Flutterby™! From 2010-11-01 to 2010-11-30

Okay, yes, I agree, the covers of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah are completely out of control. However, I am enjoying random picks from the MeFi Music Challenge #21: Cover Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah".

[ related topics: Music ]

and around that I managed to move a couple of tons of dirt and landscaping materials

[ related topics: Photography Dan's Life ]

Hmmm... I recently figured out how to get the Petaluma city council and committee videos on to the iPad for viewing, using VLC. A complaint has been filed with Apple because the app store license terms conflict with the GPL (MacWorld provides a user friendly article).

So now the only way to watch those videos on the iPad is to have someone else transcode them (you already had to have a real computer to download the videos, though). I'll probably implement this at some point (though that is a pretty processor intensive process, and I'm not sure where I'll stash the compute for that), but it does point to an increasing divide between Steve Jobs' vision and the open (software/source/data) movements.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Content Management Software Engineering Video ]

Last Monday, when we were flying out of Detroit airport, I noticed a poster on the wall. It was a "put a human face on the TSA" sort of piece of propaganda, had a picture of a smiling guy in a TSA uniform with a bio beside him. Described him as a retired mechanical engineer.

I thought at the time that it was kind of strange that we, as a society, educated someone to a fairly skilled discipline, and then made that path so odious that when they had the chance to get out of that field they switched to standing around an airport checkpoint.

Last night Charlene and I watched An Education, a Nick Hornby written film about a 16 year old girl whose parents and teachers are pushing her on a track to Oxford, how her teachers and headmistress present their work as an horrendous task that they do for the reward of that one bright pupil who moves forward, and how her parents complain of their life dedicated to helping her get ahead, versus a man with a sports car who sweeps into her life and shows her a fun world of concerts and jazz clubs and trips to Paris.

It put another face on the argument that it is our responsibility to the next generation to show them adults having fun, enjoying our lives and our paths through them. Because if we don't do that, if we don't show them that adulthood is worth striving for, if we show them a world in which we labor through twenty or thirty years of drudgery 'til our pensions vest so that we can stand around at airport checkpoints, the smart ones won't follow us.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Movies Aviation Work, productivity and environment Television Automobiles Education ]

Kokoru, "a company of the Sanrio Group", presents the Actroid:

Absolutely look like a real human! The “Actroid”, humanoid, developed with a cutting-edge technology attract you with its human look-alike appearance and astonishing high expression ability. New line of the Actroids is being developed.

YouTube of the Actroid, and more YouTube of the Actroid

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Invention and Design ]

Gawker: Why We Published the Christine O'Donnell Story:

Much of the criticism leveled against us is based on the premise that we think hopping into bed, naked and drunk, with men or women whenever one wants is "slutty," and that therefore our publication of Anonymous' story was intended to diminish O'Donnell on those terms. Any reader of this site ought to rather quickly gather that we are in fact avid supporters of hopping into bed, naked and drunk, with men or women that one has just met.

Our problem with O'Donnell—and the reason that the information we published about her is relevant—is that she has repeatedly described herself and her beliefs in terms that suggest that there is something wrong with hopping into bed, naked and drunk, with a man or woman whom one has just met. So that fact that she behaves that way, while publicly condemning similar behavior, in the context of an attempt to win a seat in the United States Senate, is a story we thought people might like to know about. We also thought it would get us lots of clicks and money and attention. But we thought it would get us clicks and money and attention because it was exposing her lies.

Quoted a little more there than I usually do, and it's worth reading the whole thing, but I'm glad to see at least one press outlet explaining the subtleties of their editorial process. Even if it's a press outlet I usually scoff at.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Journalism and Media ]

My mood: Johnny Cash does "Nasty Dan" on Sesame Street http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H75eQX006jA (Via http://flutterby.net/iZqrUz )

[ related topics: Movies ]

Language Log looks at "Red" coming to mean "Republican" rather than "Communist"

http://scientopia.org/blogs/go.../02/fractals-without-a-computer/

A very different way of creating the classic fractals, using projectors and a camera. Brilliant. It'd be a great rave/burning man trick.

