Cavalcade of Mammals

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I’m growing some cacti from seeds. I have seeds for:
opuntia engelmannii

ferocactus gracilis

echinocactus grusonii

opuntia violacea

myrtillocactus geometrizans

hylocereus undatus

The Powder Keg: The seething racial resentment of the Obama era is of an altogether different kind. by Charles P. Pierce
Many tarantulas are one particular shade of vivid blue, and no one knows why. A structural color, not a pigment color.
Doggerland, between England and France was covered by the ocean 7,000 YPB.