Weeknote for 1/5/2020

Posted on January 9, 2020 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

🤔

I did my project proposal and started on the first phase I’d planned–adding the translation spreadsheet entries for Attempto Controlled English, which is a restricted form of English that a computer can interpret and translate into logical structures. I thought it would be fairly straightforward, but there turned out to be several issues that made me question my plan, which I’ll write about next time.

😎

In the process of understanding the complications in my process, I came to a new appreciation for writing as a problem solving tool–specifically journaling. If you open a file or a page (or a voice recorder, if talking is more your thing) and treat it as a conversation partner as you work, not only can it help you break your work into more manageable pieces and think through it more carefully, but it can make your work feel less lonely too. I actually felt like I had a companion in my project who was interested in my work and could help me figure things out. I know this won’t work the same way for everyone, or maybe not right away, but it’s a practice worth trying, and I’ll be using it a lot more.

Life maintenance

😐

I got a Fitbit for Christmas, which I’d put on my wish list so I’d have more objective information about my sleep habits, and maybe I’d get around to some exercise too. It was immediately motivating on exercise, because I saw that my heart rate was consistently 10-20 beats faster than I thought it should be. I also want to stop my weight from creeping upward and try again to improve my cholesterol, so last week I returned to the MyNetDiary app I was using a while back, and I’m wading back into the TLC diet, just the basics for now until I come up with a more detailed plan. I paid for MyNetDiary premium to integrate it with my Fitbit, and apparently I’m more susceptible to gamification than I thought, because the combination of these apps has captured my attention much better than any of my earlier fitness attempts, so 2020 may be the year of the quantified Andy.

Productivity

🙂

My Goodreads currently-reading list is getting kind of long, so I’m focusing my listening to get some books off the list and make it manageable again, and last week I finished Pomodoro Technique Illustrated, a conversational guide to using this well-known productivity method. I’m using the PomoDone app, and I’ve still only carried out the most minimal steps and not very consistently, but overall I’d say it’s pushed me to be more focused and productive that I would be on my own, and I’m going to try to practice it more fully.

Software development

😎

Documenting your software for other developers can be a big problem, and it’s one I care about a lot. Last week I finished Cyrille Martraire’s Living Documentation, an excellent collection of techniques for capturing and presenting all kinds of knowledge buried in your organization’s minds and in its code, using both human processes and automated ones. I’m looking forward to experimenting with them and especially integrating what I pick up from my modeling research.

Audio

😰

I was in the mood for October-in-January last week, so I made a playlist of dark winter ambient music and, while that was playing, played another playlist of snowstorm videos. With the ominous playlist in the background, the bridge video in the blizzard list made me feel like I was watching a creepypasta and I would witness something strange and bad if I waited long enough, which of course I didn’t because the video was meant to be relaxing. Actually some of the music was also rather soothing.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Diet, Exercise, Life maintenance, Music, Productivity, Software development, Soundscapes, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 12/29/2019

Posted on January 5, 2020 by Andy

Christmas

🙂

Some highlights and random observations from the rest of our vacation at our parents’ house.

Sunday

  • I wasn’t alert for all of church in the morning, but in one of my more awake periods, we watched a monologue about Joseph’s disrupted life when Mary became pregnant, and it struck me as a fitting modern description of that ancient story. Actually that could’ve been during Tuesday’s candlelight service, which tells you my mental state and/or the frailty of my memory and record keeping.
  • That evening in anticipation of our family trip to the movies later in the week, at Michael’s suggestion we watched the enlightening and inspiring Mister Rogers documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? I’ll say more about this in the Movies section below.

Monday

  • In the evening we watched Christmas at Belmont on PBS, featuring CeCe Winans and Michael W. Smith. I added some songs from it to my Spotify playlist (see the Music section below) and commented with my family about how impressive expert musicians are as precision performers, since I am sloppy at performance and more of a maker.
  • I stayed up late wrapping presents so that would be out of the way while I was finishing up the labels. It would’ve taken much less time, but I decided I needed to try some envelope and letter folding for some of the gifts.

Tuesday (Christmas Eve)

  • In the afternoon our dad set up the Christmas tree, and the siblings decorated it, as per tradition. The decorating took less time than I expected, about 20 minutes judging by the playlist we listened to.
  • In the evening we went to our church’s candlelight service and then stood in line to take a family picture in front of the sanctuary’s Christmas trees.
  • After our dad’s yummy chili for dinner, we watched Klaus, the new animated origin story for Santa, which was very good.
  • Once my family fiiiinally got itself to bed at midnight (yes, I’m blaming them), I stayed up very late again finishing my Christmas labels. More on those in their section below!

Wednesday (Christmas!)

Christmas morning we carried out our traditional schedule–stockings, breakfast, tree presents, then lunch. My mom had replaced the old stocking she’d made in my childhood with a new one she made, so now my old one is here, and maybe I’ll use it as a Christmas decoration in the future. (Correction: The old one was made by a landlord of my mother’s.) Breakfast this year was Sister Schubert’s cinnamon rolls, which are small, which encouraged me to eat too many of them.

  • Lunch was a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, as we often do for Christmas, with the addition of roasted broccoli, since I’d requested more actual vegetables, which Thanksgiving tends to lack.
  • I was very tired after lunch and took a nap during the annual sibling walk around the neighborhood.
  • In the evening we scrolled through Netflix in despair of finding any good movie we felt like watching, but on the verge of giving up we settled on The Little Prince, and it was an excellent choice.
  • We finished the quilt puzzle. It was a fun one, with a lot of interesting shapes, colors, and textures.

 

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Some nice Christmas stuff from my family. https://www.thinkulum.net/blog/2020/01/04/weeknote-for-12-29-2019/

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Thursday

  • I continued my tech ebook buying binge with Righting Software, Software Requirement Patterns, and EMF: Eclipse Modeling Framework, all of which I’d been antsy to get my hands on. Under the mistaken impression that the site might have an after-Christmas sale, I’d waited till after Christmas, but I was going to buy them regardless. I’ve started all three, and my Goodreads currently-reading shelf is getting crowded.
  • We had our traditional House Cafe brunch, where I got my traditional French toast, which I order practically any time I have breakfast food at a restaurant.
  • My siblings were nice and went on makeup walk with me (photographic evidence), since I’d missed it the day before.
  • We tried to go see the Mister Rogers movie, but the theater had assigned seating and didn’t have five seats together, so we decided to order tickets online for the next day.
  • Dinner was Michael’s delicious turkey soup made of leftovers.
  • After dinner our dad took Abbie and me on our traditional Half Price Books run, where I picked up The Steampunk User’s Manual (follow-up to The Steampunk Bible), Doctor Grordbort’s Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory (from a series I learned about from The Steampunk Bible), Speedsolving the Cube (to help me get a handle on the 3×3 cube I bought a year ago), and a childhood favorite I never expected to find on an HPB shelf, The Man Who Lost His Head.

Friday

  • Laundry day.
  • We made it to the movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, with Mister Rogers played by Tom Hanks, who was a good fit even though I never really forgot I was watching Tom Hanks. I was slightly worried it’d just be a rehash of the documentary, but fortunately it wasn’t, and it was just as thought provoking.
  • We did my traditional Schlotzsky’s run for dinner, though I’d forgotten about the tradition till my mom brought it up. I was relieved to be reminded that even though it’s a place only I really care about, since it was one of my favorite restaurants and I don’t have one anymore, the rest of the family seems to enjoy it.
  • After dinner it was time to sit around with PBS on, and I discovered the show Craft in America. The first episode that night happened to be on quilting, which is our mother’s main hobby. I also made it through a whole episode of Antiques Road Show, which I’d only ever seen a couple of minutes at a time.

Saturday

  • I had a surprisingly quick flight back, and I was glad to have found affordable flights at comfortable afternoon times, since I am not a morning person.
  • Jeremy picked me up from the airport, and while we waited for dinner time, he helped me start assembling my dining set, which we finished after dinner. Just like with the sofa, having it makes me feel more like a normal adult and makes my home feel more complete, and I’m already finding more uses for it than I’d originally planned, so I think it was a good purchase.

 

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Bookstore cafe? Or my living room with a new dining set? https://www.thinkulum.net/blog/2020/01/04/weeknote-for-12-29-2019/

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Christmas labels

🙂

Going along with my conceptual modeling theme, my Christmas labels this year were sketchnotes of popular Christmas hymns: “Angels We Have Heard on High,” “Joy to the World,” “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “Silent Night,” and “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” Click the right arrow in the post below to see more images.

  • I’m not used to this kind of creative modeling, so I was worried I wouldn’t do it right, which led to procrastination during the beginning weeks of the project.
  • It probably helped that I’d been sketchnoting sermons for practice during the previous couple of months.
  • I made up the imagery as I went along, such as for the angels, but I had to research some things.
    • I didn’t know how to draw animals, so I looked up photos of sheep and camels.
    • I learned to draw star people from Visual Meetings, but I had to look up how to draw people running, which I found in an animation book I have.
    • I paid attention to manger images I saw around and learned that everyone makes them with the legs crossing.
    • I paid attention to what Mary looked like kneeling. Silhouettes were helpful.
    • I looked up what images people typically use for “truth” and “grace.”
  • I was again proud of myself for throwing out elements of the project I didn’t have time for. For example, I’d started drawing cartoon portraits to identify the person getting the gift, but that was getting complicated, so I wrote the person’s name in a little banner like the song titles in the sketchnotes.

Movies

🙂

Some things I noticed in the Mister Rogers’ films we watched last week.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

  • I appreciated seeing him talk seriously about his philosophy of child psychology.
  • I appreciated hearing a little about his wife and children and seeing he wasn’t an ethereal person with no real earthly connections. (This happened for me with Dallas Willard too, realizing he was born and grew up somewhere. XD )
  • His own childhood influenced his work. He spent a lot of time alone having to entertain himself during his frequent illnesses, and he was bullied for being chubby.
  • I hadn’t picked up on the main purpose of his program before–to help children deal with feelings. I assumed it was broader than that, but I think it was good for the program to have focus.
  • Coping mechanisms were important for him personally, and his puppets were one of them, especially channeling himself through Daniel and then later King Friday. A bit weird, but whatever works.
  • From the standpoint of someone like myself who’s trying to figure out how to live, Mr. Rogers was a good example of someone living out a deeply and consistently worked out philosophy.
  • He considered remembering their own childhood to be a key practice for adults, which was also a theme in The Little Prince.
  • I’d seen the clip of Rogers arguing for public TV funding before the Senate, and from the chairman’s reaction, I’d always thought he was just a pushover, but no, before Mr. Rogers’ testimony he was opposed to the idea.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

  • The movie explored his relationship and relevance to adults.
  • To a certain extent his determination to live out his philosophy had him living in his own world, even when he interacted with other people. The movie was good at portraying a normal adult’s reactions to him as he resolutely dug into the parts of life that mattered.
  • My impression was the people around him were very loyal, even though he sometimes frustrated them with his eccentric ways.
  • I loved that the filmmakers extended the neighborhood model from the TV show’s intro to serve as transitions in the movie.
  • They also did well at slipping in Rogers tidbits you might want to know, such as how he coped with life, his advice to parents, and whether he’d ever been a military sniper (which would be closer to truth if we were talking about Bob Ross).

