2012 exercise recap

Here are some statistics from 2012 in respect to exercise:

• Total exercise hours logged during 2012 amounted to roughly 301 hours, or roughly 49 minutes per day or 5 hours and 47 minutes per week.
• During the year I logged in 35 sick days. The granularity in respect to reasons is a bit lacking, but a gut feeling is that roughly half of those days were related to flu/cold and the rest were miscellaneous (e.g. small injuries). The sick days were relatively evenly spread out over the course of the year into 7 sick day stretches, averaging roughly 5 days per "sickness".
• The top three categories of sports were: 1) Savate (108h), 2) gym (98h), and 3) running (38h).
• Over the year I ran 384 km for an average pace of roughly 10.1 km/h and improved my half-marathon PR to 1h52min12s.
• During the summer I started to get into strength training and implemented Rippetoe's Starting Strength routine for beginners rather strictly for about two months, after which I made some adjustments to take account for some considerations from practicing Savate (e.g. a laxer emphasis on pushing up weight to allow for more recovery time, introduction of calf-work, etc.).
• Weight-wise my body mass increased by about 8.5kg from January to December due to conscious calorie intake increase and strength training.

Looking back on 2012, my only "official" target was to try to average 2 hours of exercise per week. This goal was achieved before midsummer. Overall I'm quite satisfied with how the year turned out in this respect and going into 2013, I'll continue along a roughly similar track, with the main new thing being that I'll try to cut fat during the Spring to drop my weight for the running season.

In terms of target setting, I don't think I'll define any strict targets for 2013. Time-wise the unofficial de facto target for 2012 turned into putting in 300+ hours by the end of the year. The temporal measurement is in my experience good if you are faced with a problem of not being able to motivate yourself to get to do any exercise. However, once you actually start doing stuff, the target becomes relatively irrelevant and needs to evolve into something else. Technically for 2013 I should be more focused on setting e.g. targets for running times, for weightlifting weights, etc., but as I'm not doing any of this too seriously, I'm afraid that defining hard goals like that would ultimately act as a demotivator. As such, I guess the goal then for 2013 would be to improve everything else but the overall time spent.

Parkinson's law and whatnot

So yeah, I've been lazy again at writing and since some people have thrown snide remarks about it, I guess this must be rectified. To get out of the hole, I decided to just briefly comment on my thinking regarding a recent blog post I read about how people overextend themselves financially and how that is a source of anxiety (related to Parkinson's law).

In general I think the guy hit the nail on the head very well; due to a variety of reasons, I guess, people tend to inflate their costs of living in tandem with increased income, sometimes even faster than their income rises. This type of pattern seems relatively universal, especially if you don't actively try to counteract it. If you don't think about it and have bad routines set out, of course you're going to expend more energy on what you're doing than is necessarily needed. Some energy, in this case financial resources, must be spent on combatting the second law of thermodynamics. You can do it intelligently or less intelligently. Doing things less intelligently often costs more than doing things intelligently.

One could of course argue that the top 1% has some type of moral obligation to do this or that, in this case to think about their spending and not overextend beyond their means. The original text suggests that this would have very direct implications on the wellbeing of the individuals in question and at least hints that the world might somehow be a better place. The first statement is undoubtedly true, but the second one is so much more complex that I would not take a strong stance either way. If the wealthiest people spent less, the only certain thing would be that the wealthiest people would be spending less. Of course one can extrapolate that it might cause unemployment to go up or the unfair distribution of resources to go down or get rid of all the wars. Who knows. I would imagine that it depends on how you scope the situation and what you are observing. As a whole the system is just so complex and interdependent that it's difficult to say what resultant effect will overpower other effects.

On a more practical level I got around to thinking about my situation. After doing a one year stint at a local non-profit NGO on what were pretty much pro bono terms I did manage to shrink my financial footprint rather significantly, mainly by accepting that with less disposable income I would have to ditch certain things and introduce new things into my life. Forge new routines which were less costly than the old ones. And so on. Despite having gone "back to the industry" since, I've actually noticed that the new routines I've forged have kept me subjectively thinking more satisfied than my old routines. Another relatively cool extra perk is related to precisely what was discussed in the original post cited above: the "space" between what I earn and what I spend widened quite a bit and I can be fairly relaxed about survival (although as a person living in the developed world and enjoying the benefits of public healthcare, free education, social security, and so on, I wouldn't really have to worry about that in any case). Ultimately, though, I think that what is happening here is that from an evolutionary and survivalist perspective I've increased my odds of survival by increasing my level of fitness to survive. I wouldn't go so far as to argue being antifragile in the Taleb-ian sense, but certainly more resilient.

However, if everyone was to do this type of shift and go back to bare minimums, what would the impact on me be? Difficult to say, but right now I think that for instance professionally I exist only because there is so much waste from people being uneconomical and inefficient in what they do and because one can relatively easily make a career out of doing more for less. If everyone across the board not only in their personal lives, but also in the professional careers, started applying more clever tactics in how to spend less effort in doing more, it is entirely possible that my comparative competitive advantage would shrink and result in a more of a Red Queen competition situation for me. On a holistic level the world would quite possibly be better off, but on a personal level it would undoubtedly force me to run faster. I suppose that might be fun in itself, but would again require adjustments to be made on a personal level to again increase fitness in the changing landscape.

