Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

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. 😕

@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!

This is one reason I am a fan of targeted advertising in principle — it should prevent people from polluting the information landscape.

In practice, I’m not convinced it works amazingly well, and the pursuit of it has done all kinds of damage to the information consumption and distribution architecture ­— plus it’s involved creating incredibly juicy targets for adversarial actors like governments.

Another thing to note: news is probably more useless than it should be because of the spam problem.

General news is probably fairly useless because there are just not a lot of things happening that everyone in the world needs to know about, so the S/N ratio is very low for any given consumer.

It’s made even worse, though, because attention is valuable and any broad communications medium will be infested by memetic parasites.

Ideally, everyone in the world would be notified of stuff like, “Here’s a new vaccine that will stop a terrible disease if you get it today”, but any sufficiently broad, high-priority channel like that will get hijacked by people who think educating people about their preferred cause justifies using the scarce bandwidth of the high-priority broadcast spectrum.

You might object, “Sure it’s not actionable for me, but if no one consumed the news, even important things wouldn’t percolate through society!”

That is probably true, but we’re so far from the point where the marginal consumption of additional news is a net positive that I don’t think we’re in any danger of an under-informed network here.

It would be interesting to have a service that gives you summaries of the news from 6 or 12 months ago, with care taken to cover the general response and counter-narratives.

I think more people should have this attitude (that you should not consume news):

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/03/the_case_agains_6.html

I have talked to people who are genuinely distressed by things happening in the news and are afraid to miss something if they cut it out. But usually information in the news isn’t actionable even if it’s important.

Just finished speaking at Chicago’s #python meetup Chipy.

One nice thing about virtual meetups — no waiting for the video to be processed and released!

Stream from my ChiPy talk is already up. Full meetup: https://youtu.be/8JFUgAJLoQE

My talk starts at ~41:53: https://youtu.be/8JFUgAJLoQE?t=2513

Slides: https://pganssle-talks.github.io/chipy-nov-2020-zoneinfo

Saw this in my back yard on Monday.

Man, people around here really over-feed their dogs!

The pumpkins I carved for Halloween yesterday. My son picked the general designs and left me with the trivial detail of executing them. 😅

Not bad considering I can’t remember the last time I carved a pumpkin. 😀

(Note the “Easter egg” shadow behind the kitty 😺)

#Halloween #pumpkins

The workbench has taken its rightful place as a work station for electronics and such (though some of the components migrate to the main desk if I need to program a microcontroller…)

This is likely the last picture of a tidy workbench I’ll get for a while.

“Bigger” here means 27” or 32”. I probably would have upgraded long ago, but I find it hard to tell whether my day-to-day experience (using Linux and not playing games) would be significantly degraded by getting some of the drastically cheaper models available.

Some steps in the evolution of my workstation:

1. Workbench as desk
   2-3. Switched to standing desk
2. Added monitor arms

Next steps: Get at least one bigger monitor, setup up my cable management game.

Exciting announcement: I’ll be giving a keynote talk at PyConf Hyderabad, which will place December 5-6th, 2020 (virtually, this year):

https://twitter.com/pyconfhyd/status/1321728958052794368?s=20

Tickets are available here: https://pyconf.hydpy.org/2020/

CfP is still open until November 8th: https://twitter.com/pyconfhyd/status/1313690523555819522?s=20

#PyConfHyd2020 #python