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Today I learned that fake medicines can work even when patients know they're fake.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161124080626/http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2010/12/22/meet-the-ethical-placebo-a-story-that-heals/

Black Guns Matter activist brings message to Detroit

Black Guns Matter founder Maj Toure to speak in Springfield; says urban populations lacking info on gun rights

Maj Toure Takes his Message of Gun Rights into the Heart of Boston

Rumbling Against Tyranny

'Black Guns Matter' Focuses On Firearms Education To Decrease Violence

What could possibly go wrong? 'Black Guns Matter' campaigner claims he will cut violence in inner cities like Chicago by arming residents with more LEGAL firearms

@MAJTOURE

Tesla Owner Who Sacrificed His Model S To Save Another Driver Gets Surprise From Elon Musk

Mmmh, that sweet good publicity. It's even better than bad publicity.

I lost a second button off my coat. I managed to retrieve both buttons with the intention of sewing them back on, but the sewing kit lay untouched on my desk for a week.

I am very much a creature of habit. I do certain things, I don't do things that I don't usually do. I'm not used to sewing buttons, so the prospect of doing so struck me as terribly onerous.

Even so, it's still cold here in the Pacific NorthLeft. Leaving my jacket unbuttoned was not only cold, it permitted my shirt to get rained on.

When I got out of bed tonight I was completely overcome with self doubt with respect to my next consulting gig. I wrote an email to two of the client's people to tell them so, but that I had done lots of projects that were far more difficult. That is, my self-doubt does not make sense.

I went out for coffee and started to feel better.

When I came home I was determined to sew those buttons, dammit, and I did.

It wasn't hard at all.

This is a problem I have: the prospect of doing many kinds of work strikes me - ahead of time - as far more difficult than it really is when I'm doing it. So I put off starting it.

I worked an entire quarter at AMCC without doing a damn thing, then checked myself into a psychiatric hospital where they told me I had Attention Deficit Disorder.

I have no lack of attention, but I don't do well at volitionally directing it. If I can get started at a task I have no problem carrying on, but I have a hard time getting started.

That I know this is the case doesn't make it go away.

New diesel Chevy Cruze can go an estimated 702 miles on a single tank of fuel

The 52 mpg highway fuel economy numbers apply to the six-speed manual transmission diesel Cruze, which gets 30 mpg on city streets. The car also comes in a 9-speed automatic transmission version, which returns 47 mpg on the highway and 31 mpg in the city with start-stop technology regulating the engine.

Not to take potshots at the "other site" but damn.

I had mostly stopped checking it because the comment signal-to-noise ratio had become so bad. But now they're running these giant floating ads that cover half the comment-text so you can't actually read them anyway.

My client asked me to bid on a second job. It requires a deep understanding of USB. I didn't understand much of the spec, so I ordered "USB: The Universal Serial Bus" by Benjamin David Lunt.

Just now I emailed my client to tell them that I'd need to study the book before I could produce a sensible bid. I said of course I would charge them for reading it, but I needed some time before I could produce that bid and get started on the actual job.

I expect they'll respect me for being honest but I fear they'll shitcan me for being an idiot.

It couldn't be any more difficult than firewire, which I was once quite good at.

Mod journal flamebait!!!

Why does the United States still let 12-year-olds get married?

This is an opinion piece in WaPo written by the founder of a nonprofit. archive.is link because I figured out WaPo has a 5 article/month limit paywall.

While most states set 18 as the minimum marriage age, exceptions in every state allow children younger than 18 to marry, typically with parental consent or judicial approval. How much younger? Laws in 27 states do not specify an age below which a child cannot marry.

Unchained At Last, a nonprofit I founded to help women resist or escape forced marriage in the United States, spent the past year collecting marriage license data from 2000 to 2010, the most recent year for which most states were able to provide information. We learned that in 38 states, more than 167,000 children — almost all of them girls, some as young 12 — were married during that period, mostly to men 18 or older. Twelve states and the District of Columbia were unable to provide information on how many children had married there in that decade. Based on the correlation we identified between state population and child marriage, we estimated that the total number of children wed in America between 2000 and 2010 was nearly 248,000.

Turns out R2D*2pa$tramimacaronomy is doing just fine stateside, for the moment...

