iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 28/09/2026

This correlation is so high that I didn't believe it until I pulled the data myself! (BTW, r=0.849, including DC). The Spearman rho is 0.874! 0.874! Everything is gender.

Recreation of plot of Trump % of total vote in 2024, versus Google Trends "testosterone booster" results by state in year 2024.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 16/09/2026

I once went down a rabbit hole trying to understand how property tax gets distributed post-Prop 13, and found that staffers had 90 minutes to solve a massive tax crisis, resulting in the most complex system I've ever seen in practice. www.californiacityfinance.com/ElledgePrope...

Text screenshot highlighting "Mac's factor" from https://www.californiacityfinance.com/ElledgePropertyTax06.pdf

Special District Augmentation Fund (SDAF).
The California legislature created the Special District Augmentation Fund in AB 8 to
maintain the authority of boards of supervisors and city council to continually determine
the distribution of block grant payments to special districts solely within their boundaries.
A conference committee, convened to find a solution to the continuing financial troubles
of local governments, gave its staff members one-and-a-half hours during lunch to
develop alternative methods for allocating special district money. The legislative staffers
ate lunch at Original Mac’s restaurant in downtown Sacramento. The formula developed
and written on a napkin was immediately dubbed the “Mac’s Factor”. (O’Brien, 1985, pp.2-3)

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 02/09/2026

It's honestly eery how the dates in investment line up with current events...

Plot of 12-month change in private investment, by category, with markers for Senate passage of the USICA (CHIPS precursor), CHIPS and IRA acts, Trump's election, and then mass tariffs in 2025.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 02/09/2026

Election day merely stalled manufacturing investment. It took the Trump Tariffs to cause massive /decreases/ in manufacturing investment.

Same plot of changes in private investment, with date markers added for Election Day 2024 and Apr 2, 2025, when massive changes in tariff policies were announced by Trump.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 17/08/2026

After weeks of brow-beating Claude about "load-bearing," I finally got it to self censor: "already load-bear– already central..."

Screenshot of Claude conversation: "Option 2 is the low-friction one if Forgejo is already load-bear— already central to your workflow. Caveat: issues/PRs opened on Tangled live in atproto records and won't sync back to Forgejo."

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 30/06/2026

Oh, I didn't know about that source, thanks! I've been looking at FMR from HUD, it would be great to correlate to other listing data, as the FMR comes from a 2023 rent study done by the local housing authority, and that study is not very accessible.

California counties in a scatter plot, HUD 2-bedroom Fair Market Rent (FMR) versus county-level Area Median Income for a 4-person household. Santa Cruz County is an outlier with the highest FMR of any county, far out of line with its AMI.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 11/06/2026

Just how bad is housing affordability in Santa Cruz? Median house prices are currently 9.3x the median wage here, and though housing prices fluctuate, the average increase is 1.2% per year. Can any social scientists comment on my use of FHFA house price data and SAIPE household income?

Plot of price-to-income ratio of housing in Santa Cruz County, from 1990 to 2024. Housing prices come from FHFA (ATNHPIUS42100Q), income from SAIPE (MHICA06087A052NCEN). There are wide fluctuations due to housing boom and bust, but the trend is from a ratio of 6.3x in 1990 to 9.3x in 2024.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 05/06/2026

Santa Cruz County is so NIMBY that it even $117k/year for a single person is considered "low-income." SC wages are far lower than SF or Silicon Valley, but HUD has to apply a special correction for exceptional housing-cost-to-income ratio. Even a median incomes qualifies for subsidized housing!

Table of 2026 HCD income bands for affordable and subsidized housing in Santa Cruz county. The "low income" cutoffs are all significantly higher than the "median income" line.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 05/06/2026

For a picture of where SF could be if it NIMBYed as hard as Santa Cruz: the *median* income is below the low income cutoff, because housing is so scarce and rare that HUD has to perform an income adjustment to mean any sort of market rents.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 05/06/2026

It's 1-person versus 4-person households. It comes from the 2026 PDF here: www.hcd.ca.gov/funding/inco...

