Flutterby™! From 2012-09-01 to 2012-09-30

Wow, it's rare that I'd side with an armed motorist over a cyclist, but from the events described in Detroit Free Press: Wayne County: Prosecutor ponders traffic accident, fatal shooting in Taylor sounds like this one was justified. From Shadow.

Meanwhile, closer to me, a motorist who drove on to a golf course in order to run over a cyclist has been charged with attempted murder:

Smith is suspected of chasing Soltani onto a golf course and knocking him off his bike after yelling at the bicyclist for taking his hands off the handlebars.

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

Jon Udell: Goodbye Fax, Hello Personal Cloud. That's where I'd hoped we were going with LID, way back when. I fear he's overly optimistic, but further musings will have to wait 'til Tuesday.

[ related topics: LID (Lightweight IDentity) ]

Huge law enforcement presence heading east on Highway 4 about the Calaveras County line.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

If I believed in hell (the place and/or the concept), it would be something like this afternoon: Attempting to reconcile a complex multi-currency accounting system months after engineers have manually overwritten most of the beautiful and technically correct and nearly perfect accounting (Invoices and GL's) the system was designed to do.

It's kind of like: A large room full of monkeys banging on typewriters will eventually recreate a shakespearian quote or paragraph. maybe even a chapter or play given enough collapses and rebirths of the universe.

In this case, a room full of engineers will eventually charge and/or credit the seemingly correct amounts manipulating the units of energy (kWh), units of currency (tariffs) and long interesting comments to describe it as they think it really should be. Some of it should not be kWh is the problem, but that is how they think. It ends up in the wrong general ledgers when they do it that way.

Oh.. and someone gave a local strip club the discounted employee tariff. Hmm.

What makes it really hellish is, I'm stuck in an office just a few miles from a nice beach, pool, bar and food...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sexual Culture Nature and environment Food Law Work, productivity and environment Currency Energy Monitoring ]

Dear "special" sysadmins that setup the Win2008 server running a GIS system, Oracle database and some other uber-important data that no-one could/would give us access to.... Thank you for allowing anonymous FTP high enough in the directory tree to allow us access to all of the images and data needed.

Now if only the guys doing the GIS survey had used a GPS enabled camera that would have EXIF tagged all the images with useful images. Instead, we'll sync up with the database we just sucked down as well. The killer thing to me is, they put > 100k (quantity, bit size) jpg's in the same directory. I like to "tree" such things.. but hey.. I'm old skool.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Sports Maps and Mapping Databases ]

Trials bike riding in the city by the bay: Danny MacAskill vs. San Francisco (YouTube)

[ related topics: Movies Bay Area California Culture Bicycling ]

Shadow passed along NPR: In Bike-Friendly Copenhagen, Highways For Cyclists, on building direct routes optimized for bicycles for commuting into the city from the 'burbs.

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

Late night at Hopmonk in Sebastopol to hear Jason Collins and the 7th Street Band with Reggie Recado, some reggae-rapper from Holland.

Lots o' heavy bass, though the warm-up DJ was a hell of a lot better than the "Decadance" DJ we saw at the Flamingo. It's interesting how that heavy bass thing (especially where it's not instrumental, but some part of percussion) drives the dance floor balance towards male.

The problem with satire and irony post The Onion's Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over' is that it's hard to tell when the world has finally folded in on itself and we've achieved ironical singularity. For instance, the latest National Review cover is done in socialist realism style.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Not generally a fan of the RIAA, but would support armed agents collecting royalty payments from those playing recorded music in campgrounds

[ related topics: Music ]

A few notes and a bunch of pictures on this weekend's trip to some big trees: http://www.flutterby.net/2012-09-01_Calaveras_Big_Trees_Park

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Travel ]

Alex Haw of Atmos Studio has designed some amazing stairs (via this Violet Impudence entry).

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Scorpion sting leaves Ahwatukee woman with a big bill. The anti-venon "Anascorp" costs $100 a dose from pharmacies in Mexico. Here in the U.S., Tennessee-based Rare Disease Therapeutics sells it to a distributor for $3,500, which sells it to hospitals for $3,780, Chandler Regional Medical Center charged her $83,046 for two doses, her insurance company paid for $57,509 of that, leaving her with $25,537 because the emergency room treatment was out of network.

Ouch.

[ related topics: broadband Chattanooga ]

For topspin: Wired: This Is ‘One of the Best Table Tennis Shots Ever’, from the 2012 London Paralympics.

[ related topics: Furniture ]

Know what I really appreciate? People sorting recycling all across the Joe Rodota trail. Taking "Multi-Use Path" too far.

Lot of articles flying around on Annals of Internal Medicine: Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives?: A Systematic Review.

Only 3 of the human studies examined clinical outcomes, finding no significant differences between populations by food type for allergic outcomes (eczema, wheeze, atopic sensitization) or symptomatic Campylobacter infection. Two studies reported significantly lower urinary pesticide levels among children consuming organic versus conventional diets, but studies of biomarker and nutrient levels in serum, urine, breast milk, and semen in adults did not identify clinically meaningful differences.

Brian Fung in The Atlantic: Organic Food Isn't More Nutritious, but That Isn't the Point, points out that the movement started out because of worries about externalities.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Aviation Food ]

With all of the caveats of the last time we ran across the Flesch-Kincaid test for readability of written text, I thought this was amusing: Smart Politics: Michelle Obama's DNC Speech Written at 7 Grade Levels Above Ann Romney's

The First Lady's speech on Tuesday evening was delivered at a grade level of 12.84 - more than 3.5 grade levels above the next highest speech of the 10 previous prepared remarks delivered by wives of presidential nominees since the first such address in 1992 by Barbara Bush.

[ related topics: Politics Weblogs Archival Marriage ]

Harvard Business Review: Why remote workers are more engaged. (Via Lifehacker).

Runner? Finished a marathon? Use the Paul Ryan Time Calculator to compare your marathon finishing time to his. Runner's World investigates the claim made by Paul Ryan that his marathon time was "Under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something.".

[ related topics: Weblogs Current Events Sports ]

Unintended Consequences: API hardcoded limit of 200 results was about to push me to do 2000+ individual queries instead.

Pirate Bay Founder Arrest Followed By $59m Swedish Aid Package For Cambodia. Sweden doesn't have an extradition treaty with Cambodia, but Cambodia has agreed to deport Gottfrid Svartholm.

