cartoon by the late Dana Fradon, in The New Yorker, way back in 1976

One of the signs of social collapse is, ironically, the simultaneous emergence of autocratic demagogues and a soaring distrust of perceived ‘leaders’ of all kinds — politicians, CEOs, priests, the mainstream media hegemony, the social media oligopoly, and ‘experts’ in every field. What we’re seeing in many countries now is a complete power vacuum as so-called world leaders whine and yell on social media like spoiled children instead of actually doing anything to improve the lot of citizens struggling with an increasingly desperate and teetering culture. This has the value of rather baldly showing us that no one is really in control, and that if we want things done we’ll have to self-organize and do them ourselves. My sense is that this self-organization in a power vacuum will be a hallmark of the coming decades, and I’ll be writing about it further soon. There couldn’t be a stronger symbolic demonstration of this shift than the large-scale toppling of statues of historical ‘leaders’ who are now seen not as heroes but as symptoms of a systemic and still-present disease that must now, urgently, be abolished — not by new ‘leaders’ but by all of us in self-organizing communities. (Thanks to Alberta Pedroja for the prompt.)

CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

Cartoon by Michael Leunig

Partying like it’s 2099: David Wallace-Wells explains that arctic temperatures have already reached levels not expected to be reached until 2099, the odds of limiting global average temperature rise to the 2.0ºC limit suggested as “inadequate to prevent runaway climate change” have now dropped to 0.3%, and in some places once-in-500-year extraordinary weather events have now occurred five years in a row. While our attention has been focused elsewhere, runaway climate change has, apparently, already begun.

Next up for our short attention spans: And so we whipsaw our attention from climate collapse to social justice to systemic racism to systemic corruption to systemic misogyny to economic precarity, and then back to pandemics. None of these problems is being addressed, none of them is improving, and all of them are out of control. The salvationists continue to proclaim that we can be saved, by technology, by a wise or hard-nosed elite, by faith, by diligent preparation, or (always the loudest proclamation) by a collective upraising of human consciousness. Ever-hopeful, we humans. Even as, fed by the happiness-promising industrial agricultural machine, we anxiously eat ourselves to death.

LIVING BETTER

from xkcd, of course

Why racist violence shouldn’t surprise us: Waleed Aly’s moving, eye-opening response to last year’s Christchurch massacre. Even more eye-opening is the torrent of racist responses in the comments.

The difficulty of explaining complex predicaments: Hank Green brilliantly explains why, despite the enormous success and value of the Vlogbrothers’ Explainer video series, they’ve stopped making them because they realize they can’t prevent their own biases from creeping in.

Feminism and CoVid-19: Hawaii’s State Commission on the Status of Women has drafted a feminist recovery plan for the state, including a guaranteed annual income. Hope the politicians implement it. Thanks to Tree Bressen for the link.

Seventeen things that are quite good: The list (it’s an open-edit Google Doc) originated by Vinay Gupta is now 30 items, with discussion. I don’t agree with all of them, but the discussion is great and you’re sure to learn something useful.

POLITICS & ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Facebook meme, original source unknown; thanks to Cheryl Long for the link

Just call it White Supremacy: Charles Blow on the language of oppression. “The lulls you experience between explosive revolts of the oppressed should never be mistaken as harmony. They should be taken as rest breaks.” Thanks to Tree Bressen for the link.

Donald Trump, fascist and shiller of beans: Masha Gessen lists the ways in which the shithole president’s behaviour represents unbridled fascism, autocracy, corruption, and abuse of power, and has since his days as a failed real estate speculator. And when he’s not doing that, he’s shilling beans.

Misinformation watch:

• • A war vet rips holes in the preposterous CIA story of Russia offering money to the Taliban to kill Americans (thanks to Lorraine Suzuki for the link)
  • Upworthy debunks the fiction of “Irish slaves” being used by right-wingers to downplay America’s history of racism and oppression of Blacks
  • The New Yorker describes a research study that obliterates the anti-abortion myths that women who have abortions later regret it, and that abortions are dangerous

Rogue cops in Oregon (thanks to Tree Bressen for the links):

• • Un-uniformed and unwanted federal cops kidnap and terrorize Portland’s citizens: This appears to be Trump’s attempt to goad the city’s protesters into violence. The state has sued the feds, and the city has demanded their removal.
  • A federal judge has blocked Portland police from interfering with journalists and legal observers covering the protests.
  • Brady lists of the state’s rotten, expelled cops are a start, but aren’t being consistently maintained.

Latest Canadian awfulness:

• • Ontario introduces its Ag-Gag law: The political protection of institutionalized extreme cruelty to animals for profit continues unabated.
  • Alberta government employed a racist video producer as judicial selection panelist, and still employs a racist media columnist as the premier’s speechwriter.
  • The University of BC has a long history of coddling and providing a speaking platform for right-wing hate-mongers and racists.

An apology to JK Rowling: The vicious attacks on JK Rowling for her expressed concern that the project of feminism and the needs of WBW are being trampled by an ideological fringe of “identitarian leftists” have been relentless. One writer eloquently apologizes. And now an open letter warning of a larger trend among leftists to ideological closed-mindedness and inflexibility has been likewise assailed for not spouting the rigid leftist party line. A few weeks earlier, satirist Jonathan Pie ripped into this same rigidity in “Woke” culture. We’ve got to stop taking our anger out on each other and redirect it to our common nemeses.

Has Biden been radicalized by CoVid-19 and BLM?: David Wallace-Wells in conversation with Washington governor Jay Inslee, whose climate emergency plan has just been adopted by Biden. Posturing, or shifting ground?

Prisons: Our new privatized, dysfunctional, expensive mental institutions: “In the U.S., people with serious mental illnesses are far more likely to be incarcerated than they are to be treated in a psychiatric hospital — despite the fact that incarceration often makes mentally ill people worse… [And] the foremost thing that I saw over and over again is how much we want people to suffer once they’re held within our jails and prisons.”

COVID-19 CORNER

“one of these things is not like the others ♫…” — can you guess what’s going to happen NEXT?  — nope, sorry, wrong guess! (the correct answer is — no) — (charts from Atlantic Magazine’s CoVid Tracking Project)

Lies and statistics:

• • CoVid-19 infections and deaths: the unofficial story: Officially, the US has reported just under 150,000 CoVid-19 deaths and just under four million infections. But statistical “excess deaths” data indicates that, like just about everywhere else, deaths have been undercounted by a third, meaning the actual US death toll so far has streaked past 200,000. On that basis, working backwards from deaths to infections, it is likely that at least 17 million and as many as 20 million Americans have caught the disease. A total of 350,000 deaths and 35 million cases (about 10% of the population; nowhere near “herd immunity”) will likely have occurred by November.
  • The positive result rate on US tests has risen recently to about 8%, far above the level at which infections could be said to be under control, as they are in jurisdictions with well-established test, contact trace and isolation procedures.
  • Canada likewise has “excess deaths” numbers that suggest deaths have been undercounted by a third or more. But the fatality rate suggests that a much smaller proportion of Canadians (about 13,000) have died, and fewer than a million have been infected. A total of about 17,000 deaths and 1.7 million cases (about 4.5% of the population) will likely have occurred by November.
  • The positive result rate on Canadian tests has remained remarkably low — less than 1%, despite the fact Canada has been doing about 1/3 fewer tests on a per capita basis; this suggests that, at least for now, it’s under control. IHME suggests that will change when new cases spike in the fall in at least two provinces (BC & Québec), even if the border with the US remains closed.
  • The Atlantic explores how a younger average demographic now testing positive could mean lower hospitalization rates (though that has not yet been the case), and lower death rates. IFRs are as much as two orders of magnitude lower among those under 30 as for those over 60. But we still don’t know how this virus affects us, including long-term organ damage even among those asymptomatic, that could create health crises emerging much later on a much larger scale than the virus infections themselves.

Let’s not forget the cause: Zoonotic transmission of pandemic viruses is directly related to deforestation, habitat loss, and incursion of humans into previously unsettled areas.

Lessons from the Manchurian plague: This 1910 bacterial pneumonic plague cost 60,000 lives, and what we learned from international cooperation to study and end it (including the first use of masks as disease spread preventative) prevented even greater loss of life in the 1918 influenza, and paved the way for much that we do to combat pandemics today. Thanks to Davis Andrews for the link.

The Mask Controversy:

• • There’s a nasty squabble going on about whether the virus is spread by small aerosol particle transmission, not just droplets (mostly liquid in coughs and sneezes). It has major repercussions for the effectiveness of masks. BC’s health leader Bonnie Henry says the dispute is overblown and masks are warranted despite some limitations in their effectiveness, and masks should always be used in conjunction with other measures.
  • Meanwhile in the US, Anthony Fauci has been excommunicated and is being undermined by Der Drumpf. Dr F is now speaking directly to the public through the media. The message is the same: masks whenever in public, whenever 6′ social distancing is difficult, and certainly whenever indoors away from home.
  • Here’s a guide to which masks are best.
  • And here’s what might happen if you don’t wear them.

FUN & INSPIRATION

electron microscope photograph of an ant, source not cited, from Earth FB page; commenter’s response: “looks like a purple Joe Biden”

You’ll never shine if you don’t glow: A lovely little video essay on fireflies and vulnerability  from John Green.

Our home on Native land: The title is a take-off on the line “our home and native land” in Canada’s national anthem. The site shows all the indigenous territories Europeans have occupied throughout the world (Brasil is notably missing), and their languages. Thanks to Tree Bressen for the link.

Sy Hersh comes out of seclusion: The eccentric, much-celebrated investigative journalist has broken a long silence since Trump was elected to answer, kind of, the question why he hasn’t been re-energized by the corruption of the Trump regime. Fascinating reading. Thanks to John Whiting for the prompt.

