Flutterby™! From 2017-07-01 to 2017-07-31

A square in the hotel lobby

[ related topics: Photography Travel ]

Does military equipment lead police officers to be more violent? We did the research.:

Even controlling for other possible factors in police violence (such as household income, overall and black population, violent-crime levels and drug use), more-militarized law enforcement agencies were associated with more civilians killed each year by police. When a county goes from receiving no military equipment to $2,539,767 worth (the largest figure that went to one agency in our data), more than twice as many civilians are likely to die in that county the following year.

[ related topics: Health Aviation Current Events Law Enforcement ]

The Greater Marin: The science of traffic and its awfulness

[ related topics: Weblogs Bay Area ]

Trump 'patriot' accidentally shot himself at Confederate rally by resting his flag pole on his gun

RT Goth Ms. Frizzle @spookperson:

a confederate flag shot a racist, this year is amazing

[ related topics: Guns ]

Some Of History’s Naughtiest Artworks Head To Sotheby’s First Erotic Sale: From Picasso’s Cubist nude to a table with boobs and penises, Sotheby’s gets nasty.

Yeah, sure, everyone's laughing at the penis table, but that carved mahogany bed is amazing!

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Nudity Art & Culture Furniture ]

Yes, I am uploading pictures of my breakfast...

[ related topics: Photography ]

RT narco rubio‏ @redstatist:

if y'all think Hobby Lobby funding ISIS is a big deal wait till you find out about the CIA and the State Department

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Careful out there, kids: Ghonorrhea is becoming much harder to treat, which means you should be using barriers for oral sex with people with whom you're not fluid bonded.

Antibiotic-Resistant Gonorrhea - STD information from CDC. Fact Sheets, Statistics, Treatment Guidelines, Resources for Clinicians and Educators.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture Mathematics ]

First attempt at Eritrean cuisine. My injera technique could use a lot of work.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

While waiting for permits and concrete contractors, we built a padlle wheel boat for Rivertown Revival

[ related topics: Photography Boats Machinery ]

A little rap about enthusiastic consent: Yes from Sex Rhymes by Schaffer the Darklord:

And we go four, three, two and to the one

I’ll be checking checking in even after we’re done

But before we progress, stop, before we undress

I’ma need a lot more than a “yes”

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

In 1990, I was working on a system that took 14 minutes to link the app. Now it takes longer than that for Ansible to reprovision a server.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Charlene in the Paddle Wheel boat we just built... https://youtu.be/EaYZnq7DQ0E

[ related topics: Boats Machinery ]

Still picture of Charlene in the Paddle Wheel boat

[ related topics: Photography Boats Machinery ]

And a video of me in the paddle wheel boat https://youtu.be/6kZF1ZJkNak

[ related topics: Boats Machinery Video ]

Bwahahaha! Be Prepared: Experts Warn That This Polyamorous Relationship Could Expand To Cover All Of Seattle By 2021.

That figure may seem shocking, but the evidence bears it out. Age, race, sex, and orientation present no barriers to a couple who is way more interested in people’s hearts than the bodies they’re in. While Adam’s been proudly bi for some time, Kelsie recently stunned experts by expressing interest in experimenting with Kara or maybe Sonia’s out-of- town friend, a development that leaves their growth potential completely unchecked. And as every field report has noted, Adam and Kelsie simply have this energy and lovingness that they can just give and give and give, and it’s so nourishing to be around. Taken together, those factors create a clear picture: This relationship is growing, and fast.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Seattle ]

Writing a Linux debugger: Part 1: Setup. A gentle introduction to using ptrace() and:

Before we jump into things, let’s get our environment set up. I’ll be using two dependencies in this tutorial: Linenoise for handling our command line input, and libelfin for parsing the debug information. You could use the more traditional libdwarf instead of libelfin, but the interface is nowhere near as nice, and libelfin also provides a mostly complete DWARF expression evaluator, which will save you a lot of time if you want to read variables. Make sure that you use the fbreg branch of my fork of libelfin, as it hacks on some extra support for reading variables on x86.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Weblogs Open Source Nature and environment Writing Gambling ]

Sexual intimacy in couples is associated with longer telomere length. Why is this important? Telomeres are the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes, shorten with each cell division, and when they get too short the cell dies.

So part of slowing aging appears to be longer telomeres.

From the abstract:

... women who reported any sexual intimacy during the course of the week had significantly longer telomeres measured in whole blood and PBMCs, but not in granulocytes. These relationships held covarying for age, body mass index, perceived stress, the relationship indices, and caregiver status. Sexual intimacy was not significantly related to PBMC telomerase activity. These data provide preliminary data that sexual intimacy is associated with longer telomere length. Future studies investigating these associations are warranted.

