L. David Baron

Nixon's resignation letter.

Fifty-one years ago today.

a deer in a neighbor's yard, looking straight at me

two rabbits in a neighbor's yard, on the grass, but near shrubbery, both facing sideways and looking at me suspiciously

Before our recent move, in the suburbs of Washington DC, the (larger than bug) animals that gave gardeners trouble were deer.

Now in the suburbs of Boston (and closer to the city center) it's all rabbits.

Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.

Indeed... looks like a different handling of O from the US but otherwise the same.

For example, if you wanted to call PEnnsylvania 6-5000, you needed to be able to convert PE to numbers in order to dial it.

How reliably were UK landline phones labeled with letters? (And was it always the same pattern of letters?)

In the US this was consistent because phone numbers from before dialing had words that needed to be converted to numbers by the caller when dialing started.

disable-output-escaping is described as an optional feature in the XSLT 1.0 spec.

The Firefox XSLT implementation takes advantage of this and works in a different way: it transforms a DOM tree directly to another DOM tree rather than to text that needs to go through the XML parser again.

A fun reminder that a loss of 60,000 jobs in and around academia is ~50% more than all coal mining jobs in the entire country.

the USA built a system of higher education so good that smart/rich people from across the world came here, spending billions to learn here, subsidizing education for Americans while spending money to live in our cities and towns. our government arbitrarily decided we should stop doing that

I think I'm probably at least somewhat in that category. I think some of it comes from thinking that if I'm going to give a 30-60 minute talk I need to have a plan for what I'm going to say. But I feel like I'm more interesting when I don't have much of a plan for what I'm going to say.

The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.

The annoying spam texts destroying the Democratic brand:

$678M raised through those spam tactics

$282M to one consulting firm: Mothership Strategies.

$11M to actual campaigns (1.6%)

The party isn’t just treating donors like marks—it’s being fleeced itself yet continues to back Mothership.

Is there a reason most of my worst experiences of this were at YYZ?

Most of the people you know who work on browser engines probably agree with this sentiment. (But there are also many people who are happier writing new code.)

#BOX issues Record Event Report (RER) at Jul 29, 7:26 PM EDT ...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE FOR JULY 29TH SET AT BOSTON MA... Link

OFF THE EAST COAST OF KAMCHATKA RUSSIA

TSUNAMI WATCH
M8.0 earthquake OFF THE EAST COAST OF KAMCHATKA RUSSIA 16:24PDT Jul 29 Depth 74km

Tsunami Warning, Watch, and/or Advisory Bulletin for confirmed or potentially destructive teletsunamis generated anywhere in the Pacific Basin.

I think this already exists for some of the area within a 10-15 minute walk of Tokyo Station. I once (on a rainy day) did a 15 minute walk underground in that area that the locals I knew didn't think was possible. I don't remember the details anymore from 2017-19-ish.

Taipei mostly does this well, though when I was last there I think they were still retrofitting some of the older stations (mostly on the Bannan/Blue line) for full height platform doors (from the older half height ones).

Photo of Tom Lehrer

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

Following my recent move, the people who have been my representative in the US House of Representatives and are today still members of the House is:
- Nancy Pelosi (CA-11)
- Jamie Raskin (MD-8)
- Katherine Clark (MA-5)

(The list of those no longer in the House is longer and less distinguished.)

Insane RCV outcome: Adrienne Adams beats Andrew Cuomo I feel a little vindicated

Great post from Jesse Richardson. Lander was close to Mamdani’s margin and Adrienne Adams would also have beaten Cuomo. pathgolden.substack.com/p/insane-rcv...

"luxury apartments"

Egregious, but shows how the tyranny of the map is inescapable under single-member districts. You can heavily favor one party, or approximate party proportional results, or maximize competitive districts. But all of them are baking results into the map, pre-determined before a single ballot is cast.

If we use tiles, please make the tiles something that's not too slippery when it rains. One of my memories of Dijon is basically skating across Place de la Libération because the tiles were so slippery I couldn't comfortably lift one foot of the ground.

IEMBot Image TBD

LWX issues Flash Flood Emergency [flash flood: observed, flash flood damage threat: catastrophic] for Montgomery [MD] till Jul 19, 9:00 PM EDT Link

The current Maryland map doesn't look that gerrymandered, but the 2012-2022 map definitely looked it. The 2020 redistricting cycle basically kept the status quo (6D/1R/1tossup) and made the map look less bad.

Maryland went back and forth about how much to counter-gerrymander. It's currently 6 safe D, 1 safe R (MD-1, Eastern shore), 1 D-held tossup (MD-6, western Maryland). There was a proposal during the last redistricting cycle to make a map with 8 D seats, although maybe multiple not safe anymore.

I wrote a comment in a standards issue repo somewhere, I think. The distinctions between what's handled on *different* key events is a mess and it's unfortunately extremely interoperable...

Is this at all related to this mess:
issues.chromium.org/issues/40863... ?

Flight Manifests Reveal Dozens of Previously Unknown People on Three Deportation Flights to El Salvador Hacked data obtained by 404 Media reveals dozens more people on deportation flights to El Salvador who are unaccounted for. “We have not heard from these people’s families, so I think perhaps even the...

New from 404 Media: hacked data we obtained reveal dozens of unknown people on deportation flights to El Salvador. No acknowledgement from DHS. "We have not heard from these people’s families, so I think perhaps even they don’t know." We are publishing the names here: www.404media.co/flight-manif...

For the 1st time since the mid-20th c, a major urban US transit network is going to be largely destroyed.

Philadelphia’s SEPTA must cut 45% of service, starting NEXT MONTH.

45% is not “waste fraud and abuse.” It’s “would you like to keep your heart or your lungs?”

wwww.septa.org/fundingcrisis/