The latest seminar in practical philosophy was a presentation about problems of overdetermination and preemption in climate action. My rough notes are below. I’m trying a new styling format for these. The notes from the talk itself will be in a normal white or black font (depending on if the post is being viewed in light or dark mode). My interjecting comments will be [L: in square brackets and in a different color].

Six years ago, David Thompson wrote a popular blog post called “My favourite Git commit” celebrating a whimsically detailed commit message his co-worker wrote. I enjoyed the post at the time and have sent it to several teammates as a model for good commit messages.

I recently revisited Thompson’s article as I was creating my own guide to writing useful commit messages. When pressed to explain what made Thompson’s post such an effective example, I was surprised to find that I couldn’t. It was fun to read as an outside observer, but I couldn’t justify it as a model of good software engineering.

Yesterday I saw two museums for the first time: Gustavianum and Evolutionsmuseet Paleontologi.

Urban sketching at Gusativanum

The Urban Sketchers meetup took place at Gustavianum Sunday morning. The museum is huge. We didn’t have time to go through it at the pace it deserved, because the idea was to find something we wanted to draw and get started. But I loved the glimpses I got of all the collections and will definitely be returning to appreciate them properly.