• Really Smart People

    07 Mar 2022 » 4 min read

    I have always had a fascination with really smart people. There are kids who grow up wanting to be the next big baseball or football or soccer star. What always impressed me was smart people. I think I first realized this when I watched The West Wing for the first time in the late 1990s.…

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  • Little Lost Notebook

    06 Mar 2022 » 2 min read

    Well, it finally happened. I lost a Field Notes notebook today. I don’t know exactly when it happened. Maybe on my early monrning walk. Maybe sometime later. But I can’t find my notebook anywhere. The good news: I’d just started this notebook a few days ago, so there wasn’t much in it. Also, I’ve gotten…

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  • Reading for the Week of 2/27/2022

    05 Mar 2022 » 3 min read about Reading & Books

    Here is what I read this week. Some of the articles/posts may require a subscription to read them. I also share my recommended reads on Pocket for anyone who wants to follow along there. Books Finished Read The numbers in parentheses following each book represent: (a) the nth book I’ve finished reading this year, and…

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  • How To Fall Asleep Quickly: A Pavlovian Tale

    05 Mar 2022 » 3 min read

    Last year I had a lot of trouble sleeping. At first I had trouble falling asleep. My doctor prescribed various medications, none of which worked well. After many, many months, I began to be able to fall asleep again, but struggled with something called “epic dreaming,” which I’d never heard of before until I read…

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  • Breaking News Demonstrates the Value of Newspapers

    04 Mar 2022 » 4 min read

    The New York Times app was a mess when the news Russian’s invasion into Ukraine broke. All of the information was listed under their “Live” section which was a list of short “up-to-the-minute” reports, often just a single paragraph. These were listed reverse chronologically, with several of them each hour. This was breaking news, it…

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  • A Brief Outage Earlier Today

    03 Mar 2022 » 1 min read about Blog & Site Meta

    If anyone happened to notice the blog down earlier today, I confirm that it was, in fact, down. It went offline around 10:45am ET and was back online about 10 minutes later. I don’t know the cause, but I was going to check with WordPress on it. This was the first outage I’ve experienced since…

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  • 3 Elements of Good Fiction

    03 Mar 2022 » 3 min read

    These days I mostly find myself reading nonfiction. I am interested in the world and how it works and nonfiction helps to satisfy that interest. This wasn’t always the case. I read a lot more fiction growing up. There were times growing up when I found nonfiction boring. Frequently the reverse is true today. I…

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  • Pronoun Use Cases

    02 Mar 2022 » 2 min read

    I have found pronouns to be useful when people list them in their email signature or bio, or business card, especially if I don’t know the person. It is a quick and easy way to avoid making a mistake when referring to the person. I know how frustrating those mistakes can sometimes be. “Jamie” is…

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  • Practically Paperless with Obsidian, Episode 20: Experimenting with the Dataview Plug-In

    01 Mar 2022 » 7 min read

    Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview. One of the things I have always loved about plain text files is that they are easy to manipulate. More than fifty years of effort has gone into reliable methods for parsing text from text…

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  • A Full Reading Day

    28 Feb 2022 » 3 min read

    Every once in a rare while I get in a full reading day. Yesterday (as I write this) was one such day. The day before I finished re-reading Tom Clancy’s The Hunt For Red October. I remember it being a good book, but upon re-reading it, it was far better than I remembered. As I…

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