[ related topics: Burning Man Photography ]

Wow! FTC Names Edward W. Felten as Agency's Chief Technologist. You, of course, know Ed Felten from Freedom To Tinker, announcement here (hat tip: Steve Bogart)

Rafe comments:

This is one of those moves that makes too much sense for me to have ever believed that something like it would ever actually happen. Next thing you know Bruce Schneier will take a job with the Department of Homeland Security.

[ related topics: Privacy Weblogs Civil Liberties Government ]

Twitter chatbot responds to global warming discussion on Twitter:

In a way, what Leck has created is a pro-active search engine: it answers twitter users who aren't even aware of their own ignorance.

ycombinator user olefoo observes that this is like "clippy" for the Internet:

I see you're trying to deny global warming. Would you like to:

1. research the available facts and science?
2. Have an authority figure you trust tell you, you're wrong?
3. Meet other like-minded singles?

[ related topics: Weblogs Current Events Net Culture Machinery Community Global Warming ]

Cook's Source magazine blatantly and unapologetically publishes article without permission. More here

[ related topics: Food ]

Just a few pictures from this morning's run: http://www.flutterby.net/2010-11-04_Petaluma_Sunrise

[ related topics: Photography ]

Nerdy Apple Bottom: My Son Is Gay (via a whole lot of you). 5 year old boy decides he wants to be Daphne from Scooby Doo for Halloween. Mom obliges. Mom writes this blog post about all the paranoid wacky shit that happened in response to kid's Halloween costume.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Sexual Culture Weblogs ]

John pointed me to the Federal Reserve's announcement that they're going to print $600 billion dollars. Here's some too tired musings I wrote on a mailing list recently:

So here's the best rationale I've come up with, with economically ignorant abstractions 'cause when I'm writing off-the-cuff that's who I am:

In an old style backed currency, if the money starts to lose value (inflation), you can buy some of it back with the currency backing (ie: gold, conch shells, whatever). If it gains value, you decrease the money supply by buying the backing material (or other people do).

In a central bank style currency, that backing is labor and productivity. It's a guess at how much people are going to produce. So if the money starts to gain value (deflation), you want to buy the backing material. Which is productivity.

Terry Pratchett plays with this idea in his satire Making Money, in which the hero stabilizes the money supply (and international relations) by identifying a reserve of productive capacity and then using the idleness of that ability to produce as his currency backing. (Trying hard to avoid spoilers, because the book is very worth reading.)

You can't tell people to produce more (or, you can, but it doesn't do any good), but you can try to convince them that their production will be rewarded by giving them something up-front, to try to kick up the productivity. And the way to do that is to buy some of that productive capacity back. If nobody's selling, you do that by borrowing from the future productivity.

Of course the problem is, as others have suggested, if you guess wrong you can go too far the other way and end up with inflation.

Which is why I'm normally extremely debt averse, but right now am pretty happy to take whatever they'll loan me at fixed rates.

[ related topics: Books John S Jacobs-Anderson Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Currency Economics Terry Pratchett ]

"Buckyballs" magnetic spheres have tied my brain in knots. That is all.

Just a reminder that I can rely on computers to do some of that filtering for me: Simple Resistor-Capacitor Filter cutoff calculator, and a much more complex RC low pass filter design tool. (via Red Echo)

[ related topics: Graphic Design Model Building ]

A molecular link between the active component of marijuana and Alzheimer's disease pathology.

