I am not doing as much study in the area of math and science lately and haven’t written on the topic since last May, but I still found time to note these pieces and wanted to share them. A typical smattering of astronomy, physics, math, biology, what have you….
Over the years I’ve developed a habit of writing politicians. I shared this habit with my friend Norbert and I after that chat I decided to share it here in case you want to develop a similar habit.
If you want to write politicians like me, you need to know how to contact those pols that mean the most to you. For me those three are the mayor, the premier of the province and the prime minister. The mayor is reachable by email so I have that address handy. The other two are reachable via a web form, so I have that info in hand also.
I have a template that I use for letters I write to each of them. When I want to write them about an issue, I pull up the template and fill it in. I usually say what the issue is, then what I would like them to do about the issue. Then I send it.
That’s it! It’s a two step process. Very quick. Occasionally I will follow up, but the purpose is really to register my voice. I don’t expect anything other than a canned response. Only one politician’s team, Mayor John Tory, ever made an effort to respond in a more personal manner.
While I do write about issues, I will also write politicians of all sorts and compliment them if they do something I approve of. Typically these will be constructive actions and often ones where politicians are working together.
I write politicians in a style I use for anyone who works for me, because they do. I don’t insult them or get angry with them: I find that never works when it comes to influencing someone I want to change.
Ideally I would write at least one politician a week but it’s more the case I write one a month.
I hope you can take up this habit. It makes me feel like I am doing something small but important in our democracy. Just like voting is small but also important. Good luck with it.
What are the best novels of all time? What about the best Shakespeare plays? And what do these two lists have in common?
What they have in common is that The Guardian has taken a crack at both of them:
This is smart in a few ways. One, there is nothing that gets people going than someone saying: these are the best. No doubt there will be many people checking them out (and driving traffic to the Guardian web site) just to see if they agree or disagree. Two, it’s really good thoughtful that the contributors have made to come up with such lists.
I grew up with The Book of Lists, so I am always interested in a good list. If you’re similar, or simply a fan of the Bard of a great novel, then check them out.
The minute I read this review by Pete Wells, I knew I had to go Libertine. I love a French bistro generally, and this one sounded especially good. On the night we went, everything about it was ideal. We snagged a lovely table near a window and had a waiter that bent over backwards to make sure we had a memorable evening. The food, from the appetizer (oeuf mayonnaise) to the mains (that sausage and potato dish) to the a dessert (a massive chocolate mousse), was delicious. As soon as we were home for the evening, I was already dreaming about when I could go again.
Sadly those dreams are done, for Libertine is closing this month. The same people own the space and plan to turn it into something else which will no doubt be great. But I would have liked another chance to eat at that fine New York City bistro.
Another place I had hoped to return to some day was Rodney Scott’s in Charleston. It too was a place that I heard of through someone famous (Anthony Bourdain) and I had a chance to dine there once at it’s location on King Street. I filled a plate with lots of food that Scott was known for, from the BBQ meats to the tasty sides. Alas there are almost too many great places to dine in Charleston and I never did go again, and now I never will.
I look forward to finding out what goes next in the space where Libertine was. And I hope Rodney Scott can make a comeback.
P.S. For more on Libertine closing, see this. For more on Rodney Scott’s closing, see this.
I wanted to go back to the very beginning of blogging, where someone’s blog could consist of just a simple html page with maybe some images to go along with it. But I also wanted to have an easy way to update it. I’ve succeeded in doing just that, with the result visible here: https://berniemichalik.com/simpleblog.html
If you think this is something you want to do, head over to here and check out what I say in that repository. It’s a pretty basic setup. There’s even advice how to host it in a bucket on Amazon, which is what I do.
Let me know if you have any feedback, especially if you think things aren’t clear. Thanks!
I could try to explain it beyond the title above, but without further adieu, I recommend you go experience HASU
It’s really great, really smart.
It’s an exciting time to be a software developer. Exciting and weird.
It’s exciting because of what developers are capable of doing with agentic AI tools from companies like Anthropic. It’s weird because as Clive Thompson writes: “In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming”. Yet while programmers may be barely programming, they are still producing code.
Indeed, not only are they producing code, they are producing A LOT of it. Take this example in this other piece by Mike Isaac and Erin Griffith:
When a financial services company recently began using Cursor, an artificial intelligence technology that writes computer code, the difference that it made was immediate.
