this week i

met priyanka at the end of her fellowship to move a futon down philadelphia stairs.  we drove to fort lee, ordered burritos, finished four red bottles to celebrate.  all agreed neil gorsuch is not good looking, he's pretty.  i slept in saturday sunday, ate battered shrimp, bruschetta.  riya ran through the summer park fountains, no clean clothes, there she goes.  visits to ice cream on grand both before and after outback steakhouse parking lot hudson river (not bay) views.  bus driver declined dollars, mta has gone cashless, so i walked one hundred blocks before bethesda bus.

successfully submitted a pull request to fix a data.table error message.

learnt paper-flattening and marbling.

read..

(1) sea levels

more than 145 million people around the world live three feet or less above sea level

the relationship between water and land in amsterdam isn't the same as it is in jakarta or lagos, so what may work for one city will not work for another.  in new york, city planners are considering a sea wall known as the big u around lower manhattan, but a sea wall won't work in miami

greenland holds enough water to raise sea levels by roughly 22 feet

(2) modern arabian power

in place of societies where elders compromised, young rulers now govern with the conviction of revolutionaries

supply is outstripping demand

6/27

this week i

published a dozen facts about medicare advantage and new beneficiary behavior.

drove to lancaster, hiked all day.  across the susquehanna, old pinnacle road (a meadow), conestoga trail (east coast wagon namesake), tucquan glen.

 

whistle solo in 2019?  bold.

 

and with that, a yogurt empire was born

 

okay, so applied physics

no no no, experimental physics

 all i know is they had roombas twenty years ago, and all they still have is roombas

read about online threats and countermeasures..

facebook's like and share buttons and twitter's tweet buttons are used to track a user's online activities even if the user does not click them

session cookies are stored in a temporary location in the client browser and are removed when the user closes the web browser or logs out of the current session. such cookies are usually used to remember user shopping cart information or to store data between multiple pages.

canvas fingerprinting works by drawing an invisible image on the user's client browser.  once drawn on the client browser, the image will collect different technical information about the user's browser and os.  a hash is then created based on the collected information.  this enables online trackers to track user online activities across different websites based on this hash, which is unique for each user's client machine.

god bless dr. john, god bless wikipedia

read..

(1) majoritarianism in south asia

in the discourse of hindu majoritarianism, all muslims and christians are ancestrally hindu

once the news of this latest atrocity recedes, the myanmar government will have reason to believe that its project of diminishing the presence of rohingya in rakhine is well underway.  sri lankan nativists who believe that the country's buddhists are bhumiputras (sons of the soil) and non-buddhists are mlecchas (inferior aliens) will take heart.  the bjp government in assam, where illegal bangladeshi immigration sparked violence in the past, will learn new lessons about the latitude given to perpetrators of ethnic cleansing, as long as it is conducted by "sons of the soil"

(2) computational currency

if you wanted to steal a bitcoin, you'd have to rewrite the coin's entire history on the blockchain in broad daylight

(3) the epidemic last century

donald trump's grandfather friedrich died from it in new york city.  he was 49.  his early death meant that his fortune passed to his son fred, who used it to start a manhattan property empire

the us lost more soldiers to flu than to the war in part because so many of them spent weeks coughing together in barracks and transports on their way to europe

the flu wasn't spanish at all.  the name stuck when in may 1918 the spanish king, the prime minister and his entire cabinet all came down with it.  in madrid, it was known as the naples soldier after a catchy tune then in circulation, while french military doctors called it disease 11.  in senegal it was brazilian flu; in brazil it was german flu.  poles called it the bolshevik disease and the persians though the british were responsible (spinner writes about its devastating effect on the city of mashed, where it probably arrived with a russian soldier from the north)

(4) the universality of war crimes

president nixon exclaimed repeatedly to a white house aide in november 1969, as the new york times headlines the my lai story, that "it's those dirty rotten jews from new york who are behind it"

(5) the volatility index

i don't worry about the effect of the speedometer on how fast my car's wheels turn or on how its engine runs.  you can't ignore it, though, in economic life

6/20

this week i

identified airport pick-up by the poster waved above his head.  we ate woodberry kitchen, drank spro, before our victory lap.  thanks for the careers

met pre-academyhealth, a few days before seeing her work on the nightly news.  an external affairs tizzy, some debate about familial relationships of prominent same last names in health policy, and a broken kitchen sink

worked in mount pleasant, stayed late for the stewed slop and strawberry shortcake.  david named his software

come home most evenings.  my father reads on his back, in the light of the lamp, forearms upright.  he smiles, i'm not sure if it's relief or just regular happiness.  it's rare but it's genuine.  "where were you all day?"  "dad, the sun is still in the sky"  eight in the summertime.  we exchange banter, as much as he'll tolerate, i already know his responses.  he shoos me out of the room, rustles the paper stiff and upright.  he finds his place on the page, i close his bedroom door from the other side.  sometimes a bridge to the outside world, sometimes just his kid.  making memories is a funny thing

6/13

this week i

published ten things to know about the medicare prescription drug program.

started summer school at the university of maryland.  geog682, open source intelligence

python has a global interpreter lock that makes multithreading a challenge

from satellite feeds: how many cars are parked at walmart and therefore do we expect revenue to grow

the foreign broadcast intelligence service translated public media, a foundational part of the cia.  doesn't have to be classified to be important

saw a cool crane or a heron or is that an egret before working in the library before paper and book making thursday

consider italics the most mysterious of the typographical emphases.  on appetite: if you can think of it, then it's possible.  if it's possible, then you can have it.  if you can get it, why don't you have it?

expect the next gulag to be populated by this word, the conspiring data scientists will often be wrong

cannot reserve a holiday inn without you spoiling it for me, google.  an astounding run.  the king is dead!  long live the queen!

6/6