Sometimes when I’m bored, I like to look at the list of ma­cOS Bash com­mands. Here’s some com­mands that I found in­ter­est­ing:

If you store your se­crets in the Keychain (and you should!), you can ac­cess them pro­gram­mat­i­cally us­ing se­cu­rity.

se­cu­rity find-in­ter­net-pass­word -s “https://​ex­am­ple.com”

I found this use­ful for writ­ing au­to­mated scripts that used lo­cally-stored cre­den­tials.

Bonus tip: If you are us­ing 1Password, there is a 1Password CLI that you can use to ac­cess your 1Password items from the com­mand line.

If you want to open a file from the ter­mi­nal, you can use the open com­mand.

open file.txt

This will open the file in the de­fault ap­pli­ca­tion for that file type, as if you had dou­ble-clicked it in the Finder.

pb­copy and pb­paste are com­mand-line util­i­ties that al­low you to copy and paste text to the paste­board (what other op­er­at­ing sys­tems might call the “clipboard”).

pb­copy takes what­ever was given in the stan­dard in­put, and places it in the paste­board.

echo “Hello, world!” | pb­copy;

pb­paste takes what­ever is in the paste­board and prints it to the stan­dard out­put.

pb­paste>> Hello, world!

This is very use­ful for get­ting data from files into the browser, or other GUI ap­pli­ca­tions.

If you work with servers a lot, it can be use­ful to know the cur­rent time in UTC, when e.g. look­ing at server logs.

This is a one-liner in the ter­mi­nal:

date -u

Alternatively, you can use

TZ=UTC date

If you want to run an Internet speedtest, you can run one di­rectly from the ter­mi­nal with

net­workQual­ity # Note the cap­i­tal “Q”!

If you are want to keep your Mac from sleep­ing, you can run caf­feinate in the ter­mi­nal.

caf­feinate

caf­feinate will keep your Mac awake un­til you stop it, e.g. by press­ing Ctrl+C. caf­feinate used to be a third-party tool, but it is now built-in to ma­cOS.

I use this mostly to pre­vent my Mac from sleep­ing when I am run­ning a server.

If you need to gen­er­ate a UUID, you can use the uuid­gen com­mand.

uuid­gen

By de­fault uuid­gen out­puts a UUID in up­per­case. You can com­bine this with tr and pb­copy to copy the UUID to the clip­board in low­er­case.

uuid­gen | tr ‘[:upper:]’ ‘[:lower:]’ | pb­copy

I use this a lot when writ­ing unit tests that re­quire IDs.

* mdfind: Spotlight search, but in the ter­mi­nal. I gen­er­ally use Spotlight it­self (or rather the ex­cel­lent Raycast). Link

* say: This com­mand makes your Mac speak the text you give it. Link

* screen­cap­ture: This com­mand al­lows you to take screen­shots and save them to a file. I pre­fer us­ing cmd-shift-5 for this. Link

* net­work­setup: This com­mand al­lows you to con­fig­ure your net­work set­tings pro­gram­mat­i­cally. I found its API very in­tim­i­dat­ing, and so I haven’t re­ally used it much. Link

A ti­tle drop is when a char­ac­ter in a movie says the ti­tle of the movie they’re in. Here’s a large-scale analy­sis of 73,921 movies from the last 80 years on how of­ten, when and maybe even why that hap­pens.

I’m sure you all know the part of the movie where one of the char­ac­ters says the ac­tual ti­tle of the movie

and you’re like

The over­all meta-ness of this is - of course - noth­ing new. And film­mak­ers and scriptwrit­ers have been do­ing it since the dawn of the medium it­self*. It’s known in film speak as a ti­tle drop.

Consequently, there’s tons of ex­am­ples through­out movie his­tory that range from the iconic (see Back to the Future’s above)

via the ec­cen­tric,

the very much self-aware

But how com­mon are these ti­tle drops re­ally? Has this phe­nom­e­non gained mo­men­tum over time with our post­mod­ern cul­ture be­com­ing ever more meta? Can we pre­dict any­thing about the qual­ity of a film based on how many times its ti­tle is men­tioned? And what does a movie ti­tle mean, any­way?

