California Wolf Project releases their 2024 report

The California Wolf Project is a relatively new effort operated by the University of California's Berkeley and Davis campuses to do serious study of the state of affairs when it comes to wolves in California.

What?!?? you may say, are there actually wolves in California?

Yes, actually, there are (although I've certainly never seen any). Wolves re-entered California more than a decade ago, after nearly a century of absence from the state, as part of the splintering of a wolf pack that roamed the high desert of Oregon. The wolves in California occupy the parts of the state that are both:

• extremely rural and sparsely populated
• supportive of an ecosystem in which wolves can find both reliable sources of food and minimal human contact.

For now, as illustrated on the project's 2024 annual report, this means mostly the high plateaus of far north-eastern California.

I've followed the recovery of wolf populations in the high country of the far west for most of my lifetime; the California Wolf Project seems like they will be an excellent contributor to our knowledge of how we are co-habiting with these fascinating animals.

The Duolingo employee handbook is surprisingly good

Have you read the Duolingo employee handbook?

It's really remarkably good, and it's also not dry. I think that second point is really important: over my career, I've participated in at least a dozen of these attempts to write down engineering culture in a way that explains what is good and what is toxic. It's really hard to do this without being bland and dull. Bland and dull means "unread", and so I think the first goal of any employee handbook has to be: get the employees to read this thing! The Duolingo Handbook accomplishes that.

I really liked the little interlude about the Super Bowl advertisement.

When debates broke out over the “right amount of butt” to show, we knew we had a winning idea.

On a more serious note, here's a section that I strongly agree with. My current company spends a lot of time trying to reinforce this same idea, and I know how hard it can be to do this properly. Engineering processes typically involve a lot of review, which means a lot of feedback, which means you need to be thinking about this:

The standard here is “hard on the work, easy on the people.” That means giving constructive, clear feedback that sharpens ideas without undermining relationships. (We stick to the “what,” not the “who.”) It also means being open to receiving feedback and not taking it personally. This candid, constructive approach allows us to hold each other to high standards while fostering trust and collaboration.

If you're involved with engineering culture at your company, you would find it time well spent to read the Duolingo handbook.

WikiTok is clever!

https://wikitok.vercel.app/ is extremely simple, but also surprisingly clever and addictive.

All it does (I think) is:

• Call Wikipedia's "special:random" tool to find a random Wikipedia page.
• Fetch that page and summarize it with an image and a short textual summary
• Display that on your screen.
• Wait for you to scroll down and do it again.

Poof! Endless scrolling of random Wikipedia articles.

Olive the Labrador is 8 weeks old ...

... it's been eighteen years since we had a puppy; I've forgotten everything I thought I once knew.

Time to start learning again!

OUSD lead levels status

I was not paying attention, and did not understand the severity of the problems with lead levels in drinking water in the Oakland Unified School District schools.

OUSD maintain some information on their web site here.

Reading through the site, it's clear that this has been a long, slow effort:

• August 2017: OUSD inquired about district-wide water quality testing through a state-funded program administered by East Bay MUD (EBMUD).
• On Feb 28, 2018 the Board of Education adopted Board Policy 3511.3 Clean Drinking Water. This policy requires the district to replace or remediate sources of consumable water that contain lead levels higher than 5 ppb. Previously, the district had been adhering to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommended action level of 15 ppb.
• March, 2022: Work order for repair and retesting (these fixtures were taken out of service and are awaiting repair).

So after five years (three of those years covered the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, when surely progress was slow, work was still required to repaire and retest water fixtures known to be delivering dangerously high levels of lead.

Several more years passed until last summer the city revealed that there were still massive breakdowns in the project.

• The protocols previously established were not followed as there were gaps in communication, workflow, and the ability to conduct testing and communicate properly with more sites being tested in the Spring of 2024.
• An average of 62 days of communication gaps has been identified between the testing date and notification to department and sites of the schedule and status of the quality testing process.
• The realization of this failure occurred August 10, 2024

Six more months have passed, but this week we heard that the district is deploying water filtering systems into a number of schools, funded by some (welcome!) private donations:

Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry and his wife, Ayesha Curry, are helping public schools in Oakland where high levels of lead plague water systems and pose health hazards to students.

The power couple’s nonprofit organization, Eat. Learn. Play., announced on Wednesday that it donated more than half a million dollars to rapidly install water filtration stations across 60 elementary, middle and high schools this school year.

Elevated lead levels were found in nearly 200 fountains and faucets at Oakland Unified School District buildings during testing last spring and summer.

It's truly sad and tragic that this problem is moving so slowly but I'm glad to see any little bit of progress being made.

I'm already missing Phil Lesh.

I'm very sad to hear that Phil Lesh passed away.

I'll be listening to Box of Rain a lot for a while now. That song has always brought tears to my eyes, but I know it will bring a lot more emotion now.

I've been making this mistake for 40+ years!

It's incredibly embarassing that, for essentially my entire adult life, I thought that Stanislaw Ulam and Stanislaw Lem were one and the same person.

And every so often I would read an article about one of them, and think to myself: "how amazing that guy was! look how many different things he did! look how much output he had! how did he find the time!"

Most recently, there was an article about Lem in the New Yorker last spring, and an article about Ulam in the New Yorker this fall. That was, finally, close enough together that something clicked in my brain, and I looked them up properly.

I mean, each of them, separately, truly was amazing

But now at least I'm no longer harboring the impression that Stanislaw was simultaneously working on the Manhattan Project while living in the Lviv Ghetto.

Well, I guess he was, in a way, but it was two different Stanislaws.

Embarassing, indeed. But I'm set straight now.