Flutterby™! From 2006-11-01 to 2006-11-30

I mentioned that yesterday morning I climbed Big Rock Ridge with Bill and Jim, and made a spirited descent. This morning I got on the bike and rode the Alpine Dam to Ridgecrest loop with Gary and Tim, and then went down to Tiburon to work with Eric. The good news is that my back wasn't that bad last night, and hasn't hurt at all today.

The bad news is that the fronts of my thighs have hurt like hell today. Such is the price of progress.

The images are grainy twilight shots from the deck at Eric's place, as I was packing up to head home.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Bay Area Bicycling ]

Study Dispels Some Sexual Behavior Myths:

"We did have some of our preconceptions dashed," she said, explaining they had expected to find the most promiscuous behavior in regions like Africa with the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases. That was not the case, as multiple partners were more commonly reported in industrialized countries where the incidence of such diseases was relatively low.

It looks like Kay Wellings has a bunch of interesting publications (oh for days and days to lounge around a half-decent university library). And The Lancet's sexual and reproductive health collection could also keep me reading for quite a while.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health Education ]

Several articles about an exhibit in the Oslo Natural History Museum about homosexuality in animals have shown up in the news of late (here's another), but this one has a really great last paragraph:

A Lutheran priest said he hoped the organisers would "burn in hell," and a Pentecostal priest lashed out at the exhibition, saying taxpayers' money used for it would have been better spent helping the animals correct "their perversions and deviances".

acelightning also copied the article to an LJ entry while linking to it.

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture moron Current Events ]

This Ideas in Food entry on Shola Olunloyo, a chef who does the "prepare dinner in your kitchen" thing was cool, and the resulting discussion mentioned food safety in the context of doing prep work in one kitchen and transferring it elsewhere made me go look up the US FDA/CFSAN Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point overview. Even more interesting reading.

[ related topics: Food Work, productivity and environment Community ]

Fascinating article on freedom and hypocrisy in Iran:

"I can afford yearly two or three months' vacation in Dubai, Europe or even America," my friend said. "Why should I bother to organize a protest against seizing our satellite dishes? We may be forfeiting our freedoms, as you say, but when the price of avoiding the authorities is so affordable, why would we risk everything to take on the regime? We have to wait until society itself is disillusioned, and the masses open their eyes."

I'm not quite sure how this ties together, but Something Positive wraps up a storyline that starts here with an apology, of sorts, to Christians. Worth reading.

[ related topics: Religion Privacy Civil Liberties ]

Courtesy of the Wonkette: The next step in political marketing.

[ related topics: Politics Marketing Propaganda ]

Men's testosterone levels declined in last 20 years. While it's pretty obvious that masculinity is in decline, I'm not sure that that's all bad. For instance, we can now drop the pretence that disco ever had any heterosexual component at all and point to Scissor Sisters. Kinda like Bee Gees in that "can't. help. it. must. dance." way, but less annoying.

Watch the video for I Don't Feel Like Dancing and tell me you're not up out of your seat.

[ related topics: Music Video ]

I don't know what all of this has broken, but I looked at upgrading to Apache 2 and decided that I didn't want to go down the path of more complexity and bizarreness. So I've switched over to lighttpd aka "lighty".

Things will be slower for a little while 'til I switch to FastCGI, but I now have maintainable config files that I understand, and the resources devoted to basic web serving have dropped dramatically.

[ related topics: Free Software Flutterby Meta Open Source ]

Wow. The link spammers discovered the Flutterby wiki a few days ago. I've deleted a boatload of stuff and disabled posting to it.

A new rule on any web services stuff: Any new content has to be scanned by humans, often. Yuck.

[ related topics: Web development ]

I think normally I'd let those of you interested in this sort of thing find it on your own, but various organizations have declared this "National Pornography Awareness Week", so I figure I should keep the awareness of pornography up for a few days: Violet Blue talks about various user-upload sites for home generated porn. I haven't actually gone to check out the various sites she mentions, I assume they're all pay, in which case we might want to toss in a few others, like Home Clips (I'm not a subscriber, but it's the same folks who run Voyeur Web).

And if your tastes run towards the prose, Be287m has done some interesting character studies that sometimes include sex, and approaches the archetype of the "sex worker" from a direction that's consistent with my observations of those who choose that line of work.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

I'm back to interested in foods and flavors again, and something got me searching on glutamates, and I did not know that there's an International Glutamate Information Service dedicated to telling you that MSG is okay and umami is good.

It's certainly not hard to convince me of that latter bit.

[ related topics: Food ]

I initially meant to put a little more explanation around yesterday's mention of Scissor Sisters, a little talking about how I haven't always been able to stand disco (and several other genres), and sometimes the contexts in which we experience a genre have a lot to do with appreciation of it.

That said, I've never "gotten" U2. I've thought the lyrics were pretentious and misinformed ("Early morning, April fourth..."), the music was repetitive and boring, and the activism of the band members had all of the traits of that ever so earnest high school sophomore. So when it's announced that in the face of Bono advocating that the Irish government give more to Africa, U2 is moving their publishing arm to the Netherlands in order to dodge taxes, all I can do is smile and say "you expected otherwise?"

[ related topics: Politics Music moron ]

Asha and I hiked up Sugarloaf Mountain today. We wanted a short hike with good views and this turned out to be excellent. There were lots of lenticular clouds in the sky and some snow left on the ground. We were treated to views of the plains to the east and the Rockies all around. There was also a glider floating around. The Boulder Municipal Airport is very active with gliders and I never thought about them hanging around up in the higher elevations. Via WikiPedia:

This is because the systems of atmospheric standing waves that cause "lennies" (as they are sometimes familiarly called) also involve large vertical air movements, and the precise location of the rising air mass is fairly easy to predict from the orientation of the clouds. "Wave lift" of this kind is often very smooth and strong, and enables gliders to soar to remarkable altitudes and great distances. The current gliding world records for both distance (over 3,000km) and altitude (14,938m) were set using such lift.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Aviation Boats ]

The Virus That Ate DHS, or how the "Zotob" virus and incompetence brought down the Department of Homeland Security's "US-VISIT", the agglomeration of databases that collects biometrics and other personal data on visitors to the United States. Do you feel safer?

