Lots of blog-related changes with the new year. My hosting subscription with Bluehost was due for renewal. But I couldn’t stomach the non-promotional annual price + all the nickle-and-dime addons. So I looked into alternatives and discovered a much cheaper hosting set up. Saved 95% of my yearly costs. Migrating was kind of a pain, but I learned a lot about cloud and the infrastructure of the internet in the process (bit of an exaggeration…it was mostly just DNS stuff)....

Lee looked at him and the brown eyes under their rounded upper lids seemed to open and deepen until they weren’t foreign any more, but man’s eyes, warm with understanding. Lee chuckled. “It’s more than a convenience,” he said. “It’s even more than self-protection. Mostly we have to use it to be understood at all.” Samuel showed no sign of having observed any change. “I can understand the first two,” he said thoughtfully, “but the third escapes me....

I haven’t listened to Biden’s inauguration address yet, although I’ve heard good things. It got me thinking about other memorable addresses by presidents. I don’t know how heralded Washington’s Farewell Address is by the presidential-address-ranking-community, but the allusions in Hamilton have certainly hooked me into wanting to explore it. Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors....

Finding books worth the time is hard. There are a lot of books and not a lot of time. This recent book looked provocative. The book looks similar to The Mundanity of Excellence – a paper on the stratification of high-performers that I re-read almost once a year. So an entire book on it might be worth the time. Then I read one of the featured blurbs. “Geoff Colvin has written a fascinating study of great achievers from Mozart to Tiger Woods, and he has brilliantly highlighted the fact that great effort equals great success....

Perception and the Representative Design of Psychological Experiments I’ve been reading a bit of Egon Brunswick’s work lately. A psychologist from the 1940s-50s. Some really solid ideas about perception. This particular book touches upon a bunch of things I’ve been thinking about lately. Perception. Statistics. Communication. It hits it all. Here he is on perception. In view of all this, one is reminded of Thurstone’s remark that perception is based on insufficient evidence, or of William James’s saying that perception is of probable things....

To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter – Vladimir Bukovsky’s autobiography about his life in the Soviet Union. A little longer than I might otherwise have liked, but the nuggets of wisdom in his life’s story and the reality of what he went through made it worth it for me. His dealings with a government that values ideology above all else were particularly eye-opening. Here he is on the essence of the struggle in the Soviet Union....

Veracity is in the eye of the beholder: A lens model examination of consistency and deception A rather interesting study about perception and truth. Appears to add credibility to the idea that there’s inconsistency to how people evaluate truth – between the cues/criteria that people say they use, and what they actually use. This tracks pretty well with the rise in partisanship-ness of discourse today. A lens model showed that whilst perceptions of cues, such as consistency and amount of detail, influence veracity judgements, these perceptions (and overall veracity judgements) are mostly inaccurate....

“People don’t choose between things. They choose between descriptions of things."– Daniel Kahneman Something very helpful to keep in mind this season. Be overflowing in grace in the course of our inevitable disagreements. Be quick to listen. Slow to speak. Two artists can render differing impressions of a landscape. They may quibble about style or elements of emphasis, but neither mistakes their impression as the comparative which the other’s impression should be graded against....

Policies, Persons, and Paths to Ruin: Pondering the Implications of the 2020 Election – John Piper’s short post on the 2020 election and how he plans to vote. Agree wholeheartedly with his observations about what is being overrated/underrated by many Evangelical Christians in regards to politics. I’m of the opinion that a Christian’s witness to the world is better served by staying out of politics in most cases (a standard I admit I regularly fail to hold myself)....

“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” – Michaelangelo Computer vision is the field of making computers see, using nothing but algorithms and images from cameras to make sense of the world. One of the principle problems is that an image is a 2D representation of a 3D world. Pictures are flat....