Alzheimer's disease is the leading cause of dementia among the elderly, and with the ever-increasing size of this population, cases of Alzheimer's disease are expected to triple over the next 50 years. Consequently, the development of treatments that slow or halt the disease progression have become imperative to both improve the quality of life for patients and reduce the health care costs attributable to Alzheimer's disease. Here, we demonstrate that the active component of marijuana, Delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), competitively inhibits the enzyme acetylcholinesterase (AChE) as well as prevents AChE-induced amyloid beta-peptide (Abeta) aggregation, the key pathological marker of Alzheimer's disease. Computational modeling of the THC-AChE interaction revealed that THC binds in the peripheral anionic site of AChE, the critical region involved in amyloidgenesis. Compared to currently approved drugs prescribed for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, THC is a considerably superior inhibitor of Abeta aggregation, and this study provides a previously unrecognized molecular mechanism through which cannabinoid molecules may directly impact the progression of this debilitating disease.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Drugs Health ]

http://www.landoflisp.com - Because all programming languages (or at least, books about them) need a music video like this one. Scroll -way- down on the page as well. The attitude and humor is incredible.

[ related topics: Humor Books Music Software Engineering Video ]

Reading Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Become Invincible:

Once you get past a certain threshold, everyone's problems are the same: fortifying your island and hiding the heat signature from your fusion reactor.

Very enjoyable.

[ related topics: History ]

Sometimes it ain't worth stealing links: Metafilter: Playing with Food Home Edition.

[ related topics: Food ]

For the past couple years, I've been working to get FOSS4G 2011 in Denver. I recently stepped down as chair of the local organizing committee to focus on my dissertation. I am still involved in many of the high level talks. Today someone asked if FOSS4G should consider adding a "Code of Conduct" statement to the program. This was partly the result of a recent sexual assault at ApacheCon. But more, it was the result of the victim in that sexual assault being brave enough to talk about what happened.

Perhaps because of my sex (male), race (white), age (middle), income (middle), religion (____), I am immune/unaware/ignorant of what is going on. What happened to this woman in Atlanta was real. I don't want something similar to happen at FOSS4G in Denver. Could including a statement in a program help?

My argument is that it could help. Maybe it'll prevent something horrible from happening. Maybe it'll help victims feel legitimized in their suffering (rather than being accused of "asking for it"). Maybe it will help everyone in the tech community start to realize that this kind of thing is happening.

But where do conference organizers draw the line? Do we need a statement condemning genocide or heroin abuse? I feel like I am not the person to decide where that line should be drawn.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Software Engineering History Community ]

San Francisco passes first "open data" law. From what I can glean from that article this is really just a codification of what's already in California's various disclosure and sunshine laws, with an emphasis on making that stuff preemptively available electronically.

Which is awesome and more cities should follow suit.

Speaking of which, a whole hell of a lot of kudos to the various departments in the City of Petaluma who made two things happen yesterday:

1. The City of Petaluma's RSS feed updated yesterday with information about a water main break that gave useful information when I went shopping in that neighborhood later.
2. The police department's announcement system got me a press release on a criminal matter in the city that was clear and concise and timely.

Woot!

[ related topics: Content Management Bay Area Law Enforcement Government ]

As pornoscanners and preflightfondlers and security theater in general are pissing off more and more travelers, we're finally getting some pushback from airlines and air travel industry groups: NY Times: T.S.A. Screening May Be Taking a Toll on Travel

The U.S. Travel Association, in fact, is worried that the more onerous screening process will discourage air travel.

“The system is broken, it’s extremely flawed and it’s absurd that we all sit back and say we can’t do anything about it,” said Geoff Freeman, executive vice president of the association. The group has convened a panel of transportation leaders to recommend a better way to balance security with a more efficient and honed screening process.

[ related topics: Aviation Theater & Plays ]

Ex-Homeland Security chief head said to abuse public trust by touting body scanners:

Since the attempted bombing of a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day, former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff has given dozens of media interviews touting the need for the federal government to buy more full-body scanners for airports. What he has made little mention of is that the Chertoff Group, his security consulting agency, includes a client that manufactures the machines.

Yep. The pornoscan is a scam. Not that that's news, it doesn't detect explosives carried internally, so it's not like it would slow down someone on a suicide run. Via this comment in this MeFi thread.

[ related topics: Aviation moron Current Events Journalism and Media ]

Wish I'd written this: TSA and the "audacity of grope", talking about the pornoscanners and preflightfondlers and how the scanners likely wouldn't have even caught "the underwear bomber", let alone anyone carrying explosives internally. With links and cites.

Thanks, Lyn.

[ related topics: Community Clothing ]

from Poems of Patriotism (and other sources, this one's oft-quoted):

SONS of Shannon, Tamar, Trent,

Men of the Lothians, men of Kent,

Essex, Wessex, shore and shire,

Mates of the net, the mine, the fire,

Lads of desk and wheel and loom,

Noble and trader, squire and groom,

Come where the bugles of England play,

Over the hills and far away !

Southern Cross and Polar Star

Here are the Britons bred afar ;

Serry, serry them, fierce and keen,

Under the flag of the Empress-Queen ;

Shoulder to shoulder, down the track,

Where, to the unretreating Jack,

The victor bugles of England play

Over the hills and far aivay !

What if the best of our wages be

An empty sleeve, a stiff-set knee,

A crutch for the rest of life who cares,

So long as the One Flag floats and dares ?

So long as the One Race dares and grows ?

Death what is death but God's own rose ?

Let but the bugles of England play

Over the hills and far away !

— William Ernest Henley.

[ related topics: Religion Quotes Pyrotechnics Flowers War ]

Interesting look at Veteran's Day, how the Internet has become an amazing historical research, and a bit of whimsy in a comment over at Sensible Erection that talks about tracking down the story behind a framed scroll found in a box of junk on a sidewalk.

[ related topics: History Net Culture War ]

Chattanooga has a Hookah Lounge? I don't smoke anything, but I still find this noteworthy.

[ related topics: Chattanooga ]

From Boing Boing: a British inventor demonstrates his designs for a perpetual motion machine. He thinks he's on the verge of cracking this, if he can get some more "leaverage" on the outer wheel. I respect his earnestness, but it is fascinating that a design that hasn't worked in the last 500 years is still attracting attention.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Machinery ]

Weird Converter. Units calculation for the fringe of us.

Remember James Frey, the memoirist who entralled us in the early 2000s with his story of conquering addiction while undergoing root canal therapy without novacaine? When his lies were revealed, he was made to suffer the ultimate punishment: public scolding from Oprah. One would have thought that his literary career was over at that point, but not so.

Since the public whipping, he has begun hanging out with literary lions, published some works, and comparing himself to Hemingway and Henry Miller. His latest project is Full Fathom Productions, a boiler-room operation where he gets debt-ridden MFA grads to write young-adult novels he will then peddle to Hollywood and the publishing empires, with a view to producing the next Harry Potter or Twilight franchise. In a fascinating article from New York Magazine we see how he offers these starving writers contracts that virtually enslave them, for at least one book. meanwhile, he owns the copyright, the authors psuedonym, and 40% of the take. Sort of like Oprah owns her spinoffs like Drs. Phil and Oz.

[ related topics: Books Writing Beer Copyright/Trademark New York ]

Art Carden in Forbes: Abolish the TSA:

Bipartisan support should be immediate. For fiscal conservatives, it’s hard to come up with a more wasteful agency than the TSA. For privacy advocates, eliminating an organization that requires you to choose between a nude body scan or genital groping in order to board a plane should be a no-brainer.

Via. If we can get enough outrage going here, maybe we can find the privacy advociate and both fiscal conservatives in the house.

[ related topics: Politics Privacy Civil Liberties ]

Driving a Land Cruiser across Africa: Democratic Republic of Congo: Lubumbashi to Kinshasa. Worth reading for the adventure story, but also for the perspective on government and society.

Via MeFi

[ related topics: moron Real Estate ]

RT @PolarBearFarm: In Soviet America you don't feel safe, safe feels you! #TSAslogans

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

A random observation: I believe that when I was in high school, I'd stop at the ice cream shop on the way home from long bike rides and get a super tall soft-serve ice cream cone for roughly $.75. I think that's about $2.75 or $3.00 nowadays.

On Sunday I went out to run an errand, forgot my cell phone, and had to call Charlene from a pay phone. The first pay phone I found was $.75, the one that actually worked was $.50. Pay phones were $.10 in that same era.

