JacobBlog!

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.