Flutterby™! From 2018-06-01 to 2018-06-29

I guess Uber's autonomous vehicles weren't killing people quickly enough? https://www.usatoday.com/story...ger-denver-interstate/662964002/

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Shadow sends along another take on the Jupe style expanding round table (animated GIF), this one has a neat take on folding the leaves back in, so it's not completely automated, but it also lowers the leaves in one segment rather than making them separate.

[ related topics: Animation Furniture ]

Seth Nichols: Why teachers are walking out.

For the last ten years, I’ve been a covert operative in Women’s World, a.k.a. Public School.  I am not a typical elementary teacher.  I am male.   And I am often confounded at what I have seen my coworkers silently acquiesce to, happily playing along, fueled only by the sense of the purpose they work from.  I am not surprised that teachers in many states have had walkouts.  I am surprised that they waited so long to start.

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

We've reached the deluge of phone and SMS spam portion of the election. Glad I already voted so the annoyance doesn't turn me away from otherwise acceptable candidates.

[ related topics: Spam Monty Python ]

Little paint thinner on some road find eucalyptus that I finally milled today...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Okay, piecing together my own security camera solution isn't working. Anyone have a turn-key preference? Ring? Blink? Nest? Other?

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

Hundreds of sex workers rally for International Whores Day.

More sex workers fighting against SESTA and FOSTA.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

The World’s Largest GMO Study Was Launched By Russians In 2014. Then It Disappeared.

“The basic idea is to create doubts in people’s minds, whether about Big Agriculture, or chemtrails, or anything else.”

Via Sensible Endowment.

Security Alert: NSA security education posters from the Cold War:

Old NSA security posters available for use in telling your coworkers to shut up already.

PDF of the Government Attic FOIA request and response, including the posters, here.

A lot to unpack from some of those, especially as we look at how state actors are using extensions of advertising techniques in propaganda today to influence public opinion.

[ related topics: History moron Consumerism and advertising Education ]

Ugh. Why are the good easy solutions always deprecated in favor of the complex systems which are deeply intertwingled with things they shouldn't be (attempting to migrate from gitosis to gitolite3...).

"If you are showing reality as it exists, people as they exist-that's political as fuck." Everything about this N K Jemisin and Neal Gaiman conversation is good. https://lithub.com/on-writing-...cs-and-queer-characters-we-need/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics moron Writing Comics Neil Gaiman ]

VPNFilter malware infecting 500,000 devices is worse than we thought.

Huge infection of routers enabling very targeted MitM attacks, including some issues with downgrading SSL.

Uber and Lyft Could Do a Lot More for the Planet. Like not exist. Or, maybe, we could do a lot more for the planet by not letting automobile transportation freeload on externalities. Surprising absolutely no one who's thought about the process:

... In New York City, deadheading accounts for an estimated 50 percent of the 600 million miles that TNCs have added to the roads since 2013. That mean more emissions from empty Ubers and Lyfts, plus their drag on other cars that burn extra gas and generate more fumes as they all sit in worsened traffic.

If you're not parking them off the street, you're, essentially, parking them on the street. Autonomous vehicles will not change this.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Space & Astronomy Automobiles New York ]

We've updated our privacy policy, up yours.

[ related topics: Privacy ]

Joyride: How One Lieutenant Just Became The Military’s Most Unlikely Folk Hero. Some notes on Virginia Army National Guard Lieutenant Joshua Phillip Yabut's theft and joyride in an M577 APC. Notes the first article:

Fortunately for the rest of us, the LT ain’t our problem. Hell, plenty of us are glad it was an officer instead of a lower enlisted. Lord knows I expected it to be some burnt out Specialist who finally decided he’d had enough.

But that brings me to my second point: we’ve all been there. No, I don’t mean we’ve all taken a 12 ton armored personnel carrier out on the highway for shits and giggles. But let’s be honest: we’ve all thought about it. ...

Bonus: RT Alison Macrina @flexlibris:

omfg, the dude who stole an APC and drove it around Virginia while being chased by the police is the same guy who tried to start an "anti-SJW" fork of @torproject back in 2016 after we kicked out a prominent contributor for sexual assault

[ related topics: Sociology Current Events California Culture ]

What A Fake ‘Female Orgasm’ Statistic Says About Gender Bias. Suzannah Weiss goes on a mission to track down the source of an oft-quoted statistic that says that cis women take on average 20 minutes to orgasm...

