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Don’t Feed the Thought Leaders:

It turns out that Philip E. Tetlock from the University of Pennsylvania, who has been studying the judgment and decision making of experts for most of his career, has something to say about those types of predictions. And Tetlock is an expert on experts: his Good Judgement Project was able to beat CIA analysts by 30% at predicting geo-political events. And the intelligence officers had access to classified information.

Philip Tetlock: Why foxes are better forecasters than hedgehogs

It’s a matter of judgement style, first expressed by the ancient Greek warrior poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one great thing.” The idea was later expanded by essayist Isaiah Berlin. In Tetlock’s interpretation, Hedgehogs have one grand theory (Marxist, Libertarian, whatever) which they are happy to extend into many domains, relishing its parsimony, and expressing their views with great confidence. Foxes, on the other hand are skeptical about grand theories, diffident in their forecasts, and ready to adjust their ideas based on actual events.

Swallowtail

More nectar gathering

Bee in flight

Blackberries in bloom at the intersection of the cross Marin trail at SFD and Platform Bridge

Just hanging out in the sun

Want to destroy ransomware and crypto currencies? Provide cheap international currency exchange and a mechanism for paying for sex work and drugs.

When you're too old and lazy to figure out how to input emoji, so resort to Googling and copy-paste, until suddenly someone shows you ctrl+cmd+space on the Mac and then it's all 👅🦫 🍆🍑 and oooh look it's got a most recently used section!

Revealed: rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats

“There were no policies at Facebook against pretending to be a group that did not exist, an abuse vector that has also been used by the governments of Honduras and Azerbaijan,” said Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook employee and whistleblower who played a small role in the investigation of the Green party ads.

She added: “The fact that Rally Forge later went on to conduct coordinated inauthentic behavior with troll farms reminiscent of Russia should be taken as an indication that Facebook’s leniency led to more risk-taking behavior.”

Twitter thread about a few passages from The Greenville (South Carolina) News, October 2^nd 1918

A number of complaints have come to members of Council of negro women who are not at work and who refuse employment when it is offered them, the result being that it is exceedingly difficult for families who need cooks and laundresses to get them.

In case you're wondering about the destruction of the family unit...

The New York Times fabricates a nonexistent shoplifting wave in San Francisco, then wrongly blames it on criminal justice reforms and the city’s supposed soft-on-crime image

Yet, state and local crime clearance reports show the problem is not San Franciscans’ failure to report shoplifting to police, but the SFPD’s low rate (4.9 percent) of making arrests in reported thefts compared to police elsewhere in the state (10.5 percent). Fuller’s quip-sourced article manufacturing a nonexistent shoplifting wave and then baselessly blaming the supposed failure of criminal justice reforms does not rise to the standards one expects of the New York Times.

Not sure how to deal with those Photoshop .psd files? Photopea is a .psd editor that's fully web-hosted (but also single-page, so you can disconnect from the net and keep editing).

The story of a unicorn solo founder making $500,000 ARR, and AMA: Ivan Kutskir, creator of Photopea

Journal of Clinical Epidemiology: The Impact of Gender on Researchers’ Assessment: A Randomized Controlled Trial DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2021.05.026

A simulated post-doctoral process was carried forward to be assessed for judgment. Level 1 and 2 Brazilian fellow researchers in the field of Dentistry were invited to act as external reviewers in a post-doctoral process and were randomly assigned to receive a CV from a woman or a man. They were required to rate the CV from 0 to 10 in scientific contribution, leadership potential, ability to work in groups, and international experience.

Yeah, you know what happened.

Fuuuu.... not now, Objective-C...

Original rainbow flag returns home to San Francisco after being lost for more than 40 years

"Hand-dyed, big mess, cotton, oh my God you don't even want to know, stitch, stitch, stitch on the little Singer. Pink is for sex, red is for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green, nature, turquoise for magic, blue for serenity, and purple for the spirit. I like to think of those elements as in every person," Baker said in that 2017 interview.

It's so windy I'm a little concerned that these shoes make me a target for falling houses

Inundated with Facebook ads for products that can't possibly be legit. I wonder how long it is before social media advertising has negative value: "As seen on Facetwitstagram" comes to mean "definitely avoid at all costs".

Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is really going all out in searching for solutions to climate change:

"Is there anything that the National Forest Servide or BLM can do to change the course of the moon's orbit or the earth's orbit around the sun?"

Ended up reading this article because of a a Twitter thread talking about crime statistics reporting and how the narrative about police and crime is shaped:

Fentanyl, guns, and murder mean you should get ready for a bloody summer:

One challenge in interpreting crime data in general—and making sense of the 2020 surge in particular—is the slow pace at which it is published. National news outlets have run stories highlighting the murder wave in large U.S. cities, painting a picture of spikes that are unique to those generally liberal urban areas. “The U.S. saw significant crime rise across major cities in 2020 [a]nd it’s not letting up,” read one CNN headline from April typifying the genre.

But one reason reporters tend to focus on crime in large cities is because they have the capacity to publish more frequent crime statistics, whereas other smaller towns and rural areas don’t or choose not to.

(I had trouble reading this on a mobile device, shared it to my desktop, was able to read it, but then went back to the page and it had gone subscription only, so....?)

RT Joan “Pride of Saugus” Donovan, 🦫 @BostonJoan

I still can’t believe I was the co-creator of 🦫.

Every time I use it, I’m like “wwwhhhaaatttt have I done with my life?”

I am more proud of this accomplishment than my PhD.

Slate: About Dam Time — The hilarious, extremely convincing proposal to make a beaver emoji.

Unicode L2/19-110: Proposal for BEAVER Emoji

This proposal requests the addition of the BEAVER emoji to the Unicode emoji library.Beavers are a suborder of rodents mostly restricted to North America, who are hunted for their fur. ​The fur trade was a significant factor in the selection of the beaver as an official emblem of Canada, which extends back at least as far as the 17th century,where the beaver appeared on the Montreal coat of arms. However, outside of Canada,the beaver has many different meanings culturally. College and high school sports teams use the beaver as a mascot. As well, the beaver is sometimes used as slang tomake reference women’s vigina[sic]. Among lesbians, references to beavers are insidejokes that carry no pejorative insult.

New text messages show toxic culture in CA police squad | The Sacramento Bee. When you've made the

For example, Eureka Police Officers Association President Terry Liles was quick to publicly criticize the officers’ “extremely egregious behavior.” In a rare public rebuke of fellow cops, the union in a statement on the department’s Facebook page hours after The Bee’s story was published called the comments “abhorrent.”

North Coast Journal: 'Mission, Values, Vision' Leaked text messages and an ensuing investigation reveal a toxic culture in at least one unit at EPD

And Charlene peeking through that hole in the burned out redwood, for scale

I don't think I managed to capture the feel of the forest, but I got a picture of Charlene, so I'll save that.

Just some pretty

Okay, maybe that last picture has some redwoods. Captions like that are what happens when the thumbnails are too small

Just a shot of mostly non-redwoods in the grove

From the loop that goes around and on the hillside above the former golf-course in the San Geronimo Valley

Testing out my fixes some CMS code with pictures from Saturday down at Roy's Redwoods

Science rediscovers what we already knew: Open Biology: Review articles — Brain and testis: more alike than previously thought?

The similarity between human brain and testis may be explained by a biochemical convergence and by the involvement of these two tissues in the speciation process. The high similarity of proteins between human brain and testis may have clinical relevance. Indeed, the common proteins may be associated with the simultaneously impairment of brain and testis function. The identification of these proteins, along with the analysis of their role in brain and/or testis function, could help in better understanding the pathophysiology of these conditions, as well as in the development of new therapeutic strategies for treating brain or testis diseases.

On the one hand: Washington Post: We may never know where the virus came from. But evidence still suggests nature.

On the other: Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences: The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?

Based strictly on these two articles I'm leaning towards "not escaped from a lab", but I also realized that as much as my social network gives me notions of whose opinion I trust and who I don't, I don't know a whole lot of people specifically into virology.

Edit: Twitter thread asserting that "...almost every single one of the named authors in this increasingly influential lab leak paper is demonstrably batshit"

Every time I mute someone on Facebook, rather than un-friend, I wonder if this is the person & time where there'll be some scandal and people will be asking why I was FB friends with them...

Well nuts, my file uploader isn't working 'cause I've moved my web site from ARM to Intel, and recompilation is blocked by my lack of understanding of the changes in C++ semantics and that Boost intrusive_ptr issue. Sigh.

Went down to the San Geronimo valley to walk around the area by Roy's Redwoods

Dry spring, the hills are golden

If I could go back to the '90s with modern technology, I'd take PDFs as an example of the absolute failure of automation. "Print this, sign it, scan it, find a way to transfer the resulting multi-megabyte file..."

Days before Rep. Mike Nearman helped protesters breach (the Oregon) Capitol, he coached constituents just how he’d help them do it

Twitter thread with the video.

Alleged US Capitol rioter who heckled police for 'protecting pedophiles' served jail time for statutory rape of 14-year-old girl

According to prosecutors' description of the footage, McHugh allegedly shouted, "You guys like protecting pedophiles?" "you're protecting communists," "I'd be shaking in your little s--t boots too," and, "there is a Second Amendment behind us, what are you going to do then?"

“The problem with a phone is that we're not very good going through orifices to get to the end users.” --- Steve Jobs, talking, perhaps, about the post-Apple Watch future?

A blog post from back in 2009: Why can't Churches be more like Contra?. One of the comments makes me think I may have another book to add to the queue:

Have you read Diana Butler Bass's book Christianity After Religion? It asks a similar question in a very powerful and convincing way. And she proposes that churches need to put their community first, their behavior second, and their beliefs (as in trust, not the modern definition of belief) last.

RT the roughest toughest frail @em_aytch

STOP DOING FLAGS

YEARS OF VEXILLOLOGY yet NO REAL WORLD APPLICATION FOUND for representing gender and sexuality WITH COLORS

Wanted to show off anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that: it was called "HANKIES"

They have played us for absolute fools

Edmunds electric car range and consumption real world vs EPA

Of course what I'd really like to see is this number after 5 years, given that we know someone who sold a Bolt that was lucky to be getting 40 miles...

You can't rewrite history that is staring you in the face — The folly of the right's obsession with the 1619 Project — Lucian K. Truscott IV

You are looking at a photograph of me and my cousin Shannon Lanier. It’s a photograph that illustrates why the 1619 Project is such a white supremacist’s nightmare, teaching that racism and slavery played a major role in the founding of this nation. It’s a photograph of the truth exposed, at least in part, by critical race theory, an academic discipline that teaches the same thing. It is not only a photograph, it is a fact. It is history staring you in the face, history in flesh and blood, history that cannot be rewritten, cannot be buried, cannot be denied, because we are alive to tell it.

That’s Thomas Jefferson’s grave we’re standing on. We are 6th great grandsons of Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third president long idolized as a founding father of the United States. Shannon is descended from Jefferson’s 36 year relationship – if relations between an enslaved person and a slave owner can be called that – with Sally Hemings, who is his 6th great grandmother. I am descended from Jefferson’s relationship with his wife Martha, who is my 6th great grandmother. Shannon’s great grandmother was enslaved by my 6th great grandfather. We are tied together not only by blood but by the stain of slavery on our family and our country. We are cousins, and we are also blood brothers. We carry in our souls the legacy of the slavery that brought our great grandparents together. We are descendants of slavery. It lives within us.

The whole damned thing is worth reading.