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Canon announces that they've built an 8"x8" CMOS sensor

Bjørn Lomborg has decided that there's no more money in being a climate change skeptic, so he's switched sides. Normally I try to hold off on some of the snarkier MeFi threads, but in this case I think it's justified: Via this MetaFilter thread.

Reddit thread of bad science jokes:

So Helium walks into a bar and orders a beer.

The bartender says, "Sorry, we don't serve noble gases here."

Helium doesn't react.

Further down the thread we find a response from "planetfour":

He He He

Groan. Via.

Violet Blue: Comment Period Now Open on .XXX – Make Your Voice Heard. Here's my letter:

I'm writing in opposition to the Proposed Registry Agreement for the .XXX sTLD by ICM Registry. The .XXX sTLD should be rejected.

• The .xxx TLD is opposed by all potential customers. There is no evidence of support in the adult entertainment industry and community for support of .XXX, despite ICM's assurances.
• The .xxx TLD is opposed by anti-porn religious organizations.
• The .xxx TLD is opposed by thought leaders in the technology and by civil liberties organizations including the ACLU.
• There is no concrete, agreed-upon definition of “adult content.”
• There is a serious concern that .xxx is a slippery slope towards a content ghetto, where regulations, especially outside of the U.S., will push any "offensive" content into a space that's more easily blocked. Even inside the U.S., Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Mark Pryor (D-AR) have introduced legislation to make the use of .XXX compulsory for all web sites that are “harmful to minors.” This phrase has been used in the past to attempt to censor basic health information.
• .XXX raises serious issues around spurious and unsupported TLD’s in regard to the impact of ICANN on rulings on civil and human rights, and ICANN’s role in content-based discrimination.

In light of the above, I object to .XXX and urge ICANN to reject .XXX.

I know we have at least one person whose spouse is a hockey fan here. RT @fpaynter:

Hockey's first gonad guard, the Cup: 1874. First helmet: 1974. It only took 100 years to realize that a man's brain is also important.

Despite the amount of posting online I do, I'm a bit of a privacy/security nutcase. The difference being what I choose to be private is possibly different from other people. I'm reading a summary of: this that includes: " a new privacy leak in residential wireless ubiquitous computing systems" and "..can observe private activities in the home such as cooking, showering, toileting, and sleeping by eavesdropping on the wireless transmissions of sensors in a home, even when all of the transmissions are encrypted. We call this the Fingerprint and Timing-based Snooping (FATS) attack".

And I had to laugh. It transcends my paranoia by large factors, has a kewl acronym, and my immediate response is: This is part of why mission critical command and control systems should not be wireless. Even minor home area networks and especially security systems. It's really easy to disable them with RF noise.

Walking around with Nancy last night, I joked about what I should have right after 9/11 was started a security consulting company. It's part of what I do now with some clients, but it's more of a perk. If I didn't like my customers and was more predatory consultant-ish, I'd be rich. Makes me think a small RV full of wireless/wired sniffing gear would be a great way to travel and work.

A New Hampshire high school student, Kyle Dubois is suing his shop class teacher, Thomas Kelley, for allowing Mr. Dubois to shock himself:

During class on March 11, Kyle Dubois willingly placed an alligator clamp on one of his nipples while a second student placed one on his other nipple and a third student plugged in a cord providing electricity, sending an approximately three-second jolt through Dubois, police said in a statement following an investigation of the incident.

Uh. Yeah. To be fair, the article mentions that the suit alleges that the teacher egged the kid on, a previous article says more on that:

"There appears to be somewhat of a conflict in terms of what the students are saying and what the teacher has said on the record," O'Connor said. "My job will be to sort out what is the truth."

For the most part, I'm okay with no longer being a river guide. There are things that are fine when we're self-destructive twenty somethings that I'm cool with having grown out of, even if it doesn't mean scaring the crap out of the rookies by surfing Grumpy's, or swimming into Double-Suck when most paddlers are happy just to get through it in their boat. "Yeah, that rapid that scares the hell out of you? I body surf it for fun on Sunday mornings."

There are, however, occasions where I get little twinges of "damn, I wish I were back on the Ocoee" (and willing to take the punishment and in good enough shape to swim the thing), as is the case every time I hear about the Bubble Baba Challenge, because running the Ocoee on an inflatable sex toy would be as badass as body surfing Double-Suck.

Violet Blue has a roundup from this year's race with YouTube video from a participant's perspective.

Drinking coffee could help protect your liver from the effects of too much alcohol.

