Flutterby™! From 2014-02-02 to 2014-02-28

The headline says 102 year old cyclist sets world record, but let's be fair, it was the record for the over 100 class, riding a bicycle for an hour at 16.7MPH.

Dude pulled a Metric Century (100km) in 4:17:27. What have you done recently?

[ related topics: Current Events Pedal Power Bicycling ]

RT Avi Drissman ‏@avidrissman:

A fun flashback to the days when a 4E71 in the right place solved every problem in the world.

http://avi.drissman.com/2014/02/lobotomizing-quicken-2007.html

Link is to an article about changing two bytes in the Mac Quicken 2007 so that he could import QFX files from financial services companies that have only paid the Windows tax to Intuit.

[ related topics: Politics Microsoft Macintosh ]

RT Elf Sternberg ‏@elfsternberg

Every middle school kid in America ought to read this. But America won't let them: http://www.newstatesman.com/vo...-porn-stars-guide-sexual-consent

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture tolkien Douglas Adams ]

It is Superb Owl Sunday, so may I present one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3EOl4Eikv4 #superbowl

[ related topics: Movies Sports ]

Oh wait, that wasn't the Superb Owl I meant to post, this is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyw6_lu3Y7Q #superbowl

[ related topics: Movies Sports ]

Some level-headed observations on California's water situation: http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/...eep-it-together-you-can-do-this/

[ related topics: California Culture ]

Not terribly fond of this cabinet's construction quality, will probably re-do at some point

[ related topics: Photography Machinery Fabrication Model Building Home Improvement ]

Shadow forwarded along Weekend Diversion: How did the bicycle cross the highway? The world’s first suspended traffic circle… for bicycles!, about the "Hovenring" suspension bridge/bike traffic circle in the Netherlands.

Draws on Twisted Sifter: This is the World’s First Suspended Bicycle Roundabout

[ related topics: Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Georgia Lawyer's Local Super Bowl Ad Is Batshit Amazing.

Via pretty much everybody, and via Metafilter.

[ related topics: Law Sports ]

Well... The untested boondoggle that is V2V appears to have some traction. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out; people I know in this space have mentioned a heads-up on this press conference this morning, I'm going to be fascinated to see what was really said and what it means practically: U.S. may mandate 'talking' cars by early 2017.

A rule mandating so-called vehicle-to-vehicle communication technology should be put in place before President Barack Obama leaves office in early 2017, DOT officials said on Monday.

"When these technologies are adapted across the fleet, the results could be nothing short of revolutionary for roadway safety," said David Friedman, acting administrator of the DOT's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Conferences ]

Good Samaritan Backfire (Or How I Ended up in Solitary After Calling 911 for Help).

This is certainly consistent with other reports I've heard and read of the San Francisco Police Department, and the SFPD's behavior reflects poorly on police generally.

[ related topics: Bay Area Law Enforcement California Culture ]

Work questions which get less ambiguous the further you get from San Francisco: "You don't have a leatherman, do you?"

[ related topics: Bay Area Work, productivity and environment California Culture ]

Dear @LinkedIn, if you don't let me see connections & profiles of people asking to connect, I can't filter spammers easily.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Podcasters & musical performers: Square Dance caller school has suggested I bring my own mic. Recommendations?

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

The Red Hot Chili Peppers didn't even bother to plug in their instruments for the Super Bowl Half-Time Show.

Update: Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea Explains Band's 'Miming' at the Super Bowl.

[ related topics: Food Sports ]

RT Kyle Machulis ‏@qDot

Cancel GDC. Shut down the industry. Video games are over. We cannot improve on this. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/02/04/goat-simulator-game/

The link is to Rock Paper Shotgun: In A Nanny State: Goat Simulator Alpha.

It's a tech demo for some sort of physics engine. The second YouTube video is, I think, the funnier one. Goat Simulator 1st Alpha Gameplay (YouTube), Goat Simulator - 2nd Alpha Gameplay (how to ruin a party) (YouTube).

[ related topics: Games Movies Machinery Video ]

Net Neutrality article in the local Pulse where I get a couple of good quotes in. Thanks Rich Bailey! The kewl thing is, we sat around for 3+ hours having a great time, and Rich turned it into a story!

[ related topics: Quotes Interactive Drama ]

Hell yes! The Stranger: Sheriff Fires Cop Who Threatened to Arrest Me for Taking Photos of Cops.

Cheers to King County sheriff John Urquhart for taking the right stand:

"Your ill-advised actions also play to some of the most basic fears among some citizens, which is that a police officer may indiscriminately exercise his or her power in violation of their rights," Urquharts discipline letter continues. He explains people fear that "in the event of a complaint, the officer will just deny the allegations and 'circle the wagons' with his or her fellow officers with the expectation they will take care of their own. In a matter of minutes, your actions violated the trust that we, as a department, spend years trying to build and maintain."

[ related topics: Photography Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Archival ]

Sports on Earth.com: Is the Super Bowl really a boost to host cities?

On the other, you have the nation's sports economists, who say the actual number is a fair bit lower. Like, maybe, zero. "There still remains no ex post evidence of an economic impact," says University of South Florida professor Philip Porter, almost audibly sighing over email since, as someone who's been studying this topic for more than a decade, he gets the same question every year at this time. "Super Bowl attendees simply don't buy much that the local economy sells."

[ related topics: Current Events Beer Sports Education Economics ]

Polishing my rewrite of Perl static web site manager in C++. Floored by the speed difference. Now questioning why I ever liked Perl.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source hubris ]

RT Trevor Timm ‏@trevortimm:

“DDOS and hacking is illegal, please cease and desist,” GCHQ told to Anonymous, as GCHQ DDoS'ed and hacked them. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/in...hackers-snowden-docs-show-n21361

Britain's legal system has long been fucked up, it's part of why the colonies rebelled, but this is another example of discovering that if we can't tell the good guys from the bad guys by the rules they follow, well, then, it gets harder and harder to tell who the good guys are.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama History Law Current Events ]

"Crocodile Magritte" is the first T-shirt in a while that I've wanted. A lot.

[ related topics: Clothing ]

RT Greg Sargent ‏@ThePlumLineGS:

Journalism: "Okay, one side may be flagrantly lying, but the other side is on the defensive.""

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

The Net Neutrality wars haver begun: Verizon is throttling AWS. http://davesblog.com/blog/2014...ory-to-wage-war-against-netflix/

[ related topics: Weblogs History Work, productivity and environment ]

PsyBlog: Intense World: Autistic Brains Create 42% More Information at Rest is a riff on Information gain in the brain's resting state: A new perspective on autism, José L. Pérez Velázquez and Roberto F. Galán.

Further support of the "intense world" theory of autism.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Yeah, y'all deserve a hot air balloon from my ride to work this morning

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Yeah, y'all deserve a hot air balloon from my ride to work this morning. Take 2

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

Q&A: The Woman Debunking Myths About Sex Work:

“Going back to the Berlin World Cup in 2006, we have eight years of data to show that for all these major sporting events, there isn’t a major uptick in trafficking. There is a major uptick in the media about fear of trafficking,” says Melissa Gira Grant, the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, which comes out from Verso in March. A former sex worker, activist, and organizer, Grant’s writing takes the media to task for their role in perpetuating harmful misconceptions about sex work. “It’s such a macrocosm of all of the terrible reporting around sex work and all of the fears around trafficking that become focused around sex workers,” she says of recent coverage pegged to the Super Bowl. 

[ related topics: Books Erotic Sexual Culture virus Writing Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Sports ]

I have been pondering how to do something like this, and will be deploying my web sites under it when it happens: BitTorrent Sync Used to Create Decentralized Web Browser:

Called SyncNet, Minardi’s tool is built on BitTorrent Sync, the powerful Dropbox-like software launched last year by BitTorrent Inc. While in its basic form Sync is generally used for syncing files and folders between machines, friends and co-workers, in its SyncNet application it is used to store and distribute HTML, images and other web content.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Derek Lowe at Corante: In The Pipeline: The Evidence Piles Up: Antioxidant Supplements Are Bad For You.

