Flutterby™! From 2007-05-01 to 2007-05-31

Ooooh, this is interesting. Remember the anti-contraception wacko Eric Keroack getting appointed to lead the HHS Office of Population Affairs, and then resigning because his practice was getting investigated for Medicaid fraud? Something in Violet Blue's recent missive, abstinence does *not* make the heart grow fonder, triggered a few neurons.

She pointed to this Boston Globe article on Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick foregoing federally funded abstinence propaganda in the schools which noted that "Healthy Futures", "...a subsidiary of a Christian, anti abortion group called A Woman's Concern...", had gotten $800k of this money.

And, what do you know, "A Woman's Concern" is Eric Keroack's group.

Anyone who believes that bullshit that Republicans are fiscally conservative has no more credibility.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Politics Sexual Culture Health Current Events ]

Frugal Fru-Gal Lou should be working on her Chemistry finals... Instead she's becoming the Queen of free stuff and discounts. Money made on the site is sending her to school, as is the money saved. But the interesting part is how Lou reconciles the frugal world with her personal ethos:

....free Diet 7UP taste test challenge kit. If you don't want to bother since soda pop isn't good for you anyway, read: it will taste gross.

And:

...are giving away free copies of An Inconvenient Truth on DVD by Al Gore. Just don't sell it on ebay, jerk.

No, you can't even give them away, let alone sell them on eBay. Oh, wait.. they ARE for sale on eBay.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics Work, productivity and environment Currency ]

I have, of late, been wondering where the sex has gone on Flutterby. I used to use "sex, drugs and technology" as a tag line, but it seems like we've lost both the sex and drugs. A symptom of getting old? Perhaps. However, this morning I ran across two anti-porn screeds on Medley, and both of them bothered me. I don't know that I have time today to take them both apart in the depth that they deserve, but I want them both here as a reminder of why I'm pro-pornography, and in the hopes that I can come back to them later:

Reader actually asks spinster aunt’s opinion (on pornography) melds elements of your classic "women are oppressed and need to be free to make their own choices" truism with "women should be free to make my choices and no others" anger, in the process going beyond "men owe us equality" to "men owe us equality except for the privileges of marriage", with the additional wonderfully unsubstantiatable "pornography’s negative philosophic value" (because the repeated disproof of the "pornography causes violence" canard has made that one unsupportable).

“The average guy who can compartmentalize, disconnect, and then come back”: a response to Ethan on porn uses a great straw-man that someone else has set up (in fact, a whacked out straw man), and then comes back to the "one size fits all I know what's best for your relationship":

Porn says that happiness is found by having the same experience over and over again with lots of different women; true eros says that happiness is found by having different experiences over and over again with the same person.

In both cases the arguments are disturbingly Procrustean, especially when they're allegedly founded on the notion that people, women especially, should be free to make their own choices rather than being stuffed into the cultural roles that have been assigned to them. Instead what we find is that standard revolutionary cry that people should be crammed into other uncomfortable roles, as if those are the only alternatives to the current ones.

So I'll pop back over to Violet Blue and Debra Hyde for a bit.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Political Correctness Sociology Marriage ]

Since May is National Masturbation Month, and because I'm interested in exploring what's changed in the culture around me, I'm gonna try to find extra sex related links for a while.

I had just run across crasch's link list today which included a link to a note on how overconfidence makes nurses better at primary care visits than doctors (and they're cheaper, to boot), and then came across Violet Blue's video demonstration for a correspondent whose OBGYN was giving her very bad advice on why oil based lubes are bad for latex.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health Sociology Video Personal Lubricant ]

Interesting. Just in case you've heard about what's going on at, say, Digg today and were curious, I believe that it's:

09 S9 11 02 9Q 74 R3 5O Q8 41 56 P5 63 56 88 P0 rot13

If not, well, then it's just a bunch of random hex digits and there should be no legal implications at all in posting it.

[Edit: Changed so that the automated searchers will have a harder time of it]

[ related topics: moron Law ]

Violet Blue covers the story about Earl Adams suing the Bentonville Arkansas library over carrying The Whole Lesbian Sex Book by interviewing author Felice Newman:

VB: According to Adams, his two sons, ages 14 and 16, were "greatly disturbed" by their discovery and apparently underwent "many sleepless nights" as a result. Do you want to comment on these statements?

FN: I imagine they went through a change of bed linens as well. Do you think the court will award them damages for a nice set of military-themed boys' bedsheets from Wal-Mart?

[ related topics: Books Sexual Culture moron Law ]

National Masturbation Month continues here at Flutterby: Over on the border between San Rafael and San Anselmo there's a cafe that was a branch of the Dipsea Cafe, which had a great menu that the kitchen could never quite deliver on (kind of the opposite of Marvin's up in Novato), then it became something like "Flying Pig Barbecue" (that, curiously, advertised "same menu, same owners"), and now it's "Café Gratitude", apparently one of several raw food restaurants of that name, the gimmick being that everything on the menu is named such that an order involves saying all sorts of affirmations. As some reviewers have described it:

Yeah, it's vegan, it's raw, it's fucking cheesy that you have to say shit like, "i am eternally blessed with happiness and vibrancy and the richness of my cup overfloweth with bounty." But i say, go with it.

Meh, not necessarily enough to get me in there, but over in Good Vibrations Magazine, Judah Pollack runs with the concept:

For entrees one could order the I Am Waiting, the I Am Touched, or the I Never Thought You'd Ask.

[ related topics: Good Vibrations Erotic Sexual Culture Food Bay Area San Anselmo ]

Best. Venn Diagram. Ever. (via Borklog).

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Spent some time yesterday evening poking around looking for touch screens for a project, and ran across the Shenzhen Top Touch Electronics Company - Comparative for all kinds of touch screen, which reports 4 levels of pricing for touch screen types: "Cheap", "Middle", "Expensive" and "Expensiver". Perhaps the Deciderer in Chief has just been practicing his globalization skills? It also has warranty suggestions for different touch screen technologies, from "2 Year / Time" to "Avoid".

[ related topics: Embedded Devices ]

Light reading: Just for giggles, I've been reading through some of the USB docs. You've gotta appreciate any specification that lists as one of its motivations "Connection of the PC to the telephone".

Fox News reports on an Australian study that suggests that bondage may make men happier:

They were no more likely to have suffered sexual difficulties, sexual abuse or coercion or anxiety than other Australians.

In fact, says Dr. Richters, men into BDSM scored significantly better on a scale of psychological wellbeing than other men.

Yeah, okay, consider the source, but... From an entry and comment thread over at the behind Kink.com weblog.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Current Events ]

Via Slashdot: India has decided to avoid Nick Negroponte's famous $100 laptop computer. Instead they are working on an entirely home-built $10.00(US) laptop! No detailed specs yet, but they claim to have gotten the price down to $47.00 already.