“Consuming coffee seems to have some protective benefits against alcoholic cirrhosis, and the more coffee a person consumes the less risk they seem to have of being hospitalized or dying of alcoholic cirrhosis,” said Arthur Klatsky, MD, an investigator with Kaiser Permanente’s Division of Research and the lead author of the study. “We did not see a similar protective association between coffee and non-alcoholic cirrhosis.”

Heavy drinkers outlive non-drinkers.

But a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that — for reasons that aren't entirely clear — abstaining from alcohol does actually tend to increase one's risk of dying even when you exclude former drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers' mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers.

As a current non-drinker, I hope there's some prophylactic effect from my youthful overindulgences...

Lego S&M! Thanks, Debra!

Interesting: Public defenders just as effective as private attorneys:

Two important caveats. The researchers did not look at convictions vs. acquittals. And they found that retaining a private attorney is apparently beneficial “for certain offenders and at certain stages” of the process. Specifically, they noted some interestingly varied outcomes when looking at a defendant’s race.

White defendants with a private attorney are more likely to be granted bail, and black defendants with a private attorney are more likely to have the primary charge reduced than black defendants with a public defender. Via John Corcoran.

The vagaries of modern rubber flapper valves (and ancient American Standard 3 gallon per flush toilets) are driving me nuts. I'm about to pull the trigger on a Toto Aquia® Dual Flush, 1.6 GPF / 0.9 GPF CST414M toilet, and put a Washlet S300 seat on it.

Anyone wanna talk me out of it? Or into some better option? The thing we like about the CST414M is that it mounts flush against the wall, so other options should mount similarly.

Sanomagic is making beautiful mahogany bicycles that seem to be very ridable as well as beautiful. Detailed pics: here.

I want a bunch of these: The Mesh Potato (Via Mars).

What do you call an 802.11bg mesh router with a single FXS port that automatically forms a peer-to-peer network and relays telephone calls without landlines or cell-phone towers? A Mesh Potato, of course.

And text would be fine, the applications I have for this (bike ride support, disaster preparedness and recovery) don't need voice.

I mentionedformer RNC campaign chief Ken Mehlman wondered why he couldn't scare the gay voter block into being afraid of the Islamic jihad.

To illustrate why Mr. Mehlman's "...greatest anti-gay force in the world..." wasn't all that scary up against the Republican right, Focus on the Family opposes anti-bullying efforts in schools as too gay friendly.

Fact for the moment: Without enforcement, everything is legal.

Philip Greenspun: Libertarianism will become less popular as government grows larger.

Between the damage that the Republicans have done to the notion of less government in the naughties, Ron Paul's disastrous mismanagement of his campaign's message, yeah, there's going to need to be another meme for that notion to grow, and it's only going to happen once Glenn Beck and the Tea Party folks flame out fabulously.

"Papieren bitte!" New York Times reports that border patrol agents are asking for proof of citizenship on Amtrak along the Canadian border.

The patrol says that answering agents’ questions is voluntary, part of a “consensual and nonintrusive conversation” Some passengers agree, though they are not told that they can keep silent.

Because when uniformed armed people start asking me questions, my first thought is always "hey, I have the right to keep silent".

Weekend Testers: Some thoughts on dates:

Now, how would you like to know that the days of a given month could vary by a day or two one direction or the other, and a committee met fairly regularly  to determine where and when the days will be each year (or to be closer to accurate, each decade) and the basic rules from the past were applied, but there was no guarantee that those days would replicate? Welcome to the Nepali calendar, which is based on the Hindu Bikram Samwat calendar. This calendar is a "lunar-solar" calendar, which means that keeping it in sync with the lunar cycles is just as important as is keeping it in sync with the solar cycles. This makes for a much more dynamic calendar, with many more rules as to how many days each month has and when they are applied.

Cool, in a freaky "wait, there are computer-using cultures that don't have enough arithmetic or astronomy to make deterministic calendars yet?" sort of way.

Scott Rosenberg: In Defense of Links, Part One: Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification, in which Scott does a takedown of the "links hurt reading" hypothesis.

I'm linking to this video of longboarding in San Ramon (two kids doing some basic skateboarding on hills, not as exciting as some videos of that activity you've seen`) so that I can tell my favorite Arun story: I was in an office, with a couple of other people, one of whom was saying something like "we've got too many Chiefs and not enough Indians". Without missing a beat, Arun, who was walking by the office, popped his head in and said "I believe that to be very much the case."

