Flutterby™! From 2019-12-01 to 2019-12-31

Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: a multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer.

RESULTS: In the 2 groups uncertain about receiving intercessory prayer, complications occurred in 52% (315/604) of patients who received intercessory prayer versus 51% (304/597) of those who did not (relative risk 1.02, 95% CI 0.92-1.15). Complications occurred in 59% (352/601) of patients certain of receiving intercessory prayer compared with the 52% (315/604) of those uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer (relative risk 1.14, 95% CI 1.02-1.28). Major events and 30-day mortality were similar across the 3 groups.

CONCLUSIONS: Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.

In other words: Pray for someone's health, or don't, that doesn't have an impact on outcomes, but don't tell them you're praying for them, because that has a negative impact on outcomes.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ahj.2005.05.028

[ related topics: Religion Health ]

Care About Journalism? Maybe You Should Cancel Your Newspaper

If an out-of-town owner is gutting your local paper, think about who’s getting your money.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Journalism and Media Currency ]

We went down to Fresno for Thanksgiving to visit with Charlene's family. Someone mentioned Raphio Chocolate, so we went by their unassuming strip mall presence, tasted a few chocolates, bought some, and put ourselves on the waiting list for a tour, not optimistic on Thanksgiving weekend.

We were planning on coming home yesterday afternoon, but a spot opened up on the 4:30 tour last night so we postponed the trip (making our arrival home later, and risking driving through the storm front predicted to come through), and we are super glad we did.

Raphio does small batch bean to bar processor. Their largest batch size is 100 lbs. They do single-origin bars, and some flavors in conjunction with Enzo's olive oil.

The tour was 12 of us squeezed into the 3 rooms of their little strip mall store front and facility, starting with a slide show of growing (enhanced by the fact that the patriarch of the family of the other 10 people on our tour grows chocolate in the Phillipines), passing around a dried chocolate pod and a taste of the juice from the pulp of the chocolate fruit, and progressed to tasting each of the single-origin chocolates, and then the Enzo's mixes, hot chocolate, and some other variants.

The couple that own the operation are charming, the flavors amazing, it was really cool to see the evolution of the stacked bagged bars as they spent their several months going from the roller mill to the tempering step.

And the different flavors of the different beans!

[ related topics: California Culture Travel Chocolate ]

British Journal of Sports Medicine: Sugar addiction: is it real? A narrative review

Abstract In animal studies, sugar has been found to produce more symptoms than is required to be considered an addictive substance. Animal data has shown significant overlap between the consumption of added sugars and drug-like effects, including bingeing, craving, tolerance, withdrawal, cross-sensitisation, cross-tolerance, cross-dependence, reward and opioid effects. Sugar addiction seems to be dependence to the natural endogenous opioids that get released upon sugar intake. In both animals and humans, the evidence in the literature shows substantial parallels and overlap between drugs of abuse and sugar, from the standpoint of brain neurochemistry as well as behaviour.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2017-097971

So, yeah, sex addiction isn't real, sugar addiction is real, and sugar is a gateway drug.

[ related topics: Drugs Erotic Sexual Culture Health Television ]

Can't turn over a Catholic school without finding pedophiles: CNN: Pedophile priests operated at this Salesians of Don Bosco California school for decades

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Sexual Culture California Culture ]

Aaron Parecki has a list of home automation devices that can be used without cloud connectivity

Flashbak: The story of punk

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, punk was first printed in 1575, the year Shakespeare became a teenager. It appeared in a song, a ballad called Simon The Old Kinge, or sometimes Old Simon The King. The song’s narrator suggests that being drunk is “a sin, as it is to keep a punk.” It seems to be a joke, a drinking song disguised as a morality tale, or vice versa. The song was popular, and was reprinted often, becoming a standard for hundreds of years. According to one writer in 1776, it was played drunkenly in taverns, with “half a dozen fiddlers” playing “till themselves and their audience were tired.” Despite its “harsh and discordant tones,” “people thought it fine music.”

[ related topics: Children and growing up Music Theater & Plays Writing ]

Reminder: If it's not end-to-end encrypted, it's public: Report: Millions of Americans at Risk After Huge Data and SMS Leak:

The TrueDialog database is hosted by Microsoft Azure and runs on the Oracle Marketing Cloud in the USA. When we last looked at the database it included 604 GB of data. This included nearly 1 billion entries of highly sensitive data, which we’ll detail below.

Millions of SMS messages exposed in database security lapse.

https://it.slashdot.org/story/...-exposed-in-unencrypted-database

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Weblogs Microsoft moron Consumerism and advertising Marketing Cryptography Databases ]

Friends are people who, when you say "hey, y'all, watch this!", hold your beer for ya.

[ related topics: Movies Beer ]

His Company Makes Speakers. Now He's Speaking Out, Opposing Tariffs

His factory is still in Minnesota, but it depends on some components imported from China. Since last fall, the company has had to pay tariffs on those components — tariffs that are now 25%. Ironically, if Digre built whole speakers in China, like some of his competitors do, he'd have to pay only a 15% import tax.

The company is MISCO speakers, I'm poking through their amplifiers to see if they've got something that'd fill one of my needs...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics ]

United Church of Bacon

Bacon is our God, because Bacon is Real.

[ related topics: Religion Food - Bacon ]

America’s Air Quality Worsens, Ending Years of Gains, Study Says

An analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data published this week by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that fine particulate pollution increased 5.5 percent on average across the country between 2016 and 2018, after decreasing nearly 25 percent over the previous seven years.

and is likely associated with 10,000 premature deaths during that time.

