Notices by Kieran Healy (kjhealy@mastodon.social), page 2

Really brings a tear to the eye. What a legacy.

A complete transformer neural network implemented entirely in HyperTalk, trained on a Macintosh SE/30.

https://github.com/SeanFDZ/macmind

Yesterday’s fun activity was writing a package to make cartograms like this. I am also open to lavish VC funding to develop an excessively complex German-style board game based on this layout, modeled on e.g. “Escape from New York”, “Warriors”, or perhaps “My Dinner with Andre”.

New Tom 7 video just dropped, so things aren’t entirely awful (though they are indeed mostly awful). Everyone should watch all of Tom 7’s videos; they are excellent in fundamentally improper ways.

https://youtu.be/M1si1y5lvkk

@siracusa @atpfm Correct use of “the mainland” spotted in this street atlas (John Tauranac, “Manhattan Block by Block”, 2005) that I picked up at a used bookstore over the weekend.

I just watched Gremlins 2 for the first time since 1990. The entire film is built around a dim, vain, tasteless New York developer named Daniel Clamp, his sprawling Clamp Building and his gimcrack Clamp Empire, which includes TV stations, his inane self-aggrandizing books, and a line of jams and jellies. At the end he falls for a character named Marla. This has been a remark about how the meaning of a work of art is not something fixed or under the control of its creators.

Borough-specific sign for the day. #NoKings https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2026/03/28/subway-sign/

Confessors in Harmony

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2026/03/23/confessors-in-harmony/

Just had some delicious potato and leek soup for lunch, with a little garlic bread. Which is an excuse to say that, in the opening line of Beowulf, “Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum … “ the “Gar” in “Gardena”, i.e. “Spear-Danes”, is the same as the “gar” in “Garlic”, because garlic is the Spear-Leek.

I’m slowly and politely getting a large dataset (on the order of hundreds of millions of rows) via its API, so I wrote a script that logs progress and helps restart after errors. That logfile is going to end up being larger than the cross-national survey dataset I analyzed for my first empirical paper.

@hotdogsladies A nice big Baby Boom poster for you about the dread year of 1946 and the march of time in general, as per @RecDiffs discussion. Some more detail at https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2023/12/20/the-baby-boom-again/

Using Quarto to write (and typeset) a book.

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2026/03/09/using-quarto-to-write-a-book/

@siracusa A nice example of context collapse that I came across while listening to the Aftershow.

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: https://socviz.co

Vibes-based analysis from me of the 6C Report Card. https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/02/charting-the-vibes-in-the-2025-apple-report-card/

Nearly at a full draft now; maybe getting a little punchy.

Once thronged with congregants; now sadly out of fashion as everyone attends the Church of the Collider instead.

And that is called paying the Dane-geld, etc. https://www.ft.com/content/0c25de53-4668-4ddf-9e28-f8c4fc34940e

Ian McKellen performs “The Strangers’ Case” speech from “Sir Thomas More” on Colbert.

@kims “I've shown some awful judgment in my life" — I mean, on the other hand, compared to the people we're taking about …