So can anything be done to increase willpower?

It appears so. As this Wired article indicates, being good at shifting attention away from a temptation appears to be what makes willpower work:

Mischel discovered something interesting when he studied the tiny percentage of kids who could successfully wait for the second treat. Without exception, these “high delayers” all relied on the same mental strategy: they found a way to keep themselves from thinking about the treat, directing their gaze away from the yummy marshmallow. Some covered their eyes or played hide-and-seek underneath the desk. Others sang songs, or repeatedly tied their shoelaces, or pretended to take a nap. Their desire wasn’t defeated — it was merely forgotten.

Mischel refers to this skill as the “strategic allocation of attention,” and he argues that it’s the skill underlying self-control. Too often, we assume that willpower is about having strong moral fiber or gritting our teeth and staring down the treat. But that’s wrong — willpower is really about properly directing the spotlight of attention, learning how to control that short list of thoughts in working memory. It’s about realizing that if we’re thinking about the marshmallow we’re going to eat it, which is why we need to look away.

Further, from the reviews I’ve read of the recent book Willpower, its thesis is that willpower depends strongly on glucose levels. (As I understand it, any significant cognitive activity requires glucose for fuel.) However, there is some disagreement as to whether glucose is a “magic pill” for willpower.

So, if you need to improve your willpower, further research of these topics could do you some good. Personally, I think there is a lot to the attention-shifting method, but have my doubts about the glucose, since I really don’t recall any of my high-willpower friends being candybar-aholics.

Although many people find that G+ is the ideal social platform for them, I deleted my G+ account because it was nothing more than a distraction to me. Yet, people who followed me on G+ are still allowed to “share posts” with me, and I receive an email notification whenever someone does so.

Fortunately this has only happened a half-dozen or so times, but it is more annoying to me than other junk mail because I specifically asked to have my G+ account deleted.

I used to be very impressed with Google, but I’m less impressed these days.

“She’s done. She’s been on this cross-country bus tour to promote her folksy ways, and now she has quit halfway through. This is a woman with a very short attention span and a complete lack of discipline and focus; she couldn’t complete her governorship, she can’t finish a bus tour, there’s no way she could cope with a grueling presidential campaign. And if, by some bizarre fluke, she were to actually get elected, I think she’d get bored halfway through the presidential oath of office and decide to go moose hunting, instead.”

I don’t worry about the impact of this on the political scene. I worry that this sort of behavior is representative of a growing segment of our society.

In this regard, I recently came across a couple of articles that I want to share with you, and encourage you to read them when you have the time. Although covering vastly different subjects, both articles bring out the point that it pays to step back and look at things differently. As noted in a recent post, it is so easy to become entrenched in our thinking, even when we’ve gotten things all wrong.

The first of the two articles is from The New Atlantic: Getting Over the Code Delusion. Unless you are a microbiologist, this article may be a bit difficult (it was for me), but it is rewarding to read and is absolutely fascinating. It shows that we understand so very little about what makes life. For example, for purposes of investigating our genome, researchers had gotten into the mode of thinking of our DNA (and all DNA) as a one-dimensional string of code. That has been useful, but it has hidden a lot of the complexities of what us tick. As noted in the article: “There is a “growing body of evidence that the topology and the physical features of the DNA [including the exact 3D structure] itself is an important factor in the regulation of transcription.” (Bracketed info is my addition.)

The second article is from The Philosopher’s Magazine: Hacker’s Challenge, in which Peter Hacker does a marvelous job of explaining why some of philosophy needs to be rebooted. He focuses on how philosophy sometimes takes simple issues and complicates them beyond all belief through the use of word games.

Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman once said this of philosophers:

We can’t define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers… one saying to the other: “you don’t know what you are talking about!”. The second one says: “what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?”

The interesting thing is, there are times when it pays to ask the sort of questions that philosophers ask. Sometimes we state a problem too simply, and by further examining what we are really trying to see, we can arrive at better defining the problem. Of course, sometimes we do the opposite.

The take-away for me is that, because we technically-oriented folk have a tendency to overanalyze problems, it can pay for us to step back and see where we can simplify.

Bottom line: sometimes life is more complicated than you think, and sometimes it’s less complicated, so it makes sense to reflect and reexamine problems in a new light.

Footnote: The following quote always amuses me, and I thought I’d share it with you. It’s a quote of Richard Feynman as recounted by Freeman Dyson:

I always thought I would be a specially good father because I wouldn’t try to push my kids into any particular direction. I wouldn’t try to turn them into scientists or intellectuals if they didn’t want it. I would be just as happy with them if they decided to be truck drivers or guitar players. In fact, I would even like it better if they went out in the world and did something real instead of being professors like me.

But they always find a way to hit back at you. My boy Carl, for instance. There he is in his second year at MIT, and all he wants to do with his life is to become a goddamn philosopher.