[ related topics: Education Global Warming ]

Will Hutton in The Guardian Opinion section: America is not the land of the free but one of monopolies so predatory they imperil the nation

Except the latest research demonstrates the reverse is true. Britain is about to make a vast mistake. In the recently published The Great Reversal, leading economist Thomas Philippon of New York University and member of the advisory panel of the New York Federal Reserve, mounts a devastating attack on the conventional wisdom, so perfectly embodied by the witless Boris Johnson. The news is that over the last 20 years per capita EU incomes have grown by 25% while the US’s have grown 21%, with the US growth rate decelerating while Europe’s has held steady – indeed accelerating in parts of Europe. What is going on?

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Education New York Gambling Economics Real Estate ]

RT YesMalarkeyHat @Popehat

Kamala Harris reluctantly agrees to concede an outcome she believes is unfair and unjust because economics, bias, and the overwhelming might of opponents forecloses any other avenue.

Sounds familiar.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Ruh roh: Careful about granting permissions to anything right now: Vulnerability in fully patched Android phones under active attack by bank thieves

"StrandHogg" spoofing flaw exploited by 36 apps, including bank trojans.

In Appeal to Hard Left, Bloomberg Praises Chinese Communism

It’s now clear, however, that Bloomberg is casting a wider net. In a recent interview with PBS — which recirculated on social media on Sunday — the former New York mayor signaled that he intends to run in the “unrepentant Stalinist” lane of the Democratic primary. Asked by Firing Line’s Margaret Hoover about how the U.S. can get China and India to be good partners in the fight against climate change, Bloomberg argued that the Chinese Communist Party was ecologically friendly, democratically accountable, and invulnerable to the threat of revolution.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Invention and Design Journalism and Media Television New York Video Global Warming ]

William Barr says ‘communities’ that protest cops could lose ‘the police protection they need’

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Community ]

Keybase and the Chaos of Crypto, in which the fall of Mt Gox is nicely tied to the horrible spamfest that Keybase has become.

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

A Newspaper Typo Led to “Satan” Showing Up at a Christmas Parade

Tim “Skippy” Miller decided it was a perfect opportunity to have a little fun while making sure all the visitors got exactly what they came for. So he put on a red suit and a red hat and a red face and made himself available to anyone who wanted a picture.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

Lost Whamageddon

Germany Expels 2 Russian Diplomats, Citing Evidence Of A Sanctioned Murder In Berlin

Identifying The Berlin Bicycle Assassin Part 1 – From Moscow to Berlin

[ related topics: Current Events Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Evernote Gave Dark Web Dealer’s Notes to the DEA

"One flashdrive provided by Evernote consisting of 18 data folders in Evernote proprietary software," the executed search warrant from July 2018, listing what data Evernote provided, reads.

Some self-hosted (although you've still gotta figure out how to hide that from your hosting provider) alternatives:

• https://joplinapp.org/
• https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
• https://standardnotes.org/

[ related topics: Privacy Software Engineering moron ]

Hackers Trick Venture Capital Firm Into Sending Them $1 Million

A Chinese VC firm and an Israeli startup had the money stolen right out from under their noses thanks to spoofed emails and bogus domains.

[ related topics: Currency ]

This is what happens when you have sex-negative culture:

• Houston Chronicle: Abuse of Faith | Part 3 Preying on teens — More than 100 Southern Baptist youth pastors convicted or charged in sex crimes
• Pastor And President Of Louisiana Religious College Charged With Sexual Assault

[ related topics: Religion Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology Current Events Law Enforcement California Culture Education ]

Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch: Emergency crews investigating report of possible small nuclear reactor in Northwest side garage

As a precaution while authorities investigate, Chippenhook Court, a cul-de-sac has been evacuated. Cranston Drive is closed between Route 33 and Dummerston Court, the next street east in the subdivision.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Any of y'all done anything with the JavaScript AudioContext API? What is epsilon for ramps? I'm trying to set up arpeggios with an oscillator and a gain control, and it gets weird when notes get short.

Academia is predicated on abusive behavior: I Told My Mentor I Was a Dominatrix

She rescinded her letters of recommendation

I was recently at a tech conference, and at modern tech conferences there's a lot of discussion about makerly things and kids, so it came out that I went to a Waldorf school through 7th grade. And someone else in the circle introduced themselves as a "fellow Waldorf survivor".

I was the runt of my class, and there was at least one instance where I was beaten pretty severely on the playground by a mob, one instance where it was bad enough that adults intervened, at least, and in critiques of Waldorf I've often seen references to such things and the general philosophy of a hands-off letting kids find their own social structures.

I never know how much of that is specific to Waldorf. I keep seeing indications that, no, in fact all grade school education is pretty fucked up. Which I guess is good, there are some things in the Waldorf process that I think are valuable.

But, yeah, I think I know something of playing dead while being kicked and poked, and why this kid chose the path they did.

An 8-year-old killed himself after being bullied, police say. The school district wants immunity.

Two days before 8-year-old Gabriel Taye ended his life, his classmates wandered around him as he lay motionless on a bathroom floor. They nudged and poked him, a school surveillance video shows, but no one helped until an assistant principal walked in several minutes later. Gabriel's parents allege....

