I mentioned on Twitter earlier today that very often when I get really stuck on something and finally decide to ask for help on a forum, the answer suddenly hits me as I finish writing my post. Most of the time the problem is something really silly that I just kept completely overlooking, and the answer feels painfully obvious once it clicks. Despite the fact that these might be a little embarrassing to post, I figured rather than letting my entire would-be forum post go to total waste once I finally get what’s happening (and so never end up clicking the “Post” button), it might be nice to post the issue on my blog, if nothing else as a reminder of my own facepalm moments.

During my five week vacation I made myself finally sit down and read a book that’s been recommended to me repeatedly: Why We Sleep by Matthew P. Walker.

Today is our last day in Glastonbury. I will miss this place, but I also feel like I’ve seen everything I wanted to see here, and that I am ready to go home and take a little bit of Glastonbury back with me.

I’ve wanted to see the Tor in person for a long time, ever since reading a fantasy book set in Glastonbury in high school. My wish has finally come true! I’m writing this post from a small apartment called Chalice Lodge on High Street, Glastonbury. To my left is an organic restaurant named Hundred Monkeys Cafe. To my right and just across the street is an organic food store. Surrounding those are a myriad of crystal shops, psychic healing practitioners, and other establishments with things like “Avalon” and “Excalibur” in their names. Today we visited many of these shops. I may get a psychic reading before we’re done here. I don’t know yet. But the most important part of the day (after eating some organic cheese scones and a tofu-based locally grown English Breakfast) was, of course, Tor. This is me with my new photograph of Tor, which will be framed and placed above my bed back home in Stockholm. I love it and I am so happy:

What follows is a set of notes I took during two of the IJCAI Goal Reasoning workshop talks, about rebel agents. Both talks were presented by the same speaker and both focused on rebel agents. These talks were quite short and the speaker had to go fast, so I feel like I missed out on a lot of the information I wanted to record. As a result some parts are obviously omitted and more than usual are written from memory today, increasing potential inaccuracies or misinterpretations. Overall the impression I got of rebel agents is that in today’s climate it is a potentially somewhat inflammatory term for a very ethical trait. It seems that, potentially, any agent in a non-trivial domain would have to be a rebel agent and have the ability to go against its instructions in order to be an ethical agent.