Engineer on @googlechrome. Involved in CSS and W3C standards. Previously @mozilla, @w3ctag. Mastodon: @dbaron@w3c.social
Rockville, Maryland, USA
Joined March 2008
- Tweets 7,521
- Following 1,244
- Followers 4,296
- Likes 18,519
L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
1/ NEW: During 12 fateful days in January, Chinese authorities failed to report any new coronavirus cases, lulling Wuhan residents into complacency.
Why? In part, because of cronyism and secret deals between the China CDC and three Shanghai companies
apnews.com/article/internati…\
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I admit I had the jar refrigerated even before opening, because I was worried it would go bad. I also switched to starter from February through July because I was worried I wouldn't be able to buy more.
The 2 loaves had 340g whole wheat, 280g rye, and 390g white bread flour.
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Today's tale of things being just fine past their expiration date:
This lovely rye bread is one of a pair of loaves I baked today. They're the last bread baked with this jar of active dry yeast that wasn't supposed to work after March 28, 2013. (Yes, I overbought around 2010.)
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L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
As Washington state locked down, its residents flocked to nearby Idaho for summer fun. Now coronavirus is surging on both sides of the border. propublica.org/article/state…
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L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
“This holiday season presents a grim reckoning,” writes our science reporter Donald McNeil Jr. We must set aside justifiable optimism for an end to the pandemic between now and spring and confront the dark winter ahead, he writes. nyti.ms/36oWuIW
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A photo of an urban environment I like [32/N]:
Yongkang Street, Da’an District, Taipei City, Taiwan
台灣台北市大安區永康街
February 2016
Compare to tweet #14, which is nearly the same view, but at night, with lots of crowds. This is 8:30am on a Sunday morning.
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On a different topic, can any eagle-eyed readers name the city pictured in my phone's background (in the previous tweet)?
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The alerts used to be called “Public Safety Message”. Now they're called “Emergency Alert: Extreme”.
(I hope the quarantine requirement is retroactive to people who arrived within the last 14 days, but since it's unclear, I assume that in practice it won't be.)
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L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
The earmark ban has made Congress less accountable and more dysfunctional. It is time to abandon the experiment. nyti.ms/2VgnVyi
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Android annoyance of the day: why would I ever want “Reset All Timers”? Can I make it not be there?
It's like a one click “mess up my life” (or at least my dinner) button.
I've managed not to do this, but I'm always afraid of it.
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Some of us remember Bush v. Gore. Giving party affiliation of judges has seemed necessary since then.
(And remember that under many counting standards, Gore should have won the election: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_U… .)
The phenomenon predates Trump. When party affiliation proves to be poor predictor of how a judge or justice will vote in controversial or high-profile cases, then it may stop.
Of course, this seems rare, I suspect because single story houses don't *look* fancy. Maybe also because people like multi-story layouts.. But I like to think it's the former.
Anyway, that's today's tale of how the math in the zoning code changes the buildings around us.
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So this means that someone constructing a single-family house in Palo Alto who wants to maximize floor area, doesn't care about a lot being in the basement, and doesn't care about reducing the size of the garden/lawn/etc., actually maximizes floor area by building single-story.
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But, if you (unlike the law) think of the habitable basement as floor area, this means that a single story house with a basement is allowed to have *more* floor area than a multi-story house on the same lot, since the above-ground limit is the same but the basement can be bigger.
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But then I started to think about Palo Alto's zoning code for the R-1 zone. (See library.amlegal.com/nxt/gate… section 18.12.)
And I remembered that single-story houses are allowed to cover more of the lot than multi-story houses, to allow them to have the same limit on floor area.
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But this one was unusual. Unlike most of the fancy new houses I walk past in Palo Alto, this one was single story. Single story plus a fancy habitable basement, that is.
At first glance that seemed odd.
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So I was taking a walk in Palo Alto today -- I think along Webster Street -- and noticed one of those (common in Palo Alto) new-ish homes with fancy light wells for the habitable space in the basement. (It's popular because basements don't count as floor area for zoning code!)
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L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
In this op ed piece, @tconnors22 and I discuss the impact of COVID-19-related shutdowns on children’s immune system development.
nytimes.com/2020/11/25/opini…
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L. David Baron @dbaron@w3c.social retweeted
If 40k people died in building collapses every year, you'd better believe that structural engineers would have some explaining to do.
It is mind-boggling to me that we do not hold transportation engineers to the same standard.
The “burden of stopping this carnage” rests on many shoulders, but principally on the civil engineers who continue to build our cities to a high speed standard. It’s time for a civil suit.
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