Robin's Interesting Thoughts

“While studying the factors that affect our ability to stay compassionate, I was struck by the crucial role of language and our use of words. [However], Nonviolent or Compassionate Communication (NVC) is more than a process or a language. On a deeper level, it is an ongoing reminder to keep our attention focused on a place where we are more likely to get what we are seeking…. The essence of NVC is in our consciousness of the four components, not in the actual words that are exchanged.”

-Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication (p. 2-8)
(italics mine)

“One sign that I am violating my own nature in the name of nobility is a condition called burnout. Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess — the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.”

-Parker Palmer (Let Your Life Speak, p.49)

“Americans… resist the very idea of limits, regarding limits of all sorts as temporary and regrettable impositions on our lives. Our national myth is about the endless defiance of limits: opening the western frontier, breaking the speed of sound, dropping people on the moon, discovering ‘cyberspace’ at the very moment when we have filled old-fashioned space with so much junk that we can barely move. We refuse to take no for an answer.

“Despite the American myth, I cannot be or do whatever I desire… there are some roles and relationships in which we thrive and others in which we wither and die.

“If I try to be or do something noble that has nothing to do with who I am, I may look good to others and to myself for a while. But the fact that I am exceeding my limits will eventually have consequences. I will distort myself, the other, and our relationship — and may end up doing more damage than if I had never set out to do this particular ‘good’.”

-Parker Palmer (Let Your Life Speak, p.42-46)

“Authentic abundance does not lie in secured stockpiles of food or cash or influence or affection but in belonging to a community where we can give those goods to others who need them — and receive them from others when we are in need. … Abundance is a communal act… in which each part functions on behalf of the whole and, in return, is sustained by the whole.

“Community doesn’t just create abundance — community is abundance.”

-Parker Palmer (Let Your Life Speak, p.108)

“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean, …the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.”

-Annie Dillard (as quoted in Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, p.80)

I converted a screen recording to a looping animated gif. It looked and played fine, but I also wanted it to pause for a few seconds at the end before starting the loop again. I couldn’t find an easy way to do this using online tools without increasing the file size of the result.

I eventually figured out how to add the delay using the open-source command-line tool gifsicle. Here is the command:

gifsicle -U original.gif "#0--2" -d200 "#-1" -O2 > with-delay.gif

• The -U option unoptimizes the input gif so that we can operate on individual frames.
• -d specifies the delay to use in hundredths of a second.
• “#0” format specifies a frame number or range of frames. Negative numbers count backwards from the last frame, starting with #-1. So the range from the first to second-to-last frame is #0 to #-2 or “#0–2”.
• -O2 (capital letter O) directs gifsicle to re-optimize the gif using recommended settings.

In summary, this command unoptimizes (-U) the original gif into its component frames; then says we want a new gif with the first frame through the second-to-last frame (#0–2) unchanged and the last frame (#-1) with a new delay of 2 seconds (200 hundredths of a second); and finally specifies that we want to re-optimize the result (-O2).

Thanks to the gifsicle manual and a reddit user for helpful hints.

I don’t think it’s widely known that (1) you don’t need to defrost fish before cooking, and (2) microwave cooking is not only fast and easy but yields better-tasting, melt-in-your-mouth results (at least for hapless chefs like me).

Most “fresh” fish sold in grocery stores is actually defrosted frozen fish. So it seems to me that you may as well just buy it frozen and let it sit in your freezer until you’re ready to cook. At that point, defrosting is time-consuming and smelly, so you may as well just cook it from frozen.

After doing some internet research and experimenting with frozen salmon and cod fillets, I feel it is my civic duty to share with the world the easiest, least messy, and most delicious way to cook fish.

