Christmas mash-up
As we say goodbye to Mariah Carey for another year, please enjoy one of my favorite Christmas mash-ups. As one of the YouTube comments put it: “A perfect mix of absolute pure evil and Marilyn Manson.”
Love you for you: Conversations Between Trans Kids and Their Loved Ones
KQED’s California Report Magazine has produced a beautiful deep-dive series Love You For You, featuring six conversations between trans, non-binary and gender-expansive kids across California with their parents, grand-parents and mentors. Well worth checking out, either at the above link or at The California Report Magazine podcast.
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OpenAI required to divulge 20M private chat logs
A magistrate judge in the ongoing copyright suit against OpenAI has ordered them to turn over a sample of 20 million private chat logs from ChatGPT users to plaintiffs, stating that the protective order baring lawyers from leaking the contents and OpenAI’s own “de-identification” of the logs should be sufficient to protect these user’s privacy.
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Tom Lehrer Easter Egg in NSA Publication
Tom Lehrer worked at the NSA from 1955 through 1957, and a recent thread on BlueSky reveals one of the papers he wrote while there included a bibliographical entry for “Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Remannian Manifolds” by Lobachevsky. Apparently the joke went unnoticed for almost 60 years. [via
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History of the Sligh / Geeba deck in MTG
I started playing Magic The Gathering when I was at Stanford back in early 1994, and introduced it to my high school friends when I went back to Atlanta that summer. One of those friends was Jay Schneider, who has this amazing habit of taking up a hobby and turning it into something world-class, so
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Remembering Tom Lehrer
I just heard Tom Lehrer died yesterday at the age of 97. I first heard of Tom Lehrer reading the lyrics to The Hunting Song in one of my Dad’s old Mad Magazines, though like many of my generation I didn’t realize he was the same guy who sang Silent E, L-Y and a bunch
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Kaiser pauses gender-affirming surgeries for patients under nineteen
Kaiser Permanente just announced that as of August 29th they will stop offering gender-affirming surgeries for patients under the age of nineteen, following a similar pause by Stanford Medicine announced last month. The Trump administration has threatened to withhold federal funding to institutions that provide gender-affirming care of any kind, and a few weeks ago
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Reminder that the Roberts Court is illegitimate…
As the latest term of the Supreme Court mercifully comes to an end, here’s your occasional reminder that the current court is illegitimate. Not because senate Republicans blocked any nomination by a Democratic president from even coming to a vote, or because Justice Thomas was caught red-handed soliciting and accepting undisclosed bribes gifts to remain
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The Cartoonists Club
My seven-year-old daughter hasn’t gotten into chapter books yet, even for bedtime stories, but she absolutely loves graphic novels. One of her favorite authors / cartoonists is San Francisco native Raina Telgemeier, whose graphic novels have become my go-to for bedtime reading after she invariably loses interest in whatever book I wanted to read after
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Seeing olo
You may have heard that about a month ago scientists at Berkeley and UW announced they have “discovered” a new never-before-seen color, which they call olo. (Here’s a quick video overview from their paper.) Before I get into what they did, here’s a quick refresher on how we see color. White light is made up