Update for 8/26/2018

Posted on August 26, 2018 by Andy

Website

🤔

The .net domain is at its new registrar now, so hopefully the DNS issue or whatever it was has cleared up. My non-US visitors can tell me.

Life maintenance

🤔

In my 3D home design software I’ve been playing with ideas for the living room arrangement. I’m giving the room too much to do for the arrangement to be easy, at least three different major functions. And there are annoying baseboard heaters along three walls that are getting in the way. Fortunately Ellen Fisher’s book tells me to try lots of different arrangements, even wacky ones, so that’s what I’m doing.

Fiction

😎

I’m liking Middlemarch much more than I expected. I identify with several of the characters, which is sometimes gratifying and sometimes troubling. And Nadia May is an amazing reader. I’ll have more to say when I’m done, which will probably be in the next update.

In case Middlemarch launches me into a classics phase, I spent some time picking out an audiobook of Moby-Dick, another favorite of my coworker’s. If I listen to that, I’ll go with the Anthony Heald version.

Music

😎

Music theory is great, but it doesn’t go far enough in helping me develop a whole piece. I need some resources about composition itself, and for that I consulted a few threads in r/composer. I chose William Russo’s Composing Music: A New Approach. It’s a long series of exercises concentrating on specific aspects of composing. I was able to flip through it at a local library, and it looks like just the kind of learning method I need.

Posted in Apartment, Fiction, Life maintenance, Music composition, Site updates, The Thinkulum, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 8/19/2018

Posted on August 23, 2018 by Andy

This update it’s books, books, and more books, even more than usual.

Website

😐

First a little housekeeping note. People outside the US (and maybe some inside?) have been having trouble accessing the website, apparently because of some DNS problem with my domain registrar. So I’ve initiated a domain transfer to another registrar, and that should be taking effect later this week. Hopefully that’ll resolve the problem.

Cognitive science

🙂

It took twice as much listening per day as I expected, but I finished the Bermúdez book, Cognitive Science. I thought it was a very helpful overview of a central issue for the field–the question of how the mind is organized and operates. It gave me an idea of the issues and positions and lots of pointers to further reading.

Futurism

🤔

Tuesday our futurism group met and talked about smart drugs and psychedelics. It was very educational and thought provoking, especially since I was in the middle of the cognitive science textbook. Psychedelics and similar drugs aren’t just an illegal or immoral activity or a way to have a good time. They’re clues to the workings of the mind. So the psychologist in me hopes the way will be opened to more scientific research in that area.

The meeting reminded me that the point of psychedelics for many people is psychological or spiritual insight, and their experiences are like a condensed form of therapy. Assuming psychedelics are gateways to the secrets of the soul, it made me think people who don’t want to engage in them aren’t necessarily missing out–there are other avenues to reaching them.

Side note for anyone who’s wondering: No, I haven’t used any of these drugs, and I have no plans to. For smart drugs it’s because they’ve barely been studied.

Beliefs report

🤔

I used my new powers of text-to-speech to finish an ebook that’s been hanging around on my Goodreads Currently Reading shelf, Trusting Doubt by Valerie Tarico. It’s a critique of evangelicalism by a psychologist and Wheaton College graduate. Unlike many skeptics I’ve encountered, she represents Christianity pretty fairly, in my view, and is concerned with holding it to a high standard of ethics rather than sneering at its absurdities. A lot of her observations were ones I share, but some were new to me. I might interact with this book as a way of organizing my reflections for my essay on my beliefs, which is a project that’s been on hold for a while.

Life maintenance

🙂

My apartment is still in a mostly packed state, though the boxes are somewhat organized. As I’ve pondered my plans for getting it into a normal, livable state, a trio of topics has emerged: tidying, cleaning, and interior design. To get a handle on these, I’ve been finding books that would give me a solid starting point.

For tidying, I’d already listened to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo and bought her more manual-like follow-up, Spark Joy.

For cleaning, I carefully sifted through the popular options available as ebooks and settled on Clean My Space by Melissa Maker. I chose it because the author approaches cleaning about the way I would–basing techniques on research, aiming for efficiency, and setting up routines. I picked up the audiobook too, which the author reads herself, and she gives it the animated personality it needs to keep the listener awake and (mostly) interested.

For interior design, I again sifted and came up with an intro textbook on the profession from the New York School of Interior Design called Home: The Foundations of Enduring Spaces. It’s written for both aspiring interior designers and people who want to design their own homes. Lots of it isn’t relevant to my situation, but I like having a full picture of the real issues in a subject. That kind of context makes me feel safer and less lost. The parts of the book that are relevant have given me helpful advice.

One principle I’ve picked up from all three topics is that you should organize your space in a way that makes it easy to clean.

My next step is to throw together an initial plan for these activities. I’m thinking the furniture arrangement should come first, and then I can discard and organize my things while I unpack.

