Flutterby™! From 2008-12-01 to 2008-12-30

50 years ago today, when I was in third grade, my grammer school caught fire. The result was the death of 92 children, 3 teaching nuns, and the devastation of an entire community. There were no grief counselors back in 1958, and a lot of us never dealt with the terrible, terrible things we saw that day. I attended a 50th anniversary memorial yesterday that filled one of the largest churches in Chicago. When the names of the dead were read family members came forward to light a candle, and I noted that there were a very few parents, now in their 80s, more brothers and sisters in their 50s (like myself), and a number of younger nieces and nephews standing in for their departed family members. Even in our fractured age there is a continuity in suffering, a sad but necessary community of grief and comfort. No matter how modern or advanced we fancy ourselves, these older rituals still work.

PS: I mentioned this event some time ago in a post about a related event. I spoke recently with the protagonist's co-author and found that the guy served his time and after apologizing, dropped off the map.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology Community ]

Roger Ebert's Journal: Your flag decal won't get you into heaven any more. (Via)

[ related topics: Politics Music War ]

Shadow forwarded along this story about a bicyclist in Silverdale Kansas Washington who was arrested after blocking traffic while trying to make a point in a Jack-In-The-Box drive-through. I think it's the right of such establishments to restrict sales however they'd like, but I wonder where this "safety concern" about serving people on bicycles from drive through windows comes from.The only thing I can figure is that they're worried about the safety of the person at the window, because perhaps someone unencumbered by a car is more mobile in a hold-up situation, but...

On the other hand, dude, have you any idea what goes into "chicken" strips? It ain't worth jail...

[ related topics: Food Current Events Automobiles Bicycling ]

Dori on what it took to switch to an iPhone:

Or in other words, $55/month × 24 months ($1080) is what it takes to get me to move to a phone that I'm otherwise currently finding very frustrating.

Interesting that the Apple solution is that much cheaper. On this last trip we forgot the Tom Tom, and didn't worry too much about it 'cause we (thought we) knew the territory, but in the details found we missed it. I half thought that if we had smarter phones we could have fallen back on them, but I still can't convince myself that I want to pay a premium to carry that set of compromises around.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Travel Economics iPhone ]

A few days ago, MarkV had a simple mandlebrot movie that took me right back to the 1980s and learning about precision issues with floating point arithmetic, today he's got another one that has me thinking about how far computing power has come.

[ related topics: Graphics Mathematics ]

Jeff fowarded the Mercedes weather-proofing ad around (alt MySpace link), and I got a giggle out of it.

[ related topics: Humor Erotic Automobiles Video ]

Researchers find oldest ever stash of marijuana:

The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.

Via.

[ related topics: Drugs Sociology ]

Five-figure bonuses stun plant workers. The Spungen family, former owners of Peer Bearing company, sold the company to the SKF group and passed along some of the proceeds to workers.

He [Danny Spungen] and other family members signed, by hand, two thank-you cards to each employee, one in Spanish and one in English. Each card was printed with all the workers' names and the years they were hired. The text expressed gratitude for "the loyalty and hard work of our employees over the years."

[ related topics: Sociology ]

Dave has some musings on anti-social networking sites:

I’m reminded of the saying: A friend will help you move. A real friend will help you move a body. But try to express those different levels of “friendship” on one of the sites out there. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but I haven’t seen any site that’s done even a half-assed job of it. In most cases, if someone asks to be my friend, I go ahead and say sure, because if I don’t, they’re going to wonder what they did to piss me off. But then how do you flag your closest friends differently? Then again, based on the popularity of the sites out there, maybe most people don’t care about the nuance (or think about which friends they’d call on if they did have to move a body).

I'd also ask: Do we want to encode those familiarities? I mean, there's the snarky "we don't want to publish our accomplices" reason, but, more deeply: Do I need a database to keep track of my "three (or thirty, adjusted for inflaction) thousand dollars in Boise" friends?

Where the "social networking" tools shine is where they allow me to have some sort of presence of various friends in my life, the continuous version of the Christmas letter. That doesn't require me to describe my relationships to the tool, except where it might let me adjust which version of the Christmas letter I send. Saying "friend" and "not a friend" is not the way to do that.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Heinlein Databases ]

Debra is singing the praises of Ravenous Romance - "Sensual love stories at sensational prices", looks to be erotic romances with an interesting publishing model.

[ related topics: Erotic ]

Awesome: Collaborative editing with Emacs, gedit and gvim. Only on the same machine right now, but there's a roadmap for doing it distributed... (Via).

[ related topics: Open Source Software Engineering Cool Technology ]

Jason Kottke asks if the "broken windows" theory holds online. I certainly think so. I think there's a ton we can do in setting the tone of online spaces to keep the trolls out. It's not foolproof, and there may be a certain level of popularity above which you have to constantly patrol for the trolls or just abandon the comments to them (ie: YouTube), but I think the only time we've had a challenge here was when TC made us the second hit for "French Military Victories"...

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

So I was skimming this article about Lance Armstrong returning to professional bicycle racing in the 2009 Amgen Tour, and then I thought... uh... a pharmaceutical company sponsoring bike racing. Hmm... Yeah. Seems appropriate.