[ related topics: virus moron Current Events Databases ]

Michael Bauer: Between Meals mentioned that the Nation's Restaurant News Consumer Trends reports that:

During the year that ended June 2006, consumers with annual household incomes of more than $75,000 spent $796 per capita at quick-service restaurants and $790 per capita at full-service restaurants.

The conclusion of the article is that high end consumers are now spending more at fast food joints than regular restaurants. At first you might think this is somewhat strange, but it turns out that the super high-end "El Bulli" restaurant in Spain serves a "Kellog's Paella":

El Bulli has been voted best restaurant in the world by Restaurant magazine, while Arthur Lubow, the food critic of The New York Times, hailed a meal there as a gastronomes once-before-you-die experience. Lubows favourite was Kelloggs Paella, made with Rice Krispies, shrimp heads and vanilla-scented potato mash.

So I think it's only a matter of time before we start seeing McDonald's branding on Michelin 3-star establishments.

[ related topics: Food Current Events Consumerism and advertising McDonald's ]

Being loved is something expressed and experienced in many small but significant ways, every day. Some things are a little more mentionable and sharable, and with all the talk about food, lately, I need to share what Nancy treated me to last night:

At the Back Inn Cafe, Bluff View Art District in Chattanooga, the First Annual Wild Game Dinner started with a Sparkling Shiraz which Nancy liked.

1st course: Grilled Honey Quail Skewer, Roasted Beef Tongue with Butterpepper Sauce, Wild Trout Sausage with Crayfish Sauce. Served with Falchini Vernaccia (wine).

The next course was Country Fried Ostrich with Fresh Persimmon, and a very good Frei Brothers Chardonnay. I really liked the taste of the Ostrich, frying it was great with the sauce it was in, but left me wanting to try Ostrich again, not deep fried.

Next, a wonderful Turtle Soup, au Sherry and Lotus Roots, Leeks and Red Potatoes. It was nothing like the Turtle Soup my GrandMother made, which was a heavier brown soup. This was light and tasty. The wine was a dry Chianti.

The Smoked Muscovy Duck Breast, with baby greens, julienne beets and fresh figs was easily the best duck I've ever had. It had a great flavor and texture. The Aresti Pinot Noir was good with it.

Finally, the main course (like we were starving..) Grilled Buffalo Tenderloin with creamy barley potatoes, mushrooms and a balsamic garlic sauce. I like the Buffalo, it was very lean, yet had a great taste and even cooked medium at the Chef's reccomendation, cut with a fork. The Chateau Greysac, Medoc was good.

Desert was awesome, a Pear Walnut Tart that was not overly sweetened or spiced, was a light complement to the cognac soaked black mission figs and wonderful cream sauce. The Jonesy Tawny Port was sweet and fruity, and Nancy really liked the taste. It's sweet and spicy like she is... :)

Neither Nancy or I are drinkers... so while we sampled the wine, there was a lot on the table when we were done, Other tables drank every drop. It was a wonderful dinner, a lot of food and drink, served well (great presentation and service), with anecdotes about the food and wine being shared at every course and the Chef receiving a round of applause on his joining us at the end.

Gotta burn some calories tomorrow... on a beautiful fall day it won't be hard to find a way.

[ related topics: Games Food Wines and Spirits Art & Culture Beer Chattanooga ]

Boulder has been wonderful so far... Comfortable summers, nice early snow, clear blue skies, great hiking... But now that the cold weather is really settling in we are finding our eyes itching and throats sore. We already knew that humidity is a problem around here. So Asha and I went out and bought a steam humidifier (not that exact model - but close) and a little hygrometer/thermometer. We brought them home and setup the humidifier on full-blast and turned on the t/h then left for dinner. We came back a little later and found that according to the t/h, the humidity dropped a couple percent. Eek! I did a little research and found out some interesting facts:

1. Hygrometers are not very accurate (usually about +/- 5%)
2. Mechanical (dial) hygrometers are fairly easy to calibrate
3. Digital hygrometers are completely inaccurate below 25%

Asha took the hygrometer into the bathroom while she took a shower. Afterwards, with the mirrors completely fogged, it read 65%. Within 30 minutes of the doors openning, it was back down to 35%. This leads me to believe that the humidity in our apartment is significantly below 25% and the hygrometer just isn't reading right. Maybe we need to go buy another humidifier!

[ related topics: Nature and environment Eric's Life Cool Technology ]

Damn, I hate to break up some good personal experience posts with a political one, but... The current meme racing through the mainstream media is that Republicans are using the phrase "San Francisco values" as sort of an epithet. In light of the recent discovery that evangelical Christianity leader Ted Haggard has been snorting meth and engaging in gay sex, I propose that we start using the phrase "Colorado Springs values".

[ related topics: Religion Drugs Politics Sexual Culture Bay Area moron Journalism and Media Marketing ]

Congrats to Dori & Tom, youngsters on the 'blogging scene, for seven years of posting.

As expected, our cat Spirit died sometime early Sunday morning. Defining a "good dog" is fairly easy, dogs have expected behavior patterns, dogs go for obedience and attention. Defining a "good cat" is less easy. Cats are, nominally, their own creatures. There are plenty of situations, as in barn cats for instance, where cats survive largely without the intervention of humans, part of the human ecosystem, but not subsistent.

Our cats are more dependent on us (I think), and as we saw Spirit dying, and worked on trying to make his last days as comfortable as possible (toward the end there we were offering at least five different types of food, from tuna to fresh chicken livers), a curious thing happened: I think I started to understand religion.

While I've enjoyed the peaceful feeling that religious ritual and ceremony can offer, I've always run up against the problem that at some core level, I don't believe. Not that at some points in my life I haven't tried, but not only have I been unable to see any evidence of that omnipotent omniscient personally interested deity, I've been unable to understand how others do.

Spirit was always an amazingly trusting cat. Trips to the vet were only a problem if he got car sick. We actually had to be very careful about pills around him because if we dropped a pill he'd try to eat it; giving him medicine was no problem.