Might be a coincidence, I don't know enough about foreign aid between those countries to know.

Thanks, Shadow!

[ related topics: California Culture ]

I'm gonna start a hip clothing store for teens who wanna be part of the conspiracy, and call it "Agenda 21". Gonna be huge.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Clothing Conspiracy Gambling Government ]

The National Review writes glowingly on the liberal that Mitt Romney once was, noted here because of the urban planning aspects of his policies in Massachusetts:

Romney’s liberal heresies on health care, gay rights, and abortion are well established. Less well known is that, as governor of Massachusetts, he was a smart-growth acolyte. He hinted at this predilection during the campaign in 2002. “Smart growth, or purposeful planning, is a concept that will be in the governor’s office if I’m elected,” he said. After winning, he created a new “Office for Commonwealth Development” to oversee the transportation, environment, and housing departments—and named as its chief Douglas Foy. It was a brash decision for a business-oriented politician: Foy was the head of the state’s Conservation Law Foundation and an ardent environmentalist who often commuted 20 miles by bike. “He was the bane of the business and development community,” Benjamin Fierro, the lobbyist for the state homebuilders’ association, told me. “My clients were very concerned about that.”

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Sexual Culture Health Nature and environment Invention and Design moron Civil Liberties Community Bicycling Real Estate ]

Twitter API v1.1:

We've chosen to throw our support behind the JSON format shared across the platform. Consequently, we've decided to discontinue support for XML, Atom, and RSS, which are infrequently used today.

Of course that's not really fair, because they abandoned RSS and Atom years ago, but...

[ related topics: Web development Content Management ]

Where Windows 8 came from

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

Wish git had a "praise" synonym for "blame" the way svn does. Typing "git blame" primes me to think less of the name I find.

The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies points out the obvious: We're wasting $750B/year and many tens of thousands of lives on our health care system, with horrendous outcomes when compared to most other modern industrialized nations.

Health care costs have increased at a greater rate than the economy as a whole for 31 of the past 40 years. Most payment systems emphasize volume over quality and value by reimbursing providers for individual procedures and tests rather than paying a flat rate or reimbursing based on patients' outcomes, the report notes. It calls on health economists, researchers, professional societies, and insurance providers to work together on ways to measure quality performance and design new payment models and incentives that reward high-value care.

I also realized something recently: Many of my friends are nervous about single payer health care. I've heard "do you want your doctor's office to be run like the DMV?". Before I moved to California, I would have answered "hell no", but here in the Golden State our DMV actually seems to be pretty well run. Maybe much of the fear of a consolidated government-run healthcare system comes from people who live in states that have poorly run government services.

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design History moron Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment California Culture Graphic Design Education Economics ]

Interesting: Melinda Gates’ New Crusade: Investing Billions in Women's Health

Perhaps more importantly, there’s her Catholic faith, which has always informed her work. “From the very beginning, we said that as a foundation we will not support abortion, because we don’t believe in funding it,” she says. She’s long disagreed with the church’s position on contraception, and the Gates Foundation did some family-planning funding early in its history. Still, she went through a lot of soul-searching before she was ready to champion the issue publicly. “I had to wrestle with which pieces of religion do I use and believe in my life, what would I counsel my daughters to do,” she says. Defying church teachings was difficult, she adds, but also came to seem morally necessary. Otherwise, she says, “we’re not serving the other piece of the Catholic mission, which is social justice.”

MeFi thread.

[ related topics: Religion Sexual Culture Health Invention and Design moron Sociology Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement ]

Covered here because a hiking topic one morning, ages ago, was what the org chart in Al Qaeda must look like: All these number three guys who are vying to not be promoted to number two.

RT Nate Silver @fivethirtyeight:

Under Obama's watch, we killed Al Qaeda's No. 2 17 times.

To be fair, It think an equivalent number of Al Qaeda #2 guys were killed under G.W. Bush's watch too.

[ related topics: Politics Movies Nature and environment ]

There are actually some good ideas in this Washington Examiner interview with Mitt Romney, but then we come to a screeching halt in a section about government funding of research at:

I do believe in basic science. I believe in participating in space. I believe in analysis of new sources of energy. I believe in laboratories, looking at ways to conduct electricity with -- with cold fusion, if we can come up with it. It was the University of Utah that solved that. We somehow can’t figure out how to duplicate it.

Way to root for the home team, Mitt, but... uh... sorry. No. "can't figure out how to duplicate it" isn't in the same universe.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Cool Science Invention and Design moron Space & Astronomy Education ]

Griff Okie's River Rock #2, Craig Thibodeau's Gladiola Blanket Chest, Michael Cullen's Fly Table

[ related topics: Photography Furniture ]

I don't think there's much in here that's new to people who've been following mapping efforts in general and Google Maps in particular, but people are gonna keep sending it to me 'til I post it, so:

The Atlantic: How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything.

One of the things that may be interesting, though: I'm noticing a bunch of people are starting to use dash cameras for logging everything. MarkV has been playing with a 640x480x30 camera that costs $8. Thinking there might be an OpenStreetMap.org analogue for street view...

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design Maps and Mapping ]

Dear FedEx: I just want two PDFs printed cheaper than I can do it at home. Why I gotta wade through billion options on ultra slow web site?

Shadow passed along This Is Not Yellow (YouTube), which gets better than just "the lemon you're seeing on the screen is not yellow" (true, but something Flutterby readers are probably well aware of). I'd rather see the rather see most of this as a web page with pictures than voice-over, but it's still kinda cute.

[ related topics: Photography Movies ]

Must get to work, but saved for later: 3d graphics in JavaScript in browser.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Graphics ]

Mutations in BCKD-kinase Lead to a Potentially Treatable Form of Autism with Epilepsy, explained in Nature News & Comment: Amino-acid deficiency underlies rare form of autism.

Gleeson’s team has tried supplementing the diets of the children with this form autism, using muscle-building supplements that contain branched-chain amino acids. The researchers found that the supplements restore the children's blood levels of amino acids to normal. As for their autism symptoms, Gleeson says, the “patients did not get any worse and their parents say they got better, but it’s anecdotal”.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Nature and environment Current Events ]

The video showing the image stabilization in the new Nokia Windows smartphone was faked, shot by a camera crew in a van that you can see in a reflection in a window behind the bicyclist.

