Flutterby™! From 2014-03-01 to 2014-03-31

SEC rules mean that SEC employees have to insider trade. SEC employees don't seem to be any better at buying stocks than anyone else, but they manage to sell pretty smartly, right before enforcement actions. Why?

Nester explained that before staff can work on an issue that involves a company, they have to sell any holdings of stock in that firm. As a result, he said, there shouldn't be any surprise that a sale would precede the announcement of an enforcement action.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

I would opt out of that company's new TOS, arbitration agreement, privacy policy, if I'd been fool enough to trust them to start with.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Privacy Invention and Design moron ]

I believe that people who design feedback questions deliberately try to make it impossible to meaningfully tell them why something sucks.

[ related topics: Graphic Design ]

Went a little overboard on wall plates...

Dang it, that wall plates comment should have had the picture

[ related topics: Photography ]

RT Mike Harrison ‏@meuon

Should patent using heat seeking ladybugs for bad connection detection. http://pic.twitter.com/dtpKRbZSit

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Just making sawdust...

[ related topics: Photography ]

techdirt: Keurig Will Use DRM In New Coffee Maker To Lock Out Refill Market

Keurig's solution to this problem? In a lawsuit (pdf) filed against Keurig by TreeHouse Foods, they claim Keurig has been busy striking exclusionary agreements with suppliers and distributors to lock competing products out of the market. What's more, TreeHouse points out that Keurig is now developing a new version of their coffee maker that will incorporate the java-bean equivalent of DRM -- so that only Keurig's own coffee pods can be used in it:

[ related topics: Invention and Design Software Engineering Economics ]

http://modernfarmer.com/2014/0...t-films-real-food-media-contest/

I'll be watching the rest of these when I get a chance.

[ related topics: Food Journalism and Media ]

Downloading software is nearly impossible. On trying to figure out if the version of PuTTY that you're about to install on your computer, to security connect to other computers, is safe...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Software Engineering ]

Shadow forwarded along IndieoGoGo: URB-E: The world's most compact e-vehicle.

I have a little issue with their sidewalk use of the motor scooter, but I like the form-factor, and think that if the Segway folks had targeted this use-case they might still be players.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Segway/Ginger/IT ]

A few about issues in the U.K from what happens when you have big centralized databases...

• NHS England patient data 'uploaded to Google servers', Tory MP says.
• Police will have 'backdoor' access to health records despite opt-out, says MP: David Davis says police would be able to approach central NHS database without a warrant as critics warn of catastrophic breach of trust

Tell your doctor nothing.

[ related topics: Privacy Health Law Enforcement Databases ]

Elf Sternberg ‏@elfsternberg:

When are the anti-gay-rights folks going to realize that every time they use the phrase "down our throats," the rest of us just giggle?

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture tolkien Civil Liberties ]

WBUR's Common Health: Some 70-Something Women Having ‘Best Sex Ever’? Really? (Yes.).

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Health ]

Recovering from wisdom tooth extraction (last one) with full anesthesia. Ugh. Ice and fuzzy thinking.

The reason to build a business presence on Facebook is so that you can see how much more CPM than TV messages to your customers there cost.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Television ]

"What Nigerian scams are to your grandfather, Bitcoin exchanges are to the 20-30 semi-tech-savvy libertarian demographic." What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

(Freudian typo of the moment: Yes, I had to backspace and re-type "Bitcon")

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian Marketing ]

In Arizona, Project ROSE is arresting sex workers to save them:

In law enforcement, language goes through the looking glass. Lieutenant James Gallagher, the former head of the Phoenix Vice Department, told me that Project ROSE raids were “programs.” The arrests were “contact.” And the sex workers who told Al Jazeera that they had been kidnapped in those windowless church rooms—they were “lawfully detained.”

The shaming and extrajudicial punishment happening here is horrific.

[ related topics: Religion Erotic Sexual Culture Law Enforcement Flowers ]

Of interest to me right now: Does Cryotherapy Improve Outcomes With Soft Tissue Injury? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC522152/

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

Mid-century modern take on a 19th century writing desk as a soldering and electronics workstation. Oak and walnut and brass.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Writing Model Building ]

Author plug: the @robkroese Mercury Revolts kickstarter closes shortly: https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...-book-four-of-the-mercury-series

[ related topics: Books Astronomy ]

Recuperation reading yesterday: @mightymur "Shambling Guide to New York City". Young woman in big city, office politics, paranormal. Fun.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design Douglas Adams New York ]

I'm always intrigued when people find steganography in the wild. In this case, photos of cats and sunsets have been observed as part of a command-and-control network for the TSPY_ZBOT.TFZAH malware.

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs broadband Law ]

Woman Believed To Be Last Of Waterbury's Radium Girls Dies:

Keane and her co-workers at Waterbury Clock Co., all young women, were told they could paint faster if they dipped their brushes into the radium-laden paint and then sharpened the bristles with their lips.

But the paint was bitter and Keane would not "lip-point," as the practice was known.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health ]

11% of Americans think that HTML is a sexually transmitted disease. I'm not sure they're wrong.

Edit: It's a PR firm fake. I'm still not sure they're wrong.

Technical Details Behind a 400Gbps NTP Amplification DDoS Attack.

The worst part is that because of buggy DSL modems (not namin' any names, but...), unless you were on the phone with your ISP trying to figure out why your connection was saturated, probably trying to figure out why you couldn't download anything because your local network couldn't get any requests out, you'd have no idea that your hardware was participating in such a thing.

[ related topics: Weblogs broadband ]

District Court of Appeal of Florida,First District. James L. THOMAS, Appellant, v. STATE of Florida, Appellee. No. 1D11–6156. -- November 20, 2013:

They did not want to obtain a search warrant because they did not want to reveal information about the technology they used to track the cell phone signal. “[T]he Tallahassee Police Department is not the owner of the equipment.” The prosecutor told the court that a law enforcement officer “would tell you that there is a nondisclosure agreement that they've agreed with the company.” An investigator with the technical operations unit of the Tallahassee Police Department testified: “[W]e prefer that alternate legal methods be used, so that we do not have to rely upon the equipment to establish probable cause, just for not wanting to reveal the nature and methods.” He also testified: “We have not obtained a search warrant [in any case], based solely on the equipment.”

Via a tweet from Declan McCullagh ‏@declanm, by way of Wired: Florida Cops’ Secret Weapon: Warrantless Cellphone Tracking, which goes deeper.

Disturbing.

[ related topics: Wireless Privacy Nature and environment Law Law Enforcement Guns ]

There is a moment when you see someones code example that makes you sish you had time to go back and rewrite the last 4 years of code...

The New Republic: Trigger warnings have spread from blogs to college classes, and that's bad.

The term only spread with the advent of social media. In 2012, The Awl's Choire Sicha argued that it had "lost all its meaning." Since then, alerts have been applied to topics as diverse as sex, pregnancy, addiction, bullying, suicide, sizeism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, slut shaming, victim-blaming, alcohol, blood, insects, small holes, and animals in wigs. Certain people, from rapper Chris Brown to sex columnist Dan Savage, have been dubbed “triggering.” Some have called for trigger warnings for television shows such as "Scandal" and "Downton Abbey." Even The New Republic has suggested the satirical news site, The Onion, carry trigger warnings.

