Flutterby™! From 2022-06-01 to 2022-06-30

Last night, rather than trying to do something useful through the Covid crud, Charlene and I watched the 2016 swing dance documentary "Alive and Kicking", and I found a couple of things that might be useful to help us think about how to evolve square dancing. And, yes, I definitely need to do the 4 week beginner swing class near me.

First: They described the great dormant period of swing dancing as the 4+ decades post WWII, which just happened to be the boom of square dancing. Some of the portrayal of the social aspects of the dance culture of Swing were a little more rosy than I've heard from friends who are into Swing, but I still think it's worth some looks at that (and part of why we dance with IAGSDC clubs).

Second: the instructors in the film are making their reputations on creating new moves, showing new sequences, demonstrating novelty. So.... kinda like square dancing of the early '70s? The height of the boom?

Third: The outfits. I don't think crinolines are coming back any time soon, embroidered cowboy shirts are gonna have to wait 'til the bad taste of Marion Robert Morrison's hypocrisy and all of the ick associated with the cowboy mythology has faded from our culture. I could see outfits like the Depression era B&W photographs of square dances depict, though...

Fourth: The roots in Black culture. Unfortunately, you've gotta go pre-Henry Ford to find that in square dancing, and we mostly just have white historians to help frame that context.

Fifth: The music. I went music shopping last night, and I realized that as much as I don't connect with the older square dance music, modern pop leaves it *all* up to the vocalists, and that's a big role for the caller to fill.

Sixth: The physicality. An established caller friend recently sent me a video to talk about. The music was 126-128BPM. Most of the dancers were moving about 110BPM. Several squares were having trouble executing the calls on time, or hearing the calls apparently, so the caller was riding the music volume hard to pull it down during the calls, which meant that after a while even if you wanted to try to dance to the beat, you couldn't, and there was lots of stop-and-go.

If I showed that video to non-square-dancers, nobody'd refer to it as "dancing". Everybody was apparently having fun, so I can't say it's bad, but I can't use it as a recruiting tool to drag people into square *dancing*.

No conclusions, just getting down a few thoughts for here and Facebook.

Alive and Kicking trailer

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Photography Movies Invention and Design Sociology California Culture Automobiles Clothing Race Video Bicycling ]

Arch Daily: New York City Mapped All of its Trees and Calculated the Economic Benefits of Every Single One

New York City's street trees map

[ related topics: Nature and environment Invention and Design Maps and Mapping New York Economics ]

New York Times Pitchbot @DougJBalloon

For this small police department at the edge of the American frontier, it was a weekly tradition: shake down the city for half its budget, bungle any response to crime, then leak stories about victims to make them look bad. But now, the woke mob is trying to take all that away.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Law Enforcement New York ]

Twitter ad for an interesting little business. For $20/month, alwaysnft.cloud will keep 2GB of IPFS content pinned on geographically distributed servers so that your NFTs don't just go away. Which, of course, has been a problem with NFT sales.

I know this has been done before, but, yes, this is a perfect illustration of the modern web: https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/

Fainter than my last test, but definitely still positive.

[ related topics: Photography ]

🏳️‍🌈misha fletcher @mishafletch

I think my gift to myself this pride month and also maybe forever is gonna be just deciding queerness in historical texts is always intentional.

Indie music producers: I am *begging* you, please consider that people might listen to your work on headphones, and don't put an instrument just in one ear and assume that room reflections will even it out.

[ related topics: Music Work, productivity and environment ]

The thing about using this external camera rather than my MacBook Pro camera is that every wrinkle in my backdrop is now visible. I'm gonna have to iron this, aren't I? #CenterCam

[ related topics: Photography ]

The New Yorker on the LA County Sheriff's Deputy gang crisis, and how Villanueva, who ran as a reformer, has only made things worse.

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

If you drink these types of coffee, you could have a lower death risk

Results showed that for people who drank a moderate amount of coffee, defined as 1.5 to 3.5 cups a day, those who sweetened their coffee had about a 30% lower death risk compared with non-coffee drinkers, according to Dr. Christina Wee, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the study. She is also deputy editor of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Unsweetened coffee drinkers had between 16% and 29% lower death risk compared with non-coffee drinkers, she added.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/abs/10.7326/M21-2977

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Health Model Building ]

RT Brad Leege @bradleege

Confirmation of how I have always perceived what a “Michigan Man” is every time someone from UM uses the term.

Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1

Capitol Police: A Michigan man was arrested outside of the U.S. Capitol this morning after he was found with a fake badge, a BB gun, body armor, high capacity magazines and other ammunition.

He presented a fake badge that had "Department of the INTERPOL" printed on it.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Guns Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Twitter thread, with pictures, of all of the endowed cherub carvings of All Saints Church in Hereford. In case you don't have your fill of 14c. penis statues fulfilled yet.

• https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1532291679415312390.html
• https://twitter.com/folkhorrormagpi/status/1532291679415312390

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Religion Photography Sexual Culture Law ]

The bleak spectacle of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial

How a washed-up celebrity, men’s rights activists and true crime stans convinced millions of Americans to buy into a conspiracy theory

[ related topics: Civil Liberties Conspiracy Government ]

The Winnie the Pooh Painting That Scandalized the Cincinnati Police

Artist Magnus Juliano was the target of threatening comments after police called for the removal of his painting “Off the Pig” from the Cincinnati Art Museum.

[ related topics: Law Enforcement Art & Culture ]

Yay! Still have a bit of lingering cough, but testing COVID negative!

[ related topics: Photography ]

Yay! Still have a bit of lingering cough, but testing COVID negative! (Hopefully without mucked up picture)

[ related topics: Photography ]

I started out left-handed. ... ish. I had the problem that I wrote in the direction of whichever hand I picked up a pen or pencil with, and when shown two pages of my work, one written left to right, the other right to left, I could not tell you which was correct, nor, as people tell it later, sometimes even that one was mirrored. Then I broke my left arm, and 4 weeks in a cast was enough to turn me into a rightie. Much to the relief of my teacher.

Recently I've started trying to play scales on a keyboard, playing with a metronome trying to stay on beat and keep my fingering correct, and... it's fascinating watching how my left and right hands approach this task differently. And how my left is more confident and seems to learn faster than my right.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Work, productivity and environment ]

Yes. More like this, please. The Sweetweird (as an antidote to Grimdark) Manifesto from @charliejane https://buttondown.email/charl...rchive/the-sweetweird-manifesto/

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. Rolling Stone: The Satanist Neo-Nazi Plot to Murder U.S. Soldiers

A rogue G.I.’s trial exposes the depths of a murderous far-right ideology — and the FBI’s complicity in spreading hate

[ related topics: Sociology Law Enforcement California Culture Archival ]

Sophie Freud, professor who challenged her grandfather’s doctrine, dies at 97 — The last surviving grandchild of Sigmund Freud described her grandfather as one of the ‘false prophets of the 20th century’

“I’m very skeptical about much of psychoanalysis,” she told the Boston Globe in 2002. “I think it’s such a narcissistic indulgence that I cannot believe in it.”

She dismissed “penis envy,” a developmental stage that Sigmund Freud attributed to young girls, as “nonsense” and the ideas of a “3-year-old boy.”

Of her grandfather’s theory of the parent-child dynamic, she dryly remarked, “I have some questions about this Oedipal relationship.”

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

RT Karl T. Muth 🌐✈️📊 @KarlMuth

Climate science and pornography are the two areas of modern Western society where a substantial portion of people inexplicably and persistently prefer the work of amateurs.

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

Bloomberg Philanthropies: New Study Shows Streets Are Safer with Asphalt Art

The new Asphalt Art Safety Study, produced by Sam Schwartz Consulting in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies, examined the impact of art in the streetscape by comparing historical crash rates and real-time behavior of motorists and pedestrians at an array of asphalt art sites before and after the projects were installed.

[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Art & Culture Television ]

Reductress - Playing Country Album Forward Reveals Horrifying Christian Messages (no need to click through, the headline is the entire joke)

[ related topics: Religion ]

So I've had a couple people mention that the Warriors are in the playoffs, and this may be impacting attendance at Zoom meetings, but I'm pretty sure they make it home to Coney Island.

