Flutterby™! From 2017-09-01 to 2017-09-29

These Women Entrepreneurs Created A Fake Male Cofounder To Dodge Startup Sexism

It's gotten a little warmer here

[ related topics: Photography ]

As if the wildfires in California weren't enough, in the wake of being shut down, apparently the Russian consulate in San Francisco is burning stuff...

RT Bay Area Air Quality? @AirDistrict

We have sent an inspector to the Russian consulate. If they document an excessive smoke violation, they will be cited.

They were quoting KQED News @KQEDnews:

Smoke Seen Pouring from Russian Consulate in San Francisco http://dlvr.it/PkBpBV

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Current Events California Culture ]

Testing unicode

¡ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ ¦ § ¨ © ª « ¬ ­ ® ¯ ° ± ² ³ ´ µ ¶ · ¸ ¹ º » ¼ ½ ¾ ¿ À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ Ç È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï Ð Ñ Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö × Ø Ù Ú Û Ü Ý Þ ß à á â ã ä å æ ç è é ê ë ì í î ï ð ñ ò ó ô õ ö ÷ ø ù ú û ü ý þ ÿ

That's convenie.... Oh, not in general, just for a car.

[ related topics: Photography Automobiles ]

Last 8' o of trench took about an hour a foot, early morning trying to avoid the heat.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Some interesting artwork created by bending insulated (for the color) wires, kept here because we've been looking at how create some artwork that portrays paths: Frederico Uribe: Connected with the Past, 2012

[ related topics: History Art & Culture ]

For the whole thread: RT @thegayYA:

THE HOW TO WRITE STRAIGHT CHARACTERS PANEL IS HAPPENING NOW, gonna try and livetweet through my tears 😂 #nerdconstories

Malcolm Potts: 110/111: Football, CTE and risk-taking:

For some years I had the privilege of chairing the campus Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects (CPHS). We often spent time discussing relatively simple ethical questions. Nothing ever approached the gravity of discussing how a young person should make a choice about a risk with a high probability of causing increasingly incapacitating brain damage. I can’t be sure how the CPHS might respond to the question – should the campus permit Cal football to continue? I suspect that they would emphasize that if it does continue then the campus has an ethical responsibility to ensure players are making a fully informed choice when they accept a highly significant risk of catastrophic damage over the remainder of their lives.

Via Eλf Sternberg @elfsternberg, who observed:

Imagine if your high school advocated a program for which 99.09% of those who enrolled would suffer brain damage:

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Ethics Bay Area Sports ]

Tim Colwell at Point & Clickbait: Nazis Always Win In Call of Duty’s New ‘Centrist’ Multiplayer Mode, Say Players:

The controversial new mode is coming under heavy criticism for the way that it forces all soldiers on the Allied side to approach every Nazi soldier and open up a dialogue with them, prior to any combat starting.

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

Brilliant and inspiring: Hacking NYC MTA "if you see something, say something" ads to actually be meaninful

Gothamist covers the ads

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Public Transportation ]

Hmmm... Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images.

Description: We show that faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived and interpreted by the human brain. We used deep neural networks to extract features from 35,326 facial images. These features were entered into a logistic regression aimed at classifying sexual orientation. Given a single facial image, a classifier could correctly distinguish between gay and heterosexual men in 81% of cases, and in 74% of cases for women. Human judges achieved much lower accuracy: 61% for men and 54% for women. The accuracy of the algorithm increased to 91% and 83%, respectively, given five facial images per person. Facial features employed by the classifier included both fixed (e.g., nose shape) and transient facial features (e.g., grooming style). Consistent with the prenatal hormone theory of sexual orientation, gay men and women tended to have gender-atypical facial morphology, expression, and grooming styles. Prediction models aimed at gender alone allowed for detecting gay males with 57% accuracy and gay females with 58% accuracy. Those findings advance our understanding of the origins of sexual orientation and the limits of human perception. Additionally, given that companies and governments are increasingly using computer vision algorithms to detect people’s intimate traits, our findings expose a threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women.

