Flutterby™! From 2016-08-01 to 2016-08-31

Now we know he endorses sexual violence: Donald Trump pledges to clamp down on Internet porn http://www.sfgate.com/news/nat...ack-down-on-internet-8976017.php

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events Net Culture ]

Vallejo's attempt at a sideshow: trying to cut donuts, but the squeal is a failing power steering pump, not the tires...

Joe Minicozzi has some worthwhile observations about development and tax policy and city growth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQRD51k41IM

[ related topics: Politics Movies ]

While y'all are debating trivial little things like the Presidential election and the latest over-hyped tech news, I think it's time to turn our attention to the insidious conspiracy that undermines our way of life. Yes, it's time that we point out the $2B/year industry that is big floss: AP: Medical benefits of dental floss unproven:

The AP looked at the most rigorous research conducted over the past decade, focusing on 25 studies that generally compared the use of a toothbrush with the combination of toothbrushes and floss. The findings? The evidence for flossing is "weak, very unreliable," of "very low" quality, and carries "a moderate to large potential for bias."

"The majority of available studies fail to demonstrate that flossing is generally effective in plaque removal," said one review conducted last year. Another 2015 review cites "inconsistent/weak evidence" for flossing and a "lack of efficacy."

[ related topics: History Current Events Conspiracy Government ]

2010: Millennium Tower's shifting perspective:

Millennium Tower at First and Fremont streets is a dynamic, constantly shifting presence on the skyline. ...

No, literally: 2016: SF’s landmark tower for rich and famous is sinking and tilting:

Rated by Worth magazine as one of the top 10 residential buildings in the world, the Millennium at 301 Mission St. is home to such A-listers as Joe Montana and Hunter Pence. Until his recent death, it’s where venture capitalist Tom Perkins owned a penthouse. Condos sell for anywhere from $1.6 million to north of $10 million.

However, since its completion in 2008, the 58-story building has sunk 16 inches, according to an independent consultant hired to monitor the problem. It has also tilted 2 inches to the northwest.

[ related topics: Bay Area Architecture Real Estate ]

Guy takes a bunch of old photographs, stitches them together, and the result is remarkably cool: Otto Lilienthal’s First Film. You will, of course, recognize the name as that of the guy who did a lot of experiment with early airplanes, specifically gliders.

[ related topics: Photography Aviation ]

The end result of an economic system in which capital concentrations appreciate faster than economic growth is monarchy.

[ related topics: Economics ]

RT Goth Ms. Frizzle ‏@spookperson:

I feel like a million bucks

a churning mass of antlers and rolling eyes pouring through the forest at night like a great black wave

RT Len L ‏@DammujedGuds:

I take my html validation like I take my women. Lots of problems in the head.

RT @jongold ‏@jongold:

Functional Programming literally has 'fun' in the title; OOP is one letter away from . I rest my case.

RT jackwilliambell ‏@jackwilliambell

Software is made 2 ways: fabricated to a design or grown from an idea. Forget 'Software Engineering'; most programmers are really gardeners.

RT jackwilliambell ‏@jackwilliambell:

Mind you, this is not necessarily a bad thing. But it would really help if the industry stopped fooling itself.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering Law Graphic Design ]

Following up on my work on the Shotbox last year, now: Panels, the backdrop system for Shotbox https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...ts/695573783/shotbox-with-panels

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Great rundown of the current state of corruption within the IOC #Rio2016 https://www.theguardian.com/co...a-bad-olympics-gold-medal-sleaze

[ related topics: Sports Guns ]

Need to bring the rest of the office up to the level of the desk. Thank you Scott for the veneer!

[ related topics: Photography Woodworking ]

Drying stain on the bathroom trim, to be followed by mumble coats of marine varnish...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Just watched Spotlight. Highly recommended. And a reminder that I need to pay for more investigative journalism.

[ related topics: Movies Journalism and Media ]

Tom and the gang finishing up the boat building workshop at the River Heritage Center

[ related topics: Photography Boats Machinery ]

What century is it again? Sandy Springs Georgia sex toy ban upheld by the 11th circuit http://www.myajc.com/news/news...gs-ban-on-sex-toys-for-no/nr9K2/

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events ]

Biked one cart back to Trader Joe's, but clearly the thieves are scrapping them out. Sigh.

