I am not an authority on … really, any subject. It’s making this blogging run pretty difficult so far.

I started writing about skepticism today, but ran into several problems. For each sentence I wrote, I ended up doing an hour or so of research. Also for each sentence I wrote, I went back and rewrote earlier sentences to cut down on verbosity or to retreat from making claims that I didn’t think I could defend. So I’m facing the blogger’s perennial crisis: what can a total layperson write about? There are only so many self-analytical posts a person can make.

My style of writing tends to follow a long, verbose narrative. I’ve been told that I write in a way that “sounds like I’m talking to you”. The biggest downside to this is that I need to put real effort into being concise. The biggest upside is that thoughtful expositions flow easily, and I’m rarely at a loss for volume. I should try to use it to my advantage.

My position as a layperson means that I should be able to write introductory guides to things, but to what? Math topics? Programming? Science? Art? Hm. I didn’t think that this would be a real problem; it seemed like once I got started, the ideas would flow on their own, but it isn’t the case.

I guess I’ll just write whatever comes to mind.

I watched V for Vendetta today, and throughout the movie I became increasingly interested in revolutions and oppression and conspiracy. Not an impressionable mind at all! Last year, there was a tremendous amount of political unrest around the world, so I was wondering about what to expect this summer. I just spent an hour watching youtube videos and searching google for people’s opinions about global unrest in 2012, and it comes off as a lot of alarmist crap.

There’s a lot of crackpot-ey sounding financial people talking about the US dollar collapsing at some point in 2012, but it seems like that would just make the cost of living higher for us, and things would stay pretty much the same. I’ve read about political unrest being tied to the price of food, and I checked out the global food price index:

The big spikes are May 2008 and 2011, with some notable little jumps in 1996, 2004, and 2006 (as well as 2009 if you discount the gulf it’s sitting in). I looked up “civil unrest” with those years, but didn’t find evidence which convinced me that there’s a strong correlation. I don’t really recall hearing about widespread political issues in 2008, but maybe there were.

So, like most people, I’m unable to tell if there’s going to be riots and whatnot this year. Watching V made some part of me want to throw off the shackles of my oppressors, but then I stopped to ask myself: what shackles? What oppressors? I am fortunate enough to have been plopped into a privileged position via my gender, ethnicity, and career-disposition, so from my point of view, if I’m in a society that needs to be overthrown, it has power in a very subversive sense.

Wandering into that ground where I have no authority, I can’t help but be reminded that a warning to take from 1984 was about a society where totalitarian rule isn’t even noticed. People can be so tricked by the system that we don’t even notice the walls of the prison. In the story, the machinations and trickery seem obvious, but not to the users of newspeak who dare not commit thoughtcrimes.

I guess I’m just feeling that occasional ennui that hits when one realizes they are perfectly free to choose what to say (as long as it isn’t hateful, taboo, or media-sharing instructions), where to live (in their country, provided they can pay for their housing), and what brands to purchase.

/down-note. Hopefully I’ll write about something fun like learning about integrals tomorrow.

Mixpanel raised $10.25 Million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (see Peter Levine’s post), and that is fantastic — my congratulations to Suhail and the gang for building a kickass product and team. I know they’ll continue to find success!

I have a personal story to share about Mixpanel, about being the wrong person at the right place at the right time.

The background

Last August I was an intern at Google working at their San Francisco office — just a fifteen minute walk from Mixpanel’s abode. I had a single semester of school remaining back in Canada and I was thinking about future employment. I responded to one of Mixpanel’s frequent hackernews job postings, and received a response from Anlu not long after.

We set up a time to come by their office, and I ended up a block away by mistake, so I showed up fifteen minutes late. They didn’t seem to notice — nothing but a warm welcome. I was quickly greeted by the team and went into the meeting room (it had a table in the middle; hence it is a meeting room) and we started the interview process. Everyone on the team took a turn, which is a great idea! They all need to be confident of a person’s skills before committing to work side by side with someone for years.

Over the next few hours, I grew to understand that these were smart, funny, friendly people who loved what they did. Suhail spoke often about how important it is to have passion for what you’re doing. I did my best to yield valid responses to their questions, and while I think I came off as a nice guy, I didn’t deliver world-class chops. I was largely unfamiliar with javascript, missed a simple solution to keep a dynamic ordering of a set of objects, and took my sweet time to write a full answer to a problem Suhail gave me.

