Finally, the IRS is “hurting” the right people…
$122 million
Time to let the math geek side all hang out there… 
So 1, 2²=4, 3²=9, 4²=16, 5²=25, and 6²=36 all have nice symmetric packings. Why does this break down for 7²=49, 8²=64, 9²=81 and 10²=100, which are messy? Mystery…
If you look the first few of those all have the same density, 0.7854, which goes with tiling all the circles as if they were squares. This is less efficient than a hexagonal tiling, 0.9069, it’s just that those don’t fit the outer square as well. But you can sort of intuitively see that with enough circles, fitting the perimeter perfectly will not make up for inefficiently tiling its area.
49 turns out to be where that changes over and you can make the bounding square smaller by using a hexagonal pattern distorted at the edges instead. After that it’s not the square numbers that fit with regular patterns any more.
ratio
= 1/radius; an orange field means that David W. Cantrell’s conjectured upper bound is violated
How dare they!
Ida B. Wells is one of the greatest Americans who never gets the credit she deserves for the work that she did in her life. She’s one of the people I’m constantly in awe of in history. Her face on a coin doesn’t seem nearly enough of a tribute to her greatness.
Right? Put her on the $20 bill!
Oh wait, that spot’s reserved for Harriet Tubman. (What IS the holdup on that?)
An Australian company found to have helped keep the notorious forum Kiwi Farms accessible online has been ordered to pay more than $400,000 in damages after a successful defamation action in the Victorian supreme court.
Data also shows that despite billions in tax breaks, regulatory favors, and subsidies, companies like AT&T have long refused to upgrade low-income and minority Cleveland neighborhoods to fiber. These companies not only engage in this deployment “redlining,” but data also makes it clear they often charge these low income and minority neighborhoods more money for the same or slower broadband.
Last week I spent some time talking to Cleveland city leaders and local activists about their plan to do something about it. On one hand, they’ve doled out $20 million in COVID relief broadband funding to local non-profit DigitalC to deliver fixed wireless broadband at speeds of 100 Mbps for as little as $18.
On the other hand, they’ve convinced a company named SiFi Networks to build a $500 million open access fiber network at no cost to taxpayers. SiFi Networks will benefit from a tight relationship with the city, while making its money from leasing access to the network to ISPs.
We’ve noted (see our Copia report on broadband competition) that such open access networks routinely lower the cost for ISP market entry, boost competition, and generally result in lower prices. Monopolies like AT&T, of course, have long opposed the idea, even if they would technically benefit from lower access costs, because it chips away at their consolidated monopoly power.
…
Community-owned broadband networks aren’t a magical panacea. Such efforts are like any other business plan, and require competency in design and implementation. But the community-owned and operated networks in more than 1,000 U.S. cities can (and routinely do) prompt a very broken and federal government-coddled status quo to actually try for once, much to its chagrin.
ETA:
TW: discussions of mental health, substance disorders, abuse of many kinds
Only in 
, eh?
Apparently it was 
at Brock’s house afterwards, eh, and moose followed…
At the risk of a bit too much news from …
We had a car stolen from the end of our driveway back in September, as have many, many folks around the GTA. This is really good news.
Well there’s your problem….
Couldn’t figure out where to post that, but you beat me to it. This is a good thing.
The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, a Charlottesville-based Black history museum, said Thursday that the statue had been destroyed.
But how will we ever remember the Civil War without that statue to remind us? Oh…yep, I’ve already forgotten it. What were we talking about? /s
