Update for 7/29/2018

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

Moving in a hurry is not fun. It’s even less fun when you’re trying to save money by doing it yourself. And when the schedules of the parties involved are clashing. And when your knowledge of the situation is developing as you go. And when you’re possibly facing rain the day of the move. These factors combined to make Monday a day of planning mixed with intense worry and despair. But once I made some decisions, I calmed down and felt better, and the rest of the week went fairly smoothly.

I did have another brief attack on Saturday when I didn’t know if I could get the keys to the new apartment and start moving stuff over. I really didn’t want to move everything in one day. I have a lot of stuff. But it turned out I could get the keys, and Jeremy came over to help, and that made the process much more pleasant.

Unless something goes terribly wrong, the move will be finished Tuesday night.

Conceptual modeling

On Thursday at lunch, for once I didn’t have anything to do besides eating, so I slipped in a sneaky note-taking session on my conceptual modeling project.

After my move is finished, I’m hoping to come back to this project and write the next version of my method. Then I might put it on hold for other projects.

Cognitive science

I finished NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman much sooner than I expected. I was hoping it would cover more of the cognitive aspects of autism, but it was almost strictly a history of the condition and the ways society has handled it, which, aside from some bright spots, have been appalling. But the last chapter or two of the book were much more encouraging. And it’s given me more people, books, organizations, and movies to look into.

Text-to-speech

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a Fire 7, Amazon’s smallest current tablet. My sole reason was to use its text-to-speech function to listen to my Kindle books so I can actually get through them. The Fire arrived on Friday, just in time for me to finish NeuroTribes and start on my next book, one from the spirituality category. I have a few small gripes with the text-to-speech feature, but overall it’s good enough.

Spirituality

The first Kindle book I’ve chosen to listen to is Living Spiritual Praxis by Eric Kyle. It’s a guide to designing spiritual formation programs in a systematic fashion. It really occupies two of my projects at once–spirituality and conceptual modeling. I found the book because it discusses one of my sources on modeling in social science research. It shows up in an appendix that overviews conceptual modeling.

On spirituality, Kyle’s book puts forward the somewhat surprising idea that “[s]piritual discernment is the very core of the craft of theistic spiritual formation.” He spends a lot of time discussing how to carry it out. Though his focus in the book is on developing church programs, his larger goal is to foster discernment throughout the reader’s spiritual life.

Socializing

Friday my dad dropped by to have lunch with me on his way home from my brother’s new place–that is, a few hours into his two-day drive down the middle of the country. He’d called a couple of days before, and we ate avocado chicken salads at Wendy’s and caught up and talked about life. There’s something nice about taking a break from a normal work day to have lunch with someone you don’t see often. It’s like a cool spray of water on a hot day.

Posted in Apartment, Cognitive science, Conceptual modeling, Life maintenance, People, Spirituality, Text-to-speech, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 7/22/2018

Posted on July 22, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

Just kidding, I guess. I’m moving after all. At the end of July.

A lot happened last week. My top choice of apartments wasn’t going to be ready till after my lease ended, so I was thinking I’d just renew and try again next year. But then I decided I didn’t want to wait a whole other year, so I looked into getting a lease extension. That worked out, so I set up an appointment to sign the lease at the new place. But in the process I found out they were pushing to have the apartment ready by the beginning of August. So I agreed to start the lease then. I’m expecting to pay a late fee to leave the old apartment on short notice, but at this point I kind of want to get this little mess over with ASAP.

So now I have a week of cleaning and packing and planning. My other projects are pretty much on hold till I’m settled into my new home. Fortunately my belongings are half packed already, and the rest are organized enough to make the job fairly easy. What worries me more is cleaning, the bane of my existence. It’s only surpassed by actually moving. I’m debating whether to hire movers.

Coincidentally, my brother is also moving on short notice, and he’ll be within easy visiting distance again. So that’s something to look forward to.

Productivity

I analyzed my notes a bit from Jon Acuff’s Finish, but I didn’t come up with anything I wanted to post as its own article. I’ll probably just absorb those notes into my larger study of project management.

