Weeknote for 7/14/2019

Posted on July 19, 2019 by Andy

Site update

🤔

Last week’s very late update reminded me that these weeknotes take me too long to write. I feel like each month’s project is just writing weeknotes and maybe squeezing in my actual project if I have time. So I’m going to think about how I can get them done faster.

Independence Day

🙂

My vacation continued through Monday morning.

Sunday

Sunday after enjoying the US Women’s World Cup win (the rare sports thing I can appreciate), Abbie and I hung out at craft and bookstores until our parents arrived. We went to dinner at our favorite family dining restaurant in the area. My dad and I found it after a long, tiring drive on one of our earliest trips up here for college.

Monday

In the morning we met at a local breakfast place, and then I dropped my car off at the mechanic to look at the damage from the previous week’s accident. Then my family drove me to work, where we said good-bye.

Life maintenance

Last week started with a fuller-than-usual plate of life maintenance concerns. It kinda weighed on my mind. So I made a list of stressors and tasks and then waited to get past them as the week progressed.

Monday

🤔

The police officer at the car accident the week before gave me a motorist report to fill out. It was due in 10 days or I’d get my license suspended or something. Then I went on vacation. I wrote as much as I could while I was away, but for the damage estimate, I needed a knowledgeable person to look at the car. Hence the trip to my mechanic Monday morning. By lunch time he’d determined it’d be hard to fix, and I should have a body shop look at it.

But first I decided to call my insurance company. They started a claim for me and gave me a rough estimate I could put on the form. That took a decently sized weight off my mind.

I debated whether I’d fix this car or replace it. By the end of the week I was leaning toward replace. With all the rust on the underside, this car will only get harder to fix, and next time it might be more than a loose bumper and an out-of-place fuel line.

Tuesday

🙂

Tuesday afternoon I had an appointment with my gastro doctor to lead up to my next colonoscopy. I have one every couple of years to check up on my ulcerative colitis. I’m used to them by now, but my worry is always who I can ask to drive me there and back, since after the procedure I’m too spacey to drive. Jeremy to the rescue! I’d forgotten he took me last year, but a Gmail search reminded me, and he agreed to do it this time too. That’ll be in a month.

Wednesday

😄

At my regular dental appointment a few weeks ago, they found a small cavity. Wednesday I got it filled. After I got there late and then waited a while for everything to get set up, the actual filling only took about five minutes.

Then they tried to charge me $1,000 … for a root canal and a crown. It turned out there were two Andrews there that day, and I was about to be really nice and pay the other one’s bill! My actual bill was only $47.

Waiting

🤔

Speaking of mysterious $1,000 bills (really closer to $2,000), I’d gotten one from the pharmacy that handles my UC medication. Another mental weight to interfere with my vacation. But the more I look into it, the less suspicious it seems, so now my main question is if the manufacturer’s discount program can reduce it.

🙂

Although it was less pressing than my other life maintenance concerns, I wanted to get my cleaning schedule set up. At the end of the week I finished recreating the Clean My Space table as a spreadsheet, so now I just need to fill it in with my intended routine.

And that wraps up my month of life maintenance!

Conceptual modeling

😎

This month’s project is a major update to my conceptual modeling essay based on my thinking and research over the past year. It’ll prepare for the more detailed work on this method that I’ll do in later sprints.

This project is a big deal for me. I see conceptual modeling research as a major subgoal of my life mission of exploring mental and relational potential. I’ve been thinking about it for many years. In fact, even if I never get very far in my career mission of contributing to artificial intelligence, if I do get somewhere with defining a system of conceptual modeling, I think I’ll feel content with my life. So if you see me spending a lot of project months on it in the future, that’s why.

Spirituality

🙂

I finished Preemptive Love by Jeremy Courtney. 5/5. It’s about the author’s philosophy of “Love first, ask questions later.” I thought the story would be sentimental, but it was way heavier than I expected. I recommend it.

After that was Breaking Cover by Michele Assad, which I zipped through. Also 5/5. Very compelling. Overall it was about how the difficult assignments God gives you (in her case, an undercover CIA job in very tough countries) can prepare you for higher purposes he has in mind. A major subtheme was empowerment: You can do more than you think, and you can turn others’ assumptions about you into an advantage.

These two books reminded me of the first principle of improv theater I learned from the book Improv Wisdom: “Yes, and.” When someone makes a suggestion, instead of rejecting it out of hand, embrace it and take it further.

But they also reminded me of survivorship bias. Courtney and Assad took risks and succeeded, but was it only because they were trusting God? Surely they had natural traits and acquired skills that gave them an edge. Their stories left me wondering what can be said about the people in similar situations who don’t succeed. Do those stories tell us anything about taking risks?

Next on my list is War Story by Steven Elliott.

