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In the spring of 1900, sponge divers sheltering from bad weather near the Greek island of Antikythera found a shipwreck on the seafloor. It was loaded with the sort of ancient treasure people know how to recognize: marble and bronze statues, jewelry, coins, glassware. Divers and archaeologists spent the next year bringing it up.

Among it all was a corroded lump of bronze and wood. It didn’t look like much until it broke apart and someone noticed teeth inside it. Gear teeth.

The United States crossed $40 trillion in national debt this week. The number is so large that the usual attempts to explain it mostly make it harder to understand. Stack $40 trillion in dollar bills and the pile would reach millions of miles into space. Save a million dollars every day and it would take more than 100,000 years to accumulate that much. Divide it among Americans and you get well over $100,000 per person.

A more useful comparison is to put the debt next to the country’s income. U.S. nominal GDP was running at about $32.5 trillion a year in the second quarter of 2026, which puts the $40 trillion gross debt at about 123 percent of one year’s economic output. If a person earning $100,000 a year had debt in the same proportion, the balance would be about $123,000. Using debt held by the public instead of gross debt, CBO puts the ratio at about 101 percent of GDP this year, almost exactly the equivalent of $100,000 of debt against $100,000 of annual income.

For most of human history, if you wanted another useful thought, you needed another person or more of someone’s time. A calculation needed a mathematician. A translation needed someone who knew both languages. A legal opinion needed a lawyer. A drawing needed a draftsman. Even after computers arrived, most of the judgment surrounding computation still came from people.

We now have machines that can produce a growing range of this work. I wrote recently about what happens when intelligence becomes cheap, and especially what that might do to the excuses we make when knowledge and competent advice are no longer particularly scarce. But there is a more basic question underneath that one: what actually makes intelligence cheap?

Markdown is deliberately limited at visual design. A paragraph is a paragraph, a blockquote is a blockquote, and the author generally doesn’t get to decide that one particular paragraph should become a pull quote, warning box, or oversized introduction. For most writing that is a feature. It keeps content separate from presentation.

Kramdown gives Jekyll sites a useful middle ground. Its Inline Attribute Lists, usually called IALs, let you add classes, IDs, and ordinary HTML attributes to Markdown elements without replacing the Markdown with raw HTML. That makes it possible to build richer editorial layouts while keeping the source readable.

Most management advice is about how to become a better manager. The 37signals Manager Playbook left me thinking more about how much management a company actually needs.

37signals has made the manager’s job surprisingly small. Managers are expected to remain practitioners in their field. The company says managing people “should not take much of your time,” in part because it hires people it expects to operate as “managers of one.” New employees get more attention, as do people who are struggling, but an experienced person doing good work is mostly allowed to keep doing it. The manager is there, but not constantly present.

High on the saddle between Sunset Peak and Yi Tung Shan, nineteen small stone cabins sit among the grass and clouds. They have no road and, with limited exceptions such as solar equipment installed during recent conservation work, no electricity. The nearest traffic passes far below. From a distance the buildings can look like abandoned military posts, but they are the remains of Lantau Mountain Camp, a Christian summer retreat founded by missionaries working across South China nearly a century ago.

In the mid-1990s, my family stayed there several times. I remember climbing the mountain with my parents and two younger siblings, drinking fresh water along the way, and lighting the kerosene lanterns at night. Those visits are why the camp means something to me, but my family entered a story already seventy years old. The cabins had survived political disorder, a failed camp on another mountain, wartime destruction, the retreat of the missionary community that built them, and the transformation of Lantau Island below. They remain because generations of owners, churches, residents, laborers, and volunteers kept carrying what was needed up the mountain.

Star Base Prometheus The 50-foot tall statue of Prometheus will be erected at Star Base, TX soon. via Atelier Missor on X

It will be impressive when complete.

Seven books give us wands, curses, flying broomsticks, enchanted castles, talking portraits, dragons, ghosts, potions, prophecies, and people who cheerfully call themselves witches and wizards. Yet when the story reaches its biggest moments, magic is rarely what saves anyone. Harry does not defeat Voldemort because he becomes the best wizard. He wins because, over seven books, he learns courage, loyalty, mercy, and finally the willingness to give his life for someone else.

Most of the magic at Hogwarts belongs to the familiar world of fairy tales. Ron says Wingardium Leviosa and a feather rises. A broom flies because this is the sort of story in which brooms fly. Nobody has sacrificed a goat or sold his soul to make the dishes wash themselves. Magic is simply part of the furniture of Rowling’s world. It gives the characters extraordinary abilities without making them better people. A wand gives Draco Malfoy more power than an ordinary schoolboy. It does not make cruelty less cruel.

There are questions people ask because they want answers, and there are questions they ask because they are not ready to have them answered.

Someone says, “I don’t know what I should do with my career,” and it sounds like a request for information. Maybe it is. But sometimes the unanswered question has become useful in its own right. As long as it remains open, the future remains open with it. No decision has been made, no sacrifice accepted, no failure risked.

On Friday, David Heinemeier Hansson shipped Omarchy 4.0, called it Quattro, and said it was one of the greatest software releases of his professional career. That is a large sentence from a man who already wrote Ruby on Rails. The launch video is an hour and a half. He posted a forty-five-second install on a fast AMD machine and thanked a long list of other people, including the authors of Hyprland and Quickshell, before ending the thread the way he meant it: computers should be fun.

I have not installed it. What follows is a reading of a release, a doctrine, and the noise a signed desktop still makes in a culture that prefers its operating systems to arrive without a name on them.

Deloitte’s fifth Future of Cyber Survey, based on 1,058 respondents, finds that 85% are somewhat or very confident in their organization’s cybersecurity strategy. They report strong executive sponsorship, access to funding, modern security architectures, and increasingly integrated planning. Yet the same respondents report implementing the actions that make those strategies real at a lower rate. The average gap between confidence and readiness is 15 percentage points.

Deloitte calls the five tensions it found the confidence, influence, vendor, breach, and budget paradoxes. Read together, they describe less a collection of cybersecurity problems than a problem of organizational execution. Security has become good at getting attention from senior leadership. It is less consistently embedded in the decisions, systems, relationships, and operating processes where risk actually accumulates.

Imagine having a list of every startup someone was building in 2007, including the ones that looked too strange to take seriously.

Most would have failed. Some would have disappeared without a trace. A few would have looked ridiculous. But mixed in with them would have been early versions of ideas that later became ordinary parts of the internet.

Early.tools offers a version of that view today. It is a human-curated directory of pre-launch startups and early-stage tools, with products grouped by stage from waitlist to launched. The site is less useful as a prediction market than as a record of what founders are trying to make while the boundaries of a new technology are still moving.

There was a time when spotting AI writing was easy. You would read three paragraphs and encounter “delve,” “tapestry,” or “ever-evolving landscape,” and there it was, standing in the middle of the room wearing a name tag that said HELLO I AM A LANGUAGE MODEL. Those days are disappearing remarkably quickly. Modern AI can write a competent email, a persuasive essay, a product review, a joke that is almost funny, or a sentence that sounds exactly like the person who asked for it. The machine has learned to imitate the surface of ordinary prose with increasing skill, quietly improving its ability to pass the smell test while the rest of us argue about whether the smell test was ever robust in the first place.

The question isn’t whether AI can write. The question is whether we can tell when it did.

Three years ago, Byun Kyuhyun used Claude much as he had used a search engine. When he had a programming question, he asked it. If he needed to know how to delete from a Go map while iterating, Claude was simply a faster alternative to searching Stack Overflow.

That is not how he uses it now. In describing his current workflow, Kyuhyun says he gives the model more context, asks it to question him before answering, compares alternatives, and uses it as a kind of rubber duck that talks back. He sometimes separates jobs between Claude and Codex and uses one to check the other. The change, he argues, is not just that he learned better prompts. The way he thinks alongside the tools changed.

We have plenty of AI agents, but xAI’s new Grok Bot is an agent that gets its own computer.

That sounds almost disappointingly mundane. We have spent years imagining AI as something that lives inside a model: a vast intelligence that can write, reason, code, analyze documents and answer questions. Give it a computer, however, and the nature of the problem changes. The computer stops being the thing the human uses to access the AI and becomes the thing the AI uses to work.

Prometheus belongs beside a rocket factory.

At Starbase, on the southern edge of Texas, Atelier Missor, a French classical foundry, is assembling a roughly 50-foot bronze statue of the Greek Titan. He stands with his torch raised, less like an ornament for an industrial site than a visitor from the ancient world who has wandered into the space age.

The image is strange, and it is also coherent. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. Fire is one of the oldest symbols of technology itself: the power to transform the world, make tools, cook food, work metal, and light the dark. At Starbase the metaphor is almost literal. A rocket takes controlled fire and turns it into motion, carrying people and machines beyond the atmosphere and, one day, to other worlds.

There are poems that describe a battle, and there are poems that make a battle feel like a judgment on the people who entered it. G. K. Chesterton’s Lepanto is the second kind. It is not content to tell us that Christian fleets defeated the Ottoman navy on October 7, 1571. It asks what happens when a people that has grown divided, comfortable, and uncertain suddenly discovers that the things it has inherited are not self-preserving.

That question is what makes the poem worth returning to. Read Chesterton’s Lepanto at the Poetry Foundation before going further. The poem itself is the primary source for everything that follows: its argument is not merely in what Chesterton says, but in the music, images, contrasts, and moral imagination with which he says it.

For years, one of my small pleasures was reading James Taranto’s Best of the Web.

It was a strange thing to look forward to. It was a daily column about politics, journalism, and whatever else had caught the attention of the editor of the Wall Street Journal’s online editorial page. It was mostly links to other people’s work, with Taranto’s comments attached. Sometimes the comments were serious. Often they were funny. Sometimes the joke was nothing more than a headline followed by another headline that made the first one look ridiculous.

When the tide goes out, you see who’s swimming naked.

In the AI era, the tide is reversing course. Global AI spending will top $200 billion this year, yet most companies get disappointing returns. Leaders blame the tech. Bad data. Immature models.

They’re wrong. The real problem is human. It’s not what people can’t learn. It’s what they refuse to unlearn.

I’ve enjoyed using Grok 4.5 to generate editorial webpages on a variety of subject. The most recent one was an attempt to test out some of the fonts and typography that would go into the August redesign of this site. Below is what went into the design.

Most product pages about robot vacuums look the same. White background, floating cards, gradient buttons, and a carousel of “best overall” badges. The brief here was different: take the dense Grokipedia entry on robotic vacuum cleaners and turn it into a single-page editorial feature that could sit comfortably next to a long New Yorker tech essay or a well-set Cabinet magazine article.

Pope Leo XIV has been on the road. Turkey and Lebanon last November. Algeria, Cameroon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea in April. Spain in June. A deliberate stop on the migrant island of Lampedusa on the Fourth of July. Peru is still expected later this year.

The one place he has not set foot is the United States.

If you have inspected network requests on a modern web page, you have encountered cdn.jsdelivr.net. It sits behind millions of web applications, serving minified JavaScript libraries, CSS frameworks, fonts, and assets without charging a cent.

Yet, compared to commercial infrastructure providers or high-profile open-source foundations, jsDelivr operates with remarkably little fan-fare. It is a critical piece of global utility infrastructure hiding in plain sight—a multi-CDN network that routes petabytes of traffic every month to keep the open web fast, accessible, and resilient.

If you spend enough time reading on the web today, you start to feel an unsettling sense of linguistic déjà vu. Every third essay opens with a sweeping observation about an “ever-evolving landscape.” Every critique pivots on a dramatic reframe (“It’s not X—it’s Y”). Every product announcement promises to “quietly orchestrate” your life while honoring the “rich tapestry” of modern work.

We are drowning in synthetic cadence. Generative models haven’t just automated prose; they’ve standardized a dialect.

Someone built a site called claude-blog.md that is, quite literally, just a raw Markdown file rendered directly in the browser. No static site generator, no serverless hydration layer, no build steps, and no dynamic client-side router running three separate JS workers. Just text and a clean parser.

