Flutterby™! From 2019-04-01 to 2019-04-30

Charlene thought tomorrow's lunch was worth a picture.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Publication date is yesterday, this is some of the results of the investigation Bezos asked for over the National Enquirer blackmail/extortion attempt on the Washington Post's political coverage: Daily Beast: Bezos Investigation Finds the Saudis Obtained His Private Data

The subtitle is "The National Enquirer’s lawyer tried to get me to say there was no hacking.", and as author Gavin de Becker dives into the agreement that AMI wanted him and Bezos to sign on to, it seems very likely that Saudi Arabia (and probably a bunch of other foreign agents) are reading IMSI data and snooping on SMS messages over-the-air.

As for the Saudi side of the equation: Not only does the kingdom have a close alliance with AMI—which owns the Enquirer, Us Weekly, the Star, Globe, Radar Online, and many other publications—but the Saudis have pursued investments and partnerships involving Rolling Stone, Variety, Deadline, the Robb Report, and National Geographic, among others.

Also worth thinking about: Your SMS messages are, at this point, essentially public. Switching to something like Signal is just a basic good idea.

[ related topics: Politics moron Space & Astronomy Law Journalism and Media Aviation - Helicopters ]

What was the Washington Post afraid of?. Fascinating read on reporting on allegations against CBS exec Jeff Fager of sexual assault.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

This is hilarious, on so many levels: LA Times: For cramped New York, an expanding dining scene, an April Fools joke I can get behind.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Food New York ]

Tech Dirt: What if Google and Facebook admitted that all this ad targeting really doesn't work that well?

Guillaume Chaslot: How Algorithms Can Learn to Discredit the Media Defamation is efficient, and AIs may have already figured it out:

During a long bus ride across France, my neighbor was watching YouTube for hours, watching the auto-play recommendations at the end of the video. Since I worked on the algorithm that computes these recommendations, I was curious what they were about. In one of these videos, the topic was the extermination of a quarter of the world’s population. I joked: “So who wants us dead?” he explained: “There is a secret plan from the government. Hundreds of videos say so! The media is hiding it from you. Go to YouTube, and you’ll discover the truth!”. His excitement was simultaneously touching and disturbing.

The algorithm I worked on had learned to exploit his credulity.

YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant — Proposals to change recommendations and curb conspiracies were sacrificed for engagement, staff say.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Currency Video Public Transportation ]

Mosquitoes Sucked Less Blood (and Had Less Sex) While Listening to Skrillex, Study Finds

The authors of the new study, published March 25 in the journal Acta Tropica, wanted to test whether loud music could be used to manipulate mosquito behavior as an "environmentally friendly" alternative to insecticides. Because mating and blood-sucking are the main means by which mosquitoes transmit deadly diseases like Zika virus and dengue fever, interrupting those behaviors with obnoxious noise could also mitigate the spread of disease, the authors wrote.

[ related topics: Music Erotic Sexual Culture virus Invention and Design Pop Culture Model Building ]

QFT: "The U.S. government, in other words, does not exist to serve the interests of Americans through either its foreign or its domestic policies; rather, it exists to perpetuate the interests of the globalized oligarchy."

[ related topics: History moron ]

I can vouch for the predecessor Sri Lankan cookbook, A Taste of Serendib, and have signed up for Mary Anne Mohanraj's update right out of the gate: https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...tofserendib/a-feast-of-serendib?

[ related topics: Erotic ]

So it's taken us 80 years or so to build out this infrastructure, and it turns out it hasn't paid for itself so we need to double-down and build it again... At our current pace it'll take 80 years to repair all the structurally deficient bridges in the US, a report finds

(CNN) — Officials have dubbed Monday's bridge collapse in Tennessee a freak accident, but that might be turning a blind eye to a larger issue.

Bridges across the United States are deteriorating, and a new report estimates it will take more than 80 years to fix all of them.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Chattanooga Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Evidence of the failure of the education system: Florida DJs May Face Felony for April Fools' Water Joke Worse Than Rubio's

Florida country radio morning-show hosts Val St. John and Scott Fish are currently serving indefinite suspensions and possibly worse over a successful April Fools' Day prank. They told their listeners that "dihydrogen monoxide" was coming out of their taps. Dihydrogen monoxide is water.

[ related topics: Education ]

The problem with limited liability companies is that it's easy to extract value and leave others holding the externalities: Judge: PG&E Paid Out Stock Dividends Instead of Trimming Trees

PG&E remains on probation for the 2010 pipeline explosion, which killed eight people and leveled a neighborhood. State fire investigators also blamed PG&E for 18 of the more than 170 wildfires that swept Northern California in October 2017. And the utility has acknowledged that its equipment likely started the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, which destroyed nearly 14,000 homes in the town of Paradise and killed 85 people.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Law Current Events California Culture Pyrotechnics Economics ]

As home pot growers left the region last year, Sonoma Clean Power lost $10 million in revenue

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Go home, Facebook, you're drunk.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Men with beards make better partners, study suggests.

