Is it always striving to do better, no matter how “good” we are now? Is it finding new things to do or meeting new friends? Do we have the right to be happy when we know that other people around the world are suffering? If we cured cancer and ended poverty, would we finally be happy? Or is happiness something internal to ourselves – a sort of feeling or pride in one’s hard work ethic? The concept of constant betterment, always trying to make ourselves better in every way. Is it this quest for perfection that brings us joy?
I don’t think that this makes us happy. Continual self-improvement necessarily implies finding fault with oneself, in order to know which direction to travel in to do better. And there will always be fault; no one can ever become perfect. So, those who strive to become perfect will always be focusing on the negative, only seeing how they can do better instead of what they have now. This does not sound happy; it sounds depressing. I think that happiness is quite the opposite of striving for continual self-improvement; it is contentment and appreciation for what one already has. If we forget our aspirations and desires for a moment and take a step back from it all, we’ll realize that we have it pretty damn good. And that’s something to be happy about.
I agree with my friend WS’s blog post about taking risks.
One goal I have for this year is to try new things and do things that are out of the ordinary for me. I’m going to try to keep an open mind about things, and do things that I’d be too uncomfortable doing before. After all, with no risk there can be no reward.
On an interesting side note, I’ve been at MIT for slightly over 2 years now. Looking back, the things that I remember the best and have the most fond memories of are the things that were the most out-of-the-ordinary for me. It is the fun, risk-taking events that I remember the most. For example, I don’t remember anything about the pset I was punting last year on halloween. I’m sure there was one (since there’s always some pset that can I be working on), but I just don’t remember it all. What I do remember, however, is the fun and out-of-the-ordinary of that night – going ice skating (for the first time), going to halloween parties with friends afterwards, etc. I’m really glad I decided to have fun that night instead of staying home and just doing homework, because it’s a memory I otherwise wouldn’t have had and it was a great time!
So, I’m going to try new things this year, be chill, and have an open mind. Let’s give it a shot…
It’s time for a philosophy post. Haven’t done one of these in a while…
As you may have heard on the news, Ted Kennedy (US senator representing Massachusetts) passed away a few weeks ago. Amid all the press, stories of his life came out. Whether you agree with his liberal political ideology or not, he was indisputably an honorable guy. It says a lot about someone’s character when a bunch of conservative Republicans (including John McCain), who fought against Kennedy all their lives in the Senate, showed up at his ceremony and told stories of close friendship and camaraderie that one wouldn’t expect. One person who spoke at his ceremony offered this summarizing quote about Ted’s life: “he didn’t take himself too seriously.” And this got me thinking …. what does that really mean? Don’t take yourself too seriously? I usually take my life seriously, and I had thought this was a good thing. After much thinking, I offer you my thoughts on this interesting piece of advice.
I’ll start off with pointing out some of the great ironies of life:
We enjoy living the most when we’re not afraid to die (”Live life today like tomorrow’s your last day on earth…”)
We often do our best work when we don’t regard it as “work”, but rather as play.
We act the best when we aren’t self-consciously monitoring ourselves, and do not care how others perceive us
Another irony can be found in taking an important test - let’s say you want to do really really well on it. On the day of the test, you get very anxious with butterflies in your stomach, and all panicky because you want to do well so much. That anxiety ruins you; and you can’t keep your concentration on the test, and you start getting anxious when you don’t know the answers to all the questions. As a result, you do poorly. Meanwhile if you had been calm and not cared so much about your grade, you probably what have done better because you would have been able to think more clearly.
All of these ironies share a central theme: Your conscious awareness of how bad you want something can actually get in the way of you getting it. The moral is, be chill and just enjoy what’s going on around you. (But of course, don’t be too chill to the point where you do’t care about anything and hence become none-functional; that’s the other extreme. Find the happy medium). Be chill, take some risks, and just enjoy it. Don’t take your life to seriously, because then you’ll want your life to be good sooo much that you’re conscious awareness of this can actually get in the way of you living happily!
