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.