Flutterby™! From 2022-04-01 to 2022-04-28

Just making more wood chips

[ related topics: Photography Woodworking ]

When LinkedIn informs me that I've appeared in 7 searches this week, it's hard to not take that as a threat.

Re-boostered.

I'm normally not much on April Fools, but this is a thing of beauty: ultra-rare lana del rey movie soundtrack single (YouTube video)

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Movies Video Java ]

Since I've been thinking about how we could wean ourselves from natural gas: Ask MeFi question about induction cooktops

Brandon Bradford @BrandonLBradfor

Is it your love language or is it a representation of earlier unprocessed trauma and the only way you know how to communicate?

Pleasant break...

[ related topics: Photography ]

I don't know which I loathe more, the vehicle that passed through our neighborhood loud enough to set off a car alarm, or the car alarm.

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

That sure is an interesting list of "news" organizations they're aggregating...

[ related topics: Photography Current Events ]

Simon Fraser University: Google autocomplete helps mislead public, legitimize conspiracy theorists: SFU study

In a study published in M/C Journal this month, researchers with The Disinformation Project at the School of Communication at SFU looked at the subtitles Google automatically suggested for 37 known conspiracy theorists and found that, “in all cases, Google’s subtitle was never consistent with the actor’s conspiratorial behaviour.”

How Google Autocomplete Algorithms about Conspiracy Theorists Mislead the Public DOI: https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2852

[ related topics: Children and growing up Movies Sociology Journalism and Media California Culture Education Conspiracy Government ]

I saw this fly across various social media things and ignored it, finally the MeFi post made me grudgingly click on it, and it's delightful and interesting: Washington Post: The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Woodworking ]

Hackaday: Is your device actually USB 3.0, or is the connector just blue?

I'm not even sure I'd be so pissed off that TurboTax is extortion through lobbying for regulatory capture if they were freakin' competent at it, but... sigh. Anyway, taxes filed.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Government ]

People often mock the tendency in software development circles to mock domain expertise, but, like, have you seen most engineering?

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

The New Republic looks at Jessie Singer's new book There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster―Who Profits and Who Pays the Price, and it looks like there's another book that's going on my reading pile.

[ related topics: Books Invention and Design Automobiles ]

Katie Jgln: Do Men Actually Like Women, or Just the Performance of Femininity?

Currently reading Beth L. Bailey's From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America, from 1988, and a lot of that is about the construction of femininity in post WWII America, where perms and makeup became an attempt to create an ideal "lady" out of every woman.

It's relevant.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Machinery Fabrication Model Building ]

Finally seeing that "tough on crime" actually means "perpetuate the problems so that police can justify higher budgets": Republican-controlled states have higher murder rates than Democratic ones: study

Third Way: The Red State Murder Problem

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement ]

RT Todd Alcott @toddalcott

PLANTS: imma wave my genitals in the air

HUMANS: mmm fragrant

[ related topics: Todd Gemmell Gardening ]

Corey Quinn at Last Week in AWS: Ubiquiti teaches AWS and crisis communications via counterexample is a deep dive into some of the background material for Ubiquiti suing Brian Krebs

[ related topics: Weblogs Journalism and Media ]

Uh oh: San Francisco's Covid effective reproduction number is at 1.12, vs the California state average of .86. Sonoma County's case rate seems to have bottomed out late last week and is starting to creep up again, very slowly.

[ related topics: Health Bay Area Law California Culture ]

Closing out tabs: Meet the Bike Man who brought the trucker convoy to a crawl

[ related topics: Civil Liberties Bicycling ]

On the one hand this is an essay about plagiarism and source material, on the other hand it's also about how popularizers rewrite history to conform to the mores and concerns of their time, erasing a lot. ‘The Ways of Fiction Are Devious Indeed’: Finding current relevancy—and outrage—in the accusations of plagiarism that have long haunted a classic of the West: Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose.