As he neared the end, perhaps I was just projecting on to him, but Spirit kept looking to us for solutions. "No, this food isn't working for me", "I'm in pain", "I need to be warmer", "let me out", "let me in", "give me water". At some point in that I realized that, relative to the cat, I existed on a plane that was, no conceit intended, god-like. The topology of Spirit's world changed as I opened and closed doors, food magically appeared, when he climbed into the shower after the water left there when we got out, I could make the rain start and stop.

And yet I wasn't omniscient, I couldn't take away the pain, and I couldn't make him live forever. And I think somewhere in there I started to understand what people believe in when they believe in gods.

[ related topics: Religion Dan's Life Cats ]

Dave has been struggling with XML. Despite my occasional snide comments about XML I'm pretty facile with it, but recently I did some work on Yadis that involved lots of namespaces, and I realized that it's evolved to be a set of technologies in search of solutions. Yeah, there's lots of interesting stuff there, but it starts to descend into the ludicrous, and pretty soon I got to thinking "even if it's UTF-8, why aren't we doing this as "name: value" pairs separated by newlines?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Content Management Work, productivity and environment Guns Archival ]

As the November Surprise is sprung, the party of values has started using an automated calling system to illegally call voters. The twist is that the calls are posed as though from the opponents, and are deliberately being made at inopportune times, designed to be as annoying as possible.

[ related topics: Politics moron ]

I haven't been on a bike in years, unlike others here, but even I like this sharp design for a folding bike. Unfortunately, I suspect a lot of these "concepts" never make it to the dealer's floor. PS, what's the advantage of a hydraulic drive?

[ related topics: Graphic Design Bicycling ]

FCKeditor has recently released version 2.3.2, and I have spent several days customizing it for NextLMS. After doing many PHP, JavaScript and XML modifications for our purposes, I just want to say: Wow. I hope I can write Webapps like this someday: Flexible, Extensible, Customizable, Very Well Written and reasonably documented. It's an singularly impressive body of work by what seems to be mostly (not all) one person in many languages.

The most amazing part is, NK's willing to pony up for a major donation/license as a Thank-You...

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Work, productivity and environment ]

Popsicle Twins may have been the act that got The Gong Show kicked off of NBC, but can you imagine this lasting more than a second or two on national broadcast TV these days?

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Television ]

Bryan Caplan has a little essay pumping his forthcoming book, The Myth of the Rational Voter. Worth a read, here on election day.

[ related topics: Politics Books ]

While I'm thinking about mortality, does anyone out there know what happened to Mark Hershberger, of openweblogs.com and everybody.org? His sites weren't updated for a while, and now they're not responding...

PNRP (Peer Name Resolution Protocol) is one of those ideas that sounds simple and innocuous enough. It even sounds like it has 'secure names', obviously a buzzword compliant marketing term to sell value added services of 'secure names' outside the DNS/Domain hierarchy. Two things make it sound like an idea that only sounds good after a case of liquor and some good drugs.. You know: that point when concepts like 'Light bulbs are dark-suckers, not light emitters' are really really deep thoughts.

Multiple entities can publish the same peer-name

PNRP does not use a routing table, but rather a cache of PNRP entries. New cache entries are acquired as a side effect of ongoing traffic. The cache maintenance algorithm ensures that each node maintains adequate knowledge of the "cloud". It is designed to ensure that the time to resolve a request varies as the logarithm of the size of the cloud.

As I start imagining scenarios for stupidity, spoofing and malice, my head explodes.

[ related topics: Drugs Health Invention and Design Law Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]

Koo-Ki Sushi, candy that looks like sushi. Saved off here for the next time I need some inspiration when I'm playing with chocolate.

[ related topics: Chocolate ]

First HIV gene therapy test encouraging. Researchers have created a version of the HIV virus that's supposed to attack other HIV viruses, or at least be benign, and it appears to be working in some cases.

[ related topics: virus Bioinformatics Physiology ]

Flutterby is closing in on 9 years, and a lot has changed in that time. I like the fact that I now load up the page and see entries from other people, Flutterby really is becoming the site I want to read.

However, occasionally I'll get grumbles from people who want something a little more personal, more oriented around me. A few years ago, TC even bought me a domain for that. I recently decided it was time to built that site.

I played around with various bits of software, even considered enhancing the system that runs this site to manage it, but eventually realized that, for all that I could do things slightly better than any other system out there, I just didn't have the time to do it right now.

I really liked TWiki, but when I installed it and played with it, it was really slow. Since I'd switched to Lighty (away from Apache) I was no longer in module interdependency hell, and I finally bit the bullet and accepted PHP into my heart and installed MediaWiki. A few extensions I've found worthwhile:

• Hex2Bit/Calendar is a simple calendar extension that works rather nicely. It has some problems with cleaned-up URLs that I haven't resolved yet, but it'll work for now.
• gmap (if that site has trouble loading, the GISWiki source for gmap worked for me) is a Google Maps extension that actually works (with a little tweaking) with 1.8, and that (albeit slightly clumsily) does a good job of letting you add paths and points to maps. In fact, in trying to convince some of the Marin Cyclists folks that they need to upgrade their web page, I've tossed in a few sample maps of upcoming rides, like the Mt Vision Ride that I'll be leading this coming Saturday (we leave at 9:00AM sharp from the Fairfax post office) or the Bovine Bakery Run.
• I've installed the OpenID extension but haven't played with it much yet.
• And I've also put in the Group Based Access Control Extension for fine grained content control, but I haven't yet got enough content up there of any sort to care who reads it.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Bay Area Maps and Mapping Bicycling ]

What's it take to make a title popular in today's competitive market for free games? A physics engine and a chick with a rocket launcher: Kumoon.

(Click through for the joke, the physics engine is kinda cool, the game play is so-so.)

[ related topics: Games ]

mw2html: Python scripts to export a MediaWiki to a set of static pages. Unfortunately it can't do anything smart with the Hex2bit/Calendar next/previous buttons, and I can't really come up with a smart idea of what it should do.

