Flutterby™! From 2010-08-02 to 2010-08-31

Investors shy away from California high speed rail plan. There's $11 billion in taxpayer dollars pledged to the plan, but it needs $40 billion total. Government subsidized rail seems like a grand idea 'til you read the tales of the railroad robber barons of the 1800s who managed to transfer most of the rail money into their pockets and then have the railroads default on the debt.

If I were an investor looking back to the legacy of Hopkins, Crocker, Stanford and Huntington, among many others, I'd go invest in something else too.

[ related topics: California Culture Trains ]

I want my off-road capable flying car! Via MeFi, where the comments point out that this is a vehicle explicitly designed to take the Gospel out to the heathen savages.

About which I'll have some more commentary shortly, because I spent the weekend camped in the Sierra with a large number of Evangelical Christians, and had an interesting and enlightening time.

[ related topics: Religion Aviation California Culture Automobiles ]

How we spent last weekend: SAGging the Agony, a few notes from working one of the rest stops on the Christian Encounter Ministries' 24 Hour Agony bicycle ride. The rider who went furthest did 446 miles, I had a fun cross-cultural experience, and finally got to use my HAM license.

[ related topics: Religion Sociology Work, productivity and environment Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Two short stories from Columbine:

• Ernst Eternal
• The Visitation Room

I've been doing some Objective-C recently for Cocoa widgets. Mostly I get stuff in and out of NS objects as quickly as possible and do everything I can in C++ (so that I actually understand the memory model... yeesh!), but some of the hate leveled at OO in Meuon's JIT coding entry and the discussion about "coding ahead" has me thinking about some of the ways in which NeXT and then Apple have mixed "...all the memory safety of C combined with all the blazing speed of Smalltalk..." to be the core of their widget set, and how paradigms for coding have trade-offs.

With that in mind, I think wtfjs is a great resource for JavaScript and all its silliness.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Software Engineering ]

Re SAGging the Agony: One of the things that makes that ride special is that they've got a roughly 2 to 1 staff to rider ratio (normally is probably < 1:10), which means every rider is tracked pretty meticulously. This is a process that takes about 4 people per SAG station (you'd think it would be less, but in practice it was 4 of us sitting around a lot, and then working together to make sure the data really did get in all the places it needed to when that burst happened). I think it should take 1 and a computer, or be automated, and if that can be implemented then maybe it could be scaled from less than a hundred riders to thousands.

With that in mind, I'm interested in info on:

• experience with long-range (20 miles or so) line-of-sight WiFi as an alternative to HAM packet radio.
• getting started with HAM packet radio.
• cheap long-range (5 foot or so) relatively high speed (< 30MPH) RFID transponders.
• possibly solving that same problem with barcodes (IR lit up security cameras for scanners?)
• old fashioned line-at-a-time dot matrix printers for data logging redundancy in harsh environments. One of the things I was thinking about was "what happens when the computers fail", and bomb-proof logging to human readable media seems necessary. But all the old MX-80s I've seen now fetch a premium, and I don't know where you'd buy new.

[ related topics: Cool Technology Bicycling RFID ]

Groaners: The Sensible Erection Lame but still awesome Joke Contest:

A spokesperson for the Greek government reassures investors: "Our state will never reach bankruptcy", said Zeno.

(It's SE, so it's NSFW by definition)

[ related topics: Humor ]

So there's the "ha ha, Mike Godwin puts the smackdown on the FBI" aspect of Wikipedia's response to the FBI's attempt to make them remove the FBI logo (PDF), article and appropriate excerpts here, but there's also the aspect that David Larson, Deputy Director of the FBI, and Brian Binney, Assistant General Counsel of the FBI, deliberately omitted portions of the code they cited to make their case.

Let me restate that: We have sworn law enforcement officers (I think, they're FBI officials, right?) making up law.

That needs to go way beyond "career limiting behavior".

[ related topics: Law Law Enforcement ]

Now that it's been announced, I can say that the Cricut Imagine (BusinessWire press release on the Cricut Imagine) is not the product I was working on last year.

But I did do code and do a bunch of soldering for the hardware for a somewhat similar device that printed (at lower resolution using older inkjet technology to try to work around patent encumbrances) and cut, and I like to take some solace in the thought that my version was used as negotiating leverage before it got dropped. Can't blame them for deciding to go with a modern super high res print engine though.

So, yeah, that's why when I got timing pulses wrong I ended up cleaning my office with denatured alcohol.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Dan's Life Current Events Work, productivity and environment Machinery ]

One of the challenges I had at the Agony was a guy with a late '70s or so bike who ran the chain off the big sprocket of the rear derailleur and completely chewed up his spokes. In retrospect, I probably could have done more, but if I keep supporting rides I'll need to get some cassette removal tools to take the rear sprocket cluster off of a wheel.

Since this is likely to be an occasional thing, the idea of small and light appeals. Larry pointed out the Stein "Hypercracker" Mini Lock Ring Tool, available in Shimano and Campy versions.

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

Okay, I'm now tracking pretty much everwhere I go, using a Wintec WBT-202. Of course this means I have a lot of time sitting on my butt at home, with occasional excursions out. What I need is a few command-line tools that can do interesting things with my trackpoints.

The data's coming out in Wintec proprietary format, but gpsbabel seems to be handling it okay, however, NMEA format seems to be dropping speed information, GPX throws away all sorts o' stuff, KML actually seems to be the least lossy.

