The world is a strange and wonderful place. Scott McCloud, of Understanding Comics fame, made a comic about… Kubernetes for Google.

I had a dough ball remaining from last night so I made a carbonara pizza for breakfast. Bake crust with pecorino, bacon, mozzarella, lots of pepper for 4 minutes, then add the two eggs and broil for ~2 min.

Main staircase. Blanton museum, Austin, TX.

From Cloudflare: Humanity wastes about 500 years per day on CAPTCHAs. It’s time to end this madness.

Yes please. One more reason to get a YubiKey.

Austin, TX

The Meatloaf Theory of Jobs

My partner and I love food. On a 0-to-10 scale, all foods have a chance of reaching the highest mark. Pizza? Definitely. Gelato? For sure. Duck? Of course. A simple loaf of bread? Hell yeah. But a meatloaf? Nope. Meatloaf maxes out at 6. Six decades of combined eating made this opinion into a fact.

A few days ago, my partner was talking about her work and how she felt it was impossible for her to do a good job. She could work hard, over communicate, do her best work, and she’d still have, at best, an impact of 6.

And there was born the meatloaf job: a job where it’s impossible to do a great job.

This reminded of David Graeber’s observation in Bullshit Jobs that people want to be the cause of events. He called it “the pleasure of being the cause.” In bullshit jobs, either people’s actions have no effect, or the effects are too far removed to be known.

Currently reading: The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker 📚

What an odd Big Sur bug. VS Code’s dock icon is minuscule and impossible to click on. It reminds me of when your Badland’s little flappy furry balls becomes tiny.

Deeply Learned Typography

Tom7 creates the uppestcase and lowestcase letters by training two deep learning models: one to create uppercase letters from lowercase ones, and the other to create lowercase letters from uppercase ones. Then he pushes things (beyond) their logical conclusions, such as creating lowercase versions of lowercase letters, and uppercase versions of uppercase letters. The results are fonts you can download and “use.” In the process, he builds a lot of really neat custom UIs to visualize what the models are doing. It’s entertaining and interesting.

Via Macdrifter.

Two loaves of Ken Forkish’s Overnight Country Blonde. After a 15h bulk rise at 23ºC, the dough had almost quadrupled in volume. Much more than usual. The final bread is a tad flat. I think it’s because it ran out of energy, but maybe I could have made deeper cuts.

Publishing datasette to Google Cloud Compute with GitHub Actions

Simon Willison has a fascinating data-publishing and data-management project named datasette. A few months ago, he put together a plugin named datasette-ripgrep that uses ripgrep (you use ripgrep, right?) to search folders of files and display the results using datasette’s machinery.

I thought of creating a datasette-ripgrep instance to search all the packages from the Enthought Tool Suite. Using GitHub to search across this cohesive set of tools, and only this set of tools, doesn’t really work.

Setting datasette-ripgrep up locally turned out to be pretty easy. But publishing it to Google Cloud Compute (GCP) using GitHub Actions so I could automate the daily the content of the indexes repositories turned out to be a multi-month effort.

I started working off the demo deploy action which took me most of the way there. But I kept running into GCP authentication issues. It complained that “No credentials provided, skipping authentication”. That is, until I realized 2 months later (of on-and-off attempts) that I was putting GitHub secrets in Settings > Environment > Secrets, and not in Settings > Secrets. *slaps forehead* I’m sure actions can see secrets in the Environment section somehow, but I don’t know how. Another thing I learned is that when the GCP docs ask you to put the service account key in a GitHub secrets, you can just paste the whole JSON as-is.

The next hurdle was that the datasette publish cloudrun command would fail with the error “You do not appear to have access to project […]“. I tried many things related to IAM, role, service accounts and the likes, but without success. The ah ha! moment came when I realized/remembered that datasette.publish.cloudrun actually talks to GCP using the gcloud command line tool. I identified that it calls the builds and deploy subcommands. Using that information I could make searches to figure out which permissions were required to execute those commands. The one I was missing was Cloud Build Editor (and maybe Viewer).

