The Thinkulum

Update for 3/13/2016, part 3

Posted on March 16, 2016 by Andy

This is the last part of an initial weekly update on my site, my projects, and my life. Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here. Future updates will usually only take up one post.

Life updates

Drawing Nearer – In January and February I attended a seven-week class at church on spiritual formation. It revolved around practicing disciplines of our choice from Adele Calhoun’s Spiritual Disciplines Handbook. Largely because of this freedom, it was the best class of this kind I’ve taken. I’m still practicing the discipline of fixed-hour prayer I managed to do consistently, and I’m still motivated to work out how to get myself to do the others I had in mind.
Humira – In December I started taking this medication for my ulcerative colitis, since none of the other eight or so medications I’d tried have completely worked. This one hasn’t either, though we doubled the dose a few weeks ago, and last week things seemed to be improving. I don’t know if that was the Humira or the low-carb diet, which I hear is supposed to reduce inflammation. Fortunately I haven’t had any side effects, not even itching at the injection sites.
Birthday games – Monday of last week was my birthday (I’m 38 now), and the day before I met up with some friends to play board games, mostly from my box. It was rather rude of them to beat the birthday boy every single time. Heather won most of them. But I didn’t mind. When I’m playing games, my main goal is not to come in last, or at least not to lose by too much.
Worship team brunch – All the worship teams at our church had a potluck brunch on Saturday. I had a really nice time there, though I learned that one of my favorite families at the church is moving out of the area this summer. I’d hoped I could get to know them better, so that was disappointing. But they’ll be living near my sister, and that makes them feel not so far away. This gathering was one in a clump of socializing. Sunday night our Drawing Nearer class had a get together, and I’ve had lunch with friends three days in the past week, which is unusual for me. Normally I eat lunch alone in my car, except on most Fridays when I play with our lunch gaming group.
Video games – After a long break, I’m getting back into playing video games a little, other than the virtual board games I was already playing. In that category I’ve played a lot of Splendor since the lunch group introduced me to it a few weeks ago. Since joining Steam, games have become like books for me–I’ve bought way more than I’ve used. Since I don’t want to spend all my time on them, I’ve decided not to worry about getting the most out of each game, and I’m trying out juggling several games at any one time, cycling through a little bit of each whenever I feel I can spare time for gaming. Lately it’s been Stardew Valley, The Sims 4, The Talos Principle, and soon to be Minecraft. I’m looking forward to getting back into Minecraft. I’ve been a little nostalgic for it lately.
Freelancing – I do some freelance work occasionally, and a job might be coming up soon, which will delay some of my projects. But it’ll hopefully give me a chance to explore an XML format called DITA that I’ve wanted to get into for years.

Posted in Birthdays, Board games, Freelancing, Health, Life updates, People, Spirituality, Video games | 4 Comments

Update for 3/13/2016, part 2

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Andy

This is part 2 of a three-part initial weekly update on my site, my projects, and my life. Part 1 is here. Future updates will probably only take up one post.

Project updates

In progress

Cognitive science field research – I’m reading Bermúdez’s Cognitive Science. I’ve paused in my reading to survey the book by reading all the chapter summaries, which give a decent idea of the contents while making me want to read for the details. Right now I mainly want to know the scope of the field–what questions does it ask, and what does it not? Other than that I’m collecting schools to evaluate and online sources to watch for regular updates on the field. I also want to get an idea of who’s who and what professional options cognitive scientists have. Getting to know a new field is kind of fun!
Math relearning – I’m gearing up to work through the EngageNY curriculum, starting all the way at the beginning with preschool. But first I’m reading yet more meta documents, the front matter to the P-5 section of the curriculum, which is titled A Story of Units. I’m not commenting on this one like I did with the Progressions. I want to get an idea of the writers’ approach to math education, but I don’t want to spend very long on it.
Diet – Yes, I’m finally taking the plunge into a low-carb diet–as an experiment. I refuse to commit to it as some sort of cultish philosophy! A while back I read that a low-carb diet could help with high cholesterol, and we have a wellness screening at work in about six weeks, so I’m trying the diet to see what happens. I’m using The New Atkins for a New You as a guide. At some point I’ll probably use the diet as an excuse to write a little nutrition program I’ve had in mind for years.
Board game box – For the past few months I’ve been assembling a box of board game systems, which are sets of generic components that can be used to play multiple games. I’ve collected all the systems I want for now, other than some simple RPGs I’ll put in the binder of rules. Now I’m waiting on a book on card games I ordered, and with the help of my friend Jeremy I’m making an index of the games so it’s easier to decide what to play. At some point I’ll write an explanation of the box for the wiki.
Nostalgia box – This box is ridiculously close to being done. I just have to attach the decorative paper to the folders and make a label for each month, and then I can start using it. I’ll post an explanation on the wiki for this one too.
Doctor Who – I’m in the middle of catching up on the modern seasons of Doctor Who and its spinoffs, a project that will take months because I’m many years behind. Right now I’m in season 2 of The Sarah Jane Adventures, which is at the tail end of the 10th Doctor. My goal is to be caught up by December, which is when the next new episode airs. Then I can participate in the hype like the fan I claim to be. I’ll post my watching order on the wiki.

Planned

Programming – A few programming ideas have been percolating in my mind forever, and I’d like to start on them soon: a database convenience library, a feed reader, and a mnemonic substitute dictionary.
Videos – I’ve also been wanting to make some videos for a while. I feel a bit out of my depth here, so I’ll need to practice some. I’ll also need to get over my perfectionism and get used to watching myself.
Drawing, creative writing – I’ve had a vague desire to get back into these. Maybe I’ll start dabbling sometime in the next couple of months.

Posted in Board games, Career, Cognitive science, Doctor Who, Drawing, Math relearning, Nutrition, Programming, Project updates, Videos, Writing | 2 Comments

I’m trying something new. Each week I’ll post an update on my projects, the site, or my life, whichever one or more of those I have something to say about. It’s mainly meant for progress reports, since I probably won’t have project contents to post every week. These updates will probably have really boring titles, like today’s. When I post a major update, I’ll call it something more interesting.

This update idea came from a couple of sources. First, I wanted to post more often without distracting myself too much from my main projects. I don’t like to keep people hanging about things I’ve said I’m working on, and I don’t like posting nothing as if I’ve forgotten about the site. But writing a coherent post about a new topic can take a lot of time, which delays my projects. And then I end up with a blog full of posts about side issues while my main concerns hide in the wings. I’ll still post about random things if they occur to me, just not as a strategy for posting more often.

Second, I wanted to follow David Allen’s advice to do a weekly review of my projects to keep my priorities in mind. I’m way too easily distracted by new ideas and events in my life. Sometimes they do need to take precedence over what I was working on before, but I need to be purposeful about those shifts. Posting my reviews will help keep me accountable.

I’ll try to post these on Sundays, but for this first one I have more to talk about than usual and not enough time to think through it all today, so I’ll post it over the next couple of days. Today I’ll post the site updates.

Site updates

Wiki comments – I’m adding the ability to comment on articles in the wiki. I’m aiming to use the PageDisqus extension, but I want it to add a comment section only on pages I tell it to rather than everywhere except the pages I exclude. To do that I’ll incorporate some code from AvbDisqus.
Topic tour – I’d started to write some short starter articles for the wiki I was calling seeds, but I decided a single overview of everything would be better. I’ll still write the seeds, but the overview feels more important. It’s helpful to me to step back and look at the big picture, and in this case it’ll be helpful to remind myself of the sources that deal with these topics; this tour will partly be an annotated bibliography. It’ll probably be a long time before I post it. I want to think through it carefully and get it mostly right before posting, and I’ll largely work on it alongside other projects rather than taking a long stretch of time to focus on it.

There will probably be two more parts to this update, one for projects and one for life.

Posted in Blog, Site updates, Wiki | 4 Comments

From computer science to …

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Andy

Many months ago I read an article on Douglas Hofstadter, a name I’d heard since high school when my friend read Gödel, Escher, Bach. At the time I thought he was probably one of those overrated thinkers who writes inspiring, popular, but empty books. And I thought that all the way up until I read that article, “The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think,” and soon after, “An interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter.” I learned that we seem to share a paradigm of artificial intelligence that’s out of style right now, one based more on semantics than on statistics. I hadn’t even known he worked in AI or that it was the subject of GEB.

So I looked up where he worked–University of Indiana Bloomington (okay, bump that one way up my list). Not in the computer science department, though–in cognitive science. Well, whatever. Maybe I could still interact with him if I ended up there, if he hasn’t retired and moved away by that point.

After finding the articles, from time to time I’d look a little more into his research group, The Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. I bought GEB, made a note of his other books, set up a Google alert for news about him, and searched for his doctoral students on social media. Then on a whim a couple of weeks ago I took a closer look at his field, cognitive science. I’d heard of it in connection with AI, but it seemed like a hazy subject, and I’d disregarded it.

Now I visited the site of the Cognitive Science Society and read their mission statement: to foster cooperation among fields such as “Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education.” I did a mental double-take. They’d just listed half my interests. And their definition of cognitive science reminded me of what I’ve recently come to see as one of my primary agendas, to understand the mind.

I was intrigued, and the researchy wheels of my mind immediately started spinning. Could this be a home for me? I had to learn more! So I’ve decided to investigate cognitive science as a possible career field instead of computer science. It’s only a slight shift, since the two overlap, but it might be a better fit. I bought an intro textbook, José Luis Bermúdez’s Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Science of the Mind, which I’ve been reading; made a list of key questions about the field; and began to search for grad programs. As I learn, I’m making a list of pros and cons. I’ll probably post my assessment once I have a better sense of the issues. But it looks promising.

Posted in Career, Cognitive science, Grad school, Life updates | 9 Comments

Common Core Math Progressions complete

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Andy

It’s about a month later than I’d planned, but I’ve finished reading the Common Core Math Progressions. I’ve posted my thoughts on them in the Math Relearning project, along with a few thoughts on the Mathematical Practice standards. I was going to take a break before plunging into the actual curriculum, but it turns out I’m a little too eager to get started on the actual math learning, so I’m going to try to read the curriculum alongside the other projects I had on the agenda for my break, such as taxes and another project I’ll post about in the new few days.

I haven’t forgotten about wanting to post every week or so during longer projects. I just haven’t figured out how to get that schedule to work yet. But I’m going to start by modifying the schedule to once every two weeks. That’s how often I post when I’m more on top of it, so I’m adjusting my expectations to my actual pattern. If I can achieve that consistently, then maybe I’ll shoot for something more frequent.

Posted in Blog, Math relearning, Site updates | 4 Comments

Plans for 2016

Posted on January 1, 2016 by Andy

Ah, New Year’s. A time for pressing the restart button on life and hoping it turns out better this time.

I don’t really make New Year’s resolutions. I make plans all year long, and I happen to make some of them around the start of January. But the plans I make in January do sometimes feel special, and it’s partly because December is such a tangle of activity that when it’s over, it feels like life is opening up again and I’m freer to look at the big picture. This is one of those times. So here’s what I’m thinking.

I have some projects to continue from previous years, such as math relearning, memory improvement, and home organizing. But I’m hoping 2016 will be a chance to get to some of the projects I’ve been putting off for years, such as graphic design and the programming projects that have been piling up in my mind. I at least want more variety in my projects. I felt like 2015 was mostly spent trying to get a handle on math relearning. But while all that’s happening, I still need to keep moving on my career plans, such as figuring out exactly what specialty to go into in AI. If you follow my blog, you probably know how often my eyes are too big for my time, but for me having too many ideas is better than having too few. To my mind, ideas mean hope and happiness. And one of my priorities this year is to get more sleep, which should help me get more done.

