Cuevano

Recommendations from 2025

2025-12-29T00:00:00-08:00

Now and then I come across creations that I so wish were my own: by some magic the artist captures the world in a way I simply know is true—deep, fresh, sturdy, whimsical, wise. How do they do that? How do they use the artifice of their medium to show the truth of our existence? Well they may not be my own creations, and yet, in that link of humanity between us, they are mine, and I am theirs, and that’s what keeps this whole thing afloat.

Here are some of the things I found and loved this year:

Fiction

How I loved Marc Behm’s The Eye of the Beholder! A private detective obsessively stalks and protects a serial killer over the years; he imagines her as his long-lost daughter. A dream-logic sad-cop noir, I guess; fans of Disco Elysium will feel right at home here.

I also had a blast with Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (I’ve read volumes I and II). It’s a time loop story, like Groundhog Day or Edge of Tomorrow, and yet not at all like them; there is no mission, no life lesson, just the absurd notion of this impossibility actually happening and its effects on the protagonist’s family and love life, and on her outlook on consciousness and existence. I was amazed at how fresh it stayed after two full volumes, and I’m looking forward to the rest.

Carissa Orlando’s The September House was a very fun read: the titular house is haunted, and its owner (our narrator) oddly doesn’t mind, except in September when the walls bleed and the spirits get so dangerous no amount of exorcism seems to help. Or is the owner going mad?

Also huge fun: Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, a book of short stories on the topic of rejection. But reader beware: I hesitate as this is the cringiest, raunchiest, most misanthropic recommendation I’ve made in this blog, and it may well not be for you.

In an entirely different note, the atypically slim Something to Do with Paying Attention, from David Foster Wallace (an excerpt from The Pale King), has one of the best descriptions of a phenomenon of deep attunement with the moment that I’ve felt now and then, never enough, an experience full of attention and serenity though not necessarily joy, and that I find so difficult to replicate at will, or even to describe. Wallace calls it doubling, others of course call it mindfulness or aliveness, and this novella is worth reading for this description alone.

One unexpected perk of having kids is the discovery that Children’s Literature is often better than grown-up literature at expressing deep insights in raw form. With our kids getting older I risk drifting away from these gems, but a late find this year was Blake Nuto’s A Day That’s Ours (lovingly illustrated by Vyara Boyadjieva). The book is precious, and describes precious time.

Non-Fiction

My last read of the year was also one of the best: Eliot Weinberger’s An Elemental Thing. It is a collection of collage essays spanning millenia and the whole world, with an emphasis on pre-Columbian and Ancient Chinese cultures, mysticism, and the elemental. It feels incredibly eclectic, and I do mean “incredibly” literally: at several points I balked, thinking “there’s no way that’s true”, only to confirm Weinberger’s facts by myself. I don’t know how he finds these things; I don’t know how he puts them together. It’s a marvel.

It seems I have yet to mention the philosopher Byung-Chul Han in this blog. I’m not sure why, as I love his works; the latest of his I’ve read is Vita Contemplativa. It is a book written “in praise of inactivity” and contemplation, not as a means to recharge and become more productive, but as an end in itself, one we as a culture are losing the ability to even recognize.

A single memoir on this list: Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People, a chronicle of her time as a Facebook executive; the “careless people” were her peers from Zuckerberg and Sandberg down, and the target of their carelessness is our own social fabric. A constant stream of jaw-dropping, appalling behaviour from these clowns. I don’t usually read this kind of book, but Meta barred Wynn-Williams from promoting it so, action-reaction, I felt I had to. It’s good.

This year I went from deep, curmodgeonly scepticism about anything AI coding-agents related, to some degree of surprise, to vertigo, to the realization that my craft has changed irrevocably in the deepest ways. I learned how (and how not) to use Anthropic’s Claude Code and… it has been a deeply liberating feeling. For instance, there is a category of personal computing problems that I could solve given enough time—say half a day. But I never solve them because I never give myself the half-day to do so. When a good prompt gets the tool to do it in ten minutes, well. I blaze through them. Essential for me in navigating this space is the prolific blog of Simon Willison, who steers clear of the hype and shows by example what can be done, and how.

I have a soft spot for earnest self-improvement texts. I particularly enjoyed three this year. Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals is a set of insightful essays that go against the grain of the typical productivity literature, best read daily over four weeks as he suggests (I also recommend his blog, The Imperfectionist, with similar topics). Through Burkeman I learned of Paul Looman’s I’ve Got Time, a rare advice book that I still find helpful months after reading. And Brendan Barca and Pema Sherpa’s The Daily Buddhist is a devotional book that has accompanied me for the better part of the year, and has been a source of inspiration throughout.

I started this year chronically injured and believing I wouldn’t be able to run again, and I’m closing it with a habit of 5-6 runs per week. I’ll have more to say about my recovery in a future blog post, but a key piece was learning about the neuroplastic component of chronic pain, as described very accessibly by Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv’s The Way Out. If you struggle with chronic pain, this is a good entrypoint to figure out what to do about it.

TV and Movies

So many good movies this year! Ryan Coogler’s Sinners may have been my favourite: vampires in the 1930s Mississipi Delta are drawn to the transcendental power of Blues music. Sui-generis, raw and pulsating.

Ari Aster’s Eddington is a neo-Western about an explosive confrontation between a small town Sheriff and Mayor at the start of COVID, featuring those mask debates and conspiracy theories I’d rather not think about again except in a format as good and unpredictable as this.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another features pathetic far-right wingnuts, somehow (as so often) in power, hapless left extremists (very much like those in Are You Willing to Die for the Cause?), and the regular people caught up in this mess. This makes it sound like a downer, but the movie is preposterous fun.

Kathryn Bigelow’s nightmarish A House of Dynamite loops through the same nuclear threat sequence three times, each time from a perspective at a power rung above the previous (and more bafflingly incompetent the higher we go). I found strong echoes of Allison and Zelikow’s excellent Essence of Decision in the treatment.

And finally, just out on theatres, Josh Safdie’s frenetic Marty Supreme is true to the theme: like a table tennis point, the plot swings from major threat to major save (to double-major threat…) at exhilarating top speed.

Four good TV shows: Severance’s second season was as much a knockout as the first; a delight. The Beast in Me is a thriller with Claire Danes as an author writing a book about her potentially murderous next-door neighbour, played by Matthew Rhys—slight connections with Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.” Following Rhys led me to the fantastic The Americans, about deep undercover Soviet spies in 1980s Washington posing as a regular couple, kids included—we’re halfway through the second season and enjoying it all. And Pluribus just finished its first season. The premise (an alien virus transforms nearly all of humanity into a placid, content hive; we follow an uninfected woman making sense of it) is great, and while it’s still to be determined whether it will end a great show, it’s worthwhile so far.

Games

Cooperative games continue to evolve and rack up awards, and I’m happy to see that. The one I enjoyed the most this year is the Slay the Spire boardgame. It is a pretty perfect adaptation of the excellent videogame, and the cooperative aspect meant I was able to have long hours of fun playing it with my son and friends. In Bomb Busters (which won the Spiel des Jahres award) the players are bomb defusers working collaboratively to defuse ever harder challenges; in Earthborne Rangers they are rangers in a post-apocalyptic wilderness, much of the fun is discovering the world around them; and in Fate of the Fellowship they are characters in the Lord of the Rings trying to destroy the One Ring and stop the onslaught of the Dark Forces—the game adapts the Pandemic system quite effectively.

Turing Tumble is a wonderfully inventive toy: a mechanism to build marble-powered computers, Plinko board-style. Supposedly for kids.

Perhaps the game I enjoyed playing the most is Blue Prince, a puzzle adventure videogame filled to the brim with mysteries, a slightly eerie atmosphere, and enough randomness to avoid things getting stale. We’ve solved the “main” puzzle (“find the 46th room of this ever-changing 45 room mansion”), but there are still so many loose ends that we’re coming back for more.

Miscellaneous

My musical discovery of the year was Frank Dupree—wonderful talent, brilliant choices, so much energy. Check him out with a Big Band Kapustin concerto here.

We visited Toronto in June. It’s still a lovely city, and within its St Lawrence Market you can still, after all these years, find the generous man from Honey World providing sample after sample of delicious honey. And we found he sells it online! Never have I had as much honey as I’ve had since June.

Meanwhile, back in Victoria, Ay Mi Mexico is our new favourite Mexican food restaurant (their consomé de birria and tacos de pastor are great). And after Charelli’s closed at the start of the year, the next best place to find great cheeses became The Farmer’s Daughter, in Sidney.

We had guest birders this year, and ambling around town with them made me appreciate the drama and beauty of the world of birds hidden in plain sight. Along with their guidance, the Merlin app (“Shazam for birds”) and a good pair of binoculars (I got the Celestron 8x42 Trailseeker ED) were crucial. Speaking of birds, our visit to The Raptors, in Duncan, was a blast.

Finally, I learned about the Clark Geomatics maps recently—specifically the Salish Sea and the Vancouver Island ones. They are astoundingly beautiful. An excellent level of detail and cartographic decisions. I don’t have the wall space for them all; I wish I did!

As ever, I enjoy hearing from you if you liked (or didn’t!) any of these recommendations, or if you have something I might like. Have a fantastic 2026!

(Previously: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, …)

Recommendations from 2024

2024-12-31T00:00:00-08:00

I’m a truffle hog, sniffing for those tasty treasures hiding under the expanse of bland mediocrity that is our culture. This year I have a bumper crop for you to enjoy!

Fiction

Let’s start with Jacqueline Harpman’s astounding “I Who Have Never Known Men”—though it is a difficult start, since I don’t know what to say that won’t spoil your discovery. A girl is captive in a strange prison among women, all the jailers men; nobody remembers why they’re there nor even where they are. A slim but powerful book, written with wisdom and generosity, about our quest to understand the world. Nominally science fiction, but don’t let that stop you.

Then we have Olga Tokarczuk’s “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead”, in which an eccentric, aging, Blake-loving woman attempts to convince her neighbours that vengeful animals are causing the gruesome deaths in their village. Charming, funny, and wily.

Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital”, in contrast, is meditative and passive—observing the world from a clarifying distance. The premise is simple: the thoughts of six astronauts in the International Space Station as they orbit Earth during 24 hours. The plot does not go much further beyond that, but that does not matter: the insights that come from coursing above everything we know, above friends and strangers, routine and hope and tragedy, sixteen times per day, are enthralling.

Two from the genius of Helen deWitt this year. “The English Understand Wool” is very short, perfectly crafted, delicious. I would have enjoyed its exacting voice regardless of plot, but the acerbic jabs at the publishing industry were sugar on top. If you, like me, devour it in one sitting and need more, then go on to her “Lightning Rods” to be—well—struck by a bolt of wickedness. A LinkedIn/TED tryhard figures out how to deal with sexual harassment complaints: by giving top performers anonymous “lightning rods” to channel their urges; he goes on to build a business empire and reshape America. The corporate and political satire is brutal and revolting, and made even better by the cringeworthy, positive thinking language of the characters.

A fascination with revulsion is also the engine of A. K. Blakemore’s macabre “The Glutton”, the (real!) story of a boy with an insatiable and abominable appetite in revolutionary France. Blakemore approaches the thesaurus ravenously, like Tarare approaches the world, and the result is the best kind of disgusting: a bizarre feast.

Far more digestible is Christopher Buehlman’s “The Blacktongue Thief”. It may be the most tight and fun fantasy I’ve ever read? In any case, it’s what, to my mind, fantasy often promises and fails to deliver. It’s smart, fast, fresh, just surreal and scary enough.

Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” is of course a classic, as you surely already know. What you may not know (I didn’t) is how fun it is to read it, how lean its prose is, and how cool its setting. Half of the secret, I think, is that Hammett never tells you what anyone thinks or feels, merely what they do, and so the narrative is propulsive and cinematic.

Two subtle gems: first, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard”, a historical novel on the social changes and the loss of nobility of the Sicilian aristocracy during the Risorgimento, and Claire Keegan’s “Foster”, a perfect novella of a girl attempting to find familial affection.

In Spanish, the best book I read was Alvaro Enrigue’s “Tu sueño imperios han sido”, a Borgesian, sometimes psychedelic, reimagining of the baffling history of the conquest of Mexico. I understand that the English translation (“You Dreamed of Empires”) is very good too.

Antonio Barba’s “El último día de la vida anterior” was another highlight: a surreal, fantastical ghost story. If you can read Spanish be sure to check it out—I don’t think it has been translated yet.

Poetry

Fiona Benson’s “Ephemeron” has a delightful range, from the careful look at insect love in its first section, through the retelling of the myth of the Minotaur, to the pain and hope of parenting.

There are roughly two stories in Shane McCrae’s sharp “Sometimes I Never Suffered”: that of the “hastily assembled angel” plummeting to Earth, and that of a mixed race American reaching Heaven after a life of sorrow: If I’ve earned my reward where is the life where I can spend it?

Non-fiction

The most eye-opening book I read this year was Stefanie Green’s “This Is Assisted Dying”. It’s also the only one that made me cry; I would be surprised if it didn’t have that power on you too. Green (a Victoria resident) is a pioneer of medically assisted dying in Canada, and this book narrates the journey to establish her practice, the experiences of her patients, and a de-mystification of the process. I am grateful for Green’s expertise, warmth, and persistence: not only because she has stopped so much suffering in the world first-hand already, but also because, through her advocacy, she has made it viable for you and me to stop ours, should the need arise.

Also enlightening: Hannah Ritchie’s “Not the End of the World”, on the climate crisis. Ritchie’s data-driven argument is that climate doomerism is both counterproductive and unwarranted. Counterproductive because it prevents action (if we are hosed anyway, what’s the point?); unwarranted because there are indeed things we can do to prevent and mitigate the worst of the crisis.

TV and Movies

“Anatomy of a Fall” is such an intelligent film. A man falls to his death from a window in his wintry chalet; did his wife kill him? Should their son lie on the stand? Fantastic writing and performances.

If you want more falls and deaths in the snow, there are dozens of them in the zany “Hundreds of Beavers”, a bizarro slapstick comedy done with skill and originality. Bugs Bunny for grownups.

Three excellent horror-inspired films that are nevertheless not horror: the naughty “Saltburn”, a kind of vampire story without actual vampires; the visually stunning “Poor Things”, a feminist Frankenstein story; and the mad-and-getting-madder body horror of “The Substance”, with a brilliant return from Demi Moore.

Also, a local theatre (the Vic) re-screened “Run Lola Run” on occasion of its 25th release anniversary. What a fun movie that was! The frantic story, the free willed editing, the music… if you can catch it again, it truly rewards a second viewing. If you’re new to it, I am jealous. The same theatre re-screened “Whiplash” (ten years out), a nerve-racking, jaw-dropping jolt to the senses. Both of these really reward viewing them loud, by the way.

Four tentative TV recommendations: “Silo”, with a theme quite similar to my first recommendation up top, had a great first season (the second, ongoing, is so far darker and flabbier); “Kaos”, a modern-day retelling of Greek myth with Jeff Goldblum as a neurotic Zeus, showed so much promise only to get cancelled; “3 Body Problem” would have been fantastic were it to provide any sense of closure at the end of the season; “Wolf Hall” is smart and delicate, and enjoyable if you don’t mind long scenes of courtiers taking off their hats over and over.

Miscellaneous

The Belfry Theatre brought in “The Lehman Trilogy”, on the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers. It was a masterful production with a great cast. If it ever comes again (or goes wherever you are), I’m confident you’ll love it. And if you can’t find it, the book itself, by Massini and Power, is great reading.

I’ve been enjoying Sam Kriss’s Substack, “Numb at the Lodge”, and admiring it for often going where my mind has been too lazy or cowardly to go on its own.

Two game recommendations: “Ready Set Bet” is a really fun horse-betting boardgame—you can try and figure out the odds, but the payouts will change as other players figure the odds themselves, and as the facts on the racetrack evolve. And the “Minute Cryptic” daily online puzzle is delightful, as it has been scratching the itch that early Wordle gave me (yes I still do the Wordle). If you’re stumped, make sure you watch the explanatory videos for each day; after a week or two you’ll be solving the cryptics far more expertly.

The Beryl AX Router was a nice discovery: a travel-friendly, easy-to-use router that I’ve used to boost the signal in hotel rooms, to simplify the connectivity from several devices, and even at home when we’ve had router trouble.

In Victoria

We’re so lucky in this town! Four Victoria pleasures to wrap up: in the morning, expertly baked croissants from Goodside Pastry House; for lunch, cute and delicious boxes from Yua Bistro; for dinner, pizza, arcades, and 80s nerdy vibes at Pinhalla, and to close, two scoops from Parachute Ice Cream—my favourite is the Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookie, but I’ve enjoyed them all.

I’ve just realized I’ve been doing these recommendations series for fifteen years now! People sometimes tell me they enjoy them, and that they discovered something great through them. If that’s you, thank you for reaching out! It means a lot, and keeps me wanting to come back a year later. While I always have hopes of resurrecting this blog for other purposes (there’s always next year), this has been the one constant all this time.

Do reach out if you have recommendations for me as well. Happy New Year!

(Previously: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, …)

Recommendations from 2023

2023-12-31T00:00:00-08:00

Another year panning for gold, another year finding wondrous nuggets in our cultural stream. Here are some of my favourites:

Non-fiction

This year, my surroundings opened up to interpretation like never before, and I have Tristan Gooley’s books to thank for it. I read “How to Read Nature” and “The Natural Navigator” in puzzlement by the mystery of why would extremely practical and life-enriching pointers such as these not be better known. The shape of the trees around you indicates the path of the sun! A glance at the crescent moon, or at a flag flapping in the wind, is often enough to get your bearings! It’s astounding, the stuff we are oblivious to, and that Gooley points out effectively and lovingly.

In the late nineties, I would listen to Pulp nonstop. I imagined the band leader, Jarvis Cocker to be a kindred spirit, going by lyrics and sensitivities alone, in the naive way a fan does with their stars. Then for a long time I stopped listening to them. When I revisited them, I was apprehensive: I’ve found other early musical loves cringeworthy in hindsight. But Pulp still holds up pretty well, and Cocker may be a kindred spirit after all, judging by the excellent “Good Pop Bad Pop”: a sort of memoir of his and the band’s early days that is funny, endearing, and seductive.

Wally Koval’s “Accidentally Wes Anderson” is a coffee table book with a compilation of places and things that match the director’s aesthetic. They are a joy to browse—and note that you can do that on the website rather than on the page. Not every photo lands—these shots sometimes aim at a parody rather than the original, the way ChatGPT can parrot the caricature of a poem with none of its soul—but when they do they’re exquisite.

I wrote recently of my love for Chris Oliveros’ “Are you willing to die for the cause?”, and I must include it in my year-end list as well. An oral history in comic-book form about the Québec revolutionaries of the 1960s with implications for activism today.

Finally, Steve Easterbrook’s “Computing the Climate” is a great overview of the early and current work to model our climate. I’m biased, of course—Steve was my doctoral advisor—, but I can proudly and safely recommend it to everyone looking to understand how climate science is done, regardless of their previous knowledge on the matter. There are fascinating bits here everywhere, from the earliest models, calculated by hand a century ago, to the bleeding edge work at the top climate centres in the world, and they are explained with care and with respect for your intelligence.

Fiction

Speaking of climate change: I wonder if Paul Murray’s “The Bee Sting” might not be the best novel published on the topic. Or rather, and perhaps because, it’s not about climate change, but about our attitude when the writing is on the wall, when something bad is about to happen and everyone can see it, but they still can’t help play their part in the unfolding tragedy. The sense of impending doom is personal and familial rather than societal, and that makes it more real. The novel doesn’t beat any drums, and it is about many, many other things as well: secrets, isolation, status, money, love, sexuality, the mystical in the modern, the tides that carry us, and the hurt we are responsible for; patterns that reverberate and harmonize through 600+ gripping pages. Wonderful, darkly comic, but also painful.

For something lighter, how about a murder mystery? Last year I pointed to a book by Stuart Turton (“The Seven Deaths…”), this year, I’m happy to recommend another one, “The Devil and the Dark Water”. A sort of Holmes and Watson pair work to tackle an impossible puzzle of a murder at sea. Impossible unless they accept the supernatural as an explanation—should they? A very fun read.

I loved Clare Pollard’s translation of Ovid’s “Heroides”. It’s an ancient text, but it feels fresh even now! The poem is structured in the form of letters from women in myth—letters in which the writers (Phaedra, Medea, Penelope, and others) describe their plights and their dilemmas. Pollard says it is “a daring act of literary transvestism” for Ovid to have taken this on, and I agree. She also points out it is the first book of dramatic monologues, and the first example we have of epistolary fiction. And it is so good, so raw, so human!

There is a podcast, Backlisted, which I discovered this year but can only take in very small doses, as it’s full of great book recommendations that would take me forever to chase. For instance, these three are books they mentioned, that I adored, and that I’d like to pass on to you: first, Raymond Briggs’ “Fungus the Bogeyman”, a delightfully dour children’s picture book depicting the life of a working class monster. Second, Jessica Au’s “Cold Enough for Snow”, a slim, calm, meditative novel about a mother-daughter holiday in Japan, and third, Pete Dexter’s “Deadwood”, a fantastically good western—no connection to the also great HBO show, or at least no connection that HBO would want to acknowledge.

TV and Movies

This was the year that “Succession” wrapped up, and what an absolute knockout of a last season that was. If you haven’t seen it, I’m afraid my superlatives might turn you off—and yet I can’t remember being stunned like this by a TV show before. Deliciously clever writing, wonderful acting, just perfect in every way.

But if a dark tragicomedy of greed and power is not your thing, how about “The Leftovers”? A seemingly random 2% of the population vanishes in an instant; the series picks up in the aftermath as those left over struggle to maintain their social order and their mental health in the face of the absurd and unexplainable. At times nightmarishly Lynchean—the first season has echoes of “Twin Peaks”—, the series succeeds thanks to its heart and unpredictability.

Two simpler but very enjoyable shows: “Extraordinary” is set in a world like ours, but where everyone gets superhero powers when they reach adulthood, except for our protagonist, a plainly ordinary woman. It’s very silly fun. And the case-of-the-week show “Poker Face” features a drifter with one key asset: the uncanny ability to tell when someone is lying. As in Columbo, you know who did it from the start, but you still want to see how the case gets solved.

