Flutterby™! From 2018-08-01 to 2018-08-31

99 Percent Invisible: Built to burn.

On how we build houses in wildland areas that will ignite long before the fire front gets to them.

[ related topics: Pyrotechnics Real Estate ]

David Huron demonstrates the "Shepard's Tone Phenomenon" (Vimeo video), an illusion where notes can sound out of sequence, or a scale can go continuously down.

David Huron explaining Shepard's Tones.

I've got a register break in my vocal range that I've been working with where I'm struggling with similar "which octave am I in?" perceptions.

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

When the free trial download of the software requires a $50+ USB copy protection dongle. The good news is it warned me off from using software which requires a dongle...

[ related topics: Software Engineering Current Events ]

The Guardian: Suspected Russian spy found working at US embassy in Moscow Exclusive: Russian is understood to have had full access to secret data during decade at embassy

The Guardian has been told the RSO sounded the alarm in January 2017, but the Secret Service did not launch a full-scale inquiry of its own. Instead it decided to let her go quietly months later, possibly to contain any potential embarrassment.

Geez, if the Secret Service is embarassed about that, just wait 'til they figure out what's going on in the Whitehouse.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Space & Astronomy Current Events Work, productivity and environment Guns ]

It's National Grab Some Nuts Day! https://nationaldaycalendar.co...nal-grab-some-nuts-day-august-3/

A lot of things about this write-up are triggering my skeptic warning, but I want to close the tab and leave this for later reading: Early Circumcision May Be A Major Cause Of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome:

In a study available on the pre-print server bioRxiv, Dr Eran Elhaik from the University of Sheffield in the UK suggests the large loss of blood caused by male neonatal circumcision (MNC), which is performed in the first 28 days after birth, can explain a strong correlation seen between MNC and SIDS.

“An infant has only 11 ounces of blood, and he may easily lose 1 to 2 ounces in circumcision, the equivalent of two to four blood donations for an adult,” Dr Elhaik told IFLScience, referencing one of his previous studies.

[ related topics: Health Education ]

Isn't really news to anyone who's been looking at the space, but this is a nice distillation of the Uber/Lyft traffic problem: RT Venkatesh Rao @vgr

Just hit me that at say $3/gallon and say 40mpg, it would be cheaper for a self-driving gasoline car to just circle around than park anywhere at more than $3/hr. At say $0.5/mile fully loaded operating cost it’s not worth parking above $20/h.

The loitering car cloud is coming.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Current Events Automobiles ]

RT Tarah @ Black Hat @tarah:

Switch nothing but name & ethnicity in LinkedIn profile & recruiter response rate goes from 40% to 2% with n=30. As a scientist, I believe this should be expanded into a peer-reviewed study w anonymized data being provided publicly on a per-company basis beginning with the F100.

Two from Shadow:

Insanely fast 9000w DIY eBike - the most dangerous and unsafe bike ever (YouTube video). Looks basically like motorcycle (or at least standard road) speeds on a bicycle chassis. Link goes straight to the test ride, but there's 11 minutes of the build before that).

And A tweet thread about checking into an AirBNB with mucked up home automation, and debugging that. We in technology have definitely not solved the "just works, without maintenance" issue.

[ related topics: Movies Pedal Power Video Bicycling ]

So I don't mind that a Macbook Pro needs an external keyboard, but do you know how hard it is to find one with an Escape key that doesn't need to chord with the "Fn" key? Grrr.

RT The Associated Press @AP:

Man who jumped out of restaurant freezer and threatened employees with a knife before dying of cardiac arrest was a suspected cold-case killer, authorities say.

https://apnews.com/fa960e0cd0e643fc82764b1d9dd0a1e4

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

Eric Meyer: Securing Web Sites Made Them Less Accessible:

In 2018? Yes. In rural Uganda, where I was improvising an introduction to web development for a class of vocational students, that’s the reality. They can have a computer lab full of Dell desktops running Windows or rows of Raspberry Pis running Ubuntu or whatever setup there is, but when satellites in geosynchronous earth orbit are your only source of internet, you wait. And wait. And wait.

On the other hand, at least this way they're getting Wikipedia and not whatever their local ISP decides to inject into Wikipedia...

[ related topics: Microsoft Space & Astronomy Sports Net Culture ]

New York Times: Workplace Wellness Programs Don’t Work Well. Why Some Studies Show Otherwise. — Randomized controlled trials, despite their flaws, remain a powerful tool. looks at the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study, a randomized controlled trial on workplace wellness programs, which the researchers then also analyzed as though it were an observational study, and the differences are striking.

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

Shadow forwarded along this great re-quoting from Peopleware: RT Channing Walton @channingwalton, Replying to @jasongorman @missingfaktor:

This reminds of something I heard.

A manager saw a dev reclining in his chair, looking at the ceiling, and asked “What the hell is he doing?”.

“He’s thinking!”, replied another dev.

“I don’t pay him to think, he should be typing!”, replied the manager furiously.

I started a new job recently, and have been loving it. I've also been feeling super productive, and my net effective on the code base has been to reduce the lines of code.

[ related topics: Furniture Woodworking ]

project:rosenbridge — hardware backdoors in Via C3 x86 architecture CPUs.

The rosenbridge backdoor is a small, non-x86 core embedded alongside the main x86 core in the CPU. It is enabled by a model-specific-register control bit, and then toggled with a launch-instruction. The embedded core is then fed commands, wrapped in a specially formatted x86 instruction. The core executes these commands (which we call the 'deeply embedded instruction set'), bypassing all memory protections and privilege checks.

While the backdoor should require kernel level access to activate, it has been observed to be enabled by default on some systems, allowing any unprivileged code to modify the kernel.

[ related topics: Robotics Space & Astronomy Embedded Devices Architecture ]

A coworker has been reporting great fun with Screeps, the MMO sandbox game for programmers. Lots of autonomous little creatures that you give behavior via JavaScript...

[ related topics: Games ]

Some years ago, we asked some teenagers to house sit and take care of the cat, with the understanding that they'd have a LAN party. We came home to find the cats well fed, that a socket that should have been on a 15A breaker was, in fact, on a 50A breaker, and melted, and that BonziBuddy and the Alexa toolbar were installed on my computer. And this receipt, which we saved because it so wonderfully encapsulated something about that experience...

[ related topics: Photography Real Estate ]

The Theremin-X Project

The Theremin-X Project imagines a small concert in which a theremin is hooked up to vibrators worn by audience members, with the pitch, volume, and intensity of the music translated directly into vibration. You can see the result below.

[ related topics: Music Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs ]

Whoah! PayPal is broken. Multiple computers, multiple sites, charging accounts, but when it gets back to the merchant the transaction was allegedly canceled by PayPal.

We disagree with the Washington Post about housing economics

Monday’s Washington Post ran a provocative headline: “In expensive cities, rents fall for the rich–but rise for the poor.”  Citing data from one of the nation’s most authoritative real estate analytics firms, Zillow, it claims not only that rents are falling for the rich while rising for the poor, but also implies that building new apartments (chiefly at the high end) hasn’t done anything to help affordability.

Other thing to note is that the income split used for these categories is for renters alone, so "high income" still means relatively low income compared to your median homeowner.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Economics Real Estate ]

Good morning to you, too!

[ related topics: Photography ]

Here's how California became the most secretive state on police misconduct:

In the 1970s, Los Angeles police officers were furious that past complaints against them increasingly were making their way into court cases.

So LAPD officials did something radical: They took more than four tons of personnel records dating to the 1940s and shredded them.

That those responsible weren't immediately charged with destruction of evidence is telling.

[ related topics: Politics History Law Enforcement California Culture ]

Intersectionality means we can critique Trump's retaliation against Brennan while still acknowledging that the CIA has created and encouraged many evil repressive regimes.

Where were they radicalized and who were their thought leaders?

• Children found in New Mexico compound were training for school shootings, prosecutors say
• More than 300 accused priests listed in Pennsylvania report on Catholic Church sex abuse
• The sin of silence — The epidemic of denial about sexual abuse in the evangelical church

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

A former Admiral speaks up for John Brennan: Revoke my security clearance, too, Mr. President

William H. McRaven, a retired Navy admiral, was commander of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2014. He oversaw the 2011 Navy SEAL raid in Pakistan that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

[ related topics: Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

Just tried to use the @BMWUSA patch kit that's supposed to be a spare tire replacement. That was a total waste of 20 minutes. Sigh. Wonder what it's supposed to do when it works?

Things that could be better documented: In Pete Steinberger's Aspects library, the AspectToken "remove" method is class-wide, not instance specific. That surprised some people who've been using it... https://github.com/steipete/Aspects

[ related topics: Language Books ]

Frame this and put it on your wall. Put it on every wall.

RT Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough @chrisdazey:

It’s a recurring theme in many aspects of human culture that the status quo is rarely perceived as being political, but wanting to change it is.

[ related topics: Politics moron Sociology California Culture ]

Dear Apple: "An unknown error occurred." is increasingly annoying when encountered via various different Apple ID login attempts.

[ related topics: Apple Computer ]

Oh, the "An unknown error occurred" it's probably just fallout from the fact that all keychain managers are broken.

It's Naked Ladies season! (Amaryllis Belladonna)

[ related topics: Photography Nudity ]

Twitter user yolo contendere @Theophite describes bitcoin:

imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin

And the "oh snap" response: Carlos Parada @CParadaTech

Wow! that would be as crazy as buying a car for $45k every 5 years and keeping it unused/parked 95% of the time, there is no way anybody would fall for that

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Automobiles ]

So that I can remember it: Rueda de Casino is a called round dance salsa that shares with (Modern Western) Square Dancing that it involves multiple partners, and calls which the dancers don't know ahead of time.

(Various exercise forms like Zumba and XtremeHipHop are called, but don't have the multiple partner interaction. Facebook video of the XtremeHipHop that got Aahz to remind me of this.)

[ related topics: Video Gambling ]

When I was growing up, people told me I should get out there and change the world. But every time I try, some asshole in a cape comes and foils my plans.

NK Jemisin's acceptance speech for her 3rd consecutive Hugo (and if you haven't read the Broken Earth trilogy, may I very much recommend it. So much thought provoking in that....)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Weblogs tolkien ]

NY Times: Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests

Their reams of data converged on a breathtaking statistic: Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent.

Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime, Karsten Müller, University of Warwick - Warwick Business School; Carlo Schwarz University of Warwick

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Journalism and Media Education Flowers Gambling ]

This Photographer Documented Three Couples Having Sex On Their Period — A chat with Nolwen Cifuentes about her stigma-challenging series.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Fresno’s Mason-Dixon Line — More than 50 years after redlining was outlawed, the legacy of discrimination can still be seen in California’s poorest large city.

[ related topics: Politics California Culture ]

Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction, You Should Too

Now, researchers have put a nail in the coffin of porn addiction. Josh Grubbs, Samuel Perry and Joshua Wilt are some of the leading researchers on America’s struggles with porn, having published numerous recent research studies examining the impact of porn use, belief in porn addiction, and the effect of porn use on marriages. Rory Reid is a UCLA researcher who was a leading proponent gathering information about the concept of hypersexual disorder for DSM-5. These four researchers, all of whom have history of neutrality, if not outright support of the concepts of porn addiction, have conducted a meta-analysis of research on pornography and concluded that porn use does not predict problems with porn, but religiosity does.

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Weblogs moron Sociology Skating ]

RT mama africa @thatgirlsalina:

IM CRYING LAUGHING

[ related topics: Photography ]

"When you ask for a UTI, you can specify that it must conform to a particular type." Man, Mac developers are freakin' weird.

[ related topics: Macintosh ]

*Normal* cats sleep curled up...

[ related topics: Photography ]

For Charlene: A breaching whale a little closer to the boat than the whale watchers were expecting: https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1032296191231438848

[ related topics: Boats Machinery ]

BI2 – building a silicone sex toy using the ESP8266 microcontroller

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Embedded Devices ]

Higher Mortality Risk Seen with Low Carb Diet — But not when carbs were replaced with plant-based proteins

A diet in which 50%-55% of total energy came from carbohydrates was associated with minimal mortality risk, Siedelmann's group reported online in The Lancet Public Health.

[ related topics: Health ]

Not sure if Burning Man season or just general Petaluma...

[ related topics: Burning Man Interactive Drama Photography ]

I think this is important, but it's a very difficult read: Nuns Killed Children, Say Former Residents Of St. Joseph’s Catholic Orphanage

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up ]

Teen phone monitoring app leaked thousands of user passwords, and the app required that 2FA be turned off. So, yeah: Snoop on your kids, compromise their privacy to everything.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Privacy Pop Culture ]

Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals

The research was conducted in China but is relevant across the world, with 95% of the global population breathing unsafe air. It found that high pollution levels led to significant drops in test scores in language and arithmetic, with the average impact equivalent to having lost a year of the person’s education.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: The impact of exposure to air pollution on cognitive performance, Xin Zhang, Xi Chen, and Xiaobo Zhang.

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1809474115

[ related topics: Nature and environment Theater & Plays Mathematics Guns Education Gambling ]

Axios: Scoop: Republicans secretly study their coming hell. A claim that Republicans are circulating a list of misdeeds and malfeasances that Democrats may force investigations into if they flip the house in the mid-terms, so that the GOP can start work on damage control. Including some of that list...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Work, productivity and environment Real Estate ]

NPR: The School Shootings That Weren't

This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, "nearly 240 schools ... reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting." The number is far higher than most other estimates.

But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government's Civil Rights Data Collection.

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

Someone posted photos of a young councilwoman in her underwear. She called it ‘slut-shaming.'

The now-disabled website, called “Rachel Hundley Exposed,” attacked Hundley for her stance on divisive issues while mayor of Sonoma. It contained photographs mined from Hundley’s social media accounts, including some showing her in a bra and underwear and working at Burning Man, the famed art and music festival. The site, supposedly created by an organization called “Sonoma Citizens for Peace and Cooperation,” called Hundley a “cruel and demented person,” who was “a cancer” that needed to be cut from the community.

The (city of) Sonoma California Councilwoman posted a YouTube video (which I have not yet watched) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxnmpqtkUMM

[ related topics: Burning Man Politics Music Photography Movies Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture California Culture Community Clothing Video Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Ex-Balch Springs police officer Roy Oliver guilty of murdering teenager Jordan Edwards

Oliver shot into the back of a 2004 black Impala where Edwards was a passenger on April 29 last year. The then-officer claimed the car was about to run over his partner, Officer Tyler Gross, but several witnesses and video taken from the officer’s body camera show the car was moving away from Gross.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Space & Astronomy Current Events Law Enforcement Automobiles Video Aviation - Helicopters ]

Moving your servers to "the cloud" doesn't reduce the staff time necessary to support those systems vs building your own, it just commodifies the skills necessary to run them.

Eating cheese and red meat is actually good for you

Eating red meat and cheese can help heart health, scientists claim

American College of Cardiology: PURE: Healthy Diet Including Dairy and Meats Good For Hearts Worldwide

The Lancet: Diabetes and Endocrinology: Association of dietary nutrients with blood lipids and blood pressure in 18 countries: a cross-sectional analysis from the PURE study, Dr Andrew Mente, PhD, Mahshid Dehghan, PhD, Sumathy Rangarajan, MSc, Matthew McQueen, MB, Gilles Dagenais, MD

Our data are at odds with current recommendations to reduce total fat and saturated fats. Reducing saturated fatty acid intake and replacing it with carbohydrate has an adverse effect on blood lipids. Substituting saturated fatty acids with unsaturated fats might improve some risk markers, but might worsen others. Simulations suggest that ApoB-to-ApoA1 ratio probably provides the best overall indication of the effect of saturated fatty acids on cardiovascular disease risk among the markers tested. Focusing on a single lipid marker such as LDL cholesterol alone does not capture the net clinical effects of nutrients on cardiovascular risk.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-8587(17)30283-8

[ related topics: Health Food Education ]

Barry Hawkins: The story of why I left Riot Games. On rape jokes and company culture.

MeFi thread

[ related topics: Games Weblogs Sociology California Culture ]

Brenda Romero’s Train board game will make you ponder.

I've been working with some groups of people to educate on the systemic pressures around housing and development patterns, and the last few days have had several meetings with people running affordable and low-income housing programs in preparation for a forum we're holding on that topic. The big message is how complex the system is, and how we need to change systemic pressures.

[ related topics: Religion Games Work, productivity and environment Sports Machinery Community Trains Real Estate ]

The sound during the previews at Juliet, Naked at @Cinemark Smith Ranch Road was so loud it was clipping, and we had to move to the back of the theater to be able to watch the movie. Making movie watching physically tolerable might be a way to get audiences back in...

[ related topics: Movies Theater & Plays Nudity ]

Series of indictments nearly wipes out Llano (Texas) Police Department.

When asked if there was a climate of corruption at the police department, Edmonson said, "Uh, no."

So two-thirds of the police department was engaged in criminal conduct.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement ]

U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question

Diez represents dozens of U.S. citizens who were denied their passports or had their passports suddenly revoked. Among them are soldiers and Border Patrol agents. In some cases, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have arrived at his clients’ homes without notice and taken passports away.

American Economic Review: Moved to Opportunity: The Long-Run Effects of Public Housing Demolition on Children

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of moving out of disadvantaged neighborhoods on the long-run outcomes of children. I study public housing demolitions in Chicago, which forced low-income households to relocate to less disadvantaged neighborhoods using housing vouchers. Specifically, I compare young adult outcomes of displaced children to their peers who lived in nearby public housing that was not demolished. Displaced children are more likely to be employed and earn more in young adulthood. I also find that displaced children have fewer violent crime arrests. Children displaced at young ages have lower high school dropout rates.

Wonder if this is linked to some of the mobility and economic opportunity issues that present themselves in rental vs home ownership?

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Invention and Design Economics Real Estate ]