Flutterby™! From 2008-08-01 to 2008-08-31

Phoenix lander confirms ice on Mars.

[ related topics: Astronomy ]

The story of a Rolex Oyster Chronograph that's currently up for sale with "included exceptional documentation". Apparently in 1943, Rolex, surrounded by Axis countries and with a tremendously diminished market, started betting on an Allied victory by selling watches to POWs in German camps at exceptionally low prices, with the additional note that "...but you must not even think of settlement during the war."

This watch comes with the notebooks, notes and clippings of Clive Nutting, prisoner in, among other camps, Stalag Luft III, and part of "The Great Escape".

From Mefi.

[ related topics: Movies History War ]

Since I'm regularly pointing out the bad guys in blue, how about some attaboys and kudos for the good guys: Tom Casady, Chief of Police, Lincoln, Nebraska, on bicycles and their rights on the road:

The seam where a concrete curb joins the pavement is prone to cracks, crevices, and pot holes, so a wider berth may be needed. Some roadways have drainage grates that will swallow a 1" tire and wheel. A row of parallel-parked cars is risky, and cyclists generally need to move out to the left by the approximate length of a 1972 Monte Carlo's door. The right-hand side of the roadway is impractical when you are preparing a lane change, a left turn, or getting positioned at an intersection to avoid right-turning cars from cutting across your path. Moving away from the right side in these circumstances complies with the "close as practicable" rule in the law, and motorists just need to deal with that, treating cyclists with the same respect as any other vehicle.

And he follows up with some surprise that cyclists think police officers don't get it:

Stow the stereotypes, and I suspect you'll find that most police officers are well aware of the content in yesterdays post, would render the same advice, and are generally inclined to support and defend cyclists rights to use the road like any other vehicle, as established in their State and local laws. ...

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Bicycling ]

DHS clarifies their rules and behavior on laptops and other electronic devices at the border of the United States:

Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop's contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons ...

ie: You take it over the border, it's theirs if they want it for as long as they want it. If you care about your data, encrypt it and send it via the internet, not on physical media.

[ related topics: Politics Privacy Cryptography ]

For the past day or two, Charlene has spent some time trying to figure out the supply chain for various vitamin manufacturers. The results have been fascinating, I think she's going to try to find some way to write this up in a much more comprehensive form as her database grows, but here's a few tidbits:

• Vitamin Shoppe uses Nature's Value as a contract manufacturer. Nature's Value uses ADM as one of their vendors, but you'll notice that everything on that page is a graphic, so if you search for "Nature's Value" and "Archer Daniels Midland" you'll find pretty much nothing (except, now, for this page).
• Drugfarm Laboratories is an Indian company that'll happily build you vitamins or other supplements, either to your specs, or their stock products for private label. Venus Pharmaceuticals is a New York company that'll do the same.
• Nutraceutical International has various brands, including Solaray and Pioneer. Because they don't elaborate much on their web site about "Pioneer" other than noting it as a brand, I'm not sure if that's the same as Pioneer Nutrtional, "Located in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts ..." (Nutraceutical International is in Park City Utah) but it doesn't seem implausible, especially since the chain also leads to Ultimate Nutrition of Farmington Connecticut. In fairness, it's perfectly reasonable that each of these brands started as independent companies in each of these regions before being brought under the big umbrella.
• It's also interesting trying to find the same product under two different labels. "B-Complex" formulations, for instance, vary substantially from brand to brand, one will have 2x the thiamine and half the niacin of another, clearly the science backing up one formulation or combination versus another isn't conclusive.

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design Databases Economics ]

Re-discovered in searching for more stuff on vitamin manufacturing, Penis Reduction Pills, boldly labeled placebo.

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture ]

Hey, any one out there know where to find the FDA or USDA definitions for "food grade" and "feed grade", bonus points for "pharmaceutical grade". Barring those, industry group or other regulatory agency definitions would be handy.

[ related topics: Health Food ]

Fascinating and worth at least a skim: Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com. Following up on the recent suicide of a suspect in the anthrax mailings, where that suspect got his anthrax, and how ABC News initially reported 4 sources offering evidence tying the anthrax to Iraq, evidence that was later shown to be completely false.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Journalism and Media Salon magazine ]

We all know that the regime won't allow the photographing of coffins returning from Iraq/Afghanistan. "On The Media" (http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/08/01/04) ran a piece about the only journalist who had the temerity to graphically document the cost of the war to the US soldiers. Zoriah Miller (http://www.zoriah.net/blog/2008/07/4000-us-combat.html) has been barred permanently from "embedding" with US forces for publishing photos of combat casualties.

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs History Journalism and Media Beer ]

I found a lot of hard ways of doing this online, editing PPP Chat scripts, etc.. This is the Easy Way To Ubuntu Using a Cell Modem using a Verizon USB727 (Airprime) USB connected cell modem.

"...Keeping the sales droids from trying to configure WiFi or networking while at a clients location: Priceless."

I have it connecting at system boot-up if it's plugged in. I just poked around for PPP utilities and saw "pppconfig" ran it and it worked, first time.

[ related topics: Shoes ]

Cleaning the house with this two and a third hour NPR recording of Tom Waits' performance from Atlanta on his Glitter and Doom tour.

[ related topics: Music ]

Ages ago I found copies of Total Annihilation for Forest and me. It gave us a common game that we could play on whatever hardware was handy. Over the years we've tried various packs, and disks have become scratched and hardware and software have moved on, and it became a struggle to get the thing working any time we got together.

Yesterday evening we set up Spring, the successor to "TA Spring" which was an attempt to build an open source version of Total Annihilation. Spring is much much more, and it looks like the modders are taking it interesting places.

Nowadays I only play games when it's a good way to relate to a nephew or pseudo-nephew, but if you've got the RTS itch it's a danged nice multi-player real-time strategy game. It'd be nice if they toned back the explosions just a bit more on the "minimal detail" modes, 'cause the 3d-ness of those works pretty well until lots of things start going boom, but I'm impressed.

[ related topics: Free Software Games Open Source Software Engineering Graphics ]

(Full sized images, 12440 x 2771 and 9760 x 2882 respectively, available if you click through and then click through again. If, for any reason, you want really high res versions of some mediocre shots)

When using Hugin to stitch panoramas under Linux(or whatever), stitch "into a high quality TIFF file" to enable blending between images. Any other setting, including high quality JPEG, results in harsh transitions between the stitched images. Seems weird that standard workflow requires an extra image conversion step at the end, but that's what works, and I suppose that I could supply a patch. At any rate, Hugin has supplanted the Canon PhotoStitcher for panoramas for me.

Now if I can just figure out how to get qtpfsgui to handle subtle rotations (4 pixels or so over 4k pixels) rather than just shifts and translates I could get some HDR stuff going too. I'm actually wondering if I can use pfstools to do the initial alignment in conjunction with the HDR composite, and then use something else, maybe Hugin, for the tone mapping.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Photography Open Source Maps and Mapping ]

This bacon frying alarm clock combines it all.

[ related topics: Food - Bacon ]

And my first HDR image, alignment done with Hugin from 4 initial images taken with a Canon PowerShot G9 on a dinky little wannabe tripod (whence some of my earlier rotation problems), tone mapping done with qtpfsgui, the Reinhard05 algorithm. Obviously there's a lot more tweaking that could be done, but this looks pretty real, and I think captures detail all the way through the dynamic range (modulo your monitor's gamma).

Poison oak in a larger tree, in Annadel State Park.

[ related topics: Photography Open Source ]

Charlene's out of town this week, and with the arm out of commission I decided to swing a little personal code in the evening. I started out toying with the Google App Engine, but after a few references that it really wanted to be Django when it grew up, and that "...it is possible to use nearly the entire Django stack on Google App Engine.", I decided to start with Django.

Much has changed since this tutorial was written, but I think I've got a grasp on things, and maybe tomorrow evening I'll see if I can start to see how the Flutterby CMS would look in Django. I think much of it should be reworking HTML templates, with the only really hard part being the user input management structure, where I put a lot of time into making sure that y'all (generically) couldn't sneak nasty JavaScript or what-have-you into comments.

Not that we've ever really been a rich enough target for that.

But I also like the way they approach their data model...

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Open Source Software Engineering ]

Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research, Stephen L. Macknik, Mac King, James Randi, Apollo Robbins, Teller, John Thompson & Susana Martinez-Conde1 (Via elf, but don't go there unless you've already taken The Awareness Test).

Anti-news: guardian.co.uk: Kids need the adventure of 'risky' play.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

It is not true that all sucky computer programs are Java applications, but I've yet to find evidence to refute the converse.

[ related topics: Software Engineering moron ]

Interesting statistics of the moment, from the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics Criminal Offenders Statistics: Recidivism rate in the general released-from-prison population, 67.5% re-arrested, 46.9% re-convicted, and 25.4% re-sentenced. Among sex offenders, 43% were likely to be re-arrested, but only 5.3% were likely to be arrested for another sex crime.

Of course that's four times more likely than any other person released from prison is likely to be to commit a sex crime, 1.3%, but it's something to think about in the context of, say, the details of sex offenders by any address in California.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law Law Enforcement California Culture ]

Following up on major McCain campaign contributor Kathy Hilton calling bullshit on the McCain ad that showed Obama alongside Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, we have this slice of awesome: Paris Hilton responds to the John McCain ad (Via).

I'll see you at the debates, bitches.