The company went from producing 25,000 lines of code a month to 250,000 lines. That created a backlog of one million lines of code that needed to be reviewed, said Joni Klippert, a co-founder and the chief executive of StackHawk, a security start-up that was working with the financial services firm.
And it’s not limited to senior programmers. As Isaac and Griffith write:
“The blessing and the curse is that now everyone inside your company becomes a coder,” said Michele Catasta, the president and head of A.I. at Replit, an A.I. coding start-up in Foster City, Calif.”
It all sounds great: who wouldn’t want such a productivity gain? Alas, there’s a problem. Isaac and Griffith add:
““The sheer amount of code being delivered, and the increase in vulnerabilities, is something they can’t keep up with,” she said. And as software development moved faster, that forced sales, marketing, customer support and other departments to pick up the pace, Ms. Klippert added, creating “a lot of stress.”
A lot of code means a lot of stress. Not just for sales, marketing and customer support teams, either. I suspect it’s also causing plenty of stress for testing, operations and application support teams in organization that rely on a DevOps lifecycle for software development.
To deal with such stress, any organization that adopts AI technology to write code and also uses DevOps needs to consider their entire software development lifecycle in light of such code. AI generated code, no matter how fast it is coded, will have limited value if it’s not reviewed and tested properly. It will have limited value if it is not written in a way that it can be supported by applications and operations. Not to mention it will be hard for others to fix and enhance it later if it is not built and deployed using agreed upon processes by the organization.
To avoid creating unsupportable code with problems that will accelerate technical debt, developers of all levels need to know more about their code than “it works on their machine”. If such developers expect others within their organization to use their code, they must write code that doesn’t impact their organization’s DevOps lifecycle. They must take the time to write AI generated code that is supportable. That additional effort by people generating the new AI code is essential if organizations are going to survive the code tsunami that is coming.
The good news, I think, is that everyone that participates in the DevOps lifecycle will be able to devise ways to support AI developers such that their code will fit in nicely. After all, as this piece by IBM on the DevOps lifecycle explains: “The DevOps process describes how software moves from ideation, through production and feedback, and back to ideation, with development and operations teams working as a single, collaborative unit.” Organizations need the new AI supported developers working with others as a single collaborative unit to succeed. If they do, the new productivity will go from something that causes stress to something that causes success.
(The opinions expressed above are mine only and not necessarily those of my employer.)
I was feeling stuck lately. I thought I needed some goal or purpose to get me going again. But what?
Lately when I’ve been stuck with personal challenges I’ve been turning to my own personal AI (i.e., Ollama running the LLM gpt-oss-120b), for advice. I asked the software: What are 3-5 goals I could set for the month that other people have found worthwhile and that could help me gain momentum to set and achieve other goals?
I got back the following:
Below are five monthly goal ideas that many people swear by because they’re concrete, doable in a single month, and give you a quick win that fuels the next big project. Pick one (or a mix) that feels most relevant to you and turn each into a SMART target (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time‑bound).
| # | Goal | Why It Works | How to Structure It |
| 1 | Daily “micro‑habit” – e.g., 10‑minute meditation, 5‑minute journaling, or 30‑sec body‑weight routine | Small, consistent action builds a rhythm. Once the habit feels automatic, it’s easier to layer more complex goals on top. | Specific: “Meditate at 7:00 a.m. every weekday.” Measurable: Track days on a habit‑tracker app. Reward: After 21 consecutive days, treat yourself to something you enjoy. |
| 2 | 30‑Day “Read a Page a Day” challenge | Reading a page a day adds up to ~30 pages a month – enough to finish a short book or digest a chapter of a non‑fiction title. It keeps your mind curious and gives you a tangible end‑product. | Specific: “Read 20 pages of Book X each day.” Accountable: Post your page count on a public calendar or share a weekly summary on social media. |
| 3 | Declutter One Area per Week | Cleaning a single spot (desk, closet, email inbox) gives an instant sense of order and control, motivating you to tackle the next spot. | Specific: “Sort the top shelf of my bookshelf every Sunday.” Measurable: Log each area with before/after photos. Result: After 4 weeks you’ll have a noticeably tidier environment. |
| 4 | Save/Track a Small Amount of Money | A financial win, even a modest one, builds a habit of budgeting and shows that you’re moving toward a bigger financial goal. | Specific: “Set aside $25 each week into a savings account.” Track: Use a budgeting app to see the cumulative total at month‑end. Celebrate: Use the savings for a fun treat or a future investment. |
| 5 | One New Skill Minute a Day | Dedicating just 15 minutes daily to a new skill (language, guitar, coding) creates incremental progress that feels fast and keeps you engaged. | Specific: “Learn 5 new Spanish words every morning.” Measure: Keep a vocabulary list; test yourself weekly. Progress: At month‑end you’ll have a solid foundation to expand. |
Quick Tips to Keep Momentum
Pick a goal that feels both meaningful and achievable for this month. Once you finish it, you’ll have a proven “win” to celebrate, and that confidence will make launching your next big goal a lot easier. Happy goal‑setting!
