Flutterby™! From 2021-03-01 to 2021-03-31

Fucking hell, all I want to do is change one line in a template on this static website, but now I'm in npm/nvm/node hell.

Maybe if your messaging provider expresses a sincere belief in supernatural enemies you shouldn't assume that they're technically competent. Also thinking about the fine line between psychosis and spiritual emergency in this context... https://www.theverge.com/2021/.../gab-hack-data-ceo-demon-hackers

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama ]

Malcolm X's family releases letter alleging FBI, police role in his death

The letter released at a news conference on Saturday was attributed to a former undercover NYPD officer named Raymond Wood. His cousin Reggie Wood joined some of Malcolm X's daughters at the news conference at the site where the Audubon Ballroom once stood to make the letter public.

Raymond Wood's letter stated that he had been pressured by his NYPD supervisors to lure two members of Malcolm X's security detail into committing crimes that resulted in their arrest just days before the fatal shooting. Those arrests kept the two men from managing door security at the ballroom and was part of conspiracy between the NYPD and FBI to have Malcolm killed, according to the letter.

"Under the direction of my handlers, I was told to encourage leaders and members of the civil rights groups to commit felonious acts," Wood's letter stated.

[ related topics: Sociology Current Events Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Conspiracy Conferences Woodworking Government ]

The more I play with various different modern languages (today it's trying to unfuck some TypeScript), the more I've learned to appreciate C.

Twitter thread describing a cool little trick for using bash and /dev/tcp to do port scanning, with refinements: https://mobile.twitter.com/0xValkyrie/status/1366408401526419459

Goofy cat

[ related topics: Photography ]

Petaluma is currently blanketed in signs promoting some probably Tea Party affiliated "open the schools" campaign. "Missing: All CA Students" and hashtag "open Sonoma schools now", like overriding evidence-based policy with mob rule is somehow a good idea.

But I'm finding that so many of my friends who are parents, even those who were in the "we should send our kids to public school because we believe in the mission of public school" camp, are saying "we didn't realize what our kids had to put up with, and we're not sure if we're going to make them go back".

Which, of course, echoes Charlene's decision back in 2019 that, as her work in the schools took her towards working with more mainstream students, that she no longer believed that working within that system was good for the students.

Of course, not all parents and students have the privilege or resources to find alternatives. And we've all known the products of homeschooling disasters.

But maybe the pandemic will provide the chance to step back and take a look at how we can rework schools to be actually focused on learning.

NPR: For Some Black Students, Remote Learning Has Offered A Chance To Thrive.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Bay Area Current Events Work, productivity and environment Education ]

Uh huh: Capitol riot probe zeroes in on Pentagon delay in sending troops

In his testimony, Walker agreed with Capitol security officials that Pentagon leaders gave a tepid response to urgent pleas for aid during a 2:30 p.m. call on Jan. 6.

McCarthy was not on the call, according to Walker, even though others wanted him to be. Walker described that coordination as a stark contrast from the military’s response to civil unrest during racial justice protests over the summer, when McCarthy was in real-time contact with him about helping law enforcement.

Emphasis mine.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Personal Lubricant ]

Twitter thread on being Black, Dr. Seuss, The Hardy Boys, and "the presence of whiteness".

Angry Birds indeed: Military Unit That Conducts Drone Strikes Bought Location Data From Ordinary Apps

The 132d Wing of the Iowa National Guard bought Locate X, a product that lets users search by a specific area to see which devices were present.

[ related topics: Birds ]

Scientific evidence that we should probably be talking less. Best observation, from the MeFi thread: "More evidence for my pet theory that neurotypicals systematically overestimate how good they actually are at judging social cues."

People Literally Don’t Know When to Shut Up—or Keep Talking—Science Confirms

When should you end a conversation? Probably sooner than you think

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Do conversations end when people want them to?

Abstract Do conversations end when people want them to? Surprisingly, behavioral science provides no answer to this fundamental question about the most ubiquitous of all human social activities. In two studies of 932 conversations, we asked conversants to report when they had wanted a conversation to end and to estimate when their partner (who was an intimate in Study 1 and a stranger in Study 2) had wanted it to end. Results showed that conversations almost never ended when both conversants wanted them to and rarely ended when even one conversant wanted them to and that the average discrepancy between desired and actual durations was roughly half the duration of the conversation. Conversants had little idea when their partners wanted to end and underestimated how discrepant their partners’ desires were from their own. These studies suggest that ending conversations is a classic “coordination problem” that humans are unable to solve because doing so requires information that they normally keep from each other. As a result, most conversations appear to end when no one wants them to.

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2011809118

[ related topics: Current Events ]

This Trained Singer Teaches Metal Bands How To Scream (HBO)

The teacher is Melissa Cross, and I'm tempted to take one of her online classes, both because new ways to approach my voice is awesome, but also because I'm fascinated from her sampler video about how she's managing the social aspects of online classes.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Movies virus Invention and Design Video ]

I mean, I completely understand that there are legitimate reasons that someone might want to transfer US dollars to Nigeria, but the jokes here write themselves...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Some musings on some of the things many of us are feeling about the differing levels of safety with regards go COVID-19 and coronavirus spread. Quinn Norton on Medium: We Hate You Now — The Hardest Problem of The Aftertimes

This isn’t my first pandemic, I grew up in the age of AIDS in a deeply impacted community. I buried a lot of people back then, and eventually did a lot of safer sex education and learned a lot about how you fight a disease as a community member, not a clinician or a researcher. I learned the valuable lesson that shame is not a strategy. There are moments, interpersonal moments, where shame is absolutely a tactic, but it is never a political strategy. So I want to assure you what I’m talking about isn’t about shaming people.

This is about the consequences of human actions. This is about pure rage, caged up in millions of houses. ...

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Sexual Culture moron Community Education Real Estate ]

Interesting: Statin users 50% less likely to die in hospital from severe COVID-19

Nature Communications: Association between antecedent statin use and decreased mortality in hospitalized patients with COVID-19

... The primary endpoint includes in-hospital mortality within 30 days. A total of 2626 patients were admitted during the study period, of whom 951 (36.2%) were antecedent statin users. Among 1296 patients (648 statin users, 648 non-statin users) identified with 1:1 propensity-score matching, statin use is significantly associated with lower odds of the primary endpoint in the propensity-matched cohort (OR 0.47, 95% CI 0.36–0.62, p < 0.001). We conclude that antecedent statin use in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 is associated with lower inpatient mortality.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21553-1

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

More like this, pleaase: Supercars: Cameras set up to detect Knightsbridge noisy drivers

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea set up the cameras to tackle drivers using Knightsbridge streets as "racetracks".

The cameras intercept when a 74 decibel noise threshold is exceeded and records the offending vehicle.

Of course right now they're just getting wrist slaps...

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Monty Python ]

South across the bay

[ related topics: Photography California Culture ]

Mt Diablo

[ related topics: Photography ]

When you search for "best comedies on Netflix" and Google suggests something with an 18% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

[ related topics: Food ]

Traffic congestion saves lives. Automobile deaths are an infrastructure engineering problem: Traffic deaths rose 8% in 2020, even as Americans drove fewer miles during pandemic

The nonprofit National Safety Council estimates in a report issued Thursday that 42,060 people died in vehicle crashes in 2020, an 8% increase over 2019 and the first jump in four years.

Plus, the fatality rate per 100 million miles driven spiked 24%, the largest annual percentage increase since the council began collecting data in 1923.

[ related topics: Automobiles Currency Flowers ]

If you had any doubts at all about what really motivates the anti-maskers: A Mexican restaurant in Texas kept its mask rule. People threatened to call ICE on the staff.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Food ]

The Booming Depression. On how the Great Depression showed greater growth than the period of the real estate crisis and great recession.

Via https://mobile.twitter.com/johnrobb/status/1368573425258803200

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Yesterday, a friend asked if I'd elaborate about the problems of high school, pep rallies, the promotion of sports, and willful blindness to abusive patterns of high school administrators and teachers.

Last night I asked Google for "best comedies on netflix", and after dismissing the ones with an 18% on Rotten Tomatoes ("Game Over, Man!"), we settled on the Amy Poehler directed "Moxie", a film about high school, and exactly those things.

