Category: Thinking hard, or hardly thinking?

(Hey, I posted the design files for the 3D printed Esperanto Jubilee cookie cutters.)
Saluton amikoj!

Esperanto has two main symbols–the green five-pointed star, which is on the flag, and the Jubilee symbol, and at least one holiday.  Esperanto Day is December 15th, and this year, I designed and 3D printed a Jubilee cookie cutter!

I hadn’t ever designed a cookie cutter with indents in the middle before, but they turned out pretty well!  Next year, I think I’ll get some cookie cutters made with a food-safe process, so I feel comfortable giving them to other people.

This year for Esperanto Day, people are asking that Esperanto speakers post that #EsperantoLives!  (So I am!)

Evildea is a relatively famous Esperanto YouTuber, and he made an #EsperantoLives post today.  Watch it!

“Wait, wait,” you say.  “You can’t just show us cookies without giving us a poorly edited high-school style essay about Esperanto.”  Fine.  If you ask for it…

Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed language in the world.  It was initially created by L. L Zamenhof in the 1880s, and was released to the world through the first book “Unua Libro” on July 26th, 1887.  His goal was to create an easy-to-learn, politically neutral second language to help bring about peace and understanding between different people around the world.

I am skeptical it will bring about world peace, but it’s definitely an easy language to learn for native speakers of many different languages, and not a difficult one for most anyone.  Some studies have been done that showed that learning Esperanto before learning another language, like French, increased how well you learned French, at a greater rate than just studying French the whole time.

I started learning Esperanto about four months ago, through Duolingo, an online language learning tool.  It is a pretty good way to start to learn Esperanto.  I spent about an hour a day learning for the first few days, and now spend about twenty minutes a day.  I tweet sometimes about Esperanto things, or in Esperanto, at @adamo_esperanto.

Like I mentioned earlier, Esperanto has two main symbols–the green five-pointed star, which is on the flag, and the Jubilee symbol.  The Jubilee symbol, a Latin E and a Cyrilic Э smooshed together, was created at the 100th anniversary of Esperanto.  This was 1987, during the Cold War, and the two symbols that begin the word Esperanto in English and Russian were to represent the joining of the East and West.

Esperanto also has a holiday, Esperanto Day, on December 15th.  This was Zamenhof’s birthday.  (Coincidentally, it’s suitably close to the solstice and many other holidays.)  Many Esperanto speakers buy an extra book in Esperanto and get together with other Esperanto speakers.  I made cookies with a custom cookie cutter, above.

It puzzles me that some people react with anger and frustration when they find out I am learning Esperanto.  It’s certainly no less useful or entertaining than spending the equivalent time watching TV or dinking around on Facebook, but I have had people genuinely get angry with me for learning Esperanto.  Today, however, it is safe in most of the world to speak Esperanto, which hasn’t always been the case.  Many of the political regimes of the 20th century actively hunted down and killed Esperanto speakers.  Others simply marked Esperanto speakers as spies or political criminals.

Since the 1960s, there has been a couch-surfing program, Pasaporta Servo, for people who speak Esperanto. Many people alive today who grew up speaking Esperanto talk about how fun it was when someone from “Esperantoland” stayed for a night or two.

There are some native speakers who grew up speaking Esperanto, and some of them had children who grew up speaking Esperanto, and there are even a few cases of third generation native Esperanto speakers. (There aren’t any people I could find who grew up speaking exclusively Esperanto.)

There’s a good body of Esperanto literature.  William Auld, a pretty awesome poet, was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature for pieces in Esperanto.

Phew!  Feel free to ask me more about Esperanto or head over to Duolingo or lernu.net (they’re both free!) and join us!

EDIT:  Wooo!  They Might Be Giants retweeted this!

I was relistening to Glean by They Might Be Giants this weekend.  Like every TMBG album, it grows on you. I was listening to “All the Lazy Boyfriends”, a track I had mostly skipped over before, and paid attention to the lyrics.  One part in particular grabbed me.

All the lazy boyfriends are preparing to change

They’re standing in the kitchen and preparing to change

All the lazy boyfriends are preparing to change

This American splendor spreads out before you

From basements to attics, garages to sheds

Who needs a vacation? Who needs a direction?

Who needs motivation when you live in your head?

While the song seems to be about lazy moochy boyfriends, They Might Be Giants are actually warning us about a common problem: over-preparing to change!

Lots of folks spent a bunch of time and money thinking about the perfect way to start. Sometimes it’s warranted, but usually it isn’t. You probably should spend a bunch of time thinking about expertise once you’re solidly an “actual beginner” stage, rather than “someone who thinks about it a lot.”

I regularly crib Merlin Mann’s line: there’s a tendency to research the best jogging shoes and buy a subscription to Runner’s World, when you should probably first go outside and jog regularly.

Living in your head is comfortable. In your head, it looks just like a featured Pinterest project, but in the real world, you may find out it isn’t quite as easy. In fact, the longer an idea lives in your head without touching the real world, the harder it is to manifest it, because the more you think about it, the grander and more wondrous it becomes. That gap between desire and reality gets bigger and bigger, and it can become paralyzing. (A wiser man than I talked about this in a video called “Brain Crack“. It’s only two minutes long, and definitely worth your time. ) Sure, it’s fun to think about things, but given the explicit choice, I would generally prefer to make something, rather than think about making it.

