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Author Archive

Links for August 2016

Tuesday, July 19th, 2016

Roland Fryer is wrong: There is racial bias in shootings by police
Hillary Clinton ‘scandals’ in perspective
Rundown of newer health fraud merchants

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
–Eugene Gendlin
1977 Time ‘Coming Ice Age’ cover is a hoax
Gary Johnson is Worse than Donald Trump (tax plan + party platform)
Libertarianism: Half-Baked Thought Experiment Cooked Up by Self-Entitled Pricks
Greenland sharks live to 400 years (272-512 yrs)
NGS sequencing machines, July 2016
NGS machine plot
Trump poll watcher voter intimidation effort runs afoul of 1982 court settlement banning RNC from voter intimidation (expires 2017 unless they get caught again)
How the Trumps Got Rich: The Trump fortune was built off theft — from workers, from the state, and from the commons. by Samuel Stein
the Primer movie explained , also youtube explanation

Links for July 2016

Monday, July 4th, 2016

Trump supporters profile in The New Yorker
Hillary Clinton Isn’t Getting Indicted. Here’s Why (ThinkProgress)
Low carb diets reduce insulin levels but do not increase metabolism rate

Links for June 2016

Wednesday, June 1st, 2016

Trump University was a scam. And so Trump is attacking the judge in two of the cases.
Illinois budget background
Similarities between Trump and Reagan: both disdainful of fasts, incurious, initially weakly supported by GOP establishment

Links for May 2016

Tuesday, May 17th, 2016

Review by Theda Skocpol of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer
Kevin Hall’s followup studies of the “Biggest Loser” dieters at +6 years, PDF
Why the Gold Standard is poor policy
List of Email to SMS Gateways
Technological Improvement Graphs
Economics of Karl Polanyi
Meet the Father of Modern Space Art, Chesley Bonestell
Military equip given to police departments

Links for April 2016

Monday, April 4th, 2016

Sex isn’t chromosomes: the story of a century of misconceptions about X & Y
Congressional Progressive Caucus’ Budget for Fiscal Year 2017
Laser Sonics model 8000, 150 W medical YAG laser system, pulsed or CW, which runs on three-phase 230 VAC
Disease heatmap showing the introduction of vaccines
New National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) five year plan still encourages nonsense
CDC uninterested in discussing how the Nepal UN mission to Haiti started a cholera epidemic

Links for March 2016

Sunday, March 6th, 2016

The Urgent Need to Save Orthodox Economists from their Crippling Myths by William Black

Our autopsies revealed a number of patterns that proved critical to our analysis, predictions, and policy prescriptions. For the sake of brevity I will not define here terms I have explained in hundreds of blogs, articles, and slides. As I noted, the blogger has heard me present and define the terms. First, we came to understand that the S&Ls were “control frauds.” Second, we found that “accounting” was the “weapon of choice” in finance – we were dealing with “accounting control frauds.” Third, we realized that accounting control fraud had become epidemic. Fourth, we realized that the control frauds were so numerous and concentrated (by asset type, commercial real estate loans (CRE) and geography) and growing so quickly that they were hyper-inflating regional real estate bubbles in the Southwest. Fifth, we identified the four “ingredients” of the fraud “recipe” for a lender. Sixth, we recognized that the CEOs running control frauds ran them for their personal benefit, by looting the S&L. Seventh, we recognized that firms following the fraud recipe were mathematically guaranteed to report record (albeit fictional) profits. Eighth, we realized the truth of the industry saying: “a rolling loan gathers no loss.” Ninth, we identified the recurrent scams by which S&L control frauds, individually and collectively, transmuted massive losses into fictional gains. Tenth, we realized that the CEOs running accounting control frauds were routinely able to suborn supposed “controls” by using the ability to hire, fire, and expand the engagement (in the case of outside auditors and counsel) to generate a “Gresham’s” dynamic (Akerlof 1970). Eleventh, we realized that the accounting control frauds had a great “tell” – they had to gut their underwriting and internal controls to follow the first two ingredients of the fraud recipe. Twelfth, we saw that the fraud recipe created an Achilles’ “heel” – the need for extreme growth, so we adopted a rule limiting growth.

Playmate figures graphed!
The Phenomenon of Man reviewed by Sir Peter Medawar
Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality by John Kessel

Links for Feb 2016

Tuesday, February 9th, 2016

Explaining what goes on in the world: in memory of Bob Fitch by Doug Henwood
Bob Fitch and New York history
5 Icelandic words you can’t translate
Vesen (veh-sen)
Skreppa (SCRAP-ah)
Nenna (NEN-ah)
Jæja (YI-yah)
Dugnaður (DOOG-na-thuhr)
JPL Visions of the Future posters
Dissent in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) (Justice Scalia, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist)
Scalia’s pro-creationism dissent.

GeneTac 1000 biochip scanner teardown

Saturday, January 30th, 2016

Picked up a GeneTac 1000, a biochip scanner. Here are teardown pictures:
Here is the unit:

Teardown pictures. The unit has a self-contained lamp module that plugs into the main controller unit (EG&G Optoelectronics, Model # 300mXT-04, lamp module LM-300MX). Can’t find much about it–looks to be a 300W lamp. The center of the unit has a CCD camera, a Nikon lens, and a big custom lens, and two sets of filters. The slide carousel is on the other side.

















Saving streaming audio on Linux

Saturday, January 30th, 2016

MONITOR=$(pactl list | egrep -A2 ‘^(\*\*\* )?Source #’ | grep ‘Name: .*\.monitor$’ | awk ‘{print $NF}’ | tail -n1)

goes to alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo.monitor on my system

LAMEOPTIONS=’ -s 44.1 –preset cbr 192′
FILENAME=foo.mp3

Record currently playing audio:
parec -d $MONITOR | lame $LAMEOPTIONS -r $FILENAME

Split into separate 1 hr files with a 3 sec overlap:
ffmpeg -ss 00:00:00 -t 01:00:03 -i foo.mp3 $1.01.mp3 -acodec copy
ffmpeg -ss 01:00:00 -t 01:00:03 -i foo.mp3 $1.02.mp3 -acodec copy

Commands from here

Links for Jan 2016

Tuesday, January 26th, 2016


The Former Dentist Uncovering Sugar’s Rotten Secrets by Francie Diep

University of California–San Francisco researcher Cristin Kearns dropped a promising career at the Kaiser Foundation to dig through sugar industry archives for a smoking gun. With help from the man who brought down Big Tobacco, she’s now proving that Big Sugar steered scientists away from looking at the ingredient’s harmful effects.

Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies: How the industry kept scientists from asking: Does sugar kill? by Gary Taubes and Cristin Kearns Couzens