As an example, consider the president of the United States. Right now as I write these words, the president is Barack Obama. I know that emotionally: it’s intuitive. If I saw the man on the street, I’d immediately recognize him and know he was the president. Contrast that with the president in the year 1847. James Polk. For most people alive today, that’s intellectual knowledge, at best. If you know it at all, it’s probably as a piece of trivia. If Polk came here in a time machine and you got in an argument with him on the street, you wouldn’t recognize him and wouldn’t alter your behavior in the same way you would if it were Barack.

Here are some other examples:

* “One day, I’ll die.” Almost everyone understands this, and yet for most of us, it has no bearing on our personality. If you’re in busy traffic and your kids are crying in the backseat and someone’s calling you on the cellphone and some idiot behind you is honking her horn, your mortality is probably the last thing on your mind. This fact usually falls into the intellectual knowledge category. Sometimes, it can be emotional knowledge as well. Tibetan Buddhist monks meditate for long periods of time on their own mortality. Doing so has beneficial effects on the personality, making one live one’s life in a more present, meaningful way.

* “The derivative of sine is cosine.” Again, if you know this, it’s probably just intellectual knowledge. On the other hand, if you’re an applied mathematician, the process of computing derivatives is so second nature that this factoid can actually become intuitive, to the point where you “see” it effortlessly.

* How to walk. This is an example of knowledge which is almost purely emotional. Unless you actually study it, you probably can’t explain the precise details (I know I can’t). It’s surprisingly hard to even think up a satisfactory dictionary definition for the word, “walk”. And yet, it’s intuitive. Unless you’re a baby or physically incapable of walking, walking is absolutely an integral part of your very personality. No matter how busy and distracted you are at work, you never suddenly forget how to walk (though, it is kind of funny to imagine a worker running around so frantically he forgets how to run:))

* What country you live in. A perfect example of something which falls into both classes simultaneously. Unlike the precise physical explanation of walking, you probably wouldn’t have any trouble at all if I asked you what country you live in. If it were on a test, it’d be a breeze. At the same time, it’s not something you forget when you’re distracted or busy. It’s something built deeply into your personality.

* God exists. For some people, this fact is emotionally true. For some, it’s emotionally false. Intellectually, it’s not a well-posed question: it’s unfalsifiable and unverifiable, at least in this lifetime.

Often, we fail to benefit from a piece of information because we have it stored in the wrong way: we fail to learn it emotionally. This is why you can’t become a guitarist just by reading books about guitar. Music is something which must be carved into your very intuition. Maybe you’re a computer programmer and you read about a great trick. That’s cool, but it isn’t going to make you a better programmer until you actually practice it to the point where you’re whipping it out unconsciously. In the seduction community, guys can read advice about picking up girls all day and night, but yet still shut down when they actually encounter a girl: a real life encounter is not remotely like an academic test.

If you don’t want to practice for months or years, and you don’t want to become a Tibetan monk, there’s a great shortcut to taking intellectual knowing and making it emotional: write, write, write!

FURTHER READING

How to be a Better Conversationalist
Trivial Knowledge
Privileged Information
Conscious and Subconscious Mind

Clocks

Gadgets which display the time, should almost always display it, unless there’s a very good reason not to. For example, Windows and OSX are good about displaying a clock at most times, but not during their login screens. There’s no reason not to display the time on the login screen. (An example of a good reason to suppress the time would be if the user was playing a game which took up the entire screen)

Again, cell phones. In a perfect world, a cell phone should double as a fully functional pocket watch. And yet, some phones suppress the time if an alert is active. And some phones won’t display time at all if they’re out of their service area. I guess the idea is they can’t figure out what timezone they’re in, but they could at least display the time based on the last known time zone. (If the programmer is that paranoid about changing time zones while out of service, put a question mark next to the time)

YouTube, Media Player, etc.

In virtually all media players, if you want to change what time you’re at, you have to slide a slider on a fixed-length horizontal bar. This is a very imprecise way to control what point you’re watching/listening to. In addition to the sliding bar, make the time display (the one which reads something like “1:22 / 4:37″) be editable. If the user wants to jump to exactly 2:05, let them click where it says “1:22″ and type in “2:05″.

