Weeknote for 12/27/2020

Posted on January 1, 2021 by Andy

Video

🤔

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me gives us Laura’s side of the story. Between tasks in my travel preparations, I watched the Twin Peaks movie. Some of the actors in the retrospective documentary said they were disappointed the show’s small town community feel was lost because the movie dropped the other plots and focused on Laura, but I agreed with this review. The movie had a different purpose from the show. The TV show told us what had gone on with Laura as it was uncovered by the investigators, which ended up fairly sanitized on screen. The movie cranked it up several notches and showed us. An emotionally wrenching portrayal.

Christmas

🙂

Last week was the Christmas trip that’s been a tower of unease looming over me since we started planning it in the middle of the year. But we made plans to keep it free of illness, and it turned out to be a satisfying time with the family. I’ll be watching our health in the next week to see if our plans worked.

Wednesday

Wednesday was our drive down to the cabin we were renting in the Ozarks. My brother picked me up and drove the whole way. One of my worries had been that my intestinal issues would give me problems somewhere in the 9-hour trip, but they were in a calm period, and the ride wasn’t too bad.

 

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Even though we were away from our usual gathering place, we kept some of our Christmas traditions: Dinner was tamales, refried beans, and Spanish rice. And my sister brought a puzzle, a painting of a cat library.

An accidental tradition we seem to keep every year is too many desserts. This time we each made at least one to bring, and we ended up with nine kinds for the five of us. I made molasses cookies.

 

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Thursday

Thursday was Christmas Eve. Breakfast was Michael’s Christmas quiche (with sun dried tomatoes and spinach). I spent the morning making Google Cardboard panoramas of the cabin. Lunch was our usual chili dogs. In the afternoon we took our sibling walk around the neighborhood, but this time our neighborhood was a leafy dirt path past some other cabins and a view of the mountains. Our Christmas Eve service was a livestream from Michael’s church. Dinner was tortilla soup by Abbie.

 

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Friday

And then, at last, Christmas. Breakfast was our traditional cinnamon rolls, plus eggnog coffee cake by Michael. After breakfast we opened presents. The other main event of Christmas is lunch, and while we find it tempting just to repeat Thanksgiving, we’ve been making an effort not to do that. This year we had ham, mashed potatoes, mashed butternut squash, roasted broccoli, green bean casserole, potato rolls, and Abbie’s “frozey fruit.” The rest was a team effort between Michael and our mom.

 

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In the evening we played a board game Michael had picked up, Wingspan. He won. I tied for second with Abbie.

 

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Saturday

Saturday we checked out at around 9 a.m. and trekked back home. I did a lot of sleeping on the way. I tend to dawdle on my road trips, but Michael’s great at making good time, and I was home by early evening.

 

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Christmas labels

🙂

This year my secret Christmas gift labels were names made out of math-related shapes. This theme came from my math learning project from earlier in the year. I didn’t find any math fonts that made letters out of shapes like I’d found for food in a previous year, so I made my own letters out of things like fractals and measuring tools.

 

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Life maintenance

😐

This week starts the Thinkulum January project month, and I’m continuing with some general life maintenance. This will include task management (mostly using Elastic Habits) and finances (switching software, updating my budget, and investing).

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Weeknote for 12/20/2020

Posted on December 22, 2020 by Andy

Life maintenance

😐

My pre-road-trip COVID test came back negative. I had to break my self-isolation for my regularly scheduled outpatient hospital visit and a couple of curbside pickups at stores, but I’d already arranged a COVID test for five days later, and that came back negative. For our family’s Christmas get together we’re trying to follow the CDC guidelines for indoor gatherings, so we’ll be masking, distancing, and ventilating. I’ll also be self-isolating when I get back. My other travel preparations are rolling along better than I expected.

Thinking

😎

I listened with satisfaction to Duncan Watts’ Everything Is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer). I’d sum up his message as, social science is hard, but guessing is worse. The book lays out numerous ways common sense backfires (including the cognitive biases everyone brings up) and proposes scientific techniques for finding better answers. Since one of my long-time personal mottos has been “Common sense isn’t,” I found the book valuable, and I’ll be revisiting it when I do my deep dive into rationality.

Samuel Arbesman takes a positive view of our shifting knowledge in The Half-Life of Facts. Replacing old beliefs with new discoveries is a normal part of science, and remarkably these changes happen in regular patterns we can quantify (which I’d call another example of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics). Studying these patterns gives us another way to manage the errors and gaps in our knowledge.

