Flutterby™! From 2022-10-02 to 2022-10-31

Neighborhood sign making part in preparation for bike and walk to school day...

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Bicycling ]

More signs from the preparation for bike and walk to school day

[ related topics: Children and growing up Bicycling ]

Even still more signs

[ related topics: Photography ]

Re uploading signs 2

[ related topics: Photography ]

The chicken unicorn is awesome

[ related topics: Photography Food Birds ]

The attention to mixing in this gradient is awesome.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Mary amd one of her signs

[ related topics: Photography ]

There's always that one awesome kid...

[ related topics: Photography ]

And the mom who knows how to write ad copy...

[ related topics: Photography ]

In process

[ related topics: Photography ]

Derek, the organizer who took this from my "hey, we should show some support to the kids on walk and bike to school day" to "let's decorate the neighborhood!"

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Bicycling ]

More progress...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Wow. TeePublic yoinked my account on August 15, asked for more information on September 5, and just reinstated my account. Never told me why, though they did ask for original artwork presumably as proof that I actually created the image. Be careful, is what I'm saying.

How come we hate on "developers", but defer to the legacy landowners who want to expand the urban growth boundaries in order to sell their family farms for sprawl?

[ related topics: Sociology ]

JavaScript believes strongly that there's more than one way to do it, and every environment believes that all of the other ways are heretical and should cause obscure misleading error messages.

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Self inflicted wounds, part of an ongoing series: Ages ago, because of termcaps stuff, I trained myself to use <esc> for Emacs meta. Of course the Visual Studio Code Emacs-like keybinding that I found doesn't do that. Sigh.

The Onion's Amicus brief to the Sixth Circuit cout of appeals for Novak v. the City of Parma, Ohio. It's a hilarious and enlightening read, although...

Just to be clear, this was not a close call on the facts: Mr. Novak’s spoof Facebook posts advertised that the Parma Police Department was hosting a “pedophile reform event” in which successful participants could be removed from the sex offender registry and become honorary members of the department after completing puzzles and quizzes; that the department had discovered an experimental technique for abortions and would be providing them to teens for free in a police van; that the department was soliciting job applicants but that minorities were “strongly encourag[ed]” not to apply; and that the department was banning city residents from feeding homeless people in “an attempt to have the homeless population eventually leave our City due to starvation.” Pet. App. 139a–41a.

It may not be all that far-fetched that the Parma Police Department would hold such an event. Maybe, much like The Onion's long track record of amazing predictive accuracy, the problem is that the Parma Ohio Police Department recognized themselves all too well in this satire.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Food Law Enforcement Heinlein ]

Bivalent booster acquired!

Feels like speeds are down and lane compliance is already better.

[ related topics: Photography ]

All through the neighborhood

[ related topics: Photography ]

Yay! Thank you to the city for refreshing paint and adding reflectors to the curve on Mountain View at Mission! Based on a little bit of watching cars it it's definitely helping southbound lane compliance, still northbound cutting

[ related topics: Photography ]

So some of my Facebook friends are totally into guys in short shorts, and some of my Facebook friends are totally into Ren Faire costuming, and every once in a while I find a topic that crosses those cultural boundaries. A friend's post started with a different view of the costumed gentleman that's showing up in the preview here, which brought up some historical questions (like "is that blue really period?"), but went down a rabbit hole of Landsknecht, German mercenaries from the 15th Century, and... yeah. Codpieces and booty shorts for the win.

https://sartorialadventure.tum...ee-haw-agenda-to-the-ye-olde/amp

https://casadekissa.wordpress....nts-its-not-all-about-the-booty/

http://germanrenaissance.net/l...ay-of-bare-legs-fact-or-fiction/

[ related topics: Sociology Clothing ]

The US is omce again conducting military exercises off the coast of SF and Marin. The show of force is largely performative, these are peaceful nations and despite the annual nature, invasions have been rare. https://fleetweeksf.org/

[ related topics: Nature and environment Bay Area ]

Twitter thread on Gloria Steinem's work with the CIA, and how she applied their counter-revolutionary tactics

