Open-Source Camouflage From Computer Vision. As facial recognition becomes more popular as a means for police state identification, innovative makeup and hairstyle fashions can be deployed to foil the Orwellian algorithms. Talk about weird. Now we’re going to be dressing for the machines?
China importing boys and women
China’s preference for male children is apparently resulting in black-market importation of both boys for adoption, and women to marry. One of many bizarre consequences of their demographic management experiment. Mara Hvistendahl’s book Unnatural Selection goes into this in much greater detail.
Car-free parenting: What’s Normal?
The strange experience of a car-free parent who finds herself and her kids in a (Zip)car for the afternoon. When do kids start noticing what’s normal, and what’s not? How do you get them not to care?
Philips has won the DOE’s L-Prize
The US DoE set up the L-Prize, modeled after the X-Prize, for durable, high quality, low power lighting. Philips just won it, with a remote-phosphor LED bulb. Warm white light, 900 lumens bright, for less than 10 Watts. Now if only they can get someone other than Home Despot to carry them!
Multi-agency armed raid takes down raw milk and cheese producer
Apparently the agricultural industrial complex is willing to take down its competition with a hail of lead if necessary. A multi-agency SWAT team descended upon a raw milk and cheese buying club in SoCal, and is holding the proprietor without bail. How can this be a serious law enforcement priority?
College Students Using Sugar Daddies To Pay Off Loan Debt
Something like 15-30% of female undergraduates claim to be willing to use sex work to pay off their student loans, and there are apparently dozens of websites designed to help them do just that. Apparently Belle de Jour was only a tiny bit ahead of her time.
Bicycles and Fresh Bread
The NY Times points out that bicycles and the European penchant for fresh bread are more closely related than you might at first imagine. A writer in Amsterdam talks about how a slightly different conception of daily life enables cities without cars, and how that life is really more free than our slavish commitment to the car.
Law and Order and Parking Lots
Sightline Daily explores the perversity of requiring bars and other drinking establishments to provide copious car parking. Nearly every city does it, despite the fact that drunk driving kills 11,000 people in the US every year. If there’s anywhere we should nix parking minimums, it’s the places we go specifically to get drunk…
Star CSP Hotline for Bicyclists
Bicyclists are encouraged to use the *CSP hotline to report aggressive drivers to the Colorado State Police (just dial *277 on your mobile). You must obtain the license plate of the vehicle and describe the aggressive behavior. Location, direction of travel, and a driver description are good too, but not mandatory. After 3 reports of the same vehicle, the registered owner gets a warning letter. Subsequent reports will result in a state trooper visiting them in person and taking “appropriate enforcement action”, whatever that means. If you’re not on a state highway, make sure you get them to enter the info into the database before you’re transferred to local law enforcement to make a report. Hopefully they’ll make some kind of annual report as to what actions this system has actually resulted in.
Lowercase theories, uppercase Theories, and the myth of global cooling
Lowercase theories, uppercase Theories, and the myth of global cooling, a good look at how the processes of science get misconstrued to the public at large, and why it’s not really a good idea for science journalism to focus on the current literature.