A marshmallow was offered to each child. If the child could resist eating the marshmallow, he was promised two instead of one. The scientists analyzed how long each child resisted the temptation of eating the marshmallow, and whether or not doing so had an effect on their future success. (Source: Wikipedia)

Short answer: yes.

Greg and I were talking about the difference between production and production capacity a few days ago, and the importance of balancing the two. It’s not a hard concept; we do this all the time when we play video games. When you play Monopoly, you build houses and hotels because you know that’s going to give you the strong resource and financial base you need to wipe the board with everyone else at the end; when you sit down for Settlers of Catan, you build cities – you don’t just start hurtling roads out there, right? You want that grain, that ore, those bricks. You want that power at your fingertips, so you Do The Marshmallow – you focus on building that power, even if it means not using all the little bits of power you have right then. Less shiny now, more shiny later.

What does this have to do with FOSS? Well, I’m reminded of the Marshmallow Experiment every time I see something like this:

“Linux geeks not caring about noobs is the main reason Windows is so popular.” –Chris Watkins

That’s my friend Chris, from Appropedia. Chris is a technical guy who loves the Free world; he’s an engineer working on disseminating open-licensed appropriate technology information to grassroots communities of hackers in the developing world using an entirely open-source software stack to do so. His statement reads to me like a bug report on FOSS’s ability to build production capacity in its communities. (We’ve gotten better, thanks to tons of long, hard work by many different groups and people – but there’s still a long way to go.)

I am also reminded of the Marshmallow Experiment every time I see something like this:

 I just think it’s bizarre. “We need more people! Lets try to recruit those with this particular type of sex organs!” –from a GNOME Women comment thread

Dude. Do you want to curse the darkness? Or do you want to light some candles? Because what you did right there is called “cursing the people who are lighting candles.” When you see someone trying to improve the capacity of a community you care about, try helping them. Constructive criticism is helpful; however, the above comment is a good example of destructive criticism. Here’s how to tell the difference.

These comments are, in different ways, both about building production capacity in FOSS communities. In a world where software is considered obsolete after a year or two, where 6-month releases are built in no small part upon the outputs of 48-hour hackfests, where there are so many compelling reasons to focus on the now – what does your project do to look into the future? (Does it?) Could you see those two scenarios above applying to the communities you work within?

I’m afraid that if we publicize ourselves as seeking to select the “best” students for admission, we will get… more box-tickers. Fewer lifelong learners. More obedient queuers. Fewer spontaneous beekeepers. More people aiming to graduate and be named “exceptional” for doing so. Fewer people aiming to shape the school that will (sometimes just barely) graduate them, and who actually do all the revolutionary rule-breaking that “exceptional” implies. (emphasis mine)

To this I say amen.

This weekend will be devoted to getting my life in order for the storm of travel that is to come between next week and the beginning of April. Once I get on my first plane, I believe there will be a grand total of 5 days where I’m not traveling. Amazingly enough, I managed to arrange my schedule so I’ll miss a grand total of one class – which is having an exam that day that I’ll simply take early.

Time management for this semester has not been perfect (it never will be), but it’s been amazingly good. The secret? Waking up early. Very, very, very early. And sleeping early – and adequately – and eating well, which sometimes for me means not guilting out over spending $3.50 on a large soup for lunch when I forget to pack the homemade meal I made the night before. Doing work at the office and being focused about it, and trying not to bring work home.

And that is how I juggle 4 graduate classes plus an independent study plus research on three days a week – I do that Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, and freelance and do my own reading (and some of my own research) Thursday-Friday. I have breaks, I take walks, I hang out with classmates, I spend entire days doing things other than work; I sleep, I eat, I go to random movie showings and talks and other campus events, I audit German 201 when I can and work my way through my grammar book when I can’t, and I spend time doing things like “let’s explore the hearing thing!” (read: go see audiologist, drive back and forth across town figuring out how Vocational Rehabilitation state services work, etc.)

