Weeknote for 9/8/2024

Posted on September 9, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

😌

My latest productivity lifestyle change is trying to wake up consistently early. I learned from my productive Saturday that starting the day early boosts my morale at least as much as getting enough sleep, so I’m going to try prioritizing my wake up time rather than trying to make up for a late bedtime in the morning.

Again I poured a lot of time into progressing a few more steps on my Kanban setup. I’m eager to reach certain milestones of Kanban functionality so I can use the system to work on my other projects. Still, even before I reach that point, I’m seeing some incremental benefits from what I’ve added already.

Parts of my Notion Kanban setup that I worked on last week:

  1. I created views to help me make decisions on tasks that have been sitting in one status for a long time, such as Priority or Paused. Creating these felt settling, because ever-growing lists of stale, forgotten tasks has been a long-term problem in my task management, and now I feel I have a sensibly organized, workable way to address them.
  2. I added dates for calculating lead and cycle times for each project as a whole. The ages of my projects immediately reminded me time passes quicker than I think and motivated me to make the most of it.
  3. I added filters to my overall Kanban boards to hide tasks from projects that aren’t currently relevant. Establishing this new way to shrink the amount of information I have to process at once felt satisfying.
  4. I analyzed how to track the status of tasks that have sub-tasks, which conflict a bit with the more linear way Kanban tends to track work. It felt clarifying to sort out some of the ways I organize information and how they should and shouldn’t change.

Parts of the system I’ll work on next:

  1. I’ll clarify some of my confusing, ambiguous statuses, such as “Ongoing.” Like many of these other discussions, it’ll keep me from continually scratching my head as I use the system.
  2. I’ll revise my Kanban board for the individual project template. Updating this view I haven’t been using will let me focus on managing my workflow within one project rather than sifting through all my tasks at once.
  3. I’ll create a timeline view that visualizes tasks that have due dates. This will give me a high level overview of my time limits to help me prioritize my tasks.
  4. I’ll create a timeline view that visualizes my task history. This will help me review where I spent my time, which among other things will help me write these weeknotes.

Audiobooks

😎

I finished listening to books 1 and 2 of The Brothers Karamazov, the reading for our first book group meeting in a couple of weeks. It made the same kind of psychological deep dive into the characters that appealed to me in Middlemarch. Then the interesting discussion on church and state added to my sense of overlap between my interests and the novel’s. And some of the dialogue was hilarious, mostly thanks to the way Luke Thompson interpreted the characters.

While waiting for the book group to start, I’ve been catching up on some of the short books in my Audible library. Here’s what I’ve listened to so far:

  1. Finding Your Best by Michael Gervais and Pete Carroll – A casual but inspiring conversation on some principles of mindset and coaching.
  2. Wally Roux, Quantum Mechanic by Nick Carr, narrated by William Jackson Harper – The reading and production were fantastic. The story took half its length to feel like it was going anywhere, but it tied things together by the end, and there were some funny moments along the way.
  3. Who Is Elmyr?, written and read by Max Horberry – A fascinating example of metafiction in real life.
  4. It’s Not What It Looks Like, written and read by Molly Burke (YouTube channel) – I’m on the tail end of this one, a moving, enlightening, and enlivening look at what life can be like for someone who’s blind.

Posted in Biography, Fiction, Productivity, Sleep, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 9/1/2024

Posted on September 3, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

😌

I finally got back to making a bunch of progress on this project. Despite that, all I finished was adding calculations for lead and cycle times and creating views for evaluating the status of old tasks. But those took a lot of time, most of it spent typing out discussions with myself to work through the many design decisions. It reminded me that while success may be 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, in software perspiration is 10% implementation and 90% deliberation. Notably I had to learn what lead and cycle time were exactly and why they were useful to know, and then I had to decide what part of my workflow should count as the starting point for my lead time, which ended up being the point when I prioritize the task for action within the next month.

Coming up I need to:

  1. Add some finishing touches to the Kanban overview boards.
  2. Update the Kanban view in the individual project dashboards.
  3. Begin updating the statuses of my tasks according to their current workflow positions and my new rules.
  4. Update the timeline views to match my new approach, moving from iterations to deadlines.
  5. Design some reports.

Food

😌

I was reminded it takes special circumstances to motivate me to cook. Saturday morning I prepared my meals for the next month, which took the form of heating up packaged frozen meals on the stove and in the oven, things like lasagna and garlic chicken pasta. It’s easy but takes a lot of time, which is something I normally feel I don’t have, but if I’ve already spent a lot of time on my projects and I have a large block of time free, I don’t feel too much resistance. The exception that gets me to prep meals at other times is when cooking is itself a project. So now I’m thinking about whether I can use these observations to create a more natural cooking schedule.

Nature

🧐

A big tree at one of my usual parks was knocked down. Some parts of my area had a big storm a couple of days before, so I’m guessing the tree got struck by lightning.

 

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Fiction

🙂

I joined a book group at work that’s reading The Brothers Karamazov. As usual, I joined primarily because it’s the easiest way to get myself to read a classic, and as usual, I’m listening to the audiobook. We got the reading schedule on Thursday, so I found the audio edition and jumped in. The narrator is Luke Thompson, an actor in the show Bridgerton and the movie Dunkirk and terrific as a reader; and despite being a classic, the book is more listenable and entertaining than I expected. Interesting characters are my favorite thing in fiction, and so far that’s exactly what we’re getting.

Posted in Cooking, Fiction, Nature, Productivity, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 8/25/2024

Posted on August 27, 2024 by Andy

Project

😐

I set up some Kanban boards for managing my work tasks. As with the project boards, these views should translate over to my personal tasks with only some light adjustments. This week I’ll try to finish updating my various boards; revise my project schedule timeline to match my new, more fluid approach; and start moving my projects and tasks into their appropriate Kanban columns based on their current positions in my workflow.

Writing

🙂

Stephen King’s On Writing showed me I’m a bit of a pantser. As much as I like the idea of planning everything out, when King laid out his very unplanned way of writing, I recognized in it the way I work—starting with a core idea that grabs me and working outward to see what it grows into as it follows its own hidden logic. The other aspect of the writing process I took from the book was the dynamics of revision: Write the first draft only for yourself, take a long break so you forget what you wrote, reread it, and then write the second draft for your readers, especially your Ideal Reader, a specific, real person who can give you feedback. King’s reading of the audiobook has personality, and the 20th anniversary edition I listened to had some nice bonus material, his son Owen reading his article “Recording Audiobooks for my Dad, Stephen King” and a fun excerpt from an event with Stephen King and his son Joe Hill.

Nature

😒

I found an unsettling patch of nettles. A lot of the woods around here have scattered poison ivy, but at one of the less frequent trails I walk, my nature app identified a great stinging nettle. On my walk there last week, I found out it wasn’t alone. It was accompanied by a large patch of them between the trail and the woods. I like to joke that I’ll pick some poison ivy for my salad, but even without my app to warn me, I tend not to touch things when I’m out in nature, because spicy plants like to look innocent. This trail is near both an elementary school and some healthcare facilities, so I hope there’s some precautionary nature education happening at those places.

Posted in Nature, Productivity, Weeknotes, Writing | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 8/18/2024

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

😐

I determined the initial work-in-progress limits for my work projects, and I was reminded of the value of such limits. I target 5 to 10 hours a week for project work, but last week I got sidetracked enough, mainly by music, that I missed even the lower end of that range, which highlights the importance of managing work with the system’s capacity in mind. This week I’ll continue the Kanban setup with my work tasks, hopefully with less distraction from other interests, and eventually I’ll end up with a visualization for my work that will help me manage it more purposefully.

Nature

🙂

I met a toad. On the way to my car Monday morning I thought I spied the chipmunk I’ve seen around, but its movements were too slow and jerky, so I took a closer look and found this amphibian, which my app said was some kind of North American toad. I don’t know what it was doing in our parking lot.

 

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Music

😎

I got acquainted with Mahalia Jackson. Seeing all the music genres available on the AI app Suno revived my interest in an old project, learning about the evolution of popular music. Looking for a starting point, I remembered reading that rock came from jazz, which came from blues, but then Musicmap told me blues came from gospel, so I started there and took the opportunity to look into Mahalia Jackson, who is considered to be the most influential gospel singer.

It’s not the kind of music I would normally listen to casually, but when I first encountered her work with “No Room at the Inn” years ago, her performance was so intriguing and endearing that the song quickly found a place on my Christmas playlist. This time I wanted to see what her performances looked like, so I watched a few on YouTube, the most engrossing of which was “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” possibly her last filmed performance. It’s still not really my style, but watching closely let me appreciate her effortless power and sincerity and her swings and swoops of improvisation, and I found myself carried along by the music like a train on a track.

I was similarly entranced by “St. Louis Blues,” the only video recording of blues singer Bessie Smith, one of Mahalia Jackson’s major influences, who had an equally effortless power.

