Flutterby™! From 2021-12-01 to 2021-12-31

Good on the kids for not trusting, but yikes, and more reason to call 911 and confirm that the person claiming to be a cop is a cop: 'See my badge, bro': Oxford High School students escape through window as voice claims to be deputy

OXFORD, Mich. (FOX 2) - </span>As a gunman opened fire inside Oxford High School on Tuesday, confusion reigned as students, fearful for their lives, were unsure if the person knocking on the door was a gunman or actually an Oakland County Sheriff Deputy.

A parent called into FOX 2 sharing what his son, a student who attends Oxford High School, experienced Tuesday amid a mass shooting that left three teens dead and eight other people wounded.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Bay Area Current Events Pyrotechnics ]

Hey, I'm working through Ray E Badness's "Drum Programming - A Complete Guid to Program and Think Like A Drummer" with a synth, and it's fine, but I'd like an intro to the more classic drum patterns, rather than '90s drum machine stuff. Any suggestions?

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

On the one hand, I appreciate that CSS now has ways to handle light/dark OS mode, on the other hand this spinner on Google Images is kinda disturbing.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Just got a newsletter from a local publication that had a story in the "premium content" section about a catering business that underestimated their Thanksgiving order fulfillment abilities, and realized that they're hoping people will pay for NextDoor rants... 👀

"No, when I proposed that we do this per version, I meant a separately for each revision, not..."

At some point I signed up for an account on Academia(dot)edu, and I suspect that I am not nearly as influential as they're trying to convince me that I am...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Brilliant! The Journal of Universal Rejection

The founding principle of the Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR) is rejection. Universal rejection. That is to say, all submissions, regardless of quality, will be rejected. Despite that apparent drawback, here are a number of reasons you may choose to submit to the JofUR:

• You can send your manuscript here without suffering waves of anxiety regarding the eventual fate of your submission. You know with 100% certainty that it will not be accepted for publication.
• There are no page-fees.
• You may claim to have submitted to the most prestigious journal (judged by acceptance rate).
• The JofUR is one-of-a-kind. Merely submitting work to it may be considered a badge of honor.
• You retain complete rights to your work, and are free to resubmit to other journals even before our review process is complete.
• Decisions are often (though not always) rendered within hours of submission.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Civil Liberties ]

XCode: "No, I can't possibly process more than a keystroke every 4 seconds, I'm recompiling to see if the code you're correcting has any errors."

Also XCode: "That code that you fixed 15 minutes ago still has errors, you'll have to manually recompile to tell me it's fixed."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Current status: Deciding on timing, ease-in and out, and alpha limits, for "throbbing" vs "gently pulsing".

If our rendering model were more complex I'd add a parameter for moistness.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Graphics ]

Volk Heroes — This fun new book about how Germans raise their kids will break American parents’ hearts.

For example, when Sophia starts first grade, school administrators remind parents that under no circumstances should they drop children off in an automobile. Could you imagine? I can’t.

The book is Sara Zaske’s guide to German-style parenting, Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children. The queue is too long, but...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Books Invention and Design Art & Culture Automobiles Douglas Adams ]

RT John Overholt @john_overholt

The problem with Great American Songbook-type songs is that their lyrics are often unintelligible to a modern audience, like “You're the top, you're an Arrow collar / You're the top, you're a Coolidge dollar” or “Now your mom threw away your best porno mag”.

[ related topics: Currency ]

I'm as much of a fan of possums as anyone, except when they crawl up your dryer vent and electrocute themselves inside the back of the machine (the single most disgusting experience I've ever had to deal with), but don't believe all of the memes: Are Virginia opossums really ecological traps for ticks? Groundtruthing laboratory observations DOI: 10.1016/j.ttbdis.2021.101780

Using a dissecting microscope, we searched the contents exhaustively for ticks and tick body parts, without sieving or pre-rinsing the stomach contents. We did not locate any ticks or tick parts in the stomach contents of Virginia opossums. We also performed a vigorous literature search for corroborating evidence of tick ingestion. Our search revealed 23 manuscripts that describe diet analyses of Virginia opossums, 19 of which were conducted on stomach or digestive tract contents and four of which were scat-based analyses. None of the studies identified ticks in their analyses of diet items. We conclude that ticks are not a preferred diet item for Virginia opossums.

And they wonder why I have trust issues

[ related topics: Photography ]

‘Pay-to-participate’ autism stem-cells paper retracted

“It’s not really a meaningful contribution to scientific knowledge,” said Turner, who co-authored a critical letter about the study earlier this year with Jeremy Snyder, professor of public health ethics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. “It’s more what’s sometimes described as a scientific token of legitimacy to help burnish the marketing credentials of that business.”

From reading this write-up, it also sounds like though the only possible outcome of the study was looking at safety, there were some claims about effect, even though there was no control group, and 20% of the participants dropped out. So, yeah, with the small sample size, any claims are gonna be marred by selection bias.

[ related topics: Health Ethics Current Events Consumerism and advertising Marketing Education ]

The World’s First Hands-Free Sex Toy Designed By & For People With Disability Is Here

It’s why he [Andrew Gurza] and his sister, Heather Morrison, created the world’s first hands-free sex toy device, designed by and for disabled people. The Bump’n Joystick is the first of its kind, and tackles the common barrier halting masturbation and the use of sex toys: limited hand movement. It’s something that’s underpinned the entire manufacturing process — from a hands-free unboxing process to a hands-free cleaning, charging, and storing experience.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Handicaps & Disabilities ]

Found these beauties growing in the rosemary. Would love to identify them.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Wider shot of the mushrooms

[ related topics: Photography ]

Why didn't the person who developed the Norske magnetic wristband get a Nobel Prize?

[ related topics: Photography ]

22 or 23 lbs of Pindo palm fruit from the freezer into the fermenter. To soak with assorted stuff overnight, tomorrow we add yeast, in a year and a half or so we'll have wine....

[ related topics: Photography Wines and Spirits ]

Deadlock Empire is a cute little game of stepping through code to see if you can create deadlocks. At least one of the first few challenges involves discovering the interface to expand out how an instruction is actually executing, but as I work on a large code base that has lots of threading, but not a clear strategy for managing that threading, I wish the previous maintainers of this code base had played this game...

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

Added the yeast this morning and sealed up the barrel. A week, and then I'll squeeze out the fruit....

[ related topics: Photography ]

Good morning!

[ related topics: Photography ]

Well, there's another person I've met, who wasn't vaccinated, who just died in the hospital of COVID. Waiting at the pharmacy for my booster shot right now.

[ related topics: Health ]

A couple of contra dance safety policies, because if we ever start square dancing again I think it will be important to have one.

• http://amherstcontra.org/Amherst_Contradance/Safety_Policy.html
• http://www.nextgendancecamp.org/safety.html

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

World’s largest pot brownie weighs in at 850 pounds for National Brownie Day

Guinness World Records previously listed the largest marijuana brownie ever baked at 243 pounds, USA Today said. To break the record, MariMed needed 1,344 eggs, 250 pounds of sugar, 212 pounds of butter, 5.3 pounds of vanilla extract, 81 pounds of flour, two pounds of baking powder, three pounds of salt, and 122 pounds of cocoa powder, the newspaper reported.

Thank you to https://twitter.com/ResearchBuzz/status/1468715874991448068

[ related topics: Drugs Health Bay Area Current Events Journalism and Media ]

Michelangelo was basically Tom of Finland with some good coloring skills, and the career advantage that his major gig was doing advertising for a large multinational company.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

Might Viagra stave off Alzheimer's Disease, or is it just erectile dysfunction? Endophenotype-based in silico network medicine discovery combined with insurance record data mining identifies sildenafil as a candidate drug for Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract We developed an endophenotype disease module-based methodology for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) drug repurposing and identified sildenafil as a potential disease risk modifier. Based on retrospective case–control pharmacoepidemiologic analyses of insurance claims data for 7.23 million individuals, we found that sildenafil usage was significantly associated with a 69% reduced risk of AD (hazard ratio 0.31, 95% confidence interval 0.25–0.39, P < 1.0 × 10–8). Propensity score-stratified analyses confirmed that sildenafil is significantly associated with a decreased risk of AD across all four drug cohorts tested (diltiazem, glimepiride, losartan and metformin) after adjusting for age, sex, race and disease comorbidities. We also found that sildenafil increases neurite growth and decreases phospho-tau expression in neuron models derived from induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with AD, supporting mechanistically its potential beneficial effect in AD. The association between sildenafil use and decreased incidence of AD does not establish causality, which will require a randomized controlled trial.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Health broadband Nature and environment Law ]

Some times the juicer really really doesn't want to press the juice out of the fruit. Sigh.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Huh, some things are timeless. Silly question: Of what era and what dance style was this written?

"But when the dancing masters got hold of it, and people paid them good money to teach them how to do it, they had to make it so complicated and difficult that it would be worth paying for, and if they made it difficult enough, it would require many lessons with their many continuing payments. And the public were all proud as punch because they had learned and paid for something so very complicated!"

(Lloyd "Pappy" Shaw, writing in "The Round Dance Book", about the polka, which legend has it was invented in circa 1830)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Writing Currency ]

Interesting Twitter thread on the power consumption differences between electrical neural networks and biological ones, and some of the pathways through which the biological ones get their power.

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

Dear Apple: Your I/O stack does, at times, seem bizarre, but I don't trust this number.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Photography ]

If it's too cold in the office, everybody just do a clean and a build at the same time. Of course the lights may dim...

(This message brought to you by the whoosh of a MacBook Pro fan...)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Bored Ape Yacht Club: Someone accidentally sold a $300,000 NFT for $3,000

"Fat finger" errors occasionally happen in traditional finance, but they're usually stopped or reversed. Not so with NFTs and cryptocurrency.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Thinking about modal UIs, and how vi asks the user to keep a fairly complex mental model of the edit state, and how XCode's latency asks the user to keep an even more complex mental model of the edit state, or pause for 15 seconds while the editor catches up.

In the context of log4j, and thinking about the abuse of npm and similar, currently pondering the notion of "the further from C, the more technical debt your organization has incurred."

Nathan Bernard @nathanTbernard

Former US Senate candidate and first Maine resident to catch COVID Max Linn found dead in hot tub after being sued for pulling gun on former aide during cryptocurrency disagreement

Max Linn, colorful candidate, dead at 62

[ related topics: Politics Guns ]

A division of Virginia’s General Assembly is dealing with ransomware attack

Unsure if this is about comestibles, or Christmas music.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Photography ]

RT Matthew Cortland, JD @mattbc

So the billionaire who owns Time Magazine, Marc Benioff, is also an investor in Elon Musk's Space X, a company at risk of bankruptcy.

And Benioff's Time Magazine gave Musk some positive publicity by naming him person of the year.

cool, cool – was the first gilded age this fuc

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Whoah. YouTube informs me that my account last year was responsible for wasting 72.4K watch time minutes in 25.2K views. I wish to apologize to the world for this. Also, that ratio is kinda weird 'cause I've been uploading a lot of multi-hour videos...

[ related topics: Movies ]

Huh. Wonder where this character encoding disaster fell down?

[ related topics: Photography ]

Good morning

[ related topics: Photography ]

Good morning, more

[ related topics: Photography ]

Good morning, more more

[ related topics: Photography ]

I've been struggling a lot with "what does the end of the pandemic look like?" and "when do we go back to normal?" and "when am I okay being indoors with other people, masked or unmasked?". At this point I've known enough people who've gotten breakthrough cases to mostly shrug it off. Yeah, it sucks for a few days, but I barely had any reaction to the vaccine so it's unlikely to be bad for me. And there's no data on whether it's commutative, but the immunity numbers for infected+vaccinated are spectacularly good, so if I'm gonna get infected too, why not get it while my immune system is supercharged and the strains are known.

I just watched a Zoom presentation by someone I know from square dancing, who's worked in public health, and he's talking about square dancing indoors with a cloth mask. And my first reaction is "DUDE!?!", but as I watch California pay lip service to masks... well...

Anyway, I'm still staying masked indoors, and generally being a hermit. But I'm wondering what the end game looks like.

The end of the pandemic will not be televised BMJ 2021; 375 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2021-068094 (Published 14 December 2021)

History suggests that the end of the pandemic will not simply follow the attainment of herd immunity or an official declaration, but rather it will occur gradually and unevenly as societies cease to be all consumed by the pandemic’s shocking metrics. Pandemic ending is more of a question of lived experience, and thus is more of a sociological phenomenon than a biological one.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games Health Movies California Culture ]

If you read only one obituary of someone you never met today, let it be the obituary of Renay Mandel Corren in the Fayetteville Observer. And be damned sure you're not drinking anything while you do.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

And I have discovered a new web comic: webcomic name — tingliest lasagne

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Project Zero: A deep dive into an NSO zero-click iMessage exploit: Remote Code Execution. So an iMessage call that was just supposed to save a .gif file also tried to parse the .gif file, but with a general file parser. When sent a properly crafted JBIG2 file, the PDF parser interpreted that in a way that could overflow and allow arbitrary writes to its memory, which let that create a virtual machine that could start to make other larger decisions on exploits.

Really crafty interesting stuff.

Edit: the MeFi thread

Hackers Steal $119M From ‘Web3’ Crypto Project With Old School Attack

In a Tweet on Wednesday, BadgerDAO (decentralized autonomous organization) wrote that it received “reports of unauthorized withdrawals of user funds.” According to blockchain security company PeckShield, the hackers stole around 2100 BTC ($118,500,000) and 151 ETH ($679,000) worth of cryptocurrency tokens. 

I like that the hacker can take control of the web infrastructure of a decentralized autonomous organization. Like these words don't mean what one might think they mean.

Via https://twitter.com/lucas_gonze/status/1466835459925938181

[ related topics: Children and growing up Cryptography ]

I don't know what Democratic strategist decided it was a good thing to clog up my SMS with long missives asking for donations for candidates all over the country, but for fuck's sake fucking stop it already.

Thinking about how the "but what about low income drivers?" when we propose VMTs or congestion charges is the "but if you punish me for murder in gonna blow up this orphanage, so who's the real villain here?" of traffic.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Do you have a ‘Quantum Pendant’ anti-5G pendant or a ‘negative ion’ jewellery item or sleep mask? If so, store it away safely

Do not throw the products away with your household waste. Because they contain radioactive materials or waste, it is important that they be handled by a company with the expertise to deal with such substances.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events ]

I was wondering how to resign my post as "Neighborhood Lead" on Nextdoor, but I think I'm just gonna get my ass banned from it entirely by calling out assholes instead.

Warwick Economics: Does Contact Tracing Work? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from an Excel Error in England

Contact tracing has been a central pillar of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, contact tracing measures face substantive challenges in practice and well-identified evidence about their effectiveness remains scarce. This paper exploits quasi-random variation in COVID-19 contact tracing. Between September 25 and October 2, 2020, a total of 15,841 COVID-19 cases in England (around 15 to 20% of all cases) were not immediately referred to the contact tracing system due to a data processing error. Case information was truncated from an Excel spreadsheet after the row limit had been reached, which was discovered on October 3. There is substantial variation in the degree to which different parts of England areas were exposed – by chance – to delayed referrals of COVID-19 cases to to the contact tracing system. We show that more affected areas subsequently experienced a drastic rise in new COVID-19 infections and deaths alongside an increase in the positivity rate and the number of test performed, as well as a decline in the performance of the contact tracing system. Conservative estimates suggest that the failure of timely contact tracing due to the data glitch is associated with more than 125,000 additional infections and over 1,500 additional COVID-19-related deaths. Our findings provide strong quasi-experimental evidence for the effectiveness of contact tracing.

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design Theater & Plays Law Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

Find out if anyone's tracking you using Apple AirTag devices without installing Apple software on your Android phone: AirGuard source code and AirGuard in the Google Play app store.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Open Source Software Engineering ]

There's a Google voice controlled speaker thingie in the office, so when I get frustrated and cuss out Google I get this British-ish voice saying "okay, but first you'll have to unlock your device".

Sigh: No, person whining on Nextdoor, the exact reason we've gotten the current City Council mechanism is that we don't want random people providing "oversight" and causing the city to bend over backwards for niche subsidies of high impact businesses.

When the anti-roundabout discussions essentially come down to "we can't have the road curving, drunk drivers might hop the curb!"

Reading the arguments of people trying to maintain the primacy of automobiles in our infrastructure design, I now understand why it was so hard to get people to stop smoking.

[ related topics: Drugs Automobiles Graphic Design ]

Walked by this on the way home, the helicopter rotor looked like ship radar... https://youtu.be/EPb_MAm4YqE

[ related topics: Photography Machinery Gambling Aviation - Helicopters ]

Another shot of 5th and H

[ related topics: Photography Gambling ]

Not sure what the meta level of corruption is from this message

[ related topics: Photography Gambling ]

The Beaverton: Movie Review: Is seeing The Matrix Resurrections worth contracting Omicron? We don’t know, none of us were willing to find out.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Mashable: YouTuber breaks down how to timestamp a call using just the background hum

The video, from YouTuber Tom Scott, features University of York research associate in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science, Amelia Gully, using a technique called Electrical Network Frequency analysis (ENF) to match background hum recordings with data from the UK's power grid (it's broken down in more detail in the video, but it essentially involves writing code that matches the recorded hum of the call with the publicly available grid logs).

The video: Tom Scott: The hidden background noise that can catch criminals

[ related topics: Movies broadband Writing Education Video ]

RT Louise Seamster @louise_seamster

If you had written a novel in 2018 set in a candle factory staffed partly by prisoners, where people are working overtime to compensate for a pandemic-induced candle shortage for the all-important Xmas shopping holiday, and forced to keep working in a Dec tornado, and

part 2

mass casualties result, and even so, all the people buying these pumpkin spice candles for gift-giving at their Omicron parties are angry because the smell is "missing", and taking to the internet to convey their anger--anyway just wondering what genre that would go in

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

Recent podcast listening: I got turned on to How To Human, with Sam Lamott, at https://www.hellohumans.co/ , because of his interview with Matthew Hahn. Hahn is known for burgling a safe that contained evidence of sexual violence against children, and having to make some difficult decisions, and his story, and subsequent philosophies, are worth a listen. Then I listened to Lamott's interview with Kevin Briggs, a CHP officer who served on the Golden Gate Bridge, talking about talking people down from suicide, and that led to the interview with Marvin Mutch, a man who spent 41 years incarcerated for a murder he didn't commit. If you're interested in broadening your perspectives on understanding society, and how it fails people with the potential to be amazing, so far it's 3 for 3...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Bay Area ]

Current status: Discussing different corporate styles on tech explainer videos. Clearly Apple's coach has taught those folks some specific hand motions, and Google has their own different stylistic choices...

[ related topics: Apple Computer ]

First findings from world’s largest study on long Covid in children

Up to one in seven (14%) children and young people who caught SARS-CoV-2 may have symptoms linked to the virus 15 weeks later, suggest preliminary findings from the world’s largest study on long Covid in children, led by UCL and Public Health England researchers.

I still have lots of questions about "long Covid", but I'm continuing to be cautious.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health virus Current Events ]

A follow-up to some of those stories of white supremacists in law enforcement, a witness who infiltrated organizations in Florida speaks out: He wore a wire, risked his life to expose who was in the KKK

“If you want to know why people don’t trust the police, it’s because they have a relative or friend that they witness being targeted by an extremist who happens to have a badge and a gun. And I know as a fact that this has occurred. I stopped a murder plot of law enforcement officers,” said Moore.

Charlie Pierce recaps the story in Esquire

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Law Enforcement Guns Race ]

You too can pay money to buy cryptocurrency to become kinda like Foursquare "mayor" but not really like that, or something, and it reads like satire but apparently these things are trading and who the fuck can tell any more? Non-Fungible Olive Gardens — Own an Olive Garden on the blockchain.

While every Non-fungible Olive Garden is tethered to a real Olive Garden, ownership is currently limited to the Non-fungible Olive Garden Metaverse, granting owners no rights or privileges in meatspace Olive Gardens.

[ related topics: Civil Liberties Currency Gardening ]

Since exploits have become such a thing in package managers, concise readable code has become desirable again. Who knew that ransomware and cryptobloat could drive elegance and efficiency like that?

Sigh. There's a timebomb that's been in this particular bit of code for a looong time. Multi-threaded code *should* be hard to write, when we make it too easy we end up with people who don't understand it writing it, and.... at least we found it.

[ related topics: Writing ]

🎶Kisses on the bottom, I'll be glad I've got 'em🎶

What use is it sneaking the sheet music for Last Christmas into the caroling lyrics packet if you happen to be meeting up with the two people who do not immediately know who Wham! is?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music ]

The specificity of ground turkey implies the existence of air turkey and water turkey.

[ related topics: Food Birds ]

Dang it, who was I talking with recently about speed limit enforceability and the 85th percentile rule? The recent California legislation I couldn't come up with at that moment was AB 43.

[ related topics: California Culture ]

Sunset

[ related topics: Photography ]

More sunset

[ related topics: Photography ]

If you haven't gotten your fill of '80s recently... Live at the Necropolis: The Lords of Synth.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Theater & Plays ]

Santa Claus is Coming to Town- Big Band Jazz arrangement by John Wernega (YouTube)

[ related topics: Movies ]

Spending the day bouncing around the shop and environs, and this came across Coverville, and I thought it was worth spreading further. A very different take on the AC/DC classic TNT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_Qunasm5os

[ related topics: Movies ]