Flutterby™! From 2017-02-01 to 2017-02-03

Holy crap: Sonic must be under a big DOS attack or something. My internet has been crap since noon or so, & issues seem a few hops away.

Edit: And confirmed: Sonic Customers Offline As Local Internet Provider Hit With DDoS Attack

[ related topics: Beer Net Culture ]

RT Kate White‏ @kwhitetod:

"Requiring parking at every station is like telling people they have to buy a landline when they rent an apartment" @CaHSRA Land Use Cmte

[ related topics: Race Real Estate ]

RT Rick Gualtieri ‏@RickGualtieri:

Inspiration of the day: Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll still be in ... err ... the cold dead, vacuum of space.

I suck at this

(And I can highly recommend his "Bill the Vampire" series if you're looking for some lighthearted end of the world vampires fighting yetis urban fantasy...)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Space & Astronomy ]

Okay, I'm 4:30 into this and it's pretty awesome: Ten Meter Tower (New York Times video), a documentary of people deciding whether nor not to jump off of a 10 meter diving platform.

Thanks, crasch!

[ related topics: Invention and Design New York Video ]

New Conan Game Lets Players Adjust Genital Size.

Go for the giggles, stay for the animated GIFs.

Thanks Tara

[ related topics: Games Animation Invention and Design Video ]

New Conan Game Lets Players Adjust Genital Size.

Go for the giggles, stay for the animated GIFs.

Thanks Tara

[ related topics: Games Animation Invention and Design Video ]

Every once in a while I buy Libertarian arguments that cigarette taxes are too high. Then I see staff employed to sweep up discarded butts...

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian Government ]

This thread of tweets from Zeeshan Sheikh‏ @zxed:

Tech companies vowed to not help make a national muslim registry.

Trump puts out a Muslim Ban

Tech companies (Apple,Facebook, Google, Uber, Microsoft, Stripe, and more ) pen a draft letter to trump

"mentions concern for how the order will affect employees with visas, and explains that the companies are prepared to lend a hand"

"to help the Trump administration make logical and necessary changes" - Guess what the help will be?

"Build a national registry database for the people from the countries I banned" - Yes, we come full circle to the national muslim registry.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Humor Microsoft moron Work, productivity and environment Databases ]

Marie-Laure Colomban posted this video on Facebook:

For those who do not yet know this dance if peculiar: yes yes! We used the kangaroo, the horse or the frog in the parisian salons of 1913

It's a square dance, super energetic, lots of high jumping. What square dancing could be.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Video ]

New Study Shows Riots Make America Conservative. This is why there are agitators.

The paper is Do Protest Tactics Matter? Evidence from the 1960s Black Insurgency:

Examining county-level voting patterns, I find that black-led protests in which some violence occurs are associated with a statistically significant decline in Democratic vote-share in the 1964, 1968 and 1972 presidential elections. Black-led nonviolent protests, by contrast, exhibit a statistically significant positive relationship with county-level Democratic vote-share in the same period. Further, I find that in the 1968 presidential election exposure to violent protests caused a decline in Democratic vote- share. Examining counterfactual scenarios in the 1968 election, I estimate that fewer violent protests are associated with a substantially increased likelihood that the Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, would have beaten the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon. As African Americans were strongly identified with the Democratic party in this time period, my results suggest that, in at least some contexts, political violence by a subordinate group may contribute to a backlash among segments of the dominant group and encourage outcomes directly at odds with the preferences of the protestors.

Note, paper is from a guy's private web site, has not been peer reviewed, so I only got there from the New York Magazine article above and have no good vetting of it.

Via crasch.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design moron Television Civil Liberties New York Race ]

Tried this. It worked: Cook's Illustrated: Better Fried Tofu. 1/4 cup of salt boiled in 4 cups of water as a brine, Marinate tofu sliced about 1" thick for 15 minutes. Pat dry and drain for at least 15 minutes. Cut into cubes and fry for 4-5 minutes per side.

Crispy, still tofu-ey. Pretty good.

[ related topics: Food Comics ]

Bud-sex: Sex between rural straight men:

...All of the straight men avoid effeminate men, and several insulted male effeminacy, contributing to the widespread devaluation of femininity. Moreover, thirteen were married and had extramarital sex without their wife’s knowledge, underscoring their male entitlement and unwillingness to consider ethical non-monogamy. The participants enjoy marginalized sexual practices, but they are unwilling to challenge heterosexism or other forms of domination, maintaining numerous systems of inequality.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Ethics Sociology Beer Marriage ]

The Self-Driving Car's Bicycle Problem:

However, when it comes to spotting and orienting bikes and bicyclists, performance drops significantly. Deep3DBox is among the best, yet it spots only 74 percent of bikes in the benchmarking test. And though it can orient over 88 percent of the cars in the test images, it scores just 59 percent for the bikes.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Automobiles Pedal Power Bicycling ]

I work from home:

911 OPERATOR: 911—what’s your emergency?

ROBERT: Hi, I . . . uh . . . I work from home.

OPERATOR: O.K., is anyone else there with you, sir?

ROBERT: No, I’m alone.

OPERATOR: And when’s the last time you saw someone else? Was that today?

ROBERT: Uh, my wife . . . this morning, I guess.

...

Way way way too close to home.

[ related topics: Humor Work, productivity and environment Marriage Woodworking ]

Do immunisations reduce the risk for SIDS? A meta-analysis, Vennemann MM, et al. Vaccine. 2007..

CONCLUSIONS: Immunisations are associated with a halving of the risk of SIDS. There are biological reasons why this association may be causal, but other factors, such as the healthy vaccinee effect, may be important. ...

[ related topics: Health ]

The Trump global gag rule: an attack on US family planning and global health aid

Moreover, there is no evidence that the global gag rule has ever resulted in its stated aim of reducing abortion. The first study to measure the effect of the gag rule showed that this policy could actually have resulted in an increase in abortions. Another study assessed the gag rule in Ghana and found that because of declines in the availability of contraceptive services, both fertility and abortion rates were higher during the gag rule years than during non-gag rule years in rural and poor populations. This is consistent with anecdotal data that the gag rule's main effect has been to reduce women's access to quality contraceptive services, thereby increasing the probability of unintended pregnancy and making recourse to abortion more likely.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)30270-2 

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health Sociology ]

Migrating the Flutterby system to use FastCGI. Holla if you see any problems, s'il vous plait.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]