{"id":725,"date":"2017-02-27T17:54:24","date_gmt":"2017-02-27T23:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/?p=725"},"modified":"2017-02-27T21:19:43","modified_gmt":"2017-02-28T03:19:43","slug":"update-for-2262017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2017\/02\/27\/update-for-2262017\/","title":{"rendered":"Update for 2\/26\/2017"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Life updates<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Jury duty<\/strong> &#8211; A few weeks ago I got a jury summons, and Monday night the website told me my number was up, so Tuesday I went down to the courthouse to see if I&#8217;d be called in for jury selection, and for about the first 40 minutes or so I watched the intro video, read the courthouse&#8217;s informative pamphlet, and read a bit of <em>Political Ideologies<\/em> to pass the time. Then my number was called for the second group, which turned out to be a murder trial, and I was the fifth juror sent up to the jury box, where the judge and the defense attorney asked me a few questions (in front of everyone, which was a little nerve-wracking), but the prosecutor moved to dismiss me without asking a single thing, so feeling slightly rejected, I made my way back to the jury lounge, where we were released for lunch, during which I took the opportunity to flee the building and get lunch from Chipotle, and after which I worked on my code console until they told us a little early that the courtrooms didn&#8217;t need any more jurors and we were all dismissed. I have mixed feelings about my experience, since the trial I was being considered for did sound interesting, but I expected that peering through a murky cloud of conflicting evidence to decide another person&#8217;s fate would be the kind of stressful burden I&#8217;m often grateful to leave to other people. Jury selection itself was stressful and left me wondering if we&#8217;d really found the best way to do it, partly because I ended up feeling like I was on trial to determine my fairness of mind (with two prosecutors and no attorney for my defense), but it also gave me a valuable image for looking at my life, since in the back of my mind I feel like I&#8217;m almost always on trial, being evaluated by the rest of the human race, not to mention myself and God, on criteria I have no hope of meeting, even when I&#8217;m clear on what they are.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Livestreams<\/strong> &#8211; Sunday my online friend <a href=\"https:\/\/www.twitch.tv\/davgov_gaming\">Davgov<\/a> taught me how to play the video game <em>Terraria<\/em> during his stream (and did a very nice job of it), and we voice chatted over Discord, so my voice has now gone out over Twitch. Unfortunately he didn&#8217;t have his stream archiving enabled, so you can&#8217;t watch the replay, but we&#8217;ll probably stream it again sometime. It was a nice way to dip my toe into streaming, so maybe I&#8217;ll procrastinate less on my own streams now.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Project updates<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Code console<\/strong> &#8211; I&#8217;ve set up the Sphinx documentation skeleton, and now I&#8217;m looking at recommendations for documenting Python code so I can do it the right way from the start and not have to write a bunch of it later, which I can say from past documentation experience would lead to procrastinating and dragging my feet the whole way through the writing. I&#8217;m also planning to start a wiki article to help other programmers who are getting started on distributing their code, which I&#8217;ll post as a seed article this week.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Knowledge representation<\/strong> &#8211; I&#8217;ve gotten into a good rhythm of tackling a couple of chapters most days, skimming each chapter and noting the software it mentions so I can post links to them later and choose some for experimentation. The book is bringing up topics I&#8217;m looking forward to digging into, like qualitative modeling, which is exciting not only because it&#8217;s the kind of thing I think about already but also because the field needs lots more research, so it could give me something to pursue in grad school and afterward. Since the aspect of KR I most care about right now is the data structures involved in each method, after posting links and choosing software I&#8217;m planning to revisit <em>Data Structures and Algorithms in Java<\/em> and this time finish it (or maybe take a course for credit?) so I can ground myself in the basics better.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Creativity<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li><em><strong>Nostalgia box<\/strong><\/em> &#8211; The February folder had my childhood experimental literature projects and handmade books, with things like a split-page book, a branching plot book, and a puzzle book, and it was nice to realize that by now I&#8217;ve collected pretty much all my original inspirations for these projects, such as <em>Graham Oakley&#8217;s Magical Changes<\/em> and <em>The Animated Thumbtack Railroad Dollhouse &amp; All-around Surprise Book, Evening Edition<\/em>, so I can study them to continue the experiments. Coming up with a simple project for this month has been a challenge, but I think I have something, so I should be able to do that this week. My musical accompaniment has consisted of my contemplative dusk playlist, my new <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pandora.com\/station\/play\/3516808458531956177\">Arnold Schoenberg Pandora station<\/a>, and songs I extracted from the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.littlethinkeradventures.com\/collections\/mp3-download\/products\/think-about-outer-space-mp3-download\">Little Thinker episode on outer space<\/a> that I grew up listening to and bought in MP3 a couple of years ago. I&#8217;ve also bought the book <em>Thinkertoys<\/em> by Michael Michalko to explore some general creativity techniques to help me with these kinds of project ideas, though that&#8217;s just an excuse to get around to the topic of creativity, which I&#8217;ve been putting off for years&#8211;not that I&#8217;ll necessarily read it anytime soon, but at least it&#8217;s available.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Drawing<\/strong><\/em> &#8211; True confession time: Even though I want to work on creative writing this year, Instagram has been pulling me towards drawing too, specifically <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/beginace\/\">beginace<\/a> inspiring me to learn perspective drawing, which seems to fit the way I think better than other approaches&#8211;treating everything as a 3D object to model rather than a 2D shape to trace&#8211;so earlier in the year I bought Scott Robertson&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=pNkG5HN4bgY&amp;t=252s\"><em>How to Draw<\/em><\/a>, which I&#8217;ll probably supplement with his <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=UKu_uf8xaos\"><em>How to Render<\/em><\/a> because shading always vexes me, though that book is really overkill for my needs. I&#8217;ve also discovered <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bohoberry.com\/bullet-journal-101-intro\/\">bullet journaling<\/a> via <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/boho.berry\/\">boho.berry<\/a>, and although I probably wouldn&#8217;t use the system for everyday task management, I&#8217;m intrigued by the other creative visual ways people use these journals.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Media<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li><em><strong>Books<\/strong><\/em> &#8211; I&#8217;m in the middle of a book I recommend to all computer science or mathematically minded people, <em>Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions<\/em>, and I&#8217;ll write about it more next week. After I&#8217;m done with that one, today&#8217;s sermon made me think I should listen to spiritual books for Lent, so I&#8217;m thinking of returning to <em>The Divine Conspiracy<\/em>, which I&#8217;ve started a couple of times without finishing.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>TV<\/strong><\/em> &#8211; I&#8217;m back to <em>Arrow<\/em> and <em>The Flash<\/em>, alternating one episode of each so I can watch them in broadcast order. I&#8217;m in mid-s3 in <em>Arrow<\/em> and mid-s1 in <em>The Flash<\/em>, and both of them are kind of exciting right now.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Web series<\/strong><\/em> &#8211; I made some progress cataloguing some creepy Internet fiction in my bookmarks, which will ultimately make it into a wiki article. I know you&#8217;re all looking forward to that.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Life updates Jury duty &#8211; A few weeks ago I got a jury summons, and Monday night the website told me my number was up, so Tuesday I went down to the courthouse to see if I&#8217;d be called in &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2017\/02\/27\/update-for-2262017\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89,160,106,161,159,58,154,151,105,115,109,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-coding-project-generator","category-drawing","category-jury-duty","category-knowledge-representation","category-life_updates","category-livestreams","category-nostalgia-box","category-project-updates","category-tv","category-video-games","category-weird_stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=725"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":730,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725\/revisions\/730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}