Giant End-of-Year Review Post

Blogging through the last third of 2024

Incredibly, I haven’t done a recap post since late August, just before we went to London on a family vacation. Actually, on reflection, it’s maybe not that incredible, as I would usually write those on weekends, and I’ve been trying to stay off the computer on weekends this fall, because it screws up my neck. Anyway, here’s an absolutely massive collection of stuff from the final third of 2024:

Me on Substack:

— London: Cultural Notes: Some thoughts about what it was like visiting the capital of the YooKay for a week.

— Challengers Ridge: Brief thoughts on a couple of widely acclaimed 2024 movies.

— On Recent Silence: A bit more about the neck thing mentioned above.

— On Not Reading: Reflections on the observation that the Kids These Days don’t read as much as I did back in the 1980’s.

— Pop Culture: College Starter Pack and Undateable Songs: A couple of amusing games involving old music.

— Simulationism: Not Even Religion: First of two posts about the work of philosopher David Chalmers, this one on the a book club about his VR book.

— Against the Lines: Yelling at clouds about how sports media is all gambling talk.

— World Series Nerves and Notes: Thoughts about the totally rational relationship The Pip and I have with the Yankees.

—Introducing Physics and Astronomy to Kids These Days: Thinking out loud about a way to re-do our intro-to-the-department course.

— Baseball Postmortem: End of the season for both The Pip and the Yankees (more the former than the latter).

— Thoughts About Thinking About Thinking: Second of two posts about David Chalmers, this one after a talk he gave on campus.

— Sanity-Preserving Tab Clearance: Pretty much what the title says: a bunch of comments about things I had open in browser tabs for an extended period.

— I Need a Hobby: Besides, you know, this.

— The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Linear Regression: The Pip’s height over time is a surprisingly straight line.

— Geometry of Growth Spurts: Overthinking the question of why everyone thinks my kid has suddenly shot up in height when in fact he’s growing at a constant rate.

— Miscellaneous Basketball: Pretty much what it says on the label: scattered thoughts about both playing and watching hoops.

— On Transitions: In which everyone moves to Bluesky in a cloud of self-congratulatory horseshit.

— Why Is a Thorium Clock a Big Deal?: In which I explain some recent physics results.

— Stop Overthinking the Election: Seriously, knock it off. It’s not that complicated.

— Books and Movies and Music, Oh My: Brief reviews of some recent(-ish) pop culture.

— The Miraculous from the Material by Alan Lightman: A new book presenting science with a sense of wonder.

— Holding Steady: My annual-ish trip to see my favorite band.

— Awash in the Lives of Others: Some grumbling about what is and isn’t Notable when it comes to books.

— Read Your Vegetables: On a flawed argument attempting to get men to read more.

— Befuddled by “AI”: In which I don’t understand how Kids These Days use LLM chatbots.

Me Elsewhere:

— A Brief History of Timekeeping on Cool Science Radio: It’s been a little while since I did a book interview with a radio show, and this was a good deal of fun.

— “How Timekeeping Innovations Turned New Year’s Into a Midnight Celebration” by Jordan Friedman: In which I am quoted a couple of times about the transition to standardized time zones in the late 1800’s.

Normally I would throw in some Links Dump here, but there were so many of my own things that that would feel excessive, so we’ll skip ahead to:

Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:

I managed to get out for a little cross-country skiing a couple of weekends ago, which was great. And, not coincidentally, I’m going to try to get out again after I hit “Post” on this…

Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:

A Hold Steady bonus track that they played live for the first time ever at the show in Brooklyn that I went to. I think it’s pretty great, and will be earwormed with it for the rest of the day…

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So, yeah, that’s a shitload of stuff. I’ll try to be a little more consistent about doing recaps, but can’t promise, so if you like any of this, click this button to get more:

And if you feel moved to reply to any of it, the comments will be open: