Congrats to the Seahawks but I confess I’m still not batting 100% at distinguishing Mike Macdonald from Mike McDaniel from Mike McCarthy

Happiest or at least most relieved person right now has to be Tariq Woolen

My kids were born in late 2019 and have never seen a Patriots Super Bowl, glad they now have the chance

Snowstorm in the DC metro seems correctly predicted by the Capital Weather Gang and the National Weather Service, which compared to the frenzied lines at stores prepping for snowpocalypse makes me wonder how many people were trusting Apple and other weather apps’ hyped forecasts

It is interesting to see a set of legal reforms where the pioneer states are NY, Oklahoma, Georgia, and potentially Massachusetts

One thing I find interesting about the Mandela Effect and how adamant people are that there was a cornucopia in the Fruit of the Loom logo because "there's no way so many people can have the same memory" is that collective false memories are legion!

Didn't realise it, but Reddit copied Semantle

Speaking of encyclopediæ, it amuses me that there are whole paragraphs in Wikipedia on why many students cannot grasp that 0.999… (aka 0.999 recurring) is exactly equal to one.

I don’t know if this was a thing in the U.S. but in Singapore when I was a kid the Cold Storage supermarket frequently had some sort of promotion where if you bought more than some sum of groceries you could buy 1 edition of an encyclopedia (Funk and Wagnalls, the World Book Encyclopedia) for $1

This is really impressive from @mayor.nyc.gov , love the shout outs to Jay-Jay Okocha and then he ties it all up in the back with an NYC reference

One of the best things you can do with ChatGPT (or any other LLM, really, but ChatGPT is the worst at it) is give it an explicit instruction that says "never use emoji unless absolutely necessary, and don't flatter me, your normal style of response is extremely cringey"

What I'm doing with LLMs right now is exactly what I thought would never be possible a year ago

In a call today where one of the speakers had a Singaporean accent. Really nice to hear. I wonder if that's what other Singaporeans in the U.S. feel if they ever hear me speak.

Maybe it’s just the former military person in me but I find it odd that McDonald’s uses voice codes for pick up orders that aren’t easily legible over the drive-through intercom. I ended up saying Delta Zulu Oh Six

Books I finished this week: Tara Conklin’s The Last Romantics, Sara Paretsky’s Burn Marks, and Kate Atkinson‘s Normal Rules Don’t Apply. In switching I got occasionally confused between The Pause in Conklin’s book and The Void in Atkinson’s, even though they are very different.

I just woke up from a nap and somehow while I was asleep, everyone on the bus has figured out we are not going to the right place

I still don’t get why the iPhone alarm doesn’t have an option to skip public holidays

I watched Avatar 3 over the weekend with my wife and oldest kid. I liked it fine, my wife and kid loved it, but did they really have to have the teenage boys in the show say “bro” all the time?

Fourth quarter Caleb Williams is breathtaking

Lol at Tom Brady saying the good thing about being an announcer is that you get to be at the conference championship every year

Really great that Mayor Mamdani is rightly tackling regulatory barriers to housing

Updated list of discussions and terms I hope get retired in 2026: 1. “Age gap” if any of the parties is over 27 2. “They’re doing it for the grift” 3. “Late stage capitalism” discussions of phenomena that have happened since feudalism 4. “Nepo baby” when no actual nepotism has taken place

When I was leading part of the UN/international organizations department at the Singapore Foreign Ministry, I learned that countries have very different philosophies about treaties. Almost no one went to the extreme quoted, but Singapore was meticulous/persnickety about compliance down to the letter

This reminds me, when I was a teenager, me and a few classmates created a board game about the Japanese invasion of Singapore modeled on Avalon Hill's D-Day. (It was for a history group project.) It was basically impossible to win our game if you were the Japanese and you decided to come by sea

Really enjoyed today's @heatmap.news webinar on "Data Center Opposition, Power, and Policy in 2026" with @jael.bsky.social, @goodjillian.bsky.social, @zeitlin.bsky.social, and @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social

The often mentioned "But China and India are still building new coal power plants" doesn't mean that the amount of electricity they generate from coal goes up. Actually, it went down last year, and the amount of coal used probably went down faster thanks to the increased efficiency of the fleet.