Sigh. Nokia used to be a cool company. What happened?

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs Microsoft Invention and Design Video ]

fauxphilnews: Kripke resigns as report alleges that he faked results of thought experiments

The inability to replicate Kripke’s results could not be similarly explained away, however, as the researcher in question was excluded from the analysis of Naming and Necessity. The report, forthcoming in Philosophical Studies, claims that 74% of the book’s thought-experimental results could not be reproduced using the standard philosophical criteria for inter-researcher agreement. A second version of the analysis, employing a generous application of the principle of charity, still left 52% of the results unverified.

[ related topics: Books Philosophy ]

Maryland State Delegate Emmett C. Burns Jr. wrote a letter to Minnesota Vikings (NFL) owner Steve Bisciotti, urging him to "inhibit such expressions from your employee." One such employee, punter Chris Kluwe responds. Just too delicious to pull quotes from.

[ related topics: Quotes Politics Sexual Culture moron Sociology Work, productivity and environment Sports Pyrotechnics Marriage ]

So advertisers who don't support "mature content" are therefore trying to push more immature content on us? Makes sense to me.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

Hanging out in Tiburon, waiting on a replacement dock that should be coming around that point soon.

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area ]

Mark Cuban: Facebook handled their IPO exactly right.

I bought and sold FB shares as a TRADE, not an investment. I lost money. When the stock didn’t bounce as I thought/hoped it would, I realized I was wrong and got out. It wasn’t the fault of the FB CFO that I lost money. It was my fault. I know that no one sells me shares of stock because they expect the price of the stock to go up. So someone saw me coming and they sold me the stock. That is the way the stock market works. When you sit at the trading terminal you look for the sucker. When you don’t see one, it’s you. In this case it was me.

[ related topics: Law Currency Economics Woodworking ]

Well worth a read: Rick Falkvinge: Three reasons child porn must be re-legalized the coming decade. Talks about some of the absurdities:

In Sweden, ECPAT has pushed through laws that make you a jailable criminal for possessing images of yourself from before your 18th birthday. Can we have a show of hands to see how many think this makes any kind of sense? That this would catch any child molesters?

But also about the fact that the strict liability rules on possession of child pornography means that the right thing to do is to delete evidence of the crime rather than hope that some prosecutor won't pursue you.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Government ]

I'm trying to get a little more modern with my web interfaces and am playing with Twitter Bootstrap for a project that needs a simple 5 page website. It's impressive with how well it works, but somehow I feel dirty loading > 100k of CSS plus jQuery just to do a little brochure site. The long term goal is updating the interfaces of some serious projects. They work very well, but are not very shiny. It's amazing how much I end up doing "back end" with the "CMS" to control certain capabilities, even with this amazing framework.

I'm trying to retool, and am realizing how much of the current state of the web is duct tape, super glue and spit. It really should not be this complicated to a pretty and functional website that works well with multiple devices and modalities. Touch screens for example, change the way drop down menu's work...

[ related topics: Content Management Work, productivity and environment ]

Summertime, and the livin' includes lemonade made from the Meyer Lemon tree in the backyard. No word on the fish or the cotton.

'Taliban sympathiser' arrest prompts new questions about FBI tactics

Khalifah al-Akili emailed the Guardian shortly before his arrest to say he thought he was the target of an 'entrapment' sting

Via

[ related topics: Invention and Design Law Enforcement ]

So that I can put this on the iPad for reading when I get home: Mining of Massive Datasets by Anand Rajaraman and Jeff Ullman

[ related topics: Education ]

Nipplegate: Why the New Yorker cartoon department is about to be banned from Facebook

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

The Automata Blog.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Neighbor making household toxics dump run. I mentioned some KCN I didn't know how to dispose of, he said "I use that!". love my neighborhood

Kurt Eichenwald in the New York Times runs down the warnings leading up to the September 11, 2001 attacks:

Could the 9/11 attack have been stopped, had the Bush team reacted with urgency to the warnings contained in all of those daily briefs? We can’t ever know. And that may be the most agonizing reality of all.

But the real message was that the system, pre 9/11, was actually working, and all the security theater since then has just been funnelling public funds into private pockets, for no real gains in security.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment New York Race Handicaps & Disabilities Real Estate ]

Re-social-media-ing somebody anonymous, via Ysabel:

Got into a political discussion with a friend today and he made a statement to the effect of "we're fucked either way" in terms of Romney vs. Obama, my response was "If I'm gonna get fucked either way, I am going to vote for the guy who will let me buy Plan B in the morning."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics moron Journalism and Media Community ]

Nature.com: Proof claimed for deep connection between primes.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Current Events ]

Flickr photo set of the "This Object Has Been Removed" art project at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

[ related topics: Photography Art & Culture ]

Eve Online player The_Mittani writes a eulogy for fellow player "Vile Rat", aka Sean Smith, one of the U.S. State Department officials killed last night in Benghazi Syria.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

50 years ago today: JFK's Moon Speech at Rice University. Like so many of his orations, there are still goosebumps to be had.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Heinlein Education ]

So apparently the Romney campaign strategy is to feign such utter incompetence that Democrats don't think it's necessary to vote?

RT @burritojustice:

Important π update! 867-5309 DOES appear at position 9,202,591! http://www.angio.net/pi/bigpi.cgi

Dear $POLITICIAN: two nearly identical emails within 6 hours of each other *decreases* my desire to contribute.

[ related topics: Politics moron ]

Ask MeFi thread of someone looking for kinky/BDSM themed puns.

Shadow forwarded along this eBay listing for a "Hydraulic Bike Powerbike Pro w/Parker Piston Accumulator" from the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Michigan:

Condition unknown - May or may not function - Feel free to stop by and check it out

Looks like some sort of battery drive system on the rear wheel, and a monster... uh... I dunno, maybe pressurized gas turbine drive on the hub of the front wheel? That much pressure tubing from the cylinder on the rear rack up the top tube to the front fork that close to my crotch would make me very nervous. The "Powerbike Pro" part of that is apparently the electric drive...

