Tonight was the best judo practice of my short judo-playing life.  I started in January.  I’ve been learning plenty fast enough to stay interested, but that still means I’m getting thrown probably 10 times as much as I’m doing the throwing, just starting to learn what to look out for, and maybe once every third practice realizing that I’m doing something completely wrong.  Tonight though… tonight was a glimpse into what could be.

At Obukan Judo, practice is only held twice a week, so I had to find myself a book to read about it and do solo drills (called uchikomi) against a wall.  Every night I’ve been reading just enough of Best Judo before bed to have a new concept or trick to keep my mind spinning.  I relax, drift off and wake back up hoping that some part of it stuck.  In my free moments at work I imagine what it would feel like to properly execute the combinations of throw attempts I’ve been taught.  I get myself ready to come into the next practice and push myself until I’m totally out of breath.

Today, that paid off.  It probably took me a third of the way into the class to gas out.  I just kept going at whatever level I could at that particular moment, which always seemed to turn out to be more than I thought I had left.  At a certain point in free standing sparring (called randori) this left me with no energy to think about what I was doing.  That’s when I really started improving.  I went up against two heavier, higher ranked, more athletic, just generally better guys, attacked nonstop, and got thrown a lot as usual… but for the first time, I was able to stick a throw or two on each of them.  I also dodged much better, even though the effort of it just felt like I was flopping around.  Rod Sensei’s advice to just feel it, not think about it, was working.

Maybe some of my success tonight had to do with pushing my cardio harder and being more in the game late in practice than some of the other guys, but I’m not going to think about that too hard right now.  Saturday is my second tournament.  I got beaten four times in a row at my first, but now I know what I’m getting into.  It’s on.

I always loved video games, but I never had a Nintendo or anything like that.  Somehow it was easier to talk my parents into getting a computer, on some pretense like that it would be as useful for learning as for screwing around.  Computers ended up getting me a job, so I think I held up that part of the deal.  But anyway, I ended up buying my first game console towards the end of high school.  When I had done enough part time jobs to put together $20 of my own, I bought a Dreamcast.  The Dreamcast was a poorly marketed, mostly failed Sega system with a cult following built on some really innovative games, like Soul Calibur and Rez.   I got that Dreamcast mostly on the promise that Rez was a gaming experience not quite like any other, and Rez delivered.

Playing Rez is hard to describe, but I’ll do my best.  Your character is a humanoid body floating through a Lawnmower Man type of scene where enemies pop up and attack.  You can drag a cursor over the enemies and lock onto up to 8 of them at a time.  When you release the lock, you “shoot” them with ascending musical note firing along with each visual shot, blending in seamlessly with the pounding techno soundtrack.  As you arrive at portals between the levels, the music changes to match the tone of the new visual environment.  It’s sort of a forced synesthetic experience and a proto-Guitar Hero all in one.

What I think makes this so cool is that you get the feeling you can contribute to the music (and sound good!) without actually knowing anything about how to make music.  I’m sure this is a big part of Guitar Hero’s appeal, but GH never grabbed me the same way.  I guess I like the music to be the focus more than the game.  So why not take this concept a step further and hand out a bunch of Guitar Hero controllers at a concert, plug them into a drum machine that keeps the timing and melody to the right key and rhythm, and let ‘er rip?

Of course a musical dunce like myself can’t be the first to think of this.  There’s a little bit of vocabulary out there to describe some overlapping ideas: interactive performance, generative music, distributed music performance…  If I had been a couple years earlier to the party, maybe I’d have gotten involved in music creation on the fly over the internet with NetPD – the archives are a good listen for slowly shifting chillout electronica.  I have this vision, though, that some day I’ll come to a concert and be able to wail on a joystick and add my own little bit of instrumentation to an undulating mass of sound that no one had completely imagined beforehand.

I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: “you mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?” – Brian Eno

I think the technology to do this is already here with Pure Data, SuperCollider, Arduino and a little mix of engineering and music talent.  Life distracted me from Arduino projects, or I might keep this idea to myself until it was performance ready, but maybe somebody else will find it interesting to combine with their own ideas and get it out before I could.

Bonus link: you can get a bit of the same experience in a quick PC or PS3 game called flOw: http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/cloud/flowing/.  The author’s thesis has a pretty cool discussion about what he thinks makes it a good game.

As I’ve started learning about personality psychology, I’ve noticed big parts of the field revolving around the Big Five personality traits, also known as the Five Factor Model.  This is a formulation of our common sense idea of personality that makes individual personality traits, and the validity of the model as a whole, experimentally testable.  The five traits are Openness to new experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (OCEAN for short).  Each trait is a continuum along which each individual is supposed to occupy a set point that defines their personality as other people experience it.  The traits were first identified through exhaustive studies of the frequency of words that people use to describe a personality, and were later confirmed to be pretty stable, predictive, and reflective of how untrained people actually think about personality.

When I first heard about this, I wasn’t so sure it fit with my common sense.  Are we all really that simple?  Maybe not, or else there wouldn’t be any other subfields of psychology, cognitive science or sociology.  But as I’ve jiggled the FFM around in my head and tried to fit it to my relationships, I do find some application, in particular at work.

Catching up with an old friend on the phone last night, he asked me to describe working at my nameless fortune 100 tech giant employer.  ”Strange” was the first word that came to mind.  The impersonal environment of long, kind of dark hallways and acres of grey cubicles, along with some unusual management practices, can skew day to day interaction way off of life outside.  Our review process pits us directly against each other for raises and promotions, with anonymous feedback from coworkers having a big impact the result.  The result is a lot of hardworking people, who are less willing than they might be to do anything pro bono or actively solicit help from coworkers on new projects.  This much was obvious about the working environment in the first six months I worked here, but as I read about the Big Five I also wondered what kind of personalities we might be selecting for, and how that would affect the feeling of coming into work.

The one trait I really stand out on is openness to new experience.  I live for variety, and this is a big part of how I experience working in tech.  Any day I can come in and learn a new tool or how some complex device works is a good day.  This is such a strong motivator that I have a hard time imagining any other reason to be here, and this blind spot got me into some trouble early.  Not everyone who works here is open to new experience; maybe even the opposite.  It turns out conscientiousness is the trait most selected for, in the form of attention to detail.  This is not one of my strong points.  But as for openness, lots of my coworkers have been around here for years (decades), have families and other concerns, and just aren’t that interested in new ways of doing things.  When this bright eyed recent college grad came in and started poking at why we don’t do this or that alternative method, I think I established myself as part of an outgroup.  Thankfully things have eased up since then with a change of management, some personal development and new requirements for the team.  I’ve become more conscientious over time.  We’ve also been forced by external circumstances to change, and although not everyone in the group has to like it, it’s been an opportunity for me to explore areas where the right answers haven’t been established in advance.  I’m still surprised that I haven’t found this mythical cache of curious engineering types that I expected, but maybe it’s out there.  If not, I’m slowly getting better at working with the rest.

Otherwise, the skew in personalities is something like what you would expect for nerds versus the rest of us.  You can see the difference in extraversion and agreeableness walking between the engineering and business admin areas.  I don’t know if the engineers are more neurotic in general, but there are one or two examples I’m always amazed manage to make it out of the house in the morning.

We’ll see how this changes through my career.  Without conducting a survey or experiment myself, I’m just comparing against my own expectations.  I’ll probably shift in the direction of my coworkers’ personalities as I get older, get a family of my own, go through all those same cataclysmic lifestyle changes.  In the mean time, I’ll just have to keep my mind open to how other people work and think.

iTunes U and Open Courseware have flooded into my life as a great way to expand my formal education beyond my original fields.  I get to occupy myself with something productive during my commute, and come into work with creative thoughts already flowing.  Lately I’ve been listening to Robb Willer’s SOC150 lectures from UC Berkeley.

I’m surprised at how much of this material from a bona fide accredited college class you can pick up just by reading the news every once in a while, checking out some blogs and watching the occasional TED talk though.  The SOC150 lectures on obedience focus pretty heavily on the Milgram experiments – you know the ones, where an unsuspecting study applicant is told to shock a guy who fakes cardiac arrest, and they find that almost everyone will follow through on it.  Part of the sense of review I get here has to be that it’s a 100-level class, but even listening to Cindy Sifonis’ 300-level lectures on the cognitive science of creativity, I feel like I’ve heard a lot of it before.  That’s not exactly a complaint though: it makes me feel much better about the time spent poking around wikipedia and zoning out to TED.

Anyway, the SOC150 lecture on norms was a bit more interesting than the ones on obedience.  A few things I took away from it:

People who witness norms being broken can behave unpredictably, but there’s a general trend that people will try to smooth things over even if they have to put themselves in a really awkward position to do it.  When a study had college students go up to elderly subway riders and ask for their seats, lots of people actually gave up their seats even when lots were available… even if giving the experimenter a weird or nasty look while doing it.

The researchers  found this experiment extremely stressful to conduct.  Knowing you’re about to break a norm can cause extreme anxiety.

Norms hang around even after everyone that knew the original reason for them has been replaced, as long as those people are replaced at a rate where the norms can be enforced on the new members of the group.

It sounds like there’s experimental support for the common sense notion that the people who enforce norms the most viciously are insecure about how closely they follow the norm themselves.  On this topic the lecture referenced one of my favorite studies of all time, the one where they showed that homophobic men are more sexually aroused by gay porn.

Sometimes (often?) breaking a norm doesn’t get you any social sanctions, or at least not visible ones.  People might just not invite you back without telling you, but even that’s not given.  This can lead to what the lecturer calls false enforcement of unpopular norms: there are ways that no one really wants to behave, but they think everyone else wants them to behave like that.  Robb Willer, the lecturer, wrote a paper about it here.  I was fascinated by the example of Princeton students who participate in drinking clubs.  So the story goes, a huge number (90%?) of students at Princeton participate in clubs whose purposes are to get smashed.  Most of the kids, if interviewed privately, say they’re not that into getting drunk all the time.  But they severely overestimate how much even their close friends enjoy it, to the point that most people think most people are big into the drinking club activities, when in fact most people aren’t.  It’s a paradox.  The lecture talked about publishing these results on posters and such to get people to back it off, and it sounded like this might have had some success.

While I was listening, my mind wandered to politics.  Ever hear that history has a well known liberal bias?  Maybe whatever truth is in that statement has to do with norms being so hard to shake off even long after their usefulness has run out.  I’m thinking of the vicious hatred some people have for Planned Parenthood.  I think you could sum up a major goal of theirs as reducing the number of unwanted kids.  That seems pretty noble, but as soon as the details stray anywhere near facilitating premarital sex, some people just ain’t having it.  Made sense 60 years ago, but maybe not for today’s 20 somethings.

Personality psychology was another topic with some great lectures available online.  Maybe I’ll get a post up on that soon.