Homeostasis and disrupting it

It is somewhat curious and slightly amusing how many different ideas and observations can be boiled down to only a handful of fundamental concepts. It may be selection bias, but in the past years I have time and again hit my head on evolution in various different areas. More recently I have been very much intrigued by physical training and conditioning of humans, vis-à-vis my own journey in Boxe Francaise, which has also led me to briefly touch upon thoughts in the strength training field.

It is not anything new as such, but training, especially in respect to strength and general fitness, seem to again link back to forcing the human body to adapt to changing levels of stress. More specifically building strength through building muscle, which is ultimately just disrupting the homeostasis of the body to provoke a reaction and adaptation, fostered with enough resources to enable the adaptation to occur. Despite the early easy linear gains which can be achieved, at some point triggering the adaptation becomes harder and demands more. If the homeostasis is not disrupted by challenging the body enough, no adaptation occurs and training becomes stuck. Intelligent variation then becomes the key to betting unstuck; altering the program to build for the certain key training sessions when personal bests are strived for, followed by enough lighter training to allow for adaptation without overtraining.

Again this appears to link very much back to some of the core ideas in evolution and population ecology, be it biological organisms or artificial structures such as industries. Homeostasis can be met in organizations as well, which I guess can be related to inertia, which stabilizes the organization's structure. Changing environment reduces the fitness of the organization and ultimately results in existential questions regarding the survival of the organization. In a way, this can be indeed seen as a Red Queen race, where adaptation is needed not only to progress, but to even keep in the current competitive position. Adaptation tends to be painful, and hence disrupting the homeostasis in the organization is something that is met with the previously mentioned inertia and unwillingness to change until it is almost too late to change anymore. At the point when the proverbial shit is about to hit the fan, the amount of adaptation needed is so significant that again the existence and the ability to survive the adaptation comes into question.

Motivation: Part Deux

So, an interesting bit about motivation occurred to me today, especially in the context of my thesis. So far I've been fairly unsuccessful at it, due to many reasons. Some key things that have come to mind about it can be summarized below:

• When you're just serving a cake, i.e. waiting around for something gruesome to end and hope of better things happening if you just sit tight and weather the shit, it's really difficult to get anything intelligent done. You just wait for things to end so you can progress again.
• When the shit does eventually end due to the fixed term (temporal sense) nature of it, things should improve. But if you're in limbo, the uncertainty is again a bit painful. You learn to live with it, and you might get some things done, but it starts digging at you fairly quickly again, because there's a small amount of hope that things will take a turn for the better.
• When finally you get put into a hole where there is no real chance for things to improve, you finally find yourself in a situation where merely sitting and waiting things out does no longer look attractive. It means that you finally find yourself in a situation where you have to start shovelling shit and get things done or the pain won't go away. That's the only alternative and the only hope.

With the third phase beginning and the cruel reality setting in, I guess we'll finally see whether things take a turn for the better. So far in respect to the thesis, I've been setting up a new environment with which to crunch the data, which should address the performance issues which were previously encountered. Additionally I've finally been able to sort out the mess with the corrupted data for 2007 and onwards, which previously caused a bit of demotivation as that would be the very interesting bit of data. But, let's see... I should have my priorities finally straight again, as counterintuitive as it might seem.

Commensurability

A great many things in life can and should be measured, as I believe I've previously written. Measuring different things is crucial to be able to track progress and speed and without metrics, we have to rely on gut instinct. In this respect a certain degree of formality is very welcome, because this relates to the problem of commensurability and comparing one point of data with another one.

Very often, however, it seems that people either on purpose or by accident devise and change metrics at whim. This makes longitudinal analyses of the data pointless; establishing trends becomes very difficult if you are encountered with a data set in which each point has been measured using different methods and perhaps even with a different logic behind. With heterogenous data sets transparency and formal descriptions of how the data has come about are needed if the data set is to be cleaned, and even then it might be tricky.

With this consideration, then, the obvious question is why are people so horribly bad at measurements and tracking different variables? A pessimistic view might be that this is done on purpose. Companies change their metrics on purpose to through stakeholders off by ensuring that a clear picture of trends cannot be established and if someone does attempt to clean the data, the analysis and results can still be questioned. Another reason could be that the people developing the metrics just need something to do to legitimize their existence in the organization, hence new metrics are devised every so often.

An equally worrying notion is that metrics are changed and tracking is executed in a very ad hoc fashion because the people responsible do not at the end of the day understand what they are doing and why. Sheer incompetence. Related to this, perhaps another annoying bit is that people tend to measure what is easy to measure, not what would be useful to measure. Proxy measurements are of course fine as long as you spend enough effort to establish that the logic by which you argue the proxy to be good is rigorous enough. This, sadly, is not the case too often either.

Overall, this is a topic which seems to pop up and cause immense headaches for me ever so often, and I believe the only solution will be to start whacking people with the Clue Stick every time I run across some offender in the future. Sheesh...