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

So I can find it again: Twitter thread on the anonymous analysis in Florida claiming an association between the COVID vaccines and higher risk of cardiac death in young men

Developing and implementing 20-mph speed limits in Edinburgh and Belfast: mixed-methods study

Results: Collisions and casualties – the overall percentage reduction in casualty rates was 39% (the overall percentage reduction in collision rates was 40%) in Edinburgh. The percentage reduction for each level of severity was 23% for fatal casualties, 33% for serious casualties and 37% for minor casualties. In Belfast there was a 2% reduction in casualties, reflecting differences in the size, reach and implementation of the two schemes. Perceptions – in Edinburgh there was an increase in two factors (support for 20 mph and rule-following after implementation) supported by the qualitative data. Liveability – for both cities, there was a small statistical increase in liveability. Speed – mean and median speeds reduced by 1.34 mph and 0.47 mph, respectively, at 12 months in Edinburgh, with no statistically significant changes in Belfast. History, political context, local policy goals, local priorities and leadership influenced decision-making and implementation in the two cities.

DOI: 10.3310/XAZI9445

Via https://mobile.twitter.com/War...Wells/status/1579114657495027713

Also https://mobile.twitter.com/War...Wells/status/1576890281827348480 which linked to Slowing city traffic cut road deaths by a quarter

Restricting a city’s speed limits to 20mph reduced road deaths by almost a quarter and serious injuries by a third, research reveals.

[ related topics: Politics moron ]

Well worth a read, explains so much about modern political tactics: Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, Accusation in a Mirror Kenneth L. Marcus of The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law

One of the most astonishing discoveries in the history of genocide studies was the Note Relative a la Propagande d'Expansion et de Recrutement (the "Note"), a mimeographed document found in Butare prefecture in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. The Note, which draws from Goebbels, Lenin, and others, is a manual of the rhetorical methods that could be used to inflame ordinary people to attack their countrymen.' For jurists attempting to interpret or apply the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the "Genocide Convention") and related statutes, this discovery has been illuminating because it demonstrates the instrumentalities through which propaganda can be used to incite mass- murder. The Genocide Convention's prohibition of incitement is central to efforts to prevent genocide, so it is unfortunate that the Note's principal rhetorical contribution-the method called "accusation in a mirror" ("AiM")-has yet to receive the attention from legal scholars and tribunals that it deserves. If properly understood, the concept of AiM could assist jurists in correcting the Genocide Convention's most conspicuous weakness (i.e., its utter failure to prevent genocides before the killings occur).

As Elf Sternberg noted when linking to this:

It has become a cliche to say that every Republican accusation is a confession, but AiM goes further: it states that everything the genocides will do, they first accuse the other party of doing first. And not vague accusations. Precise accusations.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics tolkien moron Law Civil Liberties Education ]

It's not that I'm averse to celebrating Columbus Day, but if you're looking to spread syphillis while looking for spices and gold in the wrong places, with a side of maiming and casual cruelty, count me out.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

In honor of "Columbus Day", Journal of Medicine and Life: Brief History of Syphilis.

I went down this rabbit hole because I read something that suggested that Columbus's expedition brought syphilis to Europe, and thought "wait, what about Caligula?" Turns out that maybe I shouldn't take my history lessons from Bob Guccione.

Yeah, there's a lot of theories about the origin of syphilis, and there's evidence for pre-Columbus syphilis in the "Americas" and not a whole lot of evidence for it on Europe in that era, and Caligula likely had his own set of other problems.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

We are a household with problems: our Monday evening entertainment is watching the Petaluma city staff make the cross-town connector presentation to council. Good questions, but: even if we could afford to build Caulfield or Ranier, how the hell would we pay for the maintenance?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

New IIHS Study Confirms What We Suspected About Tesla’s Autopilot And Other Level 2 Driver Assist Systems: People Are Dangerously Confused

