Category Archives: Week in review

A week in review, 2020-W21

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Wrote

  1. Loop 1 (close): school opening dashboard (2020-05-18).
  2. Loop 2 (open): remote education for younger students with no resources (2020-05-18).
  3. A dope quality engineer, an insight into how work processes could be (2020-05-21).

Read

  1. Phil Salvador, When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery, The Obscuritory (2020-05-19). (notes) Destroying a simulation can be an educational experience too, and this is how SimRefinery was meant to be played. John Hiles said that most of the trainers at Chevron wanted to use it as a conventional training tool, “but some of the more astute teachers said, ‘Let’s just get you started here by seeing if you can wreck the oil refinery, if you can abuse the inputs and the settings and essentially get fired,'” he remembered.
  2. Lee Shiu Hung, The SARS epidemic in Hong Kong: what lessons have we learned?, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2003-08-01). (notes) When no further cases were reported, the outbreak seemed to have been brought under control. However, in mid-May there were further cases. In view of the evidence that more than one generation of cases had occurred, the WHO restored Toronto to the list of infected areas. By 14 June over 90 probable cases had been reported in this resurgence. This Canadian experience highlights the importance of continuing vigilance even when cases begin to decline.
  3. Chelsea Wald, What Do Animals See in a Mirror?, Nautilus (2017-04-13). (notes) “It’s not the ability to recognize yourself in a mirror that is important,” he would come to believe. “It’s what that says about your ability to conceive of yourself in the first place.”
  4. Peter Boumgarden and Abram Van Engen, In Praise of Classrooms, Avidly (2020-05-19). (notes) In the end, what has struck us most about online learning—with all the high-tech tools it has developed—is how little technology is actually required to teach. A classroom does not need much to do a great deal. It can be loaded with screens and plugs, as ours was, or it can be little more than a storage of desks set in the right direction. Either way, it draws us together. It creates a community. It tells students, by its very structure, that we have gathered together in this place to respond to the calling of learning. It makes room for education by being a space devoted to that activity in particular.
  5. Wendy Hanamura, By Retraining Staff, We Uncover Rare Gems, Internet Archive Blogs (2020-05-17). “It can take you down some great rabbit holes,” Mandy said. “This is the stuff I’ve been interested in my adult life. Digging in and finding information that is not readily available and sharing it. Universal Access to to Knowledge. That’s important to me because it helps so many people.”

Listened

  1. St. Louis NASA Engineer Uses Hip-Hop to Get People Interested in Math and Science, St. Louis on the Air (2020-05-15). (notes) [2:33] My math teacher asked us to write a song about the quadratic formula as one of our assignments. I came back with this rap song that everybody loved, but I noticed that I didn't have to just stick with that assignment, I could apply this to some of my other topics. And they didn't all come out like a full song, like the quadratic formula did. It would just be little things, if I needed to remember a word, I would sing it in a certain way so that when I'm in a test I think of that jingle, and boom, I have the answer. I found a way to help my mind remember things that I couldn't 'cos we were overloaded with information.
  2. Teaching Remotely During Covid-19 with Prof. Justin Reich, Chalk Radio (2020-05-13). (notes) [2:28] So I would encourage people to keep it simple. That's one principle. A second principle is to really think about how you can partner with students and in K12 with their families. So the coronavirus feels like it's something being done to us. It feels like something that we have very little control over. But our response to the coronavirus can be something that we build together. So I would encourage education leaders at every level from college provosts to elementary school teachers to school principals, superintendents -- whatever it is-- asking and partnering with everybody in the system is a really important part of responding to remote learning. What most emergency remote learning should look like is kind of a package of asynchronous materials that's coupled with lots of frequent check-ins.
  3. Will the Pandemic Cause Food Shortages?, Knowledge@Wharton (2020-05-19). (notes)

Watched

蒜的一生，实在想不出有创意的名字了！下次你们帮我想！The life of garlic~, 李子柒 Liziqi (2020-04-13).

