Flutterby™! From 2011-07-01 to 2011-07-31

Finished Black Hawk Down yesterday evening. That should be required reading. Now trying to find a good book on the background to how the State Department and the U.N. got our armed forces into that disaster so that I can better understand all the other disasters those organizations seem to be guiding us into.

[ related topics: Books Birds ]

Google+ is sending me lots of 404 links on behalf of my friends. Sigh.

Okay, I am apparently on Google+, I think as danlyke1@gmail.com. Not terribly interesting 'til they've got an API and RSS feed.

[ related topics: Content Management ]

Wait, could it be? The AP actually doing journalism? AP IMPACT: Questions arise over FBI terror profile, on severe errors in the FBI's "most wanted" list.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Law Enforcement ]

For my Pixar friends: In downtown Portland, lawyer re-creates 'Up' with lots of balloons.

[ related topics: Pixar Animation Law Graphics ]

Via Genehack, Bacon Jam (scroll down a bit).

Oh, relatedly: Rick's bacon wrapped bananas at my birthday party were awesome and bear trying too.

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson Food - Bacon ]

Some mornings ya raid the disaster prep go bag for the steel toed boots 'cause the 4' crowbar needs some help.

[ related topics: Cool Science Shoes ]

Health officials in the Indian state of Rajasthan are rewarding sterilization with cars, motorcycles, televisions and blenders.

The pictured vehicle is a Tata Nano, which just seems like it's screaming for some sort of joke here.

[ related topics: Health Current Events ]

Just in case you have trouble finding it for rereading today, The Declaration of Independence: http://www.flutterby.com/archi...ndenceoftheThirteenColonies.html

[ related topics: Law Archival ]

Reading a patent with apparently made-up language. Expecting to see references to "Potter Stewarting", "Burgering" and "Rehnquist" shortly.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property ]

Archives of General Psychiatry: Genetic Heritability and Shared Environmental Factors Among Twin Pairs With Autism:

The results suggest that environmental factors common to twins explain about 55% of the liability to autism. Although genetic factors also play an important role, they are of substantially lower magnitude than estimates from prior twin studies of autism. Nearly identical estimates emerged for ASD, suggesting that ASD presents the same liability spectrum as strict autism.

SFGate: UCSF, Stanford autism study shows surprises:

"We're not trying to say there isn't a genetic component - quite the opposite. But for most individuals with autism spectrum disorder, it's not simply a genetic cause," said Neil Risch, director of the UCSF Institute for Human Genetics, who designed the study.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Television Education Archival ]

Ever try to make sense of the deep conspiracy theory folks, like the "Stephen King shot John Lennon" guy? That's what reading patents is...

[ related topics: Conspiracy Government ]

Warning, http://wheelofconcept.com/ may cause extreme cynicism and inability to take tech pitches seriously.

Yes, this is an actual complete "sentence" from an actual patent.

In other embodiments, tasks related to the communication of data between the data processors, such as, in non-limiting examples, some of the other embodiments described in the previous paragraph.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property ]

LA Times: TSA warns of possible airline threat involving implanted bombs. Yep. Could happen. People could also just form their underwear out of Semtex, which would go through the pornoscanners just fine, and carry a blasting cap (the part that's easier to detect with sniffers) in their digestive tract. Or...

Yeah. Security is about mitigating risk. I hate to be callous, but locked cockpit doors and passenger awareness have turned commercial airliners from flying cruise missiles back into devices that can kill all of their passengers and a few people on the ground. In modern terms, terrorism involves threatening a lot more people than just an airplane's full.

The TSA is just a way to transfer public funds into private pockets.

Via Larry.

[ related topics: Weblogs Aviation Current Events Clothing ]

Augh! No, you sons of bitches, not those same drawings again! And, aigh, similar but different prose! Make the patents stop, please!

Oh, look, they've added clouds to the drawings of servers and clients in the 2010 version of this patent.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property ]

For all of you folks with PhD's (or wanting to have one) in GIS systems, Locational Based Data Systems.. etc.. missed the conversation today at a utility that would have made your head explode:

Mike: What is their address?

