Back to school
Microposts
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.
Thursday, September 10, 2020 →
Evidently I haven’t been in the office for a while! Should take me a full day just to catch up on Dilbert.
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, but it is nice to get immersed in a good, long book. 📚🧙♂️
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.
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
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
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.
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 📚