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There might be additional links that didn't make the cut at notes.kirkkittell.com

A week in review, 2020-W20

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Wrote

  1. We are a strange loop (2020-05-11).
  2. A model of the garden (2020-05-16).

Read

  1. Gregory Stephenson, Before and After Desolation: Two Sojourns by Jack Kerouac at the Hotel Stevens, Empty Mirror (2019-05-10). In a similar fashion, Kerouac’s separate stays at the Hotel Stevens can be seen to reflect his inner division: his sincere pursuit of spiritual growth in opposition to the powerful attraction of the pleasures of the senses. This conflict – between the spirit and the flesh – is central not only to Kerouac’s life and writing but is, of course, a perennial theme in literature and, indeed, an abiding aspect of the human condition. The Desolation episode, flanked on either side by sojourns at the Hotel Stevens, is pivotal in The Duluoz Legend, as it also proved to be in the life of the author. Ahead for the author-narrator lay other rooms, further nights, days and distances, further ordeals and epiphanies.
  2. Ryan Hockensmith, 150,000 worthless baseball cards in the time of coronavirus, ESPN (2020-05-07). But I feel 10% less scared in my basement, with my cards. I don't really need them anymore. I don't even dig into them. I don't go through the many boxes, still organized alphabetically in protective plastic sleeves, or open up any of the packs I still have. I just stare at them. Some people have bubbling brooks or bird noises from the backyard that bring them calm and serenity. Me? I have 500 Pedro Guerrero cards that aren't worth the plastic cases they're housed in.
  3. Penelope Trunk, This is a great time to make a career change, Penelope Trunk Careers (2020-04-25). Now that schools are all online, kids have no patience for bad teaching. Compete with professors by taking their online course material and making it good. They don’t own the course info for Biology 101 and kids want to learn it from a YouTuber. Use John Green’s channel as an example: Content is a commodity, delivery is the differentiator.
  4. Jonah Raskin, 'Six at the Six' at 50 -- Return of S.F.'s poetic beat, San Francisco Chronicle (2005-09-30). Still, it's no wonder that the event has taken on mythical reverberations, and that in the Bay Area -- which seems to experience a poetry renaissance every 15 minutes -- all sorts of poets trace their lineage to the Six Gallery. The 50th anniversary celebrations in and around San Francisco over the next week will only add to the myth. Of course, poets need myths as much if not more than anyone else. I know I do. After years of reading and rereading the work that was performed at the Six, I've sometimes allowed myself to feel that I was there, that I saw and heard. Perhaps you've had that same strange feeling, too, no matter what coast you happen to live on, or what city you call home.
  5. Doug Adler, How a long-gone Apollo rocket returned to Earth, Astronomy (2020-05-11). Many people find the notion of discovering an intact piece of Apollo-era hardware appealing, and these feelings are amplified by the large size of the Apollo S-IVB. “Flown Apollo hardware will always be significant,” says Teitel. “We've been to the Moon nine times and most of the hardware that enabled those missions was destroyed — the Saturn V stages crashed into the ocean or were smashed into the Moon, most of the lunar module ascent stages were smashed into the Moon, and the service modules didn't return. That leaves nine command modules, all of which are on display in museums. Flown hardware has an allure simulators and non-flown items just don't have.”

Listened

  1. 477: The Immediacy Filter, Back to Work (2020-05-12). (notes) [23:08] I think there are ought to be a distinction between liking something, or hating something, as against liking or hating knowing that the thing's coming, preparing for that thing. I like doing things, I don't like having things to do.

Watched

How to Establish a Level-Grade Line for Landscaping, This Old House (2014-09-01).

Photo

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There might be additional links that didn't make the cut at notes.kirkkittell.com

A week in review 2020-W19

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Wrote

  1. Music notation and markup language (2020-05-04).
  2. The barred owl (2020-05-05).
  3. A law of presentations: leave it out (2020-05-06).
  4. The barred owl, 2 (2020-05-07).
  5. Forget the brake (2020-05-08).

