Idea #15: Capture as many sunrises as possible

Description
A few years ago I was sitting in an airport bar, eating dinner with a tall beer, when a man next to me began chatting about something on the TV news. Whatever it was is not important, because 90% of what passes through the mouths of CNN news anchors is generally forgotten within a few hours. What I remember is when he pulled out his phone to show me this cool new Flipboard app he'd begun using. The images up on his phone when he unlocked it was a sunrise.

One of the more spectacular ones.

"Oh," he said. "That's a sunrise I saw this morning." He began flipping through the photos. Each one was another sunrise, a menagerie of oranges and yellows and reds rising up from a curtain of dark blue. He must have had dozens of photos of sunrises, with a few of his wife, daughter, and dog mixed in. "I get up and walk the dog every morning," he explained.

From the Alexandria waterfront, when I actually managed to jog.

That idea stuck with me. A moment of singular beauty each morning, captured with the devices in our pockets. At the time, I never rose early enough to bother. Now I have a dog, and she and I walk the streets each morning. I don't always snap a photo, but I often think of this man in the airport, who hit on such a simple practice to capture a moment of peace and beauty before we fill up our days with worries and chaos.

Steps
1) Wake up before the sun rises.
2) Find a reason to go outside, or even just look out the window in the morning.
3) Pull out your phone and snap a photo every
time you look up and think, "wow."

Enthusiasm: I used to post the photos to my various feeds every week. But then my girlfriend told me I needed to cool it on the sunrise pics.
Practicality: Easy enough if I can wake up.
Difficulty: I'm not a morning person, so it's not natural for me to be up and aware before dawn.

Idea #14: Create a Writing Contest Even Though I Don't Run a Literary Journal

Description
The past couple years I've periodically submitted about a half dozen stories to a number of writing contests, paying submission fees that range from $2-20. And each time I wonder: what a great scheme! All these writers desperate for exposure, hoping to at least land on the Honorable Mention list, or even get a cash prize. Many of these contests also end up extending their deadlines, convincing more writers to submit their work - for a slightly raised fee.

Not that I think it's a scam. They do pay out the prizes, as far as I know. These fledgling literary journals or magazines need the cash flow - not  lot of people paying for thick books of short stories, poems, and essays these days. While there are more websites presenting magazines and journals in a more well-designed manner, like Issuu.com (looking through Writer's Market's list of publications, there's a lot of publications out there who haven't even updated their websites since the 1990's), but it's not certain that the Internet won't eventually destroy literary journals willing to pay writers for their work. The only ones that really provide exposure are the university-subsidized ones put out by the Creative Writing Department staff and students.

Would-be writers have always been suckers, though. Just desperate to get their name out there, they fork over a lot of money for books and seminars and webinars promising to make them good enough at the craft to be published the next day. Scroll through Writer's Market's website and look at the prices for some of these products - hundreds of dollars, many charging over $500, for something that could be learned in a library book.

I could probably run a contest, send each of the winners one of the ten copies I printed just for them and pocket the rest of the submission fees.

Steps
1) Create a slick literary website with a bunch of my own work under pseudonyms.
2) Hire a printer to produce a few copies for those who actually request one (and pay for it).
3) Start advertising a contest in Writer's Market or any of the other Writer's-whatever publications. Charge a modest fee a promise a cash prize for first and second place winners.
4) Wait for the submissions to roll in. Enjoy perusing peoples' work and select my favorites.
5) Announce the winners and send them a check along with a hard-copy of the publication. Although, it's not really necessary to send a hard-copy; this just adds to the legitimacy factor.

Enthusiasm: None. I actually don't care to do this. Sure I could, but it would probably only be a little less work than running and actual literary journal, with the added guilt of suckering would be writers like myself.

Practicality: As practical as creating a website and advertising on key writer's advice websites.

Difficulty: Technically speaking, not that difficult. Morally speaking - that depends on you.

Idea #13: Create a blog to write about the elusive nature of free will

Description
I started studying neuroscience as a hobby a few years ago, when I stumbled on an old textbook from 1996 while browsing through a thrift shop in some small town in Idaho on a roadtrip. Since I made my way through that, I've read up on a lot of the latest research in psychology, behavioral science, and neurology.

