Free Time

Few have been initiated into the mysteries of what lies beyond Vancouver, but there are rumours that beyond the doughnut and poutine sellers lies a vast region composed of a strange substance called the luminiferous wæter, through which, if one consults the adepts, signs the releases and pays embracing with them the risk of death and offering a sacrifice, one might be conveyed in mysterious craft summoned by the invocation KYAK. What, though, lies beyond?

Walk

Geez, I don't remember aspect-ratio issues on the original of this...

All Eyes On Jesus

A headline from K-Lo:

Two Popes, One Encyclical, All Eyes on Jesus — with His Eyes, in His Heart

Here you go.

The Acceptable Abortion

The utterly not-gay Michael Brown:

...there remains no reputable scientific evidence that children are born gay or lesbian, let alone a test (or ultrasound!) that could determine homosexuality in the womb.

The evidence for the "born gay" thesis:

And it has been demonstrated both anecdotally and clinically that there is much more sexual fluidity among women than men, meaning that a woman might move from heterosexual to homosexual and back over the course of a lifetime (or vice versa). So much for being “born lesbian.” It is with good reason, then, that lesbian author Camille Paglia famously wrote, “No one is born gay. The idea is ridiculous.”

There are few demonstrations of the sexual fluidity of women I trust more than the anecdotal demonstration, but they charge so much for such short phone calls.

Anyhow, why why why is Michael Brown concerned about prenatal boner preferences?

Would it be acceptable to abort a gay fetus? Where would liberals stand on this moral issue?

Aha. This thing Michael Brown believes will never happen is the ideal argument against abortion because...he doesn't really believe it:

“The pro-life Live Action group released [an] undercover video . . . showing a Planned Parenthood clinic worker willing to help a woman abort her baby if it's a girl.” As quoted on the video, the worker explains, “I can tell you that here at Planned Parenthood, we believe that it's not up to us to decide what is a good or a bad reason for somebody to decide to terminate a pregnancy.” Presumably, then, this same worker would have [said] “Of course, if you choose to abort your little lesbian, that would be fine as well.” Perhaps the “born gay” argument is not where gay activists really want to go?

I wonder what radical anti-gay preacher might invest in some kind of prenatal gay detection kit. Not that he'd support abortion under any circumstances of course...

Oilfail

The explosion in Quebec is still going to happen over and over again. Whatever the magic energy solution is, I hope it will not require fire.

NodeBox

NodeBox was initially a Processing rip-off, but with Python instead of Java. It was a little odd, because for some reason it did a lot less than Processing but was about as hard.

It still does less than Processing, but the new version of NodeBox is now a rip-off of VVVV, which is kind of nice, and it's cross-platform, which is nicer.

As with VVVV and Quartz Composer, you connect items together in a kind of flowchart, thus avoiding all that tedious coding.



It still can't touch Quartz Composer, and the interface is quirky, but the above plan was enough to whip up an animation like this in short order:



Crucial tutorials here and here.

Quick and dirty Thundra suggestion:



Hmm, larger file, but way prettier:

Errata

Bokashi!

An example--and perhaps the house's most unique feature--is its zero-energy heating and cooling system, which uses only dried straw and agricultural fermentation. In the summer, the straw dries up in transparent window shelves that act as "heat shield panels" by releasing cool moisture into the home as the straw dries. The straw is then composted in acrylic cases inside the house during winter and can heat the home up to 30 degrees Celsius for up to four weeks through "bokashi," a Japanese low-odor fermentation method. Additionally, the straw only needs to be changed a few times a year.

The Pope:

The pagan world, which hungered for light, had seen the growth of the cult of the sun god, Sol Invictus, invoked each day at sunrise. Yet though the sun was born anew each morning, it was clearly incapable of casting its light on all of human existence. The sun does not illumine all reality; its rays cannot penetrate to the shadow of death, the place where men’s eyes are closed to its light.

I dunno, Pope, the last bunch of dead people I saw were not directly sunlit but I saw 'em pretty good.

The whole world conspires to make a bad person:

OTTAWA — A month after Omar Khadr was transferred to an Edmonton prison for his own safety he was assaulted by a fellow inmate.

The former Guantanamo Bay detainee was attacked at Edmonton Institution just after 8 p.m. on June 14.

[...]

The Toronto-born Khadr, 26, was transferred to Canada last September to serve out the remainder of an eight-year sentence handed down by U.S. military commission for war crimes he pleaded guilty to committing as a 15-year-old in Afghanistan.

This guy may not wish death on all of us, but why shouldn't he?

Today in Conclusions That Conveniently Conform to My Preconceptions:

Trying to find out how the autistic brain is “different” can be like studying a spinning coin: one side says its circuits are over-connected; the other, under-connected.

How can the autistic brain do extraordinary things, like retain a photographic memory of city streets, yet fail to recall a face? Store a large vocabulary, yet fall flat in social conversation?

New evidence from a Stanford University study published online Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry freezes the coin on the hyper-connection side, at least for a time. It suggests that children with autism have higher connectivity in certain large-scale circuits, including one that helps determine the relative importance of stimuli, and another that mediates between the “inside” and “outside” world of the mind.

Totally ripping this post off:





Another obvious thing I did not know demands regulation:

Celebrities who brazenly plug freebie products on Twitter have been warned to use the hashtag “ad” to avoid falling foul of the law.

