Tag: Writing

Perhaps purpose is passion plus people 

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Today I introduced a friend who makes quantitative trading-teaching games to a friend who owns a chain of toy and game stores. 

We played a hidden role social deduction game for 3.5hrs. Then they discussed game theory late into the night. 

I pitched this buddy on moving to The City. In 2 days he’s met a handful of driven, interesting, intellectual people. He usually lives in a tiny town. He doesn’t get out much. It’s not healthy. 

I wonder if he’ll ever expand his possibilities and his capabilities. Or if he’ll collapse back into the short-term, brief-profit-seeking perspective he always has. 

—

The last few months I’ve focused on renovating an apartment. Hearing people discuss their passions and excitement is both energizing and deflating. I wonder where I’ll go after this renovation. A family, perhaps. Or an opening of activity into work… or both. 

I enjoy playing games. I enjoy bringing people together. I’ll keep playing games. Keep bringing people together. 

Into a dancer you have grown

From a seed somebody else has thrown

Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own

And somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go

May lie a reason you were alive, but you’ll never know

—

Games played

Just after midnight, as my buddy and I descended the steps into the subway station, a woman in a purple bathing suit followed. She muttered something about “Which way is this train going?” and “Who are you guys?” that we ignored. 

We paid our $3 to pass through the turnstile. She followed. 

We boarded the elevator toward the platform. The woman followed us. I tilted my head at my buddy. The woman lowered her top. 

Later, on the platform, my buddy commented: “She really must have thought we were good marks. Spent $3 and everything. And in the elevator, you see that?” 

I replied, “You know what that was?”

He said, “Advertising.” 

Welcome to New York

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A buddy had a Medical Issue. He hadn’t spent a night away from home for the last 6 months. I told him he should visit. I asked what he needs. He described to me a Minor Medical Necessity that he needs every day – something akin to using a needle to draw blood. He’s squeamish around blood, so a family member helps him. We hopped on video while his family member performed the task. 

I’m not super squeamish, so I gave the thumbs-up. Less than 24 hours later, he arrived to my guest room. 

Today at 1pm, we went to a play. At 4:10pm, we left the play. At 4:30pm, we arrived at a friend’s birthday party. At 8pm, I left the party. My friend stayed behind. The time is now 11pm. I assume he’s still there. He hasn’t socialized outside of his family in a long time. He’s a severe night owl. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s out until 2 or 3am. 

His family member texted me, asking how the Minor Medical Necessity went. We haven’t done it yet. I didn’t expect him to stay out so late. Perhaps we’ll perform it when he returns at 3am. Or perhaps this “every day” will be a 36-hour stretch between two performings. It’s an odd situation where I’m responsible for doing it, but I don’t feel responsible for making it happen. (I’ve shared this perspective with him. He must habeas the corpus. If he’s out til 9am, I’m not going to see him til the morning.) 

I made for this guy a nice evening. I had a nice time at the birthday party. My friend enjoyed it even more than me. 

He just called me. He’s not coming back for a while. He’s befriended a few people. He wants to have them over for board games. I asked about the Minor Medical Necessity. He says it’s fine: we can do it in the morning. 

I’m not a doctor, and this wasn’t laughter, but I think ‘tis a helpful dose of medicine. 

The next morning I awoke to this message: 

Games Played: 

  • After listening to yesterdays npr story, one reader sent in the town of Show Low, AZ. 

Professional doubles tennis is broken

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And the solutions are making it worse.

Wednesday night at the US Open, the mixed doubles semifinals started warming up at 7pm; each match lasted around 1hr20min, so with breaks between the matches we finished around 11:45pm. Two semifinals and a final in a single evening. Muchová and Menšík took it 6-3, 1-6, 10-6.

That compression is the entire point of the new format. People don’t like doubles tennis as much. Instead of making it better, they’re trying to make less of it. I think there are better moves. 

Tennis is a subdivided game. 4 points win a game, 6 games win a set, 2 (or 3) sets win a match. Why the subdivisions? Why win by two?

Because tennis crushes your soul. You spend ten minutes crunching point after point toward winning a game, only for all that work to be valueless when you lose that game. The same applies to sets: I don’t care how much work you put into the set, 1-6 or 5-7 both count as the same loss.

The subdivisions create the drama. They also create enthusiasm. Game points matter more than normal points. Set points matter even more. Deuce returns the game to an active stall: two jousters on idling motorcycles rich sparking with potential energy. Advantage is better still: one player a point from victory, the other a point from losing everything they just built.

