🎧 20 album covers that shaped my musical preferences: Last month, I posted a series of album covers for music that shaped my preferences. The gimmick was that there was no context or explanation, just an album cover. Now, I’d like to provide a few notes. As part of the overall framing, these are influential albums for me. They aren’t all …

Finished reading: I really enjoyed The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin. The Earthsea series is very good 📚

🏃‍♂️ Simultaneously ridiculous, inspiring, and intriguing

🔗 The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor // Bret Devereaux I want to focus on rigid science fiction armors because they offer an interesting lens to consider their design: how to armor a human body in a rigid substance is an exceedingly solved problem: quite a few cultures have tackled this particular …

Finished reading: Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman is a great companion to Four Thousand Weeks (my favourite non-fiction book of 2022). I followed the author’s suggestion and read a chapter a day to help the ideas percolate 📚

🏃‍♂️ New running shoe day!

Finished reading: Fire Exit: A Novel by Morgan Talty is a good book about the importance of knowing your family’s stories 📚

My son and I enjoyed listening to Ryan Holiday elaborate on the importance of stoicism for everyday life.

A fun Mindscape episode with Brandon Ogbunu on Fitness Seascapes and the Course of Evolution

🔗 My Experiment to Eliminate Read-It-Later Backlog Stress Every so often, I audit every information source I’m subscribed to. I ask three simple questions I picked up from the late Jim Rohn: Who am I allowing to speak into my life? What effect is that having on me? Is that ok? There are a lot of …

🎧 Having switched back to Albums (again) for music, I’m discovering what a mess my Apple Music library has become. I’ve got duplicate tracks within albums, duplicate albums, incorrect metadata, and all sorts of nonsense. Really tempting to just delete my entire music library and start …

🪓 We had great fun at last night’s Axe Pancreatic Cancer event. We started the event ten years ago to raise awareness and funds, after my Mom’s short battle with the disease. So gratifying and amazing to see what the event has become, especially under the stewardship of Pancreatic Cancer Canada.

Finished reading: In The Antidote, Oliver Burkeman makes a lot of sense to me about how to live sensibly and genuinely 📚

🏃‍♂️ Thinking about my grandmother on today’s run. She was a bright spark and warm hug for 100 years 😢

Finished reading: For You by Patrick Rhone is full of wisdom in short chapters. I read one every couple of days to let the ideas percolate before rushing to the next chapter📚

Finished reading: Superintelligence: Is Canada Ready for AI? by The Logic is a nice overview of the state of AI in Canada 📚

🍁 Some good red trees on the street this year

🏃‍♂️ Lovely weather for a run

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 20/20

🏊‍♂️ 🚴 🏃‍♂️ Here we go again!

George the rufferree 👻

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 19/20

Finished reading: Fleeced by Andrew Spence will make you mad at the Canadian banks, though he also offers suggestions for fixing the sector📚

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 18/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 17/20

🔗 E-dayism - Paul Wells We are being given a runaround. When a party wins an election, its victory excuses every mistake or excess for years before the election. We won, didn’t we? Any new criticism is interpreted as sour grapes or denial of the result: the purest illustration of one day dominating …

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 16/20

Finished reading: As a Gen X, I unironically enjoyed Chuck Klosterman’s entertaining and nostalgic analysis of The Nineties 📚

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 15/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 14/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 13/20

🎶 Emerging from a delightful revisiting of The Tragically Hip. It started with this episode of the Strombo show, moved through the No Dress Rehearsal series, and ended with the Long Time Running documentary, all accompanied by their many albums. Gord Downie’s courage really is inspiring. There’s a …

Big changes coming to the local train station with upcoming residential development

Finished reading: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh is really good📚

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 12/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 11/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 10/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 9/20

🍁 Starting to feel like Fall on today’s run 🏃‍♂️

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 8/20

🎵 Fate & Alcohol by Japandroids will cheer you up

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 7/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 6/20

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 5/20

Really shouldn’t encourage this. George will get much bigger

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 4/20

Finished reading: The Armageddon Protocol by Dan Moren finishes a fun series 📚

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 3/20

Out for a stroll

I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 2/20

🔗 Walport ahoy! - Paul Wells Walport couldn’t help noticing that Canada is a sucking black hole for information-sharing, although I bet he never imagined his own report would gather dust for half a year for no reason anyone has ever explained nor ever will. This is too important to not be taken …

🎵 Inspired by Camiel Schoonens, I’m posting 20 album covers (one per day) that have shaped my music preferences. No explanations or commentary, just the cover image. 1/20

🏃‍♂️ Preparing for this weekend’s gluttony with an easy (mostly) trail run

🏃‍♂️ I was very lucky to win a pair of Arc’teryx Norvans at the recent Truth & Reconciliation Trail Run. I picked them up today and look forward to trying them out. Big thanks to Arc’teryx for the support!

Finished reading: The Fires of Heaven by Robert Jordan. I’m simultaneously delighted and intimidated by how long these books are and how many of them are left to go 📚

I appreciate new customisation options in iOS 18 for the Control Centre, mostly so that I can remove many of the controls. That said, I took the opportunity to add a control to launch a daily meditation session. The associated shortcut switches to Do Not Disturb and launches directly into the …

The Unraveling of Space-Time series in Quanta Magazine is fascinating. Our universe is a strange place

🏃‍♂️ The 3rd Annual Truth & Reconciliation Trail Run in support of Anduhyaun Women’s Shelter was great, though difficult, fun. Lots of hills on this one

George had a busy day

🔗 How to Choose The Best Methods for your Health and Performance // David Lipman So don’t go jumping onto the latest trend, especially not if it’s been around for less time than it takes for your eggs to go bad in the fridge. When any new method arrives, it is worth spending some time evaluating …

📖 Hooray!

Finished reading: The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik is a good end to a great series 📚

🏃‍♂️ Tried a new trail near the in-law’s house for today’s run

🏊‍♂️ I tried the new structured swim workout this morning in watchOS 11. I appreciated not needing to remember the details about intervals or mentally tracking my laps. Unfortunately I can’t “accidentally” misread the clock anymore for extra rest 😀

The Experiments in Having No Head series in Waking Up from Richard Lang are great. So, I’m glad to see new sessions added

I still really like my iPhone 13 mini. My only challenge is with battery life, since the mini size necessarily means a smaller battery. Now that I have a separate work phone, I’m experimenting with my personal phone automatically enabling low battery mode when switching to my work focus. Now I …

The YouTube algorithm pulled me into a stream of Apple Watch Ultra videos that I was too tired to resist. This one from Brian Talbot resonated the most with me. It isn’t about the specs and features; it’s about the freedom

🏃‍♂️ 8 minute zone 3 repeats on today’s run. Feels like summer out there

🏃‍♂️ Back on a track for this morning’s run. I’ve been away from speed work for too long.

Finished reading: I enjoyed the rich detail of The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison. I think you need to have liked The Goblin Emperor (which I did) to appreciate this one though📚

📺 Sunny (2024) - ★★★☆☆ The first half was okay and then kind of falls apart. Although not a surprise, the last scene was unnecessary

I really like the idea of the unified inbox in the new Reeder and for $1/month I’m very happy to try it out in practice

We said goodbye to Lucy today. She was a good dog, great companion, and will be missed 😢

George did not appreciate the short-lived experiment with a life jacket

Going to be tough to leave

Coming to the end of a great vacation

Finished reading: The Long War by Stephen Baxter is okay. Not nearly as interesting as the first book in the series and has a rather meandering plot 📚

Finished reading: I mostly enjoyed The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz. Great world building across thousands of years and interesting ideas. The middle third dragged a bit though 📚

🏃‍♂️ Coming across this World War 1 monument, seemingly in the middle of nowhere while running on a country road, was a good reminder of the sacrifices people have made for us

🎵 Although more cheerful than the last few albums, Wild God by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds is still steeped in spiritual yearning

Finished reading: A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers is delightful. The Monk and Robot series is fun. Sort of like a mirror universe Murderbot📚

Finished reading: The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker is richly detailed with interesting characters and intriguing plot. A nice sequel to The Golem and the Jinni 📚

🏃‍♂️ I find it easier to keep good form at faster paces. So, practicing staying tall at a more moderate pace

🏃‍♂️ Inspired by finishing The Lost Art of Running to pay attention to my form. For this run I focused on running tall and looking forward. Tough to maintain on the hills

Finished reading: The Lost Art of Running by Shane Benzie has lots of great anecdotes and tips. I know my running form could be better and this book has both inspired and empowered me to improve 📚

A new mug from my daughter, along with some high expectations

A top ten favourite feature of iOS 18: eliminating those pesky clipboard alerts

Calm after a storm ⛈️

Finished reading: Starter Villain by John Scalzi is a fun, easy vacation read 📚

🎵 no name is distilled Jack White

Finished reading: Provenance by Ann Leckie is an entertaining political thriller in space. Nice to learn more about the universe beyond the Radchaai 📚

🏃‍♂️ All runs here are hill training

🏊‍♂️ The dogs are vigilant lifeguards while I swim

Finished reading: A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith is an entertaining and informative exploration of what is actually required to colonize space. A good counterbalance to all the sci-fi I’ve been reading 📚

Lunch companions

Chose a run over leisure

Finished reading: The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal is a good entry in the Lady Astronaut series. I enjoy these alternate histories of space exploration books📚

🏊‍♂️ The easing in continues

🏃‍♂️ Easing back into a routine

Finished reading: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky is a surprisingly amusing story about the robot apocalypse 📚

🎧 Given the rewrite of Overcast, I’m switching back from Apple Podcasts to try it out (yes, right on time). Although the audio engine is better and there are some other, nice refinements, I think my favourite feature of Overcast is that it just shows me a clean list of the podcasts I’ve …

Finished reading: Adam Frank cleverly uses interest in UFOs to get at the science of extraterrestrial life in The Little Book of Aliens 📚

Finished reading: Slow Productivity by Cal Newport has some interesting concepts for how to manage pseudo productivity. Almost makes me want to have the type of job that would allow me to really apply the advice 📚

Finished reading: Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin is a short, fascinating, and entertaining book all about black holes 📚

📺 Thoughts on recent television shows: Some short notes on recent seasons of shows that I’ve watched: Outer Range Season 2: Still nicely strange, though not as good as Season 1 Night Sky: A slow build with a sci-fi mystery. Sissy Spacek and JK Simmons are great. Clearly a second season was planned, but it ends okay for a one …

Finished reading: I enjoyed A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab. Moves briskly with an interesting plot, good characters, and intriguing magic system 📚

Finished reading: Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy is bleak, nihilistic, and compelling 📚

🔗 Matt Gurney: Anson Mount saved Star Trek Because Anson Mount saved Star Trek. And I’m not afraid to say so. In fact, I’m here to shout it from the rooftops: thank you, Anson Mount. You were just what we needed. I endorse this claim

As usual, against my better judgement, I’ve installed the public betas. I’m mostly interested in the new fitness features of watchOS 11. Although I already have something like Training Load in the HealthFit app, Apple’s take is intriguing. For me it is the simple things, like …

Finished reading: The Rise and Reign of the Mammals by Steve Brusatte is a comprehensive and detailed tour of all of the mammals, past and present, that stays engaging. Such tremendous diversity and curious lifestyles 📚

Dog couch

Finished reading: The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson is a good ending to The Wax and Wayne series. Although the Cosmere hints were intriguing, they also got a bit confusing. Presumably to be clarified in later books 📚

🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️ 2024 Muskoka Ironman 70.3: Well that was “fun”! The Muskoka Ironman 70.3 was very well organized with great volunteers and an excited crowd of spectators. I was within a few minutes of last year which I’m very happy with, considering the interruptions to my training with a trip to Portugal and introduction …

🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️ Getting ready

Finished reading: The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson is a fun continuation of the series. Intriguing to see the world of Elendel open up to a wider perspective 📚

George discovered digging. So George had his first bath

Finished reading: Justin Trudeau on the Ropes by Paul Wells is a short, informative, entertaining, and timely look at Justin Trudeau’s tenure as Prime Minister 📚

Finished reading: As Gods by Matthew Cobb is a really good look at the science, politics, and ethics of genetic engineering 📚

🎧 I’ve been enjoying The Universe podcast: a fun conversation about astrophysics. Katie Mack is great at explanation and John Green is a good audience stand in

Finished reading: Hexarchate Stories by Yoon Ha Lee contains lots of fun stories. Only make sense though if you’ve read the series 📚

Training load and rest days on the Apple Watch are nice improvements. I’m curious to explore the Vitals App too

Finished reading: Witch King by Martha Wells is good. I enjoyed the clever interweaving of the two time periods and the vivid world building 📚

Maybe not enemies

🔗 “Worse than I’ve ever seen” - Paul Wells I’m not here this week to tell a story of despair. I was impressed by what I saw of the Alberta government reponse to the opioid crisis, which reflects a level of ambition and concerted effort over time that I rarely see in government …

Welcoming George to our family So far Lucy is mostly ignoring him

🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️ 2024 Milton Sprint Triathlon: My third year in a row for this one and, despite pouring rain for the entire race, it was still fun and well organized. My times across the three have been within minutes of each other. Although this one was slowest of the three, given the conditions, I’m happy with the overall results and ended up …

🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️ Ready for tomorrow

🇵🇹 Lisbon trip: The second half of our Portugal trip was fun too. We stayed in São Vicente, to the east of the historical core. Lisbon is certainly bigger than Porto, so we used the transit system much more extensively and the Lisbon cards came in really handy with their access to transit and attraction discounts …

Finished reading: The Dog Sitter Detective by Antony Johnston is an entertaining and easy to read murder mystery 📚

Finished reading: The Narrow Road Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss is a fun interlude of the Kingkiller Chronicle series 📚

Finished reading: Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie is a good continuation of a great series. Includes some interesting ideas about AI 📚

Finished reading: Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson has a good twist on the humans-colonizing-other-worlds narrative, along with his usual, highly technical descriptions 📚

🇵🇹 Porto trip: The Porto half of our Portugal trip was great fun. We stayed on the west side of Bonfim, relatively close to the historic district and walked (seemingly) all over Porto. The one exception was taking the 500 bus out to the ocean for the afternoon. We also took a day trip out to the Douro Valley for a …

🏃‍♂️ Today’s run was a fun exploration of Porto

Gorgeous views in Porto. We’re having a great first day here

🔗 Variations on the Theme of Silence Silences that close us off, refusing connection, shoring up the ego at others’ expense—those are dead silences. But the letting-go sort, the silences that hold space or keep vigil for someone else? They are alive.

🏃‍♂️ Nice to be mostly on trails for today’s run

🎧 Perfect albums: On Hemispheric Views 110, Jason asked: Pick in your mind a perfect album. And I think it’s mostly open to interpretation, but I’m kind of thinking an album that you would say you could just start from beginning, let it run all the way through, without skipping songs, without moving …

Finished reading: The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter is entertaining. Takes a relatively simple premise about parallel worlds and really works through the implications 📚

🏃‍♂️ A misty run this morning

🚴‍♂️ Nice to get out of the basement for a proper ride outside. First one of the season! The coffe and pastries halfway through were very helpful.

Finished reading: Jinx by Matt Gemmell is a fun read. I enjoy these characters and the settings Gemmell places them in 📚

📷 Day 22 of the April Photoblogging Challenge Blue

📷 Day 21 of the April Photoblogging Challenge Mountain

📷 Day 20 of the April Photoblogging Challenge Ice

📷 Day 19 of the April Photoblogging Challenge Birthday

📷 Day 18 of the April Photoblogging Challenge Mood

📷 Day 17 of the April Photoblogging Challenge Transcendence

📷 Day 14 of the April Photoblogging Challenge Cactus

🏃‍♂️ Classic spring weather on today’s run: started with rain and then cleared up into a sunny day 🌧️🕶️

📷 Day 13 of the April Photoblogging Challenge: Page

📷 Day 10 Morning commute on the train

📷 Day 9 Crispy

Finished reading: Although it took two library loan periods, I made it through The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan. Having made it this far, I’m sure to get through all of the books now, even though there are many to go 📚

📷 Day 08 Prevention

📷 Day 07 Signs of spring in my backyard helps with well being

📷 Day 06 Windy

🍺 Collective Arts Hazy State Session IPA

📷 Day 05 Serene

Finished reading: If you want a very detailed resource on how to do CBAs, especially for public sector projects, Cost-benefit analysis of investment decisions by Glenn Jenkins, Chun-Yan Kuo, and Arnold Harberger is the book for you. That said, you really need to want details – you’ve …

📷 Day 04 Foliage

📷 Day 03 A well targeted card from my children

🏃‍♂️ New running shoe day

📷 Day 02 Flowers

📷 Day 1: Toy

Finished reading: I can’t decide if I liked Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. The first book of the series, Gideon the Ninth, was one of my favourite books of 2021. The second, Harrow the Ninth, was frustratingly confusing. Nona was similarly challenging: lots of names, hints of conversations, and plot …

🏃‍♂️ Dynamic run training in Training Today: I’ve been using Training Today for a while now to track my readiness to train (RTT). They’ve recently released a new feature that provides dynamic training for running based on RTT which takes into account your current recovery and health to make sure you don’t overtrain. Generating the workouts is …

🏃‍♂️ Part of today’s trail run was mostly made of broken bricks

🏃‍♂️ Today’s run burned off the last of the March Break cervezas. Back on the program tomorrow

🎵 Right Back To It - Waxahatchee is a stand out song on a great album

Such nerdy fun

Finished reading: Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson continues this entertaining series. A nice break from the “heavier” fantasy books 📚

Finished reading: I enjoyed Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson. Some of his usual attention to detail without getting too dry and a nice emphasis on Chinese culture and history📚

Finished reading: Although difficult to describe, I enjoyed The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada. A strange, slightly creepy story about modern work life 📚

Finished reading: The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik is a great sequel to A Deadly Education 📚

Finished reading: Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston is more fun than you might expect📚

Finished reading: My Murder by Katie Williams has an intriguing premise, good twists, and is well written. A great book📚

My plan for the week

Finished reading: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older is a fun, short murder mystery on a gas giant planet 📚

Finished reading: I enjoyed My Effin' Life by Geddy Lee more than I expected. A great testament to hard working, talented friends. Also a great excuse to revisit Rush’s music. I’d missed their last few albums and it was a pleasant surprise to discover them📚

A toasted old fashioned kind of night

Trying to avoid Apple’s Journal app 📔: I have 9,698 entries in DayOne across 4,312 days. This is one of my favourite and most consistently used apps. And, yet, somehow I am tempted to switch to Apple’s Journal app. This post is to remind me why that is a bad idea. So, here’s a list of DayOne features I use that Journal doesn’t have: I …

🏃‍♂️ Misty run today

🔗 How to Talk to Whales - The Atlantic This would be a first-contact scenario involving two species that have lived side by side for ages. I wanted to imagine how it could unfold. I reached out to marine biologists, field scientists who specialize in whales, paleontologists, professors of …

🎵 TANGK - Idles I’m enjoying their new sound

🔗 “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel | Strong Songs: A Podcast About Music Strong Songs Season Six kicks off with a widely requested classic: Peter Gabriel’s 1986 yearner “In Your Eyes.” Because why hire one rhythm section when you can hire two for twice the price? 🎧 A …

Finished reading: Although I’m far from having a crisis, I’m well into midlife. So, Midlife by Kieran Setiya was a powerful book. I could relate, when Setiya describes what he expects to feel after he finishes writing the book: If experience is anything to go by, the hole will be filled soon …

🏃‍♂️ Back to cold, snow, and ice on today’s run

Investing in the MacSparky Productivity Field Guide ✅ : There is absolutely no shortage of productivity methods and content out there, especially in the “influencer” racket. I’m quite sure that there is no one true way to be productive. In fact, I think there’s some merit to switching up my approach on occasion, just to reinvigorate my interest. To that …

🔗 The strange and turbulent global world of ant geopolitics What is surprising is how poorly we still understand global ant societies: there is a science-fiction epic going on under our feet, an alien geopolitics being negotiated by the 20 quadrillion ants living on Earth today. It might seem like …

Finished reading: I enjoyed Making It So by Patrick Stewart. Although not as much Captain Picard as some Trekkies might want, I appreciated the broader view of his career 📚

Great video from Casey Neistat. I too, somehow, continue to get older and am trying to hold on to some goals.

🏃‍♂️ Mostly trails on today’s run

🏃‍♂️ Nice to see some sun on today’s run along the Leslie Spit

📚 These Wheel of Time books are long! I only got 1/3 of the way through The Shadow Rising before the library loan ended

🚴‍♂️ Great crew for a ride up both sides of Achterbahn

Finished reading: System Collapse by Martha Wells is another fun book in a great series📚

Finished reading: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury is rather strange. Some really lovely, poetic passages about the tranquility and beauty of Mars, coupled with buffoonish characters from Earth. I totally get this could be intentional, though it is jarring 📚

Finished reading: The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1] by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn is a remarkable book. I’ve never really comprehended the Stalin-era purges. Solzhenitsyn’s dark humour and extensive narrative details really helped make them feel horrifyingly real 📚

🏃‍♂️ Found some company on today’s run

🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️ Fitness in 2023: I kept busy in 2023 with triathlon training. As a reference point for next year, here’s a comparison of 2023 with 2022. My running was surprisingly consistent. Although the totals are almost identical, I do think that my structured workouts were much better in 2023. Each run had a purpose and …

New books for the new year 📚

🥶 Shortest and coldest swim of the year

Year in books for 2023: I read some great books in 2023. My favourite fiction book was The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. Non-fiction was Enemy of All Mankind by Steven Johnson.

