Flutterby™! From 2007-10-01 to 2007-10-31

$.89AUS to $1US. The good news is another few weeks of this and China will be coming to us for cheap labor... except for all of that money we owe them.

Anyone remember when the U.S. wasn't running a monster deficit and spending itself into oblivion?

[ related topics: Current Events Currency ]

Sean Conner rambles about the state of the U.S. healthcare system for a bit. Yeah, what he said.

Charlene has had various tribulations with mainstream healthcare, and has kept me well exposed to various "alternative medicine" systems. The thing that blows me away is how ridiculously (and self-assuredly) wrong the mainstream system is much of the time. I'm sure that in a hundred years people will look back at our medical theories and systems with the same amazed bemusement as we look back on the theories of chemistry of, say, the mid 1700s, phlogiston and all.

A defector is claiming that Burma's junta has executed thousands of monks (via)

[ related topics: Politics Current Events ]

In light of Dan's recent M$-Rants^(tm), when a friend shared this link, I thought, it needs be be posted om Flutterby. http://worsethanfailure.com

Worse Than Failure: Curious Perversions in Information Technology - This may be worth checking out and adding to often.

Duplicated post from meuon. Please delete this Dan!

A bizarre ad has been appearing the the Red Eye Chicago's freebie newspaper, run by one of the big dailies:

Heroin & Pain Pill Addiction

Same Day Dosing

Low Cost & Confidential

Compassionate Staff

All Public transportation at Front Door

FREE VitaminPack Daily

FREE Gourmet Coffee

FREE Phone use (local & Long Distance)

FREE Week of Services on Your Birthday

FREE Seven Day bus pass for joining when you mention this Ad

Sundance Methadone Treatment Center 4545 N. Broadway. Chicago

We're here to help, not judge

Gosh, it makes me want to try some smack just to check it out!

[ related topics: Drugs Journalism and Media ]

Today, on Security Theater, we present a curious murder mystery: a 45-year-old mother, after getting irate at airport security after not being allowed to board her plane, was hand-cuffed with arms behind her back and shackled to a bench in a detention cell. She was later found strangled to death. Police are claiming suicide.

[ related topics: Aviation Theater & Plays Law Enforcement Woodworking ]

Pacific Lumber asking bankruptcy judge to be allowed to sell 29,000 acres of northern California redwood forest. You may remember Pacific Lumber as the company that was "overvalued" as a long-term responsible steward of its assets until that Charles Hurwitz bought it, sold all of its long-term holdings for short-term gain, and pushed into destructive logging practices that resulted in property destroying mudslides.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Law California Culture ]

T3h Cuteness, it burns: Pictures of a bear being rescued from a California bridge.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment California Culture ]

There are things of which I say "Hey, Charlene, you've gotta come see this". And then there are things I'm tempted to secretly bury and try to forget, because I know we can't possibly afford one, and any further discussion of the topic will end up talking about how we can fabricate such a thing. I know, for instance, that we've been talking about things you could do to make bathroom shower surfaces something other than acres of plastic, without bringing in a few tons of marble or granite...

Laguna wood bathtubs.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever, 1963 vs 1991. Fascinating little comparison showing some interesting evolution of language.

[ related topics: Language Books ]

Hey, now that the New York Times is mucking about with their archives less, I feel better about linking to them. Specifically, to Harold McGee articles like this one: Organic, and Tastier: The Rat’s Nose Knows, about taste differences in organic produce and grains, and about stressing basil plants so that they taste more intense. The blog entry with links to the papers.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Food New York Gardening ]

The SFGate folks are getting bored. They're making fun of second-rate TV shows and their portrayals of "San Francisco".

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Bay Area Television ]

Corn syrup prices drive Heinz to try to breed sweeter tomatoes. Of course I also wonder if this press release masquerading as a news story is actually just an attempt to differentiate a commodity that's largely just mixing bulk products:

Peterson is in Stockton, where he does business with four ketchup processors who contract with about 150 growers in the San Joaquin Valley. They grow the Heinz 9557 and Heinz 9663 varieties and others few outside the Heinz network have ever heard of. But the company expects that in about two years, new sweet varieties will join their ranks and will be released commercially if they pass muster for viscosity, crop yield per acre, and other key characteristics and considerations.

[ related topics: Food Current Events Consumerism and advertising ]

I'd run across this video of seam carving for content aware image resizing, but recently Elf linked to it and Jamie Hayes and Alexi Efros's "Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs", and started to muse:

It's probably revealing that my first thought while reading the abstract was, "Oh, cool. It shouldn't be too hard to create a detect pixilated region algorithm. If I use that to 'damage' the picture and the Scene Completion algorithm to repair it, I can restore an awful lot of important, uh, semantic detail to all those censored images on the a.b.p.e.asians.* newsgroups."

Hell, 99.44% of those images are photoshopped anyway-- not counting the pixellation. Nobody's going to care if her pubic hair is borrowed. The Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it; all I'm doing is trying to help.

Then he took his musings on potentially using image similarity and some of the techniques for figuring out what's naked skin a little further:

So, you run this program against the flickr group 'bikinis', or the Google Images search term "in a bikini". What's the likelihood that this algorithm, completely innocently and without human intervention or consideration, will produce something arguably illegal?

[ related topics: Photography Free Speech Software Engineering Nudity Graphics Video ]

Mackenab: A dangerous orthodoxy, on definitions, mathematics, and the like:

I was a participant in a very ugly Ph.D. preliminary exam this week. It wasn't the student presentation that was ugly. The student presentation was quite nice, in fact; it was the faculty behavior that was ugly. Describing it in detail here would be inappropriate, but I want to talk about something that I think is at the heart of the matter.

[ related topics: Mathematics Education ]

Many of you know that this week The Supreme Court left an Alabama sex toy ban intact. This is why I'm extremely skeptical of anyone conflating states' rights and anti-federalism with "libertarian", but as usual others have said what I want to express, only more coherently.