The Slashdot crowd is skeptical, and so am I; it doesn't seem likely that they could get a meaningful machine for that price, even if they used MS-DOS and punch-card input. It will be interesting to see if this is real, or just a newly attentuated form of vaporware (areogelware?)

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Work, productivity and environment Cool Technology ]

The anti-porn rants thread is going in some interesting directions, and I linked to one of these articles there.

In linking to this article about the gory torture of women as mainstream entertainment, Lyn said "This is nauseating. Men who don't hate women should speak up against this shit."

And... well... the problem is where do you start? I'll start at How Not To Look Fat In Shoes, as I think that's a far more insidious form of torture and degradation in the mainstream media.

It's easy to divert attention on to the grotesque, but the real problems are the things that don't shock us.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Movies Sociology Journalism and Media Shoes ]

How is it that 12 year olds manage to figure out technologies that adults, accomplished and respected in their fields, need keystroke by keystroke hand-holding to make work. It's a voice chat system developed so that pre-teens could scream obscenities at each other, how hard can it be?

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

All About My Vagina, including a 'zine that's had A Food Issue (Don't miss the Maxi Pad Biscuits with Blue Test Syrup) and the Arts and Crafts issue with instructions on making your own Lucky Vulva Coin Purse.

And Reframing the conversation from sex as a commodity to sex as a performance, via All About My Vagina: Framing and defining sexuality.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Food ]

"A laptop in every school!" "One laptop per child!": Total hoohey. The New York Times on the laptops in schools boondoggle:

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

[ related topics: Children and growing up Education New York ]

Zenni Optical and other cheap eyeglass places online are a past topic. I just got my 3 pair of glasses in the mail in under their 2 weeks, 1 high style titanium pair for $44.90, 2 pair of $8.00 glasses (reading/screen glasses in my prescription) for a total bill w/shipping of $65.85. While the $8.00 pairs frames are cheap plastic, the lenses, prescription matching and finishing on all of them are as good or better than most glasses I have had, and paid a -lot- more for. Nancy pegged my pupillary distance at 66mm using a machinists micrometer: line the points up on the pupils, read measurement. Works for me and I'll do it again.

[ related topics: History Archival ]

Last night we headed over to Cafe Amsterdam to listen to The Green Room, doing something like... well.. maybe funk/hip-hop lounge music? Enjoyed it, not an earthshaking experience, but a bunch of teenagers who are decent with their instruments.

But on the way there and the way back we saw runners from The Relay, 199 miles, Calistoga through Santa Cruz, but, damn, running at night through the San Geronimo Valley and down White's Hill... not my cup o'.

[ related topics: Music Sports ]

Over in the Compact Flourescent Gender Gap thread, Ziffle took me to task for the phrase ""long-time climate change denier and pusher of assorted other junk science."

In thinking about this I've realized a couple of things. My impression of the "climate change deniers" (and part of what's led me to this post is that I know that that's far too general a term) is that most of "them" tend to dabble in Creation Science on the side, and that every time I see a press release from the "everything is fine, stay the course" crowd, I shortly thereafter see a press release from the people they quoted to make their case saying "that was out of context and not what we meant at all".

On the other side, although "scientific concensus" seems pretty clear, I also know that the majority of people believe in political, social and religious structures that I think are completely whacked out and loony. So just because everybody believes it is no reason to go repeating it.

Then when I went looking for information, what I found was either deep papers that require a lot of background (which is fine, but I want a good overview), or hours of PowerPoint presentations, which generally means "I'm afraid to offer up my ideas for real review, so let me give it to you in movie form so that you'll apply the same critical analysis skills to my data that you would to Spiderman 3" (The aptly named "JunkScience.com with its wonderful compendium of straw men and numbers out of context is a great source for such silliness).

So, I'm looking for three things:

1. Information on the credibility of climate models. What are the major climate models out there today, what inputs they take, what outputs they give, and what historical data they've been run on.
2. How data is acquired for each of those models, and how the different acquisition methods overlap with historical acquisition methods (ie: If you're trying to match up 65 million years of ice core samples with two thousand years of tree ring data, what makes that comparison reasonable?).
3. [edit added after Ziffle pointed out the incongruity above] uh... ultimate truth, or something.

I'll instantly filter out any source which says that human behavior has no impact on climate change, because that's obviously hoohey, but I am interested in different models of how much impact humans have had, and in how the various data sources that support such models were obtained.

[ related topics: Ziffle Religion Politics Nature and environment ]

This one's for Warkitty: A series of pictures showing the birth of a parrot through early plumage.

[ related topics: Photography Birds ]

I've got a lot on my plate, and I was wondering what I was going to do to keep the "National Masturbation Month" theme going, when Lyn linked to Should Girls Gone Wild get older?, a response to Garance Franke-Ruta's modest proposal to raise the age of consent for appearing in erotic images from 18 to 21.

But once again we need to look to where the damage is really coming from. Is the long-term damage coming from appearing in these videos, or is it coming from the cultural response to the act? If so, is trying to further stigmatize female sexual expression going to do more damage, or less?

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology ]

just to say "High!"

[ related topics: Photography Chattanooga ]

Yesterday I linked to some folks who stopped just short of suggesting a burqa to protect women, today an article in The Tribune, from Chandigarh, India, about the sorts of harrasment an American woman experiences there. This is why further restrictions on women's behavior under the guise of protecting them is a bad idea.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Those of us who live out in the boonies are often interested in alternatives for net access. And I'm interested in net access as a utility that may need to be rationed the way that smarter appliances might ration electricity use in a house with limited peak availability. HughesNet sucks, part 8 looks at some of the issues and options for Canadians, but those of you who haven't yet bought homes up there in preparation for when the Alberta plains will have the ideal climate may find something useful too.

[ related topics: Current Events Net Culture Real Estate ]

I'm not gonna mention any names, but making a build system that, in cross-compilation circumstances, offers positive reinforcement that it's using the compiler and generating files in the right places, would seem like a priority for a set of fairly low level language tools.

Rick Christopherson has finished his expanding round ("Jupe") table.

[ related topics: Furniture Woodworking ]

A little screen cap from the current SFGate.com front page:

Yes, I do find it interesting that someone was found in the bay, shouting for help, far enough out that the Larkspur Ferry was a reasonable rescue vesssel. Is it news? Don't know yet, depends on the circumstances surrounding how she got there. Is it news that she was naked? See previous sentence. Is pairing "Naked Swimmer Rescued By Ferry" with "Photos" good journalism?

Uhh... bet it gets clickthroughs, but...

[ related topics: Photography Nudity Current Events Journalism and Media Public Transportation ]

If you haven't seen this presentation of The Machine is Us/ing Us (Web 2.0 in under 5 minutes) it's worth a watch.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies ]

• The MediaWiki batch upload tool is maintenance/importImages.php.
• I make a mean salsa, but I've never managed to reduce it to repeatable, so I'm looking for salsa recipes that look close so that I can document 'em. One such salsa recipe.
• Shape Lock and Utile Plast are two low-temperature (circa 160°F) high density plastics.

