Check-In: 2015-08-27 (Friday) - 2015-08-29 (Sunday)

New format! The new categories are based on Dean Ornish's brilliant talk at Exponential Medicine in 2014. This is a talk everyone should listen to. For some introductory mindfulness (with data- and science-based support behind it), check out this presentation Dr. Ron Siegel gave to Google.

I'm bringing back the pass/win/rest scale, just so that I can target specific things to improve. But I will be using "IMPROVE" to indicate an area where I would like things to be better, rather than the more judgement-based "FAIL".

I'll roll with this for a while and see how it goes.

Diet: PASS (reasonable amount of fruit and vegetables, some added sugar but relatively mild doses)
Exercise: WIN! (loads of walking averaging 20k steps)
Sleep: IMPROVE (late nights--it is good I am learning at lot and really engaged, I need more sleep)
Mindfulness: WIN! (using mindfulness to work though stress, and it is working excellently)
Love and Gratitude: WIN! (spent weekend with friends and friends of friends, looking forward to family visit in early September)

This weekend Mark and Karen are visiting from Victoria, and I went to a barbeque with them in addition to the usual Sunday noodles. I also saw some former co-workers on Friday, walked around for a bit with Andrew, and saw Jim and two of his brothers today.

My main goal right now is to get some sleep. No more stimulating internet videos late at night. Save them for the morning.

The World As I Understand It (Draft)

This is just a draft. I had a busy day to day and I have a busy weekend coming up, so it's going to be hard for me to get a Thoughts or News post out this week unless I post something half-finished.

The message below contains a lot of mad science in it. Some of these predictions may be overly optimistic or over-hyped. I will try to get it edited for sanity soon.

But most of the thoughts below are basically factual, with the ethos coming from Wall Street leaders, doctors, scientists, and mainstream media personalities. Some of the information came from BBC News and a lot of it came from Singularity University, an organization supported by places like Google and CNBC.

Anyway, hopefully these rantings will suffice for a few days until I can edit them.

Thanks. :)

---

The World As I Understand It

• Energy Crisis: The power is running out, and the fuels we are using are killing us.
• Solar
• The energy generated from solar panels is doubling every two years.
• We're only about nine doublings away from complete replacement of fossil fuels through solar.
• Nuclear
• A Canadian company called Terrestrial Energy is only a few years away from producing nuclear reactors which will burn nuclear waste.
• These reactors are safe. No more Fukushimas.
• These reactors burn nuclear waste as fuel. No more 250,000-year waste storage.
• They have a business model so good that they are 100% funded by private investment. No government money is involved in this. They plan to make money off of these things, which means they expect to be commercially viable.
• Information
• Big data gets bigger at a faster rate every day.
• AI is getting smarter at the same rate.
• Robotics is getting cheaper and smarter exponentially as well.
• Finance is an information technology. The ability to bring capital together is improving exponentially.
• Industry is also improving at this rate, from robot-operated assembly lines to the "maker revolution" inspired by 3D printers, Arduinos, and similar technologies.
• Faster and faster, we will solve the problem of how to do everything faster.
• Labour
• Self-driving trucks are now replacing mine workers.
• Self-driving trucks will soon be replacing truck drivers.
• Self-driving cars will soon be replacing taxi and Uber drivers.
• Robots are now replacing factory workers, tens and hundreds of thousands of people at a time. That's happening today, not in the future.
• Digital writers are beginning to replace journalists in some fields.
• Digital assistants will soon be doing administrative work--reducing our need for administrative jobs.
• The faster we replace human labour with robotic labour, the better our industry gets, and so the faster we will be able to build robots to replace us.
• Health
• Exponential improvements in health care will allow us to live longer and longer.
• How long? Some estimates say 120 years.
• What does medical science look like in 50 years? 100 years? How much bigger can that 120 year estimate get by the time a baby born today reaches 120?
• Pattern-recognition engines are now out-performing highly trained medical specialists in some fields. They are rapidly discovering new trends in old data, and the data available to them is rapidly growing.
• The cost of sequencing a human genome is getting cheaper at a rate that is significantly faster than Moore's Law. In a few years, genome-sequencing could be part of routine medical check-ups. Babies could be getting sequenced at birth, and before birth.
• Democracy
• (These are my own thoughts, and are not supported by academics or industry leaders as much as the other categories are.)
• Freedom of information is critical to democracy, and that freedom could be lost without constant vigilance. We must be very careful not to let our information be withheld or corrupted by domineering people and organizations.
• Privacy is equally important--and it is vanishing overnight, without public discussion. Recently, a man lost his basketball team based on racist remarks he made in a private conversation with his girlfriend. Racism is bad, yes, but are we sure we want a world where everything everyone says can be held against them forever, with dire economic and social consequences?
• We will need to find solutions where freedom of information and privacy clash.
• Economy
• In a world of ever-increasing abundance, where human labour is increasingly less necessary for wealth, what work will humans do?
• One promising solution is the idea of a basic wage
• Everyone gets paid a living wage just for being alive.
• Easy to administer--no complex rules about who gets it and who doesn't.
• No stigma, because rich people get paid too.
• Costs less than currently existing social programs.
• Studies show that productivity increases under a basic wage.
• Studies show that new companies are formed at triple the normal rates.
• More studies are needed to verify that these findings are scalable and accurate.
• Spirituality
• (Again, these are just my thoughts.)
• Humanity will (may?) continue to have the advantage in terms of spirituality, morality, and in answering the questions of what we should do and why we should do it.
• It is imperative we guide our AI creations well.
• It's inconvenient when your computer crashes.
• It's disastrous when your AI's morality fails.
• This is not a problem to solve later. It is a problem to solve now.
• Connectivity
• The genius of BitCoin was not in creating digital currency.
• The genius of BitCoin was in creating a distributed system for storing knowledge. There is no "BitCoin server". Every computer that participates adds to the computing pool that maintains BitCoin.
• BitCoin is hugely efficient in handling transactions. Banking fees are likely to drop to almost nothing--not necessarily because BitCoin itself will be adopted, but because its technology will be adopted.
• BitCoin is, in practical terms, impervious to cyber attack, unlike most current security implementations.
• BitCoin is just knowledge. It was designed to store information on finance and transactions, but in theory it could be used to store anything.
• Scientific findings?
• Digital media?
• The algorithms that AIs run on?
• The "distributed ledger", or else an even better connectivity technology, may become the global human memory, the global human consciousness, and the global AI mind.
• (This is one of my own thoughts, but the rest in this category are coming from Wall Street executives and leading computer experts.)
• Space
• With enormous and cheap manufacturing power, we will go to space.
• Moon base will allow us to travel beyond Earth much more cheaply.
• Mars base will allow humans to start living on other worlds.
• Many of us will live long enough to see this happen.

What to Take-Away From This

(Everything after this point is just my own thoughts.)

The most important laws we need to make in the next few years will relate to:

• Artificial Intelligence - How much do we let it do? How do we make sure it works for us and not against us?
• Monitoring - How do we ensure that nobody is violating these laws?
• Defence - How do we protect ourselves if somebody escapes the monitoring and creates an illegal AI or robot? Swarms of cheap, autonomous, killer robots are potentially a near-future technology, if not a present one.
• Economy and Finance - How do we deal with a disruption to the very foundation of the labour market, where the ancient arrangement of money for labour is changed forever?
• Freedom of Information - How do we ensure that information remains available for the benefit of all humankind, and doesn't get restrained by selfish parties seeking to gain control?
• Privacy - How do we protect our privacy in a world of exponentially increasing sensors and surveillance?
• World Peace - How do we promote cooperative growth across the whole world? If we don't, a robot and/or AI war is likely to happen. If we do, a whole new future becomes possible for the world, a future where life is safe, peaceful, healthy, fun, and fulfilling.

