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Several days ago, while I was out at my local Sonic picking up a gigantic Oreo Cheesecake Master Shake, my home was invaded by SJW stealth units who sabotaged my computer such that the drive hosting my encrypted /home partition started spitting errors into the syslog that look for all the world like the controller is going out on the drive.

After much panicked backing up of important shat interspersed with downtime to let the drive cool when I started getting errors, I checked my records and found out it was only eight months old. Still under warranty then, even with today's cocktastic two-year manufacturer warranties. Then I thought, you know, the first sata cable I tried when I installed this drive was bad... I should swap cables. And since I'm swapping cables, I might as well switch to an unused sata port on the motherboard. Much less of a pain in the ass than jumping through RMA hoops. That let me finish up all my backing up and twelve hours in still no errors. If it stays copacetic until tomorrow, I'm going to call it good and go back to my regularly scheduled hurting of butts.

Anyway, that's where I've been and why that climate data I promised hasn't been gathered up and posted here yet. Tomorrow will be somewhat busy around Casa de Buzzard with all the standard shat plus some real estate doings but I should be able to get to it by Wednesday at the latest.

A recent (off-topic?) discussion touching on Sci-Fi revealed to me that some people see hope and promise in science fiction stories. Those people don't see the warnings, it would seem. To me, science fiction has always been filled with dire warnings.

We recently discussed Ms. Le Guin, when she passed away. https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/01/25/011250
More about her here: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/UKL_info.html

I must admit that I wasn't a "fan" - that is, I didn't read everything she wrote, and wait impatiently for her to write more. But, yes, I did read some of her work. I've been reading a little more of her work, since her death. And, that work is filled with dire warnings!

The Diary of the Rose tells about a psychiatric doctor (Rosa), with access to some really marvelous technology, which helps her to see into the minds of her patients. Rosa spends her early career working with children, and people with truly disabling problems. Rosa is engrossed in psychiatric problems, diagnosis, and prognosis. She is the doctor's doctor - everything is about making people healthy, or at least as healthy as possible.

Then, Rosa is brought her first political prisoner. Of course, Rosa isn't aware that he IS a political prisoner. She is only told that he has to be "fixed". Unaware that the diagnosis and prognosis has already been determined, Rosa gets into Sorde's (the patient) head. She is shocked to learn that there is really nothing wrong with Sorde. But, as she learns more, both she and Sorde know exactly where "therapy" will lead, and where it will end. The patient's mind must be destroyed!

The story is scary, in that, it doesn't so much "predict" real life in some future dystopia, as it reports on real life in the modern world. In much of the world in the past few hundred years, it would be political suicide to imprison, then execute a political dissident. But, having that same dissident "hospitalized" for some form of "insanity" can be expedient.

Oh, there is indeed some "science" in this fiction. The tools that Rosa has to work with are amazing. But, the story would be much the same with or without those tools. The psychiatric doctor is being used to effectively euthanize a potential political dissident.

I do invite people to get acquainted with Le Guin. Further, I invite those people to extrapolate some of today's technology into her stories. 24/7 surveillance? Genetic mapping? Digital mapping of the brain? The deeper we dig into who and what we are, as people, the closer Rosa's diagnostic tools come to reality.

I haven't been a Le Guin fan in the past, but I am becoming one.

For those who might search for this story - it is part of Volume 1 of the 'Where on Earth' collection of short stories. It may or may not be published in other anthologies, but this is where I found it.

Enjoy!

Charlottesville remembered: 'A battle for the soul of America'

It could only happen in the birthplace of Christian Weston Chandler.

I bought a laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 2700U CPU incorporating a Vega 10 GPU, an Acer Swift 3. It has 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. Unfortunately the RAM is not upgradable but when the SSD breaks I will be able to remove it and replace it with spinning rust.

I've got Slackware-current running on it with kernel 4.17.14. It came with Windows 10 but that has been removed. In fact I managed to set it up without ever booting into Windows. When you power it up, you must press F2 to get into the BIOS. Obviously, you can avoid ever starting Windows if you press F2 quickly enough on first power up.

I made a USB boot stick for installing Slackware-current, It's actually not that hard. I began by using Alien Bob's local Slackware mirror script on my main PC to get the latest Slackware-current and to create the installation DVD .iso image. It downloaded many gigabytes of data, so took quite a while even on my reasonable (80Mbit) Internet connection.

I found some useful instructions and some boot files for making a Slackware UEFI USB boot stick. Short story: use gdisk to partition the stick with two partitions, the first being 100M in size, the second being the rest of the stick. The first has to has a type of 0xEF00 and the second 0x8300. Then you put a vfat filesystem on the first. It tells you to put an ext4 FS on the second but I'm not sure that's necessary. You need to create a directory in the first partition called EFI and under it a subdirectory called something like Slackware. Copy the files as directed at the above link into the EFI/Slackware subdir and sync the disks. You can also have a subdir called Boot which the firmware recognises specially as a default, and there is a naming convention for the files that go in there. Google is your friend.

When making a USB boot stick for a pre-UEFI system you need to run isohybrid on the .iso installation image. I did that here too. (Is this necessary for UEFI? It didn't do any harm.) dd the slackware-current .iso into the second partition of the USB stick.

Plug the stick into the laptop and power cycle, pressing F2 quickly to avoid booting any existing OS.

The firmware (BIOS) is UEFI and has Secure Boot. Before you can tell it to boot something other than Windows, you have to set a master password in the firmware. When you have done that you can change the priority of the boot devices and add the new boot loaders to the menu, after deleting the existing Windows ones.

Make sure that the USB stick is the first preference of boot device in the UEFI menus and remove the hard disk if possible so you can't accidentally boot Windows.

Reboot the machine, and hit F12 for a boot menu. Hopefully, the USB stick should be there. Select it and the familiar Slackware installation should start.

At this point you can make a backup of your Windows image in case you ever need to take the machine back for a warranty repair or sell it on to someone who needs Windows. I backed up my pristine uninstalled Windows image using dd from the command line and dumping the data onto an external USB hard disk. Piped through gzip the 256GB disk image compressed down to about 12GB. (There was a stuck pixel on the screen and I was glad I did this since I had to take it back to the store for a replacement).

Installing Slackware-current was very simple. I partitioned the SSD with gdisk to have three partitions, a 100MB UEFI boot partition (vfat), a Linux swap partition (8GB) and a Linux partition (the rest of the disk ext4). The installer said "Slackware 14.1" but that's because of the root disk image on the boot disk. I installed the complete distribution and rebooted. It worked, with eight penguins at the top of the screen.

When I say "it worked" it did, keyboard, touchpad and built-in WiFi. The kernel (4.14.56) that came with Slackware-current wasn't new enough to see the Vega GPU, so X would not run.

I downloaded the latest (at the time) stable kernel (4.17.8) and did a "make oldconfig" using the kernel configuration file from the slackware-current that I had installed. There were hundreds of new options and most of them were mysterious or irrelevant, so I just selected things as modules where I was unsure. I selected the support for the new AMD GPUs. Through poking around in /sys I noted that the touchpad was an Elan something and the WiFi chip was an Atheros 10k (driver ath10k_pci). I rebuilt the kernel and modules, but the new bzImage in /boot/EFI/Slackware and put a new entry in /boot/EFI/Slackware/elilo.conf for it and did a make modules_install. On rebooting the machine, I hit TAB to get the elilo menu and selected my new kernel. I was then able to get X up and running with a UK keyboard and the touchpad.

It turns out that to do a middle button click on the touchpad you have to put the tips of three fingers down and then push down to click. It takes a bit of practise...

By the way, I've been using it for three weeks and it's never swapped yet. It also has a fingerprint reader. I believe they are useless and will not even try to get it working.