Ever since I read about the Whole Language Learning fiasco I’ve become convinced that we have an entire generation of people who you can’t even argue with because they simply cannot read

The more likely explanation of this IMO is not “the screenwriters wrote the Stranger Things script with ChatGPT” and more “the screenwriters tried to research the 1980s with ChatGPT”, which could explain the anachronisms in the show

This post made me think, what’s the best movie / play watching experience you’ve had going in basically knowing nothing about it? For me it was picking up Monty Python and the Holy Grail on tape from the British Council and watching it with my friends none of whom knew anything about it either

Okay this is what Merriam-Webster says rhymes with “cod” (a 100 rhyme rating is a perfect rhyme). Does anyone actually pronounce “esplanade” this way?

NO GRAFFITI

Kind of crazy / cool that a quarter of a century later people are still remixing Greece 2000

Just finished Sara Paretsky’s Tunnel Vision, part of the VI Warshawski series. Had to skip a couple of earlier books in the series to because my library was out, so was a bit of a jump. Set in 1992 but the police and other authorities’ refusal to listen to Vic and other women still resonates today

Saw this @popville.bsky.social post and now I have “Pho House / In the middle of U Street” stuck in my head www.popville.com/2026/01/pho-...

One thing I hate is those “well, actually” myths about common sayings, like when people tell you the saying “blood is thicker than water” saying is really “the blood of the convenant is thicker than the water of the womb”. No it’s not. That latter is a much later retcon

ICYMI: I sat down with political scientist @samuel-bagg.bsky.social to discuss the crisis in our information environment and its roots in social identity.

Also about books, I just finished Peter Swanson’s Kill Your Darlings and enjoyed the reverse chronological plot, as well as the fact that this is the first novel I’ve read that features a couple that share a February birthday (just like me and my wife, though we’re not so murdery)

It’s not esoteric at all since these are all bestselling authors but last year I finished reading the complete works of: Laura Lippman, Elin Hilderbrand, Sue Grafton, Janice Hallett, Lisa Jewell, Liane Moriarty, Richard Osman, Nick Hornby, Elle Cosimano, and Taylor Jenkins Reid

1. Tried to slice into a piece of meat with a kitchen knife blade side up 2. Tripped at the top of a ramp jump at a military obstacle course, landed in the concertina wire below, and hit my face with my rifle front sight 3. Reached for a book to read to my kid, book fell, broke my little toe

One of my hotter takes is that being aggressively shitty to people over inconsequential shit is a pretty significant character flaw and is, in fact, contemptible. Yes, even if you're having a bad day. Yes, even if you don't like their politics.

I think there's two basic dynamics underpinning shitty mob behavior online, and the Sky Marchini/Will Stancil stuff is an unfortunate example of each. The first is a feeding frenzy - when a post is over-interpreted or just straightforwardly misinterpreted, and especially when it escapes context.

Congestion pricing is a heckuva street safety strategy www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Social media isn’t a court of law, and blocking is just an imperfect tool for controlling your experience. It’s fine to block someone if you find they make you irrationally angry. It’s fine to block someone just because they look like your ex and it makes you sad to see their profile pic.

Discourses I hope we can leave back in 2025: 1) calling people grifters instead of actually criticising their ideas 2) “age gap” discussions about grown adults in relationships 3) “nepo baby” discussions about people who simply had wealthy parents and weren’t actually beneficiaries of nepotism

There’s a weird tendency of some people to think money is the root of literally all evil. I saw someone criticising JK Rowling’s anti-trans stance as bad because she’s a grifter… and no? She very honestly believes the awful things she says and she’s not just doing it for the money

My take on the “no one uses Threads” idea is it’s exactly the same as the “Avatar had no cultural impact” discussion. People who use Threads are just in completely different social circles from people on other social media, just like Avatar is beloved by people outside the cultural cognoscenti

Holy shit it's real

Happy New Year one and all! Am in Paris now and I can report that so far 2026 has been awesome

“Pairing free buses with paid parking says we value people in motion more than cars at rest,” writes Nicolas Rohatyn.