Category Archives: Daily-Ink

Definition of anger

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Heard this a few days ago and it has stuck with me.

The definition of anger: An emotional punishment you give yourself for someone else’s behaviour.

Kinda makes my little road rage about someone not using their indicator feel a little stupid.

I think there are times when anger might be an appropriate response. But how many times is it just unnecessary self punishment? How often does it linger too long? How much mental energy is used to hold on to angry thoughts?

And who ultimately pays the price for being or staying angry?

Discovered versus Invented Math

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Is Math discovered or invented?

The conclusion I come to is BOTH!*

This is an oversimplification but I think it makes the point:

There is no such thing as 1 divided by 2. I can have 1/2 of 2 apples, that’s what we would call discovered math. I have 2 apples, I spilt them into 2 groups of one, and give you 1, and I have one left. We can do this easily. But if I cut a single apple into halves, then I have invented Math. I can’t grow a half of an apple, and I can’t cut an apple perfectly into halves.

Another way to look at this is that if I take 7 equal length 1-foot rulers and put them in a straight line, I have a 7 foot length that is made up of 7 single units. However, if I decide to make this length a single unit and I divide it into 7 parts, 1/7=0.142857 repeating.

There is math that we have discovered because it is discoverable in nature, and then there is math that is invented to make sense of ideas that we invent, like fractions of a whole. Using the 7 units of 1 divided by 7, versus 7 divided by one, is a clear example of this. A perfect 1/2 of an apple is another.

But it’s a bit more complicated and confusing than this simple explanation. This doesn’t mean that any irrational number is necessarily invented. π (pi) is discoverable and not invented. The golden ratio, Φ (phi), is also discoverable. The square root of 2 on the hypotenuse of a 1×1 square is an invention we sought to make sense of an imaginary line dissecting a square.

So, some Math is discoverable and some math is invented (capitalization is my own emphasis).

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*Note: I’ve come to this conclusion through discussions with Joe Truss on the nature of our universe and the premise that ‘We Live in a Tetraverse’.

Defining and Understanding Community

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I call it the most important book I never read. It’s called “Bowling Alone”. I asked Microsoft Copilot to synthesize the message of the book for me:

“The main message of “Bowling Alone” by Robert D. Putnam is that social capital in the United States has been declining since the 1960s. Putnam argues that this erosion of community engagement and participation in civic life has led to a weaker democracy and a decline in personal well-being. He emphasizes the importance of revitalizing social networks and community bonds to strengthen society.”

I say that I didn’t read it, but I tried. It was suggested for a book club I was in 20+ years ago and while the premise is why I call it the most important book I never read, the actual text was very much like a textbook and way too boring. None of us finished it, but we had very interesting conversations about it and I’ve thought about a lot in subsequent years.

I think the message about lost community is more relevant today than 20 years ago. I have lived in the same house for over 25 years. I know my neighbours on either side of me well, but vaguely know the rest of my neighbours beyond that. I don’t live in a community as much as we cohabitate in a common local area.

Community should describe our neighbourly connections not our geographical location. Close community bonds strengthen a society. I think about this as I think about retirement. At some point my wife and I will downsize our home. Where do we move to? To me geography matters less than community. The more specific question to ask is, where do we move to in order to maximize our connections to our friends and community?

The difference between living 15-20 minutes away from a friend versus 45-60 minutes away is the difference between seeing them regularly versus making monthly plans. It’s the difference between living in a community and commuting to occasionally visit and see each other.

In the future I want to create the community that I want, in close proximity to me. I want to cohabitate with my social community, not travel from a place where I cohabitate with strangers to get to my community of friends.

Travel to meet

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I’m in Courtney, BC, for a meeting of BC Provincial Online Learning School principals. We are fortunate that we will also be joined by the Ministry. I took the ferry here yesterday and arrived in time to join 5 other principals for a late dinner.

The dinner was enjoyable even though 80+% of the conversation was work related. That’s the nature of these meetings, because my colleagues from other districts across BC understand my job in my district better than 95% of my colleagues ‘back home’. And as we talk, we learn, we seek advice, we share, and we support one another.

All that before the meeting even starts this morning. We are principals of online school. We can easily connect online and that’s mostly how we connect. But sitting at a dinner and breaking bread together; Seeing each other face to face and in group, adds something special; And the effort made to travel to be together makes us appreciate the opportunity even more.

Fitness delusion

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Recently I’ve seen a few social media posts from a guy who has been working out for 11 years. I don’t follow him and can’t remember his name right now but basically he is in decent shape but not super muscular. He also shared the image in poor lighting that didn’t highlight his muscles like you see most fitness influencers do.

