Finished reading: The Longbow, the Schooner, and the Violin by Marq de Villiers is an interesting exploration of wood via those three objects. A bit clunky in sections, though pretty good overall 📚
Microposts
🇨🇦🥃 Enjoying the Bearface Triple Oak whisky
Finished reading: The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison continues the great Cemeteries of Amalo series. I’m impressed with how casually and simply such a rich and complex world is created in this series 📚
New notebook day!
George is recovering well from recent, minor surgery by sleeping at my feet
🔗 Matt Gurney: How Hollywood screwed with our civic expectations
Why do we assume the same government that is, for instance, struggling to fill potholes in my city, or hire enough nurses in my province, or fix a federal payroll system, is going to be more competent when presented with something totally out of the blue? This flies in the face of all of our lived experiences with government. It’s a generous assumption of state capacity that is, to put it charitably, unearned.
Finished reading: Blindsight by Peter Watts is an interesting mix of sci-fi, horror, and philosophy. I enjoyed it. Vampires in space!📚
🎧 I enjoyed Season 7 of Strong Songs and am happy to be a Patreon supporter
Glad it’s Friday
🎶 Some good, new albums that fit well together:
🇨🇦 Gloves Off is a thought provoking series (so far) on how Canada could respond to recent geopolitical developments
I was pleased by Glenn Jenkins' invitation to return to his Program on Investment Appraisal and Risk Analysis at Queen’s University and describe an approach to project appraisal and economic assessment. This is my third year participating and I’m consistently impressed by the quality of questions and level of engagement from the participants.
Download: transport-economics-and-appraisal.pdf
🔗 Optimization Culture is Making Us Fragile
For all that we know about human performance, it is still wildly mysterious. A blackbox algorithm cannot predict how you’ll perform. If you think you must have full readiness to perform at your best, then you will leave so many of your best days on the table. It is a fragility mindset that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Absolutely something to be careful about. I know I’ve sometimes been influenced by a poor readiness score and have learned to treat it as a general indicator, rather than prediction.
Finished reading: Outlive by Peter Attia is a comprehensive approach to health. Although we need to be careful about influencer nonsense when it comes to health advice, Attia’s work is carefully considered and researched. My main takeaways are the importance of strength training, monitoring my protein consumption, continuing to prioritize sleep, and carefully considering mental resiliency 📚
Tall Trees Muskoka. 📍
Reflecting on yesterday’s stomach troubles, I have to consider the deep fried butter tart I had the night before the race. A delicious concoction of a butter tart, wrapped in a cinnamon coated churro, topped with vanilla ice cream. Not traditional triathlon nutrition, but I’ve decided it prevented anything worse from happening, rather than contributing to the trouble.
🏊♂️🚴🏃♂️ I do these things because they’re hard. This was was the hardest yet: ridiculous humidity and some bad nausea on the bike made this one a struggle. 45 minutes slower than my last two attempts and every minute was earned. But, this is likely the one I’ll remember most.
Finished reading: Livesuit is a fun short story in the Captive’s War series by James S. A. Corey. Based on this and the first book in the series, a promising start 📚
Prioritizing rest and recovery this week has certainly helped my readiness to train. Great to be back in the green
Family Place Restaurant. 📍
Race fuel
🏊♂️🚴🏃♂️ I’m always worried that I’m forgetting something. Pictures like these help, plus a packing list in Apple Notes
George let’s me know when I’ve spent enough time with my phone. Leans right up against me and is not shy about using his paw to push the phone away.
But beyond the stunning breadth of the information demand power, there should be serious concern with how the government has crafted a system that is unprecedented in its secrecy and lack of transparency. Simply put, there will be millions of information disclosures every year and Canadians will be kept in the dark on both an individual basis and in terms of the overall scope of warrantless demands.
There’s a lot going wrong in this bill and it absolutely warrants some serious revisions. I find the provisions that prevent firms from communicating with customers about security vulnerabilities particularly troublesome.
Geist’s Law Bytes podcast has a good summary episode on this bill too.
I was letting myself get distracted by petty arguments on the web again. So, switched my timeline back to “Show posts but no replies”. Although not unique to micro.blog, I appreciate features like this that allow me to expand and contract my timeline.
I’m tapering this week for Sunday’s race. I’ll confess that the reduced training volume is quite nice. So much more free time too
📷 Although I missed a few days, the June 2025 Photo Challenge was fun. For the next one, I’m going to restrict myself to new photos taken during the month. I used more archived photos this time than I’d originally planned.
📷 Day 30: Solitude
🎵 Although Secret World Live is my reference album for live Peter Gabriel, In The Big Room is quite good with interesting changes to some classic songs
It’s 167 days since Carney told Jon Stewart he was an “outsider” who’d “just started thinking” about running for a leadership role in Canadian politics. He thought fast, and announced his candidacy three days later. Now he’s been prime minister for longer than Charles Tupper and John Turner were. How’s he doing?
🔗 Which came first colour vision or colour signals? When Did Nature Burst Into Vivid Color? | Quanta Magazine
Finished reading: I picked up World War Z by Max Brooks on a whim from the library. Lots of fun and much better than the movie. I enjoyed the unique structure and storytelling 📚