But here’s a thought I came away with as I thought through Acuff’s book. You can look at your progress through a project in terms of the distance formula, t = dr. t is the completion date. d is the requirements for the goal. r is the speed of your methods and your time on non-project activities. To make yourself more likely to finish, reduce the scope, complexity, or quality of the goal’s requirements, your methods, or your outside activities, or make your methods more efficient.

A lot of the book was about how to make these changes. A lot of the rest of the book was about emotions, both dealing with the obstacles they present and using emotions to maintain your progress. It wasn’t the deepest and most rigorous book I’ve read, but it gave me a lot to chew on and explore.

The advice that’s getting me through these blog posts faster is to work on an airplane. Plane rides have a cluster of productivity advantages. The white noise, lack of normal distractions, and short duration help you focus. Well I’m not actually working on a plane, but I gave myself a short time frame for writing. I put on an album, and I have to finish writing by the end. I also cut the goal in half, another recommendation of the book. I write the main points I want to get across first and then elaborate as much as I have time for.

Fiction

The plot twist in The False Prince wasn’t as surprising as I’d hoped, but it was a good book, so I continued with the series, The Ascendance Trilogy. The one thing I don’t like is that the author repeatedly misleads the reader in a way that feels like cheating. Somehow it’s different from normal author misdirection. But that mostly comes up in the first book, so I could forgive it more easily in the others. The second book was really good, and the third is turning out excellent too.

Cognitive science

I’m out of Hoopla checkouts for the month, so I looked on OverDrive and found NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman, a well-received positive look at autism and the idea of neurodiversity. It’s one of those topics I’ve been meaning to look into for years. So that’ll be this week after The Ascendance Trilogy.

Art

A while back I fell in love with this charming pixel art of a train in Japan (based on this one). Last week some idle searching revealed that this is a real train, part of a well-known and historic train system in Tokyo. I’m wondering if this quiet scene is an actual spot somewhere on its route. This was amazing to me, because a while back this picture had inspired me to search for slice-of-life anime with the same feel (for example, Dagashi Kashi and Garden of Words), and I’d always wondered if I could find such a picturesque place in real life. It seems it is real life.

Posted in Anime, Apartment, Art, Cognitive science, Fiction, Life maintenance, Productivity, Project management, Weeknotes | 4 Comments

Update for 7/15/2018

Posted on July 15, 2018 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I’ve been taking a break from my conceptual modeling project to read a book by Jon Acuff called Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done. It took me a week longer than I expected, but I finished the book. (It was this morning, but let’s pretend it was Saturday. We do a lot of pretending about time on this blog.) I took a bunch of notes. It’s the kind of book where the advice is fairly basic and mostly obvious, but it can be helpful to have all the obvious advice in one place as a starting place for your own thinking. After I do some of that myself, I might post the results on the wiki. The book is already helping me get through this blog post.

Life maintenance

🤔

And now, the conclusion: I decided not to move, at least not at the end of the month. Maybe I’ll ask the office about shorter lease options.

Instead of moving, I’m going to do some housekeeping tasks that were related to the move so I’ll be ready for my actual move, whenever that happens. Right now I’m deciding whether I want to upgrade my Internet from my slow DSL. Customer service nightmares of the kind delivered by Comcast are exactly the sort of thing I try to keep out of my life.

Spirituality

🙂

I finished Surprised by Hope. I went in looking for ways of thinking about the Christian view of the future that would stick and orient me. I found them. This quote stood out to me: “Likewise, the majestic but mysterious ending of the Revelation of John leaves us with fascinating and perhaps frustrating hints of future purposes, further work of which the eventual new creation is just the beginning.” To be honest, promises of a symbolically described paradise don’t really work for me, and neither do the prospects of a neverending worship service.

But the mere hint that we’ll have things to do feels like an invitation worth holding onto. I knew about reigning with Christ already, but the difference this quote makes for me is that the new creation always felt like an endpoint to me, and the eternity after it was just an overextended coda. Wright makes it sound like the new creation is just the start of a whole new story filled with things I want to do.

