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, Yonghai Xiao, Vahid Ayan, Andrew Devlin, Tamim Raad, and Haytham Sadeq was delightful.
Here’s the abstract:
Transportation funding is becoming an important topic of discussion at all levels of Transportation Association of Canada (TAC) councils and committees, reflecting discussions that are taking place throughout the Canadian transportation community. The fundamental needs are to maintain and upgrade the country’s aging transportation system while adding new infrastructure to meet the demands of a growing population and economy. These needs are evolving in the face of new challenges, notably changing funding sources and priorities, climate change impacts on infrastructure resiliency, changes to how the system is used, and accommodating new transportation and communications technologies. These challenges have become sharper with the COVID-19 pandemic-induced disruptions in how people and goods move and in shifts in revenues and funding priorities. These needs and challenges cover a broad range. They vary across the country, by mode, ownership, responsibility and more. All told, these complexities mean that the needs and challenges are not fully understood. This briefing describes and categorizes these key challenges and opportunities and provides an initial, high-level assessment of the broader range of potential funding sources, approaches and needs. From this review, the briefing identifies knowledge gaps and potential research directions for consideration by the TAC Transportation Finance Committee and other committees and councils to address these gaps.
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 curated, short list of podcasts. With Apple Podcasts, I kept finding new episodes of shows I didn’t intend to subscribe to in my queue.
Adding in the nice audio features in Overcast that boosts voices and trims silences, makes Overcast the right app for me.
Of course, having just made this decision and rebuilt my Overcast subscriptions, I see that Apple has now integrated Apple Music into their Podcasts app. Better ways of managing radio episodes in Apple Music is on my list of features I’d like to see. So, looks like I’m not actually settled on a podcasts app yet, which was a silly hope anyway.