Their ad had asked, “want to learn how to scale?”, and suggested they needed a back-end person. I like to play with *nix, but had no idea about the tools or processes involved in building scalable web applications or doing high volume data processing, so it appealed greatly. At the end of the day, Suhail asked how I felt about working on front end stuff, or whether my passion was for working on infrastructure related things. I told him (as I said just now) that I don’t really know javascript. That I don’t have design experience and can’t make pretty websites — but I’d love to learn how.

He told me that I simply made too many mistakes to work on infrastructure in their fast-deploying environment. Their philosophy (at the time, I have no clue now) was to ship as soon as what you have is better than what’s out there. He asked again if back-end work was my passion, and how I felt about the front-end. I defended my ability to write solid code, and echoed my willingness to learn, and I might have even said that cliche “I don’t know what my passion is yet”, because really, I don’t. Then we shook hands; a few days later I got confirmation that they’d moved on in their search, and a thanks for coming in.

That was an ego hit, but I am very thankful that Suhail gave me the advice. I made a lot of mistakes in that interview, and I saw that he was right in the larger sense: I probably would have made some mistakes and shipped code soon after at some point. Infrastructure code is too mission critical for to be incorrect. Until I improve, I have to work slowly and surely.

The Lottery

There is a stance that I could take regarding Mixpanel’s recent seed round (which is the sort of successful growth I expected from them when I interviewed). That stance is that I missed a winning lottery ticket.

I’ve been thinking about my long term plans lately. Down the road, I might want to end up in the startup game, stay secure in the working world, or return to academics. An acquaintance of mine recently got into YCombinator, raised money, and appears to be doing great — I admit to feeling envy — so I’m going to indulge in a story: Imagine that I sold Suhail on my passion for the front end.

Back to that conversation we had: he’s asking if I’m more passionate about infrastructure, and I told him that I don’t know the front end, but I’d be willing to learn. Instead of that, let’s pretend that I mustered very fine words and drove home to him that come hell or high water, I’d write the best damn front-end code anyone had ever seen. Clean, efficient, beautiful, and fast. I would make it my life, because I had a (just-ignited) passion for it. The next element of the real story is the handshake and the “too bad” notice — instead now it’s a high five, and a confirmation that they think I can kick ass along with them.

Fast forward to now, imaginary timeline: I’ve learned a ton, helped them with their front end, taken some charge — maybe made a few mistakes, but didn’t cause severe data loss — and I’m living the California startup life with a small bit of equity in a fantastic, growing company. As they hire people, my front-end veteranship naturally brings me to lead the front end team, and 5-10 years down the road they have a public offering and I end up a millionaire. My dreams of financial independence and starting my own startup then come true! All because I displayed sufficient passion that day.

This has all the earmarks of classic stories. Shirking the big company to work for a little guy. Doing something impossible “because no one told me I couldn’t”. Riding on passion alone and “doing what I love every day of my life”. The great tech-magnate tropes.

Except it’s hogwash.

Skills

While the tropes I just mentioned have value (especially “don’t tell yourself what you can’t do; the world will stop you if you actually can’t”), to think that saying something different in that one conversation is similar to ‘missing out on the lottery’ is not just naive, but downright stupid. Here’s why:

I am a junior developer.

There are some people out there who finish college as fantastic programmers. They know design and code and code-design and they whip out complex, correct code like lightning. That’s who Mixpanel needed, and I am just a mediocre programmer who is learning his craft.

I could not have fired on all cylinders and magically made up for missing skill with passion. Suhail was looking for passion because it’s probably a good signal for skill and work-ethic. If I had acted differently in that situation and delivered on passion, it would not have changed my lack of skill. I would have ended up failing their team by coming into the situation learning instead of knowing.

The bottom line is that learning and developing your skills is not something to be ashamed of, and it’s also not something that can be skipped. Instead of pretending to be awesome already, I now work with talented people who know way more than I do and I’m learning from them while contributing. That’s where I should be. (though, it is perhaps the sort of experience I should have had during my internships; I’ll write about that some time.)

This is not a Lottery

The second major takeaway from my imaginary story is that it wrongly trivializes what the team at a company like Mixpanel does. It is built on the false assumption that a great company is a thing to ride, instead of something to carry.

People who work at small companies have to work much harder than people at large companies. It is not an easy life, it doesn’t often lead to riches, and it’s certainly not a magic ticket to success. Let’s imagine that I not only had the passion, but also the skill to be worthy of a first-10 hire when I applied: Any success I might have had would be the product of great coworkers, extremely hard work, long hours, luck, and intelligence over a great period of time.

Once again, my best to the team at Mixpanel. Keep it up.