[ related topics: Photography Bicycling ]

I Peeked Into My Node_Modules Directory And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.

This is amazing. In the first section, talking about the dependencies for the "Express" module, the author discovers a dependency whose sole purpose is to "Like" a Tweet about Hot Pockets.

What sort of monster brokered an advertising deal like this? I pass sensitive customer data through Express, and they go ahead and sell my twitter favorites to Hot Pockets? Needless to say, I likely won’t be using express again.

And then it gets more bizarre.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

I'm going to move a refrigerator on Friday. Anyone have a ramp I could borrow to pull an appliance dolly on theto the truck?

[ related topics: Heinlein Machinery ]

Ya know, I can see why people like Trump... If they only listen to one half of him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSE-XoVKaXg

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies ]

Petaluma City Manager John Brown just sent around a note about funding Petaluma city streets. In it, he notes 3 ways in which city residents contribute to funds which pay for city roads:

1. A kickback to the city from the garbage franchise for about $1.73 out of the average $16.84 garbage bill.
2. About $.05/gallon from gasoline taxes.
3. About .5% of the local 8.25% sales tax, 0.0004125 of every purchase, so of every $2424 dollars spent, about a dolllar.

Various profligate spenders on Petaluma's city council (amusingly, the people who tend to label themselves "conservative") are proposing a $120M new crossing over (or under) 101 on the north end of town. Let's say that infrastructure costs about .6%/month (a mortgage runs about $600 per hundred thousand, and bridges last about 30 years, so a reasonable back of the envelope). So that's $720k/month in value that this project needs to bring to the city.

1. That's 416,184 new garbage customers. My guess is about ten times the current number of garbage customers.
2. That's... well... a whole hell of a lot of gallons of gasoline.
3. That's $1.7B in sales tax revenue.

Now there are two things plain here. The first is that the way we fund infrastructure is bogus. The second is that we need to stop building bullshit infrastructure until we have better models for how that infrastructure brings return, because the funding is *so* decoupled from the return that we've lost any sanity in building out new projects.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design Consumerism and advertising Government ]

The good news is that rather than paying $200 for a new key for your VW, you can spend £30 on an Arduino and unlock *every* VW.

(Still not bitter about the diesel thing. Really. Much. Make the bastards pay is what I'm saying.) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tec...volkswagen-in-the-last-20-years- it-can-probably-be-unlo/

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events ]

The good news is that rather than paying $200 for a new key for your VW, you can spend £30 on an Arduino and unlock *every* VW.

(Still not bitter about the diesel thing. Really. Much. Make the bastards pay is what I'm saying.) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tec...volkswagen-in-the-last-20-years- it-can-probably-be-unlo/

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events ]

The good news is that rather than paying $200 for a new key for your VW, you can spend £30 on an Arduino and unlock *every* VW.

(Still not bitter about the diesel thing. Really. Much. Make the bastards pay is what I'm saying.) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tec...0-years-it-can-probably-be-unlo/

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events ]

Ugh. Just read the "Exhibit 3 Long Form Notice" at https://vwcourtsettlement.com . Wow, VW is totally getting off with a slap on the wrist here. Unless we opt out and pursue a lawsuit separately, we're offered $13,600 for the car the fraud, or we can keep the car, get a fix (when that becomes available), and get $5,100. The only way this'd be a deterrent is if there's a reasonably high chance that future cheaters will get caught, but from what we've learned about diesel emissions in light vehicles generally since the VW cheating came to light, this pittance isn't gonna change a damned thing.

Pissed off, but tempted to take it because I'm skeptical that there'll be any other justice laid out here.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Enforcement Automobiles ]

I'm absolutely sure these things are unrelated:

• DEA Rejects Attempt To Loosen Federal Restrictions On Marijuana
• DEA regularly mines Americans' travel records to seize millions in cash

[ related topics: Drugs Aviation Current Events ]

Hope for the future: The Atlantic: Fewer Women Are Having Babies Than Ever Before: The percentage of females with infants is now the lowest in recorded U.S. history.