I generated a couple more Suno songs. Generating them is quick, if your prompt is simple, but extending and naming them can take a while, so I’ll need to be aware of how much time I can spend on it. I’m learning that as with other generative AI, Suno doesn’t necessarily follow your instructions, so you have to keep your mind open and embrace serendipity. I still have more to name, but for the country sitar songs Suno gave me, I came up with “Sitar Stomp” and “San Antonio Sitar Spring.”

Posted in AI, Music, Nature, Productivity, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 8/11/2024

Posted on August 14, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

😐

I sorted my work projects into Kanban columns based on their status—different types of to-do, doing, and done. As usual, it took longer than I expected, but thinking through the nature of my various work projects helped me shape my system, which should be helpful for sorting my tasks and personal projects. This week my predetermined project schedule has me switching to my fall housekeeping, but with my new Kanban approach I’m throwing out that schedule and sticking with my current project until it’s at a better stopping point.

Nature

😒

I dropped in on the park of the flooded paths to see if it was walkable yet. The paths were clear and dry as if they would never even think of being covered in marsh water. So I’m considering how to reintroduce the park into my walking rotation, since I’d put a new one in its place.

AI

😎

I got hooked on Suno, the AI music generation app. I’d known about Suno thanks to my AI news feeds, but I’d been resisting it, mostly because I assumed it wouldn’t be that great and that it’d be hard to access and use. Plus it did feel like a little bit of encroachment on my creative territory. But I am vulnerable to links from my friends, so when one of them sent me a link to it, I didn’t put up a fight, and I found that not only is it easy to use, its music is somehow strangely good.

Here are a few songs that have grabbed my attention:

  1. “If” – Surf rock based on a Rudyard Kipling poem.
  2. “Liminal” – A sort of new age pop interpretation of liminality.
  3. “Pop Song” – A catchy song about itself.
  4. “Healing Melodies: Namo Avalokitesvara Chant (Version 6)” – A beautiful a cappella Buddhist hymn.

To help me explore the styles Suno was familiar with, I had ChatGPT throw together a table of the genres in the mashups on Suno’s Explore page plus some extra info about them, which I put into a Google Spreadsheet.

And of course, I tried generating a few songs, which you can hear on my profile. My favorite so far is an orchestral one I called “Showtime on Banquet Day”. It actually sounds like something I’d try to write myself, though it gets a bit wild at the end.

Sliding down the Suno rabbit hole has had a few effects:

  1. It’s been another boost to my interest in music, as I occasionally get when I run across interesting recordings, usually for worship team practice, and this time it’s revived a project I’ve dabbled in here and there, exploring the evolution of popular music.
  2. Similarly it gives my meager curiosity about poetry another of its occasional bumps, this time from seeing how turning poetry into music gives the poetry more body for me, so I want to see what I can do with that.
  3. It’s helped me crystalize my thoughts a little more on what the current crop of AI applications is good for, in this case sparking creative ideas and producing quick demos to recreate and revise, since a lot of these songs aren’t really fit as-is for professional use.

Posted in AI, Music, Nature, Productivity, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 8/4/2024

Posted on August 4, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

🤔

I collected my plans for the initial Kanban changes to my Notion system. I got through taking notes on Personal Kanban, except for the whole-book synthesis notes that I’m in the middle of, and I wrote some initial thoughts on integrating Kanban with my Notion system.

I never really used the board views I’d already created because I didn’t understand how they’d help, but now that I know, introducing actual Kanban will just require some modifications to those: (1) adding some columns to manage my prioritizing process, (2) adding column sets to represent workflows for specific task types, and (3) experimenting with a way to represent work-in-progress limits on the columns.

On project iterations, I’m experimenting with dropping them, since they weren’t working anyway, and going back to the bad old days of switching projects at will, except that this time with Kanban and the rest of my productivity system I have tools and practices that should let me be more disciplined about it rather than switching on a whim.

This week I’ll update my Kanban setup, continue taking notes on my Kanban sources, and think through what my Zettelkasten sources are suggesting about organizing my notes.

Nature

🙂

I made the acquaintance of a snapping turtle. Monday I was walking at my usual Monday spot, the park down the street from work, and someone approaching me down the path paused and walked around a large, stone-like object in the middle of it. When I got closer, I saw it was a very still turtle, a snapping turtle according to my app, so of course, I had to film while watching to see if it was alive, and lo and behold, it moved! It seemed a little dismayed by my attention, so I retreated to give it more space. Sadly, when I came back around the loop, it was nowhere to be seen, and all that was left was a small, bubbly puddle that looked like drool, which I hoped meant it had hidden itself in the woods and not that it had been carried off by someone. I had read that snapping turtles emerge from the water to go lay their eggs, so I’m assuming that’s what this one was doing.

