Curmudgeon @Curmudgeon@qoto.org

https://youtu.be/aiVkyD1yzJg

My shorthand for the approach we most need in election coberage is this:

"Not the odds, but the stakes."

How does this work in practice? Margaret Sullivan answers that in The Guardian today. "Now’s the time to think about just how bad a DeSantis presidency would be."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/25/ron-desantis-florida-record-presidential-campaign?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Not how DeSantis plans to outwit Trump and then succeed in "the general" (itself an insidery phrase...) but what life would be like if he took power.

Not the odds, but the stakes.

#uspol #journalism

Guys. It's Time For Some Game Theory.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/23/civitas-institute-professor-tenure/

I want to give a shout out to exposure notifications, the API Apple and Google created at the beginning of the pandemic. Well scoped. In close collaboration with domain experts. Privacy protecting. Measurably helped, maybe not as much as hoped, but still. And now being responsibly shut down, as promised.

We should praise folks when tech is done right. I want to see more of this responsible deployment of tech.

NY: White Vet kills mentally ill Black man—GOP makes killer a hero😳

WI: White shooter kills 2 people at BLM rally—GOP makes killer a hero😳

TX: White Vet kills BLM marcher—GOP makes killer a hero😳

DC: Black cop kills white insurrectionist—GOP makes insurrectionist a hero🤔

This is what white supremacy looks like

He changed his mind.. 😂

Obviously the people have spoken. I’ll have some big news about my coverage of #Ukraine soon.

I’ll make sure to post regularly on Mastodon and keep you all in the loop!

Did you know Tesla has cameras both on the outside of vehicles and the inside, and everything is uploaded to Tesla? Anyhoo they’ve been exporting the videos, making memes of customers and then posting them on chat rooms. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sensitive-images-recorded-by-customer-cars-2023-04-06/

Can we stop with the blanket term AI?

Are any of my followers in, near, or soon to be passing through Malmo (Sweden) and want me to owe them a favour? I left a scarf in a restaurant and would like help retrieving it now I am not there any more! (boosts welcome)

A striking visualisation of #climatechange: the date of Kyoto cherry blossoms' reaching full bloom, plotted over the past 1000 years.

Thanks to the cultural significance of cherry blossoms in Japan, we have data on the specific day of the year when a very particular species of cherry blossom (P. jamasakura) reached "full-flowering" (満開) in a specific area on the outskirts of Kyoto (Arashiyama), all the way back to 800 AD.

The trend of the past 50 years is hard to miss…

Stanford: We couldn't have better engineered a scenario to make @Popehat hate everyone and everything

Wayne State: Well, lemme give it a shot
https://popehat.substack.com/p/wayne-state-professor-steven-shaviro

/5 As long as I’ve been writing in public about “wow this guy’s an asshole but his speech is protected,” I’ve been pestered by people saying “oh but why did you have to say he’s an asshole, you didn’t have to say that.” Yeah, you didn’t have to be a tedious nag, but here we fuckin are. Robustly calling out assholes while accurately limning their rights is supposed to model how the free speech bargain works.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/03/tump-judge-matthew-kacsmaryk-steve-vladeck-tweets.html

I mean, how can you not love this deliriously optimistic protest (posted by @MichalFeldman9@twitter)

Why I've been absent from this site the last three weeks.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/03/04/jonathan-salant-last-jersey-reporter-capitol/

Reminder that Twitter has no system for removing badges at scale and will basically just have to use the list of accounts followed by @verified and start removing them manually. Have fun gang

Wow!! What a breathe of fresh air this paper is in the midst of suffocating levels of "AI solves everything" hype cycle.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10798

They have found at long last, a single tile, an "einstein", which they call a "hat"/polykite that tiles the entire plane aperiodically.

Previously the best known aperiodic tiling of the plane required at the least two different tiles, the most famous ones being the Penrose tiles, and those that adorn Alhambra.

It is all the more wonderful that the first two authors don't have any academic/research affiliations. They write somewhere in the paper, how it all started, so wonderful:

"One of the authors (Smith) began investigating the hat polykite as part of his open-ended visual exploration of shapes and their tiling properties. Working largely by hand, with the
assistance of Scherphuis’s PolyForm Puzzle Solver software (www.jaapsch.net/puzzles/
polysolver.htm), he could find no obvious barriers to the construction of large patches, and yet no clear cluster of tiles that filled the plane periodically."

Why is the study of tilings such a big deal? Well, it hints at and tries to formalize various physics concepts that are of immense interest to many of us (and dare I say, even neuroscientists): quasi crystals!, possible new states of matter, emergent structures from simple units, how symmetries and asymmetries arise, stability of heterogenous media, soft matter physics, order without periodicity, criticality etc., etc.,

On quasi-crystals and their search, applications, uses etc., I recommend the wonderful Paul Steinhardt's book: "The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter"

#Physics #Maths #Combinatorics #AperiodicTiling #PenroseTiles #Einstein #Emergence #condensedmatter

TikTok: Look! I discovered hot water melts frozen food faster!

Twitter: Look at this TikTok video showing how to defrost your food faster!

Yahoo news: Millions of Twitter users view TikTok video showing new life hack for melting frozen food!

Mastodon: Please read my academic white paper describing the impacts of public school system underfunding

Random first trial post: today, March 14th, is the 29th anniversary of the Linux 1.0 announcement.

Of course, there are other arguably more important dates in Linux history, but this is one of them.