On Really Trying (2009)

Strangely reading about high achievers having had a difficult childhood and how it might have actually "enabled" them to achieve what they did, is soothing in a way. It's nice to think of your own scars as a thing that helps you sometimes instead of only a burden.

I do remember when hearing about Simón Bolívar's crossing of the Andes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju7nJjprbQg) "I wish I had this guy's energy and drive". Some people just seem to be on another level. It kind of would make sense if this was bipolar disorder?

This holds true across so many fields. I believe parts of this is in play in physical space as well. When breaking the World deadlift record. 500kgs seemed impossible until someone broke the barrier. Then suddenly others follow. Sub 10 seconds 100 meter was out of reach at some point. Bolts 9.58 seems almost impossible to beat and maybe that is why it isn't. There are of course barriers to physical performance, but I would agree that the general sentiment on where they are play a larger role in placing them than the actual limitations.

Interesting article to share on the eve of yesterday's debacle about the Navier-Stokes problem.

Maybe another quote to add to the list is about Bob Widlar (from https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/bob-widlar-silicon-val...):

> In 1965, Widlar left Fairchild to work at National Semiconductor. While there, he released his design for the industry’s first high-power voltage regulator, the LM109. This finding came at a time when engineers hotly debated whether it was possible to develop a high-power regulator on a single chip.

> Widlar, established as an engineering genius in 1969, wrote a paper settling the debate, claiming temperature swings and packaging limitations made the device impossible. The industry took his word for it and stopped all efforts to build such a device. However, in 1970, Widlar shocked his contemporaries with the 20-W LM109, the industry’s first high-power voltage regulator. The device included all of the features Widlar had claimed were impossible just one year prior.

>Claude Shannon once told me that as a kid, he remembered being stuck on a jigsaw puzzle. His brother, who was passing by, said to him: “You know: I could tell you something.”

>That’s all his brother said.

>Yet that was enough hint to help Claude solve the puzzle. The great thing about this hint… is that you can always give it to yourself.

When I've been stuck on a problem that I know there's a solution to, sometimes I've been able to get unstuck by imagining myself in the future after having solved the problem looking back and kicking myself for how obvious it was.

Maybe that only works for problems that have solutions so obvious you'd kick yourself for not seeing them, but it does put me in a frame of mind of looking back from the solution and seeing the path out of being stuck.

My other trick is that when I've been working hard to solve a difficult problem, and then at the last moment something horribly discouraging happens and everything falls apart, I realize that there is no God, but if there were, he's a huge asshole and a bully who loves to throw things in your path just before you're about to succeed, to discourage you and make you give up right as you're on the edge of success, sabotoging yourself by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Because he loves to laugh at you for being the cause of your own defeat.

Now I recognize that pattern of everything falling apart after it was going so well as a sign that I was just about to succeed, and God's just being a dick, so I refuse to give up, and interpret it as an encouraging sign, just to spite him. Even though he doesn't exist, it really annoys him when I do that.

It may sound crazy, but it's not as crazy as believing in God! Maybe it's not internally consistent, because God can't be an asshole and a bully if he doesn't exist, but it's certainly consistent with how the fictional Bible depicts him, and how the vast majority of his followers and the leaders they elect act in the real world.

I recorded this several days ago: Alan Kay was performing an AV test before giving a talk for Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration, and God threw a monkey wrench into the loop, which Alan broke out of with amazing ideas from Claud Shannon that he thinks about every day.

Alan Kay: Shannon Gave Us a Way of Dealing with Noisy Channels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjntrqhn8pk

Alan Kay performs an improvisational avant garde layered audio feedback loop about Claude Shannon, live online during Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration.

Alan was scheduled to talk about how encountering Simula sparked his early thoughts about objects. During setup, somebody had the live stream playing out loud near an open Zoom mic, so his own voice kept arriving back in his ears about 21 seconds late, over and over.

What he said was not random: "Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels." And: "I think about that almost every day. I realize what the fuck is going on and it's just so amazing." Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem is the math for exactly the kind of channel that was garbling him as he praised it.

Alan joked it was "being rerouted to Mars and back." At the speed of light, a 21 second round trip is about 3 million km one way -- eight trips to the Moon and back, not even a twentieth of the way to Mars at closest approach.

This is an accidental Zoom performance of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" (1969), where Lucier re-recorded his own voice in a room until only the room's resonance remained. Here what remains is the network: delay, compression, dropouts.

Bonus noise: YouTube's auto-transcript bleeps Alan's enthusiasm into [ __ ]. So the full chain is: Alan's voice, Zoom, stream, room, Zoom again times three, my screen recording, YouTube's speech recognizer, a censored transcript.

The fix: "Just turn off the audio at your end on Zoom."

I Am Sitting in a Room:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room

Alvin Lucier on "I am sitting in a room":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9XJWBZBzq4

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