Flutterby™!

a set of astronomy photographs Charlene and classmates took, on Flickr because we used the Astrometry bot to identify them.

I've mostly started ignoring the couple of police abuse of power articles that I stumble across daily, but this one's beyond the pale: Ten year old girl is tasered by a policeman in Arkansas:

Police report calls it 'very, very brief' stun to get her into patrol car

Offers of candy, apparently, didn't work.

I'm not sure how you actually get one, but the Bigshot Camera is one made for kids to assemble and use, ala OLPC.

Playing With Fire And Water is yet another blog of food ideas. Via MeFi.

Courtesy of Whump, Smart Bitches Trashy Books informs us that Harlequin is now doing self-publishing. The pricing for the packages is here, I'm not sure how much editorial help they can give you for $200, but given that so much of that level of push-it-out genre writing is being given away for free on the internet, that a big name would put some effort into figuring how to monetize that energy seems pretty smart.

Relatedly, MJ Rose points out that SFWA is no longer accepting Harlequin for their "you've been published" requirements.

I was exploring information on home roasting (thanks to Dan's ravings). CoffeeBeanQueen has a "What kind of coffee are you" quiz:

(sorry, the hyperlink was overritten by PicasWeb's embed HTML)

Hey, have the Google search results recently gotten a lot worse for anyone else? I went back last night to work on sussing out more info for designing the building that will become my shop, and found that I was regularly digging through more than 3 pages of crap for sale to get to the information I wanted, no matter what terms I was adding to my searches. I'm fairly sure last time I did this I was getting stuff on the front page.

Life imitates bad porn: CIA secret prison found in upscale Lithuanian horse riding academy.

We've moved the TV out of the living room into the bedroom, and I think I'm going to get a swing-out mount, and build a cabinet to hide it when it's not in use (which is most of the time). We don't have any broadcast or cable reception on it, it's just used for playing movies. Even though we still have a VHS player, that's pretty much fallen out of use, only gets pulled out when we want to watch a movie that hasn't made it to DVD yet and I'm willing to hook it up on an as-needed basis, and we have a DVD player that I think cost us $45 (or may even have been something given to us for filling out consumer satisfaction surveys), the tray sticks, but it still works.

However, the stupid DVD player is 19" wide and 10" deep, and if I'm going to get the TV in a little wall-mounted cabinet, it'd sure be nice to do the same thing with the DVD player. And, if the prices have come down enough yet, get something that'll do Blu-Ray at the same time since that seems to have taken over a fairly large portion of the video store (and will probably be obsolete shortly).

So I guess this is two questions:

1. Is there a small cheap DVD or even Blu-Ray player out there?
2. How can I design a small cabinet that doesn't require rebuilding every time the generation shifts? Used to be you needed 19"x12", but in this era of TVs being 6" deep including the wall mount, that seems to be over.

Two entries over at Brainwagon that I want to explore further but don't have time to right now:

• A couple of links on a 288 kilometer non line-of-sight optical communication
• Some links and video on home-made electronic components

Jeffrey Tucker at the Ludwig von Mises Institute: If You Believe in IP, How Do You Teach Others?, some nice musings on some of the current struggling in academia over the reproduction of classes and class derived materials, including some words on how that relates to some of the struggles Ayn Rand had over her dissemination of her ideas. Hat tip to Chris in Florida.

Remarking on Anil Dash joining Expert labs, Theresa D. Singh tweeted:

.gov is the new .com

and I couldn't help but think back to a New York Times article which mentions Henry Chung, formerly an assistant vice president at Merrill Lynch, now a NYPD patrol officer, and another officer who formerly worked for WaMu:

“I was making a lot of money, and then not making money,” he said. “As the economy got worse, the investments dried up and I needed more stability. The police offer a pension that’s unheard of.”

And I shudder at the notion that ".gov is the new .com" is completely plausible.

Don't fall into the poverty trap, you might never get out, a quick look at how U.S. government subsidies and aid fall away such that going from $25k/year to $35k/year will cause a fall in your standard of living.

Made some speaker shelves for the living room:

Just got back from seeing the cheerfully destructive 2012, which is big, dumb and a lot of fun. The premise is that a solar cycle is producing so many neutrinos that it is heating up the Earth's core with unpleasent effects. Then I wondered about how the Mayans knew about neutrinos. But one of my favorite sites, Lilek's Bleat has the real skinny on how 2012 came to represent the end of history.

Feeling old day: last night, helping Charlene with her astronomy homework I was reminded that the theory of plate tectonics is only a little older than I am. And now we're looking at those mechanisms on other planets. Every time I pick up my iPhone I'm reminded that when me, meuon et al saw the future of the Internet, I think this device was beyond our horizon, and now I whine about it's limits. And a thread about fonts over at Columbine's place has reminded me that I once weilded pieces of cast metal to do what my $89 scanner/copier/printer does at close to ten thousand DPI.

Screw the flying car, I really do live in the future!

