Update for 5/27/2018

Church

😎

I forgot to mention my latest liturgical excursion a few weeks ago. I visited the Methodist church my friends attend. It’d been a long time since we’d seen each other, so we had a nice time catching up over lunch.

One of them is the music minister at the church, and she invited me back to see their upcoming concert. So that was my Sunday morning last week, and it was very worth the visit. They performed Robert Ray’s Gospel Mass (YouTube playlist–same work, different performers, conducted by the composer!), an adaptation of the music of the Mass to African-American styles. I knew nothing about it going in, but I love genre crossovers, so I was fascinated and felt inspired to write my own liturgical music. But not yet.

Life maintenance

😐

Last week’s tasks:

• GDPR – Barely started.

This week’s tasks:

• GDPR
• Budget

GDPR

🙄

Still working on some degree of compliance.

I was going to start an article on the wiki for a running list of stories about GDPR’s unintended consequences, but someone on Reddit has created r/GDPRegret and done my work for me.

Whenever privacy issues come up, I always think of this science fiction story by Tim Pratt, “Observer Effects” (audio). Sometimes universal surveillance sounds like a good idea! Too bad human nature always has to complicate things.

Thinking

😎

I finished listening to Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan. 5/5. I plan to study it in depth when I get to my rationality project. It appeals to my sense that life is much more unknown than people like to think. I was also intrigued by his many references to classic literature and thinkers. He especially likes the French. I tend to ignore the past, but Taleb makes me feel like wading in.

Cognitive science

😎

Now I’m on Stanislas Dehaene’s Consciousness and the Brain. A member of the futurism meetup recommended it to me a couple of times, but I’ve been procrastinating on it. It’s turning out to be very good. Surprisingly it even applies to my conceptual modeling project. It intersects with my model of how introspection works in modeling.

Beliefs report

🙂

I also forgot to mention last week that my friend Linda made me this nice owl.

My friend Linda made this #crochet #owl for me and sent it with a message to help me on my spiritual journey. I did some research to see what kind of owl it could be, and I’m going with a northern or southern white-faced owl.

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on May 28, 2018 at 8:51pm PDT