RT pregabalin puuppy.news.cn @SAMOYEDWAVE

every generation is defined by what form of mass cognitive impairment it suffers from. the boomers had leaded gasoline emissions, gen x had joss whedon, and now ours will be post-multiple-covid-reinfection symptoms

[ related topics: Current Events Joss Whedon - Serenity / Firefly ]

William J. Astore (USAF, ret.): Destroying the Town Is Not Saving It — Two Unsung Heroes as Role Models for the Air Force: James Robert “Cotton” Hildreth and Daniel Hale.

Geico Facing Payout to Woman Who Got HPV After Sex in Car

Geico may have to pay $5.2 million to a woman who says she contracted a disease during sex in a car with a man insured by the company.

Hat tip to https://researchbuzz.me/

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events Automobiles ]

Been thinking recently about parasocial relationships, how I've tried to avoid becoming the object of them and relate to people more directly, and how if I want to achieve some of my goals I need yo learn to embrace them.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

This is my jam: Does bitcoin use less energy than Christmas lights? Fact-checking a dubious claim

Good read: LA Times: As El Salvador’s president tries to silence free press, journalist brothers expose his ties to street gangs.

A good read on the tactics of the guy who's not just destroying the El Salvador economy with Bitcoin scams, but is destroying its social fabric as well.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Economics ]

Postponing actual work, I took a deep breath and routed slots for T-track into my router table top, and then built the lower profile split fence I've been threatening for a while. Need to make a few more featherboards.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment Gambling Furniture Woodworking ]

Elon Musk’s regulatory woes mount as U.S. moves closer to recalling Tesla’s self-driving software

On Thursday, NHTSA said it had discovered in 16 separate instances when this occurred that Autopilot “aborted vehicle control less than one second prior to the first impact,” suggesting the driver was not prepared to assume full control over the vehicle.

CEO Elon Musk has often claimed that accidents cannot be the fault of the company, as data it extracted invariably showed Autopilot was not active in the moment of the collision.

While anything that might indicate the system was designed to shut off when it sensed an imminent accident might damage Tesla’s image, legally the company would be a difficult target.

Via https://mobile.twitter.com/MattPotter/status/1535753166880444416

[ related topics: Software Engineering Automobiles ]

Finland ends homelessness and provides shelter for all in need

In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. The reason: The country applies the “Housing First” concept. Those affected by homelessness receive a small apartment and counselling – without any preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected thus make their way back into a stable life. And: All this is cheaper than accepting homelessness.

Tennessee made homeless camps a felony. Colorado is trying something else.

Both via https://twitter.com/doug_hanke/status/1536445354404589568

[ related topics: Politics Current Events Chattanooga Real Estate ]

PNAS Research Article | Economic Sciences | Universal healthcare as pandemic preparedness: The lives and costs that could have been saved during the COVID-19 pandemic

To evaluate the repercussions of incomplete insurance coverage in 2020, we calculated the elevated mortality attributable to the loss of employer-sponsored insurance and to background rates of uninsurance, summing with the increased COVID-19 mortality due to low insurance coverage. Incorporating the demography of the uninsured with age-specific COVID-19 and nonpandemic mortality, we estimated that a single-payer universal healthcare system would have saved about 212,000 lives in 2020 alone. We also calculated that US$105.6 billion of medical expenses associated with COVID-19 hospitalization could have been averted by a single-payer universal healthcare system over the course of the pandemic. These economic benefits are in addition to US$438 billion expected to be saved by single-payer universal healthcare during a nonpandemic year.

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2200536119

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Economics ]

Air pollution takes 2 years off your life, more than smoking or alcohol

Air pollution, which is primarily the result of burning fossil fuels, takes 2.2 years off the global life expectancy for each person, according to a new report out Tuesday from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC).

[ related topics: Drugs tolkien Invention and Design Education ]

Twitter thread about landlord relationships and zoning codes that let indie stores survive in neighborhoods that have otherwise been overrun by chains, using Alabaster Bookshop in New York City, in the bottom of a building owned by a coop, and by-right retail in townhomes in Japan.

[ related topics: Invention and Design New York ]

That boy's about as useless as sidewalks in an office park.

Ah, that thing you definitely wanna see when converting a few hours of video with ffmpeg... `speed=0.639x`

[ related topics: Video ]

Okay, the Song Exploder episode with Rick Astley talking about Never Gonna Give You Up is pretty good.

RT Kenny Keil @kennykeil

old school Disney flicks: your family's dead and now you gotta fight a villain

new school Disney flicks: your family's alive and now you gotta deal with their bullshit

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Sociology ]

Thinking about how door-to-door product sales fell out of favor, but now household photovoltaic solar has become what vacuum cleaners were half a century ago.

[ related topics: Photovoltaics ]

I propose a new circle of hell, for web developers who create additional back navigation for scrolling a long document (might be time to filter web(dot)dev out of my search results entirely...)

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Yeesh. I think it's going from "how many kids did the cops in Uvalde shoot" to "did the alleged shooter kill any of the victims?"

Uvalde Hires Private Law Firm to Argue It Doesn’t Have to Release School Shooting Public Records

Some of the records relating to the Robb Elementary School shooting could be “highly embarrassing,” involve “emotional/mental distress,” and are “not of legitimate concern to the public,” the lawyers argued.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Law Enforcement ]

Dark larger crossover behind me, driver honked at me for stopping for a pedestrian in the crosswalk.

Ya know maybe the neighborhood improvement thing is a little too deep when ya start anthropomorphising utility poles. As in "that poor thing doesn't need any more impacts".

A friend gave me a 32 key keyboard for banging notes into Logic Pro. I've been trying to learn proper fingerings, and realized I needed a larger keyboard, so I checked Craigslist and got an awesome deal on a Yahama YPG 235. I know where my free time is going for the next few...

Not Just Bikes: Why We Won't Raise Our Kids in Suburbia (YouTube video), which compares London Ontario Canada to the Netherlands, and talks about children and independence in the US and Canada vs the Netherlands.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Movies Video Bicycling ]

Because we were in Grass Valley this weekend, and they were in the midst of a massive rework of a park, part of which was installing new pickleball courts: Nude Pickleball Is Taking Off

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Weblogs Invention and Design Nudity ]

Shout out to the driver in the modern version of an El Camino (maybe it's the Cadillac pickup truck?) with the modified exhaust who has passed me twice on 5th St: your casual attitude re stop signs & speed limits stands out in a field that already disrespects those conventions.

[ related topics: Automobiles Machinery ]

"Culture is informed by art, and the law follows". Kendall Ciesemier sums up why "originalists" are so afraid of change, and why so many people are so terrified of art. (from the At Liberty podcast interview with Alok Vaid-Menon)

[ related topics: Sociology Art & Culture California Culture ]

Written for a private space, pondering the edges of it: hire consultants when the institutional processes and culture are a liability, and use internal staff when they're an asset. If you're constantly hiring consultants, that says something about the institution you haven't built.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Space & Astronomy Sociology California Culture ]

For as well funded as Venmo seems to be, you'd think they could hire some programmers. They claimed to send me $10, which then said this has already been claimed, after I went through their absolute disaster of a log-in process. Holy crap it's awful.

It's not just that the shadow DOM that WKWebView uses to implement type="search" is overriding my background color, it's that the Safari Web Inspector is flat-out lying to me about this. Grrrr.

The thing about testing is running across yet another a publicly traded industrial company with a several billion dollar market cap that has weird certificate issues with their web site...

[ related topics: Business Sports Currency Economics ]

Fuck. Nothing like what should be a clean public transit ride fucked up by @ClipperCard. Both my phone and our cards reported invalid at the kiosk. Driving now.

[ related topics: Public Transportation ]

Braving the indoor theatre experience for “The Unabridged Mrs. Vera's Daybook"

[ related topics: Photography Theater & Plays ]

Just got back from the slow ferry home from the city, a trip we made to see "The Unabridged Mrs. Vera's Daybook", a documentary about Michael Johstone and David Faulk, and the community that they've created. Complete with appearance by, and post-movie Q&A shout-out to, our friend Ruby.

