Matt Panhans @mpanhans@librem.one

New in Public Notice: An interview with Yoel Roth on his falling out with Elon, why Twitter gutting its election team is bad news, and more.

"Lessons the company learned robustly after 2016 are no longer part of its playbook for dealing with elections. That’s a major risk" https://www.publicnotice.co/p/yoel-roth-interview-twitter-elon-musk-elections

**Bloomberg** of all places—you know, a major business publication—is now making a *moral* case for getting off #Twitter.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-05/the-moral-case-for-no-longer-engaging-with-elon-musk-s-x#xj4y7vzkg

Mastodon FTW! https://techstory.in/bbc-gives-up-on-instagram-threads-opts-for-mastodon/

elementary OS 7.1 is available as a pay-what-you-can purchase at https://elementary.io today. Localized direct downloads and a torrent magnet link are provided.

If you’re already on elementary OS 7, you’ll get the update to OS 7.1 alongside regular operating system updates. If you haven’t already, open AppCenter and select Update All to be upgraded!

And our hardware retailers Laptop with Linux and Star Labs are offering elementary OS 7.1 out of the box starting today! https://store.elementary.io/

The University of Pennsylvani is acting proud of Katalin Karikó now that she's won a Nobel Prize. But they kicked her out of her tenure track job when she insisted on doing the work that won her that prize:

"She recalls spending one Christmas and New Year’s Eve conducting experiments and writing grant applications. But many other scientists were turning away from the field, and her bosses at UPenn felt mRNA had shown itself to be impractical and she was wasting her time. They issued an ultimatum: if she wanted to continue working with mRNA she would lose her prestigious faculty position, and face a substantial pay cut.

”It was particularly horrible as that same week, I had just been diagnosed with cancer,” said Karikó. “I was facing two operations, and my husband, who had gone back to Hungary to pick up his green card, had got stranded there because of some visa issue, meaning he couldn’t come back for six months. I was really struggling, and then they told me this."

"While undergoing surgery, Karikó assessed her options. She decided to stay, accept the humiliation of being demoted, and continue to doggedly pursue the problem. This led to a chance meeting which would both change the course of her career, and that of science."

Elsewhere she recalled:

“I thought of going somewhere else, or doing something else. I also thought maybe I’m not good enough, not smart enough."

She's now an adjunct in UPenn's neurosurgery department. Will they make her tenure-track now? Luckily she also has a good job at BioNTech.

Both quotes here come from interesting stories. The first is from here:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mrna-coronavirus-vaccine-pfizer-biontech

The second is from here:

https://billypenn.com/2020/12/29/university-pennsylvania-covid-vaccine-mrna-kariko-demoted-biontech-pfizer/

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/

If you're interested in newer workflows for #rstats 📦 development, the 2nd edition of the R Packages book - free to read online! - includes a new chapter "The Whole Game" by @jennybryan that goes over a complete process when developing "a small toy package."
https://r-pkgs.org/whole-game.html
#PositConf2023 @rstats

This is awesome! Full text search has come to Mastodon, and it's being rolled out in a responsible way.

I know full text search is a hot-button issue. For journalists, researchers and many others, FTS is essential. Plenty of others have good reason to keep their content unsearchable.

If you're in the latter category, you don't need to take any action. Your toots will remain unsearchable just as they were before.

For the rest, please manually change the default so your toots will be searchable. This will address a major shortcoming that has kept a huge number of fedi holdouts from joining.

To do that, go to Preferences > Public Profile and select the Privacy and Reach tab. Then check the Include profile page in search engines box.