Marty Klein on the Alabama sex toy situation.

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian Erotic Sexual Culture Civil Liberties ]

I got a new cell phone. Nothing special, a Nokia 6555. I also spent $30 (gulp) on a cable so that I could, hopefully, retrieve the pictures off of it, possibly use it as an MP3 player, and maybe even see if this beasty can run Java, so I could upload Java apps to it. When I plug it in to my Linux box I get a little popup with previews of the pictures it's taken, but I can't seem to download them or mount this device as a drive.

Anyone played with this?

[ related topics: Wireless Open Source Invention and Design ]

Hey, colleges are run as though they were business with long-term interests. Go figure! Admissions and financial aid decisions are often made on the basis of who the college thinks will best be a future donor:

Moreover, contrary to popular belief, it was not the black and Hispanic beneficiaries of affirmative action, but the rich white kids with cash and connections who elbowed most of the worthier applicants aside.

Via this American Prospect weblog entry on the topic, via here, which I think I got to from the NowThis or Medley link feed.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Education Race ]

LA Times reports on a leaked memo that showed deputies having competitions for numbers of arrests and number of car impoundments:

"It's just a friendly competition to have a little fun out here," Tatreau said. It was Tatreau who sent the e-mail about the booking contest Aug. 15. Tatreau said he viewed the games, which began in July, as a morale booster for overworked deputies who, because of staffing shortages, are required to work four overtime shifts a month.

Via, which also includes a copy of the email proposing the competition. Ahhh, the good old LA County Sheriff's department, making the LAPD look like Mayberry police. And it sounds like Tatreau is one of those efficiency expert types who thinks that policing can be measured by number of arrests. Hopefully this'll be as far as he goes in his career, but I'm not that much of an optimist.

[ related topics: Games Spam Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Automobiles Guns ]

A new theory on the function of the appendix, a paper from Duke University suggests that perhaps it's for storing good bacteria when the intestines are flushed from infection. But it also had this note about the possible hazards of too much cleanliness:

In less developed countries, where the appendix may be still useful, the rate of appendicitis is lower than in the U.S., other studies have shown, Parker said.

[ related topics: Health Physiology ]

A lottery is often pitched as a way to support education. I'm all for taxes on stupidity, so the notion of state lotteries is fine by me, but I've also long believed that what happens is that you get a few years of extra dollars and then education funding from general taxes dries up. The New York Times finds that lotteries fund less than they promise, and draw mainly from a set of core players, and don't necessarily positively impact education spending:

But Brett McFadden, a budget analyst with the Association of California School Administrators, said: "It makes it harder for us to convince people that they still need to support education." He added, "They think the lottery is taking care of education. We have to tell them we're only getting a few sprinkles; we're not even getting the icing on the cake."

Rafe points out that there's a term for the situation of lotteries having to spend increasing amounts on promotion: "rent exhaustion". The entry he links to, Marginal Revolution: Beggars and rent exhaustion, has some interesting comments which tie in nicely with Terry Pratchett's notion that the best way to control theft is to let the thieves form a guild...

[ related topics: Politics Education Gambling Economics Terry Pratchett ]

Slate has a small slide show on the history of vibrators. Probably nothing new here for the regular reader of Flutterby, but some good notes on how medicine, gender relations, and the public notions of erotic have evolved. Source.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design ]

Went shopping for various necessities yesterday evening, there's a rant brewing here about trying to determine value and the value of brand names, but we're now a four coffee grinder household. And we've probably had half a pound of beans in the house in the past six months.

We just need to keep the various different spice grinds separate.

[ related topics: History Real Estate ]

Giggle: Bookhunter: The Graphic Novel.

The year is 1973. A priceless book has been stolen from the Oakland Public Library. A crack team of Bookhunters (aka. library police) have less than three days to recover the stolen item. It's a race against the clock as our heroes use every tool in their arsenal of library equipment to find the book and the mastermind who stole it.

Via More Like This.

[ related topics: Humor Books Bay Area Law Enforcement ]

An unordered list of thoughts I had during a conference call with a potential client today:

- Uh... Four million active users means minimum 20,000 concurrent users at any given moment, and you want to do all of this on ONE co-located virtual server in India? On .Net and MS SQL Server? Honestly? You really, really think that's how it will go? In that case, can I punch you? Please? I mean, I only ask because you seem like the type of person who'd ponder the question and then just blurt out "Yes," and I've been dying to hit something since I pressed "1" to join your conference.

But it's worth reading them all. Via Medley.

[ related topics: Law Conferences Databases ]

Note: When distributing pictures of yourself sexually abusing young boys, consider a non-reversible transform for blanking out your face (Via). Or, pedophile is about to learn the hard way that the Photoshop "swirl" filter isn't the right tool for preserving anonymity.

Ahhh, the perils of misunderstood technology...

[ related topics: Sexual Culture moron Graphics ]

e-gulpin'-gads: Google stock closes at $609.62, for a market cap over $190 billion, and Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck is pimping $700.

I guess we know how Bear Sterns is planning on getting over their exposure to the sub-prime market...

[ related topics: Business New Economy Economics ]

Gack. I just tried to participate in some silly Facebook thing and ended up spamming a whole bunch of people. I'm now wondering what, aside from some sort of virus propagation scheme, Facebook really is. Yuck.

[ related topics: virus ]

So I sit down with my new Windows Vista laptop to do some Windows work. Start the computer up. Wait. Get to the login screen. Enter my name and password. Hit enter.

Charlene comes in and presses the power button on her Ubuntu Linux laptop. It's probably half the CPU speed (and half the CPU cores) of this machine. She's booted and logged in to a usable desktop before I get the task bar on Windows Vista, and I then have the random timer cursor for another minute or so while I try to start up the various apps I'm going to use.

So Ubuntu's total boot, login to usable desktop time is shorter than Vista's login to usable desktop time. To be fair, if I'd used "hibernate" maybe it would have been competitive.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Microsoft Open Source Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Shoes ]

Since everyone else is linking to it, I'll do it: CIA man recounts Che Guevara's death. As Che Guevara said:

To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary... These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.

At least in Che's case the CIA guy briefly considered trying to take him into U.S. custody rather than letting the Bolivians kill him without trial. But Che Guevara totally had it coming.

[ related topics: History moron ]

Tom has been having some health issues, and in his entry titled "The pernicious US health care system", wrote:

Idiot conservatives think that it's better to make medical care more difficult and more expensive, because then people won't use as much medical services. But all that does is make people frightened to get help when they need it, exactly the time when it would cost way less to treat than when they become really sick.

My views have tempered over the years, I'm now willing to accept that the constant use of the threat of violence is a normal state of human relationships, and that sometimes so I'll engage in discussions about government run health care (despite incidents that give me pause about our system versus others). However, it seems to me that the real answer to Tom's question is "why doesn't your insurance company have a better mechanism for mid-level pre-emptive care?" If there's really a big economic gain to be made there, it seems like a better tiering system for deductibles and urgent care would be in everyone's interest.

And the big issue with healthcare that we need to address is that we can prolong life as long as we're willing to spend money, so where do we stop?

To that end, I'd like to see the stranglehold of the various guilds broken, have more primary care taken care of by nurse level practitioners, to remove the huge differences in cost between paying for insurance individually versus having a company buy it, including replacing HSA and Section 125 stuff with more general mechanisms for deferring taxes that you can do with a corporation, and have some more options about level of coverage available from insurance companies: I'd rather not pay for, for instance, coverage for various levels of psychology.

All of those things involve removing legislation, not adding new legislation.

Without a reasonable segue to get there, I'm just going to throw in Sean's look at the much pushed HR676.

[ related topics: Politics Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health Economics ]

Why did Marion Jones and Barry Bonds think they were taking flax seed oil? And why I should maybe switch from flax seed oil to a fish oil, negative childhood experiences with cod liver oil be damned.

[ related topics: Food Sports Physiology ]

Is it an indication that I live in California that when I read "Pot Pies, Salmonella Cases May Be Linked", my thoughts didn't immediately go to "problems with undercooking pre-made dinners consisting of chicken or turkey in a pastry shell"?

It's good to know that Tainted Inc. doesn't have more legal troubles than getting busted by the feds for the obvious (florid DEA press release).

[ related topics: Drugs Food California Culture ]

75 year old woman takes a hammer to her local Comcast office after three days of "no show"s waiting for a service technician to show up, then finally having help arrive, screwing up her phone service, and tell her someone else would have to fix it.

The day after her arrest, Comcast called her husband and said they could switch her to the Triple Play service but the couple would have to wait a week. He demanded that the company come out the next day and remove their equipment and told the company they were returning to Verizon for phone service.

Comcast did as her husband requested, but several weeks later the Shaws received a letter from the company thanking them for subscribing.

Yeah, that sounds roughly Comcastic. Via, Via.

[ related topics: Humor ]

Reason: The Secrets of Intangible Wealth takes a look at a World Bank report on why, for instance, a worker can come from Mexico to the U.S. and be worth so much more. After you account for natural resources and capital investment there's still a huge gap between countries:

The rest is the result of "intangible" factors-such as the trust among people in a society, an efficient judicial system, clear property rights and effective government. All this intangible capital also boosts the productivity of labor and results in higher total wealth. In fact, the World Bank finds, "Human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries."

I wasn't going to post this, but then I saw Doc Searls posting on corruption...

[ related topics: Current Events Economics ]

Two observations on Apple's launchd:

1. There is no idea so good that XML can't make look stupid and completely incomprehensible. I understand why they did it, but ... still ...
2. Where the *&^%$#@ is Apache getting started from, and how the @#$%^& am I supposed to track down these weirdnesses on Tomcat?

Okay, one on remote desktops: X11 may suck, but all of the other extant technologies for remote desktops suck more. Why aren't people using X11 in the manner it was intended? (Via and more). Yes, it's slow, and it sucks, but it sucks a lot less than VNC. And don't get me started about flashy animation and transparent window effects with VNC...

[ related topics: Free Software Apple Computer Web development Content Management Animation Open Source Theater & Plays ]

What with Everest turning into some sort of theme park, and the real accomplishments in climbing all taking an understanding of the sport and craft that exceeded the simple stunt, I thought that dramatically cool undertakings in climbing were pretty much over. I was wrong: Jaccuzzi on the summit of Mont Blanc. They win.

[ related topics: Sports ]

Just got my Mac back from repair for a noisy fan. The disk was wiped. They did warn me, but it's still annoying. On the other hand, the front latch now works, and it never worked before, so since the woman who took it from me also commented that a lot of MacBook Pros have warped top panels and she thought they'd replace that, maybe they just swapped the whole darned machine.

Nothing in my user directory that wasn't backed up or in source control, but a whole lot of stuff installed in the system that'll take me a while to get back on (and is harder to back up because who wants to try to play the "what's newer in the system?" game, especially since the next system is likely to be different?). Oh well. At least the SuperDrive update that had been saying "nothing to do" at every boot will probably sort itself out.

Interesting tidbits: If you get an appointment before going to an Apple store for service you'll wait about as long or a little longer than you will to talk to someone at the service counter of, say, CompUSA, but it probably allows Apple to carry half the staff of an equivalent electronics store. You don't need an appointment for picking up hardware (but it seemed like even at opening time they didn't mind the lighter load).

[ related topics: Apple Computer Consumerism and advertising Macintosh ]

Stored so I can show Charlene: DAK (FRS?) GMRS two way radios, with headset, for $59. If we can figure out how to modify those headsets to handle 25MPH wind noise (a foam shroud over the mic? it'd be nice if they came in right ear versions...), that might make a great tandem bicycling device. Via Tom and Dori.

[ related topics: Wireless Bicycling - Tandem ]

Another select a candidate for the 2008 presidential elections quiz that seems to be a little deeper than that last one y'all tore apart.

