An overview of my current systems and software — This piece was first published on my personal site here. I'm trying not to wed myself to ecosystems like Medium and Substack, so if you like this article, please consider subscribing to my email newsletter here. The last installment I wrote about my productivity routine was almost five years ago…

Part two: Strategy and tactics for student pilots — This piece was first published on my personal site. I’m trying not to wed myself to ecosystems like Medium and Substack, so if you like this article, please consider subscribing to my email newsletter here. Continued from part one “Aviation as craft and continuous improvement.” Below is a list of…

Aviation as craft and continuous improvement — The first installment of a two-part series on the philosophy and practice of learning to fly. In March of 2020, San Francisco began its comprehensive lockdowns to stem the Coronavirus tide. Our usual sources of entertainment dried up faster than the moisture from the brief storms that sweep over Death…

Jack Scrivener and the Second World War in the Pacific — My early years were full of sporadic uprootings: The life of a military brat. I was born on Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska. When I was four, the family moved to Virginia where my father worked at Langley, then onto Suffolk, England in the late 1990s, when he…

For 45 years, generations of Americans and Europeans struggled with and ultimately accepted a nuclear-laden and bellicose Communist bloc, the United Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the borders of Austria. For a time, it seemed inevitable that this gargantuan amalgam of nations would only…

Questions and answers from hardware to tactics — Digital Combat Simulator (DCS) is the preeminent simulator for fighter jets. It‘s astonishingly realistic in terms of aircraft physics, environments, and flight controls. I love the attention to the little things too, like the way the sun hits the aircraft canopy and illuminates scratches on the surface, or the signs…

An explainer on the arcane ecosystem of US banks and the Fed — The beating heart of the financial system is liquidity: Simply, the amount of money available to banks to lend and borrowers to spend. When times are good, there’s enough liquidity that banks lend can lend at attractive interest rates. …

A brief history of nuclear escalation and its nail-biting byproducts — We still live beneath the sword of Damacles, though we tend to forget it. The generation of humanity who knew a world without nuclear weapons before 1945 is fast disappearing and the last time humanity seriously stared down armageddon seems long ago. Dan Carlin thinks that our forgetfulness is natural…

A very pretty back-up plan — Essentials Bay Area Workers’ rating: 6/10. While Emigrant Lake boasts stellar views, there are better backpacking possibilities with the same drive time from San Francisco. When we made the journey, we actually intended to backpack nearby Fourth of July Lake, but there were no more permits when we arrived. …