[ related topics: Health Sports Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Pro-porn activism has a rant on the various "Free" but porn-free wireless internet proposals that are being run by the FCC.

[ related topics: Wireless Sexual Culture Net Culture ]

For those of you who missed it: The Cartoon Network presents the ultimate Rick Roll during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. A few notes:

1. Rick Rolling has now been done. Not only on a national scale, but by big TV. It was funny the first time, it was funny one of the times XKCD did it (this time), but you can't top this so please don't try.
2. If, two decades ago, you'd told me that I'd squeeeee like a 12 year old girl at the sight of Rick Astley doing a bad lip-sync, there would have been words.
3. You may never forget how to ride a bike, but, apparently, you do forget how to lip-sync.
4. I love it when a performer knows when to play off on previous work.

[ related topics: Music Technology and Culture Television Fashion ]

Dear Google, love the new "exclude this from the search" and "move this to the top" buttons, however, how about two versions of the "exclude" button, one that's "not appropriate for this search" and another that's "ewww ewww make it stop please never again". The first for keeping Noah Danby out of searches for Danby dishwasher stuff, the second for bizrate.com and its ilk.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

The 352 holes I drilled the weekend before last paid off, after a little bit of rework 'cause I miscalculated the height of the slides, I bent up some dividers and screwed in the drawer slides, and loaded up the drawers. More pictures here.

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life Woodworking ]

Philip Greenspun: Life is Unfair applied to globalization:

The broad trend seems to be growth in government jobs, growth in health care (essentially a government job because more than half of all health care dollars are spent by the government), and shrinkage in private industry jobs. Another 10 or 20 years of this and 100 percent of employed Americans will work for the government or the health care industry.

[ related topics: Politics Health Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

Woodworking porn: A DeWalt "best finish carpenters" entry, a journal of building a curved stair case.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Prop 8, the musical, starring Jack Black, Margaret Cho, John C. Reilly, Neil Patrick Harris and many more.

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture ]

I mentioned Not quite jam and Jerusalem: Women's Institute ladies toured the world in search of the perfect brothel. Now the women of the Hampshire Women's Institute have taken their knowledge to TV, with A WI Lady's Guide To Brothels, and the associated site things like an overview of the brothels visited..

Here's a long entry about that at Sex in the Public Square.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health Sociology Law Television ]

Hanan Cohen did a neat little mandala out of electronics components.

From the Guardian: a portfolio of charmingly lurid paperback covers from a British romance publishing house that was eventually absorbed by the Harlequin group. My favorite is the one about Canadian dope rings which seems to find the most distinctive sight in Toronto is the web of trolley wires.

[ related topics: Books Erotic Graphic Design ]

In California, a major factor of a school's budget is determined by their results of STAR every year (Standardized Testing and Reporting) A cash-strapped teacher in a suburb of San Diego has begun to sell ads on the bottom of his exams to cover some costs of printing and such. I think it leads an ethical question of whether this money should be subtracted from their state funding, or whether schools should be allowed to provide similar practices to allow an increase in funding without affecting their state allowances.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Ethics Consumerism and advertising Education ]

The fantastic thing about on-demand publishing? Anyone can be an author, without having to go through that tiresome editing process: Alec passed along Natural Harvest - A Collection of Semen-Based Recipes by Fotie Photenhauer, and while thousands of deserving authors would love to have the additional publicity that a link on Flutterby would offer, alas, they lose out.

Neil Gaiman: Why defend freedom of icky speech? Via ErosBlog.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Civil Liberties Neil Gaiman ]

Scientific American: What Would Blackbeard Do? Why Piracy Pays, Q&A with economist Peter Leeson.

[ related topics: Economics ]

nonelvis called this Yet another reason to love Richard Thompson: YouTube video of Richard Thompson singing about smart women.

[ related topics: Music Sexual Culture Video ]

Marriage gets better when kids leave the nest

"We found that marital satisfaction increased as the women transitioned to an empty nest," said Sara Gorchoff, one of the authors of the study and a doctoral candidate in the psychology department. "It was not that they spent more time with their partners but that they were better enjoying the time they spent with their partners."

U.C. Berkeley press release on the study

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology Marriage ]

QOTD: user "hotdogsladies" on Twitter:

Okay, I get it. "Family-friendly" means your kids and you will both find it condescending; just in different, wholesome ways.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Quotes Sociology ]

San Francisco celebrates 75 years since the end of (alcohol) prohibition:

The repeal of Prohibition was the end of an infamous era in the United States, when the whole nation seemed to turn its back on the law. When booze became illegal, gangsters took over the booze business, and it became fashionable to break the law. Although President Herbert Hoover famously observed that Prohibition was "an experiment noble in purpose," prohibiting liquor made drinkers of nearly everyone.

The rest of the article has some interesting anecdotes about San Francisco's attitudes towards prohibition, and I just re-read Crookedest Railroad in the World(Ob: "that's not a Harriman line") where the advantages of a tavern that was difficult to reach by anything other than private railroad with relatively easy access to the bootlegging port of Bolinas were apparent (some background on that railroad here).

