Some time ago, I created a pedigree tree that shows the musical genealogy of my former piano teacher, Monica Tessitore. It represents teacher-student relationships as arrows going from top to bottom, converging on the subject of the tree. These links don’t really mean that much because inheritance (of ideas/ideologies, style, technique, etc.) in music education is often not particularly strong, but it is still interesting to see how I am musically “descended” from famous composers. For instance, Béla Bartók is my second-great-”grandteacher” (my great-grandteacher’s teacher). Other nth-great-grandteachers include Liszt (n=3), Chopin (n=4), Beethoven (n=5), Mozart (n=6), Haydn (n=6), and Bach (n=7).

This was compiled for personal use and I didn’t adhere to an academic level of verification, so verify any links before assuming they are correct.

There is also the Mathematics Genealogy Project, which does the same thing for mathematicians using their dissertation advising relationships and sometimes more tenuous links.  It has spawned clones for various other fields; see Academic genealogy on Wikipedia.

I have many things on my todo list for the indeterminate somewhat-near future, but two of my new year’s resolutions that will involve regular effort during 2009 are:

• Read 50 books.  Recent discussion about the effect of web-surfing on the brain’s text-processing made me realize that I don’t read books much anymore.  The ability to quickly skim one-page articles online and gain a brief understanding is good, but I think it is important to retain the ability to process the in-depth arguments of book-length writing (and plot, but I won’t be reading fiction, except perhaps for a few classics if I’m in the mood).  Books are still the best method for conveying big ideas and supporting them with great detail.  I’m starting off with On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, the creator of the Palm Pilot, Blown to Bits, about privacy in the digital age, and The Bill of Rights by Akhil Reed Amar, who coincidentally seems to have originated the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.  I will be posting reviews of the books I read.
• Increase my content and software production.  I have, so far, been mainly a consumer of information (RSS junkie, etc.) and a user of software, perhaps with the exceptions of my relatively unimportant Wikipedia articles and several-year-old calculator programs.  In 2009, I resolve to blog regularly, even if only book reviews, and to get involved in free software in a significant way, be it creating GNOME themes, writing a small application based on one of my frequent ideas, or contributing to a free software project that I use.

Like most people, but probably to a greater degree than most, I am a serial procrastinator.  We all must find a way to gain the willpower to do our work first, and what we want to do later.  I am not that strong of a believer in self-improvement material when it comes to procrastination, because I think avoiding procrastination involves willpower more than it does strategies.  One constantly consciously puts off doing something whenever possible, and to stop doing that only requires willpower.

Unfortunately, tonight, I was writing a paper, and when I had finally got working for an extended period of time, and when I switched to my browser to look something up, I involuntarily was sucked into Facebook because I had the tab open.  This also happens a lot with Wikipedia; you can read chains of linked articles and end up reading about something entirely irrelevant.

To remedy this, I envision an application, possibly a browser addon, that, when you have a word processor open (and it could do some checks to see whether the document you are editing is likely a paper, such as by seeing whether you have a standard MLA header, for example), compares the text of your document to the text of the tab(s) you currently have open, and closes it/them if there is insufficient relevancy to indicate that what you are browsing is related to your paper.  I believe this is necessary because one can unconsciously procrastinate when web-browsing, so a strategy or tool such as this is a useful counteraction.

This post was a method of procrastination.