Journal of Evolutionary Biology: The masculinity paradox: facial masculinity and beardedness interact to determine women's ratings of men's facial attractiveness contains this handy graph:

Hat tip to https://researchbuzz.me/

[ related topics: Photography Current Events ]

I owe a whole bunch of friends and acquaintances book reviews, but on Tuesday evening, Charlene got a couple of copies of Mieke Eerkens' All Ships Follow Me: A Family Memoir of War Across Three Continents. I read the preface, and then devoured it in one continuous read.

It's the tale of her father, who was a young boy of Dutch descent living a relatively privileged life in Indonesia when the Japanese invaded it in World War II, and who then survived internment there, and her mother, who was the child of Dutch parents who were members of the NSB. The look at that latter situation, the young girl with parents who were affiliated with an organization associated with Nazi collaboration, and the traumas not just of war but of post-war reconciliation and social adjustment, was the part that was most enlightening.

A good look exploration of inter-generational trauma, but also of how a society deals with the cascade of effects that come from casual hate.

We've got two copies that we'll likely be loaning around, but if you're looking for a read that doesn't map easily to current events, but definitely opens up pondering the implications of some of them, I'd recommend this one.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books History Sociology Machinery Maps and Mapping ]

USA Today: COPY, PASTE, LEGISLATE You elected them to write new laws. They’re letting corporations do it instead.

Center for Public Integrity version

Graphic treatment (which feels kinda superfluous) Copy, paste, legislate — We looked for legislation that was written by special interests. We found it in all 50 states.

An investigation by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity has found that in the last eight years, more than 10,000 bills introduced in statehouses nationwide were almost entirely copied from bills written by special interests.

Shorter version in this Twitter thread

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Invention and Design Law Current Events Guns Government ]

93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs

TLDR: read the paper and view the gallery of pretty Perl programs.

In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Software Engineering Community hubris ]

Secret Life of an Autistic Stripper:

I've always had trouble reading social cues, but in the strip club, where rules and roles are crystal clear, I finally learned to connect.

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Archival ]

France's "Yellow Vest" protestors destroy 75% of traffic radar, resulting in a 17% increase in traffic deaths

OPINION: Why the yellow vests are accountable for over 100 deaths in France

Wonder if this will impact some of the attempts to legislate around reproductive policy and abortion: Oral Sex Appears to Have an Intriguing Link to Miscarriage Risk

The paper is Oral sex is associated with reduced incidence of recurrent miscarriage. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jri.2019.03.005

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Law ]

Pro Publica: The IRS Tried to Take on the Ultrawealthy. It Didn’t Go Well.

Ten years ago, the tax agency formed a special team to unravel the complex tax-lowering strategies of the nation’s wealthiest people. But with big money — and Congress — arrayed against the team, it never had a chance.

[ related topics: Politics Currency Government ]

RT PJ Sage ‏ @peejsage

⁦I need to take a moment to respond to @LinderPG⁩ & ⁦@PittsburghPG’s⁩ uncritical celebration of ⁦@MarinusAI⁩ creating tools for cops to further target marginalized communities of sex workers

(thread)

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Law Enforcement Community ]

Twitter thread of compiler/language errors that are quines. Eg:

$ cat /tmp/quine.pl
Illegal division by zero at /tmp/quine.pl line 1.
$ perl /tmp/quine.pl
Illegal division by zero at /tmp/quine.pl line 1.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source hubris ]

Catching up on older email, a bunch of links from Shadow. I don't think any of these are repeats:

• Seed is a web comic about an AI whose budget was cut and was presumably shut off, and a young woman who finds a mysterious presence that might be an ally, and I'm hooked.
• Twig is a web serial by the author of Worm.
• What writing a multithreaded program feels like, but as I watch our cats play various games around food, also interesting to watch how these cute little puppies can't stay in their lane.
• QFT: RT Ian Devlin @iandevlin (Reddit image cap):

Fancy browser developer tools are great and all, but border: 1px solid red; has helped me figure things out more often than I can remember.

• The White Line trail is Sketchy and Deadly 💀 (YouTube video), on a mountain bike trail near Sedona that's terrifying and beautiful.
• That's gonna be an easy ride, a picture of yet another bike marked trail, this one's blocked by trees and a power pole in the middle.

[ related topics: Games Movies virus Nature and environment Food Bay Area Software Engineering Writing Artificial Intelligence Race Video Bicycling ]

RT Michael Renner @terrorobe:

OR: "Why do people find DNS so difficult? It's just cache invalidation and naming things."

/ht @__edorian

QOTD, Mandy J Pants: "Decided I'm going to write a safe-sex instructional manual for the BDSM & kink community.

"Working title: Beat, Play, Glove."

[ related topics: Quotes Erotic Sexual Culture Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Community Clothing ]

‘She lies to everyone’: Feds say Mar-a-Lago intruder had hidden-camera detector in hotel

Secret Service agent Samuel Ivanovich, who interviewed Zhang on the day of her arrest, testified at the hearing. He stated that when another agent put Zhang’s thumb-drive into his computer, it immediately began to install files, a “very out-of-the-ordinary” event that he had never seen happen before during this kind of analysis. The agent had to immediately stop the analysis to halt any further corruption of his computer, Ivanovich said. The analysis is ongoing but still inconclusive, he testified.

Via https://twitter.com/WeldPond/status/1115332247786274816

[ related topics: Politics Photography moron Current Events Travel ]

The more I get called upon to call square dancing for various groups the more I really appreciate the Van Halen brown M&Ms story.

So a lot of people are linking to that thread about DNA sequencing fish, and how the electrophoresis suggested that the fish they were served was nothing like what was advertised. And in at least one case salmon purchased from a grocery store matched body louse.

There are two things here: One is that, yes, there's a lot of seafood fraud (though how Red Tuna visually matches Tilapia I'll never know), but the other is: Think about how people take DNA criminal evidence as gospel...

https://twitter.com/AwesomeBioTA/status/1114262375446663168

[ related topics: Bioinformatics Law ]

St. Louis gave teens free birth control, and they now have very low abortion rates

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

‘Blowin’ Up’ Suggests We Treat Sex Workers as Humans, Not Criminals

We spoke with director Stephanie Wang-Breal about the growing sex work decriminalization movement and the complicated truth about the lives of Asian massage parlor workers

Seems like it's one that'd be worth seeing.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology Work, productivity and environment California Culture ]

Looking for something brainless to do a few Fridays ago, Charlene and I ended up watching Fighting with my Family. Which was a really well done exactly what you think it's going to be movie.

And we haven't gotten to it yet, but we both expressed interest in watching the "Fighting With My Family" documentary on which the movie was based.

Anyway, I'm not totally able to let it just be entertainment, but Roxy Comics take on Wrassle-Mania was cool. "Costumed murder gymnastics" indeed.

[ related topics: Movies Sociology Sports Comics ]

Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity of the University of Minnesota Law School: Low Income Displacement and Concentration in U.S. Census Tracts, 2000 to 2016 (map)

[ related topics: Children and growing up Education Maps and Mapping ]

Neuroscience Reveals 50-Year-Olds Can Have the Brains of 25-Year-Olds If They Meditate. Not sure why I'd want the brain of a 25 year old; I not only know a lot more, I think my decision-making processes are much better evolved now.'

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Television ]

Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa:

A global team reviews audio clips in an effort to help the voice-activated assistant respond to commands.

Amazon reportedly employs thousands of people to listen to your Alexa conversations

[ related topics: Books Music Current Events Pop Culture ]

ACLU Comment on Julian Assange Arrest:

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Holy shit! Although there are a lot of potential problems with the study, the magnitude of the shifts is pretty amazing. Autism symptoms reduced nearly 50% two years after fecal transplant. Radical Fecal Transplant Therapy in Kids Has Reduced Their Autism Severity by 47%

The article in Nature: Long-term benefit of Microbiota Transfer Therapy on autism symptoms and gut microbiota:

Many studies have reported abnormal gut microbiota in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), suggesting a link between gut microbiome and autism-like behaviors. Modifying the gut microbiome is a potential route to improve gastrointestinal (GI) and behavioral symptoms in children with ASD, and fecal microbiota transplant could transform the dysbiotic gut microbiome toward a healthy one by delivering a large number of commensal microbes from a healthy donor. We previously performed an open-label trial of Microbiota Transfer Therapy (MTT) that combined antibiotics, a bowel cleanse, a stomach-acid suppressant, and fecal microbiota transplant, and observed significant improvements in GI symptoms, autism-related symptoms, and gut microbiota. Here, we report on a follow-up with the same 18 participants two years after treatment was completed. Notably, most improvements in GI symptoms were maintained, and autism-related symptoms improved even more after the end of treatment. Important changes in gut microbiota at the end of treatment remained at follow-up, including significant increases in bacterial diversity and relative abundances of Bifidobacteria and Prevotella. Our observations demonstrate the long-term safety and efficacy of MTT as a potential therapy to treat children with ASD who have GI problems, and warrant a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in the future.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-42183-0

[ related topics: Children and growing up Privacy Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health Nature and environment Invention and Design Current Events Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Fantastic Twitter thread on "The Great Migration" and automation and Southern farm labor. Should be read in the context of modern immigration policy and farm labor and creating a by-definition criminal underclass labor-force...