Bradley's Jade page has a new page, and I've got a new vacation destination: How to Find Big Sur Jade At Jade Cove.

Yow! Ouch! In Santa Rosa, a crane attempting to remove a tree stump has tipped on to a house. The picture is worth a look.

Gliffy - Flow Charting and More - I've been playing around for a couple of weeks (free) and just signed up for the premium package ($25/mth for 1-10 users). It's not Visio, but it's not Dia either. In a world where you need to flow chart something out really quick, with people in different places using various OS's it's amazing.

Phil just showed me imphoto from imsense. I was very impressed. Load a photo, it has a "how much" and a "toggle between the original and the how-muched photo" option. Also has some curve adjustment, but the "click this button and your image looks better" was surprisingly good.

I could very much see this fitting in the "I've got a bunch of vacation snapshots and I don't have time to individually tweak them" part of the photo workflow. I'd do manual tweaking for art shots, but for the pictures left in the directory after I've extracted the ones to make look really good this could be a nice tool to round out the photo album. Very cool technology.

I generally try to stay away from the trolling for hits that is the mainstream computer press, but I'll make an exception: Cringely in PCWorld: AT&T: Ignore Verizon's Ads and Fix Your Own Woes:

Coverage is abysmal. I watch people all around me chatting on their T-Mobile or Sprint Nextel or Verizon phones when I'm getting zero bars. "Voice quality" is an oxymoron. As for 2G or 3G data speeds, roll the dice and take your chances. Customer service? I'm sorry, I can't talk about that right now, I just ate.

I can't speak for 3G coverage, but I've got 4 out of 5 bars right now, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the little 3G icon disappear several times today. People who call me regularly know to try my land line as well because some days the calls come through, and some days they don't (and the iPhone doesn't register them as missed, so AT&T must just be dropping them silently).

Some of this is Apple's fault, there was a point release of OS 3 that wouldn't hold 3G long enough for me to web surf, as I walked over Olive Street and downtown I had better luck turning off 3G and just falling back to the old network. I'm pretty sure I didn't have this many lost calls before I got the iPhone.

Of course there have been suggestions that the 3G network congestion wasn't that point release, it was just AT&T incompetence in running a network. I don't know who to believe there.

All of which has me at the "I really like having a web browser in my pocket, and the iPhone is kinda cool, but I wonder what it'd cost to buy out of that contract" stage.

Thanks to Flurry, makers of a tool that smart phone developers can use to track application usage somehow, for the link (via Flurry's twitter feed) that started this ramble.

Zack sent this page on basic ultralight gliders with an "OMG! OMG! when can we build one?" sort of message. I told him not 'til after I built my shop...

The Hubbert Peak Theory of Rock, or, Why We’re All Out of Good Songs. A good look at innovation and resource consumption.

CJ forwarded The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster, first published in the Oxford and Cambridge Review in 1909:

Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine. The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. ...

Unconnected whatsoever, have you heard that Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford, is finding that teens are starting to prefer the artifacts of MP3s?

Berger then said that he tests his incoming students each year in a similar way. He has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer "sizzle sounds" that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

One of the notions of some of the health craze folks I have trouble with is the concept of "cleansing". It seems to cover way too much territory, and is often couched in terms that trigger a whole bunch of my BS alarms. However, maybe there's something underlying the concept: Washington University's Center for Genome Sciences researchers claim junk food binge alters community of microbes in the gut in less than a day, and that transferring those microbes to mice fed a healthier diet makes even those mice gain weight.

Bonus food link: AlterNet: Who's Really Behind Organic Food Brands Like Amy's and Odwalla? As I've mentioned, I'm a fan of Amy's.

Brilliance: Matt Bors looks at what Lincoln could have faced in the context of the current health care debate.

Today's XKCD seemed particularly apropos given that I finished Shop Class as Soulcraft last night:

"Significant amounts" of water found on the moon.

Equasy - An overlooked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms

From page 129 of Shop Craft as Soulcraft:

In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter wrote that the expansion of higher education beyond labor market demand creates for white-collar workers "employment in substandard work or at wages below those of the better-paid manual workers." What's more, "it may create inemployability of a particularly disconcerting type. The man who has gone trhough college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

But that's okay, because organizations like Starbucks spring up in order to utilize that new labor pool.

A few more from CJ:

• Mason Williams: Tummy Gummers/A Major Thang (YouTube video), more to Mason Williams than "Classical Gas".
• Times Online claims that (UK) middle class shoppers are stealing expensive food in record numbers in an attempt to keep up their standard of living.
• A really cool Wired look at the making of an astronomy photo. I'll justify that 5D MkIV yet...

And from Eric:

• USGS The National Map beta.

Somewhere else:

• Free Culinary School.com
• Frets.com home shop tech articles, including lots of notes on metal working.

Ah, remember those heady days of the late 90's, when we were assured that civilization would fall when the Y2K bug destroyed all our systems? Wired looks at whether or not it was effort wasted. The concensus, however, is that there would have been some trouble, but we caught it in time.

