Automated updates: 2023-03-20
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John Colagioia
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@ -129,7 +129,7 @@ I didn't know that it could happen, but Data has impressed me, here, sneakily ma
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> **DAVIES**: And then the crystals break down, which is why we found all these traces of illium-629.
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While possibly named for the [ilium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilium_%28bone%29) part of the hip bone, "illium" seems like a chemical element, by context. Maybe interestingly, the heaviest isotope per element at least appears roughly linear, based on what we know, giving me an atomic weight of roughly `2.6z -- 7.55z`, where `z` represents the atomic number---the number of protons in each nucleus---for that element. If that holds true into the future, then we might imagine that a hypothetical <sup>629</sup>Il has an atomic number of at least 245, more than doubling the number of entries in our current periodic table. Estimating the *maximum* atomic number (assuming that we have the lightest isotope) would, if I remember correctly, require researching modern quantum chemistry theory to determine the minimum number of neutrons necessary to make a particular nucleus at all stable, and I probably won't go that far for this...
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While possibly named for the [ilium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilium_%28bone%29) part of the hip bone, "illium" seems like a chemical element, by context. Maybe interestingly, the heaviest isotope per element at least appears roughly linear, based on what we know, giving me an atomic weight of roughly 2.6z -- 7.55z, where `z` represents the atomic number---the number of protons in each nucleus---for that element. If that holds true into the future, then we might imagine that a hypothetical <sup>629</sup>Il has an atomic number of at least 245, more than doubling the number of entries in our current periodic table. Estimating the *maximum* atomic number (assuming that we have the lightest isotope) would, if I remember correctly, require researching modern quantum chemistry theory to determine the minimum number of neutrons necessary to make a particular nucleus at all stable, and I probably won't go that far for this...
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> **RIKER**: O'Brien, take a nap. You didn't see any of this. You're not involved.
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@ -7,12 +7,13 @@ tags: [freeculture, politics, scifi, fiction]
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summary: A short story that may sound familiar
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thumbnail: /blog/assets/2481692525_828cb92490_o.png
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offset: -15%
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teaser: Introducing a new superhero, in an entirely fictional story about bank runs caused by terrible (and - I emphasize - entirely fictional) individuals.
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teaser: Introducing a new superhero, in an entirely fictional story about bank runs caused by terrible (and — I emphasize — entirely fictional) individuals.
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proofed: true
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---
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As usual, I'll explain elements of the story at the end.
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Right now, I can say that this story came together shockingly quickly, after days of trying to find a place to start. And it finally pays off a promise that I made years ago.
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@ -219,15 +220,17 @@ While that project collapsed---a story for another time, maybe---I've always tho
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* The following day, big investors---including a name that comes up frequently in discussions of destroying companies for petty reasons---sparked a run on the bank.
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* In the days following, people started worrying about companies shutting their doors, with some unable to lay off employees, because they couldn't pay severance packages.
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Flint Consolidated Services Corporation adapts ideas in **The Air Trust** (1915) by George Allan England, as initially adapted in my own [**Seeking Refuge**]({% post_url 2019-12-14-seeking-refuge %}). In that novel, Isaac Flint attempts to create a monopoly on oxygen, so a modern equivalent of that trust seems appropriate to be invested in industries that cut against what consumers would prefer.
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Again, I most emphatically do *not* want to accuse someone of causing a bank run in order to increase unemployment around Silicon Valley, in the wake of the February jobs report. Silicon Valley Bank had clear issues, due to deregulation of the banking industry, that would have caused its collapse sooner or later. But I also wouldn't at all feel any surprise, if someone found evidence to the effect that someone orchestrated it or a whistleblower came forward.
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Flint Consolidated Services Corporation adapts ideas in [**The Air Trust**](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12826) by George Allan England, as initially adapted in my own [**Seeking Refuge**]({% post_url 2019-12-14-seeking-refuge %}). In that novel, Isaac Flint attempts to create a monopoly on oxygen, so a modern equivalent of that trust seems appropriate to having investments in industries that work against what consumers would prefer.
