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

Idea #8: Create a log of story ideas

Description
Recently, I flipped through my journal and stumbled across an idea I had come up with for a story. Nothing crazy or detailed, just a quick blurb that could be fleshed out in the future into a complete plotline. I had jotted it down quickly, the handwriting a scribble, thinking that it would make for a good story and I didn't want to lose it. Then I promptly forgot about all about it.

But this is the point of keeping a journal, right? To capture those ideas that drift out of the smoke in our pre-frontal cortex, before the wisps drift off again into the ether. Our minds are always changing - fail to record an idea, and it might never come back from the hidden lands of inspiration. The problem is, these story ideas are buried in amongst the pages of sketches, grocery lists, designs for furniture or other items to build, dream logs (a future blog post on that shortly), and other mishmash. With no key word or date search capability.

So I just have to go back through my journals, one page at a time, and type them up.

Steps
1) Dig up old journals from the basement.
2) Find the story ideas and type them up.
3) Select the most promising and flesh them out into a complete story.
4) Get them published.

Enthusiam: Moderate. Much like the jotting down of story ideas, enthusiasm for reading through these ideas fades as soon as I get them typed. But at least I have them for the future, right?
Practicality: I'd forgotten how many journals I've kept over the years. And that's not counting the ones from high school (dare I step back into that mindset?)
Difficulty: I had to flip back through years and years of notebooks and journals. And sit down and actually type them up. And I'm still haunted by the feeling that I've missed a few.

And I did. I went back and dug out my journals, flipped through them, and typed them into a Word doc. I now have a list, a sampling of which includes:
- A man with Alzheimers in a nursing home who sends postcards about places he had been to with his wife when she was still alive. His granddaughter puts them together into a story of his life, a biography she would have never known had she not read the postcards.
- A boy who is a thief and punk, but wears a Boy Scout uniform to look wholesome.
- A short short about a lottery winner who sets fire to his own house to fake his death so he can finally shake all the people asking him for money.
- A future in which the government has mandated public servants to have electrodes implanted in their brains to force them to make policies according to laws and regulations, removing emotional thought from policy decisions. Based on a new technology using nanofiber cables implanted in mice's brains, successfully making them turn in certain directions when the light in the cables turns on.
- Based on a man I met in the Philippines, who long since went "off the grid," who is now dying and teaching his lessons to an American who happened by chance to meet him while on vacation.

And that's just a quarter of the story ideas I dug up out of these journals. Someday I'll type them up and get them published.

Idea #7: Study neurology to better understand why I do things

Description
"Why do we do what we do?"

Google that phrase. You'll bring up self-help speeches by Tony Robbins, the Amazon page for the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, an article on a New York Times blog, a Harvard Business Review blog, and many other references links to blogs, book reviews, news articles, etc. There's no shortage of pondering about the reasons behind our actions. But up until a few months ago, I thought of the answers only in terms of philosophical conjecture, with theorized assumptions about human behavior.

But then in March I stumbled across a neuroscience textbook in a small thrift shop while driving through the frozen and snow covered plains of Idaho. And I'd just been thinking about reading a book on neuroscience! I thought to myself as I thumbed through the pages. I'd been planning to read something more friendly to the liberal arts student, but if it was going to land in my way, I was going to read it.

It was published in 1996, but I figured I could catch up with some other, more recent things that had happened since then. As it turned out, there was quite a lot - the textbook doesn't even mention the MRI or fMRI until the last chapter. Any neuroscience book on the shelves today will be at least 75% filled with references to lessons from MRI studies.

But I learned a hell of a lot anyways, since much of our knowledge comes from animal studies. Like it or not you animal rights activists, but most of the time what we know about how the brain works comes from sticking electrodes into the brain of monkeys (or other primates, like college students) and mice. And then I kept it up with more books that report on what we've learned about the brain and what we can do with that information: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, Imagine by Jonah Lehrer, Brain Rules by John  Medina, and An Alchemy of Mind by Diane Ackerman. Let me tell you, I recommend any of those books even if you haven't read a neuroscience textbook, but I was just glad I had read the textbook so I was already familiar with the parts of the brain these authors reference in their books.

