Flutterby™! From 2022-08-01 to 2022-08-31

Went over to Vallejo for the Obtanium Cup, ran into people we did not expect to run into, but... 1/3

[ related topics: Photography ]

I've been looking for a new coffee mug, and my current mug broke this very morning, and I found one there that matches the surrealism of the current environment... 2/3

[ related topics: Humor Photography Nature and environment Invention and Design ]

Gonna be a little more work to wash, but coffee is a ritual... 3/3

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

Saved off for future reference, when I pull the CNC down from the rafters: Tweet of an embedded sidewalk marker which reads:

Full Stop

Ceder & Milvia St.

On this spot, at this intersection on October 12th, 2013, a driver in a silver Honda Civic came to a full and complete stop, even with out other traffic or pedestrians present. The driver proceeded to safely accelerate in a prudent manner unlike which has not been observed since.

[ related topics: Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Conflicts of interest for members of the U.S. 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee

Results: Our analysis found that 95% of the committee members had COI with the food, and/or pharmaceutical industries and that particular actors, including Kellogg, Abbott, Kraft, Mead Johnson, General Mills, Dannon, and the International Life Sciences had connections with multiple members. Research funding and membership of an advisory/executive board jointly accounted for more than 60% of the total number of COI documented.

DOI: 10.1017/S1368980022000672

Via

[ related topics: Health Food ]

Crimes with Python's Pattern Matching

[ related topics: Monty Python Python ]

Great Twitter thread on how weird the (building/housing/commercial) development process is

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Stored off because we've talked about using machine learning to better understand square dance music filenames in SquareDesk, rather than the cobbled regex heuristics I came up with: StorySniffer - using machine learning and Python to tell whether or not a given URL points to a news story

[ related topics: Music Current Events Monty Python Education Python ]

Scott Aaronson explains using the quantum computing Shor algorithm to do large prime factoring. I think I'm a little closer to understanding this stuff after reading... only a little, though.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Masturbation and testosterone 7 days later

In 2003, a group of four scholars appeared to have published science demonstrating that, on the 7th day of abstinence following last ejaculation, testosterone spiked in their sample of 28 men. In December 2021, the study was retracted. Two of the four authors could no longer be found. ...

Via this Twitter thread which talks more about the anti-porn "Reboot" movement.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Went down to San Geronimo for Marv Zauderer's singing circle. Came back to this just north of Marin French Cheese....

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area ]

For a city allegedly in extreme drought there sure are an amazing number of people pressure washing sidewalks around here...

Wait, so you're telling me that internal investigations were used to bury evidence and protect in-group members? AP: Seven years of sex abuse: How Mormon officials let it happen

The Associated Press has obtained nearly 12,000 pages of sealed records from an unrelated child sex abuse lawsuit against the Mormon church in West Virginia. The documents offer the most detailed and comprehensive look yet at the so-called help line Herrod called. Families of survivors who filed the lawsuit said they show it’s part of a system that can easily be misused by church leaders to divert abuse accusations away from law enforcement and instead to church attorneys who may bury the problem, leaving victims in harm’s way.

[ related topics: Religion Erotic Sexual Culture Law Enforcement ]

Peak Design's Guide to San Francisco: Episode 2 (YouTube video) "Today, we're going to be looking at the hottest neighborhood in San Francisco — Austin Texas!"

[ related topics: Movies Bay Area California Culture Graphic Design Douglas Adams Video ]

OH: "LAUSD is the largest owner of asphalt spaces on the planet"

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Following the intensive training from Recology on what goes in what bin, volunteering at the Petaluma Music Festival. This band is good, but I really liked the marimba group playing on the stage closer to the entrance.

[ related topics: Music Photography ]

I want to pay for a news source that does the stenography all of the usual outlets do, but labels those stories with which organization sent it the press release or kit that led to the story.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

‘The best thing we can do today to JavaScript is to retire it,’ says JSON creator Douglas Crockford

Crockford also notes though that JavaScript will be hard to shift, in particular because it is the language supported by every browser for DOM (Document Object Model) manipulation. Asked about what can replace it there, Crockford said: “There are two difficulties. First, we don’t have the next language yet. It needs to be a minimal capability-based actor language that is designed specifically for secure distributed programming. Nothing less should be considered.

“Second, we need all of the browser makers to adopt it and to simultaneously replace the DOM with a well designed interface. Good luck with that.”

