Flutterby™! From 2011-06-01 to 2011-06-30

Doom, in JavaScript in your browser (or at least in Mozilla), compiled using LLVM.

I feel old.

[ related topics: Open Source ]

A few more from Shadow:

• YouTube: 2 thieves try to rob a bar occupied by 50 bikers.
• English Russia: How gay pride parades are held in Russia. The army comes in and suppresses them.

On that latter point, back in March Amnesty International reported that Egyptian women protesters were forced to take 'virginity tests'. The Egyptian military has now admitted to the practice:

"We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place," the general said. "None of them were (virgins)."

Stupid ideas are very powerful things.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Movies Current Events hubris ]

CNN Money: Zipcar's damages rule has a big flaw.

Yet another reason I don't think that car sharing is going to be the big transportation boom that some boosters predict.

[ related topics: Business Automobiles Currency ]

Lyn announces:

Finally! NRC report PDFs will be FREE starting tomorrow! Go thou and get to readin'! http://nap.edu/

You've seen all the "OMG! UN says cell phones cause cancer!" headlines. And then there's the other side: the CTIA Statement on the IARC Working Group Categorization of Mobile Phone Use points out that:

IARC conducts numerous reviews and in the past has given the same score to, for example, pickled vegetables and coffee.

Forbes: Matthew Herper: Why You Still Shouldn’t Worry About Cellphones And Cancer:

Now, 96% of the U.S. population, or about 300 million people, have cellphones. If everyone’s risk of glioma went up 40% as a result of cellphone use, the number of gliomas in the U.S. would increase by 8,000. That’s a one in 40,000 increase in each person’s risk of glioma, which still isn’t very big.

But the study the WHO is citing only showed the 40% increase in the 10% of people who used cellphones most. I don’t know how many people in the U.S. would now fall into this group, but we’d be talking about maybe hundreds of cases spread out over the whole U.S. population.

The whole thing is worth reading, especially as he compares this to the risk of throat cancer from HPV...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama History Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment ]

Just got mail from the New York Times, subject: "Come back to NYTimes.com to read your 20 free articles in June". Well, guys, frankly since I'm only allowed 20 free reads, I've been deliberately avoiding the NYT for those instances when people send me interesting links that I feel like I just have to read.

[ related topics: Invention and Design New York ]

Tiger Beatdown: Fond Memories of Vagina: Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow (thanks, Columbine).

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Trying to write an assessment of current technologies without exposing ignorance, unduly insulting people, or dismissing promise: Very hard.

Why Dan Wolfe @patriotusa76 was most likely behind the current Congressman Weiner kerfluffle. Obligatory John Stewart Daily Show coverage of the incident pointing out that once again the only people actually doing any real journalism appear to be... uh... you know... bloggers:

By the way, those "liberal and conservative blogs" having an "all out war", they're probably not doing anything about this story, except, uh, showing that the EXIF tags from the photo don't match the camera that Weiner normally uses...

[ related topics: Politics Photography Movies History Journalism and Media ]

Outside Aperture:

A fan film inspired by VALVe's masterpiece video game title Portal. With the fate of the main character of the game, Chell, left up in the air at the end of the game, we took the liberty of creating a fan film under the assumption that Chell lived to escape the Aperture Science Labrotories, and must now face life out in the real world. She finds an abandoned house, still stocked with food, and begins a new life with her trusty Portal Gun at her side

http://www.eisenfeuer.com/projects.ef

[ related topics: Games Movies Invention and Design Food Guns Video Real Estate ]

Brainwagon: What should Radio Shack do to satisfy the DIY/Maker community?

[ related topics: Community ]

My Petaluma T&TaC appointment is up at the end of June. Anyone got final arguments about why I should re-enlist?

Remember "The four food lobbies groups"? And "the food pyramid"? The latest attempt to further sell the big food conglomerates' ideas of nutrition have arrived: The USDA's "Choose My Plate" is a series of bad pie-chart like graphics for a five food group system.

Your tax dollars at work.

