Digging for Fire

I have a deeply personal post I need to write, but it won't make sense without the context. So I'm going to break it up into multiple parts. They might seem disconnected to begin with. This is part two. Part one is here. On the 22nd of September, 1949, Ronaldo Fabri got on a boat, leaving behind a country on the brink of revolution. Egypt in 1949 was a country with a long history and fresh wounds.

I have a deeply personal post I need to write, but it won't make sense without the context. So I'm going to break it up into multiple parts. They might seem disconnected to begin with. This is part one. In 2009, Talia and I went on a Contiki tour of Europe. Despite being the only married couple (we were only 22!) on a Contiki tour, we managed to have a great time touring Europe without getting too...

We're spending the last days of pesach in Mullumbimby. There's an amazing Jewish community here, full of young families and friendly faces. The Rabbi was kind enough to let us park our caravan in the yard of the shul, so we'll be very close to services over the next two days. This morning I was up early with Zohar and we went for a 6am walk down Burringbar Street, which is the main street of the t...

When was the last time you were offline? Like, really offline. Not just signed out of Slack. Not Do Not Disturb. Not even airplane mode. I'm talking phone entirely off for a good 24 hours. Stay at home, with no internet, and no screens. It's a forcing function for your mental health. I challenge you to try it. Once a week, or once a month, or once a year. Some sort of schedule helps set the right...

Out of sheer curiosity, I applied for a job that had a really interesting cross-over between Education and AI. I flubbed the interview. I felt very out of practice, but also, the CEO had very silicon valley vibes. She was operating at a way faster speed to me. Come to think of it, people often say that I'm calm or relaxed. Do they mean it as a compliment? It only happens when I'm on work trips.

I received a proposal today. Someone asking me to invest a decent chunk of money into their work. But the proposal was kind of hard to parse. It was written well, but the concepts weren't well organised. The structure was too complex, and poorly formatted.1 Of course, it was AI generated. I spent 30 minutes going over it with a colleague, call it an hour between us. The damn proposal probably only...

Normally I start with a blog post that I then convert that into a podcast. But this is a podcast first, and I'm going to turn it into a blog post later. I don't have a script that I'm reading from. This is all sort of off the cuff. There's something that I've been meaning to talk about. To speak out loud. And I hope you find it interesting. I've been thinking a lot about academic integrity lately.

Welcome to Pirate School! A new podcast hosted by me and Talia Carbis, about the chaotic, messy, wild world of home education. This podcast is basically just a chat about how we homeschool. We're both trained as teachers, so we do know a lot of those foundational education principles. And, of course, we have opinions. We just released episode 9, which you can find on Apple Podcasts, or wherever yo...

Say something profound Say something profound Say something profound Say something profound Pull it down from the heavens Pull it up from the ground Say something, Say something profound Say something oblique Say something oblique Some obscure reference Something antique The less that they get it The better it sounds Say something obscure and profound Say something brand new Say something unique A...

Pebble is back!1 I wrote about it, Eric Migicovsky wrote about it, even John Gruber wrote about it, and it's now available for pre-order. But… iPhone users like myself have been warned. The experience will be hamstrung, due to Apple's lack of interoperability between iOS and third-party devices. Some features will appear first on our Android app, and then eventually we’ll add them to the iOS app....

I've been interacting with quite a lot of Americans, Europeans, and Brits the last few days. I've learned two new things about the USA, and for once, neither comes from my typical sarcastic, antagonistic disposition toward "the land of the free". First, Americans share a common cultural temperament with Aussies, which is that they're not afraid to call bullshit. They're inclined to stand...

It's pretty rare to find people who live an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle where there's no Orthodox Jewish community. But I do. Because I'm recognisably Jewish (I wear a kippah), I often encounter people who have questions and pre-conceptions about Judaism, which I'm more than happy to oblige. There is one particular misconception about Judaism that I encounter time, and time again. For some reason, p...