Other: "Entrando por el colmado Luis 3 casas de despues" Which essentially means: 3 doors past Luis's Mini-mini-mini market.

Mike: "Going which way? On what road?"

Other: -blank stare-

Yes, it's in the system as "3 doors down.."

[ related topics: History Economics ]

"When people get together and play good chamber music, it's like watching people fucking onstage." — Albert Fuller

[ related topics: Music Erotic Sexual Culture Salon magazine ]

I still have dreams of the snippet manager, and maybe I'll dump MediaWiki on Flutterby.net so that I can implement most of it there (I have an architecture that I think will work simply), however...

What I'd really like right now is an RSS aggregator that simply understands that blogentries have comments. That would be far more useful to me than any number of Facebook killers, because it would let me better interact with the people I'm already reading and socializing with online.

Done right, that could give me a Facebook like stream that'd be the distributed killer everyone's talking about. Heck, I'd add RSS feeds to the comments here for that.

Google got big not by trying to own the conversation, but by facilitating us in finding and participating in it. Google+ so far appears to be an attempt to own it. It looks like it came from Microsoft.

Unless it changes directions pretty radically, I'm not excited.

[ related topics: Humor Content Management Microsoft moron Work, productivity and environment Architecture ]

I could swear I linked to this before, but even though it's an old gag it bears the occasional repeating: http://ismycreditcardstolen.com/

Fascinating: The Connected States of America. Put in a county, see which other counties the residents communicate with, either by minutes of talk or SMS messages, using AT&T data.

Cindy Gallop: Make love not porn (video). Also as a TED talk.

MakeLoveNotPorn.com is down, but her talk has a thrust of "lets educate and create alternatives". Also some good notes on "social media experts".

Via Sociological Images.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs Movies Journalism and Media Video ]

Green Roads Construction: Are contractors our roadblock?. On how North Carolina eschewing cost-plus pricing, bringing down not just road construction costs, but the carbon load and materials costs for road resurfacing.

[ related topics: Machinery Fabrication Model Building ]

Sexonomics: How the anti-sex lobby profits:

Is there enough money in it to even bother making this criticism? Well, thanks to a little tool that compares the money from funding grants over time, we can make a rough guess of what it's worth. For instance, funding for studying trafficking is enormous - in 2009, it was funded worldwide to the tune of nearly a billion US dollars. This is a total greater than the amount of grant money awarded to study lung cancer, which of course, is also devastating, and affects far more people. And spending on trafficking since 2000 has dwarfed the grant awards on such important international health concerns as malnutrition, malaria, or tuberculosis - conditions that kill millions of people worldwide every year, and affect hundreds of millions more.

Via Feminisn't

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Health Currency ]

Can we standardize on 7 for "erase this voicemail" and "find the originator of this robocall and nuke them from orbit"?

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

I did not know that there was enough of a market for carved stone skulls such that Skullis would advertise themselves as "creator of the finest crystal & gemstone skulls", but there you are. I suppose that "totally metal" is actually more refined than this.

But snarking is easy, and there's some beatiful rock there. Check out the 16.9" long ammonite skull or the lace agate skull that looks like a Grateful Dead artifact.

And hopefully in a thousand years someone will write a new-age self-help book based on digging through the remains of a completely metal crash pad and use these skulls as evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Via MeFi, where it was observed that:

Man, the world is a big place. You have to figure there is a very small sliver of overlap between people who have $6000 to drop on an Ammonite fossil skull and the people who want a $6000 Ammonite fossil skull. an yet Skullis survives.

[ related topics: Books Invention and Design Economics ]

I tossed this in the comments to my Google+ notes, but it's too good to not share on the front page: Anti-pseudonym bingo

Also, yes, thank you, we are aware that a bingo card does not constitute a logical reasoned argument. You could, if you like, use it as a clue that we've heard some of your ideas before though.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Archival ]

Argh. Yesterday, Charlene's Gnome keyring blew chunks and started asking her for a password. Barring any other way to fix it, I nuked the folder. I had apparently forgotten how many different applications used that annoying piece of crap to store passwords.