It helps a lot that grad school classes for me have been heavily reading-based so far, and I’m a fast reader; one professor dumps about 300 pages of dense developmental psychology on us every week, and I usually read it after dinner on the evening it’s assigned. In fact, I try to do all my work for a class on the day of that class – a week before it’s due, that is, not the morning-of. And I do all of my meeting/workgroup followup immediately after the meeting (if I can) or that same day (if I can’t). This means I have some very, very long Mondays – 3 of my 4 classes meet on Mondays – but I know that when I’m done, I’m really done. It’s amazing how wonderful it feels to know it’s not possible for you to be forgetting something.

Again, it’s not perfect. I slip. I slip a lot. But it feels like I’m using my time more effectively this semester than I have in… any other semester I have ever been at school, so something’s working. And I’m letting myself do that – I’m trying hard things, it’s ok if I fail, I recalibrate and get back on track and readjust the track instead of beating myself up… which takes a lot of willpower, because it’s the intellectual-rational part of my brain that needs to keep on shouting “IT’S OKAY DON’T BEAT YOURSELF UP” when I… beat myself up. (Instinct! It’s hard to fight that habit!) But progress is being made!

It helps to have something you really want to do. And it helps to make yourself focus on several things you want to do, and to turn down stuff, or keep extra stuff optional, so you don’t end up with towering piles of obligation. I suppose I would summarize my strategy this term as “when you take on an obligation, do it immediately, thus acquiring no obligation backlog whatsoever.”

I’d like to get better at regular exercise, which is something I’m still experimenting with – none of my lifehack attempts so far have gotten me to exercise regularly this semester, so I’ve decided that I’ll take advantage of Purdue’s cheap ($45 for the semester!) group fitness classes. Sure, maybe I should be able to do pushups on the floor of my own apartment. But I’m still new enough to the whole “fitness” thing that having structure, company, and people to nag me about my form is not a bad idea – and then maybe I’ll do pushups at home to practice outside of class. Who knows?

Had one of those “wait, how did 4 hours pass, and is it really 3am now?” conversations with Mark last night; there’s something satisfying in the sort of friendship where you can go months without contact and still know you’ll be slugging it out, no-holds-barred, over your new ideas and directions within a few minutes of starting to talk again. I give him shit, he gives me shit, and we thereby keep each other honest.

Sebastian sent me “WAT,” a brilliant 5-minute lightning talk on programming languages that left me howling with laughter. Via Karl Wurst came an insightful blog post on defaulting to closed and  Macneil Shonle’s “Why I Will Randomly Assign Students in Group Projects.” Fellow Olin alum Katie Rivard pointed me to Up The Ivy, an old satire of academic culture.

And now it’s time for coffeehouse decompression with Velvet and Nikitha. Mmm… quiet time.

1. IRB. “Wait. Not only do you not do IRB, you don’t even know what it is?” (Not Shannon – she trained as a sociologist. I meant the art/design students.)
2. How we describe ourselves. We had to write artist/designer statements for ourselves and for somebody else. An artist/designer statement by an artist or designer reads sort of like… philosophy. An engineer’s “artist/designer statement” reads like a resume parsed as a technical specification. (There’s another engineering education student in the class.)
3. What we need to justify. I showed Shannon the abstract I was working on and braced for questions on my (fuzzy and emergent) methodology – but she took one look and nodded – “ah yes, grounded theory!” – and said it looked good. “Wait. You… didn’t ask me to justify this? It looks okay? But it-” …is much more normal to be things-other-than-positivist in social science research. Yes. Forgot about that.
4. Thesis work. Art and engineering students tend to produce their Masters’ theses in two parts: a Thing and a Paper. In Engineering,the Paper is about the Thing. It describes the Thing, how made the Thing, how the thing Works. The Paper About The Thing is the Thesis. In contrast, art students are specifically not supposed to write their Paper about their Thing. They are not to explain their Thing. Instead, the Paper is a separate work that complements the Thing – I am not sure what that means yet – and the two together form the Thesis. I… am still trying to figure this one out. And don’t even ask me what a PhD in art looks like!

