Flutterby™! From 2016-12-01 to 2016-12-29

Much concern about the new administration gutting Social Security, but I doubt civilization will last long enough for that to matter.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Archival ]

ECC Poetry: Revenge. An excerpt:

because real talk, you didn’t stop the future from coming.

You just delayed our coronation.

We have the same deviant haircuts we had yesterday;

we are still getting gay-married like nobody’s business

because it’s still nobody’s business;

there’s a Muslim kid in Kansas who has already written the schematic

for the robot that will steal your job in manufacturing,

and that robot? Will also be gay, so get used to it:

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Robotics Sociology Heinlein Marriage ]

Anyone know what % of an air conditioner cost is labor? Trying to figure out how <$900/job/year is enough to not move a plant.

[ related topics: Heinlein ]

Tara Parker-Pope writing in The New York Times: Believing in Treatments That Don’t Work. On cough syrup, antibiotics for ear infections, beta-blockers for heart attack victims, back surgery, arthroscopic surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee, and other procedures that fare no better than placebo.

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design Writing Work, productivity and environment New York ]

FGM (female genital mutilation) happened to me in white, midwest America'

Yes, it was 1947, but Christianity is not nearly so far removed from Islam as its adherents would have you believe.

[ related topics: Religion Current Events Race ]

Via Shadow: RT Re-Think CS11 @StopCS11

In light of today's #airpollutionwarnings in London we call on @tfl and @MayorofLondon to halt all Cycle Superhighway Schemes until reviewed

nicely summed up in the Reddit thread: Anti-cycling lobby wants halt to cycle superhighway in London because of air pollution levels.

[ related topics: Sports Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Another from Shadow: Cool tall bike with more wheels..

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

Modern circuit breakers are pretty amazing. #itworks #ow #gonnaleaveamark

Hard to tell at night but what looks like a huge smoke plume from something north of Richmond to the top of the bay on the east side

[ related topics: California Culture ]

Going back through Google's spam filter (which is way too freakin' aggressive), another from Shadow: Bike Mine presents an explosive solution to bike theft:

The Bike Mine is a very simple mechanical alarm that uses a titanium trip wire, spring-action punch and shotgun blank commonly referred to as a "saluting blank," all housed in a rubber-wrapped steel body and attached to the bicycle via Velcro straps. The titanium wire gets connected to the wheel or nearby structure, so that when a bike thief moves the bike, the saluting blank goes off, creating a 150 dB blast to wake up the bicycle owner (and half the neighborhood) and ideally scare the thief off immediately.

Here's the (sadly canceled) Bike Mine kickstarter campaign

[ related topics: Cool Science Spam Monty Python Travel Pedal Power Bicycling Databases ]

Nielsen Norman Group: The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think:

Overall, people with strong technology skills make up a 5–8% sliver of their country’s population, whatever rich country they may be coming from. Go back to the OECD’s definition of the level-3 skills, quoted above. Consider defining your goals based on implicit criteria. Or overcoming unexpected outcomes and impasses while using the computer. Or evaluating the relevance and reliability of information in order to discard distractors. Do these sound like something you are capable of? Of course they do.

Now consider this in the context of how much of basic computer use is just logical thinking...

OECD Skills Studies 2016: Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills

[ related topics: Quotes User Interface Education ]

I thought we knew this: NPR: Going Bare Down There May Boost The Risk Of STDs:

"We were surprised at how big the effect was," says Benjamin Breyer, a urologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the study. "Right now, we have no way knowing if grooming causes the increase in risk for infections. All we can say is that they're correlated. But I probably would avoid an aggressive shave right before having sex."

Via Sensible Endowment.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Health Bay Area California Culture Education ]

Advertisers run screaming from anything sexy, but line up for hate-filled false news and have to be called out on it https://twitter.com/slpng_giants

[ related topics: Current Events Consumerism and advertising ]

US life expectancy declines for the first time since 1993. The article says that:

Rising fatalities from heart disease and stroke, diabetes, drug overdoses, accidents and other conditions caused the lower life expectancy revealed in a report released Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics. In all, death rates rose for eight of the top 10 leading causes of death.

And the accompanying graph suggests that most of the loss of life expectancy is below age 65.

Via Sensible Endowment.

[ related topics: Health Mathematics Flowers ]

That viral graph about millennials’ declining support for democracy? It’s very misleading.:

So where does this graph go wrong? It plots the percentage of people who answer 10, and it treats everyone else the same. The graph treats the people who place themselves at 1 as having the same commitment to democracy as those who answer 9. In reality, almost no one (less than 1 percent) said that democracy is “not at all important.”

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Optimism and Cause-Specific Mortality: A Prospective Cohort Study, Eric S. Kim, Kaitlin A. Hagan, Francine Grodstein, Dawn L. DeMeo, Immaculata De Vivo and Laura D. Kubzansky:

Growing evidence has linked positive psychological attributes like optimism to a lower risk of poor health outcomes, especially cardiovascular disease. It has been demonstrated in randomized trials that optimism can be learned. If associations between optimism and broader health outcomes are established, it may lead to novel interventions that improve public health and longevity. In the present study, we evaluated the association between optimism and cause-specific mortality in women after considering the role of potential confounding (sociodemographic characteristics, depression) and intermediary (health behaviors, health conditions) variables. We used prospective data from the Nurses’ Health Study (n = 70,021). Dispositional optimism was measured in 2004; all-cause and cause-specific mortality rates were assessed from 2006 to 2012. Using Cox proportional hazard models, we found that a higher degree of optimism was associated with a lower mortality risk. After adjustment for sociodemographic confounders, compared with women in the lowest quartile of optimism, women in the highest quartile had a hazard ratio of 0.71 (95% confidence interval: 0.66, 0.76) for all-cause mortality. Adding health behaviors, health conditions, and depression attenuated but did not eliminate the associations (hazard ratio = 0.91, 95% confidence interval: 0.85, 0.97). Associations were maintained for various causes of death, including cancer, heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease, and infection. Given that optimism was associated with numerous causes of mortality, it may provide a valuable target for new research on strategies to improve health.

BBC: Optimistic women 'cut risk of deadly diseases', NPR: A Brighter Outlook Could Translate To A Longer Life

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Content Management Microsoft Health Invention and Design Current Events Monty Python ]

Baltimore's cash bail system traps thousands, propelling the poor deeper into poverty. The bond system means that innocent people who just want to keep their jobs end up with tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Chuck Jones in the Washington Post: I’m the union leader Donald Trump attacked. I’m tired of being lied to about our jobs.

Audi cars now talk to stop lights in Vegas. Which is to say that they talk over the 4G LTE network to Traffic Technology Services (TTS), of Beaverton, OR, and TTS talks to the stop lights. But still cool.

Although the idea of an Audi driver watching the countdown to a green light and punching it should put fear into slow pedestrians and people who accelerate through yellow lights...

[ related topics: broadband Automobiles ]

The Russians hacked both DNC & RNC systems & leaked Democrat emails: what are they blackmailing Republicans with? http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016...&referer=https://t.co/xeyVMCSuU0

Super shout out to http://www.justonecookbook.com/ for a bunch of inspiration and flavors for last night's dinner.

Dressed for dinner at the Circle n Squares holiday party

[ related topics: Photography ]

Shadow forwarded along this fantastic desk by Vedad Kulalic: https://www.reddit.com/r/woodw..._desks_and_chairs_he_made_alone/

The same picture also appears at http://www.hawaiiforest.org/woodshow/woodshow12.html

He's done another draped table: https://www.reddit.com/r/woodw...table_table_designed_and_carved/

[ related topics: Furniture Woodworking ]

John Sundman's latest Technopotheosis talks about firefighter training and is worth a read: http://us13.campaign-archive1....5b4c59237f39c9358c&id=e90fc55762

RT everett byram ‏@rad_milk:

don't assume someone's gender just because they are back in town

U.S. DOT advances deployment of Connected Vehicle Technology to prevent hundreds of thousands of crashes .

