Flutterby™! From 2001-07-01 to 2001-07-31

Maybe I need to add a "yuppie indulgences" category (or is that what the Dan's Life category is for?). After sleeping (and... ahem... other stuff...) on a full-wave waterbed that I'd bought from Eric about a decade ago, I recently decided it was time for a change. Heating costs here in California pushed me away from another water bed, so I went out and laid on a bunch of mattresses in various places, decided on the ones I liked, then asked for prices. The good news is that I thought the $9k Duxiana beds were uncomfortable unless my feet were hanging off the bottom. The bad news is that I settled on a Stearns and Foster "Kingsley-Royale" set. Just think of it as a buck a night. For the 10 years it's warranteed for.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Oh, this is especially apropos given that two Mormon missionaries just knocked on my door... Carol Queen writes about kink in Utah.

"We should make our own replica of the Angel Moroni," mused one man the next morning. (The gold Moroni tops the highest spire of the Mormon Temple, holding a trumpet to his lips.) "Except he'd be holding a dildo."

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

So this afternoon I dropped in to San Anselmo Coffee Roasters and ran into John Arms. John's a guy with a few decades on me who's seen a bunch of life, he's been a photographer and author and teacher, and we sat and chatted about life and sex and all sorts of fun stuff. He's into numerology, and read my name, and while I'm a skeptic, I always admire a framework for so much projection and drawing out. Anyway, what a really pleasant way to spend an afternoon when I should really have been proof-reading chapters for Catherine or working my way through Molecular Biology of the Cell, a huge tome that I'm devouring at a whopping 2 to 3 minutes per page. And I thought that when I squeezed through high school biology with a "C" I'd never care again that the Golgi apparatus is stacks of flat sacks.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Dan's Life San Anselmo ]

Cynthia Robins muses on some of the great courtesans and mistresses of the early 20^th century, mentioning a few recent miniseries and book appearances.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

An article on evolving marketing strategies among San Francisco panhandlers. It uses local examples to illustrate points from the Needcom web site.

[ related topics: Politics Bay Area ]

Among the varied topics on this morning's hike were the reaffirmation of the Janeane Garafolo / Roger Ebert expressed opinion that one should never see a movie whose trailer starts with "In a world where...", we then seguéd into the discussion about the question of audience for such trailers which tied in nicely to the recent Peterme comments about KnowNow:

...one also has to wonder who on fucking earth thinks such marketing copy is worthwhile?

and it occurred to me... As I've worked with people from Catherine to Alec on editing and improving writing, one of the hardest things to do is break the high school and college inspired writing styles, that stiff formal overly verbose essay style which does nothing but obfuscate. Alec recently told me something along the lines of "yeah, it's all bullshit, but big meaningless words like that will get me a better grade." I wonder if it works the other way, if, after the years of indoctrination into parroting rather than thinking that standard educatuion enforces, people start to read this crap and, on a subconscious level, think "Gee, I can't make any sense of it, it must be really good." Of course that'd explain a whole lot about postmodernism.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Movies Writing ]

smart-ass Guide to San Francisco (note:flash based)

[ related topics: Humor Web development Bay Area Political Correctness ]

Leo is looking for the original source, possibly McLuhan, of the idea that the function of mass-media is to deliver an audience to advertisers. Any help?

[ related topics: New Economy ]

Just to prove that the process is flawed, gee big suprise there, a man from Australia patents the wheel. Just when Firestone thought the worst had happened, now they have to pay this guy royalties.

[ related topics: Humor ]

Hey! Let's patent the allergy free pet.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property ]

Interesting that News.com is running a series on companies like Oracle selling "solutions" which aren't.

It is a scene repeated countless times in the corporate jungle: A company endures months of sales pitches, pays millions of dollars for new software, discovers massive problems, and spends far more to fix the product than the original cost of buying it.

And customers have little choice but to keep eating the expenses while salespeople walk away making up to $1 million in a single year.

[ related topics: Business New Economy Software Engineering ]

Chet Atkins deat at 77

[ related topics: Music ]

Via Robot Wisdom comes a review of Heroines and Harlots: Women at Sea in the Great Age of Sail:

Well into the Victorian era, ritualised mass sex was a regular routine in Her Majesty's forces: the larger ships could accommodate 500 copulating couples in one space, each in hammocks 16 inches apart. The imagination boggles.

[ related topics: Jorn Barger Web development Erotic Sexual Culture Robotics Space & Astronomy ]

What, do they think this is, Cleveland? Cambodian sex shop raided a day after opening.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Oh, here's a great idea: Lie to teens in the hopes that they'll trust you. The "Medical Institute of Austin, Texas" tries scare tactics that try to portray smoking as more dangerous than sex.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture ]

I've watched with an immense amount of irritation as trademark lawyers take hardnosed stands against fan sites and parody sites over the use of a trademark. It bothers me when people have absolutely no sense of humor. Wendy Liebowitz, someone who use to send out those nastygrams, has some common sense advice to trademark lawyers attempting to zealously protect their clients tradmarks.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Law ]

Via /.: As anyone who's ever gone through the hassle of trying to use non-Microsoft software to handle mime-types that the Microsoft software pretends to handle can attest, integration into Windows is a touchy thing. Now Kodak finds they can't register their own digital camera drivers.

