Stranger Things season 3 is fun with 80s nostalgia and familiar characters. Not as delightfully creepy as season 1 though.

RStats on iPad

Among the many good new features in iPadOS, β€œDesktop Safari” has proven to be surprisingly helpful for my analytical workflows. RStudio Cloud is a great service that provides a feature-complete version of RStudio in a web browser. In previous versions of Safari on iPad, RStudio Cloud was close to unusable, since the keyboard shortcuts didn’t work and they’re essential for using RStudio. In iPadOS, all of the shortcuts work as expected and RStudio Cloud is completely functional.

Continue reading β†’

Thanks to a recommendation from @verybadwizards I read and very much enjoyed Ted Chiang’s short story “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”. Plenty of deep implications for free will and morality in a fascinating story.

After 20 years and four cars, the Darwin Fish on the back of our car has disappeared. Hopefully it wasn’t ripped off by a zealot!

Replacements are surprisingly expensive (~$50). But the car looks wrong without one.

I enjoyed The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu. Very inventive, though definitely some grim parts, as you might expect for the second book in a trilogy. The dialogue can be a bit clunky, so the emphasis is on the science. πŸ“š

As Canada’s federal election campaign gets increasingly ridiculous, I’d like the political parties to know that I’ll vote for whoever has the most credible and ambitious climate change plan. This includes a carbon price, otherwise it isn’t credible πŸ‡¨πŸ‡¦ πŸ—³

Our family data plan was close to the limit, so I called Rogers to temporarily add some data. They ended up offering unlimited data for $15 less per month! A nice surprise and good reminder to call every year or so to check on better deals.