Via this Metafilter entry linking to Genesis — an interpreted, procedural, and Turing-complete Paleo-Hebrew programming language.

Why not make an object-oriented language?

This suggestion makes me consternated. Genesis will never be object-oriented because the Bible explicitly forbids object worship...

[ related topics: Movies Software Engineering ]

Wow. We're using slave labor to prop-up telemarketing. Fronteras Desk: A woman’s climb through Arizona's prison labor system shows entrenched racism and labor abuse.

KJZZ: A yearlong investigation shows that Arizona prisoners’ work is exploited in more than just state grounds and other public spaces.

And now I'm following Lola N’sangou more closely.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Television Race ]

A little possibly good news: Rhodium Group — A Congressional Climate Breakthrough looks at possible impacts of the "Inflation Reduction Act":

Our preliminary assessment of the IRA is that its policies, including the new leasing provisions, reduce net GHG emissions by 31% to 44% below 2005 levels in 2030 (Figure 1). We model the impacts of the IRA on three core emissions scenarios—high, central, and low—from our newly updated baselines for 2030 US emissions under current policy in Taking Stock 2022. The range in Taking Stock and in our IRA results reflects uncertainty around future fossil fuel prices, economic growth, and technology costs. In the high emissions case, which features cheap fossil fuels and more expensive clean technologies plus faster economic growth, we find that the IRA can accelerate emissions reductions to a 31% cut below 2005 levels in 2030, compared to 24% under current policy (Figure 2). On the flip side, in the low emissions case, with expensive fossil fuels and cheap clean technologies, the IRA can drive even larger reductions, from 35% below 2005 levels under current policy to 44% below 2005 levels with the bill. In the central emissions case, the bill accelerates emissions reductions to 40% below 2005 levels in 2030, compared to 30% under current policy. If Congress passes this package, additional action from executive agencies and subnational actors can put the US’s target of cutting emissions in half by 2030 within reach.

Via https://twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/1552805663688073219

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Photography Invention and Design Law Current Events Economics Global Warming ]

I believe HTML+CSS has far surpassed Perl on the TIMTOWTDI and "write only" axes.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source hubris ]

It's so weird when the neighbor with whom I interact occasionally gets divorced from the spouse that I only met a few times and starts dating again. I now have to learn a new name for a person who occupies a certain social role in my brain...

[ related topics: Invention and Design Marriage ]

Wow, it's Naked Lady season again already!

[ related topics: Photography Nudity ]

Well. Granicus is b0rk3d. Isn't that special.

RT Xopher pro-choice voter 🏳️‍🌈 ♥️ 🇺🇦 @Halftongue (yesterday, I missed it)

Hey, you know what else happened on this night in 1974? Janet Weiss and Brad Majors, two ordinary, healthy kids, began driving out to see their old Denton High School science teacher, Dr. von Scott.

As they drove, they listened on the car radio as Nixon resigned as President.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Automobiles Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Sigh. I know that the kids these days are using <span> tags with click handlers and styling to implement all of their interface, how long is it gonna be before the hotness is just gonna loop back around to a handle to the framebuffer and draw it yourself...

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

🎶I'm all right, nobody worry about me🎶

[ related topics: Photography ]

Listening to "Hallowed Covenant" on the Nobilis Patreon podcast, and wonder if I'd be sensitive to some of the aspects that I'm finding problematic if I didn't know the authorship. I suspect so, but it's an interesting opportunity for self-reflection.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Pop Culture ]

Today's CSS rant is brought to you by grid-* and it's tabular, just use a fucking table, WTF!

[ related topics: Furniture ]

If it's the insights that change everything, that suggests that everything had already changed. So now I'm looking around with suspicion...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography ]

Psychology Today: The Rise of Lonely, Single Men Dating apps and a drastically changing relationship landscape

Key points

• Dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing as healthy relationship standards increase.
• ...

(Emphasis mine)

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Weblogs Health ]

RT Paul Fairie @paulisci

A Brief History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

🧵

Nobody Wants To Work' Has Been Complaint for Decades, Viral Thread Shows

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Television Marketing ]

The Onion: Conservatives React To The Mar-A-Lago Raid

“The FBI has strayed so far from the agency’s original mission to kill civil rights leaders.”

