Weeknote #62 (20251123-20251129)

meta

A short (two day) work week and the Thanksgiving holiday — what’s not to like? (Mx18 having to spend the holiday at school was the one fly in the ointment…)

did

  • Really just a pretty quiet week: my main accomplishment was cooking our Thanksgiving dinner; everything came out tasty
  • Other than that, there was a tremendous amount of not very much at all, which was nice

read

  • “Whistle Up”

    The best tip I can give you for distribution is talk to people. Talk to friends, see who needs 'em and who knows people that need ‘em. Talk to your neighbors. Talk to store owners you might be friendly with. Stock your neighborhoods’ Little Free Libraries. If you’re a church, temple, or mosque person, talk to folks there.

  • “Part 1: My Life Is a Lie”

    This was heavily linked all over the place, so you’ve probably already seen it — but if not, it is well worth reading in full, but TL;DR the “poverty line” is based on an outdated metric and is likely about 25% of what it was intended to be:

    This week, while trying to understand why the American middle class feels poorer each year despite healthy GDP growth and low unemployment, I came across a sentence buried in a research paper:

    “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”

    I read it again. Three times the minimum food budget.

    I felt sick.

  • “LLMs for Medical Practice: Look Out”

    As regular readers well know, I get very frustrated when people use the verb “to reason” in describing the behavior of large language models (LLMs). Sometimes that’s just verbal shorthand, but both in print and in person I keep running into examples of people who really, truly, believe that these things are going through a reasoning process. They are not. None of them.

  • ‘Your “Yukon Gold” Potatoes Probably Aren’t Yukons—Here’s Why’

    This popular yellow-fleshed, Canadian-born variety is the potato I often default to because it’s thin-skinned, naturally creamy, and still manages to hold its structure when cooked. It’s also the recommended potato for many other Serious Eats recipes. But when I went to buy them, they were nowhere to be found in Brooklyn or Manhattan—not at the many mainstream grocery stores I tried, not at Whole Foods, not at specialty food stores.

watched

  • More MLS playoff games — next week we won’t be rooting for Vancouver as much as against Inter Miami…
  • More Criminal Minds with TheWife, finishing S8 and getting into S9

cooked

  • Monday: sopa de ajo
  • Tuesday: baked pork chops
  • Thursday: various charcuterie, turkey, stuffing, mash, gravé, sautéed spinach, canberries, rolls, pumpkin and apple pie

photo

obligatory turkey picture

I’ve been making this same turkey recipe for the last …15(?)-ish years, I think I have it down!

looking forward to

Three work weeks left in the year, and then a couple weeks of down time to round out the year — let’s go!