(Illustrated version here)
        After buying copies of books from my book printer, finding errors to correct, and giving the bad copies to my daughter who wants them, rather than discarding them I realized I was stupid. It would be a lot cheaper to buy a laser printer.
        An inkjet wouldn’t work for me. The printer is going to be sitting idle most of the time, and inkjet nozzles clog; I’ve had several, and all clogged if you didn’t use them at least every other day. Plus, the ink dries out in the cartridges. Being a powder, toner has no such problem.
        So I went looking at the Staples site, and they badly need a new webmaster. This little four year old laptop only has a gig of memory, and a lot of people have far less. The poor little machine choked. That damned web site took every single one of my billion bytes!
        Or rather than firing him, make him design his websites on an old 486. Or even 386.
        So what the hell, I just drove down there; I didn’t want to wait for (or pay for) it to be shipped, anyway, I just wanted to see what they had.
        Buying it was easy. They had exactly the printer I was looking for; Canon, a name I trusted since we had Canons and other brands at work, wireless networking, and not expensive. They had a huge selection of lasers; it’s a very big store. I paid for the printer and sheaf of paper, and man, lasers sure have gotten a lot less expensive. I expected at least $250 just for the printer, maybe without even toner, but the total including tax and paper was just a little over a hundred.
        When I got home, of course I pulled out the manual like I do with every piece of electronics I buy—and it was worse than the “manual” that came with the external hard drive I ranted about here earlier. Cryptic drawings and very little text. At least the hard drive didn’t need a manual. All there is is a network port, a USB port, a power socket, and an on/off button. Plug it in and it just works. With the printer, I really needed a manual.
        Kids, hieroglyphics are thousands of years out of style and I don’t know why you’re so drawn to emoticons, but there was an obvious reason for these hieroglyphics: globalization. Far fewer words to be written in three different languages.
        I could find nothing better on Canon’s web site. So I followed the instructions in the poor excuse for a manual for unpacking it and setting it up, as best as I could.
        I couldn’t find the paper tray.
        I’ve been printing since 1984 when I bought a small plotter and wrote software to make it into a printer. Afterwards I had ink jets at home until now, and lasers at work. All the lasers were different from each other in various ways, usually the shape of the toner cartridge, but all had a drawer that held the paper no matter what brand of printer.
        I couldn’t find it. Sighing and muttering, I opened the lid to the big laptop and copied the CD’s contents to a thumb drive to install the printer on the smaller notebook. There’s no reason to make two calls to tech support, because an installation screwup is never unexpected when you’ve been dealing with computers as long as I have.
        And why send a CD? Fewer and fewer computers have CD or DVD burners any more. Why not a thumb drive? All computers have USB ports these days, and have had for over a decade.
        The installation was trouble-free but still troubling; I didn’t think the wi-fi was connecting, as it said to hold the router button until the blue light on the printer stopped flashing. I held the button down until my finger hurt and was about to call tech support, but as I reached for the phone the light stopped flashing and burned steadily.
        Maybe it was working, but I’d have to find the paper tray to find out. But it had installed a manual, one I couldn’t find. So I plugged the thumb drive back in and searched it visually with a file manager, and found an executable for the manual. Running it took me to an offline web page which wasn’t too badly designed, but I would have far preferred a PDF, as I could put that on the little tablet to reference while I was examining the printer in search of where to stick the damned paper, instead of a bulky, clumsy notebook.
        I finally found it, and it wasn’t a tray, even though that’s what the documents called it. I haven’t seen anything like it before, and the documentation was very unclear. But I did manage to get paper in it, and sent a page to it, and it worked well.
        Meanwhile, I wish Staples would fix their web site, and Canon would fix their documentation.
        When did clear, legible documentation go out of style? Hell, the lasers we had at work didn’t even need docs. Good thing, too, because IT never left them when they installed crap. Another reason I’m glad I’m retired! Work sucks.
        At any rate, a few hours later I printed the cleaned up scans of The Golden Book of Springfield so I could check for dirt I missed looking on a screen. I saved it as PDF and printed it from that. And amazingly, this thing prints duplex! It only took fifteen or twenty minutes or so to print the 329 pages.
        I’m happy with it. Man, progress... it just amazes me. But when I went to print from Open Office, the word processor I’ve used for years, I didn’t try sending the print job to the printer, but it looked like Oo won’t print duplex.
        Then I discovered that they may stop developing Open Office because they couldn’t get developers; the developers were all working on Libre Office.
        Damn. The last time I tried Lo it didn’t have full justification, which was a show stopper when I’m publishing books. I’d tried it because someone said it would write in MS Word format. I was skeptical, and my skepticism was fully warranted. It could write a DOC file, but Word couldn’t read it. Plus, of course, the show stopping lack of full justification.
        I decided to try it out again, since Oo may be doomed… and man! Not only does it have full justification, it has a lot Oo lacks that I didn’t even know I needed. It appears to now actually write a DOC file that Word can read, even though when you save it in DOC the program warns you it might not work in Word.
        And it might… I haven’t tested it… might arrange pages for a booklet. I’ll test it with this article… when it’s longer than four pages, as it is now.
        This was all over the course of the last week as I was working on a PDF of the Vachel Lindsay book. The computer nagged me that the printer was running low on toner (it has a small “starter” cartridge), with a button to order toner from Canon. I clicked it, and damn, the toner cost almost as much as the printer did.
        Then I ran out of paper, so I went back to Staples, where I discovered that the printer I had paid eighty something plus tax for was now twice that price! So I got the toner and five reams of paper.
        At any rate, I tried to print this as a booklet, and this is what came out:

        It’s backlit; the picture on the top left and the grayer text on the bottom right are on the other side of the page.
        But a little fiddling and yes, it will print booklets. It isn’t Libre Office doing it, it’s the printer itself!

        I like this printer. I’ve figured it to about a penny per page, and I don’t think that’s too expensive, considering a page is both sides.
        And then I had this document open in Libre Office, tried to insert a graphic (the second one in this article), and it simply didn’t insert. Maybe it doesn’t like JPG files, I don’t yet know. A little googling showed me that I’m not the only one with this problem, and none of the fixes I found fixed it. I have Open Office open now.
        And here I was going to uninstall Open Office. I’d better not, I guess. I’ll need it if I want to insert a graphic; inserted in Oo they show in Lo. Puzzling.
        A week later and I’ve found that sometimes it will insert a graphic, but only if you go through the menu; using text shortcuts never inserts it. And sometimes it simply doesn’t insert the picture, and sometimes it says it doesn’t recognize the format when I’d just put the same graphic in another Lo document.
        Well, I’m not uninstalling Open Office yet, anyway. Not until Lo solves the graphics show-stoppng bug.
…
        I wrote that a few weeks ago, and have been using both. Libre Office has a horrible problem with keyboard shortcuts, and those shortcuts save a LOT of time. But except for its horrible bugs, it’s a better word processor than Open Office. So both will remain installed.
        It’s possible I may uninstall Microsoft Office, depending on how well Lo’s spreadsheet works. I haven’t even fired it up yet, but Oo’s spreadsheet is almost useless.
…
        The above is several months old now. Lo does lack one important thing Oo has: controls to move to the next or previous page. Not good when you’re writing books. Also, it still has graphics problems. Often, simply opening a document in Lo removes any graphics.
        After sitting idle for a month or so, I needed to print a return label. I’m starting to become wary of buying anything from Amazon. I’d bought a new battery for this laptop a year or two ago, and the battery came from someone other than Amazon, and it was the wrong battery. I got the right battery directly from Acer.
        Then I ordered a long throw stapler to make booklets with, and staples for it. The stapler came a week later; no staples. So I bought a box from Walgreen’s. A week later, the staples came, again not from Amazon, and they had simply thrown the box of staples in an unprotected envelope. The box was smashed, the rows of staples broken.
        Then I ordered a DVD, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I watched the first six, put the seventh in the DVD player—and it was region coded for the UK! Some company from Florida sent it. WTF is wrong with people? So I needed a return label.
        It wouldn’t print; it just hung in the print queue until it timed out. After a little digging, I found that the router had assigned a new IP address to it.
        So after a lot of googling, I gave up and cringed; I was going to need tech support, which is usually a nightmare. I wind up on the phone talking to someone with an accent so heavy I can barely understand them, if at all, who is ignorant of the product and reading from a checklist.
        I found Canon was one of those few companies that actually care about keeping their customers happy. Support was over email, painless, and effective.
        I have to say, it’s the best printer I’ve ever owned.

Merriam-Webster defines the adjective fake to mean "counterfeit, sham." The noun is further defined as follows:

one that is not what it purports to be: such as
a : a worthless imitation passed off as genuine
b : impostor, charlatan
c : a simulated movement in a sports contest (as a pretended kick, pass, or jump or a quick movement in one direction before going in another) designed to deceive an opponent
d : a device or apparatus used by a magician to achieve the illusion of magic in a trick

The dictionary glosses fake among a set of synonyms which "mean a thing made to seem other than it is," further specifying the nuances of fake: "fake implies an imitation of or substitution for the genuine but does not necessarily imply dishonesty."

All of these uses have a common sense of something that is deliberately constructed to stand in for something "genuine." When someone presents a "fake ID" to get past a bouncer at a bar, the implication is that the person is showing credentials that are known to be false and in fact were manufactured to be so. Deception is not required for something to be called "fake," but merely an attempt to simulate something "real."

When the debate over "fake news" erupted a few months ago, it was first targeted at news that fit this common everyday English definition of the word fake. The concerns expressed early by Facebook, Google, et al. were over the use of deliberately fabricated news stories that knowingly contained false and made-up claims. The standard example was Buzzfeed's report of Balkan teenagers producing made-up news stories for profit.

There are various motivations to fabricate news stories. Among them:

(1) Profit from ads
(2) Propaganda (inciting followers of a cause to be moved or outraged by a story made up to target and play off their beliefs and biases)
(3) Hoaxes (just doing it for the "lulz")
(4) Satire and parody (standard example being The Onion)

As more and more stories came out on this "fake news," it became apparent that a lot of the stuff in the first three categories here seemed to be aimed at conservatives and Trump supporters in the past election cycle. Not all of it, certainly, but a lot of it.

So, a new counter-movement started to protest against the proposals to police "fake news," and the first thing this movement did was to redefine an English word.

Fake would no longer imply an intent to create something false and pass it off as genuine. Now it could mean simply "inadvertently erroneous" or even simply "biased." Once this new usage slipped in, it became suddenly pervasive. A major "mainstream" news source doesn't do enough fact-checking for a particular story? It's branded as "fake news." Does the story have a slightly sensational or biased headline to get attention, but the story is completely factual? It's "fake news."

Did this redefinition of "fake" originate among the actual "fake news" sources themselves, in an attempt at self-preservation? It's unclear. But the new usage rapidly spread among conservatives who wanted to attack CNN or the Washington Post or the New York Times. Left-leaning folks joined in and similarly started branding Breitbart and other right-wing sources as "fake news," even when the targets were merely presenting a viewpoint difference or bias, not literally making up facts and claiming them to be true.

From my perspective, this is NOT a small matter. The distinction between bias and unintentional error vs. outright fabrication and deliberate lies is important. The recent furor over "alternative facts" is simply another stage in an attempt to blur this distinction.

While we should rightly criticize news sources -- whatever their "bias" or however they might "lean" politically -- for bad fact-checking practices, outright bias, and other poor journalistic practices, most of the "mainstream" news sources acknowledge when they make actual errors of fact. They print retractions. They print corrections. Sometimes they may not come quickly enough for our taste, and again that should be criticized. But it is different from actual "fake news."

We witnessed a redefinition of an English word in the past few months, and few people seem to have noticed. The implications of its redefinition are also disturbing and Orwellian. And while this redefinition seems to have originated on the Right (or perhaps even among the fake new fabricators themselves), it has spread to the Left as a convenient way of criticizing news sources they don't like. It is a symptom of division, and it's an unproductive way of shutting down discussion. Rather than debate the substance of a story, one can just claim, "Oh -- I don't pay attention to MSNBC/Fox News/whatever, because it's just fake news." And the debate is declared over, in sort of an anti-argumentum ad verecundiam.

Can fake ever be corralled into its old meaning again? I don't know. But whatever we call the distinction between reality and fabrication, it's an important one.