Elizabeth Kolbert, science writer, visited scientists
trying to undo some of humanity's damage to the ecosystem
and perhaps avert the end of all human life. E.g.,
trying to keep a very-efficient snail-killing fish species
out of the Great Lakes so it doesn't wipe out the food supply
for the existing not-so-efficient snail-eating critters.
Or trying to preserve the desert pupfish, whose natural
environment nowadays consists of a pool in one desert cave.
Or trying to prevent southern Louisiana from sinking under
the Gulf of Mexico. Or geoengineering tricks to reflect
sunlight back out into space. Or…
What have we learned? Undoing the damage is hard.
Replacing the things that have been destroyed is hard.
The scientists preserving the Desert Pupfish constructed a
second pool in which to raise more Pupfish. Rather than
quarry out rocks exactly like those from the original
Pupfish pool, the scientists tried constructing something
from foam. I mean, sure—it's plain ol' rocks, right?
There's no way you'd need an exact copy of plain
ol' rocks to keep Pupfish going, right? Except that the
Pupfish pool's ecosystem has some burrowing beetles; it's
easier to burrow into foam than into rock; the beetles
in the constructed-second pool had too easy a time, ate
a lot of pupfish. Not even plain ol' rocks are easy.
It's easier to just not trash the original ecosystem; and
that's hard, too.
We're getting pretty desperate.
There's no reason to think any of these measures will work
better than nationalizing ExxonMobil, Chevron, etc
and winding down oil drilling and coal mining. I guess it's easier to get a grant
to save the Desert Pupfish?
Permalink
2025-02-18T17:37:06.663465
Walking in #SanFrancisco 's Richmond District, I saw a new-to-me
(but actually almost a year old) mural by
Sorrell Raino-Tsui of the ABG Art Group and/or Athen B. Gallery.
Celebrating immigrants who settled in the neighborhood, it featured
(among other things) onion domes.
Later on, I bumped into a utility box painted by Eddie Ahn.
I'd been a fan of his comic books.
He'd been on my mind lately: he was running for public office.
Alas, he was on the Neighbors and Labor Slate, backed by
let's-outlaw-the-poors groups like GrowSF and the
Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club.
It's tough being a comic book fan; every couple of years,
you find out some creator is a jerk and reading their work
just makes you sad. Anyhow, Ahn also called out neighborhood
features, including onion domes.
That utility box obviously depicted the Holy Virgin Cathedral out around 26th Ave, so I kept walking
until I could see the original.
Permalink
2025-02-08T21:54:40.987031
Chalk art at 20th and Irving in San Francisco: ¿dónde están los huevos?
Permalink
2025-02-08T20:17:42.656661
It's a
history of arithmetic technology leading up to
(and after)
the pocket calculator.
I wasn't expecting to learn much; but I did learn some.
Why wasn't I expecting to learn much? I've read a lot about
the history of computers; unsurprisingly, there's plenty of
overlap between computer-history and calculator-history.
But the bits of calculator history were sufficiently weird
for most purposes.
E.g., John Napier, the logarithm guy, was seriously
into the occult. I guess back then, you became a "Renaissance
Man" by reading all the books you could get your hands on.
It was possible to learn everything; but some of that "everything"
was just wild crap that someone made up about demons. John Napier
had darned broad book-larnin', but trusted some books'
assertions-without-evidence overmuch. Fortunately, he could figure
out logarithms were cool without needing to interact with the real
world too much and/or asking the advice of slow-to-reply demons.
Casio's first calculator wasn't near pocket-sized.
Back before transistors, its logic was electromechanical
relays. This calculator was the size of a desk. Imagine
asking for the answer to a simple formula and hearing a sound
like a bank of Strowger switches.
Oh, and a UX tale of figuring out how a calculator's keys should
feel: instead
of something silly like a piano, they took inspiration
from accordion buttons 🪗.
Bonus: The epilogue talks about the decline of the pocket
calculator. One reason for the decline: Smartphones came
along, with built-in calculator functions. Carrying another
device just for calculation didn't make so much sense.
But but to illustrate the idea of a smartphone,
he used a picture of a
Nokia
9000 Communicator,
giving me a bracing whiff of nostalgia.
Yes, our GEOS operating system brought about the decline of the pocket
calculator (albeit a miniscule fraction).
Permalink
2025-02-05T00:34:48.983785
I moved my backups off of Google servers.
Many months ago, April 2024, Google fired workers protesting
Project Nimbus, a Google-Amazon-Israel project, during an
intense period of the Gaza Genocide. This suggested that Google
Cloud Services, the part of Google that works with outside-of-Google
programmers to use Google's services, had fired a lot of competent
people—I figure that most of the Googlers still there
didn't think they could find work elsewhere and thus had been scared
to protest.
Google isn't a monolith; just because Google Cloud Services was
messing up doesn't mean all of Google was falling apart. But I knew
that my backups used Google Cloud; my reliable
backups didn't feel so reliable anymore.
It took me a few months to move my backups.
Well, it took me a few months to fail to move my backups the hard way; then almost
no time to move them the easy way.
I wasted a lot of time trying to keep my scheme mostly the same, just
storing stuff on someone else's storage. I liked my custom-made system,
and to keep things simple I wanted to keep using it instead of learning
some new-to-me system… But eventually I realized I was putting a
lot of effort into failing to figure out how to keep my "simple"
system going without Google cloud storage. Learning one of these new
not-so-new anymore systems was pretty easy by comparison.
(I was using rclone mount, and thought I had a lot of choices
about where to store my files; a lot of places support rclone! But when
I looked more closely, I found out almost all those places support rclone
mostly—they support it except the mount feature.)
Once I had my backups flowing to the new place, I didn't delete my old backups
from Google right away. I had an annual subscription; so it seemed worthwhile to
leave the files up there for a few months while I made sure that my new backups
were working OK. That finally happened, so I finally canceled.
That little task just took me nine months.
Permalink
2025-02-02T16:59:27.333674
I found out about GroceryDB, a data set of grocery ingredients sold at some big chain stores
(via the excellent Data is Plural blog).
Thus, future versions of the Phraser phrase list will know about
cultured dextrose and modified corn starch, substances which are apparently all around us
(if we are standing in our kitchens, anyhow).
Then I wasted some time staring at modified corn starch trying to use it as a cryptic clue.
Alas, if there are interesting anagrams of corn starch, I didn't find 'em. Scorch rant? Never mind, then.
Permalink
2025-01-30T16:35:00.900984
A little over a year ago, the 9th and Irving Starbucks unionized.
That's why became a regular. I guess that's also why Starbucks
is shutting down this always-busy store.
![snap of closing notice taped to door. Text: January 27, 2025 / Dear Starbucks customers, On January 31, 2025 at 7:30pm, your Starbucks at 9th and Irving, location 744 Irving, will be permanently closing. We would like to thank you for being part of our store community [part message out of frame and I forget what it said] you are the heart of who we are at Starbucks. It has been a great pleasure to connect with you every day. We are very thankful to have played a role in your daily routine and that you have shared these moments of your life with us.](https://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/importable/2025/starbucks-closing.jpg)
Considering the context, I imagine the Starbucks CEO biden his time until an anti-labor USA president came along,
then acting swiftly.
Anyhow, this isn't the biggest fallout from that context; there's plenty of worse news out there.
If this was your regular coffee spot and you're not sure what to do, I recommend the Beanery, kitty-corner
and a little uphill on 9th Avenue. It's pretty good. It's where I used to go, and I suppose it's where I'll
go in the future.
Permalink
2025-01-29T15:29:05.898665
I saw mention of another movie database.
I already knew about IMDb, a pretty-good example acquired by Amazon some years back.
New to me: TMDb, The Movie Database.
I previously figured out how to use IMDb's data to improve phraser's phrase list
with lots of movie titles and movie-people names.
Now I figured out how to do it again with TMDb, hopefully thus getting a broader list.
(Maybe more international?)
And maybe if Amazon ever goes on a cost-cutting rampage and discards IMDb, I might
have a fall-back plan. Anyhow, this data should trickle in next time I update
the phraser lists; I'm trying the new data at home now to make sure it doesn't
ruin everything.
Permalink
2025-01-26T02:01:48.582900
I continue to check my little dashboard of San Francisco COVID numbers each morning to figure out whether
getting together with a dozen nerds in someone's house to solve puzzles is fun weekend plans or an embarrassing
thing I'll have to explain to my doctor when we determine the cause of my long-term lung problems. Lately,
the numbers have been looking OK, but they don't all look OK: of the three numbers
I track, one of them, COVID-in-wastewater, recently rose up from not-so-scary to kinda-scary. Although those
wastewater numbers are noisy, the level's stayed high for over a week, so it's probably not just a blip.
I'm still going places; the low number of reported new cases and % positive tests give me some reassurance
that things are OK. But don't be surprised if folks who only track the wastewater numbers start canceling
their get-togethers.
As it happens, I did cancel my weekend puzzle-get-together plans; not because of scary wastewater numbers, but because of a lack of those numbers.
The California Department of Public Health paused posting their numbers on January 6th and didn't resume posting until the Tuesday after Mystery Hunt.
The day they paused, San Francisco's numbers were rising very steeply. I kept hoping they'd post new numbers that showed the rise had slowed down so
I'd feel confident swapping air with friends for a few days. And they did post those numbers, just too late to reassure me. Ahem. It's a good thing I'm not bitter.
Permalink
2025-01-23T21:00:52.683011
Seen on Haight Street, San Francisco, USA; applies in all geographries.
Permalink
2025-01-22T16:31:30.364260
