I'm a nonviolent guy, but I do want to find who is responsible for the phrases "clean ingredients" / "clean food" so I can hit them with a folding chair.

Cuddling with her teddy bear

I am once again reminding you that jury trials are good. Plea-driven mass adjudication is bad. If you get a jury summons, *don't whine about serving*.

We all know "NSFW" means Not Safe For Women, amirite? Guys? Guys?! Wait, no, come back!

"Listen, you snot-nosed little shit! I was taking sandwich shrapnel in DC while you were crapping in your hands and rubbing it on your face!" It doesn't have the same punch as the original, but 1991 Gary Busey could sell it.

A movie you've seen more than seven times with a gif

<3 the Datasaurus Dozen jumpingrivers.github.io/datasauRus/

Reminder that at the Founding there were ~ 6 felonies (basically all capital crimes) and *even then* it was controversial. We are so so far from that. Pardon power needs serious reform.

Sometimes I find myself thinking "am I the dumbest man alive?", but then I hear a commercial that licensed `You Can Call Me Al` by Paul Simon that uses exactly 0 lyrics. At least I'm not that dumb.

The teaser line this post *really* needs: "we can hope for a 1000 years if Microsoft doesn’t fuck it up"

Dear #rstats, Please find attached the alpha version of my book "An Introduction to R for Policy Analysis": policyanalysislab.com/shared/r-for... Unfortunately, the draft has been released too late to be considered for a Nobel prize, but I look forward to being nominated in 2026. ...

First animated crush without saying your age

Beware "$5 footlong"-ing yourself into a corner, guys!

...dude looks like a LEGO. How high do you need to get to think this design is acceptable?

1/ A thread to introduce myself as I will try to post more consistently on here When people would ask me where I am from, I would often dread it -- I grew up in Qatar, Somalia, Kenya, Mongolia, Rhode Island and Arkansas which honestly sounds like a set up for a joke (no, my parents weren't spies)

Have you ever been so excited about Trick or Treating that you wear a pumpkin bucket on your head for several hours?

Help me understand this. They *were* slaves. That was evil and bad and stuff. If slavers had changed the law to call them "bestest friends ever", that wouldn't have erased the evil of holding another human as property and all the attendant evils.

if you are giving work to lawyers, as a legislator, when you can achieve a similar outcome without doing so, you are almost always fucking up

Yes! This is absolutely a theme, and a good one. My favorite game ever -- Bloodborne -- is packed to the gills with similar themes (but turned up to 11 and covered in blood and cosmic horror). Games can be a fantastic medium to explore ideas.

I need to emphasize that some of the "ideas" AAAs have should result in people hanging from their fingernails. Wow, you got a famous person (ooooh! aaaah!) to do voice work in your game? They're not good at it, and it adds literally nothing, but I'm glad it made it more expensive to make!

3 yo insisted the older kitty wanted to dress up like a bat for "Halloweener". She did not, in fact, want to dress up like a bat. #Caturday

Y'all remember that CU was about whether an anti Hillary movie could be released within a certain number of days of an election, right? Literally today, while No Kings marches are happening, ask yourself if you want Trump's FEC to be able to control what private groups say before elections.

This is such a critical point in the Old/First Testament, whatever you want to call it. If you reduce the entire thing down to one paragraph, "Israel wanted a king for reasons beyond comprehension" is a sentence in that paragraph.

Hey for those of you who don’t have kids, pls know that until recently, schools had stopped teaching phonics for decades. The substitute method sold to districts everywhere was, & I’m not kidding: “Just look at the word & take a guess!” OH WHY CAN’T THE CHILDREN READ? SURELY IT IS THEIR OWN FAULT!

Reminder that the original pardon power was controversial in the 1780s/90s, and it applied to like 6 federal crimes. Wtf are we doing here, guys? www.pbs.org/newshour/pol...

What are the canonical papers on clustering standard errors?

I got to this late, but "somehow use arrow and / or duckdb" is the hammer to many, many nails.

This of course was a CLASSIC of the genre!

The issue remains that we elect geographically. 2024 Trump-Harris Alabama: 64.5-34 Massachusetts: 62.2-36 Congressional delegation (GOP-Dem) Alabama: 5-2 Massachusetts: 0-9 Increasing the number of reps and moving to proportional representation fixes this and probably moderates both delegations.

The female-authored-male-pen-name (or sex-masking-initials) books about the experiences of young men are usually really good, and should continue to be read.

My ghost-obsessed 3 yo keeps calling it "Halloween-er", and now I'm afraid I'm going to say it.

Lot of people should read this exhaustive list of life improvements from the 90s: gwern.net/improvement

What kind of psycho decides to have their 5'11" (read: probably barely 5'10 after going through the Willy Wonka taffy stretching machine) rookie QB throw **over 50 times**? What is wrong with these people!

4 word horror story for an R user: "has a Java dependency"

any econometricians seeing this know of recent-ish papers comparing out-of-sample predictive performance of discrete choice models? particularly interested in anything getting at choice data that can't be rationalized with the variables available

This black squirrel is my new favorite little guy. I could do without the attempts to plant black walnut trees in my yard / flowerbeds, but these are tradeoffs I'm willing to make.

writing is thinking (code edition)

As a huge Rush fan, this is awesome to hear. Rush's music is simply too good to not be out there getting played. Neil Peart can't be replaced, but he should be celebrated. Anika Nilles is brilliantly talented, and I'm sure she'll do great. www.rush.com/rush-fifty-s...

I see your Taylor Swift & raise you 'Transformers: The Movie (1986)'. They kill off ~ all main characters (incl Optimus Prime!) to make room for new toys to sell. And it's awesome. Music? Awesome. Action? Awesome. Plot? Serviceable. Orson Welles? Yes, somehow. A Weird Al song? Yes.

Someone in our area has been doing landscaping (poorly), and I keep finding black strips of landscaping cloth in our yard. Thought that's what this was at first. Nope! Black squirrel! So handsome.

“What is your research question?”

I'm not going to get up on my "media criticism" high horse, but this is annoying. Same outfit (ABC News), 30 min apart. The thing with less votes: "failed" The thing with more votes: "was rejected" It's small, but I don't care for it.

Has anyone gotten duckdb working with Snowflake (w/ key pair authentication)? There's a community extension but the documentation is a dozen kinds of terrible. Trying to plumb R to Snowflake and I'm in obdc driver hell (& even if I get out of hell I'd still be stuck using obdc in 2025)! #rstats

"But proving legal status can be really hard because these officers don't accept Real IDs as proof that someone's here legally, even though that was a big part of the Real ID Act." New @ij.org case. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYSf...

Came upstairs from work to find my 5 yo had packed the older/smaller cat into a bed with a bunch of little stuffies "so my friends can help her sleep". If you wondered what tired + annoyed + cozy looked like, I give you... #Cats

Watching me food prep atop the cabinets like a creep #Caturday

Playing with `{rix}` and I'm up and running. Huzzah. Feels smoother than a few months ago. *However*, my help files don't work! Even something like `?mean` doesn't return anything. Running out of the command line, if that matters (no IDE). Am I missing a setup step? #rstats

At the suggestion of Russ Roberts (he gave a few weeks heads up before the episode of EconTalk dropped), I read Hemingway's `For Whom the Bell Tolls`. I had a copy I never started that I lost in various moves over the years. It's **so good**! www.econtalk.org/hemingway-lo... 1/2