Unitarian (https://xitter.cf/t.co/Oa2WTYfKzI), father, husband, geek, runner, activist, @ACLU member, liberal, Democrat. @MomsDemand member.
Chicagoland, IL, USA, Earth
Joined March 2008
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BLESSING: "Recognition of ripeness." It's a very, very, very old definition. Simplistically, it's 'celebration'. Really: a specific type of celebration. Ripeness implies new usefulness, a mile-stone passed, a configuration-change into an intended state. Help your God Bless you.
The difference between an outdoor broom and an indoor broom is the outdoor broom doesn't know how to keep his voice down.
I'd like to buy a dozen of these but I'm not sure where I'm supposed to put them on my Tesla. Glovebox?
Temu brings you luxe car upgrades without the luxe price tag.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Devices like the exhaust whistle shown are banned by name in California under Vehicle Code 27150.3. Most other states prohibit exhaust modifications that create excessive or unusual noise, which these are designed to do.
law.justia.com/codes/californ…
findlaw.com/legalblogs/cri…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistle_t…
worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings…
Hey, @iRobot : your app stinks.
1. I wanted to do a clean-now on one room. I can't. I can add an automated run. No.
Hmmm.
2. I somehow started it, it's doing something? ... It now says cleaning mop. Effing stop, it's waking up the house!
3. Cannot rename a room. Why the eff not?
4. Egads, it's done cleaning mop, It's trudging down the hallway. How the f do I stop it? Oh, right, wait 15 seconds for it to connect and then hit the x button in the app.
5. Is there a button combination on the top of the damn thing to tell it to go back to its dock right effing now? I seem to be able to turn it off but not to make it go home.
6. The app button that says 'dock Controls' should include a button that says, go back to your doc now.
7. The app should have a voice controls button which lets you tell the app what you want done and when, and then have it confirm that and do it. My Tesla will drive anywhere in the United States and stop for chicken if I tell it to verbally and you can't get your app to do simplistic things like stop washing your effing mop and waking up the house. – at Oakwood Hills, IL
justanyone retweeted
I find this chart does a better job of communicating the decisions people made about their own lives in the past. People weren't having 6 kids because they wanted 6 kids, they were having 6 kids because they wanted 3.
Hey, @Uber_Support , when you pop up reserve trips on my screen, please add wait time as the first line in the timing list?!?
I accepted a ride without noticing it was Uber reserve, drove 10 minutes to get there. Once there, I discovered I would have to wait a half hour for nothing. I never would have accepted the ride in the first place with that much wait time. – at Cary, IL
Moments of awesomicity are near 1:28. youtube.com/watch?v=zi8ShAos… "Give Me Compliments" sung with a very strong German accent.
justanyone retweeted
We can all from Keith's philosophy on obstacles:
An obstacle is a feature of the current situation, not a permanent condition of the landscape.
Every fence has a weak point.
Every weak point can be found.
Every found weak point can be used.
Every used weak point can be found again once the farmer repairs it, because the repair will be adequate, and adequate is not the same as impassable, and Keith knows the difference.
Keith is not aggressive about this.
Keith is not frustrated.
Keith is patient, methodical, and completely confident that the gap exists, that the gap will be found, and that the gap will be used.
Keith has never once stood in front of a fence and decided the fence was correct.
Keith has stood in front of many fences.
Keith is on the other side of all of them.
Be like Keith. Be ungovernable.
Keith the Apocalypse Bringer is a three-year-old Anglo-Nubian goat in a field in Devon.
Keith should not be underestimated.
Keith has been systematically dismantling the ecosystem since approximately 7am, when he ate a bramble. This is significant because bramble is an invasive scrub species that outcompetes wildflowers, reduces biodiversity, and creates dense monoculture thicket that nothing else can use.
Keith ate it. Keith does this every day. Keith does not charge for this service.
8:15am - Keith ate a thistle. Thistles are also considered invasive scrub in managed pasture. Goldfinches eat thistle seeds, but Keith's grazing will ensure the pasture remains open enough for the ground-nesting birds that can't use dense scrub. Keith has not attended a conservation workshop. Keith arrived at this conclusion by being a goat.
9:00am - Keith dismantled a section of hedge. This was less helpful. Keith does not have a perfect record.
10:30am - Keith escaped the field. He was in the road for eleven minutes. He ate a neighbour's rose. This is not being counted in Keith's environmental impact assessment.
11:00am - Keith was returned to the field. Keith regarded the farmer with the specific expression of an animal that does not recognise the concept of property.
12:00pm - Keith ate more bramble. His digestive system: four stomachs, a rumen full of specialised microorganisms, the ability to extract nutrition from lignified plant matter that would defeat any other animal on this field, is converting scrub vegetation into milk with a fat content of approximately 4.5%. The milk will become cheese. The cheese will be sold at the farm shop. The farm shop is four miles away. The cheese food miles are: four.
3:00pm - Keith produced manure. The manure will grow the grass. The grass will grow the bramble. The bramble will be eaten by Keith.
This system has no inputs.
It has been running since goats were domesticated approximately ten thousand years ago.
Keith is not aware he is saving the planet.
Keith is thinking about whether the fence on the north side has a weak point.
It does. Keith found it at 4:45pm.
Keith got out again.
It's pretty funny that the party that was so against participation trophies keeps giving them once a week to Trump – at Cary, IL
Hey, @michaelsheen (& @SheenFacts_)
My wife says, as a proud Welshman, you might appreciate this: – at Oakwood Hills, IL
"W. The only vowel you really need."
@Cymru @BBCWales @WalesOnline
("W. Thw wnly vwwwl yww rwwlly nwwd." ???)
"W. The only vowel you really need."
@Cymru @BBCWales @WalesOnline
("W. Thw wnly vwwwl yww rwwlly nwwd." ???) – at Oakwood Hills, IL
justanyone retweeted
Right now, in barns and equipment sheds across the American Midwest, farmers are making the most consequential decision of this war. Not generals. Not senators. Farmers.
At $683 per ton urea, corn economics have collapsed. Nitrogen is the single largest input cost for corn production. At pre-war prices a farmer could justify 180 pounds per acre and expect a margin. At $683 the math breaks. Soybeans fix their own nitrogen from the atmosphere through root bacteria. They do not need the molecule trapped behind the Strait of Hormuz. The seed decision is being made this week across roughly 90 million acres of American cropland. Once the planter rolls into the field, the choice is irreversible. Corn seed in the ground stays corn. Soy seed stays soy. The acreage allocation locks in.
USDA Prospective Plantings reports March 31. That report will tell the world how American agriculture responded to the Hormuz blockade. But the decisions it captures are being made now, in conversations between farmers and agronomists and seed dealers who are looking at nitrogen prices and making the rational economic choice: plant the crop that does not need the input you cannot afford.
Every acre that shifts from corn to soybeans tightens the corn balance sheet for the rest of the year. Corn feeds livestock. Corn feeds ethanol. The Renewable Fuel Standard mandates 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually, consuming roughly 43 percent of the US corn crop regardless of price. That demand is inelastic. If acres shift and production falls while the mandate holds, corn prices spike. Feed costs spike. The protein cascade reverses. The US cattle herd sits at 86.2 million head, a 75-year low. Poultry and pork margins that were benefiting from cheap feed compress when corn crosses $5 per bushel.
This is how a naval blockade 7,000 miles from Iowa reaches the American grocery shelf. Not through oil. Not through shipping. Through nitrogen. The farmer cannot afford the molecule. The molecule cannot transit the strait. The farmer plants soy instead. The corn supply tightens. The ethanol mandate consumes its fixed share. The remaining corn reprices. The feed reprices. The meat reprices. The grocery bill reprices.
The decision is not political. It is arithmetic performed on a kitchen table by a person who needs to plant in three weeks and cannot wait for a ceasefire, an escort convoy, or an insurance normalisation that the Red Sea precedent says takes years.
The deepest penetrator in the American arsenal cannot reach a sealed Iranian doctrinal packet. But the fertiliser price it failed to resolve is reaching every planting decision on 90 million acres of the most productive farmland on Earth.
The war’s most irreversible consequence is not happening in a bunker. It is happening in a barn. And by the time USDA publishes the data on March 31, the seeds will already be in the ground.
Full analysis in the link.
open.substack.com/pub/shanak…
justanyone retweeted
Doris is a four-year-old Texel ewe on a fell in the Lake District.
Doris is, according to several recent opinion pieces, destroying the planet.
Let's check in on Doris.