And after all this studying up on the science of the brain, you know what I've learned: most of what we do is more reaction than action.

Think about it: our brains are wired to react to events in split-second increments. Most of the time, we rely on instinct or on learned habits. Something happens, our brain defaults to previous patterns, and we act based on past behavior. Or we experience a flood of emotion (i.e., a flood of chemicals flowing from our neurons) and we act in response.

What you hear in your brain from that endless self-talk telling you why you're doing what you're doing? That's just the language center in the left side of your brain lending a voice to describe what you're feeling and what you're doing about it. But the fact is, that language center (most likely Broca's area, just above your left ear, FYI) is playing catch-up: you're in the act long before you describe to yourself what you're doing. Hence the reason we often reply "I don't know!" when someone asks us why the hell we did what we just did in a heated moment of panic. We haven't had time to tell ourselves why we did it.

So you know what this means to me? I don't know what actions could legitimately be called "original." We think we're doing things for our own original reasons. But you know what? It's not original We're reacting. We're responding. We're acting out of habit, just the way we did it last time. Maybe we'll try something a little different this time, hoping for a better outcome. But is that an original idea? Did we come up with that ourselves, or did we borrow it from something we read about, heard from a friend, or saw in a movie?

We are big, organic robots, and yet the best computers still can't perfectly replicate our actions. Perhaps it's because they act from rules of logic instead of rules of learned habit.

Okay, my essay is over. So what's the goddamned hare-brain idea?
Figure out how to act not from habit or emotion, but from that deep, untapped well of insight in my brain.

Steps
1) Understand better my reasons for doing things. Identify cues, responses, and rewards.
2) Figure out where to substitute better responses.
3) Meditate, and therefore learn to separate myself from the responsive mind (the mind that only reacts to impulses, emotions, and cures).
3) Act with original, untarnished intention.

Enthusiam:  On-going. I devour any book, magazine article, or news report on brain science.

Practicality:  Depends on the consistency of practice.

Difficulty:  When is self-discovery ever as simple as it sounds?

One note: the image of the brain pasted above is from the newest, most advanced and detailed high-definition 3-D imaging of the human brain ever created. In case you think I'm exaggerating, consider this: for most of human history, the way we have viewed the brain was either with a corpse (with no brain activity to observe) or through images of the living brain that showed clusters of activity. PET scans, MRIs, fMRIs - all of these shows bright lights where clusters of activity in the brain respond to things like questions asked of the subjects or images viewed by the subjects, or actions made by the subject. (Fun fact: we've learned about the brain on sex by putting people in MRI machines and having them masturbate).

But you know what each bright light on one of those brain images represents? Millions of neurons firing at that moment. Neurons fire for very specific reasons: one fires when it recognizes a line you see at 90 degrees, another fires when it recognizes a line at 95 degrees, and so on. One fires when you see the color red, another fires when you see a different shade of red, and so on. Add that up, and you can imagine how many neurons are involved in looking at just a red square. Multiply that by millions more, and you can see why scientists estimate the number of neurons in the brain to be in the 100's of billions. And all we can do right now is make a rough estimate as to what parts of the brain respond when you ask someone a question, or show them a picture, or have them perform an action.

So my point is that we are finally getting to the point of narrowing our views of the brain down to extremely tiny proportions. That high-def 3-D scanner can view brain structures as small as 20 microns, which is 50 times smaller than than images from the best MRI scanners. Fuckin' amazing, no?

http://news.discovery.com/tech/biotechnology/brain-ultra-high-res-3d-130620.htm

Idea Updates

Description
I decided to write follow-up post to the ideas posted to this blog over a year ago, to give readers a sense of what happened with these ideas. I try to make sure that no idea is ever wasted with inaction, but some action lasts longer than others.

Kick-off Idea: Start a blog
Well, here we are. It's been a year since my last post. We'll see how long it lasts this time. Still, I've got a good feeling about this second try.

Lottery Scratchers: An Investment Plan
This initiative lasted nearly three months, from early April to the end of June 2012. I maintained a tracking sheet, logging my scratcher purchases, and whether I won or not. I actually achieved a win rate of 32.3% - nearly 1 in 3 resulted in winning at least the cost of the ticket back. Score! But then I needed money for other things (i.e., credit card bills) so I put a hold on the game. Months went by, then I started to turn the idea over in my head again (much to the chagrin of my girlfriend, who doesn't like any form of gambling). I sat down and ran the numbers: if I spent $10 each time on scrathers, three days per week for a year, then even if I won the maximum amount of money I could I would still end up in the red.