Shari Ulrich’s homage to Canada: The renowned singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist jams with a bunch of my other neighbours in a delightful song she wrote about her adopted home here in BC. And if you’ve ever lost someone to Alzheimers, you’ll probably like her lovely new song The Sweater.

The NYT Manual of Style: There’s a ‘preview’ version of the first 130 pages (words starting with A-F) of this classic 350-page reference. If you’re a word and writing style geek like me, you’ll probably find it fascinating reading. The contrast in styles to the (free) 25-page Oxford style guide is telling.

Indigenous Americans had contact with Polynesians 800 years ago: New DNA research indicates that by 1200 CE, Polynesians had traveled to and interbred with the indigenous peoples of what are now called Colombia and Ecuador, centuries before colonization by Europeans.

Yes, it’s a satire, I think: Andy Borowitz reports that US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has promised to protect children from contact with education. And the Onion reports that the FBI has uncovered an Al-Qaida plot to just sit back and watch the US collapse of its own accord. (Thanks to Earl Mardle for the second link.)

The art of Sandra Boynton: The renowned cartoonist-author-composer has produced many fun videos featuring celebrity singers. Some, like When Pigs Fly (feat. Ryan Adams), are animated; others, like End of a Summer Storm (feat. Alison Krauss) are just profoundly moving. And she has the world’s best bio.

The Blessing: This American religious pop song has gone viral and global. Catchy melody, if you can get past the annoying salvationist lyrics, and now with more than 30 covers in many different languages. Pretty suited to CoVid-19 times if you know how to edit music clips together. My favourites are the UK version and the Haitian creole version. Thanks to Tree Bressen for the links.

The story of The Girl From Ipanema: The song is the world’s second most recorded, but it’s not the simple bossa nova song you might think. For music geeks only, Adam Neely provides a fascinating history of the song and the genre, and then breaks down its haunting melody and counterpoint, and its astonishingly innovative harmonies. Much more than meets the ear.

RADICAL NON-DUALITY STUFF

Wallpaper motif in a post by Mushin Schilling; original source un-cited

David Bohm on Radical Non-Duality: Long before Tony Parsons & co, David Bohm was channeling Krishnamurti on the self as illusion. He said it much more coherently than Krishnamurti did, but it’s also clear how hard it was, and is, to explain this message. Tony and the other radical non-dualists listed on my sidebar have since developed a vocabulary that makes the message much more intelligible. And of course the message is actually thousands of years old, though it has only been recently stripped of its unnecessary and distracting religious/spiritual trappings.

Some excerpts from a recent conversation between Frank McCaughey and Michael Riley:

[When the illusory self suddenly falls away] the brain at that ‘moment’ cannot cope with seeing everything… [The ‘me’ is all about reaction and] it doesn’t know how to react to this.

It’s not that the self lets go; it’s that everything lets go of the self.

The sense that anything could be other than it is, is gone; not ‘gone away’, just gone.

The falling away of the seeking energy came first and then there was a slow retroactive dawning that what that meant was that the one that was doing that seeking was over.

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

photos by award-winning photog Kathrin Swoboda: “Cold enough to see the melody”; thanks to Earth FB page for the link

From Caitlin Johnstone’s blog:

I am reminded of a famous contentious interview between Noam Chomsky and British journalist Andrew Marr in which Chomsky derided the false image mainstream journalists have of themselves as “a crusading profession, adversarial, we stand up against power,” saying it’s almost impossible for a good journalist to do so in any meaningful way in the mass media. “How can you know that I’m self-censoring? How can you know that journalists are-” Marr objected.

“I’m not saying you’re self-censoring,” Chomsky replied. “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

From a Black Lives Matter poster, variously attributed (thanks to Tree Bressen for the link):

Treat racism like CoVid-19: Assume you have it. Listen to experts about it. Don’t spread it. Be willing to change your life to end it.

As Y was at home ill, it was a logistically challenging week, and I did not get a whole lot done. But all in all an ok week.

• Did some interviews on the macro-economic impact of open data in the Netherlands
• Kept up making notes Zettelkasten style in Obsidian (now about 50). My old blogposts and presentations are a rich source for them. Those 50 or so notes are almost all a braindump of my existing notions around certian topics. I haven’t much added anything from other material I read. I did stumble upon a new connection between my notes for the first time.
• Had an interview for a new director at the NGO I chair, and we signed two new senior project leads. Arranged further interviews for next week.
• Sat down with the entire team of the NGO I chair to talk with them about their wishes for a new director
• Discussed how we can use an ethical guide we wrote for the use of geodata and how to apply it to more generic data driven initiatives.
• Picked the first batch of blackberries
• Had a bbq with our company‘s team and those of the company that rent desks in our office, in my colleague’s F garden
• Took care of Y on Thursday and Friday full time.

Some in our neighbourhood are taking ‘staycation’ up a level: 4 tents and a swimming pool set-up on a small back porch

“Specialization is for insects” Robert A. Heinlein

Between can be a difficult location. Cast or crew. Analog or digital. Quant or sales. Worker bee or management. Head or heart.

If you choose to reject the standard either/or logic and opt to stake out territory at a boundary or junction, the most likely result is ridicule and rejection. No matter how continuous reality may be, we insist on carving it up.

When I first moved out of the tech crew and into the stage manager’s shoes, I thought I was taking a small step. What I was doing was choosing to live in a DMZ. I became the referee when the lighting director and the choreographer both wanted the stage at the same time.

There was a time in one especially difficult production when I had had it with both the Producer and the Director. I can’t even remember what the argument was about. I left a note in the office that I was going back to school and they could finish the show without me.

A friend in the cast found me ten hours later in the one place I figured no one would think to look. I was in the third subbasement of the university library. Probably the first time I had set foot there since September and it was now March. I was coaxed into going back to the production, after apologies from the Producer and Director.

This was the earliest incident I can recall working to reconcile conflicting perspectives and demands to pull off a vision. Carpenters wanted to build, electricians wanted to light, dancers wanted to stretch, and actors wanted to run lines. All of it had to come together for the curtain to go up on opening night.

Over time, my interests have migrated to how to balance technology opportunities and organizational limits. But the reluctance of most to look outside the boundaries of their playgrounds remains. My head likes the challenge of figuring out the differing sets of details and their interactions.

Most players pick a side. They choose to belong to one organizational clan or the other. They commit to being management or to being a machine learning expert. Fewer choose to work as simultaneous translators; to learning the language and theories of new technology and of deep strategy.

Our systems are built around slotting people into speciality roles. What often gets lost is that someone has to work at being the glue fitting key elements together.

The post Working in the boundaries – making the pieces fit together appeared first on McGee's Musings.

You have to call it a test before you begin.

Plenty of failed ideas are reclassified as tests when they don’t pan out.

And if it is a test, define success and failure first.

How many people need to do [x] for the test to be considered a success?

There should be no confusion about whether the test was a success or not.

And be clear about what you will do if the test succeeds or fails (again, before you begin).

The point of a test is to take a hunch and remove any subjective bias for the benefit of the community.

You should test your hunches in your community, just set some standards before you start.

This is my second post in a series about how we have to change how we teach CS education to reduce inequity. I started this series with this post, making an argument based on race, but might also be made in terms of the pandemic. We have to change how we teach CS this year.

The series has several inspirations, but the concrete one that I want to reference back to each week is the statement from the University of Maryland’s CS department:

Creating a task force within the Education Committee for a full review of the computer science curriculum to ensure that classes are structured such that students starting out with less computing background can succeed, as well as reorienting the department teaching culture towards a growth mindset

We as individual computing teachers make choices that influence whether students with less computing background can succeed. I often see choices being made that encourage the most capable students, but at the cost of the least prepared students. Part of this is because we see ourselves as preparing students for top software engineering jobs. The questions that get asked on technical interviews explicitly drive how many CS departments teach algorithms and theory. We want to encourage “excellence.” But whose excellence do we care about? Is Silicon Valley entrepreneurial perspectives the only ones that matter? The goal of “becoming a great software engineer” does not consider alternative endpoints for computing education (see post here). Not all our students want those kinds of jobs. Many of our students are much more interested in giving back to their community, rather than take the Silicon Valley jobs that our programs aim for (see post here).

Please don’t teach students as if they are you. First, you (as a CS teacher, as someone who reads this blog) are wildly different than our normal student. Second, your memories of how you learned and what worked for you are likely wrong. Humans are terrible at reconstructing how their memory was at a prior time and what led to their learning. That’s why we need research.

In this post, I will identify four of the methods that are differential, that advantage the students with less computing background — there are many more:

• Use Peer Instruction
• Explain connection to community values
• Use Parsons Problems
• Use subgoal labeling
  

Use Peer Instruction

When I talk to computer science teachers about peer instruction and how powerful it is for learning, the most common response is, “Oh, we already do that.” When I press them, they tell me that they “have class discussions” or “use undergraduate teaching assistants.” Nope, that’s not peer instruction.

Peer instruction (PI) is a technical term meaning a very specific protocol. Digital Promise and UTeach are creating a set of CS teaching micro credentials, and the one that they have on PI defines it well (see link here). PI is where the teacher poses a question for the class for individual responses, students discuss their answers, students respond again, and the teacher reveals the answer and explains the answer. The evidence suggesting that PI really works is overwhelming, and it can be used in any CS class — see http://peerinstruction4cs.com/ for more information on how to do it. I use it regularly in Senior-level undergraduate courses and graduate courses. There are ways to do PI when teaching remotely, as I talked about in this post.

I’m highlighting PI because the evidence suggests that it has a differential impact (see study here). It doesn’t hurt the top students, but it reduces failure rate (measured in multiple CS courses) for students with less background (see paper here). That’s exactly what we’re looking for in this series — how do we improve the odds of success for students who are not in the most privileged groups.

