Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!
Image by Midjourney v6. The prompt was my own.
The perks of being born in late December, after the (Gregorian) Christmas but before the New Year:
📚 Writing with Style: The Economist Guide may not be the most important style guide to come out, but it has to be the funniest. Between the self-references and the dry wit lie many lessons: that even professional writers do some things a certain way because the alternative would “look weird”; that I use too many commas, the Oxford comma being one of them; and that if my name were ever to be mentioned in The Economist it would lose its diacritics — unless I insisted they stay. It earned its place on the shelf above the screen.
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!
Image by Midjourney v6. The prompt was my own.
I tend to add “to all who celebrate” because the Serbian Orthodox Church is still on the Julian calendar, which is off by 13 days. Most orthodox churches are aligned with the Gregorian calendar and have been so for the last 100 years thanks to a revision proposed by — drumroll please — the Serbian Orthodox Church. Having a good idea and not following through because Russia isn’t on board is a typical Serbian thing to do, so points for consistency I guess.
While I admire Craig Mod’s extensive introduction to Walking and Talking, the European part of me — which is 100% to the nearest decimal — is rolling his eyes and thinking, “Really, Craig?”
This is America at its best and worst: optimize, plan, extract every ounce of utility from what is supposed to be a leisure activity. I’d rather go flaneuring.
It was a good year for television! Or for my clearing the backlog, as some of these came out years ago:
Last year’s list is here.
Today’s Washington Post has a good write-up on how genetic engineering of the near-extinct American chestnut tree to make it more resistant to infection went wrong:
After he enlisted the help of Ek Han Tan, a geneticist at the University of Maine, to analyze the chestnut’s genome, they made their discovery this fall: The plants they were working on were, in fact, not Darling 58 trees.
Instead, they found they were working with a different chestnut line — called the Darling 54 — where the gene was inserted in another chromosome entirely, potentially corrupting one of the tree’s existing genes.
…
In a phone interview, Newhouse, the SUNY ESF director, acknowledged the mix-up but said he wasn’t sure what transpired.
“As far as exactly how it happened, we don’t know,” he said. “It must have been a label swap between these two trees that we were working with at the same time” in or around 2016.
The brilliant minds who think engineering mosquitos is a good idea can’t foresee that even a seemingly innocuous clerical error can lead to disaster, never mind the second-order effects to nature if your project succeeds. Whoever’s read Taleb’s Incerto (or some of his tweets) knows better.
My podcast diet has become stale. I work from home more, commute less, and have decided not to wear AirPods when others are around, With a family of five this means no more than 30–45 minutes in the early morning before anyone else is up. And those minutes are filled with the usual suspects, which continue to be fine, but they are also two elderly economists with similar views. Where’s the variety?
So, here is an aspirational list of things I will try out in 2024. Be warned: a few years ago I put Lex Friedman’s podcast on a similar list, and apologized profusely after realizing it was a good cure for insomnia and not much else. As always, caveat lector.
If the links above were not explicit enough, here are my actual regulars: ATP, EconTalk, Conversations with Tyler, with a sprinkling of The Talk Show and Dithering. They all feature prominently in years past: 2022 — 2021 — 2020 — 2019 — 2018 — The one where I took a break from podcasts — The very first one.
🍿 Klaus (2019) flew under the radar for us when it first came out, so kudos to the Netflix recommendation algorithm for resurfacing it for the holidays. It is a classically — and beautifully — animated family movie that’s not trying to be hip or edgy, and is all the better for it.
This time last year, Netflix scrapped the director’s follow-up project. Here’s hoping that Ember will find a new home.
“Typically the most important thing is not how you do the optimization but rather what you decide to optimize.” This is in regards to a school bus route optimization disaster:
The program — developed by graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — uses artificial intelligence to generate the routes with the intent of reducing the number of routes. Last year, JCPS had 730 routes last year, and that was cut to 600 beginning this year…
So, people thought you could eliminate — pardon, optimize — 20% of the routes without consequence. Don’t blame AI, which is nothing but an incantation used to make someone’s magical thinking a reality.