Flutterby™! From 2018-10-01 to 2018-10-31

Great Twitter thread on false accusations of rape and sexual assault, how rare they are, and what patterns they fall into.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

The point Shadow has been making: RT @emptywheel:

This is a subtweet:

That Kavanaugh was not credible about Dr. Ford should make folks realize that he was not credible on warrantless wiretapping, torture, judicial philosophy, using stolen emails, and Kozinski.

[ related topics: Automobiles Philosophy ]

Eight-year-old Swedish-American girl pulls pre-Viking era sword from lake

On the one hand, interesting approach to food deserts, on the other hand, you know that roads and parking are over-subsidized when it's cheaper to drive around your building...

South Side farms sell produce to thousands using CTA buses as mobile markets.

[ related topics: Food Economics Public Transportation Aviation - Helicopters ]

I suspect that this is actually evidence of issues in quality of journalism than of an actual specific exploit, but because it's floating around today I'd like to keep a link to it: Bloomberg: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies. The assertion is that there was a chip that looked like a signal conditioner on some lines of Supermicro motherboards that wasn't, and this was some kind of backdoor. The technical details on how that would have worked are sketch, obviously something on a bus line would need to then be a tool to trigger some sort of associated code in some higher level systems.

The whole story is kinda tough to accept as-is, we really need more technical details in order to evaluate it, but Amazon is pretty clear: AWS Security Blog: Setting the Record Straight on Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Erroneous Article.

Apple strongly refutes report that it found Chinese ‘spy’ chips in iCloud servers.

CNBC: Chinese spy chips are found in hardware used by Apple, Amazon, Bloomberg says; Apple, AWS say no way:

Asked by CNBC for comment, Apple reiterated its strong denials of the report, stating: "We are deeply disappointed that in their dealings with us, Bloomberg's reporters have not been open to the possibility that they or their sources might be wrong or misinformed. Our best guess is that they are confusing their story with a previously reported 2016 incident in which we discovered an infected driver on a single Super Micro server in one of our labs. That one-time event was determined to be accidental and not a targeted attack against Apple."

Addendum: Lawfare: The China SuperMicro Hack: About That Bloomberg Report

[ related topics: Books Weblogs Current Events Journalism and Media Boats Public Transportation ]

RT Vicki Boykis @vboykis:

Me at career day in middle school, brightly: Okay, kids. I'm a 'machine learning engineer', which is just a fancy word for -

Kid in the back: Yeah, we know what you do. PyTorch or Tensorflow?

Me: Well, I, uh, don't do deep learn-

Kids: BOOOO GO HOME I BET YOU ONLY USE ONE CORE

[ related topics: Children and growing up Education ]

Really? That's a standard ASCII character. T-Mobile doesn't trust that their database inputs are sanitized. Not a confidence builder...

[ related topics: Photography Databases ]

Don Palmerine in the Washington Post: I watched a rape. For five decades, I did nothing. — Many men have stories to tell and confessions to make. This is mine.

[ related topics: Microsoft Movies ]

Today in tone-deaf donation pleas: It's kinda like the NYPD bragging that 22 shots missed Amadou Diallo...

[ related topics: Photography Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Stock photography is over. Thank you for playing. Iryna Kuznetsova on Shutterstock, a cat for all situations.

[ related topics: Photography Economics ]

Another disturbing Twitter suspension incident, this one probably because of a bad content filter run amok https://civic.mit.edu/2018/09/...earch-heres-why-thats-a-problem/

Shadow forwarded along: John Dvorak: 5G Got Me Fired. (Archive Today link)

The tension between advertiser vehicle and journalism continues to get more and more stretched. Technology reporting has never been great, but especially as we see more behavior that looks like deliberate trolling from national newspapers, and how that's impacting who is and isn't viable in national politics, it's useful to look at the fringes.

[ related topics: Politics Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media ]

RT Adam Kotsko @adamkotsko:

Remember back when George W. Bush was installed as president against the popular will, then presided over the biggest foreign attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor, then led us into a war based on lies -- and he was reelected because he "kept us safe"? I think about that a lot.

RT Adam Kotsko @adamkotsko:

George W. Bush's incompetence and lies led to more American deaths than any other post-Vietnam president, by far -- and he "kept us safe." Everyone agrees: he "kept us safe."

It should be noted that Barack Obama, too, didn't do nearly as much of a drawdown in the efforts to "keep us safe".

