tingilinde

gerrymandering

A thoughtful piece by Greg on gerrymandering.

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But why not adopt the obvious remedy? Just mandate compact redistricting by law, and the mischief will end. Stopping gerrymandering in its tracks.

Unfortunately, you may not be aware that compact maps are just as easily manipulated for political gain as a district that looks like a cracked mirror. Even more surprisingly, to guarantee an elected legislature proportionately reflects the views of its citizens, you must settle near kindred spirits, live in an echo-chamber, and gerrymander- or risk disenfranchisement!

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fantastic illusions

Ten winners from 2021

a tip of the hat to Greg

 

audio's uncanny olympic valley

An hour into the first of last year's AVP beach volleyball tournaments a warning clickthrough page appeared on the event's Amazon Prime Video page. Amazon' had been covering the AVP tournaments since 2018, but the pandemic forced a strict spectator-less bubble.  During the previous two years they hadn't spared any expense. Now they had to keep viewers engaged.  Rather than using sampled crowd audio and cutout spectators, they they focused on highlighting the event's audio.  A sports audio specialist was brought in and dozens of microphones were installed on the main court, players chairs, coaches, referees,  along with a number of moving microphones.   The first match immediately was sprinkled with some rather colorful language - enough to trigger Amazon's warning clickthrough.  

 

Watching the matches was something of a revelation. Sounds of the game ranging from sound normally masked by crowd noise to coaches discussing tactics with players during timeouts.  The announcers had been coached to work around the new sound field. By the end of the first tournament the viewer experience was excellent.  Similar things happened in other sports that took the "honest" route. Viewership often increased, while many of the major sports saw drops.  Now NBC and other large networks around the world have to deal with an Olympics with empty stadiums.  How will they react?  A miscalculation could damage viewer engagement.  It's a very interesting social technology experiment.

 

It turns out a lot of work has been done over the past sixty years.  Sports like football (not the American variety), tennis, rowing, past Olympic games, and online games have driven innovation.  Seven years ago 99% Invisible aired a radio documentary produced by Peregrine Andrews on the sound of sports.  It's fascinating and worth the hour.  Listen with stereo headphones or earbuds.  

Roman Mars · 99% Invisible-127- The Sound Of Sports

There's another fascinating question.  How do athletes react to empty stadiums? That experiment has been underway for a year now.  It's not simple.

 

quick and dirty merv-13 fan-in-a-box air filters

A simple solution.  Not as good as directly exchanging outside air, but it might be useful in some settings.

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So how did we do in our tests with our “Box Fan with a MERV 13 filter” cleaning device? In the tool room, the device removed 59.7% of the one micron sized particles and 86.4% of the five micron sized particles. In the breakroom, the device removed 74.6% of the one micron sized particles and 80% of the 5 micron sized particles. In short, the results show meaningful reductions in the target particle size range. The “Box Fan with a MERV 13 Filter” should be a useful tool in the fight against Covid-19.

One thing we need to make clear – this device is not a HEPA air purifier. It does not have a Clean Air Delivery Rate (CADR) which is the standard for measuring the effectiveness of air cleaners. Purchasing and using a HEPA air purifier is the better option. However, their cost may be prohibitive. In this case the “Box Fan with a MERV 13” filter is a reasonable option.

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a realistic typewriter font

An almost realistic typewriter font - no indentation on the page though.:-)

 

a serious robotic pool stick

A remarkable project - a tip of hat to Greg

dismantling democracy

Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier on the current Republican effort to damage and possibly destroy democracy.

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American democracy’s vulnerability to disinformation has been very much in the news since the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016. The fear is that outsiders, whether they be foreign or domestic actors, will undermine our system by swaying popular opinion and election results.

This is half right. American democracy is an information system, in which the information isn’t bits and bytes but citizens’ beliefs. When peoples’ faith in the democratic system is undermined, democracy stops working. But as information security specialists know, outsider attacks are hard. Russian trolls, who don’t really understand how American politics works, have actually had a difficult time subverting it.

When you really need to worry is when insiders go bad. And that is precisely what is happening in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. In traditional information systems, the insiders are the people who have both detailed knowledge and high level access, allowing them to bypass security measures and more effectively subvert systems. In democracy, the insiders aren’t just the officials who manage voting but also the politicians who shape what people believe about politics. For four years, Donald Trump has been trying to dismantle our shared beliefs about democracy. And now, his fellow Republicans are helping him.

Democracy works when we all expect that votes will be fairly counted, and defeated candidates leave office. As the democratic theorist Adam Przeworski puts it, democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” These beliefs can break down when political insiders make bogus claims about general fraud, trying to cling to power when the election has gone against them.

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predatory capitalism

Cory Doctorow with a tale from our golden age of predatory capitalism,

 

improving ventilation

This resource may be useful if you're trying to improve air changes in a room.  The readme has commentary and references.

Good ventilation is an important tool.

 

 

 

airbreak

Very cool - jailbreak CPAP machines to make them function as a ventilator.

a tip of the hat to Steve