Weeknote for 4/12/2020

Posted on April 12, 2020 by Andy

Productivity

😎

In my continual quest not to waste my life, I seem to have taken a couple of significant steps forward in the past week, if they last.

At the beginning of the week I picked up an idea from Cal Newport’s Deep Work, the idea of dividing your workday into time blocks of 30 minute increments, except I applied it to my whole day. Instead of just recording what I do and letting its content and end point be based on my whims, I planned them out. It has worked amazingly.

My library hold of Daniel Pink’s When came up, motivated by this video presenting some of its ideas, so I listened to that and found it valuable, especially its justification of naps, and I’m being a little more forgiving of myself but also more careful about them. I’m also looking out for midpoint slumps in my activities.

Toward the end of the week I experimented with a shorter time frame for Newport’s time blocks, a minute, as a way to stay aware of the passage of time as I worked. I found an interval timer app called Seconds that let me create a Pomodoro timer that would speak the countdown of minutes. Another remarkable success.

Programming

🙂

After a week or two of trying, I finally got through the first data structure chapter of Lafore’s book, and with my productivity experiments I got through the next three chapters in two days.

Life maintenance

🙂

Monday I went to the infusion center at the hospital for my Remicade infusion. A few weeks ago I worried that the outpatient building would’ve been converted to an ICU by this point in the pandemic, but it hadn’t, and the only difference was that I had to stand way back from a table where masked nurses asked me questions about symptoms and risky contacts and gave me my own mask. Then two more rounds of questions as I progressed through the building.

My mom the seamstress also made us masks, and I got mine in the mail but haven’t worn it yet. It does look very nice though.

I’m finally running low on the groceries I was planning to use (the stockpile is for real emergencies), so I started making plans for my next round of shopping, and I decided to try grocery shopping online. I debated whether to go out myself, but I’m feeling a little vulnerable with my immune system treatments, and I wanted to try this new thing I haven’t done, so I spent a while gathering records of my past shopping, prioritizing and categorizing them in various ways to narrow them down to what I needed, and on Saturday I filled out an Instacart order, which should be filled sometime this week. I’m very conscious of the shoppers’ risks, so I tried to tip well. I also got carried away and ordered things from Target, CVS, and Amazon. I’m thinking this will develop into some sort of regular shopping system for at least as long as the shutdown, maybe longer.

My time blocking has had one of its other desired effects, getting me to bed. And it pretty much does take a whole day of planning to get myself to bed on time. As a result my sleep has been much better this week, except for the night I woke up dehydrated and then cut my foot on a sharp pebble or something in the bathroom. (I took care of it, and my foot has been fine since then.)

Spirituality

🙂

I listened to another Life Model book, Transforming Fellowship by Chris Coursey, an in-depth explanation of the 19 brain skills trained by the organization. I felt it was the best introduction to the Life Model I’ve come across so far. It was well written and overviewed the history of the model, the various resources the organization offers, and both the reasoning behind the skills and some exercises for learning and practicing them.

Friday was Good Friday, and I made use of my day off by working on my data structures book and watching the evening service of the church my brother and I traditionally attend for Easter. They did a great job with their streaming setup under the circumstances, but it definitely felt different than being there among all the people. I did feel more freedom to supplement the service with online activity, such as looking at a full-screen view of The Return of the Prodigal Son when it came up in the sermon and later scrolling through the church’s many quality Facebook photos when I got bored.

Music

😎

A livestream I watched with interesting electronic music in the background reminded me of the magical period last year when I explored drone music, and I felt inspired to look into similar genres. A quick Google search for one of the artists in the stream took me to the electronic music review and news site Resident Advisor, so another music exploration project may be emerging.

Posted in COVID-19, Life maintenance, Music, Naps, Productivity, Programming, Sleep, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 4/5/2020

Posted on April 5, 2020 by Andy

Programming

😐

I devoted almost the full 10 hours allotted to the project last week (Data Structures and Algorithms in Java by Robert Lafore), but I spent most of that time figuring out meta issues, like how exactly to take notes and turn them into flashcards, so I didn’t even finish the chapter I was on the week before (on arrays and binary search), but I decided to put off flashcards until a future project, maybe next month, when I catch up on my learning system setup. For now I’ll just work on taking notes more efficiently as I push myself through the book.

