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Thursday, July 7th

goals 1 (finance tracking)


i'm in the process of delineating goals for projects i'm thinking about. when i'm done with this, i think a mindmap would be the best way to track the different projects and their respective goals.

project $

general goal: track my money
specific goals that define what the project must do:
- have an idea of how much money i have, and in which accounts
- track expenses by category
- predict out how much money i will have in the future
- save receipts to track what i pay for and when (merge with physical receipts for certain items)
- keep track of monthly recurring and variable expenses

this means i don't need anything complicated. i can download monthly credit card statements for most of my transactions (i'd say over 90% of my transactions, comprising more than 95% of overall expenditures). monthly bank statements provide a picture of how i pay my credit card bills, and also how i gain income (as i have direct deposit from my job into my bank account). monthly mutual fund statements give a picture of how those funds get money from my bank (a level of redundancy is available at each level). the idea is to dl these three statements every month. i'm not sure whether or not i want to match these to receipts that i may save. for example, i usually purchase coffee with small globs of cash (<$2) - but rarely save these receipts.

i could save all reciepts, but then monthly statements from my visa card would be excessively redundant - they'd allow me to check the validity of charges, but i don't feel that i'm there yet. maybe an initial level of discipline is good. i can follow this with some other fancy jizz.
Nirav on 07.07.05 @ 03:32 PM EST [link] [No Comments]

Sunday, July 3rd

oh, no god


during my drive from albany to cherry hill, nj, i came across a good way to think about whether or not there's a god-like thing.

it depends on how you think about free will (this strain of thought will eventually turn paradoxical, but keep with me). if we live in a mechanical universe, one without souls and magic, there's a compelling argument that we ultimately don't have free will. (this is b/c we can trace back the causes of events to observable phenomena - and out inability to do so hinges on our lack of complete information [ a constraint that becomes less and less binding as time progresses]).

however, in order to live a decent life without going nuts, we need to believe we have free will. things that remind me that i don't have it drive me nuts. things that make people apparent for the b0ts they are drive me crazy. i think a decent way to resolve this problem is that given that we don't have anywhere near a complete information set or complete rules of the game, and even if we did, nowhere near the ability to compute what outcomes will be or would have been, we don't know what's coming next and therefore the upshot is that we have free will, because it seems that way to us.

on to god-like forces. like with free will, what matters is what we can observe. if god-like forces have no observable impact on my life, there's no reason to act is if it exists. assuming that things exist when they don't impinge on our lives isn't helpful (though i suppose i'll have to concede that stories give people piece of mind).
Nirav on 07.03.05 @ 12:37 AM EST [link] [1 Comment]

Friday, July 1st

admirable traits


it seems that good character is valued over intelligence. could this be because a sizeable amount of intelligence is directly exogenous (given semi-randomly [or by genetics or some other deterministic force]), while character is often developed through harder-to-trace personal histories? this means character has more of an unexplained (or at least, not as easily explained) component than does intelligence.

if we think it has a larger unexplained component, this means it might be more likely to be percieved as magical and mysterious, or ultimately, "human" - like "souls" and "consciousness" (the latter until recently). we tend to value things that make it hard to reduce things to their mechanical underpinnings because we feel special.

blammo! we value character over intellect.
Nirav on 07.01.05 @ 06:46 PM EST [link] [5 Comments]


holy fucking shit (e.g. objectives)


right, so there are a few basics to cover in this inaugural entry. reasons for starting this:

- i'm trying this out to see what it's like, whether or not it's easier to keep tabs on my day's "work" on various projects
- i'm learning how blogs work. i hope to get a feel for what they're good at and where they fall short, and maybe think of ways to fix perceived shortcomings
- it's a way to make sure my ego keeps growing, like a stalk of superfertilized asparagus
- it may eventually help me get into the habit of writing more frequently. this may return amazing dividends. among these may be listed: increased ability to spell correctly, proficiency in my native language, and i might actually develop a writing style (or at least convert my vulgar cadence to text)

bling blang blong
Nirav on 07.01.05 @ 02:20 AM EST [link] [No Comments]