Flutterby™! From 2017-03-01 to 2017-03-31

Waldo Jaquith describes "cyber":

Imagine going to a congressional hearing about regulation of gastroenterologists and finding that every congressman was asking questions about "who made a big poopy." That's the most accurate metaphor I can gin up for how the word "cyber" sounds outside of legislative circles.

Fifteen or so years ago, Charlene and I started to sew together some stretch sensors to do something like this: Spire breath tracker.

Another one from Shadow: You brake, I brake. A picture of two guys, two scooters, one ladder, and a whole lot of "oh holy fuck no not now not ever".

Dr Jen Gunter: When evidence says "no", but doctors, patients and the system say "yes":

I have spoken with patients who have had a clearly unindicated surgery who are no better and yet many are perfectly satisfied with the unhelpful surgery. In fact they are happy because they equate the surgery with their doctor taking their complaints seriously and trying something. The bigger the intervention the less unhappy people seem about it not working.

This is a problem I've had with my last several doctor's visits: I paid some amount of money for something the pharmacy concocted up, but it was likely just bad tasting placebo. And so I'm more likely to resist the next time Charlene says "you should get that checked out".

What I want is a doctor to whom I can say "no bullshit, no placebos, if it isn't either known to work or I'm part of a trial, I want no treatment."

Think I'm gonna have to say exactly that next time.

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

Just learned that some modern vibrators have an "Airplane Mode". Imma let that sink in for a moment. #milehighclub

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Aviation ]

Just ordered a new laptop for Charlene, 'cause I was pretty sure hers was approaching 8 or 9 years old. And then looked up how old the laptop I'm currently using is. Holy crap we keep technology around a looooooong time in this household. I mean, I guess it makes sense, 'cause we're not gamers and when I need to do serious compute I either let it run for days or do it on leased servers in "the cloud", but my day-to-day laptop is over 6 years old...

[ related topics: Invention and Design Archival ]

Last night, Charlene and I had plans to go see Moonlight with friends, but I'm in no shape to do that, so we were home, and decided to do a movie there. Hidden Figures isn't out on streaming, we went down the Oscar nominee list, and eventually ended up deciding between Hacksaw Ridge and Hell or High Water. Went for the latter.

Hell or High Water is a film that reminded me of back in the days when I was immersed in storytelling craft. In two decades, this is a film that's gonna be dissected. Every line of the very spare dialog moves the story. In every shot in this film there are several things said. The script is spare and powerful. What's happening in the backgrounds is as important as what's happening in the foregrounds. It's a modern western that, in tone, reminded me of Tender Mercies, albeit with more gun play, with beautiful sparse landscapes and small towns and payday loan billboards.

It's a film about how men relate (and, yes, where this film has a flaw it's that there ain't too much for the womenfolk to do, but it's also a critique of that culture, so I'll kinda let that slide). About obligations and family, and what drives us. Despite being a Western chase film, with the two Texas Rangers after the two brothers on the wrong side of the law, it's also not a film with good guys and bad guys; at points we see the same sorts of being tight lipped and uncooperative to the Rangers, and then as a mob chasing down the robbers with intent to kill. The circumstances drive the actions, in ways that leave lasting questions.

And the parallels between the relationship of the two Rangers and the two brothers gave me little "aha" moments well after the movie ended.

Not a big loud violent blockbuster. If you like your films slow and contemplative and can tolerate a little bit of gun violence (and, yes, a few deaths) with that, this is one that's sticking with me.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Sociology California Culture Guns ]

Bash Bunny by Hak5. "The world's most advanced USB attack platform." Emulates a bunch of different trusted USB devices.

The Bash Bunny Revealed (YouTube video):

"...from plug to pwn in 7 seconds."

And

"With the Bash Bunny, compromising a system is as quick and easy as hopping on a box."

Epoxy up those USB ports on machines you don't have total physical control over, kids.