COVID-19

😐

Last week I didn’t really leave the apartment or keep up with COVID-19 news or do any housework. I was mostly focused on getting through work each day, since I was especially tired a lot of the week. I had already decided I wanted to try to maintain a regular routine as much as possible and not create any habits I’d have to unlearn once life returned to something like normal, and I’ve realized that includes not taking afternoon naps I couldn’t take at work. So now I’m back to working on getting more sleep at night.

I did take a short walk through the neighborhood over lunch on Monday, and that was nice, so I’ll try to do more of that. The neighborhood felt quiet but pretty normal, as if there weren’t a crisis going on, but of course I knew there was, so that cast its usual surreal mental haze on the experience.

This week I’ll have to venture back out into the coronavirus cloud (my term for the outside world, which some people seem to treat as being saturated with disease, kind of like in this creepypasta) to have my Remicade infusion at the hospital (the outpatient building, so hopefully relatively safe) and possibly to shop for groceries, unless I decide to try delivery, which seems statistically better for the community’s health, since fewer people come into contact. I still have my new collection of nonperishables, but I’m trying not to dig into my emergency supplies too much until I really need them.

Spirituality

🙂

I listened to the latest book by Jim Wilder, an integration of Dallas Willard and the Life Model called Renovated. Dallas Willard was the well-known purveyor of spiritual disciplines within evangelicalism and a major figure in my conception of spiritual formation, and the Life Model is a paradigm based on neuroscience for psychological and spiritual development within communities. I was involved with them a while back through a local organization that does Immanuel prayer trainings, and I think they’re on to something, so I’m pleased to see this new book, since it merges two of my worlds in spiritual formation and because I think it’ll broaden the Life Model’s audience, especially since they’re working with an established publisher this time instead of self-publishing. The book is fairly short yet dense, so delivers its model of spiritual formation in the manner of a firehose, which could be disorienting for the uninitiated, but that’s kind of how the Life Model goes, and readers will need to follow up with the recommended resources in the back.

Fiction

🙂

Our book group at work for To Kill a Mockingbird is on hold, and my library checkout has been extended till at least June, but I decided to finish the audiobook anyway, and I loved it, mainly Atticus, Scout, and their relationship. I want to know what Black people think of the book though, since the author was white. But I’m at least glad to finally know the plot after all these years of hearing about it. A quote from Atticus in chapter 11 that was very helpful to me: “[Courage is] when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”

Video

🙂

I watched some nature livestreams while I worked:

. Farms (good with my new moody instrumental folk station on Pandora)
. Outdoor feeders (good with soft piano jazz)
. A beach in Hawaii near some of the Lost filming locations

People

🙂

I haven’t done much video calling since this shutdown started, but Friday our family had a Zoom call, and it was nice to see everyone and conversate–nicer than I expected, since I’m not used to that kind of socializing. I’m looking forward to our future virtual get togethers.

Posted in COVID-19, Fiction, Livestreams, People, Programming, Sleep, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 3/29/2020

Posted on April 1, 2020 by Andy

COVID-19

😐

This pandemic means different things to different people. Something I realized after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami is that disasters are selective–the people living past the edge of the wave didn’t have their homes destroyed, and people inside sturdier buildings weren’t swept away, though certainly everyone was affected.

Like many people, it seems, my life hasn’t been extremely affected by COVID-19 to this point–I’m not feeling sick, I can easily work remotely, I haven’t had urgent needs I couldn’t meet, I’m content to be alone for long periods, and my time was already fully occupied at home. As far as I know, no one I know has caught the disease, though at least a couple of friends are at risk. So far I’ve stayed busy just trying to manage my life like I usually do, and to a certain extent this shutdown is like a vacation, a break from certain activities that gives me a different vantage point from which to consider life and some space to experiment and to rest.

