90 posts
A Tumblr for short notes, links, and miscellany: science, politics, tech, recipes, and life. Mostly written between 2015 and 2017, originally at notes.shaunagm.net.
Note: I recently started writing a newsletter about the intersection of technology and governance,Hello, Governor! I’m still experimenting with format, content, etc, so feel free to give feedback about what you like or what you’d want to see.
It’s the last day of my mini-batch, although it’s not my last day at Recurse, since there’s an active alum community I’m eager to be a part of.
Today I finally tackled making a code madlibs program.
When we left off, I’d written some rather ugly code that gave us the basic features of a madlibs program without using any macros. But the whole point of this project is to better understand lisp macros. So today I focused on refactoring my program to use macros instead.
Building off of yesterday’s work, today my hope was to finish my humble text-focused Madlibs program, so that I could move onto code-focused Madlibs tomorrow.
Day 1 of my Recurse mini batch is complete! I spent a good portion of it meeting people and learning about the community, but I did also make some small steps on my project:
Next week I’ll be doing a mini-batch at Recurse. I’m planning to blog about it each day, and I figured I’d start by laying out my plans for the week.
I just fixed a Django bug that took me ages to solve. Part of why it took so long is that the errors I was getting weren’t surfacing the right search results. So, in case anyone ever has a similar problem, I will record what happened here and hope the search algorithms send this their way.
I have read a great many non-fiction books in my life, and I remember the details of heartbreakingly few of them. Over the last year or so, I have worked to change that pattern.
When chants of ‘equal pay!’ ring through soccer stadiums, men jump on Twitter to explain why, despite performing better internationally than the men’s team, women soccer players don’t deserve equal pay because they don’t earn as much revenue.
Debunking the Capitalist Cowboy by Nan Estad at Boston Review:
It’s a Crisis of Civilization in Mexico by José de Córdoba at the Wall Street Journal:
The sum of all known reverence I add up in you whoever you are, The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him, The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you, not you here for them, The Congress convenes every Twelfth-month for you, Laws, courts, the forming of States, the charters of cities, the going and coming of commerce and mails, are all for you.
“Many scientists prefer not to think about politics, but the work that scientists do has always had political consequences, from the quiet tragedy of an understudied disease to the undeniable horror of a city destroyed in an instant.
Almost five years ago now, frustrated by the lack of trans-inclusive children’s books that my best friends’ kids had as options, I sat down and wrote a story about a tiny trans/gender non-conforming superhero named Super Princess. It’s so exciting to finally be able to put this book out into the world. This is a story about the magic of empathy and the importance of approaching the world with love instead of fear.
How to Survive America’s Kill List by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone - an American citizen’s fight to escape assassination by the US executive branch:
“[Socrates] adds that as far as he himself is concerned he believes that “it would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I direct were out of tune and loud with discord, and that most men should not agree with me and contradict me, rather than that I, being one, should be out of tune with myself and contradict myself”. The key notion in this sentence is “I who am one” which is unfortunately left out in many English translations. The meaning is clear: even though I am one, I am not simply one, I have a self and I am related to this self as my own self. This self is by no means an illusion; it makes itself heard by talking to me - I talk to myself, I am not only aware of myself - and in this sense, though I am one, I am two-in-one and there can be harmony or disharmony with the self. If I disagree with other people, I can walk away; but I cannot walk away from myself, and therefore I better first try to be in agreement with myself before I take all others into consideration. This same sentence also spells out the actual reason it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong: if I do wrong I am condemned to live together with a wrongdoer in unbearable intimacy; I can never get rid of him.”
The problem is all inside your head she said to me The answer is easy if you take it logically I’d like to help you in your struggle to be free There must be fifty ways to win the midterms
This is a quote from Norman Thomas’s Is Conscience a Crime?, a book about conscientious objection during WWI from the wizened vantage point of 1923. Thomas was a six time socialist candidate for President; Secretary Baker, referred to here, was the Secretary of War under Woodrow Wilson.
