Flutterby™! From 2012-11-02 to 2012-11-30

This one's been making the rounds, and then Nancy sent it along, and, yeah, I got a good ol' smile out of it: The TOUGHEST Bridge In The World (ORIGINAL) - Trucks vs an 11'8" bridge.

Apparently a couple of people have an office right near by: http://11foot8.com/

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Machinery Embedded Devices ]

Bought Cross In The Closet because I felt it a book other people should read, was stunned by how much I got from it. Thank you @tim_kurek

[ related topics: Books ]

Co.EXIST: What’s Really Happening In Blacked-Out Manhattan. On self-organizing relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

In a disaster, your best resources will be your neighbors.

The Trenches: Too Funny To Fix

RT The Walking Dev ‏@MarioZaizar

"if you're using Postgres then just create index concurrently. if you use MySQL then just start using Postgres" #rubyconf

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Open Source Databases ]

Today's reminder that rich Democrat states are continuing to subsidize poor Republican ones: http://www.slate.com/blogs/mon...erican_currency_union_works.html

[ related topics: Currency ]

RT @yenzie:

Sometimes, the rage runs so deep, you just have to strap kittens to your fists and head for the closest kindergarten...

Took part in a consumer interview yesterday. Lots of examples of why stores want to be less convenient in order to merchandise to me.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

I know shared capital is one of the arguments for public transit, but if Sonoma County Transit bus #210 cost half a million dollars, the five of us on here could each be driving a $1500 junker, have a substantial house downpayment left over, and still be getting a better ride.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Public Transportation Real Estate ]

Overheard in a training video for a website:

Unlike Excel, which is a desktop database, __ is a web database...

I cringed, but kept my mouth shut because for the intended audience: Way too many people use spreadsheets for databases.

[ related topics: Video Databases ]

So should I give up on packages and compile everything from source, or is there a good distro for Linux that has current software?

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Software Engineering ]

Reading Ross Chapin's Pocket Neighborhoods. Architecture porn: exciting to look at, but not convinced I could have a long-term relationship.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Architecture ]

Kiana Hayeri: Your Veil Is A Battleground, photographs of young Iranian women. I got there from the Violet Impudence posting of a collage picture on tumblr that I'm not finding on the Kiana Hayeri site, but I'm at work and will want to dive into this more later.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

In the post-mechanical world, a stopped clock is no longer right twice a day. But self-adjusting for DST is worth that loss.

"PHP was invented to make Perl look elegant." -- Don Hopkins

[ related topics: Perl Open Source hubris ]

The good news is that I apparently know more about certain business processes than anyone else. The bad news is Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

RT Lee Daly ‏@leedalyire:

Here @corybooker, can you sort the pothole outside? Granda swears blind he only votes FF but if ya sort that he'll take care of ya next time

RT Cory Booker ‏@CoryBooker:

Sir, it looks like you live in Dublin, Ireland. I've got 99 problems & your ditch ain't one MT @leedalyire Can u sort the pothole outside?

(For those of you completely out of the loop, Cory Booker is the mayor of Newark, NJ, and currently overrun with Hurricane Sandy cleanup issues)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Theater & Plays Handicaps & Disabilities ]

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/

I was impressed with the depth of several articles. For example, this one on: Electric Assisted Velomobiles. Not sure I would consider a velomobile practical for much of the nation. I'm also hoping we don't get that desperate for energy. It was still an impressive article and I enjoyed it. Good content, which seems to be rarer and rarer.

[ related topics: Bicycling Energy Monitoring Transportation ]

"Clean" - I made the mistake of watching a few minutes of network news recently, and was compelled to go soak in the hot tub to de-stress. This cartoon nails that feeling.

It's election day: Please go vote.

This social liberal and fiscal conservative wishes he had better choices.

[ related topics: broadband Current Events ]

JC, whom I know because his path leads him through Petaluma regularly, has been musing on his blog and other places about real estate ownership as violence. Since he doesn't have comments on his blog, I'll put 'em here.

Continued in the comments...

[ related topics: Weblogs Real Estate ]

Weeks ago

I'm sure this has been mentioned on Flutterby before, but Frank Llloyd Wright's long-lost doghouse.

Unfortunately, neither Eddie nor any of the Berger’s other dogs ever took to it, and the structure was dismantled just 10 years later.

[ related topics: Ziffle Weblogs Chocolate Dogs ]

Mackenab: The Kindness of Strangers.

Especially for the "how can I stretch just a little bit and help someone out" inspiration.

Secret balloting is a good idea. Please don't create social pressure by posting photos of your ballot. The cause you help may be your own.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Because I want these somewhere easy to find if we go out carousing this evening:

• http://vote.sonoma-county.org/content.aspx?sid=1009&id=2456
• http://vote.sos.ca.gov/
• http://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/ballot-measures/
• http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/
• http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/mobile/president/
• http://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/results

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Those switches by the individual seat lights? They control parts of the whole cabin overhead lighting. WTF?

[ related topics: Photography ]

Election night party. NBC on TV. Presidential election played out as Nate Silver predicted. TV news: making anything a horserace.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Current Events Television ]

Woke up at 4AM for the second day in a row. Stupid daylight savings time switch. Grrr.

[ related topics: hubris ]

Really wanting a language with compile-time type checking. Maybe Java wouldn't be so bad after all for this sort of web stuff.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Okay, I have a bit of a handle on the bugs in the code, still trying to figure out the bugs in the human processes.

OH on the bus: "Progress just doesn't like you."

[ related topics: Public Transportation ]

Okay, Maker kids: When using Inkscape to draw your gears, what's best practices for the out-set for router bit width?

Or: What's the right way to build router paths for gears?

[ related topics: Children and growing up Woodworking ]

Just stealing wholesale from the Slashdot entry:

Race Sense is a smart phone app meant to help motorcycle racers get faster. There are an awful lot of claims here, I'm not sure what all is hogwash and what is real, but the notion that we're using more general purpose computers to get vehicle telemetry and inform the driver is another step in the revolution.

• Gizmag article on the app
• Wired article on the app.

AP: Exit poll shows economy still the top concern:

Overall, 53 percent had a favorable opinion of Obama, while only 47 percent felt that way about Romney.

Wait, so the 47% voted for Romney?

CNN 2012 Presidential Election Results exit polls. Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Television Economics ]

Flip All The Pronouns: Dad hex edits binary image of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker:

It’s annoying and awkward, to put it mildly, having to do gender-translation on the fly when Maya asks me to read what it says on the screen. You can pick your character’s name, of course – I always stick with Link, being a traditionalist – but all of the dialog insists that Link is a boy, and there’s apparently nothing to be done about it.

From a Twitter conversation about people whose Linked In profiles start with Unicode heart characters, comes an alternative that's one finger off: http://shapecatcher.com/unicode_info/128070.html

Oh hell yes: Chromatic: I Stopped Parsing XML Thanks To XML::Rabbit. I'll have to pull XPath from the long lost recesses of my memory, but this looks like it lets you easily pull XML into Perl Moose objects. All those state machines and crap go bye-bye!

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Perl Open Source hubris ]

November 9th, 2012 is Carl Sagan Day, 35th anniversary of the Launch of the Voyager Mission to the stars.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Space & Astronomy ]

Top chefs unite against blogger's review.

The guy's blog is Dining With James, the article outlines the chefs, but if that doesn't put you off from fine dining...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs ]

CBS News: Adviser: Romney "shellshocked" by loss.

Came from a retweet by @Medley, who also observed:

... if Rs won't deal with facts in their *own* campaigns, why trust them with ANY policy/power levers?

Yeah. This.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events ]

Cisco VP of services Mike Quinn goes full-on Mafia on over a leaked memo:

... The company in response to a number of requests to share internally what our RFP contained once again is insulted by the lack of respect for the business and "family" internal to Cisco. The person or persons whom felt it was cool or correct to share this internal memo should now have the intestinal fortitude to stand up and admit that they did this, then resign.

and

... That you disrespected everyone else at Cisco. Now I know you do not have it in you to stand up and admit what you did, so I will now make you my "hobby." Ask around you will find out that I like to work on my hobbies.

Sounds like comic-book-guy with an ego. There are ways to deal with internal leaks, sounding like the goth kid who carries the silly spiked knives crossed with wannabe Mafia kingpin isn't one of them.

This was in response to a memo about California State University saving $100M when they ditched Cisco, which was in response to Network World: Country's largest 4-year university expels Cisco, saves $100 million.

[ related topics: Books Weblogs broadband Sociology Current Events Work, productivity and environment California Culture Community Education ]

Uh oh: PLOS ONE: The Impact of Climate Change on Indigenous Arabica Coffee (Coffea arabica): Predicting Future Trends and Identifying Priorities.

... The models show a profoundly negative influence on indigenous Arabica. In a locality analysis the most favourable outcome is a c. 65% reduction in the number of pre-existing bioclimatically suitable localities, and at worst an almost 100% reduction, by 2080. In an area analysis the most favourable outcome is a 38% reduction in suitable bioclimatic space, and the least favourable a c. 90% reduction, by 2080. Based on known occurrences and ecological tolerances of Arabica, bioclimatic unsuitability would place populations in peril, leading to severe stress and a high risk of extinction. ...

[ related topics: Global Warming ]

Forbes on the difficulty of deducting business expenses related to marijuana.

... The end-run works like this. If a dispensary sells marijuana and engages in the separate business of caregiving, the caregiving expenses are deductible. If only 10% of the premises are used to dispense marijuana, most of the rent is deductible. ...

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama Politics ]

OH: "'For science' is like 'You only live once' for nerds."

[ related topics: Theater & Plays ]

RT Timothy Asher ‏@betthearm:

Stop using "guru," "ninja," and other terms for job descriptions. You are a Sparkly Code Princess. Own it.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Heinlein ]

ARM CEO Warren East says that Moore's Law is irrelevant, efficiency is now more important than processing power:

... The analogy I would use is routers. Once upon a time, routers were effectively mini-computers in a massive box. Cisco managed to reduce that to things you have in your home. There's no reason it shouldn't go that way for servers.

Yes. This.

[Edit: The Slashdot article suggests that there's a hell of a lot of marketing speak in this guy's presentation. I'm not linking to it for notions of whether ARM or Intel is actually building more efficient processors, but because I think his vision of the re-decentralization of computing is important]

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Scientific American: Wrens Teach Eggs to Sing: Parent wrens sing food passwords to unhatched chicks to avoid having to feed impostors.

[ related topics: Food ]

The Sessions - YouTube trailer. Because I want to put it on the "go see" list.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Edit: Damn it, satire GOP suggests opening up the party to believers

Opting for a bold “big tent” strategy to rebuild the party, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, told reporters today, “We need to welcome people who believe in different things than we do, like math and science.”

[ related topics: Mathematics ]

House painting progress.

[ related topics: Photography Real Estate ]

Carl, our house painter, asked "how many hours you got into that?". I'm in denial.

[ related topics: Photography Real Estate ]

When you rout the wrong side of the board, it's time to call it a night. Related: is "french cleat" the dirtiest sounding woodworking term?

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Reddit readers save man's life from nasty testicular cancer.

Like that "Go on to kill again" Wizard of Oz summary? Let's get Rick @ShakeNTell Polito exposure: http://facebook.com/thatpolitoguy http://thatpolitoguy.com

If you enjoy apocalyptic humor, @RobKroese's Mercury Trilogy is on sale today: http://www.amazon.com/gp/featu...7190_pe_button/?docId=1000677541

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Books tolkien Astronomy ]

For Charlene, another place to take the boat: Chicken Ranch Beach on Point Reyes on Tomales Bay.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Food Bay Area California Culture Boats Machinery Birds ]

An interesting note from the Bay area: a series of Smash and Grab robberies of local TV news crews.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Bay Area Current Events Television California Culture ]

Your Red Bull sponsored semi-urban downhill mountain bike ride in Bolivia video of the day, courtesy of Shadow.

[ related topics: Movies Video Bicycling ]

RT Joshua Malina (@JoshMalina)

I bet behind closed doors, e.e. cummings was like "OH YEAH. UPPERCASE, BABY. THIS FEELS GOOOOOOOOOOOD!!"

Awe, teh cute! Wild boar piglet adopted by Watusi cattle at @SafariWest: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20121112/ARTICLES/121119870

Letter to a future Republican strategist regarding white people. Too much good stuff to pull quote.

[ related topics: Race ]

Streetsblog New York City: Honda to Sleeping, Distracted and Aggressive Drivers: Don’t Sweat It.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5e0YmQUpTA
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79PG7ov5rE4

Fascinating that the way they're selling safety features is explicitly as compensation. I didn't see this route as a way to autonomous vehicle adoption, and it's interesting that pre-loading expectations might also help pushback against lack of huge safety gains (like happened, or, errr..., didn't happen, with ABS) as we move forward with cars taking active control from the drivers.

[ related topics: Movies Invention and Design New York Model Building ]

I am currently wearing toe socks for the Vibram 5 Fingers, but I like interesting socks, and Charlene likes interesting socks, so here's a link to Unsimply Stitched - cool socks.

[ related topics: Clothing ]

The real lesson of the Petraeus affair is that fuckups who can't manage their personal relationships are running US covert foreign policy.

[ related topics: Sports ]

http://windows95tips.tumblr.com/ . Really.

Android UserManager API documention: isUserAGoat():

Used to determine whether the user making this call is subject to teleportations.

Mobility Lab: Hack Day Resulting in Transit-Screen Excitement

511.org GTFS transit feed agreement. Yes, you have to sign things to get the data in a usable format. PDFs are free.

[ related topics: Public Transportation ]

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) "By Choice Not By Chance" (PDF) is the first statement by the U.N. declaring contraception a human right. Via CBS News: UN calls contraception access a "universal human right" via Salon: U.N. calls contraception a “;universal human right”;.

This on the heels of the death in Ireland of Saviti Halappanavar who died likely because she was denied an abortion:

... She was quickly brought to hospital, where medical staff told her she was fully dilated, was leaking amniotic fluid and would miscarry her child, her husband said. He said that the hospital staff informed his wife that the miscarriage would only take a few hours. Three days later the fetus died inside Halappanavar’;s womb, he said. During this period Halappanavar was in extreme pain and continually asked doctors to terminate the pregnancy, her husband said. Staff refused, according to Praveen Halappanavar, on the grounds that they were prohibited from performing abortions by law and that they could not remove the fetus until its heart had stopped beating. Praveen Halappanavar told the Irish Times that they also refused on the grounds that “;this is a Catholic country.”; ...

[ related topics: Religion Sexual Culture History Current Events Salon magazine Marriage ]

That moment when you realize HTML has become overcomplexified and you really need a preprocessor and simpler markup language to generate it.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Violet Impudence on the game Glitch shutting down.

I’ve come to believe that an old online acquaintance of mine, the most misanthropic man I’ve ever met, was absolutely right when our glorified-smiley-face avatars sat in a room in The Palace one day back in 1997 or 1998 and he said that the avatars were actually a dead end, a detriment to conversation between adults. I think he expected us all to come to our senses, and we apparently never have. We keep making the avatars better and more interesting, and we keep hoping that social communities will accrete around those avatars, like sand forming a pearl. It hasn’t happened yet.

Lots of good game design and socialization discussion in there, go read.

I had an epiphany yesterday, clicking through another "hide all by ..." in response to a "sponsored post" on Facebook, that we look for forums to facilitate conversation. Those forums can often pull some economic value out of that conversation, whether it's the coffee or bar shop selling us drinks in exchange for a place to meet people and chat, or whether it's Gmail reading our email and offering us related ads.

At some point that mediation becomes too intrusive. Maybe it's the one-note "progressive" or other political zealot at the coffee shop who keeps monopolizing conversations and proffering up "obvious" ideas without understanding the system in which those ideas need to be implemented.

On the other side, sometimes rules meant to keep the interactions within a context can interfere with the conversations. Games are one example. I recently resigned my post on the Petaluma Technology Advisory Committee partially because the Brown act "Sunshine" rules made it difficult to have conversations on the topic. And moderators at forums all over are delicately balancing "on topic" vs "human connections".

