Colin Wright's Blog, page 21

Landscape Portraits

It can be difficult to balance the presumed prudence of digging deep into a particular field, a particular topic or profession, with the desire to explore more widely; to dabble in other realms of inquiry and to invest portions of your time and energy in a rudimentary understanding, therein. Part of the reason for the […]

Self-Reported

For about a month, I’ve been tracking my sleep habits using two different sensors. One of these sensors is tucked under my mattress, plugged into the wall, and connected to my apartment’s WiFi. It keeps track of movement, and seems to be fairly sensitive: it gets a lot of its most vital data from my […]

Tiny Upgrades

I started running again recently. Back in my college years I ran five to ten miles per day as part of my intercollegiate Ultimate Frisbee workout routine. That continued to a lesser degree, just a few miles a day, when I left school and moved out to LA. Though by then my gym regimen had […]

Flappability

There’s something to be said for a Stoic response to difficult or uncomfortable situations. To be more specific, it’s nice to be able to step back and assess things from a mental distance. To recognize and acknowledge what’s happening, but to address it from a place of calm, rather than a state emotional fragility. To […]

Metacognitive Exercises

Why did I just do that? This is a question I try to ask myself regularly. Being conscious of the reasons behind our actions isn’t something most of us are taught to make time for, but I find it’s an excellent way to ensure the way I live is aligned with what I believe; with […]

Planning for the Fire

There’s something wrong with the fire detection system in my apartment building. In the five months since I moved to Memphis, we’ve had probably twenty false-alarms, the siren in the hallway just outside my flat blaring an enduring, ear-shattering sonic pulse each time. After a week in which nearly every day was accompanied by such […]

Regular Revolutions

Milestones are valuable tools. They’re endpoints that aren’t real in the sense that a rock is real—there’s no physical law stating that the approximate end of a journey around the sun starting from an arbitrary point we happen to use as our commencement and completion of a calendar cycle must be celebrated in any particular […]

Surface Tension

There’s a superficial level to every discussion. If you follow this conceptual thread far enough, you’ll find that language itself is just a coded analogy that allows us to approximate meaning to each other, verbally and with written glyphs. But in this case, I’m talking specifically about the caricature-like discourse we often engage in because […]

How You Get There

One of the major challenges we face as an increasingly interconnected, globe-straddling species, is in how we organize ourselves even as our traditional distinctions dissipate. It’s easy to look around at the surging waves nationalism and assume that this isn’t an issue; we’ve clearly got our distinctions firmly in place. But a lot of what’s […]

Educational Balance

At two months old, babies understand the fundamentals of physics. Which isn’t to say they could tell you the equations underpinning concepts like entropy or explain how mass informs gravity. But at two months they do have a tacit understanding that unsupported objects will fall and that physical objects do not disappear when concealed; which […]