2024-11| The Discreet Charm of Wooofles
No clever comments about any of it, here are some things I thought about in November.
• The
Global Carbon Budget
is out. It’s not great news - emissions increased again.
I’m a coauthor because I was responsible for running and submitting our model, which happens to be the only
model in the included suite that simulates the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation correctly. Not really
through my doing, but I’ll take it.
🦭 Mluvila jsem do
rozhlasu —
Honza Boček mě pozval povídat si o Global Carbon Budget a o tom jak se modeluje
uhlík v oceánu. Celkem předvidatelně zaznělo slovní spojení 'autonomní ploutvonožec'. Mám z toho docela radost,
povedlo se mi neříct nic fakticky blbě a cca mluvit v souvislých větách, i když oceánografie v češtině jako obor
vpodstatě neexistuje. (Babička (86) má radost že jsem mluvila do rádia, čímž považuji debatu o tom, zda mají veřejnoprávní
media provozovat podcasty za uzavřenou.)
• Work in progress: I made a (very rough, probably-useful-mostly-only-to-me)
lookup page
of python syntaxes that I commonly ask
chatgpt about. (I don’t know how much water/energy chatgpt uses, but probably a lot, and anyway I feel vaguely silly asking the
stupid robot about the same things over and over. It’s not particularly organized right now, but I’ll be adding to it, and
it has been useful.)
• (Re: the above — A perpetual source of ~inspiration~ is meeting people who started out quite clever and then tried hard over
30 years to a) gain context and b) become efficient at using their brains, basically out of some sort of curiosity. One of them once
said to me something like “life is about I learning to work with yourself so that you can optimize your research output” and I kind of
hope that’s not true, but I do get what she was saying. My brain feels like wet cake a lot of the time, efficiency wise, but some things
about working can become more efficient with time, and figuring out how to supplement the finite nature of the wet cake is probably one
of them.)
• We bought a waffle maker, affectionately called WOOOFLEMAKER, for $8.99 at value village (the largest second hand store here),
and now we have wooofles every morning — a remarkable joy:dollar ratio, really (to me, anyway. I think the other occupant of the
house may be getting sick of wooofles). Looking around our tiny flat, I’m not sure there are any kitchen items that don’t come to us
via value village or the like. The paradox of the ratio of the cost of consumer goods to the cost of housing is never more stark than
in places like Victoria, British Columbia. I know someone with a good, above-average-paying, union job who lived in his car for a while
after getting evicted because it was so hard to find an apartment, and the median rent for a 1-bedroom flat is ~69% of the median
after-tax income. But if you want your plates to be beautiful Edwardian/GDR porcelain for basically free, no problem. I own a $200 dollar
rice cooker because someone didn’t need it and left it on the street, and J found it and then gave it to me when he moved to New Zealand.
(Inexplicably, it plays twinkle twinkle little star when it’s done making rice, which is a good thing to remember when making rice at 6 in
the morning in a studio flat of which I am not the sole occupant).
• I’m on Bluesky now, kind of, as tjarnikova
• Hezké postřehy o psaní.
• Via M via Discord:
Check out the punk scene
- a great dig /ode to libraries. (Flaming hydra seems cool!
Yet another small group of people who write things on the internet whom I now
send a small amount of money to every month.)
🇮🇸 A very vague project to read more things that aren’t on the internet: One (not previously read) novel
from each European country, heading west to east. On K's recommendation, I started in Iceland with Miss Iceland (Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir),
set in 1960s Reykjavik. The themes - a young woman writer’s emancipation from repressed 60’s Icelandic society -
are a bit strongly-placed, but I really liked the general atmosphere. (The only other Icelandic novel I've ever read is
Land of Love and Ruins by Oddný Eir, which is apparently polarizing but which I personally liked quite a lot.)
🇮🇪 I’m now n to Ireland, where, after a brief and
unsuccessful struggle with the dark surrealism of Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman, I have settled on The Picture of Dorian Gray.
It’s intensely funny and quite extra and quite fresh, despite being written in 1890. (Is it about twink death?
It’s kind of about twink death.) (It occurs to me that I should technically be on Portugal right now. Send me your favourite
Portuguese novel, please.)