[ related topics: Politics Health Food Work, productivity and environment Graphics Beer ]

Barnes & Noble Nook Color hacked to run Meego Linux

[ related topics: Free Software Books Open Source ]

Charlene and I are currently reading Christopher McDougall's Born To Run. We just finished one of the chapters about how when people actually started to apply science to running, all of that crap about padded soles and arch support and pronation that was selling shoes and is still the conventional wisdom if you walk into a "running" store, was clearly shown to be hokum that injures people.

Similarly, I'm currently distilling a whole lot of the accepted wisdom on traffic and transit planning, and comparing that to the published studies on what we actually know about how traffic and transit works, and I'm discovering a whole lot of hogwash.

So I'm kind of on the lookout for "check your premises" rants. Here's one: What parents aren't asked in school surveys, and why.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Books Sports Shoes Public Transportation ]

For Columbine: The letter that changed James Bond's gun, and gave his armourer a name. Also in a 1962 Sports Illustrated article. Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Guns ]

Google's announcement of Schema.org, a collaborative effort between Bing, Google and Yahoo to actually use semantic markup from your website.

Someone an Indian accent from the "Windows Support Center" just called me about my computer problems. The malware agents are sophisticated.

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

Petaluma must read: Basin Street Blues in the Bohemian: http://www.bohemian.com/bohemian/06.01.11/feature-1122.html

Learning the limits of the tools and materials we bring to Family Build Night: http://www.flutterby.net/2011-06-04_Carving_Cheap_2x2

[ related topics: Sociology Education ]

Steve Coast, who is probably one of the biggest proponents (both in word and action) of free software and data, recently took a position at Microsoft. As far as I can tell, it's his first experience with the Redmond Koolaid. His insights aren't really new but it's fun to watch someone who was an unabashed Micro hater come to terms with the fact that Microsoft actually does some things quite well. One of those is delivering a really good IDE and visual debugger. Note: that link is really about Steve's impression of the latest version of Microsoft DAO/ADO/Jet/Linq and I pointed out his error on his blog.

But reading his blog after spending a day chasing trivial logic errors in Python made me really long for a good visual debugger. A few years back, I ended up writing some code in C++ partly because I could find better debuggers for that language than I could for Python. Unfortunately, that code is going unused because it's nearly impossible to find Geography Grad students who can write C++.

Anyhow, I'm ready to spend actual $ on a real debugger. My time chasing stupid logic and syntax errors in Python is worth more. ActiveState Komodo seems to be the top choice. Is Eclipse/PyDev worth the effort? How well do they play with ArcGIS?

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Python hubris ]

3d printer as key machine = Enter a key code, print a key. It's actually a lot harder than just going to the locksmith and saying, I need a Schlage 532456 (or whatever) key, but I am impressed with the accuracy and usability of things generated by 3d printers. Simply awesome.

As I look around at the uses of physical keys, this whole paradigm needs to be re-invented with a look towards the future.

[ related topics: Graphics ]

So iOS & Twitter integration: Does this mean you've just lost the ability to independently manage apps on that platform?

Interesting: Patrick Chovanek on China's high speed rail:

Rather than moving people more quickly, [China] should build a rail system that moves goods and makes people more productive where they already are.

(alt link, an expansion of 1, 2)

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Trains ]

uniquely luxurious chess set that combines strategy and sensuality.... "Strip Chess" anyone?

Interesting: Mapnificent lets you pick a point, and then munge a slider to show you the region accessible via public transit within the slider selected time from that point.

Big holes in the Bay Area, it apparently just knows about Muni, BART and a little bit of CalTrain (and knows nothing of the Golden Gate Transportation District, AC Transit or SamTrans), but an interesting use of, presumably, the General Transit Feed Specification, and a cool way to look at data.

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture Trains Public Transportation ]

Ask any traffic engineer, and they'll tell you the holy grail of traffic management is widespread deployment of in-vehicle (also called "floating car") traffic probes.

Waze does that by trading that information by free turn-by-turn traffic on your phone, and incorporating the traffic data into those directions.

