My 2017

Work

Shelfie, the start­up I had worked at since 2014, shut down in January. I took a cou­ple of months off and by the time I was ready to start look­ing for work, Kobo de­cid­ed to buy our tech and hire us. Kobo’s main office is in Toronto, but we still work from Vancouver.

Reading

These are some of the things that I en­joyed or that have influenced my think­ing in 2017.

Books

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark (Haymarket Books, 2004).

Rebecca Solnit wrote this book near the end of George W. Bush’s first term as pres­i­dent. She presents an out­look of hope in the face of un­cer­tain­ty.

Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (Riverhead Books, 2015).

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010).

The sto­ry of the Great Migration, told through the lives of three peo­ple who left the American south to pur­sue bet­ter lives.

HLA Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford University Press, 1961).

Hart’s con­cept of law com­pris­es pri­ma­ry rules that tell us what to do and sec­ondary rules of recog­ni­tion, ad­ju­di­ca­tion, and change. He con­trasts this with Austin’s the­o­ry that law is just a bunch of or­ders backed by threats.

I liked Hart’s writ­ing. It was pre­cise and con­cise: every word mat­tered. I also liked that Hart seemed to take Austin’s the­o­ry at its strongest, ac­knowl­edg­ing its mer­its and ad­dress­ing crit­i­cisms that had arisen against his own view­point over the years.

This book made me think about ques­tions that I hadn’t thought about be­fore. ⊕In baseball, when a runner touches home, their team is awarded a point. Is that just a habit, or is that a rule? Assuming it’s a rule, is it also a moral rule? These are the kinds of questions that Hart gets into. Much of this book is about de­mar­cat­ing law from non-law (and like­wise, rules from habits, and le­gal rules from moral rules). In the search for a con­cept of law, you end up need­ing to check whether a par­tic­u­lar definition or de­scrip­tion cap­tures those things prop­er­ly thought of as law and ex­cludes things that aren’t. This is some­what cir­cu­lar, but Hart takes a prag­mat­ic ap­proach: what dis­tinc­tions are use­ful for the kinds of analy­ses we tend to do?

Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (Modern Language Association, 1933).

This book changed the way I think about read­ing, and art in gen­er­al. I’ve long held the view that you sim­ply “like what you like”, and that once an au­thor’s words are out on the page, all that mat­ters is the in­ter­pre­ta­tion that you as a read­er bring to the work (FYI, in In Home Alone, Kevin is dead). Rosenblatt’s trans­ac­tion­al the­o­ry of read­ing is one of many read­er-re­sponse the­o­ries (of which my view was an ex­treme). She em­pha­sizes the pri­ma­cy of your own im­me­di­ate re­ac­tion, but also de­scribes how to eval­u­ate that re­ac­tion by look­ing at how much of it is ground­ed in the text. This reflection on the caus­es of your re­ac­tion can help you learn more about your­self and oth­ers. An an­cil­lary theme is how lit­er­a­ture can help de­vel­op the em­pa­thy nec­es­sary for a strong and rep­re­sen­ta­tive democ­ra­cy. ⊕Democracy im­plies a so­ci­ety of peo­ple who, no mat­ter how much they differ from one an­oth­er, rec­og­nize their com­mon in­ter­ests, their com­mon goals, and their de­pen­dence on mu­tu­al­ly hon­ored free­doms and re­spon­si­bil­i­ties.—Louise Rosenblatt

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, My Own Words (Simon & Schuster, 2016).

The high­lights for me were Justice Ginsburg’s ear­ly writ­ing, her thoughts on com­par­a­tive law, and the role of dis­sent.

John Hodgman, Vacationland (New York: Viking, 2017).

Articles

Barton Beebe, “Bleistein, the Problem of Aesthetic Progress, and the Making of American Copyright Law” (2017) 112:2 Columbia Law Review 319.

Beebe ar­gues that, with re­spect to copy­right, courts should rec­og­nize that aes­thet­ic progress can hap­pen when there is sim­ply more art and more peo­ple that have made art (Beebe refers to John Dewey’s Art as Experience in de­scrib­ing this view). This would lead courts to find val­ue in more works than they do now, and would sup­port a more ex­pan­sive fair use ex­cep­tion, al­low­ing more things to be made, even if close copies.

Jennifer Leitch, Having a Say: Democracy, Access to Justice and Self-Represented Litigants (PhD Thesis, Osgoode Hall, 2016) [un­pub­lished].

It is difficult to get mean­ing­ful ac­cess to jus­tice as a self-rep­re­sent­ed lit­i­gant. The ex­tent to which a per­son suc­ceeds at that can affect their par­tic­i­pa­tion in oth­er as­pects of democ­ra­cy.

“Inside Jobs: Hear what American work­ers have to say about their jobs”, The Atlantic (2017).

Zahr Said, “A Transactional Theory of the Reader in Copyright Law” (2017) 102:2 Iowa Law Review 605.

How an ac­cep­tance of Rosenblatt’s trans­ac­tion­al the­o­ry of read­ing would change the ques­tions that we ask ju­rors and the ev­i­dence we give them in copy­right cas­es.

