Flutterby™! From 2005-10-01 to 2005-10-31

I hade been using Comodo for my *.cybrmall.com wildcard SSL certificate, cause a year ago they were the cheapest by a large margin. I recently tried to renew with them (at $399) and was unable to because their interface kept saying I needed to login with another login/password (than the only one I had) to renew that certicate. Calls to tech support got 'all lines are busy, e-mail us', and my emails got back a form response saying ' you can not request a login/password change more than 3 times in 24hrs ' - In other words, complete system shutdown. Goodbye Comodo.

I picked RapidSSL.com and was blow away how simple and streamlined their website and process was in comparison, and that I had a valid Tier 1 wildcard ssl certificate in under 30 minutes after I started the process by clicking 'buy'. They 'identified' me by both emailing the admin contacts for my domain, as well as an automated phone call where I verified a number on the web page and they recorded a sample of my voice (which means they verified my phone # as well). I saved $200, no faxing and waiting, and everything worked so well I feel compelled to share.

[ related topics: Spam Cool Technology ]

Every time I see a Robert Altman film, I end up transfixed by the beautifully framed shots, thinking I'm still watching because the craftsmanship necessary to put together a film like that must mean that there's a deeper meaning, and ultimately disappointed by how banal and trite the film ends up being. So it was with Dr. T. and the Women. A few funny bits, but when the bits were funny they were applied with a sledge hammer, and mostly just a cast of unlikeable people without depth or appropriate motivation.

But the Lyle Lovett soundtrack was good.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Just got back from hanging out with a neighbor after a road improvement district pot-luck. Nothin' pulls the neighborhood together like potholes.

So we were hanging out with our neighbor after the meeting, and she was showing us our house and mentioned that she was going to put Warm Tile Floors heaters under the tile in her bathroom. Looks kinda cool. Nuheat is another such product. I'd be scared of going with electric heat in this market, but we're looking at ways to improve "spot heating" so that we can use energy only where and when we really need it, and... well... we'll have to see how this works out for her, but it seems neat enough to warrant an entry here so I'll remember it later.

[ related topics: Cool Technology Real Estate ]

Porn star, Christian debate adult film industry:

One curious student asked the obvious question to Jeremy: “How big is it?”

“It’s 2 inches from the floor,” Jeremy said, causing more outbursts. “Seriously, I’m telling you, I’m standing here, and my penis is parked in the car.”

After the audience calmed down a bit, Jeremy asked the student if he wanted both speakers to answer the question.

“Ron, if you want to find out, you have to marry me first,” Leahy said.

Apparently they're touring, here's an account from a talk they did in Kansas, and a Michigan school has interviews with Leahy and Jeremy. (thanks to Violet Blue)

[ related topics: Religion Sexual Culture Sociology ]

Next time I need some inspiration for food presentation: cute sushi.

[ related topics: Food Art & Culture ]

The military gets more recruits from rich ZIP code regions than from poor ones.

[ related topics: Politics War Economics ]

One of the coolest experiences of living out here has been lying out in the hammock and hearing the "whoosh whoosh whoosh" of the wings as various of the large birds that make their homes in the surrounding trees beat through the air above us.

And we've been trying to learn a few more bird calls, to pick up on the chatter when they're stationary.

I know there are some owls over in the bell tower of the San Anselmo town hall, but I'm not sure what all we've got in the woods surrounding us. Here are Owl Sounds - All Species. Some exotic enough that we won't hear 'em here, but really cool.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Bay Area Birds San Anselmo ]

I should really keep up with Jeff Pidgeon more, I run into him occasionally since my Pixar days and always have good conversations with him, but it took an entry over on Brainwagon to tell me that Jeff Pidgeon now has a blog and a Cafe Press store for his various designs.

[ related topics: Pixar Graphic Design ]

Also saved so I can show it to Forest:

• Preventing hearing damage while listening to headphones.

And from the "what is it reasonable to expect from a 12 year old" department:

• The Fall 2005 Pedal Press from the Marin County Bicycle Coalition lists Gabe Maria, a 12 year old who commutes to school five miles over the Terra Linda - Sleepy Hollow Divide.
• The Feldmann family has done 5,284 miles so far this year, with a 10 year old and a 12 year old on their own bikes.
• Over at the Hovercontrol.com helicopter flight simulator community, a 13 year old has had the patience and attention span to go through and pass their pilot training program.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Music Aviation Bay Area Sociology Bicycling Aviation - Helicopters ]

Forest, my nephew who has been staying with us for a while now, has been asking about "things that blow up". I've been thinking about things that I can do fairly simply and easily that might be an introduction to learning, and that won't require me getting a safe to store materials when I'm not around to keep a watch on 'em. I've thought that one place to start would be with the old saltpeter and sugar smoke bombs (3 to 2 by weight, if I remember right). I should probably start by introducing the periodic table of the elements and going through the calculations necessary to come up with:

9.6 KNO₃ + C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁ --> 4.8 K₂CO₃ + 7.2 CO₂ + 11 H₂O + 4.8 N₂ (source)

Which is actually closer to 4:1. Huh, so much for the common lore, although maybe it's easy to melt the ingredients together with more sugar. Or maybe I should just check my sources better, as I haven't sat down with the periodic table and made sure that all works out.

From there I've been thinking about making black powder, but it sounds like to do a reasonable job at that I have to get a good unadulterated charcoal (ie: not briquettes), and build a ball mill, and... yeah, a damned lot of work. I've heard that sugar can be substituted for the charcoal, but I think it'd still require a ball mill (got the motor, could probably use a piece of PVC or ABS for the tumbler, would have to get some lead balls for the agitator, and spend a half a day fabricating the whole thing).

Unfortunately, he's a 12 year old product of the video game generation, zero attention span and all. If I were less burned out on him right now, and he had the attention span of, say, the rat boys, I'd go talk to the neighbors who have chickens, start by refining KNO₃ ourselves from that manure, probably just buy the sulfur outright, but... well... The other thing is that I'm not sure I trust him with this knowledge just yet.