There’s more to say about these films, but this post is long enough already!

Audio

🙂

Soundscapes

Continuing my theme of seasonal ambiences, I’ve been accumulating quite a list for winter and Christmas, so if you’re still in the Christmas spirit, here’s the ongoing list I’ve come up with so far, partially sorted by subject matter (city walks, Santa’s workshop, etc.). During some of my Christmas project sessions I listened to the crafting and gift wrapping videos so I could pretend I was working with other project doers.

Music

Here’s a bunch of the music I listened to around Christmas:

  • Christmas 2019 (Spotify) – Based on playlist searches for some of the songs from Advent Orchestra–“Who Would’ve Dreamed” and “Emmanuel (Hallowed Manger Ground)”–plus a couple of songs from Christmas at Belmont.
  • Christmas Lo-Fi (YouTube) – To go with last year’s expansion of my musical tastes into chillhop, I saw one of these in my YouTube recommendations and decided to make a whole playlist. It makes good background music for this video of walking around a wintry Japanese city.
  • Soul of Wind Christmas Guitar 2019 (Spotify) – Based on this video, which I ran across while wrapping presents on Monday and made my companion for the night.

Conceptual modeling

😎

The Thinkulum project month of January starts this week (on Dec 29), and after weighing some options, I decided this project will be to sort out some of the pipeline from writing about a model in plain English to working with it in software. The main deliverables will be (1) a cheatsheet of translations between informal English and various modeling languages and (2) a user guide for basic operations in the software I’m focusing on. This week is for planning the project and starting on it.

Posted in Christmas labels, Conceptual modeling, Holidays, Movies, Music, Soundscapes, Weeknotes | 6 Comments

Weeknote for 12/22/2019

Posted on December 23, 2019 by Andy

Christmas labels

🙂

I worked on this a lot more last week, but I’ll probably still be up late Christmas Eve, though maybe not as late as the last couple of years. Toward the end of the week I had a brilliant flash of insight–since my Christmas project has taken over a month the past two times, if I want to finish earlier, I should start it on an earlier month! So next year I’ll schedule the Christmas project for sometime before November.

Philosophy

🤔

I finished Nathaniel Branden’s The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, which are the practices of living consciously, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, living purposefully, and personal integrity. I found this book toward the end of high school when I was becoming aware of psychology and trying to boost my low self-confidence, and I was intrigued by its well-rounded and orderly take on the subject, but at the time I only read bits and pieces. Now that I’ve been through the whole thing, I’d say the pillars cover a lot of important ground, and I think his techniques would be very helpful, so I recommend the book, but I have reservations too. I’m not sure the practices by themselves will create an attitude of equality and compassion like Branden expects or that they’ll ensure someone feels worthy of love, and I wonder how he’d advise people who have severe physical or mental limitations and actually can’t handle everyday life on their own. But the book still has an important message, and I think of Branden as an earlier generation’s Jordan Peterson without the strident politics and Jungian weirdness, so if you want just a gentle kick in the pants about taking care of your life, Branden’s your guy.

After Branden I started on Becoming Wise by Krista Tippett, the host of the radio show On Being. I’ll write about it in a week or two, but so far I love it.

Christmas

🙂

My annual Christmas vacation in Texas with my family has begun. My brother and sister and I all arrived on Saturday.

  • The living room at my parents’ house feels much roomier this year, and I’m proud of them for working so hard to declutter and reorganize their home. I’m especially glad because this vacation it’s doubling as my bedroom.
  • Dinner at The String Bean was delicious, but they somehow refilled my raspberry tea with something that tasted like maple–interesting, but since maple tea isn’t on their menu, probably a mistake.
  • This year’s jigsaw puzzle is a quilting scene that Abbie got our mom for her birthday early in the year.

I’m also proud of myself for getting ready for this trip in an orderly, non-panicked fashion this year, even while ramping up my work on the Christmas project. I take this as a sign that my life management skills are improving.

Posted in Christmas labels, Holidays, Philosophy, Psychology, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 12/15/2019

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Andy

Music

🙂

We had our Advent Orchestra performance Sunday morning, and all my practice paid off. I played pretty cleanly, and I was able to play the high parts through the whole morning with minimal cheating. For the future, now that I have some exercise books lined up, I’m hoping to practice throughout the year so I won’t have to work so hard at the end of the year to get my playing in shape.

Life maintenance

🙂

I think I’ve taken care of all my major, urgent-feeling concerns now. The main update is that my health insurance finished renewing my medication referral and I was able to make an infusion appointment for Monday afternoon, so my flare-up fears have been relieved. I haven’t set up my new table and chairs yet, but maybe this week.

Christmas labels

😐

Still chipping away. I’m about 80% done.

