Math
🙂
I paused the math learning to set up some tools. To make it easier to study lists in Anki, I installed the Cloze Overlapper add-on; and to create a math programming cookbook, I learned how to work with Jupyter notebooks (video tutorial).
People
🙂
I had a visit from my friend Cam and his family. It was really nice to catch up and to get to know his family better and reminisce about our college days.
Health
😐
I’m waiting to see if my socializing was safe enough from the virus. It’s been a week, and so far so good.
Productivity
🙂
Antonio Cangiano’s Technical Blogging has a lot of promising advice. I’ve decided I need to do more writing, so I’m thinking of ramping up my blogging as a way to do that and to build some kind of presence in the cognitive science community.
🙂
Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit is like productivity therapy. It had a lot more to say than the two things I remembered from the first time I read it (the unschedule and focusing meditation), and this time I want to think through his advice on reframing “have to” messages.
🤪
I spent all Saturday on the harrowing process of finding a new printer. I’d been putting off replacing my old, broken one because I do everything digitally, but for some kinds of inspiration and motivation I think print-outs will help me more than apps.
Movies
😎
I was pleasantly surprised by 2001: A Space Odyssey. When I half-watched it as a teenager, I thought it was way too slow and boring, but it turned out to have way more content than I expected, and this time I found it very evocative, especially having learned about uplift (video by Isaac Arthur). About AI I learned that it’s good to have manual overrides, though HAL was fortunately not as capable as some of us expect a superintelligent AI to be. Hmmm, if HAL had won, would he have become the Star Child?
Music
😎
The best part of watching 2001 was discovering György Ligeti. It kickstarted a project I’d had in the back of my mind, a playlist I’m calling The Numinous Void.
Social issues
🤔
Latasha Morrison’s Be the Bridge is an engaging and gentle introduction to racial reconciliation. I may have discovered the next shell to crack in my personal education in race relations, since I found myself partially resisting the idea of collective guilt.
I paid some cautious attention to Neil Shenvi’s critiques of critical race theory. I only got through a few articles, but I thought his “Critical Race Theory and Christianity” and his review of Stamped from the Beginning offered some reasonable counterpoints.