[ related topics: Quotes ]

When the Java library choice comes down to the one that I can find a semi-legit looking download for, rather than the one for which there are official docs or whatnot...

[ related topics: Language Books Software Engineering ]

Facebook bug set 14 million users' sharing settings to public

[ related topics: Business Currency ]

Alleged hit-and-run driver gave voice to attitude many adopt behind the wheel: Get out of my way

“As I’m driving, I’m driving too quick . . . to the point where it’s like, I couldn’t really stop,” Fitts told Boston 25 News reporter Drew Karedes, who should get a medal for not punching this guy in the face on the spot. Fitts also said the light was green and that he beeped at the man repeatedly but struck him with his SUV because swerving would have led him into a pole.

But those fucking cyclists, amiright?

[ related topics: Humor Current Events Graphic Design ]

Saw Ocean's 8. Stylish and fun. Audience enjoyed it. Afterwards Charlene started asking plot questions, and then we both agreed to stop and not ruin it.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Why OpenStreetMap is in Serious Trouble.

I've been using various map data for my job for the past two years or so, including Open Street Map, and I think this critique misses the forest for the trees: contributing to open data repositories takes time and effort. Creating tools which use those repositories takes time and effort. Learning enough about geography, including the social science aspects of it, in order to meaningfully contribute is a non-trivial endeavor.

As much as it's amazing to have this resource, it's created by volunteers who, eventually, are looking around and facing the economic realities of living. There's a hell of a lot of open source and open data out there that has just been exploitation by people who have gotten rich, and as much as it pains me to say this because I'm a happy user of open source projects and a happy contributor back into some of them, a lot of "open" is just riding on the backs idealists who were willing to work for free.

I suspect we're gonna see a swing back kinda the other way.

Via.

[ related topics: Free Software Weblogs Nature and environment History Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Education Maps and Mapping Bicycling Economics ]

Love Boats: The Delightfully Sinful History of Canoes

As further proof that canoeing had become a hotbed for teenage delinquents, in 1913 the Minneapolis Parks Board refused to issue permits for canoes with unpalatable names. Local newspapers published some of the offensive phrases that slipped past the board the previous summer, including “Thehelusa,” “Kumonin Kid,” “Kismekwik,” “Damfino,” “Ilgetu,” “Aw-kom-in,” “G-I-Lov-U,” “Skwizmtyt,” “Ildaryoo,” “Win-kat-us,” “O-U-Q-T,” “What the?,” “Joy-tub,” “Cupid’s Nest,” and “I Would Like to Try It.” The commissioners unanimously agreed to outlaw phrases lacking obvious moral and grammatical standards, though a few of these clever pre-text-message abbreviations clearly had them scratching their heads.

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Ethics History Political Correctness Boats Machinery ]

FCC Emails Show Agency Spread Lies to Bolster Dubious DDoS Attack Claims

The FCC has been unwilling or unable to produce any evidence an attack occurred—not to the reporters who’ve requested and even sued over it, and not to U.S. lawmakers who’ve demanded to see it. Instead, the agency conducted a quiet campaign to bolster its cyberattack story with the aid of friendly and easily duped reporters, chiefly by spreading word of an earlier cyberattack that its own security staff say never happened.

E-Mails Show FCC Made Up DDOS Attack To Downplay The 'John Oliver Effect'

After screwing around with various home-built surveillance cam solutions, I just installed a Ring doorbell plus 2 cameras. Still want something better, but that'll do for now.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Photography tolkien ]

Part of getting older is checking the legality of things we might attempt. Tangentially, I now know that there are exemptions in California code for vehicle widths for various "Implements Of Husbandry".

[ related topics: California Culture ]

Ex-police chief, 2 officers framed teen for burglaries in Key Biscayne Florida

Federal prosecutors said Police Chief Raimundo Atesiano and two cops acting under his authority lied about the arrests to wow the small village's elected leaders with their crime-solving savvy.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Pop Culture ]

Wow. Dell and Lenovo are both shipping laptops that can be configured with 128G of RAM. Don't let anyone tell you that Slack hasn't done good things for the world; it's created a market for machines that can run the client!

[ related topics: Economics ]

From the department of "duh": Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered?, John M. Griffin and Amin Shams, both of the University of Texas at Austin - Department of Finance:

This paper investigates whether Tether, a digital currency pegged to U.S. dollars, influences Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices during the recent boom. Using algorithms to analyze the blockchain data, we find that purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices. Less than 1% of hours with such heavy Tether transactions are associated with 50% of the meteoric rise in Bitcoin and 64% of other top cryptocurrencies. The flow clusters below round prices, induces asymmetric autocorrelations in Bitcoin, and suggests incomplete Tether backing before month-ends. These patterns cannot be explained by investor demand proxies but are most consistent with the supply-based hypothesis where Tether is used to provide price support and manipulate cryptocurrency prices.

New York Times: Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say

[ related topics: Invention and Design Currency Education New York Economics ]

National Bureau of Economic Research: The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture Economics ]

FCC shrugs at fake cell towers around the White House.

Of course it could as easily be Secret Service snooping on traffic in DC as foreign state actors, or a combination.

[ related topics: Race Real Estate ]

I suppose it's not original to observe that the economy of the future will revolve primarily around artists using their Patreon proceeds to pay the medical bills of friends through GoFundMe.

[ related topics: Art & Culture Economics ]

The most amazing thing about the Petaluma Valedictorian who had her mic cut off isn't that the school administration was trying to hide sexual assault, it's that the event had someone on the sound board paying attention... I've paid for many events where there wasn't.

This valedictorian began to talk about sexual misconduct at her graduation. Then her mic was cut

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture ]

Well, shit. I think I've lost the bandwidth bet with TC: Mobile internet to reach 28% of media use in 2020

Internet usage will finally surpass TV in 2019.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture broadband Journalism and Media Television Net Culture ]

ACLU: One Woman Who Knew Her Rights Forced Border Patrol Off a Greyhound Bus

[ related topics: Weblogs Civil Liberties Public Transportation ]

Jalopnik: This Test Shows Why Tesla Autopilot Crashes Keep Happening

BBC Technology: Car insurers warn on 'autonomous' vehicles

[ related topics: Current Events Monty Python Television Automobiles ]

A Tiny Revolution: I Appreciate Right-Wing Honesty

This is a common phenomenon when countries are doing horrible things. At such moments, nice liberals generally present a wholly false picture of their country's history, either because they're incredibly ignorant or just because they think it makes their argument stronger: "Our Great Nation has never [put minorities in internment camps/tortured people/launched aggressive wars/taken candy from a baby] before! We mustn't start now!" Meanwhile, interestingly enough, conservatives are often more honest. In normal times conservatives go into a frenzy if anyone mentions their Great Nation may not be flawless. But when new horrible things need to be done, they'll tell the truth about the past in response to the nice liberals' lies: "It's preposterous to say we've never [put minorities in internment camps/tortured people/launched aggressive wars/taken candy from a baby]. Of course we have! AND LET'S DO IT AGAIN NOW!"

The whole thing is worth reading.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design History Archival ]

Announced at the company call today, so I can put it on the social medias: I have resigned from current job to go on to next job, which will be in an office, with cow-orkers, but said office will be in Petaluma.

[ related topics: Heinlein ]

The Little-Known Behavioral Scientist Who Has Transformed Cities All Over the World:

“Why are you architects not interested in people?” Ingrid Gehl asked her new husband, Jan. “What do you think about the fact that your architecture professors take their photos at four o’clock in the morning … without the distraction of people in the photos?”

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design Architecture Marriage ]

Burn it all down: State Department Tells US Diplomats To Stop Evaluating Women On Their Baking Skills

There is currently a fairly contentious issue in Petaluma. Developers of commercial projects over $500k have to put 1% of the cost of the project towards public art. Developers can either choose to manage this art themselves, as those behind the recent Deer Creek project did, or to give it to the city, where the Petaluma Public Art Committee (PPAC) can decide how to use it.

continued in the comments:

[ related topics: Nature and environment Art & Culture ]

Confessions of a disk cracker: The secrets of 4AM:

I mentioned this to Jason Scott, and he set me straight. Preservation is driven by pirates, who are driven by ego but constrained by the technical limitations of their era. In the 1980s, this meant storage space and network speed. Nobody got kudos for cracking “Irregular Spanish Verbs in the Future Tense,” no BBS would waste the hard drive space to host it, and no user would sacrifice their phone line to download it. So it never got preserved in any form.

