This year I volunteered to manage the fall fundraiser for my kids’ Girl Scout troop. The girls sell snacks and magazines to their family and friends, and then get a cut of the proceeds. They also can earn patches and little trinkets based on how many items they sell. The Girl Scouts use the volunteer managers as a free last-mile distribution network, which means that I spent the better part of my morning today going through bags of tchotchkes and packaging them up for the 20+ girls in the troop based on what they earned.

This is fiddly work. The patches are small and easily miscounted or mislaid, and there are more than 15 different kinds of rewards which makes it easy to accidentally skip over one. And mistakes are painful — I’m on the hook if anything is missing[^money] — so it’s important to get it right. So I borrowed something from my data analysis bag of tricks and used a checksum.

Wisconsin: land of beer, bratwurst, and cheddar cheese. I consumed copious amounts of all three during my time as a grad student at UW-Madison, but none is the food that I miss the most. That honor is reserved for spicy cheese bread.

I like to imagine that at some point in 2017[^2017] the NFL execs gathered around a long mahogany table in their secret clubhouse NYC headquarters. They took a break from their important discussions about how to downplay the connection between football and CTE or the best ways to sucker cash-strapped municipalities into funding new stadium development, to grill the middle manager who was in charge of their data. “Hey nerd!” I presume they opened, “Why the hell have we been paying all this money for the last three years for these stupid RFID chips? Teams are barely using it!”