Looks like I'll reach my reading goal this year, something that didn't happen as often as I would like this decade. Crime and Punishment made most of December's quota, but wasn't as interesting as I remembered. Shop Class as Soulcraft, a Hubski Book Club selection, was refreshing and much more grounded than Pirsig's meditations on motorcycle maintenance. That left 150 pages to go for the annual target, and I couldn't decide if something somber and serious was the way to end this year, or something light and distracting. I ended up with Borges, because it's always the right time for Borges. Hope everyone enjoys a healthy and happy 2021!
☑️ ambigram on title page
Magpies, minarets, Roma, and cats all over. Holiday getaway where Thanksgiving is not observed but stores promote Mega Cuma discounts on Friday. Ate brain for the first time, challenged by a friend to try söğüş. Not intolerable while I could avoid thinking about the ingredients, which also included (lamb) cheek, tongue, and “eye edges.” Staying up nights with jet lag reading Ureneck’s book about the burning of Smyrna. Puts the challenge of eating gross food in perspective. Edit: backup images; imgz trial to end Dec 27.
Yes, how much of your relentless positive energy and failure to complain are we supposed to take? I enjoy your observations on the natural world, and I wouldn't mind some more comments on cars. Maybe you could try the mk method and sprout your oaks indoors? It didn't work for me, but there are still acorns all over the sidewalk so I might try again.Sucks for Hubski though...
Emergence Do you have the book? It's one the architect of Hubski ought to read.Groups of human beings, left free to each regulate themselves, tend to produce spontaneous order, rather than the meaningless chaos often feared.
Metro rider reported seeing a six-car pileup on 66. Dynamic tolls increase with congestion, so tweeting drivers complained of $12 toll to park on the highway. Happy Bike to Work week!
Meetup Report The meetup began at Proof, in Chinatown across G Street from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. We had our pick of seats as the place opened for happy hour at 5 p.m., and am_Unition was casting aspersions on economics by 5:05. I allowed that macro seems to be a kind of folklore, but microeconomics appears to be as valid a science as any other, if dismal, and suggested that a concept like demand elasticity can be studied empirically and modeled with equations. am_Unition argued that there is so much noise burying the signal that predictions are useless. A pseudo-science then, with disputed measurements taken in an extremely complex environment used to create complicated models which project into a hazy future -- reminds me of climate science, I jabbed. I also accidentally used the verb “trump,” breaking the ice on as many contentious subjects as possible, but am_Unition was unruffled. He later confessed that they don't even bother to consider relativity when launching satellites, and just clean up the mess with orbital corrections later. Some science! We walked over to SAAM to take in the special exhibit before it closed at 7. I pretended to be a tour guide by reciting bits from a Park Service history of the building, which stored patent models, served as a Civil War hospital, and was the site of Lincoln’s second inaugural ball. The president and Mrs. Lincoln arrived at 10:30 p.m. There were 4,000 people dancing to the music of three bands by midnight, when an elaborate supper was served. The buffet tables could only accommodate 300 at a time, and “a mob rushed to the buffet. Chaos ensued. Foraging gentlemen grabbed large platters of food to carry to their guests, spilling much of it on the surging crowd.” I forgot to mention that Walt Whitman got fired from his job in this building when a copy of his own book was found in his desk. We followed a path (prepared with help from Google Street View’s perspective down the corridors) that passed by the portrait of Ben Franklin used for the $100 bill. Then a quick look at Albert Bierstadt’s “Among the Sierra Nevada, California” and Thomas Cole’s “The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge”. While searching for the Cole (the museum had the temerity to move things around since Google came through) I told the story of how the painting was cut from its frame with a pocketknife borrowed from a fireman as the lightning-stricken house it was in burned down. We were unable to detect any crease where the painting was folded in half and rushed out into the rainstorm. Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen was the special exhibition, and turned out better than expected. We patronized the Art-o-mat, a repurposed cigarette vending machine which dispensed mediocre, but non-toxic, bits of art. We walked through the Conservation Center but omitted looking for “Female Angler Fish with Parasitic Male” as no meetup participants were especially interested in anglerfish. I did learn that anglerfish are bizarre. We then retired to NoPa, where am_Unition’s intimate knowledge of hockey enabled us to score a window table after a brief wait. Findings: • am_Unition believes re-election is unlikely, and we shook on a $20 wager. • am_Unition expects a serious cyber attack will lead to loss of life before long. Nothing wagered, as he is probably right. • I asked how high you could stack 1-meter cubic blocks of concrete before the ones at the bottom were smashed. am_Unition guessed two kilometers. I wasn’t prepared for such a high guess, and hesitated before guessing 2001 meters. This one will probably depend on how good the grade of concrete. Initial research suggests that a cone shape can be even higher. Nothing wagered. • We pledged to publish our draft responses in the gouging conversation.
Why Google has 200m reasons to put engineers over designers "In the world of the hippo, you ask the chief designer or the marketing director to pick a blue and that's the solution. In the world of data you can run experiments to find the right answer. "We ran '1%' experiments, showing 1% of users one blue, and another experiment showing 1% another blue. And actually, to make sure we covered all our bases, we ran forty other experiments showing all the shades of blue you could possibly imagine. "And we saw which shades of blue people liked the most, demonstrated by how much they clicked on them. As a result we learned that a slightly purpler shade of blue was more conducive to clicking than a slightly greener shade of blue, and gee whizz, we made a decision. "But the implications of that for us, given the scale of our business, was that we made an extra $200m a year in ad revenue."Bottom line: they probably sell more ads with those changes in place.
"About six or seven years ago, Google launched ads on Gmail," Cobley explained. "In our search we have ads on the side, little blue links that go to other websites: we had the same thing on gmail. But we recognised that the shades of blue in those two different products were slightly different when they linked to ads.
You, a decent atheist, find the union unconscionable and do not want to be associated with it in any way. You would not sell this guy a bagel, you do not even want him in your store. Are you still on the fence over whether SCOTUS should justify coercing you with threats of fines, arrest, or imprisonment if you choose to decline this man’s business?You’re the baker. A customer, age 60+, comes in and tells you he wants a wedding cake. His bride is age 14, legal age to marry in your jurisdiction.
Cool, good luck! With a seven hour cutoff you will be sure to get a medal and shirt. Wikipedia says January is the "Cool Dry" season, which sounds good, but gives low temperatures of 22.6°C (72.7°F) and highs of 30.3°C (86.5°F). Maybe that explains the crazy starting time? Gun Start: 3:00 AM Cut off: 10AM (7 hrs) I'm going to try to beat the Oprah Line on Sunday. Looking forward to your next #tripreport! 42K
Celebrity spotting in DC is hit-or-miss. Gene Weingarten I saw Gene Weingarten on the metro Friday evening. He looked familiar from a reading of I'm With Stupid I attended, but that was some time ago and he seemed more recognizable from the unflattering cartoon portraits by Eric Shansby that appear in his humor columns. Weingarten is a connoisseur of the tragic, comic, and silly. I thought about saying hello but he was busy reading The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived by fellow Washington Post writer Tom Shroder and I didn't want to bother him. The Alibi Club Getting on the metro escalator one day I noticed a decrepit building across the street. I looked up 1806 Eye Street on the way down and became familiar with The Alibi Club before I reached the mezzanine. Described as D.C.'s Viper Room, it was founded as an exclusive gentlemen's club in 1884, a spin-off of the stately Metropolitan Club around the corner. I've been curious about these sanctuaries since reading about the hero of Memoirs of an Invisible Man taking refuge in New York City private clubs. I made a habit of looking around for VIPs whenever I passed by. I have only ever seen one sign of life in the building, when an apparent caretaker came out, locking the door behind him. I didn't bother him. The Metropolitan Club, in contrast, has a doorman and men in suits regularly enter and exit. Muhammad Yunus I learned of the Nobel Peace Prize winner in The Price of a Dream, a profile of his organization, Grameen Bank, which demonstrated how small, profitable loans to impoverished Bangladeshi villagers can effectively relieve poverty. Microfinance has a mixed reputation these days, but still seems to me a dignified and useful development strategy. Yunus is speaking at George Washington University tonight, in the same auditorium where I saw Freeman Dyson and accomplished the feat of making myself four handshakes from Napoleon. Dyson told a story (as I recall) about a parade in France, in which the emperor gave an apple to a little girl. At festivities surrounding the 1889 centennial of Bastille Day, Dyson's grandfather met the girl, now an old woman. Freeman Dyson provided the third link, and I am fourth in line. Perhaps I ought to be more pleased by being once-removed from Feynman. Someone named eadwacer (related to Eadwaker?), who uses the Forever Labs logo, tells a variation of the story.
