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The other day, Amy brought home some Halloween knick-knacks shaped like skeletons doing yoga. She set them up on the dining room table, and then stood back and addressed them: "The skeleton in me honors the skeleton in you."

I love this on several levels, because paradoxically, death and darkness can be very funny.

If you're not familiar, she was paraphrasing the Sanskrit phrase 'namaste', which is usually translated something like "The divine spirit in me honors the divine spirit in you". Yoga culture uses 'namaste' as both a greeting and a goodbye, like 'ciao'.

But the 'divine spirit' borders on woo-woo, doesn't it? Mystical vagueness attempts to invoke awe at the cosmos, but it can also provide excellent cover for bullshit.

A skeleton is the opposite of vagueness. Literally hard and literally inside of us. Even the metaphor the skeleton represents cuts like crystal: when the living flesh falls away, this becomes visible.

At Halloween, values get flipped. All year, we worship light and life. But the Sun disappears and the world stops growing, and for one brief period we acknowledge their complimentary qualities.

We constantly have darkness and death around us. They are part of life as much as light and birth. A world of pure light without darkness would blind us just as surely as the night. We require death to live: even the strictest vegan diet still requires the destruction of cells. All the organic matter that makes up every living creature was created by something else that lived before.

A false association between darkness and humorlessness gets exposed. A form of humor absolutely exists within darkness and death – just a subtle, rare form. While my brother was dying of cancer, we shared a couple priceless laughs. I worked with some Ukranian folks during the invasion, and God bless the Eastern Europeans, they've elevated this to a fine art. "The invasion has been easy to deal with," they joked, "because we still have Covid to take our minds off it."

Zen tradition expects masters to write a poem before they die. One master was procrasting. As he became weaker, his students worried more that he hadn't written anything yet. One morning they found he had passed on, but there was a note scribbled next to his bed:

Birth is thus,
Death is thus,
Poem or no poem
What's the fuss?

Laugh until you cry, cry until you laugh. Savor the darkness along with the light. Embrace death as part of life.

Have a Happy Halloween.

We are living in a crisis of epistemology, but that's a so dry. Flat Eartherism ('FE'), while useless as a factual theory, provides a really excellent illustration taken as epistemological performance art.

How do we know what's true? Epistemology is the study of that. You may think it's outrageous to give FE any consideration, but that's the audaciousness: it turns out to be surprisingly difficult for an ordinary person to prove the earth is round without special resources.

With our own senses, we can tell the Earth must be curved. As a little kid I used to watch the ocean with binoculars. When ships came in over the horizon, first I'd see the antennae, then the bridge, the deck, and finally the hull.

But curved and round are not the same. Not proof.

With a modest telescope, like the ones Galileo built by hand in the 17th century, you can see Saturn and its moons are all round. Our moon is obviously round, and with a dark filter, you can see sunspots rotate.

Why would the Earth be shaped differently from all the other planets? FE doesn't even bother to try to answer the question. But Newton also skipped the explanation when he invented the theory of gravity – "Hypotheses non fingo," he wrote, 'I feign no explanation'.

A huge difference: Newton's theory simplified the model and provided hella useful answers, where FE adds complications and answers nothing. But today, while we can measure and predict gravity accurately, we still can't explain it. Point is, a lack of explanation doesn't prove roundness.

The ancient Greeks came up with a method – "geo-metry" literally means "measuring the Earth". Measure the angle of shadows cast at noon in two locations, very far apart north-south. The difference between the angles divided by 360 equals the distance between the locations divided by the Earth's circumference. Reverse the equation, to get a number for the circumference, you'll find the value is incompatible with a curved planet, but not a round one.

By itself, the circumference can't prove anything either, as the distance between locations could be manipulated. FE says there's a vast conspiracy to distort all references to the circumference – maps, car odometers, airplane and ship mileage, all altered.

This claim can be disproven, but you have to stake your life on it.

Walk between those two locations and count your steps. Then learn the geometry and perform the calculation using your measurement. Or, invest a lifetime of effort to become the type of person who can travel into space – either an astronaut or a billionaire passenger.

At this point though, you can't be considered "an ordinary person" any more. You would have done something remarkable, which would change you. FE represents an epistemological barrier – the boundary where common sense and scientific truth separate.

If we're fully honest, we don't think of the heliocentric model in our everyday life. In the morning, we describe what happens as "sunrise", not "earth turn". When we move, whether it's by legs, bicycle, car, boat or plane, we don't think of travel as being a curve across the surface of a sphere. We think of it as a straight line on a flat plane – like a map.

A phrase popular right now says, 'believe the science'. That's not even wrong. The motto of Newton's Royal Society is 'Nullius In Verba' – take no one's word for it. You're supposed to treat the science skeptically, to try to poke holes in it.