TV

🙂

I finished Jessica Jones season 2. Another 5/5. I liked this season even more than the first one. Both dealt with deep themes and desperate situations, and Jessica’s sarcasm is always entertaining. But this season felt more serious to me, maybe because the villain wasn’t cracking jokes.

Now I’m on season 2 of Dark. Wonderful. Philosophical. Confusing. I’m relying on a couple of Reddit posts to help me sort out all the character relationships.

Posted in Car, Career, Conceptual modeling, Health, Holidays, Money, Site updates, Spirituality, TV, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 7/7/2019

Posted on July 15, 2019 by Andy

It’s a record! 8 days–a new personal best on lateness.

Independence Day

🙂

Last week (technically the week before at this point) we had a little family reunion at my brother’s place in Wisconsin for the 4th of July. My place was on my sister’s way there, so she stayed overnight before we drove the rest of the way together. Our parents drove up from Texas.

Tuesday

I took the afternoon off to finish getting ready for my sister’s visit. She was arriving that evening.

😕

On the way to the store to pick up some things for her stay, I got rear ended by a car that got rear ended by someone else. No one was hurt, but our cars were all damaged. For me the main damage was my rear bumper, which popped out of the wheel well on each side. I need to get it fixed before it falls off and causes another accident. The problem is my car is old and stays outside, so the bottom is really rusty and hard to fix. So I might be buying another car a year or two early. But I couldn’t take care of any of that until I got back the next week.

🙂

Abbie arrived safely. After she got settled, we ate a dinner of frozen lasagna while watching Big Hero 6. More on that in the Movies section.

Before this month’s life maintenance project, my overnight guests had to use my sleeping bag or my huge comforter for a bed. Happily, I now had a sofa bed. I also got all my boxes moved out of the living room, added a towel bar to my bathroom, and did some way overdue cleaning. So now my apartment is much more presentable.

Wednesday

🙂

We weren’t leaving till mid-afternoon, so I spent the morning on more chores to spruce up the apartment. For one thing, I had to wash the sheets I’d bought for the sofa bed because they smelled weird.

🙄

Since Abbie had very long drives on this trip already, I offered to drive between Illinois and Wisconsin. Our trip was uneventful, except that we meant to avoid tolls, and then I made a wrong turn and didn’t avoid them. So later I had to go to the Illinois toll website and reconstruct our route so I could pay them. Thankfully Google Maps creepily tracks your location so you can do things like that.

🙂

Dinner was at a local bar and grill near my brother’s place. It was good but greasier than I was ready for. Lunch had been at a local Mexican place near my place, so it was a day of local dining.

Thursday

🤓

Thursday morning I did a little research to clear up some questions I had about the holiday. How did the colonists win the Revolution against such odds? Why did the allies help? Why did the colonies want independence in the first place? Why is independence day July 4? Why do we celebrate with fireworks? Very enlightening.

😎

After a late breakfast, we rented a paddleboat and circled a few times around the bay near Michael’s home. It was midday, which would’ve been a mistake except that there were lots of clouds and a nice breeze. The boat place has more than just paddleboats, and we passed by kayaks, groups of paddleboards, and a swimmer with a bright pink float tied on. Some of the paddleboarders had their dogs with them standing or lying on the board.

😐

At night we drove to a country club for fireworks. It was a mixed experience. The golf course was nice but a little too hilly for comfort. While we waited for darkness, we were snacked on by Wisconsin’s aggressive mosquitos, which seemed to think bug spray was an appetizer. But I did enjoy hearing the chatter of the other visitors around us.

Finally the warning firework was fired, and after a trickle of intro bursts, the show got started. It was a lot like the shows I was used to at home. We were close enough to feel the booms. But after what I took to be the mid-show climax, the pace trickled off again, as if they were having technical problems. People started leaving, and we joined them.

Friday

🤓

Friday we stopped by Michael’s office at his new job, and then it was off to rural Wisconsin for lunch and a museum.

The museum was The House on the Rock, the massive curiosities collection of the late Alex Jordan, who I had never heard of. But my brother’s description sold me on it immediately, and I felt a kinship with this collector before we even arrived. By the end my opinion hadn’t changed, as overwhelmed and tired as I felt. There’s a corner of my mind that, if you blew it up into a person and a half, would be an Alex Jordan. I even bought both the books at the gift shop–a biography and a museum guide–for inspiration in my home (and life) design.

Being there reminded me of a quote I vaguely remembered from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods about roadside attractions as places of power. Only after we’d finished our tour did I remember that the scene in the book was about the very place we were visiting. I was so shocked by the mental connection that I let out a sudden “Oh!” and startled my sister. Later I found out the American Gods TV series filmed those scenes on location, which makes me more interested in watching it.