There are a couple of problems, though. It intermittently hangs on boot when the kernel tries to switch from UEFI VGA to the AMD GPU driver (the open source one) and the machine locked up hard when watching a video in Palemoon. It wasn't on the network so I couldn't try to ssh. I had to power cycle it.

Next we shall see how SETI@Home runs on it.

She’s the world’s top empathy researcher. But colleagues say she bullied and intimidated them

Tania Singer, a celebrated neuroscientist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, is known as one of the world’s foremost experts on empathy. In her research, she has sought to demonstrate that meditation can make people more kind and caring. The title of a profile of Singer written by this reporter in 2013 summed up her public image: Concentrating on Kindness.

But inside her lab, it was a very different story, eight former and current colleagues say in interviews with Science. The researchers, all but one of whom insisted on remaining anonymous because they feared for their careers, describe a group gripped by fear of their boss. “Whenever anyone had a meeting with her there was at least an even chance they would come out in tears,” one colleague says.

Singer, one of the most high-profile female researchers in the Max Planck Society (MPG), sometimes made harsh comments to women who became pregnant, multiple lab members told Science. “People were terrified. They were really, really afraid of telling her about their pregnancies,” one former colleague says. “For her, having a baby was basically you being irresponsible and letting down the team,” says another, who became a mother while working in Singer’s department.

[...] In a plan presented to the researchers on 25 July, MPG said it would separate Singer from her current colleagues and allow her to set up a new, smaller research group in Berlin for 2 to 3 years while the postdocs and Ph.D. students in Leipzig finish their projects and move on. (The Leipzig group, which once numbered more than 20 scientists, has dwindled to just five.) She would then return to her lab.

“It appears the Max Planck Society decided it would rather sacrifice another generation of students than risk a scandal,” says one former colleague. Asked how MPG would ensure that future students are treated better, a spokesperson says details of the plan are still being discussed.

[...] [Colleagues] say working with Singer was always difficult. She wanted to be in control of even the most minute research details but was often not available to discuss them. In-person meetings could quickly turn into a nightmare, one colleague says: “She gets extremely emotional and when that turns dark it is terrifying.” Another co-worker describes what happened after he told Singer some people in her group were unhappy: “She was very hurt by this and started crying and screaming,” he says. “It escalated to the extent that she left the room and went door to door in the institute in our department, crying, yelling to the people in the room ‘Are you happy here?’ When she came back, she said: ‘I just asked and everyone said they’re happy so it’s obviously you that’s the problem.’” (A colleague who says he was present corroborates the story.)

Almost every current or former lab member brought up Singer’s treatment of pregnant women; the issue was also on a list of grievances, shared with Science, that lab members say they drew up after a meeting with the scientific advisory board in February 2017 to record what was said. “Pregnancy and parental leave are received badly and denied/turned into accusations,” the notes say.

How Goop's Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow's Company Worth $250 Million: Inside the growth of the most controversial brand in the wellness industry. (archive)

On a Monday morning in November, students at Harvard Business School convened in their classroom to find Gwyneth Paltrow. She was sitting at one of their desks, fitting in not at all, using her phone, as they took their seats along with guests they brought to class that day — wives, mothers, boyfriends. Each seat filled, and some guests had to stand along the back wall and sit on the steps. The class was called the Business of Entertainment, Media and Sports. The students were there to interrogate Paltrow about Goop, her lifestyle-and-wellness e-commerce business, and to learn how to create a "sustainable competitive advantage," according to the class catalog.