Practice uncertainty through audacious epistemology.

Software development is based on computer science, but it is an art form. One thing any artist has to learn is how to manage anxiety while under pressure to deliver.

In software development, just as the rest of life, people often don't ask for what they want, they ask for what they think they can get. Someone makes a bizarre feature request. You ask some probing questions and find out the real need is totally different. Why didn't they ask for that? They thought it would be too much, so they invented an alternative which they imagine (often incorrectly) would be easier.

Another form of mis-directed request: Anxiety Transfer.

Someone's nervous about the project. Big promises have been made. No one checked with development whether the promises were feasible. But a delivery date has already been specified in a contract.

Understandably, what this person wants is to not be nervous anymore. But they're seeking to relieve their anxiety in the wrong way.

The best way to relieve anxiety is some form of physical exercise. I ride a bicycle and do yoga for exactly these reasons. A long walk can do the trick too.

Instead, this person wants me to be nervous. It may be unconscious, or they may be aware of it and feel bad about it. But the projection can be intense.

Much like the bizarre feature request, they want developers to feel this way for the wrong reason. They think that a freaked-out developer will frantically work nights and weekends to get the features done by the deadline. And they're often right about the overtime schedule, to the point there's an industry term for it: a 'death march'.

What they're wrong about is the result the death march produces. Freaked-out developers working in the middle of the night produce bad code. You might technically get all the features you wanted, but they're like chunks embedded in a pile of crap. Along with the features come bugs, a compromised user experience, and all the other reasons why most software sucks.

In order to write good code, a developer has to be in a calm state of mind. I have had to work on the ability to resist anxiety transfer. Easier said than done, right? Here's some methods that have worked for me.

Instead of focusing on what "should" get done, focus on what can get done. Figure out the most important element, get that done first. Put some fallback or checkpoint in place so that item won't slip back to un-done. Only then move onto to next most important item.

Communicate with consistent candor. Anxiety gets transferred when you implicitly buy into the transferer's assumption, that it is not only desirable but possible to satisfy an unrealistic request. To stay calm in an unrealistic situation, you need to openly describe what's unrealistic about it.

And last, be prepared to call a bluff: some folks will hint (or say straight out) that you'd be able to do this if you were a better developer. And of course the related subtext that if you don't, maybe you'll be fired. But unless they can find someone better than you to do the work right now, then you are actually the best developer in the world who is currently available. The hypothetical better developer will contribute very little if you get canned.

Assert your right to stay calm, for both your own well-being and the quality of the work.

Physics explains a tremendous amount about how we see the world, but it has limits. One mystery physics can shed very little light on: why time seems to go forward. And it turns out this mystery has immense implications to how we live our lives.

Football season has started, and games are filmed from many different angles. Sometimes when a scene is re-played, we'll see the film go in reverse.

Like the re-wind, the equations of physics are reversible. They work just as well whether you define time as going forwards or backwards.

When the quarterback throws, energy stored in his muscles is transferred to the ball. A tiny bit is lost as heat from air resistance as the ball travels, but most of the energy is still within the ball when the receiver catches it.

If you've ever caught a ball thrown by someone who really knows what they're doing, you feel the energy. A stinging slap against the skin of your hands, immediately followed by a shock traveling up the bones of your arms. Less felt but still present, the energy transfers down through your feet.

It's equally valid to describe stored energy coming out of the ground, travelling through the receiver's skeleton into the ball, which then flies backwards (absorbing heat out of the air) into the passer's hand. The energy then fuses the carbohydrate back into the passer's muscles.

(If this seems impossible, remember everything has to go in reverse. The game timer ticks up instead of down, a hot dog comes out of someone's mouth and goes back to concession to un-cook, the grass on the field un-grows as light streams out of it back to the Sun, etc etc).

Reversability holds true from the highest to lowest levels. A photon strikes an electron, the energy excites the it, and a tiny moment later, another photon gets re-emitted.

Our Milky Way galaxy is on a collision course to hit the Andromeda galaxy in a few million years, but it's just as valid to say that the galaxies already collided, and now are rebounding away from each other. We could go on to say that the energy from that collision will go on to fling the Milky Way into particles of dust, eventually collapsing into a single point – the "gnaB giB" in reverse.

Some physicists have dedicated their careers to finding any sign of the 'arrow of time' – some tiny clue why time appears to go one direction and not the other. Bless their hearts, they're not having very much luck.

In our everyday lives, it seems there must be some difference, because we feel time pass. But it also seems like my house stays in the same place and the Sun moves over it.

Today, we only know the opposite is true because of hundreds of years of difficult work. Work which caused tremendous doubt, grief, anger, as people had to gradually let go of what seemed obvious and accept what was inescapable.