[ related topics: Mathematics Education Bicycling Databases ]

A good item from The New Statesman: a vivisection of the current rash of bogus books about how your brain allegedly works. This includes the cult of neurolinquistic programming, the supposed Republican brain, and the almost criminal misuse of fMRI scans to prove anything you like. The reference to one book as a "perverse manifesto for autolobotomy" is certainly the tastiest description of the week.

[ related topics: Books Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Software Engineering Bioinformatics ]

pHash is a library for perceptual hashing. I've been playing with some ideas for this, and an off-the-shelf version that I can use to match up all of the various backups of my pictures that are floating around on a gazillion different hard drives seems like a great idea.

[ related topics: Language Books Photography Boats ]

Springsteen in the USA: 40 Years of Touring as a Study in Spatial Diffusion (and the map in JavaScript on a Google Map, a video of the map animation on YouTube, some talk about building the map).

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Animation Movies Robotics Embedded Devices Maps and Mapping Video ]

In Prince George’s, cameras to monitor speed cameras. Really.. Attacks on traffic cameras are costing enough that they're putting up cameras to watch for attacks on cameras.

It's cameras, all the way down.

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs Movies ]

Parents of twin babies pre-emptively bribe fellow airplane passengers. I like it.

[ related topics: Aviation Community Woodworking ]

On some social media thingie I read a comment about how a recent up-and-coming cool toy spawned from yet another project management development effort, kinda the way that Blogger sprang from Pyra's efforts.

And it got me thinking. I'm currently using Astrid as a to-do list manager, and am not in love. Sure, I like the fact that, with Locale it's got geographically enabled items, so that the phone can remind me when I'm near Trader Joe's that the disaster kit needs restocking with those Indian food MREs, and it's got lists, and indenting of a sort, but...

What I'd really like out of a to-do list is something that...

• understands dependency. Probably as more complex than hierarchy.
• can turn those dependencies into templates.
• lets me group high-order tasks into the day's todo (ie: today's a workshop day, or a house day, or a work day, or I'm in the grocery store right now, show me my lists for those).

What are you using for list and project management?

[ related topics: Food Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Real Estate ]

The Onion pushes the edge. Hard. No One Murdered Because Of This Image:

... The image of the Hebrew prophet Moses high-fiving Jesus Christ as both are having their erect penises vigorously masturbated by Ganesha, all while the Hindu deity anally penetrates Buddha with his fist ...

[ related topics: Religion Humor Food ]

Anti-texting campaigns echo abstinence only sex-ed, which doesn't work: http://www.itcanwait.org/ "Take the pledge"

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

"Invisible" fastening system, for woodworking and more. website

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

bashttpd. Because everyone needs a web server written in bash shell script.

Battery Showdown! - testing and comparing AA batteries. (Via MeFi)

Taking a sick day to sharpen the saw. Thinking about the problems at work, and how solving those can help me reach larger goals. Deep breath

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Woodworking ]

More car shopping

[ related topics: Photography Automobiles ]

The band we came to see: Lonesome Pixel setting up at Pixarpalooza!

[ related topics: Photography Graphics ]

Dan with a Buzz and a six foot Woody. Made of Lego.

[ related topics: Photography Lego Mindstorms ]

Box Wine jamming

[ related topics: Photography Wines and Spirits ]

Software Patents and the Return of Functional Claiming, Mark A. Lemley. An InfoWorld article explaining:

Lemley's thesis is radically simple: "Most software patents today are written in functional terms," he writes. "If courts would faithfully apply the 1952 Act, limiting those claims to the actual algorithms the patentees disclosed and their equivalents, they could prevent overclaiming by software patentees and solve much of the patent thicket problem that besets software innovation."

Having read a few software patents recently I suspect Lemley isn't as educated on the things as he'd wish, because the ones I've read did explain the algorithms in play, but I'm not as up on software patent litigation as I probably ought to be.

Via /..

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Interactive Drama Software Engineering ]

Spontaneous Interventions looks like a good source of ideas for hacking towns and cities.

Thought I was good with knots. One handed bowline. Know a Carrick bend from a sheet bend. Follow-thru 8s. Then I tried to rig a model ship

[ related topics: Machinery ]

Philip Roth wrote "an open letter to Wikipedia" in The New Yorker complaining about his problems in trying to change an entry in the Wikipedia article on The Human Stain.

Philip Roth and Wikipedia fact-checks Mr. Roth's article:

Third: people should perhaps start having a debate about the way authors are treated in “proper” sources. The New Yorker, the Guardian, ABC News and the Los Angeles Times – all respected bodies. And all, without being able and/or willing to do their own research, happily published or republished Roth’s assertions. We rely on these organisations for reporting what our politicians do, what our armed forces do, how entities with the power of life and death over humanity are accountable to the people. And they happily gulp down the glorified press releases of anyone who offers to let them touch his Pulitzer.

[ related topics: Books Invention and Design Current Events Archival ]

All of our garlic is assisting other dishes. Your food is important to us, please hold and it will be spiced in the order it was received.

[ related topics: Food ]

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's administration targets electrical safety codes, citing home builders' concerns:

Current code requires builders to install arc-fault circuit-interrupter (AFCI) protection, ground-fault circuit-interrupter (GFCI) protection, and tamper-resistant receptacles in new construction and most remodeling.

The new plan would make installation of those devices optional.

I recently installed a bunch of tamper proof sockets in my shop, and am not sure that was a great move, and have no love for all of the false trips of our house AFCI (though the shop one, used only for lighting, is fine). GFCIs, however, are awesome and I can't imagine why anyone would be down on them.

Anyway, I'd love to learn more about this.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design Current Events Machinery Fabrication Real Estate Model Building ]

The Economist with a little backgrounder on the coming intellectual property vs 3d printing storm. Via a tweet from Tara Calishain from Research Buzz.

[ related topics: Graphics Economics ]

Live Cat slips by TSA x-ray scanners (link from Princess N.)

[ related topics: Aviation Theater & Plays ]

Andrew Rosenthal at the New York Times: Freedom From Facts. Opening with

At the Values Voter Summit this weekend, Rick Santorum said that social conservatives would “never have the elite smart people on our side.” ...

and pointing out that the GOP is now taking pride in making shit up and diverging from reality.

