7 Jul 2010 #

(But first,) some data from everyday life.

For the last three days I've been taking classes at Yoga to the People, twice in Berkeley and once in the Mission. Classes have been taught by a different teacher each time but have been very similar each time. The teaching is short (60 minutes) and simple (focusing on vinyasas and the various virabhadrasana poses, with the most "technical" pose being virabhadrasana III -- in one class we did ardha chandrasana) but very intense physically. Some of the more intense standing series were repeated. I probably won't make it to another class today (or tomorrow; I'm leaving for the east coastNew York, where there is another [the original?] Yoga to the People), but the experience has been a great reminder of the value of rigor and simplicity in physical practice.

San Francisco, like any industrialized city, can be expensive. I've spent more than I hoped but less than I feared. Here's a rundown:

There are some logistical details of practical interest buried in (and omitted from) this already-aggregated data. Discussion on this forthcoming.

Interesting internets things today: time banking; interactive map of social enterprises

4 Jul 2010 #

Okay, I'll say it: god damn I love Berkeley. I took BART in from SF and went to Karma Kitchen for lunch (I got dinner in a box too, but I'm still so full it might become breakfast), lounged around (and digested) for a few hours, then took a class at Yoga to the People. It was only an hour but it totally kicked my ass (in the best way possible).

In vaguely related news, I should probably document more logistical details here soon if I want to stay true to the notion of the "experiment". Forthcoming: what is "lightness", what does it have to do with sustainability, and what are the experiments?

4 Jul 2010 #

Originally posted 29 Jun "Worldly possessions":

Backpack, bicycle, helmet, lock, leg. San Francisco Caltrain station, 4th & King. Lobby and bathroom with water fountain are closed, train doesn't leave until midnight.

2 Jul 2010 #

I'm in San Francisco now. More on that later, but one of the benefits of this has been that today I had a long block of time where I wasn't accountable to be anywhere and I could take as much time as I wanted with my yoga practice. Mostly for my own reference, I'll post the sequence here. It took just under two hours.

Classical surya namaskar (5); surya namaskar A (5); surya namaskar B (5); tadasana; prasarita padottanasana A; salamba sirsasana II; with the right leg forward: trikonasana, ardha chandrasana, virabhadrasana II, parsvakonasana, urdhva virabadrasana II; vinyasa; prasarita padottanasana C; parivrtta prasarita padottanasana; previous series with the left leg forward; vinyasa; padangustasana; on each side (with a vinyasa in between): virabhadrasana I, parsvottanasana, virabhadrasana III, urdhva prasarita ekapadasana, eka pada uttanasana,¹ arm balance;² pada hastasana; on both sides: vrksasana to utthita hasta padangustasana; vinyasa; on both sides: anjaneyasana (low and high), parivrtta anjaneyasana (inside and outside), utthan pristhasana, ardha hanumanasana, eka pada koundinyasana II; three times: malasana, bakasana, vinyasa; mayurasana; hamsasana; navasana (3); baddha konasana; janusirsasana (both sides); paschimottanasana; purvottanasana; setu bandhasana; eka pada setu bandhasana (both sides); salamba sarvangasana I; salamba sarvangasana II; halasana; karnapidasana; matsayasana; supta baddha konasana; jatara parivartanasana (knees bent); savasana.

¹ As far as I know this is not a real name for a real pose. Just imagine uttanasana with one leg folded (with the foot behind the hamstring). It's like ardha baddha padmottanasana, but without the half-lotus.

² I don't have a name for this arm balance. It's kind of a cross between eka pada galavasana and eka pada bakasana: one ankle rests above the opposite knee. The horizontal leg then rests on the upper arms and the other foot comes off the ground as in bakasana.

I'm still working on mayurasana and hamsasana (especially hamsasana).

Next time I'm hoping to add more seated twists (I'm thinking especially of marichyasana and ardha matsyendrasana) and arm balances (maybe parivrtta bakasana and astavakrasana...I really don't have those at all, but they're fun to try). I also *forgot* to do pigeon.

Please email me if you think I'm doing it wrong.

16 Jun 2010 #

Wow, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Netbook Edition is fast (on my light, but slow, 2009 Acer Aspire One ZG5). I haven't even set up ratpoison yet (and to be honest, I may not). Even Firefox is faster (I have set up vimperator; without it, there's not a lot of screen space for the page you're looking at). Wireless worked out of the box, and I didn't have to sudo anything to connect to a network. I'm impressed.

