Family Christmas Letter 2024

Merry Christmas from the Nysetvold Family! Elissa is Supermom. She’s running Rivendell Academy, our home school, as well as teaching at the South Houston Area Performing Arts Co-op (SHAPAC) and playing piano for their choirs. SHAPAC is a one-day-a-week deal that gives the kids some social and artistic exposure, and the rest of the week, […]

Family Christmas Letter 2023

The 2023rd year of our Lord has been good to the Nysetvold family. It has sure been wild for Elissa. She gave birth to Elanor Eve Nysetvold in May; a medical scare resulted in her getting induced a few days early, literally the day after Dan and Will’s school let out. Then she decided to […]

Family Christmas Letter 2022

Merry Christmas! This has been an exciting year for our family. Elissa is a domestic ninja. She’s been teaching Dan piano, helping Dan and Will get way ahead in math, making sourdough bread, sewing dresses for Marie, instigating a new tradition of Sunday post-Church family board games, and more. Not to mention moving from San […]

Brazil São Paulo South: Ten Years Later

Ten years ago, I got home from my mission to Brazil for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I served in the São Paulo South Mission, in cities including São Vicente, Ribeirao Pires, São Bernardo, and the Zona Sul of São Paulo itself, speaking Portuguese. I had previously studied Spanish and Latin and […]

Nuclear regulation now should be more like pipe safety regulation during World War II

Our civilization would be better off if it had dramatically more, cheaper, cleaner energy. To achieve this, we should allow nuclear power to become dramatically cheaper and more common, and the main barrier to this is over-the-top safety regulation. The history of the ASME piping and pressure vessel codes, which govern both oil refineries (my […]

Link Roundup #1

This is a collection of some of the best articles I’ve read in the last several months. Might become a semi-regular feature if people let me know they like it. SpaceX is doing amazing things – I would argue they are making more progress in aerospace engineering than every other organization on earth combined. I […]

My Ancestors’ Religious Freedom

Public Square Magazine has just published my essay on my ancestors’ experience with political repressions in general, and religious freedom specifically. Give it a look!

Down the Ethereum rabbit hole

I know smart people who react to cryptocurrency with everything from outright skepticism to guarded indifference to enthusiasm. This year I finally looked down the rabbit hole for myself, and was surprised how much potential is there, specifically in Ethereum; this post is an attempt to collect what I’ve learned. So first, links and commentary […]

Leisurely Consecration

Public Square Magazine recently put up a piece I wrote on Josef Pieper’s “Leisure: The Basis of Culture” and his concept of leisure/worship as contrasted with laziness/idleness/acedia. I’m quite proud of it; give it a read!

The Request Batting Average

There may or may not be stupid questions, but there are definitely stupid requests. I have a concept of a “request batting average,” computed as [number of approvals] divided by [number of requests]. You can tell a lot about the quality of an engineer asking for money, or a Christian saying his prayers, by looking […]