Grand Canyon Whitewater Rafting

Grand Canyon Whitewater Rafting

“Go! Go hard! Go go go!” Tommy yells over and over. Adrenaline pumping, we paddle like mad dogs to get enough momentum to punch through wave train of Hermit Rapid… and we do! We emerge on the far side, tired but victorious, and watch from an eddy as the other boats go in.

They follow our course… but suddenly there’s a head sticking out of the water. Lora, the guide, leaps to pull the person out, only to let the boat drift sideways into the next wave. The raft flips, and now there’s heads bobbing out of the water all around. “Get ready!” Tommy hollers, “We’re the rescue boat now!”

Watch the video to see how things unfolded from there:

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In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan - Book Notes

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
by Michael Pollan
Goodreads

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That is the core advice Michael Pollan has for you on how to eat - it’s right on the cover of the book. It’s way simpler and easier to understand than the nutritional recommendations you usually see, which talk about things like trans fats and Omega-3s - things that you can’t see and touch.

Pollan traces the origins of such nutritionism to the aftermath of the 1977 report of the United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. The committee’s goal was, broadly speaking, to recommend a national nutrition policy. Towards this end, the committee’s report recommended that Americans “eat more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and less high-fat meat, egg, and dairy products”.

This was, unsurprisingly, met with a less-than-enthusiastic response by the cattle, dairy, and sugar industries, who proceeded to lobby the committee furiously, eventually pressuring the committee to change those guidelines to instead “choose meats, poultry, and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake”. Eating less is bad for business, plain and simple. And no longer do guidelines tell you what foods to eat - you must look within for invisible “saturated fats” and consult experts for guidance on what foods contain more or less of it.

And so, despite ever more fine-grained advice on what to eat, we’ve been getting fatter and fatter (image source):

We're getting fatter

And along with that, we’ve been suffering more and more from the “western diseases” like hypertension, heart diseases, cancer and so on. What gives?

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Building a Second Brain

Building a Second Brain

One of the most powerful takeaways I got from reading David Allen’s excellent Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity is to not rely on my brain to remember things that need to get done.

The trick is to instead rely on a system that is external to your brain and to fully commit to using it - to capture everything that needs to get done and any pertinent notes about it outside of the brain. This frees up brain cycles from trying to memorize long lists of things (which a piece of paper or software can do a lot better than you) and lets you instead focus on creating value. The effect of this on reducing stress is immediate and profound.

Allen first published the book in 2002, and his suggestions were decidedly old-school and paper-based. These days there is no shortage of digital tools to keep TODO lists - Asana and Trello and about a million others.

But while all these tools are reasonably good the core job of keeping a list of things to do and letting you check them off, they also kind of suck in capturing complex ideas and more generally supporting the job of figuring out how to do these things when they are nontrivial and the path to getting them done is not clear at the beginning - which one might argue is the case for most interesting, challenging, and valuable work.

What are the features and qualities of tools to do that?

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Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin - Book Notes

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win
by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
Goodreads

Jocko Willink became something of an icon after Extreme Ownership came out and became a #1 New York Times bestseller. The core idea is this:

On any team, in any organization, all responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame.

Everything comes back to that, no matter what. Your supplier didn’t deliver? Own it - make sure you don’t rely on a single supplier in the future, or keep a close eye on what the supplier is doing. Your boss isn’t getting things done? Own it - lead from below and make sure things get done anyway. There was one of those slippery “acts of God” and things got derailed? Own it - find a way to get things done anyway. You don’t know how do something that you need to do? Own it - learn it, figure it out, and get it done. Like Jocko says, no matter what, there is no one else to blame.

"After hearing this guy, I went to my boss and fired him"

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Understanding Sign Language in Video with AI

Google Meet now offers real-time closed captions for speakers, and this is very helpful for deaf users using the platform to communicate with hearing and speaking users. In this Google is ahead of the competition - thanks Google!

But that’s helpful only in one direction - the deaf person can read the captions to understand the hearing person… but to make themselves understood, the deaf person has to type what they want to say. This is far from ideal.

Could a deaf person sign into the camera and have software create closed captions of what they are signing in real-time?

Yes. I hacked the above demo of software understanding American Sign Language (ASL) together in about a day’s worth of work using Google’s MediaPipe Holistic framework for face and hand pose prediction and TensorFlow for machine learning.

There are plenty of issues with it: the vocabulary is limited, I taught it all the signs myself (and it might therefore struggle with signing accents), it doesn’t use temporal information (and therefore could not tell the difference between some pairs of signs, like “mother” and “grandmother”) and so on.

But those are all solvable problems - just a matter of solid engineering work. There is a number of large datasets of labeled training data - Dr. Bill Vicars’s lifeprint, or handspeak, or various sources on giphy.

In fact, there’s a lot of demos similar to mine online.

Why hasn’t someone built a production version of it? I don’t buy the argument that it’s a matter of technology anymore. Is it a matter of there not being enough money to be made here? Is it just not considered important enough?

Please ping me if you know any companies building ASL-recognition from video into a commercial product - or if you’re thinking about starting one!

UPDATE: The Economist has published a good overview of the “race to teach sign language to computers” (paywall). The article cites data collection and annotation as a major issue, as well as some technological challenges, including capturing people’s facial expressions (I’m calling BS on that - take another look at the video above to see why). On the bright side, there are a number of teams working on the problem… but on the darker side, none of those seem to be at one of the software giants.

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