People behaving badly
Did nothing but read once I got home last night. Until 1am. Well, I popped a bitsy pizza into the toaster oven when I first got home, and around eleven or midnightish I got the bunnies tucked away for the night and started getting ready for bed. But still, I was up till 1am and I got no knitting accomplished, aside from a few rows onto a sock at Grandma's. So much for being highly motivated to knit lace right now. (On the plus side, since so few of the shows I watch are airing new episodes right now, there's not much stacking up on the DVR but The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Which was a major factor in my decision not to start watching something last night -- I didn't think there'd be much to watch, unless I pulled up some movie I'd recorded a couple of months ago or maybe grabbed a Netflix disk. And I didn't feel like getting into two hours of something past 8pm at night.)
In happier news, we seem to be coming to the end of the July flood of accounts. We have stacks upon stacks of policies to print out, but I just finished inputting the massive account that's been taking up my last few days and grabbed what appears to be the last account waiting to be input. I think I can give myself another three-day weekend next month -- I should pick a good day and put that request in...
A couple of links picked up from Facebook:
Snake oil or cure all? -- being a graphic representation of a lot of dietary supplements, with bubble size indicating popularity and the Y-axis indicating the level of actual scientific evidence favoring the substance. Folic acid, green tea, vitamin D and probiotics have the strongest evidence. Note the scattering of golden bubbles specifically marked as having low evidence but promising results and hence being worth keeping an eye on.
Texas ag losses could set new record amid drought -- "The drought has spread over much of the southern U.S., leaving Oklahoma the driest it has been since the 1930s and setting records from Louisiana to New Mexico. But the situation is especially severe in Texas, which trails only California in agricultural productivity."
Links from my Yahoo! page:
Dark winters 'led to bigger human brains and eyeballs' -- "Humans living at high latitude have bigger eyes and bigger brains to cope with poor light during long winters and cloudy days, UK scientists have said. The Oxford University team said bigger brains did not make people smarter. Larger vision processing areas fill the extra capacity, they write in the Royal Society's Biology Letters journal. The scientists measured the eye sockets and brain volumes of 55 skulls from 12 populations across the world, and plotted the results against latitude. Lead author Eiluned Pearce told BBC News: 'We found a positive relationship between absolute latitude and both eye socket size and cranial capacity.'"
Sidelinked from the above:
Connecticut mountain lion 'crossed US' before death -- "A mountain lion killed on a road in the US state of Connecticut had walked halfway across the US before it died in June, scientists have said. DNA tests showed the cat was native to the Black Hills of South Dakota, 1,800 miles (2,896km) away, scientists said. And its DNA matched that of an animal collected by chance in 2009 and 2010 in the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin. The evidence suggests the cat had made the longest-ever recorded journey of a land mammal, scientists say."
Lucas loses Star Wars copyright case at Supreme Court -- "A prop designer who made the original Stormtrooper helmets for Star Wars has won his copyright battle with director George Lucas over his right to sell replicas. The five-year saga, which ended in the highest court in the land, has stakes of galactic proportions."
Chernobyl's Przewalski's horses are poached for meat -- "A herd of Critically Endangered wild Przewalski's horses in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is under threat from poachers, say scientists. Researchers in Ukraine say that the population may be in decline because poachers have been removing the animals faster than they are breeding."
Seeing the Wood for the Trees: New Study Shows Sheep in Tree-Ring Records -- "Nibbling by herbivores can have a greater impact on the width of tree rings than climate, new research has found. The study, published this week in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology, could help increase the accuracy of the tree ring record as a way of estimating past climatic conditions. Many factors in addition to climate are known to affect the tree ring record, including attack from parasites and herbivores, but determining how important these other factors have been in the past is difficult. Working high in the mountains of southern Norway, midway between Oslo and Bergen, a team from Norway and Scotland fenced off a large area of mountainside and divided it into different sections into each of which a set density of domestic sheep was released every summer. After nine summers, cross sections of 206 birch trees were taken and tree ring widths were measured. Comparing these with local temperature and the numbers of sheep at the location where the tree was growing allowed the team to disentangle the relationship between temperature and browsing by sheep and the width of tree rings."
