Not gonna lie, I’m gonna totally buy this.

http://www.leatherman.com/on/demandware.store/Sites-leatherman-Site/en_US/Blog-ShowPost/?p=705

Barbara Loe Fisher, the president of the National Vaccine (dis-)Information Center, said:  “Fifty-seven cases of measles … in a country with a population of 317 million people is not a lot of cases.”

Bullshit. 57 cases of a disease that was declared eliminated as recently as 2000 is a lot.  And the outbreak is spreading: Not all of the victims were even at Disneyland.  Consider this:

Transmitted via a sneeze or a cough, the virus can live in air droplets for two hours after an infected person has left the room, exposing everyone who enters during that time frame. It’s particularly contagious during the four days before a rash appears, when most people are unaware they are infected.

Measles is far more infectious than Ebola.  This is the outbreak we should be worried about.

And it’s entirely the result of the anti-vaxxers.

This is awesome: a browser extension that lets you click on US politicians’ names on the web to pop up a box telling you where they get their funding from. Data from opensecrets.org, which is one of my favorite sites.

A 16-Year Old Programmer Just Made a Plugin That Shows Where Politicians Get Their Funding

“Education is different from so many other fields because everyone has been to school, so everyone feels they know how school should work – obviously, this must be true, because everyone who has ever flown in an airplane is qualified to be a pilot. Parents remember what school was like for them, or how much they hated homework, or how lazy their social studies teacher was and they carry that college-ruled trauma with them as they walk their kids in the door on back to school night. Legislators and school reformers and every article commenter have a hundred things teachers should do differently and zero hours of field experience. It’s maddening to try and work in a hurricane of noise generated by people who feel so entitled to directing us.”

http://truestories.gawker.com/all-the-children-are-ours-essays-from-school-teachers-1679254821/1679318066/+maxread

All it took to end the slowdown was taking away lunch breaks.  Looks like the NYPD is making up for lost ticket volume over the last couple of weeks.

http://gothamist.com/2015/01/12/slowdown_now_crackdown.php

I would watch this SO MUCH.

Here’s a really fun paper on Bernoulli numbers by S. C. Woon from 1997.  Woon generates the Bernoulli numbers by some operators that he then analytically continues.  He does the same for Bernoulli polynomials and Euler polynomials, plays with the relation of Bernoulli numbers to the Riemann zeta function, and then gives us these fun graphs of the behavior of the zeros.

Quoting from the end of the paper:

As s approaches every integer > 5, an interesting phenomenon occurs: A pair of real zeros may meet and become a doubly degenerate real zero at a point, and then bifurcate into a pair of complex zeros conjugate to each other. Thus, the pair of real zeros appears to “collide head-on and scatter perpendicularly” into a pair of complex zeros.

3 fundamental kinds of scattering can be observed:

• Point scattering:
A pair of real zeros scatter at a point into a pair of complex zeros which head away from each other indefinitely.
• Loop scattering:
The same as point scattering but the pair of complex zeros loops back to recombine into degenerate real zeros within unit interval in s and then scatter back into a pair of real zeros, much like the picture of pair production and annihilation of virtual particles.
• Long-range sideways scattering:
The additional zero that flies in appears as if “it is carrying with it a line
front of shockwave” that stretches parallelly to the Im(w) axis. When the “shockwave” meets a pair of complex zeros that are looping back, the pair gets deflected away from each other momentarily before looping back again, while the additional zero gets perturbed and slows down discontinuously.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/9705021v2.pdf

I am not a cat person, but I didn’t know that when Jennifer Jurney and I adopted Loki almost 15 years ago.  He and I have, over the years, strove and cuddled; fought and snuggled.  Last night he passed, and today I feel the pain of his absence in our life.

I am not a cat person, but Loki was my cat.  It can be hard to understand the way another fills your life until they’re gone, and the gaps are then suddenly incredibly stark.  All the chores, and frustrations, and what-always-felt-like-nonsense that he required – now that they’re not required – don’t feel so nonsensical.

I am not a cat person, but over the last few weeks of winter holiday we spent a lot of time on the couch, and in the chair, and in bed at night cuddling with Loki.  He was an enormous cat, a Maine Coon, and in our Brooklyn apartment we all knocked shoulders all the time.  Tonight our home feels shockingly empty.

I am not a cat person, but I miss Loki.  He was our guy.

“The story of civil rights is not an event that ends with a triumphal arrival at a Southern statehouse.” David Remnick on Bill de Blasio and the N.Y.P.D.

http://nyr.kr/177Jq9o

“Some are serious and some are humorous. And of course, some are with babies (since the President loves babies). I hope you enjoy this year’s album of photographs.” —Pete Souza, Chief Official White House Photographer. Check out his year in photos: wh.gov/year-in-photos.