[ related topics: Food Law Enforcement Civil Liberties ]

Just a box. Olive and whatever the other wood happened to be in the scrap pile. First time re-sawing to 1/8", got some technique to work on.

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

Another shot of the box.

[ related topics: Photography ]

And one more shot of the box.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Zoom really needs a sharing mode that lets me see the Zoom settings of the remote participant so I can debug their fucking sound settings.

Out riding the tandem. Stopped at Friedman's, but because we're on the bike decided to walk around Deer Creek Village shopping center and see what's here. It really is a little piece of Fresno in the heart of Petaluma.

[ related topics: Nature and environment California Culture Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem ]

Welp, TeePublic removed my account, apparently my "traffic congestion drives positive outcomes" T-shirt violated their terms of service. I wanna say this was a mistake, but I also wanna say "big car: they're everywhere, and out to get us".

[ related topics: Automobiles Clothing ]

There's not much I use my work email for. Internally, we use Slack, so it's accounts & password recovery for a few services, Github, Algolia, and so forth. So why TF is said email full of recruiter spam? Who thinks this is a useful way to recruit?

[ related topics: Spam Work, productivity and environment Monty Python ]

Culture Shock: Reassessing the Workshop

Ironically, the workshop’s roots are overtly political. It was by reading two books—Anis Shivani’s Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies and Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War—that I learned about how the U.S. government, via the CIA, interfered in the creation of the Iowa Workshop, and how this interference continues to inform the multitude of writing programs we have today. From 1941 to 1964, Iowa Writers’ Workshop director Paul Engle fundraised for the program by using explicitly anticommunist rhetoric, promising to promote American values through the teaching of creative writing. Among the program’s donors were the Rockefeller Foundation, State Department, the Fairfield Foundation, and the Asia Foundation, the latter two of which were CIA front groups.

(Interesting follow-on to noting that modern art was a CIA weapon)

[ related topics: Politics Books Software Engineering History moron Sociology Writing Current Events Art & Culture California Culture Guns Archival ]

Huh. Interesting timing on this... Plea deals upended for pair accused of peddling nuclear sub secrets:

A judge said the proposed prison terms for Jonathan Toebbe and his wife, Diana, were too lenient, given the potential damage to national security

I'm sure it's not at all related to possible other newsworthy situations which might involve potential damage to national security.

[ related topics: Law Marriage ]

Petaluma police sent out a press release about a series of arrests resolved with crisis intervention techniques. Which is great, they took a couple of people who were potentially violent into custody without injury. But what struck me was that one subject has been arrested 58 times since 2003, another 16.

As a matter of public policy, we're clearly doing something very very wrong. Incarceration *clearly* isn't working if someone's getting arrested 58 times in 2 decades. The only thing it seems to accomplish is to make a person less employable, and more likely to run afoul of the law in the future.

So I invite you to think about what social structures might look like that'd actually help both the guy hallucinating while waving around a machete, and the society that feels threatened by him (people like me).

We do know that environment and stress are huge contributing factors in psychosis. We can see that policing as we currently practice it is just reacting to the same problem over and over again.

Estimates vary, but between policing and prisons we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year in this country, and we're getting this. Seems to me like we'd be *way* better off redirecting a whole lot of that to social safety net, mental health services, providing more stable childhoods.

Instead it sure feels like we're buying our local police forces more Armored Personnel Carriers.

I am happy that Petaluma has implemented the SAFE (Specialized Assistance for Everyone) team as an alternative to police response, and that Chief Savano is making the efforts he is, but they're working within a larger system that is designed not just for failure, but to self-perpetuate, and continue the cycle.

We've gotta break that cycle.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Nature and environment Bay Area Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Single Moms: Less Housework, More Leisure Than Married Moms

In their investigation of a nationally representative sample of more than 23,000 mothers, Joanna Pepin, Liana Sayer, and Lynne Casper found that single mothers did less housework and spent more time on leisure and sleeping than married mothers. What’s more, the single mothers managed all that while spending no less time caring for their children.

Marital status and mothers’ time use: Childcare, housework, leisure, and sleep

Liana C. Sayer and Joanna R. Pepin in the Washington Post: Opinion: Moms spend even more time on housework when a man’s in the house. Here’s why.\

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs Sociology Marriage Real Estate ]

RT Dewey P. Dribbles, Esq. @kylekinane

court is all like “place your non shit-wiping hand on this book of half-remembered ghost stories told by inbred winos and promise not to lie to this final boss cop in a goth prom dress.” ok sure man whatever you say.