I suppose he’s serious about this. He’s stated many times his belief that he is lucky to have won the “ovarian lottery,” recognizing that he could have been born into poverty and could have died of starvation at an early age.

So, why doesn’t he just cut the US government a huge check? I’m not sure. Could be that deep inside he feels he might as well throw money down the toilet as to donate it to such an inefficient government.

Or, perhaps there is no way to really do it, which is why I propose a voluntary tax. This would enable an individual, or corporation, to cut a check to the Treasury Department that would be a voluntary tax, above and beyond the required tax.

Of course, there are disincentives. For example, how does one know how the tax would be used? What if it went to keep a war going, instead of to fund improvements in education? To overcome such a disincentive, perhaps the donor could specify how the funds are to be used (within some bounds). Or, perhaps all such proceeds could be directed toward paying off the national debt.

Your thoughts?

But, it is not built for serving more than one or two pages per second. While that might not sound bad, given that it’s more than 86,000 pages per day, if a high-profile blog links to your site, you could receive hundreds of page requests per second. At that point, your blog would crumble and visitors would not be able to view it.

But, if you use a caching plugin, you can get lots of page views per second, and it will likely save your blog from crashing during those periods where you get a lot of page requests. This can have downsides, though, and can even limit your choice of themes. I’ll get more into that in a moment, but first I’ll share my own benchmark data.

When I started using the BasicMaths theme from Khoi Vinh, I figured it was so lightweight that WordPress could serve up several page views per second. So, I turned caching off. (I had some hints that the caching plugin might have been interfering with comments. No proof … just suspicions. So, I wanted to see how things went without caching.)

But then I came across Gruber’s article (linked above) and wondered if I could really do without caching. So, I ran a test on my server using ApacheBench:

keenerliving.com:~$ /usr/sbin/ab -n 40 -c 4 http://www.keenerliving.com/

Concurrency Level: 4
Time taken for tests: 26.008 seconds
Complete requests: 40
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 1493320 bytes
HTML transferred: 1482280 bytes
Requests per second: 1.54 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 2600.806 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 650.202 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 56.07 [Kbytes/sec] received

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 1736
66% 2112
75% 2155
80% 2541
90% 3010
95% 3178
98% 26008
99% 26008
100% 26008 (longest request)

I was surprised and disappointed in the 1.54 pages per second, with some requests taking 26 seconds to complete. So, I began disabling plugins, and saw a little bit of improvement but not enough to give me confidence in my system.

Then I installed the latest version of WP SuperCache and set it up to cache each page upon reading, and to modify my .htaccess file to bypass WordPress for subsequent requests of cached pages and serve up the cached page. The improvement was significant:

Concurrency Level: 4
Time taken for tests: 0.168 seconds
Complete requests: 40
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 1501400 bytes
HTML transferred: 1487760 bytes
Requests per second: 238.72 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 16.756 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 4.189 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 8750.26 [Kbytes/sec] received

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 15
66% 18
75% 20
80% 21
90% 24
95% 33
98% 52
99% 52
100% 52 (longest request)

With SuperCache, my site can deliver over 200 pages per second, and no requests took longer than 52 milliseconds. That’s a remarkable improvement!

(As an aside: I also experimented with W3 Total Cache, but was unable to get more 13 pages per second out of it, at least with my choice of caching method of “disk” … however, I may experiment more with it someday … a lot of people swear by it.)

There is a downside, though, at least with regard to the BasicMaths design (and with some of my past choices, too.) The BasicMaths design is set up to account for discrepancies in how different browsers handle code, which is great. (For example, when it detects that the reader is using Internet Explorer, it will serve slightly different CSS code than if the reader had been using Chrome or Safari or Firefox.)

But the way that it does it appears to cause a problem in caching. The caching software saves the version of the first user to a page. So, if the first person to read post xyz uses Firefox, the caching software is going to save the page using the Firefox CSS. When a person views that cached page using Internet Explorer, part of the page may be all messed up, because Internet Explorer needed different CSS.

To help you picture this, we’ll work with an example. I fired up my Windows machine (I normally use a Mac), to view the Keener Living home page in Internet Explorer. I looked at the source of the page that was served, and it contained the following line:

<body class=”home blog unknown-os unknown-browser”>

That is, this cached page was created when it was viewed on an unknown browser (possibly even Google Bot), and so the design just uses the default css. The default CSS seemed to work okay except for blockquotes, which became indented a couple of hundred pixels, making the quote look really odd. Here is a snapshot:

There are ways to use supplemental stylesheets for different browsers (typically to account for Internet Explorer quirks), without caching problems. Paul Irish discusses optimum methods in his popular post. This post and the posts that it references are important reading for web designers and bloggers.