The more I learned about the way the brain and body respond to external stimuli, the more I learned that people have overestimated the role of "free will." Many people don't understand the extent to which humans' behavior is governed by automatic processes: subconscious processes, emotional reactions, stress-coping mechanisms, and learned habits.

"Lövheim cube of emotion" by Lyhord - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons -

There's been a wave of popular science books lately delving into these concepts, such as Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Jonah Lehrer's similar pop-psychology books, and Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit. And while these books touch on the nature of neurology and free will, they still don't dive into the scientific nature of free will directly. I figure it could make a good blog - every week I could examine a new aspect of behavioral science and psychology, focusing on the quirks in the complex organic machinery known as the brain.

Steps
1) Write some essays, a series of five or six blog posts that lead into each other.
2) Create a new site, maybe with WordPress this time (sorry Blogger, but it's just easier to customize).
3) Start rolling out the posts on a weekly basis.

Enthusiasm: I've been thinking about this for a few weeks, developing the essay ideas in my head, and started drafting the first two today.

Practicality: Like any blog, not to hard to create, but sitting down and writing is hard. Now that my job has started to calm down after the summer I might have time to sit down and write.

Difficulty: Easy to start, hard to continue. Keeping up with a blog is hard! Maybe I could just submit the essays as nonfiction to literary journals. But with a blog I could develop a series.

Idea #12: Create a matrix to predict people's decisions

Description
I was walking down the Metro platform on my way home when it hit me: people are completely predictable.

Not long ago I read Phillip K. Dick's Exegesis, which lead me to immediately spot a book with an illustration of his face on the cover in a simulation of a circuit board, called How to Build an Android: The True Story of Phillip K. Dick's Robotic Resurrection by David F. Duffy. That got me interested in reading more about artificial intelligence and the way the brain functions, so I read Ray Kruzweil's How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. Kurzweil really drives home the concept of the brain as a pattern recognizing machine, starting with low level pattern recognition and building up hierarchically to more complex patterns. But the idea that suddenly struck me was the fact that essentially, the brain responds to stimuli based on past experience. And also based on inherent structure - or what people would normally refer to as personality.

It's a controversial idea, but I think we've all been misguided by the poetic idea that we are complex beings whose inner workings are pretty much unknowable and ultimately unpredictable. I realized that was bullshit. We just don't know enough about ourselves to accept that we're all basically reacting to the world based on our past experience and the way our personhood has shaped. There are all kinds of scientific studies out there that show how we are affected (either consciously or sub-consciously) by various situational and experiential criteria, that there had to be a way to form a model to accurately describe, with a somewhat high degree of probability anyways, a person's decision.

I came up with the idea of creating some kind of matrix to represent the factors that shape the person (a subject profile) and the factors that frame the decision to be made (the circumstances). In the column headings of my spreadsheet, I listed a combination of personality dimensions based on the Five-Factor Model (the nature aspect) and personal experience/socio-economic status/education (the nurture aspect), lifestyle practices, and emotional state. Together, these factors contribute to the development of habits that subjects fall back on in response to stimuli. In my rows, I listed a series of questions about the decision, such as whether it required an immediate response, whether the person affected is friendly or not, the expected outcomes of the decision, and other things that people take into account  when considering how to respond to a decision. 

The decision itself would be framed in simple terms of positive, neutral, or negative. There are a wide variety of reactions that a person can have, but mostly they boil down to a few types of responses that are framed in these three terms.

Steps
1) Create a matrix to contain all the criteria that shape the subject's experience and personality, and the factors included in the event.
2) Research the scientific basis for certain criteria and factors, to ensure it's based on proven ground.
3) Design a program to score a subject's responses to a questionnaire, creating a subject profile. Figure out how to weight the criteria based on expected impact.
4) Create a survey with questions presenting a situation and requesting a decision. The questions would be like those questions presenting moral dilemmas (for example, "A train is speeding toward a person on the tracks. Do you pull the switch and divert it to a crowd of old people?"). 
5) Have a computer program answer this survey using the subject profile as a guide. Compare answers with the subject's completed survey.
6) Collect as many surveys as possible. Revise program based on collected data for more accuracy.
7) Sell to some tech firm as an amazing new model for artificial intelligence. 

