The Decision Strategist

Every now and then I hear about some linux distribution and end up switching my install to play with it.  I’ve recently moved to Archlinux, which is a minimalist distribution aimed at installing only the basics and letting you proceed from there.  So now I’m in the process of designing my desktop, and it’s got me thinking about how to most efficiently organize my desktop.

The Design Process

I have to begin by asking myself how I use my computer. From there, does it make sense to have an icon-based desktop (I click icons to start programs) or a menu-based desktop (I click a menu that lists my programs that I select)?  Do I want files on my actual desktop, or is it better if it is kept clean?  Do I want a taskbar?  What kinds of information do I want continually displayed?

Regardless of whether I’m using icons or menus, I usually put the programs I use most often in the easiest place to access.  But I realized that the ease of starting a program shouldn’t be based just on how often I use it, but also on how often I close and restart it during a typical session.

For example, I use a web browser basically every time I start a session.  But I also never close it once it’s open.  So while the number of times that I start the web browser is higher than any other program, the number of times per session is relatively low, and in fact, is basically one.

In contrast, I use the terminal often, but not every session.  However, any session that I do use a terminal typically involves multiple terminals and, rarely, closing terminals and starting another one.  So while my frequency overall is lower than for my web browser, my frequency per session is much higher.  The same goes for quick note takers such as tomboy, or quick text editing such as gedit.

So this time around I am organizing my menu in such a way that a terminal, tomboy, gedit, and maybe firefox are at the top of the menu, while my other programs are buried in the typical sub-menu structure under headings like “office”.  The same most-often used programs will get the key shortcuts, along with a generic “run” box.

Why menus instead of icons?  All of this is happening on my laptop, which has a 14″ screen.  As such, I want to keep the entire desktop available for programs.  If I use icons, then I either have icons on the desktop, so I have to move a program that is covering them before I can start them, or I have icons in a taskbar, which takes up permanent space on the top and/or bottom of the screen.

On the other hand, a menu can be brought up with a click anywhere on the desktop, or with a key shortcut, and allows quick access to any program that I need with either the keyboard or the mouse.

Which actually brings up another point: minimizing the need for a mouse.  Touchpads are abominably slow, and there are times when I don’t have a usb mouse with me.  It’s much easier if I can start a program with several keys than by navigating via touchpad.

Finally, there is the multiple desktops aspect.  My use of additional desktops hasn’t changed much since I started using linux back in my first year of college.  I have one desktop for terminals, one for text, one for web, and one for media.  I think this setup is pretty standard, and using ALT+Left or ALT+Right to switch desktops and CTRL+Left and CTRL+Right to move programs between desktops, it’s very easy to effectively have 4 separate spaces that are very fast to switch between.  I wonder though if there isn’t a better setup for these somehow.  At the very least, the order of the desktops can be important.  I’m often referencing the web when programming, writing, or playing with my distribution, so there is a question of whether the web desktop should be between the terminal and text desktops, or to one side.  I’m not sure what the best answer is.

Of course, a lot of this is heavily dependent on the fact that my work is heavily text-based.  If I was doing graphics work, I may want a different setup.

In addition, whenever I do these distribution change and corresponding desktop redesign phases, there is always a little voice telling me that no matter how much time I save by having a key shortcut to start a terminal and all my other little tricks, it’ll never make up for the 20 hours I spent designing the whole thing.  But then, the design process isn’t entirely utilitarian anyway.  A big part of it’s fun is trying new things and new looks.

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It struck me recently that the life of a person can be related to the a complexity metaphor. In a human life there are distinct stages. When young we are actively forming connections, building emotional and reasoning abilities. As we become older, we reach a limit in the breadth of our complexity, but we continue to enhance the depth of our complexity. In other words, its hard to develop new capabilities, but we become better at the ones we already have. Then at some point, as we age, the complexity of our brains reaches a saturation point, and new information can only be added at the cost of losing old information.

I know this isn’t an exact fit. It is of course possible, as we are increasingly finding, to learn new skills and modes of behavior as an adult. But it is much more difficult.

The brain has a natural limitation in terms of it’s capacity, perhaps defined most literally as the number of possible connections between neurons. When we are young there are plenty of unused connections available to develop new capabilities.

But at some point, most of our neurons have been used in one way or another. We can still learn new things, but it is more difficult. It is easier to strengthen the connections already existing, and perhaps make new connections between existing groups of neurons.

Then, as we age, we reach the limits of our capacity and have to start re-wiring to make room for memory or any new skills we are still managing to learn.

I think its an interesting idea because it suggests that it is necessary that as we age we become forgetful and less mentally agile. Retaining the ‘youthful’ abilities of the brain would require giving up a set of previously made connections.

There is also the sense here of a neural network sagging under the weight of it’s own connections.

I mention all of this because, as an almost-thirty-undecided human, I am waiting to hear from the peace corps regarding an invitation and filling the time with thoughts of law school (and/or grad school) after the peace corps. But at what point does it make more sense to focus in on a subject I already know than to continue trying to learn completely new ones?