I had seen Ruby's pictures, but didn't have a sense of the entire cultural context in which the amazing costumes occurred, and the movie was touching and inspiring (there are gonna be some additions to our neighborhood shortly) and I suspect it'd be good even viewed on your own tiny screen, and not in a room full of people attached to the community who applauded and cheered.

https://www.verasphere.com/the-new-documentary.html

[ related topics: Photography Movies Invention and Design Sociology Travel Community Public Transportation ]

How did people find their cell phones before they had land-lines?

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Dear Watts pressure regulator: this is why I have trust issues.

Dear Watts pressure regulator: this is why I have trust issues.

[ related topics: Photography ]

A gazillion different ways to use search engines better than you currently are: https://researchbuzz.me/2022/0...-a-github-full-of-search-gizmos/

Thought: We used to be concerned about running out of phone numbers, but these days we can abandon our land lines, and only us olds still use SMS. Wonder if this is analogous to how the IPv4 address space problem will be solved...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Space & Astronomy Sports Real Estate ]

Via Shadow: Just a Normal Bike Math: 0.5 х 2 = 1 Wheel (YouTube video). Cool execution, though I have to admit that I'm skeptical that he got those pop rivet shafts to shear at the right place on the first try.... And a good mix between enough to show the construction techniques without artificually padding things out.

[ related topics: Movies Mathematics Machinery Fabrication Video Bicycling Model Building ]

Instagram and Facebook remove posts offering abortion pills

On Monday, an AP reporter tested how the company would respond to a similar post on Facebook, writing: “If you send me your address, I will mail you abortion pills.”

The post was removed within one minute.

Substituting "a gun" or "weed", items that Facebook claims are similarly banned, did not have the same impacts. And, of course, under Federal law certified prescribers can ship abortion pills.

https://twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1541943456133656577

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Sexual Culture Health Writing Machinery Guns ]

US Census — Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the Southern States of the United States, compiled from the census of 1860

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping ]

Watch an electric ‘fan car’ beat every car ever at Goodwood Hill Climb

The McMurtry Speirling produces more than 2,000kg of downforce (on a 1,000kg vehicle), and unlike traditional aerodynamic surfaces, this doesn’t scale with speed – it’s available at any speed due to the fan’s operation. This means the McMurtry has more downforce at 0mph than an F1 car produces even at 150mph.

[ related topics: Movies Automobiles ]

Interesting Twitter thread about using infrared sensitive ink edge-markings on cards and an IR camera on a Raspberry Pi to tell card orders after shuffles

https://github.com/nettlep/magic

[ related topics: Photography ]

Unsurprising: Did violence follow Roe decision? Yes — almost all of it against pro-choice protesters

Right claimed to fear pro-choice "rage" after SCOTUS decision — but so far the violence is directed at protesters

So, yeah, the promulgators of the pre-Dobbs vs Jackson violence continue.

[ related topics: Salon magazine ]

FTX buying Robinhood is like AOL buying Time-Warner...

[ related topics: moron ]

After Uvalde shooting, tech companies tout their solutions. But do they work?

A study conducted by researchers at Washington University and Johns Hopkins found that surveillance responses to gun violence within kindergarten through 12th grade school systems “have not stopped the increasing frequency of their occurrence, but have instead increased racial and ethnic disparities in multiple forms of discipline”.

“I am hearing more and more that schools are starting to look like prisons, and that makes young people feel more like suspects than students,” said Odis Johnson, a professor at Johns Hopkins who co-authored the study.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Work, productivity and environment Guns Education ]

Just listened to Michael Lewis — Against the Rules: Baby Judge School followed by What Roman Mars can learn about Con Law, with Elizabeth Joh: After Dobbs, and... don't listen to them back to back, because damn I've now got a really dark view of the US legal system...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Astronomy Law ]

From the comments in the Metafilter link to the Adam Neely/Rob Scallon YouTube video crossovers Metal Musician sucks at Jazz and Jazz Musician sucks at Metal, comes Rob Scallon & Emily Hopkins — Harp (44 strings of absolute beauty… and sometimes farts)

[ related topics: Movies Video ]