Read

  1. Austin Kleon, Not everything will be okay (but some things will), austinkleon.com (2020-05-06). If we are going to paint the neighborhood with slogans, let’s at least honor each other’s grief and intelligence.
  2. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Google expects its staff to work from home until 2021 and it's not alone, ZDNet (2020-05-08). IT management is also OK with this new work from home model. An IDG survey found 71% say the coronavirus pandemic "has created a more positive view of remote workplaces." This is already making them look at "how they plan for office space, tech staffing and overall staffing in the future."
  3. Wayne Hale, The Kaboom Case, NASA Blogs (2009-01-07). Everybody who was anybody at NASA from the Administrator on down, had a box in their office to the Flight Director loop. And the loops were recorded for posterity. It was very important to pick your words carefully when talking on the loop. Telling jokes or otherwise fooling around was not allowed. But the worst sin was to “talk over the airwaves”, not on the loop, but where only the people physically around you could hear a conversation. We were trained so to talk on the loop even if it was to the guy three feet away next to you. The conversation was to be done “on the loop” so that others could follow it as well.
  4. Henry Fountain, No Yeast at the Store? No Problem. It's Everywhere in Your Home., The New York Times (2020-05-07). (notes) Her mother got the starter from her mother, whose husband arrived in the Yukon during the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s. Family lore has it that Ms. Christensen’s grandfather got it from some prospectors from California who had first prepared it during the gold rush in that state decades before
  5. Adam Minter, In the ‘Star Wars’ Economy, One Thing Doesn’t Pay, Bloomberg (2019-12-22). So what, then, is the business model that supports so many junkyards and scavengers? Rey, the Jawas, and everyone else who scavenges in the series recognize that there's more value in a working gadget or spare part than in the raw materials that constitute them. The value is in the energy, engineering and manufacturing required to make the stuff. So, for example, that crashed star destroyer on Jakku isn't stripped for metal; instead, we see Rey risk her life to scavenge it for reusable components that she can sell.

Listened

  1. How COVID-19 spreads, and how to stop its growth, The Radio Café (2020-04-24). (notes) [7:22] Stopping the exponential growth of this disease is utterly essential, and the Prokopenko study gets across that the way to do that is to have an above-threshold level of social distancing. There's a couple of critical things here, Mary Charlotte. People do not yet know there is a threshold. They don't yet have the image of the fire spreading or not spreading, even though it's perfectly well known.
  2. Exploring Afro-Latin Music's Midwestern Impact, St. Louis on the Air (2020-05-06). We never had something in the St. Louis region that honed in, or just allowed people to enjoy, the Latin music. By Club Viva opening the way it did, it gave people a new perspective of what was out there, especially with Afro-Latin music, which is not seen when you think of Latin music as a whole.
  3. The Future of the Library, Akimbo (2020-05-06). (notes) [4:41] How did we end up with libraries in the first place? A couple reasons. The first is, governments like to write things down. They like to write down rules and regulations, as well as debts and balance sheets. In addition, religions like to write things down. And so the combination of scripture, spiritual books, and government records led to the need to store all of these scrolls or tablets or, ultimately, books. So the first libraries weren't libraries in the way we think of them, they were warehouses for books that only certain people were anointed to be able to enter.

Watched

Carrot Cake Recipe, Chef Tips (2014-03-24).

Photo

the barred owl

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There might be additional links that didn't make the cut at notes.kirkkittell.com

A week in review, 2020-W18

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Wrote

  1. Subatomic tasks (2020-04-26).
  2. Automate and lose (2020-04-29).

Read

  1. Alina Selyukh, More Essential Than Ever, Low-Wage Workers Demand More, NPR (2020-04-28). (notes) "We are the same people that they didn't think we were worth $15 an hour, but now realize that we are worth way more than that," says Cynthia Murray, a long-time Walmart worker in Maryland. "I've been there 19 years and I don't even make $15 an hour. ... I have to work more than a week in order to get one hour of sick time."
  2. Laura Paskus, The Endless Search for Charles Bowden, High Country News (2020-03-25). (notes) “It’s easy to make a living telling the people in control they’re right,” he told Carrier, adding, “Look, you have a gift, life is precious. Eventually you die, and all you’re going to have to show for it is your work.”
  3. Alan Jacobs, the seductions of prediction, Snakes and Ladders (2020-04-28). (notes) This is an article that simply should not have been written. But everyone’s doing it, I guess. The seductions of prediction are irresistible.
  4. Hank Shaw, Wild Ginger, Edible and Toxic, Hunter Angler Gardener Cook (2012-05-22).
  5. Mark Arsenault, How the Biogen leadership conference in Boston spread the coronavirus, The Boston Globe (2020-03-11).

