JacobBlog!

I like ’em both for the same reason: they involve writing words worth a thousand pictures. Here’s my entry for the LPSNJ National HS Poetry Competition Dec ’09:

Canopy, coolness. Green-diffracted light-not-light ether-rays from Sun that doesn’t burn the
Heat-peat of the living, mottled-matte ground-mat
Of autumn’s fallen blades
Which sink with the wood and are consumed into the trees, into the mist. Into dust-chariots
On which great fog streams of God-thought-breath ride until bursting-emerging
In enlightenment through the leaves…

And the alien Power Lines stood tall in fire-barren field on the scrub hill,
Surveying the scorched skeletons of ancient stumps.
Yet they wept in anger,
At the fresh buds they had wrought
Even as in wrath with flame they smote the mountain,
At the life that yet persisted betwixt charred exterior and undying core,
At Nature, immortal as they were impermanent.

Which cycles surely as the moon that daily rises upon the woods,
Which cannot be long defied by infernal lightning nor the man-made destruction
With which we ourselves smite,
In foolish attempt to score a lasting mark
Into the quicksand on which we rest,
That broadens as we hack away the roots beneath.

Bonus alternate ending! Original post can be found here and here.

Sitting at peace in the stillness between the hollow waves is but one tributary of the vast “stream of power and wisdom” that animates me, the great river of physical and spiritual truth that emanates from nature. Running my hand along the ice-glazed needles of the fallen pine, inhaling the green-diffracted God-thought-breath of the morning forest, laughing as I hold wide my windbreaker and lean euphorically into the rushing torrents of the rain: this timeless rapture is my inspiration, this intricate, organic splendor a sanctified model for my thoughts. This is why I paddle out, never knowing exactly where I’ll return to shore.

http://www.dropshots.com/en14vn#date/2009-03-13/22:27:12
Our “blockerbot” uses a ramp to quickly hop out of the starting box. It then follows a line up the opponents’ incline and prevents them from scoring by means of the blocker arms it drops down.

Photos: Me, at surf!

It is my personal belief that paddling out into the lineup through a bank of heavy mist and suddenly finding yourself unable to see the shore is among the most surreal experiences a person who is both sane and sober can have. Emerging from the thickest part of the onshore fog and into the realm of brighter sunlight that streams through the oculus in the clouds and sparkles across the water outside is like crossing the border into a parallel world utterly isolated from that which we experience in our daily, land-lubberish lives. The feeling must be akin to that which drove explorers and sailors of old to risk their lives and endure harsh conditions and low wages to embark again and again. It must be similar to that which brought Jacques Cousteau to explore the deep, what carried Charles Lindbergh to the skies, what drove early astronauts to fly to the moon. It is the euphoria and mystery that greets those who dare to leap where no one has ever looked, who realize that there is no emotion truer than that which comes from floating adrift in a flimsy, tiny capsule through a chaotic universe unimaginably larger than they. It is only when we are lost that we finally find ourselves…

When you are surfing in the fog you are very directly prompted to think philosophically. I inevitably ponder the counterintuitive truism in quantum mechanics that states that all you do not see could indeed be – and in fact is – anything and everything it can be. As fellow wave riders – strangers and friends – wink out of your sphere of sight and consciousness, as the steadfast constructs of society become transient and melt into the muffling grayness, you lose all standards for comparison and preconceptions of perspective and your thoughts branch out unfettered as you ride (or duck dive beneath) the waves that without direction or premeditation appear before you. In this contemplative state of mind, concepts that have long eluded you suddenly coalesce. The massively parallel algorithm that underlies my project for the Intel Science Talent Search came to me not in a laboratory or classroom but when I was observing the patterns made by the rivulets of water running down my surfboard as I emerged from underneath a wave. Oftentimes, I find it more productive to empty my mind to the ocean’s meditative lull than to study…