[ related topics: Children and growing up Current Events Law Enforcement Television Community Education Video Philosophy Conferences ]

https://twitter.com/ajthelawyer/status/1202389720417931264

Today someone called my office for advice about what to tell a Soldier with a "confederate" flag on his car. My advice was that, as an Army officer, he needs to infom the SM of Lee's order to surrender, and should accept the SM's surrender.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1202389720417931264.html

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

Baltimore Beat: Climate of Vulnerability: What a recent prostitution sting reveals about Commissioner Harrison, policing, and sex work in Baltimore

Twitter thread from author Justine Barron on the highlights

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Work, productivity and environment Global Warming ]

Hey, remember when everyone was calling New York City stupid for not caving in to every single Amazon demand... Amazon signs lease for new Manhattan office space less than a year after scrapping plans for Queens headquarters

[ related topics: Politics Books Invention and Design Space & Astronomy Current Events New York hubris ]

Stripchat Partners with Psychologist to Crush Anti-Masturbation Shame

Adult cam site Stripchat has partnered with the Sexual Health Alliance (SHA) to offer live and private virtual counseling sessions to cam viewers concerned about their consumption of adult entertainment.

The ultimate goal of Stripchat and the SHA’s Dr. David Ley is to ease the greater awareness and acceptance of sexual freedom

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture Health Theater & Plays Civil Liberties Government ]

This is cool: The Deep Sea — Made with ♥ by Neal Agarwal

Amazing telephone tester, Tandy, we couldn't find the manufacture date, at Thrifty Hippy in Petaluma

[ related topics: Phreaking ]

Amazing telephone tester, Tandy, we couldn't find the manufacture date, at Thrifty Hippy in Petaluma (now with picture, apparently Firefox Beta has a bug)

[ related topics: Photography Phreaking ]

SwiftLaTeX: The Browser-based Fast LaTeX Visual Editor.

Washington Post: The Afghanistan Papers — A secret history of the war: At war with the truth — U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.

“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.”

Who'd have thought that the institutions involved in the war on Vietnam might have had similar results in Afghanistan?

[ related topics: History Graphics ]

‘A Polar Affair’ delves into a centurylong cover-up of penguin sex

During his months observing Adélie penguins, which included an entire breeding cycle, Levick witnessed the birds engaging in same-sex mating rituals. He also saw the birds engage in a variety of other sexual behaviors that in humans we might call promiscuity, infidelity, even prostitution. Levick recorded these scandalous details in a second manuscript, “The sexual habits of the Adélie penguin,” in 1915. But the manuscript was stamped “Not for Publication” and remained unpublished for nearly a century.

Looks like the book, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins is a delve into the culture around why that manuscript never got published, and how we look at animal behaviors through the lens of current morals.

[ related topics: Books Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology California Culture Pedal Power Birds Bicycling Woodworking ]

Report: Federal government wasted millions of dollars on charter schools that never opened

More than 35 percent of charter schools funded by the federal Charter School Program (CSP) between 2006 and 2014 either never opened or were shut down, costing taxpayers more than half a billion dollars, according to a new report from an advocacy group that reviewed records of nearly 5,000 schools. The state with the most charter schools that never opened was Michigan, home to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

The report, titled “Still Asleep at the Wheel,” said that 537 “ghost schools” never opened but received a total of more than $45.5 million in federal start-up funding. That was more than 11 percent of all the schools that received funding from CSP, which began giving grants in 1995.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Software Engineering moron Education ]

Violet Blue's Cybersecurity Round-Up: December 10, 2019 talks a little about the "NotPetya" attack that was targeted at the destruction of online backups of any company doing business with Ukraine, and <href="https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/maersk-ciso-says-notpeyta-devastated-several-unnamed-us-firms/a/d-id/1336558">took down a big chunk of Maersk's infrastructure, and did extreme damage to two other US companies that have tried to keep the damage secret, one of those might have been FedEx.

NotPetya was attributed by the U.S. and U.K. to Russia. It was deployed in June 2017 to harm Ukraine — on the same day a Ukrainian military officer was assassinated by a car bomb. He just happened to be the man who was investigating and gathering evidence for The Hague of Russia’s military aggression, for Ukraine’s case against Russia in the International Court of Justice

[ related topics: Invention and Design Law Law Enforcement Automobiles Economics ]

Fascinating: Essential Oil Poisoning Is on The Rise. Here's What You Need to Know

Not all oils are of equal concern, either. Most commonly essential oils produce skin irritations or contact dermatitis. Others contain naturally occurring compounds known as endocrine disruptors, which have the potential to interfere with our hormones in unwanted ways.

But the researchers found just under half of the calls made to the centre were for eucalyptus essential oils. Taking just a few millilitres can result in stomach pains, nausea, and in some cases, even convulsions.

Paid article which I have not read: Essential oil exposures in Australia: analysis of cases reported to the NSW Poisons Information Centre https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.50403

[ related topics: Health Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]

The Man Who Slapped a Female Reporter’s Butt on TV is a Christian Youth Pastor

[ related topics: Religion Technology and Culture Television ]

GQ: Exit Interview: Karl Urban Is Excited to Be One of The Boys — The star of Amazon’s darkly funny superhero series looks back at 2019, his career, and some unusual elder wisdom.

The other thing is just an anecdote. I once worked on a movie called Red with Ernest Borgnine, who was 92 at the time. And I asked him what the secret of his longevity was. And he looked at me, he smiled, and he said, "Well, I masturbate twice a day." I'm always looking to pick the brains of the elders and to learn where I can. So I'm not quite sure where to place that one, but I'm passing it on.

[ related topics: Books Sexual Culture Movies Space & Astronomy Aviation - Helicopters ]

Exclusive: Facebook Fired A Contractor Who Was Paid Thousands In Bribes To Reactivate Banned Ad Accounts:

The individual was paid to reactivate ad accounts connected to Ads Inc., a San Diego–based marketing firm BuzzFeed News previously revealed was running a sophisticated Facebook scam that involved placing more than $50 million in ads that typically made false claims about celebrities. The ads were part of a scheme that tricked consumers into signing up for an expensive monthly subscription for a product that was initially marketed as a free trial. Ads Inc. announced it was shutting down in October as a result of the BuzzFeed News investigation.

Hat tip to Research Buzz

[ related topics: moron Current Events Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Sports Marketing ]

Great. Suddenly the app is refusing to start about 50% of the time, apparently blocking on something deep down in AppKit layout issues under a scroll view (I'd blame NSOutlineView, but maybe that's actually an NSTable stack bit?)

[ related topics: Graphic Design ]

Napa freight carrier Biagi Bros. tests all-electric heavy truck to haul bottled wine. It's a Transpower repowered Peterbilt model 579 class 8 cab.

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits Machinery ]

I'm gonna continue to believe that excommunicated is one's state after successful communication

cat | lpr

[ related topics: Photography ]

As ineffective as the War on Christmas has been, you have to wonder if it's being run by the same people running the war on Afghanistan... https://www.washingtonpost.com...istan-papers/documents-database/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama History Graphics Sports Databases ]

Office of the Inspector General U.S. Department of Justice — Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation (PDF)

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

When "Finding Neverland" was released, I saw some discussion among party DJ circles about whether it was still possible to play Michael Jackson songs.

I've also heard the argument that as heinous as Spade Cooley's actions were, his kids are arguably the surviving victims, and since his estate went to them, that buying his music was actually a way to support the victims.

I've got a few Michael Jackson tunes in my roster for square dancing, and haven't played them since, but... really, I mean we all kinda knew, right? So how do we separate the art from the artist? As entertainers where do we draw the line?

Turns out "cancel culture" is a big ol' non-existent thing. Now that streaming revenue provides us a real-time view of what people listen to, major revelations about musicians committing heinous deeds leads to an immediate spike in people listening to their music.

I'm not sure what this proves, but it's a data point. And I'm not sure what to take from this, but it's a reminder to me to try to reprogram myself from "oh, celebrity I've never heard of did heinous thing, let me acquaint myself with their work".

Jezebel: These Musicians Were 'Canceled,' But People Kept Listening

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Children and growing up Music Sociology Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture California Culture Pop Culture Community Woodworking ]

I saw the QR code, and beyond being surprised that "encourage your phone to do something you don't understand" was still a tying, was struck by how it looked like television static. Skeuomorphic snow crash.

[ related topics: Photography Technology and Culture Television Woodworking ]

I find myself needing to implement a parser. Hopefully a friendly one with some really good support for interactivity, like autocompletion and template presentation. I know peg/leg is the current hotness. What other resources should I read up on?

Just being neighborly, I'm on the email lists of a couple of local real estate agents. A few days ago one of 'em mailed around a Christmas giveaway email, offering a chance at a couple of different "smart home" packages. So let's talk about smart homes....

From exploiting Bluetooth or WiFi enabled locks to hacking your Ring cameras to holler insults in the middle of the night and watch your family for giggles...

Inside the Podcast that Hacks Ring Camera Owners Live on Air

In the NulledCast hackers livestream the harassment of Ring camera owners after accessing their devices. Hundreds of people can listen.

She installed a Ring camera in her children’s room for ‘peace of mind.’ A hacker accessed it and harassed her 8-year-old daughter.

Digital lockpicking - stealing keys to the kingdom

In the era of smart devices, it should come as no surprise that more and more appliances "turn" smart. The KeyWe Smart Lock is no exception. In order to make life more convenient, it is designed to have both the mechanical lock mechanism and additional functionalities on top of it. Those include, but are not limited to, generating one-time guest codes and unlocking the door based on proximity.

Convenience does, however, always come at the cost of security.

Maybe cloud-connecting everything isn't such a good idea.

[ related topics: Wireless Photography Weblogs Movies tolkien Theater & Plays Sociology Real Estate ]

Today's moment of sympathy with a StackOverflow commenter: "So no, I have no idea what NSSplitView uses to decide if a setPosition: should work..." Yep. I'd swear this call was working previously, but now it isn't and I have no freakin' idea why.

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

Catherine na Nollag @cafernblue

i still think my favourite thing that's ever happened to me on the internet is the time a guy said "people change their minds when you show them facts" and I said "actually studies show that's not true" and linked TWO sources and he said "yeah well I still think it works"

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

Okay, I still love the Small Town Titans version more, but this takes You're A Mean One, Mr Grinch in an entirely different direction that I quite enjoy: You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch - Lindsey Stirling ft. Sabrina Carpenter

[ related topics: Movies ]

Shedding light on fraudulent takedown notices — Berkman Klein Center’s Lumen database helps bring attention to falsified court orders

Volokh found that over a four-year period, close to 200 out of 700 court orders submitted to Google were what he characterizes as “either obviously forged or fraudulent or at least highly suspicious cases,” including at least 80 outright forgeries. It is possible, Volokh says, that this is still only the “tip of the iceberg.”