In the end, the Service Account has the following roles (I’m not 100% sure they’re all necessary):

  • Cloud Build Editor
  • Compute Engine Service Agent
  • Service Account User
  • Cloud Run Admin
  • Storage Admin
  • Viewer

After 100 failed deploys and much reading of mediocre Medium articles and of Google’s (seemingly) incomplete and incorrect READMEs, the 101th deploy succeeded! You can now search the ETS repos at the very unglamorous URL of https://datasette-ripgrep-ets-alicuzwd4a-uc.a.run.app and see the source on GitHub.

The discussion on symbiotic relationships between apps on the latest Core Intuition by @manton and @danielpunkass reminded me of Eastgate’s SummerFest/WinterFest for “artisanal” research/thinking/writing apps. It’s a great example of a collection of complementary apps.

What is the maximum one can be doing with someone else and still be hanging out?

Austin Kleon talks about the 13-month International Fixed Calendar. It reminds of the ISO week numbers that the Danes love so much. It always weirded me out when they ask something like “Are you free week 14?” But thinking back, they might have been onto something.

Despite all the damage done by the ice in Texas, it still created quite a bit of beauty (or at least novelty).

Icicle agave during the Texas winter storm.

Lessons Learned During My PhD

I shared these notes with my friends and colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) when I finished my PhD in December 2015.

Here are things that I either learned during my PhD, or that helped me get through it. I in no way have all the answers, but there are a few things that helped me that I think would be helpful to other people as well.

I split the content in six different sections, meta-things, writing, reading, speaking, programming, and mind and body. I included links to articles, books, and tools that are related to each section.

Meta

The main recommendation here is to have a system to deal with all the things you have to do and the things you want to do. I personally used the GTD method, which stands for Getting Things Done. I highly recommend getting the latest book. You can find it delivered at your desk for 100 kr. The main ideas of the system are: everything goes in an inbox (physical and/or on a computer). Periodically, process the inbox and decide if you’ll do the thing, trash it, or store it in your reference system. “Tasks” that require more than two action are considered projects, and a project consist of a list of physical, actionable actions. The other important thing about GTD is that it includes a weekly review of all the projects in your system, as well as your calendar and other active things in your life. I learned about this almost 10 years ago now1 and I would go as far as to say that it changed my life.

There are many applications designed to implement the GTD system. On the Mac, there’s OmniFocus, Things, and TaskPaper (really worth checking). Todoist is multi-platform.

I also recommend reading Getting Results the Agile Way, by J.D. Meier, which proposes a different take on selecting what you should work in. The basic idea is to pick 3 things to focus on every day, three per week, three per month, and three per year. The things you do every day should go towards you weekly goals, etc. The Asian Efficiency blog (weird name, I know), is a good noise-free resource about that kind of material (check the “specialty topics” in the sidebar).

Make checklists

Keep checklists for processes and things you do often but with lots of time in between, like how to log on to remote computers, adding printers to your computer, etc. It will save you a lot of time in the long run. Similarly, save info about things you never remember how to do, such as the behavior of the FFT implementation in MATLAB, check if a file exists using bash, undo a Git merge, etc.

I keep all my notes in individual text files. I have about 800. They live on Dropbox, which means I can edit them and view them anywhere. On my Mac I use nvAlt to search and write them. ResophNotes does the same thing on Windows. Evernote is a web-based service that can be used for a similar purpose. I write all my notes in Markdown (I even wrote a paper in it!), which also allows me to easily export my notes or view in nice previews. Both nvAlt and ResophNotes are “markdown-aware”.

Keep a Logbook

I kept a daily or weekly text file in which I wrote almost everything I did within the day. I would write down either thing that I wanted to do, notes to clarify my thoughts, or the things I just did. For example, I would save the Git commit for a particular simulation and my comments about the results. It helped me when I wanted to look back at why I did certain things or to find the source of certain ideas.

Sometimes Paper Is the Best Tool for the Job

I tried doing everything on the computer, but sometime paper really is the best tool for the job. The final product doesn’t have to be on paper but paper is often really helpful to develop ideas because of the freedom you have to place things wherever you want!

