Month: January 2007

Graphing human lifelines

Throughout a person’s life, their body traces a continuous path over the surface of Earth. By considering only their east-west motion we can graph this path in 2 dimensions, assigning the vertical dimension to time. If the lifeline of every human who’s lived in the last 100 ka were combined into one map it must look something like this. At the top, the first humans expand throughout Africa, and then gradually east, reaching China by 60 ka BP. (The simultaneous expansion into Europe is unfortunately masked by the overlapping African longitudes.) Between 15 ka and 10 ka BP humans probably crossed a temporary landbridge into the Western Hemisphere and quickly reached the eastern tip of Brazil.

Be remarkable

1. Understand the urgency of the situation. Half-measures simply won’t do. The only way to grow is to abandon your strategy of doing what you did yesterday, but better. Commit.

2. Remarkable doesn’t mean remarkable to you. It means remarkable to me. Am I going to make a remark about it? If not, then you’re average, and average is for losers.

3. Being noticed is not the same as being remarkable. Running down the street naked will get you noticed, but it won’t accomplish much. It’s easy to pull off a stunt, but not useful.

4. Extremism in the pursuit of remarkability is no sin. In fact, it’s practically a requirement. People in first place, those considered the best in the world, these are the folks that get what they want. Rock stars have groupies because they’re stars, not because they’re good looking.

5. Remarkability lies in the edges. The biggest, fastest, slowest, richest, easiest, most difficult. It doesn’t always matter which edge, more that you’re at (or beyond) the edge.

6. Not everyone appreciates your efforts to be remarkable. In fact, most people don’t. So what? Most people are ostriches, heads in the sand, unable to help you anyway. Your goal isn’t to please everyone. Your goal is to please those that actually speak up, spread the word, buy new things or hire the talented.

7. If it’s in a manual, if it’s the accepted wisdom, if you can find it in a Dummies book, then guess what? It’s boring, not remarkable. Part of what it takes to do something remarkable is to do something first and best. Roger Bannister was remarkable. The next guy, the guy who broke Bannister’s record wasn’t. He was just faster … but it doesn’t matter.

8. It’s not really as frightening as it seems. They keep the masses in line by threatening them (us) with all manner of horrible outcomes if we dare to step out of line. But who loses their jobs at the mass layoffs? Who has trouble finding a new gig? Not the remarkable minority, that’s for sure.

9. If you put it on a T-shirt, would people wear it? No use being remarkable at something that people don’t care about. Not ALL people, mind you, just a few. A few people insanely focused on what you do is far far better than 1000s of people who might be mildly interested, right?

10. What’s fashionable soon becomes unfashionable. While you might be remarkable for a time, if you don’t reinvest and reinvent, you won’t be for long. Instead of resting on your laurels, you must commit to being remarkable again quite soon.

Happy New Resig!

I am pleased as punch to announce that John Resig is sidling up beside Mark to add some more firepower to our developer support capabilities. John is an accomplished writer of both code and prose, and seems pretty fired up about putting those twin gifts to work in service of developers, add-on and web-stuff both. He’s jresig on IRC, and as with Mark and Sheppy you’ll see his fingerprints all over our developer support story in the weeks and months to come.

this is good news. john resig is awesome.

Cancelling online accounts

Tom Spring signed up for 32 online accounts and then tried to cancel them, documenting the incredible hassle, false billing charges, and crazy runaround he got from vendor after vendor. After reading this there’s no way I’ll ever sign up for NetZero, AOL, True.com, Classmates.com, BlueMountain, Rhapsody (ick), Napster (double-ick), ESPN, or MSN Internet.

funny how all these sleazy sites also suck. there must be a connection.

Possible Words

In general, if we have an alphabet of size A and look at length N words, the space of possible words is AN large and each word has just (A-1)N neighbors. Hence the fraction of neighbors declines nearly exponentially. The number of W(N) real words looks like a Poisson distribution with a peak around N=8 for English.

Exploring the space of possible words of length n, with visualization

Before The Dawn

Using genetic anthropology to reconstruct the 90% of modern human history that is unrecorded. The discoveries are coming in fast; no doubt we’ll have a revival of alternative history books soon 🙂 We are beginning to uncover all the near-extinction events in our history that left marks in our mitochondria and Y-chromosomes. more vast and scary than any foundation myth.
2023-04-06: The 0-sum games that held humanity back for 300k years

The default condition of humans is no different from the default condition of other animals: Males fight each other over females. In humans, in apes, in deer, in insects. Despite apes being more intelligent than insects, they live in the same stability. And the same can be said about the human default: Despite being more intelligent than apes, humans are just as stuck in their ecological niches until the powerful among them get incentives to develop.

We are used to seeing human development as a line of progression. Step by step, generation after generation, humans are commonly thought to have added one small invention and observation after another, culminating in big breakthroughs and discoveries. I think it could be more useful to see human history as episodic. On some occasions, humans focused on the things that are possible to develop, that is, technology and teamwork. During most of the time, human males focused on a pursuit with little development potential: How to snatch as many females as possible from other males. However intelligent a species is, it will not develop as long as all its intelligence is used to play a 0-sum game.