[ related topics: Python ]

Spontaneous out-loud laughter: Mary "Arthur" Poppins: "Supertelevangelistic sex-and-drugs psychosis" (props to Brad at Must See HTTP:// for the find).

[ related topics: Religion Drugs Humor Sexual Culture ]

Guns N Roses cancels show when Maine State Fire Marshall's office representatives don't let them drink on stage with pyrotechnics:

McCausland said the band had wanted to drink beer, wine and Jagermeister while performing. A couple of hours after being told that would violate state law, Guns N' Roses canceled its concert, he said.

After the cancellation, a band spokesperson blamed fire marshals for "making it impossible for the band to perform their show to the usual high standards that their fans deserve."

[ related topics: Current Events Wines and Spirits Beer Pyrotechnics Guns Flowers ]

Had a good ride today, up Mount Vision, 65 miles, 14.7MPH, but a small (3) mismatched and relatively newbie group so there was very little pacelining or drafting. Wayne's ride was cut short when he sheared the two largest sprockets off his rear cluster on the Mount Vision climb. So it is in the vein of people who shear parts off their bikes in steep climbs that I point to: Russian Hill Roulette, a cute little film about riding up the 6 steepest hills in San Francisco.

[ related topics: Bay Area Bicycling ]

Next movie in the Academy Award Best Pictures was 1935's Mutiny on the Bounty. I think pretty much everyone knows the story so I won't give any spoilers. The acting is a step above everything seen thus far. The story was presented in a cohesive manner that really allowed Clark Gable to show Mr. Christian's internal turmoil. I do look forward to seeing an eventual transition into more subtle expressions. Most "acting" at this point is on stage and the actors play things up to make emotions stand out in a theater but haven't learned to keep it subtle for the more intimate movie screen.

[ related topics: Religion Photography Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Movies Theater & Plays ]

Okay MediaWiki gurus (I'm talkin' to you, Jay): How do I make the Main_Page process extensions? I can see the edits that include the extensions in the page history, but they don't seem to appear in the front page. They work everywhere else. In particular, I'm currently trying to use DPL2 to show a list of updated pages (it'd be nice if I could set that up as an Atom feed, but I'll settle for making people subscribe to the new pages list for now), but it just ain't happening like I want it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment ]

Now that the whole Bubble Web 2.0 thing is playing itself out, the question is: "What's next?". I think we can look to Microsoft for leadership in our naming problems. Nearly a decade ago, they leaped from Windows 3.1 to Windows For Workgroups (ie: 3.11) to Windows 95. So I'm thinking "Web 07" is next up ("Web 007", while equally correct, won't work because of the obvious legal issues). Three years later, with the change in the decade, we can have "Web DE" ("Decade Edition"), and thereafter it becomes a little fuzzier.

Because version numbers are so 2.0.

[ related topics: Web development Microsoft ]

An interesting story from Slate: The decline of the venerable "Bus Plunge Story" from the nation's newspapers. These tiny, one paragraph/two sentence stories would give the bare outline of some tragic carreen into a mountain abyss by a bus overloaded with hapless natives in some benighted country. They were used in those days before computerized typesetting as one inch fillers underneath too-short stories.

When I was a kid the Chicago papers used Porch Fall stories the same way. Underneath a regular report of some big fire you would find a micro-story like, "Stanley Gritis of the 400 block of N. Springfield broke his leg when he fell off his porch roof while painting on Tuesday. He was treated and released from St. Elizabeth's Hospital." There were maybe a dozen per day. The city papers jointy supported a news bureau which gather these reports from the fire and police departments and funnelled them back to the newsroom. Nobdy thought anything of them. I wonder what media convention of today will look as add to people 50 years hence?

[ related topics: Nostalgia Current Events Journalism and Media Typography Public Transportation ]

Well, I think its cool: A super-sized jet-powered Radio-controlled model C-17 built in the UK. With a 20 foot wingspan it can also fly low over your area and drop a paracute pallet with a little radio-controlled jeep and a pair of paratroopers. Maybe we could start flying these things over Afghanistan to frighten the Taliban!

[ related topics: Aviation ]

Apologies for the outage last night. Spammers trying to find exploits had filled up my logs so fast that the partition with the database on it ran out of space. Back to 40% used on that partition again.

If the Republicans want my vote in 2008 they can promise to classify net abusers as terrorists and expand the use of cruise missiles.

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta ]

Turning on a user interface for Evan Prodromou's OpenID for Media Wiki plug-in lacks one thing: On a case sensitive filesystem, you're looking for MonoBook.php.

[ related topics: User Interface Law Journalism and Media ]

Experimenting with putting the mundane personal updates in a different place, this is just a picture to hang a state of my world rambling this morning.

[ related topics: Photography ]

I've mostly been happy with Opera as my email client, once I adapted to it. But occasionally I'll yearn for something in emacs. mew is a mail reader that runs in emacs that looks interesting.

Here's one that maybe Mark V can answer, because of his foray into podcasting: I'm in the market for a small lightweight voice recorder. The specific application is that I'd like to be able to "take notes" while riding my bike. I guess "perfect" would be something that I could tag an external mic on to and tie to my brake hood, so that I could operate the start and stop features there (because at 25MPH in exposed wind, I'm guessing that the automatic "start recording when you hear noise" feature is worthless).

Anyone got suggestions? Or got one lying around that they bought with great intentions but want to sell used?

[ related topics: Cool Technology Bicycling ]

Since there has been a theme of "got recommendations for" posts on Flutterby, I'll throw mine in. I'm looking for a decent program (preferably freeware or close to it) that will do simple ER diagrams and other simple flowcharts (like B-trees). MySQL has a new tool called Workbench that can actually build tables from ER diagrams but it's still an early alpha (what irony - someone from MySQL just called me as I wrote this!). I downloaded a demo of SmartDraw, which looks like it would be a killer app for an academic who needs the occasional diagram to spice up a publication or presentation (you'd be surprised how often diagrams are shared among publications - with appropriate citations, of course). But $199 is a bit beyond my budget right now...

[ related topics: Open Source Nature and environment Invention and Design Software Engineering Databases ]

A Christian Science Monitor article on "Micro-CHP" systems (via Rebecca Blood). Looks like an interesting technology, it's a combined generator and heater that runs off of natural gas. Marathon Engine Systems has one such product.

Interesting partially because although it ties you to one fuel source, it's a good way to re-use all that waste heat that, at a normal natural gas generating station, would just be evaporated at the cooling towers, but also because it puts a house on a peak energy budget. A house with a reasonably efficient lighting system can run on 2kW (if your dryer and water heater are gas), but only if your toaster and refrigerator and microwave are smart enough to not try to fight with each other for resources...

(May your deities help you if you have a decked out gaming PC, though...)

Managing appliance energy use is something we're going to need to get the large gains in efficiency that will become desirable as energy costs increase, and any way that the demand for that gets pushed is good.

[ related topics: Cool Science Cool Technology Real Estate ]

QOTD: Shelley Powers on Second Life:

Every time I read a story associated with Second Life, I am moved to pity.

I keep getting bounce messages from spammers trying to send stuff to the mostly defunct idrama mailing list. Last time I sent an email to the list suggesting that it be shut down, someone asked me to write a note about why I no longer cared about computer mediated interactive drama. It's been a few years, I still haven't written that note, but I think that quote kind of sums it up.

[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama Sociology ]

Economist Milton Friedman, dead at 94.

[ related topics: Economics ]

While it's true that some people take Emacs way too seriously, like running Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel, the rest of us just use it as a full-featured tool. One of the cool features: TRAMP (transparent remote file access), being able to edit files on ssh/scp or ftp or rcp accessible remote systems as though they were local files.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Sports Cryptography ]

Percy's Big Gay Economic Development Plan:

Fact: 25% of billionaires are gay* (in whole or part).

Fact: 27% of hedge fund managers are gay (in whole or part).

Fact: 54% of adult gays are college grads (compared with 28% of the general population).

Fact: The average income of adult gays is $53,500 (compared with $32,000 for the general population).

With that kind of brain power and economic clout, shouldn't we be recruiting more gays to move here? Yes, we should!

Greensboro, NC could be the next big boom spot.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Education Economics ]

Apologies for the outages. I recently switched to PostgreSQL 8.1, and at some point in the middle of the night weird things are happening, and it's dying.

[ related topics: Databases ]

Your Linguistic Profile:

50% General American English

25% Yankee

10% Dixie

10% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

[ related topics: Language ]

You are what your grandmother ate:

Feeding mice an enriched diet during pregnancy silenced a gene for light fur in their pups. And even though these pups ate a standard, un-enriched diet, the gene remained less active in their subsequent offspring.

And Harold McGee has a weblog.

[ related topics: Food Bioinformatics ]

Today's bike ride was a loop up around the area known as "The Geysers" in northern Sonoma. Yes, there are geysers there, no, they're not accessible to the public. Did see a couple of geothermal power plants, though. I forgot my camera, so you'll have to take my word for it (unless you're Dori & Tom, then you live in the middle of it), but it's beautiful up there this time of year. The vineyards are all in different states, so looking down from the mountains there's a patchwork of reds, yellows and greens, and the cloud formations were spectacular (probably helped by the fact that I'm sure there's a general upwelling over the area, 'cause there's a lot of energy being released from the earth as steam).

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bicycling ]

The frenzy over Intellectual Property is not confined to Hollywood or giant media companies; it has now arrived in the musical theater. According to the Chicago Tribune, a recent unprofitable production of the musical play Urinetown has run into trouble. The promoters properly paid the composers and writers their fee for rights to the play. However, a lawyer representing the original director of the New York version claims that his client has a separate interest in the staging and choreography, which was allegedly stolen by the Chicago group. Oh, and somebody else owns the logo for the play. No papers have been filed yet, and since the Chicago production failed to make even a blip on the vibrant local performance scene they probably won't, but now producers at dinner theaters and regional venues are scared.

The article states that some production contracts forbid the restagers from making major changes to the show, like changing the gender of characters. Of course, the look and feel of certain spectacular shows is why people attend. Imagine Lion King without those giraffe-men, Les Mis without the turntable, or Miss Siagon without the helicopter. Or maybe we should imagine what could be created without those icons. Modern dress and radically reworked productions have kept Shakespeare vibrant for half a millenium; is such possible for Chorus Line?

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Writing Law Copyright/Trademark ]

Went to see Happy Feet last night. Much like "Snakes on a Plane", the high concept can pretty much narrow it down: if "tap dancing penguins" wasn't a draw, this movie wasn't for you.

Not a great movie, the first half of the story was real uneven, the second half had at least one bit preachy and abstract bit that was jarring in the face of, well, tap dancing penguins. And with the licensed "Elvis" and "Marilyn Monroe" properties, and all the pop music, I kept feeling like I was in product placement hell (part of what made the first half of the movie so uneven, I guess).

But perfectly watchable. And, you know, tap dancing penguins.

[ related topics: Music Movies ]

3 tons of cocaine found in submarine off the coast of Costa Rica. I don't know what the cost of getting cocaine into this country is, and I don't know what the cost of expendable people to run the mechanisms to do that is, but it sure seems like there must be enough money floating around to set up equivalents of the "DARPA Grand Challenge" for drug running.

Or maybe that's the way it is: Build an autonomous submarine that can get from Bogota to somewhere off the Carolina outer banks with a low sonar profile and some reasonable bottom following abilities and get a few million bucks?

[ related topics: Drugs Current Events Boats ]

Apropos the immigration discussion that sprung up under the "gay economics" entry, here's Philip Greenspun's discussion of Jeffrey Sachs's The End of Poverty:

If an African achieves the standards of a First World nurse, he or she can easily emigrate to Europe or the U.K. where such skills are in high demand. The emigre enjoys a much more comfortable lifestyle in the rich country, can make free voice calls to friends and family back in Africa, and can fly home in 8 hours on a discount airline. Educated and productive people are the biggest assets of most countries and, more so than ever, they can simply choose to walk away.