(Added: alternate link to the video)

[ related topics: Politics Humor Pop Culture ]

Forbes reports on the Parents Television Council's "Happily Never After" study of prime time television:

"Today's prime-time television programming is not merely indifferent to the institution of marriage and the stabilizing role it plays in our society," the study reports, "it seems to be actively seeking to undermine marriage by consistently painting it in a negative light."

As a television non-watcher I have trouble second-guessing this study, but, yeah, I'm sure that the "Everybody Loves Raymond" portrayal of marriage is just awful compared to, say, "The Honeymooners" ("Bang, zoom, straight to the moon!" and "One of these days … one of these days … POW, right in the kisser!") or "I Love Lucy".

Gloria Brame has a few additional comments.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Technology and Culture Sociology Current Events Television Marriage ]

Ahh, Microsoft's notYet .NET platform, making issues like deploying software on all extant Linux distributions look trivial in comparison. How the hell can one platform have so many diverse and malfunctioning components?

[ related topics: Microsoft Software Engineering moron ]

JT keeps reminding me to not tar all law enforcement officers with the brush that should be reserved for a few bad ones (today's example), I often have to remind myself the same thing over college students kids these days. 26 cheerleaders freed from elevator after prank.

The girls, who were attending cheerleading camp, told rescuers that they had decided as a prank to see how many of them would fit into an elevator, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

Edit: The Austin American-Statesman points out that these were 14-17 year olds, which makes the stupidity a little more understandable, but still...

In fairness to college students everywhere, these are Texas cheerleaders, but how far out of high school do you have to be to think that maybe overloading an elevator isn't a good idea?

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

Note, if you are screwing around with an Atmel AT91SAM9XE-EK ARM9 evaluation kit, trying to look at the examples or install Angstrom Linux on it, and you can't figure out why it won't boot from flash, run SAM-BA and then on the "Flash" programming page, mash "Execute" for the "Boot from Flash (GPNVM3)" script and power cycle.

A quick victory without having to read the whole datasheet. Yet.

[ related topics: Free Software Hardware Hackery Interactive Drama Open Source Robotics Software Engineering Shoes Embedded Devices Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Gonzo's iPhone App, Slasher, just got slashed by Apple.

[ related topics: Apple Computer iPhone ]

Librivox.org provides free audio books from the public domain. You can record a book, or chapters of a book, adding to the project. - I've dumped some on our TomTom and enjoyed them. There are some classics out there worth revisiting on your next long road trip. The quality of the readings vary a little, but are surprisingly good overall.

[ related topics: Books Music Travel ]

Apologies for my absence, Friday night I went down to LA for a pre-SIGGRAPH get-together, arrived home late Sunday evening, spent all day yesterday in a client meeting. On Friday, right before I got on the train, we figured out that Windows problem I was bitching about, it was like a great mystery story, where everything came together at the last minute, and the realization that one DLL was loading another DLL in its initialization functions, and where that initialization was being called from had implicitly changed, and that the second DLL was only installed and available in the Windows system directories if a device had been plugged in and the USB driver initialization routines had been allowed to run all the way through came in one blinding flash with enough time that I could comfortably walk down to where the Amtrak bus stops in Petaluma.

Today I'm playing with embedded devices and JTAG programming systems, and trying to get my 2Wire cheesy DSL modem/router to deal with multiple public interfaces and a private address that hasn't been assigned via DSL to help out a friend who had been using Comcast, but given that they're now semi-randomly blocking ports and dropping packets needed another set of solutions for some stuff he was doing.

[ related topics: broadband Software Engineering Embedded Devices Trains Conferences ]

I've already had one person tell me how they thought that the little girl singing at the opening ceremonies to the Beijing Olympics was so amazing. Yeah, turned out she was lip synching to a 7 year old who wasn't considered pretty enough to do the actual performance. Not that I needed to be any more cynical, but I think it's pretty demonstrative that the Olympics are opened with a prime example that it's not what you do or how well you do it, it's how you look.

During the live rehearsal, the Politburo member said Miaoke's voice "must change," Chen said.

"We had to make that choice. It was fair both for Lin Miaoke and Yang Peiyi," Chen told Beijing Radio. "We combined the perfect voice and the perfect performance."

"The audience will understand that it's in the national interest," Chen added.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Sports ]

Of all of the bumper stickers on my car, the "I ♥ Pornography" one was the one that raised the most negative comment. Eventually it got removed, partially because the stickers were looking ratty, but also because when Charlene occasionally borrowed my car the school administrators were asking her to park well away from the school.

When I pulled it off, I commented that without it and "Celebrate Perversity", the rest of the bumper stickers were really superfluous, but people have often wondered why. After all, I find most pornography dreadfully boring, the overly made-up "Paris Hilton" look-alikes of the mainstream leave me cold, I read the blog at Kink.com but find the films themselves giggly-silly, and so on. Yesterday evening Charlene and I had a bit of driving to do, and on the way she was reading from Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, which had this quote from George Bernanos:

I have often thought for a long time now that if, some day, the increasing efficiency for the technique of destruction finally causes our species to disappear from the earth, it will not be cruelty that will be responsible for our extinction and still less, of course, the indignation that cruelty awakens and the reprisals and vengeance that it brings upon itself ... but the docility, the lack of responsibility of the modern man, his base and subservient acceptance of every common decree. The horrors that we have seen, the still greater horrors that we shall presently see, are not signs that rebels, insubordinate untamable men are increasing in number throughout the world, but rather that there is a constant increas in the number of obedient, docile men.

That, right there, is why "I ♥ Pornography".

So it is with that in mind that I link to a few bits of commentary about the conviction of Karen Fletcher, aka "The Red Rose", on obscenity charges stemming from some stories she wrote and published on a web site. As all the commenters say, her stories were abhorrent, I want nothing of their content, but I find the notion that we're convicting people for sharing their thoughts to be yet another step in the march towards that evil of docility. Taken alone it's easy to dismiss her conviction, or the bullshit security theater that the TSA and U.S. Customs inflict on us, or the cop who hollers at the passenger in the car that was speeding because, as he explains to his partner, "this guy doesn't seem like he's getting it", but as a pattern it bodes very ill for the future of our culture.

• Elf Sternberg: Defining Deviancy Up: The Red Rose Conviction.
• Renegade Evolution comments on the Karen "Red Rose" Fletcher case.

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

Nikol Hasler, of the very funny and worth watching Midwest Teen Sex Show, writes about trying to obtain "Plan B" emergency contraception: Plans B Damned: The Quest for Emergency Contraception.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture ]

Not quite jam and Jerusalem: Women's Institute ladies toured the world in search of the perfect brothel (Via). Spurred on by the murders of five prostitutes in November and December 2006, the ladies of the Womens Institute of Hampshire England decided to do something to protect women: Legalize prostitution in Hampshire.

Apparently there's a documentary now on their search for the perfect brothel on which to model their legalization efforts. I'd love to see the documentary, but the article's a nice light fluff piece, with a giggly picture of the ladies visiting the Bunny Ranch in Nevada.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Houston Police have "lost" $50,000 worth of sex toys from their evidence stash. A commenter over at Gloria Brame's entry says it best:

The article should read: "Police are baffled by the disappearance of these items, but also feel more content in their marriages than they have in ages..."

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture moron Law Enforcement ]

The winners of the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced, top (cough) prize goes to Garrison Spik:

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

[ related topics: Language Humor Writing New York ]

"Excuse me, but I think your arguments are bullshit." said CA State Senator Patricia Wiggins, D-Santa Rosa, to the Rev. Robert Jones as he was whining. Via this SFGate article

[ related topics: Politics Video ]

A federal judge has told the University of California that when considering applicants, it has the constitutional right to ignore high school course work grounded in the notion that the Bible is infallible. [Via the Register and SFGate ]

[ related topics: Children and growing up Law Work, productivity and environment California Culture Education ]

The Register points to SFGate and a 20 Page ruling from a federal Judge who says the University of California, when considering applicants, has the constitutional right to ignore high school course work grounded in the notion that the Bible is infallible.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Law Current Events Work, productivity and environment California Culture Education ]

It's not news that Julia Child worked for the OSS, but with the National Archives releasing 35,000 pages on the OSS, details are emerging about Julia Child's spying career (Via. And, you'll notice, she was never outed 'cause her husband reported on Nigeria's yellowcake purchases.

From the bottom of that article, the CIA's pages on the OSS, and the Archival Research Catalog (ARC) of the National Archives where, presumably, with enough effort one could track down all sorts of interesting tidbits about her covert career.

[ related topics: Language Books Current Events Archival Marriage ]

RoofRay - calculator to determine the solar potential of your roof. Our house is almost directly north-facing, so we've got the back side of our roof to play with (modulo various vents and pipes), but given our electric bills and general ability to conserve photovoltaics make zero sense for us. However, I am thinking about solar hot water pre-heating.

[ related topics: Real Estate Photovoltaics ]

There's some weirdness happening on the Flutterby server, Mike, if you get a chance would you give a 30 second once-over (specifically, a couple of things like "top" are complaining about versionitis), so if anyone notices things going wrong with the web site please drop me email or call me (cell is 415-342-5180). Thanks.

[ related topics: Flutterby Meta ]

Fingers crossed, on the basis of some security concerns with the Flutterby server I did some stupid upgrades, which borked the Kerberos libraries that SSH depends on, so I decided to upgrade from Dapper to Hardy. I really hope I get lucky and this works...

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

It just needed a little TLC. Even a Linux system needs to check it's hard drive every few years.. Especially after a complete system upgrade.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source ]

Fluffy (insipid, even) Washington Post article about how U.S. rules on "Mad Cow" disease in humans have caused a shortage of sperm from Scandinavian sperm banks:

Now, as the remaining vials of Nordic semen frozen in U.S. sperm banks are running out, a small but desperate number of would-be parents are frantic. Peterson has flown repeatedly to Denmark, and went again this week, to try to get pregnant with sperm from the same donor. Others are going to Canada or Mexico, or haggling with other American women who have leftover vials.

What I found interesting about this was thinking about the explanations "evolutionary psychology" and similar trends have come up with for male promiscuity. This is the sort of article that's usually later completely discredited as hogwash, something that brands as a cultural movement the behavior of five or six Manhattanites, but here's a case where the prospective mothers are treating the men involved as nothing more than a source of DNA, and where the prospective biological fathers are completely okay with that role. Humans are fascinating. And weird.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Sociology Law Sports ]

Wood porn: Gilmer Wood Company has all sorts of gorgeous figured exotic woods.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

I'm not generally a fan of "the gold standard". Especially since gold now has an industrial use in electronics, rather than, as it was historically, just being a shiny metal with curious properties, tying currency value to keeping an important commodity from the market seems foolish. But I understand some of the arguments both ways, and think that Terry Pratchett's recent novel Making Money is a worthwhile exploration of the value of currency.

But here's another piece that's worth a read, and if anything can make me a fan of a position, William Jennings Bryan opposing it is a good start: William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech:

You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard. I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.

Also worth reading because of the way in which political oratory has changed over a century.

[ related topics: Politics Currency Economics Terry Pratchett ]

EFSL, a FAT filesystem library, supports FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 on the TI TMS C6000 DSP and Atmel's ATMega microcontrollers, with the promise that it's relatively easy to implement new ones, just add a read and write for a 512 byte block. RAM requirements are 1.5k, the license is GPL with an exception that allows you to statically link to the library, so the requirement is that you push changes to the library code back upstream.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Embedded Devices ]

Hat tip to Rafe who pointed here. Uh. Yeah. If I'd been exposed to that billboard while growing up, I'd have done a lot more to avoid the technical fields.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Sexual Culture moron Consumerism and advertising ]

I'm spending the afternoon doing... uh... investigations of market conditions for a client. After reading a bunch of stuff on web sites I don't normally search, including places like eBay, the eBay feedback profile for tryork5ifp has me laughing out loud.

U forgot to erase the mem card—man are YOU limber—AND that shaved Midget? HUGE! Seller: bushellcollectibles ( 3216 [Feedback score is 1,000 to 4,999] ) Jul-28-08 10:58

Reply by bushellcollectibles (Jul-28-08 11:15): Only left what I wanted u 2 c - the rest will be on youtube for all to view!

who says eBay has jumped the shark?

[ related topics: Humor ]

Best quote of the Presidential Race yet:

In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.

On Video. The issue seems to be if you can get some token support from other countries, as you invade, it's not a nation invading.. It's an Empire.

• US/"UN" Invasion of Afganistan, 2001
• US/"UN" Invasion of Iraq, 2003

It was a really stupid comment by McCain. At least I live in the Empire.

[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama History Theater & Plays Video Gambling ]

“We wouldn’t be comfortable discussing the internal investigation,” Richards said. “We can say comfortably that over 1,100 search warrants were executed last year and 580 to date this year and that, with such a high volume and such a fast-paced environment, it is understandable that mistakes could happen.”

I wonder if "mistakes could happen" covers clubbing an epileptic man in the head with a shotgun?



Two important things in this story, one... the chief is making statements apparently before an investigation is complete, and two... they give no reasons why this man's arm was dislocated after he was hit in the head with a shotgun. Sometimes making no statement at all is better than making half-statements.



Via Fark, but I prefer the discussions here in all honesty.

[ related topics: Politics Privacy Law Enforcement ]

Playing with wireless stuff, got a few little 433MHz modules that I'm hoping to make do some tricks, but I'm now dropping into antenna design issues, which is way beyond what I've done. Hoping that I can just drop 32cm of wire on to the lead of the module and call it good, but only the 'scope will tell me for sure.

And I have to figure out how to get +5V off a serial port (I'm doing a "quick and cheap" hackup, otherwise I'd drop a USB chip on a board), I think I'm just going to provide a USB cable for power...

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Wireless Embedded Devices ]

Argh. Should remember that saving gas by going to Radio Shack rather than driving up to HSC is a false economy. These huge 50v 1µf capacitors, I bought out their stock of 4(!) at $1.19 each, I'm sure they're a dime a piece at HSC, I'd have bought several handfuls, and when I found myself mis-soldering or breaking leads I wouldn't be delicately trying to save components.

