Gotta get this thing back up again! I got inspired by reading some old Switzerland blog posts. I definitely miss Zurich and the student house and the unpredictable serendipity of every day there. Thanks Past Spencer for writing everything down so I can rediscover the insights I learned back then, reexperience the delights and the heartbreak alike, and get fired up. I read some of The Man who Solved the Market, a biography of Jim Simons, in the morning. Really interesting stuff. The guy is competitive, tenacious, and has a big appetite for risk.
Met Mom and sis M at Birchwood Park. While they jogged the stairs, decided to do some wind sprints–haul up the hill at a dead sprint, walk down, repeat. This exposed a big weakness in my workout routine–although my cardio is pretty good in general, this extreme exercise had my lungs and throat burning and me gasping for air within 7 or 8 iterations. I biked home, still pretty tired. Crazy!
Had a great long conversation with Dad, where we talked about different types of work and the corresponding characters. The most obvious characters are the inventor, the prototyper, and the implementor. There are some subtleties here–in particular, prototypers don’t just make demos–they build real working systems, but without the performance engineering and the polish. Dad thinks some people have a preferred mode of work / character, and his is the prototyper, even though he’d been working as an implementor / moonshotter. This brings us to the other, less familiar characters: the moonshotter, the knower, and the futurist. The moonshotter tries to bring a big project to fruition (Musk, Gates, Bezos, etc.), usually after the necessary components (for SpaceX, rocket engines, stir welding, etc.) have been invented, prototyped and in some cases implemented. The knower–there are few examples of this character, but it might be my preferred one. Feynman might be an example of a successful knower–someone who tries to understand things from first principles and cast that understanding in a simple and general form for use in teaching and consulting. Very interesting. Embracing my knower side would imply certain strategic choices; in particular, getting out there on Twitter, trying to bring my first principles understanding of e.g. causality into discussions, and learning about new subjects when they seem like they could be of use to smart folks. The conversation took me through a late and scattered lunch. Afterwards, took a pretty epic bike ride with sister Iz. We set out towards Birch Bay, our route taking us through beautiful, almost empty lands surrounding the great BP refinery. We found ourselves on a sharp line of asphalt with an incredible meadow and forest on one side, and across the railroad tracks on the other, a stand of birch so regularly spaced and open as to defy the imagination. Soon the birches yielded to giant white tanker cars, and then, the refinery! Huge vats, each numbered and with spidery staircases up the sides. The first we saw was labeled 50, but we couldn’t believe there were really that many. Smokestacks, spindly black scaffolding, blinding orange industrial lights–the refinery was something to behold. But no sooner were we past it, than we found a trail I remembered from way way back. Also BP land, but with nothing on it. The trail just ran through a meadow with the bay on both sides. Isolated and wonderful. Once through that, Birch Bay was just a step away. The smell of firewood perfumed the air and people goofed off on the beach as we cruised down Birch Bay drive. We couldn’t resist stopping at our old friends the Worthies, knocking on the door and stepping back a few paces. Had a good conversation, caught up.
It was late when we headed back. Dinner was at the latest 7:30, and there was no way we could make it, so we made a wild last ditch sprint to Edaleen’s and asked Dad to pick us up. Even then, it was tight. Iz was dripping sweat. We cranked hype tunes by Izzy’s favorite band BTS on my tiny phone speaker. I called out the miles as Iz pushed herself like a true prospective college athlete. We made it just in time to grab a sundae and wolf it down on the way home, before we all had burritos. Afterwards we watched an episode of Parasyte and then an episode of the Office. I headed up, goofed around a bit, ended up reading some old Zurich blog posts and some notes I’d written to myself back at the time I was living the good crazy life in Culmann, and wrote this log!
Gratitude Journal
- Crazy refinery drive-by
- Delicious fudge on the sundae
- Fun conversation with Dad
- Wind sprints