[ related topics: Movies Video ]

Interesting little article on sex, reproduction and blue... feet: NY Times: On Galápagos, Revealing the Blue-Footed Booby’s True Colors:

Males avoid mating with females whose feet has been dulled with paint, the researchers also discovered. And when a male’s feet are artificially dulled after his mate has laid one egg, the female responds to the apparent decline in his condition through a downsizing of her own, making her second egg smaller than the first.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology ]

"Mistakes in planning for parking are literally cemented into the urban form." Donald Shoup

I had a long rant about the Republican health care proposal that was revealed yesterday (with 2 whole days of deliberation before the vote). How devoting over 10% of it to clauses about lottery winners seemed like governance by toddler tantrum. How replacing the individual mandate with a 30% premium hike in the first year looked designed to remove the cost savings of preventive care and replace it with more risk taking. How the whole thing seems to be part of the long slide from Republicans laying claim to the "economic conservative" label to Republicans simply carving out regulatory capture to legislate profits in one sector at the expense of overall economic growth, indeed of economic sanity.

I like to believe that there was a time when it wasn't like this. The Affordable Care Act was essentially what George Bush proposed back in the 1991 era time frame. What Mitt Romney implemented in Massachusetts. It wasn't perfect, but it was a set of political compromises that moved the US towards the reduced healthcare costs and improved outcomes that actual developed nations had. Yes, Democrats blocked it back then and it took the delicate maneuvering of Barack Obama to get it passed, but if we can't have a real healthcare system, it was a step in the right direction.

This current set of "burn it all down, lie about it, and run off with the profits" GOP leadership is just. I don't understand. If the intent is to destroy the federal government and bring about a French Revolution style era of guillotines, do they not understand that they're going to get caught up in this too? I don't get it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Health Nature and environment Invention and Design moron Law Gambling Economics ]

It's a mark of good metaphor that the parallels aren't immediately obvious. That as we immerse ourselves in the story we find our own parallels and aha moments. N. K. Jemisin's "The Broken Earth" series isn't an easy read, but "The Fifth Season" kicked me in the gut hard (in a good way) with the ending, and about midway through "The Obelisk Gate" I had a bunch of "holy crap" moments as I took the observations on relationships and power dynamics between children and adults in her fantastical world of geologic magic and mapped it back on to my understanding of humanity. Very challenging reads (a good portion of both books is in second person, the timelines aren't always linear), but damn they're paying off.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Books Clowns ]

Mapping Whole Communities and Their Homes with Thermal Images to Reduce Heat Loss

Energy - Compete With the Neighbours: Dr. Geoffrey J. Hay at TEDxCalgary

[ related topics: Movies Community Maps and Mapping ]

So Wikileaks today revealed a whole bunch of documents about the CIA's hacking arsenal, they're calling it "Vault 7" and "Year Zero".

Ed Snowden tweeted that he thinks the dump is legit, and pointed out that the CIA keeping quiet about these breaches meant that anyone could exploit them. iOS and Android are known targets, as was a hack to keep the microphones on on Samsung "smart" TVs even when they appeared to be turned off to the users.

This release has also led to further questions on whether or not it really was "the Russians" behind the hack of the DNC during the election, an allegation that many of us have pointed out isn't really supported by the evidence that's been made public. As Wikipedia's press release points out:

As an example, specific CIA malware revealed in "Year Zero" is able to penetrate, infest and control both the Android phone and iPhone software that runs or has run presidential Twitter accounts. The CIA attacks this software by using undisclosed security vulnerabilities ("zero days") possessed by the CIA but if the CIA can hack these phones then so can everyone else who has obtained or discovered the vulnerability. As long as the CIA keeps these vulnerabilities concealed from Apple and Google (who make the phones) they will not be fixed, and the phones will remain hackable.

It's worth noting in all of this that tools like Open Whisper Systems' Signal don't appear to have been compromised, but the platform you're running it on may be. Which you probably already suspected, because that's the obvious attack vector, but still...

Richard Stallman pointed out the problem:

With software there are only two possibiliities: either the users control the program or the program controls the users. If the program controls the users, and the developer controls the program, then the program is an instrument of unjust power.

[ related topics: Free Software Apple Computer Interactive Drama Software Engineering Graphics Mathematics Sports Guns iPhone ]

Existential Comics - The Council of Elrond. Or what happens when Foucault, Chomsky and Fanon join the quest to destroy the one ring...

[ related topics: tolkien Comics ]

Charles C. W. Cooke @charlescwcooke:

I’ve yet to read a single positive analysis of the House’s Obamacare bill.

Carol Bannon‏ @MAcatholicmom:

@charlescwcooke try going 2 a conservative source? Open up your reading habits 2 include those w/ whom u would naturally dismiss

Charles C. W. Cooke

I’m the editor of National Review Online.

