iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Young adult: Fret not; I'll fill up your low tire. Parent: Thank you! YA: Actually they were all low. Fixed now! P: Only one was low…? YA: The numbers on the driver's door pillar are for the factory tires. Your actual tires are stamped with "max 51 psi." P: 😬😬 YA: Also your suspension is terrible

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

There is a little mining town in West Virginia named Big Ugly. When my family was there in the 1980s there had been a murder there, and the newspaper headline was "Big Ugly Woman Kills Husband."

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I haven't identified the newspaper this came from, but the same essay was posted today on a Substack operated by the "Iosco County Dems." Tawas City is on the eastern shore of Michigan's Lower Peninsula.

U.S. can be described as an ‘Elective Autocracy’

Editor,

Under the U.S. Constitution, only Congress has the power to pass legislation and make new public law. Executive orders cannot create new law or appropriate funds; they only direct how existing law is administered.

Since January 2025, only 108 bills have passed through Congress. Meanwhile, approximately 300 executive orders have been signed, with roughly half being legislative in substance. Let that sink in. Political scientists have a term for a system where one person rules by decree while the legislature sits idle: an Elective Autocracy which might be closer to describing the United States today.

Here’s the concept: an elective autocracy is what happens when a country keeps the outward form of democracy – elections, a legislature, courts – but power actually concentrates in a single office. The vote still happens. The other branches still technically exist. But the real decisions are made by one person, unilaterally.

The Constitution was built to prevent exactly this. Congress legislates. The President executes. Courts interpret. Three separate powers, each checking the others. That’s the design – the complete opposite of autocracy.

So how do you get from a constitutional democratic republic to an elective autocracy? Not with a coup – all it takes is a little drift. A legislature passes fewer and fewer laws. An executive then fills that vacuum with orders, mandates and directives, one after another, on immigration, spending, regulation, whatever Congress won’t or doesn’t touch. Nothing about the system officially changes. You still vote. Congress still meets. But the actual lawmaking moves into one office.

That’s the mechanism of an elective autocracy: legitimacy borrowed from elections, power exercised like a decree-issuing executive. It doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates. This isn’t about any single leader – it’s about the structure that allows it. An elective autocracy doesn’t require anyone t…

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The choir director comes out. They are a Muppet: a human person, hunched under fake fur, arms high to operate head and hands. The choir watches the Muppet choir director, ignoring the human puppeteer. "This church isn't going to work for me," thinks my dream-self.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

In my dream, I am trying to find a new church. Maybe I have moved? Anyway, I've visited one that seems promising, but it's weird how much they talk about the spiritual lives of Muppets. The choir director comes out. They are a Muppet: a human person, head and shoulders under fake fur.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Everyone knows that "kablooie" is for literature; science goes "boink." [Watterson, 1991]

Two comic panels.

Dad: "What story would you like tonight, Calvin?"
Boy: "Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie!"

Two comic panels.

Tiger: "I'd hate to be accused of inhibiting scientific progress … here you go."
Button: BOINK

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

"let's write STUPIDLY TASTY on the inside of the beef jerky package" "what if someone opens it halfway to hold the food in the plastic while eating" "only a moron would do that"

A beef jerky wrapper is halfway open, with the word STUPID prominently visible on the inside.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Millions of generations of genetic separation in 10⁴ years of physical separation paints a horrifying picture of proto-Chihuahuas maturing and having a new litter two or three times a week. They'd be an impressive meat crop, though.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I have known this tune since forever, but it has never occurred to me that it came from a movie scene with baby elephants walking.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

For The Future by Wendell Berry (mostly) Planting trees early in spring, we make a place for birds to sing in time to come. How do we know? They are singing here now. There is no other guarantee that singing will ever be. The birds will consume you after you have been eaten by the worms.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

As a person with more than the average number of arms, I can sympathize.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Note that all astrophysical black holes are much colder than the cosmic microwave background. (IIRC a solar-mass black hole would have a Hawking temperature of about 70 nK; bigger black holes are colder.) Even an isolated BH is absorbing more than it emits; that's before nearby hot accretion disks.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

No Starks in the Nashville Symphony Chorus this season. But if your brother is singing under a name you should come hear the Bernstein this weekend, it's going to be amazing.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Ready to feel old? The "Equal Earth" projection doesn't appear in this list from 2012 because the projection was invented in 2018.

xkcd.com

Map Projections

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I have a choir conductor who says "command-ess!" whenever we do something particularly nice that he'd like to hear every time from now on. I lean over to the mathematician singing next to me and say "colon dubya queue" and we chuckle smugly.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Shelby Bottoms Park, Nashville, August 30.