1. Rinse the frozen fillet in warm water to remove its crust of ice, then pat dry with a paper towel.
   (Do not skip this step! I learned this the hard way. The fish interior will not cook if there is too much ice/water on the outside. Also: you need to pat-dry the fish quickly or else the paper towel will stick.)
2. Place the fillet on a plate. Drizzle with oil, salt, pepper, and any spices you want.
   (I often just spread coconut oil with a little salt and pepper and maybe some dried sumac. The internet is full of ideas… pesto, sriracha, mayonnaise, lemon, parsley… just be aware that too much water content will affect the cooking.)
3. Cover the plate lightly.
   (It does not need to be airtight. I just use a normal plastic microwave cover.)
4. Microwave on full power for 4 minutes.
   (This works well for an 8oz fillet in a 1000-watt microwave. A large fillet needs an extra minute or two of cook time.)
5. Wait 1-2 minutes after the microwave stops. Then check the interior with a fork for uncooked areas (they appear translucent or bright). If there are uncooked areas, microwave again for 1 minute and wait 1 minute.
   (The reason for waiting is that the heat inside the fish continues to cook for a while even after the microwave stops.)

Over time you get a feel for how long you need to cook different fillet sizes in your microwave. The goal of course is for it to come out fully cooked (but not overcooked) after the first microwave session. In my 1000-watt microwave, 4-5 minutes is usually enough (plus the 1-2 minutes of waiting).

I updated my javascript library and blog to play well together.

That means I can illustrate a point about interest rates with an interactive widget for you to play with. (Go ahead, try it!)

(For more details, see the Visual Loan Calculator.)

It’s all part of the vision to make it easier to communicate using the tools of explorable explanations.

Religion serves many purposes, but I’ve come to believe that one of the most important is helping people cooperate with each other. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”

Many religions label behaviors that serve the community as “good” and those that are overly self-serving or detrimental to others as “evil”. Individuals are often cast as having a “light side” and a “dark side” or dual influences from “god” and “satan”. Religion helps and encourages people to engage in the former type of behaviors.

Robert Wright realized that we can insightfully describe this using the language of game theory.

Specifically, some situations are “zero-sum” or “win-lose”, meaning that one person’s gain is the other’s loss. For example, if there is only one rabbit to eat, then if I eat it, you go hungry.

Other situations are “non-zero-sum” or “win-win” meaning that cooperation results in gains for both people. For example, if we can only catch rabbits by working together, then cooperation is what allows us both to eat — cooperation leads to abundance.

Humans are equipped to handle both types of situations. If we sense a zero-sum situation, hormones like cortisol flood our body and we become protective, aggressive, and narrow-minded. If we sense a non-zero-sum situation, hormones like oxytocin flood our body and we become generous, caring and creative.

I’ve come to believe that one of the key insights at the core of all successful religions is that nearly every situation can been seen as non-zero-sum. In other words, we can nearly always apply creativity to find win-win solutions (which generate abundance) even if a situation at first seems clearly win-lose. The key hurdle is that our ability to be creative and generous depends on our non-zero-sum hormones being activated. In other words, this is a self-fulfilling prophesy where believing that a situation is win-win is required to put us in the right state of mind and body to figure out what set of actions will make it win-win.

Viewed in this light, many (even most?) religious and spiritual practices are ways of maintaining that community-oriented, win-win mindset. For example, an emphasis on forgiveness helps us return to a cooperative stance with a person who has betrayed our trust. A practice of gratitude inspires us with past examples of generosity and abundance. A weekly gathering helps us stay connected and aware of the community which we all depend on.

It makes sense to me that successful religions became successful in part because they helped communities cooperate and create more win-win solutions leading to abundance, relative to religions which were less effective at promoting cooperation and whose communities thus missed out on valuable opportunities.

The Dalai Lama has often said, “My religion is kindness.”

I’ve come to believe that this has a sound basis in mathematics.

“A tool can give you something concrete that you can imagine using, but a tool is not going to give you persistence… it’s not going to tell you which path to take. It’s not going to give you mettle… when everything feels like it’s been destroyed around you, you can’t just pull out a tool… Where do we nourish and foster the creative imagination that permits you to bring into the world something that does not now exist?”

-John Paul Lederach (via On Being)