Week 13 - Diwali
Some realisations about festivals and what they mean, ludic loops, Seabed 2030, complicated flowcharts, some cool tools & projects, and a random thought on running.
This week ended with a long weekend on the occasion of Diwali. I’d never been much of a festival enthusiast, but observing what it means to people around me has been revelatory.
I chose not to go home this time and I can give you multiple seemingly-reasonable answers to back my decision. However, the truth is that taking the time out to celebrate a festival with my family just wasn’t on my priority list.
As I sit at my table on a sunny Sunday afternoon, with people around me indulging in the festive formalities, I can assure you that my decision to stay back could not have been more wrong.
If you are with your family today, whether that is your blood-related family or a circumstantially-acquired one, spend some time with them; no matter how trivial the events of the day might seem.
Anyhoo, with that being said, let’s move on to the stuff I learned over the course of the past week.
[Learnings] Ludic Loops
Ever played a game where you’d sworn to dedicate only a certain amount of time but ended up playing it for hours? The game might be using a phenomenon called ludic loops: tight, pleasurable feedback loops that stimulate repetitive and, sometimes, compulsive behaviour.
As Douglas Haven from NewScientist writes, Slot machines perfectly illustrate the concept of the ludic loop. They lure people into short cycles of repeated actions using tricks familiar to behavioural psychologists: you do something, the machine responds with lights, jingling sounds and occasionally cash rewards. You do it again. And again, and again (NewScientist Article).
Interestingly, we always believed that dopamine is the chemical output for reward or pleasure but new studies have shown evidence of its role being a lot more subtle. Dopamine is linked to the compulsion of repeating an activity, immaterial of whether the activity is pleasurable or not.
I came across ludic loops through a Wharton Magazine article titled, Why Uber is Using Surprising Psychological Experiments to Motivate its Drivers, which highlights even more psychology tactics that the company uses to keep its drivers hooked.
[Cool Projects] Seabed 2030
Came across this very cool international effort to chart the world’s entire ocean floor titled: The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project. What makes this project a great human aspiration is that we’ve only mapped about 20% of the oceans that surround us.
What the GEBCO project could do in terms of furthering the knowledge of mankind is incredible and I can’t wait for new discoveries to come out.
[Funny] Complicated Flowcharts
While reading up on conversational interface architectures of the project that I’ve been working on, I came across a rather interesting example of why making extensive, overtly complicated flowcharts might not be the best idea.
But then again, making complicated flowcharts is REALLY fun and, as an aesthetic output, one can definitely admire the above image although, for the purpose of clear communication, this might not be the best way to present information.
[Tools] Inbuilt contrast checker on Chrome
Do you know you can look at the contrast rating of any element on a website simply by using Inspect on Chrome? Find out more here.
This is especially useful for people designing content to be put on the web and ensures that (at least) one element in legibility meets the gold standard.
[Cool Projects] Control your entire computer with just your keyboard???
Came across this incredibly smart project by rvaiya on GitHub.
This person divided the entire screen into a grid that is accessible with different shortcuts.
This allows people to use the keyboard as a makeshift mouse pointer for ANY object on the screen, unlike all the other keyboard-accessible tools that are available currently.
Quite a smart way to look at this problem, while the entire world was stuck on one approach.
[Learnings] [Courses] Learning web development
I finally got around to making progress on my endeavour to learn web development from scratch, in order to (someday) build an entire website all by myself. I’ve been learning on freecodecamp.org and while I knew some of the basics that were being taught, here are some new ones that I picked up:
HTML5 has some elements that identify different content areas. These elements make your HTML easier to read and help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and accessibility.
Identify the main section of this page by adding a `<main>` opening tag before the `h1` element, and a `</main>` closing tag after the `p` element.
Nested elements should be placed two spaces further to the right of the element they are nested in (indentation)
You can link to another page with the anchor (a) element. For example, <a href='https://freecodecamp.org'></a> would link to freecodecamp.org.
A target attribute with the value of “_blank” opens the linked document in a new window or tab. For eg: <p>Click here to view more<a target="_blank" href="https://freecatphotoapp.com">cat photos</a>.</p>
<figure> element allows you to add <figCaption> with closing tags to add image caption.
Unordered lists <ul> are bullet points while <ol> are ordered lists with numbers.
<em> or emphasis italicises, whereas <strong> boldens.
The "action" attribute indicates where form data should be sent. For example, < form action="/submit-url"></form> tells the browser that the form data should be sent to the path /submit-url.
I really wish I had paid more attention to computer science and math in school. Would’ve helped so much now. Anyway, trying not delay my learning further and pick this skill up as soon as I can and, hopefully, make a cool personal website like Josh W Comeau.
[Personal] Running goals
I ran a total of 25 km this past week. It’s been rather peaceful to have this time to think about things that you would have otherwise never thought about. Somedays, when I’m struggling to reach the next kilometre, I hum a stanza of some song that I might’ve heard during the day. And then, the stanza just stays in my head and it holds such disproportionate importance as if the stanza is the answer to the universe.
After a long time, I found something that is a good substitute for climbing, for me at least. Activities such as these where your body is repeating an action for long periods of time and you’re thinking, or not thinking at all, allow you to just be. Be with yourself, your body and your mind; without any fights between the three.