[ related topics: Politics Bay Area History ]

RT Francis @Purple_Drazi:

"Today we celebrate Columbo Day, observed by pretending to leave a room and then turning to ask one more incriminating question." #JustOneMoreThing

Google+ to shut down after coverup of data-exposing bug.

Google hid major Google+ security flaw that exposed users’ personal information.

Project Strobe: Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs, and sunsetting consumer Google+

[ related topics: Privacy Weblogs Consumerism and advertising ]

Wonder why PTC (Positive Train Control) has taken so long to implement? Well, apparently it's not just that they're not trying to solve the safety problem, they're trying to solve the scheduling one, it's also that they have no idea what business they were in, and only recently talked to customers to find out what the customers actually wanted.

Canadian Pacific invents a better mousetrap to smooth intermodal volume.

“We were surprised. Two-thirds of all the traffic we delivered in western Canada on any particular day didn’t need to be there that day. Didn’t need to be there the next day. Or the day after. We were hurrying up to wait,” Wahba said during CP’s Oct. 4 investor day.

So CP came up with a concept called the requested arrival date. The shipper would tell CP when its container needed to arrive, and CP would manage when the box moves to ensure on-time delivery.

[ related topics: Current Events California Culture Machinery Trains ]

‘This is MY son’: Navy vet horrified as mom’s tweet miscasts him as #HimToo poster boy — and goes viral.

RT Pieter Hanson @Thatwasmymom

That was my Mom. Sometimes the people we love do things that hurt us without realizing it. Let’s turn this around. I respect and #BelieveWomen . I never have and never will support #HimToo . I’m a proud Navy vet, Cat Dad and Ally. Also, Twitter, your meme game is on point.

RT Daniel “the Devil’s cabana boy” Summers @WFKARS, Replying to @MarlaReynoldsC3

I, too, once found excuses to avoid going on solo dates with women.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

The debt that we owe Millennials can never be truly repaid. No, really, y'all are screwed. But while we watch you march bravely towards your climate change related doom, unless the political situation explodes and we all die for other reasons first, thank you for your service:

Millennials Kill Again. The Latest Victim? American Cheese

[ related topics: Politics Movies moron Current Events Global Warming ]

Well, this is fascinating... Given that evidence-based medicine is still in its infancy, that the placebo effect is so strong, and that we can prolong human "life" pretty much indefinitely, healthcare can chew up as much of an economy as a society is willing to let it.

The board of CVS apparently realizes this, and is consolidating: CVS’s $69 billion merger with Aetna approved in deal that could transform the health-care industry

[ related topics: Health Law Enforcement Economics ]

Anyone else remember when computing used to be a mostly deterministic process?

And now we come to that every few month situation where we try to figure out the magic sauce for @letsencrypt this time. Some day I'll figure out how to configure it and Apache to "just work", today is not that day... sigh.

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Work, productivity and environment Clowns ]

Our office is in a co-working space. I walked past an open conference room and a guy was saying "...high value leads for you, like the Glengarry leads...". I should have stormed in and taken his coffee.

[ related topics: History Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Conferences ]

Yesterday we had a new dryer delivered. For various (legitimate) reasons, the deliver guys wouldn't help me stack it. So once I got the stacking kit in place I lifted the dryer up on to saw horses, and from there up to on top of the washer.

Turns out I am *OUCH* years old.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Woodworking ]

Practical public transit finally comes to Southern California: Tunnel with a rail system is found under Mexico-California border:

Mexican police and military forces found the tunnel’s entrance during an operation in mid-September. Mexican officials worked with the team of U.S. agencies to explore the tunnel. The team reached the tunnel’s end on Thursday.

So mid-September to Thursday (October 4th?) to travel 627 feet? I guess despite the dedicated right-of-way this is about as fast as taking the bus.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement California Culture Trains Public Transportation ]

I realize I haven't actually signed up to pay for iCloud, but given the number of times I've logged back in and still get complaints about not being able to access it, I'm pretty certain that it's irrevocably broken and unusable.

Whoever decided that '-' at the beginning of the line should denote an Objective-C method name didn't spend a lot of time poring over diffs

Holy crap. The amazing Capricious by Julie Cox that ran on the @Nobilis Erotica podcast is up for a Parsec! https://locusmag.com/2018/10/2018-parsec-awards-finalists/

[ related topics: Erotic ]

Cop who’s been arrested 3 times, fired 6 times, can go back to work, magistrate rules

Still, the controversial cop’s lengthy record and internal affairs file has earned him unflattering headlines from publications across the state. Most famously, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune wrote an exposé in 2011 that outlined his 18 years in law enforcement to that point as looking more like “a rap sheet than a resumé.”

