Ward Q. Normal (he/him)

A Side Benefit of Reasonable Anti-COVID Precautions A few weeks ago, some asshole with a blog discussed how masking at meetings can prevent disease transmission: I also was at an in-person conference on Tuesday and Wednesday, and by the last couple …

Yep. Not getting colds is awesome.

If you stopped masking, you can always just start again! It's not a skill you have to work on. There are no gatekeepers who will kick you out of masking club for not having kept up with it. It protects you and others. There's literally no reason not to do it! #MaskUp

@weeklyshowpodcast.bsky.social 49% of covid cases are asymptomatic.

every infection causes cumulative damage.

vaccines alone can’t keep us from transmitting covid and getting long covid.

see next skeet for my ongoing thread of bad stuff covid is doing to us.

#MaskUp.

Just for the record #1: that cold was the result of traveling back to IL last Xmas and having to eat inside.

JFTR #2: I have sick kids in my class all the time, so I know I'm being exposed to bugs.

Masks work, folks. If you don't like being sick (who does?), I *highly* recommend them.

My colleague, out sick with her third cold of the school year: "Maybe I should go back to masking full time."

Me, wearing my mask, still COVID free, and having gotten only one cold in the last 6 years: "Um, yeah, no shit."

Post a banger that isn't in English.
youtu.be/ZhfCWRd9OjM?...

Fantastic. Long before I first heard this, I knew the Damned song "Jet Boy Jet Girl," which is the same tune but with completely different (atrociously snotty & offensive) English lyrics. The first time I heard the original it blew my mind.

In re: that NYT anti-cannabis op-ed, a reminder that one of the most important questions you can ask when consuming media is "who is paying for or behind this message?" My assumption on this article is booze companies who see legal cannabis eating into their profits. Hmmm....

I hear from people who are surprised I'm still talking about ICE, they thought they'd withdrawn from MN.

No, they have not. In some respects they've escalated.

Some asked why MN is a target. Are there are there a lot more illegals or criminals here?

No, it's not about that. It's about a grudge.

If it's part of the USA, why does it have a Spanish name? Checkmate, stupid libs.

so much of our present misery is just a giant, prolonged backlash to integration

Star Trek Voyager scene. We've got Tuvok standing next to Seven of Nine (Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 01). She's looking and him, and he's doing a smouldering, eyebrow popping look off into the distance thing. Closed caption reads, "I share your discomfort with social gatherings."

"Today in Chemistry History" infographic marking Dmitri Mendeleev's birthday (8 Feb 1834). The graphic highlights the date of publication of Mendeleev's first periodic table (1869) and shows the elements that were known at that time and included in the table. It also shows the elements which had yet to be discovered which Mendeleev used his table to predict the properties of.

Dmitri Mendeleev was born #OTD (8 Feb) in 1834. He's known for recognising periodic patterns in the properties of elements, using these to predict the properties of undiscovered elements. And, of course, the periodic table! wp.me/p4aPLT-8UU

#ChemSky 🧪

ethics professor here, can confirm

A post on threads from user stephens_bens. It reads 'I'll always remember an interview with Steve Buscemi on Bulleye, Jesse Thorn asked him "As an actor with many decades of varied and outstanding roles across your career, does it ever bother you that one of the things you will most be remembered for is a 3-second gif in which you're wearing a backwards baseball cap and carrying a skateboard?" And without missing a beat, Buscemi replied "I'm carrying *two* skateboards." And you know what? He is.' Below that is a screen cap of Buscemi's famous "fellow kids" moment.

I never noticed this either.

"You know something people? I'm not black, but there's a whole lots of times I wish I could say I'm not white."

- Frank Zappa

Note: I have determined that the emotional response to this varies widely depending on whether one likes the song or not.

"Raspberry Beret"? Sure. "With or Without You"? Not so much.

Is there a word for:

There's music playing, but the volume is low, and it sounds all muddled, but then you hear a single lyric and can identify the song, and suddenly it sounds louder and much more clear?

That happened to me twice this week.

You can take your used coffee grounds and mix them with 1/2 cup of white vinegar, it’s cheap & easy and it creates a huge mess that smells terrible

If you haven't, go check out the second Neu! album. They ran out of money, so half the album is original tracks, and the other half is those tracks played at different speeds. The first time I heard it, I thought my record player was breaking down, and had to remind myself I was listening to an MP3.

Related: A lot of jam bands should have stopped listening to #Phish way earlier 🤣

Hard same, dude. That's exactly it.

I often say, "I don't like bands where I feel like I could name every album in their music collection."

BTW I heard this fall '94, on tour with Steve a month after we met. He pitched a story to the San Diego weekly and got us backstage, which was actually just hanging out in the empty theater post-show. Chatted with Fish about how "No Pussyfooting" made him physically ill the first time he heard it.

If I remember correctly:

"If people go, 'who is that drummer? He sounds just like so-and-so' that would make me so sad. I'd rather have them go, 'that's Jon Fishman. That dude sucks.'"

Jon Fishman once said when he found a drummer who he really loved, he would stop listening to them, to avoid too much influence. The gist was "I don't want people to hear me and think I sound like a great imitation of someone else. I want to sound like me, even if people hate it."

the people who want you to believe that generative AI can paint like Picasso tend to gloss over the fact that Picasso didn’t have hundreds of Picassos to learn from. He had to make something new, which a model trained on old art is definitionally incapable of doing.

Super Bowl Sunday is the anniversary of one of the happiest days of my life: the day I realized I no longer had to pretend to like football.

mamdani child podium gave me an idea:
we should have a monthly primetime network show where a random American child gets to address the entire nation for half an hour about whatever topic they want

Without naming your job, tell me something you say over and over again at work.

“You HAVE TO label each axis and include units”

Hey please include a trigger warning on posts like this.