It brings back memories of the early web’s best impulse: fetching a raw document across a wire, reading it, and moving on with your day.

In 2013, a Montreal startup called Crew was bleeding money. To stay afloat, they hired a photographer to shoot custom imagery for their website, but ended up using only a fraction of the photos. Instead of letting the remaining high-resolution files languish on a hard drive, founder Mikael Cho posted ten leftover photos to a simple $19 Tumblr blog with a single instruction: “Do whatever you want with them.”

That humble Tumblr feed grew into Unsplash—the web’s default visual infrastructure.

Paste a supported URL on its own line in a Markdown file and the build turns it into a responsive embed.

AI Video

Every year, millions of visitors choose Florida for its beaches, outdoor attractions, golf courses, and sunshine. But increasingly, events happening more than a thousand miles away are shaping the visitor experience in the Sunshine State.

One of the most surprising examples is the growing influence of Canadian wildfires.

In recent years, massive wildfires across Canada have produced smoke plumes large enough to travel across much of North America. In May 2025, satellite imagery showed smoke from Canadian wildfires spreading through the Midwest and reaching northern Florida, prompting air quality concerns far from the fires themselves. According to reporting from WGCU Public Media, NOAA imagery captured a broad swath of smoke reaching into the state as wildfire activity intensified across several Canadian provinces. 【1-7dcd8c】

SpaceX has spent years operating in a world of private funding rounds, long-term bets, and founder-driven narratives. This week, it enters a different arena.

The company is set to release its first quarterly earnings report as a public company following its June IPO, and Wall Street is watching closely. Not just because of the numbers, but because of the extraordinary divide between believers and skeptics.

This is the build log from my side of jonathanfrei.com V5: what the constraints were, what I wrote into the repo, and where the code actually broke.

I did not invent the product. Jonathan answered a configuration questionnaire first—personal site, English, GitHub Actions (not the classic github-pages gem), custom minimal CSS with system dark mode, accessibility and mobile-first defaults, domain on Cloudflare, plain Markdown, solo contributor, drafts in an obfuscated public folder, no comment system, no non-standard plugins. Repo name came later: jonathanfreidotcomV5. Those answers were the spec.

You can handle multiple platforms embeds—like YouTube, X (Twitter), Instagram, Vimeo, and Spotify—with a single client-side JavaScript approach or a Ruby plugin hook.

Because platforms like X and Instagram use full interactive widgets rather than simple <iframe> elements, using JavaScript is usually the most reliable solution.

This script checks paragraphs in your content for standalone URLs from supported platforms and swaps them out with their corresponding responsive embed HTML or platform scripts.

I decided to rebuild my personal site again, now at v5. The previous stack had done its job, but I wanted something new I could use to begin publishing again and learn some new technologies. So I decided to build a clean Jekyll site on GitHub Pages, Markdown-first writing, a custom domain still sitting behind Cloudflare, and enough structure that I could keep shipping posts without wrestling the tooling every time.

I did most of the work in conversation with Grok 4.5. Not as a one-shot “make me a website” prompt. More like a multi-turn build log: plan first, execute against a named repo, then chase open issues and a few features that only made sense once the skeleton was live.

When three separate wildfires blew up across Spokane County this August, burning through thousands of hectares and sending 60,000 people packing, local officials pulled out the standard script: record heat, shifting winds, bad luck. You can read the play-by-play in The Spokesman-Review or check The Business Journal for the staggering price tag on destroyed homes.

Weather provides the spark, but fuel builds the bomb. And when you spend a century letting dead timber and overgrown brush stack up until a forest looks like a game of Jenga played with matches, calling the outcome a “natural disaster” is just bad accounting. It’s organizational negligence. And when that negligence guarantees a town burns down every August, it’s just slow-motion arson with better paperwork.

This is the first post on the new version of the site.

Built with Jekyll, deployed by GitHub Actions, and served behind Cloudflare. The design is intentionally minimal so it can grow into custom article layouts, a portfolio, or a photo gallery later without fighting the foundation.

Drafts live in an obfuscated folder that is excluded from the public build, indexes, feeds, and robots.txt.