Explain connection to community values

I blogged last year about a paper (see post here) that showed female, Black, Latino/Latina, and first-generation students take CS because they want to help society. These students often do not see a connection between what’s being taught in CS classes and what they want. That’s because we often teach to prepare students for top software engineering jobs — it’s a mismatch between our goals and their goals.

I don’t know if this is an issue in upper-level classes. Maybe students in upper-level classes have already figured out how CS connects to their goals and values. Or maybe we have already filtered out the CS students who care about community values by the upper-level and graduate courses.

CS can certainly be used to advance social goals and community values. Teach that. In every CS class, for everything you teach, explain concretely how this concept or skill could be used to advance social good, cultural relevance, and community values. If you can’t, ask yourself why you’re teaching this concept or skill. If it’s just to promote a Silicon Valley jobs program, consider dropping it. We are all revising our classes this summer for fall. It’s a good time to do this review and update.

Use Parsons Problems

Parsons problems (sometimes referred to as “mixed-up code problems”) are where students are given a programming problem, and given all the lines of code to solve the problem, but the lines are scrambled (I usually say “on refrigerator magnets”). The challenge is to assemble the correct program. My wife, Barbara Ericson, did her dissertation work (see post here) showing that Parsons problems were effective (led to the same learning as writing the programs from scratch or from debugging programs) and efficient (low time cost, low cognitive load). She also invented dynamically adaptive Parsons problems which are even better (for effectiveness and efficiency) than traditional Parsons problems.

Parsons problems work on-line, so they fit into remote teaching easily. I’ve been doing paper-based (and Canvas-based) Parsons for exams and quizzes for several years now (see post here). Parsons problems work great in lower-level classes. There is relatively little research on using them in upper-level and graduate courses — I suspect that they could be useful, if only to break up the all-coding-all-the-time framing of CS classes.

I’m highlighting Parsons problems for two reasons.

• First, they’re efficient. As Manuel noted (as I quoted in my Blog@CACM post), BIPOC students are much more likely to be time-stressed than more privileged students. I’m reading Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman which makes this point in more detail (see website). Our less-privileged students need us to find ways to teach them efficiently. This is going to be a particularly concern during a pandemic when students will have more time constraints, especially if they, or a relative, or someone they live becomes ill.
• Second, they are a more careful and finer-grained assessment tool (see this post). If you ask students with less ability to write a piece of code, you might get students who only get part of the code working, but you get little data from students who only knew how to write part of the code but get none of it working. Parsons problems help the students with less computing background to show what they do know, and to help the teacher figure out what they don’t know how to write yet.
  

Use subgoal labelling

Subgoal labelling is pretty amazing (see Wikipedia page). Even our first experiment with subgoal labelling for CS worked examples (see post here) has shown improvements in learning (measured immediately after instruction), retention (measured a week later), and transfer (student success on a new task without instruction). Since then, Lauren Margulieux, Briana Morrison, and Adrienne Decker have published a slew of great results.

The one that makes it on this list is their most recent finding (see post here). Subgoal labeling in an introductory computing course, compared to one not using subgoal labeling, led to reduced drop or failure rates. That’s a differential benefit. There was not a statistically significant improvement on learning (measured in terms of exam scores), but it kept the students most at risk of failing or dropping out in the course. That’s teaching to advantage the students with less background in computing. We don’t know if it works for upper-level or graduate classes — my hypothesis is that it would.

This is an almost direct match for my current experience. Although the study mostly covered my US colleagues and there is a considerable amount of additional entropy involved in my current role and timezone span, it is extremely accurate.

Longer hours and 30-minute meetings, in particular, have in fact become the new norm. And I found it highly amusing that my “Swiss cheese” analogy made the story.

What the piece doesn’t cover is the loss of productivity (and burnout) that comes from constant context-switching and the massive amount of synchronous “face time” we keep getting pulled in to on account of the novelty (and reassurance of having attention) that video calls provide.

Again, remote was great until everyone else joined in and turned it into an “Eternal September” of short video calls and calendar battleships.

This is one of those books (978 page PDF) that isn't intended to be read, but rather, browsed through to gain an appreciation for the art at the core of computing. Don't expect to understand it all (unless you're Daniel Lemire). It's the sort of book that says "The examples of assembler code are for the x86 and the AMD64 architecture. They should be simple enough to be understood by readers who know assembler for any CPU." But it's also full of useful tidbits, like "There are two types of right shifts: a logical and an arithmetical shift." And "Never ever delete the unoptimized version of some code fragment when introducing a streamlined one.Keep the original in the source." This is advice chip makers could have used.

Last summer developer Charlie Chapman launched Dark Noise, an ambient noise app for iPhone and iPad that’s packed with delightful design details and key system integrations. My initial review praised how Chapman was able to take an otherwise standard utility app and build a standout experience which, from day one, raised itself above a crowded market of competitors.

The main reasons I loved Dark Noise from the start had little to do with the app’s basic utility: playing ambient noise. The app has always had a good selection of noise options, but nothing in the sound department made it truly special to me. It was the other areas of the app experience, everything surrounding that basic utility of ambient noise playing, that was so great. Icon animations, buttery smooth panel transitions, haptic feedback, strong iPad support, alternate app icons, Shortcuts support, a customizable widget, and more all made for a compelling product.

One of my only disappointments with Dark Noise was the inability to mix different noises together. Each noise could only be played in isolation, never more than one at a time, which proved a disadvantage compared to other ambient noise apps I’d used that enabled mixing different noises to create a custom soundscape. I’m happy to say that Dark Noise 2, released today, adds this functionality at last.

In Dark Noise 2 not only can you mix different sounds to create custom noises, but there are also eight new sound options to choose from, iCloud sync has been added for syncing your favorite sounds and custom mixes, and there’s optimized support for the iPadOS cursor. It’s a big release that retains the design elegance Dark Noise has had from day one, but expands the app’s usefulness in key ways.

Sound Mixing

In any other app, adding a sound mixing feature could have been as bare-bones as letting you tap multiple sounds to cause them to play simultaneously. That would have been fine, but in fitting with the high bar set by the rest of the app, Chapman threw a lot of care and polish into Dark Noise’s sound mixing feature.

To get started creating a sound mix, simply tap the plus button in the top-right corner of the sound list. From here, you’re asked to set the mix’s name, add noises to it, and optionally customize its icon.

If there’s a limit to the number of sounds you can add to a custom mix, I haven’t been able to reach it yet in my testing, but I know you can add at least 10. You can even add multiple versions of the same sound for an interesting mix.

Creating a custom mix on iPad.

After each sound is added, you’ll see a volume slider accompanying it so you can tweak the levels of different noises to your liking. As you make various adjustments, there’s a play button at the bottom of the screen which enables quickly sampling the product of your work. You only need to hit play once, because after the mix kicks off you can make adjustments and have the sound update in real-time to your changes, whether you’re simply tweaking volume levels or adding or removing entire noises. The whole mix creation process is simple and intuitive.

When you’ve assembled the right collection of noises and sound levels for your mix, you can either save the mix and be done, or you can keep the creative juices flowing by customizing your mix’s icon. Every mix has a default icon auto-assigned, but if you tap the Edit button beneath that icon you can either upload a custom image or even a GIF to serve as the mix’s icon, or take one of Dark Noise’s existing icons as your foundation and tweak it with different colors to suit your preferences.

Images and GIFs are pulled directly from your Photos library, and GIFs in particular make great mix icons because they will animate when a mix is being played, just like any of the default noise icons in the app. If you want to use a built-in icon for your mix, you can choose from all the app’s options and change both the foreground and background colors to make it stand out from all other sounds in the noise list.

Saved mixes go into a new My Mixes section of the noise list, but you can also favorite them just like any other noise to send them to the top of the list. If you ever want to edit a custom mix, you can do so via the Edit button that appears when long-pressing or right-clicking the mix.

New Sounds

Dark Noise already had a great selection of sound options, but the new ones are nice additions:

• Rain on Tent
• Wind Chimes
• Windy Trees
• Seagulls
• Lake
• Ship Deck
• Flag
• Lullaby

Many of these became instant favorites upon my first use, and of course each includes a beautiful animated icon upon being played. While I never felt like Dark Noise was lacking in sound options before, I appreciate the expanded roster.

All the Rest

iPad cursor support. Before Dark Noise 2 you could still use a connected mouse or trackpad in the iPad version of the app, but nothing was optimized for that mode of input. Now, the cursor will snap to different interface elements like play/pause controls and buttons for AirPlay, sleep timers, and more. The heart glyph for favoriting sounds and the drag lines for rearranging favorites now subtly jump forward when you hover over them with the cursor too, which is a nice touch.

New app icons. Dark Noise already offered one of the most impressive arrays of alternate app icons, but it adds two more in this release: a skeuomorphic option inspired by macOS Big Sur’s new icon design and one that’s based on the artwork of Chapman’s own podcast, where he interviews indie developers: Launched.

There’s an icon for everyone.

iCloud sync. Until now Dark Noise didn’t have a syncing system in place for keeping data between iPhone and iPad versions up to date. This honestly wasn’t a real problem, because the only thing sync would have been useful for was having your favorited sounds stay the same on both devices. It didn’t take much work to manually re-favorite the same sounds on each platform.

With the addition of custom sound mixes, however, it’s more important than ever to have a sync system in place, so I’m glad to see that iCloud sync is now employed both for populating your mixes across multiple platforms as well as syncing your favorites list.

Dark Noise 2 is a fantastic update that retains the app’s fundamental design strengths while adding valuable new functionality via custom mixes and great new sounds. I love that mix creation is a full-featured, intuitive experience rather than something that was quickly thrown together – it fits well with the whole app’s design ethos.

Some 2.0 releases for apps are more radical, but Dark Noise didn’t need that kind of update; rather, this latest version retains the strong foundation of the original while building upon it to offer more of what users want. If you were already a Dark Noise user, you’ll love the app even more now, and if you weren’t, there’s never been a better time to try it.

Dark Noise is available on the App Store as a one-time purchase.

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The City of North Vancouver’s Council  unanimously approved their new Safe Mobility Strategy, joining the City of Surrey who approved their Safe Mobility Plan last year.

In North Vancouver there are about ten vehicular collisions a year that result in serious injury or fatality. The intent of the adoption of the plan is to embrace a safe systems approach to achieve Vision Zero where no lives are lost in using the City’s road system.

Guidance is already provided in the City of North Vancouver’s Community Plan that measures ease of mobility as a factor in a liveable city.

The City’s document in nine concise pages summarizes an overall approach to move to Vision Zero. They intend to accomplish this by a four pronged approach which will also impact work in all transportation and planning endeavours in the city.

The four factors are:

 1. Design safe streets
This means changing the design and features of City streets, intersections, and curb space to reduce the risk of conflict; and providing more space, separation and protection for the growing variety of ways people choose to travel.

2. Encourage safe speeds
We do this by promoting speeds that are appropriate for specific street or pathway types. This is achieved through lower speed limits and street design changes – like narrower streets, speed bumps, landscaping, and other treatments.

3. Promote safe behaviour
We will support the development of a range of community outreach and education campaigns, targeted enforcement, and new regulations to foster a culture of safe mobility.

4. Be evidence-based and accountable
This means prioritizing actions and interventions in the right areas by collecting more data; this will increase our understanding of safety issues on our streets. We will report back to the community regularly on our progress as we work to achieve our vision and goal for safe mobility.

The City of North Vancouver has made this document a foundation to the overall transportation plan which is currently being updated. You can take a look at the Safe Mobility Strategy as well as the presentation to Council here.

Images: DanJarvis&NYCParkingTicket.com

PT: One of Translink’s most valuable assets is its CEO, Kevin Desmond.  He was the needed leader after the appalling debacle of the BC Liberal’s imposed referendum, he led the agency to the best performance in North America, and he has an even bigger challenge in restoring confidence and ridership in the Covid era, current- and post-.  (It’s on the way; ridership is already up about 40 percent.)

Here’s his latest call to action (with my added emphasis in bold) in Linked-in here:

Kevin Desmond: COVID-19 has dimmed the vibrancy of urban centres across the globe and spurred some to question whether we are witnessing “the end of cities.”

The pandemic has disrupted our lives in so many ways that it’s hard to predict what tomorrow will bring, let alone which changes will become permanent. However, I firmly believe that cities will rise again – with a recovery driven by transit.

After all, cities have been at the heart of every prosperous society. We are, as Harvard economist Edward Glaeser puts it, “an urban species,” living off the fruits of collaboration that cities – and public transportation – provide.

But the pandemic is testing the key tenets of what makes cities and transit work, namely bringing people together. Public transport is facing a crisis unlike any other since the late-1940s. What then took place over two decades – an 80 per cent erosion in transit ridership, brought on by the rise of the personal car and suburbia – was realized in just two weeks earlier this year, as COVID-19 emerged. In response, public health measures have kept people safe, but have stunted transit.

As a society, we can’t afford to repeat the same mistakes and allow transit to whither.  Effective public transport is synonymous with equitable and sustainable urban development. Metro Vancouver was a leader on this front before the pandemic, with record-setting ridership that led North America. Notably, the sharpest increase in transit ridership was in communities outside the City of Vancouver.

Unfortunately, in the short-term, I believe the return of traffic congestion is inevitable. We have already witnessed a dramatic decline in transit ridership and a sharp rebound in traffic congestion. Early data show that driving in Metro Vancouver is already up by around four per cent compared to one year ago. I think we can all agree the future we don’t want is one with more congestion.

That’s why it’s critical that we rebuild public confidence in the safety of transit, through initiatives such as TransLink’s Safe Operating Action Plan and our recently launched Open Call for Innovation, focused on improving the cleanliness and safety of the system. Now is the time for our industry, worldwide and here in the Lower Mainland, to seek out and embrace innovations.

Looking beyond the immediate future, we need to contemplate whether the rapid societal changes initiated by this crisis, such as social distancing and tele-commuting, will persist. If so, that will have significant implications on transit ridership – a crucial consideration for TransLink, which depends heavily on fares for operating revenue.

We also need to ask: how might our urban landscapes change? Already we’ve seen cities reimagining their streetscapes to create more space for pedestrians, cyclists, and restaurants. Many of these changes could positively improve the livability and vibrancy of our cities I believe we need to consider how transit can complement these measures and contribute to this new urban experience.

Time will tell which changes will hold, but TransLink welcomes conversations on how our region can increase efficiency while balancing diverse priorities throughout the transportation system. Improving the livability of Metro Vancouver is central to our mission and drives our organization every day.

As we help the region Build Back Better, I believe the region’s values – which we learned about through our largest-ever engagement in Transport 2050 – will endure and help inform the decisions we need to make together. Transport 2050 will also help us navigate the next 30 years, with its inevitable population and economic growth, and face the trio of challenges presented by affordability, congestion, and climate change.

Now, more than ever, we need to keep our bold vision for the future alive and create a vision for sustainable transportation in 2050. We need to advance our plans to build high-capacity transit and capital projects, which create jobs and economic activity for our region. And we need to continue working with partners to ensure there is a plethora of mobility options for all people in the Lower Mainland.

The pandemic will bend our trajectory, but ultimately, we remain committed to the same bold vision for transportation. In the end, vibrant public transportation isn’t just a symbol for the comeback of cities, it’s not even a key ingredient. Transit is urban recovery.

This morning on Mastodon I asked:

If you were looking to write the perfect non-technical book on decentralisation, what would you include?

There were some great replies and I’m not going to do justice to them all here, but I want to summarise below some responses that I hope to return.

• Anarcho-syndicalism
• Autonomy
• Cash money
• Coercion and control
• The Commons
• Conformancy
• Consensus
• Deprogramming hierarchical thinking
• Economic networks
• Email vs Gmail
• Exploitation
• Fandom
• French Resistance
• Hierarchy
• Inequality
• Integrity
• Medical system
• Microwork
• Murmurations
• Murray Bookchin
• Networked agency
• Online Course for Self-Organising Teams
• Open 2020 videos
• Patterns for Decentralised Organising
• Platforming and deplatforming
• Resilience
• Security
• Sewage networks
• Shooting the Dog
• Solar power
• Suppression
• Sysadmins
• Trust
• Wind power
• Zines and tape culture

If I do get around to writing some or all of a book like this, I envisage it will have discrete, overlapping chapters like Anything You Want by Derek Sivers or 33 Myths of the System by Derek Allen. As a few people said, it’s probably best not to put ‘decentralisation’ in the title if it’s meant for a general audience.

My thanks to all who took the time to respond!

This post is Day 10 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

22 Principles for Great Product Managers

By Alex Reeve, a PM at LinkedIn. These are really strong - I particularly liked the "leading your team" section which emphasizes ensuring your team understand the goal and the path to reach it, and that you know what winning will look like and how to tell.

Via Hacker News

mkalus shared this story from bellingcat.

The city of Portland, Oregon is currently in the national spotlight after video evidence of federal agents driving rented vans and abducting activists went viral. This footage was taken in the early morning hours of July 15, and an Oregon Public Broadcasting article published on the 16th brought the matter out of the local social networks of Portland activists and on to the national stage. 

As I write this, mainstream media personalities are beginning to parachute into Portland to cover what some have dubbed the “fascist takeover of Portland”. The word “Gestapo” is trending on Twitter.

The abduction filmed on the 15th did not happen in a vacuum. As other local reporters have noted, it was the end result of more than six weeks of escalating state violence against largely nonviolent demonstrators. I have been in the streets of Portland documenting this movement since the very first riot. Before the national press unleashes a flood of new stories based on their first few hours in town, I’d like to explain what’s been happening:

State and Federal law enforcement are at war with the people of Portland.

The Beginning

Depending on who you ask, Portland’s fifty-plus nights of protests either started on May 27th, when an activist collective called the Youth Liberation Front occupied the steps of the Justice Center, or on May 29th, Portland’s first night of large scale protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The evening began with a large, peaceful rally at North Portland’s Peninsula Park. Several thousand citizens gathered there, and marched 4.1 miles to merge with the protesters occupying the steps of the Justice Center.

The Multnomah County Justice Center contains the Portland Police Bureau’s chief headquarters, as well as the city jail. The Youth Liberation Front, who describe themselves as “several packs of feral teens,” had occupied the steps of the Justice Center for a little less than three days at this point. They had been raided by the Police on the night of the 28th, but for the most part police presence was minimal in the days leading up to the 29th.

While several thousand citizens marched from Peninsula Park, a crowd of hundreds gathered at the Justice Center. There were no police in sight. At one point a black man on a Trike rolled up and started playing “It’s been a long, long time coming” by Sam Cooke. A dance party ensued:

Pretty high fucking mood here in Portland right now pic.twitter.com/KSWtYgzmMB

— Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) (@IwriteOK) May 30, 2020

At 10:35 p.m. local time, the crowd at the Justice Center marched off into the streets of downtown Portland and, several minutes later, met up with the crowd from Peninsula Park. Together, both groups marched back to the Justice Center and surrounded it.

#portlandprotest pic.twitter.com/ELK6kbwAqa

— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) May 30, 2020

At a little before 11 p.m., several dozen protesters began to shatter the windows of the Justice Center. They entered the building, trashing the interior and lighting random fires inside. I watched all this happen from feet away, and it is my opinion that the destruction was unplanned, yet more or less inevitable — you could feel it in the mood of the crowd. The 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis had just burned: there was absolutely no way Portland wasn’t going to try to do the same thing.