Build stuff

A more or less arbitrary quote from Joichi Ito's Innovation on the Edges piece:

Well, one thing is you've got to be anti-disciplinary because if you're in a discipline and you're worried about peer review and you're knowing more and more about less and less, that's by definition an incremental thing. You've got to be anti-disciplinary in the way that you've got to have the freedom to connect things together that aren't traditionally connected. You get that ironically by not being rigorous, and by building. It's practice before theory.

In general the piece relatively interesting and to a great extent.

Motivation

On greed

Recently at lunch with a colleague of mine we were discussing the prolonged economic crisis. As is not so very uncommon these days, he highlighted the point of greed as something that has changed historically, or at the very least the ability of greedy speculators to significantly disrupt the functioning of the system and amass massive amounts of wealth by mere speculation, not by actually producing anything concrete. One example which was mentioned was the speculation in the African bond market, of which I alas have no knowledge of.

We did agree that perhaps slightly too liberal deregulation may have been the catalyst in enabling global greed of this magnitude to materialize, but where our views diverged were the practical implications of this. Certainly, if left unchecked what we've witnessed in the last decade may destabilize the system in such a significant fashion that it would have sever consequences on the everyday lives of people who at the end of the day are merely victims, not necessarily the culprits as such. Ultimately, however, I think the systems will balance themselves out in one way or the other, but the amount of pain endured in the process will be a key question.

It is easy to also say that regulation is one potential key in ensuring that this type of mess does not come around too often. However, what that regulation in practice would be, though, is difficult to say. Certainly some things are clear, however. One thing we ought to have already learned is that if entire systems have single points of failure, the robustness of the system is significantly impaired. The global banking model which has been applied in the recent history may be one thing which causes a bit of a headache, as banks become large in size and potential conflicts of interest arise inside the banks, which I am fairly skeptical that Chinese walls can sufficiently solve.

Another fundamental learning is that of accountability. Moral hazard, the buzzword of yesteryear, if you will. If you decouple accountability from the equations, certainly you will have situations where people behave in irresponsible ways. How you bring back accountability is by not bailing out everyone who gets into trouble. You let bad decisions lead to bad consequences so that the feedback loop will ensure that the parts of the system gradually learn to avoid these types of decisions. Building off of this, think of the bond markets, which have been the focal point of discussion for too long already. The big problem is that when the environment has been injected with a fair dose of volatility, the investors who are responsible for allocating their own and possible other peoples' capital have started questioning some assumptions they've made earlier, especially in regard to the ability of governments to make good on their debts. Enter rising interest rates for some and low interest rates for others. Rising interest rates mean that countries cannot get new debt as cheaply as before, not that the debt already issued would have increasing costs. This in itself is not problematic at all: if the credit card company figures that I've lost my steady source of income, it's very likely they will feel that the risk associated with the credit that they're giving me has risen and hence either cut me off or charge me higher interest rates to compensate for the risk.

Now, where the proverbial shit hits the fan is if you have built your finances to rely on debt financing and are heavily leaning forward with it. If all of a sudden you are cut off from the ability of borrow, the house of cards comes crashing down. Is it now time for regulation? Perhaps. And not the regulation of credit rating agencies, mind you, as some have argued. But consider simple regulation and simple heuristics such as "thou shalt not build thy public sector on debt" would decouple the ability of the bond markets to punish nations, merely because nations would by definition not commit the sin in the first place of getting hooked on cheap credit, which is ultimately merely stealing from the next generation of citizens and giving to the current situation of citizens. Why is regulation and simple heuristics needed? Because the politicians running the system will always discount time so as to prefer immediate gains over longer term gains. And that is logical because without immediate gains the politicians won't be in the office in the longer term.

Interestingly enough if we move down a layer from the nation level to the firm level, we notice that the same dynamic was present in the financial crisis of 2008. Banks base a bulk of their business on the ability to borrow short term. If the credit dries up, their operations grind to a halt, making again the banking system incredibly sensitive to outside shocks and increased volatility in the environment. This is one reason why the Basel framework has been worked on; to ensure that banks have enough liquidity to survive the conditions. To be honest, I'm not an expert on the Basel frameworks, but what I have heard from some sources is that even the newer things will not most likely ultimately solve the issues. But they are working towards implementing some heuristics which may limit the ability to create profit by trading it off for a potentially more stable system and decreased mortality rates when things do go south.

The interesting question on the nation level, then, is whether or not similar heuristics should be implemented with international agreements (e.g. by increasing couplings in the scope of the EU) or should countries look to implement them on their own. The philosophical answer, at least for me, is clear, considering my skepticism of big and intricate organisms: it should be in the interest of individual nations to sort themselves out and hence no larger level coordination should be needed, as long as the voters understand that it is irresponsible of them to give the politicians the loaded gun with which to shoot the country itself in the head. Of course, that is assuming much of voters and politicians, which may suggest that in the real world someone must force this type of behavior. Unfortunately that, however, does not go well with freedom and liberty.

Regardless, the above merely goes to show that one way of decoupling oneself from the speculators' ability to harm you might not be to beat up the speculators but find ways of solving the core problem. Despite my colleague's view that we have never seen this level of greed before, I am fairly certain that the opposite is true: we've always encountered greedy people, be it (naively put) the bankers of today or the monarchs/sovereigns/conquerors of before.

