Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Month: October 2024

  • 20241013

    Watching the home opener at Ball Arena last night was troubling in terms of projecting how goaltending will impact the entire season. The Colorado Avalanche hockey team so far this year is playing fine offensively, but the goaltending is downright concerning to the point of being potentially troubling throughout the entire season. Outside of the poor goaltending performance from both goalies the overall vibe and crowd were what you would expect for a home opener in Denver, Colorado.

  • 20241012

    Things progressed yesterday to the point where I both finished up the last lingering draft post for the Lindahl Letter and recorded the podcast audio for it. That resulted in the publication of an actual Substack post for the first time since July. That is a good sign given that posts are supposed to arrive every Friday. I actually had some really good consistency on the publishing front and sustained a 3 year streak of never missing a deadline. That streak however eventually rolled up into a ball of failure and sat in the middle of the room to linger for some time. I’m already busy at work on my next research notes about quantum computing programming languages.

  • 20241011

    Earlier this week I had started to think about how to figure out when quantum computing will break the cryptographic patterns used in cryptocurrency. It might be time to write some code and share it on GitHub that would break the cryptographic keys used in wallets. That is one of things that has been starting to percolate around in my thoughts recently. I’m trying to figure out the best ways to spend some of my time each day. Intellectually, I know the best possible perfect path forward would be to begin again with the three-folder academic path. Put simply I would start to work on three different research papers for future publication storing the idea and ultimately the final paper in the folder. The goal being to finish papers and retire the folder to start a new one so that I always have three open writing projects geared exclusively toward writing academic papers for the express goal of publication. I know that is what I should do and that it would be easy enough to manage. I could even digitally manage the project using my Overleaf account to manage the manuscripts in LaTeX format.

    Knowing the right path to potentially take on a daily basis is not enough to actually make your feet start taking the right steps along that path. Sometimes you can see the future path and you just don’t elect to walk that way forward. Maybe my strong preference to work on research notes compared to complete academic papers is what had unfolded into where we are today. Shamefully the last updates I made in Overleaf were 10 months ago. That probably lines up pretty well with where my writing efforts slowed down. I can see a handful of papers in that projects folder that are in various states of repair, preparation, or a few that were completed.

    It looks like my Overleaf subscription runs until December 19th. I should probably take advantage of the current subscription and try to deeply consider what three paper topics are work considering and building up into final products.

  • 20241008

    Last night was a big television night for Kansas City. Both the Royals baseball team and the Chiefs football team played big Monday night games. The Royals team played in the ALDS playoff round against the New York Yankees for MLB and the Chiefs team in a matchup against the New Orleans Saints. We were actually able to watch both games at the same time on the YouTube TV using split screen. It was a great night for sports and both teams were victorious.

  • 20241007

    Today my office is torn up as part of the new window delivery and installation process. By torn up I mean that my standing desk is pushed back toward the far wall to allow access to the windows. That means instead of starting my day at my desk I’m sitting at the kitchen table. This does mean that I’m closer to my espresso shots from the Nespresso machine. Right now, I’m wondering if I should just eat my Huel breakfast shake now or wait a little bit. Instead of wasting decision making on that sort of thing I should just go with it and eat breakfast a little bit early today. My writing process stalled out this morning right here at this point. I’m going to take a moment and try to refocus on writing a couple more paragraphs of content.

    My big plan for today is to watch the Frank Zappa documentary Zappa (2020) on Blu-ray. This week should be a week of relaxation and focusing on specific tasks. It’s a big week of planned vacation. Sometimes taking a little bit of time off really helps. I should probably take a bit of that time today to focus in on reworking my writing trajectory and five-year writing plan documents [1][2]. Both of those are shared on the weblog, but they need to be revised and reviewed. Overall, my rate of productivity has dropped a lot over the last 6 months. I need to refocus both my writing trajectory and five-year writing plan to be more realistic in terms of output. Back in 2022 my writing plan was put in place, and it runs into 2026. Now is probably a good time to consider my conformance to the writing plan and to consider what would be next.

    Footnotes:
    [1] https://www.nelslindahl.com/research-trajectory/  
    [2] https://www.nelslindahl.com/my-5-year-writing-plan/

  • 20241005

    It’s time for another session of writing about writing in an effort to continue generating prose. That topic is pretty consistently covered here. Really the overall writing plan is to keep writing during any given writing session to move beyond that part of the coverage and shift into other stream of consciousness based topics. Part of that effort is about just going where my thoughts take me instead of dialing in to coverage of a topic from the backlog. It’s reasonable to assume that just skipping the base writing projects and focusing all my efforts on backlog items only would be more productive. Sadly that would not be the case as sometimes the warmup writing is necessary. At the start of the day I’m not really able to just jump in and be absolutely productive. Maybe if I had jumped in and worked on things later in the day or toward the end of the day that type of backlog focused writing would be more possible.

    Taking a moment to zoom out what I’m really trying to explain is that stream of consciousness based writing has a lot of merit to it as a form of creative expression. Just relaxing your mind and going in whatever direction happens to pick up movement can lean to all sorts of interesting writing projects. It’s also in some ways about learning to think out loud and just go with where that process takes you as a journey in and of itself. Ideally that leads me to some type of essay development or consideration of complex ideas, but a lot of the time it just produces an ongoing narrative about the very basics of daily writing. Its mundane and repetitive. At this point, I probably have well over a million words just about my feelings and thoughts about writing for the sake of writing. I’m not trying to get somebody to read that by publishing it out as a manuscript or anything. I’m aware that it was created and not particularly worried about that part of the process.

    Right now, during the writing process for example, I could switch over and work on some type of project from the backlog. This would be the ideal time to make that switch. That switch might be the smart move at this point given that no real topic has grabbed my attention. It’s that spart of innovation or creativity that drives the best writing. At times, that thing that makes the best things just does not show up to the party and you have to move along with the business of writing instead of enjoying the fruits of being generally creative. I’m going to take my own advice at this point and make a switch to working on some other projects during this fine Saturday morning. This week should be a week of producing fine quality content. We will see if that happens, but it will take some time to know what really happens.

    It turns out that I’m back here writing again. Some time has passed. I was thinking about the process of writing without making decisions. Part of that is just being in the flow of the writing process. It’s about creating and not getting overly focused on decision points along the way. Having to make decisions within the writing process over and over again will just slow things down and ultimately make the writing process slower and may just break any flow to the writing project.