So in short, James Watson appears to be right when he says that reactive oxygen species are your friends. This is all rather frustrating when you consider the nonstop advertising for antioxidant supplements and foods, especially for any role in preventing cancer. It looks more and more as if high levels of extra antioxidants can actually give people cancer, or at the very least, help along any cancerous cells that might arise on their own.

A good run-down on the various evidence that suggests that a little oxidation is good for the cell.

[ related topics: Archival ]

Your code may be elegant, but mine f***ing works.

I think much of my recent disagreement with Perl comes from people trying to build "elegant" solutions in it. We end up with side effects and overloaded behaviors and code that has some sort of intellectual elegance to it, but is just a freakin' nightmare to read and maintain.

C++ has some of that, but it's far less celebrated in the culture. Going back to C++ and being able to easily see what and how is causing the failure (and, you understand, I'm saying this about C++) is opening my eyes to just how bad it has gotten.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Sociology California Culture hubris ]

RT NSA Public Relations @NSA_PR:

Our agents are not "script kiddies," they're "precompiled third party security tool aficionados"

You guys, at the 1989 1889 Trans-Mississippi & International Exposition in Omaha, there were ostrich drawn carriages. Ostrich buggies! Why do we not have ostrich buggies today?

[ related topics: Photography ]

Utiliflex has a new website. Not really a big deal, except that this time Joe and Omar did it and no "spikey haired web dudes" were injured or abused in the process. I am proud of them. Weebly.com provided the tools and for your typical EveryFuckingWebsite.com type of company website. Other than reminding them about Inkscape and The Noun Project for some graphical elements, all I had to do was point DNS. They were impressed with the tools and left me alone. Weebly deserves some link love.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Bug of the day: 0.00000000000000711 became 7.11E-15 became $7.11. Lessons: never use floating point for accounting; typed languages are good

[ related topics: Boats ]

Typed languages sometimes feel like straitjackets, but that's only because you're the person being protected by those restraints.

The San Francisco Bay Area hasn't been this excited about 3-5" in a looong time. http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/...king-rain-forecast-for-bay-area/

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture ]

San Jose police could tap into volunteer residents' private security cameras under new proposal (Via CNet's inflammatory version). The headline is a little misleading, it reads more like it's one grandstanding city council member turned mayoral candidate who wants to set up a registry whereby people can offer up to police a way to view their surveillance video, and the police are thinking this is going to be a nightmare:

A San Jose police spokeswoman said the department is interested in the idea but still is exploring its merits, including potential costs and privacy concerns.

"We also would have to factor in how such a system would be weighed against other pressing priorities for our limited time and resources," Sgt. Heather Randol said.

[ related topics: Photography Privacy Invention and Design Bay Area Current Events Law Enforcement Video ]

You lost me at "infographic": one paragraph worth of text spread over 3 pages in garish colors.

RT Alan Swan ‏@alanswan

Yes I just made that sound in my head too... http://pic.twitter.com/nVtemvGybf

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Net Culture Embedded Devices Clothing Archival ]

Every time the Google Play store offers me free music I take it: why "Thug Motivation 101" just finished downloading to my phone.

[ related topics: Music ]

That NBC Sochi "your mobile device will be hacked" was 100% bogus: http://blog.erratasec.com/2014...100-fraudulent.html#.UvUxPfFw1Og

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Oh, this is a brilliant episode in the annals of bullshit marketing: RT Helen Burt ‏@PGE_Helen

@PGE4Me customers in 2013 experienced the fewest electric service interruptions in company history. http://ow.ly/i/4uDxF

Yep. We're in the midst of a record drought. 2013 was the driest year in San Francisco Bay Area history. No rain because we had no storms to bring them, and storms are what cause service interruptions.

But keep on crowin' about it, guys. And I'm glad you didn't blow up any neighborhoods with poorly maintained gas lines.

[ related topics: Bay Area Consumerism and advertising California Culture Marketing ]

Stored for future retrieval: Cauliflower crust pizza, 'cause sometimes we muck about with gluten free stuff.

Hey, Rahinah Ibrahim's lawsuit was successful and U.S. District Judge William Alsup has ruled that she should be removed from the "no fly" list.

The judge said the U.S. government must clear up Ibrahim’s records and tell her whether she is back on the terrorist watch-list — information that he blacked out of his public ruling while dropping a few hints (for example, describing the government’s concession that Ibrahim “poses no threat to air safety or national security and should never have been placed on the no-fly list”). He also cited the government’s own admissions, in public audits, that its watch lists have been full of errors and misidentifications. But he said the government still has the authority to deny a visa to Ibrahim, after reviewing her forthcoming application, and there’s not much that the courts could do about it.

[ related topics: Weblogs Movies moron Law Law Enforcement ]

The folks running Whitehouse.gov have all of those petitions I've signed. Why keep sending email updates they know just piss me off? #vrm

[ related topics: Sports ]

When I took my current job, I was really optimistic. I had enjoyed writing Perl for my various personal sites, I had done a bit of Perl professionally back in the .com boom, and I thought that this was a chance to explore a language that allowed tremendous productivity in a professional setting.

Now, about two years later, I want nothing to do with the language. I'm rewriting the system which generates the static HTML at Flutterby.net in C++ (and quite enjoying both the typed language and the performance gains), I'm pushing towards other back-end technologies, and I'm trying to get into the habit of using other languages for my little utility scripts, just so I don't keep falling down into the Perl well.

What can I point to as the source of this turn-around? This isn't by any means exhaustive, but, in no particular order...

Perl is notorious for "TIMTOWTDI", "there is more than one way to do it". This makes Perl a wonderfully expressive language, but it also means that there's tremendous cognitive load associated with different coding styles. Consider a multi-line string. I have seen:

$a = <<EOF;

This is a multi-line

string

EOF

and

= "This is a multi-line\nstring\n"

and

= "This is a multi-line\n"

."string\n"

and

join('', map { "\n" } (qq/This is a multi-line/, qq/string/));

Unfortunately, that last one shows up far more often than it should.

Perl has no type safety, and the type coercion rules must be approached carefully. We've all made the goof of accidentally confusing scalar and list context (Although not all of us have been interrogated by the police after making that mistake, Flutterby link here). Of course smart coders will explicitly cast scalar() around code that they mean to be scalar, just to make the point clear, until someone doesn't and everything goes to hell.

I mentioned earlier this week about where 0.00000000000000711 became 7.11E-15 became $7.11. I'm not sure what the actual chain that led to this process looked like, but I can imagine. And, of course, the fact that there isn't strict typing means that the general edict of "currency must be in pennies" goes quickly out the door as soon as you get some guy with a CS degree on your team who hasn't thought deeply about what a divide means and not explicitly casting back to an int, or saying "Let me just round to two digits with a /^(\d*\.\d\d)/".

The standard solution to this sort of typelessness is to throw Moose at it. This feels really good, at first, but then the side effects kick in, and you're looking at a stack dump and thinking "how the heck did we get there?" and then the performance penalties bite you, and then you're back to "no, really, let's just put it in a hash and be done with it."

And, of course, Perl's system for references for complex data structures is basically like C pointers. Which is awesome if you're a C coder (I am), but it's hard to explain this stuff to people who learned programming in college.

Perl has no good SOAP environment. There are basically 3 different SOAP environments on CPAN. All of them are buggy in their own unique ways. You will end up sniffing the wire or otherwise hacking deep in the bowels of them to end up debugging interop problems, usually with people on the other end who are completely clueless because they're using Java and SOAP just works.

Dist::Zilla. Yeah, it's awesome. Until you can't figure out how to tell it to not include that one dependency which you can't install on the ancient production machine and which is only used in tests.

Speaking of which, Ruby has gotten really good about versionitis and packaging specific versions of libraries for a deployment environment. C and C++ are pretty damned good about this, either with static linking or with careful thought. local::lib is not a solution nearly as often as you'd like, and having version dependent library trees scattered throughout your deployment environment plays hell on security upgrades.

SSL and the various Perl sockets environments. Hate. Hate. Hate.

Character encoding. 'nuff said. If you're gonna fuck it up that badly, gimme back my goddamned pointer to bytes in memory and let me figure it out.

Many of these issues are exacerbated by the particular environment I find myself in, but my impression is that the Perl 6 wankery is making its way more and more back into Perl 5, with more emphasis on hidden side effects and "elegant" code which would be awesome if it works, but makes it completely impossible to figure out what the code is doing by looking at it.

And then we're in debugging and we'd be better off back in gdb and C, because there's just less abstraction to muck with.

[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Books Perl Open Source Nature and environment Software Engineering Theater & Plays Writing Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Television Heinlein Currency Education Maps and Mapping Databases Archival hubris ]

NBC edits out IOC anti-discrimination statement from opening ceremony. Didn't think it was possible for me to loathe NBC more than the International Olympic Committee, but I guess I learned something.

[ related topics: Sports Fashion ]

Canada Fires back at Russian ban on gay propaganda

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

French journalist "hacks" govt by inputting correct URL, later fined $4,000+: A Google search turned up public files that Olivier Laurelli is accused of publishing.

Careful with wget, folks. The authorities are clamping down.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

Elf Sternberg muses on "Dark Artists" in the vein of "Dark Programmers". Got some thinking to do here...

We have an phrase in the programming world, the Dark Programmer. The term comes from the analogy with dark matter: we know it exists because it exert gravitational force on our galaxy, but other than that we have no idea what it is. A dark programmer is like dark matter: we know they exist because someone keeps writing Java-based actuarial software for insurance companies, banks, hospitals, and other large institutions, but these aren't the sort of people who post to GitHub or Bitbucket, don't contribute to Stack Overflow, and generally aren't interested in advancing, or even learning much about, the state of the art. They just want to do their job for the day, go home, and not think too much about what they do.

[ related topics: tolkien Software Engineering Writing Art & Culture Heinlein Education ]

Practicing with square dance checkers. Amazing for how many moves I depend on cues from fellow dancers rather than knowing definitions cold.

Rafe has some musings on how to write about security, but I think there's also a larger message here that needs some spreading about journalism generally. If the New York Times is just blindly repeating sources without applying any critical thinking, and they are, then they're just echoing the already loudest voices.

And we've long established that popularity occurs for reasons of social structure that probably aren't things I want to be supporting.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Journalism and Media New York ]

Shadow forwarded along Wired: Mutant Scooter From India Is a Pickup Truck on Two Wheels, a headline which had me thinking "cargo bike with a motor", but is about this press release from Hero Motors that announces, among other scooters, the RNT turbocharged diesel-electric hybrid scooter...

The RNT also has options galore. First of all, you can add an accessory oversize generator which along with the diesel engine allows you to deliver extra electrical power for work (or play) at a remote site. The optional removable LED lamp in front of the dash can be unclipped and re-aimed to light up wherever you are, so you can carry on into the night.

the "hybrid" option is provided by an electric motor in the front wheel, so it's conventional drive by default, two wheel drive in harsher conditions, and front wheel drive in urban conditions.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Machinery Bicycling ]

Gloria Brame posted her Keynote Address to the Leather Leadership Conference 2009 to Facebook (she had, of course, previously posted it to her blog, and I think it's worth a read.

On my Facebook feed, a 20 something acquaintance recently posted a "hey, any of you guys bi and wanna hang out?" Now I was a particularly repressed 20 something, but I'm trying to imagine that message in a generically public space in which people of all ages (ie: his parents, us, his peers) interacted back in the late '80s or early '90s, back before the Internet started connecting sub-groups and revealing critical masses of people.

Now, Charlene and I square dance with a predominantly gay culture, and in looking at the history of that community I see it forming as a "separate but 'equal'" sort of community under the extreme prejudices of the '80s, where callers who called for a gay club would likely not be invited back to their gay clubs.

I think Gloria's got some good musings on what it means to transition a community from the "other", the dangerous closeted spaces, losing large numbers to HIV, into something that's still got its own identity, but that feels inclusive.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Weblogs Space & Astronomy Sociology California Culture Net Culture Community Conferences ]

San Jose Mercury News: California Drought: Database shows big difference between water guzzlers and sippers draws on a state database that they don't have a direct link to, but that has per-capita water consumption numbers for various areas. Some interesting stuff there, and one serious WTF:

One factor that has kept urban water use high around Sacramento and much of the Central Valley is that many of the homes didn't have water meters until recently. They now are gradually being installed after former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a 2004 law mandating meters statewide by 2025.

Seriously? It took until 2004 to mandate this in California? WTF, politics?

[ related topics: Politics Bay Area Astronomy Current Events Television California Culture Databases ]

Shortly, pictures of teachers asking for retweets to show students about internet privacy will compromise 68% of all net traffic.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Privacy Net Culture ]

RT Julian Simpson ‏@JulianSimpson

Dear people in suits: if you were THAT important, you wouldn't be wearing a uniform to work and you wouldn't have to be there this early.

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

Evanston Illinois is a leafy suburb just north of Chicago along the Lake Michigan shore. It is the home of Northwestern University (my alma mater, Speech 1973)and more than a century of town vs. gown animosity. The latest twist is a classic NIMBY fight over a new hotel in downtown Evanston, which is feared will bring in the new nomadic scourge, "transient academics" Your town may be next!

[ related topics: Politics security Education ]

Doing testing on a process. Had no idea that it was running this long. Now thinking I have to look forward to optimizations for scaling.

[ related topics: Sports ]

Waxed moustache, pointed beard, camo fedora. We have reached peak Sebastopol.

More in the "don't let the door hit your ass on the way out" dept: Previous estimates of the America's Cup cost to San Francisco low by a factor of 2: http://www.sfgate.com/sports/a...-F-more-than-doubles-5222510.php

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture ]

An Iridium Go! (Satellite Uplink) might be added to the travel bag when it comes out, and makes me think even more about why am I where I am. The more we experiment with a mobile lifestyle, the more it seems to fit. I come to the office for use of some insane screen real-estate, and to be socially interrupted. Even in the office, most of my real work is via email and chat. Mounting a thunderbolt display or two properly might take some doing, but it is possible.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Call your senators and congresspeople and tell them to stop the surveillance state: https://thedaywefightback.org/

A good case that Comcast is throttling Netflix: http://mattvukas.com/2014/02/1...-throttling-netflix-infuriating/

[ related topics: Law ]

Obi Wan comes clean, or what if he'd told the truth to Luke Skywalker?

An open letter from a Death Star architect, the guy who designed the exhaust port flaw speaks out.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Star Wars Space & Astronomy Architecture Aviation - Helicopters ]

Banner ad: "MongoDB just got better!". Uh... aim higher, guys. (Actually, that's not fair, I'm using Mongo for syslog and it's pretty cool)

I'm not generally a fan of state-sponsored sporting events, and the International Olympic Committee makes my skin crawl, so I've generally got nothing but schadenfreude over the beating that the current Winter Olympics in Soche is taking in the media, but not paying too much attention to it.

But this? This is brilliant: The Onion: Lolo Jones Becomes First American To Be Objectified In Both Winter And Summer Events.

[ related topics: Food Journalism and Media Sports ]

RT penryu ‏@penryu:

OH: "I have filled in the captcha incorrectly 12 times and now I am crying because I'm a robot and this is a horrible way to find out."