That data's going to be very valuable.

[ related topics: Monty Python Automobiles Boats ]

Woodworking porn OTD: Center for Furniture Craftsmanship: Regeneration: Fine Woodworkers Under 30. Mostly for Virginia Blanchard's screen and Brett MacLearnsberry's lamp (which I'd seen in a local publication).

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Daniel Miessler says "The People Making the Best Arguments Against College, Went":

Thus, we’re left with a massive number of people who did go to school, benefitted greatly for it via a myriad of invisible ways, and yet are thoroughly convinced that it did very little for them. And they’re the ones doing the well-written blog posts about it.

And I believe that this is a classic example of the inability to distinguish correlation from cause, and that if you applied the same argument to, say, having seen television and talking about the lack of value of television in success, you'd see how silly the argument is.

Going to college is ubiquitous enough that you're extremely unlikely to find someone who can talk intelligently about it who hasn't been exposed. That doesn't mean that the exposure is a precondition to talking intelligently about it.

Which brings me to:Harvard Magazine catching up with 3 college dropouts from the class of 1969:

“The reason I dropped out was that it seemed silly for my parents to be paying a whole lot of money for me to do things I could do for free,” she explains. “It wasn’t Harvard that made me leave Harvard, it was me. I wanted to be young, alive, and free. Free to hitchhike around the country, check out California, try living in a commune. And I did all that. I have a number of friends who feel they missed out on the ’60s. I didn’t.”

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Weblogs Technology and Culture Television California Culture Currency Education ]

Ya know, tweaker night at Grocery Outlet isn't nearly as entertaining as stoner night at Whole Foods.

Ninja Educational System. Thanks, Columbine.

3 Way Street, a video of bicycle, pedestrian and motor vehicle interactions in a single intersection in New York City.

It's no wonder NYC motorists hate cyclists.

Via MeFi. The filmmaker's blog entry about it.

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Pedal Power New York Video Bicycling ]

BBC News: Women cyclists make up a far higher proportion of deaths involving lorries than men. Why?:

The report said that male cyclists are generally quicker getting away from a red light - or, indeed, jump red lights - and so get out of the danger area.

The story goes through a bunch of possibilities, but it's also interesting that violating traffic rules may make you safer...

[ related topics: Current Events Monty Python ]

Books to buy when they're published, winners of the Terry Pratchett &; Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now 1^st Novel Prize:

• David Logan, Half Sick of Shadows
• Michael Logan, Apocalypse Cow

and short-list:

• Adele Abbott Postponing Armageddon
• Dave Beynon The Platinum Ticket
• Andrew Salomon, Lun
• Shereen Vedam, The Coven at Callington

(Listed here mostly so that I can print this page and take it to my bookseller...)

[ related topics: Books Terry Pratchett ]

Must click: New York City's Park Avenue before and after cars.

[ related topics: Invention and Design New York ]

Embrace WTF. Some musings on the 3 types of WTF.

[ related topics: Weblogs Archival ]

Cute little video on the idiocy of bike lanes and New York City's lack of enforcement in maintaining them.

Edit: I'd posted that just before I saw that Shadow had passed along the LiveLeak version of the Video.

[ related topics: Movies Invention and Design New York Video Bicycling ]

I want a giant virtual hand that can slap media outlets that keep giving twits a platform. e.g.: Levitt & Marketplace

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

"Doing something the way we learned to do it is about the dumbest reason I can think of to do something." - Kevin Drake

Listening to sarcasm will make you more creative. Suuuuure.

[ related topics: Current Events Pop Culture ]

Hey, anyone remember the Penis Blog project? (Anthony Weiner's got nothin' on me...)

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Weblogs ]

Finally saw Showgirls. Quite an accomplishment to make that much buff flesh anti-erotic.

[ related topics: Erotic Woodworking ]

Larry noted this $20 million lawsuit filed in drowning deaths. Two kids went out on a semi-frozen pond, fell through, their friends went out to rescue them, fell through too, then...