Captcha Text

Captcha Text is that thing in every form you fill out where you have to verify you’re human by typing some squiggly letters into an input box. Brilliant idea, a bane to spambots everywhere. Here’s the thing. If you enter something else wrong in the form (like you choose an existing username or your “confirm password” doesn’t match), you’ll typically have to enter the captcha again after fixing the form. There’s no point to having to refill a captcha a second time. If you were able to fill it in correctly the first time, you’re either human, or such a well-programmed bot that the 2nd one isn’t gonna make a difference anyway.

Monitors

Laptop monitors, and any other monitor integrated with a computer, should take a lesson from classic desktop monitors: an off/on switch. It should be possible to turn the monitor off without turning the computer off. With a laptop, it’s usually not even enough to load a black-screen screensaver: the monitor will still emit light.

Shorter URLs

Many (I’d go so far as to say almost all) URLs contain unnecessary subdirectories, a lingering remnant of the very early days when the typical website was a static directory of real files. Take the English Wikipedia, for example. The URL for their “technology” article is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology. There is no reason for the “/wiki/” subdirectory in there. It would be better if the URL were simply: http://en.wikipedia.org/Technology. Probably better for search engine optimization, too (but that could just be superstition).

UPDATE: From the email, Gwern pointed out a couple reasons for longer URLs. See more details at (1) below.

ATM Machines

Maybe there are some privacy concerns involved… but it would be kind of cool if an ATM machine remembered customers’ choices from previous uses, and offered a shortcut key to repeat them. For example, say I go to an ATM machine and make a $200 withdrawal. In doing that, I have to select “withdraw”, then “checking account”, then “type another amount”, then finally type in “200″ (actually I have to type in “20000″, since it goes “$.02″, “$.20″, “$2.00″, “$20.00″ and finally “$200.00″– which is a whole other thing in itself, since we can’t withdraw in penny-granularity anyway!) Then I come back a few days later to the same ATM. This time, after entering my PIN, there ought to be a “Withdraw $200 from Checking” button right at the beginning.

Auto-Form Fill

Modern browsers like Firefox are set up to remember things you type into forms, and when you start typing in a new form, a list of previous things appears that you can choose from. Unfortunately, at least in Firefox, there’s no intuitive way to remove things permanently from the list. Over long periods of time, some of these lists can fill up with quite a lot of junk. It would be best if you could highlight a choice on the list, and then right click, and a right-click menu would show up with some options like “Edit”, “Delete”.

I will update this in the future as I think of new things, and/or as my ideas are integrated into the technology of the world

NOTES

(1) The first reason to use longer URLs is, an URL system with no subdirectories might conflict with things like robots.txt, sitemap.xml, etc.: common files which live in the root directory and have a very specific purpose & protocol. For example, Wikipedia has an article on “robots.txt”, but also has its own robots.txt. The two should obviously be kept separate. The second reason is the danger of setting up the more advanced, shorter system on one webhost, and then being surprised by a new webhost which doesn’t give the necessary .htaccess privileges or whatever.

Great points. Programmers should carefully make sure no “robots.txt” issues arise. It’s not a problem in Wordpress: wordpress url names end with “/”, so a mischievous blogger could create an article with URL “mysite.com/robots.txt/” but this would be distinguished by the “/”. Wikipedia uses uppercase for filenames, and that would suffice to distinguish its real “robots.txt” from its article “Robots.txt”. Even if an URL system was so generalized as to lack even this much structure, programmers could still hardcode necessary URLs as “illegal”. (Incidentally, for all the care Wikipedia takes with ensuring people can look up obscure things like “Robots.txt”, you still can’t look up “#”. Go ahead, try it, the results are seriously broken, especially if you click “Search” instead of “Go”. And this flaw is non-trivial over at the English Wiktionary.)