Philosophy

🤔

I listened to Anam Cara, which was unfortunately not the intro to Celtic spirituality I expected, though I benefited from it anyway. I wanted a map of the distinctives of Celtic thought, and what I got was more of a meandering tour of O’Donahue’s Celtic-inspired point of view with some side trips into Marx and Hegel. His insights felt pretty familiar, so I think the spiritual content of my Christian Education degree was even more Celtic influenced than I knew, but some of the book still felt foreign enough to my default perspective that Celtic spirituality is worth further exploration, so I’ll probably look for another overview at some point.

🙂

Now I’m on Nathaniel Branden’s The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, which basically promotes a philosophy of thoughtful individualism (as opposed to a brazen selfishness).

Politics

🤔

It seems to me that American politics is currently dominated by two battling sets of conspiracy theories, one on the Republican side and one on the Democratic, and right now my political reading list is about diving into the Democratic set. I’ve mostly procrastinated on these kinds of books, because I already read enough criticism of the president in articles and social media posts, and adding whole books just felt spiteful, but right now I’m interested in the broader international issues, so it seems like the right time. I’m also interested in seeing how serious investigative journalism is done, and these seem like good examples.

Last week I finished Craig Unger’s House of Trump, House of Putin, and it tied together a lot of the threads I’d seen in scattered political tweets and articles over the past couple of years. It treated its subject clearly enough that I was able to follow the names and details fairly well, when I was expecting nothing but confusion. Although I probably found the book via Amazon recommendations, I was put on the path to prioritizing it by this intriguing tweet about Trump’s mafia connections and the accompanying website on the topic. I recommend the book if you want an angle on the weird, ominous state of current world politics, at least as it relates to Russia.

Now I’m on a pair of books by Seth Abramson, Proof of Collusion and Proof of Conspiracy, which I’ve wanted to read ever since seeing his “Grand Bargain” tweets spreading the blame for 2016’s election interference to several other countries besides Russia (related Reddit thread).

AI

🙂

Saturday I got together with a couple of other AI enthusiasts for lunch, an informal meetup that grew out of the futurism group I’m in. It was a lively and informative conversation, and as a side benefit I learned from the cyber security guy how to properly monetize hacking. 😉

Posted in AI, Christmas labels, Health, Life maintenance, Meetups, Music, Philosophy, Politics, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 12/8/2019

Posted on December 8, 2019 by Andy

Christmas labels

😛

Not quite done, but I made good progress. I give myself about 2 1/2 more weeks and it should be done. 😉 Last week my excuse was that music preparation kind of took over my time, but this week I’ll need to find another one.

Music

😐

Last week I decided that if my lips were going to make it through playing the French horn for a run-through and two church services the upcoming Sunday, I’d need to intensify my practicing, so a couple of days I increased my practice time from a half hour to at least an hour, and I skipped Wednesday to recover. I also wrote some lower lines for the new songs that I could play if my lips got too tired, which helped last year.

Life maintenance

🙂

On Black Friday I ordered a dining set I’ve had in mind for my living room for over a year. They delivered it last week, so once I’m at a good spot with my Christmas labels, I’ll put it together, and then I’ll Christmas decorate, if it’s not too close to my vacation to be worth it.

😕

Even though my Christmas project from last month isn’t done, this week I’m still planning to start my life maintenance miscellany, especially focusing on the remaining tasks left over from the summer. Added to those is a delay on the next infusion of my ulcerative colitis med because the approval needs to be renewed and the insurance company likes to take its time, so I’ll probably make some calls to see what I can do about that, since I don’t want to spend my vacation in the bathroom.

Philosophy

🙂

I finished Kevin Aho’s Existentialism: An Introduction–wordy, but I did feel well introduced, and even though I consider my perspective to be generally existentialist already, I picked up on new key points that gave me lots of food for thought, such as the idea that we have a fundamental anxiety about death that we continually distract ourselves from (also a key feature of Ligotti); that we have no essential self but are always inventing it, unless we’re avoiding the responsibility and merely playing our societal roles; and that to do our fundamental duty to be authentic, we need to face and integrate our pain (also a key feature of Gurdjieff), though it wasn’t clear to me what we’re being authentic to if we have no essential self. I agree with Aho that even though the initial period of existentialism is long past, its perspective still has a lot to contribute.

I’m almost done with Irvine’s Stoicism book, and I’ve refilled my reading queue with a bunch more philosophy of life books. Next will be John O’Donahue’s Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom.

Productivity

🙂

I took advantage of some Black Friday sales and bought a bunch of ebooks, mostly on programming, but also one on productivity called Pomodoro Technique Illustrated about a system where you use a timer to manage your work cycles–typically 25 minutes of work followed by a 5-minute break, and a longer break every four work sessions. Pomodoro is a popular method in the Internet productivitysphere, and I tried it a while back without much conviction, but around Thanksgiving I felt the need for a productivity push both at work and at home, so the sale was timely. Last week I tried it using the PomoDone app, and it helped me stay much more focused at work. I didn’t really use it at home, but it at least got me thinking of my activities in terms of focused blocks of time. I’m still in the middle of the book, which I want to finish because his advice will help me refine my practice.

Programming

🙂

My conceptual modeling thoughts and binge buying of programming ebooks have brought software development back to the front of my mind, so I’ve added another side queue for books on programming. I’m starting with Living Documentation by Cyrille Martraire, because I’ll want a lot of documentation in my math student simulator, which I’m planning to return to in the next few months.

