Brian Marick

Software person (programming and testing). Involved in Agile from relatively early on. One of those grumpy old-timers who think it's lost its way.

I retired during Covid. As I’m “broke to harness,” I keep up what was part of my schtick: read widely and oddly, then explain outside-tech ideas to a mostly-techie audience. Instead of talks, my venues are a blog, a podcast (infrequent), and link-heavy Mastodon posts.

I like boosting other people’s posts. My leftish #uspol posts are so labeled.

podcast: https://podcast.oddly-influenced.dev/
blog: https://blog.oddly-influenced.dev/
github: https://github.com/marick
location: Champaign, Illinois ("downstate"), USA

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npub1yrly4m6mrracwqe0g2gmthvawqt9vs9839692dmrd92mzz873d5q4kdn0g

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marick_at_mstdn.social@momostr.pink

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nostr-pub.wellorder.net

yabu.me

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npub1yrly4m6mrracwqe0g2gmthvawqt9vs9839692dmrd92mzz873d5q4kdn0g

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Last Notes

2026-10-16 15:57:45 UTC

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Andrew Pickering’s /The Mangle of Practice/ has an interesting chapter on Hamilton’s discovery of quaternions. He uses it as an example of some of his ideas about how discoveries happen.
I summarized his chapter here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260207154734/https://www.exampler.com/old-blog/2004/02/13/index.html

2026-10-07 14:23:21 UTC

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I worked summers building houses for my dad. He didn’t pay me much, but he paid me more than I was worth.

2026-09-30 15:26:34 UTC

I support the corporate death penalty. Star Meat Delivery faked inspection certificates on more than 167,000 pounds of meat. It should not be fined. Its headquarters should be razed, the ground where it stood should be salted and turned into a cautionary tale. Local schoolchildren should tour the site and throw rotten tomatoes at unflattering statues of the C-suite executives, who should be barred from ever working in the industry again.
Pour encourager les autres. https://www.borges.pitt.edu/index.php/i/pour-encourager-les-autres

2026-09-17 22:36:53 UTC

You know how, when you have a baby, you suddenly see babies everywhere?
It’s that way with C.S. Peirce and me. In “The Doctrine of Chances,” he made an oblique remark about the normal distribution. Wanted to flesh that out and I find he was there in early experimental statistics:
⁃ Blinded trials: “Peirce's experiment inspired other researchers in psychology and education”
⁃ "the first English-language publication on an optimal design for regression models”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments#Statistical_experiments,_following_Charles_S._Peirce

2026-08-29 22:52:06 UTC

RE: https://mstdn.ca/@dbattistella/117179802627443577
Took me a while to get it.
#note1c4k…wsfz

2026-08-27 14:29:27 UTC

Ratko Mladic has died, aged 84. The Grim Reaper’s aim is getting better.
https://www.reuters.com/world/bosnian-serb-general-ratko-mladic-convicted-genocide-has-died-serbian-tv-reports-2026-08-27/

2026-08-25 22:26:47 UTC

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Hey! Retrofuturism is a noble attitude, should not be tainted by association with Musk.
http://arxta.net/

2026-08-15 01:32:55 UTC

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…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw7gNf_9njs
Well, it wasn't two weeks after she got married
That Wanda started gettin' abused
She put on dark glasses and long sleeved blouses
And makeup to cover a bruise

2026-08-15 01:30:38 UTC

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…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2pd1l0i0A8
I’m tearing down your brooder house,
‘Cause now I’ve got the pill.

2026-08-15 01:28:33 UTC

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…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khgXDDuaclo

2026-08-15 01:27:51 UTC

I miss the days when country music was woke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDd32K-mOVw

2026-08-10 23:01:36 UTC

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I have no idea what he’s trying to convey.
Maybe a mathematician audience will get it. I think of them as more in touch with pop culture than I am.

2026-08-09 23:05:20 UTC

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It identified my machine as an Apple M1 instead of an Apple M2, so I feel safe, secure, and anonymous.

