Update for August 24, 2009

When I don’t have enough to collect into a proper blog post, I will be collecting various bits and pieces in an update post such as this.

• On the productivity front, I’ve found it easier to use Anxiety for short term next day tasks and Google Tasks for longer term tasks. Also, I’ve combined the Grand Project idea (long term projects such as writing a book) with Tim Ferris‘s idea of setting short term goals over a 2-3 month period. My project ideas list now breaks up projects into short term goals. I’ve added a reference to the list on my daily routines list too so that I look at it every day. I am essentially attempting to establish a workflow of documents which I go through on a daily basis by having documents reference each other. You can do this easily in Google Docs! Just highlight some text, click link, and choose the document from a drop down box instead of entering an url.
• Fellas, layering for casual, business casual, and formal is key to looking good without much effort. Let’s end the terrible reign of constantly casual in America!
• I’ll be putting up culinary tips I’ve collected from various places (and personal experience) either tonight or tomorrow morning. I’ve had some basic experience cooking for myself, but I intend to learn more and cook more in the near future.

And now, a request for some suggestions and thoughts:

• It’s tough to schedule a problem set homework assignment primarily because technical problems may not necessarily benefit from a continuous application of effort for hours on end. I’ve heard some tips on dealing with this, such as dividing and conquering the problems by level of difficulty and giving oneself an excess of time in the case that a problem is extraordinarily difficult to solve in relation to the others. How do you guys handle problem set homework assignments? Is there any particular secret or should we just expect to put in an unknown amount of time? Update: This article should help with this question.
• Science was borne out of philosophy, and philosophy for Socrates (by way of Plato) is a response to pure sophistry and rhetoric. That is to say, philosophy differs from sophistry as it tries to ascertain some truth beyond just the interplay of words and convincing enough arguments. Science in this respect is much like philosophy in that its proponents argue that it is concerned above all with some truth independent of rhetoric. Feyerabend, and perhaps a postmodernist or two, would argue otherwise, saying that science is a community activity whereby a scientist (with some sort of accreditation) tries to convince other scientists of some competing explanation of phenomena. I tend to side with Feyerabend and his ilk, but what does this mean for the veracity of scientific claims and why shouldn’t the general public just dismiss science as an endeavor as just a series of clever verbal jousts?

This post is way too long, in the future I will have tighten these up significantly.