She moved to the teacher's desk, where she sat down and crossed her legs. She talked about why she started the business, how she only ever wanted to be someone who recommended things. When she was in Italy, on the set of "The Talented Mr. Ripley," she'd ask someone on the crew about, say, where the best gelato was. When she was in London, on the set of "Shakespeare in Love," she asked a crew member where to find the best coffee; in Paris, she asked an extra where to find the best bikini wax; in Berlin, the massage you can't miss. She wasn't just curious. She was planning this the whole time. The first iteration of the company was only these lists — where to go and what to buy once you get there — via a newsletter she emailed out of her kitchen, the first one with recipes for turkey ragù and banana-nut muffins. One evening, at a party in London, one of the newsletter's recipients, a venture capitalist named Juliet de Baubigny, told her, "I love what you're doing with Goop." G.P., as she is called by nearly everyone in her employ, didn't even know what a venture capitalist was. She was using off-the-shelf newsletter software. But De Baubigny became a "godmother" to Paltrow, she said. She encouraged her vision and "gave permission" to start thinking about how to monetize it.

[...] G.P. didn't want to go broad. She wanted you to have what she had: the $795 G. Label trench coat and the $1,505 Betony Vernon S&M chain set. Why mass-market a lifestyle that lives in definitional opposition to the mass market? Goop's ethic was this: that having beautiful things sometimes costs money; finding beautiful things was sometimes a result of an immense privilege; but a lack of that privilege didn't mean you shouldn't have those things. Besides, just because some people cannot afford it doesn't mean that no one can and that no one should want it. If this bothered anyone, well, the newsletter content was free, and so were the recipes for turkey ragù and banana-nut muffins.

[...] A gynecologist and obstetrician in San Francisco named Jen Gunter, who also writes a column on reproductive health for The Times, has criticized Goop in about 30 blog posts on her website since 2015. A post she wrote last May — an open letter that she signed on behalf of "Science" — generated more than 800,000 page views. She was angry about all the bad advice she had seen from Goop in the last few years. She was angry that her own patients were worried they'd given themselves breast cancer by wearing underwire bras, thanks to an article by an osteopath who cited a much-debunked book published in 1995. Gunter cited many of Goop's greatest hits: "Tampons are not vaginal death sticks, vegetables with lectins are not killing us, vaginas don't need steaming, Epstein Barr virus (E.B.V.) does not cause every thyroid disease and for [expletive] sake no one needs to know their latex farmer; what they need to know is that the only thing between them and H.I.V. or gonorrhea is a few millimeters of latex, so glove that [expletive] up."

But something strange happened. Each of these pronouncements set off a series of blog posts and articles and tweets that linked directly to the site, driving up traffic. At Harvard, G.P. called these moments "cultural firestorms." "I can monetize those eyeballs," she told the students. Goop had learned to do a special kind of dark art: to corral the vitriol of the internet and the ever-present shall we call it cultural ambivalence about G.P. herself and turn them into cash. It's never clickbait, she told the class. "It's a cultural firestorm when it's about a woman's vagina." The room was silent. She then cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, "VAGINA! VAGINA! VAGINA!" as if she were yodeling.

Who would hate on a pseudoscientific goop-peddling succubus with steam-cleaned nether regions (and an egg)?

Previously: NASA Disputes Origins of Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop "Healing Stickers"

Original Submission

So, the dating world, there is a term - Catfishing. I guess that is the practice of using someone else's photos that are super hot and then basically trolling people. There is apparently a lesser form of this called kittenfishing where you use deceiving photos that are actually you, but are not exactly truthful. Last week, I was kittenfished.

I started chatting with a woman on OKC. She had only two photos (flag #1) of her, and both were from the same angle (flag #2). She looked really cute, so I messaged her. There was a pretty good exchange of messages. She eventually dropped a hint that she might be fat, so I asked for some photos that showed her body.

Now, this is where I feel bad. I'm sure it can be difficult being a fat woman. I asked for photos as nicely as I could - "Hey, so I love your pics, but I notice that you only have two photos that are practically identical to each other. Do you have any photos that show your body that you would be able to share?"

To her credit, she did share actual photos that showed a rather large woman. I've dated a larger women in the past who I got along with well, but I wasn't attracted to her and it didn't work out. I will not do that again.

So, anyways, she posts actual pictures that show her body. I said thank you, and complimented her dress. The next day, I sent a message saying that I didn't think it would work out because I felt that I had been deceived and that deception is not a good way to start a relationship.

She didn't take that well. Here are the last two messages of the exchange:

ME> So I've had some time to think and I'm sorry, but I don't think that it would work out. I really enjoyed our conversations, but ultimately I feel like I was misled.

> I Understand that everyone cherry picks some of their best photos to post to dating websites, but I believe that the photos should reflect the person that you will be meeting. Starting a relationship on deception is not a good way to begin.

> I'm sorry things had to go this way and I hope you eventually find what you are looking for.

>Take care,

>-- Snow

  -----------------

HER> I've been thinking about this as well. We would not have progressed past being frientds ...as sitting in Church on a Sunday knowing I was dating a married man would have made me a rather large hypocrite.

>But since you have brought up the subject... You asked 'my story' In it I said... 'Currently I am good enough to fuck but too fat to date.' That should have been a big fucking indicator as to what I might actually look like body wise.

> I have my reasons as to why I don't post body shots. After the 100th message of 'Hey wanna Fuck' I hope you can at least appreciate why...then again maybe you can't...hopefully one day you will. If it's imperative to see my body...fine...If it's not to you liking...fine...there is the door don't let it hit you in the ass on the way out. You are not the first...you damn well won't be the last...and make no mistake on this...the loss is never...EVER...mine

> I wish you all the best in your future endeavors...

> So Long Boyo...

> HerName

** She disabled her account **

I feel pretty bad. I'm sure it's tough being a fat woman doing online dating. I was caught between a rock and a hard place. I didn't find her body attractive at all and I'm not going to go on a date with someone I'm not somewhat excited about. I did feel mislead and I was hoping that by telling her that, she would realize that deception up front leads to disappointment later. Maybe I should have just said 'Sorry, this isn't going to work out' and left it at that. I wanted to call her out on the photos though.

Anyways, I hope I didn't break this poor woman who obviously had body issues and had had a rough time dating. I don't feel good about how that one ended. I honestly don't know if I'm the asshole in this situation or not, so I'm here asking SN.

So, SN... Am I the asshole here? Please place your judgement below.

Crazy Rich Asians isn’t about money, it’s about entitlement—and that’s a good thing

Why Did It Take So Long to See a Cast Like ‘Crazy Rich Asians’? (archive)

Right, so I was in a mood tonight and considering how idiotic it is for white folks to think I should venerate the cultures and traditions of my ancestors from hundreds of years ago when they don't even venerate the cultures and traditions of their still living ancestors. Being the smartass I am, I went outside and did a rain dance (Okay, so it bore a strong resemblance to the Thriller dance. Fuck you. I'm an indian and if I say it's a rain dance, it's a rain dance.) while I was having a smoke.

I finish my smoke and come back in, quite amused with myself and do a #weather on IRC to get the forecast and fuck me if it didn't work.

So, I'm sitting here greatly amused with myself and then I remember I was going to take my boat out for half a day of jug fishing tomorrow.

Fucking stupid ancestral magic powers.

ASUS' Android Go phone comes to the US for $110

The first Android Go phone to reach the US, the Alcatel 1X, was frankly lackluster between its not-even-720p screen and mediocre processing power. ASUS, however, is hoping to spice things up by launching the ZenFone Live (L1) in the US as a Best Buy exclusive. The unlocked handset costs slightly more than its rival at $110, but you're getting a lot more for your extra Hamilton. The ZenFone carries an 18:9 ratio, 5.5-inch 1,440 x 720 LCD screen, a speedier Snapdragon 425 processor and a heftier 3,000mAh battery, not to mention dual nano-SIM slots and a place for your microSD cards. This might be an ideal phone if you're a traveler who'd rather not risk their main device on a trip.

Related: An $80 Android Go Smartphone For Sale in USA