I know this happened once before, but... Grrr...

So the FaceTwitPlusSpace streams are ablaze with bemoaning the last space shuttle mission. Color me not sad. The space shuttle was a way overpriced compromise that NASA will be better rid of, and now they can get on with the stuff that makes more of a difference, including improving the quality of unmanned missions.

For some good reading on why I (and many others) will shed no tears for the space shuttle, may I suggest Maciej Ceglowski's A Rocket To Nowhere.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

Conspiracy theory of the moment: People are giving Michelle Bachmann press in order to make Sarah Palin palatable in comparison.

[ related topics: Conspiracy Government ]

RT @heathercorinna "Dear abstinence-only: you owe me back pay 4 cleaning up your mess every day. With billions of dollars of funding, I know you can afford it."

Passed a group of teens in the park posing for pix with an empty bottle of Capt. Morgan's. Realized that regret is reserved for the sober.

A couple from Shadow:

• Wired: Lightweight lock loop secures bike wheels, for urban bicyclists who don't want to remove their front wheels and want an additional loop that fits in their U-lock to get both wheels. I've seen enough damage done in urban cycling environments that I'd be wary of leaving anything outside, locked up or not, so maybe the thing to fix in that transportation arena is better bike management...
• Reporter: If New York City gets bike lanes, the terrorists win:

Crusading anti-bike lane CBS 2 reporter Marcia Kramer is on the scene at a proposed Manhattan bike lane: "A Second Avenue bike lane is next to the Israeli Consulate," she says. "Imagine if the man on the bike was a terrorist!"

• Gadar.net offers Marcus Bachmann (spouse of Michele Bachmann) lifetime membership:

“In light of Marcus Bachmann’s spike in popularity on gay and gay-friendly blogs across the U.S., internet dating megasite Gaydar.net is offering the the husband of Tea Party presidential candidate Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) a complimentary lifetime membership,” reports Gaydar, on its blog.

If they do this for all the closeted Republicans out there, they'll be out of business in no time...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sexual Culture Weblogs Invention and Design Sports Net Culture Pedal Power New York Video Bicycling Archival Marriage ]

How to make edible panties from licorice or noodles.

[ related topics: Graphic Design ]

I don't have time to dig into this further right now, but Larry mentioned this: Lab-Made synthetic windpipe implanted in man with tracheal cancer.

Gary Johnson Calls Family Leader Pledge “Offensive and Unrepublican”:

Johnson went on to state that “the so-called ‘Marriage Vow” pledge that FAMILY LEADER is asking Republican candidates for President to sign attacks minority segments of our population and attempts to prevent and eliminate personal freedom. This type of rhetoric is what gives Republicans a bad name.

“Government should not be involved in the bedrooms of consenting adults. I have always been a strong advocate of liberty and freedom from unnecessary government intervention into our lives. The freedoms that our forefathers fought for in this country are sacred and must be preserved. The Republican Party cannot be sidetracked into discussing these morally judgmental issues — such a discussion is simply wrongheaded. We need to maintain our position as the party of efficient government management and the watchdogs of the “public’s pocket book”.

“This ‘pledge’ is nothing short of a promise to discriminate against everyone who makes a personal choice that doesn’t fit into a particular definition of ‘virtue’.

[ related topics: Books Privacy Political Correctness moron Sociology Civil Liberties Community Marriage Government ]

Worth a read: Wired.com: How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History

A bunch of sausage recipes, saved here 'cause I especially like making up a quick fresh sausage occasionally.

[ related topics: Food ]

Louisiana decriminalizes oral and anal sex - Things get a little easier in the "Big Easy".

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events ]

Lazyweb: What's your favorite online fax service? Both "email me inbound faxes" and "fax this PDF to some number".

