I had thought I might do a week-in-review post when we were down in Florida, because I tend to get up very early, but I opted for trying to unplug more than usual. As a result, this recap will go back quite a ways…
Me on Substack:
— Obligatory Super Bowl Thoughts: Pretty much what it says in the headline.
— Book Review: TERMINATION SHOCK, Neal Stephenson: This is very much a Neal Stephenson book, with all that implies both good and bad.
— Horseshoe Theorem: The same terrible math education Takes come from both ends of the political spectrum.
— Decision Point of the Moment: On why I don’t write that much for Forbes any more.
— Quick Hits: Some short-ish comments on stories that happened while we were on vacation.
— Gen X Is Career Limiting: On my generation’s antipathy to “selling out.”
— State of the State of the Union: I no longer have any interest in watching the biggest political speech of the year, and that kind of bums me out.
— Recent (Re)Reading: Quick takes on some books by Harlan Coben and Terry Pratchett.
Me Elsewhere:
—What Is an Optical Lattice and Why Does It Make Such Good Clocks? at Forbes: Some explaining of the physics behind some recent work on ultra-precise atomic clocks.
— 85 Queen: A Brief History of Timekeeping with Chad Orzel: An online event with the Kitchener Public Library:
— Tracking Time: From Past to Future: This is an interview I did with a British ebook platform, which has some fun stuff in it.
Links Dump:
—The regrettable death of the Slatepitch by Matt Yglesias: He’s right about the flattening of the modern internet, but I’m not sure how to feel when people ten years younger than me are reminiscing about the Good Old Days.
— Kids Have No Place in a Liberal Democracy by Elizabeth Bruenig: The title’s a little clickbaity, but it raises an interesting problem about how to balance individual autonomy with the fact that kids can’t be given autonomy.
—Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children by Josh Barro, Liz Bruenig, and Tim Carney: A podcast following up on the previous link.
—Does My Son Know You? by Jonathan Tjarks: Kind of a tough read, but a very impressive bit of writing about family and facing death.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
Today crosses the half-year mark for my latest in a long series of intermittent attempts to be a better person, in this specific case by losing weight. I’m not doing anything all that complicated, just trying to eat a bit less (cutting out snacks between meals and trying to keep portions down), and weighing myself every morning. I also exercise regularly, but not significantly more than I was doing before I bought the scale in September— it’s really mostly about food. The routine measurement does a lot of the work, here, just as a reminder of the project.
Because I’m a great big nerd, this inevitably involves graphs: the blue points in the above are the daily weight measurements, the red are once-a-week points from a seven-day moving average. The gaps are times when I was out of town for one reason or another. It’s maintained a pretty consistent downward trend (a bit less than half a pound a week, if you fit a line to the red points), so I’m generally pleased with myself. I don’t have a very specific goal in mind, here, just a fairly general “be less fat”; I got down to 220 or so back in 2007-ish, but that was mostly due to a stomach problem making it hard to eat. I’m definitely not trying to get there again…
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
This was the middle song of a three-song run on shuffle play one night as I was going to sleep in Florida, and I said “I should remember that sequence, that was good.” Then I woke up randomly in the middle of the night and could remember the outside two songs, but not this one. In the manner of odd problems in the middle of the night, this really bothered me, and made it difficult to get back to sleep; I eventually clicked the “skip backward” button a whole bunch of times and found it. And now I am highly unlikely to forget it.
And that’s what I’ve been up to. Here are the usual buttons:
And if you want to mock my taste in Dad Rock, the comments will be open.