Nick Doty @npd@octodon.social

📚 libraries are amazing
📚 interlibrary loan is amazing
📚 books are amazing

This trilogy (Outline; Transit; Kudos) by Rachel Cusk is unusual, fascinating writing, the protagonist so self-effaced that her name is almost missing entirely. It is a book told through those conversations you have with the talkative stranger next to you on the plane.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21400742-outline
#reading #amreading #📚

Couldn't the House of Representatives just used a ranked choice vote to pick a Speaker?

I've never understood why it has to be determined exclusively within the majority party, or why we need this behind-closed-doors maneuvering. Which representative has the most support from the rest of Congress? Might very well be Rep. Nancy Pelosi, but the current process seems like such a weird way to suss that out.

Look how excited they are! Here's a video of people yelling "we did it" and "congratulations" in their respective native tongues:
https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/index.php/extwidget/preview/partner_id/684682/uiconf_id/31013851/entry_id/1_spfg9pbn/embed/dynamic
Here's the napkin where all the NIST researchers put their bets on what the final number would be:
https://www.nist.gov/image/17pml010plancks-constant-predictions-napkincroppedhrjpg

Members of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) -- representatives of 60 countries -- have voted to change the definition of a kilogram effective May 20, 2019.

The kilogram will no longer be the mass of an platinum-iridium cylinder kept in a safe in France, but instead will be proportionate to the Planck constant, h, measured to be 6.626070150 × 10^-34 kg⋅m^2/s.

Those adorable Sanitation department robots are the highlight of "Maniac". I'm glad they reappear in the coda.

Ten months later, and I've just finished my first two ActivityPub-powered chess matches, exactly as I'd imagined. I highly recommend https://castling.club and kudos to @kosinus for building it out so nicely!

A lovely intermodal transit day, ending with a bus trip over the Bay Bridge into the newly opened beautiful transit center with the rooftop park.
🚌🚇🚲🚶🚇🚍🌉🌴🌲🌳
#transit #sf #bus

@king I'm open for challenges!

@king I challenge @kosinus in part because there isn't yet a directory of random people to challenge to an ActivityPub based correspondence chess game.

Switching my (small) monthly auto-payment support for the Octodon administrator and Mastodon developer back to Patreon, since Liberapay's payment processor has shut them off.

Happy to see that Patreon seems to have chosen more reasonably payment structure/options in the meantime. First of the month works totally fine for this sort of thing.

📚 _Where There's Love, There's Hate_
I like everything about the writing of this book -- the husband/wife authors (who coyly refer to themselves with cameo appearances), the apparent relationship between the authors, Borges and their super close literary circle, reading the book in English translation when one of the main characters is a translator and details of how she translates detective story books into English are important to the plot.

But the story itself is just fine.

London Breed sworn in as the Mayor of San Francisco, promises to change "the politics of no to the politics of yes" including "yes, we will build more housing."

A dangerous precedent: soda companies paid to put an intentionally harmful but potentially popular measure on the California ballot (all local taxes would require 2/3rds ballot initiatives) and then convinced the legislature to block new municipal soda taxes for 13 years in order to withdraw the measure from the ballot.

Now that large companies are aware of this possibility, I fear the extortion will happen every election year.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-cities-banned-from-imposing-new-soda-13035692.php

Henry George wrote _Progress and Poverty_ in San Francisco, pawning all his belongings to cover the cost of the plates because no one would publish it, recognizing exactly the same problems that we see in San Francisco today. And he identifies the remedy (property tax, in particular tax on land valuable by virtue of location), the very remedy that wealthy voters have explicitly excluded from California with Proposition 13.

Oil portrait of Henry George, that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.