Listened

  1. Build a career in data science, Talk Python to Me (2020-05-01). (notes) [23:20] The reason we wrote this book was because we felt there's a lot of technical guidance out there but not on these other really important skills you need. And I do think that one of those skills, if you want to change the practice of a company, you can't necessarily just email it to them one day and have that be done. You need to talk to them, figure out what kind of scares them about this change, do change management. And I think to not underestimate the importance of things like communications and working with stakeholders when thinking of things like technological solutions even if to you it may seem really obvious that of course this is going to be 100% better.
  2. Moneyball's Michael Lewis: “The Trump Death Clock”, Danny in the Valley (2020-04-28). (notes) [17:34] You talk to anybody who has worked in pandemic response, and they'll say, the big problem is leadership at the top explaining to the people that you've got to distance before you know you have to distance. You have to do it before it's obvious. It's essentially a preventative thing, and it's unsatisfying because if it works you think, "Ah, we didn't need to do that, so few people died." And you don't really internalize that so few people died because you did this.
  3. #996: About that Hazard Pay, Planet Money (2020-05-01). (notes) [3:59] A lot of those jobs have always paid less, but now that they're "essentially" these workers are being asked to risk more. Their titles got fancier, but their jobs got way worse. And the market is supposed to solve this, to reward risk, so why aren't workers getting paid more? Today on the show, we spend a morning at a grocery store, and we ask, "How much is essential work worth?"

Watched

《空山鸟语》'Birdsong in hollow valley'——Beautiful Chinese court music style宫廷雅乐风 宋代装束 秦时明月, 自得琴社 Zi De Guqin Studio (2019-05-26).

Photo

taking down the mulberry tree

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There might be additional links that didn't make the cut at notes.kirkkittell.com

A week in review, 2020-W17

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Wrote

  1. Stability vs equilibrium (2020-04-20).
  2. Dive: lessons learned (2020-04-22).

Read

  1. Kae Petrin, St. Louisans Are Gardening To Manage Stress, Find Purpose Amid Coronavirus Isolation, St. Louis Public Radio (2020-04-21). In most crises, Salois said, people aren’t confined to their homes. They would have jobs or ways to chip in that make them feel useful. “If you have a typhoon or a tornado, you're out and about. You’re trying to clear brush or rescue your neighbors — you’ve got things you can do. Having something you can do really does help when there's trouble,” Salois said. She thinks gardening could help fill that desire to do something productive.
  2. Susan Atteberry Smith, Here's Our Guide to Growing Native Plants, Missouri Life Magazine (2020-04-07). (notes) Native plants predate European immigration to the United States. Plants from other parts of the world can become invasive in Missouri for a variety of reasons and can spread, choking out native species. [...] Invasive plants decrease biodiversity, too, she adds, because if native plants disappear from an area, so do the insects that eat them, along with the soil-enriching worms that munch on bug larvae.
  3. Seth Godin, Don't know (can't know), Seth's Blog (2020-04-20). (notes) As William Goldman said, nobody knows anything. It’s so much more honest (and efficient) for a selective college to send a letter to the people who meet basic criteria and say, “you’re good enough, but there aren’t enough slots, so we’re going to pick randomly.” Because the truth is that a randomly selected class of qualified people is going to be just as high achieving as any other combination they could create. And if you’re the one who wasn’t picked, don’t sweat it. They don’t know better. They can’t.
  4. Shane Franklin, "Wild Ones" Teach Foraging in Missouri, KSMU (2012-08-13). At her seminars with the Wild Ones at Burr Oaks, Mathews has plenty of suggestions on how to forage safely and sustainably. And even where the beginning forager could start. “My suggestion would be to pick out five plants in a year. Follow that plant through a whole season and learn about just five plants at a time. Be sure you know them well, and how to use them and what they are used for.” Mathews says you almost never want to take the roots, just cut the leaves. This way you can revisit the plant in the future. She says at first, make sure you go with someone else who knows the plants better, and always carry a good plant identification book with you.
  5. Cal Newport, Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far. Bring Back Blogs, Wired (2020-04-23). (notes) Twitter was optimized for links and short musings. It’s not well suited for complex discussions or nuanced analyses. As a result, the feeds of these newly emerged pandemic experts are often a messy jumble of re-ups, unrolled threads, and screenshot excerpts of articles. We can do better.

