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Cake day: June 10th, 2025

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  • I don’t want to diminish the tragedy, but… this reminds me of a joke I first heard told by Garrison Keillor, but it was already old when he told it. Here’s a link to one version: https://www.maxtrescott.com/max_trescott_on_general_a/2011/02/aviation-joke-hunting-for-moose-in-alaska.html

    The following is a joke – not real – the NBC story is real, but the following is NOT:

    Two hunters hire an Alaskan bush pilot to flythem in his float plane out into the Alaskan wilderness for a week long moose hunt. After landing on a lake and dropping them off with all their gear, he reminds them of of the terms, saying, “I’ll be back in a week to pick you up but you can only have one moose between you. The airplane’s not big enough to carry any more than that.” The hunters agree and head out as the pilot flies off.

    A week later he returns to find the hunters waiting with their gear and a wealth of meat including two whole moose heads complete from racks to delap to neck. The pilot is furious. He shuts down and jumps out of the plane. “You idiots, I told you one moose. Now we’re going to have to leave the other here to rot. What were you thinking?”

    One of the hunters replies, “Last year we paid the our an extra $500 and he flew us out.”

    The pilot refuses, “It’s not the money, it’s the weight!”

    “Well that’s B.S.,” says a hunter, “Cuz’ our pilot last year had the same type of plane as you and he took off just fine.”

    After much back and forth, the pilot relents. They load up all their gear, strap one head to each wing and the pilot fires up the plane to takeoff. The aircraft hops and skips on the water, lifts off and stays in ground effect until the last possible moment. The pilot pulls up, clearing the trees at the end of the lake by inches. The aircraft climbs out slowly but not high enough to get over the low, forrested hills and they crash in a tumble of spruce.

    Everyone survived with minor injuries, but the pilot was knocked unconscious in the crash. He was attended by one of the hunters. As he came to, and, as so often is the case, he asked “where are we?” The hunter looked toward the crash and then back to the lake. ”I’m not absolutely sure,” he said, “but it looks as if you got us about a quarter mile further than our pilot did last year."


  • Per that definition:

    Vacuum tubes (thermionic valves) were the first active electronic components… and by the 1920s, commercial radio broadcasting and telecommunications were becoming widespread and electronic amplifiers were being used in such diverse applications as long-distance telephony and the music recording industry.

    So tubes are in! Old lamps are OUT!






  • I am not confident I or most other Americans can always tell what is misinformation. A recent bout of AI generated ‘Am I the A-hole?’ post on reddit recently got a bunch of people angry (Meta would say, ‘highly engaged’) because enough of them though the stories might be true.

    When the Fukishima power plant got hit by a tidal wave, I foolishly believed an ‘expert’ on TV that day who said the plant was designed so that lead shielding hoods would automatically cover the rods in the event of power loss. Well THAT didn’t happen. I no longer remember who the ‘expert’ was, so he could fool me again. Maybe he has.


  • I, too, know the trend of criminal U.S. administrations to tell the other side to tone it down and just go with the President. The current administration makes me more outraged than post-9/11 when we knew the hijackers were Saudis, we knew bin Laden was around Afghanistan/Pakistan, and we had a team of Nuclear inspectors WITHIN Iraq saying they’d found no evidence of such weapons, yet a few days before their official report was finished, Bush declares war on Iraq? With no exit strategy? When Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11?

    Rather than suggesting we all calm down, or that true patriots back the President, I’m simply seeing the article’s point in asking people to stop following the top, say, 2% most divisive voices. It is a sad truth that the worst liars will get their followers to disbelieve Dr. Fauci such that he becomes divisive through no fault of his own, but he won’t hit the critical ‘worst’ list because he’s not spouting vitriol of his own.

    As far as Bernie goes, there were a good number of Bernie backers at Trump rallies, so I honestly doubt that anyone but moneyed think tanks have much bad to say about him.


  • I agree that as categories, the are different things, just as ‘tools’ are not the same as ‘weapons’, but ignoring the perncious overlap borders on criminal. If you follow actual news sites and reporters but omit the likes of Musk, you will still see Musk quoted, but it is more likely to be properly discredited where needed. At no point does the article suggest you avoid all partisan content, it simply says the most divisive is likely to hurt us all. You know the platforms profit from engagement, so they’ll promote the worst offenders’ content upward, but we don’t have to take that bait.

