What am I up to now?
December, 2024
Contents
Updates
Updates? What updates?
At the end of October, I was sitting at my desk, overlooking the Thames, working on my PhD. Today, I am sitting at my desk, overlooking the Thames, working on my PhD. Some projects look more promising than a month ago; others have withered. I remain here.
I’ll be in Gambia for half of December. The baseline survey for our project there is begining in the first week of the month, and there are lots of logistics to nail down before the new year.
Around Christmas, I’ll head to the Bay Area, and I’ll be around for a month. I’m excited to spend time with my wonderful girlfriend and her friends and family. If you would like to meet, please reach out!
Reading
No long reviews this month. Next month I’ll put my list of the books I read in 2024 here; you can also see my lists from 2022 and 2023. My thoughts at this point are that I had less fun reading this year than previous years. The highs were lower, but the median book was better, perhaps. More thoughts next month. If you want to influence the list slightly, my amazon wishlist is here.
Links
Why have cheap airline flights all been re-routed to China recently? Chinese airlines can use Russian airspace, saving tonnes of fuel, allowing them to outcompete European airlines which have to route to the south.
What Matt Bell learned from 130 hours in a Waymo. I’m excited to try one next month in the Bay!
There’s a whole book on Lady Baker, who explored the headwards of the Nile in the late 19th century, but it’s probably not worth your time. This article might be:
Samuel had found nineteen-year-old Florence, as he called her, in 1859 at an auction of white slaves in a Turkish-administered town in Bulgaria. (There is some date about her exact age: she was certainly less than half Baker’s age when he met her.) Her real name is believed to have been Barbara Maria von Sass, born in Transylvania, then part of Hungary. Her parents had been killed in the 1848 uprising, and she had been raised from her childhood by a wealthy Armenian trader who intended to make a good profit when he sold this beautiful blonde teenager at auction.
Orwell on Tolstoy on Shakespeare , a polemic worth reading if you enjoy any of those writers.
But is King Lear not also curiously similar to the history of Tolstoy himself? There is a general resemblance which one can hardly avoid seeing, because the most impressive event in Tolstoy’s life, as in Lear’s, was a huge and gratuitous act of renunciation. In his old age, he renounced his estate, his title and his copyrights, and made an attempt — a sincere attempt, though it was not successful — to escape from his privileged position and live the life of a peasant. But the deeper resemblance lies in the fact that Tolstoy, like Lear, acted on mistaken motives and failed to get the results he had hoped for.
This is on me for taking so long to figure out: the origin of the title of qntm’s short story “Lena” comes from the test image of Lena Forsen used to study color processing.
Speaking of short stories , here are a few:
Lots of talk around how to design legitimate utopia. A fun effort from Alicorn.
Superman, and the public will , feature in this one.
Here’s one I can’t really describe, but the title, “The Mother of All Squid Builds a Library”, is mostly representative.
More realist than the previous , about a walk on a mountain.
Previously
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