Finished reading: Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaikovsky is a good end to a fun series. I enjoyed the world building and premise of the trilogy which doesn’t get too serious 📚

Finished reading: Against the Grain by James C. Scott is a really interesting exploration of the links between agriculture and state building. Definitely changed my mind about early state formation 📚

We had a fun family night out to see the Candlelight Tribute to Taylor Swift at Longboat Hall. Interesting to hear the music reinterpreted by these talented musicians

🎵 Will Butler + Sister Squares - Will Butler + Sister Squares I’m enjoying this one

The new Apple Watch integration with Training Peaks is really nice. Like my Garmin friends, I can finally just roll out of bed and do what my watch tell me to without having to manually create workouts 🏊🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️

DayOne has integrated Journaling Suggestions already. A nice addition and now there’s no compelling reason to use the new Apple Journal app. I liked the promised simplicity of the new app, only to find it too simple. My journal is extended memory, so I rely on search, which isn’t in the …

Lucy tried the gecko food. Didn’t work well with her system, but she has no regrets

🏃‍♂️ Forgot to turn off the workout before getting back in the car. Got some impressive running paces! 😀

Nice addition to HealthFit: a visual summary of training load to see if you’re optimizing stress and recovery

🏊 🚴‍♂️ 🏃‍♂️ Alright, signed up for the Ironman 70.3 in Muskoka. I enjoyed the race last year and look forward to a repeat

Even more defaults: As a follow up to my Duel of the Defaults post, I’ve made a few changes. These are all based on further adopting app defaults to simplify things. 📰 RSS: I’ve swapped out Feedbin for iCloud as the backend for NetNewsWire. Although I really like the Feedbin service, my primary use of it …

🎄 Tree is up and decorated

🏃‍♂️ Light rain, wind, and NIN playlist made for a gloomy ambience on today’s run

I don’t understand Apple’s algorithms. There’s no way I listened to 100 Gecs Boiler Room Session 51 times. Once was fun, but it is 1 hour and 26 minutes long. I would remember listening to it that many times

🏃‍♂️ A bit gloomy on today’s off the bike run

Trying out a new home screen with my personal focus. Screen Time at the top left to keep me honest and Day One on the top right to make journaling easy. I’m testing out relying on Siri suggestions as a large widget which is working out well, so far. Just Notes in the dock with everything else …

🔗 How paltry the return by Jen Gerson “Now more than ever, soft and hard power are important,” Joly noted, correctly, ignoring the fact that Canada increasingly has neither, and doesn’t seem to be doing much about that. Making a good case that we don’t take ourselves seriously anymore

Finished reading: I’ll admit that I was hesitant to read Mistborn: Secret History by Brandon Sanderson. The original Mistborn trilogy came to a satisfying end for me and I knew that reading this book would open up to the whole Cosmere universe. I’ve simply decided that I don’t need …

In a pleasant surprise, my cellular carrier just boosted by monthly 4GB to 20GB at no cost. I’m not accustomed to this kind of good customer service from a carrier

Finished reading: All Souls Lost by Dan Moren is fun. Has the same lightly humorous tone as the Bayern Agenda series with a supernatural, rather than sci-fi, plot 📚

Hmm, I beg to differ Apple Music

I’m not ready ❄️

Finished reading: The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin is a great follow up to A Wizard of Earthsea that adds depth to the world of Earthsea📚

🦎 We have a new houseguest

🏃‍♂️ Frosty out there on today’s trail run

🎵 Who Can See Forever Soundtrack (Live) - Iron & Wine is a good one

🏃‍♂️ Another Thursday, so another hill repeat run. Note to self, next time don’t start the repeats at the bottom of a big hill. The cool down run back up the hill wasn’t fun.

Finished reading: I really enjoyed Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Great characters and good story. Although I’m not steeped in gamer culture, you don’t need to be to follow along📚

Although it seems frivolous, my favourite new feature of WatchOS 10 is the Snoopy watch face. I have it set as my weeknight and weekend face, and enjoy its whimsy. A nice break from my serious work watch face, full of calendar events and reminders.

🏃‍♂️ Felt winter coming on today’s run with temperatures hovering around freezing

🎵 Dirt - Alice in Chains Best opening of any grunge album

🔗 David Enoch argues that much of the public discourse on the Israel-Hamas conflict is depressingly simplistic Perhaps moral philosophers can contribute to public discourse even now—for instance, in thinking about how decisions should be made given the tremendous uncertainty involved, or to insist …

🏃‍♂️ Hill repeats at a steady, moderate pace for today’s run. I tried to focus on my downhill form: staying loose and keeping ground contact time short

🎵 Find A Way Home by MxPx is a fun punk rock album

Finished reading: American Moonshot by Douglas Brinkley. I’ve read several books about the Apollo missions, all of them focused on the science and engineering. This book is a fascinating look at the politics and JFK’s indispensable leadership. 🚀📚

Non-default apps: As a follow up to my list of default apps, I have a few non-default apps that weren’t on the original list from Hemispheric Views. 🏃‍♂️Fitness: As I wrote about recently, I use HealthFit (mostly) instead of Apple Fitness 🧘 Meditation: Waking Up, instead of Mindfulness 📓 Journal: Doesn’t count yet, …

Duel of the Defaults: My List: Episode 097 of the Hemispheric Views podcast held a fun Duel of the Defaults! competition. Here’s my list. I’ve really shifted to defaults over the past year. I’m conflicted about this: I really like a good indie app, yet find my needs don’t justify the complexity of using non-defaults. ✉️ Mail …

📺 The Night Manager (2016) - ★★★☆☆ A good show. I binge-watched it over the weekend while recovering from a nasty cold. Hiddleston and Laurie are both great

Finished reading: The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson is fun. A nice break from the epic storytelling of the previous series. The Sherlock Holmes meets Western lawman vibe fits in well with the allomancy 📚

Finished reading: Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky continues a great series. Interesting and diverse aliens, cosmic scale mysteries, and against all odds, plucky humans 📚

New running shoe day! After 1,109 kms, I’m replacing the orange ones with another pair of Saucony Kinvara. I definitely don’t recommend waiting so long, just got distracted 🏃‍♂️

Choosing a portfolio of fitness apps 🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️: There’s a bewildering array of fitness apps out there. Here’s an attempt to document what I’m currently using. I have some criteria when considering a fitness app: Available on the Apple Watch, ideally as a first class app, rather than just presenting data from the phone Suitable for multisport. …

Finished reading: Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson is pretty good. Nowhere near as visionary as Anathem or Seveneves, though tighter than _Fall; or Dodge in Hell_📚

🍿 I enjoyed Fathom (2021), a documentary about attempts to communicate with whales. Pairs well with Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs

Day 30: Treasure

Day 29: Contrast

Day 28: Workout

In Search of Lost Time, by Tom Vanderbilt is delightful Yet the more precisely time is measured, the less it starts to feel like time at all.

🚂 Importance of Transportation Funding: Framing the Issues: Discussions about transit often end up about funding. To help make these discussions productive, I was pleased to co-author a paper through the Transportation Association of Canada titled Importance of Transportation Funding: Framing the Issues. Working on this with David Kriger, Nick Lovett, …

This didn’t last long. When using Apple Podcasts to listen to Apple Music radio, you don’t see album art and can’t easily add music to your library. Discovery is my main use case. So, though I like the idea of this integration, in practice it doesn’t suit my needs 🎵

Day 27: Embrace

Switching podcast apps, again 🎧 : As predicted, after a couple of months with the Apple Podcasts app, I’m back to Overcast. I think that Apple’s Podcasts app is great for anyone new to podcasts, given it has a strong focus on discovering new shows. I’m looking for a podcast app that simply plays my carefully …

Day 26: Beverage

Day 25: Flare

Day 24: Belt

Finished reading: The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy by Tom Chivers is an entertaining and interesting book about AI risks and the Rationalists that worry about them 📚

🏃‍♂️ Starting to see the Fall colour changes on today’s run. Powered by PUP and Rage Against the Machine

Starting Fall with a pumpkin ale from Lake of Bays brewery

Day 23: A day in the life. Enjoying the nice Fall weather outside with a good book

Day 22: Road

🚴‍♂️ Likely the last ride of the season with this crew. Getting too dark! Unfortunately we had to end early, thanks to a flat tire.

Sunrises are a nice benefit of getting up early

Day 21: Fall

Day 20: Disruption

Day 19: Edge

GPS Watch? No Thanks. Top Runners Are Ditching the Data. For many, GPS watches are a remarkably useful training tool. But there are other runners, including world-class runners like Jacobs, who have a hard time understanding the fuss. To them, a smorgasbord of data is more hindrance than help. And …

Day 18: Fabric

Day 17: Intense

Interesting guest column by Reg Whitaker in Wesley Wark’s National Security and Intelligence Newsletter The leading physicists mobilized in the Manhattan Project were on the one hand applying intelligence in the sense of the same pure quest for knowledge that had driven the discoveries of …

🏃‍♂️ Today’s run was an endurance run with a progressive fast finish. I tried breathing through my nose for the first hour to keep things slow. Powered by Billy Talent and Beastie Boys

📺 I enjoyed Foundation Season 2. A good part of that enjoyment requires letting go of the original books and embracing this reinterpretation

Finished reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler has so many fascinating ideas about consciousness, intelligence, and language embedded in a good story about a community of octopuses. I really enjoyed this one📚

Day 16: Oof!

Day 15: Red

Day 14: Statue

Day 13: Glowing

Day 12: Panic

Day 11: Retrospect

Day 10: Cycle

Finished reading: Earthseed by Octavia E. Butler is a powerful story that is surprisingly optimistic for a dystopia 📚

Day 9: Language

Day 8: Yonder

Day 7: Panorama

Almost BBQ’d a mouse! Spotted it just as I was turning on the burner.

Day 6: Well

Day 5: Forest

Day 4: Orange

Day 3: Precious

Day 2: Buildup

Not a great start to Season 2 of Invasion. The ease with which Mitsuki easily dispatches a half dozen invaders doesn’t suggest much jeapordy. I really liked the initial mystery and slow build of the first half of Season 1. So, will stick with Season 2 for now 📺

Day 1: Abstract

Finished reading: The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison is a great story about an outsider being thrust into power and the decisions they need to make without compromising their ideals 📚

Photos of a dog at a cottage: Lucy enjoyed her time at the cottage

The only perk of returning home from a cottage vacation is that I got to watch the season finale of Strange New Worlds. Great show! 🖖

Last night of vacation

I’ve been making an effort to listen to the Moments in Waking Up when the randomly timed notifications come in. This one resonated with me today: “We too have problems that cannot be solved by more thinking”

Finished reading: I really enjoyed Hands of Time by Rebecca Struthers. Although notionally about mechanical watches, there’s also interesting ideas about time, building things by hand, and focusing on what really matters. The book also resurrected an internal debate about the Apple Watch vs …

Finished reading: Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson finishes the remarkable trilogy. Robinson’s meticulous detail (though occasionally overwhelming) really brings Mars to life, along with compelling characters and ideas. Although I sympathize with the “reds”, I think the series ended appropriately 📚

I’m disappointed that Amazon cancelled The Peripheral. Season 1 was really good 📺

The owner of the cottage we’re renting just switched to StarLink. We’ve gone from 1 Mbps to 10. Nothing like the 1,000 we’re used to at home, though more than enough for lounging around the cottage. The only trouble we had before was that music streaming was unreliable.

Exploring the lake 🛶

Every night!

Found another long run loop 🏃‍♂️

Finished reading: I enjoyed The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan. I’m simultaneously pleased and daunted by the number of books left in this series 📚

My longest swim yet 🏊‍♂️

Finished reading: Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky is a great start to the series. I enjoy a good story about plucky humans taking on powerful and mysterious aliens with inscrutable motivations 📚

Tried a new route today 🏃‍♂️

Finished reading: Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson is a compelling and richly detailed story about a prehistoric tribe. Since I’m on vacation at a cottage in the woods, I felt a stronger connection with the world of the book than I might have at home 📚

Vacation is going well

Kids are having fun on the vacation

Finished reading: I enjoyed the evil, killer Hogwarts of A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik 📚

Highlight of the vacation is having access to a lake and the time for longer swims 🏊‍♂️

This will do

Found a WWI monument on today’s run. Despite their age, these are still important reminders of sacrifice

Finished reading: I really enjoyed The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier. I think this is the first story I’ve read that really explores the implications of the simulation hypothesis 📚

Finished reading: The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan continues the imaginative and entertaining series 📚

We screeched into the start of this vacation as a smoking pile of rubble after several intense months of work. Time to refresh and recuperate

Impressive harvest from kid #2’s first attempt at a home garden

Relaxing

Found a good spot

Fascinating to spend some time with the K-9 unit today. The dogs are so focused and enthused about the tasks.

Huntsville 70.3 Ironman notes 🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️: After a few weeks of recovery, here are a few notes on the Huntsville 70.3 Ironman. The short version (given there’s lots of details below) is that the course was fantastic, though very hilly, and I managed to shave 15 minutes from my last 70.3. Pre-race No surprises here. There were scheduled …

The End of Media by Paul Wells is an important and surprisingly entertaining series on the decline of media and corresponding rise of issues management in Canada

Finished reading: Dust by Hugh Howey is a good ending to the trilogy with a nice note of hope. I hadn’t enjoyed the second book in the series as much as the first, but Dust put it in perspective and I appreciate it better now 📚

Knob Creek On the Rocks Old Fashioned is tasty

Finished reading: Although very strange, I enjoyed The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss. There’s no need to read the book to understand the rest of the series and it wouldn’t make much sense as a standalone. Nonetheless, learning more about Auri and great writing make it worthwhile 📚

Peppers are ripening

Finished reading: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson is a satisfying end to an entertaining trilogy. I enjoyed the creative world building and interesting characters across the three books📚

A fun day on a challenging course for the Ironman 70.3 in Muskoka. I managed to cut 15 minutes from my PB. So, I’m happy, if rather sore

Registered and ready to go!

Essential travelling companions ☕️

Here we go again 🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️

Hard to believe that I’ve been blogging for 20 years. I’ve never been prolific and there’s a big dip through 2013 to 2016 when Twitter dominated. But, I’m really glad to have stuck with this.

📺 Silo (2023) - ★★★☆☆ A good show. I’d enjoyed the first book (not so much the 2nd, haven’t read the 3rd). The show is consistent with the book, while making good changes

Fun to see Toronto playing itself, rather than New York, in S2E3 of Strange New Worlds, complete with the omnipresent construction cones 🖖 📺

Finished reading: Shape by Jordan Ellenberg is a delightfully meandering book about geometry and why it is important. The book is much more about people than math. Well worth reading 📚

The Three Body Problem series is one of my favourites for mind-bending ideas. So, I’m really curious to see how this new Netflix series portrays the books.

Simplifying my personal iPhone: Now that I’ve separated my work and personal iPhones, I’m taking some time to simplify my personal device. The biggest change is that for work, I’m now fully into the Office 365 product. So, email in Outlook, tasks in To Do, and notes in OneNote. Although I really liked using …

🎵 I’ve been enjoying New Mythology from Nick Mulvey.

🏃‍♂️ Today’s run had no distance or pace goal. A run with no plan is usually a bad idea. This one ended up being longer than it likely should have been

Training Peaks integration with Apple Workouts in WatchOS 10 is a big deal! I’ve been creating custom workouts on my watch for a while now. This will be a lot easier.

I like the new design direction in WatchOS 10. I always wanted the Siri watch face to work and this new approach seems similar and, hopefully, will actually surface relevant details.

Milton Sprint Triathlon 🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️: That was fun! Really well organized, friendly racers, and great weather. There were 466 racers, though other than the parking lot, it didn’t seem crowded. Swim Mass start by age group for the swim. Temperature was quite nice. Other than an elbow to the nose coming around the last buoy, a …

I enjoy the packing. Helps calm the pre-race nerves

I find “compress the history of the universe or humanity down into a number line” projects compelling. This one is particularly well done (via Kottke)

☎️ 😱 Living dangerously for seven years with a corporate phone: For seven years now, I’ve been living dangerously by only using my corporate phone for everything. I knew this was wrong, yet couldn’t resist, until this week. There were only two, day-to-day negative impacts of relying on a corporate phone. The first, admittedly minor, though …

🚨Warning🚨 Contains highly addictive substances. Open with extreme caution

Finished reading: The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss is a good second book in the series. The long, imaginative fantasy narrative is exactly what I was looking for in a book 📚

🥱 This justifies a nap

🎵 Simply the Best by Tina Turner was a staple in my childhood home. My Dad had one of her concerts on VHS and watched it frequently. For this song, in particular, he turned up the volume quite loud

🏃‍♂️Nice zone 2 run with some pickups

Lettuce seeds are germinating. We might have lots of salads to eat in a few months

Finished reading: An Emergency in Ottawa by Paul Wells is a good, short read on a very consequential period in recent Canadian history 📚

On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. – Charles Babbage

🎵 Don’t Test the Pest by Pest Control will give you the kick in the pants that you might need to get going

🎵 Perhaps In Sides is Orbital’s best album? I could listen to The Box, Pt. 2 on repeat for a while

Finished reading: Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells is another fun, short Murderbot story. I like that these are staying simple and sarcastic📚

Best feature of the hotel: two fresh pancakes with the press of a button

Finished reading: Enemy of All Mankind by Steven Johnson is fascinating. The importance of a seemingly small incident is really well explained and shows how such a thing can reverberate through history 📚

Finished reading: The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef includes some good tips for keeping an open mind and incorporating constructive feedback 📚

Glow in the dark mini golf

📺 Star Trek: Picard (Season 3) - ★★★★☆ Definitely the best of the three seasons. Leverages a lot of nostalgia which is okay with me. Nice to clean up after the Nemesis debacle and give these characters a proper ending.

So impressed with this team. My niece has been great in net. 🥅🏒

Finished reading: A Beginner’s Guide to the End by B. J. Miller and Shoshana Berger. I’m grateful that I didn’t need to read this book now. That said, this is an important topic, best thought about when it isn’t an emergency. Despite a few America-specific points that …

🎵 10,000 gecs - 100 gecs - ★★★☆☆ A good workout album: fun, quirky, and upbeat

🏃‍♂️ Good trail on today’s long run. Fun to slog through mud on occasion

We enjoyed the Stranger Things Experience. A fun mix of live, interactive action and pre-filmed material.

A nice view for my cycling avatar that makes me keen for winter to end. I’m looking forward to riding outside again 🚴

Day 31: Practice

Day 30: Mirror

Day 29: Slice

Day 28: Prompt

Day 27: Support

Day 26: Instrument

The whimsy of Zwift distracts from the difficulty 🚴‍♂️

Day 25: Spice

Day 24: Court

Day 23: Chance

Day 22: Insect

Day 21: Tiny

Day 20: Houseplant

Day 19: Analog

📺 Servant (2019) - ★★★☆☆ A good show. Relies pretty heavily on creepy mood, rather than plot, and dark humour.

Finished reading: The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul is full of great content. I was much more cerebral in my youth and have been externalizing thought much more productively recently. This book helps confirm the approach and adds new techniques 📚

Day 18: Portico

Day 17: Early

Day 16: Road

Day 15: Patience

Day 14: Horizon

Day 13: Connection

Finished reading: The Last Druid by Terry Brooks. I’ll confess to reading this only to finish off the entire Shannara collection. This is the fourth book in the The Fall of Shannara series and much better than the middle two, which seemed far too rote. The original series is still my favourite, …

🎵 Citizen of Glass - Agnes Obel - ★★★★☆ Haunted by faeries

Day 12: Shiny

Day 11: Gimcrack

Day 10: Ritual

Day 9: Together

Day 8: Walk

Day 7: Whole

Day 6: Engineering

Time for a refill 🥃

Day 5: Tile

Day 4: Zip

Day 3: Solitude

Day 2: Weather

Day 1: Secure

Lucy is done for the day 💤

Finished reading: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is really good. I enjoyed the characters, world building, and narrative structure. I’m curious to read the next book, once I’ve finished a few other books in the reading queue📚

I found a new favourite Tequila at a tasting last night: El Tesoro Añejo

I’m looking forward to another season of The Joy of Why podcast. Great science content and Steven Strogatz is an enthusiastic host

Finished reading: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal is a fantastic alternative history of the space race. The sexism and racism in the story is infuriating (which is exactly the point). I’m looking forward to reading the next book📚

📺 Shining Girls (2022) - ★★★☆☆ A good mix of mystery and suspense with time travel and multiverse plot

Never a circle, but always delicious

Finished reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir was great fun. We should have more enthusiastic high school science teachers as heros in our stories📚

Well, guess I had a good sleep! Today is a rest day. So, peak performance includes sitting around and catching up on some TV 😀

🎶 After a last scrobble on Dec 4 2007, I’ve resurrected my Last FM account and connected it to the Albums app. This should encourage me to listen to more complete albums, while also tracking what I’m listening to. I’ll keep using the Apple Music app for those “in between …

📺 Season 1 of The Peripheral is good. I remember enjoying the book, but not enough of the details to worry about spoilers or notice any changes made in the show

What I think about when I say goodbye to my beloved dying pet But it was still deeply upsetting. My eyes started to water just writing about it. The good death of a beloved animal who has led a good life is both sad and OK. The inescapability of mortality means we have to accept it but we don’t …

Finished reading: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe by Sean Carroll. I really appreciated this book. Starting from high school math, Carroll leads you through 200 crisp and entertaining pages to actually show you how to derive Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. A nice middle ground …

Currently reading: All the Math You Missed by Thomas A. Garrity. I’m looking forward to this challenge 📚

Finished reading: Life Is Hard by Kieran Setiya is a good, pragmatic book about how philosophy can help you navigate difficult times. I appreciate Setiya’s easy going style and his approach is a good complement to Oliver Burkman’s practical advice 📚

Rules are for bad people - Paul Wells I was going to say Hussen should table one of two things: every piece of communications material that was ever produced for him by Munch More Media, or his resignation from the government. But I’m not sure why we can’t have both. Indeed

🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️ I’ve cancelled my Strava subscription. This isn’t directly caused by the price increase (though a 100% increase is big!), rather this was a good reason to reconsider the service. Most of the Strava features that I’ve found useful (detailed analytics for the most part) …

Articles like “We will never be able to live on another planet. Here’s why” highlight an important tension. As a fan of science fiction, I’m really excited by the prospect of space exploration and agree that, eventually, we need to find additional places to live and thrive. But: …

🎵 GMT - Jamie xx Remix - Oliver Sim - ★★★★☆ Thanks to the new HomePod video for reminding me of this song.

📺 Echo 3 (2022) - ★★☆☆☆ Decent entertainment: well made and acted. The story was relatively straightforward, until the last episode, which started to hint at trauma and consequences.

📺 The Boys (Season 2) - ★★★☆☆ Not quite as good as season 1, though still entertaining and outrageous

I was feeling a bit worn out. So, skipped this morning’s swim and slept in. This did wonders for my Readiness To Train score, which hadn’t been green for a week. A reminder, which should be unecessary, of the importance of rest.

🍿 Turning Red (2022) - ★★★☆☆

Finished reading: Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A fun read. I really liked the structure of alternating each chapter between fantasy and sci-fi, plus the story was intriguing 📚

Finished reading: Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer. A satisfying ending to the Terra Ignota series. I really enjoyed this series, though it can be a tough read. Jammed full of ideas and rich details, which can seem overwhelming at times. In the end, I’m not sure it was a successful novel, despite the …

🎧 The Essential Sam Harris is a well done, comprehensive set of podcast episodes that dive into the details of specific topics, including artificial intelligence, consciousness, and morality. I’ve enjoyed each one, so far

🎧 Interstellar jazz from Hyper Dimensional Expansion Beam will wake you up

📺 Slow Horses seasons 1 and 2 are both great. I enjoyed the sarcastic competence of the rejects at Slough House

Started 2023 with a polar bear swim 🥶. 0°C air temperature and 2°C in the water. Now we’re huddled by the fire to warm up 🔥

My 2022 focussed on fitness. Strava helpfully summarizes this as over 4,000 km travelled with 1,600 🏃‍♂️, 2,500 🚴‍♂️, and 100 🏊‍♂️. Plus 🏋️‍♂️ and essential 🧘‍♂️ sessions. I’ll build on this in 2023 while striving for balance

🏃‍♂️ Nice run along the river. I’m glad it has warmed up a bit

🎶 I listened to a lot of Nils Frahm this year. Slightly biased, perhaps, by his most recent album being over three hours long

Precarious

Great additions to my reading list. Family knows me well 📚

Reading more books in 2022 📚: I read many more books this year than in recent, past years. Although this was intentional, I’m glad it worked out. I really cut back on my various internet feeds, so that I was less distracted away from books. Purchasing a Kobo and connecting it to the local public library was also helpful. The …

Finished reading: Network Effect by Martha Wells. Murderbot is great! I’ll happily keep reading any books in this series 📚

Waiting for the train

Finished reading: The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson. This series has been really entertaining so far📚

Computation with marbles 🧮🧐: I’ve been interested for a while now in better understanding the underlying mechanics of computers. I’ve also been keen to do something other than stare at a screen. Turing Tumble is a fun solution to both of these goals. Turing Tumble is an educational game in which you build a …

Spotted on today’s run

📺 Although I was entertained by The Rings of Power, I agree with Bret Devereaux’s criticisms of the show that left it feeling hollow

🎧📺 A fun episode of the Strong Songs podcast about the great Andor TV series

Festive moose

Finished reading: I wanted to like The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen by Linda Colley. The main thesis is that as societies became more complex and conflicts more intense, governments needed to develop written constitutions to cede rights to their citizens and keep them participating in wars. I found …

🏃‍♂️ Running in fresh snow can be nice. The ambient noise of the city is muffled and the snow cushions your foot striking the ground ❄️

Finished reading: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. Well worth reading. I appreciated the absence of giant, apocalyptic battles and the focus on the maturation of a single wizard📚

🎄Decorating

🏃‍♂️ I expected the rain on today’s zone 2 trail run. The hail and wind gusts were a surprise. Hard to hold zone 2 while being pummelled by ice! 💨🌧️🥶

📺 I’m looking forward to season 2 of Slow Horses. Season 1 was a surprise favourite for me

🏃‍♂️An easy, zone 2 run today. Almost dark by 5pm

Likely doing this a few times today 😴

📺 Outer Range on Amazon Prime is pretty good. Mysterious and creepy with great Wyoming scenery. As with many shows like this, I worry that the premise can’t sustain more than a season. We’ll see with this one, though the last episode seemed to unravel quickly

🎵 A moody soundtrack to my afternoon

The legal test the government must pass: not was it right, but was it reasonable? The Constitution, it is said, is not a suicide pact. I would say it another way: the law is not an ass. Written between the lines of any statute is an abiding expectation of reasonableness.

🏃‍♂️ I’d planned for an easy zone 2 run this morning. Picked the wrong running group though. Time to update my zones anyway. I likely shouldn’t be able to hold zone 5 for so long

Time for a stout

Getting tense

Saturday night

Rediscovered Maybe It’s Me by Treble Charger in my music library. Instantly transported back to undergrad at university. I’m always impressed with how music anchors certain time periods 🎵

The new Checklists search attribute in Apple Notes is really helpful for my weekly reviews. I’ve setup a smart search that shows all of my recent notes that still have incomplete checklists. Great for finding those forgotten tasks in meeting notes 🗒️

Finished reading: The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark. A fun, short story📚

How much does a Triathlon cost? 🏊‍♂️ 🚴‍♂️ 🏃‍♂️💰: Other than knowing if I was physically capable of finishing, the main source of uncertainty when I signed up for my first triathlon was how much it would cost. Starting out, I had one pair of running shoes and some goggles from my kids' swimming lessons. So, I knew I’d need to invest in a lot …

Winter has arrived ❄️

Finished reading: Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge. A fun mix of murder mystery and sci-fi, in which groups of people emerge from thousands of years in stasis to find human civilization has vanished📚

Finished reading: A Short History of Canada by Desmond Morton. Somewhat like vegetables, I know that reading about national history is good for me, just not that exciting. That said, this book was well written and interesting. Now, back to sci-fi 📚

As a public servant for 15 years (and counting), I enjoy Yes, Minister on the BBC. More accurate than we’d like to believe #mbnov

I’m enjoying these Yoga for Every Runner sessions in Apple Fitness. I’m certain that mobility is important for staying active 🏃‍♂️

Although it is 8ºC outside, the household consensus is that we’re still warm enough inside. We’ve never gotten this far into November without turning on the furnace

Curious wind patterns have pushed all of the leaves on the back deck into a narrow pile

Neighbours dropped off a surprise feast of mini sandwiches for mbnov

I figured waiting until the last minute for the first day of mbnov would provide inspiration for a clever post. I was mistaken

Lucy is helping again with candy distribution. Hard to get a stable photo, her head is swinging around to take in all the sights, sounds, and smells 🎃

Finished reading: Tiamat’s Wrath by James S. A. Corey. I’ve enjoyed each book in the series and this one was not an exception 📚

Best tree on the street 🍁

Black Lab Brewery 🍺

Rival Consoles' new album Now Is is out and well worth listening to 🎧

Finished reading: Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer. A really interesting book that explores the surprisingly difficult problem of defining what it means to be alive📚

Transitions

I’ve been trying out more of the radio features on Apple Music. At least two features would help out: some way to mark episodes for later listening (I’m sharing to an Apple Note for now) and saving progress, so that the episode doesn’t always start over from the beginning 🎧

Lucy has settled into the couch

Are rising profits fueling inflation? - The Hub There are of course important issues to explore and debate when it comes to the level of competition in certain areas of corporate Canada, and there are also many overlapping causes of rising consumer prices. But when it comes to claims that …

As we move into Fall weather, time to switch to indoor riding. The setup is a bit cramped, but I have coach Lucy to keep me company from the couch 🚴

A Day in the Life Photo Challenge: Walking to the dentist with unsettled weather in Toronto, Ontario 🇨🇦 at 15:57

I’ve registered for the Ironman 70.3 in Muskoka 🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️

Long runs are great in Fall weather 🏃‍♂️

After putting up with this nonsense of cables for too long I put in an hour of work and tidied everything up. A good example of how something that bothers you for months can just be fixed with a little bit of effort.

Finished reading: Mistborn: The Final Empire (Mistborn, 1) by Brandon Sanderson. I really enjoyed this one. An interesting origins mystery, well conceived magical powers, and good world building 📚

A three hour and seven minute album from Nils Frahm! Definitely on the ambient end of the spectrum and good for staying in the zone 🎶

Morning rides are getting chilly 🥶

Finished reading: Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. A classic sci-fi story. Hard to believe it was written in 1953 📚

I’ve enjoyed a couple of Time to Run sessions. The coaches are relatively restrained, while offering useful tips, and the music fits in well. They’ll be good for days when I don’t have anything specific planned and have about 40 minutes to spare 🏃‍♂️

Our worries that the morning glories wouldn’t recover from the replacing of the fence were unfounded. They’re as exuberant as ever.

Finished reading: Shift by Hugh Howey. I’m not sure that Wool needed this prequel. Part of the enjoyment of the first book was the mystery of how people ended up living underground after an apocalypse. That said, I’ll read the last book in the series 📚

The hanger for my rear derailleur broke on my commute this morning. So, a shortened ride, along with a minor crash when the freed derailleur ended up in the spokes of the rear tire and I tumbled over the handlebars 🚴‍♂️

Fun ride to Unionville today 🚴‍♂️

Finished reading: Exit Strategy: The Murderbot Diaries (The Murderbot Diaries, 4) by Martha Wells. I’ve enjoyed each of these novellas, though the first one is a standout 📚

Ten questions about the hard limits of human intelligence | Aeon Essays Despite his many intellectual achievements, I suspect there are some concepts my dog cannot conceive of, or even contemplate. A fun (in a nerdy sort of way) essay on the limits of our understanding

I’m enjoying the Really Specific Stories podcast series from @martinfeld. I’ve been listening to podcasts for a long time now and hearing people talk about the medium and associated technology has been fascinating

Finished reading: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers is a charming story about a human and a robot on a quest to find purpose 📚

Finished reading: Plague Birds by Jason Sizemore is quite the story: advanced AIs living in people’s blood, genetic manipulation run amok, the collapse of civilization, and a mysterious alien. A fun read 📚

An early start for today’s ride to avoid the heat and catch the sunrise 🚴‍♂️

Finished reading: Among Others by Jo Walton is very good. A celebration of SF, despite being about magic and fairies📚

Back in the city for today’s run. A bit strange after all those quiet, hilly cottage runs

Relaxed and happy

Found some rapids on today’s run 🏃‍♂️

The Kobo Libra 2 is great for cottage reading 📚: As a follow up to my earlier post, now that I’m on the eleventh book of my vacation, I can confirm that the Kobo Libra 2 is exactly what I’d hoped. The screen has been easy to read in all lighting (especially bright sunlight on the dock), the page turn buttons are reliable, and the …

Finished reading: Although the book is unfinished, I enjoyed Starlight by Richard Wagamese. The theme of appreciating the land resonates well with my cottage vacation. I also found the themes of fatherhood and adopted families compelling 📚

Ominous clouds for today’s swim

A fun Upgrade episode on automation with Jason Snell, Federico Viticci, Rosemary Orchard, and Matthew Cassinelli 🤖🎧

Finished reading: Tunnel 29 by Helena Merriman is an engrossing book about students that escaped from East Germany during the Cold War, only to then tunnel back under the wall to help more people escape 📚

Finished reading: The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan was a perfect vacation read. A long and immersive fantasy story with both familiar elements and novel ideas📚

Back on the gravel roads for today’s run

Nice run along the James Cooper Lookout Trail, despite some tough terrain 🏃‍♂️

Finished reading: Although I was initially confused by the plot of Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, once I got into the story I enjoyed it. A nice mix of humour, honouring your identity, immigrating, and classical music 📚

Rays of light

Looking for a beaver lodge 🦫: We’ve seen a beaver swimming from one end of the lake to the other, most evenings at our rented cottage. Today we paddled out to investigate. We found three separate lodges, though I could only really get a good picture of one. As well as a dam that was blocking a culvert at the end of the lake.

Different running route today to find some unpaved roads and justify packing my trail shoes on the vacation 🏃‍♂️

Finished reading: Arriving Today by Christopher Mims is a very interesting look into the logistics network that we all take for granted with an emphasis on Amazon. A fascinating mix of robotics, AI, and labour laws📚

Nice to get out for a long swim 🏊‍♂️

Interesting to hear William MacAskill on two of my favourite podcasts (Mindscape with Sean Carroll and Making Sense with Sam Harris). Although there’s some necessary overlap, the two hosts drew out different themes in the conversations 🎧

Finished reading: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a delight. A strange and fascinating story that is unlike anything that I’ve read recently 📚

Finished reading: Persepolis Rising by James S. A. Corey is a solid start to a new Expanse story. Although I like the mystery surrounding the alien artifacts, Expanse is at its best when focused on the people📚

Around here you run hills, whether you want to or not

Misty morning for an easy run 🏃‍♂️

Finished reading: The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson is a fun parallel worlds story with lots of plot twists 📚

Such a delight to swim in a nice, deep lake 🏊‍♂️

Finished reading: Shipstar by Gregory Benford isn’t nearly as ambitious as Bowl of Heaven, the first book in the series. Although there are several big ideas in the book, they didn’t really connect well together. 📚

Lucy is settling into cottage life

Finished reading: I enjoyed The Golem and the Jinni: A Novel by Helene Wecker. Great writing and interesting characters, set in 19th century New York, that explores immigration and finding your purpose 📚

Tranquility

I’m enjoying the Time Management for Mortals series by Oliver Burkeman on the Waking Up app. A nice extension of his Four Thousand Weeks book 🎧

Finished reading: The Nova Incident by Dan Moren is an entertaining mix of espionage, action, and sci-fi. I’ve enjoyed all of the books in this series 📚

I’m aligned with the views of the Incomparable panel on recent Star Trek: Discovery is disappointing, Picard is frustrating, and Strange New Worlds is delightful 🖖

Reunification day! Kids are back from a month at summer camp. Tanned, relaxed, and happy

Finished reading: Although I was already familiar with many of the details, A Series of Fortunate Events by Sean B. Carroll was a brief and entertaining overview of the role of chance in biology. Both humbling and inspiring to think about how contingent everything is📚

My annual cottage vacation is imminent and a favourite part is reading books by the lake. In past years, I’ve packed a pile of library books. But, I average more than ten books over the break. Adding in my family (though they’re less voracious readers) means we end up with a big box of …

Very difficult for me to not enjoy Star Trek Picard, given my nostalgia for TNG. That said, season 2 was only okay. The scenes with Q were all great and I liked the idea of the Borg queen trying to recreate a collective. The rest was pretty muddled.

Season 1 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was really fun. I enjoyed the return to mostly self-contained episodes and appreciated the modest fan service 🖖

Lucy would like some pizza

Tremblant 70.3 Ironman notes 🏊‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏃‍♂️: After a few days of recovery, and before I forget, here are a few notes on the Tremblant 70.3 Ironman. The short version (given there’s lots of details below) is that the course was fantastic and the race was really well organized. Pre-race This part was easy and the day prior to the race. …

The Ironman 70.3 in Tremblant was a fantastic experience! Gorgeous course – though you really have to like hills – and really well organized. Ridiculously hot on the run though 🥵. Thankfully there was plenty of ice at the aid stations. I ran most of the course with my shorts full of ice …

Yikes, quite the cliff at kilometre 52!

Season 3 of For All Mankind starts off strong! One of my favourite shows of the last few years and I’m looking forward to this season 📺

My longest bike ride yet: 105 km. Tough, but fun. Good to have a strong crew pulling me along 🚴

Great Vance Joy show that featured a rainbow after a short rainstorm 🎶

Although a small thing in the context of the WWDC announcements, I like the upcoming changes to the Workout app in WatchOS 🏃‍♂️

A big thank you to my race crew for their support at today’s triathlon.

First time using the new bike rack.

I think this is everything!

Finished reading: I really enjoyed The Rook by Daniel O’Malley. A fun mix of espionage and supernatural with a good sense of humour 📚

Day 19: Breakfast indulgence: scrambled eggs, bacon, avocado, and cheese 📷

Day 18: No longer random puzzle pieces 📷

Day 17: Hold 📷

Unwanted house guests

Day 15: Prairie clouds 📷

Day 12: Tranquility 📷

Day 11: Maroon sign of spring 📷

Day 10: For several years, we’ve participated in a fundraiser for Pancreatic Cancer Canada that sells pots of purple pansies 📷

Day 9: Magnolia blooms are imminent 📷

Finished reading: Although surprisingly little actually happens with the plot in Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers, the characters and world building are great. Along with fascinating questions about what it means to be human and how to value tradition📚

Day 8: Toronto Union Station 📷

First outdoor ride on the new bike. Great to be out of the basement, though I swallow fewer midges on Zwift 🚴‍♂️

Day 7: We appreciate and enjoy our provincial parks 📷

Day 6: Cloud silhouette 📷

Day 5: Earth 📷

Day 4: LRT tunnelling at _Thorn_cliffe Park (bit of a cheat on the prompt) 📷

Day 3: One of my experimental setups in grad school was a tinfoil room with a hive of bees 📷

Day 2: The oldest photo in my library is of my grandfather in his navy uniform from 1945 📷

Day 1: Ran up a lot of switchbacks to get to the top of Signal Hill in Newfoundland 📷

The Toronto Half Marathon was great! So nice to be out for a proper group event again. And I had a wonderful race crew for cheers and end of race snacks

Tomorrow’s race will be fun! I haven’t been in a proper event for awhile 🏃‍♂️

Finished reading: Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb Trilogy Book 2) by Tamsyn Muir is really imaginative and well written. I found it rather confusing though. Lots of characters and plot points to track📚

Severance is fantastic. An intriguing premise, with great acting, and careful attention to detail in every episode. Well worth watching

COVID and Readiness to Train 🦠🏃‍♂️🚴‍♂️🏊‍♂️: With two school-age kids, this seemed inevitable: All things considered, my symptoms aren’t too bad, which I’m grateful for. Nonetheless, I’ve mostly been in bed for a couple of days to properly recover. Since I’ve been monitoring my Readiness To Train (RTT) score, I was …

The weirdness of Raised by Wolves shifted from intriguing to distracting between seasons 1 and 2. Although the second half of season 2 was better than the first, overall the season wasn’t successful for me

Although it seems like a luxury, $70 for always dry shoes is worth it. Especially with spring weather 🏃‍♂️

Happy Lucy

Completed an FTP test this morning. Important to do, though super challenging 😓🚴‍♂️

I’m letting my Pinboard subscription expire. I’ve added 3,500 bookmarks since 2010 and the service was valuable when actively engaged in research. I haven’t looked up a bookmark in the past few years though. Now I’ll rely on Apple Notes and Micro.blog Bookmarks

New trail running shoes 🏃‍♂️: I added a new pair of running shoes to my closet: Saucony Switchback 2. They are a lightweight trail shoe with the BOA Fit System (rather than laces) and good treads for gripping. I took them out for a 10k run around the neighbourhood. Not quite the right conditions, since I was mostly on sidewalks …

Don’t forget to tie your shoes

Just fixed a small issue with my Elite Suito bike trainer: the magnets stopped working, so the resistance couldn’t be automatically adjusted. This is obviously a major feature of the trainer and particularly important for Zwift rides. Fortunately, a quick conversation with their support team …

I’m really enjoying these videos by Mark Lewis on fitness and motivation I appreciate his message of only striving for above average and carefully considering the trade offs between training and the rest of your interests.

Finished reading: Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse is a great story about a monster hunter on a Navajo reservation after a climate apocalypse📚

Finished reading: The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi is a fun “soldiers in space” book with some interesting ethical concepts📚

Finished reading: A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers is really good. A strong emotional core with an intriguing sci-fi structure📚

Busy morning so far

One of the highlights from last night’s Stout Beer Festival: Beeramisu Imperial Stout from the Third Moon and Bellwoods breweries

Although I was disappointed to miss out on attending Micro Camp March 2022, I’ve enjoyed catching up on the videos. A nice diversity of topics, each very well presented

I think I liked season 1 of Raised by Wolves? A curious mix of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror that overall was more about mood than plot. I’m not sure what to make of the ending yet.

Integrating MindNode, Reminders, and Mail 🗺 ✅ 📧: I’m still using MindNode for task management. Seeing all of my tasks, projects, and areas of focus on one mind map has been really helpful, especially since it is integrated with Reminders. One challenge has been integration with Mail, given the majority of my tasks arrive via email. Despite …

As a follow up to my post about swimming with an Apple Watch, I’ll note that the watch only records activity when your arm is moving. So, things like kicking drills aren’t recorded. Not a serious issue for me, though this can make stats inaccurate. Despite this, I still appreciate the simplicity of …

Pancakes for dinner

Indoor cycling 🚴‍♂️: The last piece of my training setup was an indoor bike trainer. Canadian winters aren’t great for outdoor cycling (-20ºC with a blizzard just a few days ago, for example). So, I picked up an Elite Suito-t which is well reviewed and on sale at my local bike shop. This is a direct transmission …

A fun one

A good one on a cold night

Finished reading: As with the first two books in the trilogy, The Saints of Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton is a fun sci-fi story about humans fighting back against powerful aliens. Definitely an easy read, though with some pretty imaginative twists and ideas about the future 📚

Finished reading: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan is an entertaining mix of computer nerds, ancient rituals, cryptography, and a love of printed books 📚

I’m fortunate to have a nice bike storage room at my office. Something happened there today that prompted the facilities manager to send us the list of prohibitions, which included this miscellaneous grouping at the end 😀

New bike 🚴 : I knew going in that a first triathlon requires a lot of planning and gear, especially when you don’t have any equipment. Given that the cycling component is the longest distance, it is important to have a good bike. Once I knew my size, the next step was to actually choose a bike. And, oh my, …

Finished reading: Salvation Lost by Peter F. Hamilton is fun. Part 2 of the Salvation trilogy and a great humans fighting back against powerful aliens story📚

There’s been some shovelling today ❄️

Lucy is enjoying all this new snow ❄️

Finished reading: The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian is a fascinating and very well written overview of the current state of AI research. I was particularly struck by how much of the challenge with safe AI is based on our poor understanding of our own intelligence 📚

Bike sizing 🚴‍♂️: I’ll be spending many hours and a reasonable amount of money on a bicycle over the next few months. To be efficient, comfortable, and injury free, I want the bike to fit me closely. So, I sought the advice of Scott, a professional bike fitter. Scott has an interesting contraption that is the …

As a benchmark for upcoming training, my coach had me run a 5k time trial. This is also useful for determining my heart rate training zones. I started off too fast and paid for it near the end, but managed to hold a good pace from KMs 2 to 5 🏃‍♂️

Listening to Apple Music Activity Playlists for a week 🎶: As an experiment, I spent the past week listening only to the Activity Playlists in Apple Music. So, whatever I was doing, I picked the most closely related playlist. Often these were straightforward. Cooking dinner with help from the kids: Cooking with Family; triaging the morning inbox of email: …

My first swimming workout 🏊‍♂️: I’ve been in a pool with my Apple Watch before, though only either to splash around with the kids or with a beer at an all-inclusive resort. Today was the first time I’ve used it for an actual swimming workout. It has also been a long time since my high school swimming days back in the early 90s. …

Time to stop tracking my personal life ⏰: Through 2020, I built up an ornate system for tracking my time for both work and personal projects (like this one for reading). For most of 2021, I found this tracking really helpful. I need to track my hours at work anyway, so using Timery and Shortcuts to automate much of this has been great. …

Finished reading: The Stranger in the Lifeboat by Mitch Albom is a compelling, brief story about faith and redemption 📚

Finished reading: This seems to be the consensus, so I won’t belabour the point: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman is a powerful book. If you feel overwhelmed by busyness or slightly adrift, it is well worth a read. There are some tough messages in it, though, that require contemplation 📚

Lucy has resolved that 2022 will be the year of more food

As an update to my earlier post about using MindNode for task management, I’ve refreshed my areas of focus and projects for work. I still find MindNode really helpful for this, especially for seeing the balance of projects across the areas of focus. In this case, I can see that I have many Process …

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin is a really interesting story about two different worlds and a physicist that tries to bring them back together. As with most good science fiction, the story is about the people, rather than the science, but the sci-fi setting accentuates the morals of the story …

I sincerely hope this will not become a new Christmas tradition

A good time to reread the classic A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens 🎄

Finding a Triathlon coach 🏊‍♂️ 🚴‍♂️ 🏃‍♂️: When I ran a marathon several years ago, my training plan was just to go for countless long runs. Now that I’m older and wiser, I’m going to be more sophisticated in training for Tremblant and that means getting a good coach. The first question any potential coach has asked is: what is my goal for …

Breaking in my new shoes with some hill sprints 🏃‍♂️

A Christmas classic

Although a time and concentration commitment, I enjoyed this 3Blue1Brown video. Showing how to approach a problem from a computational or generalizable direction is interesting and provides a good lesson on the importance of diverse approaches.

