posts

numbers don’t lie (vaclav smil) there’s a lot of “elite” love for vaclav smil. bill gates and steven pinker wax poetic about smil. i guess i get it. he provides a dispassionate comparison of various things and stands back all neutral-ish like. this was a quick read and the follow-up elements are well laid out if you’re keen to dig into something further. the whole book is laid out as a series of brief essays on whatever the topic du jour was a weriting....

overview note - this is a WIP while i find time to write this down notes on installing mastodon in a self-hosted manner where the front end is largely proxied by cloudflare’s tunneld services and object storage is handled on an S3 server someplace in the cloud. pre-requisites you’re gonna need the following a domain with the ability to control your DNS if you want to use the cloudflare biz, you’re going to need to have the DNS and the account elements setup on cloudflare in advance of this because, well, cloudflare’s going to be the front end of things....

2034: a novel of the next world war – (ackerman, stavridis) the audible version of this got me across the better part of south dakota. i can only listen to fiction via audiobook and this did the trick. it’s a solid ride through the coarse concepts of potential american decline in military dominance. or put less jingoistically, an interesting conception of what the rise of china and india means in a multipolar world order....

writing to learn (william zinnser) this is not really what i was expecting it to be and it was surprisingly engaging. broadly, this is an argument for using writing as a mechanism for learning vs. learning to the test or via standard educational practices. he highlights institutions that have incorporated writing deeply into their programs. i have a natural bias towards organizations that have a culture of writing and this is perhaps the one thing that’s intrigued me about amazon work culture from what i’ve heard from friends....

somehow i got pointed at this thing and, like a fool, i couldn’t look away … prompt: He was successful, attractive and charming but he’d learnt that people of that age always had secrets. … and go! … this was most certainly the case for chaz. chaz was brought up in the boomer generation and while he’d been fortunate enough to accumulate a small amount of personal wealth, there were clearly some “unaccounted for” expenditures....