J.N. Thomas

I really wish Sunny Day Real Estate could set aside their apparent hatred for each other long enough to release more than one new track every ten years.

I’m a college professor. As such, I don’t have much of a fear of public speaking at this point in my life. I am, however, pretty introverted.

Why does every extrovert seem to think they can wololo us into also being extroverts? I’m fine, big dawg—I promise lol.

When/if we ever build a Dyson sphere, mark my words--that fucking thing will just be boiling water.

The place where I come from is a small town. They think so small, they use small words, but not me, I'm smarter than that. I worked it out—I've been stretching my mouth to let those big words come right out.

Goddamn, @chess.com

Submitted an anonymous proposal to my department to teach a course titled "Vectors for Philosophers" and got an email the next day like "this was you weisberg right?"

Yes, JD. Let’s ask them if they think a stay at home mom, avowed Christian, and widow of a veteran deserved to be shot in the face and left to bleed out in her own car after dropping her 6-year-old off at school, for the crime of looking out for her neighbors. Let’s ask everyone running for office.

Definitely picking this one up.

לא בשמים היא

I have been accustomed to a stubborn disposition that admits it wish its history disassembled.

My grandmother was a Polish Jew born in 1932 and saw some "hard times" that I'm sure you can extrapolate. Did anyone else with family who went through these times pick up a lot of odd habits and/or behaviors you assumed were normal until you got older?

The Biggest Breakthroughs in Mathematics: 2025 YouTube video by Quanta Magazine

It was a big year for mathematics. youtu.be/hRpcWpAeWng

Unexpected email from Jonny Griffiths telling me there's a new 2026 update of his RISPS book, that's great investigations for impressionable A Level students. Download it now from www.risps.co.uk with links to Geogebra and Excel files
@jonny-griffiths.bsky.social

I tend to avoid talking about having Crohn's because chronic illness is just one thing I have to navigate and not part of my personality, but I noticed the company who makes my new biologic is called Organon. As a logician, that was kind of a fun coincidence! Maybe it's a good omen.

Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (great book btw) has so much Hebrew and Yiddish slang that he included a glossary in the back.

A few years ago my aunt threatened to revoke my Jew card because I hadn't seen Fiddler on the Roof (I still haven’t). I don’t like most musicals and 3.5 hours or whatever is more than I’m willing to commit to something I probably won’t like.

I’ve seen Schindler’s List and A Serious Man and I’ve read Michael Chabon novels. I feel that’s more than sufficient for my ethnically mandated media consumption.

Me to my friends (you know who you are, asshole) when they threaten to revoke my ethnic identity because I’ve never seen Eight Crazy Nights:

a man in a suit and sweater is standing in a parking lot with a man in sunglasses behind him . ALT: a man in a suit and sweater is standing in a parking lot with a man in sunglasses behind him .

Me to my wife: “That woman looks like she has her shit together.”

My four year old: “Daddy, do you have your shit together?”

If a mass of incompressible fluid is floating in space, subject only to its own gravity and centrifugal force, what shape will it adopt as its angular momentum is increased?

Initially, it will form an oblate spheroid, with two equal semi-axes shorter than its axis of rotation.

Correct. It's eschatology and that's all it's ever been. A bunch of ding dongs who think they're too special to die so this is the end times of their replacement religion.

That's probably what people with legitimacy in funding, lol. I rotate between 4 active tapes so I at least have 4 "generations" back at any point. Integrity is good in general. If stored properly it will outlive us for sure, but you do only get so many write cycles before you should retire a tape.

Yeah! No problem. It's a rabbit hole for sure. I'm in academia now, but when I was a researcher in industry, the head of IT at one of the companies I worked at used tape storage and he'd regularly take the tapes to a bank vault somewhere. That's how I learned about it.

I have scripts I’ve written to automate reproducing the easily found media in case it’s ever lost. I didn’t see much point in using expensive tape storage for that stuff.

In my use case, however, it’s great because I’m mostly making backups of research datasets, which are massive text files and text compresses extremely well. I do have a lot of personal media on my JBOD as well but I only back up the rare stuff and everything else is just catalogued.

It varies by generation, but my drive is LTO-6 (I think LTO-9 is the current gen) so each tape holds 2.5TB by default but can store up to* 6.25TB compressed.

The “up to” is doing a lot of heavy lifting because that assumes everything compresses well and not everything does.

I may have the most comprehensive set of tweets about #Qanon in existence. I scraped and catalogued (within guidelines at the time) every single mention across the standard hashtags and filtered them for quality. We’re talking many, many, MANY GB of this shit, just sitting in my JBOD and on tapes.

Not to mention gigantic datasets of tweets from before the Elon takeover I used in my grad school research that probably don’t exist anymore and I’m not sure what I can even legally with it since the TOS there are now completely fucked up.

It’s not quite done, but I’m pretty happy with my progress on the 10” mini rack I designed and printed for my #homelab #server setup.

And yes. That is a tape drive lol. Part of my 3-2-1 backup strategy. I’m collecting a lot of data from cosmic radiation and #SDR and I don’t want to lose it.