There have been analy­ses

and oh so so many lis­ti­cles

of the ti­tle drop phe­nom­e­non be­fore, but they are small and anec­do­tal. Here’s the first ex­ten­sive analysis of ti­tle drops for a dataset of 73,921 movies that amount to roughly 61% of movies on IMDb with at least 100 user votes*. I’m look­ing at movies re­leased be­tween 1940 and 2023. Special thanks go to my friends at OpenSubtitles.com for pro­vid­ing this data!

I started out with two datasets: 89,242 (English) movie sub­ti­tles from OpenSubtitles.com

and meta­data for 121,797 movies from IMDb. After joining them and fil­ter­ing them for bro­ken sub­ti­tle files I was left with a to­tal of 73,921 subtitled movies. With that out of the way, I re­al­ized that the tougher task was still ahead of me: an­swer­ing the ques­tion what even was a ti­tle drop?

The naïve ap­proach is - of course - to sim­ply look for the movie’s name any­where in the subtitles. Which is a fan­tas­tic ap­proach for movies like Back to the Future with a nice unique ti­tle:

But this quickly breaks down if we look at movies like E or I *, which lead to way too many matches.

We also run into prob­lems with every movie that is a se­quel (Rocky III, Hot Tub Time Machine 2) since none of the char­ac­ters will add the se­quel num­ber to char­ac­ter names/​over­sized bathing equipment. Similarly, the rise of the colon

in movie ti­tles would make for some very awk­ward di­a­logue (LUKE: “Gosh Mr. Kenobi, it’s al­most like we’re in the mid­dle of some Star Wars Episode Four: A New Hope!“).

(See also the He Didn’t Say That

meme.)

So I ap­plied a few rules to my ti­tle match­ing in the di­a­logue. Leading ‘The’, ‘An’ and ’A’s and special char­ac­ters like dashes are ig­nored, se­quel num­bers both Arabic and Roman are dropped (along with ‘Episode…’, ‘Part…’ etc.) and ti­tles con­tain­ing a colon are split and ei­ther side counts as a ti­tle drop. So for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

ei­ther “Lord of the Rings” or “Fellowship of the Ring” would count as ti­tle drops (feel free to hover over the vi­su­al­iza­tions to ex­plore the matches)!

With the data clean­ing out of the way, let’s get down to busi­ness!

Alright, so here’s the num­ber you’ve all been wait­ing for (drumroll):

36.5% - so about a third - of movies have at least one ti­tle drop dur­ing their run­time.

Also, there’s a to­tal of 277,668 ti­tle drops for all 26,965 ti­tle-drop­ping movies which means that there’s an average of 10.3 ti­tle drops per movie that ti­tle drops. If they do it, they really go for it.

So who are the most ex­ces­sive of­fend­ers in men­tion­ing their ti­tles over the course of the film? The over­all star when it comes to fic­tion only came out last year: it’s Barbie by Greta Gerwig with an im­pres­sive 267 ti­tle drops within its 1 hour and 54 min­utes run­time, clock­ing in at a whopping 2.34 BPM (Barbies Per Minute).

On the non-fic­tion side of doc­u­men­taries the win­ner is Mickey: The Story of a Mouse

with 309 ti­tle drops in only 90 min­utes, so 3.43 Mickeys Per Minute!

What’s in­ter­est­ing about the (Fiction) list here is that it’s pretty in­ter­na­tional: only two of the top ten movies come from Hollywood, 6 are from India, one from Indonesia and one from Turkey. So it’s def­i­nitely an in­ter­na­tional phe­nom­e­non.

Looking at the top ten list you might have no­ticed this lit­tle icon

sig­ni­fy­ing a movie where the data says it’s named af­ter one of its char­ac­ters*.

Unsurprisingly, movies named af­ter one of their char­ac­ters have an av­er­age of 24.7 ti­tle drops, more than twice as much as the usual 10.3. Protagonists have a ten­dency to pop up re­peat­edly in a film, so their names usu­ally do the same.

Similarly, movies named af­ter a pro­tag­o­nist have a ti­tle drop rate of 88.5%

while only 34.2% of other movies drop their ti­tles.

