Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
Reminder to self: No more pre-built desktops unless *every component* is upgradable.
I just spent 2 1/2 hours convincing an old Dell to see the new graphics card again after upgrading the processor. It’s mostly working now, but everything before Windows finishes booting will only go out on the old onboard video.
Amazon: “Hi, we noticed you bought an accessory for a tablet. Here’s a trade-in deal for tablets!”
I don’t know, the fact that I bought an accessory for my current tablet suggests I might be planning on hanging on to it for a while.
To be fair, the ad doesn’t mention the recent purchase, so it could be unrelated. Possibly.
So DC decided it wasn’t already mining enough of Alan Moore’s ideas this year?
J.H. WILLIAMS III Responds to PROMETHEA Joining JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA
— Newsarama
DC using Promethea bugs me more than them using Tom Strong.
Partly, Promethea is the only ABC comic I read through to the end, so it matters to me more.
Partly it’s the same as Watchmen: the series was *a story*, not episodes driven by a story engine.
That said, the *concept* of Promethea *is* a story engine, which could have life and relevance beyond her original series – especially now.
But I don’t think she’ll achieve that as a guest star / supporting character in Justice League.
And having already alienated Alan Moore, you’d think they’d at least *say something* to JH Williams III about it.
Last time I read about Biosphere 2, it was abandoned. Turns out U of Arizona took over 10 years ago!
Now that I think about it, I did read an article a few months back about the corporate takeover in the 90s, given who was involved.
Slight Street Sign Modifications Can Completely Fool Machine Learning Algorithms
From the still-needs-work department: It’s possible to add noise to an image that the human brain filters out (or doesn’t even notice), but that will cause computers to misclassify it. Amusing when you’re sorting photos of animals, but dangerous when it convinces a self-driving car that a stop sign is simply reporting a speed limit.
Photo taken at: Polliwog Park
That’s the roof of a gazebo sticking out of the water.
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Correction: it’s an information kiosk. Same style of roof as the picnic shelters, but not as tall. #flooded
eighteenbelow says:
Oh geez, that seems pretty extreme! I’d heard you guys got a lot of rain and flooding, but I hope it’s a good thing in the long run and helps alleviate the drought.
Thanks, I hope so too. Our part of town did pretty well. We had an inch of water in our garage, but it only went halfway back (apparently it’s not level) and the only things that seem to have any damage are an old suitcase that might dry out ok, and some empty boxes. Power only went out for about a minute before it came back on, and we drove through some flooded roads yesterday before holing up at home.
This park is a basin in the hills, and apparently used to be part of the same seasonal marsh system as the preserve I’ve posted photos from. It’s all playground areas, benches, and picnic shelters. A friend who used to live here says flooded during heavy rain when she was here, so I imagine it’ll be fine when it dries out. Muddy, but the area near the pond is usually covered in duck and goose dropping anyway. Not my favorite part of the park, let me tell you.
The local paper reported one death a few miles away, believed to be the same person who went missing during a rescue from a flooding homeless camp. Lots of mudslides, flooded garages and damaged stuff, but not much structural damage. A retaining wall a few blocks from us collapsed and crushed an empty car.
Other parts of the LA area fared a lot worse, especially near the mountains, and especially areas downhill from last year’s fires, but we’re ok here.
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Notes: Flickr album with more photos, other commentary and pics here.
https://www.climatecentral.org/news/what-climate-experts-think-of-trumps-win-20860
It hit 93 degrees in LA this afternoon. We get November heat waves sometimes, yes, but globally 2016 is on track to be the hottest year on record, beating the record set *last year*. 2011-2015 has been the hottest 5-year period on record.
Trump has publicly called climate change a hoax and stated his intent to cut clean energy programs, reduce environmental regulations, increase use of coal, and back out of the Paris climate treaty. People who actually study climate are…not encouraged by this.
What. The. Fuck.
I think we have enough evidence by now that “just do what they say and you won’t get hurt,” aside from being what you tell hostages instead of supposedly free citizens, isn’t even true.
And why did they even have weapons drawn if the caller thought the patient was threatening suicide? Don’t shoot yourself or we’ll shoot you? Really? Does that work?
This is a clear case where de-escalation was necessary — and someone was already doing that. They should have stayed back and let him, not get in the way, screw things up further, and handcuff the victim while he’s bleeding out. He’s lucky to be alive.
This is something that had been kicking around in my head as well, but @absurdistwords puts it into words better: “What is harrowing about this case is that clearly if the victim wasn’t there this would be about an autistic man killed with a toy truck.”
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So the official story is that the officer was trying to shoot the disabled man with the toy truck and missed. As if that makes it any better.
Note: I think this was the post after which my cousin unfriended me on Facebook.
Actors sometimes use stage names that are easier to pronounce than their real names, but it doesn’t change their acting ability.
Same goes for ingredients: Whether you can pronounce its name doesn’t change its nutritional value.
I mean, would you want to eat Brassica oleracea? No? How about kale? Same thing. Whether you can pronounce the name doesn’t matter.
I’m all for looking for deeper context. Dietary headlines are pretty much always overly simplistic, and it’s important to consider scale (doubling a tiny risk is still tiny), interactions, and trade-offs (avoiding one ingredient and increasing another beyond healthy levels isn’t going to help).
But ridiculing an organization for saying that sunlight and air pollution can cause cancer? That’s so blatantly dishonest I thought I was reading a satirical quote from the Onion.
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Also: Treating the various categories as if they’re all the same. Quick reference: Group 1 means there’s sufficient evidence that something causes cancer. Group 2A and 2B mean there’s limited evidence, so they’re not saying they’re sure. Group 3 means that there’s no indication that it causes cancer, but they haven’t ruled it out.