Via The Economist: Advances in AI are used to spot signs of sexuality

Additional: The Guardian: New artificial intelligence can tell whether you're gay or straight from a photograph

[ related topics: Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture Current Events Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

THAT EQUIFAX "Have you been breached" SITE IS A TRAP! Specifically, you can enter *anything* in there and it'll tell you "Based on the information provided, we believe that your personal information may have been impacted by this incident.", and then it'll continue to try to enroll you in "TrustedID Premier". If you read the Terms of Service for "TrustedID Premier", you're signing away rights to sue and such. DON'T FALL FOR THIS!

Addendum: Krebs on Security: Equifax breach response turns dumpster fire

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Civil Liberties ]

Stud y uses great tits to measure air pollution:

Czech scientists have captured around sixty great tits all around the country to measure the level of heavy metals in their bodies and their impact on the birds’ health. At the same time, they used the birds to map the extent of heavy metal contamination in various regions around the country. The results of the study were published in a prestigious international magazine called Science of the Total Environment.

[ related topics: Health Nature and environment Maps and Mapping Birds ]

The Economist: The “free” economy comes at a cost — But economists struggle to work out how much:

This sounds like a wonderful deal for the consumer, but it generates problems elsewhere. Take taxes. Professionals are not allowed to evade tax by selling their services for benefits in kind, so why should consumers not be taxed if they are paid for their data in the form of services? Statisticians also struggle in a post-price world. GDP is mostly measured by transactions at market prices. A recent study by Leonard Nakamura of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and Jon Samuels and Rachel Soloveichik of the Bureau of Economic Analysis used the amount spent on advertising to estimate uncounted output, and calculated that in 2013 American GDP should have been $19bn higher than reported.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Current Events Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Economics Government ]

Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — a quantitative socio-economic study

Well, het guys, at least.

Unfortunately, this percentage decreases rapidly as you go down the attractiveness scale. According to this analysis a man of average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females (0.87%). This equates to 1 “like” for every 115 females. The good news is that if you are only getting liked by a few girls on Tinder you shouldn’t take it personally. You aren’t necessarily unattractive. You can be of above average attractiveness and still only get liked by a few percent of women on Tinder. The bad news is that if you aren’t in the very upper echelons of Tinder wealth (i.e. attractiveness) you aren’t likely to have much success using Tinder. You would probably be better off just going to a bar or joining some coed recreational sports team.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Economics ]

Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

Or why in the wake of the Experian Equifax leak you probably shouldn't bother with the "credit lock" extortion, and should just arm yourself for when some big bank tries to screw you over with bogus debt fraud. Because then it could become downright fun...

Sex Parties Changed The Way I Viewed My Sexual Assault:

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

OkCupid: Your looks and your inbox: How men and women perceive attractiveness:

As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable. But with the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.

The ‘internet of things’ is sending us back to the Middle Ages, which explores modern connected devices as extensions of medieval feudalism.

And links to WaPo: How a fish tank helped hack a casino.

[ related topics: Current Events Net Culture Gambling ]

So this weird Bluetooth device started showing up on my truck stereo. Someone lose a tracker?

[ related topics: Wireless Photography Machinery ]

Manufacturing plywood boards: Then and now (YouTube video).

[ related topics: Movies Video ]

Manufacturing plywood boards: Then and now (YouTube video).

[ related topics: Movies Video ]

Reducing rape seems to be a fundamental social shift in how we interact and think of each other: A woman interviewed 100 convicted rapists in India. This is what she learned.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Porn stars really hate Ted Cruz (Funny Or Die Twitter Video)

Reminder that Ted Cruz Doesn’t Believe You Have the Right to Masturbate

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events Video ]

Shadow (who may be Flutterby's only remaining other reader...) forwarded along a little mountain bike disaster, narrowly averted. Yikes.

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

Bradley Manning leak did not result in deaths by enemy forces, court hears: Counter-intelligence officer who investigated WikiLeaks impact undermines argument that Manning leak put lives at risk:

Brigadier general Robert Carr, a senior counter-intelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the Defense Department, told a court at Fort Meade, Maryland, that they had uncovered no specific examples of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals that followed the publication of the disclosures on the internet. "I don't have a specific example," he said.