If It’s Broken, Fix It

If you see something that is broken, or that could be better, just fix it. Especially if other people have noticed the same problem. I mean to fix both immaterial things (BitBucket, for example) but also physical things. Did you know you can report broken things to CAS and they’ll come repair it within a day or so? Blocked toilet, dead light, water leek? Report it at https://fejlmeld.cas.dtu.dk or use their iOS or Android apps (can’t find the link, but look for DTU Fejlrapportering).

Writing

Build an Outline When Writing a Paper

At first, I did not have a method for writing but then I read this article by Timothée Poisot, which really helped me. The main idea is to start building an outline as soon as you’re working on the new project. As you read papers, or have ideas, you add quotes, citations, and snippets to your outline. You can start writing sentences and whole paragraphs whenever you want. The big advantage is that all the relevant things you find for a given project are all together; no need to go hunting for where you read that thing, six months ago.

On the Mac, I use Tree2, which I love. OmniOutliner is the most famous alternative, but it much more expensive. I don’t know about Windows or Linux. I know Microsoft Word has an outlining mode that could work. You could also outline in a normal Word document, or a text file, but good outliners give you many shortcuts to move things around and to insert new ideas. The new Manuscripts application for Mac looks amazing. Scrivener is an amazing writing tool for both Mac and Windows. It is particularly good for large projects.

Other good resources include:

Get Good Early and Write More

Do not despair, you will get better at writing! I don’t really know how to do it, but the earlier you get good the easier your life will be. :-) A possible way to get better is certainly to write more. Maybe having a writing club would help. There are many good books about writing. I read How to write a lot, by Paul J. Silvia and really liked it.

Here are a few articles about writing:

Reading

Make Time

You never find time, you’ll have to make some. Personally I found out that I could read an article on the bus and while walking. When I needed to read many article, I would take the bus mornings and nights for a week. That way I could read about 10 articles in week. It helped me to keep a stack of papers that I wanted to read on my desk; I could grab one whenever had a moment.

Read With a Goal

I find that it’s much easier to understand and remember papers if I read with a purpose, as a way of answering a question. Also, if that question is related to what you’re currently working on, you can add your discoveries in the outline of your paper.

Give Faces to Names

I found that being able to associate a face with an author name helped me remember who was talking about what and made it easier to remember different papers and ideas.

Take Notes and Highlights

That one is pretty obvious, but writing down notes and ideas while reading papers really helps. It helps while reading the paper but also later when coming back to it. I designed a highlight system for myself based on the idea of Walton Jones. I used specific colors to code different things, for example paper-specific results were yellow, new references in green, and paper summaries in red. This way could look back at a paper and have a general overview of what was important without reading the whole paper again.

On the Mac, Skim allows you to export notes including their color. It also works well with DEVONthink (see below).

Have a Good “Personal Search Engine”

I recommend having a good search system for your notes and papers. On the Mac I use an application called DEVONthink which can show you documents related to the one you’re currently reading. It also does non-exact searches, e.g., it can search for the meaning of your query, not just the exact words you typed. It really is magic. I am not aware of anything exactly the same on Windows or Linux, but The Brain (Windows) and Recoll might be good places to start.

Give Your Articles Unique Identifiers

I gave all my articles the same file name structure, authorYEARfirstword, e.g. chabotleclerc2014predicting. I picked this format because it has no space and it’s also very short and compact. It’s essentially a unique identifier. I used the identifier everywhere: in handwritten notes, computer notes, outlines, marginalia. This way, I knew exactly which paper I was talking about.

Remembering Things

I tried to use spaced repetition (also see this link) for a while but it didn’t stick for really long. Anki is probably the best tool for the job.

Things That Didn’t Work

Having a Wiki

Based on the idea of this crazy guy, Stian Håklev, I tried setting up a wiki using either DokuWiki or TiddlyWiki. I managed to keep it updated for about a month and then abandoned it. It required a lot of maintenance and a lot of diligence to keep up with the linking between subjects.

2021 update: These days, I would strongly recommend looking into Zettelkasten as an alternative.

A Single Giant Outline, Mind Map or Concept Map

I tried building a gigantic outline or mind map or concept map of all the things I learned, but it became unmanageable. I still find these methods really useful when fleshing out an idea for a project or paper, but they were not really good tools for me to manage such a large amount of knowledge. If you want to try these tools, on the Mac I recommend MindNode (simple and cheap), and iThoughtsX (more powerful, more expensive). MindMeister is online and very popular. Docear mixes an outliner, a reference manager (JabRef) and an outliner. It’s power and complex. If you want to know everything about mind mapping and the best tools, check out Brett Terpstra’s blog.