Interestingly, Zillow puts the house my parents sold in the middle of my senior year of high school for what I think was on the order of $195k at $392k (it was over $500k when we were house shopping three years ago).

So, pulling some numbers out of my ass, it's been 25 years or so, a quadrupling in prices for those goods suggests inflation has been just about 5% in that period (using the old back of the envelope Rule of 72), which sounds about right to me.

Which, if that's our standard, means that house prices have not kept up with inflation, nor have salaries.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Wireless Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Bicycling Economics Real Estate ]

I linked to his last video, but he's back: Danny MacAskill - Way Back Home.

So maybe the Scots have traded in the claymore for a bicycle, but they're still nuts, in a completely awe inspiring way.

[ related topics: Pedal Power Video Bicycling Archival ]

I don't have a problem with a federally run Post Office, I see a need for reliable messaging, but why are we subsidizing junk mail?

http://www.wimp.com/kinectvideo/ and http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Kinect/index.html

Excellent demonstration of what/how a Kinect sees in 3d.

[ related topics: Graphics ]

Netsurf is a small lightweight web browser for Un*x-like platforms. With CSS, HTML 4, Unicode and HTTPS support, no JavaScript yet (but that's not necessarily a bad thing...).

From a modern monster PC to a humble 30MHz ARM 6 computer with 16MB of RAM, the web browser will keep you surfing the web whatever your system. Originally written for computer hardware normally found in PDAs, cable TV boxes, mobile phones and other hand-held gadgets, NetSurf is compact and low maintenance by design.

Discovered via someone pointing out this article about Netsurf which observes:

The best possible way to install NetSurf is compiling from source code. There are some binary packages [list of platforms elided] but they are most likely spiked with GTK libraries which are of no interest here.

When GTK dependence is "heavyweight", I've found my tribe.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Open Source Television ]

Yet another piece on the TSA groping and fondling that's well worth reading.

Wood boat-building porn: LumberJocks: Shipyard Memories: The Smaug Blog.

[ related topics: Boats Woodworking ]

Yep, Peter Rez, physics professor at Arizona State University in Temp, suggests that ex-ray exposure from the backscatter scanners gives you a cancer risk in the same range as the risk of being killed on an airplane by terrorism (Via, via).

[ related topics: Weblogs Aviation Current Events Education ]

When engineers have free time, they create farces like the Turboencabulator.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator

The video links at the bottom of the description and worth watching.

[ related topics: Video ]

"Baggage handlers in Miami took bribes to allow oversized/overweight cargo onto flights. I'd normally drop this, even though

...police spokesman Detective Roy Rutland said investigators think some of the luggage checked by the skycaps could have gone onto planes without passing through security.

seems pertinent in the face of all the attention given the passengers via the pornoscanners and the preflightfondles.

However, the real thing that caught my eye with this was that anyone who's traveled with a bicycle, especially with a tandem bicycle, has played the "wonder how much it's going to cost me to fly this time?" game, and gotten different answers on different legs of the trips, even within the same airline. Seems like if the airlines want to nip this, they'd do well to have reasonable well-stated baggage policies right at the desks and on the front of their web pages, so we know how much we'll be forking over to whom in order to fly.

[ related topics: Aviation Law Enforcement Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem ]

Holographic Autocad by Zebra Imaging - we've come a long way since Dan captured frames from AutoCad with a Targa card.

[ related topics: Weblogs Journalism and Media Education ]

Stumbled across a recipe from FoodNetwork.com. Recoiled in horror.

And we're back. Something made Apache suck all the spare cycles out of the server. Installing monit now.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source ]

Our venerable old Black & Decker Toast-R-Oven lost a heating element. Repair, of course, is absurd, so I went looking for replacements. Now that I'm into woodworking, my associations with the Black & Decker brand aren't positive, so I started looking for other devices.

We have a small house. We're also not averse to paying for quality. So though these things go for roughly $30, for a toaster oven that was well insulated and gave us the right impressions of quality and design we could easily see paying $150 for such an appliance.

