Wednesday, November 17, 2021 →
The Strong Songs Year Three, In Review episode is a good summary of a fun season 🎧🎶
Microposts
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 📚
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 the app really helpful.
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 unknown senders
- A confidentiality warning with direction to delete the email and all attachments if I’m not the intended recipient
- Lots of details about how to join the Teams meeting
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 part of the setup for the Shortcut.
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 the vast majority of people aren’t reaching a huge audience. And yet at any single moment just about anyone with a smartphone has the ability to surveil millions of people across the globe.
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), especially when you follow @jean’s advice and skip the bad episodes. Many great characters, interesting plots, and ethical conundrums with a good episodic approach, rather than the long narrative arcs of DS9 and Discovery 🖖
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 📷
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 📷