What I'd like is the ability to say "give me the points from when I crossed this line to when I cross it again (or another line)", or "give me the points from time X to time Y", or even "break this set of trackpoints into segments wherever I stopped for more than X seconds".

Fairly simple stuff, I could whip it together in a few hours in Perl, but if someone else has already done it I can build on what they've got rather than reinventing the wheel.

Suggestions?

Oh, and someone else has undoubtedly already fought the "why does my KML work in Google Earth but not in Google Maps" problem. I know I've fought it once. If anyone's got refreshers on the subset of KML Google Maps likes (or maybe I should just switch to OpenStreetMap...)

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Maps and Mapping Maps & Mapping ]

UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center: Pancreatic cancer cells grow more quickly using fructose than glucose:

“Traditionally, glucose and fructose have been considered as interchangeable monosaccharide substrates that are similarly metabolized, and little attention has been given to sugars other than glucose,” the study states. “However, fructose intake has increased dramatically in recent decades and cellular uptake of glucose and fructose uses distinct transporters ... these findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation. They have major significance for cancer patients, given dietary refined fructose consumption.”

This being used to demonize high fructose corn syrup, but those of you paying attention at home would also recognize agave nectar as mostly fructose.

[ related topics: Health Physiology ]

I'm not generally a Michael Bloomberg fan, but Bloomberg's speech on the Cordoba House "Ground Zero" Mosque is worth a read. via MeFi, which also had bearwife's comment:

What the heck do the opponents think Osama bin Laden was aiming at, anyway? It was our Constitution and our civil liberties. He already scored too large a hit as it is.

[ related topics: moron Law Civil Liberties Real Estate ]

Prop 8 overturned, as long as the Utah Mormons can continue to meddle, this'll go to a higher court.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Rights Groups File Lawsuit To Allow Challenge To Targeted Killing Without Due Process:

NEW YORK – The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Civil Liberties Union today filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to challenge their refusal to grant a license that would allow the groups to file a lawsuit challenging the government's asserted authority to use lethal force against U.S. citizens located far from any battlefield without charge, trial or judicial process of any kind.

Nasser al-Aulaqi has retained the CCR and the ACLU to challenge the U.S. government's stated intent to assassinate his son, U.S. citizen Anwar al-Aulaqi, without due process. However, the Secretary of the Treasury has called him a "specially designated global terrorist," which makes it a crime to represent him as a lawyer without the permission of the U.S. Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Yep. Nothin' says "democracy" like extrajudicial capital punishment. When rights are illegal, only outlaws will have rights. Via SE.

[ related topics: Law Civil Liberties ]

Colorado gubernatorial candidate front-runner Dan Maes thinks bicycling is a UN plot:

Maes said in a later interview that he once thought the mayor's efforts to promote cycling and other environmental initiatives were harmless and well-meaning. Now he realizes "that's exactly the attitude they want you to have."

"This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms," Maes said.

He added: "These aren't just warm, fuzzy ideas from the mayor. These are very specific strategies that are dictated to us by this United Nations program that mayors have signed on to."

When did politics turn into a sad parody of wacko AM talk radio?

[ related topics: Politics Software Engineering Sports Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Further update: Google and Verizon announce roughly what the NY Times said they were going to. I take back some of those nasty things I implied about the NY Times.

Update: GooglePublicPolicy twitter account denies the story.

Remember when Google was the big player on our side for Net Neutrality? Yeah, they've gone evil: NY Times reports that Google and Verizon are talking about tiered traffic.

All the more reason I'm interested in building some alternative networks. Again: Anyone near Petaluma wanna play with point-to-point WiFi?

Going from Jaunty to Lucid Ubuntu on the Flutterby server. Hopefully it'll all "just work".

And it ain't perfect, and I'm still running an older version of PostgreSQL 'cause I can't get 8.4 to run. Sigh.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Two great examples of bad ideas in one story: In Pleasant Hill California, Police Jacket-Clad Bandits Stage Brazen Home Invasion.

1. Why no-knock warrants are an extremely bad idea.
2. Why wireless versions of your website are also a bad idea. I mean, sure, there's a "View classic version" link on the bottom, but that just goes to a full-width no ads version of the site. I'm good if you're going to use a different stylesheet for mobile browsers, but I have yet to see a site that redirects mobile browsers to another URL that gets it right.

[ related topics: Web development Wireless Current Events Law Enforcement ]

Ars Technica looks at the BusyBox v Westinghouse copyright lawsuit, and how the bankrupt remnants of Westinghouse got off way easy relative to music pirates.

[ related topics: Music Law Current Events Copyright/Trademark Embedded Devices - Linux ]

A /. story comments about how easy it might be to use child pornography as a weapon, riffing off this tale of a guy caught framing his boss, and the same story with a little more from the perspective of the guy who was framed.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law Law Enforcement ]

Good article, tools and demo about the perils of memcaching compounded with poor authentication techniques. Bottom line: don't memcache things that include or may include authentication or important data.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Congrats to RasterWeb for 13 years!

As I read stories about Water Based Data Centers I think about adding something like a Small Modular Nuclear Reactor to the flotilla, and tapping (legally) some undersea fiber cable or maybe parking at a friendly island nation ala Cryptonomicon and being a semi-mobile data center for all of those things that you don't want very much government involvement in. You might even supply excess power to the island for some governmental approvals and umbrella. Having a floating data center makes more sense if you can move it where it is either needed, or economically or legally advantageous. Sergey would probably love to have a "Republic of Google" for some projects.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron Boats Machinery Archival ]

Churchgoers, strippers protest one another in Coshocton County, Ohio:

Now, the dancers have turned the tables, so to speak. Fed up with the tactics of Dunfee and his flock, they say they have finally accepted his constant invitation to come to church.

