Notices by Blaise Pabón - controlpl4n3 (blaise@hachyderm.io), page 2

A veces, cuando planteas que hay que abordar cambios radicales en las ciudades para adaptarse a y prevenir los peores efectos de la crisis climática, los adalides de la "realpolitik" acusan muy airados a los proponentes de utópicos soñadores, porque ¿cómo vamos a cambiar el funcionamiento de algo tan complejo como una ciudad?

Suelen ser las mismas personas que olvidan cómo las ciudades se transformaron de arriba a bajo para acomodar a los coches, hasta el punto de vertebrarse en torno a estos.

Episode https://shipit.show/129 of the @changelog podcast voices the observations and concerns about working in #sre #devops and information #technology in general.

It's just a few steps behind where we're currently at with the Nivenly job Seeker's Council.

Okay, I hung up the laundry. Imagine an enormous star flinging off its outer layers after it runs out of fuel and its core collapses under its own gravity. If it doesn't become a black hole, the core can shrink down to a ball of neutronium just 20 kilometers across. Just as a ballerina spins faster as she pulls in her arms, this ball spins really fast - like 1000 rotations a second. And since neutronium conducts electricity, it can blast out radio waves as it spins, creating a blinking radio signal, called a pulsar. Pulsars are so precisely periodic that when Jocelyn Bell first spotted one, people thought it was a signal from aliens!

Like the rest of us, pulsars slow down as they age. But this also means their signal weakens. So we usually don't see pulsars in the gray region of this chart - to the right of the line called the 'pulsar death line'. Pulsars are the gray dots to the left of this line. The pink squares are called 'magnetars'. These are the squalling infants in the world of pulsars: young and highly magnetized neutron stars that do crazy stuff like put out big bursts of X-rays now and then.

But then there are weirder things. A telescope array called the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder was searching for radio waves connected to a gamma ray burst in 2022 when it stumbled on something that blasts out radio waves about once an hour. It lost track of this object, so folks brought in the more powerful MeerKAT radio telescope and found it again.

Now it's called ASKAP J1935+2148. It's well to the right of the pulsar death line. What could it be?

(2/3)

"More Americans wanted the 1939 German-American Bund–style hate rally at Madison Square Garden than the big-tent party with high ideals about the American constitutional order. And we can no longer reassure ourselves, as we did in 2016, that Trump voters didn’t precisely know what they were getting or that much of what he promised to do was not to be taken seriously."

~ Jason Linkins

#fascism #cruelty #USA #Trump #future
/31

https://newsletter.tnr.com/index.php

Let's assume, for a moment, that the thread of prophecy is not severed, and that we maintain some form of democratic government based on the US constitution. We keep having elections and whatnot.

I recognize that extremely bad stuff might happen that makes this not true, but if we have an overt authoritarian takeover, shooting in the streets, the French army liberates us or whatever, then talking about continuity of judicial appointments is a bit silly, isn't it? So, staying within bounds.

But the revolution is not going to come as a knock on your door, where you just get your protest sign and then we all yell really hard and then the world is good again. It is going to be a grinding game of inches. One day you're going to need to drive a friend across state lines, and you'll really need that registration to be current. You're going to run for a local office and you'd better not owe any back taxes. And you're going to need the income from those jira tickets for mutual aid.

Until Wednesday I will only post soothing articles not related to the election. And right now I could use some help. If you cut out the green star here, you can fold it so all its tips meet at one point, and make a convex polyhedron. Here's my question: are all the necessary fold lines along the gray edges - the edges of the small equilateral triangles?

I would print it out and fold it up myself, but my printer is broken!

[Edit: my question above is now answered in the thread below, thanks to Gerard Westendorp.]

In fact I have a more general question. Suppose you draw any 11-sided polygon whose corners lie on an equilateral triangular grid. Draw yellow equilateral triangles pointing in from the edges as shown here. If those yellow triangles crash into each other or share an edge, start over! Otherwise, if you cut them out you'll get an 11-pointed star. You can fold it up so its points touch, and you'll get a convex polyhedron tiled by the small equilateral triangles coming from the grid. But here's my question: do those equilateral triangles ever need to get *bent*?