“My editor thought those journals were real. He pretty much shouted at me, ‘You can’t use journals written by somebody else!’ ”

I stared. “Exactly, Dad! That’s what Stegner’s done! Why are you defending him?” My mother and I both looked at him, waiting. He looked sad. “The man was my friend.”

[ related topics: Books Writing ]

Anybody got an Android calendar app they're super happy with? I find myself fumbling over the UI of the Google Calendar app so that I'm not keeping my commitments up to date.

[ related topics: User Interface ]

In the past two decades I've cared about hard real-time limits, but never had to worry about performance. So why do I still instinctively wonder if Manhattan distance would work, or whether should I burn the cycles on a sqrt() and multiplies...

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

Selling this tandem. Local folks, come by and test your relationship with a ride and I'll make a deal....

[ related topics: Bicycling - Tandem ]

Selling this tandem. Local folks, come by and test your relationship with a ride and I'll make a deal.... Pic1

[ related topics: Photography Bicycling - Tandem ]

Selling this tandem. Local folks, come by and test your relationship with a ride and I'll make a deal.... Pic2

[ related topics: Photography Bicycling - Tandem ]

What if, and hear me out, we released a pack of rabid hyenas? Might that solve it?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

I love these ESI Extra10 headphones, but the cable developed a short and I couldn't solder a splice in, so I used some olive wood to mount a jack.

[ related topics: Photography Woodworking ]

This is interesting, although the study was funded by GE Ultrasound, and this write-up is in a web site that's giving me ads with foot pressure points for organs, so more than a little hokum: Diabetes successfully treated using ultrasound in preclinical study

The newly published study indicates short targeted bursts of pFUS at this area of the liver successfully reversed the onset of hyperglycaemia. The treatment was found to be effective in three separate animal models of diabetes: mice, rats and pigs.

The actual paper is subscription-only: Nature Biomedical Engineering: Therapeutic ultrasound modulates autonomic nerve pathways in diabetes

Ultrasound pulses have been used to modulate a liver–brain autonomic nerve pathway to prevent or reverse the onset of hyperglycaemia in models of diabetes in several species. The ion channel TRPA1 was shown to be essential in transducing the ultrasound stimuli within the metabolic control circuit.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-022-00878-2

[ related topics: Erotic Nature and environment ]

For a moment there I wasn't actually sure where this "Goodies For Your Furry Friends" subject line was going...

[ related topics: Photography ]

This morning's wet stormy walk to work was accompanied by the Unexplainable podcast episode "Making Sense: How sound becomes hearing". I've obviously done the usual things with synthesizers, like trying to create Shepard's scales and ambiguous tri-tones, but it was really cool trying to map the descriptions of some of the "most people hear this as" stereo effects to what I was hearing, and to hear about some of how people who get cochlear implants after losing their hearing learn how to map speech and hearing back on to their new inputs.

Some good reminders that we map our senses to internal models, and process those inputs in very different and varied ways.

I got the episode through the Switched on Pop feed, but there's an embedded link in Vox — What science still doesn’t know about the five senses: Our senses create our reality. They can trick us, but also teach us.

[ related topics: Health Robotics Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Embedded Devices Maps and Mapping ]

Twitter thread I think is important and want to find later: RT Sam Feldman 🌹 @srfeld

In June 2020, Buffalo cops were caught on camera gratuitously pushing a 75-year-old protester to the ground, fracturing his skull. Two years later, let's check in on what's happened to those cops. It shows how our hierarchy of consequences for police misconduct is all screwed up.

[ related topics: Photography Law Enforcement Television ]

RT Lillian Bishop 🐡 @dbishopii

I just want to dismiss the idea that the Midwest or Great Plains “grow the food you eat.” California grows the food you eat. The “entire middle of the country” exists to produce ethanol for gas and grain for animal feed.

From further down: RT Paul "BLM" Mitchum🌻 @PaulMitchum

WA: 12 electors

ID: 4 electors

The apples-to-potatoes vote disparity MUST BE ADDRESSED.