[ related topics: Web development Food Cool Technology Fabrication ]

Short on the heels of the news that marijuana can exacerbate symptoms in pyschotic people, we find that cannabis chemical curbs psychotic symptoms, study finds.

... "One possibility is that there are good guys and bad guys within cannabis," said Markus Leweke, of the University of Cologne. He and his team compared the effects of CBD and a leading anti-psychotic drug, Amisulpride, on 42 patients with schizophrenia. After four weeks the symptoms of both groups had improved, but those treated with CBD suffered fewer side-effects.

[ related topics: Drugs Current Events ]

Violet Blue says "the cutest safer sex ad evah!" of My Boy Lollipop (alt), but also warns:

One thing -- don't use whipped cream with condoms as depicted in one of the scenes, the oil will pop the latex!

Searching around, this apparently comes from the French organization AIDeS, and it's not the first time they've done cute commercials. Unfortunately, their pages don't have downloadable video, but from their page on "Sugar Baby Love" gives stills which make me think that this and this and this are all the gay version, and this one's a het version to "Baby, Baby" (alt).

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Technology and Culture Movies Journalism and Media Television Video ]

Chicago city alderman finds technical excuse to dump offensive billboard. The offensive message? "Life's short. Get a divorce.", advertising the legal services of Corri Fetman and Kelly Garland of the firm Chicago Women At Law.

[ related topics: Political Correctness Law Consumerism and advertising Marriage ]

This one's for Larry, because at one point he was interested in good knives, a fascinating article on Damascus steel: The Key Role of Impurities in Ancient Damascus Steel Blades (via Sensible Erection).

[ related topics: Cool Science Machinery Cool Technology ]

I was whining about the silliness of Boost's compilation system, but it turns out I can't use it 'cause the platform doesn't yet support C++ exceptions. Which means no automatic memory management. Not a huge deal, but I'd had my hopes up.

And wow, do auto_ptrs have some really interesting failure modes or what?

[ related topics: Software Engineering C++ ]

Silly question for you embedded developers out there? Anyone know of a DOS/FAT filesystem library that reads and writes and is free for redistribution (not GPL)? I see a number of commercial products, which are an option, and free source for reading, but everything that allows writing is either for pay, or bundled in to the rest of an OS (like Linux).

[ related topics: Free Software Embedded Devices ]

I don't for a moment want to downplay the risks to American troops, especially in light of the alleged attacks being planned in New Jersey, but I hope that Bryant will forgive me quoting an entry he made, in its entirety:

130 homemade hand grenades, a grenade launcher, another 70 hand grenades rigged to be fired from a rifle, a machine gun, a short-barrel shotgun and 2,500 rounds of ammunition.

Muslim radicals planning an attack on an army base? Nah. Five militia members in Alabama plotting to kill a bunch of Mexicans.

Oddly, this does not get as much press as the Muslims. Some domestic terrorism is just more interesting, I guess.

[ related topics: Current Events Guns ]

In the "anti-porn rants" entry I've been having a back-and-forth with the proprietor of NoPornNorthampton. One of my problems with the site and the attitudes espoused therein is that there's a lot of "I believe this person because they back up my prejudice", without dunning the claims.

Kind of like the infamous Mark Klaas lies of "50,000 children abducted annually by strangers", and much like that lie, these continue to propagate without any basis in reality, simply because they substantiate the myths which underly the current social structures. As James Watt is alleged to have said, "A lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on".

One of the entries there is this reprinting of a letter by Robin Morgan claiming that pornography causes less remorse in rapist. All anecdotal, but I went out looking for rape statistics.

The first two pages I found were the US DOJ Rape Trends page and the Australian Institute of Criminology Trends in Recorded Sexual Assault page. My first reaction was "whoah, theirs is going up while ours is going down", but then I re-normalized the graph, and realized that ours is just approaching their levels, and has been dropping rather dramatically (and, for once, I'm not going to claim causation between lots of cheap net porn and the drop-off in assaults, but note the correlation).

The Australian numbers are going up, although that page says:

This increase does not necessarily reflect an increase in the prevalence of sexual assault, but is likely to be influenced by an increase in reporting incidents to police.

And then goes on to state that "Victimisation surveys ... suggest that between 12 and 20 per cent of sexual assaults against women are reported to police", so that also tells us nothing about how the data between the two are related, I'd have to dig into the USDOJ numbers more deeply to figure out if there's any attempt to normalize those numbers.

But what I also found interesting was that:

In 2003, the last year for which ABS data are available, 82 per cent of recorded sexual assault victims were female.

If we can extrapolate from these numbers (yeah, that's a huge "if", and there's another big "if" in here for reporting rates), that means that roughly the same number of male adults are the victims of sexual assault as women are sexually assaulted by non-acquaintances.

Huh. I have to think about that for a bit...

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Shoes ]

Giggle: Violet Blue visits a tranny bar called "Divas". It's been awhile since we've been out to hit a drag show, but I could see doin' with an evening of hootin' and hollerin'.

[ related topics: Humor Erotic Sexual Culture ]

A few weeks ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry's initiative to make the new HPV vaccine mandatory was shot down by his Republical legislature, and many people were up in arms about Republicans being pro cancer.

I'm sympathetic, I know that there has been much opposition to this product because it might give women more sexual freedom, but I'm also wary of new medical technologies. Especially those involving mandatory vaccinations. So I wasn't terribly surprised to see that a group of UCSF doctors warn against the wide use of cervical cancer vaccine:

"At this stage, vaccination can still be considered experimental," said Dr. Karen McCune, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UCSF, who co-authored the editorial. "To be discussing mandatory vaccination when the main clinical trials are still ongoing seems extremely premature. We're feeling like the enthusiasm is driving policy rather than data."

[ related topics: Privacy Sexual Culture Health Civil Liberties ]

Just to counter-balance that note against mandatory HPV vaccination, the New England Journal of Medicine reports on a study that links HPV to throat cancer, and oral sex is a risk factor here.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health ]

It's another event at the San Geronimo Valley Community Center: The Wavy Gravy Summer of Love Revival, on Saturday, June 2^nd2007, 4-9 PM. Art opening with original works by Wavy Gravy, Jerry Garcia, Dave Sheridan, Stanely Mouse, and MOT. Live Music from the Revival All Stars, with members of Zero, the Jerry Garcia Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and other acts you've heard of.

Partial proceeds to support Camp Winnarainbow.

C'mon out and party like it's 1969! Except it ends at 9PM rather than going for 3 days, and it'll be June in Marin, so it'll be pleasant, rather than wet and soggy... And Jerry's dead, but everyone else can still groove.

[ related topics: Music Bay Area Art & Culture Community ]

Tee hee hee: Over at Real Adult Sex, Figleaf addresses issues of male privilege in the Kathy Sierra, and offers up one more example of male privilege that I haven't seen addressed elsewhere:

The real reason guys don't fucking hijack comment threads every time men venture an opinion (and sometimes even when they don't) the way they do to women is that men can do something women can't. Something the various trolls, gnats, and serial murderers that afflict women just really don't want to deal with. See, the second we want to hear crickets from those kind of guys is we can always post photos of our pee-pees, as I have below the fold.

Hmmm... If we end up with a trolling problem here I may just have to consider that...

If that hasn't convinced you that there's bunches worth reading over there, here's guest poster Kochanie following up on that example of male privilege, and then here's a great post on how language can excuse violence which links to I Blame The Patriarchy on that mob of Yezidi Kurds who killed that 17 year old woman with stones.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Net Culture ]

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: Solid freeform fabrication: DIY, on the cheap, and made of pure sugar, a 3d printer that works by carmelizing sugar with a heat gun.

[ related topics: Cool Technology Fabrication ]

The Masturbation Month of May continues: Mastubation, Bonding and The Threat To Society:

Clearly there's context here to show a connection between the fears of individuality and the individual's duty to carry out his contract with his nation and the fabrication of masturbation as threat. Masturbation's threat to individual integrity is larger than the fear of the moral decline of the nation; it's that in pleasing himself the individual will not care for his state.

Fight the power! Stolen from Sensible Erection.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Ethics Sociology ]

Okay, I would have to dig deeper into Bill Richardson before I could actually vote for him (although he seems to have a reasonable if politically delicate stance on abortion), but I like Bill Richardson's TV ads (Thanks, Bill P.!).

[ related topics: Politics Humor Television ]

The Bayeux Tapestry, animated. Tres cool.

[ related topics: Animation Archival ]

A couple of you may have noticed issues with UTF-8 versus ISO-8859-1 character set issues since the move to the new server. I just went into the code to see if I could hack around this, and discovered that I should be dealing with them already.

Anyone know how the submitted form's character set should be sent to CGI.pm?

[ related topics: Web development ]

In Praise of Sardines: I Cook Like A Girl reminds me of an exchange I had with Charlene one evening. I was in the kitchen, slapping something together, and asked what she'd like with her... I forget what it was, it may have been polenta, or it may have been collards or some sort of greens, and she asked if I had ever just cooked an ingredient and served it, or if I always had to fuss over it.

Really. I have. I think. I'm sure that at some point I've just steamed greens without tossing garlic or currants or something else in with them...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Food ]

We linked to the first Doctor Doctor video, of imploding a 55 gallon drum with a little bit of water. Now the duo have upped the anté: Launching a 5 gallon Alhambra bottle with hydrogen generated from electrolysis. Diane points out:

Note that it doesn't touch down audibly until the credits are rolling. :-)

[ related topics: Humor Cool Science Video ]

One of the reasons I'm pro-pornography is that I look at some of the figures lined up against it and think "how can anything they're opposing be bad?" Susie Bright linked to a great example of one such, a YouTube video of Part 1 of the 1965 propaganda film "Perversion for Profit" (here's the Internet Archive version). Funded by that right upstanding citizen Charles Keating, who later was shown to have stolen huge amounts in the 1980s Savings and Loan scandal, it's a testament to the moral cancer that ripped through this country in the 1950s and early '60s (and '80s and aughts, for that matter), all of those slimeballs who claimed to be Americans but trampled any notion of freedom and liberty with their narrow minded hatred.

In her entry which linked to the video, Susie also recounts her run-in with the narrator:

He tried to shut down my high school underground newspaper, in 1974, because we ran a very dry article on birth methods control - trés Our-Bodies-Ourselves- with a diagram that he told his TV audience was "the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life." It was a cross-section drawing of women's genitalia!

But it is interesting to listen to the rhetoric and look for echoes of the unsubstantiated claims in the modern-day moralists.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Privacy Sexual Culture Movies Ethics History Journalism and Media Civil Liberties Net Culture ]

Heather Jansch Bronze and Driftwood Sculpture.

Interesting theory on pornography: Why Hardcore is Better Than Softcore: Object versus Commodity (via Elf's comments).

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Dang, for a theme that's allegedly inspired by Masturbation Month (I've dropped the "National" because everyone else has, why limit ourselves?) we're sure end up doing a lot of theorizing. But then I'm the sort of person who would end up with the text pages in a Playboy stuck together (or at least would have back in the days when they were also a pretty darned good general magazine, a time that I think is gone). But various threads have me revisiting some old notions, and it's good to exercise those neurons.

I mentioned some of the guilt issues in rape that I've encountered in the discussion with Eric under "without the veil", and in the "rape statistics" thread, NoPornNorthampton linked to an entry in which he quoted extensively from the "Family Facts" website, part of the text included:

In 1995, the Journal of Communication reported on a meta-analysis of 24 different studies. Researchers found that "A relationship between pornography consumption and believing rape myths exists...."

Now there are an awful lot of rape myths, but I believe that one of the most damaging rape myths we can possibly hold is the notion that power struggle is not a part of sexual allure or eroticism. One of the notions that I recounted in the "without the veil" thread was that the cultural reaction to rape is sometimes as damaging to the victim as the rape itself, and one of the issues here is that because we in the culture haven't (until mainstream BDSM came along, and then only those of us out on the fringe) had the opportunity to talk about consent, and to allow that fantasies, even realized ones, can have some pretty nitpicking qualifications, the existence of a rape fantasy is assumed to be the desire to be raped.

So many women, having failed to repress some submissive fantasies, feel guilt over having been raped, because our culture told them that fantasy wasn't okay, that if they'd imagined it, then they deserved it.

That is why I scream so loudly when people try to conflate the fantasy of pornography with the harsh reality of the crimes in the real world.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology ]

After many years as a largely theoretical construct, Quantam Mechanics at last produces a marketable product: The Harmony Chip, which fixes your aches and pains and even makes your car run better. It should fill in the treatment gaps left by that other estimable product, Tachyonized Water.

[ related topics: Bioinformatics Automobiles Baloney ]

Wow. One of the tenets of my personal philosophy is that fraud is coercion is the use of force, that if you obtain something through lies it's somewhere along the same continuum as taking something at gunpoint. Apparently, Massachussets law disagrees: Court rules sex through use of fraud is not rape:

The Supreme Judicial Court unanimously ruled that a judge should have dismissed the rape charge against Alvin Suliveres, 44, of Westfield, because Massachusetts law has for centuries defined rape as sexual intercourse by force and against one's will, and that it is not rape when consent is obtained through fraud.

Hopefully Massachussetts legislators will rectify this.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law Current Events Philosophy ]

Why is consent so hard to pin down? Some of the Pope's recent remarks about South America might help give us some clues:

Benedict also defended the church's campaign centuries ago to Christianize indigenous people, saying Latin American Indians had been "silently longing" to become Christians when Spanish and Portuguese conquerors violently took over their native lands centuries ago.

"In effect, the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture," he told the bishops.

Wow. Recognize any parallels in that language?