The Kodak team felt double-crossed. They had worked with Microsoft and the camera industry for a year on a new photo-transfer standard that allowed Windows to recognize when a camera was plugged in. Now, Kodak felt, the standard was being used against Kodak and other digital-camera makers, because it favored Microsoft's competing camera software, embedded in the planned new version of Windows.

[ related topics: Photography Microsoft Invention and Design ]

Enhance shareholder value, boff a coworker! Italians more productive when having affairs with colleagues.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Women are more likely to be happy later in life if they're eager to have sex as college students, says a study begun in 1972 which checked back in on its subjects 15 and 25 years later.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Because it's always worth a re-read: The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies

[ related topics: Politics ]

I've been looking for someplace I can get catfish delivered to an uncle in Massachusetts (he was transplanted years ago from Arkansas) and came across this restaurant. You'll have to check it out and let Dan tell you how authentic it is.

[ related topics: Web development Coyote Grits Food ]

Via Must See HTTP, although it's shown up on a few other weblogs this morning, how to make a Giant Gas Bong from a Gas Giant

[ related topics: Drugs Humor ]

Via Backup Brain, UC Berkeley folks create rotary engine the size of a penny. They envision it powering a laptop, I'm kinda wondering about what happens when a catalytic converter fails when you're using the thing on an airplane...

[ related topics: Cool Science ]

Flasher the Clown participates in Clayton parade:

Flasher the Clown (aka Bob Manion) is a kindly 59-year-old devout Mormon whose "act" consists of throwing open his multihued oversized clown coat and letting kiddies pet a Yorkshire terrier peeking out of a pouch in his pants.

Adrian Blevins writes an Ode to the Erection in Salon.

Of course, as anyone who has had any experience with them knows, erections often operate independently of their owner's wishes, so it makes no sense whatsoever to use ideas against them. Erections are not interested in ideas. When an erection sees an idea, it laughs out loud.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Via /. the Google Zeitgeist. I remember ages ago a few of the other search engines did a "what are 10 other people searching for right now" page, but that was probbaly back when they were getting less than 10 searches/second. I've also noticed recently that while Google is really good for some sorts of searches, going back to Alta Vista, Hotbot and Excite can give some drastically different, and sometimes dramatically better returns. Yet another reminder that search engines are only as good as their last query.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Stolen from Justin Thyme's Journal (let's see if we can get 'im a little traffic over there), Reason interviews Bradley A. Smith on why campaign finance laws are evil, reiterating many of my arguments that when you make it more difficult to raise money you give the advantage to those who can pay the lawyers to work around the law.

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian Law ]

Cracker who used Bill Gate's credit card to send the Microsoft head a case of Viagra goes into rehab. Is that high-concept, or what?

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft ]

Via Hack The Planet, The Economist has a reality check for video on demand. The only surprising thing here is how many years it's taken for some of these folks to realize the obvious:

What happens, then, if CNN has a 30-second clip of President Bush that 100,000 Americans choose to view at the same time? Even at the lowest resolution, the capacity required is 30 gbps. In other words, that one 3-inch by 3-inch picture on the computer screen is hogging no less than 6% of the entire Internet backbone capacity in North America.

[ related topics: New Economy ]

Just reading this squicked me: There's an exhibit of torture instruments here in San Francisco.

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

Man cleaning up this mess is a pain, but it was worth it... Full-wave water bed to be replaced today. Bottle of Canola oil. Fun.

This entry was as just the above paragraph, but I thought about it a bit more and I think to make this an actually useful entry, I should provide some lessons from the experience:

• It was only a fifth to a quarter of a 48oz bottle of Canola to get us rather slippery. I was kinda surprised at how little it took, given that my body's pretty hairy.
• Showering all that oil off sucks. Next time I'd try water-based lube, although the cheap-for-large-quanties stuff like Probe would also need a spray bottle, lest it become sticky.
• Let a bit of water out of the bed first. We didn't, and kept sliding off to the sides because of this.
• Two was fun, I'd bet a few more to make a puppy pile would be an absolute hoot.

[ related topics: Erotic Dan's Life Personal Lubricant ]

Sometimes little things just set off an admiration for ironies. Because of the news stories involving him I looked up Congressman Gary Condit's homepage and found a prominent graphic linking to The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events ]

In the "get a life" department: the British White Witches complain that the Harry Potter Movie portrays broom riding incorrectly.

"Warner Bros claims the film is an accurate portrayal of things that happen in witchcraft, yet woodcuts from the 16^th and 17^th centuries show broomsticks being ridden with the brush part in the front," said Kevin Carlyon, who has his own coven in Sussex, southern England.

"It's a common mistake -- even the sixties TV series 'Bewitched' showed broomsticks being ridden backwards, but this is not correct," he said.

[ related topics: Humor Movies moron ]

I wanna new drug: New York Times article on Salvia divinorum, also known as "diviner's sage", causes "intense hallucinations, out-of-body experiences and, when taken in higher doses, unconsciousness and short-term memory loss." But it's not a social drug, so it apparently isn't taking off in the circles that new drugs generally filter through. The other weird bit is that the folks interviewed for the article claim nobody understands where it interrupts the neurological pathways.

[ related topics: Drugs ]

Via Mouthorgan: Brian Dalton gets 10 years in prison for pornographic diary entries, found during a probation officer's search of his home. This is disturbing in different ways than the Mike Diana case, but has echoes of it. Discussion over at Mouthorgan.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Ethics ]

Hanne Blank is doing a survey on attitudes about virginity that I haven't taken yet, but that might be fun.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Via the null device, in Australia a weelchair bound woman sues over discrimination at swinger's party.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Via Upstairs at Dry Creek, Gregg Easterbrook takes on the idea that Europe is further ahead environmentally.

