Week 55: Working dad
September 21, 2019
- Some weeks you are on top of things, some weeks the things are on top of you.
- OMIGOSH you guys. I don’t even like F Scott Fitzgerald but when I think about Alex’s (ten! year!) project to collect all his short stories into one place I feel quite elated. She even had to go to the library of congress, dig out three of his most unknown shorts, photocopy them, and then type them up by hand. Honestly, what a woman. You should read her blog post about it, it’s a trip.
- A while ago someone asked me how I liked being a “working mum”. I answered in the spirit of the question - “Do how is being at work while also having a baby” - and suppressed my anxiety at the phrase “working mum”. Later my friend identified the source of my angst - nobody ever seems to use the phrase “working dad” do they?
- On Monday I played Age of Empires after work, it was a lot of fun once we’d worked out how to run it. I am coming last.
- Tonight we’re going to finish Pandemic Legacy 2.
- This week we also brought back crossword club.
- And this week James Burke came in and gave a talk. A lot of people said it was great but I think it might actually have been bad? I don’t know. I have questions. I am probably taking the things he said too literally - presumably the statement that one day in the next 20 years we’ll be walking around with nano-fabricators that make anything we want, so we won’t need jobs anymore, presumably that was just a provocation. Also - that k-web thing… just seems a bit shit?
- I don’t know very much about nano-technology but luckily my dad knows everything about it so I phoned him and asked him about the idea that nano-fabricators will be able to smash together atoms to make whatever we want and all they’ll need is dirt and water and oxygen, and he got very cross. “This just shows a fundamental lack of understanding of basic chemistry. The amount of energy required to do that would be so high it would not be viable on any consumer scale. [etc]”
- This is not the first thing I saw this week that everyone else seemed to think was good but was actually bad, however I have decided just to shut my mouth about the other thing because it’s probably fine that some things are bad. I don’t want to be one of those “unpopular opinion” people.
- Yes sorry I am a nerd that plays board games and talks about nano-technology with my dad