By the end of the session, you have no idea where you have drifted to because it is impossible to even tell if you’re moving, much less which direction. You could very well end up at a different beach, or for that matter a different country, than where you paddled out. In fact, you half expect to. Doing otherwise would violate the mysteriously adventurous aesthetic sense of the universe that, for all the protests of the existentialists, again and again proves itself to be law. And it is law. No matter where you end up (which is never exactly where you expect), the sanctity of the surrealness of the session persists long after, transcending time. Those who embark on a voyage into this realm never fully return, nor do they desire to.  The experience that I here describe happened to me three years ago and yet I write about it as if it were today. It also happened to me what on my watch (which I left in the car) appeared to be three hours ago, but I know wasn’t because I could feel myself traveling through eternity crammed onto a pinhead in that minute instant that my feet retracted off of the sand and onto my shortboard.

Bonus alternate ending!
Sitting at peace in the stillness between the hollow waves is but one tributary of the vast “stream of power and wisdom” that animates me, the great river of physical and spiritual truth that emanates from nature. Running my hand along the ice-glazed needles of the fallen pine, inhaling the green-diffracted God-thought-breath of the morning forest, laughing as I hold wide my windbreaker and lean euphorically into the rushing torrents of the rain: this timeless rapture is my inspiration, this intricate, organic splendor a sanctified model for my thoughts. This is why I paddle out, never knowing exactly where I’ll return to shore.

“Why Science/Engineering?” Essay Idea!

In attempting to ascertain the composition of the person’s psyche, it is often productive to hear his or her complete answer to a specific question. For me, the most telling query is perhaps a bit unorthodox: “Who is your favorite superhero?”

My answer? Phil, the protagonist of Groundhog Day. What? Yes. He was an ordinary man who one day awoke to find himself trapped in a universe with an intriguing peculiarity in its time dimension: every morning, the same day would repeat itself exactly. I admire him because of what he made of this predicament: by analyzing the initial conditions and results of his past actions, he was able to put himself in the right places at the right times to achieve his goals. He had no superhuman powers – only his intellect and an intuitive understanding of the scientific method – yet eventually was able to exploit the properties of his “looping” universe to save lives and master many skills.

Fundamentally, this is what researchers do. It is also what I have tried to do  for essentially all of my life. By deeply understanding various quirks of a challenge (or a system that behaves unexpectedly), it is frequently possible to find a clever way to overcome it.  This is my favorite way to do so.  So in eight years of robotics competitions, I’ve never attempted to complete a task in the expected way – in fact, it is for the joy of attempting the unorthodox that I compete in the first place.  Just recently, in the 2009 Botball competition, each team had to deliver a number of items to a given set of destinations across the board. Our team was allowed two separate robots. After carefully reviewing the rules and measuring the distances on the board, I suggested that we evaluate the expected value of the strategy of sending one robot to block the opposing team’s scoring zone instead of assigning them both to the task of collecting objects.  It was higher than the conventional. Nothing prohibited this, so we implemented the strategy over the next six weeks and used it to win first place in the head-to-head double elimination tournament in all of the Southern California [video clip]. This year, I was elected to co-head the 2010 team.

Something I randomly wrote while in the midst of AP English last year…trying to turn it into one of those “challenges you have faced” or “explain any significant drop in your academic performance” college essays. It’s supposed to leave the reader with a powerful positive impression.

A new year had come, AP Chemistry x2, AP World History AP Spanish, AP Calc BC and Honors English 10, were gladly left behind. My resilience is among my greatest virtues, I always bounce back, but it was as if my mind were lacking some key process; it was in need of a reboot.

It was October 15, 2008, and I lay in bed, resting after surviving yet another day of brutal reading quizzes and a harrowing standardized test (the PSAT it was this time). I thought then of my cube. If I were really to write a process analysis paper on solving the Rubik’s cube, it would behoove me to first test my memory in that area. There were few subjects about which I could write with such creativity, passion, humor, and drama, and in fact, an emotional descriptive essay on that topic had singlehandedly rescued my English grade the year before; why could it not do the same at this time in another form?