Were you as nonplussed as I was by the adaptation of The Sandman to the screen? If so, then let me suggest Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive” as the fix to your ailments—such a good movie! A despondent vampire wonders why he should keep waking up every night among the “zombie” mortals; his wife comes over to lift his spirits. It’s everything there is to love from the classic issue “The sound of her wings”, set to gorgeous photography, music, and performances, and none of that dumb CGI.

Finally, what a ride “Triangle of Sadness” was! The smartest movie I’ve seen in a while—it’s also fiercely anti-ideological, original, surprising, and funny. I shouldn’t try and summarize it for you; it’s one of those films that benefits from going in not knowing what to expect. I can’t wait to see what Östlund does next.

Games

It was also a good year for games for me. The very best find, I think, was Cole Wehrle’s Pax Pamir, a board game in which players take the role of local Afghan leaders trying to navigate the “Great Game” of geopolitics played by the empires above them. It is technically innovative and tight—I heard it described as a knife fight in a phone booth—, extremely tactical, with multiple plausible strategies, and crafted so that all players have a reasonable shot at victory until the end. At the same time, it is illustrative on the role of local powers in empire-building, and on an aspect of world history I was not familiar with. The components are beautiful, but you can also play the game online at Rally the Troops.

Years ago, I recommended Flamme Rouge as a game that I felt got bicycle races intuitively right. I feel the same now about Granerud and Pedersen’s Heat: Pedal to the Metal, for car racing: the rules are simple and elegant, and they push you to get to the finish line with all you’ve got, your machine about to blow up—unless maybe you pushed it a bit too much. Lighter fare than Pax Pamir, and far easier to teach too I believe.

A late, wonderful discovery, was the most recent Spiel des Jahres winner, Dorfromantik, designed by Michael Palm and Lukas Zach. I became so fond of this game, perhaps because it reminds me so much of Carcassonne, the game that got me into modern Euro designs. Dorfromantik, in fact, looks like an evolved, mature, corrected Carcassonne—similar to the evolution from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to Tears of the Kingdom. It is a cooperative “campaign” game (early successes unlock more tiles and complexity), and it works perfectly fine as a solo game. Challenging at higher levels, and addictive.

On the Switch, I also enjoyed playing Chants of Sennaar with my son. A unique game of linguistic puzzles—the task is to piece together utterly foreign languages—, with an inspired aesthetic and a fine story.

Others

I had no idea that Nick Cave, the musician, had such an expansive, loving soul. In his website, The Red Hand Files, he takes on questions from random strangers, and gives back compassionate, wise, heartfelt answers. I read them carefully whenever a new one pops up.

One podcast recommendation (other than the aforementioned Backlisted): the epic takedowns of airport bestsellers that is If Books Could Kill, with Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri. Smart, funny, and good at pointing out just what is off about the usual suspects hogging the mike all the time.

I have been trying to wean myself off of Google this year. I feel like I’ve had enough of it, and the less I give them the better we’ll be. I’m still checking alternatives to their mail and calendar applications, but I found it easy to get off their maps and browsers. Search is crucial, and for that the key for me was learning about Kagi. I switched to it and I haven’t looked back. The search results are great, and there are no ads. The price seems fair for not being the product myself.

To cure your clogged-mailbox-and-dozens-of-browser-tabs syndrome, I’m happy to suggest Omnivore, the best Read Later service I’ve found. Free, open source, cross-platform, beautifully designed. Send your newsletters there, send your open tabs there as well, then take them on when you have the dedicated time to clear them.

Finally, if you are in Victoria, drop by the Dumpling Drop downtown for some fantastic food. Vegan options available; top it up with a Kid Sister popsicle from their freezer, then coffee from the reliably good Hey Happy or the just as good but far less well known Saint Cecilia nearby. And if you do go, let me know and I’ll join you! It will give me a brilliant excuse to have some more myself.

I believe that’s it. I hope you found something above that tickled your curiosity. If you did, I’d love to learn about it, as well as about any of your own finds. Happy New Year!

(Previously: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, …)

Are You Willing to Blow Up the Cause?

2023-11-11T00:00:00-08:00

I approached Andreas Malm‘s “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” with some trepidation, after reading positive coverage, either of the book or of the movie based upon it, from people I respect. Trepidation because I knew the gist of its argument (for attacks on property to fight climate change), yet I am both temperamentally and pragmatically nonviolent. Would the enormity of the climate crisis and the arguments in this pamphlet change my outlook? Turn me into an advocate for, and a perpetrator of, property destruction to help stop the rise in carbon emissions? Would it lead me to sabotage?

That would have been a very tall order, for me. I admire Gene Sharp and his writings. I’ve read and been convinced by Erica Chenoweth‘s and Maria Stephan‘s studies about the statistical analysis on the superiority of nonviolent tactics. I watched with despair first-hand as the peaceful messages from G20 protesters in Toronto were hijacked by black bloc doofuses, burnt in a dynamic of pointless vandalism and indiscriminate repression. I admire the practical emphasis on nonviolent civil disobedience by Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil (setting soup-throwing-into-artworks incidents and their ilk aside, of course—these hurt nothing except our collective intelligence). Still—global warming is an enormous problem, and I have turned my life around on a good argument several times. What if Malm is right?

Well, I shouldn’t have bothered. “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” turned out to be one of the sloppiest and most irresponsible arguments I’ve read in print in a long time. It is sloppy in its analysis of nonviolent protest, and irresponsible in its careless endorsement of sabotage.

On his analysis against nonviolent protest, Malm makes three main points: (1) sometimes violence is necessary, as when faced against a mass shooter, so anyone who thinks they are nonviolent are fooling themselves, (2) pragmatic nonviolent icons are not the doves they’re cracked up to be, and (3) what if nonviolence doesn’t work and our commitment to it is a waste of time? Each of these has glaringly obvious replies — (1) a systemic, slowly unfolding problem is not a mass shooter, (2) so what?, and (3) any approach could indeed fail, but some may go beyond failure and poison the cause; why wouldn’t “try a couple of bombs” fail even worse? But Malm doesn’t see these replies. I have the sense that he’s too drunk with retributive power to see them. Early in his book, he narrates how he and his friends would go out at night and puncture the tires of SUVs, calling themselves, with baffling tone-deafness, the “Indians of the Concrete Jungle” (no, I’m not making it up, I wish). The idea was to instill fear in the hearts of wasteful motorists. He claims, with zero evidence, that drops in SUV sales are a result of his fine slasher work.

Malm thinks that that’s the path to follow, just amped up by a kiloton or two. He disses the climate movement as too doughy, too mild-mannered—he repeats a criticism of Extinction Rebellion kids looking like they just stepped out of a community theatre (rather than the proper anarchist uniform he sports, I guess). Not edgy enough! He feels that someone should, you know, really do something. If someone just had blown up some infrastructure, some light sabotage here and there, a decade or two ago, that would’ve taught them a lesson, and maybe we’d already be on our way out of this crisis. He’s not saying that everyone should be violent, but hey. A bit of diversity of tactics! Normie protesters with their cute signs and community organizers and children over there, bomb throwers over here, all working in harmony for a common but not quite articulated goal.

It really is a good thing for him that the supposedly common goal is left as an exercise for the reader, because I doubt that spelling it out would gain him much traction in the mainstream. Reading between the lines, the ambition goes, predictably, way beyond stopping carbon emissions—indeed it doesn’t even seem to be primarily about that. Because Malm takes as a premise that you simply cannot fix the problem under our economic systems. So it follows that you must overthrow the government, and not just yours, as this is a global problem, but nearly every government in the world, and institute in its place, I suppose, a worldwide Leninist regime? Something that will ban property everywhere, in any case, as he warns us that “property will cost us the earth”. This is how we get to the trope that plagues so much left commentary of late: if you want to avert the collapse of our civilization, you must bring about the collapse of our civilization. Best to leave all of this unsaid in your sales pitch!

Let’s say, instead, that of course, we will take the utmost care in not hurting anybody. Of course, our acts of sabotage won’t ever be thought of as terrorism by the public: we’ll define terrorism in a way that doesn’t cover us and everyone will adopt our definition! Of course, the targets will be selected surgically and with a galaxy-brain analysis of the impact of our actions. And ah of course, of course, uhm someone else should actually do the deed? Maybe some kid somewhere? Malm himself would in principle get his hands dirty, he just uh, hasn’t gotten around to it yet. He’s the brains of this outfit!

Well what does he think would happen if we listened to him? When the opponent has the most sophisticated surveillance technology and the most devastating weapons in existence? A couple of well-placed bombs, the oil companies fold, the system is brought to its knees, the spell is broken, blood is left unspilled, the blinkers come off of everybody’s eyes, then a radical transformation of every aspect of life and a magical eco-utopia? Are we on a matinée action movie? That really is the level of strategic thinking here. Even Jacobin is telling Malm to come off it, and these are the guys who sell DIY guillotine posters!

Reading Malm I was doubting myself: how is this taken seriously by anyone? What am I missing? Which is why it was so refreshing, coming out of “How to Blow Up a Pipeline?” to read Chris Oliveros’ new and excellent “Are You Willing to Die for the Cause?”, a graphic novel about the Québec revolutionaries of the 1960s. Different situation, but so many similarities! It’s all there: pseudo-intellectual windbags egging each other…

…the Che cosplay…

…the lazy “there would be even more damage if we don’t do this” rationalizing…

…the “it will be just property damage” good intentions…

…the poor kids not knowing what they’re getting into…

…the stupidly unnecessary deaths…

…the predictable reaction of the state…

The same course of action staring back at us, from sixty years ago! The same tragedies to avoid, for those who want to listen—and we’re lucky that most in the climate movement have, so far.

I don’t know what it is about Oliveros’ writing, or about his graphic style, that works so well at conveying the deadly, assured cluelessness of these fellows; their futility. I just hope that, sixty years from now, people will have managed to navigate out of this crisis without falling into the same traps, without the same kinds of self-inflicted wounds. And it’s possible. We are seeing progress on multiple fronts (too, too slow, yes), we have the high ground, and public opinion is vastly on our side. Let’s not blow it.

Recommendations from 2022

2022-12-31T00:00:00-08:00

When you look for a recipe online, do you quickly scroll past the long reminiscences about growing up on a farm and Nonna’s secret spices? Me too. So let’s just skip the preamble here and get to the good stuff:

Fiction

I had a blast with Turton’s “The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle”. I really couldn’t put it down… in fact I had so much fun that I read it all again a second time the moment I finished it! Without spoiling much, I would describe it as a combination of Groundhog Day, Agatha Christie mysteries, and Quantum Leap, and if any of those appeal to you, I think you’re going to love it.

DeWitt’s “The Last Samurai” was also fun, although a fun of a different kind. Denser, concerned with learning, exploring, non-conforming—concerned with genius, I suppose, but a genius that here feels within reach. It is also about parental and filial love, and it is surprisingly touching.

I’ve recommended many of Ursula LeGuin’s books before. This year I read “The Word for World is Forest”, and I think it is another gem. She explores colonialism, exploitation, violence, and cultural infection. Needless to say, it is a sad book. Also a very Taoist one.

Two more old books, but new to me. First, “The Great Gatsby”. How is it so good? I was dreading either a stiff solemn tragedy on ambition and hubris, or glitzy Leonardo DiCaprio, bootleg whiskey, and flappers. But Fitzgerald’s short book about class is neither. Instead it is fun, clever, nimble, quirky, beautifully written, and still relevant.

The other old book I only recently read is John Williams’ “Stoner”. I knew nothing about it—nor about Williams—when I picked it up at the bookstore, except that it was in the Staff Picks section. The cover was boring and one of the blurbs referred to the novel as “quiet.” It’s a campus book, and campus books tend to be rather meh. You are told what will happen to Stoner within the first paragraph, and it isn’t much of consequence. And yet, I think this is my favourite book of the year. It is wise, kind, observant, and it praises the persistent, dedicated, imperfect, and loving work that so many do every day to keep what is good alive.

Non-fiction

If you approach self-help books with the same kind of subtle shame I do (it’s hard to admit you may need help, and that you are naive enough to think you might find it in a place as full of quacks and hucksters and fakers as the self-improvement genre), you’ll find much to like in Schaffner’s “The Art of Self-Improvement”. Schaffner studies the self-help literature academically, distilling what the best of these books are trying to say, what do they value, how has their advice changed over time, and how our stance about improving ourselves bleeds into the political domain. The result is enlightening.

“How to Invent Everything”, by Ryan North, is a book that I’ve always wanted, but I had never known how to ask for it. Want to know how to make fertilizer, soap, or baking soda from scratch? Glass or steel? Simple machines, musical scales, paper? How to find salt or domesticate animals? It’s all here, under the premise that you are stuck back in time and need to get civilization going by yourself. More instructive by far than any classroom lectures I’ve attended—this is what popular science books should be. Very funny, very cool.

Davies’ “Extreme Economies” attempts to understand economics by looking at what happens when certain conditions of social life are at the edge: refugee camps, prisons, failed states, reconstruction after a disaster, extreme old age, and so forth. I appreciated the novelty of the idea more than its execution, but I still found it quite valuable.

Kate Beaton’s “Ducks”, a graphic memoir of Beaton’s two years working in the Alberta oil sands, is both deeply personal and broadly useful to understand what it’s like out there. I don’t know why the graphic medium is so good at conveying everyday life in the far north, but it works.—and Beaton is so talented at conveying emotion and thought visually, in a seemingly effortless manner, that the book is a joy to read. (Don’t take my word for it either! This book is my one point of overlap with Obama’s own book recommendations for the year.)

Finally, in Reilly’s “The Staff Engineer’s Path” I found a fantastic description of what it is I should be doing and thinking about at this stage of my career. It is thorough, kind, supportive, and full of practical advice. Highly recommended.

Poetry

“The Carrying”, by Ada Limón, spoke to me particularly well. Limón’s poems deal with both the mundane and the transcendental—and with the fact that you get to the latter via the former. They are like gardens: productive, weedy, a miniature universal struggle. They are full of life and death. Not every poem hits, of course, and Limón is very immersed in the United States. This is an American book, often a very NPR book. But when these elements are quieter, it’s also a humane, joyful, empathetic, sorrowful experience.

Film and TV

So much to share! But I have to start with the wonderful “Everything Everywhere All at Once”. What an exhilarating experience! Goofy and profound and fresh and thrilling.

Some fun movies: “Glass Onion”, while not as mind-blowingly good as “Knives Out”, is still excellent. Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig seem to be having a lot of fun, and we are all the better for it. “Confess, Fletch” is a light dry noir comedy, and shows that Jon Hamm can be quite funny. And after watching Val Kilmer’s appearance in the new Top Gun, I remembered an early movie of his that I thought was a classic, only to discover it is half-forgotten: “Top Secret!” Old comedy often grows stale but this is still so good—cheesy, zany, dumb fun.

On TV, I thought “Severance” was nearly perfect. Stylistically precise and gorgeous in its surreal and sterile corporate propaganda aesthetic; narratively tight and complex. The one small knock against it is that the finale leaves more out than in, and the second season won’t come out for a while, so it feels incomplete. “Slow Horses” is astute and twisty, and Gary Oldman is a delight in his role. “Only Murders in the Building” has a cheeky look at the true crime podcasting genre and great character interactions; both seasons so far have been quite enjoyable.

I’m surprising myself a bit by recommending something from the Star Wars franchise, but “Andor” was excellent as well. I read somewhere that it’s like The Wire on space, and while I certainly would not go that far, the comparison aims in the right direction: Andor is a sociological story of resistance and insurgence, with full-fledged characters with complex motivations. No lightsabers in sight.

Sports stuff

I started running more seriously again this year, and to a lesser extent, swimming. A few things have helped me a lot: for my running, the approach in Fitzgerald’s “80/20 Running” has been exceptionally good—it helped me realize I had been going too hard in previous years (leading to injury and an overall decreased mileage), and how to craft better running plans for myself. I’ve also made heavy use of my Garmin Forerunner 255, of some rolls of KT Tape, and of a Roll Recovery R8 Plus self-massager.

In the water, my big obstacle for the longest time was the lack of goggles that wouldn’t leak. No goggles I tried would help, and I tried a lot of them—I suppose they don’t make them with my head shape in mind—, which meant stopping frequently to drain them and putting up with the red itchy eyes afterward. However, this year I found the goggles from THEMAGIC5, which are custom-made to your face: you submit a face scan and get a 3D-printed fit for you. The effect is miraculous, with absolutely zero leaks. They are a bit pricey, but they essentially unlocked swimming for me. I love them.

Miscellaneous

The best source to navigate the war in Ukraine has been the series of columns from Lawrence Freedman in Comment is Freed. Such a bright strategic mind, with so much clarity of thought. Whether it is the possibility of nuclear war, the potential angles of a peace negotiation, or the tactical positions of each army, I learned a lot about how to think of these issues from Freedman’s approach. Similarly, Hannah Ritchie, in her Substack and Twitter feed (oh, Twitter…) cuts through the misinformation and doomscrolling of our climate crisis to present an evidence-based, highly numerate, and useful climate commentary.

One boardgame I enjoyed this year was Cascadia. Winner of the Spiel des Jahres, and based in the fauna of the Pacific Northwest, it’s a deep game with a moderately simple ruleset. Another one was also nominated to the same award: SCOUT, a trick-taking card game with even simpler rules but an amazing execution. And finally, the WASGIJ? puzzle series gives a good spin to the classic jigsaw puzzle model by asking you to assemble not what you see in the box, but what a character within sees, or what will happen later.

Yet again this was a difficult year for the world. I do think though that art, books, stories, and beauty provide not just—or not necessarily—escapism to cope, but a deep value worth fighting for; a window into what we actually are, what we want, and how we can reach contentment. I hope you find a nugget or two for yourself in the list above. Until next time!

(Previously: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, …)

For effective altruism, but against Effective Altruism

2022-12-24T00:00:00-08:00

There is nothing wrong, and much right, about promoting altruism. You are privileged and have more than you need; others need your surplus (be it resources or time); sharing it is good and laudable. Encouraging others to do the same is good and laudable too.

There is also nothing wrong, and much right, about striving for altruism to be effective. You could share your surplus to charitable efforts that achieve nothing, or to others that are almost certain to alleviate extreme suffering—indeed, to save lives. Personal sympathies for specific causes aside (and personal sympathies are quite important!), advocating for effective charities as the default target for our efforts is worthwhile.

Being an altruist, an effective altruist, seems commonsensically good. I wish altruism was well established in our society, and I wish altruists gravitated towards charities with proven benefits for those in dire need.

And so you may be forgiven if you find a community called “Effective Altruism” (EA) and assumed this is what it’s doing. It says it does, and it looks like it does at first, if you squint, and I suspect many in the community have been squinting for a long time. But its leaders have a tendency to follow philosophical rabbit holes that land them in positions that would seem satirical, were they not taken in earnest.

The core of the problem, I think, is that Effective Altruist leaders are not trying to be effective altruists, but maximizing altruists. They want to find the way in which they can do the most good, and they have the hubris to imagine they can do it. This maximization impulse is a black hole. It pulls every effort into the initiative with the greatest Expected Value.

This is how you get to longtermism, the current (but not first) cancer of EA. There are 8 billion of us today. There may be 8 trillion some day; there may be none if we go extinct. If we think that life is worth living, then 8 trillion is way better than 8 billion, and bringing about that future, eliminating the obstacles in its path, becomes the one thing that matters. This goal overrides everything: by this logic, poverty, famine, climate change, war, and genocide, while deplorable, are mere ripples in comparison to the catastrophe of extinction, or to the tragedy of failing to fulfill our galactic potential.

The conclusion of this stance is abhorrent, and longtermists, knowing it is unsellable, attempt to paper over its monstrousness with platitudes. They know it is a gruesome position. I sometimes suspect that, deep down, they are themselves not convinced of its validity. But they lock themselves within it via rhetorical tricks.

The main longtermist trick is disguised with mathematics—it consists of adding zeroes to the side of the equation you favour until you get the answer you want. For instance, via creative hand-waving, we can say that in the far future the Milky Way could support a ridiculously high number of human lives, say 10^58. If there’s no actual physical space for such a large number, we can always say some of those will live in simulation form. If you have a remotely minute chance of helping, via your actions, to bring about that future, or help those incomprehensible large numbers of humans be even remotely happy, then the maximization calculation overwhelms every other alternative to ease suffering in the world. And if you run the numbers and the longtermist solution does not come out on top? Just add another zero or two or ten to your expected number of humans in the far future and you’ll be all set. You can use any number you want from the vast unknowable future to justify your prefered alternative in the present.

The consequence is the exact opposite of being effective with our altruism: it entails the dismissal of attempts to ease actual suffering today, especially in the Global South. Longtermist leaders have advocated for focusing only on existential risks, for valuing lives in the developed world higher than those elsewhere (because of their greater potential to advance cutting-edge science), and for funding Artificial Intelligence research initiatives—led, it has to be said, by their friends and contacts—rather than bringing people out of poverty. They advocate for giving money to their peers and acolytes, because those are the people that really get it.

Today, Effective Altruism is licking its wounds from its association with the Sam Bankman-Fried implosion. Perhaps the movement will not recover, and perhaps that’s a good thing. And yet, I wish people separated actual effective altruism from the EA label. Lately, I’ve seen a lot of derision thrown at people trying to be effective with their altruism, and I think that’s unfortunate.

Do you donate your time or money to improve the lot in life of others? You are an altruist. (And if you don’t—why not? If you are reading this, you are probably luckier than most, living in relative luxury, and as Singer’s Drowning Child thought experiment illustrates, you are at least partially responsible to mitigate their suffering. Your generosity can quite literally save lives.)

Do you donate to causes that are likely to actually make a difference? You are trying to be an effective altruist. Please, keep sending your funds to global charities that have extensively demonstrated to have a good impact—GiveWell keeps the best list—, or to local charities you trust, and keep giving your time as best you can.

And do you think we’d be in a better spot if more of us did the same? Well, then you have the seeds of an effective altruism movement… but beware: movements evolve in the most unfortunate ways.

Recommendations from 2021

2021-12-29T00:00:00-08:00

To the persistent souls that still visit this resurrection plant of a blog, hi again! I often tell myself I’ll return to regular posts soon, and that will be true one day. In the meantime, as long as I’m around and remember where I left the keys, I will at least keep coming to share my list of yearly finds, hoping you will like some of them too. Here we go:

Fiction

Let’s start with Rivka Galchen, whom I was grateful to discover this year. I loved Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, in which we get a first-person account of the real life trial, for witchcraft, of Johannes Kepler’s mother (!). Darkly comical, but humane, never cold; Galchen’s writing gives me Ibargüengoitia vibes, partly in its commonsensical pragmatism in the face of historical aberrations. Like Ibargüengoitia, Galchen is also an autobiographical essayist, and her Little Labors collection, on motherhood and raising a baby, was fantastic. (For a sample of her writing, check out this article on nuclear fusion: she makes the subject’s mysteries both accessible and beautiful.)

It was through Galchen that I got to Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs Caliban, perhaps my favourite book of the year. I’m afraid to say too much about it, because I don’t want to spoil it for you. But I’ll say I found it very funny, very clever, very moving, and deliciously absurd.

Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships is a retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of the large cast of women involved—human and divine. A brilliant idea, well executed—the range of voices and experiences is eye-opening.

I laughed with the new translation, by Julia Lovell, of Journey to the West—especially on the first few chapters. I was unaware of the long Chinese tradition of the Monkey King character; his ridiculous hijinks are whimsical and dream-like. Also dream-like was Sussana Clarke’s Piranesi; like Mrs Caliban, this is perhaps a book best approached without too much research—just plunge in.

Three fun books: Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club (septuagenarians playing detective in a retirement home), Laurent Binet’s Civilizations (Incas and Aztecs dodge their guns-germs-and-steel trap and conquer Europe), and Jon J Muth’s graphic novel adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s The Seventh Voyage (an astronaut attempts to fix a spaceship clunker with the help of a time loop).

There were a couple of books I would not typically pick up, but I am glad I did. The first was Maggie Shipstead’s Astonish Me: an intergenerational drama starring ballet dancers. Extremely good; sharp and full of energy. The second—it was actually a book I did pick up, then almost dropped when I realized it was about a pandemic; I’ve got enough of pandemics for a good while thank you—was Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven. Despite striking a few false notes (a cartoon villain, some postapocalyptic tropes), on the whole it was great. It’s at its best when making the case for the simple pleasures and opportunities in everyday experience.

Non-fiction

A suggestion: if you will get and read only one of the books in this post, I think you should make it Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land. It’s a graphic journalism piece on the Dene, in the Northwest Territories. I thought it was illuminating, complex, honest, probing, humble, full of beautiful illustrations, of love for the land and of empathy for the people Sacco interviewed within.

Chelsea Vowel’s Indigenous Writes was sardonically enlightening on some of the same issues—of indigenous identity, culture, interactions with the Canadian government, treaties, stereotypes, law, and the day-to-day perspective and outlook of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people.

George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain was a real treat. It’s a book about writing and reading—about exploring what in a story makes it work, and why, and how can we use the same principles if at all. There is genuine love for literature here; Saunders’ advice is warm, practical, and full of compassion.

Speaking of practical advice, Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset has it too, though of a different kind. Early on, perhaps, you’ll read her description of the “scout mindset” and proudly think “oh yes that’s me,” but in the rest of the book Galef will show you how difficult it actually is to remain open to changing our positions. More importantly, and in contrast to the plethora of more fatalistic accounts of our cognitive flaws out there, she will provide good tools to help us get closer to that scout ideal.

One more non-fiction recommendation: Nina MacLaughlin’s Hammer Head. MacLaughlin was a journalist with a career crisis; she became a carpenter apprentice by chance. This memoir of her apprenticeship is deep—it’s a story of a change of professional identity, of craftsmanship and teamwork, of gender, of the wonder of turning trees into spaces for living, of the pride in being able to effect these transformations, of humbling mistakes, and of the endless road to mastery. As a very occasional and very amateur carpenter, I found a lot to like.

Miscellaneous

Succession finished its third season and continues to be immensely enjoyable. Dune on theatres was a hypnotizing experience. Get Back is a bit of a miracle: I grew up listening to these Beatles songs and now it turns out there is fascinating footage of the moments they sprung up, almost casually, on the spot. We’re in the midst of watching Money Heist; awesome so far.

I loved playing Disco Elysium—what a weird and idiosyncratic detective point-and-click game this is. My gaming group and I have only played a few sessions of Masks, but I’m also liking it so far. And on the Switch, my boy and I are currently going through our third playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and we are still not tired of it.

I now use Obsidian for note-taking, (following, kind of, the Zettelkasten method) and Dash for API documentation; I’ve been using both for months, pretty much daily, and I absolutely love them. Simple, well-made, useful. Also for work, the StaffEng podcast has lots of exactly the kind of advice and perspective I feel I needed at this point. All of these resources, by the way, I found via mentions by Lorin Hochstein, and if you work in software you would do well to check his Twitter feed and his excellent Resilience Engineering papers compilation.

And that’s it for the year! Thank you for coming around. If you do decide to try out any of these recommendations, please drop me a line—you can find out how fairly easily if you don’t know already. I would love to learn your thoughts.

I hope you have an off-the-charts spectacular 2022—or a calm and steady 2022, really, if that’s what you are after; after the past couple of years who could blame you. Lots of love and contentment, in any case.

(Previously: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009)

Recommendations from 2020

2020-12-31T00:00:00-08:00

Well, what a year.

But if you are reading this, you made it to the end. I hope that you and yours made it unscathed, and that whatever is brewing for 2021 is gentler for the world than what we’ve gone through.

As usual, I have a few recommendations to share as the year ends. Maybe you’ll find something new to like here.

Fiction

Is there a bad Strugatsky brothers novel? I have been going through them piecemeal over the years, and it seems to me they could do no wrong. This year it was Hard to be a God, in which a scientist from a technologically advanced, communist Earth is sent to another planet to observe the dealings of an alien society stuck in the cruelty, superstition, and oppression of the Middle Ages—and is ordered to not intervene. He can see all that’s wrong; he thinks he could stop the suffering; yet intervention may be counterproductive.

In a somewhat similar track, in Tyll, by Daniel Kehlmann, we get the story of a vagabond performer in times of war and plague. It is both sharp and humane, with just a touch of the fantastical. It’s also instructive—a camouflaged historical novel about the horrendous Thirty Years War. Kehlmann wrote another more clearly historical novel that I enjoyed this year as well, Measuring the World, on the lives and academic pursuits of the mathematician Gauss and the explorer von Humboldt; diametrically opposed yet harmonizing.

There is a fairy tale, Lucky Hans, about a fellow who gets a huge treasure for his work and sets out on a journey. He gradually trades it all away, happy with each seemingly detrimental exchange, until he has nothing. Henrik Pontoppidan took that structure for Lucky Per, another novel I enjoyed this year, despite its length and the self-centredness of Per, the protagonist, which perhaps made me cringe because I saw some of myself in him.

The wizard in Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea starts from a similar point, but goes in an entirely different direction: the hero’s journey here consists of restoring the balance after some early mistakes. I think Le Guin’s books are so brilliant not because she packs a lot of plot per page—though she does; this slim book could be a multi-volume set in lesser hands—but because she packs a lot of wisdom. She translated the Tao Te Ching, and I think there is some of that here too. We are lucky to have her writings, and I look forward to reading the rest of this series.

Non-fiction

I had my first run with social psychology in grad school, in the early 2000s, and I think now that it did some damage. “Researched showed” that we humans are not to be trusted: we will electrocute and might kill a stranger if asked to, we will brutalize our peers if given a police uniform and told to act as guards, we will not stop or call for help when we find someone in need. I would read these studies, surprised, and think “if the time comes, I need to do better than that,” fearing that perhaps I actually would not. But I should have relied on that instinct of surprise more: in one of my favourite books this year, Rutger Bregman’s Humankind, I learned that most of this initial research was deeply flawed, and in some cases outright deceptive. Bregman shows, with plenty of examples and findings across disciplines, that this cynical view of human nature is wrong. The large majority of us, across cultures and time scales, actually tend to be kind and protective of each other; this is our strength. We can be ruthless, of course, especially if we think ruthlessness is the way to live, which is why it’s particularly important to spread the word that it is not. This book restored my faith in us, and I recommend it deeply.

Where Bregman clarified my mind, Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa expanded it. It is a philosophical, yet empirically informed, exploration of animal consciousness; a lot of it based on underwater observations, because our farthest-removed relatives live under water. I saw it described somewhere as “philosophy in a wetsuit,” and it’s a fitting description. While I don’t think it solves the mystery of the subjective experience, it helps illuminate it.

On a very different topic, but no less consequentially, Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth demolished and reconstructed my understanding of economic policy. Kelton’s plain prose and clear arguments make it easier to understand what I think is the economics equivalent of a Copernican revolution. I knew Modern Monetary Theory existed—I just didn’t know I would find it so straightforwardly true. But be warned: if Kelton lifts the veil for you like she did for me, you’ll be endlessly annoyed by the inane mainstream political commentary wondering “how are we going to pay for all these government programs” or lamenting “the national debt that we’re passing on to our children and grandchildren.”

Annie Duke’s How to Decide is a handbook—a set of guided exercises, with commentary—that I found quite useful. It was initially meant to be a companion of her (also very good) Thinking in Bets, and it drove home some of the points of that book that I had only glossed over before.

Finally, Sarah Cooper’s (yes, that Sarah Cooper’s) 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings was a lot of embarrassing fun. I confess I had independently, and I think unconsciously, discovered some of these “tricks,” and having them described as cynical ploys on the page, along with those I’ve seen from others, helped inoculate me from that low-level, counterproductive organizational sparring.

Miscellaneous

I think I only went to the movies a couple of times this year, before the pandemic closed it all down! But I was glad that one of those times was for Parasite; if you haven’t seen it yet, I suggest you do. The less I say about it the better.

We did watch some TV, but oddly for a time of lockdowns, far less than previous years. I liked both seasons of The Umbrella Academy, and, so far, the first season of The Man in the High Castle.

The piano has been my Covid hobby. We bought a digital piano—a Roland HP702, which I love—in late July, and I have been playing it every day since. Among the resources that I’ve found most useful, I would recommend the Theory Lessons website and app, a great primer on music theory for a beginner like me, and Carl Humphries’ The Piano Handbook, which I’m slowly going through.

My boardgaming group met very little in person this year, and it transformed into a Discord-based role-playing group. We have been playing a campaign using the Dungeon World system, which is accessible, flexible, and fun. (I have also been listening to the hilariously ridiculous Spout Lore podcast, an “actual play podcast” from some great Victoria-based improv comedians.)

With the family, I’ve been playing some escape room games that I think are very well done. We liked The Dungeon from Adventure Games, and pretty much every scenario from the Unlock! series that we’ve tried.

Speaking of escape rooms, I also decided to try out the Escape Mail puzzles from Mobile Escape, and I have been having a lot of fun solving them so far.

This was an odd, hard year, but I have many reasons for gratitude.

I’m grateful that most of my family remains healthy, that we’re happily employed, and still discovering beauty around us.

I’m grateful for medical science—I believe the vaccines rolling out these days are the biggest scientific success of my lifetime.

I’m grateful to live in British Columbia, where we have the guidance of a great Public Health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, who preaches kindness and calm.

I’m grateful at the prospects of a little more sanity in the political discourse down South.

And I’m grateful for the still slim but slowly growing chances that I will get to see, hug, and kiss my family far away, perhaps within a year or so.

May you have a healthy and happy 2021.

(Previously: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009)

Recommendations from 2019

2019-12-31T00:00:00-08:00

The year wraps up, the decade (depending on how you count) wraps up, and so here I am, dusting up this blog once more to share some of the things I enjoyed in the past twelve months:

Fiction

The most intriguing and beautifully written fiction book I read this year has to be Davies’ West, in which, baffling everyone around him, an American settler and mule breeder leaves her ten-year-old daughter behind to go on a solo expedition to find the fantastical creatures that would match the—prehistoric—bones recently discovered in Kentucky. The world treats him and his daughter with predictable harshness, but the author is tender to them, and explores alienation, grief, vocation, extinction, displacement, and the wilderness in a very slim, careful text.

Armitage’s revised translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, was an enjoyable read. Perhaps the alliteration that Armitage emphasized so keenly in his translation gets in the way somewhat, but on the whole the story, the rendering, and the illustrations are all quite compelling.

The tale of Sir Gawain is about preordained death, and so is Vila-Matas’ short story El Día Señalado (in Spanish; no translation as far as I am aware), in which a fortune teller predicts the day of the year and the conditions in which a girl will die. We follow her cycles of anxiety each year as the date approaches and she attempts to avoid the predicted conditions. I liked the story’s arc as well as its incisive and unexpected observations about Mexico.

Recent years have given us a number of Roberto Bolaño’s unfinished works that I sadly found I could not recommend. It would seem that, after his death, the vultures feasted on his archives, publishing anything and everything they found. Despite my better instincts, I would buy and read it all, with the result that I had inadvertently soured somewhat on his works as a whole. This is why it was such a pleasure to read his Monsieur Pain, one of the first books he published and which I had not been able to find before. While it’s not his best work, it features a lot of what I like about him—his mixture of precise and ambiguous imagery, the turns of a scene from the banal to the nightmarish, that fantastical but plausible combination of Borges and Lynch.

Non-fiction

I loved Goff’s Galileo’s Error and wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in the philosophy of consciousness. I remember a conversation with a friend, ten or fifteen years ago, in which I claimed (in lucky ignorance) that deep down everyone is stumped by the question of consciousness. He said that this was not the case—Dennett had explained it—and I went, checked out Dennett, and was thoroughly disappointed: it didn’t seem to me he was even in the right ballpark, yet without the proper training I could not explain why with any rigor, nor find satisfactory alternate explanations. This issue lay dormant for me until fairly recently, when I learned of Chalmers and then of Goff, who in his blog and his recent book explains, to a wide audience, with kindness and patience but without dumbing down, the state of the philosophical debate on consciousness. It’s far more fascinating than I expected; as fascinating as the subjective experience of consciousness itself should have led me to expect.

Another great find for me was Tetlock and Gardner’s Superforecasting. Tetlock has done the kind of research that I would have loved to conceive of and carry out: he analyzed the forecasting accuracy of experts, over many years, and though he found it seriously lacking (on the whole, hardly better than chance), he discovered that some people are actually great forecasters, and went on to investigate why, and how to transfer that skill to the rest of us. The book is enjoyable, smart, and in its own way, inspiring.

On the topic of mathematical thinking, I thought that Page’s The Model Thinker was informative and useful. Page walks through a large number of models to conceive of a situation, and while the book is uneven, at the very least it provides the seed of insights one can pursue by oneself. Finally, I thought Broussard’s Artificial Unintelligence gives the current AI hype a good cold shower. I would particularly recommend it to those for whom computing and AI appear alien and threatening.

Movies and TV

This was a great year for movies and TV, in my opinion. I had tons of fun with Knives Out; so much I had to watch it twice: first just to enjoy it, then to understand how it was done. It’s one of those films you’ll enjoy best if you don’t know anything about it, so I won’t comment on it further. Just resist the urge to even watch the trailer and go find it in the theatres, if you can.

While I don’t usually go for a horror movie, I thought Us was excellent. Great atmosphere and performances; ideas, scenes, and social commentary that stay with you far longer than the thrill itself. Jojo Rabbit was great too: a combination of comedy and gut-punching tragedy that must have been very hard to pull off. And Julianne Moore was incredible in Gloria Bell, a movie that is down to earth, guardedly hopeful, and wise.

My favourite TV show this year (though it was a close call) was Russian Doll. Any story with a Groundhog Day premise gets my attention; this one plays with the plot with intelligence, a couple of great twists, and an increasing sensation of needing to right a world gone askew.

The other contender was Succession, which is deliciously nasty and sharp (I’ve yet to watch the second season; please do not spoil it for me). I also enjoyed The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, though if I’m honest, only the first season. The pilot is stunningly good on its own.

Others

I found a great podcast series from Canadaland: Commons. Currently exploring Canadian dynasties, the previous season focused on the oil sector, and was quite eye-opening. Canadaland also produced Thunder Bay, an excellent walk through the racism, corruption, and homelessness that plague a city most of us rarely think about. Cautionary Tales was another informative podcast this year: good popularization of social science research, relevant for everyday life.

And finally, a boardgame recommendation for a game I only tried once, recently, but stayed with me: the very asymmetric Root. Four players with very different goals and game mechanics play on the same board and can cooperate or hinder each other (one plays for industrialization, another for military dominance, a third for class struggle, and the fourth for solo adventuring) in the context of a forest filled with cute critters. Such disparate mechanics and goals should make for an unbalanced game, and yet it all worked well together. I expect I’ll be playing this one much more.

I’m happy to say 2019 was another good year for me and my family. I made a point of disconnecting more from the news firehose last year—from Facebook (pretty much everywhere), from Twitter (on my phone), from obsessively checking the dumpster fire in the most powerful country in the world—and the benefits were clear to me. I plan to continue along this path.

As part of this disconnection, I almost did not touch this blog at all. I did not announce, for instance, that I switched jobs midyear, leaving Limbic Media after six years and joining Workday; I did not drop by to say that I’m having a tremendously great time in my new position. I did not write about my disappointment, when going on a bit of a pilgrimage to see Remedios Varo’s works at the Museo de Arte Moderno, that the museum’s Varo collection was entirely in storage after being featured in a major exhibition that I missed by a couple of weeks. I did not mention that Mushi the Cat went missing from the family that adopted him (I don’t believe I had mentioned that we had to give him up for adoption either), nor that he was thankfully found again. I didn’t mention I gave a couple of talks, after years away from the microphone. I didn’t come to presume to tell you who to vote for in the Canadian Federal election this time around.

I’m not sure how to feel about that. Bittersweet? I would have liked to share some of those things, but I don’t believe you needed them. Nevertheless I think I’ll come to the blog more often in 2020, though I’m not sure what for, how frequently, or when. Subscribe if you want to, but I promise nothing :-).

I wish you a happy 2020!

(Previously: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009)

Recommendations from 2018

2018-12-31T00:00:00-08:00

It’s the end of the year again, which as far as this blog is concerned, means it’s time to dive into my memories of 2018 to bring you some gems you might like. Here we go!

Fiction

This was another good year for fiction. I particularly liked Miller’s Circe, a modern take on Greek mythology from the point of view of the world’s first divine witch. The premise may sound a bit conceited, but the gods feel real, powerful, and vain; while humans, short-lived, sometimes genial, wash through Circe’s shores. The book is a page-turner, but a wiser and kinder one than I anticipated.

Patrick DeWitt had a new book out this year, French Exit, and it was excellent: eccentric characters, crisp dialogue, fun settings. When I was done I wanted more of it, but—as the book warns from the very start—all good things must end.

Malas Hierbas, by Pedro Cabiya, is a very entertaining story of a Caribbean zombie passing off as a pharmaceutical executive, trying to find a way to become alive again. I understand that the English translation (Wicked Weeds) is quite good, but I haven’t read it.

Meanwhile, in Barba’s República Luminosa (not translated yet, as far as I can tell), a city’s bands of roving homeless children begin to take control, to organize, to terrorize, and to coopt the more privileged youth to their side. It’s a surreal and subtly horrifying ride.

Speaking of horrifying, Lewis’s The 2020 Commission Report is based on the premise that Kim’s North Korea attacks Trump’s United States in the year 2020, and that the book—the report—is the best effort of the US Congress to understand how it all spiraled out of control. Lewis is an arms control expert, and what makes this book nightmarish is that pretty much everything that goes awfully wrong in it has actually gone wrong; we’ve just been lucky that it hasn’t had the same outcome yet. Despite the horror, this tale of annihilation was far more fun than it had a right to be.

I also enjoyed Alderman’s The Power, a tale in which women discover an inner source of extraordinary physical power, immediately and radically shifting the gender power imbalance, and smashing the patriarchy—and a lot more with it. It’s a bit on the nose, but I think it needed to be: I learned a lot from it about our real gender dynamics, and I suspect you might, too.

Finally, North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was lots of fun. It’s a kind of Groundhog Day story, in which the protagonist relives his life after each death, retaining the memories of what’s happened in his earlier lives. It’s probably one or two hundred pages too thick, but still quite engaging.

Non-fiction

Harper’s The Fate of Rome deals with the shocks that nature dealt the Roman Empire, in the form of climate change and pandemics, weakening it, and ultimately helping bring about its downfall. History has evolved a lot, being now much more informed by the creative use of forensic archaeology, climate science, DNA sampling, and epidemiology, and the results are eye-opening.

Clear’s Atomic Habits, a self-help book, actually helped me. It provides good, practical advice on how to foster the kind of habits we want and break those we don’t. I had to squint past the folksy anecdotes at the start of each chapter, but it was worth it: the discussions on how habits shape identity, and on how to tweak that system in our favour, were enlightening.

Two other books with good practical advice: first, Nosrat’s Salt, Falt, Acid, Heat made me a far better cook, not by giving me easy recipes to follow, but by helping me understand the underlying principles and tools available in the kitchen. Read it all and you’ll find it has somehow built up your intuition in ways you’ll find useful and gratifying three times a day. It is also beautifully illustrated.

And second, Metz and Owen’s 99 Bottles of OOP provides a clear example on how to approach programming problems with a test-driven development perspective, how to tackle naming challenges, and when and why to create abstractions. Down to earth mentoring, easy to follow, immediately applicable. I’ve been programming for many years, but I still found Metz and Owen’s book improved my skills almost overnight.

Children’s Literature

My daughter and I have enjoyed reading through the stories in Nagaraja’s Buddha at Bedtime many times. They are approachable, relevant, and wise. Not really religious, as the title might lead you to believe; just calm and mindful. Nagaraja has two other books for kids on the same vein, and they are just as good.

We also discovered Woodcock’s Coding Games in Scratch, an easy to follow guide, and we’ve been having lots of fun programming games together: the platform makes it easy to have a full game coded in an hour or two, and it’s pretty amazing to see it unfold.

Podcasts

I’ve recommended Duncan’s Revolutions podcast before, but I feel like I need to do it again: he’s now going over the Mexican Revolution, which I believed I understood well already, and I find that I get a lot more context and insight from Duncan’s narrative.

I thought the first season of Wooden Overcoats, about competing funerary homes in a small English village, was hugely entertaining: great voice acting, fun situations, good writing. And the Beef and Dairy Network Podcast, a satirical improvisational show supposedly about the cattle industry, gets pretty weird and features great comedy actors.