Indeed, despite European protestations, American ecological standards are far more strict than European rules, and have been for 20 years or more. "Europe is now the world leader on environmental issues," the Swedish environment minister, Kjell Larsson, said as Mr. Bush arrived in his nation. But Paris today has worse smog than Houston; water quality, especially of rivers, is lower in Europe than in the United States; acid rain reduction has been more rapid in the United States than in Europe; European Union nations like Greece, Italy and Portugal still discharge huge volumes of untreated municipal waste water, a practice all but banned in America.

[ related topics: Politics Nature and environment ]

Dori recently commented that the tone of Flutterby seemed "anti-breeder". I replied that while that was mainly my opinion, if we make the distinction between parent and breeder, and that parents seem a rare breed in this culture, then yes, it was. And I'm not alone. An article in this morning's Salon, titled Save lives! Defy nature! takes on the attitudes that have created apologists for Andrea Yates and the idea that children are a right:

This part-time job of parenting has overtaxed our school system, and believe it or not, our universities as well, where teachers are forced to assume the role of surrogate parents and all the problems associated with it.

[ related topics: Child-Freedom ]

A Chronicle report on the transformation of Edgewater West to Hotel Ibiza, from a swinger's paradise to some sort of... well... before the switch I did want to make it over there to experience it. Now it just sounds like a bunch o' rowdy frat boyz.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Andreas, over at Bit Jazz, is looking for high quality uncompressed motion video that he can demo his new codec with. If you're a budding director that'd like money people to associate your visuals with some pretty cool technology, you might want to drop him a line.

[ related topics: Cool Science Invention and Design ]

The Indescribable Nth is a rather cute short movie if you have the bandwidth. Of course everyone will have the bandwidth when I win my bet with Dan in 2020...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Dan's Life Movies Todd Gemmell broadband Coyote Grits ]

So I just went to Anime Expo with my friend Leo and I'd have to say the crossdressing ratio is even higher there than at Burning Man , it did after a fashion feel like a bman city type event. Perhaps the most interesting part of the trip was hanging out with Leo's friend Scott. S/he's had a rather interesting life from being an Anime director to being Canadian royalty.

[ related topics: Burning Man ]

Back in May I found an article about the "Gorgeous Guy", who started as a post on Craig's List, and allegedly became something of a local celebrity. Well, the "gorgeous guy" was a self-perpetrated hoax.

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

I'm about two thirds of the way through Neil Gaiman's American Gods. It's a fun romp, sort of a Sandman meets Tom Robbins, I'm not yet sure if I'm going to end up oddly unsatisfied at the depth of the story, as I have with the last two prose novels of his I've read, but I'm sure enjoying spending time with Shadow, Wednesday, and the gang, and he manages to merge the fantastic with the ordinary in a wonderfully seamless way.

[ related topics: Books Neil Gaiman ]

The 2001 results of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are now available.

[ related topics: Books Writing ]

I've said before that L.A. is what would happen if you dropped a whole lot of money on a midwestern city; middle America taken to an extreme. According to this Salon Article on LAPD obscenity crackdowns that city is Cincinati... The article is also the obligatory Adam Glasser/Seymore Butts, talks about "bukkake", and while there's nothing new here does give the usual good arguments asking why this is not protected speech.

Sex in the bedroom may have gotten wilder but, Takeshita asserts, that doesn't make movies featuring provocative sexual content any less obscene when distributed. "What two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home is between them," he says. "As soon as that activity is distributed publicly, that's where obscenity statutes come into practice."

[ related topics: Privacy Sexual Culture ]

Buy a mobile phone, get a vibrator. Unfortunately, Nokia is up in arms over their phones being used in the promotion, because it seems only a matter of time before someone effectively merges the two toys.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Court prohibits man from having kids. I'm with Dan on this one, this stallion should be made into a gelding.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Child-Freedom ]

Bush unveils plan to cut drug costs for seniors. But Jenna's still a sophomore, right?

[ related topics: Politics Health ]

Went with Leo, Phil, and Charlene to see Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (warning, very annoying Flash site) last night. A technological marvel. All those places where I wondered if they were avoiding showing too much because the animation or some other feature sucked? Not a problem. Too bad they didn't have a script. It's probably watchable if you're an animé fan, but the dialogue is painful at best, even if there does seem to be a story somewhere underneath all that begging to get out. At Scotch Night Larry Gritz commented that he thought the animation was fine but the skin shading was weak. Perhaps I've been looking at too many fashion magazines recently, but I thought the skin was fine. The face animation was a little wooden, the hair was perfectly reasonable, the clothing was very well done. So it's probably a must-see if you're an animation or Japanese movie fan, otherwise skip it, there'll be something along soon with equivalent technology that doesn't have painful dialog and gratuitous video-game sequences (although based on the Monsters, Inc. trailer beforehand, that may not be coming from Pixar).

[ related topics: Pixar Animation Movies ]

Finished American Gods on the bus this morning. Not disappointed at all. Gaiman manages to take a very confusing cosmology and make it work, partly because we're associating so strongly with his protagonist, who's also very confused by this universe. The story moves along, the prose is wonderful, the few loose ends have already started to tie themselves up in my mind as I make connections, there are a few references to his other works which don't seem gratuitous, and I don't think I'm spoiling too much by saying that the climax takes place in Chattanooga. Recommended. And Todd's already got his own copy, so I'm happy to pass mine around.

