Q4 Progress Report: December Week 4

I caught Mom's cold.

She ended up getting antibiotics for it; I don't have nearly as bad a case of it (assuming that it is, in fact, the same cold), so I'm not planning to go to the doctor at this time. Mom is getting better, thankfully.

Hopefully I'll wake up feeling better tomorrow. This has really put a damper on Christmas preparations, and our expected closing on the house. That should take place later in the coming week, however, so hopefully next week's review will be a little more exciting.

Q4 Progress Report: December Week 3

It was a busy week. I'm tired.

I think we're done with the interior painting, which really just leaves a once-over on the floors left to do before we're in the clear to hand the property over. I'm not removing the painting supplies though until I get confirmation from my parents, though. Of course, I'll still need to keep the yard up, but that's a different sort of struggle.

That said, the last few days haven't felt much like a reprieve, because other factors naturally come into play. Most notably, I've been to three (3) social functions of various sizes in as many days. Mom is also fighting off a cold, so I've been looking to manage an even higher percentage of household tasks than usual.

Oh, and we put up the Christmas tree tonight. No decorations yet, but I'll get into that in the next few days.

I had intended to get a haircut on Friday, but just...didn't. On the bright side, it's a bit warmer, which is when I prefer to get them anyways. It is beginning to get annoying, though, so the incentive is definitely there.

My other major goal for the week is to push out a blog post on some elementary rocket engineering principles, with derivations. I'm having a lot of fun with my notes, so the incentives are there, too.

Ideas, Ideas Everywhere—And Not A Word To Write

Since NaNoWriMo ended, I've been having a lot more trouble writing than I'd expected. Maintaining that level of output was obviously extremely difficult, but I had figured that cutting back my daily allowance would make things easier.

No dice. I dropped to 1000 and then 500 words a day, and I'm still not really feeling any desire to keep pushing on that story. Part of the problem is that I'm running into a complex part of the plot which I'm not really sure how to execute, so writer's block is hitting pretty hard. That's...to be expected, I guess. Part of the reason for doing NaNoWriMo was gaining a bit more experience writing something besides the early introduction to a book.

The thing is, it's not like I'm out of ideas for stories. I just sort of...burnt out on that particular story.

If I had other active projects, that probably wouldn't be as much of a problem. But I haven't worked on anything recently—any fiction project, to be clear—that made it past the early planning stages. I've got scenes, characters, subplots running around in my mind, but nothing that really resembles a coherent story arc.

Of course, as I've remarked before elsewhere, I find it difficult to develop conventional plots because I just don't alieve in evil. Whenever I'm trying to set up a conflict, I find it extraordinarily difficult to come up with a reason that the characters couldn't solve the problem before the first act.

Maybe I should just double down on that. Surprise, the rest of this sci-fi thriller is actually a rom-com!

It's not like I have any reason to believe I'd be better at writing romance, but at least then I don't have to make excuses for having happy characters. Probably. I don't actually know what's standard in those sorts of books.

We'll see what happens. I've thrown some words on the page with no clue where they'd go, but got some feel for writing that atmosphere and mood in the process. I'm unlikely to salvage it; other ideas are more appealing. Maybe I'll play around with plots over the weekend and run with one of them next week.

Is it almost Christmas already?

Q4 Progress Report: December Week 2

Writing has slowed down a lot, though that's arguably due to other factors. For instance, we've tentatively accepted an offer on the house already, which led to some mid-week crunch that I hadn't previously been expected. If this goes through, the property turn-over won't happen for some time, but it's nice to have a date on the calendar for that.

My parents' participation in a Christmas market for church, on the other hand, was entirely expected but nevertheless took up a good deal of time. I also had the pleasure of doing a phone interview this week, but—though not entirely expected—wasn't an interruption to my overall routine.

This week is mostly going to be focused on continuing the turn-over prep, though I think my parents are in the Christmas spirit and want to decorate before some company is over on ... Wednesday? I can't keep their schedule straight. I'm a little skeptical that that will happen but we will just have to wait and see. A higher priority for me is a haircut—it's getting to be time again and I'd rather not have just had one during all the holiday going-outside-and-back-in-again. Complete opposite of a rest if you ask me (but of course you didn't).

There's also some administrative stuff on the horizon—changing over accounts that are still using my school email, making sure files are organized, and maybe working on some writing for the next month. I may take a break from my current NaNoWriMo draft and focus on some other fiction project, or perhaps doing a few end-of-year blog posts is in order. I'll probably decide tomorrow.

Oh, and happy Smallpox Eradication Day!

