New hymn day! “Amazing Grace,” “This Is the Christ,” “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need,” and “Come, Lord Jesus,” among others.
Blog
Four new art pieces.
Until After the Trial of Your Faith:
After a decently long stint with Literata as the font on this site, I’ve switched to EBC Garamond. It’s my personal fork of the 8 pt size of EB Garamond — I like thicker fonts that don’t feel quite so digital, and the 8 pt version has that. I’ve fixed some glyph collisions (in the small caps), modified some of the glyphs I wasn’t happy with (widening the /p/, for example), turned off some default ligatures, and fine-tuned the kerning. This is still very much a work in progress and there are still changes I want to make, but it feels ready enough for use here.
A note on process: I opened the original SFDs from the repo in FontForge and exported UFOs. I’m using Fontra (which I’m quite liking, by the way) to edit the glyphs, and I hand-edit the OpenType feature definitions in Vim. I use fontmake to generate OTFs and pyftsubset to convert them to WOFF2. And I have a little testbed HTML file that I use to check in-browser whether I’m happy with the changes. It’s a decent dev experience.
And goodness, this is fun. I’m having a blast.
Links #127
Victoria Gill on the reservoir of liquid water found on Mars. Exciting!
Benj Edwards on researchers crafting lifelike robotic skin from living human skin cells. This is weird and kind of disturbing in a few different ways. (I’m over here imagining a fleshy Roomba whose skin starts decomposing after a software update fails. Zombie robots, anyone?)
Victor Tangermann on scientists creating a robot controlled by a blob of human brain cells. And hey, another disturbing step forward. Ha. Part of me wonders, by the way, how far advances like these will get before global climate change regressions become a blocker to progress.
Ted Gioia on doctors raising a patient from a deathlike state with ultrasound electronic music. Fascinating.
Sara Hendren on sending kids to college. “This is the first of many parenting presuppositions that make up the cultural water we’re swimming in and therefore can’t see. We imagine our children as maybe-slightly-immature but essentially fully-formed selves. Our job is framed as clearing the obstacles only; we’re tasked with whatever passive supports will help our children optimize themselves on their own terms.” Which is how I’ve seen it. Her point here, though, is that this isn’t enough, and that these kids still need to be formed. “But formation is in short supply everywhere! I don’t get very far, even among fellow professors, when I bring this up. The autonomy-led, buffet-style, platform-burnishing model for higher education is thoroughly internalized in most places. You have to look pretty far and wide to find a strong sense of mission for forming young people into their free future selves.” Interesting throughout.
Teenage Engineering’s medieval EP-1320. Ha. Love this.
Tanner Greer on Patrick Collison’s canonical Silicon Valley reading list. While I’ve admittedly soured a fair bit on SV technologists in general and I have zero interest in becoming more like them, the books on this list that I’ve already read (The Power Broker, Dealers of Lightning, The Dream Machine) were good, and I suspect there are a few others here worth reading. (I’ve long wanted to read A Pattern Language, for example, and Seeing Like a State and Titan and The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt are on my list as well.)
C. D. Cunningham on the CES Letter not actually being the sincere questions of an honest truth-seeker. Not a huge surprise.
Eleanor Konik on themed logs being more useful than daily ones. Agreed.
Steven Luu on using enums instead of booleans. A good point.
Booknotes 3.17
Nonfiction
- An Immense World, by Ed Yong, published 2022. One of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read. It’s about the different ways animals sense the world (smell, sight, electric fields, etc.) and is chock-full of facts and scientific discovery stories that lit up my brain, like this one, to take an example at random: “Octopuses are different. Unlike squid, they can touch every part of their bodies. They can even reach inside themselves to groom their own gills—the equivalent of a human putting a hand down their throat to scratch their lungs.” While reading the book I wanted to switch careers and become a scientist. Definitely planning to read it again someday. (Which is saying something; I’m not much of a rereader.)
- Medieval Horizons, by Ian Mortimer, published 2023. Also fascinating, about the large-scale changes that happened in different parts of life during the Middle Ages (travel, literacy, warfare, sense of self, etc.), and how those changes set the stage for modernity, in some ways more importantly than the technological changes of the Industrial Revolution. A compelling antidote to the idea that medieval times were static and boring.
Fiction
- The Witness for the Dead, by Katherine Addison, published 2021, fantasy. Cemeteries of Amalo book 1. Really liked it. I think I even liked it as much as The Goblin Emperor, different though it was. The worldbuilding really works for me, even (and perhaps especially) the long, complicated names and the traditions and protocols. Looking forward to the rest of the series and to trying out Addison’s earlier books.
- The Wolf of Oren-Yaro, by K. S. Villoso, published 2017, fantasy. More action-packed and less of a character study than I expected from what I’d heard about it.
- High, by Adam Roberts, published 2024, science fiction. Interesting ideas, decent prose, generally liked it. I feel like I haven’t read nearly enough of this sort of idea-driven science fiction in a while, though that may say more about my memory (or lack thereof) than anything. Looking forward to reading more of Roberts’ work.
Links #126
The Open Press Project looks cool, especially their new postcard printing press, which I am trying very hard not to covet.
Ted Gioia’s reading list on stupidity, starting with Thucydides. “This book is absolutely the place to start—and it marks an important moment in human culture. For the first time in the Western world, a historian turned to his own society and said: ‘This is stupid.’” I’ve started reading Thucydides because of this article and it’s surprising how modern it feels in some regards.
