Books
Currently Reading: The Lost Art of Real Cooking. Discussion and persuasion about cooking and how we choose to view it.
Liberty’s Blueprint: How Madison and Hamilton Wrote the Federalist Papers A good solid overview of the Federalist Papers, with interesting insight into both Madison and Hamilton. It made me interested in Madison; maybe I’ll read a biography about him.
Podcasts
Dice Tower 303 & 304: I remember enjoying them, but retained nothing. That’s been true of many espisodes of late. While enjoyable, are they a waste of my time? I’ll experiment with the voice recorder and see if that helps.
Master Plan 57&58: Both episodes were about editing and word choice. 57 was a panel on editing, while 58 was a dialogue with a fellow Fate editor. Both were interesting but very inside baseball.
TJ Hour 1022, Boston: A calm discussion about terrorism, with analogies to revolutionary war atrocities and protests, such as the Boston massacre and Boston tea party.
TJ Hour 1023, Human Progress: An optimistic look at science and progress that did a great job of underscoring the improvements in medicine and transportation since the early 1800s.
Other
The most influential thing in recent weeks was the theft of my laptop. It was a painful blow, not really for the shiny silicon box, but for the 10 years of emails, pictures that I hadn’t yet uploaded, etc. that I’ve been transferring forward. I’ve lost several evenings to resetting and changing passwords and installing software on the new system. There’s much worse in the world, but it’s annoying at worst.
Interestingly, both Starcraft and Windows 8 wound up preserving more information than I’d expected. I was looking forward to repeating Starcraft–I’d made it to the final mission, but thought I’d have to start from scratch. Nope! The saved game was online, so I got to restart at the final battle. [Still having trouble making it past 70%…]