Ides of March

Immediately after π-day is a great day to make a Shakespearean joke.

CAESAR

The Ides of March are come.

SOOTHSAYER

Ay, Caesar; but not gone.

Indeed, at the time of writing, the Ides of March isn't completely gone either, seeing that [in this time zone], we are still on March 15.

Today was mostly focused on reading the Bible. There is the usual daily devotional readings from Bible in One Year 2020 with Nicky Gumbel (I'm on day 311 of 365; once I'm done with this, I will switch over to Through the Bible in One Year by Dr Alan B. Stringfellow). I finished up the last half of Matthew (in NKJV), and worked my way through Exodus again via listening to the reading of the NKJV.

``But wait,'' you might ask, ``didn't you do that just about two weeks ago already?''. Well, yes, technically I've listened through Exodus already, but ah, it was in ESV, not NKJV. There is ``a difference'' only because of my completion stint: like almost everything I do, I keep track of which books of which Bible version I have been reading. And I am ``only a few books'' from completing NKJV, which means that after I completed all 66 books of NKJV, I can add another entry to my read list.

Part of the reason why I maintain such a tracker is to validate this statement that I keep hearing from many people: ``Oh! I have read the whole Bible more than ten times'' (emphasis mine).

I'm just wondering if it is possible to read ``the whole Bible more than ten times''. Maybe there are some books that keep getting revisited so many times due to their importance in doctrine and/or theology that it feels as though they have read the whole Bible more than ten times.

Since I have doubts, I set up some kind of data collection and see what I get.

Notice that some books have fractional distributions. This came about because while I was on the Bible in One Year 2020 with Nicky Gumbel set of readings, there were times that I spent roughly half the book reading using ESV, while I spent roughly the other half using NKJV. So it felt more accurate to just mark the book's coverage as being shared across versions. This also means that the vertical coverage of versions end up not counting such fractional coverage, which is reasonable I think.

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It's the end of month two of my sabbatical. Frankly, it doesn't feel like anything other than ``natural''. Is a little strange to just wake up, and plan about three big things to do (each thing covering about 2.5--3.0 hours), do them, and then turn in for the night. No need to scramble and panic due to uncooperative people, mind is significantly less foggy due to the relative freedom to just think about things without having to worry about how to sugar-coat things to make excuses instead of actually finding a solution.

Really seductive to keep this going on for as long as it is possible. Again, I don't have apartment/wife/children/care to ``feed'', so monthly expenses can be kept low enough that whatever I have lying around can be made to stretch for a while.

Mmmm.

Funny enough, I haven't been gaming much for the past month. Yes, I played The Outer Worlds, but after that, I kinda just went back to reading, playing some flute/笛子 here and there, and watching YouTube videos of cool people doing cool stuff that I might like to do, had I have more space to run a physical workshop.

Alas, I am stuck with only a mental/virtual one over my computer, in which case is Eileen-II.

I did think about why people are more drawn to things that involve mechanical engineering (think gears, rolling marbles, big builds and the like), and the answer seemed obvious to me: people are drawn to things that involve mechanical engineering because mechanically engineered things can be filmed well. I mean, yes, people like ElectroBOOM and Mark Rober do some cool electronics projects, but the types of electronic projects that they choose (and the way that they present them) are those that can be filmed easily.

Imagine, if you will, a video showing the type of lab that a computer scientist would work in, messing around and building [say] a toy Huffman encoder, a type of compression software.

Most of the things are going on in the computer scientist's head, and wanting to film that would require the said computer scientist to pull up a white board and start to draw things out using technical jargon just to save four more white boards of pre-cursor information.

And unlike the visceral view of someone getting hurt [in a controlled way] (I'm looking at you, ElectroBOOM), watching a computer scientist doing debugging is super boring since it is a lot of sitting in front of the screen and staring at code, writing random-looking state dumping statements to check for various invariants. Unless said computer scientist monologues the thought processes, which may make for either a short video, or a confusing one due to jargon.

I mean, the closest example of the monologuing is from the LockPickingLawyer, who demonstrates how he picks certain locks by sounding off the steps that he is taking, and verbally confirming what his fingers are feeling on the lock pick ``nothing on one; two feels binding, got a nice click out of him; nothing on three; four feels binding, got a click on that, but there is some counter-rotation, so we'll ease up on that a bit; nothing on five; going back to one...''.

Hmm.

Anyway, that's all I have for today. Again, for those who suddenly appear here and read what I am writing, it is not the case that I write here daily---it is just that I am on a sabbatical for now, and I promised myself that I would write something once a day. Most of the time, it would appear that writing a blog entry in this blog is the thing to write, though sometimes I do write some poems, or even stories.

Here's to another fruitful month in my sabbatical. Till the next update then.