Flutterby™! From 2010-07-01 to 2010-07-31

Institute For Local Government: Legal Issues Associated with Social Media has two papers worth reading if you have to deal with such things. A few notes because I'll be using these later tonight. First, there are three classes of forum:

1. Traditional public forums, like streets, sidewalks and parks.
2. Designated public forums, which are intentionally opened non-public forums for public discourse. Comments at a city council meeting fall into this category. The threshold issue is is this communications vehicle opened to materials of the publics choosing?
3. Non-public forums.

Government agencies have to be careful to not let #2 become #1.

Choose names carefully, especially where abbreviations and acronyms are involved...

It's important to make a distinction between "prepared", "owned", "used" and "kept in custody", as the latter status invokes all sorts of potential disclosure (who "likes" or "friends" this page and what profile information is then made available to the agency?) and data retention legalities.

Make a distinction between "official requests" and "general public information", which is part of triggering that general disclosure issue, at least under California state law.

And, finally, beware of possible Section 508 issues. Gulp.

[ related topics: Law California Culture Community ]

Ask MeFi: What clever relationship hacks have you come up with? (Thanks, Dave).

Mother of a 14 year old boy charged with possession of a destructive device and child abuse because he was making a dry ice bomb.

I really want to know more about this case. Via /., wherein the first post right now terms this the "war on curiousity".

[ related topics: Children and growing up moron Law ]

Just a reminder: I printed out and stuffed the photographer's rights page in my camera bag.

[ related topics: Photography Civil Liberties ]

Why team Jacob always has to lose in Twilight:

Why does Team Jacob always have to lose? Because Eclipse is a movie about rejecting adulthood, not just as a person but also as a culture. It's about rejecting adult relationships between men and women, but also between people of different races and between people from the city (like Victoria's army) and people from Forks. It's about never crossing boundaries, never leaving home.

Because it's not just a series of books and movies about a 90 year old puttin' the moves on a vulnerable young teen.

[ related topics: Movies Astronomy Sociology California Culture Pop Culture Architecture Race Java ]

What does the American "Ethnic Food" section look like in a German grocery store? (direct YouTube link). Via Journals of Walnut Keep.

And, yeah, it's fun to laugh at the Swiss Miss, but evaluate the "Asian" section in any major American grocery store versus a small specialty store.

[ related topics: Food ]

Open Knowledge Foundation Blog: Bad Science on Open Data. The good news here is that the Guardian published the data so that the dialog could happen to begin with. Hat tip to Now This.

[ related topics: Weblogs Current Events ]

MeFi entry on marine mammals (specifically issues with Orcas) in captivity that I'm saving for later.

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Unqualified Offerings: Positive Punishment. On how we expect immediate results from taking the moral high ground, but allow the low ground years to (not) work.

[ related topics: Politics Ethics ]

The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies.

The Declaration of Independence in American, by H.L. Mencken.

[ related topics: Archival ]

Holy Shiite! Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah has died.

(if not for the bad pun, I'd ignore this However, it speaks to the way the U.S. is perceived in that region that the CIA is generally credited with a failed assasination attempt that killed 80(!) bystanders.)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Dictators ]

Jakob Neilsen just released some preliminary results from a controlled study of reading speeds on the iPad, Kindle, PC and books. The net result: the test subjects were able to read from books faster than the other platforms. I haven't had any quality time with an eReader yet but I can definitely agree with the PC vs. book results. That is, reading long text on a PC sucks. Also, PC World covered the research and demonstrated their statistical illiteracy:

Interestingly, Nielsen's results appear to show that reading on the iPad is significantly faster compared to the Kindle 2. But Nielsen was quick to dismiss this conclusion arguing that the reading speeds between the two devices were "not statistically significant." "The difference [between reading times on the iPad and Kindle 2] would be so small that it wouldn't be a reason to buy one over the other," Nielsen wrote.

Non-ordinal statistics cannot be used to determine ordination if the values are not statistically significant. That is, it is meaningless to say "the iPad is significantly faster than the Kindle 2" because the values do not denote rank without statistical significance. This is why scientists don't like to release raw data.

