Still alive :-)

Just a quick note to say yes, I'm still kicking. Going through a bit of a reality-check re: where I am with Think, Try, Learn and Edison, and I'm brainstorming some options for funding them. Now that I've had an anti-burnout reset, I'd welcome a situation in programming, especially if something exciting comes up. I'm also open to other work that involves research, thinking, and writing, say in technology, engineering, or the QS tool realm. I'd welcome your suggestions and pointers to possible opportunities.

Let me leave you with a few quotes.

You could never be bored when you confronted mystery.

From The Burning Wire: A Lincoln Rhyme Novel (I'm a sucker for Jeffery Deaver's work). Everything seems stupid when it fails. -- Fydor Dostoevsky, from Crime and Punishment (free download here).

Everything seems stupid when it fails.

From Fydor Dostoevsky's from Crime and Punishment (free download here).

"lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most"

"But what I mean is, lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most. I mean you can't help it sometimes."

From Writing habits of the the best writers | Psychology Today.

Question: Have you had this happen to you? What was the result?

"One of my goals is to catalyze an army of good self-experimenters"

One of my goals is to catalyze an army of good self-experimenters; part of my job is therefore to train readers to do their own homework. Richard Feynman famously remarked, "It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong."

Tim Ferriss in his Wired interview Tim Ferriss Wants to Hack Your Body.

Of course I love this quote, which expresses something Ferriss and I have this in common. His approach is through doing extreme experiments on himself, then sharing them compellingly and controversially with an large, receptive audience that's he's fostered. He's done a ton of good in promiting an experiment-driven life.

My approach is through developing and sharing the wider philosophy (I call it Think, Try, Learn) and creating tools that make it easy for anyone to create, track, and learn from their experiments, and help others with theirs. With the recent Edison features of quantified data and group experiments, the tool now has enough in place for me to figure out how well it does this.

"I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing..."

I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and in many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean. I might think about a little, but if I can’t figure it out, then I go to something else. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.

Richard Feynman from The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

"Tell me, Betty. Has your husband always been..."

[Reet Pappin] Tell me, Betty. Has your husband always been this, well, ... bitter?

[Betty Armstrong] No, he wasn't at all. I think it's something new he's trying.

This is from the absurd The Lost Skeleton Returns Again, one of the gems I found on the new Amazon prime instant video. (Learning about this new benefit was a delight, since I've been a Prime subscriber for years to feed by reading habit.) I perked up when I heard Betty's response, which is a lovely Think, Try, Learn perspective. Not an experiment I personally want to try, though.

I love the work of this indie movie team, though I think the first movie, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (official site here), was better. Here are a few gems on YouTube from this same team (I enjoy how they play with language):

• On bitterness: Bitterness... The Lost Skeleton Returns Again
• And I think this is brilliant: Tales From the Pub: "Message From Beyond"

I've embedded them below. You can find more at moontaurus's YouTube channel.

I'm curious

If this is your sort of humor, what else do you like? I need a lift!

---

---