USGS Announces Initial Availability of Historical Topographic Quadrangle Maps of the United States

[ related topics: Earthquake Maps and Mapping ]

I've got an interesting problem - on a Win 7 machine, adobe acrobat has been set as the default handler for .lnk (shortcut) files. So every link on my desktop looks like acrobat, and clicking one launches acrobat, which tells me that filename.exe, the target of the shortcut, isn't a pdf. This just began, and 3 uninstall/ reinstall cycles hasn't changed the situation. (With Acrobat gone, the shortcuts work just fine..)

The set default programs shows that acrobat is the default handler for .lnk files. I could change defaults, but can't find a way to restore the working mode which is that .lnk shows up as "Shortcut" with "Unknown Application".

Does anybody in Flutterbyland have insight?

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Television ]

Wood Tape — a tale of indulging a 4 year old in Home Depot.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Russell B. suggests that various sections of the New York Times could simply re-use the same text.

[ related topics: Invention and Design New York ]

Yay! Structural calculations back for the workshop shear walls. Just told the truss guys to go ahead with theirs. Forward progress!

Sugru - Hack things better. Mouldable air-dry silicone. In little packets.

Video of five friends working to free a Humpback Whale from a fishing net in the Sea of Cortez. Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Movies Work, productivity and environment Video ]

Awesome! Cyclists challenge JetBlue to a cross-town race. You've probably heard that this weekend the 405 in LA will be closed, an event being referred to as Carmageddon". JetBlue is offering a $4 flight from Burbank to Long Beach. The Wolfpack Hustle bicycle crew has decided to race from a home in Burbank to the Long Beach Aquarium, while Joe Anthony does the same trip via airplane.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Aviation Travel Pedal Power Bicycling Public Transportation ]

How Wired Magazine Helped The US Government Try To Frame Julian Assange (And Failed)

[ related topics: moron ]

SFGate: When arcades ruled. With pictures.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Why don't robocall telemarketing scammers (yes, redundant) actually follow through when they threaten that this is my final opportunity?

Birth control seems to be a side effect of the fashions of the 17th century. In any case, it's an interesting read full of fashion advice for the next RenFair. NSFW.

[ related topics: Law Fashion ]

Yay! We're back! Don't know what all happened with the outage, but it's good to be communicating with the outside world again.

Know all of those studies which purport to show how kids from married families have better social and cognitive development? It turns out, at least in the UK, that if you control for income and education Marriage does not improve children's development. Via this Guardian article:

By examining data from the Millennium Cohort Study, a sample of children born in the UK in the early 2000s, the institute shows that children born out of wedlock are behind in cognitive development at three, five and seven-years-old but this is because "cohabiting parents tend to have lower educational qualifications than married parents". The same pattern is observed with "socio-emotional" development.

Which I got to via an SFGate Blog entry.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology Marriage ]

Mork keeps on giving: when the database worms eat into your murder trial. On how the complexity of the "mork" database on the Mozilla codebase led to discredited (after the trial) evidence introduced by the prosecution during the Casey Anthony trial:

He [Jose Baez, lead counsel for the defense] pointed out the discrepancy between the first analysis the sheriff’s office did that showed one visit to a website about chloroform and an analysis done later with a second program that appeared to show 84 visits. However, according to Baez, the first report showed a progression that made it clear that the 84 visits were actually to MySpace.

Speaking of which, I haven't commented on the Casey Anthony trial here because mostly I didn't know what it was until I saw my various social media feeds light up with commentary about the verdict. From what I can tell, if you have problems with the verdict you should get involved with Orange County's Sheriff and District Attorney race, because that appears to have been a tremendous example of investigatorial incompetence and prosecutorial overreach. At least based on the Wikipedia article on the death of Caylee Anthony. Although it could also have been a grand jury pushing the prosecutor's office to overreach.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Law Journalism and Media Databases ]

The Guardian: Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat:

The results, published in 2002, showed that those receiving the extra nutrients committed 37% fewer serious offences involving violence, and 26% fewer offences overall. Those on the placebos showed no change in their behaviour. Once the trial had finished the number of offences went up by the same amount. The office the researchers had used to administer nutrients was restored to a restraint room after they had left.