[ related topics: Robotics ]

RT Paul Palubicki ‏@paplikaplik:

And now the system is using tech to subvert and control us. We need a bit more revolution and a lot less "disruption"

RT John Robb ‏@johnrobb

Will an online presence harm your future prosperity? Some people think so. They are wrong. If you don't have one, you look sketchy.

It's obvious, but at least people are starting to realize it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

How Much Does It Cost to Be Ambassador to Hungary?

[ related topics: Current Events ]

So "Freedom Industries" and now "Patriot Coal"? Sounds like the first refuge of the scoundrel to me

[ related topics: Privacy Civil Liberties Government ]

Comcast data breach. But its okay, if you had a Comcast account your payment info was already in the hands of a hostile party.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Realization: Petaluma's 101 Casino is at *5151* Montero Way. So just across the way from a 72 hour involuntary psychiatric hold. #5150

[ related topics: Gambling ]

Working out Chain Reaction from all positions

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Working out Chain Reaction from all positions...

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Petaluma360 looks at the lack of options for treating mental illness: 'These people need help, not jail' http://www.petaluma360.com/art...0219911/1362/community?p=7&tc=pg

[ related topics: Community ]

Yes, that's Taminations playing on the floor. Square dance nerds.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Interesting: Godot is an MIT licensed game engine.

Looks like it's totally something to send the next "how do I program games" questioner after.

[ related topics: Games Software Engineering Machinery ]

One from Shadow: Why bicycles do not fall: Arend Schwab at TEDxDelft (YouTube).

And to spoiler it (it takes a little while for him to get there): it's not castoring trail, and it's not gyroscopic effect. And in the end he shows how his students created a self-stable rear steering bicycle.

[ related topics: Movies Television Pedal Power Bicycling ]

NY Times: Vast Study Casts Doubts on Value of Mammograms. The study is BMJ: Twenty five year follow-up for breast cancer incidence and mortality of the Canadian National Breast Screening Study: randomised screening trial:

... During the entire study period, 3250 women in the mammography arm and 3133 in the control arm had a diagnosis of breast cancer, and 500 and 505, respectively, died of breast cancer. Thus the cumulative mortality from breast cancer was similar between women in the mammography arm and in the control arm (hazard ratio 0.99, 95% confidence interval 0.88 to 1.12). After 15 years of follow-up a residual excess of 106 cancers was observed in the mammography arm, attributable to over-diagnosis.'

So early detection might not influence mortality, and appears to cause unnecessary treatment.

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design ]

http://chaoscontrolled123.tumb...ere-looking-at-hieronymus-boschs

Luke and I were looking at Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights and discovered, much to our amusement, music written upon the posterior of one of the many tortured denizens of the rightmost panel of the painting which is intended to represent Hell. I decided to transcribe it into modern notation, assuming the second line of the staff is C, as is common for chants of this era.

so yes this is LITERALLY the 600-years-old butt song from hell

[ related topics: Music Gardening ]

Planning Love.org, Valentine's Day cards

... for planners, architects, urban designers, landscape architects, transportation engineers, and those who love them.

The Little Girl from the 1981 LEGO Ad is All Grown Up, and She’s Got Something to Say.

The news van kit struck her as really quite different. She does not have children, so the change in LEGOs represented by the Friends line was startling: “In 1981,” explains Giordano, “LEGOs were ‘Universal Building Sets’ and that’s exactly what they were…for boys and girls. Toys are supposed to foster creativity. But nowadays, it seems that a lot more toys already have messages built into them before a child even opens the pink or blue package. In 1981, LEGOs were simple and gender-neutral, and the creativity of the child produced the message. In 2014, it’s the reverse: the toy delivers a message to the child, and this message is weirdly about gender.”

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Lego Mindstorms ]

Friend is in Santa Clara. What's a good place to meet tomorrow night between there and Petaluma? SF? Sausalito? Make him drive here?

[ related topics: Bay Area Sausalito ]

Whoah, this looks like it might be a way better solution to our file syncing issues than OwnCloud!

FolderSync for Android

... enables simple sync to cloud based storage to and from local folders on the device memory card. It currently support multiple SkyDrive, Copy.com, Dropbox, Dump Truck, SugarSync, Bitcasa, Ubuntu One, Box.net, LiveDrive, HiDrive, Google Docs, NetDocuments, Amazon S3, FTP, FTPS, SFTP, WebDAV or windows share (Samba/CIFS) accounts, and support for more platforms are planned.

SFTP! So just give my home server the phone's keys... I'm likin' this...

[ related topics: Books Microsoft Open Source Machinery ]

I should pimp for my author friends more: Go pre-order a copy of "A Bird On Water Street": http://dulemba.blogspot.com/20...igned-copy-of-bird-on-water.html

[ related topics: Birds ]

RT Kyle Machulis ‏@qDot

"Him" interface for controlling underwear vibrator via Google Voice Recognition by @Vibease http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOxPdnCTTks

...:

Send your moans to google, they process them, then ping your sex toy app to control your vibrator. No problems here. None at all. Nope.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Movies Clothing ]

RT +/- ‏@mr_urf

10 reasons you’ll want to stab me in face by the time you’re halfway through this piece of link bait shit

Mark Evanier remembers Sid Caesar.

Another thing Howie said. He took me once to a lunch group — a bunch of out-of-work actors gathering every Thursday afternoon at Cafe Roma in Beverly Hills. The "cast" was mainly folks who'd worked on Hogan's Heroes, which Howie had directed. As we got there, Robert Clary said, "Sid will be joining us today."

Howie said, "Really? Who are we going to talk to?" Because — and this was one of the big reasons Sid wasn't on TV more — there was no Sid Caesar when he wasn't in character. Give him a role to don, especially a role with a dialect, and no one was funnier. But Sid playing Sid? Nothing.

From the Metafilter thread.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Work, productivity and environment Television ]

Yay! The Petaluma PD busted the asshole who was throwing trash on the streets near Wickersham Park! https://local.nixle.com/alert/5144747/?sub_id=373138

I saw this video about the third option: Jury Nullification which lead to the Wikipedia article: Jury Nullification and a little more reading like: this one and while I knew Juries "did it", I didn't understand the stance officially. All of a sudden I have a little more respect for the power of a jury trial and our legal system.

[ related topics: Law Video Woodworking ]

[ related topics: Photography Archival ]

Okay, this is indeed the best school closing announcement evarrr: Durham Academy's Head of School Michael Ulku-Steiner and Assistant Head of School/Upper School Director Lee Hark announce that there's no school (YouTube).

[ related topics: Children and growing up Movies ]

RT Bill Humphries ‏@whump:

.@ErrantPedant I’m laughing now that movies are using TED talks as a way to introduce the villian and let them monologue.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Language Log: Whom loves ya? looks at Wired: How to Create the Perfect Online Dating Profile, in 25 Infographics and observes that although men who use "whom" get 31% more contacts from female respondents:

But listen, guys, here's the point: none of this complicated crap makes the slightest bit of difference! Wired didn't check the syntactic contexts, they just counted word-form tokens!

It simply doesn't matter whether you use whom correctly!

I suspect this is also behind the rampant "I/me" misusage.

[ related topics: Graphic Design ]

Somona County problems: RT @murphstahoe: "One problem with living in Wine Country. Wife completely unimpressed with "Trip to Wine Country" for Valentines Day"

https://twitter.com/murphstahoe/status/434033266903875584

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits Travel Marriage ]

Email from my local bookstore with staff picks: several books that wouldn't have gotten dead trees versions if not for their ebook success.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Nature and environment ]

RT Molly Ostertag ‏@MollyOstertag

Well, I was working and then I was drawing these sexy Photoshop pun valentines, I really don't know what happened http://pic.twitter.com/dkVlzIQ0IY

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Robotics Work, productivity and environment Embedded Devices ]

Extracting telemetry information being broadcast from a news helicopter from noise in the audio stream on a YouTube video.

[ related topics: Music Current Events Video Aviation - Helicopters ]

If I ever nefariously acquired the credentials to someone's Amazon account, I would just find free books & send them to their kindle reader.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books ]

Golden Gate, turning goldener

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area ]

Color appearing

[ related topics: Photography Gambling ]

Sutro Tower sunset

[ related topics: Photography ]

More writer pimping: A friend mentioned yesterday that he pulls out and re-reads @jsundmanus occasionally: http://www.wetmachine.com/acts-of-the-apostles/

[ related topics: Writing ]

Dear Android "share" tool: I don't know where you got that picture for that email address, but that's not even close enough to be wrong.

Livin' la vida?

[ related topics: Photography ]

Careful with those "supplements", folks... Is the breast cancer drug tamoxifen being sold as a bodybuilding dietary supplement? (BMJ 2014; 348 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g1476). Summary: Yes.

... Often the substances are not listed on the labelling, and products may be marketed as “natural,” exploiting the belief that they are safer and healthier options. In other cases, such as with Esto Suppress, only an obscure reference is made to the substance, such as a chemical name. Most users will be unaware that they are taking these substances. ...

[ related topics: Health ]

RT Sarah Jeong ‏@sarahjeong:

💘You have the key to my heart💘 but not the private key, that's sloppy security

Whoah: Sexually transmitted food poisoning exists, and it involves seafood.

We don’t know why anyone would want to have sex while experiencing stomach pains and diarrhea, but it seemed like a good idea 25 years ago, when two guys went out for a seafood dinner while tearing it up in the Bahamas. Shortly after their meal, they started experiencing symptoms of food poisoning, symptoms that they passed on to their wives through sexual intercourse. According to an entry in Clinical Toxicology, the men had ingested a toxin called ciguatera, which was passed on to their wives through their sperm.

And now you have your obligatory VD (no, it doesn't stand for "Valentine's Day" post for February 14^th).

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Food Marriage Model Building ]

Today I learned that "polyestrous" is not a trait of leisure suits.

That's kinda freaky...

Ages ago, I implemented some code to show referrer links on Flutterby entries. T.C. used this to make an infamous entry the #2 result on Google for "French Military Victories", and we all giggled, then the spammers hit it, and I took it out.

Then I implemented trackbacks, and the spammers hit it, and I took it out.

Then I said "well, I feel pretty good about the people who run the web sites listed in the OPML file of my RSS feed reader, why don't I just run through that list once a day, and link back to inbound links from there?"

So I did. It's over there on the right, below the comments (and on the individual link), and there's some design issues I'd like, but...

I have also tried various attempts to create more internal linkage on Flutterby. I built the wiki portion (which now largely sits unused), have tried to manually link to old entries.

Today I realized that, because I have my various RSS feeds in my RSS Syndicator, I have an internal link tracking system. That appears to be working.

It's kinda freaky when code sneaks up on me like that, when I suddenly realize that I've implemented functionality that I didn't know I had. But it's also kinda cool...

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

Duke student works as a porn actress to pay tuition, discovers that, largely, other Duke students are misogynist assholes:

“If I could do it again, I don’t know if I would’ve done porn. I don’t know if I would’ve gone to Duke,” said Lauren. “After how I’ve been treated, I sometimes find myself wondering…. I had scholarships to other schools where I would’ve had to pay nothing. But I chose Duke because I thought it would be a great place for me—I thought that I belonged here.”

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Movies Space & Astronomy Aviation - Helicopters ]

Frank Gehry Is Still the World's Worst Living Architect:

... What's particularly frustrating about Gehry's career is that he's somehow meant to be cool, a kind of sci-fi architect for the Millennials, a Timothy Leary of CAD; but he's Guy Fieri, his buildings hair-gelled monsters of advanced spatial douchebaggery.

Via a lot of people, and because shaming starchitects and those who hire them is a public good.

[ related topics: Ziffle Architecture ]

Listening to @strongtowns ep 164, thinking about how a Petaluma sales tax levy would create an externality and information disconnect.

[ related topics: Politics Pop Culture ]

Upcycle old bike parts into Kinky fun.

http://grist.org/list/get-your...toys-made-of-upcycled-bike-tires

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Bicycling ]

Just testing something with a pic from yesterday

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Things gmail gets right: apparently marking every email containing the "word" "sellathon" as spam.

[ related topics: Spam Monty Python ]

Tree branches and overcast

[ related topics: Photography ]

I like "Basic Auth" (over SSL), especially when it's 4am and I'm trying to kludge some DES mycrpt cookie magic into a bogus authentication method so someone can use an overdesigned <form> style login page "like everyone else". The idea of trying to convey authentication information across websites (pseudo securely) via cookies and server to server cross checks is insane.

[ related topics: Net Culture Clowns ]

Craigslist fail: PEX tubing for sale, the picture shows it lying in the sunlight (you're supposed to minimize PEX UV exposure).

[ related topics: Television ]

Another from Shadow: Dramatic Tackle Arrest Of Fleeing Suspect On Bike Crash Police In Sacramento! (YouTube).

[ related topics: Movies Law Enforcement Bicycling ]

Waiting on pore filler to dry, mahogany parts for the kitchen

[ related topics: Photography ]

Yay! We like getting notices that a lien has come off the deed!

Replaced the sign at Wischemann Hall

[ related topics: Photography ]

io9: Learn how Hollywood screwed over the VFX industry in Life After Pi is a look at the Hollywood Ending documentary.

Short answer: Movies play on glitz and glamour to get people to work for less than they'd do the work for otherwise.

[ related topics: Movies Work, productivity and environment ]

Gigawipf takes a big array of floppy drives and uses stepper motor noises to play "Tainted Love".

Soft Cell's Marc Almond notices, and adds vocals.

[ related topics: Movies Bay Area ]

Probably going to rework them, but some drawer fronts

[ related topics: Photography ]

<shrug> Sometimes the most surprising thing about events like this is that people are surprised. http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/16/us/snake-salvation-pastor-bite/ This doesn't prove an absence of God but perhaps the pastor had faith in the wrong one? Quetzalcoatl comes to mind but that might be a bit hard to pronounce.

[ related topics: Religion ]

Has anyone already written the code to use the AVR on the Gertboard for the Raspberry Pi as a simple GPIO expansion/demux?

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery ]

I've been a long time occasional listener to Coverville, and have recently been working on learning a bit more about music as I try to find tunes that I really like, that I think might resonate with other square dancers, and is fast enough to dance to (that last part is harder than you'd think).

Anyway, I was talking with Steve Minkin, who is our caller at Redwood Rainbows, and we got to talking about covers. His thesis was that white performers covering black artists usually were more popular, but worse. His "except" was contrasting The Robins version of "Riot in Cellblock #9" (YouTube) with Wanda Jackson's cover of Riot in Cell Block #9 (YouTube).

I can see why he appreciates Jackson, but something about the timing in that Robins version is pretty damned cool. Anyway, always interesting to hear two very different versions of a song we think we knew.

[ related topics: Music Movies Nature and environment Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Education Birds Race ]

Haven't got your fill of techno-babble about privacy and security: Forbes: Former NSA Security Architect Pushes Email Encryption For The Masses:

Will Ackerly’s primary focus with the NSA was developing technology to protect data. “After my experience at NSA I really gained an appreciation for how hard it was for people to protect their data and an acute awareness that there’s a lack of tools out there for individuals to be able to protect their data.”

The product is Virtru, I don't see any source code links on their web page. So, yeah: Do you trust the NSA to make your email secure?

[ related topics: Privacy Open Source Cryptography Architecture ]

Snowden Documents Reveal Covert Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at WikiLeaks and Its Supporters.