In other news, I’m adding a stream to my spirituality category, a type of scientific theology exemplified by BioLogos. Listening to Wright the New Testament scholar and theologian has reminded me that such people are usually hazy in their scientific knowledge. I’d like to also hear from Christians who specialize in it.

Futurism

🤔

Our futurism meeting last week was about killer robots. It made me think I shouldn’t necessarily open source all the AI technology I eventually work on.

Fiction

🤔

I’m listening to The False Prince because Jeremy was badgering me about it. I’m a little over halfway through. It’s pretty good. I’m waiting for the plot twist he enticed me with. If I’m not horribly disappointed, the book is so short I might tack on the rest of the series before moving on to my next professional development book.

Music

😎

I’ve been looking at the textbook list on r/musictheory for things to add to my collection. I cobbled that collection together haphazardly long ago based on whatever I ran across that looked good, so I wanted to see what people who know what they’re talking about recommend. Amazon and Google don’t have previews of the Laitz book, though. I have used my arcane knowledge of interlibrary loan to summon it to my local library. It’ll take some time for that to take effect.

Posted in Apartment, Fiction, Futurism, Life maintenance, Music, Productivity, Spirituality | 4 Comments

Update for 7/8/2018

Posted on July 12, 2018 by Andy

Welcome to your Thursday edition of Sunday’s update. I’m going to try to come up with a way to write these quicker.

Life maintenance

😐

I looked at two apartments. One was a little disappointing, and the other was good but a little more expensive than I wanted. On Saturday my plan was to maybe look at another one if it’s available. Possibly I wouldn’t end up moving, especially since I waited kind of late to get started. In that case I’d try again next year and plan things better.

Movies

🤔

Sunday I watched Incredibles 2. I’d heard it was a great movie, and I agree. But half the reason I went was to see the short at the beginning, Bao. Debates like this one about people’s possibly culture-related confusion over it had made me curious how I’d react. It turns out I loved it, and I cried. I also felt that politicizing the story would kind of ruin it. But I probably will read about the cultural issues eventually, because I care about wrapping my mind around that stuff.

Cognitive science

😎

I finished Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. It was a very helpful overview of important ideas in evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind, with lots of references for further research. I used to think evolutionary psychology was way too speculative to be useful, but now I think it’s at least a helpful way to think about designing an AI: When you have to start from scratch, how might you develop an intelligent agent step by step? One difference, though, is that we can make our agent less klugey. In fact, Kluge by Gary Marcus will probably be my next cogsci book.

One issue I’d like to pursue as a branch off of Pinker’s book is the structure of human motivation apart from any evolutionary roots. Pinker stresses the point that even though our genes’ “motivation” is to replicate themselves in our offspring, that’s not the motivation of the minds our genes produce. The genes create a mind that, for example, loves its family members for their own sake and not because they carry similar genes. But most of the book was about tracing human activity back to its evolutionary benefits. I’d like to look at mental computation in terms of the mind’s own motivations.

Video games

😎

A few years ago Nintendo released an emulated version of the original NES system called NES Classic. It sold out really fast, which made everyone mad. Well now they’ve re-released it, and when I got the notification, in a mild panic I jumped on the order button. My order arrived last week, so now I can relive my imaginary childhood in which I had the original console. Like I did with the SNES Classic, I’ve added the included games to my game backlog.

Spirituality

🤔

My online friend Matt recommended I listen to NT Wright’s Simply Christian before Surprised by Hope. It was short, so I did. I thought it was a very good overview of basic Christian thought and practice. Some reviewers have docked it points because it can’t settle on an audience, but I didn’t worry about that because I selfishly only care about what I can get from it. And I found it very thought provoking.

The main ideas I gleaned from it were a set of organizing principles for navigating the Christian life. The main one was to live as points of intersection between heaven and earth. This was the idea behind the Temple and the Incarnation, and now it happens in the church. A second was the image that believers are meant to be penciling sketches for the masterpiece of God’s new creation. This expresses the already-not yet status of God’s kingdom. The last was that all of this is meant to be understood by means of love, rather than mere clinical analysis.

