Jan 04 2019 ∞

watching a co-author bomb on presenting joint research is physically painful

Reading off the slides verbatim as if these words are all completely unsurprising, skipping slides and then going back, running out of time before showing a single result. I worked so hard on the slides and on the underlying research and he gets back from two weeks on vacation, makes some small changes that break all the formatting, and then treats the audience to this incoherent and unpersuasive rambling. I don’t know how to deal with the resentment I’m feeling right now.

16 notes

Jan 03 2019 ∞

Atlanta stuff so far on this trip

Downtown office buildings have a confusing system of skywalks just like Minneapolis. One of the skywalks even had a Caribou Coffee!
Anywhere you go, if you are a white man in business attire, people will ask you for directions.
My phone died and then my phone charger died and wandering around an unfamiliar city without a functional phone looking for a drugstore is pretty overwhelming but that’s fixed now.

I wanted to go out and explore more tonight but wow I am wiped out and having second thoughts.

14 notes

Jan 02 2019 ∞

Virginia legislator who twice met Bashar al-Assad will not seek reelection

This state-level Republican in the DC suburbs met with Assad in 2016 and 2018. He plans to spend more time with his grandchildren and also more time hunting poisonous snakes. Everything about this guy seems like a confusing poorly-conceived parody.

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“ Eight out of 10 transactions in the Southern African nation—whether paying for milk at the corner store, paying an electricity bill or buying fuel on the black market—are done using EcoCash, according to data from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. In a country of 13 million people, the platform has more than eight million users.

— Zimbabwe abandoned its own massively unstable currency for the US dollar but the country has basically no US cash to work with - so everyone in the country is using an app that lets them store and transact US dollars digitally. But since these digital dollars can’t feasibly be exchanged for actual US greenbacks, there’s a steep and floating exchange rate between EcoCash US dollars and what everyone else in the world would consider US dollars. Effectively a private company has invented its own currency and convinced everyone in the country to use it, which means that the long-run functioning of the economy depends on EcoCash continuing to operate smoothly.

40 notes

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