2026-08-09 17:21:32 UTC

RIP John Crowley, author of /Little, Big/, the only book I’ve read twice to Dawn, I think.
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/john-crowley-has-died

2026-08-05 14:38:24 UTC

Now there’s a headline that will cause company PR to take up day-drinking:
“The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor”
“Put into context, the revelation is a horrifying twist in an already nauseating story of corporate greed and deregulation. Though the institution of slavery may have been formally abolished, its legacy lives on — fully embraced by the for-profit companies pumping our food supply full of parasites.”
https://futurism.com/science-energy/diarrhea-lettuce-taylor-farms-prison-labor

2026-07-02 23:26:35 UTC

RE: https://www.manton.org/2026/07/02/more-reporting-today-from-the.html
There’s this ancient technology, called “taxation”, that gives the public the upside of success without risking the downside of failure.
During the 30+ years I ran my own business, I don’t recall any government wanting a stake in Testing Foundations / Exampler Consulting. They just taxed my profits.

2026-06-24 21:32:55 UTC

Somewhere I read a theory that science works so well in terms of giving humans control over the physical world because:
1. Theories are tested; that means doing experiments.
2. Those experiments are frequently at the cutting edge of technology - so experimenters are inventing new ways of controlling nature.
3. This bleeds over to applied scientists and engineers.
I can’t remember where I read this. Maybe Hacking’s /Representing and Intervening/? Anyone know?
#Science #philosophy #Technology

2026-06-06 01:26:26 UTC

“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of whom will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.” - Davis X Machina

2026-05-31 23:00:07 UTC

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The reason I never abandoned Emacs was that Emacs made it trivial to have four separate views into files or the results of processes ***simultaneously*** visible even on teensy displays.
IDEs kept saying to me, “No, you want one big window into one file,” and “you do not want flipping from the code to its current test to be a simple matter of moving your eyeballs to the visible tile where the current test results are available. You want *mechanism*.”
Are IDEs still that way?
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/116/671/670/278/427/566/original/f0e289187c149fe1.jpeg

2026-05-31 22:43:15 UTC

I’ve programmed with punched cards. I’ve programmed with `ed` and other line editors.
Let’s not get too carried away with the whole steampunk-style retro-programming.
(I’m sensitive to such because I have an uncommonly bad short-term memory for a programmer, so I need my tools to keep context for me and make it instantly *visible*.) [@rl_dane](https://polymaths.social/@rl_dane ) https://polymaths.social/@rl_dane/statuses/01KSWDS00H4EP0G80PW5K807RW

2026-05-31 22:31:22 UTC

I’ve long been obsessed with Hemingway’s bit in /The Sun Also Rises/:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
That happens a lot! I think there are many reasons. One reason I got from Dörner’s /The Logic of Failure/¹. Humans as curve-fitting animals will frequently fit a simple linear curve to exponential data, which results in unpleasant surprises later on.
Good book. 30 years old. Suggest something more recent?
¹ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/dietrich-dorner/the-logic-of-failure/
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/116/671/557/259/299/967/original/6986906c70c5efb9.jpeg

2026-05-10 13:39:25 UTC

An OK article from a creative writer professor about AI. (Happy ending.)
He’s coming from the “I write to find out what I think” school. One phrase *nails* the feeling: “the moments when a draft resists its own author.”
Also: “their struggle to translate thoughts into word isn’t evidence of failure, but a sign of growth. Even when, and especially when, words fail.” That’s the ticket: I don’t have writers’ block. I am undergoing a prolonged, extreme growth spurt.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/10/fiction-writing-professor-ai

2026-05-02 21:58:44 UTC

Wikipedia is so useful. So is the Internet Archive.
Thank you to everyone who’s contributed to them.

