May 2021

June 9, 2021

For me, May was the first month resembling normality since COVID started. It was also pretty busy, but in a fun way! I finished Bradfield’s operating systems course, went to a close friend’s wedding, and took a flight to Virginia to visit my family for the first time in 18 months. I feel lucky.

Reading

I didn’t read any books in May. Maybe this month!

I did read two particularly good articles about inflation. Alex Williams wrote a piece about inflation measures and why arguing about which inflation measure is “correct” is a useless exercise. Instead, people should “go out and dig into the detail tables in the inflation data, and make their own trackers.” Matthew C. Klein wrote an article about the disparity between rents and home prices, and I really liked how Minsky-ian he sounded when he emphasized that home prices are determined in large part by financing conditions.

I spent part of a weekend reading about the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP), a project to digitize and restore images taken by the Lunar Orbiter program spacecraft in 1966 and 1967. The project operated out of a vacant McDonald’s, and I got a kick out of the images of the workspace. This Wired article about the LOIRP gets the vibe of the project across.

Watching

Caleb Gamman's videos are criminally underappreciated – he's been making great and high effort videos for a year now, but they haven't gotten a ton of views. Hopefully the YouTube algorithm will bless him. This is his final entry in his series where he fixes Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. I don't even like Revenge of the Sith, but I still got invested in this project! Gamman also posted his full list of changes if videos aren't your thing.