Apparently London has elected a new Lord Mayor, which is a completely different office from the Mayor of London. Because England (which isn’t quite the same as the UK or Great Britain) is determined to be hopelessly confusing.
Granted, we have Manhattan, which is the same as New York County and which has its own President, which is a not the same as New York City, which has a Mayor, except that the Governor of New York State (a different thing) sort of runs the NYC subway for some reason.
And East New York is in New York City and New York State but not New York County, and not to be confused with West New York, which is in none of those.
New York, New York, the town so nice they named it something like 15 times.
The official boundaries of Manhattan include a number of surrounding islands, according to NYC law. But it’s complicated. Oyster Island, for example, is usually submerged and is no longer shown on most maps
And then there’s Ellis Island, which is partly landfill added after the boundaries were drawn. Its status was in dispute until a 1998 Supreme Court case (NJ vs NY) ruled the original island is part of NY, but the landfill belongs to NJ. This has almost no practical significance.
Most confusing is the boundary involving the "Spuyten Duyvil creek as it existed prior to its being filled in”, which has the effect of making a tiny part of the Bronx legally part of Manhattan.
The baroque governance structure of NYC gives London a run for its money (though London has better official garb). For example, each of the five boroughs is represented by a President, who has an almost comically small amount of official power.
Borough presidents used to have a great deal more power, via the Board of Estimate (sort of the NYC Senate). Then the Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that the Board of Estimate was unconstitutional. But we still have borough presidents.
Basically, NYC government is now there’s a mayor, and a city council, and no one is quite sure what anyone does but everyone eventually unifies around hating the mayor.

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More from @mattblaze

12 Nov
Content warning: Nerdy thread ahead.

I redid my informal tests of various cellphone-sized Faraday pouches, to measure the amount of attenuation they actually provide. Tl;dr: the expensive commercial ones generally work well. Cheap makeshift ones generally don’t.
First, what’s a Faraday pouch and why would you need one? A Faraday cage severely attenuates radio signals going in or out. It can be used to assure that an untrustworthy device (like a cellphone) isn’t transmitting or receiving signals when it shouldn’t be. Paranoid? Yes.
A Faraday cage is simple in principle: solid conducive container that completely enclosed the signal source. But actually constructing one that works well can be challenging. Any opening can create a junction that acts as an RF feed. There are pricey (~$50) products for this.
Read 24 tweets
10 Nov
Email that starts “I know you’re busy” and proceeds to ask me to spend time doing something to save them time.

So, were they lying when they said they know I’m busy? Or are they flexing how much more valuable I should think their time is compared with mine?
People who genuinely need help almost never use the “I know you’re busy, but” template. It seems to be reserved for people who know they’re asking for something unreasonable, but want to appear reasonable.
Cue the parade of people telling me I should be more generous with my time. Maybe I should smile more, too?
Read 4 tweets
10 Nov
For the record, I will not be offering my election integrity course at the University of Austin.
Even imagining doing that makes me want to hide under the bed.
I’m considering, however, a course in computation theory, covering such topics as Gödel’s completeness theorem, Turing’s Halting Solution, and why they don’t want you to know whether P=NP.
Read 4 tweets
9 Nov
The reaction to this illustrates the Great Divide in America, which is between those who’ve read Caro and those who haven’t.
The thing about The Power Broker is that when you first see it you think, oh god, this is one of those impossibly long books people claim to have read but never actually do. But then once you actually crack it open, you’re just hooked.
It’s ostensibly a biography of Robert Moses, but it’s actually a political history of New York and the power of infrastructure.
Read 5 tweets
8 Nov
If you’re a computer scientist and you’ve not read this seminal work, you owe it to yourself to do so. (Un)fortunately, it’s become hard to find platforms on which the attack can be reproduced in the form described, but it’s a transformative experience when you do.
Mastery of the buffer overflow attack - not just understanding it conceptually, but actually being able to execute it - is like developing a terrible superpower. You start to understand the problem of security in an entirely different way. @aleph_one’s paper made that accessible.
Anyway, @aleph_one’s paper, and an exercise based on it, is assignment #1 in every security course I teach.
Read 10 tweets
8 Nov
“Why did you block my other account? You must be an asshole.” You might not be learning the intended lesson here.
For the record, I block people for a variety of reasons, my being a capricious asshole being only one of them. Mostly I block people for being abusive or excessively tiresome.
If you’re unhappy about this, please feel free to make a first amendment complaint about me to your nearest police precinct. They’ll be glad to help you. Or complain to my employer (that’s George Mason University, remember).
Read 4 tweets

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