Enthusiam: Crazy-high. Nothing like believing you've designed something totally original and brilliant. (Unless you tell me someone out there has already figured this out).
Practicality: Ambitious-much? This is an all-encompassing model that is way beyond my field of study.
Difficulty: With the knowledge demanded, either I spend years studying up, or I get folks to help. Any computer programmers out there interested in helping?

Idea #11: Hire released convicts when I own a business

Description
With the increasing consolidation of criminal history data throughout the United States, in the future it will become more and more difficult for people who have made mistakes in the past, mistakes for which they have been punished through the criminal or civil law system, to move past those mistakes. If I owned a business, and someday I may do so, I would give people a second chance with a decent job.

I swear I thought I heard an NPR story on how the consolidation of past records limits second chances, but I have been unable to find it. In any case, the increasingly evident truth is that the government - or rather, governments, since many libertarians tend to forget we live in a federalist system with many layers of government - will have the ability to consolidate all those records that people acquire over the years of, you know, living.

In general, this is a good thing. People can't skip around committing felonies and then committing some more because no one was tracking where they were and what they did in a previous locale. Seems like nowadays that's the horror story - some child molester was never formally charged in one county, so he moves to another - or another state - and gets hired by another school.

But let me get back to my point. I happen to know that the State Department is considering a "blacklist" of families who should never be considered host parents for exchange students. This will undoubtedly be supported by findings from criminal background checks. Yet, the question is: what kinds of crimes land a family on that blacklist? How many, and how long ago? All excellent questions for wondering where any teenager should live, but what if you put your own name in those crosshairs? Is a DUI when you were 23, when you are now 33, an offense that should disqualify you from ever hosting an exchange student?

To be clear, there are no guidelines published, but should some sort of "blacklist" be created, some will (or should) be published. The point I'm trying to make is that there will very soon be no such thing as a "second chance." No one with any sort of criminal past will be considered for a job, unless the employer is willing to overlook the criminal past of the applicant. And isn't under the pressure of some government authority to factor in that criminal history.

So anyone who runs a business, who respects the possibility that people can come back from a mistake, should be willing to employ someone who already made a mistake. I mean ex-convicts.

If you haven't heard or Dave's Killer Bread, I advise you to go out and buy some. Not only because it's amazingly good (and it is), but because Dave himself has an amazing story about personal redemption. Moreover, his company employs ex-convicts. Now there's always the risk of recidivism with ex-convicts, but I'm sure Dave, with his ex-convict backstory, has figured out a way to manage the risk of recidivism affecting his company (i.e., theft, robbery, or embezzlement by current or former employees).

The biggest risk of recidivism is hopelessness. Not having a future, not having a stable life, not having a decent job. Provide these things, and studies show the rate of recidivism declines. If Dave's Killer Bread can do it, I'm sure many other employers could, as well.


Steps
1) Own a business, one capable of hiring others.
2) Establish a plan for hiring ex-convicts. How much will they be paid? Will I assist with housing?
3) Develop a risk assessment: in what positions will I employ ex-convicts? Will they be a risk to the stability of the company? How will they be screened? What are the criteria for disqualification?
4) Hire some ex-convicts.
5) Monitor their performance. Not just for negative performance - if they do a good job, they should also be praised.

Enthusiam:  First I need to own a business. Then we'll see how enthusiastic I am - but it's a good idea.
Practicality: See the response for Enthusiasm.
Difficulty: Unknown. I would have to look at other businesses who do the same.

Idea #10: Re-learn Russian

Description
Learning a language is either a commitment to re-learning for the rest of your life, or it's a continuous source of guilt for the rest of your life. Or in my case, it's both. I put the work in, so I have to keep up on it periodically to keep from feeling like the all the time I spent in classes isn't wasted. And when I let it slip, I feel guilty for not keeping up on it and letting the investment in learning the language go to waste.

I studied Russian for three years in college, spent a semester studying in Moscow. I've studied it off and on over the years, but after a while it's nice to let it go for a bit and study other things, even other languages. I tried reviewing my Russian while studying Spanish once, trading off days (Monday is Spanish day, Tuesday is Russian day, etc.) but that really doesn't work very well. And it's exhausting. So I let my Russian slip into disuse. I could always come back to it, I told myself.