Neighbors called 911 and firefighters arrived a few minutes later. But the lawsuit alleges firefighters stood idly at the water's edge for nearly 45 minutes for a boat and other equipment before attempting to rescue the teens.

There was also a recent kerfluffle out here when a man walked into the bay to commit suicide and firefighters and police didn't rescue him.

It bothers me that we, culturally, are getting an expectation of rescue. That there's this sense of "someone should do something", even when that something could further endanger life and limb. This sense of entitlement is, I think, one of the down-sides of outsourcing our humanity to the state.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs Current Events Law Enforcement California Culture Boats Machinery ]

App developers: Assume that I have multiple identifiers and personae, and that identity is your notion of me.

Hokay, time to load up the truck for Family Build Night. Be glad when fair season is over so we can take a week off from it.

[ related topics: Sociology Machinery ]

Gotta say, Speedy Gonzales impressions are hilarious when done by an actual Mexican...

Was way happier when my image of flirty underage girls on the Internet was a 40 year old mustachioed cop, not Andrew Brietbart.

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

http://www.hover-bike.com = Want. Desire. Admire. Respect. Fear. All at once.

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

Goofed roasting coffee this morning. Burned the crap out of it. Tastes like Starbucks. Ugh.

Demolition debris to be loaded tomorrow, switching to rebuilding the irrigation system this afternoon.

And a nice evening listening to music at the Petaluma Trolley fundraiser http://petalumatrolley.org

[ related topics: Music Pop Culture ]

Finished Born To Run, now I wanna do an ultra. Is there a 50 or metric 100 that'll give ya 16-20 hours to finish?

Off to buy parts for the irrigation system. Someday I'll get back to house projects I actually enjoy...

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Yay for Freecycle! Most of the demolition materials are gone, and I know more of my neighbors!

"Obedience to the law is freedom"

[ related topics: Privacy Civil Liberties Government ]

Wrong! All Answers Are Wrong!, in which Columbine explores "Derek Powazek, Bob Garfield, “On the Media,” conventional wisdom, snark, and a lot of other things which are way too long to just throw at you..."

My response:

The thing that I've realized about modern journalism is that controversy generates readership. "Did you see that article that...?". When Powazek says "...there is something worse than getting criticized online - total silence.", I think that he's on to something that's been ingrained into the newspaper editor's psyche: We want reactions.

Which means that your average newspaper article is what we online discussion old-timers would refer to as trolling, and that explains the quality of the comments to such articles.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Community ]

It's official: Developers get better with age.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Help: Post Skype, I was pretty sure that there now exists a technology that lets a machine behind a NAT firewall allow an inbound connection. Use pattern would be that Machine A publishes its availability to Server S, Machine B gets credential information from Server S and can then initiate a connection from B to A.

Any hints? This is basically what Skype does, and I know I read an article about how they did it at some point, but I'd like to be able to implement something similar.

Yay! Talked to engineer, he thinks we're good on the shed. Maybe we can pull permits by the end of the week? #fingerscrossed

I have never "gotten" U2, but this Quora: Why is U2 so popular answer seems to nail it.

Love that @petaluma_police are tweeting. Now if they can replace boilerplate "**(Person/Agency)**" with useful text, I'd be ecstatic.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Enforcement ]

Cooking pot generates 400mAh and delivers it via a USB jack.

[ related topics: Food ]

How Hackers Stole 200,000+ Citi Accounts Just By Changing Numbers In The URL.

Someone, or several someones, needs a good smacking.

Shape-shifting mannequin. From Fits.Me.

Last time I played in this space everyone was trying to figure out how to make custom clothing. Turning that concept around and approaching the problem from the other side is smart.