I was especially intrigued by his discussion of hidden knowledge, discoveries we could make by triangulating from what we already know or simply by noticing studies that have been overlooked. This is the idea behind my project Mining Ancient Thought, and I keep an eye out for AI projects that draw new knowledge from the existing scientific literature. Here’s one that found possible COVID treatments. Two examples from Arbesman that caught my ear were CoPub Discovery and DEVONthink.

People

🙂

I had a video chat with my old college roommate Jason. It’d been quite a while since we’d talked, other than a couple of brief text chats, but we picked up where we left off, it was a good conversation, and I was glad we made the time to connect. It cemented my observation that if I want to socialize, it generally needs to be scheduled. It also reminded me I want to deepen some of my relational skills, since my talks with Jason are rarely superficial, and I’d like to make the most of such conversations.

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Weeknote for 12/13/2020

Posted on December 15, 2020 by Andy

Life maintenance

😌

I got my Christmas present mailed in plenty of time. This was one of those times when a deadline made me procrastinate less and not more.

🙄

Polyphasic sleep apparently doesn’t work for me. I’ve drifted into some form of it by accident, and it’s leaving me feeling disordered and dissatisfied. If I can find the motivation somewhere, I’ll try to get myself into a more normal sleep schedule.

🙂

I bought a Humble Book Bundle on personal finances and investing. It was well timed given my current project of updating my finances and trying out investing. I need lots of help on that second one. It seems like an easy way to wreck the first. The books are all published by Wiley, and they include such titles as The Savage Truth on Money and Online Investing for Dummies.

Thinking

😎

Robert Alan Burton questions why we’re so quick to feel certain. In On Being Certain, he argues that the feeling of knowing is thought’s reward system, and feeling it about thoughts that could be wrong motivates us to investigate them in case they’re right. The reason I picked up this book was a study I read about many years ago in which patients reported a sense of familiarity merely when a surgeon electrically stimulated a certain spot on their brain. This conflicted with my assumption that the sense of recognition somehow comes directly from the brain’s matching external facts with its internal knowledge base. Similarly, the surgeon could trigger a sense of strangeness in the same way. Burton looks at the feeling of knowledge from this and other angles, and he arrives at a conclusion that skeptics will find familiar, that as natural as it is, we can’t rely on “knowing that you know” as a sign of knowledge. We have to check it against evidence and logic.

People

🙂

Tuesday Jeremy and I found a solution for socially distanced socializing in the cold. We had a last-minute get together at Panera before I began my self-isolation for my Christmas travel. We didn’t want to eat inside and couldn’t anyway, but it was too cold to eat outside. So we parked opposite each other, ate in our cars, and talked over the phone. It worked surprisingly well.

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Weeknote for 12/6/2020

Posted on December 6, 2020 by Andy

Christmas labels

😌

I finished them. On Saturday I was on the home stretch, so I pretended it was Christmas Eve—the time I’d normally finish them—and worked on it till morning. I’d slept earlier in the night, so it wasn’t too bad. Keeping me company were some Christmas playlists of Victorian and lo-fi music, ambiences of gift wrapping, and ASMR roleplays of Christmas parties.

😰

My next Christmas project is gift wrapping and sending. Since I normally use whatever my parents have at their house and we won’t be there this year, I need to find some wrapping paper. Later I’ll need to make a trip to the post office. And I need to do all this before I start self-isolating on Wednesday for the family’s Christmas vacation. I imagine a normal person would hardly give this a thought, but practical tasks on a short timetable make me uneasy, mainly because I don’t trust my own use of time.

Life maintenance

😎

A coffee maker I ordered came in the mail. Up till now I’ve been drinking Mount Hagen instant coffee, but a lot of times I need something stronger, and I figure a coffee maker will give me more flexibility. It was hard to decide on a machine because the reviews for so many were mixed, but I found one customers rated highly at both Home Depot and Amazon, Hamilton Beach model 46381, a 12-cup programmable one. For coffee I’m starting with the standard Folger’s Classic Roast. It’s all working well so far. And it got me through the final night of label making.

Thinking

🙂

I’m listening to a book on the feeling of certainty. Now that my political podcasts are more manageable, I have listening time to spend on other things, and I’m going with a book that keeps drawing my attention, On Being Certain by Robert Alan Burton. It addresses a neurological insight I ran across long ago that lately has felt more important in our divisive time, that certainty is a feeling that is not necessarily tied to actual knowledge or even any prior content at all. I’ll say more next week.

