Steve Mould just shared a very interesting video explaining how the LED lights on smart watches are able to measure your heart rate (and in some devices, SpO2) through the skin, in human-understandable terms. It's a great sumamry of the complexities involved in quantifying biological data non-invasively with the power of physics.
Worth a watch, go check it out on Mould's channel; though I am a bit sad that my favorite protein in all of the human body — hemoglobin — did not get an explicit shout-out.
Every year around this time, I listen to the latest Yearly Themes episode of Cortex, crack open a new Theme System journal, and ponder my goals for the year ahead. I try to think of my yearly theme by considering "where I’ve been, where I’d like to go, and how I’d like to grow on the way” — while reflecting on these questions, the turbulence and pain of recent years combined with the anticipated flux and transition in the years ahead of me stood out the most. I’m in a season of challenge and change, and it’s so often the case that these periods are ripe opportunities for renewal and growth. The imagery this drew to mind was that of a horrible forest fire incidentally clearing the underbrush and fertilizing new life in the flame-hardy giant sequoia trees of eastern California's Sierra Nevada mountains. Sequoia trees grow to towering heights over thousands of years, and evolved during this time to endure extremely harsh environments — including forest fires, which historically benefited sequoia groves, with their fire-resistant bark and heat-triggered pollen cones. The resiliency and longevity of the giant sequoia serve as an apt analogy for my current situation and goals, and helped lead me to my theme this year: The Year of Sequoias. Part of the inspiration also stemmed from my favorite line in one of my favorite poems:
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. - Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, by Wendell Berry
This line (really, the entire poem) captures quite well what I am striving for in the Year of Sequoias — thinking about my choices and priorities on a "millennium" time-scale, improving both my physical and mental resiliency, and forming more meaningful and lasting connections with others. The Year of Sequoias, to me, is an opportunity to grow in that fertile soil of challenge and change into the person I'd like myself to be in the next decade, rather than just the next year. It's a chance to consider carefully how what I do, say, eat, play, and care for impacts others around me...and others a millennium away. After all, planting a sequoia tree means thinking with future generations in mind, and leaving behind gifts instead of curses.
I’ve been using home screen widgets to remind me of the Year of Sequoias and its principle aims.
I’ve made the mistake in previous years by creating too rigid of a rubric for my themes — usually work-related components with specific grading criteria that did not work well for my brain and ultimately left me dissatisfied. I tried something a bit different with the Year of Sequoias by incorporating more “soft” targets and “heart and soul” scoring in lieu of hard-and-fast metrics. I've broken the Year of Sequoias down into three primary components: "Strengthening My Bark", "Deepening my Relational Roots", and "Planting for the Millennium" — I'll expand on each a bit more in the rest of this post, and touch on some of reasons for choosing these specific theme tenets. It'll be a bit personal at times and certainly a bit off-color from what I usually write, but right now getting these thoughts written down and published somewhere feels important to me. Take what you will from it.
Strengthening My Bark
This is the most "ordinary" branch of the Year of Sequoias — resolving to become more physically and mentally fit has been a big priority for me in recent times, and I'm hoping to take that resolve to the next level this year. The biggest change in the Year of Sequoias moving forward is increasing my focus on the physical side of "physical and mental health". I've spent a lot of energy in the last two years trying to stay mentally-resilient and sound (haven't we all?), and I feel I've found stability in my current therapy schedule, various anxiety-taming strategies, and general worldview. Turning my attention towards physical health has meant going on more (and longer) walks with my wife and our dog, and joining her in more Apple Fitness+ workouts (usually pilates). My wife just marked the milestone of closing her rings every day for a year, which is an example I'm hoping to emulate this year (or, at least try to). For now, I'm off to a good start:
I’m hoping to keep this trend going as long as I can.
I've never struggled with my weight, but I've certainly never devoted the time and energy to fitness that my body needs. I still don't think I'm disciplined enough in my exercise habits, and I'm hoping that the Year of Sequoias keeps my eyes focused on shoring up my physical health and better preparing my body for the unknowns in life. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that you should never take your good health for granted.
