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A turtle scientist’s crude behavior has sparked a #metoo moment in herpetology

Scientist Loses Distinguished Award After Acceptance Presentation Full of Racy Photos

Scientist Loses Award After Acceptance Lecture Featured Students in Bikinis

I like turtles

I'm in a pretty good mood this morning and you lot could very well make use of this, so I'm going to share with you the Old Indian Fire-Starting Trick as taught to me by my forefathers.

Setup: First you need a prepared fire ready to be set aflame. It can be your traditional fire of the tinder, kindling, wood type or it can even be charcoal doused in lighter fluid if you're in a bind. Next you need to announce that you'll be performing the "Old Indian Fire-starting Trick" to get it going.

Execution: Carefully inspect the prepared fire, making sure it is safely laid. Make visible note of any failed attempts to get it going. Wet a finger in your mouth and hold it up to test the wind. Affirm with a nod that conditions for the trick are suitable. Now pull a lighter* out of your pocket and use it to light the fire.

When called on your bullshit, recite the following, counting each off on a finger as you do: I tricked you, I started a fire, and I learned it from an old indian. Old indian. Fire-starting. Trick.

This trick is good for most any audience or occasion. Feel free to add any audience-appropriate cheese before you pull out the lighter. You're welcome.

* I advise a Bic for those of you not experienced in lighter selection. An overfilled Zippo will land you with a mild but annoying chemical burn on your leg and a Cricket will run out of fluid before it runs out of flint, leaving you looking at a lighter with fluid in it that can do nothing useful ever again.

New Grow Light Technology Being Tested in Canada

A new, broad-spectrum light that mimics sunlight more closely than others is being tested in Canada, the Edmonton Journal reports. The light is manufactured by Edmonton-based G2V Optics and was originally designed to test solar cells at the University of Alberta.

Michael Taschuk, the developer of the light, previously managed a team of researchers at the University of Alberta. The lights have been in use at Endless Sky Canna Corp in British Columbia, Canada.

Endless Sky’s CEO Travis George reports that the lights are twice as effective as other grow lights the company has used.

You may think you have many and varied reasons why some of the things I say boil your blood. You're wrong though, there's only really the one reason. Guilt.

In this world you either take the position that it is okay to do what you know is evil for $reasons or you do not. You do, I do not. You rationalize it away with as many layers of camouflage as necessary to obscure this from your conscious mind but your unconscious mind is not fooled. It knows you've chosen evil and it is not placated by your excuses. This is where the rage comes from inside you when I unashamedly speak the truth.

Only when you reject all rationalizations and excuses will you ever have the chance to be at peace with yourselves. A good fishing spot wouldn't hurt either, mind you.

You may now commence the guilt-fueled rejections of the truth I have just spoken.

The potential for scamming is reasonably high with any online market. I've liked Ebay for years now, because it usually enables me to beat competitors prices with a nice margin.

Recently, my OBD2 scanner has gone AWOL. The thing is pretty old, and pretty basic, it just gets the codes, and leaves you to figure out what they mean. So, it's AWOL. I asked my brainy son about a good replacement. Among his recommendations was the Autel MaxiLink ML629. It's not a super brainy device, but it does a little more than just read the codes. ABS brake alarms, airbag alarms, and transmission codes, as well as some kind of database to let you know what the codes mean.

I priced the thing as high as $160, Amazon had it for $129, and Ebay gave me about five hits for $109, with several other priced higher.

I didn't buy immediately. I just sat on the information for a few days. Went back to Ebay yesterday, and found that the particular sale that I "watched" had ended. So, do a search for the same item, and I'm faced with a wall of $114 sales.

Now, that price is obviously not "bad", but it seems suspicious that less than a week ago, there were five hits for $109, but now, the lowest "buy it now" price is $114.

Is Ebay running some kind of algorithm (like Amazon is purported to do) that establishes what I might be willing to pay, then gives me that price? It just seems odd, and oddities tend to catch my attention.

Possibly, they are trying to pressure me to buy now, rather than wait a few more days? "Oh, geez, it's gone up 5 dollar in four days, what will it be in five or ten more days?"

All of that, plus, I have an email in my inbox. "Your Ebay rock star report". WTF? Common dumbass television advertising tactics? Maybe that email is punishment for blocking advertising and trackers.

Is anyone else having weird and/or creepy experiences with Ebay? Are they beginning to go downhill?

An additional bit of weirdness:

In a different browser, using a different proxy, I did another search for the same item. There is a similar wall of offers for $114, but I'm also seeing others priced as high as $210, $199, $151, and $147. I'm definitely NOT seeing precisely the same results when using different browsers, or, more accurately, when I'm more anonymous.

I feel like I'm being gamed. Maybe not as badly as Amazon does, but the feeling is still there.

HOME / INSPIRING

NASA Is Training This 17-Year-Old Girl to Become One of the First Humans on Mars

Better than dying on the Space Shuttle, I suppose.

Begin the test by looking at this picture. When you're finished looking, read the spoiler below.

Today on this 214th anniversary of the historic duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton I have but one thing to say.