Oh snap.

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Took a walk in my pink pussy hat, got asked if it was anti-Trump. No, it's pro-women, but the difference in framing is thought provoking.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Missed this little tidbit back in November: Pentagon and intelligence community chiefs have urged Obama to remove the head of the NSA:

But there was a second, previously undisclosed breach of cybertools, discovered in the summer of 2015, which was also carried out by a TAO employee, one official said. That individual also has been arrested, but his case has not been made public. The individual is not thought to have shared the material with another country, the official said.

Soooo... the US is disappearing people now? That's kinda unnerving.

Via Ed Snowden's tweet

[ related topics: Law Work, productivity and environment Community ]

Emer O'Toole in The Guardian opinion: The Catholic church is ‘shocked’ at the hundreds of children buried at Tuam. Really?:

So you will forgive me if I am sceptical of the professed shock of Ireland’s clergy, politicians and official inquiring bodies. We know too much about the Catholic church’s abuse of women and children to be shocked by Tuam. A mass grave full of the children of unmarried mothers is an embarrassing landmark when the state is still paying the church to run its schools and hospitals. Hundreds of dead babies are not an asset to those invested in the myth of an abortion-free Ireland; they inconveniently suggest that Catholic Ireland always had abortions, just very late-term ones, administered slowly by nuns after the children were already born.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Interactive Drama Sexual Culture ]

BMJ Open Epidemiology: Childhood academic ability in relation to cigarette, alcohol and cannabis use from adolescence into early adulthood: Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE), James Williams, Gareth Hagger-Johnson:

Conclusions: In a sample of over 6000 young people in England, high childhood academic at age 11 is associated with a reduced risk of cigarette smoking but an increased risk of drinking alcohol regularly and cannabis use. These associations persist into early adulthood, providing evidence against the hypothesis that high academic ability is associated with temporary ‘experimentation’ with substance use.

Eurekalert Press Release: Brainy teens may be less likely to smoke, but more likely to drink and use cannabis: Patterns persist into adulthood, refuting notion that it's 'just a phase,' suggest researchers

ProCon: High Achieving Students More Likely to Smoke Marijuana and Drink Alcohol, Says New Study

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

New threshold: first two sets of pushups this morning to 40 each, formerly 30 each.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

RT Glen Weldon‏Verified account @ghweldon

🎶 Is he strong? Listen, dork.

He is radioactive pork. 🎶

Referencing New York Times World:

Officials in Fukushima are struggling to clear out radioactive boars from towns http://nyti.ms/2n4CAxA

[ related topics: Invention and Design New York ]

Walked by shooting a Honda commercial during my lunch break

[ related topics: Photography ]

Wanna see some amazing acrobatics? Check out the videos on Greta "Aerial Zen" Pontarelli's web page.

I think my favorite is Greta Pontarelli IPC 2013 World Pole Art Masters Champion ~ Singapore (YouTube).

Might also be worth mentioning that she's 61 in that video...

[ related topics: Religion Movies Art & Culture Video ]

Yellowbook threw trash in our yard despite claiming to respect yellowpagesoptout.com

A Slack channel I'm on is talking about analyzing blowjob data for bogus submissions. Quantified Self has gone a little too far...

2 weeks off for the cold, kinda nice to have my running buddy be the "no, we've gotta slow down for a little bit" on today's 5 miles...

[ related topics: Sports ]

RT Alissa Walker‏ @awalkerinLA:

Something I learned from this story: 1 in 200 Americans have killed another person while driving a car. http://www.wbur.org/cognoscent...y-killed-a-cyclist-shane-snowdon)

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

Breaking Roads, Making Bank:

“It’s common to see residential streets with low-density, single-family homes that are 40 feet wide — or wider,” explains University of California urban economist Steven Whitstanley, “when maybe 100 vehicles a day travel that route. If asphalt was distributed according to need — rather than aesthetics — most neighborhoods could get rid of half, three-quarters (or more) of their paved surfaces.”

