Flutterby™! From 2009-08-01 to 2009-08-31

I hate time. There is never enough and it is relative. Besides doing date math in computers, I just hate the whole concept. However, I just invested a couple of hours (wasted?) in messing around with encryption keys and certs.. some of which were not working. Why? Because I was signing them a couple of hours in the future of the clock on the server that was checking them for validity. Time IS important.

On the good side, it proved the certificate begin date stamps are working. Laughing..

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Mathematics Cryptography ]

New York Times on the deal MSNBC and Fox News reached to silence the feud between Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly.

Glenn Greenwald looks at this, and adds that Richard Wolfe, a high powered lobbyist, has a regular gig on MSNBC

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Journalism and Media Salon magazine New York ]

Good article about state funded religious centric bad sex education, pro-abstinence, little actual education.

This sums it up nicely:

"Neither Mahan nor any of the speakers offered information on what to do if abstinence fails. Did he talk about proper use of condoms or birth control? No, but he did make the offhand and scientifically unfounded comment that condoms are “pieces of rubber that deteriorate in your back pocket. They only work some of the time.” But the medical community considers an 87 to 98 percent effectiveness rate in preventing sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy as more than “some of the time.”"

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Work, productivity and environment Community Education ]

Terry Pratchett, diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 1997, calls for UK law to allow assisted suicides:

Life is easy and cheap to make. But the things we add to it, such as pride, self-respect and human dignity, are worthy of preservation, too, and these can be lost in a fetish for life at any cost.

I believe that if the burden gets too great, those who wish to should be allowed to be shown the door.

In my case, in the fullness of time, I hope it will be the one to the garden under an English sky. Or, if wet, the library.

[ related topics: Health Law Current Events Terry Pratchett ]

Steve Jobs Hates The App Store, or, the author asserts, he must. Interesting read...

[ related topics: Apple Computer Humor Weblogs ]

NY Times: Modern Love – Those Aren't Fighting Words, Dear:

Let me be clear: I’m not saying my husband was throwing a child’s tantrum. No. He was in the grip of something else — a profound and far more troubling meltdown that comes not in childhood but in midlife, when we perceive that our personal trajectory is no longer arcing reliably upward as it once did. But I decided to respond the same way I’d responded to my children’s tantrums. And I kept responding to it that way. For four months.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Fashion Marriage ]

Bwahahaha! Where's the Diploma? Sarah Palin Didn’t Graduate from High School?

(I hate to toss a spoiler in here, but I also know that in two years I'll be digging for this entry and unable to come up with the right search terms, so this is parody on the "birthers" claiming fraud with Barack Obama's birth certificate...)

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Argh. A week or two ago my DSL modem died. I went and got the best one Staples had in stock, which sucks and lacks features I need, and after recovering my password from AT&T I plugged it in and got some set of redirects asking me to download and run files from a domain that didn't look anything like anything like ATT.net.

I used my iPhone's net connection to verify that this is what I should be doing, and cursed their name, but...

Just got a call from someone who's going through the same thing with Comcast. She got a redirect and a request to download a file from some HTTP address at "comcastonline.com". Sounds kinda like phishing to me, so I "whois comcastonline.com" and see that the registrar is "CORPORATE DOMAINS, INC" and the Administrative and Technical contact is "Corporation Service Company / Domain Administrator".

The DNS servers for that domain are comcast.net, so I told her she should download and run it, but...

Is it that big company network admins are deliberately colluding with scammers to try to get users used to dodgy network and security practices? This sort of crap is horrendous, I guess it's too hard to do things right within their network environments, but still...

[ related topics: broadband Economics iPhone ]

Cool thread on window frame construction over at LumberJocks

[ related topics: Fabrication Woodworking ]

TruFocals adjustable focus glasses, NYTimes puff piece on them, via Debra Hyde.

[ related topics: Cool Science Physiology ]

I had dropped the following note off in an email to a mailing list I'm on, got a few "thanks, that made me think" messages in response, and didn't think much of it 'til Warkitty today posted some commentary on an op-ed that ran in their local paper that offended a whole bunch of Chattanooga cyclists.

Anyway, this note was in reaction to the sentence of 4 months in jail and 800 hours of community service for a San Mateo county Sheriff's Deputy who fell asleep at the wheel and killed two cyclists and injured a third. There was outrage from some in the cycling community at that sentence, which can seem fairly light, but I saw it in a different light...

When I was much younger, I was driving an automobile in a semi-industrial area, at or below the speed limit (no, really, I believe it was a 35 zone, it was in a corner where I was probably below 30), came around a corner, and there was a toddler standing in the middle of the road, situated such that he was obscured by the side pillar of my windshield until the very last minute.

When I got to him, he wasn't breathing and I couldn't find a pulse. Luckily I had recently had my BLS certs renewed, including infant and child CPR, and through a number of miracles he survived.

I wasn't charged with anything. Mitigating factors may have included that the parents of the toddler had been on television the previous week complaining about people speeding by their house (which was opposite the cement plant and just down from the sailboat factory).

As I said, I faced no legal repercussions. However, since that accident two decades ago I have been an *extremely* cautious driver.

I don't think there's any penalty which would have acted as an incentive to me to be more attentive. I'm fairly sure that the deputy in this most recent incident will never get in a car again without hearing the thuds of his vehicle hitting those cyclists. So I'm both fairly sure that he won't re-offend, and that any stronger punishment won't serve as a deterrent.

I think there's a strong cultural component that needs to focus on the automobile as a potentially dangerous weapon that kills more people every year than guns, I think we need a consciousness that understands that a car is a deadly scary device, but I don't think that harsh punishment of the contrite will actually lessen the number of automobile related injuries and deaths.

[ related topics: Bay Area Political Correctness Law Chattanooga Automobiles Bicycling ]

How (not) to wash a car (short video involving large mining machinery)

[ related topics: Automobiles Machinery Video ]

50 academics spoke up. Can you amplify their voices?

Last week 50 academics signed on to a letter written by Ron Weitzer and myself. It was a collaborative effort and required compromise and you can read the letter here. Today there have been several news stories about this letter. If you support the overall mission of keeping prostitution in RI from being criminalized please comment on the stories listed below, or blog about the same.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Law Current Events ]

Kudos to Free Antenna Design and specifically their parabolic wifi antenna design for directional boost. Yeah, I'm playing with some WRT54GL's and Coova.org with the idea of fixing Greyfriars WiFi free public WiFi access to something usable by iPhone's and netbooks. The idea is concentrating the signal in the coffee shop and out towards the street, but not neighboring places.

[ related topics: Graphic Design iPhone ]

Bing search tained by pro Microsoft results.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

US Mint is selling boxes of 250 dollar coins for $250 with free shipping, and I haven't followed this all the way through yet, but the MeFi entry claims you can pay with your credit card. Anyone get miles or cash back?

(Whoops: Further entries seem to suggest they've dropped the free shipping)

[ related topics: Currency ]

Translation Party translates a phrase back and forth from English to Japanese until it gets the same output. Just to save you the typing, "excited naked girls" does not reach equilibrium. Via Sensible Erection.

[ related topics: Language Humor ]

I know that some Flutterby readers had their head under a rock during the 80s - but for those of us who spent their teenagehood in mainstream society during those years, John Hughes wrote and directed movies that really seemed to "reach us". The Breakfast Club was one of the first movies that I could identify with the characters and even characters we sometimes wished we could identify with, such as those in Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Weird Science. I never realized it, but he also directed some of funniest comedies of all time such as National Lampoon's Vacation and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. You'll be missed.

[ related topics: Movies Automobiles Machinery Trains ]

August 8th: Sneak some zucchini on to your neighbor's porch day, this MeFi entry has more.

There's been a lot of helping other people happening recently, so yesterday evening Charlene and I took some time to ourselves. One of our activities was hopping on the bike and pedaling over to the theater to see Julie and Julia. It's the new Nora Ephron film, riffing on a book by Julie Powell which appears to be either titled Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously or Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, an expansion of the blog The Julie/Julia Project.

Let's get the preliminaries out of the way: We liked the movie, and will probably see it again when it comes out on DVD. Meryl Streep does a damned good job at capturing Julia Child in all her goofy glory, and we laughed and cheered at her successes.

Many reviewers have complained that the scenes with Julie, played by Amy Adams, drag the movie down a bit, but I've got a different interpretation: This is the meanest Nora Ephron film ever, and the reason the Julie scenes don't move along is that Ephron views the media sensation that Julie became, with her whiny New York City sensibilities and attitudes, as a bumbling lightweight next to the accomplishments of Julia Child. Played this way the film isn't as lighthearted, it's comparing a woman who viewed her recipes as a simplified version of a cuisine she poured her heart into learning to a woman who thought cooking those recipes was a great success. The film then becomes a lighthearted hagiography of Julia Child(which I'm not at all averse to, and I'm now hoping I can rent more of her video from the store rather than buying DVDs, but I will if I have to), and a dark condemnation of the popular attitudes of celebrity.

No matter how its viewed, we enjoyed it a lot. And wondered how the lobsters fit into the "No animals were harmed during the making of this film" statement...

[ related topics: Books Weblogs Movies Food Journalism and Media Education New York ]

Should you be tempted by the offers to upgrade your CostCo card to a business level if you'll take an AmEx card and get cash back: Don't. You'll spend more time and money trying to undo AmEx billing issues than you'll possibly save with the cash back features.

I think we've finally unextricated ourselves from that disaster, but it'll still take yet another trip to the CostCo service counter to be sure. Sigh.

Linking to this rather idiotic SFGate article on the hidden costs of social networking because I was moved to comment on that site, and I figured I should reproduce it here.

I was recently appointed to a minor public committee, and mentioned this on various social networking sites, whereupon an acquaintance remarked "OMG, they published all that information about you!" (like phone number and contact address). Yeah, and before the Internet we had these things called the "white pages" where you could look up information about me.

We've become *way* too over sensitive about personal information flowing around. It's always been flowing around. I was a dork and an outcast in high school, and even *I* was aware of what got developed on the sly in the school B&W photo lab. Pretending that somehow life is different now is just stupid. The real thing we should address is why society at large has a problem with teenagers being teenagers. Frankly, the lack of youthful indiscretions should have more of a negative impact on your career than the existence of them.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Net Culture ]

Accounts differ as to who started throwing punches, but guy goes to disrupt meeting on health care policy, ends up in fight, being injured, has no health insurance, is now soliciting donations to help with his medical costs.

This is almost as good as Joe the Plumber's small business aspirations. Snicker.

[ related topics: Politics Health Current Events ]

Charlene's been helping a friend who's in the hospital awaiting an organ transplant. Health insurance and health care issues have been on our minds recently. A few random notes:

SFGate.com: Doc Gurley: Part I: Insured? Good income? Here's how hospitals can still destroy you financially. Yeah, we've noticed that, things like a person being barely conscious in an ICU and having piddling little bills turned over to collection agencies: Someone's getting kickbacks from the collection agency or something.

Sarah Palin is getting quoted a lot for her Facebook "death panel" essay:

... The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Let's be absolutely clear here: First, there are panels making life and death decisions based on subjective judgments right now. Second, currently it's the government keeping your health insurance companies in-line while they cancel the policies of paying customers ("post-claims underwiting"). Third, are you gonna pay for that kid, or am I going to continue to pay for your kid with my taxes, because it's a good bet that even if you managed to get private insurance to pay for health bills so far, and paid for the additional costs of educating a child like that, you're not going to support that child through their adult life.

We're at the stage where we can keep people alive for as much of our GDP as we're, collectively, willing to funnel towards keeping them alive. The time has come to make some tough decisions, and the alleged "free market" side of this debate seems to be caught up in ridiculous mis-statements and lies. I'd love to hear some voices from the free market side of this offer up some cogent coherent discussion of the issues, but if they're out there they're being shouted down by Palin, Limbaugh, and the rest of the either misinformed or deliberately misinforming Republican welfare queen whiners.

[ related topics: Politics Health moron Current Events Journalism and Media Economics Government ]

I was discussing Quantum Bogodynamics with a colleague today and started pondering why geeks tend to emit fewers bogons than suits. I forwarded the theory that white gold is a specifically strong bogon absorber and that geeks, if they wear jewelery, as more likely to wear white gold than any other precious metal. So Stephen R. Donaldson may be significantly to blame for the proper functioning of many of our computers.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Technology and Culture Quantum Bogodynamics ]

Yesterday I had a little spare time so I pulled out my RZRaven kit and attempted to muck with the firmware on it. It already has a command that's sendable from the USB stick to query the thermometer, so I figured I'd either use that ADC, or query another one on the device, and couple it to a Si85xx-EVB and build a little current measuring block.

Kind of a disaster, the default firmware doesn't compile to a size that fits on the device using AVR-GCC, when I trimmed out the features I didn't care about I was still having trouble getting the code to talk to the LCD and network controller, I tried downloading an eval copy of the IAR compiler, which I'd be okay with paying for, but it's one of those "we'll tell you how much it costs after we guess how much we can squeeze you for" products, and my simple attempts to program the device using their environment and their output binaries and my existing hardware didn't yield fruit.

So today I did just a moment of searching and ran across Tweet-A-Watt. I have one Kill-A-Watt that can be adapted to this, as I play with power monitoring in general I'm less and less convinced that there's much to be saved in my house, but it seems like this'd be a good place to start with wiring up the house with distributed sensors.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Software Engineering Embedded Devices Real Estate ]

Elf Sternberg rips Ben Stein several new ones: Ben Stein: A Collection Of His Greatest Hits!

I may have mentioned that in the past I had an insurance withdrawal be taken out twice in one month, which caused an overdraft. In todays terms though thats a big deal as they save up all the checks coming out and then when your acount is low they send the checks through, the big ones first. This causes a ripple effect (not the wine) which causes a simple problem to wind up costing hundreds of dollars. The poor are hardest hit it appears. Recent headlines show that 38 Billion is made by the banks each year this way.

This is being litigated in Britain

So while they are ripping us off, they have a very different treatment for large customers: Welcome to Kite That Check!

http://www.firsttennessee.com/...tent&Item=ControlledDisbursement

I had an account with First Tennessee since 1985. I walked in and cancelled it when they refused to refund my money. They said they did not sort the checks by size. What lies! They are not the same bank I started with 24 years ago thats for sure.

[ related topics: History Wines and Spirits Chattanooga Currency ]

I think this struck me as funny because I'm reading Shantaram, which is kind of a love song to two things, Bombay and the author's younger swaggering thinks-he's-bad-ass-gangsta self. So my quote of the day comes from today's Darths & Droids (a re-imagining of what the Star Wars prequels might be like if they were a role-playing campaign, the yellow bubbles are the NPC/DM's dialog):

If I cloned myself, we'd fight to the death and the winner would be the new me.

[ related topics: Quotes Star Wars ]

Hey, Larry, how do you switch household circuit level (15-20A 115v) current? I was thinking about the Tweet-A-Watt that I've got parts on order for, and thinking that it'd be cool if it could switch, but that it'd then be drawing current to keep the relay (or whatever device I used to switch) in one state or the other.

So I typed "latching relay" into Digi-Key's search field, and got one device that looked like a reasonable candidate, the coil voltage is 6VDC (control on voltage is 4.5VDC, which makes power supply easier), coil current is over an amp, gulp, but that's what capacitors are for, however the sucker costs over $44 at 25 units...

Automation Direct has a 16A latching relay with a 24V coil rating for ten bucks, that'd require some additional power supply wrangling.

Is this the sort of thing one could do with a pair of SCRs or a transistor?

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery ]

When I was last out in the SF Bay area, I attended WhereCamp - the unconference held right after O'Reilly's Where 2.0. My friends Peter Batty and Ben Tuttle and I have organized WhereCamp5280 - an unconference for people interested in geography, technology and society. If you're in Denver tomorrow or Saturday, come down and check it out!

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area California Culture Maps and Mapping ]

Internet Villian of the Year and a good list of runner-ups. As proof that money influences politics, note that the issues aren't scammers, spammers, child porn, or political/social extremism. It's "copyright" issues.

Modified my life goals: I want to be rich enough to be considered eccentric, poor people are just plain crazy. I now also want to be rich enough to influence politics, in eccentric ways :)

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Sexual Culture moron Current Events Net Culture Currency Copyright/Trademark ]

"I wouldn’t let my child kick an evangelical Christian . . . that doesn’t mean I’m training her to become one." Via Mark Hershberger

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up ]

Our favorite Supreme Court whackjob Antonin Scalia in his dissent to the Troy Anthony Davis case:

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged “actual innocence” is constitutionally cognizable.

Screw the facts! We've got a process here we need to maintain! Via, Via.

[ related topics: Law Civil Liberties ]

TechCrunch has a number of fluffy little graphs put together based on data collected by some new search engine on job seekers versus job offerings. Totally unscientific, bla bla bla, but it does put Washington DC on the top of the list by a large margin. Nothing that's created there is actually sold (well, okay, influence is sold, but it's really created back in the home districts). This does not bode well for the solidity of the economic recovery.

[ related topics: Current Events Economics ]

New York Times on a new technique for fabricating DNA evidence. Here's Forensic Science International Genetics: Authentication of forensic DNA samples. The authors are part of a startup which claims to be able to distinguish their fabricated samples which fool current tests from actual samples.

Note that this doesn't invalidate DNA testing to prove a mismatch, only to prove a match. Via /..

[ related topics: Cool Science Law Enforcement Physiology ]

Remember when TV cooking shows were driven by knowledge and people who'd spent a lot of time and energy learning their craft? Yeah, me neither: What would Brian Boitano cook?. Further reason we don't have TV.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Food Television Education ]

A couple of stories from the UK healthcare system from this MeFi thread.

"Former nurse is forced to sell her home after forking out £100,000 on treatment abroad because of NHS shortfalls". Well, actually, she went to Monaco to have two pacemakers fitted because she was worried about the wait at her local hospital, and then went to Germany for some experimental stem cell procedures. Nothing in the article about the background on the wait.

"A Kent man with lung cancer is paying £70 a day for tablets which are not available on the NHS." A Roche spokesman, this is a guy who's job it is to sell the pills, said "Tarceva can slow the progression of cancer, but cannot stop it. It can increase life expectancy by two months or longer." Here are some notes on erlotinib (Tarceva®).

I think both of these stories are instructive because discussions about these aspects of healthcare are exactly the sort we need to be having. Private health insurance is available in Britain. So far as I can tell (from these articles) both of these patients could have bought that insurance and they didn't. Both patients are now complaining about not having full free funding for experimental therapies.

Either we're going to end up paying 90% of our GDP to health care, or we're going to have to be willing to give the hard-ass answers to these issues.

[ related topics: Health Current Events Economics ]

We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

NASA finds Amino acid glycine in comet trail.

“We discovered that the Stardust-returned glycine has an extraterrestrial carbon isotope signature, indicating that it originated on the comet,” said Dr Elsila.

via MeFi (on the iPhone, explaining stunted English and minimal links)

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

A number of things about this article on links between pesticides and Parkinson's disease that make me want to dig in to the background a little bit and do some fact checking, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were a link there.

[ related topics: Health Food Physiology ]

The Verbosity Difference, on OOP and programming language verbosity:

The problem is that the marginal cost of adding a new class is greater than the marginal cost of extending an existing class. If it was easier to make a new class, we would have done so. But we would also have made a new class if it was harder to add methods to an existing class, because then the trade-off would have been different. In other words, what matters is the difference in verbosity between the “right way” and the “wrong way”, not the absolute level of verbosity.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Earlier this year, police officer Johannes Mehserle shot train rider Oscar Grant in the back while he was handcuffed and lying face down on the station platform. Several videos of this from different angles were taken by bystanders. At the time I wrote that "... it seems like the cop is the victim of systemic problems."

The Mayers Nave public report on the Johannes Mehserle shooting of Oscar Grant is out, Matier & Ross have a high level view.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Trains Public Transportation ]

I don't know why I found this sign amusing because it was near the bathrooms in the hospital we were visiting a patient in last night, but I did.

[ related topics: Photography Archival ]

White House backs right to bear arms:

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said people are entitled to carry weapons outside such events if local laws allow it. "There are laws that govern firearms that are done state or locally," he said. "Those laws don't change when the president comes to your state or locality."

[ related topics: Guns Government ]

On the tail of Jamaican Usain Bolt smashing the 100m record, an interesting controversy has come up in women's track. South African, Caster Semenya, after easily winning the 800m event, is having her gender questioned. Interestingly, even if she was born with female genitalia and raised female, if she carries male chromosomes, she would be disqualified. From the Times Online:

There are between 20 and 30 different types of “intersex” conditions, each of them affecting the body in different ways, and it is for the medics to decide whether, if Semenya is found to have one of them, the resulting hormonal balance gives her an unfair advantage.

Granted, I never found this to be much of a problem. But according to the Times, "Gender verification used to be mandatory across Olympic sports but the issue was so delicate and scientifically complicated that it was dropped before the Sydney Olympics."

This could be huge for feminists and homosexuals. First, it creates a class of "natural" or "pure" women, despite the fact that women with "intersex conditions" suffer the same disadvantages (and likely more). If you liken this to Oscar Pistorius' bid to run in the 2008 Olympics, his statement was basically "I don't think anyone is going to cut off their legs to gain an advantage." Similarly, I can't imagine anyone willingly accepting the societal disadvantages of being female just to win races. And no one is questioning Usain Bolt's masculinity.

For homosexuals, it provides more evidence that sexuality and sexual orientation is not cut-and-dry: male or female, opposites attract.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Sports Fabrication Race ]

Remember all the hullabaloo when Dick Cheney met in secret with representatives from those energy companies? The Huffington Post(!) is reporting on efforts to get transparency with Barack Obama's meetings with health care executives.

[ related topics: Politics Health ]

Sociological Images looks at how the LA Times has covered up bare skin in photos.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Tuanie Ismail built a 1/10th (15 foot long) scale model of the merchant vessel Avondster, YouTube video of stills of the construction, Sunday Times article.

[ related topics: Fabrication Model Building Woodworking ]

MapJack is like Google Street View, only with much higher resolution images, and a far smaller coverage area. A few towns in California and Thailand, so far.

[ related topics: Photography Maps and Mapping Maps & Mapping ]

Glenn Greenwald: Fringe leftist losers: wrong even when they're right. Some musings about why the mainstream called everyone who suggested that the "terror alerts" were politically motivated, in the face of Tom Ridge saying that he resigned because he was asked to raise the terror alert level before the 2004 U.S. Presidential election.

And I giggle and cringe that 39% of Americans (and 62% of McCain voters) think the government should stay out of Medicare.

I do have to admit that I do want in on the "Pubic Option": Funniest signs from the healthcare meeting protests (Strongly suspect that most of those signs are plants).

[ related topics: Politics moron Salon magazine ]

Quantitative Easing in another era: http://www.economist.com/busin...splayStory.cfm?story_id=14215012

Back then they cut off the head of the heads of state for their crimes. But they were more enlightened it appears.

But one lesson from Law’s sorry tale endures: attempts to maintain asset prices above their fundamental value are eventually doomed to failure.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Twitter is adding location to their API. Here's how it works.

Need to fix my status update page to use the W3 geolocation API.

[ related topics: Web development Maps and Mapping Maps & Mapping ]

I need to follow up on the techniques used in this rounded corner coffee table. And I should probably order David Marks' DVD on Jigs & Fixtures for Curvilinear Woodworking.

[ related topics: Furniture Woodworking ]

Politicians are primarily interested in re-election, which means their interests aren't aligned with those of the electorate. Via RC3, using Matthew Yglesias' observations.

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian ]

In an effort to stimulate discussion on heath care reform, Larry's asking why we don't offer a tax credit to those who meet the President's Council on Physical Fitness's President's Challenge.

Seems to me like it should be something that happens at an insurer level rather than a federal tax level. But then there's a whole bunch of stuff happening at the insurer level that shouldn't be, or at least should be more transparent as they screw us over, so it's also easy to toss a "but they started it!" back at the insurers to justify federal involvement.

[ related topics: Politics Weblogs Health Community Gambling ]

Today was a big "tweaking" day for me. It was rollout day for Prepaid Electricity in Guyana. The pic on the right is a utility board director's house getting one of the first prepaid meters. Had a great day, all went well and the software (Juice) that vends electricity worked great in an area with only cell phone text messaging as a means of vending. It was a long day in the sun...but a good one.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Wireless Photography Cool Science broadband Robotics Software Engineering Embedded Devices Real Estate Java ]

As we now know, you can add Uranium to your Amazon wishlist. But what if you don't exactly know what to do with it? Well, fire up your Amazon Kindle and double check your credit limit with Visa. Amazon sells a $6000+ book on nuclear energy.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Pyrotechnics Archival ]

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale (YouTube video) (Via).

[ related topics: Music Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Video ]

I'm generally a fan of Cafe Gratitude, it's an option when Charlene and I are hanging out down in Marin (although in the evenings we'll usually go to Taco Jane's), it's one of the places I take people when I want a relatively affordable Bay Area dining experience (not too many raw food restaurants in middle America...), and their desserts...

Well... their desserts are awesome! However, Charlene recently picked up Sweet Gratitude: A New World of Raw Desserts, and I was thumbing through it. On page 10 they have a section on "Making Cold-Pressed Espresso", which seemed like a bunch of work for something that'd probably get similar flavors with just a fairly dense hot-water drip process, but I thought "okay, they're doing the raw thing".

Then a few days ago I was roasting a batch of small Peru beans in the popcorn popper out in the back yard, and realized that... well... the whole roasted coffee bean thing kinda blew the "raw" concept out of the water. Not that I'm complaining, their desserts are still awesome, but...

Anyway, coincidentally, the East Bay Express article on the connections between Cafe Gratitude and the Landmark Forum also popped up recently, and I thought that explained some of the attitudes within the cafe. Don't have any issues with Landmark Forum, I bet they've got a lot more on the ball than most modern psychology, but there's a certain vibe in the place that almost needs to be experienced to be believed, and it makes sense that Cafe Gratitude's founders have ties to such a "human potential" / "self-improvement" organization.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Food Bay Area Current Events Work, productivity and environment California Culture ]

"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” —Margaret Thatcher

This hits me hard, I'm in Guyana, watching new footage of Fidel Castro, seeing socialist politics in Guyana (it's not, yet) and Venezuelan politics up close.

It's a quote from another Flutterby link, and I just wanted to bring it to the forefront, It's worth remembering, thinking about.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design Currency ]

A Wired article claims the placebo effect is getting stronger (Via SE). It also mentions that there are geographic and cultural differences on the strength of the placebo effect, and that pharmaceutical companies have been venue shopping clinical trials.

[ related topics: Drugs Health Sociology ]

Expert tells Texas state-sanctioned review board that the fire for which Cameron Todd Willingham was executed was not arson.

Over the past five years, the Willingham case has been reviewed by nine of the nation's top fire scientists -- first for the Tribune, then for the Innocence Project, and now for the commission. All concluded that the original investigators relied on outdated theories and folklore to justify the determination of arson.

Via MeFi which linked to Crime Scene KC on the topic.

But that's okay, because Justice Scalia says the Constitution has no problem with executing the innocent, as long as they were convicted:

This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Content Management Todd Gemmell History Law Current Events Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Pyrotechnics Dogs ]

Stanford study says that multi-taskers suck at multi-tasking. BBC article on the study:

"The shocking discovery of this research is that [high multitaskers] are lousy at everything that's necessary for multitasking," Professor Nass said.

"The irony here is that when you ask the low multitaskers, they all think they're much worse at multitasking and the high multitaskers think they're gifted at it."

Via /. which mentions the "Dunning-Kruger effect", where incompetent people tend to overrate their skills, and competent people tend to underrate them.

(And combine that with the fact that we trust confident people more, and... oh boy...)

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Current Events Work, productivity and environment ]

Dornob: DIY Design Inspiration from … the Prison Population? republishes pictures from Marc Steinmetz's "escape tools" series, images of weapons created by inmates in German prisons.

Next time you think you need to go out and buy that tool rather than making something to do the job at home.

[ related topics: Photography Heinlein Graphic Design Guns ]

An inspirational story: a ghetto-born hip-hop artist forces Warner Bros. music to fulfil their contract and pay for her Ph.D. in Psychology!

[ related topics: Music Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Consumerism and advertising Art & Culture ]

Just because we like cake: Da Bombe Dessert's Edible Millenium Falcon

[ related topics: Star Wars Food - Cake ]

Viv writes her "this is why you're not getting more money from me" letter to HRC. My "yeah" goes something like:

Human Rights Campaign and Joe Solmonese ran a particularly incompetent anti Prop 8 campaign. Bad enough that you'd think they really wanted Prop 8 to win so they'd continue to have something to rail against and keep hitting us up for more contributions. Sorry, next time the money will go to an organization that actually makes a difference.

[ related topics: Weblogs Civil Liberties Trains Currency Archival ]

Dear QuickTime: If you can't play a simple MPEG 2 file, please don't steal the file association. Windows Media Player deals with this file just fine.

Sometimes I think the primary reason to run Linux is to avoid QuickTime and the hell that is iTunes, then I remember that Windows and the Microsoft versions are bad, just not as bad.

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

Rachel Lucas writes about visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau.

(Topic picker chose Work, productivity and environment. In light of "arbeit macht frei", I decided that was tasteless.)

[ related topics: History Sociology War ]

RT @Skud women in open source, please tell bruce perens you are not a magical unicorn. http://lwn.net/Articles/349044/

[ related topics: Free Software ]

So there's a New York Times article looking at procedures during the Hurricane Katrina aftermath at a New Orleans hospital. Seems like a slightly biased against the doctors account of medical professionals doing the best they can in horrific circumstances, with what feels like a little attempt at stirring up some public outrage at doctors who apparently used morphine to hasten the deaths of those they felt they couldn't save.

This same article was published over at ProPublica, and was apparently partially funded by that organization. Not sure what that means yet.

The MeFi thread that links to this article has a number of interesting comments, including one that takes the author of the article to task for a bunch of interesting omitted information.

And for bonus linkies, I haven't delved in to this nurse's LiveJournal account of being on duty during and after Katrina yet.

[ related topics: Health Ethics Hurricane Katrina ]

Yesterday an Australian Science magazine beamed more than 25 thousand text messages from their readers to the extrasolar planet Gliese 581d, using a radiotelescope array near Canberra.

In other news, the Committee for SEGI (Search for Extra-Gliesian Intelligence) called an emergency meeting in Fxwpgt City to determine once and for all what "RTFM" means.

[ related topics: Weblogs Space & Astronomy Heinlein ]

Nudist camp battles industry over G-strings, on how there's a divide between the family-oriented naturists and the group that's heading off towards the swingers.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Nudity Sociology ]

Press Democrat article on the trend towards edible landscaping and suburban food growing

[ related topics: Food ]

Mattel, the company whose misconduct sparked the whole "all toys must be tested" regulations, has been exempted from those regulations by the CPSC.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Harold McGee, The Curious Cook, writes on prolonging the refrigerator life of berries by them in hot water for a short time to kill the exterior molds. Immersing blackberries, strawberries and raspberries in 125°F water for 30 seconds, and blueberries in 140°F water for 30 seconds, increased refrigerator shelf-life while (surprisingly) not affecting texture or flavor.

[ related topics: Food ]

Top 10 signs you might not be a libertarian

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian ]

By Thursday morning in Guyana, the "Opposition Party" leader had a new axe to grind, and his band of semi-pro protestors descended upon Guyana Power and Light to make a protest about Prepaid Electricity. The pic was taken looking outside of the utility office windows. The local media showed up, took a few pics and completely fictional and erroneous complains about what was going on. It starts to rain. Protest over. Real protesters would have gotten a little wet and been actual customers. These same people were protesting something else at the Presidents house the next day.

Even though the protest was a farce, I'm kind of proud. How many of us have helped create a protest in a foreign country?

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Cool Science Microsoft Robotics Invention and Design Journalism and Media Civil Liberties Embedded Devices Skating Real Estate ]

iPhone2VLC - control your VLC media player from your iPhone.

(Hey, yet another innovative iPhone application that's not on the app store... Hmmm...)

[ related topics: iPhone ]

Disney buys Marvel Comics. Look for X-Men/Little Mermaid crossover soon.

[ related topics: Comics ]

So apparently Wikipedia is going to try color coding unreliable text. Bifurcated Rivets immediately adopts a similar system:

Following the lead of Wikipedia I have decided to colour code untrustworthy text. Anything that is blackish in colour is definitely unreliable, and anything blue is probably dubious.

Seems like a reasonable disclaimer to add here too.

[ related topics: Web development Journalism and Media ]