The reason why we're all screwed eventually

It is all to do with staircases. Especially spiral ones. Everyone knows that spiral staircases are nifty if you need to protect yourself from invading knights, who typically enter the staircase from below after invading your castle. With most people being right-handed, you obviously build the staircases so that when going up, the staircase forces the left hand of the person to be on the outside. This is convenient as this increases the difficulty of the attacker to hit you with their sword while at the same time making this easier for you to do.

We no longer stab people with swords, because this is considered not nice. However, we still have spiral staircases. General convention is also in all civilized countries to go on the right side of the road. This also fits well, because in spiral staircases which have been built in the proper fashion, by sticking to the right side of the steps you're doing things right. Right? Right. And that's because the probability of taking a misstep is higher when going down and often the outcome of a misstep is also a lot worse on average when going down. To mitigate this bit, it's only logical to allow the people coming down to occupy the wider bit of the step. And by sticking to the right side of the step of a properly built spiral staircase, this happens. It's all very logical and nice, and when people adhere to this emergent rule of how to act properly, everything goes smoothly, people don't get killed by stumbling in the stairs and people don't need to stab each other with swords.

However, this is not often the case, alas, as some people cannot understand the system dynamics and why certain things are better done in one way and not in another. This means that you will have deviants who don't act in the proper way in spiral staircases and this initially causes confusion, annoyance, and ultimately more accidents. And all because they are selfish and cannot optimize the system. It is those people who will ultimately cause fragile but optimal systems to break apart.

Lesson of the story? When you go up a spiral staircase, you step on the narrower bit of the steps. When your going down, you step on the wider bit. If you don't do this, I will stab you with a sword. Capisce?

The dilemmas of measuring

A recurring theme in many of the jobs I've done over the years is how to measure different things. How to measure the impact of a project, how to measure progress, how to measure this and that. A cynical viewpoint would note that in many cases the measurements are irrelevant. Too often the measurements are merely used to justify one thing or another. To motivate funders to give more money or to ensure that the project doesn't get killed off. The objective has already been devised and then the purpose is to ensure that the measurements support the objective. At best these are naive metrics and at worst it's blatant cherry picking.

One specific problem relates to developing metrics. Often metrics are developed partly or entirely outside of the context, e.g. a project or a program that are ultimately being measured. Some external person devises a plan of how to assess the project and what to measure. Or a person calls up the project manager and tells them that the quality of software needs to be measured. And because developing metrics is fundamentally difficult, compromises are made and software quality is assessed verbally and qualitatively with biases and personal agendas in place. Or then traffic lights are used to indicate status.

Once the metrics have been defined one way or another, things don't get any rosier. There's the problem of changing metrics as the project learns more. Then there's the problem of metrics often not being automated, which causes a relatively large amount of resources being spent on compiling measurements and aggregating them. And because manual labor is involved and biases and agendas persist, each step has a risk of the data being altered either consciously or unconsciously, so that when it ultimately reaches the decision makers there's no guarantee what they are actually seeing and basing their decisions upon.

Then there is the issue of the object of the measurements not necessarily being too interested in measuring things or being measured. This always spawns existential questions; should the project be canned or not, or was tax-payer money wasted or not? This also links to accountability: when the shit hits the fan, who was responsible and who gets axed? So it's not difficult to see why there may be a certain amount of resistance to measuring things and why biases and agendas emerge.

However, ideally measuring progress is a very good thing indeed. But it has to come from within, and the object of measurement should inherently also see the value. As a fairly naive example, I identified a few years back that I'm not in very good shape. This wasn't necessarily a problem per se at the time, but I was afraid that it might have negative impacts down the line. Not being in good shape would possibly negatively affect my performance in work and in life. It might limit my degrees of freedom in performing things or in taking up hobbies. It might also have adverse effects on my physical appearance, and so on. Identifying that something needed to be done, it was obvious that changes needed to be made at the level of routines, and not exercising was one fundamental problem.

One of the easier and still fairly relevant measurements was just keeping a track of the hours spent exercising. The point of this was to reduce the barriers to exercising. Jogging is difficult if you don't know where your shoes are or what good jogging routes are or how much time you're going to spend running a certain route. So obviously static friction is larger than kinetic friction, so ensuring basic movement will help things further down the line.

Once the static friction was beat, the next thing was to ensure that the exercise was heterogenous enough that I don't get trapped into practicing a small subset of exercises and instead strive towards a holistic enough approach. So this was then tracked by reviewing the types of sports I had already done, which I'd been already recording while keeping track of exercise hours. Running and gym (with a certain routine) was relatively ok, but I was for instance neglecting flexibility or crossfit-type exercises. So obviously that needed to be fixed.

Then came the issues of ensuring that I'm eating enough and the right things. And observing correlation between training amounts and types when reflected against injuries and the time spent in being unable to train. The next step is then to start measuring outcomes, i.e. my strength and ability to do a portfolio of different things. I've already been running half marathons on an at least yearly basis, so some data points are available in respect to cardio and endurance, but ensuring a more holistic approach to tracking progress might be good. At least in a toolbox fashion which would allow me to test myself every once in a while. Another thing going parallel to this has been a purely subjective assessment on a scale of 1-5 after each exercise on how good it felt.

