waste on the same scale food, shampoo, consumables etc.

Habit updates

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

So when I started my attempt to blog regularly a little over a month and a half ago, I had an overly ambitious goal of adding one meaningful entry per day. Obviously that requires a significant time investment and whilst I managed it for a week, I've fallen off. This wasn't unexpected however, as with all habit building/breaking it's unlikely to change the first time you try. I reaslied it follows the trend of dieting or the gym that most people have. They are pretty vigilant for the first week or two, then they miss a day because of a work function, or they are sick. Then they miss another for a different reason. The routine is then broken and they stop going, they might have spurts of activity where they regain or rediscover their original motivation but the routine always gets interrupted or broken.

What I've realised is that isn't a bad thing, it'd be ideal if we could robotically acquire and discard habits at will. I'd program myself to wake at 6, go running, work efficiently, not eat crap and so on. It's not a bad thing to have routines broken because then the feeling of achievement and progress towards self improvement is much greater for all the obstacles we face. My goal of not having any soft drink has failed fairly miserably, but that's always going to be one of the hardest things to break, but at least I'm noting every day I do or don't have it. There's a few days a month where I don't have any, if I can slowly build on that, that's progress.

So back to this blog, I wanted to update every day, but that hasn't happened, but I have been updating about once every 9 days or so, which is a lot more than I used to do. So I may have failed at my original stated goal, but I set that knowing that I'd likely not be able to keep it up, but if it gets me in the habit of thinking about making blog posts more often, then it's working. So all up, it's been relatively successful. In 90 days or so I've transformed from making one blog post a year maybe to probably an average of 30 or 40 a year at this current rate.