
Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout - neilk
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html
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h34t
"So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never
accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching
classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for
pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying
about any importance whatsoever."

The full acceptance of burnout seems important. ie, rather than cling to old
ideas about who you are and what you want, at a certain point it's best to let
go of your ambitions and simply embrace life in whatever way you can. I
remember one conversation I had on a bus in Thailand some years back:

"What do you do?" "Oh, I'm a burnout from China. I mean, I was starting a
company there, and I sort of imploded. Oh, the business didn't fail, it's
still running... _I_ just failed. At being me."

It was the first time in my adult life that I _didn't_ have an impressive
story to tell about what I was achieving.

Failure, instead of driving people away (as I'd feared), led to more empathy
and deeper relationships. And instead of harming my career, it gave me the
freedom to explore my interests without the pressure to achieve, which helped
me figure out what I really enjoy. I'm now working crazy hours again, but it's
so well aligned with my values and interests that I rarely feel stressed. (And
I take better care of myself, because I know what can happen if I don't.)

~~~
exch
I've solved my burnout problems slightly differently. I too made the conscious
choice to stop pressuring myself into performing above and beyond what I was
able to deliver and decided that my programming work was hence forth strictly
going to be done as a hobby. I stopped working in IT completely because it
simply was too stressful and no fun at all anymore.

I decided that it was time for a very radical change. So I deliberately went
and looked for a profession I would otherwise never even have considered. A
friend of mine invited me to a book binding workshop. The old fashioned kind
that is. Before that I have never ever done anything with my hands. I was
utterly convinced I didn't have this sort of thing in me at all, but I gave it
a try anyway because this was exactly the kind of radical change I was looking
for. I fell in love with it immediately and have never looked back again. It
turned out to be such a wonderful and fulfilling job. No more stress, no more
over-ambition. Instead I get to learn a fascinating profession and I go home
every day feeling utterly and completely satisfied.

I do still write code, but strictly in my spare time and strictly those
projects I know I will enjoy doing. This ensures that it will always remain as
much fun as it was when I first started out.

------
noonespecial
All the people I've ever met seem whom I'd consider in the genius category
seem to share this trait. They see ordinary things that everyone else
overlooks and wonder about them in a playful and curious way. Plates wobbling,
apples falling from trees, or even as PG so eloquently put it, "looking at
Maxwell's equations and saying, what the hell is going on here?"

Its like driving a wedge into a tiny crack in the unknown and splitting it
open to reveal all of the cool stuff.

------
sharmajai
I read 'Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman' few years back. I can recall bits
and pieces of this prose, but after two not-so-popular android apps - made in
part time, the ideas for the next app were drying out, partially due to the
fear of failure.

I think I needed this more than any other time, thank-you for posting this.

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pjscott
This is completely off-topic, but I've been seeing this weird style of
quotation marks occasionally for a while now. It uses two backticks at the
beginning, and two apostrophes at the end: ``quoted''. If you're not using
TeX, doing that will generally look pretty weird. So why do we still see it?

~~~
kragen
From the 1970s until about 2001, the common fonts on Unix systems drew those
two characters as something approximating ‘ and ’. This gave us Unix users a
simple and easy way to put ‘single’ or “double” quotes into our man pages, our
web pages, our TeX documents, pretty much everywhere we would put text.

Unfortunately, the stupid losers at Microsoft and Apple never picked up on
this, and eventually the glyph for the apostrophe was standardized as that
ugly vertical piece of shit you probably see on your screen right now, which
comes from the typewriter days when you would overstrike it with a period in
order to make a shitty exclamation point, thus eliminating the need for one
key on your cheap-shit typewriter; and the backtick was standardized as being
an accent grave with no fucking letter underneath it, which makes a lot of
sense when you're printing things out on a fucking dot-matrix printer with
backspace, but not on a VT100, let alone a fucking window system.

Well, in the early 2000s, the folks at the X Consortium decided to standardize
on making X-Windows apostrophes look like the shitty Microsoft Windows
apostrophes, instead of waiting for the douchenozzles at Microsoft to catch up
to the ASCII typography we had in the 1970s. So now instead of having shitty
quotes only on Microsoft and Macintosh systems, we have shitty quotes
everywhere, unless you use non-ASCII characters. (To be fair, _all_ the glyphs
looked shitty on X back then, so it's not like we were giving up some kind of
Caslonian paradise.) The saving grace is that you actually _can_ use non-ASCII
characters now, and they will work everywhere with no problems. They look like
this: âHello, world!â .

