Nan Desu Kan

Having just looked at Skinbad’s photo of his clan clad for Halloween, I remembered that I owed the planet some photos of my own.

Every year GS1 (geoff-spawn #1) and I attend Nan Desu Kan, Colorado’s biggest anime convention. This year Mrs. geoff and GS2 came along, and Mrs. geoff made anime costumes for both grubs. She did a great job, as you can see:

Free Books!!

Many of you have whined to me in an unseemly fashion: “Geoff, how can I amass a technical library as vast as your own?”

To which I reply: “Give it up, Sunshine. Ain’t gonna happen.” But as a consolation prize, I do have duplicates of some books that I wouldn’t mind offloading to a good home. So, if anybody among the countless multitudes who read this blog cares to acquire a few books gratis, let me know. Here’s what I’ve got:

The Dynamics and Thermodynamics of Compressible Fluid Flow, Vol. I, Ascher Shapiro, 1953. A classic text on compressible flows by one of the huge names in fluids.

Handbook of Physical Properties of Liquids and Gases: Pure Substances and Mixtures, 2nd Ed., N. B. Vargaftik, 1975. Nice compendium of experimental data on a wide range of fluids.

Solid-State Laser Engineering, 2nd Ed., Walter Koechner, 1988. The bible for solid-state lasers.

Fundamental Aspects of Electrochemical Deposition and Dissolution Including Modeling, The Electrochemical Society, 1998.

Photoelectrochemistry, The Electrochemical Society, 1997.

Handbook of Viscosity, Vol. 4: Inorganic Compounds and Elements, Carl L. Yaws, 1997.

Handbook of Thermal Conductivity, Vol. 1: Organic Compounds C1 to C4, Carl L. Yaws, 1995.

Making Flow Happen

This is the last post on Flow for awhile, so Flow non-fans can breathe easy. I just wanted to make two concluding points relating to actually manifesting the flow experience in your life. Many people experience flow only sporadically, even after they’ve identified their activities. What’s wrong?

To achieve the flow state, you must be able to concentrate. And to concentrate, you need three things:

1. a comfortable, equipped space without distraction;
2. an extended period of time to enter and operate in the zone; and
3. quieting of the “monkey mind.”

So Much for My Grandiose Plans

Finally finished scrambling around this evening, but then made the mistake of lying down on the bed for a couple of minutes. 6 hours later I woke up, completely missing the FFXII release party. We’re having a bunch of work done on the master bedroom before we move our stuff in, so we’re hustling around getting various components every day (plus unpacking, moving furniture around, setting everything up again, and doing the normal family/works stuff) – hence the exhaustion. In the meantime we’re sleeping in the living room – hence the easy availability of the bed.

Oh well, I’ll just slink in and grab my copy this afternoon.

Final Fantasy XII is Being Released Tonight!!

Final Fantasy X was released in the US almost 5 years ago. It was a fantastic game – great gameplay, great characters, great story. It’s the only video game I’ve ever played twice. Of course, one of the reasons I played it a second time was that it took 5 freaking years for Final Fantasy XII to be developed (Final Fanasy XI is an online MMORPG, which I can’t start playing for fear of completely neglecting my family).

Final Fantasy XII was released in Japan in March, where it’s sold about 2.5 million copies and received perfect game ratings from gamer magazines. The US release is at midnight tonight. My wife pre-ordered my a copy of the special edition for my birthday, so I’ll be scooping that up this evening at the local GameStop.

What amazes me is how huge this business is. Final Fantasy XII cost $35 million to develop. The anticipated sales are at least 7 million copies. Here’s how some of the earlier titles fared:

• Final Fantasy VII – 9.8 million
• Final Fantasy VIII – 7.9 million
• Final Fantasy IX – 5.3 million [Not as compelling as the other titles]
• Final Fantasy X – 7.9 million
• Final Fantasy X-2 – 5.1 million [This one really sucked]

Multiply those numbers by $50, and you get an estimate of the retail sales of these titles. Everytime one of these comes out, you’re talking $250 – $500 million in retail sales; most sales occur within 6 months after release. Then, of course, there’s the merchandising that goes with it. For the FFXII release in Japan, they were even selling a branded drink and a branded PS2 system for hardcore fans. Both of which were really stupid marketing moves, but you get the point.

Anyway, tonight’s the night.

Cheating for Flow

So you’ve tried your best, but you’ve got a crappy job and no joy in finding flow. I mean, you can only do so much with a crap job, in which case you try to minimize the pain and look for something better. In some cases, though, you can cheat a little to get a more flow-like experience out of your workday. Here are some suggestions I dug out of some long-lost reference. They’re kind of smarmy, but whaddaya gonna do?