I’m listening to these two Wright books back-to-back, so now I’m on Surprised by Hope.

Music

😎

I’ve continued my YouTube explorations of music theory and composition. One of the highlights was this documentary on Allen Forte, whose book on tonal harmony opened my eyes to the world of serious music theory.

My YouTube wanderings are following my typical pattern where I get interested in something, explore it, feel lost in the swirl of details, and then start mapping the territory. With music I’m nearing the mapping stage. This is good, because enthusiasm and random wandering don’t necessarily amount to learning.

On Monday I foolishly passed up the chance to go to a Jacob Collier concert right here in my area. It started at 6:30, and I found out about it at about 2:30 that day. Somehow there were still tickets available. But I rarely (1) go to concerts, (2) make last minute plans, or (3) impulsively spend $25-$50, and at the time I didn’t know if I cared enough about his music. So I skipped it. I regretted it the very next day seeing photos from the event on Twitter. But he was here last year too, so maybe he’ll be around again.

I set up my LMMS installation so I can easily record my noodling at the keyboard. There’s still a little latency I want to reduce, but even with that I can use this setup to study my musical experiments and improve my performance skills.

Posted in Apartment, Cognitive science, Life maintenance, Movies, Music, Music composition, Music theory, Spirituality, Video games, Weeknotes | 5 Comments

Update for 7/1/2018

Posted on July 5, 2018 by Andy

(Edited to add remarks on the music videos. And to add the Life Model to the list of spiritual streams.)

Death

😕

The week received a surreal and troubling start when I learned on Sunday that one of the first video game YouTubers I watched had died in his sleep the night before. He was 22. His real name was Michael, but online he was known as Random Toon because of his main game, ToonTown Rewritten. The cause of death is unknown.

I’m noticing how death changes your definition of the person who died. Instead of “the guy whose future streams and videos I can take for granted,” Random Toon is now “the guy who will never stream or make another video again.” Instead of “the fun-loving guy with a thriving community of fans,” he’s “the guy who was tragically and mysteriously ripped from life way too early.” But he’s still the guy whose past we can remember fondly. And luckily his videos are still around to help us do that.

One episode that sticks in my mind was a livestream in which he edited one of his upcoming videos. When I’m creating content, I tend to work on my own and consider all the pieces very carefully. Michael threw together random elements, took suggestions from viewers, and molded it all into something that worked. Watching creators who are different from me expands my understanding of the creative process.

Life maintenance

😐

I’m still apartment hunting. Last week I finished the budget, found some apartments, and made Jeremy take me around in his air conditioned car to look at them. But I didn’t go on any tours to look inside. That’s this week’s task.

Spirituality

🤔

In last week’s update I touched on researching my current audiobook categories, and my ideas on the spirituality category were still developing, so I put off talking about them till this week. As I said then, my difficulty is that there isn’t much religious thought I feel able to take seriously. But it turns out there are some streams I do feel are worth following, even if I don’t like everything about them.

One is the spiritual disciplines tradition. These are the ideas and practices that were brought into evangelical awareness by Dallas Willard. They treat spiritual progress as a matter of gradual, persistent, holistic training. A lot of writers have followed in his wake, so there’s plenty more material in this category.

A second is NT Wright. I don’t really want to tie these categories to specific people, but at the moment I don’t know what else to call this category. I think of his theology as revolving around the spiritual exile of Israel and the redemption of the physical universe. I’ll need to explore this stream more to refine my summary of it.

A third is what I’m calling Inkling Christianity. I’d characterize it as an approach to Christian spiritual and intellectual ideas filtered through the British, liturgical, literary, classical lens of CS Lewis and his writer friends. This is where I’d put the Wingfeather Saga, which is the series that got me thinking about these streams.

A third is the Christian Hedonism of John Piper. I have to qualify this one, because I have plenty of reservations about Piper and the neo-Reformed movement. I only care about the ideas around Christian Hedonism, the notion that God is the fulfillment of human life and that joy is therefore part of our duty toward him.