Things we can do as individuals include:

• Look into how your job is going to get taken over by a robot or AI.
• Start planning your 110th birthday party, because you might get to have it.
• Promote world peace. Seeing your 110th birthday may depend on it.
• Find a way to become involved in this global transformation, whether that's to help it happen or to help it happen peacefully and well.

All Of This Is Happening Right Now

It's going to be a wild ride. There's no stopping it. Just grab on to the seat of your pants and yell, "Wheeee!"

Check-In: 2015-08-26 (Wednesday)

Body: walking (lots), diet
Mind: documentaries, visit to Makerspace at EPL, errands
Spirit: documentaries, walking outside
Social: corresponding with friends, walking downtown

Yesterday I dropped in on Edmonton Startup downtown and unfortunately a) guest visits are apparently by appointment only and, b) the place seemed to be undergoing renovations. I sent them an email yesterday asking for an appointment. No news yet.

While I was downtown, I picked up a new wristband for my Fitbit and then dropped in on the Edmonton Public Library's Makerspace. I quizzed the poor guy at the desk about their 3D printing for about 20 minutes, though actually he seemed to enjoy talking about it. I put a couple of models into the queue to get printed, just so that I could see how this process goes.

I continued to watch documentary videos, still mostly on the Singularity University website, and they continue to dazzle me. The current technology available is going to absolutely revolutionize life on Earth, and it's got nothing on the future of technology.

Here's a taste, which I'll be posting about tomorrow. This is a video about actual, real self-driving trucks replacing mine workers. This is going to have profound implications for oil sands workers--the plummeting price of oil is going than the tech in this video: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30084997

I'm finally honing in on what I'm going to do with the rest of my life (my parents planted the idea in my head when I had dinner with them last week):

I am going to become a science journalist.

I'm now starting to formulate the strategy. It will likely involve crowdfunding, like Kickstarter or Patreon, and will need to involve learning about Accounting, Business Planning and Proposal Writing, Digital Video Filming and Editing, and Social Media for Promotion and Community Growth.

More on all of this soon.

Check-In: 2015-08-25 (Tuesday)

Body: walking (lots), diet
Mind: documentaries and talks, visit to Edmonton Public Library
Spirit: documentaries and talks, walking outside
Social: visiting with friends

Yesterday was another brain day. I've run across a website called Singularity University that deals with the exponential curves of human activity. You've probably heard of Moore's Law, the prediction (validated by decades of data) that computing power increases at exponential rates. But this also applies to manufacturing, finance, and many other aspects of human life as well.

SU even managed to get me to take a second look at solar panels as a possible, viable energy generation solution for the future. Not unassisted, I don't think, but Ray Kurzweil, an executive at Google, pointed out that the Human Genome project had only 1% of the genome mapped half way through the project--yet still completed on time. He says that solar panels are following a similar exponential curve.

Anyway, the future is loaded with interesting possibilities. I am now off to visit Edmonton Startup to explore them further--and just to do some work on my laptop.

Check-In: 2015-08-24 (Monday)

Body: walking, diet
Mind: documentaries, cleaning, job search
Spirit: walking outside, documentaries
Social: Amber's birthday party (music Bingo)

Yesterday I set up my Upwork profile, which is an online system for finding work as a professional (or hiring professionals). My profile was approved this morning, so I'll soon have to follow-up by doing some online tests to help prove my skills for prospective employers.

In the evening, I went to Amber's birthday party, which was at the Druid Pub's music Bingo night. I didn't win anything, but had a reasonably good time. It's hard work for an introvert like me to handle the whole socialize-with-booming-music thing, but I did okay. And actually, I think I may benefit from going a little more frequently, just to give myself a moderate amount of training in the art of socializing. Not to overdo it, of course.