So, anyone got any simple relatively safe ideas for things that go "bang" that don't require spending lots of time or too many tens of dollars at the chemical supply place? And it's been a long time since I've done my high school chemistry, anyone got a reliable source for the results of things like the classic KNO₃ + S + C and such so that if I do sit down with him and a periodic table of the elements and try to make this a reasonable lesson I don't have to do gobs of figuring? Especially sources that are more educationally oriented and less "Anarchist's Cookbook" like?

And, for the record 'cause maybe some day I'll be less burned out on him, and trust him a little more, here's a sugar rocket motor kit, building "waterfalls" and all sorts of other cool stuff from United Nuclear.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Dan's Life Pyrotechnics Education Model Building ]

I've yanked a thread here 'til I can resolve a few personal issues. Email me with questions.

In the past few months, I've had two people well-known to me and very close to my wife, die. Both were younger than me. One was a pre-Olympic athelete in bicycling and swimming, a Dartmouth grad who had just started a job as a lawyer in Aspen, CO, before slowly, over two years, losing his physical and mental capacity to a brain tumor. The other was a 23-year-old activist who lost both her parents at age 9 to AIDS, did not even have a drivers license because she believed in bicycling, and worked in several AIDS and womens' charities. She was killed instantly when run over by an armored car riding her bicycle across a college campus.

At a reception for the latter, a friend explained how she had just taught her 4-year-old daughter, when leaving someone, to always look them in the eye and from the heart wish them goodbye because you never know when that would be the last time you'll see them. It's a way of honoring the connection between your souls.

[ related topics: History Law Heinlein Sports Automobiles Education Pedal Power Bicycling Marriage ]

On the one hand, I'm not a great fan of the idea of fertility treatments, and I think a lot of people who do become parents shouldn't. On the other hand, I'm not sure I can get behind this proposed Indiana legislation that would make it illegal for unmarried people to use "assisted reproduction", and require that the prospective parents also provide to a court:

(6) Personal information about each intended parent, including the following:

[snip]

(B) Values.

(C) Relationships.

(D) Education.

(E) Emplyment and income.

(F) Hobbies and talents.

...

And:

(10) A description of the family lifestyle of the intended parents, include a description of individual participation in faith-based or church activities, hobbies, and othe rinterests.

Maybe this is just sour grapes. Maybe this is me saying "restrictions on child-bearing are fine if the rules match my values", but I shudder at this level of government intrusion into personal life, especially when the intrusion is so clearly intended not to raise the living standard of the prospective child, but to enforce a specific set of stated goals and values onto the prospective parents.

[ related topics: Religion Politics moron Sociology Law ]

Autodesk acquires Alias for $182M.

[ related topics: Graphics ]

Those wacky anti-porn activists over at XXXChurch.com have a program that they call Porn Sunday. They've decreed this coming Sunday, October 9^th, as "National Porn Sunday", and churches in California and churches in Ohio are participating.

Now I'm not sure that I can get behind their meaning of it, but I know I can get behind something that'd go by the name "National Porn Sunday". So celebrate with me, or at the very least allay the fears of your favorite teenager by telling 'em that the worst that'll happen is blisters.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Sociology Current Events California Culture ]

Jon Carroll asks some good questions about the Judith Miller situation:

So now here's the really odd part -- Libby's lawyer said that Miller had received an "explicit waiver" from Libby about a year ago, saying that it was OK to testify. Miller says that she did not hear it from Libby directly but only from his lawyer.

Did she think his lawyer was lying? And if so, why didn't she pick up the phone and just ask Libby what the deal was? Alternatively, why didn't Libby, when he realized that Miller was going to protect him, pick up a phone and call her? Or send a message with John Bolton? What changed between waiver A and waiver B? All the explanations offered by Miller and her defenders at the Times just don't make sense.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Beer ]

I mean to listen to the original NPR interview with Rick Santorum so that I can verify this myself, but the buzz around certain sectors this morning is Buzz Machine pointing out Rick Santorum's redefinition of "conservative". We have, of course, encountered Santorum before, but now he's gone completely bizarre, with:

This whole idea of personal autonomy — I don’t think that most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. And they have this idea that people should be left alone to do what they want to do, that government should keep taxes down, keep regulation down, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, that we shouldn’t be involved in cultural issues, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world.

Well, it's good for him to come right out and say what those of us who've been really confused about the big gap between what the Republicans have been saying they want and what they've been doing have observed: If you're a "Conservative" in the modern sense of the word, you think that people shouldn't be left alone, that the government should raise taxes, increase regulation, control your behavior in the bedroom, and dictate cultural direction.

[ related topics: Politics moron Sociology Current Events ]

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...6/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/cia_sept11_6

Oh, yeah here's a vote for good government. The spin I heard was that Tenet would dump dirt on everyone in DC if they went after him.

I feel safer.

radix

[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron ]

You remember, probably vaguely from your American History class in High School, something called The Federalist Papers. Written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, they were intended to gain support for the U.S. Constitution by explaining the meaning and reasoning behind that document. In modern times, if you, perhaps, call yourself an "originalist" and claim that documents should be interpreted in the language of the times in which they were written, these would be critical papers in interpreting the U.S. Constitution.

In light of the nomination of Harriet Miers to the United States Supreme Court, I'd like to quote extensively from The Federalist Papers #76: The Appointing Power of the Executive, the bit about presidential nominations:

To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. In addition to this, it would be an efficacious source of stability in the administration.

It will readily be comprehended, that a man who had himself the sole disposition of offices, would be governed much more by his private inclinations and interests, than when he was bound to submit the propriety of his choice to the discussion and determination of a different and independent body, and that body an entier branch of the legislature. The possibility of rejection would be a strong motive to care in proposing. The danger to his own reputation, and, in the case of an elective magistrate, to his political existence, from betraying a spirit of favoritism, or an unbecoming pursuit of popularity, to the observation of a body whose opinion would have great weight in forming that of the public, could not fail to operate as a barrier to the one and to the other. He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.

(hat tip)

[ related topics: Politics moron Law ]

Remember ages ago an anonymous correspondent asked us to identify the source of a picture, and Diane tracked it down to a set of photos by Akira Gomi.

