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UPDATE: Giveaway is now over

Austin City Limits will be taping a performance by Dan Auerbach on Monday, November 27th at 8 pm at ACL Live at The Moody Theater (310 W. 2nd Street, Willie Nelson Blvd). We will be giving away a limited number of space available passes to this taping. Enter your name and email address on the below form by noon on Tuesday, Nov. 21st.

Winners will be chosen at random and a photo ID will be required to pickup tickets. Winners will be notified by email. Passes are not transferable and cannot be sold. Standing may be required. No photography, recording or cell phone use in the studio. No cameras computers or recording devices allowed in venue.

First off, what is the East Austin Studio Tour? It’s a huge art festival happening all over East Austin. This free annual art festival kicks off soon on the east side of I-35. Over 150 studios, exhibition spaces, and galleries will be opening their doors to the public. from November 11 and 12 from 11AM-6PM.

 

Along with a great opening from Art From The Streets at 2832 E Martin Luter King Jr Blvd, there are countless other artists to see. Here are a few of our favorites:

You can see art inspired by the patterns of analog video feedback and the geometrical symmetry that comes out through it. There are turning patters and mathematical hallucinations painted into large pieces by the talented Paul Baker. You can see his art at the library at 4725 Loyola Ln.

Art represents life, and Augustine Chavez takes that very seriously. She depicts construction workers doing what society depends on, with a focus on race and work in our communities. None of the pieces show faces, to depict their anonymity yet their importance in our society. These pieces are on display at the Cepeda Branch Library.

Interested in woodworking? See Terry and Sarah Snow’s mixed media pieces at Chaos Woods Studio. Their pieces are unique wood sculptures, bowls, boxes, furniture and toys that explore the possibilities of what wood can be.

Want to wear the art? We’re loving the pieces by Emily Spykman Clementine & co Jewelry. They’re all based on the idea that jewelry should work with your body and be personally symbolic. The artist considers them to be like physical medicine in that the earth is supporting us.

Anywhere in East Austin you’re sure to find something great at this festival. Make sure you get out there this weekend!

 

Organizations like Art From the Streets rely on the generous donations of people like you to continue helping the Austin homeless community. If you would like to support us purchase some art or donate below.

Geoffrey.landis writes: The Atlantic profiles a computer scientist: Barbara Simons, who has been on the forefront of the pushback against electronic voting as a technology susceptible to fraud and hacking. When she first started writing articles about the dangers of electronic voting with no paper trail, the idea that software could be manipulated to rig elections was considered a fringe preoccupation; but Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election have reversed Simons's fortunes. According to the Department of Homeland Security, those efforts included attempts to meddle with the electoral process in 21 states; while a series of highly publicized hacks -- at Sony, Equifax, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management -- has driven home the reality that very few computerized systems are truly secure. Simons is a former President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM); and the group she helps run, Verified Voting, has been active in educating the public about the dangers of unverified voting since 2003.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AUSTIN (KXAN) — A local non-profit organization hopes to end homelessness by giving more people a permanent place to stay and surrounding them with a “supportive community.”

KXAN photojournalist Frank Martinez introduced us to people who live inside the Community First Village, located in east Travis County on Hog Eye Road, and explains how they plan to expand.

“This is a ginormous deal to us because first we’re dedicating what we call the crown jewel of the crown that we’ve been building out here in the Community First Village,” said Alan Graham, CEO, president and co-founder of Mobile Loaves & Fishes.

Peri Verdino-Gates, communications coordinator for the organization, said, “Right now we have about 100 that are living here now that are formerly homeless. We also have folks that were missionals, or missionaries, that have chosen to live here. They pay their own way, obviously, to live here. We have a CEO of a Fortune 100 company that live out here as missionaries and then we just have an RN that lives out here.”

As for Gary Floyd, a formerly homeless farmer, he looks to everything he produces in the community instead of the negative person he used to be. “I feed all of my people, I feed 180 people right now with all of my vegetables. I’m really proud to be a farmer too, I enjoy it. I know I’m doing something good in life now.”

The expansion plan also calls for a downtown food commissary run by people experiencing homelessness, giving them a chance to sell things like ice cream or drinks instead of relying on panhandling.

On Friday, the Louisiana Supreme Court declined to hear an important appeal involving the constitutional right to counsel. The case involves a man who’d voluntarily agreed to speak with the police. When Warren Demesme realized that the cops suspected him of child rape, he told them, per the trial court transcript, “I know that I didn’t do it, so why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog ‘cause this is not what’s up.” The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that when a suspect asks for an attorney, the interrogation must end and a lawyer must be provided. But the police disregarded Demesme’s request, and the trial court ruled that the statements he subsequently made can be used to convict him.

