Precisely. Living in fear is exactly what mask-refusers are doing: worldofwonders.substack.com/p/on-the-nat...

i love to imagine this logic applied to other mitigation tools—trembling at a seatbelt, cowering from a helmet, freezing at the sight of a condom—easy to reveal how laughable a take the idea of masking as an act of fear is.

FYI for BC residents, if you want a COVID booster/flu shot, I was able to search in my emails for a previous "Book your next vaccine appointment" from a previous year and click on the link and it just let me schedule my covid vaccine.

Great tip! And do get your booster. COVID test positivity is high in BC... and trending up again.

#MaskUp indoors to reduce odds of getting infected, #GetBoosted to reduce acute severity and reduce odds of the myriad potential organ damage & #LongCOVID!

This is a great tip! I found mine through my text messages and was able to book in moments

Probably because their finance guys have explained that either AI succeeds or we're spending 2027 fighting other wasteland scavengers over the last can of beans in a burnt out mall.

One of the best to ever do it. RIP.

Need a good news story this Thanksgiving?

“In true Hollywood fashion,” says McKibben, “our liberation and our destruction are arriving at precisely the same time, offering us a remarkable choice. Our species, at what feels like a very dark moment, can take a giant leap into the light. Of the sun.”

I have an idea!!! Maybe promote clean air & masking! Whatever, enjoy your sickness folks.

I expect she'll blow around like a leaf. I had a 16' low-profile canoe that I used to take out on Lake Ontario & around the Thousand Islands that was just a dream in the wind, no problem at all. This boat is opposite. The Gulf Islands are *very* sheltered, though, so for local cruising she'll be OK.

...which produced a much fatter, rounder boat. I did a couple of builds with an (now retired) expert about ten years ago and highly recommend that as a way of getting a good boat on your first try in a timely way (took a few days). This was my first solo build and took me a year in interstitial time

That's awesome! Anything that exists is better than anything that doesn't. I was actually inspired partly by coracles for this boat: when the ribs started to take on a life of their own and want the whole thing to be much wider and more open than the plan called for, I decided to let them take over,

"I respect your decision to drive sober. But by the same token you have to respect others who drive drunk."

Yeah, about that...

#pretendpanel Time to talk about my long-standing obsession with a man who died in the 7th century BCE.

Archilochus was a Greek poet and (possibly) mercenary soldier whose work survives mostly in fragments.

You get such a glimpse of the world through these and how people have always been people.

And to be clear: I am assuming you WILL check the output... that's WHY I'm predicting you're going to spend more time than it saves. If you just took the results at face value you'd save tonnes of time, and the summaries would be full of subtle errors.

Thanks! I can (just) pick her up with one hand (albeit a hand I've been lifting weights with for a long time!) I'm using a canoe paddle. She's 47 inches wide, which is too much for a kayak paddle (at least any of mine). Gonna put in a (removable) seat and oarlocks next!

Thanks! The skin is 840D (9 oz/sq yd) ballistic nylon. The plan I didn't really use calls for dacron, which is lighter but not as tough, and I live in the Gulf Islands and have a cavalier attitude toward rocks. I've also used ballistic nylon in the past, so am more familiar with its quirks.

I grew up in Nanaimo but lived mostly back east as an adult, with a couple of stints in the US. I've worked as an independent consulting scientist off and on since the late '90s. I'm a lousy employee, much happier on my own. Now in the Gulf Islands with a few US clients. Best of all possible worlds!

Making Americans less healthy & less safe:

Slightly more than half of the 1,300 CDC firings last Friday have now been reversed. But about 600 people, "including analysts responsible for monitoring and protecting the [US] from biological, chemical and...

1/9

www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

It can't make judgements. I get that it looks like a help, but you're asking it to do something that it is structurally incapable of doing. All the stuff about "reasoning models" for LLMs is a lie. It's a language emulator, nothing more. You will spend more time on it than it saves, is my prediction

In the early '90s I was up for my dream job at JPL & chose to not go for it because it meant becoming a Usian and I am a Canadian and not willing to change that. I moved back to Canada (LA to Winnipeg, in January) and have never regretted it, but I regret it less now than ever before. This is tragic

Fermi.

This by the way sheds light on the question I hear from people, "If ICE smashes its way into my car and then discovers they screwed up and I'm a citizen after all, will they pay for the broken windshield and tear gassed upholstery?" No, they won't.

I've been mostly linux for 33 years and entirely linux except when required for work for 20 years, and Linux Mint is my current go-to distro. Very stable, auto-updates, easy to install, and has a dumb version with X11/xfce the way God and Linus intended. Upgrading my wife's machine to it this week.