[ related topics: Food California Culture ]

Well shit, there's another book that needs to go on my reading list: How the Internet Became Straight

Alexander Monea, author of "The Digital Closet," argues that the internet became straight by suppressing everything that is not, forcing LGBTQIA+ content into increasingly narrow channels.

[ related topics: Books Net Culture ]

Biked downtown to pick up some audio cables. Shout out to the SUV driver who signaled right, started to turn, and then made a left turn when I pulled out to pass. Missed me, but I'll give you an A for effort. I *really* need to get that camera running.

[ related topics: Humor Music Photography Sports Pedal Power ]

RT Elior Sterling (he/him) @eliorsterling

In 2018 200,000 minors were married in the United States. 87% of those were girls, 13% were boys. That means *at a minimum* 74% of those kids were marrying adults.

But conservatives are calling LGBTQ+ people "groomers"

https://childusa.org/wp-conten...-on-Child-Marriage-in-the-US.pdf

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology Marriage ]

So apparently Bon Appetit sponsors this Instagram personality and YouTuber who, back in February, posted a video of water-bath canning seafood. The outrage over the botulism fears was large enough that they took the video down, but apparently they still give the dude a platform: It's botulism with Brad Leone: Bon Appetit is testing health standards.

Via a bunch of places, but here's the MeFi link.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health Food Journalism and Media Video Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Woohoo! 3 new subscribers! 6,868 total minutes watched! 2,359 total vie... oh, if my videos generally run an hour or two, that means... uh...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Movies Invention and Design ]

Anybody know how to make Apple NSGradient drawing actually fade to the outside color? Trying to fade to tranparent for subtle glow effects, and getting harsh edges...

[ related topics: Apple Computer ]

Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis: The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer's block”, Dennis Upper doi: 10.1901/jaba.1974.7-497a

It's been cited: A Multidisciplinary Replication of Upper’s (1974) Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of Writer’s Block doi: 10.1007/s40617-018-00290-w

Edit: Further citation in A Multisite Cross-Cultural Replication of Upper's (1974) Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of Writer's Block

[ related topics: Writing Law ]

"The tentacles aren't zebra'd" is a thing I just said when discussing user interface aesthetics.

[ related topics: User Interface ]

Mad props to Parkdale Haunt podcast for that Canadian First Amendment joke in their recent live episode. I laughed.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Civil Liberties ]

"When we call something an accident, we feel better at once, and at once, we fail to prevent it from happening again. Only by overcoming this tendency can we prevent accidents." --- Jessie Singer in the excellent "There Are No Accidents".

Having just had this book mentioned to me, but someone whose code I've worked with a lot but whose code I also don't always find super readable, this feels worth reading: It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code

It may not be possible for us to ever reach empirical definitions of "good code" or "clean code", which means that any one person's opinions about another person's opinions about "clean code" are necessarily highly subjective. I cannot review Robert C. Martin's 2008 book Clean Code from your perspective, only mine.

That said, the major problem I have with Clean Code is that a lot of the example code in the book is just dreadful.

[ related topics: Language Books Education ]

As Charlie Stross described it

Thread! Explaining all those weird Christian rituals associated with the current festival in familiar Jewish terms.

Great thread describing Easter.

[ related topics: Religion ]

Separated Bike Lanes Means Safer Streets, Study Says

Researchers assumed that having more cyclists on the street was spurring drivers to slow down — a relic of a 2017 study that found that cities with high cycling rates had fewer traffic crashes. But it turned out that wasn’t the case.

Instead, researchers found that bike infrastructure, particularly physical barriers that separate bikes from speeding cars as opposed to shared or painted lanes, significantly lowered fatalities in cities that installed them.

[ related topics: Law Sports Pedal Power Bicycling ]

RAND finds that Republicans swallow fake news more than Democrats

The reasoning processes that are predictive of belief in things like “birtherism,” “plandemic,” and “trutherism” are not gained or lost suddenly with the support of a particular candidate or cause, the report stresses, but rather are “developed over an individual’s lifetime and are all at least somewhat adaptive . . .” This, of course, points to the role of the education system to teach things like critical thinking and media literacy to children and adolescents early and often.