[ related topics: Quotes Erotic Sexual Culture Technology and Culture Invention and Design Food History Current Events Journalism and Media Television Education ]

The Sonoma County Woodworker Association meeting last night was held at the shop of Tom Ribbecke. Tom had Bobby Vega there to demo his "Halfling™" acoustic basses, including the "Diana" bass that Tom is building for Jack Casady.

Creativity 360 ~ FULL SHOW: Jack Casady with hosts Bobby Vega & Tom Ribbecke.

Long YouTube playlist of Bobby Vega noodling around on various basses.

Need to find some more of Bobby on a Halfling™, it's got a really cool sound that's different from an amplified bass.

Now I wanna build an arch-top guitar...

[ related topics: Music Movies Woodworking ]

BetaBoston: A vast hidden surveillance network runs across America, powered by the repo industry, on the automated license plate reading cars that are trolling parking lots and apartment complexes across the country, looking for vehicles whose owners have defaulted on their loans.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: broadband Current Events Real Estate ]

A nice empirical study of vaccine risk communication--and an unfortunate, empirically uninformed reaction to it.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Las night's SCWA: Tom Ribbecke and Bobby Vega demo the "Diana" bass commissioned by Jack Casady

[ related topics: Music Photography ]

Shooting photos up women's skirts legal in Massachusetts, high court rules.

"At the core of the Commonwealth's argument to the contrary is the proposition that a woman, and in particular a woman riding on a public trolley, has a reasonable expectation of privacy in not having a stranger secretly take photographs up her skirt. The proposition is eminently reasonable, but (the law) in its current form does not address it," the court wrote in its decision.

Wish I had time to chase down the details of the law, it'd be interesting to see how the legislature failed on this.

[ related topics: Photography Privacy Law Current Events Bicycling ]

Senator Mark Udall claims Obama knew the CIA was surveilling the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Torture.

McClatchy and the New York Times reported Wednesday that the CIA had secretly monitored computers used by committee staffers preparing the inquiry report, which is said to be scathing not only about the brutality and ineffectiveness of the agency’s interrogation techniques but deception by the CIA to Congress and policymakers about it. The CIA sharply disputes the committee’s findings.

To quote Matthew Green ‏@matthew_d_green:

There is a fundamental problem when NSA/CIA employees can surveil oversight committees without expecting an immediate, severe jail sentence.

But we have a severe oversight problem in general: Thomas M. Harrigan, DEA deputy administrator, told the House Oversight Committee that 'Every Single Parent' Opposes Marijuana Legalization.

Either this man is incompetent, or he's lying to the House Oversight Committee. In either case, he should be fired, and those in positions of responsibility who allowed him to rise to his current position should be severely sanctioned.

[ related topics: Drugs Politics Libertarian Invention and Design Software Engineering Law Work, productivity and environment New York Real Estate ]

Ugh. Ibuprofen helping me focus from wisdom tooth pain, but hating the "I need to stretch" feeling painkillers give me.

The complaint on my social media feeds was that if you type "rice-cake" into Wolfram Alpha it doesn't tell you about rice cakes, but I find it fascinating that it breaks down "rice" and "cake" into common units (calories, calories from fat) for standard serving sizes, and shows you those units added together.

I'd think you'd want it to do the subtraction. "rice-cake" should be 122g, but -20 calories.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Journalism and Media Television Food - Cake ]

On the one hand, .sexy is a TLD now? Everything is wrong in the world. On the other hand: http://vim.sexy/

For future digging in to: The Verge: Bad brains: some people are physically incapable of enjoying music: Research shows that people who say "I don't like music" aren't just trying to sound cool looks like your usual bad rewrite of a press release:

The study's results, published today in Current Biology, are surprising. Although these participants were perfectly capable of perceiving when a tune was sad or happy, they didn't show physical or emotional reaction. They didn't shiver if a singer hit a high note, and their heart rate didn't increase with each crescendo. But when asked to play a game involving a monetary reward, those who were indifferent to music reacted just like everyone else: the thought of winning even a small amount of money was enough to make their hearts race. The results were unchanged a year later, when 26 of the students took the test again.

But the paper appears to be Individual Differences in Music Reward Experiences Ernest Mas-Herrero, Josep Marco-Pallares, Urbano Lorenzo-Seva, Robert J. Zatorre and Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal Vol. 31, No. 2 (December 2013), pp. 118-138, and is available in PDF form off of Josep Marco-Pallerés web presence.

I'm particularly interested in this because I strongly suspect I'm somewhere on that spectrum...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Games Television Currency ]

Dinosaur Comics looks at driving.

[ related topics: Comics ]

RT Jessi Sheron ‏@JessiSheron

I drew the inside of my brain at all times. http://pic.twitter.com/OHYyPLKurg

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Canadian Regulators: Canadian Porn Isn’t Canadian Enough. Your porn is not Canadian enough, CRTC warns erotica channels.

Seems simple enough to fix: Just dub in "aboot" and end the occasional sentence with "eh?" or "hey?".

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events ]

Quinn Norton - A Day of Speaking Truth to Power - Visiting the ODNI

Brennan Letter to Wyden Acknowledges that CFAA Applies to the CIA, but also seems to assert that the CIA snooping on Senators is a "...lawfully authorized investigative, protective or intelligence activity."

Follow up to yesterday's news that the CIA was surveilling the members of the Senate Oversight Committee investigating torture.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Archival ]

RT Kieran Healy ‏@kjhealy

You have to admit, that does seem like a plausible reason. http://pic.twitter.com/hMopNdi20l

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Hmmm... Don't really have a venue to wear this one in: http://northwestpress.com/shop/wibbly-wobbly-sexy-wexy-t-shirt/

[ related topics: Clothing ]

Using Google Maps in an MitM interception on FBI and Secret Service phone calls. Put up an answering machine. Put up a web page with contact info for the organization you want to grab calls for, wait for Google to spider the page and put that in Maps as contact info, wait for the calls, send the recording of those calls on to the real answering machine.

You can be your own private NSA without a floor in an AT&T building.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Maps and Mapping ]

NTSB administrative law judge Patrick Geraghty rules that commercial drones are legal.

[ related topics: Law Current Events ]

I have found myself in a number of situations recently where a tailcoat would be appropriate attire. I have thought about sewing my own. I had not, up until this time, thought about making my clothing taser-proof by embedding carbon fiber.

[ related topics: Clothing ]

Unusual Locomotives.

All locomotives more than 18 years old. Proof on file in pursuance of Title 18, USC2257

Via MeFi, which calls out some of the cooler ones.

[ related topics: Art & Culture ]

Charlene and I painted the ceiling of our bedroom with a view of the summer night sky, with glow-in-the-dark paint. It's pretty awesome, there are, of course, improvements and ideas we're thinking of, but I've also been trying to learn a little more about optics and projection and other ways to create similar effects because it's great for the bright stars, but for the dimmer stars we just stippled regions.

So I've also been looking for awesome astronomical imagery. Phil Plait showcases a 7000 x 3074 image of the big dipper.

Via.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

Dantone® color matching system

Via @EccentricFlower.