Here is another example that demonstrates this: Let’s say you want other people to like you. This is a reasonable thing that most people would like, no? One way to do this is to try to make yourself look really good and try to hype yourself up to all of your friends so that they’re all impressed by you. If it works though, those people won’t really see you as being a close friend. You’ll likely come across as distant and self-centered, and the “friendships” will only be unidirectional. A much better approach to getting other people to like you is to do the completely unintuivive thing of completely forgetting about yourself and your desire to be liked! Instead think more about your friends. Genuinely caring about them and there lives, will mean much more and hence develop much closer personal relationships. And then everyone is happy: you won’t be making yourself sick by self-consciously worrying about your image, your friends will have someone who truly cares about them, and they will of course like you for this. Win-win situation for all. This is what Ted Kennedy did, and this is how he had so many friends in the Senate, at both ends of the political spectrum. I heard countless stories in the news and at his ceremony about how whenever a friend or political foe was going through a tough time, Kennedy would literally be the first to call and offer help. He made it his top priority to care about the personal lives of his fellow Senators. And because of this, Kennedy was liked by all, and turned almost into a martyr upon his death. I’m sure he had a better quality of life because of it too, since all of these friends genuinely admired him for it just as much as he cared about them. Irony: to lead a more happy and fulfilling life, forget about yourself. Don’t focus on improving your life; think more about others and you’ll end up having a happier life in the end. Don’t take yourself too seriously.
So, “don’t take yourself seriously” just might be my second favorite quote (right after “I’m on a boat” ). I think it means to be chill, content with yourself (even when you’re unsure), and not care too much about where you are right now. Because if you do that, you’ll necessarily find yourself on higher ground down the road.
I’ve noticed that I tend to use my computer a lot… perhaps even a bit too much. I suppose that isn’t surprising given I’m a computer science major, but maybe I should start cutting down a bit. Typically, whenever I’m not sure what to do or I have a bit of free time, I find myself on auto-pilot, heading over to my computer. It’s just what I do, I guess. I end up surfing the internet, reading blogs, checking email, facebook, programming random stuff, using graphics software, etc. But it eats up so much of my spare time!
Lately though, I’ve been on my computer less. For instance, I hardly used it at all yesterday, and it was great! I had so much free time, and the day seemed to last twice as long. I got so much stuff done. I wish I could say that this was a self-enforced victory of will power, but alas I cannot. The real reason why I wasn’t using my computer is because it has hardware issues, and I couldn’t really use my computer
You may have heard that nVidia is in some trouble for producing a large number of faulty graphics cards that have found their way into various Dell, Apple, and HP computers. To make a long story short, my laptop happens to be one of the ill-crossed models to receive a faulty chip. My computer worked fine at first when I got it two years ago, but lately it’s been dying due to video card-related issues. At first it was manageable, but the problem has since become much worse, to the point where my computer has been at times completely unusable and unreliable (especially it seems, before psets have been due). My computer is also overheating a lot… at one point, I measured my computer’s internal temperature to be 91 degrees celsius… yes, nearly hot enough to boil water!! Computer’s aren’t meant to be that toasty inside.
Enough was enough, so I called up Dell last week to tell them what was going on, and that I suspected I had a faulty graphics chip. Sure enough I was right; my computer was affected. Luckily Dell is handling the situation well, and will be replacing my motherboard next week, so the problem should be fixed.
I’m excited that my computer’s finally going to be in working order again, but in another sense that probably means I’ll be using my computer too often again … My forced vacation from computers is now ending, so I’ll actually have to use my will power to avoid letting this little computation device eat up all of my spare time
I’ve been awe-inspired for as long as I can remember with things that can fly. I was thinking about perhaps building some sort of model RC aircraft this summer because I think it would be really cool. As I googled around, I found this amazing video. A guy from Canada constructed a model RC airplane with a built-in wireless video camera that can move left/right and up/down. The best part, however, is that this camera motion is controlled by a gyroscope mounted to the pilot’s visor; So when the pilot moves his/her head up, the camera moves up as well, etc. It feels like you’re in the plane, check it out:
I would love to build something like this, but it might be difficult for these reasons:
It’s probably very expensive. RC planes alone aren’t particularly cheap, and a wireless, color, high resolution radio camera almost certainly isn’t cheap!
The radio video range might not be that great, so that you could lose video (or worse, control of the aircraft) if you fly it too far away. So, you can’t fly long-range missions with the plane
I’ve been trying to think of ways to solve these problems (at least the radio issue). I have an interesting idea; instead of using radio controls to fly the plane, it would be cool to consider leveraging our pre-existing internet and cell-phone network infrastructure. In other words, if we could beam control signals and retrieve video from the plane over the cell-phone network, a plane could fly for much farther. In fact, assuming the plane doesn’t fly into any drop-out zones (which would probably be less of an issue since plane’s are high in the area above obstacles anyways), the plane could potentially go ad infinitum (or at least until the batteries run out )!
