Man, what a friggin amazing weekend.

There is nothing like having 100 of your family and friends come in from out of town and throwing the biggest best party you can think of. It's a whirlwind for sure, the kind of thing you wish you could make last forever. Uh. Man. I want to thank so many people, and I will do so more privately also, but for the record, the following people have been extra special amazing:

John Figdor for a wonderful ceremony - and all the work that goes into it, and guiding us through putting it together

Heather Kresge and co-photographer Robert were so on the ball, thoughtful, artistic, and calm the whole time; seriously, hire her if you need photos ever

(Alexa and Wes the videographers were great too!)

Alex Homer for totally great DJing - the kind of skilled DJ whose timing is always perfect, and who can work in a whole list of stuff we like but also know that, yeah, everyone actually *does* want to hear Don't Stop Believing

Amanda and the rest of the Mattress Factory crew for running the show at the super coolest venue I can imagine

Krishna and the folks at Tamarind for delicious Indian catering - way better (and cheaper too) than standard ol' American catering (and Jen and volunteers at 412foodrescue.org for saving leftovers even, maybe!)

Matt and Charlie Wein for helping us come up with a bar menu we loved, buying a ton of drinks, and serving them up to a hundred thirsty partygoers

Cheryl, Natasha, Ivana, and Miya for being a great Bridal Party and being game for doing readings kinda on the spot

Daniel and Killian for being the Best Man and Best Woman, seriously, waiting on us hand and foot, knowing exactly what we needed all the time, and helping everything go smoothly

All of you for being my loving family and friends! Ok going to go Like everything on Facebook now, be back in a couple hours.

This is what I wanted to say about Trump

Not surprisingly, Scott Aaronson says it better than me.

"Against those considerations, I recently realized that there’s an argument for speaking out, which goes as follows.  Suppose Trump actually wins (as of this writing, Predictwise still gives him a frighteningly-high 27% probability).  Suppose my family somehow survives whatever comes next, and one day my daughter Lily comes to me across the rubble of the post-thermonuclear hellscape and says, “daddy, in the Good Days, the days before the War of the Small-Hands Insult, the days when there was plentiful food and water and Internet, didn’t you have what used to be called a ‘blog’?  Then why didn’t you speak out on this blog, why didn’t you do whatever tiny amount you could to prevent this?”  So, alright, this post is my answer to her."

My answer to my future daughter is this: in the goal of not adding more noise, I won't write my own long thing; instead, I refer my (four) blog readers to Aaronson's post. It's so good - all of it, about why Trump is totally unqualified, why he's possibly Hitler but more likely "only" Putin or Pinochet and that's still not ok, why social media vindictiveness and life-destroying is counterproductive, why we need to understand why people are voting Trump instead of assuming they're just racist imbeciles, and about how we should probably do something to stop him but it's really unclear what will work. (I'm surprised the Black Mirror episode "The Waldo Moment" hasn't been referenced more often.)

Why economic revolutionaryism now?

Man, basically this. (I used to read Tim Bray for some Android things or something, but he's one of the few I've kept around for being just pretty interesting at blogging kinda in the way that I want to be?)

I guess why I was psyched about Bernie despite it no longer being cool was this: an economy that looks hopeless and broken forever, for a lot of (most?) people.

Like, my future looks bright in the short term. I'm one of the people that mainstream Democrat party cares about, I've got a 401k, I've got steady housing and employment and food and I'm unlikely to get all revolutionary, I'm demographically likely to support rather safe progressive values (e.g. LGBT equality)... but look, we need the unsafe progressive values, the ones that Buddha (our salvation is all bound up in each other) and Jesus ("whatever you do for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did for me") and Gandhi/Dostoevsky/Churchill/Whoever ("you can judge a society based on how it treats the least of its people"). A functioning society that only works for me and my 401k doesn't work. But this is obvious; go back and read that Tim Bray post and the ones he quotes like the Unnecessariat post.

Especially the one about how moral appeals don't work for some issues. Which is why am I focusing more on the chunk of the world that's our economy than some of the other pressing issues. It seems likely that enough people are going to get angry enough that they're going to overturn the NC bathroom law; it seems less likely that we're going to get so straightforwardly angry about the economy. I mean, the series of small cuts that's giving us the ongoing long-burning economic crisis (and heroin and suicide crises) is leading some of those people whose lives have been hosed to... Trumpism? That seems like some people are taking advantage of the complication of all these issues.

Maybe global warming or malaria are still bigger issues. Ok. There's also the argument that, if you take the (maybe?) most powerful country in the world and let it eat itself with bad economics, you're not going to solve global warming or malaria. But I'd believe that we should focus on global warming or malaria too.

Inspiration in Amsterdam

Week before last: conference in Cologne. Here are some things about going to a conference in Cologne that are great:

- The public transportation. Look at this!


- Woyton Coffee, a fine local minichain that helped me deal with my jet lag, insomnia, hypomanic state, whatever it was
- Beer gardens where you can just go with a conference-group of 15 people you hardly know, and instead of "ugghhh where can we possibly go" it's "sure, come on in, and beers for everyone? great, beers for everyone. and food if you want to order it, and we can split the checks."
- Do you want to see the sights? There is kinda one sight, it is the giant cathedral, it is super pretty and worth seeing, it is right downtown next to the train station, you can see it for an hour or for a minute.

But even better, afterward I went to Amsterdam to see my friends Michael and Antonieta, and Daniel who was able to join us for a day. It was super great! Here are some things that were great:
- reuniting with my old friends
- public transport there is also great, ok
- OV-fiets! This is a bike you can rent from a place right next to the train station, for 3 euros a day, that comes with its own lock, fenders, everything you need. It is not sleek or lightweight but neither is anyone else's bike, and it works. This made my Amsterdam trip so much better.
- the coffee shops. (The ones where you drink coffee. No, really.) Between Hay, Hutspot, Scandinavian Embassy, CT Coffee and Coconuts, and Bocca Coffee, I was well caffeinated and impressed with design.

CT

- the Stedelijk Museum. It's their MOMA. Awesome stuff. I learned what the Amsterdam School in the 1910-1930 was (kinda like art deco + Myst), learned what Gerrit Rietveld did (think Mondriaan in 3D), saw a bunch of paintings and sculptures I liked, went inside a replica of an old bar called the Beanery, got a little disturbed and really intrigued by a Jon Rafman/Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) video ("Sticky Drama", vaguely inspired by his research in online communities like Second Life and WoW)

Karel Appel, Questioning Children #2

Rietveld, Elling Buffet

Adolf Eibink and Jan Antoine Snellebrand, a desk lamp

Jan Eisenloeffel, a table clock

A bunch of Amsterdam school lamps

Here's a thing that was not great: shopping. I tried to buy some things because a lot of my old clothes are wearing out, and I figured, I'm Dutch-sized, they should fit me well. Nah, not really! Not any better than anywhere else, it seemed. And the styles are all denim or denim-colored. Everything's jeans. And not even good jeans: skinny jeans! Those are uncomfortable, man. Shirts and jackets in shades of blue. I am not on board with the current style I guess. (It's ok, I'll be in style again in 5 years.) I went home and bought some clothes at REI.

Well, ok, these pants were cool, and not jeans. But they were also 190 euros.

Here's another thing that is great: Project Fi. I didn't have to futz with a local SIM card or anything, just showed up and everything worked and was still the same price for text and data (texting free, data $10/gb). The future is here!

Link dump posts aren't the best but it's what I've got for you now

Global warming: What's really warming the world? (yes, it's people.) It's good to have a few solid links on hand for debates I guess. (OTOH there's that phenomenon where showing people facts that contradict them makes them dig in their heels, not think twice... if you get a digging-in-heels response from this, what are the counterarguments though?)

Economics/basic income: Man, I was going to post some news article but as usual I could just post a much better Slate Star Codex post. This one's about how America's not the Land of Opportunity, and basic income might be the only way we might get there, though even that's not a slam dunk. And follow that link to "how bad are things"... yow.

Algorithmic fairness: There's software used to predict future criminals. And it's biased against blacks.
UGH DUH OF COURSE IT IS... given that most companies cannot get something as simple as "serve a web page" right, of course they will not get something as subtle as "don't make your algorithm secretly hate black people" right. So what's the answer? Keep it as goddamn simple as you can, and when you have an algorithm that's as powerful as that one, at *least* require that it's open source. (This doesn't solve everything; it can be open source and complicated as hell, and open source doesn't mean that anything will ever change, but "ok company, make whatever algorithm you want, we'll use it to determine people's lives without asking too many questions" is not a solution.)
Edit: OOPS I READ THIS TOO CASUALLY; seems their algorithm is fine, or at least off the hook for now. Do stats right, please. Draw conclusions after you do the stats. Don't start off trying to prove something's racist.
Lessons learned from this whole episode:
- internet writers do things that I do not like. So do all of us. (see also: academics, in every single thing they ever write.) In the long run, we should as a society stop doing that somehow. In the short term, it's at least useful to know that this is the world you're in.
- I'm thinking of stopping using the term "racist." It's basically a swear word at this point.
- Please please do not misinterpret what I'm saying in the previous sentence. Not saying we should stop discussing racism, or that people aren't racist, or algorithms aren't racist, or that everyone should stop using the word "racist", or... any number of other stupid things. I just mean that as soon as "racism" comes up, everyone (including me) gets defensive or aggressive and the conversation (which might have otherwise gotten us somewhere) is usually no longer worth having.
- Please let me know if there are unforeseen negative consequences of the above. Also please let me know if you're a POC and find this a bad or hurtful idea.

Design on the web: Relatedly, here's a nice roundup on the subject of things that web and mobile app designers and writers do that I do not like. Noticeably absent: broad claims like "the internet is making us stupid." Present: a solid list of anti-patterns. (or "dark patterns.")

Python and NLP: On a lighter note, the amazing Allison Parrish, one of my main inspirations in creating Swot Perderder, made a sweet python library that would have saved me a solid bit of hassle: Pronouncing.

SF Rent: Eric Fischer is indeed a hero, and various versions of this article about SF rent prices have been creeping across my internet. Dear authors of the "software used to predict criminals is biased against blacks" article: you should be required to be as thorough and humble as Eric if you want to publish data journalism. (well, maybe that is an impossibly too high standard :)

Brains: Finally, and sorry to end off with a difficult one, but this is important, ok, really smart psychologist argues against the information processing model of the brain. It's gotten us somewhere, but at this point it is doing more harm than good. At first I was all like "yeah but what if you could model all the neurons" but his point about the uniqueness of it all is intriguing.

"even if we had the ability to take a snapshot of all of the brain’s 86 billion neurons and then to simulate the state of those neurons in a computer, that vast pattern would mean nothing outside the body of the brain that produced it."

Dang. Ok, that's got me thinking. Not enough to say anything wise about it yet.
Edit: ok, after conversations with friends, and rereading the article, I guess a lot of it is a giant rant by someone who doesn't actually know what computer scientists and cognitive scientists do, and assumes they're dumb. Eh. I glossed over that to get to the pull quote about simulating a brain in a computer, and that's what I took out of it. And I agree that most of the rest of it is pretty dumb; here's an entertaining take down of some of the ranty bits.

The quantum foam of our lives

Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain starts out with a guy lost in the desert babbling about "quantum foam", the super tiny low-level "fabric of the universe" made up of super-tiny particles.

Been feeling like there's a lot of that in my life right now, metaphorically speaking - little tasks that you can't even think about or enumerate, because talking about them takes more time than just doing them. But there are a lot of them, and you have to remember them all and do them all.

Here are some examples over the last week or so:
- switch the credit card I have signed up for Lastpass after my old card got frauded
- call like 3 banks to say I'm traveling (oops, forgot to do that, cards haven't been blocked yet, knock on wood)
- activate new credit card
- call bank to change address on new credit card because they still had an old address on there which was screwing me up for some reason (see? I can't even remember, it's just all foam)
- water plants
- fold laundry
- plan thing for some friends I have coming into town soon
- send a thank you note to someone at work who's done a lot of work on an old project of mine and it's finally getting published
- vote
- blog/facebook about voting
- confirm something with the videographer (what thing? I don't remember)
- decide whether to go camping with some other friends (unfortunately, no)
- plan a birthday party because I'll be in town again then
- invite friends to said birthday party, worrying all the while that I'm forgetting someone
- send Tati a venmo charge for some groceries
- reply to tweets that came in at CHI
- pick up a prescription
- plan dinner with a friend
- go to doctor because I have a sudden sore throat right before traveling (turned out to be nothing, huh)
- email a old friend
- check if the wedding venue has glassware
- investigate disposable glasses for our wedding because they don't
- worry about if anyone will think it's suuuper tacky if we have disposable glasses (answer: no, deal with it)
- pack clothes for Germany trip
- file reimbursements for previous conference
- shave
- bottle kombucha
- respond to a comment about a paper review
- update wedding registry so people can buy us more stuff, because some of the categories we've run out of. (people like to buy you fancy lodging on your trip. huh.)
- blog about a conference I just went to
- type up this blog post

By my count, 4 of these are brought on by social media increasing our feelings of responsibilities, 6 are because of a wedding, 5 are because of work, 4 are hobbies/fun things I bring upon myself. There's not even any one culprit. As a result, my brain always feels full.

Man, how do we even do anything? Yeesh.

Is Portlandia our generation's suburb?

Reading this rant about "Hot New Food Cities" and agreeing, yeah, often a neighborhood is "up and coming" exactly as much as it looks like 2007 Portland. Coffeeshops are hip if they look like early-2000s Seattle shops; bars are cool if they were novel in 2006.

I'm even losing a taste for single-origin-and-fancy-wood coffee shops. Which are my thing as much as anything is my thing. It's just, when that's everywhere, what distinguishes each one? My parents' generation can go to Chili's in any city in the US; is it that different from me going to Ritual in SF, Victrola in Seattle, and Espresso a Mano in Pittsburgh?

I mean, it is different: I want a world of Ritual and Victrola way more than a world of Chili's. It's more interesting to go to, their coffee is pretty uncontroversially better than the food is at Chili's, and I've got to imagine it's wayyy better to work at an independent shop than a chain. Taking this analogy a step further, if our vegetarian pastrami and Korean BBQ tacos are last generation's Macaroni Grill chicken parmesan, well, I'm okay with that. We've got a ton more variety and creativity going on.

But it's not enough! As a city, if all you can offer is a good "food scene," you're a little bit missing the point. Show me a city where the Korean taco vendors can afford to live and walk to work, now we're talking. (this criterion is actually a pretty decent one: for it to work, it has to be a walkable place with affordable housing and low crime. there's of course more: diversity, schools, transportation, environmental niceness, and probably a bunch of other things that aren't coming to mind right now, but it's a start.)

So my worry is this: in trying to avoid the mistakes of our parents' and grandparents' generation, we're not going to move to the suburbs. Fine. But as their folly was putting a nice quiet house with a nice quiet yard over all, are we going to make our own mistake: prioritizing the Portlandia eating-drinking-shopping wonderland over an actually well-functioning city?

sometimes you can take some of these positions too far

When I was about 18 and started to think for myself, I realized that we are way too far in one direction in this country and I should basically always vote/argue the other way.

Our country and especially our cities are made for cars, and we're seeing that become unsustainable in many ways. Anything that brings us fewer cars and more walkers, bikers, and public transit takers, is a good thing.

We as a country are (to borrow some words) racist as hell, we're only slightly less sexist than we are racist, we've got a lot of generations of both "isms" (and many more) to start undoing.

We flex our military muscle too much and end up creating as many problems as we started with (at huge cost to veterans on our side, and civilians on theirs, and at huge monetary cost to our country).

We really ought to do as much as possible to help the world as a whole, environmentally - and not just save spotted owls, but think about the environment holistically and do things in the direction of helping it.

Inequality's a big issue. Our world would be better with way higher taxes, especially on the rich.

(probably more similar things too.)

And like, I still feel like these views are 95% correct. Just... sometimes they're not. Hearing about an anthropologist who studied with a tribe in the Amazon and wrote some pretty unflattering things, I'd have been inclined to say, yeah, probably the unthinking eye of colonialism talking. But maybe it wasn't! Similarly, sometimes we should do a military thing, or build car infrastructure. Remembering that I'm operating with simplifying rules that are only 95% correct (and that percentage may even shift over time) is maybe one way to avoid being smug.

(Not even getting to things like "gentrification" where it's unclear if we're even looking at the right side of the problem, let alone whether it's gone too far. Digging into zoning laws and city hall and taxes is way harder than writing a snarky thinkpiece about an Apple store.)

Scrubby sponges

I grew up using these "Dobie" sponges:

but in the last couple years, I (like most people I know) have started using these guys:

I mean, they seem way better, because they have one side that's all sponge. You can sop up a spilled water or something. The Dobies don't do that as well. I used to be a firm Dobie defender though. Huh.

Also, what are these called? Sometimes I end up calling them "spongey doobers" and sometimes "spongey fellows." I'm not sure why.

election blues (npi)

After a short bit of googling it looks like my man Bernie is falling behind. I was surprised to find that this made me sad.

I'm disappointed in people on the internet being loud and smug and snippy on both sides of it. I'm disappointed with "Bernie Bros" being dumb guys. To be fair, I haven't even seen a Bernie Bro myself, I've just heard secondhand stories of Bernie Bros being dumb guys. (More than I've seen Hillary Bros being dumb guys.) I'm disappointed with both Bernie fans and Hillary fans yelling about the other subteam as if they're idiots.

I'm disappointed in the same way Astra Taylor is here. Disappointed in a political discussion that leaves me full of awareness-raising, bashing the usual racists and sexists, word-policing, and so on, tolerating everything except the outgroup, but not really doing anything except yelling really loud for 11 months.

I guess I don't know what I expected? Like, I guess this is literally just politics, and presidential races are generally large shouting matches for a long time. So, you know, whatever.

In other news: UN forces caused a cholera outbreak in Haiti, but at least some delightful weirdo's been gluing protractors all around Pittsburgh and this blog The Decolonial Atlas exists so that's something. (Blue Tribers, eat those up)

Is neoliberalism the problem? What does "neoliberalism" mean?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

Sounds good to me. Or rather, sounds like "neoliberalism" encompasses all the things that make me pessimistic about modern government, ideology, and the entire world really. Unless... it's like the word "gentrification", where it just represents whatever you personally don't like.

simple maximizers vs reason-based agents

I guess I'm into this talk. In short (b/c it's 1hr long and a little new-agey):
You can approach decision-making by maximizing some number, conceptually. Food A is taste 2 + healthiness 5 = 7, food B is taste 3 + healthiness 3 = 6, so you eat food A.

But you can instead look at it by looking at the values you have, and compare them to the values that each food helps you fulfill. My values are (taste, healthiness, x, y, z) and food A fulfills x and y, and food B fulfills z and not w. Plus, my values can shift after I see the options.

I think you can see them as the same thing, like I think they're mathematically identical at some level. But as any designer or any computer scientist who's written assembly and javascript knows, looking at it a different way (or at a different level of abstraction) really matters.

Half formed thought and I gotta go write more thesis now. Eh, hitting publish!

politics update a day later

ugh so apparently:
this was not just a random bit I happened to stumble on, this was an unusually bad bernie stumble
some people on the internet are arguing that this was an unfair kinda gotcha interview
bernie releases a statement to do damage control
and the two bernie dudes and the hillary dude and lady who I've allowed to remain in my facebook feed are at it again and sharing all kind of garbage about how the world is unfairly biased against their candidate and blah blah

as someone writing a thesis proposal right now, I know the pain of trying to plan a whole project without knowing the details of how it'll work. let alone something as complicated as running the whole country. I mean, imagine trying to pick a new CEO of Google, and quizzing her on "how would you improve Android market share? and what's your plan for self-driving cars?" I don't know; I hire people to build the self-driving cars. Here's my vision, my goal; you worry about the details.

I guess this is the whole issue of "what's a good leader? and what's a good vision?" As researchers, we've got to do this too: set out a vision. But it's a weird line: not too many or too few details. I've done the too-many-details version; I was an engineer. I've tried the not-enough-details version, and I'm told it's not a good vision, and I don't know why. Working on it.

but enough about me. I like bernie's vision: the combination of money and power in the US stops any systemic change from happening, and so let's do something about it. (more about how race and money and power are intertwined, and a fascinating read, only partially related) and we've got models to follow in this direction, and most of them are in northern europe. (haven't heard him say "basic income", but he'd be way more likely to than hillary.)
oh and global warming etc. (though he's totally against nuclear, even as a stopgap :(

and I mean it's not over - well unless you count the superdelegates - I remember hearing some noise about how the superdelegate system wasn't totally insane but I don't remember why not, so please explain this to me if you know why not.

meta note: I get all this from just reading the internet when I'm bored. I feel like I'd be better off not reading the internet all the time. But it's these info snacks that get me through the day when I'm working on something difficult. welp.

talkin bout politics, talkin bout bernie and hillary

From the start I've liked Bernie slightly more than Hillary. I'd vote for Bernie and be pretty excited about it, I'd vote for Hillary and think it's fine. I think we ought to move the government towards Northern Europe in a lot of ways. I think they're doing pretty well. I think politics in the US needs some overhauling b/c people have so little say and big nasty corporations can funnel infinite money into whoever they want. I think most republicans are pretty obnoxiously blockading everything they can, most recently the supreme court justice, but there's been a bunch of other stuff. (destroying Pennsylvania's financial situation while they're at it.) Incidentally, the entire republican party is pretty much exactly wrong on every social issue. So, we gotta have a non-republican win this most important office. Oh, and global warming is definitely happening and caused by humans and we should really do something about it.

That's about as far as I know. I don't know what exactly we should do in Israel, but I'm pretty sure that we've been pretty egregiously supporting Israel in pretty egregiously subjugating Palestinians. I don't know what we should do about ISIS, but I'm pretty sure we shouldn't march in and attack them because that's kinda what they want. I don't know what to do about police violence, but I do know that nonwhite people have it way tougher here than white people (sometimes violently so) and we can't ignore that. I don't know how we should change the US economy, and if banking is really the root of all evil here, but I know we've got to do something. I don't even know what we should do about international trade, really, at all.

And here's Bernie sounding just like me. And that's kind of depressing, because someone with my expertise shouldn't be running the country. But, transcripts make anyone sound dumb (though I'll agree this one could have gone better. sounds like obnoxious stump speeching.) And... I guess if you knew in detail what to do about everything you'd be superhuman, so maybe it's ok to be vague (and directionally right) on some things.

But it does sound like I'm searching for ways to uphold my pre-existing positions. Maybe I gotta dig up a crummy interview with Hillary and see how she sounds there. Anyway, color me still-undecided. (and, tbh, excited to have a race with an actual choice.)

hello friends, would you like this t-shirt?

yes of course you would

it is of course the raddest Rock Star, Jimi Hendrix, known for his amazing guitaring on songs like hey joe, voodoo child (slight return), lucy in the sky with diamonds

if you wear it you will look as super cool as this guy standing all along the watchtower there. people of the gender you are attracted to will want to stand next to your fire. (not that lady though, she's already with that guy (probably because of his cool shirt))

anyway if you want one, if you got to get one into your life, I will screen print you one for the cost of the shirt + postage. send me an Electronic Mail (dan dot tasse at gmail) with:
- your address
- your size
- what color you want
- what kind of shirt you want - I can buy a cheap one for like $7, or a fancy American Apparel one for like $18, or my current favorite, AA shirts in the colors they're trying to get rid of for $9.
- what color ink if you want anything besides black (I have white, red, blue, yellow; black's been working best but I'm happy to try others. sadly, no purple haze.)

offer is open to all friends who don't mind waiting like a couple few weeks for a rad shirt because this is totally in my spare time best-effort-whenever. but just like jimi, I'll work hard to get it to you, eight days a week!

Some finances over the last 5-8 years

Lending Club: I put in $x in 2010/2011, and now I have $1.31*x.
Kiva: I put in $x around the same time, I now have $0.88*x. (this is fine. in the meantime that $x has been loaned and reloaned about 7 times. it's trying to do some good, not trying to make a return. shoot, you can't even make a return.)
Scottrade traditional index funds stuff: I put in $x: 7% in 2008, 14% in 2009, and 78% in 2011, and now I have $1.96*x. Wow.

Lessons learned:
1. invest in 2008/09 :-/
2. invest in index funds, still, always
3. I can't really trust anyone to calculate these numbers in ways I can easily understand. Lending Club tells me I'm getting "Adjusted Net Annualized Return" of 8.31%. I assume this means I would have (1.0831^5)*x = 1.49*x dollars now. If you gave me those start/end numbers, I'd calculate that I've made about 5.5% per year. Which is not terrible, but it's not 8.31%.
4. It's surprisingly hard to get this info. Which is surprising, because this is exactly the kind of info you should get. It's easy to see your portfolio's performance over the last N days, which is worse than useless.