A note on the data here

This is the more ex­per­i­men­tal part of the analy­sis. To fig­ure out if a movie was named af­ter its

pro­tag­o­nist I’ve used

IMDb’s Principals Dataset

that lists char­ac­ter names for the first cou­ple of ac­tors and com­pared that to the movie’s ti­tle.

This ap­proach yields re­li­able re­sults, but of course misses movies when the char­ac­ter the movie

is named af­ter does not ap­pear on that list. So you might find movies that miss the

‘Named’

icon even though they’re clearly named af­ter a char­ac­ter.

Special char­ac­ters in the ti­tle and char­ac­ter name are also chal­leng­ing: for ex­am­ple, Tosun Pasa which ac­tu­ally has a ş char­ac­ter in its ti­tle - wrong on IMDb (Pasa) as well as the sub­ti­tles

(Pasha) - or WALL·E with the chal­leng­ing · in the mid­dle: Even

though there are men­tions of “Wall-E” in the sub­ti­tles, the script - look­ing for “WALL·E” - would­n’t

de­tect it. (I’ve fixed both of these films man­u­ally - but there might be more!)

Titles or sur­names also usu­ally pre­vent be­ing counted as ti­tle drops ac­cord­ing to our de­f­i­n­i­tions.

Michael The Brave,

King Lear or Barry Lyndon might men­tion a char­ac­ter’s name (‘Michael’, ‘Lear’, ‘Barry’) but leave out the ti­tle or sur­name

- so zero drops.

Nevertheless, there do ex­ist named films where you would ex­pect a ti­tle drop which does­n’t come!

Examples are:

Anyway - back to the analy­sis!

An in­ter­est­ing cat­e­gory are movies named af­ter a char­ac­ter that only have a sin­gle ti­tle drop - making it all the more mean­ing­ful?

Title-drop con­nois­seurs might sneer at this point and well-ac­tu­ally us that a “real” ti­tle drop should only hap­pen once in a film. That there’s this one mem­o­rable (or cringe-y) scene where the protagonist looks di­rectly at the cam­era and de­clares the ti­tle of the film with as much pathos as they can muster. Or as a nice send-off in the last spo­ken line.

Such sin­gle drops hap­pen sur­pris­ingly of­ten:

11.3% of all movies do EXACTLY ONE ti­tle drop dur­ing their run­time.

Which means that there’s about twice as many movies hav­ing mul­ti­ple ti­tle drops than sin­gle ones.

In the sin­gle drop case it is more likely that the film­mak­ers were adding a ti­tle drop very consciously.

Single drops of­ten hap­pen in a key scene and ex­plain the movie’s ti­tle: what mys­te­ri­ous fellowship the first Lord of the Rings is named af­ter. Or that the au­di­ence wait­ing for some dark knight to show up must sim­ply ac­cept that it’s been the Batman all along.

One sus­pi­cion I had was that the very meta act of hav­ing a char­ac­ter speak the name of the movie they’re in would be some­thing gain­ing more and more trac­tion over the last two or three decades.

And in­deed, if we look at the av­er­age num­ber of movies with ti­tle drops over the decades we can see that there’s a cer­tain up­wards trend. The 1960s and 1970s seemed to be most averse to mentioning their ti­tle in the film, while it’s be­come more com­mon-place over the last years.

If we dig deeper, this growth over the decades comes with a clearer ex­pla­na­tion: split­ting up movies by sin­gle- and multi-ti­tle drops shows that while the ten­dency of movies to drop their title ex­actly once keeps more or less steady, the num­ber of multi-drop films is on the rise.

Your ex­pla­na­tion for this (More movies are be­ing named af­ter their pro­tag­o­nists? Movies are more productified so brand recog­ni­tion be­comes an im­por­tant con­cern?) is prob­a­bly as good as mine 🤷

Another ques­tion I wanted to an­swer was if a high num­ber of ti­tle drops was a sign of a bad movie. Think of all the trashy slasher and hor­ror movies about Meth Marmots and Killer Ballerinas - would­n’t their char­ac­ters in the sparse di­a­logues con­stantly men­tion the ti­tle for brand recog­ni­tion and all that?

