Productivity
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I explored the application of CPU scheduling to human task management. A computer has a lot of tasks to juggle, and normally it flips between them so seamlessly, you donāt notice. How does it do that, and what lessons can I learn? Mainly I wanted to know how the scheduler decides each taskās priority and how long itāll take. That week errands, naps, and doomscrolling crowded my time, but I fit in a few interesting chatbot conversations to collect some ideas on the connections, especially this one with Claude. My prompts were based on some intro articles I found (“Introduction of Process Management“, “CPU Scheduling in Operating Systems“). Researching the terms they brought up directed me to Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (free on the bookās website), so Iām going to read it to dive deeper.
But thatās all a side note. My main task is still to add Eisenhower Matrix prioritizing to my Notion system.
Spirituality
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Scot McKnightās Fasting gave me a new perspective for wading back into this spiritual discipline. Fasting is on my radar because studying discipleship has me thinking about the spiritual disciplines, and this is one Iāve mostly avoided because Iām not great at handling hunger. A friend brought up fasting a few weeks ago as helpful training in self-control, and since Lent was starting soon, I decided this would be a good time to look into it again.
McKnight characterizes fasting as a response to a grievous sacred moment, a part of oneās full-body expression of the gravity of a crisis or loss. He contrasts this with an instrumental view where we fast to get something out of it. But here heās talking about short-term benefits, like answers to prayer or weight loss, because he does see a long-term benefit in the form of body discipline, where our character is shaped by this moderate voluntary hardship.
My plan is to try a small amount of fasting for Lent, skipping a meal on Fridays, to see what happens. Iāve done a few fasts at random times in years past, but this will be a more organized and principled attempt. I want to spend that meal time trying to pray, an activity I donāt excel at but that seems a natural partner to fasting. Mainly I donāt want to get distracted by my usual activities while Iām not eating and forget the reasons Iām doing it.
Nature
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I returned to my outside walks thanks to the less frigid weather, and they got a little strange.
Geography
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I chose some map projections for learning world geography. I donāt know when Iāll actually learn it, but the motivation comes up pretty regularly now. Of course, the trouble with world geography is it takes place on a globe, which gets distorted when you flatten the surface onto a screen or a page. If I want to learn by drawing, Iāll need a flat view of the land. I looked through Wikipediaās list of map projections and ended up with three winners that Iād use for different purposes:
- Nicolosi globular – Iāll use this for my overview of the continents. Itās an easy shape to draw and preserves the landmass shapes and directions relatively well.
- Cahill-Keyes – Iāll use this if I want to preserve the shapes extra well, maybe once I start learning the countries. It keeps landmasses mostly together rather than carving up Antarctica or Greenland. Itās a harder shape to draw, but itās easier to rough out than the commonly used Goode homolosine. It preserves directions less well, since the equator meanders up and down, but theyāre still stable enough that you can roughly tell where north is. Alternatively I could use multiple orthographic projections centered on each region the way Wikipedia displays countries.
- Robinson – Iāll use this if I want a very easy and familiar way to visualize the whole globe with consistent directions. Itās very well known, since Rand McNally has used it since 1963. The shapes are overall less distorted than many similar projections, but it stretches the shapes near the poles, especially Antarctica, which is smeared all across the bottom.
