The Week in Meep, 22 Oct 2023: Podcasts, Books, and a Trip to a Shrine
Jesus says howdy! (probably)
Just a quick round-up of things I’ve been doing this last week.
Podcasts
I appeared on a podcast series for the Society of Actuaries: “Launching Your Actuarial Career”:
Yes, it’s from September (and I recorded it well before then), but it got re-promoted last week, which reminded me about it.
Two things:
I did talk about the actuarial career, but my current job isn’t strictly actuarial, which I mention.
And while it’s about “launching” one’s career, I have general career advice and especially advice about giving presentations
Social Security Series
More from the SOA — there is a 4-part series with Bruce Schobel, an actuary who knows all sorts of ins-and-outs of the Social Security system … and details I didn’t know about. Bruce used to work at the Social Security Administration during an especially crucial reform period for the program.
Part 1:
And you can find the remaining 3 parts at the SOA podcasts:
The Seen and the Unseen: Timur Kuran
I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of listening to the podcast The Seen and the Unseen, and this episode with Timur Kuran was fascinating to me: Episode 349: The Incredible Insights of Timur Kuran
Why did the Middle East fall behind Europe despite being in a similar state in 1000 AD? How do modern authoritarians benefit from our tendency to falsify our preferences? Timur Kuran joins Amit Varma in episode 349 of The Seen and the Unseen to share his learnings from history — and what they teach us about today.
The discussion over preference falsification as well as inheritance laws in the Arab world and its effects in developments of scalable enterprise structures was very interesting… and yes I listened to the whole, over-5-hour show. I have a long commute.
Oh wait, he’s at Duke? I don’t know about that, man…. (I went to NC State… GO STATE!)
Books: the Royal Navy and Churchill
I’m still cranking through the Aubrey & Maturin series. I’m currently up to book 15, The Truelove.
You can dip into the series almost anywhere, as the author, Patrick O’Brian knows to give enough context for you to understand the plot for that specific novel. But one may have trouble caring about the main characters for any one novel if you don’t have the history between the two friends.
I’m near the end of this novel, at which they end up in Oahu, to try to settle a war between Hawaiian factions, one side bolstered by the French & Americans, and obviously the Brits on the other… or will those be the sides? I don’t know yet… I haven’t gotten to the end!
There is also the issue of the stowaway of a woman who had been a prisoner in Botany Bay… and she definitely is “off”.
I’ve also been re-reading the 2nd volume of William Manchester’s Churchill biography, about the period of 1932-1940, after Churchill left having meaningful political power up to when he became prime minister. It’s subtitled “The Lion Alone”. I’ve been highlighting some quotes on Twitter/X:
https://twitter.com/meepbobeep/status/1716028009579246017
https://twitter.com/meepbobeep/status/1715411388997247003
And I’m sorry, I laughed when I came to this bit:
https://twitter.com/meepbobeep/status/1713836604345749628
It turned out to be a false alarm, so Churchill didn’t actually have to hand it to Hitler at all. But it was at the beginning of the war, and things were still a bit in confusion.
I still have a little bit to go in this one as well — Poland has fallen, but France has yet to be taken, and it’s the “Bore War” in which the Germans have yet to attack England itself, partly due to the extremely cold winter across Europe 1939-1940.
A Trip to a Shrine Upstate
I went to the NY State Eucharistic Congress yesterday, and I bought a bunch of books from Pauline Press, as well as one by Kathryn Jean Lopez that the author kindly signed for me:
But rather than go on about the books, here are a few pictures I took yesterday:
I did not take pictures of the Eucharistic procession (Jesus says hey! Well, likely he would) - they had plenty of professional photographers and videographers for that. It was very nice - I walked near some young friars who were a bit insistent about singing. And I sang with them.
The picture in the middle is of some of the notes I took during a talk Peter Kreeft gave as a keynote.
Quite a neat shrine. I plan on going back next year.