My previous post was a little dense and academic. Sorry about that. We're not all educators, but we are all learners. Even though Ecological Dynamics was a little hard to parse, there's some really helpful learning advice contained there. I'm going to sum it up here in a more casual tone. And before you read this point I want you to pause. Think about something that you are trying to learn right n...

I was recently introduced the sports psychology methodology called Ecological Dynamics. It's an approach to skill acquisition for physical activities which is becoming widely adopted by contemporary coaching practices. Elite coaches across the globe are leveraging these strategies to achieve remarkable success in top-tier sports. I believe Ecological Dynamics can apply broadly to skill acquisition...

The dragon is closing in. The cleric is out of spell slots. The rogue is unconscious. The barbarian is bleeding out, and the wizard has one last chance to pull off something, anything, that might turn this around. The dice clatter across the table. Don't we all live for moments like this? We’re drawn to the thrill, the drama, the high-stakes decisions. But Dungeons & Dragons isn’t just about r...

Soundtrack for this post. What Satie is teaching me. Fast and quiet It's very natural to play allegro forte, fast and loud. It's much harder to play allegro piano, fast and quiet. Just because my days are busy, quickly moving from one task to another, that doesn't necessitate stress. It's possible to play quickly and quietly. So I endeavour to move through my day with calm alacrity. Crossover is i...

In order to, maybe, reach a wider audience, I’ve decided to change my position on social media. I recently ran into an X profile which declared itself “write only”. My plan is to create social profiles that do the same, auto-posting words and clips from this blog. l-w------- I've chosen four networks: X, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. These are all primarily text-based platforms, which suits my b...

Inspired by Matt Webb's Unoffice Hours, I've opened by calendar for 30 minutes every week. Whether you'd like to chat about a recent blog post, how I organise, homeschooling, podcasting, film recommendations, or anything else, I'm available. All you need to do is book a call. You will need to be contactable via FaceTime. When you book the meeting, you will be given a FaceTime link to join the call...

Whenever I'm working on something new, my end goal is to distill it into the simplest version possible. Clean, readable, minimalist. Usually, that process starts with chaos and complexity. Whether it's a coding project or a TTRPG concept, the genesis is the same. Throw together a whole mess of ideas, goals, questions, and inspiration. Then refine. Find parts that fit together nicely, trim the fat,...

Derived from the Old English Wōdnesdæg, Odin’s Day. A Norse god of complexity and contradiction, war and wisdom. In the Romance languages, mercoledì, miércoles, and mercredi, named for Mercury. A Roman god of trade and travel. These gods, it seems, aren’t on my side. Wednesdays have been a struggle for me. I could use a little wisdom, a lot more focus, maybe some guidance on Wednesday. German give...

This is a special audio-only episode of Digging for Fire, where I discuss Brandon Sanderson's latest Cosmere novel Wind and Truth with special guest Lior Carbis. Spoilers!

There are three kinds of ads. Heat seeking missiles [BAD] Data aggregators purchase your data, analyse your location, purchase history, browsing history, app usage, and more, then create a complex profile of you with AI assisted inference. They guess, (and nearly always accurately) your income, hobbies, education, age, gender, and most worryingly, your most likely future purchasing behaviours. The...

Keep ‘em in suspense. Make all the promises you need to. Walk right on up to the door holding all the answers. Then, zag. There’s an art to timing a good zag. Too early and you lose impact. Too late and you lose trust. A good storyteller knows how to zig, but more importantly, knows precisely when to zag. I was on a call the other night with my brother, discussing Severance (s02e03).

"I love that Facebook shows me the ads I want to see!" Have you ever come across anti-privacy apologists? "Privacy is dead. It's a thing of the past. You just can't expect a right to privacy in the modern world." This is such a dark road to go down. The end-game is a black mirror episode where the ads we see are so innocuous, so inconspicuous that we don't even realise how they...

I noticed something weird about the things that interest me. I’m fascinated by emerging technologies. I’m all about the bleeding edge, more than happy to trade software bugs for early access. Give me the beta! I had an early smart watch , I was early to the smart home (much to the chagrin of my wife!), I bought into VR with the original HTC Vive, and I’ve been excited about LLMs since the launch o...