Update for 6/26/2016

Site updates

• Wiki comments – You can now comment on my wiki articles! Certain ones I’ve enabled it on, which is currently only the Math Relearning set, but I’ll be adding it to other articles later. The comments extension uses Disqus, so you’ll have to sign up with that the first time you comment. I’m wondering if I should switch my blog comments from the WordPress feature to Disqus so there’s one place to find all the site’s comments, but I’ll put off that decision till later.
• Other housekeeping – I’ve added a contact form, since random visitors didn’t really have a way to get in touch except through Twitter. I would just put up my email address, but a form lets me find out which emails are coming through the site. I’ve also unified the search across the blog and wiki by connecting both search forms to Google Site Search, though the wiki’s Google search is somewhat hidden in the sidebar, and the regular wiki search is still at the top, but I’ll keep it there for now because that’s sometimes the way I create new articles. Next on my agenda for website housekeeping are adding SSL and updating the site and topic intros, but those will happen sometime after my next math update.

Project updates

• Math relearning – This week I’ll look at grade 1. I’ve been studying my addition and subtraction flashcards during my break, but just a little here and there, which will make it take roughly forever, since there are 700 cards and the algorithm repeats them until I get them right often enough.
• Diet – 3 weeks left till my blood test. I’m thinking of testing some home cholesterol testing kits by using them the same day as the lab’s test and comparing the results, so I need to investigate and buy those before then. My muffins were edible this week but blander, which I attribute to using Swerve when the recipe was apparently expecting a sweeter sugar substitute, and they were somehow drier, even though I went back to almond flour, but I smothered them in sugar-free fake maple syrup, and it was fine. I also tried out the idea of topping a salad with tuna salad, which worked nicely.
• Daily routine – Even though I still like the idea of cramming in all my regular activities each day, in practice last week on days when I had less time, I did make choices based on what felt most important, which was usually my projects, though I did get in my devotion and walk one day, and overall this seems like a decently realistic approach for my level of self-discipline, so I’ll stick with it for now. I didn’t keep track of my sleep schedule, but my impression is that it was less terrible last week, and I’ve concluded that part of my tiredness during the day, especially in the morning, has been because the days I wake up at 5, I try to sleep a little more before I have to get up, which ends up interrupting a sleep cycle, so I’ve decided just to stay awake in those cases; and I’m going to try getting myself to bed a little before I want to sleep and finishing whatever I was doing from there, so at least I’ll be ready for bed even if I stay up later than I’d like, rather than throwing myself into bed whenever exhaustion overtakes me and immediately sleeping. Also I think I could waste less time and get more done on the things I’ve planned if I somehow addressed my tendency to mindlessly follow whatever interests me at the moment, which is basically half of all my problems in life, so I’ll look at that again this week, though I think that problem would be helped with more sleep, which is the other half of my problems. I like the idea of tracking my time so I’m not left wondering how exactly I used it, but I need to find a method that isn’t tedious, so I’ll look into that too.
• Books – I’ve been on a bit of a book buying binge lately, which I’ll talk more about in the conspiracy section below, but one I’ll mention here is Philosophy of Mind by Jaegwon Kim, which I chose on the strength of its Amazon reviews. I wanted to follow up my purchase of a metaphysics textbook with that one because philosophy of mind, an area of special metaphysics, interests me more than general metaphysics because it relates more directly to my probable career field of cognitive science and to my day-to-day philosophical ponderings. I still don’t know when I’ll get around to reading it, but maybe I’ll sneak in bits here and there until I set aside some official time for it.
• Conspiracy theories – This topic has graduated from a life update to a project, since at this point it’s less something that’s happening to me and more something I’m pursuing, I’m sure to the chagrin of some of you. I’ve gotten to the stage of buying books, four so far: The Illuminatus! Trilogy (the novel from last update), Conspiracy Encyclopedia (a well-regarded overview of theories, according to Wikipedia), A Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory (another overview, self-published, that covers some alien-related topics that Conspiracy Encyclopedia misses), Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (on Western esotericism, which overlaps with many conspiracy theories but is also a topic I’ve been curious about for a long time). I’ve also been thinking about what I could post to the wiki in this area. Last week’s interesting podcast find: Kingdom Intelligence Briefing, about how the Elite are using the technology of fallen angels to create an army to battle God via transhumanist manipulation of our DNA, while they also use the Large Hadron Collider to open a portal for the fallen angels to enter our dimension (see the host’s book The Shinar Directive).
• TV – Last week I reached a milestone in my Doctor Who catch-up when I finished the Tenth Doctor, David Tennant, certainly the most poignant regeneration I’ve seen so far.

Life updates

• Chapel – Last week in chapel we had Stuart Garrard, formerly of the band Delirious?, and he talked about his Beatitudes Project, which collects some remarkable stories of ways Jesus is working in and through people (more on the project here in the “Author” section). He also sang a couple of songs, one of which used an acoustic guitar that he also somehow got to sound like a bass. To top it off, my getting to see Stu made my friend Jeremy intensely jealous, which is secretly the point of everything I do.
• Brexit – Last Thursday the UK shocked themselves and the world by voting themselves out of the EU, a move nicknamed Brexit (for British exit). Normally I pay very little attention to current events, but this one touched a nerve or three for me, and I’ve dumped several hours into reading articles and comments to try to get a handle on the events and issues surrounding this referendum. I’m very sympathetic to the Remainers, but there’s Euroscepticism to consider, which I know practically nothing about, so I may be taking my friend Ciro’s advice and reading some Yanis Varoufakis. I might even start an article about Brexit on the wiki to keep track of my investigations. My new conspiracy detecting skills are telling me this is a plot by somebody to get me interested in history.
• Worship team – This weekend my regular worship team performed, and it went decently, except for the new song. I was supposed to play the intro, and I got flustered at the last second because my metronome wasn’t ready, so I’d have to guess at the tempo, not a strength for me, and I counted the rests in the melody wrong and ended up playing it in 3/4 rather than 4/4, and the poor vocalists followed my lead in confused, halting fashion until the chorus, which was clearly in 4/4. So that was fun.