Diwali Observed; Forum Threads and Java Tips

Online posts on Oct. 20, 2025 noted that Diwali began on the U.S. West Coast, observed with lamps, fireworks and floating dates, and that California may observe the holiday next year. The posts also observed that Oct. 20 is World Statistics Day and cautioned about common misuse and misunderstanding of statistics. A Reason/Volokh open thread reiterated the author’s institutional affiliations (Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution; Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA) and clarified that his blog posts are personal opinions, not institutional endorsements. Other community items included a dev.to welcome thread encouraging new members to introduce themselves and earn a Warm Welcome Badge, and a Medium primer advising Java developers to implement Runnable rather than extend Thread and to prefer java.util.concurrent thread pools—highlighting ForkJoinPool for CPU-bound tasks while warning it is unsuitable for I/O-bound work and sensitive to task granularity.