The point here is that the metrics and their relevance has evolved over time as progress happens and the environment changes. The will to measure is also intrinsic and the measurements have been very lightweight with the heavier measurements (e.g. diet and calorie amounts) being done every once in a while on a temporary basis. The measurements are also reflected against the overall goals of becoming more fit (across a multitude of dimensions) and so on.

An interesting question, however, would be whether hiring a personal trainer would bring better results or improve the situation.

Cost structures and what you really, really want

I ran across an article this morning where Metallica's guitarist was cited saying that the group is essentially forced to tour ad infinitum without the ability to take, for instance, a few years off. The reason for this is that apparently the good old times of yesteryear when royalties from albums would give you a steady stream of income are gone, and to keep their studio afloat, pay wages, etc., the group must focus on touring at a pace which is increasingly becoming more than what members of the group would enjoy.

From in between the lines one can easily find again the age-old critique about how online music and piracy are eating away at the livelihood of musicians, and fair enough, I guess Metallica must employ a ton of people and hence generate jobs in the society and bring taxes to the state. But I'm still left wondering that if the environment has changed so drastically (and in music business, it indeed has), then why isn't Metallica adapting? I don't really know that much about the music business, but one would easily start questioning the point of running your own studios and keeping a huge amount of people on payroll. Shouldn't you be able to bring your cost structure down and efficiency up by procuring specific services on demand instead of running the entire machinery yourself? I mean, if you're touring all the time, why do you have your own studio? And if you have your own studio, rationally thinking it would be only logical to share it with others. Others who could help finance the running costs, or even make you a bit of profit at best.

Again, I know nothing of music business or how Metallica works, but the symptoms of this situation very closely resemble things that hit closer to home for me: a business which is unable to adapt to the changing environment in which revenues and profits are going down forcing people to be ultimately laid off, but instead of stopping to analyze the core problems and align the organization into a new stance, the culture just drives people to continue on the track that they have been on and merely try to do the same stuff that they did before with less resources. This despite the fact that the stuff that was done before may have become increasingly irrelevant as the environment has changed.

Equal outcomes

One thing that I've started wondering recently is how values scale to different levels. The political left has often been associated with values that promote social welfare and the distribution of wealth across the entire population, where the wealth is often collected via taxes from the wealthier and distributed to the poorer. In Finland this is notable as the minister of finance is from SDP, the local social democrat party. Despite this, she sternly opposes Greek bailouts, eurobonds, and the whole shebang.

If you consider, the situation on the EU-level is structurally similar to that of social welfare on the local level. Our southern friends have due to many different reasons found themselves in a pickle and our now about to fall through the cracks of the EU society. This may or may not have ripple effects to other states also on the slippery slope. And if the shit hits the fan, then it will also trickle down to the individual people. Now, the proposed eurobonds, for instance, are again one mechanism with which wealth can be transferred. In practice they would lower the barriers for struggling states to raise capital from the markets and lower the interest rates. On the other hand interest rates would go up for the norther block. Shouldn't this be entirely acceptable, if we already are doing it on a different level?

(Note: these do not reflect my views. Instead I'm merely trying to tease out what at first glance appears to be an inconsistency in thought...)

Maneuver vs. attrition and martial arts

Having been doing a fair amount of Boxe Francaise over the past half a year, I got around to thinking about the nature of competitive martial arts across the maneuver vs. attrition warfare dimension. Assaut sparring, which is fairly commonplace in BF, emphasizes light contact and proper technique. This combined with the inhibition from using e.g. knees and shins in kicks and elbows in close combat translates to a situation where artificial barriers force the savateurs to emphasize correct distance control and speed over parking in front of each other and throwing everything they've got at each other. For me as a practitioner this also translates into a nice physical exercise thanks to the emphasis on movement.

Given this situation, it should be fairly easy to see why BF could be classified as closer to the maneuver warfare end rather than attrition warfare. This said, of course maneuver warfare also is linked to the concept of attrition; continuous movement leads easily to situations where stamina of the cardio type may make or break matches. Similar thinking can be relatively easily applied to other martial arts as well. One aspect which may be a driver for this is that in martial arts competitors are often grouped by weight, which often is a good proxy via which significant mismatches in power are avoided. But would competition across weight classes change the point of the sports on the maneuver-attrition dimension?

If weight disparities correlate fairly positively with power disparities between competitors, then it stands to reason that in a competition where rules didn't exist the more powerful competitor could just punch the other guy out. The counterargument would then be that this asymmetry would give a fairly big incentive for the less powerful competitor to increase their technique and focus on avoiding going head-on and instead try to focus on weaker points. Maneuver warfare again.

If rules are implemented and e.g. knock-outs are forbidden and excessive force is banned, as is the situation in assaut (combat and pre-combat don't contain these limitations), this effectively eliminates the risk of being punched out of the competition. This should then translate into lower barriers for competitors to engage in what would otherwise be riskier moves as the potential downside has been capped and the upside is larger (e.g. obtain four points by executing a kick to the head, which otherwise would be risky as it would expose you a fair bit to the opponent). But again the attrition bit seems to be mitigated to the background.

However, if you happen to be the underdog in respect to technique, then an attrition strategy might be the way to go, assuming that you can get the other guy to gas out. This would significantly reduce their capabilities to wage credible warfare against you while relatively speaking your capability has significantly improved. This might be one case where attrition could be a very relevant approach.

