Nostr notes by Mark Gritter

We could just ... not give police tear gas. That is a decision we ...

2025-06-15T03:10:23Z

We could just ... not give police tear gas. That is a decision we could make. A state or city could make that decision, and remove it from inventory.

Maybe police do not actually need area-denial weaponry present at every public gathering. Maybe "people are throwing bottles at us, therefore tear gas" need not be the standard playbook.

The medical research on the _safety_ of CS gas suggests a spectrum from "unknown" to "probably dangerous, particularly the way it actually used": https://www.propublica.org/article/tear-gas-is-way-more-dangerous-than-police-let-on-especially-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic https://med.umn.edu/news/u-m-study-shows-little-research-available-long-term-effects-tear-gas-use

I had less luck finding studies about its _effectiveness_ of CS gas for the presumed goals of police forces: officer safety and encouraging compliance with dispersal order. I found a lot of quotes from police along the lines of "well, the only alternative is bashing people with batons" One study of the introduction of CS spray in UK police forces (for personal protection, not crowd control) did not find a clear win: https://doi.org/10.1108/13639510010343065

Anecdotally, we might look at the current situation at LA, or that a few years ago in Minneapolis, and note that CS gas was not effective in reducing crowd antagonism, even if it does move people from one place to another.

A #ComputingHistory question that came up today: what is the ...

2025-01-11T05:44:52Z

A #ComputingHistory question that came up today: what is the origin of | (the vertical stroke) as bitwise OR in PL/I, and thence to the C family of languages?

I haven't been able to trace it further back, and interestingly in logic it was the "Sheffer Stroke", NAND (although Wikipedia claims that Sheffer actually used it for NOR instead?) There does not seem to be a logic or typesetting convention that birthed |.

I don't know enough about early IBM keyboards to know what other characters might be available.

The choice of & for AND instead of ^ -- it's right there! -- is similarly unclear.

the red one in the center is the convex polyhedron. The ...

2024-09-16T17:36:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…s85g
_________________________

the red one in the center is the convex polyhedron. The illustration is it surrounded by 38 others it the space-filling arrangement.

This illustration of a 38-sided space-filling polyhedron is ...

2024-09-15T21:58:33Z

This illustration of a 38-sided space-filling polyhedron is great! https://wolfr.am/Engel-38

This is the largest number of sides known for any convex space-filing polyhedron. The theoretical upper bound is 92, given by https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.2114

#polyhedra #spacefilling #combinatorics