Wow. That was an actual helpful list. I’ve adopted all five just to see how I can do.
What I’m noticing at first:
What I observed towards the end:
I stopped doing this once I took a break and went on vacation. It was rewarding, though. And it helped jump start me into doing things I was not. I highly recommend it.
P.S. For more on the importance of doing things 10 minutes a day, read this.
(Image from Valeriia Miller)
If you had to buy only one ebook, I would recommend this one: 50 Masterpieces You Have to Read Before You Die. Coming in at just over forty thousand pages, it has the following:
And it’s not just for Apple ebook readers: there’s a Kindle version too.
Best of all, it costs less than three bucks!
Barbara Kruger once slammed some as “a ridiculous clusterfuck of uncool jokers”. I think of that phrase often, and I thought to apply it again when I read about Palantir’s manifesto on a recent thread on X. It’s easy to dismiss it as “the ramblings of a supervillian”, but I think there is something more to it. Reading it, I thought I saw references to ideas like those espoused by Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt, among others. I mean, Palantir wouldn’t be the first on the American right to do that.
As an experiment, I asked ChatGPT what German writings from the first half of the 20th century this resembles. It came back with this:
That was a good summary of the manifesto. Reading more on Spengler, Jünger and of course Schmitt confirmed that. The Palantir manifesto might not be a Nazi document, but it is aligned with writings of pre-1933 radical conservative thought, much of that which went on to influence Nazi Germany. To me the manifesto shows how dangerous Palantir is at its core.
Now I get it: for some of you, it’s hard to take these jokers at Palantir seriously. I mean:
Not to mention things like the fact that they are taking the time to design their own…chore coat, or that Palantir associate Peter Thiel is saying such crazy things that the Catholic church is mulling burning him at the stake.
So yeah, while they may be a bunch of uncool jokers, as far as jokers go, they are far from harmless. Being a joker and being dangerous aren’t mutually exclusive.
Every so often the debt of a country becomes a political issue and writers start cranking out pieces like this in the Wall Street Journal about how:
“The U.S. national debt now exceeds 100% of gross domestic product, crossing a once-unthinkable threshold, on the way toward breaking the record set in the wake of World War II.”
There’s some interesting choices of words in there, like “once-unthinkable” and “breaking the record”, phrases that seem to indicate danger.
If you feel nervous about the debt, here’s some things to consider. First, remember that personal debt and national debt don’t work the same way. Second, it’s important to take a longer term view when considering national debt.
A good example of a long term view is this chart of the U.K. government debt as a percentage of GDP. You can see the debt to GDP ration rose substantially above 100% at two major events in British history: the battles with France in the 19th century and the battles with Germany in the 20th century. Indeed, the ratio rose as high as 250% in the 20th century, only to subside to below 50% in the postwar era.
This is not to say that the ratio does not matter. It is to say that there is nothing magical about breaking the 100% ratio. The ratio could go higher. Chances are it will eventually go lower if for reasons of inflation if nothing else.
Writers — usually right wing writers — start bringing up the debt when left wing governments are in power. It’s a way for them to frighten people and pressure the government into spending less. (Such writers rarely bring up debt, especially for things like military expenditures, when the government is right wing.) Don’t be frightened. Governments have an obligation to tax and spend responsibility. They should not be basing their spending on this ratio.
(Image is from here.)
Smart People I Know 