If time is truly and completely reversible, it means today is tomorrow's yesterday. There would be no difference between past, present and future.

Only moments of experience. Just mysteries.

A paradox: spending the effort to keep any system in good working condition at all times takes less effort than allowing any part of the system to fall into disrepair. Like most paradoxes, a subtle twist explains why: false warnings are worse than no warnings.

As a kid, my parents had a '78 Chevy Malibu that started having a dead battery once a week or so. My father couldn't find the source of it. Then one night, he came home in our other car during a new moon, and in the pitch black New Hampshire country darkness, he saw a faint light coming from inside the Malibu.

Turns out a door switch had failed, and the interior lights were staying on even when the door was closed. But the dome light was burnt out, so only the so-called 'courtesy lights' – tiny bulbs built into the door panels – were staying on, draining the battery very slowly.

If he'd replaced the dome light when it burnt out, he would have noticed the door switch failure instantly. But allowing one seemingly unimportant part of the system to fall into disrepair caused another very important part – the charging system! – to fail in a weird and super hard to find way.

I've seen very similar things happen in software when developers tolerate faulty error messages. "Oh, ignore that warning, it's not correct." This seems harmless but can make other problems harder to find. If you don't want to spend the time to fix a warning, then shut it off – a false warning is much worse than no warning at all.

Police say that messy cars get broken into more often. Thieves know that if there's a mess in the backseat, the chances something valuable is mixed in there are much higher. In a messy house, you'll spend much longer looking for misplaced items.

Your doctor will tell you that staying fit will keep you from getting sick or injured. Part of this involves the ability to 'hear' warnings from your body. If you constantly have some discomfort due to lack of fitness, it makes it harder to notice a new discomfort from some other cause.

There's some cosmic truth of thermodynamics here. Systems in good order tend to stay in order. Systems in disrepair tend to fail.

Keep all your systems in good order. If you can't keep up with good order, you probably have too many systems.

Whoever names these things decreed September as the unfortunately-acronymed SPAM, Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. Kidding aside, I was grateful when I heard our local NBC affiliate would dedicate an entire 6pm newscast to the subject. I decided I would join their "Let's Talk About It" campaign in writing.

Rather than sorrow or morbidity, I felt an immense sense of peace and relief. Just the idea of talking openly about suicide makes me feel better.

But actually putting words down has proven more challenging. Although we have freedom of speech in America, a powerful taboo shields the subject. Even with the official encouragement of a network news program, I still feel like I'm going to get in trouble for bringing it up.

Writing – putting words down – is a form of ending. Suicide poses us such difficulty because it is an ending, and we have no idea how to talk about endings.

I met a coach named Deb Shannon who blew my professional and spiritual mind with a simple question. When starting a job, have you ever had a conversation with your new employer about how and when that employment will end? I've never even heard of this happening. This conspicuous silence during the hiring process implies you will stay at that company forever, even while everyone involved knows that's not true.

Humans are fundamentally story-telling creatures. Instead of sharing tales around a flickering campfire, now we stare at a screen and let it do all the talking. But a look at our stories shows our fear: they never end. Sequel franchises dominate the movies. 'Grey's Anatomy' is in its eighteenth season. Even a show as realistic as 'This Is Us' buries death under misleading layers of flashbacks and foreshadowing.

We struggle to talk about suicide and death because we're uncomfortable with endings. And without a concept of endings, the middles we find ourselves in are muddled in confusion. Not just software and entertainment, but all the spiritual and moral messes of our time.

But as cliche as it sounds, every ending is a beginning. Only once a story is finished, its last word put down, can it take on a life of its own.

Let's talk about it.

I'm returning to a regular writing schedule, publishing every Saturday.

Part of the process of writing requires figuring out what to write about. That's hard for me. There's also the mechanical discipline of it: just writing a lot, staying on a schedule. Making a habit of it. Practice.

Adding new habits comes easily to me, due to a mildly traumatic childhood.

At about 6, my family went on a road trip. My father locked the keys in the car. We got home safe eventually, but had to wait for a locksmith, a grueling amount of time for a little kid with nothing to do.

After that day, every time we were getting out of the car, I'd ask him, "Do you have the keys?" A couple times, he started to get annoyed, until once he did not in fact have the keys. After that, he grumblingly tolerated me asking.

Later they promoted me to latchkey kid, and I knew how important those keys were. To this day, every time I step out the front door, my left hand instinctively goes to my pants pocket. To make sure I have them, because once in a while, I don't!

At some point, the behavior spread, from the specific 'don't get locked out' to the general 'small steps help avoid disasters'.