Should I explain Leyan Lo’s beginner’s technique? Too formulaic. The Fridrich method? Too abstract. The Petrus Method? Too abstruse. Choices, choices, choices…

I was on the verge of drifting off – maybe the esoteric quality of my thoughts  could be attributed to this. But suddenly, my tiredness was gone. I had not slept, but a spark that I had presumed extinguished was rekindled. My dilapidated 3x3x3 was suddenly in hand, drawn from a Jimbo’s bag of miscellaneous belongings in desperate need of sorting. Grains of sand from Hawaii were stuck in the grimy lube, stickers were discolored, tattered, and missing, but it was in my hand again. I almost hesitantly twisted a face, fearing the worst had come, that I would need to disassemble and clean it again, that I would miss a rare opportunity to reflect and remember and wonder and dream, and I would be unable to take advantage to a now all-too-ephemeral state of mind that inspired me to my most memorable undertakings: my Fourier Transform Sound Analyzer (Calc Project), My Rubik’s cubing descriptive essay, my Name Vignette, my Rock and Tree poem, my #1 Video Game Bot, my Grabber Arm V. The only thing that hadn’t faded overmuch was my persistent punning.

Elusive thoughts darted through my flickering mind. Maybe my problem was that I had refused to acknowledge that there were more fundamental concepts I hadn’t learned. Once upon a time I had imagined that the process of studying and learning built up new “centers” in my brain and I could almost feel them filing information and growing as I assimilated knowledge. It was with that attitude of diligence and humility with which I had proceeded through Spanish 1, and as a result been able to skip directly to Spanish 3 with little additional study. It was that wonderment that drove me to program and design websites and build robots and write essays and win contests and that landed me at or near the top of every class through my freshman year and in middle school. If I were to tell my 8^th grade history teacher (who presented me with the History Award) or 9^th grade English teacher that I received a B in AP World History second semester, I would gave been greeted with a look of incredulity. Or my 9^th grade science teacher would have been flabbergasted were he to learn that I received a B second semester in AP Chemistry. For that matter, my teachers at the beginning of the year would have likely said the same. What had I lost? Where had that radiant internal beacon of intelligence gone? I never had been “normal,” though I had occasionally pondered the notion of how that would feel. But my experiences through that difficult year, I realized just how scary it would to be that; empty, devoid of motivation, lacking that extra drive and intuition that would push me over the edge. That realization that there was no such thing as frictionless coasting, no perpetual motion, that one’s prior heroic effort does not excuse his apathy today was both new and old; I had simply forgotten it. My physics teacher, Mr. Harvie, constantly tells us to “sprint across the finish line,” that it is not the end but the beginning, that laurels make a fragile perch on which to stand (maybe move this idea to end?).

Advanced classes (and this is the reason that they appeal to me) are by nature designed to change one’s view of the world. If you presume be able to instantly integrate all knowledge that you gain, you are not learning properly, not augmenting your ability to think in the way you are intended to. That is why I welcome their rigor. Adversity forces adaptation, and my mind is up to the challenge of solving new problems and creating new thoughts and structures. It is only when I assume that something will be easy and that I have nothing to fundamentally expand or change that I learn nothing from a class. Because AP Chemistry is largely based on mathematics that I could have done in 7^th grade does not mean it is conceptually simple. Fermat’s last theorem is comprehensible by a 5^th grader, but its proof widely regarded as one of the most difficult problems in math in history (this paragraph could be moved).

It was in that same state of mind I had learned how to yo-yo and cube, the former inspired by videos I had seen as a child, the latter by friends (juniors like Ernest Lee and David Chen) who were in my AP Computer Science Class I had skipped into as a freshman. I focused, I saw, I tried, I learned, I slept, I dreamed, I memorized, and created in massive quantities. I once could remember all that I tried without difficulty – I could memorize and recite massive essays and poems (like in Santiesteban’s Spanish III, and the Rock and the Tree in 6^th grade) because I did not know that it was not possible, I once could act and perform without the slightest fear—until I learned, from society, from others, to doubt myself.

My stiff fingers became more supple as they lost themselves in patterns of antiquity, remembering algorithms they had not carried out in months, regurgitating what they knew, efficiently flicking and twisting the faces of the cube to and fro, creating order from chaos. The cube definitely needed new lube.

Of its own accord, my mind began to make associations. “This would be a great topic to write and essay on; it might boost my flagging English grade” I mused.

Another voice inside my head retorted, “Maybe that’s why you can’t remember how to learn.”

“This internal dialog would be a great topic to write an essay on; it might boost my flagging English grade.”

Like a strange loop, like a camera pointed at the television screen onto which it displays, I perpetuated the cycle a few times.

“There you go again,” my oft-quieted voice of rationality sighed. I snapped out of it.

What I had learned in the past year was how to use things; I had learned how to use open-source Java and JavaScript libraries, I had lost my drive to write all my classes from scratch, the way I wanted them, I learned to hire people to do pieces of my web work, I was now motivated by outcome, not process; I learned for the utilitarian benefit of learning, not the unadulterated exultation that accompanies erudition in its purest form.

I pulled out my 4x4x4. This was my new one, it had never been lubed as I had neglected to buy any though I had long ago fully broken it in. I still had to make out a list of the replacement parts necessary for my broken 5x5x5 and Square1. I solved the centers, and clumsily paired the edges, unable to remember one of my algorithms. Twist, flick, twist, the rough rectangular prism of plastic was strenuous on the tendons in my wrists.

Almost solved, last layer. Wait, corners, don’t go like that. How can it be? Oh, PLL Parity. Then I botched my OLL parity algorithm and was doomed to begin again, but my wrists were too painful. 3x3x3 instead. What was that algorithm again? My favorite to do? Darn, messed it up. Fiddle, twist, focus. Why was it so comforting delving into those recesses of the mind that I had so carefully sculpted in my youth? It was as if they were better structured, more wholesome, effulgent, joy-filled, good, right; they were a place of safety, a place I had taken care to build right not most “efficiently”.

Ah, here we are, that’s it, I was missing the R’F step. Wait, why isn’t it working? Ah, simply an illusion of the scrambled cube on which I was practicing, it operates sideways, now I remember. The old algorithm now glided smoothly from my hands.

The cube; once a source of bafflement and wonder, then nearly an object of affection; was now an old friend, pointing out the error of my ways, revealing that what I had so long sought was already inside me, suppressed by the narrowness that accompanied my overly ambitious mind. In remembering it, I remembered what drove me to it, what made me who I was.

I now reached into that same bag of chattels and pulled out my best yo-yo, my Hybrid Hitman; a rubber o-ring breakpad on one side, a starburst on another – an experimental, high-performance design once cutting edge and esoteric,  now standard issue. I remembered its touch in my hand.

Double-or-nothing, Eli-hop, flying trapeze, sideway brain-twister. Double-mondial, boingy-boing, false drop, bind catch. Side mount, magic drop, single flop. I hadn’t forgotten a bit. I noticed an enticing loop of string as I suspended my yo-yo sideways I hadn’t seen before and began to innovate. Something had awakened from a long but troubled slumber. An inexorable process had begun, a process that was slowly scouring the slate of my mind, of my successes, my disappointments, scouring it of everything but the lessons it had learned. In my reverie, I had sunk back into the stacked comforters of my bed, but I suddenly leapt up and dressed. There were new frameworks to comprehend, broad visions to glimpse, new details to resolve, and new challenges to face that could only be effectively overcome with a “beginner’s mind,” with the innocence and awe that fill the mind of a prodigious child, that could only be confounded by assumption and arrogance and preconceived ideas of the nature of reality. I opened my door and stepped not into the familiar hallway but into a luminescent analogue of the world from which I had emerged.

It is generally silly for people to claim that Web hosting costs too much.  You can get an excellent hosting package for just 4-6 dollars/mo — this is the cost of buying an expensive, fancy coffee or two each month!  Plenty of people do that every day.  Relatedly, in general, it is critically important to analyze exactly all of your incomes and expenditures – much optimization is possible and higher quality of life can be attained.

Just found them online at http://groups.google.com/group/iaroc/web/iaroc-2009-standings

There’s even a video of our technical presentation! http://blip.tv/file/2369163/

Take that, Douglas Hofstadter.

I am not exceptional in any way. No, any skill and success I might have is simply the result of my ability to become — for lack for better word — “obsessed” to anything and everything that I desire to master.  It probably started with yoyoing. I had always loved yoyos, but I was never particularly good with them.  However, in middle school, I really became intensely fascinated with them, and resultantly “practiced” unconsciously in sleep and in my waking hours. Whether or not I had a physically yoyo with me, I could feel my subconscious thinking its way through the maneuvers and inventing.  So every time I actually picked up the wonderful little gyrating device, my performance improved by a quantum leap.  Around the same time, I became interested in Web programming. While I had always been interested in computer science, I knew little about this field and was excited by its potential.  I was in middle school, and a couple of friends pointed me in the right direction and I launched.  I found tutorials and examples online and read them and made my own modifications.  I reverse engineered existing web sites, figuring out how to replicate and improve upon behaviors that I discovered in the “wild.” My skill level reached that critical threshold at which I was eligible for entry into professional world and, with experience, the skills that my yoyo-like obsession with the subject had seeded blossomed outwards.

This building skill positively impacted my understanding of other skills I was attempting to build.  It was as if by mindlessly observing myself as I trained and grew, I taught myself not only the nuances of the subject but how to efficiently learn, how to efficiently teach myself.  So suddenly, I found myself more academically successful than ever in fields from mathematics to biology to English to history. It was with the same open-mindedness and intent to get myself “addicted” to thinking about the subject,that I approached each new item and it was suddenly very easy to learn. Every waking and sleeping moment, with no effort on my part, my subconscious turned out mutations of questions I had.  My skill level skyrocketed with relatively little conscious effort, and I overcame and outraced even many of those with pre-existing advantages.

So I entered high school and I then was the one with a head start, not only in specific skill areas, but again, in teaching myself.  When I observed a bunch of people amazingly speedsolving Rubik’s cubes and other twisty puzzles in my AP computer science class (which I had skipped into as a freshman on the basis of my prior knowledge), I thought to myself “well, cool, I wish I could be able to do that!” And I envisioned the result and for the first time consciously applied my earlier technique.  And I doubted myself –  “No, people can’t modify the way they learn!” – all the way up until the point at which I found that I could suddenly, magically, do it. I had just put a bit of genuine interest — not an undue amount of practice or effort — and my brain had taken care of it for me.  I had made the subliminal portions of my psyche “obsessed” with it and they in turn made all that they could of these reverberating  neural patterns.

And every new skill I gained, every new subject I became interested in, every new book I read, broadened my horizons and increased my ability to learn and assimilate knowledge.  Through speed cubing and memorizing and practicing algorithms, I learned the value and the joy of going to great lengths to finally master a skill. This, I realized was true of nearly anything that I wished to learn, be it math or history or english. I simply need to have the interest and dedication to overcome a certain threshold and suddenly I would accelerate forward of my own accord.

It is said that to become an expert at something, you must undergo 10,000 hours of practical experience.  I have not found a way around this — my brain is not magically wired to assimilate information more rapidly. No, whatever’s going on in my head, thoughts pertaining to subjects that interest me seemed to echo in my brain and twist themselves around and etch themselves into my neurons over the course of every waking and sleeping moment and I simply log my 10,000 hours more quickly and in a different manner.

