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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.

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...

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.

They're even paying me to prepare my bid. That is, I'm getting paid just to tell them how much it will cost them.

This is really good news. These people really like me.

This despite the fact that I constantly feel like I'm fucking up. Sometimes I don't go in to work because I sleep all day. But as a consultant, I'm not particularly required to show up, I'm only required to deliver a quality product on time.

Which I did, for my first project. It had a hard deadline because our customers were scheduled to go to manufacturing March 1. They wanted a whole month for QA so I absolutely had to finish by February 1, which I did.

Everyone at the client company likes me. I like them too. It's good to work for good people, that makes a lot of difference to me.

I bought a Mac Mini with some of the money from my first paycheck. I worked at home tuesday and wednesday, and will work at home tomorrow (Friday). I brought one of their evaluation boards from work to use at home.

In other news, I busted a button off my coat. I briefly considered purchasing an entirely new coat, then thought "What a colossal waste of money, I'm not that lazy, I'll sew the button back on." Then I braved a torrential rain shower as I went to but a sewing kit on the way home today.

Republicans vote to rebuke Elizabeth Warren, saying she impugned Sessions's character

Republican Senators Vote to Formally Silence Elizabeth Warren

Sen. McConnell Refuses to Let Sen. Warren Speak About Attorney General Nominee Sessions - YouTube

Rule XIX - Senate Rules Committee - US Senate

Micron 2017 Roadmap Detailed: 64-layer 3D NAND, GDDR6 Getting Closer, & CEO Retiring

Worth a look, but not a submission just yet.

I recently griped that I sleep more than anyone, but that all that sleep does not make me feel rested. Actually it makes me feel terrible; when I first wake up in the morning I feel as if I've been beaten with a baseball bat.

Back in the day I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, a phenomenon in which one stops breathing during sleep. It partially wakes you, reducing the quality of sleep.

But I had surgery for it in 2008. As far as I could tell the surgery worked. Actually for some time my sleep was just dandy.

In response to my comment, AC recommended I take Vitamin D. Now I am skeptical of nutritional supplement treatment, but at this point I'm willing to try waving a dead chicken over it. I googled it and found what appeared to be a credible report of peer-reviewed research that indicates Vitamin D deficiency diminishes the quality of sleep.

For several months I've had a low-sugar, low-cholesterol diet. I'm pretty sure that diet is low in Vitamin D as well. It's been a cold winter here in the Northern Hemisphere; I haven't had much of the exposure to the Sun that causes our skin to make Vitamin D.

I stopped at the drugstore on the way to work just now and bought some 2000 IU Vitamin D3 tablets. I also got Vitamin B12. The article also recommended Vitamin B5 but the store didn't carry it. I took my first doses when I stopped at Peet's for a coffee.

A while back I complained to my witch doctor that I often slept all day, that no amount of sleep made me feel rested. In response he prescribed the antidepressant Welbutrin. It's working partially, in that, if I didn't have to get up, I would sleep until noon.

My present contract has a long commute. I don't have a key to the office. To work a full day I need to get out of bed at 7:00 AM. It is uncommon that I manage to do that.

I just bought a Mac Mini. Soon I should be able to work from home, but even so it's not going to work if I'm sleeping all the time, especially if that sleep is not restful.