Silly JavaScript example of the moment: Create a yoyo with jQuery and CSS3

The MeFi entry pointing to this Kodak post about creating a portable digital still camera in 1975 and this NY Times article about it had a few comments that got me thinking. There's the usual "why couldn't they see far enough?" and "Xerox PARC could, but they couldn't get corporate to execute" and that kind of stuff, but empath's observation about seeing the future is worth a pondering:

I'll give another example -- if someone had asked you, in 1980, which would have been the more world-changing invention -- the ability to make video-phone calls, or the ability to send a text message to anybody, at any time, anywhere, most people probably would have said video-phone calls, because I think it seemed like a more difficult problem.

Video calls are one of those things that I've tried and abandoned a whole bunch of times. Asynchronous text exchanges? I've been doing that for more than two and a half decades, but when that started nobody in the mainstream saw the value.

And then I'm not sure what it was about this comment about Kodak owning the sensor market, and then losing it to Canon and Nikon, and Rochester suffering got me thinking, but...

I get a lot of "hey, we're working on this cool project, you should join us!". I saw a handheld portable personal video player ready to come to market years before Apple brought out theirs. I've sat sipping scotch and talking about all sorts of products that eventually came to market a decade or so before they finally hit the big box retailers. Time after time, the problem wasn't the ability of the engineering team to execute, it was owning enough of the ecosystem to make the overall product useful. That portable video player? Heck, the guys working on the hardware understood that a portal that led the user to content was a necessity, but they couldn't get the next level up to spend a few tens of thousands to stumble through getting that portion working.

In that comment above, the thing that struck me was that Kodak owned the consumables, but Nikon and Canon owned the lenses. So Kodak's digital cameras used Canon lenses; once Canon figured out sensors Kodak's line was toast.

I'm not sure how to summarize that realization, but as you look to consumables and ancillary products and how to position your efforts, I think it's worth looking at how Kodak, in its pursuit of providing the consumables, lost the long-term game.

See also: this great MeFi comment about the decline and fall of Sears. And also realize that many of these things happen at scales longer than human careers. There's another lesson there.

Bruce Schneier Rant sounds a lot like one of my rants.. if I were eloquent.

Panhandlers with Debit Cards - I'm not suprised that he found some decent needy people, some lifestyle choices, and a lot of professional panhandlers that would not leave their very profitable spot.

Just a little (somewhat embarrassing) experiment: Recent runs in KML and on Google maps, automagically extracted by Perl from my pocket GPS logger.

• KML of run on 2010-08-02 06:02:55 Schollenberger Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-03 06:06:42 Helen Putnam Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-10 06:02:33 Helen Putnam Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-16 06:09:14 Schollenberger Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-17 06:03:45 Helen Putnam Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-19 06:11:29 Schollenberger Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-20 06:15:55 Schollenberger Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-23 06:10:56 Schollenberger Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-24 06:05:18 Helen Putnam Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-26 06:07:40 Helen Putnam Park (View on Google Maps)

I've been carrying a Wintec G-Rays 2+ GPS tracker in my pocket recently. Sometimes I'll remember to mash the "start new track" button, sometimes I won't, so I whipped together a little Perl that grabs the bounding rects of polygons saved in "My Places" in Google Earth, and runs through the tracks that come off that thing and splits 'em up. So I can run my tracks through it and see "Oh, look, there's a "005-Home-HelenPutnamPark.kml", and a 006-HelenPutnamPark-HelenPutnamPark.kml", so I drove to the park, ran in the park, and...

There are a few limitations with what I've got so far.

I can take Perl and convert from WGS84 (ie: "latitude and longitude" for you folks who don't want to know about datums) to UTM (meters, for those of you who don't wish to dig further) so that I can say "how far did I jog?" using Proj.4 or Geo::Coordinates::UTM.

However, I'm just using axis aligned bounding boxes around the regions I've drawn in Google Earth because I don't have a convenient library for basic 2d vector operations in Perl.

What I'd like is to not have to:

1. Rewrite line-to-line intersection code in Perl from C++.
2. Rewrite "in polygon" intersection code in Perl from C++.

When I go looking for basic geometric operations code in Perl, I find examples that were written by professors as examples for CS classes that have clear degeneracies. I could fix them, but that's a few hours, and in that time I could write my own that'd also have some edge cases I undoubtedly missed, and that use data structures that look nothing like what other people might use.

There has to be a library of basic 2d vector operations for Perl, no? I'm installing Math::Intersection::StraightLine and Math::Polygon::Tree, but the CPAN entries don't give me great hope that these are any better than the other sample code I've stumbled across. Someone has to have done this right?

Rob Rhyne: Update on Briefs. Guy gets tired of waiting for Apple app store approval, open sources his app.

