marklacey

Add to this Portrait in Jazz and Explorations.

I’ve been listening to those four albums very regularly for 6-7 years now. For a while I listened to at least one of the four each night.

I haven’t read White Fragility and couldn’t read the entirety of the article linked here due to the paywall, so I cannot comment on those.

I have been trying to educate myself about the topic recently, though, and would strongly recommend looking into some of the excellent work on systemic racism in the US if you’re interested in learning more.

The documentary “13th” (available for free on YouTube at the moment), the 2nd season of the podcast Scene On Radio (“Seeing White”), and the book How to Be An Anti-Racist are three things I can recommend based on what I’ve read/heard from them so far.

What you’re calling the “recent forced redefinition of racism” is not especially recent. I first heard this argument around 30 years ago, and at the time dismissed it, but now understand why people want to emphasize that over the definition I recall learning as a child which was structured along the lines of a belief in superiority of one group over another.

Having a belief may impact how you feel towards someone and how you act towards them, and may even have an impact on that person if you are in a position to influence the course of their life.

Having a system that is designed and reinforced to encourage disparate outcomes is far more impactful to that group as a whole.

I’m not going to argue that both aren’t harmful, but I’ve certainly come around to the conclusion that systematic or policy-based racism (if you’re uncomfortable calling it racism, feel free to disregard the name and come up with something you’re more comfortable with) has disproportionately affected Black and non-black people of color in the US.

Yes that’s one thing this bird would do. The whole cycle of two or three repetitive sounds from an alarm before moving to another song.

Yes you’re right. Judging by Wikipedia it seems likely it was a northern mockingbird.

I spent two summers in an apartment in San Francisco that was near the nest of what I assume was a nightingale.

Every night around midnight it would start singing. It would loop through maybe 8 songs. Some of them sounded very much like the local environment. For example one song was pretty much identical to sirens that I would periodically hear.

It would last for an hour or two each night. I don’t know where the bird went the rest of the year. That was almost ten years ago and I still miss falling asleep to that.

Not a lot of good fried food here.

I have only found one reasonably good fried fish place and most of the french fries in the area aren’t great.

This is something I’ve seen called “butts-in-seats management”, and yes, I’ve seen it in practice.

Many years ago I had a new skip-level manager who emailed me one day saying that he had dropped by my office a few times to introduce himself but I was never around and he was really concerned with the fact that I never seemed to be in my office working. I am relatively certain every time he dropped by I was either in a colleagues office discussing a work issue or had run down to grab a coffee. But to him this was “concerning”.

He didn’t last long. I believe he moved on in 8-12 months.

The SF Bay Area has a population that is 75% of Sweden’s entire population.

SF itself is more densely populated than Sweden’s most densely populated city which appears to be Stockholm (7700/km^2 vs 5000/km^2). Stockholm has a population around 20% larger than SF.

According to Wikipedia, California is smaller than Sweden.

So there may be some dense pockets in Sweden but it certainly isn’t more densely populated than California and it doesn’t appear that there are large cities that approach the density of NYC/SF.

Sweden has 1/4th the population of California. It looks like the total deaths is around 50% higher than California although of course California might have deaths that should have been attributed to COVID-19 that weren’t.

It looks like it was estimated to have arrived in Sweden two days earlier.

Okay I’ll complain.

I work in industry in a position where having access to papers is very helpful, some would say essential.

I have access to IEEE and ACM DLs. I don’t, however, have access to myriad papers from other organizations like Elsevier or Springer Verlag. These are often cited by papers on IEEE/ACM DLs. Some are from 20-40 years ago and still very relevant and interesting.

I have yet to find a way to get access to these in a predictable manner (yes, sometimes you can find preprints or old PostScript versions on various authors academic websites, but not generally).

Often the contents are from government sponsored research from the US government and possibly other governments (if only through their support of Universities in their country).

Assuming you’re referring to my comment:

> wait another day or so for the exterior surface to become safe.

Unless you think that for some reason the exterior of the box is going to have live virus for more than what’s been reported, this seems reasonable.

> Order a bunch of water and TP

The TP makes sense. I don't understand why you're suggesting to order water, though.

Can you elaborate?

I haven't seen any recommendations that tap water would be unsafe.

If you're in an earthquake prone zone like SF or LA of course having water at home is a very good idea any time of the year.