The attempts to “improve” the game make it shorter and worse. Doubles removed advantage. 40-40 is still called “deuce”, but it’s now next point wins, rather than win by two. This change isn’t new:  the ATP has run no-ad doubles since 2006, which means the ratchet has been turning for twenty years. I’m writing now because it’s accelerating. 

This year, the US Open shortened the set too. In the mixed doubles championship, every match except the final is first to 4 games instead of first to 6. And they’ve replaced the third set entirely (final included): instead of playing games, it’s a “match tiebreak”, first to ten points.

That’s how you fit the semifinals and the final into one night.

The problem? Less-engaging games. If you have a bad game, the solution is not making it shorter. This is the classic mistake a promoter makes when they note “people have short attention spans these days”.

Don’t make it shorter. Make it better. Tennis lives on the drama. The excitement. The possibility. The heartbreak. Don’t give me less of that. Give me more.

Look elsewhere

Tennis has multiple levels: a match consists of sets which contain games which contain points. The US Open is making alterations at the set level. That’s the wrong level. The problem isn’t that doubles points come in sixes instead of fours. The problem is the points.

Only around ⅛ of doubles points are engaging (e.g. involving an impressive show of athleticism, or great strategy/tactics, or a large swing in likelihood of who wins the point). Compare that to ~⅓ in singles. And in singles between strong competitors, even when one player serves ace after ace, the mental game makes up for the disappointing physical game. Doubles has no such cover.

So make the point more interesting.

To do that, restrict the ability to hit winners. The first time a point goes hard-serve → barely-successful-return → smash, it’s cool. By the third time, it’s repetitive. By the thirtieth, you’re on your phone. (People actually left the tournament audience between the semifinals and the finals!) 

How to limit winners? Mandate that the ball’s second bounce be within some designated line arena. The game goes from pound-pound-pound to much more finesse.

It’s also a change tennis players could easily adjust to. You’re not moving the lines (they have years of muscle memory hitting exactly those places) and you’re not adding new restrictions on which shots are legal (eg pickleball’s no-volley zone). You’re limiting the players’ targeting and power, which is already in their wheelhouse. Tennis doesn’t become a fundamentally different sport: you just basically make one version of killshot illegal. 

(A worse idea, for contrast: scrap the finish line entirely and make every game win-by-two from zero. Every point matters. You don’t get the comebacks from 0-40, but you give every point more potential energy. I don’t think this is a good idea. But I think it’s still better than simply making the match shorter.)

The US Open has pumped money into the mixed doubles championship and restructured the seeding to encourage big names to play it. It worked, for two nights. But none of it makes the game better. I like watching tennis. Yet after viewing the mixed doubles at this tournament, I have no interest in watching Serena WIlliams and Carlos Alcaraz play mixed doubles just as I have no interest in watching them do laundry. Even if someone were drawn once by the famous names, they’d be unlikely to return due to the unenjoyable structure. Pumping money into a bad structure is like adding fuel to an unstable fire: you create a flash in the pan. 

You improve the game long-term by actually improving the game. Stop experimenting at the meta-structure and actually make the points fun.

Meh-ntalist

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In freshman year of highschool, my theater teacher told me: “There are no magicians. There are only actors pretending to be magicians.” 

Tonight we saw neither. 

Suhani Shah bills herself as “the world’s most subscribed mentalist. I have no way of disproving that claim. 

What I can disprove: 

  1. Around ~30 minutes into the show, she wrote a number on a whiteboard, attempting to match the number that had been written while she was blindfolded. She failed. The audience did not clap. She commented on the audience not clapping. I told her “It’s wrong.” (I was on stage at the time as an audience participant.) 
  2. Around 3 minutes later, she told me and the other on-stage participant to select one of us to draw on the board, and tell her who it was. We neglected to tell her. She incorrectly guessed it was me. 
  3. There was another part where she had someone say a number that was on their mind. The reveal was to be EITHER that she had written the number both on the white board AND on a piece of paper already on stage, OR that she was wrong on the whiteboard as a dramatic intensity-heightener, and then MAGICALLY CORRECT with the paper on the stage. I can’t tell which, because 1) the numbers didn’t match, and 2) she didn’t play off the note-being-correct in a way that was obvious or compelling. 
  4. At ~the 75th minute, she performed an actually-shocking trick that I have no idea how she did. (She received random three-to-five-digit numbers from the audience, which combined with an audience member’s “random” button presses of additional numbers summed to the first 6 numbers on a twenty dollar bill and a pre-written scroll.)
    1. Okay, I actually just figured out one way she could do it: have the “calculator” app not actually be a true calculator, but be a program which only looks like a calculator but actually inputs the desired digits at the audience member’s presses. 

