Pizza night so someone doesn’t give a wut wut.
2020 International Religious Freedom Report
The Department of State submits this annual report to the Congress in compliance with section 102(b) of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (P.L. 105-292), as amended. This report covers the period between January 1 and December 31, 2020.
I wrote my dissertation explaining how the US got there, enacting a law protecting religious minorities around the world, and the book manuscript version in progress examines some of these reports in depth.
Quick break from the work, and lo! I just past 1700 elo in online chess.
(“Rapid” ~ 10-15 min games and where I play the most.)
Quick view from my building. My office is actually one of the windows off the left but this view from the top of the stairs is so much better.
Almost wrapping up spring soccer.
Big kiddo finally learning to kick big.
And he may have found his calling as goalie.
Little bro had his last game for the season.
And of course, they all get medals at their age for being good sports
Last game for big bro next Saturday.
Jobs outlook for the summer
Lot of intereesting stuff on the jobs data, From the Washington Post, via @Pratik earlier today:
It’s not a ‘labor shortage.’ It’s a great reassessment of work in America.
But Scott Sumner called it awhile ago
Because millions of unemployed workers in low pay service sector jobs earn more on unemployment than they did on their previous jobs, and because most of those jobs are unpleasant, employment will likely remain quite depressed all summer, before bouncing back in the fall. That’s not to say the economy won’t grow. The end of Covid makes it likely that sectors such as travel will pick up, but the quality of service will be lousy, perhaps the worst of my entire life.
Put differently, while the WaPo and Sumner are not talking strictly the same thing, there will be a lot of movement in the labor sector in the coming months. Lots.
Not that we needed more reason’s to distrust Google. But its kerfuffle with Roku is getting hot. From John Gruber..
I don’t have a roku, and I still use Gmail. But transaction cost of switching gets lower all the time. We need a serious YouTube competitor.
Spent most of yesterday afternoon, evening, and this morning banging my head against the desk troubleshooting why my citations were not rendering in Rmarkdown.
I was using an outdated template that breaks pandoc. 🤦🏽♂️
J&J slashes April target of vaccine
With domestic production of the company’s vaccine still unapproved, the government slashed its national allocation of the J&J vaccine to states by 86 percent to just 700,000 doses next week, down from nearly 5 million, a cut that Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) called “very concerning.”
I Called Off My Wedding. The Internet Will Never Forget
The internet is clever, but it’s not always smart. It’s personalized, but not personal. It doesn’t know or care whether you actually had a miscarriage, got married, moved out, or bought the sneakers.
The true, the good, and the beautiful.
Big kiddo has his initial assessment for fall classes at a classical school here in town.
Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired,
But then begins a journey in my head, To work my mind when body’s work’s expired.
—Shakespeare, Sonnet 27
I recently started reading the sonnets to the big kids as they fall asleep.
Starting Soccer, pt 3
We conclude our three part story on the boys starting soccer this spring. Paco had his first practice. Other than missing the first half of the NCAA Men’s basketball final (and let’s be honest, after how bad Baylor dominated, I didn’t miss much), I was glad the start time was a little later in the evening.
Paco did a lot better at practice than in his first game. I had mentioned previously that he struggled during the game because he didn’t understand that other kids get turns at the ball, and he doesn’t need to score a goal on every possession to have fun. We still had a few pre-practice jitters. When we arrived, Paco demurred when I encouraged him to go say hello to his coach. Eventually, with some coaxing, he finally joined his team during the warm up.
He’s starting to get the hang of the concept, and when he’s on, he’s actually very good. I won’t post the video but during the scrimmage, he handled the ball well and scored a goal.
March Madness 2021
I had Michigan winning the tournament (and as a very loyal Ohio State alumnus, I had good reason not to and wasn’t sorry when they lost). @maton on the other hand,
I picked Baylor to make the championship game (and win it) but pretty much nothing else in my NCAA bracket went right this year. Meanwhile, the NBA season feels like a sprint to the playoffs… The west play-in tournament is going to be tough. 🏀
Starting Soccer, pt 2b (Opening Day!)
It wouldn’t be a full morning of soccer without the big kid’s first game. Our theme of jitters continued. In fact the pattern was the same: lots of eager excitement, followed by extreme shyness just before the game started, tears in and throughout the game, with moments of courage and elation.
Nacho got to play goalie for a bit of the first half and was surprising good. But he was also scared of the ball. Although that isn’t exactly a good virtue for a goalie, he nevertheless did his best.
After the game, he was slapping high fives with his team-mates and told us that he really loves playing soccer “even though I cried a little.” For us, that’s really all that matters—getting him to enjoy the competition, over come low-stakes fear, and learn to love the game.
Starting Soccer, pt 2a (Opening Day!)
