Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Second rate reporter says what?

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Open Thread: Why Bloggers Dogs Have No King

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It’s probably a good thing that dogs don’t write their own blogs. This was told to me as a Choctaw legend, which it almost certainly isn’t…

“Back in the Past Days, when people and animals talked to each other, all the dogs got together and decided they should elect a king. The only problem was — nobody could agree as to how that king should be chosen. The greyhounds said it should be the fastest dog, the mastiffs said it should be the biggest dog, the border collies said it should be the smartest dog, and the poodles said it should be the cutest dog. Every dog had an opinion, and every opinion was being expressed, all at once, at the maximum possible volume.

Then a scruffy little dog who’d been sitting in the corner spoke up. He knew he wasn’t going to be anybody’s choice for king — he was old and ugly and dirty and had a bad attitude. “The one we should pick for our king,” he said, “should be the dog who smells good under his tail.”

Dogs being dogs, this struck them all as a brilliant solution. Yes! They just needed to find the dog whose butt smelt sweetest! Every dog in the pack started sniffing each other’s backsides! And yet, tragically, not even one dog with a pleasant-smelling butt could be found…

That was many, many years ago. The dogs still have no king. But whenever two dogs meet, they’re very eager to check out each other’s tail ends to see if they’ve found their king at last! (And sometimes arguments break out when overly personal remarks are passed about the other guy’s fitness for the throne.)”

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An Interesting Gadget

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Your laptop:

Newer models of laptops manufactured by companies like Apple and Lenovo contain accelerometers — motion sensors meant to detect whether the computer has been dropped. If the computer falls, the hard drive will automatically switch off to protect the user’s data.

“As soon as I knew there were these low-cost sensors inside these accelerometers, I thought it would be perfect to use them to network together and actually record earthquakes,” geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California at Riverside says.

So a few years ago, Cochran got in touch with Jesse Lawrence, a colleague at Stanford. They whipped up a program called the Quake-Catcher Network. It’s a free download that runs silently in the background, collecting data from the computer’s accelerometer and waiting to detect an earthquake.

Laptop accelerometers aren’t as sensitive as a professional-grade seismometers, so they can only pick up tremors of about magnitude 4.0 and above. But when a laptop does sense a tremor, it’ll ping the researchers’ server. “And when our server receives a bunch of those, we then say, ‘This is a likely earthquake,'” Lawrence says.

Pretty clever, and this is the sort of thing that is right-in my wheelhouse for things I think are cool- take something that already exists and put it to use doing something else useful. I was always a fan of the crowdsourcing of space research.

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Cornered

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I’m watching a fascinating episode of Book TV on C-Span that features Barry C. Lynn of the New America Foundation discussing his new book, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction.

Have any of you read this? I highly recommend watching this, which was part of the Annapolis Book Festival:

Worth your time.

Additionally, if, like me, you are stuck to the desk working and would like something interesting to listen to, this TNC/David Remnick conversation at the NYPL is pretty worthwhile.

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Friday Night Open Thread

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We’ve had a series of really violent thunderstorms here today. I apparently slept through one set, taking a nap from 4-5, but it has looked like the skies are going to unleash holy hell again soon. Power is out in a lot of places and there are lots of trees down.

I have Samantha for the week-end, and the house is a hive of activity. All it takes is for Lily, Tunch, or Sam to get worked up about something, and the other two join in.

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