A few weeks ago, Giulia turned eighteen. As a birthday gift, she asked for a skiing weekend with me. Our family’s precious little thing has traditionally been spending the Christmas week skiing in the Alps. We haven’t gone as much as we’d like in recent years, so I was pleasantly surprised and thrilled that she wanted to celebrate adulthood at our special place with her dad. We left home Friday at five in the morning. At ten, we were on the slopes, admittedly feeling a little lost without the rest of the gang. We quickly got into the right mood, though. We spent three glorious, precious days together. We can rarely spend time together, just her and me, when in town. This morning, I walked on the beach thinking about those three days and pondering how lucky a dad I am. Her birthday gift turned out as an invaluable gift for me. ...

A few months ago I started my review of Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage with these words: Of all the stories of maritime adventures I’ve read, that of the Endurance, masterfully told by Alfred Lansing in this book, is the most incredible and shocking. And I meant that. As the book’s title suggests, that story is simply unbelievable, yet true. Imagine my astonishment this morning at the news that the Endurance was found in the depths of the Antarctic. ...

Quoting [Nelson’s weblog][3]: Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I’ve never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users’ data. Ouch. A lesson learned the hard way: My plan now is to host my own blog-like collection of all my reading notes like [Tom does][2]. ...

This book stands up to its fame. It’s chock-full of precious insights on our decision-making and behavioral processes and how and why we humans are often capable of making informed yet awful decisions. The bad news is that we can hardly avoid most of these biases, no matter how hard we try and even if we know about them. So-called experts in the field are subject to these same biases: their short-term estimates and predictions can even be pretty good, but they will fail miserably in the long term, like any other man or woman. There are so many interesting tidbits in this text that it’s overwhelming. Some, if not most of them, may even fall in the ordinary sense category, but the added value here is we are being told why they fall in that class. Because I came to reading it so late (it was published in 2011), this book might be the main reason why some of these concepts are now common sense. ...

In 2014, James Somers sat down to write a beautiful, entertaining lament about the state of today’s dictionaries and an argument in favor of the adoption of Noah Webster’s 1913 edition. I don’t want you to conclude that it’s just a matter of aesthetics. Yes, Webster’s definitions are prettier. But they are also better. They’re so much better that to use another dictionary is to keep yourself forever at arm’s length from the actual language. ...

What the Ukraine flag signifies. A golden field of grain (Ukraine is the world’s 4th largest exporter of barley and corn, and the 5th largest exporter of wheat) beneath clear blue skies. Sky above grain, or freedom above bread (source1.) The story of Ukraine’s flag is rich and controversial. It appears to be true, however, that “blue sky over sunflowers” forms Ukrainians’ conception of their flag. [rss]: https://nicolaiarocci.com/index.xml [tw]: http://twitter.com/nicolaiarocci [nl]: https://buttondown.email/nicolaiarocci ↩︎ ...

The first preview of C# 11 is out, and well, I think I like what I see. I dig the new List patterns and am a fan of allowing newlines in the “holes” of interpolated strings. Parameter null-checking is a bit contentious, and it’s good that they are releasing it in preview one and asking for feedback. In a nutshell, they want to spare us a lot of boilerplate. Code like this: public static void M(string s) { if (s is null) { throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(s)); } // Body of the method } Would be abbreviated by adding !! to the parameter name: ...

This book is not about the famous, daring, and in some ways fortunate capture of Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960, nor about the covert transfer of the Nazi officer to Israel. Instead, the volume recounts the 1961 trial in Jerusalem, which ended with the defendant being sentenced to death. Hannah Arendt followed the trial as a correspondent for The New Yorker. She took notes, studied the papers, and reconstructed the many witnesses’ personal stories. Her work was first published as articles in The New Yorker and later revised and updated as a book. ...

Kottke reports this juicy excerpt from Jonny Greenwood’s interview at npr: Thom [Yorke]’s band had a keyboard player — [whom] I think they didn’t get on with because he played his keyboard so loud. And so when I got the chance to play with them, the first thing I did was make sure my keyboard was turned off … I must have done months of rehearsals with them with this keyboard, and they didn’t know that I’d already turned it off. ...

Chelsea Wald in Nature: Scientists say that urine diversion would have huge environmental and public-health benefits if deployed on a large scale around the world. That’s in part because urine is rich in nutrients that, instead of polluting water bodies, could go towards fertilizing crops or feed into industrial processes. According to Simha’s estimates, humans produce enough urine to replace about one-quarter of current nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers worldwide; it also contains potassium and many micronutrients (see ‘What’s in urine’). On top of that, not flushing urine down the drain could save vast amounts of water and reduce some of the strain on ageing and overloaded sewer systems. ...