[ related topics: broadband Space & Astronomy Archival ]

Teenager Threatened to Murder Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris, U.S. Says:

The defendant said he did not have access to a firearm because his “parents won’t purchase a firearm based on his history and the strict gun laws in Maryland,” and said that he “probably won’t be able to get one,” the memo said.

Yay for those parents.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Consumerism and advertising Guns Government ]

"Every curb cut is a monument to Ed Roberts" https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/

[ related topics: Photography ]

U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani. On the one hand, it's about time, on the other hand I'm having trouble feeling sorry for the investors, it's like they weren't even trying to do diligence...

Is anyone getting Mastodon to work? I have an account on a mastodon.cloud instance that only works occasionally, and one on a *.masto.host instance which is responsive, but doesn't seem to be getting any content from other sites...

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Two reasons Mountain View Ave needs speedbumps: yesterday a cop was tailgating someone driving prudently, today a kid dropped his bike at the Fairview curve.

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

Courtesy of Shadow: RT fake githubber @jessfraz

Can’t stop laughing at this.

“Some providers now have something called Metal-as-a-Service, which I really think ought to mean that an '80s metal band shows up at your office, plays a gig, smashes the furniture, and urinates on the carpet”

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3215876

The link is to Kode Vicious — Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud — Cache is king. And if your cache is cut, you're going to feel it. in which a company moves to "the cloud" and discovers that shared computing resources aren't all they're pitched to be...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Television ]

RT Ryan Saavedra 🇺🇸 @RealSaavedra:

Democratic Minnesota Senate candidate Richard Painter just released this campaign ad.

It has an attached video. I'm... oddly intrigued.

[ related topics: Politics Video ]

Ugh. The annoyance of JavaScript developers who think that everything's gonna happen through NPM, rather than being generated from other applications. (This particular case is OpenLayers 4, but...)

[ related topics: Law ]

How I Broke, and Botched, the Brandon Teena Story:

The original writer of the Village Voice story that inspired “Boys Don’t Cry” looks back on her reporting — and the huge error she still regrets

[ related topics: Writing ]

When SF traffic is so bad I get off the 14 Express down Mission St and manage to pass 2 route 14 buses on foot before I get to my bus. Even with Moscone Center convention tourists on the sidewalk.

[ related topics: Bay Area Public Transportation ]

Pilot study. Small sample size. Needs follow-up. However: Chemical Research in Toxicology: Association of Type 2 Diabetes with Submicron Titanium Dioxide Crystals in the Pancreas, Adam Heller, Karalee Jarvis, and Sheryl S. Coffman.

When you realize that Ansible basically serves the same function as OS/360 JCL, but that the latter was easier to read and made more sense.

[ related topics: Mathematics ]

Revisiting the relationship between traffic congestion and the economy: a longitudinal examination of U.S. metropolitan areas:

... . Economic productivity is not significantly negatively impacted by high levels of traffic congestion. In fact, the results suggest a positive association between traffic congestion and per capita GDP as well as between traffic congestion and job growth at the MSA level. There was a statistically insignificant effect on per capita income. There may be valid reasons to continue the fight against congestion, but the idea that congestion will stifle the economy does not appear to be one of them.

Via Streetsblog Denver: Widening Roads Does No Favors for Denver’s Economy.

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

These may be too large, but I've had this idea for cuff links for a while now...

[ related topics: Photography Gambling ]

This is written in the usual breathless Democracy Now style, and seems perhaps a little overblown. Sounds like Brooks County, Texas, is poor, strapped for cash, and has a lot of people dying as they try to make the desert crossing from Mexico. And the producer of The Real Death Valley: Full Length Weather Channel Documentary (Vimeo video) is asserting that various laws on attempts to notify next of kin were broken, and the various Texas authorities have a different view of how far the county needs to go.

But I'm putting this in my archive because I think I'm going to want to find it again as the US discussion about refugees and migrants evolves: Mass Graves of Immigrants Found in Texas, But State Says No Laws Were Broken.

[ related topics: Community Video Government ]

Science Advances: Macroeconomic evidence suggests that asylum seekers are not a “burden” for Western European countries:

This paper aims to evaluate the economic and fiscal effects of inflows of asylum seekers into Western Europe from 1985 to 2015. It relies on an empirical methodology that is widely used to estimate the macroeconomic effects of structural shocks and policies. It shows that inflows of asylum seekers do not deteriorate host countries’ economic performance or fiscal balance because the increase in public spending induced by asylum seekers is more than compensated for by an increase in tax revenues net of transfers. As asylum seekers become permanent residents, their macroeconomic impacts become positive.

Via Reason: Migrants Boost Per Capita Incomes and Lower Unemployment Finds Yet Another Study

[ related topics: Politics Weblogs Theater & Plays Television Economics ]

Efail: A Postmortem. Some notes on PGP, GnuPG/GPG, maintaining old software, different use cases and customer bases, and thoughts on how to improve processes.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Reminder: Friday and Saturday are "Spare The Air" days in the Bay Area, so you should wait 'til Sunday to burn this motherfucker to the ground. http://sparetheair.org/

[ related topics: Heinlein California Culture ]

From some time in pre-history, my dad dug up this picture out a young me...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Just got back from Won't You Be My Neighbor?, the Fred Rogers documentary I don't think it was a great film, but it was definitely time well spent, got me thinking about a bunch of things. One was that, early in the film, there was talk about how he was a Presbyterian minister, and how this was his ministry... And I had this moment of cognitive dissonance going through how his ministry was about the substance rather than the branding, and how rare that felt.

And I'm still pondering if he's that much of an outlier, or I'm that much of a cynic, or what.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

The owner of the Red Hen explains why she asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave.

The Sarah Sanders tweet that launched a thousand replies:

Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left. Her actions say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so

And, of course, a reminder that food establishments turning down customers based on political views has a history, from 2012: Radford bakery that turned Biden away sells out of 'freedom cookies'.

(Although many people have compared this to wedding cakes and said things like "liar is not a protected class")

RT Chalis Montgomery @ChalisforGA:

To clarify:

You were separated from your MEAL and you are upset?

The director of the United States Office of Government Ethics from January 9, 2013 to July 19, 2017 weighs in: RT Walter Shaub @waltshaub

Sarah, I know you don’t care even a tiny little bit about the ethics rules, but using your official account for this is a clear violation of 5 CFR 2635.702(a). It’s the same as if an ATF agent pulled out his badge when a restaurant tried to throw him/her out.

Bonus, 'cause I don't have a better place to put it: RT Michael Cavadias 🌹 @michaelcavadias

very interesting from the 2002 vote that created ICE..

Barbara Lee - NO

Bernie Sanders - NO

Nancy Pelosi - NO

Russ Feingold - NO

Nydia Velazquez - NO

Hillary Clinton - YES

Carolyn Maloney - YES

Joe Crowley - YES

Chuck Schumer - YES

Diane Feinstein - YES

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Privacy Ethics Food moron Current Events Work, productivity and environment Civil Liberties Birds Marriage Government ]

Testing the drive train of the pedal powered paddle wheel boat we're building for Petaluma Rivertown Revival. A bit of slip in the rope drive, but I think it'll work... https://youtu.be/15bq0w4e0Ao

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Boats Machinery Trains Pedal Power ]

Copied over from Facebook: In a few hours it'll be June 26th in Japan, and Facebook will become unusable for a day as the notifications explode. And somewhere with that rotation of the earth, I'll unlock level 50. Facebook assures me it's traditional to beg for donations on one's birthday, so, a list of suggestions for ways to improve our world:

• Go introduce yourself to a neighbor you haven't met yet.
• Say "hi" again to one you have.
• Host a neighborhood potluck. Or go to one. Or take a couple of neighbors to a coffee shop and have the conversation there.
• Do art, in public, so that people drop by and say "wow, cool!" and "I want to do that!". And so that kids say "when I'm older I want to make one of those!"
• Help a friend fix something.
• Learn how your city (and state, and country) works. At least skim your town's General Plan, and know what committees and commissions it has. Think about how a decision that you agree with, or don't, was made.
• Talk to a candidate for public office, or an elected official. Especially a local one whose votes you don't seem to understand. Listen.
• Ask a developer why they build the sort of projects they build. Ask what would need to change so that they build the sorts of projects you wish they'd build.
• Move some of your car trips to walking or biking.
• Pet a cat, or scritch a dog behind the ears.

