Category: tricks

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Grants, proposals, and pitches: How to make people understand an idea

When I was in grad school, first engaging with more established scientists, I was excited to share my ideas, and transmit my enthusiasm to others. “Yes, but why is that important?” I would hear. So I’d try again, explaining my idea. “By my does it matter?” So I’d try again, starting to get frustrated. I wasn’t getting the idea across. if I was asked how is it new, innovative, and important, I’d hear three different ways of asking the same question. What I was missing is that they’re specific distinct concepts.

It took forever but I eventually learned how to answer these questions, very much alone. As a result I win grants and get friends and colleagues and strangers excited about my work. My qualifications are a 5/5 record with the US National Science Foundation, which has a 5% acceptance rate, and several million in federal funding for risky interdisciplinary research projects. But I’ve lost something too. I write, edit, and review a lot of grants and have to train the people in my lab to write them well.  But when a student or someone else in my lab shares an idea, my first answer is “Yes, but why is that important?” And when they try again, I ask “But why is it important?” It makes me wonder if I’ve learned anything, because do I really know the framework for convincing others if I can’t explain it to others and make them more convincing?

So I finally say down and tried to make sense of it all. There are a lot of overlapping words: novel, original, important/transformative, impactful, a contribution, feasible, well-designed. What’s the difference between your rationale, your objective, your approach and your rationale, or your aim and your research question? They each mean something and in very competitive grants you have to demonstrate each of them one by one, and how they come together. But how are they different? How do they relate and what’s the best order for them?

It’s important to answer because when we write, we tend to moosh them all into one field. But they have to be distinct, and you have to know which is which when. So it’s not enough to check all the boxes, you have to check on the right box and none other.

A landscape metaphor is suddenly helping me communicate the difference between all these seemingly saccharine and indistinguishable words.  I imagine a single research project as part of a journey out from what everyone thinks to somewhere new. This makes it easier to make each part distinct.

This all might sound trite and obvious. But people often think that by describing the destination, the landscape, route, view, and distance, are all implied. They’re not.  They’re each important to get into. Also, this breakdown unpacks single laden words (“gap”) into questions to answer (“what’s new?” “hasn’t this been done?” “why?” “what is everyone missing that you saw?”). If you see “novel” in an application, you can look here and see what questions are being implicitly asked, and then answer them like a mindreader.

Here is a breakdown, with the rough order that they tend to come up in grant applications.

  1. The landscape you’re in and its major features, geography, population centers, demographics, and natural history. Why is this general region important to understand. What industries does it support?
    1. (The landscape in the metaphor is “the subject area” of the grant and its stakes.  Beyond setting up the case for the social/theoretical impact of the work, don’t actually spend too much time on this, just enough to establish your expertise, make everything that follows make sense)
  2. Landscape is distinct from Your destination, a description of the location you want to end up in
    1. (“the project and objectives“; what are you trying to accomplish? ). It will turn out that the destination isn’t special in itself, but only for the other things about it: it’s distance, it’s view, the path to it, and that you have inside is information on how to get there. So don’t cram everything into the destination, those are distinct things to establish in their own space, just share enough to make the following stuff make sense.
  3. Destination is distinct from The distance to the destination. It’s not exactly about distance, because this is just a metaphor.  More basically it’s about establishing that the destination is a remote “there” and not a currently populated “here”; that the distance is in fact non-zero.  What about the destination makes it a place that’s not already known and populated? Can you show that it’s not currently charted and that no one is currently there? Can you say why?
    1. (“the gap”. What’s kept everyone from already being where you are? is it far away from others, or close but obscured, or hard to perceive?)?,
  4. The view from the destination
    1. (“the impact”: what’s special about the new place you’re trying to go? what new things can you see from that vantage point (what questions can now be answered or, better, asked), ether looking forward to uncharted territory, or backward for a fresh perspective on what is known? Remember that no one’s been there before and only you have glimpsed it, so make them want it. “Intellectual merit” and “transformative potential” are about this.
    2. Also aside from what additional vistas it reveals, are there any resources at the detination that can be shipped back to where everyone is (real world applications, concrete problem solved; doesn’t have to be extractive, since knowledge is not subtractable). These are what makes the work “important”. this can also be shifted up before gap or down after approach),
  5. Your route. The path you’re taking there
    1. “The approach“. Are you taking a smart route to your destination? What makes it smart? Is it a shortcut? Does something about your approach makes you travel faster than others? Is it strategic in another way? What has bogged others down who have tried? Often when the word novelty appears, it’s specifically about approach. “Feasibility” is also about this.  Sometimes the best way to show there’s a path is to reveal your current location, that you’re already following the path (“preliminary work”).
      1. This section requesting the approach is also where checkpoints, evaluation, measurement, and alternate routes/contingencies get described, just enough to build confidence that you’ve thought about it
  6. Your preparations for the journey
    1. (“the team”, what about you and your group makes the journey doable, and especially doable by you? the best is to give a reader the sense that you’re the best people to do it, that no one else could, either because of your training, or because the originality of your exposition on the other parts shows that you’re the only person who’s really ready for the trip).
    2. Your compass. This doesn’t end up in the application, but you should also make sure that you want to make the trip, or at least be clear why you’re doing it.  Sometimes people get so caught up in applying for money for the sake of having more money, when a small tweak can lead to a journey that will feel more like an adventure, and more in the direction you want to go. 

