As far as I can tell this is Alton Brown’s journey:

• “No pasta.” Live and Let Diet, Good Eats S13:E13
• “No white foods.” To the media at some point? I can’t find a direct reference, but AB mentions having said it in later episodes.
• “No white foods but Cauliflower’s good actually.” The Caul of the Flower, Good Eats S14:E21
• “No white starch.” Various web sources, approximately 2015.

Given that, I think he probably does intend to include most starchy potatoes, although I’d guess the problem has more to do with the way most potatoes are served and not the potato itself.

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I spent most of last night talking with a dear friend about community and connection in the current age of the Internet.

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The way I make sense of the world is to talk about it, at length, with anyone who’ll listen. Which frequently means the people closest to me are stuck listening to me as I work out any complicated long-poll decision making process.

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“Is this a problem you have to solve, or can the world solve it for you later?”

— Adam Savage

In competitive video games you should expect a 50% win rate. About half the time the other team will be better than you, half the time they won’t. You’re operating at the razor’s edge of your skill level. Today I realized that’s likely true in every other part of life as well.

Language is hard. Communication is harder. When someone receives a communication, they interpret it through their own understanding and world view and the message that’s ultimately received may bear only a passing resemblance to the one that was intended. Ideally, we’re all working to get better at communicating what we actually intend, since the burden is on the communicator to be understood, not the receiver to interpret.

With this in mind, I’m writing this as something of a preemptive “disambiguation” of some terms I intend to use in future blog posts with two intentions in mind:

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I’m about to say something you might find shocking, so before I do I want to make two things clear:

• This isn’t a complaint post. The purpose is not to vent.
• I actually consider this a positive and optimistic thought process.

Okay. Ready?

I don’t like Hawaii

I’ll wait a moment for the outrage to subside.

Nothing at all against the residents or people. I’ve traveled a lot and my experience is that people, broadly, are kind and welcoming.

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Watching A Goofy Movie as a kid: it’s about a parent learning to understand his son.

Watching A Goofy Movie now: it’s about a family learning to understand each other.

My dream used to be to have no clocks in the house. To be fully untethered from needing to know what time it was.

Probably achievable up to a point.

Now that I’ve got all these mechanical clocks I really appreciate them from a different perspective. Time is just the beat of life, the ticking never stops. The numbers and meaning we assign them are arbitrary.

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