spider who couldn’t hide

https://youtu.be/rLw-9dpHtcU

Officer Involved

Radio station KPCC has put together an impressive expose of the Los Angeles Police Department. Apparently, if you want to kill unarmed, non-violent people without fear of prosecution, the LAPD has a career option for you!

Maybe that’s why police officers are far more likely to abuse their children and partners than the rest of us – because we’re attracting and selecting the worst possible people to serve as peacekeepers? Or is it even worse than that; does police culture actually create monsters from people who honestly wanted to do good?

“The infliction of physical punishment is not every man’s job, and naturally we were only too glad to recruit men who were prepared to show no squeamishness at their task. Unfortunately, we knew nothing about the Freudian side of the business, and it was only after a number of instances of unnecessary flogging and meaningless cruelty that I tumbled to the fact that my organization had been attracting all the sadists in Germany and Austria without my knowledge for some time past. It had also been attracting unconscious sadists, i.e. men who did not know themselves that they had sadist leanings until they took part in a flogging. And finally it had actually been creating sadists. For it seems that corporal chastisement ultimately arouses sadistic leanings in apparently normal men and women. Freud might explain it.” — Rudolf Diels, as quoted in Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts”.

You can do science just as badly as you can do religion

I can’t read the Science Based Medicine website, despite my complete agreement with many of its conclusions, without getting annoyed by the priestly attitude of its authors.

They make broad generalizations that could often be equally well applied to the mainstream physicians the site claims are qualitatively superior. For example, from Scott Gavura, Naturopaths offer an array of disparate health practices like homeopathy, acupuncture and herbalism that are linked by the (now discarded) belief in vitalism – the idea we have a “life force”. I’ve certainly never had any difficulty finding doctors who believe in “life forces” and “souls” and such – the churches are full of ’em, seriously. And I’ve heard at least one physician recommend acupuncture, because it had worked on other patients of his.

SBM’s authors also often seem to promote a Medieval doctrine of contagion when they talk about alternative medicine – if any person who claims to be an herbalist or chiropractor does something wrong, this proves that all herbalists and chiropractors are equally wrong. Such a doctrine, if applied equally harshly to mainstream medicine, would make SBM’s own doctors somehow guilty for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. I can’t abide that kind of sloppy thinking.

I wish I could choose less preachy, more convincing allies. It’s good that SBM names and exposes actual quacks, and homeopathic superdilution remedies truly are outmoded nonsense… but I keep finding myself wondering if perhaps Medieval witch-hunters burned some folks who actually deserved it, occasionally.

mood tiles

Remember mood rings? Check out thermochromic tiles.

A beautiful proof of theory

Science fairs weren’t this elegant when I was a wee lad. Thanks to Jason Kottke for the link.

mimic –me-harder

I don’t have to use mimic on my cow-orkers because they insert invisible characters into their code all by themselves. And then they tell me that “the system is broken” when their code does not compile…

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

Humans as explicit elements of a machine; note the electrical connections to the participants forearms.
https://youtu.be/Fn9pvYGQAzs

Sextants are back

The Navy suddenly noticed that GPS systems are fragile.

ISP hacked, blog savaged

Our ISP, iPower.com, was hacked and an amateurish attempt was made to plant various forms of malware on this site. Fortunately for my non-existent readers, the hackers weren’t particularly competent. Unfortunately for me, the same might be said of my ISP…

User registrations are disabled, for the nonce, which again will be a trial for my non-existent audience.

Sam’s tasty art

These hop over to these guys generic viagra tab coupons are free with no expiry and can be downloaded after online verification is confirmed. Use temporary email addresses Smart services are available, such as 10 minute mail; which is a service provided by why not try here generic viagra different medical care organizations such as hospitals, community pharmacies, home health agencies, hospices, and specialized infusion companies where patients in need of special assistance are given care in a non-inpatient- setting. So if you brand cialis australia want to have the best sex ever. This therapy is needed by those people who need these medications save a lot of money and also 100mg tablets of viagra time which you need to travel to a local drug store. height=”250″ class=”size-medium wp-image-2595″ /> Sam Nielson is awesome. Visit his site.

Programming time

Never program time. Call the system instead, and let the sysadmins do their job. The GNU ‘date’ program is excellent, and a good sysadmin will maintain it rigorously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

Foswiki dependency hell

I really wanted to run Foswiki, because it seems like most of the TWiki devs ended up there, and because my employers want to run an enterprise wiki with fine-grained access and revision control driven from a corporate directory. Since Foswiki is written in perl, and Graham Barr’s excellent perl-LDAP modules can easily handle arbitrarily complex directory integration, I figured I’d just rip out all the code that checked users and groups against the Foswiki DB and replace it with appropriate LDAP calls, then send my mods upstream to the Foswiki devs. They seem like a good crowd, they’d probably appreciate a non-caching LDAP module.

But we’re heavily federally regulated, and we can’t run unmaintainable code. The number of unpackaged dependencies I’d need to run Foswiki on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is just unsupportable. I can’t find an audited, securely maintained package of File::Copy::Recursive, for example, anywhere. And there’s quite a few more (although some are available from EPEL).

I’d love to find a wiki engine that used real LDAP, instead of just caching copies of data retrieved by LDAP in a local database.

Bonsai kickstarter

Stephen Voss wants to make a coffee table book of bonsai.

NASA Ames

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. — William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum

The photoessay This Used to Be the Future reminded me of a childhood spent reading yellowed 1940s science fiction.

1958 General Motors Firebird III

Marx’s letter to Lincoln

Online tadalafil viagra rich in fats are far from healthy. This levitra cheap online works almost the similar way that the viagra works. viagra online is free from any side-effects or health hazards. His leg was broken, his skull was fractured, and there was purchase generic levitra take a look at the pharmacy here blood everywhere. Type III is divided into four types: IIA, IIB, IIN, IIM depending on the characteristics of india generic cialis check out for more info dysfunctional von Willebrand factor. here.

Mapping 2.4Ghz wifi

As featured on hackaday and more than a few other sites.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqqEYz38ens

Cryptic sword

British Library museum shelfmark 1858,1116.5

13th century double-edged European knightly sword, 2lb 10oz (1.2kg), 38″ (964mm) long and 6½” (165mm) across the quillons. Found in the river Witham, Lincolnshire, in July 1825, and presented to the Royal Archaeological Institute by the registrar to the Bishop of Lincoln. The blade was broken near the tip and mended “in modern times” according to the British Library website.

Said to bear an indecipherable inscription “+NDXOXCHWDRCHWDRCHDXORUN” inlaid in gold wire on one side, but to me it looks more like “+NDXOXCHWDRCHWDRCHDXORVI+”.

idiosyncratic history of Iraq

Tim Urban at waitbutwhy has published a lengthy, somewhat incomplete and occasionally foul-mouthed history of Iraq amerikabulteni.com treat impotence. buy viagra from canada The best part is that you will get the medicine effect lasting for more than 4 hours. Be aware of the main ingredients of the oil: Javitri, Samudra Phal, Ashwagandha, Sona Patha, Jawadi wholesale tadalafil Kasturi, Kapur, Jaiphal, Tulsi, Buleylu oil, Dalchini, and Nirgundi. For the high price of the medicine it was out of reach of the common people of all classes as this cheapest cialis http://amerikabulteni.com/2018/01/07/dunyanda-en-fazla-kar-yagan-10-buyuk-sehir/ like $ 15.00 per pill. “from Muhammad to ISIS”. I think it’s the shortest, most complete and evenhanded treatment I’ve seen yet.

i’m so full of empty

Tomorrow, I will continue to be. But you will have to be very attentive to see me. I will be a flower, or a leaf. I will be in these forms and I will say hello to you. If you are attentive enough, you will recognize me, and you may greet me. I will be very happy. —Thich Nhat Hanh

Girl Scouting today

Girl Scout working on her Gold Award Project

Harking back to my previous post on girl scouts of 1918…

Girl Scouting today’s still got that moxie.

morale

Morale is more often than not the difference between winners and losers.

“That’s quite clear,” murmured the O’Keefe in my ear. “Weaken the morale—then smash. I’ve seen it happen a dozen times in Europe. While they’ve got their nerve there’s not a thing you can do; get their nerve—and not a thing can they do. And yet in both cases they’re the same men.”


It seems to me that bad morale has far more effect than good… you can believe in what you’re doing and still fail, but it’s vanishingly rare for someone with low morale to succeed. To do that you have to be a certain kind of bloody-minded, unstoppable curmudgeon, as inexorable as a glacier, which isn’t nearly as easy or as much fun as being a high-spirited and confident person.