Aside from being clear about each of these things, as if they aren’t implied by the others, its even better if you have insightful things to say about each: “Most people take this approach but it’s actually a dead end” “People don’t realize how much is over that peak” “Everyone thinks this area is well-explored but we found a hidden valley”.  If you’re not original in most of your proposal, just in the method or the question, when highlight that and hope it’s enough to impress a committee. The more of these things that you can bring something original to, the better your chances at making people excited. It’s not just about money: it’s important to be good at making critical people excited about things. For me, this is how to do it.

This is just a draft, still needs polish, but hopefully useful. It is all informed by frameworks like Heilmeier Catechism, Ikigai, @mako’s Project Planning Doc, and the standard mix of fields on most grant applications, which can be hard to tell apart, and my experience stumbling through.

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Behavioral fiction and the transmission of literary experience

How would fiction be different if reading a book gave us a character’s experience, not vicariously, but directly? To take the question at face value: we can. To challenge its premise: we already do. Here are three examples, from late-pulp adventure, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and popular cognitive science.

William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (1973)

The screenwriter of iconic adventure movie The Princess Bride (1987) based it closely on his novel of the same name. He presents the book as his abridged edition of the “original” Princess Bride, an 18th century court satire by a fictional S. Morgenstern, famously long and boring. The book is introduced within the frame that his father (who becomes the grandfather in the movie), had read him the book as a child, rambling through it with familiarity, skipping the boring parts, interrupting the good parts, altogether making the reading as good as the story. But Goldman goes a step further, giving a listener his experience of having the book read that way. Goldman’s “good parts” version actually has a lot of boring parts. They’re inserted precisely where the grandfather skips around in the movie. They’re fun to read as an exercise in futility, Goldman has a fun tone, but they’re very openly about nothing, and when I was reading the book to my son he wouldn’t have any of it. I found myself skipping around the book just like in the movie. I got to be grandpa. That’s behavioral fiction.

Booth (1969) on Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 33”

I’ve shared before on the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Booth, and his argument that “each reading of a Shakespeare sonnet is a peculiarly real experience for its reader. It is the experience not of recognizing the mutable nature of the human condition but of participating in an actual experience of mutability.” In his 1969 An essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets he shows how “each reading of a Shakespeare sonnet is a peculiarly real experience for its reader. It is the experience not of recognizing the mutable nature of the human condition but of participating in an actual experience of mutability” His books show how Shakespeare plays and poems manipulate context, assumptions, and semantics to invoke in readers phenomena such as confusion, overstepping, and déjà vu.

