Finished reading: Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton 📚
Not much has changed in how people think about religion since Chesterton wrote this more than a century ago. Alas, the way people write about it has gotten much worse.
Apps and/or services I have tried and dropped so far this year:
The one that stuck:
Yet again, Microsoft is eating everyone’s lunch. Back to the 1990s it is.
The 20th day of the 4th month is a special day for everyone, most of all lovers of murder mysteries and fine art. This year, it is also the end of Ramadan.
But was it all worthy of the most expensive fireworks display to date?
He’s a Firefox user.
The finalists of Axios DC’s best building bracket are the Washington National Cathedral and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. An easy choice!
I am having more fun than I should following the Axios D.C. building madness brackets. The semifinals feature two traditional versus modernist face-offs: EEO building v. MLK library and the National Cathedral v. NMAAHC. Just delightful.
I first hear about “date me” docs a few months ago, when someone I followed on Twitter shared his. Today, Tyler Cowen wrote a brief note about them and pointed to another one, from a (female) acquaintance of his.
As someone who’s been in a stable relationship for 14 years this month, I count my blessings every day that I don’t have to think about dating, in the US, in the 2010s and now the ’20s. And for the reason why, look no further than the ridiculous dating apps, and now “dating docs”, which remove all exploration, randomness, and surprise — which is to say everything human — out of the process of finding a partner. Serendipity Which was surprise in a prior version of the post but serendipity is a much better word; thank you, dear reader. in particular is underrated by those who think these documents are a good idea, both in finding out you have common interests with someone you were interested in, and in discovering new things that you wouldn’t have considered before.
Don’t get me wrong, it obviously works for someone — probably people who think a trustless financial system is a good idea — but it is clearly not for me. More worryingly, a portion of kids these days seems to enjoy eliminating everything Dr. Who At least every Dr. Who up to and including David Tennant — things started getting depressing during the Capaldi years and I drifted away from watching…liked about humans. Which is an interesting thing to be happening at the same time when algorithms are starting to “hallucinate”, “lie”, and — let’s call it what it is — bullshit, which have for better or worse been typically human traits.
I shall now grab my walker and shuffle off into the sunset.
If you haven’t yen seen CGP Grey’s new video in which he ranks the US state flags, please do so now. It is vintage Grey.
The DMV region is 2 for 3 in the good flag department: Maryland’s is in the so-bad-it’s-good category, DC’s is just a really good flag I’m proud to see fly every day. Virginia’s is… quite bad. The seal is good — I love to see Latin in the wild — but as Grey notes, plastering your seal over a blue background does not magically make a flag.
What would make for a good flag of Virginia is the black snake on yellow background design it’s put on its specialty license plates, but of course “Don’t tread on me” has been forever poisoned, and other than the plates it has no particular ties to Virginia. If anything, since Ben Franklin drew the original design Pennsylvania could have use it to replace its own vexicological abomination, but for the toxicity.
No, if Virginia is to lean into its herritage it should put a ball of cotton on the left, a leaf of tobacco on the right, and a congestion-priced highway right down the middle.
As evidence that people can change with age, I present this manual for spaced repetition. Some 20 years ago I would’ve eaten it up — I did, in fact, run SuperMemo on a Palm Tungsten T while in med school — but now the technique seems good for test prep and little else.
For your Saturday reading pleasure: How to Beat Roulette: One Gambler Figured It Out and Won Big
That one gambler was from Croatia, some of his gambling buddies were from Serbia, and the Bloomberg reporter had this typically Balkan interaction:
As I pressed him about computers, he threw up his hands in exasperation and started to argue with his friend. Is he angry, I asked. “No, that’s just how he talks,” the friend replied.
That is indeed just the way we talk.