But while I’m on my placid journey, I’ve tried to stay aware of people who are having a much harder time–people who have the disease or who have died, their loved ones, health care workers, government officials, business owners and managers, people who’ve been laid off, students with uncertain futures, people stuck away from home, church staff, nonprofit workers, people with mental health issues, the homeless, people who are alone and need help, people who are worried.

What can I get myself to do beyond thinking concerned thoughts? I’m still working that out. I am certainly mired in my own comfort zone.

About the pandemic in general, from what I’ve read, the keys to controlling it other than social distancing will be (1) broad testing, (2) a vaccine, and (3) better treatments, so those are issues I’ll be keeping an eye on.

Productivity

🤔

In my continual quest to waste less time and get somewhere in life, I listened to Deep Work by Cal Newport. It’s a good book, but the obstacles to deep work it addressed were mostly the diffuse work styles people choose on purpose rather than the problems of distractibility I deal with, though he did advise accepting boredom, and he suggested some exercises for building up concentration endurance. I might read a book or two on ADD for extra advice.

Project management

😎

I continued rethinking my project planning and reflected on the fact that my project “months” amount to much less than a month of time, so thinking of them as months only keeps me less aware of the time I’m working with. I found it helpful instead to think of each project month as a 40-hour work week and each project week as a 10-hour work day, so a calendar year is equivalent to 13 work weeks or just over three work months. This way of thinking gives me

  1. a better idea of what I can expect to accomplish in my personal projects (the amount I’d expect to complete in a week at my job);
  2. an important factor in selecting projects (my limited, well-defined total time per year and the large, well-defined chunk each project takes up);
  3. a sharper awareness of productivity and waste within a project (wasteful activities take up enough time to endanger the main tasks);
  4. a way to monitor my time usage within the project (as a percentage of the allotted time); and
  5. a stronger reason to monitor my time usage outside the project (to reserve a specific amount of project time per week).

Time will tell, but this new paradigm feels like a game changer.

For ideas on planning my projects more realistically, the previous week I’d listened to The First 20 Hours, since a lot of my projects are about learning new skills, and last week I continued the theme with the book Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review, since a lot of my other projects are about getting an overview of a topic, ideally from multiple sources. My idea is to choose a principled subset of the book’s guidelines based on the particular project’s goals and constraints.

Programming

🙂

This month’s project is to study the book Data Structures and Algorithms in Java by Robert Lafore (sticking with his program and not trying to get too innovative), so I started that last week and got through the first substantive chapter, which was about arrays and binary search. Part of the plan is to learn via flashcards, so I ended up spending a chunk of time figuring out Anki and how I wanted to get my notes into it.

Bible

😐

I started working on the audio Bible recap.

Movies

🤔

Sunday I watched A Quiet Place, which is similar to both Bird Box and COVID-19 in that safety requires keeping yourself from normal human behaviors that to most people feel essential and automatic–speaking, seeing, and congregating, respectively–a kind of horror that feels very effective to me, especially with the notion that these unnatural, almost impossible precautions are permanent. Our COVID-19 precautions will not be permanent, but I suspect they’ll go on long enough to feel that way.

Saturday I watched The Incident (2014), a Spanish-language film that I picked because it sounded surreal, and though I liked it overall, the ending was confusing and felt a little contrived, and it made the whole thing feel like a long Twilight Zone episode, when I was hoping for something with a little more gravitas.

Posted in Bible reading plans, COVID-19, Movies, Productivity, Project management, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 3/22/2020

Posted on March 26, 2020 by Andy

Learning

🙂

I had the notion that Josh Kaufman’s book The First 20 Hours would help me plan my projects, since many of them are about learning new skills, so I listened to that early in the week with the idea that I could wrap up my learning system setup with a plan for future practice based on Kaufman’s method.

Unfortunately I only got as far as taking notes on Kaufman’s method and didn’t get around to applying it to the learning system setup, but I can keep working on that as long as it doesn’t slow down this month’s project too much.