I’m not entirely sure how I will proceed at this point. The options are to (1) keep the current design and move to a dedicated server, hoping that it can serve a lot more than one page per second, (2) live with the problem, although that means some readers are occasionally going to see dorky looking pages, (3) get a different design, and (4) move to a new platform, such as ExpressionEngine, in hopes that it can handle a lot higher throughput.

I really don’t want to move servers. I love Tiger Technologies and have gotten great (actually fantastic) service anytime I had a question. (Search Engine Land also uses TT and the head of the webspam team at Google, Matt Cutts, uses TT for his personal blog.) And, I doubt that a dedicated server would really give me the throughput assurance that I’d like to have anyway, at least not without caching.

I guess I’ll go with option 2 for now. Specifically, I am going back to using Genesis and SuperCache, and will do a lot of testing to see how well the cached pages look in different browsers.

Well, I’ve got a couple of videos that will help us with this. The first is from our friends at D’Addario. They have put together a YouTube that shows how to string a guitar so you don’t wind up with slipping strings:

I just used it to restring my Godin Classical SA and found it to be very helpful.

My late friend Buster B. Jones also put together a YouTube video on restringing a classical:

Note that Buster emphasizes a pre-stretching of the strings, and I’ve heard pros and cons on that. Some say that it can permanently stretch part of the string (resulting in a deformity), resulting in a need for constant retuning. Yet, I know Buster wouldn’t have emphasized it if it didn’t work for him. My guess is that it might work better for folks who change strings often, like Buster did, and that it’s potential negative effects might catch up with you if you leave the strings on long enough.

On my previous restringing, I tried it Buster’s way and, after a while, my first, second and third strings required constant retuning … I’m talking about barely being able to get through a tune without have to retune. I don’t know if that was from pre-stretching, leaving the strings on too long, or just having a bad set of strings.

Something I recently learned from my friends at MisterGuitar is that one should put the stiff end of the string (applies to bass strings only) through the bridge and not through the head, as the flexible end is more prone to slipping (it can slip on the bridge, but not on the head). I’ve never encountered a problem in my 30 years of playing a classical guitar, off and on, but I don’t put my guitars through the paces that pro guitarists do. So, to avoid problems in the future, it makes sense to take advice from the pros.

As to tuning, I’ve tried several apps on my iPhone and iPad and prefer ClearTune. It’s also available for devices that run on Google’s Android operating system. A snapshot is shown to the left.

One more point on strings: I mentioned the D’Addario brand above, and it is a great brand. I am personally using D’Aquisto Flamenco #470 right now, and am very satisfied with them. This is the brand (and number) that Buster used, and he sent several sets to me and I still have a couple of sets left. I can’t recall the brand that I used when I seriously played the guitar (some 30 years ago).

You should change strings reasonably often. I have been known to leave a set on the guitar for months at a time (my previous set was about 10 months old), and that is just not good, even though I don’t play very often. You run into problems with tuning, as well as a severe reduction in sound quality.

I hope these tips are helpful to those of you who either play, or are thinking of playing, a classical guitar. If you have additional tips, please feel free to share them in the comments.

Update: Master guitarist John Knowles, one of the few guitarists to ever receive the Certified Guitar Player award from Chet Atkins, commented on my Facebook page that he leaves as little slack as possible when stringing a guitar, to minimize the time for stretching. He also noted that he changes strings every couple of weeks or so, because he loves the sound of new strings. For me that would be too often, no more than I play, but about every four to six to eight weeks might work good for me.

TechCrunch on why Android is not working out to be as open as Google wanted.

David Rock, author of Your Brain at Work, on how to have more insights.

Via a tweet from Bill Gates: “A look at the work of Sal Khan- http://bit.ly/ax82Il – very good online teaching. I’ve been viewing many of his lectures @ khanacademy.org”

Via a tweet from Tim O’Reilly: “The top three new tech majors, according to Microsoft. I agree. These are all hot fields. http://bit.ly/cA5Vls via @kjones44″

I was hugely disappointed in the book. My first disappointment came on page 2, where the authors referred to the legendary physicist Richard Feynman as “a colorful character who worked at the California Institute of Technology and played the bongo drums at a strip joint down the road.” There is no mention of the fact that he won the Nobel prize and is generally considered to be among the most influential physicists of all times. (I recall reading that physicists had been surveyed on who they considered the most influential physicists, and Feynman ranked near the top, along with Einstein and Newton, while it seems to me that Hawking ranked somewhere around 40.) This is an example of a larger problem with the book: it has no references to other documents, and it looks as if the authors go out of their way to avoid giving credit to other physicists.

The book does a decent job with the history of physics, and science in general, although I really tire of seeing much of the same old history repeated in every popular science book. It would be nice if there were a Wikipedia page of science history that authors could refer to (and link to) and where they could add a paragraph or two emphasizing whatever they wanted to.