It could just have been the effect of having Stargate on in the background, but for twenty minutes I sat here and couldn’t think of a topic. It’s day 3 of 21 in my attempt to establish blogging as a habit, and I hope that I’m not already out of ideas. I actually tend to have a lot of ideas about halfway through making a blog post (on days 1 and 2 I certainly did, at least), and I also come up with things throughout the day — perhaps I should note them down. If we can’t have one real topic, then let’s touch on a few smaller ones!

Decimal Time

Simple concept: 10 hour days with 10 ‘minutes’ each hour, and 10 ‘seconds’ within that, and so on. I think that using the same names for different units gets especially confusing though, so let’s ditch them and go with SI prefixes:

What I find to be striking about this is that the units seem usable in real life. A nan is functionally equivalent to a second, and it’s faster and easier to say. A mic (I’d say “mike”, but you can argue about pronunciation if you like — it’s from “micro”) is the least useful, but it’d be more functional to say “just a mic” than “just a sec” or “just a moment”, because we often need 10-20 seconds when we say that. A mil is extremely similar to a minute, and a cent at about 15 minutes is a very common unit of time we work in already.

Okay, so what’s the big deal? Why bother, right? I’d love to have some solid defense against that, but I’ve got nothing. Especially when it turns out that a great number of people have attempted to accomplish this sort of reform before and it has rarely found success. Near the turn of the century, a company called Swatch marketed and sold watches which had 1000 “.beats” throughout the day, which you would use to denote time, @264 for example.

Before that, the France made a number of attempts (or perhaps, one very long attempt) at introducing decimal time, but it regularly fell out of use. Their system was much as I’ve described here. Just look at this fun clock picture I pulled off of the wikipedia page about it:

The Chinese were at it even before that, and seem to have operated with decimal time in full swing for a very, very long time, alongside a similar system to the one which we use. So this idea is hardly original, and it’s also unlikely to suddenly take the world by storm.

Why think about it at all, then? Just out of curiosity. First, I’m interested in what it would be like to have a different standard of time: the second being slightly faster, but the minute and the hour longer. How would that affect my mind’s perception of the world Beyond that though, I’d like to try out living in a different time than everyone else. It may be the closest a boy can get to being a time traveller. I’ve also put some thought into living on unix time, just have that monotonic timestamp on a watch and try to use it to live by. It could make for a really interesting experience.

A brief related tangent

Something I have done in the past is deliberately, regularly choose to do foolish or unusual things. It’s borne out of a desire to have new and fresh ideas. My rationale is that if most people think similarly about things, then two people who have similar experiences might have similar ideas. To have a “new” idea, you have to be “first” to it, which means that you need to spend more time thinking about a problem than anyone else who has had a similar set of experiences to you.

Really good ideas then should tend to come from people who have thought about problems a great deal, or who have had unique experiences. Since you can’t magically think about hard problems for a long time, a hack would be to raise the uniqueness of one’s experiences. A simple plan to achieve that is to add rules into your daily life which cause you to go about things a little bit differently, and then maybe you’ll see what others cannot.

That’s one reason it would be cool to live on monotonic time counting forward in seconds from epoch. Or to have one hundred thousand nans each day, instead of 24 hours.

Writing better code

As I have more code to write, I find I’m getting smarter about a lot of things and seeing a lot of clever ways to use (particularly python) language features that I might not have thought of in the past. Today I learned about python dict-expressions when trying to filter a given set of columns out of an array of dictionaries. They’re new to 2.7, but have been being discussed since before 2.3 — they’re just like list expressions, except you use {} instead of []. I’m writing in a 2.6 environment, so they were unavailable, but a workaround is to pass a list expression to the dict() constructor, like so:

dict([(i, 2*i) for i in range(10)])

I was curious about what was ultimately best performance-wise, because that hack job with the dict() constructor is tough to read. A coworker suggested using the profile module, callable with

python -m profile my_file.py

and it is excellent! I had to write my own repetition into the test to get useful results(unlike with the timeit module), but it dumps total, per_call and cumulative time spent in each function, as well as a count of function calls, without any additional instrumentation. It was greatly useful — and interestingly, vanilla code without any list or dict expressions was faster, but not by a huge amount. In 1,000,000 tests, a double-nested for loop to iterate over the array and save individual columns took 8.250 s of total time, while the dict-expression (on python 2.7) took ~10 seconds, and the list-expression in the dict-constructor took ~11 seconds. I couldn’t find any way to simplify or speed up the expressions, so I wonder if that points to some cases where expressions are just slower than vanilla code.