 

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Weeknote for 7/28/2024

Posted on July 29, 2024 by Andy

Math

🧐

I continued the setup of my math relearning project while working through the first two sections of the prealgebra review chapter. I experimented with a more streamlined approach to note-taking aimed at keeping myself from doing way more than necessary. The approach involves (1) quickly reading through the section to gauge what I need to learn and to gain a sense of how the pieces fit into their context and then (2) revisiting the parts that need attention.

On the actual math content, I fell down a rabbit hole on how to model negative divisors, since my textbook modeled all the arithmetic operations but division, the most complicated one.

For the next few weeks math will take a back seat to my productivity system and seasonal housekeeping.

Productivity

🤔

I took a bunch of notes on Personal Kanban to prepare for the next iteration on my productivity system, which starts this week. In this book, Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry take the manufacturing-inspired business management framework of Kanban and turn it into a lightweight personal productivity framework, and I’m using it as a starting point for overhauling some of my Notion system. The biggest changes I see so far relate to (a) rethinking iterations as the way to organize my project work and (b) refining the way I funnel tasks into my workflow.

Nature

😮

My walks last week had some edge. Saturday night as I stepped out, I was met with an erratic, extra flappy creature swooping over the parking lot with suspiciously spikey wings—a bat! Or so it seemed to me. I’ve read there are quite a few bat species in my area. It had a couple of friends with it too, zooming back and forth. It made the start of my walk rather tense, since so many bats carry rabies, but not scary enough to overcome my compulsion to film.

Also on Friday I came across a wasp hunting a spider.

Posted in Math relearning, Nature, Productivity, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 7/21/2024

Posted on July 22, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

😎

I’m getting an early start on my personal Kanban system. Since my new motivation to keep a schedule is still alive, I’ve had some extra time in the morning for side projects, so I’ve been spending it on getting into Kanban sooner. So far I’ve assessed my history with Kanban (mainly a more limited and less informed attempt in 2022 that didn’t stick) and assembled the sources I’ll draw from. One of them I listened to this week, Scrumban by Corey Ladas (intro article), a book dense with insights that uses the kind of analysis I live on to helpfully compare Kanban to other approaches. With my new understanding of the framework, now I’m seeing kanban systems pop up everywhere, such as the reservoirs I visit on my walks, which are buffers that helps the pipes manage the flow of stormwater through the system. There’s also my cooking routine, where the throughput is limited by my freezer space, number of food containers, and demand, since I make meals faster than I can eat them.

Zettelkasten has come up in my life again thanks to Tiago Forte’s very good summary article of Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes. I listened to Ahrens’ book a few years ago and didn’t really know what to do with it, but this time my mind has been stirring with improvements I can make to my notes in Notion, so it may be time to revisit the book soon, since it’ll affect how I write tasks for my Kanban board.

The 80-20 Learner by Peter Hollins is helping me optimize my learning. As with Scott Young’s Ultralearning and Josh Kaufman’s The First 20 Hours, I listened to it to help me learn more efficiently when I’m trying to get through large bodies of material, like entire math courses. It was short but gave me some food for thought. I especially want to explore the idea of writing out my thoughts on a topic before I learn about it (1) to focus my learning on my questions, (2) to give my new knowledge a firmer tree of existing knowledge to attach to, and (3) to make a bunch of guesses to be wrong about, since mistakes are how you learn.

My new weeknote writing schedule is shaping up. I got through much more of the content before Sunday this time. The process still has some issues to work out, such as the amount of time I spend writing, but it’s an approach I can work with.

Math

😌

I started my math iteration. To kick things off with some planning, I decided on the textbook to use (Intermediate Algebra by OpenStax), the learning techniques I’ll try (the 80/20 principle; just-in-time, mnemonic flashcards; and writing by hand), metrics for measuring success (flashcards and assessments), and some things I won’t include in the project for now (adding to my math programming cheat sheet, updating my math relearning pages on the wiki, and doing anything with my math student simulator).

Then I started on the first chapter, and … I’m still not learning algebra—it’s a review of prealgebra. But I’m having a good time anyway with the work journaling approach I’ve picked up since my last foray into math, which lets me work more consciously and record thoughts that may become essays at some point.

