I plan on being as transparent as possible about the development and growth of Locavore, as I think we’re all sort of interested in knowing the behind-the-scenes stuff. And I’ve got nothing to hide, so I might as well share.

I installed a component developed by Pinch Media that allows me to get pseudo real-time stats on usage of the app. I don’t get any information that’s sensitive, but it’s more like having web stats in the app and being able to get general data about how many people are using the app each day.

Here’s what it is telling me about New Users per day (the last line is yesterday, or Monday March 23rd):

So, it looks like I’ve already sold more than 1,000 apps, which is a lot more than I was expecting to sell the first week.

The growth is attributable to the fact that the app got covered in a couple big tech and food blogs near the end of last week. The most significant ones, in order of their publication, are:

1. Cook Local: Locavore for the iPhone – Mar 16th (First review!)
2. The Stranger Slog: Local Food App for Your Phone – Mar 19th
3. Serious Eats: Find Local, in Season, Food on Your iPhone – Mar 19th
4. MobileCrunch: Review: Locavore for the iPhone – Mar 20th
5. Gizmodo: The Week in iPhone Apps – Mar 20th
6. The Food Section: Local Food Shopping for the iPhone – Mar 20th
7. Lifehacker: Locavore Lists the In-Season Food Near You – Mar 23rd
8. TreeHugger: In-Season Food App for Locavores’ iPhones – Mar 24th

So that has been very exciting to watch.  People seem excited.  I’m excited.  Everyone wins.

I’m not sure if this amount of momentum will continue though, so I will continue to seek ways to get the word out about the app, which will include developing more features that make the app more useful.

The surprise: Twitter!

I did not anticipate just how much Twitter would play in to the promotion of this application.  The ability to track any mention of “locavore” on Twitter using their real-time search has made it possible for me to follow mentions of the app (along with everything the Obamas are doing with their Whitehouse garden) and in several cases has led to conversations about the app, about features, about new ideas.  Twitter is pretty much designed to spread information as quickly as possible, and I’m only now beginning to realize the full scope of what that means.  I don’t want to take advantage of it or anything, but I was simply surprised to find that it was as effective of a tool as it has turned out to be.

Week 1 was pretty eventful.  I suspect week 2 might not be as eventful, but if it is, I’ll post about it.  In the meantime, I’ve got to get back to work.

How to get it

If you want to learn more about Locavore, click here. To visit the detail page in iTunes, click here.

Independently of the way or reason that you enjoy things (of which I think there are 9 kinds), another dimension to consider is the capacity to enjoy those things. The threshold at which something becomes enjoyable. How good does it have to be before it is enjoyable?

I’ve noticed that there seem to be a couple easily distinguishable steps on the staircase of enjoyment capacity or threshold. In our brains, each neuron also has a certain threshold of chemicals needed for it to trigger on the long chain of neural connections, and in the atomic realm there are different energy levels that electrons can orbit a nucleus. I think this digital nature of nature is highly convenient for us to make broad generalizations about things we don’t know much about. The digital nature of enjoyment is the newest category of such generalizations.

1. Bystander enjoyment

The lowest orbit of enjoyment. You see a beautiful car go by, you see someone else enjoying a delicious meal in the window of a restaurant as you walk by. You enjoy their enjoyment. You don’t experience it directly, but you can see that something out there has enjoyable qualities and you partake in them indirectly.

2. Passenger enjoyment

The second orbit of enjoyment. You are in the passenger seat of a friend’s car, and you enjoy the beauty of the car. You are at your sharing a bit of your friend’s meal, and you realize that his dish is better than yours, but you don’t necessarily covet the meal. Their meal is good, and that is enjoyable in itself.

3. Ownership enjoyment

The third orbit of enjoyment. You own the beautiful car, you bought the delicious meal. It’s 1-degree of separation from your own soul, and this is enjoyable. You deserve to enjoy it because you paid for it.

4. Inventorship enjoyment

This is the highest energy orbit of enjoyment. It radiates with energy and life. You brought into life the thing you’re enjoying, and it speaks for you and you speak through it. You invented the car, you made the meal, it’s yours, it’s almost you. Other peoples’ enjoyment of the thing increases your own enjoyment of the thing. Exponential power to the exponential degree, etc.

The controversial conclusion

We can all enjoy things on the 4th threshold of enjoyment, but how many of us are true connoisseurs of the 1st and 2nd levels? The first 2 levels are all about empathy, compassion, connection, relating to others. The second 2 are all about the self. They do happen to result in the same feeling of enjoyment, in increasing levels, but I think that those who focus too much on the 3rd and 4th and neglect the first 2 will eventually become weaker, less attuned, less appreciative of the full scope of experience, and possibly more miserly and grumpy. That’s my thought right now at least.

Enjoy things that you don’t own and didn’t invent. It’s good for you!

I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to statistics, and monitoring progress, so I think I’ll mention every once in a while (for better or for worse) what’s going on in the land of trying to make Locavore successful.

The first reviews

The first review award goes to Cook Local. She also got the first review in the iTunes Store. If any of you have an extra minute to review this in the iTunes store, it could potentially get me a little extra traction there. Missy from Groovy Vegetarian also wrote up a few nice words yesterday. I’m a horrible self-promoter, so I appreciate anything anyone writes about this, good, neutral, or critical.

For bug reports, ideas, and other feedback, I’m also going to be looming like a hawk over at my Locavore Get Satisfaction page. If you have the app, you’ll notice that on the About tab, there’s a link directly to Get Satisfaction from within the app as well, so you can submit feedback, ideas, and bugs from there while you’re thinking of them. I think I’m the first app to be using this integrated feedback component, so I hope people find it useful.

How many people bought the app?

Based on my very limited knowledge (since Apple only gives you weekly reports), I think somewhere around 40-50 people downloaded the app. I gave out around 30 promo codes as well, so don’t know what percentage of those were used. I’m hoping that those 40-50 people like the app, and that word of mouth sort of helps it grow. So, room to grow!

How can you help?

I’m glad you asked. A lot of ways! I want ideas for how to make this app more useful and interesting. I want tips on sources of data for fruit and vegetable availability in other countries. I want to find out planting schedules, by state and time of year, so that we can show not only what is available but what should be planted when. I want information on availability information on poultry and fish. I would love to team up with the awesome Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch to make information about sustainable fishing more available.

Think big. Think about ways to create a collaborative community of people who update and maintain information on availability around the world, changing with the seasons and the years.

I sent this out to a few friends with high places this morning… follow @enjoy_locavore for some promo codes and news in the future.

I know it’s a big iPhone news day (I’m very excited myself), but in addition to all the 3.0 news, I’m happy today to launch Locavore, a powerful yet simple application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that allows users to find the freshest, most sustainable fruits and vegetables no matter where they are in the United States.

Utilizing built-in GPS and location awareness, Locavore finds a fresh food enthusiast’s location and then shows them what foods are currently in season locally, and what is coming in season soon. Getting this information quickly (especially while at the market and trying to decide what to buy) means that one can get the freshest, tastiest, and most healthy foods available any time of the year.

Locavore finds information about nearby farmers’ markets and food availability data from a collaboration of partners such as LocalHarvest.org, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and others to give users a real-time look at what’s available to them and where to get it. This data will continue to improve and be updated over time.

The application also connects users to recipes from Epicurious and links to Wikipedia through a simple to use and intuitive interface. It features 234 well-known and more obscure fruits and vegetables with beautiful full-color images of each, in case a user momentarily forgets what an aprium or a rambutan looks like.

Locavore is available now at the iTunes App store for $2.99 for the first thousand customers. Coming up in the next update: integration with Facebook Connect to turn the appreciation and knowledge of local food into more of a social, collaborative, effort.

Sincerely,
Buster McLeod

Questions, etc, you can email me at locavore@enjoymentland.com

About us:

Buster McLeod is a co-founder of the Robot Co-op, maker of 43things.com, 43places.com and others. He was also the co-founder of Seattle-based art gallery and bar, McLeod Residence. Now he is interested in building small, useful apps for the iPhone that make life a little healthier and more interesting.

Matt Hickey knows tech. He also knows that in the current age of iPhones, Facebook, and everything connected in real time that it’s important that it’s accessible to everyone. His design sense aims to that: Simple is better. You’ll find that theme throughout the Locavore application.

1. I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me: How about if I just don’t have any gods at all?
2. Do not make an image or any likeness of what is in the heavens above: I don’t plan on it, but if for some reason I feel like it, I don’t see what the problem would be.
3. Do not swear falsely by the name of the LORD: I don’t swear much to begin with, unless I’m trying to be funny, but I don’t think it’s wrong.
4. Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy: I call it Sunday Funday.
5. Honor your father and your mother: Okay, I do think this is good advice.
6. Do not murder: I don’t like the idea of personally killing people.  But I think it’s okay to kill really bad people, and also food.
7. Do not commit adultery: Okay.
8. Do not steal: Okay.
9. Do not bear false witness against your neighbor: Yeah, you’re right, lying is bad, unless you’re trying to throw your neighbor a surprise party.
10. Do not covet your neighbor’s wife: Yeah, not sure why there’s a whole commandment for this, especially since it overlaps with number 7 quite a but, but I suppose there’s no point in this.

So, of the holy ten, #6-10 seem to be pretty good advice.  That’s a 50% Enjoymentland approval rating.  So, it has some use, I guess.  Which, since I read somewhere that 60% of people can’t name even 5 of the Ten Commandments, it seems like the general consensus is that they’re sort of out-dated as well.  The ones that are obvious, and which pretty much exist in any moral guidebook (lying, stealing, killing, cheating, being nice, etc) are also in every other religion, so it seems like there’s no point in sticking with these 10 over going with someone else’s, especially considering all of that wasted stone tablet space that could’ve been used for something else.

To be completely honest, I think the 4 noble truths are bullshit.

According to Buddhist thought, there are four axioms of truth that you must accept in order to make progress towards “enlightenment”. They are:

1. Life means suffering.
2. The origin of suffering is attachment.
3. The cessation of suffering is attainable.
4. The path to the cessation of suffering.

Definitions (in italics) taken from here, my editorial comments will be below each point.

Truth #1: Life means suffering

To live means to suffer, because the human nature is not perfect and neither is the world we live in. During our lifetime, we inevitably have to endure physical suffering such as pain, sickness, injury, tiredness, old age, and eventually death; and we have to endure psychological suffering like sadness, fear, frustration, disappointment, and depression. Although there are different degrees of suffering and there are also positive experiences in life that we perceive as the opposite of suffering, such as ease, comfort and happiness, life in its totality is imperfect and incomplete, because our world is subject to impermanence. This means we are never able to keep permanently what we strive for, and just as happy moments pass by, we ourselves and our loved ones will pass away one day, too.

This is simply not true.  At least, no more true than the statement that “Life is pleasure”.  Why focus on the negative, guys?  Why not realize that the suffering is just as impermanent as the joy?  The former doesn’t outlast the latter, they are merely two sides of the coin of experience, emotions go up and emotions go down.  Impermanence is as much a blessing as it is a curse.  The beauty of spring is all the more beautiful because it comes and goes.  The sadness of death is tinged with the joy of having had the chance to be alive.  To focus entirely on the negative makes me think that you’re trying to play some kind of manipulative trick on me.  To say that everything is painful and sad is simply not consistent with my own experience of the world.  It would be more accurate to say that life creates in us a response of ever-changing joy and sadness, pleasure and suffering.  One is no heavier or more real than the other.  Life is a buffet of positive, negative, neutral, and mixed experiences.  Therefore, truth #1 is not true.