Meeting with Creativity for breakfast was the highlight of a busy weekend spent attached to screens monitoring events in Turkey. On my way to Firehook I passed a storefront with a live display of positions with prices on various political events. It was a prediction market, a powerful forecasting tool that I had little hope of seeing after Intrade was shut down. We talked a lot about science and the difficulties of obtaining knowledge. I saw Feynman and Kahneman in Creativity's book collection. I kept him over two hours yet we never got around to talking about running. At one point my phone chirped and we watched a Periscope feed of people climbing on an abandoned tank on a street in Turkey. I got a coupon from the prediction market and later opened an account, geting a $15 match as promised. Now I have $50 to bet and grow. It is an educational site, with limits on volume, but wins and losses are real. They collect 10% of all profit. I can today buy shares at 66¢ that will pay a dollar (less fee) once we are delivered from a Trump White House. I take some comfort whenever I hear reassurance that the lesser of two evils will prevail in November, and believe this is what will happen ... but when I have to put my money down my confidence drops. Maybe I should just wait a bit longer and see what happens at the convention. But then, if things become more clear, the price will change to reflect the new understanding. I see why prediction markets are so effective at weeding out baseless opinionators and encouraging the well-informed to speak up.
The Post has long been a champion and cheerleader for Metro. That it is now expressing such despair is telling. It may be hard to imagine how bad a system can be that still delivers passengers to destinations daily. I am well-situated as a rider: I can walk to a station served by two lines, both of which directly connect to a station from which I can walk to work. Yet I rode my bike every day last week, and intend to do so whenever the weather allows. Some of the original 1000-series cars delivered in the 1970's are still in service, and show their age. Since a 2009 crash, Metro only uses them in the middle of trains, away from the crumple zones at the ends. Later cars have upgrades like digital displays which can display upcoming stations, but frequently show only the name of the line. Electronic platform signs showing arrival times were a long-demanded upgrade, but when they show approaching train times it is often bad news, and they often don't show train times at all, rather information about elevator outages, a static PSA like the website address, or stupid see-it-say-it security reminders. The escalators are notoriously unreliable; it is noteworthy when all the escalators in a station are running. Many were built to exit a station into open air. This was a somewhat magical experience when it was snowing, rather less so in the rain. Eventually glass canopies were installed over the exits. Same with elevators; I once saw a man give up waiting for a broken elevator and take his wheelchair down the escalator. The farecard system is complicated, fares are charged based on distance (requiring turnstile interaction at entry and exit) and there is usually a queue of confused tourists at the farecard machines on weekends. Station managers, when present, are helpful, but the fare variation, difference in paper vs. plastic RFID fares (paper farecards were recently discontinued), and primitive vending technology are challenging for newcomers. Even a seasoned commuter must stay alert. Approaching a turnstile, the heavy jaws of the gate are likely open to admit the previous rider. You wave or wiggle or drag your SmarTrip card over the reader, and once it registers, a tiny green electronic display, appropriate for a 1980's pocket calculator, updates showing your balance. You can't read this without stopping, so you proceed through, only to have the jaws close, bruising your thigh and destroying any smartphone in your pocket. Turns out the tiny display actually showed a low balance in the same tiny green letters. Only recently were you allowed to exit a station with a negative balance of a dime or two (you can enter with a low balance because your fare is not determined until you exit). On board, the lack of good information displays on any but the rarely-sighted 7000-series trains oblige the operators to make high-volume, low-clarity announcements about upcoming stations. These are mixed with automated warnings about the doors. Metro doors are especially touchy, and frequently require several attempts to close. (Annoyingly, they also require several seconds to open, upon arrival at a station, as the operators have to stand up and look out a window before operating doors.) Operators will sternly warn passengers of the need to offload a train if a door jams. This happens to me once or twice a year, and when a loaded train unloads onto an already-crowded platform in rush hour, it is an ugly scene. If I am leaving work between 5 and 6, I sometimes take the train in the wrong direction, further downtown, so I can turn around and catch a less-crowded train going my way. Official IT tools are unpolished and clunky, so most riders rely on third-party tools that depend on an API. MetroHero is a recent arrival. You can look up historical data on performance of individual lines and see that most airlines manage better performance. I don't know if WMATA has a slogan, but they might want to adopt Delta's old underachieving promise: We Get You There.
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease scores: 116: "The cat sat on the mat." 65: Reader's Digest 57.9: Moby Dick 52: Time magazine low 30s: Harvard Law Review 0.2: Dale Carrico's Condensed Critique of Transhumanism As far as I can tell, there is no critique here, merely links to other arguments. But it is very likely that I am missing something, or some things. The first of four pieces which "subsume transhumanism within the terms of my critique" — i.e., criticize transhumanism — is similarly opaque: "Of course, there is no question that no technology, however superlative, could deliver literally omni-predicated capacities..." I think he means that even a robot couldn't make a stone so heavy that the robot couldn't lift it. Is there a Simple English version?