Flutterby™! From 2018-01-01 to 2018-01-31

Ethan's mom is back, and took the EV for a spin... https://youtu.be/dfFl8S2TG9o

No visit to uncle Dan's house is complete without kabooms

https://youtu.be/pjccpiN9aFs https://youtu.be/5W63WMZK6AQ

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Ethan posing with his go cart

[ related topics: Photography ]

python sweetness: The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table Isolation patches in which it is posited that there's a major security issue in all modern CPU architectures that the maintainers of the NT and Linux kernels are currently rolling out fixes for, but that the fixes are probably going to have huge performance impacts.

And these are likely related to the Rowhammer issues in modern SDRAM.

... And ...

IOHIDeous, a fascinating deep dive:

This is the tale of a macOS-only vulnerability in IOHIDFamily that yields kernel r/w and can be exploited by any unprivileged user.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Open Source Theater & Plays Law Monty Python Macintosh Python Furniture ]

Moonset on the morning run

[ related topics: Photography ]

A rebooted http://goatse.cx , riding the cryptocurrency/bitcoin wave:

Welcome to Goatse. Meme creation in the blockchain.

Goatse is going to change the world... again.

Goatsecoin.

[ related topics: Marketing Bicycling ]

Fantastic round-up of all sorts of evidence analysis pseudoscience: Round-up: A Lot of CSI-Style Forensics Have Turned Out to be Bogus, from bite mark to burn pattern to blood splatter to handwriting to hair to polygraphs to toxicology to fingerprint analysis, with a few bonus entries on DNA and genetic matching.

Everyone's been passing around Vanity Fair: “Oh My God, This Is So F---ed Up”: Inside Silicon Valley’s Secretive, Orgiastic Dark Side and saying "ewww, gross". I'm saying that too, but I'm saying it about the writing more than the topic. I wrote a long thing for a Facebook thread that I'm gonna toss in the comments 'cause it's long.

[ related topics: Religion Writing Current Events ]

Ages ago, I think I heard Eric make this observation: RT Reginald Braithwaite‏ @raganwald

Please repeat after me:

“Venture-backed startups are exercises in financial engineering, not software or hardware engineering.”

If software and hardware talent was the “scarce resource,” all the experienced engineers would be on permanent retainers with the big financial firms.

Engineers would be shuffled within portfolio companies like minor league ball players getting called up and sent down. They’d never be laid off, just redeployed.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering ]

Brent Simmons: 2018: Some Hope, a call to rebuild the blogosphere and social web that we once had. I'm skeptical that the new thing can be built on the web. I think JavaScript and Google have killed it.

The unruly web — unregulated and uncontrolled — is, perhaps paradoxically, the easiest place to limit hate. Not because we can stop people from publishing, but because we don’t have to live by Dorsey’s and Zuckerberg’s rules and designs.

I remember when TC used referrer back-linking to make a Flutterby entry the second Google result for French Military Victories, and the idiocy and trolls that descended on the comment thread there. It's not just that we're at the whim of Twitter and Facebook's algorithms of what to amplify, but Google's too. And in integrating the mainstream media, we've amplified trolling: Unlike the old days of Usenet, with tools for filtering and killfiling, we have to reinvent the wheel for every place we publish or read.

Some of the new concepts for commenting with backlinks, as we used to do when we all read each other anyway, need a good aggregator, and I'm not sure HTTP is the right protocol to do that under. I've been pondering the tuits to do such a thing for ipfs or dat or something else that's distributed, that uses simple public keys for identity, and that means that it's likely that we have collective back-ups of family photographs and such.

[ related topics: Photography Content Management Invention and Design Theater & Plays Sociology Journalism and Media Net Culture Aviation - Helicopters ]

Study: Taking calcium and vitamin D doesn't help protect your bones:

Upon drilling down to certain subgroups, they found that for people who started out with at least 20 nanograms of vitamin D per milliliter of blood, adding more vitamin D through supplements was associated with a greater risk of hip fractures. The same was true for people who took high doses of vitamin D supplements just once a year.

Looks like the paper is Association Between Calcium or Vitamin D Supplementation and Fracture Incidence in Community-Dwelling Older Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis Jia-Guo Zhao, MD; Xian-Tie Zeng, MD; Jia Wang, MD; et al,

JAMA. 2017;318(24):2466-2482. doi:10.1001/jama.2017.19344

[ related topics: Health Current Events Consumerism and advertising Community ]

Men with autism may misread social cues in body odors

In the new study, researchers exposed men to sweat collected from people who were skydiving. Unlike controls, men with autism do not show increased skin conductance, a measure of physiological arousal, to this ‘fear sweat.’ They are also more likely than controls to trust a mannequin that emits this scent.

Looks like the study is at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29180748

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events ]

Google Maps feature I want: within the fastest public transit option time, maximize walking.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping Public Transportation ]

RT Belinda Barnet‏ @manjusrii:

5yo: I am building a semi ominous vehicle out of cardboard

Me: You mean semi autonomous

5yo: You don't understand my technology

A while ago I asked for some guidance on carving tools. Today this arrived in the mail. Thank you @DavePolaschek, this is gorgeous!

[ related topics: Photography ]

Whoopsie: Carefully crafted certificates allow arbitrary remote code execution on the AMD bootloader security processor

I've been watching this sort of development pattern issue carefully, as in Petaluma we've had developers near the new rail station fighting pushback from the "that's not Petaluma" folks who are pushing for few stories low density development. It'll be interesting to see if this goes anywhere, and whether or not developers hold off on projects in the hopes that they can go higher: Bill could add millions of new homes next to California's public transit stations:

California State Senator Scott Wiener proposed a trio of new housing bills on Thursday, including one that would make it easier to build taller projects near public transit.

