Flutterby™! From 2021-05-02 to 2021-05-31

If you haven't had your fill of sweet Jewish mythology urban fantasy lately, this is just so much all that: http://giganotosaurus.org/2021/05/01/just-enough-rain/

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Erotic ]

The struggle far transcends Twitter, and is real: RT Midtown Brandi Frown 😾 @ItsTheBrandi

Twitter culture is talking to someone on this site for eons and knowing their pronouns and then having to be like, 'Uh, weird question but what should I call you when we chat IRL because I will not yell, "Corporate Chicken Fucker, we finally meet!" in public.

[ related topics: Food Sociology California Culture Birds ]

I have a new favorite recipe and food web site: http://www.justthefuckingrecipe.net/

[ related topics: Invention and Design Food ]

Unsolicited deck pic

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Charlene said, of our sunscreen stash, "some of them I threw out 'cause they were gross and old", and I wondered just what the subtext there was...

This is really good, and worth a New York Times read, an excerpt from Steven Johnson's new book and PBS show Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer: How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life — Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. How did we do it? Science mattered — but so did activism.

[ related topics: Books Invention and Design New York ]

McSweeny's: I Am Thrilled That My Career Day Exhibit on Shaft Hardening at My Son’s Middle School Was So Popular

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

If May is any indication, it's definitely gonna be a Hot Summer, but I don't think we need to gender it. Hot Nby Summer, maybe?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

A Surprising Number Of Sea Monster Sightings Can Be Explained By Whale Erections

Cetaceans, sex and sea serpents: an analysis of the Egede accounts of a “most dreadful monster” seen off the coast of Greenland in 1734, April 2005 Archives of Natural History 32(1):1-9 DOI:10.3366/anh.2005.32.1.1

April 2005Archives of Natural History 32(1):1-9

DOI:10.3366/anh.2005.32.1.1

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Archival Gardening ]

A New Study Reveals that Not Prosecuting People for Nonviolent Misdemeanors May Actually Reduce Crime

In a new study we consider this question, using data from Suffolk County, Massachusetts (where Boston is located). We show that prosecuting minor offenses like the ones described above actually does more harm than good. Scaling back the prosecution of nonviolent misdemeanors leads to an increase, not decrease, in public safety.

How did we reach this conclusion? In our study we exploit a feature of nearly all criminal justice contexts: what happens to your case depends a bit on luck. As a defendant, you might get lucky and be assigned a lenient prosecutor instead of a harsh one. In Suffolk County, cases are randomly assigned to prosecutors, and those prosecutors vary in their leniency. Using rich administrative data from the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office on future criminal complaints, we follow the lucky defendants over time to see what happens to them, relative to the people who were unlucky and got assigned to a less lenient prosecutor.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Law Law Enforcement ]

‘We’re terrorized’: LA sheriffs frequently harass families of people they kill, says report

The report looks to be at https://www.aclusocal.org/site...asd_family_harassment_report.pdf

Via https://mobile.twitter.com/SamTLevin/status/1389693659356942336

[ related topics: Sociology Current Events ]

Wait, when did we go from "Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter" as satire to sincerely asking "do you have a SubStack?"?

Presence of Armed School Officials and Fatal and Nonfatal Gunshot Injuries During Mass School Shootings, United States, 1980-2019 doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.37394

... in fact, controlling for the aforementioned factors of location and school characteristics, the rate of deaths was 2.83 times greater in schools with an armed guard present

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Your car is spying on you, and a CPB contract shows the risks

The kit, MSAB says, also has the ability to discover specific events that most car owners are probably unaware are even recorded, like “when and where a vehicle’s lights are turned on, and which doors are opened and closed at specific locations” as well as “gear shifts, odometer reads, ignition cycles, speed logs, and more.” This car-based surveillance, in other words, goes many miles beyond the car itself.

[ related topics: Television Automobiles ]

Exclusive: Sacramento PD documents describe secret investigation that led to cop’s arrest

The case spilled into the open Thursday with Sacramento police announcing the arrest of Alexa Kimberly Palubicki, 26, a three-year veteran of the department.

Palubicki faces two felony counts of filing a false police report that accuse her of lying when she reported that the motorist came to their attention because he hadn’t used his turn signal when pulling into the gas station and was suspected of driving under the influence. She is scheduled to be arraigned Monday.

[ related topics: Law Current Events Law Enforcement ]

Letters of Note: Diane Fossey mourns the death of Max Standby

Letters of Note update: in case it wasn't clear, 'Max Standby' was a vibrator

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Law Current Events ]

I saw a quote from Orson Welles that I was trying to source, “I don’t say we all ought to misbehave. But we ought to look as if we could”, but I couldn't find it..

This is not that quote, but it's good: Orson Wells talking about police misconduct on his BBC show in 1955

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Monty Python Law Enforcement Woodworking ]

Signed up for Netflix to watch Mitchells vs the Machines. Turned that off after half an hour (great animation, no screenplay connection), signed up for Paramount+, watched the first episode of From Cradle To Stage. Enjoyed it, but we're just not cut out for TV & movies.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Animation Movies Television ]

Those excess mortality numbers... damn! New Study Estimates More Than 900,000 People Have Died Of COVID-19 In U.S.

IHME: Estimation of total mortality due to COVID-19

[ related topics: Invention and Design Theater & Plays ]

Former Sacramento Police Officer Arrested After Allegedly Sending Explicit Messages To 15-Year-Old Girl He Met Online. The "Former" is that he was fired after the allegations were confirmed.

The family of the 15-year-old girl says she appears to have met the former cop, Daniel Donahue, through an app tied to Snapchat called “Hoop.”

The girl said she brought the conversation to her aunt’s attention when she found out Donahue was a police officer.

[ related topics: Sociology Law Enforcement Pop Culture ]

US Energy Information Administration: Pipeline shutdown disrupts gasoline supply in the Southeast:

Gasoline and other petroleum products also continue to be delivered by Plantation Pipeline, the other major pipeline transporting supplies from the Gulf Coast to as far north as the Washington, DC area. With a capacity of 700,000 b/d, Plantation has about half the capacity of Colonial Line 1 and ships a mix of gasoline, diesel, and other fuels. Like the Colonial system, Plantation also runs at or near full capacity.

Emphasis added, but damn the writers are lazy.

Also, RT Luca Filipozzi @LucaFilipozzi Replying to @Bing_Chris:

Thank you for targeting Big Oil rather than a hospital. Now, finally, we can see some law enforcement reaction.

[ related topics: Writing Law Enforcement Machinery ]

Friend recommended these amplifiers to me, and I've gotta admit I'm pretty impressed by truth in advertising. This one proudly boasts "no sparks"!

[ related topics: Photography Consumerism and advertising ]

Also impressive in truth in advertising is the suggestion that this amplifier is "almost compatible"!

[ related topics: Photography Consumerism and advertising ]

No, I'm not going to link to the spaghetti TikTok, because I don't kinkshame and I think laughing at people's fetish videos is tacky. Whatever gets you off gets you off and that's fine.

Bitcoin explained: RT Bigby Brimble

Imagine a child's concept of an evil businessman. He plugs in his pollution machine to make money. It doesn't do anything for anybody, just pollutes and then he gets money for it.

RT Ankle Megami Tensei @StochasticOoze

At least the villains in Captain Planet were generally getting something useful out of their polluting schemes. Natural resources and whatnot. Cryptomining is polluting for zeroes and ones that a handful of people have decided is money.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Currency ]

Air pollution from farms leads to 17,900 U.S. deaths per year, study finds

Now, a first-of-its-kind study shows that air pollution from Duplin County farms is linked to roughly 98 premature deaths per year, 89 of which are linked to emissions directly caused by hogs. Those losses are among more than 17,000 annual deaths attributable to pollution from farms across the United States, according to research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Television Global Warming ]

Rebekah Jones Tried to Warn Us About COVID-19. Now Her Freedom Is on the Line

In a Cosmopolitan exclusive, the whistleblower speaks out about being raided at gunpoint, charged with a felony, and forced to flee hundreds of miles to protect her family. And no, she doesn’t see this ending well.

[ related topics: Politics Privacy Sociology Civil Liberties Government ]

Interesting Twitter thread: RT Viki Male💙 @VikiLovesFACS

This @NEJM paper did long-term follow-up on 3958 #pregnant ppl who received a #COVID19 #vaccine.

👉🏻 No increased risk of pregnancy-specific adverse events (including #miscarriage).

So why are ppl claiming it shows a 24x increased risk of miscarriage? 🧵

10.1056/NEJMoa2104983

The paper is Preliminary Findings of mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine Safety in Pregnant Persons.

[ related topics: Television ]

Interesting: Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering: this may impact some Chrome extensions

What’s changing  We’re updating the way Google Docs renders documents. Over the course of the next several months, we’ll be migrating the underlying technical implementation of Docs from the current HTML-based rendering approach to a canvas-based approach to improve performance and improve consistency in how content appears across different platforms.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Graphics ]

RT Jared Pechacek @vandroidhelsing

Mistyped it as “het lag” so now we have a term for when you grow up thinking you’re straight

Ah, Nextdoor: I am one house off this intersection. On the one hand I'm slightly concerned, on the other hand, yeah, the intersection is dangerous, and I'm thinking those kids are probably making it a lot saafer.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Real Estate ]

This is pretty amazing: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically).

COVID-19 Endothelial Dysfunction Can Cause Erectile Dysfunction: Histopathological, Immunohistochemical, and Ultrastructural Study of the Human Penis

https://doi.org/10.5534/wjmh.210055

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

"Rodents and pigs share with certain aquatic organisms the ability to use their intestines for respiration, finds a study publishing May 14th in the journal Med. The researchers demonstrated that the delivery of oxygen gas or oxygenated liquid through the rectum provided vital rescue to two mammalian models of respiratory failure."

Ryo Okabe et al, Mammalian enteral ventilation ameliorates respiratory failure, Med (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.medj.2021.04.004

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Doc Searles - How the cookie poisoned the Web. The first interactive version of the Flutterby CMS maintained passed state where it needed to via parameters in the URL, because I thought that we might have a a web where cookies were optional. Now we have to click "yeah, whatever, violate my privacy" with every site in order to use the web.

[ related topics: Privacy Content Management ]

Fully vaccinated people can shed their masks in most places -U.S. CDC

CNN: Public health experts: Why we're going to keep wearing our masks — Opinion by David Holtgrave and Eli Rosenberg

The Seychelles is the most vaccinated nation on Earth. But Covid has surged

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design ]

Boston releases scathing review of police commissioner; Dennis White files injunction to stop his removal.

The city’s investigator also described four witnesses who alleged that White’s abuse of his first wife was much worse than has been previously disclosed, and included allegations of him holding her face to a stove, burning her hair, and kicking and choking her. The investigator wrote “it was confirmed” that White’s former wife “repeatedly reported both physical and mental abuse” to the department but the department’s internal affairs office did not investigate until she sought a restraining order in May 1999.

The report also documented the department’s pattern of protecting its own. The city’s investigator tried to contact 21 witnesses regarding White, but only seven agreed to speak to her.

The police department that has a history of protecting child rapists has a history of protecting domestic abusers. Go figure.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Race Gambling Archival Marriage ]

Just finished Ina Park's "Strange Bedfellows: Adventures in the Science, History and Surprising Secrets of STDs". Laugh out loud funny in places, taught me things, I recommend it. And am game to share (the book) if you're local.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Games ]

This is fascinating: Radiobiological shot noise explains Three Mile Island biodosimetry indicating nearly 1,000 mSv exposures. Why the release of radioactive Xenon during the Three Mile Island event back in 1979 appear to have been way more biologically impactful than the raw numbers than the physical dosimetry in the area indicated. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-67826-5

Nuclear is still miles away better than coal, the occasional radiation release has nothing on fly ash ponds and other pollution impacts.

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Made a Hyatt reservation. Price for no cancellation or for joining their loyalty club was $50/night lower than price for just regular terms. So giving them permission to email you marketing crap is worth $50/night to them. In case you wondered what your data was worth.

[ related topics: Law Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]

How ‘Rear Adm. Jack Meehoff’ fooled a bunch of real retired generals and admirals

In a commentary for Defense One, retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Paula G. Thornhill wrote that the opinions expressed by the retired leaders who signed the Flag Officers 4 America Letter do not deserve any sort of special consideration just because of the signatories’ former ranks.

“It’s a small step, but one place to start is give an ‘F’ to a poorly written missive, supported by a self-selected group of retired white men, posted on a website that implies, somehow, these retirees are uniquely ‘for America,’” wrote Thornhill, associate director of the Strategic Studies program at Johns Hopkins SAIS. “This letter demonstrates just how unworthy they are of the public voice they tried to claim as flag officer retirees.”

[ related topics: Software Engineering Current Events Race ]

So say you wanted modern boilerplate to get an Electron+TypeScript+React (with hopes of adding Fluid+Fluent) app running quickly. What's the quickstart that actually works (eg: not in the first page of Google results) that leaves the fewest package manager warnings?

[ related topics: Sports ]

Thinking about the dude driving the truck down Kentucky St hollering out the window at people wearing masks, and even though I'm vaccinated I'm gonna continue to wear the mask just to trigger the MAGAts.

[ related topics: Machinery ]

Very pleasant walk downtown this evening

[ related topics: Photography ]

Didn't find anywhere quiet to sit and sip a tea, though

[ related topics: Photography ]

Nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones Marta Serra-Garcia and Uri Gneezy in Science Advances 21 May 2021: Vol. 7, no. 21, eabd1705 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd1705

Abstract We use publicly available data to show that published papers in top psychology, economics, and general interest journals that fail to replicate are cited more than those that replicate. This difference in citation does not change after the publication of the failure to replicate. Only 12% of postreplication citations of nonreplicable findings acknowledge the replication failure. Existing evidence also shows that experts predict well which papers will be replicated. Given this prediction, why are nonreplicable papers accepted for publication in the first place? A possible answer is that the review team faces a trade-off. When the results are more “interesting,” they apply lower standards regarding their reproducibility.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Television Gambling Economics Public Transportation ]

Research findings that are probably wrong cited far more than robust ones, study finds

The study in Science Advances is the latest to highlight the “replication crisis” where results, mostly in social science and medicine, fail to hold up when other researchers try to repeat experiments. Following an influential paper in 2005 titled Why most published research findings are false, three major projects have found replication rates as low as 39% in psychology journals, 61% in economics journals, and 62% in social science studies published in the Nature and Science, two of the most prestigious journals in the world.

Nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones Marta Serra-Garcia and Uri Gneezy DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd1705

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Nature and environment Gambling Economics Public Transportation ]

McSweeney's does a Seven Brides for Seven Brothers explainer.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is based on “The Rape of the Sabine Women,” a foundational Roman myth, which told the story of the mass rape of Sabine women by Roman men. The film starred Jacques d’Amboise, Russ Tamblyn, and the incomparable Jane Powell, who also danced with Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding.

[ related topics: Marriage ]

Sunrun salespeople, ignoring "no soliciting" signs *twice* in 3 days.

The two types of nerds: Those on my timeline talking about how Star Wars was released 44 years ago today, and those mentioning that it's Towel Day.

[ related topics: Star Wars Space & Astronomy Aviation - Helicopters ]

Just a place for me to hang a Twitter thread claiming to unmask the identity of Golden State Nationalist Stefan Perez with possible ties to what looks like the Santa Rosa Police Department getting played in arresting 3 women over the vandalism of the home of a former SRPD officer who testified for the defense in the George Floyd murder trial</a.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement California Culture ]

The real nerds have been pointing out that, yeah, it's Towel Day and the anniversary of the release of the original Star Wars, but it's also the day of The People's Revolution of the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May in Ankh Morpork. Wear your lilac.

[ related topics: Star Wars Space & Astronomy Aviation - Helicopters ]

Currently reading RFC2616 to try to figure out why on our browser built on top of WkWebView I'm getting a short HTML page when I think I should be downloading a larger PDF, but from a site I can't access myself. How's your day going?

Cool Twitter thread on the current state of Rowhammer attacks against dynamic RAM

Chicago’s predictive policing program told a man he would be involved with a shooting. But it couldn’t determine which side of the gun he would be on. Instead, it made him the victim of a violent crime — twice.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Guns ]

Next time I need woodworking design inspiration: a tentacle themed crib

[ related topics: Graphic Design Woodworking ]

The thing I like most about working in Swift is the different semicolon semantics than Objective-C, because nothing makes me feel productive like trying to remember when I should and shouldn't use punctuation.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Some web developers should not be left alone near a keyboard. Just found a blog where someone managed to break content when navigated to with the "back" button in Safari (works in Firefox and Chrome)...

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Harsh, but fair. And balanced.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Well, if you're gonna have a parking garage, I think this is a decent way to gussy it up.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

Remains of 215 children found at former residential school in British Columbia

The Kamloops school operated between 1890 and 1969. The federal government took over the operation from the Catholic Church to operate as a day school until it closed in 1978.

From the MeFi thread: Here one day, gone the next: Kamloops Indian Residential School survivor remembers his schoolmates disappearing, and MeFi user Jade Dragon recounts her Mom's experiences being kidnapped and put in a Canadian residential school for indigenous children

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up moron Current Events ]

Our i3 has the flickery AC light problem, and the quote is $1,400 to fix it. What's the current state of ~250mi range electrics, focus on build quality (unlike the i3), and is anyone actually competing with Tesla yet?

Rode out to Tomales and back this morning. As I passed poppies, this Memorial Day, I kept thinking about "In Flanders fields..."

[ related topics: Photography ]

The drought was obvious in Chilleno Valley, the herons and pelicans still had water, but there was a lot of cracked dried mud.

[ related topics: Photography ]