What Grows From the Dead; Dave Dobson; 2024

Note: this was actually published on 4/6/25; I backdated to 3/24/25, when I finished the book 

This is a short recommendation for friend Dave Dobson's What Grows from the Dead.  In the author's note Dave says his premise with the novel was to "merely start him out about as low as he thought he could possibly be, and then to start to make things worse for him."  Bujoldian in approach and tone!  Things are grim, but never grimdark, in this thriller / mystery / crime(?) novel set in modern day western NC.

Annual Average Temperatures in Burlington

It's the start of another year in Burlington with no snow on the ground and none forecast in the near future.  NOAA provides a ton of weather data and so I downloaded some Burlington, VT weather data in CSV format.  The data I used comes from two stations, one for measurement prior to 1940, and data from the Burlington International Airport since 1940.

A quick scatterplot shows the average temperature in degrees Fahrenheit by year.  The years start with 1902 and go to present day.  The average yearly temperature ranges from about 42 to 50.  Obviously, average daily temperatures for individual days within every year have a much wider range; looking at the average yearly temperature is a useful first look at long-term trends.  Just by eyeballing, it certainly looks like there is a decades-long upward trend from the 60's to today, and a typical day in 2020 is 8 degrees warmer than a typical day in 1960.  That could easily be the difference between a January with snow cover and a January with bare ground.  

Fitting a best-fit line to the data helps us to see that long-term upward trend: 

... though a quick examination of the residuals confirms that the straight line is not a great model here.

A third-order polynomial does a much better job of capturing the initial stability, followed by an upward rise in temperatures.  A piecewise spline might be even better, but this is enough for a first quick look.  

Next steps might be to look at how the temperatures change over time for each day of the year, or look at the snow depth data. 

2024 in Reading

I've logged 42 titles in my spreadsheet for 2024 so far, a big drop from 2023, and back to the levels of the previous few years.  What happened?  Well, my library dropped Hoopla, so all the graphic novel reading that drove the increase in 2023 mostly went away.  Once again I was part of a Hugo awards reading group and read all the short story, novelette, novella, and novel finalists.

What stood out this year?

Are You My Mother?  Alison Bechdel's 2012 graphic memoir about her relationship with her mother, and companion to 2006's Fun Home, about her relationship with her father.  I think they should be read in order, but it's possible to read Are You My Mother? first.

Clementine, parts 1 and 2.  These were the last titles I got from the library through Hoopla.  This is Tillie Walden's graphic novel about the zombie apocalypse, specifically a character from the Walking Dead video game (which I haven't played, and I haven't seen the TV show, either).  Despite not having any background knowledge of the character, and despite Hoopla screwing up the titling so that I read book 2 before book 1, Walden's illustrations and storytelling made it possible for me to pick up a character in the middle of their story and enjoy it.

Menewood.  Nicola Griffith's 2023 sequel to the 2013 Hild (which I finally read in 2023).  Like Hild, Menewood is a fiercesome tome about the semi-fictional life of St. Hilda.  You really should read this series in order; it is worth the effort.     

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands.  Kate Beaton's 2022 graphic memoir about the individual, community, and cultural harm caused by the way corporations run the extraction of oil in rural Canada.  There are no moustache-twirling villains, but you'll still be filled with rage that such conditions are acceptable just so we can have slightly cheaper fuel.

Some Desperate Glory.  Emily Tesh's 2023 debut novel won the 2024 Hugo Award.  It begins as a story about growing up in a cult and trying to shake off the brainwashing, and quickly reveals much greater ambitions.  What I liked most was how characters have conversations in which they don't hold back information to cause misunderstanding; they're just incapable of understanding each other b/c they've had warped experiences.  I don't know what they are gong to do next at any given moment (in a good way, not a completely chaotic "these characters will do random stuff" way) and that's compelling to read about.

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?  Kelly and Zach Weinersmith's 2023 graphic novel.  With recent billionaire obsession with escaping to Mars, this is a timely and well-researched read.  Zach also writes Saturday Morning Breakfast Comics, which is a staple of my Feedly reading list.  

Braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants.  Robin Wall Kimmerer's 2013 cross-disciplinary book on "western" and indigenous botany and environmental science.  I heard on NPR the other day that this was one of the most-borrowed nonfiction books of 2024.  Our CSA farm has had the corn and squash washed out the last couple of summers in the VT floodings; this helped inspire me to plant a 3 sisters garden in 2025 (I've known about 3 sisters gardens for years, but it never made sense to grow one before b/c we were part of a CSA).  

Arboreality.  Rebecca Campbell's 2022 collection of interwoven short stories about how climate crises could affect the people and landscape of British Columbia over the next 75 years.  Heartbreaking and hopeful.

T. Kingfisher.  Yes, this is an author, not a book, but my 2024 in reading was dominated by Ursula Vernon, writing as T. Kingfisher.  I first got introduced to her work in 2023 with What Moves the Dead and Nettle & Bone for the Hugo finalist reading group, and continued this year with Thornhedge (2024 Hugo Novella winner), A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking (2020, won all the YA fantasy awards), and A Sorceress Comes to Call (2024).  I love her characters's voices and the stories she tells.  They're not exactly *cozy* in that there is real danger our heroes must struggle against, but it's also not grimdark.  I think there's a lot of what I liked about Bujold in Vernon's writing.  

The New Colossus on the eve of a new administration

 The New Colossus says

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me"

...not "your H-1Bs and EB-1As."  

(note: published 12/31/25; backdated to when I first shared with friends)

Thank you, old macbook, for your service

May Computers for Change find a use for your parts.

This is my old macbook pro that I used at Dataiku from 2017-2021.  When I left, I could take it with me for a nominal amount and use it as my "working at the couch" computer, so I did.  At Olive + Availity, the (lenovo and then dell) laptops are much more locked down, so this was useful until the battery in the macbook started to die and I needed to have it plugged in at all times.  With the prospect of tariffs in our near future, this seemed like the time to retire it.  (all the stickers are from 2017-2020, with the exception of the Tech-E-Tiger sticker, which I got as part of helping to maintain my college class's tech infra)

The old laptop, decorated in stickers (Dataiku had a top-notch sticker game)

The new macbook is an Air with an M3 chip; this is more than enough power for what I plan to do with it (some light data science, PrinceCon website development, and eventually the move of nearly all personal computing off the old 2016-era tower once Windows 10 support ends). 

I'm choosing a macbook over a PC because I greatly prefer the terminal in mac over Windows powershell or WSL, and don't feel comfortable enough with linux to make it my primary workstation (my 2013-era laptop from IBM has been serving as a linux server for my personal Dataiku instance for several years, but that has mostly been a set-it-up-and-forget-about-it stituaton).

(note: posted 12/28/25 and backdated to 12/28/24, when I originally shared with friends on facebook)