People

😃

Saturday I hung out at the airport with my online friend Paul. It’s the first time we’ve met in person in the 20 years we’ve known each other. He was on a long layover, and I wasn’t sure how we’d do it in a pandemic, but luckily O’Hare has a Hilton inside its grounds, so we sat in the empty lobby on their well-spaced, cushiony chairs and talked for a couple of hours. It was a good conversation, and I was very glad we didn’t miss the opportunity.

Posted in Christmas labels, Coffee, Holidays, Life maintenance, People, Thinking | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 11/29/2020

Posted on December 3, 2020 by Andy

Christmas labels

😐

I’m about 95% done. Hopefully this last little bit doesn’t drag on too long. I should be able to finish it in a couple of days.

Life maintenance

😌

I upgraded to an iPhone 12 mini. I was still on an iPhone 6, and it had gotten very slow and crashy. The Verizon website wouldn’t take my payment, so I had to go buy it in the store. Luckily it wasn’t crowded with people and so hopefully not crowded with viruses. But now I have a new phone, though the lack of headphone jack put me in an awkward limbo period. Most of my phone usage involves audio, so I’ve used my old phone for everything except texts and calls while waiting for my headphone adapter and wireless earbuds to arrive.

Once I finish the Christmas labels, December will be dedicated to life maintenance. I’ll focus on either productivity or my finances. I put off dealing with money even more than I put off cleaning, so if I don’t get to it this month, I’ll probably make it January’s project. I’d like to switch my financial software, update my budget, and start some investing.

Space

😎

I watched China launch a rocket to the moon. If all goes well, it’ll bring back lunar samples from areas we hadn’t visited. The technology sounds very challenging and like a significant step forward in these kinds of robotic missions. I hope it works, especially if they share the engineering details with the rest of us.

Politics

🙂

I settled on some podcasts to follow. These feel workable because most of them aren’t daily. This list will probably change.

TV

😎

I finished the first two seasons of Twin Peaks. A strange mix of cringey, profound, and dark. I’m looking forward to the rest of it, especially with all the questions the ending left open. The movie, a prequel, is on its way to me from Netflix DVD, and then will be season 3, which was made 25 years later.

I started Star Trek: Discovery season 3. I love this show. Getting back to it feels like coming home. Appropriate for the theme of this season.

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Weeknote for 11/22/2020

Posted on November 23, 2020 by Andy

Christmas labels

😐

Some more learning, some more making. I feel like I’m making decent progress on the actual creation. Maybe another week or two? It was a good idea to move this project up from November to October.

Space

😎

I watched three significant launches. I’ve learned that space is hard, so whenever these launches succeed, I exhale in relief. The first was the SpaceX Crew-1 launch of astronauts to the ISS on Sunday. This was the follow-up to the test flight with Bob and Doug back in May. I watched the long pre-launch stream—inspiring as always—and then the docking stream the next night. Waltzes were a perfect soundtrack.

Sadly, during this time, an Arianespace launch failed during flight, destroying its payload of two earth observation satellites. I missed this launch because I didn’t hear about it till afterward. I had learned a bit about one of these satellites, SEOSAT-Ingenio, so I was disappointed, and I can only imagine what the people involved must be feeling.

On Thursday was an Electron launch of 30 satellites, and I was especially pleased that several years’ worth of university students got to watch their project make it to space.

Then Saturday was the SpaceX launch of Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, a house-shaped ocean observation satellite I’d seen here and there online. The launch stream paid tribute to the scientists the satellite is named for, a long-time champion of earth science who passed away this year of cancer.

Politics

🙂

The podcast project continues. I spoke too soon when I said I was tired of 24/7 commentary. Last week I added a few more and started my process of elimination. I decided to leave out the long, rightwing radio shows. They tend to be repetitive and less informative than I’d like. Plus I kind of had to force myself to listen. Townhall has a digest podcast that I might follow instead. The podcasts I’m feeling most at home with are on the center left and center right, so I’ll probably end up with more of those than further on the spectrum.

I do feel a little like I’m wasting my time on this project when I know all this podcast listening will fade before long. But to be honest I’ve lost some motivation for AI (temporarily) and don’t feel like going back to Lex Fridman yet.