[ related topics: Politics Food ]

University of Chicago Press: The History of Cartography, Volumes 1 and 2, as online PDFs.

BBC News: You're hired: How the apprentice gets ahead in Germany.

an entry stolen wholesale from MeFi:

Letters from Johns. Letters from Working Girls. Letters from Men Who Watch Pornography. Three projects from Susannah Breslin.

[ related topics: Books Erotic Sexual Culture Movies Current Events Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Education ]

Seeing the headline "Gates Foundation Launches Effort to Reinvent the Toilet" I immediately thought Windows Me 2?

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Microsoft moron ]

Google+ makes me feel old: An *adult* passing around Baz Luhrman's video to Mary Shmich's "Wear Sunscreen" as new to her.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Video ]

Cool: MarkV is playing with transmitting PWM audio with an Arduino directly driving a laser diode.

[ related topics: Music Gambling ]

Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does Size Matter*? (PDF)

This paper explores the link between economic development and penile length between 1960 and 1985. It estimates an augmented Solow model utilizing the Mankiw-Romer-Weil 121 country dataset. The size of male organ is found to have an inverse U-shaped relationship with the level of GDP in 1985. It can alone explain over 15% of the variation in GDP. The GDP maximizing size is around 13.5 centimetres, and a collapse in economic development is identified as the size of male organ exceeds 16 centimetres. Economic growth between 1960 and 1985 is negatively associated with the size of male organ, and it alone explains 20% of the variation in GDP growth. With due reservations it is also found to be more important determinant of GDP growth than country's political regime type. Controlling for male organ slows convergence and mitigates the negative effect of population growth on economic development slightly. Although all evidence is suggestive at this stage, the `male organ hypothesis' put forward here is robust to exhaustive set of controls and rests on surprisingly strong correlations.

[ related topics: Politics moron Travel Economics ]

Feminisn't: Fund America's first sex workers' rights billboard, on trying to put a billboard in LA to point out that sex work is different from sex trafficking. Direct donation link.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Work, productivity and environment Civil Liberties ]

Bunch of pictures from Monday's visit to Malakoff Diggins State Park http://www.flutterby.net/2011-07-18_Malakoff_Diggins

[ related topics: Photography ]

Texas's "abstinence only" sex education has led to the highest teen birth rate in the nation

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Pop Culture Education ]

Discover Magazine: How to Avoid Repeating the Debacle That Was the Space Shuttle.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Dave Winer on Dropbox and the "hamster business model". Via Upon 2020.

Remember, if you're not paying what it costs to offer the service, you are not the customer, you are the product.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Dave Winer ]

Posted to my Google+ account:

As others have noted, Skud's account on Google+ is gone, presumably over the "no pseudonyms" rule (this place is largely nerds anyway, I'd imagine that nobody thinks of Skud by her given name anyway). Since I talk with most of y'all on other forums, and really the only person I follow who's posting original content here is using a pseudonym, I'm not sure how much longer my Google+ participation will continue.

No RSS. No APIs. Hamhanded social policies. Kinda making Facebook look responsible, frankly. But, really, let's all get back to using our own blogs, shall we? The world was way better then.

