After getting an unexpected upgrade to United’s first class on a red-eye trip from San Diego to DC, I can report that a 4-and-a-half-hour flight is too short to get any meaningful rest no matter where you sit. The only bonus was the blanket.
☕️ If there were Michelin stars for coffee shops, San Diego’s Bird Rock would deserve all three: worth booking the hotel away from the venue just to be close to it for your first morning cup. Outstanding.
🏀 The Denver Nuggets have fired coach Michael Malone and GM Calvin Booth. I guess they wanted to avoid the inevitable.
📚Finished reading: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki.
I have tons of free time, as is evidenced by (a) that I’m spending a half hour writing this blog post and (b) that I spent a couple hours earlier this week reading Atlas’s book, for no other reason than I felt like it. And this wasn’t even the only pleasure book I read over the Thanksgiving weekend. But I’m also in a continual time debt, a veritable treadmill of time commitments. I’m in the middle of writing 5 books and a few dozen research articles, and I keep taking on new projects. No way I can do all of these! But, as with Atlas and his finances, somehow I keep going.
Andrew Gelman describes my life, basically.
🏀 Alex Ovechkin has just broken Wayne Gretzki’s career goal record and looking at his career trajectory made me realize Nikola Jokić was becoming the Ovechkin of basketball:
Which is great!
Richard Feynman popularized the term “cargo-cult science” as actions of research who follow the form but not showing much if any care for the substance of science. Andrew Gelman has second thoughts about the metaphor and proposes “ritual science” instead, and for good reason: cargo-cult implies a technological gap that may be impossible to bridge, while he uses ritual here to mean mindless repetition.
The maneuver does throw rituals under the bus, as proper rituals are far from mindless. Still, this is indeed how the word “ritual” is used colloquially so Gelman is on the right track. “Mindless science” would also cover the phenomena though is too broad: science — or rather, scientists — can be mindless in other ways. (ᔥAndrew Gelman)
If the world wasn’t chaotic enough, get ready for an invasion of the home humanoid robots. My cynical side predicts mechanical Turks, or rather Cambodians and Vietnamese, controlling these remotely as a service that is not (yet) subject to tariffs.
🏀 Kudos to the person who suggested that the Orlando (Magic) at Washington (Wizards) game should be Harry Potter Night. Showing the Orlando starters as dementors was a lovely touch.
Don’t feel obliged from Oliver Burkeman is on my list of things to occasionally re-read. High school was the right time for me to hear this advice from one of his Guardian editors: “if you can’t do something, saying no right away usually makes it much easier for everyone."