Nick @internic@qoto.org

After spending some time familiarising myself with pywavelets, I have found that an R library (WaveletComp) is probably more convenient. It has confidence intervals (pywavelets, not at the moment of writing), and the cone of influence seems to be automatic.

pywavelets is a generic tool for wavelets, while WaveComp is more focused on statistics for time series. I tend to go directly to Python, and I think I need to change my default when thinking in software to do somewhat advanced statistics.

Another PSA that Google uses its fonts to track traffic to other people's websites. Google has no business knowing who visits other people's websites. If you want to use Google hosted 'free' fonts in your site, let your visitors know, or learn to host them locally on your server.

For instance:

https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/how-to-self-host-google-fonts--cms-34775t

To use Big Tech is to feed it. There are other ways.

"Before former President Donald Trump could appear in Tucson a second time, his campaign had to make a deposit of $145,222.70 upfront.

The required deposit came about because Trump failed to pay an $81,837 bill from a campaign event he held at the Tucson Convention Center in 2016."

https://www.kold.com/2024/09/11/trump-campaign-required-pay-upfront-deposit-145000-before-thursday-event-tucson/

Scientists used #NASAWebb to observe our Extreme Outer Galaxy, a region bursting at the seams with activity.

Find:
⭐ young stars
💨 jets of material
🌌 background galaxies
✨ foreground stars

Learn more about the fringes of our Milky Way: bit.ly/3Xl0F2N

HISTORY OF PHYSICS

Michael Faraday and the first attempt of a Unified Theory.

On March 19, 1849, Faraday's diary records:

'Gravity. Surely this force must be capable of an experimental relation to Electricity, Magnetism and the other forces, so as to bind it up with them in reciprocal action and equivalent effect. Consider for a moment how to set about touching this matter by facts and trial'.

1/

I'm working with someone who uses github copilot and a lot of my feedback boils down to "that's something that people used to do in #python but it's obsolete now" because *of course* that's the sort of feedback I'd give. Of the code that github stole, most of it is always going old because, like, more things happened in the past than in the present. So now we live in a very weird present-future where allegedly-cutting-edge "AI" is telling us to do Python 2.7 idioms like class ClassName(object)

I'd love ideas for how to intentionally "break" my terminal so that one of these 4 things happen:

1. backspace doesn’t work, it prints ^H instead
2. terminal won't echo my characters when you type them
3. the line not breaking, and the terminal pasting new characters over old ones
4. overflowing the line, and when I backspace, the line is poorly redrawn

ideally I'd love steps that are:

a) specific
b) close to something that might "realistically” happen while using the terminal normally

If the next administration wants to support entrepreneurs and small biz, we need a renewal of the paperwork minimization rules.

I'm now 45 minutes into insurance paperwork, despite having a broker supporting me. Enjoying such questions as "What is the ending month of the ERISA plan."

I've got 4 outstanding emails to lawyers, CPAs and more support email folks.

I was a bit apprehensive about signing up to #Mastodon but I really shouldn't have worried. Compared to the Bluebird of Misery (or Xitter, because so many people are leaving) it's like a breath of fresh air to be surrounded by pleasant and positive people on here!

Reynisdrangar sea stacks off the southern coast of #Iceland at Vík í Mýrdal. Although the sea looks dark and foreboding, it's actually very clear water but the sand beneath is black.

@photography

Please read the ALT tag for more...

Will Big Journalism will take serious note of something Trump said on Fox "News" today, referring to the ABC News moderators' fact-checking of three (among dozens) of lies during the debate:

"They're a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that."

Another lie, of course: The government doesn't license news organizations per se.

But ABC's airwave licenses are massively valuable.This is not an idle threat.

delighted

I think my favourite bash solution so far (h/t @philz42) is to use `trap DEBUG` to print the filename & line number every time PATH is modified

something like this:

function _trap_DEBUG() {
local cmd="${BASH_COMMAND}"
local line="${BASH_LINENO}"
local filename="${BASH_SOURCE[1]}"
if [[ "${cmd}" == *"PATH"* ]]; then
echo "${filename} line ${line}: '${cmd}'"
fi
}

trap '_trap_DEBUG' DEBUG
set -T

not sure if there's a zsh equivalent though

writing about PATH is so funny, it's like

1. just add “PATH=$PATH:/my/dir" to your shell config, no big deal
2. ok but uh also you need to worry about path ordering, maybe it has to be `PATH=/my/dir:$PATH` instead
3. oh also bash sometimes caches PATH lookups, so if that happens then you need to run `rehash`
4. oh yeah and also if there are spaces in your PATH, then you need to quote it every time you add to it, like `PATH=/my/dir:”$PATH”`
5. also sometimes commands are aliases or builtins

The solar corona is heated to millions of degrees, vastly hotter than the surface of the Sun. Astronomers suspect the magnetic fields that pierce the surface somehow trap energy and drive the increasing temperatures. Astronomers have observed the magnetic fields on the surface of the Sun for decades, and now, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Maui has mapped out the coronal magnetic fields for the corona in unprecedented detail.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1057450

For those that don't know, I help run a giant women in technology slack group (more than 10,000 members!)

It's not just open to software and computer folks, however much that's the main group.

If you're a woman in biotech, in industrial science, in manufacturing or engineering, any technical field or technical line of business, you're welcome to join. It's very big tent about 'tech' and 'woman' both.

HMU for an invite

Good. Senate leaders ask FTC to investigate AI content summaries as anti-competitive: The latest AI features found in Meta, Perplexity, Apple, Google and others are hitting artists, creators, news site and publishers while they’re down. Meanwhile Google and Meta, reporting record breaking billions of dollars per year in advertising revenue increase because of AI summaries keeping users on Facebook and Google sites without sending any traffic to original creators https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/10/senate-leaders-ask-ftc-to-investigate-ai-content-summaries-as-anti-competitive/

All right, I'm going to get an e-ink tablet, probably. I take paper notes constantly and I'd like to have them organised in one place and easily-searchable, instead of in a stack of notebooks on my office shelf. Even with the contents pages I make for each one, they're quite hard to navigate...

Anyone got any recommendations? I know ReMarkable advertise well, but I heard you can't search handwritten notes, which sort of sucks.

(Please note: yes, it has to be e-ink.)

(Boosts welcome.)

A truth about technological progress that I am coming to realize is almost universal is "that which empowers also enfeebles".

I'm thinking right now about the move from physical paper books to digital.

There's a huge "MIT used book sale" happening today. That kind of thing just doesn't happen in the digital book universe.

It COULD in a fair world, but yay unconstrained megacorp capitalism, it currently can't.

No reason Amazon couldn't set up a system where I could transfer my Kindle books to anyone for $0 or some fee if that's what I was going for. But this will never happen because from their perspective it would represent investment without return, and a diminishment of sales on new titles.

Stupid, myopic narrow minded thinking will kill us all.