Author: David Faden
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Starting the new year with a little gardening
There was a break in the rain on New Year’s Day so I headed over to the school. I carried a couple plants with me that had been growing in pots on our patio for a while: California Aster (Symphyotrichum chilense), cultivated from overflow from our yard, and goldenrod (probably Solidago velutina ssp. californica), salvaged…
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Relay teams vs individuals
I’ve been wondering occasionally how we should describe group actions. What determines what the group can accomplish vs the individuals acting independently? One particular example of this is a relay race vs individual runners. We could think of the task as requiring getting a token across a certain distance, the shorter the time, the better.…
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Pittosporum tobira’s sticky seeds
Back in April, I wrote about Pittosporum tobira, hoping to put a few facts into my memory. One thing that “stuck” with me a little: that the genus name refers to them having sticky seeds. Now that the seed pods are popping open, the source of the name seems clearer: Seed pods popping open on…
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Parsing “Pollinator Post”
May Chen runs a treasure of an e-mail newsletter, the “Pollinator Post”, where she shares macro shots of insects and plants, mostly local natives, from her hikes around the East Bay, along with commentary drawing on her decades of experience as a docent. Until recently, these posts were available only via an invite-only e-mail group,…
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Thinking about “Think Stats”
I saw Allen Downey lament on LinkedIn that when he gets a message from Google Alerts about “think stats”, and it’s not about his book “Think Stats”, it’s usually someone saying something negative about statistics. Well, just let me say, I think stats are great, and I’m sure “Think Stats” is great too! I’ve just…
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Covington Sensory Garden Natives Blooming November 1, 2025
The Covington Elementary sensory garden features a lot of native plants. Here are the ones I noticed blooming Saturday while we were working on some upkeep. Common Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) Many of the plants in the main yarrow patch in the garden aren’t just done blooming; their tops are brown and crispy. This one in…
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KmpMatcher + links
In an earlier post, I talked about extracting attachments from .eml files, which I was doing in pursuit of a half memory of having implemented the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm. That turned out to be a dead end so I ended up consulting a lot of other sources and glomming together something new from those. You can…
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Lessons from Casai
I was curious what an ex teammate had been up to, which led me to this Medium post from him: CTO Logs: Casai. Impressive and a little intimidating, and this just covers part of what he’s been up to. It covers his journey from joining the company as CTO, building up its engineering workforce, to…
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Errors you might see if you forget `bazel_dep(name = “protobuf” …)
If you forget to include the dependency on protobuf in your MODULE.bazel file while including a cc_proto_library target, you may see errors like the following when you try to build that target: ERROR: /private/var/tmp/…/external/abseil-cpp+/absl/utility/BUILD.bazel: no such target ‘@@abseil-cpp+//absl/utility:if_constexpr’: target ‘if_constexpr’ not declared in package ‘absl/utility’ defined by /private/var/tmp/…/external/abseil-cpp+/absl/utility/BUILD.bazelERROR: /private/var/tmp/…/external/protobuf+/src/google/protobuf/BUILD.bazel:483:11: no such target ‘@@abseil-cpp+//absl/utility:if_constexpr’: target ‘if_constexpr’…
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“The Wild Trees”
Richard Preston’s 2007 book “The Wild Trees” drew me along, partly through instilling a fear that the next paragraph would reveal a fatal fall. I’m glad to see that the main protagonists still seem to have survived to this day: Stephen Sillett, Marie Antoine, Michael Taylor. I appreciated the adventure and the science, the personal…