There are, I realize, huge differences between art and design – I’m not yet attuned to what those differences are (Shannon explained a few to me – department cultures, the objective/subjective balance in their work, individual vs collective shows, and so forth). So that’s something for more exploration later.

1. Gluten.
2. Lactose. (Yogurt/kefir/cheese seem to be fine as long as I don’t go nuts.)
3. Meat. (Red meat more than white meat, white meat more than seafood.)

I’m not allergic to any of these, but I do appear to be sensitive – it’s almost as if those three substances each has a slowly-draining reservoir (for engineers: look, it’s an integrator! For Oliners: look, it’s a bathtub!) somewhere inside me, and if I “fill” the reservoir by eating that substance faster than it can drain, my brain starts doing funky things. Actually, it’s not “as if” there were a reservoir – there is. It’s called my bloodstream.

The usual procedure for an experiment goes something like this:

1. Reset environment to known control state.
2. Introduce the intervention.
3. Record results.

The human body’s a funky thing, though. It depends on your mood, how much sleep you’re getting, how dehydrated (or not) you are, whether you had a big paper due that week, if you exercised, whether it’s cold outside… and there’s no reboot button. So finally we ended up with this little guide to food challenges – that’s what they’re called, “food challenges.” Sounds like a reality TV show! Anyway:

Reset environment to known control state. Have a “safe food diet” – a bunch of dishes that I like to eat, are nutritionally balanced (protein, carbs, fat, vegetables, fiber, all the stuff your mom told you when you were small), and don’t contain any of the stuff I’m trying to test for. So for me, a bowl of rice and black bean chili works – or curry over quinoa, or… you get the idea. Eat this for long enough that your system “clears out” whatever substances you’re testing; in allergy/immunization studies, this is usually 1-2 weeks. (Allergy and immunology journals, by the way, are nice sources of procedures for experimental setup; check out PubMed if you have access.) I’m going for 2 weeks, which lets me set approximately one food experiment up per month.

Introduce the intervention. In other words, “eat gluten, lactose, and/or meat,” while making sure my meals remain nutritionally balanced (so that any effects won’t be the results of, say, not eating fiber). In controlled doses, depending on what I want to test. Also, watch out for the placebo effect. Nutrition and food science journals are most useful as models for this segment of the study.

For instance, I think I have some gluten sensitivity; if I eat bread at every meal, my brain goes fuzzy. But if I’m on a gluten-free (or, since gluten is everywhere and I’m not vigilant enough about it, almost gluten-free) diet and have a slice of bread, I’m fine. So what’s the tipping point – how do I get a better model of that reservoir? How big is it (3 bread-slices?) and how fast does it drain (1 bread-slice per day, meaning that I could eat 2 slices of bread today and 1 tomorrow and be fine, but not 3 today?)

Record results. Since I’m looking at my brain state here – neurochemical changes, in other words -I want to look at how other researchers have measured “effects on thinking.” I tend to notice effects commonly associated with ADHD (yep, I have that too) – lack of focus, physical restlessness – so things like the Conner Scale or Hyperscheme (another scale) might be worth looking into; PubMed has plenty more that I don’t know about just yet. Again, watch for the placebo effect. Whenever possible, I’ll try to measure things somewhat less subjective than my opinion… but sometimes you just have to use your thoughts as an imperfect, messy instrument because that’s all you’ve got.

Neurochemical changes can happen fast. Stomach-brain communication is pretty quick – the “I’m full, stop being hungry!” signal takes maybe 20-30 minutes. So it’s possible I may be able to record these things during the meal – or at the very least, at the end of the day. Some food effects can take as long as 3 days to show up… but for mental-performance tracking, I’m likely looking at a shorter scale.

