Ben Mann Monthly 2020.09: planes, boats, family, match making, Korean
Purpose
An index for my memory
A menu of topics for my next conversation with you
A faster way to share what I’m excited about without the barrier of writing a complete blog entry on it
A skimmable way to spread content I found valuable
Experiments and experiences
Flying
I flew to and from Boston this month with no issues! I wore my full face respirator the whole time on the way there and everywhere except my plane seat on the way back. I was reasonably impressed with the sanitary practices in place, but I think if anyone near me was contagious but asymptomatic I'd be a bit concerned. Luckily Boston and SF are both low risk areas, so I think my risk was relatively low. Five days after I arrived I got a COVID test at CVS. Five days after I got back I got a pixel, both negative. Waiting is important to have enough viral load to show up on the test.Boats
On Cape Cod no one locks up their small boats, so I bought two pairs of $7 paddles on Amazon and we temporarily stole borrowed two canoes on the pond by my parents' house. There was a little learning curve on steering and paddling efficiently, but generally we had a great time! We chased some swans, pretended to be pirate ships, etc.Time with family
I'm very lucky to be able to work from anywhere, and with my office closed I don't have to worry about missing out on important meetings. I haven't lived with my parents and siblings for more than a week since before I left for college. It was great being able to spend "low energy" time with them cooking, watching movies, taking long walks, and playing tennis, pickleball, and pictionary. There was less pressure to spend every moment with them since I knew I'd be there for three weeks, so I was able to take more Ben-time to recharge when I needed to. I'm really impressed how much everyone's communication skills have improved in the last few years! Things are still getting smoother.Learning Korean
I took the first six 30-minute Korean lessons in the Pimsleur audio-only course. It's tough! I have more trouble with the phonemes than most of the other languages I've studied (French, Spanish, German, Latin, Russian, Chinese, Japanese). The words also feel like they have a lot of extra syllables for simple concepts, but I'm slowly figuring out that a lot of the extras come from politeness particles. Like everything, as my chunking improves it'll get easier. Just gotta put in the time.Match making
Turned out to be even harder than I expected! With 30 people for each gender in the pool it's still tough to match all the important attributes: height, age, location, interests, athleticism, ambition, etc. So far I've made ~6 matches. I'm hoping they go well, but my true goal in the initial match is to discover revealed preferences I can factor into the next match. I don't trust people to know what they want.
Life updates
Started reading The Player Of Games
Brother is moving to Finland while his wife builds a 1.5GW nuclear reactor ☢️
Ordered two Oculus Quest 2s & a Pixel 5
Took the OpenPhilanthropy survey on longtermism
Learned about the rocker-bogie mechanism for stair-climbing robots
Moved to Mission Bay (no movers!)
Learned contact staff basics
Content
5 point Likert ratings for “I would recommend this content to a friend”, sorted
Molecules, muscles, and machines: Universal performance characteristics of motors 4/5
Turns out there are scaling laws for animated and inanimate actuators! Muscles and motors are roughly equally efficient at producing force per unit of mass.
Palm Springs 4/5
Best take I've seen so far on time loop premise: a guy is stuck going through a wedding every day until he accidentally pulls in someone with him. They must find meaning knowing that they might live forever in a loop.
Strong performances from all the leads, esp JK Simmons
Facebook Connect: John Carmack Unscripted Live Keynote 4/5
John Carmack is the uber-nerd for a reason: he's incredibly talented, articulate, and direct.
He talks about
internal political issues at Facebook
the engineering challenges and tradeoffs in making Quest 2 like lens optics, heat dissipation, and latency
his vision for how these devices will continue to evolve both in implementation and use.
A funny, touching exploration of authenticity, hipster-ness, long-term relationship compatibility, achieving your potential, getting out of old ruts, and the success treadmill
Excellent acting from Adam Driver, Naomi Watts, Ben Stiller, and Amanda Seyfried
Movable Housing for Scalable Cities 3/5
An interesting vision for how to solve housing: pre-build the foundations with standard hookups for utilities, and make the houses interchangeable.
I think we're already starting to see this play out with companies like Cover, but moving the house seems like the hard technology piece to figure out. If we had heavy-lift airships then it'd be easy!
Seems like it'd be hard to get critical mass on the house moving infrastructure unless it was already available for something else.
Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future 3/5
Framed as a fictional story, but there's no real plot and the characters are flat.
Vision 1: automation causes mass unemployment and pushes most people into minimum quality of life ghettos
Vision 2: Everyone gets a monthly stipend to spend on whatever they want from a giant open source catalogue. The credits represent how much of the self-sustaining robots' resources the thing requires to make. Society forks into people who prefer to spend most of their time virtually and people who like to spend time in the real world. Both create lots of tech & art.
IMO this dichotomy is rather unrealistic, but I enjoyed the creative world building, especially the credit system.
Train to Busan 3/5
Satisfying and creative Zombie battle mostly on a train