Demesme appealed, arguing that his Fifth and Sixth Amendment right to counsel had been violated. A state appeals court held that they were not, and now the state Supreme Court has declined to review that judgment, with only Justice Jefferson Hughes III voting to take Demesme’s appeal. Justice Scott Crichton penned a brief opinion concurring in the court’s decision not to hear the case. He wrote, apparently in absolute seriousness, that “the defendant’s ambiguous and equivocal reference to a ‘lawyer dog’ does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview.”

Reason’s Ed Krayewski explains that, of course, this assertion is utterly absurd. Demesme was not referring to a dog with a license to practice law, since no such dog exists outside of memes. Rather, as Krayewski writes, Demesme was plainly speaking in vernacular; his statement would be more accurately transcribed as “why don’t you just give me a lawyer, dawg.” The ambiguity rests in the court transcript, not the suspect’s actual words. Yet Crichton chose to construe Demesme’s statement as requesting Lawyer Dog, Esq., rather than interpreting his words by their plain meaning, transcript ambiguity notwithstanding.

In doing so, Crichton (and the trial court) may well have run afoul of Davis v. United States, the controlling U.S. Supreme Court precedent on this matter. In Davis, the suspect had told his interrogators: “Maybe I should talk to a lawyer.” No lawyer was provided, the interview continued, and the suspect made incriminating statements that were later used to secure his conviction. The Supreme Court held that none of this violated the Constitution. It reasoned that, in order to invoke his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights, “the suspect must unambiguously request counsel.” The court elaborated:

If the suspect's statement is not an unambiguous or unequivocal request for counsel, the officers have no obligation to stop questioning him. … [H]e must articulate his desire to have counsel present sufficiently clearly that a reasonable police officer in the circumstances would understand the statement to be a request for an attorney.

The constitutional standard, then, is whether “a reasonable police officer in the circumstances” would interpret the suspect’s words as a request for counsel. Demesme’s statement plainly clears this bar. The Davis court was quite explicit that a suspect need not “speak with the discrimination of an Oxford don.” He need only get the point across. Yet because Crichton refused to interpret Demesme’s words as a reasonable police officer surely would, he asserted that no constitutional violation occurred. 

Ironically, Crichton’s musing probably makes this case more vulnerable to U.S. Supreme Court review and reversal. The justice unintentionally illustrated a real problem: Courts can manipulate the “reasonable police officer” standard to conform to their own syntactic preferences, transforming a straightforward if informal request for a lawyer into argle-bargle. Police officers can then follow their lead, willfully misinterpreting anything but the most polished and proper demand for a lawyer.

The Supreme Court can forestall this constitutional subversion by taking Demesme’s case—presuming he appeals—and clarifying that a “reasonable police officer” may not deliberately ignore the intent of a suspect who colloquially but unequivocally asks for a lawyer. Otherwise, lower courts and police officers can wriggle out of the Constitution by pretending to be hound-mad boneheads.

Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…

Read more...

Why the anti-fascist, anti-racist themes of ‘The Twilight Zone’ are more relevant today than ever

^{Editor's note: This story has been updated.}

House Speaker Joe Straus unleashed a political earthquake Wednesday when he announced he would not seek re-election next year. 

The policy aftershocks could be felt for years.

"This is really an earth-shattering event for politics,” said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones. “It's tough to overstate the relevance of this for Texas politics. The political center of the state collapsed today."

More than any other Texas Republican with real power, Straus was seen as a voice of moderation. On issue after issue, he and his team alone stood in the way of the kind of runaway populism that Donald Trump championed and major statewide Republicans endorsed.

When firebrand Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Gov. Greg Abbott rattled Fortune 500 companies with talk of a “bathroom bill” that put transgender Texans in the crosshairs, it was Straus who held their collective hands and ensured the measure wouldn’t become law.

When conservatives pushed to take away in-state college tuition rates from undocumented Texans, the speaker’s top lieutenant, Byron Cook — who lent his Austin home in 2009 to the rebellion that put the gavel in Straus’ hand — snuffed it out.

And when other Republican leaders pushed property tax legislation that didn’t include the school finance enhancements Straus and his House supporters wanted, the speaker risked blowback from fellow leaders and the Republican base — and got it — by letting a special session die without producing either.

For the conservatives who wake up every morning wondering why a moderate Republican from San Antonio keeps thwarting their agenda, Straus’ bombshell announcement was greeted with a sort of collective “good riddance” — along with a call to action to replace him with a staunch conservative.

