2019 H1 Retrospective

July 01, 2019

Reading time ~7 minutes

Reading and Minor Life Updates, H1 2019

Preface

We come again to an update on what I’ve been reading and doing. I never got around to actually doing a year in review after my last post, so I’ll try to summarize here, first.

In many ways, I feel like I’ve very on track with my life. I can’t perhaps say ‘I am who I want to become’, because that’s an infinitely ambitious state. However, what I can say is that ‘I feel like I’m within a margin of error of appropriate trajectory against my goals’--although I certainly wish I was perhaps a few billion dollars richer.

So, as these things go, I don’t have to put quite as much exertion into bringing myself up to that goal. As such, the theme in my life these days is more about community--building friendships, encouraging virtue in myself and those around me, creating the foundation for an intergenerational environment that will lead to happy families and values passed down genetically and memetically.

In action, this means spending more effort trying to help my friends locate themselves out near me. If they are located near me, helping them get better and higher paying jobs so they feel comfortable establishing deep roots. For the (many) that want families, helping them be comfortable and pursue it, fiscally and emotionally. That’s not to say that we haven’t had our own major improvements this year, but merely that I don’t feel like I have to ‘build a framework’ as much anymore.

Minor Benchmarks

  • Sami has started at Microsoft--I’m very happy for her, and I think the team she’s joined is great.
  • My work at Microsoft continues to increase in scope
  • I am now deadlifting 525 again, with a 475x5 PR. Squatting 440, with a 425x3 PR. Benching 305, with a 390x3 PR. Sami is deadlifting 300, squatting 215, and benching 130.
  • I’ve started doing cardio (gasp). I’m not satisfied with the health of my heart. Running and other cardio will never be ‘fun’ for me, but my goal is to get to the point I can consistently churn out 3 miles in 20 minutes on the treadmill, and then just maintain there.
  • I’ve started shooting semi-regularly, and am working to help friends into that hobby get to the range more often as well.
  • I shaved and changed my haircut! I finally have almost entirely clothes that fit me well, something that’s been a challenge since I started lifting.

My big goal for the second half of the year is to be able to bring up my technical reading and skill development again, something I’ve had a hard time balancing against everything else.

Reading

To recap from my January post--

In April, after a number of years of putting it off, I finally started reading the Great Books of the Western World.

This is a 35,000 page, 54~ volume project (I may skip Freud). To really understand it and the motivations behind it, I suggest reading the essay ‘The Great Conversation’, written by one of the people who led the project, Robert M. Hutchins (President and Chancellor of University of Chicago). I’ve wanted for a while to tackle this--it’s a long project.

In 2018, I managed to finish up through Week 28 (Year 1) out of my 38 weeks since I started. This means I took about 35% longer than I should have, so finishing the entire curriculum (at ~5000 pages a year, 35000 pages over 7 years) would take me about 9.5 years instead. I’d like to get that 35% margin down to ~20% or so in the next 52 weeks, or read 43-45 weeks worth with only 7-9 ‘slack’ weeks.

Well, I left off with ‘Year 1, Week 27’ when I wrote my post at the start of the year. Where am I now? Well, practice certainly seems to have helped--I am finishing up Year 2 Week 1, or Week 53 overall, meaning that I have done 26 weeks of reading in 26 weeks!

This project has paid off tremendously. As I may have shared in the past, I don’t think that my broad views have changed significantly, but how they manifest, the edge cases, the manifestations of those views...I feel much more articulate in my ability to express them.

There is one repeated note--in addition to my inability to deal with described geography (e.g. in military campaign) in text, I am utterly unable to follow long textual descriptions of laboratory setups and experiments. It vexes me, but in the various long works about (off the top of mind) candles (Faraday), magnets (Gilbert), or hearts (Harvey)...I simply begin skimming once they get to heavily textual description of instrumental setup. I’d love to be able to accelerate my pace of reading, but I think that time will go to technical reading or practice instead.

