2019 Prediction Results

For the last three years, I've made predictions about how the coming year would go. In 2019, I made sixty (60) predictions, and now it's time to see how well I did.

Predictions left unmarked, while those struck through were incorrect. I am not throwing any out this year, which would be marked in italics. There are a few borderline cases, such as Boeing's Orbital Flight Test, which did not dock at the International Space Station due to a software problem, but otherwise appears to have been a successful spacecraft demonstration. I am also counting my time playing around with Python as learning a new programming language, because I had basically forgotten everything I learned about it from the last time I used it.

PERSONAL/PROFESSIONAL

I will read 15 books this year: 95%
....20 books: 80%
....30 books: 60%
I will read three technical/science/engineering books this year: 80%
....five books: 60%
I will write an average of one blog post per month: 90%
...two blog posts per month: 70%
I will still be using Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr: 80%
I will remain single this year: 60%
I will have my wisdom teeth removed: 60%
I will not be hospitalized this year: 95%
I will compete in NaNoWriMo: 80%
...and succeed: 70%
My French will improve this year: 60%
I will not begin learning Russian this year: 70%
I will begin learning a new programming language this year: 70%
I will either find an engineering job or enroll in grad school: 90%
I will still be participating in the Less Wrong/SSC community: 90%
I will attend some sort of Solstice event: 70%

SCIENCE/SPACE

No successful human clones announced: 80%
KIC 8462852 will not be satisfactorily explained: 80%
No strong evidence of extra-terrestrial life found: 95%
The Mars InSight lander will still be operational: 90%
Both Voyager spacecraft will still be operational: 80%
Hubble Space Telescope will still be operational: 90%
JWST scheduled to launch on or before December 31, 2021: 70%
SpaceX conducts Demonstration Mission 1 successfully: 90%
SpaceX conducts Demonstration Mission 2 successfully: 70%
Boeing conducts the Orbital Test Flight successfully: 90%
Boeing conducts the Crew Test Flight successfully: 70%
Falcon Heavy will fly at least once this year: 80%
SLS scheduled to launch on or before December 31, 2020: 70%
Virgin Galactic tourist flights will not begin this year: 60%
Blue Origin begins crewed test flights this year: 70%
No Chinese crewed space flights this year: 80%
No deaths in space this year: 90%
No country leaves the ISS Treaty: 90%
Sci-Hub will remain easily accessible from the United States: 80%

POLITICS/WORLD

Donald Trump will still be President of the United States: 95%
Mike Pence will still be Vice President of the United States: 95%
Donald Trump will still be planning to run for re-election: 90%
At least one new US government shutdown will occur this year: 80%
More than 5 major Democrats (current or former Governor, Senator, or Representative) announce Presidential bids: 90%
....more than 10: 70%
At least one major Republican announces a Presidential primary challenge: 70%
United States will not go to war with a nuclear power: 90%
United States will not enter a major new war (>100 US casualties): 70%
Theresa May will still be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 80%
UK will leave the European Union: 90%
No additional countries opt to leave the European Union: 90%
North Korean government will not be overthrown or displaced: 95%
North Korean government will not begin major liberal reforms: 95%
US Nominal GDP will finish ahead of the EU and China: 80%
Bitcoin will end the year valued $500 or above: 80%
....$1000 or above: 60%
Fewer than 25 cases of wild polio contracted this year: 70%
Fewer than 100 cases of vaccine-derived polio this year: 80%

META

I will remember to score these predictions: 95%
I will still be overconfident in these predictions: 80%
I will be less overconfident than in 2018: 60%

The last two predictions required me to do some analysis before scoring, and serve as my tie-breaker questions. This year, I almost had to invoke them for that purpose.

60% predictions: 5 right and 3 wrong, for a score of 63%
70% predictions: 8 right and 6 wrong, for a score of 57%
80% predictions: 13 right and 3 wrong, for a score of 81%
90% predictions: 13 right and 1 wrong, for a score of 93%
95% predictions: 8 right and 0 wrong, for a score of 100%

Graphed, my results look like this:

This is much better calibration than either 2017 or 2018. Deviation from the orange line indicates the degree of under- or over-confidence. I had some small under-confidence at the very high ends, and some over-confidence at that 70% level, but overall my result hug the perfect calibration curve much more closely than the previous years I've done this exercise. I'm still counting this as over-confident overall, but just barely.

I did about evenly-well in each major category. Personal/Professional and Politics/World were tied at 74% accuracy, while Science/Space was 84% accurate. My overall accuracy was 78% i.e., I got 47 out of 60 questions correct.

Unlike previous years, there aren't any major, obvious failure areas. I still had a degree of launch schedule optimism, which contributed towards the over-confidence at the 70% mark, but not to nearly the same degree as in past years. I also missed both questions about UK politics. Finally, the other categorical error was expected fewer cases of polio this year than actually occurred. This could be a case of anchoring: there were very few cases in the years before I began making calibrated predictions, but polio eradication effort has run into some serious stumbling blocks the last couple of years, with 2019 being particularly bad.

My overall take-away is that my calibration has improved, with the obvious caveat at 70% confidence. Besides adjusting for this, there does not seem to be a major, obvious lesson for my 2020 predictions besides more of the same.

Last Sunday Night (for now)

I think it's time to admit that weekly reviews just aren't very compatible with my academics—a month is long enough to say that it's not a single occasion, but rather the general pattern of the semester.

I've been doing reasonably well (I still haven't gotten very many assignments back) and mostly maintaining my balance, but the process of slowing down long enough to reflect on the past week is a habit I've clearly broken. We're on Fall Break right now, which seems a reasonably enough time to state the matter openly.

Grad school is more reasonable than the demands of being an undergraduate upperclassman, but the fact remains that it isn't easy to maintain a writing habit. I started a couple of Fictober prompts, for instance, and almost instantly abandoned them simply because I had other assignments and such to worry about. Design reports seem to satisfy the itch well enough that I don't have to write—there's ideas still bouncing around in my head, both fiction and non, but fitting it into my schedule is....tricky.

In any case, this concludes a series of weekly reviews stretching almost a year. My conclusions is that they can help clear my mind to some extent, but do not in themselves provide too much in the way of self-organizational value. Talking about my life to friends on a regular basis probably goes further, with the added benefit of feedback or simple external insight. It's possible to get stuck going in circles, which is one of the reasons I'm so glad to have more friendships in my life than I remember having had right now.

Come to think of it, maybe that's why I don't feel so compelled to write about my personal life so often. It's gotten a lot less internal, and about that, I really can't complain.

Busy

Things are starting to pick up academically, to the point that I've had to turn down invitations to social functions (that I actually wanted to go to, rather than as a lame excuse). The career fair is this week, adding to the load, but overall I think I'm managing it quite well.

As a summary, I'm not sure what information is really relevant. All I'm thinking about is my specific assignments—diffuser design in propulsion, the second homework in my space class. And the RASC-AL meeting tomorrow. 

Oh, and I finished the main text of Manned Spacecraft Design Principles today. There are some useful appendices that I intend to read through before calling it finished, but I'm done with the bulk of the material. Expect a review sometime soon-ish.

I don't know when the next serious blog post will be. Could be a week, could be Halloween. We'll see. School is both more important and urgent.

Week Two

This last week went pretty swimmingly from a strictly academic perspective, but we had wallpaper removed in the hall and that was a bit of a disruption. I'm glad that that work is basically over. Dad is doing some touchup around the edges, but as far as I'm concerned he's welcome to it. I spent far too many hours doing that last summer and fall to think about going back to it anytime soon.

I'm still a little sick, but getting better. Allergies are a confounding factor, though those haven't really gotten to bad yet.

This week, my main focus is optimizing my morning and evening routines to make more time in the day to study. So far, the actual homework situation is insignificant compared to undergrad, but a habit for reading and research will serve me will in the coming months. Making more room for that—and for high-quality recreation—is a good thing to focus on.

Labor Day Weekend

I guess I was so worked up about classes starting that I forgot to do a weekly review last Sunday. I kept my streak seven months, I think. I'm not going back into the archives to check for certain.

In any case, the first week of classes went well! I think I'm going to get a lot out of these courses. Thanks to new information I got from my erstwhile- (and to-be) classmates during the School of Engineering orientation, I made a last-minute change to my schedule, but I'm not regretting it so far. The new faculty in the department is teaching an experimental class that may or may not be offered again, whereas the course I switched out of appears to be offered every fall semester. Unless something drastic happens, I'll take it next autumn.

Speaking of, it feels like autumn. I caught a cold from Mom (or at one of the orientations), and about simultaneously the weather got cold and rainy. Coming home from the first day of classes, taking notes at the sun went down at an unreasonably early hour, drinking echinacea tea and blowing my nose occasionally—it was a stark difference from where I was a few weeks ago.

Also, Dad did notice my new glasses, after six days. I'm finally getting used to them myself.

I've got the house mostly to myself this weekend—Mom and Dad made plans that I would love to participate in, but from experience I know that big obligations at the start of the semester are academically unconscionable. Given how much I've gotten done, and yet how much I need to do tomorrow, I stand by this decision. I'll be in much better psychological shape for it.

We're probably having home improvement work done at some point this week, too, so there's that on my plate. How supervision will be my responsibility depends on when the contractor finally finishes the previous project. I'm a little concerned that I haven't heard anything yet, but then again, I wasn't in a hurry to do this at all.

One Week Left

That's right: a week from tomorrow I will be a student once again. I'm kind of excited, but also not, because I've been through enough syllabus weeks before to be blase about it.

This week was pretty busy: I had my car checked over to make sure it was in good condition (it is). I went to the dentist on Thursday, and took myself to the local art museum afterwards. That was really interesting and I'm going to have to go back there—it's a lot more fun when it's self-directed! The last time I was there was a field trip in high school, and before that I was either too young to appreciate the matter or busy trying to keep track of both parents and my grandmother. Visiting by myself was a total change of pace.

On Friday, I picked up my eyeglasses. I didn't tell Dad about this and I'm waiting until he notices. So far, he hasn't said anything. If that doesn't change this week, I'll need to be more obvious somehow—perhaps switching pairs when I leave the room briefly. Admittedly, the frames aren't all that different, but my old pair were kind of skewed on my face, so I thought it was a noticeable shift. But we're all self-involved like that.

This weekend had multiple social outings, so I'm a little over-extroverted right now. This coming week entails multiple orientations in Lawrence, which may have a similar effect, but there's a couple of days before that starts, and it's nothing like Boiler Gold Rush. I expect to be well-rested for the start of my first semester of graduate school.

Late Sunday Update

I almost forgot to write anything this week because I've gotten MATLAB working on my computer again and that removed the major stumbling block for a project I've been working on for...awhile now. So expect that in the coming few weeks. As in, I've been working on that instead of going to bed on time. Given how much trouble my sleep schedule has had this week, I'm counting a productive late night up as an improvement.

Anyway, I finalized my classes this week and didn't get to do that car maintenance I'd hoped for because Mom's car had issues and had to go to the shop instead. Hopefully mine can hold out without any major trouble for the time being. I think it's mostly okay, but I'm going to be commuting a lot this semester.

It's Happening

It's all happening. Or at least, that's what it feels like.

I've reached the point in grad school prep where I've realized I need a checklist. That's when it starts being real, I suspect. In any case, I won't vent about it here.

But on top of all that, the hard drive in our DVR-cum-router has finally bought a plot, which is leading to all sorts of gnashing of teeth among my parents. I got off TV years ago but they're both still disciples of cable. The box is still working fine at providing Internet, which would keep me satisfied if not for the fact that the box lives in my room and so I'm subject to any actions taken upon it. Since it's really not cooperating, we'll probably just have to write off everything that was on the hard drive and get a new one.

I really don't have time to deal with cable crap this week, so I'm very much hoping that the system is as plug-and-play as it claims to be.

On the plus side, I got new glasses ordered this week, so those should be ready before school starts. I'm also managing to get some writing done, which might make the pressure after classes begin a bit lower having already gotten some material up ahead of time.

Enrollment

This week kicked off the process (finally!) for getting enrolled in fall classes. I haven't finalized my schedule so no sneak peeks—not that anyone should really care besides my immediate family—but I should be able to achieve that will in-time for classes.

There's also all the usual documentation and orientation rigmarole which seems designed precisely to thwart its stated purpose—ensuring a straightforward onboarding for new students—and that will probably be continuing until sometime this autumn. That won't really heat up for another few weeks still, though, which gives me a window to take care of some of the other tasks I'd like to take care of before then.

Probably the most significant this week will be trying to order a new pair of glasses. I went to the optometrists a few months ago for a new prescriptions, but couldn't find any frames that I felt happy with. Of course, at that time I was both under a good deal more pressure and also unspeakable cold for the whole experience. Evaluating the possibilities should be significantly easier in more pleasant weather.

In the meantime, my behaviorism experiment continues with mixed results. It remains continuously tempting to stay up far too late, which stands in the way of incentivizing early rising. More practical incentives will be arising soon for reasons implied above, but maintaining a 24-hour sleep cycle would be immaterial were I not trying to interact with those around me.

