Notices by Peter Williams (pkgw@mastodon.world)

Billion dollar idea: kitchen containers with some kind of RFID tag with their tare weight, so you can weigh them on a special scale while full and get the right measurement without having to pre-weigh them while empty. You're welcome, world.

If anyone's looking for something to do during what will be a *very* long week, my local phonebanking operation was truly overjoyed when I volunteered to help them with Zoom technical support

@powersoffour Boo! Sorry to hear that.

@powersoffour Well, trying to canvass swing-state voters was definitely less immediately gratifying than last time, but at least we were helping turn over every damn rock in the state

@powersoffour I got in after retrying a few times

@powersoffour Unexpected roadblock to phonebanking tonight:

@powersoffour Just got off of doing a round of phonebanking myself and there was a lot of positive energy to feed off of!

@powersoffour What is "rituals I do not miss one tiny little bit", Alex?

@powersoffour There was a record for June 2, 1888 marked "7h23m" with a note saying that the observation started just as the stars were coming out and it's like ... uh, in what possible time system does summer twilight in Cambridge happen at 07:23?

I've spent several hours being extremely confused about the timestamps in the early logbooks of some of the Harvard photographic plates and I think I've finally figured out that the logged time is ... hours after 3 PM Eastern time?

@powersoffour I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love how much you love Mitchell.

@buttondown I have to run out the door, but creating a new email hung in the email list screen, then the editor was being slow and unresponsive for various tasks. Handwavey guess the some backend APIs were being slow or failing?

@buttondown Sorry for the vague report, but: email editor is seeming wonky right now.

@powersoffour I have a dream, which is probably extremely dumb, that one day normal people will actually use TeX for this kind of stuff. We are, uh, not there yet, to say the least.

@august_fly @dburke You're visiting?

@august_fly @dburke No worries, these things can be a whirlwind. I'll be around, my only constraint is a 3 PM that I'll see about moving ...

Thinking of becoming a Cybernetics Guy

@powersoffour Maybe try reaching out to Robert Hurt at IPAC? I'm pretty sure that he uses Blender for sci-viz of the more public-facing kind

@powersoffour I would be seriously "impressed" if the Numpy folks manage to be worse than Python 2>3! 3.0 came out in December 2008 and the Python 2 EOL was January 2020. People don't really talk about it this way but eleven years to make the transition is ... kind of a disaster.