Archive for May, 2007
I asked this question of the fledgling Olin student product design firm IdeaTree at the end of the semester. “Why now? Why not 5 years from now?” In the case of IdeaTree, I was asking them whether it made sense to start a design firm now or to start working towards* a design firm with a firm deadline – no pun intended – of full operation 5 years in the future, when the students involved (all frosh and sophomores) have industry experience and contacts?
*This is what Chris and I are working on, starting off as “geekspeak translators” that help folks talk about their tech needs with engineers (usually through writing specs and giving technology overviews). We’ve had two projects so far and things are going well, although we really need a better way of describing ourselves and a punchier name than “Human Readable Specs.”
Anyway. For any decision of whether to take an action or not, there’s a list of Reasons Yes and Reasons No for any point in time – call these Y(t) and N(t) and label them green and red, respectively, in the figures that follow.
In the simplest case, you take the action at the maximum Y(t) and minimum N(t) possible.For instance, the question “when should I die?” usually yields the answer “as late as possible.” (fig 1) However, “when should I wear diapers?” has a much different answer for most people (fig 2) and “biologically speaking, when should I have kids?” usually peaks in your twenties. (fig 3)
“But Mel, the max value of Y(t) and the min value of N(t) usually don’t coincide.” True. So you can take the difference Y(t)-N(t) (fig 4, purple) and go at the maximum value of that, since it’s the time when the positives most outweigh the negatives.
“But every issue is both positive and negative!” (or: “for every good reason to do it there’s also a bad one!”) Okay, okay. If Y(t)-N(t) is always constant (fig 5), go for the minimum value of Y(t)+N(t). In other words, when you have the fewest issues and therefore the least situational complexity (fig 6, blue) which could lead to uncertainty and definitely just gives you More Stuff To Deal With.
Astute former ECS students of mine will notice these graphs have few labels, no scales, no units, titles, etc. This brings up one last point – that there’s also the question of whether the question deserves as much thought as that – some things are most optimal when you don’t bother obsessively optimizing them. There are more ways to deal with the world than enumerating and rank-ordering items – stop planning and start living. Do it now.
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Wouldn’t it be great if dentists could implant tooth buds into your jaw when they do a crown or make a filling? That way, when the filling reaches the end of its lifespan several years later, the matured tooth will wiggle it loose and shoulder in, white and shining, to take the filling’s place. No need for repeated fillings which get progressively more invasive. I’ve got a vested interest in this, as my teeth are particularly susceptible to decay; since my extended coma occurred in early childhood, I have weakened enamel in my adult teeth.
Turns out some folks are
working on this. (see the first abstract, “tissue-engineered odontogenesis in dog mandibles.”)
And another random thought from a long-ago conversation with Eric Munsing. Is design a western variant of meditation, a sort of commercialist Zen? It emphasizes awareness, attention to details both large and small, the connections between things, subtle meanings. Its practitioners spend hours in contemplation and creation. It uses both sides of the mind (often denying there are two sides at all), leaps across cultures, transcends classes. It’s about being
here, awake. I recognize I’m mangling terms and possibly clutching at straws here, but what
are the connections between the burgeoning field of “design thinking” and traditional notions of cultivating awareness?
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Since I’ve graduated and can’t affect them any more, I’ve just looked at my grades[1] for the first time in a very long time.
It’s a strangely detached feeling, lovely in its peacefulness. I grew up as a Studious Asian Child (TM). I used to wait anxiously for grades, work towards them, fret over them, and agonize over anything less than a B+. I pored over gradebooks whenever I could, making sure I was jockeying for a top score. It was another game to play, but it became an overriding input of my life. In middle school, I once spent an afternoon scrubbing a refrigerator to get an extra half-point to push me into an A- so I could get a 4.0. I kept a running total of points on my calculator. I was a grade addict, an plus-junkie, a check-head.
Sophomore year of college I went cold turkey. Now I don’t even remember to check them until over a week after graduation, and that only when I read Boris’s post about checking his. No drama, just mild surprise. They’re numbers on a screen, measurements by one metric, some more meaningful to me than others, all small parts of my mental picture of “how I did” in a given class.