For so many reasons, I remain skeptical. And suspect this is premature.

So if "consentacle sex" doesn't make you run screaming... back when Nobilis ran this story on his podcast I wondered how he was possibly going to take the Hentai "tentacle sex" trope and do something that didn't totally squick me, and somehow he managed it. Monster Whisperer, now in print (I think he's also doing it in Kindle form).

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Animation ]

Hey, my employer's press-releasing some new patents... https://speedgauge.net/news/press/speedgauge-awarded-new-patents

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

Yahoo disclosed that an August 2013 breach disclosed information from a billion accounts. This is separate from the breach reported in September of half a billion accounts, and apparently included the unencrypted security question data.

Related to those breaches: We've long known that Yahoo has been scanning customer emails for a government agency, but that scanning was covering all email through Yahoo, not just targeted accounts, was implemented via a kernel module, and was implemented by bypassing the security team.

So, yes, at this point we can pretty much assume that any hostile anywhere has read email into or out of Yahoo.

[ related topics: Weblogs moron ]

You've seen the hands drawn on the McDonald's cup, right? Well if you poke a hole in it... http://imgur.com/wYahuwm

[ related topics: Interactive Drama McDonald's ]

When your search gets hijacked by the Google recruiting game, and then you have to remember what you were looking for...

[ related topics: Games ]

Well, whoever was abusing the flash flooding alert mechanism on my cell phone, I've turned it off. Don't need *that* many warnings...

[ related topics: Wireless ]

I triggered the magic search terms that gets the Google programming puzzles, the first one is trivial, the second would have been trivial with NumPy, but that's not listed as an available package, so I coded up a longer form-factor version, but between interruptions and real-life, by the time I tried to submit it it said "Time limit exceeded". I'm not sure if that was because of overall time (it said I had 72 hours for that challenge, but the timer was doing wacky shit), or run time (where we get back to "just use NumPy"), but I was fed up enough with the annoying environment that I closed the tab.

I'd be interested if the same search terms trigger it for anyone else, though, if you wanna play... email me.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Nature and environment Software Engineering Clowns ]

See, this right here is why I don't decorate for holidays... (ask me about "the bears" some time...) http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp12142016.shtml

Caltech: Parkinson's Disease Linked to Microbiome:

To test this, the researchers utilized mice that overproduce αSyn and display symptoms of Parkinson's. One group of mice had a complex consortium of gut bacteria; the others, called germ-free mice, were bred in a completely sterile environment at Caltech and thus lacked gut bacteria. The researchers had both groups of mice perform several tasks to measure their motor skills, such as running on treadmills, crossing a beam, and descending from a pole. The germ-free mice performed significantly better than the mice with a complete microbiome.

The paper is "Gut Microbiota Regulate Motor Deficits and Neuroinflammation in a Model of Parkinson's Disease."

[ related topics: Nature and environment Robotics Current Events Sports ]

The thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good lady with a dildo: Sex toys used to help chase off armed robber at San Bernardino shop.

This is why when Republican voters get all up in arms about "The 2nd Amendment" I'm not willing to listen until we can talk about how Lawrence v. Texas is as important.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events Guns ]

We were worried about entertaining the young nephew. He disappeared shortly after he got here and is clambering around on the workshop roof

Nephew got loose in the wood shop.

[ related topics: Photography Woodworking ]

Cruise ship docked at the Fredericksted pier as we flew in. Now in the rain forest with chickens in the trees.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Machinery Birds ]

Crowing rosters have me awake at 5:30. Lots of wind. Rest of family stuck in Miami. When Ethan wakes it's breakfast and snorkeling.