Deepen My Roots
My dad died about a year ago as I write this of liver failure. He struggled with alcoholism for much of his life, and as a result he and I had a strained relationship. In the weeks after his passing, the thing that struck me the hardest was how isolated he was in his final years...and how that extreme isolation was indicative of his lifelong tendency towards solitude — few friends, and fewer still close connections. The context of The Quarantimes only amplified my strong reaction to his bare apartment and lack of connection. We've all probably struggled with unusually potent feelings of loneliness in recent memory, but so often (especially for introverts like myself) we do little to address these feelings, like reaching out to the people in our lives. The Year of Sequoias means actively prioritizing my “root system” — that is, the connections and relationships in my life. Like roots, some connections are small, tendrillous, and fleeting — others are entirely vital and require constant nourishment. Both varieties, however, bring richness and life to the tree (and, in this metaphor: to me) that it cannot go without. I’ve long been someone who has been content with few close friends, and sometimes even cagey with my time and my vulnerability with others — no doubt traits I inherited from my father. In the Year of Sequoias, I aim to fight these habits and actively seek out connection with others — strangers, acquaintances, co-workers, friends, family, and loved ones — to develop deep and lasting roots that (ideally) will be life-giving resources when harsh seasons inevitably come to pass. Every reaching root will look a bit different — it could be a kind message on Discord to a complete stranger, or an extra game night with my circle of friends, or even a week-long escape to Mexico with my wife (COVID-allowing 🤞). Whatever the case, my goal is to remember that each root I form necessarily adds to who I am; I can't pretend that "I don't need very many friends" or "I'm comfortable alone" when I know that's not true! "Deepening My Roots" means prioritizing both passing friendships and life-long bonds so that one day when drought strikes, I'm not starved for water.
Plant for the Millennium
This section of my theme is the "fuzziest", but in many ways is also the most crucial to me. "Planting for the Millennium" to me means adjusting my perspective from "now, this week, or this month" to "this year, this decade, and next generation". It's knowing that even my small decisions can and will impact others around me, perhaps for a lifetime, and acting accordingly. I'm hoping that "millennium thinking" finds its way into every area of my life — in small things like how I behave to strangers on the internet, and in big things like career decisions, life priorities, and what I build and leave behind when I'm gone one day. I mentioned before that I'm in a season of challenge and change; "Planting for the Millennium" feels most relevant to me in the context of the changes going on in my life. Whether it's the hunt for our first house (bad timing, I know), or my imminent transition from PhD student to...something more, or in spending time with my fast-growing nieces (who I swear just yesterday were one and two years old), I've noticed "millennium thinking" creeping more and more to the forefront of my mind. I ponder my career and what actions I can take to lead changes and elevate our lab's work, my wife and I discuss at length our goals and how we choose to serve our community, and I see myself as a role-model to the people around me and try to carry myself as such. This aspect of my theme is entirely about a change in perspective resulting in preferred behaviors and attitudes; I am under no illusions that I am doing or building anything that will truly "matter" in 1000 years — but that doesn't mean I can't think that way in hopes of making better choices and leading a happier life.
Renewing A Theme
Although I am writing and posting this in early 2022, I’ve been living the Year of Sequoias for the better part of the last year as well. I’ve had mixed results, and the theme feels entirely incomplete (perhaps due to its ambitious scope!), so I'm renewing it for the upcoming year and redoubling my efforts in doing so. I think that some themes strike so deeply and fit a season of life so well that the “yearly” in “Yearly Theme” is easily and eagerly discarded in favor of an "extended" theme. I'm hopeful that the Year of Sequoias ends up outlasting it's designated duration and helps me grow into more of who I want to be — after all, surely each of our Yearly Themes (if successful) is anything but "yearly" in their impacts on our lives.