Listened

  1. System 1 Research is Product Management, This is Product Management (2020-04-20). (notes) [8:51] It's equally important in any kind of digital development to understand that it's not just the app, it's just not a tool to do something. It's also plays into people's understanding of who they are and how they perform that role. Are you using new and cool techniques? If that's a position you aspire to be and adopt and think, then it's not just about the features themselves, but what kind of story that it tells. And that framing of the story is extremely important for people to buy into and say, yes, we've got to use this app, and this is what we need as a business, even though there might be a lot of other tools that you can use, but understanding the motivation and what can make people make say, yes, let's make this switch.
  2. Which Companies Will Survive the Economic Crash?, SupplyChainBrain (2020-04-22). (notes) [13:59] There's a lot of stickiness to restarting an economy and who's going to dictate that and how it's going to happen is yet to be seen, but because the federal government didn't impose mandatory shutdowns, they're going to have a lot of challenges imposing a mandatory back to work decree.
  3. #1210 - Q&A: Should I quit my job and go full time with my hustle?, Side Hustle School (2020-04-24). (notes) [06:21] Congratulations, once again. Shelly represents what many of our listeners aspire to. And of course you don't have to quit your job, just to throw that out there. Lots of people actually build up the side income to a substantial level but continue with their job. I think it's just wonderful to get to the point where you have a choice, and then once you have the choice, you have so much more power essentially. You have more power, you have more leverage, you have the ability to decide for yourself, which I think is a wonderful thing no matter what you end up doing next.

Watched

Andrew Bird, "Near Death Experience Experience" (2020-04-22)

Photo

can I offer you a nice bread in this trying time?

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There might be additional links that didn't make the cut at notes.kirkkittell.com

A week in review, 2020-W16

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Wrote

  1. Time for yourself (2020-04-13).
  2. Nod to self, from a different orbit (2020-04-14).
  3. Don't narrow out the future (2020-04-16).

Read

  1. Rob Walker, Productivity and the Joy of Doing Things the Hard Way, Wired (2019-05-28). (notes) At some point you have to wonder if the thing we’re hacking away isn’t just annoyance or inefficiency, but potentially delightful serendipity. Or, you know, life itself.
  2. Tyson Bird, Author and Illustrator Edward Carey Shares the Story Behind His Quarantine Drawings, Texas Highways (2020-04-14). (notes) I draw now what people ask for (with the exception of a self-portrait on my fiftieth birthday), and I like that. It takes me somewhere different, and we all need to find new destinations during this time of shelter. I’ve no idea what drawings will follow, nor how many drawings will be stacked up by the end of this. I’m just taking it—like so many people around the globe—one day at a time. One drawing at a time. A drawing a day to keep the eye off the plague.
  3. Divya Gandhi and Anusua Mukherjee, Art for the Anthropocene, The Hindu (2019-12-28). (notes) Her unerring eye for detail began with a large coffee table book, Hummingbirds, she illustrated. “It lifted my art to another level. I had to follow a very specific protocol: each plate had to be to scale; each one had to depict both the male and female of the species. And each had to show one interesting behaviour trait of the hummingbird
  4. Gwen Moran, Now is a great time to make some mediocre art, Fast Company (2020-04-07). (notes) Creating things, especially in the face of uncertainty, fear, or other distressing and unsettling emotions, is an innate drive, she says. “It speaks to our own individual identity and our need to have a sense of agency and control over our lives and over our time,” Kaimal adds.
  5. Steve Blank, In a Crisis – An Opportunity For A More Meaningful Life, steveblank.com (2020-04-16). (notes) But every crisis brings an opportunity. In this case, to reassess one’s life and ask: How do I want to use my time when the world recovers? What I suggested was, that the economic disruption caused by the virus and the recession that will follow is one of those rare opportunities to consider a change, one that could make your own life more meaningful, allow you to make an impact, and gain more than just a salary from your work. Perhaps instead of working for the latest social media or ecommerce company or in retail or travel or hospitality, you might want to make people live healthier, longer and more productive lives.

