Ben Schmidt

@bschmidt.bsky.social

6962 Followers 844 Following

VP of Information Design at Nomic building new interfaces to embeddings; former history professor/digital humanist. Bsky for humanities/dataviz-y things, @benmschmidt@sigmoid.social for techy stuff, the bad place for business. https://benschmidt.org

Poster for the movie Heat 2
In 1991, arXiv was an email-based service housed at Ginsparg’s Los Alamos lab workstation, on a cluttered desk using a NeXTstation (forerunner to Apple’s MacIntosh). It was never meant to be a fixture for science dissemination and discovery.
Chart. In-text descripton is: "history has decreased the most at research universities (RI and RII in the old Carnegie classification). Both private and public universities have seen drops, but the declines have been especially steep at private, non-for-profit institutions. (For-profits remain unimportant enough in the history universe that I haven’t included them.)"
│ race │ count │ │ varchar │ int64 │ ├─────────────────┼───────┤ │ White │ 192 │ │ Black │ 37 │ │ Native American │ 10 │ │ Hispanic │ 4 │ │ Asian American │ 2 │
Just a screenshot of the thing described in the post.
Grover Cleveland was a man of great integrity who served as both the 22nd and 24th President of the United States. He is the only president in our history to serve two non-consecutive terms, which proves the lasting trust the American people had in his leadership. Cleveland was known for his honesty and his firm belief that "a public office is a public trust." He worked hard to stop government waste and was famous for using his veto power to protect the nation's treasury. He believed in a limited government that allowed the free market and individual hard work to drive the country forward. During his time in office, he stood up against special interests and fought for a stable economy based on sound money. Cleveland’s dedication to the Constitution and the rule of law made him a respected leader across the political spectrum. He was a sturdy defender of American independence and a man who never compromised his principles for popularity. His presidency reminds us that character and honesty are the most important qualities in a leader. He remains a symbol of the rugged, principled executive.
Mr. Trump appears to have left himself room to make five last-minute nominations; there are only 245 people in a list the administration distributed. The White House did not reply to questions about whom he would choose to fill extra slots.
In this context, the "switch to Python" advice starts looking even more like cargo cult thinking. You'd be switching a working pipeline to get... what exactly? The ability to make maps in Python instead of Arc? But you're already happy with Arc's output, and you're not bottlenecked on visualization—your bottleneck (if any) is data processing and reporting, which your current stack handles. The one actual risk I see: It's Raku, not Perl. You already acknowledged the Perl ecosystem is waning, and Raku is even more niche. If you hit a point where you need to debug something deep in the language or you want a library that doesn't exist, finding help gets harder. Raku's geospatial ecosystem is... sparse. That could eventually bite you. What I'd honestly do in your position: Keep the pipeline exactly as is. Don't switch languages just because fashionable people say so. But be thoughtful about the Raku drift—not because Python is inherently better, but because "stable, widely-used Perl" has more long-term staying power than "interesting, niche Raku," especially for solo work where you need quick answers if things break. If your Perl code is holding up fine and you're not hitting the edges of its capabilities, there's no business case here. You're solving the right problem with tools you understand. That's the opposite of technical debt.
Claude screenshot. TypeScript — derive a type from a value, use it to constrain another: typescriptconst vals = { foo: 1, bar: 2, baz: 3 } as const; const lookup: Record<keyof typeof vals, string> = { foo: "a", bar: "b", baz: "c" }; // ✅ Error if you add/remove a key from vals and forget to update lookup Python — no equivalent; you have to maintain two separate definitions manually: pythonfrom typing import Literal Keys = Literal["foo", "bar", "baz"] # must be kept in sync by hand vals: dict[Keys, int] = {"foo": 1, "bar": 2, "baz": 3} lookup: dict[Keys, str] = {"foo": "a", "bar": "b"} # no error for missing keys either The two gaps: Python can't derive a Literal type from a dict's keys (keyof typeof), and dict[K, V] annotations don't enforce exhaustiveness the way Record<K, V> does in TS.
