Nicolás Velásquez

I work as an elder and hospice caregiver, which I am oddly passionate about. I can love on them shamelessly and no one complains about my codependence. It's a win-win situation. Many of my caregiving colleagues complain about the repetitive questions and, sometimes reactions, of the elderly, especially when those patients happen to read the newspaper, especially with the current downward spiral of our country — as if these people haven't lived through enough horror... I love my dementia peeps, but sometimes wonder if there's a Guinness Book World Record for how many times an hour a dementia patient can repeat the same question — it's got to be in the hundreds. At least with small children, they ask different questions. Dementia patients will get stuck on one short question and ask it until you can interrupt their train(carousel) of thought and successfully redirect their attention. That carousel is pretty manic sometimes. A couple days ago, I picked up my mail from the post office and drove over to the nursing home to take (let's call her "Miss Daisy") Miss Daisy out for a drive. Before we took off on our road trip, to the end of The Road and back, in our landlocked little town (Juneau, Alaska), I set my copy of The Onion down in front of her. Over our two-hour excursion, tiny Miss Daisy read that front page at least a dozen times and each time she would snicker, giggle, and guffaw, then put it down on the dash board and, a minute later, discover it anew. I think it was the best afternoon of my life. We don't often hear them laugh and when they do, it's the sweetest thing you've ever heard. ... Thank you, thank you, thank you, for the really important work all of you do. You make the world a better place.

I got permission to share this, and I'm extremely grateful for that.

The Onion got this letter from one of our subscribers in Alaska. She works with dementia patients and decided to leave a copy in the car for each one.

This email made my year. Read it and you'll see what I mean. People are good.

Trump Just Unveiled His Expensive New Line Of Fragrances—And The Bottle Is Peak Trump This grift stinks.

This grift, along with the fragrances, I'm sure, stinks.

GitHub - matloff/Rthreads Contribute to matloff/Rthreads development by creating an account on GitHub.

Parallel computation is a long time interest of mine (research and a book), so I am pleased to announce a new package, Rthreads, that provides threading for R! It's a full rewrite of my old package, Rdsm, located in github.com/matloff/Rthr.... 4/

Let us be the sunlight that destroys the mold upon our nation.

This is what we regrettably ended up calling “false positives” in Colombia.

In a few years we will discover that ICE was rewarding detentions via operational metrics that came with bonuses and days off. Agents started following the incentives and taking people into planes to death camps for candy.

Who’s In and Who’s Out at the Naval Academy’s Library? An order by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office resulted in a purge of books critical of racism but preserved volumes defending white power.

Adolf Hitler's “Mein Kampf” is still on U.S. Naval Academy shelves. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and “Memorializing the Holocaust” are not.

An order by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office led to a purge of books that are critical of racism — but preserved volumes defending white power.

A reminder that if the government can send migrants to a prison camp without any due process, it can send U.S. citizens there, too. I know because this happened to me and my family in 1942.

LTO-9 tapes are 18TB, cost under $100 each, and last for 30+ years making them the most efficient cold storage solution on the market, which every competent IT professional knows, but no im sure you can just dump all of that essential data in some shitty budget cloud storage service lmao

Drop #631 (2025-03-31): Happy [Belated] BoothDay To You Today’s Drop covers three significant topics: Charles Booth’s transformative social research on urban poverty through innovative mapping, the alarming expansion of aggressive immigratio…

Since I wrote this post — dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev/2025/03/31/d... — on March 31st, an additional 590 (total of 835, up from 245) humans have been disappeared by ICE.

The @disappearedtracker.bsky.social —
public.tableau.com/app/profile/... — is a wall of shame for the GOP, MAGA & POTUS admin.

Thank you very much! Muchas gracias!

Person holding a cardboard sign which reads "Hand off working COBOL code"

Now there's a protest sign you don't see often.

Signal Messenger Contact Follow this link to message on Signal.

I'll have lots more to say on this as my reporting progresses. But for now, I'll just say that if you're a current or former BLS or Census employee and have seen anything concerning, I'd love to talk to you. You can reach me anonymously on Signal at bencasselman.96.
signal.me#eu/4LIg1kAOm...

Thousands join protests against Donald Trump and Elon Musk Demonstrations mark the first big display of public resistance to president’s frenetic second term

Thousands join protests against Donald Trump and Elon Musk

https://www.ft.com/content/4041b210-0f4a-4726-a964-6b17cfe1a6f4

It's like they're speedrunning all the mistakes civic tech learned over the past 25 years.

I should have made more AOCs.

Also, please memorize this:

"I INVOKE MY RIGHTS TO SILENCE AND COUNSEL AND WILL NOT ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS WITHOUT MY ATTORNEY PRESENT."

That, "am I free to leave?", and identifying yourself in stop-and-ID states are the only things you should ever say to police. Ever.

Those weren't fairytales

This was….five months ago

😱😱

Cheatsheets - Posit Resources

Ever forget how a certain #RStats function works mid-analysis? The Posit cheat sheets (posit.co/resources/cheatsheets) have got your back with handy (and free!) one-pagers for dplyr, #ggplot2, #Shiny, and more. They've saved me countless times! #tidyverse #datascience #rladies

Very excited to say something I haven't been able to say in a decade: we are hiring a tenure-track historian at Louisiana Tech. We're casting the net wide, basically any field outside of North America. Happy to answer any questions ulsltu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/LATECH...

Hello everyone! I'm Alyssa Columbus (@alycolumbus.bsky.social), your curator this week 🎉. I'm a biostatistics PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins who is passionate about trustworthy data analysis, open science, and teaching #rstats. Excited to connect with you all! #rladies

This just made my work a bit easier! Thanks a lot!

merrick garland reading about marine le pen being prosecuted and his brain just bonkering at the idea you could prosecute a politician

Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go.

“Everybody in math and physics uses it.”

Nearly 35 years ago, Paul Ginsparg created arXiv, a digital repository for sharing research. It changed science for good.

Three decades in, Ginsparg reflects on its legacy—and its future.