Listened

  1. Managing Crises in the Short and Long Term, HBR IdeaCast (2020-04-14). (notes) [10:27] Taking a narrow view is another one of those traps and the human mind is hardwired when faced with a threat to narrow its perspective. You think back to our sort of prehistoric ancestors. When they heard a rustling in the bushes they had to really quickly figure out was that going to eat them, or were they going to eat it? And so this narrowing happens and you have to, if you’re going to lead, you have to pull back and see that bigger picture, not just the foreground, what’s happening now, but the mid-ground and the background, looking into the future. Because if you’re leading you've got to be thinking about not what has to happen right this second. Hopefully you’ve got competent people around you doing that. But what are we going to need in two weeks, two months, six months?
  2. Agility Robotics' Damion Shelton: "Legs over wheels", Danny in the Valley (2020-04-15). (notes) [18:23] We've been selling product early. So that was one of the lessons from my 3D scanner days was sell something as opposed to nothing as rapidly as you possibly can because you're going to learn an awful lot.
  3. Authenticity is a Double-Edged Sword, WorkLife with Adam Grant (2020-04-06). (notes) [35:48, Carmen Medina] You're not going to win those battles if you do a frontal assault every time. And sadly, for a lot of organizations, behaving in your authentic way can be perceived as a frontal attack. And I just think that's horrible, but that is still the world that we live in.

Watched

Guilty of Treeson, WORLD'S BEST TREE FELLING TUTORIAL! Way more information than you ever wanted on how to fell a tree!

Photo

garlic forest

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There might be additional links that didn't make the cut at notes.kirkkittell.com

A week in review, 2020-W14

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Wrote

  1. Change (2020-04-03).

Read

  1. Anne Helen Petersen, This Pandemic Is Not Your Vacation, Buzzfeed News (2020-03-31). (notes) The question to ask, then, is whether your relocation to a rural place will be a net help or a harm — not for you, personally, but for the community itself. Americans struggle mightily with the ideology of individualism: that all that matters, in a particular moment, is what is happening to you and yours. Rural America is asking you to think otherwise. You might “enjoy” your quarantine more. But the rural places so many Americans treat as playgrounds, and the workers who make that play and respite and feeling of safety possible, may suffer profoundly in your service.
  2. Mitra Sorrells, Coronavirus upends revenue management strartegies for hotels and airlines, PhocusWire (2020-02-14). (notes) From the standpoint of revenue management, including pricing and forecasting, coronavirus is a massive challenge for the travel industry – affecting both the relevance of historic data, the ability to predict the future and the need to address cancellations in the present.
  3. Jennifer Riel, How to Think About Long-Term Strategy When You Can Barely See Past Tomorrow, Ideo Journal (2020-04-02). (notes) Winning isn’t easy. It’s tempting to define winning narrowly, to make the task seem easier: winning means increasing the stock price this quarter. But as the last few months have demonstrated, a shareholder-led definition of winning is not only hollow, it can leave organizations with nothing to fall back on in a time of crisis. We need a far richer, more aspirational understanding of what it can really mean to win.
  4. Erica Klarreich, In Game Theory, No Clear Path to Equilibrium, Quanta Magazine (2017-07-18). (notes) “It has always been a thorn in the side of microeconomists,” said Tim Roughgarden, a theoretical computer scientist at Stanford University. “They use these equilibrium concepts, and they’re analyzing them as if people will be at equilibrium, but there isn’t always a satisfying explanation of why people will be at Nash equilibrium as opposed to just groping around for one.”
  5. John Cassidy, The Triumph (and Failure) of John Nash's Game Theory, The New Yorker (2015-05-27). (notes) That’s partly because Nash-influenced game theory isn’t actually a testable scientific theory at all. It is an intellectual tool—a way of organizing our thoughts systematically, applying them in a consistent manner, and ruling out errors. Like Marshallian supply-and-demand analysis or Bayesian statistics, it can be applied to many different problems, and its utility depends on the particular context. But while appealing to the Nash criteria doesn’t necessarily give the correct answer, it often rules out a lot of implausible ones, and it usually helps pin down the logic of the situation.

Listened

  1. #80 John Maxwell: Developing the Leader in You, The Knowledge Project (2020-03-31). (notes) [32:16] So I think all great leadership with others begins with personal leadership myself. The first victor I want to have in my life is a personal one. If I've got a few of those I can help you get some victories in your life also. But I definitely believe that the credibility of leadership, the confidence of leadership, all begins when I lead myself well. If I can lead myself well, then I've got potential leading you well. But if I can't lead myself well, why would I want someone else to follow me? To be honest with you, a lot of people they wouldn't want to follow themselves because they haven't done that.
  2. #86 - David Silver: AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and Deep Reinforcement Learning, Artificial Intelligence Podcast (2020-04-03). (notes)
  3. Creative Destruction, Akimbo (2020-04-01). (notes)

Watched

Sex Education: Season 2

Photo

change

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There might be additional links that didn't make the cut at notes.kirkkittell.com

A week in review, 2020-W22

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Wrote

  1. 2005, the way home: day 2 (2020-05-25).
  2. 2005, the way home: day 3 (2020-05-26).
  3. 2005, the way home: day 4 (2020-05-27).
  4. 2005, the way home: day 5 (2020-05-28).
  5. 2005, the way home: day 6 (2020-05-29).
  6. 2005, the way home: day 7 (2020-05-30).
  7. 2005, the way home: day 8 (2020-05-31).