Ian Cognito: Comedian dies on stage in Bicester

"He was like his old self, his voice was loud. I was thinking 'he's having such a good gig'," Mr Bird said.

Mr Bird said Cognito had even joked about his health during his set, telling the audience: "Imagine if I died in front of you lot here."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Current Events Monty Python Birds ]

So Matrix.org bills itself as "An open network for secure, decentralized communication."

Someone cracked their internal network wide open and started opening Github issues on their findings. Apparently that account was quickly suspended, but there's a repost of the security issues that has some constructive policy suggestions that are worth a read-through.

[ related topics: broadband ]

Sometimes she's actually cute.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Think we're getting pretty close on the design for this year's Bodega Bay Wooden Boat Challenge... https://youtu.be/EXYjvsjwfkI

[ related topics: California Culture Graphic Design Boats Machinery ]

Affixing the rudder

[ related topics: Photography ]

Second pass at the rig geometry

[ related topics: Photography ]

Boat interior

[ related topics: Photography Boats Machinery ]

In light of Paris' Notre Dame cathedral burning down today, a thread on the renovation and maintenance of the structure: RT Maggie Koerth-Baker @maggiekb1

Husband (architect and engineer) pointed out that whoever the contractor on this Notre Dame renovation was, they're legally and financially fucked now. That got me curious about the firm ... which led to some old articles and, oh man, the aftermath of this is gonna be messy ...

Articles linked:

• Notre Dame Cathedral Is Crumbling. Who Will Help Save It?
• NYT from 1992: Paris Journal; To Notre Dame's Rescue, Sickly Gargoyles and All
• Rescuing Notre-Dame: France’s Iconic Cathedral Raises Funds for Restoration via French Cultural Center
• The Notre-Dame Cathedral is falling apart — and the U.S. is fixing it

Of course when I first read of the fire, I saw a mention that it was being done in the context of a $6.8M renovation, and I wondered what the conversion rate was between millions of dollars and hushed up molesting priests. Let's put this in perspective: Art doesn't become famous because of something intrinsic (see Electroniccopyavailableat:https://ssrn.com/abstract=32583181Fame as an Illusion of Creativity: Evidence from the Pioneers of Abstract Art, doi:10.2139/ssrn.3258318 ), this is a monument to an institution of institutionalized abuse, and maybe we should start evaluating our cultural treasures by what they really stand for, rather than how they're romanticized in a Victor Hugo novel...

[ related topics: Open Source Sociology Current Events Art & Culture Pyrotechnics Architecture Marriage Woodworking ]

Just so I have a record of it somewhere: Threw my back out (twisting to grab something) on the couch on Sunday. It hurts like hell. Just keep powering through it, I guess...

YouTube's New Fact-Check Tool Flagged Notre Dame Fire Coverage And Attached An Article About 9/11

Not only can they recommend Nazi videos when you're watching cute cats, they can discredit breaking news. Good on ya there, YouTube...

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Journalism and Media Pyrotechnics ]

Neuropsychologia: Biological and cognitive underpinnings of religious fundamentalism.

Abstract Beliefs profoundly affect people's lives, but their cognitive and neural pathways are poorly understood. Although previous research has identified the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) as critical to representing religious beliefs, the means by which vmPFC enables religious belief is uncertain. We hypothesized that the vmPFC represents diverse religious beliefs and that a vmPFC lesion would be associated with religious fundamentalism, or the narrowing of religious beliefs. To test this prediction, we assessed religious adherence with a widely-used religious fundamentalism scale in a large sample of 119 patients with penetrating traumatic brain injury (pTBI). If the vmPFC is crucial to modulating diverse personal religious beliefs, we predicted that pTBI patients with lesions to the vmPFC would exhibit greater fundamentalism, and that this would be modulated by cognitive flexibility and trait openness. Instead, we found that participants with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) lesions have fundamentalist beliefs similar to patients with vmPFC lesions and that the effect of a dlPFC lesion on fundamentalism was significantly mediated by decreased cognitive flexibility and openness. These findings indicate that cognitive flexibility and openness are necessary for flexible and adaptive religious commitment, and that such diversity of religious thought is dependent on dlPFC functionality.

doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.04.009

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama ]

RT Jay Rosen @jayrosen_nyu:

A sentence about Facebook and news that I want you to read and ponder. "Supporting high-quality outlets would inevitably make it look like the platform was supporting liberals, which could lead to trouble in Washington, a town run mainly by conservatives."