[ related topics: Books Todd Gemmell Chattanooga Neil Gaiman ]

"A lot of people poo-poo Australian table wines...": Researchers in Australia claim screwcaps better than corks in preserving wine.

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits ]

The New York Times has aan interesting review of an exhibit of the work of photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado, titled Can Suffering Be Too Beautiful?.

"Beautification of tragedy results in pictures that ultimately reinforce our passivity toward the experience they reveal," Ms. Sischy argued years ago. If that were true, then the whole history of Christian art would be a practical failure. But she is on to something.

[ related topics: Religion Photography ]

Seth passed along this interesting essay by Lee Siegel on how money has overshadowed sex in writing about pornography, and how journalists, in using money as the titillating factor in stories where they used to use sex are straying further from the real issues of power and manipulation that exist in semi-legal systems.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Writing Law ]

In that thread about parenting there's been some discussion of parental licensing. My second-hand experience with teacher and massage therapist certifications are that they're primarily ways to funnel funds towards the entrenched establishment, and are generally more a barrier to competent people engaging in the profession than a guarantee that the incompetent will be kept out. The SHADOW passed along a darkly funny story of an illiterate social studies teacher in New York who's been ironically complaining about the quality of teachers. I'm not sure whether this hurts or helps my cause...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Humor Current Events ]

For no particular reason:

I Don't Want Them All

(I Just Want All The Ones I want)

All the pretty girls ---

Abbey's downfall, his destruction.

And his only regret ---

the ones he missed. Oh!

The standingcock hath no conscience. Oh!

How can I be true to one,

without being false to all the others?

Edward Abbey, in Earth Apples, p.85

[ related topics: Quotes Sexual Culture ]

Via David Chess (who usually talks about interesting legal stuff and not these techie things), two approaches to a pretty nasty Windows XP/Outlook security hole. Microsoft's take on the bug, and their solution, is drastically different from Georgi Guninski's take on the bug, and his solution: "Uninstall Office XP and Windows.". Interesting, is that for a simple JavaScript crack Microsoft says: "The person who discovered this vulnerability has chosen to handle it irresponsibly, and has deliberately made this issue public only a few days after reporting it to Microsoft" when, frankly, three days seems like more than enough time for some script kiddie to have discovered this exploit on their own.

[ related topics: Web development Microsoft moron ]

I need to get a diary going so I can feel better about venting and spewing in self-indulgent ways. Spent the weekend trying to understand Principal Component Analysis, struggling through Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors, when I opened Numerical Recipes in C, looked at the Jacobi method for solving the Eigen* problem and realized that I could just combine several steps in the analysis and avoid a whole bunch of the math (although I'm probably doing all the same arithmetic). It's still going to be roughly O(n³), but I'll get the critical information out in the order that I care about it, and since the whole point of this is throwing away the low information axiis, that could reduce one of the terms from a few thousands to two or three.

And I need to work on my flirting skills, especially as a couple, 'cause Ahlia at Alfy's is cuuuuuute. And as always, dinner at Alfy's was very enjoyable.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Food ]

Via Backup Brain, another Gregg Easterbrook perspective on how GW Bush can be effective on global warming without focusing on carbon dioxide emissions, interesting, in light of that other Gregg Easterbrook comparison of the U.S. versus Europe on environmental issues that I linked to pointing out that no European nation has ratified the Kyoto accords either. Hey, who's paying Easterbrook's salary?

[ related topics: Politics Nature and environment ]

Just a place to hang continuing "Dan as parent hater" discussions.

[ related topics: Child-Freedom ]

Via Scripting News, John Doerr publicly apologizes for characterizing the Internet as ``the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet.'' Except that he later backed away from the apology and replaced it with more meaningless hyperbole.

[ related topics: Dave Winer New Economy ]

Phillip Morris is doing a public service in the Czech Republic.

I wonder why Ted Bundy never thought of this defense?

[ related topics: Health ]

To do: Implement Dave Winer's distributed membership and preferences API so that users who have logged in here have shared user info with the various Userland hosted weblogs and discussion areas, and vice-versa.

[ related topics: Web development Weblogs Dave Winer ]

cheney solves the energy problem: "make the navy pay it.". With the $186,000 electricity bill for the vice-presidential manor cutting into his budget, Dick Cheney has decided to take decisive long-term action.

[ related topics: Politics ]

NON-ABDUCTEES ANONYMOUS I think Flutterby needs a laugh. You need realplayer for this short. (warning do not drink soda or milk while watching as it is sure to come out your nose)

After strugging with Microsoft Word under VMWare with a document this morning, I downloaded Open Office. I haven't played with it enough to get full stability impressions, but with first impressions as a way to edit MSWord files, I'm quite happy. Now if I can just wean people over to a real document format... Anyway, if you use a real OS but need to deal with the pointy-haired ones, take a look at it.

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

The other day I was walking with Phil to lunch. I tend to be a much more aggressive pedestrian than Phil, so there were a few instances where I stepped off a curb, Phil hesitated, and then, even though I'd looked both ways, I stopped too. It was an interesting example of trusting the perceptions of others over my own. Advertisers are taking advantage of this effect, the New York Times notes that The Secret Agents of Capitalism Are All Around Us.

As it has become ever harder to reach people between the ages of 12 and 34, advertisers have pushed viral marketing entirely underground, pitching them on the sly and hoping that the message takes and spreads, viruslike, with none of the intended marks knowing the better. This might mean leaving cigarette packs in bars, as tobacco companies have done, or loaning automobiles to ''key influencers,'' as Ford did in 1999, when it placed the Ford Focus with 120 people in five major markets. Or it might mean hiring some of Big Fat's 50 operatives in 30 cities to drink vodka and water at trendy bars.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

Dmitry Sklyarov arrested for pointing out that Adobe lies about their ebook security. The DMCA is bad stuff, kids.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Politics ]

A very cool Salon memoir about working as a script supervisor in the "golden age" of porn.

I realized that I had taken this job not only to add to my résumé and pay the rent but because I was just as intrigued about making porn as the next person. What I found was that while making a scene sexy requires artistry that few filmmakers possess, the crews and actors on pornos are sweeter than, and just as creative as, the raging egomaniacs on the high-budget, overblown "legitimate" productions I would end up on.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Oh sure, now that they're in financial trouble Salon makes his work obvious again: Keith Knight on food: "I'm gonna tell you right now, people... food is like sex to me... 'cept that it smells better, lasts longer, & costs less to get..."

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture Food ]

Dang, I'm gonna miss Mary Chapin Carpenter's stop in Marin, but Clean Sheets has a look at Time*Sex*Love* and Mary Chapin Carpenter's other works.

[ related topics: Music Bay Area ]

Stolen from Pursed Lips, a clothing store owner asks "what happens when anti-sex laws are taken to their logical ends?"

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

I mentioned the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov yesterday, via /. here's an archive of Sklyarov related documents at Cryptome including an HTML version of the PDF of the criminal complaint which actually mentions rot-13. So according to the US DOJ

tr A-Za-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m

is a violation of Title 17, United States Code, Section 1201(b)(1)(A), the penalty for which is five years imprisonment and a fine of $500,000. Get out your checkbooks now and send the EFF money.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Free Speech Law ]

So the answer seems to be convincing the breeder dads to try and pinch a few golf balls.

[ related topics: Humor Photography Todd Gemmell Child-Freedom ]

I'm always looking to contibute to the sex side of Flutterby and I came across this video and found it to be erotic, althought I can't totally say why. Latent mechanical fetish? Bjork thing? idunno..watch the video and maybe give feedback. Is this erotic?

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Movies ]

I'd noticed a few glitches in some of the formatting code, and thought I corrected them, but couldn't figure out why the only seemed to work sometimes, ie: I'd hit reload when they were wrong and they'd fix themselves. Then I remembered how Apache handles modules. Aaaaugh! Anyway, explicitly formatted tables and lists should work the right way now.

So Jeffrey Archer is found guilty of perjury after he sued a British tabloid for libel over a report that he'd hired a prostitute when he actually had. A guy autodarwinates by drowning while trying to settle a bet in the San Francisco bay. Don Ramsell thinks a talking box will keep you from getting arrested for DUI. But at least fewer Webby awards contenders went broke after being nominated than, say, products with Clio winning ad campaigns have failed.

[ related topics: Web development Bay Area moron Current Events ]

A very interesting article on grammar and the Second amendment.

[ related topics: Language Politics ]

Via Kuro5hin, a Time article about lawsuits resulting from a French law that allows disabled children to sue if their mothers were not given a chance to abort. There's discussion over at Kur5hin (at the usual naive college-student level of that forum). But there are some good ethical considerations at stake here. Quote from the commentary in the Time article:

The metaphysics is breathtaking. A child stands in court, and demands the legal right never to have existed. The judges on the bench nod gravely. Except that it is not the "deformed" child that stands in court. It is parents and lawyers, collaborating in odious work.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Web development Health Ethics Law ]

Had lunch over at Pixar's new digs today. Lunch was quite yummy, food service sure has come a long way since Elroy's. It was the first time I've been on that lot since construction was finished. Heard the tales of the cracking floorboards, the brick sent back because it was the wrong color, the $20k throw rugs, the multi-hundreds of dollars a cord wood for the pizza oven, the guy whose job it was to wander around and touch up the faux-weathering on the hand-bolted beams, the new render farm, with the next generation Sun machines that are actually 10% slower than the previous boxes, and two times the racks and several times the power consumption the room was designed for. Names of the tour-guides elided to protect their careers... I enjoyed much of my time at Pixar, but overall I'm glad to have moved on; that the money was spent on making the building a showcase and not on the amenities that could have made working there a much nicer experience speaks of the corporate culture issues that lead to my decisions. Despite the rumours, I do think that a sphinx with the face of Steve Jobs in the fields beside the entrance would be a little over-the-top.

[ related topics: Pixar Dan's Life Food ]

David Steinberg's latest Comes Naturally column talks about his further adventures photographing sex. Has some neat pictures, too.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Sexual Culture ]

I know a few of us are interested in aviation 'round these parts. Airline Safety is an awesome web site with lots of cool reading, whether or not you're spooked by detailed accounts of airline disasters. For instance, check out their FAQ on horizontal stabilizer malfunction as an answer to questions raised by the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261.