And with that the NSA has set back cross-national-boundary rape investigations at least a century. Along with any other credibility for extradition requests.

Via a lot of places, but this MeFi entry, which also mentioned this report from Jacob Applebaum's presentation to the Chaos Communications Congress:

... One case involved Julian Assange's current home at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where visitors were surprised to receive welcome messages from a Ugandan telephone company. It turned out the messages were coming from a foreign base station device installed on the roof, masquerading as a cell tower for surveillance purposes. Appelbaum suspects the GCHQ simply forgot to reformat the device from an earlier Ugandan operation.

Just got a pitch for "Free In Person Cloud Training". Kinda missing the point of the cloud, no?

RT Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63:

If Yanukovych succeeds in using force to crush rights & democracy, perhaps the IOC will consider Ukraine as an Olympic host nation.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Civil Liberties Sports ]

Capital One Contract Update Gives Company Ability To Visit You At Home:

Another curious addition to the Cap One contract reads, “We may modify or suppress caller ID and similar services and identify ourselves on these services in any manner we choose.”

That annoying thing when the packages for a library have different function signatures than the online documentation. Build from source...

[ related topics: Language Books Mathematics ]

So: Web apps for control which dump MQTT messages into a controller for the Raspberry Pi+Gertboard home automation stuff? #suchanerd

Kickstarter for Mercury Revolts, book 4 of the @RobKroese series. Great reads: https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...-book-four-of-the-mercury-series

[ related topics: Books Astronomy ]

Frontier Communications takes over West Virginia landline operations from Verizon, complaints drop nearly 70%, and broadband coverage increases from 62% to 88%.

(Some of this is due to restrictions imposed in Frontier by regulators as a part of the sale.)

[ related topics: broadband Journalism and Media ]

Whoah: Time: Here’s Why Your Netflix Is Slowing Down. About the Netflix vs Verizon peering dispute. That this is going to get worse is not news to the rest of us, but that a high profile mainstream media outlet is finally on to this is.

[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media ]

Well, check that one off the bucket list: RT Tony Robbins ‏@BadRobbins:

@danlyke @PeterGanzevles @jwgoerlich Nothing can be "too" Tony Robbins, no?

Miami of India: The Forgotten Capital of Art Deco.

Partially because I'm looking for inspiration for the design of the built-ins for the office.

[ related topics: Art & Culture Graphic Design ]

Forbes: Medicine Or Mass Murder? Guideline Based on Discredited Research May Have Caused 800,000 Deaths In Europe Over The Last 5 Years.

Y'all may not have seen the recent struggle over unionization of the VW plant in Chattanooga. There was talk of trying to bring in a German style worker's council in the plant, and various parties said that the way to do this in the U.S. was for the workers to join a union. The unionization of the plant was seen as a deciding battle on unions in the South, garnering national mobilization of forces on both sides. U.S. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee said:

"I've had conversations today and based on those am assured that should the workers vote against the UAW, Volkswagen will announce in the coming weeks that it will manufacture its new mid-size SUV here in Chattanooga," said Corker, without saying with whom he had the conversations.

The UAW reported that the majority of the workers at the VW plant had signed union cards, but then the vote failed to ratify the union.

The headline says: "Volkswagen official threatens to block expansion if workers won't unionize", which seems a little off, he's the head of the VW's worker's council, but:

“I can imagine fairly well that another VW factory in the United States, provided that one more should still be set up there, does not necessarily have to be assigned to the South again,” said Bernd Osterloh, a member of VW’s powerful supervisory board and head of VW’s works council.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Invention and Design Current Events Chattanooga ]

Overade foldable bike helmet

Via, with animated GIFs.

[ related topics: Weblogs Animation Bicycling ]

Sixteen billion for Whatsapp is the Facebook management getting all the cash they can out before their stock crashes, no?

[ related topics: Economics ]

"Scan finished: Twitter is safe". Oh Lookout virus scanner for Android, how little you know...

[ related topics: virus Bay Area ]

Violet Impudence has a great look at how U.S. media coverage of the Ukraine revolution sucks so badly. Go. Read.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

How the creator of 'Vampire Diaries' used Kindle Worlds to get back at her publisher.

So Kindle Worlds is a write fan fiction in someone else's universe, Amazon takes care of the licensing details, you can still get paid for your writing thing. LJ Smith was the original author of the Vampire Diaries books, but was fired from the series in 2011. She's now writing fanfic, and topping the charts there.

Via.

[ related topics: Books Writing ]

Not embedding the picture because I respect copyright, but you should click through and see this: RT Frédérique Geffard ‏@fgeffardAFP

A priest holds a cross and shield during clashes between protesters and police in Kiev by Sergey Gapon #AFP http://pic.twitter.com/1E7hXNGb98

Image at MPR news.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Current Events Law Enforcement Embedded Devices Copyright/Trademark ]

DeKalb officer's lie kept teen locked up:

"Due to the unfortunate circumstances of being at the wrong place at the wrong time with a supervisor whose intentions were misleading for any rookie officer, I have made this decision to resign," Hudson wrote in his resignation letter.

Busted for unwritten department policy, hung out to dry.

But, worse, once this lie was exposed and the information was taken to the DA's office, it still took a year for the guy to get released and he's now suing to overturn the conviction.

Reading a bit between the lines here, I think that the expectation of a young black male in DeKalb county that what he does doesn't matter because he's going to be hassled by the cops is probably a factor.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Pop Culture ]

Time: Tales from the TSA: Confiscating Aluminum Foil and Watching Out for Solar Powered Bombs:

The memo advised the entire TSA workforce that terrorists were plotting to use solar powered improvised explosive devices in order to harm aviation interests. But not to worry: TSA headquarters was on the case. The memo continued to explain that new technology was being explored in order to detect solar powered IEDs.

Sure seems like someone's been trolling the TSA...

[ related topics: Cool Science Invention and Design Aviation Law Fashion Photovoltaics ]

This looks very interesting: ABC Science: Spun fishing line turned into muscle, the approachable article version of Science: Artificial Muscles from Fishing Line and Sewing Thread. Via /..

So... nichrome & monofilament muscles, maybe? Guessing you can't wrap the heating element in monofilament, but maybe wrap the twisted monofilament in the heating element? So much you could do with a super cheap linear actuator...

[ related topics: Gambling ]

I hate to say good things about Buzzfeed, but this sort of article is the promise of new media: Exclusive: How Ukraine Wooed Conservative Websites.

Publishing the full content of press releases and talking points memos, rather than rewriting and excerpting them, is how journalism needs to be done.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Journalism and Media ]

Nothing here you don't know, but I'm sure I'll have to go back and find this shortly: CNN: Bruce Schneier: It's time to break up the NSA

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

Wind Up Bots (Vimeo video). Windup robots in Buenos Aires. I wanna live in that world. Via.

[ related topics: Robotics Theater & Plays Video ]

Could swear I had a picture of this, but can't find it now...

[ related topics: Photography ]

A little for your listening pleasure:

• Eye of the Tiger played on a dot matrix printer.
• Guns & Roses Sweet Child of Mine done as New Orleans Jazz.

[ related topics: Movies Invention and Design Guns Flowers Hurricane Katrina ]

Essentially adding a comment to this: Ender's Game

Finally saw the movie Ender's Game, bought the DVD at Wally World. It was awesome in it's attempt to cram a book with a lot of ideas and inner dialogue into an hour and a half sci-fi action movie. It did a fair job of it, with some decent acting of cliche tropes and good visuals/effects. If you didn't read the book when you were 13 (or as an adult) I doubt the movie makes much sense beyond the facade of imagery and action composed of compressed highlights from the book. It lacked the depth and breadth of the book.

Overall, I liked it because I was in the mood for that kind of movie, and will probably watch it again.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Games Movies Heinlein Archival Woodworking ]

So if you're not gonna show Chekhov's gun, do you have to have a concealed carry permit?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Guns ]

Skype is planning to continue sharing information with Russian law enforcement.

Microsoft Corporation that owns the Internet call service Skype is ready to keep in store its Russian users’ negotiations, correspondence and data exchange during six months and share it with the Russian police, if necessary, Microsoft’s press office told Itar-Tass.

In case you wondered which side Skype and Microsoft were on...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft moron Law Law Enforcement Net Culture ]

Kitchen electrical plates in progress. Lots of problems with mahogany splitting. Grrr.

Kitchen electrical plates in progress. Lots of problems with mahogany splitting. Grrr...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Because, you know, Petaluma...

[ related topics: Photography ]

So when your governor gets a federal indictment on corruption charges for some really egregious situations that apparently your state law doesn't cover, what do you do? Virginia working on hilarious new ethics law looks at Washington Post: Va. ‘ethics reform’ is riddled with loopholes and softens a penalty for lying in disclosures, and how it downgrades assorted violations from felonies to misdemeanors.

Yay for politicians stepping up and making the tough decisions...

[ related topics: Ethics Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Archival ]

Hypothesis: The Purpose Of The Cockshot Is To Test Boundaries. Interesting look into the dynamic of come-ons.

Just hanging a few here that I know I'm going to want to go back and find again:

• Cops slam into Brooklyn man's parked SUV, bust him for 'driving' with no license: suit: Robert Jackson, 31, says was arrested in Brownsville in April when a cop driving the wrong way down a one-way street hit the SUV he was sitting in, and then claimed he was driving without a license.
• New Jersey resident Marcus Jeter cleared of charges the prosecutor was asking for at least 5 years on after dash cam footage showed the arresting police clearly lied.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Humor Invention and Design Current Events Law Enforcement New York ]

RT Ilya Mouzykantskii @ilyamuz:

Private Jets out of Kiev in the last hour or so, pulled from FlightRadar24. Also quite a few charter planes inbound

This revolution especially has been a fascinating look at the exposed society...

The situation in Venezuela has sent me off reading a whole bunch of articles trying to figure out what's happening down there. Looks like Chavez sold out the country's future for votes, but it's also clear that there aren't too many good guys in the story.

Anyway, one of the articles I read was the Wikipedia article on the 2002 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt, which notes that it's heavily disputed, but in that and some other articles following-up, one thing struck me: I understand that the U.S. has chosen to take a place in world politics where we're meddling in, but do the CIA and the State Department have to be so fucking incompetent in their response plans when they're called out on this?

It's like kindergarteners caught with their hands in the cookie jar and blaming it on the dog.

[ related topics: Politics Dogs ]

Biking in LA: Guest post: Taking the lane — a CyclingSavvy instructor explains her objection to bike lanes:

We need to recognize a simple fact about bike lanes. They tend to make the people in them irrelevant to other traffic. When you are not in the way, you are irrelevant. At low speed differentials, irrelevancy might be OK. But at high speed differentials, the slightest motorist error can be devastating.

[ related topics: Sports Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Compare and contrast:

• Romantimatic is an iOS app to remind you to express affection to your significant other. Article about Romantimatic and author Greg Knauss here.
• BroApp is Your Clever Relationship Wingman: Automatically message your girlfriend sweet things so you can spend more time with the Bros.

On the one hand, both of them are focused on the same relationship issue, but somewhere in there is a strong disconnect. I don't for a moment dispute that BroApp is obnoxious, and I kind of think that Romantimatic is sweet, but I also think that Romantimatic is already somewhere along the continuum, and isn't solidly at one end.

It's also interesting reading the page about the development of BroApp, about the heuristics for not messaging while you're with your girlfriend, or if you've been messaged in the past hour, or... basically, trying to appear to be human, trying to pass the Turing test.

I have a set of scripts which help me manage my social media updates. I can schedule updates for the future. Once or twice I've gone in and removed a pending update because of the evolving conversation, and far more often than that I've thought about it. I also make an effort to send Charlene a message every once in a while telling her how much I appreciate her and, yes, have considered setting up something to remind me. I haven't yet done that, but I could easily see heading down that path, putting in heuristics, automating attention...

And then somewhere we're back into Turing test territory: Is this what AI looks like? Some set of heuristics and hacks to simulate empathy?

And if I augment myself by further building systems to help me do these things, and I probably well (After all, what's the difference between reminding myself that I should acknowledge Charlene's contributions to my life and reminding myself of any of the other tasks I should be undertaking), is, in the end, the difference between BroApp and Romantimatic just one of tone?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama History Current Events Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]

Virginia state senator Steve Martin:

... And, I don't expect to be in the room or will I do anything to prevent you from obtaining a contraceptive. However, once a child does exist in your womb, I'm not going to assume a right to kill it just because the bearer of the child (some refer to them as mothers) doesn't want it to remain alive.

Via and Via and Via.

On the one hand it's refreshing, Martin seems to be one anti-choicer who claims to be not going after Griswold v. Connecticut. On the other hand...

There are a number of things I can point to as cracks in my formerly hardcore Libertarianism. However, part of the philosophy underlying that libertarian attitude, which was heavily steeped in the Objectivist philosophies of Ayn Rand, was that I get to make the decisions about when, and when not, to risk my own safety and well-being to help people. I've played in enough high adrenaline sports contexts that I've had, several times, to weigh the "how much risk am I willing to assume in order to help that person" decisions, where "risk" and "help" could be life vs death.

It is, therefore, inconceivable that anyone calling themselves "libertarian", or in any way holding up liberty as an ideal, could presume to impose that decision on someone else. Having had to make such decisions (often on the "I'll accept the risk" side) I will never judge someone who chooses to not assume risk, whatever their reasons.

Pregnancy has a huge cost and contains many risks.

Anyone against widely available easy abortion is, therefore, against liberty. Whether it's Ron Paul or any other politician. And, thus, it is my single defining issue: If I can't trust you to allow people their own decisions on that front, I cannot trust you to make any decisions for me.

What state senator Martin is clearly saying here is that he believes women are somehow not worthy of the responsibility to make decisions of their own sovereignty. He deserves only our scorn.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Objectivism Libertarian Sexual Culture moron Law Philosophy Archival ]

New Scientist: The world needs to talk about child euthanasia. And adult assisted suicide, too, but we're not making strong inroads on either.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

rage-quit for bash.

Or, if you're a node.js user, you could use fuck-you

(╯°□°）╯︵sǝssǝɔoɹd oʎ llɐ llıʞǝɓɐɹ

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

And news from friends in Turkey suggests that that might be the next state to fall: Leaked Recording of Turkish PM Erdogan Instructing Son to Hide Huge Sums of Money.

[ related topics: Business Food Current Events Currency Birds ]

The systemd fallacy. I've been reading a couple of things about systemd and why it's a bad idea. For years I've been a Debian and then Ubuntu user. Unity was bad enough, but with those two headed towards systemd I'm really in the "okay, time to find a new Linux distribution" camp.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Invention and Design ]

http://vickybit.tumblr.com/post/77814248526

“Oh, my, god. Becky, look at her butt.

It is so big.”

—'baby got back' passes the bechdel test (via battlestardidactica)

Via @Vicky_Bit's tweet

[ related topics: Religion ]

Some amazing butterfly pancakes. Also.

Many more amazing pancakes at Nathan Shield's blog.

[ related topics: Butterflies ]

Looks like it'd be uncomfortable for long rides, but as a "packs into a small space" way for two people to get around town, the UnaTandem. That awful page design doesn't give me any idea of price or availability...

A web search brings up more pictures, but no vendor info that I've found.

