Selma, protest tactics, and the false hope of moderation

I watched the Academy Awards (yes, the whole thing) with my church community group last night, and one of the most moving moments was when Common and John Legend performed the song Glory from Selma, right before they won the award for Best Original Song. As they pointed out in their acceptance speech, Selma is a timely movie, because its spirit exists today in movements from the US to France to Hong Kong.

I came across one of the best discussions of the movie on a website I normally peruse for its excellent sports analysis. Mark Harris of Grantland primarily responds to some of the criticism of the movie's portrayal of President Lyndon B. Johnson, but has many interesting things to say along the way. His defense of the genre of historical fiction as providing value beyond mere recitations of facts is stirring, but I want to focus on another point of his.

Soylent, ~60 meals in

Growing up, we occasionally would have tacos for dinner. We would carefully assemble each taco with a layer of meat, possibly some beans, then top it with cheese, lettuce and tomato. And then after one bite it would all fall apart on me so I'd end up eating taco salad. Eventually, I ended up just getting a bowl and making the taco salad from the beginning.

I asked my mom, “Why don't we go one step further? Why not just blend all of the ingredients into a smoothie? Then you could take it with you in the car to soccer practice and it wouldn't make as much of a mess? Plus, then maybe we could open up a drive-thru restaurant where other busy people could buy our taco paste!”

Attempting to become a regular blogger

Hello!

In case it isn't obvious, it's been over half a year since I posted anything here. That didn't exactly match my original vision for the blog, and I'm now attempting to revive it.

"But wait," you think, "is this just going to be one of those typical second-to-last blog posts promising a certain level of content, before the blog goes dormant forever? The internet is littered with those sorts of blogs!"

No, that's not how this is going to go. In fact, to prepare for this return, I already have six posts drafted (to varying levels of completion), with a handful of other ideas on the table after those are used up. I'm aiming to spend more of my idle time thinking and writing and less of it on mindless activities.

I estimate that I can sustainably post about once a week, so I'm going to plan to do so every Monday morning from here on out. Come back tomorrow to hear what I think about Soylent, the meal replacement I've been trying out for the last few months!

Sam

PS While I'm pretty excited and confident that this will happen, if any of you has experience regularly blogging like this (writing on the order of a thousand words a week for a personal blog), I'd appreciate hearing what helped you keep going!

Weird Al and Things I Fundamentally Enjoy

This past week, Weird Al came out with his 14th album of his ridiculously long career, Mandatory Fun. In doing so, he released eight music videos from the album in eight days through eight different video distribution services (e.g. Youtube, VEVO, Yahoo! Screen, Funny or Die, and several more I hadn't heard of.) He linked them all on his website, and they're pretty good, so check them out! My favorites are Word Crimes, Handy, and Mission Statement, but Tacky and Foil have also grown on me. Inactive doesn't have a music video, but it's also pretty good.

On a different note, I'm looking forward to my family visiting Boston in August. I've started to think about what we'd like to do with which of my friends, like who to go see a Red Sox game or eat dim sum with. It's a somewhat complicated problem to try to pair up all of the different combinations, since I want them to meet all my friends while doing fun Boston things together with them.

I also recently got back from a leadership retreat with the Graduate Christian Fellowship. As a small part of the retreat, I got plenty of feedback on how the large groups that I had organized had been. We had found the top 11 "Burning Questions" topics the fellowship was asking and found pastors and professors from a variety of backgrounds to cover those difficult issues.

How are these three things related?

Managing Tasks without Deadlines

This year, I've reached a subtle but important transition point in my academic life. Up until now, I've mainly been taking classes, which usually means that my work came in chunks due at regular intervals, whether they are readings, problem sets, or essays.

This meant that the main way I kept track of all of that was through calendars and to-do lists with deadlines. For instance, I used Google Calendar's tasks heavily, 

By contrast, from here on out (at least while I'm in grad school), my academic work consists primarily of open-ended tasks like "investigate this research question." Those sorts of tasks often don't easily admit a characterization into "done" and "not done" or have deadlines. So I needed a new system.

After trying out a couple different ideas, I've come across something I find I really like. Here's the idea: I plot all the various things I have to do on two axes. The first axis is how important or urgent that task is. The second axis is how enjoyable, fun or rewarding it is. Earlier, I posted a cruder version, but here's what that graph currently looks like:

The Apologetic Value of Modern Day Miracles

Why are some very smart people Christian, and some aren't? This is an important question, because we can't both be right. In this post, I share my new approach to rationalist Christian apologetics, and why I think there are still important questions that need to be answered here.

Dreaming

The last month or so has been pretty relaxing. First, I visited home for my sister's graduation and Mother's Day, and then I went to Caltech for Ditch Day and hung out there for another week after that. Since then, I've remained pretty relaxed, and allowed myself to sleep in quite a bit. As a result, I've started dreaming more.