sojournTime @sojournTime@qoto.org

Drops of Jupiter is still a banger

neat hand-drawn zoetrope disc

#zoetrope #animation

I assembled my new Framework laptop this morning! I was SUPER nervous about assembling a laptop, but they have great video and written instructions on their website, and it booted into bios with no issue! I'm really excited about having a laptop that is designed to be repairable, and I hope it lasts me for a LONG time

Turns out that the slowest part of this process is actually waiting for my rural internet to download the latest version of Ubuntu...

Thanks for the recommendations, fediverse.

#Netzfund

The open letter genre is not my favorite, but this is a pretty good one: it makes sense both as a letter and as an editorial (whereas I think most open letters only succeed at one of those at most). Makes me feel proud to be a ProPublica supporter. https://link.propublica.net/view/5f0a081e2adb6b4c4e117336mh8n0.fq0/77a20502

If you love Richard Feynman you've got to watch this video...

... where Angela Collier will ruthlessly dissect the mythology he built around himself. You probably won't agree with everything she says, and you may hate some of it, but it will still be thought-provoking.

I didn't know about what she calls "Feynman bros": lazy male students who read Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman! and try to adopt the flashy womanizing persona he depicts there, instead of working hard on physics. I can easily believe they exist. So if you know a youngster who likes physics, don't give them that book. Instead do what my uncle did: give them The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

I didn't know these books and indeed every book 'by Feynman' was actually written by his Caltech colleague Robert Leighton or his son Ralph Leighton based on audiotapes of lectures or conversations. I still don't know how much of a role Feynman had in crafting these concoctions.

I *did* know that he once flew into a rage and tried to choke his second wife.

I did not know he was good with children, eagerly answering letters from them, etc. It's nice that Collier points out this good side.

I *did* notice, from his anecdotes, that he put a huge amount of work into trying to seem like a manly man rather than a nerd.

I didn't fully notice that almost none of his anecdotes feature the famous physicists he worked with at the Manhattan Project. Collier points out that this leaves him free to make things up.

I think she overlooks how he eagerly *points out* that he used tricks to seem smart. He explains the tricks to show they're not so hard.

I could go on....

(1/2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc

Today, 100 million Americans are the target of a much larger misinformation campaign, executed by Fox News et al, showing them a distorted view of the world at the behest of the entire Republican Party, rather than a single candidate.

~Fin~

The blogs became daily reads for staff, whose coverage was inexorably influenced by the Thune campaign's slow drip of poison.

Come Election Day, Thune won by scarcely 4,500 votes. Senate Democrats lost their leader. Republicans got their scalp.

Lauck went on to be a senior advisor to Thune, and Van Beeck spent years as legislative counsel for Thune. All this had zero impact on public disclosure and campaign finance laws.

The blogs had a single, shared mission: distort the worldview of the political reporters at the Argus Leader, the state's major newspaper. Each blog covered the race in great detail, complaining about claimed bias from the paper and its reporters (never mind that none existed).

Argus Leader reporters were not accustomed to having a constant source of feedback, and they each blog became a funhouse mirror in which they perceived themselves.

Ultimately, Daschle would be the sole incumbent to lose, and the first majority leader to lose reelection since 1952. The Republican nominee was Thune, formerly South Dakota's House rep.

Thune hired two people—Jon Lauck and Jason Van Beek—and had them start South Dakota political blogs, "Daschle v. Thune" and "South Dakota Politics." There was no disclosure that those blogs were Thune campaign mouthpieces. They pretended to be independent.

Twenty years ago, John Thune was elected to the U.S. Senate using a terrible, novel misinformation campaign that presaged the media environment of 2024. With Thune the new majority leader of the Senate, post-election, I think it's time to retell this story that has somehow been forgotten.

In 2004, Sen. Tom Daschle was the Senate minority leader, and Republicans were desperate for his scalp.

Speaking as someone living in Hungary, to friends in the #USA:

The greatest weapon the system has is outrage fatigue. Doing so many unimaginable things at the same time that people just sigh and go on. Having so many things to protest that you run out of days and hours. Piling on so you start focusing on surviving with your bare mental health day to day.

Pick your cause and stick to it. Support others who focus on different causes. Don't try to do everything at once.

Sometimes, people make fun of guys for doing stuff like this, but I think it's way more cool to do something you are passionate about, that is actually constructive, than buying guns for a self-created Apocalypse and harassing women online, because they won't have sex with them.

Nerds rule!

People have gotten so used to the existence of the Internet Archive’s web archive that they forget how revolutionary and subversive it is. The idea that that is somehow safe while the book lending was not is completely flawed. They were just up against a more powerful group.

#InternetArchive

Seen a couple takes about the Hachette case along the lines of “the Internet Archive should’ve stuck to just archiving the Internet and not testing new theories of copyright” and uhhh... I’m not sure what it is you think the Internet Archive does, outside of testing new theories of copyright.

#InternetArchive

I can't decide which of these is the most idiotic cliche in political journalism. You decide.

Mathematicians get annoyed at how physicists take beautiful formulas and clutter them up with 'useless' constants like

𝑐 - the speed of light
ℏ - Planck's constant
𝑘 - Boltzmann's constant
𝐺 - the gravitational constant

making it harder to see the essence of things. Most mathematicians prefer units where all these constants are set equal to 1.

I used to be like that too - but right now I'm doing a project where I 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑 these constants to see the essence of things!

(Of course it's good to keep these constants around to avoid making mistakes where you equate quantities with different dimensions: this is what computer scientists would call a 'typing discipline'. That's important, but it's NOT what I'm talking about now.)

When you're studying just one physical theory at a time, you can set dimensionful constants equal to 1 to simplify things. But often we like to study a whole 𝑓𝑎𝑚𝑖𝑙𝑦 of physical theories at once - a family where those constants take different values! We can't set them to 1 if we're interested in what happens when they approach 0. For example:

As 𝑐 → 0, special relativity reduces to Newtonian physics.
As ℏ → 0, quantum mechanics reduces to classical mechanics.
As 𝑘 → 0, statistical mechanics reduces to classical mechanics.
As 𝐺 → 0, general relativity reduces to special relativity.

And this is just the beginning of the story: various collections of constants can approach 0 at different rates, and so on.

When we do this, we're studying what mathematicians would call a 'moduli space' of theories - or even better, a moduli stack. We may want to do 'deformation theory', where we expand answers in powers of some constant. And so on.

So don't scorn those constants!

So... my son nerd sniped me! He saw a video on the Fold-and-Cut Theorem by Vsauce and said I should figure out how to fold a piece of paper to cut out the hat and spectre tiles with one cut. Mission accomplished! This blog post has downloadable PDFs: https://divisbyzero.com/2024/08/14/fold-and-cut-hat-and-spectre-tiles/