Luke.stirling

In the USA, laws passed in 1976 and 1998 ensure that virtually nothing ever enters the public domain, but it's a different story in the rest of the world -- for now, at least. (more…)

I have been told that I must deal with a “misogynistic” statement expressed on Freethoughtblogs by Lux Pickel. They said, “Centering our pro-abortion rhetoric around women is inherently erasing of the existence and needs of trans individuals.“

I have two points to make here.

1. There is a gross misunderstanding about what I can do. I do not manage FtB in any sense of the word — this is a kind of anarchic collective with a group of fully autonomous blogs. I have no particular authority. In fact, I’d say I have less authority, because there’s definitely an anti-authoritarian mindset here, and the fact that so many people think that because of my traffic (which is totally irrelevant to status at FtB) I must be the boss has fostered a bit of a counter-reaction. So the last thing that would get a proposal approved is having me author it.

   This is not to say this is a good situation. The lack of central authority here has, in my opinion, been a detriment to the progress of the network. If I had to do it all over again, I would have set up a board of directors with some limited authority, and which would have included independent non-bloggers, to make essential decisions about the overall direction of the network. But we didn’t, and I am not in charge of the network. That seems very hard for a lot of people to grasp, that we might have devolved power here to the group rather than keeping it all in the hands of the founders.

2. Even if I were the Omnipotent Tyrannical Overlord of FtB, though, I wouldn’t do anything about Lux’s post. I agree with them.

   Here’s the problem. Gynecological services, including abortion, ought to be essential rights for all people who have female plumbing — ovaries, uteruses, all the tissues that developed under the influence of low levels of testosterone in the embryo. This is not synonymous with the psychological and sociological concept of “woman”. There are people who identify as men who have the capacity to get pregnant; there are people who identify as women who cannot get pregnant, and will never need an abortion. The naive expectation that the organization of some ducts in the nether region will always coordinate perfectly with the arrangement of neurons and synapses in the cranial region is mistaken. We are making a gross category error when we try to force all aspects of personhood to fit precisely into a simplistic conformist gender binary.

This can also work the other way: there are people who identify as women who will face medical issues like erectile dysfunction and prostate disease. That should be respected and treated as a matter of course, not as some weird peculiarity that is the subject of debates about what kind of doctor they should see.

And no, I’m not really interested in debating the ontological status of individuals with or without ovaries, or with or without testes. You’ll have to argue with the entire network, not just me, if you expect to get some kind of change in policy on it. Good luck with that!

Hovertext: Of course, a perfect simulation awaits the advent of the quantum computer.

New comic!
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Happy New Year! LEGO sent us 75827 Ghostbusters Firehouse Headquarters, and I am pleased to end the year by giving you this review. This set, available January 1, 2016, has 4,634 pieces and retails for $349.99. It features the Firehouse and eight minifigures and four small ghost figures, including Slimer.

Saying the set is massive is a bit of an understatement. This set has the third most pieces of any LEGO set ever made. To give you an idea, I present you the box with my cat, Athena, for scale. The set features bags numbered 1-14, with an average of 3 bags per number. Make sure you have a garbage can near you during your build process, since disposing of 40 or more plastic bags generates quite the mess.

Opening the box, you have box-ception with two unprinted boxes inside the main box, the instruction manual, a 32×32 grey baseplate and a number of loose bags at the bottom. One box contains numbers 1-4 and the 16×32 baseplate. The second box contains numbers 5-7 with some plates and the fire pole. Numbers 8-14 are in the main box.

The instruction manual is lovely and hefty at 418 pages. The opening pages feature a summary of the movie and the importance of the set before diving into instructions. I would prefer instructions of this size be spiral bound in general, though I did not have any issues keeping the book open to the proper page. I didn’t have an problem with pages falling out, either, like I have with previous large instruction manuals bound this way.

The minifigures are spread throughout the bag groups. Each minifigure has dual-printed heads, and Louis Tully actually has two heads. The second head features a printed on handle for the bucket he wears. The minifigures for the Ghostbusters themselves are different than those featured in 21108 IDEAS Ghostbusters Ecto-1. All of the Firehouse Ghostbuster torsos have elbow pads, an arm pocket, and the Ghostbusters logo printed on the arms.

• Peter has a new hair piece unique to this set, with a new torso/head print. Unlike Ecto Peter, the Firehouse Peter is covered in slime.
• Ecto Raymond and Firehouse Raymond are identical exception for the previously mentioned arm printing.
• Egon has a slightly different face. The Ecto Egon is looking straight-on through his glasses. Firehouse Egon seems to be glancing left, though this might be a printing error.
• Firehouse Winston has a new hairpiece unique to this set.

