PicoBlog

It was easy to be a cynic in the 90s. There was something in the air: the President was caught in a stupid lie, the X-Files was on TV, and alternative rock took a world-weary, almost jaded turn. Indeed, as older bands like REM, Jane’s Addiction, and Depeche Mode became the mainstream, major labels started looking for the next big thing. Artists like Beck and Marilyn Manson were snapped up and pushed into heavy rotation, while smaller labels like SST, Factory Records, and IRS faded away.

Howdy. So much ground to cover this week… LA ANNIVERSARY This past Sunday (3/3), I celebrated (by not really doing anything special) the 24th anniversary of my move to Los Angeles. I’d been living in Boston, but traveled back to Long Island to drop a bunch of things at my parents’ house so I was flying out of JFK Airport on a one-way ticket. I still remember taxiing on the runway with my cat Brandy at my feet.

Author’s note: This post was originally published on March 31, 2022. It marked the beginning of a personal re-evaluation of what had been a long-held grudge. I have subsequently reached out to Dave Mahler directly. I consider this grudge to be not only inactive, but in retrospect, dramatically overdone. You can read more about my own conclusions in the most recent newsletter. MARCH 31, 2022 — A grown man, angered by a public slight directed at his wife, initiated a confrontation and shouted a profanity in anger at what was essentially a work function.

The standard Sega Genesis controller isn’t a bad gamepad. It just kind of is. It’s exceptionally large for the minimal number of buttons on the thing — you’ve got A, B, and C face buttons, a directional pad that is designed to make going in eight directions a little easier to do, and a Start button. It’s just kind of inexplicable in that regard and some others, for a number of reasons we’ll get into.

Bryan Caplan’s book, Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids, argues for the claim you’d expect it to make. The argument: having children is one of the most rewarding things anyone can do. Very few people regret a child. Yes, parents report being less happy moment-to-moment than non-parents, but, and this is the core theme of the book, that’s because parents try too hard to shape their children. Once you start parenting less, the selfish case for having one more child is set.

I met Rohan Thakur through the Lightdash community slack a few months ago, and have since had a chance to meet up in person and stay in touch over slack and email. Rohan was part of the original data team at WeWork, and is now leading the analytics and analytics engineering teams at Collectors. Rohan recently deployed Lightdash at Collectors, but began to look for a more powerful multi-purpose semantic layer to use with Lightdash and for many other purposes.

I had a meeting with a colleague scheduled on the calendar a few weeks ago. He returned from a business trip and emailed me saying he was sick. He asked if we could reschedule. No problem. We checked our calendars and picked a date and time. The day before the meeting, he wrote to me again. He was still battling a virus. He thought he would be better, but he was progressing rather poorly.

Hello, dear readers! Welcome to this week’s newsletter. As we teased in last week’s newsletter we are about to launch a paid premium version of the newsletter. In the Premium Membership, you will get our Free Future Minds Newsletter PLUS: Exclusive access to our new unpublished data (Aphantasia & imagery), hot off the press so you and your businesses can start benefiting straight away. We have a long queue of unpublished projects, that you haven’t seen yet as it takes years in science for data to be published.

Russian political scientist Sergei Karaganov looks on at a young PutinI first met Sergey Alexandrovich Karaganov in the late 1980s. A few years younger than me, he shared my interests in European security and nuclear arms control. He was at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow and enjoying the opportunities opening up after Mikhail Gorbachev encouraged fresh thinking and more open relations with Western academics and think-tankers. To be honest I enjoyed his company.