This is my site, so I get to choose the best Granite Geek posts/articles of 2019. Here they are, looking backwards through the year.
(What about my favorite post of the decade? Many of the several thousand posts I’ve written over the past 10 years have disappeared due to changes in servers and employers and I’ve forgotten them, so I can’t choose a favorite. But I will include one possiblity at the very end.)
Dec: The most fun thing was the project running a fake ranked-choice election for the candidate-stuffed Democratic primary. Our experiment showed at least one thing: Some people *love* ranked-choice voting.
The second most fun thing was getting a state historical marker placed for the invention of BASIC computer language. I spent much of 2018 working on this, but it was finally put up in June 2019.
Nov: An intriguing new law subjects Reddy Kilowatt to local control.
Oct: New Hampshire installs 4,000 sticks along highways each winter, which seems … odd.
Sept: Why is a group of loons called an asylum? It’s partly the Monitor’s fault.
Aug: Court says ‘Patent troll’ isn’t defamatory because nobody knows what it means
May: Not tree-huggers – tree-measurers.
March: Will a plant-based burger fool my taste buds? (Spoiler: Yes, but nobody else’s)
March: In which I admit that I never truly realized that molecules can be different sizes.
March: What a difference a K makes … (not, not “kilo” but in the spelling of a lake’s name)(by the way, the spelling was, indeed, changed later on)
Jan: Why aren’t airplanes exciting anymore?
Jan: Crowdsourcing our love affair with stone walls.
And what about my favorite article of the decade? It might be this celebration of mathematicians’ love of blackboards.
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