Back Row: Ecto Ghostbusters Front Row: Firehouse Ghostbusters

I am very impressed with this set. The build, though time consuming, has been a wonderful experience. There are plenty of excellent techniques. I feel less like I’m building a set and more like I’m creating a build of my own. Each wall is two studs wide, allowing for detailed outside colors and completely different interior. In addition to the new hair pieces for the minifigures, there are a number of new parts in this set, including:

• 1X5X6 Panel, black, with corrugated texture
• 1×1 round tile with pin in pearl gold
• 1x4x6 Door with 3 panes in brown and dark brown
• 1x2x1 Double corner panel (two of the 1×1 corner panels together)

This set does include stickers. This includes the mirrored silver stickers, which LEGO has always made as stickers. Some were things that should have been printed, including the Ghostbusters iconic logo. This was a sticker placed on a 2×2 white tile and 2×2 inverted white tile. Other 2×2 tiles, including a magazine cover, were printed. I don’t understand why the decision was made to not print the Ghostbusters logo. In the Ecto-1 set, even the curved 2×2 slopes were printed.

First Floor

>The first four bags groups are dedicated to building the first floor, which is quiet impressive. The desks, toolbox, lamp, and boxes make their appearance. The windows are all recessed by half a stud, which looks excellent and adds to the overall visual accuracy. The interior uses dark green as its main color, and has the shelving across the entire back wall. The main doors are brick built, with the black doorframe coming to the party late in bag group 3. Being brick built adds an extra level of detail.

One detail I particularly like is the pink slime leaking out on the sidewalk. I remember the pink slime vividly from the movies when I was a kid and appreciated seeing it incorporated into the build.

This set features the pre-molded staircase that is very familiar to the Castle and City themes. The set uses 1×2 inverted brown slopes to smooth out the visible edge, which I hadn’t seen used in a set previously.

Second Floor

The second floor has some interesting details; the sink, for example, uses the studs sideways and does not connect to the rest of the model using a stud connection. For stability, one of the corners uses a telescope piece that’s completely hidden.

The kitchen is very detailed, with a fantastic fridge and arcade machine. The sink uses the new double corner panel, and isn’t attached by studs at all, and is quite effective. There are plenty of healthy options including pizza and a soda in a red can. The second floor bathroom is awfully messy and I suspect Slimer is at work. The shower and toilet are clever and detailed. I don’t like the fact that there is no wall between the beds and toilet, however. I understand that it’s a space issue in the model and when the firehouse is open, it doesn’t make a difference. But after the rest of attention to detail in the model, this just stuck out.

Third Floor and Roof

The third floor features shelving with instruments, a computer, a coffee table, and a pool table. The pool table is rather clever and full of excellent techniques, including a studs-not-on-top design. The coffee table securely attaches to the floor diagonally using jumper plates. The fireman’s pole is attached to the third and first floors, and is added as one of the final steps.

The roof is designed to open on the side, just the same as the rest of the building, and is solidly attached to the model. Each portion that opens seals with a clip and rod, and helps make the set very solid when moved, preventing the sides from swinging open (which they did during building, every time I had to move it).

Overall, this set is fantastic. It’s full of great details the sort of that adult fans would put into their own creations. It has interesting techniques for minifig-scale items, and just feels complete. I appreciate that with the immense size of this set, very little felt repetitive during the build process, even with the tile/modified bricks with studs on the side design for the windows. I appreciate the continuity with the Ecto-1 fitting perfectly inside.

It was, understandably, a very long build. We’re talking a full marathon of Lord of the Rings, Extended Edition build length. If you choose to build this (and I hope you do), be prepared for the long haul and make sure you’ve got good lighting and a decent chair. You’ll find the result well worth your time.

You can check out all of our pictures on flickr.

Here at The Brothers Brick, we recognize there’s been a lot of conversation in the LEGO community regarding this set and a similar submission on IDEAS. We reviewed this as a set and won’t be making further comments regarding this topic.

Seattle builder Dave Sterling has built a LEGO version of London’s Charing Cross Railway Station as it appeared in the late-Victorian period. Dave’s creation formed part of an international collaboration entitled Around the World in 80 days which was displayed at Brickworld Chigaco. Dave has really captured the intricate details and elaborate exterior features representative of Victorian architecture.

A replica of the 70ft high Eleanor Cross was built in the forecourt of the station in 1865, and this is very nicely depicted in Dave’s build by the ornate tall ‘cross’ complete with tan microfigs, masonry bricks and arches.

The Charing Cross Railway Station that can be seen in London today is quite different from the way it appeared in the time of Jules Verne in 1872. The elegant curved glass roof actually collapsed in 1905 while the glazing was being repaired so it is great to see the curved glass structure represented in all its glory.  In addition, bomb damage in World War II destroyed the elaborate Mansard roof and chimney stacks but Dave has captured the original steep sloping roof and tall chimneys perfectly.