He got ridiculed. Most comments were all about how he should look a lot bigger after all that time. But the good news is that a lot of healthy, fit, natural body builders came to his defence.

People have a false sense of what it means to be fit because the people they see on social media are jacked up and have rather unrealistic physiques that are too hard to maintain. Some use steroids to enhance their growth. Others have chiseled abs, and that involves not just physical training but a very strict diet. And of course they only take photos in the best light after doing a ‘pump’ to maximize their size.

Here’s the reality: adding just 10 pounds of muscle is hard work! Adding 10 more after gaining your first 10 is significantly harder.

Six years ago I was overweight and started a fitness journey that I’m still on. It took me a year to lose just over 25 pounds. I did this with regular cardio, weights, and reducing my snacking using intermittent fasting, (basically, no snacking food from dinner to a late breakfast 5 days a week). I accomplished this in one year, then it took me 5 years to build my weight back up with 13-14 pounds of good weight. That’s right, my gains average are less than 3 pounds a year… and I’m thrilled with my progress.

Gaining muscle is hard. Unless you take the route of unhealthy supplements like steroids, you aren’t going to bulk up any time soon. Will you see results from your hard work? Yes. Will that mean that you get a lot stronger? Yes. Will you see a massive difference in the size of your muscles? Probably not without considerable effort over a long period of time.

Being fit doesn’t mean that your body looks like a body builder. It doesn’t mean that you walk around with six -pack abs. It does likely mean that you are feeling better and stronger than you were a year ago. It does mean that you are making small gains that you might notice even if others don’t.

Don’t buy into the delusions of ideal fitness that influencers share on social media. They aren’t sharing the sacrifices they make to look like they do. They are sharing month old images of when they were jacked up for a competition because they can’t maintain that look day to day… or they are making unrealistic dietary or lifestyle sacrifices to keep looking that way, so that they can sell you their program, or suppliments.

Find a way to make fitness part of your life, so that your quality of life can be better in the years to come. That’s it, that’s all. And once you’ve figured that out, appreciate all the small gains, because realistically that’s all you’ll see, small gains over time… and that’s a good thing no matter what the bulked up and juiced up influencers say.

Free Speech and Audience

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For most of my life I’ve been a bit of a free speech absolutist. I believe, or maybe believed, that even idiots had the right to free speech. You want to deny the holocaust or believe the earth is flat? You are an idiot. You are free to express your beliefs and people are free to ridicule your unsubstantiated beliefs. You want to share your stupidity, go ahead and do so to the cost of your social credibility.

But social media has changed, or is changing, my view. If you wanted to stand on a soap box and share dumb ideas, you will likely be ridiculed in the community you live in, and no one will take you seriously. You will essentially ostracize yourself and your message would fade as people got fed up listening to your nonsense.

But move from a town square to the metaphorical global town hall of Twitter and Facebook, and suddenly you get these echo chambers of stupidity that feed off of each other. Throw religious absolutists into the mix and some really silly beliefs start to get amplified. Essentially, there is an opportunity for idiots to find their tribe.

“A theory isn’t a fact,” is a common theme used to debunk scientific explanations. But then pseudo facts that are invented by these people are not held to nearly the same standard. So, on social media, bad ideas spread, gain popularity, and start to build an audience of believers. Instead of ridicule, these fools find a community. Instead of being ostracized, these morons find followers.

So the incentives are there to be inauthentic and to spread misinformation, instead of the disincentives of ridicule and shame. And so absolute freedom of speech no longer has the consequences it once had, and bad information ends up spreading faster than good information.

Even the debunkers and scientific thinkers speaking out against these charlatans peddling misinformation end up feeding the algorithm that puts the bad messages in front of more people. So bad ideas get spread, and this happens at a faster rate than good ideas.

I don’t know how to fix this, and I struggle to think that censorship is the answer. But allowing bad ideas to spread freely seems wrong too. Who decides? Who censors? What criteria do we use? The reality is that censorship is a slippery slope… but we are already on a slippery slope where the current social media models and the algorithms that promote more time on these apps already seem to favour the spread of bad ideas. And the tools used to elevate ideas effectively are being used to share and amplify bad ideas faster than good ones.

Ultimately, despite this, I am still a free speech absolutist. I just think free speech and the right to an audience are two different things. How we police this is not something I think can or will be solved any time soon.

Dial tone

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When was the last time you heard a dial tone? When was the last time you used a rotary phone? Or a pay phone?

I tend to use Siri a lot. I don’t go to my phone app, I just ask Siri to call the number for me. And I call people a lot less than I text them.

