Eight years of bits and bobs

Hello!

Spent thirty minutes picking tomatoes in the dense backyard jungle of plants, looking carefully for all the red ones. Then, having exhausted one spot, I’d move a step over to another—only to see several in the previous spot that I’d missed. Oh, the power of a change in perspective.

Plenty of links today, vaguely grouped—hence, bits and bobs.

---

Today marks eight years since Hit and Miss issue #1, if we count it “the second Sunday in September” as the Hit and Miss birthdate. Turning eight gives this child no extra legal privileges I’m aware of, but it’s getting to that age where you can leave it unsupervised for longer periods, give it time to explore its interests, and then hear it excitedly discuss them later.

Being the excellent people you all are, I’m grateful to you for continuing to indulge this meandering child as it grows into whatever person it’ll be—and whatever person I’ll be, getting to parent it from week to week.

Speaking of parenting, this delightful On Being conversation with Sylvia Boorstein is nominally about parenting, but really about how caring for and being kind to ourselves sets an example for children around us to grow into.

---

While weeding yesterday, listening to an unending queue of podcasts, an ad from KitKat came on, saying something like “Canadians are being too polite to AI and using a lot of energy. So take a break from saying ‘sorry’, ‘please’, and ‘thank you’ to AI to save energy.“ This is a real ad I heard from KitKat!

I looked it up, and this seems to be a new KitKat ad campaign. “Have a break from AI politeness, it’s not worth the energy” is a thing that a chocolate bar company is making ads to tell me??

This is, incidentally, not the first time KitKat got looped into the AI scene.

---

Any highlights in that unending stream of podcast episodes? I’m glad you asked:

• Episode 420 of Ben Franklin’s World, interviewing Peter Kastor about his project Creating a Federal Government, 1789–1827. If the title of that project alone isn’t enough to see why I was excited about it, get this: it’s a database, manually transcribed from numerous primary sources, of nearly every U.S. federal employee in the first almost four decades of the U.S. government’s existence.¹ SO MUCH GREAT STUFF IN THIS EPISODE!
• Sporkful interview with LeVar Burton, including stories of stolen steaks and how hard it is to eat when you have a VISOR on.
• Another Sporkful episode, this one on how Michelin stars are awarded. (Including a guest appearance of Accenture consulting advice on how to make Michelin more profitable, looooool.)

---

Final bits and/or bobs:

• Robin Rendle’s reflections on Poverty, By America use his personal experience with poverty to illustrate the book’s central themes—really good.
• Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press is one of my long-time favourite newsletters, offering a window into the publishing industry. Trubek recently wrote about how to read more, specifically how to read more for pleasure.
• Lean is a programming language for math proofs, that can then actually verify those proofs. Imagining how all the parts of a proof would read in Lean brings to mind that much of jq’s standard library is itself written in jq. Anyway, I’m very glad other people are into math like this—I will happily benefit from your enthusiasm!! (via SB)
• Question and answers about life with a “dumbphone”.

---

It’s in the footer every week, but I mean it every time—thank you, so much, for reading along. In eight more years, this thing’ll be driving itself—whew!

All the best for the week ahead.

Lucas