Still, the book was helpful, and so far my main takeaway is that, for the sake of time, I should keep my learning projects simple and stick with the programs others have created rather than trying to do my usual deep dive with original thinking and abundant rabbit trails.

Research

🙂

Thinking about how to learn and write faster brought me back to the idea of Zettelkasten, and reading more about that online led me to the book How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think by Lion Kimbro, which is an intriguing title, so I listened to it to see what it could add to my existing practice.

The first thing I gained was a reinforcement of the notion that I could throw my half-formed products online just to get them done and available, since that’s the way he wrote that book, and even though the result is messy, it’s quirkily conversational enough to stay interesting.

The main things I don’t do that he reminded me of are to maintain an overall map of my notes and to review them regularly and to generally see them as a more integrated body of work than I typically do.

Life maintenance

😐

This COVID-19 situation has been surreal, rapidly developing, and very uncertain, and my church and employer have been following the lead of our governmental leaders in making their decisions. The guideline for the max size of a gathering has gone from 250 to 50 to 10, restaurants and bars in Illinois were ordered to close, and finally on Friday the governor placed the state under a shelter-in-place order, so we can’t leave home except for grocery shopping and other essential purposes.

On Monday my company encouraged everyone who could to work from home, so that’s what I’ve been doing, except for Wednesday when the water was off in my apartment building for plumbing repairs, and our church’s Sunday services have been reduced to a skeleton crew. Friday it seemed the plumbing work had given my bathroom water a strange taste and had enriched my kitchen water with sediment, so after lunch I took a trip to Target for a faucet filter and some other things, and I felt better about my water, though it revealed a peril of working from home–home issues can come up and distract you from work.

Since I’ll be seeing a lot more of my apartment for a while, I’m going to try to squeeze in a housekeeping side project of organizing and cleaning.

Spirituality

🙂

Because of the unfolding COVID-19 situation, my church encouraged us to stay home on Sunday and watch the service’s livestream, so since it wasn’t my week to play on the worship team, that’s what I did, and even though I was watching at home alone, knowing the service was happening live and that others were watching and commenting, I felt surprisingly connected to the community. The church leaders recommended that we stay engaged, so I sang along with the songs and even continued my practice of sketchnoting the sermon.

Saturday I finished listening to The Word of Promise, the NKJV dramatized audio Bible. I’ll write my thoughts in a separate post (for real this time!).

Movies

🤔

Last weekend I was in the mood for a movie and settled on Coraline. This review contains spoilers.

I liked the movie pretty well, but it also reminded me of the trouble I have connecting with Neil Gaiman’s stories. I know they’re supposed to be good, and I can sort of appreciate them, but somehow his grammar of fantasy doesn’t quite fit with mine.

One more concrete problem I have is that his characters automatically know the magical rules of their world, even if they’ve just stumbled upon them, and I am very sure a real person would horribly fail at intuiting such rules. The only way I can reconcile myself to this type of storytelling is to wrap up the characters’ improbable knowledge in the conventions of some genre. Some descriptions of the story call Coraline a fable, and I think that would take care of it.

One misconception I had at the beginning is that this story would dovetail with my recent, mnemonics-fueled musings about adding an imaginative layer to the everyday world. Early in the movie Coraline seems to gaze speculatively at her new home’s drab surroundings and heads down the path away from the house, talking to a cat she meets on the way. I mistook this for having an imagination, but it turns out, as I see it, half of Coraline’s problem is that she’s locked onto whatever she sees in front of her (her harried parents and annoying neighbor boy, the lack of fun things to do), and then over the course of the story her vision is forced to expand.

Posted in Learning, Life maintenance, Movies, Research, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 3/15/2020

Posted on March 22, 2020 by Andy

Life maintenance

Last week an article on my usual political blog advised that we stockpile a month of supplies in case of disruptions because of COVID-19, and it woke my inner prepper, so I acquired a new hobby of somewhat anxious grocery shopping, which I did almost every day, but I decided to stockpile little by little at several stores so I wouldn’t be clearing any shelves.

