Flutterby™!

Excavator hit an unmarked gas line. Lots of traffic detoured through our neighborhood...

Excavator hit an unmarked gas line. Lots of traffic detoured through our neighborhood...

FiveThirtyEight: Surgery Is One Hell Of A Placebo:

A 2014 review of 53 trials that compared elective surgical procedures to placebos found that sham surgeries provided some benefit in 74 percent of the trials and worked as well as the real deal in about half.¹. Consider the middle-aged guy going in for surgery to treat his knee pain. Arthroscopic knee surgery has been a common orthopedic procedure in the United States, with about 692,000 of them performed in 2010, ² but the procedure has proven no better than a sham when done to address degenerative wear and tear, particularly on the meniscus.³.

Via Sensible Endowment.

Jesse Watson: The Hard Thing About Software Development:

This is why the price for remote programming keeps dropping to zero. You cannot compete with on-premise talent when it comes to deep specialization in a business domain. The higher you move up the value chain in terms of your business offering, the more that the variations inherent in the business problems and technology constraints become wickedly complex.

Ouch: 153k Ether ($30+M) Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack (etherscan.io). It's kind of fun with a side of schadenfreude to watch the "code will replace contracts" people learning about writing solid contracts with code.

Relatedly, based on recommendations from Scary Devil Monastery type sysadmins, I've pre- ordered Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard

Ouch. Always know how your equipment works if you're gonna lie, kids. Especially if you're planting evidence, and your body cam records continuously and saves the last 30 seconds before you turn it on...

Body camera footage shows officer planting drugs, public defender says.

The footage is from a January drug arrest. It shows an officer placing a soup can, which holds a plastic bag, into a trash strewn lot. The officer can then be seen walking to the street, where he flips on his body camera.

"I'm gonna go check here," the officer says. He returns to the lot and picks up the soup can, removing a plastic bag filled with white capsules.

Police cameras have a feature that saves the 30 seconds of video prior to activation, but without audio. When the officer is first in the alley, there is no audio until 30 seconds later.

To my friends on the spectrum, let me explain to you an unspoken social rule that possibly nobody has ever explained to you before:

If a neurotypical asks you, “What game are you playing?” they’re not asking you to describe the game.

They’re asking you if they can play too.

Why this superintendent is banning homework — and asking kids to read instead:

The policy will apply to all elementary school students in the district — about 20,000 — but not to middle or high school students. Maier, an expert on reading acquisition who started running Marion schools in November after serving as lead professor of teacher education at the College of Central Florida, said she is basing her decision on research showing that traditional homework in the early years does not boost academic performance but reading — and reading aloud — does.

Yay for (some) evidence-based education.

Stack Overflow Import:

Do you ever feel like all you’re doing is copy/pasting from Stack Overflow?

Let’s take it one step further.

from stackoverflow import quick_sort will go through the search results of [python] quick sort looking for the largest code block that doesn’t syntax error in the highest voted answer from the highest voted question and return it as a module. If that answer doesn’t have any valid python code, it checks the next highest voted answer for code blocks.

Sexual intimacy in couples is associated with longer telomere length. Why is this important? Telomeres are the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes, shorten with each cell division, and when they get too short the cell dies.

So part of slowing aging appears to be longer telomeres.

From the abstract:

... women who reported any sexual intimacy during the course of the week had significantly longer telomeres measured in whole blood and PBMCs, but not in granulocytes. These relationships held covarying for age, body mass index, perceived stress, the relationship indices, and caregiver status. Sexual intimacy was not significantly related to PBMC telomerase activity. These data provide preliminary data that sexual intimacy is associated with longer telomere length. Future studies investigating these associations are warranted.

Correlation is not cause, and all that...

Cosmopolitan: Amen: Sex Once Per Week Could Slow Aging

Writing a Linux debugger: Part 1: Setup. A gentle introduction to using ptrace() and:

Before we jump into things, let’s get our environment set up. I’ll be using two dependencies in this tutorial: Linenoise for handling our command line input, and libelfin for parsing the debug information. You could use the more traditional libdwarf instead of libelfin, but the interface is nowhere near as nice, and libelfin also provides a mostly complete DWARF expression evaluator, which will save you a lot of time if you want to read variables. Make sure that you use the fbreg branch of my fork of libelfin, as it hacks on some extra support for reading variables on x86.

Bwahahaha! Be Prepared: Experts Warn That This Polyamorous Relationship Could Expand To Cover All Of Seattle By 2021.

That figure may seem shocking, but the evidence bears it out. Age, race, sex, and orientation present no barriers to a couple who is way more interested in people’s hearts than the bodies they’re in. While Adam’s been proudly bi for some time, Kelsie recently stunned experts by expressing interest in experimenting with Kara or maybe Sonia’s out-of- town friend, a development that leaves their growth potential completely unchecked. And as every field report has noted, Adam and Kelsie simply have this energy and lovingness that they can just give and give and give, and it’s so nourishing to be around. Taken together, those factors create a clear picture: This relationship is growing, and fast.

And a video of me in the paddle wheel boat https://youtu.be/6kZF1ZJkNak

Still picture of Charlene in the Paddle Wheel boat

Charlene in the Paddle Wheel boat we just built... https://youtu.be/EaYZnq7DQ0E

In 1990, I was working on a system that took 14 minutes to link the app. Now it takes longer than that for Ansible to reprovision a server.

A little rap about enthusiastic consent: Yes from Sex Rhymes by Schaffer the Darklord:

And we go four, three, two and to the one
I’ll be checking checking in even after we’re done
But before we progress, stop, before we undress
I’ma need a lot more than a “yes”

While waiting for permits and concrete contractors, we built a padlle wheel boat for Rivertown Revival

First attempt at Eritrean cuisine. My injera technique could use a lot of work.