How to Not Die in America by Molly Osberg at Splinter News:
PyCon is one of my favorite events - the only big conference I’ve been to that feels like a small one. This year it was in Cleveland, Ohio, not too far from where I live, so three other pythonistas and I piled into a car together and turned it into a road trip. We had a blast and it made PyCon seem even more like a summer vacation.
“Refusing the parlements their right of remonstrance was an act of despotism. Liberty had taken shelter in them; it had chosen an irregular method of expressing itself; but since no one had given it another method, it was necessary to allow it that one.”
Here’s a summary of what we know as of the afternoon of Wednesday, March 21st:
I wrote an ‘intro to operations’ guide. The ideal audience is me a week ago.
To Be, or Not To Be by Masha Gessen in the New York Review of Books:
_The law locks up the man or woman
From the studiously moderate Brookings Institution:
every so often I remember that the clinton analytics team’s motto was “a decision tree grows in brooklyn” and i smile
Public Policy After Utopia by Will Wilkinson at the Niskanen Center:
Things have been quiet on this here tumblr, in part because I have taken to blogging about a subset of topics here. If you’re interested in my thoughts about “humans and how we interact with each other, with a focus on how we can better deal with complex and large-scale social situations”, I recommend following my new blog as well.
I spent a good portion of yesterday staring at my Django test cases and whimpering. No matter what I tried, no matter how thoroughly I flushed the database between each test case, state seemed to be persisting from test to test. “How is this happening?” I howled to my computer.
Me: Wow, Django’s Case() sure is a useful addition to the annotate function! You can use it to chain together When() functions to conditionally annotate your queryset! Django is so cool.
The Supermanagerial Reich by Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Raphaële Chappe at the LA Review of Books:
You did a bad thing…
Julia Evans, in her recent summary of her time at the Recurse Center, links to this cool little project which visualizes how you use Git. Here’s my result:
It’s late Friday night, technically Saturday morning, and like a party animal I’m up googling, “Could someone mess up my server if I let them run arbitrary Python code with no imports.”
This might be the best introduction to an academic paper I’ve come across. From Roger Myerson’s Fundamentals of Social Choice Theory:
A quote by Frank Serpico, by way of writer Lawrence Grobel, by way of Metafilter:
Catching up on the Crooked Timber archives today, I saw they’ve done several seminars since last I looked, on three books/series I’d love to read: Jo Walton’s The Just City and The Philosopher Kings,Ada Palmer’sTerra Ignotaseries,and Cory Doctorow’sWalkaway.For those of you unfamiliar with Crooked Timber, it’s a community blog and their ‘seminars’ are when people all post reviews and reflections on the same work within a short period of time.
So I read Kushner’s statement today, which includes the line “I am not a person who has sought the spotlight” and, well, I couldn’t help myself.
So I’m watching my way through this pop math YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown and out of nowhere comes this extraordinarily fascinating fact: the ancient Babylonians circa 1800 BC probably (possibly?) knew the Pythagorean theorem and were generating Pythagorean triplets:
My friend Sumana Harihareswara recently posted a great collection of links on ‘call-out culture’ to MetaFilter.
If someone asks me, “What is open source software?”, I have an obvious answer: “Software that is licensed as open source and makes its source code available for users to review, modify and share.” Ditto “What is open science?”, to which I’d respond: “Science that is made available to review by anybody and available to reproduce by anyone with the necessary skills and equipment.”
I have seen this argument happen over and over again, especially in progressive spaces.
For Valentine’s Day, I want to talk about the poem I posted the other day, “Law, Like Love” by WH Auden, and why it means so much to me.
I’ve been thinking recently about the human tendency to try to put things in context, to search for patterns across different situations and conversations. It’s something I do a lot, and that my friends and the communities I’m a part of do constantly as well. Here are some examples from just the last week or so:
Law, say the gardeners, is the sun, Law is the one All gardeners obey To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.
