This Side Up

twitter, mastodon, threads, what a confusing mess.

i've used all of them at this point. here's what i see as the real differences.

the "algorithm" gets talked about a lot; on social media it amounts to how the particular platform decides what to show you. algorithms are all over the place. classically they're biased towards maximizing profit for the media platform, but they also have the potential to biased towards the views of major figures at the platform.

we all know that Facebook's algorithm is erratic on its good days, and it's also not even remotely consistent across platforms; i deleted the app from my phone because it started shoveling hate speech items at me relentlessly, which the web app has never done. i have no idea what was going on, but there appeared to be no way to turn off the spigot of bile.

twitter's algorithm has changed a bit since the Musk acquisition. it is now heavily based on Musk's own notions about what people should see, most obviously the fact that twitter now promotes heavily Musk's own tweets. but even pre-Musk, it interspersed a lot of ads and promoted some things for its own reasons.

Threads, being a product of the Facebook/Instagram axis of social media companies, certainly leans heavily into its algorithm. but it seems better tuned, i don't really see much objectionable coming from the algorithm, but do see quite a bit of stuff i wouldn't miss if it went away. the feed is innocous, and the main concerns here are Meta's obsessive collection of info on users for ad tracking and potential resale. this collection issue is why Meta has kept Threads out of Europe; european regulators don't have a sense of humor about GDPR violations and Facebook is currently in some trouble about this. i can give threads a not totally awful grade, but not a really great one because there doesn't seem much control allotted to the individual user. but i may have missed some useful settings.

i'm not going to talk much about bluesky. i'm not on it, i've not been invited. folks who know more than i suggest that while some of the owner/management team are odious, there are some very good communities nonetheless. in this rapidly shifting landscape it's hard to say how bluesky will ultimately play out. it offers a significant contrast with threads - while threads has made joining really easy - if you have an instagram account, you have a threads account, which is why the threads user count blew up in the first week, bluesky is all about invites and release of invites has from all reports been erratic and inconsistent (and no, i'm not fishing for an invite.).

so this leads us to mastodon. mastodon is the product of a developer with a very old time way of thinking. this has resulted in a system that has a lot of interesting ideas and features, but it is hard for a non-techie to get their heads around, and needs learning to even figure out how to get on. additionally, your mastodon experience can vary wildly depending on what onramp you choose. mastodon is not a monolithich social media entity; rather it is a lot of smaller social media platforms that talk to each other. they aren't necessarily administered the same way and a lot of people have bad experiences because of administrative bias. so you need to pick an instance, and choosing poorly can result in a bad mastodon experience. the tools to aid you in picking one aren't well developed. so where bluesky is limited by a decision to control invitations, mastodon is limited by being hard to figure out.

on the other hand, mastodon is mercifully algorithm free. you see postings from the people you follow. a number of SF writers for whom i have great respect - John Scalzi, Ann Leckie, and Charlie Stross to name three - post on mastodon. there are various computer security notables. and the stuff they post doesn't get buried in "promoted" articles.

threads is threatening to join the "fediverse", which is means it will become an alternate interface to mastodon - but it would be the freak client with ads and an algorithm and promotion. when that happens, i expect to direct my friends and followers to track my mastodon account and i will stop using threads directly (the account is _{nfgusedautoparts}en.osm.town ). i have my own mastodon instance, because as a cranky old Un*x/Linux admin, how could i not resist doing that? it's stamps.town (the original intent was a stamp collecting theme), but anyone is welcome. i'm quite hostile to hate speech and that's how i admin my server. so don't come over to spew bile. you'll be toast in a split second.

A relatively lightweight start to what is sometimes a pretty heavyweight book

The front page is just telling us what it is. One thing to point out though is that it explicitly states what updates have been applied. In the January 2021 copy i'm looking at, "Updated Through TB 21-01", that is, the first technical bulletin of 2021. The name of the file will also clue you in as to when in the season it was issued. Note that the Racing Memo series (RM) doesn't get into the GCR. The racing memos cover a variety of things, like letting scrutineers and stewards know of forgeries of certified safety equipment. The RMs age off of the content management system, which is unfortunate. I have saved a couple of the RMs on counterfeit safety gear as I felt that they were too valuable to let go.

Next page, well, copyright notice and a list of the club's registered trademarks.

