Sanders Can Win.

Sanders Can Win. Here's Why. 4/18/2016:
 The truth is that less than a year ago Bernie Sanders had absolutely nothing, and Hillary Clinton was better positioned to win the Democratic nomination for President than any Democrat in the year before an election since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Bernie Sanders entered the 2016 primary election a superlatively old Independent socialist Jew with a bevy of Old-World tics (like talking with his hands), no fashion sense whatsoever, unruly hair, no super-PACs, and no national name recognition.     The Democratic Party felt no loyalty to him, at either the state or national level.   He was at three percent in the polls.     He was from one of the smallest states in the nation, one of the ones that few outside New England ever talk about or think about. He had no money. He had no friends in the media.    He had surrogates, indeed a diverse cast of them, but somehow they never got invited onto major-media political panels.  He had no way to force Clinton to do more than four or five debates, all of which would be held, per the decree of the Democratic National Convention, at the most inconvenient hours.   He had a penchant for blunt talk that seemed certain to sink him in a political climate where every mental lapse quickly becomes a meme.   He had a “fringe-candidate” sign on his back that it seemed he would never get off.

It’s now April 18th, and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been statistically tied in every single national poll taken in the last month.

That we pretend that any measure in which Sanders comes up short — say, in his support among African-Americans — is somehow a fatal flaw in the man and not a sign that absolute nobodies don’t become household heroes in under six months is an insult to America’s collective intelligence.

(And the sign that it’s well past time for somebody to just say what most of America already knows to be true is that today Philip Bump of The Washington Post wrote a scathing editorial complaining that Bernie Sanders says his average contribution is $27 when it’s in fact $27.89.)

It’s a miracle Sanders is performing even as well as he is,  given the structural disadvantages he suffers relative to his opponent because of how we run elections in America.

In almost every state, Sanders performs better with voters the more they’re exposed to him, and Hillary worse the more voters are exposed to her.

So when both Clinton and Sanders fail to clinch the nomination via pledged delegates alone, and both head to Philadelphia with an eye toward wooing the (still completely unpledged) super-delegates, Clinton will win if her advantages are treated as assets rather than signs that she should have been beating this old socialist Jew from Vermont with the rumpled suits and unruly hair by twenty or more points all along. And Sanders will win if the Democrats pick the better candidate — which, given the harrowing dangers of a Trump presidency, I damn well hope they do.

Data flows through streams ...

Idle Words > Talks > Haunted By Data


This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 1, 2015, at the Strata+Hadoop [Big Data Conference] World conference in New York City. The video version is here ytube (20 mins).

In preparing this talk I decided to check out the data landscape, since I hadn't seen it for a while.

The terminology around Big Data is surprisingly bucolic. Data flows through streams into the data lake, or else it's captured in logs. A data silo stands down by the old data warehouse, where granddaddy used to sling bits.

And high above it all floats the Cloud. Then this stuff presumably flows into the digital ocean.

 I would like to challenge this picture, and ask you to imagine data not as a pristine resource, but as a waste product, a bunch of radioactive, toxic sludge that we don’t know how to handle.

pinboard.in strings and pulleys cross-referencing material across five bookshelves and a greenhouse a cloud of white bookmarks how we laughed!

Pinboard Turns Six

Today is Pinboard's sixth birthday as an online service, but of course the roots of the site go much deeper. 

My grandfather started Pinboard all the way back in 1931, when he was a young agronomy   {(Ancient Greek ἀγρός agrós 'field' + νόμος nómos 'law') is the science and technology of producing and using plants for food, fuel, fiber, and land reclamation.} student in need of some way to help keep track of cuttings. 

What began as a simple system of shelves and apple saplings had soon expanded to encompass the books in his comfortable study.

 In 1968, like so much of Polish culture, Pinboard went underground, in this case literally, as a warren of tubes and cables that could be quickly disconnected if a local political officer came snooping by. The rat's nest of hidden cabling below the floor would inspire me years later when it came time to wire up my own servers.

By 1980 Pinboard was an elaborate system of strings and pulleys cross-referencing material across five bookshelves and a greenhouse.  / :) //  One of my earliest memories is tugging on one of the threads and watching a cloud of white bookmarks fly out from between the onion-skin pages of a thick tome. I got a sound drubbing for it.t

With changing times came changing technology. Visits home turned into long evenings keying cards into a ZX Spectrum, lulled into inattention by the soft hiss of the cassette tapes that the data would save onto (or the dreaded crinkling sound that meant the tape had gotten wrapped up in a spool).