Reams of paper and terabytes worth of server space have been spent writing about how our phones are bad for us in one way or another. The immensely harmful effect that social media has on our mood, our beliefs, and our self-image; the many examples of apps designed to addict you or trick you to empty your wallet; and the countless hours spent scrolling aimlessly through a shallow sea of equally-shallow content. As unfortunate as it is, we’ve largely accepted these negative influences on our lives as table-stakes of the social internet and the smart phones we love and get in line to buy every year — yet we do painfully little to make room for positivity in our digital lives. That’s where Affirmations from developer Justin Hamilton comes in — an app entirely dedicated to building users up and sparking joy in a digital world so determined to wear us down.
A Self-Care Salve in Our Digital Desert
On the face of it, Affirmations is an incredibly simple app: it’s a large repository of encouraging, loving, and wholesome phrases displayed in a rotating home screen widget, as scheduled or random push notifications, or just sifted through manually in the app. But, naturally, the way that this simple concept is executed on makes all the difference in how well it jostles you out of a negative headspace. Affirmations’ aesthetic is rich with calming color tones in smooth gradients, and subtle haptic feedback throughout the app (especially when tapping through affirmations) helps to gently nudge you to pay attention to the message being shown. These small details were so clearly made with care, and are entirely vital for what the app aims to do for its users — every aspect of the app evokes the positivity and reassurance it wants to share, in both what the app says and how it looks and feels while saying it.
Affirmations is helping to make my home screen a more pleasant place to be.
I find the best way to use Affirmations is via its home screen widgets. Carving out some space on my home screen for a small widget that cycles through compliments and encouragements throughout my day is such a simple antidote to the other stressors found there — like my calendar, emails, and reminders. I’ve recently been reassessing the “balance” of my home screen — especially how much of that precious real estate I set aside for “goodness” — and Affirmations is a crucial component to shifting that balance away from “stress, work, notifications, tasks” and towards “happiness, calm, pause, breath, joy” whenever I unlock my phone. The widget serves as my ever-present reminder to center wholesome thoughts instead of negative ones, and to reassess my attitude when something has gotten me down — it seems like such a small thing, but it's really made a noticeable difference in my mood because of how quickly it redirects my mind from the negative to the positive.
Tailoring Affirmations to best fit your needs is dead-simple, as is setting up notifications to randomly brighten your day.
In addition to simply displaying words of encouragement, Affirmations also has an excellent offering of features to fine-tune when and how the app tries to lift your spirits. You can set custom notification times for an affirmation to be delivered via push notification, as well as enabling "Random Notifications" to add a bit more spontaneity to when you're affirmed. You can control how many random notifications you receive in a day, and can also set a "do not disturb" window — because not everyone wants random encouragement at 3AM. Affirmations also allows you to toggle off specific categories of its pre-loaded affirmations that may be less applicable (or affirming) to you in your specific situation. Justin is always adding new affirmations and new categories, even with time-specific affirmation categories like Pride Month affirmations and seasonal affirmations like "Pumpkin Spice Season is here!" (for those who observe it), all of which can be toggled off if you'd prefer. Users are also able to populate the app with their own affirmations (up to 200 characters), perhaps to add a personal goal or a specific call to action to the rotation of messages — allowing a more targeted tenderness that the developer could never have introduced on their own. The appearance of the widgets (and the app itself) is entirely customizable, with settings to modify the color scheme of the gradients, gradient opacity, font size, as well as the drop shadow — meaning Affirmations can fit into any home screen aesthetic. Oh, and of course, Justin has created a wonderful selection of custom app icons as well!
Making Affirmations your own is easy with the straightforward appearance customization and colorful app icon selection.
Also hidden within Affirmations' Settings is a built-in breathing exercise bubble akin to the Apple Watch's Breathe app, a truly delightful Fidget window full of haptic feedback on buttons, sliders, and dials familiar to any iOS user, and an extensive repository of mental health resources from organizations and governments from around the world.
The Fidget page of Affirmations is such an unnecessary but excellent addition to an app focused on mental health.