One of my important habits is keeping lists of items that I desire to remember and share. The most important of these is my list of good ideas. My ’09 science fair project was one of its items. The algorithm and FPGA microarchitecture that I designed, tested and submitted to Intel is one of its items. And many of my various web sites and web businesses were all once just ideas I noted in this monolithic compendium.  It is now over 1800 entries long and growing, and it has transcended the label “list” – it is a complex interconnected and annotated web.  Items are tagged by standard keywords denoting their class and magnitude, and I have noted emerging patterns and critical relationships between entries. This organization facilitates lookup (I group synonyms and potential keywords) and prompts my brain to make novel connections and further expand the web. At this point, ideas even seem to emerge on their own – they have achieved a sort of critical mass. As I look through my notes and am prompted to new invention, I almost feel as if I am merely transcribing connections made by an independent consciousness that has miraculously arisen within my text-only Google Document.

It is my personal belief that paddling out into the lineup through a bank of heavy mist and suddenly finding yourself unable to see the shore is among the most surreal experiences a person who is both sane and sober can have. Emerging from the thickest part of the onshore fog and into the realm of brighter sunlight that streams through the oculus in the clouds and sparkles across the water outside is like crossing the border into a parallel world utterly isolated from that which we experience in our daily, land-lubberish lives. The feeling must be akin to that which drove explorers and sailors of old to risk their lives and endure harsh conditions and low wages to embark again and again. It must be similar to that which brought Jacques Cousteau to explore the deep, what carried Charles Lindbergh to the skies, what drove early astronauts to fly to the moon. It is the euphoria and mystery that greets those who dare to leap where no one has ever looked, who realize that there is no emotion truer than that which comes from floating adrift in a flimsy, tiny capsule through a chaotic universe unimaginably larger than they. It is only when we are lost that we finally find ourselves…

When you are surfing in the fog you are very directly prompted to think philosophically. I inevitably ponder the counterintuitive truism in quantum mechanics that states that all you do not see could indeed be – and in fact is – anything and everything it can be. As fellow wave riders – strangers and friends – wink out of your sphere of sight and consciousness, as the steadfast constructs of society become transient and melt into the muffling grayness, you lose all standards for comparison and preconceptions of perspective and your thoughts branch out unfettered as you ride (or duck dive beneath) the waves that without direction or premeditation appear before you. In this contemplative state of mind, concepts that have long eluded you suddenly coalesce. The massively parallel algorithm that underlies my project for the Intel Science Talent Search came to me not in a laboratory or classroom but when I was observing the patterns made by the rivulets of water running down my surfboard as I emerged from underneath a wave. Oftentimes, I find it more productive to empty my mind to the ocean’s meditative lull than to study…

By the end of the session, you have no idea where you have drifted to because it is impossible to even tell if you’re moving, much less which direction. You could very well end up at a different beach, or for that matter a different country, than where you paddled out. In fact, you half expect to. Doing otherwise would violate the mysteriously adventurous aesthetic sense of the universe that, for all the protests of the existentialists, again and again proves itself to be law. And it is law. No matter where you end up (which is never exactly where you expect), the sanctity of the surrealness of the session persists long after, transcending time. Those who embark on a voyage into this realm never fully return, nor do they desire to.  The experience that I here describe happened to me three years ago and yet I write about it as if it were today. It also happened to me what on my watch (which I left in the car) appeared to be three hours ago, but I know wasn’t because I could feel myself traveling through eternity crammed onto a pinhead in that minute instant that my feet retracted off of the sand and onto my shortboard.

Last Wednesday, my Advanced Topics class and teacher were surprised to find me yoyoing ferociously outside the door.  It is one of the few activities that does not currently aggravate my RSI – I am making liberal use of this convenient fact to do it heavily. From this practice my reflections arose…Yo-yoing

Yo-yoing is a lot like learning a foreign language. It is also a lot like Rubik’s cubing. It is also a lot like math, poetry, art, and surfing. It is a lot like inventing because it is. First, you must put in hard work to master the basics. If you cannot sleep a yo-yo, you certainly cannot do a brain twister mount to triple mondial with a false drop and end. There is no excuse for a shoddy comprehension of the basics. The laws of physics grade on all or nothing scale. You do the homework or you drop out. The thing is, however, you want to do the homework because it feels incredible – natural even – to develop a familiarity with the device. It is almost as if I am subverting the innate ability to become interested in focused my ancestors required to wield bows and arrows and spears to hunt mammoths and fend off enemy tribes. They survived. They reproduced. They were the best of the best. The fact that I am here today proves that: they succeeded in transmitting their genes, their talents for building coordination without pain and undue effort. I’m programmed to consider the reward of gaining the skill as commensurate in value with the days of subconscious practice, mental and physical, that I put in. It is for the same reason that so many people go to the trouble learning to surf: even when failing, it is clear that we are learning – our repeated flops into the water are not in vain because they are not aimless and random: with each, we become more acquainted with the properties of the waves and boards.