When it came time for me to take over Pinboard, I vowed to continue my grandfather's committment to Eastern European craftsmanship and traditional Polish customer service. But then I got bored and thought, "eh, just put it online and see what happens." That was six years ago today.    {July 2009}

 I changed the business model of the site in January [2015]  from a one-time signup fee to a recurring fee, but has this affected income? It doesn't feel like it. Possibly it has. I really need to look into it. I am a terrible businessman. Thanks for another year entrusting me with your precious data, and giving me the genuinely pleasant feeling that comes from running a useful project. Please don't forget to make backups!

—maciej     July 09, 2015

// am happy he is still maintaining this….  

/my links stop at 2014, bcs stopped auto mirroring dlcs, that's ok.  

https://pinboard.in/u:mcassimatis/   

mcassimatis

14470

Sunsetting Delicious

Since the birth of the site, Pinboard has always offered a Delicious sync feature. You could enter your Delicious username on the settings page, and the site would periodically poll your public Delicious feed and add any new bookmarks it found.

Because Delicious appears to be in a terminal coma, and because working around bugs in their RSS feed has historically consumed a lot of development time, I am going to turn Delicious sync off effective October 1, 2014. If you want to keep hooking the services together, you will still be able to do it through an outside service like IFTTT or Zapier.

Of course you will still be able to import all your Delicious bookmarks, as well as export Pinboard bookmarks in a format that Delicious can (sometimes) read. The only thing going away is the automatic sync.

—maciej on August 21, 2014

// wld hv used this, m prefered to the new delicious, but as of 2009 was I fading......   
was glad for the auto sync, so I cld defer initiating chang...

/// was maciej a del.ici.o.us user, wanted to make sth simple interface emphasis on content like had bn?  

wh I seem remember.  may have saved early posts about, as dlcs>pin. 

https://thuktun.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/an-interview-with-maciej-ceglowski-of-pinboard/
 built Pinboard because I had long wanted a bookmarking site that would serve as a personal archive (meaning store bookmark content in case the original site went offline). I was also motivated by the Delicious redesign around the summer of 2009, which I found very unpleasant.

incentive salience.

/ valience  /  valence

 
am ok being alone  if no pressure   /if I was dying/    ~  mostly?  only w pressure > fear. ?     /so, do wh I wld do if dying?  = wh?  say anyth
 if can sleep long.  .    then coffee.  and then sth: tv show gives me emotional lives of others, sth interesting.

am not ok doing things alone.  anyth goal oriented.  even going to grocery  (but can.  minimally.)   sunlight.   

am int in articulating: What is going on here?   re anyth, if w someone ` in conversation.  dynamic = a there.
if alone, always re myself:  what is going on, wh can make okay?
this kind of note-taking  ***

rg- That is your ~~~  task?   challenge?    //it is wh I will regret not   hvg ~undrstd~ ***  tried to tell   = 'writing'    .    is anyone like me?                                              Tell me you are like me.                     my horizon.
                                                             
                                norm is to come to meta physics after physics.   "to me it just sounded like Being Being Being" 
                                to come to grief later.  ~ existentialism- or nihilism.  not as a stance an ism but as? an always-already-
                                    poverty not to live in the physical world.  

            nothing can 'compete w intensity' of inner world (blltn brd.  fr Autobiogr of a schizophr, intr by her psyanalyst?)   inner objects
            my unwillingness to come out of sleep.  sense of outside world as not real - ?  ~ irrelevant.  cannot care about. 
                                        therefore "won't."  do not want.  - why is that terror  dread     /because I cannot stay? 
            *** this, too.  I do not care.  only when awake.  only after - forgetting, distance fr full inner immersion. + stimulating dopamine.
                    there is no option but that?  have to forget? 
                    been  trying to?  face this since 18.  Tender is the Night.  What was it I almost understood? the painter at the idyllic mental hospital. 
                        and Dick tells her, what  more or less   it was nothing.   fringes of cnsness   can't go there.      peasant blood, thick ankles. 
                                wh means what.  a so-full inescapable necessity even of living in the world.  /does anyone whose experience is that take
                                any int in the 'fringes of cnsness'?  wldn't be irrelevant to them. 
                I love him.  I know him.  iona moon.  it's not the same.  it feels the same. 
                this is what I know.  this inner.     
                        no longer feels like a qstn ? not as compellingly    feeling is "a trick"     it was nothing    /but: this. is nothing. - is wh d n care abt.

-if I cared, it wld be about the task of describing, asking.    
/if I forget enough to not only care about ~staying - refusing this.   - rejection of this is wh I care abt?    then wh was the feeling of a qstn?  trying  to not reject?  to accept?    ..........that may be right............
                           