Correlation is not cause, and all that...

Cosmopolitan: Amen: Sex Once Per Week Could Slow Aging

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Health ]

Stack Overflow Import:

Do you ever feel like all you’re doing is copy/pasting from Stack Overflow?

Let’s take it one step further.

from stackoverflow import quick_sort will go through the search results of [python] quick sort looking for the largest code block that doesn’t syntax error in the highest voted answer from the highest voted question and return it as a module. If that answer doesn’t have any valid python code, it checks the next highest voted answer for code blocks.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Monty Python Python ]

Why this superintendent is banning homework — and asking kids to read instead:

The policy will apply to all elementary school students in the district — about 20,000 — but not to middle or high school students. Maier, an expert on reading acquisition who started running Marion schools in November after serving as lead professor of teacher education at the College of Central Florida, said she is basing her decision on research showing that traditional homework in the early years does not boost academic performance but reading — and reading aloud — does.

Yay for (some) evidence-based education.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Monty Python Python ]

To my friends on the spectrum, let me explain to you an unspoken social rule that possibly nobody has ever explained to you before:

If a neurotypical asks you, “What game are you playing?” they’re not asking you to describe the game.

They’re asking you if they can play too.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games ]

Ouch. Always know how your equipment works if you're gonna lie, kids. Especially if you're planting evidence, and your body cam records continuously and saves the last 30 seconds before you turn it on...

Body camera footage shows officer planting drugs, public defender says.

The footage is from a January drug arrest. It shows an officer placing a soup can, which holds a plastic bag, into a trash strewn lot. The officer can then be seen walking to the street, where he flips on his body camera.

"I'm gonna go check here," the officer says. He returns to the lot and picks up the soup can, removing a plastic bag filled with white capsules.

Police cameras have a feature that saves the 30 seconds of video prior to activation, but without audio. When the officer is first in the alley, there is no audio until 30 seconds later.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Drugs Children and growing up Interactive Drama Music Photography Health Current Events Law Enforcement Television Race Video Gardening ]

Ouch: 153k Ether ($30+M) Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack (etherscan.io). It's kind of fun with a side of schadenfreude to watch the "code will replace contracts" people learning about writing solid contracts with code.

Relatedly, based on recommendations from Scary Devil Monastery type sysadmins, I've pre- ordered Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard

[ related topics: Books Movies Writing Current Events Education ]

Jesse Watson: The Hard Thing About Software Development:

This is why the price for remote programming keeps dropping to zero. You cannot compete with on-premise talent when it comes to deep specialization in a business domain. The higher you move up the value chain in terms of your business offering, the more that the variations inherent in the business problems and technology constraints become wickedly complex.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

FiveThirtyEight: Surgery Is One Hell Of A Placebo:

A 2014 review of 53 trials that compared elective surgical procedures to placebos found that sham surgeries provided some benefit in 74 percent of the trials and worked as well as the real deal in about half.¹. Consider the middle-aged guy going in for surgery to treat his knee pain. Arthroscopic knee surgery has been a common orthopedic procedure in the United States, with about 692,000 of them performed in 2010, ² but the procedure has proven no better than a sham when done to address degenerative wear and tear, particularly on the meniscus.³.

Via Sensible Endowment.

[ related topics: Health Mathematics Education ]

Excavator hit an unmarked gas line. Lots of traffic detoured through our neighborhood...

Excavator hit an unmarked gas line. Lots of traffic detoured through our neighborhood...

[ related topics: Photography Gambling ]

Amy Pence Brown: Reviving Hilda.

There are at least a hundred images of Hilda resurfacing from over the years and they are all silly and cute and feature her in a bikini doing a variety of sweet, sexy and often clumsy things. Her imagery has been shared repeatedly in fat activist/body positive circles and pages and posted on my wall and private messaged to me over the past few years, as news of her existence was shocking and celebratory. Here was a body that looked more like mine than many others I'd ever seen revered as something sexy enough to be on a flirty calendar. Her imagery has been a positive breath of fresh air in the body shame and sex shame filled media we've been used to consuming for so long.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture History Current Events Journalism and Media ]

University attacked by its own vending machines, smart light bulbs & 5,000 IoT devices:

Today’s cautionary tale comes from Verizon’s sneak peek (pdf) of the 2017 Data Breach Digest scenario. It involves an unnamed university, seafood searches, and an IoT botnet; hackers used the university’s own vending machines and other IoT devices to attack the university’s network.