Interestingly though, there’s no strong con­nec­tion be­tween film qual­ity (expressed as IMDb rating (YMMV)) and the prob­a­bil­ity of ti­tle-drop­ping.

An as­pect that cer­tainly does have an im­pact on the prob­a­bil­ity of a ti­tle drop though is the genre of a film.

If you think back to the dis­cus­sion about names in ti­tles from ear­lier, gen­res like Biography and other non-fic­tion gen­res like Sport and History - al­most by de­f­i­n­i­tion - men­tion their subject in both the ti­tle and through­out the film.

Accordingly, the prob­a­bil­ity of a ti­tle drop varies wildly by genre. Non-fiction films have a strong ten­dency to­wards ti­tle-drop­ping, while more fic­tion-ori­ented gen­res like Crime, Romance and War don’t.

Finally, we can ask the ques­tion: what even is a movie ti­tle?

I could­n’t find a com­plete clas­si­fi­ca­tion in the sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture (“What’s in a name? The art of movie ti­tling”

by Ingrid Haidegger comes the clos­est). Movie ti­tles are an in­ter­est­ing case, since they have to work as a de­scrip­tion of a prod­uct, a mar­ket­ing in­stru­ment, but also as the ti­tle of a piece of art.

Consequently, it’s a field ripe with opinions, science and ex­per­i­men­ta­tion

and listicles.

The most ex­ten­sive clas­si­fi­ca­tion of me­dia ti­tles in gen­eral I could find is TVTropes’ Title Tropes list

which lists over 180 (!) dif­fer­ent types of tropes alone. Some of those tropes are:

While nam­ing a movie is a very cre­ative task and pretty suc­cess­fully de­fies clas­si­fi­ca­tion, we can still look at the over­all shape of movie ti­tles and see if that has any im­pact on the num­ber of ti­tle drops.

One such sim­ple as­pect is the length of the ti­tle it­self. As you would ex­pect there’s a neg­a­tive correlation (if only a slight one*) between the length of a ti­tle and the num­ber of ti­tle drops it does.

Still, there are some fun ex­am­ples for reaaaaally

long movie ti­tles that nev­er­the­less do at least one ti­tle drop:

And while these pre­vi­ous ex­am­ples only drops parts from be­fore or af­ter the colon, this next specimen ac­tu­ally does an im­pres­sive full ti­tle drop:

And with that, we’re done with the over­ar­ch­ing analy­sis! Feel free to drop us an e-mail

or fol­low up on X/X, Bluesky

or Mastodon

if you have com­ments, ques­tions, praise ❤️

Oh, and one more thing:

If you’re cu­ri­ous, here’s the full dataset for you to ex­plore!

We in­vite you to down­load raw JunoCam im­ages posted here and do your own im­age pro­cess­ing on them. Be cre­ative! Anything from crop­ping to color en­hanc­ing to col­lag­ing is fair game. Then up­load your cre­ations here.

Please re­frain from di­rect use of any of­fi­cial NASA or Juno mis­sion lo­gos in your work, as this con­fuses what is of­fi­cially sanc­tioned by NASA and by the Juno Project.

We in­vite you to down­load raw JunoCam im­ages posted here and do your own im­age pro­cess­ing on them. Be cre­ative! Anything from crop­ping to color en­hanc­ing to col­lag­ing is fair game. Then up­load your cre­ations here.

Please re­frain from di­rect use of any of­fi­cial NASA or Juno mis­sion lo­gos in your work, as this con­fuses what is of­fi­cially sanc­tioned by NASA and by the Juno Project.

We ask that you re­frain from post­ing any patently of­fen­sive, po­lit­i­cal, or in­ap­pro­pri­ate im­ages. Let’s keep it clean and fun for every­one of any age! Remember, this sec­tion is mod­er­ated so in­ap­pro­pri­ate con­tent will be re­jected. But cre­ativ­ity and cu­rios­ity in the sci­en­tific spirit and the ad­ven­ture of space ex­plo­ration is highly en­cour­aged and we look for­ward to see­ing Jupiter through not only JunoCam’s eyes, but your own. Have at it!

