May 17th 2026 - Reading Summary
The Hobbit
Chapter 9 - Barrels out of bond
- Captives
As the group tries to decide which direction they'll go numerous torches surround them. It's the wood elves here to take them prisoner. With their hunger and tiredness they almost welcome the arrest. All but Bilbo, who slipped on his ring and stepped away, are chained together and made to walk fast through the woods. They come across a bridge which they cross that leads to the elven king's door.
Atomic Habits
Chapter 9 - The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits
- Lazlo and his chess children
We learn the story of Laszlo Polgar who raised his 3 daughters to play chess. They each became grand masters. His strategy was to raise them in a household fully immersed in chess. Playing against each other, reading chess books, and seeing pictures of great chess players became their normal life. To them this was a great childhood and it led to great results.
- We imitate behaviors of others
We imitate the behaviors of those around us. Our culture ingrains habits that become automatic for us whether we're aware of them or not. This stems from our desire to be part of a group.
We imitate the behavior of 3 groups:
- The close
- The many
- The powerful
Prot's Elisp Book
Macros
We can use macros to define our own special forms. We can see what a macro expands to by placing the point on the closing parenthesis and running pp-macroexpand-last-sexp.
Macros are a way to reuse or inject code into your logic flow. Arguments passed to functions are evaluated before the function is called but with macros you can pass arguments that the macro chooses when to evaluate.