👓 Why Most of America Is Terrible at Making Biscuits | The Atlantic

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There’s a scientific reason no one outside the South can nail them.
Anyone who follows Jeremy CherfasEat This Podcast (or specifically his excellent microcast series Our Daily Bread) would have seen this one coming from a mile away. One can get some reasonably flaky and tender biscuits (and not hockey pucks as she describes) with all purpose flour using harder wheat, but having the alternate version certainly makes a nice difference. Of course this would use a more laminated/pastry sort of method than the sort of cloudlike fluffiness that one typically gets in the South with a more generic mixing method that is usually employed.

👓 Stakhanovite movement | Wikipedia

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The term Stakhanovite originated in the Soviet Union and referred to workers who modelled themselves after Alexey Stakhanov. These workers took pride in their ability to produce more than was required, by working harder and more efficiently, thus strengthening the Communist state. The Stakhanovite Movement was encouraged due to the idea of socialist emulation. It began in the coal industry but later spread to many other industries in the Soviet Union. The movement eventually encountered resistance as the increased productivity led to increased demands on workers.

👓 Alexey Stakhanov | Wikipedia

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Alexsei Grigoryevich Stakhanov (Russian: Алексе́й Григо́рьевич Стаха́нов; 3 January 1906 – 5 November 1977) was a Russian Soviet miner, Hero of Socialist Labor (1970), and a member of the CPSU (1936). He became a celebrity in 1935 as part of what became known as the Stakhanovite movement – a campaign intended to increase worker productivity and to demonstrate the superiority of the socialist economic system.

👓 Unhappy Would-Be Shopper Goes on Rampage in Local Best Buy | Pasadena Now

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Pasadena police officers arrested a 32-year-old Pasadena man who reportedly went on a rampage at a local Best Buy store Tuesday afternoon, yelling and tossing items, after a store employee refused to run his credit for purchase of several smartphones. The incident happened at about 3:44 p.m. in the store located in the 3300 block of East Foothill Blvd., police Lt. Pete Hettema said.

👓 Beyond fiction | Scott Aaronson

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I now know firsthand what it’s like to be arrested by armed police officers, handcuffed, and sharply interrogated, while one’s wife and children look on helplessly. This is not a prank post. It happened in Philadelphia International Airport. As someone who was born in Philadelphia, and who’s since visited ~40 countries on 6 continents and flies every week or two, I’ve long considered PHL possibly the most depressing airport on the planet (and the competition is fierce).

👓 Thank you, world! | Scott Aaronson

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1. This post has no technical content. As the tag indicates, it’s entirely “Nerd Self-Help”—thoughts I’ve recently found extremely helpful to me, and that I’m hopeful some others might be able to apply to their own life situations. If that doesn’t interest you, feel free to skip.

2. I’m using the numbered list format simply because I have a large number of interrelated things to say, and getting each one down precisely seems more important than fashioning them into some coherent narrative.

From section 17:

But you, readers, armed with wisdom I lacked, can reach a happy place in your lives a hell of a lot faster than I did.

An important reason for people to blog and share their stories.

👓 Lecture notes! Intro to Quantum Information Science | Scott Aaronson

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In Spring 2017, I taught a new undergraduate course at UT Austin, entitled Introduction to Quantum Information Science. There were about 60 students, mostly CS but also with strong representation from physics, math, and electrical engineering. One student, Ewin Tang, made a previous appearance on this blog. But today belongs to another student, Paulo Alves, who took it upon himself to make detailed notes of all of my lectures. Using Paulo’s notes as a starting point, and after a full year of procrastination and delays, I’m now happy to release the full lecture notes for the course. Among other things, I’ll be using these notes when I teach the course a second time, starting … holy smokes … this Wednesday. I don’t pretend that these notes break any new ground. Even if we restrict to undergrad courses only (which rules out, e.g., Preskill’s legendary notes), there are already other great quantum information lecture notes available on the web, such as these from Berkeley (based on a course taught by, among others, my former adviser Umesh Vazirani and committee member Birgitta Whaley), and these from John Watrous in Waterloo. There are also dozens of books—including Mermin’s, which we used in this course. The only difference with these notes is that … well, they cover exactly the topics I’d cover, in exactly the order I’d cover them, and with exactly the stupid jokes and stories I’d tell in a given situation. So if you like my lecturing style, you’ll probably like these, and if not, not (but given that you’re here, there’s hopefully some bias toward the former).

👓 Ten updates | Scott Aaronson

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If you like quantum, complexity, etc., then please read to the end! I’ve gotten a bunch of emails lately of the form “why haven’t you ever blogged about such-and-such?,” when it turned out that I damn well did blog about it; it was just somewhere down in a multi-item post.

👓 Getting some traction on micro.blog | Andy Sylvester

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I made a post on Sunday, and it triggered a nice stream of comments from people on micro.blog, all of which appeared as comments on my post. Cool! It looks like the webmention support on both ends is working well. As another step in WordPress/micro.blog integration, I am adding my comments RSS feed ...

👓 Gutenberg | Colin Devroe

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I’m writing this post using a new post editor that is coming in the next version of WordPress code-named, and likely named for all-time, Gutenberg.

In fact, I’ve written several of my most recent posts, including this photo post of South Iceland, using this new editor.

Gutenberg is an editor that allows a WordPress author to use an interface for writing that is much more akin to using Google Docs or Microsoft Word. You type, drag images, add headlines and quotes, and all other various things using a much more visual way of editing than previous versions of WordPress had with what is now being called the “Classic Editor”.

👓 Indie WYSIWYG: How I Fixed My Instagram Problem | Alex Kearney

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I talk about what-you-see-is-what-you-get posting system for my #indieweb site and how it improved my post quality.

👓 nPOV | nLab

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Wikipedia enforces its entries to adopt an NPOV – a neutral point of view . This is appropriate for an encyclopedia.

However, the nLab is not Wikipedia, nor is it an encyclopedia, although it does aspire to provide a useful reference in many areas (among its other purposes). In particular, the nLab has a particular point of view, which we may call the nPOV or the n- categorical point of view .

To some extent the nPOV is just the observation that category theory and higher category theory, hence in particular of homotopy theory, have a plethora of useful applications.

👓 nPOV | nLab

Read POV (ncatlab.org)

Wikipedia enforces its entries to adopt an NPOV – a neutral point of view . This is appropriate for an encyclopedia.

However, the nLab is not Wikipedia, nor is it an encyclopedia, although it does aspire to provide a useful reference in many areas (among its other purposes). In particular, the nnLab has a particular point of view, which we may call the nnPOV or the n- categorical point of view .