I’m moving to Auckland in 2021! Blog post content will suffer while I wrap up my work for ONI and organise the logistics of moving myself and my possessions to the other side of the world in the middle of a pandemic. A couple thoughts from the week:
Angela Duckworth’s plot of Phone location vs Grades quantifies what we already intuit: phones are really powerful distractions.
Packing the array of mildly useful objects I’ve collected over the past 3.5 years in Oxford is a huge source of decision fatigue. Packing things into boxes is relatively trivial, but attempting to vaguely optimise the set of possessions is an incredibly complex task. Moving objects to New Zealand by freight comes in at approximately US$0.5 per Litre, but in 1000 L units. How much are those old running shoes worth now? Postage stamps are “value dense”, but how do you recapture that value efficiently? As a technology hobbyist, a range of electronic componentry has hardly any value in the abstract, but if it can be used to fix something can be hugely valuable.