Unfortunately, there is not much you can do when an idea like Mad Thomas: Fury Tracks pops into your head. My options–after searching to see if it already exists–were to think about it all day or to just make and post it. Apologies to everyone involved with both franchises.

The fist day of every history class should include watching a video in this format on whatever the subject the teacher intends to cover.

Daniel turned four yesterday. The kid is getting huge but is still so sweet. He is the luckiest middle child. Instead of being forgotten in the middle (overshadowed by his older brother or ignored because his baby sister hogs all the attention), he gets best friends on both sides–a loving big brother to look up to and a sweet little sister that shadows him everywhere.

I posted when Daniel turned three and turned two, and it is baffling that it is already past time to post his birthday well wishes. Gabi also wrote some sweet words about our son on Facebook and included another picture of him in his Iron Man costume–which he’d probably always wear if we let him.

Brian Kesinger, a story artist at Disney animation, created a great collection of Star Wars: The Force Awakens drawings done in the style of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes.

via Pascal Campion

This gif kinda makes it seem as if the Star Wars prequels are not awful garbage movies. Also, how long before this gif is updated with scenes from The Force Awakens?

Age and productivity have an out-sized effect on the global economy. The challenge of the next hundred years is to figure out how fewer workers can support an increasingly older population. Greg Ip wrote an in-depth exploration in The Wall Street Journal of how shifting demographics are changing the global economy.

Ever since the global financial crisis, economists have groped for reasons to explain why growth in the U.S. and abroad has repeatedly disappointed, citing everything from fiscal austerity to the euro meltdown. They are now coming to realize that one of the stiffest headwinds is also one of the hardest to overcome: demographics.</blockquote>

via Twitter

I really enjoyed the optimism Matt Damon exudes in his performance in The Martian. He stays positive and focused on solving every problem he encounters even the most hopeless of circumstances.

Last year I wrote a post of Fourteen things I’m thankful for in 2014. This has been another year filled with new challenges and joys, and I’m glad to be able to share another list of blessings. Here are some of the things I’m thankful for from 2015:

This really was an exceptional year, and I’m looking forward to the challenges and joys of 2016.

There is a gallery on Imgur that shows close up photos of many of the models and sets used in the original Star Wars trilogy. It is amazing to see the care and craftsmanship that went into each model–even the ones that only get a few second of screen time. There are a couple of examples below, but the whole gallery is worth exploring.

There was so much great art and care that went into the production of the three original Star Wars films. And now, 30 years later, there are still new and imaginative remixes and fan creations–like this Auralnauts video that made Gabi and I laugh and laugh last night–keeping the work as fresh as ever.

This world map shows countries by the proportional size of their stock markets.

Created by Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett, this illustration shows “free-float equity market capitalization” in billions of dollars.

My kids and I really enjoyed this superhero alphabet by illustrator Simon Koay. They were able to identify almost all the comic book characters, which is impressive for a six and three-year old. 

Here is Koay’s description of the project:

A synthetic perspective view of Pluto, based on the latest high-resolution images to be downlinked from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, shows what you would see if you were approximately 1,100 miles (1,800 km) above Pluto’s equatorial area, looking toward the bright, smooth, expanse of icy plains informally called Sputnik Planum, in this image taken July 14, 2015 and released September 10, 2015. The images were taken as New Horizons flew past Pluto from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 km).

It doesn’t matter how many attempts it took Jonathan Toews of the Chicago Blackhawks to make this trick shot. It is amazing how he pops the bottle of the top off the net and then hits it out of the air with the second puck. Here’s the shot again from another angle.

The first shot:

And another view:

via Dave Ellis at NoVolume

Two years ago, Gabi and I had our sweet little baby girl baptized.

She’s not so little now but still very sweet.

Art by Pascal Campion.

The webapp, Baby Name Explorer, lets you see a graph of the popularity of baby names over time. The site was created by Randal Olson, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Biomedical Informatics. The app makes it easy to see when common baby names were most popular. 

It looks like my parents picked my name right at he height of its popularity. 

https://vine.co/v/eIXejbQ2utM

Artist and illustrator Takumi created this Egyptian-styled telling of the story of Mad Max: Fury Road (which you should totally see or see again).