In Facebook it's particularly obvious because Facebook is taking the step of filtering content from companies I want to hear from, and inundating me with content I don't want, even though I'm giving them all sorts of personal information to help their filtering. What they need to do is find ways to charge for the companies I want to hear from that I don't know about yet, in much the way Google does, but instead they flood me with crap from big companies I've learned about and rejected.

It's got to be done delicately, I'm already inundated with a lot, but I think there's room in there for mediated conversation that enhances our interactions. I don't think it's games (though I get a lot out of bike riding with a group), but there's still opportunity.

[ related topics: Politics Games moron Law Graphic Design Community Bicycling Economics ]

17 euphemisms for sex from the 1800s

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Flutterby is back. Unhappy with DomainMonger. Suggestions for DNS providers w/REST APIs gratefully received.

You are trying to pass binary data through a maze of twisty character encoding issues, all alike. Or different . Who knows?

Coming up with new ideas that will dramatically revolutionize the world: easy. Culling to those which the world is ready to accept: hard.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Las Vegas, I am in you. But will be leaving you for a sliimmer more attractive Detroit in under an hour.

[ related topics: Sociology Gambling ]

Somewhere else in the world I just logged into a smart grid AMI system, that can disconnect (turn off) a few thousand people with the web login of: admin and a password of: 123456 the published default password..

The system has been up for > 1 month and has real customers on it. The meter manufacturer has an engineer on site that barely speaks engrish and is afraid to change the admin password because other people at the manufacturer would not know how to login...

He'll hate the 20 character "line noise" password we just set when he figures out we reset the password. [evil grin]

US News and World Report has a fluff piece on "RelayRides", a "rent your car" facilitator.

Let's see: The article says average price of $8/hr, RelayRides takes 40%, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics says the average cost of owning and operating an automobile is about $.59/mile. So: I'd only make money if they drive < 8 miles in that hour. Hmmm...

Sounds like a great deal for the renter...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Mathematics Automobiles Currency Furniture ]

Sunday morning's sunrise.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Airports: CNN pushing Gaza violence porn, Microsoft booths pushing the Surface and Windows 8. Both celebrating the tragedies of humanity.

[ related topics: Humor Erotic Sexual Culture Microsoft Aviation moron ]

From the "investigating the obvious" files: University of Canterbury (New Zealand) postgraduate psychology researcher Carsten Grimm's research project has determined that sex and alcohol make you happier than religion and kids. No duh.

Surprisingly Facebook rated last in meaning while texting came in 26th in happiness. Carsten's research has revealed the complex relationship between happiness and well-being in people’s daily lives.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Content Management Invention and Design moron Current Events Education ]

Historic moment: actual observed use of a QR code in the wild! (At Aqus Cafe)

[ related topics: Photography ]

http://erratasec.blogspot.de/2...-committing-crime-right-now.html

Good short summary of Implicit/explicit authorization to access a computer.

Awesome! 50 Shades of Chicken cookbook has a trussed up bird on the cover.

“The recipe and headnotes follow a chef and his chicken on an emotional journey very much like the original trilogy,” the author wrote.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/leisure...-heats-up-kitchen/#ixzz2CxzG9hnm

Thanks, Shadow!

[ related topics: Food Birds ]

How come we never hear about police violence against unsolicited telephone and SMS solicitors? I could support that sort of overreach.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Phreaking ]

ABC News on Yahoo: Shipping Containers to Become Condos in Detroit. Leaped out at me for two reasons. First, it acknowledges (several times) that the building shell is very little of the cost of the building:

Joel Egan, co-founder of HyBrid Architecturein Seattle, which has built cottages and office buildings from shipping containers for close to a decade and coined the term " cargotecture" to describe this method of construction, warns that although containers can be bought for as little as $2,500, they shouldn't be seen as a low-cost housing solution.



"Ninety-five percent of the cost still remains," he says.

Second, Thanksgiving this year was a potluck down in the south bay, courtesy of Chris Rasch, aka crasch here on Flutterby, and I ended up talking someone part of the Future Living Foundation. I'm not entirely sure what they're all about yet, but I'll be digging in a bit further there.

[ related topics: Current Events California Culture Machinery Fabrication Skating Architecture Seattle Real Estate Model Building ]

ABC News on Yahoo: Shipping Containers to Become Condos in Detroit. Leaped out at me for two reasons. First, it acknowledges (several times) that the building shell is very little of the cost of the building:

Joel Egan, co-founder of HyBrid Architecturein Seattle, which has built cottages and office buildings from shipping containers for close to a decade and coined the term " cargotecture" to describe this method of construction, warns that although containers can be bought for as little as $2,500, they shouldn't be seen as a low-cost housing solution.



"Ninety-five percent of the cost still remains," he says.

Second, Thanksgiving this year was a potluck down in the south bay, courtesy of Chris Rasch, aka crasch here on Flutterby, and I ended up talking someone part of the Future Living Foundation. I'm not entirely sure what they're all about yet, but I'll be digging in a bit further there.

[ related topics: Current Events California Culture Machinery Fabrication Skating Architecture Seattle Real Estate Model Building ]

Lots of real-time server to JavaScript web page stuff out there, but ObjectFabric claims to have a better handle on the off-line case, and deal with mobile apps better. More fallout from the Thanksgiving potluck I need to dig into further.

[ related topics: Law ]

Digby: Your Daily Stupid, on rabid "patriots", the pledge of allegiance, and TV stations showing old movies. Aaah, ignorance of history.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Movies Television hubris ]

Remember that much hyped arrest for "bomb making materials" at the Oakland Airport a week ago Tuesday? McGann Tells His Story of Unusual Watch Arrest at Oakland Airport, and he plans to sue the Alameda County Sheriff's Department, sounds like with good reason.

[ related topics: Movies Aviation Bay Area ]

This project has no right to leave me this sore.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Trotify in the wild (YouTube video). Trotting coconuts for your bicycle.

Courtesy of Shadow.

Edit: http://www.trotify.com/

[ related topics: Movies Pedal Power Video Bicycling ]

http://scanlime.org/2012/11/hacking-my-vagina/

The title alone told me this probably should be on Flutterby, that it's hacking microcontrollers and feedback loops and sex toys nails it. The amount of detail, pics and narrative in the build writeup is awesome.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Embedded Devices ]

Nate Silver in Esquire: The End of Car Culture. Not the first person to observe that the love affair with cars may be changing.

[ related topics: Sociology California Culture Automobiles ]

Helsinki refitting metro train system to be driverless, hoping for 100% coverage in 2016.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Machinery Trains ]

If social media is basically a meme/virus propagator, I only want to be a vector for the really obscure diseases.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama virus Journalism and Media Graphics Mathematics Marketing ]

Amused at how small the world is. Even in pseudonymous online spaces I seem to re-connect with the same people.

The Shocking Details of a Mississippi School-to-Prison Pipeline. Well, not shocking to anyone who's been paying attention to the ways that our prison industry (whether via privatized prisons or strong prison guards unions) is sucking human and economic resources out of our society, but there you have it.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Economics Archival ]

16th Century manuscript with exploding pigeons!

PDF of DIGITAL_HUMANITIES, Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, Jeffrey Schnapp, posted here so I can grab it on the iPad without worrying about it scrolling off my social media feed.

[ related topics: Todd Gemmell Journalism and Media ]

Hong Kong's real estate bubble depressing birth rate.

[ related topics: Hong Kong Real Estate ]

Why you don't roll your own encryption. Asher Langton downloads Leaping Brain video file, discovers that player is a Python wrapper around VLC, figures out that he can save unencrypted .MOV from that, further finds that in fact the "BrainTrust™ proprietary video encryption" is that the beginning of each 1K block is XOR'd with "RANDOM_STRING".

Doh.

[ related topics: Monty Python Cryptography Video Python ]

Social interaction is sexual reproduction for ideas.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Dave Alden sent me Mother Jones: I Was A Warehouse Wage Slave. I don't know whether I've read it before (and I'm writing this on a bus so I can't go check if I've linked to it), but if it wasn't this article I know I've seen a similar one. The ensuing email exchange was long enough that I'm going to post it here.

