Just Chilly Enough For Winter, But No Rain
I’ve just returned from a two-day team offsite in Vancouver. Hooray for oshizushi on the company dime!
Vancouver was lovely — just chilly enough for winter, but no rain — and it did leave me thinking, just a little, “what if we moved back?”
I don’t think that’s likely, because I know from experience that Vancouver is catfishing 😊 Apparently the rain started the day after I left.
Our team took an introductory curling class, which was surprisingly fun? I would play it regularly if I was a retiree, as, indeed, most of our Thursday-morning lanemates were.
I only recently learned that deodorant and anti-perspirant are different.
Yes, yes, I know. Sadly there’s a lot of things you’re supposed to know as an adult that sometimes just don’t get passed down.
Deodorant, aside from perfuming, makes your pits acidic, so that smelly bacteria can’t hang out. Anti-perspirant literally plugs up your pores so that you can’t sweat, most commonly with aluminum, which tends to stain clothes.
I’ve recently switched to deodorant (long story) and... I think I prefer it? You don’t get the uncomfortable clogged feeling you sometimes get with anti-perspirant and you don’t get permanent stains, even if you’ll more often sweat through your shirt. You are, er, supposed to sweat, after all.
The Wirecutter has taken much (perhaps well-deserved) criticism over the past few years. The general consensus seems to be that it’s devolved into little more than a marketing platform that can’t be trusted for recommendations.
That said: I do like the Wirecutter’s podcast. It has a fair amount of self-congratulatory banter that you should skip, and I don’t quite trust the actual product recommendations, but many of the episodes are handy summaries of “things adults should know but probably don’t”, like, say, how and why to install a bidet or percale vs sateen sheets.
I was listening to Sam Arbesman’s interview with Linda Liukas on Orthogonal Bet, and while I can’t entirely recommend the episode...
I’ve never really preferred these podcasts that are just “two people talking”, since they often feel like an unedited ramble, with no narrative or themes. I tend to skip boring questions, get lost in the conversation, and give up on the episode.
Conversations with Tyler and Ones & Tooze are the exceptions that prove the rule. Conversations is mostly engaging from the sheer weirdness of Tyler Cowen’s questions, while Ones & Tooze is a conversation in name only — in practice, Adam Tooze takes over most episodes with an economic narrative.
Otherwise, I strongly prefer public-radio-style narrative podcasts.
... but Linda did make an interesting point, which was that curiosity is like a muscle — you have to practice, you have to keep asking why.
I wonder if I’ve been practicing curiosity enough recently. When’s the last time I read a truly interesting non-fiction book? When’s the last time I dove into a rabbit hole of curiosity about some random topic?
Planning ahead with my goals for next year, I was considering something like “investigate 12 research questions”, inspired by Allen Pike’s “You Should Have a Research Question”. I don’t know if that will finally make the cut, but it might be a good way to push myself.
I found that Allen Pike link easily with Raindrop. I’m not sure I’ve ever discussed my archiving practice, but in practice:
- Almost everything I read online passes through GoodLinks, an indie app similar to Instapaper or the (dearly departed) Pocket.
- I export my GoodLinks archive to CSV with a little script (mostly written before the days of vibe coding!).
- Then I import that CSV to Raindrop.io, an indie app vaguely similar to Delicious (is that still around?) that, crucially, supports full-text search across all archived links.
So to find that link above, I just typed something along the lines of “have a research question” and it popped right up (alongside this essay-length StackOverflow answer to the question “what language design features made Lisp useful for Artificial Intelligence research?”).
I’ve run out of holidays to wish! Although I suppose Diwali and Halloween are coming up. In any case, have a good week.