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Wow, the Brontë family was kind of cursed, eh?

I recently saw Umberto Eco: A Library of the World, a documentary about Umberto Eco's extensive book collection. At first blush this doesn't sound like the sort of topic that would make for an interesting documentary but with something like 50000 books spread over two libraries, a significant number of them dating from the medieval era, there's actually a surprising amount of stuff to unpack here. If you like books, you'll like the film. I thought it was great.

In my case, I found myself thinking less about the books themselves and more about the subtext surrounding them. Eco was unsurprisingly disdainful of e-books and valued the physical durability of paper. It's an opinion with which it's easy to sympathize given how e-books are often saddled today with restrictive DRM and competing formats. Ink on paper doesn't have a "format" problem and often lasts centuries. Do you think you'll be able to read your Kindle 100 years from now?

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Try as I might, I simply cannot seem to get the hang of that "food flip" chefs on TV do when they're frying something.

Good article. I find myself becoming more sympathetic to this point of view the older I get. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/06/the-perils-of-innovator-mindset

I enjoy writing software more than I enjoy using software. I'm not berating myself over this, nor am I proud of it. It's just how I am.

What this means in practice is that I will often write a whole bunch of code before I even start trying to debug it. Writing code tickles what I imagine is the creative part of my brain, and it feels good. Running and debugging code tickles the "chore" part of my brain and it doesn't feel as good.

(Yes, programming is creative. It's an act of creation. I'm emphasizing this point because there is a tendency in non-technical circles to view programming as something sterile or clinical, like accounting. I would imagine, however, that there are very few accountants who do accounting in their spare time, whereas you can easily find tons of programmers who do coding in their spare time, myself included).

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Interesting door in Saint-Henri, Montreal

Jack the Cock is coming...

It's just a building with fire escapes but this strikes me as very New York

I can't be the only one who thinks that the Brooklyn Tower looks like Sauron's home base from Lord of the Rings, right?

Joralemon and Columbia

The Oculus, near the World Trade Center

Near the new World Trade Center, New York

Noice

Some days I think I'm a Sans Serif soul and other days I think my soul is full of Serifs. It's like Jekyll and Hyde, but which is Jekyll and which is Hyde?

It's rare but, weirdly, this is not the first time a freestanding locomotive has just randomly appeared in the middle of my neighborhood.

I classified a lentil curry recipe on my website as "easy" and a friend of mind disagreed, pointing to the chopping it required and it never occurred to me that the necessity of chopping would disqualify a recipe from being easy, but here we are. And I guess that makes sense?

Pistachios. The clams of the nut world.

In 1931, a book was published in German under the title "100 Authors Against Einstein", attempting to refute the Theory of Relativity. By some accounts, when Einstein was confronted with this book, he is reported to have said something along the lines of:

Why a hundred? If I were wrong, one would have been enough."

I have no idea if this is for real. Still, though, it's pretty good, right?

To be clear, Einstein was talking about physics, not politics or philosophy, but even in the social sciences I find myself sympathetic to the spirit of this quote, fake or not, especially when faced with people who harp on an idea like the popular vote.

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I think I need to read some of this person's stuff. She apparently recreated Around the World in Eighty Days with 8 days to spare.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly

I got a "book nook" for Christmas - kind of like a book end, but more elaborate. Super fun, I want them all.

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Annual Christmas tree snap

I just read a quote that said that the brain is "a machine for jumping to conclusions" and I don't know why but this feels so true.

It's egg nog season, motherfuckers!

I did a zoom presentation today and one of the audience took a screenshot of me talking. I looked pretty crazed. I'd be fucking terrified of me.