I’m not immune to this, just because it’s risen to the level of consciousness and I often notice it. I still have this problem. My short-duration personal anti-savior for this is a specific person I met at a hackerspace who regularly discusses a project he’ll get to Real Soon Now that he started thinking about in the early 1980s.

So, fellow meatbags, stop living in your head so much! Stop preparing to change and start changing!

Amanda, Matthew and I have recently watched the first season of the BBC comedy Coupling. Although most places online claim it is the British answer to Friends, I really don’t think so. I don’t appreciate Friends that much, and Friends seemed more to me like Mad About You with more people. Coupling is much more in your face about the sex and relationships than I remember Friends.

Coupling is about dating, relationships, and sex. There’s a character, Jeff Murdoch, who comes across as a Kramer type guy. He has an odd bit of wisdom every episode, some accurate, others not. One I’m particularily fond of, and afflicted with, is the Giggle Loop.

• Patrick: What’s a giggle loop?
• Jeff: Don’t ask. To know about the giggle loop is to become part of the giggle loop!
• Steve: I think we can take it.
• Jeff: You’re not ready for the giggle loop. Basically, it’s like a feedback loop, you’re somewhere quiet, there’s people– it’s a solemn occasion, a wedding! No, it’s a minute’s silence for someone who’s died!
• Steve: Right?
• Jeff: Minute’s silence, ticking away–the giggle loop begins! Suddenly, out of nowhere this thought comes into your head, the worst thing you could possibly do during a minute’s silence is laugh! As soon as you think that, you almost do laugh! Automatic reaction! But you don’t–you control yourself! You’re fine! But then you think how terrible it would have been if you’d laugh out loud in the middle of a minute’s silence and so you nearly do it again! But this time, it’s an even bigger laugh, then you think how awful this bigger laugh would have been, and so you nearly laugh again only this time, it’s a very big laugh, let this bastard out and you get whiplash! And suddenly, you’re in the middle of this completely silent room, and your shoulders are going like they’re drilling the road, and what do you think of this situation? Oh dear Christ–you think it’s funny!

After a disaster with “Lesbian Spank Inferno,” Steve has a monologue on porn that had me looking for a transcription online as soon as the episode finished.
Anyway, Coupling was “adapted” for NBC and flopped. There’s a line or two of dialogue every episode where I know I don’t know what they’re talking about, because I’m not British. But in order to increase my cultural diversity, I netflix’ed The Wicker Man so I can understand these Britt Ekland references.

The first season is only six episodes, and there were only 28 total. They’re only half hour long, so you could easily watch this show over a few weeks without overdoing it.

Happy Birthday Legend of Zelda!

I <3 Zelda. Legend of Zelda games is what makes me buy a console. I’m dying to play Twilight Princess, and I can already see my grades next semester dropping because of it. I hope Amanda and I can play it together!

I’m wearing a Zelda shirt Amanda bought me in celebration of this joyous day.

I have memories of the original golden cartridge on the NES. I remember walking downstairs late at night when I couldn’t sleep, and watching my father play. I remember being stuck on level five for so long. I had found it before I should have, and had the hardest time. I remember sitting on the carpet in third grade, and while playing with my shoelaces, I rolled my shoelace into a circle, and remember thinking it looked like one of the monsters in the fifth dungeon. This was Digdogger. Zelda has influenced catchphrases. One night after my roommate was playing A Link to the Past on the arcade, as he was falling asleep he mentioned something about how cool it would be to have a “shield hat.” I mentioned it to him the next day, and he explained. This was the headpiece of the Helmasaur King. Whenever “shield hat” is mentioned, it now refers to a moment of sleepdrunkeness.
I hope there are many great Zelda games, and I hope to be fifty years and thirty four days old and write about the Legend of Zelda’s fiftieth birthday.

Please take some time to read the Wikipedia entry on The Legend of Zelda Series. There’s a lot of stuff linked from there.

Zelda Trivia: Miyamoto named Princess Zelda after hearing the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, one of my favorite books of all time, and he lived in St. Paul.  Here’s a picture I took of a statue of him I found in St. Paul.

Most people who know me know I’m absolutely in love with wearable computing. I’m in love with it to the point of wanting to go to grad school to work with them after I get my Electrical Engineering degree.

It recently came to my attention that I may have nearly everything needed for a good step in the right direction.

The ideal wearable is modular, as the equipment available changes all the time. When I’m sitting down at a trusted computer with my wearable, I don’t want to rely on a tiny display or auditory output. I want to be able to interact with my data on the dual 19 inch LCDs.

I need to be able to

• send and receive email
• browse the web
• instant messaging
• make and view appointments and other calendar-based information
• make and view a contacts list
• write and read basic text documents

ON THE GO!

Now, there are a lot of reasons why it’d be good to have a head-mounted display that lets me see some computer output as well as the real world. However, there are a lot of reasons why that isn’t going to happen in the next year or two for me. I don’t have over a thousand dollars to spend on a display. This limits my options a large amount. I also don’t have the knowledge of optics required to homebrew a solution based on a cheaper display.

Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society.

Neal Stephenson, “Snow Crash”