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I read this blog post of a professor who my advisor’s collaborate with. I really liked it and in particular I really liked the message in this video that he shared. In short it talks about how we often have much better taste in a subject before we can make things that are quality within the subject. For example I think I have pretty good taste in music, but the music I make is not very good (yet). The point in this message is that you have to spend time making many things first to build up your skills to become an expert in the material. This can take years! You just need to trust the process, create a lot of things by doing consistent work each day, and trust the process and results will come.

I also chatted with a friend last night and learned about how taffy machines are actually quite complicated! The proper mixing of taffy can be thought of mathematically and analyzed. A professor at UW Madison actually dove into the patent history to understand how they solved the problem then, and then offered a mathematical solution to the problem. Here’s a good entry article and here is an academic article on the subject (I have not read the latter).

Daily Listening

This song is a bop.

Daily Reading

Read a bit of The Rings of Saturn. He was describing a large summer house created by a rich businessperson (pretty incredible list of construction projects he was involved in) in order to incorporate themself into the higher society of England. The house apparently made it hard to discern what the boundaries between indoors and outdoors were and I thought that was an interesting design to think about; how do you design a space so that you cannot tell when you have left the interior?