Flutterby™! From 2007-08-01 to 2007-08-31

ErosBlog has a fascinating post on the economics of porn web sites: Cookie Cutter Porn Paysites. One of the pastimes over at Sensible Erection is trolling various sites for their sample pages and providing a huge list of them, like this. I've always wondered, given what's available in front of the wall, what the economics of what's behind the wall is. It's even weirder when you look at a URL and see DOMAI or Hegre in the URL and realize that if that sort of image is your kink you could head on over to the source material and get all you wanted for probably less than membership at most of these sites.

I probably just don't understand the economics of porn or the mindset of the porn consumer, but it seems to me that there's definitely some irrational behavior and leverage of incomplete knowledge going on here.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Consumerism and advertising Economics ]

Okay, to counter the porn post, how about some tool porn: YouTube video of 10 minutes of a 5 axis milling machine cutting a V8 engine block from solid stock. Complete with cheesey porn-like soundtrack. Via ToolMonger.

And because we like to send you straight to the original source for our porn, the English Matsuura home page, and the 5 axis machining subsection of their pages.

[ related topics: Machinery Cool Technology ]

Sean Connor is trying to spruce up Pornfinity.com for sale, and in the process came up with a cute hack to use website icons as bullets in a list.

[ related topics: Web development ]

The Simpsons new movie (haven't seen it yet) is about Alaska, the locals seem to be laughing at themselves and enjoying it. I have to admit, there is something about having normal Anchorage AK grocery stores that also sell .50 caliber handguns, ammo and hard liquor be appealing as well as make you go: "Hmmmmmm".

[ related topics: Movies Invention and Design Television Alaska ]

This one's for MarkV: Outside The Law had a link to an analysis of an old film of an amazing baseball game that could reveal the greatest ballplayer ever.

The stadium is entirely filled, and as we know that the Polo Grounds could hold 55,000 fans in that year’s configuration, it is fair to assume that this was a game of some note, and that the players participating were extremely popular.

[ related topics: Games Movies Sports ]

hey, if you're a Marin area person and want to meet some other cool people, I have needs... for people to help out at the Marin Cyclists Marin Century in the afternoon up at the Valley Ford rest stop, or the evening at the Vallecitos school start/finish line or the Nicasio rest stop.

And SAG drivers, all day!

[ related topics: Bay Area Bicycling ]

Jesse James Garrett's remark of the morning:

At the end of my life, I would like to have back all the time I spent untangling cords.

I've been finding The Economist to be my best source for real information. They provide an interesting spin on various topics. Here's a piece on the post-dot-com recovery of San Francisco and yet another piece on sub-prime lending. This week's issue looks like it'll be good. The cover story is about tightening lending practices.

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture Economics ]

Hee hee hee: Boulder and Denver restaurant chain runs ads dissing Barry Bonds:

Hapa Sushi Grill ran a half-page ad Thursday in the satirical weekly The Onion that read "Congratulations Hank Aaron on 755 home runs." At the bottom of the page, the ad continues: "Organic beef and chicken, no added steroids." Full-page ads are planned for two Boulder, Colo., daily newspapers starting Friday.

[ related topics: Humor Food Sports ]

This one's for TC: In Japan, solar cells are such a status symbol that people are putting fake ones on their roofs. (Via Cleantech Blog)

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Photovoltaics ]

Washington Post article on the enhancements in sport, and how banning performance enhancing drugs rewards the cheaters:

For Nick Bostrom, the lesson is, we should not create rules in sport regarding violations that may be undetectable and that cannot be enforced. "To do so would be to reward cheaters with unfair advantage," he says. Rules are fine as long as we can ensure openness and compliance. Bostrom is the director of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute and a member of the philosophy faculty there.

Oddly, lots of great pull-quotes in there, but the overall article felt like it left something to be desired. I did like the part about drawing the lines between "natural" and synthetic hormones, and looking at where to draw the line on contact lenses.

[ related topics: Drugs Health Sports Philosophy ]

http://www.thescreamergirl.com/nowsm.htm

Is a Feminist Free to choose to submit to a man or does Feminist Political Correctness preclude a girl following her nature?

[ related topics: Politics Nature and environment moron ]

I recently, yet again, saw a kid wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, and got to thinking about making up a T-shirt with pictures of a number of political luminaries of a similar ilk who'd be as easily recognized. Say, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Che. We could toss in many more but I think that'd be enough to make the point.

I'm not sure that either the interviewer or the author is compelling enough to make me want to buy the book, but here's an interview with the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him, courtesy of The Boston Diaries.

[ related topics: Politics Books moron Clothing Dictators ]

Jeff's off climbing Kilimanjaro, but this one's making the rounds, hopefully he'll catch up with this when he gets back: The KillaCycle electric motorcycle, 0-60MPH in 1.04 seconds, quarter mile in 8.168 second @ 155.78 MPH...

If you think about it, the KillaCycle is just a giant cordless drill with wheels.

[ related topics: Cool Technology ]

Joe Kurmaskie, aka "Metal Cowboy", and family, start a cross-Canada trip on a triplet with a tag-along bike and a trailer.