Kameron Hurley: Rage Doesn’t Exist in a Vacuum, or: Understanding the Complex Continuum of Internet Butt-Hurt*

To an outsider seeing my screaming meltdown at these two men, in which I raved and shouted and told them how they were utter assholes for harassing us, and they should fuck off, and who the fuck did they think they were, this might have seemed like the raving of some unhinged person. After all, from afar, all you see is two guys at a bus stop talking to a woman who seems deeply uncomfortable. But my rage, my “sudden” outburst was actually the result of the venting of six full months of increasing dread and terror inflicted on me not even so much by actual bad people, but people ostensibly concerned for my safety, whose admonitions that I “stay inside” and watch my back, and be careful, and who would then go on to talk about who’d been raped, shot, stabbed or mugged that week, had really started to get to me. It was a rage at the entire situation, at being expected to shut the fuck up and go inside all the time because I was a young woman. It was rage at the idea that the threat of violence so clearly worked to keep people in line.

But there's some deeper good stuff in here about visibility, and it also reminded me...

A few days ago, ColorOfChange.org ‏@ColorOfChange tweeted:

Facial recognition software built by white techies upon existing racial assumptions only reliably differentiate btwn white faces #rightscon

I recently pulled together a little OpenCV stuff to grab all of the faces out of my image library, and I'm hoping sometime over the next few to write a little code to let me label some of those faces and do a little network training to attempt to do some automatic identification of people in my image library.

A few friends are talking about a product that might incorporate this technology. Said product has a target market that's mostly white.

It is completely conceivable that said product could ship, could even get through a few product revs, before it ever hit a non-Caucasian face sample. Heck, there are a ton of face sample databases out there (that are used for training such things for demo code) that are all Caucasian.

So I can completely understand, for instance, how HP might ship racist webcams. How local bubbles can cause a lack of visibility.

So, yeah: Keep helping me out with visibility, and if anyone knows of a good dataset of non-Caucasian faces to train some software with, that'd be cool too.

[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Books Movies broadband Software Engineering Current Events Net Culture Machinery Trains Race Databases Economics Public Transportation ]

Slate: I Opted My Kids Out of Standardized Tests, Then I learned a thing or two.

Except: What started as a personal, family decision carries so much more weight for me now, and it’s frustrating to know that our actions aren’t making a bit of difference, beyond our household. As a school administrator friend wrote to me, “I applaud parents who opt out and I really wish more would. However, to make a true impact on the system, thousands of parents (especially of high-achieving students) would have to opt out.”

Either we start kicking the elected representatives who are putting the industry of standardized testing above the long-term good of the economic system, or we support parents who take more direct action by pulling their kids out of this charade, but either way we need to toss the education profiteers out of the money train.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology Machinery Trains Currency Education Economics ]

Lawmakers pull about-face on food safety 'glove law'

"It had unintended consequences," said Assemblyman Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, a physician and chairman of the Assembly's Committee on Health, which carried the bill in the first place. "There was not a specific incident that led to the new rules. The statute was intended to make minor changes to the California Retail Food Code, because food safety is something we have to take very seriously. So we wanted to make sure that the bill was consistent with other food safety regulations, including minimizing bare-hand contact with food."

So WTF? There wasn't a compelling need, but they railroaded this through anyway without asking? Seriously questioning the whole political process right now.

[ related topics: Politics Health Invention and Design Food moron California Culture ]

RT Ryan C. Gordon ‏@icculus:

Apparently Thunderbird's scam detection algorithm is pretty accurate. http://pic.twitter.com/dwpHOCKwEq

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics moron Embedded Devices ]

If the deities had meant us to use foreign character sets, they wouldn't have given us ASCII. #encodinghell #utf8

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

perl -Mutf8 -le 'while (<>) {utf8::decode(); s/([\x{ff}-\x{ffffffff}])/sprintf("&#%d;", ord($1))/eg; print ;}'

For those times when you need to get HTML entities for some gawdawful string.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source hubris ]

So much for using Facebook to keep up with vendors you care about... http://www.marketingpilgrim.co...plummets-toward-rock-bottom.html

It's a portable personal cloud (from an old whitewater paddling friend): http://www.indiegogo.com/proje...-world-portable-computing-system

[ related topics: Whitewater ]

I mostly love my ISP, but mucked up DNS blacklisting means I'm over to Google for DNS. Don't want to, but it makes the web usable. Sigh.

So Crimea going with Russia seems kinda like if Alabama seceded to North Korea. We'd be pissed off, but it really makes sociological sense.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

It is ridiculous that in 2014, one of today's projects is building my own irrigation controller. Anyone want to buy & market a good one?

[ related topics: Economics ]

Supreme Court ruling delivers a major blow to "rail to trail" bike and multi-use paths:

The case wasn’t about bike paths per se — it was about whether or not the federal government retains its control over land that had been granted to railroad companies once it’s been abandoned.  But the decision undermines a federal “rails to trails” program, threatening the more than 1,400 bike and nature trails it’s created since its inception in 1983.

Well crap. We paid to build the railroads, we paid again when they defaulted on their public debt, and in the end we're not even left with the land we gave 'em to begin with.

More on the story from NPR.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Software Engineering moron Law Current Events Machinery Trains Salon magazine Bicycling Real Estate ]

Join the SPSCM - Stop Sobriety Right Now (YouTube). The Society for the Prevention of Sobriety in Celtic Musicians needs your help.

[ related topics: Movies ]

New York Magazine: Meet Terri Conley: The Psychologist With an Alternative Theory of Hookup Culture:

The reason women are turning you down for casual sex seems to be that, for one thing, a lot of you are calling them sluts afterward. A lot of you aren’t bothering to try to be good in bed. Until you can try to get that under control, it’s kind of hard to take seriously all these complaints about not having access to casual sex.

Via Elf Sternberg @ElfSternberg.

A number of good observations in there.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture tolkien Invention and Design Sociology California Culture New York Furniture ]

By the way, sorry about the outage over the weekend... You try to do a nice thing for someone, they end up using a fixed IP box for a spider, and then, worse, screw up spawning behavior in a cron job so that a forking spider ends up forking the box.

The forker has been admonished.

[ related topics: Heinlein ]

If you see an ad saying I "Like"d something, just be aware that I clicked that button in order to get free merchandise. #canbebought

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Dear @NYTimes: Sending me "update your account" links to newyorktimesinfo.com feels very much like a phishing attempt. #themoreyouknow

The nice thing about @USPS tracking: I can see that my package is sitting in a sorting facility in Novato (next town over) since Friday.

[ related topics: Heinlein ]

If I ruled the world: I'd change the syntax of SQL to require the "WHERE" clause at the beginning of the UPDATE & DELETE statements.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Databases ]

Greeley Colorado barber shop is refusing to cut the hair of customers who smell like marijuana.

[ related topics: Drugs ]

I remember when my Dad got my Mom one of the early LED watches, I think sometime back in the '70s. An elegant little gold case, with red digits that glowed when you pressed the button on the side. And then, of course, came the first LCD watches, with seconds counters!

This is the frame of mind with which I would like you to view the "Dali Clock" xscreensaver code running on the Pebble e-Ink watch (YouTube video). Via JWZ.

[ related topics: Weblogs Movies Law Art & Culture Sports Video ]

On that Feinstein calling out the CIA: Give it a week, she'll change back. https://www.google.com/search?...e&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

Edit: Ghostride The Whip on MetaFilter:

Feinstein is pretty much the embodiment of "When it happened to X, I did not speak up for I was not an X".

[ related topics: Politics Open Source ]

OMG! I would so fly across the country to see this: The Onion: Robert Mapplethorpe Children's Museum Celebrates Grand Opening

[ related topics: Children and growing up Food Art & Culture ]

When I was a kid, my dad had a coworker who'd occasionally show up at our house on his bicycle. Our house was a good distance away from my dad's work (Pittsfield, MA) and wherever he lived, so to a young person who thought that bicycling 10 miles round trip to "town" (East Chatham, NY) was a big deal, Bob was inspirational. He rode a Raleigh.

