What is The Linked Letters?
The Linked Letters is operated by me, George Limpert, a publication I created originally in 2024 with encouragement and support from my father. I had spent the past two decades in academia as a student and then a faculty member. My job was funded from “soft money”, meaning that it required developing grant proposals with the hope that they would be reviewed favorably. I felt like I didn’t have as much direct control as I’d want over my success, which is why I wanted to enter the private sector and start my own business.
Although my background in academia was in meteorology and climatology, I also had many programming projects on the side involving video game development and sports analytics. I’m still interested in meteorology as well, even though I’m no longer practicing in that field. Over time, I developed many software and hardware projects for a wide variety of purposes. Rather than keep this information to myself, I’d like to share it with the public.
I’ve long been an advocate for free and open source software, using Linux and many other free software tools for my work. I believe that the world is a better place when information, data, and software are shared freely instead of locked up in proprietary vaults. For that reason, I plan to release my projects in a collection on Github. My license of choice is the GNU General Public License, which allows users to freely distribute and modify the source code while ensuring that the software remain free.
The name The Linked Letters was my father’s idea, a reference to the interlocking letters that are common on baseball uniforms. Baseball was the first sport I followed, and the first baseball season I remember well was the 1993 season. I was a Cardinals fan who watched my team fall out of contention that year, then saw the next season ruined by a mid-season strike. Even now, baseball is still my favorite sport, though I also thoroughly enjoy hockey, football, basketball, and motorsports. While I intend to post a lot of baseball content, I decided to also publish other types of content at The Linked Letters, too. Some of the projects I’d like to write about in the near future include:
A tutorial for the new SDL3 graphics and game library, and perhaps to create some simple video games
An improved climatology of severe thunderstorms, and how climate change may be changing severe weather patters in the United States
Hardware projects using the Arduino and Raspberry Pi platforms to collect weather data and perform various other tasks
Using statistics to rate teams in football, hockey, basketball, and baseball, and to predict the outcomes of upcoming games
Analyzing publicly available data from racing series like NASCAR and Formula 1 to evaluate the performance of teams
Developing tools to better understand the wealth of data that Major League Baseball has released via Statcast, especially to understand what attributes actually make a good hitter or an effective pitcher
Developing a robust system to evaluate how baseball players’ skills evolve with age, then using that system to make predictions of player performance in upcoming seasons
My pledge
In addition to helping me with the original concept for The Linked Letters, my father is also the person who originally got me interested in science fiction like Star Trek and Doctor Who. Although I like the usually optimistic future of Star Trek, I have a few rather dystopian concerns for our own future. One is an internet where artificial intelligence is constantly trained on content, then generates output that is fed to more chatbots, leading to vast amounts of low-quality content that isn’t always readily distinguished from authentic content generated by real people. The other is a future where we depend on complex hardware and software systems to perform many functions for us, but we don’t have enough people around who understand how those systems work. I also have concerns about a future where virtually all of our content is locked behind paywalls, where our world depends on microtransactions paid to a few large corporate behemoths that act as the gatekeepers to the arts and sciences, and scant little content is freely available. I hope that none of these dystopia will ever happen, and I do not wish to contribute to any of these futures. As a result, here is my pledge:
My pace of publishing articles is a bit slower than other sites because I do all of my work myself, including developing source code, writing articles, and then editing them before publication. However, my pledge is to release as much of my source code as possible under free and open source licenses, and to never use artificial intelligence or chatbots to write content for me.
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