TBB took this opportunity to ask Dave a few questions about the build:

TBB: Charing Cross Railway Station is a real London landmark, can you tell us a little bit about why you chose to build it with these particular features as it appeared in the late-Victorian period?

DS: The MOC isn’t a direct recreation, but my own interpretation based on reference photos and space constraints. Because of the collaborative display aspect for Brickworld, I had to narrow the build from my original plan of 64 studs wide down to 48. In doing this, I had to make some changes to the look and feel to keep everything (mostly) in scale.

Over the years, the building has changed quite a bit but since the book was set in 1872, I had to find pictures and build the station as it was in that time period. A tall order seeing as cameras were a rarity back then. Luckily it was mainly the roof that changed and I was able to find enough pictures of the old roof combined with detail pictures of the building today to make the whole thing work.

TBB: What is your favorite part of the build?

DS: The curved glass roof is one of my favorite elements of the build and I’m really happy the way it turned out. The shape/sweep and rigidity is just perfect and it’s fairly easy to set up and tear-down for transport. I let the test build sit on my table for a week to satisfy myself that it wasn’t going to blow apart on me due to the stresses from the bend. It’s amazing how strong the roof really is and it will hold a couple of pints sitting on top of it quite easily (we did some testing both during the build and at Brickworld).

I also am really happy with how the Eleanor Cross came out since it’s an iconic part of the station forecourt. Getting this to look right was a real challenge. Initially I was thinking of skipping it, but many thanks to my “brother from another mother” Heath Flor, for pushing me to add this in as it really completes the MOC.

TBB: Do you know who many pieces your completed build has? How long did it take to complete?

DS: Honestly have no idea how many pieces are in it, but the MOC stands at 48 studs wide by 128 studs long and is around 24″ tall. It took me about 4 1/2 months to build. I estimate that total build time was somewhere around 80-120 hours but it’s a really rough guess. Time flies when you’re having fun!

TBB: Overall being part of the this year’s most ambitious and massive feat of LEGO engineering sounds like an amazing experience…

DS: I’d like to thank my wife, Stacy, for helping keep me focused while working on this build and for being an amazing source of ideas and feedback on this and all my other LEGO creations. Also, many thanks to my fellow VirtuaLUG members for their support, encouragement, and being the vehicle that made me want to pursue this creation. Finally, thanks to all my fellow builder friends and other LEGO geeks out there for being a constant source of inspiration and building knowledge.

The LEGO community is unlike any other and you all inspire me to keep building. 

Butler News in Pennsylvania identified this man as John Pisone, seen here harassing a group of anti-fracking protestors and making incredibly racist remarks and monkey noises to the black cameraman. In the video, the man repeatedly boasts that he works for a living and accuses the others of being lazy parasites. From Raw Story:

“Have you actually done something with your life, have you had any kind of a job?” the man asks one of the older activists, who laughs in his face.

“Just like this chimp right here,” the man continues, motioning at the camera.

“What did you say?” one of the activists asks.

“Yeah, chimp,” the man replies. “A f*cking n****r right here with a mop on his head. I don’t give a f*ck. He’s milking my f*cking tax dollars.”

“We’re peaceful, we do not need your antagonism,” one of the protesters says.

The man responds by mocking the group with chimp-like noises. He goes on to explain that he had time to “tease” activists because his job was rained out that day.

But after the video was posted, someone recognized him and alerted his employer, MMC Land Management, who promptly fired him. They said in a statement:

Today, we were disgusted to learn that one of MMC’s former employees used racial slurs and made racially charged comments during a peaceful protest in Mars, Pennsylvania, outside of work hours at a location with which we have no affiliation. We are sorry that this incident occurred. Whether at work or not, we do not condone hate speech - EVER. Inclusion and diversity are among MMC’s core values. We believe in equality for everyone, regardless of race, age, gender identity, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. MMC has terminated this employee and will never do business with him again in the future.

[via]

70sscifiart:

Don Dixon’s cover art to the 1977 book Colonies in Space

Oh, you mean why am I not nice about people constantly asking me for free things? Trying to butter me up with ‘sexy compliments’ to get me to post free content? Oh, I don’t know! Why do you use the word bitch to describe women being unpleased & assertive?

A resurrection from a few years ago to tide us over the holiday period.

This is James Smart's breathtaking photo of an anti-cyclonic tornado touching down near Simla, Colorado. The image is the grand prize winner of the 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest. Below, two of the other incredible honorees: Tugo Cheng's photo of the Tian Shan mountain ranges in Central Asia; Andrew Suryono portrait of an orangutan in the rain in Bali, Indonesia.