Being right about something occasionally is fun, and gives you a little dopamine rush of pleasure, a pleasure that I personally encounter extremely rarely. I feel like I’m right about something today, so mark your calendars, but it’s not something I’m actually pleased to be right about: People both don’t understand and aren’t using Level 2 (L2) semi-automated driving assist systems well or safely. I’m being bold and saying I’m right about my thoughts on this – which I’ve been ranting about for quite a while – because a study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) just dropped, and it comes to essentially the same conclusions: Significant percentages of people who have cars with L2 semi-automated driver assist systems overestimate the capabilities of the systems, and as a result use them in potentially dangerous ways. With these systems becoming more and more common, it’s time we addressed this bluntly and honestly.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

France says car ads must come with a caveat: Walk, bike or take public transit instead

Automakers will be able to choose between three messages, according to the rule published in France’s official journal: “Consider carpooling,” “For short trips, opt for walking or cycling" or “Use public transportation for everyday trips.” At the end of the message, advertisers must affix the hashtag “#SeDéplacerMoinsPolluer” — or #MovePolluteLess.

Via this Twitter thread in which Warren J. Wells suggests:

Policy Idea:

No more car ads that show people driving illegally.

with a link to a Dodge Charger ad.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Sports Automobiles Pedal Power Bicycling Public Transportation ]

If, like me, you have been looking for a single place to find Tara Calishain (aka "ResearchBuzz")'s various search gizmos, good news! They've landed at https://searchgizmos.com/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events ]

Huh. Work has me digging into RSS feeds, and I'm noticing that Perl's XML::RSS module seems to be dropping the pubDate from items. I suppose this is yet another reason to not depend on libraries. Sigh.

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Perl Open Source Work, productivity and environment hubris ]

Social media polarize politics for a different reason than you might think

Social media are polarizing not because they isolate us with likeminded others, as often thought, but because they provide spaces where we create social identities that increasingly align with our political preferences. ‘This drives conflict and creates an all-encompassing division between two homogeneous and opposed political tribes’, concludes digital geographer Petter Törnberg in a new study. ‘The internet is thus less of an “echo chamber”, and more like the Lord of the Flies.’ The study is now published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

How digital media drive affective polarization through partisan sorting

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2207159119

After the great unfriending/unfollowing/blocking of the Trump era, I've gradually started undoing some of that, and I think he's on to something: IRL relationships we get a filtered version of someone, but on online relationships we get everything. Get the hobby alone, and it's great, get that with a side of racism or Putin apologism or what-have-you, and it feels like I need to either filter that, or make a "that's not appropriate" comment.

I kinda wonder what this means for the work of organizations like Braver Angels, which seem to be "conservatives" (I'm not sure what that term means any more) trying to bridge the divide by creating human relationships, but when the basis of that divide bridging is politics, well... might be related to why Charlene and I walked out of the workshop we took thinking that this was counterproductive.

Via https://twitter.com/pettertornberg/status/1580106544729198592

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design moron Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Race ]

Having trouble figuring out who this branding is supposed to appeal to. Like "my generator has a restraining order and can't be within a quarter mile of an elementary school" is a selling point or something?

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Currency ]

Watching the candidates forum, from the candidate who proposed reducing our reliance on cars with subsidized on demand point-to-point ride services to the one whose slogan eschews politics talking about dabbling in politics, we're feeling... informed.

[ related topics: Politics Community ]

Because this isn't showing up in places where it should be, and because I think John is the best candidate for District 2: John Shribbs for Petaluma City Council

Well, I thought I had recurring payments to the Signal foundation set up, but when I went to pull them because Signal's dropping SMS support, I guess I didn't? Or they're coming from somewhere else? Huh.

A friend is exploring the Northeast, and sent a picture of a large photovoltaic solar installation with a "guess where?" note. So I spent a bit of time poking around solar on Google Maps, which happen to be near ski areas, and now my social media is full of ski equipment ads.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Sports Maps and Mapping Photovoltaics ]

Cleaning out my library. Do I know anyone interested in'90s CG books? The Graphics Gems series, Introduction to implicit Surfaces, Wavelets for Computer Graphics Texturing and Modeling (Ebert etc al), the Foley, Van Dam, etc. book...