Reynald Drouhin has taken those images and built Mise á nu. If you click through to the Flash app, mouseovers change each image from clothed to unclothed. It's a simple little hack, but what I find most striking about this is the subtle change in facial expressions on each of the women pictured.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Physiology ]

Yay for folks who send me cool links! In this case it's one that's been sitting in an open tab for a while. Down in Mill Valley there's a guy named Tony who runs a painting business as "The Londoner". He also does the most amazing Halloween decorations ever. Last year we ended up at his pre-trick-or-treat party, the one for the adults, which actually seems to be a bigger event now than the one a few nights later for the kids.

Anyway, I saw what he had going and said "you know, I've got a box full of motors in my basement...". All of this is the long way of saying that he now has most of my motion control stuff.

But two things have come up. I've just discovered that my neighbors are model builders and effects guys, and when I mentioned doing some work with motors and computer control some eyes lit up, but before all that...

FSCockpit.com has a page on full motion cockpits, which lead to Jim's flight simulator on the cheap which is driven with wiper motors. This kind of makes me think that maybe if I pair up the stepper motors I've got, and took some effort to make sure that the rotation axes were close to the center of gravity...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Aviation Bay Area Embedded Devices ]

Mark has an entry in which he links to The Panda's Thumb: Harriet Miers and Carl Baugh … Connecting the Dots. It notes this Newsday article on Miers which uses Judge Nathan Hecht, a colleage who has dated Miers, as a source for:

Miers also has given 10 percent to 12 percent of her earnings -- "if not more" -- to the evangelical Valley View Christian Church in Dallas, where she has been a congregant for about 25 years, Hecht said.

The Valley View Christain Church - Misc. Links page has a prominent (with graphic) link to the Creation Evidence Museum run by one Carl Baugh, a guy so far out that other "creation science" distance themselves from him (mirror). As Mark says:

Apparently it's not just Roe v. Wade that we have to worry about, but perhaps Epperson v. Arkansas or Lemon v. Kurtzman that we have to worry about.

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Politics Law Current Events Art & Culture Archival ]

The headline reads: London to Get Sexual 'Theme Park', the reality is closer to a sex museum. Still sounds like it'd be worth getting to if you're in town.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Art & Culture ]

I am really pleased and excited to announce that the Stanford Racing Team has just become the first autonomous vehicle to complete the 132.2-mile DARPA Grand Challenge, in 7 hours 46 minutes (out of the 10 hours allowed). Looks at this point as if the CMU Red Team Too and CMU Red Team will also complete the course, but the SRT time is faster. What an exciting day for robotics!



SUNDAY UPDATE: Stanley, the Stanford vehicle, has been declared the winner, completing the course in an official time of just under 6 hours, 54 minutes. SRT will take the $2million prize back to Stanford with them. Three other vehicles completed the challenge within 10 hours: the two CMU vehicles, and Gray Team from Metairie LA, a sentimental crowd favorite comprising students and engineers some of whom lost their homes in the Katrina flooding. A fifth team, TerraMax from Oshkosh WI, completed the course also, although not within the 10 hours specified under contest rules.



Yo, Dan: I smell "something that ought to interest a 12-year-old and be eminently achieveable" here (and no, I don't mean the DARPA Grand Challenge necessarily: I mean BotBall, Lego robotics, FIRST robotics....)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Coyote Grits Robotics Sports Lego Mindstorms Education ]

Dennis' Whiskey Corner presents Sippin' Poems & A Drinker's Companion To English Verse:

Whiskey is a drink best suited to relaxation. Beer is perfect for watching football. Wine is great with dinner. But whiskey is happiest when wed to book of poetry. Although any free time is a good time for fine uisgebeatha.

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits Poetry ]

Dave had a link to Coyote Blog: Is There A Minimum Income Necessary To Be Responsible?, looking at situations where the law assumes personal responsibility or a lack thereof.

[ related topics: Ethics Law ]

I'm in the process of writing some simple scripts to pump a bunch of email into the Scarab bug tracking system. Wow, we're not sure what's up, but with a newly rebooted machine running MacOS/X it's taking three or four seconds to serve up a page, at the far end of acceptable. But run it for a while and the JVM starts opening more "Mach Ports" and the next thing you know the Java process is sucking down all of the CPU for ten or fifteen seconds to serve a simple query.

I'm not sure what's going down, but in the process of tracking this down I'm having yet another of those "the Mac looks nice, but it'd be cool if they'd jack up the interface and slide a real kernel in under it" moments. The Mach kernel has a bunch of really wonky flaws which prevent these machines from being nearly as responsive or stable as they could be.

[ related topics: Open Source Software Engineering Macintosh ]

I've been following this story for a few days. The details of this are still filling in, and a bit sketchy, but: the red-rose-stories.com site has been shut down, and its operator has been charged with obscenity. The web site hosted only written prose, and from the reports of what the content was I'm not going to defend it based on that, but if this case isn't successful (and it's hard to imagine that it'd hold up to challenges) it will still have a tremendous chilling effect.

It is, however, also possible that not all of the details have leaked out yet.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law Current Events ]

Missouri to track traffic by looking at movement of individual cell phones. This is with current cell phones:

Instead, it takes the frequent signals that wireless phones send to towers and follows the movement of the phones from one tower to another. Then it overlays that movement with highway maps to determine what road the phones are on and how fast they are moving. Lumping dozens, hundreds or thousands of those signals together can measure traffic flow.

But they are individually tracked.

[ related topics: Wireless Privacy Maps and Mapping ]

In the "projects I'll likely never have the time or resources for, but are oh soooo cool", there's the Helicycle single seat helicopter. Less than $40 per hour operating costs (ie: per mile comparable to that of a car even if you don't count that a car needs to travel further because of road versus air distance), with a turbine(!), 7.5:1 power to weight ratio (fairly high performance), $23,500 for the airframe kit, $11,000 for the engine, looks like 600-700 hours of construction time.

And then there's the whole "learning how to fly a helicopter" thing, but... wow! Neat!

