On the past being a ghost, the best treatment of it I've encountered is the short story Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling [1]. It's so worth the complete read, so I hate to reduce it to a quote, but the critical bit is:
> We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves.
You're not alone. I've even tried to dream up ways to "humanely" vaporize them so they wouldn't suffer being at the bottom of a trash heap with old food and what not dripping on them, their innards squeezed out, which is sure to be their fate if I donate them. And now I see the same illogical attachment tendencies in a couple of my kids. It's a burden.
I too have benefited recently (since 3 months) from rowing, and started by simply emulating Dark Horse rowing on a laptop set to the front/side of the machine. I really like Rowalong channel now, because he gives effort instructions in terms of your best 2k pace. For example, he'll say "2k+18" for the next interval so if your best 2k time had average 2:00/500m pace, then row currently at 2:18 pace. Compare to Dark Horse who might say "Go at 75% effort" which suffers from subjective self reporting.
If you haven't seen it, https://rowinglevel.com has tables for various distances and ages. It intimidated me at first (these times are fast!) but reaching beginner and novice when they once felt completely impossible is a good feeling.
> It took months to get up to speed with a lot of initial back pain, but the strength gained has done away with back issues I used to have.
> The most interesting result from this study was the change in the spread for HRV.
Did your HRV increase, indicating better health? How are you measuring it?
> I was able to break an 8 minute 2k row when I did it with cyclic breathing.
Can you explain more? Search results for "cyclic breathing" return many varied results. Are you performing it while during the row, or in preparation for it? I can get 2k meters under 8 minutes, but I'm gasping at the end.
> ...lets me write codeblocks in my notes and turns my note taking system into a literate programming environment. So I have for example a self-written plugin that applies transformations to existing pages to incorporate the sort of question templates suggested in books like How To Solve It or on websites like untools.
Do you have any posts or additional information on this in particular?
This is very relatable :) A workmate and I have fun making variations of "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors!" and sarcastically suggest the other tries OCaml, Haskell, or Idris when something isn't going their way.
- How type theory can prove mathematical theorems. I can limp through the first exercises of Software Foundations, but eventually realize I'm just "making it work" instead of knowing how it works. Only made it halfway through My Little Typer and even implemented STLC and used it to prove simple propositions with implications. But I still couldn't tell you how dependent types magically make it possible to prove real theorems.
- How opamps work and how they're used to make a differentiator.
- How quantum computing works. I want understand it to understand why factoring and discrete log fall to QC but not the post-quantum algorithms. I never make it past the intro chapters.
- What exactly makes cryptographic hash functions have desirable properties like collision resistance? Bits go in, bits go out, why can't full observation of the process not yield a method to construct inputs for a target output? Similar questions for block ciphers. It is much easier to "see" the impossibility in public key schemes because you can play and experiment with the math. In symmetric algorithms it looks like just a bunch of arbitrary bit operations.
EDIT:
- Relativity. I accept things like time dialation and nothing can go faster than the speed of light. But I have no idea why you would experience less time passing than me after a high speed rocket trip when, from your perspective, you saw me on a high speed planet trip. Or what prevents a rocket in space with 3m/s^2 acceleration from reaching the speed of light after 100,000,000 seconds.
> I've found that the greatest benefit of cloud storage is not as a backup, but as our primary place to keep and look at photos. We started uploading and organizing everything in Flickr a few years ago, and now we spend more time enjoying our photos with Flickr's web and mobile apps than we ever did when they were scattered across our laptops and backed up to an external hard drive.
This is a good point. I was 100% anti-cloud for my photos, but have to admit the barrier of bringing out the external HDD and hooking it up to a PC means we hardly ever look at them.
Every time our phones reach capacity, I download all pics/video to my laptop. Then I plug in a portable SSD and copy them there in folder name "media until <current date>". When I get to work next, I copy them to an identical portable SSD stored there, at which point I free the space on my laptop. This whole process happens about 3-4 times per year.
I'm currently using returned/refurbished Samsung T5's at about $100/TB.
I use graphviz probably weekly and it's actually become a bit of a productivity hack. If there's something I don't want to do, I can often convince myself to just DRAW it instead, usually with graphviz. Once drawn, the actual task is easier, both because the barrier of starting is overcome, and because the drawing is useful in the task.
For example, I had to parse DWARF debug info recently to scrape type information, something I dreaded doing. Instead of diving into the DWARF specs, I set out to adapt one of the pyelftools [1] examples to produce a .dot file and graphed it with dot, producing [2].
Now looking at the picture, it's nearly obvious how functions and structs and types are stored. The rest is trivia (How do I access this attribute? How do I iterate over a DIE's children?).
Here's a simple alias so that anything that writes to /tmp/tmp.dot can be viewed with a single command:
alias graph='dot -Tpng /tmp/tmp.dot -o /tmp/tmp.png && open /tmp/tmp.png'
> Throughout the day I have reminders set to step back and examine what I am doing at that moment.
How does it work? Does an alarm sound and you've resolved to stop whatever you're doing and reasses? What is a success story? Has it caught you browsing youtube and put you back to work?
> This is usually coupled with one or more mental exercises to keep perspective.
What are the exercises?
> In the evening before going to bed I sit back down with my journal and go over any major events from the day and examine them against my philosophical beliefs.
Is this a written or electronic journal? How long have you been able to consistently do this? I've had many 2-week streaks but none better.
Do you recommend any other resources? I've read Meditations, Pigliucci's book, and pick up Farnsworth's book every few days, but so far it's mostly quotes instead of a description of practices like the title promises.
> We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...