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.
