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Then Began the Epic Ten Hour Wait for the Glue to Cure.

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Our Hero Supplicated Before the Gods and Spread Super Glue Upon the Broken Parts.

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But In His Haste, Our Hero Tightened the Smallest Screw, Snapping the Plastic Clamp for the E-Bike Screen, The Most Impossible Part to Replace or Repair.

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The Hero Joyously Set Out to Position This Handlebar Upon the Stem, Tilting it Just So, and Fitting the Grips and Lever to His Hand.

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Upon His Return Home, He Reached Into His Bike Parts Pin, and Lo, Drew Out A Perfect Handlebar. This Handlebar was Not Too Wide for Commuting, Swept Back for an Upright Posture, and Fit All of the Existing Cables, Levers and Shifters. Also, This Handlebar Was as Black as the Inside of a Pocket.

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Our Hero, Returning from His Daily Siege of Poor Ergonomics, Had the Epiphany that Perhaps Bike Position was Pinching a Nerve. Or Perhaps He did Not Realize that Misery at Work is Simply a Tribulation Exacted by the Gods.

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An Odyssey of Middle-Aged Pain, Hope, and Woe, All in a Single Hour.

David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Now with log ticks and plotted in bigger format, if that helps makes it clearer.

David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Also, that's a log scale on both the x and y axes, so some of those states above and below 1 are quite different.

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Reposted by David Hsu

Owen Winter @owenwntr.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Love this map of where world cup players were born umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/birth...

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

The x-axis is heating degree days / cooling degree days, an indicator of climate region; legend color is voting in the last 3-4 presidential elections; legend size is GDP in million divided by population in thousands, basically GDP in $k per capita. Just trying to fit as much as possible.

David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

Not an unreasonable suggestion.

David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Maybe better labeling here. Also: sorry HI and AK, but we all know where you are, to the far left and far right on this graph.

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

I'm not sure if this means that much but occasionally I get entranced by packing as much information possible into one graph. Plotting on a map would just reveal most of the coastal and north-south differences between energy consumption, production, climate, wealth, and politics.

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Allez les Bleus! Must have been 2006, since our first year at school together was when I got to Seattle in 2005. Less happily, that was the year that Zidane ... yeah, that.

David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

I'm not usually into fashion, but my daughter and I were chatting about electronic fabrics and I then later found this. ANREALAGE 2025-26 show: things really light up at around the 4:00 mark. youtu.be/U8_Fa4Cdb_0?...

youtu.be

ANREALAGE AUTUMN/WINTER 2025-26 COLLECTION “SCREEN”

YouTube video by ANREALAGE

David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Academics on the morning of June 1, after Commencement, sitting down to a clean desk and (mostly) empty calendar for the summer stretching ahead ...

static.klipy.com

Bird Jumping For Joy

ALT: Bird Jumping For Joy

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

The video around the 3 min mark shows a tent, though those flexible rod elements might get tangled.

David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

@bslotterback.bsky.social my first thought: very useful applications in bikepacking.

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Me also but I bowed to the naming that all of the youths would know.

And yes I know George Lucas had an original vision of nine movies but that doesn't mean that they were all equally good ideas.

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Here's my full ranking because I REMEMBER THE ORIGINALS before they were polluted: 1. The Empire Strikes Back 2. Rogue One 3. A New Hope 4. Return of the Jedi 5-10. Seen some of them, but I can't remember which, which says it all.

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

You should try making bacon in the microwave.

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I actually didn’t like this video. Despite being in favor of walking and bicycling, look at Copenhagen or Amsterdam: pedestrian and bicycling activities there are very structured and therefore safe. Bicyclists will also enforce right-of-way against clueless pedestrians in their lanes.

David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Oof, i just saw the most predictable crash in Cambridge. Person wearing headphones jaywalking between stopped cars. Noisy motorcycle going fast in the shoulder / bike lane (!?) wiped out, I think to avoid oblivious pedestrian. Everybody standing but also seems like everyone partially at fault.

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Wow, this sounds really cool! Now, let me get back to “Infinite Jest”… “Palantir has sold clothing — including logo-emblazoned hoodies, shorts, caps and a T-shirt featuring Karp’s favorite motto, “Dominate” — for years.” www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/s...

Palantir Is Making a French Chore Coat. Yes, That Palantir.