[ related topics: Books User Interface Statistics ]

Where was my bike made? (Via Larry)

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

It's fire season out here in Northern California. Last Friday, when I went out to Tara Firma Farm there was a fire burning just north of D street with lots of air traffic. And yesterday I did a dump run up Stony Point Road, and there were large areas of burned grass.

Two Rock Fire has a Flickr set of pictures from the Stony Point Fire that are pretty impressive.

(I'd link to the local paper on the D street fire, but their pictures aren't as good, and they don't have a good direct link system. Newspapers don't get the web, apparently. It's a rule.)

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area ]

A look at Hidemi Sugino's cakes.

GodBlock - Protect your children. Web filtering for the rest of us.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up ]

As if you needed another reason to avoid them: PayPal hates conferences, especially OpenCamp

[ related topics: Conferences ]

Woot.com asks the AP for $17.50, following the AP's licensing price for quotes from AP articles. Via the TechCrunch article on the topic.

[ related topics: Quotes Weblogs ]

Google pulls their geographic data from a whole bunch of different places. Every once in a while I run across one that really makes me want to know the story behind how that data ended up on a Google map: Dogshit Park in Santa Barbara. Hat tip to Alan Glennon.

[ related topics: California Culture Maps and Mapping ]

Strange doings in the airways: this interesting piece from Slate tells of obscure short-wave radio stations that broadcast only a voice repeating strings of numbers. They are generally thought to be spymasters in Moscow and Cuba sending untraceable messages to their agents in the West. It is reported that the recently arrested New Jersey spooks listened into such transmissions for their instructions. There are some sound files included, such as the East German STASI's penchant for beginning the program with a polka.

[ related topics: Language Invention and Design Conspiracy ]

New York Magazine: Why Parents Hate Parenting:

... As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value in five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”) ...

I think that came from Lyn Via Kottke. Relatedly, Shawn's Being A A Parent Is A Choice has been sitting in an opened tab, partly because I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into controversy surrounding Dr. Maria New's use of dexamethasone, but also because I've been reminded several times recently that a little more acknowledgement that kids are a hell of a lot of work, and that the payoff can be rewarding, a cultural acknowledgement that kids aren't necessarily the life-fulfilling bundles of joy that we sometimes portray them as would have saved a number of people I know, especially some lower-income single moms, a hell of a lot of pain and suffering.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology ]

Somewhat related to that last entry on the perils of parenting, on Monday along with the other projects on the house Charlene and I did some chemistry experiments, and we've been doing various crafts and projects with the kids across the street and some outings with our COTS Family Connection kids, and Charlene's been running the free lunch program up at the Vida Nueva development in Rohnert Park.

Sorry for the digression. The upshot of this is that Charlene has said, roughly, that she thinks we need to help give all of these kids some of the amazing experiences that my parents gave me when I was growing up. So we've been looking through various chemistry books, and leafing through The Boy Mechanic, with an eye to setting up a series of projects that we could do in an evening, hopefully with some parental involvement, at Vida Nueva.

(The kids across the street are in a different class, their mom's a teacher at the Live Oak Charter School, and they come to us with projects they want to do that are more than we could accomplish in a group setting.)

We're starting to develop a list. Among the things we've come up with are things like kite making, Jacob's Ladder toys (I could cut and rout the blanks, we could show up with ribbons and glue to finish building them), tops (with the opportunity for learning about some cool optical illusion effects), pantographs, maybe an easier to use version of the bottle rocket launcher that Sage (the kid across the street) and I built, with older kids maybe some basic chemistry experiments (crystals and supersaturated solutions).

Anyway, if anyone's got brainstorming on fun projects to do with kids, with the ulterior motive of teaching kids at an experiential level about chemistry and physics and that we can create cool stuff, I'm all ears.

And if you haven't looked through The Boy Mechanic recently (available on Gutenberg.org and from Lindsay Books).