[ related topics: Aviation Machinery Cool Technology Fabrication Aviation - Helicopters ]

Ya don't poke around for helicopter information without coming across a lot of pilots who flew in Vietnam. Vietnam Moments is a set of recollections by such a pilot. Rough grammer, homonyms for spelling, short sentences, but still compelling reading:

Where the stream came out of the jungle canopy there was a small opening that a chopper could get in. Once we cleared the small opening I was in awe at what I saw. Upon clearing the canopy opening we found ourselves inside what I can only describe as a huge tunnel that followed the stream up the mountain side for as far as I could see. The stream was more like a small white water river that was maybe 30-40 feet wide. The trees seemed to start a short ways away from the edge of the white water. I can only assume that was that way because during the monsoon season any sapling that tried to take hold would be easily washed away by the torrent of water during that season. The top of the tunnel was about 80' up with no hanging vines. I guess the rule there was no limbs under 80' because there were none. We were in a natural tunnel under the jungle canopy that was created by the flow of that water coming off that mountain and you would have never guessed it was there.

The AC flew her up a ways and finally put a skid on one of the larger rocks to our right that would make a good exit spot for our team. To the left was white water. The two guys on the left side of the ship took one look at that white water and decided that they best go out the other side of the ship. With the team out we just did a pedal turn and flew on out. I wonder how many other chopper crews go to see something like that.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Aviation War Aviation - Helicopters ]

From a thread over at Hover Control, a few references for learning to fly a helicopter simulation:

• A copy of the Helicopter procedures from the X-Plane pilot operations handbook
• Helicopter Maneuvers
• Dynamic Flight Maneuvers from The Rotorcraft Flying Handbook FAA-H-8083-21

And the thing I've discovered about helicopter approaches is that, unlike fixed wing approaches, it's okay to be a little slow; you want to be at or below autorotation speed so that when the flare happens (and it's a super steep flare, not just a "oh, let's float down the runway 'til we hit) you don't gain altitude. So (obviously depending on the flight simulator, the aircraft model, and the payload and fuel) approach the numbers at 50-65 kts with zero(!) collective, flare way hard, and as speed drops to zero pull up to enough (65-75%) collective to drop into a ground-effect hover.

[ related topics: Aviation Aviation - Helicopters ]

Jerry is shamelessly asking for links to his electric car weblog

[ related topics: Weblogs Automobiles Cool Technology ]

I recently (tonight) had to do a long proposal for a project, and part of it was doing a short technical and personal bio. I've already been working for these guys for a couple of weeks doing odd stuff (various servers) and they have been impressed. But when I sent them the 2 short paragraphs on me (one techy, one personal stuff..), they did not believe it and I was not 'fluffing' at all. Looking at it later, I kind of see their point. It's hard to be humble, yada yada...

I'll bet most Flutterbarians are in the same boat. As a significant portion of next years revenue for GeekLabs may depend on this gig, I'd like to get it, but it's too late to change this one, but any suggestions for the next time? What do you do?

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Boats Machinery ]

The Cloud Appreciation Society:

We believe that clouds are for dreamers, and their contemplation benefits the soul. They are the Rorschach images of the sky, and if you consider the shapes you see in them you will save on psychoanalysis bills.

Props to HGR1219 for the find (dude, if I could find a user account that looked like you I'd throw the "post on front page" flag).

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment HGR1219 ]

Yesterday, Elf had an entry titled The Evangelical Instinct Toward Honor Killing. Worth a read:

A quarter-million women a year die of cervical cancer. The FRC, seeking to protect their message, has decreed that those deaths should continue rather than let one more woman be less fearful with her sexuality. In saying so, the FRC betrays both the worst instincts of the monotheistic traditions that came out of Judea and the worst instincts of American culture: It wants to continue the honor killings of women who defy the FRC's sexual mores, but it doesn't want to have to look them in the eye while doing so.

"FRC" refers to the Family Research Council.

And since we're on the subject of the haters, buried in the so-called "Children's Safety Act of 2005" is a clause that would attempt to apply 2257 record keeping requirements to any scene that simulated sex. Screw Griswold v. Connecticut, they're after the First Amendment.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health Sociology Law Current Events Civil Liberties Sexual Culture - U.S. Code Title 18 Section 2257 ]

I hadn't really remembered that it was still there, but the brouhaha over the recent sale of weblogs.com reminded me that I was still checking for last update times. So I looked at the last update times, and realized that it wasn't working. Then I looked at weblogs.com and saw that there was so much spam and crap that it really no longer mattered. So, does anyone care if I remove the "ping it" code?

And does anyone want a replacement protocol, perhaps some sort of subscription mechanism? I can't imagine VeriSign actually figuring out a solution to this.

[ related topics: Weblogs Spam ]

Clean Sheets has a quick rundown of some of the current hypocrisies in sex and politics.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Current Events ]

A couple links stolen from Daze Reader:

Why Porn Is Good for America (Or, at Least, No So Bad) talks about all the benefits we had in that widely decried decade of moral decline that was the '90s.

Nerd Porn Auteur, a little spoken word riff (I haven't listened to the MP3, just read the text) about the state of porn:

But I don't wanna watch this misogynist he-man woman-hater porn.

I want porno movies that are made with guys like me in mind:

Guys who know that the sexiest thing in the world

is a woman who is smarter than you are.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture ]

Scarfed from Brainwagon for all of those really cool geo-data and mapping projects that I have kind of on the back burner but haven't gotten to actually implementing (and need to spend a couple of hundred bucks on hard disks to really go forward with): Blue Marble: Next Generation is a set of images of the earth processed to remove the clouds, at 2km and 8km per pixel, broken out by month. So you can watch the seasons change.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Graphics Maps and Mapping ]

Cannabinoids promoted generation of new neurons in rats' hippocampuses. The article quotes Xia Zhang, an associate professor with the Neuropsychiatry Research Unit at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon:

"Chronic use of marijuana may actually improve learning memory when the new neurons in the hippocampus can mature in two or three months," he added.

[ related topics: Drugs Physiology ]

Do women perceive color differently from men? And how many people do have four primaries?

[ related topics: Physiology ]

For many years there have been a few things I really wanted but never got around to. A garage with an automatic door; a swimming pool big enough to swim laps in, and private 'enough'. I did a lot of swimming as a youngster and I miss it. It was magical.

I had seen 'Citizen Kane' years ago and remembered his opening words and closing scene - 'Rosebud' he said and it was a snow sled - he loved when it he was a small boy. It was symbolic of what he tried to recreate his entire life, that feeling of joy he experienced as a young boy on his snow sled.