As for the restrictive servers, I don’t think that’s such a big problem. Running Wikimedia requires PHP and a database, both of which are far, far bigger privileges than .htaccess. Besides, if a giant project like English Wikipedia is forced to move to such a restrictive server, I think URLs will be the least of our troubles

FURTHER READING

How to Improve Blogspot
Reinventing the Wheel
The Halting Problem

EXAMPLES

* “I can’t call in sick.” For most jobs, this is untrue. Going in to work when we’re sick endangers everyone around us, and it cheats our employers. A respectful job, one with dignity, will respect sick days. A really good job might even respect I-just-don’t-wanna-come-in-today days. Unless you work for Ebenezer Scrooge, you’re allowed to call in sick. You’re also allowed to claim your vacation time and your lunch break. Many people feel like they shouldn’t take sick days or vacation time, that it’ll make them a “bad worker”. That rule is self-imposed and self-limiting.

* “I have to simplify this math expression.” I teach calculus at university, and the single most common question is: “Can we leave it like that on the test?” “Don’t we need to simplify the answer?” No, if you needed to simplify it, then it wouldn’t be “the answer”, by definition. In mathematics, we simplify expressions to make later work easier, or, very rarely, for aesthetic value. It’s not an end in itself. Rather, it’s a great way to give yourself extra opportunity to make an algebra mistake and lose some points. If the instructions don’t say “simplify”, then simplifying is a self-constraining law!

* “I can’t kiss/get physically intimate on the first date!” To constrain love and emotions by such “old wives’ rules” is to cheapen them– as if Cupid cared whether or not the courting rituals du jour have been followed to the letter.

* “I can’t publish a blog article less than 500 words long!” This is one I always struggle with myself. Somehow I have trouble bringing myself to publish anything short. I guess this is a specific type of Search Engine Superstition. Or maybe it’s because some of the bloggers who influence me the most tend to write huge thousands-of-words articles. In any case, this is a self-inflicted handicap and I ought to try to break it.

* “Everything I write has to be original!” There’s nothing non-cliche original under the sun. I strive to write original content, but that just means content that I haven’t personally seen. I broke this rule a few times with Kubla Khan, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Buddhist koans. I didn’t get arrested by the Internet Police. In fact, those three “articles” perform pretty well! The point is, true originality isn’t something you can easily put on tap, so if you want to update regularly, don’t be afraid to steal now and then

* “I can’t use the ‘goto’ command in C” Once upon a time, some Very Serious Person ™ wrote an essay against using goto in the C programming language. Ever since then, the command has suffered a scarlet letter, even though the original reasoning was debunked. This is one of the most resilient remains of the old “push the wrong key and the computer will blow up” mentality from the late 80’s/early 90’s. Have fun escaping from nested loops!

WHY DO WE INVENT THESE RULES?

Left on autopilot, we tend to follow autopilot behaviors. That means extra rules and constraints and bounds which aren’t based on reality. With this blog, for example, in the past I’ve tended to write articles which are >500 words (usually significantly more in fact). After writing hundreds of those essays, the behavior has become normal and ordinary. If I’d written hundreds of short little 300-word updates, then I’d flinch away from publishing anything larger. In other words, a lot of it is behavioral momentum. Another cause of self-constraining behavior– as in the “goto” example or the “first date” example– is bandwagon mentality.

The best way to break these established patterns is to shine the spotlight of presence on them. Presence is that state of mind (or rather non-mind) where we simply observe passively, suspending judgment and analysis. This state automatically shuts down the autopilot. See the “further reading” below for three ways to be more present.

FURTHER READING

Three Ways to Be More Present
The Pain Body
Reality Escapes

In the past year, I finally rented a web-server and started teaching myself web programming. My first endeavor, I didn’t even know what a database was– I spent hours carefully programming a C program to generate romaji dictionary files, only to discover that servers aren’t usually happy about people uploading hundreds of thousands of text files The point is, I didn’t know squat about programming for the web. I could’ve grabbed a textbook, but that would go against the whole point: I write and develop things for fun, and last time I checked, elementary coding manuals were anything but! So I did some wheel re-inventorating. I coded my own forums from scratch, and even the wiki-like Connections Project. It would’ve been ten thousand times easier to download phpBB and wikimedia. But I wouldn’t have learned nearly as much.

By doing those projects from scratch– reinventing the wheel– I learned so much about how the internet functions! And the knowledge which I gained is emotional, not just intellectual. If I read some textbooks, even took a class in PHP or SQL, I’d gain the knowledge intellectually, but it wouldn’t have been etched into my very intuition like it has since become.

One thing about reinventing wheels is, your wheel is gonna really suck. It probably won’t roll straight, if it even rolls at all. Until today, my forums were an eyesore. I’m great at coding now, but I’m not great at web design, the art of rearranging and resizing things so they’re all purrty-looking. Maybe I’ll master that next The forums are still a long way from being as advanced as the common forum engines out there… they still suck, just not quite as much as yesterday! It might take years ’til I catch up. But when I finally do, I’ll have enough momentum, I’ll whoosh right past all the open-source forums

That’s ok, though. Once you’ve developed the skills, you can easily refine your wheel and make it better. Today, for example, I completely renovated the forums, so they use the same layout as the blog. (Now that I look back on it, that seems so obvious it’s painful. Isn’t that always the way with good ideas?) Tomorrow I’ll do the same to my Connections Project. In the process of marrying forums and blog, I made dozens and dozens of modifications to Wordpress to make it more efficient and better-performing. Most of these, I never would’ve spotted if I didn’t have the on-your-feet intuitive programming skill I got from building some projects from scratch.

One of the surprising things about mathematics curriculum at the university level, is that “History of Math” is usually a senior-level course, or even early graduate level. If you think about it, this class could be renamed, “Reinventing the Math”. It isn’t so “advanced” because it necessarily requires mathematical maturity. If they wanted, they could adjust the course to be doable by freshman or high school students. The thing is, most people who aren’t majoring in mathematics, just want to pass their math requirements and that’s it. In order to study and really benefit from the history of math, you have to be really interested in mastering math. Otherwise, it just looks like algebra except the notation is even worse! Thus the requirement for “History of Math” shouldn’t be so many years as a math major– it should be so much desire to learn the subject. The benefit of learning it is, you gain a much deeper understanding and appreciation for those theorems that come from the magic hat.

Chiseling your first project from stone isn’t always the best strategy. If you need to do something under a deadline, go with whatever you can get your hands on. If you have a long-term interest in solidly understanding something, your roots established deep in a profound understanding, then start from the beginning: start chipping!

FURTHER READING

Autotidact: Be A Self-Teacher
Autodidact PhD
You might be an autodidact if…
Announcing: Forums!

So few understand the deep workings of the search engines (certainly I don’t understand them very well), and yet so many are affected by them. Together that creates fertile ground for superstition. The search engines (and primarily I’m speaking of Google) conceal the secrets of their trade, leaving us unenlightened mortals to wild speculation. Schools have developed, with their own dogma and ideologies about how to get on the front page of a web search!

Here are a few examples of superstitions about Search…

* “If you want to rank high, you’ve got to repeat the keyword a million times!” There’s evidence this actually worked in the early days, when search was really bad. Not so much today. For a while, I was guilty of the opposite superstition. After analyzing the word counts of some popular bloggers, I became convinced that the desired keyword should actually have a fairly low density! These days, I no longer parse my articles in such depth. I figure one superstition is no better than another. I’m better off just having more fun by writing how I want Not how Zeus, God of Search wants.

* “Links with the ‘nofollow’ attribute are useless!” A while back, to combat spam, Google announced a way for webmasters to mark links which were susceptible to spam– like blog comments or wiki edits. Basically, this has been wildly successful at cutting down on spam. However, there are minority schools who theorize that the whole ‘nofollow’ thing is a feint from Google. After all, it doesn’t really matter whether or not the links actually contribute to a page’s success– as long as spammers don’t think they contribute! As for me, again, I see only two religious cults fighting one another. I’ll just ignore the tag and focus on the things I can actually know, control, and/or enjoy.

