Friday May 7th, 2021
I saw a quote from Orson Welles that I was trying to source, “I don’t say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could”, but I couldn't find it..
This is not that quote, but it's good: Orson Wells talking about police misconduct on his BBC show in 1955
Exclusive: Sacramento PD documents describe secret investigation that led to cop’s arrest
The case spilled into the open Thursday with Sacramento police announcing the arrest of Alexa Kimberly Palubicki, 26, a three-year veteran of the department.
Palubicki faces two felony counts of filing a false police report that accuse her of lying when she reported that the motorist came to their attention because he hadn’t used his turn signal when pulling into the gas station and was suspected of driving under the influence. She is scheduled to be arraigned Monday.
Thursday May 6th, 2021
Your car is spying on you, and a CPB contract shows the risks
The kit, MSAB says, also has the ability to discover specific events that most car owners are probably unaware are even recorded, like “when and where a vehicle’s lights are turned on, and which doors are opened and closed at specific locations” as well as “gear shifts, odometer reads, ignition cycles, speed logs, and more.” This car-based surveillance, in other words, goes many miles beyond the car itself.
Presence of Armed School Officials and Fatal and Nonfatal Gunshot Injuries During Mass School Shootings, United States, 1980-2019 doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.37394
... in fact, controlling for the aforementioned factors of location and school characteristics, the rate of deaths was 2.83 times greater in schools with an armed guard present
Wait, when did we go from "Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter" as satire to sincerely asking "do you have a SubStack?"?
Wednesday May 5th, 2021
In a new study we consider this question, using data from Suffolk County, Massachusetts (where Boston is located). We show that prosecuting minor offenses like the ones described above actually does more harm than good. Scaling back the prosecution of nonviolent misdemeanors leads to an increase, not decrease, in public safety.
How did we reach this conclusion? In our study we exploit a feature of nearly all criminal justice contexts: what happens to your case depends a bit on luck. As a defendant, you might get lucky and be assigned a lenient prosecutor instead of a harsh one. In Suffolk County, cases are randomly assigned to prosecutors, and those prosecutors vary in their leniency. Using rich administrative data from the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office on future criminal complaints, we follow the lucky defendants over time to see what happens to them, relative to the people who were unlucky and got assigned to a less lenient prosecutor.
Tuesday May 4th, 2021
A Surprising Number Of Sea Monster Sightings Can Be Explained By Whale Erections
Cetaceans, sex and sea serpents: an analysis of the Egede accounts of a “most dreadful monster” seen off the coast of Greenland in 1734, April 2005 Archives of Natural History 32(1):1-9 DOI:10.3366/anh.2005.32.1.1
April 2005Archives of Natural History 32(1):1-9
DOI:10.3366/anh.2005.32.1.1
If May is any indication, it's definitely gonna be a Hot Summer, but I don't think we need to gender it. Hot Nby Summer, maybe?
Monday May 3rd, 2021
This is really good, and worth a New York Times read, an excerpt from Steven Johnson's new book and PBS show Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer: How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life — Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. How did we do it? Science mattered — but so did activism.
Sunday May 2nd, 2021
Charlene said, of our sunscreen stash, "some of them I threw out 'cause they were gross and old", and I wondered just what the subtext there was...
Unsolicited deck pic
I have a new favorite recipe and food web site: http://www.justthefuckingrecipe.net/
The struggle far transcends Twitter, and is real: RT Midtown Brandi Frown 😾 @ItsTheBrandi
Twitter culture is talking to someone on this site for eons and knowing their pronouns and then having to be like, 'Uh, weird question but what should I call you when we chat IRL because I will not yell, "Corporate Chicken Fucker, we finally meet!" in public.
Saturday May 1st, 2021
If you haven't had your fill of sweet Jewish mythology urban fantasy lately, this is just so much all that: http://giganotosaurus.org/2021/05/01/just-enough-rain/
Friday April 30th, 2021
Walkable Main will not return to Breckenridge
“Something that I am really concerned about is … if a restaurant that is in the closure is able to be not just at 100% capacity but then even above 100% capacity, we already have an employment issue in this town,” Owens said. “We know lots and lots of people are trying to hire and are understaffed, and I guess I would just really hate to see some people that are at 120% capacity getting full staff, and then somebody north of town or south of town not able to get full employees because there’s just additional pressure on the employee situation.”
"We can't stop catering to cars, business might improve!" is certainly a take.
Thursday April 29th, 2021
Regular Coffee Drinking Tied to Functional Brain Changes
Using fMRI, researchers found that connectivity in the somatosensory and limbic resting states was reduced in regular coffee drinkers (CDs) in comparison with non–coffee drinkers (NCDs), suggesting an association between coffee drinking and improved motor control and alertness. In addition, dynamic activity in several cerebellar and subcortical areas of the brain was increased among CDs, consistent with an improved ability to focus.
The study is Nature Molecular Psychiatry: Habitual coffee drinkers display a distinct pattern of brain functional connectivity
I'm following along a Zoom presentation with the links in the slides, and it's a strong reminder: Organizations: make sure the links you publish in your slides work with the case published! Also, keep your web links static, don't move things once you publish!
Wednesday April 28th, 2021
... Those less clear, less direct conspiracy theories were the more insidious stories in my home growing up, because they were the soup of insinuation and implication in which I was always swimming. I filled in the gaps, I made the structural jumps to the obvious next step in the story, and then it became my story, which became my memory of the event. And then I became the storyteller.
Like any story, a conspiracy theory has to be aerated through tellings and retellings in order to stay alive, and through the reach and versatility of social media, myth becomes memory. ...
For all of your machine learning needs: Punatorium announces OPun:
Open source Puns! We've got a data dump of all of our puns on our site. You can check out the Github repository here
We would appreciate you keeping the source of Punatorium with the data you use. You can use it for private or commercial purpose, but please link back to Punatorium.
What might you use Open Pun (OPun) for? Well, you could spin up your own Pun of the Day API, to return a random pun each day. You could feed the puns into a chat bot to tell random jokes for your community (Need a chat bot? Check out our Typescript based chat bot that works on Discord, Telegram, and IRC).
Via the always awesome https://researchbuzz.me/
Andrew Brown Jr.'s death is off-screen in this video. You'll be forgiven for thinking that a bunch of armed dudes dressed in black rolling up in the back of a pickup truck and jumping out with guns blazing is ISIL in Syria rather than Pasquotank County https://www.wavy.com/video/cit...e-warrant-at-andrew-browns-home/