Ultimately, however, I don't know whether there is any greater value in applying this approach to martial arts. The objectives of competitors are fairly homogenous, as are often the tools at their disposal and the ability to use them, so in this respect the results might again be fairly boring. I will have to google around a bit, though, as I'm sure that there must be a fair bit of thinking done by others on this subject.

Exercise

That's the exercise so far this year in hours. The green pluses are "sick days". Is there a pattern or trend emerging? Correlation? Causality? Let's get some more data...

Indecisiveness and strategy

When you're trying to revive a company, the worst thing you can possibly do is be unclear on the strategy.  Employees can't commit, priorities can't be set, everything freezes while the staff waits to hear what they'll be asked to do.  Every time there's s shift like this, another round of experienced employees put their resumes on the street.

The above from an analysis on Yahoo written by Michael Mace recently. I can't agree more with this.

Tech evolution and the rise of meritocracy

Coupled with my reading on technological evolution and the whole shebang in relation to my thesis, I've been also thinking a bit about what all of this means for society at large. The current discourse seems to roughly go along the lines of blaming a failing and fragile economic system which has been pushed over the edge by reckless behavior. This is causing ripple effects in employment and causing a lot of people, especially youngsters who have shed a fair bit of money for the degrees, to become a bit grumpy. The two presented solutions for solving the economic problems in Europe revolve around either implementing austerity measures or alternatively shelling out even more money to stimulate growth and employment. And so on.

But all the while I have this nagging feeling that people are overlooking the fact that one of the more important drivers behind unemployment is that recent rapid changes in technology are causing the landscape to also change at a very quick pace, making a lot of old positions disappear as, well, people are often inherently very inefficient. In practice, for instance, a lot of the tedious white collar work done in offices can relatively easily be automated, if this was wanted. Another example is how governments are often blaming outsourcing for jobs being lost to lower cost Asian countries, but in the longer run changes in e.g. manufacturing technologies will ultimately kill even those jobs. I, for instance, was able to design and start printing stainless steel buttons for my blazer in less than a few hours. And the prices for these types of technologies will just be going down, making it even more attractive.

So ultimately this leads to a situation where many of the jobs which existed due to inefficiencies will now become increasingly rare and make the world much more meritocratic. Amusingly enough many people say that they want a world which is fair, but with the world becoming very fair very fast, I'm not entirely certain that this is really what people will want.

The logical next question is what to do when the dust settles, or how to start countering this trend already now. Personally I've been spending a fair bit of time just doing things; writing code, reading, playing with all types of things. Ultimately trying to regain enough competence that when the meritocracy hits into gear, I'll hopefully be competent enough to stay afloat. As another interesting note, I have a hunch that fancy degrees will not stand closer scrutiny in a meritocratic world and as such, relying on success because you have an MSc in your pocket will also fail. But we'll see.

Mechanical Principles

Quality of a suit

Building off of the relatively bad impression of Senli and Frye, I got around to thinking about what actually makes a good suit, or a good jacket. From my, i.e. the consumer's, perspective, three dimensions are easily identifiable: 1) the quality of the fabric, 2) the quality of work, and 3) the quality of "fit/style". I'm sure more can be identified and there is a bit of possible overlap between the categories, but for my purposes I believe this approach to be sufficient for the time being.

The quality of the fabric is, I believe, the easier of the group to understand. While not entirely disambiguous, the qualities of fabrics can be relatively objectively assessed via a couple of different viewpoints. On one hand the durability of the fabric is fairly relevant and contributes to the longetivity of the garment. On the other hand some fabrics are woven with methods which involve more labor or are more technically difficult to do, adding a certain scarcity/rarity aspect and raising the perceived value of the fabric in some circles. Also the material of the fabric contributes to the quality with for instance synthetic materials often being less valued based on arguments regarding e.g. breathability of the fabric while cashmere is often considered to be something aspirational based on again the scarcity and fineness. Ultimately this dimension will need to be discussed in the context of the customer and the attributes need to be scaled based on what the customer wants.

The quality of work in turn refers to the technical quality of the labor that goes into making the garment. Some people like to highlight that garments made by hand are better than garments made by machine, but I somehow prefer the more practical stance of using machines where they are better and using hands where they are better. Not being trained in tailoring, I'm of course relatively ill-equipped to assess quality of work very objectively. However, ultimately I think this dimension should also contribute to the longetivity of the garment in addition to linking to the style and fit of the garment.

The final dimension is then of course the fit and style of the garment. No amount of quality fabric and quality worksmanship will help if the fit and style do not match with what the customer wants. This category is most probably the most subjective of the three and is determined the most by what the customer actually wants. This also poses a big problem in e.g. bespoke tailoring as the customer needs to be able to communicate clearly to the tailor what is wanted. Or on the other hand the tailor must be competent enough to present the right questions to get the information from the customer.

The second and third dimensions have fairly much overlap. For instance from the dimension of fit/style, I could say that I aesthetically like a spalla camicia shoulder, but this also directly links to the quality of worksmanship as a spalla camicia shoulder obviously is a fairly well defined technical way of attaching the sleeve to the jacket's torso. Other similar examples can be identified with relative ease.