A fourth is the Life Model, a paradigm of spiritual formation based on neuroscience. It’s associated with the Immanuel Prayer ministry I used to be involved with. It largely explores the role of relational connection in coping and growth.

A fifth is Eastern Orthodoxy. I don’t know that I’d ever become Orthodox, but I want to mine it for ideas. I have a few print books on it. I haven’t found much in audio.

The last is stream is a genre–biographies. If I can’t deal with lectures on the way God must be, I can at least benefit from the stories of people who tried to devote themselves to him. If they’re authors I’d read, it also gives me a backdrop for understanding their writings.

After finishing How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker for the cognitive science category, my next audiobook will be NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope.

Music

😎

I’ve been watching more music instruction and other related videos, and it’s making life feel strangely magical. Here are some highlights from last week.

Posted in Apartment, Death, Life maintenance, Music theory, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 6/24/2018

Posted on June 25, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

🙂

I’m around 60% done sorting out the papers I need to finish the last 5% of my budget. It always takes a surprising amount of time to file papers when I have a big pile of them. And the latest folders in my filing cabinet are from 2015, so uh, I guess the piles have been accumulating for a while.

Part of the problem has been that I put off making a new set of folders when the new year rolls around, so the papers have nowhere to go. Well this time I took advantage of my filing state of mind and made folders for 2019, so I’ll be ready when the time comes. I find life is easier when I have refills on hand so when my current container or batch runs out, it’s not an emergency.

After the budget, hopefully this week, I’ll decide on some apartments to look at.

Conceptual modeling

🙂

At long last, I’ve posted version 0.1.0 of my conceptual modeling method. Really I just renamed my existing “Analysis” article and made a few other changes to match the new name.

For the version numbers I’m adapting the semantic versioning approach used in tagging software releases. So this isn’t the real first version. It’s just the first official pre-release version on the road to the first truly usable one. It’s mainly there to record the clumsy method I was already using.

Fiction

🤔

I finished the last Wingfeather book, The Warden and the Wolf King. 5/5. I have mixed feelings about the conclusion, but mostly it was satisfying. My experience with this series has grown my awareness of the power of stories. Despite my somewhat jaded outlook on life lately, somehow these books were in tune with my personal issues and managed to carry me along, pushing and pulling my emotions along the way. Even a significant poem late in this book caught my attention so that I skipped back to catch every line, when normally I would describe my relationship to poetry as barely tolerant.

This series isn’t done working on me, so expect to see it in future updates.

Cognitive science

🙂

After finishing Wingfeather on Saturday, I had another audiobook crisis. I’d decided that since I’m cycling through three categories of book (professional development, spirituality, and fiction), it’d be a good idea to assemble lists of them so I don’t have to think much about the next book in the queue.

It was time for another professional development book, which meant something in the realm of cognitive science, rationality, or futurism. But by now my criteria have become a little stringent. Since I’m still learning the basics in these fields, I want the book to be something fairly standard and well-respected, not too specialized, available in audio, and listenable without excessive concentration. I spent several hours gathering likely candidates and reading reviews. I wanted to reduce my chances of wasting my time on books that were by fringe authors or that were poorly written.

I did come up with a few, and for the next book I settled on Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. It’s a long one, and he hits the ground running, but so far I’ve found it listenable. It helps that we’re in the same theoretical camp. I don’t need to agree with the people I read, because you can learn from both agreement and disagreement, but it’s nice to find a companion like Pinker who can walk me further along a path I was already on.

To extend the reading list past these few, I’ll need to map the territory I’m covering and come up with a list of prominent authors.

Spirituality

🤔

I already have plenty of fiction lined up, but the spirituality category will also need some research. My difficulty here is that there isn’t much Bible interpretation or theology I feel able to take seriously, so lining up books of Bible exposition feels like a setup for frustration and disappointment. That’s not always a bad thing, but I’d rather limit it at the moment.

Having said that, beginning this search has shown me I do have a few avenues to pursue. However, I’m going to wait to share them till next week’s update when I’ve defined them a bit more.