A black butterfly perches on a red flower.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Honestly a big reason I stick with Emacs is that I still do lots of things in the terminal, and it's quicker and more robust to have the editor in the terminal, too. Maybe the next time I decide to switch editors I'll try that one — but it opened a GUI window and I went, "ugh, nope."

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I decide every two or three years that it's time to move to a more modern tool. So far the modern tools have always turned out to serve my purposes less well.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

If you want the Emacs spell-checker to not bother you about a correct word, are your options • [a]ccept for this session vs. [i]nsert into private dictionary • [a]dd to private dictionary vs. [i]gnore for this session Twenty-plus years with this tool, and I misremember every time.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I thought surely this was an error, because Hubble isn't far enough from Earth to see Saturn's south pole. I guess Saturn has just had its southgoing equinox, and the image crew is doing a ton of deconvolution of our mostly side-on view?

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

It's currently labeled "adult content, does not include nudity," which is baffling. I guess it does include adults?

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

A "plucky chicken" invites some punnily frightening mental images in a book about bird cousins without feathers. Maybe when you kid-ify your mammals book, an unreliable narrator: a bald-faced orangutan? Pushing the boundary of politeness: a waxy beaver explains castoreum and scent marking?

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

The orang is probably a beautification advocate on her HOA board

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Discussing an acquaintance who arrived the US as a child on a refugee visa. This young adult needs to renew their driver's license. The discussion is whether a US citizen should go with them to the DMV so that, if they disappear, someone will know about it. Not a "land of the free" discussion.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

If you were standing on the Moon, in the dark shadow, Earth would cover the Sun and most of the corona. But you would see sunlight bent through Earth's atmosphere: a ring of reds and golds, every dawn and dusk on the planet, all at once.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I considered having more children but a library card was cheaper

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The Imagination Library program stops sending you books if your kids are older than five.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

To be fair, nuclear physicists generally have the source at hand, while astrophysicists usually do not.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I knew the names for "CamelCase" and "snake_case", but only today have I encountered the name for "kebab-case".

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

[recursive epistemology hat] seems presumptuous to presume there isn't another way we haven't yet invented but that scientific evidence will suggest we should use instead

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Do you mean the history of that sense of the word? Or is the answer that "according to" would have been too many characters for this post?

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

The "Glance" advertising tool for lockscreens on Motorola phones crosses the line from "dark patterns" to "malware." Unacceptable. I submitted a "policy violation" complaint in addition to this dumb review, but I'm not optimistic.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I read a great book about ten years ago (Walker's "Why We Sleep") which put this in a new light for me. We like to say things like "while you're sleeping your brain consolidates memories." But I came away from the book with a simpler perspective: sleeping is what memory consolidation **feels like**.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Right, that was your intended point. The "actually whales are fish" comment was made by somebody else. I wrote something different from that, but you were distracted by a name you didn't like.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Me: Wow, a hand-addressed envelope! With a handwritten letter on blue-lined paper inside! Letter: would you like to be a Jehovah's Witness

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

You've made in interesting point, but I'm not sure it's the point you intended to make. Cheers.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Me: [pastes a Shakespeare couplet into a document] Copilot: Hey, I can tighten up that writing for you!

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Book recommendation: Dawkins's "The Ancestor's Tale" The "whippomorpha" (a good search term) are ungulates, though without proper hooves. Whales are closer to trout than trout are to sharks. The common feature is skeletons. Sharks diverged during the era of only cartilage; we invented bone.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

It took me a while to parse this, because of the strange way that The Economist has labeled their coordinates in the plot. The way to read it is: the relationship between homework scores and exam scores in the non-chatbot group is linear, but the relationship in the chatbot group definitely isn't.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Desk drawers count as "shelves" in this context.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I have a foolproof method for locating lost items like this. What you do is go to the store and purchase a replacement item, then bring the replacement home and put it on the shelf next to the lost one.

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rob mahurin @robtasm.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Hmmm, my system fonts do not distinguish СССР from CCCP. Perhaps I have missed the joke. Or perhaps you would enjoy this sixty-minute talk about what exactly "plain text" means, which explains, among other things, the title of the Billy Joel concert album "kohuept".

youtu.be

Plain Text - Dylan Beattie - NDC Copenhagen 2022

YouTube video by NDC Conferences

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