Yessssssssss.
In at least one small way, I’ve managed to master my education rather than the other way around, to use its metrics as an (occasionally helpful) guide to my own rather than the gospel to which my life is held. It sounds really simple, stupid, and obvious, but – hey, I’m a slow learner. It took me 15 years of getting grades to learn how to look at them this way. And if you’ve been raised in a “grades! grades! grades!” culture, it’s easy to step back and calmly evaluate yourself when you’re getting decent scores. It’s much harder when you start tanking (by their standards). Accepting volatile information into your input stream and letting it affect your judgment but not cloud it – that’s tough. I’ll be old and wrinkled before I ever get a grasp on that, if I ever do. But this is a step.
Now to print the screen and give my parents the letters they’ve asked for for 4[2] years.[3] And work on The Project.[4]
[1]To anybody who has the notion that I actually get good grades, I will say (1) Hah. and (2) class grades don’t necessarily correlate with how much you’ve learned.
[2]homophones wheeeeee!
[3]I love footnotes.
[4]Dun dun DUNNNN…
Addendum – 1:30am is the best time for your mother to read such documents, because she’s sleepy enough to not be able to react much.
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Got shanghaied for another impromptu job today. Furniture relocation for a family friend who’s moving to a retirement home. An entire dining room set from her apartment to our house, starting with the chairs. “I can carry two at once.” The chairs were big but light, perhaps 10 pounds each. “No, no, you need to be careful with them.” “I can carry two and be careful with them!” “No.”
We lifted them one at a time from the living room to the hallway, from the hallway to the elevator, from the elevator to the lobby, from the lobby to the front door, from the front door to the sidewalk, from the sidewalk into the van. Then we drove the van home and carried chairs from the van to the front door, from the front door to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the dining room…
Then we drove the van back* and moved the tabletop. All I will say about the tabletop is that (1) it was delicate dark wood with a hinge in the middle and a glossy, impeccably varnished finish (2) the floor was alternating strips of carpet, raspy tile, and concrete (3) were it one foot larger in any direction, it would not have fit in the van, period and (4) ow, my back.
*it was rush hour. Joy!
I also got a talking-to from my mother about not trying to please everyone all the time. “You can’t keep on giving if you don’t have anything” was the overriding sentiment. Translation: “Please try to find some source of income instead of volunteering.” If I didn’t look out for myself, she said, nobody would (except the family, of course). I really need to get some sort of automated income – I hate having to think about earning money, I want to be able to volunteer all my life. Book royalties? Website advertising? 37 cents in interest from Disney stock every year (a birthday present from 20 years past; I own the smallest portion of Disney stock that it is possible to own). At least my housing and food are paid for until August 19. I don’t know anything about this making-money stuff.
Time for a trip to the library. I need to learn, and fast.
First, however, I need to learn how to organize a conference. I’m doing so in the hardest way possible right now – giving it a shot and making all sorts of wonderful inexperienced mistakes. My “do NOT do this again” catalog is expanding exponentially right now. God, I’m looking forward to running my second conference and not making all these blunders – it’s gonna be great the second time around!
‘Course, it’s going to be fantastic the first time too. So now I get back to my flood of emails…
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Last summer during brainstorm training at
Continuum we did our final round on ways to build a hill for the upcoming
Design Squad show (a game show for teenage engineers). Since the episode hadn’t started filming yet (alas, they shot about a week after I left) we weren’t supposed to talk about it at the time in case one of the contestants would hear. Now that it’s out, I can say that they designed “summer sleds” that roll down grassy hills – the end products resemble either toboggans-on-wheels or
very low-riding wagons.
I finally watched the
episode tonight (episode 13, “Winner Takes All”) and the grass hill in the office – they built one inside by the main staircase – looks even better than I’d thought. Continuum is really as cool as it looks, especially after the office renovation – although there isn’t incessant screaming, cheering, and camera zooming a-la MTV as per the episode. It’s also
really weird to see your former coworkers on television. I’m biased, but seeing Continuum people up there was the best part of the whole show for me.