[ related topics: Language Children and growing up Current Events Journalism and Media Education Archival ]

RT Carmen Crincoli, but Fhqwhgads @CarmenCrincoli

🤣 “More astronauts are from Ohio than any other state………we need to ask ourselves what it is about Ohio that drives people to leave the PLANET.”

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

RT DilDog @dildog

Chicken Delta 8 Pie may be legal in your state despite Chicken Pot Pie still being illegal at the federal level.

[ related topics: Food Law Birds ]

Whee! Remember 2 weeks ago when the fully vaccinated Covid case rate per 100k in Sonoma County was sub 6 and the unvaccinated case rate was single digits? Yeah, we're at 8 and 17.5 today.

[ related topics: Law ]

Yay! Replaced the long-loathed Toto Carlysle II toilet with a Swiss Madison St Tropez. So nice to have reliable flushing again!

There are times when even knowing the context I can't figure out what someone is trying to say, or whay their motivations for posting are...

[ related topics: Photography ]

At the Western Railway Museum, loving theseold slogans

[ related topics: Photography Art & Culture Public Transportation ]

Okay, trying from where I actually have data coverage... At the Western Railway Museum, loving these old slogans

[ related topics: Photography Journalism and Media Art & Culture Public Transportation ]

Okay, trying from where I actually have data coverage... At the Western Railway Museum, loving these old slogans

[ related topics: Photography Journalism and Media Art & Culture Public Transportation ]

Okay, trying from where I actually have data coverage... At the Western Railway Museum, loving these old slogans

[ related topics: Photography Journalism and Media Art & Culture Public Transportation ]

The ancestor of the SMART trains

[ related topics: Photography Machinery Trains ]

I'm not sure why, "Down Under" is a legitimate classic

[ related topics: Photography ]

Not sure of this is a plea for mortgage relief, an admonition against participating in the financial system, or just a warning about the neighboring slope.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Fixing a picture from yesterday

[ related topics: Photography ]

What if Dunning and Kruger thought they were really really good at statistics?

Economics From The Top Down: The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Mathematics Economics ]

The nice thing about social media is that every six months when a meme comes back around, in a different social circle this time, I get the chance to hone that joke reply.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Marketing ]

Back in May I did a little HAI Zoom session that they were teasing for their effective communication workshop, and I grabbed a screen shot of a slide that I wanted to capture the ideas in:

12 Obstacles to Effective Communication

• Directing
• Threatening
• Should-ing
• Giving Advice
• Arguing
• Criticizing
• Name Calling
• Stereotyping
• Diagnosing
• Interrogating
• Diverting
• Minimizing

Ya think maybe there's some regulatory capture in play? Recreational marijuana access reduces demand for prescription drugs

[ related topics: Drugs Health Current Events Education ]

Happy Bicycle Day! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwvWtZl2ICY

[ related topics: Movies Pedal Power Bicycling ]

RT (Michigan State Senator) Mallory McMorrow @MalloryMcMorrow

Senator Lana Theis accused me by name of grooming and sexualizing children in an attempt to marginalize me for standing up against her marginalizing the LGBTQ community...in a fundraising email, for herself.

Hate wins when people like me stand by and let it happen. I won't.

Includes video of the speech, and the text of the speech in the Twitter thread. And, yes, we need to be smacking down the pedocons at every turn.

And speaking of taking on the pedocons, if you haven't yet watched Mississippi State Representative Ian Mackey speak to the hate of fellow Rep Chuck Basye, it's worth a watch.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Movies Community Video ]

Beanstalk cryptocurrency project robbed after hacker votes to send themself $182 million

The attacker used a flash loan to obtain a controlling stake in the project

The headline and article use "robbed" and "attacker", but the person who obtained the flash loan to gain the controlling stake and take advantage of being the majority shareholder and therefore control the governance system was just using the structure as it was designed to be used.