I like to think that we are free to pursue new avenues for as long as we like, but is there some natural limit in which the decreasing returns to scale yield increasingly small returns for my time? Or by learning new fields, am I keeping my brain agile and young just by virtue of exercising it?

I don’t know very much about neurology, so someone can probably correct some misconceptions I have here.

-zot.

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It’s funny how much of a role movies play in affecting our imagination. Last night I was thinking about some new projects at work and how I was excited to work on them. That I actually had work, especially exciting work, made me pretty happy with the idea of walking in to work on today.

But in my imagination I wasn’t walking in to my actual office. It was in the same spot, but it was much more high tech, much like the scene of any movie involving the government trying to stop a terrorist. There were several people who worked for me, and I walked in saying “Alright, what have you got for me?” in a very self-confident and assured manner. I was wearing a suit.

In reality, my office is shared with a co-worker, my furniture is modular, and though my computer is pretty high end, there are no write-on screens or anything like that. No one works under me and I am generally the first person in the office. I also biked to work and walked in wearing jeans with my pant legs rolled up.

So my first thought was that it is pretty funny how different my imagination of what was going to happen was from how it actually happened. But then I got to thinking on how a lot of disagreements and disappointments happen because we envision a situation one way and it turns out to be completely different. I was inevitably setting myself up for disappointment when I imagined walking in the door to my office.

I wonder if visual media, particularly movies, have affected our imaginations so that they tend to vary greatly from real life, or if human imagination has always differed greatly from reality. Indeed, that is essentially the definition of imagination. Are romantic movies responsible for encouraging our imaginations to create scenes wildly out of proportion with reality? Do the thrillers make everyone imagine a job that is more intense and exciting?

While the link between violence in media and actual violence is tentative at best, there is some pretty strong evidence that inaccurate portrayals of car driving make people more risky drivers. In other words, visual media affects, at least temporarily, the models of physics in our heads.

Consider our imagination of how a punch actually affects someone. In movies it takes a fifteen minute fight to knock someone out, but most fights are over after only a few strikes at most. I don’t have a lot of real world experience with fights, so perhaps it’s natural that my imagination would take after the movie version.

The same is true with how a car responds when you take a tight turn at high speeds. Generally it flips over, but in movies a professional driver and special effects ensure that the car screams around the corner perfectly.

On the other hand, my girlfriend thinks I have the causality backwards. Maybe our imagination influences are visual media to be more unrealistic, rather than the other way around.

Most likely it’s more of a give and take: the imagination informs the media and vice versa. But if movies inform our imaginations, maybe that explains why homeland security is so keen on movie script terrorist attacks and why economists are so bad at forecasting.

Just some food for thought. What is your perspective?

-zot

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This article in the New York Times talks about differences in intelligence and making mistakes. Intelligence is a funny thing. It’s a concept that there is no real way to measure. Perhaps because there is no real consensus on what intelligence means. Is intelligence being able to interpret geometrical shapes? Or perhaps being able to understand the concepts in a paragraph (Who’s concepts? What language and subject?)? Perhaps intelligence is being able to interpret body language to understand emotions? Maybe it’s making decisions that are least destructive to our health, in which case all smokers are less intelligent than non-smokers.

At risk of treading dangerously close to ‘everything is relative’ territory, I think it is very hard to judge intelligence. Is a drug user who robs a store not being intelligent? Does being a drug addict in the first place have anything to do with intelligence? In fact, does breaking any laws of any kind have anything to do with intelligence?

I think intelligence has little to do with your genetic gifts and more to do with how hard you work to understand things. If you tend to face unknown or confusing situations by saying ‘meh, nevermind I am not really interested’ or ‘this is too hard’ it almost certainly will be. But if you face those situations by asking what you can learn, pretty soon those situations aren’t as hard as they first seemed.

In other words, I think the human bell-curve of intelligence looks something like this:

<insert picture>

If measures of intelligence are dependent on cultural values, we can be assured that they discriminate against groups with different values. Someone who was raised with the idea of getting married and having a family over going to college is not by definition any less smart than the upper class kid who was raised to go to Harvard.

But we as a society seem to think that intelligence is an objective measure, like the length of a board or the size of a hard drive. Whether you rate someone else as intelligent probably has a lot more to do with how closely their values align with yours than it does with how much processing power they possesses. People don’t like the idea that you can’t assign a number to someones intelligence, or that that number will depend more on whether the person was raised in line with the dominant world view or not.

It’s a weird culture of fear that we have. Even those of us who are critical of what we might call ‘consumer values’ are afraid of the person who is homeless, or the person who is living in the projects. The reality is that people in substantially different walks of life probably have a lot of interesting things to say if we could just overcome our fear of crime and self-protective disdain.

Part of the problem with writing articles over multiple sessions is that you pick up in a very different place from where you left off. I hope this all makes some kind of sense.

-zot.

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