Actually, I think it's possible to win one of the larger prizes, or even the top prize, before that year is up. But still, the numbers shook my confidence. I haven't returned to the game yet. Just stuck with boring old stocks and bonds.

Roommates: A Saga of Intrigue and Despair and Beer and Dick Jokes
I moved out of that place the next month. That pretty much ended the need to ruminate on a play about living in a bachelor house.

I have kept the story idea filed away, however. I may break it out again some time in the future.

Apprendre le Français en 15 Minutes Tous les Jours
 I went to Mexico for vacation a couple months later. I dropped the French and started re-learning my Spanish to prepare for the trip. At the time, I told myself it wasn't permanent, I would pick it up again soon. Over one year later, I haven't touched that French book. As a matter of fact, I've been getting the itch to get back to studying my Russian again. Ce la vie, the life of the periodic linguist.

Become a Bike Merchant
Throughout that summer, I put hours upon hours of time over the course of six months into transferring all the parts from an old bike who frame was bent out of whack (I struck a pizza delivery guy - but that's another story) to a nice, expensive frame my father had given to me. I put a couple hundred dollars into taking having a professional bike shop install a new stem, but otherwise the work was completed with my own two hands.

A month later, a guy with bolt cutters clipped it from the bike rack at the Metro. Bike merchant dreams - crushed.

Stemming the Invasion of Kipple
This idea faded after a few months. Life moves on, and stuff gets stashed in the corner. I moved a second time eight months later, and took the opportunity to trash unnecessary stuff. So I'm going t file this under the "Completed" column.

There - old news is taken care of. Now I can move forward.

Steps
1) Force myself to look back over this old blog.
2) Remember why I thought this was a good theme for a blog.
3) Remind myself that it's still a good theme for a blog.

Enthusiam:  Renewed.

Practicality: Done.

Difficulty: Low - months of delay for only 15 minutes of work.

Idea #6: Stemming the Invasion of Kipple

Description
I've been following through on the long-held idea to buy a car and move to another place, so I've been too busy to mull over hare-brained ideas. But while unpacking my stuff, I came up with one for getting rid of old stuff. I got rid of as much stuff as I could while packing, by put it out on the lawn with an ad on Craiglist saying "Curb Alert: Free shit!" (which is surprisingly effective - people [with horrible psychologically-based hoarding issues, no doubt] troll Craigslist for those kinds of ads), and dropping everything else off at Goodwill. But I still have all this stuff.

So I thought, "You know, if a fire rips through your home or a burgler puts his gun to your temple, there's really not much stuff you care to think about, other than your life." I wondered what I would choose to keep if someone put a gun to my head and said, "Is that really something you need?"

An extreme situation? Yes, definitely. But if this were some kind of new revival of the Saw films, and  Jigsaw were mind-fucking me to make me see some deeper meaning in life or something - what would I choose to get rid of in that dire situation?

The idea: each week, pick 10 things that are unnecessary to the continuation of my life and toss them in the trash. They could be big or small, like when playing strip poker and choosing to take off the watch or a sock so my shirt doesn't have to come off. But eventually, just like strip poker, I'd get down to the bare essentials. Every week, I'd get closer and closer to the smallest set of things I really needed.

Steps
1) Look around my room full of unpacked boxes.
2) Pick 10 items as I see them.
3) Throw them in the trash. No excuses.
4) Repeat the next week, moving to the various drawers of junk I have.

Enthusiam: Right now, with tons of stuff clogging up my smaller room with no basement to store junk in, it seems like a fantastic idea. I think my enthusiasm will wane as soon as I allow myself to make excuses for the things I keep.

Practicality: Seems incredibly practical, until some time in the future when I look around for something I decided to throw out during this life overhaul excercise. Whoops - there I go making excuses already.

Difficulty: Maybe humans are born hoarders - it's as difficult to let go of things as it is to accumulate them.