Status:

Most of the stuff my PE teachers at secondary school said went right through me as it was irrelevant nonsense, but one thing has stuck with me. I remember one of them talking about the importance of keeping up sports once we left school and didn’t have him forcing us to do it. He told us about meeting star pupils years later and them smoking and being fat (this was the 80s, and he was a PE teacher) having let themselves go.

I don’t really care about that — fuck 80s school sports and all who taught them^* — but what’s struck me is I don’t think my other teachers gave a talk like this. Nobody explicitly warned us about the dangers of stopping learning academic stuff.

Looking back, the stuff I learned at school was of course important (and while I didn’t do at all well at formal exams I did still learn a lot), but it really just formed a foundation layer for the enormous amount I’ve learned since. Maybe this is normal and unremarkable and everyone keeps learning through their lives, whether it’s through career development or hobbies. I clearly didn’t need it, but maybe I’m like those people who go to the gym for fun. What about the people who just stopped learning once they didn’t have to anymore? I don’t know where I’m going with this.

^* Like many things in education, they’re probably much better now.

Reading:

• RIP Sam Neill — One of the really good ones. It’s rare to find someone whose work you really enjoy and who then turns out to be a really great person in real life.
• Flickr’s optimistic committing — Or, isn’t it neat how Flickr’s uploader shows you what’s going on? This is one of the features from when Flickr was run by the original team and it really shows. There’s so much annoying crap on there now that Yahoo later implemented and which for some reason SmugMug haven’t rolled back. Flickr was very much of its era but produced so much best practice stuff that today’s web companies could dearly learn from.
• Astronomers detect ‘raspberry sugar’ on dust cloud in Milky Way — Today I learned sugars came from space.
• Jessamyn’s guide for removing unwanted AI from your junk — As part of her role helping library patrons with their tech problems. This is apparently a frequent request.
• Using the Xteink X4, a minimalist e-reader — I remain intrigued by this stripped down, pocket sized ebook reader. Not enough to drop ~£50 on it though.
• Sentiers No.411 — Still processing the links from yesterday’s edition but I did enjoy reading the newsletter itself.

Watching:

• Laura Kampf ‌(17:11)