[ related topics: Aviation ]

Ages ago, I linked to a report that Germany's largest sex merchandising firm was planning an IPO. Later, I found a report that they had. Now comes a report that Beate Uhse, founder of the self-named firm, is dead at 81.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Apropos of [ahem] nothing at all, I wonder if a company whose biz-dev people are more important than the creative or technical staff has any long-term prospects? I wonder what it means when a company's customer is not its audience? If markets are conversations, then who is the dialog with? And while the rest of the country is trying to figure out how to keep the driver focused on the road, what are the long-term effects of Pioneer releasing a car stereo wtih customizable images on its display?

The system allows each radio to store a total of 5MB of generated images including 1MB for personalized custom screen savers. The unit comes with seven factory-generated screen savers such as CART racing, space travel and flight of the bird.

[ related topics: Music Technology and Culture New Economy ]

Test your browser with this PAGE

[ related topics: Web development ]

"What you're seeing in these proposals is how little you can really do with $300 billion when you're trying to reach an elderly and disabled population with high expenditures." DIANE ROWLAND,, executive vice president of the Kaiser foundation, on the Senate's struggle to pass prescription drug benefit

Have we brought up euthanasia on Flutterby yet?

[ related topics: Business Politics Libertarian Health moron ]

Interesting Find Law Forum on Transsexuals, dress codes, and the law, about the legal maze that gender dysphoria poses to anti-discrimination law, where sexual orientation discrimination doesn't come into play, and how Title VII allows employers to maintain sex-specific dress and grooming codes. Mentioned as an exception to that is Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins because that ruling was made based on expected behavior, not appearance.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law ]

Well it's about bloody time! Chattanoogans probably already know that Judge Walter Williams faces impeachment. Certainly in my stint in 'nooga he caused lots of scorn and mistrust of the government in my social circle. If ever there were someone you'd want to give a "your terms are acceptable" reply to that "over my dead body" attitude...

"Maybe I'll change if I come back in a different life, but I ain't changing in this one. They'll have to carry me out first. They'll have to bring the stretcher in here," the municipal court judge said.

[ related topics: moron Law ]

Via /., study says computer gaming may be good for your kids.

"They seemed able to focus on what they were doing much better than other people and also had better general co-ordination. Overall there was a huge similarity with top-level athletes. The skills they learnt on computers seem to transfer to the real world," Rutter said.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Games ]

A fun little four part foray into the world of gambling on Kuro5hin (two / three / four):

This has all worked in our favor. The fact that we keep returning and playing at these levels after more than three years is highly suspicious. The casinos know we are lying about the money coming from "my business," but they let us play because they don't care that the money might be stolen or earned selling smack to kids. They only start caring who we are when they begin to suspect that we won the money from them.

[ related topics: Politics Privacy Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Law ]

To counterbalance all this serious stuff, check out the July 23 entry of the Daily Illuminator for "punchlines for jokes that don't exist":

marq . o O ( "I SAID .... "What? And leave the Marmoset"! ... you know ... the MAR-mo-set! ... maybe I'm not telling it right ... " )

SMarsh . o O ( "You can get more than two good pictures out of a ViewMaster." )

SMarsh . o O ( Actually, that's an okay punchline... 'What's the difference between George Lucas and a ViewMaster?' )

[ related topics: Humor Star Wars ]

This Film captures the funny side of George Orwell.

[ related topics: Humor Movies ]

Via PeterMe, a web publication that looks really promising for those of us into games: Game Studies: the international journal of computer game research

[ related topics: Games ]

A Monkeyfist article recounts the death of Carlo Giuliani, the "protester" killed at the Genoa G8 summit, with:

"Then, in a fit of excessive cruelty, the kind of excess that capitalism is best known by, the Carabinieri ran over his dead body with a heavy police vehicle."

Oh, please. If you've any doubts as to his intent, look at this sequence of photos: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 (which are also, albeit with a different slant, mirrored at Nausea Manifesto) and tell me that if you were an occupant of that vehicle, with busted out windows and people attempting to use a 2x8 as a battering ram against your head, and despite your brandished weapon, someone wearing a ski-mask came at you with a fire extinquisher, apparently hoping to throw it in the vehicle (and perhaps break the valve off in the process?), you'd have reacted with any more restraint. Only one policeman fired, and only two shots? Give those guys freakin' medals.

There are certainly enough injured policeman from those clashes that there was precedent about his intent, but his father assures us that "...he was a peaceful boy, never violent".

Yes, Joseph Stiglitz has fairly compelling and damning criticism of the World Bank and the IMF, but take a look at the results of the Genoa G8 summit. Looks like they'd be more likely to piss off economic conservatives than self-proclaimed socialists. So what's the fuss about, aside from a chance to blow off some adolescent steam in a way that will, at best, get a wrist slapping, rather than the full-on charges that participation in vandalism and assault would normally warrant?

[ related topics: Politics ]

If you want a protest done right, try the Boycott Adobe efforts in conjuction with the EFF. Adobe calls for release of Dmitry Sklyarov. Hopefully, having let this genie out, they can convince the prosecutor to drop the charges.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Free Speech ]

A Gamegrene rant about the lack of richness in MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) has me pondering. Debra Hyde has talked recently about her experiences with multi player Diablo II, and Alec, the alpha rat boy, has punctuated my helping him with his homework with showing me his progress through the single player game, and I realize that this is a wonderfully rendered and realized environment, but the interaction with it is too abstracted to be compelling to me. Anyone wanna chime in with observations on the current state of avatar chats, MMORPGs, MUDs, and how they've become more or less compelling?

