Saw someone wondering when the DOGE teens might stumble across the National Institute of Standards and Technology, accidentally throw out a mass standard and prevent us from ever knowing what an ounce is again, which reintroduced me to these beauties:^[1]

I have never smoked cigarettes and I have never had an interest in smoking cigarettes, but damn if I don’t wonder if a pack of these would fix what’s wrong with me.

Is it worth it for a non-smoker to order two cartons of unsmokable reference cigarettes to carry around as a bit in case someone asks to bum one? Certainly cheaper than dropping $1,200 on technical peanut butter.

I highly encourage you to peruse NIST’s entire catalog of reference materials [pdf] for calibrating machines, validating experiments, and just generally allowing industry to function. It’s almost like having an existent government is useful. Balm in another week trying to remind myself that just because the clown car goes very fast does not mean it isn’t full of clowns.

This bit from Matt Bruenig’s review of Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance really resonated:

I don’t personally understand why policy arguments need to be coupled with historical narratives to be compelling. If some aspect of the status quo is bad, then that is true regardless of whether it used to be less bad and regardless of how it got to be that way.

Took a few passes at figuring out enough SwiftUI to make the little app I made last year to fetch cycling stats out of HealthKit prettier. Pretty happy with the results:^[2]

Starting to see little bits of green on the ends of branches. I hope the plants don’t get fooled again this year.

The laser printer I bought in an effort to never need to buy another printer suddenly gave up on life. This is the last time I buy a product called – I shit you not – the HP Neverstop.