Examples he points up are Sonnet 33 (Wherein “each violation of the reader’s confidence …evokes a miniature experience for the reader that mirrors the experience of betrayed expectations which is the subject of the poem …”), Sonnet 8 (second quatrain, “an emblem of the paradoxical conditions it recommends”), Antony and Cleopatra (III.x.2, whose “fusions and confusions of entities mirror and enhance the fusions and confusions of the identities of Antony and Cleopatra”). In the case of Sonnet 33, starting “Full many a glorious morning have I seen”, the attested plot of a person enjoying the sun until clouds arrive, twice, is paralleled by the sonnet’s alternations between treating the sun as the apparent subject of the poem, and as a metaphor for a loved one, twice.

Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979)

Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer-winning GEB is a classic investigation of consciousness, completeness, and self-reference, each chapter introducing a thread in the “eternal golden braid” of his argument. Each chapter is broken up with a dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise, making their cameo from Zeno’s paradoxes. What is special about these is that they transmit every concept while discussing them. A core theme of the book is how much we can infer about truth from what is not true. He motivates the tension with a discussion of figure and ground, pointing out cases from art (incl Escher), music (incl. Bach), and mathematics too, in which a whole can be inferred from its part. In the dialogue following the chapter, the Tortoise explains the concept to Achilles (or the other way around). Or he seems to. They’re talking on the phone, and we only get one half the exchange. But it seems to be enough to catch the point, while experiencing it, just how much we know when we know only a part.

Literary experience, the experience of literature, is often represented as vicarious experience. We’ve internalized that enough to be satisfied when a writer can make us feel like we’re really there with the characters, in the room, over the shoulders. But we can use words to incept experiences in each others’ minds. Behavioral fiction raises the bar on fiction by reminding us just how direct literary experience can be.

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Visualizing the 4th dimension in 1936 (Jean Painlevé documentary — 10 min)


This visualization effort was clearly inspired by Edwin Abbott’s book Flatland. It’s in French but Youtube’s automatic translations became excellent in the last few years. Plus you can put together most of the content from the visuals, which are the best part. I’m enough into the look of this retro stuff (the staid narration! the graininess! the effects! the props!) that I don’t really need comprehension to get from this everything I need.

Jean Painlevé may have been the first science documentarian. He’s best know for his sea life documentaries, which precede Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s, but as you can see he did lots of other stuff. His parents were Victorian-era free-love anarchist aristocrats.

I crush majorly on Painlevé; look up his other stuff as well.

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How I got https://0w.uk from $10/yr. Finding the cheapest, shortest, least desirable domains on the Internet


Short URL’s are useful in their own right. But they are in demand, prohibitively expensive, and also hard to find. You have to know some tricks to find unused URLs without raising the eyebrows of hucksters, but with the explosion of top-level domains (the end part of a URL, like .com), it’s actually possible. Using this price sheet, you can find all kinds of stuff: prices are going below the standard $15/year for .com, and also well above, like over $8000/year for a .makeup link. Rooting around, with .za not available yet, .uk comes out as the cheapest 2 letter domain per year. In .com, two, three, and four character domain names are all gone, and super valuable. How about in .uk? Are there any two, three, or four level domains? I wanted to find out, so I wrote the following shell script

#Low profile search for the cheapest, shortest domain on the Internet
for i in {0..9}; for j in {0..9}; do whois $i$j.uk | grep "No match"; done;
for i in {a..z}; for j in {0..9}; do whois $i$j.uk | grep "No match"; done;
for i in {0..9}; for j in {a..z}; do whois $i$j.uk | grep "No match"; done;
for i in {a..z}; for j in {a..z}; do whois $i$j.uk | grep "No match"; done;

The key part is whois, which takes a URL and queries an official database of registered URLs. grep pulls out all error messages returned by whois, indicating URLs that have never been registered. It returned exactly one value, meaning that out of (10+26)^2=1296 possible URLs, only one had never been registered. So here you are, talking to the proud owner of the least desirable possible 2-letter URL: 0w.uk. And rather than paying thousands or millions, I pay less than $10, less than one pays for .com or .org.