Continued in the comments...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Writing Work, productivity and environment Macintosh Public Transportation ]

From Columbine, "BERNINI!" (read down...).

CBS: Study: Porn actresses are more religious and have higher self-esteem than other women.

Journal of Sex Research: Pornography Actresses: An Assessment of the Damaged Goods Hypothesis

[ related topics: Religion Erotic Sexual Culture Model Building ]

Jay Ashworth asked:

Is this what we'll say about Bradley Manning in 2062?

Pulitzer wanted for reporter who broke story on Nazi Germany’s surrender.

Microchip’s New GestIC® Technology Enables Mobile-Friendly 3D Gesture Interfaces.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Graphics ]

Alive Tiny World: Too many reasons why.

On being a woman and a game developer.

[ related topics: Games ]

Feeling a need to write yet another generic CRUD web interface. Reinventing the wheel in *late* 2012.

No, Google, "dioxide" is not a synonym for "monoxide" (Looking for references to Byrd's 2nd antarctic expedition)

There aren't many people that can write that mission critical crucial chunk of code, for a one-off ethernet/tcpip datagram for a piece of encrytion hardware (less than 10 of this specification exist world-wide) with "interesting" documentation (missing some chunks), that could not be tested: that works flawlessly when you finally get to test it, behind hard to get to locked doors on another continent. We finally got the 2 units installed, keys loaded, tests ran, and it all "just worked".

Thank you, Dan!

I really liked the "man trap" revolving door to the data center, which no-one uses because you can't carry gear in and use it. But it sure looks impressive.

[ related topics: Photography security Embedded Devices - Linux ]

3d printers have hit the $500 price point.

[ related topics: Graphics Graphic Design ]

US CERT: Vulnerability Note VU#281284 Samsung Printer firmware contains a backdoor administrator account

Woot! Samsung printers and some Dell printers manufactured by Samsung have a hardcoded back-door that allows attacking other devices. Get a hostile machine on your network, even temporarily, it can bootstrap itself to the printer!

Via, Via.

Where's my firewalling traffic-shaping capable Ethernet switch?

[ related topics: broadband ]

I have a mostly "live and let live" relationship with smokers, but waiting at the bus stop and biking on the MUP are changing that.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Bicycling Public Transportation ]

If you are going to force me to use your SOAP XML server, your API should not dump stack traces, it should give me a nicely formatted SOAP with some error condition/code/description. Yes, I am delusional and have added "is_soap_fault()" code so I can deal with such insanity.

Should a consumer of a production web service be exposed to the internal issues and configurations of your system. Should I know that the code is in c:\\webapp\.... and see the whole cascading gibberish dump or should I simply get the error: "Something bad happened, please contact XYZ with error code 9999".

But my real question is: If the initial error is "Can not connect to the database server", why did your application attempt multiple functions after that break?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Web development Content Management ]

RT @BrianHonan:

Think Stuxnet was scary? Just heard the Siemens Plcs targeted by Stuxnet are used in most breweries, stuff just got real :)

Since I just got back from an air trip: http://www.gocomics.com/garymarkstein/2010/11/24

[ related topics: Travel ]

One of those "duh, why didn't I think of it?" brilliant ideas that's completely obvious in retrospect: Project Gazelle is a firearm that lets you tag your target in your view, and then next time the crosshairs cross the target it fires. Basically, you get to virtually make the shot a couple of times until you get it right, then just wave the gun 'til you get it in the right place.

Presumably, from the HUD, it also includes doing wind calculations.

Looks like their web site will be at http://tracking-point.com/ . A few other references:

• http://www.thefirearmblog.com/...point-precision-guided-firearms/
• http://soldiersystems.net/2012.../project-gazelle-tag-track-xact/

Via Kottke

[ related topics: Weblogs Movies Robotics Embedded Devices Guns ]

Anamorphic optical illusions (YouTube). Download and print your own Rubik's Cube, tape, and shoe.

Via Kottke

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Shoes Embedded Devices ]

We've had steam punk and diesel punk, but no '70s brushed chrome and (faux) dark wood paneling. So I lay claim here to "polyester punk"!