The toasters in that price range are really small convection ovens. I had trouble convincing myself that you could actually make a usable convection oven with 1800 watts to work with, and they're all bigger. So we started reading online reviews, a space which the spammers have completely taken over, and started to sink deeper and deeper into the morass, and eventually I was at Lowe's and said "screw this, I want a toaster", and picked up a...

... sigh, $30 "Euro-Pro" toaster. Figuring that while we were spending hundreds of dollars of our time trying to figure out what a good appliance was, we could have a functioning disposable toaster.

In the sealed wrapper, the handle wasn't installed correctly. Opened up, the door needed me to bend sheet metal to be operable. It's all working now, and it's fine, I guess, but I'd really like a good toaster oven device. I guess maybe the smaller Breville, which is still way larger than we want, is the way to go, but consumer appliances suck.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Graphic Design ]

A lot of people have been forwarding around Google's little propaganda piece: 20 Things I Learned About Browsers And The Web, a little demo of HTML 5.

• What a gawdawful annoying interface.
• Why does a picture book need to store local data to my system that goes beyond a cookie? 3.8 megabytes? Really?
• I don't get why this is better than Flash. It doesn't degrade nicely in browsers that aren't laden with JavaScript.
• While we're at it, how about another set of raspberries for the continued overrunning of the world with JavaScript: Most sites that use it for UI tweaks just make the site more annoying (Twitter, Facebook, every financial services site I've ever used, I'm lookin' at you). And it makes it much harder to actually use the data you're publishing for more interesting stuff than just mindlessly consuming it like television watchers.

So, yeah, I can see that the drooling masses are going to overrun the web with this crap, but we don't have to let the quality go quietly. Sigh.

[ related topics: Books User Interface Technology and Culture Television ]

So after ranting about the hellish things people do with JavaScript, I'm considering implementing a simple CAD/drafting system in it because I dislike everything out there, and the state of CAD on the iPad right now is beyond atrocious.

Anyone got a favorite JavaScript multi-touch framework? Scripty2 works great on desktop machines, but has some heavy transform reset issues in the iPad.

A hike topic a few years ago was "how much it must suck to be the #3 guy in the Taliban". Because every few months U.S. forces killed the #3 guy. We talked about what the line of succession must be like, how there's this big backlog about #4, "no, I'm good, I don't need the promotion right now", a lot of political infighting to get enemies promoted.

A search on "'number 3' Taliban" brings up an inkling of how many #3s U.S. forces have claimed to have killed. Enough that you might suspect that "#3" is a stand-in for "we thought he was important", that U.S. intelligence services were utterly clueless, and "#3" was press release speak for "perpetrator" or even "suspect".

Well, a little more evidence towards that side of the balance: NY Times: Taliban Leader in Secret Talks Was an Impostor.

“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

American officials confirmed Monday that they had given up hope that the Afghan was Mr. Mansour, or even a member of the Taliban leadership.

[ related topics: Politics Nature and environment moron Currency ]

A first-person account of the TSA grope-down while wearing a kilt... regimental. Via ErosBlog.

Steve Coast: I’m working at Microsoft and we’re donating imagery to OpenStreetMap!:

Of course, this doesn't mean Microsoft 'owns' OpenStreetMap any more than CloudMade or MapQuest do with the significant resources those firms have put in to making a better map with OSM. OSM continues to be independent as it always will be, and I will continue in my roles to push the OSM cause forward. ...

[ related topics: Humor Weblogs Microsoft moron Work, productivity and environment Maps and Mapping ]

Among my twiddling about today, I rendered some maps from the Sonoma County GIS Data Portal using Mapnik and Python. Further reading, Tim Sutton has a PDF version of Martin Dobias's Python QGIS developer cookbook.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping Python ]

playing with Sonoma County GIS data. Does this give Petaluma people any ideas? http://www.petalumaopen.com/en/Using_GIS_Data

Every once in a while it's a good thing to simply "give thanks". To what/how/how is up to you. No matter how you do it, it's a perspective adjustment we need more often. Life is good, some of those that read this are due some personal gratitude: Thank You.

