2025-12 | A question can be a form of answer
I’ve been working on an atmospheric paper, which feels pretty far afield for me.
One refreshing part is a reorientation to a new topic. Research (or, really, doing most things)
requires some amount of specificity, and the facts you take for granted in one field are very much
not common knowledge in another one, even if they’re close. I know how salty the ocean should be
(roughly 35 grams of salt per kilogram of seawater is a good start), but I don’t know how much atmospheric
pressure there is at ten kilometers of altitude — a similarly basic fact. Picking five numbers to
describe a system might be a good way to get at it — or at least asking which numbers it would be helpful to know.
I really like
How to come up with new ideas
by Parker MacCready, and I follow quite a few of his notes about
research process. This essay was the impetus for starting a monthly research diary. (I also have pages for most
of my projects, but having a chronological journal that I start and end each day with, even if the notes are short,
is very helpful for me personally). Very often it will take all your creativity just to solve little problems that come up.
This is certainly true of any programming job lives rent free in my head. (Directly relatedly, this month I struggled
to download and process several terabytes of CMIP model output, which is one of those tasks that sounds simple until you
try it.)
I finished Lindsey Freeman’s Running, “the feminist and queer handbook of running that she always wanted but could never find.”
I liked it a lot — a loosely interlinked set of queer perspectives on the sport, vignettes and personal memories and facts,
a scattered snapshot that conveys something of how she relates to running. When I ran competitively
I was reasonably good but unreasonably intense about it, and I resonate with something of the combination of intensity-joy-outsider
perspective that threads through the book. Maybe we were similarly queer teenagers, sprinting around overgrown gravel tracks and doing
our solitary long runs along the strangely specific tarmac of suburban USA.
I’m realizing that this sort of almost-scrapbooking is one of my favourite styles of writing: gentle,
fairly-lightly-written-but-insightful meanders on a number of
top that thematically hold together. Sebald does it; so does MacFarlane. Catherine Lacey's Mobius Book, which I also read this month,
does this as well, though it's not entirely light.
Not declaring an overarching narrative, but trying to triangulate a vantage point and share it with you.
"I am having a crisis. But I'm also having tea, do you want some?" -Catherine Lacey, The Mobius Book
As usual I made some vaguely aspirational python thing for a new year: this year it’s
2026 BINGO.
We are leaving Vancouver Island, for now. I will miss this landscape: the moss, the rain, the seals, the damp coffees,
the ferns, the mushrooms, the mouse that runs along the floor of the Drake pub as I write this, even the comically bad bus service.
But I realized I will also miss the way the people are: by and large unusually gentle with each other and often slightly queer in
a way that suggests that there are lots of ways to be, that there is space to breathe. It’s something to take into the rain,
especially these days. Find us in the East of England.
(I forgot how good
this
comforting/unnerving song is; the lyrics unsettle, the sonic blanket says that everything will be alright.
Off M's
One Banger A Day playlist, a truly eclectic treasure.)