And then Huffy bought Raleigh and Raleigy became Ruffeigh and... well...

Tara brought this to my attention: University of Nottingham set to launch online archive for famous Raleigh factory, and it brought back memories of Bob picking his way on those skinny tires down that dirt road that led to our house.

[ related topics: Nostalgia Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Sports Travel Education Pedal Power Bicycling Real Estate ]

Bennett Haselton seems to confirm that Comcast is selectively denying DNS. Of course many other ISPs, even nominally good ones, are also doing DNS blacklisting, so it's hard to call out Comcast specifically on this...

This is a great little tale of all that's wrong with our rural subsidies, transportation policy, screaming "access to health care" rather than "just fucking move" as an excuse for everything: Who’s Behind Alaska’s ‘Road To Nowhere’?.

[ related topics: Health Currency Alaska Global Warming ]

Yes, it was a Hispanic guy in the hole

[ related topics: Photography Race ]

Open-Ephys is a tool for doing electrophysiology experiments. Looks like the designs for an Arduino shield and some additional multi-channel analysis software right now.

Open source neuroscience tools to help DIY researchers

[ related topics: Free Software Software Engineering Current Events ]

What out-of-town writers need to know about S.F.. The details change a little bit from decade to decade, but, yeah, if you're an out-of-town writer tasked with an article about San Francisco trends, grab this article and spend the rest of your per-diem kicked back with a brew in the Mission.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Writing California Culture Douglas Adams ]

How come HTTP status code 501 is "Not Implemented", and not "Original Fit Jeans"?

Why Atom can't replace Vim, and, you know, I've never had vi commands explained that clearly and it almost makes me want to switch from Emacs. Damn, that's nice and clear.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

"around 29,528 feet" Can we maybe decide that 5 digits means you can drop the "around", or maybe say that the original units were meters?

Innocent man goes free after 30 years on death row. Glenn Ford served in Louisiana's infamous Angola prison, after prosecutors suppressed evidence, used peremptory challenges to racially stack the jury, and the police coached witnesses.

[ related topics: Privacy Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Automobiles Government ]

Must-read look at the Feinstein/Senate Intelligence Committee/CIA missing documents situation: http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...n-senate-intel-committees-files/

[ related topics: Politics ]

Stoplights are invisible to drivers. At least in practice. Sigh. It's a dickheads in SUVs sort of morning.

A fascinating look at how the CPI seems disconnected from reality: Rob Cockerham looks at Price Increases at McDonalds from 2002 to 2013.

[ related topics: McDonald's ]

Your interview: Richard Robinson, Brighton Science Festival, in which The Argus allowed readers to write the questions:

In an upcoming war between mankind and goats, which side will you be on? What techniques can science provide in order to give mankind an edge in a conflict against powerful and cunning goats?

[ related topics: History Current Events ]

Replicant Developers Find Backdoor In Android Samsung Galaxy Devices. Replicant developers find and close Samsung Galaxy backdoor, where "close" means "if you run Replicant".

In particular, the proprietary software that is in charge of handling the communications with the modem, using the Samsung IPC protocol, implements a class of requests known as RFS commands, that allows the modem to perform remote I/O operations on the phone's storage. As the modem is running proprietary software, it is likely that it offers over-the-air remote control, that could then be used to issue the incriminated RFS messages and access the phone's file system.

Via /.

One of the reasons that even though I run the WhisperSystems suite for messaging and voice calls, and generally trust the people there, I don't really trust my phone all that much.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering Current Events Sports Community ]

Audi demos V2I traffic light "green wave" speed assistance. Video (haven't watched yet), Via. Testing currently in Las Vegas and Verona.

So: requires retrofitting signals. Not human visible, so no easy way to check for malfunctions. I like the concept, but I'm guessing it'll be kinda stunt-ish until it deploys, and then will eventually become another "wouldn't it be cool if that worked?".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Automobiles Video Gambling ]

RT Elf Sternberg ‏@elfsternberg:

"Love between a man and a woman is a beautiful thing, provided you're between the right man and the right woman."

[ related topics: tolkien ]

Finally went and read the Feinstein CIA speech. This is important. Read it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...1e3-8599-ce7295b6851c_story.html

City of Seattle creates priority parking for musicians.

The signs are cute, but I think this is roughly the same loading zone that most big live venues have...

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Seattle ]

Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2014/161

Abstract: We apply the Flush-Reload side-channel attack based on cache hits/misses to extract a small amount of data from OpenSSL ECDSA signature requests. ... In particular we show that with as little as 200 signatures we are able to achieve a reasonable level of success in recovering the secret key for a 256-bit curve.

0666 - the umask of the beast

I don't have an immediate application, but maybe some of y'all do: Johannes Ernst: Digital signatures on JSON payloads — let’s call it ‘jsonsig’

[ related topics: Weblogs LID (Lightweight IDentity) ]

There's been a likely case of HIV spread through sexual contact.

"There were cases where it was suspected, but not all the pieces were there to say it so clearly as this one," says Patrick Sullivan, an epidemiologist at Emory University who wasn't involved in the study.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Health Law Education ]

First square called in public. And really, first successful square.

Sunrise

[ related topics: Photography ]

I don't need to duck into iOS or Objective-C that often, but Stack Overflow: Hidden features of Objective-C looks like fascinating reading.

RT Chris ‏@obscuresec

Authenticated vuln scans can have some unintended effects when there is a rogue device on your network. #ntlmrelay

Uh, yeah, that could have some potential side effects.

[ related topics: broadband ]

RT Coda Hale ‏@coda:

A monk asked Ryokan, “what is the true boundary of a service?”

Ryokan smiled and embraced the monk warmly.

“You, my friend, are fucked.”

Nate Silver on the Launch of ESPN’s New FiveThirtyEight, Burritos, and Being a Fox:

... If you know the subject that Thomas Friedman or whatever is writing about, you don’t have to read the column. You can kind of auto-script it, basically.

QFT.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Space & Astronomy Writing ]

An IRC channel is snarking on TED talks right now.

• http://www.vanityfair.com/cult...-talks-humor?mbid=social_retweet
• https://twitter.com/RandomTEDTalks
• http://get-tedpad.com/

[ related topics: Humor Sociology California Culture Conferences ]

Stored away for future reference: Fucking Shell Scripts

The easiest, most common sense server configuration management tool...because you just use fucking shell scripts.

I'm on the Nixle alerts for my various local law enforcement agencies. Some of the busts are suspect, but most of them are "Yay!" takedowns of burglars and drunk drivers and similar, and generally give me a better vibe for law enforcement than is my baseline.

Here's one in the "Yay!" column for the much maligned BART cops: Woman finds her stolen bike on Craigslist, then helps BART police sting the thief.

[ related topics: Weblogs Law Enforcement Trains Bicycling Public Transportation ]

My struggles, #3254 in a series: Misreading "underserved" as "undeserved".

Really enjoyed Tim's Vermeer last night. Good musings on art & technology, proof, obsession. Go see it.

[ related topics: Art & Culture ]

Homonym of the day: electronics spec sheets talking about "scares" part supplies. I'm a little uneasy...

The mystery of the Zombie RAM.