Finally, while not a podcast, I’ve been meditating daily using Headspace this whole year, and loving the results. I should be able to meditate unassisted, but I could never do it regularly before, and I’m grateful for the range of assistance that Headspace gives me, and the ways it helped me establish the meditation habit.

Boardgames

Three boardgame recommendations: first and foremost, Secret Hitler, a Mafia-like social deduction fable in which liberals try to keep fascists out of power, while fascist plot to keep Hitler’s identity secret, and to get him into the Chancellery. It’s very easy for liberals to shoot themselves in the foot, weakening the republic and its norms as they try to root the fascists out. The game art is quite pleasing, its mechanics are better than most similar party games, and its theme is on point for our times.

Food Chain Magnate, the most recent game from Splotter, is, like most of their previous games, sharp, balanced, and rewarding. It can be played online here for free, and maybe it should—the accounting is all automated online, so you can better focus on your food chain franchise.

Flamme Rouge was a joy to play. You take the role of a team of two cyclists, and you win if one of them is the first in the game to cross the finish line. Every other team will have as much energy available as yours, so it all comes down to efficiency and placing your cyclists tactically in the group. The rules are simple and can be explained in ten minutes, but they fit the theme of the game beautifully: drafting, elevation, exhaustion—all of these concepts become accessible and intuitive.

Movies and TV

The best movie I watched this year came late: Cuarón’s Roma, available on Netflix, was just undescribably good. It’s gorgeously shot and directed, but, far more importantly, I could not stop thinking as I was watching it the great extent to which it was True: true to me, as a child born in Mexico in the seventies, true as in honest and heartfelt, true architecturally and contextually, true as art should be. Roma does not show my life’s events, but it shows my life like no other movie I can think of. It’s a masterpiece; I know I’ll go back to it many times.

The Coen Brother’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an antology of six short Western stories, also available on Netflix, was funny, dark, cruel, and touching; one hard candy after another. I think it’s one of the best Coen movies yet.

Another good dark movie was Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin. Stalin dies, and those around him jostle for power, while everyone else just tries to do whatever it takes to stay alive in this demented regime. The humour here is lucid and macabre, but I know it’s not to everyone’s liking,

Finally, I was told I should see Sorry to Bother You without reading anything about it, so as not to spoil it. It was good advice, and I pass it on to you: just go see it, if you can find it.

So. It was another good year for us, and as is often the case, it feels strange to type this in the knowledge of the disparity between our small lives and the bizarre wellspring of despair of the daily news cycle. And this brings to mind one more recommendation to wrap up this post: to disconnect more.

After struggling with the unfolding calamities in newsfeeds everywhere, I decided to get them all out of my phone: no Twitter, no Facebook, no news apps—and nothing at all at night. I still check in on my computer, now and then, reading the news once or twice a day like the gods intended. I still care. But now most of the frantic daily stuff looks small, pointless, and overheated, a recipe for frustration and rage. I’m glad to be out of the loop. Instead of reaching for my phone, I keep a book nearby, and a list of long reads on my computer. I feel a lot saner and more focused as a result. Maybe you’d like to try it?

I hope 2019 goes wonderfully for you. Happy New Year!

(Previously: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009)

Victoria's Municipal Election, 2018

2018-10-13T00:00:00-07:00

Victoria is having its municipal election just a week from now, on October 20th, and the streets, including our own sidewalk, are lined with lawn signs.

This post lists some resources I found useful in deciding who to vote for, and then my rationale and endorsements.

Resources

The City of Victoria elections page is one impartial place to start looking for information on the candidates
Victoria Votes has useful summaries on all candidates. Generally speaking, I found the site’s commentary a bit lax, though not misleading—reading the candidates websites, conveniently linked from the Victoria Votes site, you can find more relevant details
Victorians for Transportation Choice has candidate responses to transportation questions, which have turned out to be one of the main dividing issues among candidates. I feel the questions are smart, and the answers give good hints both about the stance of the candidates and about their understanding of civic matters
The School Board Trustee candidate platforms are, as a rule, ambiguous, mushy, and released too late, and it’s difficult to really assess where they stand. I guess, since there are only nine candidates for twelve positions, not standing out too much is a good strategy. But this makes it difficult to make an informed decision. On a pinch, the BC Teachers’ Federation’s endorsements page helps by providing a list of progressive, labour-minded candidates
Sexual education is a wedge issue elsewhere in Canada, but thankfully our school district is mostly enlightened in this regard. Sex Ed Is Our Right collected trustee candidates’ stances on the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity program, and if you scroll down to district 61 you will see that most candidates support it

Where We Stand

Four years ago, I somewhat reluctantly endorsed Dean Fortin over Lisa Helps. Helps won a narrow victory and went on to prove that my concerns with her were unfounded. She has been an effective mayor in a period of significant growth in Victoria. She listens to city residents, she is receptive to First Nations issues, she promotes neighbourhood community building, and she has steered the city to an (even more) enviable position within Canada.

The two main issues in town today, I would say, are transportation (or, really, the expansion of the bike lane network) and housing.

The first should be a non-issue. In Victoria’s streets, as in most of the world, the car is king. We know this situation is expensive and unsustainable. We know that walking and cycling whenever possible make us healthier and keep our air clean and our wallets full. So we need to slow down car traffic and to build a cycling network, in order to make car alternatives safer and more compelling.

So the city begins building a modest network of separated bike lanes downtown, and to consider lower speed limits, and—as entitled factions tend to do—the Car Clown Task Force comes out in full force, complaining about a war on cars, about gridlock, about lack of parking, about the choice of street for a bike lane, about construction costs, and so on, until they’ve convinced themselves that they’re being oppressed so hard they won’t be able to come out of their driveway. But I’ve been through downtown since the new bike lanes opened, both driving and cycling. Driving is still just as fine. Cycling is unbelievably better. We should keep building this network.

The second issue is serious, and while one may argue that Helps and Council should have seen this coming and reacted more quickly, I think they just got caught up in the wave with inappropriate short-term options. The problem is that housing here is expensive—in Canada, I think Vancouver and Toronto are the only cities with a worse housing problem.

We basically have a lot of people moving into town (it’s a great place to live!), and while construction cranes are now a seemingly permanent fixture in town, there are not enough spots for everybody yet, and in particular for families with kids. All of this raises rents, mortgages, and property taxes, and therefore makes living here unaffordable. It increases homelessness. It makes the prospect of having to move extremely stressful for many. So we need a denser city, but it takes time to build up, it takes effort to fight NIMBYism, and it takes prudence to grow responsibly and maintain a green, laid-back city with a beautiful character.

Last election, we had two strong left-of-centre candidates (Helps and Fortin). This year, the stronger opponents to Helps are further to the right. Stephen Hammond and his New Council slate have predictably toady proposals, such as tax cuts, increasing police budgets, and stopping the bike lane network. Similarly, Michael Geoghegan wants to fight the current bike lane placements, and to loosen energy efficiency standards in new construction. To the extent that his platform has themes, they are to make city governance more like Langford’s (a Victoria suburb) and to get money from the provincial and federal governments to solve our problems (which, sure, I want that too, but good luck).

Endorsements

Mayor

This year, the choice for mayor was easy. The incumbent, Lisa Helps has been an effective and capable leader, with a promising vision for Victoria. She definitely has my vote.

Council

The vote for councillors is as important as the one for mayor! They help shape the agenda and provide us with better representation at City Hall.

You can vote for up to eight councillors, but note that it is good strategy to only vote for your favourites, as filling up a ballot increases the chances that candidates you are less keen on squeak past your preferred choices.

Jeremy Loveday is my top choice for City Council. I have personally seen how active and purposeful he’s been as a councillor fighting for the civic good. When we began organizing to improve our neighbourhood, he was there with us, giving us advice and information. I will gladly vote for him.
Grace Lore, I think, will bring a useful perspective to Council: as a working mother, and as a renter, she brings to her platform underappreciated issues of family housing and childcare that, if implemented, will benefit us all
The Together Victoria slate (formed by Laurel Collins, Sarah Potts, and Sharmarke Dubow) also has my support. Its three candidates will help address the affordability problems in Victoria
Ben Isitt is, finally, also a reliable, progressive choice for Council, and I encourage you to support him, too

School Board

Given the difficulty in assessing differences between trustee candidates, I encourage you to vote for the candidates endorsed by the BCTF. In alphabetical order:

Vincent Gornall
Diane McNally
Ryan Painter
Rob Paynter
Jordan Watters

Amalgamation

In our ballots, we will also have a referendum question on whether to establish a Citizen’s Assembly to explore the amalgamation of Victoria with Saanich. I am, in general, averse to amalgamation (I prefer small organizations over large; I saw the damage that amalgamation brought, and continues to bring, to Toronto), but this question is merely about establishing an Assembly to explore the issue, and about Victoria and Saanich, two municipalities that are joined at the hip. I will reluctantly vote Yes in the referendum question.

Free Money for Charity

2018-03-28T00:00:00-07:00

Many of the most impactful charities around the world are not set to receive tax-deductible donations from Canada. If you want to donate to them in a tax-deductible way, you need to find a registered charity in Canada that will reliably pass along your donations, and provide you with a tax receipt.

These days, the best way to do that is to donate to one or several of the campaigns set up by Rethink Charity Forward (RC Forward), within the CHIMP platform. This is how I manage a good chunk of my monthly donations (to a Global Health Fund, to GiveDirectly, to an Animal Welfare Fund, and a small sum to contribute to RC Forward’s operations).

The reason I post this is that, due to a CHIMP promotion, for the next week I can send three of you a CHIMP referral which, should you accept it, will give both your new account and my current account $10 to donate to the charities of our choice.

That’s potentially a total of $60 which can go to very worthwhile causes. Please consider joining! If you want one of these referrals, let me know, soon, at jorge.aranda (AT) cuevano.ca, and I’ll send it your way.

Recommendations from 2017

2017-12-31T00:00:00-08:00

Another year over! And as I learned this year, whatever the news and the grand-scale history, our small lives carry on, if they can, cooking and enjoying breakfast, making funny faces to our kids, watching the birds and the trees on the way to work, and trying to find love, beauty, humour, skill, and good ideas around us.

In that spirit, and following my little yearly tradition of sharing what I’ve found, these are some of the things I enjoyed the most in 2017:

The book that surprised and delighted me the most has to be Wilson’s new translation of “The Odyssey”. I had read the book in Spanish a long time ago, more in an effort to pay my literary dues than for fun, and I had found it obtuse and remote; a dusty relic. I have the sense, perhaps not wholly justified, that large egos over the centuries have tried their hand at translating Homer in an effort to impress us with their flowery language, rather than in an effort to translate. But in Wilson’s version the text is raw, fresh, human; it pulsates with life and blood. It helps me understand why others before me worshipped the ancient gods the way they did, the mixture of fear and curiosity they must have felt when seeing a stranger come to shore, or when landing their ship in a foreign island, and the attraction to the story that made them huddle in silence to listen to a poet deliver the next installment of their epics.

In a previous post I had mentioned how much I like Roald Dahl’s children books, but I’ve now read “Kiss Kiss”, a collection of some of his adult short stories, and I like him even more. That same spice is here, the same eye for twisted souls, the same storytelling strategy of plots that spiral into the absurd and nevertheless work well. I also loved the Strugatsky Brothers’ “Roadside Picnic”, a great take on an incomprehensible interstellar visit.

In literature in Spanish, I thought Villalobos’ “No Voy a Pedirle a Nadie que me Crea” was marvellously funny. He has the same deadpan humour that Ibargüengoitia had, a great ear for character voices, and, in this book, a page-turning plot as well. Another excellent find was Pauls’ “El Pudor del Pornógrafo”, an earnest, impassioned, and claustrophobic epistolar novel, a bit of Kafka and a bit of Lynch. Finally, Zambra’s short story collection, “Mis Documentos”, though a mixed bag, has some real gems.

Three great non-fiction books: Duncan’s “The Storm before the Storm”, Brown’s “Building Powerful Community Organizations”, and Kleppmann’s “Designing Data-Intensive Applications”. I still love Duncan as a podcaster—I continue being an avid listener of his Revolutions series—, and his jump to the printed page is just as good as his other work, and topical for the state of the American republic today. If you are concerned about that state, or the state of your own country, city, or neighbourhood, Brown’s handbook is a great guide to get started organizing a better world. And Kleppmann’s book is simply one of the best technical books for my line of work that I can think of. If you work with databases, queues, concurrent processes, or anything along these lines, my guess is you’ll find many insights here.

There are so many good podcasts around these days! Among those that I particularly enjoyed, the first one has to be the hilarious “My Dad Wrote a Porno”. Because if your dad tells you he’s been writing raunchy erotic literature, and that he goes by the pen name Rocky Flintstone, I think one of the best things you can do to stay sane is to gather with your best friends, read his ouvre, and absolutely tear it apart. It makes me laugh so hard that my face hurts.

Now, on the more informative podcasting front, Adamson’s “History of Philosophy without any gaps” is fun and accessible, (though I think maybe one or two gaps would have been alright), and Bortolotti’s “Canadian Couch Potato” podcast, a companion to his blog, provides professional, consistent, and trustworthy financial advice.

“American Vandal”, a Netflix TV show, was another great discovery. It’s an antidote for the seriousness and the tropes of true-crime podcasts and shows, which is a good enough reason to recommend it, but it also has good writing and pitch-perfect performances. It also made me laugh a lot.

I recently wrote about my love for Twilight Struggle and Go, so I won’t talk more about those games here, but there were two other boardgames that I liked this year. The first is Terraforming Mars, which is perhaps what you would get if you developed the fantastic Race for the Galaxy card game into a longer, but still tight and balanced, boardgame. The second is T.I.M.E. Stories, a cooperative game and a mashup of Quantum Leap with a Groundhog Day mechanic. I’ve played a handful of scenarios, and they have all been different, satisfying, and challenging in different ways.

On the computer, my six-year-old and I spent many fun hours working a farm in Stardew Valley, a cute and versatile game without any Farmville-esque psychological traps. When playing alone, I had the most fun with Darkest Dungeon, a kind of dungeon-crawling X-Com cousin, and (on my phone) with Dreamquest, a poorly drawn but well designed deck-building game.

Thanks to everyone who gave me tips to some of the above; I hope you’ll find something to like here. And if you have any recommendations for me, please share them! I’m easy to find. Here’s to a happy and healthy 2018!

(Previously: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009)

Over a Hundred Years of Research

2017-11-17T00:00:00-08:00

I agree with everything Greg Wilson wrote here, and I had been thinking along similar lines after recent incidents such as:

the haughty response from sociologists to Cathy O’Neil’s New York Times op-ed, in which she despairs at the lack of academic involvement in algorithmic accountability
the sarcastic replies to Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s observation that schools don’t usually teach us about how to go from data to wisdom
the sneers at Twitter’s seeming inability to deal with the social problems in its platform

In all of these cases, reactions from humanities academics tend to express an exasperation with how little society minds them. “Ha, Cathy O’Neil is laughable, there’s entire research centres dedicated to this!” “Pfff, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, may I introduce you to the fields of Epistemology and Science and Technology Studies? You may like them.” “Geez Twitter, we’ve been researching status for over a hundred years. Why doesn’t anybody study this?” And, to some extent, I see where these critiques come from. After all, if you have dedicated your life to the study of a problem, and the world seems to ignore your work, or to pretend you’re not around, it’s understandable if you feel frustrated. But I think this natural reaction is misguided.

As I see it, the mission of academia is twofold: to explore outstanding questions, and to explain our understanding to the rest of society. Research without dissemination leads to isolation, to the ivory tower; dissemination without research, to stagnation. From this stance, evidence that the public knows nothing about your decades of volumes and treatises should be classified as a failure of your field; a failure to fulfill your mission. The healthy reaction to cases like the above should be “hmm, how can we make ourselves clearer?”, not “lol look at these ignoramuses.”

I did interdisciplinary research. Coming from computer science, I studied, and truly enjoyed, sociology, epistemology, philosophy, and organizational science. But it was not easy to crack them, and most people in the mainstream don’t have the time, the resources, or the inclination to do a second degree. The idea that the average person is going to meet you where you are is a fantasy; the task and the challenge is to meet them where they are. So, if your field is over a hundred years old— where are its entry points for lay people? Where are the texts that present the findings that citizens and policy makers should know, in an accessible format and without sacrificing substance? Where are the articles or blog posts where regular folks can learn about new developments? If these don’t exist, or if they can’t yet be produced because research is inconclusive, or because these are genuinely thorny concepts, then that’s hardly a failure to pin on the confused lay person, and you should not wear your rarefied isolation as a badge of honour.

Twilight Struggle and Go

2017-11-16T00:00:00-08:00

For the past few years, I have been playing two boardgames online quite regularly: Twilight Struggle and Go. I usually play them asynchronously—Go in the Dragon Go Server, and Twilight Struggle through Steam (there is also an iPad app linking to the same server). I love making a move or two when I need a break, and though games tend to last weeks or months in both cases, I like how their arcs intersect with my daily life.

Frankly, I am still quite bad at Go, but it has been on my mind a lot recently due to the AlphaGo Zero developments. To beat Go masters, previous versions of AlphaGo (Google’s AI Go player) used a combination of machine learning techniques, recorded historical games, and human expert input. But AlphaGo Zero started from scratch, with no reliance on recorded games. It reached a level high enough to beat the previous champions a few weeks after starting training.

It is by all accounts both the most advanced Go player we’ve seen, and the most foreign; not merely a better execution of known strategies, but a new and (in my case, impossibly) hard to understand approach to the game.

Now, I don’t care so much that we’ve found a way to program computers to beat us at it (though that is very cool), and I don’t care for the silly singularity fears and ecstasies that Artificial Intelligence triggers in some folks (except to the extent that this distracts their efforts from more important issues). But I do care about the idea that a boardgame that has perhaps been with us for four millenia has had this infusion of freshness and creativity in our lifetimes. It’s as if aliens had independently discovered the game, too, and played it better than us, and, though we can’t understand each other, they are letting us watch over their shoulders and learn.

Twilight Struggle, on the other hand, is not likely to continue being played four millenia from now: it is too historically specific, and its ruleset too fiddly to travel easily across generations. But these qualities do not affect the game in the here and now. It’s a great game, complex and knotty, and since it’s less well known than Go, I’d like to describe it briefly.

Twilight Struggle is an asymmetrical game about the Cold War, for two players. One plays the United States, the other, the Soviet Union. The Cold War in the game is driven by three main factors: first, the Domino Theory of ideological contagion and regime change, second, the inevitability of world events, and third, the spectre of nuclear annihilation.

Both powers attempt to maintain their presence around the globe, blocking their opponent from achieving an overwhelming dominance in any region. They have a glimpse at some of the events bubbling up (revolts in Vietnam, charismatic Communist or Capitalist regional leaders angling for power, the Cuban Missile Crisis), and must position themselves to take advantage of these events, kick them down the road, or at least try to mitigate them. And though, by the sick logic of Great Empires, they must assert their authority everywhere, sponsoring coups, meddling in local governments, and so on (if they don’t, their opponent will), the more aggressively they act, the closer they bring the world to a nuclear holocaust.

This morbid dynamic of whether to push things right to the brink of destruction in an already chaotic world, just to deny your opponent any room to maneuver, is the stroke of genius of the game. Novice or reckless players end blowing up the world a lot—a gloomy realization these days—, and though with experience (and a good guide) one improves humanity’s chances of survival, the spectre of annihilation gives the game a long-running tension.

There is randomness in Twilight Struggle, and between players with similar skill a couple of bad hands or a string of unlucky dice rolls may doom the less fortunate player’s chances. But provided one knows this coming in, this randomness colours, rather than spoils, the game, as it adds to its sense of certain but limited power. Rather than luck, and just like Go, Twilight Struggle rewards study, patience, and prudence. I find it amazing that, given the asymmetry, the large amount of events in the game, and the complexity of the board and rules, the game remains well-balanced, tight, and engaging.

Both of these are “just games,” of course, but a good game captures our imagination. There is a joy in discovering this kind of strong, sharp, robust design, in exploring it, grasping it, however imperfectly, and slowly making it part of our lives.

Horgan is the new BC Premier

2017-07-20T00:00:00-07:00

A couple of months ago, worried about the agenda of the BC Greens leader and his likelihood to collaborate with the BC NDP, I wrote:

Andrew Weaver, please prove me wrong! Agree to a solid, stable collaboration with the BC NDP, one that will bring forth electoral reform, enact environmentally strong policies, and reverse the damage done by the current government. Many of us would be happy to give you our support in future elections if you do so.

Well, after a roller-coaster ride, John Horgan, the BC NDP leader, is the new Premier; Weaver proved me wrong; and I am extremely happy about all this.

Weaver’s (and his party’s) support for the new BC NDP minority government seems strong, and the Greens appear to have forced the NDP hand somewhat: the new government commits to an electoral reform referendum, to re-explore the viability of the Site C dam project, to stop oil pipelines construction projects in BC, and to a number of additional sensible policies.

This path to Horgan’s premiership was absolutely unlikely, but the outcome is equally promising.

Unlikely, because it relied on very slim margins of victory in several ridings, as well as on the support of an opponent with which, from the outside at least, he seemed to hold a bitter rivalry.

And promising, not just because the policies of the new government are big steps in the right direction, nor because the Greens will help keep the NDP honest and on target, but because, in a time with a generally dark political outlook, the NDP/Green agreement shows the way towards inter-party collaboration in Canada. I have always been puzzled at the lack of collaboration under the parliamentary system here, which seems to have much less interplay than similar systems in Europe. I believe Canada suffers from some fear or aversion to rise to a collaborative pattern, and to the extent that the BC NDP/Green agreeement is successful, we will gradually learn to think of collaborative solutions by default.

(One additional source of hope: the arrival of Sonia Furstenau, a teacher and environmental activist turned politician, to the Legislature as the MLA from Cowichan and Deputy Green Leader. Best of luck to her, to Horgan, to Weaver, and to everyone in the new government.)

Scientific computing in 10 years

2017-05-24T00:00:00-07:00

Greg Wilson, being the gloomy jaded pessimist he is, thinks leading-edge programmers will be doing scientific computing in JavaScript in 10 years. I disagree—I don’t know what these programmers will be using then, but to the extent that they will be building on currently mainstream technologies I think it will continue being R and Python, rather than JavaScript. We placed a bet on it; this post is here for reference.