Wiener (D-San Francisco)'s SB 827 calls for the statewide removal of single-family home and parking requirements for projects within a half-mile of transit hubs like BART, Muni and Caltrain stations.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Bay Area Sociology Current Events California Culture Trains Public Transportation Real Estate ]

Don’t pirate or we’ll mess with your Nest, warns East Coast ISP:

As part of its [response to allegations of piracy] throttling routine, Armstrong Zoom's warning letter openly threatens its suspected file-sharing customers about its ability to use or control their webcams and connected thermostats.

Most Germans rent rather than buy their homes:

West Germany’s first housing minister—a former Wehrmacht man by the name of Eberhard Wildermuth—once noted that “the number of communist voters in European countries stands in inverse proportion to the number of housing units per thousand inhabitants.”

[ related topics: Books Real Estate ]

TempestSDR: An SDR tool for Eavesdropping on Computer Screens via Unintentionally Radiated RF. Using software defined radio to do Tempest style remote reading of screens. DVI works best, HDMI signals are fainter.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Study: Cyclists Don’t Break Traffic Laws Any More Than Drivers Do

[ related topics: Government ]

RT casey‏ @gh0stmaw:

new phrase im patenting . "kink sniping" posting something vaguely spicy for the sole purpose of destroying certain people

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Brookings: New evidence that access to health care reduces crime:

The authors found that when Medicaid expanded, both violent and property crime rates fell. The authors argue that the effect is driven primarily by increasing access to substance abuse treatment: they find that Medicaid expansions increased the number of people receiving such treatment by 20 percent. It’s possible that Medicaid expansions affect criminal behavior through other channels as well — for instance, it also increases access to mental health care and reduces financial instability. But assuming that substance abuse treatment was the main driver of effects on crime in this setting, the authors estimate that a ten percent increase in such treatment (at an annual cost of $1.6 billion) yielded an annual benefit of $2.9 to 5.1 billion in avoided crime. That’s a big return on investment.

The paper is National Bureau of Economic Research: Substance Abuse Treatment Centers and Local Crime Samuel R. Bondurant, Jason M. Lindo, Isaac D. Swensen:

In this paper we estimate the effects of expanding access to substance-abuse treatment on local crime. We do so using an identification strategy that leverages variation driven by substance-abuse-treatment facility openings and closings measured at the county level. The results indicate that substance-abuse-treatment facilities reduce both violent and financially motivated crimes in an area, and that the effects are particularly pronounced for relatively serious crimes. The effects on homicides are documented across three sources of homicide data.

[ related topics: Weblogs Health Invention and Design Economics ]

WBEZ News Homeless Patients Get Novel Treatment From Chicago Hospitals: Housing:

The pilot’s overall results are in, and the hospital thinks the program is worth continuing. Health care costs per patient housed dropped 18 percent on average each month, according to the hospital. The University of Illinois Hospital will expand the program to house 25 additional homeless patients. And at least three other Chicago hospitals are launching or recently launched similar programs.

[ related topics: Health Software Engineering Current Events Television Education Real Estate ]

Western Digital My Cloud drives have a built-in backdoor.

More troubling is the existence of a hard coded backdoor with credentials that cannot be changed. Logging in to Western Digital My Cloud services can be done by anybody using "mydlinkBRionyg" as the administrator username and "abc12345cba" as the password. Once logged in, shell access is readily available followed with plenty of opportunity for injection of commands.

People are reporting that this did get fixed more recently, although nobody's sure if it got "fixed" by changing credentials, or by being removed. Speculation is that it's left over from a DLink product.

Vulnerabilities at http://gulftech.org/advisories...20Multiple%20Vulnerabilities/125

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events ]

Ownership change on this bank, I assume Tulip was taken.

[ related topics: Photography Flowers ]

TFW an ad for a game looks familiar, and then you realize you coded that game 20 years ago for the Toy Story Activity Center, but in 3d...

[ related topics: Pixar Games Animation Graphics ]

Taking ibuprofen for long periods found to alter human testicular physiology

The researchers report that just two weeks into the study, they found that all of the volunteers had an increase in luteinizing hormones, which the male body uses to regulate the production of testosterone. The increase indicated that the drug was causing problems in certain cells in the testicles, preventing them from producing testosterone, which is, of course, needed to produce sperm cells. They further report that the change caused the pituitary gland to respond by producing more of another hormone, which forced the body to produce more testosterone. The net result was that overall testosterone levels remained constant, but the body was overstressing to compensate for the detrimental impact of the Ibuprofen—a state called compensated hypogonadism.

David Møbjerg Kristensen et al. Ibuprofen alters human testicular physiology to produce a state of compensated hypogonadism, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1715035115

[ related topics: Erotic Health Theater & Plays Current Events Work, productivity and environment ]

Guys, guys, hear me out: Slack, but with business level reliability. You know, like IRC, but private.

More speculative execution madness, this one is wonderful because as I read through it I had the "aha" right before the big reveal. Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360.

[ related topics: Graphic Design ]

Open KJ, a cross-platform Karaoke Jukebox player.

Ouch: RT Tyler Simpson‏ @Braintasm

Went and saw The Post tonight. I watched a film about newspapers inside a movie theater inside of a mall. It was a dying industry turducken.

[ related topics: Movies Theater & Plays Woodworking ]

Larry asks about emergency wilderness survival:

This got me thinking. If I’m going to be heading out into the woods, placing myself in a situation where I might be required to spend the night should things take an unexpected turn what is the minimum list of things I need to have with me? I am far from being an expert so look at this as a conversation starter. Where could I be off? What have I forgotten.

