The first snow of the year. Meager for now, but more is on the way tonight. The kids were ecstatic.

Today I learned — from my 4-year-old, no less! — that house flies are among the top 10 non-bee pollinator families. Numbers 1 and 2 are also in the fly family. Is it time to retire our swatter?

The Washington Post has your weekend reading covered: “He spent his life building a $1 million stereo. The real cost was unfathomable”.

The faded photos tell the story of how the Fritz family helped him turn the living room of their modest split-level ranch on Hybla Road in Richmond’s North Chesterfield neighborhood into something of a concert hall — an environment precisely engineered for the one-of-a-kind acoustic majesty he craved. In one snapshot, his three daughters hold up new siding for their expanding home. In another, his two boys pose next to the massive speaker shells. There’s the man of the house himself, a compact guy with slicked-back hair and a thin goatee, on the floor making adjustments to the system. He later estimated he spent $1 million on his mission, a number that did not begin to reflect the wear and tear on the household, the hidden costs of his children’s unpaid labor.

So it goes…

🍿 Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986) was a delight, even at 2 hours. As the first Studio Ghibli movie it has been overshadowed by what came later, but its influence is obvious. Inside Ghibli itself, there is one-to-one mapping of characters (Captain Dola becomes Yubaba from Spirited Away, her husband becomes Kamaji) and plot points (a boy protecting a magical girl in Ponyo). Externally, the robots are echoed in The Iron Giant and Wall-E. Doesn’t the latest Zelda have a flying castle? And of course it is one of the first popular steampunk anime.

I will also note that the movie is almost 40 years old: it came out the same year as Top Gun and Crocodile Dundee. But good luck getting your kids to watch either. Incredible how much more gracefully animation ages compared to live-action.

Always good to see a friend’s work out in the wild. This is Bump by Matt Wallace in the tweens section of Politics and Prose.

And so my trip to San Francisco ended with a 3-hour flight delay by United “for mechanical reasons” and a 3:30am touchdown at Dulles airport. At least it wasn’t a 737 MAX.

Amusingly, one year ago to the day I wrote about On Bullshit, a broad, timeless, Great book if there ever was one.

A proposal to reform the NIH intramural program that makes a whole lot of sense. (ᔥTyler Cowen who recently linked to another new-to-me science blog that is quite good. A Blogroll update is long overdue.)