Notices by Mike Olson (mikeolson@mastodon.social)

Latest Citation Needed by @molly0xfff just dropped. Scroll down to about 60% of the way through for a recap of bad news for the Presidential candidate involved in World Liberty Financial:

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-69/

I just watched the Harris-Walz rally in Philadelphia. I could rave. I don't need to.

Love the focus on joy, on the future. Love Kamala Harris.

Walz is an exceptional choice.

Harris is an excellent public speaker now. She and Shapiro both have some Obama cadence to them.

Joe Biden stepped up when the country needed that, four years ago. He stepped back when that was necessary, two weeks gone. Hell of a patriot.

I think we're gonna win this one, you guys.

I plan to put in my work.

In my town of Berkeley, CA, the public library has a branch that lends only tools. Hammers and screwdrivers, yeah, but concrete mixers? Monster masonry drills? Electric demolition hammers? They got 'em!

About once a decade, I need to sink a posthole. I always borrow the postholer and digging rod from the library and do a much nicer job than my wife expects.

This is such a wonderful service. Plus I like to brag about my local public library!

First, a coherent digest of the terrible Project 2025. Driving Christian Nationalism into American society would be much easier if knowledgeable professionals, loyal only to the Constitution, could be rooted out of government, and control transferred to partisan actors:

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/inside-project-2025s-plan-to-reprogram-the-government/

2/3

Two starkly different views of how we ought to reform the administrative state have crossed my feed just lately. Sharing them here because I am struck by their similarities and by their differences.

Short thread so that I can link to just one in each post, making the previews work better.

1/3

@eb has written a pretty good tick-tock on the introduction of the xz backdoor:

https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor

"The Bezzle," @pluralistic's new book, is out today. My local independent bookseller will get a visit this afternoon.

By coincidence, yesterday was the 4th anniversary of his self-hosted, self-published blog. He's written an interesting retrospective on that project. This is the open web many of us thought we were building in the 1990s:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/fore/#synthesis

Andreesen Horowitz has a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times print edition today. It's promoting a new book by general partner Chris Dixon, called "Read Write Own."

I have thoughts. 1/n

@sundogplanets I raised the question of orbital crowding and collision debris with a Starlink employee recently. I'm concerned about much, but that issue in particular seems like a big one.

The response: Life of individual satellites is single-digit years. They're still subject to atmospheric drag and orbits will decay. They'll reenter, burn up. Same is true for any debris due to collisions. Sort of "self-cleaning."

Do you buy that argument? Pointers to more reading I should do?

@floatybirb @sundogplanets Gravity pulls on the small bits just as hard as the big bits, so modulo initial trajectory everything should be coming down at the same speed. Debris should clear as fast as the satellites do.

I take the insider at face value. They know more about planned lifetime than I do. I trust them to have told me the truth as they understand it, and they're pretty technical.

If it's "years" instead of "decades" that seems less bad to me.

Holy moly!

"Due to lower local gravity, the sea level in the IOGL is up to 106 m (348 ft) lower than the global average."

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/indian-ocean-gravity-hole/

@Gargron I was thinking exactly that yesterday, driving on Highway 80 through downtown San Francisco.

The billboards along there are a spotlight on Silicon Valley's psyche. For a while it was all about cloud, then data, then blockchain, then weed delivery. Right now it's AI alley.

That piece of freeway is an up-to-the-minute news bulletin on what the VCs are funding.

I've been chasing a bug in one of my computer programs for almost a week, now. It was driving me nuts! Complicated math formula, depends on lots of messy real-world phenomena. I was positive I was calculating it correctly, but it kept producing an obviously wrong result.

Stared at it until stupified. No joy.

I finally decided to ask some smart people for help. To avoid wasting their time, I wrote up as simple and clear an example as I could.

I instantly saw my error.

Life lesson in there.