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Trump Tourism Effects, or, that can’t be right. https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2026/10/01/trump-tourism-effects/
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Kieran Healy
@kjhealy@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-060 Followers
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41 Posts
Joined October 26, 2022
Website:
NEW! The Ordinal Society:
Data Visualization Book:
1995 Version:
Boosted by @kims@mas.to
Steven Lukes’s “The Diversity of Morals”. https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2026/10/08/steven-lukes-the-diversity-of-morals/
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I assume that when whoever is making it IPOs they will reveal the full lineup implied by the existence of Tilly Norwood.
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On Golden Gate, you can chat to the built-in foundation model directly with fm chat. You can also do things like pipeline it into scripts. E.g., in the second screenshot here it's reading and summarizing a @sixcolors@zeppelin.flights article. The model's context window is quite small, so I had to write a script that chunked the text, so it's sort of serially summarized. Still, it’s nice to have fully-local access to this model in this way.
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Targeted flattery-spam/phishing aimed at harmless academics like me is leveling up! Book Club rubbish is so last month. Thanks, LLMs! I just got a highly elaborate six-paragraph one “from” Emily St John Mandel (of Station Eleven fame). The choice of author to impersonate is really quite clever. Like the book club spam, it’s trawling for somewhat vain people who are susceptible to flattery, which of course excludes academic authors [puts hand to ear] sorry I’m just getting an update
Really brings a tear to the eye. What a legacy.
I just watched Gremlins 2 for the first time since 1990. The entire film is built around a dim, vain, tasteless New York developer named Daniel Clamp, his sprawling Clamp Building and his gimcrack Clamp Empire, which includes TV stations, his inane self-aggrandizing books, and a line of jams and jellies. At the end he falls for a character named Marla. This has been a remark about how the meaning of a work of art is not something fixed or under the control of its creators.
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Ian McKellen performs “The Strangers’ Case” speech from “Sir Thomas More” on Colbert.
A complete transformer neural network implemented entirely in HyperTalk, trained on a Macintosh SE/30.
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Replying to
I dug up my first r-help post, sent late on a Friday night in December of 1999. Plus ça change.
Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: https://socviz.co
Yesterday’s fun activity was writing a package to make cartograms like this. I am also open to lavish VC funding to develop an excessively complex German-style board game based on this layout, modeled on e.g. “Escape from New York”, “Warriors”, or perhaps “My Dinner with Andre”.
Absolutely outstanding design work here. Amazing.
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While I don’t think this essay quite finds a solution, the problem it identifies is real. “What bit of the division of labor will *you* symbolically reject to create your special identity?” is the personal version of social theories that fantasize about rejecting the division of labor while somehow keeping all of its benefits.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-radical-reasons-why-you-dream-of-making-things-by-hand
@siracusa@mastodon.social A nice example of context collapse that I came across while listening to the Aftershow.
Using Quarto to write (and typeset) a book.
https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2026/03/09/using-quarto-to-write-a-book/
@hotdogsladies@mastodon.social A nice big Baby Boom poster for you about the dread year of 1946 and the march of time in general, as per @RecDiffs@mastodon.social discussion. Some more detail at https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2023/12/20/the-baby-boom-again/
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You could do all the usual Catholic things with Father Demo but if you wanted him to save anything you had to pay fifty bucks.
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@siracusa@mastodon.social @atpfm@mastodon.social Correct use of “the mainland” spotted in this street atlas (John Tauranac, “Manhattan Block by Block”, 2005) that I picked up at a used bookstore over the weekend.
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New Tom 7 video just dropped, so things aren’t entirely awful (though they are indeed mostly awful). Everyone should watch all of Tom 7’s videos; they are excellent in fundamentally improper ways.
https://youtu.be/M1si1y5lvkk
No one can force me to have a secure website!!!
First words of presenter on panel: “I’m not a linear thinker.”
[proceeds to ramble for 25 minutes].
I guess I can’t say I wasn’t warned.
@atpfm@mastodon.social @siracusa@mastodon.social Lol you lot are going to get email from annoyed “U Penn is an Ivy League university and not some random state school” people. (I know you didn’t claim it was but I predict your discussion will trigger them; they are very touchy.)
Replying to
@ethanschoonover You have nothing to lose but—actually you have nothing to lose at all, because you don’t accumulate any state
New York City Hexmaps. https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2026/04/19/new-york-city-hexmaps/
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Hourly average net flows through NYC Subway stations, or, I just made 424 animated pie charts and I’m not sorry.
https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2026/04/25/hourly-subway-station-flows/
Vibes-based analysis from me of the 6C Report Card. https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/02/charting-the-vibes-in-the-2025-apple-report-card/
I thought I had found a clever way around an annoying problem—I have to get hundreds of randomly-named SVG elements that correspond to ordered elements (train stations) in a CSV. So I concocted a script in Illustrator to extract, all at once, the layer names of a bunch of elements after I have cmd-clicked them so they're all selected. I am so clever. But ... Illustrator cannot extract them in the order I clicked them, only in layer order, which is itself random. Gaaah.
@drdrang@fosstodon.org Hey, I managed to trigger the thing.
Nerd Entertainment, if you like litigation between two big companies: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.474095/gov.uscourts.cand.474095.1.0.pdf
Borough-specific sign for the day. #NoKings https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2026/03/28/subway-sign/
Everything is fine over there