“In many neighborhoods, residents argue that road-space is needed, especially for on-street parking,” Whitstanley continues. “But in almost every American city, we grossly overbuilt parking beginning in the 1970s.” Whitstanley points to the “parking crater” studies that started being done in the mid-2010s, showing how much area of a given metro was given over to parking. (The most famous example being Los Angeles County where more than 200 square miles were covered with parking in 2015 — around 18.6 million parking spaces, or about 3.3 spaces for each car.)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Space & Astronomy Sociology California Culture Automobiles Education Economics ]

Wilmington North Carolina police falsely told a man he couldn’t film them. ‘I’m an attorney,’ he said. ‘I know what the law is.’:

“If a police officer gives you a lawful command and that command is disobeyed, they’ll arrest you,” Bright said. “The fact that I wasn’t arrested and he didn’t even try to arrest me is proof that he was being dishonest.”

So the big problem here is: You know that the police officer is lying to you when you refuse to do something and they don't arrest you? I sure hope that the ACLU (or even this guy, 'cause he's a lawyer) sues the fuck out of the Wilmington NC police department and gets enough of an award that other police departments sit up and take notice.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Current Events Law Enforcement Television Video ]

Why I snapped up the Headington shark house. OMG I so want this roof treatment!

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

White supremacist stabs interracial couple after seeing them kiss at bar, police say.

Where was he radicalized and what can we do to discredit his thought leaders?

Speaking of white supremacist thought leaders, Steve King, Congressman from Iowa, tweeted:

Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies.

I understand that there's some concern about how quickly members of one culture assimilate into another culture, but my experience has been that people moving into a culture are generally doing so because they want the benefits that that culture provides. So, yeah, this is just flat out racist bullshit.

[ related topics: Sociology Current Events Law Enforcement California Culture Marketing Race ]

How is the NSA breaking so much crypto?

For the nerds in the audience, here’s what’s wrong: If a client and server are speaking Diffie-Hellman, they first need to agree on a large prime number with a particular form. There seemed to be no reason why everyone couldn’t just use the same prime, and, in fact, many applications tend to use standardized or hard-coded primes. But there was a very important detail that got lost in translation between the mathematicians and the practitioners: an adversary can perform a single enormous computation to “crack” a particular prime, then easily break any individual connection that uses that prime.

That enormous computation would probably cost a few hundred million bucks, and "Breaking a single, common 1024-bit prime would allow NSA to passively decrypt connections to two-thirds of VPNs and a quarter of all SSH servers globally."

That appears to have happened.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Privacy Civil Liberties Cryptography Currency Government ]

Scott Pruitt denies basic climate science. But most of the outrage is missing the point.

Such knowledge-producing institutions — not only science, but also academia and journalism — are not immune to criticism, of course. And they are never entirely free of biases or error. Their procedures and results are always open to democratic dispute.

But absent some compelling reason to believe that those institutions have been corrupted or systematically distorted, we accept their results. Otherwise, epistemological chaos ensues, persuasion becomes impossible, and politics devolves into a raw contest of power.

This addresses something I've been pondering lately: How do we know what we know? This two-pronged problem, one, that "science" has been pretty lax about what gets published as such (see the reproducibility problem, and sciencing by press release in order to get research dollars), and two, that there's a lot of medicine and similar that gets handwaved, or even deliberately placebo'd, and the skepticism that this engenders spills over into other disciplines.

Which means that we get the anti-vaccination push, we get a whole lot of "alternative medicine", and we lose the basis for any discussion. Even something as simple as CO₂ and global warming, which really doesn't take much more than high school physics to talk about in an informed way.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Health Journalism and Media Community Global Warming ]

Back in May of last year, Tom Negrino wrote "I've had a big secret, now I'm sharing it."

Based on Dori's Twitter, it's likely that Tom will take his own life tomorrow or Wednesday (does the countdown end at 1 or 0?). See The Healdsburg Tribune: Living and dying on his own terms.

There have been a whole lot of appreciations of Tom in various places, Andy Ihnatko's appreciation was open in my tabs as I sat down to copy and paste this over from Facebook:

I've seen a bunch of blog and social media posts honoring Tom Negrino, and I figure I should say something, since the countdown suggests that tomorrow is when he may choose to take his own life slightly early, and not wait through the pain for cancer to take it for him. Unlike so many of y'all in the Mac community, I don't have a publishing story, though I have bought every revision of Tom and Dori Smith's reknown "JavaScript for the World Wide Web Visual Quickstart Guide".

I had hoped to get up to visit, but this sick cough hit me and I definitely didn't want to impose anything that might be communicable.