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 27/04/2026

The US isn't Norway, our EVs won't work in our cold weather and we are a major fossil fuel producer. Pic unrelated.

Norwegian oil rig, icy sea and mountains, and the northern lights.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 20/04/2026

There was a time when the dictatorial and punitive power of Steve Jobs ensured that Apple would never let this sort of "I have two Outlooks" problem persist:

macOS Finder listing of two different Numbers.app programs right next to each other.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 23/01/2026

The US's massive clean energy manufacturing boom is being cancelled. If the US wants to catch up, US manufacturing needs to have the scale to compete on the global stage. We need more action to avert the worst climate disasters. www.canarymedia.com/articles/cle...

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 12/01/2026

Not Yakov of course, but just to share a great resource, here's two random pin drops from globalsolaratlas.info. Winter is significantly better in NY than in Germany.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 12/01/2026

Finance, like CNN, loves to be conned

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 11/01/2026

I think the tides might be turning on this in the grid community. These German modelers think new baseload is unnecessary for the future: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Summary

The transition to decarbonized energy systems has fueled a controversial debate over the necessity of traditional “baseload” power. Skepticism remains regarding the reliability and economic feasibility of power systems relying mainly on cheap variable renewable energy (VRE) sources. Addressing this, the German Academies' project “Energy Systems of the Future” (ESYS) analyzed the role of baseload power plants within a decarbonized, continental-scale energy system. Their findings indicate that a secure, net-zero European electricity system is technically robust and economically viable when based on VRE paired with extensive flexibility, storage, and grid interconnections, without requiring new baseload capacity. The integration of new low-carbon baseload technologies, such as nuclear fission or fusion, natural gas with carbon capture and storage (CCS), or geothermal energy, has a marginal impact on overall system costs. While low-cost baseload technologies could be efficiently integrated to achieve high utilization, their future role is contingent on achieving cost reductions beyond current realities.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 18/11/2025

Great talk by @erika-alden.bsky.social at #Scverse2025 on what's the next PDB? What is PDB? It's the protein database that underlies the recent protein folding Nobel Prize and billions in recent biotech investments. Unlike other big science, PDB was an organic effort of $10B of separate grants.

Slide from a talk showing big science projects from physics: James Webb ($10B), CERN ($5B), Perseverance Mars lander ($2.7B), Hubble ($10B), Expanded Very Large Array ($2B).

Below:,Life Science: Human Genome Project ($2.7B), Protein Data Bank ($10B). (Note that PDB is not a coordinated centralized funding mechanism, but an organic effort, collecting $10B worth of work)

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 10/11/2025

I wouldn't start today! Here's all I can find online. Maybe the print editors are better

NYTimes coverage of Russia's war in Ukraine for Nov 10, 2025. Articles are titled "The Village Where Draft-Age Men Have Mostly Vanished," "Anti-Corruption Agencies Double Down Despite Pressure From Zelensky", "Escaping Ukraine's Front Lines", "Sanctions on Russia", and "Ukraine Gamifies the War"

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 04/11/2025

Don't hear that because it's not true. Water usage has dropped as population grows. Replacing inefficient infrastructure with water efficient housing is a much bigger effect. Here's my city, typical of every city I've examined: andthewest.stanford.edu/wp-content/u...

Plots of population and water usage from 1951 to 2020, titled "Santa Cruz decouples water use from population growth." Population has tripled since 1951, even as water usage decreased significantly since 2000.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 29/10/2025

The true abundance agenda. youtu.be/mBEA7PKDmiY

Scatter plot of countries, showing happiness versus metal bands per million. There is a positive correlation.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 29/10/2025

I really like what I'm reading in that thread, but have you ever considered becoming *more* of a lunatic?

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 20/10/2025

Saw this great summary of local politics recently

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 04/10/2025

Ця тема правильна, але я не дублю цей шітпост. Він надто світлий для дуже темної теми. www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-to-t...

