Apart from that I'm on the thesis. I'm not where I want to be with it really. I got the methodology done which Wes gave very positive feedback on. I'm currently writing up Augury. I want to use some projects I've done and will do as lynch pins of certain sets of ideas. Augury is a lot about the metaphorical languages around inscrutable technologies like machine learning so I'm using it as a kind of vortex for that. The text in that 'chapter' is currently at about 9000 words and I want to bring it down to about 4000 but there's still so much to say. When do you stop? I try and read one thing everyday, a chapter, an essay a paper and that just adds to all the things I want to say.
Anyway, working on that will be the weekend having finished off the chapter with Kristina on Friday.
I've been cycling loads more, taking the opportunity of good weather and quiet roads to get my muscle memory back. Waking up at about six, doing some calisthenics and then going out for about two hours.
Thing on the Internet
- Matt Webb has been really active on Interconnected again. That blog is evergreen good with his musings and interesting stuff. It's been going FOREVER, I've read it since I was a student. He gave it a go at a redesign - always a tricky proposition. There's a sign-up version too.
- Strelka are hosting a seminar on Friday evening that I'll be popping along too because why not, those folks are weird and really intellectual.
- RKG are doing another pub quiz tomorrow evening.
- Twitter still, regrettably, exists in a child-like state and is full of opinions in both pithy and threaded form.
Everyone's doing loads of things now (like livestreams, festivals, initiatives and events) and I was reflecting on this this morning next to the problem of taking our entire university online over the last three weeks. That kind of freneticism is exhausting, we'll run out of generosity and then things will get ugly. I'm writing from a position of enormous privilege but is the drive to ramp up activity with this crisis the same logic as that of capitalist exploitation? I don't know. I just worry that yeah, we burn out on generosity and then things get really ugly. I'm going to revisit the salvage stuff more, it makes more sense to me as a crisis response.
Channel Recommendation
Oh I have loads lined up. YouTube is a goldmine right now. I'm going to re-recommend Numberphile again. Which is just a great maths channel. I now know why adding up all the possible whole numbers gives you -1/12