So when I recently got the garage with the automatic door, and the private pool, I decided to put up a sign that says 'Rosebud', and then I researched 'Rosebud' on the internet and lo and behold, Rosebud is more than a snow sled it appears -- it is: "Rosebud was what Hearst called his mistress, Marion Davies', clitoris." http://5minutesonline.com/ft/orson%20welles2.htm

In reading more about it I like it. Rosebud - the sign will go up by the pool and it will remind me of my childhood, and warmly, of a good friend of mine too.

Rosebud - you're the best.

Ziffle

[ related topics: Language Ziffle Children and growing up Sexual Culture Net Culture ]

Just in case you haven't seen it, here's a story of a guy who wrote a JavaScript worm that propagated on MySpace, but, more interestingly, here's the explanation behind the worm, which has a few things I didn't think about when trying to harden user input on this site, and which I should write some code to clean out.

[ related topics: Web development virus ]

Hey, anyone out there have experience with flight simulation? I've been flying the FlightGear helicopter models a bit, and ogling the HeliCycle, and I'm getting the aviation bug again. But in reading through a few references while waiting for some tests to run I'm starting to wonder about how good the helicopter flight model is: It seems a little shy on ground effect, it has no model for feeding blade drag back into the engine, issues like that.

When I was young, probably up to 12 or 13 years old (before I discovered computers), I was totally into aviation, accumulating all the old books on airfoil sections and aeronautics I could, building a wind tunnel and doing a few tests. This weekend I spent some time doing mind experiments on helicopter dynamics and I'm starting to think it'd be fun to at least work through the math of a helicopter simulator, if not actually write the critical bits of code.

But those books are long gone, and those it's been a long time since those neurons were exercised.

So, anyone out there have a line on something like the old NACA lift-drag graphs, especially in numerical form? And an idea of which airfoils are used in helicopter rotors? I'll either have to brush up on my calculus or just do a number of samples to try to catch the issue of different blade speed over a swept area. I don't remember specifically how to deal with swept-wing stuff, but the helicopter has that in spades and solving for a number of samples along the blade and convolving them somehow seems like it might be the easier way to do this.

But I'm also working of the memories of what I could pick up for peanuts at library basement sales, and I'm trying to refresh myself on Reynold's numbers, wing lengths and stall behavior, and wondering if Glauert's model for lift and drag versus speed (N/pow(1-mach*mach, .5)) sufficient? The nice thing about helicopters is that you can pretty much clip when the rotor tip hits Mach 1... I think.

I think the issues of engine simulation are already done, although references to such things would be gratefully received, but any suggestions for good places to start for someone who once knew a little bit would be helpful.

[ related topics: Books Cool Science Aviation Mathematics Machinery Aviation - Helicopters ]

First it was the 'Di-Lithium Crystals', and now it is Transparent Aluminum ala: aluminum oxynitride -- ALONtm that is making the news in the military armor circles.

"The substance itself is light years ahead of glass," he said, adding that it offers "higher performance and lighter weight."

So either the writers of Star Trek are/were aliens, from the future, or just really smart at predicting future technologies. I'm going for time travellers and think they should be arrested for it for some reason yet to be determined by guys in dark glasses. Still I'm wondering, is it too late to get a patent on Tribbles?

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Star Trek Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy Writing Current Events Archival ]

Build your own noise cancelling headphones (stemming from an "ask /." entry with completely content-free comments).

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Music ]

Jonathan Coulton does Baby Got Back as a soft-rock cover.

And somewhere I remember a klezmer version of "Hit me baby one more time", I could have sworn it was over at Borklog a while ago, but don't see it in the whole thing.

[ related topics: Music ]

Hardware hackers and robotics geeks: Serv-O-Link has plastic spur gears, sprockets, and drive chain, with online ordering.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Robotics ]

Dear Steve Jobs - Please build Apple II's:

Woz got it. Thirty seconds after unwrapping an Apple II, you were opening the lid and connecting ribbon cables. It was respect. Apple extended respect. And Apple was respected by my rocket scientist buddies and myself. Apple extended the respect through meaningful manuals, a documented architecture and a generally awesome computer. Nothing was hidden. You could POKE and PEEK your way through the whole machine.

The Apple II became a platform for invention. A modem in every slot to create the first online chat? Music keyboard controllers years before MIDI? Digitizing audio through the cassette input jacks? Controlling teletypes through the joystick ports? Big Traks and Armatrons connected as $30 robots? The Apple II was the hub of lots of cool homebrew technology. The first time I heard Van Halen's "Ain't Talkin' About Love" was through a tiny Apple II speaker. All 15 scratchy seconds of it. Where'd I get it? I downloaded it from a bulletin board.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Nostalgia Music Robotics ]

The amatory thesaurus, assorted slang of a sexual nature, with attempts at era and origins, such as "in and out like a fiddler's elbow".

[ related topics: Language Sexual Culture ]

Doin' a little web development today, using WWW::Mechanize to stuff data into Scarab, and in the process I started pondering a little off-track.

In a recent thread, Mars said:

yeah, it's long past time to start abandoning big central servers and start swinging back around toward mesh architectures. Let's start with the DNS....

Obviously this is something that comes up occasionally, but it got me to thinking: One of the potential solutions to some of the search engine problems is starting to find ways to decentralize search, either by actually decentralizing the indexes, or by offering up starting web pages as a way to build cultural context: Rank links by distance from these trusted sites, that sort of thing.

Since we're finding that we need ways to limit cultural spaces in general, why not give names cultural meaning? Why not have a name service that can be used hierarchically, so that more specificity can be offered (much like "bang paths"), but such that words like domain names become known and defined in a context as people start using them for a meaning?

[ related topics: Perl Software Engineering Sociology ]

Anyone who's been in computing a while knows that the participation of the fairer sex is often a topic of conversation. But today, when Dave Winer asked "How To Get More Women", the only thing I could think of was:

"In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women."

— the character "Tony Montana" in Scarface

[ related topics: Quotes Dave Winer Movies ]

This interesting story from the LA Times gives the Lagos side of the ever-present 419 scam letters from Nigeria, with their Edwardian verbiage and Machiavellian scheming. That $500 you might lose goes a long way in the slums of the Bight of Benin.