[ related topics: Privacy Invention and Design Civil Liberties New York Government ]

sh is a full-fledged subprocess interface for Python 2.6 - 3.2 that allows you to call any program as if it were a function

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering Monty Python Mathematics Python ]

Mother Jones magazine is reporting, with video, that Mitt Romney said:

All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them.

and that

Romney went on: "[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

And you know what? That right there is how I went from being a hard-ass right-wing Objectivist to voting Democrat. Because I went from believing that I could convince people to take personal responsibility and care for their lives, to believing that in order to make that behavior change stick we had to provide a safety net and an example so that people can see that, yes, they can take personal responsibility, and give them the room so that they can see that they can indeed care for their lives.

Because there are two problems with writing people off and not continuing to try to convince them that they should take personal responsibility, and they're kinda linked: The first is that they're out-reproducing us, and I would like to take this moment to point out that the GOP policies on healthcare and abortion aren't helping that. The second, and I don't wanna Godwin the thread to early or anything, but the second really is: What are you going to do with those people?

Because either we can educate them and elevate them to our level, or they're gonna overrun us. I mean, there is a third option: We could spend over half of our Federal budget to build mechanisms of destruction and killing and try to wipe them out faster than they're reproducing. But, wait, it turns out that we'd need to spend more than that, because... well... how's that foreign policy working out for us? How much more would we need to spend on bombs to make that work out domestically. And has that ever worked for a nation?

Cambodia, Germany, North Korea, China... yeah, I'm not coming up with any good examples here.

So it looks to me like if we want to have a society that doesn't look like Somalia, we need to step in to change the culture where the parents involved weren't up to the task. We must "...convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." The future depends on it. Our future depends on it.

That Mitt Romney believes that he can't means that he has abandoned hope for any sort of future that seems rationally possible. It's going to cost more to protect our enclaves against the angry masses than to bring them into the fold, and my life's too short to stand with principle rather than adopting pragmatism.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Objectivism Sexual Culture Health Food moron Sociology Writing Work, productivity and environment Heinlein California Culture Video Real Estate ]

I am part of the 53%, but Romney's opinion that "I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility" is defeatist and wrong.

RT Rhodri Marsden ‏@rhodri:

The way I now consume news: a) See jokes about a story on Twitter b) Try to work out what the story is c) Find story d) Understand jokes

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

It's been too long. Entropy is winning and Scotch Night is approaching a sad little whimper of a heat death. Perhaps a new hangout with a little Sreampunk & kink would would invigorate the aether ....

http://sf.eater.com/archives/2...e_armory_club_opens_tomorrow.php

[ related topics: Invention and Design Bay Area Archival TC steampunk scotchnight ]

In Canada, art students are required to buy a $180 art history book with no pictures in it. Why not? Copyright clearance problems.

[ related topics: Books Photography Art & Culture Copyright/Trademark ]

Rackspace sued for patent infringement for hosting Github.

Direct link to the PDF hosted on priorsmart.com, and the list of software patents claimed.

I didn't get further than the first patent:

In a data processing system, a mechanism identifies data items by substantially unique identifiers which depend on all of the data in the data items and only on the data in the data items. The system also determines whether a particular data item is present in the database by examining the identifiers of the plurality of data items.

ie: hashing a data set, filed Oct 24, 1997, issued Nov 2, 1999.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Content Management Software Engineering Current Events Consumerism and advertising Graphics Databases ]

go to hellman looks at three alternatives to Amazon and PayPal for payment processing: Stripe, Balanced and WePay.

[ related topics: Books ]

We won't build more roads until motorists start behaving, says Gov't. Alas, it's satire.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Golden Gate Bridge Phasing In All-Electronic Tolling This December:

The options for motorists who do not have a FasTrak account will include a pay-by-plate or "one-time payments" that motorists will make up to three days after passing through the toll plaza, Currie said.

[ related topics: Bay Area moron Current Events ]

Marijuana fights cancer. Is there anything this wonder drug can't do?

"The preclinical trial data is very strong, and there's no toxicity. There's really a lot of research to move ahead with and to get people excited," said Sean McAllister, who along with scientist Pierre Desprez, has been studying the active molecules in marijuana - called cannabinoids - as potent inhibitors of metastatic disease for the past decade.

Looks like the article is referencing California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC): Cannabidiol as a novel inhibitor of Id-1 gene expression in aggressive breast cancer cells.

[ related topics: Drugs Health Bioinformatics History California Culture ]

If you liked today's XKCD, this: http://xkcd-map.rent-a-geek.de/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Maps and Mapping ]

The bus ride is being dedicated to becoming proficient in JavaScript. To that end: Eloquent JavaScript, the book.

[ related topics: Books Public Transportation ]

Wooden Boat forums thread on Scow Schooners.

[ related topics: Boats Machinery Community ]

So apparently Ruby is the new PHP. Both in quick web apps, and in horrendously bad software development practices.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Software Engineering ]

Tee hee hee: Yesterday was "Talk Like A Pirate Day", today is "Swear Like A Sailor Day": http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp09192012.shtml

Shadow forwarded along Outside: Colorado Driver Honks at Cyclists in Attempt to Make Road Rage History:

This might be the longest series of unnecessary honks in the history of driver-versus-cyclist confrontations. An older male driver in a Ford SUV, license plate Colorado 893 EKG, slowed behind two bikers out for a Sunday ride near Longmont, Colorado, and laid on his horn for an awfully long time. He ignored the fact that the cyclists rode single file on the edge of the road. He honked so incessantly that one of the two cyclists ran out of memory while recording a video of the incident on his phone.

Here's the original YouTube video.

Finally, the perpetrator was ticketed:

James Ernst was ticketed on two counts of misdemeanor harassment, impeding the flow of traffic and improper use of a horn or warning, according to the Colorado State Patrol.

It took me a while, and a whole bunch of seeing related links fly by on FaceTwitCaPlus, to bother linking to this, and partially because all of us who bike have had some asshole do a variant of this. Maybe for not this long, but it's happened. And until the guy got ticketed, there wasn't any closure on it. It was just another asshole in an SUV harassing cyclists. This one got caught on video, but this shit happens every single weekend, all around the country.

[ related topics: Humor Music Weblogs Movies Robotics Automobiles Embedded Devices Video Bicycling ]

The Atlantic: Not Wanting Kids Is Entirely Normal.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health ]

Chick-fil-A vows to stop donating to anti-gay groups. Hate is not good business.