I think we can also look at some of the social fallout from the whole affair. It is interesting that Y2K caught the imagination of the truly paranoid, and we heard claims that at the stroke of midnight on 1/1/00 the prison doors would automatically unlock and the streets would be full of desparate criminals, while the telephone system and electrical grid were destroying themselves and nuclear reactors would merrily melt down. Hmm isn't there a movie being released this weekend that sounds like this?

The other issue is that Y2K ruined the right-wing militia movement. I've seen claims that they bankrupted themselves laying in k-rations and ammo while building bunkers against the starving hordes. When nothing happened they looked like idiots. Well, at least they had some textured vegetable protein to eat.

CJ continues his attempt to get me into large format photography: Midway down this page is photographer's A&B flash powder, perfect for that outfit involving a fedora with a "press" card in the hat band.

Alas, they've changed the headline before I could catch 'em in the act, but recently David Nutt, of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, was forced to step down after he criticized the government drug policy relating to marijuana. CJ tells me that the original headline was "Drug Adviser Nutt Sacking Was 'Humiliation', Says Colleague"

How People Are Fooled By Ideomotor Action:

Hare carried out several more such experiments with similar results. Apparently he never fully understood the key aspect of Faraday's results -- that honest, intelligent people can unconsciously engage in muscular activity that is consistent with their expectations.

One of the things I respect about the "New Age" movement is that parts of it are consciously looking to leverage our subconscious behaviors and desires. And if the placebo effect really is getting stronger (formerly), then there's lots of untapped potential in our beliefs. The problem is that in order to be effective we have to believe that fooling our minds works, so riding the ragged edge of belief without falling headlong into the fallacies is extremely difficult.

An awesome semi-obvious idea that will take over the world and that I have no idea how to monetize.

Over on Twitter, Eric asked:

Watching Google Go video: http://bit.ly/3NUeUW Like what I see so far - but will there be library support?!?

I looked at Google's Go (as distinct from Francis McCabe's Go! programming language) and had a similar thought: I want to see what this language can do, I've been playing with Python and SDL recently, let's port that code to Go. Oh. Wait. No SDL bindings...

However, another realization: Processes are great ways to compartmentalize, and interprocess communication via pipes can be relatively cheap if it's implemented right. Why not make the GUI front-end one process in a language I'm familiar with that's fast and cheap, and write the back end that computes the (in this case) physics in Go? I could set up a pipe to pass data structures back and forth and... How should I serialize the data structures?

Back at Pixar I wrote a system for image output that had an API for image output. One side would say "the pixels are coming down the pipe as (signed|unsigned) (double|float|int32|int16|char) in (little|big)endian byte order" (the endianness was either defined, or native), the other would say "I want them in this format", I think quantization happened upstream anyway though there was probably some of that, and the library figured it out.

It could take multiple inputs, via network or pipe, the senders could even say "I'm sending this XY chunk of the image" and the receiver could say "buffer it and give it to me in scanline order." So you could be processing one portion of an image on a little-endian machine, another on a big-endian machine, and writing a driver for a format TGA was a matter of saying "give me scanlines in Red Green Blue Alpha order, throw out everything else", RLE compressing them and stuffing them to disk.

The flaw that I know of in it was that Tom Lokovic was, at the very time I was writing this, working on deep depth buffers, and my system only handled a fixed number of samples per pixel. But I think it got everything else mostly right (I'm sure Mark or the other Tom will drop in here to point out ways that it's been a beast, and given that the latter has used what I think is my code for a critique of coding style, I'm prepared for that).

The world needs a similar standard for interprocess calls. It's not XML, I've built a distributed system using it and that's way too expensive to parse. It might be JSON, but I rather think it's something binary. I also think it handles fairly complex data structures and has a notion of mirroring structures and persistence of objects at the other end.'

It is both a wire format and a set of libraries that provide an API that someone would recognize whether they were working in C, C++, C#, VisualBasic, Python, Ruby, Perl, Lua, or Google's Go.

And I think it'd be fun to write, but I don't have anyone to pay me to do it and I think it'll also need some names and/or applications big enough to push it so it becomes a standard. You listening, Google?

I've been playing about a bit with Python again, and again I'm having the "what niche does this fill?" issue. It's not anywhere near Perl's whipupitude, and its constructs are such that I end up prematurely thinking about optimization. Every time I dive into Python I start wondering why I'm not using C++ for the task.

Yesterday, I read this thread about Google possibly deprecating Python for internal projects, courtesy of Rafe, which seemed kind of weird given that the Google App Engine started and was wrapped around Python, but all of the comments about why made sense.

Today I ran across the Go systems programming language, which is apparently evolving from some internal Google projects. It's optionally typed, syntax looks like a mix of Python and C++, and has an emphasis on concurrent execution.

Seems like a good day to thank a veteran. Also seems like a good day to take a little effort to make sure that politically we stop using our military quite as much.

Ricoh GXR camera system seals the CCD in the interchangeable lens unit. Interesting to think about the economics of that...