@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

bthalpin

@bthalpin@mastodon.social

Sociologist in Limerick

Mostly playing with unrealistic computer models of real world processes

Emacs, Stata, Shiny & Rstats, Julia, Python

Linux on the desktop since about 1997

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selzero, to random
@selzero@syzito.xyz avatar

For those that will bash a Bible while complaining about immigration.

Here is a "terrorist leading thousands of illegal invaders across borders claiming they want "refuge against an oppressive regime".

bthalpin,
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

@selzero @simon_brooke @lukevanin

Small boats, not Amazon packages.

Things haven't been the same since all the Angles and Saxons came across the Channel in small boats.

glynmoody, to random
@glynmoody@mastodon.social avatar

Three million malware-infected smart #toothbrushes used in Swiss #DDoS attacks — #botnet causes millions of euros in damages - https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/three-million-malware-infected-smart-toothbrushes-used-in-swiss-ddos-attacks-botnet-causes-millions-of-euros-in-damages what a headline...

bthalpin,
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

@glynmoody It didn't actually happen

DZGrizzle, to random
@DZGrizzle@mastodon.social avatar

From the Coaching Network

bthalpin,
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

@DZGrizzle I've said it before: "lots of US evangelicals are followers of the Jesus of the Old Testament, and not that dirty f***ing hippy of the Sermon on the Mount"

simon_brooke, to gamedev
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

I've spent some of today finding bottlenecks in my world-simulating cellular automaton, and I can now simulate 10,000 years of history from the middle of the Ice Age to the middle of the Iron Age over 40,000 square kilometres (at kilometre scale) in slightly under two minutes of wall-clock time. It's utterly caning my poor computer, but it doesn't crash.


The state of my poor computer in the middle of a simulation run. Memory is maxed out (garbage collection is clearly the major bottleneck) and eight of my twelve processor cores are also maxed out.

bthalpin,
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

@simon_brooke All the more impressive that this is powered by a wind generator (+solar) that you had to repair yourself!

philipncohen, to random
@philipncohen@mastodon.social avatar

Today I realized "resilience" in psychology is inequality in sociology. Something is a "risk factor" if it has an average negative effect. If everyone overcame the risk equally there would be no negative effect and thus no resilience. Resilience means some people overcome it and others don't.

bthalpin,
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

@grimalkina @philipncohen That's why I said "first". Sociology doesn't ignore the individual either, but the centre of sociology is much more towards structure and that of psychology much more towards the individual.

bthalpin,
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

@philipncohen It's a good conceptual pair to highlight a key psych-socio contrast: one discipline looks for explanations (first, at any rate) in individual differences, the other in social structure.

bthalpin, to bluesky
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

Who's who on ?

I'm running a completely non-scientific crawler, looking at what blueskites are being mentioned by others, recently.

There are ways of doing this properly and this is not it, but here is my top 10: The most @-ed blueskites (on the basis of about 2500 accounts checked)

65: pfrazee.com
45: neilhimself.neilgaiman.com
39: bsky.app
37: nytimes.com
34: jay.bsky.team
34: darthbluesky.bsky.social
25: washingtonpost.com
23: alttext.bsky.social
22: scalzi.com
20: deck.blue

glynmoody, to climate
@glynmoody@mastodon.social avatar

One person dies after severe turbulence on London to Singapore flight - https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/21/severe-turbulence-london-to-singapore-flight "More than 30 passengers injured as Singapore Airlines Boeing 777 is diverted to Bangkok" likely another consequence of ...

bthalpin,
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

@glynmoody I don't doubt the climate change potential here, but it's the second recent case of serious injuries in a Boeing due to sudden loss of altitude, and the first case was due to a malfunction, though initially reported as turbulence.

bthalpin,
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

@glynmoody Weather, or someone touching the back of the pilot's chair?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/pilot-shows-how-cockpit-chair-allegedly-moved-on-nosediving-boeing-plane/vi-BB1jZdLq#details

onezero, to random
@onezero@mastodon.social avatar

Work in progress: a Tele Deluxe with a neck made by Metatonal Music, fretted in a 24-to-the-2/1 just intonation tuning.

bthalpin,
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

@onezero Wow! You can actually see the Just Intonation.