I had the RS-232 chips around, and will probably end up being tied to cheap microcontrollers rather than PCs in the end, so I went that way, but the device has a USB port on it just for power during the prototyping phase. That feels kind of right in a very wrong way.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Embedded Devices ]

If you are into bugs, excellent photos and commentary by an insect maven.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

Woodworking plans for detailed models of construction vehicles. Via.

[ related topics: Machinery Fabrication Model Building Woodworking ]

The Amethyst Initiative:

Launched in July 2008, the Amethyst Initiative is made up of chancellors and presidents of universities and colleges across the United States. These higher education leaders have signed their names to a public statement that the 21 year-old drinking age is not working, and, specifically, that it has created a culture of dangerous binge drinking on their campuses.

Via. Perhaps founded in 2008, but I've heard the same sentiment from the same sorts of folks for two decades now.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology Wines and Spirits Education ]

Mike Smith on the Chugalug mailing list describes how to set up apt-cache:

If it's just for your local stuff setup apt-proxy (assuming Ubuntu/Debian: apt-get install apt-proxy), then change your /etc/apt/sources.list lines from us.archive.ubuntu.com to the.aptproxy.ip.address:9999, port 9999 is the default, you can change it.

I've got 3 machines here that update regularly, I've wanted to set up a cache for this, in fact i've even see the apt-proxy package and installed it, I just needed to get off my butt and get the default port. Now you have the default port too.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source ]

In the future, all devices will be powered by USB jacks, and we'll spend our lives clicking "Cancel" to the "Windows has detected a new desk lamp. Do you want to search for drivers?" dialog.

[ related topics: Microsoft Invention and Design ]

I'm writing a paper about geoprocessing in AJAX. I want to benchmark some JavaScript but the Date.GetTime() function has a variable implementation and may only be updated every 55ms or so. Any ideas?

[ related topics: Writing Mathematics ]

Bumbling TSA inspector damages American Eagle jets and puts flights at risk, luckily the damaged Total Air Temperature (TAT) probes were noticed during preflight inspections by the pilots.

[ related topics: Politics Aviation moron Current Events ]

QOTD, from MeFi thread about underaged Chinese gymnasts:

Next time, let's just have the folks at Pixar put on the Olympics.

[ related topics: Pixar Quotes Animation Graphics Sports ]

Charlene and I took Forest to see Tropic Thunder last night. Forest and I LOLed (LedOL?) repeatedly, Charlene didn't much, though she got a good laugh out of our laughter. Later we were talking about why I found it so funny, and I averred that a good portion of it was how ridiculously it sends up many of the idiocies that are found in many (most?) movies.

Of course that got me to wondering why the popular culture is about mocking and ridiculing the popular culture. Is there really a dichotomy between the side of the culture that's ridiculed and the one that's doing the ridiculing, or is this really about "look, this is stupid, hur hur hur!"?

No answers, just as I didn't answer similar questions after seeing Idiocracy, but I feel like I'm becoming more aware of the questions.

I'm sure you've read lots of other reviews about the movie, yes, it's gross and offensive on many levels, Robert Downey Jr.'s performance, especially in light of the running theme of ragging on actors playing the sorts of people they aren't, is brilliant, I'll avoid spoilers by saying "the guy who plays the studio exec", despite any feelings you may have about him, turns in a character that makes me willing to forgive many of his personal flaws, and I think it's worth seeing in a fairly crowded theater, because laughter is infectious.

[ related topics: Movies Political Correctness Sociology War ]

The realm of the musical theater moves to beyond the infinite: Stan The Man, a musical based on the lifetime works of Stanley Kubrick. (PS, read the entire review)

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Bizarre Artificial Intelligence Baloney ]

The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States has released A Portrait of Sexuality Education and Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs in the States (Fiscal Year 2007 Edition), a comprehensive profile of sex ed with profiles for individual states. RH Realith Check: Gaining Ground on Sex Ed: Five Years of SIECUS State Profiles gives the run-down:

The real victims in this situation continue to be the young people who are receiving misleading, biased, or false information through tax-payer funded abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, and who have missed the opportunity to receive good, comprehensive sex education. The teen birth rate is up 3 percent nationally, the first time in 15 years that we have seen any increase, and one in four teenage girls is infected with an STD. ...

Via.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Sexual Culture Sociology Education ]

For my birthday, Charlene had gotten tickets to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, and since school starts back on Monday, we took advantage of one of our last weekdays off for the year and went yesterday. Around the time I moved to California, the land was being used as an "oceanarium" and zoo called "Marine World/Africa USA" (apparently unrelated to the operations of similar names in Florida), but in 1996 that non-profit defaulted the land to the city of Vallejo, and the company that is now Six Flags was brought in to operate it.

I am aware of the controversies over captive marine mammals. I'm sympathetic to the notion that keeping a 15-20 foot long four ton creature in a swimming pool is cruel. On the other hand, in talking to the trainers of these animals I also see the same spark and love for their charges that I observe in horse people, and I'm quite happy to wolf down a burger. The end result of this short digression into biology and ethics is to explain that when faced with a choice between riding roller coasters or watching marine mammals, I'm headed towards the walrus tank.

So we spent the day in a place now known for its rides, looking at the remnants of what it was 10 years ago. And I haven't gone to an amusement park other than Disneyland and California Adventure as an adult, so that's the standard by which I judge theme parks.

Overall, it was a disappointing experience. We may go back, but only after consideration, and then reluctantly. We weren't quite as disappointed as the folks in this message thread, but that's probably only because we've got more disposable income and expected to be nickled-and-dimed. More in the comments.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Dan's Life Ethics Sociology California Culture ]

What does it take to get a "Wine Spectator Award of Excellence"? Up until Robin Goldstein publicized this stunt, about $250 and a word processor:

As part of the research for an academic paper I’m currently working on about standards for wine awards, I submitted an application for a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence. I named the restaurant “Osteria L’Intrepido” (a play on the name of a restaurant guide series that I founded, Fearless Critic). I submitted the fee ($250), a cover letter, a copy of the restaurant’s menu (a fun amalgamation of somewhat bumbling nouvelle-Italian recipes), and a wine list.

Via Dr. Vino, via Polymeme.

Of course I continue to be fascinated by how much of our appreciation of food and spirits is subjective, I'm not sure whether this is another data point in that or my notion of what "journalism" is.

[ related topics: Books Food Wines and Spirits Journalism and Media ]

Polygamous males live longer:

After accounting for socioeconomic differences, men aged over 60 from 140 countries that practice polygamy to varying degrees lived on average 12% longer than men from 49 mostly monogamous nations, says Virpi Lummaa, an ecologist at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Via.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Marriage ]

California's Prop 65 must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but in practice, the notion that people need to be notified about potential carcinogens in the environment means that there's a "This facility contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer or reproductive harm" sign on pretty much every commercial building, so the notifications have lost all meaning.

/. reports that California's new list now includes gallium arsenide, which suggests that LEDs are now on the list. I can't tell if this includes the finished package, or just the manufacturing process...

[ related topics: Law California Culture ]

One of the things that political coalition building involves is bringing together disparate points of view. In practice, this often means putting two politicians on the same ticket who are as offensive as possible to my sensibilities while still making me think that they're better than the alternative.

If this is the measure of political acumen, Barack Obama has hit it out of the park by choosing Joe Biden as his running mate. Declan McCullagh provides a list of reasons that adding Biden to the Obama ticket is almost enough to make me reconsider the other side.

[ related topics: Politics Sociology Current Events ]

Charlene and I have been looking at drawer slides, we've got a few favorites, but two of our cabinets are going to be very shallow, which limits our options somewhat. I posted a query about drawer slides to LumberJocks, specifically asking about drawer depth to width and racking with various slides, and got a response from someone from Accuride. I've exchanged email with him, the short version is that I'm just a hobbyist building one small kitchen, I expect we'll buy about $2k in slides, and Accuride just went from an also-ran to a front-runner.

I'll see how some of those slides feel, but there'll be some test cabinetry along shortly...

[ related topics: Woodworking Home Improvement ]

Some practice doors mounted to a quick & dirty plywood box, 'cause we're still visualizing parts of the new kitchen design. More here.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Woodworking Home Improvement ]

I've been trying to wrap my head around the struggles currently happening between Russia and Georgia over the provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Leo had a link to Stratfor: Georgia and Kosovo: A Single Intertwined Crisis, which describes how the precedents set up by NATO and the United States in dealing with Kosovo are what Russia is looking towards for guidance in dealing with Georgia. Well worth reading.

[ related topics: Politics ]

F. Paul Wilson: Lipidleggin'.

[ related topics: Food Law ]

Setting the record straight on Bottle Shock. George Taber, who wrote the book Judgement of Paris which inspired the movie, noted that:

... in '73, Chateau Montelena bought "just over 40 tons of chardonnay from local growers" -- about 20 tons from Henry Dick in Alexander Valley, 14 tons from the Bacigalupis in Russian River Valley and the remaining 5 tons from Napa Valley growers John Hanna and Lee Paschich.

So, yeah, despite the Napa label, it was Sonoma grapes that turned the world upside down.

[ related topics: Books Movies Bay Area Current Events Wines and Spirits ]

Anti-news: People barter sex for goods and services:

A recent study of 475 University of Michigan undergraduates ages 17 to 26 found that 27 percent of the men and 14 percent of the women who weren't in a committed relationship had offered someone favors or gifts -- help prepping for a test, laundry washing, tickets to a college football game -- in exchange for sex. On the flip side, 5 percent of the men surveyed and 9 percent of the women said they'd attempted to trade sex for such freebies.

From the SE entry:

As Fleshbot says: it’s called “dating”.

Update: that Fleshbot entry.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology Education ]

A conversation here about printing costs made be try to look up the price to print a document at Kinko's whatever FedEx is calling it these days. Not only do they not have prices on their web site that I can see, their b0rk3n store locator thinks "94952" is closer to Point Reyes Station than Petaluma, and amidst all of the shipping centers and pick-up and drop-off points doesn't return their actual location in Petaluma unless you check off everything but the "FedEx Kinko's" box.

How can a company that generally gets it fairly right be so clueless?

[ related topics: Business Bay Area ]

Mark Hershberger has an entry worth reading: Why Create? and how to avoid the black hole of "productivity" which riffs on _why's recent twitter:

when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.

And while I'm just ripping off content from Mark, he also links to winterspeak riffing on a profile of traffic engineer Hans Monderman which noted:

They also found, in surveys, that residents, despite the measurable increase in safety, perceived the place to be more dangerous. This was music to Monderman’s ears. If they had not felt less secure, he said, he “would have changed it immediately.”

and

“When government takes over the responsibility from citizens, the citizens can’t develop their own values anymore,” he told me. “So when you want people to develop their own values in how to cope with social interactions between people, you have to give them freedom.”

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Privacy moron Writing Work, productivity and environment Civil Liberties ]

Okay, this is totally non-seasonal, but come next spring I've gotta remember it. The Planet Karen comic strip muses on the oddities of Easter mythology, leading me to think that I need to get this crucifix mold and do those instead of bunnies.

Just to be authentic.

[ related topics: Religion Chocolate ]

'Three Pony Rule' Invoked to Cut Former NFL Player's Monthly $18K Child Support (Via):

While acknowledging there are unique problems with determining the reasonable needs of children of high-earning families, the court said trial judges should nevertheless avoid overindulgence -- citing the doctrine of In re Patterson, 920 P.2d 450 (Kan. App. 1996), that "no child, no matter how wealthy the parents, needs to be provided [with] more than three ponies."

Interesting note on a court taking steps to reduce child support and alimony payments.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Law Sports ]

I wish it went deeper, and I hope that they continue to follow the story, but here's an interesting little article about SF police, community activists, and the Glide Memorial Church trying to negotiate ways to keep drug dealing out of the food line.

[ related topics: Religion Health Food Bay Area Law Enforcement Community ]

Random for Eric: 8 great Google Earth scientific discoveries.

[ related topics: Maps & Mapping ]

Gloria Brame has a picture of a bondage cake, and I thought "what could be more Flutterby than mixing sex and pastries?"

[ related topics: Erotic Food - Cake ]

Mark Hershberger passed along the story of these Feminist in Training stickers, with the expectation that I'd comment a bit.

It's the tale of a couple of women at MIT who noticed a laptop that had a yellow sticker on it. The text read "Babe crossing next 5km", and the associated icon was three women in a line, you can tell that the stick figures are women because of the breasts and ponytails, on hands and knees.

They talked with the owner, told him what they found offensive about the sticker (and I wish the article gave a little more detail there), and worked with the owner to come up with a solution, which was a circle with a slash to go over the existing sticker, with the label "feminist in training" across the slash.

So, what to comment on? I understand why the women in question found the initial sticker in poor taste, I did, and it reminded me of the cover to the "Snoop Doggy Dogg Doggystyle" album, but I'm not sure that the "solution", the big negative slashed circle, speaks to me either.

A young woman across the street has a bumper sticker that I think is kind of cool, it's done in the style of the chrome buxom woman on the iconic mud flaps, except she's holding a book. We know that librarians are hawt, but I like that sticker because it takes the trashy image and says "no, you want really sexy, make her smart".

The slashed circle, on the other hand, isn't opening a dialog, isn't asking why that imagery happened to appeal to the laptop's owner, it's saying "no! bad dog! get down!". Which, I suppose, is why I'd like to hear his side of the story as well.

[ related topics: Books Sexual Culture Political Correctness Sociology ]

Ouch: Shadow forwarded along this successful setting of the world mountain bike speed record, 107MPH, but Eric Barrone's bike broke in half shortly after he passed the speed sensor. He survived with a couple of broken ribs, but... downhill mountain bikers are nuts!

[ related topics: Video Bicycling ]

Suspended cop: Sex with prostitute wasn't fun, it was work (Via)

[ related topics: Sexual Culture moron Law Enforcement ]