I don't know how much lasting good the leak has done, but I think it's easy to argue that without the leak we wouldn't have seen the Arab Spring uprisings, or US drawdowns in Iraq, both of which seem like good things.

When driving an electric car has downsides: malfunctioning chargers, 2 ChargePoint, 1 EVGo. Home on gas. Sigh.

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

Motel 6 sets corporate policy to not share guest lists with ICE, overriding local managers who were sharing guest names with immigration authorities.

[ related topics: Travel ]

A Python script to grab SSH server keys from new Amazon EC2 instances via the API to prevent MitM attacks on that first time you log into a new instance.

[ related topics: Books Invention and Design Monty Python Cryptography Python ]

ProPublica: Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach ‘Jew Haters’, but there were only 2,274 people in it, too small a group to buy a targeted ad. Luckily, Facebook provided a work- around:

Facebook’s automated system suggested “Second Amendment” as an additional category that would boost our audience size to 119,000 people, presumably because its system had correlated gun enthusiasts with anti-Semites.

In case anyone wonders about my mixed feelings around the rights to keep and bear arms...

Buzzfeed: Google Allowed Advertisers To Target "Jewish Parasite," "Black People Ruin Everything"

[ related topics: Religion Law Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Civil Liberties Guns ]

RT Micah Sifry‏ @Mlsif:

It's funny that Facebook makes its users (the product) use their real names, but it allows its customers (the advertisers) to use any name.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

Daily Cal: Full speaker list released for ‘Free Speech Week’ at UC Berkeley.

Looks like this is a deliberate "Springtime for Hitler" in multiple ways... A week out, and:

According to campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof, however, the campus administration is currently unable to confirm a list of speakers. Only three of the speakers have contacted the campus or UCPD to make security arrangements, which is required for all campus events.

Additionally, rental fees for available indoor venues have not been paid, and no venue contracts have been signed.

“To date a number of key deadlines have been missed,” Mogulof said in an email. “While campus officials and venue managers are working diligently to assist the Berkeley Patriot group with its proposed events, the group’s failure to meet important deadlines is making it increasingly difficult to ensure a safe and secure program.”

[ related topics: Bay Area Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Dictators ]

Charlene in the Exuberant Calamity paddle wheel boat, Petaluma turning basin

[ related topics: Photography Boats Machinery ]

Along side the beer festival on the Petaluma river

[ related topics: Photography Beer ]

More Charlene paddling around the turning basin

[ related topics: Photography Whitewater ]

Hell has frozen over: The Wall Street Journal is saying good things about building codes.

Homes Built to Stricter Standards Fared Better in Storm. Hurricane Irma as the test case for building codes post Andrew and Wilma.

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

The Week My Husband Left And My House Was Burgled I Secured A Grant To Begin The Project That Became BRCA1

A wonderful story of misadventure, involving, among other things, Joe DiMaggio.

Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Sociology Skating Marriage Real Estate ]

Cervical artery dissection related to chiropractic manipulation: One institution's experience.:

CONCLUSION: In this case series, 12 patients with newly diagnosed cervical artery dissection(s) had recent chiropractic neck manipulation. Patients who are considering chiropractic cervical manipulation should be informed of the potential risk and be advised to seek immediate medical attention should they develop symptoms.

Another study adds to growing body of evidence that chiropractic neck manipulation is a risk factor for stroke. Patients should be warned of risk.

[ related topics: Law ]

Wood you? Glenmorangie and Renovo team up for booziest bike ever.

Bicycle made with oak whisky (they spell it "whiskey", poseurs) barrel staves.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Wines and Spirits Pedal Power Bicycling Woodworking ]

University of Texas at Austin: Risks of Harm from Spanking Confirmed by Analysis of Five Decades of Research

AUSTIN, Texas ­ — The more children are spanked, the more likely they are to defy their parents and to experience increased anti-social behavior, aggression, mental health problems and cognitive difficulties, according to a new meta-analysis of 50 years of research on spanking by experts at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan.

Probably some things we can take for public policy from this, too.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/fam0000191 (which isn't currently resolving...)