[ related topics: Travel Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem ]

As volunteer coordinator for the Marin Century/Mt Tam Double bike ride, I love my volunteers dearly. However... The first that reduced me to hysterical giggles was a guy who, after I've been sending mail for a few months, replied Thursday evening with "...I've been meaning to contact you..." for the affirmative for a pretty key and hard to fill role. Love that he's doing it, but more than a day's warning would have saved some stress.

The other was that Charlene and I went out to put warning signs on the north course last night, a great set of documentation, descriptions and photos illustrating where every numbered sign was to go... only it was sorted by sign type, not by, say, mile position on the course.

The AV aid from that that I'm going to use at the volunteer appreciation event was the one page that had two missing location photos, but still had arrows in the blank spaces showing where the signs were supposed to go.

At this point, the avalanche is underway, it's too late to worry about the pebbles. 20 minutes and we're off to Bolinas Fairfax Road and Route 1 to set up an aid station.

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area Bicycling ]

On the Tandem@Hobbes list there's been a discussion that's devolved into "bar end shifters versus brifters", and the ride yesterday has me thinking, yet again, about styles of riding. I did a quick wrap-up of our experiences yesterday, probably not enough yet, but this morning Charlene and I got to talking about nutrition for long distance rides. A sponsor for the Marin Century was Clif, we'd had lots of discussions during the planning phase about the logistics of not using the Hammer products. Clif has a better marketing budget, but they don't seem to understand the needs of serious exercise the way the Hammer folks do (and what's with caffeine in everything?).

Anyway, that, and the other mixes of foods, got Charlene looking around for various other caloric sources and information on food and nutrition and long-distance riding, but her poking around lead to A Rider's Guide to Building the Long Distance Bicycle eBook, that looks like it might be worth the $10 if you're into building a reliable maintainable lightweight bike (rather than something like my road bike, which is a high performance bike, but I've gotta get it up on the stand and re-tune everything every few rides, if anything breaks my backup plan is "call for a ride", and there's no good way to put racks on it).

[ related topics: Health Food Bay Area Consumerism and advertising Marketing Community Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem ]

I'm sorry, sir, your poetic license has been revoked for rhyming under the influence.

It's looking like all sorts of environmental assumptions don't hold up to scientific scrutiny. This is from/about the UK, not sure if all of these assumptions apply to the US. (this reminds me of the debate we had about hybrids and diesels awhile back)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t...ws/uk/science/article2195538.ece

What happens when a culture cedes that the citizens exist for the state, and not vice-versa: China tells living Buddhas to obtain permission before they reincarnate.

Of course, in the Sensible Erection thread, "benjamander" points out that:

Being a bodhisattva used to imply that you only came back to teach others to become enlightened, as a means to end all suffering and dualism.

It's not Chinese red tape that's killing Buddhism, it's Mystic Buddhism that's killing Buddhism.

[ related topics: Sociology Current Events California Culture ]

A few years ago I was struggling with some performance and module dependency issues in the Emacs mail reader VM when dealing with HTML messages, and decided it was time to leap forward into the new millenium. I started using Opera for my email, and have been mostly pleased, but I really need an email system that integrates with other tools better, and it should be hackable, so I'm looking around for a better system.

Today's tab dump over at Genehack pointed to Getting Things Done, in Emacs, which has some good suggestions in that realm.

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson Social Software ]

If Java is such a great computer language, how come all of the applications that are written in it that I have to deal with suck so badly?

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Some photos by Anna Mackinnon, one of our SAG motorcyclists, of last weekend's Marin Century

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area Bicycling ]

In the comments to this entry on candidates stances on the issues, Jeff asked if someone would do a decision table that would hide the candidates names until the decisions were all made: Pick Your Candidate uses that table to do just that, although it doesn't have an "It's not a federal issue, damn it!" option.

[ related topics: Politics ]

I was not a fan of Bowling Alone. I thought Putnam completely handwaved changes in tolerance (more here), that he implied cause when there was only correlation, it was an interesting premise, and one that I believe had some germ of truth to it, but it didn't hold up.

However, I may get suckered into his next book, if only to see if I can see the flaws: Robert Putnam's latest study claims that racial and cultural diversity hurts civic life:

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

[ related topics: Sociology Current Events Community ]

After struggling install Microsoft Windows Vista on to a computer, Matthew Schenker discovers a machine into which he can load Vista.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft ]

While in Anchorage last week, last minute karmic confluence offered up some space on a salmon fishing charter boat in Seward at 6am. Leaving Anchorage at 3:30am, fishing until early afternoon netted us a nice catch of Silver Salmon. While not normally "my thing" it was a great day with kinfolk and a lot of fun. Good eating when we got home as well... we filled up the in-laws freezer.

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Alaska ]

IPICO Sports has timing systems for runners, and is investigating timing systems for bicycling events. If we could have information of which riders have passed which rest stops for the Marin Century, especially if we can figure out a way to see where the groups of people are and try to deal with staffing and sag issues better, that'd be worth a buck or two per rider.

[ related topics: Bay Area Sports Bicycling ]

Even though I'm on the National Do Not Call List, I still get one or two telemarketers a day. I found a cool website to figure out just who is calling: WhoCalled.us

If you haven't caught up with Looking For Group, it's a tale by the guys who do Least I Could Do, about young Cale'anon, a bold young adventurer who wants to do good but is predestined for evil, his companion Dick, the warlock, who kills bunnies and kittens, and a cast of similarly evil characters off to complete their destined quest.

They have a dead trees version that they're trying to sell, promising that if they hit their marks they'll hit an MWF schedule. Find your local comic shop here. However, what got me to point to them now is the 4 minute preview for the forthcoming Looking For Group feature film: Slaughter Your World.

[ related topics: Music tolkien Comics ]

A MetaFilter post on Rock City resources, for all you Chattanoogans.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Chattanooga ]

On the one hand, I mock the people who've turned Scrabble into a game of rote memorization and pattern matching, on the other hand, I need every edge I can get to beat Charlene: Sanjeev.NET : The 10-Step Scrabble Study Plan, and the Ottawa Scrabble Club Study Room.

[ related topics: Games Scrabble ]

Just noting a moment: Luminent mortgage REIT in trouble:

Luminent also thought it would be protected because it holds higher-quality loans, with almost no exposure to the imploding subprime market.

As of June 30, its loan portfolio had a weighted-average FICO credit score of 715 (on a scale of 300 to 850) and an average loan-to-value ratio of 71 percent.

Dow down 378 on sub-prime concerns. George W. Bush promises no cash bailouts to strapped homebuyers, a statement which I wholeheartedly endorse, but note that his careful wording doesn't preclude bailouts to the loan sharks who participated on the other side of this debacle.

[ related topics: Politics Economics ]

Making your own bacon. I've had a hankerin' for bacon of late, this'd be interesting. And an excuse to fire up the smoker again.

Unfortunately, we need to draw down the freezer a bit before I do anything else in large quantities. To that end, anyone got suggestions for small to mid-sized auxiliary freezers? Good resources for figuring operating costs? We don't need huge, but we are putting a moderate amount of food by, and better ways to save things like vacuum packed fruits and cured meats would be good.

[ related topics: Food Food - Bacon ]

This MeFi entry pointed to A Dissertation upon Dissertations:

Audience. You may one day turn your dissertation into a book, during the many leisure hours you can expect to enjoy as a well-paid and pampered junior faculty member at the fortunate college or university that you select from the many that will vie for your services. You will then bask in the admiration of the theological world and the less critically grounded adulation of the general public, while living luxuriously on your vast royalties. Perhaps there will even be a lump sum for the movie rights.

[ related topics: Humor Books Education ]

The Other War: Iraqi Vets Bear Witness:

After persistently acting on such false leads, Sergeant Bocanegra, who raided Iraqi homes in more than fifty operations, said soldiers began to anticipate the innocence of those they raided. "People would make jokes about it, even before we'd go into a raid, like, Oh fucking we're gonna get the wrong house," he said. "'Cause it would always happen. We always got the wrong house." Specialist Chrystal said that he and his platoon leader shared a joke of their own: Every time he raided a house, he would radio in and say, "This is, you know, Thirty-One Lima. Yeah, I found the weapons of mass destruction in here."

[ related topics: Politics Sociology Guns War ]

Federal Reserve promises to supply "reserves as necessary" to ease current credit crunch. So, let me get this straight: A lot of people, both individuals and as part of large companies, have been using credit unwisely. If I understand this right, the Fed just kicked $70 billion ($35 billion each on Thursday and Friday) into the money supply in order to mitigate the effects of their stupidity, and to make it easy for people to... use credit unwisely. From the article:

The free flow of credit is important to the smooth functioning of the national economy. Increasingly restrictive lending conditions can put a damper on people's ability to buy big-ticket items such as homes, cars and appliances. ...

So... uh... we have to encourage people to spend money unwisely because otherwise they'll feel the effects of their stupidity? And someone thinks that doing this will have good long-term consequences?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Heinlein Currency Economics ]

Nice Bicycle Sidecar - Mixing some woodworking with bicycle building.

[ related topics: Pedal Power Bicycling Woodworking ]

Because m mentioned it in the "credit crunch" thread: Court Rules: Novell owns the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights! Novell has right to waive! A little smackdown on those frivolous lawsuit inducing lying scumbags at SCO.

[ related topics: Free Software New Economy Law ]

Charlene and I have been looking around at real estate, especially as the crash begins, trying to get a feel for what's where, and in our voyeurism yesterday were browsing ZIP Realty and ran across the houses in Ross. After some giggles at the taste of people selling a fifteen million dollar house, Charlene said "I wonder what that'd buy in Fresno".

So we slapped two million plus into the search engine and went poking around Fresno. Found at least one house that... well... in comparison the place in My Big Fat Greek Wedding can only be described as "tastefully restrained".

However, this afternoon I get a call, a Realtor who was tracking us on ZIP Realty who wanted to see if he could help us with houses in his area. I asked what his area was... "east Fresno". I hated to deflate the guy, but... well... no, sorry, dude, we weren't looking at multi-million dollar houses on your beat to buy.

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Recumbent Bicycle with Sidecar - It's not quite art, but it's the first time I've gotten really strong aluminum welds. Iin a short road test with Nancy, it handles very well. The side car is mounted on pivots, that clamp onto the main frame. The rear mount was machined (crudely) to fit into the bike frame, and allows the weight to transfer on the strongest part of the frame. It'll also detach/attach quickly, so I can ride my bike normally easily. With a small cooler bolted on, I think it's ready for some Burning Man cruising with Nancy.