On female beauty as a depreciating asset.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Economics Marriage ]

Great little article on localization. Well worth reaading if you're contemplating translating software to other languages.

Apologies to whomever I lifted this off of for the lack of credit, it was in my morning RSS feed but I'm not sure where.

[ related topics: Perl Software Engineering ]

Home Value and ZIP Code Predict Obesity Rates

Property values proved to be the best predictor of obesity prevalence, Adam Drewnowski, Ph.D., of the University of Washington here, and colleagues reported online and in the September issue of Social Science & Medicine.

And, within a given ZIP code, each $100,000 increase in median home value was associated with a 2% decline in obesity prevalence (P<0.001), the researchers said.

[ related topics: Health Economics Real Estate ]

Ideas in Food linked to a Popular Science article on Dave Arnold, a guy adapting gadgets to do molecular gastronomy, and a gallery of kitchen device porn.

Yesterday I used our dehydrator to melt a whole mess of chocolate for making truffles for Diana's memorial this Saturday, last night we had a truffle dipping party at a neighbor's house, and earlier in the week I made a strong ginger tea, crushed up some garlic and a lime, and used the vacuum marinator to infuse that into some tuna, which we then cooked in coconut oil. Could have used a little more fat or something else, 'cause it was a little dry, but was way tasty.

[ related topics: Food Chocolate Cool Technology ]

I'm not sure I agree with all of it, but Slactivist: Break down is a little ramble on why our distrust of American built automobiles was deliberately created by the very industry which now decries the hole they have to dig themselves out of:

General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have loudly insisted for years that they are technologically incompetent. They have spent millions of lobbying dollars to explain all the things they cannot do, all the improvements they are unable to make, all the ways their abilities, designs and engineering are inferior to those of their competitors. All of that money spent advertising their limits and incompetency has had an impact. American car buyers listened. We believed them.

Starting with, for instance, better fuel mileage.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Automobiles ]

Oh dear, looks like I've got a new comic to read: "You can do more evil if you stay on the right side of the law."

[ related topics: Humor Law Comics ]

I have only a rudimentary knowledge of climatology and such, but why do people think that historical evidence of warming preceding CO2 level increases invalidates current climate theories? Basic physics and lots of observed evidence says that when visible light comes through the atmosphere, is absorbed by opaque things (ie: the ground), and then radiates back up as infra-red, that CO2 absorbs that re-radiated energy more than an atmosphere without CO2. You can reproduce that portion of the experiment in a high school physics classroom.

And nobody who's concerned about global warming and climate change that I know of is challenging the notion that a lot of such things happen for reasons that have nothing to do with the atmosphere gas composition: solar variations, other things on the surface that lead to albedo changes, even geothermal activity, certainly actual particles of stuff distributed in the atmosphere.

As I understand it, everyone believes that the problem is that this is the first time when the CO2 increase has preceded the warming, rather than lagging it. So why do those in the "climate change isn't a problem we need to worry about" camp think that reiterating this non-sequiter relative to the current theories think that they're saying anything profound?

[ related topics: Global Warming ]

Interesting: UnChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity is a book written for a Christian audience that interviewed "...440 non-Christians and 305 active churchgoers", although that breakdown makes me want to investigate their notion of what "non-Christians" really means. Interestingly, though, according to this article on the book:

The vast majority of non-Christians - 91 percent - said Christianity had an anti-gay image, followed by 87 percent who said it was judgmental and 85 percent who said it was hypocritical.

Such views were held by smaller percentages of the active churchgoers, but the faith still did not fare well: 80 percent agreed with the anti-gay label, 52 percent said Christianity is judgmental, and 47 percent declared it hypocritical.

The article is worth reading, the book may be too. Now if we can get a publisher to tackle Islam in the same light...

[ related topics: Religion Books Sexual Culture Current Events ]

"Wow , am I really that disturbed?" thought of the moment... I'm rebooting a system ('cause who the hell can tell what launchd is really doing?) and I see:

Oct 15 15:10:49 xxx.example.com comp.apple.SystemStarter[56]: ipfw: rule 10 does not exist

And I automatically wonder if ipfw knows about rule 34.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama ]

Carbonating at Home with Improvised Equipment and Soda Fountains

[ related topics: Food Fabrication ]

It's a real-life Fred Flintstone like bicycle, somewhere in the Phillipines. 100% pure awesome.

[ related topics: Photography Bicycling ]

Andrew at HigherEarthOrbit is scratching his head over managing authentication for phone-based services. Of course, phone with browsers support authentication for browser-centric WAP applications - but what if you want to create a service that doesn't depend on a browser? What if it's not WAP?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Get the MacBook Pro back from the Apple store (have I rambled about the Apple store yet? Fascinating job of making you grateful for half the staffing of a CompUSA) on last Wednesday. Turned it on, did some work, reconfigured it 'cause they'd wiped the drive.

Thursday, Friday and the weekend, helped Phil out with some issues for his app that he's running flat out to make a Christmas ship for, learned things about Windows Vista that... well... I'll never unlearn.

Yesterday the MacBook Pro was... fine. Today the fan noise is back. And it's super annoying. So I tried searching on "macbook pro noisy fan" and "macbook pro fan noise". Wow. I'm not alone. Sigh, another few days without the Mac. When are we going to start the Linux port again?

[ related topics: Free Software Apple Computer Microsoft Open Source Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Sports Macintosh Machinery ]

Giigle: What if Google were designed for Google, what if the web site were designed so that the search engine algorithms would use it?

[ related topics: Web development Graphic Design ]

iStat Pro, for a one-stop Dashboard based look at your CPU temperatures and fan speed on your Mac. I'm using it on my MacBook Pro to monitor this bad fan, just in case...

[ related topics: Macintosh ]

Making vodka liquid center candies. Via Ideas In Food.