But this was just to write down some of my thoughts on how I approach the issue of assessing clothes. Also, as a brief update, Mr. Frye has yet to get back to me regarding the email I sent him after receiving my suit and overcoat, so another thing to consider is the quality of customer service, which in the case of Senli and Frye has also been found lacking.

First impressions of Senli and Frye

So having just returned from China and after having ordered a suit and an overcoat from Senli and Frye, I have to admit that I'm very much underwhelmed by many things. Some things to start off with:

• The given specifications weren't followed. To guide the style, I dragged along my last autumn's Sartoria Rossi MTM single-breasted navy blazer. What was produced was a horrible bastardization of a very padded jacket with a fairly roped shoulder. The same problem persisted with the overcoat.
• The collar role of the jacket has been somehow destroyed entirely making it appear very flat and two-dimensional. This is something I would associate with outfits such as A Suit That Fits and similar companies.
• The button holes appear very much machine-made and are very generic.
• The breast pocket was straight and not the curved barchetta type.

I'm not an expert on the fabrics, so can't really evaluate them too well. There is a bit of handwork in the garment, but a bulk appears to have been done by machine. There are many small details which aren't done entirely properly, giving a feeling as if the person who did the work couldn't really be bothered too much.

But the biggest problem is the style and fit, which both fail horribly. And because of this, it doesn't even matter what the technical quality of the work really is, because if a garment doesn't attract you to wear it, it doesn't even need to last.

To my shame I was in a rush in Beijing and forked over the cash too easily. The price for the suit and the overcoat was altogether 14000 RMB, which is very heavily overpriced for what was ultimately delivered. This was my first and most likely only test into Asian tailoring market and that's why I ended up deciding to just go to a bit higher pricepoint than what the average there is.

I did email Mr. Frye, highlighting the dissatisfaction, but he has yet to reply. In the mean while I would advise anyone thinking of doing business with Senli and Frye to perhaps think again. Based on the experience so far, there aren't too many positives.

Homebound

Sitting at a cafe at the airport in Beijing listening to Jimmy Eat World and shortly heading back to Finland. Finally. China has spawned some mixed feelings; I don't really know what to think. Individual people who I met were very nice and polite, but collectively I just don't see the system working for many reasons, which I may elaborate on in the future. The inability to be able to trust people is also annoying. And ultimately I got the feeling that people don't take pride in their work and they lack the artisan spirit. And that's bad.

Oh, and what is it with airport food: the breakfast here was horrible. You would imagine that it wouldn't be too much to just do things well, but no...

Expectation management

The application processes for Finnish schools has swung into gear recently, as evident from the number of advertisements pasted in buses, trams and metros. This got me thinking about the expectation management aspect, which links directly to the dissatisfaction of e.g. the Occupy movements. Most of the advertisements suggest that the degrees offer a very good first step in a career and go around spurting words like finance and business. Yet, if I do a bit of reflection on the courses I've studied at TKK around business and management, to be honest I've been left a bit wanting. Of course they're fun and fairly light in weight, but I'm not entirely certain that they've significantly contributed to my knowledge or ability to succeed in my career.

The problem, how I see it, in these cases revolves around the fact that only once you've actually started doing real work do you gain enough insights about the real life to be able to ask the right questions and understand the substance of the courses. It's of course fun to talk about innovation management and do case analyses where you get to write general comments on how to tackle a 400 million per year budget of technology development, but let's face it, citing some academics and writing very shallow and general suggestions won't get you too far. Of course they teach you something, but to be honest, if that is the level of post-grad courses in universities, I'm somewhat worried about what they are teaching in vocational institutes or the ammattikorkeakoulu.

I may be repeating myself but I think that prior to having any real experience, the most useful things that students can learn are practical tools that they can apply in different situations. And I'm not talking about innovation funnels and frameworks, but simple things like mathematics, languages, programming, and so on. A certain amount of common sense wouldn't also hurt. Looking back at my degree so far the most useful things I've learned, in no specific order, include:

• The attitude of not getting frightened when encountering a problem. Many of the exercises done during advanced mathematics courses looked very scary, but instead of freezing, just start taking tools and hitting the problem with it.
• The ability to search for tools and concepts to hit problems with, linked with the reading skills to be able to go through even large bodies of literature and try to organize and make sense of the publications to get a grasp of a field.
• Understanding that in many cases when trying to figure out things and solve problems, exact solutions may be irrelevant and more often than not figuring out magnitudes is more than enough. And if more is wanted, you can always dig deeper and narrow down your approximation.
• Programming skill are always beneficial. They teach you a certain type of thinking and approach to problem solving as well as offer you very concrete tools with which to attack larger masses of data, perform simulations, etc. Everyone should know at least a bit of programming, in my opinion.

There are certainly many other things as well, but those were the first to come to mind. Having also worked during most of my degree, school may not have in fact taught me all of those things, but a combination of working and studying has been a very helpful combination. But interestingly enough most of the things I've listed above have not been learned as a result of any specific course. And it is entirely possible to go through a degree program without worrying too much about learning any of the above skills, but this will undoubtedly lead to a situation where the expectations that were created with the degree marketing aren't really met and reality hits in at some point, causing huge dissatisfaction in the people who neither automatically got the career they thought was promised to them nor did they end up learning any of the core skills to increase their competitiveness in the job market.