[ related topics: Content Management Community ]

• Frequent Sex Protects Intimates From the Negative Implications of Their Neuroticism. Neuroticism makes us unhappy. Sex makes us happy. Happiness can prevail.
• The Dark Side of Forgiveness: The Tendency to Forgive Predicts Continued Psychological and Physical Aggression in Marriage. If you don't speak up, the behaviors will continue.
• Marriages Are More Satisfying When Wives Are Thinner Than Their Husbands. Now this one is interesting (and searching for more detail on this is what led me to the other two), it might explain the "fat schlub with the supermodel" TV cliché. Via WRCB: UT Study: Secret to happy marriage: A skinny wife which appears to misstate the findings of the study.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Technology and Culture Sociology Television Marriage ]

Looking for feedback: For a variety of reasons, I've abandoned Mediawiki for Flutterby.net. Which made it easy, when Charlene made the suggestion this morning, for me to implement a new feature. On pages such as this year's McClure to Kehoe hike, or our most recent visit to Malakoff Diggins, there's now a little "zoom" icon under each picture. Clicking on the picture takes you to the page with the different available sizes of the picture, but clicking on the little icon pops up a Lightbox 2 view of all of the pictures on the page.

So here's the feedback question: First, are the "next" and "prev" functions obvious enough, and, second, any suggestions for a better icon to do this with?

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Invention and Design ]

Some great AT&T and T-Mobile merger parody ads. Went to look at phones the other day, decided that even if the merger goes through it'd take AT&T two years to screw up T-Mobile to the point where it feels like an AT&T company, buuuuuut...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Video ]

Nobody makes relationship violence and murder sound quite as attractive as Barry Manilow. "Music and fashion were always the passion..."

[ related topics: Music Sociology Fashion ]

Skud writes about her suspension from Google+. Limor "Ladyada" Fried's account was suspended but then reinstated.

Violet Blue: Google Plus deleting accounts en masse, no clear answers.

Skud is gathering data on Google+ suspensions, if you've been affected please fill out her survey.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs ]

James Fallows: The Chart That Should Accompany All Discussions of the Debt Ceiling.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Just in case you didn't see this elsewhere: Warriors and women: the sex ratio of Norse migrants to eastern England up to 900 ad, in which Shane McLeod checks the sex of skeletons at Viking burial grounds by examining their bones rather than applying the cultural filter that if they've got a shield and a sword they must be male, and adjusts history substantially. USA Today article on the topic

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology Law Community ]

Observation: Google+ is like Tumblr with less porn and more SEO and social media "experts".

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Journalism and Media ]

For Eric: NY Times: Dissing the Doctorate is a transcription of The Grad Student Rap (YouTube).

[ related topics: Movies Education ]

The Constants They Are A Changin': NIST Posts Latest Adjustments to Fundamental Figures

Peter Hartlaub: Golden Gate BART and other failed rapid transit dreams (photos), pictures of the future of light rail, from the past.

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area History Trains Public Transportation ]

I assume that this is just a viral ad for the Fleshlight sex toy, but... Fleshlightning (Extended Trailer) points to Fleshlightning.com. I'd see it in theaters.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Movies ]

Via Jay, RT @ErinPatrick:

"Dance like the photo isn't being tagged, love like you've never been unfriended and tweet like no one is following." Anonymous

[ related topics: Photography ]

Trying to geocode some data. Using http://geocoder.us/ and it's working okay, but not great. Of course part of the problem is that they're using the Tiger data set. I'm considering tossing them $50 for 20k lookups where I don't have to wait 15 seconds in between queries just because I've gotten some good use out of their free service, but I'm also wondering what other options are out there.

Suggestions?

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Vicodin makes me think I'm hilarious. This is incompatible with possibly cracked ribs.

Holy Smoke can turn your dearly departed into ammunition:

Once the caliber, gauge and other ammunition parameters have been selected, we will ask you (by way of your funeral service provider) to send approximately one pound of the decedant's ash to us. Upon receiving the ashes our professional and reverant staff will place a measured portion of ash into each shotshell or cartridge.

Example: 1 Pound of ash is enough to produce 250 shotshells (one case).

They also do rifle and pistol ammunition.

Hat tip to Tara at ResearchBuzz

[ related topics: Law ]

Brighton Body Casting has done many plaster casts of vulvas.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Graphic Design ]

Ribs still hurt, but I'm somewhat up and about without painkillers. Need to avoid overdoing it, so the workshop waits. Damn.