@loquitur
Ex-NASA Unix algorithms buff. Miniaturist by inclination, I admire the work of Edward Gorey. San Francisco born & still there. Undefined by my 31-year-old twins. Likes: Pynchon, Borges, O'Keeffe, Lehrer, Incredible String Band, Paul Robeson, Remedios Varo.
Thanx. I'm sympathetic; I live in a major city where Tourette syndrome occurs in public enough to evoke reactions, whether or not it is properly understood. Here the irony is that although the syndrome is "uncontrollable", it takes much self-control to make a TikTok vid to present it unvarnished.
Ah, the year when both "The FBI" (starring Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.) and Jack Webb's "Dragnet" were playing on TV. Alas, this was before his time.
Serendipitously, I was just reading about Climategate (p. 69-70) in your great collaboration with Prof. Hotez "Science Under Siege". Sad about her, not just wrongheaded about hockey-stick verification, but so opportunistic about other areas you've highlighted. Did she know in advance about JE?
The excess COVID deaths caused by DJT-encouraged vaccine hesitancy were estimated at 200,000-300,000. Agree that USAID stoppage estimates result in more annually per simulations, only to be attenuated by gap filling by other governments or intl. actors. Climate change death is another horrorshow.
Impeachment of any cabinet-level official still requires 2/3 of the Senate for removal. Sad — only takes a simple majority to confirm, as Cassidy did for Kennedy but now regrets.
Further amplifying the statistical snark (the rest of the political junkie site (long-running for over 20 years) is often this way, too): www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Item...
Some folks at Sun pronounced HP UX "Hockey pucks", especially the hockey-enthused CEO Scott McNealy.
Ah, ye olde Unix wars, with every vendor (Sun, HP, DEC, IBM, SGI, etc.) having their own version. Now it's settled -- Unix clone Linux wins for most commercial server hardware, while Apple runs with BSD Unix for consumer goods.
Hopefully, the FERC estimates for the next several years won't be too impacted by the active sabotage of renewable energy by DJT, outlined here (NYT gift article): www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/c...
Cyber Ninjas redux.
Here's a rundown on why DJT's polling numbers remain stubbornly near 39%, and are not closer to his low of 34%.
Executive summary -- it's the framing provided by the "news desert" vacuum filled by the Sinclair group: cmarmitage.substack.com/p/how-do-39-...
If DJT were the only force, anything could happen. But it only takes 4 House Democrats and 20 Senate GOP to remove DJT completely from the equation. About financial repercussions, it's better to quote a real economist like Paul Krugman paulkrugman.substack.com/p/its-sundow...
Further, here's a very approachable laudatory note about Conway from an unusual source (a politics-junkie website run by two academic professors, one a noted computer scientist and another who is a historian): www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Item...
Another computing propellerhead who broke the gender barrier (but in a slightly different way) was Lynn Conway. Included in her recognitions was the IBM Lifetime Achievement Award, given after a rare public apology by them for once firing her. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Co...
Yup, oil wars are so 20th century, since both China & the U.S. have reached peak oil consumption due to electrification, where 90%+ of new power plants use renewable energy. See also www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Item...
This is reserves, not production. Fortunately, as the world electrifies, peak *consumption* of oil is being reached in both China and the U.S. as 95%+ of new energy sources actually put online are solar+wind+water. Solar has already won, but many folks don't know it. Oil wars are so 20th century.
… by that I mean you don’t just take the empirical “FSD” programming and flip a switch (i.e. somehow “mirror image” the neural nets) exhibiting a general truth. Like Ginger Rogers did with Fred Astaire, only “backwards and in high heels”, ha!
Quite thoughtful! The bit about "confusing local wins with general truths" reminds me of tooling around SF in a driver-assisted Tesla. The careful NN training "as is" would instantly fail in a reversed-lane country like the UK. Solution is to retrain there, but w/o extracting "general truth" 1st ...
Thank the "one-man environmental disaster" Thomas Midgley Jr., who, in addition to helping spread tetraethyl lead around in the atmosphere, co-piloted CFCs such as Freon into our environment. Check this out for more eye-rolling bits: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_....
But it's hard to rewrite stuff where someone, or possibly multiple people at multiple agencies, already have copies of the originals. Similarly, the survivors + Massie + the estate may have their own copies of originals, and are just waiting for blatant mismatches or to release what DOJ doesn't.
This has been out for a while, but is only for one property:
www.justice.gov/ag/media/139...
Here is the article mentioning H&M -- it's too bad Recology only landfills textiles, but Goodwill/Salvation Army does landfill diversion. apple.news/A-SeKhbZfTRa...
Re: math SOTA--very impressed by the 118/120 score on the collegiate William Lowell Putnam competition, notoriously more difficult than IMO, taken by HS students. I took courses once from a top-5 Putnam fellow who was dean of 3 depts. (math, engineering, and CS) at UC Berkeley, prof Elwyn Berlekamp.
First, good to see your influence as a subject in Bill McKibben's "Here Comes the Sun"! 2nd, US solar will skyrocket when UL approves "balcony solar" as a consumer product like Germany's done. In 3 yrs, 1M+ there have hung a 400W panel or two from a railing/window sill. No permits, just a wall plug.
Solar in the US will skyrocket when UL approves "balcony solar" as a consumer product in the U.S. like Germany has done. In 3 years, millions of folks there have hung a 400W panel or two (800W) from a railing or windowsill. No rooftop install needed, no permits, only a 240/120V plug. Renters too.
“But I have dreamt a dreary dream
Beyond the Isle of Skye.
I saw a dead man win a fight,
And I think that man was I.”
— Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, reprising
The Battle of Otterburn, Child Ballad #161
in “The Devil is Dead"
Yes. I find it enlightening sometimes to reread the classic De Millo/Lipton/Perlis paper "Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs": www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLO...
Or this (these blues-artist ripoffs happen all the time): www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hbg...
Looks like the science community has found a home.
academic.oup.com/icb/article-...
If they've recently ended the 2025 program, or it's just greenwashing, I'll retract that part, but solar is the absolute way to go for data centers around the world, as Apple has certainly recognized.