2026-03-21 00:45:57 UTC

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Darwin’s 8 years working on dissecting barnacles is my go-to example when I want to tell theorists to stop despising the nitty gritty. Darwin weaved the theoretical together with the observational.
Can’t say as it’s ever swayed anyone.
https://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/Richmond_cirripedia.html
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/darwins-barnacles/

2026-03-12 19:47:25 UTC

Question for those more knowledgeable about #philosophy.
Darwin spent eight years dissecting and cataloging species of barnacles.¹ My understanding is that it was both crucial to refining his nascent ideas on evolution *and* established his reputation as someone who sweated the details, which made his fellow scientists more likely to believe his theory when he finally published it. (1/3)

2026-02-13 02:09:48 UTC

“Epstein had pitched him on a potential art exhibit titled “Statutory” that would showcase underage models dressed to look older than they were. “You are incredible,” Ross told Epstein in response to the idea.”
I hope I speak for all of us when I say: Ick. Gross. What the hell is wrong with you?
Universities need a different funding model than hiring administrators whose main job is sucking up to rich assholes and worse.
Government, too.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/2026/02/11/professors-epstein-files-begin-face-consequences

2026-02-13 00:22:02 UTC

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I’ll be damned. My world is shaken. There’s more than one Westminster?

2026-02-11 18:05:05 UTC

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Given that Westminster is famously in England, does that mean “all-American” is a universal term? Do German dog shows refer to “der amerikanische Hund”? French “chien américain”?

2026-02-02 14:29:21 UTC

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I now view nearly all digital *products* the same way.

2026-01-23 15:27:03 UTC

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A veteran magazine editor I worked with (~30 years ago) told me the justification for pull quotes was the belief that one way people decide what articles to read is by flipping through the magazine until something catches their attention. Pull quotes were intended to be one of those things.
That’s why she (rather than the author, or me, the interface-with-the-author editor) chose them: we would be bad judges of catchiness.
(It was a paper magazine.)

2026-01-14 00:47:24 UTC

Sometimes it’s the little things, the straw that breaks the camel’s back. I hope.
“I was going to school!” the 16-year-old citizen protested.
They choke-hold-ed him, then:
“Agents had taken his phone. He used Find My to locate the phone — at a vending machine for used electronics miles away, close to an ICE detention center.”
They took his phone and sold it.
https://www.propublica.org/article/videos-ice-dhs-immigration-agents-using-chokeholds-citizens
“At long last, have you no decency?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc6Yo3A7CC8

2025-12-29 18:04:18 UTC

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I’m intrigued. Two questions:
1. Is there a free trial period?
2. Is cancelling as easy as signing up?
I’m always up for new experiences, but I’ve been burned before.

2025-12-27 02:35:56 UTC

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Crap, this wasn’t supposed to be a response to you but a response to my https://mstdn.social/@marick/115789169818897537

2025-12-27 02:34:52 UTC

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¹ I know Kuhn’s description of “paradigm” is confused. But I think blending the three main senses Margaret Masterman identified² in /Structure of Scientific Revolutions/with Lakatos’ notion of the “hard core” of a research programme is solid. Toying with a blog post focused on that topic, because I think people need to interrogate “disruptors” as to their “extended hard core”.
² In /Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge/, which is apparently open access: https://user.fm/files/v2-daa3ae64ecf3f61492a0a047a78de3d0/Imre%20Lakatos%2C%20Alan%20Musgrave%20-%20Criticism%20and%20the%20Growth%20of%20Knowledge.pdf
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/115/789/194/090/695/309/original/6a89386338f3f12e.png
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/115/789/194/159/516/468/original/38639f0cec34ba21.png
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/115/789/194/216/765/466/original/0d0d9fc52082c9dd.png
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/115/789/194/276/632/526/original/eb08ec9380ee0533.png

2025-11-25 17:24:12 UTC

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* Economic precarity is when your expenses are close enough to your income + savings that a major event will lead to bankruptcy/default. That in turn cuts you off from the credit market, anything that involves a credit check (like most rental housing), etc. High chance of permanent “economic inertness.” (2/7)

2025-11-25 17:24:12 UTC

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* When thinking about precarity, you don’t get to say that cars are way better than they were in 1963. The question is: how much does it cost to get to work? Or: what does the minimal car cost? It’s more expensive than in 1963.
* Minimal housing is way more expensive. Healthcare ditto.
* At one time, the poverty line was the precarity line. Unfortunately, it was set to 3X the cost of food (because that was the easiest to measure). (3/7)

2025-11-25 17:24:12 UTC

An interesting analysis of hidden increase in economic precarity in the US. Results are extreme enough that I’d like to see the analysis repeated for Scandinavian countries or Germany. https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie
Key points: (1/7)

2025-11-23 14:35:56 UTC

What I don’t understand is how someone can write a biography (granted: only a couple of printed pages) of Charles Darwin without mentioning the single most inspirational thing he ever wrote:
“But I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.”
Gives the rest of us hope.

2025-11-19 15:22:36 UTC

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I’m a fan of citizen’s assemblies as done in, for example, Ireland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens'_Assembly_(Ireland) It’s a formal structure for involving citizens in legislative work.

2025-11-08 19:30:51 UTC

Well, looks like my son’s health insurance will nearly double.
Also, it’s likely that cuts to research will mean he won’t have a job come January.
Thanks, Republicans, for your devotion to the working class!
(While his job is funded by research programs on commercially-important fish and invasive species in the Mississippi River, his day-to-day work is mostly on a boat, out in the river, catching critters.)

2025-11-07 20:57:53 UTC

I’m looking for a particular mathematical satire. I think it might have been taking on those yellow Springer books. The nub of the joke was
1) a mostly textual paragraph or so either defining or proving something simple
2) Some transition like “from this it easily follows that:”
3. The rest of the page is solid equations, similar to the image (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_theory)
Anyone got a source for this? Thanks.
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/115/510/415/993/521/454/original/b9cffe3cb1f70ac1.png

2025-10-09 15:39:54 UTC

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Must say that the background scenery makes a lot of those pictures not ugly.
She and @npub1y4d…j3r5 should do a joint project. Some sort of compare-and-contrast thing?

2025-10-08 13:15:09 UTC

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Bruce Sterling’s /Holy Fire/ is on this topic:
"Set in a world of steadily increasing longevity (gerontocracy), a newly rejuvenated American woman drifts through the marginalised subculture of young European artists while dealing with the implications of posthumanism.”
"Holy Fire is the story of an old woman who has gained a second youth […] and who has an ontological transformation as a result.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Fire_(novel)

2025-10-05 23:09:28 UTC

I’m one of those who think metaphors do shape thought. Which made me think of the difference between “adopted” and “domesticated.”
“We’ve been instructed to adopt Scrum” vs. “We’ve been instructed to *domesticate* Scrum”.
“We’ll be adopting AI across the enterprise” vs. “We’ll domesticate AI across the enterprise.”
When you adopt something, you accept it as it is. It has the control. When you domesticate it, you change it, as wolves were changed into dogs. You have the control.

2025-09-26 14:03:09 UTC

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“What happens in practice ought to be possible in theory.” – Elinor Ostrom (paraphrase, referring to the theory of the Tragedy of the Commons)

2025-08-21 14:31:52 UTC

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Aw man, I hope you didn’t just permanently associate one of my favorite Stones songs to an image of Trump.

2025-08-11 13:25:42 UTC

Doesn’t it seem that, if the “tragedy of the commons” were true, Patreon couldn’t exist?
Ostrom’s Law¹ goes something like “if it happens in practice, it ought to be possible in theory.” (1/2)

2025-07-20 23:32:07 UTC

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We assholes thank you. I can take being called an “asshole,” but calling me a Republican – them’s fightin’ words.

2025-07-20 23:16:09 UTC

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Well, I’m kind of an asshole, and I don’t want to be lumped in with Republicans. I have my standards, sir.

2025-07-20 13:41:00 UTC

82-year old Chilean, granted permanent legal residency (political asylum) by the US in 1987.
Lost his “green card”. While getting it replaced, ICE snatched him. Family couldn’t find out where he was, thought he was dead. Then they were told he was dead (anonymously? - unclear)
Instead, he had been deported. Not to Chile. To Guatemala. He’s now in a hospital there.
His fate depends on the whims of the people who sent him, people immune to the law.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ice-deported-grandpa-green-card-b2792290.html