[ related topics: Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement ]

The Planetary Society: NASA Then & Now has some amazing sliderable "first pictures vs current pictures" exhibits.

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

Vehicle over 39 feet attempts to navigate State Route 175 between Hopland and Lakeport, despite posted warnings. The best part of the video is the caption: "Note that the audio of this video was edited to remove expletives of surprise from our crew."

[ related topics: Music Video ]

Why is there no option in Nextdoor voting on inappropriate messages for "drive the person who reported this message screaming in terror from our neighborhood"?

The First Abstract Painter Was a Woman

Wassily Kandinsky has long been widely regarded as the forefather of abstraction, but as the shows of Af Klint’s work clearly establish, her abstract paintings predate his by several years. “As of 1906, that is, nearly six years before what is recognized as the inaugural date of abstract painting,” wrote Pascal Rousseau in the catalogue accompanying the Berlin show, “Hilma af Klint, who lives away from the axis of modernity (Paris/Munich/Milan), was painting abstract, sometimes monumental works.”

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

Okay, Amazon, why does "with lids for slime 8oz" rank higher than both "for clothes" and "for freezing food"? What are people searching for out there?

[ related topics: Books Photography Food Clothing ]

Facebook uses shift-enter to avoid immediately sending a message. Nextdoor uses shift-enter to immediately send a message. If I were ruler of the universe...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

U.S. Border Agency Says Hundreds of Employees Have Been Arrested Over 2 Years

WASHINGTON — More than 500 employees of the United States’ primary border security agency were charged with drug trafficking, accepting bribes and a range of other crimes over a two-year period, according to reports released on Friday.

[ related topics: Politics Health Work, productivity and environment Heinlein ]

The Cut: Stormy Daniels Didn’t Want to Be Anybody’s Hero “It was funnier when he wasn’t the president.”

And now if you go to one of my shows, it’s large groups of women, oftentimes in homemade matching Stormy shirts. They are loud, and they’re angry. They’re like, “Fuck Trump.” Or they’re crying. I’m like, “Jesus Christ. There’s no crying in tittie bars. What’s happening?” People are grabbing me and giving me money, and then later they’re sharing their personal stories — women are saying, “I was molested or I was raped, and you’ve given me the inspiration to file charges against my boss.” Just heavy, heavy shit every night.

Lot of good stuff in here. So many awesome pull quotes that could get used.

[ related topics: Religion Quotes Interactive Drama Humor Television Currency Clothing ]

Wow: New Yorker: Did Uber steal Google's intellectual property? isn't just about Uber, but about Levandowski encouraging a culture of terrifying disregard for safety while at Google, before he defected.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Sociology California Culture ]

Google search for "production db_password filetype:env inurl:com"

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Databases ]

The Scanner: Sex workers returned to SF streets after Backpage.com shut down.

“Without being able to advertise online,” Long said, “a huge number of sex workers were forced to go outside, and many have reported that former pimps came out of the woodwork offering to ‘manage’ their business again since they were now rendered unable to find and screen clients online.”

Golly. It's almost like the moralists weren't thinking about the broader context. Who could possibly have seen this as an unintended consequence?

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Bay Area ]

American Mercenaries Were Hired To Assassinate Politicians In The Middle East:

The CIA said it had no information about the mercenary assassination program, and the Navy's Special Warfare Command declined to comment. A former CIA official who has worked in the UAE initially told BuzzFeed News there was no way that Americans would be allowed to participate in such a program. But after checking, he called back: “There were guys that were basically doing what you said.” He was astonished, he said, by what he learned: “What vetting procedures are there to make sure the guy you just smoked is really a bad guy?” The mercenaries, he said, were “almost like a murder squad.”

But it's not like foreign policy like this has ever really backfired on the United States, right?

[ related topics: Software Engineering Current Events ]

Giving Florida man a run for his money: Bristol Tennessee man run over by lawn mower while trying to kill son with chainsaw

[ related topics: Chattanooga Currency ]

Democrats didn't leak Dr. Ford's letter—it was most likely the White House

[ related topics: Automobiles Race Real Estate ]

With Trump comparing the outrage over Saudi Arabia's killing of Jamal Khashoggi to the treatment of Brett Kavanaugh, are we sure that Kavanaugh stopped at sexual assault, and hasn't been killing and dismembering people in a long serial murder spree?

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

How is software getting more complex? These days it takes all of the infrastructure of iCloud to do nothing more than randomly tell the user "An unknown error occurred."

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

So ignoring all of the cultural identity issues, here's an interesting thing on the science of DNA testing: Washington Post Fact Checker: Just about everything you’ve read on the Warren DNA test is wrong

We are not trying to defend Warren’s decision to release the test, just to set the record straight about what the test shows. The media bungled the interpretation of the results — and then Warren’s opponents used the uninformed reporting to undermine the test results even further. We fell into this trap as well, and were too quick to send out a tweet (now deleted) that made an inaccurate comparison. We should have not relied on media reporting before tweeting.

[ related topics: Politics Sociology Journalism and Media Television ]

It is easy to throw potshots at the current administration (I mean, if you're gonna compare the Saudi murder of Jamal Khashoggi to the allegations against Kavanaugh, we should probably be digging up the back yards of several suburban Maryland backyards looking for remains), but I think it's important to call out the good stuff, too: The Whitehouse is making noises about withdrawing from the Universal Postal Union. This is probably a good thing. Shipping for devices from China is currently amazingly subsidized, in ways that mean it's currently cheaper to ship electronics to me from Shenzen than from San Jose.

Planet Money did a backgrounder on this: https://www.npr.org/…/63...pisode-857-the-postal-illuminati

https://www.whitehouse.gov/br&...0;/statement-press-secretary-38/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Space & Astronomy Machinery Currency Conspiracy ]

As a truck drives by way faster than appropriate for the neighborhood I'm walking through, I'm thinking about how much nicer it'd be if the sidewalks were two feet wider and the road four feet narrower.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Machinery ]

Looks like they were wrapping up something on Kentucky street. Couldn't have been much, they weren't there when I walked by the other way a few minutes earlier.

[ related topics: Photography ]

If the Petaluma PD is really so hard up for funding, I can point out a couple of intersections where they could easily pull down a few thou an hour with stop sign violations.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

RT Robbie Gramer @RobbieGramer:

He's not dead, he left the consulate we have evidence

OK, he has disappeared

OK, he may be dead

OK, he's dead but we didn't do it

OK, he's dead, but it was a rogue group who worked for us

OK he's dead and we did it, but it was only because a 1 vs. 15 fight broke out

Conservatives mount a whisper campaign smearing Khashoggi in defense of Trump.

It's kind of amazing how the statists are coming out of the woodwork in defense of the killing...

Read Jamal Khashoggi’s columns for The Washington Post

NY Times: Saudis’ Image Makers: A Troll Army and a Twitter Insider

A Twitter thread by Frédéric Leroy looking at the evolving science and propaganda surrounding "Cow farts cause more climate change than cars"

[ related topics: Global Warming ]

Saudi Arabia Will Now Punish Online Satire With Five-year Jail Term

Actual news will be punished withS beheadings or dismemberment with a bone saw or whatever...

[ related topics: Current Events Woodworking ]

I remain super skeptical about rent control's impacts on a community and the political scene that it engenders, but I need to dig a bit into the source material behind this: USC joins growing collection of research that moderate rent regulation in region will alleviate housing crisis . It contains sketchy things like:

However, much of the evidence provided has been either skewed or ignoring social issues like stability within neighborhoods. For example, multiple studies in New Jersey, the most rent-regulated state in the country, have shown that rent control has had little impact on rent levels and availability, contrary to common economic research. But this was because, according to Pastor and his crew, researchers accounted for income levels, the racial makeup of neighborhoods and other related factors.

Like, what does that mean? If "rent levels" means "occupancy", then, yeah, a region with low vacancy rates will have low vacancy rates after rent control too, because nothing's been done to impact supply.

And "...accounted for income levels, the racial makeup of neighborhoods..." means somehow they accounted for gentrification as some sort of externality? The article makes little sense on this matter, but is being passed around by Prop 10 proponents so I'd like to understand it better.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Invention and Design moron Community Economics Real Estate ]

So much chasing problems in tech that had no good reason to break on upgrades this weekend. Including: why did Ubiquiti change the mounts on their APs? Had to plaster fill the old holes...

Not sure if this was wind and bad tape, or a deliberate act...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

High capacity wires are magic, and I'd love to learn why this was designed this way.

[ related topics: Photography Clowns ]

Turkish president says murder of Jamal Khashoggi was ‘planned,’ calls for extradition of Saudi suspects. If there's one thing that gives me pause in this whole debacle it's that relative to the Saudis, Erdogan is the good guy.

Shudder.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Birds ]

Bobby D. Lux: Opinion: Dead Kennedys Songs Weren’t Supposed to Age This Well:

Punk songs aren’t supposed to live long enough to have a mid-life crisis. But here we are in 2018 and the Dead Kennedys songs I wrote (Yes, I wrote them. I don’t care what some lawsuit says) during the Carter administration are now out there buying Volvos, taking the kids to soccer practice, making sensible financial investments, and sipping red wine while silently nodding along in agreement with Chris Matthews.

These songs should have died a long time ago. Do you know how depressing it is for them to still be relevant right now? Every song. Even Viva Las Vegas.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Theater & Plays Wines and Spirits Sports Gambling ]

Discussion in another forum is helping me distill some ideas, and the notion that identity politics is the recognition that bigotry means more to people than money, and that this explains so many of the places where economics fails to predict behavior, is super powerful.

Quote without attribution for now:

... the economists (and libertarians) just assume that money matters more to people than being bigoted does. They are manifestly wrong about this.

Certainly there are plenty of examples to support this perspective.

[ related topics: Politics Community Currency Economics ]

This is fascinating: Android apps are being acquired by companies that are using them to measure ad usage patterns to build fraudulent ad views.

What the tests don’t show — Doctors are surprisingly bad at reading lab results. It’s putting us all at risk.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

A synopsis of Dan Weinreb's undergrad thesis: A Real-Time Display-oriented Editor for the LISP Machine. As interesting as the synopsis is what he went through to get the copy:

Eventually I broke down resolved to order it from the British Library. Before I did, I contacted MIT again. I had hoped that perhaps I could convince them to borrow it from the British Library, make a copy for their own records, then make it available on DSpace. I was willing to pay for it. We exchanged a few emails along these lines, culminating in one where they informed me that they did have the document. Someone found it, uncatalogued, in an offsite roll of microfilm. They were working out how to go about making it available, which I gathered was a complicated process (almost 40 year old thesis, author deceased, multiple departments involved in the process, etc). I was told that the process was normally 3-6 months for a new thesis, who knows how long for this one.

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

Citylab: How Manhattan Became a Rich Ghost Town — New York’s empty storefronts are a dark omen for the future of cities.

One might expect that new companies would fill the vacuum, particularly given the evidence that e-commerce companies can boost online sales by opening physical locations. But that brings us to the third problem: Many landlords don’t want to offer short-term leases to pop-up stores if they think a richer, longer-term deal is forthcoming from a national brand with money to burn, like a bank branch or retail chain. The upshot is a stubborn market imbalance: The fastest-growing online retailers are looking to experiment with short-term leases, but the landlords are holding out for long-term tenants.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Currency Fashion New York Economics ]

The problem with voting by mail is no cool sticker.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Yep, digital literacy is a thing: Older People Are Worse Than Young People at Telling Fact from Opinion:

The research tacks against the idea that younger people who are extremely online (or “digital savvy,” in Pew’s terms) might be more exposed and/or more susceptible to misinformation. But the real correlation with poor performance is exposure to television news, which has fallen off among young people but remains very high among older people. This shouldn’t be surprising, if we consider the evolution of American media over the past 60 years. Someone born in 1958, now 60, witnessed two revolutions in media before the internet: talk radio and 24-hour cable news. Both blended facts and opinions in new and unprecedented ways, and they matured with the cohort of Americans who are now over the age of 50.

Pew: Younger Americans are better than older Americans at telling factual news statements from opinions.

American Press Institute: How younger and older Americans understand and interact with news.

[ related topics: Language Interactive Drama Politics Technology and Culture Movies Invention and Design History moron Theater & Plays Current Events Journalism and Media Television Net Culture ]

Secret Service intercepts ‘potential explosive devices’ sent to Obama, Clinton, and the Time Warner Center where CNN offices are, a day after a bomb was sent to George Soros' home.

Edit: RT Kaitlan Collins @kaitlancollins:

The package with an explosive device sent to CNN’s NY offices was addressed to former CIA Director John Brennan, CNN has learned. Brennan doesn't work for CNN. He's a contributor for MSNBC.

Edit 2: RT NPR @NPR

The total of four refers to:

- 1 addressed to Hillary Clinton

- 1 to former President Barack Obama

- 1 to the building that houses CNN's office in New York City

- 1 to Wasserman Schultz, former chairwoman of the DNC

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/24...s-addressed-to-clinton-and-obama

Edit 3: San Diego Tribune office, Kamala Harris's office evacuated because of suspicious packages. That one was a false alarm.

Edit 4: Emily G ‏@EmilyGorcenski:

As the US wakes up to news that the homes/offices of two former presidents have had bombs sent to them, let’s take have a refresher on who is actually committing domestic terror:

Edit 5: RT The Associated Press @AP Turns out Cuomo was misinformed. UPDATES: Suspicious Package Sent To Cuomo's Office Actually Just Info On Proud Boys

BREAKING: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says his Manhattan office also received a suspicious device.

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

As the bombs sent to CNN, Soros, the Clintons and the Obamas have been so far successfully defused, it might be worth it for those who'd use violence to further their aims to look back at the bombing wave in 1919, in which the victims were a night watchman and a maid, but which radicalized the intended targets.

Uphill All the Way: The Fortunes of Progressivism, 1919-1929: Chapter Three: Chaos at Home: Progressives in the Crucible of 1919

US WW-II era training airplane painted in Luftwaffe livery crashes and burns on Southern California freeway. The pilot walked away from the crash, but if the writers of 2018 would back off on the heavy-handed metaphors, that'd be great.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Aviation Writing California Culture Pyrotechnics Woodworking ]

Fascinating. RT Robin Houston @robinhouston:

A curious situation. The best known lower bound for the minimal length of superpermutations was proved by an anonymous user of a wiki mainly devoted to anime. http://mathsci.wikia.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem

The proof essentially works, I think. See the end of this thread for what I mean by that: https://groups.google.com/foru...pic/superpermutators/j5y24bOemiM

But because it isn’t part of The Literature, other mathematicians are reluctant to cite it or rely on it in their work. So it’s in a strange limbo state.

Actually, I get the impression the proof was originally posted to 4chan, and was copied to the wiki by someone else, which is why it’s credited to Anonymous.

I think this is an archive of the original 4chan thread about the problem: http://4watch.org/superstring/

Here is another write-up of the anonymous proof, by Jay Pantone: https://docs.google.com/viewer...M3eTVCUUFKATAuMQEBdjI&authuser=0

Hot news! The original 4chan thread in which the proof was posted is archived at https://warosu.org/sci/thread/S3751105#p3751197 Many thanks to the anonymous internet sleuth who dug this up and sent it to me.

[ related topics: Current Events Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Community Birds ]

Saudi Arabia now admits that the Khashoggi killing was premeditated, Salah Khashoggi, Jamal's eldest son who was apparently compelled to appear in a photo op with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and who was being prevented from leaving Saudi Arabia, has now managed to get out.

[ related topics: Photography Fashion ]

How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android’ — The internet giant paid Mr. Rubin $90 million and praised him, while keeping silent about a misconduct claim.

Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out. Instead, the company handed him a $90 million exit package, paid in installments of about $2 million a month for four years, said two people with knowledge of the terms. The last payment is scheduled for next month.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Net Culture ]

Man arrested after black volunteer says he was threatened at Charlotte polling site

Via Finally! Black Poll Worker Calls Cops on Suspicious Caucasians for #LurkingWhileWhite

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events Law Enforcement ]

RT Kat Papa Johns Delicious @KatPapaJohns:

My ex-husband did it missionary style. He showed up uninvited from another country and told me every day how my thinking was wrong.

[ related topics: Marriage ]

How HBO Is Changing Sex Scenes Forever

In the wake of #MeToo, the network hired an intimacy coordinator to make the filming of sex scenes on ‘The Deuce’ safe for all. Now, they’re doing it for every show and movie they produce

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Technology and Culture Movies broadband Bay Area Television ]

Okay, I may have to make one of these. Shadow forwarded a long: Picture cube (animated GIF).

[ related topics: Animation ]

Every 2018 website: https://2018.bloomca.me/en

Via MeFi

NPR: What Happens When A Country Bans Spanking?

"It could be that bans come into place in countries that have already generally accepted that spanking is not the best discipline method," he said, or there may be other cultural factors involved. "We haven't answered with certainty" the impact of the bans, he says, noting that more research is needed.

Wonder what impacts (sorry) there are on fetish play...

[ related topics: Sociology ]

Washington Post — Newt Gingrich: 'We'll see whether or not the Kavanaugh fight was worth it' (video)

The Guardian: Dining club emails reveal Kavanaugh's close ties to Trump's solicitor general.

[ related topics: Current Events Video ]

Live long and prosper.

[ related topics: Photography Theater & Plays ]

RT lauren warren @iamlaurenp

Have...you met kids?

Elementary school teacher accused of having wine in classroom

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Wines and Spirits ]

BoingBoing: Steve Mnuchin stole Cesar Sayoc's house, a good rundown.

Mnuchin denied wrongdoing for years, before finally accepting a consent decree and stipulating to wronging homeowners. Mnuchin might have faced prosecution in California, except Kamala Harris -- then California Attorney General -- declined to prosecute the case her staff built against Mnuchin and his bank. Harris is one of the people targeted by the bombs that Sayoc is accused of mailing. At the federal level, Eric Holder (Obama's Attorney General and another bombing target) declined to bring criminal charges against any of the bankers involved in the crisis of 2008 and the epidemic of house thefts that followed it (today, Holder earns $3m/year working for an elite lawfirm servicing the banks he declined to prosecute).

[ related topics: Food Law Work, productivity and environment California Culture Birds Real Estate ]

Neat Twitter thread about Cal Poly's "Architecture Graveyard", a large region of open space with students' architectural experiments.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Architecture ]

The argument that family gatherings at religious buildings should hire enough security that they can take more than 3 SWAT team members in casualties doesn't seem like one that exactly supports the 2nd Amendment...

[ related topics: Religion Sociology Architecture ]

Sure, sex is great, but have you ever come out exactly even on number of bags of Quickrete bought vs the number of bags needed? Lesson learned: spend the $25 on an actual concrete float, using the tile trowel I kept catching the edge with the teeth.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Boats ]

Okay, my pipe cutter situation is pissing me off. What's the Festool of pipe cutters?

[ related topics: Woodworking Festool ]

RT Strong Towns @StrongTowns:

The sad truth is that helmets won't save a cyclist in the vast majority of car/bike crashes if the car is going above 20 mph. So why do we put so much pressure on riders on to strap in—and why *don't* we put more pressure on road engineers to #slowthecars?

Carlton Reid: I Do Not Wear A Bicycle Helmet

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Automobiles Pedal Power Bicycling Gambling ]

Thread by @qDot:

My AI blowjob thread was mildly popular, and I've been thinking about things I missed in the first round.

Time for a @SarahJamieLewis style "I'm still thinking about this" thread continuation.

CAN ALGORITHMS HAVE A SEXUAL ORIENTATION?

ANOTHER THREAD

(link on Twitter)

If you missed it, here's Kyle Machulis (@qDot)'s original Twitter thread on machine learning and blow jobs:

Ugh. I will be receiving this article for the foreseeable future, and while I love yelling at people for sending me dumb shit, I have things to do. In an effort to save time, I present

ONE DEGREE OF TRANSLATIONAL FREEDOM DOES NOT A BLOWJOB MAKE

A THREAD

About 'The Blowjob Paper:' Scientists Processed 109 Hours of Oral Sex to Develop an AI that Sucks Dick and the heterosexuality of the Autoblow, and Analysis of Movement in Oral Sex Performed Upon Men

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture Civil Liberties Education Artificial Intelligence Handicaps & Disabilities Government ]

Piano Genie: An Intelligent Musical Interface.

We introduce Piano Genie, an intelligent controller that maps 8-button input to a full 88-key piano in real time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRb0XAnUpIk

[ related topics: Music ]

California Is Hella Stoked It’s Not Mississippi.

Ted Cruz threatens that if Beto O’Rourke wins their Senate race, Texas will turn into California. Politicians routinely pander to crowds of extras from Deliverance, disparaging the Golden State to garner raucous applause from people who’ve literally never left Mississippi. The President of All Fifty United States, Which Includes California At Last Check, tweets all the damn time about what a festering shithole it is.

While California provides a distant, easy-to-mock effigy to burn, the facts tell a hella different story. The United States would be light years ahead of where it is today if it could borrow a tenth of California’s ingenuity, spirit, forward-thinking, and good fortune. Of course, if you’re elbow deep in the shiny new nacho cheese fountain at the Golden Corral in Fucklesburg, West Virginia², you probably (a) don’t read my blog, and (b) won’t believe anything that challenges John Denver’s ill-advised assertion that your state is “Almost Heaven.”

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Weblogs Invention and Design Current Events California Culture ]

Ugh. Replaced the starting capacitor on the drill press and I'm still getting just humming when I turn it on.

Dear Amazon recruiter: If I reply "no" to your direct email, what makes you think I'll reconsider if you hit me up via LinkedIn? If you aren't considering double asking, then you're wasting my time and I'm even less interested in considering your offer.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books ]

Here’s how to avoid problems with straight-ticket voting in Texas:

But according to the Texas secretary of state’s office, the voting machines are not at fault. Rather, the problems reported are the result of “voters hitting a button or using the selection wheel before the screen is finished rendering,” which de-selects the pre-filled candidate selection.

"before the screen is finished rendering". What the fuck century are we living in that a screen of a couple of candidate choices is taking longer to render than a display refresh?

[ related topics: Graphics ]

From today, it's OK in the US to thwart DRM to repair your stuff – if you keep the tools a secret

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

So I'm awash in the usual election SMS spam, and messages from someone calling themselves Chloe from "the Facebook claiming department", but the other day I got an email from someone representing themselves as a recruiter for Amazon's S3 group. It seemed personalized enough that I sent back a "no thank you, but thank you for thinking of me" message.

This morning I get a message from the same dude via LinkedIn. Way to read your email, dude. Sigh.

What function do recruiters serve, anyway?

[ related topics: Books Spam Monty Python Mathematics ]

How do y'all find new music and/or keep abreast of music in the popular culture? I'd like to find more bouncy pop-y modern music, but the reality is I don't listen to a lot of music, my music listening time has now become vocal practice time or I'd rather be listening to podcasts, so.... some "here's a quick overview of what the kids these days are listening to" without having to find a shopping experience to wander around in would be awesome.

Bonus: Some 9 year old music: Lily Allen | F You (Official Video - Clean Version)

[ related topics: Children and growing up Music Movies Invention and Design Sociology California Culture Pop Culture Video ]

Man, TV news current events advertising has gotten dark.

[ related topics: Photography Technology and Culture Current Events Consumerism and advertising Television ]

Mueller refers sex assault scheme targeting him to FBI for investigation. Apparently one Jacob Wohl, youngest person ever barred for life from the financial industry, was offering someone $20k to lie about having been sexually assaulted in a scheme to be publicized by Republical lobbyist and radio host Jack Burkman, through an organization called "Surefire Intelligence". The kicker:

Wohl declined to comment on his involvement with Surefire Intelligence. However, his email is listed in the domain records for Surefire Intelligence’s website and calls to a number listed on the Surefire Intelligence website went to a voicemail message which provided another phone number, listed in public records as belonging to Wohl’s mother.

Edit: Whoah, it gets even better. Someone's doing a dive into the online presence of "Surefire Intelligence"

Jacob Wohl is a moron and didn't realize that there are reverse image search engines other than Google when he was adding filters to these pictures. Yandex got this as the very first result.

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Sexual Culture Law Enforcement ]

It's interesting to see how forums are dealing with neo-Nazi trolls and reworking their standards and codes of conduct to navigate the challenges of allowing a community to communicate vs keeping those spaces safe and respectful: forum.rpg.net: New Ban: Do Not Post In Support of Trump or his Administration:

We are banning support of Donald Trump or his administration on the RPGnet forums. This is because his public comments, policies, and the makeup of his administration are so wholly incompatible with our values that formal political neutrality is not tenable. We can be welcoming to (for example) persons of every ethnicity who want to talk about games, or we can allow support for open white supremacy. Not both. Below will be an outline of the policy and a very incomplete set of citations.

[ related topics: Politics Games Invention and Design Bay Area moron Community Race ]

Florida Appeals Court Says Producing Passwords Is Testimonial And Protected By The Fifth Amendment

AP: Authorities probing immigrant Saudi sisters’ mystery deaths:

Their mother told detectives the day before the bodies were discovered, she received a call from an official at the Saudi Arabian Embassy, ordering the family to leave the U.S. because her daughters had applied for political asylum, New York police said Tuesday.

That we keep having any dealings with the Saudis is indication of corruption that goes so deep in society. And I'm not picking on Trump here, the US has a long history of coddling these monsters.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design moron Sociology Law Enforcement New York ]

Work is very serious stuff

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

RT Ken Cheng @kenchengcomedy:

terrorism is one of the only areas where white people do most of the work and get none of the credit

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Race ]

Fascinating: iPhones are Allergic to Helium. MEMS accelerometers are apparently susceptible to helium and hydrogen, but various Apple devices use MEMS timing oscillators from SiTime, and if you've got enough light gases in your environment, like from a helium leak in an MRI machine, your phone can stop functioning...

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Weblogs Nature and environment ]

In light of Donald Trump ruining Thanksgiving for thousands of US National Guard troops:

How the tragic killing of an American teenager halted the military border presence in 1997. US Marines in ghillie suits shot and killed an American who was carrying a .22 rifle while herding goats, within 300 yards of his home.

San Antonio Express-News: Border killing 20 years ago changed military tactics

From 1998: Washington Post: Report: U.S. 'failures' led to border death.

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