Edit: if you want to try Lending Club, use this link and I think we both get some free money?
Also, my other current jam is Wealthfront, so try that out too. Happy to talk more about either.

Sell a new metaphor, and the world will beat a path to your door

I was just thinking about the guy who convinced us that the filmy feeling on your teeth was Bad and you should brush them to always feel minty fresh and never filmy. (Source: some Gladwellian pop-psychey book, epistemic status: probably false but it's a useful story and "toothpaste creator" would make a nice concept handle (see #9))

The phrase "tech addiction" is real tempting b/c it uses something we know how to talk about (addiction). (well ok we're bad at talking about addiction too but we at least know a way to talk about it.) Talk instead about "building tech muscle" and we'd look at the same behavior a different way. Candy Crush builds tech muscle.

Probably something for a designer in this, or like a rhetoritician, or really a politician. (see also: "tough on crime" etc)

We need a better mnemonic than ABCDE for skin cancer

ok here is the mnemonic for "is this skin mole something I should worry about?"
It's real dumb:
Asymmetry - if it's asymmetric
Border - if the border is jagged
Color - if it's 2+ colors
Diameter - if it's larger than a pencil eraser
Evolving - if it's changed
if it hits any of these criteria, then ask your doctor about it.

Don't get confused! E is not "elevated" or "eraser-sized", B is not "big", D is not "dark", C is not "changing", etc. Good luck stashing this in your brain along with a million other things.

Here's my best attempt given like 10 minutes of thinking:
if it's funny colored
funny shaped (if the border is jagged that also counts as funny shaped)
real big
or changed
see your doctor.

I feel like 2 "funny appearance" rules + 2 non-"funny appearance" rules is easier than 5 rules. And the "real big" and "changed" are for me the easiest to remember - a big frickin spot or a thing growing on you? YEP SCARY

I don't know, give me your best shot, internet medicine hive mind.

adios for now, Ingress

Ingress was pretty fun, but I'm done with it for now. Hit level 14 (out of 16).

I liked running into people on the street who were also playing (happened maybe 6 or 8 times?). I didn't like the idea of getting involved in a local community and like meeting up at fixed times. I don't have time to join a WoW guild; I don't have time to schedule meetups to play Ingress.

I liked having a spare moment and using it to hit up a couple nearby portals.
I didn't like:
- explaining to people when I played it.
- that weird itch whenever I was anywhere thinking "ooh I better check if there are any good portals here"
- losing a lot of time sometimes. "oh, I'll just hit this portal on the way home." -> "hey... there's another one over there that's well linked, I should hit that one too" -> "oops I've been walking around here futzing around with my phone for 45 minutes."

I liked exploring places! I've found like a couple neat nooks and crannies playing this.
I didn't like usually not finding new nooks and crannies, because I spent all that "exploring" time hunched over my phone.

I liked getting points. The same way I liked getting sweet items in Diablo II.
I didn't like glyph hacking. You kinda have to do it in order to get enough items and it's just not a fun minigame. It takes like 30 seconds, which is too long (and it's too involved) to just do it real quick.

Why I quit now: The Sojourner/"play Ingress N days in a row" badge was keeping me going (if I hit 360, I'd get an Onyx badge, and I'd need two onyxes to get to level 16), but I realized, if I wanted to hit the AP requirement, I'd probably get the Recharging and Glyphing badges first.

Check it out, I 3d printed a thing

Our heater has a knob to turn it on or off. The knob broke. I went to a hardware store and an appliance store, and neither had ever heard of the brand ("Hammel"), even. So I printed a new one.





It works. It was only slightly difficult - I used Rhino to make the STL file (a little extruding shapes, boolean difference and union, I think that was about all I needed; difficulty level 4/10), then Makerbot's software to convert the STL to an X3G which our particular printer needed (Makerbot Replicator X2), and that was about it. Thanks to Ayman and Cati for help!

It's on Thingiverse too so if you have the same janky old heater you can print it yourself.