Mary Robinette Kowal on the WFC award contest rules and specifications. Ahhhh yep.
"According to a bunch of fancy linguists, people who are more sensitive to written typos and grammatical errors are indeed the kinds of Type A assholes everyone already suspects them to be." Hahahaha, wait a second… (Grokked from John Scalzi, to whom I once wrote an email pointing out some typesetting "errors" in a book of his)
"Researchers found that cost — and even high-tech promises of seeing around curves — had little to do with performance" of your car's headlight system. "(T)he Insurance Institute for Highway Safety tested 82 different headlight configurations available on 2016 model-year cars. More than half of these setups (44) earned no better than a rating of 'poor.'" Well, that can't be good. As someone who drives many times on rural, unlit roads, so very much this.
Sometimes an aircraft carrier is just a cigar. Or something. That's Jim Wright on how we pay it forward with our taxes and how some people only want the aircraft carrier and not educate or keep healthy the people who operate it, do the planning, fly the planes, lube the planes, lube the engines, cook for those who do…
Marie Vibbert on horny boys, sexual harassment, and chat-bots passing the Turing Test (with a solid dose of the objectification of women).
Because all the cool kids are talking about it, a ten-year old girl gets the opportunity to design her own prosthetic arm, develops it as a glitter cannon. Because why the fuck not? Okay, I'm starting to warm to this whole "makers community" (3D printing for the masses) idea. (Grokked from Saladin Ahmed)
The high costs of caring for someone with Alzheimers. And that's on top of the mental and physical strain it makes on the caregivers.
A hospice in Texas is under investigation that management ordered hospice nurses to increase dosages of drugs to hasten patient's deaths. Two thoughts here, this is the result of badly based insurance incentives and two, fucking business majors. We used to have a joke when I was first in college, if you can succeed at engineering go into the arts, if you can succeed there go into education or communications, and if all else fails, get a business degree.
"Security researchers have discovered 1,418 vulnerabilities in CareFusion’s Pyxis SupplyStation system (used to automagically dispense pharmaceuticals and other medical supplies) that are still being used in the healthcare and public health sectors in the US and around the world." Pyxis systems have the greatest market penetration and if you use a mail-order pharmacy, or a large hospital pharmacy, chances are a Pyxis machine counted out those pills and packaged them. (Grokked from Dan)
"Until 2008 not a single earthquake had ever been recorded… from the Dallas–Fort Worth area… Since then, close to 200 have shaken the cities and their immediate suburbs. Statewide, Texas is experiencing a sixfold increase in earthquakes over historic levels. Oklahoma has seen a 160-fold spike in quakes, some of which have sent people to hospitals and damaged buildings and highways." I'm sure it can't be man-made. LOOK A SQUIRREL! Another example of the result of conservative politics ("Drill, Baby, Drill!" and weakening regulatory agencies). "The (1969) experiment showed that human-triggered earthquakes could be controlled by adjusting wastewater-injection pressure. Unfortunately, the lessons of Rangely and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal were apparently forgotten by the early 2000s, when fossil-fuel companies embarked on the shale-gas boom." (Grokked from Kameron Hurley)
The oil business is corrupt? "After a six-month investigation across two continents, Fairfax Media and The Huffington Post can reveal that billions of dollars of government contracts were awarded as the direct result of bribes paid on behalf of firms including British icon Rolls-Royce, US giant Halliburton, Australia’s Leighton Holdings and Korean heavyweights Samsung and Hyundai." Shocked, shocked I am… Actually this could be quite interesting, especially for Halliburton who is subject to US anti-corruption laws (which includes clauses for contracts not awarded in the US to foreign subsidiaries). Although the did open a world HQ in Dubia (at the time wonks speculated it was so they could do work in Iran, which is still verboten for US companies). (Grokked from Dan)
"The question of who shot Brittney Mills is wide open. And the answer could be locked up in an iPhone — her iPhone." Or not. But the police don't have much else to go on. The update since I wrote this is the FBI is now helping more cases with their unlocking scheme, although they haven't promised to help in this case yet.
"'A 21-year-old kid just sort of dies out in the middle of nowhere and nothing happens?'" Life and death in the Bakken oil fields. But we don't need any regulation. Why? Because (at least on "public land") "requiring such an upgrade (automatic oil level checkers) would cause some companies to shut down." Only their required to have them in Canada and on our off-shore rigs and they seem to still be in business. I don't know, why don't we require the use of a respirator with a gas filter when checking oil tanks manually? Or design some mechanism to vent the gases before someone sticks their head over the thief hole? Again, that would be too much money. Just like properly venting coal mines.
"After The Washington Post published a lengthy investigation into the origins of Hillary Clinton's email scandal, including the bombshell revelation that 147 FBI agents were looking into her private server, the newspaper corrected its report late Tuesday to note the number of agents looking into Clinton’s emails was actually fewer than 50." What's a few hundred people here and there? Liberally biased media my ass.
"Abortion rights advocates, meanwhile, scoffed at the space anti-abortion groups tried to put between their approach and Trump’s." Yep. The Trumpster spilled the beans because he did "study" the issue and he understood exactly what the anti-abortion groups want, but not enough to use the language those groups want their chosen candidates to use. Again, he shows his ignorance on how to dog-whistle correctly. And then Dr. Carson goes on to say that the Trumpster didn't know the question was coming so hadn't prepared. Really? A GOP candidate didn't know the abortion questions would be coming? Do these people believe we all have brain damage?
Why do I rail so much against the anti-aboritonists? "The doctors and nurses at St. David’s Medical Center in Austin cried with them, but said because of Texas law HB2, they could not help speed Taylor’s labor. Technically, the baby was healthy and the mother was healthy, so to induce labor (at 20 weeks) would be an abortion, and to do it at this stage in the pregnancy would be illegal." That's one of a few hundred reasons. Not only is this a cruel and painful intrusion into personal lives by placing government between patient and doctor, this can be psychologically damaging (a claim some anti-abortionists make against those who have abortions, for which there is no evidence). These laws damage people's lives for no other reason than pregnancy isn't the wonderfully easy thing it is made out to be in the media. (Grokked from Chuck Wendig)
Damn autocorrect. "Untied" is a legitimate word.
"A 15-year-old girl was pepper-sprayed in the face Tuesday during a tense shouting match that erupted after she was groped outside a Donald Trump campaign rally in Wisconsin, local police said." So, just who is doing all the violence at the Trump Rallies?
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