Check-In: 2015-08-22 (Saturday) - 2015-08-23 (Sunday)

Body: walking, diet, sleep
Mind: rest
Spirit: games
Social: visiting with friends

I took a bit of a brain break this weekend, not really intentionally but it may be a good thing as I'll be needing my wits about me for job searching this week. My friend Jim came into town on Saturday for a visit and stuck around for noodles last night, which we shared with my other friend Shane, as is tradition on Sunday nights.

Saturday morning, prior to Jim's arrival, I went to the farmer's market with Amber & Jay, which was good for securing some healthy food. So it's been a very sociable and healthy weekend.

Now, with the oil sands and the world economy collapsing around my ears*, I'm off to find work.

* Actually, China's stock market is still up 40% from where it was last year, even after all the recent drops... which means the problem isn't that their economy is slowing down, but rather that it was floating a giant bubble of dreams and wishes that is simply being corrected to sane reality. So hopefully this won't be a 2008-style event, but rather something that will balance out in relatively short order, allowing investors to regain confidence and re-enter the market. But only time will tell.

I personally am still up on the stocks I bought last year, but I'd still rather not sell right now.

Check-In: 2015-08-21 (Friday)

Body: walking
Mind: feeding cats, job search, documentaries, game testing, laundry
Spirit: walking outside, games, futurism
Social: visiting with friends

Yesterday was another brainy day full of chores, job searching, documentary watching, and a bit of testing with the game. I'm really happy with the level of mental activity, though I may tone it down a touch for the weekend as an intentional break.

I was a bit light on healthy food because I haven't had the chance to go grocery shopping all week, but I've remedied that with a visit to the farmer's market. I have a ton of cherries and some fresh lettuce and peas and zucchini now. Plus eggs and onion.

I also visited with a couple of friends.

Lots of good things.

Tim O'Reilly and the 'WFT Economy'

Another video about automation (in this case, social connectivity) and the economy:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/08/12/1844243/tim-oreilly-and-the-wtf-economy-video#ooid=tkbmt5djqMbgumH2B9Yh7JBTZPSecCaO

Here's another talk he gave on the sharing economy, and how open-source work adds value to the economy and becomes, overall, profitable for many people:

Check-In: 2015-08-19 (Wednesday) - 2015-08-20 (Thursday)

Body: walking, diet, sleep
Mind: documentaries, documentaries, job search, interview, documentaries
Spirit: walking outside, thinking about the future
Social: visiting with friends, visiting with family

Ever since I decided that I wasn't looking for low-quality work just to pay the bills, but instead wanted to do something career-focused, I have been on fire with pie-in-the-sky ideas.

The problem with pie-in-the-sky ideas is that it's hard to turn them into cash in the relatively short run. The good thing is that it's very inspiring. I have been starting to research unusual job opportunities, such as looking for communications jobs at nuclear research locations or even the Canadian Space Agency. Like I said, pie-in-the-sky.

But I think I have reached the end of my convalescing stage, which was certainly necessary for the first several months of my extended sabbatical. I am now itching to get involved in something challenging and innovative and I am now dumping most of my thought and energy into figuring out what that could look like. On a daily basis I am overhauling my plans to go from computer science to sociology to business to documentary making and journalism, so there's a lot of flux.

Based on a recent suggestion from my parents, I'm going to look into the local startup community to see if there's much going on in terms of robotics. I think getting involved in the startup community is a good idea generally, though, as I have a lot of the right entrepreneurial spirit right now. I just need some more experience in the startup process in order to harness that spirit.

Anyway, exercise and socializing and the like are going well.

Check-In: 2015-08-18 (Tuesday)

Body: walking, diet, sleep
Mind: documentaries, organization, errands
Spirit: walking outside, games
Social: visiting with friends, corresponding with family

Yesterday was mostly dominated by two events: first, a visit from the plumber, who did some work in the bathroom as part of the repairs for the unit one floor down from me; and second, a belated visit to the Double Greeting with my friend Shane.

