Thank you!
I highly recommend @debcha.bsky.social ‘s book How Infrastructure Works for thinking about the world we need to build for the future we’re going to have
Every so often I go read the Amazon reviews for replacement SawStop cartridges and see how many fingers have been saved lately Even the folks reporting false positives on wet wood, nails, etc almost always give five stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Every day, I’m like: is this burnout or information overload or looming dread or late-stage capitalism or aging or post-covid or from dealing with the endless new tasks shunted to us (everything from self-checkouts to post-purchase surveys) or burnout or information overload or looming dread or…
This is the part of if that people miss. Like… If Waffle House changed their company policies to allow managers to close up and people to go home the very second the weather services recognized a real danger to human life, the Waffle House Index would no longer hold as a metric.
Not all the way, no. MAybe some precautions, but they basically use "lights are on and you can see us cooking: as a signal of where things stand: www.wafflehouse.com/how-to-measu...
Waffle House - How to Measure a Storm's Fury One Breakfast at a Time
Reminder that the Waffle House index isn't a joke, it's a very real correlative metric and if you see a waffle house not just closed but BOARDED UP, then shit in that area is likely to be very very bad, and you should take it seriously.
Because of better weather protection and building codes. The deadliest hurricane in US history, the Galveston, TX hurricane was so deadly in part because they had no warning (why that is, is racism but that's for another time).
One of the hardest things to convey to people is avoided disaster. I've heard people say hurricanes are nbd anymore because even though more people are living on the coast and deaths haven't skyrocketed. Why is that?
"Singular value decomposition" (SVD) is the most useful linear algebra technique I know. But it's often not taught in classes! Here's a visual demo for the 2D case, which gives you all the intuition you need for higher dimensions: www.bewitched.com/demo/svd/