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

I think so. I mean, much of the country is already quite urbanized (85+), so there's not much more room in a % metric. Plus, there aren't many new transportation technologies except perhaps telecom, and migration and population growth has slowed, so maybe that all adds up to a stable urban share.

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Nope, there isn't a model or point that I'm trying to make. I just thought it was interesting to look at and share.

David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

I started thinking about how urbanization trends differ across the US and maybe went a bit too deep. Made this plot of % urbanized pop in each state versus John Borchert's model of urban evolution based on 5 epochs of urbanization in the US defined by transport tech (and AC!). YMMV.

Nine panel (3x3) graph of nine Census regions. Each panel has states plotted as urbanized percentage of the population versus year. Background shading is based on Borchert's model of urban evolution.

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Hint of the AI bubble, number 9,477,615,337: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/u...

Sneaker Company Allbirds Plans to Pivot to A.I. Yes, A.I.

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Enjoyed reading "The Unaccountability Machine" by Dan Davies: at turns thoughtful and hilarious. Goes deep into cybernetics, history, neoliberalism, and accounting (!). A friend sent me this quote which is pretty funny and on target unless you're an academic; then the joke is on you (and me).

Book highlight that says: "A not-wholly-unfair analysis of academic publishing would be that it is an industry in which academics compete against one another for the privilege of providing free labour for a profit-making company, which then sells the results back to them at monopoly prices."

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

When I'm writing about electricity and the changes it wrought, I think about this article often by @adriennelaf.bsky.social .... written in 2015, more than a decade ago (!), this opening paragraph still rings true for AI as it did for dot coms, cloud computing, social media, crypto:

Picture of giant incandescent bulb from 2014.

Article excerpt: Did Electricity Cause a Tech Bubble?

What investors can learn from the frenzy around the new technology a century ago

ADRIENNE LAFRANCE
NOV 10, 2015
TECHNOLOGY

Silicon Valley often finds itself faced with a difficult question, one that’s asked so often it’s practically a parlor game: Are we in a tech bubble? In other words, is the volume of money pouring into technology companies sustainable, or are we on the brink of a dot-com-esque collapse?

In The Atlantic’s recent survey of dozens of tech thinkers, entrepreneurs, and executives, there was a curious response to this question that came up more than once. This isn’t a bubble, more than one respondent insisted, in the same way that there wasn’t an electricity bubble a century ago: People might have said it was a bubble at the time, but they were wrong.

That’s a compelling comparison, and it requires a bit of unpacking to properly assess. Was there an electricity bubble? Did people at the time even claim there was?

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Did you know that Guyana has a GDP per capita of more than $70,000? Me neither! Statistics say this is from oil extraction, but what is Guyana like? To compare: US $72k, Saudi Arabia $63k, Germany $62k, Australia $60k, Japan $46k. Plot from @ourworldindata.org , ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-...

Map from Our World in Data showing the highest-income countries in the world, with Guyana highlighted.

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Excellently written and argued, as always by @author-calnewport.bsky.social. (One author where you can't ask, 'where does he find the time?'.) www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/o...

Opinion | Technology Weakens Our Minds. We Can Fix This.

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

I was featured on a short podcast episode for Ask MIT Climate talking about the grid of the future, sometimes (micro), and community choice aggregation. climate.mit.edu/podcasts/e5-...

climate.mit.edu

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

I highly recommend The Soul of a New Machine if you haven’t already read it.

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

House is so good. I actually went to high school school with the kids of the family building the house, and Bill Rawn and Apple Corps are all great characters.

David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

I met him in high school at a book signing, and read his first five or six books before the even more recent and successful ones. I still think about the people he wrote about all the time. Rest in peace. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/25/m...

bostonglobe.com

Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author who expanded nonfiction’s reach, dies at 80 - The Boston Globe

Mr. Kidder’s best-selling books, such as “Among Schoolchildren” and “The Soul of a New Machine,” expanded the range and popularity of narrative nonfiction.

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

Enjoyable on multiple levels: the thought, the patience, the local economy, the apples, the many adjectives for flavor, all to adapt to climate change and global competition. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/21/u...

After Cosmic Crisp, Scientists Unveil an Apple for the Climate Change Era

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

Strong evidence in favor of academic conferences: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/t...

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David Hsu @dhsu.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Liked this. Running on basic competence in government and anti-corruption draws a nice contrast with incumbents in both parties. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/o...

Opinion | The Scrappy Mayor Showing Democrats How It’s Done