In the near term, the next month or two, here’s what I have in mind:

Finish reading the math progressions. At some point I’ll post the notes I’ve been taking.
Finish making my nostalgia box. I’ve procrastinated on this one for a couple of years, but I’m finally ready to complete it. I’ll write more about that once it’s ready.
Update some things on my site and my social media accounts.
Write a bunch of article seeds on the wiki side of the site. These will hopefully help me write more often. I’ll explain them in a later post.

Ready, set, go!

Posted in Life updates, Projects | 1 Comment

Virtual board game week

Posted on November 20, 2015 by Andy

Last week I reached a small milestone in my math reading, so this week I’ve been taking a break to play some video games. Mostly I’m trying out video games that implement board and card games. I think hobbyists just call them all board games.

I played a few board games growing up, but most of the ones I’ve played have been in a lunchtime gaming group at my current job. We usually play on Fridays. Sometimes the group’s organizer (who writes for the excellent board game community site iSlayTheDragon) gives us a few options, and I typically vote for games I haven’t played before because I want to survey the field. In the past two-and-a-half years with this group, despite some long breaks I took from playing, I’ve still played almost four dozen games.

But while it’s fun to see what’s out there, it can be slightly tiresome to feel like a newbie even when we repeat games because I haven’t had any practice in the meantime. In fact, for most of my life I’ve largely avoided games because I find them taxing and I expect to play poorly. I don’t own any board games, and I need a way to play the same games often so I can improve. And that’s why I’m glad there are enterprising developers who have created software versions of a lot of these games and game creators who are nice enough to license their content for them.

Among its many, many features, BoardGameGeek offers some ways to find virtual board games. It has a wiki page with dozens of links to websites where you can play them, usually for free. Then some of its pages for specific games have links to places you can play online or download an iOS version of the game. See Carcassonne, for example. The iOS app link is under the game image in the upper left of the entry, and the online and other virtual play links are in the More Information section farther down the page and the Web Links towards the bottom.

You can also look up the games directly in whatever stores will work for your platform. Here’s a search of the iOS app store for games by designer Reiner Knizia. And here’s a search on Steam for PC games related to the publisher Games Workshop. Here’s another Steam search for their board game tag.

Then there are game engines that are designed for board games. These are single programs that let you play a lot of different games. A couple of examples are Tabletop Simulator, which is a 3D environment, and Vassal, which is open source. You install the engine and then the modules for the games you want to play. I’ll probably buy Tabletop Simulator once it has better support for touchscreens.

Virtual board games offer several modes of play, which you’ll need to be aware of when you’re deciding when to play what with whom. Some games will let you play by yourself against AI opponents. Some let you play online against other people. Some give you a hotseat mode (also called local multiplayer) where everyone plays at the same computer and the game cycles through the players as their turns come up. As I hinted at in my previous entry, I’m especially looking for touch-friendly games with a hotseat mode so I can pull out my Surface whenever I’m with people and we want something to do–Small World 2, for example. I played that with my coworker on his iPad during the train ride home from a workshop.

I’ve played a few virtual board games this week. My brother was visiting last weekend, and we played Hanabi (BGG entry). We had to play on separate computers, but it worked really well. Since then I’ve played a couple of games of Sentinels of the Multiverse (BGG), which I’m learning in order to play with some other friends (and now I have the theme song stuck in my head), and the iOS version of Ra (BGG), which will need a lot more study and practice. Yes, I treat games like school.

Looking into these virtual options has gotten me kind of excited about board games. They’re a good way to socialize, so after I’d resisted them for so long, this enthusiasm is a nice change.

Posted in Board games, Life updates | 2 Comments

Somerville

Posted on November 3, 2015 by Andy

Last week I acquired a new device, a Microsoft Surface Pro 4. And I do mean new. It was released that Monday, which is also when it arrived. I preordered it. I’m really not much of a gadget person, but they’ve been seeping into my life over the past few years–first an iPod touch, then an iPhone, various Kindles and other ebook readers at work, and now this Surface.

So why did I buy it? Well, my uses for one were mounting up.