As usual, tip o' the hat to https://researchbuzz.me/

[ related topics: Databases ]

The "study double" probably got paid more than the adjunct professor teaching the class... Varsity Blues, Online: Georgetown U. Parent Paid $9K for Stand-In to Take Courses for Her Son

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Overheard: "The difference between a million and a billion is about a billion."

Totally like the concept and execution of this gingerbread Hotel Petaluma #petalumagingerbread

[ related topics: Photography Travel Food - Cake ]

Some people have amazing gingerbread fabrication technology #petalumagingerbread

[ related topics: Photography Food - Cake ]

RT 👅 @grufwub

`strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM | tail -n 1`

if you bought a PC with Windows 10 embedded product key and wanna get it from within Linux

Followed up by: RT A:\NEINI @neingeist

sudo hexdump -s 56 -e '"MSDM key: " /29 "%s\n"' /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Microsoft Open Source Robotics Embedded Devices Furniture ]

Lawmaker Says He Didn't Research Ectopic Pregnancy Procedure Before Adding To Bill

State Rep. John Becker, a southwestern Ohio Republican, got help from Barry Sheets, a lobbyist for the Right to Life Action Coalition of Ohio, as he crafted a measure that's since drawn international scrutiny for its questionable medical grounding, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported Wednesday.

[ related topics: Humor ]

Can Tolling Help Everyone — Estimating the Aggregate and Distributional Consequences of Congestion Pricing, Jonathan D. Hall, University of Toronto, June 28 2019

Abstract Economists have long advocated road pricing as an efficiency-enhancingsolution to traffic congestion, yet it has rarely been implemented because it is thought to create losers as well as winners. This paper uses survey and travel time data, combined with a structural model of traffic congestion, to estimate the joint distribution of agent preferences and evaluate the aggregate and distributional effects of road pricing. I find that adding tolls on half of the lanes of a highway yields a Pareto improvement. Further, the social welfare gains from doing so are substantial—up to $1,740 per road user per year.

JEL Classification: D62, H41, R41, R48.

[ related topics: Education Economics ]

Shadow forwarded along a couple of Reddit links over an incident in England where a cyclist and guy driving a big ol' truck met on a narrow one lane road, and the cyclist decided to not budge.

This time it is an idiot on a bike. The huge truck has to move so his mountainbike doesn't get muddy.

and the follow-up

Cyclist raging at trucker for not giving him enough space to pass.

And I don't know enough to make a judgment here, but I do think that my initial "dude, just grab the bike and let the 4 wheeled vehicles by" does reflect some ingrained pro-automobile biases that I need to introspect on.

[ related topics: moron Space & Astronomy Automobiles Machinery Bicycling ]

Not news, but Our World In Data: Link between health spending and life expectancy: US is an outlier

Via this tweet

[ related topics: Health Current Events ]

For 20 years, a Tennessee baby thief kidnapped more than 5,000 children from the streets, hospitals, and shanty towns of Memphis. Now, 70 years later, survivors of her 'house of horrors' are confronting the past.

In the 1900s and 1910s, formalized adoptions were fairly rare, but in the 1920s adoption began to be marketed as a shortcut to societal improvement. According to one ad from the National Home Finding Society, adopting would "reduce divorces, banditry, murder, and control births, fill all the churches and do real missionary work at home and abroad, exchanging immigrants for Americans and stopping some of the road leading to war."

Any correlation with current events is your own extrapolation.

[ related topics: Children and growing up History Work, productivity and environment Chattanooga Real Estate ]

Previous book on the reading list was Matt Ruff's "Lovecraft Country", a fictional musing on Lovecraft's racism and Jim Crow era United States. Current book on the reading list is "Hidden Figures". Pretty much ready to say we should burn it all down and start over.

[ related topics: Books Race ]

Petaluma: because of course a random parking lot has a forty foot tall sculpture in it.

[ related topics: Photography ]

RT not brendan @crocodilethumbs

🎶 Hey there Delilah... a thousand miles seems pretty far but they've got planes and trains and cars 🎶

Guy That Just Waked 500 Miles and 500 More: they have what

[ related topics: Machinery Trains ]

Teaching and Teacher Education — Volume 67, October 2017, Pages 135-142 — The myths of the digital native and the multitasker Paul A. Kirschner, Pedro De Bruycker. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.06.001

7. Conclusion

As has been shown, there is quite a large body of evidence showing that the digital native does not exist nor that people, regardless of their age, can multitask. This corpus of research also shows that though learners in this generation have only experienced a digital connected world, they are not capable of dealing with modern technologies in the way which is often ascribed to them (i.e., that they can navigate that world for effective and efficient learning and knowledge construction). Finally, the research shows that these learners may actually suffer if teaching and education plays to these alleged abilities to relate to, work with, and control their own learning with multimedia and in digitally pervasive environments.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Work, productivity and environment Television Machinery Fabrication Education Model Building ]

RT Anson Ling @ns0n

Straight people: I just feel like pop culture is cramming the homosexual lifestyle down my throat.

Also straight people:

Also your reminder that the Mallhark Christmas Movies plot generator Twitter bot exists.

[ related topics: Photography Movies Sociology California Culture Pop Culture ]

Washington Post Fact Checker: The biggest Pinocchios of 2019

We wanted to keep this list to 13 items, and Trump ended up with seven. Even then, you can say we are cheating because a few of Trump’s items are all-around categories.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Is it wrong that when I hear politicians talking about having a mandate that I think that they shouldn't be bragging about their Grindr profiles while campaigning?

Okay, these Canadian stock photography images are pretty awesome: Hockey player checks out lumberjack while woman in Canadian tuxedo looks on in disbelief

[ related topics: Photography Sports Economics ]

Saving off to rewatch the production portion, the actual song starts around 11:33: Ali Spagnola: What if Lizzo's Truth Hurts was by Mumford & Sons? (ft. Nataly Dawn of Pomplamoose) (YouTube video)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Video ]

From 2008: Quantifying the External Costs of Vehicle Use: Evidence From America's Top-Selling Light-Duty Models notes that it skips over a whole heck of a lot of external costs that aren't directly tied to per-mile vehicle travel, and comes up with:

Using a sales weighted average over vehicle makes and model, our estimates for these five costs are about $0.236 per VMT.

So adjusted for CPI that's closer to $.29/mile, the paper admits it's not a comprehensive list, but when we look at what gas and use taxes pay for as a fraction of auto infrastructure, this gives a good ballpark that gas taxes should be somewhere on the order of $6-7/gallon higher than they are.

[ related topics: Politics Government ]

Looks legit...

[ related topics: Photography ]

RT Jen X @Ernestandedith1

Pretty sure I heard that the only way to save an ectopic baby is to reimplant it up the urethra of the man who wrote the legislation.

I mean I'm not a Dr but many people have said this.

Many people.

Not exactly news, but I know I'm gonna want to find this article again, and in light of the recent duping of the Hallmark Channel it's worth reiterating that the loud cranks are getting results: It’s Not ‘One Million’ — It’s One Meddling Mom

One Meddling Mom has issued so many calls and condemnations over the years, it's become easy to tune them out. As GLAAD has arduously detailed, OMM has gone after everything from recent blockbuster Toy Story 4 for including a seconds-long clip of a supposed lesbian couple that quite literally no one but them noticed, to Chips Ahoy for a Twitter ad featuring a Rupaul's Drag Race star. Basically if a company hires, recognizes, features, or in any way supports an LGBTQ person, One Meddling Mom will issue a petition, claim to have millions of supporters behind her, and then start cranking the AFA machine in hopes of getting some sort of press for her campaign-of-the-week. OMM even uses a conservative PR firm, Hamilton Strategies, to help spread this message to a wider public.

[ related topics: Pixar Interactive Drama Sexual Culture Weblogs Animation Space & Astronomy Current Events Aviation - Helicopters ]

NPR: The whistleblower complaint has largely been corroborated. Here's how.

A harrowing read on what Saudia Arabia is up to these days: Insider: The story of Jamal Khashoggi's murder and how the world looked the other way.

Sure, we like to talk about the excesses of the tech boom causing all sorts of ridiculous business models, but there was once a brand built on home delivery of potato chips. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Chips

[ related topics: Food ]

Fun night calling for the Napa Boots and Belles. Always fun to get a new floor to call to, and fun to get the love back from the floor.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Shoes ]

bellingcat: Two Europol StopChildAbuse Images Geolocated: Part II — Cambodia. Fascinating read on using various mapping tools, including Google Street View, to tell when and where a couple of pictures were taken.

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Maps and Mapping ]

RT Roy Wood Jr- Ex Jedi @roywoodjr

In this instance, Impeachment is you and ya homegirls having all the evidence that ya man is cheating but to break up with him you gotta convince a jury of his frat brothers (who was there with him cheating) that your man is a cheater

[ related topics: Star Wars Woodworking ]

HP Lovecraft Of The Day:

The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

As quoted in Pinpointing The Exact Moment 'Cats' Reviewers Lost Their Minds

[ related topics: Quotes Invention and Design Current Events ]

Let's talk about the War on Christmas, shall we? 'Lewd and immoral': Inside the centuries-long war to sanitise Christmas carols:

The Puritans famously tried to ban Christmas precisely because it was not solemn enough. In 1643, UK parliament passed an ordinance requiring citizens to observe Christmas day with “the more solemn humiliation because it may call to remembrance our sins, and the sins of our forefathers who have turned this Feast, pretending the memory of Christ, into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights’.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture History ]

Mistress Matisse @mistressmatisse

I’ve modeled naked for porn, and I’ve modeled naked for art, and here’s the difference.

In art:

1. You don’t wear shoes
2. You don’t look at the camera
And you don’t smile

So if you’re looking at the camera, smiling, with your shoes on? Porn.

Not doing that? Art.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Nudity Art & Culture Shoes ]

Impeachment Today: Nancy Pelosi to Senate–Not So Fast summarizes the state of the parties wonderfully:

The four Democratic congressional members representing San Diego voted in support of impeaching President Donald Trump. The region’s lone Republican congressman, Rep. Duncan Hunter, abstained because he isn’t allowed to vote due to a felony conviction.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Hummus and Magnets: 0x5f3759df. On a fast inverse square root function (1/sqrtf(x)) and abusing int pointers to float values.

[ related topics: Mathematics Boats ]

Battle of the Richmond Bridge: Car vs eBike (YouTube video). Yeah, the bikes win, whatever, the amazing thing is to consider that especially on the approach to the bridge how much looping back and forth the bike path takes vs the car path.

It's like the space was designed for bikes to be second-class or something.