[ related topics: Religion Current Events Civil Liberties ]

LiquidMetal looks too good to be true, but they "granted to Apple a perpetual, worldwide, fully-paid, exclusive license to commercialize such intellectual property in the field of consumer electronic products in exchange for a license fee" - Not sure what they'll use it for, but after watching the demo video and this one, I'd love to have some to just play with.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Movies Consumerism and advertising Video ]

Bridging the Chasm Between Two Cultures. Karla McLaren, author of 9 books in the metaphysical/"New Age" genre, talks about her becoming a skeptic, and why there's a communication gulf between the capital-S Skeptic culture and the New Age one.

One of the biggest falsehoods I've encountered is that skeptics can't tolerate mystery, while New Age people can. This is completely wrong, because it is actually the people in my culture who can't handle mystery—not even a tiny bit of it. Everything in my New Age culture comes complete with an answer, a reason, and a source. Every action, emotion, health symptom, dream, accident, birth, death, or idea here has a direct link to the influence of the stars, chi, past lives, ancestors, energy fields, interdimensional beings, enneagrams, devas, fairies, spirit guides, angels, aliens, karma, God, or the Goddess.

We love to say that we embrace mystery in the New Age culture, but that’s a cultural conceit and it’s utterly wrong. In actual fact, we have no tolerance whatsoever for mystery. Everything from the smallest individual action to the largest movements in the evolution of the planet has a specific metaphysical or mystical cause. In my opinion, this incapacity to tolerate mystery is a direct result of my culture’s disavowal of the intellect. One of the most frightening things about attaining the capacity to think skeptically and critically is that so many things don't have clear answers. Critical thinkers and skeptics don't create answers just to manage their anxiety.

And I think there's lots in there about talking between different cultures with different philosophical bases that's worth reading.

Via this Metafilter thread where several early commenters are clearly part of the problem.

[ related topics: Religion Books Health Sociology California Culture Philosophy ]

Obama Administration In Danger Of Establishing "New Normal" With Worst Bush-Era Policies, Says ACLU.

[ related topics: Politics Civil Liberties ]

If you're interested in people photography and portraiture, don't miss OkCupid's look at profile pictures:

File this under "icebreakers, MacWorld '11". Finally, statistical proof that iPhone users aren't just getting fucked by Apple:

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Photography Weblogs iPhone ]

Star Trek PADDS - Interesting article comparing the Star Trek PADD to an iPad. Biggest difference: Controlling a starship.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Star Trek Space & Astronomy Current Events Art & Culture Aviation - Helicopters ]

John Kelly writes about the flaws in the Duquenois-Levine test for marijuana.

[ related topics: Drugs ]

If you have a moment to play with a little bit of simple cool C code (and a platform that lets you install libreadline and libportaudio easily, check out MarkV's Zounds! Sounds! riffing on an old PDP-1 sound program. Any time something comes out of a discussion between Mark and Tom there's gonna be coolness, this is some neat sounds stemming from a program that was 6 instructions on a PDP-1.

One warning: Mark's blog software’s auto-whateverifier has changed the “x” in the example switch and mask settings to a multiplication operator. So copy and pasting those settings doesn’t work. You'll have to type 'em in.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Community ]

Scarleteen: Something About Olives. (Really. It's so totally about olives.)

This is hardly surprising: there's a whole lot of pressure to be an extra-virgin, after all. People pay more for you. You have a better reputation. You have a status other, lesser, oils don't get to have...well, unless they make the claim anyway, maybe knowing they're not really virgins, or maybe feeling like your definition of what makes an extra-virgin just isn't the same as theirs.

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture Food ]

U.S. military judge rules confessions gained from tortured detainee are admissable.

In May hearings, a man identified as Interrogator 1 said in testimony that he threatened Mr. Khadr with being gang-raped to death if he did not co-operate. That interrogator was later identified as former U.S. Army Sergeant Joshua Claus. He has also been convicted of abusing a different detainee and has left the military.

I think it is important to note that the argument for allowing the evidence is that it wasn't obtained during those particular torture sessions, but this sounds like a really thin line, and the sentencing a torture victim life imprisonment for things they may or may not have done at 15 years old in a war situation is not exactly the way to win hearts and minds.

More in this article. Via a whole bunch of places, including this blog entry via Shawn.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs History Law Current Events ]

I remember 20 years ago ripping out "const"s because Microsoft's semantics were so messed up it wasn't worth the hassle. 2 decades later....

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron ]

Brainwagon: Thoughts on the Google-Verizon net neutrality proposal

Evidently some area kids are making soda bottle bombs and exploding them around their neighborhoods. Somerset happens to be a subdivision of "prairie mansions" - all at least 5,000 square feet and starting around $1.5M. Of course, the media makes it sound like it's some suburban al Qaeda:

“It’s scary,” Grauer said.

In both cases plastic bottles were filled with chemicals that create explosions powerful enough to hurt people.

Umm... yeah. You could say that a cap from a cap gun can "create an explosion powerful enough to hurt people."

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Journalism and Media Guns ]

Oh. My. Russel Brunelle's cycling blog has a picture of the cover of Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape. This looks like it deserves a space in the seat-back pocket next to the Sibley bird guide.

