Updates

Now’s as good a time as any to fill you in: I now work for Tucker Max and Rudius Media. If you’ve read my blog at all, you probably know that’s a big deal for me. Anyway, I’m in Shreveport for the movie, staying at the party house. Survival is not guaranteed. Alcohol, archery, axes–I’m just starting alphabetically.  I’ll have more coming soon.

We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt.

–Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

I once had a job doing CAD, and to say I was overqualified would be an understatement. I won the state industrial technology contest in high school. My teacher had me teach his classes the hard stuff. The expertise needed for the job was menial by comparison, so I finished tasks quickly, and got bored just as fast.

And speaking of menial, one of the tasks I was given involved making the most efficient use of raw material available–basically cutting a number of different pieces out of larger ones with the least amount of waste. I’ll simplify it a bit:

Let’s say you have access to 10 x 10 sheets of metal. If someone asked you for two 5 x 10 sheets, you would simply cut one stock piece in half, with no waste.

Now imagine you need six 5 x 5, and five 2 x 5 sheets. This requires a bit more thought, but can be pretty easily figured out like a puzzle. You can do it with two stock pieces, and no waste.

You’re probably seeing how fast the difficulty scales, so I’ll get to the punchline. What if your task were to cut 500 pieces, of all shapes and sizes? Or 10,000? Not only that, but what if you had many different sizes of stock to choose from?

I quickly realized what a pain in the ass this would be to do manually, by simply putting them together in the best way I could come up with. And even then, how did I know it was the most efficient pattern? All I was doing was trial and error, and the uncertainty got worse as the number of possible arrangements went up. It was mathematically ugly. I wanted beauty, I wanted the formula: X pieces cut from Y pieces with Z efficiency. So I tried to come up with one.

My bosses weren’t happy about how I was spending my time, so I placated them by explaining the potential of enormously reduced material cost and man-hours. And I still did my other work, but I could finish a typical workday in 1-2 hours, so I had plenty of spare time. I just wasn’t using it to surf the internet.

After a week or so of wracking my brain, I was dumbfounded and frustrated at my lack of progress. My roommate happened to be a computer science PhD student, so I asked him for help. Why is this so hard? And if you have any sort of math/comp sci background, you can probably guess his response:

“Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha”

Apparently, while playing around with some rectangles, I had stumbled upon one of the great problems of mathematics. It’s funny how quickly menial becomes profound, if you give it legs.

Being an artist or philosopher or scientist used to be a lot easier to dismiss as unrealistic. Not too long ago, your dreams were “shelter” or “food” or “water that doesn’t kill you.” Nowadays, there are still plenty of people that think this way, but as the economy reveals it to be more and more an excuse, there is a new one taking its place: “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know” might be the most important and productive expression since man first put word to meaning–when it’s punctuated with an ellipses, not a period.

“…but I’m going to find out” is the other half, of course.

Did I want to buckle down and revolutionize complexity theory? Hell no. But at least now I know that. There are many forms of laziness, but only one truly matters: Being too lazy to find out.

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Further reading: Opportunities

Just finished some backend work on the site, updated the design, etc.

I’m still fixing some of the kinks, and I’ve also been working on several cool projects lately. Typing this now is nearly making me late for work, but I appreciate your patience and will begin posting regularly again very soon. Seriously, if you’re still here, giving me your attention, it means a lot to me. Thank you.

I’m deleting and reposting my latest entry, Houses of Cards: Pickup Artists. For some reason I was having problems with the RSS feed. Anyway, if you already read it, check it out again, because it’s the whole story this time and not just half of it.

My site was down for a little while, and I lost some posts and comments. I think I restored everything, but let me know if you experience any problems. Thanks.