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..are some of the weirdest.
In the early days of Journalism folks like Mark Twain and Lyin' Jim Towsend told some woppers to get newspapers sold in the Boom towns of California and Nevada but they never felt the need to get down and dirty.

I happened to stumble across this one: The Pubic Hair Preferences of the American Woman.

My first thought was "really???" Then... "Gross.".... then "Really????" The only rational explanation I can think of is that "538" is trying to get momentum for their shiny new web site.

Is this kind of "journalism" needed? Is there some kind of journalistic "ecological niche" this kind of story fills? What is even more astounding is that the study which provided the data for the article was done at the University of Texas and "Federal support for this study was provided by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development". Is this kind of science needed? Did we really need to know?

One last quirkish thing. The official title of the study was: "Prevalence and correlates of pubic hair grooming among low-income Hispanic, Black, and White women". Now a number questions come to mind: Why were *only* low income woman in this study? Was it because no high income women were available? Is their some kind of unspoken "moralistic" statement here or just a couple of Gynecologists getting cheap 'jollies'? Was there an actual scientific value in the study or was it just a way to spend some money?

Portions of this were originally posted HERE I did not re insert the links so go read the original for the reference links here on soylent.org

T am reposting this because My words as a "minority" seems to have gotten lost in the noise in the original comment post.

I am Jewish. I chose to be Jewish. When I was asked why I wanted to be Jewish[1] I explained it:

"When I was small I was kicked and beat, and spit on, sworn at and picked last for kick-ball. I spent my whole life being a loner and being hated or disliked for good or bad reasons... most of the reasons I was bullied was because I was an easy target. So why do I want to be Jewish?" I replied. "I won't be alone any more."

So I'm Jewish right? No according to some of the Orthodox Jews. I'm not Jewish enough for them but I certainly am Jewish enough to feel the wrong end of other people's intolerance... or other people's ignorance.

There has been a long ongoing debate about where to draw the line on "intolerance", "hate speech", "bigotry", or "denial of history". My simple line is this: "Hate Speech is still free speech. The trouble comes when people begin to act on their hate speech. If they act on their words then they should be considered anathema..." Saying "I hate you" with words is one thing. Saying hate with a burning cross or a loaded gun or a rope is another. The speech might be incitement but are war games incitement?

The poster who was "singled out" by this post [that's a kind of hate speech too] had some "informed" words to about Jews. I clarified his error. 'Nuf said and no remarks flew back and forth... Later when I posted a journal saying maybe I should not comment on "political" stuff here any more this poser singled out was the first to step forward and say he didn't want me to be silent.

I've had words from others here like "Hey Jew Boy...!" [soylentnews.org] which were much closer to the Good All Amerikan Skin Headed Boy". I didn't piss my pants and run for the wings. I told a joke instead... which got up-modded. Hate speech from ACs is more to be feared than from someone who is willing to use their own identity to say unpopular things.

So from my experience I would rather have Ethanol Fueled say what he feels than someone play the anonymous coward with true and ominous hate speech.

Now as for the original poser-- I DO NOT like what you have done here. Who appointed you the judge and jury? You have made "Front Page" hate speech without actually saying "So and So is a immoral and evil scum sucking friend of all of the bastards that don't believe like "we" do so let's put him in the public square, shame him, mark him as an EVIL ONE..."

Uh, guess what? That is they way ALL hateful pogroms begin-- singling out someone's because of some alleged moral or ethical superiority. One can easily see this in the words of a recent American President, no, not Obama, George W. Bush [wikipedia.org]. Does he happen to be one of your friends? Has Bush's words made the world a better place to live. Sure. The Iraqi's are good friends and customers of the Iranians. The Afghans and the Pakistanis hate the U.S.

If we are going to paint people with scarlet letters , are we truly morally superior? The empirical answer is-- no.

