Today I Learned

In order to make the Voter Power Calculator I needed to transform the data into a specifically shaped JSON object.

In previous years, I've done this by hand. This year, I just used the following prompt: please convert the following table into a JSON object with the party name as the key, the number of votes under the subkey of 'votes' and the number of seats under the subkey of 'seats', and ignore all other data: and copy-pasted the table from Wikipedia. I also was able to ask ChatGPT to please summarise the total of votes from the above, and it gave me the correct answer, along with a little button that allowed me to expand its 'thinking' on the topic.

Frank Zappa on improvisation - https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/1737542431795507481

https://finallyfocused.org/adhd-sugar/

Interesting topic for discussion—although this article heavily implies that the key takeaway here is about sugar, for me the more interesting topic is actually:

And when the researchers looked closely at 60 specific regions of the brain, they found glucose metabolism in people with ADHD was “significantly reduced” in half of the regions. Those regions included areas in the brain that control attention and distractibility, movement (i.e. restlessness), and impulsivity.

To me, this looks more like the metabolism of glucose in the brain is more of a proxy for the energy requirements of each part of the brain. Seems like the 'diet' topic is a bit of a jump, even though a diet with properly controlled glucose intake is likely a good thing.

If you don’t care about slowing down and landing it seems. I saw a flight from Vienna to Shanghai on Flightradar24 which was passing overhead and it departed 18 minutes ago.

Good chance I’ve seen the only one I’m ever going to.

Despite the toy sets my son plays with, the T. rex was a 'late-stage' dinosaur, who lived 70 million years ago, and is one of the last new species to have existed before the dinosaurs all got wiped out.

Stegosaurus seems to have died out around 145 million years ago.

The generic Hungarian word for trash cans, 'kuka', unexpectedly originates from the names of German industrialists Johann Josef Keller and Jakob Knappich. The story is quite involved, to the extent that one would be tempted to dismiss it as a folk etymology, if it wasn't ridiculously well-attested. Keller and Knappich founded an acetylene factory in Augsburg, Bavaria in 1898. They named it Keller und Knappich Augsburg (KUKA). Their venture quickly expanded into manufacturing of welding equipment, household appliances, and eventually car parts and heavy industrial robots. In the 1920s, they manufactured hoppers for Hungarian municipal garbage trucks, which they stamped prominently with their logo. This led to refuse trucks being known colloquially referred to as "kukás auto" (lit. "car with KUKA written on it"), even long after KUKA stopped manufacturing those hoppers. And the noun kuka, referring to trash cans, arose as a backformation from there! And this is how two German industrialist gave their names to Hungarian trash cans. Of course, it probably helped that a word kuka existed in the Hungarian language already at that point (as an unrelated adjective referring to a mute person), much like snowflake existed before Snow and Flake founded the town.

From Geoff Boeing.

In some countries (US, Canada, Spain/Japan to a lesser extent) this is a result of deliberate planning. Outside of the US, it looks like there are a couple of key factors:

• Where the city is coastal (e.g. Bangkok, Barcelona, Dubai, Lagos, Melbourne) the orientation is perpendicular to the coastline, with the longest roads leading away from the sea
• Where the city has a river running through the centre (e.g. Budapest, Cairo, Warsaw)

Exceptions There are more exceptions than cities that actually support my hypothesis, but the world is a funny place:

• Berlin, but there are potentially political reasons for this
• Hong Kong, likely due to its topography (Hong Kong is squeezed in between mountains and the sea)
• Moscow, but the Moskva river does not flow neatly from one side of the map to the other, it snakes its way from North West to South East taking lots of backwards and forwards turns
• Mumbai, which is built on a peninsula, limiting the number of roads which can go perpendicular to the coastline
• Rio, which is built on the mouth of a bay
• Rome, which is an interesting exception. I can't really see why this is. The Tiber does meander somewhat but has a clear North/South direction.
• Tehran is inland, but seems to pick up its polarity from the Caspian Sea to the North, so not fully an exception here
• Venice, which is also a geographical peculiarity in lots of ways

I wonder if this creates any ways for businesses to artificially reduce their tax bills by paying large 'ransomware' fines and then laundering that back into the company somehow (or directly into individuals' pockets)? I mean, it sounds a lot like fraud, but I'm sure there are some people out there already doing it, and probably people providing this as a service on the Dark Web or something.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/gpsolo/publications/gp_solo/2021/november-december/impossible-be-sure-anything-hacking-taxes/

Barrett told the BBC in 2013 that he had fathered 23 daughters and 18 sons. Bassist for Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and for Bob Marley, died today ages 77.

