Jolly

I have been invited to a meeting at work titled “How to effectively schedule and hold meetings.”

By declining the meeting I feel I have mastered its core lessons.

In statistics, when you have a population parameter (the "true" value of a statistic in frequentist parlance) the general notation is to use a Greek letter to represent the value:

ϕ

when you estimate a parameter you put a caret on top of the Greek symbol to indicate you have estimated a value. This is pronounced "hat" so the value below would be "Phi hat." (not sure this comes out well on mastodon, but the caret is supposed to be on top of the phi)

ϕ^

This lets your reader know that this is your estimate of the population parameter. You are saying "hey reader, this is my best guess"

Given the current political climate, I think what is really needed is a new combining diacritical mark to represent "I pulled this number out of my ass." an "ass hat" if you will. . .

φ̐

maybe something like this.

Ah. The dog days of November.

I have a password for work that I am required to change every 60 days for security reasons.

For security reasons, I am not allowed to use my password for anything. Instead I need to use my account name, a PIN and one of these authentication hop-set thingies.

The only time I ever use my password is when I enter it to change my password once every 60 days. Except, the password rules are very strict, and require complicated combinations so I always forget what my password is.

So every 60 days, I have to sit on hold with tech support to give me a temporary password which I then use to change my password. The one I am not allowed to use for anything.

Last time I did this, I suggested to the tech support guy that, since no one is allowed to use their passwords, perhaps it would be better if we got rid of the passwords and just used the pin/authentication system that everyone is already using. They responded to that suggestion like it was the most insane thing they had ever heard.

In their latest email blast, they mentioned they are improving security for the password reset site. Now to change my password I will need the pin, hop-set thing, my old password and I will have to solve CAPTCHAS.

kagi (the search engine) has a feature that lets you block websites from appearing in query results. Apparently they keep tabs on who gets blocked the most by their users:

https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard

Its kinda interesting to look at. There were not a lot of sites at the top of their "most frequently blocked" list that surprised me, but as a generalization you could say that there is a certain species of website that is A) Big, B) Annoying to use, and C) generally useless in terms of providing information. That seems to be the type of site that dominates their "blocked" leader board.

@jfk@photog.social trying to get off at Navy Yard this morn was the least safe I have ever felt in the metro system. Extra long headways -> over crowded cars -> hundreds of people on the platform at once. Since half the stations exits were closed, no easy way for them to leave. I was forced to walk along the vey edge of the platform.

I like when pundits write articles about how the pundits got it all wrong. It like the takes-having equivalent of “You are not in traffic you *are* traffic.”

When I was young I was not part of the monoculture. I didn't watch sports, or American Idol or Survivor or whathaveyou, so I never had any idea what was going on.

It's not that I wanted to be part of the monoculture, I didn't but sometimes it felt a little lonely not being able to talk about what everyone else was talking about.

Some people say the days of monoculture are over, but I don't think that is quite right. It is just the monoculture these days is participating in culture war bullshit. Something happens, usually on social media, and everyone takes a side. Everyone is still talking about the same thing, they are just yelling.

I am still not part of the monoculture, there is something happening about jeans and a model I think (I really don't care). But I feel less lonely these days.

My wife’s cat cannot tell time.
But he does know when it is 18:00

My wife’s cat cannot measure things
But he does know exactly how long her arms are.

I’ve noticed at work there are two types of retirement parties:

1) Parties for beloved coworkers that everyone will miss.
2) Parties for despised coworkers that everyone is glad are finally retiring.

It’s kind of interesting that type 2 parties are always happy events and type 1 parties are always a bit sad.

It’s a bad sign if you are in a work meeting and the presenter opens up a .xlsx file and gives a 5 minute instruction on how to zoom in on a teams screen share while they wait on their file to load.

In a conversation about the social effects of some new or emerging technology I often here the bromide "technology is neutral." The idea being that some manifestation of tech has no intrinsic value.

Facebook is trying to bring a wearable AR product to market, it will record everything you look at and use facial recognition to track people around you. Facebook has a track record of being evil, so trying to defend the product by saying "well, Facebook might be bad, but technology is neither good nor bad" is not really making a point. Most of the time when people say "tech is neutral" you can justifiably add "but this current application will be bad" to the end of that sentence.

"Tech is neutral" is the least interesting thing you can say about the application of technology, and it is often used to avoid talking about the actual social problems tech can and does create.

I just lost a days worth of work because I had the audacity to include an equation in MS Word. Somehow that corrupted the docx file. I guess it happens when word tried to translate latex style markup to whatever jank it uses under the hood to format equations.

Unbelievably frustrating but also sort of fascinating. In my lifetime I’ve watched word descend from the obvious best choice for writing on a computer to a pile of laggy jank that just isn’t as useful as other options. Or maybe it just feels like that because I’ve learned better ways to use a pc since my high school days. In either case, office products seem to be the worst choice for most of the work I do. But I’m stuck using them because my colleagues don’t want to learn better tools. Bleg.

I see a lot of non-English language posts on mastodon. Whats weird is that I can immediately recognize most languages as not English. I start reading a post and before I get past the second word think "Ah, this is Spanish, a language I am not comfortable with." or "Ah this must be German, I don't understand this at all." The only exception is Dutch, which I--without fail--begin reading and think "If I just read a little more of this sentence it will start to make sense."

What are you doing to take your mind off the US election? Personally, I am thinking about the US election, but I am open to other ideas.