(Nice guitar too)

bthalpin, to random
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

More & more of my Gmail inbox is crap, but a lot of it comes from really peripheral things I did (hey, I bought some Levis, hey, I clicked on a Substack link) & quite a bit is from people who are not me but think they have the same e-mail address (thanks guys for the offer of a lacrosse scholarship, mortgage, car insurance claim details, sports club membership). Since I mostly read it via IMAP (behind , thanks @jmason) I am v inclined to leave the crap there to confuse Google Inc!

bthalpin, to emacs
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

Using org-mode to write a blog entry:
Write the blog in org-mode
Export to HTML
Copy the <body>...</body>
Start editing a new post in WP
Add a "Custom HTML" block
Paste your HTML into it.

Bonus: customize the theme using org-mode HTML export CSS classes. E.g., my pre-formatted "example" classes were too wide for the box, so adding this makes the box extend left and right:

example {
margin-left: -5em;
margin-right: -5em;
margin-bottom: 1em;
margin-top: 1em;
}

badastro, to random
@badastro@mastodon.social avatar

Last night I saw a gorgeous halo from high cirrus clouds around the Moon, so I had to get a shot. In this wide angle view you can see Procyon below the Moon, Castor and Pollux right next to it, and Capella way over on the right. Zoom in to see the stars better.

bthalpin,
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

@badastro It's the alchemical male symbol

bthalpin, to random
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

Great post from Henry Farrell celebrating the Crooked Timber 20 by re-assessing the Graber wars

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/08/debt-4102-days-later/

bthalpin, to random
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

Elsevier and other academic publishers have pivoted from oligopolistic publishers to researcher-surveillance vendors. They track everything you do and sell the analysis back to your employers.

It's about time that academics became more aware of this.

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/yu34t/

bthalpin, to emacs
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

In 29 and before, and possibly earlier builds of 30, M-x buffer-menu RET opens a buffer menu with the (previously) current buffer at the top, with point on it.

Now in Emacs 30, if a buffer-menu already exists, it opens that, without refreshing it. I.e., the previously current buffer is not automatically at the head of the list. I keep killing the wrong buffer by mistake 😞 🤦

When did this happen? Where should I moan about it?

bthalpin, to emacs
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

In approximately 3 weeks, the oldest dated comment in my configuration file will turn 30.

And my email address was halpin@vax.ox.ac.uk and had relatively recently changed from JANET style little-endian to Internet style big-endian.

bthalpin, to bluesky
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

I've established I can use the AT Protocol API to post to from or I tried to re-post a Mastodon toot, but received this error message:

"Invalid app.bsky.feed.post record: Record/text must not be longer than 300 graphemes"

bthalpin, to python
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

Playing with doing something "embarrassingly parallel", and very much missing the ease of multi-threading in

bthalpin, to random
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

The Green Party in Ireland get an awful lot of shit, but at the moment they are getting things done, and things like this make them seem like the adults in the room (not even wrt climate change itself, but just in terms of meeting the binding commitments (with swingeing penalties!) that Ireland has already committed to).

https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2023/07/27/coalition-rift-sparked-by-varadkar-comments-on-multibillion-euro-rail-plan/

bthalpin, to ubuntu
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

Has anyone any idea why I am getting these graphics artifacts on Google Maps? Firefox, 22.03, Dell XPS 13. Some odd symptoms elsewhere too.

bthalpin, to Germany
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

Am I being completely cynical to suggest that 's enthusiasm for is just a way of masking continued investment in CH4 infrastructure?

Hydrogen at scale is not that effective, green or "blue", and investment in hydrogen is money taken away from investment in green electrification.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/rome-berlin-plan-massive-hydrogen-pipeline-to-africa/

bthalpin, to mastodon
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

I've had a little process running for the past year or so, totting up Mastodon "active monthly users". Occasional bumps up (one outstanding one last summer when Elon did something particularly idiotic) followed by long slow declines.

Was somewhat disappointed to see recent growth of about 250k turning out to be a phantom instance (telling lies via the API).

#mastostats #mastodon #api #fediverse

bthalpin, to random
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

It's the biggest thing to happen to Ballintemple since George Boole caught his death of cold walking home from Queen's College Cork in the rain in 1864.

bthalpin, to random
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

People are talking about this as a terrible new use of AI. It's not. It's a classic use of AI, as we see in AI policing, AI in HR, AI refusal of insurance claims, etc: have the computer rubber-stamp what you wanted to do anyway.

Just faster, and with even less reflection.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes

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