[ related topics: Photography Art & Culture Automobiles Fabrication Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Just went to see the latest Neil Gaiman written movie: Stardust. I don't know how to write a longer piece on its flaws without all sorts of spoilers, but... it had its cute moments, and somewhat likeable characters, but the last half fell into predictable and the ending was a total ewok dance.

Didn't, alas, hold a candle to Mirrormask. Also saw previews to Boewulf, and I'm definitely not a fan of the "mid-way between effects and animated movie" genre, and based on how disappointed I was with Stardust that one isn't on my list. Damn.

[ related topics: Animation Movies Neil Gaiman ]

Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky

A little rundown on the sexual explorations of prominent members of the "family values" party, or "these are the people who protest that 'gay marriage' is immoral?".

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture moron Sociology Marriage ]

Okay, how do I get the execrable Facebook to give me an RSS/Atom or even just email feed for updates there? Grrr... Useless "social networking" sites increasing the cognitive load for me to do things.

[ related topics: Content Management ]

Hmmm... Given the current market turmoil and other stuff, we've been diversifying a bit, and had a few bucks we were going to throw into a CD. Charlene went looking around for CD rates, and saw that "ING Direct" was promising pretty good returns. So we signed up, they transferred the money, and we then got emails that said things like:

We received your request to open an ING DIRECT Account, but we need some more information from you in order to do this. For your security, this is not something that can be done via e-mail, voice mail or regular mail.

So Charlene called this morning, and they used vague language and then started asking about credit cards and credit card details, and told her that if she didn't give them they'd cancel the account and she couldn't ever open an account with them in the future.

The whole thing felt like a really bad phishing scam, so Charlene told 'em "Okay, cancel the account", and now we're out ten days while the transfers settle down so we can do something else with the money.

We hope. The phone numbers all check out as valid ING contact info, and I've sent a note off to their fraud department hoping for verification, but... well... sometimes the slightly higher promised returns ain't worth the time of a company that's gonna try to wheedle info out of you they shouldn't need.

[ related topics: Spam moron Economics ]

I need a Windows laptop. It should also run Linux. It needs to have decent 3d performance. Different set of priorities from the last time I bought a laptop. Any "must have"s or "avoid at all cost"s?

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Open Source Theater & Plays Graphics ]

Got an HP Pavilion dv6000 (or, as it says on the sticker on the bottom, dv6452se). The process, however... So, we're going to San Rafael, we know, barring anything really weird, we're going to spend a thousand dollars, this evening. This is the attitude with which we walk into each store.

First we went to Best Buy. Looked at various computers they had, best selection, was approached by a completely computer ignorant salesperson who got all huffy when I asked about checking for Linux compatibility (and had not heard of Linux). We said "well, if we can't check we should go elsewhere", he said "yes, you probably should".

Went to CompUSA. Got somewhat computer ignorant person who promised to go find more knowledgeable salesperson to help us out. Waited while browsing computers. None of the computers really excited us, but still we waited. Eventually we gave up.

Went to Staples. Really lousy selection of computers.

Went to Office Depot. Looked at computers. Guy came up, asked if we could help. We asked if we could run a Linux live CD to check browser compatibility. He said "sure". We talked computers for a bit, he was a user, but he'd heard of Linux. He left us alone. We booted Ubuntu on various computers, played around for a bit, settled on the HP. Yay for Office Depot San Rafael. And, come to think of it, two of my four laptops have come from there...

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Music Open Source Bay Area Theater & Plays ]

I don't know what circumstances of life conspired to let Shaun Lunt spend 3 months flying a Piper Super Cub all over Alaska, but I'm jealous. He has a lot of other photos of flying, skiing and mountain biking, and apparently generally lives the high life, but those Alaska pics are cool.

[ related topics: Photography Aviation Alaska ]

a gorgeous wood (beech) tandem bicycle.

[ related topics: Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem Woodworking ]

Lean Construction, comparing the process of building software to the process of building buildings:

I started to explain: “In software development, we are told we should manage our projects like construction projects, where a building is designed at the start, cost and schedule are predictable, and customers get what they expect.”

Silence. “You’re kidding, right?” “No, honest, that’s what we’re told.”

[ related topics: Software Engineering Fabrication Architecture ]

Oh, wow. After a year and change using the Mac as basically my sole computer, it's amazing to get back to Linux. No more networking stack randomly going nuts, much more responsive on basically the same CPU, applications that feel better integrated and just work better (yes, most of that is that I loathe the native Mac apps like Safari and Mail.app and use alternatives). As the Mac2Ubuntu.com guy says:

P.S. Yup, you can do more on Ubuntu than you can on your Mac.

It's like switching from haute couture to blue jeans, yeah, some of the edges are frayed, but it's just a much more comfortable environment that's built to fit me, not some highfalutin' thing that looks great but conforms me to the computer.

The switch leaves me wondering if I should still keep using Opera's email client. Charlene's been having some issues with Opera on Ubuntu, I've been having some issues that I'd chalked up to Mac wonkiness, but now that RAM is essentially free Firefox is looking better.

So: What's an email client that does IMAP well and allows quick piping of messages to an external application? Do I go back to Emacs and Gnus (where, I believe, the key is "|")? Evolution has been ignoring this feature request since 2002, KMail lets you run filters that can spawn external apps, but it's not clear that the interface for this is simple and quick. Or are all of the GUI based mail client writers stuck in GUI land thinking?