Foxdle, the daily internet word guessing game where the answer is always "FOXES".

[ related topics: Games Net Culture ]

Well. Facebook just restricted my account, again, because the algorithm thinks I'm promoting human trafficking with this post:

At the end of 1985, in my senior year of high school, my family moved from Newtown Connecticut to Hixson Tennessee for my Dad's job with GE Ceramics in Chattanooga. I came down, spent a week or two in school there, decided that just wasn't gonna happen and a friend's family took me in for the remainder of high school. I moved down in the summer of '86, intending to take a kind-of gap year at UTC, but stayed for a bit over 9 years. Long enough that I think I've solidly earned the label "Damned Yankee".

In the process of my time there, going from teenager to late twenties, with a large detour through long-haired whitewater hippy, I had some encounters with the local constabulary. Nothing that got me a record, but...

I have heard "here, kid, have a hit off of this, it was probably yours once anyway".

Referring to "The Dukes of Hazzard" as "a documentary" lets us dismiss "law enforcement" of that area as buffoons, rather than looking at the real genuine harm that comes from letting a bunch of armed bullies enforce the social structure.

And it surprised me very little when, shortly after the deputy who was brought up on charges for the incidents in which this woman was victimized, and in the face of various other allegations of department misconduct, the "server crashed", losing 15 months of dashcam video.

Which is to say that I very much hope the FBI gets involved here, because I don't even trust the TBI to be far enough from the corruption to give a fair and accurate accounting. And I suspect that what happened here is exactly what it looks like happened here.

https://www.wdef.com/woman-who...-baptism-found-dead-at-her-home/

[ related topics: Children and growing up Sociology Law Enforcement Heinlein Chattanooga Whitewater Video ]

Algorithmic amplification of politics on Twitter

...To test the hypothesis that left-wing or right-wing politicians are amplified differently, we identified the largest mainstream left or center-left and mainstream right or center-right party in each legislature, and present pairwise comparisons between these in Fig. 1B. With the exception of Germany, we find a statistically significant difference favoring the political right wing. This effect is strongest in Canada (Liberals 43% vs. Conservatives 167%) and the United Kingdom (Labor 112% vs. Conservatives 176%)....

Via https://twitter.com/rajiinio/status/1516099773228478468

[ related topics: Politics moron ]

Interesting reading, that I think applies to a lot of design work for a population that we're not a part of: Disability Dongle

I created the term “Disability Dongle” in 2019 to draw attention to the phenomenon of design and engineering students and practitioners who prototype “innovative” disability solutions. The definition satirizes an outcome in which designs or technologies “for” disabled people garner mainstream attention and accolades despite valid concerns disabled people have about them.

[ related topics: Weblogs Work, productivity and environment Graphic Design Handicaps & Disabilities ]

More commentary on the "Beanstalk" cryptocurrency getting wiped out that I mentioned earlier this week: Code is LOL

To describe the Beanstalk incident as anything other than a system working as intended is giving cryptocurrency developers far more credit than they deserve. This “$182 million hack” is the predictable, replicable result of directly connecting every cent within a project to a codebase, and allowing said codebase to directly create transactions with that money. It is libertarian democracy - you can vote, your vote matters, but all that really matters is who - and this can be one person - has the most votes, which in many cases can be as simple as “who has a lot of money.”

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Currency Archival ]

Cynthia Albritton, a.k.a. Cynthia Plaster Caster, Artist and ‘Recovering Groupie,’ Dies at 74

[ related topics: Music Current Events Art & Culture ]

Research Buzz: Need to Translate RSS Feeds? It’s Easy with IFTTT and This Google Apps Script

Earlier this week I wrote an article about finding and previewing foreign-language RSS feeds using a Google Sheet I made, the RSSinator. That’s useful but it doesn’t answer an obvious question: how do you translate foreign-language RSS feeds on an ongoing basis?

[ related topics: Content Management ]

University of Cambridge: Anglo-Saxon BBQ: England's early medieval kings were mostly vegetarian but peasants treated them to huge meat feasts, new studies reveal.