By all means, feel free to block the idiot on Facebook who maligns your knowledge while complaining about "immergrants", but help educate and inform your community. And yourself.

If you feel the need to give money, well, heck, I can provide a list: Woodhull Freedom Foundation, Scarleteen, any of the huge number of organizations helping with refugee settlement, ACLU, EFF, CBLDF, Nature Conservancy, Planned Parenthood, Coalition on the Shelterless (or your regional homeless to permanent housing services organization), and I'm sure that you can come up with many more.

But improving our communities starts with individual actions. So start there.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Privacy Sexual Culture Free Speech Nature and environment moron Art & Culture Civil Liberties Automobiles Community Currency Bicycling Dogs Real Estate Government ]

RT Eλf Sternberg @elfsternberg:

Well. Is machine learning really just polynomial regression hidden under a mountain of make-work? https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.06850

Polynomial Regression As an Alternative to Neural Nets:

Despite the success of neural networks (NNs), there is still a concern among many over their "black box" nature. Why do they work? Here we present a simple analytic argument that NNs are in fact essentially polynomial regression models. This view will have various implications for NNs, e.g. providing an explanation for why convergence problems arise in NNs, and it gives rough guidance on avoiding overfitting. In addition, we use this phenomenon to predict and confirm a multicollinearity property of NNs not previously reported in the literature. Most importantly, given this loose correspondence, one may choose to routinely use polynomial models instead of NNs, thus avoiding some major problems of the latter, such as having to set many tuning parameters and dealing with convergence issues. We present a number of empirical results; in each case, the accuracy of the polynomial approach matches or exceeds that of NN approaches. A many-featured, open-source software package, polyreg, is available.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Software Engineering Law Work, productivity and environment Education Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

RT Angus Johnston @studentactivism:

Okay. I've found it. The absolute culmination of the "we have to build bridges with the far right" argument.

This Twitter thread. I will put the rest of it in the comments.

NYT articles mentioned (available only to subscribers):

• https://timesmachine.nytimes.c.../15/110041420.html?pageNumber=15
• https://timesmachine.nytimes.c...machine/1934/06/16/94541107.html

[ related topics: Photography ]

RT Kashana @kashanacauley:

They called it the Civil War because everyone on both sides was nice.

[ related topics: History ]

Just a few reminders about civility in politics.

• When Protesters Bear Arms Against Health-Care Reform
• Gas line cut at US Representative Tom Periello's brother's house after the address was posted on a Tea Party web site
• Bart Stupak received threatening messages for health care vote
• Protests outside Steve Driehaus's house
• Vandals attack Democratic offices nationwide
• Erick Erickson is sorry about some of the things he said

Erick Erickson, the forty-one-year-old right-wing radio host and political pundit whom The Atlantic described in 2015 as “the most powerful conservative in America,” has made a career of online provocation. He became the editor-in-chief of the influential conservative blog RedState in 2006, a position he held for nearly a decade. In a 2008 blog post, he dubbed Michelle Obama a “Marxist harpy.” In a 2009 tweet, he called the retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter “a goat fucking child molester.” Later that year, Erickson argued that President Obama won the Nobel Prize because of an “affirmative action quota.” The 2014 Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Texas, Wendy Davis, was, in due time, “Abortion Barbie.”

Which is not to decry these techniques, merely to point out that in the face of "when they go low we go high", these are the techniques that worked.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Weblogs Health moron Current Events Law Enforcement Trains Public Transportation Real Estate ]

7 best practice locks for beginners. In case you wanted to work in your lock picking and locksmithing skills.

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

Bunnie's Blog: New US Tariffs are Anti-Maker and Will Encourage Offshoring

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design ]

The onshore breezes are keeping us comfortable...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Sausalito and Larkspur ferries from the Vallejo ferry, Angel Island in the background

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area Public Transportation Sausalito ]

Among the many reasons housing in California is so expensive: The strange and terrible saga of San Francisco’s ‘historic laundromat’ represents the worst of planning and development in this town

“The historians did a wonderful job. I only wish they had a more worthy subject,” Tillman says. When they came to him and told him the study — which the city in February mandated he undertake — would cost twice as much as he’d counted on, he claims his response was magnanimous: “Eh. Historians gotta eat, too.”