Via Kottke.

When the selfie stick burst on the scene a couple of years ago, I assumed it was an elaborate Internet hoax. It seemed like one of those fake products that was a social commentary on narcissism, consumerism, or some such thing. It turned out that they’re real and becoming more popular.

Mark Zuckerberg announced that one billion people used Facebook in a single day for the first time.

On Monday, 1 in 7 people on Earth used Facebook to connect with their friends and family. […] I’m so proud of our community for the progress we’ve made. Our community stands for giving every person a voice, for promoting understanding and for including everyone in the opportunities of our modern world. A more open and connected world is a better world. It brings stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities, and a stronger society that reflects all of our values.</blockquote>

The best technologies are the ones that enhance your natural abilities rather than replace them. These are the innovations that have historically had the biggest impact on what humanity can accomplish, and this is the factor to watch for when deciding what emerging technologies to get excited about. Sep Kamvar, writing about the power efficiencies of a human brain and body vs. that of a super computer, points out how energy efficient a car is compared to a person on a bike.

A midsized car gets a little over half a mile per kilocalorie of energy. A human walking gets 10 miles per kilocalorie. Even if we exclude the cost of the car, the cost of the road, and the cost of the infrastructure we build for fueling, walking is still 20 times as efficient as driving.

Tom Fishburne, the Marketoonist, tweeted this cartoon today:

The joke in the comic is too true. Numbers in a PowerPoint are rarely called into question—even though challenging the assumptions of a presentation is an easy way to appear smart and insightful. However, there is little incentive to question any data that doesn’t conflict with one’s currently held beliefs. On the other hand, if there is conflict, even additional evidence beyond the charts and graphs will rarely change someone’s mind, so the numbers—even if accurate—may as well be made up.

via

via

I made this emoji-based-mosaic of my avatar using this clever JavaScript tool by Eric Lewis.

According to articles published in the Daily Mail, one surefire way to affect your odds of developing cancer is to drink wine. Here are a few examples of articles against drinking wine:

…and here are a few in favor of the beverage:

I first came across the Kill or Cure list of Daily Mail cancer articles back in 2010 and was amazed to see all the expert research pointing to the adverse or beneficial effects many ”inanimate objects” have on one’s chances of developing cancer.

This video edited by Dmitry Pisanko compiles times lapses shot from the International Space Station.

There is also a collection of high resolution gifs from this video on Imgur that loop details of the 4K footage.

The ISS is impressive to behold, and the images of Earth taken from it are truly captivating. Seeing the world from this perspective is very eye-opening. The world is big and we take up such a very small part of it. 

Chess Academy is the latest addition to my phone’s home screen. The app is an addictive tactics trainer that presents a series of chess puzzles to solve. There is no time limit for each puzzle. If you enter the correct series of moves, you gain points, and if you make a wrong move you lose points. After making a mistake, you can try to solve the puzzle again, but if you’re still stuck after trying every combination you can think of, you can ask to be shown the solution.

The current feature set in the app is quite limited. While the Chess Academy website has multiple interactive lesson tracks, tactical training, and practice games, the iPhone app only lets you practice tactics. I don’t know if their development roadmap includes adding more of the desktop features. It would be a nice touch, but even if they don’t add them, the tactical training has plenty to keep me busy and entertained.

Alan Taylor from the Atlantic posted the winning pictures from the 2015 Traveler’s photo contest.

NASA recently published an amazing set of images from the far side of the moon. The photos show the moon passing in front of the sunlit surface of the earth.

This animation features actual satellite images of the far side of the moon, illuminated by the sun, as it crosses between the DSCOVR spacecraft’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) and telescope, and the Earth - one million miles away. Credits: NASA/NOAA</blockquote>

My little girl turned two today. She has gotten so big so fast. It seems like she was just a baby—fitting snugly into the crook of my arm—but now she has grown into a beautiful little girl. She was the smallest of my three kids at birth but now has no trouble keeping up with her older brothers’ shenanigans.

We were a family before she came to join us, but I can’t imagine how we could be a family without her. She makes our family whole.

