That's good, it's bad luck to be superstitious. I learned that In middle school,,🤪🥴

Jonathan Haidt is the one who wrote The Righteous Mind which has been discussed here. That book has an interesting viewpoint that I find useful to remember in some Thanksgiving conversations, but Haidt doesn't do much useful with it in the book.

In his about page:

But the transformation of society in the 2010s was not caused by anxious college students. They were simply the “canaries in the coal mine” — the first generation to have moved their social lives onto social media platforms. As soon as they did so, around 2012, an epidemic of mental illness began.

There's a number of places that statement could lead, but he skips over the "transformation of society" part as far as I can tell. His policy proposals are to change the "Must be 13+ to register" checkbox to 16 and he wants Congress to make Facebook give him access to data for research.

I think he's found a real issue. I don't think he has a useful idea of what to do about it though.

Also from his about page:

We showed how this anxious new generation arrived on campus and demanded new norms, procedures, and bureaucratic responses that are incompatible with the older truth-seeking culture of universities.

University are so much rosier when we forget about the arms race of tuition and student loans and credentialism.

That sounds painful. I've mostly had to deal with vocabulary-only versions of these from an engineering manager who never had enough buy in from other departments to make major changes.

The OKR vs KPI showdown

In a series of mandatory high burn rate meetings two leansixsigma blackbelts, keepers of secret knowledge from Japan and ancient wisdom from Illinois, fight to the bitter end* attacking and blocking with statistics beyond any comprehension which haven't been applied correctly since that one guy left.

* in the end we're saddled with both

Where are you that only the last four books of the Vorkosigan saga are available?

I could get them all on paper from the library, I just couldn't get the others as audio for no money or effort on Overdrive. Yeah they're kinda cozy, but it must put you off more than me. I read a couple Peter Wimsey books and didn't regret it.

To be clear I made it through the 5 Corwin books, haven't read the other 5.

I have read Earth Abides!

Read a lot more this year than the last several years combined.

Nonfiction In chronological order:

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn - unrelenting, I had to break it up with multiple fiction books between the sections.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt - I read this following kb's recommendation, it has given me some food for thought at the last few family gatherings.

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow - also read because of kb's recommendation. This one had a lot of history I had never heard before, and new context for a lot that I had heard. Highly recommend.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann - interesting, but less impactful than the Dawn of Everything.

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman - argues against common ideas that human nature is bad. I didn't get much out of it.

Fiction in no order, I jumped between series as audiobooks were available from the library:

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand - better than I remembered

Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot - so much slower than I remembered

The last four books of the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold (the only ones available as audio) - the background setting of the Galaxy was a little confusing since I jumped in at the end, but the stories are self contained. If I remember correctly these were recommended to me years ago as an example of how women write scifi with less wooden characters and more emotion than men, though the comparison was mostly to golden age of scifi authors. I liked the books. Definitely not 'hard' scifi, but I'll argue they're definitely scifi and not 'fantasy with spaceships and lasers.'

A couple of the Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers - cute, kinda twee

Firsrt quarter of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - was reading this and liked it, but had to return it and then had no desire to check it out again once I picked up something less self referential.

Ra by qntm - fun idea, but chaotically written.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman - fun

Isle of the Dead by Roger Zelazny - Sometimes I search an author on hubski, trying to get an idea of whether I'll like a book. I was searching Neil Gaimon and found this recommendation for several Roger Zelazny stories. I had heard of Zelazny but never read anything of his. It made a bigger impression than anything else I read this year. Thanks kleinbl00 for leaving that recommendation for someone else eight and a half years ago.

The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny (Corwin books) - enjoyed these.

The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski - enjoyed all of these, though I thought the short stories were more engaging and the novels leaned more on political intrigue.

God first, America second.

So we're back to 'murica first!'?

he needs to either represent his electorate or his X in some legislation, who is he going to choose?

filter for X in ['religion', 'shareholders', 'finances', 'influence', 'celebrity', 'special interest group' ...]

Once we filter out the flawed candidates we will be left with the one pure, unblemished, sacrificial lamb to send to Washington to save democracy...

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I'd argue insider trading and the churn between business/lobbying/legislating are conflicts of interest to fight.

Separation of church and state is more about the Pope owning half of Italy and Kings deciding to be their own Pope and less about people voting for a pastor.

Never had souse.

My Dad's family used to slaughter hogs every year and they would toss the head in a giant pot with whatever else was left after butchering the cuts for smoking, lard, and sausage. The start of the process is the same as souse, except that at the end enough cornmeal is added to prevent it from becoming aspic. Then after it's cooled and set, instead of eating it cold, it was sliced, fried, and eaten for breakfast.

It's usually called scrapple, but they called it panhaus I think.

I'm not calling you out, it's just weird and I like sharing it.

I can see how ground meat in jellied stock became a dish - concentrated stock will cool into jelly all on it's own, mix some of the meat back in and make it pretty, there you go.

But the old Jello™ recipes happened because marketing needed to move more Jello™ and so Jello™ could now be part of every dish at every meal.

Who wants a slice of cold kidney beans quivering at you during supper:

jellified meat broth

That's been mentioned here before...

Being cancelled or given a Twitter pile-on by woke warriors doesn’t seem to be the solution – it only entrenches the true believers and epistemically stubborn in their false ideas.

A paragraph later:

So the vaccine for this epidemic is more likely to be facts, stated plainly and often, and for the bad thinkers to be called out and ostracised if they refuse to listen.

There's not much difference between those two. 'If X didn't work we need to try X harder, because its gotta be the solution' is just another variety of bad thinking.

Related - the 10000 step goal was invented for branding of a Japanese pedometer because the character for 10000 looks a bit like a stick figure walking - 万

The explanation that made sense to me is that's it's a local minima, like local minima around Starry Night or the Mona Lisa that make those paintings keep appearing in descendant images for many generations, except this local minima is negatively weighted to lots of things and is surrounded by gore.

I'll agree with you in daylight but with demure at night

I'm sure the tracks are covered again after the rain last week.

I have been there a bunch of times, it's close to DFW. But the timing is a little tricky, only once was the water low enough and clear enough to wade and splash around the tracks. I was 7 or 8 and it was a fantastic camping trip.

Midlake - Roscoe

There's a reasonable explanation:

( All "T"s are capitalized in words on This site To emphasize The word "Time". )

But it looks like you'll be out of a job

Guidance from HIS Holy MEASURES

removes The Mystery from our History and abolishes costly, Time-consuming experimental research for Perfection!