The earlier part of the day had me just hanging out at home, so I watched a lot of documentaries, sent some thorium and economics links to a relative of mine (a second-cousin-in-law), and did some organization of several tasks (I accomplished one of those tasks later in the afternoon).

After dinner, I played a game called XCOM; Enemy Unknown, which is actually really fun. Fans of the original XCOM game find that it isn't quite the same as the old one, but the new one, while different, is fun in its own right.

Overall, yesterday was a good day. So good that I almost put a win in the Social column for no particular reason. Then I remembered an important change that I'm making to the check-ins: instead of treating it like a score card with passes and failures, I instead want to change it to a gratitude list. Expressing gratitude towards people and things in your life has proven benefits for mood, energy levels, and productivity. Also, game designers have increasingly discovered that gamers hate losing xp but love gaining it. So marking things as pass/fail is actually fairly unimportant for an experience point system, where all that matters is rewarding the positive actions.

So these are partly things that I accomplished, and partly things I am simply grateful for.

Check-In: 2015-08-15 (Saturday) - 2015-08-17 (Monday)

Body: PASS (walking, diet, rest)
Mind: PASS (reading)
Spirit: PASS (walking outside)
Social: WIN! (family reunion... ish)

The weekend was dominated by my uncle's birthday, for which he had a minor family reunion including many of my cousins, cousins' children, cousins' children's significant others, aunts, uncles, and other relatives. As a result the vast majority of my time was spent socializing.

I managed to get some walking done, though well below my normal step goals (I think it was healthy to take a break to let my body heal a bit, though), and I did a little reading to relax when I could. So the other categories are just simple passes, though that's still a good thing.

To be honest, though, the amount of socializing involved was a little more than I like, so I'm glad to be able to just sit alone at my computer for a bit today. Even though I've got a plumber coming and going all morning because there's a leak in the stack between my unit and the one downstairs. (Fortunately, I don't think I have any liability for the repairs.)

Robots At Last--And Possibly Forever

For a couple of weeks now, I've been promising posts about robots. So here's the first one.

I've decided to start on a cautiously positive note dealing with the effects of robots on the economy. More depressing topics like military robots will need to get dealt with too, but since I'm thinking about jobs and careers a lot lately, these talks are closer to my heart.

First, Rodney Brooks:



And then Andrew McAfee:


And lest I let a day go by without talking about thorium, remember that we'll have limitless, green, safe energy thanks to thorium reactors, so this robotics revolution will be happening in a planet that is getting greener, richer, and, as a result, hopefully calmer.

Check-In: 2015-08-14 (Thursday)

Body: PASS (walking, diet, sleep)
Mind: WIN! (documentaries, cleaning, paperwork)
Spirit: PASS (TV, games)
Social: Whoops!

Yesterday was a pleasantly quiet and productive day of exercise, cleaning, and paperwork chores. My condo and legal/financial well-being were well served by my actions.

On the other hand, I'd made plans to hang out with friends for a boardgame night, but early in the afternoon I decided to relax by watching documentaries, and then around 10 pm got a ping from Amber asking if I was still planning on going out. Er... whoops!

I could've used the socializing too, I think. So I'm gonna put a "whoops" under social.

At least this coming weekend will be excessively social, so I'll get a refill on the social tanks then.

3D Perspective Art

Some links my dad sent me a while ago. First up, some 3D perspective art:



Then a time-lapse of one of them getting made:



Finally, for Lego fans, one that shows the art getting made while also showing the distortion that makes the illusion work:

Check-In: 2015-08-13 (Wednesday)

Body: WIN! (walking, diet, sleep)
Mind: PASS (game dev meeting, documentaries)
Spirit: PASS (walking outside, games, TV)
Social: WIN! (game dev meeting)

Yesterday was pretty laid back. I met with the game development team at lunch, which got me some walking, some socializing, and a kale caesar salad that was really good. I had more salad for dinner, plus some fruit, so that's a diet win as well. And I got to bed at a fairly reasonable time.