In Shopshifting: The potential for payment system abuse, Karsten Nohl and Fabian Bräunlein showed attendees at Hamburg's Chaos Communications Congress just how poor the security in payment terminals is, and demonstrated several attacks that would let them harvest card numbers and PINs, make undetectable phantom charges and refunds to merchant accounts, and commit other mischief. (more…)

In 2013, 16-year-old Ethan Couch was found guilty of drunkenly plowing into a group of people helping a stranded motorist, killing four of them and maiming two others. A psychologist hired by Couch's defense lawyers said the teen's extravagantly wealthy lifestyle prevented him from knowing right from wrong. Texas State District Judge Jean Boyd agreed. Instead of sending Couch to prison, she gave him 10 years probation and a stint at a luxury rehab center in Newport Beach, California, which offers cooking classes, yoga, and "equine-assisted psychotherapy."

The horse-enhanced rehab apparently didn't work, because a video recently surfaced that shows Couch, now 18, playing beer pong at a party. The conditions of Couch's probation forbid him from drinking alcohol. Shortly after that, Couch failed to show up for a scheduled meeting with his parole officer. When authorities investigated, they discovered Couch and his mother Tonya (48) were missing, along with their passports. After a brief manhunt, Couch and his mother were captured in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Couch has dyed his hair black.

The Daily Beast has more about Couch's parents, who seem like real pieces of work:

On a February night at 1 a.m., a cop found Ethan urinating in a parking lot, with a 14-year-old girl naked inside his truck, which contained a Miller Lite can and bottle of Grey Goose vodka, according to D Magazine.

Tonya paid Ethan’s fines and court fees, and blamed herself when he didn’t complete an alcohol class and community-service hours. She said she’d “misread the online thing.”

During a deposition in a civil suit against the family a year later, Tonya was asked about the girl. “That morning?” Tonya replied. “Her mom picked her up, I assume. I guess. I don’t know.”

Meanwhile, Ethan’s father has troubles of his own. In August 2014, police arrested Fred for impersonating a police officer, The Dallas Morning News reported.

Cops say Couch showed up to a disturbance call at a North Richland Hills home the month before and claimed to be a Lakeside reserve officer. He allegedly provided a bogus badge and ID card.

It’s unclear what’s become of the wannabe-cop charges.

It will be interesting to see how Couch's legal team and the justice system of Tarrant County, Texas will handle this incident, now that millions of people are paying attention.

From NBC News:

Luke Williams, a former district attorney in Lubbock, Texas, told NBC News a judge ought to be able to reinstate Couch's original sentence.

"He still has the 10 years he was probated hanging over his head," Williams said. "A judge can convert that into straight jail time."

Beyond that punishment for the drunken driving, prosecutors said they are considering new charges for Couch fleeing the country — which he achieved with help of his mom. Prosecutors said they will charge Tonya Couch for helping her son flee.

On Tuesday, prosecutors announced for the first time that they intend to charge her with "hindering apprehension," a major offense under Texas law. It carries a possible sentence of one to 10 years in prison.

71 year old Thomas Podgoretsky has resided in the UK for 48 years on a permanent leave to remain visa. He has four British children and six British grandchildren, as well as three British ex-wives. The Home Office has given him 72 hours to prepare for his deportation to the USA, despite his having no living relatives there. (more…)

Amazon’s Fire TV stick is a great little device. Plugging nicely into an available HDMI port on most TVs, the device ‘smartens up’ the dumbest of devices and makes available the growing world of IPTV services.

The one currently plugged into my TV in the bedroom has mainly been used for the ‘free’ video streaming services bundled with Amazon Prime but the stick is equally at home streaming video from Netflix or any of the many services available from Amazon’s store.

However, Amazon’s little device has a trick up its sleeve. Being Android based, Fire TV Stick can run a much wider array of apps and services than Amazon offers through its regular on-screen interface. Of particular interest is Kodi, which together with a vast array of plugins offers access to all the latest movies, TV shows and live sports most people could ever need.

And news of just how special the Fire TV Stick/Kodi combo can be has been traveling fast in the past few weeks, particularly in the UK.

The first signs that something might be going on came very early December when even for Prime customers Amazon started advising that delivery for Fire TV Sticks was not the usual ‘next day’, but was actually nearer two weeks. For someone looking to buy two units as gifts, that was unacceptable. Other stores weren’t much help either.

After checking stock at nearly two dozen Argos and Currys retailers (both huge operations in the UK), just two units were found at the former 12 miles away. But the bizarre thing was that when I collected the items the lady behind the counter asked smilingly: “Are these for Kodi?”

Of course, I know about Kodi. We all know about Kodi. But for it to be mentioned without any prompting at the point of sale in a retailer was quite a surprise to say the least. And for a worker at a non-specialist retailer to know so much about it hints at the scale of the issue.

In case you missed it, Amazon banned Kodi from its store in the summer over piracy concerns but with the official APK plus adbFire and a loader like FireStarter, the software runs like a dream on Amazon Fire TV Stick.

“Everybody is buying these for Kodi, you can get everything on it. But that’s it now, we’re out of stock,” I was told while handing over the cash. Interesting…..

Intrigued, in the weeks that followed I monitored stock at Argos, Currys/PC World, Amazon themselves and several other big retailers including John Lewis and the nation’s biggest supermarket, Tesco. After an initial delay Amazon appeared to do the best in having stock available but all the rest really struggled.

Now, just days after Christmas, Currys/PC World have zero stock for home delivery and its the same situation at Tesco, John Lewis and Argos. Checking for local stock at the latter in the London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow regions reveals not a single unit available. Only Amazon themselves can offer anything (correct, 28 Dec).

Granted, it’s more than likely that Fire TV Stick has proven popular with consumers due to it working with Netflix and iPlayer, but Chromecast does that too and anyone can buy one of those devices at any of the above retailers anywhere in the next hour.

Admittedly, it’s a possibility that Amazon screwed up and didn’t make enough Fire TV Sticks. But if that’s the case, why is eBay awash with (ahem) ‘fully loaded’ Amazon Fire TV Sticks for immediate delivery?

Also, Google Trends can sometimes offer an insight into what people are interested in during a given period. So, we locked into December, did searches for both Kodi and Fire TV, and restricted results to the UK.

As can be seen from the image below, not only is Kodi even more popular than Amazon’s device, but the interest in both the software and the hardware follows similar waves.

There can be little doubt that interest in both Kodi and Fire TV are now at a high, not only in the UK, but also elsewhere. It’s also a further sign that piracy has really migrated out of the bedroom and onto the living room TV, something that Hollywood and other interested parties really wanted to avoid.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

clubjade:

Star Wars is not here for your armor misconceptions. In a response that’s getting some digital ink, the official Star Wars page’s reply to a clueless comment on Phasma’s armor. Just say no to actually dangerous boob-plates!

All photos courtesy Cindy Chinn

We’ve seen a number of artists working with pencil leads over the last few years, where the narrow dimensions of graphite are carved into minuscule objects. This recent piece by Nebraska-based artist Cindy Chinn is particularly ingenious, an entire carpenter’s pencil is turned into a tiny train, trestle, and bridge. “This piece was designed using straight lead pieces for the rails, with the tiny carved train placed and securely glued on top of the rails,” Chinn shares. “The train engine is only 3/16″ of an inch tall. The pencil is 5-5/8″ long and mounted in a wood shadowbox frame as shown in the photos.”

You can see more of Chinn’s pencil carving work on her website and on Etsy. See more pencil carving fun from Salavat Fidai, Diem Chau, and Dalton Ghetti. (via Laughing Squid)

“While everyone waits for the voters to finally figure out that they ought to be supporting Rubio, the only candidate who at the moment looks like he might be able to defeat Donald Trump is Ted Cruz. From the perspective of the party’s fortunes in the general election, that would be sort of like being cured of your electoral syphilis by contracting gonorrhea.”

- Marco Rubio’s big problem — and his party’s

Not that I expected much, but this review of Sam Harris’s latest with Maajid Nawaz confirms what little I did expect.

It quickly becomes clear, however, that Sam Harris is illiterate when it comes to history. He has a tendency, both in his online writings and in this book, to reduce all 1,400 years of the Islamic past to jihad. The world, he says, witnessed “a thousand years of jihadism” before Bin Laden sent airliners to mutilate the New York City skyline, and Islam spread “primarily by conquest, not conversation.” The historian Zachary Karabell wrote an entire book refuting this simplistic repackaging of history.

…

At one point, Harris even bizarrely rationalizes the Crusades. Remember, he tells readers, the Crusades “were primarily a response to 300 years of jihad” — the emphasis here is his. The Crusades were a “reaction,” he laments, and in any event, holy war was a “late, peripheral” development within Christianity. This ought to be news to the flayed bodies and burned heretics and massacred dissidents put to death by Christianity’s sword. Muslim empires were authoritarian, as were Christian empires. Muslim clerics gave fatwas declaring jihad, and Pope Urban II gave his own decree explicitly calling on Christian subjects to take up arms and reclaim the Holy Land from the Mohemmadans. Why Sam Harris feels the need to take sides in the fanatical squabbles of our barbaric ancestors eludes me.

All of this can be excused, but only up to a point. What is inexcusable, and what should preclude Sam Harris from participating in any more projects on Islamic Reformation, is his complete lack of awareness about Muslims as they actually live today. He censures American Muslims for paying more attention to the coldblooded massacre of three American Muslims at the University of North Carolina than to the crimes of ISIS — proximity to Raleigh over Raqqa may explain why — before going on to say that hate crimes against American Muslims are “tiny in number, often property-related, and still dwarfed five-fold by similar offenses against Jews.” Reread that sentence and take in the moral callousness of this thinker.