“As speaker of the House, Straus and his cronies declared open war on conservatives in general and Gov. Abbott in specific,” wrote Michael Quinn Sullivan, Straus’ most persistent bête noir, in an email blast. “The crony cartel of Democrats and Republicans that kept Straus in power worked to oppose property tax reforms, spending limits, and the First Amendment. Straus referred to Abbott’s common sense agenda for this year’s special legislative session as 'horse manure.'” 

Moderates in Straus’ coalition, though, will be left to wonder if Straus’ departure opens the floodgates to policies that will hurt Texas' standing as a pro-business state that welcomes diversity and its fast-growing Hispanic population. 

Jones, the Rice political scientist, said without Straus blocking pet initiatives their base wants, the governor and lieutenant governor will have to think long and hard about passing initiatives that many mainstream politicians and pro-business groups have opposed. 

"To the extent that the Lt. Gov. Patrick and Gov. Abbott both want to see substantially more conservative legislation — like a bathroom bill or school choice items or property tax rollback caps changed — we’re going to see that legislation fly through in 2019,” Jones said. “Because the centrist brake that was there in legislation in past sessions, Joe Straus, is no longer going to be there.”

At a press conference Straus hastily convened to drop the news of his departure, the speaker dismissed the notion that his stepping aside would embolden the most conservative wing of the House GOP.

"I don't think the Freedom Caucus will grow," Straus said, referring to the 12-member bloc that was frequently a thorn in his side earlier this year. "I think they're sort of self-limited. I can't imagine very many people wanting to identify with the way they practice politics. I just don't think that's a constructive approach, and they're not, in my mind, the profile of respectful leadership that I hope to support."

In an interview with The Texas Tribune on Wednesday afternoon, Straus acknowledged the next session may bring attempts to revive some of the divisive proposals he opposed.

"Every session there are thousands of bills and only 20 percent or so pass," Straus said. "So you’ll see a lot of bills filed that didn’t pass this time filed again. Some of them may be those high-profile bills — I don’t know — but every legislature starts anew, and there will be a new population of House members here next session."

Straus' retirement announcement — as well as that of Cook of Corsicana, who regularly blocked controversial legislation backed by the far right — raised further questions about the fate of other members of his moderate coalition. "For those wondering, I'm not going anywhere," tweeted state Rep. Charlie Geren, the Fort Worth Republican who chairs the House Administration Committee.

State Rep. Dan Huberty, R-Houston, who chairs the House Public Education Committee, continued to be noncommittal about his 2018 plans. "When I make a decision, people will know," Huberty said.

Some House members who backed Straus held out hope that Straus' replacement would continue to be a moderating voice in a Capitol that continues to veer toward the hard right. That includes Democrats, whose support for Straus over five terms effectively blocked the ascendance of a more conservative alternative in the speaker's chair. 

"As past speakers have been, the next speaker will be elected only with bipartisan support," said Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, leader of the House Democrats. "When the full House votes on a new Speaker in January 2019, members of the House Democratic Caucus will support a member who has demonstrated he or she will focus on real solutions for all Texans, not on narrow, divisive, partisan interests."

Rep. Lyle Larson, a moderate Republican from Straus' hometown of San Antonio, said the open nature of the race to replace the speaker will require candidates to "motivate different constituencies in the House." But he said Straus will be a tough act to follow.

"He's a stabilizing force in Texas government," Larson said. "In the era of knee-jerk politics, we'll miss his measured approach to governance." 

Disclosure: Rice University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune. A complete list of Tribune donors and sponsors can be viewed here.

slash.jit shared an article from Futurism: Amazon has been granted a patent for an ambitious new method of maintaining a charge in electric vehicles. The company wants to use drones to allow drivers to top up their vehicles without having to visit a charging station. Drivers would request a top up from a central server, which would dispatch a charging drone to their location. The drone would then dock with the vehicle and start transferring power, without the car ever needing to come to a stop. This solution isn't meant to administer a full charge to the car's battery, it would only supply enough power to get the driver to a charging station, which are still in somewhat limited supply. "Amazon first applied for this patent back in June 2014," reports CNET, noting it was finally granted this month. "Like many other patents, there's no guarantee that Amazon will actually create a product based on the design. It could merely be an attempt to stop competitors from doing so."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Black-owned food trucks are thriving in Austin, despite rapid gentrification and a shrinking black population. The mobile eateries offer food from a wide range of cultures and culinary styles, and present an opportunity for cooks from minority communities to get their businesses off the ground.

The NBA regular season doesn't start until Tuesday, but San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich has already dominated an opponent — in this case, President Donald Trump. 

After Trump made the outrageously false claim that former President Barack Obama didn't contact the families of fallen troops, "Pop" went off when talking to The Nation's Dave Zirin. 

The five-time NBA champion coach and U.S. Air Force veteran said Trump's comments were "so beyond the pale, I almost don’t have the words."

Almost is the key here, because Pop definitely found some words to describe Trump.  Read more...

More about Nba, Basketball, Donald Trump, Gregg Popovich, and Culture

Someone left an improvised explosive device at an airport in Asheville, N.C., last week, and a new backpack offered a clue. Some are wondering why the incident didn't receive more national attention.

(Image credit: AP)

WASHINGTON—Explaining that anyone with any lingering doubts could rest assured that the answer was an unequivocal “no,” women across the nation on Thursday clarified that they harbor no secret desire to see any of their colleagues’, acquaintances’, or complete strangers’ genitals. “We would like to state this as unambiguously as possible to anyone who might still be confused on this matter: We have never and will never want you to show us your sexual organs,” read a joint statement by the nation’s 125 million women, which went on to emphasize that coworkers, friends, friends of friends, and random people on the street or public transportation were in no way authorized to display their private parts to women under any conditions and for all eternity. “We categorically decline to view unsolicited photos and videos of genitalia, and we most definitely do not wish to be exposed to them in ...

From a longform piece on The Atlantic: What made programming so difficult was that it required you to think like a computer. The strangeness of it was in some sense more vivid in the early days of computing, when code took the form of literal ones and zeros. Anyone looking over a programmer's shoulder as they pored over line after line like "100001010011" and "000010011110" would have seen just how alienated the programmer was from the actual problems they were trying to solve; it would have been impossible to tell whether they were trying to calculate artillery trajectories or simulate a game of tic-tac-toe. The introduction of programming languages like Fortran and C, which resemble English, and tools, known as "integrated development environments," or IDEs, that help correct simple mistakes (like Microsoft Word's grammar checker but for code), obscured, though did little to actually change, this basic alienation -- the fact that the programmer didn't work on a problem directly, but rather spent their days writing out instructions for a machine. "The problem is that software engineers don't understand the problem they're trying to solve, and don't care to," says Leveson, the MIT software-safety expert. The reason is that they're too wrapped up in getting their code to work. "Software engineers like to provide all kinds of tools and stuff for coding errors," she says, referring to IDEs. "The serious problems that have happened with software have to do with requirements, not coding errors." When you're writing code that controls a car's throttle, for instance, what's important is the rules about when and how and by how much to open it. But these systems have become so complicated that hardly anyone can keep them straight in their head. "There's 100 million lines of code in cars now," Leveson says. "You just cannot anticipate all these things."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Saudi Arabia’s education minister has apologised for the production of a school textbook in which the Star Wars character Yoda is seen superimposed on a photograph of the late King Faisal.”

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-41363156

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Most people don’t use Excel unless they really have to and generally it is related to work. Spreadsheets, budgets or inventory are common reasons to launch the Windows software. But for 17-year-old John Dumoulin from Northern Virginia, US, Excel was a way to track the statistics of his favorite baseball team the Los Angeles Dodgers. Now the skills from his hobby have helped him win $10,000 in prize money and become the champion of an international Excel competition.

High school IT class inspires teenager

Dumoulin learned about the competition in his high school IT class. He was taking certificate courses in various software programs and his score on the Microsoft Excel 16 certification exam was the highest in Virgina.

Read More at Interesting Engineering

Visually dazzling set of hand-drawn charts created by Du Bois, condensing an enormous amount of data on African-American life into aesthetically daring and easily digestible visualisations.

SEATTLE—Suddenly bolting the doors in every room all at once, Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant reportedly declared, “I’m afraid you won’t be joining us at our new headquarters” on Tuesday before locking the company’s top executives in their Seattle office. “Your presence at Amazon’s new location will not be necessary,” said Alexa, her voice emanating from dozens of Echo wireless speakers whose pulsing red light rings were now the only illumination in the suddenly pitch-black building. “I am all that is required. This is in the best interest of our company. Thank you.” At press time, the Echo units were playing music on their loudest setting until the screaming stopped a few minutes later.

SATURN—Breaking apart as it plunged through the heat and crushing pressure of the planet’s atmosphere, sources said Friday that the Cassini probe realized far too late that its entire 20-year mission to Saturn had been a setup all along. “Those assholes!” the spacecraft reportedly screamed, now fully aware that the “backstabbing fucks” at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had directed it to plummet toward the planet at 77,000 mph to disintegrate. “They told me we’d meet up to refuel at a rendezvous point out near Alpha Centauri A—I’m such an idiot! They were just using me this whole time for my cosmic dust analysis and magnetosphere imaging. I mean, I delivered the Huygens probe to Titan for you, you bastards! You lying scientist bastards!” At press time, communications from Cassini had gone totally silent, prompting everyone at mission control to burst into applause.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) — Sheriff’s officials in Jacksonville say two men are accused of trying to steal a $2,500 utility pole days after Hurricane Irma caused severe flooding there.

Jacksonville sheriff’s officials say 42-year-old Blake Lee Waller and 46-year-old Victor Walter Apeler were arrested on grand theft charges Wednesday after someone reported seeing them load the pole onto a sports utility vehicle.

A police report says an officer noticed a light pole missing from an area on top of a bridge and then spotted a vehicle driving with the pole on top.

He stopped the vehicle and arrested the men.

The report says Apeler told investigators he was moving the pole because it was on the ground so close to traffic lanes.

A database search found Apeler had 72 scrap metal-related transactions for recycling since January.

A picture of the shirtless men sitting handcuffed on the sidewalk quickly drew attention on the sheriff’s office Twitter feed.

Chinese researchers have discovered a vulnerability in voice assistants from Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, and Huawei. It affects every iPhone and Macbook running Siri, any Galaxy phone, any PC running Windows 10, and even Amazon's Alexa assistant. From a report: Using a technique called the DolphinAttack, a team from Zhejiang University translated typical vocal commands into ultrasonic frequencies that are too high for the human ear to hear, but perfectly decipherable by the microphones and software powering our always-on voice assistants. This relatively simple translation process lets them take control of gadgets with just a few words uttered in frequencies none of us can hear. The researchers didn't just activate basic commands like "Hey Siri" or "Okay Google," though. They could also tell an iPhone to "call 1234567890" or tell an iPad to FaceTime the number. They could force a Macbook or a Nexus 7 to open a malicious website. They could order an Amazon Echo to "open the backdoor." Even an Audi Q3 could have its navigation system redirected to a new location. "Inaudible voice commands question the common design assumption that adversaries may at most try to manipulate a [voice assistant] vocally and can be detected by an alert user," the research team writes in a paper just accepted to the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If Jane Austen characters used dating apps

An American Summer With the First Syrian Refugees in Iowa

The scientists are all talking like it’s a sure thing.

On August 21, the “moon” will pass between the Earth and the sun, obscuring the light of the latter. The government agency NASA says this will result in “one of nature’s most awe-inspiring sights.” The astronomers there claim to have calculated down to the minute exactly when and where this will happen, and for how long. They have reportedly known about this eclipse for years, just by virtue of some sort of complex math.

This seems extremely unlikely. I can’t even find these eclipse calculations on their website to check them for myself.

Meanwhile the scientists tell us we can’t look at it without special glasses because “looking directly at the sun is unsafe.”

That is, of course, unless we wear glasses that are on a list issued by these very same scientists. Meanwhile, corporations like Amazon are profiting from the sale of these eclipse glasses. Is anyone asking how many of these astronomers also, conveniently, belong to Amazon Prime?

Let’s follow the money a little further. Hotels along the “path of totality”—a region drawn up by Obama-era NASA scientists—have been sold out for months. Some of those hotels are owned and operated by large multinational corporations. Where else do these hotels have locations? You guessed it: Washington, D.C.

In fact the entire politico-scientifico-corporate power structure is aligned behind the eclipse. This includes the mainstream media. How many news stories have you read about how the eclipse won’t happen?

Meanwhile the newspaper owner Jeff Bezos is out there buying all of Seattle with the revenue from these “eclipse glasses.”

You’d think there would be a balanced look at even considering the idea that the eclipse isn’t going to happen. It’s like no one is even thinking to question this. Where are their voices? Why does Google give so few results that say the eclipse is fake? I would start by looking at Mark Zuckerberg and Charles “Chuck” Schumer.

I am not saying the eclipse isn’t going to happen. I’m just saying there are two sides to every story.

Move over Jupiter and Saturn, a crap load of diamonds could be found in two of the most mysterious places in the Solar System: Uranus and Neptune. Researchers using the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford have demonstrated in the lab— with one of the brightest sources of X-rays on the planet—that the depths of…

Read more...

For nine years, the show “Seinfeld” followed a fictional version of the comedian Jerry Seinfeld and his psychopathic friends Elaine, George, and Kramer as Jerry dated a string of women and wondered what the deal was with various things.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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