A tweeted endorsement by a celebrity to their army of followers is now seen as the most effective form of direct advertising for many youth-focused brands.

Sponsored tweets don’t come cheap - socialite Kim Kardashian earns up to £6,300 for every message she posts on her account.

The director of the Urbana Free Library thinks books that are more than ten years old are embarrassing to read. Hard-to-read FOIA documents here, in which workers tell the story of Brand New Technology - spiffy RFID checkout system! - making some bossy nitwit called Deb Lissak go crazy. Tinfoil would protect against RFID radiation.

Important Breaking News from The Hill!

Stop the not-presses!

US President Barack Obama, in a speech delivered to a special meeting of the UN General Assembly, is calling Lady Gaga’s rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner — in which she swapped the lyrics “home of the brave” for “home for the gays” — “reprehensible.”

Shocking and momentous!

Hang on a sec, we may have misread...oh yeah, it wasn't anyone important saying anything important to anyone else important anywhere important, it was no-longer-a-congressman Allen West writing a Facebook post, which is something like what that guy in accounts payable who gets red-faced does. Except that guy in accounts payable has a useful day job.

In a Monday Facebook post, West wrote, “Having served in the US Army for 22 years alongside some very brave men and women, I find Lady Gaga's defiling of our National Anthem reprehensible.”

West has apparently been hired by Fox News, so no wonder Facebook has given him a rare spot on its editorial page, the prestige of which outstrips even the mighty— oh forget it.

Correction

Let My People Go to Jail

Wingnut welfare bum Thomas Sowell:

When teenage thugs are called "troubled youth" by people on the political left, that tells us more about the mindset of the left than about these young hoodlums.

Seldom is there a speck of evidence that the thugs are troubled, and often there is ample evidence that they are in fact enjoying themselves, as they create trouble and dangers for others.

Why then the built-in excuse, when juvenile hoodlums are called "troubled youth" and mass murderers are just assumed to be "insane"?

At least as far back as the 18th century, the left has struggled to avoid facing the plain fact of evil -- that some people simply choose to do things that they know to be wrong when they do them. Every kind of excuse, from poverty to an unhappy childhood, is used by the left to explain and excuse evil.

One such excuse is the lure of money. It leads people to do and say the strangest things.

All the people who have come out of poverty or unhappy childhoods, or both, and become decent and productive human beings, are ignored. So are the evils committed by people raised in wealth and privilege, including kings, conquerors and slaveowners.

I am stumped! Has anyone on the left written an appreciation of anyone who came from humble circumstances? Or referred to a king or conqueror or slave-owner as evil? No?

It seems to me that there is an opportunity here to put forth some kind of innovative political program.

Prior-to-Melting Linkage

Kanye West:

You want the historical record to be right.

Yeah, I don’t want them to rewrite history right in front of us. At least, not on my clock. I really appreciate the moments that I was able to win rap album of the year or whatever. But after a while, it’s like: “Wait a second; this isn’t fair. This is a setup.” I remember when both Gnarls Barkley and Justin [Timberlake] lost for Album of the Year, and I looked at Justin, and I was like: “Do you want me to go onstage for you? You know, do you want me to fight” —

For you.

For what’s right. I am so credible and so influential and so relevant that I will change things. So when the next little girl that wants to be, you know, a musician and give up her anonymity and her voice to express her talent and bring something special to the world, and it’s time for us to roll out and say, “Did this person have the biggest thing of the year?” — that thing is more fair because I was there.

But has that instinct led you astray? Like the Taylor Swift interruption at the MTV Video Music Awards, things like that.

It’s only led me to complete awesomeness at all times. It’s only led me to awesome truth and awesomeness. Beauty, truth, awesomeness. That’s all it is.

MooseStache:Someone is attempting to turn news into a flow of information chunks rather than articles:

The news business creates a pile of new content every day and then, effectively, throws it away and starts again. How does structuring news help you to you reuse content?

I call it news amnesia. If you do articles, you have to do this since you need something new today. I think it's as frustrating for journalists as it is for the readers. What we do is say “Here's the latest fact and the story it belongs in”. Maybe it belongs in two stories. We will then point these stories to each other. Nelson Mandela has been in hospital maybe five times in the last year. We have a story tracking this and people are following it and eventually when he dies we will update it. People do that already with pre-written obits but that's the exception. For a lot of other stories like legislation – say gay marriage in France – we were tracking it until it finally went through and then all we had to do was say “passed”. All the background, we already have that.

I hate Facebook, but Facebook is also an accumulation of cool data:

A photo doesn't have to be posted by a very popular page in order to trigger a large cascade. On January 17, 2013, a young Norwegian man by the name of Petter Kverneng posted a photo following the format of other "Million Likes" memes (MLM). The essence of this meme is that someone claims that they will have some sought after request granted (usually receiving a pet puppy or kitten) if their photo is liked one million times. In Mr. Kverneng's photo he is shown holding up a sign saying that his friend would have sex with him if the photo gets 1 million likes. The intent was not serious, as Mr. Kverneng later told ABC News: “it started as a joke, and it ended as a joke. Me and Catherine are just friends.” Nevertheless, the photo received a million likes in less than a day, producing a cascade of reshares, a subset of which is visualized below.