Alex Lundry

Drake Maye shall never vanquish'd be until / Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him

Thank you! One of the motivations for making this was actually for the data driven campaigns class I teach.

Ballot Blocks Guess how this neighborhood voted in 2024!

Solar panels & a boat in the driveway...is this a Harris or Trump neighborhood?

🗳️ Ballot Blocks #13 - 3/7
❌🔶✅
Play at ballotblocks.com

Thank you! Glad you enjoy it!!

Thanks! Yellow means you’ve got the correct winner but wrong margin.

That's so great to hear - thank you!

I did - thanks! Me and Claude Code over the weekend. Absolutely mind-boggling experience.

Ballot Blocks Guess how this neighborhood voted in 2024!

Ballot Blocks
🗳️ Ballot Blocks #12 - 3/7
❌🔶✅
Play at ballotblocks.com

A children’s phonics packet titled “ai words”

Seems a little young to be teaching parameters, tokens, and quantization…

This chart, from Ben Fritz’s excellent WSJ article on Marvel today, tells a hell of a story…

More intermissions please! This is the (re)innovation that the movie theatre experience needs.

And we thought cell phones at the theater are bad…

Does it bug you as much as it bugs me that the shortest day of the year doesn't also have the latest sunrise and earliest sunset? I don't like that asymmetry...so I made a dataviz to help me better understand it and maybe see the underlying pattern better. 📊 #dataviz

A Beloved University of Illinois Tradition Sings On: Dial-A-Carol Goes Live Dec. 12 Looking for something fun to break up your day this holiday season? Kids love using the phone? Call Dial-A-Carol. It's FREE!

Apparently every holiday season student volunteers at University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana run a 24-hour "Dial-A-Carol" hotline. A student volunteer will sing a carol of your choice! Try it - tonight is the last night! 217-332-1882

YouTube video by Coldplay Coldplay - ALL MY LOVE (Official Video) (Directors' Cut)

Dick Van Dyke is one of the all time greats, and it's absolutely beautiful to see him get his flowers in this video by Coldplay and Spike Jonze:

An animated worm face with big bulging eyes taken from the Earworm Eraser video.

"The Earworm Eraser is a 40-second audio track designed specifically to squash earworms — a song on repeat circling around and around in your brain that can't easily be shaken off."

All I want for Christmas is ... help getting this song out of my head: www.npr.org/2024/11/27/n...

“The Hike” by Drew Magary: This is what you would get if Guillermo Del Toro rewrote “The Wizard of Oz” with a middle aged male protagonist. An engaging breezy read that gave me some super weird dreams and got me wondering if I had successfully gotten myself off of my own “path”. 4/5⭐️

“The Kaiju Preservation Society” by John Scalzi. This book is pure bubble-gum sci-fi in the best possible way. So much fun. I’m sure the movie rights have already sold; what an incredible addition this would be to the Godzilla-verse! 4/5⭐️

This is SO good. Worked really beautifully on mobile too.

AI playlist chat showing what I asked for.

Spotify playlist with a Beatles song, Otis Redding, Jim Croce

Finally tried the Spotify AI playlist generator. It did not do well. First ask? Songs that are like the Beatles that aren’t by the Beatles. It gave me a list entirely of Beatles songs. After revision I asked it to only give me songs recorded after 2000. It failed.

Cover of the book Nexus shows a pigeon.

Also just finished “Nexus” by Yuval Harari. Not the tour de force of Sapiens or Homo Deus, but an important big picture look at AI. I have a ton of thoughts to put in longer form, but until then know this is a worthwhile “big think” book if you’re at all interested in our AI driven future. 4/5 ⭐️

Cover of the novel The Afterlives by Thomas Pierce. A dog inside a yellow frame.

Just finished The Afterlives by Thomas Pierce, a sweet reflection on life, death, and the potentially soft barrier between them wrapped up in a cozy haunted house story. 3/5 ⭐️

Yeah, I recently installed Ollama and have been experimenting with pal, mall, ollamar. It's really incredible where all this is headed.

Live Music Society Announces $290,000 In Funding For 34 Small Venues in the U.S. To Assist With Needs That Enable Growth — Live Music Society Surpasses $1 Million in 2024 Funding with Largest-Ever Toolbox Grant Round Non-Profit Has Given $4.1 Million To Support Small Music Venues Since 2020

Two fantastic small music venues in DC - The Pocket and Rhizome - have been awarded a "Toolbox Grant" from the Live Music Society. Well deserved - congratulations! www.livemusicsociety.org/news/live-mu...

3 songs in and Father John Misty’s new album is EXCELLENT. Those strings on “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose”? <chefs kiss>

This is great - will be useful for the peer review component of my dataviz course. 📌

Hidden Patterns in Folk Songs Reveal How Music Evolved Songs and speech across cultures suggest music developed similar features around the world

"Consistent differences suggest that singing isn’t just a by-product of speech, yet why it evolved is still unknown. Perhaps it developed to unite people, an idea called the social-bonding hypothesis."

Hidden Patterns in Folk Songs Reveal How Music Evolved:

👀 that 18-29 year old number - nearly half!!

Sheet music of Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time is Here” illustrated with the Peanuts gang singing around the Christmas tree

Tonight’s sight reading project. There are some funky chords in there!

This seems like it could be really helpful! 📌