🍿 The Boy and the Heron (2023) was the weirdest Miyazaki movie we’ve seen, and the competitions is strong. It starts with the misleading title (the original How Do You Live would have made more sense), continues with the heron’s terrifying transformation, and ends with bizarre fantasy world building.
The best explanation I can think of is that most of the movie was the boy’s fever dream after a self-inflicted wound to the head. I’ve had dreams where strange twists made perfect sense and in which I acted as if I knew what was going on. It is best, then, to squint and follow the dream logic without worrying too much about the mechanics. The message in that case is clear: there is malice in all of us, but let’s not allow it to carry us away. Not original, but important.
Janan Ganesh, telling it like it is:
The hardest thing to convey about modern politics to intelligent readers, who tend to assume that ideas drive events, is the tribal shallowness of it. People take a certain position because the opposing side doesn’t.
He is writing about foreign policy, but applies just as well to masks, vaccine mandates, approach to tech, etc. which gets us to the package of sometimes incompatible beliefs you can expect to get from either side.
Dave Winer has some good advice:
I’m often tempted to offer advice to the parents, but I won’t offer it unless asked, except this. If you have children, there’s a good chance one or more of them will not have children, and you should love them the same, and provide models of acceptance while they’re growing up, by bringing childless people into your home, so the kids know that this is one of the legitimate choices in life, offering proof that you won’t love them any less if they go down that path. And here’s the hard part, imho, for people with children – keep that promise.
Good quote today from Adam Mastroianni’s latest newsletter:
When I see someone salivating over the idea of a Science Gestapo, I have to marvel at their faith that authorities only ever prosecute guilty people.
Applies more broadly than science, of course.
Andrew Gelman has a new — and free — textbook out, Regression and Other Stories. From the cover:
Many textbooks on regression focus on theory and the simplest of examples. Real statistical problems, however, are complex and subtle. This is not a book about the theory of regression. It is a book about how to use regression to solve real problems of comparison, estimation, prediction, and causal inference. It focuses on practical issues such as sample size and missing data and a wide range of goals and techniques. It jumps right in to methods and computer code you can use fresh out of the box.
Between that, his Bayesian Data Analysis and many other freely available lectures and books, has there ever been a better time for high school students bored out of their minds by the pedestrian curriculum? But I am now just projecting to myself from 20-some years ago — I am sure high school students of today would rather spend time on their PS5, and my past self would probably have joined them. (↬Andrew Gelman)
Reviewing my notes I saw the phrase “rigor mitigation”. This is, of course, a failure of autocorrect and a reason why analogue is better than digital. But I’ve been exposed to corporate speak for so long that for a moment I thought it may have actually meant something.
A few interesting links:
🍿 Dune: Part Two (2024) was as good as it gets. There were only so many things Villeneuve could have brought into focus from the copious world-building of the books, and he chose ones that were right for a movie. Part Three will be a blast.
📚 Finished reading: Moonbound by Robin Sloan, which is a light, fluffy, summer-time — someone less charitable may have said paper-thin — version of some of my favorite sci-fi series. But please don’t mind my inner snob showing off: it is a fine book and I anxiously await the sequel.
My boss at the NIH was in his late 80s when I started working there, early 90s when I left. There was an obvious physical decline into complete frailty during those four years, but he was as sharp, lucid and stubborn as ever. You don’t get to work into your 90s unless you have it your way, and “the way” became shorter hours in the office with prolonged nap time, sometimes during meetings, while maintaining the final word on anything that happens in the lab.
So, “the mind is willing but the flesh is weak” often came to mind, and until we develop a Futurama-style brain-in-a-box there are limits that biology imposes which can’t be overcome through force of will. You hate to see it, but we will be seeing it more and more often as the Baby Boom generation gets into its sunset years. Not because they’re any more selfish than other generations, mind you (my old boss was of the Silent generation), but rather because they are the most numerous and the biggest beneficiaries of death-delaying medical advancements.
It seems to me that the higher up the person is in the hierarchy and the longer they have worked in the field (my boss spent 60 years at the NIH), the harder it is to imagine anything other than staying on the job until an act of God intervenes. This is exactly what happened; I was gone before then, but there were many in the lab who were left scrambling for a new position, taken by complete surprise that their 90-plus-year-old chief was no longer with us.
So it goes…