I'll toss my response in the comments.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs ]

Bitfury De-Anonymises Millions of Bitcoin Transactions and Addresses. Gosh, I hope nobody was using Bitcoin for anything that might be frowned upon by authorities or as a way to subvert laws about currency or anything. It would be bad to have behavior like that written to a global immutable distributed publicly available ledger.

Bonus: Miami Bitcoin Conference Stops Accepting Bitcoin Due to Fees and Congestion

[ related topics: Current Events Currency Conferences Government ]

There Will Be Bud (YouTube, trailer)

[ related topics: Beer ]

Dan Harmon apologizes to Community writer Megan Ganz on his podcast Harmontown. That article has a transcript, the podcast episode is here, the apology starts at 18:38.

And so that’s what I continued to do, telling myself and anybody that threatened to confront me with it that if you thought what I was doing was creepy or flirty or unprofessional, then it’s because you were the sexist. You were jealous. I was supporting this person, I’m a mentor. I’m a feminist. It’s your problem, not mine, that you’re the one who’s seeing things through that lens. And so I let myself keep doing it.

Ganz has pointed to this apolog. Over on the MeFi thread it's pointed out that this is kind of like a public marriage proposal, especially given some of Harmon's fans she's kind-of got to smile and take it in public, but I do think that this sort of self-aware confession and reflection is a necessary part of starting to reframe how we communicate about the fucked up socialization we have around gender and "love".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sociology Writing Community Marriage ]

Jiz Lee @jizlee tweeted

Yes! Engaging in sex work taught me more about respecting boundaries than school, TV, or anywhere else. I’m so grateful for it, but also furious that so many of us miss this important education early on. We need to talk about sex and consent!

Quoting Lorelei Lee‏ @MissLoreleiLee:

The public narrative says that whoring means making yourself indiscriminately available when the truth is the opposite - whoring is all about setting exact limits for when and under what circumstances our bodies can be touched.

(Lorelei Lee's whole thread is worth a read)

Immediately above that, there was a Tweet from Elf Sternberg:

Straight people. "I guess the sex and drugs didn't start until after 12:30am and all the boring fuckers have gone home." https://medium.com/@paulbiggar...orse-than-it-sounds-29f4a3c7e4b8 … Seriously? The last party I went to, I left at midnight; by then, I'd already tied up four women and two men. :-)

And:

The power trip described in that story is gross. But it's also... weird. Like, that delay until after midnight just feels wrong. Don't these people have lives in the morning? Weren't they working all day? Does cocaine give you the illusion of energy reserves?

I think that something happens in our repressed culture. When we put up all of these walls and boundaries around sex, we make it unspeakable, and we end up with this weird- ass uncanny valley in between sex and hoping that sex might occur, rather than being able to talk about it honestly. And it's in this space where it becomes really easy to forget power dynamics, rather than specifically explicitly playing with the power dynamics.

And we have to be really careful when we wrap ritual and meaning around sex without acknowledging that, at the center, there's sex, we end up with these weirdly coercive situations.

[ related topics: Drugs Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture Technology and Culture Health tolkien Space & Astronomy Sociology Work, productivity and environment Television California Culture Travel Education ]

Github: danielmiessler/SecLists pull request: Remove my password from lists so hackers won't be able to hack me #155. In a list of the top 1000 passwords, one user wants to remove "dolphins" in order to make their account more secure.

SFGate: New SF policies bar arrest of sex workers who come forward to report violence

SFPD Department Bulletin A 17-249 12/19/17 Prioritizing Safety for Sex Workers (PDF):

In light of recent events in the San Francisco Bay Area and abroad, officers are reminded that, pursuant to DGO 2.01 and 3.01, any officer misconduct against sex workers, including retaliation, coercion or coercive intimate acts, is subject to disciplinary and/or. criminal action. Sex workers are vulnerable to violence and face barriers in reporting violent crimes to law enforcement in San Francisco. The criminalization of sex work is one of the primary barriers to reporting violence to law enforcement. Sex workers report fear of arrest as a barrier to reporting violent crimes.

This bulletin institutionalizes the Department's existing prioritization of violent crimes and aims to ensure equal access to safety for persons engaged in sex work and other forms of sex trade including trafficked persons. The Department seeks to promote the safety, dignity, and well-being of all San Franciscans, including sex workers; and to reduce violence, trafficking of persons, and abuse, including labor violations, within the sex industry. The Police Department and the District Attorney's Office have developed complementary policies for persons of any age engaged in sex work and other forms of sex trade who experience or witness violent crimes.

A step in the right direction

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Bay Area Law Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement California Culture ]

I really want to see Secure Scuttlebut or Fritter+Dat or similar as the next step in social media, but they're all in JavaScript, and I don't think my next laptop will have more than 32G of RAM.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

How robo-callers outwitted the government and completely wrecked the Do Not Call list. The meat of the article is in the first section, where they describe the guy with the $25k/month mansion near Laguna Beach who, eventually, ended up happily paying a $2.7M penalty to the FTC for telemarketing. And probably didn't stop.

Damn but we need some hard criminal penalties against robocallers.

[ related topics: Nature and environment moron ]

(Taiwan) Police give out infected USBs as prizes in cybersecurity quiz

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

Dear mobile Firefox: I can deal with the broken stuttering input fields, but how about an "I'm thinking" indication so that my taps don't get all queued up on the wrong things.

Just because I may want to be able to find it again. I'm not much on following the politics of speculative fiction, but an author has had his membership in Worldcon revoked. Jim C. Hines has compiled some of the background: Jon Del Arroz’s History of Trolling and Harassing

[ related topics: Politics ]

In honor of Martin Luther King day: Have you done something recently that's resulted in the FBI trying to blackmail you into suicide? If not, why not?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Enforcement ]

What the hell @usaa? Downtown Vallejo is a "secure location" and you won't provide roadside assistance?

Waiting fora tow truck on a street with a cardboard box shelter on one side and a recent model Mercedes on the other. I have been propositioned in this neighborhood before, but nobody has made eye contact tonight.

[ related topics: Automobiles Machinery ]

Riding the ferry up to Vallejo to get my truck. The bay is foggy and grey, but the chart of current location is pretty cool.

[ related topics: Photography California Culture Machinery Bicycling Public Transportation ]

Love me some working waterfront

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

Shout out to Michael, who was camped in the First Baptist Church of Vallejo alcove last night, came out to check on me when we were dealing with the truck issues, and said "hi" this morning.

[ related topics: Religion Machinery ]

The guys with the Sonic logo on the truck say they're not supposed to talk about the implications of them doing pole work in my neighborhood, but I have a few guesses. #fiber #giddy

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment Machinery ]

Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000.

Researchers Neil Gandal, JT Hamrick, Tyler Moore, and Tali Oberman have written a fascinating paper on Bitcoin price manipulation. Entitled “Price Manipulation in the Bitcoin Ecosystem” and appearing in the recent issue of the Journal of Monetary Economics the paper describes to what degree the Bitcoin ecosystem is controlled by bad actors.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Google knows...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Wild Things: Animals and gender coding on children's clothes:

After one too many polemics on the subject my husband asked if perhaps I was exaggerating. He decided to try and apply some numbers to my rants so he put together a nifty little webscraping tool that looked at twelve major high street chains, pulled out every item of clothing with an animal on it, and made a big list of animals divided by gender and in order of popularity.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Software Engineering Graphic Design Clothing Marriage ]

Nature Human Behavior: Aggregated knowledge from a small number of debates outperforms the wisdom of large crowds, Joaquin Navajas, Tamara Niella, Gerry Garbulsky, Bahador Bahrami & Mariano Sigman

The aggregation of many independent estimates can outperform the most accurate individual judgement. This centenarian finding, popularly known as the 'wisdom of crowds', has been applied to problems ranging from the diagnosis of cancer to financial forecasting. It is widely believed that social influence undermines collective wisdom by reducing the diversity of opinions within the crowd. Here, we show that if a large crowd is structured in small independent groups, deliberation and social influence within groups improve the crowd’s collective accuracy. We asked a live crowd (N = 5,180) to respond to general-knowledge questions (for example, "What is the height of the Eiffel Tower?"). Participants first answered individually, then deliberated and made consensus decisions in groups of five, and finally provided revised individual estimates. We found that averaging consensus decisions was substantially more accurate than aggregating the initial independent opinions. Remarkably, combining as few as four consensus choices outperformed the wisdom of thousands of individuals.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Nature and environment Theater & Plays Aviation - Helicopters ]

Slate: Live Free or At Least Try New Hampshire police officers colluded with federal officers to circumvent state law. Will the state let them get away with it?

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design Theater & Plays Current Events Law Enforcement ]

This morning's walk included discussion of absurd C++ object solutions for something simple and fast in C. Made me wonder how much code "elegance" comes from the tech Libertarian thing of baroque philosophies with little pragmatic grounding.

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian Community ]

Oak Park IL kills its Divvy bike share program:

Divvy cost taxpayers $17.48 for every ride, Andrews said in a Facebook post. Trustee Andrea Button clarified that Divvy was subsidized by parking fees, not by taxes, but the high cost was hung around the program’s neck: a $35 subsidy for each round-trip bike ride.

Ouch. But/and: if you've got essentially suburbs, everyone has room to park their own bike. Spending the parking fees on other ways to make that district better (including bicycle amenities) seems like a much smarter way to go.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Nature and environment Software Engineering Travel Pedal Power Bicycling Government ]

RT Scott Westerfeld @ScottWesterfeld:

Pedialyte was designed to hydrate kids with stomach illness, but 55% of its sales are actually to adults with hangovers.

In other words, the same business model as YA literature, but electrolytes instead of feels.

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Mechanical Turkers may have out-predicted the most popular crime- predicting algorithm.

The accuracy, fairness, and limits of predicting recidivism, Julia Dressel and Hany Farid:

Algorithms for predicting recidivism are commonly used to assess a criminal defendant’s likelihood of committing a crime. These predictions are used in pretrial, parole, and sentencing decisions. Proponents of these systems argue that big data and advanced machine learning make these analyses more accurate and less biased than humans. We shMechanical Turkers may have out-predicted the most popular crime-predicting algorithmow, however, that the widely used commercial risk assessment software COMPAS is no more accurate or fair than predictions made by people with little or no criminal justice expertise. We further show that a simple linear predictor provided with only two features is nearly equivalent to COMPAS with its 137 features.

The official Equivant response dodges the big question and focuses on the methodology that the researchers used to train the linear predictor, but I think gets it wrong, because the rebuttal complains that:

... The scale was likely developed and then tested on the same large data sample. This is often known as giving only a limited internal validation. This commonly leads to “over-fitting” that falsely heightens the apparent predictive accuracy. ...

But the paper notes that:

Each classifier was trained 1000 times on a random 80% training and 20% testing split; we report the average testing accuracy and bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals for these classifiers.</bloockquote>

The paper is Science Advances 17 Jan 2018: Vol. 4, no. 1, eaao5580 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aao5580

[ related topics: Weblogs Software Engineering Law Enforcement Machinery Trains Education ]

A failure of central planning: 'Entire aisles are empty': Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages. Yep, this is what happens when you break markets and give centralized entities too much control over a distribution and retail network.

Whether that centralized entity is called the Soviet state, or Amazon.