Read

  1. Jelani Cobb, The Death of George Floyd, in Context, The New Yorker (2020-05-28). The video of Floyd’s death is horrific but not surprising; terrible but not unusual, depicting a kind of incident that is periodically reënacted in the United States. It’s both necessary and, at this point, pedestrian to observe that policing in this country is mediated by race. On Tuesday, in Minneapolis, hundreds of protesters, many wearing face masks to guard against COVID-19, braved the pandemic to protest at the spot where Floyd died. Outside a nearby precinct house, police cars were pelted with rocks, and officers responded by firing tear gas.
  2. James C. Cobb, Even Though He Is Revered Today, MLK Was Widely Disliked by the American Public When He Was Killed, Smithsonian Magazine (2018-04-04). King did nothing to quell these concerns when he later told David Halberstam that he had abandoned the incremental approach to social change of his civil rights protest days in favor of pursuing “a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values,” one which would “look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation.”
  3. Tiffany Wen, The hidden signs that can reveal a fake photo, BBC Future (2017-06-29). “More often than not, people think that the real images are fake and that things that are fake are real,” says Farid. “And their confidence is very high. So people are both ignorant and confident, which is the worst combination.”
  4. Sally Patten, Expect to spend half your time WFH till the end of 2020 (2020-05-01). Alex Badenoch, group executive of transformation, communications and people at Telstra, said: “We know we need to balance both our business needs with the views and feelings of our employees. Some people are keen to return to the office as soon as possible, while this creates concern and anxiety for others." Mr Dixon argued that it was critical that companies consider how they would manage an outbreak of COVID-19 in the coming months in the absence of a vaccine.
  5. Dana Goodyear, The Coronavirus Spurs a Movement of People Reclaiming Vacant Homes, The New Yorker (2020-03-28). He and other activists identified the safest houses, in the best condition, and matched them with potential occupants, good custodians who would work to improve the houses. It was important, he said, to limit the reclamations; his ultimate goal was not to have people squatting in the houses but to add moral force to the argument they are making to Caltrans. “Of course, anyone can do it. But there’s a lot of respect here for us and what we do and our opinion. I say, ‘You want to ruin the movement? We’re not going to take anymore; we’re going to work on the ones we have.’ ”

Listened

  1. 180 - Meltdown, You Are Not So Smart (2020-05-19). (notes) [53:16] One is that the amount of tuning and optimization that we have done in our systems for the normal day—that I think is one of the big things that we are seeing now, that normal is actually—the normal range of parameters that we can operate in is really narrow relative to the total range of parameters that we can operate in. And I think that's one of the things that coronavirus is highlighting. [...] The other thing is that in systems, there is a delay. So, you can think about the delay in different levels. [...] I bet the people that make toilet paper are also not buying and storing months worth of lumber to make months worth of toilet paper. I bet they're buying that in real time, right? So if all of a sudden there's a spike in demand, they've now got to go and get more trees somewhere, and that is a delay that is going to flow back through the system.

Watched

香煎鳕鱼【曼食慢语第110集】, 曼食慢语 Amanda Tastes (2015-08-19).

Photo

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  • YYYY-MM-DD: There is no future.

