Books: The Golden Spruce
2023-07-19
I enjoyed this book less because of the story and more because of the sense of place. Like taking a trip to the remote areas of Alaska and British Columbia — and in some ways better.
jdilla.xyz
Disappearing navigation elements (powered by ChatGPT)
2023-07-17
The navigation elements on my blog now fade out as you scroll down my blog so as not to clutter your view. This has been bothering me for a while so I decided to clean it up.
You can see a demo below or by scrolling on your screen :)
You can see how I did it here
Childless cities
2023-07-15
This piece from the Financial Times really resonated with me.
It hits on something I've experienced: the difficulty of finding a community in an American city that is affordable enough to live in, safe enough to let children play in, and has access to good education. It's so hard to find. In most parts of the US, if you want to have these things, you're pushed to the suburbs.
It seems to me that urban areas have an amazing lack of urgency around this problem.
While reading, I couldn't help thinking of this picture I took during my first week living in Zürich:
In what US city could you imagine this scene?
A group of grade school girls on their way to school all by themselves, without a parent in sight. One of my favorite things about living in Switzerland was that it was not just possible to live in an urban area, but easy.
Change log: image responsiveness
2023-07-15
One of my proudest accomplishments from the past year is coding this website with the help of GPT.
When I first built the site, I wasn't sure I was going to finish it and GPT didn't have sharing features, so then I was done and I couldn't share with others what it was like, but it was really impactful for me. This skill that had always been outside of my grasp was now something I could do... and what did that mean for other skills?
Since finishing the site's MVP, I've periodically made changes, but haven't put all the effort into sharing them. I'm going to try and do more of that though, in part because ChatGPT's sharing features make it so easy to do.
So with that prologue, here's my first change log post: images are now responsive on the site. This was annoying me for a while and I'm glad I took the 15 minutes to fix it.
Here's how things looked before:
And here's how things look after:
You can see how I did it here
Marathons and the increase in mortality
2023-07-12
Just to give you a sense, the mortality rate for something like cardiac arrest or a heart attack goes up by about 15 to 20% on the day of a marathon. Now, most people are not having cardiac arrest or a heart attack, so the aggregate impact on a city might be limited. But I think if I were to talk to people about the Boston Marathon bombings, most people would say that was a horrific event. But more people die because of marathon-associated road closures every year in a given city with a large marathon than died in the Boston Marathon bombings. But the bombings, what they did are so salient to us. Deaths in these other channels, we don’t even think about that.
That is from David Epstein's newsletter Range Widely. The cause is that the closure of roads along the marathon route makes it difficult to get to hospitals quickly.
An idle thought: I wonder if the same holds true for cardiac arrests during rush hour traffic?