April 17th 2026 - Reading Summary

The Hobbit

Elrond provides his home and care for the group and their mounts. He identifies 2 swords that they found in the trolls lair which are of Gondolin origin. One sword belonged to the king of Gondolin.

Elrond then asks for their map and holds it up to the moon light revealing runes that say, "five feet high the door and three may walk breast." He explains that these are moon-letters which were written by dwarves and can only be revealed under the same type of moon and season they were written under.

Elrond speaks of some more text found by the moon light. It appears to tell them how to find the key hole. They tale their leave the next morning.

The Eye of the World

They come across a trouble maker who starts complaining about the Women's circle. His wife comes out and tells him to leave the Women's circle matters alone or he's going to have to cook his own food.

Tam and Rand quickly make their way out of there as to not be recognized because Tam is a widower and he's always being offered someone's cousin for marriage.

Atomic Habits

Evidence leads to belief

The more evidence we have for a belief the more we will believe it. I can see in my experience that the more I do meditation the more evidence I accumulate for the belief that reality is just moments of experience and that each experience is impermanent, unsatisfying, and not under my control.

The author makes the point that the more we do a behavior the more evidence we accumulate for our identity. The more we read the more evidence we have that we're a reader. The more we write the more we believe we're a writer, etc.

We don't need to be perfect. We just need more experiences that align with the identity we want than go against.

How to accumulate evidence

In order to accumulate the evidence we need for these new identities we need to:

  1. Decide who we want to be
  2. Prove it through small actions that align with that identity

Some people only have the results in mind when trying to decide who they want to be. Start from there and work backwards to recognize the identity of the type of person who achieves these results.

Prot's Elisp Book

Evaluating expressions

You can evaluate elisp from anywhere using things like:

  • eval-last-sexp
  • eval-buffer
  • eval-region

M-: eval-expression allows you to write and run an arbitrary elisp expression in a minibuffer.

ielm brings up a buffer where you can run Elisp commands.

eval-print-last-sexp is like the regular eval function but it puts the results right below the expression.