I met Tom and Dori because we were part of that pre-2000 group of not quite journalers not quite resource directory publishers that eventually became called "webloggers". Back when Google PageRank was a number, my blog fought it out with their cat's domain for the higher rank. Being North Bay folks, we've run into each other over the years. A breakfast with tech geeks, a "hey, we happened to stop in Healdsburg, y'all up for dinner?", we always found things to talk about, perhaps because we had many of the same interests but came at it in such different ways. I think the last time we ran into them was a book signing event, probably William Gibson at Copperfield's.

Tom and I never worked together, so I don't have personal stories of how gracious he was to the poor company reps doing their best at press events gone bad, or how awesome he was working with editors, or any of the other fantastic memorials I've read over the past few days.

But as a member of the early blogging community (who are all still very much welcome to crash on my couch any time they've got an interview in the Bay Area) and a part of the the base level of running into cool people that makes living in the North Bay what it is, I'll miss him.

And I still feel like he's gonna go with me owing picking up the tab at at least one dinner. Probably more than that. Damn it.

And, Dori, I realize we've been lax in getting our butts up to Healdsburg, and I am totally not the best person for saying "Oh, hey, we should do something unasked...", but if there's anything we can do, please ask.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Weblogs History Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment California Culture Sports Macintosh Community Douglas Adams ]

Breakup of a polyamorous triad results in a judge granting child custody to all three:

The judge took cues from the boy himself in making the unusual decision.

Asked how he told his two moms apart, the child had explained that one was the “mommy with the orange truck” and the other the “mommy with the gray truck.”

Via Cosmopolitan

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law Machinery ]

PornHub offers free snow removal services with branded plow trucks tomorrow to people in Boston who want to get plowed. http://www.bostonmagazine.com/...og/2017/03/13/pornhub-snow-plow- boston/

[ related topics: Weblogs Current Events Machinery ]

Called the new square dancer class at Vallejo Pioneers tonight, so much energy and fun!

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Yes, we're all getting a good laugh about listening via microwave ovens, but http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1274748

Washington Post: Government marijuana looks nothing like the real stuff. See for yourself.

Man, nothin' but stems and leaves. In the North Bay, I suspect you could pick up a garbage bag of this for a few bucks with the understanding that at best you'd be attempting to boil it down for hash oil...

[ related topics: Drugs moron Current Events California Culture Databases ]

"We can't afford the future." Kim Stanley Robinson talking about how finance, not technology, is the limitation.

If you're a paddler, this is hilarious: First unicorn descent of the New River Gorge (YouTube video)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Invention and Design Video ]

Worth a watch: TED Women: Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger: Our story of rape and reconciliation.

Got there 'cause [redacted unless they say otherwise] posted a link to BBC: Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger: Should a rapist be invited on stage?, about the controversy over the possibility of this conversation and the subsequent cancellation at a Women of the World Festival.

Added: Excerpt from their book South of Forgiveness, which definitely looks worth a read.

[ related topics: Movies Current Events Monty Python ]

Uncomfortably Me: Sex Goddess Project Explores Sexuality In An Unapologetic Way (NSFW). I've mentioned Ricardo Scipio before.

"Women have for too long and in too many cultures had their sexuality suppressed only to be pseudo-released within the stiflingly unkind world of porn. I'm extremely humbled and proud to provide a vehicle for women to unapologetically express themselves with love and authenticity; something porn cannot offer," Scipio says in a press release on his website.

As a male photographer, Scipio says he knew it was he who was "repressing how the subject should portray her sexuality." This made him rethink his boundaries and become more supportive of how his model wished to show herself intimately.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Archival ]

So much good stuff in Raph Koster speaking at the Game Developer's Conference: Still Logged In: What AR and VR Can Learn from MMOs.

One slide has some advice for modern developers of VR spaces:

• Do tiny groups - two?
• Of friends only.
• That don't move.
• With unrealistic avatars.

Basically, what we've come to by fragmenting back into all of these little Slack channels that we have now.

And "an old school text MUD from 1992 is closer to Snow Crash than anything that has been built with goggles."

