I wrote up a piece on how standards are made, because of some folks being very negative about the grant on other social networks: writings.thisismissem.social/how-standard...

Would love to see a documentary on this! “Our people need to be heard in their voice,” said Aucha Kameroff, the group’s leader. “One of the voices that we have as people in rural Alaska, or any place, is by voting" www.kotz.org/kotz-local-n...

Just Steve took a lovely 14-hour break last night and into this morning, and he's 5 hours into tonight's rest, as well. Last night was on the trail, though, and tonight he's at Finger Lake. He's taking his time and then some, which seems right. Jeff King would be great company.

Iditarod: Leaving Rohn many teams wont put booties on for about a mile or so as you head out and its glare ice with spots of overflow, and very windy. Dogs need the grip, wet booties don't last long. Head toward the blinking light in the distance, at the trees, once there put booties on. #mushersky

Started to look at Iditarod run/rest schedules, felt exhausted, and tomorrow is another day. Can't tell much from the first 36 hours, anyway. Having the attention span of a ferret I checked prediction markets for Iditarod bets and there weren't any. An as-yet untapped opportunity to lose money

In Iditarod, Sam Martin left Rainy Pass, ran a couple of miles, and turned around to return to the checkpoint about three hours ago. Still there.

1/ In Iditarod, looks like Jessie is going to run through to Rohn, which is a change from his recent races. He's been running for about 7 hours. From where he is it's less than an hour to the bottom of the gorge, and another half-hour or so to the checkpoint.

1/ So, looking at what Jessie H is up to in Iditarod, the past few times they've run from Willow he's rested before heading down the gorge, run through Rohn and camped between Rohn and Nikolai, and camped again after Nikolai and the 24'ed in Ophir.

Good lord, that Iditarod camera guy on the snowmachine talks a lot.

1/ Yesterday @jeems.bsky.social asked if there were multiple people who'd made the same choices in Fantasy Iditarod. This morning I threw together some code and dropped the results into a second sheet in the FM choices spreadsheet. The biggest surprise was that the

The Iditarod website appears to be down - we're getting a 504, suggesting that the CDN is unable to fetch content from the origin. In the past Iditarod has blamed outages on DDOS attacks; curious to see if they say anything about this one.

No real surprises at 5am this Iditarod morning, other than 1) Brenda ran straight to Skwentna, and 2) Just Steve appears to be where the map says he is, since he hasn't checked into Skwentna yet. Wonder if he's waiting for daylight.

1/ In Iditarod, it looks like we've got four teams who ran straight through to Skwentna: Ryan, Kevin, Jason, and Brenda. We'll see how that works out. One of the best dog people I know told me that if a long run is going to cause problems, it

Real World Crypto (as in cryptography, not cryptocurrency) is happening at the same time as Iditarod. Great conference. I'm retired (and glad of it) but still crypto-interested. Fortunately Iditarod moves a lot more slowly than the conference.

1/ Okay, in Iditarod it looks like a bunch of teams are setting up to make it to Finger Lake in two runs. From there, it's common for teams up front to make the it to Nikolai in three more runs, camping between Puntilla and Rohn and then Rohn and Nikolai

Excellent op-ed!

Okay, here's what I think is going on with Wade - I think his tracker sent a bad update. The reason I think that is because his speed is unreasonable. He's not off the trail.

Right now Rohn is at right about the first spot where a lot of folks like to camp. Ryan's just about to another popular spot but I'm guessing he's going to run to Skwentna and take a break there.

In Iditarod, so far Jessie Royer has the fastest time into Yentna (she tends to be very fast early in the race). FWIW I think she still holds the record for 101 -> Central in the Quest, which is the leg running over Eagle Summit.

In the Iditarod, most experienced teams usually camp somewhere between Yentna and Skwentna. It's 70 miles from Willow to Skwentna, which is a lot to ask for a first run, and since checkpoints can be noisy and chaotic people like to stop somewhere where their dogs can actually get some rest.

Outstanding news for Alaskans, unless you drive a car, heat your home with oil, buy stuff that's trucked up or flown in from down south, or ...

Just learned that Country Joe McDonald died yesterday. I loved him when I was a teen. *Can't believe his work is relevant again ... )

Also in Iditarod, it looks like it's taking about 4.5 hours for the first team to arrive in Yentna, which is a little slow but not terribly so. That's not really a surprise given the snow situation.