[ related topics: Movies Space & Astronomy Automobiles Video Bicycling ]

If there's one place that I didn't expect to crumble first, it's from the huge distribution magazine of Evangelical christians: Christianity Today: Trump Should Be Removed from Office

It’s time to say what we said 20 years ago when a president’s character was revealed for what it was.

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama ]

And, my Dad has died. I am relieved that he is no longer trapped in the pain and helplessness of the last few months. I am sad to have lost a cheerleader and collaborator and awesome person of the highest order.

The Gerrymanderer's Daughter, a profile of Stephanie Hofeller, who gave the files of deceased notorious GOP consultant Tom Hofeller to Common Cause

“I’m his legacy; his grandchildren are his legacy,” she said. “My character is a reflection of him, too. Just because he was too short-sighted to hitch his wagon to my star doesn’t mean that wasn’t the case. I can’t think of any better way to elevate him than to try to correct his mistakes.”

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Law Aviation - Helicopters ]

I'm just blushing a little, so I'll continue to stand here...

I'm just blushing a little, so I'll continue to stand here...

[ related topics: Photography ]

What you need is a job on which you can build a career and a future

[ related topics: Photography Heinlein Gambling ]

Petaluma to SFO via an Airport Express bus with square wheels, then to ORD via the red-eye leaving at 11:58PM and on to TOL in the morning.

[ related topics: Aviation Public Transportation ]

Dear airport bathroom toilet: not flushing while I'm sitting on you (and thereby spraying dirty toilet water all over my nethers) would be an appreciated feature.

[ related topics: Aviation ]

"Leather Ladies"? Tell me more...

[ related topics: Photography ]

"Sharable" (yes, I am in a strange land looking with wonder upon the customs of the locals.)

[ related topics: Photography Real Estate ]

Report Reveals Jesus Christ May Have Benefited From Father’s Influential Position To Gain High-Powered Role As Lord And Savior

[ related topics: Religion Humor ]

A number of really cool videos from Shadow:

Grandpa Amu made a combination of Luban table with a piece of wood. I could swear I've seen something like this before, but my attempts to find it on Flutterby are failing, and it's fantastic work with hand tools.

7 yrs of Impossible, Wild and Crazy Woodworking, a bunch of really cool machines and mechanisms.

Okay, this one's more "that's nuts": Rocket Bicycle World Record ǀ 333 km/h (207 mph) ǀ Rider: François Gissy

[ related topics: Movies Space & Astronomy Work, productivity and environment Pedal Power Bicycling Furniture Woodworking ]

Auto-corrupt just changed "Merry" to "Meh". I have never felt more seen.

Playground squirrel died for your sins

[ related topics: Photography ]

Crop duster used to spread 100 gallons of 'holy water' on Louisiana town

The Rev. Matthew Barzare of St. Anne Church told NPR that the plane was an efficient way to cover more ground for a blessing.

"We can bless more area in a shorter amount of time," he said.

Presumably they did this during the day so no vampires exploded...

[ related topics: Religion Movies Community Woodworking ]

Can't even get up to get the cell phone to take a picture of the cat that's holding me down with a wide-angle camera, so I had to make do with the laptop.

[ related topics: Wireless Photography ]

Arizona DHS Agents Paid to Have Sex With Alleged Sex Trafficking Victims They ‘Rescued’.

And I'm pretty sure that those "rescued" women are gonna get deported back to the economic and social conditions from which they were trying to escape.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Economics ]

this Tweet from Rob Henderson recommending and quoting Thinking In Bets by Annie Duke:

Despite the popular wisdom that we achieve success through positive visualization, it turns out that incorporating negative visualization makes us more likely to achieve our goals. Gabriele Oettingen, professor of psychology at NYU and author of Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motiviation, has conducted over twenty years of research, consistently finding that people who imagine obstacles in the way of reaching their goals are more likely to achieve success, a process she has called "mental contrasting".

One of those studies is Cognitive Therapy and Research, Vol. 15, No. 2, 1991: Expectation, Fantasy and Weight Loss: Is the Impact of Positive Thinking Always Positive?, Gabriele Oettingen and Thomas A Wadden:

Both expectations and fantasies predicted weight loss, although in opposite directions. The more positive a subject's expectation of success, themore weight she lost. The more positive her fantaay about weight reduction, however, the smaller her weight loss.

[ related topics: Books Erotic Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Invention and Design ]

Fake “Radical Feminist” group actually paid political front for anti-LGBT James Dobson organization

The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) is a supposedly radical feminist activist group which, as noted by Pink News, shows “little evidence of campaigning on any women’s issues unrelated to transgender people”. They claim to “lobby for pro-choice legislation” and for “women’s autonomy”, but somehow evidence of (or calls to) action for such purposes are completely absent from their website (archived here so you don’t have to give them pageviews) outside that vague mission statement blurb. What you do see, however, is a lot of collusion with not-exactly-feminist-friendly right-wing media which is interesting when you realize where their funding comes from.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture moron Current Events Journalism and Media Television Civil Liberties ]

I find myself, once again, incapacitated. (Incatpacitated?)

More chess at the Toledo art museum

[ related topics: Photography Art & Culture ]

Resetting the board after the game

[ related topics: Photography Games ]

Really liked this ceramic piece by Katsuyo Aoki

[ related topics: Photography ]

Also liked that the Toledo Art Museum pays attention to modern artists.

[ related topics: Photography Art & Culture ]

We went for the light and projection exhibit, which was super cool!