For concept maps, I love Scapple, which works on Mac and Windows. Cmap is also multi-platform, but heavier. I use them when I want to find structure in a mess of ideas floating in my head.

Speaking

This series of articles by David L Stern really influenced me: How to Give a Talk. He suggests 5 rules3:

  1. Don’t put words on slides
  2. Use black slides
  3. Show your data
  4. Don’t tell jokes
  5. Don’t take a data dump on your audience
  6. Practice, practice, practice.

Of course, some rules are meant to be broken, but it’s worth a read. I also liked the book Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds.

Programming

When Modeling, Optimize for a Metric

When working on a new model, first decide what you’re optimizing for, is it a correlation, the mean square error, or some other metric. Make sure this metric is computed automatically with each simulation, so you have immediate feedback about how good your model is. Just eyeballing the results is a really bad idea.

D.R.Y.

Don’t. Repeat. Yourself. When you see that you have the same code in multiple places, it’s a good hint that you need to refactor it into a function, and to call that function. Also, if your function is hundred lines long it’s probably a sign that he should be chopped into smaller functions that have clear names.

If you’re interested in becoming a better programmer, I recommend The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, Clean Code and Code Complete.

Write Tests

You should write tests for your functions to make sure that they are actually doing what you think they are doing. They help make sure that code is correct, they help detecting regressions (when you break things that used to work), they act as a specification, design and documentation, and they make refactoring easier.

I cannot tell you how many times I found small and huge bugs because of the tests I wrote. All decent programming languages, including Matlab include a framework to automatically run tests. The words you want to look for are “unit testing”. You should run tests every time you make changes. You can even set Git to run the tests before every commit. This way you can make sure you never commit broken code.

The advantage of working with a free language (Python!) and in the open is that you can use “continuous integration” system to have them run tests every time you push new changes to GitHub (or BitBucket). Travis CI is one of those services.

These articles or sites are worth reading for info about testing.

Don’t Overuse Code Comments

Code comments are useful to explain why you’re doing something, but they should not explain every single line of code. Otherwise one day you will change the comment or the code and then one of them will be lying and you won’t be able to know which one.

Instead, use explicit names for variables and functions. Write function help files. Write documentation. Write README files. And break up long and complicated lines of code into smaller ones where you can name concepts and variables.

Use Version Control

Version control is a communication tool and a collaboration tool. It’s invaluable even if you don’t work with someone else, I can assure you that your future self will be really happy to know what your past self was thinking when he/she wrote that code/text. I heard your future self can get really upset. :-)

Track Where Stuff Comes From

Track where experiment results and figures come from. You can do it by hand, by keeping your log book and tracking output folders and inputs commits, but you can also use automated solutions. I used Sumatra, which is written in Python but can be used with Matlab. Every time you run a simulation it saves to a database: the experimental parameter used, the input files, and the command line outputs. It also allows you to comment and tag results. You can look back and see where things are from, what worked and what didn’t, and rerun experiments with exactly the same parameters. A provenance-tracking tool like Sumatra paired with version control is a good step towards making reproducible research. Recipy is a new Python-only solution that looks interesting.

Follow “Best practices”

Some very bright people have written “Best practices” for scientific computing. It’s worth reading the two or three articles below and applying their recommendations. I also recommend looking at this shablona project, which proposes a standard folder structure for a given project, I found it to work really well. It’s written with Python in mind but it could easily be adapted for Matlab.

Learn about literate programming, a useful concept where the code and the text (of, e.g., an article) live together. This can be done in Matlab using the publish command. In Python, the Jupyter notebook is the way to go. Actually, you can use the Jupyter notebook with Matlab.

If you want to do more than just read things, you should try to organizing a Software Carpentry workshop. It’s pretty much free and would probably help a lot of people.

Your Computer Should Work for You

If you find out you’re doing the same thing over and over again it might be worth automating it. On the Mac, Keyboard Maestro can do magic (like activating menu items for you, clicking places, moving windows, etc.) On Windows, AutoHotkey can do similar things, and on Linux, I found AutoKey to be the best.