Small steps have spread into all areas of my life. I keep my car tires at proper inflation all the time, so when I head to a rock 'n roll gig, I know the chances of getting a flat are much less. Maybe I still get a flat, once in a million. But the car handles better and gets its maximum fuel efficiency when at the recommended pressure. Win-win.

There's that book called 'The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People', maybe 'habits' could be replaced by 'obsessive compulsions'. What's the difference between the two?

Whether you like the result. How your peers, friends, family like it. Whether it makes you more effective.

Habits are just obsessive compulsions with beneficial results. Fine tune your OCD into OCB.

Physics makes a big deal about wave-particle duality. In some cases light seems to behave like a particle, others a wave.

The same thing is true of your life though.

About ten years ago, the Transit authority in Boston released an anonymous set of rider data. Some analysis found that from even as little as two weeks' of information, they could predict a rider's location above 90% accuracy.

How can that be possible? Well, if you're at the same location on two consecutive Monday mornings, chances are good that you'll be there on the other Mondays too. Some people don't work office hours – say, bartenders and nurses – but they have their own cycles. Individually, they seem unpredictable, but in huge quantities, patterns emerge.

The artist Ray Collins takes amazing pictures of ocean waves. Zoom in close on any part of the wave, you'll see it's never smooth, but made up of smaller wave patterns, droplets… particles.

The camera only records particles. Videos are made up of moving pictures. But still, we know it's a wave. We recognize the pattern.

In huge quantities, patterns emerge.

A bus rolls by, you see a face staring out the window that doesn't see you. Sometimes they're on a once in a lifetime voyage, but mostly they're on their Thursday commute.

We talk about waves individually, but there's no wave that comes from nowhere. The most rogue wave coming out of calm seas depends on the action of other particles.

We talk about lives individually, but there's no life that comes from nowhere. We're all waves, being directed by other particles.

I wish I knew everyone's nickname
All their slang and all their sayings
Every way to show affection
How to dress to fit the occasion
And I wish we all waved
All waved
I wish we all
I wish we all
I wish we all
Waved

I'm more and more convinced that everyone suffers an equal amount. It seems some people suffer less than others, but everyone suffers in different ways.

What matters is how you choose to suffer.

I practice a lot of discipline to stay fit. 60 miles a week on bike, 15 minutes of yoga twice a day, pullups for upper body strength. My wife once teased me that I eat like a Buddhist monk – lots of fruit, veggies, brown rice.

Sitting on the couch eating junk food seems easy. Until one day you can't get up, back pain, bad knees, out of breath.

You're going to suffer either way. But you get to choose.

If you have a lot of close friends, and live a long healthy life, you're going to wind up going to a lot of funerals. But most people would prefer that to the alternative of loneliness.

Some people seem to have an easy life. Mom and Dad still married, grandparents and the family dog still healthy, popular in high school, got into their top college on the first try. But these people, bless their hearts, have extreme limitations in subtle ways. They can't relate to real suffering, and when something truly rough finally happens to them, they collapse.

I'm convinced that 'easy' is always wrong. A good life comes from choosing to do the hard thing.

Not everything hard is good, but everything good is hard.

Do it the hard way.

Ernest Hemingway wrote a short story called, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber".

What a title. It's a story in itself. It seems like a spoiler, because we know how things turn out for old Frank, don't we?

But that's how the story ends for all of us. We just get distracted by the 'short' part, and forget about 'happy'.

In order to have a long happy life, you have to have a short happy life.

It's easy to say, I'll be happy when I'm successful. But Hemingway was tremendously successful, and tremendously unhappy. An amazing career, affairs with beautiful women, wealth and fame, respect, and starting a family of his own weren't enough, and he took his own life.

He ate from the trough of success with both hands, and it still couldn't make him happy. You can't say I'll be happy when. You have to be happy now.

In the story, Francis has a moment of enlightenment when he's put in danger, and has to act without thinking. We can be distracted from thinking about ourselves for a minute. But distractions all wear off and we have to pursue another.

It's common to say you should live your life like every day is your last. That's not a life, that's a bender. Constant gratification results in ill health and eventually must end.

Live like it's everyone else's last day. What would you do if you knew, tomorrow, that person will not be coming back? You'd do something special for your loved ones, you'd make that change in your life you know would make them proud, try to make the world a better place, care for passing strangers.

Some gratification is obligatory. We have to enjoy ourselves or we'll never be happy, and what's the point of living if you don't appreciate it?

Find gratitude in serving others.

You can have it this second – thinking about others' well-being is instant and free. It wears off but it never wears out – I always feel good when I think about others' well-being. No one can take it away from you.

Work for the future but don't worry about it. Flip the script like Obi-Wan: if death should strike you down short, you defeat it because you die happy.

Live a short happy life as many times as you can.