Ham shot first.

ThorCon Molten Salt Reactor can be safer safe and scalable to 100 GW within a decade

Nvidia GTX 1180 to Use New High-Speed Connector: What You Need to Know

Quadrupling Wealth with a ten billion person Global City

Japan's Video Game Bars Are In Danger

Since playing with Knoppix on a friends thinkpad circa 2001 while he was on break from uni, ive been a Debian user ever since. That extended to Ubuntu back during 6.06 LTS days and then on to Linux Mint and Cinnamon after hating unity/gnome 3. But I've been craving something more lightweight and systemd free but had yet to find an interesting enough alternative until reading this reply (Thanks urza9814 and Azuma Hazuki!).

I really liked what I saw and it felt like a cross between a modern Linux distro and light weight OpenBSD. BSD licenses for their from-scratch package manager; I don't dislike the GPL but BSD is much more permissive and allows giving back to the BSD folks. Then we have the use of runit for init which uses the very slick idea of a managed process tree (very Unix). Plus the distro is rolling which is something I've always been interested in for desktop use. LibreSSL is a big plus along with a myriad of ports to other arch's like raspberry pi and other arm boards (like open and net bsd).

I first downloaded the musl libc version to see how much it could support and surprisingly the musl libc version is plenty stable and usable. Though, I wanted to run a serious hardware box to test it out and see how it performs, and more importantly, how simple it is to install and manage. So I opted for the standard glibc version. Runs like a champ. The xbps package manager is easy to use and a few simple commands keep the system up to date and install packages and resolves dependencies just like apt or rpm. The install process is also very simple as you boot into a live desktop, open a terminal and run the installer as root using sudo. After a very quick configuration the installer does its thing and you're ready to reboot. So far I have my plan 9 tools setup such as drawterm and plan9port. Getting a usable system up and running is honestly pretty damn easy. One word that sums it up: refreshing.

My next steps are some sort of mdadm torture test to see how stable it runs between reboots. Though I'm not so sure if it's systemd/kernel/hardware related just yet. If its crap software, then my workstation/big file server gets voided. I'm also interested in switching my laptop as well.

== All aboard the 9grid Part 1.1 ==
So I've been eager to write a second chapter to my plan 9 experience and so far progress has been slow and steady. I have a much better grasp of the concept of name spaces and how the OS works but do not yet feel qualified to write a guide. I have been tinkering with my setup, a Celeron J1900 board with a 256GB SSD running the most recent version of 9ants configured as a CPU server. The box sits next to my router plugged into the network and happily hums along at about 11 watts which costs me about a buck sixty here in NYC to run 24/7. I don't allow direct access instead relying on an ssh tunnel via my ageing Debian box which is an old wyse terminal that sips power at 8W (void conversion in the future). I can pop onto my CPU server from work using cygwin on windows 10 and drawterm built under cygwin.

The feel of plan 9 is quite interesting. The GUI feels obtuse at first but after getting to know how to mouse chord and use the terminal, it becomes a pleasure. The whole idea behind the lack of a command history is because the text buffer of the window is your history and is fully editable. if you see a command example in a man page you can edit it on screen, highlight it, and "send" it which runs that command.

The plumber is a message server that receives plumb requests which are text strings that the plumber parses and matches against a set of rules in your plumber config. The rule then performs the appropriate action such as running the associated command. This is similar to the context menus in the MS Windows right click menu. Instead of having open/openwith or some menu modifier buried deep within the registry, you just have a message decoding server. If it's a url, open the web browser with that url. If it's a png open page to display it. If it's a text file which includes scripts and source files then open them in acme. etc. Very neat little service that gives you a lot of interesting functionality.

The Acme Text editor is quite interesting and quickly showing it's powerful ease of use. Open a session and you have a listing of your home directory. right click a file to open it in a new window. if the file is an image, media, or whatever, then the plumber will forward the request to page which will open the appropriate viewer. Right clicking a directory opens that directory in a new window. want to create a directory? type the shell command mkdir newdir, highlight it, and middle click it to run that command. Then click get to refresh the directory listing and you will see newdir. Acme use example:
Create a new script file in current directory window:

touch newfile, highlight, middle click.
middle click get to relist directory contents and observe newfile.
chmod +x newfile, highlight, middle click.
right click newfile to open edit buffer in new window.
add some stuff to file, e.g. #!/bin/rc \ echo "Hello world!", click put (save)
in directory window, middle click newfile
new windows opens with script output we just executed: Hello world!

All of the above commands and editing is done within acme windows. The idea is the editor works with your tools, not against them. The only issue I have had is input events are skipped causing infinite loops. This happened when using fgets from stdio and not native plan 9 input using the draw libraries.

I have to organize my notes and writings pertaining to my tinkering with plan 9. The architecture is quite interesting and simple overall. I plan on writing a bit of a basic into of the OS internals such as how the kernel works, booting, networking, graphics and more. But I am still a ways off but having a ton of fun learning by working in the OS. I have been fooling around with this guide and building the examples in plan 9 using acme and as much native plan 9 libraries as possible. Fun learning experience.