Page 3 is a little more interesting. First, we get a disclaimer about potential for injury. Now we all know that playing in traffic, which is what we do, is dangerous. But the disclaimer is almost certainly still a necessity.

The paragraph after the word Forward is more important. It points out that paper and electronic forms exist, the electronic form gets regular updates, and therefore a more recent electronic edition takes precedence. And it gives permission for me and you to use the GCR for purposes related to the racing operations of the SCCA.

I'm thinking that mention of the precedence of newer versions belongs in the rules proper, but it may well be repeated there. I'll be looking for that as this series moves on.

Then, a cute quote of Thales of Miletus about the necessity of rules governing competition.

Finally, a Mission and Welcoming Environment Statement. I'm of two minds about this. One part of me says that this shouldn't be necessary, but the realist in me recognizes that there are people in the world (and in our club) who need to be reminded wat the club is supposed to be and to not be jerks.

This series was inspired by two things. The first are the reread blog series relating to various extended works of fiction that appear places such as www.tor.com, and the second is the realization that it has been far too long since i really went through the rule book.

My career as a tech official and mediocre club racer started in the early 90s. I've served as Chief of Tech for New York Region (since 1996) and Mohawk Hudson Region (since 1997). Neither region is running an active racing program now, so I've been intermittantly chiefing races for New England Region in recent years. Also, I spent 3 years in the barrel as NEDiv Divisional Administrator of Scrutineering in the late 90s.

So how is this going to work? I'm going to front to back with the 2021 GCR, starting with the January version that I just downloaded from the site. But this first post going to be more of a background/history thing. So let's get started!

Some years back I'd resumed cycling in the hilly area around my home in Rensselaer County, NY, on my ancient and honorable 1984 Trek 500 (owned since new). I'd worked my way up to 2 hour, 20 mile rides on nice weekends and late afternoon rides of around 10 miles on nice weekdays.

It was on one of these rides that i had my first noticeable bout with a heart rate & blood pressure spike, I gradually stopped cycling, and the medical diagnosis came in and during a lovely visit to Albany Medical Center I got a quad bypass.

For some time, I went regularly to cardiac rehab at a local hospital, but I became concerned about how much travel time was involved, and convinced myself that i would go back to cycling. Ha ha.

In early-mid summer of this year, mostly holed up for the pandemic, I had a doctor's appointment. She made some pointed comments about my weight. She was right. So I did some quick maintainence and attempted a program of indoor and outdoor riding, indoors using a Trek 7100 city bike that we got for @allison that she never really used, combined with zwift and a CycleOps (Saris) trainer. Outdoors was on the ancient Trek 500.

It went slowly and erratically at first. Regaining and maintaining fitness seemed a lot harder than it used to be. During the fall, I found myself limited by various things polinating, and I don't enjoy cycling with snot pouring out of my nose. So I decided to go fully indoors, using the trainer in the basement.

I also set about educating myself about a lot of details I'd not been concerned with before. I now know things like how to calibrate the trainer to the bike, how to take an FTP test to determine what kind of power i can sustain for an hour, how to create custom interval workouts that match my notions about training, and how to actually map out a schedule and stick to it. I've also taught myself to manage my wattage and hold a steady cadence.

And some where in all of this I made some sort of breakthrough, a combination of mental and physical more than likely. I'm now riding more than 4 hours a week most weeks, including 2 interval workouts and 3 free rides on the various zwift courses, I've completed 31 of the individual zwift courses, I'm now in a mindset where I push through the painful parts of the simulated climbs so i can enjoy the downhill that comes afterwards.

And today i saw 175 pounds on the bathroom scale, down 15+ pounds from June. 174 would represent "normal" instead of "overweight" on the BMI scale.

I look forward to the spring where I'll return to the outdoors on the ancient Trek 500. I plan to hit the ground runn..., er, riding.

I'll take it.

this article has caused a lot of discussion and dissent. The main text is withdrawn. The link to the SCCA flag manual is still here.


