Flutterby™!

A MetaFilter entry reads

A five meters long 1/72 scale model of the USS Enterprise is looking for a new home

Basically, the guy who built it is moving into a retirement home and is looking for a museum or some such that'll take it. Seems like a message that needs to get spread pretty far.

Frank Paynter abandons Twitter, following Bill Meloney: I’m going back to IRC … See you there. I'm not quite ready to give up on Twitter, and IRC has its own shortcomings, but the points are all valid.

Hunter S. Thompson motivational posters (Via SE).

Why comprensive sex education is a good idea: 16 year old Torrington Connecticut girl mistakes sounds of sex for assault, rounds up friends who go beat up her mother's lover.

Your disaster speculation for the day: Seed Magazine: The Extinction Oscillator.

... It turns out that the biodiversity minima of the 62-million- year cycle happens when the Sun is “bobbed up” on only one side of the galaxy, when the solar system is on the disk’s upper, “north” side. ...

Louis Rosenfeld: Shame and disgust, on contracting for the VA hospital system and asking one's-self ethical questions:

Nope. What they told me was that they didn't really want to make it easy for veterans—those people risking their lives for their country—to learn about the health benefits that they were entitled to. And that taxpayers had committed to funding. All to save money—and for what??

Hat tip to Hanan Cohen.

Vanity Fair: Trouble in Paradise. Interesting article on the sexual culture that evolved on Pitcairn Island, where the "Mutiny on the Bounty" descendants landed, and how that's conflicting with British sexual culture. No answers, but the start of some questions.

Light Lane: Bring Your Own Lane for bicyling at night. Brilliant idea. Illuminating application. I'd put one on my recumbant.

Hey, Petalumans, there's a gathering at Aqus next Tuesday, 7/7 at 7. Come meet the meat behind other online personas.

I have an idea for the evolution of a few scripts and applications that I've been playing with that I think could turn into something larger. I've started doing a little playing around with a browser app, and realized that I need a little bit of structure.

So, a couple of questions:

1. This app needs to run in a browser, needs to be quick and responsive, and needs to communicate the changes to the document that the user makes back to the server and confirm that those changes got made in a robust way. I could re-invent a bunch of wheels, but I have the feeling that people have already tried to build JavaScript frameworks for this. Anyone got experience with jQuery, Prototype.js, or something else they'd recommend?
2. I'm planning on using Perl with Apache and mod_perl for the server, just because it'll let me build and deploy fast. Any particular "gotcha"s in architecting something that talks to a JavaScript browser app?
3. What's the best set of docs for mapping APIs? Google Maps has a lot of bad info and dead ends in their documentation, but at least there's public discussion and lots of development happening. OpenLayers has a lot to recommend it, but their documentation doesn't even mention some of the types of events that I think are critical (ways to get interaction events out of the map to code in the surrounding web page).

And, yes, the flaws in the KML from last weekend's road trip (pan south to the stuff in Monterey) is what's driving this.

Fine Woodworking has embedded YouTube link (Direct link) of SawStop inventor Steve Gass sticking his finger into one of his tablesaws, taken from Discovery Channel's Time Warp series.

A chin up from Sam Maloof (Hat tip to Rockler).

Adrian Colesberry (warning: all flash site) has written a book titled "How To Make Love To Adrian Colesberry". Susie Bright has some excerpts, it looks very funny, but Adrian Colesberry also has a blog. His observations on kink in politics seem worth a read:

There was no raping of female prisoners during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, which is almost unheard of in wartime. The soldiers were quite happy to starve women to death, to pull their fingernails out one by one, to suffocate them with plastic bags, to let them die in childbirth, but no raping.

Speaking of cognitive disconnect, here's an article about California's budget crisis with emphasis on Modoc county, highest recipient per-capita of state funds, Republican stronghold:

Assemblyman Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber (Tehama County), vice chairman of the Assembly budget committee, represents Modoc County. He said cutting social services is not what he has in mind when he talks about deficit reduction - it's chopping other things, such as regulatory oversight committees and government employees.

He said health and road services cost more per capita in rural places like Modoc because they're remote and expensive to reach. So don't blame the sticks for consuming more funding per person, he said.

Uh. Yeah. So it's a lifestyle choice to live out there, and they're independent and all and don't need your government services anyway, but that lifestyle and location is just naturally more expensive so they're entitled to all that money and shut up about it?

Freakonomics blog entry which points to Donorcycles: Do Motorcycle Helmet Laws Reduce Organ Donations?, an as-yet unpublished paper that says that:

Our estimates imply that every death of a helmetless motorcyclist prevents or delays as many as 0.33 deaths among individuals on organ transplant waiting lists.