America is a country built in many ways upon Puritan values... you know the values that gave us the Salem Witch Trials and Nathaniel Hawthorn's "The Scarlet Letter". We are still pushing the Puritan agenda. So we paint people with labels rather than addressing the issues they raise or the ignorance they display. We allow Religion to teach hate and narrow non-accepting moral values and allow morally ambiguous actions by Corporations and the Government... and then call anyone we disagree with a hate-monger or intolerant. Would you become one of these people you hate if you became the victim of some petty criminal regardless of color who takes a liking to your possessions or your body and acts on their desire?

Understand something criminal behavior is criminal behavior regardless of race, creed, color, or political affiliation... I'm sorry but painting labels and scarlet letters do not resolve the issues that create the criminal behavior.

One man's intolerance is another man's daily norm and another's belly laugh.

The person in question has a right to his opinions how ever disagreeable they seem.

[1] Unlike some other religions there are specific rules about Jewish converts. One of the rules outlined in the Talmud is the requirement to ask the proposed convert: "Do you not know we are a people that has been brutalized and downtrodden and unpopular, and our ways are very different from the ways of the rest of the world?"

A $1,499 supercomputer on a card? That's what I thought when reading El Reg's report of AMD's Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card which is rated at 11.5 TFlop/s(*). It is water-cooled, contains 5632 stream processors, has 8 GB of DDR5 RAM, and runs at 1018MHz.

AMD's announcement claims it's "the world's fastest, period". The $1,499 MSRP compares favorably to the $2,999 NVidia GTX Titan Z which is rated at 8 TFlop/s.

From a quick skim of the reviews (at: Hard OCP, Hot Hardware, and Tom's Hardware), it appears AMD has some work to do on its drivers to get the most out of this hardware. The twice-as-expensive NVidia Titan in many cases outperformed it (especially at lower resolutions). At higher resolutions (3840x2160 and 5760x1200) the R9 295x2 really started to shine.

For comparison, consider that this 500 watt, $1,499 card is rated better than the world's fastest supercomputer listed in the top 500 list of June 2001.

(*) Trillion FLoating-point OPerations per Second.

Now that I've had some time to clear my head, I want to expand on my original feelings. I'm pissed off about this, and my temper flared through on the original post. I'm leaving it as is because I'm not going to edit it to make myself look better, and because it sums up my feelings pretty succinctly. How would you feel if something you worked on under the promise of building the best site for a community was regularly and routinely causing corporate firewalls and IDS systems to go off like crazy?

You'd be pissed. Had we known about this behaviour in advance, it would have been disabled at golive or in a point release, and a minor note would have gone up about it. Instead, I found out because we were tripping a user's firewall causing the site to get autoblocked. I realize some people feel this is acceptable behaviour, but a website should *never* trigger IDS or appear malicious in any way. Given the current state of NSA/GCHQ wiretapping and such, it means that anything tripping these types of systems is going to be looked at suspiciously to say the least. I'm not inherently against such a feature (IRC networks check for proxying for instance), but its clearly detailed in the MOTD of basically every network that does it.

There wasn't a single thing in the FAQ that suggested it, and a Google search against the other site didn't pop something up that dedicated what was being done; just a small note that some proxies were being blocked. Had the stock FAQ file, or documentation, or anything detailed this behaviour, while I might still have thought it wrong, at least I wouldn't have gotten upset about it. I knew that there was proxy scanning code in slashcode, but all the vars in the database were set to off; as I discovered, they're ignored leading me to write a master off switch in the underlying scanning function.

Perhaps in total, this isn't a big deal, but it felt like a slap in the face. I know I have a temper, and I've been working to keep it under wraps (something easier said than done, but nothing worthwhile is ever easy). CmdrTaco himself commented on this on hackernews and I've written a reply to him about it. Slashdot did what they felt was necessary to stop spam on their site, and by 2008, slashcode only really existed for slashdot itself; other slash sites run on their own branches of older code. Right or wrong, such behaviour should be clearly documented, as its not something you expect, and can (and has) caused issues to users and concerns due to lack of communication. Transparency isn't easy, but I have found its the only way to have a truly healthy community. Perhaps you disagree. I'll respond to any comments or criticisms left below.

The new "reply to" and "parent" buttons - I just can't seem to get used to them, probably since I associate buttons with forms and there really isn't a form associated to them.

The new gradient in "Title-bars" is too steep for two-line-headers, when setting the gamma to be proper to show the first line the second line feels "washed out" and the text becomes slight blurred, when setting the gamma to be pleasant for the second line the contrast becomes harsh on the first line... However I can see why this causes an issue since the gradient for single-line-headers are just right.

Just my own musings about this..

As I've stated several times, cheap IP cameras are a little flaky. So even if you calculate the appropriate number of pictures to take in a 24-hour period, midnight will inevitably arrive and the script will still have a handful or two of pictures left to take.

So first we need to kill off the previous day's job. Here's the way to do that from cron:

00 00 * * * /bin/ps -o pid,args -U fliptop | /bin/grep grab_pic_tv-ip551wi.pl | /bin/grep -v grep | /usr/bin/xargs /bin/kill -15

Substitute the username your scripts run under for the -U switch and the name of your perl script in the 1st grep. Basically, this command takes all process that run under a particular user, greps out just the one process your script runs as, throws out any instances of the grep statement itself that may make their way into the results, then kills it w/ signal 15.

Next, at one minute after midnight, we start the next instance of the script for the new day:

01 00 * * * /bin/nice -n 19 /usr/bin/perl /home/fliptop/tv-ip551wi/grab_pic_tv-ip551wi.pl

Again, substitute the appropriate script location and name. I usually run these things nicely so they don't interfere too badly w/ other processes that run from time to time.

All that's left is to create the movie from the previous day's images:

03 02 * * * /bin/nice -n 19 /usr/bin/perl /home/fliptop/tv-ip551wi/ffmpeg.pl

As before, substitute the proper location and script name. You can run this at any time after midnight.

As you can imagine, watching surveillance video can be pretty boring since most of the time there's nothing noteworthy happening. However, once in a while you can see some damn interesting weather. One day last May I was reviewing some footage and thought to myself, "that would probably look pretty cool if it was edited a little w/ some Vivaldi."

Coming next, cleaning up your images.

Chapter One
Previously

Pirates
        Nothing happened in the last week that I didn't log in the ship's log. At least not what you want to hear, I get it. You don't need to know every time I take a shit or what I had for breakfast, right? Anyway, the whores pretty much behaved themselves. Like the log says, robots were trying to fix the busted generator but I knew they couldn't. They do what they're programmed to do no matter how impossible.
        Anyway, after a week there were some more little rocks in our way, but these were mapped; we could just go around them. The computers would do the actual steering but I have to sit in the pilot seat in case the four of them disagree about something and I have to make a decision. I've never seen that happen, though.
        While we were driving around the rocks, Wild Bill called over the MASER link. "John, Bill here. I'm about a light minute ahead of you and I'm standing still again, but this time it's on purpose. There's pirates ahead, and I can't outrun them on batteries. If your systems are all in good shape, run like hell. If you're having problems you should stop."
        Shit. I could out run them on one generator but what if the other one went out? Hell, I could just detour around them. Too bad Bill didn't have that advantage, batteries just didn't hold enough energy.
        I answered him back. "Pirates? This far out? Are you sure they're pirates?"
        It would be a couple of minutes before I heard back. I put the course correction into the computers' input console while I waited, then addressed the folks on board. "Passengers and cargo, attention. Prepare for unexpected gravity changes. That is all."
        Bill answered. "It's a fleet and they're not listed in the computer. Hell if I know what they're doing out here."
        Damn. Bill was a damned good friend who had helped me out of jams more than once. And he was hauling tons of different metals, a valuable cargo inside a valuable ship. His short circuit could have been sabotage; pirates have been known to infiltrate the company before. The company wouldn't too much mind pirates killing Bill but they'd hate to lose the ship and cargo, so maybe I wouldn't get in too much trouble for what I planned. I picked up the phone and addressed the ship's P.A. System. You can probably get a lot more detail from the computers, but anyway I got on the P.A. "Attention, ladies, this is the captain," I said. "Strap down, we're going to have some crazy gravity in a few minutes. That is all."
        I strapped myself into the pilot's chair myself. I turned the boat around and decelerated, shut down half the engines, made one look like it was sputtering, and informed Bill to get ready. Then I went toward the pirates while the computers figured out the trajectory for what I'd planned. I'm glad I have those computers, I could never do the math myself.
        They saw me, and I pretended I'd just noticed them and changed course. I wasn't kidding when I told the women gravity was going to be weird.
        They took chase. I went just slow enough to keep them the right distance and get where I was headed when I was headed there. From the radar it looked like they were steering those things by hand. Good, that raised my chances. Actually there wasn't any danger to me since I could outrun 'em easy and they can't shoot at me or anything that might damage the boat and cargo, which is what their goal is. But it raised my chances of saving Bill's ship.
        You know how the pirate fleets work, with a lead ship carrying an EMP. They don't know we designed these ships with pirates in mind and their EMP wouldn't stop us. And I didn't want them to know so I sent them a nice little present, fired from the rail.
        I hear the pirates still use gunpowder.
        The bastard's ship exploded and we were almost there –
        When I reached the right spot we took off like a bat out of hell. Ten seconds later the poor pirates got caught in the rain, as we say. They probably all died. I sure hope so, murderous bastards after my friend!
        I set the course back to Mars and addressed the ladies. "You can unstrap now."
        Time for inspection, since I'd pushed her hard on one generator.
        Like it says in the log, it was fine but a little warm. The engines were in good shape, too, but I shut down the one I made stutter for twenty four hours, just like the book says.
        This called for a beer. Hell, this called for champagne but I didn't have any. I started back to my quarters for a beer.

To be continued.

This morning I was thumbing through my copy of "The Writer's Guide to Building a Science Fiction Universe" and I happened upon the star system building chapter. As I read through the chapter they described the nearest binary star system, Alpha Centauri. It struck me as odd [after having played around with star system generation programs [based on Stephen Dole's Accrete] for something like 20 years that binary's with different types of stars exist. I'm not an astronomer just a curious generalist.

Take Alpha Centauri for example a G2V [something like our Sol] and a K2V is much smaller than Sol but will live 1.5 to 3.0 times longer than Sol. I thought this odd. so I did some Google search... and found that there is no good reasonable explanation that I can find for two different classes of stars being in the same system.

Apparently how binary star formation occurs is debatable. The most favored explanation seems to be that binaries systems form from a common stellar nebula.

So I got to thinking about the Alpha Centauri System as an example of the curious nature of binaries.

Alpha Centauri A is much larger than Alpha Centauri B.
Alpha Centauri B has a much longer life time than Alpha Centauri A since K2V stars burn much slower than G2V.
Orbital separation varies from 11 AU to 36 AU
The assumption is that they both formed at the same time and are ~6B years old.

And yet...

Some how it just does not seem right that you would have separate two stars of different masses that would form from a single stellar nebula. How can can their formation have occurred? One would think the larger of the two, A, would have sucked up, B. How can the relative motion of B around A occurred? How could the orbital mechanics of a gaseous cloud allow for one part to eventually orbit another?

A study from the NRAO VLA Antena at Pie Town, NM suggests that the formation of binaries occurs because the main stellar nebula fragments.... but no mention is made as to how this might occur.

In a "Matrix Moment" it occurs to me that the simplest answer is that we live in a simulation with a subprogram that randomly cranks out stellar systems with random features and elements much like a chart in a table top RPG...

One wonders if there is a rabbit hole with the stuff of arguments here or just a curiosity...