polyployed

 I made a post on hacker news a few weeks ago, I wrote... When DNA matching was introduced, we discovered that at minimum 10% of people on death row were innocent. Death row cases are among the most litigated and examined cases. So, 10% is a reasonable floor, and we're already in double digits. It turns out I'm wrong about the statistic, but the posting window has closed, so I'm going to correct myself here. The actual statistic I confused was this: The exoneration rate is about 10% of the execution rate. For every 1 person exonerated, about 8,2 are executed.  https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/data/death-penalty-census/key-findings  

I'm outlining this because I'm lazy today. We are much more aware of sound that we think. The first time this became clear to me in my own life, was when I saw a great horned owl for the first time. I saw it sitting, not far from, on top of a telephone pole. It flew away, and I had this incredible spooky feeling, or feeling of unreality. I then realized that it was because there was no audible sound. Every other time I'd seen a bird that size flying away, there was a subtle sound that was just missing. This might also explain why various people's have referred to owls as being spirits. Our sensitivity to differences in timing is incredibly small, possibly less than six mircoseconds, and our precise short term audio memory could be as long as 20s. Audio quality in networked systems (Human hearing) When humans are observing other people, they tend to fall in sync with each other. (This is facilitated by mirror neurons.) If a person is following another person, or watch...

The idea that a chump who bankrupted a casino could outmaneuver the country that invented the term "checkmate" was always profoundly stupid... - Comment from CamperBob2 on hacker news  

" Amnesty through ignorance begets incompetence as a standard"

 The first time I heard the term Trunk Based Development was in relation to Google's development process, but I'd used it for several years at Google. Over the years I've noticed a misunderstanding about Trunk Based Development. Some users of Git seem to believe that it means committing directly to trunk. This misunderstanding has to do with Google's source code control system, Piper. Piper is a descendent of Perforce. Perforce has the concept of a changelist. A changelist is a group of files that will be committed together as an atomic unit. When you develop with Piper, you group your modified files into a changelist, and then you send the changelist out for review. Once your changelist passes review, it gets committed. Here's where the misconception comes in. The documents describing Trunk Based Development explicitly states that the process doesn't use branches, but branches are a different concept in Piper, and they are distinct from changelists. Git uses br...

 They haven't seen the light, they're just choking on the smoke.

 Quote of the day: "bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it." - Yonatan Touval

 Quote of the day:  “ Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it, creating a sort of negative feedback loop. Rather than a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,’ a higher level of corporate BS in an organization acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.” From  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886926000620?via%3Dihub#

A few days ago I listened to the new RadioLab episode " Song of the Cerebellum ", and I had a shocking moment of revelation. The episode is structured around young woman who had a stroke centered in her cerebellum, and it closes with a description of how she is different from she was before. This self-description of the changes in her mind struck home deeply. She could have been describing my experience of the world. She describes being laughing too loudly, and her social interactions being a bit off. She finds it harder to sing. She is off the beat. When she sings the notes don't go from her brain to her voice. Her hand writing sucks. Her experience of the world doesn't flow any more. This is a description of my existence. I have a defective cerebellum, or defective wiring between the cerebellum and the higher portions of my brain. This is something of a relief. I understand more about who I am.

 This is a painting of a dodo made by Cornelis Saftleven in 1638. I've always thought that dodo pictures didn't look like real birds. They look cartoonish and just bizarre. This looks like a real animal that actually existed. I don't quite understand why this picture isn't the one that we're shown.

 So, I read a great saying about building houses today, "Build one for your enemy, then build one for your friend, and then build your own one".  I have no idea what language this comes from.

 Does anyone know which invader stole all their vowels?

 Someone summed up what DEI programs are about, and I think it bares repeating: DEI programs are about hiring qualified women and minorities rather than hiring lesser qualified white men.

 In the United States the holidays of Halloween and Thanksgiving are bulwarks against the invasion of Christmas. Without them, Christmas would invade October, just like it has in Germany.

Many animal that we thought of as pure vegetarians will eat meat when given the opportunity. When deer find bird's nests they will eat the nestlings, and tortoises will gleefully hunt birds. The birds get their turn though. It turns out that German Peacocks eat sausage, so the next time you're in Germany, and you visit Pfaueninsel (Peacock Island), please guard your sausage. If you don't, then it may not not be there when you turn around.

On a recent trip I visited with some old friends for a few days. Some of her family is a little suspect. At some point she told me story that describes how. Many years before she was visiting with some relatives, I think a pair of aunts. The three of them were sorting out the belongings of another recently deceased relative. At that particular moment they were sorting though old albums and pictures. Some are being tossed, and some are being kept. My friend notices one that's just been tossed onto the discard pile. She picks up the photo, and she can't believe what it is. It's a snapshot of Mahatma Gandhi. Not a clipping, not a repro, but family snapshot of Gandhi. She picks it out of the discard pile. Thinking that that her aunts didn't recognize it, she asks them, "Do you know who this is?" The aunts squint at it for a second, and then one replies, "That's the horrible little man that ruined India for us."

 I think I've finally boiled down the both sides fallacy to its essence. A both sides argument uses a non-representative sample to draw a false equivalence between two groups.

Thought: Ravens are crow magnums.

The refrain, "there's nothing in the house to eat," is something I usually don't think. I find it a bit lazy or unimaginative, but I admit it's appealing in some way. I've found myself falling into this pattern in the last few weeks. I think it's often habit.  I've just been making sandwiches recently. Admittedly good sandwiches are pretty easy to make here in Germany. Good bread, good cheese, and good meat are plentiful and cheap. I think I've become lazy by eating so many sandwiches. Tonight I finally tired of sandwiches. I spent a good fifteen to thirty minutes dancing around the fact that there was nothing to eat. Well, nothing other than the bean soup I made on Thursday. The bean soup that left me with impressively long-lasting gas. I'm meeting people tomorrow, so I'm holding off on eating that. Then I realized that I had a bag of roasted beats. From there the idea of borscht came to mind, and as it turns out, borscht is really easy to...

In the the last three years I've had multiple people tell me that California does not have a drought. I have been told that California's water issues are man-made.  I have been told that this is a media misrepresentation. California has been in drought. You could just look at drought.ca.gov to check, but that doesn't seem to be enough for some people. It's the government, and they feel that the government can't be trusted. So I want to demonstrate the facts as an eye-witness. First a little background on California hydrology. Much of California's water comes from snowpack in the mountains.  One third of LA's water supply comes from snowpack. For the last twenty five years I've been hiking out to small alpine lakes in the Sierra Nevadas. These lakes are fed directly by snowpack, and they drain naturally into streams and creeks.  They are unaffected by civil engineering. Since the drought started, these have been drying up. My most recent trip was in 202...