For my whole life, school is what has given me meaning. Now, starting my job, I realize that I have to find that meaning on my own. This has been unexpectedly terrifying; the framework in which I lived has melted away. For those accustomed to such existential freedom (to which most have unconsciously adapted), this is nothing — they just… live life, you know? Their adaptation happened gradually since their high school or college careers ended. So, I guess I’m not alone… but I do feel adrift sometimes. I shouldn’t expect too much since it has only been 4 weeks since graduation. Typing it out in black and white, i realize that, wow, it HAS only been 4 weeks since graduation. Life feels a LOT different in the rhythm of a job than it ever did in the rhythm of school. While I struggle to figure this out, I’m going to be a better husband to my wife, spend time with my family, and be better friends with my friends. I’ve been so goal-oriented, that I can’t decide if I should set more of them, or learn to focus my life without them. Probably, as is almost always the answer, a little bit of both.
Sometime in 2003, when this online space was only 4 years old, I thought: “I would love to be a dentist.” The journey is the destination and all that, but the destination is pretty great. So, it’s time to start as a dentist tomorrow. My weeks off since graduation have been wonderful, but what’s even better is that I don’t fear the years ahead the way I did the years of dental school. Somewhere, deep down, you know when what you are doing isn’t sustainable. Like 4 hour nights of sleep or back-to-back hotdog eating contests, you know that this is a pace you can’t sustain. This isn’t that. This is an opportunity to learn, to treat patients, and to grow my relationship with my wife.
“Your 1920x1080 TV takes a 1920x1080 signal, chops the edges off it and then stretches the rest to fit the screen because of decisions made in the 1930s.”
— Matthew Garrett
“120Hz and 240Hz TVs have the potential to show you each 24p frame for exactly 1/24th of a second, perfectly replicating The Way Movies Look, and that’s great. The problem is, it’s hard to make them do that, because of awful motion-smoothing settings that are On by default.”
— Stu Maschwitz
“‘Can I choose?’, Beatrix asks. She’s still confused. She thinks this is like home where one can choose from a selection of things to watch. A well organized list of suggestions and options with clear box cover shots of all of her favorites. I have to explain again that it does not work that way on television. That we have to watch whatever is on and, if there is nothing you want to watch that is on then you just have to turn it off. Which we do.”
— Patrick Rhone
“You know those [unskippable] FBI warning messages that appear at the beginning of DVDs and Blu-ray discs? They’re getting an upgrade—and they’re multiplying.
The US government yesterday rolled out not one but two copyright notices, one to “warn” and one to “educate.” Six major movie studios will begin using the new notices this week.”
— Nate Anderson
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent [television],” he said. “[Apple is] not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
— (Inspired by) Ed Colligan
So if you take Wikipedia as a
kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every
page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in
every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents
something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of
human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg
at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s
the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of
thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion
hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way,
now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects
a year spent watching television. Or put still another
way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every
weekend, just watching the ads.
This is a panoramic picture stitched from ten photographs, all depicting Millenium Park in Chicago on the evening of May 27, 2012. Mykala and I walked down from our hotel through the muggy air to sit on the pristine grass and listen to some great music. The night was perfect: the setting sun, the still air, little ones running around on the grass, couples eating picnic dinners on foot-high tables. I’m told the performers were the “Northwestern University Chorus and Symphony Orchestra with the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus” — and they were great. The material, however, was not good. Very dissonant, difficult material about 9/11, former president Bush, etc. Not exactly what you expect to hear for symphony music in a park. The piece was Richard Blackford’s oratorio Not in Our Time. I would not recommend it. I would recommend Millenium Park.
Afterward, Mykala and I strode the luxurious high-rises and their urban enclave, talking excitedly about our future together. This is the kind of night you go on a vacation for.
Two years ago, Mykala and I ate a life alteringly great watermelon. The darn thing made you ask questions like “What is truth?” and “Have I known beauty until now?” Ever since, we’ve been on a watermelon quest. Today, we have matched that previously awe-inspiring watermelon: we just had a (part of a gigantic) “Little Bear” brand seedless watermelon (#4032). I didn’t ask any big life questions, but did ask where it was from. Target. Hmm.