Behaviorism Followup

I think setting up a strongly-positive incentive gradient for my days is, unsurprisingly, working, though it's a bit more difficult to maintain when other people are involved. I'm going to try continuing this in the coming week, perhaps transitioning towards more desirable projects. It's very easy, in an obligation-focused environment, to forget what you actually wanted to do (instead of what some vague other supposedly expects you to do).

Behaviorism

I'm doing a theme week again!

Specifically, I have probably mentioned before that I am not a morning person. This week, I thought about why that is. Right now, there isn't any particular reason to dislike mornings, besides the process of getting up. Why do I dislike that? At the current point in time, no rational reason! I can set my own hours, do what I want when I get up, and arrange my schedule more-or-less as I so desire.

However, this was not always true. Over the years, I developed a strong negative association with getting up in the morning. This can be attributed to a number of factors: school starting at a developmentally-unhealthy time through almost the entirely of K-12, massively insufficient sleep during a good deal of college, unpleasant obligations upon waking—years of this before I decided to develop the usual chemical dependency! The opposite result should be more surprising.

The theme for this week, then, is going to be attempting to reverse this situation. My plan is pretty simple: since there wasn't all that much on the agenda this week anyway, I'm going to start the day doing something fun. I want to do this as early as I can, and continue for a significant period. My hope is that, by the end of the week, I'll be looking forward to getting up in the morning, rather than internally resisting the change.

If this doesn't work, I'm willing to extend the project until school starts, but it may not take nearly that long to change my attitude. Once that occurs, I can start in on constructive activities earlier and earlier in the day (particularly since I have more discretion in choosing my agenda than I did before receiving my degree).

Short Update

I'll probably have a post up in the next week or two over here or at the new blog, depending on how discussions of the content matter go with some friends this week. I might have published it sooner, but Dad has been off work for nine (9) days now and that's really not at all friendly towards my goals.

Asteroid Day

I pushed out an extensive blog post for Asteroid Day, which I think is going to become an annual feature. My 2019 Planetary Defense Progress Report follows onto the inaugural update I published last June, and covers even more ground describing the international effort to detect and deflect deep space objects which could threaten Earth. If that sounds interesting to you, I really do recommend you take a look; I worked hard on this and hope plenty of people can learn from it.

Even better than last year, I got to discuss Asteroid Day in person with some of my friends who saw the post and were curious. Ancillary benefits!

This week, of course, is Independence Day, so my Dad has the week off work. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to understand that just because he's on vacation (read: eager to give himself a week-long asthma/allergy attack from cleaning the basement) does not me that I am in a situation to be further disrupting my routine. This last week was off-kilter enough; I'm just hoping to carry on with my personal projects and so on.

We even have a large-scale home maintenance operation underway which was forced upon us unexpected (but which we would have needed to do eventually), so I suppose I don't understand the urgency to exert a great deal of effort on something which is lower priority. Honestly, the idea of self-utilitarianism would be useful for society as a whole. What I mean by this is a selfish interest in your future self, avoiding hyperbolic discounting, thinking seriously about what order to do things in. As a general rule, the actions which will provide you the most long-term utility should be done first: ceteris paribus, fixing something that negatively affects you every day should be done before something that negatively effects you every once in awhile.

I think that this is self-evident, but self-evidently it is not. So far, I have not had much success explaining it to people who are used to making unordered, unweighted lists.

Continuing Education

I got my acceptance letter to grad school this week, which means that in two months time I will either be employed or pursuing my master's degree. At this point, the latter seems more probable. I would have liked to have waited to pursue graduate study, but my desires have had very little to do with reality these last twenty-five years.

In the meantime, my personal research programs are staying alive. I finished Superfuel and Rocket Propulsion Elements this week, which moves me a bit further along. I wasn't particularly impressed with either book and may write reviews at some point soon. (I need to take Superfuel back to the library tomorrow so hopefully I can get something up on Goodreads in short order.)

That's about it. I have some plans for this week, but nothing particularly noteworthy in the conventional sense.

Father's Day

Father's Day is proving much less over-bearing that Mother's Day did, though in part that's because Dad wanted to go see a movie today instead of book group (which isn't this week), and my presence was not required for that. We're going out to eat this evening and that will probably be a bit tiring. Consequently, I'm writing this now instead of later so I can get ready for bed immediately after we get back.

I was hoping to get a few things done this morning, but unexpectedly I suffered a severe bout of insomnia last night. I have some hypotheses but I'm not really sure why. Regardless, today was not a particularly productive day; tomorrow needs to be better.

The last few weeks, I've been thinking about intentionality and how to implement changes in one's life (prompted by material we've been discussing in the local rationalist group). More recently, I've also been thinking about the goals and ideas that I had at various points in my past and wanting to take steps towards achieving a healthier mindset. Among other things, I've decided to completely give up my fiction writing for the foreseeable future so that I can focus entirely on my technical projects and independent research.

Oh, I should mention that I'm about to finished Rocket Propulsion Elements and will be advancing to spacecraft design texts in the very near future. My reading progress as a whole has been quite satisfying as of late.

Mercury

I crossed another planet off my list while I was at the local university observatory on Friday night. Mercury is up above the horizon after sunset, and visible through telescopes and the naked eye. By my count, that just leaves Uranus or Neptune (I can't recall which, but I think it's Neptune) left for me to see with my own two eyes.

The fact that astronomers thought they saw surface features on other bodies when their telescopes weren't all that much more powerful than those I was looking through...really says something about human psychology, most likely.

Tomorrow, it's back to the problem of getting people out there.

Twenty-Five

As of today, I have been an independently-breathing human being for a full quarter-century.

As recent birthdays have gone, this one has been pretty good. I woke up early, ate lunch with some friends, got a car wash, and went out for dinner with my parents. Last year there was a power outage and I accidentally ordered a spinach quiche at dinner. The year before that I could barely walk because I spent the day before crouching down constantly to show Cub Scouts how to launch model rockets.

We'll see how the coming year goes; the last year has felt largely like a zero on the sum of my life. At the same time, I feel a lot more mature than I did a year ago—but that's true every year. I think that's how growth works. The experiential and developmental aspects of maturation (which are...all of it, oui?) take time to occur.

A higher gain might be nicer, though.

Memorial Day Weekend

All told, I think I did pretty well this week (despite some atrocious weather). I took care of several administrative matters, finished reading Spacecraft Mission Design, and started getting up early again. Technically I fell down on that last one this morning, but not particularly dramatically compared to recent Sundays and I'm on track to continue.

Part of that is that I need some space to work on my own tasks even despite the plan to do lots of stuff together on Memorial Day. Specifically, Dad wants to assemble some shelving units to organize the basement (which really doesn't seem like a priority to me given the functionality deficits on the main floor of the house) and of course we're doing the cemetery circuit. We'll probably cook out, too—I should ask if we need to take that meat out of the freezer tonight. That's...more than I'd really like, and Dad is off Tuesday to complicate matters. And he works from home Wednesday and Thursday, so.

Back to the library with me, most likely. I didn't get to it as many days as I would have liked this week, so I'm due for a correction. The next book of theirs I'm reading is non-technical, which I think lowers the activation energy requires while building up the basic habit.

I might stop doing Links

I'm definitely not doing them this month. May is almost over and I haven't saved any interesting articles to share. And I'm not in a hurry to go digging up links just to make the post.

This is directly a product of my hard-fought battle of wasting less time on social media—a battle I think I'm winning, this being but one more piece of evidence. But that itself is due to a strong philosophical opinion against news and for passivism. Several of the commentators whose opinions I value keep reiterating points about the value of focusing one's attention and fighting the distractions of our information-overloaded culture (see, for example, CGP Grey and Meredith Patterson for different perspectives on this problem). Honestly, I'm not convinced that they go far enough. It's not just about a difficulty focusing, but about the selfish valuation of your own time and effort.

On that note, my pace of reading books has been really go, and I'm not experiencing an overwhelming distractedness or anything like some people describe. If anything, it's the reverse; I read The Stand in eleven days, basically dropping everything once the plot started to pick up around page 250. To some extent that's because Stephen King is an engaging writer, but it also indicates a certain ability to engage with longform narratives still survives.

Returning to the main point, I'm just not all that enthusiastic about compiling a list of links just for the sake of compiling it. I don't even enjoy doing it, and consider how many stories have proven mistaken, illusory, or simply non-consequential. Why should I bother writing summaries for all of them? What purpose does it serve? Some stories are worthwhile, yes, but honestly the ones that excite me for whatever reason are probably worth discussing in greater detail.

That's why I'm probably giving up on link posts. This is hardly a hard commitment, but I would be somewhat surprised if I decide to resume link posting when I could be, I don't know, reading spacecraft engineering books.

Mid-May

I didn't do all that much this week because I was consumed reading The Stand for most of it. No joke, I read almost nine hundred pages between Sunday evening and the wee hours of Friday morning. I can clearly see why Stephen King is such a successful (as in, highly selling) author. Simultaneously, I have no strong desire to read any more of his work.

This, quite predictably, has thrown off a lot of my internal schedules and whatnot, so the goal for this week is to get that under control, and quickly at that. There's a number of things I want to do, like finish cleaning the fridge, get a haircut, push out a book review, work on job applications, and so on.

One positive: getting back to the YMCA after all these years. I'm mostly focusing on treadmill-type exercises because my daily distance walked must have crashed after graduation. This is a good opportunity to read in a significantly less sedentary manner, and appears to be a promising place to integrate library books into my reading profile. My mom is trying to get there two or three times a week, and I will endeavor to go along most of the time.

I might start swimming again if I can deduce the combination to my old lock, but until that occurs or I shell out for a new one, I'll go for something less capital-intensive.

Oh, also: the weather finally let up so the local campus observatory was open to the public. It was their ADA night, as well, so there were on top of the parking garage instead of a building roof; consequently, more telescopes. I got to see Mars, Jupiter, and Luna through some pretty big scopes, plus a couple of stars. The International Space Station did a pass near the moon early in the evening. This Friday probably won't be as exciting, provide the clouds decide to cooperate again.

Mother's Day

I spent basically the entire day doing things with people, and I am exhausted.

To be fair, it was a busy week. Still, I'm not a big fan of socializing. I hope I can spend a bit more time to myself this week. I have a blog post I want to finish and another I want to start, plus plenty of material to study and practice on my own. Job applications also fell off in the last couple of days and I'd really rather jump back on that saddle.

A small change: I've decided to no longer exercise on the weekends. My thought process is that first, exercise is often a stumbling block in my morning routine, and I'm wasting perfectly good Saturdays with slow starts. Second, I've been having weird pains in my upper body, so I think that I might need to incorporate a dedicated rest period, and weekends are a natural point to do that. We'll see if things improve.

(I should note that I've started alternating exercise sets and reading in the mornings, which slows down the overall process but makes it easier to complete, so my exercise has been slightly more regular in the last fortnight or so. It's also stacking up pages read, which is good for my self-esteem more generally—the length of my to-read list has been giving me anxiety for months if not longer, and finally drilling into it the way I have since finishing First Man is making me feel a lot better about it.)

So that's the current situation. No major progress to report, but not too much trouble, either. I'll probably stay in tomorrow to avoid overtaxing myself, but then it's back to the library everyday. Those engineering texts aren't going to read themselves.

Routines

My routine is less weekly and more daily, which I think is part of why the weekly reviews are losing interest to me. In the academic environment, weekly cycles mattered a lot, and I sort of rolled that over after coming home. Part of that, though, was that a lot of the house stuff required Dad's presence, which could only be guaranteed on Saturdays and Sunday afternoons.

There's still weekly components, especially on the weekends, but I'm operating a good deal more autonomously at this point, at least with regard to how I structure my overall time. I'm not going to the house to paint or whatever; I'm going to the library to read engineering books in the afternoons. I've noticed some of the same anti-productive dynamics at play there; I want to try shaking things up, but ultimately I am the one directing my action there and I have the capacity to change things should I so desire.

(I think I am going to experiment with that, in fact—not tomorrow, because I have plans that involve other people but an insufficiently specified time. Tuesday I have evening plans, though, so it would honestly be idea to try going to the library in the morning and coming back mid-afternoon to see where I'm at cognitively. I thought that would be a good strategy at one point back when I was working on the house, but in practice I turned out to be pretty tired when I got home and rarely accomplished what I wanted in the evenings. Whether the same applies here is an important question to answer.)

Introspection is still valuable, of course, and Sunday nights are still a good Schelling Point for introspecting. I'm just not sure it's the more insightful point to be doing so.

April Week 4

At this point, I think I have to admit that the quarterly objectives systems was insufficiently valuable, seeing as we're already a month into Q2 and I haven't missed it any.

I have some thoughts about why that was the case, but I haven't taken the time yet to organize them to the point that they're ready for public consumption. That said, I have organized them, and taken away some lessons for future planning projects.

I haven't decided what, if anything, will replace this. Frankly, the weekly reviews seemed almost entirely divorced from my actual goals, so I don't see any particular reason to discontinue my Sunday night posts. They provide a useful catalyst for introspection and near-mode planning. The issue is that they don't do that much to turn far-mode plans into near-mode plans.

I'll think about the implications of this problem further in the coming days. My day-over-day is solidifying into a more regular routine, with fewer surprises and lower variance. Worrying about the weekly plan(s) means a lot less in that context. Systems and habits matter more. I wanted to steal Malcolm Ocean's habit-a-week idea, and tried to implemented it back in 2016, but failed poorly. Maybe it's a good time to implement something in that vein.