[ related topics: Cool Technology ]

Software hack to plug iPhone and iPad PDF security hole is released:

Users who haven’t jailbroken their devices will have to wait for Apple to release a fix.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Software Engineering iPhone ]

Linking to this Guardian article about the drug-company scare tactics paper about the end of antibiotics in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, about a gene that makes many bacteria resistant to more basic antibiotics spreading in India in which the primary author is up-front about his goals:

"Frankly, pharmaceutical companies as well as governments and the European Commission need to really get their act together," says Walsh ... "What we need is for somebody to give us something like €3m [£2.5m] a year. It's not a lot of money."

mostly so that I can point out this truth in the comments in the Sensible Erection entry, where "sacrelicious" noted:

the black plague ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity for europe. that'll happen when two-thirds of your population dies of a disease that strikes indiscriminately and all of the resources are re-distributed amongst the surviving third.

I'm pretty bacteria resistant, so I think this'll be great for me!

[ related topics: Health ]

Miguel de Icaza: Initial Thoughts on Oracle vs Google Patent Lawsuit. Very interesting read on software patents, licensing, and how this relates to the Microsoft Community Promise.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Humor Weblogs Microsoft Software Engineering moron Community Guns Databases ]

Ella prescription emergency contraceptive approved by the FDA

• The Adventures of Li'l Cthulhu
• Call of Cthulhu in under 2 minutes
• And, of course, if you're confused by all of this, from ancient times (in Internet years) a Jack Chick like tract to help you figure it all out: Who will be eaten first? (which, I believe, was originally a Howard Hallis creation, but his site is undergoing redesign).

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Net Culture ]

What Happened With Our Porn, Ourselves and Facebook:

I am still considering pursuing a contact at Facebook, but clearly — right now — Facebook isn’t a safe place for women to talk about explicit sexual imagery in any manner other than with fear, aversion or hatred. That any group can be removed by people who do not agree with the point of view of said group (such as the anti-homophobia group that was deleted around the same time), highlights a greater problem between our culture, democracy, free speech and social media: its fragility. Social media is simply too weak, and too frightened of what it means to be human, to be sustainable.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Bay Area Sociology Journalism and Media ]

A few photos of stuff the same distance from the World Trade Center as the “Ground Zero Mosque”.

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs ]

Journalism warning labels.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

"I'm driven to the company of others because I think I'm a bad influence on myself, and I'm trying to dilute the effect" -- Gn0me on SE

When I first learned Emacs, I printed up a cheat sheet of common operations I did and taped it to the side of every monitor I used. I'm realizing that there's a lot more that Emacs can do for me, so it's time to do that again.

/r/emacs: Tell us about the obscure, but useful features of Emacs that you know about. is a good source for more stuff.

Latest woodworking tool lust: The Arbortech Mini-Grinder.

The Abortech Mini-Grinder promo YouTube video looks like the good bits out of a rather long and over-detailed Google, which is worth watching just because I think I could carve most of the leaf wrapped around the wooden vase using tools that I've already got...

Looks like it's about $230. Not sure I can justify it right now, but it's definitely on my "want" list.

Turned on to this by this thread over at LumberJocks where someone noticed it in use on a clip on Spiegel on line.

[ related topics: Movies Video Woodworking ]

Interesting notes about a new in-depth biography of the master, Robert Heinlien. Apparently he got into the sex stuff early, with his second wife having an affair with L. Ron Hubbard, and their getting introduced to a Crowleyist sex-majick enthusiast. I guess Valentine Michael Smith had to be inspired by something, as did Nehemiah Scudder.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Scientology Heinlein Marriage ]

Dark Patterns:

Normally when you think of “bad design”, you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Graphic Design ]

CarnalNation: Katherine Chen: How Video Games Taught Me About Sex:

[ related topics: Erotic Games Sexual Culture Video ]

Kindle and iPad Displays: Up close and personal.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

You'll laugh. You'll cry. 2010 Rapha Gentleman’s Race Report (In Full), a report on riding a brutal 126 mile race in 101° weather on a tandem. Also about relationships and mind over reality.

A MeFi thread with more stuff on the ride.

[ related topics: Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem ]

Heather Corinna on Scarleteen: So, About That Study...

It's not news that mainstream media tends to do a poor job reporting on both science and sex, and a poorer job still job when young people are involved. Resisting salacious headlines or claims appears to be intensely challenging for many when teenagers and sex are the subject. There were a couple standouts -- and Oliver Wang's piece on this and another study over at The Atlantic deserve special mention -- but on the whole, most reports misrepresented the study and its findings in some way, and many demonstrated that right in their headline.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology Current Events Journalism and Media Pop Culture ]

Elf on the media and the "ground zero" mosque, quoted in entirety for truth:

Dear Mainstream Media:

Here we are, three weeks or so into the BurlingtonNorthernCoatFactoryIslamicCommunityCenter controversy, and only now are you learning that Imam Rauf is a Sufi? And only now you're learning that "sufism" is distinct from the Shia'a or Sunni traditions, a mystical and highly tolerant tradition that the Shia'a and Sunni traditions generally look down upon?

We've been at war in several countries where these are major issues and you still don't understand them? Where the hell is your responsibility to educate the American people?

And Jason Mustian weighs in:

In fairness, we've been building 'ground zeros' near Iraqi mosques since March 2003.

[ related topics: Quotes History Journalism and Media ]

Jason Davies is running for Petaluma city council. The crazy bastard. I like Jason personally, I'm not totally sure what directions he's going to take and I think that he tends to be a... marketing guy, so sometimes he jumps at the high level without considering the details. On the other hand, I like his willingness to shake things up.

I haven't yet given him my unqualified endorsement, but I'm generally positive on him and think he's someone I can vote for.

Just spent some time talking with him, I now endorse Jason Davies for Petaluma City Council.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]

Worth noting: Today is the 90th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Law Civil Liberties ]

I'm quoted at the end of page 3 on this article about Shirlee Zane's comments on the Cordoba House development.

[ related topics: Quotes Real Estate ]

Installed the long anticipated first batch of kitchen cabinet doors last night.

[ related topics: Photography Home Improvement ]

Blag Hag: Best Atheist Sex Toy Ever. It's a Flying Spaghetti Monster bondage set!

(Thanks, Shawn!)

[ related topics: Religion Erotic ]

Scott Rosenberg: Dr. Laura, Associated Content and the Googledammerung. On the hash that "Associated Content" is making of Google results.

While we're at it, can we get the gazillion badly informed "go find your actual information elsewhere" home improvement and crafting sites thrown off of Google?

[ related topics: Databases ]

The True Story of Automoblox. The founder of the Automoblox toy line on the travails of getting his company up and running. Required reading for anyone who says "I have this (Chinese|Indian|Taiwan) company that says they can build it for me for five thousand dollars!"

[ related topics: Toys Woodworking ]

In the wake of setting up a web site for aggregating information about Petaluma, PetalumaOpen.com, and a few requests to slap up some simple editable sites, I decided to move Flutterby.net back from my home-written system to MediaWiki.

I was impressed by the speed enhancements, the WYSIWYG FCKeditor extension, and the flexibility and speed of the new MediaWiki API, which let me upload my articles with just a little bit of Perl.

And Mediawiki.el is now fast enough to be usable (I suspect largely due to the API). Yay Mark!

Which leads me to my question: What parameters do I send to emacs to make it open one of my wiki pages on startup? I can write a bit of Lisp to do this, but --script skips my ~/.emacs.d/init.el code and then exits.

I suppose I could have my "upload these pictures and create a new blog entry" script alter the init, but that seems even more annoying.

[ related topics: Weblogs Perl Open Source ]

Leo Laporte: Buzz Kill. On realizing that giving these so-called "social media" sites all of our conversation, we're losing things:

I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs. Well no more. I’m sorry for having neglected you Leoville.

[ related topics: Weblogs Journalism and Media ]

California is currently on the way to having the worst year for pertussis (Whooping Cough) since 1958. Last year they had 2,700 cases with 7 deaths. Much of this is caused by a general reduction in vaccination for the disease, which is falsely accused of causing autism.

Fortunately, the forward thinking Science Fiction community is planning a counter-attack. At next week's DragonCon Sci-Fi convention in Atlanta, one group is setting up a nearby vaccination clinic for attendees and their children. The future belongs to the survivors, whether they be the ones with the longest claws or the smartest ideas.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs Health Community ]

Philadelphia requiring bloggers to pay $300 for a business license.

Seems like there might be a place for a town that's willing to do this for a buck or two a year to get together with a domain registrar and provide contact info and a P.O. box to do business from...

Thanks, Chris.

Researching The "Rape Culture" of America.

Koss and Pollitt make a technical (and in fact dubious) legal point: women are ignorant about what counts as rape. Roiphe makes a straightforward human point: the women were there, and they know best how to judge what happened to them. Since when do feminists consider "law" to override women's experience?

I'm not sure where I stand on the thesis of the essay, but it's worth reading through, there's lots of good stuff in there.

[ related topics: Sociology Writing Law California Culture ]

More social media musings. So I had that link to Leo Laporte: Buzz Kill. If you're interested in more musings on the ways that we're giving up our conversation spaces to others: Scott Rosenberg: Why trust Facebook with the future's past?, Larry Burton: Ponderings on friendship and writing, and Violet Blue's Gnomedex talk (uStream video) touches on the difficulty of using Tribe/Facebook/whatever as a forum for any sex related discussions.

Speaking of which, now that I've moved back to Mediawiki over on Flutterby.net I need to do a little rework on building some better RSS feeds of content there.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Content Management Weblogs Technology and Culture Sociology Journalism and Media Community Video Economics ]

Minneapolis will pay $165,000 to zombies (and their attorneys).

Although U.S. District Judge Joan Ericksen had dismissed the zombies' lawsuit, it was resurrected in February by a three-judge panel of the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ...

(Emphasis mine)

Walk into the Porche dealer.. Take a test drive of a black Porche 911 with all the goodies. Squeeeling the tires a little in a curve, scream: "I like it, I'll take it". Pull back into the dealership with a big grin and a happy sales-droid. Take a chair in front of the big desk, sip a cup of coffee served by a buxom lass, and tell the sales manager that you loved the ride in the Porche 911, and you want it delivered tomorrow with a couple of minor modifications: You want a Cummings diesel motor in front of the dashboard and that it should be Ferrari red. Plop down a large deposit in cash and walk out.

In the high dollar corporate IT world... it happened again today. They test drove and -liked- the Linux system, have for weeks. And then asked for it on Windows Server and MS-SQL. It happens all the time... We would laugh at the guy at the Porche dealer, shouldn't we laugh in IT?

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Open Source Currency Databases Furniture ]

Why I don't read /. any more. Went there today, one of the stories is a link to this reprinted press- release about Canon claiming a 120 megapixel sensor.

There's a lot of speculation that could happen in the slashdot discussion thread for the article, but rather than the possible insight that one used to be able to find in some of the +5 articles, it's poorly informed fanboy statements and whining about how that many megapixels don't mean anything without better lenses (never mind the physics!).

So, here's some speculation: If you abandoned the standard Bayer pattern and started throwing in some pixels with ND filters, you could improve the dynamic range of the sensor immensely.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Current Events Community ]

crash had a link to this ScienceDaily article which is a reprint of this Washington State University press release about some interesting research:

Four separate studies led by a Washington State University social psychologist have found that unselfish workers who are the first to throw their hat in the ring are also among those that coworkers most want to, in effect, vote off the island.

The PubMed abstract for The desire to expel unselfish members from the group (DOI link), by Craig Parks and Asako Stone in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, says:

An initial study investigating tolerance of group members who abuse a public good surprisingly showed that unselfish members (those who gave much toward the provision of the good but then used little of the good) were also targets for expulsion from the group. Two follow-up studies replicated this and ruled out explanations grounded in the target being seen as confused or unpredictable. A fourth study suggested that the target is seen by some as establishing an undesirable behavior standard and by others as a rule breaker. Individuals who formed either perception expressed a desire for the unselfish person to be removed from the group. Implications are discussed.

This would explain a lot about my career. Sigh.

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

My review of Druin Burch's Taking The Medicine.

A few notes on characters and plot: Melodrama and Mary Sue, and Id and villainy.

Those two entries are Ed's bit of riffing on his notion that "no one's a villain in their own mind" contrasted with books to make my flist's heads explode: John Ringo, wherein a self-loathing hero is described. John Ringo's response to that review is worth reading if you're interested in what makes fiction successful, if you don't make it that far down the comment threads otherwise. (Related: this Sensible Erection entry that turned me on to that review).

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books ]

Apropos of my review of Druin Burch's Taking The Medicine, car crash victim beaten by security guards after trying to leave the hospital when he discovered that he was misidentified and scheduled for cancer removal surgery. (Via SE)

[ related topics: Health Automobiles ]

WSJ: Large commercial property owners are choosing to default, mostly to pressure banks into loan restructuring.

Owners of commercial property have an easier time walking away than homeowners because commercial mortgages are typically nonrecourse. That means the biggest penalty for walking away is the forfeiture of assets and cash flow they may generate.

Just pullin' numbers out of my ass: If smoking has gone from 44% in the 1950s to 24% in the 2000s, and life expectancy at birth has gone from 68.2 to 77.9 years and smoking reduces your life expectancy by 25 years (there are differing opinions on that number), and health care spending for roughly the same period has gone from < 5% of GDP to > 16% of GDP, then is it reasonable to say that we're spending 11% more of our GDP on 4.7 more years.

Or, if our working lifespan is about 40 years, we're now devoting 4.4 more of those years to paying for healthcare, giving us a net gain of less than four months.

Hmmmm...

[ related topics: Drugs Health Current Events Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

Howl! The Onion (video): TIME announces new version of magazine aimed at adults.

[ related topics: Humor Journalism and Media Video ]

Although I believe he's been outed several times before, Dubya's 2004 campaign chief and former RNC chairman Ken Mehlman has come out of the closet.

Privately, in off-the-record conversations with this reporter over the years, Mehlman voiced support for civil unions and told of how, in private discussions with senior Republican officials, he beat back efforts to attack same-sex marriage. He insisted, too, that President Bush "was no homophobe." He often wondered why gay voters never formed common cause with Republican opponents of Islamic jihad, which he called "the greatest anti-gay force in the world right now."

And frankly, Ken, the rest of us all wondered why the Republicans didn't just outright declare their support for the Islamic jihad, because the Republicans have done more to support those efforts than any other political group, and because their stated goals are pretty well aligned.

As Kattullus says in the MeFi thread:

I guess it counts as progress that a prominent Republican outs himself without having been arrested in a men's bathroom for snorting cocaine out of a male prostitute's rectum.

[ related topics: Drugs Politics Erotic Sexual Culture moron Sociology Marriage Furniture ]

The 'July Effect': Worst Month For Fatal Hospital Errors, Study Finds. From the UCSD news center, similar stories in Scientific American, U.S. News & World Report ,The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Discover Magazine.

The actual paper appears to be A July Spike in Fatal Medication Errors: A Possible Effect of New Medical Residents by David P. Phillips and Gwendolyn E. C. Barker (PDF) (PubMed entry, alt link off a Turner.com server, SpringerLink version)

Inside medical institutions, in counties containing teaching hospitals, fatal medication errors spiked by 10% in July and in no other month [JR = 1.10 (1.06-1.14)]. In contrast, there was no July spike in counties without teaching hospitals. The greater the concentration of teaching hospitals in a region, the greater the July spike (r = .80; P = .005). These findings held only for medication errors, not for other causes of death.

This started out as a blog entry about hospital errors, but it's turned into an article on journalism, because I got there by the Huffington Post embedding an ABC News video, and as I look through these various articles it's pretty clear to me that we'd have been a lot better off if I could find the original UCSD press release rather than the various people writing Google fodder articles based on articles based on it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Health Invention and Design Writing Current Events Journalism and Media Video Economics ]

@jeriellsworth tweeted:

Back in school a counselor said to the student body "If you don't study hard just put your grubbies on and go out to the shop right now."

and

I'm glad I spent time learning how to build things in the shop and have books with all the knowledge I missed by not studying.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Books Education ]

http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/

I've always been a big proponent of nationalized healthcare. I grew up an Air Force brat, so I know how well socialized medicine works. Sure, the doctors weren't the best but the care was universal. I got to see the doc, had my prescriptions filled and it didn't matter how close my family was to the poverty line. I never lacked for treatment...

