Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

Made katsu curry for the first time last night. Not so bad, but it made me want to go visit Japan again, which I fear won't be possible for a few years. 🙁

(Amazingly, I took photos of every stage except the finished product. 🤦)

@gedvondur Or alternately get on a video call with someone where your phone is pointing at the ends and have them tell you the colors as you work.

Not sure your setup, but I imagine you could rig up something similar to the pseudo-overhead-projector things people make for teaching classes (they draw on a piece of paper and capture the image from overhead, then broadcast it to the class).

@gedvondur Probably a pain, but can you clamp the ends in place so the order won't change, take a picture of them, then use a color-picker software to look up the associated hex codes?

Apparently CVS Minute Clinics will do it, but not in CT or some other states. We may just go get it done in Massachusetts to minimize the fuss, as annoying as that is.

Would be nice to know why Minute Clinics have this rule in CT, so that I can (I assume) call the relevant legislator.

@rodolpho No, that's a good idea! (I didn't even know these things existed.)

I'm going to call my insurance and see if they offer any options, if they can't help, I'll try the travel clinic.

I can't seem to find any way to get a flu shot for my 2 year old without going to a pediatrician (we don't have a pediatrician in the area yet, since we recently moved). Pediatricians won't give the shot unless you are a patient, CVS won't do it, urgent care doesn't do vaccines.

This seems less than advisable for a public health measure. I'd think that for something like preventing a kid from being a vector for a deadly disease, you'd want as little bureaucracy as possible. 😕

@2ck Also, I think that politics is a team sport for the majority of people in the US. If you are a straight-ticket Republican / Democrat voter (which most people are), you are not going to accidentally miss something in the news that would flip your vote to the other side of the aisle — anything that makes a particular candidate so disdainful that committed partisans would flip allegiance for them would be such a big story that you'd hear about it anyway.

On the other hand, spending your time studying a diverse selection of "long view" sources is almost certainly more likely to change your mind about what part(ies) to support or not support, since it could cause an evolution in your thinking about what the best policies are.

@2ck I disagree here. The marginal voter is probably not informed particularly well by following the news.

Consider this: your vote is most likely to make an impact (and have a direct impact on you) in local elections, but very few people follow local politics.

Also, voting happens fairly infrequently — you don't need to poll for that information at a high frequency. Your time is much better spent reading history, economics and political science to build a framework for what good policies look like, and then reading a dispassionate summary of the candidates' positions and their previous actions just prior to voting.

@Electronics Probably should have tagged this #electronics as well.

@Electronics Anyone have a suggestion on how to convert an LTSpice model to something that ngspice / oregano can handle?

I found a .asm / .asc schematic for the ULN2003 transistor array that I'd like to try out, but oregano doesn't seem to have a way to import it.

I'm willing to try other circuit simulators as long as they have a reasonable GUI. I already tried Qucs and it seems to be worse in this regard (and buggy in general).

I would really love it if there were a cultural norm that science journalism aimed at the general public would not publish stories about anything until it's accepted widely enough to be included in textbooks.

Instead, no one reads textbooks but they read the science section of the newspaper, which spouts out nonsense (and contradictory nonsense) that never gets any further scrutiny or coverage, and the public gets a horrible misunderstanding about both the nature of science and the nature of the universe. ☹

One thing I'll note about this: it's easy to think that I'm just talking about political news, but this 100% applies to "science journalism" as well. The scientific news cycle is so horribly broken (which I see as a major contributor to stuff like the reproducibility crisis), and I think a big part of the reason is that people have taken to following science happening "up to the minute", and as a result the only things that get covered as news are early-phase research papers — and ones that give surprising results!

Both of these things make it much more likely that any conclusions drawn from them would be spurious!

@brainwane And as I mentioned in one of the posts in the thread, I'm mainly talking about the current state of things, on the margin. I'm not advocating a situation where no news is produced and no one learns about the wider world, just that there's an immense over-production and over-consumption of news at the moment.

Interestingly, I could see a world where my view is "no one should read 'the news'" rather than "fewer people should read 'the news''" — one where there is no generalized news, and people tend to follow specialized news (e.g. I follow Python news and I could follow news about my neighborhood or my town). If we did this and cultivated networks of people we trusted to show us interesting things that are timely and actionable, we'd probably get a much better experience (chances are you are 1-2 degrees of freedom away from someone who could tell you about a deadly disease coming or something).

@brainwane At the end of the day, most world events are not something you can personally affect or which should change your behavior in any way.

In the very rare situations where this is the case, you'd be better off cultivating networks of people you trust to deliver you actual actionable information, since that automatically filters the signal from the noise for you.

@brainwane I appreciate your perspective on this.

I think that the position that people who have less table living situations need the news more is not incompatible with my thesis that fewer people should read the news — I would guess that the median news consumer is well-off and in a stable situation.

That said, I think that the vast majority of news is *not* actionable, and even for people who would take action it doesn't make sense to drink from the news firehose.

@drewfer It's certainly better than instant news, but it's still got all the wrong incentives, and is generally not terribly accurate.

@hansw Lol. I am by no means a "company man".

If you are not interested in a civil conversation please do not engage me, though.