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.

Q1 Progress Report: January Week 2

Short post this week because of the winter storm that hit Kansas City. My house has power, but we lost cable last night, so I'm typing this with data on my phone. One of our acquaintances wasn't so luck; we lent them a sleeping bag and took over some warm food. If their power isn't back tomorrow they can visit us during the day (though I've been tracking KCP&L's progress online, and it's pretty steady).

This week I mainly focused on setting up a decent routine. Progress has been slow; I'm starting to spend time working at the public library to improve my environment. I expect to ramp that up next week. Unfortunately, another cold is making its way though the family, so I've been dealing with that amid the snow and my other responsibilities.

This coming week my goal is to continue establishing a productive routine and use that time to pursue my various goals. This will probably require more autonomous operation, but having spent the weekend largely cooped up with my family, I can't say that that's a bad thing.

Objectives for Q1

Heading into 2019, I am continuing my experiment of setting up quarterly goals. Whether I succeeded at my Q4 goals depends on your interpretation, but the results thus far are insufficient to draw a clear conclusion. So here we are.

This time, I'm grouping my objectives into four (4) focus areas. Arguably, my actual goals are more ambitious this time; however, some of these activities are self-reinforcing. Others fall under the same heading, but represent different ways of achieving that objective.

For instance, applying to jobs and graduate school do not produce mutually compatible outcomes, but that's okay, because they're alternate ways of moving into the next phase of my professional life. That's the first objective area.

The second objective area is self-directed studying. Here, I will continue reading textbooks and working exercises (I'm about 40% of the way through Rocket Propulsion Elements). I've also been reading some technical papers and would like to resume programming in other languages besides MATLAB. If I'm making good progress, I might try to work on some sort of technical project (programming or otherwise), but that's a secondary or even tertiary goal.

The third objective area is organization. This sorta ties in with the previous two, because a lot of my academic materials didn't come back from undergrad in the most orderly manner, and because if I move out, I'd like it to be a smoother transition. Even if not, cleaning up the house benefits the whole family and is long overdue.

The final objective area is writing. The main sub-objective is finishing my monthly blog posts in a more timely manner. This is achievable simply by allocating time regularly, as I found during NaNoWriMo. (This insight informs all of my objectives for the 1st Quarter.) Ideally, I'll begin posting more frequently than once or twice per month, but we'll just have to wait and see whether that happens.

I would also like to work on fictional projects again, though I've had some serious writer's block since the first week of December. If I allocate time to writing and revision, that may or may not clear up; I haven't really been in this situation before. There's also some ideas for long-form nonfiction stirring around in my head, but making a commitment would be premature at this time.

The same goes of any other major projects I could throw out, so I'll refrain from making unwarrented hypotheses. I would say that my objectives for Q1 look more like laying foundations and doing preparatory work rather than trying to achieve any particular goal. The results for particular goals were mixed in Q4. Perhaps this strategy will perform better.

Weekly reviews of my progress will be continuing each Sunday (unless something dramatic happens, in which case: no promises).