We'll see.

Reading Program

I'm doing something unusual today, and taking a book off my Goodread's to-read shelf. Almost invariably, I add books and leave them there till I finally get around to reading them. Removing them is so exceptional I feel the need to write a blog post justifying myself!

The specific story is pretty simple here: when I put John Anderson's Hypersonic and High-Temperature Gas Dynamics on my reading list last summer, I was more interested in bookmarking it for future reading rather than giving it a particular priority in my independent study plan. However, since then, I've started giving much more weight to reading the books that are already on my to-read list (and don't want to overpopulate it with the hundreds of titles which have, at least briefly, caught my attention over the years).

Hypersonic aerodynamics is an advanced topic, and Anderson recommends Fundamentals of Aerodynamics and Modern Compressible Flow as pre-requisite texts. At this point, I'm not going to forget about his hypersonics book, so when and if I get to the point where it's appropriate to study high-speed flow, I'll know where to look. In the meantime, however, I'm better served prioritizing more foundational engineering texts and the other types of books on my list (history of science, philosophy, fiction).

I'll probably use the newly-vacated slot for Spacecraft Mission Design by Charles D. Brown, which strikes me as a more appropriately challenging textbook at this point in my reading program.

April Links

In the first three months of 2019, a Google product died every nine days.

FiveThirtyEight introduces a new accountability project to check the calibration of their predictions. In a shocking turn of evens, 70% predictions happened about seven times out of ten. It's almost like statistics works.

In a huge victory for small business owners and entrepreneurs over legalized cartels, Arizona becomes the first state to recognize out-of-state occupational licenses.

Speaking of cartels, the San Francisco planning commission has more members with second homes than members who rent. Maybe that has something to do with their extreme protectionist, anti-growth policies?

Was the college admissions scandal about rich parents helping their kids, or giving the parents the satisfaction of performing pseudo-meritocracy?

Republican Senators introduce a bill to fast-track regulatory evaluation of new birth control products. Congress doesn't have the power to directly mandate over-the-counter contraception, but telling HHS to give priority to assessing such products is about the next best thing.

Kansas Legislature approves a bill giving counties the option to implement open polling in future elections. Note that this bill does not require counties to provide open polling options, so check with your local election office before the race.

After severely damaging their only aircraft carrier last fall, the Russian Navy is considering scrapping it entirely.

Easter Sunday

It's been almost a month and I still haven't decided whether or not it's worthwhile to continue these, but I haven't taken the line-item off my weekly to-do list, so I'm still doing them. The fact is, though, I don't think the reviews have helped all that much beyond being aware of my own behavior better, and there's a few other things that happened around the same time which may or may not have had a greater impact.

This week was not all that productive; the big thing was finishing Spacecraft Propulsion. It's a lot shorter than a lot of other books, which is a big factor for why I was able to speed through it when I'm still about a quarter of the way from the end of Rocket Propulsion Elements. I'm going to use my library time on something lighter before picking up what will be a similarly gargantuan text on high-temperature gas dynamics, so again, progress may not be all that fast.

This coming week I mostly want to get back into my routines of exercising, meditating, studying, and applying for jobs. This last week I was pretty wildly off and my performance suffered for it. There may be some scheduling aspects which work in my favor the next several days; it remains to be seen.

How fast the start goes depends on just how badly my body reacts to the dose of pollen and hearing damage I sustained going to church today. Seriously, who brings bagpipes to an Easter service?

April Week 2

I've been reflecting on what's been missing from my quarterly goals based on an interesting discussion I had at the local rationalist meetup last weekend, but I haven't quite yet finished articulating it in a form fit for public consumption. Maybe this week? It's hard to say. Spring allergies have been hitting me hard and a foray into cooler weather didn't help any.

Consequently, I didn't feel really as accomplished as I would have liked this week. There we some administrative tasks, household errands which really shouldn't have been as much of an ordeal as they were, and the like. The big excitement was renewing my CPR certification on Monday and going to get a haircut on Tuesday.

In the coming week, I'll hopefully reach a decision on whether or not these weekly reviews and quarterly objectives are actually worthwhile. That's the only thing that seems worth mentioning at this point.

April Week 1

Am I doing quarterly objectives? I still haven't decided. Nevertheless, weekly reviews continue.

My Q1 review was how I started my week. Because it's also April, I published a post for Amazing Breakthrough Day on my real blog the same day. That did surprisingly well (by my standards) and makes me want to keep writing for more hits. I haven't felt that motivation in awhile.

The good news is that I came up with a good idea for a short post on Saturday. That day I went with my old Scout Troop to volunteer at a church soup kitchen—except we make sloppy joes, not soup. According to the recipe notes, this is the 15th consecutive year the Troop has done this. I was pretty tired when I got home but my renewed social calendar meant heading out again.

Despite all that, I managed to finish reading Spacecraft Propulsion by Charles D. Brown, which is one of the technical books on my formal reading list. I'll probably work some of the exercises next week, but I make no commitments. Brown is better about writing textbook problems than many authors, but this book primarily uses English units of all god-forsaken things so it remains to be seen whether my resolve will be sufficient. In either case, the next book on my list (Space Vehicle Design by Griffin and French) doesn't have exercises, so there isn't a clear conflict there.

Tomorrow night, I'll be getting re-certified for CPR, which is neat. In other re-learning news, I've got some programming ideas bouncing around my head, but my MATLAB subscription expired, so I need to choose another language. Right now I'm decided between C and vPython, so I'll hopefully get one or both of those set up this week.

There's also some internal affairs stuff I need to work on, like job applications and the like, but that's not particularly worth enumerating.

Winter 2019 Quarterly Review

In January, I laid out some objectives for the first quarter of 2019. The first quarter is now complete, so let's look at whether I completed those objectives.

My objectives for the first quarter were divided into four (4) focus areas. Of these, I did quite poorly in one, and acceptably but not impressively in the other three.

The first area was applying for jobs and graduate school. I completed my graduate school application, though this took longer than I had really expected. (The trip to Texas in mid-February rather disrupted the process.) Preparing for the GRE was a significant factor there, but that too has been put behind me. Since completing that process, I've resumed near-daily job applications, which I hope to keep up into the second quarter.

The second area was my self-directed study, which I continued but largely failed to accelerate. I worked through a number of technical papers that had be cluttering my desktop, which is a relief. I did not, however, finish reading Rocket Propulsion Elements as I had hoped; about 150 pages still await me. My general reading schedule has picked up again since finishing First Man, and in the last week I found library resources available to me that will considerably improve the situation (see the last weekly review for Q1).

The third area was cleaning and organization, and here I have precious little success to report. I put a little time into this back in January, but since then have done almost nothing to sort and catalog my various physical possessions. This is looking like less of a priority as the odds of attending grad school increase, but I would still rather have everything in its place.

The final area was writing, where again I did alright but unimpressively. I managed to publish at least one proper blog post each month so far (including April already) but went little beyond this. I've also tried to write a little fiction again—I managed to outline a plot that didn't strain my own suspension of disbelief, but only wrote a few pages of the text itself. This is a rather recent development, mind you, so I may very well pick the project back up again in the coming days.

High-level take-aways from this quarter are oddly similar to last quarter: I need to allocate more time to achieving my goals. This is more possible than before, but still somewhat challenging.

I had some success experimenting with time-blocking, but this was largely exhausted on GRE preparations, so I should try that again to associate it with something more emotionally rewarding. Planning my day in advance lets me think about what I actually need to achieve (assuming everything goes well).

A related issue, which I noted last time, is over-extension. My Q1 Objectives had a narrower focus than the original set six months ago, but even so I felt underspecified in what I was actually supposed to be doing. Now, I've dealt with some lesser matters that won't be recurring should I chose to continue this experiment, but the general point stands: chose which goals actually matter and pursue those exclusively.

The final issue I've noticed is that my time horizon is too broad for meaningful planning even over a three month period. I may opt to start pursuing month-by-month objectives, either in stead of or in addition to this quarterly system.

Q1 Progress Report: March Week 5

Last Q1 progress report! I'm planning to do a quarterly review on Monday, at which point I'll decide whether this experiment in self-documentation has actually been worth the trouble. Right now, I really can't say whether I'll decide to continue it or let this join the long list of productivity strategies I've abandoned over the years.

I am feeling like I'm making some progress this week. Mainly, this is because I finally made it up to the Linda Hall Library, which turns out to have an amazing collection of engineering books. This includes a number of aerospace books I had thought I would have to buy, but can in fact read for free. Between this and digging into the local library catalog a bit deeper, it turns out that most of my to-read list is already available to me.

In other news, I spent some time organizing my inbox and getting my job-application plan in better order. Linda Hall Library seems like a much better place to work than the public library, so I may be going there to work through a larger number of applications in a day. (I find the situation at home less amenable to extended focus.) We're also working on developing some new programming for the local rationalist group, which I'm looking forward to implementing.

My GRE scores also arrived this week, but I'm not really so much interested in how well I did as what KU Aerospace thinks of the matter, so I'm basically living with Schrodinger's Score until I get an answer from graduate admissions.

My focus this coming week is reading engineering books at Linda Hall and applying for more jobs. If I decide to continue with quarterly planning—or any other sort of time-delineated planning system—I'll be working on that as well.

March Links

Scott Alexander digs deep into wage stagnation and the great decoupling. Unsurprisingly, it's complicated.

Sarah C argues that GPT-2 results support the claim that humans not concentrating very hard aren't really intelligent, and discusses the implications for the future of education and debate.

Related: you can now ask the public distribution of GPT-2 questions via Tumblr.

80000 Hours clarifies what they should have said instead of introducing the ambiguous term "talent gap". A lot of discussion about earning to give and the effective altruism scene hinges on assumptions about what "talent gaps" actually are, and this goes a lot way towards reducing the confusion.

Kaj Sotala explains internal family systems using the analogy of a poorly-programmed robots. Evolution doesn't seem like a very good programmer, so the comparison seems quite plausible.

Crime appears to be going up in Canada. It's not clear why, nor is this a sudden new development; the rates bottomed out in 2014.

Speaking of 2014, here's an old article arguing that poor waste disposal systems are what actually killed President Harrison.

New Hampshire considered becoming the second state in the nation to use ranked choice voting, with the legislature tabling a bill that would have applied RCV to state's presidential primary. The bill's supporters in the legislature promise to continue pushing for electoral reform in the Granite State.

In a related story, the case for using ranked-choice voting in any replacement for the Electoral College.

A bipartisan group of Senators led by Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) are reintroducing the Nuclear Energy Leadership Act that died in committee last fall. Coupled with other energy bills, NELA could provide the necessary impetus to test, certify, and license the next-generation reactor designs necessary to make clean energy financial viable in the coming decades.

Q1 Progress Report: March Week 4

I took the GRE as planned on Monday. It wasn't exactly the experience I expected, but in many ways the testing environment was more conducive than expected. My preliminary quantitative score estimate was acceptable though not particularly impressive, so we'll see if KU is satisfied with my credentials.

To a certain extent, it feels like I have finally graduated. Dealing with the old house, taking the trip to Texas, applying for grad school—there's been something large hanging over my head at every waking moment since May 13, 2018. Now, finally, I have a largely free hand. This is a nice feeling, and I'll be taking advantage of it to scope out some better work spaces and participate in more social outings than I would have been able to attend six months ago.

Warm weather is helping with that, of course. It feels like spring in March, which is...not really the way it's been the last several years (to my memory, at least). On the Equinox itself, I met up with a few friends, and did some stargazing, which was a lot of fun and something I'd like to get into again as the weather improves.

Dad did have his procedure that morning; it seems to have gone okay, though he's still pretty tired day-over-day. He'll check in with the doctor this week, so hopefully we'll get to know whether it was a success.

Those seem to be the major activities this week. For the time being, the ball is in another court. While I wait for an answer, I'm getting back in the saddle on job applications, studies, and my writing projects. But there's nothing interesting to say about that at this early point.

Q1 Progress Report: March Week 3

This week was almost exclusively GRE preparation. I take the test tomorrow. On the practice exams, I've scored close to but not precisely at the level I need, so I'm a little nervous. I canceled plans for today so I would have time to go over more practice problems.

In the Verbal section, I'm doing far better than I need to, so I haven't really worried about that since the first practice run. Quantitative is the stickler. A lot of this math I haven't had to do in any rigorous form since high school, or possibly even earlier, so it's not really clear why this is an indicator of my ability to perform as an engineering graduate student. Probably cargo cult admissions if we're being totally honest with ourselves, but it seems to be the only game in town.

I don't really have a whole lot of plans for the rest of the week, besides a Spring Equinox party on Wednesday. My Dad is having a small-ish medical procedure done that day, so hopefully all goes well and I won't have to cancel. There aren't any a priori reasons to expect complications, but human bodies are an uncooperative mess atimes. We'll have to wait and see.

Job search was strong in the first half of the week but is currently taking a back seat to GRE prep. I'll be back on that sometime this coming week.

Q1 Progress Report: March Week 2

Not really a great deal to talk about this week, because I've been mostly focused on preparing for the GRE. I've also put some time into a few job applications and maintained my usual study routine, though both of those may slip in this final week. I'll probably have a lot more unstructured time to work within after finishing that last step on my grad school application package.

