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Reading the Star Trek fan forums, I see that most fans hate, hate hate this week’s episode. I liked it, but did not love it. A pleasant 53 minutes. Nice to see Rachel Harris — I’m a fan of that actress. The season continues to advance Spock and La’an’s story arcs.

On the downside of the episode: It was slight. The show “Angel” did the same gag in 2004 and it’s a funny-once joke; it does not play twice. The show dragged in the middle and the writing and puppet action were too clever.

The fans are hating the number of gimmick episodes this season. I enjoyed the “Griffin Incident” and “Human Best Friend” a great deal, did not care for the “Case of Chiaroscuro” and I’m ready for the show to just go back to being regular Star Trek now.

I hope they don’t turn La’an into a supervillain. The character deserves better. If I were writing that character, I’d have her tempted by some Darth Vader figure, be on the verge of a very dramatic moment of succumbing to Pure Evil, and then have a Joss Whedonesque anticlimax where she says, “Um, no? Fuck evil. I have free will, I choose good, it isn’t even a tough choice, now go away Darth Vader Figure and stop bugging me.” Also, she should continue dancing with Spock even if they are not boyfriend-girlfriend anymore because why not?

I just posted the following to LinkedIn and I am inordinately pleased with myself about it: “Questex, the company where I have happily worked for the past two years, is now Forge, and ‘Forge’ is now my second-favorite F-word.”

Kyla Scanlon “on wealth vs. labor and ownership vs. effort."

Over half of Americans no longer believe full-time work will get them to their financial goals, Scanlon writes. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to be financially comfortable just through work, even if your work is skilled, white-collar, professional work. Our economy rewards owning things over doing things. Labor’s share of economic output is declining, while corporate profits rise.

This casino economy encourages a kind of performative affluence — social media influencers, and their followers, who flash the signifiers of wealth — fancy cars and jewelry — and promote get-rich-quick schemes. Often even the influencers are not themselves wealthy; it doesn’t cost too much to rent a fancy car by the hour to appear in your Instagram video.

Yes, Boomers have accumulated most of the wealth, but that’s just luck, not conspiracy. They came up in a period of affluence, when houses were affordable. They’re numerous, long-lived, they vote, and when they vote, they vote their self-interest.

I say “they” here to describe Boomers even though I am one myself. However, I was born in the tail end of the Boom and don’t feel particularly financially comfortable.

The Sand Letters

“On his deathbed, President Chester Arthur ordered that all of his personal and professional papers be burned. Three barrels of documents went up in flames. But 23 letters survived, initialed only ‘J.I.S.'”

Arthur was a prince of the spoils system of government — institutionalized corruption and bribery — that was standard through most of the 19th Century. But as President he led dismantling that system and replacing it with professional civil service that drove many of the great advances of the U.S. in the 20th Century.

Arthur was turned around, to a large extent, by those 23 letters, from Julia Isabella Sand, a woman who lived an obscure life in New York. Though she exerted great influence on Arthur, she and the President never met.

Comedian and amateur historian Elliot Kalan and 99% Invisible host Roman Mars tell the story.

Use an LLM to build a personal wiki for areas of research

At the beginning of April, the prominent AI researcher Andrej Karpathy tweeted (https://x.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595) out an idea that was, for a certain kind of productivity nerd, an infohazard. He described the idea this way: ‘Something I’m finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest.’ He proceeded to describe his process: adding source documents to a local folder and using an LLM to extract and organize their contents into a Markdown wiki that gets updated as he adds new material."

I don’t know whether I will do this but it sure is intriguing.

Anthony Bourdain in 2005: Direct from cassette. “Two hours turned into a highly personal conversation, recorded on a cassette that sat untouched for twenty years. This week, that tape gets its first public airing, and we discuss Tony’s preferred sucker-punch etiquette, his loyalty to cigarettes and the Chateau Marmont, ayahuasca in Peru, and the talk show he dreamed up with Christopher Walken in mind.”

The Rest is History looks at the Irish Troubles. There are strong parallels to Israel and the Palestinians. The violence in Northern Ireland eventually ended, which is a cause for cautious hope in Israel/Palestine.

I admired Anthony Bourdain. I consumed his interviews and read as many articles by him as I could find. I found “Kitchen Confidential” among the most inspiring books I’ve read.

When he killed himself, I came to think of his public persona as a lie, and stopped watching, listening to or reading him.

But now I think the public Bourdain was a character he created, played and tried to live, and I should resume appreciating his life and work.