Learning

I made a spreadsheet to sort out my confusion over these mnemonic systems and help me set better learning goals. Each sheet covers a type of item to learn, the item column lists the items in that category, and the other columns list the substitute words (or components  in some cases) from the mnemonic systems in various sources (Higbee’s Your Memory, Kelly’s Memory Craft, and O’Brien’s You Can Have an Amazing Memory). I got through the main books I’m using, and I also wanted to collect examples from the web but didn’t get around to it, partly because of COVID-19 prepping and partly because it began to seem more important to spell out people’s methods for generating their mnemonic substitutes than to list the substitutes themselves, but I didn’t get around to that either.

This week I’m assessing how to wrap up this sprint, and next week starts the next project month.

Bible

The Old Testament prophets are not the most reassuring thing to hear during a pandemic.

Movies

Friday I watched The Godfather: Part III, which was interesting–the parts I understood–but did somehow feel emptier than the others, maybe because Michael’s life actually was emptier at that point and maybe also because I was extra confused toward the end.

Posted in Bible reading plans, COVID-19, Memory, Movies, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 3/8/2020

Posted on March 9, 2020 by Andy

Learning

🙂

Last week I (1) reread a lot of William Atkinson’s anti-mnemonics book, (2) filled out my list of mnemonic devices, (3) listed over 30 memory palaces I could use from my life, (4) got a handle on the ways Lynne Kelly uses her rapscallions (mnemonic characters), and (5) nailed down one of my key difficulties in using memory techniques, which is my mind’s slowness at forming creative mnemonic associations. This realization has resolved the question of when I’ll get back to working on my mnemonic substitutes dictionary: this week. Mnemonic systems are already good for memorizing numbers, and this dictionary will give me a way to memorize everything else.

I also (6) introduced myself on the Art of Memory forum, and hopefully I’ll have some good conversations there.

Life maintenance

😐

My life maintenance projects could use a boost.

Diet

I’ve been sticking to my diet, but my weight is hovering, and I suspect it’s because my metabolism has slowed to compensate. Maybe exercise would help, so it’s convenient the weather is getting nicer and my memory project has given me a reason to walk around the neighborhood.

Sleep

I’ve had spotty success getting myself back on schedule, and it’s because I’ve been giving myself excuses to stay up in certain circumstances. So I need to reprioritize sleep and sacrifice other things when necessary, and to do that I’m going to set my bedtime intention in the afternoon and plan my evening accordingly.

Music

🙂

Our church’s new sound system was installed over the weekend, and our team got to try it out on Sunday, which mostly worked out well, so now the congregation can hear everything clearly wherever they are in the sanctuary, and the instrumentalists have individual mixers that we listen to through headphones, which is really an improvement over our old setup.

Bible

😐

I got through my Bible listening for the week, Deut 5-Neh 11. Sometimes I end my listening late in the day and don’t really have time to note my reactions, so I’ve gotten a bit behind on that.

Movies

😎

At the beginning of the week I finished The Godfather Part II, and it certainly sets up a rich scenario for reflection and speculation and analysis, so if Part III is as mediocre as I hear, I’d agree that II is the best of the series. My favorite scene was when Kay makes her stand.

Friday I watched Bird Box, which I knew almost nothing about, and it’s another movie that stuck in my mind afterward, with ruminations on its psychology. In some ways it has a typical plot for a survival horror, but it’s also a cosmic horror with very surreal elements, so of course I loved it, and I was intrigued to find out it’s based on a novel, which I will be listening to because I need to know more.

Birthday

🙂

Saturday was my Douglas Adams birthday, and I’d thought about planning something for it, but I ended up waiting too late and not feeling like setting anything up anyway, so I let it be a normal day and hung out at a couple of my favorite spots around town, and I ended up dropping by Jeremy and Heather’s and playing Mamma Mia! with them. Overall a pretty nice day.

Posted in Bible reading plans, Birthdays, Diet, Learning, Movies, Music, Sleep, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 3/1/2020

Posted on March 3, 2020 by Andy

Learning

😎

Last week officially started my learning project, and I dashed out the plan and started the work, since I was so excited about it. The project’s purpose is to set up a learning system to experiment with, and that will take the form of implementing some mnemonic systems and spelling out some study procedures based on learning research.

Last week I listed most of the mnemonic techniques and systems I’d found, and then I got sidetracked rereading and highlighting Memory Craft, since I love that book so much and it has a lot of unfamiliar advice.

This week I’ll start creating my mnemonic devices and sneak in some more notes on my sources and my own thoughts.

When I started researching memory techniques, I thought they’d just be a tool for learning, but the more I learn about them, the more I see they’re an art that can integrate with a surprising amount of my life. My research on them (1) motivates me to learn some foundational topics I’d been putting off that would give me hooks for further knowledge or that would help me develop other memory techniques (e.g., world history, data structures in programming); (2) points me toward some hobbies and practices I’d put on the back-burner that would give me memorable ways to encode information (music composition, sign language) or would give me components for memory palaces (home decorating, taking walks, video games, drawing, origami, knots); and (3) even involves conceptual modeling, since you have to analyze information to encode it in a mnemonic.

History

🙂

Memory Craft inspired me to listen to an intro history I had on my to-read list, E. H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, which felt like listening to a C. S. Lewis children’s story and was just the kind of history overview I needed, except that it was still very Eurocentric, so I’ll have to look for more in-depth treatments of other regions. But the main thing is it got me to care about the people and events of history, and it gave me some dates to start with for my own History Journey.

Spirituality

😐

Last week on Ash Wednesday I started my listen through the Word of Promise audio Bible. The week’s readings were Gen 1-Deut 4, and this time to give myself material to share, I’m jotting down notes on my reactions to each day’s chapters. I’ll wait till the end to post my thoughts so I can link to them all in one place. So far I’ll say the recording is cinematic, which makes many parts of it very engaging, though I must say large stretches of it are still a challenge to get through, just because the Bible gets very bureaucratic and also far removed from 21st-century Western life.

AI

🙂

At the suggestion of a member of my futurism meetup, I joined an AI meetup, and we had our first meeting last week. The people were very interesting, and the coordinator gave an overview of the state of AI that organized the technology in a simple but helpful way and gave me search terms for further research. I don’t know how involved I’ll get with any projects they cook up, but I’ll keep attending the meetings.

Fiction

🙂

At work this year we’re doing book groups on the theme of diversity. Last year I used the book groups to make myself read Middlemarch, a classic and thus a book I probably wouldn’t get to on my own, and this year I’m taking the opportunity to make myself read To Kill a Mockingbird, which I may or may not have read when I was supposed to in high school. Of course, as usual I’ll be listening to the audiobook, which I started last week when I had some time after the day’s audio Bible assignment.

Posted in AI, Bible reading plans, Fiction, History, Learning, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/23/2020

Posted on February 25, 2020 by Andy

Sleep

🙂

After my degraded time management the week before, I had some success getting to bed earlier last week by using a Pomodoro timer to break up my work at the computer, which kept me from losing track of time and gave me stopping points. This is very encouraging, because usually when my self-imposed schedules fall apart, they stay that way.

Conceptual modeling

😐

Events conspired to keep me from getting much further in Meaning and Argument last week, but I’ll probably keep working on it during my learning project. My summary of this modeling language project is that I learned a little about modeling languages and a lot more about taking notes–oops. I also gained a greater sense of urgency about managing my project time, because I need to make a lot faster progress, and my hunch is it’s possible, so I’ll keep experimenting.

Learning

😎

Last week I continued cramming in books on learning before my listening time is taken up by the Bible (see the Spirituality section below).

I started the week with Memory: How to Develop, Train, and Use It by William Walker Atkinson, which argues that mnemonics are time-consuming tricks with limited value that weaken your natural memory from disuse, and the book describes how to remember more using only your natural memory. I disagreed with his assessment of mnemonics, but I was interested in his techniques and thought he did a decent job of explaining them.