[ related topics: Photography ]

E. coli Could Produce a Popular Psychedelic for Therapeutic Use

“The number-one advantage is it's simply cheaper” than—or at least cost-competitive with—other methods, says lead study author Alexandra Adams, an undergraduate student in chemical engineering at Miami University in Ohio. Furthermore, “it's easier to manipulate E. coli than other organisms,” she says.

Adams and her colleagues engineered E. coli that incorporated three genes from the Psilocybe cubensis mushroom, enabling the bacteria to synthesize psilocybin from the cheap and easily obtainable precursor molecule 4-hydroxyindole, and then they optimized the process to produce the drug on a larger scale. They reported their results last December in Metabolic Engineering.

[ related topics: Health Bioinformatics Education ]

Throwback Saturday: We had goats. These two buildings were their shed, and after the goats were gone these were playhouses and whatnot. And I think the dark one was also a duck house for a while.

[ related topics: Architecture Real Estate ]

People who don't put stuff in the overhead bins should be allowed off the airplane first.

[ related topics: Aviation ]

And with a drive from Toledo to Detroit, a flight to SFO, a bus to the Petaluma fairgrounds, and a walk home, I'm back amongst our cats and environs a half an hour before midnight Pacific.

[ related topics: Aviation California Culture Public Transportation ]

A major funder of the anti-vaccine movement has made millions selling natural health products

But over the past decade a single donor has contributed more than $2.9 million to the National Vaccine Information Center, accounting for about 40 percent of the organization’s funding, according to the most recent available tax records. That donor, osteopathic physician Joseph Mercola, has amassed a fortune selling natural health products, court records show, including vitamin supplements, some of which he claims are alternatives to vaccines.

[ related topics: Politics Health History ]

Installed new stove/oven. Used it. Texted Charlene "I am a fan of convection bake". Realized the pun. Not sure whether pleased or disgusted with myself...

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Argh. So apparently in 2018, the SANE team broke backwards compatibility with driver library locations. So everyone started `sudo ln -sfr /usr/lib64/sane/libsane-* /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/sane`. Not content with inflicting that, apparently they did it again in 2019.

[ related topics: Language Free Software Books Open Source ]

First off: "free". Second, given the value they're extracting by having this in your home, Google should be paying you. Third, why does Twitter think I'm still in Ohio this week?

An ode to hummus: GoRemy — All About That Paste (YouTube video)

[ related topics: Movies Video ]

This is my shocked face: Chief says cop "fabricated" coffee cup insult...

A Kansas police officer "fabricated" a story that a McDonald's employee wrote an expletive on his coffee cup over the weekend, Herington Police Chief Brian Hornaday said Monday. Hornaday said the officer no longer works for the department.

Chief: Local officer resigns after making up coffee cup incident

Chief Brian Hornaday said McDonald’s didn’t have anything to do with writing obscenities on an officer’s coffee, and that it was “fabricated by a police officer no longer employed with the agency.”

I'm trying to find how the story spread, but my impression is that Hornaday did some pretty serious boosting of the lie when it first spread, and is doing some ass-covering and blame misdirection now.

[ related topics: Writing Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Video McDonald's ]

It's like November 1979: Protesters chanting ‘Death to America’ break into U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad. Almost like maybe the trillions we've spent bombing and terrorizing brown people in the Middle East have been counter-productive or something.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

First off: "free". Second, given the value they're extracting by having this in your home, Google should be paying you. Third, why does Twitter think I'm still in Ohio this week?

[ related topics: Photography ]

So... how does California AB5 apply to square dance callers?

[ related topics: California Culture ]

<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/15/facebook-took-down-our-fact-check-medically-necessary-abortions-thats-dangerous/">Daniel Grossman and Robyn Schickler— Facebook took down our fact-check on medically necessary abortions. That’s dangerous.

Last month, the anti-abortion group Live Action posted a video to the Facebook page of its founder Lila Rose, claiming abortion was never medically necessary, and Facebook asked the fact-checking site Health Feedback to review it. Health Feedback reached out to us as medical professionals, and we both commented that the video was inaccurate.

What happened next seems less shocking in an era when politicians routinely dismiss fact as fiction: Republican Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Ted Cruz (Tex.), Kevin Cramer (N.D.), and Mike Braun (Ind.) sent a letter to Facebook complaining that the fact-check was biased, and Facebook responded by removing our assessment. Rose’s inaccurate video remains posted.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health Theater & Plays Flowers Video ]

IRS Reforms Free File Program, Drops Agreement Not to Compete With TurboTax

The changes come after ProPublica’s reporting showed how TurboTax maker Intuit tricked customers into paying for tax prep they could have gotten for free.

[ related topics: Politics Software Engineering ]

How did Carlos Ghosn escape from Japan without any of his three passports?

So we know that Jeffrey Epstein had a false passport. Seems like it's probably just something you do when you're rich...

Update: Turkey detains seven people over escaped Nissan executive Ghosn’s ‘illegal’ transit through Istanbul. Somehow he had two French passports?

This Insect Has The Only Mechanical Gears Ever Found in Nature

The small hopping insect Issus coleoptratus uses toothed gears on its joints to precisely synchronize the kicks of its hind legs as it jumps forward

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Inside Job? Thieves Use Postal Service Master Key To Swipe Packages

The bonus is the tweeted picture of the key, that could probably be used for reconstruction from a blank...

[ related topics: Heinlein ]