The ken burns civil war documentary is rated “18+ for language and violence.” I am not sorry watching it with the children.

Different fields are different. You can get pretty far in engineering fields with FAFO. It doesn't do much in astronomy.

Have you found this sort of interactive graphic helpful in explaining the topic to students? Can you say more?

I increasingly doubt there is any such thing as _THE_ scientific method. Different sciences are different. I've never seen a working scientist or college/grad textbook explain or use "the" method. Have you?

Stopping at “caffe central” in SF for refreshment. I had hoped from the name that there would be a giant portrait of Kaiser and Mrs Franz Joseph but alas.

I know I have raised this before but I am shocked at the implosion of children's nonfiction publishing. The Cambridge public library has a 3 to 1 ratio of fiction to nonfiction for children's. And the fiction is much chunkier books that respect the reader much more. This makes me sad.

How often have you argued about philosophy probability in bed with a date? I’ve done it with two people, which seems like a lot when you think about it.

I think I shall go to Motley Hue this year.

Whenever I read anything by Frederic Maitland, I wish I could write like that. He is so so good.

Went to see "A Complete Unknown" last night. It's so so good. Superb acting and storytelling. Deft at showing the influence of music on the people around it. Nobody previously had the nerve to have a high-stakes scene about picking the music acts for a folk festival.

GMU student charged in mass-casualty plot targeting Jews A GMU student was arrested after allegedly telling an FBI informant of plans to attack the Israeli Consulate in New York.

What are we doing here. www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/202...

There is something sad about an FBI informant "pledging loyalty" to a college freshman saying "here's how you do a massacre." The student isn't a terrorist mastermind, he's an idiot who is talking big. An antisemitic idiot, but still.

My favorite kind of wedding is the one that runs for a full weekend, at the end of which the friends of each of the new spouses have met each other and the couple goes forward with a new social circle built around themselves.

I was very glad to attend one of these last weekend.

A small fraction of fission neutrons are emitted later (milliseconds to minutes), and that gives time for thermal expansion and other effects to stabilize the reaction. This was not publicly known in 1940, but is a key enabler for nuclear reactors.

The drama of the story is that the reactors are run subcritical with added neutrons and the operators have to keep them stable on short timelines and it's exhausting, because it'll go prompt critical and explode if you screw up. Real reactors don't have that problem, because...

The first story about the occupational stress of nuclear reactor operators (Heinlein's Blowups Happen) was published two years before the first nuclear reactor went critical.

(On my mind because the Chicago Pile went critical on this day in 1942.)

I have no reason to think this is factual, but it’s extremely funny and so I am not sorry to share it.

I enjoy the way that work gradually trails off in the run-up to a holiday as people start to disappear.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am reading Reynolds’ book “fiefs and vassals,” so this is on my mind.

The word feudalism conjures up all sorts of images and associations. Knights, castles, fiefs, vassals, etc.

What specific place and time most closely matches your mental notion of “ideal” feudalism ? Are there particular works of fiction that seem to you to best represent it?

I haven't bothered. The last covid rounds were indistinguishable from any other cold-type infection and it didn't seem worth the hassle.

This was based on a conversation we'd had months before. I am charmed that the child has been quietly thinking about warship design ever since.

Randomly at breakfast, my six-year-old asked “daddy on HMS Dreadnought why did they put the lookout right by the smokestack?”

I bought a house several years ago and apparently that is just a lifetime pie subscription from the real estate brokerage. I approve.

For the first time, I have been in the assign-annual-ratings meetings at work. I understand all the complaints about stack ranking much more vividly now. It's soul-sucking and makes me feel dirty even if it solves a genuine organizational problem.

I want less social media discourse and more discourses on Livy in my life.

A heads up for new bluesky users, and this is something the devs REALLY should make clearer during the onboarding process: whenever you post a nude on this app it goes up on a big screen at a baseball game

The Bay Area clearly reached perfection in 1968 and every change in the last 55 years has been a regression.

Which is worse: getting a “can we talk” text from a romantic partner or your home contractor?

How do engineers get their first people-manager job? By filling a gap in their local context? Starting a company?

Follow up. I have failed at detaching from work but solved the #2 problem on my worry list.