Corollaries to the impact on use of various psychoactive substances from current laws are left as an exercise to the reader.

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture Machinery Trains Fashion ]

Evidence that I may yet lose Dan and Todd's Bandwidth Bet: The Telly. Live British television everywhere. A subscription service to a Slingcatcher setup. I'm not sure what the pound is trading at right now, but it's expensive enough that you've gotta really want British TV.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Todd Gemmell broadband Television ]

Several days ago, CJ forwarded me David Graeber's essay "Hope In Common", and I've been sitting on it because on the one hand it's a good call to remember that states are just belief structures, and as we watch portions of this system self-destruct it's important to remember that we have the opportunity to rebuild those belief structures in a way that better serves us, and yet I believe that the underpinnings of the belief structure that Graeber proposes are fundamentally broken.

However, this morning Frank Paynter passed around De-Corporatizing the Panhandling Panjundrums, which just points out that the part of the reason that most of us are so unsympathetic to the bailouts of the automakers is that we see corporations, rather than the interlinked economy of our fellow citizens in the central states (even if those fuckers have generally been voting against our freedoms and liberties and for destroying the economy and the image of the U.S. abroad).

I think there's something there. Of course the reason that we're seeing self-interested fat white guys in suits panhandling in Washington is that they are generally just assholes who happened to get lucky who don't generally have a clue ("No one could have foreseen...", except for, maybe, Toyota, Honda, etc...), and who are begging so that we fund their corporate jets, but if they were sincere they'd start making the public face of this endeavor our fellow citizens. Of course that might mean actually changing the way that the automakers run from an adversarial one to one where everyone feels like they're on the same team, and the UAW is gonna fight that one as hard as GM's upper management, but a lad can dream.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Boston Diaries has some interesting ramblings on X11 selections that I want to write some code to play with, ways to get alternate info out of the clipboard and primary selections so that, for instance, I could select a region in Firefox and paste HTML, rather than a text representation, into Emacs (without having to go through the "view selection source, copy that" process).

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Python version 3.0 has been released, and somehow I happened across the /. thread on this topic which had someone commenting about the from _future_ import ... feature for exploring forward compatibility, in which it came out that from _future_ import braces results in SyntaxError: not a chance.

On the notion of Python in general, it's becoming a cleaner more consistent language, which, on the one hand, makes it appealing like C, but on the other hand pushes it towards just being "a better Java" rather than either a better Perl or a better C++. I like Python in theory, but every time I sit down to do something in it I wonder why I'm not writing in either of the latter two.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Software Engineering Python ]

QOTD:

My dearest, you are the spoon of my enchilada, the supervillainess who spreads weaponized love in the sewer of my heart.

[ related topics: Quotes ]

Among other aspects of pain, a good portion of this week has been struggling with cross-compilation issues. From dealing with stupid assumptions, like that intermediate executables (that process data files into other files and are run during the compile) shouldn't be compiled for the target platform, to figuring out which combination of defines sets the path which the executables will search for their support files versus the path into which they'll be written for their temporary install before being baked into the remote filesystem, a bit of my pain has been caused by the obfuscation that seems inherent to automake/autoconf projects.

John recommended checking out CMake, which doesn't help me for dealing with all of these other projects with their own build systems, but may help me keep my own sanity for mine.

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

Woman with no arms is a licensed pilot and flies an Ercoupe, it looks like without modifications (Via MeFi).

[ related topics: Aviation Current Events Video ]

In a statement from the South Lawn of the White House, Bush said, "Today's job data reflects the fact that our economy is in a recession. This is in large part because of severe problems in our housing, credit and financial markets."

Man this guy is clueless... This was the first time Bush admitted that the US economy is in recession.

[ related topics: Politics Economics ]

The docked boats from the Petaluma boat parade, in which Santa arrives by seagoing vessel and local yacht owners see how many boats they can squeeze into the turning basin without someone sinking. Much fun, in a small town way.

[ related topics: Photography Boats Machinery ]

Walrus Magazine: The Archipelago of Fear — Are fortification and foreign aid making Kabul more dangerous?.

[ related topics: Politics War ]

Woodcraft sent us a $10 coupon for December. On Saturday, among other things, we went up to Woodcraft to get some more Dominos, and while we were there we decided to save some money (can't use the coupon on Festool stuff). I'd heard great things about Japanese pull saws, so we got a Takumi Ryoba and a flexible flush-cut saw. Most western saws cut on the push-stroke, so you've got to have either a rigid back, or a fairly thick blade and a handle that lets the user compensate for potential flex with their wrists. Pull saws, obviously, cut on the pull stroke, so the blade kerf can be much thinner, since there's not a skill component to keeping the blade from buckling you can use those muscles for blade guidance and...

