March 15, 2024

The latest ATP members' special is their best one yet. It is called John’s Windows, it is about John Siracusa’s window management system, and it is one of those rare podcast episodes that are best viewed on YouTube. Easily worth the price of membership.

March 14, 2024

📚 Finished reading: Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

Slow Productivity is a book that could easily have been a blog post but the three sub-heading of that hypothetical post are sound and worth adopting. They could also fit on a fortune cookie:

  1. Do fewer things.
  2. Work at a natural pace.
  3. Obsess over quality.

These are as obvious as they are short. Of course, you don’t need a book to learn and understand them — it’s enough to see what people who do great things are doing themselves, like Nassim Taleb, or Stephen Wolfram, or any good writer who writes their own books. But if you are too busy to learn by example and dig into people’s work habits described peacemeal and without a big red arrow pointing to the things that everyone should do, well, then, this is the right book for you.

It is also a bit of a cuckoo’s egg, ready-made for wide distribution through book clubs and large corporate purchases, which it says right on the copyright page. But then if you are a large American corporation with a large American corporation’s goals and values, maybe having your employees all becoming part-time flaneurs may not be the best idea. The American number go up because of quantity not quality, and you get to quantity by grinding it out, not by taking long walks.

So, there may need to be an intermediate step there, another airport book for Newport to write for the executives and the board members about short-term goals not reigning supreme. Good luck with that.

From the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology:

The high and rising rates of maternal mortality in the United States are a consequence of changes in maternal mortality surveillance, with reliance on the pregnancy checkbox leading to an increase in misclassified maternal deaths. Identifying maternal deaths by requiring mention of pregnancy among the multiple causes of death shows lower, stable maternal mortality rates and declines in maternal deaths from direct obstetrical causes.

Translation: maternal mortality often went undetected, so they changed the way we had to measured it. We don’t like how the new way of measuring is making us look compared to other countries, so we want to change it back. Goodhart wins again. (↬Washington Post)

March 13, 2024

One day spent in Miami and after a few encounters at stores, restaurants, cafes, etc. it is with some sadness that I have to report that I am most definitely not made for these climates. How does any work get done with so much waiting in line while the cashier is chatting to the customer in front?

March 12, 2024

📚 Finished reading: Liberation Day by George Saunders, who is the conscience of the Baby Boom generation. What have we allowed to happen to this world? is what most of his protagonists ask, as their brains are washed, heads are hung up on walls, bodies are pelleted by hail. This is similar to the Tenth of December, his last short story collection, only this time some of his characters do, eventually, with much hemming and hawing, grow what under a certain light could be interpreted as a spine. It was high time, George.

March 11, 2024

🏀 It was clear after their first 10 games that the Wizards won’t have a post-season, but it’s now a mathematical certainty. At least they have a two-game winning streak (stretched from a streak of one — thank you for the laughs, WaPo). Against the Heat, no less. The Washington Wizards are the ultimate broken clock.

Here are some very cool photos of late 19th century Washington DC. It looked more like the Wild West than I would have suspected — see #11, Ford’s Theater and #46, 7th and D for good examples.

Most of it is gone, but some things are left standing — like #19, now part of the Smithsonian. (↬Reddit).

March 10, 2024

I thought we got rid of this nonsense last year, but apparently not. Remember, it’s never too late to resurect Swatch Internet Time.

Studies like this one we just published, about immunotherapy of T-cell lymphoma, used to take up all of my time; now, they are a weekend project at best. How times change.

March 9, 2024

🍿 American Fiction (2023) was as good as biting satire gets: funny, poignant, and, ultimately, tripping on its own feet. It is better than The Triangle of Sadness and miles above Don’t Look Up but at heart it is still an insecure adolescent whose every seemingly earnest confession is followed by a “just kidding…” handwave.