A friend of ours is currently on the waiting list for a liver. I support choice in helmet use.

"Slightly overweight" people live longer than "normal weight" people (/. summary linking to Science Daily article and NY Times article).

Charlene and I have some differing views on health and nutrition. There are several places where each of us looks at the belief structures the other has and ask "how can you know that?" and "how can you believe that?". In particular, Charlene's a fan of the Gerson therapy, an alleged cure for everything that involves copious amounts of fresh vegetable juices, but whose health claims I believe don't hold up under scrutiny. On the other hand, her variant of this has helped her go from a size 18 to a size 6, so its hard for me to critique too hard.

But as I look at some of the claims of the proponents of Gerson therapy, its hard for me to critique them when on the conventional medicine side I'm met with things like the four food lobbies which became the ludicrous food pyramid, and I'm met with quotes like:

“It may be that a few extra pounds actually protect older people as their health declines, but that doesn’t mean that people in the normal weight range should try to put on a few pounds,” said Mark Kaplan, DrPH, coauthor and Professor of Community Health at Portland State University. “Our study only looked at mortality, not at quality of life, and there are many negative health consequences associated with obesity, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes.”

Because high cholesterol might lead to heart disease which might lead to early death? Uh... yeah. Not to mention that the whole "high cholesterol" thing has morphed from "high cholesterol" to "high LDL cholesterol" to "the 'proper' ratio between....". And how did we come up with "normal" weight here in the first place?

Just kidding Eric, but it does seem you might now be able to legally collect and use rainwater in Colorado. at least for: fire protection, animals, irrigation and household use.

Howl: An interview with San Francisco zookeeper Jane Tollini on sex in the animal kingdom, and a hilarious part two.

Darrin Bell tittered "If any editorial cartoonists draw Michael Jackson moonwalking through the Pearly Gates, I will personally beat them down w/a sock full of quarters." Apparently Bruce Plante was the first....

I grew up fairly far out of the mainstream, and moved only slightly into it when our family moved to Connecticut and I went to a public school for 8^th grade. I remember semi-embarrassing myself, turning it into a "ha ha just kidding" moment, when in high school band the sheet music to "Billie Jean" or somesuch was passed around and I asked "who the hell is Michael Jackson?" I stand by that statement. Can we STFU about it already?

If you knew Cynthia Johnston, perhaps at MetaCreations, Adobe, Rampt, or Meta4, she's got some major medical issues and needs help. Charlene and Susan Kitchens are looking at organizing fundraisers for her and seeing what else we can do, but starting by gathering a big list of friends that we can build into an extended support network for her, even people who can just say "Hi, remember me?" as she goes through the next few months would be great.

Please contact me, danlyke@flutterby.com, Charlene or Susan.

On Tuesday evening, I dropped my iPhone and cracked the screen. Everything still worked, so I wasn't expecting to get it fixed 'til we got back from our vacation, but I did a search for iPhone repair near Petaluma on Google, there were two results, and Rami from MyIphoneRepair.com, repairing iPhones up in Santa Rosa, got back to me first. Yesterday morning I drove up there at the crack of dawn and watched as he replaced the screen.

Yeah, its a process I probably could have done myself, but as he describes it it took him several busted parts 'til he got the procedure down, and he's got the extra inventory for when that happens. Totally worth paying him to do it, he did a really nice job of it, and my iPhone is now back to new with genuine Apple parts.

And, sorry Gary, he won't touch the old iPhones.

Hanging out in Pacific Grove. We go whale watching tomorrow, generally take a few days off (yes, I am typing this on my iPhone).

Sat next to a family speaking Persian at dinner, noted a large number of Middle Easterners in the supermarket. Seemed weird until I realized that we're right next door to Monterey, home of the Defense Language Institute.

Oh: had my iPhone screen repaired this morning. Further info and full review when I'm back at a real computer, but I now know *the guy*.

According to Supreme Court, students in a school setting are protected by something less than the “probable cause” standard:

"The lesser standard for school searches could as readily be described as a moderate chance of finding evidence of wrongdoing,” the court said.

Hooray for the judges that they found the strip search of 13-year-old Savana Redding as a violation of her rights. But boo on them that they didn't hold the violators liable. Evidently, the law was vague on the subject, so the school administrators had not liability. WTF? The law was vague? It's the freakin' Fourth Amendment. Making a 13-year-old girl strip to her knickers is unreasonable unless you have damn good probably cause.

I wonder why they aren't going after these people for child-molestation!

In honor of yet another hypocritical politician getting busted for cheating on his wife, and the ensuing trite press conference in which all the usual lame tropes are dragged out, Randy at Something Positive has made a Political Press Confession Bingo card.

