Microposts

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 between Kaminar and the Federation seemed really out of character to me. Despite that, I like where they ended and look forward to S4 🖖

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 have great hopes for the IndieWeb, it is really hard to compete with that kind of reach and ease of use.

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 probability. It is none of these things, nor is it meant to be. It should not even, really, be thought of as means to make an inference (although, it is in the most simplistic interpretation of the Neyman-Pearson paradigm). It is, instead, a means to critique a potential inference.

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 NetNewsWire and Apple News.

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 📺

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 both incredibly slow and amazingly interesting. My recollection is that I only used AppleWorks and Audion. But, it led to a long interest in and use of open source software like R and LaTeX that continues to this day.

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 structures. Her proposals for change would help us achieve the world we’re striving for. 📚

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 😢

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 the screen around so easily. Super helpful when sitting at a desk typing for hours on end.

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

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