[ related topics: Religion Sexual Culture Sociology ]

Oooh, cool: Intel's PowerTOP tool for Linux, to help tune devices which are using CPU cycles wastefully to tune power consumption on Linux kernels > 2.6.20.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source ]

I need to break out the cameras again and start doing more than snapshots of scenery. Michele Serchuk Photography has some interesting portraiture and people shots.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic ]

Interesting category over at Figleaf's Real Adult Sex investigating women as the "no sex" class, and how that assumption maintains a two-tiered system. Start at the bottom, where he rambles about why making men the initiators means that women have to be reactive:

... Except in the most abstract political sense neither "yes" or "no" are direct actions. Thus "no" can only be a *reaction* to an action initiated by another. To that extent it creates a limited right to be left alone *thereafter,* but not a right to be left alone in the first place. And, as Autumn of the now-dark Putting Perfection on a Curve frequently mentioned, it was wearing to be obliged to decline the (generally polite) advances of multiple men whenever she just wanted to sit down by herself at a table in a bar, have a beer, and spend the afternoon writing.

In other words the right to "no" is a critical defense. But actual power? Um, not. ...

Start at the bottom and work up.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Sociology Beer ]

The Aesthetic Apparatus Deviant Sex Act Fabricator

[ related topics: Humor Erotic Sexual Culture ]

100 Divas:

A while back, Edge started the 100 Bloggers[ed note: link redacted 'cause it goes to link spammers now] project. This inspired me to start the 100 Divas project where I would spank 100 Divas.

[ related topics: Erotic ]

The sex theme has me thinking about fraud, but I've also been doing pondering recently about commodities and value recently, and I'm coming back to notions of running open companies and trying to educate customers rather than base profit on knowledge that the seller has and the buyer doesn't.

Bruce Schneier muses on why bad security wins in the market, in the context of George Akerlof's paper The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.

You can apply many of these observations for markets for all sorts of things, I think I've agonized before over how you tell if, for instance, cookie sheets are good or bad, and I could have sworn I linked to this previously, but I can't find it now, so courtesy of Jay here's The Man Who Said No to Wal*Mart, on Jim Weir, head of Simplicity, which acquired the Snapper brand of lawn mowers, refusing to sell to Wal*Mart because the conditions involved creating a cheapened version of their brand which would lead to consumer confusion.

As we see versions of, for instance, brand name tools made specifically for big box home improvement retailers, it's damned rare to see someone stand up and say "no, I'm not willing to dilute my brand for the sake of more immediate sales". Which is sad, because the brand is what has long-term value, but on the other hand we see so many other companies looted for immediate stock value because playing for the long-term doesn't get the board or the CEO big payoffs, why not grind the brand to smithereens?

[ related topics: Business Consumerism and advertising Cryptography Economics ]

Charlene and I are projecting out some economics, both personal and national, and thinking that it'd be good to be in a position to buy a house in two or three years (sometime when mortgages aren't running at 2.5-3x rents...). So we're starting to get our ducks in a row, and one of the things we're playing with is looking at our credit scores.

Both of us have pretty good scores, I've actually got a slightly worse one than hers because we recently got a joint credit card that we put all of our household expenses on (for the sake of the 1% rewards) and they did the check on my credit record, but not hers (for some odd reason, because the card appears on both of our reports), but if we have a few years to prepare, why not go for a perfect one?

Anyone out there have any credible references on how to boost a high 700s/low 800s score up those last few points?

[ related topics: Economics Real Estate ]

For Eric (kinda, they're really more just plain cool cool than useful for his work), a bunch of R/C airplane and helicopter platform aerial photography in Japan: CUE Air aerial photography, lots of stills and videos on that site, a cute flight with the bear pilot here. (via MeFi)

[ related topics: Photography Movies Aviation Work, productivity and environment Toys Aviation - Helicopters ]

If there is a god and said deity is worthy of worship, then there's a special place in hell reserved for this guy: Jerry Falwell dead at 73.

[ related topics: Religion Politics ]

Up in Wisconsin, a swinger's campground has opened: Camp NCN (no clothes necessary). Okay, such things happen all the time, but the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article on the opening misses no puns:

Suffice it to say it's a campground with plenty of hookups.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Clothing ]

http://babeswithbooks.blogspot.com/ (The entry from which I got this over at crasch's LJ also has lots of stuff on photovoltaics, which is interesting to me right now for reasons which may or may not become apparent at some point...)

[ related topics: Erotic Cool Science ]

Sometimes bike helmets actually work:

"I didn't see it coming, but I sure felt it roll over my head," he told The Capital Times newspaper. "It feels really strange to have a truck run over your head."

[ related topics: Machinery Bicycling ]

I knew that I'd seen the reason for C++ member functions of the form bool abc() const throw() before, but couldn't remember the details. It turns out there are good reasons I wasn't immediately familiar with them: A Pragmatic Look at Exception Specifications:

Moral #1: Never write an exception specification.

Moral #2: Except possibly an empty one, but if I were you I’d avoid even that.

[ related topics: C++ ]

I'm pretty much a "whatever's cheap in large quantities" when it comes to personal grooming products, but the Elave "Nothing To Hide" campaign (Flash, with music, contains male and female nudity) is the first ad I've seen in a long time that made me wonder if there's any place I could buy those products.

[ related topics: Nudity ]

As if I didn't already have way too much on my plate... okay, so I'll call this one "reserved for future reading": Bob Altemeyer's book The Authoritarians. Altemeyer is a psychology professor who's spent his career thinking about authoritarians. From the intro:

The last reason why you might be interested in the hereafter is that you might want more than just facts about authoritarians, but understanding and insight into why they act the way they do. Which is often mind-boggling. How can they revere those who gave their lives defending freedom and then support moves to take that freedom away? How can they go on believing things that have been disconfirmed over and over again, and disbelieve things that are well established? ...

(Snitched from Bifurcated Rivets). While we're on that topic, crasch had Wolf Blitzer interviewing Ron Paul on his altercation during the Republican debates with Rudy Giuliani. I would so like to see a Ron Paul vs Bill Richardson presidential election next year, but, being the cynical pessimist that I am, I'm guessing it's gonna be Mitt Romney or Rudy vs Obama or Hillary. Oh well, at least if it goes that latter direction there'll be no moral problems with voting for a third party candidate...

[ related topics: Books Privacy Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Ethics Civil Liberties ]

A pioneer in the photovoltaics business, Ted Ciszek has a website called Siliconsultant.com, complete with a set of pages on silicon information, from various crystal growth technologies through solar cells.

[ related topics: Cool Science Cool Technology Photovoltaics ]

Columbine had a link to an excerpt from Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason. There's nothing there that you haven't seen before, about the rise of media manipulation in politics (complete with a bit of mea culpa) and the lack of public discourse, and how the internet may have the opportunity to bring back political discussion and citizen ideas, but it is interesting to read stuff like:

Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century's ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself—because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations.

coming from Al Gore. No matter what your stance on global warming, he certainly did a bang-up job in bringing it to the fore as a matter of public discourse, maybe he can do some of the same things in terms of awakening people from their stumbling through responding to the emotional messages and narratives that politicians are presenting us, to looking at their actions and how the stories we get told differ from the end results.