After 2.5 years of faithful service (which, honestly, is far too long), I’ve updated my trusty Sauconys with a new pair. The red is a bit flashier than my usual style, but they’re comfortable 🏃‍♂️

Post COVID-booster recovery run 🏃‍♂️ 🦠💉

Getting our COVID boosters

How to fix the disaster of human roads to benefit wildlife | Aeon Essays Unbelieveable: …about a million individuals of all species are killed every day on the roads of the US. In North America overall, the cumulative scale of all this roadkill now surpasses hunting as the main cause of …

I’m slowly making my way through Pragmatism, and Other Essays by William James and was amused to see: I offered this as a conciliatory olive-branch to my enemies. But they, as is only too common with such offerings, trampled the gift under foot and turned and rent the giver. I had counted too much …

A long run with fresh snow is a great start to a Sunday 🏃‍♂️❄️

Looks like someone went for an inadvertent swim 🥶

The great unfollowing 😱: Inspired by @cedevroe’s semi-regular purges, I’ve gone through my many services and unfollowed, unsubscribed, and deleted everything. And, I mean everything! That’s all of my RSS feeds, newsletters, podcasts, and Micro.blog, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts. This seemed kind of crazy at …

I listened to each song on Pitchfork’s 100 Best Songs of 2021. Although I downloaded a dozen or so songs, the vast majority of them didn’t appeal. Hopefully I’m not just getting old! 🎵

Improving my running with a gait analysis 🏃‍♂️: In preparation for Tremblant, I had my gait analyzed to find out if there are any issues with my running form. I found the process surprisingly thorough and interesting. Katie (a registered physiotherapist) started out with a general discussion about my running history and goals. Then she filmed me …

I really like the idea of Screen Time and want to use it to manage my behaviour. And then I get something like this: apparently I stared at aeon.co (a great website) every minute from midnight to 6. I’m certain I was actually sound asleep then

After likely too much deliberation, I’ve registered for the Ironman 70.3 in Tremblant. Although “only” half an Ironman, it is still daunting enough to make me both nervous and excited (nervouscited, as my daughter often says) 🏊‍♂️ 🚴‍♂️ 🏃‍♂️

A good, long article on the James Webb Space Telescope that includes both details on the telescope and explains the science that makes it so exciting

Classic, having finally settled on Apple Notes, Craft has announced an eXtensions Developer Platform that is tempting me back. I’m glad Micro.blog is here as a support group for those of us that can’t stop fiddling with our tools 😀

Bowl of Heaven by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven is quite expansive in scope and imagination. A fun, easy read with some big ideas 📚

First snowstorm run of the season ❄️ 🏃‍♂️

Urban trail run 🏃‍♂️

2021 iPhone Home Screens: My iPhone Home Screen continues to evolve and, now that we have Focus Modes, I’ve made some further adjustments. From left to right, I’m using three different Focus Modes: Personal, Work, and Fitness. The first two are entirely widget focused, while Fitness has a few app icons as well. The dock has …

I really enjoyed season 1 of Foundation. Definitely a departure from the books, which was totally necessary. The companion podcast was interesting too 📺

The moon trying to break through the clouds

The Strong Songs Year Three, In Review episode is a good summary of a fun season 🎧🎶

I picked up Artifact by Gregory Benford at my local used bookstore on a whim. I’m glad I did. It is a fun mix of archaeology, theoretical physics, and espionage 📚

Integrating Micro.blog Highlights with Apple Notes 📒: Now that I’m committed to using Apple Notes, I wanted a way to download my Micro.blog Highlights into Notes. I like using Bookmarks as a read-it-later service and the highlighting feature is great for quickly blogging excerpts from articles. For longer-term storage, though, and integration with the …

I’m enjoying the redesigned Waking Up app. The new design is much cleaner and easier to use. The original design was interesting when the app debuted. A couple of years later, with all the additional content, it had become rather complicated to navigate. After 941 “mindful days”, I’m still finding …

Okay, these automated email signatures are getting silly. I just got a meeting invite with 6,000 characters in 500 words. None of which were actually written by a person. It included: A note that anyone attending an in-person meeting needs to be vaccinated A warning not to open any attachments from …

Lessons from using Apple Notes for three months: Back in September, I committed to using Apple Notes for three months. The goal was to focus on my use cases for writing, rather than fiddling with new apps continuously. Here’s what I’ve identified so far. Many of the approaches and features that I’m using in these use cases are readily available in …

Inner Symphonies by Hanna Rani & Dobrawa Czocher has been really helpful this week 🎵

A fun discussion on the Mindscape podcast with Christopher Mims about the interconnected industrial ecology

I enjoyed Revenant Gun: Machineries of Empire by Yoon Ha Lee. A fitting end to the trilogy📚

I’m standardizing on using Micro.blog Bookmarks as my read it later service. To make this easier, I’ve created a Shortcut for sending links from Safari to Bookmarks. Now I can keep the Micro.blog app set to posting, instead of having to switch back and forth in settings. You’ll need an app token as …

On the Internet, We’re Always Famous in the New Yorker is well worth a read The most radical change to our shared social lives isn’t who gets to speak, it’s what we can hear. True, everyone has access to their own little megaphone, and there is endless debate about whether that’s good or bad, but …

Lucy is ready to help with Halloween 🎃

Day 31: Home 📷

When Star Trek: Voyager originally aired, I was too distracted with grad school to pay much attention to it. Many years later, thanks to @jean’s comprehensive Viewer’s Guide I’ve finished the series. The show is very good (certainly better than the reputation it seems to have), …

MacStories' Comprehensive Guide to 250+ of Apple Music’s New Mood and Activity Playlists is a great resource for a rather opaque feature. I’m amused by the specificity of a “checking email” playlist, though I do spend too much time doing exactly this activity

Day 30: Red 📷

Switching to iCloud+ Custom Email Domain 📧 : I’ve switched my personal email over to Apple’s custom email domain with iCloud Mail. A roughly ranked list of reasons for the switch is: One less account to worry about. Not that it was a big deal, but now I don’t need to know the various setup details for my personal email. Once …

Railway City’s Jumbo is a good, though bitter, IPA 🍺

Day 29: Cycle 📷

This new song from Jack White will wake you up 🎸🥁

Remarkable, scientists have measured time dilation in a cloud of atoms and found that the time experienced by the atoms at the top of the cloud is 0.00000000000000001% shorter than the time experienced by those at the bottom. Such precision!

Day 28: Underneath 📷

The first two episodes of Invasion on AppleTV+ are intriguing

Day 27: Chaos of a toddler. This is how I found him one morning 📷

Day 26: Bliss for me is the family relaxing on a dock, reading books, during summer vacations 📷

Day 25: Gravity 📷

Day 24: So many connections. I have to admit that I’m surprised it actually works 📷

Although I’m generally aligned with longtermism, this essay in Aeon points out important (if slightly hyperbolic) tradeoffs that have to be considered. As with so many things, we need to find ways to fix today’s problems while also keeping an eye on the future

Great weather for apple picking 🍎

Day 23: Lots of meaning to discern when playing Codenames 📷

Murderbot is one of my favourite characters from the past couple of years. So, this origin story from Martha Wells was fun to read

Day 22: Having a rest with friends 📷

Day 21: An impressive space at the foot of a mountain 📷

Day 20: I’m looking forward to resuming winter sports 📷

Day 19: Mirror in a lake 📷

Morning arising 📷

Day 18: Lucy is finished for the day 📷

Day 17: No need for a compass when hiking in the city, just follow the sound of traffic 📷

Day 16: Rotation 📷

Day 15: Ethereal 📷

Day 14: My favourite wheels as a kid 📷

Day 13: Lucy is a couch animal 📷

Day 12: Rock legends 📷

Day 11: Hygge 📷

The cansim R package is really helpful 📦 📊: Statistics Canada has a wealth of data that are essential for good public policy. Often a good third of my analytical scripts are devoted to accessing and processing data from the Statistics Canada website, which always seems like a waste of effort and good opportunity for making silly errors. So, I …

Day 10: The bridges of my morning run 📷 🏃‍♂️

Day 9: Swinging through the trees is safe with this gear on 📷

Day 8: A benefit of a twilight run is that the sidewalks are clear 📷

Day 7: Spice 📷

Day 6: Street 📷

Day 5: The toys are watching, always 📷

Although A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine isn’t as remarkable as A Memory Called Empire, I still really enjoyed it. Some of the enjoyment was momentum from the first book. I also liked the mystery of the aliens and the exploration of shared memories and awareness 📚

Day 4: Sharp dressed boy 📷

Day 3: Majority votes are rare in Canada these days 📷

Added this to my “brains are fascinating” note: How memories persist where bodies, and even brains, do not It seems that a 44-year-old French man had gone to hospital complaining of a mild weakness in his left leg. Doctors learned that the patient ‘had a shunt inserted into his head to …

Day 2: Lightning up the Dark 📷

Day 1: Touch 📷

Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs is about so much more than whales. Beautifully written, Giggs uses whales to talk through society, culture, environmentalism, evolution, and history, along with lots of good natural history on whales📚

We had fun solving CluedUpp Games The Ripper mystery with these serious looking investigators

I really enjoyed the Foundation books as a kid and thought it might be fun to read them along with the new Apple TV show. I know they’ll diverge and look forward to seeing how they approach the original content

Two things to note: 1) Clearly the totalling is off and 2) How can the app for my robot vacuum be in the top 10?

Federal Election Day here in Canada 🗳 🇨🇦. As a public servant, I have no public opinion about the parties. I do think, though, that we have a civic obligation to vote and, so, encourage any Canadians out there to make an informed choice and cast your ballot.

We celebrated 21 wonderful years of marriage with an extended weekend at the Sir Sam’s Inn near Haliburton. We had gorgeous weather and lots of relaxation. To burn off some of the delicious food, we hiked up to the top of the ski hill through a twisted, 5K path to get a great view over the lake. …

A good reminder to experiment with my coffee setup: How to enjoy coffee | Psyche Guides

Found some tranquility

Nice view from a hike to the top of a hill

Currently reading: Fathoms: the world in the whale by 📚

I’ll be hanging out here for the next few days

Surprising no one here, I’ve realized that I spend far more time thinking about systems for my notes than in actually taking notes. To add some public accountability, I’m declaring that for the next 3 months I’m only using Apple Notes. This will help me develop a good note taking …

Advanced voting 🇨🇦

A happy 97th birthday to my wonderful grandmother! Such an inspiration to us all

Back to school with a mixture of excitement and nervousness

I certainly wasn’t expecting Nils Frahm’s next album to be a dub record!

Ball hockey fans

I’m enjoying Watch the Sound With Mark Ronson, a series on music production with episodes on topics like reverb, synthesizers, and sampling

Restocking some essentials 🥃

Currently reading: A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan, 2) by Arkady Martine 📚

I really enjoyed Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton (book 1 of the Salvation Sequence trilogy). A fun blend of sci-fi, detective novel, and alien invasion with a cliffhanger ending📚

A new game on the iPad: try to guess what term Photos is searching for in Spotlight. Here’s an example where I’m launching Overcast and Photos has used “ov” to find pictures of ovens. This has actually been a great way to uncover how much more sophisticated Photos has become.

My Micro Camp sticker has arrived and looks great! Thanks @burk!

Black Lab Brewery has some great beers, plus I enjoy the branding

Our epistemic crisis is essentially ethical and so are its solutions Before you know it, people have starkly different views on the matter, and their views are based on perfectly solid research. The point here is not that we can’t know anything, it’s simply that the world is a complex place, and …

This book caught my eye at the local used bookstore: Pragmatism and Other Essays by William James 📚

Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors is an interesting mix of reflections on solitude, the importance of conservation, and American history 📚

Although I only caught day 2 of Micro Camp 2021 live, I really enjoyed the talks. I’ll catch up on day one in a couple of days.

Currently reading: Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors 📚

Readiness To Train with the Training Today app 🏃‍♂️: I’m trying to sequence my workouts in a more systematic way to avoid overtraining. I’ve found Training Today really helpful in determining this Readiness To Train (RTT). The app uses data collected by my Apple Watch to provide a straightforward indicator of how ambitious I should be on …

Excession by Iain M. Banks is a great read with a fun mix of space opera, humour, morality, and mystery 📚

A great video on the Standard Model of physics

Really well done and fascinating video on The Sounds of Space

Currently reading: Excession by Iain M. Banks 📚

The iPadOS save dialog for MS Office has become confusing. I can never figure out which of these “Documents” folder is my documents folder, rather than a colleague’s

Back in the office after a 13 month gap and spotted my first PPE vending machine on the commute. A sign of how things will be after COVID-19 🦠 😷

Mortal on Amazon Prime is good. A nice take on the Thor myth that doesn’t adopt the Marvel spectacle style (though that style is good fun)

A nice run along Taylor Creek 🏃‍♂️. Except for the hill up to Lumsden Ave near the end; that part was horrible

I’ve been using the iOS betas for just over a week. The new Focus feature is as useful as I’d hoped. Being able to change notifications and home screens by context is great. Especially for switching off from work

Currently reading: The Little Drummer Girl: A Novel by John le Carre 📚

A quiet run along the beach this morning. Certain to be much busier this afternoon 🏃‍♂️

The Tomorrow War is totally ridiculous. And, I watched it anyway

Finished reading: Matter (Culture) by Iain M. Banks. This was a straightforwardly entertaining read 📚

A misty run this morning 🏃‍♂️

Humid out there 🥵. Good thing there was a breeze by the river 🏃‍♂️

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 …

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 …

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 …

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. …

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 …

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 …

Currently reading: Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚

First vaccine dose administered! A very efficient process.

An excellent For All Mankind season finale. I’m looking forward to season 3 and further divergence from our timeline

Well S2E9 of For All Mankind certainly ended on a cliff hanger! How are they going to wrap all this up in just one last episode? 📺 🚀

Math Without Numbers by Milo Beckman takes a conversational approach to math, saying as much about how mathematicians think as it does about the math. Removing numbers helps focus on the concepts and the delightful illustrations are just whimsical enough to match the prose📚

There are some great observations about data in Why the Pandemic Experts Failed that apply in any context. I won’t spoil the list, other than to say that I strongly agree with the first one: All data are created; data never simply exist. We rarely put enough thought or effort into planning how data …

Life Is About What We Can Do For Each Other - RyanHoliday.net All of this is a way of dodging the reality of the choice in front of us: Can you subjugate your own interests—if only temporarily—for the sake of someone else? Countless someone else’s. Most of whom you will never know or even meet. Can …

I’m looking forward to starting Math Without Numbers by Milo Beckman 📚

Happy Easter from Lucy

Currently reading: Limitless by Jim Kwik 📚

I’ve reached the F barre chord stage of my guitar lessons. A tough spot! 🎸

Thanks @jean! Stickers arrived

Currently reading: Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday 📚

Humble Pi by Matt Parker is a very entertaining book about math errors. His irreverent personality really comes through and the stories make the important point about how essential math is to our everyday lives. 📚

Cookies!

Lucy with her dog-walking friends

Currently reading: Humble Pi by Matt Parker 📚

I’ve enjoyed listening to one of David Whyte’s poems each night before bed in the Waking Up Contemplative Action track. A good way to clear out my head

The Light of All That Falls by James Islington is a great end to The Licanius Trilogy. I was in the mood for an immersive fantasy series and these delivered, each book weighing in at close to a thousand pages. Interesting mix of fantasy, politics, time travel & free will 📚

Lucy gave up before we even started our One Academy Everest class

Wow, S2E3 of For All Mankind has a really powerful scene about parenthood. Very well done

Night skiing

Currently reading: The Light of All That Falls by James Islington 📚

The long way to a small, angry planet by Becky Chambers is great. I really enjoyed the characters and the sense of family on the Wayfarer. Definitely a nice change of pace from some more typical hard sci-fi stories that are more focused on the physics📚

Frustrating how everything goes haywire when updating AppleID passwords. HomePods become unresponsive, messages can’t be delivered, and other subtle errors arise. All this and it isn’t clear where you need to sign in again (having already done the obvious in AppleID settings)

I can relate to Lucy’s perspective on the day

Great day for skiing! Wore out the kids by the end. They’ve been inside too much recently 😀

Fantastic to have season 2 of For All Mankind out. I really enjoyed season 1 and this new season looks promising

Currently reading: The long way to a small, angry planet by Becky Chambers 📚

Super exciting that Perseverance landed safely on Mars. We need more of this kind of good news and human achievement.

Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett is a charming, short book about how our brains work and our misconceptions about them 📚

Currently reading: Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett 📚

Qawa imperial stout with coffee and chocolate from Bandit Brewery. A good beer for a frozen night

If you’re interested in how algorithms are affecting us, Hello world by Hannah Fry is a great read. Rather than explain how algorithms work, Fry describes their opportunities and risks in different parts of society, such as health, justice, and art 📚

A fascinating, weird, and unsettling conversation about the differences between the right and left hemispheres of the brain on the Making Sense podcast

A great, long article on the use and development of COVID models. Plenty of lessons for modelling in general, especially when human behaviour is involved, which is relevant for transit planning

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir is a very imaginative and entertaining mix of sci-fi and horror 📚

Lucy wants to know when it will warm up from -15°C 🥶

Star Trek: Picard is a flawed show that did a great thing — it gave TNG a proper ending I agree with Matt Gurney’s take: So Picard, really, is something I’d be judging on two entirely different levels: as a part of an existing Star Trek legacy, but also as a new addition to it. …

Despite some fair criticism, I enjoyed Tenet. Had to watch it twice to make sense of it though.

Blueprint by Nicholas Christakis is an interesting book about universal feature of our societies (the social suite) and how they are based on genetics, emergent properties, and complex network effects. The book has lots of interesting examples and makes clear connections between human societies and …

Perhaps nothing @help can do about this, but figured worth asking. Bookmarks aren’t extracting article titles for Quanta Magazine

Making waffles

🥶🏃‍♂️

An interesting experiment: a favourite David’s Tea infused into a favourite Beau’s beer. I like it!

Trying a new coffee. A nice change from my usual dark roast.

The addition of table support to Agenda is very welcome.

Currently reading: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir 📚

Delightful when text aligns across lines, yet also frustrating when the alignment is so slightly off

Choosing a podcast player 🤔🎧: There’s been a fair bit of discussion over on Micro.blog about podcast players recently. I’ve switched among Overcast, Castro, and Apple Podcasts players over the years and, mostly to help myself think it through (again), here are my thoughts. For me, there are three main criteria: audio …

Season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery was entertaining. Despite some awkward plots that were perhaps necessary to get to the right ending, they really did well with character moments. My only disappointment was the diminishment of Saru in the last few episodes. The sudden conflict he felt about choosing …

I absolutely agree that Facebook has been a major contributor to the mayhem we see in politics these days. I also have significant concerns with how they harvest and use data. All that said, I was able to quickly solve a problem by posting a question to my neighbourhood’s Facebook group. While I …

Transforming boxes of components into a gaming PC 📦🕹: Like any 12-year old, my son is pretty keen on gaming. As an all Apple house, his options were a bit constrained. So, we decided to build a PC from components. I’d last built a PC about 30 years ago, when I wasn’t much older than him. I remember thinking it was cool to be using a machine I’d built …

A nice tribute to Neil Peart in Rolling Stone Magazine 🥁

I appreciate Sam Harris' call for competence and compassion in his most recent podcast episode

Having spent countless hours in grad school arguing about frequentist and Bayesian statistics, I appreciate Richard D. Morey’s take on the importance of p values: The mistake many statistical commentators make is to interpret the p value as attempt at a quantification of evidence, or as a posterior …

My experiment to avoid Twitter for a week has now grown to two weeks. I’m surprised by how much I don’t miss it. I thought that it was a good source of interesting news, tailored to my interests. So far though, I’m still finding good content to read with a renewed use of …

Scheduling random meetings with a Shortcut ⚙️🗓: Staying in touch with my team is important. So, I schedule a skip-level meeting with someone on the team each week. These informal conversations are great for getting to know everyone, finding out about new ideas, and learning about recent achievements. Getting these organized across a couple of …

Currently reading: Blueprint by Nicholas A. Christakis 📚

Of the 30 books that I read this year, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine was my favourite fiction book. And, What is Real by Adam Becker was my favourite non-fiction one. 📚

Lost in Yesterday by Tame Impala was my most played song released in 2020 And Phoebe Bridgers was my favourite artist Thanks to Federico Vittici’s Apple Music Wrapped shortcut for analyzing my music library.

I enjoyed season 1 of The Man in the High Castle. A suitably realistic alternative history with an intriguing mystery of the strange films. I’ve heard seasons 3 and 4 are disappointing, so I’ll likely stop at the end of season 2 📺

Currently reading: Ego is the enemy by Ryan Holiday 📚

20 Macs for 2020 was a fun series and, overall, I agree with the ranking. Strictly for nostalgic reasons, I would have included the PowerBook G3. This was the first Mac I ever bought and I spent a lot of time with it in the first few years of grad school. I ran the public beta of Mac OS X which was …

The Value of Everything by Mariana Mazzucato is an effective description of how our economy is constructed by decisions and assumptions over time. By defining value as the same as price, we confuse value creation and value extraction, which leads to many of the problems we see in today’s economic …

Year of the Tangible: Inspired by Coretex, I’m declaring Tangible as my theme for 2021. I’ve chosen this theme because I want to spend less time looking at a screen and more time with “tangible stuff”. I’m sure that this is a common sentiment and declaring this theme will keep me focused on improvements. Since …

Merry Christmas! 🎄🎅

Quite disconcerting that I don’t know how or when I cracked the screen on my Apple Watch. The top left half still works, so not completely broken 😢

Three episodes in and I’m really enjoying season 5 of The Expanse 🚀🪐📺

I’m very happy that Tripping with Nils Frahm is released. Great music for working at home with headphones 🎧🎹

Currently reading: The Value of Everything by Mariana Mazzucato 📚

I’m catching up on 20 Macs for 2020 and just listened to the episode on the iMac G4. Brought back vivid memories of two intense months of finishing the writing of my thesis. I was sequestered in a small room with the lab’s iMac G4 and still remember how great it was to be able to move …

This video from Matt Parker on Excel is fantastic. Be sure to keep an eye on the chyron

MindNode is the best mind mapping app for iOS: Continuing my plan to update App Store reviews for my favourite apps, up next is MindNode. MindNode is indispensable to my workflow. My main use for it is in tracking all of my projects and tasks, supported by MindNode’s Reminders integration. I can see all of my projects, grouped by areas of …

I’m really looking forward to the live album Tripping with Nils Frahm being released soon. I’m impressed with how well he can translate his studio albums into a solo live show 🎵

Learning that Growl is retiring after 17 years really reinforces the notion that the legacy of a good project is so much more than just the code and application #mbnov

As the COVID lockdown continues, I miss being a pedestrian in the city. There’s nowhere to go! #mbnov

I like the approach that Sean Carroll describes in this episode about being a science advisor for a movie. Rather than telling the director that their time travel theory is wrong, you treat the screenplay as data and concoct a theory to fit. Much better for collaboration.