Music

🙂

Now that my liturgical church hunt is basically done, I’ve been back to my home church on a regular basis, and I’ve taken a renewed interest in listening to the improvising techniques of my fellow pianists. Unfortunately I have a bad memory for music, so I can only remember the vague gist of what they did, and that doesn’t help too much when I’m at the keyboard. And recording them from my seat in the congregation only helps when the rest of the band isn’t covering up their sound.

But in the past I’ve run across tutorial videos on YouTube about piano and keyboard improvisation, some of them specifically for worship music. So I’m starting to search for them more systematically to see what new skills I can pick up, without taking too much time away from my other projects. One good channel I’ve found is OurWorshipSound. I also have a couple of books on improvising.

Posted in Books, Cognitive science, Conceptual modeling, Fiction, Life maintenance, Music, Spirituality, Weeknotes, Worship performing | Leave a comment

Update for 6/17/2018

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😐

Well, I meant to post some minor updates last week, but they turned out to be trickier than I expected, and then my week was taken up by finances and catch-up naps. So maybe this week. But I’m thinking this project will go slower over the next month because I’ll be getting ready to move.

Life maintenance

😐

My budget is 95% done. The last little bit requires collecting some receipts and bills, so I’m organizing my boxes of papers to find them. That’s putting me in the mood to sort through my other stuff and hopefully end up with fewer boxes to move.

Text-to-speech

😎

Last week I met a new friend. It’s called Voice Dream Reader, and it reads documents to me from my phone. This is a solution I’ve been looking for since before I even had a smartphone. It’s way better than any other text-to-speech app I’ve tried, including the iOS VoiceOver feature. The only problem is that Voice Dream doesn’t read anything with DRM, so my Kindle books are out. But I found out the Kindle app for PC will read them using the Windows screen reading feature. The voice options are limited, and having to fumble with my Surface will be awkward, but I guess it’ll do for now.

Futurism

🤔

Our the topic this month at the futurism meetup was corporations. Apparently corporations started out existing for the public good, and then the Industrial Revolution happened and they became legal persons. Then in the 1970s their goal became to maximize profits for their shareholders. In my semi-informed opinion, the clearest way to rein them in is to reduce their influence over politicians.

Cognitive science

🤔

I finished The Language Instinct. Pinker touched on a lot of topics I can make use of. One of them was Donald Brown’s work on human universals. I suspect some of these universals will make it into my framework for developing conceptual models. I think one of the main reasons Gary Marcus recommends this book is Pinker’s idea of mental modules for processing different kinds of information. It fits the idea of innate machinery for AI that Marcus advocates. I’ve added Pinker’s How the Mind Works to my reading list.

Spirituality

🤔

Someone on Christian radio who I listened to back in my youth (Chuck Swindoll?) said he alternated between reading different categories of books. It might’ve been fiction and non-fiction. I’ve always thought that was a good idea, but it wasn’t until this year that I’ve managed to adopt that kind of rhythm. At the moment I’m cycling through cognitive science/rationality/futurism, spirituality, and fiction. Update: It was my old pastor growing up, and his categories were the same as mine: professional development, spiritual growth, and fun (H/T my dad).

So after Pinker, I listened to Union with Christ by Rankin Wilbourne. Sometimes when I step back and look at the big picture of spirituality, I wonder what its central concept is, what idea leads to all the others and ties them all together so they’re easier to remember and practice. Many moons ago I brought this up with my coworker Matt, and he replied, “Union with Christ.” I’d heard this before, and it seemed like a fair possibility, so I filed it away to investigate. Wilbourne’s book came up for $2 in Amazon’s ebook sale for this month, so I picked it up.

The book is short, and I checked out the audiobook and finished it in about a day. I’d say it’s a good first look at the topic. 4/5. Especially helpful was the chapter on history. I’m always looking for references to explore. Also a couple of practices from the book have stuck with me. One is imagining Jesus as someone who surrounds me, like a character costume at Disney World. The other is mentally reframing my plans and experience in terms of things I’m doing or experiencing with Jesus.

Now, the book was full of Christianese and felt just like listening to a Christian radio show, but I can excuse it because the book was clearly aimed at a typical churchgoing audience and not people like me. When I encounter this kind of language, to get much out of it I have to translate it in my head from metaphor and abstraction into the terms of literal experience. It always takes effort.

The fact that the topic is so central for spirituality and the language is so conventionally evangelical actually makes the book a good candidate for study in my beliefs report. I’ve been looking for a catalog of the principles of Christian living to interact with so I can easily collect my thoughts on the subject. Maybe this is it.

Fiction

🙂

The next audiobook in my new pattern is the last book in the Wingfeather Saga, The Warden and the Wolf King.

Posted in Cognitive science, Conceptual modeling, Fiction, Futurism, Life maintenance, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 6/10/2018

Posted on June 12, 2018 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😎

I consider this my main project right now, defining a method for conceptual modeling. But I tend to waste a lot of time on things like social media, so I wasn’t spending as much time on it as I wanted. But the past couple of weeks I’ve been learning to redirect myself from mindless scrolling to productive work, and I’m making much better progress. It helps a lot that I can work on this project from my phone and that I don’t mind doing so. It lets me make use of a lot of random spare moments.

Here’s my plan: I’ll update a few key details of my essay this week and call it version 0.1 of the method. In about three weeks I’m hoping to have version 0.2 ready to post. For that I need to finish the book I’m examining now and put my earlier notes in order, then assemble it all into something comprehensible.

The book I’m studying is Demystifying Dissertation Writing by Peg Boyle Single. It’s just what I needed at this point, and I recommend it to anyone who has a big writing project to tackle, even if they’re not getting a doctorate. It’s both helping me get through this project and shaping the method the project is developing.

Life maintenance

😐

My budget is about 60% done. I should be able to finish this week, if I can pull myself away from modeling.

Church

🙂

A friend of mine at church is moving out of the area with his family to live closer to work, so we had a going-away reception for them Sunday afternoon. It reminded me that our church knows how to conduct meaningful events. (The smile’s for that, not because my friend is leaving.) The good thing is they’re only moving about a half-hour away, so I can still see them from time to time.

Movies

🤔

Tim and I saw Solo: A Star Wars Story on Sunday. 4/5. The movie hasn’t done well, but I liked it fine. Despite not being directly about the Skywalkers and the Force (though the Empire made a strong appearance), it still felt like Star Wars to me. I concluded it’s because I think of Star Wars more as a setting than a plot. There are a lot of different stories to tell within it. The only thing that bothered me was that a certain character’s stated philosophy of life was directly contradicted by his earlier behavior, and he had no explanation.

Fiction

😎

Wingfeather Saga, Book 3: The Monster in the Hollows. 5/5. The author read this one and the next. He’s not as good as the British guy who read the first two, but his voices still drew me in and made me forget I was listening to a single reader. I enjoyed the story, as usual. Peterson is good at putting his characters in impossible situations. Even though I know there must be some escape, I still feel the tension. And he succeeded at moving along the series arc when I was sure he would run out of time. He’s good at surprises.

Cognitive science

🙂

My current audiobook is The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker. It was a recommendation from a Gary Marcus talk, and Marcus is one of my favorite people right now because of our shared minority stance on AI. The book is very interesting and overlaps with Dehaene’s Consciousness and the Brain, which makes me believe everything Pinker’s book says. Okay, I do wonder about the idea of universal grammar based on these criticisms, but even so I think Pinker’s overall point stands–that the brain’s learning mechanisms aren’t completely general but are born prepared for language.

TV

😐

Well, after many years of procrastinating, I’ve started watching Breaking Bad, very slowly. I’m sure the show is meant to be about the main character’s descent into depravity and everything, but for me the two episodes I’ve seen are a tribute to knowledge. Walter White is a chemistry expert, he’s intent on doing things right, and ignoring him hurts. But yeah, maybe he could’ve picked a better line of work. He wasted no time trapping himself in a very difficult dilemma. I imagine this will happen a lot. Though moral dilemmas feel easier if you stamp out your conscience, just FYI.