Going for him, Greg has the most popular language today, which, from a humble and rushed start in our browsers, continues to shift shape and burrow in the most unlikely places, and to prove all of its naysayers wrong. Against that, I have technologies that have ingrained themselves in the scientific community, which have fast, usable, and sophisticated modules that took many years to build and get right, and which offer newcomers a different career path and paradigm, spiraling out of data and formulas (rather than out of the browser) into the rest of the world.

Whoever wins the bet, it should be a fun dinner in 2027, and I’m looking forward to it.

Prove me wrong, Andrew Weaver!

2017-05-24T00:00:00-07:00

After two weeks of waiting, the final results from the BC Provincial Election should be released today. The election was a nail-biter, with the BC Liberals nine votes away from a majority government and the BC Greens in a kingmaker role, that is, with enough votes to prop up a Liberal or NDP government, provided that the early results held, after absentee ballots and a final recount in the closest ridings.

So far, it looks like the early results will hold, which is good news—at the very least, we won’t have a BC Liberal majority. At the federal level, as a Green, this would have been my dream scenario, but I have previously expressed reservations about Weaver’s progressive values and willingness to work with the BC NDP. I felt that, if the BC Greens landed in this scenario, Weaver would rather collaborate with the centre-right party, perhaps extracting a couple of small concessions (spun like magnificent deals) for his support. I would love to be wrong. There is broad support for a left-wing coalition, and rejecting calls for cooperation would also damage the BC Greens’ reputation as a progressive party, and the damage would be long-lasting and extend to the Federal Greens as well (one of my main fears and misgivings about Andrew Weaver).

So: Andrew Weaver, please prove me wrong! Agree to a solid, stable collaboration with the BC NDP, one that will bring forth electoral reform, enact environmentally strong policies, and reverse the damage done by the current government. Many of us would be happy to give you our support in future elections if you do so.

Site Migration

2017-05-10T00:00:00-07:00

You may notice things are a bit different here: I have migrated from Wordpress to Jekyll, partly to minimize exposure to advertisers, partly to reduce hosting costs (the site is now hosted on S3), and partly to scratch the itch I’ve had for a while to explore static site generators and serverless hosting.

The one downside to this is that the new site does not have comments, which I used to enjoy quite a bit. I thought about adding Disqus, but this would mean allowing one more third party to track your browsing habits, and I would either have to pay for the service or allow them to display ads, which I did not want to do. So: if you want to comment on a post, I would welcome your thoughts directly on Twitter, Facebook, or over email or coffee!

2017 British Columbia election

2017-05-02T15:29:07-07:00

If you live in British Columbia, you must be aware that there is a provincial election going on. It is an interesting one—the polls, for whatever they are worth these days, project a fairly close election between the BC Liberals and the BC NDP, which gives our personal decisions a greater weight than usual.

(For context for people outside of British Columbia or newcomers to the province, there are three parties of note here: the BC Liberals, which have been in power since 2001, the BC NDP, and the BC Greens. The “BC” at the start of their names is not there just to be pedantic; these parties are not technically associated with their federal namesakes, and in the case of the BC Liberals, they are in fact quite distinct. Though the mapping between federal and provincial NDP and Greens is fairly easy to make, the BC Liberals are best thought of as Federal Conservatives. They favour capital over workers, resource exploitation over environmental concerns, and lower taxes over higher social safety nets. So the BC Liberals capture the vote of the right-wing and of the confused voter, while the BC NDP and BC Green typically split the vote of the left-wing voter.)

For progressives in the province, the Clark government has been infuriating on education, on private over public interests (selling away our natural resources, seemingly even at a loss), on political lobbying (the New York Times called BC “the Wild West” of political cash), on handling of First Nations issues, and a range of other issues. As with the 2015 Federal Election, the goal for a progressive, again, must be to get rid of the conservative forces in power.

Now, I am a member of the federal Green Party, and as such, in theory, this election should have posed a difficult decision for me: the pragmatic objective, as I just stated, is to vote the BC Liberals out of office, but I want to vote for the platform and party that is closest to me. This would have meant deciding between the strategic option of voting for the BC NDP, to shore up their support against the BC Liberals, or the principled option of voting for the BC Greens, to fight for increased Green representation in BC, even if that meant increasing the BC Liberals’ chances of victory.

However, I found there was no tension between strategy and values in this election. The reason, in short, is that the BC Greens under their current leader, Andrew Weaver, is simply not a party that I want to support.

I have been following Weaver’s trajectory for many years, since before he was elected as the only BC Green MLA in 2013. I’ve followed him on Twitter, I’ve read a book of his, and I’ve heard him speak a few times. My concerns began mildly: I would note that, instead of attempting collaboration with the BC NPD, as Elizabeth May, her federal counterpart, would do in Ottawa, he would shut down every opportunity to do so. He then voted for two disastrous BC Liberal budgets, rejected the Leap Manifesto, repeatedly stated that he saw no problem in ignoring components or the direction of the Green Party platform, as the BC Greens are an entirely different party, and claimed that the BC Greens are the natural home of the Federal Liberals, with whom they share the same values and policy. I saw him being, frankly, extremely boorish to critics on Twitter (his late-night Twitter tirades resemble those of another appalling politician south of the border), constantly punching left rather than right, musing about public support for private schools, and in general demonstrating that, except for a concern for environmental issues, he promotes and is fine with a right or centre-right government, and is therefore all too happy about splitting the left vote if that means the BC NDP won’t get in power.

Consider this alternate scenario: the BC Greens leader realizes they won’t win this election, and does not want four more years of BC Liberal government. They agree to collaborate with a BC NDP government, since their platforms have so much in common in the first place, and extract significant concessions for this support. Both parties in coalition can then pool resources into battleground ridings against the BC Liberals, and be in a much better shape to defeat them. The net result: a progressive government with a strong environmental platform, power-sharing which results in better governing experience for the BC Greens and better prospects in the near future.

It is an idealistic scenario, to be sure, but under Weaver it is absolutely delusional, and the reasons why it is delusional (his aversion to left-wing policies, his bridge-burning confrontational style, and yes, his ego) are the same reasons why I think he is a poor leader and one not worthy of my support.

The BC NDP, for sure, has some problems as well. I find them generally unimaginative, anxious not to veer left too much so as to try and secure the centrist vote. They are ambiguous on fracking and extracting liquefied natural gas, as well as on the Site C project, which in practice almost certainly means they will support both projects, and instead of campaigning for electoral reform they merely claim they will put the question forth in a referendum. But these problems are minute in comparison to those posed by the BC Liberal government. I therefore endorse the BC NDP in spite of them.

Finally, in the Victoria-Swan Lake riding, there really isn’t a strong opposition against the BC NDP in terms of skill or proposals. I encourage you to watch the CFAX debate between the three main local candidates. If you do, or if you meet him elsewhere, you will find that Rob Fleming is experienced and prepared. He knows what the local issues are and how to fight for them. Chris Maxwell (BC Greens) and Stacey Piercey (BC Liberals) both seem like good people, but, to put it mildly, they are woefully unaware of the local situation or how to achieve viable political solutions in comparison. Only the BC NDP put forth a strong candidate in this riding, and I was glad to vote for him in early voting. I encourage you to do the same.

Donation and Action Pledge

2017-01-28T05:01:24-08:00

Given the current global state of extreme poverty and humanitarian disaster, as well as the unfolding assault on basic human rights in the United States and the resulting threat to world peace and stability, I pledge to donate a percentage of my time and money to causes which I think address these problems effectively.

My current commitment stands as follows:

Money

I pledge to donate at least 2.5% of my pre-tax income to worthy causes.

At the moment, my donations are spread through the following causes and charities, all via monthly payments:

Extreme Poverty and Humanitarian Disasters

The bulk of my donations goes to charities recommended by GiveWell, and mostly to the Against Malaria Foundation, the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, and Give Directly. I’ve set up these donations in Canada through Charity Science.

I have also set up recurring payments to Seva, which fights preventable blindness, and to Doctors Without Borders, which can be found in the midst of the worst crises in the world, bravely providing essential medical care.

Human Rights and Advocacy

I donate to Amnesty International and to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

Additionally, as a response to the shockingly inhumane actions of the new American administration, I am now a monthly donor of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and, after consultation with people more knowledgeable than me, of the Casa del Migrante, which provides hospitality to migrants, refugees, and deported individuals in Mexico and Central America.

(UPDATE: I have now also added the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to the list of organizations to which I donate monthly. As a Mexican-Canadian, I feel it is a bit strange to donate more to American organizations than to either Mexican or Canadian ones, but things in the United States truly look dire in comparison these days.)

Environmental and Other Interests

I am a donor of Mercy for Animals, an organization fighting to prevent cruelty to farmed animals, of the Lifecycles Project, which fosters community health, urban farming, and food security in Victoria, and of the Green Party of Canada, which through Elizabeth May has often been the first or only voice of reason on many issues in our Parliament.

Time

I pledge to commit an average of at least two hours per week to non-violent action towards the causes above.

This at the moment involves protesting, researching, writing materials to advocate for these causes and for effective means of action, and contacting Members of Parliament. I expect the specific actions in which I’ll invest my time will fluctuate depending on events.

Time spent yelling on my pillow on Twitter or Facebook does not count.

I am fully aware that 2.5% of my income and two hours per week is a small commitment.

If you are doing or giving more than this, I commend you for it, and I admire you. I intend to do more, as personal circumstances allow, and will update my pledge if I do so.

If you are doing or giving less than this, or not at all, I invite you to consider if you can increase your commitments. Your time and money are more powerful to effect change than you may think.

Finally, I make my pledge public not to brag (it is actually somewhat uncomfortable to do so), but with the knowledge that giving is contagious and in the hope that learning of it will help tip your scale in favour of committing as well, if this is something you had been considering but were not sure of doing before.

If you do decide to donate time, money, or both, I invite you to make your commitments public, small or large as they may be, to help your friends and contacts know of your actions and to encourage them to go on the same path. We can do something about these issues. We have power. We should use it.

Recommendations from 2016

2016-12-31T01:00:53-08:00

It’s hard for me to match the unfolding disaster that 2016 turned out to be, politically and environmentally, with the intense but beautiful ride it has been at home, trying to raise a child and a baby and somehow remain sane and on top of things. However, despite the sleepless nights and play dates and overall running-around, there was time for books, movies, and podcasts. Here are some of the things I loved this year:

The best book I read in 2016 has to be Eliot’s “Middlemarch”. It is wise and funny, relevant despite its age, and intimate. Like with other great books, I simultaneously wish I had found it much earlier, to profit from it when I was younger, and that I had not found it yet, so that the discovery still laid ahead. It’s not short, but I will most likely read it again.

Among the easier and lighter reads, my favourite was “The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn”, from the Strugatsky brothers. It’s a strange mash of science fiction and mystery, with a bit of the weirdness that I loved last year in “Annihilation”. Carey’s “The Girl with All the Gifts” is not a great book—many characters are cardboard cut-outs, and you could trim about a hundred pages in the middle and end with a better story—but it’s got an excellent premise and a very good ending, and all in all I was very glad to read it.

Regarding non-fiction, Sharp’s trilogy on “The Politics of Nonviolent Action” is precise, careful, practical, and astoundingly useful. If I could convince everyone to read a single book as soon as possible, it would be the first volume, and especially the first half of it, on the sources of power and how to fight them without violence. We will need to internalize this very soon. Also on non-fiction, and mentioned recently already, Singer’s “The Life You Can Save” presents a compelling utilitarian argument for donating to fight extreme poverty and, quite literally, save lives, restore sight, and reduce suffering in the world. He made me realize you and I have far more power to do these things than I imagined.

I have been reading lots of children’s books, predictably. My kid and I both loved Hatke’s “Zita the Spacegirl” series: good story, nice art, kickass heroine. We also both liked Roald Dahl’s prose quite a bit, and probably read “Fantastic Mr Fox” in full a dozen times.

A subdued movie that I nevertheless really enjoyed was Chandor’s “A Most Violent Year”. I loved his earlier “Margin Call” as well; both movies are intelligent, well acted, and unconventional. The remake of “Ghostbusters” was everything I could hope for, and I’m happy they chose such a talented cast. Finally, “Arrival” was an emotionally satisfying sci-fi film, which is something quite rare.

I’ve been running a lot, and I like listening to podcasts while I run. The one I like the most is Mike Duncan’s “Revolutions”: his ongoing project is to go through key revolutions in modern history and to narrate them entertainingly but without dumbing them down. So far he’s gone through the English, American, French, Haitian, and Bolivarian revolutions, and the whole series is excellent. Last year I recommended his “History of Rome”, which I binged on obsessively; I might go back and listen to it all over again next year. I also enjoyed “Good Job, Brain” quite a bit: a very entertaining trivia podcast that makes long runs much lighter. Speaking of running, this year I discovered CityStrides, a one-person labour-of-love website that pulls your run data and tells you what percentage of a city you’ve run, and which streets you still need to get to. It has prodded me to explore lots more of Victoria, and to find interesting areas, houses, gardens, parks, and shortcuts previously hidden all around me.

Finally, I mentioned these in my previous post, but I should repeat them in case you missed them: three resources that helped me enormously with my finances were the Mr Money Mustache blog, Bogle’s “Little Book of Common Sense Investing”, and Swensen’s “Unconventional Success”. The first two are easy reads, the last one less so, though it’s quite informative. They were all incredibly valuable to me.

I feel like I’m bracing for 2017, with a sense of dread and angst, and unsure on whether next December there will be room for lightness to recommend trivia podcasts or children’s books. And yet we must still try to make the new year a happy one. May we succeed!

Resources on frugality

2016-12-30T11:41:04-08:00

I was certainly far from frugal during the past several years of my life, but that changed early in 2016: thriftiness became one of my values. In the interest of helping others down this path, here is an assortment of resources I pored over last year and that I wish had been collected in a single place when I got started.

Stop Digging

The first thing to realize is that, unless you’re paying some mind to these issues, you may be unwittingly digging yourself into a hole. The following would be useful:

The concept of Lifestyle Inflation. If you didn’t know it existed and haven’t been actively fighting it you probably suffer from it.
The New Yorker profile of Pete Adeney, Mr. Money Mustache. I understand he did not like this profile very much (it was too focused on his eccentricities), but for me it was the right thing at the right time. If it clicks for you too, you’ll want to read…
The hundreds of posts at the Mr. Money Mustache blog. From Zero to Hero is a good one to get started, as it gives links to a bunch of other key posts. Your Debt is an Emergency is also great. You may not like his style, but I adored it: it was the kind of tough love I needed to prod myself into action, to shame myself out of dumb decisions, and to realize that caring about money is not necessarily a self-centered or egotistical pursuit, but can be a tool to reduce consumerism and to find contentment in simple pleasures.

Miscellaneous Tips to Change Habits

Some frugal changes are obvious, some not so much. The blog above goes in detail into a lot of them; here are a few specific things that helped me along the way:

A simple tool to estimate the true cost of things: cutting a weekly expense of x dollars results in savings of 800x after ten years if that money is invested instead. Similarly, cutting a monthly expense of x dollars results in savings of 200x after ten years. So if you stop eating out for lunch at work (~$50 week) you’ll have $40,000 more in your account after ten years, approximately, and cutting your monthly cellphone bill from $80 to $20 (which, yes, can be done in Canada, see below) will increase the value of your savings account by about $12,000. Changing a few of these recurring costs is the difference between barely breaking even and saving enough for retirement. (Edit: but note Neil’s comment below and my response to it).
Buying secondhand through VarageSale: I used to eschew Craigslist because of a couple of bad experiences, but VarageSale has a good community and for some types of products (such as baby stuff) it’s fantastic. I haven’t bought pretty much anything new for our baby, yet pretty much everything he has is still as good as new—and will be resold when he no longer needs it.
The Public Library has amazing resources that I tended to overlook, or simply did not know existed: you can get free audiobook rentals with Hoopla, free digital magazine issues, free desks and wifi if you want to work away from home and the office. And of course free books. This is the case in Victoria and quite likely in your city too.
In general, to change habits, Duhigg’s The Power Of Habit is a good read, especially the first section on individual habits.
The cheapest way I’ve found to have cellphone service in Canada that doesn’t involve burners from the 7-Eleven is to get a tablet data plan from your provider and do calls and texts through a VoIP service such as Fongo. Jamie Starke gets into some details on how to do this. Depending on your data usage this setup can be as cheap as about $10 per month. It is, however, admittedly clunky. If you want pretty much seamless but cheap mobile service, Public Mobile has very good prices: a decent plan costs about $40 per month.

Investing

If you’re following along and you’ve settled any debts you had, you’ll start to accumulate some surplus. How should you invest it? This was an intimidating topic for me: when I got started I barely knew what stocks and bonds were—and I knew the field is full of people waiting to profit from my ignorance. The following helped me quite a bit:

The book route: I strongly recommend Bogle’s “Little Book of Common Sense Investing”, followed by Swensen’s “Unconventional Success”. They are clear and honest, and after reading them you’ll have the basics to invest on your own, as well as a healthy dislike for your bank’s financial advisors.
The blog posts route: There are many blogs with similar kinds of investing advice (that is, espousing the passive investing approach); some of the best ones are JL Collins (specifically his stocks series) and the Canadian Couch Potato.
This is covered in the above, but you need to understand index funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). In general, Investopedia has decent summaries on many investing topics.
In Canada, it turns out RRSPs and TFSAs (edit: and RESPs) are actually quite important, and it pays a lot to familiarize yourself with them.
Also in Canada, we are not yet lucky enough to have extremely low-cost index funds. However, we do have extremely low-cost ETFs from Vanguard (and others). The downside is you need to perform your own trades, which is scary the first couple of times. I recommend Questrade as a platform to manage your accounts. It is practically free for passive investing using ETFs, it works well, and you can go through the experience with a free trial with pretend money.

Altruism

After you started saving enough money and you see financial independence in the path ahead, you should consider what else to do with the extra money. You could save it as well of course, but it definitely could be better used elsewhere: there are millions of people in dire need today, and straightforward mechanisms in place for you to help them with donations. The following resources helped me understand this issue, and where to donate:

Singer’s “The Life You Can Save” was an eye-opening book. It is humane and intelligent, and it lays out the case for effective altruism clearly. You can also check out some of his talks on the topic, and the website that spun off of his book.
GiveWell is a great organization that evaluates charities in depth to figure out where your donations are most likely to do best, focusing on alleviating extreme poverty and its consequences. They are extremely transparent, thorough, and analytical. On a smaller scale, Animal Charity Evaluators performs the same work on organizations fighting for animal rights.
If you want your donations to be tax-deductible in Canada and you want to donate to charities endorsed by GiveWell, then your best alternative is to donate to Charity Science and ask them to pass on your money to the charities of your choice.

I’m still very far from being a frugal saint, and though I know I could be doing a much better job at it, as I look back over the past year I am still impressed at how efficient I’ve become in this sense, comparatively, and at how at peace and free this all makes me feel. I need less than I thought, and not only do I not miss any luxuries, but I’m glad I do not depend on them to be happy anymore. I hope these resources are useful to you too.

Property-based testing with Hypothesis

2016-09-14T02:43:04-07:00

Over at the Limbic Hack blog, I’ve posted a new article on how to do property-based testing with Hypothesis. Hope you like it!

Programming Robot Turtles genetically

2016-04-01T08:30:20-07:00

A heads-up that we have a fairly new blog for tinkering stuff where I work at Limbic Media, and I just posted a little article on an attempt to do genetic programming in Python—go read it!

Recommendations from 2015

2015-12-31T09:58:05-08:00

Well! 2015, the hottest year yet in recorded history is wrapping up, and it’s time for one more installment of my “things you might like because I did” series.

The most impressive, necessary, beautifully written, and haunting book I read this year was Alexievich’s “Voices from Chernobyl”. Really, it doesn’t actually feel like homework, but I came out of it thinking that every technologist and every advocate of nuclear power has the moral duty to read it, and if I can convince you of doing so through a flippant analogy, I’ll do it: this book is like “World War Z” for a catastrophe that actually occurred, and that will occur again. As Alexievich says: “These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future.”

Zambra’s “Formas de Volver a Casa” is a simple account of growing up under a dictatorship, but under this simplicity there is a struggle to come to terms with the authoritarianism lurking in everyday society. I found it relevant for our political moment, as I did two of the plays in Camus’s “Caligula and 3 other plays”: the titular play, and “The Just Assassins”.

I really enjoyed Perec’s experimental “The Art of Asking your Boss for a Raise”, which is the most fun you will ever experience executing a flowchart. Also, I believe I’ve recommended everything that Patrick DeWitt has ever written, and he has a new novel out, “Undermajordomo Minor”, that is also a delicious read.

Richardson’s “Vectors” has some excellent aphorisms; McDougall’s “Born to Run” did more to change my life than most of the books I read this year (more about that in a later post), and Harvey’s “Dear Thief” is contained, melancholic, and heartfelt.

Faber’s “The Book of Strange New Things” has a great premise (space explorers send a Christian missionary to evangelize an alien race) and develops it brilliantly and with empathy—don’t let the apparent religious tones deter you. On a darker direction, Vandermeer’s “Annihilation” revisits Lovecraft and makes it better: a very weird but enjoyable nightmare. However, if I were you I would avoid the two latter installments of his trilogy.

As for movies, “What We Do in the Shadows” is comedy very well done, “Mad Max: Fury Road” is apocalyptic action very well done, and “The Big Short” is a semi-documentary (?) very well done. Of course, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is simply very well done; I am glad Wes Anderson exists and does these precious films. On TV, the one series I watched that you may have missed is “Halt and Catch Fire”—give it at least a couple of episodes though.

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. The one that I binge-listened the most was Mike Duncan’s “The History of Rome”—like hearing a very knowledgeable, very patient, rather funny and dorky friend go on and on about one of the best real stories we’ve got. “The Truth”, in turn, is a collection of radio dramas, and it’s all about the production: great voice acting, great effects, lots of genre and narrative variety. Finally, “Criminal” has well researched and surprising short stories revolving around crime as its focal point.

Four good boardgames with very different mechanics: first, “Tajemnicze Domostwo”, also named “Mysterium” in the American edition, is just excellent. A cooperative mix of Dixit and Clue, and a great exploration of the difficulty of communication—more than just a boardgame, I would say, but great as a boardgame too. Get the original version, as they unforgivably screwed up the art in the American one. “Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space” is simple and tense; like the sci-fi horror “Alien” made into a game. “Skull” is a short and sweet bluffing game, and though the edition I linked to has beautiful art, you can play it with coasters on a pinch. Finally, “Spyfall” is wonderful as a party game: one person is the spy and tries to remain undercover; everyone else is out to get them. Like “Werewolf” but shorter, sillier, and without player elimination.

