Sunday, September 16, 2018
Regex 101 is a great online regex tester.
Speaking of regular expressions, for the past year, I’ve used an automated process for building Anki flash cards. One of the steps in the process is to download Russian word pronunciations from Wiktionary. When Wiktionary began publishing transcoded mp3 files rather than just ogg files, they broke the URL scheme that I relied on to download content. The new regex for this scheme is: (?:src=.*:)?src=\"(\/\/.*\.mp3)
Edit 2018-09-17: Nope, still not right. This is the new working version:
data-.+\s?/?><source\s+src=\"(\/\/.*\.mp3)
Gina Loudon is a liar and an idiot. She claims in her recent book proclaiming the sanity of Donald Trump that she has a Ph.D. in psychology. In fact, she does not. Her degree is from an online “school.”
Saturday, September 15, 2018
Interestingly, Fox News rejects requests from the Tor Browser. The New York Times loads perfectly normally via Tor. I don’t often visit Fox News but an article title caught my attention.
Thursday, September 13, 2018
Politico has a piece today about Trump’s outrageous claims in the face of weather disasters. In almost every context, he reveals himself to be an abject fool; but lurking beneath that idiocy is another layer of loathsomeness - the complete lacking in understanding of science. I want a reporter to ask him any of the following questions about hurricanes:
“Mr. Trump, can you describe for us your understanding of how hurricanes form?
How fascism works
A recent piece in The Atlantic by Peter Beinart filled in a cognitive gap in understanding how a large minority of U.S. citizens continue to support an abjectly incompetent, almost certainly criminal, willfully ignorant, and generally hateful man as president. The article Why Trump supporters believe he is not corrupt makes the argument that when Trump defenders concern themselves with the idea of corruption they are not thinking of political corruption so much as corruption of the purity.
Managing classical music collections in iTunes in 2018
My approach to wrestling with iTunes to make it (barely) usable for classical music collections.
Using lynx to bypass ad block detection
Organizing works as playlists and folders It turns out that command line text web browers like lynx can bypass AdBlock detection.
On macOS, I installed lynx using Homebrew. Then from the Terminal, it’s just lynx your-url. It’s actually quite pleasant to read text without all of the images and fluff.
Quarantining extremist ideas
This is an interesting essay in The Guardian on the idea of quarantining extremist ideas.
A non-trivial proportion of the population regards the media as having a responsibility to represent all idea with equal validity. So the appearance of extremist ideas in the press, even if they are treated negatively, results in more legitimacy than they are due. The authors in this essay make a case for quarantining these extreme ideas, refusing to cover them.
Remind me, how do you say "WTF?" in German?
Donald, how can you be such an ignorant ass? When a petulant, irrational, and incurious baby-man meets with world leaders, what can possibly go wrong?
Turns out, a lot.
A letter to Jerry Brown
Dear Governor Brown,
By now you are aware of Nicholas Kirstof’s piece^[Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/17/opinion/sunday/kevin-cooper-california-death-row.html] in The New York Times in which he presents abundant evidence that investigators and prosecutors framed Kevin Cooper for the murder of four people in Chino.
Advanced DNA testing could produce potentially exculpatory evidence. Or not. But the truth must be pursued. You have rejected calls to exercise the authority of your office to order such testing.