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 #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 #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 #4: Apprendre le Français en 15 Minutes Tous les Jours

Description
I studied German in high school, Russian in college and grad school, and Spanish off and on over the years with a few books here and a few classes there. What's one more language? Here's the idea for those who do not know enough French already to read the title of this post: learn French in 15 minutes a day.

Granted, I can't speak any of these languages fluently at the moment as I am out of practice (especially my German, which I've barely touched since senior year in '99). Not long ago I heard an interview on NPR with the author of Babel No More, Michael Erard, who talked about "hyperpolyglots" he wrote about - people who have learned dozens of languages. There was another author on the show who talked about people who picked up multiple musical instruments over their lifetimes - the similarity between musical instruments and languages being that there is an underlying structure to the sounds used. Erard talked about learners of multiple languages or instruments seeming to have "plasticity," or the flexibility and desire to focus on learning new things. I also remember hearing somewhere about a person who studied multiple languages at a time by only studying each language 15 minutes at a time, then moving on to something else for the rest of the day. It's sort of a tortoise vs. hare approach.

And some might think: It's not possible to learn a language without a teacher. Actually, many of the languages these polyglots picked up are self-taught. Now, the degree to which they actually could use the language may very, but a teacher is not required so long as their is practice and the ability to learn from mistakes. I learned that from reading the blog of Tim Ferriss, whose opinion is that classes are more like training wheels - the sooner they come off and you start practicing for reals, the better.

Diligently studying French in the Metro

So I thought, how about I just start learning French? I've always wanted to, so how about I start with a book on my 20 minute metro rides to work?


Steps
1) Purchase a decent book that teaches French.
2) Spend 15-30 minutes each day studying the underlying grammar, and most-needed vocabulary, listening to the CD that comes with the book for pronunciation.
3) Improve on the basic French ability: Read blogs or Twitter feeds from French speakers to get a beeter sense of common French usage. Watch TV shows and movies in French.
4) Practice: write sentences in French. Have short conversations with French speakers. 

Originality: Doesn't everyone say they want to learn a language? Buy a few tapes, go to some classes, and then before long it's dropped and the tapes and books collect dust on the shelf. In fact, I've got those for Mandarin Chinese and Philippines Tagalog on my shelf.

Enthusiam: So far I've kept it up for a couple months. But I've also been thinking of doing this for years - now is just when I seized the initiative.

Practicality:  The key here is that I also studied other languages. That means I have already learned three things that first-time language learners (or rather, first time second language learners) have to figure out:
1) How a language is structured; i.e. the basic grammatical concepts of any language;
2) How to go about learning a language: listening for proper pronunciation, common words to study, etc.; and
3) What works best for me: Flashcards, grammar books, writing practice sentences, and (when I can bring myself to) speaking with others.

Difficulty: Learning a lnaguage to any point of actual proficiency is hard - it takes a lot of time and practice. Sure I can learn French - the question is rather "how well?"