[ related topics: Politics Books Journalism and Media Net Culture Community ]

I have mixed feelings over the United States' occupation of Iraq. I believe that it was a mistake to get involved over there, that the United States was blindly mislead (see my previous entry) despite the truth being above the fold on the front page of the New York Times, and that the primary purpose of this war is to line the pockets of the cronies of the current corrupt administration.

On the other hand, I rather believe that we as a nation bear some responsibility for un-fucking the situation over in Iraq. The current administration is obviously incapable of being the driving force behind that, but maybe if we had a president who was willing to stand up and say (and believe) the same things that General David Petraeus has said about values (source) we could regain the moral high ground and have a prayer of being a positive uniting force, rather than a common enemy.

And it's especially tough when I read Some Soldier's Mom on the Democratic response to the Bush Administration's fuck-ups and find myself agreeing with parts of her argument:

Forget why or how we got there. Inside the four corners of the box WE ARE THERE and whether it was intended or not, our military presence is keeping millions of Iraqis alive and if we leave, they will die.

and empathizing with her desire to know that the sacrifices that her offspring have made are worth something.

At any rate, this musing was started by hearing Colby Buzzell on some radio station and thinking that his book, My War: Killing Time In Iraq, would be worth a read.

And we must demand of every presidential candidate, no matter their strategy on dealing with Iraq, that they embrace the same moral high ground that Petraeus is asking of the troops.

[ related topics: Politics Books Ethics Journalism and Media ]

Spring brings nudity to Vermont town, apparently neither Vermont nor Brattleboro have public nudity prohibitions:

Nudists could pop up anywhere, he [Rev. Kevin Horion] said. "I am concerned we don't know where they are going to strike."

[ related topics: Nudity ]

Ron Paul's voting record courtesy of VoteSmart, via crasch.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Ya know what C++ is? Every time you have that niggling little feeling that a particular feature will come to no good, but for the life of you you can't explain to the suits why it'll come to no good, it's just that "ugh, this'll end up being a late night debugging session in 6 months or so coupled with the realization that several then mandatory features are mutally exclusive" feeling?

Yeah, C++ is all of those features, rolled into one language.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

To bring you a smile:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=myhyBqspxxA

And a reminder just how cool and creative the Beatles were. LSD was legal until 1967.

And now back to the regularly scheduled Internet . click click click

[ related topics: Drugs Movies Law Net Culture ]

We have seen in the last few elections instances of unofficial or quasi-official political campaign ads released only online. The Hillary 1984 , for example, was produced by a group affiliated with the Obama movement. Most of these things are never intended to be sent up to the big leagues, IE, broadcast TV, but are perhaps intended more to impress the cognoscenti, or to remind candidates that some factions of their supporters might be feeling ignored.

But that's all in the national realm. There is also a movement of people developing YouTube ads for local issues that might have a more immediate effect. The Chicago Tribune reports of two such ads that got play in Illinois. One attacked an alderman for being a tool of the real estate developers. It was as manipulative as broadcact ads, but it had a real impact. True, only 5,500 people saw it online, but in our recent aldermanic elections some races were decided by only about 100 votes or so. The developer's tool lost. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues, and online advocacy becomes a local factor, rather than a national one.

[ related topics: Politics Technology and Culture Television Video Real Estate ]

HomebrewCPU.com:

Magic-1 is a homebuilt minicomputer. It doesn't use an off-the-shelf microprocessor, but rather has a custom CPU made out of 74 Series TTL chips. Altogether there are more than 200 chips in Magic-1 connected together with thousands of individually wrapped wires. And, it works. Not only the hardware, but there's also a full ANSI C compiler for Magic-1 (retargeted LCC), and a rudimentary homebrew operating system.

[ related topics: Cool Technology ]

How To Be An Alaskan Fisherman.

[ related topics: Alaska ]

A lot of people have been posting the Congressman Tim Ryan's attempt to eat on a food stamp budget foiled by the TSA. While I have no opinion on his food stamp budget stunt, hopefully losing peanut butter and jelly to the idiocies of security theater could inspire him to lay a little smackdown on some of these stupidities.

[ related topics: Politics Food security ]

Charlene noticed some deal from that big financial services company, "ING", so I typed "ing sucks" into Google, to see what negative statements about them were floating out there on the web.

Oddly, that phrase didn't turn up anything related to financial services...

[ related topics: Humor ]

It's been way too long since we've had a party, so... Sunday, June 10^th, 3PM 'til whenever. Our place in Lagunitas (email or call, 415-488-4053, for directions), probably best if you park down on Sir Francis Drake and walk up, 'cause parking here at the house is limited.

We'll smoke a turkey and whatever else we can come up with, and do some salads and whatever, but if you've got a favorite something or to drink, that'd be cool. Within the limits of the space we'll try to get as diverse and interesting a crowd as we can muster up, and talk as long as the bats will keep the mosquitos at bay and the raccoons and the deer don't get too organized.

So after years and years of incompatible revisions of that abomination called the ".DOC" file, Microsoft finally decided to catch up with the rest of the world and do something modern. Rather than adopt, say, the Open Document Format, they once again decided to go off on their own direction and create the ".DOCX" format, a zip file containing XML documents (kinda like OpenOffice.org has been doing for a long time).

The howler is that they call this the "Office Open" format, but nothing reads it. Furthermore, there's supposed to be a plugin for OpenOffice.org from Novell that reads it, but attempting to install it on Windows gives about a gazillion error dialogs, and because it's in some lame-ass RPM format and claims that the straight .oxt plugin only works on Windows, I haven't bothered to try to to install it on Linux.

I just wussed out and asked the person who sent me the document to try again as .DOC...

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Open Source moron ]

Why Defend Porn? (via Medley).

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

When I was a wee lad, my dad and I started to build a vacuum cleaner powered hovercraft. I remember getting as far as three disks of plywood with sheet metal edging on them, and we may have even gotten a "t" structure in between 'em, but it kinda fell apart because in that wonderful 200 year old house we had no smooth concrete surface on which to float the thing. The floors, which were big wide slabs of eastern pine, had decent sized indentations in between the boards, and the basement and floors of the barns were unfinished dirt.

Here's a video of a leaf-blower powered hovercraft that's a lot simpler than what we were building. I haven't got the page loading yet, but plans should be here (if you can't figure 'em out from the last few seconds of the video). Still requires a flatter surface than I had back then, but most of y'all don't live way out in the boonies.

[ related topics: Nostalgia Cool Science ]

So I go to make a comment on one of my sisters' MySpace page, and it says:

Currently you are not allowed to post comments to this blog entry.

This blogger only allow(sic) blog comments from friends.

(emphasis mine). Huh. Guess I know where I stand there... [grin].