Q4 Progress Report: November Week 5/December Week 1

December is here, which means we're two-thirds of the way through the fourth quarter of 2018. Or, to put it another way, there's less than a month left in the year.

As previously mentioned, I completed NaNoWriMo last month. The book itself is a long way from finished, but I've got some momentum now. Over the coming weeks I'll be putting a lot fewer words on the page each day, but that's in part because I find the difficultly of the marginal word rises non-arithmetically past a few hundred. Two thousand words (per day) is considerably more than twice as hard as one thousand words. At least right now; that may change as I get a bit more practice.

I also managed to push out a proper blog post as well as my November links before midnight Friday. That was a little closer than I like it, but manageable.

Over at the other house, I've been retrieving the last stragglers from the garage and finishing up the paint touch-up. That's been going faster than expected, which is good because the house is officially on the market.

Since between these changes my free time is slightly increasing, I've been going to a few more social events and, as predicted, ramping up the job search. I'm also hoping to work on some writing projects—there's some posts I'd like to do on some engineering topics to better explain them to my non-aerospace friends and family. Provided I manage to avoid getting roped into too many holiday activities, keep an eye out for those.

NaNoWriMo Takeaways 2018

I won NaNoWriMo this year. I've never done that before.

Truth be told, I've never even come close. In 2013, I started planning a story but didn't commit any words to the page before turning my spare attention back to school work. In 2015, I got about about 13% of the way towards a reduced goal before losing focus. Since then, I've had to much on my plate to even naively think that I could complete.

Having now made the time commitment to write 50,000 words in the course of a month, I can say that I was right to wait. It's possible to accomplish a lot in the course of a month with a few hours every day, but during undergrad I certainly didn't have that many extra hours to spare. As a graduate, though, the equation in a little different.

My novel is nowhere near finished, but it's satisfying to have gotten so far into a fiction-writing project. As it turns out, my past attempts have been suffering, at least in part, from analysis-paralysis. My desire to plan out the story in intricate detail interferes with my ability to just sit down and put words on the page. Niven's 17th Law.

From here on out, my plan is to write about a thousand words per day, without worrying about it if I happen to fall behind one day. If I can keep that up, I'll be at 80,000 words by the end of the year. Whether the book will be done at that point is an entirely separate question. Once it is, I can start revising the draft in the direction of something publishable. I don't know if I'd ever want to publish this, but that's a matter for another day.

November Links

SpaceX is undergoing some reorganization to accelerate the timeline for Musk's satellite internet project.

Arguably related: Aerospace America on the perilous road to Mars.

French artist Thomas Appéré renders Ryugu in comparison to several major cities, which gives a nice sense of scale.

Scott Alexander has been particularly prolific this month and I'm wildly behind. The major items include updates on ketamine, SSRIs, marijuana and preschool, with a new Much More Than You Wanted To Know on the latter.

Long-time rationality blogger Kelsey Piper does a Vox Explainer on Nick Bostrom's vulnerable world hypothesis. It's a worrying read, and it's not clear what we can do about it. World government is often brought up in this situation, but it's not obvious that that would actually reduce long-term existential risk.

A new (?) rationality blog argues that rationality is not systematize winning and discusses why this formulation is so controversial in the first place.

Robin Hanson on funding prestige science.

Speaking of which: scientists finally isolate enough specimens of a long-elusive microorganism to sequence its DNA. It turns out that they represent an entirely new supra-kingdom of life.

Doing statistics on an illustration from Jurassic Park.

Senator Sasse (R-NE) discusses the impact that high-fidelity photo and video manipulation could have on the future of journalism and political trust.

What the end of World War I sounded like.

Our World In Data looks at income inequality in 83 countries and concludes that's there was no global trend between 1990 and 2015. Certain regions and many individual countries saw significant rises, but enough countries saw insignificant change or reduction to defy a clean narrative.

Data does not suggest that corporal punishment is good for child development, and countries than ban it tend to have less violent crime among youths. The researchers are careful to note that this doesn't necessarily prove anything: countries which ban spanking are probably different in other ways, as well.

The surprisingly sensible case for building a Congressional dorm. Representatives-elect who can't afford DC rent until their salaries take effect in January are making a lot of headlines, but there's also pragmatic reasons to consider such a project. It reduces the barrier-to-entry for relatively regular citizens to run for office, and bipartisan room assignments might improve the political climate on Capitol Hill.

In what may be a related story, Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-MA)—yes, that Joe Kennedy—wants House Democrats to focus on a positive-sum economic ideology, rather than the current left-right conflict.

Meanwhile, in Connecticut, the argument for reforming the party primary system gets stronger.