Neither of us experienced it as a comedy. Both of us were glad to have seen it.

Both of us also came out of it shaken, like we'd just relived those experiences of three and a half or four decades ago. All the same willful blindness from administrators. Heck, I even had the cool engaging English teacher although, alas, I didn't get him until the last semester of my Senior year.

But, yeah. Kinda summed it up.

Moxie trailer

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Games Movies Food ]

RT Nora Flanagan @noraflanagan

I coach junior roller derby. For the five years I've been coaching, we have welcomed trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming skaters. We might have been the first youth sport to do this. Here's what I've seen: ( 🧵 )

RT Helen Zaltzman @HelenZaltzman

People who argue that we can't abolish the British monarchy because of tourism know that no tourists ever go to France. All their palaces evaporated overnight in 1848

RT Michael Harriot @michaelharriot:

I have received a lot of emails pushing back on this quote from my mother.

“A black child’s humanity can never be fully realized in the presence of whiteness”

Some of them were genuinely interested in understanding why this is not racist.

A thread:

Some good observations about guitar playing and handedness in there.

Underpaid Workers Are Being Forced to Train Biased AI on Mechanical Turk

Workers who label images on platforms like Mechanical Turk say they’re being incentivized to fall in line with their responses—or risk losing work.

This summed it up nicely:

“I sometimes find myself thinking like, I think this is a wrong answer ... but I know that if I say what I really think I will get booted from the job, and I will get bad scores,” said Sarah. "And I'm like, okay, I will just do what they want me to do. Even though I think it's a shitty choice.”

So we're paying people crappy wages to continue their education experience.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Machinery Trains Artificial Intelligence ]

Tara of Research Buzz tagged me, and yeah: Why I'm very much not a fan of dynamically inferred type languages, even though the whipupitude is awesome: iCloud allegedly locked out a user over her last name

iCloud has had the occasional service issue, but its latest problem appears to be highly... specific. Actor and author Rachel True claims iCloud has effectively locked her out of her account due to the way her last name was written. Reportedly, her Mac thought lower-case "true" was a Boolean (true or false) flag, leading the iCloud software on the computer to seize up. The problem has persisted for over six months, she said.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Movies Software Engineering Law Macintosh ]

Holy shit, this is an amazing drone shot video: Right Up Our Alley.

If you'd shown this to me 20 years ago I'd have... I think this would have been inconceivable.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Video ]

RT buttplug.io 🍑🔌 - Open Source Sex Tech

why haven't i hooked up buttplugs to tradewars 2002 yet

what the fuck is wrong with me

RT buttplug.io 🍑🔌 - Open Source Sex Tech

brb making a FOSSIL Driver connector for Buttplug so i can use my RA bbs for teledildonics

(i hate that i legit want to do this and i don't know whether to blame @foone or @gravislizard first)

RT Jon Jones @jonjones

That's a *very* different kind of door game.

[ related topics: Free Software Erotic Games Sexual Culture ]

Stuff gathers by the back door to go out to the shop, so I hung some boxes on French cleats to help organize that

Stuff gathers by the back door to go out to the shop, so I hung some boxes on French cleats to help organize that (with picture this time)

[ related topics: Photography ]

Built these top cabinets for some basic armoires that we wanted to add a little storage to (and dissuade the little cat from jumping up on).

[ related topics: Photography Home Improvement ]

The other cabinet

[ related topics: Photography Home Improvement ]

Workshop listening last night: Life on the Swingset episode #389: Nerdy Banter with Simone and Malcolm – The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality. I was impressed enough by their discussion that I immediately bought all 3 books in their "The Pragmatist's Guide" series.

And Vox Conversations: The psychedelic roots of Christianity. Still interesting, but didn't grab me as solidly.

[ related topics: Religion Books Community Douglas Adams ]

Yeah, regulating facial recognition these days is like trying to regulate hammers: Hacked Surveillance Camera Firm Shows Staggering Scale of Facial Recognition.