It all started one bright morning when I wondered: Can the RAM memory on an AVR chip continue to store data after power is removed? If it can hold the data even just for a brief moment, then that could be very useful in a project I am working on.

I'm doing hardware design this afternoon, using an AVR as the core processor. Hopefully I don't have to deal with this sort of stuff, but...

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Interactive Drama Work, productivity and environment Graphic Design ]

So I've laid out the circuit, and I have pins left over. Don't know if to be optimistic, or scared. Now... to the breadboard!

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

This. This is why newspapers have died: http://www.dumbingofage.com/20...as-a-teenage-churchmouse/comics/

[ related topics: Books Comics ]

They say hay is four horses, but they never say how much hay. Possible arbitrage opportunity?

A suggestion on Facebook that I check out Schmart Board for surface-mount soldering. Apparently they make surface-mount boards with long over-tinned traces, you put a small tip on the trace and chase the solder back up to the pin.

Everything I'm dealing with right now is either through-hole or on a carrier, but this looks super handy.

Doing some Arduino stuff. Had to dig through the parts box to find a full-sized USB cable...

Searching for niche technical info, thinking about how the rise of Google searches vs blog links for finding stuff devalues PageRank...

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Microcontrollers talking Bluetooth and seeing things, Cafe Gratitude cookbook pies in the fridge, dinner in the oven... productive day.

[ related topics: Wireless Work, productivity and environment Embedded Devices ]

Scrabble. Two blanks. Bingo, for 59 points. Unsure if this was a good play.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Scrabble ]

Listening to Planet Money on the Jones Act. Amazing how much we spend on the military in indirect ways, beyond explicit budget line items.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Pop Culture Currency ]

TechDirt: Nancy Pelosi admits that Congress is scared of the CIA, pulling quotes from Roll Call: Pelosi Praises Feinstein, Calls CIA Director’s Statements ‘Befuddling’:

“I salute Sen. Feinstein,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference of the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I’ll tell you, you take on the intelligence community, you’re a person of courage, and she does not do that lightly. Not without evidence, and when I say evidence, documentation of what it is that she is putting forth.”

Pelosi added that she has always fought for checks and balances on CIA activity and its interactions with Congress: “You don’t fight it without a price because they come after you and they don’t always tell the truth.

[ related topics: Quotes Politics Current Events Community Conferences ]

A *DRUNK DRIVER* rear-ended stopped traffic and killed two people, but local media are trying to make texting the issue. WTF?

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

Mark Shuttleworth: ACPI, firmware and your security

Arguing for ACPI on your next-generation device is arguing for a trojan horse of monumental proportions to be installed in your living room and in your data centre. I’ve been to Troy, there is not much left.

[Emphasis original] Yes. We need to be insisting on open source and open designs everywhere. Especially as we see more and more evidence of gross incompetence and outright snooping from vendors of embedded systems.

[ related topics: Free Software virus Robotics Embedded Devices Archival ]

Superior Visual Thinking May Be Key to Independence for High Schoolers With Autism:

Researchers at UNC’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG) and UNC’s School of Education report that teaching independence to adolescents with autism can provide a crucial boost to their chances for success after high school.

“We explored many factors that contribute to the poor outcomes people with autism often experience,” said Kara Hume, co-principal investigator of FPG’s Center on Secondary Education for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (CSESA). “It’s clear that teaching independence to students with autism should be a central focus of their activities in high school.”

The more I read how thinking on Autism Spectrum Disorders is evolving, the more I find myself on that spectrum...

[ related topics: Ziffle Children and growing up Beer Education ]

King City, California, police officers arrested:

Tuesday's arrests, which also included a former police chief, came after a six-month probe of the police department launched in September when a visiting investigator — there to check out a homicide — heard from numerous sources that the community didn't trust its police department.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement California Culture Community Personal Lubricant ]

Went to @RadioShack for some transistors. They had one 2n2222, 1 baggy of 15 2n3906 s. This is a store of last resort, not a supplier.

Your feel-good video of someone being suprised with the news that their prediction made 30 years ago is true: Stanford Professor Andrei Linde celebrates physics breakthrough (YouTube):

Assistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo surprises Professor Andrei Linde with evidence that supports cosmic inflation theory. The discovery, made by Kuo and his colleagues at the BICEP2 experiment, represents the first images of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. These waves have been described as the "first tremors of the Big Bang."

Via Kottke.

This from the news that gravitational waves have apparently been measured, supporting the WMAP inflation theory of the universe.

[ related topics: Movies Space & Astronomy Astronomy Current Events Education Video Economics ]

And the Seattle Police Department comes through with aplomb and class: Anti-Cop Protesters Make Cops Look Awesome.

Several people had asked me last week to march with them. I've been a loud advocate for police reform and I'd complained about a Seattle cop's misconduct last year (the SPD flip-flopped on the case, pointed fingers, etc.). But I didn't plan to attend. I've been to anti-cop marches before—such as one that idolized an alleged cop murderer—and that shit is a liability to its own cause. Well, I'm glad I didn't go, because I ran into the marchers by chance on Saturday evening:

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Seattle Archival ]

Gonna have to buy the new edition of the Scrabble dictionary (H/T to @Peterme ): http://www.slate.com/articles/...g_inside_the_contest_to_add.html

[ related topics: Games Invention and Design Scrabble ]

RT Elf Sternberg ‏@elfsternberg

The study the US Gov uses to claim pot is detrimental has insanely skewed samples. They claim "the average pot user" smokes 1,880 joints/yr.

continued:

Seriously. Look at Table 1, "Characteristics of sample cannabis users:" http://brain.oxfordjournals.or...rly/2012/06/04/brain.aws136.full

Sheee, you don't even have to get that far into the paper to see that it's bullshit:

... Lower Global Assessment of Functioning scores are typical of the general population of cannabis users and are most likely due to cannabis use impacting on functioning in daily life.

Uh. Yeah. Correlation vs cause much?

Addendum: Elf continues:

@danlyke A National Academy of Science agrees with you: http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...3/01/09/1215678110.full.pdf+html (warning: PDF).

[ related topics: tolkien Furniture ]

Washington Post is suggesting that the NSA has the ability to replay any phone call within an unnamed country for up to 30 days:

At the request of U.S. officials, The Washington Post is withholding details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned.

[ related topics: Software Engineering History ]

How To Extract Sheet Music From YouTube Videos, using a service called Chordify, which, yes, attempts to extract chords from audio files.

I think I got this by way of Tara of Research Buzz.

[ related topics: Music ]

Nassim N. Taleb ‏@nntaleb:

The arguments about the tail risks of GMOs & their "safety/necessity" are eerily similar to those I heard about banking risks before crisis.

Full Disclosure mailing list shuts down, and surprisingly, it wasn't a legal challenge from a vendor, or from one country or another's law enforcement, it was in-fighting and trolling.

I'm not willing to fight this fight any longer. It's getting harder to operate an open forum in today's legal climate, let alone a security-related one. There is no honour amongst hackers any more. There is no real community. There is precious little skill. The entire security game is becoming more and more regulated. This is all a sign of things to come, and a reflection on the sad state of an industry that should never have become an industry.

I miss the old net too.

[ related topics: Games Law Law Enforcement Community Global Warming ]

Eccentric Flower rants about surveys, and I've got further thoughts on this (especially the *PIRG scamsters, who are using push-survey techniques to try to get donations which, last time I checked, seemed to go entirely to their on-staff lobbyists).