And a link to where the quote came from: Wired: 15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook:

Scandals. Backstabbing. Resignations. Record profits. Time Bombs. In early 2018, Mark Zuckerberg set out to fix Facebook. Here's how that turned out.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Oh this is brilliant: RT Colin Charles @bytebot

A lot has been said about the Uber IPO prospectus but maybe none as cogent as this FT comment.

He then embeds a comment, which is behind a paywall, as an image:

horsesatemymoney

Abbreviated version of prospectus

We don't make money

We probably will never make money

Our current business relies on shareholders to fund cheap cab rides in the hope that regulators will let us become a monopoly and charge whatever we want but the regulators are not playing along

We have therefore spent more money expanding into other low margin highly competitive activities like food delivery or trucking despite there being lots of specialist logistics firms so not obvious how we are going to make any money there either.

We hope in the future there will be driverless cars and that we can then make money because no drivers but other people are developing them too

We have annoyed lots of regulators so we have lots of disputes and problems with regulators

We don't pay much tax and have done lots of aggressive tax planning and so we have lots of disputes and problems with tax authorities

We don't employ anyone (or we say we don't) but we have lots of de facto employees and so we have lots of disputes and problems with drivers and employment tribunals

We don't actually own many assets because we managed to get our drivers to provide their own cars

We have an app but other cab companies also have apps

Current investors want to get out so we hope you will buy some shares anyway because you have heard of us also we need more money to fund the businesses that don't make money

We are expanding into more business lines that don't make money and we need more money to fund those

We are really big and you have heard of us plus we say we are a tech disruptor so don't worry that we make no money it will all be great because you will be an Uber investor

[ related topics: Politics Food Work, productivity and environment Machinery Currency ]

Jessica Valenti: What Does #MeToo Repentance Look Like?

Of all of the high-profile men who have been accused of sexual misbehavior — from violent assaults to indecent exposure — not one has demonstrated a sustained or serious commitment to making amends. There have been no large public donations to organizations that fight sexual violence, no volunteer hours put in at women’s shelters, no discussion of books read or advice taken.

Why is it so hard to just issue a sincere apology?

[ related topics: Books Erotic Sexual Culture Community ]

SPIDER-MAN BEEN BLACK — The MICHEAUX MISSION

There was one detail that does stick out, however. My mother did not play with the images her kids were exposed to. All the art in our house had black people in them. Our books had to feature Black characters or, at the very least, anthropomorphic animals (lot of Beatrix Potter and Frog & Toad in my house.) My sister had all Black baby dolls, and me and my brother were only supposed to play with Black/nonwhite action figures.

If you know anything about nerdom, you can figure out how this was a problem. ...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Books Art & Culture Real Estate ]

Fantastic interactive introduction to the Fourier transform. Worth it for that opening animated GIF alone.

[ related topics: Animation ]

From MeFi: My God it's full of STARS, comes 1,060-hour image of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) captured by Amateur Astronomers.

The image is a mosaic made of 16 smaller fields of view, which, once stitched together form a high-resolution image of 204 Million of pixels! As of matter of fact, this is not the work of a single person but by a team of five french amateur astronomers called "Ciel Austral":  Jean Claude CANONNE, Philippe BERNHARD, Didier CHAPLAIN, Nicolas OUTTERS et Laurent BOURGON.

"Ciel Austral" owns a remotely-controlled observatory located in the most prestigious skies of the planet, in Chile, and more precisely at the El Sauce Observatory (Coquimbo Region). A 160-mm APO-refractor telescope and a Moravian CCD were used to obtain this wonderful field. The datasets were taken over several months, ranging from 2018 and 2019. The heavy files handled represent 620 GB and needed few hundreds of hours to get out of the image processing step! Once stacked together, they make up the stunning figure of 1060 hours of exposure. If you are more curious, we invite you having a look at their official website here.

Le Grand Nuage de Magellan

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Space & Astronomy Astronomy Work, productivity and environment ]

Kevin Drum (in Mother Jones): Money Talks, and It Says Climate Change Is Real.

When Republican senators make fools of themselves pretending that climate change is fake, they know there are no consequences for being wrong.¹ Traders don’t have that luxury. What they care about is accurately hedging risk, and the only way to do that is to listen to climate scientists and make their bets based on the real world. So regardless of whether they’re personally liberal or conservative, that’s what they do.

[ related topics: Music Currency Global Warming ]

Really? We've got people driving around Petaluma with snow tires? While we're complaining about potholes?

Raspberry Pi + eInk display calendar

I would love a full-color eink display. Charlene and I would both like some digital picture frames, but the ones commercially available are all pretty crappy emissive displays that have to do some sort of presence and light detection to turn on and off.

The Atlantic — The Truth About Dentistry — It’s much less scientific—and more prone to gratuitous procedures—than you may think.

