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New book launched! Hello all. Just a short note to let you know that we (Alberto Frigo and myself) just published a book entitled "

#quantified self

Chekhov, moments and privacy

I was recently re-reading one of Chekhov’s short stories, The Lady with the Dog, and found two paragraphs I’d missed the first time I read it, about this time last year. Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov (Mitya) and Anna Sergeyevna meet in a small coastal town and have an affair. She owns a Pomeranian dog.

The first quote reminded me of life-logging and the importance of moments.

“At Oreanda they sat on a…

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Surprises and the structure of external lifelogging memory

(screenshot of Dublin lifelog meetup at zalando Rami Albatal)

I was recently invited to give a talk at the Dublin lifelogging meetup, by Rami Albatal and Cathal Gurrin. The focus was on memory and how it can be affected by life logging. To prepare for the talk I tried a little “experimento” a month before, to see what I most often forget about and how my “external memories” remind me of things.

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My best books of 2016

I read less this year (19 books), compared to last year (40 books). But I think 2015was a bit hectic, a bit of a race to see how many I could actually read. This year the books were a bit longer, on average 372 pp compared to 295 pp in 2015. So, if the number of books read in 2016 was approximately half those in 2015, the number of pages was around 64% of 2015 (total of 7429 pages in 2016 /11800…

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Time-lapsing the day away

Every morning for the past month I made a time-lapse video of my life-logging photos . It’s become a habit, like watching an X-ray of the day before.

To do that I used Time-lapse Tool, a free program. You just open a new project, point it to the folder you want and decide how long you want the video to be. I decided on 2 minutes. Any less and the day seemed to fly by and I couldn’t see too much…

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"Baker-blog-breakdown"

“Baker-blog-breakdown”

In his book The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker (who also wrote The Mezzanine, which I’ve mentioned before), creates Paul Chowder, a poet who is compiling an anthology. Near the beginning there is a brilliant sequence of how Paul goes about choosing his favorite poems. He realizes that the good poems really have only one excellent part, one stanza or even one line. Then, within that line, there is…

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Guest post: The 10 Stoic Precepts

(This is a guest post from Alberto, a brother in arms, a stoic quantifier with an inspiring 36 year quantifying project)

by Alberto Frigo

In this essay I present what I believe to be the 10 Stoic precepts. These precepts are recurrent topics found in the letters that Seneca wrote to his friends. These precepts bring forward the figure of a stoic. They are meant to generally address him towards…

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#education #quantified self #writing

New pathways: building memories with life-logging photos

A crosswalk, in April.

A while back, at the beginning of 2015, I was flipping through a Nature magazine and ran into a paper entitled, “A global strategy for road building”*. It was one of those papers that sounds interesting, so I ripped it out of the magazine, filed it, and then promptly forgot about it.

Determined not to use the file of “interesting papers to read” on my desktop as a…

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Quantified kidney stones

Last Tuesday August 2nd, I got a sore back in the middle of the night, around 3h00. It was on my lower left, where I sometimes get lumbar pain, but this time it felt strange, like a deeper numbing sensation. I also felt a bit nauseous. The day before we had flown from Madrid to Montreal and I thought the pain was probably from sitting down for 8 hours while holding onto our one year old. I took…

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Fragments

A life logging camera narrates quite little. It’s more about fragments. No clear story, no narrator to create a narrative fallacy, just pieces that ask to be collated.

I bumped into this after scanning some images from my morning commute. A glimpse of all the things our ego tunnels ignore.

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Quantified time horizons: a criminal mind?

Figure 1. Blurred scan of my “weeks ahead” page in a log book, with appointments per day for the next six weeks (L being Monday, Lunes in Spanish) .

According to Akerlundet al. (2016), in a recent publication in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), the decision to commit a crime depends on how one views time. Most criminals having very short time horizons, where the immediate…

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My take on the working time budget of professor Todorovsky

Dimitar Todorovsky has written two reports (1997, 2014) in the journal Scientometrics (impact factor of 2.27, not bad!) about his time budget as a university professor, including different phases (new teacher, director of department etc). I first heard out about the 2014 paper via Ernesto Rodríguez (twitter @eramirez) from Quantified self (http://quantifiedself.com/). Here I summarize what I…

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#education #quantified self

Narrative clock

I have several stacks of New Yorker magazines at home, been a subscriber for years. It’s a bit of a problem though, to get rid of them, they keep piling up. Each one is almost like a work of art, the poems, the fiction, the artwork and the interesting articles. I try to throw out one year’s worth every New Year’s, or give them away somehow, but now I have stacks from 2012, 2013 and 2014, lying…

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Quantified self squared and Holy week

These past few days in Spain, during Holy week, large wooden floats come out of wide church doors, carried by hidden costaleros (men underneath the structures, with cloths on their shoulders and backs). Apparently these things can weigh up to a tonne (2000 pounds) and need 20-50 men (yes, always men), underneath, to bear the weight and presumably their sins. The news today is that a team of…

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Logger love

You came in a small box, a few days before I expected you, looking expensive, compact, wearable, simple yet already complex, ready to be held, jacketed, pocketed, all mine. Nothing too elaborate, your unique connection, your critical point, which has a secret link to the rest of me, so much so that it sometimes surprises me. I want to live with you, I want you to help me to be a better person, to…

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Walking to the end of class

Recently, while searching the scientific literature for studies on the usefulness of journaling, I read a paper by Greenwood (1998)*, which refers to single and double loop learning. In the former, when we attempt to do something and it fails, we pick ourselves up, and obstinately try to obtain the same goal using other means. Double loop is when we pick ourselves up, but before trying to use a…

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Reviewing life-logging photos

When I try to recall what happened on a given day, using my working memory, the process seems to go as follows: I give a name to the day (usually a day of the week), and then wonder where I was, who I was with, and what I did in general. The results are generally less than impressive. If it was recent, say three days ago, I may recall two to five locations, four to eight people and maybe five to…

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