What’s so undesirable about 0w.uk? It wasn’t clear at first, but here’s what I’ve come to: Two ‘w’s are desirable because of the invocation of the World Wide Web’s “www” convention. But a single w doesn’t do that. All it does is give so many syllables that the url takes longer to pronounce character-by-character than some five-letter URLs. And the 0, being easily confused with o, makes it so that the most available possible word-level pronunciations (“ow!” or “ow-wuck”) are positively misleading.

Still, it’s got some charm for being the runt of its litter. I put it to good use.

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Instagram Demo: Your friends are more popular than you


I’m teaching a class that uses code to discover unintuitive things about social systems (UC Davis’ CMN 151). One great one shows how hard it is to think about social networks, and it’s easy to state: “On average, your friends are more popular than you” (Feld 1991).

It’s one thing to explain, but something more to show it. I had a demo coded up on Facebook, but it was super fragile, and more of my students use Instagram anyway, so I coded it up again.

To run the demo you

  1. Consider not to participating (because, for a student, the demo involves logging into your Instagram account on a public computer and running code written by someone with power over you).
  2. Log in to your Instagram account
  3. Click to show your Followers, and scroll down that list all the way until they are all showing. This could take a while for people with many followers.
  4. Open up View -> Developer -> JavaScript Console (in Chrome. “Web Console” in Firefox. Slightly different for other browsers. In Safari you need to find developer mode first and turn it on)
  5. Ask them to paste the code below, which will be accessible to them via Canvas, into their browser’s JavaScript Console. If Followers aren’t showing, it won’t work. This could also take a while if you have many followers. Keep pasting the last part until the numbers are stable. You computer is working in the background growing the list of your followers’ numbers of followers.
  6. Open this Google Sheet.
  7. Paste your values into the sheet.
  8. Calculate the average number of followers, and the average number of followers of followers. Compare them. With enough participants, the second will be bigger, even if you exclude giant robot accounts.

This post isn’t an explainer, so I won’t get into how and why it’s true. But the way you set it up beforehand in class is by reasoning that there shouldn’t be a systematic difference between your and your friends’ popularities. The numbers should be the same. You wrap the lesson up after the data is in by hopping onto the spreadsheet live and coding up the averages of their followers, and of their friends followers, to show that their friends’ average is higher on averages. After explaining about fat tails, you drive it home on the board by drawing a star-shaped network and showing that the central node is the only one that is more popular than her friends, and all others are less popular.

The code

Open your Instagram Followers (so that the URL in the location bar reads https://www.instagram.com/yourusername/followers/) and paste this into your JavaScript console.


// from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/951021/what-is-the-javascript-version-of-sleep
function sleep(ms) {
return new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, ms));
}
function instaFollowerCount(page) {
return parseInt(page.querySelector("a[href$='/followers/']").firstElementChild.textContent.replace(/,/g, ""))
}
function instaFollowerCount2(page) {
return parseInt(page.querySelector("head meta[name='description']").attributes['content'].value.match(/([\d,]+)\sFollowers/)[1].replace(/,/g, "") )
}
function instaFollowerList(page) {
return Array.prototype.slice.call(page.querySelector("div[role='presentation'] div[role='dialog']").querySelector("ul").querySelectorAll("a[title]")).map(x => x.href)
}
// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/247483/http-get-request-in-javascript#4033310
function httpGet(theUrl)
{
var xmlHttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlHttp.responseType = 'document';
xmlHttp.open( "GET", theUrl, false ); // false for synchronous request
xmlHttp.send( null );
return xmlHttp.response;
}
function httpGetAsync(theUrl, callback)
{
var xmlHttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlHttp.responseType = 'document';
xmlHttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
if (xmlHttp.readyState == 4 && xmlHttp.status == 200)
callback(xmlHttp.response);
}
xmlHttp.open("GET", theUrl, true); // true for asynchronous
xmlHttp.send(null);
}
var iFollowers = instaFollowerCount(document);
var aFollowers = instaFollowerList(document);
var docs = [];
for (f in aFollowers) {
httpGetAsync(aFollowers[f] + "followers/", function(response) {
docs.push(instaFollowerCount2(response));
});
if(f % 100 == 0 & f > 0) {
await sleep( 1000 * 60 * 30 + 10000); // in ms, so 1000 = 1 second.
// instagram limits you to 200 queries per hour, so this institutes a 30 minute (plus wiggle) wait every 100 queries
// If you're fine running the demo with just a sample of 200 of your followers, that should be fine, and it's also way faster: this demo can run in seconds instead of taking all night. To have it that way, delete the above 'await sleep' line.