So that’s my lifehacking braindump for the day. Hopefully it’ll be useful to others experimenting with similar stuff (I’m looking at you, Matt Ritter). And many thanks to Dr. Annie Mahon for helping me geek out with her this morning!

Also, I need a lot more calcium than I’m getting. As a fairly skinny Asian woman who’s not big on lactose (milk), I’m at risk for osteoporosis; I eat yogurt on some days, but at best that gets me about 500mg of the stuff, and I need 1000. But you can only absorb 500mg at a time, and shouldn’t go over 2500mg in a day. No problem; I’ll just get a supplement in 500mg increments and pop one during lunch if I have yogurt for breakfast, and pop one during breakfast and one during lunch if I go yogurtless for the day. Must build strong bones! Do weight-bearing exercises! Mel smash!

I’ve decided to think of my life as a 125-year project. (Because I think medical science makes it feasible – and also because I like cube numbers.)  The plans you make for the future look way different when you think of it as “wow, 100 years to go.”

This morning, TuxRadar ran my piece on open source education in Europe (many thanks to Dave Neary for the pointers). I’m also now officially a piece of Purdue propaganda – my work with open source and education was featured in a “5 students who are example makers” profile by Sue Ferringer and also got picked up in the (Purdue) Presidents’ Newsletter. This was, to employ a generic and overused phrase, “really cool.” It also threw me off equilibrium a little bit (though in a positive way, I think) – I’m not used to that kind of attention.

I love how the photographer managed to capture me in can’t-sit-still mode. But it’s still a little weird to look at the website and go “wait, is that me?”  It’s fascinating to see how much gravitas a shiny website, good photos, and snappy text can add. I’m desperately learning how to combat impostor syndrome; I still get overwhelmed, confused, lost, tired – but I am doing awesome things, and I shouldn’t forget that side either. The challenge is to keep my eye on what’s important, following my own internal compass towards learning and doing excellent work, regardless of the circumstances. The more I charge forth into the world, the more important being grounded becomes; I’m trying to build a foundation of being centered and taking time to rest and renew and recalibrate.

And so I read, I stretch, I take the time to cook and eat good food. I’m about to do lunch in a moment, but before doing that, here’s something else that gave me pause today – some folks made a couple comic strips about Hobbes (from Calvin & Hobbes) and Bacon (daughter of Calvin and Susie, named after the philosopher). It’s a beautiful homage. This post has links to all four strips (use the alternate links), and NPR has commentary on them as well as a pointer to Gerry Canavan’s collection of Calvin-as-a-grownup drawings from multiple artists (one is PG-13 NSFW, though if you get depressed at the last strip do see the sequel halfway down the thread here).

I loved Calvin & Hobbes as a child. I still do. And found reading the Hobbes & Bacon strips to be a lovely, bittersweet moment; time moves on and life moves on, and we see others walk the paths we once trod. I’ve been thinking a lot about the future lately, and how perpetual adolescence is no longer such a central part of my identity – I’m no longer everyone’s kid sister, I’m taking on more complex roles. And that is strange and new, budding and unfamiliar – and wonderful. It’s amazing how much you can grow when you feel safe, and when you channel your energy towards learning (and the associated discomfort) instead of defense mechanisms. Crazy.

To the people, places, and communities who make me feel safe and grounded, and give me a solid place to fly from and to come back to: thank you.

Get a big bowl. Mix together some plain yogurt (about 2 cups) with a few heaping spoons of mustard (spicy, with the big mustard seeds unbroken) and sriracha (or, I suppose, the hot sauce of your choice). Throw in some pepper and salt and whatever other random spices you like — I used some “southwestern spice blend” my mom had given me, but honestly I think the mustard and sriracha are already plenty. I also lopped in a heaping spoon of finely minced garlic, because I had it around.