[ related topics: Food Wines and Spirits ]

Just this Saturday I was trying to talk someone through the idea of using a stack of NiMH AA or AAA cells to power a bike computer that only had 6 hours or so of runtime. Someone's productized it, and while you could easily build the NiMH version of this yourself, rather that the LiIon version, for $50 less, at $69 this seems perfect for the bike yuppie without a soldering iron to whom I'd love to offer a solution, but whose solution I don't want to support: 5V Pocket-Size Lithium Battery Pack with USB connector, a battery life extender for your USB powered device.

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

The OS's as characters - just a funny pic of the day, if you are just a little geeky.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Interactive Drama Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Over the summer three Russian built computers at the International Space Station seized up and endangered the attitude control and life support systems. The Russians blamed "dirty" power coming from the new US built solar array. However, after tearing the things apart the crew found that pins in the badly designed cable system had corroded from condensation produced by the nearby dehumidifier. As space reporter James Oberg reports, this summers shuttle flight brought up replacement parts, including a cable 40 centimeters too short. Thanks to the replacements and some duct tape, the computers are now humming right along.

In other news, President Putin has promised Iran more help completing their nuclear reactors.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Space & Astronomy Current Events Race ]

http://www.ronpaulgraphs.com/ (Via, which also has some interesting notes on geographic distribution of Ron Paul supporters).

[ related topics: Politics Graphic Design ]

Hey, Apple: If you're going to include a compile of "apr", can you not cripple it? Hey, Apache, if I tell you to look in a different place for your "apr" dependencies, can you not look in the default places as well?

[ related topics: Free Software Apple Computer Open Source moron ]

Shadow (warning, autoplay music) sent me a link this morning to this Wired gallery of various bike hacks. Of course I didn't post it fast enough, which meant that the inevitable MeFi thread followed, pointing to, among other things, this Flickr set of the evolution of a bike fish, the obligatory C.H.U.N.K. 666 tallbikes and choppers, and a tallbike with suspension.

Not quite kinetic sculpture, not quite human powered vehicles, just people messing about with torches and bikes.

[ related topics: Pedal Power ]

Interesting: Portland Maine middle school offers contraception:

While students need written parental permission to be treated at Portland's school-based health centers, state law allows them to receive confidential care for reproductive health, mental health and substance abuse issues.

ABC News version of the story, which claims that:

...by state law, if a student requests confidentiality, health care workers must honor it. Meaning birth control pills could be prescribed without a parent knowing.

Something else I find interesting is that:

Five King students, ages 14 and 15, reported having sexual intercourse last year, said Amanda Rowe, head nurse for Portland schools.

In the last four years, Portland's three middle schools reported 17 pregnancies, not counting miscarriages or terminated pregnancies that weren't reported to the school nurse, Rowe said.

They don't say how many of those were from this school, which, from the pictures of concerned parents at the school board meetings looks pretty white and middle class, but it does suggest that the actual incidents of sexual intercourse may be undercounted. (Update: Another paragraph identifies that "5" as a subset of the 138 visitors to the health center.)

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

A look at the erotic cakes of The Cake Gallery San Francisco: Sex Cakes For You.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Bay Area California Culture Food - Cake ]

VC investment is up 8% for the last quarter, but down 8% into the Bay Area. It's also mostly later stage investments. Interesting.

[ related topics: Bay Area Economics ]

Yep, it's Saturday, time for more whines about Windows Vista: In this case, going back to an earlier restore point is deleting my installer source code and random files out of the directories which are used to build my install package. The project is in a folder off of my desktop, which I'd think would make it inviolate, but... weird.

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

Shelley reports that O'Reilly is rolling out the "web 3.0" brand. If history is any indication, this says that after web 3.1 we'll get WebForWorkgroups, followed by web versions based on dates...

[ related topics: moron ]

Giggle: Belief in Evolutionary Psychology May Be Hardwired, Study Says. (Via Real Adult Sex)

[ related topics: Humor Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

Worth reading: See no evil, see it everywhere: The cloak of invisibility renders child porn more terrifying and harder to do anything about

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Law Law Enforcement ]

I've long been a fan of Frank Abagnale the con man turned security consultant made famous by the book and movie titled Catch Me If You Can. ComputerWorld has a little fluff piece interview with him that I enjoyed. (Via)

[ related topics: Books Movies security ]

Who could resist reading at least the second paragraph of this obit from The Telegraph of London? "Ron Cunningham, who died on Monday aged 92, was an escapologist and end-of the-pier artiste specialising in feats such as eating light bulbs and removing a straitjacket while hanging upside down with his trousers on fire."

[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media Pyrotechnics ]

On Saturday I was up in Petaluma helping Phil with some installer issues, and we wandered downtown to see if there was anything useful in Copperfield's. I've been keeping my eye open for My War: Killing Time In Iraq by Colby Buzzell, and they had a copy. I started it last night. It's a good read, and an interesting balance between someone with a Bay Area background who signed up to be on the front lines because he needed something to kick himself out of his rut, so he's both gung-ho and reflective in a way that I can empathize strongly with; a mix of metal-head twenty-something with a dry sense of humor. I just finished a passage about the politics of the on-base Iraqi stores, one of which started selling gasoline powered scooters and then, since they could only buy diesel fuel on base, gasoline:

... Chain of command finally told him he was not authorized to sell scooters to soldiers. I can't figure out if they shut down his scooter business because they didn't like the idea of soldiers on scooters, or if it was because they didn't like the idea of an Iraqi charging whatever the hell he wanted to for gas. Hmmm...

[ related topics: Politics Humor California Culture War ]

Argh. I think I now officially hate the Mac platform as much as Windows. Windows doesn't try to be Un*x or anything standard. Windows is just different. The Mac tries to be Un*x, except where Apple thinks they can make it "better", which usually means "broken in arcane ways" and "you're going to spend hours trying to figure out what flags they used when compiling libraries, or trying to reverse engineer init scripts so that they work with launchd".

