Notices by Kieran Healy (kjhealy@mastodon.social)

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.

10th anniversary rewatch. So many happy memories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8

When a billionaire owner’s effort to avoid negative attention about fascist appeasement by directing his editorial board to not endorse a candidate inadvertently draws far more attention than simply letting the newspaper follow its normal process would have, this is known as the Reichstand Effect.

A working Turing Machine made out of Lego. Posted to Lego Ideas in the hope that Lego will make a set of it, I think. Detailed video of operation at the link. Absolute madness. https://ideas.lego.com/projects/10a3239f-4562-4d23-ba8e-f4fc94eef5c7/updates#content_nav_tabs

The key slide for Day 1 of Modern Plain Text Computing

Gearing up to teach Modern Plain-Text Computing, which I’m pleased to say is now required for new grad students. A real barrier to successful PhD research—a “hidden curriculum”, to coin a phrase—is knowing how to use your computer properly for technical work, which no-one teaches. Except now we do.

I have to say, the one good thing about Zuckerberg is the way he acts as a repeated and decisive rebuttal of the notion that the world would be a better place if only the techbros had some sort of education in Classics and the Humanities more generally. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx29e0w3gkvo

TIL Walz keynoted the Esri User Conference last month in San Diego. Looking forward to a GIS Nerd admistration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni8BrT0-6gM

I know last semester’s campus protests caused problems for its administration, but is Harvard *quite* sure it wants to unilaterally ban using chalk or writing or drawing on any University property? I can imagine several, uh, plausibly educational use-cases.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/7/30/harvard-campus-use-policies-draft-document/

Good Lord, how depressing is that Google Gemini ad about getting the AI to write your kid’s fan letter to her hero athlete? Why not get Midjourney to make a picture to enclose as well? What do they think it means for a child to write a fan latter, or for a recipient to read one?

New version of chatbot reaches level of function where it responds to all queries by making a little twisty-wrist gesture with pinched fingers and saying “But isn’t it more *complicated* than that?”

Quite the saga. https://www.sandofsky.com/lambda-school/

This seems like both a personal cry for help and an indication that you work for a dangerously dysfunctional organization

By the middle of July, The Rolling Stones’s first gig will be closer to the nineteenth century than to the present.

Also, incidentally, Mick Jagger’s son is younger than his great-grandson.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/arts/music/rolling-stones-live-review.html

The horror twist of course is that it turns out the skeleton is also me

Be the Change you want to see in the World—Graduation Speaker

Change the Bee you want to see in the World—Genetic Engineer

Want the Change you see be in the world—Numismatist

See the Bee you want to change in the World—Field Entomologist

Change the See you want to be in the World—Pope Francis

Change in the World? You want a Seabee—Chester Nimitz

Today's events stitched together from a series of JPGs courtesy of the GOES-EAST Weather Satellite.

In Astronomical terms, the period immediately after Totality is known as “Dad Has A Carefully Worked-Out Plan To Get Back Home Ahead Of The Crowds”