People

🤔

Saturday I bought Jeremy lunch at a local deli, partly because the weekend before was his birthday and we didn’t get together and partly because I found out that weekend that the restaurant was closing in a week. He’d never been there, so his first sandwich there was also his last, unless the restaurant reopens someday, and fortunately he enjoyed it. Coincidentally the day before I’d listened to William Irvine illustrating the Stoics’ negative visualization with the example of eating at a favorite restaurant that would soon be closing, and since the deli had recently become my weekend tradition, I wondered if I’d feel bittersweet about our lunch. It turned out the answer was no, I only felt slightly more reflective, so I guess I hadn’t formed that much of a bond with it, but it does seem to be a community hangout, so it’ll be a loss.

Posted in Christmas labels, Life maintenance, Music, People, Philosophy, Productivity, Programming, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 12/1/2019

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Andy

Christmas labels

😐

I got myself over the major hurdle in the work, once I managed to stop procrastinating toward the end of the week, but I still have the final products to make, so I’m giving myself another week, which is week four of the project anyway, since I started a week late. I’m just shifting the extra week of October’s project into December’s, which will be some miscellaneous life maintenance.

Spirituality

🙂

I finished Hidden Wisdom, a survey of esoteric spirituality: Carl Jung, Gnosticism, esoteric Christianity, the Kabbalah, magic, neopaganism, shamanism, alchemy and hermeticism, G. I. Gurdjieff, Sufism, Rosicrucianism and other secret societies, and the New Age. I read it to explore unfamiliar ways of conceptualizing the universe and to get some context for the fragments of esotericism I encounter from time to time, such as this episode of Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know on technology and the occult, which made much more sense to me after the book. Some of esotericism’s ideas I could embrace were reminders of ordinary things that gained new emphasis for me, such as the fact that some things you want to accomplish require a lot of time, effort, discipline, and even some pain and sacrifice. But I also found myself wondering what concepts from esotericism might be compatible with mainstream Christianity but go underappreciated or unrecognized, such as maybe the idea that the sacraments are a rite of theurgy, though that seems outside what mainstream theologians would accept.

Philosophy

🙂

I decided to keep going with my philosophical list, so I ended the week on Existentialism: An Introduction by Kevin Aho. It’s fairly short, so after that this week is A Guide to the Good Life, William Irvine’s intro to Stoicism.

I was going to end the list there, but I thought of some others on philosophy of life to add, and then my next list on ethics and personality is really just an extension of this one, though with less of the weird, and I’ll even be returning to literature, so I might as well consider this reading list to be ongoing.

Politics

🤔

I’m still in a political mood, so I’ve decided to listen to political books alongside my others, though I’ll give priority to the other topics. First up is Craig Unger’s House of Trump, House of Putin, which looks into Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia. I’ll leave you with that provocative thought and save my political ramblings for other weeks.

Thanksgiving

🤔

My Thanksgiving was kind of a dud, since I didn’t end up with any social plans, and I didn’t do much else that day either. I got my Thanksgiving dinner from Boston Market, which had a lot more people than I expected, some of whom were picking up a meal to eat at home, but there were also some couples and families eating in the restaurant. I had my typical car picnic at a forest preserve, and I was planning to take a walk afterward, but I waited too late and it got dark. I did have a good text conversation with my family and a good phone conversation with my online friend Paul, so those were highlights, and the Boston Market food was good.

It was an interesting experience spending Thanksgiving alone, one I’d actually been curious about, but I wouldn’t want to make it a habit, since the next day felt less satisfying than other years because I hadn’t gone through the effort of the holiday, and I knew conversations about the holiday would be awkward. I’ll need a new strategy for making Thanksgiving plans. I don’t like inviting myself, but maybe I can make it known that I’m looking for somewhere to go, which is basically how my siblings each invited me over this year, but by then it was too late for me to feel comfortable making arrangements. At least Thanksgiving is the only holiday that gets tricky for me like this, and this is the first year no plans have really worked out.

Posted in Christmas labels, Holidays, Philosophy, Politics, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 11/24/2019

Posted on November 26, 2019 by Andy

Christmas labels

🤔

I got past a milestone, and I’m hoping to finish these this week, or at least the main part of the work. I’ve been feeling procrastinatory because whenever I try something new with the intent to create a final product as opposed to just exploring or creating a draft, I have a sense of impending, devastating failure. Maybe I can relieve the pressure by lowering my expectations and treating these labels as drafts.

Movies

🙂

I picked up my AI movie project again, and Tim and I watched The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), which I’d borrowed from Heather. I found it to be an effective and timeless story about the stubborn and troublesome traits that might make humans bad neighbors. It treated AI as an integral part of the solution, and it was a tad too optimistic, in my opinion. I think it needs a sequel where the robots go haywire and threaten galactic civilization. The next movie in my list is the 2008 remake.

Fringe

🤔

I finished Andy Thomas’ The Truth Agenda, an integrative overview of major conspiracy theories. The book at least got me to pay attention to some topics I’d only dismissed before, such as 9/11, the moon landing, Princess Diana, and crop circles, and it made better arguments than I was expecting, so now basically I have several more research projects to file somewhere in my big list. Overall my impression is he made his best cases for particular historical events and much weaker cases for a global conspiracy and claims from alternative science.

Spirituality

🙂

Currently I’m listening to Hidden Wisdom, a book about Western esoteric spirituality, covering traditions like gnosticism and the Kabbalah. I should finish it this week, so I’ll give you my thoughts in the next update.

