Category: Uncategorized

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The Washington Times published a well-sourced and humorous report headlined Universities help students cope with Trump win with canceled classes, milk and cookies. We wind through stories of canceled classes, quizzes not being counted, and even therapy animals. However, I was most curious about one part of the headline:

Meanwhile, Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy provided a ‘Self-Care Suite’ that included ‘Milk and Cookies,’ ‘a Legos Station’ and ‘Coloring and Mindfulness Exercises,’ according to a memo obtained by The Free Press.

I voted for John McCain in 2008 and went to class (Brooklyn College) the day after his heavily foreshadowed landslide defeat was confirmed by election results. I did not think to run around wailing or tell my professors about my feelings. The former would have been unseemly and the latter deeply weird. But had someone offered me a cookie, I would have taken the cookie. I read this now and think that there should have been cookies. I would have settled for Dunkin Donuts. If people today with outstanding student loan debt can demand that the majority of Americans with no such debt pay their debt, I think I can demand retroactive cookies from Brooklyn College. I am not picky but white chocolate macadamia, ginger, or oatmeal raisin would be very welcome.

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On October 20, 2024, I wrote an article about presidential runner-ups with the most recent birth dates. My article was inspired by the fact that prior to the 2024 presidential election, Al Gore, who lost in 2000, was the youngest person to finish runner-up in a presidential election.  I went through all the runners-up to see if Mr. Gore had the longest streak, and learned that he was the record holder.  Mr. Gore had appeared slated to extend his mark prior to July 2024 since both of the presumptive major party nominees were older than him.  However, the presumptive Democratic nominee, now-outgoing President Joe Biden, withdrew the race and was replaced by the Vice President, Kamala Harris, who is just more than 18 and one-half years younger than Mr. Gore. I noted the possibility that Mr. Gore’s streak would end and indeed it has. As Donald Trump prepares to join Grover Cleveland as the only men to serve two non-consecutive terms as president, Ms. Harris replaces Mr. Gore as the presidential runner-up with the most recent birth date. This is admittedly a very niche record, but Mr. Gore’s holding the mark for six elections is a fun oddity, especially in light of the fact that he was not an exceptionally young major party nominee in 2000. I will add a few small updates to my research article in the coming days.

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Fixing Computer With Punch by Nicholas A. FerrellNicholas A. Ferrell
I built my current desktop computer back in August 2020. One of the benefits of building your own computer is that you can easily fix it when you have a hardware issue. For example, one of the top fans on my case is becoming a bit off-kilter. Once in a while (maybe once every 30-40 start-ups), it wi...

I had to buy case-fans for my current computer, which I built back in August 2020. I have had issues with the fans rotating askew and making an unpleasant noise. I had already replaced two before one of my replacement fans started to go. In February, I fixed the replacement fan by punching the top of my computer case. Unfortunately, the punch solution became unreliable on the morning of October 26, 2024. Having work to do, I unplugged the offending fan. I think I can harvest case fans from my previous desktop PC, which I built in 2011.

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I published a research article on Halloween in Japan on October 17, 2024. My article was based on a selection of English-language sources. After I published the article, it occurred to me to use Feedle, an interesting search tool for RSS/ATOM feeds, to see if I missed any good Halloween-Japan articles. While I did not find any articles that I would have added for their research value, I did find an important report on capybaras at the Nagasaki Bio Park devouring a Halloween Jack-o-lantern in 2020. From that report, I learned that the jack-o-lantern was something of a mulligan after the capybaras had struggled in doing battle with a sturdier pumpkin a few weeks earlier.

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Anime News Network reported that Crunchyroll is adding Girls Band Cry, a spring 2024 anime, on November 6. Girls Band Cry was perhaps the only high profile anime of 2024 to not be officially simulcast. News of Crunchyroll’s picking it up is bittersweet for me. I am a Crunchyroll subscriber. But I purchased Girls Band Cry on Amazon (in the digital purchase is really a rental sense) early last month. Fortunately, I actually watched all 13 episodes in early-to-mid September, so I got some value from the “purchase” before it officially arrives on Crunchyroll. I had been on the fence about writing a Girls Band Cry review, but now I almost certainly will with the news that it is arriving on Crunchyroll. Now can you expect to see it ranked in my year-end top-six anime of 2024 in a couple of months (see my 2023 ranking)? I did (mostly) like Girls Band Cry, but we are close enough th the end of the year that I will issue a no comment on its prospects.