[ related topics: Games Conferences ]

The Atlantic: What your therapist doesn't know. Interesting article about the pushback against quantifying therapy, and what happens when therapists do.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

TED talk: Peggy Orenstein: What young women believe about their own sexual pleasure. From the teaser text:

Why do girls feel empowered to engage in sexual activity but not to enjoy it? For three years, author Peggy Orenstein interviewed girls ages 15 to 20 about their attitudes toward and experiences of sex. She discusses the pleasure that's largely missing from their sexual encounters and calls on us to close the "orgasm gap" by talking candidly with our girls from an early age about sex, bodies, pleasure and intimacy.

From the talk:

... I also know what I hope for for our girls. I want them to see sexuality as a source of self-knowledge, creativity, and communication, despite its potential risks. I want them to be able to revel in their body's sensuality, without being reduced to it. ...

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

I am susceptible to the argument that social programs have a macro-economic effect of raising poverty. Back in my 20s, when I knew less about history and sociology and economics than I do now, I made that argument. So I know where the current administration is coming from with the "cut all of the social programs and let 'em starve" attitudes.

But here's the thing: We have a huge historical resource for what happens when you do that. Nazi Germany was totally big on that, and the killings started not by rounding up huge groups of people and sending them off to concentration camps, but by doctors in homes for the disabled, or treating disabled people, quietly killing off "drains on society". It's only a short hop from there to the elderly, and thence to your least favorite ethnic group, and so on. The slope is slippery, and gets steep pretty fast, and I'm not willing to go there.

There is hope, however: If you want to lower the birth rate among poor people, if you want to reduce the number of children born to parents who can't take care of them, we have lots of data on that about what works. And it works really really well: You give women reproductive choices. You give them birth control. You give poor people social stability and a basic standard of living so that they don't feel it necessary to turn to bad relationships in order to survive.

If you want the next generation to have earnings potential, you give 'em school. You make sure they aren't hungry, so that they can learn. You start that schooling really early, because pre-school and "Head Start" style programs may have no impact on middle class children, but early intervention has a huge positive impact on poor kids.

Similarly, if you want to reduce the number of people in nursing homes, if you want to reduce the costs of nursing care, without starting down that slippery slope of turning people out on the streets to die, which quickly escalates into being "humanitarian" by euthanizing them first, you subsidize some in-home meals (Impact of home-delivered meal programs on diet and nutrition among older adults: a review, Zhu and An, Nutrition and Health (2013)).

All this bullshit "cost cutting"? It's going to fucking kill the economy of the next generation.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Health Food Handicaps & Disabilities Economics ]

Many of you knew prolific technical author and pioneering blogger Tom Negrino. He died yesterday, after a bout with cancer. If Tom touched your life, even if he didn't, give this a look.

App Camp for Girls: The Tom Negrino Memorial Fund

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Supreme Court modifies United States v. Robinson with Riley v. California and decides that cell phone searches after arrest require a warrant.

[ related topics: Wireless Privacy Current Events California Culture Conspiracy Government ]

Holy crap, people. The Trader Joe's restroom should not need more than 3 flushes or 5 minutes! #dancingwithcrossedlegs

Your dose of "awwww" for the morning: Humans are adorable.

Woman, 56, dies after drinking toxic tea from SF Chinatown tea shop:

Xie and the surviving victim became critically ill — experiencing weakness and abnormal heart rhythms that required resuscitation — within an hour of drinking tea they had bought from the herbalist, officials said.

The common ingredient may have been aconite that wasn't properly processed.

[ related topics: Bay Area Current Events ]

Gathering this note up from Sunny Megatron as inspiration when I'm trying to put together an evening of square dancing:

One of the analogies that we use is a roller coaster analogy, and that is: If I am setting up a scene with someone, I am the dominant, I am creating a scene for my submissive. It is my job as the engineer of this mental roller coaster to get all of their information, all the stats from them: So what do you like? Do you like corkscrew turns? Okay, you don't like dark tunnels, I won't put any dark tunnels in my roller coaster. And that's the negotiation phase. And then it's my job to get the specs that they've given me, put together a roller coaster of everything that they want, but making it feel like a mental surprise. So even though I've engineered this roller coaster to have a very clear beginning, middle and end I know exactly what's going to happen and it's planned out, I want them to feel like they are mentally on a runaway car. That they might go off the rails, they might crash into the wall, because that's what we're getting at: We want that endorphin rush, we want that adrenaline going.