It reminds me of a memorable line from the old crime-show Cagney and Lacey. The head of the Bunco Squad is lecturing the cops on the venerable Pigeon Drop Swindle. Just as he's getting to the part where the victim is induced to put up cash as a bond to allegedly later acquire the found money, one detective says that she never understood this part, why anybody would make the conceptual leap from keeping the money to giveing away more. The Bunco man looks at her with a mournful face and says, "Nobody understands, Detective. Nobody".

[ related topics: moron Law Enforcement Currency ]

Alas, I can't read Japanese, because the world's smallest piloted coaxial helicopter looks kinda cool!

[ related topics: Aviation Cool Technology Aviation - Helicopters ]

Porn drives adoption of new technologies. Mark Morford muses on porncasting for the new video iPod, but povpod.com already has custom comment for the video iPod, shot from a perspective that makes it look real when you're holding it in your lap...

[ related topics: Apple Computer Sexual Culture Invention and Design Video Mark Morford ]

Supreme Court of Kansas rejects harsher penalties for homosexual statutory rape over heterosexual statutory rape.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law ]

According to Popular Mechanics, Rice University nanotechies have build the world's smallest car. It's about as wide as a DNA molecule and uses buckyballs for tires. White sidewalls optional.

[ related topics: Weblogs Automobiles Education Race ]

Watched Kinsey last night. Enjoyed it, but wasn't blown away by it. I was familiar enough with his life's work before seeing the movie, and it didn't seem to add much, and the story arc felt crufted on (which is kind of what you have to do with most biopics). Worth a watch, but don't expect life-changing.

But some of the intro that provided a backdrop for the times in which Kinsey worked seemed familiar when I read a review of Put What Where? Over 2,000 Years of Bizarre Sex Advice.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Movies ]

Finally saw Mirrormask on Saturday. Sort of Pink Floyd The Wall meets Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

We start with Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Gaiman's work you might know from American Gods or The Sandman, stories that at first appear simple, perhaps even simplistic, but have layers of depths. One friend described his work with "you don't have to have an advanced degree in classical mythology to understand it, but it helps". McKean is an illustrator who does a lot of collage like work, a style instantly recognizeable if you know it, and you've probably seen it. Add in a healthy dose of Jim Henson Studios style animation, with mixed live action.

The plot summaries you've seen do it justice, girl in a circus family hates that world and wants to join the normals, and in the process finds herself in a bizarre surreal world which she underswtands is a dream, but, like dreams, she finds out of her control. The process of her tracking down the mirrormask and escaping plays on themes of adolescence and childhood rebellion in in ways that never quite become as threatening or menacing as a world in which the first few people she meeet are destroyed by advancing waves of... something dark and creepy... would seem to go.

So it could become a horror movie, but it doesn't. It dances delicately along the line of children's movie and dark psychological thriller in a way that few films can.

I don't know if it's a great movie, but it's certainly a good one, and I'd go see it again in the theater. That big screen does a lot to make the surreal world that much more real.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Animation Movies Sociology Art & Culture Neil Gaiman Mirrormask ]

Anyone out there have any night-vision equipment? Apparently some laundry detergents have brighteners in 'em that make clothing really show up well in IR. A list of laundry detergents that are acceptable and unacceptable for washing your camouflage, just in case.

[ related topics: Clothing ]

The weekend before last we needed to get out of town, and the opportunity presented itself. We'd seen the antique car collection in Escalon, so we turned the car east down 120. It turns out Escalon has little more than that, so Saturday morning we headed up to Oakdale and had a perfectly delightful two days hanging out on the banks of the Stanislaus and exploring things like the Oakdale Cowboy Museum.

It was early afternoon on Sunday when we decided to turn back west, and Charlene said "let's take a route we haven't done before". So we discovered route 4, went back along the levees, through the incredible tackyness that is Brentwood, and right before Pittsburg saw a sign for the Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve. With only a few minutes left 'til closing we wandered up the trail, saw a really cool tarantula got to the entrance of the visitor's center, then had to turn around and leave.

So yesterday we grabbed Forest and went again. The mines were low grade coal in very thin deposits (18"-3') from 1849 to the early 1900s, but then someone discovered the sandstone, and sand was mined for glass up until the end of WWII (when the Marshall Plan rebuilding meant that ships needed ballast coming back from Europe, and that ballast included lots of cheap high grade silica sand for glass).

But there are some remaining really cool holes in the ground, and the terrain out there is kinda nice too. We're going to have to go back without the nephew in tow so we can explore more of the landscape, but for $3 they lend you a hardhat and a helmet and take you into the silica mines. And the visitor's center is one of the tunnels in the mine.

There are miles and miles of this, closed off in the early 1980s after some accidents with carbon monoxide and too many kids caught partying underground, but parts that are open are well lit and regularly checked for safety and pretty cool. And there's another one that's quite a hike from the entrance that's open for a couple of hundred feet in that's "bring your own light" that we'll have to take the off-road tandem and go discover at some point.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Nature and environment Machinery ]

I saw this one-handed clock in the Hammacher-Schlemmer catalog the other day, and it got me thinking about interfaces. Clocks have been around for nearly 800 years, and it took a few centuries to come up with our current standard 2 or 3 handed face. The digital display clock did not replace the old one however. Instead we seem to have realized that we don't need so much to know what time is is as what time it isn't, and the clock face is a fast visual calculator of how much time we have before or after some reference moment. I see little chance of things changing in this realm.

My question is what other interfaces still need improvement. The auto companies have tried new ideas over the years, like push-button manual transmissions in the 50s, or experimental steering yokes instead of the wheel, but they never caught on; the existing interfaces seemed to do the job fine. Certainly the keyboard/mouse combination isn't the last word on the man/computer interface, but what might the alternative be? Somehow, I don't think voice activation is the way to go, and direct brain connection jacks seem far off. The pen interface seems to have had its moment and is now going back to teeny-weeny keyboards on Blackberries et al. The menu-driven interface on lower-priced digital cameras is a nightmare if you want to try something different like not using the flash but holding the damn camera still instead. I think a volume dial on my TV's remote would be more convenient than the up-an-down buttons. Where else do we need work in this area?