If I were a betting person I'd bet that Ryan is going to run through Yentna, but I've got new clue whether or not he's going to run to Skwentna. If he does that's a hint that he's likely running his usual schedule.

RWC livestream has started at www.youtube.com/live/QQhyxFj...

1/ Between races I forget how truly uninformative the Iditarod tracker is. Looking at the reply, I'm reminded that they show someone as "resting" whenever their speed drops below a certain value. Unfortunately sometimes that's the result of GPS artifacts and measurement error. That is to say

Okay, problem sorted. Spreadsheet showing the number of times each musher was picked in Fantasy Iditarod, and the same data sorted by price group. A few surprises but mostly as expected

i came out publicly on intl. Women's Day 5 years ago. a few months later i got my hrt prescription at Planned Parenthood in Soldotna, Alaska. i knew the world hates trans people, but being true to myself and feeling love from people who really see me has been totally worth it.

A thing I usually do just for the halibut is to tot up Fantasy Mushing picks to try to see if there's consensus about Iditarod results, but it's gotten so big that doing a copy and paste to snag the data no longer works, so I need to rewrite the code to scrape the web page

FB added a button to reactivate pages they took down, so I've reactivated Mushing Tech. There's some old content there that may help answer questions about trackers, race data, etc. (That's my hacker puppy, Jack, in the photo - we lost him a few years ago and still miss him every day)

It's "Nee-na-na." A friend of ours had a litter whose names were chosen from British derogatories, and no matter who was actually up front on his team he'd tell the announcers that he had Arseface and Cockwomble in lead, because he thought it was fun to have them put it over the loudspeakers

Waiting for victims to report Internet scams is a losing game. Paudel and Stringhini propose LOKI, a data-driven framework that proactively hunts for fraud. By mining toxic search queries, it automatically surfaces tens of thousands of undiscovered scam sites. www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/l...

1/ Iditarod starts in a few hours, so I thought this might be a good time to talk about that first run, up to Yentna. I took a look at how, over the past 10 years, runtimes to Yentna related to finishing position. The TL;DR of it is that the top-finishing teams are faster but NOT fastest.

It is true that Proton is located in Switzerland and responded to a legal request from the Swiss authorities. But it is also true that most people do not know what an MLAT is and there is a widespread misunderstanding that using Proton will protect your account from US govt requests.

That video of Dan Sullivan hanging out with ITC executives rather than mushers or fans is maybe the least surprising thing ever.

i, for one, am ready to let ai handle all of my important medical decisions

1/ So, there seems to be an abundance of former rookies-of-the-year in Iditarod this year, at six (seven if you count Thomas). That means it's 1/3 of the field. For two of them, Josi and Hanna, this is their second Iditarod ever, which means they haven't run it since winning ROY.

Okay 12-year-old saw me type “lol” just now and is positively disgusted. “What are you, a MILLENNIAL?!!” Honey, we wish were young enough to be millennials. “What’s older than a millennial?!!” You’re welcome.

OpenAI head of robotics just resigned over company deal with the Pentagon saying… “Surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got”

The Iditarod preview showed a few pieces of video of Røkke on a sled, and he was tense, hunched forward, and leaning on the driving bow. I hope that will improve within a day or so, but if it doesn't he's going to get very beaten up driving his sled

UR CORPORATOCRACY WILL AUTOMATICALLY CHANGE UR TIME

Gotta admit that I'm kind of smitten with Deeter's big lunk of a dog, Arthur. He looks awesome.

I have many issues with Senator Dan Sullivan but if you are running for US Senate then you must - you absolutely must - have an opinion when the US goes to war. Taking "No comment" on this topic is appalling.

They're going to write books about all the big brain moves of this gang of imbeciles and among them will be "Spending a year trying to kill renewable energy and then launching a war that sends oil prices soaring"

Bandcamp Friday is the happiest Friday of the month.

"Today brought one of those moments that reminds you why dog sledding is pure magic." www.facebook.com/reel/1987512...

GLORIOUS 🐣 🪶

I won’t defend Markwayne, but I’ll defend his goddamn name. It’s a fuckin name. People get assigned and/or choose names that other people think are weird enough to make fun of all the time due to no shortage of race and class and gender asininity His name is fine; his politics suck

This is why you need photojournalists