Category: Observed (Page 1 of 24)

Where were you when you found out about [X]?

April 3, 2026 /

Matt Glassman blogged about this topic yesterday, and I thought it was an interesting opportunity for reflection. As he wrote, here are “the national news events for which I can recall precisely where I was when I found out about them. Excludes sporting events, elections, (most) court decisions, and the passage of legislation, and must be a minimum of 5 years ago”:

Space Shuttle Columbia takes off on STS-1, April 12, 1981. We watched this live in school, in a library, on one of those TVs-on-wheeled-carts. I was in second grade. We may have watched Reagan’s inaugural address that way, too.
Challenger explodes, January 28, 1986. This one, which Matt listed, made me think of the Columbia above. I was in middle school. Some science classrooms (not mine) had tuned into it for Sally Ride, and kids started running in the halls, town criers yelling, “the Space Shuttle blew up!”
The Gulf War breaks out, February 24, 1991. I was out to dinner with my two best friends at a pub across town. We were seniors in high school. One of my friends had just turned eighteen; my birthday was five weeks away. Much of the dinner conversation was spent wondering whether the draft would be reinstated.
OJ Bronco chase, June 17, 1994. We were at my friend’s house (one of the two from the Gulf War item above) watching the Knicks game, until we weren’t.
OJ trial verdict, October 3, 1995. I was temping at Wiley Publishing as a new grad. We listened to the verdict over AM radio in someone’s office.
World Trade Center collapse, September 11, 2001. I was at home when it started, with the TV tuned to NY1, and at the Economist office when the towers came down. Fascinating to recall that it was a regular work day, and my boss was rather peeved that we all left early.
Eastern seaboard blackout, August 14, 2003. I was in my apartment, which was good, because it was on the eleventh floor, but bad that evening when the dog needed to go out.

Those last two items were experienced more than found out, of course. Matt has some interesting footnotes about that in his blog post that I generally agree with, although I think the lack of recent events is less about smartphones and more about the continuous nature of adulthood: apparently it takes a lot (blackouts, terrorist strikes) to shake us out of our rhythms.

Some of the recents events I considered—Matt wrote about covid lockdowns; I thought of the financial crisis—have been rolling incidents rather than moments in time. I also thought of some events that really mattered to people, like Kurt Cobain’s and Princess Diana’s deaths, but I don’t have a personal recollection of the moment. Interesting stuff.

Identity crisis

March 6, 2026 /

I’m at the waiting room at the doctor’s office. It’s a big space, the entryway to a health center, maybe 50 feet long with lots of couches. I’m sitting at the far end, one of around ten people waiting for their appointments.

A nurse comes out from a door on the other end of the waiting room and calls the next patient. “David?”

All ten people look at her. I stand up. So does the man across from me, and another man closer to her, by the front desk. We all smile.

“David who?” we ask, more or less in unison.

The nurse is a little surprised, but she checks her chart. “David H.,” she replies.

I sit down.

The man across from me says, “I’m David H.”

The man in front of her says, “I’m David H.”

The nurse blinks. The two men look at each other. One of the David H.es asks if she can be more specific. She’s obviously struggling with how to manage her patients’ privacy, but after a second, she gives up.

“David Hayes.”

The man across from me says, “I’m David Hayes.”

The man in front of her says, “I’m David Hayes!”

My local David Hayes bursts into laughter. He starts walking across the room to sort things out. The David Hayes closer to the nurse stops him. “I gotta shake your hand.”

As they’re approaching the desk, a second nurse comes out of a different door and says, “David?”

(Dis)parity

January 16, 2026 /

Baseball headline of the week: Kyle Tucker, Dodgers agree to 4-year, $240M deal.

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ 2026 payroll is larger than the bottom five Major League Baseball teams’ payrolls combined.

The Dodgers’ payroll is so big that the gap between them and the New York Mets’ #2 payroll is larger than six teams’ entire payrolls.

The Dodgers and the Mets are the only two teams with projected payrolls over $325 million. Fifteen other teams—half the league—are under $160 million. You could put any two of those teams on the field and play ball for less than the Dodgers or Mets pay for one dugout.

The Dodgers’ use of deferred money means they have $298 million in commitments for 2028 already. Twenty of the other 29 teams have less than $100 million on the books, and three have $0 (really).

I don’t know how this ends, and I root for the original large-market juggernaut, but this game needs some degree of payroll parity in the next agreement, because leagues need fair competition to stay interesting.

(Source)

Some of my best-evers

October 31, 2025 /

I recently pulled out my old Helly Hansen all-weather coat. My wife bought it for me on a trip to Norway back in 2007. It developed a small tear in the nylon on the chest, so I moved onto other jackets, including two more Helly Hansens. But I never let go of the first one, for a reason: it’s easily the best jacket I’ve ever owned.

