[This post began its life as a comment on one of PZ’s posts, but I couldn’t figure out how to insert an image.]
My late mother inherited my maternal grandmother’s engagement/wedding ring; and now it’s mine.
Grandpa was a poor farmer in Higbee, Missouri when they married over a century ago, and the ring is probably not worth a lot of money, but I think it’s pretty and old-fashioned. It should probably stay in the family.
OK, I think the Java Rational class that I mentioned before is ready for prime time. That’s not to say that it’s actually useful for anything; but it was something to do for lulz over the holidays. 😎
[doc, code, the Boost license]
Can anybody think of more features that it should have?
Mike the Mad Biologist reminds us of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
If I were a member of the House or the Senate, I’d introduce a bill to remove the disability and see whether it gets a two-thirds majority in both houses. That probably wouldn’t stop Trump because, even if the bill failed, we’d still need a finding that Trump engaged in insurrection or gave aid or comfort to those who did. It would likely make the news, however; and that would be fun. 😎
I’m estranged from my extended family because they’re mostly Trumpistas, and I have no desire to be the crazy uncle who shows up when there’s food; but I’m a fairly extreme introvert, so that’s actually OK with me.
It’s possible for me to get bored, however; so just for lulz, I decided to translate my rational number into Java.
I haven’t done any Java work since I retired, and so I don’t have javac on either the Windows or Linux partition on my home computer. It’s probably out there somewhere on the VPS that I rent, but I haven’t found it yet. The result is that, as I write this, the code hasn’t even been compiled, let alone tested; and we know how that can go.
If anybody out there might actually find this useful, would you care to be my tester? 😎 You’ll find the current version of the source in this ZIP archive.
Update: 2024-12-26 20:00−6:00: OK, I found javac on my VPS and, after fixing a bunch of stupid mistakes, got a clean compile. For the sake of my sanity, I’ve added the requirement that the one-argument Rational(double) not be passed a subnormal value; and I’ve put the new documentation and the ZIP file containing the new source at the links above. Now for some testing…
Update: 2024-12-28 09:00−6:00: I found some bugs just by desk checking the code some more, and I reorganized the documentation a bit. OK, now for some testing…
Update: 2024-12-30 20:30−6:00: OK, I think it’s done.
One thing that I’ve found striking is that, although there have probably been numerous deaths by gunshot in New York over the last few weeks, exactly one is all over the news. Indeed, it was the lead story on NBC Nightly News tonight, beating out Assad’s overthrow in Syria which came in second. And it’s not just the corporate media: although PBS News Hour had Syria as the lead story, apprehending the likely killer got second place with about ten minutes of air time.
What’s so special about this particular murder? The only thing that I can see is that the victim was one of the oligarchs.
Here’s a late addition to the support of Julia Serano’s post, and probably a boring one as well since others have already said it better than I, and I really have nothing to add.
But I do want to go on record as supporting LGBTQ+ rights which strikes be as just basic human decency.
(I also agree with others that we’re stuck with voting for politicians in the Democratic wing of the Oligarch party, but we should express our displeasure whenever we can at having no better choice.)
I just found out that I have a Substack account. 😎
A while back, I got a free subscription to some e-mails sent by Robert Reich; and after a time, I updated to a paid subscription, not because I wanted to use any new features, but because I wanted to support Reich’s work. The credit card I used at the time needed to be replaced because of some fraud; and this morning, I got an e-mail message saying that the card had been refused and I needed to update my payment details. OK, that makes sense.
I didn’t recall ever signing in to the account before (although I must have to do the paid upgrade); and it took me a while to remember what I had used as a user ID and password. After finally logging in and figuring out how to navigate through all the settings, I changed the card info…I hope. We’ll see whether I did everything correctly.
While I was in there, I added this blog’s URL as my “website”; and I think I figured out how to get a permalink to a particular one of Reich’s posts. I’ll probably try to use that shortly.
I think flex gave a good answer to the question in my previous post.
I’m now leaning toward an idea that I’ve had for quite a while which was reinforced by a recent e-mail message I got from Robert Reich’s Substack. Here are three of what seem to me to be the important bits:
On Tuesday, according to exit polls, Americans voted mainly on the economy — and their votes reflected their class and level of education.
…
While the economy has improved over the last two years according to standard economic measures, most Americans without college degrees — that’s the majority — have not felt it.
…
While Republicans steadily cut taxes on the wealthy, Democrats abandoned the working class.
Yeah, professional Democrats and Republicans are pretty much united in their support of large corporations and billionaires (although the Republicans crank it up to eleven and the Democrats are much better on “social issues”). That’s why I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary when he was still a viable candidate (although I wasn’t a “Bernie bro” who stayed home out of spite).
I’d love to just quote the whole thing, but that goes way beyond “fair use”. I guess the next job for this old fart is to figure out how to link to a particular post on somebody’s Substack.
I still can’t get my mind around the election results; but there’s something that’s nagging at me: when I see shots of folks at Trump rallies, it looks to me like they believe, immediately and uncritically, everything he says. How can they not know that he’s a liar?
flex has a comment on Mano’s blog that lists some things that one of their coworkers has said, including “Trump was never convicted of any crime.” How can anyone not know that he was?
The only thing I can think of is that they get all their information from Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk (or worse). Is there anything we can do to get the truth out to these people? (I’m not doing jack shit by posting this on FtB. I’m “preaching to the choir” as they say; but I don’t know what else to do.)
The Sweedish word, “Spåromr.” (possibly an abbreviation) came up on an e-mail list I subscribe to; and somebody asked for a translation because he couldn’t get a reasonable result from Google. Can anybody translate?
Update: 2024-11-05 07:55−6:
Thanks to dorfl, comment 2. What prompted the question is:
Photo by Gary Kazin. Used by permission.
The wavy lines make me think of water though, not railroad tracks.
Ah, a brief respite from worrying about the election. 😎