iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Brook was named after Haskell Brooks Curry She unfortunately has one brain cell that is working very hard! Anyways in an another life where she was granted human status she'd be posting LinkedIn slop because that's what you do with one brain cell

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

And most of these gurus talk about something big. Complex social systems. Biology. Computational science. And my part of studying small parts of that is carefully talking about things and having lots of caveats. Or, my experience studying in a nutshell;

Tumblr post by user gerardwaist: "people b saying things so definitively. like man i think it depends"

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The sizes of introductory math and calculus courses at the University of California system have not measurably increased since the introduction of SAT-optional admissions (2020-26). However, preparatory mathematics courses have increased while rates of D/F/Withdrawing/Not Passing has exploded.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Education systems, like many complex systems, defy simple panaceas. Education policy needs to grabble with multifactorial influences on education outcomes — it hasnt. I did some of my graduate research on this subject and worked as a statistician at Ed, so I'll beat this drum endlessly, really.

Slides from "A Nation at Risk?" (2022) talk by Lucille E. Nguyen, graduate research in educational statistics.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Just pick up one of the Thompson(s) and learn it, skill issue frfr

Silvanus P Thompson and Martin Gardner's Calculus Made Easy

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Slaps the roof of historical acts: this baby can fit so much of "the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself." (Marx, The German Ideology)

Salesman selling a car meme. A man in a suit stands in front of a car, talking to a man with a pensive expression.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I did my master's thesis on the Akaike Information Criterion and am, I suspect, the only person in the world to have it tattooed on me. So I am always happy to see it applied. ft. Brook (after Haskell Brooks Curry) the cat

Brook, a black cat named after the logician and mathematician Haskell Brooks Curry, sniffs a hand. The wrist of the hand is tattooed with the Akaike Information Criterion equation, AIC = 2k - 2 ln L.

A palm and upper forearm proximal to the wrist is pictured. The wrist of the hand is tattooed with the Akaike Information Criterion, AIC = 2k - 2 ln L.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

My crank theory of transnational housing modernity? Housing appreciating faster than most forms of capital, and everyone from the US to France to China. NIMBYism is the sign of modernity, in rising housing as a share of wealth. And then HOAs in the US and Hukou in China exists to protect it.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

> 50 years of stability 50 years ago we were 3 years away from the Iranian Revolution and 4 years away from the Iraq-Iran War. Anyone who thinks that 50 years of stability in geopolitics is even possible in this domain — well, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell them.

Real and nominal imported costs for oil, 1965-2005, Energy Information Agency. Shows price spikes from 1970-1980 and 1998-2005.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Important question! The electrolysis of water to gain hydrogen is an option, but the cost range is higher because electrolysis energy costs to get hydrogen from water, which the Royal Academy of Sciences estimates to be 85% of total costs.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

Run from it, hide from it, the Haber-Bosch Process comes for you all the same.

A chart describing the ammonia generation process through the Haber-Bosch process.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

I mean my quip was Boserupian, that societies across the globe have adapted to population pressure with agricultural intensification, and this is a long-run trend across societies.

Routledge version by Ester Boserup's book The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

Average weekly hours worked have been decreasing for private nonfarm weekly average hours worked since Q4 1981, punctuated by recessions. There's some interesting recent research on this issue.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

The owners of farms who lament the costs of automation overwhelmingly rely on low-wage, high precarity workers who are often undocumented, disadvantaged, and desperate for employment of any sort. Farm wages are overwhelmingly less than nonfarm wages, especially non-supervisory wages.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

Throughout industrialized nations, there's been a long-run decline in hours worked annually. This time is, in fact, used on leisure and other non-work activities. This has been concurrent with mechanization, automated manufacturing, and the decline in agricultural share of total employment.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

The trees speak Vietnamese and so too does the girl who straps your girlfriend down

A meme of the Lorax, wearing a us military forest camouflage helmet, saying "I am the Lorax And I speak for the trees. The trees speak Vietnamese"

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

I was born today! I spent the last few days in Avalon, Santa Catalina Island to celebrate.

A view of the Bay from the hills of Avalon, Santa Catalina Island, California. Boats are parked on the left and the Casino is visible.

A view of the Bay from the hills of Avalon, Santa Catalina Island, California. Boats are parked on the right and buildings are visible on the left.

A view of the Casino on Avalon, Santa Catalina Island, California.

A selfie of Lucille Eleanor Nguyen wearing a bike helmet at a green Georgetown University tee shirt. It is sunny and she is wearing polarized sunglasses.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

Accountability is the best aesthetic. (or don't trust the AIs to make decisions, folks, always double check)

Lucille Nguyen wearing a tee shirt wearing "A Computer Can Never Be Held Accountable, Therefore A Computer Must Never Make A Management Decision."

IBM 1970s training slide noting "A Computer Can Never Be Held Accountable, Therefore A Computer Must Never Make A Management Decision."

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

We are losing our connection to the old texts, smh

Haskell Brooks Curry's book, Outlines of a Formalist Philosophy of Mathematics. Part of North-Holland Publishing Company's Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, edited by Brouwer, Beth, and Heyting.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

The newest member of my household, Brook! She's a shy little black kitty.

Photo of a black cat. Her name is Brook.

Photo of a black cat playing with a toy. Her name is Brook.

Photo of a black cat under a dresser. Her name is Brook.

Photo of a black cat hiding underneath a dresser. Her name is Brook.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

The Makkhawan Rangsan Bridge and Sala Daeng intersection are burned into my mind. And I hope that the American people don't have similar images burned into theirs, but I have a creeping suspicion that they might soon learn those same hard lessons.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

I always remember the line in the West Wing when the president's advisor is told that he committed a war crime fighting in Vietnam bombing a civilian plant, when he asks why he was told about it. "All wars are crimes."

