September 2024

I started off the month with a trip down to Kirkcudbright to see my parents. Jack had a great time running around the garden, picking fruit and playing on the local beach. It was nice to see my parents garden in bloom.

I took a quick trip to Dunbar with Gordon and Amy for an 8km run and lunch.

As like most other months I spent a fair amount of time at the National Museum with Jack. He loves the technology room with spinning wheels and the hot air balloons that “go up!”.

Harriet and I had a nice date night out at Muna’s Ethiopian Cuisine in Bruntsfield. Worth a look!

We rounded off the month with a trip to Crail in Fife for a few days, visiting Anstruther and St Andrews.

I organised both GlasgowJS and EdinburghJS, resuming the meetups after a summer break. I did a short talk on Astro and Personal Websites, we heard from Alistair at the Scottish Tech Army, and Emmanuel (visiting from France) gave a talk on NX.

I read:

• Chip War by Chris Miller on the history of semiconductors and the geopolitics of the semiconductor industry

  China’s import of chips—$260 billion in 2017, the year of Xi’s Davos debut—was far larger than Saudi Arabia’s export of oil or Germany’s export of cars. China spends more money buying chips each year than the entire global trade in aircraft. No product is more central to international trade than semiconductors.

• How to Know a Person by David Brooks

  A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger. A person who beams warmth brings out the glowing sides of the people she meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached. “Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being.” The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.

• Great Britain? by Torsten Bell on the problems the UK faces in the coming years. It examines inequality, and how our cities have failed to make the economic transition through deindustrialisation to new economy. Often there are policies that have held us back:

  …in the 1960s, concerns that Birmingham’s economy was too strong saw the Labour government legislate to stop the city expanding. Having already restricted manufacturing growth two decades earlier, ministers now limited the building of new offices, on the grounds that the city, with incomes well above the national average, was attracting more than its share of economic activity. No one has that worry today – Birmingham was declared bankrupt in 2023.

  and stagnation costs us:

  And what’s the material cost of stagnation? If wages had continued growing at the rate we were accustomed to before the crash in 2008, around 2.2 per cent a year, British workers would now be earning £14,000 more a year on average, cumulatively taking home an extra £340 billion.

• Stoner by John Williams

I also started on The Principles of Product Development Flow by Donald Reinertsen and Slouching Towards Utopia by Brad J DeLong.

That’s all for September!