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The Luminary got an offhand mention in **Seeking Refuge**, where I promised that he "has not appeared yet, but will someday soon." Welcome to soon. I have a lot of notes about his history and predecessors, which I may eventually use for something. Wooster Amalgamated and "Eebee" Wooster also come from my novel, based loosely on the public-domain-in-the-United-States books in the *Wooster & Jeeves* series and other sources described in that book's credits.
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I created Four Freedoms City partly around the Luminary, though I may try to pull together a more complete description some day for people who need a fictional metropolis in their setting, with some level of detail. If you think of it as looking like New York City, then you probably won't feel too far out of place.
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I created Four Freedoms City partly around the Luminary, though I may try to pull together a more thorough description some day for people who need a fictional metropolis in their setting, with some level of detail. If you think of it as looking like New York City, then you probably won't feel too far out of place.
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Down Town Savings Bank comes from Philip Wylie's [Gladiator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator_%28novel%29), which lapsed into the public domain after not renewing its copyright. Crown Bank comes from Tom Warin and Nora McGunnigle's **100 Heroines**, which I can't find available online at the moment and don't even remember where *I* got it, but released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Traders National Bank comes from James Branch Cabell's **The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck**, in the public domain due to a long-expired copyright. [Hotel Attraction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Attraction) originally would have stood in Lower Manhattan on or near the site of the World Trade Center, as proposed by infamous architect Antoni Gaudi. I threw in Parsley & Frame and FMWUB largely as placeholders.
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Down Town Savings Bank comes from Philip Wylie's [Gladiator](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42914), which lapsed into the public domain after not renewing its copyright. Crown Bank comes from Tom Warin and Nora McGunnigle's **100 Heroines**, which I can't find available online at the moment and don't even remember where *I* got it, but released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Traders National Bank comes from James Branch Cabell's [**The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck**](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10041), in the public domain due to a long-expired copyright. Shopway comes from [**Bulletproof Blues**](https://ogc.rpglibrary.org/index.php?title=Bulletproof_Blues) [Hotel Attraction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Attraction) originally would have stood in Lower Manhattan on or near the site of the World Trade Center, as proposed by infamous architect Antoni Gaudi. I threw in Parsley & Frame and FMWUB largely as placeholders.
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For anybody looking to try out their editing or rewriting with this story, I would strongly recommend starting with how much exposition this tries to pack in. I tried referring to things in passing or making the conversations interesting in some respect, but the fact remains that a lot of this research and analysis doesn't have a clear "hook," where we could see our characters engaged with anything. As a result, the story has two sections where the characters explain parts of the story, and I don't care for it.
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For anybody looking to try out their editing or rewriting with this story, I would strongly recommend starting with how much exposition this tries to pack in. I tried referring to things in passing or making the conversations interesting in some respect, but the fact remains that a lot of this research and analysis doesn't have a clear "hook," where we could see our characters engaged with anything. As a result, the story has two sections where the characters explain parts of the story, and I don't care for it. In a more visual medium, we could at least do some of this with maps and charts, but we don't get that in prose.
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The characters also don't really have strong voices, probably accounted for by how quickly I put the story together to get it out (later than I'd like) on a timely Sunday post.
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@ -0,0 +1,73 @@
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---
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layout: post
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title: Developer Diary, International Day of Happiness
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date: 2023-03-20 06:32:05-0400
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categories:
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tags: [programming, project, devjournal]
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summary: Progress on assorted projects
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thumbnail: /blog/assets/Mario-Canete-Farias-in-2007.png
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teaser: This week's updates include
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proofed: true
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---
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Today marks the [International Day of Happiness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Day_of_Happiness), a United Nations project to "make people around the world realize the importance of happiness within their lives." It also includes a campaign to make people happier, through exactly the sorts of changes that you might expect, like reducing poverty and inequality, protecting the environment, and so forth.
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I don't know if talking about code actually makes me happy, or only lets me vent my frustrations, and I'd rather not introspect on that point...
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## Socialite
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{% github jcolag/socialite %}
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Because I have a variety of small social media projects that come and go as I investigate them, I decided to create a repository for this sort of transient work, something between a dump site and an incubator. Because I expect to jump around to different things and keep most scripts relatively superficial for now, I call it **Socialite**.
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So far, you'll find:
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My un-shortening script---[`unshort.rb`](https://github.com/jcolag/socialite/blob/main/unshort.rb)---which finds shortened URLs (based on an accompanying list of shortening sites) in a file and recursively replaces them in-place, until it finds the original. I used this to prevent [my Twitter archive](https://jcolag.github.io/twitter/) from redirecting everything *back* to Twitter.
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A prototype script---[`post.js`](https://github.com/jcolag/socialite/blob/main/post.js), which I'll rename soon---to post a message to [Cohost](https://cohost.org/jcolag/).
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## Entropy Arbitrage
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{% github jcolag/entropy-arbitrage-code %}
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Somehow, I never committed it to the repository, but at least for Friday posts, I've started working on a process to blur out any images that people might consider sensitive, specifically those that I've marked as "sensitive" on social media. I noticed that I hadn't published any of those changes, so started doing so.
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If you review the JavaScript and CSS on the blog, you can see where this will end up. While the images that go up on social media don't always show up on the blog---because they don't have a compatible license, since so many organizations have inexplicably gotten themselves subscriptions to Getty Images, even when they publish under Free Culture or similar licenses---some will. And of those, a subset will have an upsetting quality to them, at least for many readers.
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For example, social media has an extensive trope of images that I call "revile at the ugly authoritarian." These sorts of pictures tend to turn my stomach. Not only do I not need these creeps mugging in my face, and not only do they circulate to provoke an emotional reaction for the sake of "engagement," but they strongly evoke the racist and sexist ways that media has tried to "other" and maintain hatred of women and disadvantaged groups. I can think of other categories of images, but while I consider them a part of the articles that I post, I don't want them centered on my blog.
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As a result, I want the images to act similar to how they do on social media, mostly blurred, until the reader interacts with the image. For now, I only have the code committed to toggle the new (but not committed) `sensitive` CSS class.
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```javascript
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window.addEventListener('load', (e) => {
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Array.from(document.getElementsByClassName('sensitive')).forEach((i) => {
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i.addEventListener('click', handleImageClick);
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});
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});
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function handleImageClick(e) {
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const cs = e.target.classList;
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if (cs.contains('sensitive')) {
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cs.remove('sensitive');
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} else {
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cs.add('sensitive');
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}
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}
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```
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For all the images marked sensitive (with the CSS class), add or remove the class on a click event.
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## Next
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This week, I need to finish committing the sensitive-image code, getting the CSS into place. While there, I also have an update to the [Prism](https://prismjs.com/) code that handles syntax highlighting of the code that I post. I realize that it needed a refresh anyway, and while I had the page open, I added more programming languages to highlight, since my code snippets don't always show up well.
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In addition, I'll probably keep working on **Socialite**.
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Oh, and I *might* start working on a Mastodon front-end. As I follow more people, it takes me more time to "quickly check updates" there. A lot of that time, I spend seeing the *same* messages that (frankly) I didn't care about the first time, or someone amplifying every single message of a thread, which I end up having to read in reverse order.
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In any case, now that I have a general sense of how the Mastodon API works, it seems reasonable to put together a custom client that acts the way that I actually want it to work.
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* * *
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**Credits**: The header image is [Mario Cañete Farías in 2007](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:My_Grandfather_Photo_from_January_17.JPG) by [Diego Grez Cañete](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15304738), made available under the terms of the [Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 Unported](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en) license.
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