George Budd @Gbudd@social.cleverlibre.org

I have to let you all in on something.

At this point in my career I’m privileged to mentor a lot of young people, especially veterans and college students. And every so often they’re like really excited to meet me and say they would like to be like me. This totally blows my mind because they go to like MIT, Stanford, or Purdue ….and they’re usually in the second year of a PHD and they run their cybersecurity competition team and speak 9 languages or something….

I was a TERRIBLE youth. Yea, I eventually went to DePaul which is respectable and I have three okay undergrad degrees - merely because I had no choice but to enlist at 17 and the military kicked the crap out of me. I went to community college first the hard way around. I almost didn’t graduate from high school. I was a miserable, unhappy, uncool gnc goth kid who hacked computers and swore a lot. Those schools would have .blown their noses at my application and probably banned me from the campus for being a delinquent.

What I want to say is if you’re one of those rock star young people, I’m super impressed by you, and you’ve picked one hell of a role model. Keep it up, and don’t burn out.

If you’re that totally screwed up teenager, though, I might not get to see you at awards ceremonies and touted by the top professors at cons, but you can make it too. Even if nobody is ever in your corner.

#ELI5 Why is water see through?

I'd never thought about it like this. Wow.

Michael Penn's video on defining the natural logarithm as the integral of 1/x got me thinking about how this was slightly mysterious to me when I first encountered it in high school. Usually, the integral of x^(n-1) is x^n/n (plus a constant). But n = 0 is this weird exception. How could you get from an unpromising expression like "x^0/0" to the natural logarithm?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAbPwgre2Vs

I'm mad. Someone showed me this link:

https://www.mathartfun.com/

And now I'm broke. 😡

But, I have to do some research (playing with toys) to figure out this lesson idea I have that involves various weighted dice-- and they have a lot of really fun dies. Well, if I like this lesson idea I'll make the school buy me the next batch. Purchase orders are such a drag.

Rather than Republicans thanking me for my service on Veterans day I would rather they keep their hands off of the benefits I earned during that service. Veterans earned benefits, Your corporate donors didn't .
@housegop

I'm barely a suicide survivor. It's not that I never felt that way again, it's more that I understood that the darkness passes. Hope all reading this know it too. Let's all stay alive together.

My 16 y old kiddo has been battling severe depression and social anxiety for several years with my husband and I by her side all the way. Several days ago a young entrepreneur fair was announced and I suggested the possibility of participating presenting a product using some of her beads work. I was delighted to see she started producing right away. She hasn't been enthusiastic about anything for years. I'm writing this with tears coming down and wanted to share proudly with you.

"This is a public service announcement... with guitar!"

41 years ago today
"Know Your Rights" is a song by the Clash, released on this day in 1982 as the first single from the album Combat Rock.

The three are:

"The right not to be killed. Murder is a crime, unless it is done by a policeman, or an aristocrat".

"The right to food money, providing, of course, you don't mind a little investigation, humiliation, and if you cross your fingers, rehabilitation".

"The right to free speech (as long as you're not dumb enough to actually try it

#punk #punks #punkrock #theclash #knowyourrights #history #punkrockhistory #otd

Today's XKCD is hard https://xkcd.com/2765/

It's one of his interactive ones where you control a lunar lander style craft - but you can't get far and end up deep in a gravity well

#xkcd #space #game

BREAKING!: Pica opts to settle in lawsuit over couch scratching incident and accusations of being a “Cute inquiline of human apartments” estimated damages: a record 2.6 million head kisses

In a statement to the press through her lawyers #pica said “That’s a lot of head kisses and we want to emphasize that this does not imply we are ‘baby’ however we felt we owed it to America to put this contentious case to rest.”

One of the greatest things I've learned as I've gotten older is that you don't have to be good at everything and that, in fact, being mediocre at just a TON of shit is super fun.

You can learn a little about a ton of stuff and then decide if you want to make that time commitment that it takes to make you actually good. You can dance around stuff and put it down and come back to it and whatever.

It's very freeing. I wish I'd learned it earlier.

Loops of superheated plasma larger than the Earth dancing across the Sun, recorded by the Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft. #AltText4Me

Credit: SDO/NASA Goddard
Further reading: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/news/coronal-rain.html

Defending Nazi memorabilia or artifacts or whatever the hell by citing an “appreciation for history” rings hollow when you spend your free time at school board meetings screaming at teachers for having the audacity to teach your white child about American slavery and Jim Crow.

Excellent timing that a 21 year-old cis, straight white guy Air National Guardsman who makes videos of himself shooting guns while shouting racist and antisemitic epithets is behind the massive intel documents leak on Discord while Republicans claim, without evidence, that trans folks are bad for military readiness.

👋 Hello #fediverse! I'm going into a meeting at 4ET to talk about our newsroom's social media options.

If you think our station and other NPR stations should have a Mastodon server and a broader presence in the #fediverse, pls boost this post. If you have thoughts, please reply, I want to hear them!

"This afternoon, conservative campus group Intercollegiate Studies Institute reached out to offer me $10,000 to debate Michael Knowles at the University of Pittsburgh on the validity of trans people."

https://charlotteclymer.substack.com/p/why-i-declined-10000-to-debate-michael

“The most brilliant Love Ninja strategy I have ever encountered “

“Every Friday, Chase’s teacher asks students to take a piece of paper and write the names of 4 children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. She also asks students to nominate 1 student they believe has been an exceptional citizen. Ballots are privately submitted.

After students go home, she takes out those slips, places them in front of her and studies them. She looks for patterns.”

https://doamm.com/2023/04/10/the-most-brilliant-love-ninja-strategy-i-have-ever-encountered/

Speaking of telephony experience, I just used a kick meter to estimate the amount of cat 6 cable left in a box.

TDRs are for the weak.