Ok, so I could have done without the incessant pop licks and Really! Upbeat! Cheerfulness! but shows like Design Squad are a step in the right direction towards making engineering cool – and just as important,
more transparent – to students. I’m looking forward to seeing where they go. My own documentary* on engineering teams is going to take a less scripted, more reflective approach – it’ll be interesting to see how the two compare.
*Yeah, I really need to figure out how to get digital film equipment. I knew microphones were expensive, but sheesh! Any recs for getting budget cameras/lights/microphones/lens/software/etc? I’ll need it pretty long-term, a bit over a month (July to mid-August).
Monday, May 28th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
My SCOPE team was watching Gallimore present to a bunch of collared-shirt-and-glasses types in the back of a room that looked like AC109. He was doing very well. I was getting very restless. Most of the audience seemed to be following the presentation, but the front row was made of 6 kids (aside from them all speaking English, they were the most diverse group of kids you could imagine) around the ages of 10-11 years old who were utterly lost. Too many abstractions in the presentation for the NDA’s sake. “I’m Vague-Man! I work at the store! I do things!” I wanted to burst in and whisper to Eric that dude, the kids didn’t get it. But that wasn’t the point of our presentation; they weren’t our customers, so he was giving the right kind of talk.
So when it came my turn to talk, I ignored the collared shirts, hunkered down in front of the kids, and gave the example of using our system to control… a Lego motor. And the scene gradually shifted into an ECS tutorial. A motor materialized at my elbow when I turned around, and when I turned from drawing diagrams of torque on the blackboard it was not surprising to find it hooked up to a DAQ, which was plugged into a laptop chugging MATLAB which had definitely not been on the table before…
We talked about Ohm’s law (again) and I found myself thinking, for completely unrelated reasons as the kids pretended to be electrons, that I should really pick up a book on semiconductors afterwards (I should). It wasn’t until a towheaded boy piped up about the nonlinearity of various components that I realized it was odd for 5th graders to understand the differential equations associated with viscous damping. How are they asking these questions? I thought in wonder. Oh! I’m dreaming!
Gosh, I should add this stuff to the textbook! I thought, and found myself staring at the side of a digital alarm clock, followed by a slight wave of disappointment that I wasn’t actually teaching.
Lots of thinking to do. And lots of work. I just need to be at my computer long enough to do it. The family’s been doing a good job of keeping me away from my laptop, but I’m going to tell them that today, after lunch, I really need to get work done now.
Monday, May 28th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I’m finally back home in Chicago, meaning that I’ve got a lot of correspondence catching-up to do (how does one accumulate over a thousand emails without noticing?) and I’ll be on radio silence for another day or so taking care of that. However, I would like to note that:
- I failed the Olin challenge twice in the airport – Lynn Stein was on the plane to Paris that was boarding at the gate across from mine, and then I turn around and get on the plane only to discover Joanne Kossuth on the same flight.
- My brother is a cynical little man*. And I say this with as much affection as possible. We are very different people indeed.**
- Other families give graduation gifts like… I don’t know, cameras, or computers, or even cooking equipment. My graduation present… was underwear. “Well, you need to buy it sometime,” my mom says. I must admit that it is a rather pragmatic gift, since it’s surprisingly expensive stuff and this certainly saves me money. But still. (And she complains that I’m strange!)
*A hypothetical scenario is probably the easiest way to describe this. Imagine giving each of us a paperclip.
Me: A paperclip! Oh boy, a paperclip! Thank you, thank you! I’m gonna figure out a million things to do with this paperclip – ooh, maybe I could use it as a jumper wire… or a pin… or – hey, look at this shiny paperclip! You want to go find out about how it was manufactured? Hey, could we teach other people how to use paperclips? Wow, a paperclip! I have a paperclip!
Jason: Thank you for the paperclip. How can I get another?