Of course, the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) arrived very shortly thereafter. In one of the more gentlemanly moments of the entire uprising, they gave a warning to people who’d brought their families and dogs, urging them to leave. A sizable chunk of more moderate demonstrators went home. A thousand or more protesters ranked up, and began shouting at the police. At a little after midnight, the PPB launched the first of what would eventually be hundreds of tear gas grenades into the crowd.

The crowd scattered, pushed by police in several different directions at once. They split into several groups. One rampaged through a series of downtown banks, shattering windows and lighting fires as they ran from the cops. Another, larger group of demonstrators tore through the luxury shopping district, sacking the Apple Store, Louis Vuitton, H&M and, eventually, looting a Target. The rest of the night was a messy haze of gas, flash-bangs, and burning barricades. 

The Portland Police have stated that more than a dozen riots took place over the last fifty days, but May 29th remains the only night that truly felt like the actual people of this city were rioting. 

A Very Bad Weekend

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler was out of town on what has become known as Riot Night. At 11:49 p.m., less than an hour into the rioting, he posted this angry tweet:

ENOUGH.

I had to leave Portland today because my mother is dying. I am with family to prepare for her final moments. This is hard, this is personal, but so is watching my city get destroyed.

I’m coming back NOW. You will be hearing from me, @PortlandPolice, community leaders.

— Mayor Ted Wheeler (@tedwheeler) May 30, 2020

Wheeler declared a state of emergency early the next morning and instituted an 8 p.m. curfew for the entire city. Well over a thousand protesters assembled the next day, Saturday, in front of the Justice Center. Starting at around 6:00 p.m., they occupied the intersection of 3rd and Main, which sits between the Justice Center and the Federal Courthouse. Police mostly held back behind the Justice Center until a little after 6:50, when a group of four activists sat down in the middle of the intersection of 2nd and Main. 

Police quickly shoved the demonstrators out of the intersection and then occupied it themselves, ensuring it was still just as closed to traffic as it had been when the protesters occupied it. Groups of protesters began to move in to confront the police and laid down in front of their riot line:

This situation very quickly turned violent. Police began by pulling people up from the ground and then pushing forward into the crowd behind them, shoving with their nightsticks until, at about 6:58 p.m., one hour before curfew, police started hitting people. The crowd retreated at first, but eventually formed up and halted, waving protest signs in the officers’ faces. Police swung several times at crowd members, driving them back, and eventually charged into the crowd with abandon, even striking at people who were on the ground. At one point an officer lost his baton and charged into the crowd, pummeling a demonstrator with his gloved fists.

Following this, the Portland Police ordered the crowd to step back from the road and into the parks. They then began launching tear gas, coating the parks and also dousing dozens of random motorists who had the misfortune to be anywhere within several blocks of downtown. 

Again, the demonstrations continued for hours. The crowd was eventually chased down to the waterfront and broken apart by a curtain of tear-gas. Thousands of Portlanders watched the day’s violence on livestreams by various journalists and came out the next day, Sunday the 31st of May, to register their displeasure. An enormous demonstration, between 7-10,000 people, rallied at Laurelhurst Park. 

By the time the crowd started marching they were all in violation of the curfew. But there were far, far too many people to arrest, and the Police kept their distance almost the entire march. They seemed to panic at one point, when the crowd began marching across the Burnside Bridge into downtown, towards the Justice Center. Several riot trucks, loaded down with officers, came roaring in to block the bridge. When they got a good look at the sheer size of the crowd, they turned back around.

The crowd eventually reached and surrounded the Justice Center. A tense, hours-long stand-off ensued. Activists demanded the police take off their riot gear, then amended that to asking them to take a knee. The police were unmoved. Eventually, the crowd thinned out enough that the PPB felt secure dispersing it. The evening ended with small groups of protesters running through the streets, pursued by officers hanging off the sides of riot trucks and shooting wildly at everyone they saw. It kind of sucked — I have no other words to describe it.

Robert got hit in the foot. And it’s now a civil disturbance AND an unlawful assembly! Upgrade! pic.twitter.com/uRLkcNuqDn

— 45th ןǝןןɐɹɐd ʇsıpɹnsqɐ ǝpɐbıɹq (@45thabsurdist) June 1, 2020

The Cycle of Violence

After that first terrible weekend, the situation in Portland began to stabilize into something predictable. On Monday, June 1st, a second mass rally, similar in size to the one on May 31st, assembled at Revolution Hall near the middle of the city. These people attempted to march to the Justice Center, but by that point the police had called in for an enormous chain-link fence, to wall it and the Federal Courthouse off from the rest of the city.

The protest on June 1st was distinctly different from anything that had come before. A new group of inexperienced activists took the wheel, and they placed great emphasis on talking with the police and avoiding any confrontation. In this they were successful, and the crowd marched across the Hawthorne bridge, toured downtown, and marched back to Revolution Hall with barely any sight of police officers. 

This would prove to be the beginning of a split within Oregon’s protest movement. On one end were more moderate liberal marchers, who sought to avoid conflict with the police while engaging in “peaceful protest.” On the other end were more radical demonstrators, who found the rally on June 1st to be pointless. After this night, the two parts of the movement grew further and further apart.

The more moderate demonstrators coalesced around a new organization called Rose City Justice, which continued to lead mass demonstrations for the next couple of weeks. Most of their marches followed the same basic pattern as the one on June 1st, although they also occupied chunks of highway on several occasions. They succeeded in avoiding conflict with the police, but their numbers rapidly dwindled. On June 30th, they announced an end to their nightly marches. 

Meanwhile, the more extreme members of the movement gravitated towards a series of nightly protests around the fence walling the Justice Center and Courthouse off from the rest of the city. Thanks to a joke I made during a livestream, they began calling it the “Sacred Fence.” It has a Twitter account now. 

The rallies at the fence were met with intense police violence from the very beginning. On June 2nd, after another mass rally by the group that became Rose City Justice, about a thousand activists peeled off and approached the fence. They demanded to be allowed to protest at the Justice Center, and were forced away from the fence by a barrage of police impact munitions and tear gas. 

The crowd reformed, repeatedly, and continued to march on the fence. The police eventually responded by an indiscriminate barrage of grenades, kettling the crowd on all sides with walls of tear gas. The amount of gas used was so overwhelming that a photograph of the resultant nightmare was used for a New York Magazine spread:

Portland, Oregon gets a two-page spread in New York Magazine. pic.twitter.com/EWnlC6ghJR

— Aaron Mesh (@AaronMesh) June 20, 2020

Again, large numbers of motorists stuck in traffic were tear gassed by the police, temporarily blinding a number of them and helping to spark eight lawsuits seeking to ban the use of tear gas by the PPB.  

“Tear Gas Tuesday,” as it came to be known, was also the very first night where Portland crowds were able to repeatedly reform after being gassed and dispersed by the police. As one activist told me after a particularly heavy bout of gassing, “It’s only really scary the first time. Then you get used to it.” The crowd at the Sacred Fence started to bring more traffic cones to douse gas canisters — they also brought umbrellas and shields to deflect impact munitions. They continued to march on the fence, prompting the police to reduce its size to just covering the area immediately around the Justice Center and Courthouse.

The nightly demonstrations took on a predictable cadence after this. Crowds would assemble around the fence and heckle the officers inside. On some nights, the police would choose to start firing impact munitions into the crowd, and eventually gassing them. On other nights, they would not. Every use of force was justified by the police due to the crowd throwing something over the fence: fireworks, water bottles, even a can of beans one time. And, apparently, a half-eaten Granny Smith apple.

More items recovered that were thrown at officers: Full beverage cans, bricks, bottles, rocks, food. pic.twitter.com/RTGILdcUKS

— Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) June 6, 2020

The Portland Police removed their fence on June 15th, as the nightly demonstrations at the Justice Center had faded down to just a few hundred individuals on a good night. The Justice Center protests became a regular outlet for activists, a place where someone could always go to have a confrontation with the police. As often as not, the nights there ended in violence.

Yet through the latter half of June and into early July, protesters began experimenting with different tactics. Some small groups of activists started destroying statues, starting with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington on June 14th and 18th. On June 25th, spurred on by the creation of the Seattle autonomous zone, several hundred Portland activists attempted to occupy the North Precinct before being forced out by tear gas and batons. At one point, Portland police broke the window of a protester’s car and pulled them out into a cloud of tear gas.

The police teargassing the streets of Portland and pulling people out of their vehicles into the gas. #Portlandprotest #blacklivesmatter   #PDXprotests #pdx #oregon #blm #acab #northprecinct #portland pic.twitter.com/FIswALdILG

— Garrison Davis (Teargas Proof) (@hungrybowtie) June 26, 2020

After being pushed out of the precinct, the crowd set an enormous dumpster fire, which they used to ward off a police advance for several minutes. 

For unclear reasons, a small group of activists moved over to the Mid-K Beauty Supply, which abuts the North Precinct, and set fire to the plywood covering its windows. This was a contentious decision and angered several members of the crowd. As the police advanced and began to fire tear gas, a larger group of activists beat the fire out before fleeing.

The next day, June 26th, a number of black community leaders in Portland issued a statement condemning the demonstration at the North Precinct. One of them, Pastor Dr. Steven Holt, called the fire at Mid-K Beauty Supply “a terrorist activity.” Together with Mayor Ted Wheeler, this group held a press conference in front of the burnt plywood façade of Mid-K.

As June ended, Portland protest culture settled into an odd rhythm. There were nightly gatherings at the Justice Center, which sometimes ended in police violence and sometimes ended in parties. Several times a week, new rallies at places like the North Precinct or the Portland Police Association headquarters would occur. These were often heavily promoted by the anti-fascist group Youth Liberation Front, who are probably the strongest consistent voice for Portland’s radical protest scene. On any given day, Portlanders could generally find some sort of peaceful rally or, if they choose, wind up in a skirmish with the PPB. 