[ related topics: Food Bay Area Heinlein California Culture Real Estate ]

ICE agent accused of assaulting lawyer while deporting Honduran mom with 3-year-old. They're scared of cameras.

[ related topics: Photography Law Current Events ]

With all the reports of sexual misconduct by ICE agents, I'm pretty fuckin' over the "but what about the trafficked children" derails. https://www.washingtonpost.com...ly-molested-them-lawsuit-claims/ https://theintercept.com/2018/...-detention-sexual-abuse-ice-dhs/ http://www.endisolation.org/se...ssault-in-immigration-detention/

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

538: Democrats Are Wrong About Republicans. Republicans Are Wrong About Democrats.

But what if Americans’ views of the parties, particularly whichever one they don’t belong to, are, well, kind of wrong? That’s the argument of a study by scholars Douglas Ahler and Gaurav Sood that was recently published in The Journal of Politics. They had the polling firm YouGov ask American adults to estimate the size of groups in each party. For example, what percentage of Democrats are black, or lesbian, gay or bisexual? What percentage of Republicans earn more than $250,000 a year, or are age 65 or older?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Sexual Culture Model Building ]

RT (((edelweisspirat))) 🌊 #GeneralStrike @crandallgold

If you think that Mexico is only sending drug dealers and rapists,

but also worry that Mexicans are going to take your job...

What the fuck do you do for a living?



[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Heinlein ]

A good document to (re-)read and ponder.

Martin Luther King, Jr: Letter from a Birmingham jail

Current mood:

[ related topics: Photography ]

Took me a moment to clarify to which room the maximum capacity referred....

[ related topics: Photography ]

Charles P. Pierce: The Civility Debate Has Reached Peak Stupidity

I’m old enough to remember the raucous town halls of 2010, when the AstroTurfed forces of the Tea Party shouted down members of Congress while men with automatic weapons strolled around the perimeter of arenas in which the President of the United States was speaking. I’m old enough to remember when N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer of Civilization's Rules and Leader (Perhaps) of The Civilizing Forces, was working out his Universal Lexicography of Insult for the benefit of a party that ate it up with an entrenching tool. Newt also emerged on the electric Twitter machine over the weekend, leaping to SarahHuck’s defense, and that was nearly enough to make me give up English as a hobby.

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Work, productivity and environment Guns Birds ]

I have actually pulled up the "new entry" page for this a couple of times, and then closed it, and... what's tipped it over for me is the discussion in a group for current and former Pixar folks, and how much "this rings true" and "wow, I'm so sorry I didn't see this dynamic for what it was at the time and find a way to intervene" there is in that thread.

Cassandra Smolcic — Pixar’s Sexist Boys Club And My #MeToo Call For Radical Change

[ related topics: Pixar Animation Invention and Design Graphics Community ]

RT P░pp░n B░rr @pippinbarr

░░░ NEW GAME

░░░

░░░ It is as if you were making love

░░░

░░░ https://pippinbarr.github.io/itisasifyouweremakinglove/

░░░

░░░ Share the love!

(Browser game, with UI elements in the style of Windows 3...)

The "About" text notes:

We have created It is as if you were making love to provide a usable and efficient experience of pleasuring a partner without the distress and dissatisfactions of a physical body to navigate.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama User Interface Games Microsoft Invention and Design ]

So which download of an executable of Git for Windows is least likely to completely infect my VM with malware? (And I'll bet the PuTTY download is still over http... sigh.)

[ related topics: Microsoft virus ]

Broad anti-trafficking law faces its first Constitutional challenge:

The first lawsuit against the federal law targeting sex work online was filed late Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. On behalf of plaintiffs including Human Rights Watch, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, and the Internet Archive, along with an individual sex workers’ rights activist, the complaint argues that the law, Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (H.R. 1865), is a violation of the First and Fifth Amendments. The plaintiffs are also asking for a preliminary injunction.

Plaintiffs include the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, Human Rights Watch, and the EFF.