Sunny Megatron is host of a show about sex on Showtime, this quote is from Tristan Taormino's Sex Out Loud February 17, 2017 episode: Sunny Megatron and Ken Melvoin-Berg on Becoming the Dynamic Duo of Sex Educators and Offbeat Elements of Kink. Sounds like Sunny and Ken play on the far side of psychological role play.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Heinlein Automobiles ]

With all of the discussion about whistleblowers, I think it's important to note that the best way to stop whistleblowing is to stop doing illegal things, and make sure that those who use official channels to report illegal activity are taken seriously and don't face recriminations.

The United States government has been doing very badly on all of these fronts.

[ related topics: moron Community ]

Giving Petaluma Pete a good run for his money on a street piano https://youtu.be/10u6J4bBCCg

[ related topics: Music Currency ]

We've found the source of the drug violence: Washington Post: Marijuana raids are more deadly than the drug itself

[ related topics: Drugs Health Current Events ]

Funnest bit about owning a BMW i3: when it's in the shop and Charlene is driving loaner new 3 and 5 series BMWs and complaining...

[ related topics: Invention and Design Automobiles ]

The thing about tech meetups is people sidetracking the speaker with extraneous questions. On the first slide.

Apparently "data scientist" is what we used to call "programmer".

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Ya know, if I were going to point 50 to 100 years away when discussion automation being a social and political issue that we're needing to deal with, I'd be pointing to the past, not the future...

I'm largely in a "bring on the automation" mode, and I'm not really sure how much we need to worry about middle America's low-skill manufacturing jobs, I mean the Republicans will probably manage to set up policy to kill off most of those unemployed fairly soon, but "50- 100 more years away" is just bizarre.

Mnuchin on robots taking US jobs: 'It's not even on our radar screen ... 50-100 more years' away.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Robotics History moron Community ]

Went to see the waterfalls at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, and look at the sun at Ferguson Observatory

[ related topics: Photography Movies Astronomy Java ]

Another from the canyon at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park

[ related topics: Photography ]

Square Dance calling for El Camino Reelers on Friday Night, thanks Bennet Marks for the picture!

[ related topics: Photography Heinlein ]

Christians: More Like Jesus or Pharisees?

Kinnaman, president of Barna Group, directed the study. He commented on the creation of a “Christ-like” scale: “Our intent is to create some new discussion about the intangible aspects of following and representing Jesus. Obviously, survey research, by itself, cannot fully measure someone’s ‘Christ-likeness’ or ‘Pharisee-likeness.’ But the study is meant to identify baseline qualities of Jesus, like empathy, love, and a desire to share faith with others—or the resistance to such ideals in the form of self-focused hypocrisy. The statements are based on the biblical record given in the Gospels and in the Epistles and our team worked closely with a leading pastor, John Burke, to develop the survey questions.”

Newsweek: The Bible: So Misunderstood It's A Sin:

...The Barna Group, a Christian polling firm, found in 2012 that evangelicals accepted the attitudes and beliefs of the Pharisees—religious leaders depicted throughout the New Testament as opposing Christ and his message—more than they accepted the teachings of Jesus.

[ related topics: Religion Humor Invention and Design Community ]

Some of you may be aware of the dust-up that's been happening in the Drupal community. Drupal founder Dries Buytaert asked Larry Garfield to leave the community. Garfield responded publicly with TMI about me:

I am involved in two such communities, specifically the BDSM community and the Gorean (Gor) community. The former is by far the larger of the two and more varied, although I spend more of my time and activity in the Gorean community. It's a small community, and sadly much of what is found online about it is utter crap, just as most in the BDSM community find the "50 Shades" representation of BDSM to be harmfully misleading. The Gorean subculture is inspired by a science-fiction book series written from the 1960s onward to today, and predicated on a strong sense of personal honor, integrity, and community. It also practices consensual Master/slave relationships, and has a strong gender bias toward male-Dom/female-sub relationships, but that is not the cornerstone of Gorean culture. There are other groups that are biased the other way, or have no gender bias. There are even groups in Chicago (where I live) that have regular "fem-dom" parties. To each their own.

There has been much back and forth on this, with the Drupal board being very cagey, and on the other side a number of people wondering how long it was going to be before followers of the various Abrahamic religions started to get kicked out.

I've got complex feelings on this, on the one hand I didn't shed too many tears when Brendan Eich got outed for having donated to the Prop 8 campaign, an outing which led to his ouster from Mozilla, but I'm also very much in the "if it's consensual, what happens in Garfield's home is none of my business". And then, of course, we get into sub-discussions about what "consent" means in BDSM relationships...