2025-07-07 22:59:55 UTC

cc// @npub1hr7…jxyc
⬇️ https://mstdn.social/@marick/114814403061622768

2025-07-07 13:58:01 UTC

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I wonder how many techbro billionaires view Gibson’s /Peripheral/ series as depicting a desirable (worse: inevitable) future, with them as the “klepts”, resource constraints solved by mass depopulation, etc.
https://thecinemaholic.com/what-is-the-klept-in-the-peripheral-explained/

2025-07-07 13:53:56 UTC

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Was reminded of William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981) recently, which looks at the connections between the Art Deco / Futurist science fiction aesthetic of the ‘30s and fascist aesthetics (and content).
What’s interesting is how opinion-shapers can latch onto even robustly anti-fascist science fiction (like Iain M. Banks “Culture” novels) as inspiration for fascist-inflected visions of the future.

2025-07-06 12:20:09 UTC

Representative Derrick van Orden voted for a huge transfer of wealth from the rural poor.
He publicly responded to a list of consequences with the word “YES!”
He wrote a letter to his state’s (Democratic) governor asking that the state government find the money somewhere to save rural hospitals.
He is in a barely Republican district (R +3).
People are saying, “Boy, come the next elections, he’ll be in trouble.”
No.
1/
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/114/806/253/716/443/846/original/e5029627dcbd0ea6.png

2025-07-02 23:10:08 UTC

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Do people actually do that? Do they actually believe any employee will be more forthcoming? (I would hunker down and try to muzzle my reactions.)

2025-06-30 17:29:50 UTC

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So large-scale property damage suggests a real rupture in the social order in a way somehow more visceral. It’s not the damage to the property that amps up the feeling of violence, it’s the damage to society. As a social species that depends on society for our survival, that really hits home. (Violence of that sort *feels* like danger to us, up close and personal.)
Or so is my theory, anyway. So, my answer to your question is neither yes or no, but: mu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)#Non-dualistic_meaning (8/8)

2025-06-30 17:29:50 UTC

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If al Queda had killed 2,977 people in individual shootings, spread around the country, on 9/11, I venture that people would have been less shocked than by the image of those towers falling. After all, people die all the time, about 130 every day in the US from guns alone. People are ephemeral, but large-scale property is supposed to be *permanent*. (7/8)

2025-06-30 17:29:49 UTC

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If it was your *knee* I smashed with a hammer (to make it unusable), pretty much everyone would say that was violence.
A bunch of people acting in concert to smash a store window during a riot seems violent not just because of the act itself, but because of the number of people doing it and the general lack of order (which is scary in itself and also brings the possibility of escalation to mind). (3/8)

2025-06-30 17:29:49 UTC

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If I took my own computer disk drive into my driveway and smashed it with a hammer (to make unusable) few people would say that’s violent. It’s my own property, after all. But it’s more violent than ripping up a sheet of paper because it’s more dramatic.
If it was *your* disk drive I smashed (to make it unusable), that would be more violent. (More people would say so.) (2/8)

2025-06-30 17:29:49 UTC

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Also, people are weird. They often care more about property than strangers, in a way reminiscent of how people will munch popcorn, unfazed, as a movie villain kicks an onscreen victim, but show a villain kicking a *puppy* and you’ll get a reaction. (6/8)

2025-06-30 17:29:49 UTC

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Implicit, I think, in your question is “are people using the word ‘violence’ to describe property damage acting ideologically? In order to have their audience feel the connotations of extreme violence (mass murder, say) for an act that isn’t that extreme?” Sure, probably, though it’s entrenched enough that most people using it to criticize property damage are just saying it out of habit. (5/8)

2025-06-30 17:29:49 UTC

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If the window belonged to a mom-and-pop bodega the act would affect me more – would seem more violent – than if it were the window of a Wells Fargo branch bank. Why? Because I identify with the owners – they’re more like me – whereas Wells Fargo has no actual people who suffer any particular harm. (4/8)

2025-06-30 17:29:48 UTC

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Like all concepts, “violence” isn’t defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. (References available on request.) Instead, there are more or less good matches, defined by social consensus.
If I’d written up some notes about your question on a sheet of paper, composed these posts, and then ripped up the paper, only someone being deliberately pedantic would say that was a violent act.
If I ripped up your love letter to me, that seems more violent. (1/8)

2025-06-28 12:19:50 UTC

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“psychological safety”, because:
1. Shouldn’t we be focused on the jerks, rather than on the people being jerked around?
2. Jerks *like* causing a lack-of-psychological-safety. The term encourages them to keep “owning” others.
Compare “team members should have psychological safety” to “a team shouldn’t have jerks in it”.

