So I was having a rough time an hour or so back and called the wife, and told her so, and that I’d been stuck in this vicious circle of negativity for a while now. In response, she said there was this nice TED talk that she had seen on the topic recently, and I should watch it too. And so she sent me this:
It’s a nice TED talk, but I think she uses too many words to describe what she needs to describe. It’s just not “quick enough” (check out the wife’s blog post on distractions caused by professors being too slow in class. She only talked about the throughput of words here, but I think it’s deeper and extends to throughput of information content) and it doesn’t need ten minutes to communicate what she has said here.
And so I thought about how I could convey the message better. I realised that the entire talk above could be condensed into one little finite automaton. And then I drew it (using the Paintbrush App on my Mac).
I must say I’m feeling much better already! Tell me if this is a good representation, though!