I've always been a big proponent of nationalized healthcare. I grew up an Air Force brat, so I know how well socialized medicine works. Sure, the doctors weren't the best but the care was universal. I got to see the doc, had my prescriptions filled and it didn't matter how close my family was to the poverty line. I never lacked for treatment...

As an adult, I now work for the Federal Government. I have the same health insurance choices as President Obama and Congress (although I bet Obama can get the socialized medicine from the military since he's their Commander in Chief). In a complete reversal of my childhood medical experience, I chose a high-deductible plan with an HSA. Because the premiums the Government pays for the high-deductible plan are so much lower than regular plans, the difference is deposited in an HSA for me.

This arrangement is really nice because it gives me funds for medical care that don't have to come out of my regular budget. But the funds are limited, so it benefits me to shop around. I went to a walk-in clinic this Spring for a persistent cough due to allergies. The receptionist gave me two options: they would bill my insurance company $325 for the visit or I could pay $75 out of pocket. Since the $325 wouldn't begin to make a dent on my deductible, I paid the $75 out of the HSA.

I don't know why it costs the clinic 5X as much to bill my insurance. I'm just glad I had the choice!

http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/

@jeriellsworth tweeted:

Back in school a counselor said to the student body "If you don't study hard just put your grubbies on and go out to the shop right now."

and

I'm glad I spent time learning how to build things in the shop and have books with all the knowledge I missed by not studying.

The 'July Effect': Worst Month For Fatal Hospital Errors, Study Finds. From the UCSD news center, similar stories in Scientific American, U.S. News & World Report ,The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Discover Magazine.

The actual paper appears to be A July Spike in Fatal Medication Errors: A Possible Effect of New Medical Residents by David P. Phillips and Gwendolyn E. C. Barker (PDF) (PubMed entry, alt link off a Turner.com server, SpringerLink version)

Inside medical institutions, in counties containing teaching hospitals, fatal medication errors spiked by 10% in July and in no other month [JR = 1.10 (1.06-1.14)]. In contrast, there was no July spike in counties without teaching hospitals. The greater the concentration of teaching hospitals in a region, the greater the July spike (r = .80; P = .005). These findings held only for medication errors, not for other causes of death.

This started out as a blog entry about hospital errors, but it's turned into an article on journalism, because I got there by the Huffington Post embedding an ABC News video, and as I look through these various articles it's pretty clear to me that we'd have been a lot better off if I could find the original UCSD press release rather than the various people writing Google fodder articles based on articles based on it.

Although I believe he's been outed several times before, Dubya's 2004 campaign chief and former RNC chairman Ken Mehlman has come out of the closet.

Privately, in off-the-record conversations with this reporter over the years, Mehlman voiced support for civil unions and told of how, in private discussions with senior Republican officials, he beat back efforts to attack same-sex marriage. He insisted, too, that President Bush "was no homophobe." He often wondered why gay voters never formed common cause with Republican opponents of Islamic jihad, which he called "the greatest anti-gay force in the world right now."

And frankly, Ken, the rest of us all wondered why the Republicans didn't just outright declare their support for the Islamic jihad, because the Republicans have done more to support those efforts than any other political group, and because their stated goals are pretty well aligned.

As Kattullus says in the MeFi thread:

I guess it counts as progress that a prominent Republican outs himself without having been arrested in a men's bathroom for snorting cocaine out of a male prostitute's rectum.

Howl! The Onion (video): TIME announces new version of magazine aimed at adults.

Just pullin' numbers out of my ass: If smoking has gone from 44% in the 1950s to 24% in the 2000s, and life expectancy at birth has gone from 68.2 to 77.9 years and smoking reduces your life expectancy by 25 years (there are differing opinions on that number), and health care spending for roughly the same period has gone from < 5% of GDP to > 16% of GDP, then is it reasonable to say that we're spending 11% more of our GDP on 4.7 more years.

Or, if our working lifespan is about 40 years, we're now devoting 4.4 more of those years to paying for healthcare, giving us a net gain of less than four months.

Hmmmm...

WSJ: Large commercial property owners are choosing to default, mostly to pressure banks into loan restructuring.

Owners of commercial property have an easier time walking away than homeowners because commercial mortgages are typically nonrecourse. That means the biggest penalty for walking away is the forfeiture of assets and cash flow they may generate.

Apropos of my review of Druin Burch's Taking The Medicine, car crash victim beaten by security guards after trying to leave the hospital when he discovered that he was misidentified and scheduled for cancer removal surgery. (Via SE)

A few notes on characters and plot: Melodrama and Mary Sue, and Id and villainy.