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

The Spanish Royal Philanthropic Expedition to Bring Smallpox Vaccination to the New World and Asia in the 19th Century Clinical Infectious Diseases, Volume 41, Issue 9, 1 November 2005, Pages 1285–1289

About the De Balmis expedition. In 1803, 22 orphaned children and the son of the director of the orphanage were loaded onto the Spanish corvette Maria Pita and serially infected with cowpox in order to bring smallpox vaccination to the new world. They brought the vaccine to the Canary Islands, but by the time they reached Puerto Rico, the vaccine had already arrived via the Virgin Islands. However, they set up infrastructure to produce more, and headed on to South America. Balmis split the party, continued across Central America, back on to boats to the Phillippines, China and other parts of Asia, continuing back through the Middle East.

https://doi.org/10.1086/496930

Via MeFi. Now listening to Futility Closet episode 42 on The Balmis expedition.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Invention and Design Pop Culture Boats Machinery ]

Reliance on 'gut feelings' linked to belief in fake news: Study finds political bias isn't all that shapes how we perceive truth:

People who tend to trust their intuition or to believe that the facts they hear are politically biased are more likely to stand behind inaccurate beliefs, a new study suggests.

And those who rely on concrete evidence to form their beliefs are less likely to have misperceptions about high-profile scientific and political issues, said Kelly Garrett, the lead researcher and a professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

Epistemic beliefs’ role in promoting misperceptions and conspiracist ideation R. Kelly Garrett, Brian E. Weeks:

... Individuals who view reality as a political construct are significantly more likely to embrace falsehoods, whereas those who believe that their conclusions must hew to available evidence tend to hold more accurate beliefs. Confidence in the ability to intuitively recognize truth is a uniquely important predictor of conspiracist ideation. Results suggest that efforts to counter misperceptions may be helped by promoting epistemic beliefs emphasizing the importance of evidence, cautious use of feelings, and trust that rigorous assessment by knowledgeable specialists is an effective guard against political manipulation.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design moron Current Events Education Conspiracy ]

We're now well stocked, if you happen to have any that need stopping

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

Stack Exchange code challenge - Build a working game of Tetris in Conway's Game of Life. In which people start with logic gates, build a RISC processor, implement Tetris, and are now talking about a GCC back-end for it.

[ related topics: Games moron Work, productivity and environment ]

Whoa: the "Google.com was registered 20 years ago" story made me check Flutterby.com: Creation Date: 1997-08-13T04:00:00.00Z

Finally, a Movie About the Kinky Threesome That Inspired Wonder Woman. About soon to be released Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, the story of the origins of the Wonder Woman comic.

[ related topics: Movies Birds ]

Distrustful U.S. allies force spy agency to back down in encryption fight. The NSA blew their credibility with the Dual Elliptic Curve stuff, and now nobody in the ISO trusts 'em....

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

Flint’s lead-poisoned water had a ‘horrifyingly large’ effect on fetal deaths, study finds:

That decline was primarily driven by what the authors call a “culling of the least healthy fetuses” resulting in a “horrifyingly large” increase in fetal deaths and miscarriages. The paper estimates that among the babies conceived from November 2013 through March 2015, “between 198 and 276 more children would have been born had Flint not enacted the switch in water,” write health economists Daniel Grossman of West Virginia University and David Slusky of Kansas University.

PDF of the working paper

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Current Events Work, productivity and environment Education Gambling Economics ]

A Facebook flamewar reminds Huey Callison of someone, and:

Here's something interesting: I just flipped through a pretty spectacular meltdown in somebody else's Facebook thread, and one of the names looked familiar.

It was from a mailing list discussion nine years ago, discussing why usenet killfiles were originally invented. The guy who just in the last few days melted down on Facebook? Same guy that had a famous flamewar in the 80s, just before Larry Wall implemented killfiles.

...so he's not just a nutcase, he's a HISTORIC nutcase. He was a fedora-wearing douchebag before the current generation of fedora-wearing douchebags were even BORN. HE HAS ALMOST SINGLEHANDEDLY DRIVEN INNOVATION IN THE FIELD OF PLONK.

Bonus: If you didn't click through and read the thread, the concept of "Plonk's Constant" is introduced...

[ related topics: Perl Net Culture Community Aviation - Helicopters hubris ]

Boats along the river always make me want to know the story...