It is less obvious in many other fields that working through pain and failure is worthwhile and rewarding. Thus, many people give up. But because I see these other subjects as analogous to yo-yoing, I stick with things a long time – I enjoy doing things wrong failing, and encountering unexpected hurdles because I know I’m learning. I love it when my computer has problems or a mechanical device breaks – it’s an excuse to learn more about how these fascinating machines work; I am being given an opportunity to increase the fluency of my understanding of them, and this is fun because it is incredibly cool to master every navigatory nuance of an art. Similarly, I find it enjoyable to get to the last step in solving a variation of a Rubik’s-style puzzle and to make a mistake: although I often lose my work, this is an extra puzzle, an extra challenge – am I skilled enough to dig myself out of this ditch? Do I understand my algorithms well enough or am I just repeating them out of muscle memory? If I do, it feels incredible, if I don’t I still learn (though I’m not immune to annoyance — it’s not very fun when you make such a mistake when going for a speed record; however, nonetheless, again understanding and do not make the same mistake the next time). (Also, I do not regret it when my computer crashes and I lose data because it gives be a chance to remake what I did better and more efficiently.) For this, I appear to be very persistent. But I know better: persistence is refusal to give up in the face of failure. I simply refuse to regard my mistakes as failures. They are fun and often lead to great discoveries!

So when I am stuck in a “boring” lecture, I realize that in a different light, it is probably something that I would be fascinated with. Ugh: simplifying ugly boolean algebraic expressions by hand? First of all I’m glad I put in the effort to learn because suddenly I can understand all the tricky details in people’s HDL code, but more importantly it feels good to exercise a strong mental muscle in the process of doing this. Although theoretical knowledge in the absence of an application is often difficult to palette, I realize that simply learning how to do it well and quickly is its own reward: like a yo-yo trick.

Furthermore, yo-yoing has built within me an ability to look ahead and plan sequences of steps that will be both efficient and artful. I put in the effort to choose meaningful variable names because in choosing accurate monikers I clarify my understanding of the algorithm that I’m working on. You cannot name something properly unless you fully comprehend every use it will be put to. The hallmark of an advanced yo-yoer – like an advanced surfer or advanced Rubik’s cuber – is not the ability to perform difficult moves in isolation but to string those and simpler ones together without wasting time to set up and think. You cannot get a higher score on a wave or a faster solve time unless you look ahead – far ahead – and realize that every action will have lasting consequences, realize that is futile to sprint ahead and begin something that you cannot finish or follow with another upon completion.

So is often noted that people are good at a lot of seemingly disparate things together. Tiger Woods was a star academic, the drummer from Queen is an astrophysicist, Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman was an expert safecracker. People marvel at these people who seem to be untouchable in the broadness of their tastes and interests. But I have found that ever since elevating a single skill — yo-yoing — to an elevated level, it has been easier to learn everything that I wish to learn, from computer science and mathematics to art to athletics to language – because in learning that one thing deeply, fully, properly, I gained not only that specific skill that but learned how to learn: to listen to what others say, to teach myself, and to keep trying forever is easy when one can become motivated without any real effort.

Now that I have something worthwhile, people ask me about it. When are, for lack of a better word, “awed” by anything I do or produce, I laugh at the irony: what they sometimes mistakenly believe to be some sort of unreachable talent or inborn brilliance is really just the result of me messing around with a child’s toy and having the boldness to think about what I’m actually doing as I play.