Cavalcade of Mammals

On Ubuntu 12.04.

Downloaded from https://github.com/vangdfang/libcutter/.

It was hard to compile, requiring libsvg and several other libraries.
I added to the include directories:

CMakeLists.txt
—
include_directories(${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/include/ ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/include/pub /usr/include/freetype2)
—

Download keys.h from: http://www.jestinstoffel.com/files/keys.h

—
#ifndef KEYS_H
#define KEYS_H
#define MOVE_KEY_0 1194338851ul
#define MOVE_KEY_1 1563510831ul
#define MOVE_KEY_2 992311905ul
#define MOVE_KEY_3 913389615ul

#define CURVE_KEY_0 0x7D316E22ul
#define CURVE_KEY_1 0x4A4A7133ul
#define CURVE_KEY_2 0x5A3C5C5Ful
#define CURVE_KEY_3 0x78613A61ul
#endif

—

Full set of keys:
—
KEY0 - 0x272D6C37, 0x342A6173, 0x3663255B, 0x2B265A4D
KEY1 - 0x7D316E22, 0x4A4A7133, 0x5A3C5C5F, 0x78613A61
KEY2 - 0x47302A23, 0x5D31482F, 0x3B257A61, 0x3671382F
KEY3 - 0x303F6863, 0x71646D30, 0x4769457B, 0x6D342569
KEY4 - 0x45356650, 0x3A386D69, 0x575A7037, 0x335F357D
KEY5 - 0x343A2148, 0x614F3925, 0x753F6953, 0x47463626
KEY6 - 0x3F62626D, 0x7E555F44, 0x7E29425A, 0x52246268
KEY7 - 0x47302A23, 0x342A6173, 0x4769457B, 0x335F357D
—

Replaces include/pub/keys.h

./util/draw_svg ./util/svg_tests/Mini_DIY_circuit.svg /dev/ttyUSB0

Test run, worked!

Other options:
Freecut — Firmware replacement, haven’t tried.
Licut –Tried binaries and program compiled from source, did not work.

Cricut dissection, discusses the default blank cartridge.
ATX Hackerspace cricut page
Repair info
Build-to-spec Cricut Hacks Wiki (recovered from the Internet Archive)

Firefly’s 15 Best Chinese Curses (and How to Say Them)
If at First You Don’t Succeed: A short history of the Republicans’ 48 attempts to repeal Obamacare. By NEERA TANDEN
Origin of America the Beautiful
Syphilis: Then and Now. Researchers are zeroing in on the origin of syphilis and related diseases, which continue to plague the human population some 500 years after the first documented case. By Kristin N Harper, Molly K. Zuckerman, and George J. Armelagos
Misunderstanding Orange Juice as a Health Drink: Juice is, nutritionally, not much better than soda. How did U.S. consumers come to believe that oranges, in any form, were an important part of a healthy diet? by Adee Braun
The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks’ Most Devious Scam Yet By Matt Taibbi
From & Friends: Failing upward at the Democratic Leadership Council with Al From. by Rick Perlstein
Oxford Nanopore MinION early data review
Chicago food inspection reports are online
Ten Terrific Resources for Writing Space-Based Hard Science Fiction
Honey Badger
Recent history of political murder in Argentina: An Interview with Uki Goñi by Jessica Sequeira
Panda’s Thumb tears apart “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design Review”
DNA-encoded libraries for drug discovery
Coiled fishing line as muscle fiber
How to Write About Tax Havens and the Super-Rich: An Interview with Nicholas Shaxson
Boltzmann’s Anthropic Brain
The Deep State and its vulnerability

Here’s an interesting graph comparing disease prevalence before vaccines and now:

This is quite a strong correlation, but how do we know that vaccines caused the diseases to become so rare? Did vaccines causes disease incidence for all these diseases to bottom out, or is it something else, say a coincidence, or maybe all diseases are just disappearing because Americans are healthier today?

So more information is needed. The first thing to consider is that all infectious disease hasn’t gone away. The cold is still as common as ever. Kids still get sore throats and ear aches. There are also the ones I don’t think about or haven’t heard of, like RSV, croup, Fifth disease. And looking at adults, clap, HPV, and gonnorhia are at epidemic levels. So infectious disease is still very common, but the worst diseases have become rare–the ones for which general vaccination is practiced .

Another line of evidence that vaccines are what stomped out the targeted diseases is the timing. They didn’t all disappear at once, not even close. What was observed is that each disease dropped off after widespread vaccination became common.

