Flutterby™! From 2012-06-01 to 2012-06-30

New York Times: Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era.

A study published in 2010 by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that children and teenagers whose parents do not have a college degree spent 90 minutes more per day exposed to media than children from higher socioeconomic families. In 1999, the difference was just 16 minutes.

Yep. Access is not the problem. Culture is the problem.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Sociology Journalism and Media California Culture Education New York ]

Does anyone have an example of a "mobile optimized" site that's actually better than the regular site on a modern smart phone?

Watch this and compare to the Actual Lyrics - It's possible to to read them in sync, but the audio-visual supported different (English) lyrics took huge priority even when I hid them and listened again.. and again.. while reading the Latin.

[ related topics: Music Movies ]

Router lathe for millikng the mast

[ related topics: Photography Woodworking ]

2x4s aren't really stiff enough for lathe rails, and the mast stock flexed a lot.

[ related topics: Photography Economics Woodworking ]

Out at Tara Firma Farm for the barn dance, being watched by two owls and their babies

[ related topics: Photography Movies ]

A day on the river with a homemade boat

[ related topics: Photography Boats Machinery ]

First few strawberry plants on the roof!

[ related topics: Photography Gardening ]

Eulerian Video Magnification for Revealing Subtle Changes in the World or, detecting heartbeats by watching skin color changes in video.

Via Mefi.

[ related topics: Video ]

Microsoft unauthorized certificate was used to sign Flame malware. Makes you feel that much safer about UEFI secure booting/Windows 8 "secure boot", no?

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Pyrotechnics Shoes ]

Heard yesterday: "If you're driving a Cadillac de Ville like that, you don't need a fedora, and the ostrich feather is implied."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Automobiles ]

You know that slippery slope where anti-child-pornography becomes suppression of discussion about reasonable ideas? Those Doppler-shifted screams you're hearing are thoughts falling off of it: West Virginia coalfield dweller goes to Washington to testify about pollution, with picture of 5 year old child bathing in dirty water, Republicans on the committee investigate for child pornography.

Although, you know, maybe 5 year olds bathing in polluted water is what gives these guys hard-ons...

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Community ]

JMR Higgs: Illuminatus! vs Atlas Shrugged

[ related topics: Objectivism Robert Anton Wilson ]

Hey, Victoria Webb got a shot of us on the river for @P360. Number 20 at http://petaluma360.com/apps/pb...COMMUNITY&ArtNo=602009993&Ref=PH

[ related topics: Community ]

New York Times: We Only Think We Know The Truth About Salt:

One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies — involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range. Effectively what the 1972 paper would have predicted.

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design New York ]

I am neither a Boing Boing fan nor a Xeni Jardin fan. Lots of reasons. But Xeni gets it right on Boing Boing: NYT-“MEN invented the internet”.

Later: Dave Winer: NY Times is more than sexist.

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

Alan and Jake want me to run the Mud Man with them, September 23, 2012. We doin' the short, or the long? http://www.vineman.com/MudMan.htm

Gail Collins on Texas’s Abstinence Sex Education Problems:

The state pushes abstinence sex education yet it has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy. So why is the rest of the country paying half a billion dollars a year to support their teen mothers? ...

Nothing new here, just yet another example of social conservatives pushing their externalities out on to the rest of us.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Pop Culture Education ]

Sensible Erection informs me that the "Trololo" guy has died. His name was Eduard Khil. Apparently the original lyrics were either suppressed by Soviet censors or by a disagreement with the lyricist, making this guy kind of a Soviet punk version of Lawrence Welk.

Somewhat annoyed by all the "vote today" email flood, everyone I know absentee voted weeks ago.

Medical Science Daily has a rundown on a panel discussion including Kay Redfield Jamison, James Fallon and Elyn Saks on the link between genius and insanity. That link may just be one of a gazillion content farming articles, when I went searching I found tons of them, the video appears to be at World Science Festival: Madness Redefined, I haven't had a chance to watch it yet. Choice pull quote:

"I think the creativity is just one part of something that is mostly bad" -- Elyn Saks

[ related topics: Movies Current Events Community Video ]

Kottke is collecting a list of bad password requirements.