Mental calculation is one of my lifelong tensions around math, and Arthur Benjamin’s Secrets of Mental Math gives me some potential ways to relieve it. I don’t have much math anxiety, but when it does come up, it’s because I’m expected to do math in my head. Yet in past iterations of my math relearning project, I’ve been too impatient to do the examples on paper, so mentally is how I’ve done them. That works for the most part, but with more complex concepts like fractions it’s a strain to keep track of all the details. That probably means I should just slow down and do them on paper, but Arthur Benjamin tells me to a certain degree there’s a way to have my mental cake and eat it too.

Everything in life is related to everything else, and that’s especially true in math, so it’s interesting to see that these relationships mean there are tricks that make arithmetic calculations easy enough to do in your head. It was also good to see that when the tricks don’t make things easy enough, even mathemagicians use the familiar mnemonic techniques.

Nature

🙂

Friday’s walk brought some rare sights. (1) A clear view of a green heron, which I’ve only seen once before. (2) Chipmunks galore, when they’re normally in hiding or rushing out of sight. I think summer must be the time to spot them. Earlier I even caught a glimpse of one scurrying into a hole by the back entrance of my apartment building. (3) A lily pad with an actual flower.

 

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Movies

🤔

I finally watched Don’t Look Up, and as a person who is always wondering if he cares about the right things, it was a sobering movie despite its humor. The movie is about all the ways society confuses itself into self-sabotage when disaster looms. All the people in the story who were missing the point and being willfully ignorant and playing chicken with reality were frustrating and depressing, and afterward I listened to Isaiah 20-24 from my reading plan and realized we’ve had these problems for a while, so the movie made the Bible more darkly real for me.

It also made me realize that your priorities in life make assumptions about what’s secure in your context and what’s not, and that’s why when disaster threatens to sweep everything away, the normal activities people are preoccupied with sound irrelevant and absurd. It’s what Maslow’s hierarchy looks like when you “meet” your needs by denying they aren’t being met.

Mostly the movie made me wonder what preventable (non-climate) disasters I might be ignoring and how it would change my behavior if I didn’t ignore them. But it also highlighted another layer of choice we get to make even when our more consequential actions fail, the choice to connect authentically with the people around us. Whatever the film’s flaws, I thought it got the main characters’ final scene exactly right, and the way they spent that moment was just the way I’d want to spend it.

Posted in Math relearning, Movies, Nature, Productivity, Sustainability, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 7/14/2024

Posted on July 16, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

Inspired by another listen to David Anderson’s book Kanban, I worked on making my evening schedule more consistent. The exploratory, knowledge-centered projects I’m involved with are more complex and variable than the manufacturing assembly lines addressed by The Goal (which I read recently) and its Theory of Constraints, and the Kanban approach adapts TOC and similar frameworks to these messier environments.

One of the priorities of Kanban is to achieve a predictable delivery cadence, and I realized I’d never achieve a consistent flow in my projects if I didn’t protect my project time, so I started collecting techniques and focusing my efforts. Primarily I set particular times as “bedtimes” for the activities of that time block so I could start my project time block and my actual bedtime on time, and I kept those times in mind as I progressed through my various routines.

A deep dive into applying Kanban to my projects will be part of my next productivity iteration in a couple of weeks.

Blogging throughout the week is off to a promising start. I added a daily blogging session as a follow-up to my daily admin time to comment on any topic that had come up that day or made progress. Spreading out the blogging over the week on purpose did lower the stress of writing … until I got to Sunday and realized I had a few more topics to cover. But this pile-up led to some ideas for improvement this week—aiming to write only one topic per day and to finish all my notes by Sunday so all I have to do is revise and post.

Learning

🙂

I set up the FLEx project for my mnemonic language, began studying the concepts in the FLEx “Introduction to Lexicography” article, and began filling in the names for my new set of PAO initials.

The language file has nothing in it except some metadata from the setup wizard, but it’s ready to receive words when I’m ready to enter them. I still haven’t settled on a name for the language, but my working names have been Thinkunem (which is Thinkumnem without the confusing silent m) and TML (for Thinkulum Mnemonic Language), which echoes the kind of acronymic names we use in programming (HTML, CSS, JSON, etc.).

The lexicography article will help me keep language features in mind to make use of, which is far from straightforward given the highly idiomatic nature of the language, so I’ll have to think about what counts as a lexeme, a morpheme, a root, an affix, etc.