6:30am - Doris began grazing. The fell she is grazing is semi-natural upland grassland. It has existed in this condition for approximately eight hundred years because sheep have been grazing it continuously for approximately eight hundred years. Without Doris, the coarse grasses outcompete the finer ones. The wildflowers disappear. The skylarks that nest at ground level lose the open sward they need and abandon the site. Doris does not know what a skylark is. She has found some good grass near the wall and that is the full extent of her agenda.
7:45am - Doris walked into the bog. This was not the plan. There was no plan. Doris extracted herself, turned around, and regarded the bog with the expression of an animal that has decided the bog started it.
9:00am - Doris found a gap in the wall and went through it. She was now in Brian's field. Brian's field is, by any measurable standard, identical to Doris's field. Doris is aware of this and does not consider it relevant.
10:30am - Doris was returned to her field. The farmer repaired the gap. Doris watched the repair with the focused attention of an animal taking measurements.
11:15am - Doris rolled into a dip in the fell and got cast. This means she ended up on her back and could not right herself because the weight of her fleece shifted her centre of gravity past the point of recovery. She lay there in the dip looking at the sky with the composure of an animal that has decided the sky is quite interesting actually.
11:40am - The farmer found her, righted her. Doris walked away at speed. No acknowledgement. Complete dignity. As though the last twenty-five minutes had happened to a different sheep.
1:00pm - Doris grazed the area around the base of the dry-stone wall. The grazing keeps the vegetation short enough that the wall's base stays dry and frost doesn't work into the joints and expand. The wall is two hundred and sixty years old. It will outlast everything currently being written about livestock farming if the vegetation around it is managed. It is being managed by Doris eating grass. Doris does not know she is doing conservation work. Doris has found something particularly good near the fourth stone from the bottom.
3:00pm - Doris produced manure. The manure will feed the soil microbiome. The soil microbiome will grow the grass. The grass will grow back where Doris has grazed it. The grazed areas will remain open enough for the tormentil and harebells to survive. The tormentil and harebells are why people drive three hours from Manchester to walk on this fell.
This system has no external inputs. It has been running since Texel sheep were brought to these fells from the Netherlands in 1970 and discovered the gaps in the walls shortly afterward.
5:00pm - Doris lay down. The fell was quiet. The skylarks were still up. The wildflowers were still in the turf.
5:47pm - Doris found a new gap. She was in Brian's field again.
Brian has started keeping a log.
justanyone retweeted
The math on this project should mass-humble every AI lab on the planet.
1 cubic millimeter. One-millionth of a human brain. Harvard and Google spent 10 years mapping it. The imaging alone took 326 days. They sliced the tissue into 5,000 wafers each 30 nanometers thick, ran them through a $6 million electron microscope, then needed Google’s ML models to stitch the 3D reconstruction because no human team could process the output.
The result: 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, compressed into 1.4 petabytes of raw data. For context, 1.4 petabytes is roughly 1.4 million gigabytes. From a speck smaller than a grain of rice.
Now scale that. The full human brain is one million times larger. Mapping the whole thing at this resolution would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet.
And they found things textbooks don’t contain. One neuron had over 5,000 connection points. Some axons had coiled themselves into tight whorls for completely unknown reasons. Pairs of cell clusters grew in mirror images of each other. Jeff Lichtman, the Harvard lead, said there’s “a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.”
This is why the next step isn’t a human brain. It’s a mouse hippocampus, 10 cubic millimeters, over the next five years. Because even a mouse brain is 1,000x larger than what they just mapped, and the full mouse connectome is the proof of concept before anyone attempts the human one.
We’re building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we’re trying to imitate. The original is 1.4 petabytes per millionth of its volume. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that.
The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull. The data center required to merely describe one-millionth of it would span 140 acres.
justanyone retweeted
Please enjoy this Cheeky Pint / @dwarkesh_sp crossover with @elonmusk.
Dwarkesh was most interested in how Elon is going to make space datacenters work. I was most interested in Elon's method for attacking hard technical problems, and why it hasn’t been replicated as much as you might expect. But we got into plenty of topics in this three-hour session.
00:00:23 Space GPUs
00:35:39 Alignment
00:58:48 xAI
01:15:01 Optimus
01:28:03 China
01:40:46 Management
02:16:38 DOGE
02:34:58 Space GPUs redux