Not much else to report; I'm mostly avoiding the heat for now, though tomorrow I will likely head out to sign up for some French classes.

Nukes Back On in Japan!

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33858628

Per the above link, Japan is turning their nuclear plants back on again! This is good news. Just to recap:

• Nobody died at Fukushima.
• Nobody will die to do radiation exposure. In fact, the radiation in the Fukushima area is lower than naturally-occurring radiation in some other parts of the world--places where there is no elevated cancer risk!
• All of the fear was just media hype designed to attract viewers in order to generate advertising dollars.
• Turning off the nuclear plants forced Japan to burn more fossil fuels.
• Burning fossil fuels puts carbon, mercury, and radioactive waste into the air.
• Yes, fossil fuels spread more radioactive waste than nuclear energy, mainly because nuclear keeps it all contained while carbon sources blow it out of smoke stacks.
• But it's the mercury to watch for, because that causes cognitive impairment in newborns, and the carbon, because that's altering the world's climate which may lead to widespread economic collapse.

All in all, Japan turning its nuclear plants back on is a very good thing.

Hurray for sensible energy planning. Boo for media fearmongering.

Check-In: 2015-08-12 (Tuesday)

Body: WIN! (walking, yoga, diet)
Mind: WIN! (documentaries, scribbles, finances)
Spirit: WIN! (yoga/meditation, TV, games)
Social: PASS (email, rest)

I did a full session of yoga yesterday, which felt really good, and managed to get my walking quota done on top. Also, I ate a ton of fruit (pineapple, peaches) and some salad, so I'm claiming a full diet victory as well.

For brain work, I poked at my finances, watched some documentaries, and did some "scribbles" which will need to be transformed into bits at another point. A little bit of TV and games on top of meditation seems good for the spirit.

It was another socially quiet day, but that's not altogether a bad thing. I'll call it another rest day.

Tesla's New Charging Station

There's a new charging station available for Tesla cars, and it perfectly blends high-tech awesomeness with skin-crawling creepiness, which nicely captures the entire robotics industry right now, as we have conversations about human-corpse-eating military drones on one side and empathic life-saving companion robots on the other, with manufacturing and transportation in between.

Check-In: 2015-08-11 (Monday)

Body: PASS (walking, light yoga)
Mind: WIN! (writing, Linux, documentaries, research, reading)
Spirit: PASS (walking outside)
Social: PASS (rest, correspondence with friends)

It was a quiet but mentally active day yesterday. I managed to get the Unity game engine running on Linux, though I haven't tested it with a proper game project yet. That will be today. I also watched some nuclear energy documentaries which kicked off a spate of research into all manner of nuclear topics from bomb designs to foreign policy history to innovative new reactor designs. I relaxed later by continuing my re-watching of The 10,000 Day War on YouTube and reading from Proof, a book about the science of alcohol.

I guess sometimes my brain decides it wants to do some heavy lifting and I'm off to the races.

As a result I didn't dive too heavily into the other topics. I did enough yoga-ish exercise that with a slightly better diet and bedtime I could've gotten a win, but those didn't materialize. I will work on them today, as I'm starting to realize that winning in the Body category is key to winning everywhere else in the long run.

It was good to have a quiet day, though. Yesterday's score is mostly basic passes, but a day of basic passes is still a great day, especially as a rest now and again.

Check-In: 2015-08-06 (Friday) - 2015-08-09 (Sunday)

Body: PASS (walking, diet, *yoga, *sleep)
Mind: WIN! (documentary watching, writing, research, Linux install)
Spirit: PASS (walking outside, TV, *yoga)
Social: WIN! (visiting with friends, corresponding & visiting with family over the phone)

* I've had some success with these things over the last few days, but could be improved.