Strawberries and sedums, on the roof

[ related topics: Photography ]

I "passed" my Global Entry interview yesterday, and have boiled it down to: I paid $100 to DHS/Customers and Border Protection for them to have permission to run an FBI check on me to see that I have never been arrested or convicted, and collect their own copy of my fingerprints and mug shot. My goal was to explore the process, and get out of some lines and hassle when traveling. We'll see how the 2nd half of that goal works soon.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

For Larry and me:

[ related topics: Photography Comics Shoes ]

A nice little piece from Slate on how the world of academic SF studies has focused intensely on the Alien movies as the sina qua non of something or other. Of particular interest is how the entire field almost tore itself apart over the issue of Sigourney Weaver's sexy underwear.

[ related topics: Movies Space & Astronomy Clothing ]

Kink quote of the day: "50 Shades of Grey is to real bdsm as a gloryhole is to tantric sex." http://www.besplace.com/2012/0...-stereotypes-of-sexual-deviants/

[ related topics: Quotes Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Fire aboard nuclear submarine that caused $400m in damage was started by a vacuum cleaner. Fodder for kids next time they're told to clean their room...

Hat tip to Jay

[ related topics: Children and growing up Pyrotechnics Community ]

When we finish the sailboat, I think I know what's next on the boat building queue: Autocanoe, a pedal-powered side-paddle-wheel amphibious canoe.

[ related topics: Boats Machinery Pedal Power ]

While they are taking about firearms mostly, this applies to cybersecurity and other places as well, I thought it was -mostly- well said: The Grey Man

Hey, @LGUS, I would love to give you (positive!) feedback and reviews on your product, but your web site and feedback is very broken!

Apologies for the downtime, in light of the big ol' LinkedIn security failure I decided it was time to update the way Flutterby stored its passwords. Hopefully we're back and rockin' and rollin', and your passwords are about to be more secure than they've been.

The 15 minutes between when you discover an unknown device with an Atmel SBC HTTP server on your network, and when you remember...

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery broadband Robotics Embedded Devices ]

• High Blood Caffeine Levels in Older Adults Linked to Avoidance of Alzheimer’s Disease. The paper from the study (PDF)
• Inhaled Marijuana May Keep Brain Cancer in Remission. Spontaneous regression of septum pellucidum/forniceal pilocytic astrocytomas—possible role of Cannabis inhalation Mansoor Foroughi, Glenda Hendson, Michael A. Sargent and Paul Steinbok Child's Nervous System, 2011, Volume 27, Number 4, Pages 671-679

[ related topics: Drugs Health ]

Shay Aaron makes tiny sculptures of food.

Shay Aaron's Etsy shop and Flickr photo stream.

[ related topics: Food Trains ]

This is annoyingly wrong: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=pNcfyRP9 dumps the contents of http://pastebin.com/pNcfyRP9 which says:

You have been successfully unsubscribed.

A spammer sending around a particular set of IndieGoGo recording glasses (no, no link love for this asshole) is using this to present a mock unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message. So, yeah, if you see the "these are cooler than Google glasses" spam, that's what this schmuck is doing.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Spam Monty Python ]

Pancake flipping accident has left me covered in batter, and I am a husband, but somehow Charlene objects to the obvious description.

[ related topics: Marriage ]

Charlene touching up resin on the epoxied seams

[ related topics: Photography ]

[ related topics: Photography ]

This American Life: What Happened at Dos Erres was strongly suggested in my Facebook feed. I haven't had a chance to listen to it, but apparently it's about the events recounted in Pro Publica: Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in Guatemala. Back in the Reagan Years when we were supporting "anti-communists" no matter the rest of their agenda, government forces went in to the Guatemala town of Dos Erres and killed 200 people, sparing only 2 young boys. One of the commandos raised one of those boys on his own, and the boy later moved to the United States, without the benefit of documentation.

Then one day he got an email from a prosecutor in Guatemala, offering help with his immigration status if he took a DNA test. Turns out the father of one of those boys was working in another town on that fateful day...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Archival ]

On Saturday evening, Charlene and I went into the city to the Brava Theater for a showing of Shining Night: A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen and a performance/fundraiser by Volti.

I learned something interesting about myself. Lauridsen is a composer who does choral chants, the movie interplays his music with interviews with him. The credits have an extended musical overlay, and this was followed by a couple of songs of his sung by the 20 piece choir (and one done as a sing-along). As the credits rolled, one of the speakers said something like "I can't imagine that anyone has an elevated heart rate", and as we shuffled out of the theater various people said "wasn't that beautiful?"

Here's the thing: Lauridsen's music reaches deep into my lizard hindbrain and tweaks my alert detectors. It elicits my body's fear reaction; straight past that "you've gotten through things that you've thought were going to kill you by focusing and thinking clearly", raises my heart rate and kicks my adrenaline.

It'd be like walking out of a screening of Alien and hearing "wasn't that beautiful?". Awesome? Amazing? Yeah, these are words that capture it, but there's something about how his music impacts me that is apparently completely the opposite of how it hits the rest of the world.

Curious. And weird.

[ related topics: Music Movies History Theater & Plays ]

Views like this make me want to finish the thing in resin rather than paint, UV be damned.

[ related topics: Photography ]

If deleting your Facebook account is the new "I don't have a TV", deleting your Google+ account is the new "I don't have an 8 track player".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Technology and Culture Invention and Design Television ]

Interesting: Goodwill is opening a thrift store with higher end branding under the name "Georgi & Willow".

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Sonic.net CEO Blog on the ever increasing FCC Universal Service tax. Corporate welfare disguised as a subsidy for rural living.

[ related topics: Politics Weblogs Government ]

RT ‏@theophani:

Dear male developer, Do you want more women speakers at confs? Then please RT this speaker resource I'm building: weareallaweso.me #waaa

SF Weekly: Muni: Our Transit Agency Has Neglected Maintenance for Years:

Some of Muni's diesel bus lines do better than 4,000 miles between breakdowns, an all-time high for the agency. But it's still lower than AC Transit (4,665), Seattle King County Metro (5,805), or SEPTA (9,842). Muni's 40-foot electric buses can't even hit 2,000 miles. Sixty-foot electric buses, the 7000-series, only go a piddling 833 miles between breakdowns. Muni's internal goal is just 1,000 miles, meaning buses could die virtually every week and still perform satisfactorily. "Even our goals have been reduced over the years to reflect the condition of our fleet," Haley admits.

[ related topics: Bay Area Current Events Seattle Public Transportation ]

Bad day for transit in the Bay Area. I knew something was up because of various San Francisco logistics issues in my twitter stream, but this KQED article on the BART outage today is accompanied by a picture of the fire in an under-construction building near the elevated tracks that's pretty scarily dramatic. Wouldn't be surprised if BART is down for a couple of weeks, if they have to rebuild those elevated portions.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area California Culture Pyrotechnics Machinery Trains Fabrication Public Transportation Model Building ]

That command you're looking for is, as root, "echo 0 > /selinux/enforce". And then admin your machine like as was meant to be run.

Bypassing standard frameworks: fine. Using "username" and "password" configs when framework uses "user" and "pass": There. Will. Be. Blood.

Thinking about lack of redundancy in fixed route infrastructure in the context of yesterday's BARTpocalypse.

Online woodworking tool stores are pissing me off. Well, okay, that's overstating the case, but I'm not a fan of "we're going to mark up the living daylights out of stuff and then send you coupons which you have to track" business model (canonically: Michaels). However, Woodcraft also has the Shinwa 301/S03.00 Bakuma American Slim Cut Hand Saw 300mm, the tool which made me fall in love with hand tools, and which I have used to rip 4'x8' sheets of plywood rather than set up the power tools. Really.

