March 23, 2025

Hit and Miss #394: Bring on the SPRING

Hello!

It was the March equinox on Thursday, the start of spring here in the northern hemisphere, a day with more or less equal hours between day and night. That day feels like you’re balanced at the precipice; now, we’ve lived the first few days of the rapid fall toward the longest day of the year, tipping into warmer and fuller times. The equinox is a public holiday in some countries, which is a nice touch—a day to celebrate a natural cycle, why not? In a similar vein of celebration, the March equinox is also Nowruz, the Persian New Year, as I learned from Sameer this week.

As I smell spring in the air, I’m keen to get the bike out and ride (after I fix the season-ending flat that hit in late November last year). As the weather warms, the air itself expanding to hold more water, more energy¹, it feels like the feasible range of our days expands, too—we can move farther than we might in winter, we can fill our days with more. Anyway, it’s all very exciting, and I’m keen for spring to unfold.

Okay, some links:

• Excellent open data of the week project goes to OpenTimes, “a database of pre-computed, point-to-point travel times between United States Census geographies”. It’s super valuable to have reference information like this readily available for free. Bonus that it’s calculated using reproducible, open source techniques, and served with impressively inexpensive cloud hosting.
• Every year, Adam Scotti, Justin Trudeau’s official photographer from before he was leader of the Liberal Party, posts a roundup of photos from the last year.
  • 2024 to March 2025 was not a normal year for Justin Trudeau; Scotti’s roundup of the last fifteen months, his last roundup with Trudeau, captures those months well.
  • I dig the idea that Scotti’s work was that of a sort of visual historian (though “deeply embedded journalist” or “authorized photobiographer” might be a better description, creating work for future historians to draw from).
  • Hopefully such access and openness remain the norm with future official photographers; yes, they’re part of a partisan team and have something of a partisan lens (ha), but it’s a uniquely valuable output for understanding how government works at the highest levels. (It’s also more possible than it was even fifteen years ago to share this kind of work in the moment—Scotti’s Instagram stories and posts often offered interesting perspectives on recent days’ events. Particularly for “logistics of government” nerds like me.)
• “Hey, wait – is employee performance really Gaussian distributed?? (via Sean) ticks many of my interests, from thinking about individual “performance” in the realm of an organization, to using data science techniques (aka “computers can do lots of math quickly if we let them”) to estimate answers to questions for which we don’t have great data readily available.
• This week’s missive from Mike Monteiro, “how to organize your books”, is the best question to have, because it means you have books, and those are wonderful things. Mike Monteiro’s newsletter is a good one to subscribe to, as I seem to link to it every other week.
• In honour of spring, Nicola Griffith shared some neat patches.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas