Flutterby™!

Shadow forwarded along this awesome mug that I might have to find a version of:

List of people injured or killed at gender reveal parties

Preprint and not yet approved, but.... Brain imaging before and after COVID-19 in UK Biobank, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690

We identified significant effects of COVID-19 in the brain with a loss of grey matter in the left parahippocampal gyrus, the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the left insula. When looking over the entire cortical surface, these results extended to the anterior cingulate cortex, supramarginal gyrus and temporal pole. We further compared COVID-19 patients who had been hospitalised (n=15) with those who had not (n=379), and while results were not significant, we found comparatively similar findings to the COVID-19 vs control group comparison, with, in addition, a greater loss of grey matter in the cingulate cortex, central nucleus of the amygdala and hippocampal cornu ammonis (all |Z|>3). Our findings thus consistently relate to loss of grey matter in limbic cortical areas directly linked to the primary olfactory and gustatory system.

Ugh. So the Ubuntu Snap for aws-cli is broken. Isn't this the sort of crap that fancy new packaging systems are supposed to protect us from?

Thinking about the dangers of 2 factor auth, and how we need to implement it as 2 of n factor auth.

Okay, I realized that lumber prices are down a little bit off the peak, but that's just showing off.

Bowden's Own (car) detailing tools. Scroll down to hit the last several items. The attention to detail and commitment to the bit here is impressive...

Bombshell Report Finds Phone Network Encryption Was Deliberately Weakened

A spokesperson for the organization that designed the GEA-1 algorithm, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), admitted that the algorithm contained a weakness, but said it was introduced because the export regulations at the time did not allow for stronger encryption.

"We followed regulations: we followed export control regulations that limited the strength of GEA-1," a spokesperson for ETSI told Motherboard in an email.

Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2021/819 — Cryptanalysis of the GPRS Encryption Algorithms GEA-1 and GEA-2

Anyone out there parsing Amazon Transcribe JSON? I'm trying to figure out how you get from the times used in things like speaker labels and the alternative items back into the transcript text.

Giggle: For a recipe that my aunt Kay never made, it was quite good

Twitter thread poking holes in Monica Gandhi and Kyle Hunter's piece on "mistakes" California made in the COVID-19 pandemic handling, specifically on the bits where they try to tie suicide rates to virtual schooling.

Posting this here 'cause I know a bunch of CPAP users, and Charlene's CPAP vendor *did not* contact her to tell her about this... If you're using Philips equipment manufactured before April 26, 2021: "Discontinue use of your device and work with your physician or Durable Medical Equipment (DME) provider to determine the most appropriate options for continued treatment."

Medical Device recall notification (U.S. only) / field safety notice (International Markets) — Philips Respironics

COVID-19 cases are on the rise again in Sonoma County, and I can't help but note that mid-May and June are looking awfully similar to last year. Hope that vaccine stays effective.

In the future, everything will be Constantinople

A take of two kitties

Maybe I *have* been hanging out with too many anarchists lately, #912 in a series: Read "AMAB", wondered what the "M" was... "All Moms Are...? No, that doesn't scan."

Don’t Feed the Thought Leaders:

It turns out that Philip E. Tetlock from the University of Pennsylvania, who has been studying the judgment and decision making of experts for most of his career, has something to say about those types of predictions. And Tetlock is an expert on experts: his Good Judgement Project was able to beat CIA analysts by 30% at predicting geo-political events. And the intelligence officers had access to classified information.

Philip Tetlock: Why foxes are better forecasters than hedgehogs

It’s a matter of judgement style, first expressed by the ancient Greek warrior poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one great thing.” The idea was later expanded by essayist Isaiah Berlin. In Tetlock’s interpretation, Hedgehogs have one grand theory (Marxist, Libertarian, whatever) which they are happy to extend into many domains, relishing its parsimony, and expressing their views with great confidence. Foxes, on the other hand are skeptical about grand theories, diffident in their forecasts, and ready to adjust their ideas based on actual events.

Swallowtail

More nectar gathering

Bee in flight

Blackberries in bloom at the intersection of the cross Marin trail at SFD and Platform Bridge

Just hanging out in the sun

Want to destroy ransomware and crypto currencies? Provide cheap international currency exchange and a mechanism for paying for sex work and drugs.

When you're too old and lazy to figure out how to input emoji, so resort to Googling and copy-paste, until suddenly someone shows you ctrl+cmd+space on the Mac and then it's all 👅🦫 🍆🍑 and oooh look it's got a most recently used section!

Revealed: rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats

“There were no policies at Facebook against pretending to be a group that did not exist, an abuse vector that has also been used by the governments of Honduras and Azerbaijan,” said Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook employee and whistleblower who played a small role in the investigation of the Green party ads.

She added: “The fact that Rally Forge later went on to conduct coordinated inauthentic behavior with troll farms reminiscent of Russia should be taken as an indication that Facebook’s leniency led to more risk-taking behavior.”

Twitter thread about a few passages from The Greenville (South Carolina) News, October 2^nd 1918

A number of complaints have come to members of Council of negro women who are not at work and who refuse employment when it is offered them, the result being that it is exceedingly difficult for families who need cooks and laundresses to get them.

In case you're wondering about the destruction of the family unit...

The New York Times fabricates a nonexistent shoplifting wave in San Francisco, then wrongly blames it on criminal justice reforms and the city’s supposed soft-on-crime image

Yet, state and local crime clearance reports show the problem is not San Franciscans’ failure to report shoplifting to police, but the SFPD’s low rate (4.9 percent) of making arrests in reported thefts compared to police elsewhere in the state (10.5 percent). Fuller’s quip-sourced article manufacturing a nonexistent shoplifting wave and then baselessly blaming the supposed failure of criminal justice reforms does not rise to the standards one expects of the New York Times.

Not sure how to deal with those Photoshop .psd files? Photopea is a .psd editor that's fully web-hosted (but also single-page, so you can disconnect from the net and keep editing).

The story of a unicorn solo founder making $500,000 ARR, and AMA: Ivan Kutskir, creator of Photopea

Journal of Clinical Epidemiology: The Impact of Gender on Researchers’ Assessment: A Randomized Controlled Trial DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2021.05.026

A simulated post-doctoral process was carried forward to be assessed for judgment. Level 1 and 2 Brazilian fellow researchers in the field of Dentistry were invited to act as external reviewers in a post-doctoral process and were randomly assigned to receive a CV from a woman or a man. They were required to rate the CV from 0 to 10 in scientific contribution, leadership potential, ability to work in groups, and international experience.

Yeah, you know what happened.

Fuuuu.... not now, Objective-C...

Original rainbow flag returns home to San Francisco after being lost for more than 40 years

"Hand-dyed, big mess, cotton, oh my God you don't even want to know, stitch, stitch, stitch on the little Singer. Pink is for sex, red is for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green, nature, turquoise for magic, blue for serenity, and purple for the spirit. I like to think of those elements as in every person," Baker said in that 2017 interview.

It's so windy I'm a little concerned that these shoes make me a target for falling houses

Inundated with Facebook ads for products that can't possibly be legit. I wonder how long it is before social media advertising has negative value: "As seen on Facetwitstagram" comes to mean "definitely avoid at all costs".

Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is really going all out in searching for solutions to climate change:

"Is there anything that the National Forest Servide or BLM can do to change the course of the moon's orbit or the earth's orbit around the sun?"

Ended up reading this article because of a a Twitter thread talking about crime statistics reporting and how the narrative about police and crime is shaped:

Fentanyl, guns, and murder mean you should get ready for a bloody summer:

One challenge in interpreting crime data in general—and making sense of the 2020 surge in particular—is the slow pace at which it is published. National news outlets have run stories highlighting the murder wave in large U.S. cities, painting a picture of spikes that are unique to those generally liberal urban areas. “The U.S. saw significant crime rise across major cities in 2020 [a]nd it’s not letting up,” read one CNN headline from April typifying the genre.

But one reason reporters tend to focus on crime in large cities is because they have the capacity to publish more frequent crime statistics, whereas other smaller towns and rural areas don’t or choose not to.

(I had trouble reading this on a mobile device, shared it to my desktop, was able to read it, but then went back to the page and it had gone subscription only, so....?)