[ related topics: Photography Technology and Culture Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Television Heinlein ]

Mars linked to Fuel Efficiency of Travel in the 20^th Century.

[ related topics: Automobiles Trains Public Transportation ]

I don't think I've put this up here before: The Gigapxl folks are shooting 9"x18" film and scanning it. The image gallery is worth a look through, keep clicking 'til you get to one of 'em where they show the extreme detail stuff.

[ related topics: Photography Cool Technology ]

Charles Petzold asks "Does Visual Studio Rot The Mind?" and, unsurprisingly, answers "yes". There's a lot more that could be said here, but thank the deities of your choice that I've been productive today and that I'm not working under Windows, so I'll leave y'all to figure it out yourselves.

[ related topics: Microsoft Work, productivity and environment ]

A couple to add to the reading list: Debra is proud to announce that she's got work in two anthologies, "an essay about sex and personal radicalism at midlife" in Everything You Know About Sex Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to the Extremes of Human Sexuality (and everything in between) and a story in Stirring Up a Storm: Tales of the Sensual, the Sexual, and the Erotic.

Meanwhile, Carly Milne of the late lamented "pornblography", just put out Naked Ambition: Women Pornographers and How They Are Changing the Sex Industry.

[ related topics: Books Erotic Sexual Culture Writing ]

I've built the helicopter controls and started flying the FlightGear Bo105 helicopter. Gotten pretty good at it, too, my hovering's a little shakey, and I'm having trouble holding forward flight altitude at speed at better than +/- 50 feet or so, but within the limits of my hovering I can do rudder turns, and fly sideways, and I'm starting to feel like I have some control.

At least in that flight model. And the FlightGear helicopter flight model is missing some critical bits, there's no downwash calculation, so there's no ground effect (and, less importantly but still an issue, no vortex ring state (VRS) issues), there's no engine model so you're blessed with 100% rotor speed all the time, but this also means that there's no autorotation, and the helicopter is powerful enough that I've hovered straight up 2,000 feet, which means that a whole set of issues with climb rate and such don't exist.

So I downloaded the X-Plane demo (6 minutes, then all the joystick inputs go to 0, with amusing results...), fired it up with their model of the Bell 206, tried to reset the controls and...

The problem here is that I've never been at the controls of a real helicopter. It's been many years, but I've felt the buffet of a stall in several different light fixed wing aircraft, I've felt rotation and the wheels getting light during take-off, I know what an approach and flare should feel like, I've held an altitude and direction with rudder turns and with the ailerons. And, frankly, most of the airplane simulators I've ever played with have been, to the limits of their model, relatively true to that fixed wing experience.

But every helicopter simulation I see starts with some basic similarities, and then is radically different from all of the other ones. I've done a lot of reading, I've been a passenger in a real helicopter once, but when the thing leaps off the ground with a very minimal collective input, and the cyclic lag doesn't seem to mesh with the numbers on the helicopters I've read, I start to wonder what's going on.

Everyone raves about X-Plane's fidelity to aerodynamics, and I can accept that it's my technique or something about how my controls are trimmed out or whatever, but parts of the experience are so completely different from those of FlightGear that I've realized I need to find an authority.

One of the reasons I stopped playing video games was that at some point in the last few levels of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 I realized that I'd gotten all of the general purpose dexterity with a controller I was ever going to get, and the only thing that continued play gained me was getting better at Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. And I was one hidden area away from having seen everything in the game.

There is a lot more that I can learn about helicopter flight from any simulator that's applicable to the real world, but at some point many of the more difficult reflexive skills, like maintaining a hover, or being able to make the axis of a rudder turn around the mast, or the tail, or the nose, feel like they start to become more an exercise in learning a simulator than in learning flight.

And what I haven't found is anywhere that a real world pilot compares the helicopter flight model of, say, Microsoft Flight Simulator to that of X-Plane and FlightGear. I've seen several pilots talk about tuning the "reality settings" of MSFS to be fairly realistic (and I think most of those are using a third party model, like the Dodosim RealStart 206), I've seen comments which indicate that the X-Plane aerodynamics simulation is more true-to-life...

So, anyone got a suggestion about how to proceed? I don't, right now, have the budget to go drop a couple of grand on real world flight training so that I can then evaluate each of these simulators. The Hovercontrol.com folks have a community built around Microsoft Flight Simulator, which I've wanted to stay away from for reasons of future platform (I'd hoped to not maintain a Windows XP box for very much longer), but there are real pilots over there who seem happy with that. I could add basic ground effect calculations to FlightGear fairly simply, although I'm not up to more complex rotor downwash aerodynamics yet.

And, frankly, I'm seeing enough code during the day that if I'm going to be building stuff to chase this as a hobby I'd rather spend that time working on something physical, like further improving my flight controls.

[ related topics: Games Microsoft Aviation Software Engineering Machinery Aviation - Helicopters ]

Smoking marijuana is less of a cancer risk than tobacco. I'd be interested in pursuing this story a little further, because most of the marijuana smokers I know are also of the "once a month or six" sort, not the "pack a day" sort, and my guess is that any more widespread recreational use of marijuana would follow that sort of pattern; much sparser use of marijuana compared to tobacco (or probably even alcohol).

[ related topics: Drugs Health ]

Made up this squash soup recipe with a few changes based on what I had on hand:

1 Tb	dark sesame oil
2	small yellow onions	diced
3 stalks	celery	chopped
Heat a large pan, start sautéing the onions & celery
2 t	coriander seeds
1 t	cumin seeds
4	cloves
In a dry skillet, toast the coriander and cumin seeds, toss in the cloves toward the end. Take out and grind in a mortar and pestle until it's powder
2	bay leaves
1 thumb's worth	fresh ginger	minced
1 Tb	cinnamon	ground
1/4 t	cardamom	ground
Add these to the onion and celery, which by now should have put out enough liquid to not burn the powdered spices. Let cook a short time, then add
2 1/2 lbs	acorn squash squash	peeled, seeded and chopped
4 cups	chicken stock
1 t	dried lemon grass
This would have been much better had we had a stalk of fresh lemon grass
1/4 cup	dried coconut
1/2 cup	whole milk
A substitute for coconut milk (how can I not have coconut milk in my cupboard? Must rectify!). Toss in the blender and run for a while
1/4 t	lemon oil
A substitute for not having the fresh limes. When I first tossed this in I thought it was an excessive amount, but it was almost too subtle in the final mix, so don't add this and the coconut milk until the squash and celery are soft. Toss in a blender and puree all of the ingredients to date. Serve with:
1 Tb	fresh basil	chopped
1 Tb	fresh mint	chopped

I think adding the juice from fresh limes rather than the lemon oil at serving time would really kick it up a notch, and I'd like to try it again without the chicken stock, as I think that there are enough subtleties of lighter flavors in here that it doesn't need that huge kick of umami in the bottom notes.

