Nick Doty @npd@octodon.social

Sometimes I just like making a pretty graph to illustrate something, even if it's not dramatically insightful?

#socialscience #graphs #ietf #infoviz

"We are not against the construction at all", said the representative of the three neighborhood associations -- each of which are made up of wealthy, white, single-family homeowners -- who is suing the University to stop construction, on the grounds that it might affect their ample street parking.

In this case, the construction is a few new beach volleyball courts, so that UC Berkeley can more equitably invest in women's as well as men's participation in campus sports.

The very earliest blooming wildflowers of California: the Fetid Adder's Tongue, in a redwood forest on Mt. Tam, and the Footsteps of Spring, in the grass on Bernal Hill in San Francisco.

Updating my year-plan, with mission statement and high-level goals, for 2019:
https://npdoty.name/plan/
* stay healthy
* support family
* explain tech standards
* promote privacy
* fight fascism

What if your phone or watch could broadcast a "no photos, please" message, and then people taking pictures with their phones got a prompt to confirm that they got your consent before taking a photo?

I think there's a lot of opportunity for broadcast tech, around privacy and in other areas:
https://bcc.npdoty.name/no-photos-please-and-other-broadcasts

Steve King's open and unabashed white supremacy is disturbing as ever, but it also demonstrates the confusion that comes from assuming supremacy.
"You could look over there and think the Democratic Party is no country for white men." -- Rep. Steve King
House Democrats are approximately 38% white men; the United States population as a whole is approximately 30% white men.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/us/politics/steve-king-trump-immigration-wall.html
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI825217#RHI825217
https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1061730087823912960

On a train on New Year's Eve, so I felt compelled to make a map of my Amtrak travel progress: https://npdoty.name/trains/

The Wired magazine I just received contains 12 full-page ads -- including back cover, inside front cover, and a fold-out spread -- for a "vaping" product, an addictive tobacco nicotine delivery system increasingly popular with kids.

The spin-off native advertising "Wired Brand Labs" group included a justifying editorial, concluding that alternatives to cigarettes "may have the potential to present less risk", while specifically avoiding saying that these products actually do present less risk.

Google Drive automatically scans and asks to "back up" all the files on an audio recorder immediately upon connecting it to my laptop USB port. If I accidentally press the wrong button, Google will have access to sensitive research data in violation of both my expectations and my commitments to my research subjects.

Me: hi computer, I would like to run this simple command
Computer: did you mean, "download and install updates and address conflicting version details for hours upon hours"?

📚 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.