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A New Internet
The USA just decided apparently to abolish "Net Neutrality" making the public Internet beholden to large, established corporations. This is bad news for individuals and small businesses.
What we need is a new internet, a grass-roots one, ad-hoc, created by volunteers.
Many years ago when WiFi was new, there was one such attempt I seem to remember called "Consume the Net." I never had the money to buy the hardware at the time, but it sounded like a great idea. The problem in those days was getting any sort of broadband connection was difficult and expensive. You could get a 56kbps POTS modem, sometimes ISDN (64k * 2) or cable (500-600kbps) if you were very lucky and ADSL was just coming out. WiFi was already running at megabits.
Now we have a different set of problems to work around, but the technology is ubiquitous, cheap and mature.
It would we cool to have the equivalent of open access points on this new co-operative internet that you could scan for and join if you promised to behave.
Any ideas?
Harry Potter by Algorithm
The Guardian has a story about some Harry Potter stories written by Botnki's predictive text keyboard (complete with link to github).
“He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione’s family. Ron’s Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself.
‘If you two can’t clump happily, I’m going to get aggressive,’ confessed the reasonable Hermione.”
So not much worse that the original.
Expensive ITER Fusion
12-Year-Old Girl Flies From Virginia to Interview Roy Moore
Roy Moore Emerges from Self-Imposed Exile to Chat with 12-Year-Old Girl
Trump Group Sends 12-Year-Old Girl to Interview Roy Moore Ahead of Alabama Election
Millie in Alabama (5m49s)
Roy Moore seemed delighted to be interviewed by a friendly, innocent, and untainted young reporter. He touched her at 4m49s into the video.
Dennis Rodman Has Secret Message From Kim Jong-un for Trump
Rolls Roil
Racial dispute at beloved bakery roils liberal college town in Ohio
The three students were arrested after punching and kicking the white shopkeeper. The 18- and 19-year-old students said that they were racially profiled and that their only crime was trying to buy alcohol with fake identification; the shopkeeper, Allyn Gibson, said the students attacked him after he caught them trying to steal bottles of wine.
The day after the arrests, hundreds of students protested outside the bakery. Members of Oberlin's student senate published a resolution saying Gibson's had "a history of racial profiling and discriminatory treatment."
Few colleges put the "liberal" into "liberal arts" more than Oberlin, which in the early 1800s became the first in the country to regularly admit women and minorities. But it also more recently has become, for conservatives, a symbol of political correctness gone awry and entitled youth.
News articles in 2015 quoted students decrying the school dining hall's sushi and Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches as cultural appropriation. The divisive, voice-of-a-generation actress Lena Dunham, famously a 2008 Oberlin alumna, was quoted in Food & Wine magazine as saying, "The press reported it as, 'How crazy are Oberlin kids?' But to me, it was actually, 'Right on.'"
Kepler Announcement on Dec. 14
NASA Hosts Media Teleconference to Announce Latest Kepler Discovery
NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EST Thursday, Dec. 14, to announce the latest discovery made by its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data.
NASA and Google are both users of the D-Wave "quantum annealer", ostensibly for machine learning purposes.
Porn Star May Have Been Cyberbullied Into Committing Suicide
What is August Ames Cause of Death? Porn Star Found Dead After Cyberbullying
Adult film star August Ames was found dead in her California home on Tuesday, according to BuzzFeed. The erotic actress, who appeared in over 270 films, was 23 years old.
The Canadian actress’s official cause of death has yet to be released by the Ventura County Medical Examiner’s office due to pending family notifications. However, some members of the porn industry believe Ames, whose birth name was Mercedes Grabowski, may have taken her own life.
Just two days before Ames’s death, the porn star was a victim of cyberbullying after she posted a tweet on Sunday saying she refused to perform with a male actor who did gay pornography.
Shortly after Ames’s comments about working with "crossover performers"—porn stars who appear in gay and heterosexual scenes—she was bombarded with angry tweets accusing her of discriminating against the LGBTQ community and being anti-gay.
Ames defended her stance, writing that she was not homophobic, but decided not to shoot with men who have done gay porn for health reasons. “I’m not putting my body at risk, I don’t know what they do in their private lives,” she wrote.
Therese Dreaming
My Winter Weekend Adventure.
As my username might suggest, I love winter. It's been pretty nice outside lately so I wanted to get out to the mountains for a walk with my daughter and wife. There is a nice little lake in the mountains about 50 minutes away. It's got a pretty wide, flat trail, so I thought it would be perfect for towing my girl in a cheap-o sled I bought from Canadian Tire for $12.
We invited a friend and we got all loaded into the car and headed out. As we get closer to the mountains, it became clear that my plan had a glaring flaw... there was no snow. My plan to tow my girl in the sled was not going to work out and we didn't bring a stroller. Oh, well, I guess I'll just have to carry her and we'll go for a short walk.
It was a beautiful day. About -2C, and the lake that we went to was barely frozen. Frozen enough that you needed a fist sized rock with a high trajectory to break though the ice. It was really fun to throw rocks at the ice. If you took a smaller rock and threw it like you were skipping a rock, it would skitter along the top of the ice and travel a LONG way. Several hundred yards. The ice was very smooth and fast.
When you would throw a rock along the surface, it would make an eerie metallic-like sound -- just like this: https://youtu.be/ZIHF5EoEixc?t=227
We finished up our short walk and went into a nearby town for a pizza lunch. I was a little scared that my daughter (who had not had a nap) would be a little shit at the restaurant, but she was an angel! So well behaved. I was pleasantly surprised.
Next week my wife goes back to work. She's only going back part-time (3 6-hour days/week), but I'm a little scared to be left alone with my daughter for the day. I've never had much luck with getting her to go to sleep. I'm going to have to figure something out. I've been able to get her to sleep in the past by reading to her and then cuddling until she goes to sleep, but that hasn't worked in several months. The car also seems to work, but she wakes up when I unload her. My wife uses her boob to get her to settle down.
Does anyone have any suggestions for a father on how to get a 1-year old to sleep?