2025-06-27 21:14:42 UTC

There’s a possibly apocryphal story about the computer scientist Mary Shaw, who took advantage of how old-timey computers produced static on the AM radio band, and the static varied according to which and how many core memories were active (or something like that). So Shaw used a portable AM radio to listen to the varying static produced by her (non-timeshared) program and let it help her debugging.
Can’t find a link. Any pointers?

2025-06-26 18:12:19 UTC

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I’m with you, though there’s plenty of room for non-silly non-commies.
Also, the manifesto should emphasize that it’s only that society *encourage* silly dance parties – you don’t have to personally *attend*. <shudders>

2025-06-25 21:55:24 UTC

No way my dad would be allowed in the USA today. Spoke little English. Poor. Didn’t have a high school diploma. Came from a recent enemy nation (Germany).
Died a wealthy man. Because he worked hard and well, lived frugally, ran his business conservatively, and played right by the people he built houses for.
It’s hard for me to resent immigrants. https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:cak4klqoj3bqgk5rj6b4f5do/post/3lsha73xfn22f

2025-06-21 23:04:15 UTC

Regarding the “ My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts” article¹. No strong opinion about the article, but I was struck by it as an example of a certain rhetorical style that seems very effective with programmers. Some elements:
* What I think of as “pugnacious pragmatism.” “Other people are concerned with airy-fairy things; I care about getting the job done.” I confess I’ve used this myself. (1/6)

2025-06-01 23:45:26 UTC

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I thought *I* was a nerd.

2025-06-01 14:37:12 UTC

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At any given moment, half of the moon is dark.* Is there textual evidence that Pink Floyd was speaking of meeting on a permanent dark side, or just somewhere on the side currently dark?
* I’m ignoring the effect of light reflected from the earth. It’s a *metaphor*, dammit, not an astrophysics lecture.

2025-05-23 13:14:58 UTC

In /Danse Macabre/, Stephen King wrote "I recognize terror as the finest emotion [...], and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud."
This sort of applies to the Authors of our Timeline. They're traditionally more ironists than horror writers, but in the past decade, they've gotten *way* more obvious – the equivalent of going for the gross out. (1/2)

2025-05-06 21:50:52 UTC

The mechanics of how the Trump administration is strangling biomedical research in a way that keeps the story quiet:
1. Don't actually cancel grants or tell researchers to stop work.
2. But, at the end of the month, don't pay for work done.
3. Repeat.
4. Universities can't say grants have been canceled because technically they haven't.
5. Universities are incentivized to keep negotiating (and keep quiet) in hopes the NIH will change its mind.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/conspiracy-of-silence-how-trump-is-covertly-strangling-billions-in-disease-cure-research/sharetoken/54ea6c5a-61c7-4c4c-a19a-96017fef87b5 (not paywalled)

2025-04-17 22:27:38 UTC

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Forwarded to my son, who graduated from New College pre-DeSantis and is Not Pleased About What Happened. May it give him a bit of schadenfreude.

2025-04-16 22:25:08 UTC

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Funnily enough, I was just typing up notes on why governments should not be run like households. The different relationship to money has much to do with it:
"[G]overnments are not like households, and there are a number of reasons why. The first and most obvious one is that the government owns its own bank. Not only does it own its own bank, that bank is actually the creator of all the money in the economy." – Richard Murphy (https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/01/23/the-curse-of-the-household-analogy/)

2025-03-30 23:31:44 UTC

There was a book I read ~20 years ago that was about the early history of the Oxford English Dictionary. It was partly about all the people who contributed definitions. One very productive person was in an insane asylum.
I'd swear "harmless drudges" was in the title, but I can't find it.
I always thought that you could do worse in life than being one of those harmless drudges who just help other readers.
Links?

