Flutterby™!

The Jointmaker Pro Stationary Hand Saw. Wow, cool idea, looks like neat execution, puts a wood saw in a jig that lets you do extremely precise cuts.

I'm gonna try to follow up to my initial reaction to Iron Man. I'll try to avoid being spoilerrific, but I'm going to put it in the comments, if you still want to see this film, consider yourself duly warned.

When DVDs first came out, I had an "ewww, all the artifacts make this unwatchable" reaction. This article on a very common DVD chroma upsampling error may be 6 years old, but is interesting reading, and I'd love to see how many modern players still have the same problem.

Relatedly, the MeFi thread that I got that from also mentioned a 25 year old bug in the BSD *dir() libraries.

Found this in my travels: Religious Cartoons

It was a busy weekend. We made some forward progress on the front door trim, finished up a limestone and fir table for the back yard, and set up a lattice for some morning glories and other climbing flowers (although it's hard to see the lattice in front of that ugly fence in the pictures).

Well worth a listen: This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money, on how the real estate bubble happened.

Nancy and I just got back from The LEAF, Lake Edan Arts Festival, a wonderful weekend of camping, dancing, music, spoken word, more contra dancing, a pot-luck with friends and naps. Lots of naps. Waking up to drums at 1am and playing drums at the drum circle until 3-ish..more naps. Waltzing on Sunday morning. Our calves ache from our camping on 'top of the mountain' (it's a good hike back and forth) and dancing and walking so much. But it was a wonderful weekend. Life is good, and we sure needed the reminder. Of special joy was camping next to a group of musicians and their friends that were as good as the main acts, and it seemed, were always playing guitars, singing and making joyful musical noise. It's not Burning Man, but it's a heck of a shot in the arm.

NASA is set to announce its next big mission plan: landing on a Near-Earth Asteroid. Bruce, Willis, call your office!

Jerry and a "Robot" play well together, plan to take over the world next.

For Eric: A quick Marin IJ article on Robert Campbell's new book of aerial photographs of Point Reyes and vicinity. Campbell is the proprietor of Chamois Moon (legit business site, but annoying unrelated pop-up ad), and they've got some notes on the Helio Courier they fly.

Nigerian Scammers: It's Now Completely Impossible To Sell A Laptop On Ebay.

Six San Diego State University fraternities have been suspended following a monster drug bust. When I first saw this I thought "Fraternities dealing cocaine? Who knew?",

A member of Theta Chi sent out a mass text message to his "faithful customers" stating that he and his "associates" would be unable to sell cocaine while they were in Las Vegas for a fraternity formal, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The text promoted a cocaine "sale" and listed the reduced prices on bulk quantities.

but it was Tom who pointed out the kicker:

Those arrested included a student who was about to receive a criminal justice degree and another who was to receive a master's degree in homeland security.

Uh. Yeah. I've been thinking about the GPS vs Radar thread, and how we could work to change my impression that a teenager accused of speeding and a random police officer are roughly equally credible witnesses, and I'm surprised by two contradictory things: First, that only two of those busted were looking towards law enforcement, and second, that they hadn't made the contacts to get off.

I'm reminded of a friend whose offspring was busted at a party at college, and was offered a free ride if said offspring would become an active informant. Clearly these guys had outlived their usefulness.

Howl: The Zpittvar's "Clucking":

Clucking is ze combination of course of climbing and fucking but together they become something unique; they combine so perfectly that you move the experience to another level.

And, because this is video and reproducing the accent is part of the charm:

Vee remember always zat vee are climbers who fuck and not fuckers who climb.

Via Sensible Erection (where else?)

My dad sent 75 Skills Every Man Should Master via email, rather than posting it here, but it made me think enough that I put it here.

Last Friday, Charlene was down in Fresno, so I went out with the hiking gang to see Iron Man. Given the previews, I wasn't looking for too much, something engaging enough that when, inevitably, despite the potential licensing issues, they cranked up the "naaa naaa na naa naa, nana nana naa naa [beat] naa naa" I felt compelled to holler "whooo!" and throw up the horns.

What I found was something that's making me look at images of masculinity and success a little bit, and made me interested in how popular culture is playing those notions. Especially when combined with the discussion on the train, and the way those young women identified with their own tribe, it's got me asking some questions that I thought I'd answered.

More on those as the blog continues.

Where do all the neurotics live? On the East Coast, of course. A psychological tour of the United States, in five maps. You could also skip the article and jump straight to the five maps, although I think a little normalization by population may be in order.

