Category: Attention
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Decreasing Marginal Utility of Life Experience
When it rains, it pours. When we have a lot of something, we tend value it less, especially any more quantities. If we are hungry and all we have is one orange, it’s pretty valuable. The second orange is still valuable but less so. The hundredth orange doesn’t have much extra value compared to the…
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Many Molehills Can Make Mountains
Recently, they’ve discovered that heading soccer balls frequently can create an increased risk of concussion. Obviously, using your head for a soccer ball once doesn’t cause much damage, but doing so repeatedly in a short period can. We may respond to this by deciding we will never ever hit the ball with our head. Problem…
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Why Write
Sometime ago, my manager asked me to put together a plan to validate a very complex system of software, so I requested a specification from the development team. After all, what was I supposed to test unless there was some document of what the system was required to do? But none existed. The entire project…
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Craming
We started with good intentions, we were going to start studying early, slowly, and make sure that we really knew the material before the final. But here we are, the final is two days away and we still need to read through the last half of the text-book. So like we’ve done before when woefully…
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Toward a Peak-A-Boo Epistomology
Years ago, just before moving to India for a few months, my parents gave us a travel book on India. It was chock-full of beautiful pictures of what might be the most colorful country on the planet. When we got there we discovered the same beauty illustrated by the book, but quickly realized that it…
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Complaining without a cause
When my wife and I celebrated our anniversary, we decided to spend a couple of nights at a bed and breakfast. The B&B had the option of spending a little extra money to get a room with a hot tub. The idea of a hot tub sounded nice so we got that room but in…
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Dealing With Frustration
We were sitting at a our 10th red light surrounded by cars everywhere. Anxiously wishing we were at our destination, the light turned green and …. nothing, just lots and lots of brake lights. Glare back at the light still green, yet no movement. Now it’s turning yellow and one car made it through the…
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Running The Project Gauntlet
Every time I go for a longer run, I experience almost the same mental states, all of which feel like they will never end even though I’ve experienced them before. It starts with feeling fresh and excited; I look at my pace and see I’m running faster than typical and I’m not even out of…
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Thrashing
Swimming has been a part of my life as far back as I can remember. I used to go swimming regularly with my cousins at my grandparents pool and lived close enough to the ocean to swim there occasionally. I even remember doing an open water swim (probably 300m) in a small mountain lake when…
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Dealing With Insecurity
I have two friends who are extremely talented software designers: one wrote an algorithm by himself that typically takes teams of engineers to implement, and not being told otherwise, solved a problem that all the teams at large companies said was impossible. The other wrote a piece of software which provides the foundation for many…