Today are the first games for the boys. Paco went first. Although we missed our first practice this week because we never received the email from the city league, Paco was very excited to get started.
Of course, no game would be complete without butterflies. Paco ran out to start and immediately returned, crying, after the first scrum for the ball. He didn’t like that he didn’t get the ball. Then he said that everyone was too fast. (Paco is actually among the fastest of kids his age.) The shyness is new for him, as he is usually the the first to introduce himself.
Thankfully it was an aberration from our usual Paco. He got back in there and gave it another go. This jittery shyness is a theme, I bet and both kids will overcome it eventually.
Spring Soccer, pt. 1
Today Nacho had his first soccer practice. He wanted to do a sport for more than a year and just as we began to look at youth sports last spring, the world shut down. So he was, to put it lightly, more than thrilled to start soccer.
He struggled a few times. Thrice he came running back to me asserting he wanted to quit. Thrice he went back and kept at it. I was proud to see him persevere through his frustration.
Weeding
I spent part of my weekend working on the back yard. When we bought our home last summer, both the front and back had been neglected for a long while. What green did cover the ground was a mix between crabgrass and nutsedge. After months of spaying herbicide to kill what was up, watering until new weeds emerged before repeating the process, I was finally down to the last few stubborn weeds.
Not long after I started the two older kids decided that they wanted to help. First came the eldest with his toy shovel asking what I was doing. I explained that the remaining weeds had roots that went deep into the ground and needed to be dug up by hand. He began to help by digging around some of the smaller weeds. Of course, little brother realized there was fun to be had. I couldn’t help but recall all the times I decided to “help” my dad when he was doing yard work and reflected on how he must have felt having to stop work to teach me how to pull weeds correctly or make sure I was doing ok. But those were some of the earliest, and still fondest, memories of doing something with my dad.
I forgot to snap a photo of the full bucket when we finished. But it was a real threat to do something with my older two boys.
Simplified Research
My research organization has gotten a little too byzantine over the years. Navigating to an active research project is now six levels deep on my computer. If I want to get to my book manuscript, e.g., I have to do the following: Dropbox/AcademicWork/Projects/Inprogress/mssBook Then, I still have to navigate within that folder between my archival material, grant reporting, the book proposal, and the manuscript. It’s a mess.
AcademicWork/Projects/Inprogress
- IRJRF_CCES_2018
- Accepted_Changes
- Analysis
- Data
- Paper
- Presentation
- RnR_Notes
- RnR_Letter
- Locke_Immg
- Mss_book
- Archival_Materials
- Archive_Staged
- GrantReporting
- Proposal
- ResearchMaterials
- RA_Hiring
- mss
- chapter01
- chapter02
In the example above, I included the folder structure for another paper I am working which is in the final stages. Project directories are structured right. Lincoln Mullen’s tutorial recommends keeping all the associated files together. He is not alone. Folders like data, paper, and figures keep things neat and tidy. They especially make things reproducible because they create walls between things like raw data which should never be modified from the sausage of writing a paper.
The rest needs to be revised. How I got here is somewhat understandable. I got lazy. When I started graduate school, I worked primarily in Scrivener, which is still an amazing app, and a pot-pourri of iOS apps on my iPhone (and later iPad). Much of the complexity creep was abated even more (read: ignored) by moving the Inprogress folder in my Mac’s Finder sidebar. That made getting to an active project one level deep on my Mac and as simple as opening the app I needed to manipulate files on an iOS device. And once I got past my comp exams and started the disseration, I didn’t want to change horses midstream.
While writing my dissertation, I noticed an increasing amount of friction. I moved to a plain-text workflow during graduate school. Writing a makefile, e.g., was and is more challenging when the relative path between things is more complicated. Here, too, the complexity can be mitigated (read: ignored) through a clever use of prefixes and shortcuts within makefiles.
PREFIX = /Users/lmp/Dropbox/AcademicWork/Pandoc_Templates
BIB = /Users/lmp/Dropbox/AcademicWork/Bibs/refs.bib
BIB2 = /Users/lmp/Dropbox/AcademicWork/Bibs/primary.bib
I haven’t found a good set of best practices beyond Mullen’s tutorial and a few others. It was very helpful to re-read them after a few years. What I need, however, is something beyond mere guidelines and some working examples. In a few weeks I will update what I settled with, but for now, I just want to get a good statement of the problem.
Family photos
My wife has been wanting family photos for a while. Back in 2019, we agreed that “next year” we’d do it for our Christmas cards. Of course, that didn’t happen. A few weeks ago a member on one of her Facebook groups said she wanted to do free photo sessions to give back and get back into a rhythm for when the world opens up. Needless to say, we’ve very happy with the outcome.