Daylight savings really messed with me today, though, so I didn't get too much done. I'm hoping to avoid too much disruption in the coming week, because I really would like to put in the effort. It's oddly nice having an external academic project to put effort into; I guess college really has reshaped the motivation pathways of my brain. In either case, grad school or engineering employment sounds like a nice alternative to feeling undirected.

Of course, if I have a bit more time on my hands, I can certainly come up with directions on my own. I've just been preoccupied with the application schedule since we sold the old house. Time-blocking has definitely helped with my productivity in the last fortnight, however, which is raising my confidence to undertake larger self-guided projects. Oddly enough, my time visiting relatives in Texas totally obliterated my procrastination habits, at least for a little while. I'm slipping back, but seeing my own desire to slack off disappear like that was hugely reassuring.

Now I just have to figure out how to replicate that on a smaller carbon footprint.

Q1 Progress Report: February Week 5/March Week 1

As intended, I finish my grad school application this week and scheduled my GRE. Since hitting "submit", I've also gotten back into the swing on regular job applications; momentum which I hope to continue as a prep for the test. I've been blocking out my time in half-hour increments this week, which is helpful insofar as it gives me a detailed routine to be following. It's not a productivity panacea, of course, nor does it make getting out of bed any easier on cold mornings like today.

I took Sunday off, though. It snowed today, though not too deeply. I was able to shovel our driveway in maybe half an hour, which took my Dad and I a good too hours to do when we had a heavier snow back in January. Hopefully the nasty winter weather is over (but I know it probably isn't).

Regardless, this coming week I need to study for the GRE and apply to more jobs. Based on the initial success of time-blocking, I'll be continuing that into the coming week. I've also got a bit more than usual on my social calendar and a blog post to finish up and post, so I'm probably going to need it.

February Links

The New York Times has an interesting (if poorly-implemented) widget to show the careers paths of every sitting Congressperson. Good luck getting it to show you yours, though.

Five-year cancer survival rates are up almost across the board.

The cognition case for giving kids more time to play (even if that comes at the expense of school).

What happens when you try to avoid using any of the major tech companies for a week? Answer: life gets really hard. This was an interesting experiment to read about, but as usual with tech journalists, the author draws the complete opposite conclusion about the economics of the situation.

Speaking of drawing conclusions: Libertarianism.org has a reading list of their favorite criticisms. None of these made my reading list right now, but might at some point down the road.

Commercial Crew schedule slips again, with the SpaceX uncrewed demonstration flight scheduled for 2 March and Boeing expected to launch no earlier than April. The SpaceX date appears to have held through the Flight Readiness Review, however, so this might actually happen in the next fortnight.

More recent downlinks from New Horizons show that 2014 MU₆₉ is not actually a snowman, but rather a pair of pancakes.

After 14 years of operation on the Red Planet, the Opportunity rover is pronounced dead after the final attempt to restore contact fails.

The European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope provides new relative velocity data on the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. Based on the latest measurements, astronomers have revised the expected collision time by 600 millions years, which gives us a little longer to procrastinate the problem.

A 2018 paper looks at evidence for and against what they call the Silurian Hypothesis, i.e. that humanity is not the first technological civilization on this planet. The authors look at what evidence our civilization is currently leaving behind, and dig through the geological record for similar signatures. Unsurprisingly, they find little in the way of conclusive evidence, but use the idea as a springboard for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

There's been a lot of buzz about computer-generated faces lately, so it shouldn't be surprising that there's now an online quiz for that. As it turns out, it's not very hard to spot the fake. Among other things, the computer doesn't have very coherent rules about symmetry or what a normal backdrop texture looks like.

Gwern, meanwhile, has been applying the same technique to anime faces. The results range from cosmic horrors to entirely plausible manga characters.

80,000 Hours has an article about how to avoid doing accidental harm when trying to solve hard social and technical problems. I think it extends beyond the effective altruist movement to problem-solving in general.

Related: GiveWell discusses charity failure stories.

Q1 Progress Report: February Week 4

As predicted, I did not get too much done while I was visiting relatives. This makes sense: I was focused on visiting with relatives rather than other projects. I did make some progress, most notably drafting a now-published book review while riding in the car. I did more than my necessary share of the driving, though, so the time available for that was relatively limited (moreso, when we consider how early the sun goes down this time of year).

I did get some used clothes from my grandfather, though, so that was nice. Having relatives with similar measurements pays off when they liquidate portions of their wardrobes.

This week, I'm going to try out explicit time-blocking to better regulate my activity through the day. I'm going to finish my grad school application come hell or high water (though I'm hoping we're done with the major inclement weather for the winter). In addition to that, I'm trying to get back into my regular routine of e.g. daily studying, which was naturally quite disrupted in the last week.

Q1 Progress Report: February Week 3

This Sunday night update comes to you on Sunday morning, because I'll be spending the bulk of today driving in a car to see relatives in another state. Which, incidentally, is why there's very little in the way of concrete goals for me to complete next week (though I will continue working away at the broader objectives I've discussed in previous weeks).

No dramatic progress to report this week, mostly more of the same. I'm coming to the conclusion that I need to adopt some more-detailed strategy to increase my output to desirable levels; there are ideas floating around, but I won't finalize that until after I get back. Over the years, many different strategies have caught my eye, but very few of them have had any lasting positive impact. Greater reflection beforehand is necessary to increase the likelihood that the latest shiny object is actually worth pursuing in any depth.

Q1 Progress Report: February Week 2

I've been doing a quite bit better on the sleep front, though a disruption on Wednesday meant I fell off the wagon a bit again. However, I've managed to maintain positive momentum long enough this last time around that the benefits were sufficiently apparent to motivate me towards recovery in the near-term (read: I'm already basically back on schedule).

One advantage is having more time to, like, read before bed, so I've read more pages in the last week than probably the rest of the year combined. I'll be finishing First Man tonight, so expect a review later this month.

I'll be travelling to visit relatives pretty soon, however, so my #1 priority is finishing my grad school application. I've been working on that this week, and should be able to wrap it up in the next few days. Then I can turn more of my attention back towards longer-term projects.

In the short term, however, I'm in the market for a haircut and new glasses frames. I probably won't get the latter before heading out of town, but I think my extended family would rather see me properly shorn. I know I would—thankfully the weather should be warm enough for a few days that I can afford the hit to my body's thermal insulation.