[ related topics: Language Books Movies Graphics ]

Wow, is the @CaliforniaPUC actually sending unsolicited SMS messages that look a lot like phishing scams, from a 10 digit number, asking people to sign up for Flex Alerts to phone numbers that I'm pretty sure are already signed up for Flex Alerts? Major fail.

Scene is hopping down at Riverfront this evening!

Scene is hopping down at Riverfront this evening! (Now with picture)

[ related topics: Photography ]

Put in an o!d DVD with that "you wouldn't steal a car..." trailer thing, and dayumn I'd forgotten how the MPAA knew how to make piracy seem really sexy!

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

Nature: Scientific Reports: Alzheimer’s disease large-scale gene expression portrait identifies exercise as the top theoretical treatment

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-22179-z

Via https://mobile.twitter.com/max...avere/status/1581338154736328704

The replies have a guy giving examples of muscle growth among older people.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Bioinformatics ]

Despite 'defunding' claims, police funding has increased in many US cities

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

CPerlLexer, a recursive descent parser for the C programming language that can be tied to an LLVM back-end plug-in for a full compilation experience, but can also be used for parsing C.

Via https://twitter.com/thingskatedid/status/1582055068148191232

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

That thing where ya solve Queerdle, but then have to go Google the word because WTF...

...and then even more WTF.

"Forward progress has been stopped." Alert from Watch Duty, or the results of your morning Agile stand-up. Context is important.

[ related topics: Movies ]

JSON model has a `-(BOOL)valueIsADictionaryThatCouldBeAnArray:` method. I am so tempted to submit a pull request for `valueIsAPhoneCallThatCouldBeAnEmail:` and always return `YES`.

Raffensperger conspires with Walker’s campaign and rightwing orgs to smear Senator Warnock and MLK’s Church

[ related topics: Religion Graphics ]

This is fantastic: Github Copilot investigation:

If Microsoft and OpenAI chose to use these repos sub­ject to their respec­tive open-source licenses, Microsoft and OpenAI would’ve needed to pub­lish a lot of attri­bu­tions, because this is a min­i­mal require­ment of pretty much every open-source license. Yet no attri­bu­tions are appar­ent.

There­fore, Microsoft and OpenAI must be rely­ing on a fair-use argu­ment. In fact we know this is so, because for­mer GitHub CEO Nat Fried­man claimed dur­ing the Copi­lot tech­ni­cal pre­view that “train­ing [machine-learn­ing] sys­tems on pub­lic data is fair use”.

But a hell of a lot of that code is GPL or LGPL licensed and one can apparently recreate it with the right prompts...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Microsoft moron Machinery Trains Joss Whedon - Serenity / Firefly ]

Health Affairs: The Role Of Administrative Waste In Excess US Health Spending

Research indicates that the US spends more on health care administration than comparable nations. One estimate from the Peterson Foundation, based on 2021 data from the OECD, finds that the US spends $1,055 per capita on administrative costs—by far the highest amount on a list of twelve OECD nations plus the US. The country with the next highest level of per capita administrative spending is Germany, at $306 per capita.

All this and crappy outcomes, too?

[ related topics: Weblogs Health ]

The fact that Missouri Governor Mike Parson still has any sort of political career, rather than being laughed out of office, is an indictment of everything, especially voters: https://missouriindependent.co...arson-still-says-hes-a-criminal/

[ related topics: Politics moron ]

Started reading The Art of Multiprocessor Programming last night, and dang I miss programming close to the metal. This using Promises and ending up with weird queue conflicts because there's no real plan for concurrency sticks.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Art & Culture ]

Sometimes I get old and cranky about abstraction layers like testing frameworks. Seeing "Sometimes, Mocha will get confused and list the wrong test as having failed." accompanying a recommendation for binary search with commented out code doesn't help.

That feeling when you add a :johnny_cash_with_raised_middle_finger: emoji to Slack...

Huh. Not only is @SignalApp dropping the Android SMS capability, it now looks like it's taking days to deliver Signal messages. Think it's time to pre-emptively purge my account and just move everything to SMS. Sigh. I wanna help make the world encrypted, but...