Politics

🤔

Thanks to the impeachment hearings and my conspiracy reading, I’m in even more of a political mood than I have been, so after Hidden Wisdom I’m going to put the rest of my current philosophy queue on hold and try some of the political books I’ve been putting off, starting with Craig Unger’s House of Trump, House of Putin.

Music

🙂

They sent us the orchestra music early last week, and I managed to practice pretty consistently, so I’m seeing progress, and I should be fairly prepared by the first rehearsal on Tuesday. Somehow I seem to have more endurance this year, meaning my lips don’t get too tired playing high notes, which is good because this music seems to hang around in the upper register more than in past years. I’m still planning to write alternate lines for myself in case my lips give out.

Posted in Christmas labels, Fringe theories, Movies, Music, Politics, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 11/17/2019

Posted on November 19, 2019 by Andy

Christmas labels

😐

I got the planning done and a tiny bit of work. I’ll need to do a big push this week to make sure I don’t fall behind my schedule.

Life maintenance

😐

I’m still working through my medical billing issues from the summer, so I’m making myself continue that this week, because I feel a need to resolve it all by the end of the year. It does feel like extra work, though, when I have enough to do already.

Fiction

😎

I finished Unutterable Horror, and I’m glad Joshi is so opinionated, because I need guidance through unfamiliar territories like this huge genre of literature. Not that I’m planning to become deeply familiar with it, because as much as I sometimes talk about horror media, I have definite limits on the types I can tolerate, and I have to be in the right mood to begin with, but the milder kinds of horror intrigue me as a source of creative ideas and of a sense of deep mystery. This book has reminded me that I’m not very interested in traditional horror tropes, like ghosts, vampires, and the occult, and instead what tends to draw me, other than cosmic horror, is random, Twilight-Zone weirdness happening in everyday life, the kind of stuff I imagined when I was young, and this type of story shows up in places like Kafka, Donald Wandrei (see “The Eye and the Finger”), and the “mundane horror” of Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson, who was a frequent writer for The Twilight Zone. Now I’m looking back through the book highlight the authors, titles, and Joshi’s assessments so I’ll have stories to read, and then I’d like to find other opinionated reviewers who can help me keep up with new titles, and since this historical survey has been so helpful, I want to read others for science fiction, fantasy, and general literature.

Fringe

🙂

I apparently wasn’t done with October weirdness, because last week I was still in the mood for darker stories and ideas, and then came the impeachment hearings, which highlighted the conspiracy theories of both political parties and gave me the extra nudge to look into that world again. So I added a book to my reading queue that I bought a while back, The Truth Agenda by Andy Thomas, an overview of various conspiracy theories and other fringe research that tries both to present a reasonable case for them and to tie them into a cohesive view of the world and its history. I’m nearing the end of it, and I’ll give you my thoughts next week, but here’s a video of one of his talks that will give you an overview. Reading about conspiracy theories makes the political books on my backburner more relevant, so now I’m more likely to read them, but I’m going to put those on hold to get back to my original queue.

Spirituality

🙂

The next book in my queue is another strange one, Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions by Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney, and it’s actually relevant to The Truth Agenda because it covers similar kinds of esoteric spirituality. I originally added it to give me some context for understanding the book of alchemical art I bought, largely for decoration (Alchemy & Mysticism by Alexander Roob), but more generally I’m interested because I like exercising my mind with dramatically different ways of looking at the world, and in the context of this queue, it’s continuing a series on philosophies of life, arranged from more weird to less, some of which are reflected in weird and experimental literature.

Music

😐

The Advent Orchestra at church is coming up again, and even though I haven’t been practicing the horn all year to keep my lips in shape like I’d hoped, I’m on top of things just enough to give myself a couple more weeks of practice than previous years, if I don’t procrastinate, and this year I was also better about keeping my valves unstuck. So I’m picking out some free French horn exercise books from the International Music Score Library Project, and I’ll practice those till I get the orchestra music. I’m looking for exercises that work out my upper range, that aren’t rhythmically very fast or complicated (since that’s not really an issue in our Advent music), and that give me interesting melodies to play (as opposed to repetitive scales, arpeggios, or other patterns).

Posted in Christmas labels, Fiction, Fringe theories, Life maintenance, Music, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 4 Comments

Weeknote for 11/10/2019

Posted on November 10, 2019 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😉

As a bookmark for this project till I get back to it next year, I’ve posted a summary of the state of my research (a week late). To be honest though, I’ll most likely cheat and work on it in the meantime during other projects, because I’m kind of obsessed with this topic.

Christmas labels

😐

The update post for conceptual modeling took a lot more time than I expected, and I didn’t get around to any written planning for the Christmas labels, but I’ve been planning it in my head for weeks, so this week I’ll write things down and get started.

Fiction

🙂

I’m about three-fourths through Unutterable Horror, and it’s giving me quite a few authors to explore, such as Ambrose Bierce with his biting cynicism and Lord Dunsany with his invented mythology. I didn’t realize just how major of a figure Lovecraft is in the genre, at least according to Joshi, and I was a little disappointed to learn that the “King in Yellow” author Robert Chambers wrote so little that’s worth reading, but at least there’s more than I knew about. I should be able to finish Joshi’s book this week.

Worship team

😎

Last Sunday my team was scheduled to play, and we were without a pianist, so after the rehearsal Saturday morning I volunteered. I immediately wondered if I’d made a mistake, because I feel like the bar has risen since I was a regular pianist, but after some practice I felt calmer. It ended up going well, and somehow the set felt special, mostly hymns like “Nothing but the Blood,” a little different from our usual selections, so I felt privileged to be on piano.