The Center for Latter-day Saint Arts is publishing a Latter-day Saint art critical reader.
Hamilton Nolan on public ownership of public goods. “When you take a vital service and privatize it, you ensure that it will run according to a private profit motive rather than running with the goal of providing the best service to the public.” Agreed. More generally, capitalism (at least the late-stage growth capitalism we see at scale, the surveillance capitalism, the crush-the-poor capitalism; I’m not talking about small business here) more and more seems to me to be at odds with the gospel. (Which I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by, given that a philosophy of selfishness was always destined to be at odds against a philosophy of selflessness.)
USGS showing all the earth’s water as a single sphere. Much less than I realized!
Procreate does the right thing and pledges not to add generative AI features to the app. The right thing in my mind, anyway. What a wonderful breath of fresh air. When I see apps add generative AI, it makes me want to avoid them. (So this is what it feels like to become a cranky old man.)
Ytch. Mashup of YouTube and old-school TV. More fun than I expected it to be.
We’ve started playing a new game as a family, dubbed the journal game. One person picks a random entry from their journal and reads it aloud, leaving out the date and any extremely obvious giveaways. The others try to guess when the entry was written.
It’s turning out to be surprisingly fun, at least in part from solving a mystery using clues, and in part from remembering the past and sharing stories. (Not everyone in the family has a wide range of dates covered by their journal, by the way, but that hasn’t stopped us.)
Links #125
Mike Grindle on his one big text file. I don’t know that I’ll do this, but it’s still fun to read about. (At work I have a handful of text files — a to-do list, a backburner list, a log, a list of what I did each day. For personal stuff, I use my home-crafted apps since I want to be able to use my phone.)
Steph Ango on knowing what to remove. Yes!
Robert Birming on timeline pages (via Tracy). Hey look, convergent evolution. Fun to see.
Maxime Heckel on dithering and retro shaders. Nice writeup, and the final result is nostalgically fun.
Andrea Anderson on ope, which turns out to not be from the Midwest after all. (Until I read this article, by the way, I had no idea that I myself say ope. I do.)
Suw Charman-Anderson on genre-hopping as a writer and on being a generalist. This is good.
Times New Roman regular vs. bold. I had no idea the bold is so different structurally! (Flat serifs, etc.)
David Epstein interviews Evan Ratliff about AI voice clones and Evan’s Shell Game podcast.
Ziyang Chen, Daniel Geng, and Andrew Owens on visual spectrograms that look like images but can also be played as sounds. Ha. These are cool. (Gimmicky, sure, but there’s room in the world for cool gimmicks.)
Booknotes 3.16
Nonfiction
- Young Stalin, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, published 2007. Quite good. For me — who didn’t know much about Stalin beyond a vague “leader of Russia during WWII who killed a lot of people” and who also didn’t know much about the October Revolution beyond it taking place in 1917 — this filled in a lot of details. Fascinating (and tragic) to see where single-minded devotion to revolution can take a man. Stalin feels like a real person in my head now, human and all (surprisingly human, really), no longer just a vague supervillain. Also, I had no idea about all the exiles. Or all the many girlfriends. Or the disturbing age gaps with some of them. That part was gross. (Different times? Sure, to some degree. But still.)
Fiction
- Hidden, by Benedict Jacka, published 2014, fantasy. Alex Verus book 5. Liked it. The overarching story continues to be interesting. (I don’t want to spoil anything with these reviews, which makes it hard to say much of anything about books later in a series like this. Apologies.)
- The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, volume 6, by Beth Brower, published 2022, fiction. Good as usual. Delightful and witty and fun. I’m debating whether to hurry up and read volume 7 so I can finally get caught up with my wife (and be ready for volume 8, which hopefully drops sometime this year) or wait a bit first since volume 8 isn’t ready quite yet and I don’t want to run out of Emma M. Lion books yet.
- Come Tumbling Down, by Seanan McGuire, published 2020, fantasy. Wayward Children book 5. Dark and imaginative and somewhat uncomfortable. I don’t know that this one worked quite as well for me, but I still plan to continue reading the series.
Links #124
Mandy Brown on kinworking instead of networking. I like this reframing — much more human. “Think of the work of checking in on people, arranging gatherings, keeping up the group DM, providing emotional and material support.”
Tim Andraka’s art. Love these.
Utah bans some books in public schools statewide. Embarrassing, and a slippery slope. Utah is bonkers sometimes.
Jeremy Keith on reading patterns. I loosely try to balance my reading between nonfiction and fiction and between female and male authors, but I’m not rigorous about it, and I’m sure I could do better at diversifying my reading.
Yanko Design on Monoli’s crystal that makes things look like pixel art. Ha.
The Church is creating a BYU medical school, focused on teaching with research in international health issues and worldwide humanitarian efforts. Cool.
Slime Mold Time Mold on the case for lithium possibly being the main cause of the obesity epidemic. The evidence does look somewhat compelling, at least on an initial glance. Seems worth investigating further.
Andrea Pitzer on how Trump’s massive deportation plan would effectively turn into concentration camps. I’m glad the American people seem to be rejecting Project 2025, because yikes.
Matt Haggard on paper planners. I’ve been all-digital for a while, but this intrigues me. (Both the idea of returning to paper and the idea of designing my own planners.)
Johnny.Decimal, an interesting organization scheme. I don’t know that I’ll ever adopt it in full, but some of the ideas seem useful, and (for now) I’ve started using a similar categorization scheme for cataloging projects.