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

Hey @TweetNovato, light sensor for left turn off SB Redwood Blvd on to Grant is broken. Waited 2 cycles on my bike, finally turned to the sidewalk. Cc @MarinBike

[ related topics: Nature and environment Bicycling ]

The difference between bike path entrances and jungle guerilla warfare booby traps is how much feces gets smeared on the sharpened stakes. It's all about how quickly the enemy is supposed to die.

[ related topics: Photography Bicycling ]

Just noticing where the no parking zone begins. Seems like a conscious decision to park in the bike lane...

[ related topics: Photography Bicycling ]

A Legendary Erotic Archive Has Been Out of Public View For Decades. We Found It. An article about digging through the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality which closed in 2018.

[ related topics: Erotic ]

Ugh. I miss when asynchronicity meant pthreads. Keeping track of Promises is harder than it should be...

More forensic science exposed as fraud: Forensic Bitemark Analysis Not Supported by Sufficient Data, NIST Draft Review Finds

The draft review finds that “forensic bitemark analysis lacks a sufficient scientific foundation because the three key premises of the field are not supported by the data. First, human anterior dental patterns have not been shown to be unique at the individual level. Second, those patterns are not accurately transferred to human skin consistently. Third, it has not been shown that defining characteristics of those patterns can be accurately analyzed to exclude or not exclude individuals as the source of a bitemark.”

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Current Events ]

My schadenfreudometer broke, and I'd just gotten it repaired: "Vox Day" aka Theodore Beale's ‘Anti-Woke’ superhero film cancelled after losing all fan donations to a crypto scam

Beale is a longtime right-wing blogger who promotes his own role in the misogynistic GamerGate harassment campaign. He was also at the head of the Rabid Puppies< campaign attempt to usurp the SciFi Hugo Award with a host of right-wing fiction and innocuous, sexually charged e-books (which eventually blew up in his face spectacularly). Beale has been called “the most despised man in science fiction.” He reportedly called the lauded and award-winning SciFi-Fantasy author N.K. Jemisin, who is Black, an “ignorant half-savage.” These comments helped him getexpelled from the Science Fiction Writers Association.

[ related topics: moron Cryptography ]

If I could go back and do one thing for computer science, it would be to pick one thing, length, count, size, whatever, for the number of items in an array, or characters in a string, and just use that. I can do all sorts of other language switching, but...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

The Commodordion, a Commodore 64 based electronic accordion, with a second C64 for rhythm.

Thinking about the connection between performative work and professional sports fandom....

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Bunch of Pindo palm fruit that needs to ripen for a bit before we de-pit it, but the freezer is filling up. This year's Pindo wine is gonna be fruit heavy...

[ related topics: Photography Wines and Spirits ]

Thinking a lot about how groups will latch on to anti-factual information as a way of demonstrating in-group membership, and how that causes a movement to become unmoored from reality.

Thinking a lot about how groups will latch on to anti-factual information as a way of demonstrating in-group membership, and how that causes a movement to become unmoored from reality. (Fixing picture...)

[ related topics: Photography ]

Hey Sonoma County folks, anyone got feelings on Damon Connolly vs Sarah Aminzadeh? Based on the way they discuss various issues on their campaign web pages I'm feeling like Damon Connolly is more in line with my concerns on housing and transportation, but I'm open...

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

PLoS One: The consequences of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act for police arrests

doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0261512

Conclusions

Evidence in this paper suggests that expanded Medicaid insurance reduced police arrests, particularly drug-related arrests. Combined with research showing the harmful health consequences of chronic policing in disadvantaged communities, greater insurance coverage creates new avenues for individuals to seek care, receive treatment, and avoid criminalization. As police reform is high on the agenda at the local, state, and federal level, our paper supports the perspective that broad health policy reforms can meaningfully reduce contact with the criminal justice system under historic conditions of mass criminalization.

Via https://twitter.com/uche_blackstock/status/1583455778073374720

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Community ]

A project that's been in play for at least two years. We've been trying to organize some neighborhood street safety projects, and was some pushback on street painting because there'd been some difficulties with a rainbow sidewalk project...