2025-03-27 18:24:08 UTC

Here's a long article about the steps that led to deportation of Venezuelans to El Salvador.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/how-the-alien-enemies-act-deportations-were-orchestrated-to-keep-the-courts-unaware
What's striking is how reporters, without the authority of the legal system, can find out what happened, but an actual judge is still being successfully stonewalled, not being told the (presumably) same details despite a series of demands for information (but, notably, no penalties for misbehavior.)
Justice deferred is justice denied, your honor.

2025-03-18 23:05:21 UTC

Something I think I've noticed. Both tech leaders and homeless people talk way more loudly than is necessary, with that coded-male attitude of aggressive self-confidence, and launch into rants at the slightest hint of contradiction.
Also they are not overly concerned with the negative externalities of their actions.
I'm not saying that startups should make homeless people their decision makers, but they might demand fewer stock options.

2025-03-03 13:53:51 UTC

For me, these two essays echo in interesting ways:
"Ten Observations about Tokyo": https://www.persuasion.community/p/10-observations-about-tokyo (via @npub144u…adjw, @npub153l…caex)
"A critical theory of (or for) America": https://josephheath.substack.com/p/a-critical-theory-of-or-for-america (via @npub1pz3…dwqw, [@swart](https://mastodon.cloud/@swart ))

2025-02-21 22:59:48 UTC

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Actually, that's starting to be a minor obsession of mine: models for capturing the TRVTH of the matter vs. models (designs) for taking the next few steps to see what happens.

2025-02-21 01:02:06 UTC

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A book that powerfully influenced me was Freeman Dyson's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_in_All_Directions, which presented the attitude, "there is always a next thing to understand. Isn't that *great*?”
Contrasted to the attitude that "we now understand all that's important. The rest is bookkeeping."

2025-02-21 00:59:03 UTC

Riding home, I reflected on our (programmer) obsession with simplicity. It occurred to me that I dislike simple models put forth as capturing some essence of a complex problem. But! There are a few people (Ward Cunningham, most notably) who put forward simple models as something you can *use* to better understand the complex reality.
One approach says "we're done here, except for boring details." The other: "Here. Use this to gain experience that will help you move forward."

2025-02-03 17:40:46 UTC

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Got through to Durbin, whose spokeswoman said she couldn't speak for the Senator. (I refrained from "But that's your job!") Duckworth had an "unusual call volume" message, so I commented via her form.
In addition to grinding the Senate to a halt procedurally, and no to any nomination, I pointed them to the Brooks Brothers riot as the optics their constituents need. Seeing a disabled veteran senator dragged out of her wheelchair by security would make for a good symbol.

2025-01-16 00:00:07 UTC

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I'm afraid I don't understand your message.

2025-01-13 16:23:47 UTC

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This has been my 2025 contribution to public health. Please forward to RFK Jr., who is in the "train it naturally" camp. Come to think of it, he's pretty damn fit for an old geezer – way more than me – and I've seen shirtless pictures of him but I can't recall ever seeing pictures of his legs. Hmm... (4/4)

2025-01-13 16:23:46 UTC

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So he started dressing in baggie clothes that obscured his body. Except he cut the legs of his sweat pants short so that the only muscles his fellow gym rats could see were his calves. Wounded pride drove him to work the calves to get them in proportion to the rest of his body. (2/4)

2025-01-13 16:23:46 UTC

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The immune system *is* trained by challenging it, just as muscles are. (Very different mechanism, though.) However, an unvaccinated person is like someone who never trains their calves. When they suddenly have to use them (measles, polio, covid), they'll pay the price.
Do they want to be like that fool at the gym who spends all his time on bench presses and curls and has pipestem legs and skinny forearms? (3/4)

2025-01-13 16:23:46 UTC

There are number of people who think they can train their immune system (e.g. by drinking raw milk or "raw water") to be tough enough to kick the ass of any infectious agent. I bet a good number of them compare it to building muscles. Maybe leaning into the comparison would help.
I remember reading that Arnold Schwartzenegger, like lots of people, early on overdid the upper body and tended to skimp on leg day, so was not well proportioned. His calves were particularly bad. (1/4)

