Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

Update: after I posted this, I saw several people wearing such hats, one in full Revolutionary War-era costume.

Best sign I’ve seen thus far: “United we ribbet. Divided we croak.”

For the next No King demonstration, I’m going to wear a tricorn hat. I’ll skip the powdered wig, though.

@mattblaze The debate in a nutshell: "I didn't come here to be insulted!" "Well, where would you like to go to be insulted?"

I had an interesting experience exiting Customs today. There were some folks from CDC who were asking folks to volunteer to do nasal swabs, to test for Covid, flu, and RSV. They asked where we'd been, where we lived in the US, if we'd had the relevant vaccines (they seemed surprised we'd had the RSV shot), and if we'd ever had Covid (nope!). They did not ask for any PII—this was apparently a sampling technique to see if folks are bringing viruses in.
And to thank us, they handed us some Covid test kits.

Part of an art installation outside Waterloo Station in London.

@TindrasGrove @eigen Thanks. I see it's on the grounds of the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, which is actually what I was looking at when I happened to notice Snowden Pond.

Just noticed this: quite close to the NSA, there's a Snowden Pond… (I wonder if the pipes or streams feeding the pond leak.)

There are fairly disgusting, not to say dishonest, recruiting ads for ICE on DC-area TV programs. They're aimed at current law enforcement officers, playing on their oaths of office (sanctuary cities require you to not protect the people you were sworn to protect) and saying that ICE only arrests "the worst of the worst", which in reality seems to mean anyone brown-skinned, as opposed to the "predators" the ads talk about. And there's a $50K sign-up bonus, student loan forgiveness, etc.
Are these ads showing elsewhere?

Wow—a treatment for Huntington's: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cevz13xkxpro

The raptor is coming tomorrow.

I was baking something today from a recipe that used weird units. Tell me, is a tablespoon 2.71828 teaspoons or is it 3.14159265 teaspoons? I know it's something like that…

@mattblaze @msherr Nah—a Reviewer #2 bot would only say nasty things about the paper, while completely missing the point.
More seriously: I think what Micah is asking for is an AI-driven summary piped to a text-to-speech program. Given what I've seen of AI summarizers, I'm skeptical that such a program would be accurate enough to be useful, and I wonder how well text-to-speech would do on technical material. (A few weeks ago, Siri told me to take a road to somewhere named "Vah"—or at least that's how it decided to pronounce "VA." from a sign…)

For some reason, this Doonesbury cartoon, from 1982, keeps coming back to me: https://www.washingtonpost.com/doonesbury/strip/archive/1982/8/26

@evacide I have a two word answer to anyone promising to do that: "error bars". While I'm sure that they can build a system that can reliably distinguish an infant from a senior citizen, I doubt very much that they can reliably distinguish a 17-year-old from a 19-year-old.