Overcoming a racist background

How do people who grow up in an all-white environment learn what racism is? Some things that made a difference for some people:

They can imagine being in someone else’s shoes.

Hawn was diagnosed at age 13 with Type I diabetes. He had to carry his blood-sugar meter everywhere, and insulin to his baseball games. He was painfully thin.

“I was very sick for a long time,” Hawn says. “My entire seventh-grade year I was sick.”

The illness made him stand out at a young age…

They’ve been transformed by a relationship

Hawn… says he began to question what many of his peers believed when he met a Black teenager in an American Legion program designed to promote teenage boys’ civic engagement. The teens spent a week together with others in a dormitory. Hawn bonded with his new friend over their love of hip hop music, sports and girls.

They have been moved by a story

Johnson started reading other African folk tales. Then she read the “The Diary of Anne Frank.” The girls in the books looked different than her, but she shared many of their dreams and hopes.

They are willing to pay the price

Hawn, too, is paying the price for his beliefs.

His parents have stood behind him. But some people in his staunchly conservative community denounced him on Facebook, and the lengthy dismissal process, which ended with his firing last May, has worn him down at times.

Full article: https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/01/us/white-people-overcoming-racist-backgrounds-blake-cec/index.html. About 3,000 words.

Two funnies (XKCD and GEICO)

Too lazy to put up something more useful, but these might make you smile.

xkcd.com is mostly tech- and science-related funnies, but everyone should get this. Note that every xkcd has an extra comment when you hover the mouse over it:

https://xkcd.com/2579

And sometimes a group does something so… wrong… that it makes even a serial killer shake his head. (A little subtle, watch carefully.) It’s an ad, yes, but one of my favorites. (30 seconds)

Snowplow names

What? You never realized that states and DOT snowplow drivers and citizens might like to name their plows?

Some of my favorites:

Ctrl Salt Delete
Clearopathtra
Large Marge
Salt Salt Baby
Clearing Present Danger, Fast and Flurryous, The Big LePlowski, Mission Implowsible
Blades of Steel
Dolly Plowton and Snowprah Winfrey
Darth Blader, Han Snow-Lo, Snowba Fett, Snowbegone Kenobi

https://www.michigan.gov/mdot/0,4616,7-151-9615-575096–,00.html

https://www.dot.state.mn.us/news/2021/03/02-snowplow.html

And some discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29883840.

Pentagon: climate change threatens global security

Today, bad news (in the sense that bad things are coming; good news that we are recognizing it). Excerpts from a Washington Post article:

Sweeping assessments released Thursday (10/21/2021) by the White House, the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon conclude that climate change will exacerbate long-standing threats to global security.

“Climate change is altering the strategic landscape and shaping the security environment, posing complex threats to the United States and nations around the world,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said.

Drought and other extreme weather can spark conflicts and force population displacements… one report that estimates that by 2050, up to 143 million people in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia could move for climate-driven reasons.

Geopolitical tensions are likely to rise in the coming decades as countries struggle to deal with the physical effects of climate change — which scientists say already is producing more devastating floods, fires and storms.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/intelligence-pentagon-climate-change-warnings/2021/10/21/ea3a2c84-31d3-11ec-a1e5-07223c50280a_story.html

Loonies (Canadian kind)

A loon appears on Canada’s one-dollar coin because the original dies, featuring a different design, were lost in transit. (Is this any way to design currency?)

When Canada decided to replace one-dollar bills with one-dollar coins, the 1935 Emanuel Hahn “voyageur” design was adapted for the new coin, but something went awry — the master dies of the new one-dollar coin were lost in transit.

Voyageurs

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/a-loon-way-home/

John Oliver takes on The Da Vinci Code

I read The Da Vinci Code and hated the writing. Pedestrian at best, convoluted and clumsy at worst. John Oliver didn’t like it either:

None of this success would really bother me that much if it were not for the fact that the cryptic at the heart of The Da Vinci Code, the puzzle (that) art throb Robert Langdon has to solve involves a poem that begins,

“In London lies a knight a pope interred
His labor’s fruit a holy wrath incurred.”

Now we quickly find out the knight in question is Sir Isaac Newton. So Isaac Newton, labor’s fruit, you’re thinking apple, right? Apple. It’s your first guess and it’s also your only guess and you’re right because it’s fucking apple. No one should need Robert Langdon — a Harvard educated puzzle solver who fucks — to get to the bottom of this. A child could solve that puzzle. And yet the poem continues:

“You seek the orb that ought be on the tomb
it speaks of rosy flesh and seeded womb.”