The Battle in the Courts  

On June 11th, a federal judge in Portland issued a two-week restraining order on the use of tear gas. This was a partial granting of the request of a local activist group, Don’t Shoot Portland. Under the terms of the “ban,” Portland police were only able to use gas as a “life-saving measure.” This ban came with a loophole, however. Riots are assumed to be life-threatening situations, and so the PPB increasingly started making riot declarations to justify their use of tear gas. 

In one five-day period, from June 30th to July 4th, the PPB declared three riots. The justifications for this were often questionable. For example: the rally on June 30th was a march of about three hundred people that ended at the Portland Police Association headquarters. The PPA is Portland’s local police union. It is a private entity, but the city seems to deploy significant resources to protect it.

By the time the marchers arrived at the PPA building in North Portland, it was surrounded by a riot line, with numerous police vehicles and riot troopers waiting in reserve. The state troopers who guarded the front of the building wore no identifying numbers or name tags. Within minutes of the crowd’s arrival, the police declared an unlawful assembly and demanded the crowd disperse. They justified this by citing “criminal activity” in the crowd, but what that meant was unclear. 

Within an hour, and with no clear justification, the PPB declared a riot and began firing tear gas into both the crowd and the neighborhood around them. Local residents were kept out of their homes, and some wound up stuck outside their houses and apartments in the gas cloud.

A few weeks later, on July 14th, a second march again formed up around the Portland Police Association headquarters. On this occasion the riot declaration was made after a police officer slapped the phone out of an activists hand and sent it careening into the window of the PPA building. It broke a window, which the PPB used as justification to declare a riot and deploy tear gas.

So here's the video, from TeebsGaming on https://t.co/DafGnlPdl3 , of an officer smacking the phone from a protester's hand into the window of the PPA building. And the broken window is what they then used as their reason to declare a 'riot' and gas people. #PortlandProtest pic.twitter.com/x8iqQMFvTx

— KBOO Community Radio (@KBOO) July 14, 2020

Portland Police have also been taken to court for their treatment of local journalists. They have regularly targeted press during demonstrations, with the worst night so far being the first protest at the Portland Police Association. Three reporters were arrested within the span of a few minutes: Cory Elia, Lesley McLam and Justin Yau. 

Video taken by Elia shows that his encounter started when he walked past an officer he recognized, John Bartlett, and mentioned his name while livestreaming. Officer Bartlett knocked Elia’s phone out of his hands. Several minutes later, a group of officers grabbed Elia, tossed him to the ground and arrested him. He was charged with two counts of assaulting a police officer.

I filmed Elia’s arrest and saw no sign of any resistance. You can judge for yourself here.

Justin Yau was arrested the same night for filming an arrest himself. He was also charged with felony riot. Lesley McLam also initially faced felony charges, but the District Attorney rejected these charges. These arrests came after weeks in which Portland police assaulted a number of local journalists. Sergio Olmos was shoved repeatedly by police on the night of June 6th. Cory Elia was thrown into a wall and kicked while on the ground the same night. Reporter Donovan Farley was assaulted on June 7th while attempting to film an arrest. Officers beat him on the legs with truncheons and maced him as he tried to leave.

On July 2nd, less than 48 hours after the march on the PPA building, U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon issued a temporary restraining order against the city, banning police from arresting or using force on anyone they “know or reasonably should know” was a journalist or legal observer. Two weeks later, on July 16th, Portland Police arrested local reporter Andrew Jankowski while he was covering a demonstration. 

At this point, most of the Portland press corps, including myself, are actively suing the Portland Police Bureau. The federal injunction does seem to have moderated their behavior, but at the end of the day the level of the anger of individual officers seems to be the only real factor that determines whether or not a journalist spends the night in jail. 

The Edge of All-Out War 

On July 4th, Portland’s thirty-ninth consecutive night of protests, more than a thousand people assembled in front of the Justice Center and Federal Courthouse downtown. They began launching dozens of commercial-grade fireworks into the concrete facades of both buildings, prompting a response from the police and federal agents inside both buildings. 

What followed resembled nothing so much as a medieval siege. The windows of both government buildings had been covered in plywood weeks ago, after the first riots. Officers inside fired out through murder holes cut in the plywood, pumping rubber bullets, pepper balls and foam rounds into the crowd, while the crowd formed phalanxes of shield-bearers to protect the men and women launching fireworks back in response. Federal agents dumped tear gas into the street, but Portland’s frontline activists had long since lost their fear of gas. The feds and the police were eventually forced to sally out with batons to drive the crowd back. 

I reported on the fighting in Mosul back in 2017, and what happened that night in the streets of Portland was, of course, not nearly as brutal or dangerous as actual combat. Yet it was about as close as you can get without using live ammunition. At times, dozens of flash-bangs and fireworks would detonate within feet of us over the course of a few minutes. My ears rang for days afterwards. My hands shook. I could not write for days.

The whole situation prompted the first major federal response to Portland’s nightly protests. It started in the media, with CBP commissioner Mark Morgan going on Fox News to denounce local activists as “criminals.” 

“These are not protesters, these are criminals, who got together and actually brought weapons, they brought shields, they brought frozen water bottles, rocks, lasers, weapons with the intent to destroy a federal building and harm law enforcement officers.”

I take some issue with this, because there was never any real chance of either the Federal Courthouse or the Justice Center being seriously damaged by fireworks. Both buildings are, at this stage in the protests, essentially fortresses. Before federal agents opened fire, activists in the park actually seemed much more interested in shooting fireworks at the Justice Center, to provide a show for their friends incarcerated inside.

A prisoner inside the Justice Center began waving out at the crowd, and there was much rejoicing. pic.twitter.com/Esvm37oMHN

— Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) (@IwriteOK) July 5, 2020

I also take issue with the next thing Mark Morgan said:

“One of the criminals, that were actually trying to assault one of the CBP employees while he was being arrested, the report right now is that a pipe bomb- a fused incendiary device and a machete was actually discovered during that search. Think about that… Think about the deadly consequences from these criminal actions.”

This is rather interesting, because the Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security actually posted a picture of this “pipe bomb”:

You may notice that this “bomb” has no hole for a fuse. When I showed this to activists on the street, most of them suggested this was probably a device for breaking windows. That seems very likely now that we have the charging document from that weekend. The man with the machete is Andrew Faulkner. He is charged with assaulting a federal officer by shining a laser pointer at their face. Neither he, nor any other Portland protester, have faced any charges related to the possession of a pipe bomb. 

Mark Morgan referred to this device, and the other “weapons” of these protesters, as deadly. However, so far, the only person who came close to dying as a result of these demonstrations is Donovan LaBella. On Saturday, July 11th, LaBella attended one of the nightly rallies in front of the Justice Center. People who were in attendance at the time described the general mood as subdued, and the crowd as passive, when Federal Agents with the U.S. Marshals began charging out to arrest and shoot protesters. 

In the video below, Donovan can be seen holding a set of speakers above his head. Federal agents fire a munition towards him, and he gently tosses it away. He does not throw the munition towards officers, merely away from himself. After this, a federal agent shoots him directly in his skull with a rubber bullet. Donovan collapses instantly, his skull shattered.

The officers have a shot someone in the head with what appears to be an impact munition, there is a lot of blood. #blacklivesmatter   #pdx #portlandoregon #oregon #blm #acab #portland #justicecenter pic.twitter.com/8JmR3QA0AN

— Garrison Davis (Teargas Proof) (@hungrybowtie) July 12, 2020

Use of force experts interviewed by Oregon Live say the agent likely did not intend to hit Donovan in the head, “since the risk of serious injury is high.” Sid Heal, a retired Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department commander, stated: “In this particular case, there is no rational way to say that deadly force was authorized.” On July 18th, the New York Times reported on a leaked DHS memo which warned that the agents deployed to Portland had no training in riot control or managing protests. 

On July 10th, one day before Donovan was shot, President Donald Trump had congratulated the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, for crushing the protest movement in Portland. At a meeting of military commanders in Doral, Florida he praised Wolf by stating: “It was out of control. The locals couldn’t handle it, and you people are handling it very nicely — so nicely that the press doesn’t want to write about it.”  

Yet of course the protests and riots have continued, even after LaBella’s brutal maiming. As I type this, hundreds of Portlanders are engaged in a series of pitched skirmishes with federal agents and police officers, just as they have been most nights since the end of May. As federal forces have failed to contain the unrest, the Trump Administration has turned up the heat on their rhetoric. Acting secretary Wolf visited Portland on the 16th. He called protesters “lawless anarchists.” In a statement issued the same day, he wrote that:

“A federal courthouse is a symbol of justice — to attack it is to attack America. Instead of addressing violent criminals in their communities, local and state leaders are instead focusing on placing blame on law enforcement and requesting fewer officers in their community. This failed response has only emboldened the violent mob as it escalates violence day after day.”

This is untrue. Virtually all crime, including violent crime, has been lower in the city of Portland during the last several weeks. The Acting Secretary’s statement was filled with a number of other inaccuracies as well. The bulk of the letter is a dated list of all the alleged crimes committed by Portland protesters, who are generally referred to as “violent anarchists”. Under the heading for 07/05/2020:

This is certainly very sneaky. By stating it “appears” to be a pipe bomb the statement avoids addressing the fact that no actual pipe bomb has ever been found and no one has been charged for possession of one. Despite the Acting Secretary Wolf’s claims that these demonstrators are intensely violent, the vast majority of the crimes he attributes to them are simple acts of vandalism:

Perhaps this will change as the protests continue. But thus far, the only escalation seen recently has been the federal agents now roaming the streets of downtown Portland in rented vans, arresting activists seemingly at random. These men display no identification, no name tag or badge number or anything else that might be useful identifying them. That fact has rightly shocked Americans across the country, but at this point, it is nothing new to Portland protesters. 