But naturally school want to market their offerings and attempt to attract as many students to maximize quantity and quality because the incentives for the schools have been set to encourage pushing as many students through the pipelines as quickly as possible. Is this the most optimal situation in the long run for the economy, the students themselves, or the schools? Hardly, but short-term optimization of hastily created and incorrect metrics is often a lot easier than trying to figure out what the optimum situation would be in the long run and how that could be achieved... So, expect more disgruntled students when the batch of this year's accepted students graduate in the next 4-6 years.

Combat fatigue

Combat fatigue is setting in on multiple fronts. My one-year venture into the non-profit sector is almost over and while it very likely will in the longer run be a very useful experience, for now the main theme has been disillusionment. On the other hand my thesis has barely progressed and that annoys me immensely; there's too much data and the algorithms need to be tweaked and at the end of the day it feels as if I have nothing too interesting to say about it anymore. But I would still need to sugarcoat that with a bunch of references to credible sounding articles...

The markets also seem to be getting tired. Greece will eventually fall because it cannot reduce the inertia it has built up. And the European Union cannot increase Greece's competitiveness because that's not what politicians do. Politicians redistribute wealth in a seemingly arbitrary fashion and devise grandiose plans despite the fact that at best they accomplish very little compared to just letting self-organization and emergent designs do the job and at worst they are very counterproductive and create perverse incentives. The bigger they are the harder they fall seems like the most appropriate adage here. But something must be done because something is better than nothing and doing nothing also then spawns the question concerning what these people are actually paid to do.

Kickboxing is one of the more productive things I spend on time these days. If nothing else, at least my physical health is more or less decent. But even this area is problematic: with increased levels of exercise the level of food intake should also rise, but for some reason that's been very difficult. I'm not saying that I eat unhealthily, I'm saying that I just don't eat enough, which is strange. I know I should eat more but I'm just not hungry. Here's an obvious business opportunity for someone: provide a service which allows the customer to specify certain boundary conditions on the food (amount of energy, protein, etc.) and produce and deliver meals which satisfy the conditions. It's too much of a hassle to figure out what to eat.

Fortunately there's a one-month vacation coming up and then it's back to the real world again. Perhaps take up weight training to complement the kickboxing, assuming that the issue with food is sorted out, and then begin advancing on other fronts again...

Housing prices

On even week numbers there is a housing price bubble in Helsinki and on odd week numbers the prices are going to skyrocket in the future as there is no bubble and housing is undervalued. By applying some common sense, the world has seriously gone insane. Or at least Finland has gone insane. With two-room apartments (that is two rooms, not two bedrooms, mind you) running in the region of quarter of a million euros in Helsinki, how can there not be a bubble. If you want an apartment for less than that, it's off to the suburbs for you and even then it might be difficult.

Consider this... If you would like to pay off an annuity loan of a quarter of a million euros with a 2.5% interest rate and about 1000 euros per month, this would take roughly 30 years. That's quite hefty, considering the average income levels, degree of taxation, and other related factors in Finland. How can there not be a bubble?

Furthermore, factor in the shitty economic situation and the fact that the traditional footholds of the Finnish economy, from mobile device driven high-tech to the forest industry, are crumbling. Job security is decreasing, government debt is rising along with budget sizes and nobody seems to be able to tackle the problem in a sustained fashion (increasing the already hefty level of taxes for middle classes will end up kicking the nation in the ass...), how is it possible that regular people feel comfortable taking out loans of said sizes?

There was another genius analyst this week in a local newspaper stating that housing prices are under pressure to go even higher up. His rationale? Because rents are rising and this means that housing prices must also rise. How does this make sense? Could it be that rents are rising as people are getting laid off and must adjust their stance into a more flexible one, driving demand for rentals up? If so, why would the house prices go further up? The only way for the prices to rise would be if consumer confidence in the future is high and cheap credit is available. Confidence shouldn't be too high precisely because of the fact that competitiveness is down (both national and Euro-zone), job security is down (thanks to structural shakeups in the industries) and income levels in relation to current housing prices are seriously low. And availability of cheap credit? That worked out so well the last time around...

Fragility

"If you design systems top-down, they're going to be fragile. If you let systems develop on their own, they're going to be anti-fragile. This is how mother nature works. This is how evolution works."

Some random thoughts on leadership

• If I ever lead any type of project related to "strategies" or whatnots in the future, I'll force everyone in the team to read through the US Marine Corps' MCDP-1 Warfighting document. The thing I really like about the military blokes is that they have a very clear and concise, well focused way of thinking about issues. Clear definitions and clarity of thought. The problem I encounter these days more often than not is that people can't answer simple questions such as what the objective of a project is.
• Related to the above, I think a certain degree of martial arts also supports with clarity and teaches the dynamics of competition really well. Additionally it also teaches that blocking hits with your head hurts and losing isn't too fun.

Something to think about...

If the foreign aid that Finland pays out yearly would be cut altogether along with the funding that goes towards aiding unemployed people find jobs, every unemployed person could be paid about 500 euros more per month. When you consider the impact that the country is making with both of the previously mentioned budgets, I'm starting to think that this would be a very smart move.