Machine translation research for big tech and big academia and director of the @aclanthology. Tweets here are mostly personal.
Joined May 2010
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702 Photos and videos
If you are anywhere near Seattle, I cannot speak highly enough of Christopher Marley's "Exquisite Creatures" exhibit. It's a unique blend of natural history and art, wondrous, just extraordinary. I can't recall being this delighted, especially a day later, by a museum.
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The photos don't approach the experience of a visit. If my body would cooperate I could have spent three hours here. maps.app.goo.gl/GPRWJuzSv9hT…
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Coming up from this rabbit hole I dove into a few nights ago when I couldn't sleep:
- The main worry is trichinosis. The cycle is eggs embedded in your muscles, ingested undercooked which hatch in the stomach, mate, and burrow into muscles where they lay eggs and die
- There have only been medicines for this since the 1950s. You need to catch it early before they embed and calcify in your muscles where you just have to wait maybe months for your body to do the work of expunging them. The prescription at that point is bed rest and waiting. You will get muscle pain and intense fevers. Depending on how many you ingest, you can die.
- Bear fat may or may not be particularly delicious and clear. Nobody can agree on whether the meat is any good but it seems like by modern standards, not really because gamey compared to what we normally eat
- If you can't avoid bear meat, cook the hell out of it. Donald Trump that steak.
- There are some absolutely disgusting videos of parasitic bears (tapeworms)
- Donation centers will not accept bear meat for these reasons
- There are apparently laws requiring bear meat to be harvested (from hunted bears?) and most people just throw it away after fake complying
- An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure but that's only if the cure is available
- Life before the penicillin era of modern medicine seems filled with unpredictable dangers and you really get a sense of how useful and important Chesterton's fence would have been
- Pre-modern life seems pretty terrifying and we haven't even discussed childbirth or war
The problem with bear meat is the insaaaane parasites.
I live in/near Appalachia and my buddies hunt: don't touch it.
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For a college project ~25 years ago I built a distributed electronic voting system. This was still the early days of the internet when people were excited about voting from home "in your underwear".
The demo worked but the idea fundamentally flawed for the following reason: /1
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There is plenty you can do to increase turnout.
✓ Drive people to polling locations
✓ More staffed locations
✓ More days and hours
In other words, you acknowledge and work to preserve the legitimacy of the system, while working to address the gaps it (necessarily) creates.
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Just rediscovered this gem youtube.com/watch?v=B38PPtIL…
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This is one of those facts I came across in passing and instantly believed because it gave expression to something I'd passively kind of believed already. The paste is still probably good for your breath.
Jun 6
Toothpaste doesn’t do anything
Just brush with an empty brush, it’s way easier for little kids
There’s some value of the toothpaste has fluoride, but we just do a fluoride rinse instead once they’re old enough to spit
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Growing renaissance vibes in this city
Jun 6
Southeast Baltimore’s enormous Crown Cork & Seal complex is finally getting the love and upgrades it deserves.
I can’t overemphasize how big this redevelopment of this and the adjacent Cambridge scrap yard is likely to be for our neighborhood over here.
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