}
}

And then, after waiting until docs.length is close enough to iFollowers, run


console.log(`You have ${iFollowers} followers`);
console.log(`(You've heard from ${docs.length} of them)`);
console.log("");
console.log(`On average, they have ${docs.reduce((total, val, i, arr) => total + val) / docs.length} followers`);
console.log(`Your most popular follower has ${docs.reduce((incumbent, challenger, i, arr) => incumbent > challenger ? incumbent : challenger)} followers`);
console.log(`Your least popular follower has ${docs.reduce((incumbent, challenger, i, arr) => incumbent < challenger ? incumbent : challenger)} followers`);

The result isn't meaningful for just one person, but with enough people, it's a strong lively demo. See how things are coming along for others on this Sheet.

Technical details

Instagram crippled their API, so it isn't possible to run this demo above board, not even with the /self functionality, which should be enough since all participants are logged in to their own accounts. This code works by getting the list of usernames of all followers and posting a GET request for that users page. But Instagram can tell you are scraping so it cripples the response. That's why instaFollowerCount differs from instaFollowerCount2. In the main user's page, the followers are prominent and relatively easy to scrape, but the requested page of the friend can't be reached through a console request. Fortunately, Instagram's "meta" summary description of a user's page in the lists their number of followers, so a simple regex yields it. Of course, even scraping the follower count and IDs from the main page is tricky because Instagram has some scheme to scramble all class names for every page load or account or something. Fortunately it's still a semantic layout, so selector queries for semantic attributes like "content", "description", and "presentation" work just fine to dig up the right elements. Of course, this could all change tomorrow: I have no idea how robust this code is, but it works on Oct 24, 2018. Let me know if your mileage varies.

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Change your baby’s astrological sign with physics!

My summer project this year was a little non-academic web app project.

http://whatsyoursign.baby/

The premise of the site is that the mechanism of astrology is gravitational influence, and that since small nearby things have influence comparable to large things far away, it should be possible to tune your child’s astrological sign by giving birth around specifically arranged person-made objects. As a pop science site, you’ll see that it is a pretty soft sell: not telling anyone that astrology is wrong, instead trying to channel the interest in astrology into relevant subjects of physics.

I haven’t even released the site yet, but as a summer project it’s already a big success. I developed my frontend skills a bunch, and learned how to use astrological ephemeris databases. I also learned that astrology has a big open source community. I learned that there is a .baby and .amazon top-level domain for web addresses. I also learned a bit more about how to teach web programming students, hopefully showing the bones of the Internet a bit and making code a bit less intimidating.

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Do you lose things? Here’s the magical way to find them.

Let’s say you make a trip to the store, making sure to lock the door behind your on the way out. When you return and try to let yourself in, you discover that you lost your keys somewhere along the way. Round-trip, the whole distance traveled was longish to hunt for a pair of lost keys, like 1km. They could be anywhere!