Some things to ponder as I wonder why my dentist is suggesting 4 month intervals on check-ups...

Well, he's not wrong... Media Matters audio: Rush Limbaugh: "Whenever you hear" the left attack white supremacy, "what they're really talking about is the founding of the country and it's roots in Christianity"

[ related topics: Religion Music Journalism and Media Race Video ]

Super fun night last night calling fill-in for Lawrence at the Singles & Pairs in Santa Rosa! It's always a challenge stepping up in front of a new floor and keeping them entertained and motivated while I figure out how their square dance style and knowledge interacts with my own

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Washington Post has posted the Mueller report for download, and has running commentary as their reporters read it and as reactions come in

Also seen floating around the Barr version of the Gospels, including Matthew 22:36-39:

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘████ ███ ██ █████ ██ ██ ████ ██ ██ yourself.’

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Politics Humor Graphics Sports Boats ]

Facebook admits to storing plaintext passwords for millions of Instagram users

The announcement came as an update to an incident from last month when the company admitted to storing plaintext passwords for hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram accounts.

New Yorker: How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet is interesting in chronicling many more ways in which money is betting on climate change. If human-caused climate change is a false hypothesis, there's a shitload of money to be made betting against it, but, oddly, nobody is...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Space & Astronomy Currency Global Warming ]

The djinn nature of modern computing really comes to the fore when Siri uses phrases referring to accidental summoning...

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

RT Dread Singles 🔜 TCAF @hottestsingles:

“Always punch up never down” I whisper viciously as God’s eyes widen with the horror of recognition...

[ related topics: Religion ]

At Book Passage for Mieke Eerkens taking about her book All Ships Follow Me. A deep look into the traumas of war that follow down the generations, very recommended.

[ related topics: Books History Machinery ]

Republican discussed violent attacks and surveillance with rightwingers — Washington state representative Matt Shea exchanged messages with far-right figures, chat records obtained by the Guardian reveal

The chats on the messaging app Signal took place in the days leading up to a supposed “Antifa revolt” on 4 November 2017. Throughout late October, far-right media outlets had been stoking fears of political conflict on the basis of planned peaceful protests by a small leftist group.

[ related topics: Politics History moron Journalism and Media Conspiracy Government ]

Hardening SSH with 2fa. I'm gonna end up carrying around Ubikeys, aren't I?

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

Rep. Duncan Hunter Faked a Border Wall Crossing on Facebook

Had Hunter actually crossed the border, he would have created even more trouble for himself. The congressman is currently out on bail because he has been indicted for allegedly misusing campaign funds for personal family expenses to pay for luxury family vacations, dentistry and other bills, and even his children’s school lunches. According to the terms of his bail, Hunter is not allowed to leave the country, so if he had actually crossed over to Mexico, it would have been a violation of his bail.

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

NPR: In a hot labor market, some employees are ghosting on bad bosses

Two things stand out:

• Good for the lifeguard who bailed after getting screwed over. Hopefully the weasels who screwed him over will start to look at what they're paying vs what they lost and reconsider their hiring practices. If an employee has to come back and ask for a raise (especially in light of other people trying to hire them away), it means that the employer is not putting the effort in to manage the relationship.
• Several of the examples here involve abusive scary situations, yet somehow the employees who leave think that this will reflect badly on the employee, and not the employer. This sort of institutionalized abuse is bullshit and we should call it out.

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

Panel Paper: Does Luxury Housing Construction Increase Nearby Rents?

Preliminary results using a spatial difference-in-differences approach suggest that any induced demand effects are overwhelmed by the effect of increased supply. In neighborhoods where new apartment complexes were completed between 2014-2016, rents in existing units near the new apartments declined relative to neighborhoods that did not see new construction until 2018. Changes in in-migration appear to drive this result. Although the total number of migrants from high-income neighborhoods to the new construction neighborhoods increases after the new units are completed, the number of high-income arrivals to previously existing units actually decreases, as the new units absorb a substantial portion of these households. On the whole, our results suggest that—on average and in the short-run—new construction lowers rents in gentrifying neighborhoods.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Machinery Fabrication Real Estate Model Building ]

A couple of month's ago I read Buzzy Martin's Don't Shoot! I'm The Guitar Man. It didn't land at first, it felt like a bunch of disconnected anecdotes, but at some point I realized that it felt that way because the author was trying to make sense of a bizarre environment that made no sense.

I've long been a fan of restorative justice, but I'm thinking that the notions may need to go deeper and broader than anything we can get from our current system. I'm interested in more views like this: Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind

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

For some, working in Bay Area includes flight plans:

“I have to plan ahead, but I can get round-trip tickets for $191,” Maldonado told me. “If I do that every week, that’s almost $800 a month. But I can stay with my mother here, and our mortgage in Arizona is $1,800. It pencils out.”

