The last post in here, my review of Luck, was 4 months ago. Since then I’ve realized micro.blog is a better place for short-form writing, hence the silence.¹

The thing is, micro.blog is also better for longer essays, and the Tufte theme which enables margin notes and sidenotes instead of footnotes is an absolute delight. So, I have moved all of my writing there, which is easy to see, the last post on here being 4 months old.

Worry not, Infinite Regress will remain frozen in time until I convert it into something more cohesive — digital garden seems to be the preferred term — about meta-science and meta-medicine, which will be a fun thing to do in retirement.

Turning Red for adults. It works.

Trite and predictable, with stilted animation, convoluted storytelling, and a general feeling of awkwardness that drowns the few good early scenes. We were re-watching Ratatouille for what feels like the 56th time last weekend and it is ridiculous how much better it is in every respect despite being 15 years older. Luck… will not be getting a re-watch.

A town that has more art deco than brutalism — the largest piece of concrete in sight was a modestly sized skate park — is my kind of town. It is at once frozen in time (picture unsupervised tweens riding bicycles and scooters down a quiet tree-lined street) and progressive (in the American sense of having more crystal shops than chain stores and more rainbows than stars’n’stripes posted on storefronts). It is also, for someone who has spent the last 12 years in the Baltimore-DC area, noticeably white, but note more so than would be expected from any place in North Carolina.¹

Biltmore is as impressive as you would expect a 250-room house to be, but also shows how much better our lives are compared to the richest of the early 20th century rich. Yes, your 23,000-book library with wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling bookcases is beautiful, but even a person living on the street has access to more books than that from a device in their pocket. Never mind the demands of heating, cleaning, and maintaining the beast. No wonder then that the owners turned it into an amusement park instead of continuing to live there.

A few more observations:

• Farm Burger is a Southern fast food chain a few notches above Shake Shack that in addition to pretty good beef and incredible vegan burgers also serves roasted bone marrow. The only thing missing was sweetbreads.
• There are too many hills for it to be a biking town yet there were many people on bicycles. Having mostly narrow, slow-traffic streets downtown helps.
• There are not one but two interstate highways that bisect the city, but unlike Baltimore’s idiotic I-83 that destroyed many neighborhoods and ruined the city’s walkability, there are plenty of ways to cross the I-240 on foot. Here, having hills actually helped as the highway is in many places nestled between two slopes.
• Its largest neighbors are Knoxville (approx. 2 hours away), Charlotte (same) and Atlanta (3 and a half). That is… too far away for too little, perhaps?
• But was the 7+ hour drive from DC worth it? Hell, yes.

To get yourself in the right frame of mind before reading this book, try watching a few optical illusion videos. There is no reason to think our visual cortex is any dumber than the rest of the brain — in fact, quite the opposite. That our inference can be so easily fooled in a domain which is supposedly our strong suit is humbling.

Our statistical inference is even worse, so a short book or two on statistical numeracy should be in everyone’s library. Gerd Gigerenzer’s Calculated Risks can be that book for most people. The assumption, easily defensible, is that “most people” will get more use out of understanding frequentist rather than Bayesian probability. After all, most probabilities people are bombarded with — your chance of dying from breast cancer with and without screening, the chance of your neighbor being the killer given a positive DNA match (you know, the day-to-day stuff) — is frequentist.¹

The only reservation to wholeheartedly recommending Calculated Risks to everyone is that it falls into the category of “blog post books”, if you believe that most non-fiction books should, in fact, have been just blog posts. Or, since blogs are out of vogue, a 15-minute YouTube video may do. Or perhaps a single sentence: use natural instead of relative frequencies (e.g. 1 in 10.000 instead of 0.01%). Let your faulty cortex fill in the rest.

A massively biased and, ultimately, underwhelming account of jobs that even people performing them think shouldn’t exist. It is biased because David Graeber’s sole source of information — beside his own flowering mind — were his Twitter followers. More precisely: his followers’ self-imolations in prose sparked by the short essay which popularized the term. So you get not only a self-selected sample of young middle-class professionals discontent with their jobs, but also the attempts of that sample to connect with their anarchist idol. A fun game to play while plodding through these accounts — accounts which, by the way, take a full half of the book — is to spot the embelishments. There are many, and some even Graeber marks as such.

As for underwhelming, well, the book’s purely descriptive nature wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t skin-deep. Graeber comes frustratingly close to asking some interesting questions;¹ alas, that would have required too much research. Instead we got fan mail copypasta and cheap digs at the corporate culture. So it goes…

Cal Newport’s new book goes well with David Graber’s Bullshit Jobs (about which more to come). Newport may have in fact provide a good, if partial, answer to one of Graber’s main questions — why have jobs that workers themselves see as useless proliferated in the last 50 years? No, it isn’t just email, but rather this: supporting structures of large institutions (think IT, HR, accounting, etc) have taken a life of their own and behave as if their own performance metrics — rather than the instituion’s primary reason for being — are all that matters. Enter thousands of survey requests, daily updates, weekly newsletters, calls for feedback… from dozens of departments all shouting about their contribution to the “core mission”.

So one way to get out of email hell is to work at a smaller place, having anyone completely dedicated to human resources being a good surrogate for being too large. But even that won’t completely save you: as long as you work in a team there will be need for internal communication, and as long as the primary mode of that communication is via email, the hyperactive hivemind — Newport’s preferred phrase — will ensue. Much of the book talks about how this came to be, and how to avoid it. While none of it is revolutionary (some of it even covered on this very blog, twice!), it did point me to Asana, Trello, and other collaborative task/project management apps with file storage and messaging capabilities as good alternatives that I tended to disregard.

As for external communication, well, if the email is longer than five sentences, better make it into a call, preferably the old-fashioned kind.

A World Without Email could easily have fit into the blog post in book form category but for the need to persuade key people that too much email is in fact a bad thing, said people being ones with power to save their employees from email hell yet not being aware that their employees need saving, as they themselves tend to be protected form the onslaught with layers and layers of administrative assistants¹. Judging from the reception in the types of newspapers “key people” tend to read, he has their attention.

How times change. What in the 1990s was fluff about the importance of learning, thinking, free speech, and civility for America’s continued progress now bounces between prophetic and controversial.

Of course, it wasn’t fluff. It was as true then as it is now, only this time there is no background hum of optimism to drown out the warning sirens. The country, subsumed by ignorance left, right and center — each stupid in their own way — went from being haunted by Demons to being run by them. We are living through Carl Sagan’s nightmare, brains turned off, phones in hand, fingers at the ready. So it goes.

It is a good thing for intellectual humility — particularly in middle age into which yours truly has stepped a few years ago¹ — to open an undergraduate textbook for a field that is just outside one’s area of expertise. A series of reviews on gene regulatory networks led me down a rabbit hole of vector fields and attractor states that was interesting-yet-unscrutable enough to get me to Understanding Nonlinear Dynamics.

It is very much a textbook, info-boxes, end-of-chapter exercise, and all. It also presupposes a grasp of mathematics which I may have had just out of high school but have long since lost. This is fine: at Mortimer Adler’s suggestion I zipped past the equations and derivations, deciding to trust the authors that they are indeed correct, and went to the meat. Which, in nonlinear dynamics, as a nice bonus, also has pretty pictures of fractals and vector fields. Alas, not as artistic as Charles Waddington’s, but nevertheless striking.

What surprised me the most was how much of the field resulted from mathematicians fiddling around with parameters to see what happens. Going to a textbook to learn this was overkill — the Wikipedia article on experimental mathematics may serve the purpose just as well — but knowing the context does make it memorable. There is a pleasing symmetry here: mathematics is usually thought of as purely theoretical, yet its most interesting aspects, Lorenz attractors to Wolfram’s (not so) “new kind of science”, have relied on experimentation. Biology has been purely experimental ever since Watson and Crick, aborted attempts at theoretical biology notwithstanding, and was even a decade ago producing more data than it can handle. Would it not be neat if the answer to this biological data overload wasn’t machine learning but instead a framework for theoretical biology? If there was one, nonlinear dynamics would play a big part.

It was a brave move, to release a TV show/limited series set in the aftermath of a world-ending respiratory virus pandemic right at the tail end of covid. Good thing that the execution was flawless, from the dream-like cinematography,¹ through casting, to Satoshi Kon-like editing. Notes of Watchmen, too, in how the source material is to be taken seriously but not literally when converting a book into something else.

Importantly, Station Eleven is set in, but is not about, a post-apocalyptic Earth, in much the same way Titanic was set in, but was not about, a sinking ship. Less romantic love and more parent/guardian/child love/hate relationships here, which is why it takes 9+ hours instead of 3+ to tell the story; but a full, rich, meaningful story is told, and told well. Kudos.