From this point on, I am taking on no new freelance jobs. I will complete the ones I am currently involved in and then I will be finished for good.
It works in theory, but never in practice. Not once has it been a pleasant experience.
June 1993 – June 2008
Ages 8 – 23
It’s so incredibly tiring to know that the moment you take a break is the moment no fewer than three people will be on your case asking you where their work is.
I need to stop freelancing, but I still want to keep my programming skills razor-sharp. Perhaps working on more of my own coding projects is the answer.
Three experts on creativity, essentially espousing the same principles I had written on my philosophy site (broad exposure to ideas, a lack of initial judgment of those ideas, taking walks and otherwise not focusing too hard on single problems, trying difficult things, …)
It really does work – these are the techniques I’ve been using in my own life.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-unleash-your-creativity
One question that kept brewing in my mind was the center point about which society’s operations rotated – the central theme, if you will, of this seemingly arbitrary (hi)story that we weave.
To be clear, I know that profit is the prime motive in much of society, and that the motive for profit is how the motive for status and security gets translated into social action, but the goal of raw, undirected profit doesn’t get people very far. It has to somehow channel through an activity for a profit motive to make a social impact – and what drives that impact – the reason why I can drive to a city and see a particular arrangement of buildings and advertisements – is what I’m still seeking. It’s the very story of how we define our reality and shape our world.
But that’s most of society…
I’ve drilled down a bit into academia as I proceed to plumb its depths, and I think I’ve realized why scholars seem to go out of the way to create such an air of mystique about the whole practice of writing papers for publication. (Of course, now it’s tradition, and reinforced by the peer review system to boot, but I mean why the eternally stupid practice of making things deliberately inaccessible was started in the first place):
It’s designed to draw grad. students in. An undergraduate interested in science and looking at scientific literature would probably think “Wow, look at all of this neat stuff being done couched in barely comprehensible language! I want to do that!” Society then offers a seemingly easy and assured way of doing that: “Go to grad. school”. The bargain here is “Follow our steps and serve us well and you will eventually be successful – you too will be able to do such work.” This sounds familiar – the carrot is being dangled again, and all you need to do to get it is work really hard! Forget the fact that you’re running on a wheel…
It really takes about one month to learn how to do such things. By 6 months in, not only should most research be failing to impress, but it should be routine. Of course, you’re stuck there for as many years as the school decides to keep you for. Even the timeline of a dissertation is not usually self-determined.
Websites are becoming more application-like, with many using AJAX to make requests of the server and PHP or some other server-side language to process those requests. This seems to be getting closed to the event-driven programming model used in Visual Studio and various windowing frameworks.
Ultimately, what I hope this will converge on is a truly event-driven model, where events triggered on the client are mapped directly to server-side functions that perform processing and return their results directly back to the client-side. Rather than explicitly sending out an AJAX request and catching a response in a callback, this would then use simple functional notation and the backend processing would happen behind-the-scenes, similar to how RPC works (come to think of it, that’s sort of how “web services” worked too, but I guess those are just glorified RPC when it comes down to it). It would be as simple as Qt’s “signals” and “slots”.
At about the middle of the 19th century, something very interesting happened: the burden of scientific, artistic, musical, and intellectual advancement shifted from a rather exclusive aristocracy to a slightly privileged section of the common folk. This opened up new avenues for expansion which ultimately led to an explosion of growth and progress during the 20th century. What we think of as an exponential advance is in no small part fueled by the fact that more and more people are participating in intellectual activities.
By earlier standards, the rate of progress is staggering, but we can do better still. There are many with multiple talents or other disparities with the expectations of our currently hyperspecialized society that could change the world if they could find the training necessary to achieve their full potential. Because these individuals are at odds with society’s views, however, unnecessary obstacles and roadblocks form in their path at every turn. Rather than raising them, society discards them.
But even among those not so culled, luck and social construction plays a large part in who receives training, who is exposed to ideas, who has the opportunity to contribute ideas back, and even who is allowed to have their contributions recognized.
We are not yet done, and with an open-minded approach that emphasizes the pursuit of new thought and creativity rather than skepticism and doubt, we can draw in the rest of the population and send society through an advance as monumental as that of the Romantic period. But how do you convince a generation raised on American Idol that it’s better to sing than to judge other singers, irrespective of skill?
When you try to do as many things as I am trying to do, you quickly find out how long you must spend on individual activities when you choose to perform them in order to attain peak productivity. It probably depends on several things, including individual skill level and approach, but here are the times I’ve found best for myself:
Computer Science Research – 3-5 hours.
Mathematical Research – 4+ hours (as long as the problem continues to interest you and you’re not running against dead ends), with breaks approx. every 2 hours.
Programming – 4-6 hours, or until the problem is solved.
Web Design – 1-4 hours.
Social Sciences and Technical Writing – 2-3 hours.
Philosophy and Creative Writing – as long as the ideas keep coming.
Musical Composition – all day, with breaks but no interruption for other skills.
Piano practice – 1-3 hours.
Generating ideas – none at all; this should be a passive activity.
One of my weirder yet more practical ideas: unfoldable umbrellas attached to coat hoods. If it rains, unfold the hood and you have an instant umbrella.
Just a quick thought while reading an article on Digg bemoaning the “stupidity” of this generation (but really bemoaning what the author seems to perceive as a decline in literacy, which in turn is actually a change in the way the current generation absorbs information, but anyway…)
Most children of this generation seem not to want to read because their only institutional exposure to reading reinforces it as a boring activity. I began reading rather early (4 at the latest, but I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t), but beyond the basic “learn to read” sorts of books, my first enjoyable exposure to reading was Nintendo Power magazine. Reading is a very universal skill, of course, so I soon began reading all sorts of other things (including some of the classics), but the fact remains that I had established it as a pleasurable activity before my love for it was kindled.
What of those who are more institutionally bound? Their first nontrivial exposure to reading is something they would never choose to read – and yet they’re forced to slog through it anyway.