Monday August 2nd, 2021
Enough About FOSTA's 'Unintended Consequences'; They Were Always Intended
Just to provide a few examples, there’s a law review article about FOSTA called “good intentions and unintended consequences.” Or you could look at the 2018 OC Register article called “The Unintended Consequences of a Well Meaning Anti-Sex-Trafficking Law” (complete with cliche sexy legs 🙄). Even Elizabeth Warren, in the announcement for the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act, said “As lawmakers, we are responsible for examining unintended consequences of all legislation, and that includes any impact SESTA-FOSTA may have had on the ability of sex workers to protect themselves from physical or financial abuse.”
The chat records, provided to the Daily Dot by the activist collective DDoSecrets, detail efforts by HART (Health Advisory and Recovery Team), a self-described “group of highly qualified UK doctors, scientists, economists, psychologists and other academic experts,” to influence politicians on issues related to COVID-19.
The leak, as first reported by Logically on Tuesday, involves tens of thousands of chat messages stretching back to January before the group’s official launch. Held over the messaging platform Rocket.Chat, the communications highlight a stark contrast between HART’s public attempts to portray itself professionally and some of its members’ conspiratorial views.
Just put our Petaluma square dancing group back on hiatus. Enough people concerned about the latest Sars-CoV-2 variants, even outside, and several of those still willing to dance decided that dancing masked wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
Dear Facebook: If you're gonna lock my account and complain about spam every time I try to give something away in the local "free stuff" group or provide attribution to a tweet, we may have to part ways.
Sunday August 1st, 2021
The existence of tactical flashlights implies strategic, logistical, and diplomatic flashlights.
The prosecutors who framed him and let a murderer go free should serve that time. He spent 34 years in prison. Evidence on file for decades exonerated him last month.
Assistant District Attorney Patricia Cummings, head of the CIU, told The Washington Post that Crosland’s case had a telltale sign of a wrongful conviction: It was weak from the beginning.
...
The investigation unearthed many relevant documents that Crosland’s defense was not privy to, the CIU said, and found the prosecution’s nondisclosure of critical information violated Crosland’s constitutional rights.
Saturday July 31st, 2021
Ram 2500 Drivers Have the Most DUIs, More Than Twice the National Average: Report
Roughly 1 in 22 Ram 2500 drivers have been cited with a DUI before, a study claims.
I have two books on my nightstand right now: Joseph R. Gusfield's "Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement", and Byung-Chul Han's "The disappearance of rituals".
The former is a fascinating look at how group identity drove the Temperance movement. How lay-led organizations took moral leadership and group identity from churches, and in so doing made morality more binary. It's also fascinating for language, it was written in 1963 and revised in 1986, and I have a couple of times had to look for footnotes for a little more context so that I could understand better what the author meant by "Indian", for instance.
The latter is a more recent lament about how social media is fragmenting culture, and how spontaneous culture is destroying rituals. I'm reading it slowly, the way it (and the translation) use language is sometimes hard to suss out.
But I suspect they're actually writing about the same thing, and Han is too caught up in his privilege to understand that.
How the coronavirus infects cells — and why Delta is so dangerous
Scientists are unpicking the life cycle of SARS-CoV-2 and how the virus uses tricks to evade detection.
Friday July 30th, 2021
Facebook usefully telling me that I should probably unfriend someone...
OH in the office: "Dan found the magic. Apple will probably break the magic, but..."
Thursday July 29th, 2021
I understand how some decisions in NeXTStep ended up there: Young brash programmers thinking they're doing amazing things by pushing the envelope. I do not understand why some of those flaws ended up carried over into Mac Cocoa. And I hate NSSplitView with a white hot passion.
This is a fascinating little read: This Man Does Not Make Poppers — For decades, poppers have been the go-to sex drug for gay men. But where do they come from?
Wednesday July 28th, 2021
Huh. Obviously butterflies are a motif I'm fond of, and I'm gonna have to revisit this site's favicon and do some other looking at content. After reading this you'll never look at butterfly illustrations and accents in the same way again: Please, enough with the dead butterflies!
She may be onto something. Scant public information is available about Dallas Justice Now or its leadership. The group hasn’t replied to the Observer’s inquires, but the group’s website traces back to a right-wing PR firm called Arena. Online research also connects Arena to Keep Dallas Safe, an organization run by a confirmed astroturfer, suggesting there may be deeper connections between these efforts in terms of funders and strategy.
So, yeah, turns out Tucker Carlson's latest outrage is manufactured by right-wingers. Go figure.
The more I learn about Prohibition, the more I subscribe to the narrative that a nation with a culture so fucked up that everyone was over-self-medicating decided to double-down on the fucked up bits of the culture.
Police Are Telling ShotSpotter to Alter Evidence From Gunshot-Detecting AI
Prosecutors in Chicago are being forced to withdraw evidence generated by the technology, which led to the police killing of 13-year-old Adam Toledo earlier this year.
Abstract Sexual intercourse is known as one of the daily activities triggering spontaneous cervicocephalic artery dissection (sCAD), however, it has been unclear if masturbation can trigger the development of sCAD. Herein, we report a case of sCAD in association with masturbation. A 51-year-old right-handed man developed subarachnoid hemorrhage during masturbation. The dissection of the left internal carotid artery was evident on the 9th hospital day. Finally, he was treated with stenting and coiling and discharged with a good prognosis.
Slate Star Codex: The Control Group Is Out Of Control:
The idea was to plan an experiment together, with both of them agreeing on every single tiny detail. They would then go to a laboratory and set it up, again both keeping close eyes on one another. Finally, they would conduct the experiment in a series of different batches. Half the batches (randomly assigned) would be conducted by Dr. Schlitz, the other half by Dr. Wiseman. Because the two authors had very carefully standardized the setting, apparatus and procedure beforehand, “conducted by” pretty much just meant greeting the participants, giving the experimental instructions, and doing the staring.
The results? Schlitz’s trials found strong evidence of psychic powers, Wiseman’s trials found no evidence whatsoever.
via https://mobile.twitter.com/NLRG_/status/1419707766214696962
"It is a matter of no astonishment to us that wells should dry up in a place so like Sodom as is Santa Rosa." Samuel Cassidy, editor of the Petaluma Argus, in September 1864.
Among the spoils from this mini-vacation is "History of Petaluma: A California river town", for $20 from a used book store in Sebastopol. Included in the revelations: people have been complaining about the quality of the streets here since at least 1861.
Finishing out the mini vacation with a hot chocolate at Grand Central Petaluma
Tuesday July 27th, 2021
Kind of amazing to think that we're sitting in the flood zone
Monday July 26th, 2021
Getting mixed messages here
Sunday July 25th, 2021
So I can remember it: Jos Sances, "Or, The Whale". Powerful, and the picture doesn't capture the in person experience of exploring it.
If you are anywhere near the Sebastopol Center For The Arts, get over this afternoon to see the whale. It is an amazing piece of art.
Saturday July 24th, 2021
RT Prof. Christina Pagel @chrischirp
LONG COVID THREAD:
The people running the BBC Horizon "Great British Intelligence Test" challenge on over 80,000 people took the opportunity to see if they could detect any differences by whether people had had covid or not...
The Lancet: EClinicalMedicine: Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from COVID-19 DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.101044
Findings People who had recovered from COVID-19, including those no longer reporting symptoms, exhibited significant cognitive deficits versus controls when controlling for age, gender, education level, income, racial-ethnic group, pre-existing medical disorders, tiredness, depression and anxiety. The deficits were of substantial effect size for people who had been hospitalised (N = 192), but also for non-hospitalised cases who had biological confirmation of COVID-19 infection (N = 326). Analysing markers of premorbid intelligence did not support these differences being present prior to infection. Finer grained analysis of performance across sub-tests supported the hypothesis that COVID-19 has a multi-domain impact on human cognition.