A Revenge Plot So Intricate, the Prosecutors Were Pawns -- "Soon after Seemona Sumasar started dating Jerry Ramrattan, she had an inkling that something might be wrong. He said he was a police detective, but never seemed to go to work. He seemed obsessed with 'C.S.I.,' 'Law & Order' and other television police dramas. About a year after he moved into her house in Queens, their relationship soured. One day, he cornered her, taped her mouth and raped her, she said. Mr. Ramrattan was arrested. But he soon took his revenge, the authorities said. Drawing on his knowledge of police procedure, gleaned from his time as an informer for law enforcement, he accomplished what prosecutors in New York called one of the most elaborate framing plots that they had ever seen."
Oh, hey, the latest ThinkGeek releases: Soylent Green Crackers and Whiskey Stone Shot Glasses are somewhat interesting, but the real winners here are the Moldable Magic Chocolate Kit -- a sort of modeling clay made out of Belgian chocolate -- and the U-Socket USB Wallplug that gives you a wall outlet with a couple of USB charging sockets next to the regular electrical ones.
Going down Twitter now, catching up on the last few days' worth of links:
Another reason why Google+'s "real names only" policy is bullshit, being a post from a user irate at how the Google+ policy denies the conventions regarding names and identity in Hong Kong by suspending accounts and demanding proof of identity for HK users with English names: "It is possible, and happens a lot, that people know such names each other but don't even know what is the name on their ID card. If this happens on only 10% of America or Europe people, I must tell you this is not any rare case in Hong Kong. I mean, this can happen to MORE THAN 90% of Hong Kong people. We are Chinese people who has been ruled by an English country, that's it. if you ask them to put all those nicknames or English first names in the separated name fields and use Pinyin names or Chinese full names instead, you are banning people from recognize that guy from what they first see, instead of 'helping people bind up by forcing them use real names'. What Google asking for are not names mainly known by others, but 'names they think that is a name that guy should have'."
Obama Inauguration Pastor Reminds Us the Poor Do Not Pay Enough Taxes -- "Evangelical megachurch pastor Rick Warren, whom you may remember as the official evangelical homophobe schlub selected to give the invocation at Obama’s inauguration, thought fit to weigh in on the debt ceiling debate. How does Jesus feel about taxes, Rick? Half of America isn’t paying taxes! Which half, the corporations? General Electric? Exxon Mobil? Citigroup? No, probably he means 'the poors,' the full half of America that doesn’t earn enough income to pay federal income taxes, but who do pay myriad other taxes for things like eating, wearing clothes and driving vehicles. Let them be, Rick Warren, they aren’t getting into heaven anyway. Jesus doesn’t love them, or they’d have millions of dollars from book sales, like Rick Warren."
Eleven comedy web shows that should be television shows -- Puddin' is the one I actually tend to watch (and the reason I ran across the link to this piece, since I follow @Puddinstrip to get the handy links when the new episodes go up). My YouTube time is limited (and my access is generally limited to what's available on mobile, since I tend to be watching on my Blackberry), but these episodes tend to run less than a minute.
Google+ and the loss of online anonymity -- "As a number of users have pointed out, Google and Facebook aren’t just focused on requiring real names because they want to improve behavior on their networks - there is also a very real interest on their part in being able to build a profile of a user for advertising and marketing purposes as well. And more than one user of Google+ has raised concerns that Google’s crackdown on pseudonyms or fake names has apparently resulted in users being blocked from using any of Google’s various services, including email, because their profile is tied to all of the company’s other products." And it linked back to another piece, Anonymity has value, in comments and elsewhere -- "The fact that someone might want to set up a blog and pretend to be a lesbian in Damascus (as Bobbie Johnson described in his recent post on the issue) is definitely somewhat disturbing - in part because it was revealed that the creator of the blog had been carrying on this facade for several years, and had taken in several knowledgeable writers on the Middle East, including Global Voices Online staffer Jillian York, who wrote about her experiences in a blog post. But as online media veteran Dan Gillmor pointed out in a piece for The Guardian on the 'Amina' affair, the fact that someone can pretend to be a gay blogger in the Middle East without being discovered also means that real lesbians and other persecuted people in Damascus or anywhere else can also post their thoughts online, and that can be a very powerful force for democracy and human rights. Should anonymity (or what is actually pseudonymity) only be allowed for those who can prove that they really are political dissidents? And if so, who would do the proving?"
On Norway (also a DW version of the post, pick whichever network is currently running better for you) -- "Forget his politics for a moment: it's his combination of cold clearheadedness and forethought that scares the willies out of me. I've mentioned before that mass shooters, thankfully, seem to very rarely pay attention to tactical considerations; they mostly like to proceed to a site that's emotionally significant to them and then roam around aimlessly shooting people, in the manner of Columbine, even though Columbine was not a successful mass shooting but a bombing that failed. Breivik threw all of that out the window. Never in the history of spree killings, to my knowledge, has there ever been anyone who planned his acts as thoroughly and carefully as Anders Breivik, and then successfully carried those acts out. If he did in fact act alone (which is quite possible; hard left and Islamist violence tends mostly to be organized by groups, but for quite some time the hard right has gone very much toward the 'lone wolf' model of violence, which is a conscious strategy designed to get around the fact that their organizations are only slightly less heavily infiltrated by law enforcement than were the anarchists in Chesterton's THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY), Breivik has the single highest body count of any lone mass shooter in history. The guy who comes in second is a South Korean police officer named Woo Bum-kon, who decided one night in 1982 that he was going to wander off post and slaughter pretty much every single villager he met. Woo killed 56 people before committing suicide; he was in a rural area, he cut the telephone lines before he started operating, and he had grenades and an eight-hour operating window. Breivik eclipsed that in a couple of hours. Here's how much thought Breivik put into planning: I will bet you anything that he read up on Woo Bum-kon. Why? Woo wore his police uniform throughout the rampage, and used it to lure his victims into a false sense of security. He'd knock on the front door, the family would let the nice officer in, and then he'd slaughter everyone in the house. Woo did this over and over again. Guess what Breivik was wearing when he shot up that Labor Party summer camp?" Oh, geeze -- reading the comments on the DW post and just ran across this thought about the intial car bomb worth highlighting: "Here is the freakiest thought I've had about the whole thing: imagine if Breivick had identified a fairly prominent Islamist sympathizer -- somebody known to the cops, known to have radical leanings, somebody who's come to the attention of police a time or two but who's always skated. Now imagine Breivick stole that guy's car."
And I just caught up on my DW friends list, which has a significant overlap with my LJ friends list but is much shorter. So at least there are that many fewer entries I'll need to catch up on when the DDoS attacks on LJ cease. And probably a few more of the people I usually read who have "placeholder" DW accounts are going to start using them for the duration of the problem, and maybe form the crosspossting habit afterwards. So there's that. (I'm going to need to remember to go back once LJ is running properly and get this week's journal entries to backdatedly crosspost. Mainly because I use LJArchive to back up my journal and comments, but I don't bother backing up my DW account as well because that would be redundant (and most of the comments land on LJ anyway), so this week's entries won't make it to the backup until they make it to LJ.)
Right, time to wind up and head home. Ideally arriving before 7pm today.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.
In happier news, we seem to be coming to the end of the July flood of accounts. We have stacks upon stacks of policies to print out, but I just finished inputting the massive account that's been taking up my last few days and grabbed what appears to be the last account waiting to be input. I think I can give myself another three-day weekend next month -- I should pick a good day and put that request in...
A couple of links picked up from Facebook:
Snake oil or cure all? -- being a graphic representation of a lot of dietary supplements, with bubble size indicating popularity and the Y-axis indicating the level of actual scientific evidence favoring the substance. Folic acid, green tea, vitamin D and probiotics have the strongest evidence. Note the scattering of golden bubbles specifically marked as having low evidence but promising results and hence being worth keeping an eye on.
Texas ag losses could set new record amid drought -- "The drought has spread over much of the southern U.S., leaving Oklahoma the driest it has been since the 1930s and setting records from Louisiana to New Mexico. But the situation is especially severe in Texas, which trails only California in agricultural productivity."
Links from my Yahoo! page:
Dark winters 'led to bigger human brains and eyeballs' -- "Humans living at high latitude have bigger eyes and bigger brains to cope with poor light during long winters and cloudy days, UK scientists have said. The Oxford University team said bigger brains did not make people smarter. Larger vision processing areas fill the extra capacity, they write in the Royal Society's Biology Letters journal. The scientists measured the eye sockets and brain volumes of 55 skulls from 12 populations across the world, and plotted the results against latitude. Lead author Eiluned Pearce told BBC News: 'We found a positive relationship between absolute latitude and both eye socket size and cranial capacity.'"
Sidelinked from the above:
Connecticut mountain lion 'crossed US' before death -- "A mountain lion killed on a road in the US state of Connecticut had walked halfway across the US before it died in June, scientists have said. DNA tests showed the cat was native to the Black Hills of South Dakota, 1,800 miles (2,896km) away, scientists said. And its DNA matched that of an animal collected by chance in 2009 and 2010 in the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin. The evidence suggests the cat had made the longest-ever recorded journey of a land mammal, scientists say."