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

People Often Think An Opinion Heard Repeatedly From The Same Person Is Actually A Popular Opinion (via Medley). Hmmm...

The first thing this brings to mind is that in some space recently I was whining about Cingular's declining coverage and amazing number of dropouts, and one of the conversant says "huh, they say that Cingular's supposed to have the fewest number of dropped calls..." which, of course, is the advertising tag line. However, repeated often enough, it had gone from advertising slogan to communal knowledge.

Despite the number of Cingular subscribers in the group who were going "oh, yeah, it's hideous".

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Consumerism and advertising ]

C++ gaff of the moment: Playing with typing and various automated pointer systems and leaving an errant boost::shared_ptr<t> sptr2(&*sptr1) lying around. Bad idea.

Need to verify that BOOST's shared_ptr will work with GCC AVR32 target, but it looks like it should, and I'm having fun with Freetype and some basic widget classes.

Anyone know what a good way to get G++'s favored idioms for its various SIMD optimizations is? I could write test code and disassemble it, but if there's a "if you're doing byte swapping, use this idom" doc somewhere that'd rock.

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

Marital Sex Single Greatest HIV Risk For Women Around The World. I'd write something here, but Gloria Brame has already said "I wonder what the Religious Right has to say about the fact that it's all those closet cases trying to live up to false ideals of heterosexuality who are most likely to infect women with HIV." (ie: Ted Haggard), and Figleaf has ranted on this in the context of "abstinence only" sex "education" that targets women.

And while I'm snitching links from Gloria Brame, No Sex Leads To Less Sex, Research Shows:

Ragnar Beer of the University of Göttingen surveyed almost 32,000 men and women for his Theratalk Project, which has found that the less sex you have, the more work you seek.

I wonder if this proffers up an evolutionary explanation for puritanism: Unhappy people work more, make a bigger economy?

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

The SF Chronicle is doing a "Summer of Love, 40 years later" series. I actually don't know if we're going to end up at the Wavy Gravy shindig over at the Community Center on the 2^nd, where I bet you'll find quite a number of the folks interviewed in that series, but there were a few things that caught my attention. The first was this interview with Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft, in which Judy points out that:

This is 2007, and it's been longer from now to then, than then was from the '30s. It's an incredible thing to consider. Since time has speeded up a lot in our era, that makes it really antique.

Interesting for a little perspective and space for cultural change, but Jon Carrol puts it all into perspective:

I did try to get with the program, but there were obstacles. The biggest one was astrology. Why did that have to be part of it? I understood tipis and yurts; I got why getting loaded was fun; I loved the utopian ideals even though I was skeptical of their practical applications. But what did that have to do with your sun being in Jupiter?

and has an amusing tale of working for Rolling Stone and an interview at the Jefferson Airplane house.

[ related topics: Bay Area Sociology Community ]

I didn't see any answers or some of the depth I was hoping for, but Morgan Stanley: Policy Pitfalls in an Asset-Dependent World voices some of my concerns over how the U.S. economy is balanced:

This doesn’t mean households aren’t saving. What it does point to is an important shift in the mix of saving – away from that generated by income toward that which can be funded through wealth creation. Rational or not, this puts tremendous pressure on an economy with already deficient income-based domestic saving – forcing the US into the international capital markets to close the funding gap.

Thanks to Chris R. for passing it along.

[ related topics: Economics ]

As a whitewater guide, the primary safety related thing I tried to relate to my customers was "if you end up in the water, don't try to stand up." If you try to stand up, you risk getting your feet caught in the rocks at the bottom, and the river can very easily push you over and, suspended from that foot caught on the bottom upstream, you can die in an arm's depth of current.

One day a fellow guide missed the ferry at the put in rapid and wrapped a boat on Whiteface, I was running safety on the right, so I ran up the bank to go help pull the raft off. As I got into the water and started moving out through the current to the site of the pin, I had this weird internal dialog:

"I can walk out through this because I'm a guide, not a customer."

"What makes you different from a customer?"

"I know better than to walk across this."

I promptly slipped into the current and swam it and worked my way back up through the eddy below, but... well... any parallels you might want to draw between that lesson and, say, foreign policy, are your own.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Whitewater ]

Last Sunday, Charlene and I signed up for a "build it green" house tour, and went to the homes of several people who opened up their recently constructed homes to show ways in which they'd used interesting design, materials and construction techniques. We really enjoyed one place, still being built, but with straw bale walls and a living roof, and some neat curving walls and shapes inside, although the construction ran $240/square foot with a lot of sweat equity. And we were... well... we've been ogling things like the Deltec round homes, but after seeing the... cough... uh... attention to detail in the Glidehouse prefab ($140/sq.ft., and both of us came out used the phrase "Ikea house"), we'd be really really leery of anything prefab.

But here's an article from today's SFGate on kitchen design that I've read through and stuffed into my subconscious for a few years hence.

[ related topics: Food Fabrication Real Estate ]

When I rule the universe (with an iron fist, but that almost goes without saying), 3d software developers will be forced to use either a left-handed or a right-handed coordinate system. I don't yet know which one it'll be, but the fact that MDD files have a reversed axis from OBJ files would be cause for rolling heads.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Graphics ]

Before the server switch, I installed MediaWiki on LigHTTPD talking to PostgreSQL over at Flutterby.net, and while performance wasn't screaming, the site was usable.

The new server should be several times faster than the old server, but running under Apache, it's now a dog. If I run top while the requests come in I see the hit on PostgreSQL, and then over the next few refreshes Apache pops up in CPU a couple of times, but the CPU utilization is low, PostgreSQL isn't complaining, so it seems like something in the Apache/PHP is stalling on I/O in some bizarre and performance sucking way.

Anyone got a suggestion of where to start?

One of the things I'm fascinated by is the ability of advertisers to co-opt rituals and traditions in order to make people behave irrationally. The Marriage Industrial Complex is an interview with Rebecca Mead, author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.

[ related topics: Books Sociology Consumerism and advertising Salon magazine Marriage ]

Nancy needs a little attention in this matter: Everything you need to know about Fat Daddy's Auto Sales in Ringgold Georgia.

Hey, Diane, are you getting my emails? If not, we should fix it or figure another way to converse. If you are and just haven't gotten around to replying yet, that's okay too, I just wanted to make sure that mine weren't disappearing into the ether.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

"In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses row on row..."

Yesterday Charlene and I went out to the Audubon Canyon Ranch to go see the egrets and the herons. They've got a canyon in which there are several trees full of egret and heron nests, and up on the ridge have a platform with a whole bunch of spotting scopes, and we had a wonderful time watching the egrets come back and feed their babies.

Then we headed south along the Bolinas Lagoon to go see the other part of the process, and Charlene said "oooh, this is the time of year when the leopard sharks should be circling down near Strawberry, so we went to Strawberry and saw a couple of circling fins, but the water was too stirred up to see more than just circling fins.