An interesting challenge: scientists are asked to describe their favorite discredited scientific theory. Is it the terracentric universe, the flat earth, the stress theory of stomach ulcers or the existence of an "ether" through wich light was transmitted? Some interesting answers.

[ related topics: Cool Science Astronomy Sociology Philosophy ]

A bike lock that hoists your bicycle up a lamp post (in German). Direct link to YouTube video. (Thanks, Shadow).

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Embedded Devices Pedal Power Video Bicycling ]

Back from a Thanksgiving break road trip. One of the stops was the Bolt Tool Museum in Oroville California. A fascinating place that could use a little curating, after the umpteenth wall of all slightly different curved crescent wrenches a little more context would be cool, but still a fascinating visit.

One of the devices on display was a Blickensderfer typewriter. It was first made in 1892, and used a three row type wheel rather than the individual arms that we've come to see in old typewriters. In 1900, George Blickensderfer introduced an electric version. More at the Wikipedia entry for the Blickensderfer typewriter.

But what caught my eye about this device was that it also wasn't a QWERTY layout keyboard.

[ related topics: Art & Culture California Culture Travel Graphic Design Fabrication ]

Three views on the Wikileaks release of 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables:

The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.

Eccentric Flower: Assangery:

No, I don't mean the cables need to be destroyed; too late for that. I mean WikiLeaks needs to be destroyed. It is clear now that this is not the work of someone who has a legitimate cause or any sort of good motivation.

zeto28 on reddit: Self: Some clarification on what makes Wikileaks' release of secret US cables so damaging:

Because states are basically prison gangs and their leaders are gang leaders, understanding these prison mechanis is essential to understanding politics.

Scott Gilmore: In Defense of Secrecy:

I used to be a diplomat. I was one of those guys who wrote secret cables. Lots of them. And I said some very frank and nasty things in those cables.

(The latter two via Mark Hershberger)

[ related topics: Politics Work, productivity and environment ]

RT @Veronica: Wait, so today isn't Cyber Sex Monday? How... embarrassing.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Towel bars for the bathroom, oil will take a few weeks to dry: http://www.flutterby.net/File:...oomTowelBarsInProgress-Oiled.JPG

Avery Morrow: I’m Dropping Diaspora, This Site Is Now Closed is worth reading because, as Lyn tweeted:

Wow this is like a perfect case study of an amazingly ignorant software developer. Shames zir profession, really.

The particular complaint is that gender was made a text box in the Diaspora code. Sarah Mei describes why she made that change.

But the real issue, and one that I learned long ago when I wrote code to coerce users to enter phone numbers using the area code rules of the day, and then had to figure out how to ship a patch when the phone company relaxed the area code rules, is that if you can derive the information from your data, you shouldn't throw away information.

The users want to tell you about their language and use of it. If you need things like pronouns, do something like:

   if (gender == "male" || gender == "m") return "his";
   if (gender == "female" || gender == "f") return "her";
   return "zir";

And then as you learn more about how your users define themselves ("butch", "femme", what-have-you, maybe you give "zir" to the kinksters and "hir" to the pomo-feminists) the structure defined by your code can expand to encompass the structure used in the real world. If you want to offer autocomplete to suggest a standard, that's great, but you'll go much further if you can let the users define the ontology, rather than imposing one on them.

See also: Sarah Dopp: “Gender is a Text Field” (Diaspora, backstory, and context)

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Software Engineering Sociology Current Events ]

On the risks Julian Assange and the rest of the Wikileaks team are currently taking, over at SE BlutStein1984 observed:

Assange needs to grow a beard, have a kidney fail him and move into a cave if he keeps this up, otherwise he is liable to find himself locked up in a jail cell somewhere.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

NY Times on an Institute of Medicine study which suggests that the "calcium and vitamin D deficiency" craze is manufactured by the supplement industry (hat tip to Lyn).

The report release announcement at the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.

[ related topics: Health ]