Bonus awesome: Gina Siepel's The Boy Mechanic Project: Portable Folding Boat video

[ related topics: Children and growing up Books Sociology Boats Machinery Education Video Archival ]

You could go start by watching the videos linked to off of this MeFi entry on Denha's marble machines, or you could just go to Denha's YouTube channel and just watch all the marble machine videos (or start with this tiny marble machine), because you will eventually see 'em all.

Denha's blog and Denha's electronic musical instruments museum are both in Japanese.

[ related topics: Weblogs Movies Art & Culture ]

Johannes Mehserle, the BART cop who shot unarmed and subdued Oscar Grant in the back on January 1^st 2009, has been convicted of involuntary manslaughter and faces five to fifteen years in prison.

When the incident first happened I suggested that Mehserle and Grant were both "...the victim of systemic problems."

Lyn passed along Digby on the Mehserle verdict points out that one of the other BART police involved testified that he'd started the encounter with intimidation and threats, and goes on to conclude that:

He was just trying to teach the little bastard a lesson by swearing at him and then shooting him full of electricity while he was already on the ground. People have to learn to obey transit police officers unquestioningly and when they curse you out and threaten you out of the blue you have an obligation as a citizen to take whatever they mete out --- including death if they accidentally pick up their torture device instead of their killing device. Shit happens.

This, unfortunately, sounds about right. This was not the action of a lone rogue cop, this was a systemic failure including the decisions to equip the BART police with Tasers and then treat their use as anything less significant than the deadly force that they're supposed to replace, to design the Taser with a user interface similar to a handgun, and to allow the sort of behavior that Mehserle's fellow police officer, Anthony Pirone, testified that Pirone engaged in leading up to the shooting. Johannes Mehserle was merely one tired cop in that chain of mistakes and bad decisions that led to Oscar Grant's death.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama User Interface Cool Science Law Enforcement Graphic Design Trains Public Transportation Archival ]

For Ziffle and friends: Ayn Rand's Adventures in Wonderland.

[ related topics: Ziffle Objectivism ]

View Source for Safari on the iPhone.

View Source for Safari on the iPad.

[ related topics: Weblogs iPhone ]

Spitefuls paper-craft disaster dioramas. [Edit: Fixed the link]

GM offers the option to let you assemble your own engine for your new Corvette.

Customers who pay for the privilege will be invited to come to Wixom to assemble the engine for their car under the guidance of GM technicians.

[ related topics: Business Invention and Design Automobiles Machinery ]

My friend Jaimey Walking-Bear is running for School Board in Petaluma.

When I was in High School, someone, I think Mike McCready, was running for class President or somesuch and asked if I'd wear one of his buttons. I remember thinking he was out of his gourd, 'cause I viewed myself as something of a loner outcast, and didn't imagine that my endorsement would *help* his camplaign.

Lemme tell ya, getting asked for a political endorsement as an adult kinda feels the same way.

Anyway, I'm meeting again with Jaimey on Thursday on this topic, but I've given him my endorsement.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sports ]

This morning on Twitter, Columbine was whining about having to compile Emacs for a machine, wondering why Linux distributions even bothered with X (let alone those bloated overblown things like KDE and Gnome), and pondering that it was ludicrous to learn vi because it was better to copy the file off, edit it, then copy it back on rather than resort to that bit of antiquity.

(I'm paraphrasing.)

So since I'm actually starting to get some new readers, I figure we'd scare 'em off with an intro to "how to build a lightweight Un*x system". I've done this with Linux on a bunch of different platforms, but I'm gonna try to stay conceptual.

First thing you need is a boot loader. Intel based people have seen "lilo" and "grub", Atmel based systems use U-boot. The point of the boot loader is to locate a kernel and read it into memory, then call the kernel. Sometimes the kernel is stored on disk, sometimes in flash or other read-only memory, sometimes on a network to be accessed via "tftp" or a similar protocol.

Since the boot loader loads the kernel, that'd be the next stage. In my case this has been Linux, but I'm staying high level and the various BSD kernels and what-have-you are similar. So the boot loader gets the kernel into memory, and calls it.

The kernel then initializes whatever hardware's been compiled in to it (those of you looking for fast boot times, this is a reason to use modules: they haven't been loaded yet), and then mounts "the root filesystem" read-only, and executes "/sbin/init" as user "0" (abstractly, the kernel itself knows nothing of user names, just numbers).

If you just want the kernel and the root filesystem read-only, "/sbin/init" can be any application you want it to be. You could, at this point, link it to emacs. Of course that binary needs to only use shared libraries on the root filesystem, but it can be anything.

But usually this is a program that sets up additional filesystems, possibly remounts the root filesystem read-write, sets up network interfaces (this gets tricky if your root filesystem is on a network...), and then offers the user the chance to login.

If you're building a lightweight Un*x like system, I highly recommend BusyBox rather than the full-on GNU POSIX environment. BusyBox is just enough "init" and the standard POSIX environment to be useful, with various options to pare it down or build it up a bit, without the overhead of knowing too much about things like locales and character sets and languages and all of that crap.

And if you're building this environment from scratch for an unfamiliar platform (ie: you're cross-compiling and don't yet have a compiler that can run on a machine you've got and build for the new machine), I also recommend buildroot, a set of tools to download and compile lightweight Linux environments that can range from "give me a boot loader, a kernel, and, optionally, a login prompt" to X and all sorts of additional stuff.

But if you're a geek who likes to play around, I also recommend starting with something like my now 7 year old instructions on building a CompactFlash based embedded Linux install to bring a machine up from scratch, without all those funky package managers and what-have-you. There's a lot of beauty and elegance in the design of the Un*x like kernels and the way the layers get added as the system comes up that's worth stopping and appreciating, if you've the background to do so.

[ related topics: Free Software Hardware Hackery Interactive Drama broadband Open Source Nature and environment Robotics Invention and Design Software Engineering Law Graphic Design Shoes Embedded Devices Embedded Devices - Linux Archival ]

New York Times: Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality, Slate: The $100 Distraction Device: Why giving poor kids laptops doesn't improve their scholastic performance are articles about Home Computer Use and the Development of Human Capital (PDF) by Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches (The Effect of Computer Use on Child Outcomes looks closely linked).

Children in Romania who won a voucher for a free computer, and therefore were more likely to have a computer in their home

... had signicantly lower school grades in Math, English and Romanian but signicantly higher scores in a test of computer skills and in self-reported measures of computer fluency. There is also evidence that winning a voucher increased cognitive ability, as measured by Raven’; Progressive Matrices. We do not finnd much evidence for an effect on non-cognitive outcomes. Finally, the presence of parental rules regarding computer use and homework appear to mitigate the effects of computer ownership, suggesting that parental monitoring and supervision may be important mediating factors.

The New York Times article also draws from Scaling the Digital Divide by Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd, which looked at data from North Carolina. The NY Times says:

... Students posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband service provider showed up in their neighborhood. ...

[ related topics: Children and growing up broadband Invention and Design Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Mathematics New York ]

A bunch of people have been linking to Boston.com: How facts backfire. I don't have time to run the papers it purports to draw from to ground, though it talks about a 2005-2006 study led by Brendan Nyhan at the University of Michigan. It talks about how we process facts and corrections, and it seems consistent with stuff we've talked about here on Flutterby before, but it warrants re-visiting:

.... when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

[ related topics: Politics Privacy moron Current Events Education ]

History Channel reviewed as if it was scripted television.

I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Technology and Culture History Television Race ]

When I was in high school back in the 60s, I stumbled on a remarkable publication, the East Village Other, whigh along with the LA Free Press, the SF Oracle, the Berkely Barb etc. opened up my eyes to another, stranger world outside my midwestern environs, where dope, sex and music ruled all. And one personality who was in every issue was Tuli Kupferberg, musician, author, culture hero who has died at age 86. To give you some idea of his mind, I recommend you peruse the last 5 pages of his pamphlet 1001 Ways To Beat The Draft. Way # 1 was "Grope J.Edgar Hoover in the silent halss of Congress." Stay high, Tuli, stay high.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Music Erotic Sexual Culture Bay Area Sociology California Culture ]

FCC indecency rule struck down by appeals court. Via Sensible Erection.

[ related topics: Content Management Technology and Culture Current Events Television ]

Just some mucking about with the angle grinder...

[ related topics: Photography Furniture ]

Russell Brunelle is currently riding his bicycle across the U.S.. I (and a few other Flutterby participants) know him from the old SHS mailing list days, it's cool to watch his road unfold.

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

Viv has a cool remembrance of her grandmother: Eating pizza with chopsticks.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Giving low-income kids free books is the equivalent of providing them with summer school:

“The effect was equal to the effect of summer school,” Professor Allington says. “Spending roughly $40 to $50 a year on free books for [each kid] began to alleviate the achievement gap that occurs in the summer.”

Via Rebecca Blood.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Books Education ]

Chris links to a Raw Story article on the current police situation in Oakland (that also links to this article about what the police there say they now won't do) and writes a few notes: Oakland fires 80 police officers, lists crimes cops will no longer respond to:

Note that Oakland has 776 officers, each making an average of $188,000. If they each took a pay cut of $20,000, they could save the jobs of every officer whose job was on the line. Of course, it would mean officers would only be making $168,000/year. Could they survive on such a paltry sum?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Current Events Law Enforcement Heinlein ]

10 reasons having a toddler is like being at a frat party:

9. There's always that one girl, bawling her eyes out in a corner.

The comments expand on the topic nicely, too. Thanks, Genehack.

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson ]

NewsChannel9 Oklahoma City reports on "Digital Drugs" (YouTube video), audio files which may induce trance states like... gasp... drugs:

Recently Mustang public schools sent out a letter warning parents about the new trend, after several high school students reported having physiological effects after trying one of these digital downloads.

The stupid, it burns. And, remember folks, these are potential voters. As Report: Teens Using Digital Drugs to Get High | Threat Level | Wired.com observes:

Perhaps most importantly, what will happen if the kids move onto harder stuff like Steve Reich, Philip Glass or even Janet Cardiff’s installation, “The Killing Machine“?

Hat tip to Micah Breedlove.

Addendum: The Mustang Public Schools web page is advertising for new hires, and says:

Previously, Mustang Public Schools required a felony check for Oklahoma only.

Unfortunately, the "not a moron" test isn't necessary before sending out alarmist letters about "the music kids these days are listening to" to parents.

[ related topics: Drugs Children and growing up Music Health moron ]

Dori wrote an article on how to use HTML5 on your web site today. If you do HTML, you should read it.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Interesting little piece about how the Google, Genentech, UCSF and similar shuttle systems are replacing SF Muni:

“I don’t know,” says the other. “It’s like, you wait for Muni in the cold and then by the time the train comes, you’re like, “I’ve got to pay for this?”

[ related topics: Bay Area Space & Astronomy Machinery Trains Public Transportation ]

Terabytes Afghanistan - uncut unedited BBC Video. Supposedly 30 years worth. Dang BBC Video Player.. but interesting rawer stuff than nornal. Still digesting.

[ related topics: Monty Python Video ]

Meme Seeding: Just In Time Coding is the IT equiv of Just In Time Inventory and all of those other Just In Time _____ buzzphrases. In todays case it was a set of functions that would be called when a complex set of conditions were met. It was an easy set of functions, but a very specific set of conditions involving many systems. 2 years ago the if statement was made and a comment made.

# someday, all of this will happen and you will need to ___________

It's Sunday. It finally happened, all the pieces and systems came together.

Sure, you could call it "sloppy coding" and "failure to create a unit test" or "poorly defined specifications" and maybe even "lying to a client" that the system did _____. But, I'm trying to start a meme. Let's call it: "Just In Time Coding" aka "JIT Code".

It's Sunday evening, the code was written: XML posts sent to another vendors system that has only been online for a couple of months, raw sockets connected to another vendors system that has had several complete interface changes in the last 6 months. Notice text messages and e-mails were sent.. and it all worked flawlessly (close enough, anyway).

No money was wasted shelling out code to API's that did not exist or were changed since 2 years ago. No unit testing failures were reported, and the client would have never been able to (until today) verify that it worked as promised. Heck, it would have taken me a month to setup a one-shot test in an bogus test environment.

So remember boys and girls, there is a new buzzword: JIT Code. Say it with pride and next thing you know your marketing sales weasel types will be describing things in glossy sales powerpoints as "Powered by JIT" or "Certified JIT 2.0 Compliant".

Go ahead, use it in a sentence today. Replace: "I hacked that together with duct tape and Perl and PHP at the last minute" with "The JIT Code Verifier shows that it worked as specified."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Content Management Perl Open Source Nature and environment Invention and Design Software Engineering Law Consumerism and advertising Television Marketing Currency ]

You've undoubtedly been exposed to the recent disclosure of phone calls made by Mel Gibson in raving batshit insane mode. New York Times: Frank Rich: The Good News About Mel Gibson points out that these calls don't really reveal anything about him that we haven't known for years and years, but that the culture has changed so that those stalwarts of of "conservative" media, like Bill O'Reilly and Robert Novak and the like, can no longer come to Gibson's defense the way they have in previous years.

[ related topics: Sociology Current Events ]

Five tips for surviving a raid on your farm or food club. (Via Eric Wagoner who's currently dealing with law enforcement harassment of some of the efforts of http://athens.locallygrown.net/ )

[ related topics: Food Law Enforcement ]

I'll probably need an Android phone that can act as a USB host shortly.

• USB host stack for a (rooted) Nexus One.
• With some hardware hackery you can enable USB host mode on a Motorola Droid.
• Notes on using an HTC Hero as a USB host.

If anyone else has info on using an Android phone as a USB host, I'd like to hear it. Shawn Mike Kelley suggested this Android tablet.

[ related topics: Wireless ]

Autism is more common in children of wealthier parents, unconfirmed speculation in this article is that that's due to older fathers.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Via Mars, a beginner's guide to making an Arduino Shield PCB using Eagle, which has a freeware version and a personal version for $50.

I've been using ExpressPCB for boards, and that's fine, but I like the idea of some of the circuit checks that Eagle can provide and the idea of being able to order from multiple vendors.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Embedded Devices ]

Pay and Sit - a soulless object of enterprise, an art project, a free butt plug, or a place to rest for a quarter. All in one piece. This belongs at )^( as an art piece with more interesting/useful spikes.

[ related topics: Art & Culture Currency ]

Living Structures - There are some interesting ideas about use of space and structures to live in in this book from the 1974. Worth exploring the thoughts, if not the construction techniques. Nancy and I toy with the idea of custom building a camping trailer/RV and I've been looking at such things for creature use of space. Also, the interface to the online book works well on my large screen system,

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy Machinery Fabrication Model Building ]

Russel Brunelle writes An open letter to Lance Armstrong: http://russellb.livejournal.com/1174808.html

• The cuteness! It shreds! Jackson Goldstone bikes to kindergarten
• The joke goes on a little too long, but it is kinda cute: Tarp surfing

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Embedded Devices Video Bicycling ]

Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood Throughout the Day inferred from Twitter, presented in density preserving cartogram maps. Via MeFi

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

Hyperbole and a Half: Boyfriend Doesn't Have Ebola. Probably. has an actually useful take on the pain level charts and scales.

Do not piss off the whales! Picture of a Southern Right Whale leaping on to a sailboat, dismasting it. (Via SE).

Like to track this one down a little further, get a little more background and detail, but the run this morning went on too long and I've got lots of stuff to do today, so: BBC News reports on a UK and Australian study published in Science Translational Medicine which purports to have found the specific proteins involved in coeliac/celiac disease, an intolerance to gluten.

[ related topics: Health Current Events Physiology ]

QOTD:

"(software) patterns are a demonstration of weakness in a (programming) language"

-- Rob Pike

(Via)

[ related topics: Quotes Software Engineering ]

Yesterday Shawn twittered The Old New Thing: No, you can't lock a gadget to the top of the sidebar, which is part of an ongoing theme over there, I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature":

As my colleague Michael Grier put it, "Not many people have gotten a raise and a promotion for stopping features from shipping."

But more of 'em should.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

The other day we were talking about autism and trying to put together reasons for its differing prevalence in differing populations. One of the problems is that the autism field is becoming ground zero for strange medical ideas.

Back in October of 2009, there was news of a breakthru in research on Chronic Fatique Syndrome with scientists claiming to have found a retrovirus associated with the vague disease. hey recommended antiretrovirals, normally used for HIV as a possible treatment. However, by March of 2010 some people who had tried to replicate the experiments were not able to do it, and they were suggesting caution. Now we hear that the study's main researcher, Judy Mikovits, has shown up at the AutismOne convention, ground zero for the anti-vaccine movement. She was pushing her retrovirus as a possible cause of sutism as well.

Dr. Jonson called patriotism the last refuge of a scoundrel. One wonders if autism is becoming the last refuge of a crank.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health virus Current Events ]

OMG! I knew SRL had moved to Petaluma, but machines at Rivertown Revival on Saturday afternoon? Torn between "scared" and "Must. Go."

Cow Clicker: A Facebook game about Facebook games. As the about page says:

You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom "premium" cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called "mooney"), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends' cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.

Via lots of places, but this entry at Even More Like This gets a call-out.

[ related topics: Games Weblogs Currency ]

Sexual Experience Promotes Adult Neurogenesis in the Hippocampus Despite an Initial Elevation in Stress Hormones. Based on that, Andrea Kuszewski asks "since sex makes you smarter, can virtual sex do the same?.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Physiology ]

Sonoma County is the #2 "gayest" area in the U.S.!

We're #2, so we try harder...

Cartoonist John Callahan has died. Via a MeFi entry that has more.

If you ever found yourself starting to laugh at a crudely drawn cartoon, then stopping suddenly, shocked, and saying "that's not funny!", it was probably a Callahan cartoon.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

An interesting historical piece from Harper's Magazine in August of 1941, during those last golden months before the US entered WW2, but Hitler stood on the English Channel, at the Gates of Egypt, and was still chasing Stalin across the Ukraine. Dorothy Thompson muses during a Manhattan cocktail party as to which guest would collaborate with the Nazi's is push came to shove, and which ones wouldn't. While Thompson's own bits of snobbery are sometime's visible, there's some canny reading of the internal psychology of fascism going on here.

Of course, when the war came the America Firsters and other isolationists, right and left, disbanded. Many who wanted to stay out of the war gave their life during it. But many of the attitudes before it still haunt us.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality History Dictators ]

Stubornella on women in technology.

... I mean, just take a look at the fastest growing careers for women. We are veterinary technicians not veterinarians, dental assistants not dentists, medical assistants not doctors. We like to believe we have evolved, but the data speaks to something else. Being a home heath aide is dirty work with bad hours and heavy lifting — but it is a career women can imagine, whereas, right now, they clearly can’t imagine themselves coding. I want to understand why not…

Via Lyn, Scott, and others.

Last year when we got new cars, Charlene and I asked a few of the folks we know at COTS if there were deserving people who could use our old ones. Mine got given to someone who promptly fell off the wagon, left the shelter and the program and abandoned it in Truckee, where it was towed and sold at auction.

Charlene's got given to someone we've kept closer ties with, and who's doing fairly well, but she used it as leverage with a mechanic for another vehicle, and it apparently bounced around a bit, and we recently got a knock on the door from the translator for a woman who'd bought it for cash without all the paperwork in order at the fair. So Charlene's helping her get the paperwork in order.

Anyway, yesterday Charlene spent some time at the DMV helping square things away, and one of the discussions was about kids, these low-income, undoubtedly undocumented, people who speak little or no English have fairly large families, but the translator was talking about not driving. Apparently her mom had been teaching her to drive, and her husband, or perhaps at the time future husband, had said "stop that".

Of course now said husband is in jail, and the translator is needing to pick up a whole bunch of skills fast, and will probably end up regretting some of those kids.

While I'm glad the guy is in jail, although, unfortunately, viewing women with that particular disdain isn't yet an incarceratable offense, I'm afraid that culturally this is a symptom of something that does extend all the way up to the higher financial and social tiers. So it's worth reading that essay.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Invention and Design Software Engineering Writing Work, productivity and environment Marriage ]

Who Is Behind the 25,000 Deaths In Mexico?

No one asks or answers this question: How does such an escalation benefit the drug smuggling business which has not been diminished at all during the past three years of hyper-violence in Mexico? Each year, the death toll rises, each year there is no evidence of any disruption in the delivery of drugs to American consumers, each year the United States asserts its renewed support for this war. And each year, the basic claims about the war go unquestioned.

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Drugs Health History Consumerism and advertising ]

Magazine: Whores and Other Hackers, how the war on Craigslist erotic services is endangering sex workers.

Aside from Blumenthal, there are two things right now that conspire to keep us in this position. First, a lack of mass political capacity as a workforce—but let’s not despair entirely. What workforce can claim mass political power these days anyway? The second obstacle is the media machine’s continued confusion about where technology and sex converge. Addressing the political fight is one for the long haul, and for multiple generations of sex workers and our allies. But this internet thing, I think we can fix.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture History Journalism and Media Net Culture Salon magazine ]

New York Times: Lawmakers Seeking Cuts Look at Nonprofit Salaries talks about, for instance, the president of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America making a million bucks a year. Philip Greenspun has some additional commentary.

This past year Charlene and I have been fairly active in volunteering and giving, but we've been trying to be personally involved, and to give money only to organizations where we understand the compensation structure and costs involved. I think it's important to remember that "non-profit" is a tax status, and you should read the Form 990 of the organizations you're giving to (see Guidestar.org if you can't find it otherwise).

I think some of the real eye-opener is looking at how much some of these charitable organizations that are out asking for our money are already pulling down in tax dollars.

But this also leads down to some other questions: I accept it as a given that eventually every organization will switch from trying to solve the problem it was formed to solve into self-perpetuation mode. I also see that a lot of charity ends up helping in the short term, but perpetuating the cycles that it claims to solve in the long-term. I'm happy, for instance, to help provide outlets and activities for the underprivileged (for what that word means) kids in my community, and to help some of their parents achieve better lives for themselves, but unless these activities change the cultural context, encourage these low income families to have fewer (or no) kids, have the expectation that women will be able to make a way for themselves in the world without relying on men (who may skip out on them, or end up in prison, etc), we're not solving the problem. In fact, we're probably, long-term, making the situation worse.

Related to that, Scarleteen has just lost their Google AdWords revenue.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics Sexual Culture Invention and Design History Sociology Work, productivity and environment Community Currency New York ]

Violet Blue: My letter to Facebook about removing the Our Porn, Ourselves page

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Fools Gold: Inside the Glenn Beck Goldline Scheme

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

A Flutterby reader forwarded along a man found dead in a bondage club fire. The club was Passive Arts Studios, and today's Nic Buxom has a few words in memory of "Sharky".

He cared about people and he cared about our community and he cared about us girls. He was proud of his business and he'd made it what it is. And he offered me the best job I'd ever had. PAS wasn't even a job to me, it was getting paid to do what I love. I was given a community of strong, and wonderfully unusual women to call my friends and I was given a place that would change my entire life, for the better. ...

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Current Events Community ]

Woodworking tool porn: Heinz Tools

[ related topics: Erotic Woodworking ]

I could rip links out of this MeFi post about Karakuri ningyō, mechanical automata sculptures, but I'd just build a list of links that are already compiled there.

how US Intelligence Actually Works: A Chart

New York Post fouls up a correction (via Scott Rosenberg). Interestingly, along with the errors they make in the correctly, they state that the original bad information came from the NYPD. Why's the NYPD seeding the Post with bad info?

[ related topics: Content Management Current Events Journalism and Media New York ]

Transformus Burn Video, made in Chattanooga by Andrew Nigh at 509 East Main Street. I used to be 745 East Main, must be some karmic vortex in the neighborhood.

[ related topics: Movies Chattanooga Video ]