New endeavors

For the handful of you who are not reading this blog for the first time, welcome back. For those landing here for the first time, welcome. For those who decided to avoid Twitter during the #WorldCup and #LeBronsPersonalDecisions, The US team is still subpar and LeBron has chosen Chipotle over Qdoba because Chipotle can "put together a more complete burrito bowl for him."

"Uh, Mr. President, sir, can you please not point at my beans?" 

You can get entirely caught up with this entire blog by reading just a few (mildly) entertaining posts about iPhones, tattoos, and how dangerous it is to find good Memphis barbecue. I’ve decided to dust off the blog (by hitting the Forgot My Password button) and start writing again.

I originally used the blog to chronicle my road trip to San Francisco to embark on a PhD program at UCSF; now I’d like to chronicle the next chapter of my life. If you know me, you might be asking me, “Kurt, what do you mean new chapter? Are you already done with your program in only 2 years?"

Does a bear shit in your hammock?

Okay fine. Do most bears shit in your hammock?

That's right, no, I did not complete my PhD program. Yet.

And that’s the whole of it, more or less. I will reserve the details for future posts, but I will be taking year off from school to pursue other interests. In the meantime, I will be reevaluating my relationship with science and will be open to finding a better fit for my thesis research in the future. I am happy that I am living in San Francisco, and the BMS program has been nothing but a positive influence and support structure for me during these past two years.

Which, besides some struggles with the science, were an awesome two years. A lot happened. For one, I forgot how to cut my hair (and the NHL playoffs did the rest):

I think I knew how bad that picture was going to look. 

I also started playing disc golf all the time:

Not pictured: beers, ethics and mountain goats.

The New York Rangers made an incredible run to the Stanley Cup Final, only to lose the series 4-1. 

Henrik Lundqvist (bottom) after learning he lost lost the King of Swag 
award to Dwyane Wade at the Kid’s Choice Sports Awards. 

Okay, so not everything was good. But lastly, and by no means least, I became an uncle. I am so proud of my brother-in-law and sister, who recently brought Nora into the world:

Is she already holding a little iPhone up to her ear? 

So all in all, a lot of good has happened to me the past couple years. I sometimes wish SF was closer to my family and it didn’t require a transcontinental flight to see them. I sometimes miss Pittsburgh. But I love it out here. It is a vibrant, diverse community with a positive attitude. On top of that, I’ve met a lot of great people and I don’t know what I’d do without them.

Probably dress up less. This was an 80s party.

I’ve decided to take a year off, during which I’m going to pursue the development of a speed reading technology that I am creating. So far, I have taken all the right steps (with the help and support of many!) during the development of this idea, and it is rapidly progressing. I have big hopes for it, and I think it can go places. However, as I have learned all too well at the science bench, success is seldom, and much of life is spent mitigating failure. So we’ll see.

So what am I creating? I’d like to think I’m going to revolutionize reading, but I think I’m just a fringe participator in the revolution that has already started. This past spring, a Boston-based start-up called Spritz came public with a speed reading technology that quickly trended on social media. Spritz touted super fast reading speeds and headlines caught readers with “Read Harry Potter in 90 minutes!” and “Read it twice in 180 minutes!” Or even the new advertising scheme: “Read like Lucy!” Well, why in the world would anyone want to read this fast?

Just think how many backs of shampoo bottles you could get through. 

I, too, was skeptical of Spritz’s claims, but I've started to buy in. The technology of presenting one word at a time in rapid succession has been around since the 1960s, but has gained popularity more recently due to our heavy use of smartphones, tablets, and now smart watches. Spritz claims to have maximized the efficiency of the technology by offsetting each word appropriately so that our eyes can focus on the correct portion of the word without moving at all. This, then, reduces eye movements nearly completely, and allows for rapid speed with improved comprehension (keep in mind, however, that there is a speed limit for every person). If you’d like to learn more, or try out the technology, head to the Spritz official website or Readsy to Spritz any text of PDF file.

The highly touted uses for this technology have been email, news, and other productivity tasks. I can't wait for this; instead of ignoring your coworkers' email and leaving it unopened in the dark recesses of your inbox, you can now read it at 45,000 words per minute first, and then ignore it and leave it in the dark recesses of your email.

Interestingly, many avid readers of novels have been speaking out against the utility of Spritz for reading full-length books. They often cite certain hypothetical troubles, such as how if you speed read you might miss the implied, subtle hint of sarcasm in that one word in that one line of that one chapter where the dark, mysterious protagonist first begins to show signs of inner change. Dude, even Woody Allen had the foresight to create a zinger to be used against spritzing (yes, it’s call spritzing, deal with it):

I've never read it, but it doesn't seem like it's going to be a fair fight. 

In all seriousness, I get it: you would not want to speed through a literary work of art. However, after having to read about how Brienne bumbled around Westeros for about a thousand pages, I sure as heck wouldn’t have minded to speed that up a little.

Brienne's travels. I heard George RR Martin is considering an 8th book since she's still wandering around. 

The short of it is this: Spritz wasn’t the first to do it, but by releasing their SDKs and encouraging developers to implement their technology, they may be the first to make it stick. Personally, I think this is less “speed” reading and more “new” reading. It’s just different. I recently had a short discussion about this with someone on twitter, who thought that speed reading was “missing the point” of reading. Yes, speed reading would probably make you ”miss the point” of Shakespeare. It will probably also make you miss all 100 points on your next Shakespeare exam.

"That's what I did on the exam, professor!"

Just because it is “new” doesn’t mean it’s bad or ineffective. It also doesn’t mean it will replace anything. Letters are for letters. Email is for email. Reading is reading. Spritz is Spritz.

But wait, what IS Spritz? I think it will be a lot of things in a lot of different forms, in a lot of different settings. During the next year (plus), I’d like to create one of those, and I think I can. In a nutshell, I want to create a platform that will present eBooks using Spritz and enhance the experience with dynamic background colors and sounds. This will create a "new" form of reading. It will blur the boundaries between film and reading, and in fact it will use the quantitative relationships between the two to create the presentations in an automated way.

Without further ado, here is the link to my demo:

http://youtu.be/Cv9Lu6zv5rA

I have chosen the excerpt from the first Harry Potter book where Harry receives the Invisibility Cloak for Christmas and decides (naturally) to test it out that night. Knowing he can go anywhere without being seen, Harry goes to the library. He was such a freshman.

Make sure to wear headphones, keep focused on the highlighted letter, and just relax. This type of reading gets much easier with just a few minutes of practice and relaxation. Let me know what you like or dislike in the comments section!