From Albert Wenger on his blog Continuations: ⊕ I am quoting almost half of his fairly short blog post here but you should still go see it in context, click on the links and check out the rest of the blog while you’re at it.

Second, the world is continuing to descend back into tribalism. And it has been exhausting trying to maintain a high rung approach to topics amid an onslaught of low rung bullshit. Whether it is Israel-Gaza, the Climate Crisis or Artificial Intelligence, the online dialog is dominated by the loudest voices. Words have been rendered devoid of meaning and reduced to pledges of allegiance to a tribe. I start reading what people are saying and often wind up feeling isolated and exhausted. I don’t belong to any of the tribes nor would I want to. But the effort required to maintain internally consistent and intellectually honest positions in such an environment is daunting. And it often seems futile.

Tangential to this is a trend, particularly regarding the Capitalized Content above but also about News of the Day on any particular day, is an expectation to condemn of the “if you are not saying something publicly, you are complicit” variety. Show your colors. Plant your flag. Choose your hill or whatnot. To which I can only say: why?

A few years ago I have somehow gotten onto a list of potential democratic donor and am routinely solicited for money, even though as a non-US citizen I can’t vote or donate to a political party. It gave me a window into what declared American democrats are exposed to, and I assume republicans get the same raw deal: a barrage of emails in ALL CAPS declaring whatever is happening on any given day to be The Most Consequential Event of Our Lives, click this link to donate. I can only imagine that, slowly at first and then as a torrent, that language drips drips drips into people’s minds until it’s part of the background mental processing.

So with such a loud background it is no wonder that people feel like they need to yell to get heard, and who cares about whatever small project you’re working on in your provincial unimportant back yard when there is Important Stuff Happening over here. Being social and wanting to get heard, we start yelling out things which we believe people we would want to like us would want to hear. And if you think that sentence is confusing, well, yes it is, but not any more confusing than the predicament we’re in.

Because those things actually are important, and it’s good to have a dialogue about them, around the dinner table, at the water cooler, at the game, with people we know and care about in contexts other than internet screaming matches that, mold-like, spread over constructive online dialogue until it’s rotten to its core. So for this blog and the general and generally wonderful micro.blog community, I will have thoughts on science, coffee, books, an occasional photo, and come October maybe even some basketball. Not as consequential to the world perhaps, but consequential to me.

(↬Thought Shrapnel)

🍿 Meet the Fockers (2004): lowbrow American entertainment at its finest, but you can see how the line from lowbrow to crass is about the be crossed. The third installment — which we haven’t seen yet — apparently did cross it, as did every comedy DeNiro has done since.

🍿 Meet the Parents (2000) is the kind of lowbrow entertainment one needs after a long day at work. Sitcoms used to fill that niche, but the old ones we’ve watched several times over and the new ones are either too high-octane or too unfunny.

Nassim Taleb doesn’t often do podcasts unless they are with Russ Roberts, so him being a guest on The Tim Ferris Show was a surprise. The episode begins with a protracted introduction and a lot of reminiscing, but things take off in the second half which is an excellent introduction to Taleb’s concepts on probability.

Great for forwarding to friends and family who may have heard of Ferris but don’t know anything about Taleb except for his Twitter escapades (or are they now called X-scapades)? .

📚 Currently reading: Writing to Learn by William Zinsser and only a few pages in I have found the quote that speaks to me:

I don’t like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written.

Which goes along with what I’ve heard from colleagues about scientific writing: your manuscript isn’t ready to be published until you hate it.

🍿 Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) showed yet again that more is not better. There are too many characters, too many plot lines, too many Serious Things Happening, and not enough heart. If there is a third — and Phoebe is too good of a character for there not to be one — they better tone it down.

ChatGPT has been a godsend for custom Mathematica functions, especially simple ones that may take 10–15 minutes to write but still take me out of the Thing I’m Actually Trying to Do.

Are they the most efficient functions there are? Probably not. But they are well-written, easy to debug, and let me put small flourishes that ultimately make my life easier but that I wouldn’t bother with if I had to do everything on my own.

A recent example is Mathemathica’s built-in Tally function which takes in a list and puts out the frequency of each element (e.g. {Yes, No, Yes, Yes} in and {{Yes, 3}, {No, 1}} out). I usually deal with longer lists where percentages would also come in handy, so having percentages also listed (i.e. {Yes, 3, 25}) would be nice. I asked ChatGPT-4o, and what it gave was good enough: ⊕ This was, of course, only a part of the response. It tends to be professorial when answering code-related questions, which is very much appreciated.

TallyWithPercentages[list_] := Module[
  {tallied, total},
  tallied = Tally[list];
  total = Length[list];
  {#[[1]], {#[[2]], N[#[[2]]/total*100]}} & /@ tallied
]

It wasn’t exactly what I wanted because the output was {Yes, 3}, 25} instead of {Yes, 3, 25}, but that was easy to change with a simple intervention — Flatten the output then re-Partition it — without thinking too much about Mathemathica’s sometimes incomprehensible short-code which I forget after a few days of not needing it.

Could I have done this with a quick online search? Of course! But the cognitive load of doing it this way is essentially zero, as is the chance of getting distracted by something else happening on the page.

We recently bought a condo in DC and made a conscious effort to avoid houses like this one, which always looked like they were made out of sawdust and glue. Well:

… inspection report found about 70 code violations. The most severe: The building lacked lateral bracing for its exterior walls, causing it to sway. Without this bracing, relatively weak door frames and interior partition walls were load-bearing, holding up the weight of the structure without adequate support. “I was very scared for those people,” Englebert says. “You need those braced wall lines to stop the building from moving. If that building were to rock in the right direction, it could fall over on itself.”

Criminal negligence from builders to the initial city inspection. I feel for the home owners who have to live through this horror show. Most alarming of all: the contractor is still at it, shielded from lawsuits thanks to an LLC. Caveat emptor! (ᔥr/washingtondc)