My coworker and I en­joy hav­ing de­bates about whether the American econ­omy is in the ex­press lane to col­lapse or cruis­ing in the good times (I’m re­ally fun at par­ties). For the two-and-a-half years I’ve worked at my cur­rent com­pany, one of us has been a bull while the other has been a bear. I’ll let you guess which one is me.

Monday, November 4, when I walked into the of­fice he brought up a pod­cast he had been lis­ten­ing to on the drive to work: All-In. I had never heard of it, but I guess it’s a group of four ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists that talk about pol­i­tics, cur­rent events, and the econ­omy.

My coworker sur­faced a point that the pod­cast­ers had made in the open­ing seg­ment of last week’s episode: 85% of the past quar­ter’s eco­nomic growth came from gov­ern­ment spend­ing. I was stunned. I had in my mind that gov­ern­ment spend­ing com­posed some­thing like 30%-40% of GDP thanks to Matt Yglesias’ re­cent tirades about how im­ports don’t sub­tract from GDP, resur­fac­ing the macro-101 equa­tion:

My coworker showed me the first few min­utes of the pod­cast, where they flash this chart af­ter not­ing the econ­omy grew by 2.8% in Q3, and one of the hosts, Chamath Palihapitiya, de­scribes what he sees as go­ing on:

This is where you can get a lit­tle con­fused by data. Jason, this is net out­lays. And that’s dif­fer­ent from to­tal gross gov­ern­ment spend­ing, which also in­cludes QE… So just to be clear about what’s hap­pen­ing, 85% of this quar­ter’s GDP was in­duced by the gov­ern­ment. If you sub it out, so take 2.8% and mul­ti­ply it by 0.15, that is the true growth X the United States gov­ern­ment that ex­ists in the United States econ­omy to­day. Sacks, your thoughts here on the GDP, ob­vi­ously looks pretty good for Biden-Harris to have all these stats go­ing in their fa­vor, but there is the caveat ob­vi­ously about the gov­ern­ment spend­ing in there.

“This is where you can get a lit­tle con­fused about data” yeah, okay big guy. Let’s see who is con­fused here.

Putting aside the com­ment about quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing, which feels ir­rel­e­vant, I left his of­fice and went straight to the Department of Commerce’s web­site, where the Bureau of Economic Analysis pub­lishes GDP es­ti­mates. The third-quar­ter ad­vance es­ti­mate table 2 pro­vides us the in­for­ma­tion we’re look­ing for, and, in fact, is the source of Chamath’s graph.

You can see the Macro-101 equa­tion recre­ated here. All of these sub­cat­e­gories (personal con­sump­tion + in­vest­ment + net ex­ports + gov­ern­ment con­sump­tion) add up to 2.8% (2.82% to be pre­cise) of Q3 GDP growth.

0.85% of the to­tal 2.82% GDP growth is from gov­ern­ment spend­ing. Meaning that 0.85% / 2.82% = 30.1% of Q3 GDP growth came from gov­ern­ment spend­ing, not 85%.

If you look closely at Chamath’s chart, you can tell that he’s us­ing this ex­act data source to de­velop his gross mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the data.

So, Chamath’s the­sis that “if you back out the per­cent­age of gov­ern­ment con­sump­tion that is in­cluded in GDP, you start to see a very dif­fer­ent pic­ture, which is that over the last two and a half years, all of the eco­nomic gains un­der the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion have largely been through gov­ern­ment con­sump­tion” is to­tal hog­wash. The claim that makes up the en­tire talk­ing point of this ini­tial seg­ment of the show is a mis­read­ing of the data that I, a ran­dom non­ex­pert guy, no­ticed and dis­proved in ten min­utes of re­search and writ­ing this up.

Looking at gov­ern­ment ex­pen­di­tures as a pro­por­tion of GDP over time, you can see that the cur­rent pe­riod is noth­ing new—in fact, it’s typ­i­cal for the post-Great Recession era, roughly in line with gov­ern­ment spend­ing from the late Obama years through Trump’s pres­i­dency, pre-COVID.

Was this gross in­com­pe­tence or pur­pose­ful de­cep­tion? I’m not sure. But I know that I won’t be tun­ing in for the next episode of All-In to find out. I will not fall prey to Gell-Mann Amnesia. In my first and only 15 min­utes of watch­ing, Chamath’s con­fi­dence in mak­ing this false claim, cou­pled with his co-hosts’ com­plete lack of crit­i­cal push­back, sug­gests to me that these kinds of mis­takes hap­pen of­ten enough to where these guys’ con­tent is­n’t worth con­sum­ing.

On its flight to the International Space Station, Dragon ex­e­cutes a se­ries of burns that po­si­tion the ve­hi­cle pro­gres­sively closer to the sta­tion be­fore it per­forms fi­nal dock­ing ma­neu­vers, fol­lowed by pres­sur­iza­tion of the vestibule, hatch open­ing, and crew ingress.

On its flight to the International Space Station, Dragon ex­e­cuted a se­ries of burns that po­si­tioned the ve­hi­cle pro­gres­sively closer to the sta­tion be­fore it per­formed fi­nal dock­ing ma­neu­vers, fol­lowed by pres­sur­iza­tion of the vestibule, hatch open­ing, and crew ingress.

On its flight to the International Space Station, Dragon ex­e­cutes a se­ries of burns that po­si­tion the ve­hi­cle pro­gres­sively closer to the sta­tion be­fore it per­forms fi­nal dock­ing ma­neu­vers, fol­lowed by pres­sur­iza­tion of the vestibule, hatch open­ing, and crew ingress.

On its flight to the International Space Station, Dragon ex­e­cuted a se­ries of burns that po­si­tioned the ve­hi­cle pro­gres­sively closer to the sta­tion be­fore it per­formed fi­nal dock­ing ma­neu­vers, fol­lowed by pres­sur­iza­tion of the vestibule, hatch open­ing, and crew ingress.

Falcon 9’s first stage lofts Dragon to or­bit. Falcon 9’s first and sec­ond stage sep­a­rate. Second stage ac­cel­er­ates Dragon to or­bital ve­loc­ity.

Dragon sep­a­rates from Falcon 9’s sec­ond stage and per­forms ini­tial or­bit ac­ti­va­tion and check­outs of propul­sion, life sup­port, and ther­mal con­trol sys­tems.

Dragon per­forms delta-ve­loc­ity or­bit rais­ing ma­neu­vers to catch up with the International Space Station.

Dragon es­tab­lishes a com­mu­ni­ca­tion link with the International Space Station and per­forms its fi­nal or­bit rais­ing delta-ve­loc­ity burn.

Dragon es­tab­lishes rel­a­tive nav­i­ga­tion to the International Space Station and ar­rives along the dock­ing axis, ini­ti­at­ing an au­tonomous ap­proach.

Dragon per­forms fi­nal ap­proach and docks with the International Space Station, fol­lowed by pres­sur­iza­tion, hatch open, and crew ingress.

Please turn on JavaScript in your browser and re­fresh the page to view its con­tent.

Nintendo has con­firmed that the suc­ces­sor to the Nintendo Switch will be back­ward com­pat­i­ble with the Nintendo Switch.

In a post on X, a mes­sage from Nintendo pres­i­dent Shuntaro Furukawa also an­nounced that fur­ther in­for­ma­tion about the suc­ces­sor to the Nintendo Switch would come “at a later date.”

“This is Furukawa,” the mes­sage reads. “At to­day’s Corporate Management Policy Briefing, we an­nounced that Nintendo Switch soft­ware will also be playable on the suc­ces­sor to Nintendo Switch.

“Nintendo Switch Online will be avail­able on the suc­ces­sor to Nintendo Switch as well. Further in­for­ma­tion about the suc­ces­sor to Nintendo Switch, in­clud­ing its com­pat­i­bil­ity with Nintendo Switch, will be an­nounced at a later date.”

The post also con­firmed that Nintendo Switch Online would be avail­able on the suc­ces­sor con­sole. No fur­ther de­tails on its im­ple­men­ta­tion were an­nounced.

Earlier to­day, Nintendo re­it­er­ated it still in­tends to an­nounce its next con­sole hard­ware be­fore the end of its cur­rent fis­cal year, which con­cludes on March 31, 2025.

President Shuntaro Furukawa made the com­ments dur­ing an on­line press con­fer­ence on Tuesday, fol­low­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of Nintendo’s lat­est earn­ings re­sults, but the ex­ec­u­tive did not add any ad­di­tional de­tails.

According to a re­port, de­vel­op­ers have re­port­edly been briefed not to ex­pect Nin­ten­do’s next con­sole to launch be­fore April 2025.

“No de­vel­oper I’ve spo­ken to ex­pects it to be launch­ing this fi­nan­cial year,” said GI.biz jour­nal­ist Chris Dring. “In fact, they’ve been told not to ex­pect it in the [current] fi­nan­cial year. A bunch of peo­ple I spoke to hope it’s out in April or May time, still early next year, not late.

“I don’t think any of us wants a late launch for Switch 2 be­cause we all want a new Nintendo con­sole, every­one gets very ex­cited for it, and we don’t want that crunch of Grand Theft Auto 6 and Switch and all that kind of stuff on top of each other.”

Having launched in March 2017, Switch is in its eighth year on the mar­ket. In July, it sur­passed the Famicom as the Nintendo con­sole with the longest lifes­pan be­fore be­ing re­placed.

Although I have a good gig as a full pro­fes­sor at Iowa State University, I’ve day­dreamed about learn­ing a trade — some­thing that re­quired both my mind and my hands.

So in 2018, I started night courses in weld­ing at Des Moines Area Community College. For three years, I stud­ied dif­fer­ent types of weld­ing and dur­ing the day worked on a book about the com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween weld­ing teach­ers and stu­dents. I was­n’t the only woman who be­came in­ter­ested in trades work dur­ing this time. Recognizing the good pay and job se­cu­rity, U. S. women have moved in greater num­bers into skilled trades such as weld­ing and fab­ri­ca­tion within the past 10 years.

From 2017 to 2022, the num­ber of women in trades rose from about 241,000 to nearly 354,000. That’s an in­crease of about 47%. Even so, women still con­sti­tute just 5.3% of welders in the United States.

When I re­ceived my diploma in weld­ing in May 2022, I’d al­ready found the place I wanted to work: Howe’s Welding and Metal Fabrication. I’d met the owner, Jim Howe, when I vis­ited his three-man shop in Ames, Iowa, in January 2022 for re­search on a sec­ond book about com­mu­ni­ca­tion in skilled trades.

Howe’s shop fo­cuses on re­pairs and one-off fab­ri­ca­tion, not large-scale pro­duc­tion of sin­gle items. Under Howe’s tute­lage, I’ve fab­ri­cated skis for the ma­chines that make the rum­ble strips in the road, shep­herd’s hooks for bird feed­ers, fence poles and stain­less-steel lamp­shade frames. I’ve re­paired trail­ers, wheel­chair ramps, of­fice chairs and lawn mow­ers.

Both my ex­pe­ri­ence at Howe’s and my re­search at nine other fab­ri­ca­tion fa­cil­i­ties in Iowa have shown me that — at least for the time be­ing — tradeswomen must find workarounds for com­monly en­coun­tered chal­lenges. Some of these chal­lenges are phys­i­cal. These could in­clude be­ing un­able to eas­ily reach or move nec­es­sary ma­te­r­ial and tools. Or they could be emo­tional, such as en­coun­ter­ing sex­ism. As I ex­plore in my forth­com­ing book, “Learning Skilled Trades in the Workplace,” this is true even in a wel­com­ing en­vi­ron­ment like Howe’s shop, where I work with a sup­port­ive and help­ful boss and co-work­ers.

Being a tradeswoman means be­ing scru­ti­nized for com­pe­tence. One of the tradeswomen I in­ter­viewed for the book told me this story about be­ing tested by more ex­pe­ri­enced trades­men:

“I re­mem­ber them tack­ing to­gether a cou­ple of pieces of metal for me and say­ing, ‘Okay, I want you to weld a six mil­lime­ter weld here and an eight mil­lime­ter weld here,’ and I was so ner­vous be­cause these are the guys that I’m go­ing to work with, and I just was so ner­vous and I laid down the welds and put my hood up and the guy goes, ‘Well, god­damn, bitch can weld,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my god, thank god.’”