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Space & Astronomy Embedded Devices Clothing ]

Factcheck.org on the GOP New Hampshire debates.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Newgeography.com: Wendell Cox's Transit: The 4 Percent Solution looks at The Brookings Institution report Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America. Basically just a reiteration of the obvious: Transit spending is soaring, ridership isn't, largely because it takes twice as long to get to work on transit than it does driving (generally). Cox notes that:

A mode of transport incapable of accessing 96 percent of jobs within a normal commute period simply does not meet the needs of most people. This makes somewhat dubious claims that transit can materially reduce congestion or congestion costs throughout metropolitan areas. The Brookings estimates simply confirm the reality that has been evident in US Census Bureau and US Department of Transportation surveys for decades: that transit is generally not time-competitive with the automobile. It is no wonder that the vast majority of commuters in the United States (and even in Europe) travel to work by car.

Via The Transportationist.

[ related topics: Public Transportation ]

Time.com reports on Germany's first hiking trail for nudists

[ related topics: Nature and environment Nudity ]

"I am a lover of beauty, he of humanity. Each feels that the other has ignored great opportunities." -- Ted Chiang, in "Understand"

Not everything made in China is a questionable. But an amazing variety of Chinese knockoffs are being knocked off, from telephones to watches to condoms. Now the academic journal appears to be the next victim.

The journal Nature has written on a publisher of over 34 journals, some which have included articles already published elsewhere. Editorial board members for some journals are listed but never actually asked to join the board. The same IP hosts another company that runs conferences. Evidently, all that is needed to get into the conference and have a paper published is to pay the registration fee. I guess the next step is to be able to pay to have your articles cited, boosting your impact factor.

And like the legitimate manufacturing base, China is trying to create its own University system to provide higher education to its booming middle class. A research community also is necessary in support of the Universities. So it's natural that new journals and conferences would also be springing up to provide an outlet for research results.

Hopefully this won't result in the death of open publishing of scientific research.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Education Conferences China ]

So when they tally up the economic "benefits" of a stadium, do they include the inevitable destruction and looting from rioting?

[ related topics: Economics ]

Still mulling over Ted Chiang's novella Understand: "Pragmatism avails a savior far more than aestheticism."

Does it seem to anyone else like the best way to conceal a firearm is to paint it bright pink, as though it were a toy?

This confirms a number of things about Vancouver that I've suspected. Downtown Vancouver is... kind of a weird vibe. Commercial, out on the east side of town, is very cool. South across the channel, also got some neat stuff going on. Downtown? Uh...

Anyway, from a newspaper article about the post hockey rioting in Vancouver last night

Unruly, booze-fuelled mobs also broke into Sears at Robson and Howe. One looter managed to break into Chapters bookstore, but apparently no one bothered entering.

[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media Sports ]

Just playin' with wood. Or, "Honey, I'm gonna go out to the garage and do a joint." http://www.flutterby.net/2011-06-16_Heart_Dovetail

[ related topics: Drugs Woodworking ]

http://www.identifyrioters.com/ - help identify the vandals in the recent Vancouver hockey riots.

[ related topics: Sports ]

Does anyone know what "TBM" means, in the context of California law enforcement reporting incident locations?

[ related topics: Law Enforcement California Culture ]

Software binaries randomly crashing, so I checkout the SVN repo, compile debug, run w/gdb. No more crashes, snappier and faster. Hmmm...

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Victor Lyagushkin is a photographer and diver, with an interest in preserving and bringing awareness to the Orda Cave. Natalia Avseenko is a free diver who's setting records.

Victor took pictures of Natalia swimming with beluga whales. It's not clear where they're swimming, there are clearly man-made structures involved so it could be an aquarium.

Pictures with an emphasis on the nudity part at Whats On Sanya and the (*spit*) Daily Mail. Neither of those links has articles that I'd trust to tell me a damned thing about what's going on, but I'd like to learn more.

Via SE

QGround Control — Open Source Micro Air Vehicle Ground Control Station / Operator Control Unit. UAVs have gotten commodity enough that tracking and controlling them now has an open source interface.

[ related topics: Free Software ]

Buncha pictures from Saturday's low tide hike: http://www.flutterby.net/2011-06-18_McClure_to_Kehoe

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

So Charlene let slip a small part of my birthday surprise. Would anyone involved be interested in a river trip on Sunday? Would it conflict?

[ related topics: Travel ]

PLoS ONE: Neural Correlates of Natural Human Echolocation in Early and Late Blind Echolocation Experts

Conclusions

These findings suggest that processing of click-echoes recruits brain regions typically devoted to vision rather than audition in both early and late blind echolocation experts.

PLoS ONE blog entry about humans using echolocation and how our thinking about brain function and processing in terms of regional physiology is evolving from being sense based to being more conceptually based.

A Discover Magazine article about the brain on sonar.

The MeFi entry I stole these links from.

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Mathematics Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Globe journalist’s son crashes $180,000 Porsche

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Eric's Life Automobiles ]

I've been re-approved for another two years to the Petaluma Technology & Telecommunications Advisory Committee. (news from @JaimeyWB)

[ related topics: Current Events ]

U.S. Gypsum is shutting down Empire, Nevada, the United States' last company town. Empire is, of course, known to Burning Man attendees.

[ related topics: Burning Man History Current Events ]

RT @DJsolarlab: Every time you *like* something on Facebook, an advertiser gets its horns.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

Back from a an enjoyable day spent hangin' at the Sonoma Marin Fair

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

Must. Freakin'. Read.: My Life As An Undocumented Immigrant, Jose Antonio Vargas writing in the New York Times:

After slightly less than a year, I decided to leave The Huffington Post. In part, this was because I wanted to promote the documentary and write a book about online culture — or so I told my friends. But the real reason was, after so many years of trying to be a part of the system, of focusing all my energy on my professional life, I learned that no amount of professional success would solve my problem or ease the sense of loss and displacement I felt. I lied to a friend about why I couldn’t take a weekend trip to Mexico. Another time I concocted an excuse for why I couldn’t go on an all-expenses-paid trip to Switzerland. I have been unwilling, for years, to be in a long-term relationship because I never wanted anyone to get too close and ask too many questions. All the while, Lola’s question was stuck in my head: What will happen if people find out?

Via RC3, which also links to Chris Suellentrop: My (Legal) Editor’s Dream, on how they came to run this story.

Meanwhile, a Georgia crackdown on illegal immigrants is having a predictable effect on farm labor there:

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.

Via a MeFi thread that touches vaguely on some of the issues of what we (don't) pay for food, the problems with transporting unemployed from where they live to where the jobs are, strong dollars, weak pesos, and worker expectations. Alas, mostly with that sort of modern liberal privilege one would expect from that forum.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Weblogs Invention and Design Food Theater & Plays Sociology Writing Law California Culture Travel Community Douglas Adams New York ]

Kind of Screwed — Waxy.org. Andy Baio looks at getting sued by the photographer who took the original picture for Miles Davis's Kind of Blue album, over a low-resolution "8-bit" version of the picture:

Anyone can file a lawsuit and the costs of defending yourself against a claim are high, regardless of how strong your case is. Combined with vague standards, the result is a chilling effect for every independent artist hoping to build upon or reference copyrighted works.

A good look at the current state of "fair-use" and copyright, with a few forays into other intellectual property issues.

RC3's link to the article.

[ related topics: Law Art & Culture Copyright/Trademark ]

The Chattanoogan.com: Johnny Wilson: Wake Up Before You Sign The City Website Redo Check is a rant about Chattanooga paying $324k for a website redesign.

I admit to not knowing the particulars, but in the comments I'm going to toss my response to this that I wrote to the CHUGALUG mailing list.

[ related topics: Chattanooga ]

Diane posted a link to this article about urban exploring the mothball fleet. At the bottom were links to Scott Haefner: Inside the Ghost Ships of the Mothball Fleet (I've met Scott through Eric Wolf), freeside501's flickr stream, and Jonathan Haeber's account of the infiltration.

[ related topics: Photography Machinery ]

BF Skinner's mistake wasn't realizing that you shouldn't anthropomorphize people, it's that he anthropomorphized himself.

Off 'til Tuesday. If you know where I'm going, you probably know better than I do. Happy Birthday (Sunday) to me, catch ya on the flipside!

