Update for 8/12/2018

Life maintenance

😏

I’ve gotten over my bad feelings left over from the move and from a sense that I don’t belong in my nice new place. What helped was the idea of rebelling against it to make it a place I do feel I belong. Hopefully my friends who wanted my living arrangement to improve will be displeased. 😉

So now I’m focused on setting up my furniture layout using Sweet Home 3D. It’s taking more time than drawing or eyeballing it, but a computer model is more stable than the little scraps of paper I used for my last apartment, and this way I won’t have to redraw everything when I rearrange my furniture, which I expect to do once or twice. Plus, measuring tape is way more reliable than my wacky spatial sense.

I’ve also been researching and putting together a cleaning routine. I’m tired of always being embarrassed by the state of my dwelling and of dreading the cleaning part of moving out. This time my home will stay nice.

One thing I like about this apartment is that the parking lot is next to a miniature forest, so I get to say hello to trees and flowers and moths and bees as I pull into my space.

This is next to the parking lot of my new apartment. It turns out part of Narnia was transplanted to Illinois, and now I live there.

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on Aug 10, 2018 at 6:11pm PDT

In other news, I’m getting back to researching grad school and other career-advancing activities. Don’t tell Jeremy. He might think he had something to do with it.

Fiction

😎

I finished Blindsight. 5/5. This book is like a novelistic introduction to cognitive science. Peter Watts and I think along similar lines. We clearly have some of the same influences. Unfortunately the resulting worldview is rather bleak, at least in the scenario he paints. I’m hoping the perspective I come up with will be more positive and hopeful.

Cognitive science

🙂

Now that I have this Fire with text-to-speech, I can get through some of the important cognitive science books that have been patiently waiting in my Kindle library. Currently I’m listening to an intro textbook by José Luis Bermúdez, Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Science of the Mind.