But the big thing, the place I so want to help, is places like product surveys, feedback to make services better for me, and far too often the questions are completely orthogonal to my concerns. The "Why did you hide this ad?" survey on Facebook is one that's particularly badly designed, every discussion I've had about this suggests that we all just start randomly answering questions rather than giving them useful feedback, because the knobs are put there to mollify and pacify us, rather than to actually help us help them.

[ related topics: Community ]

New rule: Any spec for push notifications needs to start by showing that it isn't a potential platform for DDOS amplification.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

RT BinaryBad ‏@BinaryBad:

I feel sorry for dogs. They learnt to fetch newspapers, but newspapers are dying. Killed by an internet driven by cats.

[ related topics: Net Culture Dogs ]

Model View Culture: The Making of Myths: Questioning claims that are widely accepted in the technology industry. By Laurent Bossavit. Read it closely, it's worth going deeper than the pull-quotes to understand things like stock photography representations of programming.

But pull-quotes: Mark Hershberger @hexmode chose:

I eventually concluded from this entrenchment of belief that software engineering tended to be a pseudo-scientific discipline, rather than truly empirical. ...

which everyone who has done software development (rather than, say, done training people in software development processes, is pretty sure of), but I've been trying to figure out why I'm so unhappy and unproductive in my current day job (even as I manage to knock out good portions of a consumer product design in a weekend), and Mark's other pull from it is from this paragraph:

... And it also glamorizes the field, ignoring the truth that large chunks of “IT programming” are rote and repetitive work, copying and pasting templates and adjusting variable names.

Yes. That crap. I hate it. Especially when it's accompanied by an inability to actually impact the processes which require all of that mindlessly translating data from one form to another.

[ related topics: Quotes Photography Software Engineering Sociology Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Heinlein California Culture Graphic Design Economics ]

PolyOne Corporation plans to stop manufacturing Royalex, the vinyl-ABS hybrid plastic that has made whitewater and trekking canoes so rugged and damned nigh indestructible.

[ related topics: Whitewater Model Building ]

RT Noah Slater ‏@nslater

Bwhahaha. Someone opened an issue on the license. Someone else points out that by doing so, he violated the license. https://github.com/nslater/DAMAIL/issues/6

http://www.fblikejacker.in/ http://api.devmine.net/ Selling a service that hijacks unrelated user operations to appear to Facebook like clicking on a Like button.

(WARNING: autoplay audio, obnoxious, obviously you shouldn't trust 'em...)

[ related topics: Music ]

Elephants are even cannier than zoologists previously realised:

To find out, Dr McComb and Dr Shannon recorded Masai and Kamba men as they calmly said, “Look, look over there, a group of elephants is coming.” They then played the recordings to 48 groups of elephants to see what happened. They have just published the results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[ related topics: Current Events Economics ]

Dear everyone linking to that "NASA collapse is coming" study/thing: Brilliance is knowing when the bubble will pop, not knowing it's there.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

RT Laconia, the Tailhug ‏@jacel:

Visual Studio 2012: invented by hyperintelligent cats to spite us all? I think so.

RT Baral'heia ‏@baralheia:

@jacel Relevant: pic.twitter.com/RAN0Py7YDu

Which is a twitpic of http://www.commitstrip.com/en/page/3/ , aaaand I just got a new comic to read

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Robotics Invention and Design Embedded Devices ]

I don't mind people using DBIx::Class, but hate them that don't provide a shell script that actually regenerates the class files. Grrr.

RT Rogers Cadenhead ‏@rcade:

I went looking for Greg Costikyan's game blog and web presence and they were both gone. Not cool, Internet.

So a few things are wrong with the web:

• Stuff disappears from it. People die or become disinterested in their web presences, or decide to reorganize their servers.
• We should be able to host our own content. $MUCH/month, for lousy upstream connections, and we still need a colo server or an additional hosting plan.
• DNS is centralized.

I suspect that to fix this we may only need links to bittorrent hashes, and some mechanism for browsers to look inside .zip or .tgz files. Ideas?

[ related topics: Games Weblogs Net Culture ]

http://boingboing.net/2014/03/...klamp-comes-alive-with-ardu.html

A desk lamp, well animated, in the real world (not CGI).

[ related topics: Animation ]

Both because the Cold War is on again, and because we've got a domestic issue with impenetrable bizarre bureaucracies: McSweeney's: Kafka’s Joke Book.

[ related topics: Books History ]

And now the NSA's top lawyer is claiming that the big U.S. tech companies like Yahoo and Google knew about the data collection.

[ related topics: Law ]

Things that slow #IoT adoption: Our alarm light timer needs replacing. Again. Do I have to build *this* myself, too?

Sure, I can help a co-worker look at that error Perl Moose is throwing, I wasn't using my sanity anyway...

[ related topics: Perl Open Source hubris ]

The twitter account @egressmethods is an attempt to automatically generate phrases in the vein of Paul Simon's 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover.

The Register: Microsoft frisked blogger's Hotmail inbox, IM chat to hunt Windows 8 leaker, court told.

In other words, RT Matthew Prince ‏@eastdakota:

Worry if you're a startup Microsoft is pursuing and you're using Office365: competitive intelligence is a stone's throw from protecting IP.

Or, worry if you're a startup with competing technologies and Microsoft is installing, say, software that scans your computer for viruses or for search contents or...

The court complaint where this came out (PDF).

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft Software Engineering moron ]

Kickstarter for a coin sized Arduino with an integrated OLED display.

[ related topics: Currency ]

It ain't just AT&T, Verizon and the NSA, Orange gives all of its phone data to France's DGSE.

I've gotten over being annoyed at pop-over ads/sign-ups/whatever, now I'm just pissed off that they make me resize my browser to close 'em.

RT Seriouspony ‏@seriouspony

My mentor: "while everyone else tries to motivate/make the horse DO something, a master horseman tries to remove what's blocking the horse."

So SparkFun had 2,000 multimeters confiscated by U.S. Customs because the yellow case and black face was deemed to infringe on Fluke's trademark.

Fluke responded by giving SparkFun a shipment of genuine Fluke multimeters, which SparkFun is donating to various educational causes.

Fluke steps up to the plate and hits it out of the park, protecting their trademark and strengthening their brand. Well done.

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Law Current Events Copyright/Trademark ]

So ages ago TC linked to the Ernest Glitch Chronicles which, apparently, has turned into a novel.

Damn Interesting: Absolute Zero is 0K is a look at the chase for liquid gasses and low temperatures, and seems pretty much like a real life version. Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Archival ]

Spam subject line started "Bay / double-hung ...", took a moment to realize it was for windows, not Craigslist personals.

[ related topics: Microsoft Spam Monty Python California Culture ]

https://firstlook.org/theinter...de-nsa-secret-efforts-hunt-hack- system-administrators/

Hunting and Hacking System Admins: Yes you should be paranoid if you are a SysAdmin.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Net Culture ]

Okay, having the laptop to Arduino to Bluetooth to cell phone and back communication working is kinda cool...

[ related topics: Wireless Work, productivity and environment ]

RT @emptywheel

Not surprised NSA back-doored Huawei but it makes our squealing abt corrupted chips fr China pretty funny. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03...rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

Quote from The New York Times article:

“Many of our targets communicate over Huawei-produced products,” the N.S.A. document said. “We want to make sure that we know how to exploit these products,” it added, to “gain access to networks of interest” around the world.

