Kami menghabiskan waktu seharian dengan Nathan. Mencamil stok makanannya, memakan tteokbokki yang ia masak (dan lalu saya tumpahkan di boneka Bastetnya), membeli gantungan dan lem di Daiso Menteng Huis, menyantap masakan Indonesia untuk makan malam, dan melintasi pusat Jakarta untuk menuju Bundaran HI—tempat kami akhirnya berpisah jalan. Banyak makanan, beragam percakapan. Hari itu menarik (Nathan orangnya menarik).
It had been a long time since we spend a day unstructuredly with other people. We—I—thought our days of unstructured socializing were behind us. We're older: we got things to do, relatives to visit, obligations to fill. So the last time we had long conversations was when we were hiking Ciremai and Gede (so it's been too long). Hiking is ideal for long conversations: we did that with Cori, Laurie, Chantal and Willy at different times. It's not that we can't have interesting conversations while staying put. Now that we have our own place we've had a great time having Akshay, Cesar, Monica, Kunto, Shu Min, and others coming over. Those were nice, but ambling around a city with a friend whom you shared a history were nice too.
Maka saya pulang dengan sekerat rasa sendu. Banyak teman menarik di Jakarta, sementara Boston jauhnya tak terkira. Sayang kita tak bisa memiliki segalanya.
Sunday, January 12, 2020
Friday, January 3, 2020
Internet Reading 2019
I read a lot in 2019--as usual, but actually even more so. Other than papers, books (my Goodreads count is the highest ever), I also read plenty of articles on the internet.
Since May 2019, I have been keeping a text file on my desktop to throw in the links to articles I found most interesting and engaging. It grew steadily. Have a look, click on the drop-down triangle. I think you'll find some of them interesting too.
Environment: Global Apathy Toward the Fires in Australia Is a Scary Portent for the Future
Capitalism, the Left, and Modernity: Questionnaire, a Poem by Wendell Berry
More on this:
China, India, Africa, Australia: A large population of people who play games, buy household goods online, and order food delivery does not make a country a technological or scientific leader.
Nathan J. Robinson: The first time I actually became concerned was when Buttigieg described Harvard Square. There’s a fact about the world outside the Harvard gates that is instantly apparent to most newcomers: It has long had a substantial population of homeless people. [Pete] doesn’t mention seeing injustice. (All About Pete)
Learning: Why books don’t work
Thinking and Arguing: Strong stances
Uber, Cars, Space: Let's build houses for people, not cars.
Racism, Discrimination: The Common Table by Eileen Chong
The Great Land Robbery - The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms
No, The Irish Were Not Slaves Too
Hell in the House of God
I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.
Ijeoma Oluo: 'I am drowning in whiteness'
Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on Falun Gong practitioners and possibly the Uyghurs
What’s Missing From “White Fragility”
A Brief History of Racist Soft Drinks
The Match, a short story by Colson Whitehead
Fascism Has Already Come to America: For Generations of Black Americans, the US Between the End of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement Was a Dystopian State
Bari Weiss’s Unasked Questions
In Defence of the Bad, White Working Class
Not Even Water?
Research and Academia: Job market candidates, you need to spend more time editing your abstract and introduction. It will be worth more than your fourth robustness check. Promise.
But Shouldn’t That Work Against Me?
Causal Inference Animated Plot
On the academic quantified self
Claesbackman's Tips for PhD Students
Richard Hamming ``You and Your Research''
How to Give an Applied Micro Talk
How Can I Academia When My Brain Can't Even?
Common statistical tests are linear models (or: how to teach stats)
Doing Research
Harvard's Job Market Information
Marriage, Sexuality, Patriarchy: How My Wife Can Stand Me
What You Lose When You Gain a Spouse
'Did I ever really know him?': the women who married gay men
Being asexual
Queer Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Recommendation
In Patriarchy No One Can Hear You Scream: Rebecca Solnit on Jeffrey Epstein and the Silencing Machine
Cash/Consent: The war on sex work
Coding: Embrace Your Fallibility: Thoughts on Code Integrity
Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer
Writing system software: code comments.
Stack Overflow Question Checklist
Things You Should Never Do, Part I
Writing: No, you probably don’t have a book in you
Resep Meracik Paragraf Pembuka Cerita
Journalists on the ‘aha’ moments that changed the way they work
Cormac McCarthy’s contribution to the theory of increasing returns
Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper
Storygram: Ed Yong’s “North Atlantic Right Whales Are Dying in Horrific Ways”
An Interview with Editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics
Blogging With Extreme Confidence
How to Be a Writer: Joy, Suffering, Reading, and Lots and Lots of Writing; 10 Tips from Rebecca Solnit
How to Design a Better Pitch Deck
The YC Seed Deck Template
Communicating: Praise is a vitamin
Skip the small talk (part one)
Against Contempt: What is the opposite of the opposite of communication?
The Four Horsemen: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling
The Internet: - How can we talk about screen time without knowing what is taking place on the screen? In defense of screen time.
More on this:
Science: Can One Earthquake Trigger Another On the Other Side of the World?
Presidential Run and US Politics
Indonesia: Bersepeda Seperti Gunther, Esai Setelah 20 Tahun Reformasi
Miscellaneous: When was the last time you had a great conversation? When you overheard yourself saying things you never knew you knew, when you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that found places within you that you thought you had lost, a conversation that continued to sing afterwards for weeks in your mind?
Since May 2019, I have been keeping a text file on my desktop to throw in the links to articles I found most interesting and engaging. It grew steadily. Have a look, click on the drop-down triangle. I think you'll find some of them interesting too.
Environment: Global Apathy Toward the Fires in Australia Is a Scary Portent for the Future
More on Environment:
- Fifty years ago 180,000 whales disappeared from the oceans without a trace, and researchers are still trying to make sense of why.
- Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End.
- Survival of the Richest
- 'Bees, not refugees': the environmentalist roots of anti-immigrant bigotry
- Do You Believe in Climate Change? Really?
- Oil is the New Data
- The secret deal to destroy paradise
- It’s Greta’s World But it’s still burning.
- Carbon Calculus: For deep greenhouse gas emission reductions, a long-term perspective on costs is essential
- Dark crystals: the brutal reality behind a booming wellness craze
Capitalism, the Left, and Modernity: Questionnaire, a Poem by Wendell Berry
- If the Point of Capitalism is to Escape Capitalism, Then What’s the Point of Capitalism?
- Meritocracy Harms Everyone: How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition
- The Work You Do, the Person You Are by Toni Morrison
- Even artichokes have doubts
- Economics After Neoliberalism
- Welcome to the Global Rebellion Against Neoliberalism
- Selling Keynesianism
- Reviving Economic Thinking on the Right
- If we are to reject capitalism and statism (and what they further imply: nationalism and technocracy), what’s left? The power and public goods created by increasing returns phenomena require governance mechanisms that align natural polities and actual polities; this in turn typically requires decentralization.
- Judging Capitalism by its Operations and Socialism by its Aspirations: Sidney Hook
- Against Economics, a review of Robert Skidelsky's "Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics"
- The mindfulness conspiracy
- Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore: Our unpredictable and overburdened schedules are taking a dire toll.
China, India, Africa, Australia: A large population of people who play games, buy household goods online, and order food delivery does not make a country a technological or scientific leader.
More on China, India, Africa, Australia:
- Why Do Chinese People Like Their Government?
- Zombiescapes: Africa's Megacity Addiction
- In the 1980s, One of the World's Cellphone Hot Spots Was … Zaire
- Prime Minister Narendra Modi presents himself as an ascetic economic visionary. He is also a hero of anti-Muslim bigots.
- The Price of Glee in China
- American With No Medical Training Ran Center For Malnourished Ugandan Kids. 105 Died
- I got to shake the hand of a man many consider a dictator at best and a war criminal at worst.
- Who deserves the Nobel for China’s economic development?
- Australia’s Shame, a review of 'No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison'
Nathan J. Robinson: The first time I actually became concerned was when Buttigieg described Harvard Square. There’s a fact about the world outside the Harvard gates that is instantly apparent to most newcomers: It has long had a substantial population of homeless people. [Pete] doesn’t mention seeing injustice. (All About Pete)
More from Current Affairs:
Learning: Why books don’t work
More on Learning
- Learn Like an Athlete
- On Bloom's two sigma problem: A systematic review of the effectiveness of mastery learning, tutoring, and direct instruction
- Flow is the Opiate of the Mediocre: Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player
- How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
- Effective learning: Wozniak's Twenty rules of formulating knowledge
- The Parable of the Talents
- The YouTube Revolution in Knowledge Transfer
Thinking and Arguing: Strong stances
More on Thinking and Arguing
- Seeing Rooms: The rooms/spaces in which most modern work and thinking occurs are not well-suited to the problems being tackled and we could do much better. In contrast, real-world tools are in rooms where workers think with their bodies. Contrast NASA mission control room with rooms from politics. There are effectively no tools in the British Cabinet room.
- What if there are some issues where rational debate inherently leads you astray?
- Beware of things that are fun to argue: Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism
- The Tone of Civil Life Has Its Necessity and May Even Have Its Heroic Quality
- If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts
Uber, Cars, Space: Let's build houses for people, not cars.
More on Uber, Cars, and Space:
Racism, Discrimination: The Common Table by Eileen Chong
More on Racism, Discrimination:
Research and Academia: Job market candidates, you need to spend more time editing your abstract and introduction. It will be worth more than your fourth robustness check. Promise.
More on Research and Academia:
Marriage, Sexuality, Patriarchy: How My Wife Can Stand Me
More on Marriage, Sexuality, Patriarchy:
Coding: Embrace Your Fallibility: Thoughts on Code Integrity
More on Coding
Writing: No, you probably don’t have a book in you
More on Writing
Communicating: Praise is a vitamin
More on communicating:
The Internet: - How can we talk about screen time without knowing what is taking place on the screen? In defense of screen time.
- This is what the internet is becoming: a dark forest
- Superhuman is Spying on You: one of the most hyped new email clients, Superhuman, has decided to embed hidden tracking pixels inside of the emails its customers send out.
- What the Decentralized Web Can Learn from Wikipedia
- Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours
- Online, no one knows you're poor
- 136 internet videos that blew my mind
Science: Can One Earthquake Trigger Another On the Other Side of the World?
More on Science and Health:
- What It Feels Like to Die from Heat Stroke
- Frozen Alive
- The war over supercooled water--How a hidden coding error fueled a seven-year dispute between two of condensed matter’s top theorists.
- The evidence against supplements is stronger than ever, and yet more Americans take them year over year
- The Humanoid Stain: Art lessons from our cave-dwelling ancestors
- The Understory by Robert Macfarlane
- String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Bet
- How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation
- How Mosquitoes Changed Everything
- Bill Gates's Shitty Ideas
- How McKinsey infiltrated the world of global public health
- Machine Learning for Everyone
- Extreme Athleticism Is the New Midlife Crisis
- Prasad's Law: there's always enough health spending to concentrate wealth, never enough to diffuse it
- The bonkers, bristly story of how big toothbrush took over the world
Presidential Run and US Politics
More on USA politics:
- Andrew Yang and the Failson Mystique
- America, the Gerontocracy
- Trump's 'China Muse' Has an Imaginary Friend
- It’s Time to Close State Borders
- Everyone always talks about how much money there is in politics. This is the wrong framing. Americans spent about 2.5x as much on almonds as on candidates last year. Too much dark money in almonds.
Indonesia: Bersepeda Seperti Gunther, Esai Setelah 20 Tahun Reformasi
More on Indonesia:
- Betapa Sia-sianya Menangkapi “Provokator” Papua Merdeka
- Indonesia and the Quest for 7% Growth: Overpromise or Underperformance?
- Xanana Gusmao: Sahabat yang Dulu Bergerilya Melawan Indonesia
- Maraknya demonstrasi belakangan ini sudah merupakan bukti kegagalan penguasa ekonomi dan politik. Mereka telah berhasil menguasai istana, parlemen, dan berbagai sumber daya alam dan manusia di negeri yang besar ini. Namun, mereka gagal mempertahankan rasa keadilan atau membungkam masyarakat, entah dengan cara-cara kekerasan maupun bujukan moralis atau religius.
Miscellaneous: When was the last time you had a great conversation? When you overheard yourself saying things you never knew you knew, when you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that found places within you that you thought you had lost, a conversation that continued to sing afterwards for weeks in your mind?
More Miscellanea:
- Peter Thiel's Religion
- Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
- The Design Thinking Movement is Absurd
- If Sapiens were a blog post
- What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?
- What It Means to Name a Forgotten Murder Victim (I really like the ending)
- Most Important Slate Star Codex Posts
- People hate asking sensitive questions. However, it turns out that people don’t hate being asked sensitive questions.
- As linguists rush to catalog the most vulnerable tongues, they are confronting underlying questions about languages’ worth and utility. Does each language have boxed up within it some irreplaceable beneficial knowledge? Are there aspects of cultures that won’t survive if they are translated into a dominant language?
- Call the 2010s the decade of the sore winner: the underdogs that are top dogs, the upstarts who are establishment.
- An Exclusive Look Inside Apple’s A13 Bionic Chip
- Why I Quit Teaching: for 4 years, I gave teaching everything. It paid off. But I knew that next year there would be new kids, and the struggle would continue. The cycle would start again.
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