Cavalcade of Mammals

• MAGA
• Proud Boys
• Armed Militias
• And a guy dressed as Hitler

Book to read: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn by Richard Hamming. Known for Hamming codes (checksums).

Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens. Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!
It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.

Why aren’t we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? by Celeste Davis

Book to read: Much Ado About Numbers: Shakespeare’s Mathematical Life and Times by Rob Eastaway

Book to read: ‘Secrets of Automata – Ingenious designs for mechanical life’ by Michael Start of The House of Automata.

Making A Mechanical Watch From Scratch Is Fine Work
Tom’s Watchmaking Blog
Hobby CNC machining and resin casting
Part 01 of 03 – An Introduction to the Series 2 Movement

3D printed lens grinding machine by Von Fraens, link.
3D printed sphere machine by Von Fraens, link.

Shodan – search engine for Internet-connected devices.

Trump was a bad President, 1st term.

Glossary for The Sun Also Rises, wikipedia book link.

AI achieves silver-medal standard solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems

Indiana May Make Abortion Reports Public Records

Who Goes MAGA?

Here’s a Mochi flashcard deck with cancer drugs, link.

Oval: 15.25″ x 6.875″, half point width 5.9375″
81.7 in2 total area

12 Voronoi regions:
7.6 in2 (73.5g, 8.6 layers 2x + 0.6)
9.4 (91.0, 10.6 layers, 3x – 1.4)
10.4 (100.6, 11.8 layers, 3x)
10.4 (100.6, 11.8 layers, 3x)
5.3 (51.2, 6.0 layers, 1.5x)
7.2 (69.6, 8.1 layers, 2x + 0.1)
6.4 (62.0, 7.2 layers, 2x – 0.8)
3.7 (35.8, 4.2 layers, 1x +0.2) 1.5″ doesn’t quite fit
6.7 (64.8, 7.6 layers, 2x – 0.5)
3.9 (37.8, 4.4 layers, 1x + 0.4) 1.5″ doesn’t quite fit
4.9 (47.4, 5.5 layers, 1.5x – 0.5)
5.9 (57.0, 6.7 layers, 1.5x + 0.7) 1.5″ doesn’t quite fit

Place 1.5″ circles (1.77 in2, 8.5g) at each Voronoi seed point.

3 colors + clear: bottom clear – A – B – C (one of each 4 layers, 2x each 7-8 layers, 3x each 12 layers)

Tintin store in Porto

DIY cat tower

Big doll mold

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. […] under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

The Time I Built an ROV to Solve Missing Person Cases

New gene therapies confront many sickle cell patients with an impossible choice: a cure or fertility.
CRISPR treatment for sickle cell approved (Casgevy)

USB Logic Analyzer – 24MHz/8-Channel ($20)
Bus Pirate – v3.6a ($33) — v4.0 still experimental

Flipper Zero — Multi-tool Device for Geeks ($150)
CC1101 chip, making it a powerful transceiver < 1 GHz, 125 kHz RF
ID antenna, NFC module 13.56 MHz, BLE, infrared transmitter/receiver, 1-Wire, GPIO

Mini WiFi Surveillance HD Camera, $12.50
2K Pan/Tilt Security Camera, $26

A New mRNA Malaria Vaccine. By targeting resident memory T cells in the liver, a novel mRNA malaria vaccine prevented infection, even in those with prior exposure.

Falling In And Out Of Love With LA’s Mystery-Cloaked Magic Castle, part2, part3

How Many Creationists Are There in America?
2019 poll: 61%-81% US adults pick evolution, 32%-62% of US white evangelical prostestants

Exclusive: John Kelly goes on the record to confirm several disturbing stories about Trump

Hair Turns Gray Due to Stuck Stem Cells: Hair-coloring stem cells must swing back and forth between their maturity states to give hair its color. Sun et al., 2023

Unvaccinated more likely to have heart attack, stroke after COVID, study finds. Being fully vaccinated reduced the risk by about 41 percent.Jiang et al, 2023

Are the costs of Brexit big or small? by John Springford
“the British economy is around 5 per cent smaller due to Brexit”

The Overwhelming Case for CBDCs (central bank digital currencies) by Willem H. Buiter

Scarce Labor As The Cause Of Innovation. The Habakkuk thesis, Rome and the robotics revolution by Angela Nagl

Book: Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants. by John D. Clark

The Tacit Knowledge Series

Why can’t our tech billionaires learn anything new? On Marc Andreessen’s “techno-optimist manifesto” by Dave Karpf

The Trilateral Shitpost Fire that was the 1980 GOP convention, part 1: On the long history of thinly veiled antisemitic conspiracy theories on the GOP’s right edge by Seth Cotlar

An Exciting New Approach to Autoimmune Diseases by Eric Topol

Absent Gods, Absent Catastrophes : The Sharing Knife and The Lord of the Rings

Disaster Conservatism: There’s nothing worth saving from the Tory years. Nothing at allby Nick Cohen

The Bluestocking, vol 259: Dahl and Fleming

Two Stories About Tacit Knowledge To build a nuke or (can) not build a nuke by Rohit.Krishnan

Book: The Gutenberg Parenthesis The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet by Jeff Jarvis (2023)
“The Gutenberg Parenthesis traces the epoch of print from its fateful beginnings to our digital present – and draws out lessons for the age to come.”

Book: Glass Art From the Kiln by Rene Culler (2010)

Marx generator This circuit generates a high-voltage pulse by charging a number of capacitors in parallel with DC, then suddenly connecting them in series.

Perimeter of an Ellipse. Estimate or infinite series.

This article by Kevin Drum argues that the Flint water lead poisoning episode was not that bad, there was little lasting damage, and the biggest issue today is people hyping the issue and scaring kids (link).

I have to disagree that “…little damage done. Lead levels never got all that high”. True, the attention the problem received led to a quick response that soon fixed the water, and the lead levels in children’s blood began to decline.

But when the lead issue was discovered, “Resident Zero”’s water had lead levels of 217–13,200 μg/L, 14X – 900X alarming levels (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b00791)!

In the initial study, in 7 of the 9 Flint wards, > 20% of households had water lead levels > 15 ppb, the action level. In the worst wards, child blood lead levels were elevated in 11%, 9%, and 6% of children (https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2015.303003). In a quick search, I don’t see how high blood lead levels rose in these kids.

There were 17 months between the water switch and the start of corrective measures. The water lead issue was first identified in Feb 2015, and testing over the spring and summer raised greater and greater alarm as it became clear this was a widespread water issue, and then in Oct 2015 corrective measures were taken.

Several thousand children <6 years old (of 9,000 in Flint) had significantly elevated blood lead levels for more than a year due to this poisoning.