Implementing this could be tricky, however. Cell-phones are not designed to transmit arbitrary data (such as flight commands and video data) over the network; they’re designed for low-bandwidth, compressed audio. Hacking a cell phone to get this to work would be tricky, and it may not even be possible due to bandwidth limitations since video typically takes up a lot of space. Another idea I thought of however, would be to make use of relatively newer technologies, such as 3G. First of all, 3G purports to have a much higher bandwidth than a regular cellphone, making the possibility of transmitting video possible. And cellphone carriers let cellphone’s connect to the internet with 3G. Some newer netbooks come equipped with 3G, and can communicate over 3G networks to the internet (requiring a service plan, of course) anywhere there is a cellphone tower nearby.
It would be awesome to build this! Here’s a system architecture for what I’m thinking:
Basically in a nutshell, a human “pilot” sits at the computer, who sends flight commands and views the flight video (in real time). These commands and video travel over the internet, targeting a netbook mounted on the plane. The netbook can control the plane, and is also connected to a video camera (some netbooks even have webcams built in). Both the computer control station and the netbook controlling the plane are in constant communication with a computer server. The computer control station talks to the server via the internet; the netbook talks to the server via some sort of high-speed cellphone network, such as 3G, which in turn acts as a gateway to the internet.
Some advantages to this design:
Allows the plane to fly just about anywhere, because cell phone coverage is widespread
Allows for long-distance flights
Uses pre-existing infrastructure (internet, cellphone towers) instead of relying on ad-hoc RF communication
Since the netbook is a computer, it is completely programmable. It runs Windows or Linux. So, you can get it to do basically whatever you want, and to transmit whatever data you want.
A second board can be connected via serial or USB to the netbook, and this board can actuate motors on the plane (such as aeilerons, etc.) to control the flight. Complete “fly by wire”
Since the netbook is completley programmable, it can be made to deal with certain error conditions. For example, what happens if the wireless signal disappears? The plane can have an automated program to turn around or something, so that way it can get back in range. Very basic flight control can be implemented into the netbook
Using a computer instead of a cellphone is a better infrastructure choice, and makes making changes down the road much easier.
Power is not too much of an issue, since netbooks have built-in batteries, and USB buses are powered from this
Many netbooks already have built-in 3G cards and webcams for recording video
No complicated cell phone hacking required
It’s cool!
Some disadvantages to this design:
Although it isn’t prohibitively expensive, it isn’t cheap either. At about the time of this writing, a cheap netbook with a 2 year service plan goes for about $200-$250
It involves better hardware than a simple RF receiver. So if something does go wrong and the plane crashes, you’ve lost more than you would have without such a system
Possible wireless dead-zones. Although this may not be as much of an issue, since there are less obstacles and a better line-of-sight to cellphone towers when flying high up in the air
Wireless bandwidth supposedly goes down with increasing speeds. Hopefully it would still be okay in a fast-moving plane; this would need to be researched.
I think it would be awesome to build this! Since it’s complicated, multi-disciplinary, and could be expensive , it would be best as a team project in my opinion (especially when the team gets external funding!). Hmm… perhaps I should suggest this as a Next-Make project for next year?
Any thoughts on the design, or anything else for that matter?
Here a few thoughts as I take a quick break from studying. I’ve noticed that I can sort of turn all of my brain on like a switch sometimes. I’m usually on auto-pilot, which sort of feels like my brain isn’t completely on. Kind of like there are parts that could be revved up, but they’re not needed and so they’re just waiting there, idly. Lately though, I’ve found (thanks to studying) that I can turn on my brain to full potential. It’s really useful when I need to do a lot of studying, because I can go a lot quicker! It sort of reminds me of my computer’s processor. My laptop has an Intel processor that, when full horsepower is not needed, throttles down its clock-speed in order to conserve energy. But when there’s a lot of processing to be done, it increases back to it’s full-speed happiness. That’s sort of how I feel about my brain…
Inspired by my friend Wei’s blog about self-improvement, I’ve decided to join the band-wagon and write one myself! Here are some ideas and ideals that I have, some of them funny and others serious. Some have been inspired from others’ posts about self improvement, and for those I thank you!
Self-Improvement:
Be chill! – stress/unhappiness/uptightness never helped anyone
Be selfless – actively volunteer to help others, don’t just wait to be asked
). I think it means to be chill, content with yourself (even when you’re unsure), and not care too much about where you are right now. Because if you do that, you’ll necessarily find yourself on higher ground down the road.