{"id":4130,"date":"2010-07-20T21:33:11","date_gmt":"2010-07-21T04:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=4130"},"modified":"2010-07-20T21:33:11","modified_gmt":"2010-07-21T04:33:11","slug":"things-ive-done-that-make-my-life-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2010\/07\/20\/things-ive-done-that-make-my-life-better\/","title":{"rendered":"Things I&#039;ve Done That Make My Life Better"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>These are all very selfish, so sue me.\u00a0 Readers who don&#8217;t like navel gazing should stop reading now and make sure not to gaze at their own navels.\u00a0 Things I&#8217;ve done recently that have improved my life (brought to you by the word &#8220;shrill&#8221;):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Reading and listening to less politics, and when reading politics not responding to what appears to me to be an amazing lack of logic and\/or grasp of the complexity of a situation.\u00a0 I mean I enjoy political views that I don&#8217;t agree with, but only if they aren&#8217;t built of a tower of logical fallacies. \u00a0 I&#8217;ve decided not to respond to or comment on a multitude of blogs, on all sides of the political spectrum, especially those that begin with the assumption that they are absolutely completely correct, and have the answers if only you&#8217;d just listen to their single solution.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not that I don&#8217;t care about politics, it&#8217;s just that I don&#8217;t think what you have to say adds that much.\u00a0 Sorry.<\/li>\n<li>Learned a lot about graph isomorphism.\u00a0 Did you know that one of the seminal contributors to understanding graph isomorphism algorithms, <a href=\"http:\/\/weisfeiler.com\/boris\/\">Boris Weisfeiler<\/a>, went missing in Chile during 1984 under nefarious circumstances?<\/li>\n<li>Tried to perform work that will be rejected.\u00a0 This one has succeeded(!), though I can&#8217;t say I feel absolutely good about it.\u00a0 But still it has made my life a bit better because I don&#8217;t feel guilty about not doing something a bit different.\u00a0 I really really really like my recent papers, but referees differ in that opinion.\u00a0 These referee&#8217;s have also taught me a lot about how I shouldn&#8217;t review papers, so I thank them very much!\u00a0 I&#8217;ve also realized that quantum computing is now old enough to have curmudgeon reviewers from within the field.\u00a0 Congrats, you&#8217;ve just made the field a lot less happy, Mr. Curmudgeon Reviewer, I hope you have a good time in your old age sitting in your air conditioned tenured position, counting your citations!<\/li>\n<li>Read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0307266303?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=thequantumpon-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0307266303\">Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: none !important;margin: 0px !important\" src=\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=thequantumpon-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=0307266303\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" \/>, which, while it gets a little iffy in it&#8217;s breathless report of the science of barefoot running at the end and shows its magazine article roots, is a fun read about extreme running.<\/li>\n<li>Not responded to blog comments in which the commenter remarks about how &#8220;X&#8221; has made the commenter so angry that they will &#8220;no longer be reading this blog.&#8221;\u00a0 Okay, Mr. Angry Commentor, thank you for sharing, but is the world a better place with your comment?\u00a0 Probably not.<\/li>\n<li>Said &#8220;no&#8221; to reviews.\u00a0 Yes, I am a bad citizen.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve only reviewed something like 5 times the number of papers I&#8217;ve submitted.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve decided I will only review papers that I feel I would be an excellent reviewer for the paper, not just a good one.\u00a0 And, yes I am much less inclined to review a paper if it comes from a publisher who seems to be part of a journal system that is highly dysfunctional.<\/li>\n<li>Taught myself Ruby.\u00a0 Not hard to do, and lots of fun.\u00a0 Next up is understanding Rails.\u00a0 Plus I got to read <a href=\"http:\/\/mislav.uniqpath.com\/poignant-guide\/\">Why&#8217;s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby<\/a>, which I highly recommend.<\/li>\n<li>Disconnected from news that isn&#8217;t really news.\u00a0 It&#8217;s addicting listening to what passes for news these days, but I&#8217;d rather spend that time learning something outside the redundant reporting that is nearly entirely predictable from past news articles. Podcast provide a vastly more interesting audio distraction.<\/li>\n<li>Expanded my ability to cook into new and exciting regimes.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve now got a killer spinach salad, a out-of-this-world pork tenderloin with carmelized pears recipe, as well as some pretty good pizza mastered.\u00a0 Next up: must learn how to produce outrageously good and spicy BBQ!<\/li>\n<li>Spent lots of time with Baby Bacon, trying to pen down the points about life that are important, thinking hard about what I want to do in the future, and what positive moves I can act on going forward.\u00a0 Yeah, I&#8217;m a touchy-feely\u00a0 hippie guy.\u00a0 So sue me \ud83d\ude42<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>These are all very selfish, so sue me.\u00a0 Readers who don&#8217;t like navel gazing should stop reading now and make sure not to gaze at their own navels.\u00a0 Things I&#8217;ve done recently that have improved my life (brought to you by the word &#8220;shrill&#8221;): Reading and listening to less politics, and when reading politics not &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2010\/07\/20\/things-ive-done-that-make-my-life-better\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Things I&#039;ve Done That Make My Life Better&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-self-meet-center-center-meet-self"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}