We need to display updates on subagent calls in the main UI. Look at the pattern that we use for artifact updates at @packages/database/src/redis/artifact-pubsub.tsand use the same system for subscribing to sets of *assistantSessions* to hear changes. The system should allow any session to register listeners: we should fetch the content of conversations until someone actually expands or opens the relevant message (which will be on of the elements in our research accordion.) Each new message should be an SSE push -- it's not important to receive every streaming token update.
Text message screenshot of person being sent article "Jews thought Trump wanted to fight antisemitism. Why did he cut all of their grants" from the forward. Wolfson responds: "Thanks for sending. Well, it is is the case that DOGE cut grants having nothing to do with DEI. As they said it was a government wide effort to claw back money. But note the tentendtious accusation that the administration is activing like all authoritarian (or even totalitarian!) governments to destroy the humanities. Their ultimate goal supposedly being to destroy independent thought. But the progressive version of the humanities accomplished that some time ago. Today it goes by the term wokeness and intersectionality.
But we need not wait months until the summary judgment motions are filed and decided. Having asked the Court to rule on the confidentiality of these few sentences, Defendants themselves have rendered them judicial documents subject to a meaningful presumption of access. Moreover, as the Second Circuit has recently laid bare, documents "do not receive different weights of presumption based on the extent to which they were relied upon in resolving a motion," and a court may not treat the presumption as "barely cognizable" merely because it does not rely on them. See Giuffre , 146 F.4th at 178- 80. The sole question is whether the material is "relevant
"102. Defendant Fox, an ultimate decisionmaker for which grants to terminate or keep, began selecting grants for termination by sorting them based on their relation to his conception of DEI. In doing so, Fox did not critically analyze the description or purpose of each grant. Instead, he used crude filtering techniques that searched for keywords in grant descriptions that related to the grant’s application to individuals of a certain race, nationality, sex, gender, or other personal characteristic. 103. For instance, Fox searched each grant’s description for the use of key words that appeared in a “Detection List” that he created. Those key words included terms such as “LGBTQ,” “homosexual,” “tribal,” “immigrants,” “gay,” “BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color),” “native,” and so on. Terms like “white,” “Caucasian,” and “heterosexual” did not appear in the Detection List."
"The confidentiality designations as to US-000061504, US-000063328, and the four-sentence excerpt ofUS-000062916 are therefore not sustained. US-000063328 must be unsealed. Defendants shall file on the public docket complete and unredacted versions of US-000061504 and US-000063328, as well as US-000062916, no later than February 17, 2026."
"US-000062916 consists of a text message exchange sent from the personal device of NEH Assistant Chair for Programs Adam Wolfson. Defendants seek to maintain as confidential four sentences in that message. They contend that these four sentences reflect ""personal views"" of Wolfson that are unrelated to the formal decisionmaking at issue in this case. Dkt. No. 205 at 7- 8."
"109. Fox and Cavanaugh sorted grants in lists labeled “to cancel” or “to keep.” 110. No grant relating to DEI as broadly conceived of by Fox and Cavanaugh peared on the “to keep” list. Grants that Fox and Cavanaugh considered “wasteful” d thus slated for termination could be moved to the “to keep” list by Defendant cDonald only if they related to “America 250” or the “Garden of Heroes” initiatives sed on the views of Defendants McDonald, Fox, Cavanaugh, and NEH staff ember, Adam Wolfson.
Dropdown menu listing models to use for coding. Opus 4.5, Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.2, Grok Code, etc.
Bumper sticker that says "No Farms No State" above a mesopotamian cityscape and the phrase James C. Scott 2017
WASHINGTON, July 26.-Unless President Wilson withdraws the name of Adam E. Patterson of Oklahoma, the negro whom he nominated two days ago to be Register of the Treasury, he will have a fight on his hands that bids fair to rival the Crum incident in Mr. Roosevelt's Administration. Senator Tillman of South Carolina, who so violently opposed Dr. Crum's confirmation as Collector of the Port of Charleston, and Senator Vardaman of Mississippi, who was elected on an anti-negro platform, already are preparing to fight, and it is known that they have many allies. The opponents of the nomination do not make any charges against Patterson, and it is said that he holds the respect of the white people of his community. He is said to have campaigned at his own expense for the Democratic ticket in the late campaign, and that is thought to have been a reason why his candidacy was indorsed by Senator Gore of Oklahoma. The opinion was expressed this afternoon that there was little likelihood that the nomination would be confirmed. For many years the office of Register has been held by a negro. But Southern Senators find it impossible to support even a Democratic negro for a place that will give him authority over white men and women.
