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10-4-3-1-3-2. Had to work out after work today. Wasn't the worst, but yeah, there's a lot of people at the gym after work.
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Rituals of Childhood
The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass.
The last paragraph in that essay explains very clearly that a choice has been made. -
I like these guys. Also, I like that I can use the Megadeth shirt to tell that this was from the '90s.
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Make Way for Ducklings protest
“In the book, the ducklings were looking for a place to stay. If that were to happen during today’s climate this would be their fate,” said Alzayer, referring to the cages. “The statue is so beloved in the city. It's a metaphor about who we get upset about caging and who we don't.”
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Satire only makes Jacob Rees-Mogg stronger
The Lord of the Ring, by J R R R Tolkings, is understood to have been informed by J R R R’s first world war experiences.
The larger point of the piece is good, but that line is amazing. -
10-4-4-4-4-4. Gym was empty! 🎉
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Following yesterday's attack on a corrections officer outside the South Bay jail, BPD blocked off the Methadone Mile street where it happened as officers swept the street, making 15 arrests, in a raid that even had a code name. A street sweeper was called in to clear out all the trash - after a bucket of needles was collected.
Compare to what happened after a student at the Orchard Gardens School, just on the other side of Methadone Mile, was pricked by a needle while playing outside in the school yard - where addicts like to shoot up.
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The mayor's education aide, Rob Consalvo, who had watched the protest outside, then got into an argument with parents about whether the city was doing enough to protect the kids. -
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Ran 3.5 miles. It's 84°F. I think that was my limit.
Yesterday, Katt ran 7 miles in hotter weather. 😮 -
Well, I finally got the bot summary emailer working. I have a lot to say about putting it together, but I'm too tired right now. Anyway, if you want to get samples of stuff from my bots emailed to you each day, sign up here!
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So not looking forward to working on more email stuff tonight. When something goes wrong with that stuff, it's incredibly untraceable.
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A bit about the politics around NASA in this article:
Eventually, Congress got the upper hand, putting NASA on track to build the large SLS rocket at a development cost of more than $2 billion a year. The rocket program mostly benefited the Alabama space center and was championed by Alabama State Senator Richard Shelby. The potential of in-space fuel storage and transfer threatened the SLS rocket because it would allow NASA to do some exploration missions with smaller and cheaper rockets. As one source explained at the time, "Senator Shelby called NASA and said if he hears one more word about propellant depots he’s going to cancel the Space Technology program."
That sucks. This also sucks:"Administrator Bridenstine is clearly executing on President’s Trump’s guidance to increase commercial public-private-partnerships at NASA," Miller, now chief executive of UbiquitiLink, told Ars. "The game-changing technology that NASA has discovered is capitalism. This program proves NASA leadership has figured out the future is reusability mixed with commercial public-private-partnerships."
The biggest NASA leaps were made in 1960s. They did not need to "discover their capitalism" to do that. I'm sad that the baseline is now "nothing is good if it doesn't provide shareholder value to someone." -
3-3-5-5-3-5 today at home. It's hot; took it easy.
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A meteor may have crashed into Mars's ocean.
Well, if it had an ocean. They're still not sure about that. But if it did:On a world believed to have lacked Earthlike plate tectonics, any tsunamis were probably triggered by a meteor slamming into a huge body of water.
Mostly, there seems to be a lot of nothing going on other planets, but once in a great while, something like that happens. Also, someday, maybe this:There is a roughly 1-in-100,000 chance that the Earth might be ejected into interstellar space by a stellar encounter before this point, and a 1-in-3-million chance that it will then be captured by another star. Were this to happen, life, assuming it survived the interstellar journey, could potentially continue for far longer.[83]
From the beloved Timeline of the Far Future. -
A paper about how state-of-the-art deep learning often does not beat simpler heuristic methods.
This happens all over software engineering: attractive and new stuff wins over simple and effective stuff. e.g. When React first came out people were wowed by the fact that updated the DOM via a virtual DOM. But 99% of the time, rendering speed was not most web developers' bottleneck. It still bowled a lot of people over.
But also these findings underscore the well-known thing about having a ton of data mattering much more than any particularly algorithm for things like recommendations and prediction.
Also, I'm now hyped to learn more about KNN and the other baseline methods in the paper. -
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Fifty-two inmates killed in Brazil prison riot; 16 decapitated
President Jair Bolsonaro, elected last year on promises to crack down on violent crime, has described plans to “stuff prison cells with criminals.”
“I’d rather a prison cell full of criminals than a cemetery full of innocent people,” he said. “We will build more if necessary.”
The Altamira was already over capacity, according to local media. It was built for 200 detainees, but currently houses 311.
Strangely, I need to be periodically reminded that nationlism kills people, even though I live in its consequences every day.
Sepultura put out a song about an eerily similar massacre back in 1993. -
10-4-4-4-3-3-4. I actually forgot how many sets I normally do and did an extra one. Huh.