Truth #2: The origin of suffering is attachment

The origin of suffering is attachment to transient things and the ignorance thereof. Transient things do not only include the physical objects that surround us, but also ideas, and -in a greater sense- all objects of our perception. Ignorance is the lack of understanding of how our mind is attached to impermanent things. The reasons for suffering are desire, passion, ardour, pursuit of wealth and prestige, striving for fame and popularity, or in short: craving and clinging. Because the objects of our attachment are transient, their loss is inevitable, thus suffering will necessarily follow. Objects of attachment also include the idea of a “self” which is a delusion, because there is no abiding self. What we call “self” is just an imagined entity, and we are merely a part of the ceaseless becoming of the universe.

This is saying that because we aren’t aware that the things we are passionate about are going to end, that the result will be suffering.  Again, the elevation of importance of a single step in a long chain of reactions is out of place.  You could just as easily say that the origin of pleasure is attachment.  The pursuit of desires is highly pleasurable.  The deep passion of engulfing oneself in the beauty of the world is one of life’s happiest pastimes.  Sure, there is an arc to pleasure, and most pleasures must come to an end, but the resulting “suffering” also has an arc.  The bittersweet process of mourning is not always suffering.  Sometimes it is appreciation.  Sometimes it is love.  Would any child, upon the death of their beloved parent, wish that they had never loved their parent?  That they had been indifferent?  What about the “it’s better to love and to have lost, than to have never loved at all”?  The lifecycle of desire, appreciation, passing, and remembrance is a net-positive experience, and one of the true joys of life.  To love someone unconditionally, truly for their own selves, is a reward in itself, and can never be taken away.  The same goes for a delicious piece of chocolate… the sadness of finishing a bite of chocolate only strengthens the enjoyment of it.  Separation from an object of desire does not always end in suffering, and when it does, it does not cancel out the enjoyment.  I just don’t understand this piece of logic at all and I call bullshit on it.

Truth #3: The cessation of suffering is attainable

The cessation of suffering can be attained through nirodha. Nirodha means the unmaking of sensual craving and conceptual attachment. The third noble truth expresses the idea that suffering can be ended by attaining dispassion. Nirodha extinguishes all forms of clinging and attachment. This means that suffering can be overcome through human activity, simply by removing the cause of suffering. Attaining and perfecting dispassion is a process of many levels that ultimately results in the state of Nirvana. Nirvana means freedom from all worries, troubles, complexes, fabrications and ideas. Nirvana is not comprehensible for those who have not attained it.

Okay, this may be true.  But it is a ridiculous idea.  Dispassion as a goal, it seems to me that this is a strategy that only self-pitying fools would take.  The assumption of this truth is that if living isn’t going to give us everything we want, then we will choose not to play that game.  It’s like someone taking their ball away from the playground because the other kids didn’t let him win.  It’s a sore-loser strategy.  Saying that it’s not comprehensible for those who have not attained it is a cop-out.  If you want a truth to be believed, it has to be falsifiable, and have some kind of argument for its validity.  Personally, I see no reason to reject the playground of sensual craving, conceptual attachment, passion, desire, love, worries, trouble, complexes, fabrications, and ideas.  I love this playground, all the more because it is a complex creature that doesn’t obey my every whim.  It surprises, delights, and inspires.  It is a lovely game, filled with lovely people.  While I see some truth in #3 here, because it provides a strategy towards a goal that I don’t believe is valuable, it seems to me to be a useless truth.

Truth #4: The path to the cessation of suffering.

There is a path to the end of suffering – a gradual path of self-improvement, which is described more detailed in the Eightfold Path. It is the middle way between the two extremes of excessive self-indulgence (hedonism) and excessive self-mortification (asceticism); and it leads to the end of the cycle of rebirth. The latter quality discerns it from other paths which are merely “wandering on the wheel of becoming”, because these do not have a final object. The path to the end of suffering can extend over many lifetimes, throughout which every individual rebirth is subject to karmic conditioning. Craving, ignorance, delusions, and its effects will disappear gradually, as progress is made on the path.

First of all, nobody really believes in the cycle of rebirth anymore.  It wasn’t even mentioned as one of the previous truths.  It’s an old idea, unsupported by science, and probably believed to be a fairy-tale even by a good percentage of practicing Buddhists.  Second of all, even if there were a cycle of rebirth, why wouldn’t one want to continue on it?  Life is fun, if I could live multiple lives in a row as different people, I’d totally sign up for that.  Thirdly, from the previous truths, it’s clear that the spectrum of pleasure and suffering is not very well understood, and I wouldn’t trust a “middle path” between extremes to be very nuanced.  In fact, the Eightfold Path, while it does have some interesting points, falls victim to the same flaws in logic that the 4 noble truths do.  Primarily, I believe that the Eightfold Path misunderstands that the cycle of creation and destruction is part of how the universe works, and part of its beauty.  To place all of the importance on ending the cycle of creation and destruction is to disregard the primary method that this universe evolves and grows and continues to evolve.  Natural selection requires experimentation, risk-taking, pleasure-seeking, engaged individuals and groups to test strategies that either succeed or fail, and which learn from their experiences and continue to improve over time.  I believe that the 4 noble truths and the Eightfold Path encourage lack of participation, and slow down this process.  And are therefore not only misguided statements, but counter-productive.

Conclusion

The 4 noble truths might be useful to someone too weak to take a little suffering in their daily routine.  The truth that I understand includes the continued participation in the pleasure/pain suffering/joy playground of life, knowing that it is through these experiences that we continue to grow, enjoy, love, appreciate, and generally live.  To take away these mechanisms of life is to take away the sweetest fruit of life.  Much sweeter and more rewarding than simply the lack of suffering that they covet so highly.

This excerpt from Jonah Lehrer’s recent entry about Risk, Fear, and Certainty has me thinking today:

I think the financial crisis has helped expose a powerful bias in human decision-making, which is our abhorrence of uncertainty. We hate not knowing, and this often leads us to neglect relevant information that might undermine the certainty of our conclusions. I think some of the most compelling research on this topic has been done by Colin Camerer, who has played a simple game called the Ellsberg paradox with subjects in an fMRI machine. To make a long story short, Camerer showed that players in the uncertainty condition – they were given less information about the premise of the game – exhibited increased activity in the amygdala, a center of fear, anxiety and other aversive emotions. In other words, we filled in the gaps of our knowledge with fright. This leads us to find ways to minimize our uncertainty – we can’t stand such negative emotions – and so we start cherry-picking facts and forgetting to question our assumptions.

It is particularly relevant to me right now because I have just recently emerged from a highly uncertain state to a relatively bad, but certain state, regarding my bar and art gallery business, McLeod Residence.  In particular, I was uncertain about how much debt I was going to be in, due to being tied to a long term lease in a building that I couldn’t run my business in.  Yesterday, this situation came to a resolution and I now know exactly how much in debt I am, and even though it’s a big number, it’s a solid number, and won’t grow by $4,000+ every month.

So, yes, I can relate to the abhorrence of uncertainty.  Not knowing, and feeling like things are a little out of your own control, is not enjoyable.

What I haven’t fully explored yet is just how much our abhorrence of uncertainty causes us to make mistakes of judgment.  In other words, how much does the desire to avoid uncertainty cause us to avoid reality, and make decisions based on fiction, hopes, dreams, positive thinking, etc.

I love Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases, and return to it frequently over the last couple years when trying to think about how my own decision making process is affected by my biases.  How many of them are related to the desire to avoid the uncertain:

Base rate fallacy — ignoring available statistical data in favor of particulars.

Expectation bias — the tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agrees with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appears to conflict with those expectations.

Mere exposure effect — the tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.

Pseudocertainty effect — the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.

Status quo bias — the tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.

Ambiguity effect — the avoidance of options for which missing information makes the probability seem “unknown”.

And perhaps the most relevant:

Ostrich effect — ignoring an obvious (negative) situation.