That is, does every such triangle lie wholly on one face of your polyhedron, or does the folding process ever make it lie on two or more faces?

I don't know how to resolve this question mathematically, so I want to make a bunch of examples, print them out, fold them up, and see what happens. What a bad time for my printer to stop working!

(1/3)

Here's an article I wrote about the math of this business. The great geometer Bill Thurston proved a bunch of amazing theorems about it, which I explain here. The way I'm describing it here it sounds like a fun little game, but he builds it up into something quite profound.

But he doesn't seem to answer my question here: whether the small equilateral triangles ever need to be bent in the process of folding up the star!

My article starts with a different example picture. @GerardWestendorp tells me that in *this* example, when you fold up the star, the triangles do not get bent.... and you get a very nice polyhedron, called the hexagonal antiprism. I'll show you his picture of it in my next post.

(2/3)

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2024/10/30/triangulations-of-the-sphere-part-2/

The Fediverse MUST grow to encompass all websites and apps that want a future without centralized gatekeepers that are soft targets for authoritarian takeovers.

The protocols are TOOLS for doing this they are not ends in themselves, and they MUST be SECONDARY to the goal of an interconnected, open social web. To do that, we need to find ways to work together and stop yelling at each other so much.

We'd better, or we are all screwed.

https://blog.glyph.im/2024/11/the-federation-deathmatch.html

#fediverse #atproto #activitypub

It will never stop being funny to me when an #infosec company or org can't handle the basic task of putting the correct email addresses in their #DMARC record. This is well into "You have one job…" territory.
(#ISSA is the Information Systems Security Association, which IMO has always been kind of a joke whose only real purpose is as a self-perpetuating mutual-admiration society.)
It's worth mentioning that the ISSA web site is also down right now; probably unrelated incompetence.

I can’t back this up with data *directly* but I have a firm conviction that there are at least 10x as many people like this as there are useful idiots who will vote for Jill Stein or leave the top of the ticket blank because of some esoteric backwards interpretation of Kropotkin. If you want to help in the home stretch then GOTV will be categorically more consequential than yelling at a guy you made up to get mad at (and you probably already know that) https://historians.social/@philip_cardella/113403327384181534

@christina
Wow. This is brilliant
40 years of amateur #mycology and I never made the connection.
(Heh, heh, see what I did there?)

More bad behavior towards libaries. This from a library partner: 1/

We've recently received several suspicious calls asking for book titles and specific information to be read aloud. These requests, which do not appear to be for real book titles, raise concerns about potential social engineering. Social engineering refers to malicious attempts to manipulate people into divulging confidential information or performing actions that compromise security.

2/

For example, in one case, a caller asked a staff member to repeat phrases like "improve HR analytics," "by email," and "6-12 months." When asked for more details, the caller became evasive and requested additional information such as the staff member's name, library hours, address, and phone number—typical signs of a social engineering attempt.

4/

We ask that you remain vigilant and take the following steps when handling suspicious calls:

If a caller asks you to repeat unusual phrases or requests information that doesn't seem related to normal library services, politely ask for their name and their relationship to the library—whether they are a student, researcher, or another type of patron.

@itamarst @glyph
Yes, someone famously paid for hotmail.com because msft forgot to renew and the fellow needed to get his email.

@woody will remember the details better than I do.

@quintessence fwiw you don't have to do it all at once.
I keep an empty can of tomato paste with water by my desk and flush pen or two during calls.

That said, hardcore #penthusiast swear by ultrasonic cleaners.
If you can't avoid thinking about cleaning as a chore, the ultrasonic is the way to go.

I have no reservations stating that this is the best parody of #MAGA2024 and one of the best covers of #RockBand #queen Bohemian Rhapsody.... ever
https://youtu.be/YY_8WzcHqMQ

Kudos to the marsh family !

I'm working on a new draft of my lock file PEP (751), and the one thing I hope that comes of it is @hynek takes advantage of PEP 735 and drops all of the development-related extras in `attrs`. 😉

@rbreich
https://Superswingdistricts.org