[ related topics: Content Management broadband Education ]

MEL Magazine: A cultural hsitory of men sucking their own dicks. No, this has nothing to do with politics, actual autofellatio.

Via ErosBlog highlighting a stone statue of the Archbishop of Cologne Konrad von Hochstaden blowing himself atop the 14th-century Cologne City Hall.

[ related topics: Politics Sociology ]

Clinicopathological Evaluation of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in Players of American Football JAMA. 2017;318(4):360-370. doi:10.1001/jama.2017.8334:

Results Among 202 deceased former football players (median age at death, 66 years [interquartile range, 47-76 years]), CTE was neuropathologically diagnosed in 177 players (87%; median age at death, 67 years [interquartile range, 52-77 years]; mean years of football participation, 15.1 [SD, 5.2]), including 0 of 2 pre–high school, 3 of 14 high school (21%), 48 of 53 college (91%), 9 of 14 semiprofessional (64%), 7 of 8 Canadian Football League (88%), and 110 of 111 National Football League (99%) players. Neuropathological severity of CTE was distributed across the highest level of play, with all 3 former high school players having mild pathology and the majority of former college (27 [56%]), semiprofessional (5 [56%]), and professional (101 [86%]) players having severe pathology. Among 27 participants with mild CTE pathology, 26 (96%) had behavioral or mood symptoms or both, 23 (85%) had cognitive symptoms, and 9 (33%) had signs of dementia. Among 84 participants with severe CTE pathology, 75 (89%) had behavioral or mood symptoms or both, 80 (95%) had cognitive symptoms, and 71 (85%) had signs of dementia.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sports Education Gambling ]

Polishing a rusty knife (YouTube video). In which a guy polishes a rusty knife and then proceeds to do things to a daikon radish that are well worth watching.

[ related topics: Movies Video ]

Just because I'm gonna want to refer back to it: The military spends five times as much on Viagra as it would on transgender troops’ medical care

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Current Events ]

I am never so aware of how much concrete finishers cost per hour as when waiting for the cement truck to arrive...

[ related topics: Machinery ]

How Debian Is Trying to Shut Down the CIA and Make Software Trustworthy Again:

"We are not discussing a hypothetical attack here," he said. "This is a real attack. We are talking about developers in totally good faith producing software, the binary they would give you, and even if they are of good faith, we could be totally owned."

Essentially trying to find solutions for the problems that Ken Thompson mentioned in Reflections on Trusting Trust.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Open Source Software Engineering ]

LA Times: California has too much pot, and growers won't be able to export the surplus:

Devlin said estimates he has heard put California production at five times the state consumption; one consultant in the audience said the number may be 12 times what is consumed in the state.

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

RT Kyle Griffin‏ @kylegriffin1:

Here's the moment: Trump suggests it's OK for police to rough up the people that they arrest.

(Has an NBC News video excerpt of Trump's speech to Suffolk County Police today)

When they talk about "not all cops"? How many cops in that audience booed this? How many at least stood silent? Fuck "not all cops".

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Video ]

LA Times: One Mexican town revolts against violence and corruption. Six years in, its experiment is working:

“We couldn’t trust the authorities or police any more,” said Josefina Estrada, a petite grandmother who is among the women who spearheaded the revolt. “We didn’t feel that they protected us or helped us. We saw them as accomplices with the criminals.”

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Woodworking ]

A well written description of the procedural wrangling that McCain was playing at. And why McCain was in a place to be the hero on these healthcare shenanigans where people who'd previously said they'd vote no weren't able to lay this level of smackdown on McConnell: Reddit user zzzzzzzz414 comment on US Senate healthcare repeal bill fails.

Edit: This Twitter thread says otherwise.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events ]

Why the Myth of Meritocracy Hurts Kids of Color: A new study finds that believing society is fair can lead disadvantaged adolescents to act out and engage in risky behavior.

The myth of meritocracy also sends privileged kids through their Libertarian phase...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Libertarian Invention and Design Education ]

"The human brain, from the macro level to the micro level, is organized for variation and degeneracy." #nocontextforyou

Daniel Handler (aka Limony Snickett): Want Teenage Boys to Read? Easy. Give Them Books About Sex.

Searching for a suitable answer, I raided my bookshelves and reread a pile of my favorite books from my teenage years. Both high and low culture were represented; there were books by men and women, contemporary authors and ones from bygone eras, literature in English and literature in translation, books I still loved and books I can no longer stand, but the books all had one thing in common: They were filthy.

[ related topics: Books Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology California Culture ]