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Weeknote 52, 2023
§1 A final judgment on the year 2023 was exhausting. On to 2024!
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Weeknote 51, 2023
§1 The power of Bob Dylan If you wonder how Bob Dylan got to be such a big deal in the first place, take a listen to this performance from 1963. §2 Farewell, Evernote I have closed the free Evernote account I had used since 2012. The first strike was
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Weeknote 50, 2023
§1 Quotations “Sometimes the most interesting aspect of a scientific or cultural product is not its overt content but rather its unexamined assumptions.”—Andrew Gelman “Why would anyone go skiing when they could sit in the comfort of their own homes and break their kneecaps with a hammer?”—Dylan Moran
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Weeknote 49, 2023
§1 A song lyric “You can put your cards out on the table But if nobody wants to play Well, you haven't got a game, you got a mess” -- Patty Larkin
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Weeknote 48, 2023
§1 An evolving understanding of evil As a kid, Twilight Zone episodes scared me, but Perry Mason episodes didn't. As a 50-something, it's the other way around. §2 A writing prompt If you'd been the kind of person to save the leather jacket, then
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Weeknote 47, 2023
§1 “Listening” The Southern Poverty Law Center doesn't listen to me when I ask it to take me off its mailing list. Why would I think it would care about any survey response I sent back? §2 Quotation “Being cool is the enemy of doing cool.”—Wayne Coyne
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Weeknote 46, 2023
§1 I'll Have What This Is Giving A great New Wave throwback from the British band Wooze. §2 Quotation “The authors of research papers have no obligation to share their data and code, and I have no obligation to believe anything they write.”—Andrew Gelman §3 Consider the
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Weeknote 45, 2023
§1 The humility of the solver Working a crossword puzzle can be humbling. There is simply no way around the fact that if I knew Subject X as well as I thought I did, then I could easily fill in the answer given that clue. §2 Who's the
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Weeknote 44, 2023
§1 Der Kommissar Having learned that "Der Kommissar" was the title of a cult-favorite German TV series several years before it was a song title (in German and English), I now wonder if the TV series inspired the song. (Side note: If someone wanted to write a clickbait
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Weeknote 43, 2023
§1 Quotation “I’m not interested in doing research and I never have been, I’m interested in understanding, which is quite a different thing.”—David Blackwell §2 Everything is a Remix Kirby Ferguson's "Everything is a Remix" is every bit as good as advertised as
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Weeknote 42, 2023
§1 Autumn in New York Allison Young and Josh Turner perform a delightful rendition of one of my favorite American Standards songs. §2 Typists (Part 1) A lesson I learned during Usenet days is that some people think before they write and some people just type. An exchange with a
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Weeknote 41, 2023
§1 Categorical mis-statements Reading about the 75-year conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians can remind one of how rarely people who use the words “everybody”, “nobody”, “always”, and “never” demonstrate the credibility that would justify their use of those words. Why would another person believe that someone is familiar enough