[ related topics: Books ]

Tara over at ResearchBuzz tagged me in this bit of amusement: Old laptop hard drives will allegedly crash when exposed to Janet Jackson music

The issue was also apparently partially resolved by the PC manufacturer at the time. Chen says the company addressed the problem "by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback." This wouldn't completely fix things since these laptops' hard drives would still crash if they were exposed to another device that was playing the song. But "Rhythm Nation" had apparently declined enough in popularity by the early 2000s that the issue didn't become a widespread problem.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Rocky Horror Picture Show ]

Dodge Charger Daytona SRT Concept: American Muscle in the EV Era. With 126dB pseudo-exhaust noises and artificial shift points, this car not only says "I intend to kill people", it also clearly projects "asshole" and "dipshit" and "I'm compensating" with every maneuver.

[ related topics: Current Events Automobiles ]

So the headline reads Student, 20, makes $110 million trading meme stock Bed Bath & Beyond, somewhere else I read that he raised $25M from friends and family to start his company, but... Obviously, as the stock has crashed back down, there wasn't value created there, which means the money he "made" is essentially extracted from Redditors playing meme games.

Which kinda feels a lot like cryptocurrencies: on the one hand it's hard to feel bad for people burned by a moral hazard, on the other hand....

[ related topics: Games Ethics Sociology Marketing Currency Economics Furniture ]

Dear Senator McGuire

I'm writing in support of AB 2097, and hope that you can vote in support of the bill.

In Petaluma, as in most towns in our area, as the saying goes, "You'll never be homeless ... if you're a car." Excess parking makes our urban and suburban environment more more expensive, and difficult to navigate on bicycles, on foot, and on mobility scooters, forcing more people into cars, and further disadvantaging those who don't have the privilege of owning and driving a car. Making the automobile impact on our communities, from climate change to pollution to direct deaths, even more severe.

Our City Council recently held a parking workshop, and 6 of 7 council members supported an end to parking minimums, and 4 supported parking maximums. As did the majority of the public comment.

Unfortunately, the wider electorate hasn't delved into the issues of parking economics. Action at the state level can help give the Petaluma City Council, and every city council across the state, political cover to help us prioritize housing people over housing cars.

Your strong support of AB 2097 would help demonstrate your commitment to solving California's housing and climate emergencies, and help demonstrate your leadership and secure your legacy of action.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Nature and environment moron Writing California Culture Automobiles Community Bicycling Economics Real Estate Global Warming ]

Interesting Twitter thread about maps of 10 minute walkable neighborhoods in Seattle. The source of the maps is AEI (American Economic Institute) Walkable Oriented Development, which has browsable map.

A few interesting observations from that map: being adjacent to a park makes other amenities further away, and that car era commercial cores repelled high income households.

[ related topics: Automobiles Maps and Mapping Seattle Economics ]

‘How did I commit fraud?’ Ex-felon voters confused by arrests, DeSantis’ announcement. If you're not following along at home, Ron DeSantis convened an Office of Election Crimes and Integrity, and out of something like 1.6M votes cast they managed to find 20 people, and it's sure looking like those 20 people were misinformed by those who were supposed to be helping:

In the last few months of her time in prison, Oliver said she’d read about Amendment 4, a constitutional amendment approved by about 65% of Floridians in 2018, which restored the voting rights of most felons who had completed all terms of their sentence. No one told her she didn’t qualify under Amendment 4; the law doesn’t apply to those with sex offenses or murder charges. She registered as a Democrat and got her voter card in the mail.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Erotic Sexual Culture moron Current Events Civil Liberties ]

When Petaluma was ‘hardcore capital’ of the Bay Area.

After the success of “I Am Curious (Yellow),” the State’s owner, Alan Finlay, began rotating X-rated films into the theater’s schedule one week per month. He did the same at the Parkway, the drive-in theater he owned at the north end of town beside the freeway in Denman Flats (today’s Petaluma Golf Center). The Midway, a new drive-in theater along the freeway south of town, soon followed.

