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.