An animated video of a point moving along a line on the earth in mollweide projection, near the equator, and showing two hemispheres rotating with equal land and water.
A great circle over the southern ocean from India to Kamchatka
Claude -- So I think you're right - by continuity there must be at least one orientation where one hemisphere hits 29%, but it's not obvious (to me at least) that the opposite hemisphere would also be 29%. That seems like it requires a special geometric property of how Earth's land is actually distributed.
A map showing a line that goes through North America, Brazil, the South Atlantic, the Indian ocean, and up to the North Pacific through the Phillipines.
A hemisphere centered somewhere near capetown in the southern ocean.
The land and waterhemispheres. Equal-area projection. Map from wikipedia.
Junk line chart correlation purporting to show that Psychology is an outlier in low quality compared to the other social science.
A chart "Change in degrees, 2014-2024", with increases for Statistics and Computer science, and steep drops for most humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Chart titled 'Quality of Social Science Disciplines inversely correlated with change since 2008', showing that Criminology and Psychology have increased , economics is steady, and Polisci, anthro, IR, and Sociology are all down 30-40%
Line charts showing annual trends for sixteen humanities disciplines.
A line chart captioned "The big humanities majors were mostly still falling in 2024", showing drops since 2008 for most humanities fields between 10% (Study of the Arts) to 68% (religion) with history, english, and foreign languages all clustered around 50-55%
Photo of old black and white printed placards on a black surface, advertising a town hall on January 4,1980
Stock image of a robot in an elevator with three dots on its right arm
Fortune headline: Microsoft researchers have revealed the 40 jobs most exposed to AI—and even teachers make the list Accompanying Getty image of a robot with breasts at a computer while a woman packs a box with her belongings, captioned "Sorry, Gen Z: AI is coming for safe and secure teaching jobs, as well as grad roles."
Cover of "Citizen and Subject" by Mahmood Mamdani (Reissued edition with a new preface Princeton UP 2018)
Image of some OCR with text: That last example is the key to what's going on here: the book itself *is* mostly in Cherokee, but the title page is not. Nonetheless, Google OCR translates the whole thing as being in Cherokee, making some terrible suppositions along the way: depending on your font set, you may not be able to display the following publisher information.
Ngrams chart of January 10, 11th, 12th, and 13th, showing approximately equal usage.
Wikipedia text: Writing for Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield described "Blurred Lines" as "the worst song of this or any other year". He said he couldn't "remember the last time there was a hit song this ghastly – the sound of Adam Sandler taking a falsetto hate-whizz on Marvin Gaye's grave
Title: The Torrid Season Author: Edith Wharton Abstract: In the sweltering heat of a New York summer, socialites flee to the Berkshires — but Lenora Spence remains behind. As the city wilts under a strange, unending heatwave, Lenora observes with increasing dread the fissures forming in the marble facades of Fifth Avenue and in the morals of its elite. Trapped between duty and a forbidden affair with a climate scientist shunned for his apocalyptic predictions, Lenora must choose: complacency in a collapsing society or exile in pursuit of truth. Wharton’s keen eye for social decay meets a prescient warning of ecological collapse. Title: The Drowned World of Dorlcote Mill Author: George Eliot Abstract: Floodwaters have overtaken the sleepy English hamlet of St. Ogg’s. At Dorlcote Mill, young Maggie Tulliver’s great-granddaughter, Eliza, finds her education interrupted by torrential summers and creeping rot. As scientists warn of irreversible atmospheric change, Eliza turns her restless intellect to a radical idea: restoring the ancient wetland systems beneath the plowed fields. Eliot’s posthumous manuscript (recently "discovered") is a startlingly modern tale of generational guilt, ecological reparation, and female ambition in a world slowly returning to water. Title: Summer on the Ice Author: Jack London Abstract: In a future Alaska scorched by a collapsing jet stream, where summer now brings desert winds and glacial collapse, sixteen-year-old Nome native Tiva embarks on a perilous journey north to find the last remnants of the polar ice. Accompanied by a reprogrammed sled AI and haunted by the tales of the old North, Tiva discovers a secret colony of climate exiles determined to reverse the warming tide — at any cost. London’s signature brutal naturalism returns in this speculative tale of endurance, rebellion, and ecological brinksmanship.
Wikipedia page of Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge text: Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge (March 8, 1860 – November 10, 1932) was a businessman and promoter of patent fiberboard, and the first chairman of the interstate agency known then as the Port of New York Authority. The Outerbridge Crossing, a Port Authority bridge, was named for him.[1] Biography Eugenius was born on March 8, 1860, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Bermudians Alexander Ewing Outerbridge I and Laura Catherine Harvey. His sister, Mary Ewing Outerbridge, was the founder, in 1874, of American lawn tennis which was the progenitor of modern tennis. His other siblings include Albert Albany Outerbridge, Sir Joseph Outerbridge (1843–1933), August Emelio Outerbridge (1846–1921), Harriett Harvey Outerbridge, Alexander Ewing Outerbridge II, Laura Catharine Outerbridge and Adolph John Harvey Outerbridge (1858–1928).
Search results showing IBM computer code.
A photo of two city cops trying to explain something to a woman on a street, while ICE agents but a woman in a car behind. Text above the photo: The Worcester Police Department steps in at this crucial juncture, among us residents surrounding the car about to take one of our neighbors away. And they do so on behalf of the ICE agents, not us. A Worcester cop comes over, stepping between the open car door and the community, past the ICE agents stuffing the mother into the back seat, and he looks at a woman holding the shrieking daughter's baby. She’s also wailing in desperate anger and he says—to her—"Stop, stop, stop. They'll explain. They'll explain." Of course they don't explain.
Chart, 'tonnes of co2 avoided by selected personal lifestyle decisions accounting for government policy'. accounting for policy, the largest impact (2.2 tonnes) is 'live car free', then 2 tonnes 'switch to electric car', then 1.5 tonnes 'avoid one transatlantic flight.' all other interventions are below one tonne, including 'switch to green heating', 'deep retrofit of house', 'switch to hybrid car', 'plant based diet', 'one way european flight, ' etc..
Supreme Court John Jay 1745–1829. First Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Robert H. Jackson 1892–1954. U.S. Supreme Court Justice; chief prosecutor at Nuremberg Trials Thurgood Marshall 1908–1993. First Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist 1924–2005. Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg 1933–2020. Supreme Court Justice and women's rights advocate Antonin Scalia 1936–2016. Influential conservative Supreme Court justice
Quaker George Fox 1624–1691. Founder of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) Catholic Kateri Tekakwitha 1656–1680. First Native American to be canonized as a saint Junípero Serra 1713–1784. Founded missions across California John Carroll 1735–1815. First Catholic bishop and archbishop in the U.S. Elizabeth Ann Seton 1774–1821. First American-born canonized saint John Neumann 1811–1860. First American bishop to be canonized as a saint Augustus Tolton 1854–1897. First publicly recognized Black Catholic priest in the U.S. Katharine Drexel 1858–1955. Catholic saint and philanthropist for Native and African Americans Fulton Sheen 1895–1979. Influential Catholic bishop and television personality Thomas Merton 1915–1968. Trappist monk and author of 'The Seven Storey Mountain' Protestant Jonathan Edwards 1703–1758. Key figure in the First Great Awakening Military Clark Poling 1910–1943. One of the Four Chaplains who sacrificed their lives during WWII Alexander Goode 1911–1943. One of the Four Chaplains who gave his life saving others during WWII Evangelical Billy Graham 1918–2018. Christian evangelist and spiritual advisor to U.S. presidents