Hackers have broken into Verkada, a popular surveillance and facial recognition camera company, and managed to access live feeds of thousands of cameras across the world, as well as siphon a Verkada customer list. The breach shows the astonishing reach of facial recognition-enabled cameras in ordinary workplaces, bars, parking lots, schools, stores, and more.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Theater & Plays Current Events Television ]

More on the current state of facial recognition: Clearview AI sued in California by immigrant rights groups, activists

Founded in 2017, Clearview AI compiles billions of photos into a database for its software, which can use these images to identify individual people. The company has claimed to have scraped over 3 billion photos from the internet, including photos from popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Major tech companies have sent the company cease-and-desist notices in the past, arguing its photo snagging practices violate their terms of service.

[ related topics: Photography Software Engineering History Current Events Journalism and Media Civil Liberties California Culture Net Culture Artificial Intelligence Databases ]

On the Daily Dot, Ford Fischer talks about how YouTube's content policies are damaging primary source information, and rewarding pundits pushing misinforming contextualizing of that material: I filmed the Capitol riots—YouTube suspended me for ‘pushing’ election disinformation

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

I Spy with My Little Eye…a Giant Pink Teddy Bear on a Car???, on a test with driver assist systems and a mechanism for attention tracking.

Researchers found that the more than twice as many unfamiliar drivers with the Level 2 system turned on failed to recall the teddy bear compared to the other 2 groups. Almost all of the familiar drivers recalled the bear and also more of them correctly recalled how many times they had seen it compared to the other 2 groups. Those with better recall of the bear also tended to look around the roadway more when the bear was present.

IIHS pioneers new method for testing driver attention

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Automobiles ]

RT Village Person @SvnSxty

Freddie Mercury: I want to ride my bicycle

City Planners: no

[ related topics: Astronomy Pedal Power Bicycling ]

So the key is apparently to use obs.ninja for video and JackTrip for audio, This is the low latency voice lesson solution we have been experimenting towards for a year now.

[ related topics: Music Video ]

I've been using the Festool MFT table as my primary workbench for a while now. At one point I had a big ol' block of bowling alley that I was using as a secondary bench, but it was taking up a little too much room in the shop.

For the most part it's fine. I love the holes that let me clamp anywhere and use stops anywhere. Obviously the hinged rail and fence are integral to using the track saw. But it's not really beefy enough for hand tools: get to planing something and there's just not enough mass to keep things in place. Even hand sawing is ... okay, I guess ... but.

I don't use hand tools much, but sometimes there's no other alternative. And I don't have room for a shaving horse, or a dedicated chevalet, but.

Anyway, I think I need to just figure out what compromises I'm willing to make in terms of clamping to get a big heavy frame in play, and set up a good vise (I actually have the bits to make that) and a benchtop shaving horse.

[ related topics: Trains Furniture Woodworking Festool ]

Whoah: 2 feet shorter than the Ford Ranger? You have my attention: Automotive Startup Canoo Debuts a Snub-Nosed Electric Pickup

The pickup sports a unique design taken from Canoo’s passenger van and is set to have over 200 miles of range. It will go into production in 2023.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Current Events Work, productivity and environment Automobiles Graphic Design Machinery ]

Just so I can find it again, my favorite take on cryptocurrencies is David Gerard's Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, and he's got a take on the NFT craze: David Gerard: NFTs: Crypto grifters try to scam artists, again

[ related topics: moron Art & Culture Cryptography ]

RT j @sullyj3

Ever wanted your orgasms to be purely functional? Do you have a kink for category theory? Is your sexuality immutable?

Lucky for you, I just published my first open source library! It's a Haskell implementation of the @buttplugio protocol! Check it out!

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/buttplug-hs-core

[ related topics: Language Free Software Books ]

Interesting: 8 bit ortho perspective meets VR chat: https://gather.town/

Freedom! (With the purchase of any dom of equal or lesser value.)