Anyway, the reason you still sometimes see the old kind of ASCII quote marks
is that not every fucking document on the web gets thrown away in six months,
because some of us fucking try to write shit that people will still want to
read ten or twenty or a hundred years from now. When you see ``this'', you're
looking back in time, to the days when characters were bytes and men were men.
I mean, _you’re_ looking back—oh, fuck it.

~~~
pekinb
what work do your "fuck"s and "shit"s do?

~~~
adamfeldman
They could be a typographer who is very legitimately angry at the whole state
of affairs

------
andrewheins
While on a significantly smaller scale, this is exactly why I program in my
off-time. Nobody's going to make a lot of money or solve an important problem
by messing around with an app that creates fake iPhone SMS conversations, but
it keeps me sane.

It's the same reason the pomodoro technique is so effective, or why
productivity actually goes down under a highly regimented work environment.
Creativity comes from fooling around, you can't force it.

------
akamaka
Feynman's description of his curiousity and eagerness to experiment most of
all reminds me of Steve Wozniak describing his early years!

------
sigurrostyp
Make things fun, how simple, but yet so true

------
Devilboy
I know this is kinda off-topic but could someone explain why the wobble rate
and the spin rate of the plate would have a 2 to 1 ratio? Is this somehow
related to the spin numbers of elementary particles?

~~~
splat
It's a little complicated, although not so complicated that it has anything to
do with the spin of elementary particles.

The basic reason is due to perpendicular axis theorem. If you have a plate,
there is some moment of inertia about the axis perpendicular to the plate, and
a different moment of inertia about any axis in the plane of the plate. The
perpendicular axis theorem says that the moment of inertia about the axis
perpendicular to the plate is twice that about the axis in the plane of the
plate.

Now, suppose you attach a rod through the plate, but at a bit of an angle, and
then you spin the plate around this rod. As you can imagine, it'll take some
effort to keep the plate spinning about the rod; it'll be rattling around
trying to spin in a different way. Because you're not spinning it about any
axis of symmetry, the angular velocity vector is not lined up with the angular
momentum vector and so it requires some torque to keep the plate spinning
around the axis you want. But if you're just throwing a plate up in the air,
you can't exert any torque on it---it's just going on its own. So if the plate
is spinning about some funny axis, it has to do so in a special way in order
that the angular momentum vector lines up with the angular velocity vector.

So, draw a diagram of this lopsided plate turning around a rod. The angular
velocity will have some component perpendicular to the plate and some
component parallel to the plate so that the overall angular velocity is
parallel to the rod. Let's suppose that the angular momentum vector's
component perpendicular to the plate is exactly as long as the component of
the angular velocity perpendicular to the plate. Because the moment of inertia
in the plane of the plate is half that perpendicular to the plate, the length
of the component of angular momentum in the plane of the plate is half the
length of the component of angular velocity in the plane of the plate. As you
can see, the angular velocity vector is not lined up with the angular momentum
vector.

Now we decouple the plate from the rod so that it can also spin about an axis
perpendicular to the plate. If we spin the plate about this axis backwards at
half the speed it was originally spinning about this axis, the length of the
component of angular momentum perpendicular to the plate is now half the
length of the same component of the angular velocity. And so the angular
momentum vector is now lined up with the rod that we're spinning the overall
system around. But because the angular momentum vector and the angular
velocity vector are parallel, there's no need to exert any torque on the
system to keep it going. So we can remove the rod entirely and the plate will
wobble in the air in a ratio of 2:1.

~~~
codelieb
For a similar, but more complete, description (with figures), see "Feynman's
Tips on Physics," Section 4-10, The Spinning Disk, and "The Feynman Lectures
on Physics," Volume I, Section 20-4 Angular Momentum of a Spinning Body.

Mike Gottlieb Editor, The Feynman Lectures on Physics Coauthor, Feynman's Tips
on Physics