Q1 Progress Report: January Week 5/February Week 1

The weather was less than ideal for the majority of this week, and I had to go out in some of the worst of it. Specifically, I went to the optometrist, and found out that no, my memory was correct, I had this pair of glasses the entirety of my college experience. The frames are actually older than that; I had new lenses put in at one point. But apparently my eyes are more stable now that I've stopped growing; the new prescription I'll be getting isn't actually that different. I haven't picked out new frames yet—after so long, this feels like a dramatic decision, even though it needn't be anywhere on that level. It's an interesting psychological artifact of how the last few years have gone.

Looking forwards, I'm trying to maintain a positive mindset. I started working on my grad school application and will probably be finishing that up in the next week or so (though I need to take the GRE still and that will be a little further out). I'm not abandoning the job search, of course, and pushed out a quick application on Friday. Having a fall-back fully lined up would help with the search process, however, so I'm focusing on that for the time being.

I also spent some time this week working on a self-awareness and self-improvement....course, if you will, which I'm participating in with some other people from the local rationalist meetup group. We're sort of adapting the sequence that a Less Wronger put together with perspective from our technical backgrounds; right now, we're adapting the bug-list part of the program based on Failure Modes and Effects Analysis. Consequently, there's a lot of small life problems on my mind right now and I'm looking at options for fixing them (or will be, in the near future). I don't particularly want to discuss them as much on here, however, when I could be channeling that attention into the project.

We'll see how far that goes. In the shorter-term, I'm planning to continue working on my daily studies and personal research, probably going to the public library as the weather permits. It's going to be warmer for at least a couple of days, which seems like a good time to start building up the habit.

January Links

Ozy Brennan has some advice on writing irrational characters, which is an interesting position to take. This might not be interesting to everyone, but since I have trouble with writing things like "conflict", I found it an interesting read.

How much of the Internet—and specifically, the Internet economy—is fake? A surprising amount, it turns out, which has some concerning implications for a lot of conventional web business models.

Thought on sudden death, and what it means to see your childhood friends start dying. This turned out to be unexpectedly relatable: in the time since I saved this story, I learned that two of my elementary school classmates died of various causes.

Related: three perspectives for understanding global child mortality statistics.

Self-driving taxis will soon be sorta-not really available in Phoenix, Arizona.

Bill Gates's 2018 Year In Review. Discusses technology for education, medical research, and clean energy.

Scott Alexander asks what happened to 90s environmentalism. Through a series of case studies, the answer appears to be a combination of policy victories, alarmist predictions, and public apathy.

Speaking of the environment: during the government shutdown, the Libertarian Party organized volunteers to maintain trash disposal the the national parks. This is a slightly better media stunt than usual, and might fit in with a more effective electoral strategy.

Find out where your Congressional representatives fall on Internet/4th Amendment issues.

FiveThirtyEight on the history of approximating pi.

OurWorldInData discusses the demographic evidence that India's population growth is starting to decline. Projections indicate that the subcontinent's population will peak around 2060 at 1.7 billion, after which it may fall or level off—so we'll be waiting awhile to see if these models are correct.

The national college completion rate reached a whopping 57% in 2017; that is, slightly over half of students enrolling in any given year can be expected to earn a degree within six years. A lot of that comes from people going back to school during the Recession, but probably just racking up debt without improving their job prospects: new research suggests that the "skills gap" was an employer response to a glutted hiring market rather than a genuine problem.

On that note: SpaceX is laying off about ten percent of its workforce. It's unclear whether this is strictly a financial decision, a shift towards business operations model, or a combination of the two.

One of the Hubble Space Telescope's primary cameras experienced an anomaly earlier this month and was out of operation for a couple of weeks, but has since returned to normal status.

Starting in 2021, NASA will be conducting new experiments to grow food plants on the International Space Station. If this works out, it'll be an important step on the road to space colonization.

OSIRIS-REx enters orbit around Bennu, setting a new record for the smallest body orbited by a space probe and the closest approaches (without landing) to a celestial body.

Ever wonder why mercury is a liquid at room temperature? Turns out, we didn't have the answer until 2013, when scientists were finally able to confirm the long-standing hypothesis that relativistic effects in the electron cloud explain the element's low melting-point. The main challenge was performing so many quantum mechanical calculations, which modern computing finally allows.

Q1 Progress Report: January Week 4

It's been a month—a full 31 days—since we sold the old house. And nothing about my life feels any different.

Little of any major significance was accomplished this week.

Q1 Progress Report: January Week 3

Productivity is still on the slow side of the quasi-exponential upswing. Our internet connectivity problems lasted through end-of-day Tuesday—just long enough for me to come down with a cold again. I suspect it was another round of the nasty bug I had before Christmas, but it's not as though I have any lab tests to support that hypothesis.

Before that, though, I spent a bit more time at the public library, getting a little more acquainted with what they have to offer for independent researchers. I was able to download stuff to use later, which was valuable, but I also found simply the change in environment does help. I've seen this before, but to a lesser extent; it will be interesting to see if the effect holds for longer in a non-collegiate library.

The forecast called for another winter storm this weekend, so we spent some time preparing for that. Thankfully it turned out to be much less severe—only a dusting of snow at our house, not even enough to warrant shoveling the driveway. I had a number of different social events lined up for this weekend which might have had to have been cancelled if something more dramatic had happened, so I'm quite happy that it didn't. (Yes, I enjoyed writing that sentence.) My family may be investing in a snowblower soon, but that's a matter for another day.

We're also taking steps to deal with certain issues we had to neglect in the later stages of the move. For instance, a plumber is coming this week to deal with a broken toilet that's been laying neglected for some time. That, however, necessitated some organizational work in the bathroom and the adjacent room to allow the plumber space to work. Of course, that organization needed to be done at some point regardless; the current mess is emphatically not the final configuration for that space.

That said, I think I was over-extending myself earlier in how much cleaning time I was allocating per day—especially on days I had nominally set aside for other purposes. A long daily to-do list is not conducive to getting the handful of really important items done. I know this, yet somehow find myself forgetting. It's more useful to skip writing or cleaning for the day and actually finish a job application, then to have too many things hanging over my head when I already got a later start than I'd intended when setting up my list.

It's tempting to suggest making the to-do list in the morning, but evening!Nathaniel does not trust justWokeUp!Nathaniel to remember everything he has to do today. For the same basic reason, I keep a weekly list of the larger action-items.

This week, the non-recurring action items aren't all that exciting. I'd like to finish the thesis I've been reading, and finally start the ball rolling on my own graduate applications. I have a few job openings to apply to, as well, and plenty of routine studying to do.

I may also start working on another technical project I've been mulling over for a week or two now, but that will probably depend on how much time I have left over. Finishing my current blog post is the higher priority. The good news, however, is that putting in slightly more time has proven to yield better progress, so there's still a lot of capacity for simple "throw more time/effort/resources at it" type solutions to the things I'm trying to do. All it takes is a choice.