J Ben Deaton

Current Status

Here’s a brief update on several fronts.

• By all reckoning I am on the home stretch of my PhD. It’s been a long road, but models are converging, results look good, and it’s mainly a matter of finishing writing everything up to the satisfaction of my committee. I have about three months to go—definitely not time for congrats yet. There remains a soul-crushing amount of work to be done.
• During that same time, I have (what is for me) a lot of travel. I might see you in Lisbon (15WCEE), Toronto (ACI), San Francisco (ASCE Forensics), and an equal number of other places I probably can’t talk about here.
• This blog will be on hiatus until after all this. Not that any of you out there are remotely concerned about it, but I feel the pressure to write on this site. So, I’m letting myself off the hook and not worrying about it while finishing my dissertation.
• Despite my infrequency of posting, this blog is one of my favorite things that I do, and post-graduation, I am looking forward to ratcheting up the quality and frequency of posting. This may frighten you, but I have a list in OmniFocus of over 300 posts I want to write. I can’t wait until I have the flexibility to finally build this space into what I’ve always really wanted it to be.

See you on the other side. Head down, power through.

Jad Abumrad on Radiolab's inception

A recent piece by Jad Abumrad (creator of Radiolab) called The Terrors & Occasional Virtues of Not Knowing What You’re Doing is probably the most interesting thing I’ve read in a while. Here are just a few of the many archive-worthy quotes for those of you who haven’t read it or listened to Dan and Merlin’s excellent commentary recently on Back To Work.

On nauseating fear:

So somehow early Radiolab created gut churn, which is actually a fear of death. […] For some reason, at the beginning, every decision DID feel like life or death. Like I would literally die if a story didn’t work. There was a kind of existential dread that hung over the entire endeavor, even though we were just making a radio show…heard…by no one. […] The dread might be the cost of freedom.

On finding his voice in the process:

I cannot tell you WHY that collection of noises was important. But it was the first thing I’d heard that I was like…hey, that’s not bad. I think I might hear myself in there somewhere. It was like being lost in the dark and then an arrow appears. A pointing arrow; placed there by your future self, that says, “Follow me.”

On discovering (vs creating) something great:

My point in all of this is that when I look back, we didn’t plan Radiolab. It was not a conductive process, with two guys standing on pedestals waving it all into being. It was an inductive process.

On rapid prototyping and iteration:

Get comfortable with the idea that you won’t know what’s good until it’s already happened. Not to say you shouldn’t make plans. You should. But if your real aim is to be surprised, plans only get you so far. And so now, at Radiolab, our process contains an irritating but vital amount of “recognition time.” We decide on an experiment, try not to overthink it, then do it. Quickly. Then we tear it apart. What worked? What didn’t? (Actually, in the end, who cares what didn’t work. Most things don’t work. Better to ask, what can I carry forward?)

Just go and read the whole thing already: The Terrors & Occasional Virtues of Not Knowing What You’re Doing by Jad Abumrad

Via Back To Work, Episode 78: Scream, Poop, and Run

Historical RSS Service Idea

So here’s the thing. There are tons of websites out there that I would have loved to experience during their early days, but I was late to the party and am now confronted with a massive archive with no clear idea where to begin. Wouldn’t it be neat if you could re-experience the early days of a weblog?

Here’s an idea for free: Build a service that will serve you a unique RSS feed that gradually republishes an entire site’s archive beginning at a start date that you choose.

I tell it I want to start reading 43folders.com as if it were 2004. Today I get whatever was posted on 43folders.com on Jan 1, 2004. Tomorrow, I get whatever was posted on 43folders.com on Jan 2, 2004, if anything.

Yes, I can go back and spend half a day reading a site’s archive. But I would rather do it incrementally.

Don't panic. Work the problem.

Bill Baker (partner at SOM and lead structural engineer for the Burj Khalifa) in a commencement address at the University of Illinois:

I assume some of you here have read the “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” If you have not read it, your parents probably have. The novel features a book of the same name and written on the cover in bold letters are the words: “Don’t Panic.” This is extremely good advice. In your future professional and personal lives, there will be times when things will go very wrong. Do not panic; it will not help. Instead, turn to your engineering skills and “work the problem.” I cannot assure you that the problem will go away, but at least you will be in control of yourself, and you will do the best you can.

I have needed to take this approach several times in my career, once during the design of the Burj Khalifa. My firm, SOM, had gotten the commission to design the world’s tallest building. To be sure we were on target, we immediately tested our competition scheme in the wind tunnel. At that time, the scheme was only 10 meters taller than the existing world tallest building, but the results were very bad. This was a disaster. The building did not work. I could feel myself starting to panic; I took a deep breath and started to “work the problem”, as an engineer does. In the end we were not only able to get the building under control, we were able to reshape the building and change the harmonics of the tower, so that the forces and movements went way down. We were then able to “grow” the building by over 1,000 feet, so that it not only became the tallest building in the world, but the tallest structure ever built by man.

I find that an interesting insight both into Bill Baker the man (easily the most famous living structural engineer) as well as how the Burj became the achievement that it is.

My take? “Don’t Panic” is rule #1 for research. I’ve written some related thoughts before about dealing with unexpected results and treating setbacks as problems to be solved.

More: Bill Baker’s profile on som.com

Writing-related activity

Cory Doctorow on advice he gives to writers:

This is no different than Robert Heinlein’s advice to writers: Write, finish what you write, send what you write to an editor. Almost every writer who approaches me for advice is not doing at least one of those three things. And if you are not doing those three things, you are not on a trajectory to publishing work. If you are doing those three things, you may not ever publish your work, but you need to do those things, otherwise what you are doing is writing-related activity. You are no longer writing.

Obvious application to graduate school and academic writing (thesis chapters, papers, etc).

Corollaries:

• Research-related activity
• Programming-related activity
• Exercise-related activity
• ??-related activity

Everything that matters has a deceptive, counterfeit version.