Rain on the trees

I’ll finish up with a cool phenomenon I saw today as rain started to fall on the trees outside my window at work. There was no appreciable wind when the droplets started to fall, and the trees outside are very young, so that you could see each leaf bounce as it got hit by the rain. Letting my eyes unfocus a little to watch the pattern of leaf bounces was particularly rewarding as the rain became heavier; it made a magnificent optical effect. Keep an eye out!

I’ve been putting some spare cycles into thinking about humanity as a superorganism lately. At times, it’s hard to not think about. I am hardly well read on this subject, let alone authoritative, so please take the “thinking aloud” that follows with the proverbial grain of salt.

What the hell is a superorganism

In simple analogy form: you are to your cells as humanity(a superorganism) is to you, or as a huge colony of ants is to each individual ant.

Ground-back

Long ago, somewhere in the universe, multicellular life arose. It has some inherent advantages over single celled life, namely the ability of cells to specialize and perform unique tasks. If you’ve been to an introductory economics class, you will have heard about how specialization is doubleplusgood productivity-wise, so these little multicellular buggers often found themselves among the fittest. Hence, they survived.

Many of the parts of you that make up “you” are specialized cells, which perform very specific tasks. So much so that when you cut these pieces out they don’t really make sense. You don’t have specific control over individual cells in your body — you can’t tell cell 23 from the left of your thumbnail, 8 rows deep, to “heal up now” or to “go fetch a drink”, but clearly an individual, comprised of trillions of cells, manages to perform on a macro scale.

Human Groups

Now consider groups of people. Imagine taking a biologist’s fine-tooth comb and organizing and categorizing them: religious groups, national governments, municipal governments, big businesses, little businesses, clubs, volunteer organizations, guilds, militaries, educational institutions, health institutions, transit commissions, unions — I could probably sit here and keep naming organization types indefinitely.

Then you could classify them by size, age, purpose, shape (leaders, branches, etc). And then you could likely figure out a timeline of them – for example, tribal organizations (now endangered) evolved in some places into local municipal governments, which were precursors to national governments. There’s a complex web of interconnection and some organizations exist strictly to feed off of others, some organizations compete for the same resources, and some organizations even seem to eat other organizations.

The obvious point is that an organization is directly comparable to a regular biological organism. They typically have centralised command groups, communications/action channels, and often what appears to be a collective will. It’s pretty damned cool.

Think about it

This is where it gets interesting. When considering this, two natural directions arise: first that humanity as a whole likely counts as an organism unto its self, and by thinking about it as such, you may be helping it to take the first steps toward becoming a truly self-aware being. The second is that you, a self-aware being, have just provided enough evidence (for non-biologists) to sit back and freak out over the notion that your actions are not yours, but are merely the collective will of your trillions of constituent cells.

The problem of “you”ness aside (we’ll leave that for buddhists to ponder at the moment), I’d like to turn to some questions that arise out of this topic.

Identification

What would a self-aware human organism look like? I think that the entire planet as a being only became a possibility very recently (in the past few decades), when communication speeds and quality became so great. Each individual bit of humanity has a significantly higher capacity for awareness of the state of the whole with access to the internet.

What else would there be, though? Could we, as the constituents of this organism, even recognize it fully? Perhaps there are ingredients needed beyond communication and specialized internal organs; what are they? That’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot: what remains to be made, done, or thought that will help the whole of humanity to realize itself?

Esotera

The last thing that I want to bring up is what our communication is in this model. When I write this and store it somewhere, is that “part of the memories” of this larger being? Are the memes which rise above the background noise this creature’s ideas? Imagine telepathy between two superorganisms — or imagine if that’s what’s going on in our own heads! Billions of voices crying for attention and building off of each other, and the rare virally successful notion in the populace of your mind becomes a joke you tell, or your plans for lunch.

I’m especially curious going forward, as we store our thoughts electronically instead of simply speaking them, we’re making them long term accessible to vast amounts of the group — maybe that sort of internal access is part of achieving awareness.

Conclusion

This was pretty rambly, and frightfully shallow, but it got the collection of questions I’ve been juggling straightened a bit. It helps to dump these things so that later, I can come back and build upon it. A reasonable bit of this thought (this time around) was inspired by a great little story about a man who meets god on a train. It’s quite entertaining — I’m not sure how people with strong religious convictions would regard it, but it asks (and poses sensible answer possibilities to) a lot of great questions.

To conclude, I suggest taking a moment to attempt to regard the whole of humanity. The vast billions of people across the world, eating and waking and dying and laughing and sharing at every given moment. The collection of all of us, together, as a thing that wants and survives — how long will it live? If we don’t know why we exist as individuals, imagine the difficulty in answering why it exists! And that all-time-favourite, is it alone in the universe? It’s great food for daydreamy thought.