Today was her first day performing in New York. On ~3 occasions, she found herself a bit bowled over by audience members being very forward. For an audience-participation show, New Yorker culture is, I would suspect, quite specific. We move fast. Give us an inch and we’ll take it immediately. Say to the audience, “We need someone with a handkerchief. Raise your hand if you have one. One of you, join me onstage.” and someone will arrive immediately. 

She also mocked the audience participants more than I’m familiar with. This may be a cultural difference, but it rubbed me a bit the wrong way. (Partner didn’t notice or care.)

If you’re a mentalist, your job is to seem like you’re doing magic. Part of that success comes from playing off your mistakes well. 

Tonight was opening night. In two weeks, I hope she’s more successful. 

On Mathemagic

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Tonight, Partner and I saw an off-Broadway show of a guy doing fast math in his head. He calls himself a “math-e-magician.” 

This performer does a great job of playing things off. One of his acts is to to guess the missing digit of the answer to an incredibly long multiplication problem. Starting with a 4 digit number from a previous trick, each audience member uses their phone calculator to multiply by a new 5 digit number that they don’t say out loud, and then they read all but one digit aloud. Give the digits in any order — he can still figure out what’s missing.

Magicians never reveal their secrets, but, for a math-e-magician, the reveal is part of the show. The trick is that he selected a multiple of 9 as the starting number. Therefore, the sum of the digits will always be a multiple of 9. So if The sum is 68? The next multiple of 9 is 72, so the answer is 4. The sum of the digits given is 34? The missing digit is 2 (34+2=36, 36/9=0). The sum of the digits is 45? Well, the answer could be 0, or it could be 9.

This is what separates the magicians from the math-e-magicians. And math-e-magicians reveal their secrets.

He cold-reads. He will say, “I’m going to read your mind… I’m getting a lot of nothing. It’s not zero, is it?” And if the audience member says, “That’s right!”, we’re good. 

But if the audience member replies otherwise, he can say, “Try thinking harder… It’s nine!”, just playing it off like it was part of the act.

Cold-reading psychics do this as well, where they might see a woman crying and say, “It’s not your husband, is it?” and if the response is yes, they say, “Yeah, I thought so.” But if the answer is no, they say, “Yes, I didn’t think so.” 

Either way, the phrasing gives you that particular out. 

My favorite and least-favorite part of the show was when an audience member kid said that he could do 75 digits of pi, and then he could not accurately do 75 digits of pi. The performer did a great job of making the kid not realize he was flailing. The performer had said, “We’re going to do 60 digits of pi, and then maybe continue onwards.” And since the kid was flailing, the performer cut him off. 

Partner’s favorite part was when he asked a little girl for her birthday, and did a whole act with the numbers in it. He then asked for someone else’s birthday, and the girl’s sister volunteered. But the sister was quick to point out that she’s not just a sister: she’s a twin. The performer chuckled and used the birthday anyway. 

This particular performer used to create magic squares to entertain himself. Now he performs math-e-magic in an Off-Broadway show. 

Starting early sure helps. 

The light goes out in my designer’s eyes

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My designer waved the white flag. 

After two months of haggling over specific lighting, he has assented that Partner & I are boss. He literally said, “I lose.” 

I didn’t want him to lose. I don’t think him feeling like he has lost is helpful for anyone. But I also don’t want to pay an extra $14,000 on lighting. I’d rather have a visible flange. So yes, he loses. 

Partner was the key technical driver here. In some areas, I’ve been the pusher (raising the ceilings, which Partner was skeptical about but is now excited for; getting a deep tub; ensuring the island countertop is 34” tall, so it’s ergonomic for Partner’s cooking). In this area, Partner’s prior technical knowledge of lighting (she was a professional theatrical lighting designer in a past life) lends itself to this new domain. 

The final straw: learning that the second-tier lighting suggested by the showroom has a beam of ~4 feet in diameter at 6 feet high, while the lighting we found has a beam of ~13 feet in diameter at the same level. The same cost gets us approximately the same lighting specs, but pi*6.5^2 = 133sqft of light vs 12sqft, or 10x the amount of light. 