US crops are rotting in warehouses as farmers suddenly can't sell their crops to China. Grain silos are full and farm bankruptcies have doubled since 2014. It's almost like tariffs are bad for the little guy. New Zealand, on the other hand, abolished farm subsidies in the 1980s and now their agricultural industry is stronger than the rest of their economy.

Another pro-market solution: Congress might actually vote on a carbon tax. The proposed bill, which has bipartisan support, would remove a lot of existing emissions limits and substitute a flat fee per ton of CO₂ released. Because this would raise consumer prices, revenue from the tax would go into a citizens dividend for a net benefit to poorer Americans. Personally I'd prefer to spend the money on a broad-spectrum strategy to improve our energy economy, but creating a mini-UBI would certainly go a long way toward passing it.

Exciting news from the Supreme Court: civil asset forfeiture is probably going to be ruled a violation of the Eighth Amendment. This is the latest from the interesting coalition between Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch on criminal justice reform.

Q4 Progress Report: November Week 4

We are perilously close to being done with the house. Yesterday, we transported the remaining couple pieces of furniture and the majority of the remaining stuff in the garage, plus miscellaneous tools and the like. Dad and I also raked nearly all the leaves on the lawn, which was convenient ahead of the snowstorm we got today.

Since we're getting close, I'm planning to dial back up the job search this week with a new round of applications. Things have been a bit slow in the lead-up to Thanksgiving—having both parents around more does hell for productivity—but we're looking at a few weeks of relative normalcy before the Christmas season really kicks off. There's really not that much more touch-up work to do, so I should have plenty of time to focus on longer-term goals.

Speaking of personal large projects, NaNoWriMo is continuing well. I'm still on track, though 50,000 words is nowhere near the actual length of this draft. I'm not really sure if I'll go back and revise it when I'm done, but I am planning to continue at about 1000 words per day until it's done.

I'm planning to push out a proper blog post this week, in addition to the monthly links post over here.

The Third Thing

Almost a full year later, I think that I finally remembered the third thing from my followup post on accidental life outcome patterns. I'm not completely certain that this was the third thing I had in mind at the time, but definitely adds to a general perception of things going downhill all at once.

Specifically, my longtime barber had an accident sometime in the summer of 2016. This barber, Bud, had been cutting my hair since before I could process speech—since I could grow actual hair, in fact. He was at least in his 80s around the time of his motorcycle accident, and what his family described on the answering machine would be serious at any age. I'm still not sure if he recovered but he definitely couldn't continue cutting hair.

This is notable for me because a) yet another reminder of human frailty and b) I never asked Bud what the normal haircut he gave me was called. I haven't been truly satisfied with another barber since then. I don't really think "short" is a complicated request, yet I keep coming out of the barber shop looking the way I used to go into it. If I had a bit more time to burn, I would just go to different shops on a rotation until I tricked them into getting it short enough, but I don't, so I haven't.

Compared to the other things, this consequence for me personally is kind of trivial, so I'm not massively surprised that I forgot it. Also, it falls into a slightly different category: not something which had finally started going well, but an erstwhile constant that suddenly disappeared. Even so, it adds to a generalized perception that things suddenly fell apart in the late summer and autumn of 2016.

In reality, however, the conditions were all set for failure modes to occur; I just hadn't noticed and/or acknowledged them yet. Picking up on problematic trends before they become serious problems is a useful life skill, so I guess this combined ordeal will be a valuable experience in the end. Nevertheless, I can't shake the feeling that many—if not most—personal and family problems confronting the socio-economically well-off are artificial and could be avoided with a much smaller amount of foresight than we need in practice.

Oh well. Everyone has to start somewhere.

Q4 Progress Report: November Week 3

This week's update is late, but for good reason: we were working on the house tonight until close to the time that I'd usually be going to bed. However, I'm extremely pleased with the result. Aside from a single table and a few cleaning implements, there's nothing left inside the house proper. There are a number of items still in the garage, but those won't be a serious issue for showing the property. Allegedly, some realtors are coming to take a look this week.

Between that and a Thanksgiving party, I didn't have a great deal of time to write today, so I've managed to fall behind again, though I successfully caught up over the course of the last week and built up a small margin. Between that and the few hundred I did manage to get out, the situation is far less serious than before. My goal is to catch up tomorrow, but whether or not that happens is another story.

The only other big things that are coming to mind from the last week were some plumbing issues, but it appears that I successfully resolved those. However, poor drainage from those sinks has been a persistent problem, so I'm not ready declare total victory just yet. I'll be keeping that under observation as the week continues.