George Budd

Overdue introduction: Hi! I’m George, I’m a coffee-swilling programmer by trade. I’m a volunteer EMT which is the greatest job you’ll never get paid for. I serve one cat, am friends with one dog, father of one awesome daughter, and fiancé to one awesome woman. I should practice more guitar

Today I was working on a new feature and I think I spent 50% of my time rolling around in my chair through my office thinking of the most optimal way of doing it I'm a lazy coder; if I can avoid writing superfluous code, I will

he stole that from John Swartzwelder, of The Simpsons! But it remains the best writing advice anyone ever gave share.google/VFWuBmbg5uEl...

holy smokes, conan strikes up a chat with a random lady on the subway and she immediately starts riffing on his level, no problem.

Not every day you see a full set getting towed

Trust me: whatever you’re doing right now is less important than watching this candidate interview. No spoilers, just trust:

THREAD. A story, in 20 photos and captions, about a uniquely wonderful cat, who has improved my life considerably over the last few years...

Shipping code where the lunar landing engine burn control is named BURN BABY BURN is gangster as hell. github.com/chrislgarry/...

i was fortunate enough to profile Margaret Hamilton in 2019. A really kind and curious person. This was my favorite story she told me:

This picture will always be iconic. RIP Margaret Hamilton who wrote the software that successfully guided NASA’s Apollo missions through the moon.

A lovely article on a phenomenal film that's been a constant source of inspiration throughout my entire life! ❤️ There's a loneliness that comes with working on an original project that's conveyed incredibly well here, as well as the importance of inspiration & education alongside the production.

We don’t spend enough time talking about just how WEIRD all these people are. This is just an incredibly weird and insecure thing to say. Imagine any other SecDef ever being this weird and insecure?!

The craziest compound-impurity story I’ve ever heard:

An Amtrak work crew clipped the new fiber optic cable the feds put in last year, linking air traffic control systems in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Flights were grounded for much of the day.

I understand that everything is really fucked up, but I implore you to stop telling people not to make jokes about it. We are hanging on by a thread and some of us have no other means of coping.

Once again, I must point to the official statement from Toyota. www.nytimes.com/2001/11/23/a...

I guess we're doing 9/11 posts early this year. The thing that I have the hardest time conveying to my emergency management students when I teach the 9/11 response (they were not born yet) is that it simply broke everyone's brains.

Charlotte Wainwright restoring and saving old/ancient books. www.wainwrightbookbinding.com

I fell into a little rabbit hole this morning... I've been doing some fallout modeling, and it occurred to me to ask whether swapping out a U-238 tamper in a thermonuclear secondary for a U-235 one, as some modern US TN weapon designs are alleged to do, would change the intensity of fallout.

The A's just did one of the coolest things I've seen in their broadcast: Just unfiltered audio of the live director calling a Lawrence Butler plate appearance...that went about as well as they could have hoped for.

I really cannot think of a greater honor than to have the Muppets say this about you upon your passing

This girl I used to waitress with in Austin, we moved to New York together in 2003 on a literal Greyhound bus. Shared a fifth floor walk-up studio that, when it rained, had more leaks in the ceiling than we had pots and pans. We used to get drunk and smoke off the fire escape and do “sad-offs.”

people are racing on the freak bikes in minneapolis as the crowd pelts them with tennis balls and cans of beer

I want to talk about the USS Abraham Lincoln (and her relief by the GW) in terms of strategic risk, readiness, and morale. For those curious about high level military decision making, you might be surprised by how much time (should) is spent discussing risk. Let’s talk “risk to mission” first. 1/

Computer scientist Margaret Hamilton coined the term “software engineer.” She directed the Software Engineering Division at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab & led development of the on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo Guidance Computer. She was born #OTD in 1936 & turns 90 today! #WomenInSTEM

We often like to make fun of the US system of units for having (had) both a “survey foot” and a standard foot in ratio ~1.000002 (or exactly 500000/499999), but let me remind everyone that until a few years ago there were two “volts”, “ohms”, “amperes”, etc.: …

Zone Rouge: An Area of France So Badly Damaged By WW1 That People Are Still Forbidden To Live There More about it: brilliantmaps.com/zone-rouge/

Wastewater update. Warning, I’m going to reveal information about an INDIVIDUAL from wastewater surveillance, and I’m even going to reveal their name without their permission. This is usually frowned upon. 1/

😻😻😻

At this instant in 1945 (11:02 AM August 9, local time), Fat Man—a 21-kiloton implosion-type atomic bomb weighing 10,265 lbs—exploded ~1,650 feet over Nagasaki, missing its intended aim point by 1.3 miles but still killing an estimated 70,000 men, women, and children and injuring some 60,000 more.

From somebody who has rescued people off the near-top of Denali: If you climb halfway up a mountain,you still climbed up a mountain, y'all. go back to the car.

THREAD: When we talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we typically focus on August 6 and August 9. But August 8, 1945, is also one of the most important dates for understanding those unprecedented attacks. (This is an approved adaptation of a Twitter thread written by @wellerstein.bsky.social in 2020.)

Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts are amazing even now. He animated the sequence by himself for more than four months -- without computers or even an easy way to check his work. We're looking into how he did it: animationobsessive.substack.com/p/how-ray-ha...

For context, this guy demanded that THV Satellite strike her White Ensign, and now all Trinity House vessels carry a letter to explain our authority to do so*. No one has in the 130+ years since, but we're ready, and we're not striking our colours because some jumped up RN officer pushes their luck.

Penicillin was not, in fact, the first antibiotic.

All error messages should be copyable. I'm so bored of having to transcribe some arcane error code just because some gobshite developer couldn't be arsed to find the setting to make their error messages appear as copyable text.

This www.youtube.com/live/8wyqhTG...