Saturday

🙂

Saturday we had lunch with a family friend in the area, Abbie’s math teacher from high school. It was good to catch up and hear about her current work teaching computer science.

🤔

In the afternoon we hung out downtown drinking bubble tea and looking at stationery and books. The area had the kind of hipster vibe I can kind of distantly appreciate online, but I found that actually being there made me uneasy. I felt a little too out of place. I think this just means I need to spend a bunch of time in Wicker Park.

That night I drove Abbie back to my place. We managed to avoid the tolls this time. It’s kind of fun driving down country roads. I should do it more often.

Movies

🙂

Big Hero 6 was part of my AI movie project. I was half asleep for the final boss fight (because of tiredness, not boredom), but when I was alert, the movie was entertaining, though maybe formulaic. The main AI-related insight I took from it was the reminder that a lot of what we value about a person comes from our awareness of their memories and from the traits shaped by their experiences. So if you wipe an AI’s memories and restart it from its original state, it’s like the old AI has died. It’s a loss. Unless, of course, the AI was evil.

Posted in Apartment, Car, Holidays, Life maintenance, Movies, People, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 6/30/2019

Posted on July 3, 2019 by Andy

Life maintenance

🙂

My sofa came a day early on Wednesday. I thought I’d have to lug it up from the lobby, but somehow they delivered it right to my apartment door. Through a fair amount of struggle, I assembled it that evening. Then my rug came on Friday. Much easier to set up. So at last my living room is taking shape. I was even able to use the quilt my mom made me years ago to reinforce my color scheme. She tells me the pattern is a triple Irish chain.

I spent a very sweaty Saturday evening moving my boxed books into a stifling storage room. The storage bins here are pretty small, so now for the rest of my living room junk my bedroom is doubling as a storage space. I have a feeling my next decluttering will be sooner rather than later.

I’m still working on my cleaning schedule. It’s taking a little time because I’m working from Melissa Maker’s book Clean My Space, and I’m converting its schedule chart to a spreadsheet.

Fiction

🙂

I finished The Contract by John Powell and Gwen Plano. It’s a political thriller with an interesting framing device. Heaven is intervening in a global political emergency, and the protagonists are two souls the heavenly authorities send to work through human bodies on earth. It sounds apocalyptic, like a left-leaning Left Behind, but I’m not sure the Second Coming will be involved.

Although I felt the story took a long time to get all the pieces in place (half the book), once the main action started, it carried me along. When I got to the end and found out there was a sequel, the story had intrigued me enough that I bought it and started listening right away.

The sequel is The Choice, which was only by Gwen Plano. It turns out this series is hers, and Powell was only helping. Since the first book introduced the scenario, this one could launch straight into the interesting parts.

This series reminds me that “interesting” is a relative term, because I’m sure someone who’s more into romance would like the first half of The Contract more than I did, and people who are bored by research would probably be watching the clock at many points in The Choice. I think you’d call this story a police procedural. But it was just the kind of “boring” I can get into.

Since this series came right after I’d read Robert McKee’s Story, I paid attention to its use of conflict and “the gap” (between expectation and result). For being thrillers, these stories had less conflict and confusion and failure than I expected. Other than some key plot points, most of the events seemed to flow smoothly, the characters got along, and they got what they wanted. But I didn’t mind too much, because it fed the part of me that thrives on good will and cooperation.

There will be a final book in the series, so I’m looking forward to that.

Movies

🤔

Over the weekend I continued my AI movie theme with Chappie. I’d heard it wasn’t great, and certainly I had to work to suspend my disbelief, but I ended up liking it more than I expected. David Ovienmhada captures some of the difficulty I had, and it’s the main reason I find this movie valuable. Ovienmhada notes that the movie’s AI doesn’t emerge from a “clean room” setting, such as a tech company or government lab. I’m already used to imagining that a general AI could pop up anywhere in a range of contexts. But what I wasn’t considering was an AI training environment that might be as random and foreign to me as a gang of criminals.

Chappie isn’t an orderly, well-mannered, Star Trek AI. He means well, but he’s a product of his rough upbringing, and he’s catching up to the humans around him the whole time. It’s basically a robot coming-of-age story, and apart from what’s probably a typical movie structure, it’s messy. Understanding and accepting it means my mind has some territory to expand into, and I welcome it.

Nature

🙂

It’s official. This is my favorite place I’ve lived since college. On Wednesday just before I put together my sofa, I was sitting in the kitchen and spotted something on the ground outside.

After that the rabbit hopped away from the burrow toward the building, and a third rabbit hopped out of the bushes and joined it. I think that’s the most rabbits I’ve seen in person at once. What other woodland neighbors will I find here?

