Vancouver is a better city than most in North America. Amazing what not destroying your community and its environs with highways and the worship of cars can do. To be clear, Vancouver (the one in Canada, not the one in Washington) is still pretty auto-centric, but they just haven’t given absolutely everything over to them.

It’s not perfect — housing costs are utterly out of control, but that is true to some extent in nearly any major North American city. Homeowners and their interests have a near lock on all politics, local and national. Hard to see a way to change that.

Still, striking how different Vancover feels than most American cities. It’s a place at least partially for humans, rather than for machines.

Compiling Samba from source and listening to “Good as Hell.”

How many people have ever done those two activities at the same time in the history of the world is probably one.

“The laws of physics, I concluded, to the extent that they are true, do not explain much. We could know all the true laws of nature, and still not know how to explain composite cases. Explanation must rely on something other than law.”

–Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie

The problem with thinking you know more than the experts.

Wrong framing. I don’t think I know more than most experts, but I certainly am not attempting to rip myself off, wrench money from my own wallet for nefarious causes, or otherwise attempting to pilfer, purloin, or prise away some ill-gotten gain from myself.

Experts these days more than ever are attempting to do exactly that if not most of the time, then certainly enough of the time that it is an ever-present and huge risk.

So no, I do not trust experts even if they are more skilled and/or competent than I am in their domain — with the way our society is structured, that makes them more of a risk to me, not less.

Oh hell yeah, The Leftovers is back. Such a beautiful, great, gut-wrenching, intelligent, daring second season.

The first season was ok. Boring in parts, unnecessary in others, great in a few others. (But it had Carrie Coon so I kept watching.)

The second season — I say goddamn.

It’s the most human, most absorbing, most lived-in and most dementedly painstaking show on television. And the greatness of Carrie Coon. That last sentence is incomplete because nothing can complete Carrie Coon.

If season 3 is even half as good as the second one was, it’ll be better than 99% of what’s on TV now.

I might go back and re-watch season 1 in light of what I now know — suspect I was missing a lot, or was not in the groove of the show then.

I’m very happy to be visiting my friend. Go away, John Nash, she’s the one with a beautiful mind.

Why do we keep Snell’s law on the books when we both know it to be false and have a more accurate refinement available? There are obvious pedagogic reasons. But are there serious scientific ones? I think there are, and these reasons have to do with the task of explaining. Specifying which factors are explanatorily relevant to which others is a job done by science over and above the job of laying out the laws of nature. Once the laws of nature are known, we still have to decide what kinds of factors can be cited in explanation.

–Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie

Tell me again, Neil deGrasse Tyson, how philosophy is irrelevant and useless?

Strength in adversity and the need to make a living are not the same thing as freedom.

–Ellen Willis, No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

It’s strange how realizing the truth of the artificiality of your preferred fiction in no way makes it easier to consume or enjoy fiction that is also just as highly stylized but is non-preferred.

All the fiction is a stage on a stage, and all the players merely types that echo our preferred way of seeing ourselves and our world.

Video captures horse battling gator at Florida park.

God I love Florida.

Been to this park before. It’s also about 45 miles from where I grew up.