[ related topics: Privacy Consumerism and advertising Civil Liberties Government ]

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics vol. 10, no. 3, July 2018: Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles, Ozkan Eren, Naci Mocan

Employing the universe of juvenile court decisions in a U.S. state between 1996 and 2012, we analyze the effects of emotional shocks associated with unexpected outcomes of football games played by a prominent college team in the state. We find that unexpected losses increase sentence lengths assigned by judges during the week following the game. Unexpected wins, or losses that were expected to be close contests ex ante have no impact. The effects of these emotional shocks are asymmetrically borne by black defendants. The impact of upset losses on sentence lengths is larger for defendants if their cases are handled by judges who received their bachelor's degrees from the university with which the football team is affiliated.

DOI: 10.1257/app.20160390

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Sports Education Economics ]

Just a reminder that when we allow anyone to promote the bullshit "sex addiction" Puritanistic narrative, we're encouraging violence against women, against sex workers, and against minorities.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

RT Emily Strickland (@emilyst@social.emilylilyli.me) @emilyst

"gosh, emily, you sure do know a lot about computers huh?"

yeah i do a lot of fucking around, which in turn entails an inordinate amount of finding out

So last night a preacher's son went to several different Asian-owned businesses in and around Atlanta and shot people. No need for a picture, given that description, you know exactly what he looked like.

His church, Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Georgia, has, predictably, scrubbed their social media accounts, which means they know they were complicit.

The Daily Beast reported on a 2018 video of Long talking about his Christian experience, which was previously posted to the church's Facebook.

Four of the victims have been identified, Ashley Yaun, 33; Paul Andre Michels, 54; Xiaojie Yan, 49; and Daoyou Feng, 44.

Capt. Jay Baker, a spokesperson for the Cherokee Sheriff's Office, described taking the perpetrator into custody without incident:

Baker said the Long "understood the gravity of [his crime]. And he was pretty much fed up, had been kind of at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did."

The spokesperson said that Long was blamed "sex addiction" and temptation for his rampage and told police the attack was not racially motivated. It was not clear if Long ever went to the spas where the shootings occurred, and other officials said it was too early to determine a motive.

A picture of that department that believed him when he said that this attack wasn't racially motivated.

Google Translate renders this headline as "Atlanta shooter tells me I'm going to kill all Asians” Local Korean media reports on witnesses in the incident

This is a good time for a reminder that "sex addiction" and other shaming people for their desires and libido kills women. That institutions that traffic in that sort of evil are culpable in these deaths. That police will happily take tens of thousands of dollars from sex workers under laws which don't affect rich white guys.

And we should get angry about the institutions that raised, radicalized, and supported the ideas that drove this terrorist.

Addendum: Georgia Sheriff Spokesman Posted Racist COVID Shirts on Facebook

In a Facebook page associated with Capt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee Sheriff’s Office, several photos show the law enforcer was promoting T-shirts with the slogan “COVID-19 imported virus from CHY-NA.” “Place your order while they last,” Baker wrote with a smiley face on another March 30 photo that included the racist T-shirts.

And The Onion nails the headline: Sympathetic Police Know What It’s Like To Have A Bad Day And Kill 8 People

Twitter thread of Korean media coverage: https://twitter.com/JeongPark52/status/1372226344788979714

Further Addendum: Those evil fuckers at Crabapple Baptist Church have doubled down on their awfulness: Washington Post's updates point to their non-apology on their web site (that I'm not gonna link) which says "He alone is responsible for his evil actions and desires." Emphasis mine. Yeah, if those unredeemable scumbags had acknowledged that his desires were probably kinda normal for a young man, and there are outlets, but no. There are times when I wished I believed in hell so that people like these assholes could burn in it.

Asian American Journalists Association: AAJA Encourages Newsrooms to Empower AAPI Journalists and Their Expertise talks about why the English coverage of this event has been so shitty:

Since the shootings, we have heard some deeply concerning problems in newsrooms across the country, including in Atlanta.

“Are you sure your bias won’t show if you cover the Atlanta shootings?”

“You might be too emotionally invested to cover this story.”

We have heard from broadcast members — and from members across newsrooms who volunteered to cover the Atlanta shooting — who have expertise, language skills, and the cultural competency in the community, but were not assigned. AAJA urges newsrooms to offer coverage opportunities to AAPI journalists who are uniquely positioned, sourced and skilled to cover the unfolding news — and who want to be a part of it.

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events Journalism and Media Monty Python Law Enforcement Race Video Government ]

This is pretty amazing, and I'm trying to figure out how we could display this somehow: Photographer Spends 12 Years, 1250 Hours, Exposing Photo of Milky Way

[ related topics: Photography ]

Too little, and needs criminal enforcement as well: FCC enforces largest fine ever of $225 million against telemarketers who made 1 billion robocalls

[ related topics: Health ]

Tesla Full Self Driving Beta 8.2: Oakland - CLose Calls, Pedestrians, Bicycles

[ related topics: Movies Bay Area Bicycling ]

Founders of California fecal matter-testing company indicted:

Zachary Schulz Apte and Jessica Sunshine Richman, co-founders of now-bankrupt microbiome testing company uBiome, were indicted Thursday on multiple federal charges, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit health care fraud and money laundering.

As Josh Mankiewicz noted: "Shit just got real".

[ related topics: Health Law Enforcement California Culture Currency Conspiracy Government ]

5 kids hospitalized with liver failure after drinking ionized 'Real Water'

This week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it is investigating a number of reports of "non-viral hepatitis," or inflammation of the liver not caused by a viral infection, linked with consumption of Real Water.

In November 2020, five infants and children from four different households developed acute liver failur of unknown cause; and six additional people from those households — including three adults and three children — developed less serious symptoms, including vomiting, nausea and loss of appetite, according to a statement from the Southern Nevada Health District.

So far, the only common factor between all these cases was that they had drunk Real Water, the statement said.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health ]

The packaging of hot dogs and buns has nothing on the staples vs staple guns issue.

[ related topics: Guns Dogs ]

Starting a new cycle of workouts: We've been doing this MindValley "10x" program for like 60 days now, and they've gone to the "design your own" portion of the pain, so... The idea is you take an exercise that takes 5-7 seconds to do, and weight it so that you get failure after 12 reps: You can do rep 12 with good form, but number 13 fails.

This started with 2 different sorts of "integrated" (multi muscle group) exercises, rounds of squats, pull-downs, and push-ups on Mondays, and rounds of hinges, rows, and presses (dumbbells from shoulder height to together over the head) on Thursdays, with some "isolation" exercises on Wednesdays and Saturdays (eg: dumbbell curls, tricep extensions, various leg lift and ab kinds of things).

So at this point we hit the "okay, design your own workout for the next 3-8 weeks, do it, see the results" stage. I've gone from 20 to 30 lbs in each hand for each of squats, hinge, row and row (and, actually, I fucked up my form on hinge and row and injured myself, so did 8 lbs each hand on those for a while and now am back up to 30). My press is still 20 lbs (each hand), I think largely because of where it comes in the sequence. I've altered the difficulty of the pushups by moving where my hands are so I'm lifting more body weight (and using those slight grips that raise the "down" point a bit), and the pull-downs are... well... it's hard to say what "50 lbs" or "20 lbs" means on a band because it depends on where in the extension range of the band you're pulling on, but I'm up to the "almost floating at fully concentric" for 12 reps of that (170 lbs on the bands).

And my second round of each of the 6 I went down to 20 lbs each hand because my recovery time was getting too high.

I should weigh myself, see how if I've lost any weight, but that hasn't really been the point. I do need to figure out how to up my protein intake a bit; I eat a *lot* of vegetables...

Anyway, if there's one thing good that's come out of this isolation it's that Charlene and I are doing conscious workouts, and while I've always been in generally okay shape because of my interests, this is really the first time in my life I've worked out in a dedicated way. And it feels good to start the day in pain.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Invention and Design Food Software Engineering Bioinformatics Graphic Design Boats Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Two from Shadow:

Angry biker teaches pedestrians to not use the bike lane. I'm of two minds on this, one is "oh hell yeah" and "holy shit the amount of cruft blocking the pedestrians on the sidewalk should be criminal", the other is "this sort of entitlement about spaces is what the creation of 'jaywalking' was about".

A Reddit/Despicable Me meme about HTML and CSS that's dead on.

[ related topics: Marketing Bicycling ]

Finding myself in the possession of tools of the recently deceased, and I'm grateful for the regular reminder of their positive impacts on my life, and reminded of their absence.

National Bureau of Economic Research: Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of U.S. Born Students

... once selection is accounted for with family fixed effects, the correlation between cumulative immigrant exposure and academic achievement of US-born students is positive and significant.

Via this tweet

[ related topics: Children and growing up Theater & Plays Sociology Economics ]

The weirdest thing about Stardew Valley is that Dr. Harvey is trying to contact airplanes while claiming he's somewhere in rural Russia. https://www.google.com/maps/pl...m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d52!4d43.5

[ related topics: Aviation Maps and Mapping ]

Open plan offices result in more lost days to sickness: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices--a national cross sectional questionnaire survey PMID: 21528171 DOI: 10.5271/sjweh.3167

Results: Sickness absence was significantly related to having a greater number of occupants in the office (P<0.001) when adjusting for confounders. Compared to cellular offices, occupants in 2-person offices had 50% more days of sickness absence [rate ratio (RR) 1.50, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.13-1.98], occupants in 3-6-person offices had 36% more days of sickness absence (RR 1.36, 95% CI 1.08-1.73), and occupants in open-plan offices (>6 persons) had 62% more days of sickness absence (RR 1.62, 95% CI 1.30-2.02).

And less interaction: Bernstein ES, Turban S. 2018 The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 373: 20170239. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0239

Although OpenCo1’s primary purpose in opening up thespace had been to increase F2F interactions, the 52 participantsnow spent 72%lesstime interacting F2F. Prior to the redesign,they accumulated 5266 min of interaction over 15 days, orroughly 5.8 h of F2F interaction per person per day. After theredesign, those same people accumulated only 1492 min ofinteraction over 15 days, or roughly 1.7 h per person per day.

Via https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1374521429484478465

Justice Department files evidence that suggests coordination between Oath Keepers and Proud Boys ahead of the January 6th attacks

The full court filing:

The United States respectfully files this memorandum in opposition to Defendant Kelly Meggs’s renewed request for pretrial release. Defendant Meggs plotted with his co-conspirators to stop the certification of the Electoral College vote, prepared to use violence if necessary, andstormed the Capitol. And he was the “team leader” of the attack. For these reasons, the Court should maintain the order that the defendant be detained pending trial.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Law Enforcement Education ]

What if we're all sleeper agents, waiting for the right deeply embedded trigger phrase?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Pondering the old experience of Usenet and blogging as as personal connection vs how Twitter and Instagram and such seem to be more performative spaces these days.

[ related topics: Net Culture ]

Oh geez. Top post on Nextdoor right now is someone pearl clutching about WAP. First off, last year called. Second, PMRC called. Third, have you ever listened to any Blues? Fourth... well... I think it's probably time to deactivate that account, it destroys my faith in humanity.

I wonder whether voice assistants popping into the backgrounds of Zoom meetings is going to help or hinder the adoption of voice recognition systems.

If the letter 'f' auto-completes to a web page about block syntax, you might be an Objective-C programmer.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering ]

Just checking some modification testing code at work. Edited for work testing.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Seriously feeling the burn from this morning's workout, but also amused at the ads in my Twitter feed which are suggesting exercise goals like "athlete", "bodybuilder" and "otter".

Fascinating comparison of Rust and Zig:

Also, to explain why I struggled with Rust I’ll have to show a lot of complex code that I’m obviously unhappy about. My intent here is not to gripe about Rust, but to establish my (lack of) credibility: It’s so you can judge for yourself whether I’m using Rust’s features in a reasonable way or if I’ve totally lost the plot.

Finally, while it risks falling into the dreadfully boring “language X is better than Y” blog trope, I feel that it’d be more helpful to some readers if I explicitly compare Rust and Zig, rather than write a wholly positive “Zig’s great!” article. (After all, I’d steadily ignored six months of Jamie gushing about Zig because, “that’s great buddy, but I already know Rust and I just want to get my keyboard done, okay?”)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Law ]

As in the mixed feelings of that cyclist yelling at people in the bike lane that Shadow sent, I'm not totally sure how I feel about this, part of me wants to stand up and cheer, part of me is concerned: California District 19 State Assembly Member Phil Ting Proposes to Eliminate Jaywalking Tickets In California:

AB 1238/The Freedom To Walk Act promotes the fair and equitable use of roadways by:

• Legalizing crossings, when safe, outside of a crosswalk or against a traffic light
• Stopping the undue financial burden on low-income violators, as fines can total hundreds of dollars, if not more, because of added fees tacked on by the court, county, city and other jurisdictions
• Preventing police from using jaywalking as a pretext to stop Black and Brown people, especially since under-resourced neighborhoods often lack adequate crossing infrastructure

“Jaywalking laws do more than turn an ordinary and logical behavior into a crime; they also create opportunities for police to racially profile. A stop for harmless jaywalking can turn into a potentially life-threatening police encounter, especially for Black people, who are disproportionately targeted and suffer the most severe consequences of inequitable law enforcement,” said Jared Sanchez of the California Bicycle Coalition (CalBike), sponsor of AB 1238.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Privacy Bay Area Law Enforcement Civil Liberties California Culture Pedal Power Bicycling Archival Government ]

Lee Wong—an Asian American elected official in West Chester, OH & 20-yr Army Vet—took his shirt off during a town hall to show his scars from his service

Why a West Chester board member removed his shirt during a recent town hall

Lee Wong recalls many instances of discrimination in his life. He fears it’s getting worse.

[ related topics: Clothing ]

After crime plummeted in 2020, Baltimore will stop drug, sex prosecutions

Something happened in Baltimore last year. The coronavirus pandemic hit, and State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby announced that the city would no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, trespassing and other minor charges, to keep people out of jail and limit the spread of the deadly virus.

And then crime went down in Baltimore. A lot. While violent crime and homicides skyrocketed in most other big American cities last year, violent crime in Baltimore dropped 20 percent from last March to this month, property crime decreased 36 percent, and there were 13 fewer homicides compared with the previous year. This happened while 39 percent fewer people entered the city’s criminal justice system in the one-year period, and 20 percent fewer people landed in jail after Mosby’s office dismissed more than 1,400 pending cases and tossed out more than 1,400 warrants for nonviolent crimes.

[ related topics: Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture Health virus Law Law Enforcement Skating Flowers ]

When you're too lazy to go to the hardware store for hooks but want those brushes hung up now, and were stingy enough to save the frames from campaign signs

[ related topics: Photography ]

Just broke down and bought over-priced hooks for the bedroom from the hardware store because every time I tried to draw hooks to cut out of wood they ended up looking like penises.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Fascinating: Using GAN generated faces as facial recognition image searc hinput to find bot networks on Twitter

U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans' membership in houses of worship continued to decline last year, dropping below 50% for the first time in Gallup's eight-decade trend. In 2020, 47% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque, down from 50% in 2018 and 70% in 1999.

[ related topics: Religion Nature and environment Current Events Real Estate ]

A Republican has found evidence of voter fraud: Baltimore Police officer who ran for mayor is charged by state prosecutor with election crimes

Ivan Gonzalez was charged with perjury, falsifying voter registration and related charges after being indicted by a grand jury following an internal police department investigation.

The Sun first reported on Gonzalez’s apparent residency discrepancy in August. Gonzalez declined to comment at the time, telling a reporter, “You guys are fake news.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Java ]

Lil Nas X isn't worshipping the devil. He's healing deep hurt

Among many recent tweets, X wrote on March 27, "i spent my entire teenage years hating myself because of the s--t y'all preached would happen to me because i was gay. so i hope u are mad, stay mad, feel the same anger you teach us to have towards ourselves."

This tweet speaks volumes for millions of queer folks, especially Black queer people, who have suffered spiritual and theological violence at the hand of church doctrines. X's words are ones the late, great James Baldwin -- who once wrote, "Because I was born in a Christian culture, I never considered myself to be totally a free human being" -- would admire and support.

The rest of the essay is good.

[ related topics: Religion Sexual Culture Sociology Writing California Culture Video ]