But the blades are essentially disposable, so I end up tacking extra things on to orders there, weighing a few extra cents on this or that product vs buying it from someone else, and...

The thing about that saw is that I've also started to realize that I could use a few more hand tools. A joinery saw with a finer tooth would be nice, maybe something like Lee Valley's Gent's Saws. And I've got some chisels pieced together from garage sales, some of which are great, some of which aren't. Highland Woodworkin's Narex chisels seem to be a fantastic bang for the buck. So I look around and start to realize that everyone's got their own branding of various tools, and it's hard to figure out what's worth a damn and what isn't.

I look around and think "maybe it's time to drop the bucks on some Lie-Nielsen or Glen-Drake tools" products. People who tell you flat out whether you're buying O1 or A2 steel. However, there the difference seems to be that these tools have had the attention to detail paid to them to do the sort of finishing that I need to be able to do anyway: They've been properly flattened and beveled and edged and...

I'm torn, then: Is the 4x premium really just that the chisel has been finished? How do I tell? How do I tell on saws? And on a saw, how do I tell if it's worth it to sharpen it myself, have it sharpened, or buy a new blade?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama User Interface Cool Science Invention and Design Law Woodworking ]

Okay, I know we have a couple of bronies on here, even if only ironically: Shards of Equestria: Friendship is Magic: The Gathering:

Shards of Equestria is a fan-made, fully tested and completely playable custom card set for Magic: The Gathering based on the critically-acclaimed animated series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Animation Clowns ]

Woohoo! Yes, we need some more varnish, but I'm test fitting the rigging!

[ related topics: Photography ]

Ugh. Verizon doesn't honor yellow pages opt-out

In recent conversation with my Dad about one of my projects, he expressed admiration of my ability to get things done. And I thought to myself "I thought that's what people like us did?". This afternoon we're going sailing in the boat we just built. Thanks for showing me how it's done, Dad. Happy Father's Day.

[ related topics: Boats Machinery ]

In order to combat a major element of teenage crime, the South Korean govenment is outlawing commerce or harvesting of virtual objects for computer games. There is also some indication that part of the intention is to get kids back to their books instead of gold farming. Reason predicts a big black market, but I think we will find the NorKs following in the footsteps of the Chinese gulag, forcing prisoners to do the harvesting.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Games Economics ]

Charlene at the helm

[ related topics: Photography ]

Yeah, it's like that.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Under sail with a tweaked rig

[ related topics: Photography Boats ]

Apropos of today's little adventure on the water, I'm told that Michael Storer's web site has lots of information on lug rigs, right now it seems to link to this Google Docs page on setting up lug rigs for sailboats.

Virginia DNA data supports innocence of 33 convicted of sex crimes, study concludes:

The institute estimates a wrongful conviction rate in sexual assault cases of between 8 to 15 percent, comparable with the results in sample testing that exonerated two people and prompted then-Gov. Mark R. Warner to order the full Virginia project in 2005.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events ]

From work IRC: Cargo cult commuting - "if I show up at the office, productivity will happen".

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

All sorts of police misconduct, some with accompanying court smackdowns (Yay 9th Circuit), elided because it's largely the same-old same-old.

Also not getting involved in the U.VA thing: On the one hand, [grar], on the other hand, higher education [eye roll].

And I'm sure if I dug in I could find all sorts of other potential sources of outrage that I'm choosing deliberately to overlook.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Enforcement Education ]

"And now, a dolphin with an octopus stuck to its naughty bits"

Morning in Sonoma County

According to NASA, the Voyager 1 space probe is even now crossing the boundary into interstellar space. Does this mean we get to join the Federation now?

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

Star Wars At At Walker costume built on a Tandem Bicycle

And Shadow passed along The Ferdinand GT3 RS world's slowest Porsche, a Porsche looking shell over a human powered frame. I'm at work right now, so don't have the image he linked to, maybe he can toss it in the comments?