[ related topics: Books broadband Food Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

Ouch. What do Chinese weight loss herbs and flour from the Balkans have in common? They often contain Aristolochic acids which ma cause liver cancer, naturally:

Thinking about how much of modern software development is akin to criminal psychology profiling: trying to get into the mindset of the psychopath who developed this system so that I can anticipate the attacks...

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Software Engineering ]

Ugh. AntennaPod crashed and lost all my podcast subscriptions. Now trying to re-create the list...

The 29 Stages Of A Twitterstorm In 2018

Sure, the Volocopter is a cool concept, but I want my FLYING SHOPPING on our HUMAN DRONE! | Flying Bathtub #4. It's unclear how much of this is real, the tag at the end says:

Bitte nicht zu ernst nehmen, dieses Video ist als Sketch zu sehen und muss nicht dem realen Flug entsprechen. ...

Or:

Please do not take this too seriously, this video is to be seen as a sketch and does not have to correspond to the real flight.

But their Instagram of an interior flight suggests that though there was some editing to tell the story, they do have a flying bathtub n-copter that carries a human.

Edit: Build video, with some video from a previous less stable incarnation.

[ related topics: Aviation Video ]

Curbed: U.S. kids die from traffic fatalities at twice the rate of other wealthy nations:

This study also confirms that it’s not smartphones, or “distracted walking,” that’s to blame for the U.S.’s sudden uptick in traffic deaths. These 19 countries are our peer countries: They also drive cars, they use smartphones, they have comparable wealth and resources. The countries which have focused on redesigning their streets to be safe for all ages and building reliable, well-maintained public transit systems will save their kids’ lives. Our over-reliance on cars will continue to erode the health and well- being of the next generation.

But traffic fatalities aren't the only cause. Vox: American kids are 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than kids in other rich countries — A new study ranks 20 wealthy countries on childhood deaths. The US comes in last. Infant mortality is much higher, as are teenage gun deaths.

The study is Heath Affairs: Child Mortality In The US And 19 OECD Comparator Nations: A 50-Year Time-Trend Analysis Ashish P. Thakrar, Alexandra D. Forrest, Mitchell G. Maltenfort, and Christopher B. Forrest.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Invention and Design Bay Area Guns Public Transportation ]

Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders — Those with an IQ above 120 are perceived as less effective, regardless of actual performance

The researchers looked at 379 male and female business leaders in 30 countries, across fields that included banking, retail and technology. The managers took IQ tests (an imperfect but robust predictor of performance in many areas), and each was rated on leadership style and effectiveness by an average of eight co-workers. IQ positively correlated with ratings of leader effectiveness, strategy formation, vision and several other characteristics—up to a point. The ratings peaked at an IQ of around 120, which is higher than roughly 80 percent of office workers. Beyond that, the ratings declined. The researchers suggest the “ideal” IQ could be higher or lower in various fields, depending on whether technical versus social skills are more valued in a given work culture.

Psychology Today: How Smart Should A Leader Be?

Can Super Smart Leaders Suffer From Too Much of a Good Thing? The Curvilinear Effect of Intelligence on Perceived Leadership Behavior John Antonakis, University of Lausanne; Dean Keith Simonton, University of California, Davis. DOI: 10.1037/apl0000221

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Weblogs Theater & Plays Sociology Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment California Culture Education ]

Atlanta Journal Constitution: Torpy at Large: Yet again, GA war on drugs shoots itself in the foot. Cops bust a rowdy party at an AirBNB at 2AM (yeah, this starts out totally unsympathetic to the accused), claim "...officers said they noticed the smell of weed when they turned onto the block...", find a couple of grams of marijuana, arrest and charge 65 (mostly black) people.

“It was an abuse of discretion,” Griggs told me early last week. “It’s impossible for 70 people to have custody and control of that little marijuana.”

[ related topics: Drugs Health History Law Current Events Law Enforcement Civil Liberties ]

'Stoned wallabies make crop circles'. Australian opium poppy growers find weird crop circles, eventually figure out what's making them...

[ related topics: Drugs Current Events Monty Python California Culture Conspiracy ]

Reading men talking about "buyer's remorse" in the context of sexual assault, and realizing how much of our economy is predicated on assholes coercing us into transactions that we didn't want.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Economics ]

The resistance is full of prudes — The Stormy Daniels scandal highlights how we still fail sex workers.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture History Work, productivity and environment ]

RT 2018 john: same great flavor, more convenient size @genehack:

I gotta say, "the NRA is actually a Russian front" is some "S.H.I.E.L.D. is actually Hydra!" level shit. Good to see the writers stepping up the plot game in 2018!

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson Games Writing ]

Fascinating: Gun Theft Is Sweeping America — Robberies and burglaries targeting firearms sellers are skyrocketing, and law enforcement doesn’t know why.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Guns ]

I don't think about Burning Man much any more, but this was cool: A comic on the Burning Man experience.

[ related topics: Burning Man ]

You know what they call people who rely on the rhythm method for birth control? Parents. Popular Fertility App Is Being Blamed for 37 Accidental Pregnancies:

Thirty-seven women who allegedly relied on the European Union-certified fertility app Natural Cycles as a non-hormonal method of birth control ended up with unwanted pregnancies in the last quarter of 2017, according to the Swedish news agency SVT. Now, the Swedish hospital where these women sought abortions is flagging the app to local regulatory authorities.

The app is Natural Cycles.

[ related topics: Health Current Events Currency ]

Portland City Council votes to lower speed limit from 25MPH to 20MPH on residential streets.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events ]

Annals of Internal Medicine: Over-the-Counter Supplement Interventions to Prevent Cognitive Decline, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Clinical Alzheimer-Type Dementia: A Systematic Review:

Data Synthesis: Thirty-eight trials with low to medium risk of bias compared ω-3 fatty acids, soy, ginkgo biloba, B vitamins, vitamin D plus calcium, vitamin C or β-carotene, multi-ingredient supplements, or other OTC interventions with placebo or other supplements. Few studies examined effects on clinical Alzheimer-type dementia or MCI, and those that did suggested no benefit. Daily folic acid plus vitamin B₁₂ was associated with improvements in performance on some objectively measured memory tests that were statistically significant but of questionable clinical significance. Moderate-strength evidence showed that vitamin E had no benefit on cognition. Evidence about effects of ω-3 fatty acids, soy, ginkgo biloba, folic acid alone or with other B vitamins, β-carotene, vitamin C, vitamin D plus calcium, and multivitamins or multi-ingredient supplements was either insufficient or low-strength, suggesting that these supplements did not reduce risk for cognitive decline. Adverse events were rarely reported.

[ related topics: Health Theater & Plays ]

Phone broken. If you need to get a hold of me before Tuesday evening, use email.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

I think I linked to this one, but I'm not finding it right now: National Review: We Were Wrong about Stop-and-Frisk.

Which is linked to by Pro Publica: In New York, Crime Falls Along With Police Stops.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Invention and Design Law Enforcement New York ]

Ben Werdmüller: The news industry needs to wake up and join the web

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Why Is It So Hard for Americans to Get a Decent Raise?:

Those numbers are based on the findings of a new research paper that may help unlock the mystery of why Americans can’t seem to get a decent raise. Economists have struggled over that question for years now, as wage growth has stagnated and more of the nation’s income has shifted from the pockets of workers into the bank accounts of business owners. Since 1979, inflation-adjusted hourly pay is up just 3.41 percent for the middle 20 percent of Americans while labor’s overall share of national income has declined sharply since the early 2000s. There are lots of possible explanations for why this is, from long-term factors like the rise of automation and decline of organized labor, to short-term ones, such as the lingering weakness in the job market left over from the great recession. But a recent study by a group of labor economists introduces an interesting theory into the mix: Workers’ pay may be lagging because the U.S. is suffering from a shortage of employers.

And out here on the coasts, we have more potential employers...

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

I haven't had to deal with this yet, but it's conceivably in my future: Nicaraguan Address System.

Instead of street names or numbers Nicaraguans use reference points from where they start describing a certain address. There are many known buildings, companies, churches, or other reference points, which are used to get a general idea where something is located. The next step is to state how many blocks away the particular address lies from the reference point.

[ related topics: Architecture ]

Removed

[ related topics: Architecture ]

Derek Lowe: What This Here Compound Needs Is Some Hydrogen Peroxide.

Take this paper from Jean’ne Shreeve’s group at Idaho, a lab that has certainly given us all some alarming compounds over the years. If you or I (’cause we’re sensible, right?) look at a well-known crater-maker like dinitropyrazolopyrazole, we’ll probably decide that it has pretty much all the nitrogens it needs, if not more. But that latest paper builds off the question “How do we cram more nitro groups into this thing?”, and that’s something that wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask. Saying “this compounds doesn’t have enough nitro groups” is, for most chemists, like saying “You know, this lab doesn’t have enough flying glass in it” – pretty much the same observation, in the end. The way to stuff in more nitros, in case you’re wondering, is to hang hemiaminals off the NH groups and then nitrate those. (Edit: or, as shown at right, make the N-amino compounds and nitrate that). Why not? Round-bottom flasks, rota-vaps, and balances aren’t supposed to last forever, right?

Best comment: tango_uniform observes that

“More Nitrogen” is to inorganic chem as “More Cowbell” is to sketch comedy.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Aviation Law Archival ]

Okay, new phone acquired. If you get a warning about new Signal keys, that's legit. If you care about security we'll confirm over a secondary channel.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design ]

Ugh. During the @Patreon "screw the small creators" kerfluffle I ended up with a weird donation amount. Trying to correct that I get a really stupid error.

[ related topics: hubris ]

Sonic vehicles on my street again, looked like they were putting up some sort of galvanized steel cable between the poles...

[ related topics: Cool Science ]

YouTube ad for buying bitcoin with your IRA. No red flags there....

Psychedelic mushrooms reduce authoritarianism and boost nature relatedness, experimental study suggests.

Increased nature relatedness and decreased authoritarian political views after psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression Taylor Lyons, Robin L Carhart-Harris

[ related topics: Politics Nature and environment moron Birds ]

Little color in the sunrise this morning at Schollenberger park along the Petaluma river. Finished the run just as the rain started.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Satanic Temple wins lawsuit vs Missouri over abortion rights and religious freedom.

A good breakdown on the legal arguments in Missouri Court to Hear Landmark Case on Satanic Temple Abortion.

[ related topics: Religion Privacy Sexual Culture Law Current Events Civil Liberties Government ]

Must be time to replace the asphalt up at Santa Rosa Airport: Two V-22 Ospreys flew over a little while ago...

[ related topics: Photography Aviation ]

I suppose that with the number of times I've diverted into the street from a too narrow sidewalk because of traffic it's completely understandable when automobile operators divert on to the sidewalk.

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

RT 🌻Helianthus 🌻 @TagetesLucidas:

my gender is whatever gender makes you gay if you like me

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sexual Culture ]

The Turing test isn't won by machines, it's lost by humans. Some observations on how we're being gamed by algorithms.

As this misinformation spreads, traversing the social graph from bot (adversarial agent) to human, it can become more and more resilient over time. Adversarial agents can provide support and social validation to infected humans. Infected humans can (even if flawed) apply more complex reasoning and logic to support the misinformation they now believe.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

A little bright spot in the day: USA Gymnastics announces entire board of directors will resign in wake of Larry Nassar scandal, although note that they did so only after

The USOC – which oversees Olympic governing bodies – threatened to de-certify USA Gymnastics, stripping the organization’s association with the Olympics...

[ related topics: History Current Events Sports ]

Bagheera is not happy that we're lying in bed until late in the morning.

[ related topics: Photography Furniture ]

Name and shame: asshole blocking the EV charger

[ related topics: Photography ]

Woot's special today is "Tactical Pants". I'm gonna suggest that maybe thinking strategically rather than tactically in the trousers arena has a better chance of success.

[ related topics: Clothing ]

U.S. soldiers are revealing sensitive and dangerous information by jogging:

The Global Heat Map, published by the GPS tracking company Strava, uses satellite information to map the location and movements of subscribers to the company’s fitness service over a two-year period, by illuminating areas of activity.

And, of course, this reveals that there are a large number of Strava users in very small clusters, and that those Strava users tend to travel between some sites which are known US holdings, and some sites which aren't...

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

Holy crap: Almost half of toxic cleanup at Hunters Point Shipyard is questionable or faked, according to initial review. Pasadena firm Tetra Tech, a contractor hired by the US Navy, was was found to have falsified soil samples in 2012, triggering a review of data, and more whistleblowers have come forward.

It looks like this isn't throwing into doubt the state of the lots where homes have already been built, but it's still gonna get ugly for San Francisco.

[ related topics: Bay Area Current Events California Culture ]

Interesting 3 Defining Features of ADHD That Everyone Overlooks:

The textbook symptoms of ADD — inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity — fail to reflect several of its most powerful characteristics; the ones that shape your perceptions, emotions, and motivation. Here, Dr. William Dodson explains how to recognize and manage ADHD’s true defining features.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

Clickbaity headline, but Facebook invented a new time unit called the ‘flick’ and it’s truly amazing.

Break a second down into 705,600,000 parts and you get a unit that can not only evenly represent commonly used frequencies like 24FPS, 30FPS, 44.1KHz, but also the wierd NTSC frame rates...

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Dr Jen Gunter goes to the GOOP wellness fair.

The start of the day was very Hunger Games. I felt as if I was walking up to an arena. They gave us fancy slippers and almost everyone put them on except me. If shit got real cult-wise or they tried to throw me out I wanted to be able to run. Katniss would never give up her shoes.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Health Shoes ]

Associations of fats and carbohydrate intake with cardiovascular disease and mortality in 18 countries from five continents (PURE): a prospective cohort study

High carbohydrate intake was associated with higher risk of total mortality, whereas total fat and individual types of fat were related to lower total mortality. Total fat and types of fat were not associated with cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular disease mortality, whereas saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke. Global dietary guidelines should be reconsidered in light of these findings.

As I go through a ton of old photographs, there are some good suggestions in here about creating new ones: Esther Schindler: The Old Family Photos Project: Lessons in creating family photos that people want to keep

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design Sociology ]

Study Finds Virtually Zero Benefit From Workplace Wellness Program In 1st Year. $8B/year industry apparently only has value to the vendors.

The Illinois Workplace Wellness Study

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Josh Weed, famous married gay Mormon announces divorce, apologizes to LGBTQ community

The blog post actually has some good soul searching.

<blockcquote>This is what the church’s current stance does to LGBTQIA people. It actually kills them. It fills them with self-loathing and internalized homophobia, and then provides little to no help when the psychosomatic symptoms set in, instead reacting to this unexpected by-product (after all, living the gospel isn’t supposed to bring misery and death! It’s supposed to bring immeasurable joy! Right?) with aphorisms like “have more faith,” or “have an eternal perspective” or “be grateful.” And the LGBTQIA person is left even further alone, now having been shamed by having it implied that their unhappiness and lack of health is their own fault because they aren’t being righteous enough, or trying hard enough. And so, they try harder. And they get sicker. And the cycle continues. It is a sick, pathological spiral. Worst of all, and what amounts to the very crux of the problem: the church also deprives them—us—of attachment, and a natural, verified, studied reaction to attachment blockade is suicidality.

I think it's worth reading that not just in the context of the Mormon Church, but in so many societal expectations that we conform ourselves to.

[ related topics: Religion Sexual Culture Weblogs Health Sociology Current Events Community Pedal Power Bicycling Marriage ]

, even as that rate is plummeting elsewhere.

The growing specialty of maternal-fetal medicine drifted so far toward care of the fetus that as recently as 2012, young doctors who wanted to work in the field didn’t have to spend time learning to care for birthing mothers. “The training was quite variable across the U.S.,” said Mary D’Alton, chair of OB-GYN at Columbia University Medical Center and author of papers on disparities in care for mothers and infants. “There were some fellows that could finish their maternal-fetal medicine training without ever being in a labor and delivery unit.”

[ related topics: Health Work, productivity and environment Education Furniture ]

Jessamyn West is raising money to buy her book Without A Net: Librarians Bridging The Digital Divide back from the pulblisher to make it freely available online

[ related topics: Books Work, productivity and environment Currency ]

The man who aggressively went after sex workers brought low: Judge allows Elliot Spitzer’s Russian escort to dish on dirty details

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Law ]

Want to Make It in the Gig Economy? Emulate Romance Novelists:

Their three keys to success: They welcome newcomers, they share competitive information, and they ask advice from newbies.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Your Grandma Was a Chain Migrant! Jennifer Mendelsohn turns the tables on Trump’s anti-immigrant mouthpieces by digging through their genealogical records.

[ related topics: Furniture ]

China builds $200M African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa for "free". Turns out the price is that it's riddled with bugs and transmitting every conversation back to China.