Or trying to figure out WTF they're trying to accomplish with their GUI tools for server management, and so forth.

Grrrr...

Meanwhile, I've had some experiences with Vista recently that were like "okay, if I were just out of college, I'd have implemented that that way too", as opposed to the "okay, if I were a spider monkey on acid..."

[ related topics: Apple Computer Microsoft Work, productivity and environment Macintosh ]

More Mac pain, put here because searching around on the web for an answer brought up all sorts of answers, none of them this one. If, when you try to run launchctl filename.plist to try to load and run a launchd file, and you get

launchctl: propertyList is NULL

launchctl: no plist was returned for: filename.plist

Perhaps your XML is invalid. Try the:

perl -MXML::Parser -e '$p = new XML::Parser(Style=>"Debug"); $p->parsefile("filename.plist");'

trick to see where.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Content Management Perl Open Source Invention and Design Macintosh ]

Health Status, Health Care and Inequality: Canada vs. the U.S.:

We find a somewhat higher incidence of chronic health conditions in the U.S. than in Canada but somewhat greater U.S. access to treatment for these conditions. Moreover, a significantly higher percentage of U.S. women and men are screened for major forms of cancer. Although health status, measured in various ways is similar in both countries, mortality/incidence ratios for various cancers tend to be higher in Canada.

and

Indeed, the health-income gradient is slightly steeper in Canada than it is in the U.S.

Also, The Income Gradient in Children's Health: A Comment on Currie, Shields and Wheatley Price:

...we find that the effects of chronic conditions on health status are larger in the English sample than in the American sample, and that income plays a larger role in buffering children's health from the effects of chronic conditions in England. We find no evidence that the British National Health Service, with its focus on free services and equal access, prevents the association between health and income from becoming more pronounced as children grow older.

Via and Via, both from here.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health ]

The C++ FQA Lite:

This is C++ FQA Lite. C++ is a general-purpose programming language, not necessarily suitable for your special purpose. FQA stands for "frequently questioned answers". This FQA is called "lite" because it questions the answers found in C++ FAQ Lite.

Including summaries of the major defects of the language and big picture issues.

Rant agreeing with most of what's there elided 'cause I'm just in too pissy a mood today.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

In case you aren't a baseball fan, the Colorado Rockies and the Boston Red Sox are advancing to the World Series. The first game is tomorrow night. Tickets for Coors Field in Denver went on sale yesterday - only online. Within minutes the servers succumbed to "an external, malicious attack" causing "a system-wide outage" for ticket vendor, Paciolan. Only 500 tickets were sold.

Today, starting at noon (about 30 minutes ago), they brought the system back online but, evidently, with some serious traffic control rather than beefing up the servers to handle the load... The system claims "Do not refresh this page or you will be dropped to the end of the line." I call hoax... Are they actually tracking MAC addresses or cookies to manage the queue? Or are they playing on folks' tech ignorance and fears of not getting tickets to avoid another "malicious attack"?

[ related topics: Games Law Beer Sports Macintosh ]

A nice looking home-built CNC router.

[ related topics: Robotics Woodworking ]

Tampon Crafts: "for any time of the month".

[ related topics: Art & Culture ]

Woot! Violet Blue at Fleshbot: 2257 ruled unconstitutional! More at her web page. XBiz article has more scoop, 6th Circuit panel decision, so there's still a ways to go.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Current Events Sexual Culture - U.S. Code Title 18 Section 2257 ]

A recent ruling against Seagate means that if you bought a Seagate drive in the past six or seven years, you're entitled to some money back. I was reading the postings at DailyTech where the enlightened masses were making statements like:

Sorry but just because some lazy programmers decided that 1024 was "close enough" to 1000 to call it a "kilobyte", that does not change the meaning of the SI magnitude prefixes used in just about every area of science and engineering.

Maybe the problem isn't "lazy programmers" but rather the arbitrariness of the SI system. As Dan's mentioned a few times, SI sucks for wood working. I much prefer tablespoons and cups over milliliters and grams in the kitchen. And it makes very little sense to measure something like memory, which structures in base-2 (binary), using a base-10 (decimal) system. Where does decimal come from? Maybe it's our ten fingers (Latin digita: fingers). However, I can count to 1024 on my fingers if I use binary whereas I can only go to 10 in decimal. And an interesting bit of statistics: the average person has less than ten fingers! And no, that's not categorizing thumbs as something other than fingers. Assuming there are more people in the world who have lost a finger or two than the number of people who have extra fingers, the average comes out just less than 10! But that gets into mean vs. mode arguments...

These go to 11!

[ related topics: History Mathematics Woodworking Metric System ]

As Bush makes the rest of us pay for people who didn't buy insurance, I've been wondering about the effect of this year's California wildfires and whether all that reconstruction will help buffer the economy against all of those in the construction industry who'd otherwise be out of work.

(And, yes, it is fire season, locally we had rain on Friday evening and sixteen acres burned on Saturday)

[ related topics: Politics California Culture Pyrotechnics Economics ]

Yet another reason why overly coercive interrogation techniques don't work. I saw this flying around a few sites yesterday and couldn't figure the right things to say about it, but the damned tabs are still up in my browser, so I'll copy most of the links out of the MeFi entry and summarize: As CNN reports, Abdallah Higazy had just started a computer engineering graduate program at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. The school didn't have housing yet, so they put him up at the Millenium Hotel, across the street from the World Trade Center. The September 11^th 2001 attacks happened, he evacuated. When he went back to get his stuff, the hotel security guard had found a handheld transceiver that had air traffic communications frequency capabilities in his room (and lied about where he'd found it). The FBI arrested him, interrogated him, and after initially denying that the radio was his, he eventually confessed to owning the radio. He was charged with lying to federal agents.

Three days after the charges were made public, a pilot who'd stayed at the hotel previously came back to claim his radio. Higazy, thus vindicated, sued.

Steve Bergstein explains the rest, but a redacted Second Circuit court opinion (mirrored locally) was diffed with the new culled opinion, and the difference shows that Higazy's interrogation included credible threats of torture to his family back in Egypt.

[ related topics: Aviation Law Enforcement WTC/Pentagon attacks New York ]

Closing a tab: Beginner's Guide to Aeronautics.

[ related topics: Aviation ]

This was initially a response to Columbine's comments about Giuliani's recent statements about some sports issue, but for some reason I feel like I'm seeing a lot more weblog traffic this year dedicated to the "world series", and it all comes across as "hugely tax subsidized corporation with massively overpaid employees that advertises itself as part of my locality is better than your hugely subsidized corporation..." rhetoric.

I honestly don't understand why Boston area residents don't, for instance, sit around in bars talking about how CSFB is doing this year, while the North Carolinaians get drunk and threaten to whup some San Franciscan ass when Charles Schwab outperforms BofA.

Y'all are weird.

[ related topics: Sociology Sports ]

While Dan has been ranting about man things Mac and Windows, I have few rants about the new Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), but there are some tricks to Making Ubuntu 7.10 Useful (w/w32codecs).

But dang it's been fun. As soon as I have time to re-tune up my small laptop (running 7.04) it'll be on 7.10, but my other laptop and desktops are running 7.10 and Ubuntu Studio and are working very very well.

[ related topics: Microsoft Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Sports Macintosh ]

Chicago Marathon runner dies en route to the hospital:

"We need maps! We have no maps down here,"

Who says cartography is dead!

[ related topics: Current Events Sports Maps and Mapping ]

Since I'm gonna slap down some truffles shortly, and because I like playing with chocolate, making your own candy bars, and homemade candy corn (via MeFi).

[ related topics: Food Chocolate ]

Ooooh, it's all "Prop 13, Prop 13" 'til the housing prices start to slump, then it's "reassess, reassess": Rise in the number of homeowners asking the county to reduce their taxes.

[ related topics: Politics Bay Area Real Estate ]

Argh. Way busy. Need to make a batch of truffles for the re-opening of Buttercup in San Anselmo, have lots of paying work to do, Charlene is similarly busy so we never see each other, and I feel like most of my contribution to Flutterby for the past few has just been posting MetaFilter links. But when I saw this one fly by while waiting for a compile, I thought of a particular Flutterby participant who may or may not want to be singled out on this, but...

A model of Scrooge McDuck's money bin, the MeFi entry is titled "The total value of all your mines, mills, money bins, and so fourth is one multiplujillion, nine obsquatumatillion, six hundred and twenty-three dollars and sixty-two cents!".

I like the sound of obsquatumatillion.

[ related topics: Currency Model Building ]

Jay sent this along with an "I think this is on your beat" note, but I'm not sure I can come up with anything other than "WTF?": Mother acquitted in case involving daughter's genitalia piercing, the mother did it "to make intercourse uncomfortable", and had previously shaved her daughter's head to make her less attractive. This is one where a few hundred words really isn't sufficient for me to even start thinking about this, the reaction of the jury indicates that the girl was painted in a pretty harsh light:

"Maybe it was not the best decision in the world," foreman Colin Kelly said afterward. "But the intent was to try to stop a girl who was completely out of control... Are you going to put every parent in jail for making a bad decision?"

but it seems like at the very least there are some risk issues here, and a lot of questions over the responsibilities and abilities of the parent that I just don't have answers to.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology Law ]

The Georgia Supreme Court has released Genarlow Wilson after two years in prison (alternate article). He'd previously had charges downgraded from a 10 year felony to a misdemeanor. Genarlow Wilson was initially convicted and sentenced to ten years in jail for having consensual oral sex with a 15 year old when he was 17, has been used on both sides for political manipulations, and arguably saw a Georgia prosecutor apparently distributing child pornography.

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Sexual Culture moron Archival Woodworking ]

Great exposition on the chemistry of Tung oil and various other oils for finishing woodworking. I use Walnut oil on cutting boards and such, but I don't know how that works for people with nut allergies.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Somehow I got from the Snope-of-the-Day about AA batteries inside 6-volt batteries to a really cool photographic periodic table to PhotoGlow - backlit picture frames and ink jet media. I'm going to have to order of these to play with... Right after I extract a batch of AA batteries from my 6 volt lantern battery (kidding)!

[ related topics: Humor Photography Journalism and Media Furniture ]

Junkfood Science looks at the results of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) Dietary Modification Trial studies:

So, to settle the issue once and for all, one of the largest, longest and most expensive randomized, controlled, primary dietary intervention clinical trial in the history of our country was launched in 1993. This was to be THE study to end all studies and proponents believed it would finally prove the benefits of not just low-fat diets, but what has come to epitomize the government's very definition of "healthy eating." ...

The results are in, and especially given the grand and glorious predictions for the study, they're underwhelming. I'd need to read more to agree with all of the conclusions of that article, but the net result is that most of what we've heard from "the authorities" in terms of healthy eating is bunk. Which is what y'all roughly already knew. Part two in the Junkfood Science blog entries. (Via).

[ related topics: Health moron ]

Note: when using Windows machines from random sources like, for instance, just as a hypothetical, Windows machines built up for testing from parts sent from a Chinese manufacturing facility where the configuration wasn't working quite correctly, do not assume that the computer is virus free. dir /ah is your friend, and the careful use of quarantined flash memory devices that are set up to never use autorun.inf, or even CD-Rs, is recommended.

That is all.

[ related topics: Microsoft virus Work, productivity and environment ]

I giggle at the occasional spam subject line, like the profusion of "Not for oversmart people" that I've seen recently, but this one got me laughing out loud:

Subject: X-ray Sex Wheelchair Baby Rocket Cave Backpack

I read it.

[ related topics: Humor Spam ]

10-26-2007 : Taking Ron Paul Seriously In New Hampshire

http://marcambinder.theatlanti.../10/when_i_visited_ron_pauls.php

"When I visited Ron Paul's New Hampshire campaign headquarters this morning, only one member of his staff, Kate Rick, was there. The other six were out building a contraption to capture the unique energies of the Paul movement here. Excitement -- Paul is moving up (slowly) in the polls and has only, to this point, run a single radio ad."

"For the longest time, many journalists, myself included, did not take Ron Paul seriously. It wasn't that his politics -- a combination of libertarian constitutionalism and social conservatism -- were unusual. It was, principally, that he was anti-war in a party where that view dare not express itself."

"Paul is now emerging as a serious threat in New Hampshire, perhaps not to win it -- although the winner may need only 25% or so -- , but to influence the outcome in a way that reflects his worldview. He will spend most of the $5.3M in his campaign budget on television, mailings and field organizing in the Granite State. "

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian Technology and Culture Invention and Design History Journalism and Media Television Archival ]

Back in June of 2001 we purchased a "money was no object" Stearns & Foster mattress. Recently Charlene and I have both been waking up with aching backs. We haven't sat down to try to really measure the thing yet, but as I've been looking around at various review sites I'm realizing that the 1½" depression that's necessary to kick in the warranty is kind of hoohey because that's not measured as deflection under load.

We may or may not be able to get money back on this one, but we are starting to think about what to replace it with, one way or the other. Anyone got a suggestion on good ways to evaluate mattresses? And other purchasing suggestions?

QOTD:

When I rule the world, economics departments will be seamlessly merged with Religious Studies.

Pope Guilty in From this MeFi entry about the failure of the sparrow massacre in Mao's "Great Leap Forward".

[ related topics: Religion Quotes Economics ]

Wow! Jeff sent along this travelogue of a bunch of guys motorcycling across Angola. Never again will I make snide comments about motorcyclists not being man enough to power their own vehicles. These guys are hardcore, they've got some amazing pictures of hardy people and beautiful, if desolate, landscapes. And some scary ass adventures:

The one thing I love about these trips is that you learn new stuff all the time. Yesterday I learned that battery acid stains my pants white when rinsed with water, and black when rinsed with Angolan beer. This kind of stuff can come in handy some day.

[ related topics: Photography Beer Community Clothing Race ]

This one's for Warkitty: Tara Calishain of, among other notorieties, Research Buzz fame, had a link to gluten-free on the go - The Celiac Friendly Guide to Gluten Free Restaurants, Hotels & More.

[ related topics: Food ]

Map of number of inhabitants per doctor.

[ related topics: Health Maps and Mapping ]

Wow. Felt that one 60+ miles away. Diane, Bill (and anyone in that area that I'm missing...) you guys okay?

[ related topics: Earthquake ]

Charlene grew up around chicken farms, and loves chicken. We eat a moderate amount of it, generally "Rocky Jr"s from Petaluma Poultry. To me, it's just another meat, and I'd rather brine it and smoke it or do something else to get some flavor into it rather than just have it as something we cook quickly for an average dinner.

However, we've been getting our occasional beef from Marin Sun Farms, and we picked up a chicken from there. Wow. Completely different experience. Just braised in a pan, that meat had fantastic flavor and subtleties.

Anyone who tries telling me that food is getting cheaper isn't factoring in quality. Go find your local producer who's not just pumping creatures full of cheap corn. It's worth the additional cost.

And Michael Bauer has a blog entry about his father taking pride in the butchering business that felt apropos to that today:

His decision to retire came in the late 1970s when the last company he dealt with stopped selling sides of beef. Like the other companies they began to offer only cuts, often sealed in Cryovac packages.

"You can't age meat in that stuff," he said, "all it does is turn sour." Instead of selling what he considered an inferior product, he decided to get out. At the time, I was shocked because my dad didn't have any hobbies other than work.

[ related topics: Food Bay Area Birds ]

10 Zen Monkeys: How Gay Were The Hardy Boys? (via someone's link feed, may have been NowThis).

[ related topics: Sexual Culture History Sociology ]

According to a Security Analyst (puppet!) at TrendMicro, via The Register:

"16% of all PCs are infected with hacking tools"

Such as Magical Jelly Bean's Keyfinder which simply implements scripts from Microsoft's Knowledge Base to retrieve your software product ID (which I just happened to use yesterday to retrieve the WinXP key from a machine I needed to wipe clean and reinstall). They also mention a PROCKILL tool that I sure would like to get my hands on. I long for a KILL -9 for Windows!

Like any software, the tool itself isn't the problem. If you get it from a reliable source, it's not likely to create a problem.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Software Engineering moron ]

Singapore Airlines new A380 SuperJumbo features double-bedded roomettes for First class passengers making the long,long flight to Sydney. I hope they have a good in-flight entertainment system, since the airline has announced a strict no-sex policy.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Aviation Current Events ]

I got in the car to run an errand today, and today's Talk of the Nation, on selling your house, had a couple of real estate professionals talking about kitchen and bathroom upgrades and cash back schemes and such. As the market softens a bit I can see myself as a potential buyer, and allow me to offer some advice: I can price out how much granite costs per square foot, I've read the various reliability studies on appliances and I know that the high end appliances are often less reliable and less efficient than the lower end ones, and most of the customizations in kitchens and bathrooms are as much personal taste as a paint job. So that $25k you spent retiling the bathroom? Don't care.

Every hundred bucks extra I spend on the house is a buck a year extra I'll be spending on property taxes, and a buck I'll be spending on transfer taxes when I buy the house. If that's for infrastructure, great. If you're trying to pass along the tacky green granite tile job in the bathroom? No go. And it may have been a good idea two years ago to "give away" a vacation along with the house so that buyers could tack the leisure spending on to their home loan, but that's why I wasn't buying then.

Federal funds rate down another quarter to 4.5%.

In a brief statement explaining the decision, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues said that the central bank now judges that "the upside risks to inflation roughly balance the downside risks to growth."

Yep, that's a delicate knife edge you're walkin' there Ben.

[ related topics: Economics Real Estate ]