Portland Police have been hiding their names for weeks, instead using numbers that cannot be correlated to names by any means available to citizens. Members of multiple different law enforcement agencies, all with different rules of engagement from the PPB, have been policing demonstrations since the very beginning. As Tuck Woodstock, a local reporter, noted on Twitter:

“This is the natural escalation of the last 7 weeks. This is what has come of Portlanders protesting police brutality for 50 days: more bizarre acts of police brutality. Portlanders are risking everything every day. Please notice.”

That is, in the end, what both the Portland press corps and the people out in the streets, protesting every night, seem to want from the rest of the United States. Please pay attention to the videos of officers ripping people’s face masks off to spray mace directly into their mouths. Please pay attention to the video of Donovan LaBella, blood gushing from his head, seizing on the ground. And, yes, please pay attention to the videos of men in full combat gear abducting activists off the street.

Pay attention, because it is my belief that all of this will not stay confined to Portland. Your city might be next.

The post What You Need To Know About The Battle of Portland appeared first on bellingcat.

illustratedvancouver:

I recently was alerted by a friend regarding this painting that was up for auction nearby. While its quaint amateurism and whimsical perspective first struck me, I was compelled to get it. It turns out the artist, Amy Lawrence, was 76 years old when she painted this in 1967, Canada’s Centennial year. I didn’t realize the size of the work at first; it is quite large at 24 x 30”. Looking closely, you can see a BCER bus crossing the bridge mid-span, along with an assortment of cars from the 1950s and 1960s.

The following year, Amy Lawrence had nine paintings featured at the Surrey Centennial Arts Centre in Bear Creek Park as it was called then. It’s possible this painting may have even been one of the nine exhibited. Below is the full text from the article in the Surrey Leader, November 28, 1968:

Mrs. Amy Lawrence is shown hard at work in her White Rock home. Mrs. Lawrence has nine beautiful examples of her work presently on exhibit at the Surrey Centennial Arts Centre in Bear Creek Park.

Self-Taught Artist Very Busy at 77

Mrs. Amy Lawrence of 1431 Blackwood Street, White Rock finds she must paint. The desire is like a flame within her and she cannot resist the urge.
This artist is currently exhibiting nine of her beautiful oil paintings at the Surrey Fine Arts Centre at Bear Creek Park. The exhibit will continue throughout this month.
“As long as I can remember I have always been able to paint,” states Mrs. Lawrence. “I have always been trying to express myself on canvas. It has been a driving force within me.”
She reports she has never had any formal training in the field of art, but has never lacked pure determination.
Raised in Derbyshire, England, she attended the Clay Cross Science School for three years and later followed her brother out to Canada and together they purchased a half section of land near Unity, Sask. Mrs. Lawrence taught school while her brother worked the farm.
Following her marriage she settled on a 960 acre farm at Unity and settled down to cooking for hungry hired men and raising her two daughters.
Long winter evenings were spent directing plays in which Mrs. Lawrence had cast all the would-be university students prohibited from attending university because of lack of funds. She insisted on each thespian taking a winter course by correspondence to supplement their credits.
Mrs. Lawrence looks back with pride on the achievements realized by the small group of dedicated workers in the town of Unity who refused to accept defeat, despite the depression and whose persistence in organizing a high school in the area resulted in many of the town’s youth going on to complete their university and nurse’s training.
Her own two daughters, Dorothy and Margaret, went on to specialize in poultry nutrition and adult education.
Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence retired to Hazelmere and from her window she enjoyed an uninterrupted view of the Campbell River Valley with Mt. Baker beyond.
Her interpretation of this peaceful scene, depicted in beautiful oils, hangs today in the Peace Arch District Hospital, the gift to the hospital from the Hazelmere’s Women’s Institute.
A number of Mrs. Lawrence’s paintings hang in the White Rock Medical Centre. Each day she retreats to her studio on the lower floor of her home where she paints with detail of unusual depth, creating landscapes which continue to bring nature’s wonders to canvass in lifelike detail.
At 77 Amy Lawrence is a challenge to all who know her.

Spot the BCER bus crossing the Lions Gate Bridge!

If you pick up a print edition of the Sunday New York Times today you’ll see the Corner Office interview with David Gelles in the business section.

A quote that seems to be resonating with people,

This column is called Corner Office, and most people who choose to have offices are usually the bosses. And I’ve been to the offices of billionaire C.E.O.s that have their own private bathroom, beautiful art and couches. But these are all things that you can have in your house. What I love about distributed organizations is every single employee can have a corner office.

Sometimes my corner office has been the corner of an airport floor next to a power outlet! I’ve also heard from colleagues that feel like their office feels like an unsupervised day care center since the quarantine started. The point I want to make is there’s a world of possibility that opens up when you move from the finite space of a shared office, and all the politics of dividing up the scarce resource of desirable space, to the infinite game where people can define their own “office” as the place where they will be most productive, and do so however they like with no penalties or restraints.

If you had the best space in the legacy office, you probably liked it and may even have had motivated reasoning around ineffable things that happened in the office like “culture” that would be impossible without it, but the average experience of an entry-level worker was not as positive. Now there can be a much more even playing field. At Automattic we have a home office allowance people can use to buy equipment they need to make their home work area comfortable and productive, and it’s the same if you’re leading a team of hundreds or if it’s your first job.

If you’d like to hear the entire conversation they’ve posted the original audio and interview that was distilled into the print version.

Marc Levoy, the researcher responsible for the excellent camera used in the Google Pixel phones, has joined Adobe.

According to The Verge, Adobe says Levoy will build a ‘universal camera app.’

It’s not immediately clear what this means — The Verge suggested it could refer to an app platform that companies like Facebook or Snapchat could leverage to make their camera apps. Alternatively, it could refer to an app or software that works across say, a smartphone camera and DSLR. Adobe wasn’t able to define the term for The Verge.

Levoy will work on computational photography initiatives across Adobe. Adobe told The Verge that Levoy would work with the Photoshop Camera, Adobe Research and Sensei AI teams in an email statement.

Before Adobe, Levoy headed the team behind the Pixel smartphones’ computational photography technology. Features like Night Sight, Portrait Mode and HDR+ came out of that team. Levoy also helped the Pixels take great photos without as much hardware as the competition. For example, the Pixel line didn’t add a second telephoto zoom lens until the Pixel 4 last year, while the iPhone 7 Plus from 2016 was Apple’s first phone to include a second camera.

Levoy left Google in March 2020 after working there for six years. Before joining Google full time, Levoy worked on the camera in the Google Glass Explorer Edition. Levoy also launched a Google-funded research project at Stanford in 2002 that eventually became Google Map’s Street View.

Source: The Verge

The post Former Googler Marc Levoy joins Adobe to work on universal camera app appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Security researchers found a way to manipulate fast charger firmware to cause damage to connected devices.

China-based research lab Xuanwu Lab detailed the technique, dubbed BadPower, in a recent report. Xuanwu is part of Chinese tech giant Tencent.

BadPower works by corrupting the firmware of fast charger bricks. The firmware in these bricks communicates with connected devices like smartphones to determine the correct amount of power to deliver to the device. For example, a phone that can’t accept a fast charge would default to the standard 5V output, while phones with fast charging capabilities would receive 12V, 20V or higher.

According to the researchers, BadPower alters the default charging parameters and delivers more voltage than the receiving device can handle. Increased voltage like this can degrade and damage the receiver’s components, leading to excessive heat, bending, melting or even a fire.

Worse, BadPower acts silently and quickly. An attacker would only need to connect their attack rig to the fast charger, wait a few seconds to modify the firmware, and leave. Researchers say they can apply BadPower to some chargers without special equipment. Instead, they can apply the code to a regular smartphone or laptop. When the user plugs in that device, the malicious code enters the charger’s firmware and applies BadPower. The charger will then overload any connected devices.

The damage caused by such an attack can vary depending on the fast charger, its capabilities, and the device and its protections.

Xuanwu says it verified BadPower works in practice and tested 35 fast chargers from the over 234 models available. The researchers found 18 models from eight vendors were vulnerable to BadPower.

Thankfully, the researchers say manufacturers can fix most BadPower vulnerabilities by updating the firmware on fast charger chips. Unfortunately, the 18 impacted models Xuanwu tested came from vendors that didn’t include an update option. In other words, manufacturers can’t update those charger models.

Xuanwu researchers notified all impacted vendors, as well as the Chinese National Vulnerabilities Database (CNVD). Further, the researchers recommend fixing the problem by hardening firmware to prevent unauthorized modifications while also deploying overload protection to charged devices.

The report includes a video demonstrating a BadPower attack, but the video cannot be embedded here. Those interested can find it at the bottom of the report.

Source: Xuanwu Via: ZDNet

The post BadPower attack corrupts fast charger firmware, overloads smartphones appeared first on MobileSyrup.

On the Amazon product description for the Powerextra 120 Inch Projector Screen:

Tips: pure white wall may work better than the screen, it’s recommended to use when don’t have pure white wall or in outdoors, please turn off the light when use it.

Kudos for telling the truth.

Stephen Rees has posted a comment:

Roland Tanglao But when I bought it the second time I honestly did not know that I had bought it before. Sorry, but it's an age thing. My brain is a bit like a hard drive that is full and can only overwrite recent stuff.

It is certainly a brewery that is worth supporting, and it is quite a decent drink. But I doubt that at 7.5% alcohol it would have survived being shipped from London to St Petersburg in the days before steam ships - which is why "Imperial Russian" was developed originally.