[ related topics: Games ]

I'm going to try to go, so hopefully this won't sell out before I make my reservations, but the last Perverts Put Out! was a lot of fun. A reading by a lot of talented authors, Mary Anne Mohanraj and Darklady are on the calendar for this next one. Saturday the 28^th, details on the Black Books events page.

[ related topics: Books Erotic Bay Area ]

Good Vibrations Magazine has a bunch of European language sexual survival tips in case you travel abroad... Funny, they only list a "fellatio" translation for the romance languages; wonder what that says about the Germans?

[ related topics: Good Vibrations Erotic ]

Helping Alec with his homework last night, I was reminded why I hated high school so much. There are times when teachers slip up, and rather than asking unambiguous questions ask questions which depend on contextual information from the class. But in Geometry? Sheesh.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Via /., some cool notes and graphs on the spread of the "Code Red" IIS worm. Yet another reason that 'net homogeneity is a bad thing.

[ related topics: virus ]

Just because I'm too lazy to deeply delve into the appropriate RFC right now: Does anyone have a good idea what HTTP headers I should be sending to better expire the archives pages? So far as I can tell, the HTML and CGI headers I'm getting back from each are identical, yet it seems like cache checking is happening properly for the static HTML pages and not for the CGI served pages (note to self: answer might be in RFC3143).

[ related topics: Web development ]

Man, the Chattanooga references just keep poppin' out of the woodwork! Kiki passed along this tale of a nuclear powered rocket, launching 55 gallon drums via a Sequoyah Nuclear Plant safety steam release. Makes my diddling about with Loren Carpenter's liquid nitrogen soda bottle launcher look pretty damned tame.

[ related topics: Humor Cool Science ]

So I've been diddling more than I want to with XML recently, and my opinion of it is... changing slightly negatively... and I'm starting to think "Gee, some hardware instructions to deal effectively with some of the parsing and UTF-8 issues so that these GHz PIII boxes aren't reduced to a crawl sure would be nice!" Admittedly most of the problem is probably just in memory access issues, but there have to be some cool ways to accelerate processing.

[ related topics: Content Management ]

Japanese Phallus Nailing tradition seems to be effective in curbing adultry and is growing in popularity with Japanese housewives, the men ...errrr are less enthused

[ related topics: Religion Humor Sexual Culture ]

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." - Mark Twain

Via Bifurcated Rivets, based on this cartoon I think I have a new daily read: Contusion

[ related topics: Humor ]

Not necessarily enough there to go read it, but Salon talks about a guy harassed by a cop in Toledo for reading Esquire. We need an enforcement mechanism to go back and open up a can of Bill of Rights on schmucks like this:

The officer scanned the pages sternly and declared them to be pornographic. He had Sebastian open up his backpack to make sure that there were no more offending materials hidden within, but there was only his diary, his wallet and a copy of the New York Times.

[ related topics: Politics Privacy Sexual Culture ]

Bionic suit takes pain out of lifting for nurses. Well, okay, I think it's an exoskeleton sort of thingie, but:

Early tests of a prototype allowed a nurse weighing 141 pounds to lift a patient weighing 154 pounds. A commercial version of the suit will cost about $1,700 and could be available in two years.

[ related topics: Cool Science Health ]

Cam points out that that check USAnians will be getting in the next few days is just a refund against your 2001 tax credit. Hopefully they'll be smart about it and not send me one, 'cause I always end up paying anyway. But man, that's really slimy if you were expecting to have a certain amount withheld...

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Politics Current Events ]

A Swiss Microsoft site has pulled a racy ad, as a man fumbles to undo the bra of a scantily clad woman a Microsoft prompt appears, asking for a password. Apparently they're trying to say that Windows only cares about security when you want to do something. Or, given how easy it seems to be to bypass Windows passwords, maybe the message was "Use Windows, get screwed."

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft ]

One of the ideas that fascinates me is the nature of criminal enterprises as governments, formed as a reaction to other oppressive governments. Witness, for instance, the open acceptance of the Mafia in New York as a reaction to an Irish dominated police force which openly warred against the Italian communities. Wednesday Evening's Fresh Air had an interview with Philadelphia Enquirer reporter George Anastasia on how the breakdown of a sense of community within the Philadelphia mob allowed it to be cracked and destroyed; in essence with the governmental functions of the mob gone, everyone was out for money, which meant that there was no loyalty or long-term reward to sitting in jail. There are less subtle echoes of gangs as alternative government in the death of Indian "Bandit Queen", who turned first to violence, then to being a legislator in an attempt to undo the Hindu caste systems.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events ]

Larry Wall has given this year's State of the Onion address, on what's going on in the Perl community.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source ]

The US is planning retaliation for an Iraqi attack on a U2, but can you blame them? Bono pisses me off too, it's an honest mistake.

[ related topics: Politics Aviation ]

So what can we do to fight stupid software patents? This is just the latest in a long string of evidence that software patents are a bad idea, but I don't see any hope of fighting these things effectively. Perry Leopold, founder of the PAN Network:

"The patent bar has been lowered so far you can trip over it if you're not watching."

[ related topics: Intellectual Property ]

Via /., even though Adobe recanted their decision it's too late: the U.S. Attornbey's office in San Francisco gave no indication of dropping prosecution against Dmitry Sklyarov. This is akin to the convenience store robber saying "I didn't mean to kill the clerk...", remorse helps no one. Adobe could start to redeem themselves by funding Sklyarov's defense...

