Profile avatar
paul314.bsky.social
Retired actuary/data scientist. Grew up in Texas, happily living in Massachusetts. Board games, Ulysses, Bayern Munich, Commanders, GY!BE. If you voted for that guy, just shove off.
1,003 posts 269 followers 467 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
Posts 18 Comments 32

Oh, noooo, I had no idea he'd passed away. Well. Enjoy this video, which captures a lot of what made him a delight. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hYq...

submitted 56 minutes ago • 0 comments

I'm browsing the Library of Congress index for their records of Pinkerton's Detective Agency, and among the few people-names they choose to use as indices, we find Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, aka Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. They must get a lot of inquiries.

submitted 13 hours ago • 0 comments

"Think about this for a minute: 60% of the attendees of the festival—and it is reported that there are 80,000 to 100,000 people who buy tickets for each weekend—are not buying a ticket outright. Rather, they are paying a $41 fee to use the Coachella payment plan. For a $549 ticket, that’s 7.47%."

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

I'm browsing some 1958 Boston Globes and came across this ad. I love the 50s.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Kristi Noem's Easter spread.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

And may I add: if your alt-text just says what the thing is (even with further details), but doesn't actually describe what the image shows, then it may not be helpful.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Oh, that's Deep Space Homer.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

If there's one random thing I'm learning today, it's that some people don't know the difference between a suffragist and a suffragette. Suffragists worked toward suffrage via peaceful and constitutional means; suffragettes blew shit (and people) up.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

My son watched "Tree of Life" this week, and said "did you know they sprayed DDT in neighborhoods in the 50s and 60s!?" And I was like, my man, not only do I know that, but I remember the smell.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

To be honest I’ve always felt that “separating the art from the artist” is intellectually cowardly and erodes what the practice of making and experiencing art is

submitted 4 days ago • 34 comments

I don't get many follows, but purveyors of AI slop looking for mutuality get blocked immediately.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

It's telling that this guy's link to "President Biden refused to enforce it" is literally a link to Biden trying to enforce the excess purchases Trump demanded of China in the deal, the opposite of what he says.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

My alt text rating score is 97.44% ☺️ 379 posts analyzed, 39 contain images, 38 have alt text... Get your Bluesky alt text rating here: cred.blue/alt-text It's not hard to do....

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

In response to my daughter spending her money on an overpriced bunny chocolate, I asked GPT about the holidays with the most irrelevant symbols. Earth Day is “chef’s kiss“

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Our cairn terrier is 14 years old and just discovered she can stick her muzzle into her water bowl and blow bubbles. I guess we all keep learning.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we thought we'd answer a question that's often asked, "If they raised the Mary Rose, why not raise the Titanic?" Allow our scaled diagram to explain...

submitted 9 days ago • 219 comments

This reminds me of of when I was mapping German elections or polling...place names could be wildly varied (treatment of umlauts, whether "am [river name]" or regional specifier was included, etc.), and I spent more time fixing name matches than I did writing actual code.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

"The left went too far" in contemporary U.S. politics is almost always a lie and a very convenient way to rationalize moral failure. For example, "MeToo went too far" replaces "I do not care about sexual violence or its victims and I don't want to have to even feel bad about that"

submitted 10 days ago • 99 comments