BBC: Cambridge University study finds Anglo-Saxon kings were mostly vegetarian

Dr Leggett said: "I've found no evidence of people eating anything like this much animal protein on a regular basis.

"If they were, we would find isotopic evidence of excess protein and signs of diseases like gout from the bones. But we're just not finding that.

"The isotopic evidence suggests that diets in this period were much more similar across social groups than we've been led to believe.

"We should imagine a wide range of people livening up bread with small quantities of meat and cheese, or eating pottages of leeks and whole grains with a little meat thrown in."

Food and Power in Early Medieval England: a lack of (isotopic) enrichment DOI: 10.1017/S0263675122000072

Food and Power in Early Medieval England: Rethinking Feorm DOI: 10.1017/S0263675122000084

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Interactive Drama Invention and Design Food Current Events Monty Python Education ]

The BMW i7. Because drivers like big angry grills on their cars, and fuck pedestrians. https://www.bmwusa.com/future-vehicles/i7-luxury-sedan.html

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

I'm confused: how many eggs and how many days?

[ related topics: Photography ]

We can take a guess at cultural memory by the period in which people rediscover interstate highway naming or that picture of the cement truck vessel painted like a space capsule.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Sociology Machinery ]

Charlene and I were trying to make a Chladni plate and... the speaker was not up to the task, and... we let the smoke out. If anyone's throwing away a subwoofer we'd love to experiment with it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

Not sure how this works...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Huh. Wish I knew what chewed up ~35G of disk space and wasn't showing up on "du -h /" on my server. Cleaned up some logs, rebooted, and things are back to normal. But/and: I probably need to cut back on the resolution of pictures I upload for shitposts.

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy ]

When people suggest that I take psychological profiling tests, I think about ways to dispose of bodies ☑always ☐sometimes ☐never

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

The kids are alright: Inept 'People's Convoy' chased out of Bay Area by egg-throwing kids

Livestreams posted by convoy participants show police arriving to protect Wicks’ home, which eventually prompted the group to move on. It was here the convoy members made their mistake, driving onto busy, one-lane College Avenue on the Berkeley-Oakland border. There, slowed down by the usual Friday afternoon traffic, they were sitting ducks outside the Safeway. A large group of kids, armed with eggs purchased at the grocery store, began pelting the convoy.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Bay Area Law Enforcement Heinlein California Culture Education ]

Decided it was a pain in the butt to juggle wet clothes and a plastic bucket of clothes pins

[ related topics: Photography Clothing ]

On the line

[ related topics: Photography ]

RT AlgorithmicJusticeHat @Popehat

The decline of humanity is directly traceable to the loss of the winnowing impact of jarts

Another Know Before You Grow forum done, I think this one went well, but this, and getting back to square dance calling, has me introspecting. I've gotten out of the practice of square dance calling, and I'm feeling overwhelmed with the amount of email I've been processing of late, so in the day or two, and especially hour or two, before I get behind the mic, I start to get the jitters: did I do enough to prepare? Are my notes in order? Is the gear all set up correctly?

Then we're on, and it all flows, and I have the feedback from the floor, or the nodding faces (and occasional DM accolade) on Zoom, and I ride that dopamine high...

...and then it's over. And I coil up the cables, or wait for the video to finish processing, and I'm alone with my thoughts. Mashing reload on my email to see if there's any post-forum feedback. Dawdling while dragging my sound gear out to the car to prolong the conversations while everyone's just trying to clean up the venue and go home...

And I get why so many performers die young or self-destruct. I mean, I'm just an introvert who hides behind a mic, and I don't claim any particular talent, and it's not a huge thing, but that cycle up and down is there, the jitters, the rush, the crash, and it's real.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Automobiles Community Pedal Power Video Bicycling ]

You know what really gives me the warm fuzzies when running "npm install" on example code from financial services?

"found 5 vulnerabilities (1 moderate, 3 high, 1 critical)"

[ related topics: Sports ]