Make it a game Look at your task as a game. Establish rules, objectives, challenges to be overcome, and rewards.
Powerful Goal As you play the game, remind yourself frequently of the overriding spiritual, social, or intellectual purpose that drive your efforts.
Focus Release your mind from all distractions, from within or without. Focus your entire attention on the game.
Surrender to the Process Let go. Don’t strive or strain to achieve your objective. Just enjoy the process of work.

So yeah, that’s the best the self-help gurus have to offer: “Make work a game.” Nice going, Einsteins.

Probably better to seek work elsewhere.

Flow: Finding Flow in Your Life

In the last post I yammered on about the two critical characteristics of flow-type activities: concentration and challenge. …and immediate feedback. Yes, the three critical characteristics of flow-type activities are….no, wait. Make that the four critical characteristics of flow-type…

Just kidding, let’s stick with the first two. First, make a table like the one below and try to write down as many activities as you can which generate a sensation of being “in the zone.” Include activities that are close, highlighting them with some wimpy color. Be specific. For example, if “writing” is one of your activities, make sure you specify what type of writing it is. You may also want to make a separate chart that lists the anti-flow activities (like, say, watching sitcoms on TV). This allows us to divide your activities into optimal experience, drudgery, and escapism.

Flow: Gotta Get Me Some!!

So basically flow is an experience that can make us happy as we take care of business. But how do we achieve that experience in the workplace?

This is a difficult question, and unfortunately, in the tradition of self-help literature, the answer will be full of pablum. Still, there are some useful items that can be gleaned from the answers provided by Csikszentmihalyi.

Basically we’re looking for activities with the following characteristics:

• A challenge requiring skills
• A chance of completion
• The opportunity to concentrate, merging action and awareness
• Clear goals
• Immediate feedback
• Deep involvement transcending distractions and the awareness of time
• A sense of control over actions
• Absorption of self
• Expansion of self through experience

Flow: What Good is It?

So we’ve heard that flow is the sensation you get when you’re completely absorbed in some challenging activity. But what good is that?

It turns out that while you’re thus engaged, you experience a sense of enjoyment that is not based on physical sensation nor on external gratification. You feel happy because you are exercizing a degree of mastery over a challenging activity that you find interesting. The activity is then worth doing just because of that feeling (that’s the autotelic part).

What is Flow?

Have you ever been “in the zone?”

• Completely absorbed
  • Focused on an activity
  • Unaware of any audience, surroundings or passage of time
  • Loss of self-consciousness
• Challenging tasks
  • Global awareness
  • Performing at a high level
• Endorphin-like “rush”

That’s Flow.

A guy named Andrew King wrote this description of flow in his book Speed Up Your Web Site: Web Site Optimization:

Autotelic Activity

In 1963, a professor named Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi asked the question:

When do people feel the most happy?

Here are some historical answers I’ve compiled:

Revisiting Lancet: What Could Have Gone Wrong?

Many defenders of the Lancet study have argued on behalf of the legitimacy of the cluster survey technique in general and the study’s methodology in particular. What, then, could have gone wrong with the survey? I believe this passage from Appendix B: Collecting the Data may shed some light on what happened:

Revisiting Lancet: The Ministry of Health vs. Johns Hopkins

The Lancet study compares pre-invasion mortality (5.5/1000) to post-invasion mortality (13.5/1000) and uses the difference to define the number of excess deaths. As mentioned below, they support their numbers by noting that in 2002 the Iraqi Ministry of Health underreported deaths by a factor of 3, reporting only 40,000 deaths when a mortality rate of 5/1000 would have meant about 120,000 deaths. The not-at-all-conservative folks at the Iraq Body Count made the following points:

Revisiting Lancet

The updated Lancet study claimed that there were 645,000 excess deaths attributable to the invasion. A multitude of bloggers and their commenters quickly pointed out that since death certificates were shown to interviewers in 92% of the time when asked, that should mean that official records kept by the Iraqi Ministry of Health should be reasonably accurate. That is, there was not a preponderance of unreported deaths, as had been previously hypothesized. The disconnect between the Lancet’s estimate and the Ministry of Health’s reports, then, seemed to cast doubt on the Lancet’s numbers.

Separated at Birth? Dianne Feinstein and Aughra

I shopped this around to AoSHQ and Dave@GR, but had no takers, so I guess I’ll have to put it up myself. Everybody I’ve shown this to doesn’t agree with me that there’s a strong resemblance, but I cue off different facial features than most people, so *I* see a resemblance. Of course, my identification system isn’t very good at actually identifying people – I completely whiff on identifying people out of context. But it’s great at detecting moods.

Anyway, here are Dianne Feinstein and Aughra (from the Dark Crystal), whom I believe were separated at birth.