Dan Cole

D3.js in Jekyll Markdown

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 15:00:00 +0000

I’ve used d3.select to target an element <div id="example"> in this document:

Things to keep in mind:

Include morley.csv (Search local JavaScript for /morley.csv)
Include D3.js
Include box.js
Include the local CSS and JavaScript

Check out the code for this post on GitHub.

Profit vs. Purpose

Mon, 26 Dec 2016 21:42:00 +0000

The idea that all of the world should be measured in dollars to stockholders is actually a relatively new idea. It used to be that we thought that businesses had their purpose. Your purpose was to be making newspapers or fountain pens or whatever. And now we act as though the only purpose of a business was to enrich the people who trade it on Wall Street… Of course you’ve got to have profit, of course you’ve got to support your ownership. But that’s not why we’re doing it. We’re doing it because publishing a newspaper is a crucial thing to be doing. ~Andy Barnes

5-Step Process

Sat, 24 Dec 2016 14:00:00 +0000

Time is like a river that will take you forward into encounters with reality that will require you to make decisions. You can’t stop the movement down this river, and you can’t avoid encounters. You can only approach these encounters in the best way possible.

The most important quality that differentiates successful people from unsuccessful people is our capacity to learn and adapt to these things.

How People’s Thinking Abilities Differ

Details to Big Picture
Learning to Thinking (Remembering what they were taught verses independent reasoning)
Tasks to Goals
Planners to perceivers (Perceivers more readily adapt to what’s happening, while planners stick to the plan)
Driven by Emotion to Intellect
Risk-averse to Risk-taker
Introvert to Extrovert

Values

Reality + Dreams + Determination = A Successful Life

What do you value most deeply?

The quality of our lives depends on the quality of the decisions we make.

What do you want out of life?

Adopting pre-packaged values without much thought exposes you to the risk of inconsistency with your true values. It can make you a hypocrite where your claims of your belief differ from how you behave.

1. Goals

Set Goals. Higher-level thinking, synthesis, visualization, prioritization.

Your values determine what you want, i.e. your goals. Life is like a game where you seek to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of achieving your goals. You get better at this game through practice. The game consists of a series of choices that have consequences. You have the freedom to make whatever choices you want, though it’s best to be mindful of their consequences.

Achieving your goals isn’t just about moving forward. They might also be keeping what you do have or minimizing the rate of loss.

Avoid setting goals based on what you think you can achieve. Thus requires some faith that you really can achieve anything, even if you don’t know how you will do it at the moment.

To acieve your goals you have to prioritize, and that includes rejecting good alternatives. You can have virtually anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want.

It is important not to confuse goals and desires. Desires are typically first-order consequences. For example, a goal might be physical fitness, while a desire is the urge to eat good-tasting food.

2. Problems

Identify and don’t tolerate problems. Perception, intolerance of badness (regardless of severity), synthesis

The pain of problems is a call to find solutions rather than a reason for unhappiness and inaction.

Most problems are potential improvements screaming at you. It is essential to bring problems to the surface.

Problems can be harsh realities that are unpleasant to look at. Thinking about them can produce anxiety. People often worry more about apearing to not have problems than about achieving their desired goals.

Some people are unable to distinguish big problems from small ones.

When identifying problems, it is important to remain centered and logical. Be very precise in specifying your problems.

Don’t confuse problems with causes.

Once you identify your problems, you must not tolerate them.

3. Diagnoses

Diagnose the problems to root causes. Hyper-logical, willing to “touch the nerve”, seeing multiple possiblities.

You will be more effective if you focus on diagnosis and design rather than jumping to solutions. Diagnosing and design are what spark strategic thinking.

You must be calm and logical. You must get at the root causes. Root causes manifest themslves over and over again as the deep-seated reasons behind the actions that cause problems. It is important to distinguish root causes from proximate causes. Proximate causes typically are the actions or lack of actions that lead to problems. Proximate causes are typucally described via verbs. Root causes are often described with adjectives.

More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don’t is a willingness to look at themselves and others objectively.

Pain + Reflection = Progress

4. Design

Design a plan for eliminating the problems. Visualization, practicality, creativity.

Creating a design is like writing a movie script in that you visualize who will do what through time in order to achieve the goal.

Write down the plan. The plan connect your goals to the tasks. Don’t loose sight of the goals while focusing on the tasks. Be as detailed as possible, include implications (costs, dates/times, people, etc.).

Designing is very important because it determines what you will have to do to be effective. Don’t become preoccupied with execution.

5. Task

Do what is set out in the plan. Self discipline, good work habits, results orientation, proactivity

The importance of good work habits is vastly underrated. It is critical to know each fay what you need to do and have the descipline to do it. People with poor work habits almost almost randomly react to the stuff that comes at them and can’t bring themselves to do the things they need to do but don’t like to do.