How should you go about finding your keys? Should you spend the whole cold day and night slowly scouring your path? That sounds awful. But reality isn’t going to do you any favors: there’s no way your keys are more likely to be in one place along the way than another. So, for example, if the space within ten meters of your door accounts for 2% of the whole trip, the probability of finding your keys within that space must be equal to 2%, not greater than or less than 2%. Right?

Nope. It turns out that reality wants to do you a favor. There’s a good place to look for your keys.

The answer

Intuition says that they are as likely to be in one place along the way as any other. And intuition is right for the special case that your keys were definitely very secure and very unlikely to have fallen out on that particular trip. But they probably weren’t. After all, if it was so unlikely, they shouldn’t have fallen out. So we can’t just consider the world where the very unlikely happened. We have to consider several possible worlds of two rough types:
* The worlds in which your keys were very secure, but the very unlikely happened and they fell out anyway.
* The worlds in which your keys, on that particular trip, were unusually loose and bound to fall out.
So those are the two types of possible world we’re in, and we don’t have to consider them equally. The mere fact that your keys fell out means it’s more likely that you’re in the second type of world, that they were bound to fall out. And if they were bound to fall out, then they probably fell out right away. Why? We can take those worlds and divide them again, into those where your keys were likely but not too too likely to fall out, and those in which your keys were not just very likely, but especially very likely to fall out. And so on. Of the worlds in which your keys were bound to fall out, the ones that are most likely are the ones in which they fell out right away.

So there it is. If you lost your keys somewhere along a long stretch, you don’t have to search every bit of it equally, because they most likely fell out on your way down the doorstep, or thereabouts. The probability of finding your keys within 10 meters of the door is greater than 2%, possibly much greater.

What is the probability exactly? If you’d had several keys to lose, we might be able to better estimate which specific world we’re in of the millions. But even with just one key lost, the mere fact that it got lost means it was most likely to have gotten lost immediately.

Why is it magic?

If you know the likelihood of losing your keys, that makes them impossible to find. If you have no idea the chances they fell out, then they’re more than likely near the door. It’s your uncertainty about how you lost them that causes them to be easy to find. It’s as if the Universe is saying “Aww, here you go, you pitiful ignorant thing.”

Solving the puzzle, with and without data

So you can’t get the actual probability without estimates of how often this trick works.  But even without hard data, we can still describe the general pattern. The math behind this is tractable, in that someone who knows how to prove things can show that the distribution of your key over the length of the route follows an exponential distribution, not a uniform distribution, with most of the probability mass near the starting point, and a smooth falling off as you get further away. The exponential distribution is commonly used for describing waiting times between events that are increasingly likely to have happened at least once as time goes by. Here is my physicist friend, “quantitative epistemologist” Damian Sowinski explaining how it is that your uncertainty about the world causes the world to put your keys close to your door.

If you get in this situation and try this trick, write me whether it worked or not and I’ll keep a record that we can use to solve for lambda in Damian’s notes.

In the meantime, we do have one real-world data point. This all happened to me recently on my way to and from the gym. I was panicking until I realized that if they fell out at all, they probably fell out right away. And like magic, I checked around my starting point And There They Were. It’s an absolutely magical feeling when mere logic helps you solve a real problem in the real world. I’ve never been so happy to have lost my keys.

 

UPDATE: How strong is the effect?

All of the above tells us that there’s a better than 2% chance of finding your keys in the first 10 meters. But how much better than 2%?  20% or 2.001%?  If the latter, then we’re really talking intellectual interest more than a pro-tip; even if the universe is doing you a favor, it’s not exactly bending over backwards for you.  To tackle this, we have mathematician Austin Shapiro.  Backing him up I can add that, on the occasion on which this trick worked for me, my keys were super super loose, just like he predicts.  A takeaway is going to be that if this trick works for you, you did a very bad job of securing your keys.

I read your blog post, including Damian’s note. I have some things to add, but to clearly explain where they fit in, let me try to delineate two separate “chapters” in the solution to your key problem.