[ related topics: Sociology ]

There are redundant roosters here. And I'm all for early rising, but dinner is dinner...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Good morning from the St Croix rain forest

[ related topics: Photography ]

Waiting for my nephew Ethan to wake up...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Going all Indiana Jones here. But with fewer snakes.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Yes, St Croix really is this cliche...

[ related topics: Photography ]

The cove where Ethan and I snorkeled yesterday. Spectacular coral, scary waves.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Can't sleep. Standing outside in the wind watching the crescent moon rise and listening to the frogs and whatnot chirping in the rain forest

[ related topics: Pop Culture ]

Greetings from 20' underneath the Caribbean at the Frederiksted Pier.

[ related topics: Photography ]

The GoPro doesn't capture the amazing color down here

[ related topics: Photography ]

More color

[ related topics: Photography ]

Even more color, and me.

[ related topics: Photography ]

I don't have opportunities to play card games like this, but Randy Milholland is behind it... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/205007809/curtain-call-2

[ related topics: Games ]

Sent the kids off to catch a rooster for dinner, just heard from 3 yo: "I just killed a chicken, and it flew away!"

[ related topics: Children and growing up Food Birds ]

Seen a bunch of these dudes, this one when nephew and I were snorkeling in Butler Bay.

[ related topics: California Culture ]

Seen a bunch of these dudes, this one when nephew and I were snorkeling in Butler Bay.

[ related topics: Photography California Culture ]

Ethan at the surface, looking at me

[ related topics: Photography ]

Ethan goofing around

[ related topics: Photography ]

Schooled. Still trying to adjust colors in post. Should really buy the red filter, but $60 seems excessive.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Random reef shot.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Merry Christmas from Mr. Victory camp in St Croix. Where we're gonna have rooster for dinner.

[ related topics: Photography ]

And a Christmas pot luck at the camp wonderfully closes this St Croix trip. Will do something tomorrow, but fly home at 5pm local.

[ related topics: Travel ]

Ethan was disappointed that I couldn't come up with any gun powder.

[ related topics: Photography Guns ]

Amanda is not nearly the climber that Ethan is

[ related topics: Photography ]

Sara and Amanda hanging out at the edge of the surf foam.

[ related topics: Photography California Culture ]

Lunch at Country Mini Zoo: Kandaloo, Provision, several fruits I'd never had before...

[ related topics: Photography ]

One of the proprietors of Island Fire Glass sculpts a Coke bottle.

[ related topics: Drugs Photography Pyrotechnics ]

Atlanta airport, gate A20, waiting for the last leg. Ethan is asleep under the benches. Could do without the football game on the TV.

[ related topics: Games Technology and Culture Aviation Television Sports ]

Riding the shuttle to the car, but one final Christmas in the tropics shot

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Automobiles Bicycling ]

Ethan, Karen and a cannon

[ related topics: Photography ]

Another number I can call?

This is what happens when you confuse your social media poster with your SMS app...

Amanda doesn't quite get the whole cannon aiming thing

[ related topics: Photography ]

Via Shadow: My brother made table. I want one.

Spectacular book-matched burl live-edge slab.

[ related topics: Books Theater & Plays Furniture Woodworking ]

The princess is being held in the castle dungeon

[ related topics: Photography ]

More family I'm the water just south of Frederiksted Pier

[ related topics: Photography Sociology ]

As I watch the Facebook tributes to Carrie Fisher and then Debbie Reynolds flow through, I'm struck by a number of things, but one of them is how many people I know are posting pictures of themselves with Debbie Reynolds. And not like autograph signing shots, but paling around with her. She was clearly a friend and mentor and light to a lot of cool people, whether they met her through show biz or journalism.

My circles and Carrie Fisher's don't intersect as strongly, but if I had something important to say to Penn Jillette I know who I'd ask for an introduction, and this story is awesome: Penn Jillette - Carrie Fisher and me at the porn awards.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Movies Journalism and Media ]

Any truth to the rumor that the Milo Yiannopoulos book with Simon & Schuster will be titled "My Struggle"?

[ related topics: Books ]