At least I enjoyed the review.

The Billings Gazette reported last week that an 18-year-old Montanan was arrested after he threatened a Facebook friend with a gun for disclosing details about the new “Star Wars” movie.

Because I don’t want to die, I won’t say what the “friend” disclosed. Not even TMZ.com was willing to do that, but because I still think there is one verb too many in its redacted post, I’m just going to link there and not show the image itself. I will say that following the spoiler, the “friend” stated, “told you I would do it,” showing that he is hardly blameless in this matter. Still, this really doesn’t justify the threat that followed, which included the image shown here along with a threat to come to the other guy’s school and shoot him.

Presumably the bandana over his face was intended to conceal his identity, which is further evidence of the intelligence level involved here.

The discloser reported the threat, and the disclosee was arrested and charged with felony assault with a weapon. You might argue it really isn’t “assault” if you’re not even in the presence of the victim, but you’d most likely lose that argument in Montana, because the offense is defined to include knowingly causing “reasonable apprehension of serious bodily injury in another by use of a weapon or what reasonably appears to be a weapon.” If you’re both in the same town and you specifically threatened to come over and shoot a guy, I’m sure that’s enough even if you used Facebook. The definition also probably means that it won’t help that the gun was apparently a BB gun and not a real automatic.

See also “Good Reason to Kill #16: Ate Popcorn Too Loudly During ‘Black Swan'” (Mar. 15, 2011); cf. “‘Revenge of the Sith’ Causes Stupid Sith to Happen” (May 26, 2005).

“The evidence did not indicate criminal conduct by police.”

-

Cuyahoga County prosecutor Tim McGinty tells reporters, calling the fatal shooting of Tamir Rice a “perfect storm of human error.” A Cleveland prosecutor says a grand jury has declined to bring criminal charges against the two officers involved.
(via npr)

So attention police: feel free to race up in your cruiser and execute someone seconds later without even talking to them, because that’s the way we do things in America now, I guess.

Neodymium magnets can be so powerful as to be dangerous: you don't want two of them "spotting" one another when a fleshy fingertip is in the way of true love. So how do you ship a 6" one safely?

"So, is it really shielded?" asks YouTube's Braniac, chuckling to himself. "No."

The magnets featured in the video appear to be from magnetportal.de—what's a good place to buy irresponsible magnets in the U.S.?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_9QOgg0GRE

Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess downloaded the sourcecode for Red Star OS, North Korea's homegrown, paranoid fork of Red Hat's Fedora, a flavor of GNU/Linux. The researchers analyzed the OS and presented their findings to the thirty second Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg yesterday. (more…)

Methane gas has been leaking from a storage facility in California’s Aliso Canyon since October 2015 at a rate of 110,000 pounds per hour. You can see the plume in this infrared video shot on December 17, 2015. So far, 1,700 homes have been evacuated. The Southern California Gas Company thinks it will be able to stop the leak "by late February or late March."

From Motherboard:

Part of the problem in stopping the leak lies in the base of the well, which sits 8,000 feet underground. Pumping fluids down into the well, usually the normal recourse, just isn’t working, said Silva. Workers have been "unable to establish a stable enough column of fluid to keep the force of gas coming up from the reservoir." The company is now constructing a relief well that will connect to the leaking well, and hopefully provide a way to reduce pressure so the leak can be plugged.

These Star Wars-themed minifig costumes by solscud are impressive. Most impressive. With just a handful of pieces, each “outfit” is packed with enough tiny details to produce an instantly recognizable Star Wars vehicle. I’ll admit I giggled when I first saw these. They are certainly cute enough to give the microfighters series a run for their money. I especially love that red sleeve on the First Order TIE Fighter. Solscud selected vehicles from all three original-trilogy films, Attack of the Clones, and The Force Awakens.

Check out even more of solscud’s costumes on Flickr.

I’m not sure whether WhiteBrix is good at surfing, but he does know how to handle a surfboard – or, better to say, 19 of them at a time. Stacked together, these surfboards create a rather winsome skyscraper shape and, moreover, define each floor, which allows you to see the structure of the whole building clearly. And I especially like how that single-story section completes the complex – what a lovely architectural masterpiece!

One “advantage” of working in psychiatry is getting a window into an otherwise invisible world of really miserable people.

I work in a wealthy, mostly-white college town consistently ranked one of the best places to live in the country. If there’s anywhere that you might dare hope wasn’t filled to the brim with people living hopeless lives, it would be here. But that hope is not realized. Every day I get to listen to people describe problems that would seem overwrought if they were in a novel, and made-up if they were in a thinkpiece on The Fragmentation Of American Society.

A perfectly average patient will be a 70 year old woman who used to live somewhere else but who moved her a few years ago after her husband died in order to be closer to family. She has some medical condition or other that prevents her from driving or walking around much, and the family she wanted to be closer to have their own issues, so she has no friends within five hundred miles and never leaves her house except to go to doctors’ appointments. She has one son, who is in jail, and one daughter, who married a drug addict. She also has one grandchild, her only remaining joy in the world – but her drug-addict son-in-law uses access to him as a bargaining chip to make her give him money from her rapidly-dwindling retirement account so he can buy drugs. When she can’t cough up enough quickly enough, he bans her from visiting or talking to the grandchild, plus he tells the grandchild it’s her fault. Her retirement savings are rapidly running out and she has no idea what she will do when they’re gone. Probably end up on the street. Also, her dog just died.

If my patients were to read the above paragraph, there are a handful who would sue me for breach of confidentiality, assuming I had just written down their medical history and gotten a couple of details like the number of children wrong. I didn’t. This is a type.

Here’s another. 60 year old guy who was abused as a child, still has visible scars. Ran off at age 15, got a job in a factory, married let’s say a waitress. There was some kind of explosion in his factory, he got PTSD, now he freaks out every time he steps within a hundred meters of a place where manufacturing is going on. Gradually stopped going outside because there were too many scary loud noises, his wife started yelling at him and telling him he was useless, he started beating his wife, put in jail for a year or two for domestic violence, came out, by this point his wife has run off with another man and took everything he owned with her. Moved in with an abusive uncle who is 80 years old and hates his guts, but the uncle needed a caretaker and the guy needed a place to live and they were each other’s only affordable option. Currently lives off disability payments, but the government keeps trying to cut them off, and he keeps having to spend what little he has on a lawyer to prevent them from taking even that away, but half the time he doesn’t make it to his lawyer appointments because he’s too nervous about going outside. Also he has chronic pain. Also he only sleeps two hours a night because of the nightmares, and he’s tired all the time.

(“You have the pill that fixes all of this, right, Doctor? The one they advertised on TV?”)

A while ago I wrote about how strongly we filter for people who are like us intellectually and politically:

According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.

And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.

About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against.

People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is a bizarre dark matter parallel universe.

Since starting working in psychiatry, I have realized that we also filter for misery. I think a big part of this is sorting by social class. But it’s in a more subtle way than you might think. That first patient, the 70 year old, might on paper have more than the median income if her dead husband’s pension is high enough. I could even imagine the second patient getting a decent payout from his factory and being financially in the clear for a while. It’s more complicated than that – something to do with being the sort of person who ends up in these sorts of situations.

I have three non-mutually exclusive theories for this:

1. The people who come to a psychiatrist are disproportionately the unhappiest and most disturbed. This is obviously true to some degree. But I got the same sort of people when I worked in general medicine and primary care. Even the people who come to a primary care doctor are going to be a little biased towards the sorts of conditions that produce or result from sickness, but people were still much worse off than I thought.

2. My ordinary life shields me from these people. I don’t live in an especially bad neighborhood, so I won’t meet the unhappiest people there. Unhappy people are really depressing, so their lives won’t be covered as much by newspapers and TV. And insofar as they stay in their homes all the time and never come out or talk to anyone else, that in itself is going to prevent me from meeting them.

3. Or maybe many of the people I know are in fact this unhappy, but they never tell anyone except their psychiatrist all of the pieces necessary to put their life story together.

If it were mostly (1), that would be pretty encouraging and mean I’m just biased toward seeing very unlucky people. If it were mostly (2) or (3), that would be pretty bad, and mean everyone else is biased toward not realizing how unlucky everybody else is.

So I made a short script based on the following information:

– About 1% of people are in prison at any given time
– About 2% of people are on probation, which can actually be really limiting and unpleasant
– About 1% of people are in nursing homes or hospices
– About 2% of people have dementia
– About 20% of people have chronic pain, though this varies widely with the exact survey question, but we are not talking minor aches here. About two-thirds of people with chronic pain describe it as “constant”, and half of people describe it as “unbearable and excruciating”.
– About 7% of people have depression in any given year
– About 2% of people are cognitively disabled aka mentally retarded
– About 1% of people are schizophrenic
– About 20% of people are on food stamps
– About 1% of people are wheelchair-bound
– About 7% of people are alcoholic
– About 0.5% of people are chronic heroin users
– About 5% of people are unemployed as per the official definition which includes only those looking for jobs
– About 3% of people are former workers now receiving disability payments
– About 1% of people experience domestic violence each year
– About 10% of people were sexually abused as children, many of whom are still working through the trauma.
– Difficult to get statistics, but possibly about 20% of people were physically abused as children, likewise.
– About 9% of people (male and female) have been raped during their lifetime, likewise.

These numbers might be inflated, since I took them from groups working on these problems and those groups have every incentive to make them sound as bad as possible. There’s also a really big problem where a lot of these are conditional upon one another – that is, a person in prison is not also in a nursing home, but a person who is unemployed is far more likely to be on food stamps. This will likely underestimate both the percent of people who have no problems at all, and the percent of people who have multiple problems at once.

Nevertheless, I ran the script twenty times to simulate twenty different people, and here’s what I got (NP stands for “no problems”):

01. Chronic pain
02. Alcoholic
03. Chronic pain
04. NP
05. NP
06. Sexually molested as a child + suffering from domestic violence
07. Unemployed
08. Alcoholic
09. NP
10. NP
11. NP
12. Abused as a child
13. NP
14. Chronic pain
15. NP
16. Abused as a child + unemployed
17. NP
18. Alcoholic + on food stamps
19. NP
20. Clinically depressed

If the two problems mentioned above haven’t totally thrown off the calculations, this makes me think Psychiatrist-Me is getting a much better window into reality than Normal-Person-Me.

And remember, this doesn’t count all of the problems that don’t fall into easily quantified categories, like “everyone hates them because they’re really ugly and annoying”. It doesn’t count things that I couldn’t find good statistics on, like “had a child die recently”. It doesn’t count things that I would have gotten in trouble for including, like “autistic” or “single mother”. It doesn’t count a lot of things. Consider that the first patient I mentioned – the homebound seventy year old with no friends who’s being extorted by her drug addict son-in-law – would appear on this list as “NP”.

The world is almost certainly a much worse place than any of us want to admit. And that’s before you’ve even left America.

This is part of why I get enraged whenever somebody on Tumblr says “People in Group X need to realize they have it really good”, or “You’re a Group X member, so stop pretending like you have real problems.” The town where I practice psychiatry is mostly white and mostly wealthy. That doesn’t save it. And whenever some online thinkpiece writer laughs about how good people in Group X have it and how hilarious it is that they sometimes complain about their lives, it never fails that I have just gotten home from treating a member of Group X who attempted suicide.

This is also why I am wary whenever people start boasting about how much better we’re doing than back in the bad old days. That precise statement seems to in fact be true. But people have a bad tendency to follow it up with “And so now most people have it pretty good”. I don’t think we have any idea how many people do or don’t have it pretty good. Nobody who hasn’t read polls would intuitively guess that 40-something percent of Americans are young-Earth creationists. How should they know how many people have it pretty good or not?

I think about all of the miserable people in my psychiatric clinic. Then I multiply by ten psychiatrists in my clinic. Then I multiply by ten similarly-sized clinics in my city. Then I multiply by a thousand such cities in the United States. Then I multiply by hundreds of countries in the world, and by that time my brain has mercifully stopped being able to visualize what that signifies.

This wasn’t supposed to be a Christmas post, but it took me longer than I expected to write, so here we are.

And this wasn’t supposed to be advocating any particular response, but I was recently asked to plug Giving What We Can’s pledge drive, and maybe one of the good responses to realizing how awful things are is committing to donate a little bit of what you’ve got to making them better.

Facebook is desperate to ensure that the Internet never takes hold in developing nations -- they want a walled garden that they get to own and operate. (more…)

Hovertext: All language reduces to a finite string of Hitlers.

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I half joked in my post about improving Rey’s speeder that my next project would be to mod my 5,000-piece UCS Millennium Falcon set into the version seen in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. marshal banana planned a bit more ahead of me, and has spent the last year planning, designing, gathering the LEGO parts, and building his own Millennium Falcon from Episode VII.

At 7,500 pieces, Marshal’s Millennium Falcon uses fully 50% more parts than the 5,195-piece official 10179 UCS Millennium Falcon (the second-largest LEGO set ever sold by part count, and arguably physically the largest set ever). This LEGO Millennium Falcon measures 82 x 54 x 18 cm, or nearly three feet long.

While the internal structure required to make the model light enough at 10 kg (22 pounds) but sturdy enough to pose at an angle like this doesn’t allow it to have a full interior, it does have light-up engines and gun wells.

One of the most noticeable differences from the official LEGO set is the change to the sensor panel, as reflected in the minifig-scale Millennium Falcon I reviewed recently. And here’s another shot of the light-up quad cannon emplacement.

It’s clear from this top-down photo that the builder has spent some significant time with various reference materials — the plan view shows just how closely his model lines up to the shape and details published in books like The Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels. Unlike the fairly bare belly of the official LEGO set, Marshal Banana’s version has a fully detailed underside.

Similarly, I’m deeply impressed with Marshal Banana’s greebling, which is particularly evident along the sides of the Falcon — it’s hard to look intentional without looking totally random.

See his photostream on Flickr for more photos.

Finally, don’t miss Marshal Banana’s 10,000-piece Jawa Sandcrawler from 2011.