Tim Parks, “Gained in Translation”, New York Review of Books (December 9, 2017).

This ar­ti­cle put into words the way I’ve come to think about read­ing.

“So it’s true that one sim­ply likes or doesn’t like some­thing. […] But it’s also true that when pref­er­ences shift they do so for a rea­son, if not as a re­sult of rea­son­ing. Growing up, one brings more con­text and ex­pe­ri­ence, more world, to one’s read­ing and this “more” changes one’s taste. We might even say this new ex­pe­ri­ence changes the per­son and with the per­son the book. […] Our re­spons­es and pref­er­ences are not ar­bi­trary; they de­pend on what we bring to what we read or watch.”

Short stories

F Scott Fitzgerald, “The I.O.U.”, The New Yorker (20 March 2017).

Kristen Roupenian, “Cat Person”, The New Yorker (11 December 2017).

Computer things

I wrote a web app that presents some flight-plan­ning in­for­ma­tion tak­en from navcanada.ca that I find use­ful for VFR flying in the British Columbia low­er main­land. ⊕Flight Planning Page I’m not satisfied with how I dis­play the NOTAMs though. They have struc­ture (lo­ca­tions, times, cat­e­gories), but I’m not us­ing any of that to help pi­lots quick­ly de­ter­mine what’s im­por­tant to them.

I’ve been try­ing to learn how to use a pub­lish­ing tool called Pollen. I used it to lay out the text you’re read­ing right now. I was look­ing for some­thing that let me write in plain text, but would still turn that text into a nice-to-read web­site, or PDF, or what­ev­er. I found some al­ter­na­tives (Markdown, LaTeX2HTML, Pandoc), but have de­cid­ed to start with Pollen.

Because I was try­ing to learn how to use Pollen, I also learned a bit about Racket, fol­low­ing the book, Beautiful Racket. I like the things I get to think about while writ­ing in Racket, at least as a be­gin­ner Racket pro­gram­mer.

Travel

Washington, D.C.: On the week of THE INAUGURATION, I saw Gladys Knight per­form at the Kennedy Centre for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, watched two cas­es ar­gued at the Supreme Court, and vis­it­ed the Library of Congress, the Capitol Building, and National Public Radio head­quar­ters. My de­part­ing flight lift­ed off at 11:45am on January 20. I thought that be­cause I wasn’t on Earth when the Chief Justice and the PRESIDENT-ELECT re­cit­ed the mag­ic words, my uni­verse might split in two and I would land on ALT-EARTH where every­thing was fine. I land­ed on nor­mal Earth.

Cortes Island: Alison and I flew to Cortes Island to vis­it some friends who work on a small teach­ing farm.

I vis­it­ed Winnipeg twice this year: once in the spring for my mom’s birth­day and again in the fall for my Air Cadet squadron’s re­union. It was good to see friends that were part of the most influential ex­pe­ri­ences of my life. I’ve been think­ing a lot about am­bi­tion, priv­i­lege, and finding mean­ing in work; this was a per­fect chance to talk with a bunch of peo­ple that I con­sid­er peers and men­tors about how they think about those things. I also have a small group of friends that I’ve kept in touch with since high school that I get to see when­ev­er I’m back in Winnipeg. Some have even made lit­tle ba­bies and are rais­ing them to be cu­ri­ous, thought­ful peo­ple.

I at­tend­ed RacketCon in Seattle. A lot of in­ter­est­ing projects, and a lot of peo­ple think­ing about lan­guages and func­tion­al pro­gram­ming.

Track

The last time I played a game of ul­ti­mate was in the spring of 2016, but I hadn’t de­cid­ed to fo­cus ex­clu­sive­ly on track un­til this year. I like the struc­tured train­ing and pre­dictable progress that I find in track. We pay much more at­ten­tion to train­ing vari­ables like vol­ume, in­ten­si­ty, and rest pe­ri­ods in track than in ul­ti­mate. For me, that makes it more con­ducive to ath­let­ic de­vel­op­ment and I see it be­ing a sport that I’ll be able to com­pete in for decades. My sea­son bests were 7.51 s in the 60 m and 11.77 s in the 100 m.

Games

I’ve been play­ing Overwatch and I’m ob­jec­tive­ly bad (like bot­tom 5%), but it’s fun. My mains are Soldier 76, Junkrat, Orisa, and Mercy.

2018

I made a res­o­lu­tion in 2017 to not read break­ing news. It’s just spec­u­la­tion and guess­ing games. If I wait for the jour­nal­ism to sort it­self out, I get less worked up about stuff that’s not tru­ly significant and ac­tu­al­ly un­der­stand the significance of the stuff that is. I didn’t com­plete­ly suc­ceed at this res­o­lu­tion, but when I did, I liked it, and I’ll try again in 2018.

Starting in January, I’ll be vol­un­teer­ing one day per week with the BC Civil Liberties Association in a “Communications and Development” po­si­tion. (I have no idea how much of my ac­tu­al role is con­veyed by that ti­tle.) I am ex­cit­ed about start­ing this work and I feel priv­i­leged to be able to help them with the im­por­tant work that they do.

I want to share more of what I write. And I hope that I might also be changed by your thoughts, so do @ me!