I can list some of the reasons why. It’s warm but not too warm. It’s comfortable, with a soft interior and good movement. It has great practical features, including zipper pockets, a spacious exterior breast pocket, and a good hood. And it’s seriously weatherproof: I’ve coached soccer games in 43-degree pelting rain and strong winds and kept reasonably warm and dry. I wore it for yesterday’s storm, nylon tear and all, and will pull it out the next time the weather requires it.

But that’s not exactly the point. What I find interesting is that it’s lodged in my memory (past and present) as the categorical best, something I knew in the moment was as good for me as that thing would ever be.

Since grabbing the Helly Hansen yesterday, I’ve been thinking about other categorical bests from my past. Sometimes this is impossible; I couldn’t pick a vacation, I’d have three, or seven. But when you know, you know. I’m sure there are many (and I will update this post if I think of more) but here are a few:

Sneakers: Bo Jackson Nike Air SC3s, circa 1991. Man, I was still a teenager, but I was unequivocal back then: these were the best sneakers ever. I still remember them well: great looks, great support, comfortable, long-lasting. I still wear Nikes and some of them are great. But none of them were these.
Lobster: Roy Moore Lobster Company, Bearskin Neck, Rockport, Mass. I didn’t like lobster until I was an adult, and Roy Moore is what got me going. Nothing beats their straight-from-the-lobster-boat, boiled-in-seawater freshness and sweetness. It can be emulated—Jordan Lobster Farms on Long Island cooks the same way, and I once watched my buddy Rob walk down to the beach with a lobster pot, with equal results—but Roy Moore, sitting alongside some of the country’s most venerable lobstermen, stands above.
Stargazing: I’ve had a lot of special moments, from the 2024 total eclipse to the three (!) comets I’ve seen with my family the past few years. But the 2002 Leonid meteor storm tops the list. I woke up my wife and parents well past midnight and we all laid on a soccer field at the local elementary school on a frigid night, huddled under wool blankets and watching. What we got were hundreds of meteors, a barrage of flares and dreams and inspiration.
Computing: as I wrote here previously, while I’ve used many computers for countless hours dating back to 1981, the only one I’ve really loved wasn’t even mine. It was the well-loved Mac SE/30 in the editor’s office at the college newspaper. Friendly, fast and with clarity of purpose, I was never happier at a monitor. Repeating myself: “I had on it Eudora, Microsoft Word 5.1a, and a Klondike solitaire app, and it was just about perfect.”

What have you experienced as the absolute best?

The impossibility of comprehending AI

August 4, 2025 /

There’s an interesting conversation occurring around conversational AI, and the thought that humans, as a species, aren’t properly equipped to handle their existence. Consider these perspectives when next reading about blind trust in Gemini search results, or people using ChatGPT as a therapist.

Rusty Foster:

Humanity has never before experienced coherent language without any cognition driving it. In regular life, we have never been required to distinguish between “language” and “thought” because only thought was capable of producing language, in any but the most trivial sense. The two are so closely welded that even a genius like Alan Turing couldn’t conceive of convincing human language being anything besides a direct proxy for “intelligence.” … Very few of us have been inoculated with a theory of mind that distinguishes language from thought.

Philip Bump:

Our brains are simply incapable of understanding such large numbers. We can’t understand “one billion.” We also can’t understand that a thing that talks just like a human is just parroting human speech in the way we would understand it if that speech were coming from, say, a parrot. …
Remember that the human mind is clever enough to have invented things that it itself cannot fully comprehend. Man made a rock too big for Man to lift.

Look at it what it takes for Michael Lopp, one of the best communicators and smartest thinkers on tech topics, to explain how he works with AI. I grabbed a representative sentence, but at least skim the whole thing:

The number of “decisions” the robot made to design the page wildly exceeded the number of requirements I specified. … Like everything a robot generates, the burden is on you, the human, to confirm that what it generates is sound.

So: we have these tools, and we can embrace their potential and harness their output, but entire mental disciplines must be created to engage with them at an appropriate level, while the tools are simultaneously evolving more rapidly than perhaps any invention in history.

I personally don’t know where this is taking us as a society, but I’m thinking about it a lot.

Willpower vs. attention

June 23, 2025 /

Noah Smith wrote about his weight loss journey, and came to an interesting conclusion: that for him, the issue was noticing whether or not he was full:

I started paying attention to how much I ate. If it was “time to eat”, but I wasn’t hungry, I wouldn’t eat anything. And when I did eat, as soon as I felt like I wasn’t hungry anymore, I would stop eating. …
I realized, as I was doing it, that the difference between losing weight and not losing weight was just attention.
When I didn’t pay attention, I didn’t lose weight, because I kept eating after the point where I was no longer hungry. When I paid attention, I was able to control when I stopped eating.