[ related topics: Politics Free Speech Bay Area ]

Dang it, y'all, I'm gonna have to fly to New York for Webzine 2002, aren't I? Reports from Debra parts 1, 2, and Columbine, parts 1, 2 and 3.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Judge rules that lesbian can sue over death of her partner in that infamous dog mauling case in San Francisco:

Superior Court Judge A. James Robertson II said that because state law does not allow gay couples to marry, the surviving-spouse rule should not apply to same-sex couples. The judge agreed with Smith's attorney that the rule violates the equal protection clause of the California Constitution.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Bay Area Law Current Events ]

Via Weird Ass Shit and the extremely disturbed Reverend Hasty, Cut Off My Feet.com. It's just your usual "guy in accident; guy loses use of lower legs; guy decides to webcast video of guillotine chopping off feet so that he can afford better prosthetics." sort of heartwarming tale. (Damn, I've no idea how to categorize this...).

Had an interesting moment last night, I was helping someone who has done a lot of 2d collage "get" some aspects of video editing. We were talking about video-safe areas and cropping image. Something she said, and then immediately corrected herself on, showed me that she was thinking of video in terms of a progression in 2d space of 2d images, because her quickly withdrawn question was asking about how the edge cropping affected the visibility of subsequent and previous images. Very cool to see that glimpse into someone else's visualization, especially since I've been trying to do some higher dimensional algebra recently and think I'm starting to get past the "visualize lots of separate boxes in 3 space linked by time" issue, but...

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

Over in Scarlet Letters, there are some interesting images in Geoff Cordner's take on body image.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Perverts Put Out last night was fun, although it was also quite interesting going with someone who isn't familiar with either the scene or a lot of erotica, getting her reactions to especially some of the rougher and non-consensual stuff. But a lot of stuff for all tastes, far more people than last time, and Mary Anne Mohanraj's "they don't have this in Salt Lake City" reaction reminded me why, despite all of the down-sides of the Bay Area, I'm loathe to move.

[ related topics: Erotic Bay Area ]

Pervets Put Out ...humph, for really good pussy go to Live Nude Cats although you must be over 18 to enter the site.

[ related topics: Humor Erotic Sexual Culture Theater & Plays ]

From John Taylor Gatto's book The Underground History of American Education:

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.

William Torrey Harris in The Philosophy of Education (1906)

I'm only a little way through the book, but if you view it as a rant by someone who loves and feels passionately about its subject, and you get through some of the semi-conspiracist sounds in the first chapter, it's a fantastic indictment of state-run and compulsory education.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Books ]

Dori asked about 1099ers getting rebate checks. This Chronicle article on rebate checks suggests that some of the distribution seems to be based on the last two digits of your Social Security number, and if those two digits are high your check won't arrive 'til September.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Spectator has an interesting rundown of the Second Sex Worker Film and Video Festival that happened back in May.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

From Sunday's Chronicle:

The term limits law parades under a phony name. It's not the elected official's term that is limited --- it's the eligibility for re-election that is destroyed. The public is hoodwinked into lessening its own elective power.

Louis Worth Jones, San Mateo

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

Part of John Taylor Gatto's thesis in The Underground History of American Education is that mandatory government-funded education has actually reduced literacy rates (an argument I've seen evidence of before). I don't know if this is a reasonable sample, but the number of people who can't figure out what the signs pictured here indicate is absolutely amazing. I'm also unwilling to draw conclusions from this little data, but it appears, based on their responses to these signs, that bicyclists tend to have a much higher literacy rate than pedestrians.

[ related topics: Language Photography moron ]

David Steinberg on photographing sex, along with some examples of his recent work.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture Coyote Grits ]

Bill Polson has strongly recommended Fool Moon, his only complaint was that he wished for a break because his face hurt from laughing so hard.

[ related topics: Humor Theater & Plays ]

If you have any stake in the future of the 'net, if you've thought about how the 'net doesn't scale for broadcast deliveries, if you've ever felt disappointed that you got involved in the 'net to facilitate communication and instead find it used as a medium to deliver more mass-media crap, Content is Not King by Andrew Odlyzko is worth a read.

The postal system alone collects almost as much money as the entire movie industry, even though the latter benefits from large foreign sales. For all the publicity it attraces, entertainment is simply not all that large, because people are not willing to pay very much for it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies New Economy Sociology ]

Cool flowers along the trail above Woodacre on the Sunday morning hike.

[ related topics: Photography ]

In the latest Lens Work there's a spread of Peter Steinhauer's images of Vietnam. Note particularly that image of the waterfalls at Ban Gioc in Cao Bang Province. He says he's got a show at the Scott Nichols Gallery at 49 Geary Street in San Francisco through September 1^st. Might be worth a trek to the city.

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area ]

Lest y'all get the impression that the only edge pushing is happening in the big cities, Xchange swingers club busted in Decatur, Alabama.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Current Events ]

The AP covers the furor over the British satire of reactions to pedophilia, Brass Eye. But for real coverage, go check out Daze Reader for July 30^th and 31^st . And remember, Phil Collins is talking Nonce Sense.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Technology and Culture ]

So the real news isn't that half of the anti-missile defense system tests have succeeded, it's that half of them have failed despite anti-missile system test targets having embedded homing beacons. So all that talk about "decoys" was apparently just so much hoohey. If I had a vendor that was faking results, lying to me, and mis-estimating my requirements, I'd drop 'em. Why don't we fire the Pentagon and hire the North Korean military instead? it'd be cheaper, and we'd probably get more apropriate solutions.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events ]