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We survived

We were without power for about 36 hours thanks to the bomb cyclone. It went out around 11:30pm on Monday and we weren't sure when it was coming back. The outage map had all outages marked as Saturday at noon, but I was fairly sure we were on the same grid as the middle school across the street from us. It's why we went to the movies last night, to get out of the house and go somewhere warm.

This morning, Katie excitedly messaged me this morning when the power came back on.

I shared the following few posts during our ordeal.

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Red One (2024) - 4 out of 5 Hot Wheels Cars

Red One2024PG-13

You get exactly what's on the tin with this one. It's a silly action movie around rescuing J. K. Simmons as Santa Claus. Katie and I went to see it to get out of our cold dark house and it was a very enjoyable time.

Tags: movie, review, christmas, the rock | Share to:

"Like ‘old Twitter’: The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky"

In July 2023, Adam Kucharski asked his Twitter followers: What platform do you think you will be spending the most time on a year from now? Like many scientists on Twitter, Kucharski, a mathematical modeler of infectious diseases, was increasingly frustrated with changes to the platform since Elon Musk bought it in October 2022. But of the more than 1300 people who responded to his poll, the vast majority expected to keep posting on Twitter, which was renamed X just 2 weeks later. About one-quarter were banking on Threads, Meta's Twitter rival. Only about 7% chose Bluesky.

Now, that has changed, in a big way. Although academics mostly stuck with X in the year after the poll, Bluesky has rapidly emerged as the new online gathering place for researchers, Kucharski among them. They are drawn by its Twitter-like feel, welcoming features, and, increasingly, the critical mass of scientists in many fields who have already made the move. "The majority has spoken, and researchers are moving en masse" to Bluesky, says De-Shaine Murray, a neuroscientist at Yale University who has also migrated to Bluesky.

"It's just gone completely crazy," says Mike Young, a science communicator in Denmark who gives social media workshops to scientists. He and his colleague Lasse Hjorth Madsen did an analysis in August mapping science communities on Bluesky. They found more than 20,000 influential scientists—people on the platform who were followed by at least 30 other scientists in the same network. When they repeated the analysis last week with an increased threshold of 40 scientist followers, the new number of influential scientists was almost 40,000. It is likely to be many times that now, Young says.

Tags: science, social media, bluesky | Share to:

A delightful journey in programming

I am reminded what a giant nerd I am since I watched this while working on other very nerdy things.

Tags: python, programming | Share to:

Glowbug Embeds

So one of the powers of my own blog engine is that I've done a lot of automation that I call 'embeds.' This is code that allows inputting a URL or a code string and having it turned into more robust HTML. This is things like YouTube videos ending up on page, as well as when you see my movie poster or book blocks.

But, today I added a few things for functionality.

• Bluesky - I finally sat down with the API and coded the simple tool that takes in a Bsky post and fetches the html for embedding.
• YouTube & Wikipedia - They both make use of a tool called iframly which is meant to be a tool that unifies the fetching of embed code for the video or the link to a Wikipedia page. Youtube had been used peviously but it was a shitty implementation and this one looks so much better.
• lichess - The site I regularly play chess on and now I can simply link to a game's URL and have it embed an iframe which enables visitors to actually play the embedded game.

There are a lot more potential embed codes via using iframely, but I don't know if I'll ever use them. We'll see.

Tags: programming, glowbug | Share to:

Today's chess win

Sure, I won this game. But also I am testing the embed code for lichess which takes the game's link and then makes what you are (hopefully) seeing above.

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The Final Busdown

Desert Bus for Hope is an annual charity streaming event by friends of mine in Victoria, BC. It runs for a week and this year they raised more than $1,250,000 for charity.

The ostensible goal of the stream is to play a game called 'Desert Bus' which was part of a set of games called "Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors" and it has been called the worst game of all time. Which makes it beautifully poetic that it is the underpinning of this amazing charity event each year.

Today was it's finale and this is how they end the stream. It's just my favorite thing.

Tags: desert bus, charity, philanthropy, childs play charity | Share to:

"A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon"

Tags: aztec, mythology | Share to:

"The Shocking Violence Of The Chimpanzee War"

Tags: jane goodall, zoology, chimpanzee | Share to:

Do Hard Things

Tags: motivation, casey neistat, youtube, marathon | Share to:

The Onion buys Infowars

Not satire.

Tags: the onion, infowars, republicans | Share to: