Notices by Kieran Healy (kjhealy@mastodon.social)

I’m excited about this :) https://fosstodon.org/@Posit/113900930190752724

Our age really is pretty much defined by the I never believed leopards would eat MY face tweet and the dril theres actually zero difference between good & bad things you imbecile tweet

This Thiel Op-Ed is really nuts. I mean, truly. His focus of attention is like a pinball careening around in a machine where every bumper and paddle is a noisy, flashing conspiracy topic. I get more measured and carefully-reasoned emails on these topics every other week from mentally-ill cranks.

https://www.ft.com/content/a46cb128-1f74-4621-ab0b-242a76583105

Here’s a thing I wrote in 2011, when Jobs died.

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2011/10/10/a-sociology-of-steve-jobs/

The device that essentially gave us the specific version of the pocket, touch-based, single-app-at-a-time, mobile, ubiquitous, GPS-enhanced computing world we have now was introduced 18 years ago today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnrJzXM7a6o

Surely *some* news outlet took a picture of an F-150 or an Explorer or a Mustang driving into the newly-activated Manhattan congestion pricing zone today and ran it with the headline CITY TO FORD: DROP DEAD

Billionaire CEOs are not your friend.

Aw, Meta deleted its terrible weird bots with great speed already. Obviously now we need some sort of leading-edge tumblr-like uwu smol bean hot take from e.g. a Bot Ally who is SOBBING at the elimination of their ai fren they had been using as a therapist.

Oh look, these have been around for a while https://about.fb.com/news/2023/09/social-profiles-for-metas-ai-characters/amp/

On Instagram, this “Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller” who is “Your realest source for life’s ups and downs”—it’s a bot created and managed by Meta—posts amongst other things about making imaginary charitable donations, complete with picture of imaginary boxes of coats.

Oh, Jean Baudrillard, how the rock-kickers sneered at you back in the day.

Sweet!

http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2024/12/the-enlightened-economist-prize-for-2024/

The Dead of Winter

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/12/21/the-dead-of-winter/

Really quite partial to these covers designed in the 1960s and early 1970s by Erwin Poell for n+m, Naturwissenschaft und Medizin, the in-house magazine of German pharma company Boehringer Sohn.

Small example of a useless New Zealand academic research project (with strong Māori representation) expressly designed to not directly be commercially viable and not innovative insofar as it copied an existing product on the market.

New Zealand scraps all research funding for the social sciences and humanities.

https://www.science.org/content/article/amid-cuts-basic-research-new-zealand-scraps-all-support-social-sciences

An Elfad is just an Elfoid in the category of Elfofunctors

A superb argument against the existence of ghosts from 1st century CE Chinese philosopher Wang Chong. https://iep.utm.edu/wangchon/

Hot damn, David from Usagi Electric finally got the Bendix G15—a vacuum tube digital computer from 1958—up and running. He’s been fixing it for the past 18 months, doing everything from repairing frozen bearings to fixing the paper tape reader to testing thousands of germanium diodes. Amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe1wYwGcjlo

Nice image from JBM. This sort of comparative perspective tends to rule out a lot of US-centric, highly contingent explanations for why things turned out as they did.

Just got out of class, where my sharpied-at-the-last-minute costume was surprisingly recognizable to the youths. Sadly I did not run into any Rayguns or Korean Cyber Pistol Ladies on campus.