I’ve felt this same scrutiny from Howe’s cus­tomers. Once, two cus­tomers watched me as I used the iron­worker to punch ovals in rec­tan­gu­lar tub­ing. I had to step on the pedal to lower the punch, find the in­den­ta­tion of the spot to punch, hold a com­bi­na­tion square against the metal to en­sure the ob­long shape was par­al­lel to the tub­ing’s edge, step on the pedal and pull the strip­per to­ward me.

I could feel my legs turn to jelly as I per­formed the steps and — as I per­ceived it — rep­re­sented the trade com­pe­tence of all wom­ankind. I’m re­sent­ful of these silent eval­u­a­tions, par­tic­u­larly when I’m learn­ing some­thing new and try­ing to keep all my fin­gers.

The stan­dards es­tab­lished by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, don’t nec­es­sar­ily ac­count for all the phys­i­cal­ity of trades work. On the day Jim told me to bend 20 pieces of ½-inch round stock, I had to use all my weight to pull the Hossfeld ben­der’s arm to make the S shapes.

The 20 S hooks would hang on a bar and hold the 18 come-alongs that Jim had ac­cu­mu­lated. Tired af­ter I’d fin­ished all the bend­ing, I sighed as Jim told me to hang all the come-alongs on a mo­bile rack he had bought at auc­tion for just this pur­pose.

I had to squat to pick each one up and use my legs and then arms to lift each to a newly made hook. But I did­n’t com­plain. Stoicism is a workaround to cred­i­bil­ity.

My in­ter­ac­tions with Howe’s cus­tomers have been pep­pered with low-grade sex­ism. Trying to de­ter­mine the rea­son for my pres­ence, one cus­tomer asked me, “Are you the new sec­re­tary?”

Another man com­mented on my ap­pear­ance, com­par­ing me to my co-worker: “You’re bet­ter look­ing than the guy I talked to be­fore.” Such ha­rass­ment re­mains com­mon for tradeswomen and ranges from mild, to vi­o­lent, to just plain creepy, as when one man, pay­ing his bill at the front desk, whis­pered, “Your hands are dirty.”

Women in trades have re­ported en­coun­ters with cus­tomers who doubted their com­pe­tence and who re­fused to deal with them, seek­ing a man in­stead.

Some cus­tomers at Howe’s fit this pat­tern. I’ve no­ticed that if I’m at the front desk with a male co-worker, men will of­ten look past me and ad­dress them, even though I’m older and, as far as they know, more ex­pe­ri­enced. Other cus­tomers like to tell me how to do my job.

One man, watch­ing me while I cut 8-foot lengths of tub­ing for him, told me that I could sim­ply hook my tape mea­sure over the saw blade and sub­tract ⅛-inch to find the cor­rect length. Piqued af­ter I ex­plained why his method would­n’t work for a pre­cise mea­sure­ment, he re­sponded by quizzing me on some­thing I was­n’t likely to know: the pur­pose of the black di­a­monds on my tape mea­sure.

The man in the au­di­ence at the aca­d­e­mic con­fer­ence who wants to lec­ture rather than ask a ques­tion of the woman who is the speaker has be­come a trope. The pon­tif­i­cat­ing metal-shop cus­tomer should be, too. Like other tradeswomen, I’ve learned to work around un­wanted com­ments, in­clud­ing un­in­vited con­ver­sa­tions with men bent on sig­nal­ing their ex­per­tise.

My soon-to-be-pub­lished book does­n’t fo­cus solely or even mostly on my ex­pe­ri­ences as a woman in a weld­ing and fab­ri­ca­tion shop. Rather, it looks at the non­lin­ear process of learn­ing skilled trades — a process that is, for tradeswomen, some­times frus­trated by scrutiny, phys­i­cal chal­lenges and sex­ism, which re­quire workarounds.

Nevertheless, along this jour­ney, I’ve leaned on the strength of the tradeswomen be­fore me. Although these women have been “alone in a crowd,” they’ve con­sis­tently worked around chal­lenges to­ward broader and deeper ex­per­tise.

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