Anyway, I've read a bunch of think-pieces on this, but not the one that Shadow sent me today, and I think this one is good: Jon Evans on TechCrunch: Sex and Gor and open source

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Books Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs Open Source Theater & Plays Sociology California Culture Community ]

Some nights the kitchen whispers sweetly...

[ related topics: Photography ]

The intersection of Pain and Suffering. (St George, Bermuda) https://goo.gl/maps/iucpgznwuWN2

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

I never thought rage would be a finite resource, but now I'm having trouble allocating it appropriately...

Gender quotas and the crisis of the mediocre man:

common criticism against gender quotas is that they are anathema to meritocratic principles. This research on Sweden shows that the opposite can be true: Quotas actually increased the competence of politicians by leading to the displacement of mediocre men whether as candidates or leaders. The results may also be relevant for judging gender quotas in business.

[ related topics: Television ]

Christie distanced himself from the Bridgegate aides, Trump distanced himself from Christie, when's Putin going to make a statement?

Washington Post: Since 2007, the DEA has taken $3.2 billion in cash from people not charged with a crime.

That total does not include the dollar value of other seized assets, like cars, homes, electronics and clothing.

[ related topics: Current Events Currency Clothing ]

Help me out. I have this vague memory of an article from the early 2000s talking about how dance is the art form of authoritarian or tyrannical regimes. I'm pretty sure it wasn't Slate: Goose-stepping, the dance form of tyrants (as linked by Petronius back in 2003), although it was really similar to that, but talked more about ballet and other forms that have large groups of synchronized movement.

I've been thinking about this topic in the context of square dancing recently...

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Art & Culture Archival ]

"We've traced the call, it's coming from inside the Whitehouse!"

Hello from the Other Side: SSH over Robust Cache Covert Channels in the Cloud (PDF) Using CPU cache memory to communicate between two Amazon EC2 VMs.

[ related topics: Books Cryptography ]

Is it just me, or has the Breyer horse thing gotten a little out of hand?

[ related topics: Photography ]

Pondering: Capitalism won't fall when the workers seize the means of production, but when they seize the means of distribution.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment ]

We never saw the grey goo future of nanotechnology as a metaphor for trillions of Dash buttons running attacks against WordPress sites #IoT

[ related topics: Sports Woodworking ]

Brownback and Kansas is going to replace Sherman and Georgia as our simile for complete destruction of a state.

Notice that your VPN provider is willing to give you unlimited bandwidth for a few $ a month, but big ISPs have usage tiers..

[ related topics: broadband ]

The graph really should have March on the right side, and go back to the previous April

[ related topics: Photography ]

When Rolling Stone reported that Mike Pence referred to his wife as "mother", I thought that's fine, I know women who refer to their lovers as "daddy". "Little" role play kinda squicks me because of the pedophilia undertones, but I know that kink play can be deeply healing, and whatever floats your boat. Your kink is not my kink, and that's okay.

A few days ago, the Washington Post referenced a 2002 article in The Hill in which it was revealed that Mike Pence "never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won’t attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either".

This, for obvious reasons, brought a bunch of "WTF?". I mean, lifestyle play is one thing, some people do D/s 24/7 and again, their kink is not mine, but the guy is a big player on a major stage, this seems like it's got to be a huge hindrance. Unless, you know, it wasn't and the fact that women were inconsequential at high level politics wasn't a huge deal to him.

Hmmmm...

But then various other conservative commentators started doubling down, like Matt Walsh, commenter for The Blaze, on Twitter:

Seriously what's the appropriate reason for a married person to go out for a meal alone with a member of the other sex (outside of family)?

(And Blaze gets weirder, and weirder, and weirder).

Then I read @Limericking on Twitter:

Mike Pence, an adult who is grown,

Cannot sit with women alone.

However, he can

Stand by an old man

Whose fondness for groping is known.

And my off-handed comparisons of the modern GOP to various repressive regimes came into clear sharp focus: These are horrible evil people who know that they can't be trusted, and rather than actually dealing with their psychoses closet them.

Shudder.

[ related topics: Religion Politics Erotic Sexual Culture Food Sociology Boats Machinery Marriage ]