Write a Novel

This is just as an addendum to yesterday’s post. The reason why I was talking about time allocation and routines is because I want to write a novel. So here’s the math for a 50,000 word novel for Nanowrimo or National Novel Writing Month:

50,000 words really isn’t that large a novel. Assuming 300 words per page it comes out to about 167 pages. So it isn’t anywhere near some of those Russian behemoths that people either love or could leave resting on a shelf, but it is still a substantial amount of writing for a single month.

November is 30 days, and for one of my friends, yes the Thanksgiving is on Thursday this year. But that brings up a valid point. If I was to write every day then I would need to write about 1667 words every day. Yes I rounded the number in both cases if you are keeping track of the math. But I won’t. Even with a routine I will need to write less some days and possibly not write at all others, such as the one that requires a bit of cooking.

But let’s see what amount of time I would have to set aside every day to write 1667 words in a day. As I am writing this I am flowing pretty freely, even with the math, and am writing about 1200 words in an hour. My typing speed is not so great, but i just saw that I might be able to voice-type with Google Docs. It might be an editing nightmare, but maybe I can learn to speak faster than I can type, probably at this point.

All of that aside, it means that 1700 words a day is going to take me just under an hour and a half. Time I must set aside every day. Pretty unrealistic, maybe I can dictate in the car… That would give me about an hour on the commute and the transcript from a crash would be pretty hilarious, except for me, my body, and my wallet. So what if I put in two to three hours on the weekend days and then a lighter load on the weekdays.

There are nine weekend days. If I just wrote on the weekends that would put me at a bit over 5,000 words per day, meaning around four to five hours of writing. Oof. Not the way I really want to spend my weekend if the weather is as nice as it has been these last two weeks. Also it cuts out on the routine and starts stinking of inspiration, which in itself is not a bad word but fails me at critical points.

Alright, let’s figure out an hour count for the month, and give it 20% padding. 50 hours. If I take 2.5 hours every weekend day then that gets us to 27.5 more hours to distribute throughout the rest of the month, which isn’t much of a reduction, and still means if I miss a day I will have to make up quite a bit of time.

I probably need to approach 3 to 4 hours on the weekend days and keep writing on the weekdays to my dictation experiments in the car and hopefully up to an hour otherwise.

Are you interested in writing novels? How would you approach writing 50k words in a month?

Oh yeah, this was way more math than the last post that I named “Doing Math.”

Risk and Reticence

One of my favorite topics is technology. I work everyday with technology, I read news about current discoveries, and I drool over new inventions (and some new products), and dream of the possibilities. Why? I may be a pessimist, I prefer ‘realist’, about situations and being prepared, but I am optimistic about technology and that it can improve our lives.

I was talking to a friend and neighbor the other morning. He was kind enough to give me a ride as my car is in the shop and Jessie is out working. I have been thinking about conversations in general with people and realize that almost all of the conversations fall into complaining about things that will never change incrementally, or being excited by forecasted advances in technology. And I am tired of complaining without result.

The issue came up that technology removes the need to interact on a human-to-human basis. Specifically, self-driving cars will remove the need for us to interact with friends and family that need a ride because they themselves can’t drive. Broadly: we will incur less risk, or investment in those people that need help today. I agree to some degree, but I believe we are shifting risk and have to be willing to interact with others despite the enforced interactions slowly decreasing.

Exoskeletons

My brother is managing the mechanical side of a lab developing exoskeletons to assist people in walking. This is a great technology, imagine people who have never, or no longer have the ability to walk being able to walk independently other than an assistive set of legs. There are people already benefiting from this technology. But pessimistically: what does this mean in terms of interaction? This person being assisted by technology no longer has to ask for the same assistance as they did when they were in a wheelchair. Not so terrible. Really I think that there is really no real risk, in fact it helps these people go many places that the Americans with Disabilities Act never touched before: a friend’s house, trails, and many other places. Of course there is the risk that the battery may fail, or the apparatus may malfunction, but as long as they have a reasonable way to recharge it, like a standard plug, it is several steps above a wheelchair in mobility.

In the future this technology might be expanded to be helpful to people with more widespread paralysis. More independence for basic movement might lead to more ability to socialize.

Self-Driving Cars

Delving deeper into this idea. Everyone could make use of a self-driving car, but let’s look at previous advances in technology that have led this way.