Notes

This process is iterative. If this process is working, each step with change much slower than the next. People who are having a hard time achieving their goals use this process backwards. They stick rigidly to specified taks, changing their plans, goals, and values, going from problem to problem without finding a solution.

Remember that you need to do each step independently from the other steps.

The process goes better if you are as accurate as possible in all respects, including assessing your strengths and weaknesses and adapting them.

While these steps require different abilities, you don’t have to be good at all of them. This isn’t school, you can have other people do the work for you. Seek help from others. This requires you to put your ego aside and objectively reflect on your strengths and weaknesses. Having a weakness is like missing a sense – if you can’t visualize what it is, it’s hard to perceive not having it.

Principles

Trust in truth
Be extremely open
Have integrity and demand it from others. Never say anything about a person you wouldn’t say to them directly.
Be radically transparent
Don’t tolerate dishonesty
Create a culture in which it is okay to make mistakes but unacceptable not to identify, analyze, and learn from them.
Be assertive and open-minded at the same time.
Don’t treat all options as equally valuable.
Recognizde that peopkle are built very differently. Think about their different values, abilities, and skills.
Remember that people who see things and think on way often have difficulty communicating and relating to people who see things and think another way.
Look for people who have lots of great questions.

Reference

*Principles by Ray Dalio

Unthinkable Thoughts

Sun, 20 Nov 2016 14:05:00 +0000

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark, “Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think,” surprise you? ~ Richard Hamming

Creating on Principle

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 20:11:00 +0000

Craftsman, entrepreneur, or activist?

Creators need an immediate connection. Delays between having an idea and the out come lead to missed ideas. Ideas you can’t think. Or at best are stunted.

With a delay you have to imagine the out come. If you writing software, then you’re pretending to be a computer.

A delay in the feedback loop could be a waste of time. You know what you want to create, but your stuck implementing the details. Maybe some minimum time is required, but most of the time a bad interface is the issue. You can’t convey an idea fast enough. You have to start from nothing every time and build up to the thing you want.

Things need to be immediately interactive.

Before there were graphs, there were tables, but it’s hard to put the data in your mind. Graphs are a mapping of data on to a positional system. When it’s hard to see something, it is necessary to map that data onto a system you can.

Systems don’t have to be the way they are. Not everything has to use the pen and paper metaphor. Try to figure out in which ways your blindfolded. What assumptions are you making? Why do beginner not recognize their mistakes? What are your simulating in your head?

Sometimes you need more information, other times less. Being able to explore is a great feature. But remember to display it in a useful format that helps.

What is locked in your head?

This is an injustice. It is a moral wrong. We have a responsibility to correct social wrongs. Have a vision for what a better world could be. It would be invisible in today’s society.

Are you focused on a career or a technology or working for a cause? Are you working from principles. Is this a personal crusade?

Examples:

Enable mankind to solve the world’s urgent problems.
Amplify human reach and bring new ways of thinking to a faltering civilization that desperately needed it.
Software must be free. It’s a moral wrong for it to be otherwise.

You must be willing to fight for your cause. The world will try to define you by a skill. That’s why you have a major in college. That’s why you have a job title. That is the path of a craftsman.

The other common path is that of the problem solver, an entrepreneur or an academic researcher. There is a field and a set of problems within that field. You work it and make your contributions.

What do you want to stand for as a person?

Make lots and lots of things. Study lots and lots of things. Then use all of those experiences as a ways of analyzing yourself. Does this resonate with me? Does this repeal me? Or do I not care?

Confining yourself to practicing a single skill can make it difficult to get that broad range of experience which seems to be so valuable for finding a principle to follow.

A principle should be directly actionable. Does it make you see the world in an objective way. Does it prompt Yes or No answers.

What matters to you? What do you believe in? What will you fight for?

Recommend watching Bret Victor’s Inventing on Principle. Many of the thoughts are his.

Why do we have to do so many repetitive tasks that we do not like?
Why do we have deadend jobs that are soul sucking?
Why is it so hard to find great people to work with?
Why is it so hard to open up to people?

Howdy!

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 19:28:23 +0000

I wish I would have started writing down my thoughts long ago. Writing brought to us something that was only a fleeting memory before. Writing allows for deeper throughts. My writing may be random, infrequent, and riddled with spelling errors, but maybe it’ll be helpful to me in the long run.

With love, Dan Cole

Welcome to Jekyll!

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 15:04:23 +0000

You’ll find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run jekyll serve --watch, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.

To add new posts, simply add a file in the _posts directory that follows the convention YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.ext and includes the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works.

Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:

def print_hi(name)
  puts "Hi, #{name}"
end
print_hi('Tom')
#=> prints 'Hi, Tom' to STDOUT.

Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to get the most out of Jekyll. File all bugs/feature requests at Jekyll’s GitHub repo. If you have questions, you can ask them on Jekyll’s dedicated Help repository.