It's a come-on for a book called Who's Your City, the article and maps are also at Richard Florida's blog, and a direct link to that blog, Richard Florida and the Creative Class Exchange.

Had to make a trek down to Fresno this weekend 'cause of family issues. Charlene had drive down earlier, so I grabbed the Amtrak bus over to Martinez and took the train down. On the train I got into a cool conversation with two young ladies of... well... a different economic and social background than my own, who were headed back down to Bakersfield after a visit to the Mendocino area. They called themselves "Juggalo"s, a term with which I was not yet familiar, but of which I learned something. Wikipedia reminds me that these are fans of Insane Clown Posse, a "horrorcore" rap group, with a predilection towards Faygo soda.

We had a good conversation, I gained some cred by knowing some Tech N9ne lyrics, learned about Twiztid and King Gordy, both in the horrorcore genre, and which I'll save in my repertoire because sometimes it's nice to be able to tell a 15 year old that I do kind of remember what it's like to be a teenager, and "Aesop Rock", which I'm still searching for a definitive link for, but which was my favorite of the groups I hadn't heard of before. At least played through a cell phone speaker there were some interesting lyrics there that sounded listenable. Rap and hip-hop generally aren't my thing (except when I'm driving at 2 AM and need to stay awake), but I keep finding flashes of "there is something deeper under here", and "Aesop Rock" had some of that.

One of the tasks in Fresno was trying to set up an easy to prep dietary plan for a diabetic heart patient, so on Sunday, Charlene and I spent quite a while trolling the frozen foods sections of Wal*Mart, Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. This is definitely an area we'd never normally go into, and we came out with an extreme case of "what else can we suggest?". Alas, we left my notes down there, so I can't speak definitively, but the thing that totally blew me away was that as we got to the so called "healthy" brands, quite often the salt content was off the charts, and they replaced the fat with corn syrup. In the end we came back to "how can we make other tasks easier so that there's more energy left for preparing food that might actually be nutritious".

Apropos of the Maker Faire, Shadow passes along a quick Wired blurb on a side-by-side tandem bicycle with 9' diameter wheels.

I *know* there are SF Bay Area readers here, anyone planning to be at the Maker Faire in San Mateo today (Sunday)? I'll be going there this morning, probably alone, and would love to meet up with other Flutterbarians. Coordinates upon request.

I've been reading stories about our military and government having bought counterfit Cisco gear, from tiered Cisco suppliers (supposedly legit). Now the normally conservative IEEE hunts for kill switches in chips. While the article is rather specific to FPGA's, it applies to everything. Add stories like: Fly robot, fly and I see bad sci-fi horror stories coming to life before our very eyes, soon. Pleasant Dreams.

Anti-oxidant supplements such as A, E and Beta-Carotene could lower life expectancy:

Looking at dozens of previous studies, Copenhagen University researchers suggested these appeared to raise, not lower, the risk of early death.

I'm not sure what I can add to the entry over at Educated Guesswork titled Natural resistance to testosterone testing, but I'll try. It links to New York Times: Some Athletes' Genes Help Outwit Doping Test, which reports on a study about detecting testosterone doping in 55 men:

The results were unambiguous: the test worked for most of the men, showing that they had taken the drug. But 17 of the men tested negative. Their urine seemed fine, with no excess testosterone even though the men clearly had taken the drug.

I quibble with the "unambiguous" label, especially since The Economist version of the story points out that:

The result was remarkable. Nearly half of the men who carried no functional copies of UGT2B17 would have gone undetected in the standard doping test. By contrast, 14% of those with two functional copies of the gene were over the detection threshold before they had even received an injection. The researchers estimate this would give a false-positive testing rate of 9% in a random population of young men.

I'm not sure what I can add, except that it sure seems like the whole anti "performance enhancing drugs" scene is really about limiting athletic competition to genetic predisposition, and this seems like it's taking that to extremes...

Yale Law Journal: How 'Swingers' Might Save Hollywood from a Federal Pornography Statute, on the idiocies of 2257 and the implications that it has towards more mainstream movies and their artistic content as obscenity prosecutions increase.

All streets in the continental 48 United States:

All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population. The pace of progress is seen in the midwest where suburban areas are punctuated by square blocks of area that are still farm land

I now own some obscure custom PCI cards that produce tokens when given some data from an old Delphi (Generation?) application and need a Delphi uber-geek that can help me figure out how they are communicated with. The goals: 1 - connecting them to a web gateway somehow to create such tokens via the web. 2- bypassing the hardware and just creating the tokens in code.