Posted in Apartment, Fiction, Life maintenance, Movies, Nature, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 6/23/2019

Posted on June 25, 2019 by Andy

Coding project generator

🙂

Version 1 is done. The most important thing I’ve learned from this sprint is that it’s harder to create a general tool abstractly on its own, when you can only speculate about what it should do and how. It’s easier when you build it in the context of immediate needs. So instead of spending further months focused on this project, I’ll develop it alongside the programming projects that use it.

Life maintenance

😐

I forced myself out of procrastination and ordered a sofa and then an area rug to go with it. FedEx is just going to plunk the sofa down in the lobby or something, so hopefully I can get someone to help me drag it up to my apartment. That’s supposed to happen Thursday.

This week I’ll finishing organizing my books and set up a preliminary cleaning schedule.

Writing

😎

I finished Story by Robert McKee. I feel enlightened, and it’s affecting how I look at the stories I come across, a valuable stone in my path to understanding narrative. Two points that have especially stuck with me are that (1) a character reveals their character through the decisions they make under stress, which is brought about by conflict, and (2) the purpose of each segment of the plot (a scene, sequence, or act) is to create a change in the charge (positive or negative) of one or more values related to the story’s theme, such as the prosperity of a character or the status of a relationship.

Despite all the insight, there’s still more path to go, and I’m left with questions. Do McKee’s guidelines really cover all the kinds of stories worth telling? And how do these guidelines change exactly when it comes to other media, such as novels and comics? He touches on some of the differences, but I’m sure there’s much more to say.

For now I’m putting the writing books on hold to listen to some actual stories, starting with The Contract by John Howell and Gwen Plano.

Movies

🙂

Monday I finished watching A.I. Artificial Intelligence. (It took a few days. I was distractible.) I had mixed feelings about it. It seemed like two different movies. The first act was sweet and heartwrenching. The second changed tone and turned into an adventure, but it clearly continued the story. But then the third act took a strange turn that seemed to drop the earlier story. But really it was a long, and in my opinion contrived, setup for the final stretch that was meant to tie up the story in a particular way. It just felt clumsy to me. Still, I liked the movie well enough, and Haley Joel Osment was brilliant. I’d managed to go all this time without actually seeing any of his work.

Saturday I watched Upgrade. As I’d hoped, I liked it better than the similarly premised Venom. Upgrade was more serious and ultimately more alien, despite the lack of tentacles. It was a decent take on the control problem, the question of how to keep a superintelligent AI from harming humanity. The movie made a real effort to be logical, which I appreciate in an AI story. It’s easy to get those wrong. Not that we know how events around a superintelligent AI would go, but with a lot of these stories I feel the writer has made the AI character too human for no reason. An AI wouldn’t act like a normal human by default. We’d have to make it that way on purpose, or at least equip and motivate it to learn to act human, and that should at least be part of the backstory.

Posted in Apartment, Coding project generator, Life maintenance, Movies, Weeknotes, Writing | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 6/16/2019

Posted on June 19, 2019 by Andy

Coding project generator

😐

I almost finished it, but I had to extend my deadline a little. I’ll write about it next week.

Life maintenance

😐

This week starts a new project month: Sol, the extra month in the middle of the International Fixed Calendar. This month my project is a miscellaneous assortment of life maintenance tasks, mainly continuing to set up my apartment and setting up routines for cleaning and cooking. There are no real deadlines on these things, so I’ll do however much I can fit into four weeks.

Futurism

🤔

Tuesday my futurism group met to discuss the book Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff. I had mixed feelings about the book. Overall I think it’s a decent conversation starter, but it’s too vague and cursory as a set of advice on its own.

My main beef was with the last chapter, which shares its title with the book. Here’s a 6-minute video summary and a half-hour interview. He says that in the computer age, programming is the new writing, the latest advancement in media skill. The masses need to learn this skill so they won’t be at the mercy of the elites who already have it.

I agree that:

  • Everyone should learn that we aren’t limited to the software we’re given. Software is designed by people, and it can work differently than the way they’ve made it. Learning to program can give you a first-hand knowledge of this fact. That knowledge can help free your mind from the software ecosystem we live in.
  • The basics of programming are easy to learn. One place to start might be MIT’s Scratch lessons.
  • There are useful automation tools that don’t require advanced skill. For example, the website IFTTT. The Automators podcast gives a lot of pointers.

But I also disagree because:

  • Merely knowing how to program won’t be enough to free people. They need to have a creative mind and the kind of critical, sociological perspective of people like Rushkoff. So he needs to be clearer about the programs he expects people to create, especially since “software” covers so much territory.
  • Making software that’s usable and safe is hard, at least when it’s open to the Internet. It takes a lot of dedication to careful thought and testing. I imagine a world where everyone dashes off quick programs from day to day, and all those programs quickly get hacked. Data breaches become a feature of everyday life.
  • What people need are options, software they can choose when they want to leave Facebook or whatever. Not everyone has to take on the role of creating those options. And there are already many alternatives. For example, here are alternatives to Twitter.
  • The mere existence of alternative software isn’t enough. People need to use it. After all, everyone’s on Facebook because that’s where everyone else is. So there’s the business question of how we can build the popularity of these other networks and tools.