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Work, productivity and environment Macintosh ]

In the ongoing antitrust investigation of Whole Foods' proposed acquisition of the rival Wild Oats chain, various Whole Foods corporate documents were supoenaed by the FTC. These were to be part of the public record, and those involving trade secrets and WF strategies were to be heavily redacted. However, the FTC accidently released a fully readable version of the documents. They corrected the mistake quickly, but not before AP downloaded a non-redacted copy. Now the cat is out of the bag.

The documents show that WF will probably close a lot of WO stores to insure the profitability of the WF outlets; no surprise there. What is interesting is that WF insists that suppliers agree not to sell directly to Wal-Mart stores. They must go through distributors,which increases Wal-Mart's costs. It is fascinating that Whole Foods and Wal-Mart have suppliers in common. I imagine the news will horrify patrons of both establishments: Wal-Mart customers will see their favorite store dealing with a bunch of Bolshevik hippies, while Whole Foods aficianados will be appalled with any connection to the hill-billy proles who haunt the world's largest retailer.

[ related topics: Food Current Events Consumerism and advertising ]

Man deported for consensual sex:

A legal immigrant in Northern California who was 20 when he began a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old girl faces deportation to Mexico under a ruling Thursday that was described as unjust by a majority of the federal appeals court panel that issued it.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law California Culture ]

Federal ID plan raises privacy concerns:

Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states defying the federal Real ID Act.

Commentary over at Making Light, but really, you saw this coming as soon as federal IDs were proposed, and I guess we learned nothing from the Soviet Union's "Great Experiment", hey?

[ related topics: Politics Privacy Civil Liberties ]

The Economist: Banks in trouble - the game is up:

THE old-fashioned financial system was like Old Maid, a parlour game once beloved of small children. The banks were like players, dealt hands from a pack of cards, which they swapped among each other. At the end, one player was left holding a lonely queen-a bad debt, if you will-and lost.

[ related topics: Games Economics ]

Arkansas law allows children of any age to get married with parental consent.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology Marriage ]

I've got Windows Vista running on this new laptop, along side Ubuntu. Today I want to do something that requires Windows executables, and editing basic text files. I'm not sure what in the Sam Hill is going on, but the new Notepad is interpreting text files in ways that are beyond bizarre, and Write.exe seems similarly wackily challenged.

Off to find Cygnus Tools... Sigh.

[ related topics: Microsoft Invention and Design Sports ]

Jeff's account of climbing Kilimanjaro, with pictures.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Wendy McElroy on something that's been bothering me:

Since when do libertarians consider states to have rights? Only individuals have rights and those rights can be violated as easily by a state government as by a federal one.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Civil Liberties ]

County Migration, 2000-2005 (Via MeFi)

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Maps and Mapping Aviation - Helicopters ]

I'm a morning person, always have been. Great vacations for me are when I get to have great mornings. Nancy's incredibly tolerant and lets me get up and do my thing, as long as I wake her up nicely later. Great mornings including walking the pre-dawn streets and watching the sunrise in Guanajuato Mexico, London, Costa Rica, Burning Man, and our own home. I'm frustrated this morning on a road trip. I've been up since 4am, cooked breakfast, got some work done.. waited until 6am to tap in Phil's trailer window. Phil groaned and said: "Phil's going back to sleep." He did. I'm fighting the urge to hit the road again, I want to say "hi" to Eric in Boulder... and that means a 9-10+ hour drive. I'm chilling for a while longer. Maybe tomorrow will be a better morning.

[ related topics: Burning Man Work, productivity and environment Travel ]

So far I'm liking Claws Mail, but the RSSyl plugin for reading RSS and Atom feeds has a few glitches. It doesn't seem to let me stick user names and passwords in, so things like LiveJournal feeds don't show me "friends only" posts, and it seems to get really confused over what I have and haven't read already on feeds from MediaWiki sites. So, RSS/Atom reader suggestions?

[ related topics: Content Management ]

Charlene and I are trying to figure out the best way to manage some "living together" contracts, and as we've dug through various things we're thinking that maybe taking advantage of that (if properly used) societal benefit to heterosexual couples that is marriage might be the right way to go about this. We've looked at some other ways to accomplish some of the tax benefits for couples with fairly disparate incomes, and a good portion of the savings would be eaten up with accounting fees, and even then we're having trouble finding a tax advisor who'll say "that's a good idea" rather than "well... I guess we could try that."

Living wills and some of the other legal constructs we've had drawn up are fine, but there's a lot of societal power in "spouse" rather than "here are the notarized copies of papers designating a decision maker in the event of...", and we've been told that playing silly games with 1099s for services not necessarily rendered may be more hassle than it's worth.

However being, at our core, people who are deeply suspicious of marriage, we're trying to write up a pre-nuptial agreement that, should we ever decide to go our separate ways with acrimony, will protect us. Charlene is, for instance, concerned about some of the histories of possible mental illness in her genetic line, and we both want to come with break-up terms that we think are fair now, so that should such a time ever come up we have a starting place. Happy to share increases in our income that derive from joint efforts, but thinking about what happens when one or the other of us gets a windfall from something unique, like an inheritance, should we split.

Anyone got suggestions? A "divorce for people about to get married" guide?

[ related topics: Sociology Law Marriage ]

Argh. I've got two MediaWiki installs, and in both I'm getting some amazingly persistent spammers. Apparently they no longer care that all external links are rel="nofollow"ed, and they're not smart enough to make small edits, they're doing massive linkdumps that can't possibly be missed.

If we're spending over a billion bucks a week on the Iraq war, why can't we be allocating a couple of tens of millions of bucks to make sure that the promulgators of this sort of terrorism get quietly "disappeared" to a prison in Bulgaria or Syria or something? I want them locked up in some place with "interrogators" that can keep them alive for years. If you know what I mean.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama History ]

Some days Charlene and I feel like we're playing chicken with the housing market out here. Here's a help in the "It's okay to hold off" side of things: Northern Virginia Housing Bubble Fallout. Ouch.

[ related topics: Economics Real Estate ]

More cool mapping hacks: Oakland Crimespotting, criminal activity in Oakland California mapped.

[ related topics: Bay Area Law Enforcement Maps and Mapping ]

Is There Anything Good About Men?

For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Later in this talk we will ponder things like, why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things? But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you'll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We're descended from women who played it safe.

That's roughly his thesis, that male evolution has favored extremes (which is why there are more developmentally disabled males than females, too), some interesting thought fodder there.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology Biology Handicaps & Disabilities ]

That thread on prenups has me fumbling for "a cultural definition of marriage". I said in that thread that though I couldn't come up with specifics, that it was related to the difference between a wife and a mistress.

The tale is attributed to Plutarch:

A Roman divorced from his wife, being highly blamed by his friends, who demanded, "Was she not chaste? Was she not fair? Was she not fruitful?" holding out his shoe, asked them whether it was not new and well made. "Yet," added he, "none of you can tell where it pinches me.

That's how I feel about the very notion of marriage, especially while it's defined as "between one man and one woman". Having been married, Charlene's even more adamant that whatever legal structure we end up with, culturally it not be marriage. And no, I think she's no more clear on what that means than I am, except that, as we discussed mechanisms, any semblance to the standard wedding vows was right out.

As evinced by the feelings brought up in that thread, the notion of marriage has power. Marriage has deep roots in maintaining the culture, of raising children, it's not overstating the case to think that, after eons of that being the structure in which we reproduce it's quite likely that those roots extend into our genes. Whether or not the couples keep their own candles lit after lighting the unity candle in a wedding ceremony, something has changed, the community now treats the couple differently. My sister told me of getting married to a friend in New Zealand for visa purposes, they made it plain to everyone that it was for legal reasons, and yet within a not terribly long time she was on a plane to my doorstep because pressures to have that relationship be something it wasn't were too strong. She's now happily married in the U.S., but it is that experience, and many experiences like that, that makes Charlene and me very hesitant to get married, despite the legal advantages.

Why else would a discussion that I thought I'd started to investigate the legal differences between marriage as recognized by the state and a bunch of separately written contracts and tax structures become a discussion about the cultural implications of it?

So how about making this a thread where all us blind folks can describe the elephant?

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Sexual Culture Sociology Law Community Marriage ]

A little nerdliness this morning: If you're interested in performance tuning and operating system internals, this thread on atime versus relatime in the Linux kernel had some things that stretched my brain a little bit. via Genehack.

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson Open Source Software Engineering ]

When your own life isn't that interesting, fall back on relatives: my sister recounts some interesting experiences with security theater and illegal immigration on her recent trip to Mexico.

[ related topics: moron Civil Liberties Travel ]

Stolen from Brainwagon: Hacking the Hot Wheels radar gun.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Cool Technology Toys ]

Okay, I've been ragging on Ron Paul for a while, but I just listened to Ron Paul on Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me, and I laughed. Well done.

[ related topics: Politics Humor ]

Hmmm... Business Week: Way Too Good for Facebook or MySpace, about elitist invite only social networking spaces. I'm thinking we should lock down Flutterby sign-ups and find a way to dole out a limited number of new logins...

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

http://www.MoanMyIP.com (warning: automatically plays sound). I think she's faking it, but then I'm using NAT, so I'm faking it too...

[ related topics: Humor ]

Leo was recently back in town, he's been living in Japan, and one of the discussions was about fugu. He hadn't tried it yet, but mentioned that there were several levels of serving fugu, one revolved around actually eating the parts of the liver that weren't toxic (the liver is where the toxins reside).

Then I run across this: Vendors in Thailand have been dyeing fugu red and selling it as salmon, resulting in the deaths of 15 people in the last 3 years.

[ related topics: Food ]

udreamofjanie: The EPA continues its war on science.

[ related topics: Politics History moron ]

I've got lots of stuff I've been waiting to throw out there until I get my own blog set up, but sitting here beating my head on the wall at work - in a Microsoft shop (not 10 minutes by car from the heart of the Evil Empire itself) - I had to give in and start this list somewhere...

I had the pleasure (yes pleasure) of adding my contribution to a shared Word document from the comfort of my own home Linux desktop using Open Office.org the other day. The process went flawlessly. Today, I'm back in the office (little "o") with Office 2007. I open the same document to continue collaborating and trip over the same productivity vacuum I ran into at home: The document is so huge that I'm having trouble keeping track of where I am in relation to the rest of the content. I take a quick sweep through The Ribbon (shudder) but I don't see anything that looks like it might be of any help.