Based on CDC Quarterly Provisional Estimates - Natality

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Invention and Design ]

Really wish I had time to go through and read these, this looks fascinating: Everything is fucked: The syllabus:

In a much-discussed article at Slate, social psychologist Michael Inzlicht told a reporter, “Meta-analyses are fucked” (Engber, 2016). What does it mean, in science, for something to be fucked? Fucked needs to mean more than that something is complicated or must be undertaken with thought and care, as that would be trivially true of everything in science. In this class we will go a step further and say that something is fucked if it presents hard conceptual challenges to which implementable, real-world solutions for working scientists are either not available or routinely ignored in practice.</blockquote.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health Work, productivity and environment ]

Well there's a good start: Philadelphia judge overturns 158 convictions tied to rogue narcotics cops

Public defender Bradley S. Bridge estimated that Friday's total brings to 560 the convictions involving the seven officers that have been vacated since they were indicted by a federal grand jury in July 2014.

[ related topics: Law Current Events Law Enforcement ]

I need to delve deeper into this one, but I realized something as I was reading it: All of the cool subcultures I've run into have had get-togethers where the format was conversation. All of the tech get-togethers I've been to in the past... while ... decade? ... have been presentation format.

Need more conversation, fewer presentations.

Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution:

Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?

One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping some subculture could somehow escape this dynamic.

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

From a Facebook thread:

Medium: Consent, Explained., also published as HuffPo: An Essay On Consent, From A Woman Who Hosts Huge Sex Parties.

To contrast with:

Aellagirl: Why I Can’t Say Yes To Sex

The Dirty Normal: do you know when you want it?

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs Writing ]

IRS scam robo call. This massive telecommunications surveillance network, and no automated drone strikes on these people? Really?

[ related topics: Politics broadband moron ]

I miss an office. If only because I can't build an "in case of emergency, break glass" case for business tiaras http://shop.getbullish.com/collections/business-tiaras

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law ]

This series of tweets about the hack of the NSA malware staging server is worth reading: https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/765513662597623808

Okay, I need a monologue. A minute or two. Totally open to suggestions, especially if they reveal things that I didn't know about me.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Watching the console of a little debug web server in a throwaway VM on a weird port. The bot web traffic poking around is bizarre.

RT bluegleam‏ @ctrlcreep:

disproof of lovecraft: the creatures of the void would need huge eyes to capture any light at all, making them ADORABLE

Some great messages here about why we have building and planning codes and make developers conform to them. Also why we should be taking maintenance and ongoing tax base into account when we set up development fees. I believe that we need to see a hell of a lot more of this as we come to the end-of-life of suburbs and sprawl that don't pay for themselves, and cities decide to stop subsidizing that lifestyle.

City of Omaha bulldozes pothole-filled street after complaints, residents still complaining about new dirt road

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design Archival ]

Cool episode, Tina Horn (of Why Are People Into That?) on being a pro domme, index-card based CRM, and more http://www.theheartradio.org/diaries/thebighouse

[ related topics: Music ]

Housing Policy Debate: Hidden Costs and Deadweight Losses: Bundled Parking and Residential Rents in the Metropolitan United States, C. J. Gabbe & Gregory Pierce:

... We find that the cost of garage parking to renter households is approximately $1,700 per year, or an additional 17% of a housing unit’s rent. In addition to the magnitude of this transport cost burden being effectively hidden in housing prices, the lack of rental housing without bundled parking imposes a steep cost on carless renters—commonly the lowest income households—who may be paying for parking that they do not need or want. ...

[ related topics: Real Estate Model Building ]

Congrats to this year's Hugo winners! Am kinda bummed about Chuck Tingle, though.

Walking to the store, came across evidence of an excited homecoming...

[ related topics: Photography Gambling ]

Now that assisted suicide for terminally ill people is legal in California, we're going to have to start figuring out the social customs that go with it. This is not an academic question in my circles right now, so it's great to read one tale of how to do it: I arrived at my friend's party. A few hours later she died, exactly as planned.

[ related topics: Law California Culture ]

Medical notes of the morning:

Postgraduate Medical Journal (March 1973) 49, 203-209. CASE REPORTS: Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days' duration (PDF)

Patient A.B. aged 27 years, weighed on admission 456 lb (207 kg). During the 382 days of his fast, vitamin supplements were given daily as 'Multivite' (BDH), vitamin C and yeast for the first 10 months and as 'Paladac' (Parke Davis), for the last 3 months. Non-caloric fluids were allowed ad libitum. From Day 93 to Day 162 only, he was given potassium supplements (two effervescent potassium tablets BPC supplying 13 mEq daily) and from Day 345 to Day 355 only he was given sodium supplements (2 5 g sodium chloride daily). No other drug treatment was given. Initially, the patient was treated in hospital but for the greater part of the time he was allowed home, attending regularly as an out-patient for check-up.

