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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14h

An unremarked potential casualty of the Trump administration's deployment of the military in policing roles domestically, and of the military-style tactics used by ICE in raids and arrests, is precisely that broad respect. The American people will resent a force that it views as abusive, lawless […]

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14h

Occurred to me yesterday:

In the 1960s and 1970s, the US public's view of the US military was much worse than today. That was due very much to the Vietnam war, and also to a lack of professionalism in the services, drug use, other chronic problems.

Military leadership cleaned the services up […]

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19h

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi for their work on metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. This class of molecule can be carefully designed to interact with specific other molecules, making them very useful in materials science […]

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Reposted by Mike Olson

aglimme.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy @aglimme.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 1d

@mikeolson The council punting on Hopkins street was a travesty. It's a mess now and there is no plan to repave it till 2029. Riding through Hopkins and Sacramento is an exercise in dodging potholes and parked cars, it's a mess. I think we should turn McGee to one way with angles parking.

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 1d

Ah, man, I hope they don't screw it up:

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/qualcomm-buys-open-source-electronics-firm-arduino-2025-10-07/

I love Arduino boards and related hardware. I've had so much fun hacking and learning on the platform. My experience is that big companies mean well […]

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 1d

I love the look of anticipation and optimism in the face of this wire, gazing at electrons across the mysterious barrier (swiped the pic from the Nobel web site's announcement of this prize):

Strange drawing of a wire with tiny hands, holding a light bulb, looking left at its own tail, where some electrons appear to be entering the wire next to a graphic of an atom surrounded by electrons of its own. The tail of the wire also has hands, which are raised in a kind of "I dunno" way.

Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 1d

Aaaand, the Physics Nobel is awarded to John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis for their work in demonstrating classical-scale effects of quantum phenomena (specifically, quantum tunneling in electronic circuits) […]

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 1d

@heidilifeldman posted this content in a thread here on Mastodon over the last few days, but has collected for her blog the story of the first Speaker's Corner that her Indivisible group ran in Santa Fe:

https://heidi-says.ghost.io/starting-speakers-corners-while-we-can/

It's good.

Starting Speakers’ Corners while we can

In Santa Fe, I have helped start a Speakers’ Corner project. We held our first session this past Saturday. Reprinted below, from the Indivisible Santa Fe website, is my diary. But first, click the image below for footage showing a sampling of speakers from the day. ## Speakers' Corner

heidi-says.ghost.io

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 1d

Love this story and love the increasing support for cycling around my town. I've got a gravel bike (kind of a road and mountain bike hybrid) that I ride for exercise and sport), and a class 2 ebike that I use for commuting and chores. I really enjoy getting out and doing stuff, and parking is […]

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 2d

“A lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” Mr. Trump said last week. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things.”

I'm an American, motherfucker.

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 2d

It's Nobel season!

The 2025 Nobel in Medicine has been awarded to Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for their work in recognizing the role that regulatory T cells play in the immune system, opening up new opportunities in immunotherapeutics -- increasing and improving the […]

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 3d

This is an exceptional essay by A.R. Moxon.

https://www.the-reframe.com/eventually-youre-going-to-have-to-stand-for-something-2/

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 4d

Swiped this picture from a LinkedIn post by UC Berkeley chancellor Rich Lyons. Cal football has a new helmet sticker.

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Mignon Fogarty @grammargirl.zirk.us.ap.brid.gy · 4d

ICYMI, the official database of books included in the Anthropic class-action copyright settlement is now live: https://secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/

You can now file claims.

Submit a Claim

secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 4d

I never wanted to burn an American flag until yesterday.

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 4d

Thank you all for participating in the Elon Musk Remorse Contest. No new entries are being accepted; we have a winner.

Parked cybertruck with the word TOYOTA spelled out in large letters across the back panel.

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 4d

Some interesting technical details on the Apple iOS #iceblock app, and opinion on Apple's decision to remove it from the App Store at the demand of the DOJ:

https://daringfireball.net/2025/10/iceblock_removed_from_app_store

Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 5d

Artists helping me out right now: Billy Strings. Zach Bryan (East Side of Sorrow, OMG). Eliza Gilkyson — new album absolutely smokes. Dylan and Springsteen, of course, pretty much whole damn catalogues.

How about you?

Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 5d

I sold my car during the pandemic and now get around on foot, by bike and on public transit. These Southside changes have been a huge improvement for me, especially the Bancroft cycling lane that connects to north/south Milvia Street, also a cycle route […]

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 5d

Oh, nothing really, just a state-of-the-art user defined aggregate for GPS data because POSTGRES IS STILL FREAKING AWESOME MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS LATER Y'ALL.

https://neon.com/blog/implementing-a-kalman-filter-in-postgres-to-smooth-gps-data

(via Hackaday)

Implementing a Kalman Filter in Postgres to Smooth GPS Data - Neon

An open-source project that implements a Kalman Filter in Postgres to clean up noisy GPS data directly in the database.

neon.com

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 5d

Three weeks after I experienced the coolness of wind turbine blade transport over the road, this hit my feeds:

https://hackaday.com/2025/10/03/giant-airplane-goes-long-on-specialization/

I'll see your truck and raise you an airplane!

Did I mention that I love engineers?

Giant Airplane Goes Long On Specialization

While not everyone agrees on the installation of wind turbines in their proverbial back yards, one thing not up for debate is that there is a drive to build them …read more

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 7d

Their award-winning paper appears here:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-98459-4_8

But, as a friendly hint that always always works for paywalled academic papers in journals, if you look up the email addresses of one or another of the authors and send them a polite note […]

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 7d

I know I rail some about AI -- the poor choice of name, its black-hole-like effect on venture capital funding for tech startups, its misapplication to inappropriate problems and its use by unsophisticated and trusting users. All that stuff seriously bugs me!

But also, it's a super-interesting […]

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 7d

Meenakshi Mittal, a UC Berkeley PhD student, and her co-authors won Best Paper at the International Conference on AI in Education in July 2025 for their work on Askademia:

https://www.askademia.org/

It's a real-time LLM-based context-aware system for answering real-time questions from students […]

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Mike Olson @mikeolson.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 7d

It took me two days, off and on, to read this. I consider it a clear-sighted and well-researched analysis of the coming collapse of the mega-scale AI companies, and OpenAI in particular.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/

Ed Zitron's been loud and consistent in his […]

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