Those two entries are Ed's bit of riffing on his notion that "no one's a villain in their own mind" contrasted with books to make my flist's heads explode: John Ringo, wherein a self-loathing hero is described. John Ringo's response to that review is worth reading if you're interested in what makes fiction successful, if you don't make it that far down the comment threads otherwise. (Related: this Sensible Erection entry that turned me on to that review).

My review of Druin Burch's Taking The Medicine.

crash had a link to this ScienceDaily article which is a reprint of this Washington State University press release about some interesting research:

Four separate studies led by a Washington State University social psychologist have found that unselfish workers who are the first to throw their hat in the ring are also among those that coworkers most want to, in effect, vote off the island.

The PubMed abstract for The desire to expel unselfish members from the group (DOI link), by Craig Parks and Asako Stone in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, says:

An initial study investigating tolerance of group members who abuse a public good surprisingly showed that unselfish members (those who gave much toward the provision of the good but then used little of the good) were also targets for expulsion from the group. Two follow-up studies replicated this and ruled out explanations grounded in the target being seen as confused or unpredictable. A fourth study suggested that the target is seen by some as establishing an undesirable behavior standard and by others as a rule breaker. Individuals who formed either perception expressed a desire for the unselfish person to be removed from the group. Implications are discussed.

This would explain a lot about my career. Sigh.

Why I don't read /. any more. Went there today, one of the stories is a link to this reprinted press- release about Canon claiming a 120 megapixel sensor.

There's a lot of speculation that could happen in the slashdot discussion thread for the article, but rather than the possible insight that one used to be able to find in some of the +5 articles, it's poorly informed fanboy statements and whining about how that many megapixels don't mean anything without better lenses (never mind the physics!).

So, here's some speculation: If you abandoned the standard Bayer pattern and started throwing in some pixels with ND filters, you could improve the dynamic range of the sensor immensely.

Walk into the Porche dealer.. Take a test drive of a black Porche 911 with all the goodies. Squeeeling the tires a little in a curve, scream: "I like it, I'll take it". Pull back into the dealership with a big grin and a happy sales-droid. Take a chair in front of the big desk, sip a cup of coffee served by a buxom lass, and tell the sales manager that you loved the ride in the Porche 911, and you want it delivered tomorrow with a couple of minor modifications: You want a Cummings diesel motor in front of the dashboard and that it should be Ferrari red. Plop down a large deposit in cash and walk out.

In the high dollar corporate IT world... it happened again today. They test drove and -liked- the Linux system, have for weeks. And then asked for it on Windows Server and MS-SQL. It happens all the time... We would laugh at the guy at the Porche dealer, shouldn't we laugh in IT?

Minneapolis will pay $165,000 to zombies (and their attorneys).

Although U.S. District Judge Joan Ericksen had dismissed the zombies' lawsuit, it was resurrected in February by a three-judge panel of the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ...

(Emphasis mine)

More social media musings. So I had that link to Leo Laporte: Buzz Kill. If you're interested in more musings on the ways that we're giving up our conversation spaces to others: Scott Rosenberg: Why trust Facebook with the future's past?, Larry Burton: Ponderings on friendship and writing, and Violet Blue's Gnomedex talk (uStream video) touches on the difficulty of using Tribe/Facebook/whatever as a forum for any sex related discussions.

Speaking of which, now that I've moved back to Mediawiki over on Flutterby.net I need to do a little rework on building some better RSS feeds of content there.

Researching The "Rape Culture" of America.

Koss and Pollitt make a technical (and in fact dubious) legal point: women are ignorant about what counts as rape. Roiphe makes a straightforward human point: the women were there, and they know best how to judge what happened to them. Since when do feminists consider "law" to override women's experience?

I'm not sure where I stand on the thesis of the essay, but it's worth reading through, there's lots of good stuff in there.

Philadelphia requiring bloggers to pay $300 for a business license.

Seems like there might be a place for a town that's willing to do this for a buck or two a year to get together with a domain registrar and provide contact info and a P.O. box to do business from...

Thanks, Chris.

California is currently on the way to having the worst year for pertussis (Whooping Cough) since 1958. Last year they had 2,700 cases with 7 deaths. Much of this is caused by a general reduction in vaccination for the disease, which is falsely accused of causing autism.

Fortunately, the forward thinking Science Fiction community is planning a counter-attack. At next week's DragonCon Sci-Fi convention in Atlanta, one group is setting up a nearby vaccination clinic for attendees and their children. The future belongs to the survivors, whether they be the ones with the longest claws or the smartest ideas.

Leo Laporte: Buzz Kill. On realizing that giving these so-called "social media" sites all of our conversation, we're losing things:

I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs. Well no more. I’m sorry for having neglected you Leoville.