May your week smell like beautiful flowers

Mm, what an excellent time of year. When thinking of favourite seasons, the fall used to be the only one that came to mind. Now, though, spring is right there with it.

As mentioned a few years back, I try to notice some new species each year. This year, it was the serviceberry, going from the one in our yard to the many nearby. But, as that and this post hinted, it’s always the lilac that has my heart—Friday, I stopped on my ride home from work to inhale deeply from a few of the first blossoms. (And this week, the air was blessed by more than just lilacs—ah, the scents!)

Since it also feels vaguely springlike, will mention here our Wednesday evening concert at the NAC (thanks V!). Strauss’s Don Juan felt springlike (Don Juan’s lust as an allegory for mating season?), and Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major was moving in all kinds of ways. In the middle of a tumultuous week (which included many lovely moments, including catching up with some dear friends from CDS, but also some hard ones), attending to a few hours of performance was just what we needed.¹

• Ever considered redesigning the classic world map for better usability and comprehension when seen on mobile screens? (via Bill Mill) This is cool, and not just for map nerds. Design! Stats! It’s all here!
  • I appreciated the distinction between “glorified list” (categorizing geographies, like countries, by a variable) and “spatial distribution” (explaining how some variable is distributed among geographies) map types. The proposed “split continents” design (for the glorified list type) is very elegant.
  • Also, this is just the blog post—there’s an open access paper on these map designs! (I didn’t know about tests used to evaluate map comprehension—so cool.)
• Listened this week to Paul Wells’s interview with k.d. lang. It’s as frank and friendly a conversation as Wells makes it out to be—a good discussion of where she’s been and why. When lang referenced recording with Roy Orbison, it made me realize that Orbison died much more recently than I thought. (1988!)
• News this week that Microsoft is shutting down the Bing API.
  • When I first read this, I thought: Are we trending toward the dumbest future? No search engines, just LLMs as a way to access summaries of real thought; if you want to read the actual words, you need to sneakernet links around.
  • But then, today, I realized that, for the best experience of the web, maybe that sneakernet was always the way? (Sharing and curating through blogs, email, effective social media, and so on.) Thank goodness that part of the web is durable so far. (Case in point: I found this link through Ben Werdmuller’s blog.)
• Yesterday, we meandered downtown for some ice cream. Without planning for it, we ended up checking out the newly-opened Kìwekì Point and Pìdàban Passage (a bridge which connects Kìwekì Point to Major’s Hill Park). We did the classic “bolt across the Alexandra Bridge roadway” to get there, but taking the bridge on the way back was well worth it. The NCC’s page explains all the site’s amenities—looking forward to spending more time here, for picnics and sunsets alike. Recommend.

All the best for the week ahead! May it smell like beautiful flowers!

Lucas