Even 45 years ago. Apparently the hard part is keeping the patient alive during the re- feeding period, this one was successful.

In other news Paracetamol: widely used and largely ineffective. The widely used painkiller isn't effective for pain, and may be a killer.

The bottom line is that paracetamol doesn’t effectively relieve pain but has demonstrable rare but serious adverse events. If it were just a few tablets, then maybe we could ignore it, but it isn’t. Paracetamol consumption is measured not in kilograms, not even tons, but thousands of tons a year. Both public health and ethical questions are being ignored.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Ethics Law Current Events ]

Medical notes of the morning:

Postgraduate Medical Journal (March 1973) 49, 203-209. CASE REPORTS: Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days' duration (PDF)

Patient A.B. aged 27 years, weighed on admission 456 lb (207 kg). During the 382 days of his fast, vitamin supplements were given daily as 'Multivite' (BDH), vitamin C and yeast for the first 10 months and as 'Paladac' (Parke Davis), for the last 3 months. Non-caloric fluids were allowed ad libitum. From Day 93 to Day 162 only, he was given potassium supplements (two effervescent potassium tablets BPC supplying 13 mEq daily) and from Day 345 to Day 355 only he was given sodium supplements (2 5 g sodium chloride daily). No other drug treatment was given. Initially, the patient was treated in hospital but for the greater part of the time he was allowed home, attending regularly as an out-patient for check-up.

Even 45 years ago. Apparently the hard part is keeping the patient alive during the re- feeding period, this one was successful.

In other news Paracetamol: widely used and largely ineffective. The widely used painkiller isn't effective for pain, and may be a killer.

The bottom line is that paracetamol doesn’t effectively relieve pain but has demonstrable rare but serious adverse events. If it were just a few tablets, then maybe we could ignore it, but it isn’t. Paracetamol consumption is measured not in kilograms, not even tons, but thousands of tons a year. Both public health and ethical questions are being ignored.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Ethics Law Current Events ]

Made too much dough yesterday, but rather than doing loaves I threw it in the fridge. Lunch today:

[ related topics: Photography ]

Did a four mile run & 2+ mile cool down with a friend at lunch. Just ate that whole pizza myself.

wiped. In a good way. Amazing night calling, the floor moved, I let the mic do all the work and I still feel like I'm hyperventilating

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Kaiser Permanente knows so much about me, including my medical records. Why are they sending me generic inapplicable emails? #bigdatafail

Ben Werdmuller talks about Usenet, safe spaces for teens, community, and tickling

[ related topics: Bay Area Net Culture Community ]

Huh, could've sworn I posted this, but well worth a re-post: By way of Eccentric Flower, The Architectural Mirror: Ducks and Sheds:

The terms “duck” and “decorated shed” were codified in the 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, his wife Denise Scott Brown, and their friend Steven Izenour. The book argues that there are two distinctly different types of buildings and that all buildings can be classified as one or the other.

[ related topics: Books Education Architecture Gambling Marriage ]

Hello, good folks at Kaiser!

Just following up to my whine on Twitter, I didn't expect a response, but since I've gotten two @replies I figured I owed y'all this.

In particular, I'm complaining about the recent email entitled: "11 ways to get the most from your plan". This pointed me to the PDF entitled "Kaiser Permanente Annual Notification California 2016".

Now this isn't quite as bad as some of the horror stories I heard in response to my social media griping, one woman told me of getting regular mammogram reminders despite having had a double mastectomy, and there were other tales of absurdity, but: You as an organization have *so* much information about me, when you send generic documents like this you waste my time.

Worse, when that document includes things like "2. Choose or change your primary care doctor", it makes me think "oh, crap, did my recent job change mean Kaiser lost my preferences?", and then I go have to recover my Kaiser password, log in, realize that, no, everything is fine, and, in fact, there's pretty much nothing at all in this document that applies to me.

• The majority of the offices opening are hundreds of miles from me.
• Of the ones that are close to me, I might need to know in an urgent situation, in which case I'll be checking the web site in the moment.

