Caroll Spinney has been playing the role of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since Sesame Street first aired in 1969. What an amazingly impactful career. See some of Spinney’s art and learn about his career in Original Big Bird, Caroll Spinney, Leaves ‘Sesame Street’ After Nearly 50 Years.

On October 2, Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist residing in the United States, walked into a Saudi consulate in Istanbul to retrieve documents related to his upcoming wedding while his fiancée waited outside. He was not seen by anyone outside the consulate after that. Signs point to him having been murdered inside the consulate, and today a recording, purporting to be of the killing, emerged from Turkey.

Fandible is a roleplaying podcast with a cast of players playing a variety of games. I’ve been listening to their Numenera Longshot episodes and really enjoy it. I haven’t played Numenera, although I want to try. It is interesting to listen to a group tabletop roleplaying, and I also enjoy the storytelling.

More than ten years :gasp: since rewriting Geneagrapher (see a post about that here), I have published it to PyPI. Check out the Geneagrapher on PyPI!

It’s been a long time since I’ve written about Geneagrapher. In fact, I didn’t expect to look at the project again, but thanks to activity, I did a little clean-up work recently. I decided it was time to take a look at my graph. The amount of data in the Mathematics Geanealogy Project has grown a lot over past many years!

The discovery of 2015 TG387, a new dwarf planet nicknamed “The Goblin”, was announced today. According to a Carnegie Institution for Science press release, this object’s closest approach to the sun (perihelion) is about 65 AU; a little more than double Pluto’s perihelion. However, its orbit is highly elliptical, and its aphelion is about 35x further. The story here fits into a puzzle about a hypothetical ninth planet in the far outer solar system.

Hacktoberfest “is a month-long celebration of open source software”. The idea is to contribute, via PRs, to public projects hosted on GitHub. In addition to the good feeling of contributing to a project and learning, some people that contribute at least five PRs will receive a t-shirt. Sounds like fun!

Replacing the rear brake pads on the Packster for the first time was quite a challenge. I needed to get the rear wheel off the ground long enough to remove it and put it back on. To accomplish this, I parked the bike on a sidewalk staircase landing leading up to my house. The landing is a little larger than needed to have the front wheel and the center stand on the slab.

SETI neural networks spot dozens of new mysterious signals emanating from distant galaxy reports the use of machine learning to identify 72 new fast radio bursts (FRBs) in a set of data in which 21 FRBs had already been identified using other methods. What really caught my eye in the article, however, was this:

I’ve been an engineering manager for around 3.5 years, but starting tomorrow, I will once again be an individual contributor. I’ll be a Technical Lead on a team that is responsible for events and experimentation.