Traveling – I usually take my laptop with me when I travel so I can get things done and access my desktop at home remotely. I also like to access my desktop from across the apartment when I’m sending files to it from my scanner. But my laptop is old and slow now, and I’ve been wanting to replace it for ages.
Reading – Reading ebooks on my phone was getting tiresome, especially when they were PDFs. I read a surprising number of those. And zooming and panning all over the page slows down my reading. The larger screen of the Surface already helping. And the stylus makes it easy to write annotations on PDFs, which is handy for doing math exercises.
Writing – I actually had a pretty nice setup for writing using a wireless keyboard with my phone. But it only really worked well in my car, where I have a phone holder. A tablet would give me more options. The screen props itself up with its kickstand, and I can position it at odd angles without having it slide away. Plus it’s nice to have more screen space to work with.
Drawing – I drew a bit earlier this year when I was rotating through all my project areas each week, but later I decided art was a low priority and dropped it. Since then I’ve been thinking a tablet would make it easier to practice at random times. Last week I tweeted my first Surface drawing.
Recording – I have a digital piano with a USB port for exchanging MIDI data. For ages I’ve wanted to be able to record from it, but it’s not positioned very conveniently for recording to my desktop, and my apartment isn’t sized very conveniently for rearranging my furniture. I did record one MIDI sequence on my old laptop long ago, but like I said, it’s slow. A new laptop solves that.

So basically what I wanted was a tablet-laptop hybrid like the Surface or Chromebook. It would open up ways for me to do more with my projects, which is why I’m telling you about it. Hopefully you’ll me posting more on some of these projects in the near future. Why did I choose the Surface rather than a Chromebook? Honestly I didn’t think about it very much. But Windows was what I was used to, and I was more interested in using my device than in learning how to use it.

Since getting the Surface, I’ve been running across other uses for it.

Hulu doesn’t seem to recognize it as a mobile device, so when I’m eating dinner, I can watch videos on Hulu’s free side while sitting in my usual spot rather than at my computer desk.
The larger screen makes it easier to play in-person board game apps.
The keyboard turns out to have n-key rollover, which means the computer will detect several keys pressed at once, which means I could learn and use stenography with an app like Plover.
I can use my C-Pen with it to scan quotes from books when I’m working on projects away from home.

* * *

Computers have names to identify themselves on networks, and I usually like to name mine something meaningful. It took me some time to find a name for this one because I wasn’t feeling inspired by any of the fiction I had going. What’s been occupying me lately are themes, and the themes I’m into at the moment are math, steampunk, and cyberpunk. I thought about names of well-known mathematicians like Hilbert and Gauss, but those didn’t really grab me.

What kept floating through my mind was a woman I’d read about in one of my math books for teachers, Mary Fairfax Somerville. She was a mathematician and scientist in the 19th century and one of the first two women admitted into the Royal Astronomical Society. The textbook’s remarks were just a blurb, but I immediately felt she was some kind of kindred spirit. How could she not be, when she said things like, “I was sometimes annoyed when in the midst of a difficult [mathematical] problem someone would enter and say, ‘I have come to spend a few hours with you'”?

Her autobiography is available at Project Gutenberg, so I’ve started reading. From her daughter’s comments at the beginning, she sounds, well, too good to be true. Someone to learn from. And she nicely ties together some of my current themes. She was a mathematician and a woman in STEM, a topic I’ve been paying attention to lately. Better yet, as a woman in STEM she was something of a maverick in the Victorian era. She was basically a steampunk.

So I’ve named my Surface Somerville. But my friend Kenny and I have decided its real name is Mary Ada Somerville-Curie, because he wanted me to name it after those others.

Posted in Gadgets, Life updates | 5 Comments

Some math resources

Posted on October 21, 2015 by Andy

I’ve updated the math relearning introduction to reflect my Common Core emphasis, and I’ve added some resources to that page and the references. If you’re looking into relearning math or you need to understand your child’s homework, the resources will help you. Some of them include video, if you prefer watching over reading.