Use a shortcut expander application. For example, I never type “intelligibility”, I just type inty and it expands to the full word. Same thing with my name, my bank account, my phone number, etc. On the Mac, Keyboard Maestro and TextExpander are the best. On Windows, PhraseExpress is compatible with TextExpander; you can sync your snippets via Dropbox. On Linux, Autokey can also do snippet expansions.

Mind and body

Take Care of Your Body

Seriously, take care of your body. If you start having wrist, forearm, or shoulder pain, don’t just live with it. Seek help and get proper a keyboard, mouse and chair. Learn some basic ergonomic practices about keyboard, mouse and screen placement. See the articles below for more info and recommendations.

If you are in pain, really look for help: find a massage therapist, a doctor, and stretch often. Here are a few good ressources.

Spend Money Where Your Time Is

It’s worth paying for things that make your life better, more comfortable, and easier, especially if you use those things all day long. Buy a nice keyboard, you probably write eight or nine hours a day. Buy nice headphones, good software, a mattress, a bike, etc.

Ask for Help

Ask for help when you’re stuck. Ask for a meeting if you need one. Everyone is super busy, but everyone is super generous. People rarely say no, but they might say “later”. In a perfect world, everyone would be proactive, everyone would have their slot in the calendar, but sometimes the world is not perfect. Also talking to people if often waaaay faster than googling for an answer.

Make Every Day a Non-Zero Day

This idea is not from me, it is from ryans01 on Reddit (and it’s also in the PhD Starter Kit, below). His idea is to make sure that every day you do at least one small thing towards your goal. No day should be completely wasted, even if the thing you do is really small. Keeping a log or journal helps realizing all the things you’ve done in a day and keeping your mood up.

Other people have written really good and more in-depth guides than this. The PhD Starter Kit is simply amazing. Philip Guo’s Advice for first year PhD students is a must-read/must-watch (as well as many of his other articles. He also wrote: The Ph.D. Grind, a 115-page e-book, is the first known detailed account of an entire Ph.D. experience.” That guy is amazing.

  1. Make it 13 years in 2021. [return]
  2. Not available anymore, 2021-01-23. [return]
  3. Yes, that 6 rules. And it 2021, it grew to 8 rules. ¯\(ツ)/¯ [return]

They could have used additional time during the bulk fermentation to account for the cold, but it’s still a good rise.

Great Resident Advisor podcast episode. Noisy, glitchy, grimy, dark. RA.760 Hyph11E ⟋ RA Podcast🎵

Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits

[…] Math scores went up by 0.20 standard deviations and English scores by 0.18 standard deviations […] this is comparable in scale to […] the potential benefits of smaller class sizes.”

ferd.ca – Home Alone: A Post Incident Review

It’s so many things in one: a movie review, an intro to “post incident reviews,” a lesson into which kinds of precautions work and which don’t, and a reminder that things can still go wrong even when well prepped.

Ad Fontes Media rates media outlets according to their bias and reliability. 1) factual reporting has very slight left-leaning bias (see also “Facts Have a Well-Known Liberal Bias”) and consequently 2) it doesn’t seem to be possible to be reliable and biased at the same time.

In Hard to discover tips and apps for making macOS pleasant Tristan Hume says:

Chrome and Firefox have much better sounding audio resampling for watching videos on 1.5x or 2x speed. This is the only reason I don’t use Safari.

I just tried it and oh my is this true!

2020 Holiday Newsletter

For the past 4 years, just before the holidays, I’ve sent a newsletter to my colleagues about all the things I’ve read, watched, listened to, cooked, or ate in the last year. This is the 2020 edition.

The Christopher Alexander idea patch

Where I’m from, there are so many blueberries that people from that region are called bleuets. (The tourist info phone number is 1-877-BLEUETS (253-8387). You should go and visit.) When you go out to pick them (the blueberries, not the people) and you hit a patch with tons of them, we say “I found une talle!” That’s how it felt getting into Christopher Alexander’s ideas.