(From a perspective of lightness, a computer is an unnecessary luxury, or maybe an undesirable thing to have to carry around and maintain. I'm working on it...)

14 Jun 2010 #

In the tradition [sort of] of "Sentences on X" [e.g., 1, 2], some short updates:

• I've moved out of my apartment and onto a couch on campus. I've given up my car and can now carry all of my possessions while sitting on my bicycle with both hands free. (The yoga mat is a little awkward, and strictly unnecessary, but I'm going to hold onto it for now.)
• I've quit grad school. I've decided I could see myself getting a PhD in ecology, social ecology, urban ecology, or sustainable agriculture, but that I'm not motivated to get one in informatics.
• What's next?
  • I'll be in Irvine until around 3 Jul.
  • After that I'll be in San Francisco for a week or so.
  • After that I'll make my way east to Washington, DC to present "Sellers' problems in human computation markets" [PDF] at the Human Computation Workshop on 25 Jul.
    • This short (4 pp.) paper, in some ways the result of about 2 years' worth of work (mainly on Turkopticon with Lilly Irani, but also supported by Joel Ross' ongoing work on the demographics of workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform [PDF]), argues that "tools for human computers" is an underexplored design space in human computation research, which has focused mainly on how to make the lives of "buyers" of human computation (i.e., the people who post tasks to platforms like Mechanical Turk) easier. This is understandable, as most human computation researchers came to the topic through natural language processing, experimental social science, or industry research, and tend to be in positions to buy other people's cognitive labor. The "problems" of human computation research tend to be framed antagonistically (or, if you like, economically): "I [the researcher/buyer of cognitive labor] want to get this information task done quickly, cheaply, and with a good response...but the person doing the task has an incentive to rip me off." This leads to many researchers designing buyer-side quality control tools. This is fine (unless you think it reinforces the antagonistic nature of the interaction and tends to support a new, massively "distributed" [i.e., distributed in some senses but massively centralized in others] Taylorism -- which I might), but what about "seller" or "worker"-side tools? The design of Mechanical Turk in particular makes life unnecessarily difficult for the people who actually do the work -- even the honest ones! (And, though you wouldn't expect it from a review of the human computation research, there are plenty. Like someone said during the debates on "digital rights management" in the early days of the music copyright "wars", keeping an honest user honest is something like keeping a tall user tall.) So, this paper looks at some of the difficulties of honest workers in human computation systems that have been overlooked by designers and researchers.
  • After that I'll lounge around the east coast for a bit, then make my way south to Costa Rica, where some friends will be managing an organic farm. I'll be there until early 2011.

27 May 2010 #

"Replacing Facebook" conversation on the IDC list (see previous post for links). Patrick Anderson wrote:

I wonder how we will share the hardware needed to host those kinds of Free Software [i.e., free, distributed-control alternatives to Facebook]... I can't seem to find any discussion of that difficult step. I have some ideas about how to approach the problem, but don't know if this is an appropriate forum for such a discussion? Even more aggressively I want to talk about how we, the users, can own and control the entire physical layer to become a Free as in Freedom ISP and cell-phone services, etc.

I replied, maybe somewhat naively (we'll see):

Distributed resource allocation and service provision is a long-running topic in computational support for "big science" projects. This is not by any stretch of the imagination my area of expertise, but I have heard of Miron Livny and the "high throughput computing" people in his group at Univ. of Wisconsin. My guess is that their work will suggest some approaches, if not necessarily offer immediate and directly transferable solutions: chtc.cs.wisc.edu

I imagine (perhaps fantasize) that this (and other related-in-sprit projects, like for example an open-source but at least somewhat 'user-friendly' -- this means that sup.rubyforge.org, while very good for self-identified "nerds", does not count -- alternative to gmail, which may present similar personal and cultural challenges as Facebook, even if not immediately) could be a good project for some academics in departments that are interested in examining the intersection of "the technical" and "the social" (as if they were separate!) by constructing working systems with "real" "users" (as opposed to running lab studies with a few dozen undergrads, or recruiting "subjects" through platforms like Amazon's Mechanical Turk). The argument for this in what is apparently called "experimental computer science" (again, not my expertise) has been made, not coincidentally, by Livny and his collaborators. (I don't have a canonical citation. I saw a talk once. I liked it. I'm sure you can tell.)

