Author: Mark

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Holding Onto Yourself

Merlin Mann’s Wisdom Project is an excellent collection of pithy and useful observations about the world. They range from the purely practical, to the advisory, to the somewhat absurd. It’s worth a read.

I follow a Mastodon Bot that posts something from the document every six hours, and save any that catch my eye. This one resonated with me:

Try to save some parts of your life to be just for you. Including some special things that you’re happy about or are even a little proud of. If your only private things are shameful things, you will become very sad and will eventually despise your own company.

Merlin Mann

This message is increasingly acute in a world where it’s easy to externalize experiences, activities, and values. We’re encouraged to create horcruxes across social media which changes our self-perception and ability to fully understand who we are beyond what we share. This is accelerated among those whose livelihood requires them to be online, particularly if their mainly compromises their daily lives.

But the situation doesn’t need to be nearly this extreme to be impactful. If we define our worth in this world solely by factors that others nominally control, we have no sway over how we view ourselves. While we can hope to surround ourselves by well-meaning friends and lovely individuals, it’s still unhealthy to lose that sense of self by spreading it around. We each need ways to focus on ourselves and gain a better understanding of who we are independent of those around us. We can often define much of our lives by how we relate to others, but the way those relationships pan out are a product of who we intrinsically are.

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I Just Learned What BBCOR Means

In early high school, I remember all the hubbub about requiring metal baseball bats to align to the BBCOR standard. Given the pronunciation of this (“Bee-Bee-Core”), I always assumed it was a regulation about what specific materials must be used to make the bat. That’s only true insofar as the standard actually defines a material property.

BBCOR stands for “Batted Ball Coefficient of Restitution”. In other words, the standard tells you how elastic the collision between ball and bat is allowed to be. This standard was designed to dull metal bats in an effort to protect pitchers, the most likely players to be grievously injured by a batted ball. It was adopted by the NCAA in 2011, and most youth leagues that I’m aware of followed their lead. I used BBCOR-certified bats throughout high school, and continue to do so in my adult league.

You can read through the NCAA protocol for BBCOR, where the most fascinating part is the testing procedures starting on page 5. There is a table defining what the moment of inertia must be a distance of 6 inches from the knob of the bat—where the batter grips the bat—to ensure the bat isn’t “too easy” to swing. Then they use a ball cannon—that’s the term they provide—with a muzzle velocity of at least 150 mph which imparts spin at a rate of less than 10 rpm to fire fresh baseballs at clamped-down bats.

They perform six consecutive valid trials to measure the restitution of the bat using three sensors placed along the trajectory of the ball (which must be accurately placed to a tolerance of 0.005 inches.) After all that, the average measured BBCOR must be no more than 0.500.

I loved reading this, and I now want this to be a physics problem in some college class.

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ASCIImoji

If you grew up around the plain-text internet and pre-smartphone texting, you may be aware of the distinction between emoticons and emojis. The latter are separate unicode characters that are increasingly-detailed artistic renderings of various faces and items, like a Ferris wheel: 🎡. The former are clever constructions of non-emoji characters, which provide some intangible level of whimsy and cleverness that never fails to delight.1Thanks to Doug Merritt for pointing out that my original sentence here—that these were all actually made of ASCII characters—was incorrect. Many require Unicode in their current constructions, but really the fun part is that they give the feeling of plain text more so than the tiny image that is an emoji can do.

Consider this shrug: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Or someone flipping a table in frustration: (ノ ゜Д゜)ノ ︵ ┻━┻

If you enjoy this and want to add some flair to your writing, consider the wonderful ASCIImoji site. It has a near-complete table of these emoticons from which you can copy, a Chrome extension, and a .plist file you can import to macOS to create text replacement shortcuts which subsequently sync to your iPhone if desired.

Every time I see one of these, or recognize an opportunity to use one myself, I find myself grinning. It’s a simple joy of playing on a computer, and I’m glad I finally got these replacements working.

(•_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■)

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    Thanks to Doug Merritt for pointing out that my original sentence here—that these were all actually made of ASCII characters—was incorrect. Many require Unicode in their current constructions, but really the fun part is that they give the feeling of plain text more so than the tiny image that is an emoji can do.
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The Mouse and the Motorcycle

Last week I was talking with Erin on our way to a coffee shop, and I had a sudden memory of a movie where a mouse needed to scurry about to find medicine to save a young boy who had quite a dastardly fever. Naturally I thought it was a Stuart Little movie, somewhere along the series, but that didn’t feel quite right.

Luckily, the subreddit /r/TipOfMyTongue had me covered, when someone asked about this exact movie two years ago. It’s called The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and has a runtime of only 42 minutes. I haven’t rewatched it quite yet, but I was delighted to find the answer.

After finding this via a Google search, “movie with mouse needing to find fever medicine reddit”, I decided to check whether any of ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini could come up with an answer. They all failed in similar ways, though Gemini ended up being helpful despite not finding the correct answer.

I wrote the same prompt to all three of them: “I’m thinking of a movie where a mouse needs to find fever medicine to save a boy who is sick in bed.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​”

Claude suggested The Rescuers Down Under, and invented a scene that didn’t exist to match my description. When I told it about its error, and clarified that the movie I wanted was not animated, it suggested Mousehunt, which it did mention has no scene specifically matching what I wrote in.

Gemini initally suggested The Rescuers, with more complete information including scenes that plausibly match the kind of scene I was describing but without the specifics. “There’s a scene where Bernard needs to find a specific item (a diamond) to bribe a cat guard. This might be getting mixed up with the medicine element you remember.” I thought that was clever. When I followed up, it didn’t give any other movies. Instead, it gave me suggestions for what search terms I could try, and specifically mentioned using either the Tip of My Tongue subreddit, or the IMDB forums. That’s a decent failure experience.

ChatGPT was the worst at this. It confidently stated “The movie you’re referring to is The Secret of NIMH.” While the other two assistants gave wiggle room in their answers, ChatGPT assumed it was correct. Its second guess was one called The Witches, in which a boy gets turned into a mouse. 

I found this illuminating. These assistants are getting better, and I’m becoming more willing to use them, but they still have blindspots and should be considered, at best, a jumping-off point.

But also, The Mouse and the Motorcycle is killer based on my memory of it from twenty years ago.

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The Fallacies of Millennial Impact

In college, I started seeing low-effort headlines claiming yet another corporate industry death at the hands of millennial. A typical example is the casual sit-down restaurant, and you can see a compilation of such claims (along with subsequent refutations) in this CB Insights post. I’d rather focus on the broader phenomenon and the various fallacies of thinking that lead to these poor and useless critiques of an entire generation.

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Tony Wan at EdSurge, on AI Writing by Students

A short article that mirrors my thinking rather well. In particular:

Each little metacognitive act of constructing a sentence, though, reflects valuable thinking. Knowing how to use conjunctions, for instance — the ifs, buts and therefores — is an important exercise in logical reasoning. How much should we outsource that to AI? Too much, and the writing experience may feel like a fill-in-the-blank exercise like MadLibs.

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Settling on Firefox

I’ve bounced between browsers over the years. Chrome or Chromium were my default for many years while I ran Linux, with a few small dalliances with Chrome-powered alternatives like Brave. I tried Safari when I switched to a MacBook and used it for months. I then hopped on the Arc Browser bandwagon, which introduced me to features that I now consider essential. That experience wouldn’t last forever.

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