I visited House Oversight Committee Chair Jason Chaffetz’s office today. If there’s nothing else good to say about him (and there may not be) at the very least his staff is warm and polite, even when you are implying things about their boss.
Let’s say you’ve got an engineer or other employee who costs you $150,000 a year in salary & benefits. And let’s say they lose just 2 days a year to dealing with problems caused by underfunding of the FOSS projects they work with – bugs, missing documentation, lack of features that would make life so much easier.
While I am apparently on a recommendation kick, let me share with you this essay: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds. Have a handful of thought-provoking pull-quotes.
I’m not usually one for podcasts, but I discovered @fansplaining a few weeks ago and have really been getting a kick out of it. It is a “podcast by, about, and for fandom, hosted by Flourish Klink & Elizabeth Minkel” and it is fantastic.
Earlier today a friend/former colleague of mine linked to a dataset on the OpenScienceFramework with the commentary “OKCupid released some of their data!“ It turns out they didn’t release it, it was scraped.
The intro to testing session I ran on Saturday went well. Unfortunately the resolution on Hangouts on Air recordings is not good enough to read my code, so it’s pretty much unwatchable (though folks who saw it live were able to see what I was doing).
This was originally posted to my now-offline personal blog on February 15th, 2014. I’m reposting it now in honor of International Workers Day.
This Saturday at 11am EST I’ll be running a remote workshop with PyLadies on getting started with testing. If you’re a lady or genderqueer/non-binary person who wants to know more about the nitty gritty of unit tests and integration tests or maybe just the high level conceptual stuff like “why do people do this to themselves” you should consider signing up. I’m not sure if there’s an official cap but I know there are a lot of people enrolled (90ish! o.O) so it’s probably a good idea to RSVP if you’d like to join.
Last fall I had a bit of free time and thought I’d try out making apps. It was definitely a learning experience! I got to work with Java for the first time in a long time, and with the Android ecosystem. Said ecosystem has its good parts and its frustrating parts, but let me just say: I love Android Studio. I’d marry it, if people were allowed to marry integrated development environments.
I read a comment recently about the rules for bidding on government contracts. This isn’t the comment, but it gets at the same issue, which stuck with me:
I have never much liked Hamentaschen but it turns out “cookie” and “hat-shaped” are not terribly limiting constraints and much deliciousness can be fit within them.
So, LibrePlanet happened this weekend. It’s one of my favorite conferences, and not just because it’s local. This year Deb Nicholson and I ran a pre-conference workshop for free software projects to improve their usability and new contributor onboarding, hosted by the lovely folks at Bocoup. According to our participants it was a smashing success. Deb and I are writing up a guide so that other FOSS conferences can run similar workshops.
Today I had the pleasure of speaking to a Mozilla study group about The Little R’er. The Little R’er is a project of mine from about a year ago - it’s basically The Little Schemer for R. Or, rather, the first few chapters of the Little Schemer for R. R is, in my opinion, a much less elegant language than Scheme and I found that the socratic method eventually broke down as a pedagogical tool. The discovery of silent recycling did not help my enthusiasm levels either.
I spent a couple of hours today wrestling with encodings. Writing out the details here to help me remember, and perhaps save someone else from grief.
A friend shared this image on Facebook. I thought it was pretty funny, although perhaps not for the reasons its creator thought it was funny:
Modern dating is full of choices, whether between strangers at a bar or profiles on OkCupid. With so many options, it’s important to be rigorous in your search for a statistically significant other. Here are some tips to help you correlate with others.
There’s a body of research literature showing that people overestimate how well they can explain phenomena. Ask someone whether they understand how a can opener works, for example, and they’re likely to say they do. Ask someoneto explain how a can opener works, though, and you’re likely to get confusion, frustration, and a confession that they don’t understand as well as they thought they did.
When David Bowie died two weeks ago, I felt sad, but it was nothing compared to the outpouring of grief and remembrance from friends and from the culture at large. I have always liked Bowie’s music, his style, his interviews, the characters he’s played in movies. But I never quite got Bowie.