Writing

🙂

Last week I got through Design for How People Learn, and I started Story by Robert McKee. Even though I haven’t finished McKee’s book yet, it’s already my favorite of this batch. Very thought provoking and practical. Thank you, Linda, for recommending it.

Linda commented on last week’s post with a question: What do I look for in a writing craft book? I jotted down some thoughts.

  • An author who’s informed by long, broad experience.
  • Endorsements by friends or by the subject’s authorities or by the book’s popularity.
  • Depth rather than superficial techniques. Insights that go beyond the basics. I do need the basics, but after that I need more. I also prefer writers who care about the art of writing and not just how to appeal to the market. But I get that a working writer needs that kind of info to make a living.
  • Thorough coverage of its topic.
  • Citations of evidence. This could be scientific evidence about what works for readers, or it could be analysis of a wide range of examples.
  • Organization that lends itself to procedures and checklists. In my view this is a big part of what makes a book practical.
  • Examples of what to do and what not to do, with suggestions for fixing the bad examples.
  • Writing that follows its own advice.
  • Recommendations for further reading on the book’s topics.
  • Exercises are a plus, especially progressions of them, even though I always put them off when I’m just getting through the book. I value them when I decide it’s time to practice. I have whole books of writing prompts.

Great examples of these qualities are Joshua Schimel’s Writing Science and Julie Dirksen’s Design for How People Learn.

Music

🙂

My worship played last Sunday. Since I’d finished my survey of our patches in MainStage, I picked a few new ones to try out that weekend, mainly a flute and a dulcimer. I think it worked okay, but I need to practice the styles I have in mind. I also need to ask for feedback on whether what I’m playing sounds good, since I’m still learning how to fit synth into the band.

Posted in Books, Coding project generator, Futurism, Life maintenance, Music, Programming, Weeknotes, Worship performing, Writing | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 6/9/2019

Posted on June 10, 2019 by Andy

Coding project generator

😐

I did nothing on this last week. Hopefully I can make some progress this week on the most important features. Then whatever I have at that point will be version 1.0.

Movies

🤔

I finished watching The Beyond, written and directed by Hasraf Dulull. Judging from this podcast interview, he’s a sensation among filmmakers for coming to directing from an accomplished career in visual effects. Well, I don’t know much about making films, but I do have opinions on this one.

The main thing I learned from this movie is that bad writing can overshadow decent acting. The film is framed as a documentary about how an international space agency handled an anomaly. It’s an interesting concept, but I think that’s what ruined it for me. When I see a space documentary, it turns out I expect the content to be realistic. What The Beyond gave me was naturalistic acting that conveyed content that was jarringly unrealistic. It made the characters’ sincerity feel ridiculous.

I actually don’t want to spoil the movie with examples, because I felt morbidly compelled to watch the whole thing, and I wish you the same dubious pleasure. I even want to watch the director’s later movie to see what that’s like. Does that make The Beyond so bad it’s good?

But yeah, I don’t want to be too harsh. It was his first feature-length film, his budget was low, he wasn’t used to writing, and his work will improve. It had some nice visual effects. The script’s awkwardness just made for a very interesting viewing experience.

Writing

🤔

Last week I listened to Writing to Be Understood by Anne Janzer, You’ve Got 8 Seconds by Paul Hellman, and Writing Science by Joshua Schimel. The first two were good but short, and their ideas are already blurring in my mind. I’ll need to go back and study them to make use of their advice. Schimel’s book feels more distinct to me, partly because his advice was a little less familiar and partly because of the careful and repetitive way he worked through the ideas.

I have several more writing books on my current list, but the ones I’ve finished so far help me sharpen the writing questions I have. Writing advice is generally not hard to understand, so to fill my mental gaps what I want are catalogs of examples. For example, a key tool for explaining things is analogy. Janzer points her readers to Metamia, an online database of analogies.

Nature

🤔

Sunday when I was showing Tim the second bird’s nest, which I’m pretty sure is sparrows, we noticed the robins’ nest was empty. Only a week before, the babies were babies. I did notice over the week they were looking more like normal birds with feathers, but I thought they’d stick around a couple more weeks. They grow up fast!

I think the upper corner of a balcony is a common spot for nests. Looking around the apartment complex, I see that a lot of those areas have grass poking out between the beams.

Posted in Coding project generator, Movies, Nature, Weeknotes, Writing | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 6/2/2019

Posted on June 6, 2019 by Andy

Coding project generator

😐

I made some progress, but last week this project was mostly crowded out by other things. I don’t think it’s in danger yet.

TV

🙂

I finished season 2 of The OA. What a strange show. But good, and I’m looking forward to where they take things in season 3. It’s become gradually more epic and rapidly very meta, which I love. It also seems more confident this season. Season 1 felt a little awkward to me.

Before I got my new TV in January, I had taken a long break from TV shows and movies while I worked on my various projects. Now I’m catching up on all the shows I put on hold. There are a lot of them, and it’s been so long I don’t remember them all or where I left off. So I’m having to research my own viewing history.

For now I’m in the mood for Marvel Netflix shows, and the next on that list turned out to be season 2 of Jessica Jones. So that’s what I’m watching now.

Movies

🤔

I didn’t want to get stuck in catching up on shows, so I decided to intersperse some movies.

Friday, after spending way too much time sorting through the options, I watched Coherence, a sci fi film about a dinner party during a visit from a physics-bending comet. This one really did feel awkward. It was clear the actors were ad libbing the dialog based on some kind of plot-driven outline. It didn’t all make sense. Still, it came together in the end, and I ended up feeling it was worth watching. Also from this review I discovered the genre of mumblecore.

Another sci fi movie that caught my attention was The Beyond. I watched the first half late Saturday night, so I’ll write my thoughts on it next week. But it quickly went far beyond awkward. It’s probably the cringiest movie I’ve seen.

Apologetics

🤔

I finished Craig Keener’s Miracles. It reopened my mind to supernatural events. The book dumps a flood of miracle stories on the reader, and a number of them sound credible, especially when they were originally told by skeptics who then became less skeptical, or at least more confused. Many of the events seem hard to explain, such as the ones where people regrew body parts, among even stranger stories.

The world contains plenty of fraud, but this book brings me back to the place of wondering how far explanations like that can go. It reminds me of the beef I’ve had with skeptics, that their debunkings sometimes feel cursory and impatient, as if explaining part of the evidence is good enough for dismissing the rest of it and can’t we just declare victory and get on with our lives.

The book gives me a lot of good starting points for further research on several topics. I have a few directions to take my religious research after this:

  • Learn how skeptics approach the paranormal.
  • Compare Christian miracles to miracles from other religions. This kind of context gives me clarity.
  • Investigate mystical experiences, especially prophetic ones. Miracles that involve content seem more helpful than ones that leave us with an uninterpreted event, such as a healing.

Last week I also ran across a talk by David Eagleman, who takes the same approach I do to the question of religion. He calls it possibilianism. Instead of only pitting Christianity and atheism against each other, as if they were the only real options, we should be examining the whole field of possible worldviews, even ones that haven’t been invented yet.

Writing

🙂

Next I’m listening to a few books on writing skills. I’m too impatient to wait till after my fiction month. I’m starting with Writing to Be Understood by Anne Janzer.

People

Paul

🙂

Monday I had the day off for Memorial Day. I spent a large chunk of it listening to the rain and talking on the phone with my online friend Paul. He’s having a spiritual awakening, coming back to Christianity after many years away. He and I come at religion from different backgrounds, so it’s been interesting and edifying to interact about it.

Paul has the kind of new believer enthusiasm that challenges my jaded faith. He’s only just beginning to figure things out, of course, and we share a bewilderment at all the theological options. I discovered them slowly over time. He’s getting them all at once. If he’d been recruited by a particular church, maybe he would’ve settled on that one, but he came back to Jesus on his own outside of organized religion.

I’ve lived my whole life in evangelicalism, so I’m able to give him a lot of Christian info. But explaining it to him makes me realize how strange and excessive some of it sounds, such as the nuances of the Trinity, which I ended up rambling about while trying to explain the concept of a cult. It also shows me that some of what I “know” is based on old prejudices rather than careful research, such as my ideas of what other religious groups believe.

Uncle Lee

😕

Wednesday we got an email from our dad saying his brother Lee had died the day before. His heart had stopped during surgery on his abdomen. Our parents would be driving out for the funeral in the following days.

I reflected on my intersection with my uncle’s life. My family lived several states away from both sides of the extended family, and we only saw one side or the other during summer vacations and sometimes at Christmas. So I ended up not knowing my extended family very well. As a child I was intimidated by Uncle Lee because of his slightly aggressive humor. I never knew how to respond to him. But I think I do that to people too, so I can’t really complain.

When I visited his family much later, a lot of life had happened, and he seemed to have mellowed to my speed. I remember he spoke tenderly of his youngest son, who had special needs and had died years before, and of their church’s support for him.

