Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Author: Nels Lindahl

  • 20250125

    Teams at both Apple and Samsung are working on non-invasive glucose monitors in watch form which is exciting. That will be a product that helps a lot of people. It will be a very useful application of technology to provide real time information to people. I think we are going to see a lot of wearable health technology going forward. People seem to have an appetite for it and the technology is now reaching a place where things are becoming possible that could be really interesting.

    Yesterday morning, I took the time to scroll all the way back to the start of my Google Keep feed this morning. Right now I am way back in my notes from 2013 to 2017. I’m going to share some of the more interesting ones. A lot of them just got archived in Google Keep. Very few were just deleted.

    • Writing like a memory jukebox that produces one story at a time
    • What is the utility of all the reminders of a certain day image or notes from agents?
    • Write a modern treatise on society based on expanding observation from a single person’s perspective to a wider social net
    • Where is all the innovation happening? Does that change over time?
    • Has social media fragmentation changed local business marketing?
    • A really weird setting of what should have been an asynchronous meeting because the person is not really ready to fully participate. Person is so busy that they can only engage to be critical and ask questions but are not ready for the second wave of questions or to provide any additional context. 
    • Organizing and sustaining decentralized communities of interest. AKA Community organizing revisited: The basics of organizing are pretty simple. Fundamentally this is a treatise on how to bring people together for a common purpose. A community is a diverse ecosystem that has a number of stakeholders and competing interests. Initially building an organizational map of the community takes time and access to key stakeholders. A shared purpose toward a common outcome is the basic building block of an organically built sustainable community. Organizing decentralized communities requires more than basic political methods. Political organizing and fundraising has become more targeted, but at the same time it has become less personal. A political contributor may make donations and read emails from a group without any personal relationship with the organization. Follow up sections: Mapping the networks, Triangulation strategy, Digital vs. Personal, Managing the message, Building frameworks, and Sustainability vs. Outcomes.
    • Civility’s commons: an uncommon civility
    • Do people really trust a user group to define the future of a product?
    • Questions about how faculty at colleges become a commodity. Does this demonstrate an oversupply of potential faculty or some other change?
    • Survey fatigue breaking the polling industry
    • Influencing the public mind: a study of multichannel influence and the public mind
    • Build an economic model using the original Google search algorithm
    • Revisit sentiment mining paper

    Some of the things that got stored in Google Keep are things that were not a part of my backlog system or really anything beyond a note taken at the time. The context is now gone and some of the notes are really short. Most of my notes are a few words and that is it in Google Keep. A few of them are longer like the ones above. If I went back to trying to write 3,000 words or more per day, then it would be a great prompt library to help use the current context to evaluate the prompt and produce content. Honestly, none of the bullets above caused the spark of innovation to get me to write about them in a meaningful way.

    I did listen to this podcast and enjoyed it:

  • 20250123

    Sometimes we look out to see what is ahead of us and try to understand what is coming or going to happen next. It’s that big set of questions that helps us position ourselves to strive forward toward something. Within that path forward some things seem to be better than others. We can probably tread water without striving forward for some time, but nothing remains that stationary. It just does not play out that way.  During the course of my deeper thoughts about the perfect possible path forward I started to think about adopting a strategy of total absorb. 

    To that end maybe just maybe it really is time to activate the total absorb mode and begin the process of being a true information sponge. Being a lifelong learner has to be about both the accumulation of knowledge and the ability to pick up new and complex things. We are moving toward a different scenario for code development and software building. Things are changing. One thing that seems not to be changing is this podcast I listened to about streaming sports content.

    Maybe it’s time to revisit where to jump back into academic journal writing. That is where it all circles back to as a jumping off point. It’s maybe time to think about that and what it would take to really begin anew within that space.

  • 20250122

    Nothing of note got written yesterday. The words and I just did not get along. It was a day where things just did not line up for the creation of some prose. Tonight we have both a Kansas Jayhawks game and an Avalanche game. That should be a recipe for a little bit of time to engage in some writing. Right now the MacBook Air is being protected by that Glitty Padauk themed case. It has increased the weight of the device, but I’m getting used to making the switch between my desk and the sofa. Part of the writing experience seems to happen toward the end of the day during the course of watching some live sports. I’m going to try to engage in a little bit of deep thinking. 

    My 60 minutes of treadmill time today did not go by very quickly. Even with the Jayhawks on the television the time just seemed to linger. I don’t have any links to share for today. It is a day of pure thought and reason without any media that needs to be shared. We have reached the point in the writing process where I have already staged the future weblog post. That means anything written from this point forward is going to have to be pasted in over the original post from Google Docs over into WordPress. I’m still getting constant articles in my Google News feed about the actual drama over at WordPress that has been occurring. That is a story that will at some point get dramatized into some sort of theatrical content.

  • 20250120

    Today I’m going to spend some time writing and cleaning up some files before the Colorado Avalanche game. Previously I spent some time wondering about what will happen with all the files being stored in cloud drives. Intellectually I know that most of these files will just end up getting abandoned and that over time we will just have this large amount of data that is just existing without anyone ever accessing it again. I would be curious to see what percentage of files saved to the cloud are written to disk and never touched again. I would be willing to guess the amount of photos, videos, and other randomly saved files that reach the cloud and are just stored without ever being used again is probably pretty large. Even with the cost of storage having dropped so much over the years the volume of storage occurring makes that glacier of never accessed files just mind blowing. 

    Today I did spend some time listening to this Machine Learning Street Talk video. I also downloaded the first paper referenced and saved it to my iCloud drive to read later on my iPad [1]. 

    This was a fantastic interview with Jürgen Schmidhuber.

    Footnotes:
    [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12580

  • Testing the Bluesky integration

    I was curious what the WordPress to Bluesky integration via Jetpack social looked like so I created this test post. I’m making the big switch from posting my treadmill and hockey content on Threads to sharing that content on Bluesky going forward. The WordPress integration seemed to be pretty easy to set up, but I wanted to see what the content actually looked like in action. The social preview indicates that the first couple of sentences will get posted within Bluesky with the link to the actual WordPress content.

    I took a quick screenshot of what the post ended up looking like over on Bluesky. The integration appears to work as advertised and was pretty easy to set up.

    It does not appear that updates made to the post after publishing have any impact within the Bluesky integration so that is good. It would be unfortunate if every update triggered another integration event.

  • 20250119

    Yesterday during the evening I listened to this Kirk Hammett interview for a second time from start to finish during an NFL playoff game. The NFL game was on mute. This interview is probably the most I have ever heard Kirk Hammett communicate with somebody. I have the Metallica albums from the start to the black album on vinyl record. They are sitting in my office and I always enjoy listening to them, but I had never really heard Kirk talk in a longer format about guitars and music. 

    I’m leaning into the process of sharing links and other things during the course of daily blogging. You have probably noticed that the podcast and video links that catch my interest are now being shared inline with the weblog. All I can say to that new change in content delivery is that you are of course welcome to enjoy all the epic content.

  • 20240118

    I’m totally ready to watch this afternoon’s Colorado Avalanche game today. The snowblower was deployed this morning and the driveway is clear. All my mischief is managed. I’m hoping this is going to be a great game with some Nathan MacKinnon goals. My favorite of all the goals.

    I made it about an hour into the WAN Show first thing this morning. Linus was super fired up at the start of the show. Two shots of espresso were not enough to be prepared for how deep the show was going to go right at the start. 

    I’m trying to figure out if I should carry the basement television upstairs to be able to watch the Kansas City Chiefs and the Colorado Avalanche games today at the same time in the same room on big televisions. It turns out that I did move the television from the basement into the living room to facilitate watching both games at the same time. Right now I’m watching the Colorado Avalanche and the pregame for the Chiefs. It should be a good afternoon of watching sports.

  • 20250117

    My streak of writing fantastic and entertaining weblog posts every day came to an end after more than 20 posts. Last night I watched some Colorado Avalanche hockey and then went to bed without any significant writing. That happens from time to time. Sometimes the words just do not flow. Today on the other hand I’m extra full of words and thoughts about things. To zero in on a few of those thoughts, I’m going to share that I spent some time today listening to a very interesting podcast. I’m going to embed a link to the post:

    It was a pretty interesting hour of conversation, but I think it shares an informative series of thoughts about how politics shifted and changed within Silicon Valley. People are going to be writing election retrospectives and postmortems for the next few decades, but I think the principle sentiment in this podcast interview will end up being a part of those narratives.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado

  • 20250115

    Tonight I’m considering watching some basketball. No hockey games are on today that I’m interested in watching. My interests are geared toward technology at the moment. I’m totally curious to see what happens with the new Alienware Area-51 computer desktops that will be released by Dell this year [1]. My current desktop computer works well enough, but this type of build does sound pretty awesome. I’ll be curious to see how the pricing works out and what actual users of the system have to say. This is not something where I’ll be buying one on day one of the hype cycle. I won’t be first in the pool on this product release. 

    After looking at the Kansas basketball schedule for the next month, I decided to pay for a month of YouTube TV [2]. That entire month of subscription based spending is just to gain access to ESPN or ESPN2 to watch the Kansas Jayhawks play basketball down the stretch. I’m not interested in having an ongoing linear cable subscription, but I really do like to watch the Jayhawks play basketball. Obviously one of those things was victorious over the other this month.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado

    Footnotes: 
    [1] https://dell.alienwarearena.com/the-return-of-area-51/
    [2] https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/team/schedule/_/id/2305

  • 20250114

    The Colorado Avalanche are about to play some hockey in Denver tonight. I’m sitting down and ready to watch the game. My new Glitty wood MacBook Air case arrived from Canada yesterday. Installation took about 30 seconds and things are working out well enough. I can tell that the MacBook Air is now heavier and the lid moves a little bit differently due to the additional weight. I like the color of the Padauk wood and I think it will end up being a good case. I plan on having this MacBook Air for a couple of years so I think having a protective case will end up being a good decision.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado