I am in the beginning stages of a cold, before the onset of the worst congestion. Although I’m not looking forward to what’s to come, I find that the downward slope into an illness often comes with a somewhat enjoyable pattern of attention. I get drawn into things easily and can focus for long periods effortlessly. What a perfect time to hastily kick off a new project! Journaling damn near every morning since late 2011 has yielded, at most recent count, over 1.

I recently acquired a Baron Fig notebook, from my favorite local bookstore, mostly because I try to provide patronage for the things I love whenever I can. It was a beautiful notebook when I unwrapped it. Three weeks in, the fabric cover has picked up a couple of grease stains (my kitchen counter was not as clean as I thought) and the pages and cover are starting to warp a bit.

Imagine your decisions and the circumstances that ensue as a directed graph—the many possible worlds of your choices. Without care, the wrong choice may prune a whole range of more prudent options, such that only foolish choices remain. There is a special risk to decision making in groups. Perhaps you agree to a trade-off, taking on risk in favor of an immediate benefit preferred by someone else. With good intentions, all parties agree to how the risk will later be mitigated.

In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, the protagonist tells a story about a cascading comedy of errors, to which he comments: But in fact one lapse of judgment can quickly create a situation in which only foolish choices are possible. It is maddening to be constrained by historical contingency everywhere you turn, but it seems increasingly to be the standard condition of adulthood. I can’t restart anything from a clean room; systems in motion have to stay in motion.

This week, I learned that I can replace Facebook with an email account and the “Reply All” button. There’s a group of close friends I met in graduate school who are like family to my wife and I. Keeping in touch has gotten harder as we’ve followed our careers thousands of miles apart and had children. Between three families, we span three time zones and have six small children. Even Skype calls are logistically challenging, let alone air travel.

I was just flipping through my folder of draft posts and came across an unpublished list of my favorite books I read in 2017. I’ve been intending over the last few weeks of doing the same for 2018, so I’m taking the old draft as a wake-up call. Rather than let my good intentions lay fallow for another year, I’m choosing instead to lower my standards and share the list without much additional commentary:

Chris Bowler reflects on the relative importance of his habits versus projects: But truthfully, it doesn’t really matter if I never complete this project. On the other hand, doing an exercise 5 days per week to strengthen my core makes a big difference to my life. So too with running four times per week (and the first habit makes the second more doable). Helping my son with his reading makes a huge difference in his life.

Two chapters into James Clear’s Atomic Habits and I’m already feeling like this is the unified theory of self-improvement. Some fellow Beeminder users and I will be reading and discussing this book over the next couple of months, but I suspect that I’m going to have a hard time pacing myself! I already tend to be process-oriented rather than goal-oriented, but James Clear brings in another important element: what do your habits mean for your identity?

Reposted from the Beeminder Blog. Two weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, Ellen Gamerman investigated daily streak tracking among modern meditators. I was interviewed for the article, but I’m glad I wasn’t quoted now that I’ve seen her angle: Type-A people are descending on the ancient practice of meditation and tweaking the quest for inner peace to suit their hard-charging needs — racking up streaks and broadcasting their running tallies to the world.

“Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence” in Distill: By being forced to find a compact description of the training examples, the neural net learns an abstract, higher-level model of what a font is. That higher-level model makes it possible to generalize beyond the training examples already seen, to produce realistic-looking fonts. Shan Carter and Michael Nielsen describe a system where a neural network learns compact representation of the vectors along which attributes of font vary and has the capability to review new primitives to describe font design or to discover and make explicit new design principles.