As an adult, I now work for the Federal Government. I have the same health insurance choices as President Obama and Congress (although I bet Obama can get the socialized medicine from the military since he's their Commander in Chief). In a complete reversal of my childhood medical experience, I chose a high-deductible plan with an HSA. Because the premiums the Government pays for the high-deductible plan are so much lower than regular plans, the difference is deposited in an HSA for me.

This arrangement is really nice because it gives me funds for medical care that don't have to come out of my regular budget. But the funds are limited, so it benefits me to shop around. I went to a walk-in clinic this Spring for a persistent cough due to allergies. The receptionist gave me two options: they would bill my insurance company $325 for the visit or I could pay $75 out of pocket. Since the $325 wouldn't begin to make a dent on my deductible, I paid the $75 out of the HSA.

I don't know why it costs the clinic 5X as much to bill my insurance. I'm just glad I had the choice!

[ related topics: Politics Health Currency ]

Rob Rhyne: Update on Briefs. Guy gets tired of waiting for Apple app store approval, open sources his app.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Software Engineering iPhone ]

I've been carrying a Wintec G-Rays 2+ GPS tracker in my pocket recently. Sometimes I'll remember to mash the "start new track" button, sometimes I won't, so I whipped together a little Perl that grabs the bounding rects of polygons saved in "My Places" in Google Earth, and runs through the tracks that come off that thing and splits 'em up. So I can run my tracks through it and see "Oh, look, there's a "005-Home-HelenPutnamPark.kml", and a 006-HelenPutnamPark-HelenPutnamPark.kml", so I drove to the park, ran in the park, and...

There are a few limitations with what I've got so far.

I can take Perl and convert from WGS84 (ie: "latitude and longitude" for you folks who don't want to know about datums) to UTM (meters, for those of you who don't wish to dig further) so that I can say "how far did I jog?" using Proj.4 or Geo::Coordinates::UTM.

However, I'm just using axis aligned bounding boxes around the regions I've drawn in Google Earth because I don't have a convenient library for basic 2d vector operations in Perl.

What I'd like is to not have to:

1. Rewrite line-to-line intersection code in Perl from C++.
2. Rewrite "in polygon" intersection code in Perl from C++.

When I go looking for basic geometric operations code in Perl, I find examples that were written by professors as examples for CS classes that have clear degeneracies. I could fix them, but that's a few hours, and in that time I could write my own that'd also have some edge cases I undoubtedly missed, and that use data structures that look nothing like what other people might use.

There has to be a library of basic 2d vector operations for Perl, no? I'm installing Math::Intersection::StraightLine and Math::Polygon::Tree, but the CPAN entries don't give me great hope that these are any better than the other sample code I've stumbled across. Someone has to have done this right?

[ related topics: Language Perl Graphics Maps and Mapping ]

Just a little (somewhat embarrassing) experiment: Recent runs in KML and on Google maps, automagically extracted by Perl from my pocket GPS logger.

• KML of run on 2010-08-02 06:02:55 Schollenberger Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-03 06:06:42 Helen Putnam Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-10 06:02:33 Helen Putnam Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-16 06:09:14 Schollenberger Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-17 06:03:45 Helen Putnam Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-19 06:11:29 Schollenberger Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-20 06:15:55 Schollenberger Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-23 06:10:56 Schollenberger Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-24 06:05:18 Helen Putnam Park (View on Google Maps)
• KML of run on 2010-08-26 06:07:40 Helen Putnam Park (View on Google Maps)

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Maps and Mapping ]

Bruce Schneier Rant sounds a lot like one of my rants.. if I were eloquent.

Panhandlers with Debit Cards - I'm not suprised that he found some decent needy people, some lifestyle choices, and a lot of professional panhandlers that would not leave their very profitable spot.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Current Events Cryptography Trains ]

The MeFi entry pointing to this Kodak post about creating a portable digital still camera in 1975 and this NY Times article about it had a few comments that got me thinking. There's the usual "why couldn't they see far enough?" and "Xerox PARC could, but they couldn't get corporate to execute" and that kind of stuff, but empath's observation about seeing the future is worth a pondering:

I'll give another example -- if someone had asked you, in 1980, which would have been the more world-changing invention -- the ability to make video-phone calls, or the ability to send a text message to anybody, at any time, anywhere, most people probably would have said video-phone calls, because I think it seemed like a more difficult problem.

Video calls are one of those things that I've tried and abandoned a whole bunch of times. Asynchronous text exchanges? I've been doing that for more than two and a half decades, but when that started nobody in the mainstream saw the value.

And then I'm not sure what it was about this comment about Kodak owning the sensor market, and then losing it to Canon and Nikon, and Rochester suffering got me thinking, but...

I get a lot of "hey, we're working on this cool project, you should join us!". I saw a handheld portable personal video player ready to come to market years before Apple brought out theirs. I've sat sipping scotch and talking about all sorts of products that eventually came to market a decade or so before they finally hit the big box retailers. Time after time, the problem wasn't the ability of the engineering team to execute, it was owning enough of the ecosystem to make the overall product useful. That portable video player? Heck, the guys working on the hardware understood that a portal that led the user to content was a necessity, but they couldn't get the next level up to spend a few tens of thousands to stumble through getting that portion working.

In that comment above, the thing that struck me was that Kodak owned the consumables, but Nikon and Canon owned the lenses. So Kodak's digital cameras used Canon lenses; once Canon figured out sensors Kodak's line was toast.

I'm not sure how to summarize that realization, but as you look to consumables and ancillary products and how to position your efforts, I think it's worth looking at how Kodak, in its pursuit of providing the consumables, lost the long-term game.

See also: this great MeFi comment about the decline and fall of Sears. And also realize that many of these things happen at scales longer than human careers. There's another lesson there.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Photography Games Work, productivity and environment Video Economics ]

Silly JavaScript example of the moment: Create a yoyo with jQuery and CSS3

I'm linking to this video of longboarding in San Ramon (two kids doing some basic skateboarding on hills, not as exciting as some videos of that activity you've seen`) so that I can tell my favorite Arun story: I was in an office, with a couple of other people, one of whom was saying something like "we've got too many Chiefs and not enough Indians". Without missing a beat, Arun, who was walking by the office, popped his head in and said "I believe that to be very much the case."

[ related topics: Children and growing up Video ]

Scott Rosenberg: In Defense of Links, Part One: Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification, in which Scott does a takedown of the "links hurt reading" hypothesis.

Weekend Testers: Some thoughts on dates:

Now, how would you like to know that the days of a given month could vary by a day or two one direction or the other, and a committee met fairly regularly  to determine where and when the days will be each year (or to be closer to accurate, each decade) and the basic rules from the past were applied, but there was no guarantee that those days would replicate? Welcome to the Nepali calendar, which is based on the Hindu Bikram Samwat calendar. This calendar is a "lunar-solar" calendar, which means that keeping it in sync with the lunar cycles is just as important as is keeping it in sync with the solar cycles. This makes for a much more dynamic calendar, with many more rules as to how many days each month has and when they are applied.

Cool, in a freaky "wait, there are computer-using cultures that don't have enough arithmetic or astronomy to make deterministic calendars yet?" sort of way.

[ related topics: Religion History Space & Astronomy Astronomy Mathematics ]

"Papieren bitte!" New York Times reports that border patrol agents are asking for proof of citizenship on Amtrak along the Canadian border.

The patrol says that answering agents’ questions is voluntary, part of a “consensual and nonintrusive conversation” Some passengers agree, though they are not told that they can keep silent.

Because when uniformed armed people start asking me questions, my first thought is always "hey, I have the right to keep silent".

[ related topics: Trains New York Public Transportation ]

Philip Greenspun: Libertarianism will become less popular as government grows larger.

Between the damage that the Republicans have done to the notion of less government in the naughties, Ron Paul's disastrous mismanagement of his campaign's message, yeah, there's going to need to be another meme for that notion to grow, and it's only going to happen once Glenn Beck and the Tea Party folks flame out fabulously.

[ related topics: moron Marketing Pyrotechnics ]

Fact for the moment: Without enforcement, everything is legal.

[ related topics: Law ]

I mentionedformer RNC campaign chief Ken Mehlman wondered why he couldn't scare the gay voter block into being afraid of the Islamic jihad.

To illustrate why Mr. Mehlman's "...greatest anti-gay force in the world..." wasn't all that scary up against the Republican right, Focus on the Family opposes anti-bullying efforts in schools as too gay friendly.

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

I want a bunch of these: The Mesh Potato (Via Mars).

What do you call an 802.11bg mesh router with a single FXS port that automatically forms a peer-to-peer network and relays telephone calls without landlines or cell-phone towers? A Mesh Potato, of course.

And text would be fine, the applications I have for this (bike ride support, disaster preparedness and recovery) don't need voice.

[ related topics: Wireless broadband Cool Technology ]

Sanomagic is making beautiful mahogany bicycles that seem to be very ridable as well as beautiful. Detailed pics: here.

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

The vagaries of modern rubber flapper valves (and ancient American Standard 3 gallon per flush toilets) are driving me nuts. I'm about to pull the trigger on a Toto Aquia® Dual Flush, 1.6 GPF / 0.9 GPF CST414M toilet, and put a Washlet S300 seat on it.

Anyone wanna talk me out of it? Or into some better option? The thing we like about the CST414M is that it mounts flush against the wall, so other options should mount similarly.

Interesting: Public defenders just as effective as private attorneys:

Two important caveats. The researchers did not look at convictions vs. acquittals. And they found that retaining a private attorney is apparently beneficial “for certain offenders and at certain stages” of the process. Specifically, they noted some interestingly varied outcomes when looking at a defendant’s race.

White defendants with a private attorney are more likely to be granted bail, and black defendants with a private attorney are more likely to have the primary charge reduced than black defendants with a public defender. Via John Corcoran.

[ related topics: Law Race ]

Lego S&M! Thanks, Debra!

[ related topics: Lego Mindstorms ]

Heavy drinkers outlive non-drinkers.

But a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that — for reasons that aren't entirely clear — abstaining from alcohol does actually tend to increase one's risk of dying even when you exclude former drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers' mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers.

As a current non-drinker, I hope there's some prophylactic effect from my youthful overindulgences...

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design ]

Drinking coffee could help protect your liver from the effects of too much alcohol.

“Consuming coffee seems to have some protective benefits against alcoholic cirrhosis, and the more coffee a person consumes the less risk they seem to have of being hospitalized or dying of alcoholic cirrhosis,” said Arthur Klatsky, MD, an investigator with Kaiser Permanente’s Division of Research and the lead author of the study. “We did not see a similar protective association between coffee and non-alcoholic cirrhosis.”

[ related topics: Current Events ]