• Reading: The Peripheral T-Cell Lymphomas: an Unusual Path to Cure
• Watching: Vitalik Buterin talks to Tyler Cowen. I don’t understand why this only has 2k views
• Playing: Season 2 of The Americans, and also its most excellent soundtrack
• Feeling: Good about today. Tomorrow, not so much.

• Reading: Edward Tufte’s website, in preparation for his new book which I will also read at some point this year, I hope
• Watching: These Tinderbox video tutorials are an excellent introduction to a powerful application
• Playing: Running with the Wolves at bedtime, on repeat. Don’t ask.
• Feeling: Thankful that my parenting skills aren’t a trending topic on Twitter.

• Video of the week: Arthur C Clarke has a few words about the future (Bonus: I see that the trailer for Half-Life 3 is out)
• Taleb tweet of the week: Stakeholders (and a Taleb-adjacent tweet, I ordered all three)
• App of the week: Drafts
• Thread of the week: How to teach your daughter (no, it’s not that thread)
• Happy New Year!

• Reading: TCR and TCL1A collaboration in T-PLL, an article from late last year about T prolymphocytic leukemia, sometimes called T-CLL, both being misnomers.
• Watching: Video of a hawk (or is it a falcon?) picking on a rat carcass on top of a traffic light in DC, courtesy of my wife. I’ll spare you the gory details.
• Playing: Hunt a Killer, which is a birthday present I may finally get to since we are now 2 for 3 in rainy days this year.
• Thinking: If I am typing this on the phone is it still considered writing?

• Reading: My Name is Red and A Pattern Language, still. The beginning few chapters of the latter give the best explanation for why McMansions are a waste of space, with square foot upon square foot of single-use (or no-use!) space.
• Watching: Season 1 of The Americans soon to be completed. Tough stuff.
• Playing: Dark Souls III (or rather I will attempt to do so… the Elder Signs game went fine yesterday until the youngest decided sucking on monster tokens is great use of his time)
• Eating: black beans (like most cooking websites this one too has SEO’d itself into parody, but it is a good recipe)
• Thinking: Does birdwatching count as playing? Because with the gorgeous weather outside a walk in the woods will be in order.

• Read: Cell Biology by the Numbers online, My Name is Red and A Pattern Language offline. But American Registry of Pathology Expert Opinions: Recommendations for the diagnostic workup of mature T cell neoplasms is the only thing I’ll finish (and you can tell from the title it’s a page-turner)
• Watch: Season 1 of The Americans and also this YouTube channel in the background, as one of the children is quite the car enthusiast.
• Play: Elder Sign which is the perfect game to play on a rainy day, and what better way to welcome in the New Year than by fighting the Ancient Ones.
• Eat: Leftovers from The Federalist Pig (or The Capitalist Pig, as a friend tends to mispronounce it constantly in what is quite the Freudian slip).
• Think: How long can I keep this up? I give myself until the end of next week.

March 7, 2020 was a Saturday. I woke up at 8am, which is as late as it gets, since the night before we watched Breathless and The Graduate back-to-back (the 1960s were a good decade for movies). Most of they was spent in visiting friends in downtown DC. They are a family of four in a tiny one-bedroom; we compared notes on where best to stash the extra flour, rice, pasta, and other staples¹ we stocked up on expecting the inevitable. The inevitable came that night as we were heading out, when Mayor Bowser announced in a late news conference that yes indeed Washington DC had its first confirmed case of Covid-19: a man with no recent travel and no confirmed exposures, which is to say, there was already community spread. We got back to our apartment and closed the door; the next time that apartment would be empty of people again, as it usually had been on weekends and later summer afternoons before the pandemic, was more than five months later.

That was 300 days ago to the day, and as my favorite columnist and fellow millennial Janan Ganesh astutely noted, there were no grand lessons that these 300 days gave me, unless you count confirmation that humans can muddle their way through anything as a lesson. Harambe may have been killed in 2016, but 2020 was his year: a tragic, sensless event where everyone is responsible but no one is to blame — though I may be an exception in thinking this, since 2020 was the year of confirmation bias, the year of suppressing the opposing view points, the year of shaming. To complicate matters some more, it was also the year when crackpots and idiots joined into the Grand Coalition of Stoopid, expressing some points of view that maybe ought to be suppressed, and doing some things for which maybe they should be ashamed. Harambe indeed.

I finished the last year with a post about the great things that happened to me personally as the world stagnated in the 2010s. In the spirit of this year, I’ll finish with a list of failures instead, and I’ll do my best not to make it into a thinly veiled list of successes:

• I read far fewer books and watched far fewer movies than any year before.
• I wrote far fewer (medical) articles than planned.
• I wasted time on Twitter like never before (and, let’s hope, never again).
• I dropped more projects than ever before, including piano lessons, learning a new language, speed-completing the Rubik’s cube, and running in cold weather, among many others.
• I walked less than any other year since I started walking.²
• I commuted more by car than ever since moving to DC.
• I ordered more takeout than ever.
• And the one that hurts the most: I did not finish a single video game, or even play anything for more than 15 minutes, unless you count Good Sudoku which is truly a masterpiece of design and the highlight of the year. Yes, the highlight.

• Preprint of the week: Single cell proteomics
• Flowchart of the week: What sort of philosopher do you want to be?
• Taleb-adjacent tweet of the week: Takeaways from Statistical Consequences of Thick Tails
• Book recommendation of the week (also Taleb-adjacent): The Systems Bible
• Spellcheck fail of the week: Serbian PM gets vaccine, mangles hashtag

If there is a theme to this year’s list it is the intentional omission of all things biomedical, which I hope is self-explanatory considering (waves around) all this.

1. Omnibus, wherein two nerds, one professional the other amateur discuss topics of great interest, including bad architecture, bad cinema, a bad sister, and a very bad husband. It is at once entertaining, educational, and en…titilating?

2. Lex Fridman Podcast, wherein the said Lex Fridman, an AI researcher from MIT, discusses history with Dan Carlin, programming with Chris Lattner, cryptocurrency with Vitalik Buterin, Joe Rogan with Joe Rogan, et cetera, et cetera. File under “good for exploring the back catalogue, not so much for regular weekly listending”, like so many others.

3. 20 Macs for 2020, which is a weekly-ish countdown of notable Apple computers, with comments from notable Apple aficionados. Listen and appreciate how enthusiastic some people can be about some things.

4. Dithering, which is a — shock, horror — paid podcast, but one well worth your money and time if you know the two men responsible, Ben Thompson and John Gruber.

5. People I (mostly) admire, wherein an economist of some fame and with a good sense of humor talks to, well, people he (mostly) admires, including Ken Jennings of the first podcast on this list, and what a nice way to end it.

Previous editions: 2020 - 2019 - 2018 - The one where I took a break from podcasts - The very first one

• Why you shouldn’t store your data in Excel.
• Article of the week: RCT of auto versus alloSCT as first-line consolidation in T-cell lymphoma.
• Interview of the week: Miyamoto in the New Yorker.
• Thread of the week: Lear linear algebra. Wolfram University has a good beginners’ course.
• Photos of the week: so many good ones. Oh who am I kidding? It’s actually this one.