* “Doing such-and-such will get you blacklisted by Google!” If this were true, everyone would intentionally do such-and-such while disguised as their competitor. Nintendo would hire thousands of script kiddies (under the table, of course) to spam every corner of the web with pro-Playstation links. Spammers know this, so it’s always very interesting to keep an eye on the ever-developing war between spammers and Google.

* “Google favors its own products!” I don’t know how common this actually is, but I know it was a factor in my decision, when I first started blogging, to go with blogspot. But as I’ve written in Blogspot vs. Wordpress, it seems Google is so far from favoring their own blogging platform, it seems blogspot is crippled with handicaps! Well, at least nobody can honestly accuse Google of favoritism there

Transhumanists believe that we’ll eventually pass a “singularity point” after which our technology will be so awesome, all the puzzles of today will seem trivial. I wonder how a transhuman, planted in the year 2010, would look at the search engine optimization battle. It would be like if you or I went back to an ancient Roman religious ceremony!

FURTHER READING

What would programming syntax be like if the Japanese invented it
My experience with computer programming
How To Become A Better Conversationalist

…A river. We navigate it in our boats, having some minor ability to resist the currents but ultimately bound ever forward by the waves. Perhaps the river leads to a tranquil sea, or perhaps a violent waterfall– we’ll never know ’til we reach the end. One of the features of the river is that there is water ahead– the future– and water behind– the past– and the water underneath the boat is only a fleeting fraction of the total system.

…A thread. In more than one sense of the word. The linear, one-dimensional nature of the thread captures the immovable momentum of time, and at the same time, this thread is the fabric of history. Like the river, any single point in the thread is infinitesimal, surrounded before and behind by the vast unknowable what-is-to-come and what-has-been.

…A moment. Like the river, except now the boat is anchored down in one present moment, and it’s the water and the land which are moving. This is an enlightened perspective, acknowledging that there will never come a day which is “the future”, nor has there ever been a day which was “the past”. There is only the Now.

…A predator. “This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town; And beats high mountains down.” Of course you already know the answer to this cunning riddle of Tolkien. Ultimately everything which has a beginning, has an end, and in time it will fade from all memory.

…An arrow. The arrow metaphor emphasizes fate and momentum. This is a non-deterministic perspective: the dart is already released; there’s no recalling it, or changing its path. The arrow also symbolizes speed. Years fly by in a second while fate works its course.

…A spacetime dimension. Relative to a fixed origin and coordinate system, points have three spatial coordinates. Time adds sophistication to this model by adding a fourth coordinate, thus it is the fourth dimension. But while particles trace exotic paths in the first three dimensions, everything has an awful unchanging constant velocity in the fourth. (Things get more complicated when the theory of relativity is factored in!)

…Money. Through this lens, the days of our lives are an allowance we invest, for profit or ruin. Every moment is an opportunity for restless wealth-building. If only you could live forever, you could eventually be the wealthiest person in the world!

…A race. The more you do, the more is left to do; this is the busy man’s metaphor. Pink Floyd sang: “You run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking… Racing around to come up behind you again… The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older… Shorter of breath and one day closer to death!”

…A prison. This is simultaneously the prisoner’s metaphor, and the metaphor of the man who is truly free. There’s too much time and you struggle to fill it all. At first glance, this is the polar opposite of the “race” perspective– but on closer inspection, they’re two different ways of dealing with the same root poison: lack of “right action”, lack of knowing what is the one thing you need to do.

…A gift. In any case, time is a precious gift. We enjoy the experience of the river. We marvel at the beautiful tapestries woven from the thread. We live our lives in the moment, the Now. The predator devours the old so that the new can have a chance. The arrow guides us swiftly toward our ultimate destinies. Spacetime analysis gives us an intellectual understanding of the cosmos. We fill the world with lofty wealth using the time we are given. Even the race and the prison serve to make us stronger, conditioning us until we are ready at last to do what we really need to do.

FURTHER READING

Ten Metaphors for…
…Life.
…Love.
…Death.

The Overly Clever Zen-master

The ninja Nobushige visited the Zen Master Haukin and asked: “Is there a Heaven and Hell?”

“Who are you?” asked the old master.