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 08/07/2025

Just need a vacancy tax on these vacant units...

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 03/07/2025

See also this video from the same group. In my opinion they do a great job of advocating in favor of SB 79! It's beautiful. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ETh...

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 05/06/2025

Apple's new Mail categorization of emails is putting super-obvious scams directly into my inbox and marking them as "Important". Apple's AI slop integration is setting back security by decades. A basic Bayesian classifier from 2003 would recognize this scam, but AI tries to trick me.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 27/04/2025

Also, I love the more recent related headlines. The US has *zero* clue about the Australian sub stuff so Trump saying this is pretty plausible.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 09/04/2025

OK, I think this means that you avoid the corncob fate, but also that you should probably start a fund

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 02/04/2025

Great new label for the tin where I do comp bio, from @agapakis.com

Photo of a "Radical Biotech" sticker on a laptop

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 23/03/2025

I'm reminded of several stories housing blocked here, behind an 83 foot hotel, on a private parking lot that I have never seen more than 50% full. The Coastal Commission even protects parking spots not open to the public!

Map image depicting location of housing blocked by the Coastal Commission.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 08/03/2025

In their current incarnation, they are the most marvelous information retrieval machines we have concocted. Some of the hallucinations I've seen in code, where they borrow from one library to make a different library more useful, should become feature requests on the original library, IMHO.

Meme of Scooby Doo "let's see who you really are," with the masked ghost as "General Artificial Intelligence" and the unmasked ghost as "Information Retrieval"

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 31/12/2024

It was very important to not disturb the nests of gulls! I guess we know how the Coastal Commission answers the Trolley Problem

The Trolley Problem meme, depicting a trolley on track to kill five people on the tracks. A bystander has a hand on a switch to divert the trolley to only kill one person on the alternate track.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 04/12/2024

When your R package is *exceptionally* well documented, I guess it becomes >99% HTML and <1% R. 🧬 🖥️ github.com/ChanghanGitH...

GitHub Languages summary for the exFINDER repository, showing 99.1% of the code as HTML and 0.9% of the code as R.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 29/11/2024

There certainly are some small hotspots of red in the upper left corner here... If you're open to PRs I'd be happy to share.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 20/11/2024

If you use #jupyter, then you probably use tabular data, and you should try out quak with a simple `%load_ext quak`. It's a great way to do simple data profiling on a new set of data. Here's a screenshot of CIViC, useful in cancer #genomics. 🧬 & 🖥️ github.com/manzt/quak

The quak jupyter widget for exploring data tables. Atop each column is a histogram or categorical barplot, which acts as a filtering widget.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 18/11/2024

Nothing like backing a sentence with 46 cited works! (SMARCAD1 is frequently mutated in cancer, but like most chromatin associated proteins, the literature is extensive and very complex. I'm looking forward to reading this paper)

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 13/11/2024

Honestly the convenience of getting from Legoland to downtown San Diego like this, rather than cramped in a car, is worth the additional timing inconvenience. But things could be better!

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 06/11/2024

Very interesting preprint evaluating single-cell RNA data as a way to find good drug targets. #genomics #scrna www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 05/12/2023

Wait. Sorry, that was a more recent request. I really gotta stop bringing weird baggage from that other site here, though...

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 05/12/2023

Paul E Williams was advocating using bonds to fund public housing improvements in NYC.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 05/12/2023

One thing about being a renter in the US is that there's almost never an enforcement mechanism against landlords who break the law. For improper evictions, the only "enforcement" is a failed eviction.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 28/11/2023

Currently imagining a better future...

Neo: What are you trying to tell me, that you want to take my car away?

Morpheus: no, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when we're done, you won't need it.

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Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 15/08/2023

As ridiculous as building an above-ground high capacity system for cars is, trying to do this underground is even more ridiculous, in proportion to the extra expense.

Infographic comparing the width of thoroughfare needed to carry 50,000 people per hour:

Cars: 175m
Buses: 35m
Metro: 9m

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