Lucas loses Star Wars copyright case at Supreme Court -- "A prop designer who made the original Stormtrooper helmets for Star Wars has won his copyright battle with director George Lucas over his right to sell replicas. The five-year saga, which ended in the highest court in the land, has stakes of galactic proportions."
Chernobyl's Przewalski's horses are poached for meat -- "A herd of Critically Endangered wild Przewalski's horses in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is under threat from poachers, say scientists. Researchers in Ukraine say that the population may be in decline because poachers have been removing the animals faster than they are breeding."
Seeing the Wood for the Trees: New Study Shows Sheep in Tree-Ring Records -- "Nibbling by herbivores can have a greater impact on the width of tree rings than climate, new research has found. The study, published this week in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology, could help increase the accuracy of the tree ring record as a way of estimating past climatic conditions. Many factors in addition to climate are known to affect the tree ring record, including attack from parasites and herbivores, but determining how important these other factors have been in the past is difficult. Working high in the mountains of southern Norway, midway between Oslo and Bergen, a team from Norway and Scotland fenced off a large area of mountainside and divided it into different sections into each of which a set density of domestic sheep was released every summer. After nine summers, cross sections of 206 birch trees were taken and tree ring widths were measured. Comparing these with local temperature and the numbers of sheep at the location where the tree was growing allowed the team to disentangle the relationship between temperature and browsing by sheep and the width of tree rings."
A Revenge Plot So Intricate, the Prosecutors Were Pawns -- "Soon after Seemona Sumasar started dating Jerry Ramrattan, she had an inkling that something might be wrong. He said he was a police detective, but never seemed to go to work. He seemed obsessed with 'C.S.I.,' 'Law & Order' and other television police dramas. About a year after he moved into her house in Queens, their relationship soured. One day, he cornered her, taped her mouth and raped her, she said. Mr. Ramrattan was arrested. But he soon took his revenge, the authorities said. Drawing on his knowledge of police procedure, gleaned from his time as an informer for law enforcement, he accomplished what prosecutors in New York called one of the most elaborate framing plots that they had ever seen."
Oh, hey, the latest ThinkGeek releases: Soylent Green Crackers and Whiskey Stone Shot Glasses are somewhat interesting, but the real winners here are the Moldable Magic Chocolate Kit -- a sort of modeling clay made out of Belgian chocolate -- and the U-Socket USB Wallplug that gives you a wall outlet with a couple of USB charging sockets next to the regular electrical ones.
Going down Twitter now, catching up on the last few days' worth of links:
Another reason why Google+'s "real names only" policy is bullshit, being a post from a user irate at how the Google+ policy denies the conventions regarding names and identity in Hong Kong by suspending accounts and demanding proof of identity for HK users with English names: "It is possible, and happens a lot, that people know such names each other but don't even know what is the name on their ID card. If this happens on only 10% of America or Europe people, I must tell you this is not any rare case in Hong Kong. I mean, this can happen to MORE THAN 90% of Hong Kong people. We are Chinese people who has been ruled by an English country, that's it. if you ask them to put all those nicknames or English first names in the separated name fields and use Pinyin names or Chinese full names instead, you are banning people from recognize that guy from what they first see, instead of 'helping people bind up by forcing them use real names'. What Google asking for are not names mainly known by others, but 'names they think that is a name that guy should have'."
Obama Inauguration Pastor Reminds Us the Poor Do Not Pay Enough Taxes -- "Evangelical megachurch pastor Rick Warren, whom you may remember as the official evangelical homophobe schlub selected to give the invocation at Obama’s inauguration, thought fit to weigh in on the debt ceiling debate. How does Jesus feel about taxes, Rick? Half of America isn’t paying taxes! Which half, the corporations? General Electric? Exxon Mobil? Citigroup? No, probably he means 'the poors,' the full half of America that doesn’t earn enough income to pay federal income taxes, but who do pay myriad other taxes for things like eating, wearing clothes and driving vehicles. Let them be, Rick Warren, they aren’t getting into heaven anyway. Jesus doesn’t love them, or they’d have millions of dollars from book sales, like Rick Warren."