The actual SCCA Flag Manual
It may be found here (it's hard to find on the SCCA website). This is the 2012 manual, but as of this writing (late 2020) it's still current.
http://www.averillpark.net/SCCA/F_C%20Manual_revised11.11.2012_ApprovedCRB.pdf

I've been active in the OpenHistoricalMap (OHM) project for quite a while now. We've had our ups and downs, but are busy recovering from a major server outage and things are looking better and better for the future.
My early work has been in mapping historic race tracks in North America. There was some complexity in locating them and finding maps and or imagery to allow for mapping them in OHM but ultimately, you dropped them in place and set the start and end dates for their usage, and it was done.
Things have gotten a lot more complex recently. I've been working on mapping the history of the Capital District of New York, starting with Albany, with plans to radiate outwards and map Troy & Schenectady.. This has made things a little interesting. There is a relatively recent episode of Doctor Who in which all of history happens all at once. If you are going deep in time in an OHM project, the editing process consists of trying to map all of history all at once, and the more detail you map, the more challenging the editor becomes to work with.
There is a filter mechanism in JOSM (the OSM editor I use) that helps to some degree - I have a limited ability to ask for things that started or ended before or after certain years - but it could use some refinement. OHM's approach to dating could use some work as well; the Gregorian calendar stops in 1532, and older things may have some uncertainty about when they actually happened. For example, no one is entirely sure on when the northern end of the Albany Basin was filled. We know it was before 1910 and after 1892 but there's a bit of guesswork involved (and the answer may be in some forgotten records in the Albany city archives.)
The other project I've started on is the Antietam Battlefield from 1862. But that's a topic for another posting.

John Buford is one of those generals from the Civil War who deserves to be much better known than he is today. He almost became better known when he was played in the film Gettysburg by Sam Elliott, but I suspect nearly everyone leaving the theater came out without actually knowing Elliott's character's name. The two books about Buford that I am discussing here are:

General John Buford: A Military Biography, Edward Longacre, Combined Books, 1995

"The Devil's to Pay": John Buford at Gettysburg, Eric J. Wittenberg, Savas Beatie, 2014

I just finished Longacre, the older of the two, and decided a comparison and contrast would be more interesting than a straightforward review.

Longacre and Wittenberg are authors who have devoted much of their time to Cavalry operations, and both have spent a lot of time on Gettysburg in particular. Since Buford's finest hour as a Cavalry commander was certainly the first day of Gettysburg, both authors deserve to be taken seriously.

Longacre's book appeared in 1995, 2 years after the theatrical release of Gettysburg; Longacre served as an advisor for the film. In his Introduction, he explains that there is a dearth of some traditional primary documentation - Buford did not leave much in the way of written correspondence. Longacre had long regarded writing a Buford biography as unreasonable, but the film production persuaded him to try. The lack of correspondence can be seen in how the book is written, as in some places Longacre has to speculate mildly about things that a letter might have made clear (if there was a letter).

Wittenberg has a different task. He is focusing on Buford's military operations through Gettysburg, which are well documented.

Both authors hold Buford in high regard, and they are correct; Buford was almost certainly the finest Federal Cavalry commander of the Civil War (Custer's PR not withstanding). Longacre is a nice biography, but a bit light on maps. Wittenberg is more focused and detailed, and has a number of excellent maps. Wittenberg is in print, Longacre is something you'll need to find used.

Both are good books, it depends on what you're looking for.

Code Girls, Liza Mundy, Hachette, 2017

The history of code breaking is vast, complex and fascinating. There is much more to it than just the story of Alan Turing and Bletchley Park. Two recent books, this one and The Woman Who Smashed Codes examine women code breakers in the US during the first half of the 1900s. I've reviewed the latter elsewhere - it is the story of Elizebeth Friedman, a trailblazer of considerable significance from the period immediately before WWI through WWII. It dovetails in an effective way with Code Girls

Code Girls is the story of the women who were hired by the US Army and Navy to break codes during the war. Rosie the Riveter is the story we're all familiar with, we are less familiar with this story because the work of the Code Girls was a closely held secret. The story of codebreaking and the women who did it is, though, an important one.

Code Girls is not a text in code making or breaking, but it does spend a little time on codes in order to make it clear how challenging the work was. The Army and Navy would spend the war actively recruiting in colleges where women who normally would transition into careers as teachers were instead given an opportunity to contribute to the war effort.