If anybody tells you something is dangerous because it’s a Group 3 carcinogen, they are either mistaken or lying to you. It might very well be dangerous for other reasons, but Group 3 specifically means they looked at it and didn’t see enough evidence either way.
(I recently saw someone claiming bananas were carcinogenic because of the ethylene gas used to ripen them after they’ve been picked. Ethylene is in Group 3. It’s also given off naturally by plants to do things like…ripen fruit.)
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https://www.iarc.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr240_E.pdf
Here’s the actual IARC press release. It still doesn’t describe the scale of the effect they found, but it does at least define what they consider to be “processed meat” (basically anything cured, smoked, etc. so I guess that does include cold cuts). It’s worth noting that they don’t suggest people *stop* eating red & processed meat, but *limit* it, and that that risk/benefit analysis needs to be done to determine the best guidelines.
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https://www.vox.com/2015/10/26/9617928/iarc-cancer-risk-carcinogenic
Aha! Some numbers to indicate the actual *scale* of the risks involved: “In the United States, a person’s lifetime risk of getting colorectal cancer is roughly 5 percent. The IARC says that eating 50 grams of processed meat per day (about one hot dog’s worth) will boost that to about 6 percent.” For comparison, the article cites the lifetime risk of lung cancer at 1.3% for non-smokers and 17.2% for regular smokers – a *much* bigger difference!
I’d seen the 18% increase stat in several articles, but this is the first place I’d found the baseline rate, which is an important piece of information.
It’s an 18% increase for each daily serving, basically. If you assume the average American eats say, three servings of red/processed meat a day (I don’t know) for that 5% risk, then eating four servings daily brings you to 6%, five daily servings would bring you up to 7% and so on. Presumably going veggie or sticking to poultry would drop it to 3%. And that’s not considering confounding factors.
I understand reporting the findings primarily in terms of ratios since different cultures eat different amounts on average and will have different average rates…but at the same time, if you’re in science you’ve got to know that science reporting — and worse, health reporting — is pretty much worthless at trying to find the context. A few countries’ average consumption and cancer rates should have been in the press release.
Photo taken at: Los Arboles Park
todo: post as a follow-up to “Rays from the Anti-Sun!”
I think one of the markers of maturity is to look at a piece of art or pop culture and say, “Well, this isn’t my thing, but that’s OK.”
But of course that’s a lot quieter than complaining about kids these days and their awful TV shows/music/whatever, and how it’s nowhere near as good as the equivalent when *I* was that age (that I’m remembering through rose colored glasses, and of course that *shaped* my tastes), now that stuff was the pinnacle of TV/movies/sci-fi novels/etc. and everything out now is trash.
So guess which viewpoint gets noticed.
Comments on Mary Sue: Daredevil v Batman v Superman: Getting Angst Right in the Superhero Genre
I’d like to think that the general popularity of Daredevil amongst comic book/superhero fans should make it clear that fans who aren’t thrilled about the dark tone of Man of Steel (and the implied dark tone of Batman v. Superman) aren’t all just afraid of having grown-up superhero stories, but that grimness and darkness fit some characters better than others. (YMMV as to which characters they fit.)
But then the complementary tones of Flash and Arrow don’t seem to get that across either, and they actually make meta-references about it in the shows.
I’m *hoping* that once DC’s cinematic universe branches out, they’ll break things up tonally as well (like they’re doing with the DC & Vertigo TV shows), but it’s hard to be confident when they’re presenting the launchpad movie as doubling down on the angst.
Comment on I Remember Where I was When the Challenger Blew Up
I was in elementary school, outside, so it must have been during recess, when a classmate said something like, “Did you hear what happened? The space shuttle blew up!” I don’t remember how he found out, or when I first watched the video, but I remember that moment.
Strangely, I can’t remember how I *found out* about Columbia, even though I blogged about my reaction to the news. #
I’ve been kicking myself for not taking a picture of this banner when it was still up. The best part of it showing up on George Takei’s page is that Gen Korean Bbq Torrance has been participating in the comment thread, replying to people’s jokes and pop culture references with remarks like “We strictly enforce our brain policy” and, of course, “Narf!” and “Oh My!”
Note: Originally linked to the Facebook thread. The export didn’t actually include a reference to the photo itself, and it didn’t show up in a search (*cough* walled garden *cough*), but I did find the corresponding Tumblr post.
I’ve always thought that Progressive JPEGs should be used more often than they are. In my experience they usually end up being a tiny bit smaller than standard (though not enough to matter on today’s Internet), plus it really does seem like showing a low-res image that resolves into a sharper one would be more useful than slowly watching the image fill in from one edge. Well, it turns out that people really dislike those initially-blurry images. First impressions are important, and even when the sharpening is fast, it makes the viewer’s brain work harder to process the image because it has to do it twice.
Progressive image rendering: Good or evil? – Web Performance Today
Which offers a better user experience: baseline or progressive images? New neuroscientific research from Radware has the answer.
https://www.vox.com/2014/8/1/5954701/neil-degrasse-tyson-gmos-dangerous-safe
Interesting comparison: left-wing distrust of GMOs as a technology (rather than as an excuse for predatory business practices) and right-wing denial of climate change are both cases in which people reject the scientific consensus in favor of a political one…but while the right wing embraces this rejection to the point that it’s practically required for a Republican politician to deny climate change in order to get elected, the left wing establishment is less willing to throw science under the bus. “Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait has often made similar comparisons between climate change denial as a mainstream part of the Republican platform and the antivaccination movement as a fringe part of the left wing.
I hate that Mac/PC email interaction still manages to transform curly apostrophes and quotation marks into superscript numbers. Shouldn’t this be a solved problem by now?
