In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread - Anatole France


Watched Hamilton for the very first time. I have been a fan of the musical for a long time, ever since I listened to the original Broadway recording, but what made me actually fall in love with it was Jaime Altozano’s musical analysis of Hamilton. It’s one thing to listen to it, and another entirely to watch it. For example, just from listening to the songs, I had no idea that the show was double cast. And it was. On purpose.


One of the staple questions in /r/AskReddit is something along the lines of “Which fictional character never fails to piss you off?”. I recall seeing a version of a similar question at least 5 times in that subreddit. Anyway, the highest number of upvotes fell to Dolores Umbridge. Again, nothing surprising so far. The comment that I found the most interesting was: Voldemort kills people but he’s not on this list. Umbridge abuses her power and changes the rules and is just plain unfair, and she’s at the top of the list. The lesson I learned from that character, as a writer, is that audiences respond much more viscerally to unfairness than they do to straight-up evil.


I really, really like Swift, the programming language. After not doing any iOS programming for a while, I started writing a small pet-project. It’s so much easier to create a UI now, SwiftUI has been a real joy to use.


Someone mentioned online that

Science progresses one funeral at a time

As flippant as it sounds, it turns out that there is a principle called Planck’s principle formulated as follows

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. . . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth. — Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97

While the rule doesn’t seem to be confirmed experimentally, it’s an interesting observation from one of the top scientists of the 20th century.


Hey is still wonderful.


A friend sent me a video that reminded me why despite his flaws I liked Obama so much. We could use someone like him right now.

This idea of purity and that you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke — you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you. I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media — there is this sense sometimes of the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough. If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself. Did you see how woke I was, I called you out. Then I’m going to get on my TV and watch my show … That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.


Among social liberals, learning about White privilege reduces sympathy, increases blame, and decreases external attributions for White people struggling with poverty, says a study.