In chapter 1, we narrow our set of models for the location of the keys to the exponential distributions. Damian gives a good account of how this can be justified from first principles. But after doing this, we still have an infinite set of models, because an exponential distribution depends on a parameter \lambda (the expected rate of key losses per kilometer walked, which may be high if the keys are loose and hanging out of your pocket, or low if they are well secured).

In chapter 2, we use conditional probability to select among the possible values of \lambda, or, as you put it in your blog post, try to figure out which world we are in. This is the part that interests me, and it’s also the part that still needs mathematical fleshing-out. All Damian says about it is “So what is the value of \lambda? That’s a question for experiment — one must measure it.” But as you say, we’ve already done one experiment: you observed that your keys did fall out during a 1 km walk. This is enough to put a posterior distribution on \lambda, if we posit a prior distribution.

However… what does a neutral prior for \lambda look like? I don’t know any principled way to choose. A uniform distribution between 0 and some finite ceiling is unsuitable, since according to such a model, if you’re ever very likely to lose your keys, you’re usually pretty likely to lose your keys.

Assigning \lambda itself an exponential prior distribution seems murkily more realistic, so I tried that. If \lambda\sim{\rm Exp}(k), then, if I did my math right, your probability of having lost your keys in the first x km of your walk works out to k(k+1)\left(\frac 1k-\frac 1{k+x}\right), which is (1+\frac 1k)x+O(x^2) for small x. So in this case, Bayesian reasoning boosts the chances that you lost your keys in the first, say, 10 meters, by a factor of 1+\frac 1k. Observe that for this effect to be large, k has to be pretty small… and the smaller k is, the higher your average propensity to lose your keys (the mean of the exponential distribution is \frac 1k). Thus, for example, to achieve the result that the universe is helping you find your keys to the tune of a factor of 5 — i.e., that your chance of having lost your keys in the first 10 meters is 5% instead of the “intuitive” 1% — you need to assume that, a priori, you’re so careless with your keys as to lose them 4 times per kilometer on an average trip. That prior seems just as implausible as the uniform prior.

I can think of one kind of prior that could lead to a strong finding that the universe wants to help you find your keys. That would be a bimodal prior, with a high probability that \lambda is close to 0 (key chained to both nipple rings) and a small probability that \lambda is very large (key scotch-taped to beard), with nothing in between. But I can’t think of any reason to posit such a prior that isn’t transparently circular reasoning, motivated by the answer we’re trying to prove.

So… while all the exponential models definitely give you a better chance of finding your keys near the beginning of your route than near the end, I’m not convinced the effect size is all that strong; or, if it is (and you do have one magical experience to suggest it is), I’m not convinced that math is the reason!

Au.

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Design for magical spherical dice (3D printed)

I designed a die. It’s special because it’s a sphere pretending to have six sides: each roll will end with one to six dots facing up. It’s also special because you can print a copy. The trick is a weight that falls into one of six pockets under each of the numbers. “Spherical dice” sounds better than “spherical die,” so print two.

Some assembly is required: You just have to drop in the weight and jam in the plug. According to the colleague that helped me, Nobuyuki Umetani, fishing stores are the best place to get lead. For the plug, you can use your thumb. Most of the plug will still be sticking out post-jam and you’ll have to snap off the rest. The way many printers print makes them snap clean along the path of the printer head. So score the plug by drawing a knife around it’s diameter where it meets the sphere, steady it (with a vice or on the edge of a table), and give it a good whack.