Previously, Previouslyer.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Archival ]

Hello, Family Build Night or 4H robotics: Liquid nitrogen in a soda bottle propels 1500 ping pong balls out of a trash can

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Sociology ]

I'm tellin' ya: Momentum is the only defense we have. Petaluma man walking his bicycle in a crosswalk hit by motorist who handed him $60 and fled.

[ related topics: Pedal Power Bicycling ]

I'm not sure I can muster much enthusiasm for Romney doing brownface to appeal to Hispanics. Call me when the heels and bustier pix show up.

"The octetstring type (see 3.8.55) shall be referenced by the notation "OctetStringType"" #thingsthatmakemehatehumanity

Brilliant: Million Short is a search engine that lets you remove the top 100, 1k, 10k, 100k or million sites from the search results. Easy to say "bubye" to eHow, FoodNetwork, CNet, Yahoo, LinkedIn and all the rest of those content spamming awfulnesses.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Machinery ]

"everything that's wrong with Java in a single class" -- too many people on my social network feeds to credit any single one

Referring to Class AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean

[ related topics: broadband Software Engineering ]

Alec Baldwin talks with Billy Joel:

"...to watch the hangin' of Billy the Kid". Well, Billy the Kid wasn't hung, he was shot. Of course we don't know if he was hung.

If you're of a certain age this may bring back memories.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Television ]

Just got an update to my "AT&T Internet Terms of Service". Hahaha. If @ATT thinks I'm still a customer, can they un-F*&( my Yahoo login?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Net Culture ]

Susan Kitchens is following the last flights of the Space Shuttle Endeavor pretty closely:

• https://twitter.com/susankitch...tatus/248885394966446081/photo/1
• https://twitter.com/susankitch...tatus/248988794353766400/photo/1
• https://twitter.com/susankitch...tatus/249176636925284353/photo/1
• https://twitter.com/susankitch...tatus/249177581692280833/photo/1
• https://twitter.com/susankitch...tatus/249180696172695553/photo/1

And for posterity, Susan's current favorite haunt is Family Oral History Using Digital Tools.

[ related topics: Photography Aviation Space & Astronomy ]

Nature News & Comment: How to confuse a moral compass is a look at Lifting the Veil of Morality: Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals on a Self-Transforming Survey, Hall, Johansson, and Strandberg. They set up a survey in which the precepts of the question would be reversed, asked the participant to read the changed question after the survey, and

People were even willing to argue in favour of the reversed statements: A full 53% of participants argued unequivocally for the opposite of their original attitude in at least one of the manipulated statements, the authors write.

Interesting. I'd like to find a way to have some of these experiments performed on me. It'd be cool to find out which of these things I'm susceptible to.

(Which reminds me, I'm waiting for the paperback release of You Are Not So Smart: A Celebration of Self Delusion, and I need to go back and continue my re-read of Duncan Watts' Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us, which I was not as positive on as Lynn over at Medley was but I still enjoyed a lot so that I can better review it here.

[ related topics: Books Ethics Nature and environment Current Events ]

Transport for London mocks the new Apple maps app and data set: "For the benefit of passengers using Apple iOS 6, local area maps are available from the booking office".

[ related topics: Apple Computer Invention and Design Maps and Mapping ]

Princess Meena Diaries: A papier-maché Mephistopheles is another great discussion of abortion from the perspective of someone with "Cerebral Palsy and profound learning disabilities".

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Community Education ]

news of the user buyout of The Well has turned my earworm to "what shall we use to fill the empty spaces where we used to talk?"

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Although we all know and love The Daily Show, they do fuck up occasionally. Duchess St. Rollins: Dear, The Daily Show… calls them out.

(Hat tip to Jay, I believe)

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Woot! California Governor Jerry Brown signs AB1616, "The Homemade Food Act":

Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Los Angeles, said he wrote the bill in response to the increasing number of people establishing businesses based on baking, cooking and pickling in home kitchens.

[ related topics: Food California Culture ]

Know what I hate about driving? Bicyclists rinning stop signs. Know what I hate about hunting? The deer keep moving. (Yes, I'm riding home)

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

Painted the window trim for J's dollhouse

[ related topics: Photography ]

And assembled the roof for J.'s dollhouse

[ related topics: Photography ]

Reason Magazine: Dear Marijuana Reformers: Mitt Romney Thinks You're Stupid, Obama Thinks You're Easy

[ related topics: Drugs Weblogs hubris ]

Sauce Labs: Goodbye CouchDB. Turns out using not-a-database for your database causes problems.

I think there's even a deeper issue here: If you think that not having a schema and structure to your data is a good idea, you probably don't really understand how to structure your data.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Databases ]

Assume you're stupid enough to want to write a real app in JavaScript, with Node.js unit tests and all. The best "best practices" guide?

[ related topics: Douglas Adams hubris ]

Interesting: Kira Cochrane in The Guardian: Creepshots and revenge porn: how paparazzi culture affects women. Some musings on how photography and slut shaming and (social) media come together in bad ways.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology Journalism and Media California Culture ]

Murtaza Hussain in Al Jazeera: Chronicle of a death foretold: Guantanamo Bay prisoner Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif died without having ever been charged with a crime.

Why are people so afraid of our justice system actually working?

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement California Culture ]

Shadow forwarded along slashdot: Chattanooga's municipal network doubles down on fiber speeds.

I realize that /. is not a representative sample, but I find it interesting that at some point the use for the extra bandwidth starts to become "running my own server". I still think that the future of social media will be distributed computing rather than centralized data centers, but it's gonna be a decade or more 'til we can get an end-run around the big providers trying to shut that stuff down in favor of force-feeding people network TV.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture broadband Journalism and Media Television Chattanooga Sports ]

Ben Goldacre in The Guardian: The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal.

... Seven trials had been conducted comparing reboxetine against a placebo. Only one, conducted in 254 patients, had a neat, positive result, and that one was published in an academic journal, for doctors and researchers to read. But six more trials were conducted, in almost 10 times as many patients. All of them showed that reboxetine was no better than a dummy sugar pill. None of these trials was published. I had no idea they existed.

Nothing cosmic, just another pointing out that we've got some problems in how we determine drug efficacy.