Computer games: three I liked were “80 Days”, an upscale interactive fiction production; “Don’t Starve”, a survivalist game that doesn’t take itself too seriously except in its production values; and “Subterfuge”, which you could see as a better “Diplomacy”, or as the slowest real-time strategy game out there: launch an attack on an enemy and it will arrive in perhaps 24 hours, which gives you and the defendant plenty of time to recruit allies and escalate, or maybe iron differences out and turn the attack into a gift instead. A warning that despite there being a very prominent Code of Conduct on that game forbidding jerks, jerks can rather easily be found.

If you are in Victoria, you should check out the kite festival when it comes again; it is meditatively beautiful. Year-round, the coffee roasted by the Coffee Lab (at the Second Crack coffee shop in Rock Bay) and by Bows & Arrows (available at Habit and others) is delicious. Heist, the best coffee shop in Victoria, suffered the curse of all misunderstood geniuses, and closed down, but Graham, its artful barista is now at Hey Happy, so it is not a total loss. And finally, for your sweet tooth, Empire Donuts are outstanding, as are the white chocolate brioches prepared Saturday and Sunday mornings at Fry’s Bakery, but the very best sweetness I’ve found is the selection of ice cream concoctions of Cold Comfort.

As usual, I would love to hear about what you found and liked this year, and I hope the recommendations above are useful for you. Happy New Year!

(Previously: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009)

Voting in Canada’s 2015 Federal Election

2015-10-11T06:02:47-07:00

We’re in the midst of an election in Canada, and I’ve been spending an extremely long time analyzing our alternatives in the Victoria riding. Yesterday I made my decision on how to vote. Here it is, if you’re interested.

First things first. In general, in whatever riding you live, the overriding principle on how to vote should be: deny the seat to the Conservatives. If the Conservative candidate has any chances whatsoever, vote for the strongest-polling candidate from the other parties. The damage that Harper has caused to this country that I loved from my first day here has been tremendous. He has poisoned the political discourse, pretending citizens are merely taxpayers, dismantling the civil service, fighting science and evidence-based policy, turning many of us, including many born in Canada, into second-class citizens, spying on dissidents, depending, at this time of environmental crisis, on exploitation of the dirtiest fossil fuels in the planet for economic growth (only to have that economic growth crash down the moment oil prices drop), sowing up fear, hatred, and bigotry, and embarrassing us around the world. He must go. It does not matter if you think Trudeau is not ready, it does not matter if Mulcair looks awkward, it does not matter if in debates they argue like school children, it does not matter if you don’t like some policy details from one platform or the other. Our first goal must be: deny the seat to the Conservatives.

This goal, however, does not help us in Victoria. We live in a very progressive city, where the Conservative candidate does not have a shot, and the Liberal candidate stepped down after someone dug up some controversial Facebook comments. In here, it’s a fight between the NDP’s incumbent, Murray Rankin, and the Green challenger, Jo-Ann Roberts. I’ve met both of them, chatted for a good while with Rankin, saw them debate, and had conversations with their canvassing volunteers. I’ve also poured over their party platforms, though the NDP did not make this task easy,

releasing its 81-page platform document extremely late, only two days ago, when advanced polling had already started.

What do the candidates and their parties offer?

Rankin, the incumbent, offers a great resume, to start. He has worked as an environmental lawyer, has worked for First Nations communities, and already has parliamentary experience. He’s not a backbencher, he’s performed as an Opposition critic, and on an NDP government would probably have a cabinet position. Though when I talked to him

he tended to regurgitate NDP talking points, to ramp up the chumminess, and to amplify my own indignation in a manner I thought not quite genuine, I can’t blame him for that (the campaign trail is tough), and I am happy to have him as our representative, all else being equal.

The NDP itself is a bit harder to love. For a party that is the natural choice of the Left, it is bizarre to see it running to the right of the Liberals in an effort to clinch the election. There is no hint of capital redistribution in its platform, for instance. Crucially, for Victoria, the party does not reject tar sands pipelines; it rejects merely their oil-friendly approval review process (it was painful to see Rankin in a debate with an extremely environmentally-minded crowd perform verbal contortions to stick to the NDP platform on this while still trying to tell us what we wanted to hear). I have several other minor concerns, such as the party’s support for the investor-state Canada-Korea trade treaty, its doublespeaky support for the energy sector, shutting up candidates when they dare speak about keeping oil in the ground, and its folksy “let’s roll our sleeves and get’er done” approach to vision and platform documents, which makes me feel like I’m about to get swindled by my union rep.

And yet, many of my lefty friends, whom I respect highly, swear by the NDP, and love it. The choice for them is obvious:

the NDP is the progressive choice, warts and all, and it would be foolish not to support it. To them, throughout this election, Victoria Greens are either crypto-liberals, crypto-libertarians, or merely wide-eyed party-poopers who may be denying us our very first shot at a truly progressive government.

What about the Green candidate? Roberts’s resume, on progressive issues, is certainly less impressive than Rankin’s. She worked for decades as a CBC journalist and radio show host, but other than vowing to fight CBC funding cuts, and a declared affinity for Green policy, she appeared to be, to me, a bit of a blank slate from a political perspective (she claimed that her work as a journalist demanded the projection of neutrality). In debates she seemed quite sharp, yet diplomatic, following the Green principles to the dot. In the one case that I observed where she was unsure of the official party policy (on animal rights), she offered her views on the topic, and later corroborated that they matched with the official stance.

This is important to me because of two points that, combined, are problematic. The first is the Green policy against vote whipping. On its face, it is refreshing: the NDP’s Rankin is a very competent representative, but he will have to vote the party line every time, as he has during his tenure so far, and as every single other NDP representative has in recent years, for every single vote, even when that vote goes against our wishes. But one must consider the presence of people such as Andrew Weaver, a BC Green MLA (provincial representative), by all accounts a great scientist, but a petty, confrontational, status-quo politician, refusing to adhere to his party’s stance and claiming there is room for his views under its “big tent”. I have been a member of the Green Party for years, and Weaver’s performance has forced me to consider that I may have made a mistake. The big question for me then, for this election, is whether Roberts would turn out to be another Elizabeth May or another Andrew Weaver.

And why is adherence to the Green vision important? You may not be familiar with it, but if you are, and if you are progressively-minded, the reasons are evident. The Green platform is the most progressive choice available (an assertion that my NDP friends have disbelieved, but that remains standing under analysis). It is evidence-based, compassionate, modern, pacifist, and multicultural, and it follows Schumacher’s call to reject the gigantism that ails us as a society.

Obviously, the Green Party’s platform, being as good as it is, has no shot at actually forming government. It’s the Hermione Granger of Canadian politics, the woman in the male-dominated boardroom that offers the common-sensical solution, ignored, only to hear her peers repeat it mangled up and get all the credit. It’ll probably be an eternal underdog, and it needs all the help it can get.

What to do, then? Support the best platform on an untested candidate, or make a pragmatic decision, lending support to a party that can actually implement its vision? This was my dilemma, until recently. Two points tipped the balance.

The first is the poor performance of the NDP in the national polls in the past couple of weeks, which convinced me that their chance of forming government has practically evaporated, and the calculation that Trudeau’s Liberals may actually need Green seats to push their agenda. The pragmatic progressive vote here, then, given the trajectory of the polls, is Green.

The second point was my growing conviction, especially after talking to canvassers and getting a call from Roberts, and the very direct appeals from Elizabeth May, that Roberts, indeed, is committed to the progressive aspects of the Green platform.

Roberts has an uphill battle—the polls are close, though they do not favour her—but she may yet win. I cast my vote for her yesterday, and I invite you to vote for her as well. My only regret is that I came to this decision so late, so that whatever support I can drum up will be limited.

There is advance polling today (Sunday) and tomorrow. Even if you don’t agree with my conclusions, I urge you to vote. Both the NDP and the Greens need a strong showing, with as little absenteeism as possible, as our aggregated numbers will matter in determining the possible legitimacy of a Harper government, should he not get a majority but attempt to rule on a minority government. Please go vote!

A bittersweet Canada Day

2015-07-01T15:59:33-07:00

I went for an evening run here in Victoria a couple of days ago. The run took me down to an oceanfront walkway where I could see the mountains on the other side of the strait, the choppy water turning dark as the sun was setting,

the almost-full moon, and many friendly people walking their dogs, waving, smiling. I passed a tour bus parked at a lookout and about a dozen tourists taking pictures of the view we were sharing, while I thought how fortunate I am to routinely run in a place that is so beautiful that people come from around the world to see it, that they judge it photo worthy. I ran through well-maintained parks and well-lit streets, and when the night fell and I was jogging back through a few blocks of what passes as Victoria’s inner city, I still felt safe and protected.

This is all to say that I live in a gorgeous city, in a great country, and I know how lucky I am. When we’ve had medical emergencies or treatments, I find I usually only need to pay for the parking at the hospital. The schools are good and the teachers committed. People’s attitudes to me and my partner, as immigrants, are warm, welcoming, and inclusive. There are playgrounds everywhere here, public transit, bike lanes, and bike paths, and a good public library system. Canada gets so much right, and Victoria and Toronto have been such good places to live in, that I can’t be anything but grateful to have been adopted by this country.

And yet, though grateful, I’m also increasingly disgusted and exasperated by the government that this country has imposed upon itself for the past ten years, a government that vastly contradicts everything that makes the country great. How have its citizens allowed this to happen for so long? How has this seeped under us? The government dismantles our social welfare and it attempts to buy off those of us with comfortable salaries through tax cuts. We keep accumulating Fossil of the Year awards, while our government blocks any pragmatic efforts to rein in climate change and hustles to extract and sell the dirtiest fuel we’ve found. We allow government scientists to be censored, science funds to get cut, and research libraries to get destroyed. We let ourselves get worked up over this or that loose terrorist threat, while we let our intelligence services entrap weak-minded folks, and our leaders boast and try to act more macho than the US or Russia. We let ourselves get spied on by our own public servants, spied on to such an extent that, frankly, I’m fearful that inconsequential as I may be, voicing my concerns might get me a file somewhere. Even more so because, astonishingly, for a nation built on immigrants, we’ve also just passed a law (C-24) that allows the government to revoke my citizenship (or that of any dual citizen, even if born in Canada—my daughter, for instance; perhaps you?) without trial, if I commit any acts that are “contrary to the national interest of Canada”, and we’ve passed another law (C-51) that defines such acts in the vaguest terms to include, potentially, dissent or discussion.

I cannot reconcile the beautiful country around me with its increasingly brutish government. I understand that Harper is trying to bend us to its ideology; I don’t understand how so many of us are letting him get away with it.

This is a bittersweet Canada Day for me: there is so much to celebrate, but so much bad work to repair too. There is an election coming. I truly hope that by the next Canada Day this government will be out, and reparations under way.

“maladjusted” in Victoria tomorrow

2015-01-30T02:09:15-08:00

You may have heard about this from me or Val already, but a heads-up if you haven’t: the “maladjusted” play is happening in Victoria tomorrow at the Songhees Wellness Centre. It’s a Forum Theatre performance, meaning among other things that the play is interactive and meant to explore community problems; its topic is on the mental health system, treated from different angles. From the description on the Eventbrite page:

‘maladjusted’ engages audiences with powerful images and authentic voices weaving together three very personal narratives: A young teenager struggling with sadness over her friend’s suicide is misdiagnosed by her doctor; a young homeless man who is legitimately taking prescription meds gets thrown into dangerous circumstances by social workers, who are from within a mechanizing system, trying their best to help him; and finally, there is all of us, unable to adjust to the needs of a maladjusted mental health sector, who become potential agents for change.

Val has been helping coordinate the local production, and it looks like it’s going to be pretty good. There are only a few tickets left. I’ll be there, and I hope to see you there too.

Recommendations from 2014

2014-12-31T09:49:39-08:00

One more year behind us! Here are some of the things that I loved in 2014 and that you may enjoy, too:

Books! The oddest, most strangely beautiful one I found this year was Haskell’s “The Forest Unseen“. Part meditation, part scientific explanation of all that happens in a tiny section of a forest in the course of a year, it is intelligent without being patronizing, compassionate without being mushy, and constantly full of surprises.

Offill’s “Dept. of Speculation“, on the difficulty and beauty of marriage and parenthood, and on trying to achieve greatness (or, at least, to control the apartment’s pests) while being a parent, is a bit of a Trojan horse: it seems unassuming, but it unfolds in the mind after reading. Ferrante’s “The Days of Abandonment” is about abandonment of the marital kind, and it is angry, desperate, hyperventilating, funny, perfect. McBride’s “A Girl Is a Half Formed Thing“, in contrast to Offill’s and Ferrante’s books, may be the hardest: hard to parse, but also to digest. McBride’s dark, pulsating, synaptic prose is often grammatically nonsensical, but it conveys fear, loss lust, and love beautifully.

Sjón’s “The Whispering Muse” overlays some of the greatest Western myths with modern, ordinary bigotry and pettiness; the result is exceptional. On the most page-turning end of the spectrum, Theroux’s post-apocalyptic “Far North” is both very smart and very enjoyable.

Fénéon’s “Novels in Three Lines” is a collection of very short news items that ran in a Paris newspaper about a hundred years ago. They are not all interesting or relevant, but they are expertly crafted, and the accumulated effect or reading so many snapshots of old violence, suffering, random chaos, and happiness is poetically complex. Parra’s “Poemas para Combatir la Calvicie” (in Spanish), an anthology of his “antipoetry”, is beautiful for its plainspokenness.

As for movies, I loved the calm aesthetic of “Le Quattro Volte” and the hallucinogenic rush of “Vanishing Point“. “Act of Killing” is bizarre, horrifying; “The Loneliest Planet” shows a small hint of that horror to a Western backpacking couple and they find it perhaps too much to handle. “Computer Chess” is a masterpiece of awkward nerd-dom. You probably watched as much TV as I did, but if for any reason you missed “Black Mirror” or “True Detective“, they are both brilliant. One musical recommendation: the R&B covers from the Detroit Cobras are excellent.

My biggest boardgaming surprise this year was the complexity of the cooperative game “Freedom“, about emancipation and the Railroad Underground. It is not necessarily a fun experience—in fact, it is the most gut-wrenching game I’ve ever played, more art than game; educational gaming done right. On the actually fun side, “Sheriff of Nottingham“, a bluffing, smuggling, and bribing game, is great fun, and “Tzolk’in” and “Last Will” are both elegant and well-balanced; after several replays I don’t feel like I have a good grip on strategy on either of them, which is a good sign.

If you live in or visit Victoria, you should get truly wonderful coffee at Hey Happy! We’ve been going quite a bit to La Taquisa for tortilla soups and tacos. David Mincey’s “Chocolate Project”, usually at the Hudson Public Market, is on hiatus, but when it returns you should check it out, as it features outstanding chocolate from around the world. Finally, one of my regrets when we moved to Victoria from Toronto was missing out on Snakes and Lattes, but now, luckily, Victoria has an excellent substitute: Interactivity, a board game café, has a very good library and yummy milkshakes to drink while you play those games with your friends.

I hope your 2014 was also full of love and good finds—feel free to let me know of stuff you liked in the comments. Happy New Year!

(Previously: 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009)

Voting in Victoria’s municipal election

2014-11-12T13:03:52-08:00

The mayoral election in Victoria is coming up in November 15th, and for once choosing a candidate was not an easy decision. I ended up doing quite a bit of research, both on the mayoral candidates and on council candidates, and I thought it best to share my conclusions for any undecideds still left.

For mayor, of course, the choice was between Fortin and Helps. I did not understand the discontent over Fortin. He’s progressive, environmental, compassionate, and apparently a great guy. Victoria is improving through his tenure. The budget overruns with the Johnson Bridge should be expected, and the issue seems just an effort to rally up voters who define themselves as “taxpayers” exclusively. So as an incumbent he looks great—except we have a choice, in Helps, of another seemingly progressive, environmental, strong candidate. I had friends endorse either candidate very convincingly. So I had to do quite a bit of city council motion reading, debate-watching, canvasser-questioning, and so on.

In the end I chose Fortin. One reason is that he is an experienced mayor over whom I have no objections. Another reason is that, as I understand from a couple of sources, Helps’ relation with council is strained, and since those council members are likely not going anywhere, we might end up with a more dysfunctional council if she wins. But the greater reason is that, through my research, I grew convinced that while Fortin is authentically convinced of progressive causes, Helps has more of a flexible, “pragmatic” position. The positive spin on Helps’ malleability is that she listens to the public on the issues that matter to them. The negative, as suggested by her stance on issues like the Mason St development site or the Crystal Pool vote, is that there’s a chance, not high but fair, that she will take a conservative or centrist position unless there’s an outcry big enough for her to backtrack. That could get tiring. She says that she does not want to be placed within a left-right continuum; I would like a mayor that is comfortable working and deciding from the left.

Council (each voter can vote for up to eight candidates) was a difficult decision too, mainly because there were (a) many candidates, and (b) few credible ones. Choosing the first five or six was easy; the rest was tough. A good tool to decide was the Dogwood Initiative’s survey of candidates. I am still a bit unsure on two of the candidates I chose, though I’m afraid their chances are low anyway.

The most difficult, vaguest decision was for School Board Trustees (we can vote for up to nine). There are very few materials to help one decide, and, again, not very many credible candidates. Most say the same things, mostly about wanting to either keep good public services or being financially responsible, and reading between the lines of their small differences is difficult.

So here we go, my choices for this election (* indicates most uncertainty/second thoughts):

Mayor – Dean Fortin

Council

Marianne Alto
Ben Issit
Erik Kaye
Jeremy Loveday
John Luton
Pamela Madoff
Ian Hoar (*)
Charlayne Thornton-Joe (*)

School Board

Edith Loring-Kuhanga
Diane McNally
Deborah Nohr
Rob Paynter
Jordan Watters
Nicole Duncan (*)
Bev Horsman (*)
Ruth MacIntosh (*)
Ann Whiteaker (*)

If you feel I included some bizarre choices here, or that I’m missing a really fantastic candidate, I would love it if you let me know. Remember to go vote!

No Place to Hide

2014-06-09T14:10:14-07:00

Glenn Greenwald‘s “No Place to Hide” is a good and important book. Beyond the NSA disclosures, which should at this point come as no surprise to anyone who cares about the issue, he correctly emphasizes the role that the institutionalized forces of the mainstream media play in amplifying the voice and the will of power.

This behaviour of the media, and especially of liberal commentators (Hendrik Hertzberg, Jeffrey Toobin, many others) was a great disappointment to me when the disclosures began, a year ago. It shouldn’t have been—I should have kept in mind, for instance, the blindness of both capitalist and communist intellectuals to the excesses of their factions during the Cold War; I should have remembered that often the people that agree with us, especially when they are powerful in any way, agree not due to the rightness of the position, but due to their personal convenience.

Snowden, I learned in “No Place to Hide,” did remember this, and explicitly reached out to adversarial journalists (Greenwald, Poitras) and requested them not to share his materials with subservient media institutions—particularly the New York Times. This, I think, is partly why the leaks about the illegal and outrageous programs of the NSA came through at all. Snowden acted not just heroically: he was also very smart. I’m grateful for that.

Doing Good for Nothing

2014-06-02T15:09:37-07:00

Victoria friends: you should check out the new Doing Good for Nothing Victoria group—and if you’re involved in a local non-profit, I encourage you to apply to get some help.

I’m very proud that Val has gotten involved in this, and I hope that much good will come out of it.

Things were very different before we came by

2014-05-27T02:51:09-07:00

Reading Berton’s “The National Dream“, about the construction of the Canadian transcontinental railroad, I’m impressed by how different Canada was only 140 years ago. Its political system was tremendously corrupt; its territory was barren, largely unexplored, deadly; its only neighbour was poised to take over it, by economic if not military force. Victoria, the major city in the Canadian West Coast then, barely had a thousand voters—Vancouver wasn’t even on the map. The country, on the whole, appeared, to my eyes at least, to be on the verge of collapse for at least a couple of decades.

What I find striking is that this was all not so long ago: our grandparents’ grandparents lived through it. And yet the impression I got from Canada, when I first arrived, was of a country established, whole, with a culture, a history, and an identity. The “Canadian project” was not in question.

Many of the good things we take for granted were not easy to accomplish; they were not a given. They required quite a bit of effort, and quite a bit of luck, and everything that is true about that time is true about today.

Learning

2014-03-20T15:16:40-07:00

Now and then I obsess over a topic (or skill, or thing) and dedicate an inordinate amount of time to it. They have a secret and I must extract it—I must fill my mouth with their taste. They are often, unfortunately, fairly pointless pursuits. Then I’m sated—I’ve learned some tricks or stop being surprised—and the need disappears.

But there are a few topics for which my obsession is tidal. For them, whenever I learn, I feel my ignorance opening wider still: my learning is partly about all the things that are still unlearned; my satisfaction is grounded on discovering that despite years of effort I’m only getting started, that the secrets will not end, and that the journey will last my full life. I sometimes get weary and stop for a while—even for a very long while—but I’ve always taken up the path again.

I can think of four things that affect me in this way: writing, gardening, programming, and playing Go. In all four, learning feels only like peeling a layer, never reaching the core—and I’m extremely far from the core. In all four, I can see, study, marvel, and draw joy from the work of people that are much better than me. While overwhelming, this keeps me humble and hopeful. In all four, practice leads to a contemplative state, and insights seem to apply as much to the thing itself as to life in general.

Perhaps later on other things will come to have this effect on me—gardening is a fairly recent addition to the list, one I only started three years ago. I hope they will, though I can’t control it. But I doubt these four will go away.

Recommendations from 2013

2013-12-31T06:29:26-08:00

Keeping up with my little tradition of sharing stuff I liked at the end of the year, here are some recommendations from 2013.

Perhaps the book I enjoyed the most was Saunders’ “Tenth of December”. Its short stories have the kind of warmth that comes from compassion in the face of (as opposed to in ignorance of) cruelty. Catton’s “The Luminaries”, set in the New Zealand gold rush, is great, too: thematic, thrilling, brainy yet mystical. Pullman’s retelling of the Brother Grimm’s tales is fresh and snappy, and Hamid’s “How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” is a good antidote to world-lit fluff.

