@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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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"

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/

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 used in Swiss attacks — 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

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

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)

simon_brooke, to random
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

Second of February, 10:00 am, and the air temperature at 55°N 4°W is 10.2° Celsius. That's grass-growing weather; it does not feel normal.

bthalpin,
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

@simon_brooke I'm planning to do all this year's heavy tree-pruning and cutting-back-crap this weekend, because I'm pretty sure we'll see birds nesting within about 10 days.

Luckily we have the new Imbolc bank holiday!

bthalpin,
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

@simon_brooke What I said: in the middle of it all I saw a grey crow fly by carrying an implausibly large twig.

bthalpin, to random
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

Like climate change, we've known about Murdoch forever, but only now (as he retires) are people coming out of the woodwork to point out he has been the worst thing to happen to the anglophone world since 1945.

E.g., Fry & Laurie were pointing it out (on the BB f-ing C) in 1995

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 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

geomannie, to random
@geomannie@mastodon.scot avatar

I can really get behind this
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/655171

bthalpin,
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

@passenger @geomannie

In 2015, actual seats
Cons 331, Lab 232
Under STV (ERS)
Cons 273, Lab 236

So STV would have left the Tories far short of a majority.

In my analysis: Cons 277, Lab 245.

bthalpin,
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

@passenger @geomannie I think you're misreading something. It would have changed many elections. Even under my analysis of the last four, STV would have killed all chance of a Tory majority in 2015, and they would have a 12% chance of a majority in 2019.

2017 stands out in that the difference between the simulated STV results and the May disaster was unusually small.

bthalpin, to random
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

Something just reminded me of the fact that right at the start of the first COVID lockdown, when we were all obsessed with disinfecting our hands, and lots of small distilleries very wisely sold their pure alcohol stocks for making hand gel, one local gin distillery had actually put the botanicals in the alcohol before they sold it, so if you cleaned your hands at a particular dispenser in the local supermarket (SuperValu, Castletroy, Lmk) you ended up with hands that smelt of gin.

bthalpin, to random
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

I approve of this tendency: retiring the word billionaire and replacing it with oligarch.

The likes of Bezos and Musk don't (just) want more money, they want control.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2023/11/01/kathy-sheridan-oligarchs-like-elon-musk-are-most-dangerous-when-they-become-too-big-to-fail/

bthalpin, to emacs
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

;; Nov 7 2023
;; Exploit mastodon.el to toot the region

(require 'mastodon)
(defun toot-this (slug)
(mastodon-toot)
(insert slug)
(mastodon-toot--send))

(defun toot-region ()
(toot-this
(buffer-substring-no-properties (region-beginning) (region-end))))

M-: (toot-region) RET

bthalpin, to random
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

I made a submission to Waterways Ireland a while back, when their proposals included a very low speed limit for cycling on greenways along the canals and Shannon navigation. I just received notification that the limit has been scrapped.

@ccferrie @irishcycle @ownohmanny

bthalpin, to random
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

Oh FFS, half of them in Limerick.

https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/2024/01/25/ireland-failed-to-keep-carincogens-out-of-water-supply-eu-court-rules/

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

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

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.

masukomi, (edited ) to emacs
@masukomi@connectified.com avatar

[EDIT: help acquired. Details in replies]

#emacs geeks. A while ago i added something to my config that turned all characters after the 80th column red. I desperately want to turn this off in org-mode (or off entirely) but i can NOT figure out wtf is doing it.

I've looked for all the things SO answers have suggested, but I'm getting nowhere.

Help Please?

Config is here https://github.com/masukomi/masuconfigs/blob/master/.doom.d/config.el

bthalpin,
@bthalpin@mastodon.social avatar

@masukomi

Funny, but I just used binary search on my init file to solve a really puzzling problem with no obvious cause: on a new machine was locking files (as normal) but then claiming some other process had locked them.

I had a line where I was setting system-name based on an environment variable (used to be useful, I think). On the new machine the result was null, and it screwed up the lockfile names. I can diagnose it in retrospect, but I would never have thought to look for it.

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!

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