Update for 8/14/2016

Project updates

• Life maintenance
  • Diet – I finished my dairy-free experiment, and with no change in my digestive symptoms, I’m considering dairy safe. This Wednesday my gluten-free experiment will finally be over, and if I decide gluten’s safe, I’m celebrating with oatmeal, real bread, and a wrap from Chick-fil-A. Then the next step on my ulcerative colitis will be to talk to my gastroenterologist about switching from Humira to Remicade, but I want to know if my Humira is the cause of my stubborn lipids, so I’ll probably wait on that conversation till I test my blood at home at the end of September after being on the TLC diet for two months, which will tell me if the TLC diet helps even with Humira in the way. Last week’s cooking experiment: dairy-free chicken tikka masala, with the heavy cream replaced by rice milk and butter substitute and the yogurt replaced by pureed tofu, and it all worked fine, I’m sure mostly because it’s all covered up by 1/3 cup of spices.
  • Exercise – Wednesday I read about a study that said for an adequate reduction in certain major health risks, we should really be getting something like 90 minutes of exercise a day instead of the WHO’s recommended 30. I’m already doing 30, and I refuse to steal an extra hour per day from my substantive projects, so I’m thinking of getting a pedal exerciser to use at my desk at home in order to work and exercise at the same time. Or maybe I’ll wait on more research. In other news, I’ve learned 123 beats per minute is a good minimum walking pace for me, and about 133 is my minimum pace on the stationary bike.
  • Daily routine – My mornings still feel iffy but basically okay, so now I need to concentrate on my evenings. I’m thinking of making sleep this week’s main project: What would it take to get myself to sleep by 9 every night, and what would that do to me?
• Math relearning – I’m still working on the infrastructure of my program rather than programming the actual math, but I got a few steps closer to posting something, mostly by sacrificing sleep.
• Media
  • Books – Jeremy started reading Accelerando, one of my favorite books, and he didn’t like some of Stross’s predictions, so he recommended Beggars in Spain to me, and being a newly minted sucker for trans- and post-humanist fiction, I found it and started listening, and it’s been very interesting so far, with the bombastic action that’s usual in my SF reading refreshingly replaced by philosophical discussion.
  • Movies
    • V for Vendetta – To me pizza and movies go together, so Friday night I wanted something to watch with my pizza, and I settled on this one, which I hadn’t seen, so I’ve been watching it over the past few days, and I was surprised to find that I like it. I expected a character rather mindlessly violent like the Punisher, but what I got was a cultured and gentlemanly British Deadpool/Tyler Durden.
    • Star Wars – On Sunday Tim and I went over to Heather and Jeremy’s place for our long-awaited marathon of the original, unedited Star Wars trilogy, half of the point of which was to introduce Jeremy’s 9-year-old son to the series, though he already knew some of the plot from playing Lego Star Wars. It had been about two decades since I’d seen any of the original movies, and my memory for stories is terrible, so it was like introducing me to them too, and it was fascinating to watch the isolated scenes in my head get filled in with details and woven into coherent narratives.