[ related topics: Photography ]

...So I contacted the organizers, asked how I could help make this happen, and the last blocker was surface prep. So I asked my neighbors for help, and tonight we scrubbed the street.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Laying out guides for the crosswalk painting this morning.

Laying out guides for the crosswalk painting this morning.

[ related topics: Photography ]

They were laying out guides for the crosswalk painting this morning.

[ related topics: Photography ]

And this morning's sunrise was nice.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Thinking about adding more solar, but also pondering that lifetime CO2 emissions for photovoltaic may be higher than utility scale renewables. Wish Sonoma Clean Power published time of day CO2/MWh numbers

[ related topics: Archival Photovoltaics Global Warming ]

We know how to have a date night. The fairgrounds presentation to city council. Listening to public comment. The guy talking about the hundreds of thousands of people in this community of 60,865: classic. Hope the DAA doesn't end up soaking the city again.

[ related topics: Pop Culture Community ]

McSweeney's: If I Emailed My Parents Like Democrats Email Me by Sarah Gruen and Chandler Dean

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

This is really good. Petaluma has a lot of reference to Polly Klaas, some of which makes me very uncomfortable because of the ways in which that incident was used to create bad legislation and bad policy based on very very bad data. It's good to see her sisters working to fix that. It sucks that we as a society have laid this on them.

Polly Klaas’s murder fueled the 90s crime panic. Her sisters fear ‘we’re repeating history’

[ related topics: Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Douglas Adams ]

This is fascinating: Python 3.11 vs 3.8, with an excursion into JavaScript and C++. An n-body simulation runs in 31.98 seconds vs Python 3.8's 96.79 seconds...

But JavaScript runs in 0.768 seconds, and C++ compiles in 0.183 seconds and runs in 0.423 seconds, with the observation that theoretically JIT languages can beat compiled languages.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Monty Python Python ]

Wrote this for the Metafilter entry that linked to Tim Kreider's musings on Phil Tippet's Mad God, and stop-motion animation and a craft becoming obsolete.

I now want to watch Mad God, but I'm stuck on the obsolescence part of this.

Several decades ago, I was obsessed with 3d graphics. I was writing renderers, and figuring out ways to put pixels on screens faster. That obsession led to moving to California to join Pixar's Interactive Group, and when the Interactive Group was dissolved I was given the option of becoming a "Technical Director", or going into the Graphics R&D group.

At the time I saw being a TD as being an interface by which the director used the computer. That dramatically under-valued the role that the TD brings to the process, but is also not entirely wrong. I went with going into Graphics R&D, and after a little while there realized that wasn't my place either.

Anyway, here I am decades later, caught up in a world where everything is layers of abstraction. I'm no longer obsessively counting cycles, figuring out which machine language idioms splat those pixels faster. Hell, I'm no longer trying to remove unnecessary floating point operations from geometry transforms. I have an intuitive feel for how 4x4 matrices work that many people I've run into in computer graphics don't have, and yet here I am with those skills completely unused in my current career path.

I'm about to just trash a whole bunch of books with various really cool math and techniques because I'm never gonna write my own polygon rasterizer again, never gonna worry about finding the surface of an implicit surface.

And I miss that. I spend a lot of time these days trying to figure out WTF the people developing AppKit or JavaScript idioms were thinking, a lot of which feels like unnecessary layers of abstraction on top of layers of....

And I think I can draw an analogy straight from "this brush stroke goes right here" vs "let's change the input sentence a little bit and see what that gives us" to my own path of worrying whether LEA was faster than ADD and MUL vs how the framework that some coworker pulled into the project is abstracting out threading in a way that's causing us a deadlock.

I feel a lot of that "in love with a dying art", even if that art was assembly language. I fill the part of my head that used to be obsessively staying up late at night pondering state machines with square dance choreography, of all things.

And I'm reading about how JIT languages are edging in on compiled languages for performance, and thinking about what skills I should be developing for my next act. What's the art I'm trying to express, rather than the craft that gives me joy?