Yes, there’s more to light than the amount of light (or else we’d just light the whole apartment with floodlights), but we’ve already checked those traits! They’re approximately equivalent on every other element, just these have visible flanges! 

So today, my designer assented to purchasing the lights we described. He is seeking someone to buy them from. (Why he won’t just buy them from the website I found previously, I don’t know.) 

10x the light, 10x my happiness, and 300 copies of future board games. 

Here’s to holding your ground. 

Thanks, Partner. I couldn’t have done it without you. 

Against Middlemen 

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My project manager/apartment designer sent me on a wild goose chase because he likes pretty things and I like money. 

I left his office at 3:45pm. Partner & I walked the 20 minutes to the lighting showroom for our 4:45 appointment. It was hot. Partner was grumpy due to lack of food (an all-liquid diet will do that to you, especially if you make the mistake of giving away your protein shake). At 4:15pm, my designer texted to cancel: see, the showroom closes at 5pm, so what about a meeting on Thursday? I told him tomorrow (Wednesday) is good but Thursday is no good. See: we have an appointment with my designer’s boss on Thursday, and I really want the lighting nailed down before then. Partner has already designed a new lighting package, so this whole experience of look-at-this-new-lighting-package feels like a wild goose chase to me anyway. It’s all because my designer wants no visible flange around my lights, while I want 1.5% of a million-dollar farm upstate. 

Having already walked to the showroom (and being an impish sort of fellow), I entered anyway. After a 5-minute wait, I spotted the same saleswoman who had previously helped me. I asked her about the 4:45pm meeting. She said there never had been a 4:45pm meeting. 

Aha. 

I asked her if she had designed the new lighting package that my designer mentioned. She said yes. 

Me: “Could we schedule an appointment for tomorrow? Any time after 1pm.” 

Saleswoman: “Sure: I’m wide open anytime from 1pm. And you’re my top priority.”

Me: “Could you send me the product list and spec sheets ahead of time so I can research them?” 

Saleswoman: “We can only send it to your designer.”

Me: “That dramatically decreases the likelihood we will buy lights from you.” 

Saleswoman: “Sorry, it’s store policy.” 

When I shared this experience with Partner, she laughed and said wedding plans often have a password, to avoid e.g. the mother of the bride changing things. 

“That’s fair enough,” I said. “But I’m the bride!” 

I’ve heard it’s reasonably common in German culture for someone experiencing consumer anguish of this sort to say something like, “But I’m paying you money!” And maybe it’s my German genes, but that’s my natural response! 

If you’re not going to share your information with me, I won’t give you my money! I already am disinterested in the fact that you charge $20k for something that I could nearly mimic for $7k. And now you’re not going to share MY INFORMATION with me? It’s like a HIPAA violation, but for lighting showrooms! 

I emailed my designer. I started the conversation by requesting that he only tell me meetings are booked when they actually are booked. (Shots fired.) 

It’s even more frustrating because I don’t mind the flange. 

In reality, a small issue. The demolition on my apartment started yesterday, and is going swimmingly. The meeting with my designer and the owner of the contracting company went well. This is just one small drop in a sea of good news. 

And anyway, not giving them my money is the best revenge. 

Musing on Connective Tissue

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Imagine 10 or 100 people describe you, and their descriptions become a word cloud. Now take your word cloud, and compare it to other people’s.

Would we find that the people you spend time with have similar word clouds — similar descriptors, similar nouns about them? Does your cloud sit close to the clouds of the people near you? If so, in what ways alike, and in what ways different? (That’s graphing friend groups or political links in n-dimensional space according to personal traits, as a word cluster of noun descriptors of the person: clustering by cloud similarity and then drawing lines between the points based on social or political ties.)

My bet: people befriend and connect based on proximity. But the friend network is different than the leader. The map of who we like is not the map of who leads us.

Maybe “Yalie” is a noun about you, and a bunch of the people around you are also Yalies. Maybe most of the people you spend time with are quite tall — about the same height. But what about groups with diversities of traits instead: An office might cluster around Yalies but diversify by role: one person described “HR,” one described “accounting,” one described “CEO.” Some friend groups are all CEOs; other circumstances produce diversity. How does that work in an office? In politics? 

I wonder what they’d learn about politics. Is the most successful politician of a group the person who overlaps most with the rest of the group? I wouldn’t think the leader is necessarily the person with the most words overlapping others (because that person might miss a key trait, e.g. the desire to lead). Maybe the person who is friends with everybody is the one with the most in common with everybody. Or maybe the leader’s lowest commonality is higher than anybody else’s lowest (i.e. “The leader is nobody’s stranger.”). It’s got to be more complicated than that, depending on the group structure and incentives and the outsized impact of specific traits like desire for power.

Why I’ve been thinking about this: in a group that I interacted with today, the leader shares the most traits with the other group members. Each bloc shares one of her dimensions. Thinking about the descriptors of these different people and how she ended up being president: she is the person all of these different groups can agree on.

But often the leader of a group is not the leader because they have much in common with everybody, but because they plan things. That’s an interesting difference. The leader of a friend group is not the one most overlapping with others but more likely the one who organizes the events. In her case, part of it is she makes the thing happen — the leadership thing. This differs from the second-in-command, who doesn’t organize people, just makes the wheels run. Doing isn’t organizing.

Does anybody map social groups this way? A thing I’d be curious about: how do the friend network and the leader differ? The mapping half is studied — sociologists call it homophily. The gap between who connects and who leads is the fresher question.

—

Games Played

The writers missed out by failing to name it, “The Devil Wears Prada 2: The Devil Still Wears Prada.”

Don’t Mess with Transit 

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How Houston missed the bus. 

A man with a hand cast approaches Partner in the Houston light rail. He points at her and points at himself as if to say “we’re both injured!” 

His opening line: “are you a believer?” 

Partner grunts, “Catholic”. 

He tells her that Jesus will take care of her. See: he prayed and his hand doesn’t hurt. 

— 

Houston is a car-based city. The light rail only navigates along a few specific stretches. Therefore the main people who use the light rail are those who don’t have cars. The selection effects mean the light rail users are mainly poor or homeless. It’s the highest proportion of people talking to themselves or yelling arguments at the empty air that I’ve ever seen. 

So what? 

So it’s a little bit of a spiral to the bottom. The New York City subway definitely has more total homeless or poor or ghost-yellers than the Houston light rail. But the proportion in Houston dwarfs that of New York. And it feels – at least to me – much less safe.  I wonder whether that causes it to only attract those without other options. So it attracts fewer riders – and fewer affluent and influential riders. And therefore the service doesn’t expand? 

Houston doesn’t necessarily need a better light rail. The buses also work well enough, if you’re okay standing in oppressive heat for fifteen minutes. But it’s a notable trait of infrastructure: if you don’t invest early enough, you’re generally better off waiting for the next paradigm. The US is a car culture. Next up: personal helipads? 

—

And a funny quote from Partner: 

“You know what’s the funniest part of BTUs? The Brits don’t use air conditioning.” 

Brooklyn Communists

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The best part of Brooklyn? It’s near New York City. 

Partner & I trained for 48 minutes each way to an event in Brooklyn. 

The event: four fifteen-minute talks plus Q&A, starting at 5pm since we had to vacate the space ahead of a different event starting at 6:30pm. 

Partner & I arrived at 4:40. One of the organizers said, “You guys are early. Could you come back in 20 minutes?”[1] 

If you’re going to have four fifteen-minute talks, plus Q&A time, you really want to start near 5pm. See, I don’t know what they teach you in Brooklyn. But here in Manhattan, 4 x 15minute = 60 minutes. And 60 minutes = an hour. 

Instead, they didn’t start until 5:20pm because, as they said, “Some people are coming from work.” 

No duh. It’s Thursday. How did you not consider this? 

So the talks got squished to 10mins each. And the Q&A got squished to one chunk of ~8 minutes. 

And only two people put their shoes in the little cabinet despite the cabinet being labeled “put your shoes in this cabinet”. And yes, they were Me & Partner. 

—

The talks were on living in communal spaces. Partner and I are interested in living with friends. We want to raise a family alongside other families, ideally in the same apartment or neighboring. 

But, for us this trait is only one of our interests. For the people at this presentation, co-living is the main part of their identity. 

One of the recommended processes for co-living: have a roommate check-in. Include open dialogue so different housemates can share their problems. 

My problem: a poorly scheduled, structured, and run event. 

[1] Partner says they said, “You guys are incredibly early.” I didn’t hear the incredibly.