[ related topics: Star Wars Weblogs Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Eric's Life Pedal Power Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem Aviation - Helicopters ]

Via Slashdot, an editorial by Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and teacher of economics at Ohio University, calling for the abolition of student loans. It's fairly clear to me that student loans have simply resulted in colleges fleecing even more out of their students, and driving those students further into indentured servitude.

We can make an argument that college should be subsidized, that there is a public good from having more educated people (although I think we need to start finding some metrics to apply here, because I also think that higher education has become a huge circle jerk that far too often trades critical thinking for regurgitating canon), but if that's true then we're really better off recouping those benefits via, say, income taxes, and paying for the education up-front.

At least if we really believe in that educational system. Whence my opinion that we also need some metrics...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics Current Events Work, productivity and environment Education Economics Government ]

"When you say "I opt out." you're really saying "I want the terrorists to win." We're sorry you hate America."

Right to assisted suicide 'momentous' says B.C. woman. A British Columbia judge recently handed down a decision that made assisted suicide legal.

[ related topics: Content Management Health Law Current Events ]

Giggle (like a 13 year old): Erika Moen posts a picture of “The dangers of teaching a class of 13-16 year olds at an art college. (Art installation at PNCA by Jess Wise)”

[ related topics: Humor Art & Culture Education ]

JWZ announces that he has ported XScreenSaver to the iPhone:

I accomplished this by implementing most of the OpenGL 1.3 API in terms of the OpenGL ES 1.1 API.

Most of the announcement is a great rant on the idiocies of API changes:

People defend this decision by saying that they "had" to do it, because the fixed function pipeline is terribly inefficient on modern GPUs or some such nonsense. These people don't know what they're talking about, because the contour of the API has absolutely fuck-all to do with what goes over the wire.

Which also brings to mind the wankery that accompanied Microsoft's Direct3d bullshit back in the '90s, wherein we discovered that despite everything Microsoft was claiming about needing to change the API for performance reasons, on every platform we could get our hands on, OpenGL on Windows outperformed Direct3d.

When people claim they need to change long established and time tested APIs for "performance reasons", what it most often means is that clueless kids just out of school don't understand how to build software.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Humor Weblogs Microsoft Software Engineering moron Theater & Plays Graphics Mathematics iPhone ]

Why is it difficult to introduce efficiencies into the transportation system? Stuff like this: Police Ticketing Informal Rideshare Participants Based On No Law, But To Protect Port Authority Revenue.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria? by Cormac Herley, Microsoft Research (PDF). Slate article on the paper. MeFi entry.

This allows us to view the attacker’s problem as a binary classification. The most profitable strategy requires accurately distinguishing viable from non-viable users, and balancing the relative costs of true and false positives. We show that as victim density decreases the fraction of viable users than can be profitably attacked drops dramatically. For example, a 10× reduction in density can produce a 1000× reduction in the number of victims found. At very low victim densities the attacker faces a seemingly intractable Catch-22: unless he can distinguish viable from non-viable users with great accuracy the attacker cannot find enough victims to be profitable. However, only by finding large numbers of victims can he learn how to accurately distinguish the two.

In other words: It costs to lead people on, so if you can easily filter for the gullible people by making your approach obviously stupid to the smart people, you quickly winnow your list.

See also: Advertisers supporting idiotic television shows in order to find gullible customers.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Technology and Culture Microsoft Spam moron Consumerism and advertising Monty Python Television hubris ]

What do you do when the Internet and changing culture take a toll on a city's iconic business? Try to turn it into a tourist destination: The Lusty Lady strip club wants to transform itself into a landmark, to get all of those people who come by to take pictures of the sign to step inside.

"The Lusty Lady might be onto something," he said. "That place has such a storied past. They might make it more of a fun thing. It's like us, we're a niche. Like Jerry Garcia said: 'You don't want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the only one.' "

[ related topics: Photography Sexual Culture Sociology California Culture Net Culture Gambling ]

Shawn passed this around in Twitter this morning, and I thought it worth a look: Mega Cynics: Booth Beef. And I think Mega Cynics just made my comics regular reads list.

[ related topics: Food Comics ]

My sister Sara has started a blog to tell the story of a Guatemalan woman who came to the U.S.: Martina, introduction. | Cheap Food.

[ related topics: Weblogs Food ]

As the tweet from which I got Washington Post: New farm bill offers up some old failings observed: "...If there's anything farm lobby dislikes more than losing subsidies it's the public following the money".

And if the tea party started by attacking this sort of corporate welfare rather than upkeep on the local roads, I'd be more sympathetic.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Currency ]

2011 Bulwer-Lytton prize winners

As his small boat scudded before a brisk breeze under a sapphire sky dappled with cerulean clouds with indigo bases, through cobalt seas that deepened to navy nearer the boat and faded to azure at the horizon, Ian was at a loss as to why he felt blue. — Mike Pedersen, North Berwick, ME

[ related topics: Boats Machinery ]

Needs a browser extension that prevents me from reading gender or poverty threads on Metafilter #someoneiswrongontheinternet

Holy cow! I have been running a 2Wire ADSL2+ modem to do some line testing, and just switched back to my ZTE300. Net is back to way faster!

[ related topics: Sports ]

Coding Horror: Separating Coding Sheep from Non-Programming Goats. Talks about The camel has two humps (working title) by Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat of the School of Computing, Middlesex University, UK, in which two programming teachers accidentally administer a simple test before any instruction takes place, re-administer the test after a few weeks, and discover that the results are the same.

The test is a simple one in programming terms, and they explore the notion that programming is an innate skill, and not something that can be taught.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Education ]

Illinois Supreme Court: Sex With 17-Year-Old Was Legal, Pictures Were Not

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Law Gambling ]

We are doing some very nice looking invoice generation, designed to print on preprinted paper as a background. "R" wants me to print some additional accents in Yellow, White and Blue on the preprinted paper. They have a very nice black only high capacity laser printer:

Me: "I can't print yellow, blue and white on the paper, the printer only prints black".

"R": "yes you can, you are printing gray AND black already".

Sigh.

[ related topics: Race ]

Confidence. Pop 50, Elev 4,200. We couldn't find Arrogance or Hubris on the map.

[ related topics: Photography Maps and Mapping ]

Hangin' out in the Sierra. Donnell Lake overlook.

[ related topics: Photography California Culture ]

Basalt pillars from old lava flows

[ related topics: Photography ]

Random butterflies and high altitude flowers. For one who lives at sea level I'm inordinately fond of heights

[ related topics: Butterflies Photography ]

Because I'm taunting @brendanstallard, a Sierra pano shot in-phone

[ related topics: Photography California Culture ]

Steam tests in the roundhouse at Jamestown

I recenty added this D+D Oberlauda Bike Mirror to my bike. This is a well made and nearly perfect mirror for a recumbent, and probably many other bicycles. It deserve a plug. Inventory seems to be scarce, but I see them elsewhere as well.

[ related topics: Photography Pedal Power Bicycling Archival Furniture ]

Knights Ferry covered bridge

[ related topics: Photography Public Transportation ]

Steam test in the Jamestown roundhouse

[ related topics: Photography ]

While doing some system conversion, I set an expiry date to "2100-01-01" and suddenly flashed to a zombie movie scene where they dug me up from the grave in the year 2099 asking: How do we change the __________ expiry date?

[ related topics: Movies ]

I'm not normally in fashion circles, but for whatever reason any number of people have been sending around Prada's fall 2012 menswear ad campaign, and it occurs to me: Yeah, it's kinda steampunk-ish, but it's also eerily "gilded age".

Anyone else seeing echoes of the aristocracy parading around New York while bleeding the taxpayers dry with bankrupt railroads?

[ related topics: Invention and Design Fashion New York ]

In Honor of Alan Turing: A message from the sponsor, in which Jon "maddog" Hall comes out in a thoughtful essay.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Writing ]

Interesting: Shadow passed along Berkeleyside: Parents sue cycling website for complicity in son’s death. Web site allowed cyclists to publish personal bests, he was involved in a "fastest descent" back and forth with another site user.