[ related topics: Drugs Health History Work, productivity and environment Gambling ]

Hat tip to Columbine for pointing me to The Economist: The future of driving: Seeing the back of the car: In the rich world, people seem to be driving less than they used to. Talks about the notion that in developed countries we may have seen peak automobile, and some of the implications:

Cities that bank on parking fees, fines and road tolls may have to find other ways to balance the books. Plans for attracting private investment in roads may need reconsidering. In March 2012 David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, called for private investment in the road network to increase capacity. Such schemes may be viable—but not if based on a payment model that assumes ever-increasing use.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Interactive Drama Books broadband Automobiles Economics ]

A tweet that assorted presidents of note "wouldn't apologize to Muslims" made me do a quick search which turned up: The Library of Congress has an interesting little article on The Founding Fathers and Islam:

... On another occasion, the first president declared that he would welcome "Mohometans" to Mount Vernon if they were "good workmen" ...

[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Politics Books ]

Discounted cloud-based password cracking! This week only, for $20 CloudCracker will exhaust the entire DES keyspace for just $20:

This means that any PPTP VPN connection or intercepted MS-CHAPv2 WPA Enterprise wireless credentials can be cracked and decrypted with a 100% success rate for only $20.

[ related topics: Wireless Weblogs ]

An interesting and somewhat scary link from BoingBoing: Irish blogger Leo Traynor quit Twitter this summer when he started to get ferocious anti-semitic messages from a troll. When the troll started sending threats directly to his home, he began to panic. When he finally tracked the guy down, he was in for a big, big surprise. It all raises a question about how much of the animus we see on the net is real, and how much arises from a far less quantifiable place.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

Edit: Romney was joking about the airplane windows!

I had a long rant about Mitt Romney's comments at an LA fundraiser in which he said:

... “When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound.”

which everyone is diving on because of the whole "where do you want oxygen" and "open windows on a jet airplane" issue, but the article doesn't mention tone of voice. This could have been a joke, the guy could have been freaked out over nearly losing a spouse (aircraft electrical problems can get really bad really fast), all sorts fo things. James Fallows in The Atlatnic: The Romney In-Flight Fire Scare: Cut Mitt Some Slack.

Edit: As mentioned above: Romney was joking about the airplane windows.

But he did also make the comment on 60 minutes that:

"Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance ... if someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and —;; and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care."

(Transcription from NPR, rundown of media coverage at Kaiser Health News)

And I thought this was a good place for a jumping off point for a little rant: I can accept that money is something we give someone when we perceive that they've brought value to our world, and that accumulation of money can be an indication of having brought value to people.

What does it say about humanity and society when someone who makes statements like the emergency room one above can get rich, let alone if he wasn't joking about the windows on airplanes comment?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Microsoft Health Movies Aviation Bay Area Current Events Journalism and Media Pyrotechnics Currency Video Marriage Real Estate ]

California Governor Jerry Brown signs law allowing easier access to hormonal birth control. Similar story at CBS Local.

Via Think Progress, which I'm not recommending you click on because it does that "overlay and click close" thing to try to get you to something, which is super annoying, even more so from mobile browsers.

[ related topics: Health California Culture ]

Hitachi unveils optical data storage on 2cm square quartz glass pieces for archival data:

The chip, which is resistant to many chemicals and unaffected by radio waves, can be exposed directly to high temperature flames and heated to 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 Fahrenheit) for at least two hours without being damaged.

[ related topics: Current Events Archival ]

In honor of the legacy of Ada Lovelace, The Royal Society will be doing a Wikipedia edit-a-thon to flesh out the entries on women of note in technology and engineering:

Among the profiles being considered for the edit-a-thon are Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, a crystallographer who discovered the chemical structure of oil component benzene, and Dr Elsie Widdowson who oversaw the introduction of vitamin supplements to food during World War II rationing.

[ related topics: Health Food History Current Events Monty Python ]

Sunlight Foundation: Back to school: Privatizers turn to big screen to push charters, trigger laws.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Government ]

Chicago Tribune Analysis: Tribune analysis: Drug-sniffing dogs in traffic stops often wrong:

But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia. For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.

Via,

[ related topics: Drugs Health Current Events Law Enforcement Race Dogs ]

I'm prepared to blame my aging copper telephone lines for everything, but when the work VPN drops and the streaming audio plays on...

[ related topics: Music Work, productivity and environment Phreaking ]

Steve Salzberg: GM corn causes cancer in rats: a study in bad science

a lot of lead bullets: a response to the new york times article on data center efficiency.

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Guns New York ]

FHWA Offers a Guide for American Cities and Towns Considering Bike-Share.

The actual PDF is available from the BicyclingInfo.org web site, linked here because this is primarily a way for me to transfer the URL for this from my laptop to my iPad.

[ related topics: Douglas Adams Bicycling ]

Meteor is a Perl HTTP server built for real-time web applications. I'm thinking about using it to build a modified chat type server.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Astronomy hubris ]

If you have not had your existential crisis for the day, the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field photo is assembled from 10 years of imagery in the area near the center of the original Ultra Deep Field, a picture you've seen.

The new full-color XDF image reaches much fainter galaxies, and includes very deep exposures in red light from Hubble's new infrared camera, enabling new studies of the earliest galaxies in the universe. The XDF contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.

Via MeFi. Time to go listen to Monty Python's "The Galaxy Song" again.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Invention and Design Monty Python Python ]

Apparently K-Mart is mixing Martha Stewart with 50 Shades...

[ related topics: Photography ]

September 26th is Petrov Day. If you can read this, thank a subordinate Soviet Lieutenant Colonel. And try to avoid blowing up the world today yourself.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

LA Times: Contact Sheet: How I got the shot of space shuttle Endeavour passing the Hollywood sign by Gary Friedman

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Wired Threat Level: Rent-to-Own Laptops Secretly Photographed Users Having Sex, FTC Says.

Yet another reason to never ever leave the operating system and configuration that came on your computer on your computer. And trusting the hardware these days is kinda suspect too.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture History ]

A new automobile platform costs about a billion dollars to develop, and lasts 5-7 years. iPhone 5 sold $1.7 billion in the first weekend.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Automobiles iPhone ]

Greatest tree houses of the Bay Area. Specifically for crasch, but the rest of y'all will like it too.

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs California Culture Real Estate ]

Governor Brown Signs Bill to Create Safety Standards for Self-Driving Cars.

