tingilinde

on hitler's rise to power

A piece on Timothy Ryback's new book Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power. 

Hilter had many enablers - he was given the keys.  A focus on 1932 .. perhaps where the US is now.

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“The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction,” Goebbels said as the Nazis rose to power—one of those quotes that sound apocryphal but are not. The ultimate fates of Ryback’s players are varied, and instructive. Schleicher, the conservative who saw right through Hitler’s weakness—who had found a way to entrap him, and then use him against the left—was killed by the S.A. during the Night of the Long Knives, in 1934, when Hitler consolidated his hold over his own movement by murdering his less loyal lieutenants. Strasser and Röhm were murdered then, too. Hitler and Goebbels, of course, died by their own hands in defeat, having left tens of millions of Europeans dead and their country in ruins. But Hugenberg, sidelined during the Third Reich, was exonerated by a denazification court in the years after the war. And Papen, who had ushered Hitler directly into power, was acquitted at Nuremberg; in the nineteen-fifties, he was awarded the highest honorary order of the Catholic Church.

Does history have patterns or merely circumstances and unique contingencies? Certainly, the Germany of 1932 was a place unto itself. The truth, that some cycles may recur but inexactly, is best captured in that fine aphorism “History does not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes.” Appropriately, no historian is exactly sure who said this: widely credited to Mark Twain, it was more likely first said long after his death.

We see through a glass darkly, as patterns of authoritarian ambition seem to flash before our eyes: the demagogue made strong not by conviction but by being numb to normal human encouragements and admonitions; the aging center left; the media lords who want something like what the demagogue wants but in the end are controlled by him; the political maneuverers who think they can outwit the demagogue; the resistance and sudden surrender. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies in bright midafternoon light, where politicians fall back on familiarities and make faint offers to authoritarians and say a firm and final no—and then wake up a few days later and say, Well, maybe this time, it might all work out, and look at the other side! Precise circumstances never repeat, yet shapes and patterns so often recur. In history, it’s true, the same thing never happens twice. But the same things do.

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how ect might work

Induced seizures and aperiodic brain activity

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Still, even after many decades of use, scientists don’t know how ECT alters the brain’s underlying biology. Bradley Voytek, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, said a psychiatrist once told him that the therapy “reboots the brain” — an explanation he found “really unsatisfying.”

Recently, Voytek and his collaborators paired their research into the brain’s electrical patterns with patient data to explore why inducing seizures has antidepressant effects. In two studies published last fall, the researchers observed that ECT and a related seizure therapy increased the unstructured background noise hiding behind well-defined brain waves. Neuroscientists call this background noise “aperiodic activity.”

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a brave paper

Imagine trying to sort out why teenagers smell like goats.

A recent study did just that and is being mentioned across the popular press.

 

 

prosopometamorphopsia and demons

A very bizarre condition!

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

us v apple

Steven Sinofsky takes a dive into the lawsuit.  Steven was a VP at Microsoft for many years and has some depth here.

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A good deal of the relief sought is based on the desire to make it so there is no phone platform but just middleware. This is almost certainly momentum from the US case where middleware became known to legal circles. The irony is that was all about Java which completely failed for all the obvious technical reasons it would fail.

The fact that there are two middleware solutions for games shows the complete fallacy in the idea "there can be only one". Instead we'll all just get tons of crappy apps that each do their own take on "operating system".

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making a samurai sword

cough

On picking inappropriate software for the job

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Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team's systems for designing and building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel.

The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was "a joke," Vowles recently told The Race. "Impossible to navigate and impossible to update." This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.

"When you start tracking now hundreds of thousands of components through your organization moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless," Vowles told The Race. Because of the multiple states each part could be in—ordered, backordered, inspected, returned—humans are often left to work out the details. "And once you start putting that level of complexity in, which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that's exactly where we are."

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baseball

classy

Mark Robinson on Simone Biles

"Whenever I think about being wore out and being tired, you know, somebody get this on their phone and it will probably end on Facebook, but I ain't no little, weak gymnast that quits when the going gets tough."

 

trump and asbestos

He likes it  (because it's in Russia) enough that his face went on the packing material.  Of course because Russia.

(from a few years ago)