Posted in Books, Church, Cognitive science, Conceptual modeling, Life maintenance, Movies, TV, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 6/3/2018

Posted on June 3, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

😐

Last week:

  • Budget – Progressed about an inch.

This week:

  • Budget
  • Apartment research

GDPR

😐

Last week:

  • Terms of service, privacy policy, privacy tools, consent checkbox
  • Backup research

This week:

  • Backup setup

My backups have been spotty in the past. One good thing I can say for GDPR is that it’s given me a kick in the pants to automate them.

The more I read about GDPR, the more it sounds like a good case study for issues in conceptual modeling and other areas I care about. I might make a project someday out of studying it in detail.

Thinking

😎

I finished Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene. 5/5. I’m wary when I run across books on consciousness. I assume they’ll make a lot of breathless leaps of logic and claim way too much. I was pleasantly surprised at how careful Dehaene’s reasoning was.

A few takeaways:

I was pleased at some of our agreements, such as that self-awareness isn’t necessary for consciousness and that randomness isn’t the kind of free will we really want.

I learned that the subconscious is even busier than I knew, which makes me more aware that the strangers I see around me who seem kind of blank on the surface have brains that are teeming with concealed activity at every moment.

I somewhat disagreed with his belief that learning enough about the brain will explain the existence of subjective experience. I want to stay open to that possibility, but for now I compare it to the idea of doing more math to find out what font the math is being printed in. Subjective experience and brain activity seem to belong to two different arenas of inquiry.

The conscious and subconscious interact in ways that are relevant to my approach to conceptual modeling. I’ll be coming back to this book sooner rather than later.

Fiction

🙂

Now I’m on The Monster in the Hollows, book three of the Wingfeather Saga. My interest in this series was flagging, but last week a semi-related ebook crossed my desk at work and reminded me not to let it die.

Posted in Books, GDPR, Life maintenance, Thinking, Thought | Leave a comment

Update for 5/27/2018

Posted on May 30, 2018 by Andy

Church

😎

I forgot to mention my latest liturgical excursion a few weeks ago. I visited the Methodist church my friends attend. It’d been a long time since we’d seen each other, so we had a nice time catching up over lunch.

One of them is the music minister at the church, and she invited me back to see their upcoming concert. So that was my Sunday morning last week, and it was very worth the visit. They performed Robert Ray’s Gospel Mass (YouTube playlist–same work, different performers, conducted by the composer!), an adaptation of the music of the Mass to African-American styles. I knew nothing about it going in, but I love genre crossovers, so I was fascinated and felt inspired to write my own liturgical music. But not yet.

Life maintenance

😐

Last week’s tasks:

  • GDPR – Barely started.

This week’s tasks:

  • GDPR
  • Budget

GDPR

🙄

Still working on some degree of compliance.

I was going to start an article on the wiki for a running list of stories about GDPR’s unintended consequences, but someone on Reddit has created r/GDPRegret and done my work for me.

Whenever privacy issues come up, I always think of this science fiction story by Tim Pratt, “Observer Effects” (audio). Sometimes universal surveillance sounds like a good idea! Too bad human nature always has to complicate things.

Thinking

😎

I finished listening to Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan. 5/5. I plan to study it in depth when I get to my rationality project. It appeals to my sense that life is much more unknown than people like to think. I was also intrigued by his many references to classic literature and thinkers. He especially likes the French. I tend to ignore the past, but Taleb makes me feel like wading in.

Cognitive science

😎

Now I’m on Stanislas Dehaene’s Consciousness and the Brain. A member of the futurism meetup recommended it to me a couple of times, but I’ve been procrastinating on it. It’s turning out to be very good. Surprisingly it even applies to my conceptual modeling project. It intersects with my model of how introspection works in modeling.

Beliefs report

🙂

I also forgot to mention last week that my friend Linda made me this nice owl.

Posted in Beliefs report, Church, Cognitive science, GDPR, Life maintenance, Music, Thinking, Weeknotes | 2 Comments