Links - January 2025

These are links I saved on my phone last month.

South Dakota 2024 Ballot Question Pamphlet

South Dakota brags about being the first state to adopt citizen-initiated ballot measures. The government publishes a pamphlet of these measures with a short pro-and-con blurb written by citizens. Most of the ballot measures fail because SD is a very conservative state, but their presence on the ballot is a result of the state’s progressive history.

Notre Dame and Georgia fans abandon New Orleans after terror attack postponed Sugar Bowl

After a terror attack delayed the Sugar Bowl, the price of tickets fell to as low as 11 dollars. Probably a bit too ghoulish an example to use in principles of micro.

WoRMS - World Register of Marine Species

Saved just for that gutsy acronym.

Superannuation in Australia - Wikipedia

Fully-funded retirement savings program. Saved to use as example in class.

Ancient Greek Dolphin Money

Cutest coins in history. (Image source” Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. / CC BY-SA 3.0)

Celtic Bell-Money

Another odd ancient “coin”. Another professor at USD was telling me about how he has examples of bell money and dolphin money in his coin collection.

Presidential Actions – The White House

The White House publishes a chronological feed of executive orders and other presidential actions. I’ve found this to be an invaluable news source in recent weeks.

Microsoft uses a scream test to silence its unused servers - Inside Track Blog

Speaking of the recent Executive Orders, I’ve heard them compared to “scream testing”. That’s where you shut things down and then wait to see if somebody screams. (compare USAID, PEPFAR). Microsofts implementation of the technique is a bit more considered than the USAID shutdowns, albeit.

Display the message “Hey, is this your server, contact us?” on the sign-in splash page for two weeks.
Restart the server once each day for two weeks to see whether someone opens a ticket (in other words, screams).
Shut down the server for two weeks and see whether someone opens a ticket. (Again, whether they scream.)
Retire the server, retaining the storage for a period, just in case.

Can I go 2 weeks after the election without finding out who won? | Manifold

She was only able to go seven days. Here’s the vlog about how she failed the attempt.

TeXnique

A LaTeX Typesetting Game. Best I could get was a score of just 29.

Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English

“You are a teacher. A student. A reader. A writer. You are ready to become even more. Earn your master’s at Bread Loaf”

Quite the interesting name for a school. Comes from the school originally operating out of “Bread Loaf Inn”.

Claim from Brian Albrecht on Twitter

In California, insurers aren’t allowed to use models of future catastrophe to accurately price fire insurance.

Though this was supposedly changed recently, according to this article. CA insurers are able to use catastrophe models in exchange for expanding coverage to fire-prone areas.

Medicine as a pseudoscience

Here’s something interesting to think about. Medicine used to be almost entirely pseudoscientific, and even 200 years ago, it would have been very prudent to turn to herbal remedies (ie placebo) over proper medical intervention. It may not have been until the 20th century that doctors began to actually make people healthier on net. Though the commenters on this post and on a related reddit post point out a few medical interventions (setting bones, pulling teeth, etc.) that could have justified the existence of the pre-modern medical profession.

Also, I’d already known that bloodletting contributed to the death of George Washington. But one of the comments does some back-of-the-envelope math to conclude that they removed about half of his blood…

Finn Hat Pattern and Map of the Land of Ooo

A spontaneous bit of nostalgia compelled me to dig up a couple of printable Adventure Time whatzits. I remember asking my mom to make a sew me up a copy of Finn’s hat. I miss when the internet was dominated by blogs like these, now only hosted on an archive of an archive. But moreso, I miss that hat.