Half a Day in the Life of this Late Student

1. It is day 1115, 30.55% of the allocated decade.

Sleep target hit only 50%, but hormones have kicked in, so the day was off. Sleep quality was good : a full meal was eaten shortly before bed, and supplemented with fish oil and B12, and a quarter pill each of iron and zinc.

Breakfast soup was too hot, so a cold shower followed.

2. Work is all about learning how to talk to different entities. 

A.

I return to my desk. Before getting out of bed, socmed produced at least one item I couldn't reply to without getting to a desk, so it was motivation. An old friend wrote about AI and emotions - I am not enthusiastic about the industry, but I am very excited that people are beginning to take an interest in cognitive science, so I provide a bit of notation in case anyone finds it useful. In English.

B.

AI is very trendy these days, and I could do with more company on my physical exercises. So I set up a long-term event on Facebook, inviting people to walk and talk with me if they want to learn how to understand themselves as information systems. Priority 1 for the year, is physiology, across nutrition, and hyperthrophy.

C.

Priority 2 is Malaysian studies. I have ample readings from the Malay language in my feeds, but to practice Cantonese, I use Google to translate a short passage in Malay from my journals. The translation is expected to be faulty, but in order to train my aural memory, I play the Cantonese audio a few times. Machine translations will get better in the future. Meanwhile I will try to familiarise myself with pronunciation and idiomatic phrasing.

D.

Priority 3 is machine programming study. I am on the 8th day of migrating some software I wrote in JavaScript, in 2020. I am not a fan of the language, as it is sprawling, but just like English, it is lingua franca, which is why this study back then was chosen to be in this language. The prototype software is running on computers far away, and I need to learn how to explain it to my laptop ... there are several layers of difference, so it has taken a while. Along the way, I have cleaned and tidied the prototype a little. It is not robust enough to be developed further, but it has served as a useful exercise, and the learnings from this will be applied soon to a larger project of the same intention. By midday, this has been stabilised, and I am happy to take a break before figuring out what to work on next.

punctuation notes

Based on my typographical practice in both machine scripting, and human prose, here are some practical choices I adopt .

• - white space before and after semicolons ; like that, but not for commas : also for colons ... both semi-colons and colons tend to get lost in skimming.
• - sometimes you want to add space in between multiple hyphens also - - like that, which is more accented than a triple dash which takes the same space --- like that --- it doesn't skim as easily.
• - i finally figured out what to use square braces for. A lot of the writing I do is [ grossly technical ] so it helps to [ group entire concepts together ], which may be faster again for skimming, and look at my spacing before and after each brace also.
• - Curly brackets are best used as in math, for set notation { thing, thing, other thing, and thing }.
• - When one has too many braces in the chat, finally the diamond braces provide an accent of < last resort > . Also it helps to add a space between a closing bracket / brace and any subsequent comma or period, and also on both sides of each slash
• - finally, a most recent tic : replacing all commas, semicolons, hyphens, and ellipses with colons : simply as a matter of arbitrary structuring, which is less noisy. Once again : space before and after.

print media today

International book fair representation, and country-funded delegations. 

The nature of the print publications market, must be interesting in a time when it is not a necessary channel for information. 

Do you think it has shifted from a general conduit for all textual representation, to a hobbyist enclave for those who live within the fetish of printed media? 

How does representation in general, and separately market development as a subset of that ... reflect the population of writers? What percent of writers today work within the lane of printed books? 

I am curious.