That feeling when someone links you to Leslie Odom Jr singing a mashup of the two best musical theater ballads* Stars and Wait For It and you spend the next two hours systematically watching all the other Ham4Hams that have ever been recorded.
Mystery Hunt was this past weekend and as usual I enjoyed the hell out of it. Highlights included Molly’s epic history rap battle, every puzzle name in the Lovecraft-themed round, and helping to solve a number of metas. The Dreamtime meta-meta was particularly fun, so that’s the puzzle I’ll explain, rot13’d to prevent spoilers. You can skip the gibberish if you just want links to my favorite puzzles.
Inspired by this letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison.
I’ve been reading a lot lately, but slowly. My new note-taking system seems to double or even triple how long it takes me to get through a book. Part of me wants to say “screw it all!” and go back to flying through non-fiction like novels but I can already tell how much more I’m retaining now that I’m actually writing stuff down.
Whoops I am falling behind on Iron Blogger. I’ve been busy with a lot of stuff, and have yet to master the art of the casual update, apparently.
I’ve seen a lot of trickster villains recently. Of course, tricksters are nothing new under the sun - they’ve been an archetype for a very long time - but I’ve seen a lot of them lately and I’ve noticed a bit of a pattern: trickster villains tend to be paired with vigilante heroes.
For my birthday this weekend I tried to make a Zoetrope cake. I was inspired by Alexandre Dubosc, whose cakes you should definitely look at after this one, because mine does not benefit from the comparison. I’m putting the gif below a cut, as it may be a bit of a migraine or seizure trigger.
For the record, this recipe is way easier than it looks, and super tasty.
Last year I participated in a novel and exciting meta-analysis project called Many Analysts, One Dataset. A single dataset was given to researchers in over a dozen independent groups to analyze, with the hope of seeing just how divergent the analyses would be.
The players
Last month I quietly launched a new company, Galaxy Rise Consulting. Yesterday, my first client Sumana Harihareswara less quietly launched hernew company, Changeset Consulting. If you need advice, auditing, internship support, release management, sprint prep, or anything like it for your FOSS project, I highly recommend Sumana. And if you need a website, app, or data science project developed, I highly recommend me. ;)
Chiu-Ki and Cate from Technically Speaking have challenged people to make and publish a list of public speaking goals for 2016. My goals for this year are fairly modest, as I’m no longer working with an organization that will pay my way to conferences, but that does lead to an obvious first goal:
Earlier this month I participated in a book sprint to raise awareness of the imprisonment of Bassel Khartabil by the Syrian government. Now, it is rumored he has been sentenced to death.
I did an interview with Django Girls. You can read it here.
Yesterday I backed up my entire computer, deleted and resized some partitions, and then attempted to upgrade my operating system from 32-bit to 64-bit. I was following this guide, which unfortunately doesn’t tell you to follow the instructions as root from the beginning. The result? Halfway through the process, I deleted my 32-bit version of sudo in order to install the 64-bit one.
I missed this paper when it went around last week: The prevalence of statistical reporting errors in psychology (1985–2013). Daniel Lakens has a very good review of it.
Making icons for Android is pretty tedious, until you realize you can manage everything with a shell script:
I recently made myself a new personal website, and I noticed there were a couple of problems with the mobile version: the font-awesome icons weren’t displaying, and the collapsed, mobile-friendly navbar wasn’t expanding.
Note: tumblr ate the initial, more comprehensive version of this post. :( Feel free to ping me for more details.
It’s hard to trick my niece - she wasn’t born yesterday, you know!
A few days ago I was playing Set with friends when one of them asked how many cards could be put down without making any sets. Someone else responded that whatever the answer was, there was probably a very sound mathematical/logical reason for it. After a bit of thinking I came up with this:
The other day, as I was sipping hot chocolate and talking with my college friend Cora about the play Copenhagen*, I had a thought:
It’s been about a year since I’ve blogged regularly. My perfectionist tendencies started getting the best of me - every post needed to be essay-like, completely thought out.