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

I was in-country in 2010 when the Thai military fired on the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship at the Makkhawan Rangsan Bridge. Cruel April and Savage May are burned into my memory. And I will say this: it can happen here.

Thai Type 85 APCs during 2010 Thai political protest. Sourced from https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thai_Type_85_APCs_during_2010_Thai_political_protests.jpg#mw-jump-to-license

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

People always forget that there was a famine from 1975-83, as collective farming failed in Vietnam! The number of functioning tractors in the Mekong Delta fell by 76%! Even the fervent communists I know from living in Vietnam call it "the terrible starving times."

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

Some American people are really weird about Asian people ngl, especially if they view said people as being contrary to their established political narratives.

Twitter user @bigsnugga tweets "the menswear guy never talks about why his family had to leave vietnam but i can take some guesses"

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Same vibe as: breaking news I managed to get my calculator to display this NSFW content, can you believe we let kids use these in our schools?

A Texas Instruments BA II Plus Calculator with entry "8008135".

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

Hell, you can run a distilled R1 8B with just 7GB VRAM (performance will suffer but y'know). And the recent Gemma 3 int4 quantization means that you can run them on a laptop GPU.

GPU VRAM required to load Gemma 3 weights chart from Google for Developers

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

The biblical Cain has been occasionally depicted as twinkish

Emanuel Krescenc Liška "Cain" painting, circa 1885

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

Anyways, color me skeptical that a court with justices (Gorsuch) who write uniformed claptrap like this on basic statistical regression knows enough about AI, markets, or technology to be able to determine the finer details here.

Neil Gorsuch writing "normally we would have a regression analysis that would disaggregate the potential cause and identify to a 95th percentile degree what the reason is..."

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

As an ex-Catholic I love poking my head in like this:

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Real industrial work actually means manning a metal press repetitively screwing holes into sheet metal while your boss gets a meeting every few days by people who know these books like the back of their hand:

A photo of the book Understanding Variation: The Key To Managing Chaos by Donald J Wheeler.

A photo of the book The Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook.

A photo of the textbook Understanding Statistical Process Control by Donald J Wheeler and David S Chambers.

A photo of the statistics textbook Time Series Analysis: Forecasting and Control by George E.P. Box and Gwilym M. Jenkins.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

Unironically: Tesla as a company doesn't need more automated manufacturing, they need a couple of these engineers walking around with slide rules whose entire career is taking a part from 0.08mm to 0.03mm potential deviation over and over again.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

It was delightfully paired with a Guillame Gonnet Le Sauvage Vacqueras rouge, a Grenache-Syrah-Mourvedre-Cinsault mix grown in vineyards at the foot of the Dentelle de Montmirail. The soil of the region is sandy and stony with some clay-limestone, giving a very unique flavor for Rhône Valley wines.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

I made an herb-crusted rack of lamb over pommes puree with a Malbec-Port based lamb sauce with roasted green beans.

A picture of a herb-crusted rack of lamb over pommes puree with a Malbec-Port based lamb sauce with roasted green beans. One pork chop is in center, over pommes puree and green beans in the background.

A picture of a herb-crusted rack of lamb over pommes puree with a Malbec-Port based lamb sauce with roasted green beans. The green beans are in focus in the center, and the lamb chop is in the background on top of pommes puree.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

What kind of rationality? I echo Herb Simon here:

Herbert Simon on Substantive and Procedural Rationality

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

Drawing back to Herbert Simon's decision-making model, part of the designing a possible choice of action involves invention. And a cultivated, cultured mind has more options in front of them to invent choices.

A diagram of Herbert SImon's 3 stages of decision making.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

Advocating reductionism in their "Units of Exchange) section as a cognitive frame is incredibly limiting, actually, especially in a world of complex phenomena, fat tails, and the ability to create random phenomena from simple generators. emphasizing tractability is, I believe, a wrong end.

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

I have major disagreements with the CFAR handbook! For example, (using the January 2021 one): Implicit in their introduction to heuristics and biases is the idea of "prone to be making the wrong connections" when negative heuristics are in fact controversial in real-world scenarios.

When we make decisions and analyze information, we tend to move back
and forth between two broad kinds of thought—one faster, more automatic,
and more closely tied to our emotions, and the other slower, more effortful,
and more closely tied with our explicit thoughts and beliefs. In his book
Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman described
them as System 1 and System 2...

Each “system” is complex, made up of a variety of parts, and neither is
perfect. Our knee-jerk, automatic processes are prone to making the wrong
connections—if a new acquaintance resembles an old enemy, you may find
yourself feeling anxious or cold without really knowing why. Our deliberate,
explicit processes can fail by leaving out information—if you can’t put a
fleeting feeling of unease into words, you may be tempted to disregard it,
and exclude it from your calculations.

From the Handbook of the Center for Applied Rationality

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

The details about the Catholic bishops' message is hilarious:

On 28 November, 1,466 South Korean Catholic priests called for Yoon to be impeached. They issued a declaration titled "How can a person be like this" (어째서 사람이 이 모양인가), and claimed that "he is a scarecrow of private interests who has no idea what he does or who he is and handed over the authority entrusted to him by the people to his wife".

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 07/11/2024

They just corrected it on DDHQ, someone there must have realized the error from all the attention:

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L. Eleanor "Moose" Nguyen @moosewin.bsky.social · 07/11/2024

Yeah, that's my working assumption. The total CA Registration report on Oct 15 is less than the number of votes reported for Harris alone from DDHQ.

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