Notes

  • The roll has satisfying action. Video at bottom.
  • The plug is tapered so as to jam well. It functions as the number one.
  • With this design, the strength of the jam may influence the fairness of the die. Probably not a real concern (since the ball’s mid-air choice of pockets will have a bigger influence on the outcome), but this is an imperfection in the design. Someone will have to do a few thousand or so rolls to make sure.
  • The density of the fill and the weight of the missing dots could also influence a die’s fairness, but if you care that much then you know not to bet six with any dice that didn’t come through a casino.
  • You can fill the dots in if you want them to stand out. Nail polish will do. Just be careful: the plastic doesn’t forgive mistakes because its layers act like capillaries and suck up liquidy paint (or nail polish removered nail polish)
  • You want the diameter of the lead weight to leave some wiggle in the pockets. If your weight is a snug fit into the die, get a smaller weight (or scale up the size of the model).
  • I’ve oriented the model at an angle so that it’ll print correctly (without any support material on the inside) if your printer can handle printing a 45° overhang. It probably can? I don’t know how common that is, but the machine I used can.
  • The original design subtracted an octahedron from the center of the sphere, but it was a little too sensitive, and also harder to make fair, so I redesigned it to subtract three mutually orthogonal boxes.
  • Workflow was 123D (for the orthogonal part) to Meshmixer (to sculpt out the dots) to MakerWare (staging and path planning) to a second generation Replicator.
  • I got the idea from someone who did the same thing in wood. I saw it for sale at a store call Aha.

And, this is how I roll:

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2014 and is filed under straight-geek, tricks.

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Chrome extension: Facebook deconditioner

I used to find myself on Facebook even when I did not want to be there. Now that doesn’t happen any more. Every time I go I have to click through a bunch of popups. The number of popups increases by one each time I return. I can still check the site, it just takes a little work, and a little more work each time.

With the carefully engineered convenience of these sites, you can reach a point where spasms of muscle memory override your own intentions about where you want your mind. If you think a small simple barrier would help you be a more mindful consumer of social media, you can install an extension I made for Chrome.

Even if you check the “do not show popups” box every time, this plugin will still force at least three clicks before every page access. And it will still make it easier to stop than to continue. And it will still keep count.

nerds

Here is the early code (you can ask me for more recent code). And these pages are useful for authoring.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2014 and is filed under straight-geek, tricks.

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How to learn every spice in the cabinet

So many of my peers are going epicurean. Its beautiful because I think cooking is empowering: it encourages people to try new things and experiencing new ways of thinking. It worrisome because it provides another thoroughly commodified identity, with all kinds of vocabulary for justifying not liking something. I spent a year convinced that I knew how I liked my coffee (and that I didn’t like it any other way). I finally admitted to myself that it was a delusion, and that the variance between cups of coffee was greater than my ability to tell the difference.

So we’ll focus on the first: empowerment. I never knew how to use the spices. I figured that the best way was to just cook lots of recipes by the book until I got the hang of it. But so much of the joy of cooking, for me, is making stuff up. For a while I just cooked without spices at all. I still prefer it that way, but I wanted to learn the spices, so I shifted to throwing in tons of random everything. Occasionally I would make things that worked. While the random approach will eventually start to pay off fine, it requires a certain affection for failure.

Though my stance towards failure is particularly affectionate, I did eventually refine my technique, and now it is fancy enough for anyone to learn to use any spice. Did you know that taste and smell are thoroughly integrated senses? Did you know that the tastiness of coffee and chocolate is entirely illusory? Coffee and chocolate have no taste. They are entirely smell. Try eating chocolate while holding your nose: all you’ll taste is the added sugar. And you can use this confound of the senses to simulate the experience of a new spice without committing to it. Soup is the easiest for this technique, so I’ll focus on it, but it works for everything:

Make your soup without any spices at all, throwing in all kind of stuff and putting off any spicing towards the end. When you are ready, ladle a little thimbleful of soup into a cup and walk over to you spice cabinet. Now open a random spice, take a sip of the soup, and smell the spice, and the next spice, and on down the line. By mixing smell and taste, you can simulate the experience of the soup with the spice. If you like what you are tasting, add the spice to the soup, erring on the side of too little. You can try all kinds of exotic spices and figure out what you like with impunity. Its simple and intuitive, and it will eventually get you a familiarity with the spice cabinet that you didn’t imagine yourself capable of. Feel the power of spice through your main course!

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2012 and is filed under life and words, tricks.