* Updated: Math Relearning/Introduction (changes)
* Updated: Math Relearning/References (changes)

Posted in Math relearning, Site updates | 2 Comments

A CCCCC for me

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Andy

Well, I’ve made another course correction. After posting the list of measurement topics, the next step in my math relearning project was to collect and post links to online sources that discussed them so my readers could refer to them as they read my notes and I’d have less to write. So I started collecting. As usual, it was taking a depressingly long time. There were a lot of topics, and I was collecting too many sources per topic. I only wanted to spend a couple of days on it, not the week or more it was clearly going to take at that rate.

But while I was collecting links, I noticed something. Several of the resources I was finding were organized around the Common Core standards. I had read the math standards for grades K-8 a while back to get ideas for what my curriculum should cover and how I should order it, but after that I’d opted to try to streamline my studies. Common Core splits math into several domains, such as algebraic thinking, geometry, and measurement, and then covers most of them at every grade level. I wanted to try to clump the material together more to keep the presentation simpler. In the realm of pre-algebra I’d progress through number sense, measurement, geometry without calculations, the arithmetic operations, rational numbers, geometry that used arithmetic calculations, and basic statistics.

The trouble is that math is a complicated, interconnected subject, and while clumping is possible, it’s harder if you’re also trying to build math up gradually from its most basic concepts. And actually my plan was to cover the basics of each topic and then return to the topic in more depth periodically as I covered more advanced topics that related to it, so the clumping wasn’t going to be all that simple in the end. In any case, all of this takes a lot of thought and time, too much time for my purposes.

Well, the resources I was collecting brought my attention back to Common Core. Here was a program for math education that built up the concepts from the basics, and it was already being used to organize several sources’ teaching material. That’s a lot of thinking I wouldn’t have to do myself. After only a little wrestling with the question, I decided Common Core would be my new organizational scheme.

I wanted a single resource that would serve as my home base. I would read it to get the main ideas of each mathematical topic in a Common Core order, and I’d fill in the details with other research as needed. After some Amazon searching and a trip to the library, I settled on The Everything Parent’s Guide to Common Core Math Grades K-5 and the companion volume for grades 6-8. I ordered them. Then I, characteristically, did some more searching and, uncharacteristically, cancelled my order.

What did I find? It was this blog post by Crazy Crawfish, a parent who had tried to help his child with her math homework. In some ways it was a typical story of a confused parent complaining about the new way of teaching math. It was different in that it was more extensive, related the political background of the issue, and had a long comment section with some good discussion. It also had a lot of photos of the homework, which included the curriculum’s branding, a familiar name–EngageNY. EngageNY seemed to collect the new kinds of math instruction that perplexed parents. It was the kind of instruction I wanted to understand. It seemed like good place to start.

I’d run across EngageNY in my earlier searches and had noticed it included some downloadable lesson plans, but a second look revealed that it didn’t just have a few. It offered an entire P-12 Creative Commons Common Core curriculum! Thousands of pages of complete and well-organized course material available to download and use for free. I’d found my home base.

Common Core might have problems. It certainly has critics. I might examine the debate and write about it someday. But I don’t have kids with educations to worry about, and most of the criticisms don’t apply to my project, so it’ll be a while. As far as I can tell, Common Core is good enough for my needs.

I’m not sure what I’ll post for this reorganized project, maybe just my questions and random observations, but I’ll at least provide a list of the main sources I’ve found. That’ll be my next update. I’m especially looking for shorter treatments for people who don’t want to sift through a whole curriculum.

Before I get to the EngageNY curriculum, I’m reading the Common Core progression documents from Achieve the Core. They follow the development of each domain across the grades. These will give me an overview of the subject matter so I’ll know where I’m headed, and since they’re organized by domain, they’ll make it easier to see connections I might miss in the grade-oriented approach. The progressions are sort of what I was trying to accomplish in my clumping exercise. The progression documents are shorter than EngageNY, but it’s still a lot to read, around 280 pages. I’ll be on it for a few weeks. But at least it’s a few weeks on all of K-12 math and not only basic measurement. After that I might take a break from math to work on some of the projects I’ve been putting off.

Posted in Math relearning, Site updates | 4 Comments