Weeknote #52 (20250914-20250920)

meta

Summer has not quite left the building just yet, but the fade has started, for sure. Also just realized, right before publishing this — it’s a been a year of these, more or less. Wild.

did

  • Lazy Sunday
  • Blogged about Cooklang
  • Took Monday off and did adulting things: gave a reference for a former report, booked an appointment to get jabbed, and started the process of consolidating an old 401(k) into my “rollup” account
  • Quiet work week, mainly working on some annual reviews (my second least favorite thing about “management” roles…)
  • Saw Phil Rosenthal (of “Somebody Feed Phil”) on Friday night, which was fun

read

  • Drunken Apes and the Rise of Civilization

    Overall,this is a really great blog post, highly recommended. I’m pull-quoting the first thing that made me snort-laugh while reading it, but it certainly wasn’t the last:

    (This, on its own, is pretty cool; as Sedeer el-Showk wrote in Nature at the time: “they resurrected proteins that haven’t been seen for millions of years… just to find out if they could break down alcohol.”)

  • Replication, reproduction, and remixing in research software

    The bottom line is this: if the code looks badly written and ignores essentially all major tenets of modern software design, it’s probably seriously wrong in places. Not because the authors aren’t good scientists, not because of some lack of Dalai Lama blessing, but because software engineering is hard hard hard, and if you can’t be bothered to learn how to use version control, you shouldn’t be trusted to write important software.

  • The Cache Crash is a fun read about debugging a very subtle bug

watched

  • finished off S3 of Criminal Minds, moved on to S4

cooked

  • Sunday: roasted tomatillo-tomato salsa; sour cream chicken enchiladas
  • Monday: grilled spatchcocked chicken, grilled corn, caprese salad
  • Tuesday: grilled pork (a butt steak and some chops), marinated overnight in a mix of soy, Worcestershire, balsamic, fish sauce, and a sweet black garlic spice mix, plus blistered shishito peppers
  • Wednesday: tossed salad with cherry tomatoes and leftover roasted chicken
  • Saturday: bucatini