Just like last Friday, I have a longer video to share and –if your curiosity is like mine– there’s a whole host of topics you’ll want to read/watch/study more after checking out this hour.
Hobbies, those interests to pursue without it being a “side gig” and often without the need to be at all expert at them, were something I started focusing on, ironically, in the Before Times. I believed (and still believe), it’s very healthy to have some pursuit that is not monetized, potentially not judged and evaluated like job performance might, and perhaps free of some of the wacky things outside of your control that one can’t…
Thanks to Workflowy, I have notes jotted down going back over a decade. When people mention a book, a film, a game, et cetera, I add it to a section called “Stuff to Check Out.” That section includes an almost inexhaustible supply of articles and random videos (different from films) I make note of to check out sometime in the future. Well, clearly I need check out stuff a bit more frequently because this comes…
I’m well overdue to add to my Star Trek rankings even though there’s no end in sight for new series and new seasons coming out of the franchise making updated rankings something of a Sisyphean task. Not only that, I fully plan to continue adding “viewing guides” like I did for Enterprise, for people who want to boldly explore a Star Trek series or introduce someone to it: all without being bogged down in a…
Monday posts have been about motivations and resolutions and worldviews so far this year, so why stop now? From that standpoint, Arthur Brooks’ piece for The Atlantic was a welcome read (or, if you so desire, a 41-minute listen). What I appreciated was the time Brooks took in defining why we human animals are on this neverending treadmill for satisfaction. The societal pressures are, I would hope to most people, rather self-evident. The evolutionary arguments…
I’m still looking for a longer video that answers my questions about 1905 attitudes regarding lutefisk vs. surströmming and how that factored into Norwegian independence, but this works for now.
From the same folks who had the piece on the airline industry I posted back in January comes another illuminating piece about the container ships that dominate shipping via the oceans these days. One notion I found especially interesting was the one that posited that “perfect” systems –by which I read systems that are optimized as perfectly as factors allow– can be more susceptible to issues than imperfect –or non-optimized systems. That’s not necessarily an…
When I watched the recent film Don’t Look Up — as a great deal of other Netflix subscribers appeared to– they mentioned the very real Planetary Defense Coordination Office which made me think instantly of Spaceguard, which isn’t an official overall terms, but dangit, I’m not alone in thinking of it. In fact, overall efforts appear to be inspired by that vision of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, visions that have born fruit over…
Bo McCready has done every cinephile a solid by taking film genre data (as tagged on IMDb) and creating this visualization via Tableau. Now, considering that this is over 100 years’ worth of films… and thousands and thousands of films, this is quite interesting. However, if you look at the visualization above, you’ll see a given genre waxing and waning in relation to its maximum percentage of the overall number of films released that year…
All of a sudden, it’s Groundhog Day… again. And in case you’re wondering why this is the case, Danny Lewis in the Smithsonian Magazine goes deep into the historical record. And in case you don’t want the Smithsonian, but still want something plausible, perhaps with a theater reference, well here ya go. And if you were reading Danny Lewis’ article above and were thinking “hmm, what about a horror film where the groundhogs in Groundhog…