It’s been a good while since the last weeks-in-review post, so there’s quite a bit of stuff here (though I did throw in a Links Dump post which will shorten that section of this round-up). On the other hand, for a good chunk of that time we were at my parents’ doing holiday stuff, so I didn’t write nearly as much as I otherwise might’ve. Anyway, let’s get to it:
Me on Substack:
— Kids These Days Don't Read The Unreadable: A viral students-don’t-read-the-syllabus gag is really an argument for not cut-and-pasting boilerplate statements into syllabi.
— The End of the Expanse: Thoughts on the final volume of “James S. A. Corey”’s space opera series, and the series as a whole.
— ‘Tis the Season: Holiday wishes from Chateau Steelypips.
— Holiday Links Dump: As mentioned above, a bit of pre-Christmas tab clearance.
— 2021 Was Just This Year, You Know: A lukewarm take on the year that just ended.
— Base Rates and Loss Aversion: Against some cheap dunks on a NYT story about fetal tests with high false positive rates.
— Not THE Ending, But AN Ending: Thoughts on the Wheel of Time season finale.
— I Miss Ignoring People: A complaint about the way the pandemic makes me feel like I have to be an annoying busybody.
Me Elsewhere:
— Why Is December 21 the Shortest Day Of The Year? at Forbes: Some of the astronomy and history leading to the Gregorian calendar.
— What Are The Fastest And Slowest Cycles In Timekeeping? at Forbes: Our ability to time things by direct counting spans something like 28 orders of magnitude in duration.
— New Year’s Day And The Balance Of Linear And Cyclical Time at Forbes: Waxing a little philosophical about the tension between time as a repeating cycle and time as an inexorable forward march.
— It’s About Time on the Sci-gasm podcast: A podcast interview about the book-in-production with some very entertaining Aussies. That’s a Spotify link, because that was at the top of the Google results, but you can find it on whatever platform you like.
Links Dump:
— The Velocity Triangle Method for finding maximum range (no calculus needed!) by MathyJaphy on YouTube: Neat video about a geometric approach to a classic projectile motion problem.
— How to design a house to last 1000 years (part II) and How to design a house to last 1000 years (part III) by Brian Potter: Concluding a series at Construction Physics that I mentioned in the previous Links Dump.
— Do you want a president who knows about “Let’s Go Brandon” or one who reads his intelligence brief? by Ben Dreyfuss: That’s really the question.
— Perhaps High School is Not Always a Relentlessly Brutal Nietzschean Hellscape by Freddie deBoer: A characteristically withering take on a set of default tropes that always kind of bug me, too.
— What is it like not to get covid-19? by Dan Drezner: In which a notable academic and pundit tries to jinx himself.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
Looking across the lake at the control tower for the flood control dam in my hometown on a foggy morning when I was walking with my dad and his knucklehead yellow Lab.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
This came up on shuffle play this morning. I’ve been known to sing this to our dog, Charlie the pupper.
As I said at the top, that’s a bunch of stuff. Here are the traditional buttons:
And if you somehow think I left something out, the comments will be open.