In human-computer interaction ("my" "field" -- that is, I have previously presented and hope to continue presenting papers at conferences that self-identify as being concerned with "human-computer interaction") there is something of a crisis: if [technical] "innovation" no longer comes from academic or even industry research but rather from people in garages and dorms who have never read academic papers on human-computer interaction -- and that now much HCI research consists in documenting and analyzing what happens on these platforms constructed by our non-academic Others -- what is academic HCI good for? One slowly emerging response to this is that HCI academics can design *and maintain* systems that could not survive as for-profit operations. Thus far these are small (e.g., onebusaway.org, turkopticon.differenceengines.com -- disclosure: I am involved in the second of these, and interested but not involved in the first) compared to commercial and even nonprofit systems (e.g., craigslist, openstreetmap.org, coactivate.org, and older projects like riseup.net) but if this kind of activity becomes legitimate academic activity for more academics in different disciplines (that is, as more academics in different disciplines make the argument that it should be considered legitimate academic activity), perhaps more cross-disciplinary collaborations can be fostered and more fair options (as the crew behind quitfacebookday.com call it) can be made for users (that is, all of us -- as Wendy Chun and Alex Galloway and others have pointed out, the aspiring programmer is first, and simultaneously, a user).

Apologies for the hurried and rambling post; hopefully it will be of some use, if only to prompt critique from the better-informed.

Lilly has a very relevant post on "platform pluralism" which highlights the limits of open source software (and rhetorics of control and/or transparency as political panacea). Then again, as zelda comments:

While I agree [...] that there are some real issues related to who gets involved in open-source building projects, I also see no other way that something could be built and maintained with adequate privacy affordances.

This may be a grotesque comparison, but I'm reminded of a line from A Bed for the Night, journalist David Rieff's 2002 book-length analysis of "humanitarianism in crisis":

I [once] heard an official of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), who had served in the worst places in northern Bosnia, say that his job was "to bring a measure of humanity, always insufficient, into situations that should not exist."

From a perspective of "lightness," this may all be a non-problem (unlike those confronted by the ICRC in Bosnia): although perhaps impossible over short times for some users, the most desirable strategy may be to reconfigure one's life such that participation in social networking through software is not necessary. I'm not trying to redeploy Bruce Sterling's quip that "connectivity is a sign of poverty" -- this is not about letting "them" eat cake. Being able to refrain from social networking through software, if it's something you can do without trying, is probably reasonably described as a privilege rather than a choice. But I'd like to think -- although perhaps naively -- that it's one that can be arrived at through careful reconfiguration by most people who want it badly enough. Of course, it's easier for some people than for others; maybe a question to ask is, how can it be easier for more people?

26 May 2010 #

Okay, I'm joining the bandwagon; I just deleted my Facebook account. (Geert Lovink posted about "quit facebook day" in an ongoing discussion on the mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity.) I had been thinking about it for a little while, and haven't been using Facebook much at all recently, so I hardly imagine I'm a great loss to Zuckerberg et al., but this should make life a little simpler. The whole intentional movement does raise an interesting question about when people saying loudly "stop doing X" will cause people to stop doing X before they are "ready" to do it "on their own." Obviously it does work under some conditions. This reminds me of the transtheoretical model in psychology. (I know about this at all thanks to Helen Ai He and her CHI 2010 paper "One size does not fit all." N.B. "AB" stands for "Alberta." Apparently that is in Canada.)

26 May 2010 #

Tri responded to an earlier post:

Stumbled on your new blog and am curious about your approach to moving closer to campus, giving up your car, and biking is cumbersome with a typical backpack load, etc. I have been trying to figure out what I want to do location-wise. I thought about moving back to campus, but the prices are stupid. I like that there's parking where I currently live, something difficult with living on campus as well, but hate driving in general (which is how I get to campus every day; walking/biking is also doable, but not really practical). Ultimately, it leads to messing around with my schedule so that I come to campus a minimum number of days, leave at certain times to avoid traffic, etc. It's just a hassle. I have a feeling I would be more productive if I could eliminate this stress and maybe make time for on-campus activities that take place after 5pm. Where are you moving to? Is it close enough that walking/biking is more feasible?

I like about this email because it shows just how complicated the decision making process of everyday life is. How do you decide which "mode" (as it's called in the transportation literature -- bike, car, bus, etc.) you are going to take to school, or where to move to? There are many variables involved: distance between locations is the most obvious, but also important are prices, parking availability (and the regulation of parking, in Irvine, which is nothing short of draconian), the time at which certain things like classes happen in relation to other things like club meetings, the amount of things that you need to carry around from place to place to get done the things you need to get done, bike lanes and bus routes, and, of course, traffic. Confronting this decision involves a fair amount of cognitive load. It's stressful, and we just do what's convenient and doesn't involve a big ton of thinking.

The answer to the question is, I'm renting a couch informally. (I won't say where publicly, though.) I've done this in New York for two summers and it was awesome, allowing me to sleep indoors, pay a small amount of rent, get access to restroom, kitchen, laundry, etc., and not get entangled in an awful long-term contract whose other end is held by a large company with expensive lawyers with too much time on their hands. So, yeah, it makes biking + walking feasible as my primary modes. After seeing how much money I spent on gas last year (despite the fact that I don't drive that much, and get ~30 MPG) -- and I won't even get into parking tickets and the logistical annoyance of worrying about parking tickets and getting towed (yay surveillance everywhere) -- that's pretty exciting.

26 May 2010 #

This looks great: Green Garbage Project:

This site will chronicle a year in which a (fairly) typical American married couple endeavors to live for a year without throwing away ... well, anything. Impossible, you say? We don't think so, but we aim to find out.

news article; via

Maybe part of this [as in, my] project should be to take note of "citizen science" or "street science" (there are some debates about these terms and their affiliated approaches...these debates are probably mostly of interest only to academics) projects around sustainability, lightness, and so on in everyday practice. For example, I think minimizing waste while leading a "(fairly) typical" American life is likely to involve at least some increase in the complexity of behavior. So is that a tradeoff in terms of "lightness"? (This is not a criticism of their project, of course; they are trying to minimize trash, not "lightness.") Or has the complexity been moved (back) from the vast system of waste processing and disposal into the lives of the producers of the waste (where, arguably, it probably belongs anyway)?

Also, I like eating hummus, but it comes in small plastic containers (even when I buy it at the farmers' market). Who wants my (clean) hummus containers? (There is another lightness-related tradeoff: when you have all of the plastic objects you need, reuse is difficult. Actually, this highlights an interesting point: if many people configure their practices around a set of high-quality, almost indefinitely reusable material objects -- for example, a metal water bottle, a robust bicycle, and so on -- practices must be modified to reuse new objects like plastic hummus containers if they are to be kept out of landfills [assuming they can't be recycled, and that they continue to be produced]. Presumably the best answer to this over long time is to stop making them -- they are made after oil that will eventually become expensive, after all -- and maybe between now and then many people are reconfiguring their practices on an ongoing basis anyway, so maybe it's really a non-issue.)

Relatedly, I should find a copy of The Happy Minimalist at some point. (Yes, I'm aware of the irony of getting more books. This is a lightness-vs.-academic-production tradeoff.)

26 May 2010 #

Okay. I'm making this new space to take some notes. The purpose here is to explore the tradeoffs involved in attempting to practice various interpretations of "lightness" in my everyday life. This is different from attempting to "maximize" a particular interpretation. I believe "lightness" is related to "sustainability," but in what way is not yet clear to me.

In the next few weeks I will be moving closer to work (UC Irvine) and giving up my car, which I've used in southern California for the last three years. I'm excited to be doing this, because I know that I can live without a car, but when I have one I use it because it makes things more convenient. In this case lightness means "making things simpler," having fewer objects in my life to maintain, and fewer nontrivial everyday logistical challenges (e.g., "travel 5 miles with a laptop and a number of books" -- doable but not convenient by bicycle or on foot) to solve. It also means using fewer material resources, and so in this case reconciles my personal understanding of sustainability (which involves a wariness of strategies that involve complexifying behavior; see J. Tainter, "Complexity, problem solving, and sustainable societies") and the practical financial realities of being a (not particularly well-paid) grad student with undergraduate debt.

(While grad students are not particularly well-paid -- Jorge Cham suggests that the average grad student makes about as much money as the average full-time McDonald's employee -- I know many grad students without dependents who manage to save money while in graduate school. I do think that people doing political work to improve living conditions for grad students -- lobbying administrators for more grants and more affordable housing and so on -- are doing good work, and I wish them every success. But the time frame for success in those endeavors is long, and the probability of success small in any case. So at least as important as those efforts is the attempt to figure out how we can reconfigure our really existing practices to make life less difficult. I have griped a lot about how living in Irvine is expensive and it's so impossible to live in any way that approaches "sustainability" -- well, this may be true if you live "normally". But then, what counts as normal is changing, even in Irvine, and in any case, to put it in nerdspeke, the design space of everyday life is large and, perhaps especially in suburbia, somewhat underexplored.)

24 May 2010 #

OMG, update are imminent!