I started reading Political Theory: An Introduction by Andrew Heywood. This is one of several political science books I meant to read back in 2016 to get a better handle on the field, but the intensity of the political news ever since has crowded out any fair-minded treatment I might’ve given the topic. Now I feel I can expand my attention and pick that project up again. But it’s a lower priority, so I’m not going to rush through it.

Spirituality

😌

I listened to Rhett and Link’s stories of losing their faith. I’ve never really watched Rhett and Link, but a tweet from a Twitter mutual alerted me to the Lost Years series on their podcast. Evangelical deconversion stories tend to catch my attention, so I listened to the whole thing, and other than their vantage point as the people on stage, their recollections of life in the evangelical subculture and their wrestling with apologetic issues felt very familiar. It was gratifying to be reminded that other evangelicals experience frustration with their intellectual foundations, and hearing these stories nudged me closer to trying to resolve my own issues in this area.

Here are the links if you’re interested:

Modeling

🙄

My motivation is growing (and my impatience) to start on my modeling software. The political, religious, and other issues I want to grapple with are complex enough that handling them carefully will require some external tools. The tool I’d like to use probably doesn’t exist, and I’m very motivated to try to create it. That will probably start next year.

Posted in Apologetics, Christmas labels, Conceptual modeling, Podcasts, Politics, Space, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 11/15/2020

Posted on November 16, 2020 by Andy

Christmas labels

🙂

I spent the week learning about my tools. I don’t like barely figuring out what I’m doing each time I make these labels, so since I have time, I decided to learn a little more properly. Maybe I can get the labels made this week.

Life maintenance

😌

I got some recalls on my car fixed. The first recall was announced around the beginning of the year (an airbag and seatbelt malfunction—kind of important!), but the fix wasn’t ready until about the time the lockdowns started. I’ve been procrastinating since then, but my family has been carefully planning a vacation together for Christmas, and I didn’t want to put off the repairs till the last minute before the big road trip.

That’s the point we’ve gotten to—a trip to the mechanic is the sole notable moment of my week. At the same time, it does feel like an accomplishment, because I’ve somehow gotten even worse about putting off practical tasks.

Politics

😎

I added more political podcasts to try. I was already listening to too many, but I decided that in addition to keeping my cool while waiting for the election to be finalized, I wanted to hear from pundits across the political spectrum. I added some more on the right and a couple from further left.

Right:

Left:

I don’t know anything about these. I just searched for “socialist” in my podcast app. I was inspired by an intriguing interview with Vijay Prashad on Letters and Politics.

I’m not feeling too worried about the election now, and I’ve just about had my fill of 24/7 political commentary, so in the next week or two I’ll filter these podcasts to the few I might want to follow going forward, and then I’ll go back to Lex Fridman and audiobooks. I’m looking forward to some SFF and maybe some classic literature.

Posted in Car, Christmas labels, Podcasts, Politics, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 11/8/2020

Posted on November 8, 2020 by Andy

Christmas labels

🙂

I’ve gotten to the part where I create the labels. It’ll still take some time, so given my pace it’ll probably take this whole week. But that’s still miles better than doing it all Christmas Eve!

Fiction

😎

The Outside by Ada Hoffman is an intriguing mix of ideas. Even though it had a somewhat Lovecraftian theme, I wouldn’t call it scary, since it treated it like a science project, sort of like in Charles Stross’ Laundry Files, although without the Laundry’s apocalyptic expectations. But I do recommend it for the very listenable story and interesting concepts. Unlike in Singularity Sky, another one by Stross, where the AI preemptively rejects the idea of being worshipped, in The Outside the AIs have set themselves up as a pantheon. But apparently this has entrenched them in an ideological rut. Something I’m left wondering is whether the AIs would consider hiring heretics as researchers rather than prosecuting them. If they did that, I would immediately offer myself as a sell-soul.

Politics

🤔

I’m relieved Biden won the election. I had the network news livestreams running 8 hours a day all week, with my playlist of ominous music going in the background. I have many thoughts on the election, but I don’t want to try to summarize them all in this post. What I’ll say is I think it’s a mistake to demonize all the people who voted for Trump, because politics is complicated, and people’s perceptions vary widely, and yet we reduce all the complexity to a choice between a handful of candidates. We shouldn’t be surprised that reasonable people find reasons to vote for someone we never could.

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Weeknote for 11/1/2020

Posted on November 1, 2020 by Andy

Christmas labels

😐

Still working on it. Even though I didn’t finish last week, I was pleased with my progress compared to some other weeks, given how much I’ve struggled to do anything productive lately. As usual I’m hopeful that I can finish in the next couple of weeks.