The article says that those three theaters made Petaluma the only town in the North Bay showing porn, and the only town in the Bay Area showing it outdoors.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Nature and environment Invention and Design Theater & Plays California Culture ]

Shout out to https://www.thebeveragepeople.com/ for getting me unstuck today so I can bottle this Pindo palm fruit wine! I am now the proud owner of a corker...

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits ]

Apparently I bought a Ferrari today.

The corner with which we bottled 33 bottles of Pindo Palm fruit wine.

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits ]

Pindo palm fruit wine. 12 bottles given away, a bunch more to go.

[ related topics: Wines and Spirits ]

Ugh. Image uploading on my social media thingy appears to be broken. Gotta debug ImageMagick tomorrow, I guess.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

Hopefully my social media thingy is fixed now. Ferrari label on the wine bottle corker from yesterday...

[ related topics: Photography Wines and Spirits Journalism and Media Gambling ]

And the wine corker itself. Takes a little technique, but with patience it works.

[ related topics: Photography Wines and Spirits Gambling ]

And, finally, some bottled Pindo palm fruit wine.

[ related topics: Photography Wines and Spirits Gambling ]

20-25 lbs of plum pulp that we froze a month or so ago, soaking with Pectinase overnight, tomorrow we add yeast and start that fermenting.

Take 2: 20-25 lbs of plum pulp that we froze a month or so ago, soaking with Pectinase overnight, tomorrow we add yeast and start that fermenting into wine.

[ related topics: Photography Wines and Spirits ]

Saw a Lucid Air sedan in the wild today. That car makes a statement, specifically "passengers in the back seat are likely CIA assassination targets".

[ related topics: Automobiles Woodworking ]

The various email lists of TheBeveragePeople.com are about the best marketing I've run across. Topics just outside of what I've bought from them to be peripherally interesting, but all designed to draw me further into the fermentation hobby.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Marketing ]

RT wife geist @wife_geist

inside you are two wolves. this is below the minimum viable population threshold, so they soon die out. the deer population inside you explodes, quickly stripping you of your internal vegetation. erosion increases, streams and rivers silt up, and insect numbers collapse due to ha

[ related topics: Marriage ]

Parents and clinicians say private equity’s profit fixation is short-changing kids with autism. On the ways that ABA as a treatment for autism is being used to extract dollars from parents, with questionable returns.

Via https://twitter.com/stevesilberman/status/1559610330933694465

[ related topics: Children and growing up Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

Not just microplastics in the ocean: Common tire chemical implicated in mysterious deaths of at-risk salmon — Coho salmon in urban streams have been dying in the U.S. Pacific Northwest

Online today[Dec. 3, 2020] in Science, researchers led by Kolodziej report the primary culprit comes from a chemical widely used to protect tires from ozone, a reactive atmospheric gas. The toxicant, called 6PPD-quinone, leaches out of the particles that tires shed onto pavement. Even small doses killed coho salmon in the lab. "It's a brilliant piece of work," says Miriam Diamond, an environmental chemist at the University of Toronto. "They've done a tremendous job at sleuthing out a very challenging problem."

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Heinlein California Culture Education ]

Jolene, but it's to the tune of Hallelujah

Hallelujah, but it's to the tune of Jolene

[ related topics: Movies ]

Programming is just a matter of replacing bugs with other bugs until they get small enough that you don't care any more.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Hmmmm...

Hmmmm... (With pic)

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Dessert and tea along the Petaluma river.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Mobile mountain lion kibble, on 5th St! At first we thought they were statues.

[ related topics: Photography ]

There's Dad jokes, and then there's school administration jokes...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography ]

Growing up in the New York area I developed a particular notion of what "Mafia" meant. I'm giving side-eye to all those using the term "Russian Mafia" for that particular subculture of organized crime. It feels lazy and appropriative, and with deliberately muddied semantics.

[ related topics: Invention and Design New York ]

A warning to anyone who might be tempted to use the stockanalysis.com free trial for data: Their unsubscribe process is a dark pattern that requires an additional two clicks after the "why are you leaving?" survey.

Update: The StockAnalysis.com folks have gone above and beyond to react to my earlier complaint. I'm still in the "gonna have to read more closely" mode, but based on this responsiveness, as we gain customers I'm hoping there can be services which funnel users towards them...

On Sunday, Charlene and I picked up some small cones at a garage sale. Someone else added two larger cones. The neighborhood keeps setting them back up, even as they get driven over...

[ related topics: Photography ]