[ related topics: Food Bay Area California Culture Birds Economics ]

$SigOther1 just got ranted on from $SigOther1->Kid2 because $SigOther1 said things and mentioned $SigOther1->Kid2 and some past history involving $SigOther1->ExSpouse1 and $SigOther1->Kid1 as well as $SigOther1->Kid2 and past decisions made regarding the IRS and who got deductions for which kid for when.. and it's October (way past April 15th..) and and.. and..

So now $SigOther1 is now going to remove things on her blog.. when what I fear is that $SigOther1->ExSpouse1 is who reads $SigOther1's blog and got upset so still playing mind games with the chilluns, triggers $SigOther1->Kid2 to create havoc and ask to be removed from $SigOther1's blog.

Geez.. I though a lot of the fun of Blogging was you could "within slander and defemation restraints" say anything you wanted. Legally, probably. But blood and family peace is much more powerful than the 1st Amendment.

The real issue is $SigOther1->ExSpouse1 really needs to move on with his life, and $SigOther1->Kid2 needs to realize she's pretty incredible and be comfortable with who she is and not worry about what her Mom blogs about her. Her Mom loves her, and would never intentionally hurt her.

Me? I got called a "loose cannon" the other day by some yuppie dot.com wannabe Chatt Tech Council suits. I'm thinking it may be time to stop being so restrained personally and professionally.

My apologies to the Flutterbarians to whom this Jerry Springer Soap Opera means nothing.. and thank you Dan for a SoapBox that I know the affected parties monitor for my rants and ravings.... They are the ones that need to Download A Life.

[ related topics: Politics Games Weblogs Coyote Grits Free Speech History Sociology ]

Aaaargh.You know that old curse about interesting times? Yeah. Like that. Just when I thought a situation couldn't possibly get any more complex, it did. In spades. So we'll just let HGR1219 keep sending the updates for today:

• Everyone needs a Japanese Ant Image Database (no, this isn't some sort of wacky cosplay thing...).
• Real time bullshit detection for Microsoft Word & PowerPoint. I've got a valid license for MS Office, but I removed it from my XP machine because it kept complaining about stuff, so I can't test it. I can't imagine that they managed to screw it up for PowerPoint, though, that's pretty much an "if you're using it in the first place..." thing.
• PANEXA is a registered trademark of MERD Pharmeceutical Group.

[ related topics: Humor Photography Health Nature and environment HGR1219 ]

The Protothreads Library is a simple extremely lightweight non-preemptive threading API that draws from Duff's Device. Ya never know when you're going to want threads on an embedded processor.

[ related topics: Robotics Embedded Devices ]

This house is... how do I say this nicely? Not exactly air-tight. So last year we put a layer of plastic over the inside of the windows, and there was enough ventilation through the window frames that we didn't even have to worry about condensation. The Modern Plastics Defender-1 "In-jamb" Superlock Frame Systems looks like a cheap quick way to slap an interior storm window in a frame.

[ related topics: Microsoft Real Estate ]

In the Flying Plywood entry, Eric mentioned ordering an 8 position joystick from HAPP controls. If fidelity to the original console isn't an issue, Euchner-USA has some beefy industrial joysticks which look like they'd be useful if you were building the arcade/gaming console from hell. (Props to HGR1219 for the find!)

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Games HGR1219 ]

I was in the bulk section of the health food store, engaging in friendly banter with the Indian man buying a large quantity of the really good tea, and, justifying the fact that he was opening a large bag and just pouring this stuff in from the jar: "Well, you only live once." There was a short pause, after which he added "uhhh, some people say. I just undermined what's supposed to be my entire belief system, didn't I?"

[ related topics: Health Food Theater & Plays ]

It ain't the best journalism in the world, but How ATM fraud nearly brought down British banking is worth a quick glance through, especially if you've ever looked at a system's vulnerabilities and wondered what would happen if someone who really knew what was going on got loose in it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Journalism and Media Gambling ]

White House news and the 13 terrorism warnings:

We bring you these coincidences, reminding you, and ourselves here, that perhaps the simplest piece of wisdom in the world is called “the logical fallacy.” Just because Event “A” occurs, and then Event “B” occurs, that does not automatically mean that Event “A” caused Event “B.”

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events WTC/Pentagon attacks ]

Remember when the whole "satanic ritual sex abuse in preschools" craze was sweeping the nation? Yeah: McMartin Pre-Schooler: 'I Lied':

I remember them asking extremely uncomfortable questions about whether Ray touched me and about all the teachers and what they did—and I remember telling them nothing happened to me. I remember them almost giggling and laughing, saying, "Oh, we know these things happened to you. Why don't you just go ahead and tell us? Use these dolls if you're scared."

Anytime I would give them an answer that they didn't like, they would ask again and encourage me to give them the answer they were looking for. It was really obvious what they wanted. I know the types of language they used on me: things like I was smart, or I could help the other kids who were scared.

There was clearly some child abuse going on, though:

I think I got the satanic details by picturing our church. We went to American Martyrs, which was a huge Catholic church. Every Sunday we had to go, and Mass would last an hour, hour and a half. None of us wanted to go: It was kicking and screaming all the way there. Sitting, standing, sitting, standing. What I would do was picture the altar, pews and stained-glass windows, and if [investigators] said, "Describe an altar," I would describe the one in our church.

Worth reading the whole thing through to the end.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality California Culture ]