Ambient Mindfulness, No Credit Card Required
So many other apps in this category — I’m thinking “mindfulness” apps or other apps designed to motivate and encourage — have too much of a “work” component to them. Demands to set aside X minutes a day for a meditation, or apps designed to be pushy in their efforts to improve your life. Worse yet: so many of these apps are locked behind prohibitive pay-walls or scummy weekly subscription fees. Affirmations is entirely free, and is very much an ambient attitude adjustment app — an IV drip of delight, slowly but steadily shifting me toward more positive thoughts whenever I unlock my phone. This is in stark contrast to how our phones usually make us feel — unpleasant feelings like anger, sadness, fear, loneliness, or dread. Affirmations is the only app that I can unequivocally say has only ever made me feel good, charitable, and wholesome feelings. And with the volume of doom and gloom we've all be main-lining for, well, years at this point, we could certainly use more apps like Affirmations in our lives. You can download Affirmations on the App Store today for free, and try out the so-called “self-care sidekick” for yourself.
I just finished installing a new CPU heatsink on my desktop PC; a new-in-box Be Quiet! Dark Rock 4 I got a good deal on from a reseller on r/HardwareSwap. It’s an excellent heatsink, especially considering how excessive it is for my Ryzen 5 2600X CPU (I’m essentially passively cooling my PC!). Now, I could review the Dark Rock 4 as I have other products; highlighting its pros and cons, assessing it’s price-point, and elaborating on why it is (or isn’t) a good fit for my needs. But ultimately, that wouldn’t fully explain why I bought it. My stock AMD Wraith CPU cooler was more than sufficient, and I certainly didn’t need to burn $55. What I needed was a project; some mechanical task I could do with my hands. What I needed was a sense that even through all this uncertainty and chaos, there was something in my life that I could disassemble and rebuild as better than it was before.
The Dark Rock 4 is a good CPU heatsink. It was a better “bulwark against madness”.
I’ve been exclusively working from home since the first week of March due to the COVID-19 pandemic that quite nearly everyone has been affected by. Transitioning to 100% work from home has been challenging, mostly in the area of keeping myself sane. I’m spoiled to have a job where there is plenty for us to be doing from the safety of our homes, I’m spoiled to have a desk with a computer where I can do that work from, and I am spoiled to have a wife and a dog to keep my home feeling like home through all of this mess. Many reading this may be more spoiled, and some perhaps less — regardless, home isolation, perpetually bleak news, and the creeping anxiety caused by a global virus outbreak can really take a toll on one’s mental health.
I’ve had productive days, and I’ve certainly had unproductive ones too; but one thing that I’ve noticed (now, as well as during other stressful times in my life) is that I periodically need a tactile project to clear my mind and calm my spirit. Most often this need is satisfied by working in my wood shop (which I am also incredibly spoiled to have) — today, it was the anticipation of receiving the CPU heatsink I carefully selected and hunted for a deal on, the process of delicately affixing it to my PC’s motherboard, and the fine-tuning of fan RPM curves to quiet the noise my computer makes as much as possible.
“You aren’t working from home — you are at home during a crisis trying to work.” - Unknown
The unnecessary purchase of and frivolous fiddling with a computer part may seem both wasteful and trivial, but in these unusual times it also meant much more to my sanity than the money or time it “cost” me. You probably have a hobby or interest that may feel much the same — lean into it. If spending a little extra money on a high-quality calligraphy set, a handsome piece of figured walnut, a Nintendo Switch, or a CPU heatsink is what it takes to give you a sense of normalcy and safeguard your mental health, do so. There’s an excellent quote circulating on Twitter lately: “You aren’t working from home — you are at home during a crisis trying to work.” Your first priority should be you and your family’s physical and mental health. Much has been said about the former — don’t neglect the latter. Find what brings you joy when things are hard. Reference good resources (like IsolatedNotAlone.com). Consider what little things you can do to settle your mind the next time anxiety over world events takes hold, or what gift you can give to yourself or a loved one to brighten an otherwise gloomy day. Because we all sometimes need “bulwarks against madness...museums against entropy.”