He goes on to say that willpower is a conceit (my word, not his), and that the typical approach—”you have to be tough enough to fight through constant hunger, and motivated enough to want weight loss even more than food”—is wrong.

I fundamentally agree with the first part of Smith’s argument: attention is important. My weight loss this year has been predicated entirely on knowing how much I’m eating (along multiple vectors) and stopping myself from eating too much. My daily food spreadsheet was a key part of my success.

But I disagree with the hand-waving about willpower. People who are overweight have been told for their entire lives to stop eating when they’re full, slow down between courses, wait twenty minutes before taking seconds, and so forth. Knowing that generally doesn’t do much, because a person needs the willpower to acknowledge and recognize those guardrails.

When it comes to weight loss, as with any aspect of personal well-being, motivation is attention’s partner. Last winter, I was scared and desperate; that gave me the motivation to create the spreadsheet, and the willpower to pay attention to everything I ate every day for five months to reach David-minus-forty. I don’t know that I succeed with just one of those factors. And I’d guess that’s true for most people trying to lose weight.

I’m happy for Noah Smith and his successful and relatively low-key strategy. Whatever works for you! Achieving a healthy weight goal is a win, regardless of the path one takes to get there.

Car bloat

March 26, 2025 /

Oversize SUVs are making traffic worse, in Bloomberg.

I bought my family an SUV in early 2023, and it was the first time in my life that I owned a car that was more than fifteen feet long. While spacious inside, at 186″ in length ours is still considered relatively small by modern SUV standards.

Truthfully, those modern standards are totally out of whack with how big our personal vehicles should and need to be. All that mass results in lower fuel economy, faster tire degradation and more wear-and-tear on our already strained roads.

A friend bought a GMC Yukon XL that makes him laugh with glee at its ridiculousness. At 225.2″ in length, it is a more than three and a half feet longer than any of the cars I owned prior to 2023. It’s subtantially taller and wider, too.

Here’s an example of how much things have changed. In high school, our friend Frank’s dad had a brand-new, loaded 1991 Toyota Land Cruiser. It was huge! When he drove it to school we all wanted to check it out. We called it the Frank Tank.

That huge, show-stopping Frank Tank (188.2″ long, 72″ wide) is slightly smaller than a run-of-the-mill 2025 Hyundai Santa Fe (190.2″ and 74.8″).

Life’s little mysteries

March 6, 2025 /

A mobile phone battery lasts a couple of days on a charge, at best.

The battery in a car key fob expires after about a year.

Leave AA batteries in a remote for more than four or five years and they corrode and stop working. Sometimes they ruin the entire device.

Smoke- and carbon monoxide detectors have a 10-year lifespan; then their batteries (and detectors) become unreliable and need to be thrown away.

Meanwhile, the Thinner brand digital scale that we got in 2003 is still chugging away, and is 100% accurate to more than 200 pounds, on its original battery.

Kudos to the team behind this scale, which really was built to last.

Apartment living

December 22, 2024 /

My 13-year-old son has been playing clarinet since fourth grade: first on a lark with friends, then more seriously, as he joined the middle school orchestra. In recent months, he really began to enjoy it, and he’s playing a lot—sometimes for two hours at a time, sometimes as late as 10 p.m. before bed.

His bedroom shares a wall with our neighbors, an older husband and wife who we don’t speak to all that much. So I was surprised when the wife stopped me on the building’s front steps a few weeks ago, as I was returning from a dog walk and she was on her way out.

“Is your son playing an instrument?” she asked. “Like a woodwind, maybe an oboe?”

In my head, I cringed, ready for a complaint. “Yes, that’s our younger son. It’s a clarinet.”

Her face brightened. “He’s getting good!”

9/11/01

September 11, 2024 /

For the past few years, I have lived around the corner from the Firemen’s Memorial in Manhattan. Every September 11, the neighborhood gets quiet. Streets are closed to traffic, and instead are filled with fire fighters in their formal uniforms, somberly marching to the monument, alongside a substantial police presence, mostly directing traffic but also respecting the moment.

I have no direct connection to the firefighters; I’m just a neighbor, and a lot of the time I’m walking my dog nearby. But since 2019, I have felt the moment more viscerally than I did for the decade-plus before, reminded of the effort, the tragedy, the grieving that continues.

Regardless, I don’t tend to dwell on the day, other than to pay my respects. Since it’s getting a fair amount of attention this year in other spaces, I thought I’d briefly call attention to how 9/11 was experienced here. My thoughts are with those who have much worse to remember today.

As I wrote on the twentieth anniversary of the attacks: my memories of the day and the week were chronicled here on the Ideapad, and I still recommend reading them; the page is both contemplative and raw, and it holds up. Also, for really raw writing about the event, my friend Adam’s firsthand writeup is chastening.