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Hey, Medley is updating again! Thanks, Lyn!

Floppy Table.

Via JWZ, in which mhd says:

I just would have to fight of my friends to prevent them from drilling a hole in the top left corner.

[ related topics: Weblogs Furniture ]

NASA has found water ice on molten Mercury, as well as organic molecules. If the main ingredients of life can be found in the Dantean environment like that, surely we will find them in abundance in more hospitable places, like some of the exoplanets we are daily discovering. The issue may not be whether or not life exists off-Earth, but rather how much exists.

Carl Sagan would have been so happy.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

City Council meeting announcement states that it will be televised. Apparently no revolution is expected. #losingmyselfonskagandskip

Re http://haighteration.com/2012/...oks-are-just-mocking-us-now.html , it should be noted that YellowPagesOptOut.com does not work.

[ related topics: Books Work, productivity and environment ]

Taking the storm seriously: sounds like generators in the office park are running pre-emptively.

[ related topics: Sports ]

Is there a "technical cliff" analog to the "fiscal cliff" when an organization accumulates too much technical debt?

California Youth Crime Plunges to All-Time Low (PDF). From the the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. I clicked through 'cause the Boing Boing link mentioned that it correlated the all-time low in youth crime to marijuana decriminalization, which it does, but it's also noteworthy that:

In the 1950s, youth arrests equivalent to 8.7% of California’s total youth population were recorded; today, that figure is 3.4%. Youth crime declines have been more substantial since the 1970s. Total arrests, felonies, rape, homicide, property crime, and misdemeanor/status offense rates now stand at the lowest levels ever reliably tabulated. Only robbery and assault rates are higher today than 60 years ago, though still lower today than at any time since 1967.

However, these numbers may understate the youth crime decline. Many youth offenses may have been hidden in the past, due to historic data collection limitations. An average of 90,000 arrests per year in the 1950s, were reported as “delinquent tendencies,” a broad category that included various violent, property, drug, and status offenses. In contrast, only 22,000 juvenile arrests were classified as status offenses in 2011; all other arrests were reported as specific criminal offenses.

This is particularly apropos 'cause I'd just followed a link from my Twitter stream to this interview with author Andrew Vachss that began:

Zola: Today, high school massacres are common. But that wasn’t the case 40 years ago. When you were writing the novel, did you think it might be too shocking for publishers?

And instantly all my bullshit detectors triggered and I closed the tab.

[ related topics: Drugs Children and growing up Health History Writing Law Law Enforcement California Culture ]

This is mesmerisingly cool, and lays out the forecast for our next week fairly well:

Charlene asked if Fresno was going to get hit as hard as we in the North Bay are. Check out the way that firehose just washes down the coast as the surges come in over the next week!

Retrieved from http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/a...vers/img/gfs_fcst_ar_current.gif at just after 8AM PST today.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography California Culture ]

Thinking it's time to set up a network of shadow accounts that robotically process "Re-Tweet/Like this to win" messages.

[ related topics: broadband ]

The day after Thanksgiving, Charlene and I went to downtown Petaluma to have dinner at Avatars while we played Scrabble, and were amazed at how dead it was downtown.

Time says that "Black Friday" sales were down 1.8% over 2011.

Wall Street Journal says that "Cyber Monday" sales were up 17% over last year.

If I considered myself more of an analyst I'd try to track down absolute numbers for those and see if it looked like there were correlation in that shift...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Heinlein Scrabble Economics ]

Okay, this is way cooler than it has any right to be: BRAVEROBOTICS 1/12 scale Transform Robot Version7.2 (YouTube video).

The company is Brave Robotics. They have ten of them for sale:

Price: Ask

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Embedded Devices Video hubris ]

Charlene wants to do something for Christmas. I have trouble getting in the spirit, but Steve in Marin's LumberJocks blog has an entry on making wooden snowflakes, I haven't watched the video yet but maybe we can adapt his techniques to work with the Festool saw rather than the tablesaw...

And he said he stole it from Spheramid woodworks (Facebook page).

[ related topics: Weblogs Movies Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Video Woodworking Festool ]

More like this

[ related topics: Photography Current Events ]