Part of this story ties into the story of Bletchley Park. When the German Navy transitioned to the four rotor Enigma machine, the solution once found exceeded the capacity of the "bombes" used at Bletchley Park for extracting keys. A talented engineer at NCR devised a new, much faster bombe and it was put into service; the machines were fed and cared for by one group of women code breakers. The British would turn all decryption of naval Engima intercepts over to this unit. Mundy tells the story of the women recruited to help assemble the new bombe, many of whom followed the machine into operations.

The story also covers the US code breaking efforts against the various Japanese systems. There are a couple of famous Japanese codes ("Red" and "Purple"), but there were many many more and the Code Girls eventually got into nearly all of them. Frequently the US high command knew more about what was going on at Japanese outposts than the Japanese did.

Mundy examines the lives they lived in the DC area as well - women living on their own in a manner rarely afforded to them before the war changed everything.

This is an excellent, enjoyable and very readable book. Highly recommended.

One major collectable category is Souvenir Sheets. they've been around for quite a while, but in recent years there have been more and more of them. as with many things in the world of stamp collecting, they're less about postage and more about the collection.

Here is souvenir sheet from the US in 1947, commemorating the first US postage stamps.



Note that the stamps embedded in the sheet are valid for postage, you can cut them out and use them, or put the entire sheet on a package. But they're imperforate, you have to cut them out to use the individually. Early stamps were commonly imperforate.

The second replacement for the failed APC battery backup unit arrived. It was much better packed, suffered no damage in shipping and appears to work right. The original failed unit has been returned, and the first replacement (damaged in shipping) goes back today. So ultimately things worked out ok.

i found it necessary to replace one of my old APC 1000VA backups with a new one recently. a new BX1000M arrived a couple of days ago, and was working well in my home office until about 2 hours ago when it threw an "F02" alarm. the manual said that meant there was a dead short on one of the things plugged in and i should start trying to figure out what it was. i was just starting to go through the procedure when the alarm changed to F06 which means "call tech support". i tried unplugging it from the wall, disconnecting the battery and reconnecting, but it still alarmed and threw an F06 after 10 seconds of normal running with no load connected at all.

i went to their online chat. the tech rep asked about power fluctuations and i advised him that we'd had a snow storm, so maybe but i hadn't seen any clear symptoms. he gave me a reset procedure which i applied; no change in behavior. he then advised me that i should wait until the fluctuations were over, to which i replied, roughly:

1) i never said there were fluctuations, only that there might be and i'd seen no evidence

2) what the hell good is a UPS that that throws a "call tech support" alarm in response to power fluctuations

3) i have owned many APC UPS units in my time and this would be the first one to ever behave this way.

so he has issued an RMA and i'll have to go without a UPS for maybe as much as a week before the replacement shows up.

Published in 2012, winner of the Bancroft Prize, I've finally gotten to it in my backlog.

The vast bulk of military history books consist consist of battle and campaign accounts, and biographies of military leaders. There are few books on more abstract subjects in the field. Mark Grimsley's classic The Hard Hand of War is a notable entry in the latter category. Grimsley covers the evolution of Federal military policies towards the Confederacy as they progressed during the war.

Lincoln's Code intersects with Grimsley's work in an interesting way. While Grimsley focuses on the narrow 5 year span of the Civil War, Witt's timeline runs from George Washington's early experiences as a Colonial officer in Virginia during the French-and-Indian wars through to the Philippine Insurrection. Witt's focus is on the evolving state of the laws of war, and in particular, he points to the development of the Lieber Code in 1862, issued to the Union forces as General Orders 100, as a critical pivot point.

More #book acquisitions for the backlog. #civilwar #maps #history

A post shared by Richard Welty (@rwelty1889) on Feb 14, 2018 at 1:01pm PST

The other addition to the reading backlog today. Bad packaging by #amazon on this one. #book #history #militaryhistory #submarines

A post shared by Richard Welty (@rwelty1889) on Feb 14, 2018 at 1:16pm PST

New #book acquisitions #history #civilwar

A post shared by Richard Welty (@rwelty1889) on Feb 13, 2018 at 12:43pm PST

Sometimes when I list new acquisitions people ask me to comment on specific books after I've read them. These requests can affect my reading order. Here is the current short queue:

Code Girls (women working as code breakers for the US in WWII)
The Half Has Never Been Told (the economics of slavery in the antebellum US)
To The Shores of Tripoli (the very beginnings of the US Navy and Marines)

requests welcome.