We’ve come a long way from a family phone being connected to our wall, with a long cord attached to the handset. We’ve moved the phone from a side character to the protagonist. From an item to occasionally connect to one person to a tool of constant contact to the world.

Along the way, the idea of the dial tone disappeared. What else has disappeared?

In the middle

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I think that a robust and healthy middle class is essential to maintain a vibrant society. But what I see in the world is an increasing gap between the wealthy and an ever larger group of people living in debt and/or from paycheque to paycheque. The (not so) middle class now might still go on a family vacation, and spend money on restaurants, but they are not saving money for the future… they simply can’t do what the middle class of the past did.

A mortgage isn’t to be paid off, it’s something to continue to manage during retirement. Downsizing isn’t a choice to be made, it’s a survival necessity. Working part time during retirement isn’t a way to keep busy, it’s s necessity to make ends meet.

I grew up in a world where I believed I would do better than my parents did. Kids today doubt they will ever own a place like their parents, and many don’t believe they’ll ever own a house. Renting and perhaps owning a small condo one day are all they aspire to. Not because they don’t want more, but because more seems too costly and out of reach.

Then I see the world of AI and robotics we are heading into and I wonder if initially things won’t get worse before they get better? Why hire a dozen programmers, just hire two exceptional ones and they are the quality control for AI agents write most of your code. Why hire a team of writers when one talented writer can edit the writing done by AI? Why hire factory workers that need lunch breaks and are more susceptible to making errors than a team of robots? While some jobs are likely to stick around for a while like trades, childcare, and people in certain medical fields, other jobs will diminish and even disappear.

I don’t think a robot is going to wanted to provide a pregnancy ultrasound any time soon, but AI will analyze that ultrasound better than any human professional. A robot might assist in laying electrical wire at a construction site, but it will still be a human serving you when you can’t figure out most electrical issues that you have in your home. It will still be a human who you call to figure out how to fix your leaky roof or toilet; a human who repairs your broken dishwasher or dryer. These jobs are safe for a while.

But I won’t want my next doctor to be diagnosing me without the aid and assistance of AI. And I would prefer AI to analyze my medical data. I will also prefer the more affordable products created by AI manufacturing. The list goes on and on as I look to where I will both see and want to see AI and robotics aiding me.

And what does this do to the working middle class? How do we tax AI and robots, to help replace the taxation of lost jobs? What do we do about increased unemployment as jobs for (former middle class) humans slowly disappear?

Will we have universal basic income? Will this be enough? What will the middle class look like in 10 or 20 years?

There is no doubt that we are heading into interesting times. The question is, will these disruptions cause upheaval? Will these disruptions widen the wealth gap? Will robotics and AI create more opportunities or more disparity? What will become of our middle class… a class of people necessary to maintain a robust and healthy society?

4 years of crunches

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Today my buddy Dave and I did our 160th Coquitlam Crunch together. It started during covid, January 2021. We had just come off of Christmas break where we had to isolate with our family/inner circle, and so we had spent 2 weeks not connecting much, if at all, with anyone outside of our household. Dave and I were both feeling really disconnected and so on the first or second Friday back at school (neither of us remember exactly), we decided to do the Crunch. This was an acceptable thing to do because it was an outside activity.

Ignoring the fact that it got dark early and that it was cold and wet, we set off to climb this steep, 250m high, powerline trail. It was so wonderful to connect face-to-face with a friend that we decided to do it again the following week.

And here we are, 4 years later, averaging exactly 40 crunches a year… and we have plans not only to keep going, but to do something pretty challenging on this trail in the future. More on that later.

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Posts about Dave and I on the crunch here.

F2F

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I just had an hour long conversation with a friend. Now I’m going to drive almost an hour to go work out with him and hang out for a bit before my hour drive home. The phone conversation was great, but it doesn’t replace the opportunity to share time face-to-face.

Tomorrow I’ll meet another friend for our weekly walk and coffee. Those times together have evolved a great friendship into a brotherhood that we would not feel without making the effort to connect so frequently.

I love technology. I had a great conversation today on the phone. I had another great conversation earlier today on Zoom with my uncle. He lives over 4,000 kilometres away and a face-to-face is not possible, so a digital connection is necessary. Zoom lets us still see and be with each other when we can’t physically be together.

I prefer physically being together, but whether physical or digital the idea of connecting F2F with people you care about is not just nice, but actually food for the soul. It’s a chance to fundamentally connect in a way that feeds your wellbeing and enriches your life.

Who do you want to, need to connect with F2F? What’s stopping you from doing so (now)?