Dan Scott

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2018 Year in Review

As at the end of years past, I'm writing this post to take a look back at what I've written over the past twelve months and highlight some of my favourite posts. It's also an opportunity to provide a convenient annual archive so readers

Book

The Basics of Complexity

This fall I read a couple of books about complexity: A Crude Look at the Whole by John H. Miller [https://www.santafe.edu/people/profile/john-h-miller] and Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell [https://www.santafe.edu/people/profile/melanie-mitchell]. For my final post of the year (except

DIY

Oak & Ash

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've been pretty busy this fall. I took a longer hiatus from blogging than I had planned, but now I'm back at it. Earlier this year I moved to a new house and that has provided the opportunity to

Board Games

Go Proverbs

The past month I've been really busy with my job, so I haven't had much time for blogging. This post is another [https://danbscott.ghost.io/dominion-strategy/] short one on strategies for a board game. I do have some good ideas for a few more in-depth

Board Games

Dominion Strategy

As the days get shorter and colder, it's a good time of year to play board games. One of my favourites is Dominion [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36218/dominion] and for this post I decided to read up on some strategies for it. Dominion is a card game

Book

Waifs of the Tide

Some poetry, some history, and some Maritime scenery. At the end of September, I took a detour to Grand Pré [https://www.google.com/maps/@45.1196064,-64.3270018,5125m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en] after a weekend in Halifax. The landscape there is a UNESCO [https://danbscott.ghost.io/

General

Assorted Links (Fall 2018)

Now and then [https://danbscott.ghost.io/assorted-links-spring-2018/], I like to share some links I've been saving up, especially ones that relate to topics I've blogged about before. To start with, here is some musical accompaniment: One of my posts [https://danbscott.ghost.io/ticket-to-rides-adjacency-matrix/] got

Book

Facts, Forecasts, & Figures

If you're looking for a break from the doom-and-gloom in the news, this post is for you (I'll also suggest this one [https://danbscott.ghost.io/rational-optimism-about-the-environment/] from last year). Below, I share reviews of two books—so it won't be a short read

Personal

Charlie Lima Foxtrot

I was thinking this summer about when I was half as old as I am now. That year I went to a Royal Canadian Air Cadet [http://aircadetleague.com/] summer camp to learn how to pilot a glider. I dug out some photos and decided to share them here. The

Art

Aga and AGO

On a recent weekend I had a day-long layover in Toronto (deliberately). I took the opportunity to check out a couple of museums there: the Aga Khan museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario. The Aga Khan may be best known in Canada for controversy [https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/

Water

Words on Biofilm

The past couple of weeks I've been on some business trips and haven't had time to write any posts. However, I did have time on a flight to read a technical paper that I want to discuss below (I also finished reading a book that I&

Outdoor Adventures

A Day Off of Deer Island

The weekend that just passed was the New Brunswick Day long weekend here. As in previous years [https://danbscott.ghost.io/nb-day-2015/] I wanted to get out and enjoy some of the natural beauty in the province. Deer Island is one of the inhabited islands in the Bay of Fundy

Travel

Appalachian Appellation

I was recently down in northwestern Virginia on a business trip. Because I was there over a weekend, I had the chance to do a couple of hikes in the area. One spot I went hiking was in Shenandoah National Park [https://www.nps.gov/shen/planyourvisit/hiking-opportunities.htm]. While

Trip Planning

I've been on the road for my job, so I didn't have a post last week and this will be a relatively short one. To follow up on my last several [https://danbscott.ghost.io/fietspaden-en-droge-voeten/] posts [https://danbscott.ghost.io/four-maritime-museums/], I thought I'

Travel

fietspaden en droge voeten

This is my final post based off of my trip to the Netherlands. It focuses on reviewing a book about land reclamation and flood control infrastructure in the Netherlands and sharing a couple of bike trips I took out into the countryside around Amsterdam [https://danbscott.ghost.io/noord-holland/] and

Museums

Four Maritime Museums

In my posts about travelling to Copenhagen [https://danbscott.ghost.io/five-days-in-denmark/] , Amsterdam [https://danbscott.ghost.io/noord-holland/], and Rotterdam [https://danbscott.ghost.io/zuid-holland/], I mentioned that I'd be discussing some maritime museums I visited in a separate post. This is that post. Introduction Seafaring has been

Travel

Zuid-Holland

The second part of my visit to the Netherlands [https://danbscott.ghost.io/noord-holland/] was spent in the Rotterdam area (there are a lot of "'dam" places in the Netherlands; I also passed through Zaandam and Schiedam). In this post I'll share some of the

Travel

Noord-Holland

After Denmark [https://danbscott.ghost.io/five-days-in-denmark/], I travelled to the Netherlands, where I spent some time around Amsterdam and Rotterdam. In this post I'll share about what I did in the Amsterdam area; I plan to feature the Rotterdam area in my next post. Amsterdam flourished during

Travel

Five Days in Denmark

I didn't have a post last week because I was returning from vacation. In the next few posts, I'll be writing about the places I went: Denmark and the Netherlands. As the title says, I stayed in Denmark for five nights. My accommodations were in Copenhagen

Blog Info

200 Posts Interlinked

I've reached a big milestone on my blog: this is the 200th post. I thought this would be a good time to look into how well-connected various posts are. The list of links at the bottom of this page makes a good starting point for a dive into

Art

A New Twist On Familiar Vistas

Last weekend I visited the Beaverbrook Art Gallery to check out a couple of exhibits. It had just re-opened after being closed due to flooding. First of all, here is what the art gallery looked like at the end of April 2018. The flood waters were up to the building,

Book

Pirates and Vikings

This post contains 2.1 book reviews. The two books are The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates by Peter T. Leeson and The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings by Lars Brownworth. The extra 10 percent is two chapters from David Friedman's book Legal Systems

History

Steppe Cycle

This post is a review of Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa. The chapters have different authors and mostly stand on their own; the editor of the whole volume is Alan Mikhail [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/water-on-sand-9780199768660?cc=ca&lang=en&

Computer

Week 7: Haskell

With this post, I've come to the end of my series going through the book Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce Tate. It was a good experience and I feel like I learned quite a bit (but have a lot more to learn—this really only scratched

Computer

Week 6: Clojure

After the past [https://danbscott.ghost.io/assorted-links-spring-2018/] two [https://danbscott.ghost.io/st-paul/] posts on different topics, I'm returning to my series on Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce Tate. The programming language covered in this week's chapter is Clojure, a dialect of Lisp