So orb, rosy flesh, seeds. It’s fucking apple, is it. It’s apple. Guess how many pages there are between that poem and the solution to the puzzle. I’ll give you a clue. It’s a lot more than one. Both the book and the movie make it seem like only the brilliant Robert Langdon could possibly decode the mystery behind those complex words. Here is the scene in the movie version where he explains the solution like he’s Indiana Jones finding the Ark of the fucking Covenant to a speechless and awestruck Amelie:

(Langdon): “There was every orb conceivable on that tomb except one. The orb which fell from the heavens and inspired Newton’s life’s work. Work that incurred the wrath of the church until his dying day. A-P-P-L-E. Apple.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5IV9n223M. 8 min 46 seconds.

Here’s an example from the book:

It takes 830 words — two pages — for everyone to understand that the Super Duper Extra Special Secret Encoding is… it’s mirror writing:

Why battery costs have plunged

The average cost of lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars and other products fell by 6 percent (adjusted for inflation) since last year. Since 2010, these costs have declined by an amazing 89 percent.

…Until recently, the high cost of batteries made battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) much more expensive than conventional gasoline-powered cars. But when batteries cost less than $100 per kWh, unsubsidized BEVs will start to be cheaper than conventional cars. At that point, BEVs could start to rapidly gain market share from conventional cars.

Why this has happened, does demand make prices go up or down, upcoming battery technologies, and related points:

https://fullstackeconomics.com/untitled-2/

Dave Barry Year in Review 2021

Is there anything positive we can say about 2021?

Yes. We can say that it was marginally better than 2020.

Granted, this is not high praise. It’s like saying that somebody is marginally nicer than Hitler. But it’s something.

What was better about 2021? For one thing, people finally emerged from their isolated pandemic cocoons and started connecting with others. Granted, the vast majority of the people who connected with us this year wanted to discuss our car’s extended warranty. But still.

(…)

March: International shipping is seriously disrupted when the Suez Canal is blocked by a massive container ship that became wedged sideways after the pilot attempted to take a shortcut suggested by Waze.
December: ​In other economic news, investors are alarmed when the Federal Reserve Board issues a formal statement declaring that it has no earthly idea what a “bitcoin” is, and it’s pretty sure nobody else does either.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/12/26/dave-barrys-year-review-2021/

From the internet (2014)

I save interesting sayings that I find on the internet. Here are some from 2014 but which still make me laugh… or learn:

❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖

Metaluna on Ars Technica wrote about a new browser:

The current trend among many companies is to name applications with a pithy, excessively minimalist name that is related to what people do with the program. For example “Word” or “Pages” because people use those apps to write and display words and pages. Or “Numbers” because a spreadsheet is used to crunch and display numbers, etc.

In that spirit, I propose that the new browser be called “Boobs”.

❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖

Lewis’ Law: “The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.”

❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖

Steampunk: what the past would look like if the future had arrived earlier.

❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖

Derek Lowe writes an occasional blog on chemistry called…

Things I Won’t Work With

…But I have to admit, I’d never thought much about the next analog of hydrogen peroxide. Instead of having two oxygens in there, why not three: HOOOH? Indeed, why not? This is a general principle that can be extended to many other similar situations. Instead of being locked in a self-storage unit with two rabid wolverines, why not three? Instead of having two liters of pyridine poured down your trousers, why not three?

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-peroxide-peroxides

And more:

https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-work-with

❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖

Terry Pratchett quotes:

“The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.” – Equal Rites (1987)

“So much universe, and so little time.” – The Last Hero (2001)

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” – A Hat Full of Sky (2004)

“Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel?” – in a 2008 interview.

❖❖❖❖❖❖❖❖

von Braun reportedly said “Late to bed, early to rise, work like hell – and advertise” so underscoring the importance of PR.

Making chips: 20,000,000,000,000 parts

That’s twenty trillion. You have no idea how much goes into making a modern microchip.

Long Answer: If a company wants to make the most advanced chips in the world, they need to purchase an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography tool from ASML, which has a monopoly…

One EUV tool requires:

5,000 suppliers provide 100,000 parts, 3,000 cables, 40,000 bolts and 2 kilometers of hosing. The tool weighs about 180,000 kilograms (200 tonnes), and ships in 40 containers spread over 20 trucks and three cargo planes…. That is just one tool. To make a chip, a factory needs 200+ tools… The mirrors guiding this light are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimeter.

https://semiliterate.substack.com/p/why-cant-china-just-reverse-engineer. (Note, “BLUF” at the start means “Bottom Line Up Front.”)