If you live in the Bay Area and like watching birds at all, I highly recommend a trek over to Audubon Canyon Ranch.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Bay Area Birds ]

In the context of all of the discussions about inhospitable atmospheres for women that have been flying around the weblogs recently, Wendy McElroy points out a vicious piece of gender based hate speech that she received recently... sent by a woman.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Weblogs ]

Charlene and I met on Memorial Day weekend in 1999. We sat in a hot tub and talked late into the evening, and somewhere in that evening of talking we discovered the germ of whatever it was that dragged us through the subsequent two years of hell that I'd never thought I'd ever tolerate in a relationship, to the remaining six years that have been pretty darned good, even if we still sometimes can't figure out how two otherwise completely mismatched people have found whatever it is we've found in each other that speaks to both of us so strongly.

Yesterday after a day by the water looking for wildlife, Charlene pulled Before Sunrise off the shelf, which we'd bought because when Before Sunset came out the video rental places all had a backlog for weeks and Charlene hadn't seen it yet, and we watched it again.

Damn, that's still an awesome movie. Perfectly captures that sense of an evening talking leading to a connection, with all the "I want this conversation to be about now, not the future, not the past" of such an experience intact. I almost want to find the film geeks who've taken apart the movie shot by shot, analyzed the color use, and so forth, because it feels like such a perfect film, but I also don't want to risk the heartbreak that such a deconstruction would inevitably lead to, so I'm happy to just watch it again and let it be what it is.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Movies History Video ]

Okay all you LOLCATS fans (and you know who you are, and I'm not going to subject the rest of you to a link), now you can write programs: LOLCODE.

[ related topics: Humor Software Engineering ]

Yesterday, Gloria Brame linked to a video of a woman with particularly active pectorals that I think was a booth babe at an auto show, but she saw as an animation job done on some unsuspecting person. It did bring up an interesting question of copyright and the provenance of the images we get.

I'm not particulary a fan of those emails with lots of cool images, or, worse, emailed PowerPoint presentation in which someone has carefully copied all of the pictures of some artist's work off of a web site and embedded them in a single file, on the other hand, I have managed to find some really cool work by some really cool artists when I've managed to chase some of those images backwards. And what of sites like Nick Scipio's Picture of the Day (may contain nudity), where he happily republishes things that people have emailed him, and occasionally one of those things will be discovered by an angry copyright holder?

And then... Then this became more than just a simple case of the provenance of email, because Medley linked to Teen Tests Internet's Lewd Track Record, about a young woman pole vaulter from Southern California whose image has been plastered across assorted sites accompanied by commentary of the:

"...Hubba hubba and other grunting sounds."

level.

And then Violet Blue called out the SF Comical on some of their wacky tech writing, in the same entry pointing out a 14 year old photographer whose self portrait has found its way on to the cover of a porn movie. More on Lara Jade's problems at Flickr and at Deviant Art.

I don't have any answers, but it seems like we're going to need some soon, and if we don't start thinking about how to improve copyright then it's going to be done in ways that we won't like.

[ related topics: Photography Sexual Culture Movies Law Art & Culture Net Culture Pop Culture Copyright/Trademark Video ]

Interesting note... Charlene and I have been trying to be more conscious of real estate, so we've been reading the flyers in front of houses for sale, getting a feel for rents versus mortgages (by my calculations our area is still at half or less), and then some friends of ours who recently bought a place introduced us to Zillow, which was fascinating in that their estimates of houses in our area are often 20% higher than the market price of houses that have been for sale for months. A little further afield, Vallejo's getting hit hard by the sub-prime crash.

In a report called "Losing Ground," the center spotlights the Vallejo-Fairfield metropolitan area (which comprises all of Solano County) as a potential trouble spot, with one of the highest projected foreclosure rates in the country. The report predicted "that 23.8 percent of subprimes there will end in foreclosure," said Paul Leonard, director of the center's office in Oakland.

[ related topics: Bay Area Economics Real Estate ]

About that LJ (LiveJournal) Rumor...

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Weblogs Net Culture ]

Holy expletive followed by multiple loud expletives. We just got a corrupted SVN repository. There is precedence:

• http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2006-02/0473.shtml
• http://www.szakmeister.net/blog/?page_id=16
• http://cvsdude.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=473&view=next

Except that we're running BerkeleyDB, not FSFS. Gulp. Now it was extremely strange that I was getting different failures on multiple runs of svnadmin verify ... and svnadmin dump ..., so it's also quite possible that we're up against some wackiness on OS/X. Which also kicks me into brown trousers mode (but, alas, wouldn't surprise me too much).

Some notes on recovering an SVN repository:

• http://osdir.com/ml/mail.eyebrowse.user/2004-05/msg00017.html

And, note to the wise: svnadmin hotcopy ... seems like a great way to make backups, except... it appears that repositories are path dependent, and they're definitely processor byte order dependent. Some strategy involving svnadmin dump ... would be a much better idea.

This is an argument for using svn+ssh rather than https...

[ related topics: Weblogs Sports Community Cryptography Databases ]

"The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.". Meat producer wants to test all of its beef for BSE (and use this as a selling point). USDA says no.

At this point I've been spoiled by grass raised no feedlot beef, so regular beef holds no appeal, but the producer is Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, it seems like they're still getting used to the idea of permalinks, but here's their latest press release on the matter.

From Genehack's latest tab dump which pointed to this commentary on this article, which noted:

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive tests on their larger herds as well.

And, as always, isn't it interesting that the loudest voices against a free market come from the bigger companies? Of course food production in this country may as well be nationalized, food policy is far more economically driven than safety driven, but...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics John S Jacobs-Anderson Food Bay Area Theater & Plays Current Events Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

hey, check this out: http://www.spp.gov/ . Yep, that's right Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) dot gov, a web site that looks like it was made specifically to cater to the wet dreams of conspiracy theorists. For instance, check out the first entry in the SPP Myths vs Facts page:

Myth: The SPP was an agreement signed by Presidents Bush and his Mexican and Canadian counterparts in Waco, TX, on March 23, 2005.

Fact: The SPP is a dialogue to increase security and enhance prosperity among the three countries. The SPP is not an agreement nor is it a treaty. In fact, no agreement was ever signed.

Super specific question, really nebulous answer. It's like these guys are getting kickbacks from the talk radio hosts or something.

[ related topics: Politics Conspiracy ]

Musician Canned for Focus on Wrong Organ:

A Catholic priest has removed his church's organist and choir director from her duties saying her sale of sex toys was not "consistent with Church teachings."

[ related topics: Religion Sexual Culture ]

C|N>K: 86 Mac Plus Vs. 07 AMD DualCore. You Won't Believe Who Wins:

Check out the results! For the functions that people use most often, the 1986 vintage Mac Plus beats the 2007 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+: 9 tests to 8! Out of the 17 tests, the antique Mac won 53% of the time! Including a jaw-dropping 52 second whipping of the AMD from the time the Power button is pushed to the time the Desktop is up and useable.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Macintosh ]