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Aviation Work, productivity and environment California Culture Travel ]

Helloooo money laundering: RT Brit @thatgirlfrmOhio:

Bernie spent $444k of campaign dollars on his own books in 2015

https://www.fec.gov/data/disbu...amount=400000&line_number=F3P-23

[ related topics: Books Currency Pedal Power Bicycling ]

I have been paying TurboTax their whatever just because it's easy, but the fact that they get a hundred something bucks out of me because of legislative value capture is getting harder and harder to stomach. And apparently they aren't even abiding by the terms of that very well:

Here’s How TurboTax Just Tricked You Into Paying to File Your Taxes — Come along as we try to file our taxes for free on TurboTax!

[ related topics: Politics Government ]

Looking innocent. Preparing an ambush.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Sacramento Bee opinion: Did Sheriff Scott Jones get away with going rogue? Apparently so.

This is fascinating: There's a bot scanning for weak Ethereum wallets, and emptying them. There's similar evidence that the same thing might be happening on the Bitcoin blockchain. There is, of course, no recourse should this happen to you.

What constitutes a strong wallet key? How do you end up generating weak wallet keys? Given the trend towards exponential compute, when does a strong wallet key become a weak wallet key?

A 'Blockchain Bandit' Is Guessing Private Keys and Scoring Millions

Facebook urged to tackle spread of fake profiles used by US police

A Guardian report recently revealed a secret network of accounts operated by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement

[ related topics: broadband Law Enforcement ]

So far as I can tell, the business model of Accenture is essentially to hire inexperienced kids just out of college, burn them out with promise of a partnership, but that partnership will never come because a partner is someone whose family is well enough connected that they can bring in patronage business from other "born rich" kids.

This failure speaks more to failures of Hertz management in vendor selection than anything...

Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz: Car hire biz demands $32m+ for 'defective' cyber-revamp:

Among the most mind-boggling allegations in Hertz's filed complaint is that Accenture didn't incorporate a responsive design, in which webpages automatically resize to accommodate the visitor's screen size whether they are using a phone, tablet, desktop, or laptop.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Andersen/Accenture Sociology Automobiles Graphic Design Education ]

RT Scott Littlehale @FactChecker23

Why rising construction costs?

Consider the net "birth" rate of contractors ...

It's a more likely suspect than hourly labor costs (which haven't risen at extraordinary rates) as responsible for fast-rising const producer prices in the current cycle. https://www.bls.gov/web/cewbd/table10_4.txt

[ related topics: Photography Machinery Fabrication Pedal Power Bicycling Model Building ]

V8: A year with Spectre: a V8 perspective.

On January 3, 2018, Google Project Zero and others disclosed the first three of a new class of vulnerabilities that affect CPUs that perform speculative execution, dubbed Spectre and Meltdown. Using the speculative execution mechanisms of CPUs, an attacker could temporarily bypass both implicit and explicit safety checks in code that prevent programs from reading unauthorized data in memory. While processor speculation was designed to be a microarchitectural detail, invisible at the architectural level, carefully crafted programs could read unauthorized information in speculation and disclose it through side channels such as the execution time of a program fragment.

And, of course, JavaScript could be used to mount an attack, so the V8 team started looking at mitigation techniques.

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Software Engineering ]

The pun is almost a little too much, but the concept is cool. Via Shadow: Built this HANDY bike wall mount

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

How Nest, designed to keep intruders out of people’s homes, effectively allowed hackers to get in

Tara Thomas thought her daughter was just having nightmares. “There’s a monster in my room,” the almost-3-year-old would say, sometimes pointing to the green light on the Nest Cam installed on the wall above her bed.

Spoiler: She was right.

Security involves building multi-tiered systems which prevent compromise at several levels. This may involve not putting externally managed two-way AV systems in bedrooms.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Furniture ]

A browser plug-in to make reCaptcha's "I'm not a robot" accurate. It replaces the "I'm not a robot" to "I want to do unpaid image classification".

[ related topics: Weblogs Robotics ]

Satanic Temple gains tax-exempt religion status from the IRS.

[ related topics: Religion Politics moron Sociology Current Events California Culture ]

Shadow forwarded along a brilliant use for old patch panels: a patch panel key ring holder. I'd do one, except that I can never keep the little plastic retention prongs from breaking off my RJ connectors.

[ related topics: tolkien ]

Via Shadow: Runtime error. Or kind of a worst-case scenario of if your phone falls while you're bicycling...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Nature and environment Law Sports Pedal Power Bicycling ]

So it turns out that the difference between the American Taliban and ISIS really does come down to Christian vs Muslim, and not any substantive policy distinction. Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too.