**which is why he’s going to Stanford. Something about wanting to study business. Our parents say that we would make a very good partnership (opposites balancing each other out and all that) as long as we don’t kill each other first. I told them we got over that back in elementary school when I learned that he could beat me up and he learned that I had a social network (at the time, the network was called “Mommy”) that would exact vengeance in my place.
Catching up, thinking, and sleeping a lot. But mostly catching up now.
Thursday, May 24th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Sometimes there’s both. Even when you don’t deserve either.
I’ll sort this out later once I’m done grading, packing, cleaning… and graduating. Right now it’s time to do what has to get done.
Hello, adulthood. Here I come.
Saturday, May 19th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Contrary to popular belief (if it ever was one to begin with), graduation day doesn’t indicate a clean release from your school. It’s a marker in the middle of a long fading-out that begins months earlier when you start thinking about job-hunting, and ends months or even years later (indeed, for some people it never quite ends at all).
I’m in the middle of typing up grade reports for ECS, the last bit of TAing I’ll do as an undergraduate. When that’s done, I still need to migrate my website, switch over my email, update my address, track down all the websites I have control over and hand them off, do a committee writeup, and on and on and on… it’s the longest goodbye. I’m trying to rid myself of all Olin obligations (but not connections!) as quickly as humanly possible so that I can let go of it, and it can let go of me, and whatever I do for Olin in the future is out of choice and not obligation. So… transition documents, yay! I also have another personal project up my sleeve that won’t be finished for another week or two after graduation day. More on this later, most likely.
My mother says that I am loyal to a fault. That it takes me a while to decide to become part of a group or to make someone a close friend, but once I have loyalty to something I will march into the jaws of hell for it, go out of my way to do anything for it. It’s always been hard for me to detach, even when circumstances change; my loyalties have high inertia. But circumstances are changing, and I am letting go. Letting go. Letting go.
Easy to type, but hard to do.
Saturday, May 19th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
My suite went out for dinner a few nights ago. It was a microsm of why I’m going to miss them so much.
We drove to Oga’s (a local Japanese place), sat down, and waited. Chandra and I had a conversation about how to redesign the umbrella-wrapper in the corner (it places your umbrella in a plastic bag so it won’t drip) so that it would be cheaper to manufacture. “You don’t actually need springs there, so what quantities would it take before it’s cheaper to injection mold it rather than folding the sheet metal?” “Actually, I would extrude it…”
Got our seats. Sat down, ordered, waited. Conversation ranged from robotics to buying houses to fathers to how the glazing process worked for the tiny ceramic dishes that were supposed to hold soy sauce. (Kristen explained the pottery production process in 60 seconds.)
Got our food. Ate, ordered dessert, waited, got dessert, ate. Discussed the mass-manufacturing techniques that could have made the glass bowl that ice cream came, in while admiring its design (flowers). On the way to the car, Chandra mentioned that she wanted to make drunken watermelon (soak watermelon in liquor, in this case sake, so that it absorbs the alcohol – the classic way appears to be drilling a hole, sticking the neck of an open bottle into the watermelon, and waiting) and we had an argument about osmosis, with me advocating sticking two different liquors in the watermelon, one in each end, so that we had a drink-type gradient, and Chandra holding firm on having separate sample containers with watermelon slices soaking in each type of drink to maintain control over the samples.
On the way back to Olin, Gallimore’s car radio started playing “Bring Me To Life,” which was a song we rehearsed for License Server (our band) once upon a time. We’ll probably never play together again; life is taking us to too many corners of the earth (and our instruments are too big to haul on a whim). When we turned into the front drive of Olin, Eric stopped the car and Kristen hummed taps to mark one of our last entrances into campus.
VanWyk started taking down the large Japanese paintings from our lounge today. The walls are glaringly white, and the corner formerly known as “Pile Of Tools” shockingly empty. My shelves of books are being packed into blue tubs, and I now own 1 computer (this laptop) instead of 4, but I now have enough money to pay rent and food for the entire summer and buy a folding bike, so life is good. It’s always good.
Graduation rehearsal in 45 minutes. I should pick up my gown.
Friday, May 18th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
