David Saff

Well, good thing I'd mostly figured out how to give this up. See y'all somewhere else.

My town (Arlington, MA) has been giving all students free lunch and breakfast, regardless of demonstrated need, since the beginning of the pandemic. Many of us assumed that was just happening everywhere in MA, if not the whole US, which is not true. Is there a good list?

@marick Also, this map sneaks in a strongly confounding variable, since it's largely a map of "what percentage of this state's total infections occurred early in the pandemic"

@puzzlereric Interesting. I also got four spam calls in under 3 hours from 4 very similar numbers...

@valerielundeen @davidrallenjr One of them snuck into my bio. :-)

...

@Noahpinion I think that there should always be a question of "why are you amplifying this _particular_ account, if there's many people who believe the same thing". "They have a lot of followers" seems valid. "I would like to dunk the most poorly-phrased ally of my opponents" doesn't.

Question for the feed: Do you agree with the principle? Should high-follower accounts avoid doing anything that brings negative attention to low-follower accounts? Or should they treat low-follower accounts as equals?

@kcsaff But the transportation network is very capricious, if I understand correctly. I won't say it isn't _deeply_ tempting.

xkcd

Fixed the bugs causing unphysical shadows in the algebraic surface path tracer!

Looping text-to-image of "A drawing in the style of M.C. Escher"

(Just going to pick up my box of kids' art and Android figurines, still some months before any regular work-from-office, especially since we're not back to full school-from-school.)

Came home from work in March 2020, laid my badge down in its spot on the radiator next to wallet and sunglasses. It sat untouched until just now, resuming a habit and rhythm lost, like a mix tape that's been waiting since 1987 to play the second half of a forgotten favorite song.

so i didn't plan on writing this at any point in my life, but here is a thread about toilets in the library of babel. there is an interesting (intentional?) set of voids and paradoxes in "The Library of Babel" related to metabolism. latrines or bathrooms are mentioned:

Every plan, in order to have a decent chance at being accomplished, needs 5 things: 1 Positive definition of success 2 Owner 3 Timeline 4 Budget 5 Next physical action Without any of these, it's not a plan, it's a wish. Wishes sometimes come true! But plans are more reliable.

@kcsaff Definitely not what I hoped. :-(

@kcsaff Shooting with guns, or shooting with cameras?

@marick I think it's very hard for us to deeply *believe* we'd be better off pissing off our perceived clan, even when it might make intellectual sense.

@marick I think you're on to something here. Years ago, I found myself explaining to an upset 7th grader that most of our social brain evolved at a time where the biggest survival skill was making sure that your clan/tribe would still feed and protect you even in extremis.