You might know of Alexander without realizing it. He’s considered as the father of the idea of design patterns, which were heavily inspired by his book architecture book A Pattern Language. Patterns are part of a larger process to solve design problems, from problem definitions, to solutions, to the evaluation of how good the solution is. It’s that larger process that I found interesting. He named the parts of the process context, form, and fit. In brief, the context is the problem to be solved together with its constraints. It’s totally independent of the solution. The form is the solution. It has a shape that fits the context more of less well. Once I had these words in my mind, I started seeing them everywhere.

Clay Christiensen’s Jobs-to-be-Done framework (from Competing Against Luck) is a way of defining product opportunities (jobs) as a context that can be fulfilled in many different ways. To get an idea of what that means, watch him telling the story of the job of a milkshake and how milkshakes compete with bananas, donuts, and bagels, and not with ice cream.

In Demand-Side Sales, Bob Moesta (who did the milkshake research) talks about selling from the buyer’s perspective, from their struggles, from their context. In contrast to selling from the supply-side, which talks about features and form words. I highly recommend this book.

On the programming side, unit testing has morphed into form testing, whereas the original intent was context testing. Behavior-driven development tried to get that spirit back. What I heard Ian Cooper say in his TDD, Where Did It All Go Wrong talk was “Write context tests.”

Basecamp’s Shape Up is basically Alexander’s ideas applied to product development and management. It makes a clear distinction between shaping (defining the problem and the context) and doing the work (creating a form). Which in turns allows a new dimension of diagnosis when a project fails: was the project badly shaped or is it that the execution failed and form was a bad fit?

Ryan Singer, head of strategy at Basecamp, did a great intro to Alexander’s work this summer.

The Best Writing

Losing the War by Lee Sandlin is the best writing I read this year (and I read it on January 1, 2020). It’s an incredible essay on war (the Second World One), and memories. I found the “flow” to be exemplary with plenty of historical context and commentary. Well worth the time.

programming == cooking

I used to tell students that I was “teaching them how to fish.” But after reading Robin Sloan’s Home Cooked App, I’ve started telling people I’m teaching them how to cook. It’s a much richer analogy.

If you don’t know how to cook, you eat pre-packaged meals or you eat out (or you live with your mom forever). But there are tons of reasons to want to learn how to cook and tons of things to do once you’ve learned how. You can cook for health reasons, to please friends, to create the perfect version of something, as a creative output, because you’re picky, to make food you want to eat, because it’s fun. You can specialize and become a baker, or open a taco truck, or start a family restaurant, or run a fine-dining restaurant. You can teach others how to cook. In the end, you can still go out and eat if you want, you have a choice. There are so many reasons to learn to cook.

If you don’t know how to program (or how to reason about programming) you use apps you bought and hire consultants. But there are tons of reasons to want to learn how to program and tons of things to do once you’ve learned how. You can create little scripts to rename files, write notebooks to make custom analyzes, write an app to enable friends and colleagues to explore data like you can, write your own text editor (!) because vim is holding you back, because it’s fun. You can specialize and build deep learning models, or design data management systems, or build custom web apps, or start a scientific software development consultancy. You can teach others how to program. In the end, you can still hire consultants if you want, you have a choice. There are so many reasons to learn to program.

#techtalk

The Glamorous Toolkit is an impressive “moldable development environment”. I’d describe it as a strange hybrid between a notebook editor and an IDE. Any objects can have a rich and interactive representations, which is not new (to us), but the cool part is that it’s easy to dynamically add new rich representations to the development environment. Watch this talk by Tudor Gîrba to get a taste of what’s possible.

Simon Willison’s (co-creator of Django) Datasette is an impressive project to “explore and publish data”. It relies heavily on sqlite. I look forward to playing with it some more over the holidays. He’s done super cool things with it, including finding the best photo of a pelican according to Apple Photos, and building a regex search engine across a collection of Github repos using ripgrep.

#book-club

I started many books this year, but didn’t finish that many:

  • Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows is a short introduction to “systems thinking,” their components (stocks, flows, feedback loops), common system configurations, common pitfalls/opportunities of those configurations, and leverage points to intervene in those systems. I had so many “Ah ha!” moments. Many about things I “knew” but hadn’t realized the consequences of. Like how “systems with similar feedback structures produce similar dynamic behaviors, even if the outward appearance of these systems is completely dissimilar.” For example, a population system (controlled by births and deaths) has a similar configuration as an economic capital system (controlled by investment and depreciation). Reading this book, it was so easy to think “Here’s a silver bullet!” but then she totally called me out on it:

    People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mind-set of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control.

  • Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. Yes it’s a typography book, but it may also be the funniest thing I read all year. Bonus: the book itself is a beautiful object.

  • Lab Girl by Hope Jahren is a wonderful memoir of a “life in science.” She’s a good storyteller, telling a good story, about how the path to success in academia can be wild.

But I read a lot of good articles:

TYIL (This Year I Learned)

The Ouarzazate Solar Power Station melts salt by concentrating the power of 7400 parabolic mirrors towards a central tower. The molten salt is then used to superheat water and power steam-powered generators.

It’s possible to tell one’s position in the sea based on wave patterns. The 2016 NYT piece by Kim Tingley, The Secrets of the Wave Pilots, is an impressive testament of what our brains can perceive using our full bodies as sensors. See also these beautiful Marshall Islands navigation charts, and the Eagle Eyes Radiolab story about the vest David Eagleman is building to help deaf people hear.

Some Nice Pandemic things

Food

I started making pizza just after the pandemic started. I can’t wait for it to be over to organize pizza parties. My source of knowledge is Ken Forkish’s Elements of Pizza. Using tipo 00 flour is worth it. So is a baking steel/stone.

Kenji Alt Lopez’s Serious Eats episode on emulsions has a really compelling demonstration of why you should put a surfactant in your emulsions. Now I put a little dollop of mustard in all my vinaigrettes.

Music

My friend Matt shared some bardcore videos by Hildegard von Blingin’ earlier this year. Here’s Somebody That I Used To Know (Bardcore/Medieval Style Cover with Vocals). Bardcore is medieval renditions of pop songs. Obviously. So… the name Hildegard von Blingin’, is a reference to Hildegard von Bingen, an 11th century badass abbess, composer, and scientist (among others). In the early 2000, my mom gave me a CD by Garmarna, a Swedish band that does… electro-folk renditions of her 11th-century music. Hildegard von Blingin' = 1/Garmarna! Here’s one song and here’s the whole Garmarna album.

According to Spotify and Last.fm, I’ve listened to 1,700+ different artists this year, 600 of which were new to me. I won’t give you the whole list, don’t worry. Although I do have a playlist of every album I liked in 2020 and one of only the best songs I listened to in 2020.

Here are my favorite albums released in 2020, in no particular order.

Here’s more great music I discovered this year but that wasn’t made this year.

I somehow ended up listening to a lot of Japanese indie music (for a lack of better term).

#whatcha-whatchin?

  • The Newsroom by Aaon Sorkin is the best series I watched this year. Great characters, surprisingly funny, great storylines and overall arc.
  • Ted Lasso is a close second.
  • Crictor makes wonderful short, really short, videos. Do watch Popcorn (15 sec) and Hanabi (fireworks in Japanese, a big 45 sec).
  • The Last Dance (Netflix), on Michael Jordan’s career was a riveting watch. I vividly remember the 1997 Utah game where Jordan “had the flu” and still scored 38 points. At the time, my English wasn’t so great and I remembered being puzzled by the fact that the announcer said Jordan had “the flu” (which in québécois basically means diarrhea). Well, I learned that he probably did have the runs! He didn’t have the flu, he had food poisoning from a bad pizza probably given to him by disgruntled Jazz fans. Take that, Jazz!
  • The Good Place (Netflix) is an unlikely great show about… philosophy. My favorite character is Jason Mendoza. I’d watch it again.
  • The West Wing: got me into Sorkin. I shed a tear during 5 of the first 5 episodes.
  • I was going to say that The Magicians was funny, smart, emotional, with a great cast, and a fantastic ending. But as I write this, I learned there’s a 5th season I didn’t know existed. So take my “great ending” comment with a grain of salt.

I just finished reading Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows. I believe sometimes one was to be “ready” to read a book. I must have been ready for this one because I had more “Holy sh!t” moments than any other book I’ve read in years.📚