Fiction

🙂

At work we’re starting this year’s book groups, and I joined the one that’s reading Middlemarch by George Eliot, a classic British novel that’s been on my mental list but that, left on my own, I probably wouldn’t get to for years. My plan is to listen to an audio version all at once so I actually get through it and then try to at least skim the print version on the group’s schedule. The audiobook should take me a couple of weeks. I picked the Nadia May version.

Spirituality

😐

I’m counting the homemaking books as part of my personal development category in my listening rotation. But I don’t want to start skipping the spiritual formation category just because I’m including other topics in personal development. So after Middlemarch I’m going to jump back to personal development for a bit and listen to Spiritual Disciplines Handbook by Adele Calhoun.

Music

🙂

When I get distracted from a project, I’m in danger of putting it on hold for months or years. So to keep that from happening with music after being preoccupied with my move, I’ve been researching books that will give me some context and guidance for listening and composing. For general music theory I looked at the recommendations on r/musictheory and, after a library visit to compare a couple of them, picked The Complete Musician.

Posted in Beliefs report, Cognitive science, Fiction, Futurism, Housekeeping, Life maintenance, Music, Site updates, Spirituality, The Thinkulum, Weeknotes | 4 Comments

Update for 8/12/2018

Posted on August 12, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

😏

I’ve gotten over my bad feelings left over from the move and from a sense that I don’t belong in my nice new place. What helped was the idea of rebelling against it to make it a place I do feel I belong. Hopefully my friends who wanted my living arrangement to improve will be displeased. 😉

So now I’m focused on setting up my furniture layout using Sweet Home 3D. It’s taking more time than drawing or eyeballing it, but a computer model is more stable than the little scraps of paper I used for my last apartment, and this way I won’t have to redraw everything when I rearrange my furniture, which I expect to do once or twice. Plus, measuring tape is way more reliable than my wacky spatial sense.

I’ve also been researching and putting together a cleaning routine. I’m tired of always being embarrassed by the state of my dwelling and of dreading the cleaning part of moving out. This time my home will stay nice.

One thing I like about this apartment is that the parking lot is next to a miniature forest, so I get to say hello to trees and flowers and moths and bees as I pull into my space.

In other news, I’m getting back to researching grad school and other career-advancing activities. Don’t tell Jeremy. He might think he had something to do with it.

Fiction

😎

I finished Blindsight. 5/5. This book is like a novelistic introduction to cognitive science. Peter Watts and I think along similar lines. We clearly have some of the same influences. Unfortunately the resulting worldview is rather bleak, at least in the scenario he paints. I’m hoping the perspective I come up with will be more positive and hopeful.

Cognitive science

🙂

Now that I have this Fire with text-to-speech, I can get through some of the important cognitive science books that have been patiently waiting in my Kindle library. Currently I’m listening to an intro textbook by José Luis Bermúdez, Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Science of the Mind.

Posted in Apartment, Career, Cognitive science, Fiction, Grad school, Life maintenance, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 8/5/2018

Posted on August 5, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

The move is done. Even with help from friends, it was an awful enough experience that next time I won’t mind paying movers to do it for me.

Now is the unpacking, which also felt like it’d be awful, but Saturday I got myself to sort my boxes into types of items, and now I feel a bit better about it.

While I was sorting my boxes, I listened to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up on my boss’s recommendation, and that also helped me feel more up to unpacking. I’m going to try her system. It’s the perfect time for it, since all my stuff is gathered together, ready to be purged and organized. But it won’t be quick. Honestly I’m expecting unpacking to take at least a month.

I’ve also started laying out the apartment in some free home design software. I already have a brilliant idea of what to do with my bedroom.

Last time I had a one-bedroom apartment, I spent most of my time in the bedroom, which felt like a waste. This time I want to make more use of the whole apartment. It has a balcony, so Saturday night I took my dinner out there. I could see myself eating outside regularly.

Spirituality

I finished listening to Eric Kyle’s Living Spiritual Praxis via my new Fire’s text-to-speech. Despite some copyediting issues, I gave it 5/5 on Goodreads. I’m thinking of using Kyle’s method to create a spiritual formation program for my own life. I’m also intrigued by his example of Tom’s contemplative spirituality course. He includes the syllabus in an appendix, and it includes several techniques and many sources I want to look into, such as Tom Holmes’ Parts Work.

Conceptual modeling

Living Spiritual Praxis doubles as an introduction to conceptual modeling, so it belongs among my sources for this project. So far its contribution has been to raise the questions of what level of abstraction I want my method to address and how opinionated I want it to be regarding types of sources and warrants. He also brings up several synonyms for “model” that could expand my source list.

Cognitive science

A while back this Twitter exchange with my friend Adam prompted me to get a better handle on the computational theory of mind. So while I was supposed to be listening to Living Spiritual Praxis, I cheated a little and started listening to a set of articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on various cognitive science topics related to that model. They’re giving me a better picture of the various viewpoints I’ll need to deal with and locate myself within.

Fiction

My online friend Ryan recommended Blindsight by Peter Watts as a look at alien minds, which is relevant to my interests in cognitive science. So that’s what I’m listening to currently.

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

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, Coping, 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