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Graphic Design ]

Hey, there's a new OpenWhisper TextSecure release. You should run it, especially if you exchange text messages with me.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Invention and Design ]

Twitter discussion on confusing Wes Anderson with Wes Craven devolved into a link to Saturday Night Live's trailer for a Wes Anderson horror movie and a fascinating post on how that short film was made.

[ related topics: Movies Theater & Plays Television Community ]

Esquire: An Oral History of Ghostbusters:

ATHERTON: The movie had just opened and I was doing a reading for Joe Papp in New York. So I’m walking down 7th Avenue, and there’s this big Ghostbusters marquee, and there are all these buses filled with kids. But I’m not registering it too much, I’m thinking about Chekhov. And all of a sudden about eight million kids lean out the windows and yell, “Hey, dickless.”

Via MeFi, which has more links and discussion.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Microsoft Movies Invention and Design Current Events Community Skating New York Public Transportation ]

http://www.xkcd.com/now/ provides a time sensitive image (approx) showing what time it is where, compared to now, with a "rude to call" time marker. Useful in my world.

The big takeaway from the latest revelations about the NSA JTRIG program is that the NSA has a hell of a lot in common with Anonymous and 4chan.

Via MeFi, among a whole bunch of other places.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Invention and Design Software Engineering ]

That moment where you discover that the new networking device wasn't plugged in to the UPS...

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

This may be the best 404 page ever. And I don't say that lightly: http://www.romainbrasier.fr/404

I have long discounted people who talk about "trafficking" as anti-prostitution activists who are unwilling to admit that there are social and cultural situations which lead women to be coerced into prostitution in ways that are not charge-able as kidnapping, but in which clamping down on prostitution rather than solving those social and cultural situations in which women are reluctantly engaging in sex for money hurts those women more.

So I find XOJane: Britney Cason: IT HAPPENED TO ME: I Almost Became a Victim of Human Trafficking at the Sochi Olympics fascinating: that anyone would consider kidnapping, across national boundaries, into the former Soviet bloc countries, that the economics in any way support this, completely up-ends my worldview.

Via MeFi (among others), where they're trying to figure out the rest of the picture too.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology Sports Currency Economics ]

Daily Currant satirizes: Marijuana Overdoses Kill 37 in Colorado On First Day of Legalization.

Annapolis Police Chief Michael Pristoop cites it as evidence during Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee hearings. Luckily, a state senator had a clue:

Sen. Jamie Raskin, who has proposed a bill that would legalize recreational pot, responded with an immediate correction: “Unless you have some other source for this, I’m afraid I’ve got to spoil the party here, but your assertion that 37 people died of a marijuana overdose in Colorado was a hoax on the Daily Currant and the Comedy Central website.”

But this is something to remember, especially on Facebook when some distant connection yet again forwards an urban legend with "and I checked it with my local police before forwarding it".

And when we're listening to testimony during city council meetings.

[ related topics: Drugs Politics Libertarian Law Enforcement Pop Culture ]

Nancy called me 4 minutes after 3pm EST excited because she bought us tickets... Just as I was getting ready to try the same. I feel loved, and excited to be going this year, it's been too long. Maybe we'll see you there. Nancy and I will be hanging with with the Spiritual Playa camp, where I'll be one of the "make things work" guys and try to keep their blend of "BurningMan/GodLovesYou" properly adjusted. In a lot of ways, they are like the Egeria camp of 2002, a bunch of good energy healer types.

[ related topics: Religion Burning Man Work, productivity and environment ]

So this Github Atom editor thing: Apparently there are developers who don't end up ssh'd through 3 layers of hosts, firewalls & VPNs?

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

Over on Facebook, Tara made a comment about Google Plus, she meant Places, but I went off on G+ and figured I should put that rant here so I could get to it later:

Well, of course you have two Google Plus listings. You probably have more than that because you can't sneeze around an email address without creating yet another stupid Google Plus account. That friends will then put in their circles, and you'll put in their circles, and they'll put in your circles, and so on until you've circled yourself fourteen times because they've... yeah...

I didn't know you could mark one as a duplicate, but really I don't want to do that, I just don't want to have all of these freakin' Google+ profiles!

But, yeah, if you're Google? I assume that like most of us you've decided that Google+ is just annoying and awful and the best thing you can do is to make your profile as confusing and awful as possible as a lesson to the Google+ developers to fix their freakin' gawdawful notions of identity and connection and all that crap that they get horribly wrong.

Because Google+: architected by a guy whose ideas he couldn't sell to Microsoft.

And, so, yeah, apparently that false hope of "mark as duplicate" is really for Places, and if you're a Google+ user you're still basically...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft moron hubris ]

Wow: 6 San Francisco police officers indicted:

At a Hall of Justice news conference, a visibly shaken Police Chief Greg Suhr said, "I don't know that it gets any worse than this, other than an officer-involved serious injury or death, when the public trust is betrayed by a sitting San Francisco or any police officer.

"This is not only a betrayal of the public's trust," he said, "but also a betrayal of all the men and women of the San Francisco Police Department who work hard every day to do what they can to keep San Francisco safe."

Wonder how deep thils'll go...

[ related topics: Bay Area Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement California Culture Conferences ]

Because Charlene and I were talking about this last night and I didn't have numbers: recent rain data for the Bay Area. Petaluma got 0.63 inches yesterday, 6.02 inches from July 1st, vs 14.23 inches in the same period last year, and a historical normal of 20.46 inches to this date, 27.16 inches per year.

[ related topics: California Culture ]

UK's GCHQ spied on millions of web cam conversations, many from Yahoo Messenger:

"It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person,'' another snippet of an intelligence document published said. It went on to say that an informal study had found that between 3 and 11 percent of all the images carried "undesirable nudity."

So I'm not making any accusations, I'm just asking questions, but I'm wondering where all of those reprehensible "revenge porn" sites get their content from. We've already strongly established that intelligence services are heavily involved in using blackmail and shaming to steer public discourse; I wonder how many of their employees are misogynist louts who want to continue our sexual repressions?

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

• Time: Don’t Tell Amy Chua: Mexicans Are the Most Successful Immigrants. If you measure success as progress from generation to generation, it's Mexicans, not Asian cultures, who are doing the best in the U.S.
• Shadow forwarded along ATLAH Worldwide Missionary Church Posts Horrific Anti-Gay Sign In Harlem, New York. I'm not totally sure what this proves except that there are whackos in urban settings, too...
• A Long Tail of Whales: Half of Mobile Games Money Comes From 0.15 Percent of Players. Addiction is a problem everywhere, apparently...
• Eugene Volokh: Not safe to display American flag in American high school is not the right headline, but it's a look at how the 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Comm. School Dist. decision that allows schools to restrict speech if “school authorities [can reasonably] forecast substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities” to give vocal students (maybe we could even label them "bullies"?) veto power over student speech.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Interactive Drama Games Sexual Culture Invention and Design Bay Area Current Events Currency Conspiracy New York Government ]

Dear recruiters looking for "rock star"s: I can trash a hotel room and lip sync with the best of 'em, but draw the line at painkiller ODs.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Travel Aviation - Helicopters ]

Hacked together some boilerplate OpenCV code to extract faces from my images, now need to figure out how to automatically recognize people.

Yow! Some UI issues to be worked out here: Be scared of Bank of America's iPhone app. Be very, very scared.

Probably applicable to anyone using phone banking, really.

[ related topics: User Interface iPhone ]

Giggle: Woman Says She Was Attacked for Using Windows Phone at San Francisco Tech Bar:

According to a post on Stiles' MySpace page "I ran after him, but by the time I got my phone back there was a $30 charge for a trip to a taco truck in SOMA, and when I returned to the bar my identity had been stolen, and I'd been signed up for a service that sends vegan recipes to my contact list. Why would someone do that? How do they expect to monetize? "

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Bay Area California Culture Travel Machinery ]