On the other hand, I give you Reason #1 why I prefer OpenOffice.org over Microsoft Office: The Navigator. Open the Edit menu and select Navigator (or just hit F5). Done.

(Perhaps I should just do all my editing at work with OpenOffice.org Portable from now on.)

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Open Source Work, productivity and environment ]

I'm sure Walt's cryogenicly cooled corpse continues to rotate: Goth Day at Disneyland.

W announced last week that the compassionately conservative administration wouldn't aid the victims of the sub prime shell game, and yesterday the second shoe fell, when the fed allowed banks to dip deep into their insured reserves to bale out their mortgage affiliates.

http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/2...ex.htm?section=money_mostpopular

Blame the victims, bail out the bullys??

[ related topics: Guns Archival ]

Among the perfect experiences is running down highway 1 next to Tomales Bay in a loose paceline, say 20MPH, where nobody has to coast and the whirrr of the chain and the hiss of the tires on the pavement and the wind through the helmet straps, punctuated by the occasional bird, provide an amazingly rich soundtrack.

78 miles, the bike computer tells me 17.1 MPH average (not counting stops).

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture Sports Birds Bicycling ]

I'm sitting in a "traditional" RV Campground in Reno, after spending last night at an incredible spot and beaches on Pyramid Lake with "Roy" aka Phil, Pam, Clem and some new friends. An Eco-Lemming was there, touting how it was so kewl that Burning Man finally saw the light, and was dissing glow sticks as a waste compared to El-Wire as well as other radical anti=global warming/waste/trash practices. He was from N.E. Canada, drove his F-250 diesel, others there were from Baja Mexico, San Francisco and Australia. We all burned a lot of fossil fuels to get there, a lot of consumables.. a lot of.. Well, a lot of everything. I told him that while I liked El-wire (and only brought it this year, no glow.. sigh..) I thought it was practically as much or more of an eco-burden, heavy metals in manufacturing, lots of batteries... etc.

You'd have thought I had insulted his mother. Luckily, he chilled, I chilled and we all ended up having a good time.

Nancy will be arriving via plane shortly, the trailer is reasonably cleaned up and ready for her to join me. Tomorrow we'll camp on Pyramid Lake (already have the permit..) and then we'll join Dave and the rest.

See ya'll after the Green Man. It's been a great trip so far. Camping -way- off grid in the little trailer is a blast, yet comfy.

[ related topics: Burning Man Invention and Design Bay Area Beer California Culture Travel Gambling Woodworking Global Warming ]

Leo has some interesting notes on storytelling, Kurosawa, and cultural differences between Japan and the US.

[ related topics: Sociology ]

I greatly apologize for posting this link. I know we are all trying to forget the lies. I came across that site while looking for links for my post about the Bush Admin destroying the EPA Libraries and Labs.

[ related topics: Politics Archival ]

Alberto Gonzales resigns:

Let me say that it's been one of my greatest privileges to lead the Department of Justice. I have great admiration and respect for the men and women who work here. I have made a point as attorney general to personally meet as many of them as possible, and today I want to again thank them for their service to our nation.

It is through their continued work that our country and our communities remain safe, that the rights and civil liberties of our citizens are protected, and the hopes and dreams of all of our children are secured.

And now they won't have Alberto Gonzales standing in their way as they work to protect our rights and civil liberties.

[ related topics: Politics Law Law Enforcement Civil Liberties ]

Has anyone else out there played with stevia, and does anyone else taste it primarily as bitter? Charlene's been playing with various diet things, and yesterday I made a faux custard (agar agar, arrow root, yellow squash(?), among other things), attempting to follow a recipe religiously. We ended up enjoying the unsweetened version, hating the stevia version. I think I'm more sensitive to the flavor than Charlene is, but it just doesn't taste sweet to me.

Go read today's XKCD.

How long can we keep this silliness up? SFGate article about trouble selling a house in Oakland:

The house is now worth $425,000, $100,000 more than they owe on the mortgage.

And yet:

Even cutting the price wouldn't help, Dresser said, unless it were a "fire-sale" slashing of $100,000. "Then they'd have no house and no money," she said.

I mean, how the hell can you type that with a straight face? The house is worth what you can get for it, not $425k, and if what you can get for it is $325k, then it's not worth $100k more than they owe on the mortgage.

[ related topics: Bay Area moron Journalism and Media Real Estate ]

The Complete History of Lemmings, that great little computer game, from fitting a readable walking character into an 8x8 image to the controversy over the "all the 6s" level.

[ related topics: Games ]

Another way to evaluate real estate quickly: WalkScore.com takes an address and pops up a map with assorted walkable necessities nearby and gives you a score based on how accessible they are.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping Real Estate ]

Otterbox: Rugged cases that let you use your PDA in harsh environments.

No Sex, Please, We're - Um,... Liberal Bloggers:

Everyone talked about how the government lied to get us into a destructive war 10,000 miles away. No one talked about how the government lies to keep us in a destructive war against a gigantic, demonic, phantom army of alleged sexual predators, porn addicts, and swingers.

Sexuality.About.Com: The (Disappointing) Sexual Politics of Liberal Bloggers

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Sexual Culture History moron ]

Scott Rosenberg on the mess that the New York Times is in now that its archives are searchable, and people are starting to fact-check the archives. Welcome to the weblog world, guys, accountability's a bitch, ain't it?

[ related topics: Weblogs Journalism and Media Net Culture ]

New study finds married men do less housework than live-in boyfriends:

"Our research suggests that couples across many countries are influenced by similar factors when deciding how to divide the housework," she says. "It's the way the society has defined what being married means, the institution itself, that affects behavior."

Via

[ related topics: Sociology Marriage ]

You may have seen this video allegedly of Quebec undercover police attempting to incite protesters to violence. Well, the Quebec police have admitted that the masked armed protesters were indeed undercover police, but have said that they weren't there to incite violence.

They were just masked, carrying weapons and rocks, and mingling with the protesters for...?

Police agencies around the world, this is your chance to gain some trust from the public: Thousands of press releases publicly condemning this behavior would be appropriate.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Video ]

As most of you know by now, I'm a PhD student at a big university - one that's particularly known for ecological conservation and research in global warming. I have a pet-peeve: People who feed used paper through computer printers. Anyone know of a good source comparing the environmental costs of reusing paper and using fresh, recycled paper? I'm betting it's a paper cup vs. styrofoam cup thing - styrofoam cups require so much less energy to produce than a paper cup that they are the better environmental choice.

My gripe is that reused paper tends to misalign and more frequently jam in the printer. Having to resend the job is not just a waste of my time, but it also means I've unnecessarily wasted the paper and the energy the printer required to get jammed. Having worked with many printers, I bet the energy needed to charge the corona in the average laser-printer greatly impacts the total environmental costs of printing beyond just that of the paper!

[ related topics: Heinlein Education Global Warming ]

It seems Merck is trying to double their potential market for the $500 vaccine, Gardasil, by pushing for approval for its application on young men. Evidently, there's some loose evidence that HPV-16 infection might be related to a form of throat cancer, oropharyngeal. HPV-16 is one of the two strains of human papillomavirus that are related to cervical cancer and that Gardasil interferes with (or prevents - to be generous).

What I'd like to know is how effective changes in diet might be in preventing this cancer compared to an over-priced, over-hyped vaccine? Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that the vaccine exists and I've been an active advocate at CU-Boulder in getting it paid for by our student health insurance. But I believe that vaccination should be more of a personal choice that is currently allowed.

[ related topics: Health Economics ]

Venice to Rome by bicycle.

[ related topics: Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Giggle: Clowns KKKick KKK ass! on the subversion of a Knoxville KKK march:

"White Power!" the Nazi's shouted, "White Flour?" the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt "White Flour".

[ related topics: Humor Race Clowns ]

For those of you who were wondering, Scott Beale seems to have the complete rundown of the whole "burning man set on fire early" story. Whatever else you think about where the festival is going, I've been up there to help with cleanup, and spent a long time digging through the ashes of a large sculpture that was burned before the artist had finished preparing the sculpture to be burned. No matter the artistic statements and protestations of protecting life and limb and "who owns the man" discussions, Paul Addis and his real or imagined co-conspirators are assholes for having set up a potentially huge amount of work for cleanup.

Frankly I think he was also way the hell out of line on any other possible arguments, but that last point alone means that I'm pissed off that his bail has been covered, and I hope he spends some time incarcerated.

[ related topics: Burning Man Art & Culture Pyrotechnics ]

On Wednesday afternoon I was in San Anselmo with a coworker late, and on the way out stopped at Whyte's Booksmith. Always dangerous. I ran across Cradle to Cradle, something I hadn't ordered because it was a $25 paperback. Finished it last night, and I've got mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I like the concept, the notion that growth isn't bad if the waste products are beneficial, that products can be viewed as processes across their complete lifecycle and that design should take into account reasonable methods for recycling, rather than, as the authors term it, the current "downcycling" that occurs with most plastics and papers.

On the other hand, while they give a few half-hearted examples, they don't get into the things that'd be necessary to make this more than just a happy manifesto: What sort of economic and social pressures could make this happen? What are the downsites of companies controlling a product through its entire lifecycle?

I'll be going through it again, I think the ideas are important enough to try to suss more out of it, so I've got mixed feelings.

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

An ad for New Zealand's "Fresh TV", apparently a porn channel. More non-sexual sexual references than I can identify. MonkeyFilter readers are tracking 'em down, via YesButNoButYes.

[ related topics: Humor Erotic Sexual Culture Television ]

More furniture porn: Peter Loh is a woodworker who builds furniture.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

" Oh no, no, it's not racial profiling, it's just suspicious to speak arabic..." is John C. Welch's take on an American Airlines flight being held because some language instructors on their way home from teaching Marines were heard speaking Arabic, via an entry on Language Log which points out that:

As long as you know he has no weapons or explosives, you could let Osama bin Laden on the plane. I'd rather have him as a seatmate than many others - at least he doesn't drink.

While we're picking on security theater, Boing Boing reports on a moment of TSA surrealist zen @ LAX, apparently this has happened at other places, so it'd be good to get your "you didn't say 'Simon says'" and "next do we get to play 'Red Light, Green Light'?" quips ready to roll off the tongue.

[ related topics: Politics Aviation moron ]