[ related topics: Sociology Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

I have, at various times, mocked The Cluetrain Manifesto, mostly because I thought it took too optimistic a view of the consumer. In the tail end of some talk about Yahoo Sr. VP Brad Garlinghouse's leaked memo and the value of Yahoo's various sub-brands, Doc mentioned The Hughtrain, an interesting little read about branding and value. I'm not sure I agree with it, and if I do agree with it I'm not sure that that's an optimistic stance, but it's worth a skimming.

[ related topics: New Economy Consumerism and advertising ]

Komrade Gonzales on fundamental freedoms and the rights of the state. What has made the United States legal system so different is that other nations grant rights to their citizens, here the citizens grant rights to the nation. Our current "leaders" think that's wrong.

And a little righteous anger here: I want every libertarian who voted Republican at the national level in 1999 or later because they thought in any way that the members of this administration or the party that supports it could possibly have been any less evil than the Democrats of the same era to go take a little time out and think about what you've done and how we can fix it.

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian Law Civil Liberties ]

In light of yesterday's link to Alberto Gonzales, back in the USSA, here's a heartwarming tale of justice: FBI helped frame four innocents in order to cultivate the two actual murderers as informants.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Archival ]

Charlene just mentioned the appointment of Eric Keroack as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs at the Health and Human Services Department. That means he's head of the Office of Family Planning. I had seen this a few days ago over on Elf Sternberg's LJ, but outrage overload made me pass it by. Despite my shrill tone of the past few days, y'all don't read this for the politicking. However, Charlene's encouragement made me write this.

Keroack is the "medical director" for a "pregnancy crisis counseling center". I can't find it right now, but a Washington Post article reports that:

"A Woman's Concern is persuaded that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness," the group's Web site says.

(Presumably the web site was changed once this guy got political) So... uh... yeah. The guy in charge of administering over a quarter of a billion bucks to implement Title X:

The Title X program is the only Federal program devoted solely to the provision of family planning and reproductive health care. The program is designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them with priority given to low-income persons.

Thinks that easy access to birth control is demeaning to women. He also believes that:

In his presentation at the 10th Annual Abstinence Leadership Conference in Kansas City earlier this month, Dr. Eric Keroack, MD, FACOG explained that oxytocin is released during positive social interaction, massage, hugs, trust encounters, and sexual intercourse. It promotes bonding by reducing fear and anxiety in social settings, increasing trust and trustworthiness, reducing stress and pain, and decreasing social aggression, he said.

Which he then thinks implies that that:

"People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual."

So we only have a fixed amount of good feelings, and if we have too many good feelings we'll use them all up. And here I thought that "abstinence makes the heart grow fonder" was a joke.

Which makes sense. This administration put that utter fuckwit Donald Rumsfeld, who raped and pillaged the military budget to enrich his cronies and whose only successful military maneuver was finally falling on his sword, in charge of "defense", and now they're putting people who believe that contraception is eeeeevil in charge of family planning.

At this point I don't know what we can do to slow these fuckers down in their wanton rampage through rational behavior, but, damn, do something, say something, call your congressweasels and see if you can get them to say something, lest the war on sanity escalate even further. I mean, hell, apparently even Rush Limbaugh is repudiating this administration.

Obligatory link to Planned Parenthood.

(You know how to use Google, but if you want more links here's a place to start.)

[ related topics: Religion Politics Sexual Culture Health moron Current Events ]

Looks like KPhotoAlbum implements a lot of the stuff I've wanted in a photo manager, with database support in progress.

[ related topics: Photography Databases ]

A few nights ago, Charlene and I watched Word Wars, a documentary about four players at the highest levels of tournament play Scrabble. It was entertaining to put faces and mannerisms to the names that we became acquainted when reading in Word Freak, but overall it has put a damper on our enjoyment of Scrabble. We've seen what's necessary to take the game to the next level and, much as spending hours to master that tricky combo move in a console video game, we're just not interested in going there.

[ related topics: Games Movies Scrabble Video ]

crasch alerted me to Monster Road, a documentary on the animation of Bruce Bickford.

[ related topics: Animation ]

Skis, parachutes, a helmet mounted camera, and The Eiger. Yow. From the maniacs at Acro-Base.

[ related topics: Photography Movies ]

Why do action movies these days suck? Because none of it has any bearing on reality any more. Action movies used to be cool: the five takes of the crocodile alligator stunt in Live and Let Die (rc3/oi).

[ related topics: Movies ]

It's not even Thanksgiving yet, and our local Easy Listening station is already on full holiday music duty. Maybe one antidote would be to listen to some of this stuff Gregg Miner runs a small museum of historic and just plain unusual musical instruments, and he has reimagined a bunch of old chestnuts for these exotic instruments, like "White Christmas" played on 23-string Knutsen Harp-Guitars (?) or the ukelele orchestra version of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town". Unfortunately, the sample page doesn't have my favorite, "Little Drummer Boy" done by sitar and tabla ensemble.

[ related topics: Music Art & Culture ]

So here's the Thanksgiving deal: I love y'all, but we're goin' incommunicado for 4 days. No 'puters. Minimal phone. Not going anywhere, but treating the world as though we had. If the server breaks, I won't know about it. Come Monday I'll have an email folder with at least 2,500 spam messages and who knows what else, but the interim won't involve pixels, code, filesystems or databases.

If you get caught doing anything I wouldn't get caught doing, name it after me. Catch ya on the flip-side.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Spam ]

I'm back. Had a great few days unplugged. Played word games 'til we were sick of 'em. Did a bunch of playing in the kitchen, including various kick-ass crackers and textures out of the dehydrator. On the basis of this entry over at Ideas in Food, played with air pressure a little bit, resulting in at least one inadvertent asparagus projectile. Assorted other lazing off.

Back to work and life and such today, so expect entries in a bit. And if you haven't seen the the video of the novel ways that Northern Europe is approaching the problem of speeding motorists (NSFW, unless you work in northern Europe) from Ziffle's comment in this entry, that seems totally in-line with the spirit of Flutterby.

[ related topics: Ziffle Erotic Video ]

Amazingly, over this last break we played no Scrabble. We did, however, play a lot of Boggle, which makes WEBoggle interesting, and the Sensible Erection entry that pointed me there has some strategy tips.

And we played the "oh so close to a good game, but..." "Parker Brothers Option", a word game from 1982 or so. Played with tiles that have a letter on either side, you get points for flipping letters in existing words if you can play off thatword. Unfortunately, this massively unbalances the game. We might try again, but if so we'll be playing a hellacious defensive game.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Scrabble ]

I need to get going on my work stuff this morning, but there appears to have been an interesting court decision in Pennsylvania about what constitutes "knowingly posessing" images of child pornography, specifically in relation to browser caches.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law Current Events ]

I am told (and vaguely remember) that when I was a child I heard some prayers read in Hebrew, and said "I don't know what those words mean, but I like the way they make me feel".

Bill recently went to the "Oracle World", and in the post-convention conversation mentioned that he had a lot of trouble figuring out what companies did. That he'd walk into a booth that had a gazillion buzzwords plastered on the outside, and after five minutes of conversation be able to boil down their product into "big ass hard drive array", and the sales guy would agree with him. So, he asked, why can't they just put "we sell big ass hard drive arrays" on the outside of the booth?

I think that buzzword and management speak has the same effect as prayers in Hebrew or Latin: It's not important what the words mean, in fact it's probably important that the listeners not be able to glean that much meaning from them, it's all about how they're delivered, because what matters to the audience is that those words evoke a feeling.

[ related topics: Nostalgia Databases ]

The Nagy Magical-Movable-Type Pixello-Dynamotronic Computational Engine^tm:

While charming in its reticence, the buzzing beige rectangle under a desk hardly seems a fitting aesthetic legacy for what is inarguably the most important invention of the last 100 years.

With a little creative anachronism, this project aims to retrocentrically create a false historical heritage for the modern computer.

via Mars

I've long thought that those who credited Reagan with the fall of the Soviet Union cannot be true believers in capitalism: the failed notions of communism had lead the USSR to being long past ready to collapse and that, in managing to bring that about peacefully, Gorbachev was the true hero of that era, actually accomplishing what Khruschev had started so many years before. But such speculation will only ever remain speculation; those in high places in the Politburo were the ultimate players in what an intensely political process had evolved

However, given that the citizens of the United States are increasingly willing to endow the state with powers, it doesn't hurt to see more of the perspectives of what lead up to those historic changes, and Spiegel Magazine: The Kremlin Minutes: Diary of a Collapsing Superpower is fascinating.

[ related topics: Politics History ]

We watched the 1936 Best Picture winner The Great Ziegfeld. An amazing movie - over three hours. Great acting and catchy music (I'm still humming some of the tunes). The producer collaborated with Ziegfeld's wife to turn out something not disparaging while creating a great movie. Rather ironic, though, that Ziegfeld's greatest hit was in the movies - the very force that seemed to facilitate his fall from grace. This is another tip-of-the-hat to Broadway stage performances but the acting is clearly more seasoned to the medium.

[ related topics: Music Movies Theater & Plays Marriage ]

I've been scouring the web in a lit-review that will ultimately become part of my PhD dissertation. It appears that SpringerLink has a good grip on the world of Conference Proceedings and publishes the "good stuff" in the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science. I just stumbled across the Proceedings of the Third International Conference for Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment, TIDSE 2006, in Darmstadt, Germany with paper titles like An Event-Driven, Stochastic, Undirected Narrative (EDSUN) Framework for Interactive Contents. Who'd have thought that Interactive Story Telling was so big...

[ related topics: Photography Comics Conferences ]

Let's celebrate December 5^th as Repeal Day, in honor of the repeal of the 18^th Amendment. May there be many more instances where we releap the restrictions of the bluenoses and busybodies who've imposed their moralities on us (via via Shelley).

[ related topics: History Law ]

There's a longer bit about nanny governments and economic trade-offs and regulation encouraging larger scale lower quality product, but NYTimes articles disappear so fast: Peter Hoffman talks about his inability to serve various cured meats at his New York restaurant.

[ related topics: Food moron Law New York Economics ]

Speaking of nanny governments, Wired has a good piece on the fall of home chemistry in the face of the overzealous CPSC and ATF, focusing on the legal tribulations of United Nuclear. (via crasch).

[ related topics: moron Law ]

14 more years to go in Dan and Todd's Bandwidth Bet, and I have to admit that I'm getting nervous: Online video eroding TV viewing in Britain.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Todd Gemmell broadband Television Video Dan and Todd's Bandwidth Bet ]

Via several sources: "Earlier Tuesday, Bush blamed the escalating bloodshed in Iraq on an al-Qaida plot to stoke cycles of sectarian revenge, and refused to debate whether the country has fallen into civil war."

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events ]

I have meant to put up a little piece on this last weekend's experimentation with food on the personal site, but haven't gotten to writing it. I want the writing of it to be clever, but I'm just not getting there. So you'll have to do with some bullet points:

• Dehydrators are cool, now that we've figured out how to work ours. We're still figuring out flavors and assorted starches and celluloses and fibers, but we're turning out neat crackers.
• 60PSI in a soda bottle, with just air, no reaction mass, is enough to make the thing disappear if you don't expect that it'll really go places. If you look far enough "down range", you'll find it.
• If you have something in a soda bottle, especially one pressurized to 100PSI, be damned sure that it's not near the mouth when you open the bottle. Whence the "asparagus cannons" title of this post.
• 100PSI is more than a soda bottle cap is engineered for.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Food ]

Yesterday I had to make a run into town around lunch time, and ended up hearing the start of Ariel Levy on Fresh Air. I was intrigued, she seemed to have an anti-porn feminist stance, but she was taking on the whole Girls Gone Wild/Maxim culture. I went looking for more on her oon the web, and found the Ariel Levy archive at New York Magazine, but the article I read, on older women having sex with boys, wasn't particularly enlightening.

This morning I listened to the whole interview, and it seemed like she's got the nub of some ideas that I'd like to see explored further, but neither her articles nor Terry Gross's questioning managed to give me an idea of whether I'd actually like her book. So anyone out there read enough Ariel Levy to give me an idea, or point me to something that'll convince me I need to order Female Chauvinist Pigs?