2024-12-30 01:21:43 UTC

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A quick search finds that capital gains tax rates in the US haven't changed much over time. Peak looks to have been 35%, way less than income taxes. Declined after Reagan (now 20%), but nothing like the decline in the higher levels of income tax.
As a retired dude with money in the stock market, my finances wouldn't have been wildly different in 1968. (26.9%)
It remains true: once you have enough money, it multiplies by itself.
https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/whole-ball-of-tax-historical-capital-gains-rates

2024-12-30 01:15:18 UTC

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It would be hard. Even in the glory days, the rich could get their compensation in non-taxable forms (like car allowances). It's interesting: a lot of the discussion about the virtues of the past centers on CEOs, how they made X times the median employee vs. Y times now. But I wonder if that was because CEOs were more clearly employees then, vs. their current status as godlike.
What were the effective taxes on the passive investment class?

2024-12-29 00:01:16 UTC

"Street medicine providers and homeless outreach workers who travel into Las Vegas’s drainage tunnels have noticed an uptick in the number of people living underground."¹
Any other Olds noticing how much the vibe today resembles the dystopian "New Wave" science fiction of the late '60s and '70s?² Rather more than the later Cyberpunk genre.
¹ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-living-in-las-vegass-tunnels-urged-to-get-medical-treatment/
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_(science_fiction)

2024-12-17 00:36:00 UTC

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In my experience, it seems to be deployed as a meme ("the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must") less to justify the actions of the strong, more to persuade the weak that resistance is pointless.

2024-12-16 00:14:14 UTC

This youtube video on data visualization is pretty good. I've read Tufte, etc., but I still learned some new things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwtwOqdlY5E

2024-12-13 14:14:04 UTC

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In the Patreon extra for the genocide episodes, one of the hosts recounts asking a proud Greek for pronunciation of ancient Greek names. The Greek knows of the podcast, so he says, "Ah, doing an episode on democracy, right?" "Genocide. ... You don't get to dine out on this democracy shit forever. You invented all this sick stuff as well."

2024-12-13 01:08:32 UTC

I've become fond of the "Origin Story" podcast, where they trace the historical evolution of concepts. Their episodes on genocide¹ taught me some new things, made me think it's maybe, on net, not a helpful concept. Listening to their episode on anti-vaxxers² now. Their understanding of science in general is a little shallow (vulgar Popperism), but it's a good episode nevertheless.
¹ https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/genocide-part-one-the-ultimate-crime/id1624704966?i=1000657900163, https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/genocide-part-two-the-search-for-justice/id1624704966?i=1000658623603
² https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/anti-vaxxers-herd-impunity/id1624704966?i=1000659398279

2024-11-27 22:34:33 UTC

Remember Covid? Remember how Covid demonstrated the fragility of supply chains? How maximizing throughput/efficiency pessimizes resilience and fault tolerance?
Did that lesson stick *at all*? Anywhere?
(Would legit like pointers to businesses/industries/governments who changed their practices.)

2024-11-19 22:35:32 UTC

Which countries have created regulations/laws mandating better ventilation in public spaces?

2024-11-17 23:27:02 UTC

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I occasionally feel the impulse to read https://worldcomp-proceedings.com/proc/p2013/ICA7331.pdf and then implement 7-valued logic as they did. For fun.

2024-11-16 23:41:27 UTC

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I wonder if there’s a connection. Buddhism and Jainism were, I think, intersecting religious/philosophical traditions.

2024-11-16 01:40:09 UTC

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You may be interested in Jainish seven-valued logic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaina_seven-valued_logic. I think this podcast episode is the one that described it well: https://historyofphilosophy.net/jain-standpoints
(The wikipedia article isn’t great. What I’ve gathered about Jain logic is that it considers context. So, rather than `x is true`, you get `x is true under these conditions`. I think that’s neat.)

2024-11-13 13:33:34 UTC

‘The "Department of Government Efficiency" has co-chairmen.’
‘You couldn't make it up.’
– Jon Beeson