Which loops back around to computer animation and ML generated images and even the local steam power enthusiasts group, and pondering how we fall in love with the craft.

[ related topics: Pixar Religion Interactive Drama Books Animation Movies Theater & Plays Writing Law Work, productivity and environment Graphics Art & Culture Mathematics California Culture Boats Woodworking ]

That vessel looks like it has had some interesting adventures

[ related topics: Photography ]

Progress on the downtown crosswalk!

[ related topics: Photography ]

More crosswalk progress.

[ related topics: Photography ]

When I'm boiling the potatoes with baking soda to get that outside texture just right, sometimes I think I'd be better off just going and getting fries somewhere...

[ related topics: Photography Food ]

Woohoo! The crosswalk is done and looks amazing. Mad props to @AmorParaTodosLV on doing this, I know it's been quite the journey.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Oregon Public Broadcasting: Newly un-redacted report shows how feds politicized response to 2020 Portland. So, yeah, the DHS was completely politicized and being used to support the election.

“For weeks, the analysts had been telling Mr. Murphy that because ANTIFA was not in the collection, it could not be put into the analysis,” the newly unredacted portions read, making clear that the previously unnamed Murphy forced his political views into intelligence over the objection of analysts.

“Notwithstanding this feedback from the I&A analysts, on July 25, 2020, Mr. Murphy sent an email to his senior leadership instructing them that henceforth, the violent opportunists in Portland were to be reported as VAAI,” the report reads, using the acronym for “violent antifa anarchists inspired.”

Via Dell Cameron pointing out that DHS has become a national security threat.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Politics moron Television ]

Active Transportation Planning meeting at Keller Street Cowork highlighting the lack of bike parking downtown. Get a room full of people who bike to get around and it becomes really clear where we're lacking infrastructure.

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

Password restrictions are your financial institution's way of telling you that your password is stored in EBCDIC plaintext and will be used without escaping in an SQL query at some point in your login process.

[ related topics: Databases ]

In order to meet carbon reduction goals, and grow our cities in fiscally sustainable ways, we need a substantial mobility mode shift. Prop 30 locks 80% of its revenue into electric automobiles. Hmmmmm...

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

Best read on the Elon Musk acquisition of Twitter that I've read: Welcome to hell, Elon

They Once Blew Up a Classroom Over Textbooks, So, Yeah, There Will Be Violence

In 1974, in West Virginia, protesters used dynamite and Molotov cocktails against the buildings of their enemies. The protesters were upset that the Board of Education of Kanawha County voted to update the textbooks in the district's language arts classes to include more modern authors in an effort to be more inclusive and multiracial. Kanawha County is the biggest in the state, and it includes the capital, Charleston. A fundamentalist Christian member of the board, Alice Moore, discovered that some of the new books included profanity, sex, evolution, and Freud. Oh, they also contained works by Black activists like Malcom X. Moore said that she was upset that the new books would teach American history in a way that "unduly favoring Blacks." Yeah, the connections to the current fuckery over curriculum in schools are that blatant.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Books Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Pop Culture Education Architecture ]

Turbine helicopter circling over my neighborhood without searchlight for half an hour after 10PM... Now the Nixle alert comes in saying "avoid the area". Gee, ya think?

[ related topics: Aviation - Helicopters ]

First time on the Petaluma history walk. Last walk of the season, so it's a large one.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Pitting the Pindo fruit. The freezer is filling up. Some time this week I'll have to rack the plum wine, start this fermenting, and figure out where I'm gone stash a few more carboys for fermentation.

[ related topics: Photography Wines and Spirits ]

More trees in roundabouts, please, they help keep our streets safer. https://local.nixle.com/alert/9734883/?sub_id=0

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

Woodworking is just transferring marks from of part of a board that's about to get milled off to another part of the board that's about to get milled off until all that's left is sawdust. Taking the week off, in part to finish the kitchen cabinet doors.

[ related topics: Photography Woodworking Home Improvement ]

Cutting the rabbets on kitchen cabinet doors. So many doors...

[ related topics: Photography Home Improvement ]