[ related topics: Photography Boats Machinery ]

When Does it Count? The Timing of Food Stamp Receipt and Educational Performance:

The impact of poor nutrition has been established as an important determinant of learning and achievement among school aged children. It has also been demonstrated that the single monthly treatment of food stamps leaves meaningful nutritional deficiencies in recipient households during the final weeks of the benefits cycle. This paper exploits detailed administrative data on standardized math tests scores and randomized food stamp receipt dates to allow us to measure the impact of these low nutritional periods on student performance. Our main results are that scores are notably lower when the exam falls near the end of the benefit cycle and when food stamps arrive on the four days immediately preceding the exam. While both boys and girls experienced a similar penalty with receipt near the end of the cycle, the effect from receipt just prior to the exam appears to be partially explained by a large negative effect associated with weekend receipt, which coincides with the four days prior to the exam, that is concentrated among African- American boys. Our results provide evidence that households do not sufficiently smooth consumption and that this has measurable effects on student performance. The fact that weekend receipt differs suggests a behavioral response from households beyond food insecurity that also has meaningful effects.

Also: Economic Security Programs Help Low- Income Children Succeed Over Long Term, Many Studies Find.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Nature and environment Food Theater & Plays Mathematics Education Pedal Power Race Bicycling ]

Washington Post: A short history of ‘dotard,’ the arcane insult Kim Jong Un used in his threat against Trump, some interesting linguistics for the morning.

Related, I have no way of confirming this, but RT Jihye Lee 이지혜 @TheJihyeLee:

The Korean original statement said "늙다리 미치광이," which means old beast lunatic -- which was translated into "dotard."

[ related topics: Current Events Gambling ]

Push Button, Receive Hamilton: On combining Amazon Dash buttons and Sonos Jukebox music players to create buttons for music genres around the house.

[ related topics: Books Music Dogs Real Estate ]

Orkestra Obsolete plays New Order's Blue Monday (1983) on 1930s instruments.

[ related topics: Movies Invention and Design ]

Washington Post: How fights over Trump have led evangelicals to leave their churches:

More specifically, for 20 years, liberal to moderate evangelicals have been leaving their churches because they disagree with the Christian right. This is important because it allows us to recognize that this sorting process is plural, local, and continual. It is not something owned by the left or right, but a regular and expected part of life in all religious organizations.

It does also note that those who leave tend to be marginal attenders, not the core congregation.

Via Study: 14% of American Christians Left Their Churches After the Election

[ related topics: Religion Invention and Design Current Events ]

Passwords to Over a Half Million Car Tracking Devices Leaked Online:

Kromtech discovered SVR’s data in a publicly accessible Amazon S3 bucket. It contained information on roughly 540,000 SVR accounts, including email addresses and passwords, as well as some license plates and vehicle identification numbers (VIN). There were half a million records overall, Kromtech said, “but in some cases credentials were given for a record with several vehicles associated with it.”

[ related topics: Books Automobiles ]

MIT press release: Studies help explain link between autism, severe infection during pregnancy — Bacterial populations in mother’s GI tract may play a central role.:

Choi and Jun Huh, formerly an assistant professor at UMass Medical School who is now a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, are the senior authors of both papers, which appear in Nature on Sept. 13. MIT postdoc Yeong Shin Yim is the first author of one paper, and UMass Medical School visiting scholars Sangdoo Kim and Hyunju Kim are the lead authors of the other.

Maternal gut bacteria promote neurodevelopmental abnormalities in mouse offspring