The reason I like studying cognitive biases is that by studying them, and becoming more aware of our own biases (and the biases that we are pretty much all influenced by), we avoid the most meta of all biases:

Bias blind spot — the tendency not to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases.

Being 1-up or 1-down

Having tracked my own morale for many years, I’ve found that a simple way to summarize my overal mental state has been to determine whether or not I feel 1-up or 1 down.

1-up is a positive state, where you are 1 step ahead, in a sense.  You can handle the present moments needs, and you are ready for the next moment.  You have a reserve of positive sentiment, and have the energy to be kind, compassionate and helpful to the people around you.

1-down is the opposite, a negative step.  1 step behind the curve.  You are trying to catch up, slightly or severely overloaded, and unprepared for the current or next moments.  You have a deficit of positive sentiment, and are hungry for energy.  In order to get out of this state, you need to recieve energy from some source, and in the meantime you can’t afford to give your own energy out.  This results in defensive emotions: anger, impatience, sadness, fear.

It’s from a state of 1-up or 1-down that we can then drill down a bit further into the more multidimensional characteristics of mood.  But in a sense, beyond being 1-up or 1-down, the rest of the details aren’t quite as important.

What kind of beacon are you?

We all have our internal states relatively closed off from the outside world, barely even accessible to our own conscious minds most of the time.  And yet, we are all beacons sending off a signal of some sort.  Openness, closedness, compasssion, selfishness, love, hatred, strength, weakness.  The science of beacons is as simple as reading body language, facial expressions, posture, tone of voice, etc.

We’re all highly sensitive to the energy that others give off.  And yet, this sensitivity is on a subconscious level most of the time.  We don’t know that we’re reading body language and realize that our usually chipper friend is having an off-day, and yet, if we think about it for a second, we can pretty much zero in on anyone’s energy pretty quickly.

A lot of our energy is tied up in our personalities.  We often equate energy with the person themselves, so much so that we don’t even question that some people are beacons of strength and compassion and others are beacons of negativity and insecurity.  We just say that that’s who they are.  And yet, some days, the people who always have a strong beacon might be a weak beacon.  And we don’t doubt that they’re still themselves, we just sense that something is wrong.  Or, in the case that an insecure beacon one day starts being a compassionate beacon, we question them on what has changed.  What caused the beacon to shift?

What changes you?

What flips you from 1-up to 1-down?  And vice versa.  Which state feels more like your natural state?  And what is keeping you there?  These are very important personal questions to answer, all the more so because we will feel highly attached to our “natural” state, even if it is a negative natural state.

Most likely, you will spend some time 1-up and 1-down in any given day.  And finding the triggers that flip you one way or another will be very enlightening.  Drinking coffee may flip you to 1-up in the morning.  Or it may be a good breakfast.  Or it might be a donut.  In any case, the effectiveness of the initial flip often becomes an attachment.  Resulting crashes or withdrawals are not always interpreted as being caused by the donut.  It may just be a sign that we need another thing to trigger us back up.  Poor understanding of what changes you, and the lifespan of those changes could result in being highly attached to triggers that have very short lifespans or that leave you off feeling worse than you had before.  Strong understanding of what changes you will lead to the creation and maintenance of healthy triggers, and eventually a balanced sense of self that rarely dips into 1-down and therefore rarely needs drastic measures to be made.

How can you measure this?

Few of us have the level of self-awareness required to notice our emotional triggers and 1-up to 1-down transitions at the moment that they are occuring.  But watching for the most obvious triggers and slowly working your way to less obvious ones is a simple and good habit to make.

Start by checking in every few minutes and asking yourself whether you’re 1-up or 1-down.  If you check in and realize that you’ve flipped since the last check-in, think back on what caused the flip.  And then think about what emotional chain was set off, in what order of emotions.  Becoming aware of these triggers will be a reward in itself that becomes the foundation for learning how to dance around triggers and stay 1-up as often as possible.