Alex Wellerstein

among other things

🥖🍷🇫🇷

Some schools will be starved of resources. Other schools will be offered bribes. The end goal is the same. To make the universities an extension of the Trump administration. Shame on any of these institutions willing to take the bribes.

love his calm expression, and the slightly-interested woman behind him, while cities burn

It's so bad

no

Lots of slides... the Missile Command one is page 459.

ICBM Training Material | PDF Source: https://www.efoia.af.mil/palMain.aspx Published date: 7/20/2011 10:24:15 AM

www.scribd.com/doc/61068592...

also, "Develop America's Airmen Today... For Tomorrow" is a wild slogan to commit to for every slide

Screenshot of a Powerpoint slide. The title is "Strategic Effects." It has three bullet points: 1. The physical employment of nuclear weapons at any level requires explicit orders from the President. 2. Nuclear weapons are unique in their destructive power and psychological impact. 3. The use of nuclear weapons represents a significant escalation from conventional warfare. There is then an incongruous illustration: a screenshot of the game MISSILE COMMAND for the Atari 5200 (1982).

Wild illustration choice in this slide from training materials for ICBM launch officers, ca. 2010

There is a "double flash" in the apparent brightness of a nuclear detonation in the atmosphere, which may be what you are thinking of...

If any other president in all of history said the military should use American cities as a training ground he would be removed from office that same day. The hardest thing to tolerate in all this is how relatively silent elected democrats are. It’s ridiculous.

I will say if that whole military meeting had been an email it would have been a pretty weird email

A lot of people think that every international student admitted means one fewer spot for domestic students, when the opposite is more likely true - the tuition revenue international students bring allows public universities to provide substantial discounts to domestic students, improving access.

Thanks, fixed!

And the fact that these snippets are somehow connected to child abuse cases just makes it even more strange to look at... like a really unpleasant puzzle game...

OK, this is the strangest subreddit I've stumbled across for awhile. I get what it is about, but there's something very cyberpunk and surreal about it... www.reddit.com/r/TraceAnObj...

to be fair, we're comparing it to Livermore

"La machine apocalyptique"... the joke about Laser Mégajoule, the French copy of the National Ignition Facility, it that it is exactly the same as the one in Livermore, except the coffee is better...

Inventing the Doomsday Machine Tracing the idea of a weapon to automatically destroy the world

Here's a post I've wanted to write up for awhile, tracing the history of the idea of a "Doomsday Machine," from fact to fiction (or maybe it was always, to some degree, fiction): doomsdaymachines.net/p/inventing-...

mildly interesting: my long-running VS Code script finished running, but VS code itself broke. I can copy and paste the terminal text (and it is complete when I do that, whereas it is visually corrupted), but I cannot edit or manipulate anything else. how weird.

Inventing the Doomsday Machine Tracing the idea of a weapon to automatically destroy the world

Here's a post I've wanted to write up for awhile, tracing the history of the idea of a "Doomsday Machine," from fact to fiction (or maybe it was always, to some degree, fiction): doomsdaymachines.net/p/inventing-...

Not just going to be — are actively being dismantled. Huge funding cuts. Programs closed/consolidated. People leaving or laid off. Empty positions unfilled. Staff leaving or laid off. Everyone being asked to do more with less. Fear and uncertainty. Etc. This is all happening — right now.

I'm sorry, I've lost any & all patience for this level of fundamental unseriousness. Vast swathes of our universities are going to be dismantled. Real people are going to lose their jobs. Students won't have the same opportunities anymore. And these people are writing drivel like this. It's gross.

It feels like an insult to the notion of objective reality to invoke “experts” to weigh in on a numerical fact you can verify with a pocket calculator

(In reality it is a bit little less work than all that of, because the data corresponds with population density, and anyplace that has a zero — the oceans — just gets thrown out. So like over half of the data points are empty.)

(I would waste more time coming up with a clever method than a dumb method, in this instance, I think. The issue is that I want the tables to overlap somewhat — each data point will be in multiple tables — so it is not as easy as it otherwise would be.)

Worse — I am checking each row of coordinates in the row against +64,000 possible bounds boxes it could be in, so I know which table to shuffle it off to. Which is not a clever way to do it, but it'll work. It is a one-time sort of thing.

I just want the actual accurate output.