I was hoping to finish the PAO names so I can use them in my math relearning, but since I’m switching to the math project this week, I’ll be limited to working on the names a few minutes here and there till I get back to the memory project. In the meantime my alphabet is at least helping me chunk numbers into somewhat memorable nonsense words, like LIARORA for the date of this weeknote (with my new letter R for 2 instead of N).

Math

🧐

This week I’ll start a two-week iteration on my math relearning project with some exploratory planning on reviewing algebra. My main aim for this iteration is to get a sense for what I can accomplish when I get back into the project, probably in late August or early September, after another productivity iteration and my fall housekeeping and maybe a bit more on memory. I’ll be applying some of the recent lessons I’ve learned from work about learning a subject area more efficiently.

Nature

🙄

I’ve written off one of my regular walking spots due to flooding. There are two paths from the parking lot into the woods, both passing by ponds that I’m not sure have any outlets. The ponds have risen enough over the past few weeks that one half of one of them is completely covered, and the other is developing a big enough puddle that people have created stepping stones out of debris, which slipped under me this time and splashed me with muddy pond water. I’ll check back in a month and see if the paths are clear enough for regular walks again.

Current events

😐

I’m keeping an eye on the aftermath of the Trump rally shooting. I learned about it Saturday evening from a Citizen app alert. I’m glad the former president is okay and has come out of the experience with a message of unity. I’m sorry for the audience member who died—a hero protecting his family, but at a high cost for himself, his family, and I’m sure many others in his sphere. The shooter’s motives haven’t been clear, but what should be clear is that violence isn’t how we strive to do politics in this country.

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Weeknote for 7/7/2024

Posted on July 9, 2024 by Andy

Learning

🙂

I continued my mnemonic language setup with notes on the scope and characteristics of the language. Some key characteristics:

  1. The language is a mental one used for communicating with oneself, so its expression in English is a transliteration.
  2. In addition to the English transliteration, it will have an icon-like script, if I’m prepared to spend the time on it.
  3. To represent information in a highly flexible manner, it will have an alphabet, a syllabary, and a logography, or at least that’s the aim.
  4. It will draw from numerous sources, which I’ll cite in the etymologies.
  5. I’ll use the usage labels to identify the mnemonic techniques the entries belong to.

This week I aim to finish up the setup, and then next week I’ll move on to math.

I switched my PAO number alphabet from Dominic O’Brien’s to one based on letter shapes. The idea came to me while I was slightly struggling to convert a speed limit sign to Dominic letters and I realized I already had a tendency to associate numbers and letters by shape. I had to flip and rotate some numbers, but my new alphabet feels pretty straightforward, and the conversions are much easier for me: 0 = O, 1 = I, 2 = N, 3 = E, 4 = A, 5 = S, 6 = G, 7 = L, 8 = B, 9 = P. I can reuse about half of my names from the Dominic alphabet, so now I just need to come up with the new ones, plus the actions and objects I never finished.

Math

😎

From David Tall’s How Humans Learn to Think Mathematically (overview) I learned that he and Jo Boaler don’t disagree on visual math learning after all. He explains that many mathematicians take an embodied approach to thinking about formal math, most famously Einstein and Feynman. The main value of the book for me, other than inspiring me to keep pushing ahead in math, is that it pinpoints the struggles students have learning particular math concepts, which will hopefully give me a shortcut in getting through them.

Productivity

🤔

Since I’m finally caught up on weeknotes and since compressing my writing time for them rarely works, I’m going to try working on them throughout the week before they’re due. I’ve mostly resisted this approach in the past because it’s hard to assess my week while it’s in progress, but only some of my topics cover the whole week. Others take place on a single day, and writing about those as I go might be easier. I’m guessing it’ll be a relief to spend my several days of blogging before my (self-imposed) deadline instead of after it, and I imagine I’ll feel more in control of the process.

Nature

😎

I believe I spied a great egret building a nest on my walk near work. It was standing on a low tree branch over the water, picking up twigs in its beak and carefully laying them in the branches. But I read they normally nest in April and high in the trees, so maybe that’s not what it was doing.

 

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Holidays

🙂

For July 4th I walked at a park with a big flag display while listening to some of our founding documents. I don’t think I’d ever read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution all the way through, and I thought it’d be a perfect way to try out ElevenLabs’ new Reader app, and it turned out Bill the Old American Male was ideal for reading them. It was interesting to pick up on some of the ways the Constitution protects against the abuses described in the Declaration and to recognize some of its procedures from the news. The flag display was created by a veterans organization, and each of the 2,000 flags represented an individual.

 

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A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

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