We need a better system for our masks. We start the week off with a nice, clean stack and then they disperse all over the house throughout the week. We spend much of Sunday tracking them down and cleaning them. Only to start all over again #mbnov

I really like the imagery of the idiom “on the horns of a dilemma”, especially since it emphasizes the point that both choices are undesirable #mbnov

Taking a few minutes to listen to A Place by Nils Frahm really helped adjust my motivation to get back to work on a frustrating project #mbnov

I never want to answer a call from someone I don’t know. So, I really like the “silence unknown callers” feature in iOS #mbnov

In looking for a good use of provision, I found this song by Kevin Morby. Listening through his catalogue and enjoying the mellow mood #mbnov 🎵 🎧

Currently reading: The obstacle is the way by Ryan Holiday 📚

DayOne continues to be an excellent way to capture my daily thoughts. Documenting each day’s achievements has really helped me keep momentum on projects #mbnov

I wanted to avoid using the word border in a political context and was reminded how much I enjoyed Borderline by Mishell Baker #mbnov 📚

Winter is coming #mbnov

Well, if you worried that AC/DC was going to fade away, they’re back with a new album that rocks out as much as any of their other albums #mbnov music.apple.com/ca/album/…

Feeling nostalgic, thanks to NPR Tiny Desk Concerts releasing this Yo La Tengo show from their archives

I’m fascinated that it’s possible to figure out how many regular polytopes there are and I have Milo Beckman to thank for putting together these great videos #mbnov

I quite like my dependence on a morning coffee and the ritual of making it #mbnov

Oops, need to train myself to actually post my #mbnov content on the right day

A fun memory from last year. I look forward to when we can gather as a family again #mbnov

I really enjoyed To Be Taught If Fortunate by Becky Chambers. A little jewel of a space exploration story that really captures the spirit of scientific exploration 📚

Lucy likes to supervise breakfast

Many good ideas on balancing uncertainty with fiscal rules in Navigating Uncertainty in Ontario’s Budget

What Is a Particle? in Quanta Magazine is a good overview of current answers to what seems like a simple question

Apple really wants you to know that it loves the Mac just how it is. Or perhaps more accurately, as embodied in its latest computers: just how it is, but a lot, lot faster. This is good to see, though I wasn’t actually worried.

The zip line across the lake was far with a great view #mbnov

Our pumpkin wasn’t too spooky this year #mbnov

We had great fun Tree Top Trekking! The view from the top of the trees was great, especially given the weather.

Please wear a mask! They really do help. #mbnov

Rather than turn up the heat, I decided to wear a sweater. I likely won’t be able to get away with this much longer, as the temperature keeps going down. Winter is coming! #mbnov

Currently reading: To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers 📚

Says by Nils Frahm is both a great song and today’s #mbnov word of the day

Finished reading: Breath by James Nestor. A great book about the importance of breathing. Full of interesting stories that certainly convinced me to be more thoughtful about my breath. The end of the book also has a good summary of the main points with detailed methods. 📚

The latest news on a promising COVID-19 vaccine is great news. Especially for my elderly grandmother, who is very keen to get out of her apartment and see her friends again #mbnov

I hope we can return, some day, to politics being a force for good, instead of division #mbnov

I’m not sure what binds them so closely, though I treasure it #mbnov

Our lungs inflate with fresh air at the top of the ski hill #mbnov

Puzzling through the outcomes of a wild week with the help of a lager 🍺 #mbnov

I often miss the days when I had to stoop down to pick up my kids for a hug. Though I’m very proud of the teenagers they have become #mbnov

Hexagons are the Bestagons is good fun

Yesterday’s #mbnov word “astonish” would have been a great one for today, given how near the US presidential election is today

Every year I’m astonished by the first snowfall #mbnov

“We follow this new type of leader through upheaval. Because we have confidence. Not in their map, but in their compass” Amy C Edmondson, How to lead in a crisis

Currently reading: Breath by James Nestor 📚

Having just finished a collection of quick, urgent projects, I’m looking forward to some time to concentrate on the big picture #mbnov

A couple of episodes in and I’m enjoying Long Way Up on Apple TV+. Relying on electric vehicles really adds to the adventure

Rouge River hike

An impressive attempt to visualize the standard model of particle physics by Quanta Magazine

More quantum weirdness: tunnelling particles can exceed the speed of light

Some great colours on the neighborhood trees 🍁🇨🇦

For my “A Day In The Life” photo, here’s a look out my window at a beautiful Fall day here in Toronto, Canada at noon

A great day for apple picking 🍎 🌳

A nice hike through Crother’s Woods

This agenda shortcut from Matthew Cassinelli is a useful way to start my day. I modified it to include flagged reminders and just have it appear as text, rather than be read aloud by Siri.

Data Governance Sponsor recruitment: I’m very excited to be recruiting for a Data Governance Sponsor to join my team and help enhance the use of good data analytics in our decisions at Metrolinx. I’m looking for someone that enjoys telling compelling stories with data and has a passion for collaborating to build clean and …

Although waiting can be annoying, How to Wait Well makes some good points: Waiting pulls us into the present unlike any other experience of time. In the waiting, we realise that this moment is meaningful as it exists, not as some step toward a future moment. Waiting is present tense, and its …

If you’re at all curious about physics, I strongly recommend you consider watching Sean Carroll’s Biggest Ideas in the Universe. Well worth the investment of time to watch

I’m listening to The Jungle by Plants and Animals a lot this week 🎧🎵

I continue to enjoy these posts on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. This one starts a new series on iron and steel production.

Using Shortcuts automation to automatically switch my watch faces has really helped enforce the work/personal transition. A simple, yet effective trick

Supporting my favourite apps with App Store reviews 🎖: I’ve been negligent in supporting some of my favourite apps on the App Store. In many cases, I reviewed the app a few years ago and then never refreshed my ratings. So, I’m making a new commitment to updating my reviews for apps by picking at least one each month to refresh. First up is …

Optimizing urban mobility by shifting from prediction to adaptation is a good example of how complexity theory can help solve practical problems

My current theme song: Everyday is exactly the same. Just the chorus though, some of the verses are pretty bleak!

We enjoyed playing Letter Jam. A nice mix of strategy, cooperation, and language

We really enjoyed our time at Bass Lake Provincial Park. Fresh air, campfire pizza, and a hike along the lake were a great escape 🏕

The widgets in the new Fantastical 3.2 are great. Having my calendar events and scheduled tasks in the same widget is really helpful

The toddler discovered Lucy’s tail. He’s amused, she is not 😀

Trying out a new iPhone Home Screen 📱: With the release of iOS 7, I’m reconsidering my earlier approach to the Home Screen. So far I’m trying out a fully automated first screen that uses the Smart Stack, Siri Suggestions, and Shortcut widgets. These are all automatically populated, based on anticipated use and have been quite …

Back to school

There’s a good distinction made in Is Your Chart a Detective Story? Or a Police Report? between visualization as explorations of data and communication of insights. Often these two purposes are in conflict with each other.

Evidently I haven’t been in the office for a while! Should take me a full day just to catch up on Dilbert.

In defence of “poisonous"​ models ☠️🧮: Skipping past the unnecessarily dramatic title, The Broken Algorithm That Poisoned American Transportation does make some useful points. As seems typical though these days, the good points are likely not the ones a quick reader would take away. My guess is most people see the headline and think that …

I enjoyed The Shadow of What Was Lost by James Islington. A reasonably complex plot with mystery and adventure, along with some good characters. The word building has lots of potential and the rules for the magic make sense. I was a bit intimidated by the length, given it is part one of a trilogy, …

Owen is excited to get the Nintendo Switch Ring Adventure. Staying active during COVID-19 has been difficult and this should help 🏃‍♂️🎮

My favourite part of the run along the Grand river 🏃‍♂️

Catastrophe drives evolution. But life resides in the pauses | Aeon Essays is a good overview of why the pace of evolution ebbs and flows over time

Fascinating: They found that for individual cells, this power minimum hovers around a zeptowatt, or 10−21 watts. That is roughly the power required to lift one-thousandth of a grain of salt one nanometer once a day. ‘Zombie’ Microbes Redefine Life’s Energy Limits

I miss this view already

Lower Decks is great fun for this Star Trek fan 🖖

Never did catch those ducks

Still getting along

We’ve tired out the dog

Feels like a vacation

Poured rain all day yesterday. So we’re a day late for the Highland Yard run. We didn’t want to miss supporting this important cause!

In the lake within a few minutes of arriving

I’m ready for my vacation to start!

Even though I knew how it ends, Free Solo is still an intense movie. I appreciated how Sanni (Alex’s girlfriend) and the video crew became important parts of the story

Reading Shortcut for the iPad 👓⚙️: I haven’t yet adopted the minimalist style of my iPhone for my iPad. Rather, I’ve found that setting up “task oriented” Shortcuts on my home screen is a good alternative to arranging lots of app icons. The one I use the most is a “Reading” Shortcut, since this is …

Reflection journal in Day One with an Agenda assist: I’ve been keeping a “director’s commentary” of my experiences in Day One since August 2, 2012 (5,882 entries and counting). I’ve found this incredibly helpful and really enjoy the “On This Day” feature that shows all of my past entries on a particular day. …

Skipping past the dramatic title, Our remote work future is going to suck makes important points about the risks of remote work. These are all important things to watch out for in our teams, particularly the potential for stifling of mentorship.

Some unfortunate formatting in the CBC’s otherwise well done coronavirus tracker. At first glance, that’s a really big number

A small thing, but I’m finding the automatic conference call link detection in Fantastical is saving me a great amount of effort, given my days are now filled with Teams meetings

The novelty of all of us working from home is wearing off

The Aleph Extraction by Dan Moren is a fun read and worthy sequel to the great Bayern Agenda. The mix of cold-war thriller and sci-fi setting is definitely in my sweet spot 📚

A scary, but important, conversation on the Making Sense podcast about the threat of nuclear weapons

Different watch faces for work and home: watchOS 7 has some interesting new features for enhancing and sharing watch faces. After an initial explosion of developing many special purpose watch faces, I’ve settled on two: one for work and another for home. Both watch faces use the Modular design with the date on the top left, time on …

I added a HomePod to the newly renovated house. The sound quality is definitely as good as advertised and I appreciate the Apple Music integration 🎶. Siri has worked just fine for me so far, though I only really use it for reminders and calendar events.

Our Home Renovation Is Complete!: We’re very excited to move back home

Owen had his virtual grade 6 graduation with PJs on the bottom half

Decision-Making in a Time of Crisis is a good article on the danger of confusing bad outcomes with bad decisions. As advocated in the article, scenario planning is a useful tool for making decisions with uncertainty

I’m really enjoying these unapologetically nerdy posts on the logistics and tactics of Middle Earth armies.

The Last Emperox by John Scalzi is great fun and a fitting end to the trilogy 📚

We’ve compared our predictions of the 2019 🇨🇦 election to the actual votes. Overall, we were within 5% with no obvious geographical biases, though we did slightly overestimate support for the NDP at the expense of the Liberals. I think we’re on to something good here!

I don’t remember being so organized on Wednesday 😀✅

Happy birthday to my favourite son!

Photosynthesis is a pretty elaborate game with more strategy than you might expect from trees ☀️🌲

There’s sure to be a good caper behind this busted safe in the middle of the woods

Happy birthday to my favourite daughter!

Lucy couldn’t quite manage the last burpee challenge in today’s One Academy Collision class

My favourite gym has a charity event on Saturday supporting Nellie’s Shelter for women & children. If you’re new to One Academy, your first class if free! So, a great chance to get a good workout & support an important cause

I’m really enjoying these Biggest Ideas in the Universe videos from Sean Carroll. Sufficiently nerdy to be interesting without getting too detailed.

Lots of good 90s music nostalgia on this Incomparable episode

China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station is intensely creative and very entertaining 📚

A big thanks to Brie and Paul for the homemade masks!

I'm not analyzing COVID data, though I'm impressed with Ontario's open data: I’m neither an epidemiologist nor a medical doctor. So, no one wants to see my amateur disease modelling. That said, I’ve complained in the past about Ontario’s open data practices. So, I was very impressed with the usefulness of the data the Province is providing for COVID: a …

Apple’s Mobility Trends tool is intriguing. Curious to see that transit declines early, quickly, and the most. Makes sense, I suppose, given that transit users are in close proximity.

What is Real by Adam Becker is a great book on the measurement problem in quantum physics. Becker writes very clearly about the actual physics of the problem and the fascinating history. Such a clear example of how science is a human endeavour with politics and personalities 🔭📚

Simple brew tea shortcut: Since I’m mostly stuck inside these days, I find I’m drinking more tea than usual. So, as a modification of my brew coffee shortcut, I’ve created a brew tea shortcut. This one is slightly more complicated, since I want to do different things depending on if the tea is caffeinated …

A small change to my quarantine home office with large ergonomic impacts: I’ve added a Lamicall iPad stand. Much better and more flexible positioning of the iPad with this simple device.

I hadn’t expected to see gas below $1/L ever again 🚗

Quarantine home gym weights 💪

A simple Shortcut for tracking workout time: I’ve been tracking my time at work for a while now, with the help of Toggl and Timery. Now that I’m working from home, work and home life are blending together, making it even more useful to track what I’m doing. Physical exercise is essential to my sanity. So, I wanted to …

The face you make when you’re dealt 23 damage in one round

A good day for board games

I’ve found the Eno’s new album Mixing Colours really helpful while working from home under quarantine with the rest of my family. 🎧

I enjoyed Star Trek Picard. A fun mix of nostalgia, new characters, and interesting story. Plus Patrick Stewart really is a great actor. I’m glad they had a chance to complete Data’s story, after the abrupt ending in Nemesis. 📺

2 kg of coffee should keep me going in quarantine for a while ☕️

A sentence I never expected to write: A big thank you to my sister for delivering much needed toilet paper while I was in quarantine. A messy emergency was approaching 😬

A hopeful sight in the backyard

A big thank you to One Academy for live-streaming exercise classes. Definitely helping my mental health, as I continue to be quarantined in a small rental house.

Our hastily constructed office in the rental house is working out okay. Mine is on the left. Fortunately I can perform almost all of my work with an iPad. Simultaneous conference calls are a bit tricky and one of us has to wander down the hall to reduce noise.

My new coworker is demanding more walking meetings

Can’t seem to get rid of these phantom email messages in iPadOS

Counterpart is one of my favourite TV shows over the past few years. So, great that ⁦‪The Incomprable podcast‬⁩ did an episode on the two seasons 📺

Vacation has begun!

Early signs of spring

Chilly, but fun ⛷ 🥶

Moses Boyd’s Dark Matter has a great, diverse sound. Well worth a listen 🎶

Figured out how to turn on the fireplace at the rental and Lucy has a new favourite spot

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh by Carl Zimmer is a thorough, detailed, and fascinating book about heredity. I appreciated that Zimmer expanded heredity well beyond genes to make the important point that we inherit many things from our parents 📚

I’ve found mind maps really helpful recently and, so, enjoyed the Sweet Setup’s Mastering Mind Maps course. The course includes some helpful workflow examples and detailed videos on MindNode, my favoured mind mapping app.

Happy Darwin Day! I hope your day evolves in a way that optimizes your fitness 🐠🐢🦍😎🤖

A school strike is a great excuse to play video games with friends

A great sunny day for skiing

As a lapsed academic scientist, I really appreciate the courage that Laskowski shows here in both retracting several papers and explaining what went wrong. Science is built on trust. Trust that your experiments will work. Trust in your collaborators to pull their weight. But most importantly, trust …

A nice perk of the rental house is the much larger backyard. Certainly good for the dog.

We’re moving out for a big renovation. So, let the kids draw on the wall and smash it with a hammer.

Entering the chaos phase of moving

Busy feet

The release of the very good Fantastical is another opportunity to reflect on App Store pricing. I simultaneously support app developers asking for continuous income for good apps and appreciate everyone’s subscription fatigue. Seems like upgrade pricing from Apple would help

I’ve enjoyed the new The Joy of X podcast from Quanta Magazine with an episode on black holes and one on pure math. The focus is more on the scientists than the research, which I like.

Anyone else having trouble with the Siri watch face on WatchOS 6? It used to be pretty good at surfacing useful items. Now all I get are Breathe, News, and Weather tiles. All of the right data sources are enabled in settings.

I enjoyed reading this article on solitude in the woods and can particularly relate to: this anxiety, which amounts to a sort of cost-benefit analysis of every passing moment, is a quintessentially modern predicament

Interrupting the usual feed content with a work announcement to say that I’m hiring. Anyone interested in cultivating a culture of evidence for transit decisions should take a look at this LinkedIn post for the Manager of Planning Analytics 🚉 🚃 🚌 🚲

Although difficult to choose, Death’s End by Cixin Liu is the best book of the trilogy. Incredibly imaginative and immense in scope with a hopeful end, despite some grim content. 📚

Some heavy snow flakes today

There was a raccoon in our office ceiling making all sorts of noise and commotion. As soon as the peanut butter trap was setup, the raccoon vanished. Must have been caught before and is wise to our tricks.

I upgraded from an iPhone 7 to 11. Now I’m back to having the best phone in the house, which is how it should be. I felt strange (jealous?) when my kids had better phones than me 😏

An interesting article on neurons being more complicated processors than originally thought: Neural Dendrites Reveal Their Computational Power - Quanta Magazine

After 13 years in our house, we’re starting a big renovation that requires moving out. I’m amazed (though shouldn’t be) at how cathartic it is to purge the accumulated junk. I hope that, as a family, we can be mindful about what we allow in, once the renovation is complete.

A good historical perspective on the Hubble constant: How they pinned a single, momentous number on the Universe

A good article on the importance of concentration: Playing chess is an essential life lesson in concentration

There are smiles under those scarves ⛷ ❄️

Our records management team is holding a “clean desk” contest to promote good practice. Here’s my before image: And, thanks to significant effort, the after: Maybe I’ll get most improved? 😀

Brew coffee shortcut: Shorcuts in iOS is a great tool. Automating tasks significantly boosts productivity and some really impressive shortcuts have been created. That said, it is often the smaller automations that add up over time to make a big difference. My most used one is also the simplest in my Shortcuts Library. I …

With the hope that some public accountability will help, I’m declaring a 30-day ban on my use of the following sentence phrasing: Something, but something else I write this phrase often, but it is a lazy construction (okay, that was the last one 😀)

I’ve listened to more Rush in the past few days than in the last several years. I regret neglecting their music and am glad to have them back

This Micro Monday I’d like to suggest @Dominikhoecht for a good mix of interesting photos, parenting observations, and geekery.

Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll is the best kind of non-fiction: engagingly written, sophisticated enough to take the audience seriously, and about a fascinating topic 📚

I find it amusing that the Universe Splitter app is categorized as entertainment: it splits the entire universe with the tap of a button! Should at least be a utility 😀

Farewell to Neil Peart. His music has been part of my life from the start. 🥁😢

Things cost more than they used to: I’m delivering a seminar on estimating capital costs for large transit projects soon. One of the main concepts that seems to confuse people is inflation (including the non-intuitive terms nominal and real costs). To guide this discussion, I’ve pulled data from Statistics Canada on the …

This Strong Songs episode on Stairway to Heaven is a fun listen and insightful analysis of a classic song 🎙

I finished Season 3 of The Leftovers, a fascinating exploration of loss, love, and family. Well worth watching if you like mysterious plots and unresolved narratives. The actors and writing are great and the ending is satisfying. 📺

I really enjoyed this Mindscape podcast episode with Dan Dennett 🎙

The snow wasn’t great, but still nice to get out for a ski this weekend.

Bob Boilen’s Top 20 Albums For 2019 is a good list

Where to start? 📚

We take Boxing Day seriously here as a day of relaxation. So, I’m disappointed to have exceeded my 0 minutes target. The spike around 2 was when I went upstairs for a nap 😴

The Labo VR kit is great fun to build and play

I’m most certainly in the target demographic, so perhaps not surprising that I enjoyed For All Mankind. I like these sorts of alternative histories and space exploration is a fascinating topic. I’m looking forward to whatever comes in season 2. 📺

The Stiehl Assassin by Terry Brooks is okay. Given this is the last series he plans to write, I’m curious to see where he takes the fourth book. Based on the three books so far, the plot is pretty standard for Shannara series. I’d hoped for something more dramatic. After the original …

Great fun with my siblings last night on our annual Christmas dinner adventure. Storm Crow Manor was very entertaining with nerd-themed drinks.

I declared podcasts bankruptcy and recovered with a better curated subscription list 🎧👍

Declaring podcasts bankruptcy: Podcasts are great. I really enjoy being able to pick and choose interesting conversations from such a broad swath of topics. Somewhere along the way though, I managed to subscribe to way more than I could ever listen to and the unlistened count was inducing anxiety (I know, a real first world …

A mind bending discussion on the Making Sense podcast: what we perceive as reality is only a “user interface wrapper” that natural selection has created to enhance our fitness. It has no necessary mapping to the truth of reality.

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is an imaginative literary romance novel wrapped in a time travel espionage plot. I really enjoyed it, though it was not at all like my usual sci-fi reading 📚

Gamer

I’ve just bumped up my monthly support of CANADALAND to the next tier. Plenty of great content that I’m happy to pay for.

Great fun at the Axe Pancreatic Cancer fundraiser last night! Thanks to everyone that joined us to raise money to support two promising clinical trials.

A cool visualization and exploration of the network of scientific papers

As a daily AeroPress user, I enjoyed watching this documentary on its origin and culture

I finally got my flu shot and hope you did too 😷🦠

A great conversation between Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins on the Making Sense podcast. Nice to hear Dawkins talking about evolution again.

Several catchy songs on Joseph Arthur’s new album Come Back World

Recursion by Blake Crouch is an entertaining time-travel, multiverse story. Distinct from his previous Dark Matter novel, but with the right kinds of echos 📚

With an agent based model you can explore interesting scenarios. Our latest post models the 🇨🇦 election with another Liberal scandal, new Conservatives climate change policy, or proportional representation. The results are not obvious, showing benefits of non-linear modelling.

At my son’s soccer game, but I’m not that familiar with the game. Anyone know what position he’s playing in this picture?

Axe Pancreatic Cancer is back! Join us to throw axes, drink beer and wine, and raise money for pancreatic cancer research. Early bird tickets are sold out. So, don’t wait!

We’ve been using our agent-based model to analyze the upcoming Federal election here in Canada. Now that we’ve generated our predictions, we’re going to explore how best to explain the outcomes. 🗳🇨🇦

My “Best Dad” mug has been recalled. Apparently it may break when filled with hot liquid, which is exactly its function. Hopefully this isn’t some metaphor for my parenting

Task management with MindNode and Agenda: For several years now, I’ve been a very happy Things user for all of my task management. However, recent reflections on the nature of my work have led to some changes. My role now mostly entails tracking a portfolio of projects and making sure that my team has the right resources and clarity …

Stranger Things season 3 is fun with 80s nostalgia and familiar characters. Not as delightfully creepy as season 1 though.