High Points

Many people may not want to go through my entire list--especially since I don’t feel like breaking out WHY I’ve highlighted each book below. So here’s a ‘top reads’ list--in some cases a specific book, in others a broad recommendation (generally when I’ve read a number of essays from the same person).

Classical/Ancient

  • Plutarch
  • Hippocrates
  • Homer
  • Herodotus
  • Epicurus
  • Aristotle’s Politics

Pre-Modern

  • Locke
  • Federalist Papers
  • Montaigne
  • Shakespeare
  • Melville
  • Hume
  • Burke

‘Modern’

  • James ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’ and ‘Energies * of Man’
  • Adams ‘America in 1800’
  • Dewey ‘How We Think’
  • Poincare ‘On Mathematical Creation’
  • Clausewitz

Without further ado, the reading list

Since 1/1/2019

  1. The Sand Reckoner by Archimedes
  2. The Histories of Herodotus, Book IX (all previous books in previous update)
  3. The Federalist Papers, #44-End (all previous papers in previous update)
  4. How We Think by John Dewey
  5. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson
  6. Resolutions when I Come to Be Old by Jonathan Swift
  7. Plato’s Republic, Book II-End (Book 1 in previous update)
  8. The Sunless Sea by Rachel Carson
  9. Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) by Herman Melville
  10. Meditation on the Divine Will, by Abraham Lincoln
  11. A Laboratory of the Open Fields, by Jean-Henry Fabre
  12. The Man of Destiny by George Bernard Shaw
  13. A Meditation upon a Broomstick by Jonathan Swift
  14. The Starry Messenger by Galileo Galilei
  15. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  16. Themistocles by Plutarch
  17. Mathematics in Life and Thought by Andrew Forsyth
  18. Of Democritus and Heraclitus by Montaigne
  19. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
  20. The Iliad of Homer
  21. Of Bashfulness by Plutarch
  22. The Running Down of the Universe by Sir Arthur Eddington
  23. Of Youth and Age by Francis Bacon
  24. Mathematical Creation by Henri Poincare
  25. Of Experience by Michel de Montaigne
  26. On a Piece of Chalk by Thomas H Huxley
  27. A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
  28. Characters by Jean de la Bruyere (I.24, V.43, VI.18, VI.83, X.11)
  29. On Mathematical Method by Alfred N. Whitehead
  30. The Sentiment of Rationality by William James
  31. Camillus by Plutarch
  32. Second Treatise on Civil Government by John Locke
  33. Beginnings and Endings by Sir James Jeans
  34. The Philosophy of Common Sense by Voltaire
  35. On Education by Arthur Schopenhauer
  36. The Chemical History of a Candle by Michael Faraday
  37. The Way Things Are by Lucretius
  38. On War by Karl von Clausewitz (Ch 1)
  39. Address at Cooper Institute by Abraham Lincoln
  40. White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  41. The Character of Socrates by Xenophon
  42. On Ancient Medicine by Hippocrates
  43. The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill
  44. A Plea for Captain John Brown by Henry David Thoreau
  45. Letter to Herodotus by Epicurus
  46. An Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals by William Harvey
  47. The Lifted Veil by George Eliot
  48. Pericles by Plutarch
  49. A Letter Concerning Toleration by John Locke
  50. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
  51. Fabius by Plutarch
  52. The Study of Mathematics by Bertrand Russell
  53. Protagoras by Plato
  54. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (through Chapter 132--I will finish this next week)
  55. Fabius and Pericles Compared by Plutarch
  56. The Energies of Men by William James
  57. On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies by William Gilbert
  58. Thomas Aquinas by Henry Adams
  59. Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol by Edmund Burke
  60. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
  61. The Politics by Aristotle
  62. The Power Within Us by Haniel Long
  63. Farewell Address by George Washington
  64. First Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln
  65. The Virginia Constitution by Thomas Jefferson
  66. Geological Evolution by Sir Charles Lyell
  67. Of Cannibals by Michel de Montaigne
  68. The United States in 1800 by Henry Adams
  69. Rules for the Direction of the Mind by Rene Descartes
  70. Sanity of True Genius by Charles Lamb
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