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In more bike adventures I had a flat today while all the roads are very slushy from the melting snow that we just got from the snowstorm on Friday. Was a good experience getting comfortable just having to do something in a grimy circumstance. I definitely feel like I’m getting more grit at just dealing with problems as they arise, granted fixing a bike tire is pretty straightforward as opposed to solving research problems.

In that front I’ve been finding that writing my daily progress in a keynote has been really helpful to clarify my thoughts and also provide guidance for what I’m doing. Basically we have some question related to the research that we want to solve so I investigate that. This leads to more questions and then I keep going down that trail. Reviewing the previous few days work has been helpful to keep myself more aware of where things are in general.

Daily Listening Been listening to this playlist in the background while working and have found it to be very peaceful and productive.

Daily Reading Freedom’s Forge is getting to the war now. Something interesting that was talked about was how certain politicians wanted consumer car production shut down since those supplies could better be used for tanks/planes/etc. The industrialists convinced them otherwise since shutting it down would mean all the knowledge held by the tool makers and workers there would leave to other factories elsewhere in the country, so when M-day happened (the day the US would start requiring US consumer manufacturing to help manufacture goods for war) they felt they would not be able to revive the factories since they wouldn’t be able to get people there. So it was better to keep the factories producing cars in the meantime to store the workers and toolers so that when production shifted it could happen much more efficiently. It’s a good point about how seemingly wasteful things can serve a purpose to store something of value (in this case working knowledge of retooling production systems).