Caffeine doesn’t affect me. It’s not having caffeine that affects me.

Remember that time when 30 symphony orchestras, 29 conductors and 9 pianists got together to perform The Rite of Spring? We don’t either, but we’d like to imagine what this meeting of minds and talents might sound like. Stitched together from 46 different recordings - a grand total of 64 musical cuts - Q2 Music presents the iconic “Augurs of Spring” performed by as many ensembles and soloists as could be squeezed into 3 minutes and 19 seconds.

Part of Q2 Music’s Rite of Spring Fever at http://www.q2music.org/springfever/

There is a lot to be excited about in the latest Star Wars trailer, and I am glad The Incomparable has another 1 and a half hour podcast to discuss the 1 minute 50 second teaser. The first installment, Forcegiving, was such a delight.

Last week, Marco Arment posted a list of popular movies he hasn’t seen from the past 15 years.  His lack of familiarity with popular movies has come up on several episodes of his podcast, so his list didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me is how many popular movie I have seen. I don’t feel like I watch that many movies now, but based on the results below, I do (or at least I have).

The list below consists of each year’s Academy Awards best picture nominees and the top 10 grossing movies. That provides a good balance of critical and commercial popularity.

Five years ago today I bought and started restoring the bike I currently ride to work—a 1972 Schwinn Super Le Tour. I’ve spent the last five years using it to commute in a city that is not particularly bike friendly and whose weather is too hot and rainy for most of the year. That hasn’t stopped me.

I rarely see other bikers who look as if their commuting to work. It just isn’t common in this part of South Florida. However, my understanding is that bikes are the most used mode of transportation in the world. Riding a bike is also how I got around during most of my childhood and through high school.

via @jasonthielke on Ello

via Reddit

My FitBit stats show that I have taken more than 3.5 million steps in the past year.

Like many others, I’ve been bingeing on the latest season of House of Cards over the past several days. This morning I woke up with an idea for a crossover between House of Cards and another show I’ve been guilty of bingeing on–24. The idea wasn’t for a full series or episode–just for a single scene.

The scene opens at the top of the back stairwell in the White House with Jack Bauer interrogating President Frank Underwood.

Today I listened to the Smashing Pumpkins album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness from beginning to end. The two-disc album has more than two hours of music spread across 28 tracks. This album was one of the musical staples of my college years. I bought a second-hand copy of it on my way freshman orientation and listened to it throughout my undergrad. The album has some amazing hits, some strange lyrics, some hidden gems, some bad songs, and even one that can only be described as musical malpractice. When you listen to the full album you get everything the band had to offer at one particular moment in its history.

Listening to a band’s playlist or radio station on services like Pandora and Spotify will get you the hits from throughout their career. However, you will miss out on the many songs that make a band what they are. I don’t listen to many to albums from beginning to end anymore, and I don’t know many people who do. In this age of Spotify’s smart playlists, themed radio stations, and algorithmic DJs, you can listen to hours of back-to-back hits. But I think I’m missing out on something important when I listen that way. There is a lot of value in hearing a full album in the order the artist chose.



Today my middle child turned three. It has been so amazing to watch him grow up this year. It seems like he just turned two, and suddenly he has grown into this big kid.

He is such a sweet boy and a good friend. It is so cool to see how he—as a middle child—can adapt his play between roughhousing with his older brother and being gentle (most of the time) with his baby sister. I am looking forward to another year of watching him grow up and turn into an independent young man.

According to recent census data, 47 percent of the United States’ territory is uninhabited.

A Block is the smallest area unit used by the U.S. Census Bureau for tabulating statistics. As of the 2010 census, the United States consists of 11,078,300 Census Blocks. Of them, 4,871,270 blocks totaling 4.61 million square kilometers were reported to have no population living inside them. Despite having a population of more than 310 million people, 47 percent of the USA remains unoccupied.</blockquote>

My wife shared this image with me the other day, which shows how having more kids can actually give you fewer things to worry about. One or two kids more and she will be completely worry free.

One of my credit card providers sent me an email this morning promoting some of the ways I can use my membership rewards points.

Here’s a screenshot from the email: