Probabilities of probabilities
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Joined April 2009
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Tif retweeted
Rita Moreno performed “Fever” with Animal on The Muppet Show (1976) — a comedic performance that earned her an Emmy Award.
Tif retweeted
Art Deco panel featuring a bird in Chicago’s One LaSalle lobby.
Why the bird design?
In the 1920s,birds symbolized freedom & movement as aviation transformed the public imagination.
Designers were also fascinated by Egyptian art, where winged imagery symbolized the divine.
Tif retweeted
today my daughter and I walked to our neighborhood grocery store for our weekly "grocery haul," pushing our Burley bike wagon. It’s Apple Fest in Lincoln Square, and thousands of people have descended on the neighborhood, and it's extra nuts.
While we were loading our groceries into the wagon, we spotted her classmate, age 11, at the checkout with his scooter, bike helmet, and five two-liter bottles of soda.
“Hi! Are you having a party?"
No party. He and friend are going to sell cold drinks to people at Apple Fest. The crowds are so bad, he explained, that people are waiting 45 minutes to get a drink and not all of them want beer. Some will buy soda from them outside the gate.
The middle schoolers had spotted an opportunity and taken action. They could get themselves to the grocery store and then to the festival, without an adult arranging the trip, driving them, or doing anything except giving permission
My daughter noted that their social studies teacher has been lecturing them nonstop about supply and demand, so apparently the lesson is getting a local field test.
But the episode also make me reflect on the fact that planning decisions made a century ago were making these boys’ independence possible today.
Homes, shops, and public gathering places are close enough together that children can reach them under their own power. The grocery store is part of their neighborhood. So is the festival. They can run a little experiment without it becoming a transportation and logistics burden for their parents.
That is a significant part of family quality of life. Children get opportunities to exercise judgment and participate in the world around them. Parents aren't reduced to nonstop chaffeuring. Even our weekly grocery trip can be a walk we take together.
There’s a larger supply-and-demand story here as well. Lincoln Square draws these enormous crowds because it offers something people love but is in short supply ... a charming, walkable, prewar neighborhood with shops, public spaces, and street life.
The boys saw a shortage of cold drinks and decided to do something about it. We could bring some of that initiative to the shortage of neighborhoods where children can do what they did this morning.
I am spending much of this weekend volunteering at our school's tent at a neighborhood fall festival, chatting with parents with preschool age kids and talking up the school.
I do this every year and it is FASCINATING. A lot of these parents are transplants from the suburbs. They're used to commuter culture and have no frame of reference for a school you walk to. Ask them which elementary school they're considering, and they name a destination school five miles away.
So I explain the benefits of a neighborhood, walk-to school:
-Your kids get easy friendships with classmates who live two blocks away, and nobody has to drive to make them happen.
-You make friends with the other parents, because you keep running into them around the neighborhood and at every activity.
-it's very easy to volunteer and do school activities
-when your kids are in 3rd or 4th grade, they can *walk themselves to school and many of their activities* dramatically improving your quality of life by liberating you from chauffeur duty
Tif retweeted
Took my dad to a medical test this morning and the facility we went to sends you a QR code that you then scan at a kiosk to do your check-in. They literally had one live person if you didn't use the QR Code system and the line was 30 people deep. My 86-year-old dad uses a flip phone so if I wasn't with him he would have had to wait in that line. And I would say the average age of the person in that line was 80 plus. So we're making all the people with walkers and canes stand in line for an hour to check in. I'm all for embracing technology but this is ridiculous.
Tif retweeted
The homeless woman murdered in Central Park was a beloved artist and birdwatcher who made beautiful pieces dedicated to birds. She went by Lee Rogers, but also was known as Elise Bainbridge Hill. Her art was awesome. I hope her life story is shared and not just the grisly details
Tif retweeted
Starship transiting the Sun this morning during Flight 14 — prior to this morning's mission, this has never been captured before with the world's largest and most powerful rocket.
I’ve ached over this shot for years, mainly for two reasons: what does methane exhaust look like silhouetted against the Sun, and how violent are the acoustic energy waves from 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster?
Well...now we have an answer.
📸 - @NASASpaceflight
Tif retweeted
It’s not just “AI” that’s under brute force assault.
It’s also launch (environmental activists groups etc), data centers (distortions about water consumption and community energy costs etc) and nuclear energy (panic about grid & infrastructure etc)
It’s a war against our civilization, our employment, our growth and widening the distribution of wealth
Tif retweeted
As you get older, you become allergic to this doomer bullshit, because you’ve seen a million doomsday prophecies fail to ever materialize, and you realize…they’re just constantly lying.
Tif retweeted
If Democrats gain control of AI, they are going to turn the entire world into HR. You will never be able to get away from the HR Lady. She will be in your refrigerator. She will be in your toaster. There will be no escape.
Tif retweeted
You know a movement is totally grassroots and organic when they spontaneously have coordinated signs with logos and corporate level branding.
What an op.
The world is waking up to extinction risk in the wake of Jacob Coxon's resignation.
We need to rise up to the occasion now.
Every one of us. Drop everything and join us.
Emergency protests are being launched worldwide to make sure governments hear the people and the experts' voices during this critical window (links in thread). Tell your friends. Be there.
The Hugging Face attack has shown AIs are capable of autonomously hacking companies. With relentless persistence, these AI agents dismantled every barrier in their way to achieve their goal. Future AIs will pursue their goals just as relentlessly, but with more-than-human intelligence. If we try to stand in their way, we may not win that fight.
Politicians are responding. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar announced the first US bill to ban superintelligence. In the UK, Alex Sobel has done the same, and over 70 MPs and peers have signed ControlAI's letter urging Andy Burnham to back it, calling on him to use the UK's G20 presidency next year to build "a coalition of the willing to tackle this national and international security threat."
The human story cannot end here. Loss of control to AI is entirely preventable. We must unite, worldwide, for humanity.
RSVP below and share with friends and family.
Tif retweeted
86 truck drivers arrested in 3 days. Trucks left sitting on the side of the road.
Operation Highway Shield hit Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio. Federal inspectors targeted unqualified drivers, unsafe rigs, and alleged CDL fraud.
Results: • 86 arrests • 766 out-of-service orders • 51 illegal immigrants detained • nearly $1 million in stolen cargo recovered.
This isn’t a one-off. Officials say more than 26,000 drivers have been pulled for English-language violations, thousands of shady CDL schools have been shut down, and more than 30,000 improperly issued CDLs have been revoked.
Unqualified drivers behind 80,000-pound trucks aren’t a paperwork issue. They’re a public safety issue.
#OperationHighwayShield #Trucking #CDLFraud #RoadSafety #Ohio
Tif retweeted
I’m looking to connect with people who have deep practical experience at the intersection of electrochemistry, chemical process engineering, and separations.
We have a proposal for a programmable chemical-process platform designed to control aqueous chemical state and selectively move matter through a sequence of useful states, thus allowing difficult, variable, or waste-derived feedstocks to be converted into purified resources, chemicals, materials, or biologically manufactured products.
We are looking for a partner or team to run a focused proof-of-concept experiment that will validate or rule out the core physics and, if it validates, support subsequent process development. Prior work in electrochemical process development and separation and purification is relevant to aspects of our proposed design.
At this stage, I am particularly interested in people who have actually designed, built, and operated experimental process systems. Experience with electrochemical separations, electrodialysis/bipolar membranes, aqueous speciation, membrane processes, hydrometallurgy, selective recovery, or coupled reaction/separation systems are especially relevant.
The immediate objective is deliberately narrow: build the minimum experimental system necessary to determine whether the proposed architecture works as intended, understand its limits, and establish the engineering basis for scaling it if the results warrant doing so.
Please reach out if this is for you.
