2018: Day 77 the one with some questions about how we take action
Word count 166,347 + 1,510 or 167,857 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

You may be in luck today. I’m in a certain type of mood. One of those moods that will either yield good things or extremely useful prose. My thoughts in the last 24 hours have been about what exactly sparks us to take action. So many different ways exist for us to take action. We rarely describe action in terms of a unit of value. I’m not talking about confusing money and action. This question purely is about how we elect to assign our times to the things that we care about. That is more or less a question of passion and managing the moment. The moment where we are locked in and focused on the present. In that moment where we are locking in and ready to go what part of it will be inspired by the spark of action. A lot of my time is watching for the spark of creativity to drive me to write some useful prose. This is a different take on that type of action. Writing for me is a primarily reflection action that is meant to help me focus on taking the next step forward.

Taking action to do something positive with my time is a different take on things. Maybe in any given day my capacity to take action includes 12 useful hours. If each of those hours represents one unit of action, then my day includes a possible 12 units of action. Most of those units are going to get consumed by work commitments throughout the week. Another major batch of them will get assigned to family activities. Throughout this year 2 of those units of action every day have been assigned to writing. My writing efforts can probably be summed up as a mad sprint to write some things down within the last 1-2 hours of a day. Trying to account for all those units of action involves a certain amount of effort. Most of the time it is not worth it to try to figure out where that time is going and for what reasons it is going where it ends up going. Maybe in this very moment I’m wondering what exactly it would take to compel me to take a couple units of action and contribute to something else. Some cause or issue that needs a lot more units of action to move forward.

That is pretty much where my thoughts have been percolating. I have been thinking about how we take action. My thoughts have not even ventured into the world of why we take action. Let’s take this article I read about a lost bicycle. That bicycle was the means of transportation the individual used to get to work. We as a society actively pay taxes to support law enforcement that hopefully would have prevented the loss of that bicycle, but otherwise are in the business of finding and returning stolen merchandise. Alternative, we have the capacity as a society to replace the bicycle. A lot of charity based initiatives exist to help connect people with donated bicycles. Either through government or non-governmental organizations this problem of the lost bicycle could be solved. That example really happened and is very solvable. Some of the other examples out there in the world can also be solved. A lot of problems are more complex and would require some type of agreement between people working together to solve. A subset of those problems are so complex that even a solid group of folks working together are not going to be able to solve the problem. That is the point at which I have been wondering about. Some of the other smaller downstream points deserve attention, but that is not where my mind is focused at the moment.

Topic 1: Writing a perpetual literature review

I’m seriously thinking about abandoning all of my current writing efforts and start some new artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, and neural network literature review bibliographies and papers. Even the basic parts of the literature review writing would be covered in detail. This blog format could be adapted to have 4 new pages associated with the previously enumerated topics to house living and frequently updated bibliographies. That could be a good method to go about writing about the process of putting together a high quality and comprehensive literature review. My take on the process is that a certain amount of foundation and exploratory literature exist. Somewhere between the foundation and the exploration a review of the relevant literature enhances an academic article.

That is about clearly showing the intellectual pedigree of how we got to this point and where we are going to move forward. That is the essence of why people used to write papers. To say hey everything we knew up until this point got us to the start point of this paper. That paper then opens the door to something new that can make a contribute to the academy. I would say putting those artifacts together and keeping them up to date would be a good use of my time. That will probably also set the foundation for a solid return to daily updates on YouTube. I strongly believe in helping people learn about and understand artificial intelligence. I think that making high quality videos may be the best way for me to do that beyond brining together rock solid bibliographies.

Topic 2: Canceling Amazon Services

Back in 2003 my journey with buying things from Amazon started. Today all of that came to an end. It was a decent run, but I realized that Amazon was basicly taxing me on purchases of goods and services. Given that I have no representation with Amazon that relationship had to end. Enough was enough. The types of things that I bought on Amazon were not really items that I would consider necessities. Waiting for shipping on everything is just disapointing anyway. The things that I actually need I will purchase locally or buy them from the seller online. That will be model going foward. Imagine that Amazon as a company was like a broaker or a realestate agaent on every purchase you make. They just take a slice and that is how they go about things. For the most part as a company Amazon employees do not produce anything that I need. They simply take my spending power and profit by my purchases. Enough is a enough. I’m done with that company.

Probably the hardest part of the whole equation was uninstalling Amazon Music on my phone. Listenign to music is a huge part of my day. Given that both Amazon and Google are in some kind of streaming war I cannot access Google play from my Alexa services. That pretty much means that the Amazon Echo I ordered back on November 18, 2014 is pretty much useless. I may sell it and my Amazon Echo dot on eBay or just put the in the basement to gather dust. For the most part they are now completely useless to me. Rigth now I’m listening to some music on my Google Play Music account. You can imagine that the Amazon Play Music app is already tryign to get me to subscribe to access 40 milion songs on-demand. Right now I’m wondering if I should load my digital music collection on my phone and use some type of player. I did a quick search of the Google Play story for “music player” and found a few options. The last time I used a music player other than Amazon Music, Google Play Music, or the Windows Media Player was probably Winamp. Now that thougth was a blast from the past. Unfortunatly it does not appear that Winamp is in the Google Play store.

I’m going to try to export the music that was important and purchased from Amazon Music here in a few minutes. Those tracks will need to get backed up the cloud and loaded to my phone. My Google Pixel 2 XL smartphoen can hold 128 gigabytes worth of content. That should allow me to have a rather large music library with me on the go. Maybe now would be a good time to go out and back some more bands on Kickstarter. That is a great way to support indepednet music and get some new music for my traveling. Listening to vinyl records on the go is not really an option. After downlaoding all of my music that will pretty much complete the breakup. I’ll probably miss being able to stream Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda television show via Amazon Prime streaming. Yeah —- that is probably the biggest thing that I will miss second only to being able to listen to music during the hour before I go to sleep. This might be enough of a reason to go back to Pandora and my Warren Zevon station that never plays any Zevon.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs