Second vaccine doses administered! 💉 👍

Might as well try another one from Kensington Brewing

Trying out a new (to me) brewery: Kensington Brewing

This episode of the Mindscape podcast was a nice mix of my interests in math, politics, and voting theory

Finished reading: The Strategy Paradox: Why Committing to Success Leads to Failure (And What to do About It) by Michael E. Raynor 📚

Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson is a good second book in the Mars trilogy. So much great detail, you really get a strong sense of Mars as a place that is distinct from Earth 📚

I’ve listened to a few Spatial Audio songs on Apple Music and I’m impressed! If you listen to a familiar song, you can really notice the difference. Lots of space and previously unnoticed details in these new mixes 🎧🎶

Switching from Agenda to Craft, for now 📅🗒

In my corner of the internet, there’s a well trodden, twisted path of searching for the one true notes app. I’ve reached a fork in the path between Agenda and Craft. As I wrote earlier, I’ve been using Agenda for a while now and its date-based approach really suits my meeting-dominated work. Now, though, Craft has added calendar integration and I’m testing it out.

There are several things I really like about Craft, relative to Agenda:

1. Document syncing is far more reliable. This isn’t entirely Agenda’s fault. I’m restricted by corporate policy from using iCloud Documents, so have been using Dropbox sync for Agenda. I often have to wait an indeterminate, though long, time before documents sync across my devices. Craft sync has been instantaneous and very reliable.
2. Having access to my documents from a web browser is great. I’ll be back to working from the office on a Windows laptop soon and won’t have access to my iPad. So, web access will be important.
3. Performance is much better on Craft. Agenda often freezes in the middle of typing and suffers from random crashes. This could very well be something about my particular setup, though it doesn’t happen in any other apps.

On the downside, I do miss Agenda’s simplicity. Craft has lots of ways to organize notes (such as cards and subpages). Of course, you can mostly ignore this, but I like Agenda’s well-thought-through approach that didn’t require much deliberation about where to put things.

Of course, having just made this switch, Apple announced Quick Notes and I may well be back on Apple Notes in a few months.

The new Focus feature in iOS 15 looks promising. I already hide and show home screens based on context and this looks like it will help make this even more effective. Lots to unpack from WWDC

After thinking it over for a few years, Lucy has finally decided to try the outdoor couch

Thanks to a wifi range extender, I’ve improved my office location

I now live with two teenagers

Sleep Evolved Before Brains. Hydras Are Living Proof. | Quanta Magazine

It appears that simple creatures — including, now, the brainless hydra — can sleep. And the intriguing implication of that finding is that sleep’s original role, buried billions of years back in life’s history, may have been very different from the standard human conception of it. If sleep does not require a brain, then it may be a profoundly broader phenomenon than we supposed.

Starting the long weekend a day early

Andrew Potter: My fellow Gen Xers don’t appreciate our great gift: we were ignored - The Line

In retrospect, it is obvious that the Gen X obsession with authenticity was anxiety caused by the growing rumblings of a culture in transition. The old technological ecosystem that fuelled the counterculture was gone, but the new web-enabled environment that made authenticity irrelevant hadn’t quite yet arrived. Gen X was the last generation to possess genuine subcultures that were able to remain somewhat unmolested by the digital meat grinder. 

Sounds right to me

A good “in the zone” song: Persona

Kids are vaccinated!

Michael Geist is doing excellent work on Bill C-10:

There are at least three points emphasizing. First, no other country in the world uses broadcast regulation in this way, making Canada a true global outlier. Second, there is no evidence of a discoverability problem for user generated content. Third, the issue of excluding YouTube from the scope of the bill is open to considerable debate and was not even raised by CIMA in its written submission to the committee.

Debating Bill C-10 at the Canadian Heritage Committee, Part One: My Opening Statement

Great weather for a short run 🏃‍♂️

An interesting observation from my coach today:

We must stop searching for progress through punishment

Why modern Buddhists should take reincarnation seriously | Aeon Essays:

Thinking about reincarnation today is, first of all, a reminder of the complexity of Buddhism, and the fact that individual practices can’t be neatly separated from broader institutional histories. Any change in our personal lives is inseparable from change in the world around us. Second, reincarnation offers a way of thinking about the present as connected to the deep past and to any potential futures as well. We needn’t think of the specifics of the reincarnation doctrine to realise that we’re all the inheritors of a past that we didn’t create and the bequeathers of a future we won’t live to see. Third, this temporal relation is also an ethical one, because it suggests that we’re the products of other lives and the creators of other futures, and thus share a global and temporal interdependence. And fourth, it follows that part of our task as humans is to be aware of what we might accidentally replicate from our past and thus unknowingly recreate in the future.

Assuming this is true, great news that Ontario’s summer camps for kids will be allowed to open again. My kids really need this (their parents would benefit too!)

I’ve found my new power up song 🔥 🏃‍♂️ 🎵

Fleeting confirmation that spring weather has arrived

Clever:

Scientific efforts to shed light on the prehistory of clothes have received an unexpected boost from another line of research, the study of clothing lice, or body lice. These blood-sucking insects make their home mainly on clothes and they evolved from head lice when people began to use clothes on a regular basis. Research teams in Germany and the United States analysed the genomes of head and clothing lice to estimate when the clothing parasites split from the head ones.

How clothing and climate change kickstarted agriculture | Aeon Essays