                                                   
                                                     *  does it earn me anyth to show hv been asking this ever since.                                                in hs ~ salinger, irving.  sadness, passing open windows.  not so dffrnt other adolescents.
                                                but the full on bell jar feeling.  that was not other ppl's experience. 
                                                after terror, my int:  didion ctr not hold.        /also fr beginning: not alone. 
                                                prime mover.  timaeus  euclid how to start.
                                                ananke.   ..chaucer, bible: why? why tell a story, believe - act like happened? 
                                                               premise: to me it didn't happen.  there was no necessity.  there was no start. 
                                                leibniz: it d n mean anyth to be anyth unless you are that.   principle non ctrdctn. 
you need a relationship psychotherapy  not philosophy. 
who can help me if no idea wh I am talking abt?  - arrogant to think that.  no.  they mostly do not.  they. 
        they - incl, eg DFW.  so smart. despairing.  not the same.  I am so disappointed.  "this is water."  says important try is to remember that. 
                    like, not fall in the They.   (why.  why try to do that.  why be a philosopher. / or if hear it as: live in the physical world.  better. 
                        but that's not wh meant?   
I do need a philopher psychotherapist.  or best friend.              or again, does it earn me anyth that I have been saying th is wh I need.  ever since. 
'like breath to me'                                          obvsly Heidegger.  sth to actually say.  about wh is going on.  phenomenology. 
             and most helpful to me: be the clearing.  /being-me is the water.
                                                                         what is this air mood fills the room   
                                                                        every undst has its mood every mood its undst

also obvsly Kierkegaard.  he is the - 'if he had just worked things out w regina.'  the:  maybe not really about needing to understand. 
about love.  about an other.  Levinas.  but that is not _not_ about understanding.  coming to know falling in love feels the same   anne carson. 
still is about  trying to tell.   thought-tell prufrock dancer.
                    I was not even thinking of tse.  ted hughes on.  true self takes over. why is this upsetting, too much. 





want/liking  incentive valience.                  appetitive.    attracts  energizes      prime mover.  * 
rewards                vs   punishments                          
encouragement                           discouragement
hope- or okay for moment         despair

being w openly troubled others
being w open others                     

    vs   feeling of normality I cannot ... recognize   -care about-
    I am not int in most ppl ?  in most settings   //  or, in the settings I see:    that my parents see:   volunteer, jobs church preschool.  botanical gardens.  retail.      


conversation.  actual.  inquiry.  needn't be about emotional life (can be).  can be about math.
thinking tgthr.                                 character - fate - logic - ananke.  coming to know, falling in love.
                    /my qstn to carson, and to a phillips too, do you really learn and try to tell sth each bk?
                        is each one worth?   I guess it is, as way to keep thinking.
children thinking.
thus, toddlers!











conversation.  actual.  inquiry.  needn't be about emotional life (can be).  can be about math.
thinking tgthr.                                 character - fate - logic - ananke.  coming to know, falling in love.        
children thinking.   but they like to be doing. 
thus, toddlers!   still, need someone to share it with.    why  because they are not thinking -with- me?    I want the with. 


getting away with sth.  why  bcs like being with - myself   /always feels better. Bobbie re trevor smuggling cat in. 
                holden? secret. does he say that at end catcher rye well I think of it  he pretends like pudding or sth
                it is like being w ones self isn't it
con. 
gaming.  stealing.  why. = opportunity   smhw fits w my opp cost model.  way make decisions.  can get this, so will. 

What is there new in what we say to the isolated or despairing individual?

The Future of Networking by Theodore Zeldin

The growth of interest in networks is responsible for one of the principal changes in work today. Our research has confirmed its importance. But we think the idea of networking needs to be greatly expanded. Successful networking so far have been the privilege of a minority. But what about all those who have boring jobs, authoritarian bosses, sexist and racist colleagues, and who feel powerless in organisations paralysed by bureaucracy? What do we offer those excluded from the achievements and the networks which we have celebrated? What is there new in what we say to the isolated or despairing individual in search of courage? Or to all those who feel that they are bores?
It is not enough to repeat the old refrain: Model yourself on those who have succeeded. Failure is more common than success, and imitation often ends in parody. Traditionally, we have tried to blot these painful facts from our memories. Our method has been either utopianism (but utopianism is now discredited, because it has always ended in disappointment) or cynicism, which protects against disappointment and can pretend to be humour (but it means we can have no purpose in life) /yes/.
So I wish to describe a different approach, which rejects complacency and which tries to cope with the element of failure inevitable in any enterprise. There is a way to avoid being disheartened by the superficiality of many forms of success. Let us take a specific problem, networking, to see what a new attitude can do.

//okay.  tell me.

www.oxfordmuse.com/?q=the-future-of-networking