So, yeah, if you're using a Huawei router there's a chance it's been exploited. By the United States.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Content Management Invention and Design New York Woodworking ]

The Atlantic Cities: A DIY Approach to Slowing a City's Cars, in which citizens are making signs that look kinda but not really like speed limit signs and applying them liberally.

Look closer, these signs are not NYC DOT issue. First, they're made of plastic, rather than aluminum, and affixed to signposts with zip ties rather than bolts. They are not reflective, the way real street signs are. And at the bottom, in white letters on black, is the logo of the DIY street safety action group Right of Way.

[ related topics: Fabrication Race ]

Supporting the education industry over self-directed life-long learner model supports age discrimination.

[ related topics: Education ]

Not sure I'm up for $15 a shot, but the @New55Project 4x5 Film kickstarter looks very interesting: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bobcrowley/new55-film

Jack mentioned A closer look at aerial image of Highway 530 mudslide. As in "holy shit, the side just slid off a mountain and wiped several houses and people off the map" up there in Washington...

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping Real Estate ]

Shadow passed along Man riding bicycle charged with DUI after hitting car.

When police told him he was investigating Quick for a DUI, he went on a "drunken rant" to police about how he was not drunk, but he did have several beers and was "buzzed," police said. Police then asked him to do two field sobriety tests and he failed both, according to the report. Police also asked him for a Breathalyzer, but Quick refused.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Automobiles Pedal Power Bicycling ]

So are dogecoin, Americancoin, Argentum, Coinye and the like an example of Gresham's Law occurring with the bitcoin model?

Following up on my mention that Microsoft has read Hotmail accounts without a warrant to track down trade secret leaks, and that Google has dome similarly, now Yahoo, Google and Apple claim the right to read user emails.

RT ashkan soltani ‏@ashk4n:L

12 of the top 25 news sites (incl. @washingtonpost) rely on Microsoft or Google for hosted email services (2/2) http://pic.twitter.com/Dgio3KITJo

We really really really need end-to-end encrypted email with multiple paths and partitioning to confuse metadata analysis.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Hardware Hackery Humor Photography Privacy Microsoft Robotics moron Current Events Embedded Devices Cryptography Gambling ]

RT Lindsay Banks Bayley ‏@lindsaybanks:

Cost of a motor vehicle death: $6 M, '09 cost of crashes urb areas: ~$300 B, annual per cap cost of crashes: $1,522 http://usat.ly/1mqoGi1

This MeFi thread about the Maumee & Western railroad line, the "leaning locomotive" line, caught my eye 'cause my parents and youngest sister live near Maumee. But the thread has spawned all sorts of cool train related other links. Recommended.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Machinery Trains ]

So I'm not sure how NPR's Five Myths About Drinking Water got published, who decided to put out the press release that it was pulled from, but...

"Water is a great strategy for dieters because it has no calories," says Madeline Fernstrom of the University of Pittsburgh. "So you can keep your mouth busy without food and get the sense of satisfaction."

But water is not magical, she adds. Other zero-calorie options such as diet sodas are fine, too.

Uh: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_144086.html

[ related topics: Health Food Current Events Education ]

Salon: The pseudo-science of Alcoholics Anonymous: There’s a better way to treat addiction is authors pimping their book piece looking at The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry.

I have often thought that 12-Step programs are harmless to those they don't work for, and a great tool for those they do work for. The authors are making the case that because we, socially, have an expectation that 12-Step programs do work, they harm those for whom they don't work. Pretty severely.

[ related topics: Books Law Work, productivity and environment Salon magazine ]

Saved off for later reading: Psychology Today: Sex Research Takes a Strange Turn: Sex orientation isn't only about what attracts us; what repels us also matters.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Weblogs ]

RT Elf Sternberg ‏@elfsternberg:

EHLO
250 - server offers 6 extensions: 
250 - IS
250 - IT 
250 - ME
250 - YOURE
250 - LOOKING
250 - FOR

[ related topics: tolkien ]

Yes, Swype, my finger did leave the screen while trying to enter "appreciate", but "Aoki urinate" is not auto-"correct".

"In reality, on a large scale, democracy is a measurement result of how effectively propaganda was executed." -- Arsenie Yeremin

Newsweek: The CIA Doesn’t Want You to Know How Badly It Botched Torture:

"Some in the agency might not have wanted him released because so much of his case was based on erroneous assessments, that to have released him would have shown the operation to have been a house of cards, like so much of the war on terrorism," he told Harper's magazine.

So, yeah, torture, innocent people being detained because to release them would be to reveal incompetence.

These are the people informing and guiding our foreign policy.

[ related topics: Politics History Law Real Estate ]

India has gone from 200,000 cases of polio per year in 1988, to no new cases in 3 years. The World Health Organization is about to announce that polio has been eradicated in India.

Yay, vaccines!

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design ]

"muxing". Not sure how I feel about that word. I mean, it's kind of obvious what it means, but...

RT Sad Server ‏@sadserver

If you watch a movie of your life backwards, it's about a sysadmin who regains youth/happiness as they forget more and more about computers

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Net Culture ]

Thinking about assorted ATM exploits, and wondering why that code isn't running on a microcontroller, sans OS, with the fuses burned...

[ related topics: Sports Embedded Devices ]

Hedge grown into fences = Fedge. Beautiful living willow fences with some interesting patterns and ideas:

http://www.offgridquest.com/green/521-27-living-willow-fences

Time spent to make the API to the other system work: 1 hour

Time spent to make it handle a wide range of conceivable errors: 2 days

Time spent to make your system nicely display the internal implosions the other system hides from it's users so your users know the error is in the other system: priceless

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Wow! Such speed! Many vroom! Doge NASCAR is coming to Talladega: http://www.reddit.com/r/dogeco...nts/21c5xq/doge4nascar_is_funded

[ related topics: Sports ]

Oh @BayAreaClipper: all the convenience of forgetting to tag off, all the reliability of having to carry cash anyway.

Rain means the campers along the Rodota MUP are clogging the sidewalks under the bridges. Making our mental health care failures visible.

[ related topics: Health ]

Larry passed along the S.2078 — 113th Congress (2013-2014) Stop Motorcycle Checkpoint Funding Act, which seems like a great idea and first step, but if we could additionally stop the various other "papiere bitte" checkpoints, that'd be even better.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Weblogs ]

Oh, this is brilliant: Holier Than You: Cars speeding vs bikes running stopsigns calls out a comment on this article:

Today I passed a bicycle doing more than 35 mph down Alpine Road - speed limits apply to bikers too. Can the police please cite people who speed on bikes or break the traffic laws in other ways?

(Emphasis mine and Holier Than You's) A charitable reading could be that she was going the other way, but, no, she comes back into clarify that, in fact:

I was in my car - I and the biker deserve to be ticketed. I confess I was exceeding the speed limit and accelerated to about 45 mph to pass safely.

WTF? How does this woman's head not explode from the cognitive dissonance?

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Sports Automobiles Pedal Power Bicycling Government ]

I'm putting this here because I've had conversations with a couple of people recently over the "we are generating way more video than we use, how do we sort through that" issue, and I made some comment about the awesomeness that comes from the Russia-like ubiquity of dash cams: RT Richard Hall ‏@rihallix

@danlyke US version: Camera detects frustration after a "jerk"incident and auto-posts to social networks the last 30 seconds of video...