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Link Love: A Very Papery Day (and Ereader Questions) by an author (The Well Apportioned Desk)
For the last few months, I’ve been trying to decide if I should buy a new ereader and, if so, which brand I should purchase. I have been researching options from Kindle, Kobo, Onyx Boox and a few others. My goal is to read books and I check ebooks out from our library so I really want Libby support. ... I could really use some recommendations. I’m leaning away from Kindle (for the most part) but I haven’t ruled it out.

I subscribe to The Well Apportioned Desk in my feed reader. Site creator Ana Reinert is looking for e-reader recommendations. She wants an e-reader that allows her to “read books” and “libby support” for checking out books from her library. She would also prefer a non-Kindle option, although that is not a requirement. I personally have a PocketBook Color (seen here), PocketBook Inkpad Color (first model, seen here), and a 2018 Kindle Paperwhite (discussed here). I like the Pocketbooks. Pocketbook’s native Linux-based OS is unobtrusive and it is very easy to install KoReader for a much better reading and library-management experience (KoReader is noticeably snappier than the default reading app). I do not use PocketBook’s store at, instead using it for DRM-free books (I use Calibre on my PC to send books to my PocketBook). However, I have tested its built-in Adobe DRM functionality and found that it works as expected for DRM-protected books from the Kobo sore. As a bonus, Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included guide has a positive assessment of Pocketbook devices. Readers should note I have not tried an Android-based PocketBook, so I have no opinion of those. I have no take on Libby functionality since I have never checked out library ebooks (moreover, I was only aware of Overdrive). If PocketBook does not check the library box, I would see if Kobo, which, like Pocketbook, supports KoReader, is a viable option (assuming arguendo that Kobo is preferred over Kindle). Since Ms. Reinert mentioned Onyx Book, I will note that I would stay away from that one due to its tendency to phone home and GPL violations, but I would be interested in Onyx Book if something like LineageOS were available for it.

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I was walking in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, on the evening of October 23, 2024. A little girl (probably about 9 years old) was lagging behind her father. She asked him to slow down. When he did not slow down, she dropped the following line:

You’re like in the Olympics for walking.

That is a good line for a kid. Imagine what she will be able to put together when she learns about Olympic racewalking.

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My home internet service provider is Spectrum (it has been for a long time), which I discussed in some detail in an article about receiving surprisingly good customer support back in May. I have the cheapest internet plan. That plan had been for 300 Mbps. With my MikroTik hAP ac3 router and good ethernet cables, I was able to get about ~370 Mbps out of it with a wired connection. Spectrum recently bumped the internet speed on my plan to 400 Mbps for no additional cost. I finally got around to testing and got 493-495 Mbps on three tests with an ethernet connection. That is a nice increase but it made me wonder whether there is anything I can do to squeeze 500 out of it.

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Wired wrote an article about Amazon’s dream of having its AI buy stuff on behalf of customers. I am not going to dignify this inane, anti-competitive idea with my patented full analysis. Instead, I will note that Amazon’s current AI summaries of product reviews, most of which are probably fake anyway, are not ringing endorsements of the company’s prowess in this area.

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Russia: New Law Eliminates Requirement to Renounce Foreign Citizenship by Peter Roudik (The Library of Congress)
Russian law neither provides for the possession of dual citizenship nor recognizes the foreign citizenship of its nationals. (Law on Citizenship art. 6.) Under this law, all individuals are treated as Russian citizens regardless of whether they have citizenship of a foreign country. An exception is made for the citizens of Tajikistan, the only country that has a relevant treaty with Russia. (Treaty Between the Russian Federation and Republic of Tajikistan on Regulating Dual Citizenship Issues, Sept. 7, 1995.) A similar treaty with Turkmenistan was terminated in 2015.