Maternal immune activation (MIA) contributes to behavioural abnormalities associated with neurodevelopmental disorders in both primate and rodent offspring1–4. In humans, epidemiological studies suggest that exposure of fetuses to maternal inflammation increases the likelihood of developing autism spectrum disorder5–7. In pregnant mice, interleukin-17a (IL-17a) produced by T helper 17 (TH17) cells (CD4+ T helper effector cells involved in multiple inflammatory conditions) induces behavioural and cortical abnormalities in the offspring exposed to MIA8. However, it is unclear whether other maternal factors are required to promote MIA-associated phenotypes. Moreover, the underlying mechanisms by which MIA leads to T cell activation with increased IL-17a in the maternal circulation are not well understood. Here we show that MIA phenotypes in offspring require maternal intestinal bacteria that promote TH17 cell differentiation. Pregnant mice that had been colonized with mouse commensal segmented filamentous bacteria or human commensal bacteria that induce intestinal TH17 cells were more likely to produce offspring with MIA-associated abnormalities. We also show that small intestine dendritic cells from pregnant, but not from non-pregnant, females secrete IL-1β, IL-23 and IL- 6 and stimulate T cells to produce IL-17a upon exposure to MIA. Overall, our data suggest that defined gut commensal bacteria with a propensity to induce TH17 cells may increase the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders in the offspring of pregnant mothers undergoing immune system activation owing to infections or autoinflammatory syndromes.

Reversing behavioural abnormalities in mice exposed to maternal inflammation

Viral infection during pregnancy is correlated with increased frequency of neurodevelopmental disorders, and this is studied in mice prenatally subjected to maternal immune activation (MIA). We previously showed that maternal T helper 17 cells promote the development of cortical and behavioural abnormalities in MIA-affected offspring. Here we show that cortical abnormalities are preferentially localized to a region encompassing the dysgranular zone of the primary somatosensory cortex (S1DZ). Moreover, activation of pyramidal neurons in this cortical region was sufficient to induce MIA-associated behavioural phenotypes in wild-type animals, whereas reduction in neural activity rescued the behavioural abnormalities in MIA-affected offspring. Sociability and repetitive behavioural phenotypes could be selectively modulated according to the efferent targets of S1DZ. Our work identifies a cortical region primarily, if not exclusively, centred on the S1DZ as the major node of a neural network that mediates behavioural abnormalities observed in offspring exposed to maternal inflammation.

Later two links were found via American Chemical Society: Chemical & Engineering news: Mother’s gut microbes could be linked to autismlike disorders in children — Presence of certain bacteria in pregnant mice lead to abnormal brain wiring and autismlike behaviors in offspring

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama broadband Nature and environment Current Events Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence ]

Some Frogs Change Colors in an Attempt to Avoid Confusion During Their Orgies

Superaccurate GPS Chips Coming to Smartphones in 2018. Essentially a Broadcom press release, but hyping how chips which can use the L5 frequencies are coming, which should be able to compensate for all sorts of things and give accuracy to about 30cm.

[ related topics: Graphic Design Maps and Mapping ]

At Jeff Elliott's lecture on Petaluma history in 3 crises http://santarosahistory.com/wordpress/petalumas-three-crises/

Trying to get a handle on the devastation in the Caribbean: Some post-storm NOAA imagery St Croix, and I've tried to zoom in on the camp I visited with family twice last year, in February and December. We stated in tent cabins there, obviously the tent portions got ripped off, but what's really amazing is all of the mahogany trees knocked down.

https://storms.ngs.noaa.gov/st...index.html#20/17.74770/-64.86950

[ related topics: Nature and environment Sociology Global Warming ]

Because I'm thinking about this, a lot, in the context of square dancing and how to introduce "yellow rocks" into my teaching: Social Dance Community: How to teach consent starting now (Lesson 1).

[ related topics: Community ]

SFPD: Uber, Lyft account for two-thirds of congestion-related traffic violations downtown

Looks worthy of some further exploration: Open Philanthropy Project: Reasonable Doubt? A New Look at Whether Prison Growth Cuts Crime

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design ]

A little history on why Colin Kaepernick decided to kneel during the National Anthem: Kaepernick Meets With Veteran Nate Boyer, Then Kneels During Anthem

NY Times: Eric Reid: Why Colin Kaepernick and I Decided to Take a Knee.

After hours of careful consideration, and even a visit from Nate Boyer, a retired Green Beret and former N.F.L. player, we came to the conclusion that we should kneel, rather than sit, the next day during the anthem as a peaceful protest. We chose to kneel because it’s a respectful gesture. I remember thinking our posture was like a flag flown at half-mast to mark a tragedy.

Yes, your shared and open plan offices are making you sick. Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices--a national cross sectional questionnaire survey.

RESULTS: Sickness absence was significantly related to having a greater number of occupants in the office (P<0.001) when adjusting for confounders. Compared to cellular offices, occupants in 2-person offices had 50% more days of sickness absence [rate ratio (RR) 1.50, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.13-1.98], occupants in 3-6-person offices had 36% more days of sickness absence (RR 1.36, 95% CI 1.08-1.73), and occupants in open-plan offices (>6 persons) had 62% more days of sickness absence (RR 1.62, 95% CI 1.30-2.02).

Hugh Hefner, visionary editor who created Playboy magazine, dies at 91

While we're looking at the amazing ways that Hefner helped change society, a footnote in How Dick Gregory Forced The FBI To Find The Bodies Of Three Civil Rights Workers Slain In Mississippi:

The comedian wasn’t able to get the full $100,000 but he was able to get $25,000 thanks to a phone call to Hugh Hefner. “Hefner understood what those rednecks didn’t: that things had changed,” he told British GQ in 2011. That you could no longer argue that you’d ‘killed three Jews’. Or ‘killed three blacks’. What you’d done was, you’d killed three fellow human beings.”

[ related topics: Religion Quotes Sexual Culture Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Furniture ]

Nature Human Behavior: Letters: Evidence that curtailing proactive policing can reduce major crime, Christopher M. Sullivan and Zachary P. O’Keeffe

... Analysing several years of unique data obtained from the NYPD, we find that civilian complaints of major crimes (such as burglary, felony assault and grand larceny) decreased during and shortly after sharp reductions in proactive policing. The results challenge prevailing scholarship as well as conventional wisdom on authority and legal compliance, as they imply that aggressively enforcing minor legal statutes incites more severe criminal acts.

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-017-0211-5

[ related topics: Nature and environment Law ]

Interesting: I'd always thought that the relatively low fertility rate among humans in developed Western nations was a matter of choice:

But even people who don’t think falling birth rates are bad in and of themselves may have reason to think boosted fertility is a good indicator. The logic behind this rests on what demographers call “desired” or “wanted” or sometimes “intended” fertility. That is, we can simply ask women how many kids they think would be ideal. Women are surveyed at many different ages, but one simple thing to do is to look at what women who are done having kids and compare that to how many kids they had. Using data from the OECD, we can do this, directly comparing completed fertility to the fertility those women think would have been ideal, had their life and family choices played out the way they wished. For the United States, I use “intended fertility” of women over 35, which probably understates this gap versus the European countries included.

Can Uncle Sam Boost American Fertility?

I think generally the levels of human population on this planet are running us on the ragged edge of disaster, but I had thought that the lower birth rates were a preference, and it turns out they may be more an economic decision. Which, yeah, is a preference, but not quite the same.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs Space & Astronomy Sociology Sports Databases Economics ]

Fun: sshpry, spy on SSH sessions (uses strace to attach to the ssh process on the same machine as root, so it's a "careful what you run" thing, not an "ssh is broken" thing.

Proof of concept video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-SUNXc4CTM&feature=youtu.be

[ related topics: Movies Cryptography Video ]

The Atlantic: Education Isn't the Key to a Good Income: A growing body of research debunks the idea that school quality is the main determinant of economic mobility.

Rothstein, however, found little evidence to support that premise. Instead, he found that differences in local labor markets—for example, how similar industries can vary across different communities—and marriage patterns, such as higher concentrations of single-parent households, seemed to make much more of a difference than school quality. He concludes that factors like higher minimum wages, the presence and strength of labor unions, and clear career pathways within local industries are likely to play more important roles in facilitating a poor child’s ability to rise up the economic ladder when they reach adulthood.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology Work, productivity and environment Community Education Economics Marriage ]

ElCap Report Rescue Edition 9.27.17, some amazing pictures and a report of Wednesday's rock fall off of El Capitan in Yosemite that killed one person.

And then yesterday there was a ten times larger rockfall.

• CNN 2nd rockfall in two days at Yosemite's El Capitan injures one
• LA Times: Rockfall at Yosemite's El Capitan '10 times bigger' than slide that killed tourist a day earlier
• NPR 2nd Rockfall In 2 Days Injures Another Climber At El Capitan

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design Yosemite ]