Nick Cave’s song Hollywood is quite potent, particularly given the recent death of his teenage son 😢🎧

RStats on iPad: Among the many good new features in iPadOS, “Desktop Safari” has proven to be surprisingly helpful for my analytical workflows. RStudio Cloud is a great service that provides a feature-complete version of RStudio in a web browser. In previous versions of Safari on iPad, RStudio Cloud was close to …

Thanks to Run the Jewels 3 for providing a much-needed boost on today’s run 🏃‍♂️

Fall has arrived

Thanksgiving weekend begins with the traditional excessively long and slow drive on the 401

With Category Theory, Mathematics Escapes From Equality - Quanta Magazine Ultimately, you will build an infinite tower of equivalences between equivalences. By considering the entire edifice, you generate a full perspective on whatever objects you’ve chosen to represent as points on that sphere.

Thanks to a recommendation from @verybadwizards I read and very much enjoyed Ted Chiang’s short story “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”. Plenty of deep implications for free will and morality in a fascinating story.

After 20 years and four cars, the Darwin Fish on the back of our car has disappeared. Hopefully it wasn’t ripped off by a zealot! Replacements are surprisingly expensive (~$50). But the car looks wrong without one.

An unexpected and welcome surprise in the latest Byword update #rstats

I enjoyed The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu. Very inventive, though definitely some grim parts, as you might expect for the second book in a trilogy. The dialogue can be a bit clunky, so the emphasis is on the science. 📚

As Canada’s federal election campaign gets increasingly ridiculous, I’d like the political parties to know that I’ll vote for whoever has the most credible and ambitious climate change plan. This includes a carbon price, otherwise it isn’t credible 🇨🇦 🗳

Two great Mindscape episodes in a row about climate change overcast.fm/+S_7kXRI8…

I enjoyed Borderline by Mishell Baker. A good mix of fantasy and realism with compelling characters 📚

All Armed on Nils Frahms’ Encores 3 EP revived my (barely) dormant obsession with his music. His work rewards focused and patient listening. Hard to do these days, but worth the effort music.apple.com/ca/album/…

Our family data plan was close to the limit, so I called Rogers to temporarily add some data. They ended up offering unlimited data for $15 less per month! A nice surprise and good reminder to call every year or so to check on better deals.

The past, present and future of climate change from The Economist is a good overview of GHG emissions and what we should do about them. Some excellent graphics too.

One of my great hopes for Apple Arcade is that it will end the seemingly endless requests from my children to buy virtual gems

The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History is well worth a read. Really puts the dangers of cyber attacks in context.

Of Monsters and Men put on a great show in Toronto.

I declined an offer to provide a lecture on Transport Economics. I’m dissapointed, since I’ve enjoyed these opportunities before. However, it is a for-profit series and they’re looking for volunteer lecturers. This didn’t seem right to me. Hopefully, I’m not being short …

Grandma’s 95th Birthday. Her vitality is inspiring.

I really enjoyed this Strong Song episode on one of my favourite songs: Paranoid Android 🎵

Grades 9 and 6

The Fall by Neal Stephenson is well worth a read. The concepts about consciousness, computer simulations, and death were fascinating, along with the usual hyper detail from Stephenson. Definitely a marathon of a read with multiple, overlapping stories within the book 📚

Owen conquered his first #spartantoronto race

Very fun and very muddy #spartantoronto race

We often think of fungi or other microbes as not particularly intelligent. This study goes to show that across these networks, one of the reasons they can be so successful is that they can make what seem to be fairly sophisticated decisions about where to allocate resources to optimize the return …

My vacation transition in Screen Time: Reading on the dock Thursday and Friday Starting to pack on Saturday and traveling on Sunday Then Monday catching up at home on lots of email, upcoming meetings, and tasks Followed by Tuesday and Wednesday going to meetings in the office

Go Karts!

Waiting for the thunderstorms to pass ⛈

Admittedly I didn’t have high expectations, but the First Formic War series from Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston is pretty good. Not as sophisticated as the original Ender’s War series, though well worth a vacation read 📚

Paddle boat for three

Another great @highlandyardrace, in support of Places for People. An extra thanks to @boshkungbrewing for the refreshing, post-race beer

Chips in the paddle boat

Lucy the lifeguard

Kids have settled into cottage life

Earth Unaware by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston is a promising start to the prequels for Ender’s Game. Some similarities with the Expanse series, in terms of the asteroid miners, that gives some nice realism to the story and good foreshadowing of the later books 📚

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker is fascinating and concerning. I knew sleep was important, but not that it is so essential to health, memory, and learning. I’ve been falling short of my 8 hour target for a while now and am definitely motivated to reprioritize sleep again 📚

Conscious by Annaka Harris is a fascinating overview of the science of this mysterious process. Her description of panpsychism was particularly intriguing 📚

The Good Place is a fun, clever show, once you get past the first few episodes 📺

The Bayern Agenda by Dan Moren is a fun sci-fi espionage story. Well worth a read 📚

The Red Rising sci-fi trilogy is solid, page-turning entertainment. Nothing high-concept and sometimes that’s all you want 📚

Visitors Day at Kilcoo

Off to camp for a month!

High school is next!

Fun visit with Great Grandma

This CBC story is disheartening: while nearly two-thirds of Canadians see fighting climate change as a top priority, half of those surveyed would not shell out more than $100 per year in taxes to prevent climate change, the equivalent of less than $9 a month

Better Oblivion Community Center is a good listen 🎵

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu was a fun read. The Chinese perspective made it interesting, but the actual appeal was the good science fiction. I’m looking forward to reading the next two books in the trilogy.

Fun mayhem downtown today for the Raptors parade. This was as close as I could get. 🏀🦖

Lucy is ready for @rrrroutley to drop his rib

Great fun at the #spartantoronto race

Switching to summer weather mode ☀️

If you’re at all interested in mindfulness, I recommend checking out the Waking Up app. The guided meditations and lessons are very helpful.

My iPhone Home Screen: My goal for the home screen is to stay focused on action by making it easy to quickly capture my intentions and to minimize distractions. With previous setups I often found that I’d unlock the phone, be confronted by a screen full of apps with notification badges, and promptly forget what I had …

Consolidating my internet content: Like many of us, my online presence had become scattered across many sites: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and a close-to-defunct personal blog. So much of my content has been locked into proprietary services, each of which seemed like a good idea to start with. Looking back at it now, …

An entertaining David Gray show, as always

Some great images of maps from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century in First You Make the Maps

Second place finish in the relay. Next up: City finals! 🏃‍♂️🏆

Happy 11th Birthday Owen!

Chernobyl on HBO is well worth checking out. Once you’re hooked, the associated podcast is a great companion

Happy birthday Emma!

Going Critical is a great overview of diffusion in networks

Happy birthday to Kelly! 🎉

This conversation with Stuart Russell on the After On podcast is a fascinating discussion of important topics in AI 🎙

Emma and her puppy

I found The Strange Order of Things by Antonio Damasio surprisingly difficult to read. This Mindscape episode was a much more accessible introduction to the topic via a good conversation with Sean Carroll

The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene is a fascinating and clearly written tour of the many multiverse theories. Really mind bending stuff 📚

Morbid Stuff by PUP is oddly cheerful, nihilistic punk rock itunes.apple.com/ca/album/…

Seems like an unnecessarily precise monthly fee

A great discussion about Incredibles 2 on The Incomparable podcast. I agree with the overall assessment that it had many great moments, but didn’t hold together overall.

The mystery of computation, as something our brains do, is well described in this Aeon Essay

Backups: I’m very keen on backups. So many important things are digital now and, as a result, ephemeral. Fortunately you can duplicate digital assets, which makes backups helpful for preservation. I have Backblaze, iCloud Drive, and Time Machine backups. I should be safe. But, I wasn’t. Most of …

Wonderfully rich detail in the 5 podcast series from Brady Heywood on Apollo 13 🎙

The Travellers finale is a very satisfying ending to a great TV series 📺

There are useful lessons in this discussion of statistical significance for any evidence-informed process. There’s no magic number, uncertainty matters, and judgement is required.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie is a great book with an intriguing main character, compelling plot, and fascinating world building 📚

Interested in transportation demand modelling and geospatial analysis? I’m looking for a Manager, Modelling & Geomatics to lead a team of passionate and effective analysts to help generate and communicate evidence for project evaluation

Garry Kasparov: The 8-year-old chess champion’s story is quintessentially American Talent is universal, but opportunity is not, and talent cannot thrive in a vacuum.

This is a great example of using the tidyverse for graph analysis #rstats

A good reminder to choose your models carefully when trying to prove something

An interesting article about changes in our perspective on Neanderthals. They are no longer primitive brutes

Cool research showing that embryos use an optimal Bayesian decoder to coordinate development

A timely article on how Pi led to infinity and calculus

Although I’m late to reading Michael Lewis' The Long Short, it’s hard to believe it is non-fiction. The story of the sub-prime mortgage crisis is incredible 📚

Thanks to @t_rig for the great goodr sunglasses

Emma’s hair has gone curly

Great to be back at the Royalton! 🏖

This was a really good episode of the Mindscape podcast all about the multi-worlds theory of quantum physics

Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking is a fun book. Clear and concise answers to some important questions, written with Hawking’s whimsy and fully demonstrating his impressive curiosity 📚

Lots of fresh snow today

Although I’m disappointed the Counterpart wasn’t renewed for a third season, the second season ended really well. Definitely one of my favourite shows of the past few years.

Finished reading: Wool by Hugh Howey 📚

I’ve been intrigued by Stoicism for a while now and How to Be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci is a great introduction to the ideas and practices of the Stoics. I particularly appreciated how Pigliucci made the practice applicable to modern day issues. 📚

I find these attempts to generate quantum theory from simple postulates fascinating, even though I barely understand them

School ski trip 🎿

I committed to a 🚴 challenge before checking my results to see if it was reasonable. So, had to conduct some excessive #rstats to see if I was in trouble matt.routleynet.org/post/comm…

Commiting to a Fitness Challenge and Then Figuring Out if it is Achievable: My favourite spin studio has put on a fitness challenge for 2019. It has many components, one of which is improving your performance by 3% over six weeks. I’ve taken on the challenge and am now worried that I don’t know how reasonable this increase actually is. So, a perfect excuse to extract my …

After just two episodes, I’m definitely enjoying season 2 of Star Trek Discovery more than season 1. There were good parts of season 1, but overall it didn’t hold together for me. Regardless, always great to have new Star Trek

After four great ski days, we rested our legs in the hot springs today

Another great ski day

The Nugget Squad

Another glorious day

A great first day on the mountain!

Warming up ⛷

-20 degrees, but there are smiles under the scarves ⛷

I’m keen to adopt an iPad first approach. This MacStories article is a good primer and motivator www.macstories.net/stories/t…

The long nightmare of the 24-hour internet outage is over…

For awhile now I’ve been meaning to get serious about automation on iOS. The Siri Shortcuts Field Guide from @macsparky is a great, comprehensive introduction. While taking the course, I built a good dozen useful shortcuts and have many ideas for more.

Ed Harcourt’s album Beyond the End has been great headphone music for at work 🎶 itunes.apple.com/ca/album/…

Fun to be back ⛷

#CozyLife

Another Christmas dinner

Good advice from a philosopher on how to disagree constructively: Many of my best friends think that some of my deeply held beliefs about important issues are obviously false or even nonsense. Sometimes, they tell me so to my face. How can we still be friends? Part of the answer is that these …

The Barchef project is delicious

Out for a Christmas stroll

The Kano computer is a great product. Fun and easy to build with lots of good built in software.

Merry Christmas

A quiet, snowy run today.

Preparing the tree

Here’s some “behind the scenes” geospatial analysis I used in a recent @PsephoAnalytics post. This was a good excuse to experiment with the sf #rstats 📦 which makes this much easier than my old workflows

Spatial analysis of votes in Toronto: This is a “behind the scenes” elaboration of the geospatial analysis in our recent post on evaluating our predictions for the 2018 mayoral election in Toronto. This was my first, serious use of the new sf package for geospatial analysis. I found the package much easier to use than some of my …

Our predictions for the recent election in Toronto held up well. We were within 6%, on average, with a slight bias towards overestimating Keesmaat’s support. Now we’ll add more demographic richness to our agents and reduce the geographical distribution of errors …

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast is one of my new favourites 🎙

Seems like something to strive for these days: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence aeon.co/ideas/bel…

Interested in analytics and transit planning? I’m looking for an Analyst to help Metrolinx generate and communicate evidence for project evaluation ca.linkedin.com/jobs/view…

4th Axe Pancreatic Cancer fundraiser: Thanks to generous support, the 4th Axe Pancreatic Cancer fundraiser was a great success. We raised over $32K this year and all funds support the PancOne Network. So far, we’ve raised close to $120K in honour of my Mom. Thanks to everyone that has supported this important cause!

Raising funds for pancreatic cancer research by throwing axes. Great fun!

Fascinating to think of creating cognitive scaffolding for elephants aeon.co/essays/if…

We’ve completely retooled our approach to predicting elections to use an agent-based model. Looking forward to comparing our predictions to the actual results tonight for the Toronto election!

Found the exact spot we first met! Who knew it would lead to this

Cold medication

Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark is a fascinating book on an important topic. AI’s implications for society are profound and require significant debate. This book is a start. 📚

I appreciate innovation in beer, but this one went too far for me.

Great fun at the #fivepeaks Earth Run in the Rouge

Hiking Balsam Lake Provincial Park : 

Warming up at Balsam Lake Provincial Park

We had fun meeting the author Dav Pilkey and getting a signed copy of Dog Man. I really appreciated his patience with spending several hours talking to kids and signing books. 📚

Enjoying great sour beers at #sourpalooza

Ready for Pentatonix

Axe Pancreatic Cancer tickets are available now! This is a very fun event for a great cause. Early Bird tickets are selling quickly. So, if you’re interested, sign up now at pancreaticcancercanada.ca/axe-pancr…

Ready for school

Fixing a hack finds a better solution: In my Elections Ontario official results post, I had to use an ugly hack to match Electoral District names and numbers by extracting data from a drop down list on the Find My Electoral District website. Although it was mildly clever, like any hack, I shouldn’t have relied on this one for long, as …

Cousins

Vacation

Ready for Vance Joy

Ready for Imagine Dragons

Biking the Don Valley trail

Farewell Ron

Ski day

Good morning

Merry Christmas

Out at the theatre

Wood is stacked and ready for winter

Elections Ontario official results: In preparing for some PsephoAnalytics work on the upcoming provincial election, I’ve been wrangling the Elections Ontario data. As provided, the data is really difficult to work with and we’ll walk through some steps to tidy these data for later analysis. Here’s what the source data looks like: …

‪All lit up for #WorldPancreaticCancerDay‬ a whole day in advance

Finance fixed their data and broke my case study: The past few years, I’ve delivered an introduction to using R workshop that relied on manipulating Ministry of Finance demographic projections. Analyzing these data was a great case study for the typical data management process. The data was structured for presentation, rather than analysis. …

Organizing

Sack of candy

Scarecrow and the ninja

Apple picking

A happy cross country runner

A workflow for leaving the office: Sometimes it’s the small things, accumulated over many days, that make a difference. As a simple example, every day when I leave the office, I message my family to let them know I’m leaving and how I’m travelling. Relatively easy: just open the Messages app, find the most recent …

Another tribute to Labrador and Newfoundland dogs

Lovely day in St. John’s

Home of the Lab

Celebrating 17 years of marriage with @kroutley by snoozing in a hammock at @steannesspa

Gorgeous day for a pre-massage hike with @kroutley at @steannesspa

Charity donations by province: This tweet about the charitable donations by Albertans showed up in my timeline and caused a ruckus. Albertans give the most to charity in Canada, 50% more than the national average, even in tough economic times. #CdnPoli pic.twitter.com/keKPzY8brO — Oil Sands Action (@OilsandsAction) August 31, …

Fun at the Ex

Great fun at the cottage

Now Owen is hooked too

Now she’s reading on the lily pad. Relentless

Teaching the cousins how to play video games

Summer reading

Cool dude

Enjoying the cottage

Vacation officially started

Reunited!

`#canada150

Goodbye Emma!

The campers are ready!

Grade 6 graduation

When Metrolinx Planning goes to an offsite

TTC delay data and Friday the 13th: The TTC releasing their Subway Delay Data was great news. I’m always happy to see more data released to the public. In this case, it also helps us investigate one of the great, enduring mysteries: Is Friday the 13th actually an unlucky day? As always, we start by downloading and manipulating the …

Owen’s ninth birthday party

Sports car

Smells like spring

Got any food?

Owen’s birthday cake

Owen is 9!

Family bike ride

Back at the Old Mill. This time for a conference instead of a wedding.

New bikes

Boy and his dog

Forest walk

Coming out of hibernation

Happy kids

Lazy river

Nice start to the day

Ready to relax

Skiing with Grandad

A boy and his dog

Successful AxePC 2016 event: Thank you to all the participants, donors, and volunteers for making the third Axe Pancreatic Cancer event such a great success! Together we’re raising awareness and funding to support Pancreatic Cancer Canada.

Axe PC 2016: We’re hosting our third-annual Axe Pancreatic Cancer event. Help us kick off Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month by drinking beer and throwing axes!

Sticky fingers

Ribs with a fork

Ribfest with @megccase

The Ex

Last campfire of the vacation

Woodsman

Wilderness

Peaceful spot

Kites are out

My new view.

Birthday breakfast in bed

Fun in the snow

The view from Frost

Scarf

Winter trek

Good view

On the streetcar, heading towards the Santa Claus Parade

Nice to see Calgary’s big sky again

Nice view

Riding elephants

Thanks @cocothebike and @rrrroutley the Woodford Reserve is great

Our final camp fire

Turtle? Riding

Whale riding

Canoe trip to get Popsicles, for lunch!

Weather is turning nasty

View from the bike trail

Summer chairlift

Top of the ski hill

LEGO hands

Cloudy day

Hiking with Emma

Sunny, but windy

Lounging on the dock

Canoe trip

Sunset

Catching Monarch caterpillars

Vacation

The groom is ready

Premises protected by childhood innocence

Mirror image

Owen’s Mini Avengers

Waiting for the dog walker

And now, Emma has princess stickers

Ribfest

Finally set up Owen’s Christmas present from Uncle Chris ( @rroutley ) and Aunt Melissa ( @cocothebike )

Thinking of story ideas

The Squinkie Show, complete with judges

Typewritter

Stonefields Heritage Farm

Happy birthday Emma

Fish

Emma’s Easter treats

Guarding the BBQ

Easter bunnies

Bowmore 12

Motorcycle

Outdoor gymnast

Spring intruder

Late-night guest

Exciting potential of a new notebook

Getting sleepy

PJ Socks

Bikers

This part of the commute always puts the daily stresses in context

Emma turned a slipper into a monkey mobile

Traffic jam

Building a metropolis

Keeping busy

Toronto sunset

Caitlynn’s birthday

Ready for the move

Sleeper

Watching Cars 2 on the MacBook

Burger and pint

Squirrel

Bird feeder

Kelly’s pear, Gorgonzola and arugula pizza

Reading

Mariposa Barbie

Finn McMissle

Waiting for breakfast

Carbs

Kelly’s first turkey

Emma passed Red Cross level 2 swimming

Christmas outfit

The office

Elf

Bottom of the tree is getting crowded

Teddy

Owen’s proud of his decorating

Decorating the tree

Decorating

Christmas tree is in the house

Policy Tools of Government

Toy eyes

Little toys

Brunch

Christmas pot luck

Santa and Emma

Santa and Owen

Walking to school

Snow

Auchentoshan

Good food

Good morning

Public storage

Packed

Storage

Watching Emma swim

Ice cream

Dinner is served

Pumpkin designed by Emma

Climbing the rope ladder

Sliding

Slide

Bring Owen to the playground and he wants to read his library book

Looking for books

Mumford and Sons have arrived

Setting up for Mumford and Sons

Ready for Halloween

Nice outside

Pooh bear

Blocks

Caitlynn and Elmo

Go Andrew!

Ready for winter

Hammock

Sign says “No jumping from bridge”

Hugs

Juice

Thanksgiving party

Thanksgiving ice cream

Cleaning out the closet.

#VoteON

#ESRICanadaUC

Warmth

Henry

Emma’s library

Emma’s grade 1 desk

Fridge is broken. So, Licks for dinner.

Cupcakes

Bulldozer

Garlicfest

Kilns

Map of Toronto’s rivers

Owen’s busy night finally caught up with him.

Emma’s kicking the ball and Owen’s pushing the baby stroller

Playing ball

Found a forest

Lunch time

Gorillas

Cichlids are always a highlight

Princess shoes

Princesses

New sweater from Gram

Slide

Kite surfers

Windy and sunny

Out for breakfast

Well earned this week

Butterfly face paint

Ready for Grade 1

Waiting patiently for cookies

Kite flying

And, new shirt for Owen from Aunt Susie

Emma decided to change into matching tights

Thanks for the new dress Aunt Susie

Bath time

Cupcake

Happy birthday to Aunt Susie

Cupcakes

Cleaning up after thirsty kids

Ready to pounce

Collecting snails

Playing in the backyard

Finishing off the ice cream

Waiting for a treat

Curls

Busy night

Swing

Motorcycle

Splash Pad

Storm is clearing

Chicken fingers

Pasta

Hotels are fun

Back of the streetcar

Commuter

Reunited with our puppy

Water levels are down about four feet. Boathouses are up on dry land.