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Video: Cycling in the Netherlands in the 1950s kinda goes on and on, but some of the kid trailers are awesome.

Bonus video: Bicycle Rush Hour Utrecht (Netherlands) III, a time lapse of a modern busy intersection with lots of bicycle traffic.

[ related topics: Movies Sports Pedal Power Video Bicycling ]

Sometimes satire and reality merge. Shadow pointed me to Christwire: 14 Outrageous Secrets That a Homosexual Will Never Tell You, a wonderfully paranoid set of frightening.

But particularly, Charlene and I recently joined a gym. We are now members of The Redwood Club. It's an interesting mix, there are times of day when the cardio machines are full of young hardbodies, but between the pool and the Nautilus machines there are also quite a number of people who were probably told by their doctors to start exercising or the only way they were gonna continue to be mobile was on a gurney.

So I nearly snorted my coffee through my nose when I learned that:

"2) Mutual masturbation is the primary reason for gym membership."

Uh. Yeah. No.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Nature and environment ]

SFO billboard for Kayak.com claims "the full body scan of online travel search". Expensive, ineffective, and a distraction from the mission?

[ related topics: Bay Area Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

ErosBlog: Indeed, Where ARE All The Sex Games? looks a bit at the dearth of popular online erotic games.

[ related topics: Erotic Games Sexual Culture ]

Test driving the most annoying sex toy ever. Here's a description of the Arduino based sex toy, in the comments the creator talks about combining this with EEG reading...

Via ErosBlog.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

• 2011-06-24 Chia Lunch
• 2011-06-25 On Signal Mountain
• 2011-06-26 Ocoee Raft Trip
• 2011-06-27 Hanging out with Nancy

[ related topics: Chattanooga Travel ]

Way cool: As of December 2004 all vessels over 299GT are required to carry an AIS transponder which transmits telemetry on 161.975 MHz and 162.025 MHz. http://www.marinetraffic.com/ has volunteers setting up receivers so that they can give real-time updates of ship locations on a map.

[ related topics: Machinery Maps and Mapping ]

At the Paris Air Show, the Eurocopter X3 demonstrated 180kts helicopter flight. The X3 is a modified Dauphin, the focus seems to be on demonstrating that for the right price their airframes can be modified to run faster.

Meanwhile, Sikorsky's X2 concept takes two contra-rotating lift rotors and a pusher prop to achieve 300kts.

Wired article on the X3 at the Paris Air Show (Eurocopter's YouTube video), older NextBigFuture entry with X3 and X2 links, SE entry that turned me on to this.

(And, no, I'm not going to mention "Airwol..."... Damn it.)

[ related topics: Movies Aviation Video Aviation - Helicopters ]

3d printing use sand and solar sintering.

[ related topics: Current Events Graphics Photovoltaics ]

Mars has some interesting musings on a report from the US DOT: Effects of Raising and Lowering Speed Limits (1992), which finds, among other things, that posting lower speed limits can actually raise(!) the average speed for a section of road.

[ related topics: Astronomy ]

A bunch of people have been linking to I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD.

Violet Blue has some commentary that covers both the things that annoyed me and some of the aspects of what I found compelling in it.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Macintosh ]

To the writer who says #GoTheFuckToSleep isn't funny, @baratunde says #ShutTheFuckUp (HT: Medley)

[ related topics: Weblogs Writing ]

World of Fourcraft: Risk meets Foursquare. Mashable article.

Nevada Assembly Bill No. 511:

Sec. 8. 1. The Department shall adopt regulations authorizing the operation of autonomous vehicles on highways within the State of Nevada.

2. The regulations required to be adopted by subsection 1 must:

(a) Set forth requirements that an autonomous vehicle must meet before it may be operated on a highway within this State;

(b) Set forth requirements for the insurance that is required to test or operate an autonomous vehicle on a highway within this State;

(c) Establish minimum safety standards for autonomous vehicles and their operation;

(d) Provide for the testing of autonomous vehicles;

(e) Restrict the testing of autonomous vehicles to specified geographic areas; and

(f) Set forth such other requirements as the Department determines to be necessary.

3. As used in this section:

(a) “Artificial intelligence” means the use of computers and related equipment to enable a machine to duplicate or mimic the behavior of human beings.

(b) “Autonomous vehicle” means a motor vehicle that uses artificial intelligence, sensors and global positioning system coordinates to drive itself without the active intervention of a human operator.

(c) “Sensors” includes, without limitation, cameras, lasers and radar.

[ related topics: Photography Artificial Intelligence ]

More depths to someone I chat with regularly but still don't know a whole lot about: Lia May-Bird does paintings and drawings.

[ related topics: Birds ]

Speaking of people I talk to regularly but could stand to learn more about: Peter Welker is a neighbor and someone I regularly say "hi" to, but I still haven't gotten to one of his gigs. I see him all the time in Aqus arranging and composing, and he's well regarded jazz musician who's played with lots of people you've heard of, I've probably even heard his work and not known, but there you go...

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Village Voice: Real Men Get Their Facts Straight, on Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, and bullshit "child sex trafficking" numbers. And how a Santa Monica "charity consultant" appears to be raking in big bucks by generating overwrought causes. Via Feminisn't.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events ]

Note written to John Maher, aka "Petaluma Pete", and Jaimey Walking-Bear, on the topic of a more ubiquitous WiFi setup in Petaluma. Continued in the comments.

Tonight's Petaluma Technology Advisory Committee meeeting (Yay, we dropped the "& Telecommunications"!) addressed signing the city on to the California Emerging Technology Fund "Get Connected!" campaign.

Here's what I wrote to a fellow committee member. If you are a fellow TAC member (other than the one I emailed this to), please do not comment on this post or discuss this topic with me before the next TAC meeting to avoid potential Brown Act issues!

So I'm still skeptical about what Petaluma gets out of pushing the "Get Connected!" campaign. There's some nebulous stuff about federal dollars, though I'm not sure why the CETF would need that when they've got those tens of millions of telecom dollars, but anyway...

...continued in comments...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama California Culture ]

RT @CHPSantaRosa:

Great photos of CHP helicopter performing a rescue at Bodega Head Beach on June 23rd http://mekern.zenfolio.com/p595211955

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Aviation - Helicopters ]

Sydney Australia now paying people to leave. Yay for government subsidizing sprawl?

Here's the website for the New South Wales government's regional relocation grant. Via MeFi

[ related topics: Invention and Design moron ]

iOnRoad — Lane Deviation Warnings for your Android phone (coming soon). Via this Technology Review article.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Pwnie Express. Wall wart form-factor devices which maintain "... a covert, encrypted, firewall-busting backdoor into your target network"

[ related topics: broadband Cryptography ]

Army bans use of toe shoes citing image concerns. Good to know that our military that's so good at winning hearts and minds is adopting form over function...

(Can you tell I'm reading Black Hawk Down right now?)

[ related topics: Weblogs Mathematics Shoes Birds ]

Light Field Photography with a Hand-Held Plenoptic Camera

This paper presents a camera that samples the 4D light field on its sensor in a single photographic exposure. This is achieved by inserting a microlens array between the sensor and main lens, creating a plenoptic camera. Each microlens measures not just the total amount of light deposited at that location, but how much light arrives along each ray. By re-sorting the measured rays of light to where they would have terminated in slightly different, synthetic cameras, we can compute sharp photographs focused at different depths. We show that a linear increase in the resolution of images under each microlens results in a linear increase in the sharpness of the refocused photographs. This property allows us to extend the depth of field of the camera without reducing the aperture, enabling shorter exposures and lower image noise. Especially in the macrophotography regime, we demonstrate that we can also compute synthetic photographs from a range of different viewpoints. These capabilities argue for a different strategy in designing photographic imaging systems.

What I find interesting about this is that it appears to provide an image along with a 3d depth field. This could be a very useful technique to build scene reconstruction systems.

[ related topics: Photography Graphics Education ]