I was also happy to step aside for the offertory, which was “The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power” sung by our worship leader in gospel style, because I knew I wouldn’t have it ready in time, and then to see that she was able to ask her friend to accompany her, which worked much better, and it was clear that our African-American friends in the congregation loved it.

Christmas list

😛

Note to family: I’ve updated my wish list.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Fiction, Holidays, Weeknotes, Worship performing | 1 Comment

Conceptual modeling Sep-Oct 2019 summary

Posted on November 8, 2019 by Andy

September and October 2019 were occupied with my project to develop an approach to conceptual modeling. This post is a rough summary of the state of my research from this sprint.

Purpose

Part of my evolving approach to modeling is to match the situation being studied to one or more conceptual frameworks. My initial goal for this sprint was to determine the framework implied in Munzner’s account of data visualization. But my mind insisted on exploration mode, so I ended up looking into other topics as well, some more directly related to visualization and others less.

Findings

Project scope

  • To make sure I had my overall project properly delineated, I had two questions:
    • What topics counted as modeling? For example, should I include creative thinking and problem solving, since those are involved in the modeling process?
    • What academic and professional fields should I use as sources? I want to draw insights from a wide range, but I don’t want to spend time on fields that don’t focus on disciplined modeling.
  • On the topics question, I concluded the ones I questioned had some overlap with modeling, but I shouldn’t make a complete study of them as part of this project, because substantial amounts of the subject matter wouldn’t be relevant.
  • On the source fields question, I decided to focus on the fields in this sprint and later expand in two directions.
    • For creating frameworks, the natural fields would be math, computer science, and systems theory.
    • For learning process, the fields are probably business, social science research, problem solving, intelligence analysis, visual intelligence, intuition research, and the scientific method.
    • I also made a big list of all the fields that felt relevant to give me a somewhat organized future reference for this question.

Data visualization

Munzner, Tamara. Visualization Analysis and Design. A.K. Peters Visualization Series. Boca Raton: CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015.

  • I’ve read about 30% of the material from various parts of the book, but I think it’s enough to get the gist. Most of the book seems to be about working out the details of the “how” question (see below).
  • Munzner’s goal is to define a set of criteria for designing and evaluating visualizations.
  • She divides her approach into three areas: what kind of data is being visualized, why it needs to be visualized, and how it should be visualized.
  • What
    • My take is that all the dataset types are based on tables (or maybe networks or dictionaries): discrete items and attributes, though some datasets ultimately represent continuous data.
    • There are kinds of information this framework would be a stretch for, such as narratives.
    • The data types understandably focus on spatial data.
  • Why
    • What to look for in the data partly depends on the tasks.
    • What to look for is described by math, mainly statistical methods, graph theory, and geometry.
  • How
    • The book is good for expanding my visual repertoire in an ordered way. For example:
      • Visualizations can contain composite glyph objects. Thus, diagrams don’t have to be simple.
      • Visualizations are made up of marks (visual objects with various numbers of spatial dimensions) and channels (the marks’ visual attributes, which have traits that make them suitable for encoding particular kinds of data attributes).
    • Certain visuals do have semantic meaning (the expressiveness principle), such as lines on a graph indicating trends (so you wouldn’t want to connect unrelated points with a line).
    • “Eyes beat memory” is a key insight even beyond her application of it to animation. I think a major reason visualizations are so helpful for thinking is that they unburden the viewer’s memory by keeping certain information in view.

Model-driven software engineering

Brambilla, Marco, Jordi Cabot, and Manuel Wimmer. Model-Driven Software Engineering in Practice. Second edition. Synthesis Lectures on Software Engineering 4. San Rafael, Calif.: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2017.

  • Martin Fowler identifies three modes of use for the software modeling language UML: sketch, blueprint, and programming language.
    • Sketch uses UML as an informal thinking tool and lets the code diverge from the diagrams over time.
    • Blueprint uses the diagrams as a set of requirements for the code.
    • Programming language treats the diagrams themselves as executable code.
    • Brambilla et al focus on the blueprint and programming language modes. That is, MDSE models are oriented toward executable software, even if they’re not directly executable. In contrast, the sketch mode belongs to a category that Brambilla et al call model-based engineering (as opposed to model-driven), and it’s outside the scope of their book.
  • Major players that Brambilla et al cover:
    • The Object Management Group (OMG) with the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and related languages (together known as Model-Driven Architecture, or MDA).
    • The Eclipse Foundation with the Eclipse Modeling Framework.
  • MDSE models are very formal and abstract and often very detailed.
  • MDSE’s technology gets organized into layers of abstraction: models that describe systems and metamodels that describe modeling languages. OMG’s MDA framework is comprised of four of these layers.
  • Modeling languages have syntaxes. The concrete syntax represents a model. The abstract syntax represents the metamodel.
  • Syntaxes can be graphical or textual.
  • Models are manipulated via transformations, which produce other models or code.
  • OMG has a specification for representing RDF technologies.

Graphic facilitation

Agerbeck, Brandy. The Idea Shapers: The Power of Putting Your Thinking into Your Own Hands. [s.l.] Loosetooth.com Library, 2016.

Margulies, Nancy, and Christine Valenza. Visual Thinking: Tools for Mapping Your Ideas. Norwalk, CT: Crown House Pub. Co, 2005.

Sibbet, David. Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes & Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2010.