Knowledge is like muscle power. Time spent building muscle up is never wasted, because the muscle mass never completely fades away, and it comes back with a little time spent lifting weights again. Same with languages - the base vocabulary is always there, or can be refreshed fairly quickly.

So I'm going to refresh and re-learn Russian. Except I'm going to start with building up my basic vocabulary again. Use new apps (which didn't exist when I was in college) to learn all the words I need to learn. Or rather, should have learned - it's amazing how many basic words I never really learned. I think I always needed to study more vocabulary, but when you're in class you just jump through the grammar and never really invest in building up a huge vocabulary.

Steps
1) Learn common, necessary words.
2) Refresh my knowledge of grammar. (Ugh, six cases).
3) Learn more words.
4) Read Russian Twitter feeds. Get used to common usage.
5) Listen to Russian language podcasts.
6) Watch Russian movies.
7) Surf Russian websites.
8) Read more Russian literature. Start with simple stories. Maybe even get my hands on kid's books instead of jumping straight to Gogol and Chekhov.

And further down the road, when I get more comfortable with it:
9) Join some Russian conversational Meet-up groups in the area, and actually practice speaking.
10) Post some replies to online posts by Russian-speakers, another way to practice using it, instead of just reading it.

Enthusiam: Temporary. Enthusiasm for languages usually fades, so I'm going to try to ride this one for as long as I can.
Practicality: Can I study Russian while I read other books in English? I think my enthusiasm would last longer if I don't start longing for something easy to read on the Metro.
Difficulty: Is learning a language ever easy?

Idea #9: Transform writing room into light-infused creativity center

Description
A few weeks ago, I visited the James Turrell exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Turrell's specialty is the perception-transforming properties of light. He plays with the distortions in space and color that occur with the way a room is constructed and the angle of beams of light.

In the biggest piece of the exhibit, there is a room (only 7 visitors allowed inside at a time, for eight and a half minute intervals), painted entirely white, slanted downward, the walls sloping into the floors, lit entirely in color-changing LED lights that slowly shift from blue to violet to magenta to red to pink and back to blue agin. The back wall of the room is a lighter shade than that of the room.

But step closer and you can put your arm through the wall as though it doesn't exist . . . because it doesn't. It's an illusion - the back wall is actually another room, the walls sloping into the floors and ceilings to eliminate the shades created by corners and right angles. That room is lit with different lights, changing in harmony with the main room.

Turn your eyes back to the waiting room where other visitors patiently await their turn, and the white lighting out there seems to change hues as well. Except it doesn't, because it's a trick of the eyes. Turrell is playing with "color opponency," the tendency of retinal ganglian to distort colors depending on which color dominates the input. Stare at red light and any white light appears green, because all other rays within white light are cancelled out. Stare at blue light, and then any white light appears yellow.

This long intro leads to the idea of installing LED lighting in my home office, where I often sit in the mornings to write. It's long been known through various studies that light (or even just staring at walls of a certain color) can influence the mind. I could inspire creativity with blue light, stimulate my mind for the day with red light, or use violet to both stimulate and inspire.

LED light strips are pretty cheap nowadays, and easy to install. They even come with remote controls to change the color without rising from my chair. Additionally, I don't want to disrupt my concentration by periodically hitting my eyes with direct beams of light (have you ever thought about how often our eyes are stuck by light from lamps and overhead bulbs? Seems like a carryover from the 19th/early 20th centuries). So I will hide the strips behind things (dresser, closet door, back edge of my desk and a table) so that only the rays reflecting off the walls will light the room.

Steps
1) Research the parts and equipment needed.
2) Determine where the lights will go and how to connect them.
3) Purchase the equipment.
4) Set the light strips in the locations desired and connect them to a power source.

Enthusiam: At a high level, especially since some preliminary research shows that this is a fairly practical project.
Practicality: Turns out color changing RGB LED strips come in sets with a 44-button remote control capable of changing the colors and setting certain color combos to memory.  The strips can be cut after every three lights to the desired length. What I want to do will probably cost only roughly $50-60. Bonus: lighting the room with LED lights may even be more cost effective than with light bulbs.
Difficulty: We'll find out once I actually purchase the equipment and set it up.

Here's a good NPR story on Turrell's work: http://www.npr.org/2013/09/07/219367766/james-turrell-experiments-with-the-thingness-of-light-itself