Later that visit, we dropped by his neighbor’s house to chat. His neighbor made us some Folgers. One of my weird hang-ups to that point had been to avoid coffee, but I decided to take advantage of this chance to get over it, and so that instant vanilla cappuccino was my introduction to coffee.

Music

🙂

After the worship team rehearsal Saturday morning, I borrowed the laptop to record samples of most of the instrument patches in MainStage. That’s the synthesizer software we use.

I think people tend to have preferences for the aspects of music they pay attention to. I’m weak on rhythm, but I get a lot of meaning out of harmony. Another one of mine is timbre. It makes me glad our worship pastor put me on synth, because it gives me a wide range of timbres to play around with.

Since I don’t have MainStage at home, the recordings I made will let me choose the patches that will work for our performances so I can expand on the few options I’ve been using.

Nature

🙂

Also on Saturday morning, I was considering the little birds that stop by the kitchen end of the balcony, the opposite end from the robin’s nest. I wondered if there were other bird’s nests hiding on my balcony. Looking along the beams above, I found one. I put my phone on a selfie stick to check it out. It looked abandoned, like just a big clump of garbage. But on the third attempt, I caught a glimpse of something. After lunch I bought a light for my 360-degree camera and set it on video recording so I could get a better view.

Posted in Apologetics, Coding project generator, Death, Movies, Music, Nature, Spirituality, TV, Weeknotes, Writing | 4 Comments

Weeknote for 5/26/2019

Posted on May 29, 2019 by Andy

Coding project generator

🙂

I made decent progress last week, though I might’ve gone a little overboard on the comments. Even if I don’t finish everything on my list in the remaining three weeks of this sprint, I expect to complete enough that I can call whatever I end up with version 1.0.

Life maintenance

😐

I’m currently in June on the Thinkulum project calendar, which is based on the International Fixed Calendar. The next month is the extra one called Sol. My version of Sol will start on June 16 of the normal Gregorian calendar.

For this extra month I’m going to take a break from my content-oriented projects and do as many life maintenance tasks as I can fit into four weeks. Hopefully I can do some investing I’ve been putting off, revise my budget, do some cleaning, come up with a cooking plan, and continue tidying and setting up my apartment. Yes, normal people get their apartment set up in a week or something when they’ve moved. For me it takes a year or more.

Fiction

🙂

During Sol I’ll take the opportunity to catch up on some fiction listening along with some narrative non-fiction. One of the novels on my list is something I won from L. Marie’s blog last week, The Contract by John W. Howell. The author wrote a creative and entertaining interview with himself to introduce it.

Movies

🙂

Sunday Tim and Jeremy came over to watch The Hidden Fortress. It’s an old black-and-white movie about two peasants in feudal Japan who are recruited to smuggle a fortune across enemy lines. It was one of the inspirations for Star Wars. Our consensus was that it was good, though it was a simpler plot than I expected, probably because I had Star Wars in mind. I congratulate the Criterion Collection for agreeing with our opinion. And then afterward the special features were helpful for showing me why I should think it was good.

Saturday I watched Venom, the non-MCU Spider-Man tie-in from last year. I didn’t really know the character, so I only vaguely knew what to expect. For an alien blob, he was surprisingly wisecracky. It kind of disappointed me really. I was hoping he’d be more serious and inscrutable. Instead I felt like I was watching Men In Black. Maybe Upgrade will be more what I had in mind.

This movie also highlighted the realistic turn in comic book movies, because it had clearly missed that turn. Venom felt much more like the new superkid on the block than a strange new threat that humanity now had to deal with. I’m pretty sure in the real world the movie’s events would have a few more consequences.

Still, I liked the movie okay. Once again, the special features did a good job of selling it.

Nature

😍

Saturday it was a little too warm in my apartment, but I didn’t want to run the air conditioner unless I had to, so I opened the windows instead. I rarely do this. The weather turned out to be perfect–breezy and peaceful with puffy clouds and all the typical suburban sounds in the background–so I left them open the rest of the day.

Toward evening I stood out on my balcony to enjoy the tranquility a bit more, and when I turned to go back inside, I saw something between the vertical slats at the other end. A bird’s nest! It was a little too high to see inside, so I walked over and lifted my phone to take a picture.

I love birds. I was going to say this nest was the bow on the gift of a perfect day, but really the day was the wrapper for the nest. The robin parents seem a little wary of me, so my plan is to keep a respectful distance and check up on them every once in a while through the glass door.

Posted in Coding project generator, Fiction, Life maintenance, Movies, Nature, Weeknotes | 3 Comments

Weeknote for 5/19/2019

Posted on May 20, 2019 by Andy

Coding project generator

😐

It took forever, but I finally got my tests working and my vulnerabilities resolved. Now maybe I can make some actual progress on the rest of the program. This is the start of Thinkulum June, so I have four weeks to finish version 1.0.

Apologetics

🤔

I finished the main body of Keener’s book Miracles. It’s been thought provoking. Now I’m on the endnotes, which are as long as the rest of the text. It’ll probably take another couple of weeks to finish. Why do I read the endnotes? Because they contain a lot of interesting and important side discussions.

Movies

🙂

On Sunday Jeremy and I watched Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I liked the concept and the mix of art styles, and it made me curious about the various spider-people, only some of whom I knew about beforehand.

It also convinced me to buy a sound bar. My TV’s speakers were not up to the task of this movie. Turning the volume way up had little effect. The speakers work fine for other videos, so I’m not sure what the issue was. But this is a problem that seems easy to solve.

Music

😎

I finished sampling the drone music playlist I assembled from the Wikipedia article. Here are some examples that stood out to me last week:

  • Bethany Curve – I’d heard of the shoegaze genre years ago, but it didn’t appeal to me at the time, so I ignored it. Then it came up in this playlist, and this time I was intrigued. Bethany Curve reminds of the Falling Up album my sister gave me for my birthday, Hours. They’re like Falling Up lost in thought. So now I guess I’m a shoegaze fan.
  • Insurgentes by Steven Wilson – This album has shoegaze influences.
  • “Polar Drone 1” by Erik Wøllo
  • Lullaby by If Thousands – This playlist has been all over the map, but Erik Wøllo’s track and this album are roughly the kind of music I imagine when I think of drones.

As an added bonus, I made a Spotify radio station out of Big Black Delta’s “PB3” to see if I could find more drone tracks with a similar sound. I didn’t, but what I did find kept me listening. I especially liked the other songs from Big Black Delta and what I heard of Perfume Genius and Son Lux.

TV

😔

I caught up on Dark Matter, which is still one of my favorite shows. I’m disappointed it was cancelled after season 3, especially since there were some major unresolved plotlines. Apparently a season 4 can’t happen anytime soon, but I’d be content with a comic version like Jericho got.

🙂

Now I’m catching up on season 2 of The OA. I like that they’ve introduced another mystery in addition to continuing the story from the first season.

Posted in Apologetics, Coding project generator, Drone Music - Wikipedia, Movies, Music, TV, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 5/12/2019

Posted on May 13, 2019 by Andy

Coding project generator

😐

I finally got moving on this … if “moving” can mean being immediately sidetracked by a massive dependency update and the total failure of all my tests. I think I know how to fix them now, but yeah, most of last week was spent debugging. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything different after leaving this project untouched for two years in the ever-changing Node.js ecosystem. I don’t think even Yeoman, the project generation library I’m using, has kept up.

Life maintenance

🙂

To procrastinate on debugging, I organized my hundreds of books. The bookcase books are nicely arranged on their shelves now, and I’ve separated out the books I’d already planned to sell and organized the rest in boxes for storage.

Next I’m going to do some purging. I got rid of a bunch of books a few years ago in a big push to organize my old apartment. But my interests and book buying and reading patterns have changed enough that it turns out I still have quite a few books to remove.

Apologetics

🤔

I’m inching my way through Craig Keener’s 2-volume, 1200-page Miracles. My Kindle can’t decide how much time I have left in the book. Somewhere between 30 and 40 hours. Luckily I can skip about 40% of the book because it’s taken up by indexes and a bibliography. I’ll wait till I’m done to give my impressions of it.

Music

😎

Last week’s drones featured a ton of noise music. I agree with the general premise that noise can be musical, but most of what I heard didn’t appeal to me. I’d rather listen to musical noise that isn’t so caustic.

  • “Chaos Is The Cosmos” by C.C.C.C. – Mainly what I like is the title. It gives the track an evocative context. I imagine supernovas and volcanic planets and mythological chaos monsters.
  • Merzbow – I didn’t enjoy this artist, but the amount he’s produced is impressive. One might even say ridiculous.
  • Poisoned Soil by House of Low Culture – This album was interesting, basically Gregorian chant with added noise.
  • Cisfinitum – This is a noise artist I could get into. Each song has a distinct character, and they’re calm enough that I can contemplate them or just experience them without my ears being in defensive mode.

I finished adding music to the playlist, but I’m still catching up on listening, so I’ll have one more update on it next week.

I was playing on the worship team this weekend, and in my continuing side project of getting a handle on jazz organ, I revisited the Hammond B3 Organ playlist I found a while back. I paid more attention this time, listening for patterns I could easily pull off. It gave me an appreciation for the expressiveness of this instrument and the ways it combines with the rest of a jazz band.

I also started looking at the gospel patterns in Mark Harrison’s Pop Piano Book.

Posted in Apartment, Apologetics, Books, Coding project generator, Drone Music - Wikipedia, Life maintenance, Music, Weeknotes | Leave a comment