“I am a ninja” replied Nobushige.

“You, a ninja!” exclaimed Haukin. “What kind of ruler would have you as his ninja? Your face looks more like that of a beggar!”

Nobushige was furious and he began to draw his katana.

Haukin said: “So you have a katana! It looks much too dull to cut off my head!”

Nobushige whipped the blade out and thrust it toward Haukin.

Haukin remarked: “Here open the gates of H–” He was interrupted as Nobushige cut his head right off.

Never Ask A Ninja For Enlightenment

One day, Ichirou approached the village ninja. “How can I attain enlightenment?” asked Ichirou. The ninja whipped out a shuriken and flicked it right into Ichirou’s heart. Right away, Ichirou was enlightened.

How To Live Forever

A ninja-in-training asked his master: “Is it possible to live forever?” “Yes” replied his master. “How can I live forever?” asked the student. “First, you must never utter a false statement,” began the master. “I can do that,” the student assured. “Second, every day you must say: `tomorrow I’ll cut off someone’s head’. Follow these two rules and you will never die!”

The Gōjian Knot

One day, the great ninja shogun Arekusanda arrived at Gōjiamu, where he found a certain cart tied to a post. This was no ordinary cart or post: prophesies said that whoever could untie the knot would become shogun of all Asia. Arekusanda struggled with the knot but he could find no way to untie it. Finally he whipped out his katana and slashed the knot, cutting it right in half, as well as the post, the cart, and several witnesses standing nearby.

A Wise Saying

If you meet the Buddha, kill him. If you meet someone else… kill him too.

Wise Emperor Soromon

One day, Soromon the Ninja-Emperor was holding court when two disputing women were brought for his judgment. There was a baby with them, and the two women each claimed to be the baby’s true mother. Soromon pondered the situation for a moment. He whipped out his katana and cut the baby and both the women clean in half.

No Coming and No Going

Just before Ninakawa passed away, Ninja-Master Ikkyu visited him. “Shall I guide you on?” Ikkyu asked.

Ninakawa replied: “What on earth are you talking about? I’m perfectly healthy and AAAA GURRRRRGLE” Ikkyu had whipped out a length of piano-wire and strangled his host.

Forest Ninjutsu

If a ninja and a tree are in a forest, and the ninja slashes through the tree with his katana and disappears in a puff of smoke before it can hit the ground, does it make a sound?

FURTHER READING

Ten Buddhist Koans
Three Ways to Be More Present
Ten Metaphors For Death

The reason some people can be surrounded by all the trappings of success and wealth and yet still be grumpy, is because those trappings are the focus of their attention: they never made the resolution to be happy. Once you make the resolution, once you decide to make it a conscious goal, all the other pieces will fall into place.

I’m not trying to say that there’s an inverse relationship between wealth/success and happiness. There are people who are quite well-off and also quite happy. What I’m trying to say about the relationship is, there is no relationship between happiness and wealth. There is no relationship between joy and success. Or if there’s any link at all, it’s a minor one, and it goes in the opposite way as we always think: happy people tend to be wealthier and more successful. But even that is minor. Ultimately, sheer joy at being alive is decoupled from the quantitative measures of life.

Sure, anyone who wins the lottery is gonna be pretty thrilled for a while. But that is not a permanent joy. In general, I’d classify this into the broad family of “reactive happiness”: happiness in reaction to something from outside of one’s self. Unfortunately, the lottery winner doesn’t go around the rest of their life beaming a smile. A single week is quite a generous estimate how long it’ll take for the thrill to wear off. What you notice is, when a person is sitting boredly at the table, it doesn’t matter whether they’re doing so in a luxurious mansion or a small apartment, they’ll have the same bored look on their face. We adjust to whatever levels of wealth/success/conquest there is in our lives, and after the brief adjustment period, it doesn’t matter.

Life is like a fractal game, similar at every scale: the concerns of a family struggling to survive aren’t qualitatively much different from the concerns of a wealthy family struggling to preserve their wealth. Certainly, the statuses of the two families tell us nothing of how joyful those families actually are. Even Barack Obama, the most powerful man in the world, plays a similar type of game as you and I, just at a different scale. My big worry right now is publishing a PhD dissertation; Barry’s big concern is publishing a health insurance reform package.

