Ben Mann Monthly December: more startup-ing, LA, holiday parties, Spiderman, Journey to the West, New Years reflection
Purpose
An index for my memory
An 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 way to spread content I found valuable
It’s meant to be skimmable. If there’s anything you want to see more or less of, please let me know!
Experiments and experiences
Night hike mission peak into 2019
Parked at Ohlone College, hit the peak at 11:30pm. Didn’t stick around for midnight due to ~30 mph winds. Worth the view.Breath holding practice, quantified
Held my breath for 3:05 while wearing a pulse oximeter, which measures heart rate and blood oxygen saturation. Got down to ~90% by the end. Took ~5 trials to get there, probably could have gone longer if I kept trying.
Graffiti practice
After a year of planning, finally tried graffiti on some scrap wood in the back yard. It’s hard to make sharp edges with normal spray paint. There must be special paints for graffiti. A bigger canvas makes for easier detailing. Using a straightedge as a mask helps.
Holiday party at Archive
When you enter, you get $500 Archive Dollars which you can use for anything: making bets, staking dares, running pyramid schemes, and paying for services. The person with the most money got $500 USD, which caused a giant Wall Street style bidding war at the end where the leaders offered to divide the pot with others who would donate their money.
Published lazy short ribs recipe
Yearly reflection and goal setting
This year I worked through the 8760 guide (editable template) for the third time.
Warren Buffett’s exercise: list at least 25 things you want to accomplish in your whole life. Choose 5 to focus on until they’re done. Explicitly avoid the others.
Birthday Experiment Reciprocation
I started sending others unsolicited videos describing them as if to a friend. It’s gone well so far, so I’m planning to do more. Let me know if it’s your birthday and I’ll do one for you!
Life updates
Visited friends in LA, slept on a boat in Marina del Rey
Made an app to trigger my front gate from NFC, published
Continued iterating on silicon wafer QA platform with Austin, met with industry experts
Started working with Jason Begleiter on a bunch of ideas, more details to come
Making an app to meet with strangers at restaurants, let me know if you want to try the alpha next week.
Content
5 point Likert ratings for “I would recommend this content to a friend"
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 5/5
Incredible on every front: a bold, unique animation style, self-aware plot, clever jokes, great character development.
American Gods full cast audiobook 3/5
Entertaining but didn’t give me much new perspective. More like eye-candy for the mind. This is the first full cast audiobook I’ve read. It made it much easier to understand who was talking.
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch 3/5
There’ve been “choose your own adventure” films since a long time ago, but perhaps never one on a mainstream platform. I had fun making the choices, but they often felt like false choices. The film reinforces the “lone genius hero programmer artist” archetype, which is a bit unfortunate.
Hilarious, creative special effects in the service of comedy. Felt like a modern Chinese Monty Python.
Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond 4/5 (I only read the abstract 😉 )
Facebook continues pushing machine translation forward using a single latent space for 93 languages, which gave them record breaking performance even for low-resource languages like Estonian. I see this as another important step toward figuring out transfer learning.
Eye Level: Poems 4/5
Visual, modern and atmospheric, conveying depth despite brevity.