Matt Panhans @mpanhans@librem.one

I do have one small quibble with the NYT piece. The headline calls Meitner the “Mother of the Atomic Bomb.”

No. Meitner helped discover nuclear fission & foresaw its dangerous potential. BUT she refused to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, famously declaring, “I will have nothing to do with a bomb!”

Her gravestone reads, “Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity.” /2

Anyway, you can read more about the discovery of penicillin in this fun article from Science Vision. Enjoy, and happy Mould Juice Day!

https://www.sciencevision.org/storage/journal-articles/June2020/8Z8EkQYx4R0eKmiBJanG.pdf

A milestone: Tonight, the fedi was my best source for U.S. political updates.

Thanks especially to @w7voa and @samlitzinger

Latest comic on a certain pundit's infamous $78 airport meal

(For those outside the US, the commentator David Brooks has made a career out of piously trolling liberals for their supposed decadence and lack of morals.)

#uspol #economy #journalism #media #socialmedia

Burt Mustin made his debut as Mr. Quigley on ALL IN THE FAMILY on this day in 1973 — at age 89!

He started acting in his 60s after retiring as a salesman and worked constantly for 25 years.

New in Public Notice: My expectations for the debate were low, but holy crap
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/gop-debate-fox-business-simi-valley-yikes

"If all you have is an MC Hammer, everything looks like you can't touch it"

- ancient proverb

I wrote about the surprising pragmatism of Lina Khan’s Amazon antitrust lawsuit — and how it gives up on a lot of the more radical ideas in her famous law review paper. Maybe Amazon isn’t an antitrust paradox after all… https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/27/lina-khan-amazon-antitrust-paradox/

Oh my goodness I've just learned a thing about The Matrix that causes it to make a lot more sense: In the original script the humans were used as neural network compute clusters by the Machines and as a crucial component of The Matrix itself.

Which is why humans who were aware of the simulation could control aspects of The Matrix - their minds were part of its foundation.

Unfortunately the test audiences had trouble understanding this concept so the studio changed the human role to "batteries".

Case studies are always fun. The most impressive #PositConf2023 one was the city of #Chicago showing how they took 50k+ lines of rules-based SPSS code and reduced it to about 20 lines of tidymodels ML code to fix a scandalously broken property tax regime. And the whole thing is public!

Wild flamingos flock to #Wisconsin. https://www.jsonline.com/story/sports/outdoors/2023/09/22/flamingo-mania-draws-crowd-to-port-washington-beach/70932653007/

Flamingoes arrive at Lake Michigan in #Wisconsin - a totally normal and not at all weird thing.

#climate

https://milwaukeerecord.com/city-life/flamingos-in-wisconsin/