The entire message was completely irrelevant to me. And you have my home address, and know that I don't use a whole lot of medical services, so this 6 page PDF could have been distilled to a 3 paragraph email with the stuff that might possibly be relevant.

Which, of course, means that I'm way more likely to just delete future communications from Kaiser unread.

Now I realize that this is a hard problem. There are HIPAA issues, and frankly, it doesn't cost you anything to just let your customers take the costs of sorting out what's relevant and what isn't. However, when the next open enrollment period comes up and I think "well, do I follow my wife over to Western Advantage or stay with Kaiser", the amount of time I've spent figuring out whether I should have read that email will be taken into consideration.

Thanks for your time.

[ related topics: Health Law Journalism and Media Heinlein California Culture Marriage ]

Can we hold browser makers responsible for giving a rich enough development environments that users get conned into installing malware?

Reading your finger positions to steal your passwords using off-the-shelf WiFi hardware: Keystroke Recognition Using WiFi Signals Kamran Ali, Alex X. Liu, Wei Wang, Muhammad Shahzad

... When a human subject types on a keyboard, WiKey recognizes the typed keys based on how the CSI values at the WiFi signal receiver end. We imple- mented the WiKey system using a TP-Link TL-WR1043ND WiFi router and a Lenovo X200 laptop. WiKey achieves more than 97.5% detection rate for detecting the keystroke and 96.4% recognition accuracy for classifying single keys. In real-world experiments, WiKey can recognize keystrokes in a continuously typed sentence with an accuracy of 93.5%.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Does bitcoin have the capability to blacklist any wallet that's taken coin from a particular wallet? To help shut out extortionists etc?

[ related topics: Currency ]

Aha of the moment: gitosis. The easy way to set up your own hosting for multi-user git repos. Soon I will be able to publish my own damned shared git repos and get away from github...

Whoah! Patreon is getting podcast RSS feeds? Here come pay-for-play podcasts in a way that iTunes hasn't done...

[ related topics: Content Management ]

Because the Internet can always use more goofy cat pictures...

[ related topics: Photography Net Culture ]

River Heritage Center barn dance fundraiser, at the barn

[ related topics: Photography ]

As people are trying to figure out how to market square dancing, this course description is a good model: http://www.decal.org/courses/4195

[ related topics: Economics ]

Shadow forwarded along this animated GIF of a cyclist on a fixie descending faster by lying prone. Note the shock of the pace scooter rider, and the "riding no hands in front of a paceline in order to take a picture" reaction.

Sooo much testicle clenching "nope" in that.

Bonus: The original YouTube video which shows him getting his feet back on the freakin' pedals(!): Fixie rider Michael Guerra rides like Superman at crazy speeds

[ related topics: Animation Bicycling ]

James Duane in the LA Times: Op-Ed: Innocent? Don't talk to the police

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Fashion ]

So the thing that most strikes me about this story is how the attached PDF is so totally "I are a 1337 webmaster!!1!! These are definitely for3ign act0rz and not skr1pt k1dd13z!!1! You can tell by the Russian web pages...".

Basically, someone looked at the server logs. Everyone's web server logs look like this. The IP addresses I bothered to check are all colo boxes, it's likely that they're just more compromised machines.

I would love to learn some details of what data was corrupted or lost, though...

Yahoo News: FBI says foreign hackers penetrated state election systems (auto-play video), but you can ignore that and skip straight to the FBI Flash: Targeting Activity Against State Board of Election Systems.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Law Enforcement Guns Video ]

movfuscator is an x86 C compiler that compiles to nothing but MOV instructions.

Inspired by Stephen Dolan's paper that observes that MOV is Turing complete.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett ]

Talked with city planning about a potential project: Apparently houses in my neighborhood need 3 on-site parking spots? WTactualF?

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Anyone in SF's financial district or SOMA-ish (or even the Mission) wanna do lunch today (Wednesday)?

[ related topics: Bay Area ]

Tee Morris digs into the history of fiction podcasts and has recommendations http://www.tor.com/2016/08/31/...asts-you-should-be-listening-to/

Hilarious: Fizz Buzz in Tensorflow.

Of interest because in 4 years TC and I will be settling our bandwidth bet, but: Researchers map locations of 4669 servers in Netflix's content delivery network. Basically we've got Tivos everywhere.

[ related topics: broadband Net Culture Maps and Mapping ]