Journal

[T]he war has destroyed not only human lives but all human values as well. It undermines all government structures and systems of society, destroys the very foundations of democracy, freedom, and all human systems of values. Its shame is not just the shame of the Vietnamese, but of the whole world. The whole family of humankind will share the guilt if they do not help to stop this war.

Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire is Thich Nhat Hanh’s impassioned plea to the world to consider ways to hasten the end of the Vietnam War. The book is a moderately insightful look into some important historical factors that help the reader to understand the Vietnamese mindset during the war.

I found the book hard to get into; however, the second half was strong and made up for the first half. Especially valuable was learning about the connection between Vietnamese nationalism and Buddhism. The book is valuable from a historical perspective, but not meaningfully insightful outside of that.

But the ever-inflating valuation was blinding for all involved; it was easy to believe that everything was working fine because everyone was getting richer on paper.

The Cult of We is an engaging book that reads like fiction. It’s hard to believe that the We company made it as far as it did with such disfunction.

It’s a snapshot of an era when money was flowing freely and office culture wasn’t burdened with the disruption of covid. The pure number of times tequila is a relevant part of the story is staggering.

The book is well-written and enjoyable to read. Knowing the chapters are short draws you in for one after another.

In a sense, this can be considered a management book—a lesson in what not to do and how not to act.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy was a fine overview of the history and the various theories that have developed around dark matter and dark energy.

Unfortunately for such a short book, many of the chapters were context-setters and didn’t bring much to the table for those who have read other books about cosmology. The overlap can’t really be blamed too much—this certainly brought a strong cohesion to the book.

One novel thing to me I haven’t read about before is using fossil records to understand potential dark matter interactions of the past—neat!

This is a well-written primer and one I’d recommend near the start of one’s introduction into the world of pop-sci cosmology.

The premise of this book can be summed up in an early quote from the book—

In our search for new ideas, beauty plays many roles. It’s a guide, a reward, a motivation. It is also a systematic bias.

Sabine Hossenfelder argues effectively that science is overly biased towards arbitrary visions of human beauty and that these numerous biases in the scientific community prevent the field from efficiently exploring the true nature of the universe.

It’s a solid idea and well worth writing about, but the implementation in this book was hit or miss.

On the positive side, I valued the historical context paired with modern day examples of the search for beauty. Seeing discredited ideas that were overly focused on beauty in the same breath as modern examples of ideas that are centered on their prettiness is effective in making the reader question certain theories and methodologies.

On the other hand, the conversational format of many of the latter chapters did not appeal to me and felt less information-dense.

Overall, readable and a valuable perspective that I’m glad I read.

A few weeks ago I rejoined Flickr after years off of the platform.

I joined after realizing that the service effectively fulfills two needs I have around photography, two needs that I hadn’t solved very well up to this point. The first need is effortless offsite backup of my entire photo library. The second need is sharing high quality photos publicly with friends and family.

It replaces my usage of significantly-more-manual solutions to solve these needs. To solve the first need, I started utilizing AWS Glacier a little over a year ago as a way to back up my photos. I chose AWS Glacier at the time for the pricing scheme—it’s trivial to host hundreds of GB of photos, so long as you don’t have a need to access them. (On this factor alone it was very effective: I spent 25¢ a month to host my library of photos taken since 2014.)

The problem came when I needed to make a routine out of uploading my new photos. I never found a routine for uploading and never found a reasonable scheme for tracking what photos I’d uploaded successfully or not. The task was just too annoying and I found myself consistently putting it off. I also found myself dreaming of ways that I could make the task better by programming a solution, but never found the time to do that.

Ultimately this meant that my backups were not happening.

My previous solution for photo sharing was similarly clunky and required a lot of effort on my part to share—I self-hosted my photos on a subdomain of this website. I unfortunately never found the time to make that site work well and upload photos regularly. Like the backup solution, I was always considering ways to improve it but never found the time or effort to do so.

So I count this as a lesson learned—ultimately the cheapest solution isn’t the cheapest if you’re not going to use it. It’s worth spending money to solve your need if it does so in a more effortless way.