I'd love to see everybody in LA on Tuesday, March 11th. Who's free?

Update:
Taix
Tuesday, March 11
7:30 pm

We just had a USPS truck pull up and drop off a package, on a Sunday. It is Sunday, isn't it?

Also this article about Disney and the author's autistic son is pretty beautiful and complex.

Today is my first attempt ever baking bread from scratch. I decided on this recipe because it looked easy, and because:

If I've got a day where I've really got to get some uni work done - I'll make bread. Because it adds structure to my day, without taking much effort. I make the bread, and while it proofs, get some work done. Take it out, punch down the yeast. And as it rises again, more uni work. While the oven heats up, more uni work. While it bakes, I dot my 'i's and cross my 't's. Then, as a reward for a solid few hours work, I get freshly baked bread.

seems just so trustworthy.

Slate has a pretty good piece up on Wolfram Language, which links to this fantastic piece by Cosma Shalizi on Wolfram's big book from a few years ago. I knew Wolfram was a raving egomaniac, but didn't realize he was such a litigious jerk. Shalizi's piece is slightly technical, but so clear that it was easy (and entertaining) to read the whole thing.

There's a thing called "Baby Metal":

Things of note: 1) The chorus on this song is nefariously catchy; 2) This may be the best metal song ever written about how awesome it is to eat chocolate; 3) The people playing their backing music are dressed as skeletons; 4) If you show this to an actual metalhead, he or she will never forgive you.

Enjoy.

I think the study linked below, showing no significant health benefits from breastfeeding by using sibling pairs as controls, may have been misinterpreted here -- reading it as some kind of proof that the "perfect parenting crowd" is off-base seems to me to be exactly the wrong message to take away. Let's think about this systematically:

1) Prior studies of breastfeeding, many of which attempted to control for socioeconomic factors, showed significant benefits in health and IQ for breastfed children.

2) This study, comparing breastfed children to their non-breastfed siblings showed no benefit. Which means that

3) There are significant health and IQ benefits related to being a child brought up by the particular kind of parents who would breastfeed, even when you try to control for socioeconomic factors.

4) Another way to describe "the particular kind of parents who would breastfeed" is "the perfect-parenting crowd."

Therefore

5) The perfect-parenting crowd, despicable as they may be, are actually doing their children measurable, substantial good through some part of the perfect-parenting behavior. It might not be the breastfeeding, but it's something associated with how they parent, and it's fairly consequential. Better start home-baking those organic snacks and forbidding screentime, everyone!

Prove me wrong.