[ related topics: Books Sexual Culture Sociology ]

With the clearing of Sunday's storm, it's gotten crisp and cold out here. The skies have been blue, even early in the morning, but the low level fog has formed on the east sides of ridges, showing the Bay Area microclimate behavior pretty dramatically.

And now I'm almost anxious for the real rains to arrive, 'cause it'll get a little warmer:

[ related topics: Photography California Culture Archival ]

Over at Genehack, John linked to Charlie Stross on the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko:

The point is, someone with access to fresh Polonium 210 (read: less than a year old, hot from the reactor) decided to use it to bump off an enemy.

And the terrorism alert status hasn't risen a notch? Pull the other one.

I hate to ruin anyone's conspiracy theories, but here in the U.S. the stuff is moderately available and has assorted legitimate civilian uses. Yes, someone was sending a message with the way Litvinenko was killed (and as much as we'd like to call the USSR dead and gone and the cold war over, all governments are democracies and the Russian public has a way to go in their enlightenment), but, no, we shouldn't all be very very afraid because of the way it was done. There are lots of things standing in the way of using a poison like that on a larger scale, and if we panic over the tiny things then we'll kill more people in the stampede than with the actual incitements.

[ related topics: Current Events Conspiracy ]

If you haven't yet ordered your copy of The Dildo Diaries, a documentary on the illegality of some classes of sex toys in Texas, here's an 11 minute edit, the section starting at about 8:30 that makes me understand certain aspects of the national political messsituation and weep that these people are U.S. citizens with not just voting rights, but who have been elected to public office. Warren Chisum saying "If you were in my county, it could be hangin'" is chilling.

The Sensible Erection entry that linked to this also had an absolutely hilarious riff on the old Slinky commercials.

[ related topics: Politics Humor Sexual Culture Movies moron Civil Liberties Video ]

Idiocy of the moment: The Kaiser Permanente's "contact member services with questions" web page doesn't let you use question marks in the question field. Duh.

Hi there. I recently dropped a bunch of bills in the mailbox with two cents too little postage on them, and, foolishly, hadn't filled out my return address on each and every envelope. So here's what I want to do. I want to pay my bill online. Give you a credit card, a bank account, whatever.

I know you can do this, because you keep trying to get me to enroll in your automated online payment service, but here's the thing: I still want to get paper bills, I'm not yet ready to go entirely electronic, I just want to pay one bill online.

I know what the amount is, 'cause I wrote it in my checkbook. I can eventually figure out from the remaining bill stub what the identifying information of the account is (it's freakin' great that you tell me how to find it on the part that I mailed to you, how about telling me how to find it on the part I actually have?), I don't want to set up a whole bloody "relationship" with you guys, I don't want to go digging through obscure paperwork to enter ridiculous numbers while standing on my head and holding my left ear between my right pinky and index finger, I just want you to debit my bank account or credit card, and credit the account number that I give to you, is that so hard? Especially since I'm not the owner of one or two of those accounts (Charlene is), but I still want to pay them.

Furthermore, I have successfully bought and paid for products from a gazillion different online stores with this web browser. Is it so hard for you to make a site that works with it? In fact, your site probably would work with it, but you persist in checking to see if you can provide me with the "ultimate customer experience" and telling me I've got an unsupported browser.

Well, yeah, if you assholes weren't a monopoly this would be my ultimate customer experience with you, 'cause I'd freakin' cancel my account and leave!

And I've no bloody idea at all why you want to be running a Java applet in a page where I'm just trying to enter my billing information.

Finally, SBC/AT&T/whatever the hell y'all are calling yourselves these days: Do you think you could possibly get your stories straight about which database my phone number and account is in?

That is all.

[ related topics: Software Engineering moron Work, productivity and environment Databases ]

Must watch: Hans Rosling at TED: Myths about the developing world. Fantastic use of graphics, some good busting of preconceptions of what "developing world" means.

[ related topics: Politics Graphics Video Economics ]

John Robb called LA Times: Insurers learn to pinpoint risks -- and avoid them "The End of Risk Pooling".

I think the real problem is that as insurers learn how to better manage risk, there's incentive for the insurance company to mislead their customers on the nature of that risk. As risk pools become more focused, insurance companies make money because they assess risk better than not just their competitors, but their customers.

[ related topics: Current Events Earthquake Economics ]

After my query on shaving technologies a few months ago, I tried the latest N where N>=3 bladed wonders, a couple of different creams and gels, and eventually ended up back where I started: A good old style single blade (double edged) safety razor, a good badger's hair brush, and mug soap. Closest shave of all of the options I tried (although it takes just a little longer), and although the capital costs are a bit more, by far the cheapest per shave of any of the blade related options.

In fact, the ancient technologies have so impressed me that I've considered getting a good strop and a straight razor, but I think that'd be more time than I'm willing to commit to.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Two nipped from elsewhere:

Over at Pursed Lips, Debra pointed out that in this photocollage of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and what they carry, the only guy smiling is the one with a pair of his wife's panties in a bag. Here's the article that goes with it, and over at Eros Blog's (acknowledged) poach of the link they found a direct link to the photo. However, I think the statement of the picture is much more powerful in the context of the rest of the pictures.

And Violet Blue pointed out a Bluetooth enabled vibrator that responds to SMS messages. Since I like to be in a range where I can actually see and respond to my lover, and since SMS messages are so freakin' expensive and unreliable, I'm not an immediate fan, but if they offer up how to interface to it with another Bluetooth device...

And one I saw this morning that I've been pondering: Violet Blue rants about various things associated with being a "geek girl", and I can't do justice to it in a summary, but in the process she defends Xeni (of BoingBoing fame). I have to admit that while I don't question Violet Blue's hacker cred, though I might push back a little on "geek" 'cause I don't see her slinging much code, I've always seen Xeni as sort of a Jon Katz hanger-on to the scene, and this includes exposure to the "BoingBoing" magazine long before the net presence. Comments? Discussion? Someone willing to set me straight?

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Cool Technology Community ]