They've had this technology that's clearly superior to ours, and it's lasted for hundreds of years. How in the hell did they lose WWII? This is just the right way to build a saw. Period.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

A few showing some of the idiocy that child porn hysteria is causing. First, in Australia a judge has ruled that a cartoon in which characters from The Simpsons engage in sex acts is child pornography:

But Justice Adams agreed with the magistrate. He found that, while The Simpsons characters had hands with four fingers and their faces were "markedly and deliberately different to those of any possible human being", the mere fact that they were not realistic representations of human beings did not mean that they could not be considered people.

And Cory Silverberg has some interesting commentary on a U.S. Attorney giving quite a deal to a quadriplegic man in New York who was charged with posession of child pornography. The original story is here, I think there are a lot of interesting issues raised by just how much the U.S. Attorney was reading into both the law and the facts of the case.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Law Current Events Law Enforcement Television New York ]

Isaac Button, country potter (direct YouTube link), the captions allege the man could throw a ton of clay in a day. If you throw or have thrown, watch through to him throwing the carboy, just an amazing ability to control and react to the clay.

[ related topics: Video ]

Catalina loves Coco’s First Day at Kink.com, a woman writes about her experience modeling/performing for FuckingMachines.com:

After I got my paycheck, I went to my car and sat there and screamed. Screamed from how fucking cool it is to orgasm for a living. Screamed from doing something I’d never thought I’d have the balls to do. Screamed from being utterly brutalized in front of people I just met. I screamed for nothing and for everything.

(Via ErosBlog)

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

The Odessa Texas police have long been known as some of the worst abusers of asset forfeiture law around, and there's currently a bunch of questions around a drug conviction where the witness who planted the drugs which lead to the conviction has admitted as much in court.

Barry Cooper is an ex-cop who sells the "Never Get Busted Again" series of DVDs, and who is apparently putting together a reality TV show, and for this episode he and his team rented a house in Odessa, wired it with hidden cameras, put a couple of pine trees under grow lights, and waited for the raid. SF Examiner article on the raid with embedded clueless local TV news coverage and some footage of the police search (notice how many times they walk past the poster telling them what's going on before they finally take notice...).

Cooper's assertion is that the only way that the cops could have thought there was something going on inside the house was thermal imaging, and that Kyllo v. United States calls that a search for which they should have gotten a warrant. So if they got a warrant, someone lied, and if they didn't.... I hope this gets followed up good and hard.

Radley Balko at The Agitator, and at Reason Hit & Run, MetaFilter entry.

Bonus link: FBI says 15 Chicago area police officers were 'the muscle' for 'drug dealers'.

[ related topics: Drugs Privacy Current Events Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Video ]

I love good cartoons, and User Friendly has been a long time favorite. Back in the ISP days, I swear they had camera's on our walls and were scraping material from real life. I chortled at todays cartoon as it seems the scenerio presented might just be real, real soon.

[ related topics: Humor Photography Television ]

Malcolm Gladwell's Most Likely To Succeed article in The New Yorker:

A group of researchers—Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.

I got there via Danger West's commentary on what this means for how we should credential teachers, to which I can only respond "Yeah". Out here in California, I think every pretense that the credentialing process is for anything other than job security and income for higher education has been lost. Back when Catherine was looking at getting a California teaching certificate, despite having taught in several other states, the local university made it very clear that a California certificate wasn't about additional information, it was a simple multi thousand dollar shakedown.

[ related topics: Children and growing up California Culture Education Economics ]

Nature: Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy:

Human ingenuity has given us means of enhancing our brains through inventions such as written language, printing and the Internet. Most authors of this Commentary are teachers and strive to enhance the minds of their students, both by adding substantive information and by showing them new and better ways to process that information. And we are all aware of the abilities to enhance our brains with adequate exercise, nutrition and sleep. The drugs just reviewed, along with newer technologies such as brain stimulation and prosthetic brain chips, should be viewed in the same general category as education, good health habits, and information technology — ways that our uniquely innovative species tries to improve itself.

Via Sensible Erection. Addendum: MeFi thread.

[ related topics: Drugs Sociology ]

Piaw Na reports on pedaling the Google Street View tricycle (Direct link to picture collection), a vehicle for Google Street View images from places that cars can't go.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping Pedal Power ]

Hey, it's the leveraged '80s again! Sam Zell used ESOP deal to buy Tribune company before driving it into bankruptcy.

[ related topics: Content Management ]

Hey, Bill Mark is suggesting that the predictions are for snow on Mount Tamalpais on Sunday. If you live in the Bay Area, this could be a good hike! Email me...

[ related topics: Nature and environment Bay Area ]

We're canning a peck of green tomatoes tonight. Joy of Cooking 2nd ed, p805: "Be sure to screw lids with a slow steady turn, so as not to displace the rubbers."

[ related topics: Food ]

You always hear of this as the urban legend, as the woman who decorated her dress with characters from the Chinese restaurant menu, ending up with "this dish cheap but delicious", and, of course, there are web sites like Hanzi Smatter, that keep up with unintentionally embarrassing tattoos, but this time the Max Plank Institute used the wrong text to illustrate a report on China:

There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany's top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran the text of a handbill for a Macau strip club on the front page of its latest journal. Editors had hoped to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover of a special issue, focusing on China, of the MaxPlanckForschung journal, but instead of poetry they ran a text effectively proclaiming "Hot Housewives in action!" on the front of the third-quarter edition. Their "enchanting and coquettish performance" was highly recommended.

Hanzi Smatter has a full translation, and links to Language Log on the topic.

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture Current Events ]

My Dad has, a couple of times, pointed out that if we have organizations that are "too big to fail", that we have to bail out, perhaps we need to revamp the economic and legal system so that such entities can't be created. I've long thought that the primary way organizations get that way is by leveraging government intervention to build an unfair playing field. Here's an example: National Bankruptcy Day refers to February 10^th 2009, when the CPSC's CPSIA rules go into effect, causing a huge testing fee to be necessary to sell toys and garments in the United States. Needless to say, this has a bunch of crafters, small toy manufacturers, home dyers and weavers, and the like, very concerned.

If we'd simply kept the ability to show up on the doors of those who put lead paint in the pacifiers with pitchforks and torches, by keeping such things local, we wouldn't be slanting this dramatically in favor of the big manufacturers who can afford to spread that few thousand bucks to test for bad things in products from unknown sources, we'd be able to go down to the workshop of our weavers and toymakers and see what they're using.

More at the Handmade Toy Alliance.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron Law Economics ]

Slate says all mattresses are created equal, and after seeing how quickly our much vaunted Stearns & Foster wore out, and what our remedies were when that happened, I'm inclined to believe.

Power Delivery Systems swivel connector, an electrical connector for 110v power that looks an awful lot like those quick connect pneumatic connectors, and lets your cord rotate around the connector.

Foreign Policy: The 10 Worst Predictions for 2008.

[ related topics: Politics Humor moron ]

Among the projects slated for the house are making sure that my foundation anchors are up to snuff, and putting bracing on our one cripple wall. We just switched insurance companies, for customer service reasons, but The Pacific Select Property Insurance page on bracing your cripple walls and how to bolt your foundation sure makes me think highly of them as a company.

In looking at The Association of Bay Area Governments Earthquake Shaking Hazard Maps, I notice that our house is right on the border between the green "VI-Moderate" and the red "VIII-Very Strong", so I've got my fingers crossed... At least we're not on one of the few borders between "VI-Moderate" and "IX-Violent".

[ related topics: Bay Area Earthquake Maps and Mapping Real Estate ]

Hmmm... A couple of times recently I've found myself wanting for some cord. Might be time to tie a Slatts Rescue Belt to carry along with my Swiss+Tech UtiliKey.

And Stormdrane's Blog is macrame for the paracord/survivalist crowd.

Awesome: Flash drive disguised as a frayed USB cable.

I ended up hearing a snippet of this on Tuesday, and am now listening to it: Frank Schaeffer interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, not as deep as I'd hoped, but an interesting perspective, and given some exchanges I've had with Mark Hershberger, interesting that Schaeffer has found his community in the Greek Orthodox church.

[ related topics: Religion Community ]

Former NASDAQ chair Bernard L. Madoff was arrested on a securities fraud charge Thursday for running "basically, a giant Ponzi scheme." (his words, apparently). Oddly, the charges apparently have nothing to do with his experiences at NASDAQ, though you'd think that'd be prosecutable, but with a private investment advising business that, according to this article, had $17.1 billion in assets under investment, but somehow he'd managed to blow through at least $50 billion, and on Wednesday he fessed up to his employees.

I've been wondering recently about how people fall for scam artists like this, why they seem to take the symbol, the suit, the tie, the smile and the firm handshake, over the obvious notion that, hey, the guy's a stockbroker, of course he's out to screw you over hard.

I was recently talking with a guy who, being Mormon, has put a lot of effort into having 2 years of food put by. We talked for a bit, and came to the conclusion that 2 years without food is probably a 500 year event, so eight or ten generations could come and go with that being a basic economic drain on a culture, but if you need it, then that's the culture that'll survive longer term. Maybe stockbrokering is that same thing in reverse, if it's 80 years between systemic collapses (and it didn't used to be, in the 1800s this was every 15 years or so), you can hope that your generation is the one that doesn't lose in the Ponzi scheme...

[ related topics: moron Sociology Economics ]

A parody of 15 corporate logos.

[ related topics: Humor ]

Bettie Page, dead at 85:

I want to be remembered as I was when I was young and in my golden times,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2006. “I want to be remembered as a woman who changed people’s perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form.”

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Nudity ]

World Mapper - Interesting maps of stats.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

From our hike on Sunday, Charley pointing out some particulars about the wreckage of a PBM-5 that crashed into the side of Mt. Tamalpais back in 1944, shortly after taking off from Alameda, en-route to Hawaii. Image of the report here.

Finding this site, which wasn't all that hard, sparked interest in finding the wreckage from a pair of F4U Corsairs which had a mid-air collision back in 45, and left the results somewhere around the top of Cataract Creek.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Aviation ]

Plushie: An Interactive Design System for Plush Toys Yuki Mori and Takeo Igarashi, feeding back a sketch based 3d modeling system into pattern making software, to take an interactively sketched design of a plush toy and turn out patterns which can then be sewn together. Direct YouTube video link.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Graphics Graphic Design ]

Ahh, the joys of embedded Linux programming: Someone has already written a library that does almost exactly, but not quite, what you want to do, and the constant risk evaluation is "is it going to take me longer to re-implement this, or to figure out why this doesn't work?"

And nothing is ever compile and go.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Software Engineering Embedded Devices - Linux ]

Atrios at Eschaton about the "historical accident" of the net:

Imagine telling senators in 1992 that soon every 13 year old would have a porn machine on his/her desk.

Via Danger West, which added "If the powers that were and yet be could have predicted the internet, they would have smothered it in the cradle." Yep. Progress happens despite the mainstream culture and despite the power structure, never because of it.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Sociology Net Culture ]

While I'm fairly incapable of it myself, I enjoy good design. like this 3 pack of condoms.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs Graphic Design ]

QOTD:

Where the optimization phase is not premature, it will be mythical.

Via p1k3 wala:TechnicalIdeaLogging.

[ related topics: Quotes Software Engineering ]

Pictures from the 2008 National Gingerbread House Competition, More pictures (and faster loading) at the Grove Park Inn web site.

[ related topics: Photography Real Estate Food - Cake ]

"An IE Security Flaw So Serious, Experts Suggest Switching". For those of you following along at home, that's this remote code execution exploit, but I was tremendously amused by the headline: Have there been any "experts" in the past... oh, I don't know... decade or so who haven't been screaming "IE is a bloody disaster! Stay away!"?

If so, can we permanently revoke their "expert" credentials? Yeesh.

[ related topics: Microsoft moron ]

Today I became a Certificate Authority thanks to TinyCA, and I'm re-writing all kinds of user authentication code. "Simple Auth" transmits login and password in plain text, but I've recently only used it for less important things and via https. I'm now using "Digest Auth" which hides the password data in an MD5 hash with other things, and you replicate the hash on the server side. It seems to be the best authentication mechanism out there.. and yet my partner asks "the question" why don't the big financial sites and google use "auth" methods? Instead they use a combination of sessions/cookies that I call "Fake Auth".

I'll contend there are two reasons: The web monkeys didn't know how to do real auth methods, and marketing biz-dev types didn't like the auth mechanism popups or the harder "logout" multi-step processes. The "Fake Auth" methods simply delete/munge a cookie to logout. The "Fake Auth" methods also seem prone to session hijacking and man-in-the-middle attacks.

And now, for a very specific set of users using touch screen kiosks.. I am having to implement "Fake Auth" so that they can login and do things with a browser based JavaScript keyboard. I'm not happy about it even while we have some interesting things like https via our private certs, and login velocity monitoring, and IP white/blacklists.. and.. and.. I still find myself just not trusting any authentication method much. or browsers.. or.. well, as I fall down the rabbit hole or paranoia, much of anything. Mostly myself.

I've reached the level of security Zen awareness where I wonder if I can even comprehend how much I don't know.

[ related topics: Writing Consumerism and advertising Marketing Cryptography Race Databases ]

I knew there was something I liked about the guy: Will Smith on marriage:

"In our marriage vows, we didn't say 'forsaking all others'. We said 'you will never hear I did something afterwards'. Because if that happens the relationship is destroyed."

Via Rebecca, who points out that this is not necessarily a declaration that they're having sex with other people.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Marriage ]

Apple Announces Last Year of Christmas

CUPERTINO, California—December 16, 2008—Apple® today announced that this is the last year for Christmas. Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, spoke at a joint press conference held with Santa Claus at the North Pole this morning. He announced: "Apple has been honored to work with the North Pole the last several years to make Christmas possible, however, we have decided together that this is the last year for Christmas."

(in case you don't get it...)

[ related topics: Apple Computer Humor Conferences ]

Alec sent along If programming languages were religions, pointing out that I'm a Perl user:

Perl would be Voodoo - An incomprehensible series of arcane incantations that involve the blood of goats and permanently corrupt your soul. Often used when your boss requires you to do an urgent task at 21:00 on friday night.

But the last few days have been in C++, and that fits too.

[ related topics: Humor Perl Software Engineering Gambling ]

It's cold here in Sonoma, not something I'd normally comment on but for this line:

Most of the drivers officers saw in the area were being safe, but a few were traveling too fast and having to brake too hard, resulting in the overturned vehicles.

[ related topics: Bay Area Current Events ]

Yesterday afternoon the patchy clouds left the hills to the east in shadow while the afternoon sun lit the foreground.

[ related topics: Photography ]

BBC News: Romantic comedies will spoil your love life (Via).

The university's Dr Bjarne Holmes said: "Marriage counsellors often see couples who believe that sex should always be perfect, and if someone is meant to be with you then they will know what you want without you needing to communicate it.

"We now have some emerging evidence that suggests popular media play a role in perpetuating these ideas in people's minds.

Tracking down Dr. Bjarne Holmes lead to this PDF: Contradictory messages: A content analysis of Hollywood-produced romantic comedy feature films..

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Sociology Current Events Journalism and Media Monty Python Education Marriage ]

Yesterday's excitement across the street from the school Charlene works at.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Law Enforcement ]

You already knew that many of your favorite Christmas songs were written by Jews, but there are songs by others who take a more secular view of Xmas: a little look at Have Your Self A Merry Little Christmas, which was initially really really downbeat.

[ related topics: Religion Music ]

The Plea to Barack Obama to fix FISA has a TV ad they want to air, and they need more pictures of folks against FISA, by 4PM pacific, to matt at saysme dot tv.

[ related topics: Politics ]

I've said before that many of the evils of the 1950s were people, McCarthy, Hoover and their ilk, who loved the United States as a nation, but loathed the principles underlying it. I believe that the past few years will go down in history similarly. "I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system." -- GW Bush, at arount 1:40 on the video. Via Slate.com.

[ related topics: Politics Content Management History Video Economics ]

In these days of economic meltdown, it's easy to rag on the shysters of Wall Street as leaches on the economy, but I keep running across circumstances where a culture had an amazing technology or ability, and somehow was missing the economic or legal structures to use those abilities and technologies to become wealthy. YouTube video: Dude transports 22 bricks on his head. The heck with better ways to unload bricks from boats, hire the guy for the circus.

[ related topics: Sociology Law Boats Video Economics ]

(And I love that XKCD encourages redistribution)

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Comics ]

hotdogsladies had a brilliant idea in response to the controversy over Rick Warren at the Obama inauguration: "Although I haven't listened to Yes in years, I'm looking forward to hearing Rick Wakeman's convocation. Bet he wears a cape."

Careful before you help: California Supreme Court allows good Samaritans to be sued for nonmedical care.

The divided high court appeared to signal that rescue efforts are the responsibility of trained professionals. It was also thought to be the first ruling by the court that someone who intervened in an accident in good faith could be sued.

[ related topics: Law California Culture ]

Astrophotography porn: PixInsight sells software with what looks like a very developed architecture for processing astronomy photos, and has a bunch of cool pictures (although some of them suffer from the "HDR looks like an illustration" issue).

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

Your daily dose of cynicism: Wonderful? Sorry, George, It’s a Pitiful, Dreadful Life

Here’s the thing about Pottersville that struck me when I was 15: It looks like much more fun than stultifying Bedford Falls — the women are hot, the music swings, and the fun times go on all night. If anything, Pottersville captures just the type of excitement George had long been seeking.

Wendell Jamieson looks at It's A Wonderful Life(available in its entirety on Google Video). Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Movies Nature and environment Video ]

Head and neck injury risks in heavy metal: head bangers stuck between rock and a hard bass:

Conclusion To minimise the risk of head and neck injury, head bangers should decrease their range of head and neck motion, head bang to slower tempo songs by replacing heavy metal with adult oriented rock, only head bang to every second beat, or use personal protective equipment.

[ related topics: Music ]

Hanan Cohen has a graph of postings per month to rec.kites (note that it reads right to left, I guess it's that ".il" suffix on the domain that should have been the clue It's the attack of the dueling cultures, Hanan's turned it around). Usenet is dead, which I guess we've known for quite a while, but...

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

Ya'll are invited, December 27th, in Chattanooga. see comments for details.

[ related topics: Chattanooga ]

Two thoughts for the evening:

1. The nice thing about the lesson being repeated until the student learns is that you don't have to pay attention the first few times.
2. Tonight's contribution towards making my Yuletide gay: Elton John Christmas songs.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

LA Times: Vitamin supplements don't fight cancer, studies show. Turns out that vitamin interactions are quite a bit more complex than "take more of this vitamin", and that vegetables containing excesses of vitamins also apparently contain other things that allow us to metabolize those vitamins that the supplements don't provide, and that no matter how similar they appear to be, the manufactured vitamins may not be identical to those that occur in plants and animal flesh. Who knew?

[ related topics: Health Physiology ]

In an interview with Ann Curry on NBC's Dateline, Rick Warren likens gays to Pizza:

“Just because I like pizza it doesn’t mean I should marry it”

Steve Young goes on to quote:

“Mr. Warren’s relating gays to pedophiles, incest and gay marriage to his incessant craving of sex with women he was not married to caught me a little off guard.,” said Ms Curry, “But after the camera stopped filming he went on to make the comparison of gays to pizza, I must say, I was startled.”

Danger West goes on to point out that he wasn't really equating being gay with pizza, because he was talking about desire for a specific object, "...he equated cock with pizza":

But this also implies that if it’s ok to eat pizza so long as you don’t marry it, it must also be ok to eat a dick.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Food Sociology Marriage ]

Brownie Points: Value your sex life? Burger King doesn’t looks at Burger King's "Flame" body scent spray in the context of Dr. Alan Hirsh's look at scent and arousal:

Now, although no odor diminished male arousal, certain odors did diminish female arousal. The scent of cherry decreased women's arousal an average of 18 percent and charcoal barbecue smoke decreased women's arousal an average of 14 percent. Men's colognes decreased women's arousal an average of 1 percent.

The Good & Plenty candy-cucumber combination increased female arousal an average of 13 percent, as did the scent of baby powder. The Good & Plenty-banana nut bread mixture increased female arousal an average of 12 percent. The pumpkin pie-lavender combination increased female arousal an average of 11 percent. ...

Hirsh is the author of What Flavor Is Your Personality?: Discover Who You Are by Looking at What You Eat.

[ related topics: Erotic Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Food ]

A big graphic of the interrelationships between the various automobile manufacturing companies and brands (Via)

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

Our friend Sarada spent some time bouncing back and forth between Goa and Bombay and various other places in that area back in the day. We got together on Sunday evening to make truffles, and she mentioned that she'd been so impressed by Slumdog Millionaire that she wanted to go back and see it again, so last night we headed down to The Rafael to see it on the big screen.

There are movies that give a sense of place but do so at the expense of the story, The Art of Travel is one such, and even there we get a sense of a glossy film, what the lucky American wants to see. Slumdog Millionaire pulls no such punches, and, as I commented to Sarada afterwards, I felt like it's as close as I can get to the slums of Mumbai without having to worry about getting the wheels stolen off my car. Sarada, who spent time there, agreed.

But even as it brutally depicts the Hindu on Muslim violence and riots, and life scavenging in the dumps and begging on the streets, it manages to show such things as "the way things are", not wallowing in them, so I never felt dragged through the muck, or preached to.

The film opens on the hero, Jamal Malik, being tortured in an Indian Police station because he's suspected of cheating to win India's version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, after all, how would a Muslim orphan from the slums possibly know the answers? As the interrogation continues we see his life unfold in three timelines, his life, the interrogation, and the TV show, and see how his experiences lead to the answers, even when he doesn't know them.

One of the things that impressed me about it was that even as it was a tight script, it was never "on rails". There are several situations where the story could have taken a few branches, some of them quite dark, and I never had the luxury of "oh, of course our hero will prevail", yet, as I said, I never felt manipulated or like I had the horrors forced on me.

This one's recommended, especially on the big screen.

Oh, and afterwards we had tea and conversation with an accomplished Foley artist.

[ related topics: Religion Movies ]

Random YouTube of the day: Sara, 13 years old, plays Rush's YYZ, with stick twirls. Via Dave's Picks.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Music ]

I just have to toss this out there, college kid home for the holidays sends us:

...if you old people wanna see me, bribe me with foods or something

Yep. We've caved. Whatever he wants for dinner.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Education ]

Next time you call tech support, you will get this person.

Meanwhile, whatever your holiday, enjoy it with someone you love.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

Merry Christmas from The Wet Spots (warning: risque):

(Via)

[ related topics: Weblogs Movies ]

From "A Christmas Story": "My father worked in profanity the way other artists would work in oils or clay"

Toot, blurb rattle fras camel flurt! You blotter battle feast jerk up brat! Omyvon sak von ratter bottom botter...

You polly wop wapner! Drop dumb fratenhaus sticklefeiffer!

You bladder puss snotgrafter! You wort mon dang noodle. You shotten shifter pastafer! You snort tunger, lay monger sniker shell cocker!

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Handicaps & Disabilities ]

One of my gifts for Charlene this year was the promise of starting helicopter flight lessons at Makin Air or Sonoma Helicopters. To package this, I decided to head over to the hobby shop and pick up a low-end helicopter, I knew there were 2 channel (yaw and throttle) helicopters for thirty bucks or so.

I ended up letting myself get talked up into an E-Flite mCX RTF Radio Control helicopter, because it's 4 channel, which gives all 4 axes for full control, and because the guy said "here, fly it around for a bit", it took care of the hovering, and replacement parts are available for when we crash it anyway.

We just opened up the package, and I took a look at the thing and I'm blown away: It's got 4 motors, one for each of the contra-rotating rotors and two for servo control of the swashplate, and somewhere in all of this teeny package it also manages to squeeze in enough attitude and acceleration sensors to manage maintaining attitude and orientation. I need to get a toaster oven so I can do my own surface mount soldering.

[ related topics: Aviation Toys Model Building Aviation - Helicopters ]

If you're in Petaluma, it's worth a drive over to see the Christmas light show at 1623 Cabernet Court.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Wines and Spirits ]

Some pictures from the evening of Christmas Day, when traffic was light enough that I could play with multiple exposures for HDR composition.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Apropos of the current (and recurring, to my ignorant senses) situation between Israel and the Palestinian territories, the way to gain my sympathies would be for Hamas to say "we regret that rogue elements have been firing rockets into Israel, and we will assist the Israeli military in apprehending and punishing those elements so that the peace process can move forward."

The way to lose my sympathies would be for Hamas to whine "that was a disproportionate response" (to the rockets we fired at you that happened to miss).

“Don’t be sorry. We are all dying Jack. It’s just that some of us are dying a little faster. The key is to not live your life as if you are already dead.” (Via)

Reminiscent of Terry Pratchett's observation that our life flashes before our eyes just before we die. For most of us that takes about 80 years.

[ related topics: Terry Pratchett ]