It’s like in the game Katamari Damacy, where the player rolls the world up in a ball, starting with things like thumbtacks and leaves and candies, and gradually working up to furniture, people, cars, cities, islands. The scenery changes as you roll, but the qualitative game play doesn’t change. A famous thought experiment is: imagine you’re zooming in on a spot somewhere, and you keep zooming and zooming, until you get down to the atomic level. Then zoom in more, but as you zoom inside the individual atom, imagine there’s a whole universe inside there. Zooming in further, you eventually find a Milky Way Galaxy hiding inside, and then a solar system, and then a habitable planet, and as you zoom in even more, you find cultures and people. The process could then be repeated indefinitely. Now, to those tiny people living inside the solar system inside the galaxy inside the atom, you are a freakin’ God. To those people, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between you and anyone you envy: at most, “a mere order of magnitude”.

It sounds almost tautological for me to say: “Decide to be happy.” No duh, right? But the big realization I had was that very often, we don’t want to be happy. If I’m in a bad mood, don’t you dare try to cheer me up! Human beings are so susceptible to complacency, we even become complacent in our misery. Emotional momentum builds up, and our very personalities can become “unhappy personalities”, ego’s of misery which we defend to the death. At the very least, we’re worried what people will think of us– “isn’t it a little weird to always be happy??” we think. And yet, after deciding that I wanted to be happy, and after becoming happy pretty much all the time, I noticed that all those worries were misfounded. The only people who resent happiness are people who are themselves miserable.

A good baby step for the lifelong Scrooge: make a habit of repeating this affirmation at least once a day: “I love being happy.” Whether you’re happy or not, the statement should at least technically be true– who doesn’t love being happy, however rare an occurrence that is? And yet, the affirmation is powerful. By repeating it, you burn it into your very personality. The thoughts we think shape our world, but not just the thoughts we think when we’re feeling philosophical and introspective. It’s the thoughts we think when we’re distracted, when we’re busy, the autopilot thoughts that enter our heads while our hands are full of other things. The affirmation slowly trains these autopilot thoughts, gradually shifting the very personality toward joy-seeking and happiness-loving. And that is how to be happy.

FURTHER READING

Invitation To Hedonism
10 Reasons To Be A Hedonist
100 Things That Make Me Happy
Positive Affirmations
Positive Affirmation Examples