Grace Wong Bucchianeri surveyed 600 women in Ohio, and then cross-referenced that information with tax records and census data to look at home ownership vs happiness. The paper is The American Dream or The American Delusion? The Private and External Benefits of Homeownership:

An interesting portrait of homeowners emerges from my analysis. While homeowners report higher life satisfaction, more joy from both home and neighborhood and better moods on an unadjusted basis, these promising differences become insignificant and much smaller in magnitude once I control for a basic set of confounding factors: household income, housing value and health status. Overall, I find little evidence that homeowners are happier by any of the following definitions: life satisfaction, overall mood, overall feeling, general moment-to-moment emotions (i.e., affect) and affect at home. The average homeowner, however, consistently derives more pain (but no more joy) from their house and home. Although they are also more likely to be 12 pounds heavier, report a lower health status and less joy from health, controlling for the less favorable health status does not change the results. ...

And note that this was done back in the middle of the housing boom. Of course it was also Ohio... Newspaper story, Newspaper story, and the inevitable MeFi entry. This whole thing also echoes Philip Greenspun's observation:

If you can rent anything decent, try to avoid buying property. Think about the most interesting people you know. Chances are, most of them are renters. People who rent talk about the books that they've read, the trips that they've taken, the skills that they are learning, the friends whose company they are enjoying. Property owners complain about the local politicians, the high rate of property tax, the difficulty of finding competent tradespeople, the high value of their own (very likely crummy) house or condo, and what kinds of furniture and kitchen appliances they are contemplating buying. Property owners are boring. The most boring parts of a property owner's personality are those which relate to his or her ownership of real estate.

really. I hate 'em.

We just had our work computers serviced. Evidently we hadn't had any virus protection since 2007 or something.

Anyway, the geek took it upon himself (not Mike) to upgrade Thunderbird, our email program to 2.0.0.22. Now my signatures are gone. I found an add-on "signature switch 1.6.4" that will allow me to have multiple signatures but it is not compatible with the version of Thunderbird I have.

I think I should be able to deduct his hourly rate for every hour I have to spend putting things back the way I had them before he took the computers away. I don't know if he reads flutterby or not. I'm frustrated at the moment and really don't care.

Anyway, if anyone has an add-on that will let Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 give you a choice of which signature to use (by right clicking in the body of the email; at least that's how it worked before), I would really appreciate the link.

Sarah Gilbert chooses 10 notable ad campaigns that contain nudity. My favorites are the Nike "Bear Butte" running camp ad for the "Nike Free 5.0" sneakers, and the Air New Zealand nothing-to-hide ad (and "making of" video).

In linking to Marion Nestle's pointing out that the recently recalled salmonella tainted pistachios were simply re-packed and re-issued, Lyn said:

Obama needs to add fixing our food supply and food safety system to his long list of ToDos.

I've been on the fence about where to fix the food supply, but one of my on-going assumptions has been that it's cheaper to do this en-masse, that government regulation can provide an economic streamlining that each of us individually knowing the people in our food chain can't do for a reasonable expenditure of time.

I'm beginning to think that I'm wrong. I'm coming to the conclusion that there are so many externalities in food that all of the alleged gains we think we've seen in the past century or so are really just trading convenience for hidden costs, and that if we ask the government to "fix" this, we're just going to end up with a huge bureaucracy that favors the large producers. That the only way to fix the food supply is to go back to knowing the people who are growing and processing our food, and to be able to inspect those processes ourselves.

Hidden Features of Perl, PHP, JavaScript, C, C++, C#, Java, Ruby, Python and others. I've learned things from the C, C++ and Perl pages.

From the website of Der Spiegel, via Little Green Footballs, is an intriguing photo gallery of East German industrial design. It's all from the 60's, so it has that bright, plasticky sheen of the era. Some of the stuff, like the Jena glassware, is very handsome, while the power lawnmower looks like it was designed by the same guy who built the T-38 tank. What is interesting are the notes about how the products were marketed or used. The "Erika' portable typewriter is a similar to the ones we had back in college, but you had to submit typing samples each year to the Stasi so they could track samizdat writings.

How a Heartwarming, Kick-Ass Father's Day Photo Shoot Ended Up Face Down in Handcuffs on the Addison Airport Tarmac

But according to one of the crew, they had ID'd me as one of theirs, and the tower knew and tried to call it off. But once the wheels were set in motion, it could not be stopped. The pilots were pretty much cool and laughed at me and were even willing to escort me to take more shots. One old-timer gruffed under his breath, "It's the U.S.A., not U.S.S.R. -- I didn't fight to protect this shit." One even offered me his seat on a ride.