Update for 10/8/2017

Death

🤔

I spent about a third of my project time last week refreshing my memory on how to write a sympathy note. If you ever find yourself needing to support someone who’s had a loss, I recommend The Art of Condolence by Leonard and Hilary Zunin.

Life management

😐

Another third of my project time was spent catching up on sleep. The extra sleep and reading some more articles on the subject have turned my attention back to my sleep schedule, and that’s gone pretty well the past few days.

Project generator

😐

I’ve organized the rest of my tasks for this project so it’s not so hazy and intimidating.

Beliefs report

😐

I wrote some more on bibliology, but the update’s still not ready for posting.

Books

🤔

I finished Iron Sunrise. It was good but not really what I was looking for. I’m interested in exploring technological advance and its ramifications for society, and in this series those issues take a backseat to fairly normal politics and adventure.

Pushing myself to finish Iron Sunrise put me in a binging frame of mind, so it didn’t take me long to get through my next audiobook, Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. It seems like I should’ve read that one a long time ago, but I put it off.

Now that I’ve gotten to it, I think it’s a very good exploration of some of the issues they were in a position to consider back in 1950, given that not even personal computers existed. In fact, I think a lot of the issues will remain relevant as the field of AI takes off.

Futurism

😎

Continuing my binging practices, I’ve been plowing through Isaac Arthur’s videos to catch up to his current updates. All his videos are good, but one that stood out last week was on black hole farming. It’s the first in his series on civilizations at the end of time. If you enjoy pondering the fantastic, I recommend it.