Ted Chiang, kitties, life

I grabbed The Lifecycle of Software Objects yesterday morning so I could read a page or two as I went out to get coffee, then ended up reading it in one sitting -- I forgot you can't count on reading just a page or two of Ted Chiang. Such good thinking on non-human sentience, both natural and artificial! I put the book down and buried my face in Nala's curled-up body on the couch next to me. (One of life's great pleasures, in my mind, is putting one's face on a sleeping cat... they're warm, soft, nice-smelling and have space in the middle for one's nose.) Then, still in a thoughtful mood, I took the beastly beastie to the vet for testing after a month on stop-being-so-hyper thyroid medication; she gained half a pound over the last month, which is good.

I've been experimenting with a couple of decision-making heuristics lately.

One is to choose the thing you'll be more likely to remember in 10 years. This is tricky since broken bones, divorces and other tragedies are pretty memorable, but you get the idea. It's one reason I signed up for the obstacle course on Saturday.

Another is defined by a question: What would you do if you thought you were truly important? I can see this being tricky, too, for people who would get overly duty-bound if they thought of themselves as being important, but I find it encourages me to be brave.