Mental Blabberings

Happy Australia Day! Although I'm not an Australian I definitely understand why people who live here love it so much. Today was the day I went really adventurous and took the road less traveled. And today is the day I found out my favorite running route. Today I also found out that running with other people and keeping a pace is definitely much more enjoyable than running alone. This run report won't go into too much details as the last one, but I point out a few observations. Read on if you're interested in the details.

Drenched after running in the rain! So I went out running today and had my personal distance best! 7 kilometers around Ashfield, and I'm really happy that I'm able to get past the 5km mark. I've been running exactly 5km or less recently and today I made a decision to just keep running until I felt like I wanted to stop. This was a pretty special run for me because it was the first time I've ever run in the rain! I've changed things up a bit too and started listening to music on the run (courtesy of Rdio which is now available in Australia!) which made it a lot more pleasant than my previous runs.

One of my favorite activities is analyzing and performing experiments in my head. There are a few tough questions that I kind of think deeply about when I'm on the train, on the plane, running, or when I have long swaths of time where I'm alone. I tend to ask questions like "how do we know what's right and what's wrong" or "why do people generally mind their own business when they're in the train" or questions like "if we were to rebuild society again (for whatever reason) what would that new society be like given current knowledge and technological capabilities". I don't intend to post my thoughts about these questions -- those are for a different time -- but I do think it's healthy to be asking these questions even to just yourself.

It's yet another year and for me it's time to try and level up. Instead of doing the usual "here are my resolutions for 2012" I'm going a different route: go meta and look at things from a different perspective. Instead of writing out specific things, I would go more conceptual and broader. I'll also go deeper and hold myself to a higher standard than I usually did when writing blog posts. So without further ado, here's my high level view of what I want to accomplish and expand for 2012.