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A week in review, 2020-W13

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Wrote

None

Read

  1. Clancy Martin, Diary: The Case of the Counterfeit Eggs, London Review of Books (2009-02-12). Walking among the crowded jewellers’ benches I realised that with the right marketing I could make millions. I would have no competitors. The upfront costs of the deal could be financed quickly and easily if we made a few eggs that, so the story would go, I had managed to ‘purchase’ while I was in Russia: a couple of lost Fabergé masterpieces. As in the art and antiquities business, and among philatelists, tricks like these are not unheard of in fine jewellery. I had counterfeited before.
  2. Jerry Useem, How Online Shopping Makes Suckers of Us All, The Atlantic (2017-05-01). (notes) Simply put: Our ability to know the price of anything, anytime, anywhere, has given us, the consumers, so much power that retailers—in a desperate effort to regain the upper hand, or at least avoid extinction—are now staring back through the screen. They are comparison shopping us.
  3. Kristin Iversen, Men Explain Fiona Apple to Me, Nylon (2019-04-29).
  4. Michael Hogan, OK Boomer: How Bob Dylan's New JFK Song Helps Explain 2020, Vanity Fair (2020-03-27). Maybe he is doing the same thing Allen was doing: trying to use his favorite songs and movies as shields against the idea that life is absurd and meaningless. And maybe—I have no idea but maybe?—Dylan is trying to break the chain of political evil by building a chain of artistic goodness. Several of the lyrics suggest that the JFK assassination was the beginning of something very bad. Something that is still plaguing us today
  5. Alex Tabarrok, Sicken Thy Neighbor Trade Policy, Marginal Revolution (2020-03-29). The second reason why export bans are a mistake is that when there are economies of scale banning exports can decrease local consumption. A company that knows that it cannot export will be less willing to invest in building new plant and infrastructure, for example. We see exactly this phenomena in the brain drain “paradox”. Brain drain proponents argue that developing countries need to ban exports of human capital (i.e. don’t let people leave) to keep skilled workers at home. But in fact places like the Philippines, which export a lot of nurses, also have more domestic nurses.

Listened

  1. Brian Cox, actor, Desert Island Discs (2020-03-29).
  2. 697: Alone Together, This American Life (2020-03-22).
  3. The Pixies, Where Is My Mind?, Surfer Rosa (1988).

Photo

working hard from home, or hardly working from home

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There might be additional links that didn't make the cut at notes.kirkkittell.com

A week in review, 2020-W12

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Wrote

  1. Inconsistency vs uncertainty (2020-03-20).
  2. To what nature leads thee (2020-03-17).
  3. Breathe more deeply (2020-03-16).

Read

  1. Jon Methven, Effective Immediately: We Are Closing Our Homeschool, McSweeney's Internet Tendency (2020-03-18). We know there are parents out there who can both love their children unconditionally and also teach them Common Core mathematics. If this global pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we are not those parents. Just because we chose to close our homeschool, it does not mean your mother and I do not love you. It means we love you enough to know we can either love you or teach you algebra, not both.
  2. Seth Godin, Public health, Seth's Blog (2020-03-16). Often, it’s only coordinated action that can help the entire community. And coordinated action rarely happens without intentional coordination. Don’t do it because you finally got around to it. Don’t do it because it is in your short-term interest. Do it because we all need it done. It’s difficult to overinvest in building and running competent public health systems and management. And sometimes we don’t realize how important the system is until we see how unprepared we are. [Which is why, alas, today is a good day to stay home].
  3. Jeff Huang, My productivity app is a single .txt file, jeffhuang.com (2020-01-31). My daily workload is completely under my control the night before; whenever I feel overwhelmed with my long-term commitments, I reduce it by aggressively unflagging emails, removing items from my calendar that I am no longer excited about doing, and reducing how much work I assign myself in the future. It does mean sometimes I miss some questions or don't pursue an interesting research question, but helps me maintain a manageable workload.
  4. Jason Kottke, Some People, kottke.org (2020-03-20). Some people lost their jobs. Some people can’t sleep. Some people are watching free opera online. Some people can’t work remotely. Some people have contracted COVID-19 and don’t know it yet. Some people can’t concentrate on their work because of anxiety. Some people can’t afford their rent next month.
  5. Marc Weidenbaum, Taxonomy of Speakers at MoMA, Disquiet (2020-03-01). When you enter a given space, you may hear something, but excepting rooms dedicated to individual works, it can be unclear which piece correlates with the sound. Speakers are everywhere. Room after room you enter has audio; the question becomes: From which of these many pieces in front of me is it emanating? This isn’t a puzzle. It never takes long to sort out. But in the process of untangling several such circumstances, patterns begin to form and cluster, and in turn a taxonomy of the speakers comes into shape.

Listened

  1. E338.我在澳门赌钱，被高利贷囚禁, 故事FM (2020-03-16).

Watched

The Beatles, "Hey Jude", David Frost's Frost on Sunday (1968)

Photo

ok, we'll stay inside

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