It will smell fantastic. Get the chicken bits good and covered with the stuff, throw them in a bowl, wrap in plastic, set in the fridge overnight. Or if you’re me, get caught up by work and leave ‘em there for 2 whole days.

At this point you can take the chicken out and just throw it in a hot oiled skillet and you’ll get this amazing, tender, juicy pan-fried chicken. (I did that for two pieces of chicken because I’d run out of oven-safe containers and I was very, very hungry.) But if you want to go ridiculous, crank the oven to 400F and keep going.

Get some crumby-things. I used extra breadcrumbs from the freezer. The original recipe suggests crushed cornflakes. Maybe you could do cornmeal – not sure. Whatever it is, season it well — I put in some cayenne for heat, but you could probably just do salt and a lot of pepper, and then paprika or whatever you would like — and toss it with a spoon of oil (I used canola) just so it’s a bit moist. Then bread the chicken – the yogurt will make the breading stick beautifully – and put them in pans and put the pans in the oven.

35-40 minutes later, holy shit. Baked chicken, but exploding with flavor and crispy and brown on the outside as if it had been fried, except it’s healthy (sort of — healthier than fried chicken anyway) and with the cayenne giving it a little heat, the mustard seeds crunching satisfyingly, the spices exploding into the juices that flood your mouth when you bite…

Yes, the chicken would be crispier if I’d baked it on a rack instead of in a pan (where the juices made the breading slightly soggy on the bottom). I don’t have a rack. I don’t care. It’s great. I eat mostly vegetarian meals these days (although I’m not a vegetarian) but tonight’s dinner consisted of three giant pieces of chicken and some braised brussels sprouts,  and I couldn’t be more satisfied.

For the sprouts: heat a thin film of oil in a frying pan, cut the sprouts in half and brown them cut-side down over medium-high heat, then pour broth (chicken, vegetable, whatever) into the pan and cover it and let it braise until a fork goes straight through ‘em, then uncover and keep cooking until the liquid evaporates. Done. If you use milk instead of broth and throw some salt/pepper/random-spices in, it’s even better, but I had no milk tonight.

I would totally cook this for a crowd.

I think a lot of the things and behaviours that make an open source community work are also applicable to dating, if that makes any sense at all.

Aspiring to radical realtime transparency but knowing you’ll fall short, having a rhythm, working to become a better hacker and help others become better hackers themselves, even if you’re different types of contributors or working through different processes or on different projects for a while. Clarification, getting things out on the table. The willingness to waste time experimenting because you know it’s not actually wasted time at all, just a process with long-term and unpredictable results.

My boyfriend uses the phrase “beautiful awkwardness” to describe the feeling you get sometimes when you’re sitting in the uncomfortable spot in the relationship domain specifically — but if you’re lucky, there’s someone you’re sitting with, together. And maybe that’s how you can tell. I dunno, I’ve never done this before. But if you’re comfortable enough with someone else that you can be uncomfortable together, then… that means something, I think.

Found a lovely poem called “Mastery” by W. H. Auden.

You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation.

You have only to watch his eyes;
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression, forgetting
themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.

Auden also once said this:

Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.

Somehow related in the fragments of my mind: the Technium has some short pieces on wisdom for the digital age, the sorts of things I imagine great-grandchildren of today’s teenagers chuckling over the same way my generation read the “Little House on the Prairie” series with the fascination kids have of a bygone era.

Klaatu showed me ownCloud, and I am enthralled.

Trying to find copies of the International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes to read somewhere.

I started reading c-base materials written in German and can now make out fuzzy outlines of meaning without a dictionary. Yes, I’m working through grammar books and going through translation exercises in reading class where we do pull apart sentence structures with a fine-toothed comb and debate which vocabulary word maps to what phrase. Once in a while though, it’s fun to just read something normal at a normal pace and see how I’ve progressed; what looked like gibberish to me before is now a story painted in broad strokes, with blurs. No details yet, no exactness; I need to learn more words before that. But I’m learning.