Ice Cream

Canoe ride

Goggles

Sand castle

Testing the water

Lounging on the beach

Blue sky is back

Unsettled weather

Story time

Marshmallows

Storytime

Frog

Looking for fish

Sky is clearing

Hula hoop

KD Pasta

Lunch on the deck

Found a swing

They’ll be in the lake all week

Moon

Freezies

Ready for the cottage

Toy train

Zoo was fun

Water park

Cichlids

Refreshed

Pine Point

Tree climbing

More forklift

Fork lift

Concentrating

Corn

French fries

Ribfest

Lounging

Hoodie

Reunited

Tired Owen

Decorating the tree

When children decorate

In an online world, there are many more of us to watch them than there were of them to watch us. The technology was bound to work against those who value privacy most – but it was only this year we learned those privacy-lovers are very often governments. Just watch us: The utopian dream of total …

After all, what could more certain (or cherished!) than your tough-minded, critical and enlightened self? Science, the cruel stranger - The Globe and Mail (via Instapaper)

Toronto’s latte classes may look down on you if you move to Guelph. But these days, even Guelph’s got latte. A tale of two Torontos - The Globe and Mail (via Instapaper)

It was time for some “blue collar” people to run city hall – says a millionaire putting the seals of office around the neck of another millionaire. Time to get the “artsy” people out of city hall – says a public-broadcasting television comedian. Time for a fresh new start – and the “lefty pinkos” …

Last, there should be appointed a Minister of Opportunity Costs, whose sole responsibility would be to remind his colleagues around the cabinet table that nothing is free, that to favour one industry is to penalize every other. No doubt they will be astonished to hear it. Every single time. A …

Insist that a single percent of risk is 1 percent too much when it comes to terror and American lives, and then demand that those who feel otherwise be dealt with punitively, if they won’t shut up. How our “security” obsession costs us - National security - Salon.com (via Instapaper)

Halloween 2010

Toronto’s newly elected mayor identified that anger and the anxiety. Rob Ford fed into it and preyed on it, telling voters in the simplest terms possible that the current crop of politicians were to blame for all their problems, that there were easy solutions that required no sacrifices, that soon …

Southbrook Pumpkin Patch

Most Canadians are simply not disturbed by the questions they are asked on the mandatory long-form census. There is no groundswell of opposition. There is not even a ripple. According to nearly everyone who has expressed an informed opinion, including two former chief statisticians at Statistics …

Todd Houston, Ironman

Smoothies

Lake Okanagan

Airplane

How in the world did we get to the point that filling out the long form census is just too much to ask? I frankly cannot remember if I, personally, have ever had to do the long form. I’m old enough that I probably did and I hate forms enough that I may have blocked it from memory – but it simply …

I want to take this opportunity to comment on a technical statistical issue which has become the subject of media discussion. This relates to the question of whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census. It can not. Under the circumstances, I have tendered my …

To turn statistical methodology into a political controversy, a government has to really screw up. But to make statisticians shriek and flap their arms like wounded albatrosses, to cause policy wonks to turn purple with rage, to compel retired civil servants to dispense with a lifetime of discretion …

Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller firms and no leverage - a world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks, and in which companies are born and die every day without making the news. New Statesman - Beware those Black Swans (via Instapaper)

MP Irwin Cotler, a former justice minister, says that the trial will be the first of a child soldier in modern history and that such a trial is prohibited under international humanitarian law. Any thought that something like this might cause the Harper government to reconsider is, of course, …

So, no new tax; no money flowing back to government to spend; no vast new bureaucracy springing up to burden the taxpayer (Stewardship Ontario was, until about a year ago, a virtual organization, and now has all of 20 staff), and really, a pretty smart program that is the first of its kind in …

A staple of collective self-awareness, the census is our national mirror. Arbitrarily and without debate or justification, Conservatives are blurring Canada’s reflected image by poking a stick in the eye of knowledge. Travers: Census change latest move in PM’s dumbing down of Canada - thestar.com …

Rice Krispies

“Keeping the Bees” on CBC’s Quirks and Quarks

So what we have is a federal government that keeps asserting assumptions that almost all experts think are wrong, that says its critics in the PBO are wrong without providing alternative information, that backs a policy that those who know about such matters are almost unanimous in saying will not …

Haircuts

It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence. But just how prevalent is this effect? The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1) - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com (via Instapaper)

Although centralized control of messaging has been a growing feature of federal governments – indeed, governments in many democracies – nothing in Canada has come close to the attention, time and effort the Harper government puts into managing and manipulating information and image-making. The …

Bee swarm

Public service vs. Academics: I recently participated in a panel discussion at the University of Toronto on the career transition from academic research to public service. I really enjoyed the discussion and there were many great questions from the audience. Here’s just a brief summary of some of the main points I tried to make …

Emma’s new Ariel doll

Snake Oil? The scientific evidence for health supplements www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snak…

Mother’s Day Brunch

The previous prime minister was called Mr. Dithers because Paul Martin could never make up his mind. Stephen Harper, it seems, can’t stop changing his. Contraception a part of maternal-health plan, Harper says - The Globe and Mail

In other words, you are starting to matter. From prorogation and ten percenters, to anger over CIDA cuts and changes to the anthem, the grassroots have stirred enough to cause reversals in the government’s political designs. In such a light, the ten percenter victory is perhaps more important than …

via Bathroom breaks could wait during gold-medal match

Good Medicine Magazine – Health vs. Pork: Congress Debates the Farm Bill

Expressing a gold-medal performance in public-sector efficiency by the number 1, the economists scored all other competitor countries as percentages of the first-place finish. With an input rating of 0.75, Canada’s 12th-place finish meant it spent 25 per cent more money than it needed to spend – …

Funny Grandpa

Back to work

Early Spring Stroll

Our Healthy Princess

Meeting Baby Caitlynn

Science is not a cold body of facts, but an organized system of inquiry, discovery, evaluation and learning. Science not only welcomes the correction of errors, its key attribute is that it is self-correcting over time. As new research arises, old hypotheses gain or lose support. While this process …

It is time, finally, to learn from our mistakes. While global leaders focused single-mindedly on cutting fossil fuel use by promising to cut carbon emissions, they have failed to invest anywhere enough money into ensuring that alternative technologies are ready to take up the slack. Keep in mind …

Welcome to the fun house, friends. The 21st century is going to be the most dangerous and the most complicated (and the most exciting and dynamic) century in the history of the human race. The politics of science are going to get more complicated, more confusing and more contentious — even as the …

Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing …

In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus …

A great episode of Quirks and Quarks with slime moulds that can build engineering networks and photosynthetic sea slugs. There’s a very funny line in the sea slug segment that almost derails Bob McDonald with laughter. CBC Radio | Quirks & Quarks | Jan. 23, 2010

But we should cut the creationists a little slack, because every new bit of evidence, every discovery, is a nightmare for them. Take the ark. The big-boat business poses all sorts of questions. But, again, they’ve got answers. There are models and plans and layouts of the vessel. You can walk …

When the Illinois study looked at cases where engineers had taken the time to labor over sophisticated energy models, it found that 75 percent of those buildings fell short of expectations. The fault presumably lay with building managers who made numerous small mistakes—overheating, overcooling, …

From brutal brooding to retrofit-chic: Our offices will be moving to this new space. I’m looking forward to actually working in a green building, in addition to developing green building policies. The Jarvis Street project will set the benchmark for how the province manages its own building retrofits. The eight-month-old Green …

Owen Watching Cars gallery.me.com/mroutley A short video of Owen’s commentary while watching Pixar’s Cars movie. He’s really keen.

The danger in all this is not just a corruption of science but also an emasculation of politics. The key debates about climate change are political, not scientific. How much resource should we put into mitigating emissions and how much into adapting to a warmer world? How do you deal with the fact …

When a party, like an individual, is guided by fear, then courage is banished, convictions are buried, and politicians will talk but not say much. Or, to be more charitable, the party of fear will offer alternatives to the government, but they will be timid and at the margin of difference, the …

In the end, though, the rules do matter - it’s just that obeying them doesn’t. They need to be there to create a tension between conservatism and innovation. If the innovation continued unchecked, unmonitored by Susie Dent, then the language would fragment into thousands of mutually incomprehensible …

In Our Time - History of the Royal Society www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hi… A great series on the history and influence of the Royal Society.

To Bee or Not to Bee : The Nature of Things www.cbc.ca/documenta… An interesting discussion of bees with excellent footage. The documentary makes a good case for the importance of bees and describes the many challenges they face. Fun to see some old colleagues too.

Christmas Excitement

Good candidates for elimination from political language http://tgam.ca/GA7 (via @globeandmail)

Top song of 2009 in the Routley household? Boom Boom Pow by the Black Eyed Peas. Clearly the kids have too much control over the music. #fb

Canada deserves both a government willing to stand up and defend their decisions and a functioning parliament with mature debate.

Our current response to terrorism is a form of “magical thinking.” It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time. Is aviation security mostly for show? - CNN.com (via Instapaper)

International human rights, it seems, are something the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit stands ready to impose on others, but not on ourselves. Getting Away with Torture - The New York Review of Books (via Instapaper)

Irresponsibility might seem to moralists an unsatisfactory condition for an adult, but in practice it can be a huge relief. Being foreign: The others | The Economist (via Instapaper)

The case for building green has rarely been made more clearly. “It’s very simple,” explains Stuart Bowden, senior vice president of software company SAS: “We doubled our square footage, but halved our costs.” thestar.com iPhone : Hume: Going green brings unexpected savings (via Instapaper)

History has exploded from the least likely corners; spurious events unsettled our surest expectations. The 2010s will be volatile, unpredictable, dangerous – but not what we hope, and not what we fear. Ten years that shook, rattled, rolled and helped repair the world - The Globe and Mail (via …

Why do these people keep bugging us like this? Does the spirit of scientific scepticism really require that I remain forever open-minded to denialist humbug until it’s shown to be wrong? At what point am I allowed to simply say, look, I’ve seen these kind of claims before, they always turn out to be …

Good overview of the consequences of the Climatic Research Unit emails for climate policy http://instapaper.com/zWfgti9R (via @globeandmail)

Back in the good old days when the bargain was firmly in place, it would have been highly inappropriate for a bureaucrat to do as Richard Colvin did in his testimony before the special committee on Afghanistan, and effectively blow the whistle on the government from his safe perch in the embassy in …

Interesting discussion with philosophy professor Mark Rowlands. The first third on the differences between humans, dogs, and wolves, and the last third on perceptions of time are particularly good.

Four good questions regarding Afghan detainees http://tgam.ca/EO4 (via @globeandmail)

Thank goodness for civil servants who breach the walls of government secrecy and obfuscation and speak out for principle, knowing they will be subject to public attack by their very powerful employer. Speaking out, despite the cost (via Instapaper)

One teaspoon of honey, about 21 grams, contains 16 grams of sugar, or 60 calories. It takes 12 bees their entire foraging lives, combined flying time of about 9,700 kilometres, to produce this much. To understand the importance of these bees, consider that every third bite on your plate is a …

They’re playing lullaby versions of classic Led Zeppelin tunes at Owen’s daycare. Sound very strange, but intriguing. #fb

RT @rhh: And of course, now we know exactly why the Tories have been so frantically trying to muzzle Colvin http://bit.ly/J9XQW

RT @rhh: Tory’s torture defence: bafflegabble: http://bit.ly/jEg17

Mesmerizing visualization of the decline of empires http://bit.ly/258w38 (via @boingboing)

I swear the tens of thousands coming out of these (PhD) programs, they’ve got no street smarts whatsoever. They know lots of mathematical theorems – fantastic. But they’ve got no common sense. Lessons from the crisis: Re-educate the geeks | Reuters

The Canadian TV industry isn’t naturally an economically viable ecosystem where each player can succeed on its own and still fulfill a cultural responsibility. It never has been and it may never be in the future. When models break - as they are now - the answer isn’t simply to drain money from one …

Canada has left its children with little protection for the first pandemic in 41 years. Is this what Canadians wanted from their heralded national strategy? Patchwork of policies for children - The Globe and Mail

Forget fevers and sniffles. For working parents across the country, the most stressful flu symptom this fall may be that tense breakfast-table negotiation: Who is going to stay home with the kids? Who is going to wait in line for the vaccine? Who spends the night in emergency? And that unspoken …

To the extent that we have any infrastructure policy at all, it is badly disjointed, dysfunctional, often doing more harm than good as it serves the interests of politicians who are crazy for pork rather than the real needs of the American public. Op-Ed Columnist - What the Future May Hold - …

Inspiring story of Captain Trevor Greene http://bit.ly/4k15Ui (via @globeandmail)

Partisanship, the desire to do as much damage to the other guy as possible, the dramatically diminished focus on the public interest in favour of the party’s interest, has led to more dishonesty with voters, less time spent on trying to address the real issues and a dramatic increase in short-term …

Healthcare is responsible for 8% of all CO2 emissions in the US http://instapaper.com/zGkjkf8f

The new guide to citizenship could be a very interesting read, even for Canadian citizens http://tgam.ca/D8O (via @globeandmail)

Good to see these detailed analyses of the Federal stimulus money http://tgam.ca/D5b (via @globeandmail)

More commentary on road tolls for Toronto. This warrants serious discussion. http://tgam.ca/D5x (via @globeandmail)

Toll roads are inevitable and likely a good public benefit http://instapaper.com/zmfr7d8k

“Activism disguised as science” on the BPA ban http://tgam.ca/DYf (via @globeandmail)

Canada talks boldly about free trade but does nothing to achieve it http://tgam.ca/DYg (via @globeandmail)

Appreciating the sustainability theme here at the Toronto Forum for Global Cities

RT @aradwanski: Smitherman confirms in our interview that he’s leaving cabinet, running for mayor. http://tinyurl.com/ybsnuxn

We like to think that all great events have great causes, and obviously long-term political, economic and military forces shaped the Cold War – and how it ended. But momentous events are also a sort of ambush of history, when all those long-term pressures come together in an unexpected way. The …

This is precisely how the character of a country becomes fundamentally degraded when it becomes a state in permanent war. So continuous are the inhumane and brutal acts of government leaders that the citizens completely lose the capacity for moral outrage and horror. The permanent claims of …

It rarely matters who is on your side; what matters is who is against you. Unlike Gloria Loring, you don’t need a friend and you don’t need a lover. What you need is a) one quality nemesis, and b) one archenemy. These are the two most important characters in the life of any successful human The …

Most Canadians probably fall into a middle group. They’re sensible people who don’t like being sick, care for each other and take reasonable precautions to protect themselves and others. They have a sense of their good fortune in living in the 21st century and a sense of proportion about their …

Now, people waiting in queues will be questioned about why they are there - their likely response being that the health authorities have for months urged them to be there and indeed initially opened clinics to all. If they don’t fall into one of the risk groups, they will be weeded out. The Public …

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate …

A vast majority of professionals are in “emergency scanning” mode. Their self-management consists of checking for and acting on the loudest immediacies – in email, in the hallways and on the phone. Everything else is shoved to the side of the desk, and to the back of their mind. Because they’re …

Where’s the remotest place on Earth? - New Scientist: Fantastic image and an interesting research project.

200 years ago, economists made a prediction, and we got it wrong. “Big deal” you might say. But it was a big deal; a much bigger deal than some piddling mistake like failing to predict a global financial crisis. Basically, 200 years ago economists predicted that long run growth was impossible. …

While good design practices are valuable, the fact remains that every design decision we make is a guess. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk: Design Values: Validated Data over Expert Opinion

Better Place envisages a convenient network of charging outlets and battery-swap stations that will be tied together with software that makes it possible for both the system and EV drivers to know in real time the ongoing battery range and charge level. Drivers will be able to call up the nearest …

The committee’s diagnosis was stark: the market, left to its own devices, is failing to deliver. Consumers are not buying energy-efficient appliances or insulating their houses, carmakers are failing to get emissions down and power companies still prefer fossil fuels to greener alternatives. Energy …

The Lost Prestige of Nuclear Physics www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati… For better or worse, the United States has come to depend on technological progress, and if its continuance as a society in anything resembling its traditional forms is to be assured, technological vitality must be …

Denmark makes you green with envy - The Globe and Mail www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opin… We could learn a few things from the Danes.

What scientists face today is “almost disgraceful … The bureaucrats want to get a hold of the money and ask for business plans. Now do you think that George Smith and I ever wrote a business plan? Not at all,” Dr. Boyle, now 85 and retired, told a reporter Tuesday. “You don’t have time to do that …

Emacs Installation on Windows XP: I spend a fair bit of time with a locked-down Windows XP machine. Fortunately, I’m able to install Emacs which provides capabilities that I find quite helpful. I’ve had to reinstall Emacs a few times now. So, for my own benefit (and perhaps your’s) here are the steps I follow: …

Is Canada broken? www.theglobeandmail.com/news/poli… “We are in a continuous election campaign with no discussion of issues,” observes Ned Franks, a political scientist at Queen’s University and a leading authority on Canada’s Parliament. If an election is called, I’d …

Emma is very happy with her new bike and is quite a fast rider.

On our ferry trip across to PEI, we caught the attention of the boat’s captain. He was kind enough to let us visit the bridge and take some photos. The setup is pretty amazing, with many radar screens and blinking devices, but all offset by a tiny steering wheel.

Owen’s enjoying the trip.

Yelled at by the owner of the Inlet Cafe in Mahone Bay for some spilled Owen cheerios. Not family friendly, despite the high chairs and …

Out-of-office messages are set, let the vacation begin! Two weeks on a family road trip to the Canadian east coast.

But using federal dollars for infrastructure has two powerful political advantages. It gives taxpayers something tangible for their money. And it allows cabinet ministers and government backbenchers to fan out across the country, announcing local projects. TheStar.com | Opinion | Cash may never be …

Earlier in the 20th century, governments treated public money with the same puritanical respect that people generally treated their own money in a famously frugal age. It wasn’t that these governments never wasted public money, never misused it. It was that they did everything parsimoniously. But …

Owen loves being outside (via Flickr)

Impressive. Japan commits to 20 kW solar panels on all of their 32,000 public schools by 2020 http://bit.ly/CBzsF

Just tried a Galt Knife Old Style beer from Grand River Brewing. Quite tasty.

Owen’s first (captured on film) steps: http://gallery.me.com/mroutley#100189

This is right http://bit.ly/XDNA3 I’ll vote for the party that proposes a credible plan to increase taxes and cut spending.

eHealth Ontario is controversial. But, having just copied my information dozens of times for routine paperwork, we need electronic records.

What makes these service stoppages all the more irritating is that they are unnecessary. Elected politicians can – if they have the nerve – remove the conditions that foster them. Only where cities operate a unionized public monopoly on garbage pickup are city residents potential hostages to a …

Wow, $10,800 per kilowatt of power capacity for nuclear http://is.gd/1zZU9 (via @timbray)

Interesting read on the health effects of wind turbines, with a comparison to coal and nuclear http://bit.ly/S51fv (via @globeandmail)

Family stroll around the neighbourhood. Quite nice outside, if somewhat chilly.

Property rights: the Nisga’a pave the way www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opin… Engaging in commercial activity doesn’t make someone less indigenous

Restarting Apple Mail fixes my Notes synchronization problem with the iPhone. Repeat every couple of days.

Replaced stolen electric mower with a manual reel mower. Requires a bit more effort, but works quite well and is much quieter.

Lounging by the kiddie pool after a walk through the park.

Registered for Toronto Hydro’s peaksaver program. My air conditioner is going to join the semi-smart grid and reduce peak load.

http://www.gigatonthrowdown.org/ identifies building efficiency as the lowest cost pathway to achieve 1-gigaton CO2e reduction by 2020.

Bizarre. Someone broke into our garage & stole the landmower, leaving behind more valuable things. Didn’t even take the electrical cord.

Discomfort of my recent capitulation to IT was greatly reduced by #GTD guide to Outlook 2003. Saved hours of fiddling. http://bit.ly/GyObv

Instapaper Pro 2.0 released! Excellent. This is one of my top three iPhone Apps and these look like important changes.

Looks like an interesting article on data mashups in R: http://bit.ly/IEyg9 Could be a good excuse to use R at work (via @timoreilly)

Canada LEED projects: The CaGBC maintains a list of all the registered LEED projects in Canada. This is a great resource, but rather awkward for analyses. I’ve copied these data into a DabbleDB application with some of the maps and tabulations that I frequently need to reference. Here for example is a map of the density …

Playing with a dump truck (via Flickr)

Perhaps my last academic paper? http://bit.ly/32P2B Two manuscripts and several datasets left, but no resources to do anything with them.

I’ve been curious about this abandoned bank on Yonge Street. Jonathan Castellino has some great pictures of the interior. (via jonathancastellino)

I was given an opportunity to propose a measure to clarify how and on what basis the federal government allocates funds to STI - a measure that would strengthen relations between the federal government and the STI community by eliminating misunderstandings and suspicions on this point. In short, my …

Every day is ‘science day': I was given an opportunity to propose a measure to clarify how and on what basis the federal government allocates funds to STI - a measure that would strengthen relations between the federal government and the STI community by eliminating misunderstandings and suspicions on this point. In short, my …

The kids have a great time together, which is fantastic.

TheStar.com | World-beating bureaucrats www.thestar.com/comment/a… My research compared the achievements of Canadian public service and political leaders with their U.K. counterparts, and the results are very favourable to Canada. It was rewarding to hear so many U.K. public service leaders …

Math and the City: judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/1… A good read on the mathematics of scaling in urban patterns. I had looked into using the Bettencourt paper (cited in this article) for making allocation decisions. The trick is moving from the general patterns observed in urban scaling to specific …

Mama Earth Organics: I’m certain that paying attention to where my food comes from is important. Food production influences my health, has environmental consequences, and affects both urban and rural design. Ideally, I would develop relationships with local farmers, carefully choose organic produce, and always consider …

When it comes to the Canadian economy, Obama may as well be PM www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/s… An important discussion of how US energy policy is driving Canadian policy.

Commercial air travel, like many other industries, is lubricated by cheap oil. Mr. Rubin, the former chief economist of CIBC World Markets, has now bet his career on a single idea – that the cheap oil era is dead and globalization is about to wither along with it. But the most fascinating part of …

globeandmail.com: Natives, Bay Street form country’s biggest farm www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/s… … in Saskatoon today, Bay Street investors and a group of chiefs from Saskatchewan and Alberta will formally announce the unlikeliest of marriages, one that will make them the …

Goodyear's Religious Beliefs vs. Evolution: Our minister of science continues to argue that his unwillingness to endorse the theory of evolution is not relevant to science policy. As quoted by the Globe and Mail: My view isn’t important. My personal beliefs are not important. I find this amazing. How can the minister of …

Old Growth Media And The Future Of News www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2009/03/t… If only there were some institution that had a reputation for journalistic integrity that had a staff of trained editors and a growing audience arriving at its web site every day seeking quality information. If …

@globepolitics: Canada says it has legal obligation to prevent Abdelrazik from travelling: Other terrorism suspects have returne.. theglobeandmail.com/servlet… This has to stop. Abdelrazik is a Canadian citizen and should be allowed to return. I don’t understand what the Canadian Government is …

CBC.ca | The National | High-Minded Hypocrisy www.cbc.ca/national/… Rex Murphy is great at this. His main point is certainly right: we can’t have the many benefits of energy without consequence and the National Geographic neglected to show these benefits. However, I do think that …

Another good shot of Owen (via Matthew Routley)

This picture always makes me smile. (via Matthew Routley)

These companies couldn’t succeed by doing, so how are they supposed to succeed by planning? globeandmail.com: America’s monumental failure of management

globeandmail.com: The latest outrage: Just say no www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/s… But here’s a surprise for Stephen Harper. We’re calling your bluff. This time we’re telling Ottawa: not so fast. Lots of Canadians are prepared to risk prosecution and defy the ban on …

Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? Gene Weingarten Reports. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co… This is horrifying: “Death by hyperthermia” is the official designation. When it happens to young children, the facts …

Poor Ceiligh – she certainly is good natured.

A rare shot of Kelly with both kids. If only we could get Owen and Emma to look at the camera simultaneously.