John Lewis, 1940 - 2020

Good trouble

Feb 20th at the Louvre in Paris

😱 In late February, Katerina and I went to Paris for a quick trip to celebrate her birthday and to catch the da Vinci exhibit at the Louvre before it closed. We were starting to try to social distance for most of the trip, but the Louvre was packed and both of us weren’t really comfortable. Looking back at the pictures I took of the crowded hall makes me downright nervous now.

🛳 In six weeks, Scott Galloway writes, the equivalent of over 2800 cruise ships with whiteboards and a young population will set sail in the middle of a raging pandemic. I have to say, if my kid was college age, I’d be doing everything in my power to encourage them to stay home this year.

🚀 We often talk about product market fit for startups as a binary thing. Either you have it or you don’t. But that’s not quite right. Richard Purcell argues that the right question to ask is “What’s the strength of a company’s product market fit?”

🛫 British Airlines is the latest airline to completely retire the 747 from their fleet, moving up the planned retirement date from 2024 due to economic effects of COVID-19.

🔌 Volkswagen has stopped producing internal combustion vehicles at one of its biggest factories in Germany and is retooling it for electric vehicle production. They’re really trying to put dieselgate in the rear view mirror, aren’t they?

Forecast CoVid-19 death curve for British Columbia. Sources: Historical data: BC CDC; 270 additional excess deaths probably attributable to CoVid-19 in March & April per Statistics Canada; Forecast per UW/IHME as at July 14; they assume the next complete shutdown in BC to occur around October 15, as deaths begin to surge, but too late to prevent the curve above.

I went to do a bit of food shopping today, and it was an astonishing, and educational experience. I live in a very small (3,800 people) but spread-out community, and we in BC have been particularly blessed with an extremely low rate of CoVid-19 infections and deaths, due principally to good luck, but also due to our relative isolation, the extraordinary competence of our provincial epidemic health leadership under Bonnie Henry, and Canadians’ seeming natural propensity to follow the rules in times of crisis.

All food businesses in our community have clearly posted and physically marked-out CoVid-19 rules: Marks on the floor and outside walkways to delimit 6′ separation while waiting in line, capacity limits, separate entrance and exit doors, and, usually, antiseptic wash at the entrance.

There was no outside lineup in this particular business, so I walked in and took a spot in the inside demarcated line waiting to order. Between me and the person ahead of me in line was a small throng: three parents apparently from two families, two local police officers, the owner of the establishment, and, running around among them, five children. They were laughing and telling stories (it’s a small community, and most people know each other). They were, absolute maximum, three feet apart. Indoors. No masks. The kids were brushing by customers, running in and out of the doors.

I thought I’d been somehow horrifically transported to Florida. Surely this wouldn’t be happening here? The group’s conversation lasted at least five minutes before the business owner, still unmasked, returned to the kitchen. When the parents and officers continued to chat and block the way forward in the line, oblivious, I gave up and, walking carefully around them, gave up and exited.

I went to another food establishment a short distance away. An employee, masked and washing surfaces around the store entrance, told me I’d have to wait since the posted maximum number of people were already inside; I did so gratefully. When I did get in, everyone I saw in the store wore a mask and carefully avoided encroaching on 6′ space around other customers and employees. The counter was thoroughly sprayed and wiped down before I was permitted to place my items on it. At no time was I within 6′ of anyone in the store. I thanked them for their concern for public safety and for their diligence.

Many customers frequent both establishments, so how was I to account for the utterly different experience I had in them, mere minutes apart?

I’m not a fan of blaming and shaming — in my experience it usually backfires, and my community is small enough that the repercussions to all parties could easily blow out of control (I’ve seen this in other situations where residents of our community seem overly hasty to rush to judgement and take “sides”, without any concern for the facts).

And I’m sure my community is not unusual, even here in cautious BC. I just want to understand why the clearly communicated (every day!) simple advice of health experts is being ignored. Because the potential consequences are tragic. Spending time indoors with people not in your bubble/pod, without social distancing, and without masks, is, I am told, statistically as dangerous as driving drunk. We don’t tolerate drunk driving, so why do we tolerate this? It gives the lie to arguments that recent surges in cases are due to “frat boys having Coronavirus parties” — this has very quickly become endemic behaviour in the communities of just about everyone I know.

IHME at the University of Washington has recently revised its death predictions based on expected changes in social distancing and mask behaviours. The chart above shows what it now predicts for British Columbia. When I first saw the projected surge this fall I was incredulous — new cases and deaths are so low here that other jurisdictions are studying our success. But now I understand: With fewer than 1% of BC residents exposed to CoVid-19 to date (lower than just about anywhere else with a major metropolitan city), and the kind of reckless behaviour I witnessed today (and it’s not the first time I’ve seen it, though it is the first time I’ve seen business owners and police officers contributing to the problem), not only is a fall surge in deaths here possible, statistically it’s more or less certain. We, and other jurisdictions that have so far been mostly spared, are almost inevitably going to allow the levels of infection that are now hitting Florida, Texas, Arizona and Southern California, enough to bring per capita hospitalizations (already happening there) and potentially per capita deaths, up to the levels seen in New York, Québec and other hard-hit areas.

It’s discouraging, when we now know full well the consequences of our behaviour, that we seem to be knowingly sleepwalking into extending this pandemic for months and possibly years until/unless a safe, affordable, and effective vaccine can be introduced.

So what’s going on here? What is causing normally reasonable, intelligent people to act this way, when they certainly wouldn’t drive drunk, wouldn’t play Russian roulette with strangers, and wouldn’t, as one friend of mine put it “knowingly engage in a form of mindless collective mob violence with potentially catastrophic consequences for all around them”? It’s not as if their livelihoods depend on them putting themselves and others at risk.

The answer, in a word, is complacency. Or if you want two words, human nature. These are the main factors that, IMO, are at work creating this seemingly inevitable disaster:

1. We’re suckers for mimicking others’ behaviour — our peers’, not our politicians’. The weaker the ego, the more likely we are to do what everyone else is doing and feel awkward or ridiculous for doing anything else. That worked in our favour during the first peak. It’s working against us now, and the trend is worsening. Even rats, it appears, take cues from ‘bystanders’ and won’t ‘get involved’ (they are, like all mammals, usually very altruistic) if others nearby seem indifferent to a situation needing action.
2. We want to believe things are better than they really are (just look at prevailing attitudes on climate change, systemic racism, or any other crisis), and that they are at least slowly improving — the unquenchable myth of progress. So we systematically and subconsciously filter out the worst news and predictions on CoVid-19, and believe those all-too-willing (like the governor of Georgia, whose mental illness seems likely to cause thousands of unnecessary deaths and unimaginable long-term health consequences) to tell us that things are fine, instead of the truth.
3. We believe what we see more than what we hear or read. If we see overcrowded hospitals and ambulances in our communities, we’re far more likely to take precautions and believe the threat is severe, than if we just hear or read data. A single story has more effect on what we believe and do than a mountain of information. We have simply not seen enough horror stories here in BC to offset our tendency towards complacency.
4. We believe that it’s the responsibility of others, with more perceived power and resources than we have, to solve our non-personal problems. It’s so easy to believe our personal actions don’t make a difference, while governments’ and corporations’ actions could somehow make all the difference (someone must be in charge, just as someone with power must be to blame when things go wrong). It’s easy, and we want things to be easy.

It’s kind of sad to observe that we seem incapable of learning from others’ mistakes, at least unless we see them first hand. So we seem destined to repeat them. So that means another thousand or two British Columbians will needlessly die. And another 100,000 or more Americans. And another two million or more worldwide.

We may be getting a foretaste of humans’ incapacity to prepare for, or work to mitigate, crises of other kinds, most notably our imminent economic, climate and ecological collapse. Many have already drawn “hockey stick” curves showing these crises growing exponentially. We may believe that these crises do indeed loom large, but we’re not, by our nature, prepared to sacrifice much of anything we value to address them, at least until we know from direct experience and beyond all doubt that we have no other choice.

So no shame, no blame. Like rats in a maze we are just doing what creatures of our species do to deal with the needs of the moment. I can’t help but be outraged at what that leads to, and what it means for our future. But it is a pointless, futile outrage. We are wise, we homo sapiens, and capable of incredible invention, but we are also foolish, hopelessly incapable of dealing with what we have, in our blink of time on this planet, magnificently, astonishingly, and tragically wrought.

Cloudflare provides a few services which a lot of the web relies upon. The ones I have been using are free, namely…

1. Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end users.

Wikipedia

In other words, a CDN speeds up your site for users, protects you site if it suddenly becomes popular, and can notify you if your site is down.

Cloudflare was down yesterday for a time, and it made me realise that I don’t really need it for my sites. So I removed it.

2. DNS resolution

A DNS resolver, also known as a resolver, is a server on the Internet that converts domain names into IP addresses.

When you use the Internet, every time you connect to a website using its domain name (such as “computerhope.com”), your computer needs to know that website’s IP address (a unique series of numbers). So your computer contacts a DNS resolver, and gets the current IP address of computerhope.com.

[…]

The DNS resolver contacted by your computer is usually chosen by your ISP (Internet service provider). However, you can configure your network to use a different DNS provider, if you choose. This configuration can be modified in your operating system’s network settings, or in the administration interface of your home network router.

Computer Hope

Although I have an awesome, trustworthy ISP, I’ve used a DNS resolver for years. Recently I switched from using Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 service locally on my machines, to using 1.1.1.1 for families on our home router. This blocks both malware and adult content.

I’m going to keep using Cloudflare’s DNS resolver for now as it’s useful, fast, and it’s clear that they make their money from upselling to their VPN services.

This post is day nine of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

Tempering Expectations for GPT-3 and OpenAI’s API

Insightful commentary on GPT-3 (which is producing some ridiculously cool demos at the moment thanks to the invite-only OpenAI API) from Max Woolf.