[ related topics: Religion Race ]

But, please, tell me again how anti-prostitution laws protect women... Woman accused of performing sex act on Robert Kraft at Jupiter day spa arrested

Police said Mingbi's safety deposit box at Bank of America contained approximately $43,800 in U.S. currency.

Because, yes, what a woman who's clearly a trafficked victim most needs is her personal finances disclosed by police. Presumably before they confiscate that money.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Nature and environment Astronomy Current Events Law Enforcement Currency Government ]

The Onion: CDC Warns Once-Eradicated Jitterbug Spreading Across Country At Rate Not Seen Since 1940s

So by my calculations this suggests that the square dancing revival is due any minute now... But some health news about a few square dance callers, and the fact that the last two weeks have had me calling more than my usual, also have me thinking a bit about economics.

I've long said that the perfect business space is one where your business is established and there's room for one and a half participants in the market: Room to grow, not enough room for someone else to start up in it.

But in some kinds of markets there's a macro-economic effect, popularity induces demand. And, of course, pricing has a big impact.

Square dancing likely won't be anything but a hobby to me, unless I can build enough of a scene that there are still dancers around who want to keep me coming out to play when I hit retirement age, but it in this space where local callers are making $500 for a one night stand on many weekend nights (I'm still working on that level of comfort with brand new dancers), and $150 or so for two or three hours work (plus transit time) for an evening.

And if I were willing to give any more time to this particular hobby, I could drop into that space as current callers drop out.

However, that's not enough money to drag me out for the money, and I believe that if I do that, then I'll just end up calling for those groups that are slowly withering away, and in 5-10 years the market will dry up entirely.

So there's this weird space where the North Bay needs two or three more up-and coming callers, there's maybe the space in the market to absorb them, but if they step into that space, then square dancing is gonna wither and fade.

Not a fully-formed thought, just the sort of thing I ponder.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Invention and Design Food Space & Astronomy Current Events Work, productivity and environment California Culture Currency Economics Public Transportation ]

Rich guys are most likely to have no idea what they’re talking about, study suggests

Research by John Jerram and Nikki Shure of the University College of London, and Phil Parker of Australian Catholic University attempted to measure the pervasiveness of this trait in society and identify its most ardent practitioners.

[ related topics: Religion Education ]

Sex Worker Advocates Livid About ‘Pretext of Rescue’ After Authorities Arrest Women Related to Robert Kraft Investigation

The arrests "[bring] to light the intent of laws designed to assist those who have been thought to be trafficked," Cristine Sardina, the director of sex worker advocacy group Desiree Alliance told Newsweek in an email. "The guise of law enforcement infiltrating the establishment for human and sex trafficking is of little merit when those who were under surveillance for a long period of time were arrested and not offered services under the TVPRA or any [federal or state] resources related to trafficking. Who benefits? Certainly not the women who were arrested under the pretext of rescue."

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Law Enforcement Personal Lubricant Government ]

It requires registration, but it's really good. Via Elf Sternberg: Consent and Refusal Are Not the Only Talking Points in Sex — The language of sexual negotiation must go far beyond ‘consent’ and ‘refusal’ if we are to foster ethical, autonomous sex/a>

I propose centring invitations rather than requests in our model of the language of sexual initiation. This opens up a whole set of new ethical and pragmatic questions. When are sexual invitations felicitous and appropriate, and who has authority to issue them to whom? Since invitations strike a complex balance between welcoming and leaving the recipient free, what maintains this balance and what throws it off-kilter? An invitation might be degrading by being insufficiently welcoming, for instance. Or it might be coercive by being too pressing. Notice that if I invite you, appropriately, to have sex with me, then consent and refusal are not even the right categories of speech acts when it comes to your uptake. It is not felicitous to consent to an invitation; rather, one accepts it or turns it down. So the consent model distorts our understanding of how a great deal of sex is initiated, including in particular pleasurable, ethical sex.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Ethics tolkien Invention and Design ]

So apparently American Fidelity's solution to employees actually using their Flexible Spending Accounts is to make their reimbursement software so difficult to use that there's no way to get the money out.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Currency ]

How one Canadian doctor kept Thalidomde's harm from America:

The year was 1960. A new West German wonder drug, thalidomide, was about to hit the U.S. market. Just one thing stood in its way: A Canadian-born doctor, Frances Kelsey, whose work ultimately spared thousands of American lives and preventing much needless suffering. This excerpt, from the upcoming book Why Dissent Matters by William Kaplan, tells the story

Sounds like that's gotta go on my reading list...

[ related topics: Books Health Invention and Design Current Events Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

Before I started for Cocoa, I used to think Mac programmers were unreasonable in their constant whining about it. Today, while trying to figure out some constraint issues? I'm teetering on the edge of violence.

[ related topics: Macintosh ]