about time we all come together to give this elephant the help he needs. Im talking about the elephant in the room
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Erica Fischer
@enf
She is awake. She is not in acute distress. She is well-developed and well-groomed. She is not ill-appearing. Behavior is cooperative. Thought content normal.
flickr.com/photos/walking…Joined June 2008
Erica Fischer’s Tweets
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Here's an @observablehq page demoing something I'm amazed is now possible: full-text similarity search on 2.5 million @hathitrust books, real-time in the browser, where you can refine a query for similar books. E.g., a cluster of 19C racial uplift books: observablehq.com/@bmschmidt/sim
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genuinely believe a big part of why text-to-image tools have taken off so fast is their variable-reward nature. prompting feels like gambling; it’s finicky, so you keep making tiny tweaks hoping *this* will be *the one*, & the delay between prompt & output builds anticipation
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Is there a term for saying "okay just one more #StableDiffusion run" over and over again?
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I am also really pleased to have been able to revive Tippecanoe as an open source project at Felt (github.com/felt/tippecanoe). There is a blog interview with me (felt.com/blog/erica-fis) where I talk about its origin and evolution and how we are using it in processing user uploads
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We launched user data uploads today at Felt: felt.com/blog/put-your-
I am really pleased with how well it "just works" with almost anything I try to throw at it, with no manual configuration required. I hope it will do a good job with your data too, but let me know if it doesn't
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Better, ſtronger, faſter, rantier
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ROBORANTS, in pharmacy, medicines which strengthen the parts and give new vigour to the constitution.
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I find it curious that Doritos delivery trucks continue to be painted with the 1995-era Doritos logo. I don't think the trucks are actually that old.
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Cleaning spaceweed off a spaceship’s hull
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1948-Jan-25 - Looking west on Aliso St heading into downtown LA; note so-called "Chinese Wall" at right, which formed the southern border of Union Station. A Santa Fe Super Chief engine blew through the wall due a failure to properly engage the brakes.
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Part 2 on PMTiles v3: pre-compression to beat plain gzip by 3x
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have any of you seen this rather stunning prototype of the Apple 1 computer which is up for auction right now? i have a few random thoughts about it. 🧵
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Abraham Wald's aircraft memos are a statistical masterpiece.
And it had nothing to do with survivorship bias.
The question he was actually assigned: "what's the probability that N hits will down a plane, *given we have no data on the planes that were shot down*?"
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The thing I don't like about using this story to explain "survivorship bias" is that Abraham Wald didn't have access to the population of planes that were shot down. He, too, was only examining the survivors!
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Pleased to be returning to the geo field (geo sphere? geo geoid?) with my first day at
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QUARANTINE, is used for a term of forty days, which vessels, coming from places suspected of contagion, are obliged to wait in certain places appointed to air themselves, before they come into port.
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Everyone's joking about how far above list this could sell for... but drop a row of houses on the other outside lane, a centerline, and access to the sidepath, i'd live there
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#BayBridge: there is a tiny house that fell off a trailer. The left lane is blocked on the lower deck and traffic is just crawling through #SanFrancisco on northbound 101 and eastbound 80. #KCBSTraffic. Photo: Phone forcer Paul
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wait is it because you get a window or is it because it's the only seat you can get GPS reception
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For people who sit on Google Maps all day, having a window seat on a plane is like attending a concert.
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The Skinny House in Boston wasn't built out of spite - it's what remains of a larger structure.
Here's how I know.
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…KNEES, KNEES!!!
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I wonder if I have any minimized browser windows full of tweets that I meant to read eventually that are older than this one that had been waiting since August, 2019
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It's done. It's out. It's free. It's in your feeds.
It's a podcast about measurement: how we use it to understand and communicate and how it has in turn changed how we think. It's some of the best writing I've done and I'm so proud of what and I have put together.
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Oh hey, now this account actually promotes a thing!
Check out the teaser for the brand new podcast 'Measure for Measure!' ministryofideas.org/measure
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My headcanon is that the C, T, and S stand for "covid test" and "snot."
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A niche but fascinating find by that's been waiting on the shelves of the Prelinger Library for decades: a technical report from 1964 on why BART uses an extra wide, non-standard gauge for its train cars: bart.gov/news/articles/
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You might expect high-tech construction but the voice detector was made from components soldered to metal pins. It's a jumbled mess of overlapping wires and components stuck down with globs of silicone. It's kind of amazing that they'd go to the Moon with this.
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For the sake of a maximally-mysterious aphorism, I am relieved that L. Tennant Woods determined that you catch more flies with oxymel than with either honey *or* vinegar
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OXYMEL, in pharmacy, a composition of vinegar and honey.
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Celebrating Canada Day with a bell pepper that I am surprised comes from Canada
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Is anyone I know at Trans March?
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Going to start a folk etymology that the name for the fovea in the retina is from an acronym for Field Of View
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Having a weird evening of greater-than-normal colorblindness. The red LEDs of the alarm clock look milky green, and now the "Update secret gist" button looks red
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oh nooooooo
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Finally inspired to dig up some archival weather data to establish quantitatively the extent to which my face collapses back into to relative masculinity when it is hot. This trans tweet brought to you by today's face-melting temperature
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"Diagram illustrating the advantage of thru traffic routes and of rectangular layout of the chief business and community center in the development of rapid transit routes." 1/3
City Growth Essentials, 1928 archive.org/details/citygr
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It feels so multicultural to be eating New York bakery Texas toast French bread croutons from Ohio in California
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Better late than never, the UK gives pedestrians legal priority over turning vehicles cambridgeindependent.co.uk/news/the-highw
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UK just made a handful of foundational road rule changes to improve walking and cycling including making traffic give way to pedestrians.
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I was doing data visualization before data visualization was cool… and before I had any idea what I was doing
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1986's "SUPER.BARCHART Graphing program" by a young @enf
code: gist.github.com/e-n-f/2a1a77d9
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By popular demand (fine: one guy remembering that I praised "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter") I just flipped a switch to put my old "Prochronisms" blog about computationally detecting anachronisms back online at prochronism.blogspot.com. Enjoy!
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I was wondering why May 25th was stuck in my head as a significant date, but of course it is because May 25, 1962 was the date of the draft standard that was eventually adopted as ASCII-1963 archive.org/details/enf-as
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To my surprise, I have developed an appreciation for black pepper
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A Philadelphia suburban bus modified to run on rails shows up in Minnesota in the late 1960s, from John W. Diers, “St. Paul Union Depot.” (Photos on its home turf here: youtube.com/watch?v=0oR_A6)
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