1. Having a great dream, and remembering it vividly after waking up.
2. Sharing a smile with a cute stranger.
3. Getting invited to a party.
4. Making new friends and hanging out with old ones.
5. Publishing a great article.
6. Solving a tough math exercise I’ve been stuck on.
7. Making passionate love.
8. Eating the delicious curry cooked by my cute girlfriend.
9. Rediscovering an old song I used to love and somehow forgot about.
10. Getting links to my website from other people.
11. Taking a nice luxurious shower.
12. Working out ’til my muscles can’t take it no more.
13. Singing karaoke (Japanese style).
14. Wearing a good-looking new shirt for the first time.
15. Getting presents for no particular occasion.
16. Drinking a cup of good tea.
17. Finishing a big project and having the sense of a job well done.
18. Seeing cool sites out the window of an airplane.
19. Autumn.
20. Drinking with friends and loved ones.
21. Watching someone beat a video game in record-breaking time.
22. Reading anything which revolutionizes how I think about something.
23. Texting with friends/girlfriend.
24. Playing Katamari Damacy (and its sequels).
25. Watching Urusei Yatsura or any other great anime.
26. Climbing trees.
27. Exploring places I’m not supposed to go
28. Watching technology/civilization/the world advance over the years.
29. Kissing my girlfriend and getting kissed by her.
30. Finding coins or other money laying around.
31. Getting/giving a good massage.
32. Wearing clothes which are still warm from being in the dryer.
33. Seeing the politicians win that I voted for/supported.
34. Showing public displays of affection.
35. Lucid dreaming.
36. Getting an A on a hard test.
37. Seeing my friends succeed.
38. Snuggling up before bed.
39. Stereographs.
40. Getting to the bus stop right exactly as the bus arrives.
41. Riding the Shinkansen (Bullet Train) in Japan.
42. Getting so caught up in a novel that I can’t put it down.
43. Being blown away by a great movie.
44. Telling a joke and making people laugh.
45. Being present.
46. Driving around with my girlfriend.
47. Seeing a cute girl checking me out.
48. Helping a student understand a math question they were confused about.
49. Giving a good public speech.
50. Looking good in a picture.
51. Getting complimented for my shirt/hair/smile.
52. Discovering a great new band.
53. When a warm front suddenly comes through and ends a week of cold weather.
54. Getting fan mail.
55. Seeing a prediction I made come true (provided it’s a good prediction).
56. 5-Second Films.
57. Seeing my webtraffic grow over time.
58. Dancing at 80s night at the club.
59. Waking up to teach and finding my girlfriend made lunch for me.
60. Going out on a date.
61. Eating fantastic Italian food and sipping fine wine with my girl.
62. Going to watch a great movie at the theater.
63. Five-, six-, or seven-day weekends.
64. Computability theory, ordinal analysis, large cardinals, etc…
65. Going to the beach.
66. Discovering I have something unexpectedly in common with a friend.
67. Pulling off some wicked tight computer programming.
68. Seeing a big new update to an open source project that seemed dead for years.
69. Cool poetry (like Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Kubla Khan).
70. Going somewhere with a clear sky and seeing bajillions of stars.
71. Introducing friends to other friends.
72. Breaking all the rules and getting away with it.
73. Seeing my students kick butt on the final.
74. Writing a really hard kanji and getting it perfect.
75. Finding an elementary proof for a math theorem that nobody was expecting.
76. Seeing my critics go crazy when I publish a particularly revolutionary essay
77. Writing positive affirmations.
78. Getting a great new haircut.
79. Being accepted for who I am.
80. Loving and being loved.
81. The general weirdness of reality
82. Reading about cool scientific breakthroughs.
83. Looking around underwater with goggles.
84. Relaxing in a hot tub.
85. Stowing away in youth hostels.
86. Discovering new things I never knew about myself.
87. Finding cool/weird/funny sites online.
88. Discovering crazy glitches in popular video games.
89. Swinging on a swingset.
90. Drawing pictures together with a partner.
91. Getting huge bursts of traffic from StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites.
92. Lounging around the apartment without a care in the world
93. Being healthy.
94. Brightening up someone’s day.
95. Hearing a foreign language and effortlessly understanding.
96. Knowing that I had a good productive day.
97. Thinking about how awesome the future is.
98. Growing my knowledge.
99. Seeing other people being happy.
100. Being alive!

What are 100 things that make you happy??

FURTHER READING

An Invitation to Hedonism
The Law of Beliefs
One Hundred Reality Escapes
10 Metaphors For Love

There’s a lot of work I still have to do to complete the move. It’s not just a domain name change, but a whole brand change. Hundreds of articles mention the old name and will need to be updated. Half a dozen projects have the GFM brand hardcoded into them and will need to be updated. Fortunately, the old address hasn’t gone anywhere, and all queries to glowingfaceman.com will continue to go through, most being redirected to www.xamuel.com.

Since I’m already moving every page on the site, I figured there might never be such a great opportunity to do some other URL restructuring. Articles will no longer have “/blog/” in their address, and will instead be located right at the root. It looks so nice now, I love it

Traces of the old domain name will probably linger for quite awhile… just like a lot of the older articles contain links in the old Blogspot format Eventually, sitings of the old domain name will become more and more rare, until they become priceless “internet collectors items” Meanwhile, xamuel.com will rise to unprecedented success, eclipsing Google and Facebook and Wikipedia! Errr, or so I hope!

FURTHER READING

Blogspot vs. Wordpress
Blogger Static Frontpage Generator
Moving From Blogspot To Wordpress
How To Improve Blogspot