Blueprint by Nicholas Christakis is an interesting book about universal feature of our societies (the social suite) and how they are based on genetics, emergent properties, and complex network effects. The book has lots of interesting examples and makes clear connections between human societies and attributes of other animals.📚

Choosing a podcast player 🤔🎧

There’s been a fair bit of discussion over on Micro.blog about podcast players recently. I’ve switched among Overcast, Castro, and Apple Podcasts players over the years and, mostly to help myself think it through (again), here are my thoughts. For me, there are three main criteria: audio quality, episode management, and OS integration. Though, I completely understand that others may have different criteria. Like most podcast listeners, I listen at high speed, usually around 1.

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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.

Transforming boxes of components into a gaming PC 📦🕹

Like any 12-year old, my son is pretty keen on gaming. As an all Apple house, his options were a bit constrained. So, we decided to build a PC from components. I’d last built a PC about 30 years ago, when I wasn’t much older than him. I remember thinking it was cool to be using a machine I’d built myself, plus as a parent it seemed like a good educational experience.

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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.

Scheduling random meetings with a Shortcut ⚙️🗓

Staying in touch with my team is important. So, I schedule a skip-level meeting with someone on the team each week. These informal conversations are great for getting to know everyone, finding out about new ideas, and learning about recent achievements. Getting these organized across a couple of dozen people is logistically challenging and I’ve developed a Shortcut to automate most of the process. Borrowing from Scotty Jackson, I have a base in AirTable with a record for each team member.

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