Sure, science isn’t that exciting. It tends to offer up steady, incremental bits of knowledge rather than miraculous cures, and there remain a lot of unknowns. But these voids need not be filled with fantasy and snake oil. And, yes, Big Pharma and big business have had their scandals and excesses, …

Daring Fireball: Observations, Complaints, Quibbles, and Suggestions Regarding the Safari 4 Public Beta Released One Week Ago, Roughly in Order of Importance http://daringfireball.net/2009/03/safari_4_public_beta A great example of why I read Daring Fireball: strongly held and insightful opinions, …

My plea to all Internet commentators is to at least step up to a certain level of wit and discourse when you publicly disagree, and to challenge the source of your own anger before you spew it at someone else. But I don’t think that is going too happen any time soon. People out there are having …

If you’ve ever played ‘Chinese whispers’, what comes out the end is usually gibberish, and more or less when we speak to each other we’re playing this massive game of Chinese whispers. Yet our language can somehow retain its fidelity. BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | ‘Oldest English words’ …

Death Sentences Review: Death Sentences by Don Watson is a wonderful book – simultaneously funny, scary, and inspiring – that describes how “clichés, weasel words, and management-speak” are infecting public language. The humour comes from Watson’s acerbic commentary and fantastic scorn for phrases like: Given the within …

In finance, you can never reduce risk outright; you can only try to set up a market in which people who don’t want risk sell it to those who do. But in the CDO market, people used the Gaussian copula model to convince themselves they didn’t have any risk at all, when in fact they just didn’t have …

Omnivore: After seventeen years as a vegetarian, I recently switched back to an omnivore. My motivation for not eating meat was environmental, since, on average, a vegetarian diet requires much less land, water, and energy. This is still the right motivation, but over the last year or so I’ve been rethinking …

The first rule of reading a federal budget is this: When a round number such as $1-billion appears, it means the government (a) picked the number from the air, (b) doesn’t know how or where the money will be spent, or (c) doesn’t have a process for making that decision. A round number, especially a …

The best readers are obstinate. They possess a nearly inexhaustible persistence that drives them to read, regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in. Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a …

Physicists and mathematicians often stretch their imaginations by considering what the world would be like if some of their basic assumptions and principles were violated. This has led to new concepts such as non-Euclidean geometry, positrons, antimatter, and antigravity. At the least, violating …

So 2009 will be a squalid year, a planetary hostage situation surpassing any mere financial crisis, where the invisible hand of the market, a good servant turned a homicidal master, periodically wanders through a miserable set of hand-tied, blindfolded, feebly struggling institutions, corporations, …

The Arab states invest their oil fortunes in the craziest things, from the proposed Mile-High Tower in Jiddah to the indoor ski resort in dry-as-dust Dubai. Perhaps the craziest idea yet is Saudi Arabian wheat. Some 30 years ago, the lake- and river-less kingdom decided it should be self-sufficient …

CBC Tapestry interview of Sam Harris. He explains the dangers or religion, especially religious moderates. He’s always worth listening to.

The only agency that regularly finances large-scale science in Canada was shut out of Tuesday’s federal budget, putting at risk thousands of jobs and some of the most promising medical research, and forcing the country to pull out of key international projects. For the first time in nine years, …

Scientists across America are celebrating the passing of the Bush administration as the end of a dark age, a bleak stretch in which research budgets shrank and everything — stem cells, sex education, climate change, and the very origins of the Grand Canyon — became a point of conflict. But in …

No one is suggesting Darwinism has all the answers to social questions. Indeed, with some, such as the role of hierarchies, it suggests there is no definitive answer at all—itself an important conclusion. What is extraordinary, though, is how rarely an evolutionary analysis is part of the process of …

Ontario is taking its first baby steps to position itself for the coming revolution in electric cars by backing a California high-tech company that plans to build battery recharging stations. Better Place, based in Palo Alto, will unveil a pilot project at a news conference in Toronto today to build …

Instapaper Review: Instapaper is an integral part of my web-reading routine. Typically, I have a few minutes early in the morning and scattered throughout the day for quick scans of my favourite web sites and news feeds. I capture anything worth reading with Instapaper’s bookmarklet to create a reading queue of …

This country has an immense opportunity to reinvent itself with this budget and transform itself into a “green economy.” But if this metamorphosis is to take place, the budget cannot contain a bunch of giveaways to industry wrapped up in a nice green bow. Instead, it needs to hand out gift …

Yesterday I would have ranked country music as one of my least favourites. Now, thanks to CBC Radio 3, I’m a big fan.

Fantastic photos of the Sun, via The Big Picture

The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief www.nytimes.com/2008/10/1… Michael Pollan describes the upcoming food crisis in an open letter to the next President of the United States. This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited — …

Election 2008: Like most Canadians, I’ll be at the polls today for the 2008 Federal Election. In the past several elections, I’ve cast my vote for the party with the best climate change plan. The consensus among economists is that any credible plan must set a price on carbon emissions. My personal preference is …

But the Black-Scholes model is quite different. It uses a model of the future to describe the present. In the absence of this model, or some equivalent of it, present stock options have no reasonable assigned value. What then is the test of the model? Presumably, it is that if one uses it as a guide …

A Map of the Limits of Statistics: In this article Nassim Nicholas Taleb applies his Black Swanidea to the current financial crisis and describes the strengths and weaknesses of econometrics. For us the world is vastly simpler in some sense than the academy, vastly more complicated in another. So the central lesson from …

Without God - The New York Review of Books www.nybooks.com/articles/… Steven Weinberg provides a great overview of the tension between science and religion and a discussion of morality in the absence of God. Living without God isn’t easy. But its very difficulty offers one other …

Globe and Mail: Incremental man: A detailed and fascinating portrait of Stephen Harper. As the article points out: The core of any government reflects the personality of the prime minister, because everyone in the system responds to his or her ways of thinking, personality traits, political ambitions and policy preferences. Know …

A New Bank to Save Our Infrastructure - The New York Review of Books www.nybooks.com/articles/… A proposal to create a new institution to fund and co-ordinate infrastructure investments.

Dan Gardner . Harper economics www.canada.com/component… Dan Gardner interviews Harvard University economist Gregory Mankiw on climate change economics. The article is an interesting description of the differences between cap-and-trade and carbon tax policies. So why is the cap-and-trade …

The cycles in economic fashion show how far economics is from being a science. One cannot think of any natural science in which orthodoxy swings between two poles. What gives economics the appearance of a science is that its propositions can be expressed mathematically by abstracting from the real …

kung fu grippe - Better www.kungfugrippe.com/post/4858… This is an excellent post by Merlin Mann and something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit recently. Now that I’m halfway through my parental leave with Kelly and the kids, I’m wondering about all of the distractions I …

Senate Report on “Emergency Preparedness in Canada” www.parl.gc.ca/39/2/parl… This report is well worth a read just for the direct – almost sarcastic – writing. Some of the report’s commentary on the bureaucratic replies to the senate committee’s queries is …

globeandmail.com: Half-truths and zingers on the campaign trail www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/s… I wonder about this too. Why do politicians pretend to be “regular” people. Don’t we want extraordinary leaders?

The ’80s: Were They Really That Bad? : NPR Music www.npr.org/templates… NPR’s All Songs Considered provides an entertaining discussion of ‘80s music. They play some classic bad '80s music, but also find some great songs from the decade.

Even before the writ has dropped, the Tory campaign has made clear its intention to portray Mr. Harper as a minivan-driving hockey dad from the suburbs. The Liberal Leader, Stéphane Dion, by contrast, is to be ruthlessly caricatured as a wimpy and elitist academic of the mad-professor type. …

Is it really good for future generations - the alleged beneficiaries of this deluded parsimony - to pass down a clapped out wreck of a town in need of major repairs and upgrades, long-deferred works that become more expensive with every minute they are neglected? globeandmail.com: Debt free in a …

Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that’s starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and …

Many hospitals put the drugs “on reserve,” but an apparent cure-all was too tempting for some physicians, and the tight stewardship slowly broke down. Medical Dispatch: Superbugs: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Ask a Kandahari what he wants from his government and you’ll get a familiar answer: not vast ideas but practical solutions to everyday problems Boston Review — chayes.php

Success in the sciences unquestionably takes a lot of hard work, sustained over many years. Students usually have to catch the science bug in grade school and stick with it to develop the competencies in math and the mastery of complex theories they need to progress up the ladder. Those who succeed …

globeandmail.com: We must green the market www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/s…

On Language - Me, Myself and I - NYTimes.com www.nytimes.com/2008/08/0…

Ontario is not Alberta, and the philosophy that provincial rights should be paramount has always had to compete with a powerful sense that Canada comes first. globeandmail.com: Ontario struggles to decide whether or not it exists

BBC NEWS | Magazine | No time to think? news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/maga…

Unfortunately, it’s all pure bunk. To get serious about energy policy, America needs to abandon, once and for all, the false promise of the hydrogen age. The New Atlantis » The Hydrogen Hoax

Bridges Still Crumble, a Year After the I-35 Disaster - The Lede - Breaking News - New York Times Blog thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/2…

The Nature of Glass Remains Anything but Clear - NYTimes.com www.nytimes.com/2008/07/2…

The café operates on the honour system: Grab what you want, drop your money into an old streetcar fare box next to the doughnut counter and waltz out. globeandmail.com: Coffee, cookies but no cashiers

At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading. What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text. …

… the result will be an open culture of trust which gives scientists a real incentive to outsource problems, and contribute in areas where they have a great comparative advantage. Michael Nielsen » The Future of Science

Patrick Watson: Reading up on the upcoming Polaris Music Prize reminded me of Patrick Watson, last year’s winner of the prize. His “Close to Paradise” album is inventive with intriguing lyrics, unique sounds, and an often driving piano track. Particular stand out tracks are Luscious Life, …

At one moment the patient experiences a painful phantom limb; at another he sees a mirror image of his intact hand and the pain disappears How the Mind Works: Revelations - The New York Review of Books

Toronto, in my opinion, is uniquely a city of neighbourhoods, and the most important person in my job is the neighbourhood cop. globeandmail.com: Toronto’s top cop

Stop the presses! Crime rates are falling A typically clear analysis from Jeffrey Simpson on the divergence between the actual rate of crime and the attention devoted to crime by the media. Statistically, Canada has never been safer – particularly in Ontario.

It is one of Canada’s pathetic ironies that the two provincial premiers least concerned about greenhouse gas emissions govern the provinces most at risk from climate change. Climate brinkmanship in Alberta, Saskatchewan

One might suppose that such a recurrent chain of blunders would gall a politically potent segment of the population. That it has evidently failed to do so in 2008 may be the only important unreported fact of this otherwise compulsively documented election season. Why No Outrage? - WSJ.com

Stoooopid …. why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks Times Online I think this is a legitimate problem. How do we teach children to focus? I’m sure my abilities are waning.

globeandmail.com: New law puts green screen on government decisions www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/s…

My new favourite photo of the kids

www.instapaper.com Fantastic tool for keeping track of content to read. Especially with the offline access from the Apple App Store application.

Kelly and I are very happy to announce the arrival of Owen Bruce Routley. He arrived Tuesday morning just after four weighing a solid 8lbs 8ozs. Although there were some challenges with the delivery, both Owen and Kelly are recovering well and should be home later this week.

Stuck in the middle: A recent press release from the federal government entitled “Making a Strong Canadian Economy Even Stronger” contains a sentence that struck me as odd. As a result of actions taken in Budget 2007, Canada’s marginal effective tax rate (METR) on new business investment improved from …

Creationists and their old tricks: TVO’s The Agenda had an interesting show on the debate between evolutionary biology and creationism. Jerry Coyne provided a great overview of evolution and a good defence during the debate. The debate offered a great illustration of the intellectual vacuity that characterises creationism (aka …

Stikkit from the command line: Note – This post has been updated from 2007-03-20 to describe new installation instructions. Overview I’ve integrated Stikkit into most of my workflow and am quite happy with the results. However, one missing piece is quick access to Stikkit from the command line. In particular, a quick list of my …

Yahoo Pipes and the Globe and Mail: Most of my updates arrive through feeds to NetNewsWire. Since my main source of national news and analysis is the Globe and Mail, I’m quite happy that they provide many feeds for accessing their content. The problem is that many news stories are duplicated across these feeds. Furthermore, tracking …

Stikkit Todos in GMail: I find it useful to have a list of my unfinished tasks generally, but subtley, available. To this end, I’ve added my unfinished todos from Stikkit to my Gmail web clips. These are the small snippets of text that appear just above the message list in GMail. All you need is the subscribe link from …

DabbleDB: My experiences helping people manage their data has repeatedly shown that databases are poorly understood. This is well illustrated by the rampant abuses of spreadsheets for recording, manipulating, and analysing data. Most people realise that they should be using a database, the real issue is the …

Stikkit-- Out with the mental clutter: I like to believe that my brain is useful for analysis, synthesis, and creativity. Clearly it is not proficient at storing details like specific dates and looming reminders. Nonetheless, a great deal of my mental energy is devoted to trying to remember such details and fearing the consequences of …

Mac vs. PC Remotes: I grabbed this image while preparing a new Windows machine. This seems to be an interesting comparison of the difference in design approaches between Apple and PC remotes. Both provide essentially the same functions. Clearly, however, one is more complex than the other. Which would you rather use?

Plantae's continued development: Prior to general release, plantae is moving web hosts. This seems like a good time to point out that all of plantae’s code is hosted at Google Code. The project has great potential and deserves consistent attention. Unfortunately, I can’t continue to develop the code. So, if you have an interest in …

Text processing with Unix: I recently helped someone process a text file with the help of Unix command line tools. The job would have been quite challenging otherwise, and I think this represents a useful demonstration of why I choose to use Unix. The basic structure of the datafile was: ; A general header file ; 1 sample: …

Images from the Hinode spacecraft: Japan’s Hinode spacecraft has started taking pictures of the Sun. The detail of the shots is amazing and gives a sense of the Sun’s structure.

Edward Burtynsky documents our impacts on the landscape through extraordinary photographs. In this presentation at TED he describes his motivations for the work and showcases some of his best images. The descriptions of China are particularly impressive.

Stern Review on the economics of climate change: The Stern Review has been in the news recently for predicting that global warming could cost up to $7 trillion if not addressed soon. Of course, this has caused quite a stir as it offsets many of the, likely unfounded, concerns that fixing climate change will cost too much. The full report is …

Climate change and public relations: This article in the Guardian explores the use of public relations firms by big oil companies to fight against the science of climate change. Apparently, the same tactics and people even of the tobacco industry’s fight against the link between smoking and cancer are being employed by the oil …

Principles of Technology Adoption: Choosing appropriate software tools can be challenging. Here are the principles I employ when making the decision: Simple: This seems obvious, but many companies fail here. Typically, their downfall is focussing on a perpetual increase in feature quantity. I don’t evaluate software with feature …

TED-- Hans Rosling: An excellent presentation regarding the use of country statistics. The visualizations are particularly effective.

Resumes & Spam Filters: Since I’m looking for work, I found this post rather interesting. They’ve applied a spam filter to resumes to automatically filter through candidates. The output is only as good as the reference resumes used to construct the filter, but still an intriguing idea. My results are below. Most …

The Canary Project-- Global Warming Documented in Photos: The Canary Project is an intriguing idea. They are documenting the effects of global warming through pictures. Since many people, apparently, don’t believe the abundant scientific evidence, perhaps some startling pictures will be convincing.

RSiteSearch: I’m not sure how this escaped my notice until now, but `RSiteSearch` is a very useful command in R. Passing a string to this function loads up your web browser with search results from the R documentation and mailing list. So, for example: RSiteSearch("glm") will show you everything you need to …

R module for ConTeXt: I generally write my documents in Sweave format. This approach allows me to embed the code for analyses directly in the report derived from the analyses, so that all results and figures are generated dynamically with the text of the report. This provides both great documentation of the analyses and …

CBC Radio 3: The CBC Radio 3 podcast is an excellent source for independent, Canadian music. They have recently added a playlist feature that helps you search for your favourite artists and create your own radio station. Definitely worth checking out.

expand.grid: Here’s a simple trick for creating experimental designs in R: use the function expand.grid. A simple example is: treatments which produces: treatment level 1 A 1 2 B 1 3 C 1 4 D 1 5 A 2 6 B 2 7 C 2 8 D 2 9 A 3 10 B 3 11 C 3 12 D 3 Now, if you want to randomize your experimental treatments, try:

Burning your money: Burning our money by Marc Jaccard is a useful overview of some policy options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, this article is part of the Globe’s subscribers-only section, but his paper, Burning Our Money to Warm the Planet, is available from the CD Howe Institute.

Heart of the Matter: CBC’s Ideas has been running a series of shows on heart disease called “Heart of the Matter”. Episode 2 is particularly interesting from a statistical perspective, as the episode discusses several difficulties with the analysis of drug efficacy. Some highlights include: Effect sizes Some of the best …

Plantae resurrected: Some technical issues coupled with my road-trip-without-a-laptop conspired to keep Plantae from working correctly. I’ve repaired the damage and isolated Plantae from such problems in the future. My apologies for the downtime.

Competitive Enterprise Institute: The Competitive Enterprise Institute has put out some ads that would be quite funny if they weren’t so misleading. I imagine that most viewers can see through the propaganda of the oil industry. Regardless, in the long-term, industries that invest in efficient and low-polluting technology will win …

Google Importer: Google Importer is a useful Spotlight plugin that includes Google searches in Spotlight searches. This helps integrate your search into one interface, which seems like an obvious progression of Apple’s Spotlight technology.

Google calendar: Google Calendar has been featured in the news recently, and for good reason. Many of us have wanted access to a good online calendar program. One of my favourite features of Google Calendar is its integration with Gmail. If Gmail detects an event in your email message, a link appears that sends the …

An Inconvenient Truth: This looks like an incredibly important film. I hope it breaks all of the box office records.

Analysis of Count Data: When response variables are composed of counts, the standard statistical methods that rely on the normal distribution are no longer applicable. Count data are comprised of positive integers and, often, many zeros. For such data, we need statistics based on Poisson or binomial distributions. I’ve …

Getting Evolution Up to Speed: There’s a common notion that our technology has slowed, or even stopped, human evolution. Evidently, this is not true as researchers have found many locations of strong positive selection in the human genome. New evidence suggests humans are evolving more rapidly – and more recently – than most …

SSHRC and the theory of evolution: This is quite a surprise, McGill University’s Brian Alters had his proposal to study the effects of intelligent design on Canadian education rejected by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. A stated reason for the rejection was that Alters did not provide “adequate …

Deschooling, Democratic Education, and Social Change: Matt Hern provides an interesting podcast available from Canadian Voices. He considers the 150 year history of compulsory state education and asks what benefits it has provided. The basic question is, Why do we send our kids to school? Although the answer seems obvious, he takes a different approach …

Desktop Manager: I’m convinced that no computer display is large enough. What we need are strategies to better manage our computer workspace and application windows. Exposé and tabbed browsing are great features, but what I really want is the equivalent of a file folder. You put all of the relevant documents in a …

Managing project files: As I accumulate projects (both new and completed), the maintenance and storage of the project files becomes increasingly important. There are two important goals for a file structure: find things quickly and don’t lose anything. My current strategy is as follows: Every project has a consistent …

Sun grid: Sun’s new Grid Compute Utility could be a great resource. As I described in an earlier post, running simulations can be a challenge with limited computer resources. Rather than waiting hours for my computers to work through thousands of iterations, I could pay Sun $1, which would likely be …

Automator, Transmit, and Backup: The Strongspace weblog has a useful post about using Transmit and Automator to make backups. One challenge with this approach is backing up files scattered throughout your home folder. The solution is the “Follow symbolic links” option when mirroring. I created a backup folder and populated it with …

Remote data analysis: My six-year old laptop is incredibly slow, particularly when analysing data. Unfortunately, analysing data is my job, so this represents a problem. We have a new and fast desktop at home, but I can’t monopolise its use and it would negate the benefits of mobility. Fortunately, with the help of Emacs …

Rails, sqlite3, and id=0: I’ve spent the last few days struggling with a problem with Plantae’s rails code. I was certain that code like this should work: class ContentController 'show', :id = @plant.id else ... end end def show @plant = Plant.find(params[:id]) end ... end These statements should create a new plant and then …

The Globe and Mail-- Constitutional reform: How about a constitutional right to a healthy environment? The Constitution of Canada guarantees its people important rights, such as freedom of religion, freedom of expression, fair trials, free elections, and language rights. But the effective exercise of these rights is impossible without safe …

Taxonomy release: Plantae now supports the addition and updating of species names and families. A rather important first step. Now onto adding character data to make the site actually useful.

plantae foundations: I’ve made a variety of important changes to plantae’s foundations. For the curious they are: Converted the webserver from apache to LightTPD. LightTPD is fast and easy to configure. Plus it has built-in support for FastCGI which makes plantae run much faster. Set up a Subversion repository. This …

Sexual interference within flowers of Chamerion angustifolium: Hermaphroditism is prevalent in plants but may allow interference between male function (pollen removal and dispersal) and female function (pollen receipt and seed production) within a flower. Temporal or spatial segregation of gender within a hermaphroditic flower may evolve to reduce this …

Plant breeding systems and pollen dispersal: This book of about 600 pages is written to provide practitioners of pollination biology with a broadly based source of methodologies as well as the basic conceptual background to aid in understanding. Thus, the book reflects the expertise of the assembled a team of internationally acclaimed …

The effect of protandry on siring success in Chamerion angustifolium (Onagraceae) with different inflorescence sizes: Protandry, a form of temporal separation of gender within hermaphroditic flowers, may reduce the magnitude of pollen lost to selfing (pollen discounting) and also serve to enhance pollen export and outcross siring success. Because pollen discounting is strongest when selfing occurs between flowers …

Effect of population size on the mating system in a self-compatible, autogamous plant, Aquilegia canadensis (Ranunculaceae): In self-compatible plants, small populations may experience reduced outcrossing owing to decreased pollinator visitation and mate availability. We examined the relation between outcrossing and population size in eastern Ontario populations of Aquilegia canadensis. Experimental pollinations showed …

Correlated evolution of dichogamy and self-incompatibility-- a phylogenetic perspective: Historically, dichogamy (the temporal separation of gender in flowering plants) has been interpreted as a mechanism for avoiding inbreeding. However, a comparative survey found that many dichogamous species are self-incompatible (SI), suggesting dichogamy evolved for other reasons, particularly …

The consequences of clone size for paternal and maternal success in domestic apple (Malus x domestica): Clonal growth in plants can increase pollen and ovule production per genet. However, paternal and maternal reproductive success may not increase because within-clone pollination (geitonogamy) can reduce pollen export to adjacent clones (pollen discounting) and pollen import to the central ramets …

Responses to selection on male-phase duration in Chamerion angustifolium: Protandry (when male function precedes female) can enhance fitness by reducing selfing and increasing pollen export and outcrossed siring success. However, responses to selection on protandry may be constrained by genetic variation and correlations among floral traits. We examined these potential …