Here’s a study that looked at incidence for several disease in the US over decades: pdf

If you look at page 4, they summarize incidence over time for 8 diseases. At the top they summarize incidence. The colored section of the graph is detailed regional data. The grey vertical bar shows when widespread vaccination was introduced–a different year for each disease. After the vaccine is introduced, the disease incidence goes way down. Note that for smallpox, it was better vaccines replacing ones started in the 1800’s, so no grey bar is shown.

Here’s a simpler graph of measles from the CDC site:
CDC measles

So it isn’t general health or healthier people with immune systems that prevent disease causing a gradual decline in infectious disease. Instead, the incidence of a specific disease drops when the vaccine is introduced.

Rotavirus

And here’s one of the new vaccines–for rotavirus. Nearly all kids used to get it: “four of five children in the US had symptomatic rotavirus gastroenteritis, one in seven required a clinic or emergency department (ED) visit, one in 70 was hospitalized”. The vaccine was introduced in 2006 and the disease has already become much less common: CDC Surveillance of Rotavirus

See fig 4 especially.

So what I conclude from these lines of evidence is that the introduction of widespread vaccination for a disease causes it to become much, much less common.

In the last decade or so, dinosaurs have started being depicted as brightly colored. The reason for the trend of brightly colored dinosaurs in movies is that in recent years techniques for identifying pigments from fossils have been developed, using electron microscopy and ion bombardment mass spectrometry.

News report: Ancient Pigments Unearthed: Fossilized skin reveals the colors of three extinct marine reptiles by Ed Yong. The Scientist, January 8, 2014
Original article: (Abstract) Skin pigmentation provides evidence of convergent melanism in extinct marine reptiles. Lindgren et. al., Nature 08 Jan 2014

and news report: Pictures: Dinosaur True Colors Revealed by Feather Find, Chris Sloan, National Geographic Daily News
Original article: Zhang et. al., 2010

Fossil color studies were pioneered by Jakob Vinther at Yale

No doubt movie speculation is running far ahead of the science, but these are the discoveries that unleashed the trend of brightly colored dinosaurs. At this point, it is reasonable to think dinosaurs are as brightly colored as birds or reptiles are today, and in some cases the coloring of specific species is known.

Further notes on using digital camera sensors as high density multimodal sensor arrays.

1) Detect loading / strain using a module incorporating a strain sensor (e.g. the resistive type used in scales and strain gauges) to a diode. The diode is coupled to a fiber optic line that takes the signal to the camera.spectrometer.

2) Position sensors. Use an arc of partially clear plastic that has a light at one of the ends at the arc edge. A fiber optic line at the oriented normal to the arc gathers light that takes the signal to the camera. As the joint moves, the plastic arc moves and distance between the light and the fiber optic changes. This change is converted to a position.

For joints with 360 rotation, the arc of plastic is replaced by a disk. The light source is placed at the center, and an opaque radial line gives each position of the disk a different light intensity.

3) Touch sensors. Use my previous idea of an array of sensors embedded in a squishy and translucent layer with one or more light sources. Touch distorts the light path of direct or reflected light between the light source(s) and sensor in reproducible ways. The set of sensors is trained to recognize the pattern of light formed by different touches. The pattern may also be changed by movement of the surface, for example if the array of sensors covers a hand, and could bed used to detect hand position.

4) An array of fibers can be placed to collect light from a spectrometer. An array of spectrometers can be developed using this approach, as the camera can collect light from several 1D fiber optic arrays.

Cars above 50 MPG
Acupuncture found to be ineffective Bao et. al., 2013. Cancer Genetics, ppt
Collection of great posts on the pathology of the Repubs
10 million Americans now have health insurance due to Obamcare/ACA (6.4 million + 3.1 million < 26 on parents plans + direct signups
Genomics predictions for 2014
Debunking global warming denial: Is the CO2 absorption window saturated?
Scarleteen: sex ed for the real world
What happens when patients know more than their doctors? Experiences of health interactions after diabetes patient education: a qualitative patient-led study, Snow et. al., BMJ Open 2013
NSA and surveillance: Jacob Appelbaum’s talk on the NSA at 30c3 computing conference
Refuting arguments against the minimum wage: Greg Mankiw Battles the Minimum Wage (Dean Baker)
Growing Up Unvaccinated By Amy Parker
Dragon watches you
Contagious Diseases in the United States from 1888
to the Present. Panhuis et. al., 2013 NEJM blog post
9 Childhood Illnesses: more common than you think.
Cat ceiling playground
OpenROV: DIY underwater robots
Brad DeLong post with recommended books on effective govt service
Maps of preventable disease outbreaks
US Political Party Platforms
Whatever Happened to Republican Feminists? by Jo Freeman (1996)
It’s not Ike’s Party anymore by digby
Metal Clay!!
The Bountiful Breweries of the United States of America poster Pop Chart Lab

I picked up two ABI PRISM 377 DNA sequencers. These are the last generation of slab gel sequencers.

With the front open, you can see the place where the gel gets mounted.

The left side opens, and the bottom cover comes off. The laser can be seen at the bottom, and some of the power supplies on the left.

Here is the laser, a Uniphase Argon laser, 0.5W 2214-40MLA 1998.

The power supply modules are located on the left side. On the top left is the laser power supply. The electrophoresis power supply is on the left in the middle. To the right of it is the power distribution center–plugs for the laser and electrophoresis power supplies, and the blower motor. On the bottom at the left is the blower motor. In the middle at the bottom the top of a mirror module that bounces the laser back to the right at the level of the bottom of the gel. On the right at the bottom, the servo motor that moves the detector unit along the bottom of the gel.

Here’s the laser power supply. The laser is not plugged in.

Close up of the laser power supply, Uniphase 2114B-40MLA 12A:

The power distribution center labels: J41 DC Power Supply Max 4000W J40 Heater and Pump Control

The electrophoresis power supply: Spellman P/N X2094 Rev. E4 Model No PTV5P300X2094
230V 5A, output 0-5kV, 0-60mA.

Here is a closeup of the servo: Telcomm brushless servo motor

On the back side of the machine behind the top panel is this circuit board, the control, data processing, and interface board.

Two interesting chips on the board, a FPGA and a pair of voltage converters.

The FPGA is a Xilinx XC3064A

The voltage converter.

On the left of the main board is region with cooling lines:

Yellow fever could break out in the US
JeeYoung Lee makes rooms and photographs them
STEM toys
Fraud and the design of corporations
6-strand rope braid
8-strand double braid
Breaking contracts: cutting pensions in IL and Detroit
Edouard Martinet’s steampunk insects
Econ charts: public and private net jobs by President
Correlations of IQ with income and wealth
Death Star ornaments
Soundcard oscilloscope
Galinstan –low melting pt metal found in thermometers
Inexpensive USB oscilloscopes / logic analyzers
JP Morgan Chase and corruption, foreign and domestic
Running A One-Person Business by Claude Whitmyer and Salli Rasberry
Post-scarcity economics and Star Trek
Indiana public schools ‘out-grow’ charter, private schools
Taxes are unnecessary, the Fed can just print money
Chicago’s Ventra Card privatization scam
Susan after Narnia
WAVE: check if a web site can be accessed by others
Deleting phone location logs
Estate tax swindle: use GRATs, don’t pay
Evolution: GOP and evangelical protestants are the Known-Nothings

Best blog posts of the year
The Rude Pundit: A More Realistic Bush Museum
Insufferable Movie Snob: What the heck is “Pre-Code”?
Real American Liberal: Debunking Extremist Gun Arguments

Fantastic SF Travel Illustrations
What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It? by Philip E. Agre August 2004
30 of 44 tested herbal supplements are not what the label says journal link
Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt (research by Brad Werner, Kevin Anderson, and Alice Bows)
Build a Fire Tornado instructable
Stock options: I, II
Jeremy Hammond, 10 yrs in prison for embarrassing the powers with Stratfor hack
Concrete arrows across the US
Jonathon Green’s timelines of dirty words
Linky post on education, the NY, and MA by
Mike the Mad Biologist
Cliff Reid of Complete Genomics on predictions for genomic medicine
ACMG Recommendations on Incidental Findings in Exome/Genome Sequencing

State of the federal budget:

Annotated with more detail:

This is the steepest set of budget cuts since the US came out of WWII.

Is this typical for the US economy coming out of a deep, deep recession. No, unprecedented:

A sharp reduction in spending like this is slowing the recovery. If the US followed the usual course (+15% federal spending, i.e. more stimulus), an extra 2-3 million people would have jobs, and that positive feedback would be pushing the US into a full recovery.

The budget currently on the table in Washington, rejected by the GOP:

Deficit reduction since 2011:

More charts covering the federal budget, deficit, health care spending, and related matters.