I missed the news in late-August that Howard Becker had passed away A phenomenal social scientist. Not mentioned in his obit is that many who have never read is scholarly work have poured over and dog eared is, arguably magisterial, writing for social scientists, Writing for Social Scientists, Third Edition, recently reissued and updated. I happened to re-read it earlier this year. After reading the obit over the weekend, I flipped through the book to look at my annotations.

This is more a place-mark for myself when I invariably need to re-source the tutorials. Halfway through 2021, Github changed how users interact with the service in the command line. Instead of authenticating through a username and password, users must now use a Personal Access Token. The upsides in the aggregate are plenty, but mostly centering on better security for everyone. The downside, for infrequent users of Github are that I need to update all my repos.

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.

Antonio Garcia-Martinez, at his Substack, The Pull Request: The point isn’t the predictive power of the scientific hypothesis, but how it gets actionably internalized as religious doctrine: It’s possible to speak of objective empirical realities religiously and mythically, and that’s mostly what we do. Note how many climate-change discussions fixate on the flooding aspect of global warming (among the last of the effects we’ll actually see), flooding being a near-universal myth seen everywhere from Native American origin stories to the Greeks, the Hindus, numerous Mesopotamian traditions, and (of course) Genesis.

It seems like everyone has new projects during the pandemic. I certainly do. A colleague and I are reading Albert Camus’, The Plague, and posting our thoughts as a series of podcast. The first is up now on Podbean, and of course, you can easily find them on your favorite podcast app. Additionally, you can find links to the episodes as they are published, here.