I loved the poetry collection “Place”, by Jorie Graham. Its poems are strange miracles: systemic, yet focused on instants; comprehensive, yet intimate. Villalobos’ “Fiesta en la madriguera” (in Spanish) is a fun, surreal take on excess told from the perspective of the pampered scion of a drug lord. And while Daylight’s interview with Peter Naur, “Pluralism in Software Engineering”, is quite uneven, it has important insights into software development and academia that continue to be forgotten or put aside, to everyone’s detriment.

A couple of good movies: “No”, on the Pinochet referendum campaign, with its ambivalent, subtle take on social and political change, and “The Queen of Versailles”, a documentary on a ridiculous and ridiculously wealthy American family going through hard times. I’d recommend “Gravity”, but I doubt it needs recommendation. I also enjoyed the genre mix of the British TV version of “Life on Mars”, and the silliness of “Archer”. As for music, I liked the bassy intensity of Savages’ “Silence Yourself”, and Chris Thile’s album of Bach’s sonatas and partitas played on the mandolin.

I was able to run again, injury-free, throughout the year, largely thanks to daily (and initially painful) stretches on a foam roller. It’s such an unassuming, cheap, yet useful accessory. I must have tasted every olive oil and balsamic vinegar at Olive the Senses half a dozen times (and if you are in Victoria you should, too). Finally, while I’ve been intimidated by electronic tinkering almost all my life, the Arduino Experimenter Kit was a very straightforward way to get me started on designing circuits and devices (and check out node-ardx, a great resource to go through the experimenter kit exercises using Node).

That’s it. Happy New Year!

(Previously: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009)

A SEMAT update

2013-08-14T02:33:02-07:00

A few years ago I wrote a pretty critical post on the then-new SEMAT initiative, which wanted to “refound software engineering” with a “solid theory, proven principles, and best practices”. Recently, Ivar Jacobson and others published a book (“The Essence of Software Engineering”) to introduce practitioners to the SEMAT “kernel”. The book is worse than I feared. Greg Wilson and I review it at the Never Work in Theory blog.

Limbic

2013-08-06T02:48:14-07:00

These have been times of important anniversaries for me. In the past few days I’ve celebrated ten years in Canada, one year out of academia, and three months with Limbic Consulting.

In 2003, when Val and I moved to Toronto and I started my Master in Computer Science degree, I thought that my stay in both Canada and academia would be temporary. A couple of years, at most. But I discovered I liked both too much—enough to think of staying in them permanently. Years later, as it turned out, Canada is happily still our home, but I became disenchanted with the academic house, or rather with my corner of it, and left.

Professionally, this last year has been excellent—I feel like I had been in danger of being left behind by the software industry, and that I’ve caught up again. After a stint at Terapeak (a company where I learned much, but whose goals diverged with mine) I joined Limbic. I’m very glad I did. Limbic is a small firm (which I think is great) filled with smart, fun, kind, multidisciplinary people. The office feels equal parts grad lab, electronics workbench, Agile shop, and surreal cave.

We’ve got an art gallery attached to our workplace, a tickle trunk with wigs and costumes to use in standup meetings (and whenever the conversation gets heated), a dictionary of modern thought and back issues of Make as our washroom reading material, great coffee, and healthy snacks. Most importantly, the projects we are working on are both technically challenging and fun, and we have the autonomy to work on them the way we think is best. It’s a pretty unique place, and an exciting time for me.

Our harvest last year

2013-01-27T14:15:29-08:00

It’s been a while since I last wrote about vegetable gardening, but it occupies my mind quite a bit and I should share some of what’s going on. At home, we’ve had two growing seasons so far, the second being more demanding (and more rewarding!) than the first: we almost tripled our garden area.

We grew spinach, lettuce, kale, swiss chard, peas, beans, tomatoes, tomatillos, hot peppers, garlic and garlic scapes, strawberries, cilantro, and carrots. Without any actual effort we also got rhubarb and blackberries, whereas despite our efforts we had no zucchini, cucumbers, leeks, nor onions. The hot peppers and the carrots could have done much better, and I think they will this time around. Bringing the garlic heads out of the soil after spending about three quarters of a year there felt glorious, even though some heads came out with only three or four cloves.

Although I was not keeping track in detail, I think that the amount we saved on food, for veggies of this quality, surpassed the amount of money we put into the garden last year. Of course, I don’t do gardening to save money, but it’s a nice comparison: I’m sure this was not the case the year before last. This year we’re making some “investments”: a cloche frame (a kind of mini greenhouse) for the tomatoes and peppers, and an irrigation system for more consistent watering—it was difficult to find time every day to water an area this big during the Summer.

I like how gardening has become an important part of my life. I wouldn’t have expected that a few years ago: I was extremely careless and ignorant about plants. I’m still pretty much a novice, but I find the experience alternatively absorbing and dissipating. It gives life (including human life—gardening while being a new parent made the link evident to me) a more natural perspective than what I’d grown to expect in an urban environment. So here’s to many more growing seasons! And if you’re thinking about having a garden, this may be the right time to get started with your planning.

Recommendations from 2012

2012-12-27T12:41:44-08:00

The year wraps up, and I’d like to share a batch of recommendations for stuff I enjoyed in 2012.

First, books. I simply loved Semple’s “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?”. I was expecting it to be funny, but I was surprised to discover it was also clever and humane. Though I usually dislike books about drunkards or addicts, deWitt’s “Ablutions” was fresh and very, very good—after this and “The Sisters Brothers” I’m platonically in love with him. Ford’s “Canada”, a novel about a kind young soul growing among adults that can’t help but bring destruction on themselves, is written with wisdom and skill. Spufford’s “Red Plenty”, an extremely multithreaded novel about communist Russia’s central planning, was not great, but I still appreciated its ambition and originality.

As for non-fiction, I found Lucretius’ “On the Nature of Things” to be awe-inspiring: at times it would seem as if all of modern science had only worked on relatively minor corrections of his understanding of the world, while ignoring his impassioned claim that the whole point of these endeavours is to bring inner peace to humankind. Berger and Luckmann’s “The Social Construction of Reality” was wonderfully compelling, lucid, and witty. It is the book I wish I’d read at the start of my doctoral work. For something lighter, Glouberman and Heti’s “The Chairs Are Where the People Go” is an endearing and frank collection of micro-essays.

I had a good year with books in Spanish, too. The slightly unhinged lovers of Pauls’ “El Pasado” spiral down to disaster with exquisite prose. Borges’ collection of lectures, “Siete Noches”, is a touching display of his brilliance and kindness, and “Los Conjurados”, his collection of late poems, is concerned with history, transcendence, insignificance, and lives lived nobly and simply. Krauze’s trilogy of Mexican history (“Siglo de Caudillos”, “Biografía del Poder”, and “La Presidencia Imperial”) is captivating and often lyrical, although his main thesis—that Mexican history to a large extent can be reduced to and explained by the biographies of its leaders—loses strength as Mexico approaches the present time.

I’m still playing catch-up with recent movies, and I doubt I could recommend anything you wouldn’t know of already (but watch “Moonrise Kindgom” if you haven’t). One exception might be “Small Town Murder Songs”, a low budget Canadian independent film that is subtle but powerful. It features music by Bruce Peninsula–another recommendation on its own right. Going much further into the past, I found Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” to be almost perfect.

Online, I enjoyed Bret Victor’s essays. He’s clearly a genius—one I often don’t agree with, but this makes his writing all the more engaging. The New Yorker’s Fiction Podcast features authors reading other author’s works, as well as conversations with Deborah Treisman, and it is consistently superb.

Among my guilty pleasures, I loved being distracted by three sites whenever they had an update: What If, for silly questions explored seriously to everyone’s satisfaction; Horsey Surprise, for a satire of online comment trolls, and Textastrophe, for SMS pranks. I didn’t have much time for gaming, but most of what I had went to XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and, in the past few weeks, to Tropico 3, a sort of SimCity where you’re not a city mayor, but a tropical island dictator during the Cold War.

At work, we’re using Dropwizard to structure our web services, and I liked the way it puts all the relevant pieces together. For a personal project, I used and liked node.js and socket.io, and it was refreshingly easy to get my application running with them. I also toyed with D3.js, and I’m looking forward to a time when I can put it to good use—Mike Bostock’s site has fantastic examples of his library at work.

I believe that’s all. If you haven’t read them and are curious, I’ve written similar posts for 2011, 2010, and 2009. I hope you’ll find some of these recommendations useful, and I wish you a Happy New Year!

Two Solitudes Illustrated

2012-12-06T05:28:09-08:00

Greg Wilson writes:

Jorge Aranda and I submitted a short opinion piece to Communications of the ACM in February 2012 that discussed some of the reasons people in industry and academia don’t talk to each other as much as they should. Ten months later, it has ironically turned into an illustration of one of the reasons: it was six months before we received any feedback at all, and we’ve now waited four months for any further word. In that time, Jorge has left academia and I’ve taken a job with Mozilla, so we have decided to withdraw the manuscript and publish it here. We hope you find it interesting, and we would welcome comments.

The manuscript is up at Greg’s blog. Hope you enjoy it.

I’m a software developer again

2012-07-27T06:56:21-07:00

I’m happy to announce that this week I started on my new programming position at Terapeak, a local data-analytics company. I’m especially happy because it satisfies almost all the criteria I was looking for when I set out to find a job [1]. It’s quite a change for me to get out of the university environment after being immersed in it for almost 9 years—a change that I felt was necessary, and one that I was really looking forward to. So I’m no longer an academic. Or I guess you could say I went native: I joined the community that used to be my object of study [2].

I’ve only started at the new place, but I’ve been already learning quite a bit and having lots of fun. I’m also having really satisfying feelings of liberation (getting myself out of the small, ineffectual corner to which my research had been pushing me, as research tends to do), of relevance (knowing that my work will be used and found useful), and of possibility (dusting off skills that will get me closer to where I want to be). These feelings may be possibly in part due to the novelty of the change, and, as always, it’s hard to say how things will turn out. But right now this feels like it was the right choice.

—

[1] With one exception: it is not an organization working on environmental or social justice issues. But I found none of those hiring folks like me in Victoria. Of course, I’ll continue working on these issues in my free time.

[2] Though I never did research on Terapeak.

Canadian citizenship

2012-07-06T01:57:15-07:00

Last Sunday, on Canada Day, Val and I took the oath of citizenship to become Canadian (we retain our Mexican citizenship, too). The ceremony took place at the beautiful Government House, and we got the chance to meet and shake hands with the Lieutenant Governor Steven Point, the Minister of Community, Sport, and Cultural Development for British Columbia, Ida Chong, and the Mayor of Victoria, Dean Fortin.

It was an emotional ceremony, but I didn’t feel I became Canadian there. As with my PhD convocation, I felt that the ceremony was merely a ritual to mark something that had happened earlier on, gradually, over many moments and incidents. Getting the citizenship is great—I’ll get to vote, travel will be much easier—but I’ve been calling Canada home for a long time already.

Software Carpentry Assessment Report

2012-07-05T09:47:00-07:00

One of the things I’ve been doing over the past six months is an assessment of the effects of the Software Carpentry program on its participants. It involved surveys, dozens of interviews, and observations. I’m happy with the results, and glad I got the chance to do this. I delivered my report today, and it’s now available to the public (PDF). If you prefer, you can read the Executive Summary at the Software Carpentry blog.

Why not a professorship?

2012-05-30T02:00:41-07:00

Since I wrote a post about looking for a job, a few people told me they were interested in the reasons why was I not looking for a professor position. After all, the typical procedure for someone in my situation (a PhD with a postdoctoral fellowship under his belt) would have been to apply to as many professor and research lab positions as possible. Right now, I should be flying all over the continent, presenting my work at universities, and trying to get one of those elusive tenure-track positions somewhere or other—perhaps taking another postdoctoral fellowship (or two) if the professorship does not materialize.

However, I decided to step out of that treadmill when my time at the University of Victoria runs out. There are many reasons, but three stand out: I became a father, I got tired of the Ponzi scheme dynamics of the academic career, and, most importantly, I lost faith in the value of much software research to society.

First, parenthood. Among other things, parenthood meant, to me, that my partner and I should be more selective of where we’ll live, where are our friends, how much will I need to travel, and to what extent can I balance work and personal life. We’ve made friends in Toronto and in Victoria; uprooting ourselves again, perhaps a number of times until we finally settle, is unappealing. Furthermore, I now like keeping my evenings and weekends to my family, and to minimize travel. All of this does not agree with the demands placed on young computer scientists today: there are proportionally very few positions available, and if you want to get one, you might need to jump yearly from postdoc to postdoc, and from city to city, perhaps from country to country, and to work overtime to beat your friends to one of them—and once you get it, you’ll need to sacrifice even more to satisfy your tenure committee.

I don’t think it was always like this, for Computer Science researchers. From what I have heard (I don’t have concrete data), the field expanded pretty rapidly some 15 years ago, and for a while universities were grabbing new doctors as fast as they could. But CS enrollment took a huge hit after the bubble burst, and it has not recovered. As a result, university demand for new professors is pretty low—or even negative, in some cases: the positions of retired professors are not being refilled. The university keeps churning new doctors, though, and these doctors are taking postdoc positions because there’s nothing else available, and they build up their CVs so that new grads almost certainly need to engage in the same dynamic themselves if they are to compete. The postdoc life in North America, by the way, is certainly more comfortable than that of the graduate student, but it still does not compare to that of the industry professional. Before you get that professor position (if you get it), you’ll spend about ten years of your life, at least, earning a fraction of the salary of your wiser college friends. The skills you’ll learn in academia will also be a tougher sell outside of it than the skills you would’ve learned in industry (though I think they may be extremely valuable skills, they are not necessarily seen that way out there). All in all, there does not seem to be a strong financial case to be made for the academic path at this point in my field.

I could put up with all of that, actually—with the uprooting and the overtime and the elbowing and the living-at-the-poverty-line—if I was convinced that what we are doing in Software Engineering research is important to humanity. But over the past few years that belief has almost disappeared. The academic structure, at least in my area, only rewards benefits to society nominally; in practice, they are usually nowhere to be seen. You can scour our top publication venues for usefulness, as I do, and find, often, very little to report. (Sadly, you could scour my publications and come to a similar conclusion…)

This problem of usefulness to humanity exists when Software Engineering research fails to be pertinent, but sometimes also, ironically, when it succeeds: one of the goals of our research is to improve the efficiency of software companies, and for a civilization mindlessly depleting its resources faster than ever, it’s unclear whether the net impact of improving the performance of a software corporation is positive or negative to society. There is of course an argument to be made about indirectly aiding progress, but I’m skeptical of it. I only have one life, and if I’m going to put myself and my family through the stuff I described above, I want to make sure that it is for a good reason.

Now, I said that my belief in the usefulness of Software Engineering research has almost disappeared, and that “almost” is important. To be sure, some people working on this field are admirable, their work is fascinating, they tirelessly swim against the stream, and we’re indebted to them (you know who you are; don’t make me name you!). When I think of them I start second-guessing myself: should I not stay and keep trying to use my skills in meaningful problems? Am I not acting precipitously? And the empirical bent of much of our research today brings it closer to applicability—am I not giving up too soon?

Perhaps, but in the end, I’m leaving the university because I have not found a sustainable way to stay and help (truly help) fix the world, and I lost my patience. I’ve resolved to work for an organization that is actually built around that purpose, ideally, or for one that makes it easy for me to do it in my personal time. Given the current state of my field, either will bring me closer to my goal than pursuing a professorship.

Looking for a job

2012-05-01T02:53:48-07:00

My time as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Victoria will run out fairly soon: until the end of August at the latest, four months from now. It’s time, then, to look for another job, and to make some important decisions about who and where do I want to be. For reasons that deserve a blog post of its own, I decided not to look for professor positions, and to broaden my scope instead.

Ideally, I want to find a job that fulfills as many of these needs as possible:

First, do no harm. I won’t work for an organization that deals in violence to others, to the environment, or to fairness.
Second, do as much good as possible and still get paid. I would love to work for an organization that’s trying to make the world better, especially with respect to social justice or environmental issues. I would work hardest, and for lower pay, if this was the case. Alternatively, I would like to work for an organization that has enough freedom built in so that its members can pursue these goals in their available time.
Geography. Val and I like Victoria and Toronto, we’ve built networks in both cities, and they’re currently our two top choices.
Stability. I want a permanent position with a sustainable salary, because I don’t want to be looking for another job again a year from now.
Work-life balance. Reasonably low overtime and travel requirements, and flexibility in work hours to be there for my daughter when she needs me.
Good teamwork and work environment. This is harder to assess than the others, but I think a commitment to team self-organization, autonomy, and co-location are good indicators.
Technically hard problems, because I want to feel challenged and engaged at work.

And here’s what I think I can offer in return:

An unusual perspective: I’ve studied dozens of software organizations and interviewed hundreds of professionals, who have shared with me their ideas of how their teams work and how they could work better, especially with respect to coordination and communication.
Pragmatic knowledge of useful and state-of-the-art empirical research in software development, which I regularly blog and write about.
Skills that I learned while getting my PhD and that are transferable to (and, I think, welcome in) the software industry and elsewhere: observation, active listening, data analysis, communication, estimation, and self-management.
More conventionally, experience developing software and managing projects.
The assurance that, as long as my employer fulfills the needs I listed above, I’m in it for the long haul.

There’s nothing in my wishlist about specific positions or job titles—the ideal position for me might be hard to pin down with a label. I expect that for most organizations my best current fit would be around project management, although I would also love to develop software again, and to work in the intersection of research and practice. If you know of a place where I could be of help, or if you’d like to discuss possible collaborations, please let me know!

Recommendations from 2011

2012-01-03T08:59:55-08:00

Happy New Year! Alright, 2011 is gone, and I wanted to share some of the books and things I discovered throughout it that got me excited.

For me, this was a good year for books. Among the new ones, I enjoyed “The Tragedy of Arthur”, by Arthur Phillips, which presents itself as a newly discovered Shakespeare tragedy, with a long introduction in which Phillips tries to convince the reader that the play that follows is not actually Shakespeare’s, but a forgery made by his father. Colson Whitehead’s “Zone One” is a good zombie novel—like in most zombie stories, the real villain is ourselves, though in this case it’s specifically the bullshitty, bureaucratic, superficial patterns we’ve grown so fond of. Patrick DeWitt’s “The Sisters Brothers” is fun and engaging: a Western that’s both literary and pulpy at the same time. I also finished (and loved completely) Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”, a novel that explained my own mind and soul to myself like no other book has, and in a way I did not believe was possible.

I also found several great books in Spanish. César Aira’s “Cómo me hice monja” and “Las curas milagrosas del Doctor Aira” are whimsical gems. Enrique Vila-Matas’ “Una casa para siempre” is a fascinating crime and guilt novella in which neither the crime nor the guilt are mentioned nor alluded to in the text whatsoever. On the other extreme, the confessions of the repugnant philosophy professor gone bad in Guillermo Fadanelli’s “Lodo” are told with a dirty, captivating voice, and they are a great read too.

As a new father, it was pretty hard to keep track of new movies in 2011. Val and I watched lots of older stuff though—among them, I liked Broken Flowers and Persona a lot. We’re currently caught up with Breaking Bad, a great TV show about a chemistry professor that is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and becomes a crystal meth manufacturer to leave money to his family. And if it was hard to keep track of new movies, it was practically impossible to try out new boardgames. I’m still playing a lot of Go, though, and I enjoy it even more as I peel out more of its layers.

I’ve been growing tired of most of the webcomics I usually read, but Zach Weiner’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is still frequently brilliant, and Nicholas Gurewitch’s Perry Bible Fellowship is again updated, now and then, with some great strips (Gurewitch’s collection of strips, “The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack”, is wonderful too).

For my computer, I used and liked f5 for transcribing interviews. Backblaze works great for backups; I don’t even need to think about it anymore. On my phone, after Scott Leslie‘s pointer, I’ve lately been using buddhify to help myself learn to meditate, and I’m really enjoying it.

That’s it, I think. Let me know if there’s something you found that I might enjoy, too!

El agua, de Pellicer

2011-11-14T12:13:58-08:00

Hace algunos meses leí “Albercas”, de Villoro, y su epígrafe se me quedó grabado:

Agua del nadador que la divide.

Parece un verso sencillo, pero en él nos amalgamamos todos—nuestra voluntad, nuestra estupidez, nuestra elegancia—; en él se esconde el Universo, fluído, eterno, un mar y una gota.

Villoro informa que el verso es de Pellicer, y yo, que nunca había leído a Pellicer, me lo repito como una mantra, dislocado, sin querer conectarlo con el resto del poema al que pertenece por miedo a que pierda su conexión conmigo. Pero recientemente la curiosidad me venció y una búsqueda en Internet me dio el resto del poema, que es luminoso y que reproduzco a continuación:

—

El Agua, de Carlos Pellicer

Aguas horizontales

con hombres y peces y nubes.

Aguas azules y verdes,

espacio palpitante, atmósfera del paraíso submarino

cuyas medusas arcangélicas

mudan ojos y manos en huertos coralinos.

Aguas reales del viaje fabuloso

manchadas como tigres por las guerras.

Aguas víctimas o insaciables en la sed de la tierra;

sorbo de sed, aguas vírgenes.

Una gota de agua

salvó la última espiga del sembrado

o hizo temblar el dorso de Susana

entre las barbas bíblicas del baño.

Agua del nadador que la divide

y la vuelve laurel o vida nueva.

En las tinajas familiares

el agua se hace negra

de silencio y frescor. Y el ritmo de los mares

vira el buque ladrón que halló en las islas fiestas.

Aguas verticales, horizontal, cerámica y primera.

Then Epicurus knew the vessel caused the vice

2011-10-07T09:54:41-07:00

Long time without posting, but I’m back. To break the silence, here is a quote from Lucretius I like, as cited by Montaigne.

For when he saw that nearly all that use demands

Already was prepared for use by mortal hands,

That men were powerful in honor and in fame,

In riches affluent, proud in their sons’ good name,

Yet nonetheless within were anxious in their heart,

In painful quarrels of the mind forced to take part:

Then Epicurus knew the vessel caused the vice;

That all good things that enter, of whatever price,

Within us, by that vessel’s vice, became corrupt.