The next project will be miscellaneous life maintenance. The current Thinkulum project month of November starts on the same day as the calendar month. Unfortunately the next actual project won’t start till I’m done with the Christmas labels. When that happens, my next project will be catching up on some life maintenance. Getting my life more organized should improve my mood and motivation.

Fiction

🙂

To continue October’s cosmic horror theme, I started listening to The Outside by Ada Hoffmann. I found it a while back from a Reddit thread on stories that are reminiscent of H. R. Giger. I was slowed down by other listening I did last week, but I’ll finish it in the next week or two, and I’ll say more about it then.

Video games

🙂

Friday night I started playing Call of Cthulhu. My impression so far is I wouldn’t give the dialogue system any awards for logic, but the game has some nice atmosphere. It’s also pretty easy, which is just my speed right now, since I’m very uninvested in games. It’s not a terribly long game, but to go with this post’s theme of October bleeding into November, it’ll take me a while to finish it.

Politics

😎

To stay grounded as the election comes up, I’m listening to some political podcasts. Last week I learned that my guilty pleasure political blog is even less reputable than I thought (though I don’t think it’s as bad as the criticisms suggest), so I’m shifting my focus to mainstream sources. Here’s a helpful chart from Ad Fontes Media you may have seen floating around, and here’s another chart plus a searchable database from AllSides. I don’t know how many I’ll listen to regularly after election season recedes, but here’s what I have now if you want to follow along. Some of them I picked up from the Ad Fontes chart, and some I encountered randomly on social media. I’ve grouped them roughly by bias.

Left:

Center:

Right:

Honorable mentions:

These are less focused on US politics, but I listened to some good episodes from them.

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Weeknote for 10/25/2020

Posted on October 26, 2020 by Andy

Christmas labels

🙂

I made progress again. Still hoping to finish this week.

Fiction

🤔

Friday my department at work had a lunch discussion of The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. We talked about whether it was a cohesive narrative, the role of the I Ching, and the meaning of various characters’ subplots. Our conversation improved my opinion of the book, which I was only taking on faith as being better than my first listen suggested. It’s a strange book. I also got some alternate history recommendations from my coworker, since I have a story idea in that genre and I’ll need to know how it works.

I picked up my horror listening again with Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales by Christopher Slatsky. Indirect meaning seems to be the theme of this month’s stories, which is less than satisfying for my casual style of listening. I had this issue with Evenson and Dick, less with Ligotti. So once again I’m assuming the author’s work would reward a closer look, since other people seem to think so. But as with the others, Slatsky drops in some interesting ideas I can already play with.

🙂

I decided I missed The Laundry Files, so I listened to my next book in the series, The Apocalypse Codex. As usual some of the details blew past me, but I enjoy the setting, and this time I got a better sense of where the series is heading. The book fits into my cosmic horror theme for this month, but even though I think of this series as Lovecraftian spy novels, it feels less like horror and more like science fiction, because the characters have contained the horror somewhat by technologizing it. The threats are real, but they have the tools and knowledge to deal with them, at least for now.

😎

I had to use 13 Audible credits by the end of the week. My yearly renewal was coming up, and Audible’s new policies meant my old credits would expire if I didn’t use them. It took a lot of research, since I wanted to avoid using credits for books I could get from a library or that were cheaper just to buy, and I wanted to spend them on books I was likely to listen to.

But I got them spent, and my selections nudge me even closer to diving back into SFF. A few of them I’ve been curious about for many years, so I’m looking forward to seeing what those are like: Magician: Apprentice by Raymond Feist, after playing Betrayal at Krondor almost 20 years ago; Little, Big by John Crowley, which I ran across in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy; and A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., which I believe I first heard about in a sermon. I also added a few to my library from Audible’s new Plus Catalog, books that are free with your subscription. One of those was Patternmaster, the first novel by Octavia Butler, another author I’ve been meaning to read for a while.

People

🙃

I had an impromptu dinner with Jeremy—in the rain. We went to Potbelly after work for sandwiches, and since I didn’t want the virus joining us inside, we decided beforehand to eat at one of their tables outside. On the way it started raining. We ate outside anyway. We had a nice time talking, but eating in the rain was ridiculous, and it highlighted for me that people will need to keep being creative about socializing safely as the weather changes.

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