Summary of week
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I can’t really pin down my goals.
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I’m not reading in my off time.
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I think more productive self-talk, that I like this or can do this is important.
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Need a pressure to produce written material like blog posts. Going to try and do one for Ireland.
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In some sense, I know what I want to do, what I want to learn, I just don’t have a way set up to get there.
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I’ve found that I say I’ll do a lot of positive psychology stuff, but I never do it.
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It’s important to apply discipline to those things I don’t feel ‘deserve’ it, like self care or positive self-talk.
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I already have some goals, they’re just not necessarily my favourite, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t prioritise them. Stop beating yourself up Conor.
Goals for week
- Write disseration.
- Prepare for interview.
- Spend some time on Irish history if I can.
- Get in some solid gym sessions.
- Write every day. If nothing immediately pops to mind to write about, try and dig into the memory of some problem or thing you can’t recall immediately.
What is the premise of Franks’s ‘commonon patterns of nature’?
Frank takes this viewpoint that what probability distributions tell us about nature are related to information not to anything physical about nature. That when some process (made of subprocesses) converges to some distribution, this distribution says something about the constraints on complete randomness in that process. This is where you get the overlap with information theory. You can use the concept of Shannon’s entropy to say when a process is random.
In each problem, the ultimate pattern arises from the particular information preserved in the face of the combined fluctuations in aggregates that decay all nonpreserved aspects of pattern towards maximum entropy or maximum randomness. My novel contribution is to apply this framework of entropy and information in a very simple and consistent way across the full range of common patterns in nature.
This viewpoint that we’re trying to extract information from nature is interesting.