Senate Bill 1298 by Senator Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima) allows driverless cars to be operated on public roads for testing purposes, provided that each vehicle has a fully licensed and bonded operator in the driver’s seat to take control if necessary. The bill also instructs the Department of Motor Vehicles to adopt regulations that govern the licensing, bonding, testing and operation of autonomous vehicle technology.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

You stay classy there, San Francisco: SF police list arrested Asians as 'Chinese'.

Police officials have blamed the inaccurate arrest data on a 40-year-old computer system that provides officers with only four categories: white, black, Chinese and other.

Although this does bring up the deeper problem of: If you're trying to use this information to better understand the community and its policing needs, what is the right subdivision? Is 17 ethnicities enough? Does the breakdown of ethnicity vary depending on community?

And now we're way into Eric's interests in mapping and ontologies and such...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Law Enforcement California Culture Community Race ]

30 years ago Knight Rider premiered, and the autonomous vehicle of the future was a Trans Am. Now it's a Prius.

[ related topics: David Hasselhoff ]

RT @nukcub:

Apple Maps can't even get the driving directions correct in its own logo: https://img.skitch.com/20120927-fxfgewrkxc7xg36bhq78ni5b57.jpg

RT @gaberivera:

FYI, here's what a conventional route from De Anza to 280N looks like. I say Google Maps should base its icon on this. http://pic.twitter.com/0FajBClR

[ related topics: Apple Computer Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Television Embedded Devices Maps and Mapping Archival ]

Nothing you don't already know. Vanity Fair asks if any of the post 9/11 "security" crap actually does anything, featuring Bruce Schneier.

... The best memorial to the victims of 9/11, in Schneier’s view, would be to forget most of the “lessons” of 9/11. “It’s infuriating,” he said, waving my fraudulent boarding pass to indicate the mass of waiting passengers, the humming X-ray machines, the piles of unloaded computers and cell phones on the conveyor belts, the uniformed T.S.A. officers instructing people to remove their shoes and take loose change from their pockets. “We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars doing this—and it is almost entirely pointless. Not only is it not done right, but even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.”

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sociology California Culture Shoes Cryptography ]

Susan Kitchens has started posting her blog entries on her adventure at Edwards Air Force Base when the space shuttle Endeavour was there.

[ related topics: Weblogs Space & Astronomy ]

Do The Math: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist

Reflecting on it, I kept thinking, “This should not have happened. A prominent economist should not have to walk back statements about the fundamental nature of growth when talking to a scientist with no formal economics training.” But as the evening progressed, the original space in which the economist roamed got painted smaller and smaller.

Interesting to think about energy as the percent of GDP that needs to shrink in the same way that we now think about subsistence food costs as that portion which shrank.

[ related topics: Food Mathematics Economics Java Photovoltaics ]

Jessamyn's list of flags she'd like to see if she ran Metafilter as a total dictatorship. A must read if you think about online community management at all.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Technology and Culture Community ]

JavaScript: The Good Parts is a great book that convinced me I should be working in CoffeeScript...

[ related topics: Books Work, productivity and environment ]

Re-reading "A Farewell To Alms". English agricultural workers in 1650 made half of what they were making in 1400.

[ related topics: Books: A Farewell to Alms ]

Thinking about placemaking and community centers in the context of the impending death of retail.

[ related topics: Community ]

The Atlantic: The Case for Abolishing Patents (Yes, All of Them). It's a look at The Case Against Patents, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine from the Research Division Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Working Paper Series (PDF), which totally looks worth a thorough read:

... Hence the best solution is to abolish patents entirely through strong constitutional measures and to find other legislative instruments, less open to lobbying and rent-seeking, to foster innovation whenever there is clear evidence that laissez-faire under-supplies it.

[ related topics: Law Work, productivity and environment ]

Yay! It's the incredible JavaScript creeping technology cognitive load!

• Dart is a "compiles into JavaScript" language that seems a hell of a lot more sane than CoffeeScript, and it's got a point-n-drool IDE environment for VisualStudio type programmers, and is being pushed by Google to be an in-browser successor to JavaScript.
• Jasmine "...is a behavior-driven development framework for testing JavaScript code".
• PhantomJS "...is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API." A way to run full on DOM applications for testing and such.

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

ABC News Tracks Missing iPad To Florida Home of TSA Officer:

The agency disputes that theft is a widespread problem, however, saying the number of officers fired "represents less than one-half of one percent of officers that have been employed" by TSA.

I don't wanna be a troublemaker or nothin', but how much money are we spending on these goons and how much less than one-half of one percent of air travelers are terrorists? Seems like if theft by the TSA isn't a widespread problem then neither is terrorism, and we can do away with the TSA.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Currency ]

RT Jordan Harband (@ljharb)

OH: php.js? That’s like a turducken of bad ideas.

Via Shadow: Manchester (CT) Boy Takes Brakes Off Bike, Crashes Bike when he ran a stop sign and hit a car.

[ related topics: Automobiles Community Bicycling ]

Just got back from Trouble With The Curve. There was a story under there somewhere, but the screenplay wasn't polished enough to find it.

Once upon a time, there was a magical thing on the intertubes, Adobe had this thing that alowed you to do animations and effects by installing a browser plugin. It grew. Some entire websites were created in it, games, and for a long time it was the best embedded video player on the 'net.

I really don't understand the market forces and techno-politics behind it's slow death, but I can tell it's dead. My top of the line Android 4.0 tablet (Asus infinity) would like to install it, but is told by the "app store" that it's not available in "your country" and that it won't be supported past 4.0, and 4.1 (Jelly bean) is due on my machine in a few days. My latest installs of Linux, using Bodhi Linux (Ubuntu 12.04 + Enlightenment) had fits installing it, but did. I'm also being told it will see no future Linux releases.

Pseudoquote: "It's dead, Jim."

Now if the major websites like cnn.com would just stop using it.

I wish I had the chops to build a flash to "HTML5" aka JavaScript and <canvas> converter. I have some old Flash animations I am especially fond of.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Politics Games Open Source Robotics History Embedded Devices Video Economics ]

QOTD: "First, I wish they would call it "gameification." Gamification makes me think of legs." -- Puneet Kishorn on the Geowanking mail list

[ related topics: Quotes ]