Eleven comedy web shows that should be television shows -- Puddin' is the one I actually tend to watch (and the reason I ran across the link to this piece, since I follow @Puddinstrip to get the handy links when the new episodes go up). My YouTube time is limited (and my access is generally limited to what's available on mobile, since I tend to be watching on my Blackberry), but these episodes tend to run less than a minute.
Google+ and the loss of online anonymity -- "As a number of users have pointed out, Google and Facebook aren’t just focused on requiring real names because they want to improve behavior on their networks - there is also a very real interest on their part in being able to build a profile of a user for advertising and marketing purposes as well. And more than one user of Google+ has raised concerns that Google’s crackdown on pseudonyms or fake names has apparently resulted in users being blocked from using any of Google’s various services, including email, because their profile is tied to all of the company’s other products." And it linked back to another piece, Anonymity has value, in comments and elsewhere -- "The fact that someone might want to set up a blog and pretend to be a lesbian in Damascus (as Bobbie Johnson described in his recent post on the issue) is definitely somewhat disturbing - in part because it was revealed that the creator of the blog had been carrying on this facade for several years, and had taken in several knowledgeable writers on the Middle East, including Global Voices Online staffer Jillian York, who wrote about her experiences in a blog post. But as online media veteran Dan Gillmor pointed out in a piece for The Guardian on the 'Amina' affair, the fact that someone can pretend to be a gay blogger in the Middle East without being discovered also means that real lesbians and other persecuted people in Damascus or anywhere else can also post their thoughts online, and that can be a very powerful force for democracy and human rights. Should anonymity (or what is actually pseudonymity) only be allowed for those who can prove that they really are political dissidents? And if so, who would do the proving?"
On Norway (also a DW version of the post, pick whichever network is currently running better for you) -- "Forget his politics for a moment: it's his combination of cold clearheadedness and forethought that scares the willies out of me. I've mentioned before that mass shooters, thankfully, seem to very rarely pay attention to tactical considerations; they mostly like to proceed to a site that's emotionally significant to them and then roam around aimlessly shooting people, in the manner of Columbine, even though Columbine was not a successful mass shooting but a bombing that failed. Breivik threw all of that out the window. Never in the history of spree killings, to my knowledge, has there ever been anyone who planned his acts as thoroughly and carefully as Anders Breivik, and then successfully carried those acts out. If he did in fact act alone (which is quite possible; hard left and Islamist violence tends mostly to be organized by groups, but for quite some time the hard right has gone very much toward the 'lone wolf' model of violence, which is a conscious strategy designed to get around the fact that their organizations are only slightly less heavily infiltrated by law enforcement than were the anarchists in Chesterton's THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY), Breivik has the single highest body count of any lone mass shooter in history. The guy who comes in second is a South Korean police officer named Woo Bum-kon, who decided one night in 1982 that he was going to wander off post and slaughter pretty much every single villager he met. Woo killed 56 people before committing suicide; he was in a rural area, he cut the telephone lines before he started operating, and he had grenades and an eight-hour operating window. Breivik eclipsed that in a couple of hours. Here's how much thought Breivik put into planning: I will bet you anything that he read up on Woo Bum-kon. Why? Woo wore his police uniform throughout the rampage, and used it to lure his victims into a false sense of security. He'd knock on the front door, the family would let the nice officer in, and then he'd slaughter everyone in the house. Woo did this over and over again. Guess what Breivik was wearing when he shot up that Labor Party summer camp?" Oh, geeze -- reading the comments on the DW post and just ran across this thought about the intial car bomb worth highlighting: "Here is the freakiest thought I've had about the whole thing: imagine if Breivick had identified a fairly prominent Islamist sympathizer -- somebody known to the cops, known to have radical leanings, somebody who's come to the attention of police a time or two but who's always skated. Now imagine Breivick stole that guy's car."
And I just caught up on my DW friends list, which has a significant overlap with my LJ friends list but is much shorter. So at least there are that many fewer entries I'll need to catch up on when the DDoS attacks on LJ cease. And probably a few more of the people I usually read who have "placeholder" DW accounts are going to start using them for the duration of the problem, and maybe form the crosspossting habit afterwards. So there's that. (I'm going to need to remember to go back once LJ is running properly and get this week's journal entries to backdatedly crosspost. Mainly because I use LJArchive to back up my journal and comments, but I don't bother backing up my DW account as well because that would be redundant (and most of the comments land on LJ anyway), so this week's entries won't make it to the backup until they make it to LJ.)
Right, time to wind up and head home. Ideally arriving before 7pm today.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.