I don't know the law in this case, so I can't speculate on the legal aspects of what may or may not matter as a jury deliberates, but I do wonder if there was any notion in the web site of differentiating up from down times, or anything like that. Because being the fastest down the mountain isn't nearly as interesting as being the fastest up, but...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Sports Pedal Power Bicycling ]

James Fallows - 5 Signs of a Radical Change in U.S. Politics:

Underscoring the point, a Bloomberg poll of 21 constitutional scholars found that 19 of them believe the individual mandate is constitutional, but only eight said they expected the Supreme Court to rule that way. The headline nicely conveys the reality of the current Court: "Obama Health Law Seen Valid, Scholars Expect Rejection."

[ related topics: Politics Health Law Current Events Gambling ]

A little article on a simple setup for steam distillation for home perfumery.

Hat tip to Cynical Woman.

Another new-to-me online comic: Tea House: a yaoi web comic about fancy whores. I have not had a chance to dig into this one yet.

Via this MeFi thread.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Real Estate ]

on{x} is a JavaScript module for your Android phone which lets you do temporally and location aware things. I currently use Locale for this, because it integrates nicely with Astrid, but I'm thinking of applications.

Fascinating: Nature Climate Change: Hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America.

Climate warming does not force sea-level rise (SLR) at the same rate everywhere. Rather, there are spatial variations of SLR superimposed on a global average rise. These variations are forced by dynamic processes, arising from circulation and variations in temperature and/or salinity, and by static equilibrium processes, arising from mass redistributions changing gravity and the Earth’s rotation and shape.

So, for the moment, the west coast is actually seeing a sea level decline...

[ related topics: Nature and environment California Culture Global Warming ]

2012 Texas State Republican Party Platform:

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

[ related topics: Education ]

NPR: The Shop Class Stigma: What Title IX Didn't Change:

Boys are still routinely steered toward courses that lead to higher-paying careers in technology and trades. Meanwhile, 90 percent of students in courses that lead to lower-wage jobs, like child care and cosmetology, are female.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Yeah, y'all have RSS readers and can read it yourself, but I'm gonna keep hammering this one: Sara continues telling Martina's story.

[ related topics: Content Management ]

Science News: Biologists Reveal Potential 'Fatal Flaw' in Iconic Sexual Selection Study.

In 1948, English geneticist Angus John Bateman published a study showing that male fruit flies gain an evolutionary advantage from having multiple mates, while their female counterparts do not. Bateman's conclusions have informed and influenced an entire sub-field of evolutionary biology for decades.

He threw out samples for which he couldn't determine parentage from physical mutations. Turns out that biased the hell out of his samples. Sigh.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events ]

Thanks for all the birthday wishes! "The sun is the same in a relative way..."

[ related topics: Java ]

Elizabeth Dulemba visits the Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum. Here's the Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum website that includes a huge number of pictures of the collection. Madison Georgia just went up in my "places to visit" list.

[ related topics: Photography Art & Culture Automobiles ]

Some great ideas for over-engineered light switches.

[ related topics: Machinery Cool Technology ]

Exploring the Ecological Association Between Crime and Medical Marijuana Dispensaries

Results: Violent and property crime rates were positively associated with percentage of commercially zoned areas, percentage of one-person households, and unemployment rate. Higher violent crime rates were associated with concentrated disadvantage. Property crime rates were positively associated with the percentage of population 15–24 years of age. Density of medical marijuana dispensaries was not associated with violent or property crime rates.

The Atlantic writes about the study, Think Progress writes about the study.

[ related topics: Drugs Health Invention and Design Law Enforcement ]

Extreme Tech: Microsoft analyzes over a million PC failures, results shatter enthusiast myths.

The Microsoft Report: Cycles, Cells and Platters: An Empirical Analysis of Hardware Failures on a Million Consumer PCs:

... Among our many results, we find that CPU fault rates are correlated with the number of cycles executed, underclocked machines are significantly more reliable than machines running at their rated speed, and laptops are more reliable than desktops.

