A discussion on the Beeminder forum got me amped up about speed reading1. I ordered Kump’s Breakthrough Rapid Reading and started following the drills, but then found Scott Young’s debunking of speed reading. Kump’s method can at least improve skimming speed — which itself might improve comprehension (skim for structure, then go back and read closely) — but hitting one thousand words per minute with full comprehension may not be anatomically possible.

“There is No Secret Notebook”: The feeling is that the answer to your question belongs to people who have some essential quality that you forever lack. You look at yourself, with your slow and fragile reasoning power, and you feel like you’re counting on your fingers, and imagine that someone out there has a supercomputer. (Or maybe that everybody on Earth but you has a supercomputer.) This is an illusion.

Matthew Noah Smith argues in Slate that law enforcement having access to personal smartphone data is a reasonable analogue to mind reading: This is especially the case when it comes to the role that our phones play in both communication and information storage. There is simply no principled distinction between the processes occurring in the meaty glob in your cranium and the processes occurring in the little silicon, metal, and glass block that is your iPhone.

We instrument our applications with Dropwizard Metrics1 at my work and publish our metrics into Graphite. Whenever there are system issues, these metrics (plus application logs) are the principal source of data for tracking down the problem. But they also help us maintain situational awareness of our applications in production from day to day. Dashboards don’t replace automated monitoring, but Graphite-backed2 information radiators give me an instinct for what normal looks like.

When you’re driving, talking to a passenger is safer than talking to someone on the phone. Why? The passenger shares your situational awareness and knows when the conversation has to slow down for the sake of safety. Malcolm Ocean considers this as a metaphor for working with an instant messaging client open. Whereas if someone were talking to me in person, they might pick up on the physical cues of my situation, and see that I’m in a rush.

Julie Zhuo writes on Medium about trading quality for scope or delivery speed in a project. […] to create high-quality work, there has to be a minimum acceptable bar. And high-quality creators cannot trade off below that bar. They simply can’t. It would be inauthentic to who they are. It doesn’t matter if their peers, their boss, the whole wide world told them that this bar didn’t matter and that the right decision is to give up a bit of quality for speed or time or money or whatever.

You are not your thoughts. The sense that there is a you experiencing your thoughts and perceptions is a kind of thought. That sense is not you. What other people think of as you is a physical body - driven by an assemblage of thoughts and sensations - that behaves in consistent and coherent ways, due to biological factors and habits acquired through your history. No single aspect of that entity is you.

If you enjoyed Maciej Ceglowski’s “Website Obesity Crisis”, you’ll want to read Low-Tech Magazine’s article on building a decentralized low-tech network. Low-power Wi-Fi routers and cleverness can go a long way, especially if we’re parsimonious with our design. Nevertheless, even in such conditions, the internet could work perfectly fine. The technical issues can be solved by moving away from the always-on model of traditional networks, and instead design networks based upon asynchronous communication and intermittent connectivity.

In 2015, I ran 95 times totalling 293.2 miles. I wrote 220,784 words across 308 journal entries. I read 102 books. I practiced mindfulness meditation for 1,471 minutes. I’ve also had existential freak-outs over feeling too old and tied-down to achieve my goals1. But I consistently made time for the disciplines I value (writing, reading, exercise, meditation), all in the odd corners of my day. Even around the demands of parenting and work, there is enough time to add up to something substantial.

I just experienced a seismic shock to my love/hate relationship with Evernote, thanks to Tiago Forte’s article “How to Use Evernote for Your Creative Workflow”1. The love for Evernote has consistently come from the ease of capture and the satisfying feeling of browsing old notes, the hate consistently from trying to develop precise supporting systems and workflows using it. I keep using Gruber’s “Untitled Document Syndrome” as my framework for Evernote’s purpose, but then I’m torn by how poorly it fares against the alternatives for things like quick-access to facts, project support materials, and collaboration.