    The accounts with the MOST divisive political content are unlikely to be your best source of information. You might hate Rachel Maddow or Charlie Kirk, but you’'ll be better off getting news from a generic MSNBC or FOX feed than either personality. Better still, pick BBC, Reuters, and AlJazeera to see a variety of views.

    A reverse example of context: Project 2025 never explicitly says anything about IVF, but it repeatedly talks about human life “from conception to natural death”, which would mean IVF would be problematic. If you try quoting just the last sentence in this chunk, ‘day one’ might be interpreted as birth, but in context, ‘day one’ is obviously conception:

    From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.

    P.S. Do we agree that Bernie Sanders is NOT divisive? That the majority of actual people agree with most of what Bernie says, and it is only a few rich interests that object?


  • No, not in context. They are talking about disimformation like, “using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including Covid-19” from Musk. They say:

    A mere 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news. Twelve accounts – known as the “disinformation dozen” – created most of the vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic. These few hyperactive users produced enough content to create the false perceptions that many people were vaccine hesitant.

    So if you cut out the the most divisive political accounts, you will not miss ANY actual news, but are likely to miss a huge pile of disinformation.


  • If Kristi Noem had any morals or sense of remorse, she’d just curl up and die.

    On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.

    That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter

    The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.


  • Research suggests that how a body reacts to a vaccine is altered by the type of microbiome a person has. Studies on the Covid-19 vaccine, for example, suggest it affected the snot’s microbiome, and in turn, the microbiome affected how efficient the vaccine was.

    I hope those researchers get paid extra.

    The researchers asked 22 adults to shoot themselves up the nose with a syringe full of snot from healthy friends and partners each day for five days. They discovered that symptoms like cough and facial pain, for instance, dropped by almost 40% for up to three months in at least 16 of the patients.

    <shudder> There’s no way those 22 could have been paid enough.


  • The researchers examined about 222,000 menu items from over 2,000 restaurants in Boston, about 1.6 million menu items from roughly 9,000 restaurants in Dubai, and about 3.1 million menu items from about 18,000 restaurants in London. In Boston, about 71 percent of the items were in the USDA database; in Dubai and London, that figure was 42 percent and 56 percent, respectively.

    So only 3 cities, with London getting the best dataset.

    In Dubai, the researchers did not have the same types of health data available but did observe a strong correlation between rental prices and the nutritional value of neighborhood-level food, suggesting that wealthier residents have better nourishment options.

    This makes a case for “correlation does not mean causation”. The title usues the word “link”, but it sounds like poor neighborhoods have cheap restaurants because that’s what customers can afford, which is just another way of saying there’s a correlation between obesity and low incomes.

    The research moves toward evaluating the complex mix of food available in any given area, which can be true even of areas with more limited options.

    Okay, I appreciate that this is now adding to the data about what food options are available. So even though it sounds like something we already knew, having more proof from a different view is a Good Thing.

    Notice that A is obesity prevalence and F is housing prices, which we’d expect to be opposites. There seems to be correlation with A and C. It would be easier to read all of this if F was reversed to ‘lowest housing rates’ or some such.
    From source paper
    Edit: above image of the London breakdown is from the cited paper which also breaks down the same factors for Boston and Dubai.






  • The article is mostly about a lack dense housing in the sunbelt. Two chunks:

    By rigidly defining what a community is allowed to look like, suburban zoning has done more than simply shape the physical form of our cities. It has also made it all but impossible for many communities to adapt and grow, as human societies always have, which has created severe distortions in housing markets.

    and

    There’s no shortage of wonky policy ideas about how to fix housing in the US — and they go far beyond just zoning codes (you don’t want to hear me get started on building codes or impact fees). We will also need a society-wide paradigm shift beyond policy: The financial and real estate industries will need to relearn models for supporting incremental densification, which, experts consistently told me, have fallen by the wayside since the entrenchment of sprawl and restrictive zoning.

    Personally, I’d like to see more towns where there’s dense housing within walking distance of the mega strip mall… though some of those strips are too big for realistic pedestrian commuting.