Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Happy New Year!

Today starts the Chinese year of the pig. I wished a couple of my students back in Walla Walla that are from China a happy new year. One came back with that fact that the pig is the end of the cycle of animals in the Chinese new year rotation. Pig is last because it lost the race among the animals in the cycle. Next year is the year of the mouse, so I guess the mouse won the race. Anyway, thanks for the Chinese culture lesson Linqi.

I cooked Emily's Christmas present today for lunch. She brought me a box of jambalaya mix from the US when she came to visit in December. I found some sausage at the store today, chopped it up and use the mix to make jambalaya. It was pretty good, but wow the sausage here is greasy. Eight hours later and I'm still kinda tasting it.


Rachel sent me a good book today called A Guide to Reproducible Code in Ecology and Evolution. It's got good advice for anyone embarking on a data science project.

Speaking of Rachel books, the Factfulness chapter this evening admonished us to be careful when assigning blame--especially to individuals. Catastrophic failures are never attributable to a single individual. Similarly, wild successes are never attributable to single individuals. Dig a little deeper and look for the systems and policies that enabled the failure or success. They're almost always more mundane and subtle than we expect.