But things are still pretty good in the body category. I really feel a need to get a yoga routine going again. I miss doing it regularly, but for some reason I'm finding it difficult to get that started. Partly this may be a sleep issue, as I could be getting to bed earlier (though I'm not getting to bed tragically late).

It's been a highly mental few days. Yesterday I installed Linux on my laptop and struggled for a while to get Unity to run. So far it isn't running yet, but it's a huge and complex program designed to run under Windows, so it isn't shocking that there are some tricks to it. The main problem is something to do with a registry entry, so I still have some options to pursue. Anyway, I've also been watching a lot of documentaries and thinking about big problems.

I re-watched the Kirk Sorensen videos I posted the other day, and I am still absolutely convinced that the most important thing for humanity in the near future is the development of cheap nuclear power, most likely the thorium LFTR though I'm not closed to the idea of fast-breeders if they can work. I may see what I can do to push my career in that direction. For example, there may be organizations needing communications professionals, or possibly I could work on doing some science writing in order to bring the esoteric world of nuclear science to the general public.

Anyway, I've also started re-watching The 10,000 Day War, the best documentary on the Vietnam war that I've ever seen, as it gives a ton of context to the situation and takes multiple perspectives, including the proponents and critics of the war. It's not as simple as "America was bad and then lost" nor "America was awesome and the war was totally justified."

Anyway, Telus managed to destroy phone connectivity for my parents recently and they finally got their landline back, though my mom's cellphone is no longer compatible with the upgraded networks in their region. But I was able to chat with her for the first time since she got back from her vacation in BC.

Nuclear Families

This past week, courtesy of my friend Jason, I came across an interesting talk by a demographer and economist named Peter Zeihan. Mr. Zeihan uses the economics of transportation and energy, combined with demographics, to make some predictions about the future of our planet. It's about an hour long, but he's an entertaining speaker and anyone interested in these topics should have a good time.



Now despite the fact that I find this analysis really sharp, it isn't likely that Mr. Zeihan's predictions are going to be 100% accurate. The world is simply too complicated. In particular, I think we're going to see a very different energy future thanks to technologies discussed by Kirk Sorensen in his TEDx Talk.

This one is a wicked-cool 10 minutes, so everyone should enjoy it:


Multiple nations and commercial groups are seriously looking at Thorium power. Then there's technologies like the Integral Breeder Reactor or Bill Gates' still-experimental Travelling Wave technology. But sooner or later, cheap, clean, safe nuclear will become a reality, at which point even shale will look expensive and toxic.

If you're interested, there's a documentary called Pandora's Promise on Netflix, and Kirk Sorensen has a longer, more detailed video as well.

Check-In: 2015-08-03 (Monday) - 2015-08-05 (Wednesday)

Body: PASS (walking, yoga)
Mind: PASS (internet learning)
Spirit: PASS (walking outside, gaming, movies)
Social: WIN! (visiting with friends, corresponding with family)

A quiet but effective week. I'm actually really close to adding diet and sleep to my wins under Body, but they could use some slight improvement (mainly I need more salad).

I've been a bit lazy on the Mind front, but I have seen some interesting news, videos, and articles, some of which I will be sharing in tomorrow's post. Enough for a pass, in any case, and pass is still a good score.

I went to the Metro last night to watch a pair of Mad Max movies with Amber, Jason, Ian, and Natasha. That plus a couple of other visits with friends makes for a fairly social time. Oh, and I had a text conversation with my mom, who just returned from a vacation in BC. It was a text conversation thanks to phone outages in Athabasca. Here's hoping the providers involved can get their crap together, though large organizations tend to suffer from groupthink, poor management, and mediocrity, so I guess we'll see.

Check-In: 2015-07-31 (Friday) - 2015-08-01 (Saturday)

Rather than the usual format, today I'm just going with an image: the final score for July on the Fitbit Edmonton leader board.