  • I’ve read all of Sibbet, about 40% of Agerbeck, and 30% of Margulies and Valenza.
  • Agerbeck identifies four uses for drawing:
    • Representing. Traditional art fits here.
    • Thinking. This fits the uses of sketchnoting that The Idea Shapers covers. Generally speaking, the sketch mode of software modeling also fits here.
    • Communicating. Slide presentations fit here. Parts of software modeling also fit here: blueprint mode (communicating to programmers) and programming language mode (communicating to the computer).
    • Facilitating. Graphic facilitation fits here.
  • Graphic facilitation contributes insights on the process of modeling.
  • Graphic recordings mostly function as reminders, whether during a session or after it.
  • Visualization aids thinking.
  • A visual process can greatly engage a team.
  • Drawing by hand has its own meaning, so it shouldn’t necessarily be replaced by computer graphics.
  • Graphic facilitators pay attention to visual structure in addition to depicting concepts, making use of templates for the large- and small-scale structure of their drawings.
  • Certain structures enable a flexible, exploratory process more than others.
  • Abstract diagrams are like the skeleton of the model, and pictorial ones are like the flesh. For example, the border of any depicted object (a cloud, a building, an animal) can function as a containing line, and in addition to grouping and isolating content, the object will evoke meanings related to its subject matter.
  • Drawings can range from literal to metaphorical.
  • Building a visual vocabulary (like mental clip art) lets you draw fast.

Semantics

Saeed, John I. Semantics. Fourth edition. Introducing Linguistics 2. Chichester, West Sussex [England] ; Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016.

  • My goal was to learn how semantics researchers analyze words and sentences to get an idea of the fundamental concepts they recognize. These concepts could be used to build frameworks.
  • Some of these approaches compete to be full explanations of meaning, but I think they all offer tools for understanding aspects of meaning.
  • A survey of the book’s pointers to semantic primitives:
    • Word meaning:
      • Lexical relations, including lexical field, homonymy, polysemy, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, member-collection, and portion-mass.
      • Core vocabulary and universal semantic primes.
    • Sentence relations and truth: Logic brings a lot of concepts with it that would inform a fundamental conceptual framework, such as entailment, contradiction, presupposition, and tautology.
    • Sentence situations: Situation type (static, dynamic), tense, aspect (completed, ongoing), modality (level of certainty, level of permission), mood (e.g., indicative, subjunctive), and evidentiality (attitude toward information source).
    • Sentence participants:
      • Thematic roles: agent, patient, theme, experiencer, beneficiary, instrument, location, goal, source, stimulus.
      • Voice: active, passive, middle. As with the other categories, these voices bring other concepts along, such as the concepts of scene, figure, and ground and animacy hierarchies.
      • Classifiers and noun classes: These morphological constructs encode categories like shape, possession, and gender.
    • Meaning components: Semantic components, with accounts by several researchers:
      • Katz on semantic markers and distinguishers.
      • Talmy on motion verbs.
      • Jackendoff on conceptual semantics.
      • Pustejovsky’s extended conceptual semantics.
    • Speech as action: Types of speech acts.
    • Cognitive semantics: Image schemas (e.g., container, path, force), metonymy relations.
  • Concepts related to models and modeling:
    • Context and inference: Deixis, discourse, background knowledge, mutual knowledge, information structure, conversational implicature, lexical pragmatics.
    • Formal semantics: More concepts from logic, specifically predicate logic, which formal semantics translates English into. This type of analysis is explicit about modeling. Montague’s approach is actually called model-theoretical semantics. Similar approaches are situation semantics and discourse representation theory. Formal semantics covers both sentence and word meaning.
    • Cognitive semantics: Radial categories, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, mental spaces, Cognitive Grammar, Construction Grammar.

Field interactions

  • Software models tend to be more detailed and consistent than models in business and other social and creative fields, so software and other STEM modeling can contribute rigor.
  • Fields outside of STEM can contribute insights into the process of modeling. Software modeling discussions tend to skip straight to the model’s features and representation.
  • The needs of software models overlap with the needs of other fields, but software models also have features that aren’t well suited to others or aren’t relevant to them, so the modeling languages would need to be adapted. I’m looking for a database like OWL more than a behavioral system like the MOF seems to be. The behavioral aspects I’ve seen of MOF would come into play if I were making a modeling IDE.

Issues

  • Separating the MDSE abstraction layers is a challenge.
  • What features does a modeling language need, as opposed to other formal languages, such as specifications meant for validation, grammars for parsing, or mathematical notation?
  • It’s hard to know what layout I’ll need when I start a sketchnote.

Future directions

  • Create a simple tool that ties together various existing modeling tools so I can learn by experiment.
    • Attempto
    • Protege
    • EMF
    • NLTK
    • Logic programming
  • Express informal diagrams in formal terms.
  • Practice sketchnoting.
  • Catalog basic attributes.
  • Express existing questions from my method in formal terms.
  • Compare my questions to those from graphic facilitation.
  • Create instructional documents on these formal languages.
  • Expand to educational comics and technical illustration.
  • Expand to knowledge representation.
  • Create visual representations for sentence semantics.
  • Map out the semantic approaches in detail.
  • Try various textual notations for modeling, such as Human-Usable Textual Notation, KM3, and Emfatic.
  • Finish cataloging data visualization information.
  • Experiment with creating a new basic textual notation and modeling tool, if it seems helpful.
  • Begin relearning math.
  • Learn relevant areas of basic computer science.
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