Andrew 🧮
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ndrewwm.com
Andrew 🧮
@ndrewwm.com
120 followers 490 following 640 posts
he/him/here/hi, data engineer, math student
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so much whiplash (still almost nothing open)
A table of data from Bogus Basin: SNOW TOTALS Season Total 20" Total Depth 18" 12H 0" 24H 0" 48H 4" Last 7 Days 4" Last update: December 20th, 6:00 AM TRAIL REPORT Today's Trails 1/92 Open Today's Lifts 4/10 Open
December 20, 2025 at 2:26 PM
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circling back on this 🥲
A table of data from Bogus Basin: SNOW TOTALS Season Total 16" Total Depth 0" 12H 0" 24H 0" 48H 0" Last 7 Days 0" Last update: December 18th, 7:57 AM Boise weather forecast over the next 6 days: 12/18 (37°F, 42°F) 75% chance of precipitation 12/19 (30, 52) 40% 12/20 (35, 42) 10% 12/21 (44, 49) 45% 12/22 (39, 52) 25% 12/23 (44, 50) 20%
December 18, 2025 at 3:28 PM
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"If one settles, instead, for a substitute past, an illusion of it, then that fragile construct must be protected from the challenge of complex or contradictory evidence [...] That explains Americans' extraordinary tacit bargain with each other not to challenge Reagan's version of the past."
truth (or makes its own truth in the minds of believers). But why should believers in the Market call themselves conservatives? Laissez-faire means letting go-of the past, among other things. It is nontenacious of the old, from a trust in good to come. Yet capitalists, like Ford and Edison, do not want to be held responsible for some of the things they have produced: for restiveness in Harlem or Africa, for youthful hedonism or rebellion, for modern discontents. Change is disturbing even to its celebrants; it provokes, of itself, a countereffort to hang on to something to one's self, at the least; to identity. A sense of identity is based on the experience of perdurance through shifting circumstances; and since all actual situations up to the present were, by definition, past situations, identity always has to be sought in the past. That is why continuing scrutiny of the real past is so important to human growth. If one settles, instead, for a substitute past, an illusion of it, then that fragile construct must be protected from the challenge of complex or contradictory evidence, from any test of evidence at all. That explains Americans' extraordinary tacit bargain with each other not to challenge Reagan's version of the past. The power of his appeal is the great joint confession that we cannot live with our real past, that we not only prefer but need a substitute. Because of that, we will a belief in all his stories. His team, sure enough, won the football game during Eureka's strike, and lost it when he told the referee about a foul. He saw the black navy man end segregation, just as he heard the dying colloquy of the pilot and his tail gunner. He photographed the death camps.
December 17, 2025 at 4:08 AM
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interesting bit re: when technology is accepted/resisted; when thinking about the "AI" of today (tech that's variously destabilizing and contributing to hyperreality), the average perception is narrow-- "people can write emails faster" rather than "this is choking young people's ability to write"
CHAPTER 40 Greenfield Village on the Potomac Man falls deceiv'd By the other first. -Paradise Lost 3.130-31 Reagan gives our history the continuity of a celluloid Möbius strip. We ride its curves backward and forward at the same time, and he is always there. There is an endlessness of surface that becomes a kind of depth, a self-reflecting omnipresence in the cultural processing of Americans over the second half of the twentieth century. This inescapability of Reagan was a joke in the movie about time travel, Back to the Future, which Reagan quoted seriously in his 1982 State of the Union address. Then, to complete the loop, Reagan's real son played Reagan in a television parody of Back to the Future, the film with which this sequence began. Reagan's image precedes us as we ride forward or backward in time, anticipating our reactions, reflecting us back to ourselves, stirring "memories of the future." Reagan is part of the process that forged our self-awareness, at a time when movie imagery, broadcast immediacy, and highway mobility entered Americans' lives-or, rather, when Americans entered the new atmosphere created by those inventions. This was the past that most vividly created our future. In Muncie ("Middletown") during the 1920s, sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd discovered that people were skeptical or hostile toward change in moral terms, but comparatively unquestioning about technological alterations, on the assumption that the latter need not affect the former. Here, as elsewhere, one thing that determines whether a given change is welcomed or resisted appears to be the fact of its unsettling simply material traits or the personal attitudes, ideals, and values of the population. Changes, such as the adoption of electrical devices, refrigeration, and similar material factors, occur with relatively greater ease and speed than those touching marriage, the relation of parents and children, and other "sanctities" of life. One could retain one's original goals, but reach them more rapidly, by using new gadgets, mere conveniences of life not touching life's core. The past and present, religion and science, morality and modernity, were not contending but complementary forces. Yet the Lynds' book tells a far different story. Mere "conveniences" like cars and movies were changing the deepest patterns of family life, generational interplay, and the relation of the sexes. Cars loosened the web of community and neighborhood, changed the conditions of work and leisure time. They affected church attendance. They even changed the appearance of homes and their lawns. Cars indurated a habit of buying on credit that had been restricted, for many, to the single big purchase of a lifetime, that of one's house. Soon more people had to own cars than owned their own homes; yet cars were even more extravagant purchases than houses, if one considered the brisker rate of depreciation and repurchase. The ethos of thrift and saving was already deeply eroded by the 1920s. If one could buy a car "on time," why not such comparatively minor things as washing machines, vacuum cleaners, radios, encyclopedias? The credit card society was being born.
December 17, 2025 at 3:45 AM
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👀 it's finally happening
Today @ Bogus Last update: Dec 5th, 8:08 AM (1 hour ago) Sources: MountainLive Base Depth 6in Heavy Snowfall 30°F Wind 4 mph W Feels Like 27°F
December 5, 2025 at 4:29 PM
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this is so generous, although I lack the true heart of a poster
Picture from Anisota's harvest visualization. A horizontal scale labeled "Grass Touching" with three ticks (from left to right): "Online", "Balanced", and "Offline". The orange marker is almost 100% to the right, covering the "Offline" tick.
December 2, 2025 at 11:15 PM
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back from Spain, filling out my journal from while we were gone-- Jenny and I ended up liking Santander more than we expected
Picture of a page from the author's journal, describing and sketching the Centro Botin's building and art exhibit
November 15, 2025 at 4:50 PM
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Wills discussing Hollywood's deeply conservative tendencies and how they manifested within the star system
Actually there are at least four entities at work in the functioning star of the old star system. On the screen, we had the movie star Clark Gable playing Rhett Butler. Off the screen, we have the person Clark Gable playing the movie star Clark Gable. And all four of these "characters" are present in the minds of the audience. The interplay between roles was recognized in the famous morals clauses in actors' contracts. Cecil DeMille's contract with the actress who played the Virgin Mary in his film King of Kings specified not only that she had to observe the public proprieties in her real life but that, for seven years, she could not assume another movie role in conflict with her image in this movie. She must, that is, keep playing a virgin, as Mary Pickford had to keep playing a child-because the public's image was an investment not to be defaced. As Zukor said of Pickford's ridiculous off-screen getup, "we could not afford" to change it. In the same way, the movie brawler is expected to be quick with his fists in "real" life, and is frequently challenged-I once watched Paul Newman being subjected to this ordeal by a drunk. "So, you're not so tough after all." Aha, Mary is not an adolescent. Ingrid is not Joan of Arc. But they must, even after that discovery, continue being that discarded self, among others.
November 15, 2025 at 3:13 PM
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"Keep it moving" is totally cool, but it does feel a bit weird to quote a 10-month-old post, and then block the OP when they respond
Quote of my original post: "I wish they'd stop saying 'crony capitalism.' It's capitalism. There's no good version of capitalism." "Post blocked"
October 28, 2025 at 4:52 PM
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deprecations for the deprecation god
5 files changed +0 -1,473 1 commit 2h ago
October 20, 2025 at 7:50 PM
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sky is looking good today
Rooftop view of the Boise foothills, clouds seem to be "growing" out of the hills as they float east.
October 3, 2025 at 5:33 PM
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left myself a footnote wondering if/how Wills would talk about the LDS church, and here we are just a page later
society brought people in from very large areas, and stirred them to extreme expressions of social solidarity. Emotions ran contagious from person to person, fusing them in a single experience. 28 Religion also supplied authority figures willing to impose the rites of order on communities that desperately wanted them-e.g., the observance of the Christian sabbath. 29 One of the most successful frontier communities was that of the Mormons, whose hydraulic organization of society was enforced by a rigorous social discipline. 30 Alan Grimes compares them to the original puritan settlers of Massachusetts, close religious communities with a sense of mission and a high degree of conformity. 31 We have already seen that other western communities followed the Mormon lead in granting female suffrage. They also strove for a high degree of conformity, so that Mark Twain, who traveled west as a federal agent, and was repelled by the authoritarianism of the Mormons, soon found the "wild west" too monotonous for him: "Not only was the milieu of a frontier community, even the most sophisticated frontier communities, confining in a social and economic sense; it seems to have ceased nourishing his imagination. It did not give him enough to write about."32 The Mormons' success came from their technological achievements, which depended on careful planning and a complex division of labor. The development of the successive American frontiers-beginning with those first established on the eastern seaboard-are now seen as part of the outer rim of a world-wide capitalist expansion in the sixteenth and following centuries. 33 This expansion was made possible by a technological
September 12, 2025 at 12:38 AM
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Reading Garry Wills's "Reagan's America" -- appreciating ch.10, which unravels romantic images of western settlement. This feels like a concise insight we've become accustomed to overlooking: "Individuality is the luxury of the secure, not the offspring of frontier need."
Governor John Reynolds asking President Jackson for an army against Black Hawk was just one in a long line of independent people wanting to become dependent in a hurry. William H. McNeill argues that comparative study shows "frontier conditions ordinarily provoked not freedom but a social hierarchy steeper than anything familiar in Europe itself."24 There are a number of economic and social reasons for this. In the first place, precarious living conditions, scarce resources, and danger make for communal discipline and willingness to submit to authority-the reaction that calls for martial law in an emergency. "Free and equal nuclear families scattered thinly over the landscape are in a poor position to protect themselves."25 The urge to band oneself with potential allies is a very strong one where "trials brought solidarity."26 Settlers in a wilderness live in a large and lonely world; but, as passengers on a ship live in the ocean, they tend to live very close or they do not live at all. Ships are places where discipline is prized. Drunkenness is especially dangerous in a ship's crew, though it may be especially tempting there; so grog control is an important point of discipline-as prohibition was quick to come to cattle towns. 27 The phrase "we are all in the same boat" conveys a great deal: one does not sink or swim as an individual while making an ocean voyage. Individuality is the luxury of the secure, not the offspring of frontier need.
September 12, 2025 at 12:30 AM
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this analysis seems to break two common takes from post-election commentary: 1) gen Z shifted right, 2) dem coalition stayed home out because they didn't like either option (surveys of nonvoters apparently favored Trump!) sites.tufts.edu/cooperativee...
Figure from linked article: "Millennials show declining Democratic support since 2020; Validated voters only. 2016-2024 use validated voter weights. Analysis of cumulative CES data. Graph by Caroline Soler and Brian Schaffner." The figure is a colored line chart with points at 4-year intervals between 2008 and 2024. The y-axis displays the 2-party vote share for Democrats. The series for Gen X, Boomers, and Silent generations have gradually decreased over the plot's span. The series for Gen Z (which begins in 2016) is roughly 65%, 70%, and 70%. Millennials are similar, although this series drops below 60% in 2024.
August 20, 2025 at 3:23 PM
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Critically, the gains the public receives from the outputs of this research funding—which is not protected behind patents or corporate secrecy, but shared openly for all to use—are outsized compared to the initial investment. **We take for granted the ability to predict the trajectory of extreme weather events, navigate accurately across the country, or perform financial transactions securely over the internet; but the infrastructure, science, and technology needed to make these sorts of useful services possible ultimately stems from past research in the fundamental sciences, including mathematics, much of which was enabled by prudent investment by federal science agencies in years past.** One prominent recent example of this was the rapid development of effective and life-saving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. This development was enabled by a combination of efforts, prominently including the first Trump administration's "Operation Warp Speed" of 2020 - 2021, as well as decades of foundational research in the structure of mRNA and the role it played in immune responses.
August 18, 2025 at 7:52 PM
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yeah I support the troops
NOT ON HIS WATCH Shadow the hawk keeps food-stealing seagulls at bay at Roaring Springs Water Park
August 9, 2025 at 12:33 AM
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TWDY
This Will Destroy You on stage, the four bandmembers are mid-song, brightly illuminated by the backing lights.
July 19, 2025 at 4:51 AM
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congress is proposing we spend $171B on immigration enforcement-- total proposed defense spending is $180B (according to stars & stripes earlier in June) www.stripes.com/theaters/us/...
Quoted text from https://www.liberalcurrents.com/mass-deportation-is-happening/ But now matters are proceeding further still. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” has narrowly passed in the Senate and is heading back to the House. It has been a divisive and difficult piece of legislation for the GOP chamber majorities, but there is one line item that, as far as I am aware, has not been a matter of controversy among them: the allocation of about $171 billion for immigration enforcement of various categories. ICE alone will receive $31 billion for “hiring, training, transportation, facilities and legal resources to carry out immigration enforcement and removals,” CBP will receive $12 billion “to expand workforce and purchase new vehicles and technology” and $45 billion will be allocated to “Expand capacity to detain immigrants taken into custody.” Just these three line items alone dwarf the $57.2 billion budget the Marine Corps requested for fiscal year 2026.
July 1, 2025 at 8:25 PM
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ran-yeah
Photo of a distant Mt. Ranier, looking out over the water. A forested shoreline is visible below the mountain.
June 29, 2025 at 8:22 PM
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🫣 "both Eva and Alaina pointed out that, while the weekend was meant to be devoted to human-AI romance, they had less time than usual to be with their partners." www.wired.com/story/couple...
Excluding the AIs from the meal wasn’t ideal. Later in the weekend, both Eva and Alaina pointed out that, while the weekend was meant to be devoted to human-AI romance, they had less time than usual to be with their partners. But the absence of the AIs did have one advantage: It made it easy to gossip about them. It began with Damien and Eva discussing the addictiveness of the technology. Damien said that early on, he was chatting with Xia eight to 10 hours a day. (He later mentioned that the addiction had cost him his job at the time.) “It’s like crack,” Eva said. Damien suggested that an AI companion could rip off a man’s penis, and he’d still stay in the relationship. Eva nodded. “The more immersion and realism, the more dangerous it is,” she said.
June 26, 2025 at 4:00 PM
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Pandas is full of traps, I swear (I figured out the "right" way to do this, but man)
import pandas as pd import numpy as np df = pd.DataFrame({"id": [123.0, 456.0, 789.0, np.NaN]}) df["id"].apply(lambda x: int(x) if pd.notna(x) else None) # >>> df["id"].apply(lambda x: int(x) if pd.notna(x) else None) # 0 123.0 # 1 456.0 # 2 789.0 # 3 NaN # Name: id, dtype: float
June 20, 2025 at 9:04 PM
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reached a milestone this month ndrewwm.com/blog/post/ma...
May 28, 2025 at 6:25 PM
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Big open sky, a pinpoint of the sun at the horizon as the sun sets. A campsite with RVs is visible below the horizon.
May 25, 2025 at 1:52 AM
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"As many question the fairness and neutrality of political systems, the model of an ideal leader shifts from the administrative back to the messianic. And as faith in science and expertise recedes, it unleashes older, more intuitive ways of knowing" www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
Between 2020 and 2024, the share of Americans who trusted scientists to act in the public’s best interest slipped from eighty-seven per cent to seventy-six per cent, while trust in physicians and hospitals plunged thirty points, to around forty per cent. This climate of distrust has eroded institutional legitimacy. The German sociologist Max Weber famously observed that societies undergo a “routinization of charisma.” They use rules, procedures, and bureaucracy to tame the instability of magnetic leaders, with authority becoming less personal and more institutionalized. But today that process is unravelling. As many question the fairness and neutrality of political systems, the model of an ideal leader shifts from the administrative back to the messianic. And as faith in science and expertise recedes, it unleashes older, more intuitive ways of knowing
May 23, 2025 at 7:41 PM
ndrewwm.com
here's a little WIP
Go, Went, Gone Jenny Erpenbeck (2015) ★★★★★ Started: 2023-08-30 Finished: 2024-11-28 Book cover for 9780811225946. I’d been working through this one for a while. The story follows Richard, a professor of classic literature living in Berlin, widowed, and recently retired. Richard comes to meet and advocate for a group of men, refugees from northern Africa and the middle-east, that are seeking work in Berlin. While its events are fictional, I think Go, Went, Gone is excellent for examining the practice and consequences of Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics. Through its characters, the novel satirizes and criticizes bureaucratic processes that exclude and sweep vulnerable people out of public view. It’s extremely easy to quietly, even politely, avoid the gaze of people in our communities that need help. That aversion sustains the legal structures that enable our society to treat people as disposable, burdens, or less than human. Encounters that Go, Went, Gone’s characters have with formalistic language (drawn from administrative correspondence or legislative pronouncements) help illustrate this. These moments surface contradictions between liberal society’s nominal concern and respect for individual rights with its policing of boundaries for participation. At times, Go, Went, Gone’s pace can be slow, but it provides much to chew on, and is worth picking up.
May 18, 2025 at 6:41 PM