[ related topics: Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture Movies Free Speech Work, productivity and environment Civil Liberties Net Culture Government ]

I Fix It Org: Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall With the Macbook Pro Keyboard

[ related topics: Apple Computer Weblogs ]

Former ICE Chief Counsel Gets 4 Years In Prison For Stealing Immigrants' Identities

Raphael A. Sanchez, who was chief counsel at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Seattle when he opened credit cards and took out loans using the personal information of vulnerable immigrants, has been sentenced to four years in prison.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr...ud-and-aggravated-identity-theft

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Seattle ]

RT Dave Josephsen @DaveJosephsen:

Interviewer: hmmm Can you think of any way we can make this faster?

Me: Sure, lets replace this array with a log-linear histogram

Interviewer: Uh..

Me: Sit the fuck down, your smug ass wanted to play fancypants with the datastructures. Now we're here for the night

Bonus: Hexing the technical interview.

RT Peter Krupa 🌹 @peterkrupa:

if we are going to do traffic enforcement at all, speed cameras are the most racially-neutral way to do it.

imho one reason (especially white) people get SO WORKED UP about speed cameras is because their privilege isn't working.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Work, productivity and environment Race ]

Thomas J. Sugrue in NYT Opinion: White America’s Age-Old, Misguided Obsession With Civility:

King aimed some of his harshest words toward advocates of civility, whose concerns aligned with the hand-wringing of many of today’s politicians and pundits. From his Birmingham jail cell, King wrote: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’.” King knew that whites’ insistence on civility usually stymied civil rights.

[ related topics: Books Privacy Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Race Government ]

Texas sheriff deputy charged for child abuse after allegedly blackmailing undocumented mother with deportation

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events ]

The recent spate of Justice Kennedy's kid loaned a billion bucks to Donald Trump, and "civility" articles, mean that I've hit my limit of NYT articles for the month, and I'm too lazy to clear cookies or subscribe, but...

Remember that "Yanny"/"Laurel" thing that was floating around? Shadow reminded me that the NYT had a slider where you could filter between one and the other:

https://www.nytimes.com/intera...io-clip-yanny-laurel-debate.html

and noted "All I have to say is, holy crap."

For a side project, I hack on SquareDesk (.net). We needed a couple of timer and alarm sounds, so for one of them I recorded my doorbell chime. Mike, my collaborator, wasn't happy with that, so he went into Audacity and created a tone and shaped it with an envelope for a chime.

But it sounded a little too clean and computery for me, so I went in and added some over-tones and changed their envelopes and...

That rabbit hole goes deep, but as I played with trying to get something that sounded even better, I started putting in some white noise and running it through an equalizer to get that end hiss of a good gong, and...

Yeah, the human audio perception thing is weird and very very cool.

[ related topics: Music Law Enforcement Sports Boats Race ]

A Japanese cyber-security expert who defended basic decency was stabbed to death over the weekend. His killer was a troll who confessed he took revenge.

Royal Astronomical Society: Grease in space:

“Combining our lab results with observations from astronomical observatories allows us to measure the amount of aliphatic carbon between us and the stars”, explained Professor Tim Schmidt, from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science in the School of Chemistry at UNSW Sydney.

As the Sensible Endowment folks observed, there's oil in space... which explains the calls for Space Force.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Space & Astronomy Current Events ]

DHS office of the Inspector General: ICE’s Inspections and Monitoring of Detention Facilities Do Not Lead to Sustained Compliance or Systemic Improvements (PDF) .

US Government Accountability Office on ICE:

GAO found a number of inconsistencies and errors in ICE's calculations for its congressional budget justifications (CBJs). For example, in its fiscal year 2015 budget request, ICE made an error that resulted in an underestimation of $129 million for immigration detention expenses. While ICE officials stated their budget documents undergo multiple reviews to ensure accuracy, ICE was not able to provide documentation of such reviews. Without a documented review process for reviewing the accuracy of its budget request, ICE is not positioned to ensure the credibility of its budget requests.

[ related topics: moron ]

Current age: Trimming my eyebrows with my beard trimmer to curtail stray hairs.

RT Devon Zuegel‏ @devonzuegel

Fun fact: SimCity was forced to pretend that all parking lots were underground, because the game would be “really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots” http://devonzuegel.com/post/we...lding-cities-for-people-not-cars

RT Clifford Vickrey @cliffordvickrey:

“Amazon Headquarters” should be one of the disasters you can pick in the next SimCity

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Games ]