[ related topics: Humor Games Microsoft moron Consumerism and advertising Sports ]

Fortune: The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal:

"Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false," says Linda Wallace, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service's criminal investigation unit who was assigned to the Fast and Furious team (and recently retired from the IRS). A self-described gun-rights supporter, Wallace has not been criticized by Issa's committee.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Politics History Civil Liberties Guns ]

John Liu's misguided mandatory helmets call for NYC's bike share

The only sure outcome of a mandatory bike helmet law is to reverse a promising trend of growing bike use.

[ related topics: Weblogs Nature and environment Bicycling ]

Cellphone companies will share your location data with advertisers, and law enforcement, but not with you.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Law Enforcement ]

RT @AlecMacGillis:

Big loss for Mitt Romney, as court upholds national version of the successful law he pioneered. (Yes, that is the point we had arrived at.)

RT @kierstenwhite:

"The males in Brave were all plot devices!" GEE. THAT MUST REALLY SUCK TO HAVE YOUR GENDER MARGINALIZED IN A MOVIE. CAN'T IMAGINE.

[ related topics: Movies hubris ]

John Roberts, evil genius: The chief justice’s ruling looks good for Obama — but will actually benefit conservatives

At Brooklyn's 36^th St subway station, one of the stairs is fractionally higher than the rest. Dean Peterson set up a camera to watch the action. Via MeFi.

One of the things that struck me as I delved into building code for the workshop was how exacting code for stairs is. This is why.

And if you read nothing else today, go read this response in the MeFi thread by JimmyJames.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Movies New York Public Transportation ]

New England Journal of Medicine: The Burden of Disease and the Changing Task of Medicine.

Be sure to check out the graphics, the changing face of death is fascinating.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Graphics ]

Deep Sea News: How presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Fascinating: Urban renewal brochures of 1956.

Obama first learned of the correct version of today's U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the healthcare bill from a blog.

A couple minutes later, White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler came to Outer Oval and gave him two thumbs-up. Ruemmler had gotten the correct information from a White House lawyer at the Supreme Court and from SCOTUSblog.com.

Hopefully yet another nail in the coffin of conventional "journalism". Via The Atlantic by way of Mike Kelley.

[ related topics: Politics Weblogs Technology and Culture Health Law Current Events Journalism and Media Television Race Real Estate ]

There are mil-specs for glowsticks. Are there also mil-spec pacifiers to go with your mil-spec MDMA?

The blighted house next door has hit the city's legal dept and is up for sale! Needs demo & replacement.

[ related topics: Photography Law Real Estate ]

New urbanists will tell you that parking is a huge part of automobile cost. Is this why special purpose (ie: commuter) cars don't catch on?

[ related topics: Invention and Design Automobiles ]

Balloon Juice: Just a Humble Tradesman, Trapped in a World He Never Made. On "Joe Olivo" of "Perfect Printing" being the spokesperson for the "my business is 48 employees and the healthcare bill makes me unwilling to expand to 50" news story.

Whatever the validity of that view, I find it fascinating that, first, such clumsy astroturfing works so effectively and, second, that NPR, NBC and Fox are willing to re-use the same spokesperson like that. You'd figure that at least one of them, regardless of political affiliation of their viewership, would say "hey, this makes us look stupid".

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events Work, productivity and environment hubris ]

Feministe: A hymen primer for romance novelists.

[ related topics: Weblogs Archival ]

Tonight we're making ice cream with 4H. There are 4 Thermos(tm)es of liquid nitrogen in my truck. These facts are related.

[ related topics: Machinery ]

Remains of ice cream and shattered flowers with liquid nitrogen

[ related topics: Photography ]

Making ice cream

Kids smart ass emails from leached wifi get SWAT. Next they'll be serving warrants for parking tickets this way. Anyone remember the show "Dragnet" or other representations of polite professional officers making a first contact. I understand the threats may have been very specific, but it appears the police did not investigate and do their home work first.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Privacy broadband Work, productivity and environment ]