• Walking to riding
• Riding to carts/wagons
• Cars and other transportation
• Self-driving cars

Each one of these advances we could say has cut down on our self reliance to some degree. Each advance in transport has added layers of support that we need in order for it to function, but it also gives us massive freedom. In fact today’s cars allow us to escape into our own world, even while driving through the real world. Look at a traffic jam, even though there is a shared frustration, each driver has their own music, audiobook, or conversation going on.

All things happening in a car is a distraction to driving, including driving. Looking to see if a lane is clear could mean that you smash into the car in front of you. Essentially we are our own worst enemies, and as a friend mentioned last night: “We put our lives in the driver’s hands.”

By switching to self-driving cars we will become even more reliant on a piece of complex technology to transport us. That is a risk, but to see that as any worse than right now suggests that somehow today’s cars and companies are more reliable than tomorrow’s self-driving cars and producing companies. This is false. Today’s cars are easily hacked/disabled to the point that we could be left with only cars running for people that haven’t upgraded in the last 20+ years or are interested in classic cars.

So what does the convenience of not driving actually shift the risk to? I think there will be many small shifts, but I don’t think that there will be any big risk socially, physically, economically that isn’t already present, and in fact it might allow for distracting conversations to happen in a car that might otherwise cause an accident.

Really Internet?

Yep, technology has allowed more socializing, maybe. Or maybe it is just interactions. I could go into the long debate about how the internet has made people more or less social, suffice it to say that it has certainly been the main technology in promoting asynchronous communication beyond the book, and books have long been blamed for “making” people anti-social.

It is a measure of risks and benefits. In most cases, realizing the risks and countering them is enough, but there are certain technologies that end up riskier than we first thought. Being well informed is our first defense. Developing a well informed, positive, constructive outlook can help.

Contrasting Old and New

What’s the best thing about living on the mainland after seven years of living on Hawaii? Flights aren’t working out in my favor as far as schedule and cost, nor is it cheap to send furniture from my parents’. In Hawaii? Suck it up, the only way you are getting off this island is to fly or get really good at sailing. Also freight is going to cost you 1400 bucks to ship an end table… okay maybe not that much. Mainland? Okay, we will drive 3200 miles round trip for about 500 bucks, be able to take all the luggage we want, and then turn around and bring home the furniture. The bad news? We are looking at doing that in December and January. Oh seasons.

Whatever plans we have though, I think both of can be pretty flexible and be able to go before any large storms are going to occur. Then we won’t need to be as regimented to catch flights. And if we really need to we can go south. Add a few hours or more, but still make it in our own time. Also, if the weather is bad on the days we have plane tickets, the changing of plans or waiting would be frustrating to say the least.

What car are we going to drive there and pick up furniture with? Ah, but we have a direct line on a Subaru Forester, buying it Saturday. It might be the car’s first real trip period, but we are really excited to get it.

Furniture, but not really -

Due to office remodeling I also got cabinets with a countertop,  going to install that in the garage for a workbench. Might be modifications throughout the years to make it more useful, but I think it will be quite a bit easier than trying to build my own with basically no tools currently.

Short observations on work

One of the best things about working for a startup is the fact that there is huge right of way for creativity, in order for an idea to be really crazy it has to be at least one more level of crazy than normal. To put it into perspective, we have 30+ interns working for us this summer, about half the company. That is nuts in my mind, but the amount of work they are doing is actually amazing, in fact swamping our normal processes. But speaking of processes, still a large amount of room for growth or massive change.

Compared to the Joint Astronomy Centre the Center for Open Science is a massively younger, more flexible place. This is both a blessing, but it also means that we aren’t playing with 120 ton telescopes that can look at a gas cloud being eating by a black hole in the middle of our galaxy, trade-offs.

Probably my biggest issue is that there is so much going on that it is hard to keep track of who is working on similar or potentially conflicting things. I have to say that one of my merges of code essentially wiped out an entire commit by an intern, not because they did anything wrong, but because I started using schema validation rather than writing out a dataset line by line. Also there have been a couple cases where interns figure out that an issue already has a PR that just isn’t merged yet, after they code a solution. Even with all of that and the semi-chaotic nature of interactions I have to say I enjoy it nine out ten or fifteen days which is a bit better than some spans of time at the JAC.

And I have certainly learned a huge amount. That is not all that different from the JAC, but the pace is much faster, and the tools are so much newer in general at COS that sometimes you have to fix them and send in a PR to a stand alone tool. But that leads to other things: Open source! Oh man, so glad to still be working for science and for the greater good. I am not sure if I could work for a “business” company, even if I’ve dreamed of starting my own sometimes.

Anyway, on to solving the world’s problems by facilitating a better website for scientists to do better, more transparent work.