[ related topics: Race ]

The fog does cool things in the morning.

[ related topics: Photography ]

"Our team of choice is based on rough estimates of their geographic proximity to us!" http://www.bearwithme.us/index.php?strip_id=775

Okay, the various cameras are starting to come in, I need to learn a little bit more about the different grades of network cable to see if I'll save long-term maintenance time by spending a little more for stuff to run outside the house (it's easy to get through the walls up in the attic, I'd rather staple cable along side the trim than open up wallboard to get things down to human head-height: My security cameras are going to take pictures of people head-on, not hat down).

Anyway, I'll write some reviews as I get those hooked up, but: My 7 year old laptop is starting to show its age. Sometimes the trackpad stops working, and then randomly starts again, and then yesterday while I was waiting for my car to get worked on it locked up and didn't recognize the SSD when I tried to reboot. And then later it did.

So it's time. I'm partial to ASUS 'cause this beast has stuck with me, and because a new keyboard is $25 and a paperclip to change it out.

But I'd like something with an (*&^% load of RAM, 16G minimum, 32G preferred. I like some of the refurbs I saw on Amazon that had two drives, an SSD and a big spinny one, but they only came in 17"+, and I want 14-15" so I can use it on the bus.

Linux as the primary OS. I'd prefer robust display over touchscreen; I don't want glass that'll crack if you look at it wrong. Probably AMD as the processor, 'cause I don't want the Meltdown patches to totally destroy performance.

If it has graphics chops, I'm more interested in how they'll be for OpenCV or TensorFlow than for gaming performance.

How do y'all laptop shop?

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Books Photography Games broadband Open Source Invention and Design Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Graphics Automobiles Public Transportation Archival Real Estate Woodworking ]

The TDI scandal continues: VW suspends executive after reports of diesel fume tests on humans and monkeys. To be fair to Volkswagen, it wasn't just VW, it was a consortium of German companies:

Head of Group External Relations and Sustainability Thomas Steg will not report to work until the company investigates the work of the European Research Group on Environment and Health in the Transport Sector (EUGT), a research group set up by VW and fellow German carmakers BMW and Daimler.

Maybe a little cultural sensitivity training would be in order; there are some historical echoes about Germans using gas that maybe someone working in "external relations" would know to not raise...

[ related topics: Health Nature and environment History Sociology Work, productivity and environment Automobiles ]

Mostly so that I can load this on my tablet to read it: A practitioner’s guide to reading programming languages papers

[ related topics: Weblogs Software Engineering Douglas Adams ]

This is fascinating. It's been noted before that violent video games appear to reduce violence, but Fast and Furious movies may cause a rise in speeding.

[ related topics: Games Movies Video ]

I don't think I've linked this one yet: New York Times: The Follower Factory, about buying follows on FaceTwitSpace and such.

While they talk about how buying followers is essentially buying credibility for product endorsement and advertising, they don't talk about how much of this becomes fraud in the ad sales. Because it seems to me that advertisers might want to know that they just paid for impressions to 20k 'bots...

[ related topics: Invention and Design Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media New York ]

Did I mention here that we were burgled? Monday a week ago, someone came through our back gate and back door, stole a pillow case and emptied some jewelry drawers into it. I've been threatening to put up a few cameras for years, I'm now ordering bunch of them for evaluation.

On Facebook, a friend mentioned the WyzeCam, and I figured "for $20, how good can it be?" also "it's only $20", so I ordered one. Some impressions:

It's USB powered. They provide a brick and a cable. It's great for up and running quickly, but isn't going to be as useful as Power Over Ethernet for actual installations.

Attaching to your WiFi involves an smart phone app, pressing a button on the camera, and then holding the QR code on the smart phone in front of the camera. It took me a few tries to get this right because Android was doing some auto-corrupt on the password field. Luckily they do have the option to show the password field, that got it figured out.

Trying to connect to the camera, the phone told me the camera needed a firmware update. I tried, it failed. I tried again. It failed. Eventually I figured out that what was causing the failure was that the phone display was turning off. Kept the display on through the entire update, it worked.

The phone app and camera connection is... funky. I have yet to get a good live stream off the camera. Sometimes the camera connects, sometimes it doesn't. The camera settings only seem to be read back to the app somnetimes. The camera connection also seems to have an annoyingly short timeout; work quickly with whatever you want to do.

The camera looks like it's pretty good, but the H.264 video compression artifacts are so bad that I'm not sure I can see using this as a security camera: It does that smear close colors together thing such that there are nice crisp contrasty edges, but faces end up as flesh colored blobs. Once my spare SD cards come in I'll see if there's an option to save there that's got better resolution.

It's supposed to use AWS for storage, it apparently does so transparently (I had dreams of being able to easily see the raw data), and it sends a lot of heartbeat stuff to other servers. Which means, of course, that you're at the mercy of the company to not shut down.

The camera casing is not weather tight, which means it'd work nicely for interior installations. It has a vertical flip option, so it'd work well for ceilings, but that, of course, gives you the standard security camera issue of being able to see the logo on the ball cap; any real installation of something like this needs to be on the wall.

The alert sensitivity seems to be mostly about how often alerts get sent, not what gets alerted on. I've got an awful lot of alerts with nothing in them, but no video of people walking in front of the camera, because a door got moved, there was a pause, and then one of us walked through the door: The alert maybe captured the slight motion of the door, missed the human.

So it's an interesting first pass, and may get there, but the software is not yet ready for prime time, and I'll be moving forward with other cameras.

[ related topics: Photography Software Engineering Video ]

JavaScript error of the moment... "Uncaught ReferenceError: math is not defined"

[ related topics: Mathematics ]