A May 1, 2020 report by Peter Roudik for the Law Library of Congress titled Russia: New Law Eliminates Requirement to Renounce Foreign Citizenship is a useful resource for legal issues involving dual citizens of Tajikistan and Russia. Toward the end of the report, it notes that Russia neither provides for nor prohibits dual citizenship. Instead, it treats Russian citizens as citizens of Russia and no other country. However, “[a]n exception is made for the citizens of Tajikistan, the only country that has a relevant treaty with Russia.” The relevant treaty took effect in 1997. This is a good starting source for establishing that Tajik citizens who are naturalized as Russian citizens do not lose their Tajik citizenship as a result of Russian naturalization. The article also links to the relevant Russian-language treaty.

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I was formatting a new article by my good friend Victor V. Gurbo for The New Leaf Journal. Victor included a link to an Instagram post by a Bob Dylan scholar. The link was significant because Victor quoted the post. I have never had an Instagram account (I do, however, have a Pixelfed account) and do not like linking to closed platforms. Out of curiosity, I tried opening the Instagram link in Mullvad Browser and was able to see the post. I then tried saving the Instagram post using Archive Today. The saving process took a long time, but it resulted in a near-perfect capture. I included the archive link alongside the original Instagram for people like me who do not use Instagram and prefer a capture of the post to trying to navigate to Instagram. One interesting point: The Archive Today image capture of the post is unusable due to an Instagram pop-up. But the page capture looks good.

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I wrote a survey of English-language sources on the ai ai gasa back in February. That survey was inspired by a review of the Teasing Master Takagi-san series-concluding movie. Since writing about ai ai gasa, I have become more aware of the love umbrella’s occasional cameos in TV anime, similarly to how writing about anime hair color made me pay more attention to hair color in new shows. I recently re-watched a 2006 series called Living for the Day After Tomorrow (aka Asatte no Houkou) for the purpose of writing a review, which I published on October 11. I was collecting screenshots for my articles while watching the episodes. Having written about ai ai gasa not too long ago, I could not help but take the following screen capture from near the end of the show.

Ai Ai Gasa drawn in the sand on a beach. Screenshot taken from Living for the Day After Tomorrow.

Ai ai gasa in the sand of the beach! It gets washed away by a wave in the same scene. The names written are not of any characters in the anime. It is an artistic flourish to go along with a story that one character is telling another by the beach.

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According to Eric Lendrum of American Greatness: “A new survey shows that young Americans who frequently use the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok are much more likely to get their news from content creators rather than actual news outlets.” I am long on record as being an early member of the ban TikTok camp, specifically because no other great power in history would allow an adversary to perform live-action social experiments on its youngest citizens. I read this article about young people viewing CCP propaganda as an alternative to “actual news outlets” and thought “yes that is bad, but what is worse is that this is a battle between the resistable force and the movable object.”

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I just published a review of Living for the Day After Tomorrow (a 2006 TV anime also known as Asatte no Hokou) on The New Leaf Journal. I had planned to simultaneously publish an article about how I first watched the show in June 2010 on Time Warner Cable’s Anime Network on Demand. I was able to pin down the exact week I started watching a 2006 anime in 2010 thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Unfortunately, the Internet Archive was targeted by hackers a few days ago with a pro-Hamas hacker group claiming responsibility (responsibility not confirmed, however). While I could have published my finished draft Anime Network on Demand article today (it is not as if I am expecting it to be a big visit-driver), I decided to hold off until the Internet Archive is fully back online.

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The following quote comes from Jonathan Sacerdoti’s Israel’s triumphant response to 7 October, published in The Spectator on October 7, 2024:

Much of the concern surrounding Israel’s actions in the last year was not genuine, but a veiled excuse to criticise the state for defending itself. Critics lamented that Israel might sacrifice global goodwill in its pursuit of victory, but these criticisms are superficial and often placate those who have long sought to undermine Israel’s legitimacy. The notion that Israel should refrain from defending itself to preserve its reputation overlooks a critical reality: a nation’s first responsibility is its own survival, not global approval.

I could not have said it better myself. The essay, which discusses Israel’s national interest and the importance of deterrence in the specific context of surving in the Middle East (and especially as surving as a Jewish state in the Middle East) is worth reading in full.