The book also does a decent job explaining the famous quantum mechanics two-slit experiment, and does pretty well in describing how Feynman’s “sum over histories” approach explains the results.

But, the book falls flat where it needs to really shine to make its case that there is no need for a creator god (because we supposedly understand the physics of how the universe created itself). For one, it does not give a lot of detail on how finely tuned this universe really is. It gives a few examples, but doesn’t even mention that the cosmological constant must be the value that it is, to within 1 part in 10^120 (10 followed by 120 zeros), or our universe could not exist. Nor does it give references to texts that elaborate in (much) more detail on the fine tuning of the universe.

Secondly, the book makes some claims that many in the physics community would not support. For example, the authors claim that cosmic inflation (the hyper inflation of the universe when it was only a fraction of a second old) is a fact. While recent analysis of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) gives some support for the theory of inflation, it is not sufficiently conclusive to state it as fact, and many well-known physicists think the theory is hogwash and “contrived.” It similarly claims that supersymmetry is a fact, when the evidence for it is even weaker, and while there are a number of theorists who do not think supersymmetry is true.

It even posits that gravity existed before the “big bang,” and that it and M-theory (the latest version of string theory, incorporating membranes as well as strings) fully account for our universe without any need for a creator’s involvement. I’ve never read of anyone assuming that gravity existed before the universe did … if one is going to posit that, one might as well posit God. The experimental support for both cases is the same (none).

And as for the authors’ statement that M-theory is the only solution to the origin of the universe, perhaps they need to do some additional reading. I would suggest Paul Davies’ The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life?. The latter book provides a ton more information than Hawkings’ book, and covers several possible origins of the universe (including M-theory and its infinite number of universes, or at least 10^500 of them). And, by the way, none of the theories have been ruled out.

One of my favorite theories for the origin of the universe is John Wheeler’s “participatory universe,” in which consciousness plays a role in creating the universe now and in having a backward influence in time. Sounds bizarre, I know. But, it is an actual possibility. Davies discusses it in some detail in his book. (Davies noted that this is not so much a theory as what Wheeler called an “idea for an idea,” although the delayed-choice slit experiment on which it was formulated has confirmed an effective backward causality (not time travel, but backward causation).)

Actually, my favorite theory is one that is not discussed in either book (it was developed after Davies published his book): the colliding membrane version of a cyclic universe, developed by Turok and Steinhardt. I like it because it does away with the singularity, answers the question of what came before the universe, explains dark energy, and does away with the need for the theory of cosmic inflation. The one thing it has in common with Hawking’s theory is that both use M-theory (it may have more in common than that, but the theories at least share some mathematics).

By the way, have you ever thought about how planetary bodies know to follow Newton’s laws, or how electrons know how to follow the mathematical equations that Maxwell derived? If you think much about it, you may very well adopt the philosophy that most physicists have: the Platonic view that the equations (the laws of physics) are “beyond space and time”, but influence what is within space and time.

But, instead of taking the Platonic view, you might ask how the computations are carried out. How does an electron that is near a proton carry out the computation about how it is to behave next? One answer, is that the universe is a sort of computer, with each of the 10^80 atoms in it playing a role in the computation of what each of the atoms are doing.

Something to think about, isn’t it? You won’t get that out of Hawking’s book, but you can get it out of Davies’ book.

Anyway, if you have never read anything about the origin of our universe, Hawking’s short book (so short that it could be considered a rip-off) will give you some enlightenment. And, it does do a good job with the history of science. But, if you want a better understanding, and a more accurate one, Davies’ book is much better and is also written to a lay audience. The only downside to the latter is that it’s not available for Kindle (yet).

Hawking fell short of proving his claim that there is no need for a creator god. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there was one. But we do not yet know what caused this universe to come into existence, and a creator god is a distinct possibility. Even if we could determine that there are other universes, and that ours sprang from another one, it just pushes the question of god farther back in time and does not eliminate it. But, of course, Hawking knew he wasn’t proving that there is no need for a creator god … he was just doing the “Godmongering” that is popular these days and seems to result in best sellers.

I’ve been blessed all of my life with being around some really exceptional people and I have attempted to model myself after them. I can’t say that I did a particularly good job in this modeling and molding process, but having the role models helped me immensely.

And, in addition to the role models in my personal life, Richard Feynman and John Kennedy were my favorite “long distance” role models. I think these would be good role models for all of my grandchildren, and I will get Feynman’s What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character for each of them.

But surely there must be people today that my grandkids can look up to and learn from (in addition to family and others in their personal life). Thinking of such roles models is really stumping me, though. So far I have come up with TIm Tebow for the guys, but nobody for the little lady. (Oprah came to mind, but the way she promoted The Secret really turned me off … I don’t want my grandkids to grow up thinking the “the universe” is doing their bidding, and I don’t want to see them fall for any of the New Age crap.)

Who would you recommend?