Next was Memory Craft by Lynne Kelly, which I ran across in a friend’s tweet last year and then again recently on the Art of Memory forum. I haven’t read many books on mnemonic systems, so I don’t know how its approach compares, except that I imagine most books don’t bring in the practices of ancient indigenous cultures, but I do know this book is delightful and has inspired me to learn history and use it to populate my memory scaffolding. Maybe once I get more advanced, I’ll make some Lukasa-like memory boards.

After that was Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein, which discussed the ways individuals and organizations pursue a broad range of knowledge and skills (sometimes on purpose, sometimes not) and the benefits of having this range for performance, creativity, and problem solving, which are increasingly important skills as society becomes ever more complex. I appreciated the validation of my generalist lifestyle and the encouragement to make the most of it.

At the end of the week I squeezed in You Can Have an Amazing Memory by Dominic O’Brien, who I’d never heard of before the Art of Memory forum, but he’s been the World Memory Champion eight times, and I wanted to find out how such a high performer got to that level. The book was charming and helpful, not only for reinforcing the usual memory advice but also for nuancing it in ways that could speed up my memorization a bit. It also reinforced my sense that the memory challenges at these competitions make good exercises for honing your skills even if you don’t plan to compete.

My main agenda for this month’s learning project is to set up some learning procedures and tools to experiment with, especially some mnemonic systems. This week I’ll do the planning and get started.

Spirituality

😐

Lent starts this Wednesday, and like last year I’m planning to listen to an audio Bible, this time the NKJV Word of Promise, which is a dramatized version I got for Christmas quite a few years ago and haven’t listened to yet. It’s 98 hours, so if I’m diligent (2x speed, 2 hours a day), I can get through it in 25 days. If that works, I’ll have time in Lent left over, and I’ll listen to some other fitting books on my list. I never got around to writing my reflections last year, so I’ll try to do that this time.

Movies

🤔

I watched the next movie in my AI list, Alphaville, which I knew nothing about, but it turned out to be by a famous French avant-garde director, and thus I don’t really know what to make of it. My impression is it had some interesting ideas buried under clumsy execution, but who knows, maybe that was on purpose? I ended up only really caring about the city’s technological philosophy, at least the parts that were delivered by the impressively croaky AI and the engineers, which didn’t make complete sense but felt evocative, like a philosophical Rorschach test. As usual with media that feels sloppy or incomplete to me, I took it as a writing prompt, and I’m curious what a remake by someone like Alex Garland or Denis Villeneuve would be like.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Learning, Movies, Sleep, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/16/2020

Posted on February 23, 2020 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😐

I got through another two-and-a-half chapters and tweaked my note-taking method to take about half the time, at least in my very limited experiment. Instead of doing all my highlighting in one reading before taking notes, in the first pass I highlighted only the definitions and topic statements I could easily find and then in the second pass took notes while highlighting other points that jumped out. The definitions and topic statements (1) gave me a better sense of what the chapter covered before I began my notes, (2) divided the text into smaller chunks so it felt more manageable and gave me stopping points if I needed them, and (3) gave me a good sense of where the different topics were located in the chapter when I inevitably needed to revisit them.

This week I’ll get as far as I can in Meaning and Argument, and then next week will start the next month’s project, which will be on learning, and I’ll probably continue with that book and my RDF reading as a way to experiment with my learning procedure.

Learning

🙂

Even though my learning project technically doesn’t start until next week (2/23), I’ve been preparing for it with a bunch of reading and research, so yeah I’ve basically already started.

My main book last week was Problem Solving: Perspectives from Cognition and Neuroscience by Ian Robertson, which was about problem solving and adjacent topics, including learning and AI, and in contrast with the usual disappointing scientific treatments of the introspective topics I care about, the discussions in this book were satisfying and gave me a lot of welcome starting points for research. It also covered the whole spectrum of problem alignments (from well-defined “kind” problems to vague, messy “wicked” ones), which was gratifying because I mostly care about wicked problems and am disappointed when a discussion only speaks about problems in terms of predefined puzzles or exercises.

A debate with my foil Jeremy sent me down several rabbit holes of research throughout the week.

The question, “Are flashcards a waste of time?” led me to (1) the site Your Awesome Memory by Bill Powell (who loved them at first and then lost enthusiasm, then regained some of it, all of which gave him interesting things to say), (2) the idea of learning from students in medical school and other high-intensity learning fields like engineering and law, (3) the major flashcard apps Anki and SuperMemo, and (4) the Art of Memory forum, which is a hub of memory activity.

The question, “Is impractical knowledge a waste of time?” led me to two books based on an essay by Abraham Flexner: The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, containing Flexner’s essay with a commentary essay by Robbert Dijkgraaf; and The Usefulness of the Useless by Nuccio Ordine.

The question, “Why memorize when you can look things up?” led me to various scattered articles, the most helpful of which was “Why Memorize?” by Scott Young.

Bill Powell’s blog raised another interesting question, “Do mnemonics weaken memory?” which led me to the old book Memory: How to Develop, Train, and Use It by William Walker Atkinson (ebook, audio). I’ll say more about it next time.

Sleep

😐

My sleep schedule is regressing to the late-night mean, though still without naps during the week, so I’ll need to make bedtime a priority again and think some more about my time management processes, which I didn’t do last week.

Movies

🙂

Over the weekend I watched The Godfather (in installments), which I’d forgotten I put in my Netflix DVD queue to get an idea of how organized crime works and maybe understand certain political situations. It’s not the kind of movie I expect to like, but it drew me in and stayed in my mind the following days, which for me is one of the signs of a good movie. I’m looking forward to II and III.

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Weeknote for 2/9/2020

Posted on February 9, 2020 by Andy

Life maintenance

😐

I did a little better at getting to bed earlier, so my sleep schedule isn’t a lost cause yet. I’m going to start a list of rules for my time management, probably in the form of implementation intentions.

Conceptual modeling

😐

I got through another chapter or so and continued tinkering with the way I take notes to help me learn efficiently. I’m hoping I can find ways to pick up the pace.

Learning

🙂

The major event in my head last week was gearing up for next month’s project on learning, for which I started listening to my books on the topic and researching active learning.

Kenneth Higbee’s Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It is one I read ten years ago that resulted in this essay, and I still recommend the book to anyone who wants an overview of memory and some specific techniques for turning your mind into a filing system, some of which you can pick up from these talks by the author.

Benedict Carey’s How We Learn is a bit lighter on details, being written in a more narrative-oriented journalistic style, but it fills in some gaps and thin spots of Higbee’s coverage, focusing on some of the more indirect and subconscious aspects of learning, such as the way forgetting aids learning.

Stanislas Dehaene’s new book How We Learn, which I found while looking up Carey’s, is a neuroscientist’s look at memory, and unlike pretty much everything else I’ve seen on the subject, it gave me the sense that we do know a lot about how memory works in the brain. He also has extended discussions that compare human and machine learning, so the book was relevant to me on both learning techniques and AI.

A question by Jeremy about modern learning methods reminded me to look into an idea I ran across long ago, project-based learning. It belongs to a family of pedagogies called various names, but for now I’ll go with active learning, and it’s effectiveness is debated, so I’m still deciding how much time I want to invest in it.

Movies

🙂

I’ve been neglecting TV shows and movies because they take up time I’d rather use on my projects, but I was missing them, so over the weekend I picked up where I left off on my AI movie list and watched The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), a remake of the 1951 original. I don’t remember hearing about it when it came out, and the poster didn’t give me high hopes, despite the cast, but it was more thoughtful and creative than the drivel I was expecting, which might be why I liked it better than a lot of the Letterboxd reviewers.

Unlike the original, this story barely even mentioned AI, so it’s questionable whether it belongs on this list, but it’d be interesting to think about how we could create a robot with G.O.R.T.’s architecture.

I rented the movie on Blu-ray, so I watched some of the interesting special features, which included one on Fox’s efforts at environmentally friendly movie production and one on the design of G.O.R.T., which could’ve turned out much different in ways that would’ve been fascinating in another movie, but I think they made the right choice for this one.

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