From Wikipedia

Check Name	Frequency	Time	Time per year
A	~500 flight hours	~60 hours	41 · 60h = 240h
B	6-8 months	~170 hours	7/12 · 170h = ~100h
C	20-24 months	~5 000 hours	11/12 · 2 500 = ~2 300h
D	6-10 years	~50 000 hours	50 000 / 7 = ~7 100h
Total			~9 760h

1: An average 737 flies around 2000 hours per year: https://simpleflying.com/the-worlds-most-flown-boeing-737s/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39028672

Let’s take a look…

Most common	C	C♯	D	E♭	E	F	F♯	G	G♯	A	B♭	B	C
Less common	C♮	D♭	D♮	D♯	E♮	F♮	G♭	G♮	A♭	A♮	A♯	B♮	C♮
Rare	B♯	B♯♯	E♭♭	F♭♭	F♭	E♯	E♯♯	F♯♯		B♭♭	C♭♭	A♯♯	B♯
Hungarian	C	C♯	D	E♭	E	F	F♯	G	G♯	A	B	H	C

Depending on a note’s role in a scale, it may be written weirdly. For example, you rarely would refer to a B♯ on its own, but it’s the third degree of the G♯ major scale.

This is documented, I just missed it. https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/adapter-node#environment-variables-bodysizelimit BODY_SIZE_LIMIT=100000000 will fix it for you (obviously set this to whatever you fancy. Integer numbers of bytes work, string representations of human readable file sizes such as 100mb do not seem to).

And given that it doesn't integrate with Last.fm, it's a bit of a pain.

Problem statement: I want to have a list of all the music I've listened to on Apple Music.

Challenges

1. I listen to Apple Music on my iPhone, my iPad, my personal MacBook (using the Music app exclusively), my work MacBook (using the Music app), and my work Windows laptop (using the Apple Music web interface).
2. Apple Music does not offer (or at least, not in a way that I've found) the possibility to get the last played date of a track which is not in your library.
3. Apple Music doesn't integrate with tools like Last.fm to be able to 'scrobble' listens in realtime (and further, Last.fm is blocked on my work computers).
4. Spotify also is blocked on my work computers, so that's not a solution either

Although it should be noted that that's based on data from 2020 as circulation numbers are not being reported by The Times and several other newspapers since then.

This adds to the similarities between SIDS and SUDEP. https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000208038

They also have some patents such as a rubber gasket on the back of the pods and a paper liner to distribute the water which make it difficult for third party pods to extract as evenly and as successfully.

It turns out this was because during the ice age a permafrost layer locked iodine under the ice. This discovery ultimately led to iodising salt.

He did it (unsurprisingly) by dividing people. In Hungary, demonising Soros was his idea.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66065550

Some of the screws broke so now Nasa are making new screwdrivers to open the container.

When you are arguing, building a 'straw man' is a cheap way of attacking an opponent by misconstruing their argument and destroying the 'straw man' rather than the real argument. For example, if the opposing view is something like 'I am against animal testing', the straw man argument might see a response like 'so you would prefer us to use untested drugs on people?'

The concept of 'steelmanning' is the opposite. Instead of trying to construct a weak version of your opponent's position to tear apart, build the strongest possible version of their point and then consider it based on its merits. For example, you might choose to interpret 'I am against animal testing' as 'I believe that we can avoid using animals to test cosmetics'. You can then review this with your opponent and see if this point can be supported or refuted.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in this article.

This was an interesting read but very long and dry. The key take away for me on this I think is that given how thorough this review was and how many minor issues it found in a process as subject to scrutiny as aviation safety, it seems as though similar problems must be hiding everywhere.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-11-brain-epileptic.html

This observation suggests that the cognitive difficulties—in particularly, memory deficits—experienced by individuals with epilepsy may be attributed, in part, to the brief impairments induced by these slow waves.

Safari uses video/mp4, which other browsers can't record to.

Like here, where machine learning models are being gathered together like animals in a zoo. I’ve actually started a novel about AI, this idea of “model zoos” will for sure make an appearance.