I remembered it because of the news and reviews about Stephen Greenblatt’s new book on De Rerum Natura. My copy of Lucretius still sits unread in my shelf, patiently waiting for me. I think I should attend to it…

Al Gore’s proposals to help fight climate change

2011-07-13T10:32:41-07:00

In a very good article in Rolling Stone, Al Gore lays out the reasons for the sorry state of the climate change debate in the public arena. (He dishes out a lot of his criticism to the media; the media, true to form, seem to have interpreted the article as an attack on Obama.) He closes with five ways in which you can help fix things. Slightly abridged:

First, become a committed advocate for solving the crisis. You can start with something simple: Speak up whenever the subject of climate arises. When a friend or acquaintance expresses doubt that the crisis is real, or that it’s some sort of hoax, don’t let the opportunity pass to put down your personal marker. The civil rights revolution may have been driven by activists who put their lives on the line, but it was partly won by average Americans who began to challenge racist comments in everyday conversations.

Second, deepen your commitment by making consumer choices that reduce energy use and reduce your impact on the environment. The demand by individuals for change in the marketplace has already led many businesses to take truly significant steps to reduce their global-warming pollution.

Third, join an organization committed to action on this issue.

Fourth, contact your local newspapers and television stations when they put out claptrap on climate — and let them know you’re fed up with their stubborn and cowardly resistance to reporting the facts of this issue. One of the main reasons they are so wimpy and irresponsible about global warming is that they’re frightened of the reaction they get from the deniers when they report the science objectively. So let them know that deniers are not the only ones in town with game. Stay on them! Don’t let up!

Finally, and above all, don’t give up on the political system. Even though it is rigged by special interests, it is not so far gone that candidates and elected officials don’t have to pay attention to persistent, engaged and committed individuals. (…) To make our elected leaders take action to solve the climate crisis, we must forcefully communicate the following message: “I care a lot about global warming; I am paying very careful attention to the way you vote and what you say about it; if you are on the wrong side, I am not only going to vote against you, I will work hard to defeat you — regardless of party. If you are on the right side, I will work hard to elect you.”

We made a baby!

2011-06-30T10:59:36-07:00

It’s quite likely that all of you already know this, but anyway. Val and I have a baby daughter, Aurora, who is now a little over two months old. She’s beautiful, perceptive, and happy. We’re in love with her completely. She changed everything in our lives.

The Bluff Box

2011-03-31T15:15:16-07:00

Victoria readers (and especially Fernwood neighbours): a friend of mine is collaborating with a Metchosin farmer to bring local, organic, delicious food weekly from Sea Bluff Farm to Fernwood, from June to November. They called it The Bluff Box. It’s similar to a CSA program, except you pay as you go: $25 for a small box, $40 for the family-size box. I hope you sign up—we need 20 committed customers to get this going!

The Budding Gardener

2011-03-21T15:17:46-07:00

While Val worked on her term paper this weekend, I took advantage of the sunshine and mild temperatures to honor my name by working on our vegetable garden. It was exciting and a bit scary: I didn’t know if I was doing things right and I didn’t want to kill off our seedlings or sow our seeds incorrectly (I think I placed them too low… we’ll see).

I’m at the point where I’m just beginning to realize that I’m in total ignorance about gardening. I used to think it was easy; now, researching about how to grow food properly, I keep reading about nitrogen-fixing this and bolting that, about transplant shocks, companion plants, crop rotation, disease control, and lots more concepts that I don’t know how to tie together. I hear enough about these things to recognize I’m doing things far from optimally (I didn’t mulch the site last Fall, I waited too long to weed it out, and I waited even longer to transplant the seedlings), so I’ll be satisfied with a very modest crop this season. But I’ll learn fast—especially thanks to several friends who have been giving me plenty of great advice and seeds.

I used up slightly less than half of our veggie patch. I filled it up with lettuce, arugula, kale, spinach, parsley, cilantro, strawberries, and two kinds of peas. The rest of the patch is waiting for warmer weather and will hopefully feature several varieties of tomatoes (including tomatillos) and hot peppers (jalapeño and chile ancho), zucchini, and edible flowers. I hope we’ll be able to share this with some of you, and more bountiful harvests on years to come.

Birthday

2011-03-21T14:20:46-07:00

I celebrated my first birthday here in Victoria a week and a half ago! We had lots and lots of good friends coming over, and it was heartwarming—even though it sometimes feels like we just moved into town, my party was a fantastic reminder of how many great friendships we’ve already made here. Thanks to everyone who made it!

Mexican House of Spice

2011-02-23T04:12:33-08:00

A friend of us tipped us to a new business in town: the Mexican House of Spice, at 2220 Douglas St. As the name suggests, the store stocks Mexican spices, but it has a lot more stuff: tortilla flour, cheeses (fresco, panela, oaxaca…), tostadas, cactus, dried chiles, tomatillos, tamales, piñatas, and a long et cetera that includes goods from all over Latin America and Africa. It’s a bit like Perolas in Kensington Market, in Toronto. Spread the word and visit the store, to make sure it stays in business!

Circo

2011-02-08T14:22:13-08:00

Val and I went to see “Circo” at the Victoria Film Festival last Saturday. It’s a documentary directed by Aaron Schock about a struggling circus touring rural Mexico, and about the family whose members own it, publicize it, set it up, perform in it, take it down after a day or two, and move on to the next town (tigers, camels, and llamas in tow), barely scraping enough to get by, torn between business and family obligations, dreaming of the days when their acts will be more solid and their crew larger so that they’ll be able to compete in the big cities, but seeing those dreams move farther and farther away with each stop on the road.

It’s a very good documentary, and one of those rare movies that portray Mexico as it really is. It is not afraid of exploring my country’s complexities in full, but it does so gently, sweetly, and lovingly. I hope it will get a wider distribution. Catch it if you can. Here’s an interview with Schock, if you’re interested in learning more.

Back from León

2011-01-15T10:07:57-08:00

Val and I came back from León a week ago, after a much needed month-long stay. It was a bittersweet visit: I was delighted to see so many friends and family doing well, but while we were there, on January 2nd, my grandmother died of pneumonia after a long decay. I expected it to happen any day for the past few years (and, all things considered, I am glad she’s finally at peace), but I did not expect to be there to say goodbye.

I find now that going back to my hometown makes me feel older—or rather, it lets me realize my age, the status of my generation. I have plenty of younger nephews and cousins that I can barely recognize, and to whom I’m only vaguely familiar too. “Do you know who I am?” often draws out a negative, as it did when I was a boy and some traveling relative (an Older Man, to my eyes) came to León on a visit. Many of my friends have left the city or are otherwise engaged in grown-up activities and worries: mortgages, kids, schools, and the like. And the city, of course, has grown and changed: I find it slightly unsettling and unfamiliar how the old paths I took no longer take me where I want to go, and how the places I want to go to are not necessarily there anymore. In Toronto, and now in Victoria, I’m somewhat removed from all this; having it all hit me at once is a bit of a shock.

And yet it’s all good: seeing all these people and places, however different from those that I left behind on our previous visit, still brings out many of the same chords and emotions, the same aromas and flavours that are a part of me and that I didn’t know I’d miss so much, because I hadn’t learned to tell them apart from those of the rest of the world.

Recommendations from 2010

2010-12-29T13:30:38-08:00

We’re wrapping up another year, so I thought of sharing pointers to some of the things that got me excited throughout 2010 while I was not burying my head in my thesis or packing for our move to Victoria.

In terms of books, last year around this time I was very excited by Javier Marías’ trilogy, “Tu Rostro Mañana.” I still haven’t read it, unfortunately, but I did read the older “Corazón tan Blanco,” and I loved its flowing prose and its subtle plot. I was quite surprised with Roberto Bolaño’s “El Tercer Reich“—not by its quality (Bolaño is always fantastic), but by the discovery that he must have been, for a while at least, a boardgame geek: the novel narrates, with plenty of interest, a match of a game that seems to be “The Rise and Decline of the Third Reich” between a German nerd and a tortured South American. I know only two other novels that take a serious look at boardgaming (Kawabata’s “The Master of Go” and Nabokov’s “The Defense“); I love the former, and I have not read the latter.

I also plunged into Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” which has taken me a little more than I expected (I’ve only just finished Volume III), but I’m thoroughly enjoying every page. It’s not just the hypnotic prose (and I wish I could read it in the original French), but the blindingly bright cognitive, psychological, and sociological insights—a humbling masterpiece.

Probably the best non-fiction book I read this year was Paul Edwards’ history of the development of climate modeling, “A Vast Machine.” It’s engaging, timely, and fairly accessible, while exploring the difficult epistemological questions of climate simulation. On a different topic, Richard Evans’ historical trilogy of the Third Reich is engrossing and informative, and probably the best I could ask for to understand that brutal period of history.

To get a fascinating individual perspective of that time, you should read or subscribe to the “Orwell Diaries” blog, which posts entries from George Orwell’s journal seventy years to the day (so the most recent entry today is from December 29th, 1940, in the midst of Germany’s campaign of aerial bombings in the UK—thanks to Greg Wilson for the pointer). For more recent events, there are several blogs I came to love this year: George Monbiot‘s provides great commentary on ecological and social affairs (and he engaged in a wrenching debate with my PhD advisor, Steve Easterbrook, on the topic of the East Anglia emails). The New York Times’ “The Stone” blog demonstrates that philosophy is practical and relevant. Boston.com’s “The Big Picture” is a jaw-dropping photo blog (thanks to Michael Tobis for the tip). The New Yorker Fiction podcast features cool short story readings and discussions. And after the G20 meeting in Toronto, I discovered the Waging Nonviolence blog, which among many inspiring news and reflections on non-violence pointed to this essay on the futility of the Black Bloc that I wish was more widely read.

I’ve mentioned some of the great things we’ve discovered in Victoria in the few months we’ve been there (the delicious food from the Puerto Vallarta Amigos’ taco truck, Lifecycles’ fruit picking project), but there’s others I have not talked about: the Good Food Box (which is as great as Toronto’s, except for the fact that deliveries are monthly, not biweekly); the Springridge Commons permaculture garden and the Haultain Boulevard’s street garden, where anybody can come and pick any fruit, vegetable, or herb they like (just leave enough for the rest!); and Transition Victoria, the local Transition initiative, of which I should talk more in a later post.

It wasn’t a great year for new movies for me: we rented plenty of wonderful classics, but I was mostly disappointed at the movie theatre. Two notable exceptions: the mexploitation extravaganza of “Machete” and the Toronto-loving geeky fantasy of “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.” It wasn’t a great year for boardgames either (though I’m holding out for “The Resistance“), except for the hours and hours I spent playing Go, a game of intimidating depth and beauty that I appreciate more with every match I play (I’m “yorchopolis” at the Dragon Go Server; feel free to invite me to a game!).

Some software tools and I’m done; these may be old news for you, depending on where you’re coming from: I discovered Mendeley for managing my library of academic papers and notes (after painfully parting without my annotated paper copies of hundreds of papers in Toronto), I started taking advantage of Instapaper to reduce the clutter of my browser tabs, and for task management I switched from Toodledo (which was alright) to Omnifocus (expensive, but it fits like a glove!).

That’s it, I think. I hope you enjoy these as much as I have, and I wish you a happy New Year!

En León

2010-12-16T09:18:27-08:00

Vale y yo andamos de visita en León para cerrar el año. Encuentro la ciudad menos cambiada que la última vez que venimos; quizá porque aquella ocasión vimos abierto por primera vez el nuevo distribuidor vial. Entre las novedades buenas y malas que me han llamado la atención en esta visita hasta ahora:

Cada vez hay más contaminación. En la mañana se distingue una nube de smog sobre toda la ciudad.
El Forum Cultural tiene un nuevo teatro, supuestamente buenísimo, que tendremos que visitar.
En la entrada a la ciudad desde el aeropuerto hay un nuevo monstruo: un centro de “outlets” de zapatos. No me explico cómo piensan estas zapaterías mantener también todas sus otras sucursales en la ciudad.
Más ciclovías.
Más tráfico.
La comida china y thai como que se empieza a poner de moda.
Un circo de los Backyardigans.

PhD closure

2010-11-21T08:47:20-08:00

Last week I attended my convocation at the University of Toronto. It was a long and fairly boring ceremony, but I think I needed it: finishing a doctorate is one of the most anticlimactic events there are, considering the effort it takes to do it! I think the problem is that there are too many “almost there” points, or at least there were in my case:

You finish a decent draft of your thesis, but you realize there’s still lots of rough edges to polish. Okay!
You hand in your “final draft” to your committee. You’re proud of it. Yay! But you can’t celebrate yet: you need to prepare for the exam.
You pass the exam! But now you have a list of changes to make to your thesis, and you better do them quickly if you’re pressed for time (as I was) and if the scheduling window of the external or Senate defense is narrow (as mine was).
You hand in your thesis with the changes your committee requested. It took you a while, mainly because the thought of editing the Thing is dreadful. Never mind, though, it’s done. Yay again! But of course you still can’t celebrate: you need to prepare for the external defense (and for the snake fight).
You pass the defense! Woo hoo! You’re unofficially a Doctor now! Everyone calls you that. Except you still have a significant list of corrections for That Blasted Document you call your thesis.
In the solitude of your desk, you drag yourself to make those final changes. At some point in the middle of the night, you send it to your advisor; then you crawl to bed.
Hours or days later you get an email: your advisor accepted the changes. You upload the final version to the University’s database. A day later you get back an email saying that your upload failed because you didn’t name your PDF file quite the right way. You fix the filename and resubmit. You’re done.

And that’s it! “Not with a bang, but a whimper.” So after all, after so many false endings, I felt as if I wasn’t quite there yet. I would go to work every day as a “postdoctorate fellow,” which implies I’m done with school, yet except for a few moments I would slip back to that student frame of mind, with the sole difference that I wouldn’t have a thesis to write anymore.

So we flew to Toronto, where I met again with plenty of friends (but my time was tight, and I didn’t see or chat with many that I wanted to!), wore fancy clothes, attended convocation, briefly shook hands with the bigwigs present at the ceremony, and came back to Victoria with a framed piece of paper that says I’m done. It’s too early to say if it truly worked in giving me closure, but I’m glad I did it.

Neither here nor there

2010-10-30T07:57:16-07:00

You may have heard that Toronto elected a new mayor this week, a man about whom the best I can say is that he has a pretty potent voice. I was dreading his election for a while before we moved to Victoria, since I started reading more and more angry comments in online news articles on Miller, the previous mayor, and seeing fellows with “Rob Ford” buttons on the subway. On election night I was glued to my computer, exasperated with the results, reading anything I could find on the topic, and wondering how will the new political situation play out.

A couple of days later, after reading some article on Ford to Val over dinner, I realized there was something incongruent going on with me: though I cared very much about what would happen to Toronto under him, I didn’t even know the name of the mayor of Victoria, the city in which we actually live, much less his policies or initiatives. It was as if my mind was still living in Toronto and I refused (or didn’t care) to grow roots in my new town.

And I noticed this had happened to me before, when we moved from León to Toronto. I would be reading Mexican news intensely, while I barely cared about local Canadian politics. Back then we thought we’d only be in Toronto for a couple of years—in parallel to our current situation—, which perhaps made me feel uncommitted to my new environment. But eventually I started to care more about Toronto, to feel an inner warmth whenever I returned from a trip, and to get informed and involved in my community. I kept interested in Mexican affairs, of course, but differently: from afar, not from an artificial within. My interest or lack of interest for local politics was a symptom of my degree of adaptation to my new home. I can see it happening again today.

So now my life is split in three places: the one I first knew, and that grows slightly more foreign every time I visit; the one I just left, to which my unconscious still takes me in my dreams and worries; and the one where I am and should be, still rather unknown and strange, until I gradually decide to truly turn to look and discover it.

Picking apples

2010-10-09T05:49:31-07:00

A new friend here in Victoria told us about the LifeCycles Project and its fruit picking activities: if you have a fruit tree in your garden you can call them, and they’ll schedule a team of volunteers to come pick its fruit. You get a share (about a quarter), the volunteers get a share (another quarter), and the LifeCycles Project donates the rest to local non-profits. Turns out our friend is a team lead with LifeCycles, and was wondering if Val and I wanted to join in. Let’s see…

spend a few Sunday hours chatting and doing light work outdoors,
get lots of ultra-local, organic, delicious produce,
and contribute with local food banks and community centers.

Awesomeness from every angle!

We spent some three hours last Sunday picking apples from three different trees (King, Golden Delicious, and an unidentified third kind). In total we collected about 200kg of fruit. Our share was two boxes, about 15kg! Fortunately they keep well.

So far it’s been apples every day, as well as applesauce and apple salad. An apple pie or crumbler is rumoured to be in the works this weekend. I guess I’d normally get tired of so much of it after a while, but the fruit tastes fantastic and I am quite fond of it, having picked some of it myself.

The picking season is nearly over, but I think there will still be a few trees to pick, so if you’re in Victoria let me know if you’d like to join, and we can go together!

Tacos!

2010-10-09T05:19:38-07:00

(Non-Spanish-speaking friends: I hope you won’t mind that I occasionally switch back to my mother tongue. For now, in case Google Translate mangles my clear and beautiful Spanish, a summary: if you’re in Victoria you must try the tacos at Puerto Vallarta Amigos!)

Hace una semana, me escapé unas horas de la oficina para ir con Vale a probar los tacos de Puerto Vallarta Amigos. Cuando escuché de ellos por primera vez no se me antojaban; quizá por el nombre: suena agringado, como el Café México a una cuadra de distancia, como el tipo de nombre que alguien pondría sin mucho conocimiento sobre la cocina mexicana. Además, el puestito sólo abre entre semana para el lunch, y como se pone en el centro de la ciudad me queda medio lejos de la oficina, así que no es muy práctico visitarlo. Pero escuché un par de recomendaciones y me enteré que tenía opciones vegetarianas, así que Vale y yo decidimos intentarlo.

El carrito de tacos se instala en la esquina de Wharf y Yates, y no se ve como los puestos en México; más bien me recuerda a las camionetas de comida china que se ponen en Toronto, en la universidad (por St. George) o por el palacio municipal (parece que aquí en general no hay comida callejera, ni siquiera hot dogs). Los taqueros trabajan dentro de la camioneta, y ponen unos banquitos afuera para que la gente se siente si quiere (supongo que por acá es mucho pedir comer parado y malabareando el plato, el taco, y el refresco).

En fin, la taquería lleva tan sólo unos tres meses aquí. El dueño se llama Toño (Tacos Toño!), y por lo que veo es un negocio familiar: él cobra, su esposa y dos hijos preparan los tacos, y otro hijo se pasea por la calle haciendo no supe qué. Creo que tienen tacos de pollo y de res, pero también de papa con espinacas, de frijol con queso, y de chorizo de soya (resulta que Toño es vegetariano). El día que fuimos también había de hongos portobelo, pero esos no están en el menú.

Los tacos están buenísimos: las tortillas como deben estar, un poco aceitositas, la cebolla y el cilantro frescos, y las salsas sabrosas y picantes, una verde con aguacate y una roja. Lo único que falta es un poquito de limón, pero aquí es caro. Igual y para la próxima Vale y yo nos llevamos unas rebanaditas para ponerle ahí. El chorizo de soya estaba delicioso, quién sabe si porque ya llevo más de seis años de vegetariano y ya se me olvidó cómo sabe el de verdad, pero me sentí de vuelta en México, momentáneamente. Acabé comiendo unos doce tacos (dos órdenes) de varias cosas, y con muchas ganas de regresar. Si nos quedara más cerca, ahí nos la pasábamos.

Deer at UVic

2010-09-29T03:41:53-07:00

As I rode to the University this morning, I saw this young deer grazing the lawn. I slowed down, and he (I think it’s a he?) followed me with his eyes. I spun my bike around to get a better look of him and snap a couple of photos with my phone, which he allowed for a moment before deciding to walk away.

I think this is the same deer Val and I saw yesterday afternoon walking through a path between some trees, just a few steps ahead of us.

I can’t get over these deer (I’ve been awed by several apparitions already); but apparently many people here have: they just bike or walk past them, and some local residents even dislike them because they make a mess of their gardens and munch on their flowers and veggies.

One month in Victoria

2010-09-26T06:42:38-07:00

Yesterday, Val and I celebrated our first full month in Victoria. It feels like much more than a month since we arrived with our luggage, tired after sleeping only a couple of hours the night before (the last-minute rush to pack or dispose or clean everything out of our old apartment ate up the night), and carrying a dazed and frightened Mushi into our new home.

I guess it feels like much more than a month because we’ve done so much throughout: unpacking, figuring out places to shop, learning the bus and bike routes, familiarizing ourselves with the University of Victoria—nothing feels routine yet; every day is still new in some ways. Still, some patterns begin to form: I bike almost every weekday to the University (it’s a 20-25 minute ride uphill from our place), I arrive at my office between 9 and 10am and leave between 5 and 6pm (I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I’m still not used to 40-hour work weeks, but these seem to be standard for profs and students at the labs where I work). Val and I cook together when I get home; sometimes I do the cooking, when Val has evening lectures, a couple of days a week. Sometimes, not too often, we take a bus downtown and go to a restaurant, or walk to Fernwood Square or to Hillside-Quadra Village. During the weekends we clean up (it’s a bigger place, so there’s more to do!), do chores and shopping, and if it isn’t rainy I spend some time tending the garden, which is fun but frustrating: after hours of work, it looks just like it was when I started. Val has so much reading material she usually has to work during the weekends too. We’ve also started meeting people, and our agenda is now peppered with a couple of nights out with new friends each week. All in all, it doesn’t feel like we’ve been really exploring Victoria a lot yet; going downtown still feels like being a bit of a tourist, which I realize is probably OK for our first month in the city. However, I feel much more familiar with our neighbourhood, and with some areas of the University, and when I come home it does start to feel, little by little, and once again, like I’m coming home.

Welcome!

2010-09-18T15:19:22-07:00

Welcome to my shiny new personal blog!

As you may already know, I’ve been keeping another blog (Catenary) for a few years, and I intended to make that my one and only blog, to keep things simple for everyone. But I feel I’ve been restraining myself from posting stuff I wanted to post because the academic side of things kind of took over the blog—I know I have readers who don’t care about my research and others who don’t care about my personal life.

So I decided to split that blog in two. I’ll keep Catenary for work stuff, and this new blog for more personal stuff: our life in Victoria, photos, book or movie recommendations, games, whatever else comes up. I also decided to write some of my posts in Spanish here, now and then. If you want to comment, feel free to use either language. Thanks for reading!