George Budd @Gbudd@qoto.org

"I am guessing she was on stage for 1.5-2 hours a night. If you've seen her live performances you'll note that she is dancing and singing and PLAYING THE FLUTE in all of these songs.

I, deemed average BMI by Science, can barely dance through one Lizzo song, let alone keep it up for multiple hours. And I run 3 miles three times a week. So the next time you hear someone opine that Lizzo is normalizing obesity, know that this is simply more fat-phobia disguised as health concerns.” #lizzo #health

I absolutely adore the whimsical #art of 3D sidewalk chalk artist David Zinn. https://zinnart.com

Zinn creates delightful “works of ephemeral pareidolic anamorphosis” inspired by weeds, sewer covers, traffic cones & nearly everything he encounters around his Ann Arbor community.

This is the only Juneteenth article you need today. Also happy Juneteenth to all who accept and promote accurate American history. To everyone else: happy Monday. 😬 https://thegrio.com/2023/06/19/what-to-white-people-is-the-19th-of-june/

RIP #DanielEllsberg. This account of how #poet Gary Snyder inspired the Pentagon Papers whistleblower is one of the most fascinating and least-known literary anecdotes of all time. Via #BeatGeneration scholar Randy Roark.

Anyone lambasting self driving cars for not moving for emergency vehicles has never spent time on emergency calls. People do amazingly stupid things in front of our ambulances all the time. I see people pull into intersections, panic, and stop in front of the rig. I see them just plain ignore the siren. I see them try to tailgate the ambulance through traffic. I see folks park right up against the bumper on scene. I’m not defending self driving tech, but people are unpredictable and stupid too.

24 hours of Earth's rotation, with the camera locked to the sky instead of the ground. We're all hanging out on this spinning rock.
Brilliant video by Bartosz Wojczyński. https://artuniverse.eu/gallery/190705-rotation24h #nature #wonder #earth

🔥East Coast friends: if the #Wildfire smoke is thick in your area, build a Corsi-Rosenthal box filter. These are inexpensive to build and very effective, and they filter and exchange the air in your house very efficiently. We use them extensively here in the western US when the fire smoke is bad. See this resource for how to build one:

https://cleanaircrew.org/box-fan-filters/

Firecat!

Dear fellow #IT people. I know we all hate it when users give us vague error reports like "it's not working!".
But how often do you go out of your way to thank them when they get it right and send you an error message with a screenshot and reproduction steps?

If you don't do this already, I highly recommend starting ASAP. Even for the most technical users, it's helpful to perform this simple action as *positive reinforcement* for doing things right. Training users to be better at their jobs makes all of *our* jobs easier as a result.

But, as an added bonus, people seem to like being thanked! So, it also makes them like you more as a side effect ("oh, (s)he's not one of those grouchy IT people!").

I am very sorry to report that I have reached the end of my ability to live.

I will be compassionately let go on #Caturday #cats #love #animals #peace

I have had a very long, very very good life. I have had the best humans a cat could ask for. I had the best pal I could have asked for.

I will say a bit more on Saturday, but for now.... I snuggle.

#Caturday

Lately I've been reading about autocatalytic sets. Wait! Don't go away. Trust me, you want to read this!

One of they key requirements for life as we know it is metabolism. Debates about life often point to fire as "metabolizing," but that's too simplistic.

Metabolism for life can be broken down as anabolism and catabolism, or "constructive metabolism" and "destructive metabolism."

1/*

20 years ago at Clarion West, my submission story was one of the first we critiqued. Our instructor Nancy Kress advised that I not use the pen name I was currently going by (Finley Larkin - a combo of family names).

She said something like: Don't use a name you wouldn't want etched into a Nebula Award.

At the time thought: If I win a Nebula, I won't care what name they put on it because I'll be a Nebula winner!

Well. Here we are today and there's a Nebula with my name on it! 😍

I’m gonna come out and say it again — if you feel the need to refuse standard of care medical treatment for religious or moral reasons, you don’t belong in medicine. Just fuck off and find a career where vulnerable people relying on you don’t suffer because of your selfishness. I treat nazis. I treat pedophiles. I treat people of all stripes. I’ve treated drunk drivers after I took the radio call to pronounce time of death for their victims.

We. Don’t. Refuse. Care.

Don't tell the kids, but sometimes mathematicians consider infinity as a number on the same footing as all the rest. This lets curl up the complex plane into a sphere with ∞ as its north pole. 0 is at the south pole. Around the equator we have 1, -1, i and -i. These 6 points are the corners of an octahedron!

Now we can can create cool stuff like the 'Bolza curve'. Make up a polynomial that vanishes at 0, 1, -1, i and -i:

x(x-1)(x+1)(x-i)(x+i) = x(x² - 1)(x² + 1) = x(x⁴ -1) = x⁵−x

The equation y² = x⁵−x defines the Bolza curve. You can draw its real solutions but the fun starts when you consider complex solutions, even allowing infinity as a number.

Say you try to solve it for y. To do this, you just take the square root of both sides. Since most numbers have two square roots, you usually get two solutions. The only numbers that don't have two square roots are 0 and ∞. So you get just one solution when x⁵−x = 0, and this happens at five points:

x = 0, 1, -1, i, -i

But you also get just one solution when x⁵−x = ∞, and this happens when x = ∞. (Honest.)

So, if I were better at drawing, I could draw all the solutions (x,y) of y² = x⁵−x, and you'd see a surface with two sheets sitting over each x point on the sphere - except at the six corners of the octahedron, where the two merge into one!

This is the Bolza curve in all its glory. Alas, so far it seems to be visible only by the 'inner eye' of mathematicians - I don't see a picture online anywhere. But I wrote more about it here:

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/diary/january_2022.html

The moral is: it's important to learn the rules in math, follow them carefully... and then very carefully BREAK them to discover new things.

Doggo though he was alone..

White supremacy is not a mental illness but the GQP is trying its best to trigger the gullibles into deplorable behavior.