Dan Scott - The Drafting Table

Assorted Links (Summer 2023)

It's been a year since my last links post. Tried to squeeze this one in while it's still technically summer. This one has more video content than previous ones. I'll start with something I wrote elsewhere: a guest post for an online book club on C.S. Lewis' The Four

Review

Mini-Reviews 2022

Last year is well in the rearview mirror by now, but I wanted to compile some of my notes from books I read (and a movie) in 2022 while they're still somewhat in my mind. I did a similar post last year and thought it worked pretty well. Maybe you'll

Quotes

The Power of Some Men Over Other Men

"What we call Man's power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by. ... From this point of view, what we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument."

Ideas

Bent Work

"'All keep the mines open; it is a work to be shared. But each digs for himself the thing he wants for his work. What else would he do?''It is not so with us.''Then you must make very bent work.'" ~ Out of the Silent Planet, p.105

Bible

Some Say Jeremiah

They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

New Brunswick

NB Budget 2023: Healthcare Redux

Our provincial net debt in New Brunswick is now smaller than the size of the annual budget.

Water

Big Well(s)

I spent quite a bit of time in southwestern Kansas last year, on account of a couple of projects with my work. On one of these trips, I had a bit of extra time on the (long) drive from Wichita, so I stopped at a small-town museum built around a

World Issues

Prospects for a Multi-Polar World

Contrasting and synthesizing the perspectives of Balaji Srinivasan and Peter Zeihan. Skim down to the section on "Contrasting Geopolitical Outlooks" if you want to get to the main part of this post more quickly. Introduction The present moment certainly feels like we can't take anything for granted anymore. Recent events

2022 Year in Review

Annual retrospective 2022 was not a very active year here on The Drafting Table (because it was a very active year at home and at work). I had seven posts, the fewest of any year since I started this blog. However, I've got a backlog of something like 10 partial

Book

Seven Games in Silica

The topic of AI/ML (machine learning) is getting a lot of buzz right now. That makes this book review pretty timely. I. Seven Games: A Human History by Oliver Roeder is a book that came out this year. It is about board and card games, the seven alluded to

Water

Two Rivers in Asia

Travel, geopolitics, and water—this post is a review of two books that sit at the convergence of several of my interests. It can also be seen as the inland accompaniment to this post [https://danbscott.ghost.io/monsoon-prospect/] covering coastal areas in the same general region. The River at

Links

Assorted Links (Summer 2022)

Wow, it's been 5 months or so since my last post. I'm still here—in fact, I have 10 or more posts at some level of draft but time to write has been in short supply—and I hope to publish a bit more in this second half of 2022.

New Brunswick

NB Budget 2022: Staying Healthy

New Brunswick would appear to be in a very reasonable neighbourhood when it comes to several healthcare metrics (per capita): spending, acute care beds, hospitals, and physicians. So why does the system feel so strained?

Links

Assorted Links (Winter 2022)

Time for another [https://danbscott.ghost.io/assorted-links-summer-2021/] links post. This time around, I'm trying an approach of more links but shorter descriptions than usual. First of all, I wanted to share an essay I had published elsewhere: "Deepfakes and digital resurrections [https://medium.com/faithtech/deepfakes-and-digital-resurrections-dbbc5bad24bb] ". (The organization that

DIY

Tensegrity Footstool

This didn't take too long to build, but it was fun and unique. Tensegrity is a structural technique that relies on elements under tension for its integrity (hence the name). Tensegrity structures also have elements under compression, but their discontinuous arrangement gives a gravity-defying appearance to the whole. After seeing

Review

Mini-Reviews 2021

Last year [https://danbscott.ghost.io/2021-year-in-review/] was a busy year on the personal front (due to a growing family) so I didn't have as much time to write reviews of things I read compared to previous years. Still, I wanted to have some highlights and notes to reference in

2021 Year in Review

Looking back on another year of writing this blog Last year, I had only 9 posts. This year, I managed 12, which is within my target of 1 - 2 per month, albeit at the low end. I have a few more drafts started, including a couple that I was

Economics in Video Games

Contango in Patrician 4

Economic concepts in computer games is a subject I've previously [https://danbscott.ghost.io/dwarf-fortress-gdp/] written about. This time, I'll look at trade of commodities in a game that I think implements it well. Patrician IV [https://www.kalypsomedia.com/us/patrician-iv] is a game set in the historic Hanseatic

Canada

Confederation's Widening Gyre

This is a short post to check in on an issue I wrote about a year and a half ago. In my review [https://danbscott.ghost.io/nb-budget-2020-is-demographics-destiny/] of the New Brunswick provincial budget in 2020, I discussed Equalization payments and linked to a manifesto against them that some Albertans

DIY

Bangle Board

This post describes a couple of recent DIY projects I wanted to share. My wife has a collection of bangles and was looking for an efficient way to store and display them. I made a board with pegs to hang them on. Here it is after the main construction (which

Research

Batch Test to Evaluate Microbial Disinfectant Decay...

During 2020 - 2021, when there was less going on than normal, myself and the research group at the University of Waterloo where I did my Master's studies took the time to finally get a draft manuscript that had been sitting on the back burner for a while ready for

Links

Assorted Links (Summer 2021)

It seems like a good time for another [https://danbscott.ghost.io/assorted-links-winter-2021/] links post. To start with some good news, lumber prices [https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lumber] seem to be returning to normal (compared to what I remarked on [https://danbscott.ghost.io/kitchen-cart/] 6 months ago). Although there

Computer

Toward a more decentralized internet

This was a topic I wanted to learn more about, and sometimes the best way to learn something is to try to write/teach about it. Introduction It's no secret that there's a lot of angst right now about social media and the internet at large. From concerns about censorship

Personal

Affordable Wedding Tips

Some suggestions from me and my wife's experience last fall. Before we got married, both of us considered family highly important. We’re now around eight months into our marriage and this sentiment has only increased. Two truly are better than one [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+4%

Map

Cartography in the Wardrobe

The Chronicles of Narnia is one of my favourite children's series. Every good fantasy novel is incomplete without a map. While the Narnia books include some maps, they tend to focus on the area where each book is set; there is a comprehensive map [https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/115249/