[ related topics: Photography Video ]

Thermoformable Birch Wood Powers Concept Car:

The Biofore Concept Car debuted in March at the 2014 Geneva International Motor Show. Key features include the passenger compartment floor, center console, display panel cover and door panels, all of which are manufactured from UPM Grada, a thermoformable wood material made with rotary cut birch veneers.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Current Events Work, productivity and environment Automobiles Economics Woodworking ]

Mark Johnston ‏@mark_johnston:

Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus #ObamaInBrussels #EUUS #energy http://pic.twitter.com/CzPTvtnUdv

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Astronomy Embedded Devices Pedal Power Bicycling Archival Aviation - Helicopters ]

PLOS ONE: Nutrition and Health – The Association between Eating Behavior and Various Health Parameters: A Matched Sample Study, Burkert, Muckenhuber, Großschädl, Rásky, Freidl

... Our results revealed that a vegetarian diet is related to a lower BMI and less frequent alcohol consumption. Moreover, our results showed that a vegetarian diet is associated with poorer health (higher incidences of cancer, allergies, and mental health disorders), a higher need for health care, and poorer quality of life. ...

Via Grist. Correlation is not cause, this could also be why, anecdotally, so many people in the health food store seem unhealthy...

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design Food Television ]

Dear Aquasana: love the QR code on the filter assembly, just wish it were to the exact filter pack we need, not the generic filters page

RT Jillian Keenan ‏@JillianKeenan:

Many people in the agriculture industry are victims of trafficking. Therefore, all agricultural transactions must be criminalized.

Shawn passed along Grist: This ski lift for cyclists helps you get up hills. The lift is a Trampe CycloCable®, here's a link to the demo video (YouTube).

[ related topics: Movies Sports Video ]

FBI: California State Senator Leland Yee arrested.

So, the anti-gun crusader was trying to import assault rifles for gangs. And other ugly politics.

[ related topics: Politics Law Enforcement California Culture Guns ]

Violet Blue: Hackonomics: Stolen Twitter accounts ‘more valuable’ than credit cards, in which it is asserted that in the wake of the Target breach, there's a glut of stolen cards (and, I suspect, quite a bit of scrutiny on the use of many cards).

Drawing from Rand Corporation: Markets for Cybercrime Tools and Stolen Data.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Kickstarter: Faire Play: Barbie-Compatible 3D Printed Medieval Armor.

House of Cards isn't releasing Season 3 until well after the Kickstarter is scheduled to finish, so that's eliminated as a potential source of delay.

[ related topics: Graphics Real Estate ]

If I could go back in time and make the world better, I'd allow hanging commas in SQL CREATE statements.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Databases ]

/.: Russian Officials Dump iPads For Samsung Tablets Over Spy Fears, sounds like they're running some home-compiled version on Android on them.

Open source seems to be the way forward...

[ related topics: Free Software Sports ]

Hey @LumberJocks users, go here to possibly win a Hendrik Varju bandsaw DVD video series! http://lumberjocks.com/CricketWalker/blog/40343#comment-1804731

[ related topics: Weblogs Video ]

Mozilla has announced that Brendan Eich is the new CEO. Eich gave a thousand bucks to the California Proposition 8 campaign. Tim's Journal: Against Tolerance is, I think, the best run-down of why Eich hasn't made amends for that.

[ related topics: Weblogs Open Source Invention and Design California Culture ]

RT Spencer Ackerman ‏@attackerman

May 2011 http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/secret-patriot-act/ March 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/wor...ses-end-nsa-bulk-data-collection The difference is named Edward Snowden, full stop.

RT Jennifer Gunter ‏@DrJenGunter

Rather limp -> @mpf2011: “@gnuman1979: I do not want!! http://pic.twitter.com/DxnPsyLtBH / Is it Nat'l Penis Day? #NotOnMyCalendar”

RT john. ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ) ‏@genehack:

@DrJenGunter I hate to be the one to break it to you doc, but that's how they spend most of their time. 8^)

RT Jennifer Gunter ‏@DrJenGunter:

@genehack but they are prettier erect so if the cupcakes want to be pretty...

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Interactive Drama John S Jacobs-Anderson Photography Sexual Culture Robotics Embedded Devices Archival ]

Via Shawn.

[ related topics: Photography Archival ]

So Comcast is making all these moves (charging premium bandwidth fees to Netflix) and negotiating a similar deal with AppleTV and I get little sad thinking the world is going to become more comcastic(insert finger in mouth and gag). I am now comforted in realizing the net is just going to go around the dinosaurs setting up tolls/barriers to dataflow. I realize facebook/google are working in their own interest but they are opening up new lands. The upper troposphere/ lower stratosphere might become the new New Lands or wild west. http://arstechnica.com/informa...ivity-from-solar-powered-planes/

And just to put a smile on my face. Watching Ford pour lemon juice on Cadillac's self inflicted cut is priceless http://grist.org/list/why-do-w...ord-have-very-different-answers/

[ related topics: broadband Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Automobiles Photovoltaics TC ]

RT Jonathan Cremin ‏@kudoz

OH: “Schadenfriday”

As various organizations I'm a fan of crow about the takedown of Leland Yee, it's astounding how much legislative evil this slime backed...

Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: Politician Who Sponsored Law Struck Down by Brown v. EMA Arrested on Corruption Charges

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: Survey Charts Dramatic Change Toward Marriage Equality:

On Thursday, the Human Rights Campaign and Americans for Marriage Equality released the results of a bipartisan study of likely 2016 voters conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and TargetPoint Consulting. The study revealed that as support for marriage equality continues to grow, voters’ attitudes toward the LGBT community and the implications of marriage equality have also shifted. ...

But the big kicker is summarized as: Americans View Gay People More Favorably Than Evangelical Christians: Poll.

So, you know, as churches are talking about what's driving young people away and how to better lure back the 20-somethings who've left and all... well...

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Invention and Design Political Correctness Sociology Current Events Civil Liberties Community Marriage ]

FBI Investigates FEMA Flood Map Changes After NBC News Report:

FBI agents are interviewing employees at FEMA in an investigation of unusual changes in federal flood insurance maps that benefited oceanfront condo buildings with a history of flooding, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

Soooo, we're involved in insuring high value low-lying buildings... why, exactly?

[ related topics: Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Maps and Mapping Architecture Real Estate ]

I am going to print this out as a sticker and randomly apply it to objects

[ related topics: Photography ]

RT Truculent ‏@Truculent67

I'm "cars had ashtrays in the backseat" years old.

Asked for ID while buying a bottle of Sonomic vinegar (with my credit card): "sorry sir, too bitter, no more vinegar for you!"

Via Shadow, a picture of a miniature tool set that definitely needs some additional background. Holy crap, that's amazing.

Lady at hardware store on learning I'm a computer programmer: "With all the cool projects you do, I thought you made things for a living."

[ related topics: Software Engineering Education ]

Wow! The "April Fools" forelash is in full-swing today.

great spoof of a technical meeting at: http://www.wimp.com/theexpert/

It'd be funny, except I swear I've been in this meeting, in Spanish.

The very end is perfect.

And there will a variant of it in English at 3pm today.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms703214.aspx - Dan. Was it you that was talking/tweeting about signing XML? I saw this and thought it was apropos, even if the Microsoft way.

[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Humor Web development Books Content Management Microsoft moron Woodworking ]

LumberJocks: My version of a Stanley 112 / Veritas Scraper plane.

That is some gorgeous woodworking. And awesome tool building.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]