I was going to put this on my facebook page, but it seemed worthy of a higher status. As it were.
We live in a police state, here in America, in the same way one gives oneself a particular religion or non-religious label. Unless you are a priest, a habitually repentant sinner, or like me, a habitually annoyed atheist, you usually aren’t anything. Someone can’t look at you and pick out your belief system. It is in the background lurking around doing nothing, ignored and all but forgotten most of the time. But when needed out comes the book (The Bible, The Origin, whatever). Our police state, like most people’s religion, can be turned on or off as needed by most people with privilege, or at least, someone is turing it on and off so it can spend a lot of time in the background doing nothing, ignored and all but forgotten most of the time. The other day a fugitive who apparently lives in the wooded swampy areas that permeate the part of Minnesota I live in (ever since he executed his lover at a gas station, then ran him over with his BMW, a couple of weeks ago) was spotted, possibly, at the nearby small airport. I saw pictures of the police response. It looked like Ferguson, with the armored vehicles, cops wearing storm trooper gear, and all that. Yes, the police state is always available and that is what the police state looks like to the privileged.
If only that was all the police state was.
Police searching for fugitive near my house. They may be overdressed for the occasion. But maybe not.You see, the Ferguson Event, where the police showed up in the Storm Trooper gear, is not really the thing to worry about. If that’s all they did, we’d be fine. So what if the police need to show up every now and then in the large black van, back door opening, one, then another, then another, storm trooper attired cop hopping out and going into squat-move-stalk stance and loping off weaving back and forth among themselves and holding their guns to their noses like the priest holds the crucifix at that one point during mass, “hut, hut, hut” serpentining into the danger zone. That would only be now and then, when “needed” because of the fugitives living in the heavily wooded swamps.
What really happens in Ferguson is not that. The real problem, in Ferguson and everywhere our nation’s African American’s and often Hispanics are mostly sequestered, is a totally different thing.
If you want to know what happens, you need to do this. First, get black. Once you are black it is much easier. If you are not naturally black I’m not sure how you do this. Anyway, get black and then go stand on a street corner. If you are of the right age white people will pull over and try to buy drugs from you. If you are the right sex people will assume you are a prostitute. Eventually the police will stop by and they’ll throw you in jail for no good reason. But it will go on your record. Eventually, you’ll get thrown in jail for no good reason a certain number of times, and then you won’t get out. For no good reason.
Prefer to drive? You can do that. Same effect. A white person I know works mainly with white people in a white town in a white part of the Twin Cities. There are a few black people there, of course, but in her unit only one African American colleague. Regular guy. Drives slow. He is stopped by the cops on the way to work about twice a month. No one else who works there has ever been stopped by the cops. Driving while black was big thing, on the news and all, a while ago. Still a big thing. Just not so much on the news. You still cant’ drive while black in many communities.
How about Beverly Hills? The police in Beverly Hills, during the year 2013, issued 3,250 traffic tickets and over 1,000 citations for non-traffic violations. That might not sound like a lot to you, but I’m not talking about Beverly Hills, California. I’m talking about Beverly Hills, Missouri, down by Ferguson.
Beverly Hills, Missouri has 571 people living in it.
Beverly Hills, Missouri is 92.7% black. Of the remainder, about half are white.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the police state. It is not Storm Troopers on armored vehicles. Unless necessary. It is not black helicopters. Well, now and then with the helicopters. It is not drones. Usually. Mainly it is day to day police work that pays for itself because every few minutes somebody gets a fine for being black and living in one of those places where the African Americans in our country are generally sequestered.
So this all started out me wanting to tweet an article I read in Slate, then elevated to a Facebook posting with comments, and I ended up taking it a little farther than I thought I would and now I have to get on to other things. Go read the article for yourself. And the Washington Post article it is based on. Be careful though, the WaPo piece is a thinly disguised Libertarian argument.
I’m just posting the graph and very little info right now. The per day rate of new cases is currently about 123 cases per day, the total number of suspected, confirmed, etc. cases is 3,685 with 1841 fatalities. These numbers no longer include Nigeria (and the one case in Senegal is not included either).
I’m convinced that the people who made and run both Facebook and Twitter don’t have a clue as to what Facebook and Twitter are for. And by “for” I mean how the users use them. I know, I know, if you are not paying for the product than you are the product. I get it. But it is also true that for a service to be successful it should meet a need or two, and knowing what those needs are is ultimately linked to success or failure. It seems like on line services like Facebook and Twitter are too big to go away or fail. And that is exactly how we humans tend to view established institutions right up until the day the go away or fail.
Twitter’s CFO has said that Twitter will start to filter your twitter feed in a manner like Facebook does. This probably means that your feed will contain a subset of tweets that you normally would see depending on who you follow, or what list of tweeters you are looking at. There may be a technological way around this, but any fix provided by an updated API will not be helpful because Twitter has a reputation for changing the API (the way programmers use to interface with it) in such a way as to stifle development of applications that actually use twitter. Any larger scale or longer term investment in Twitter requires using the simplest interface, with few bells and whistled, or the rug may be pulled from underneath your project.
One of the great uses of Twitter is shared conversations (like this one) or shared not taking at conferences. Other uses include data collection and communication of ongoing processes. People have used twitter to record the catch by fisherfolk in marine conservation projects, for example. If Twitter Facebook-i-fies the Twitter feed, none of that will be possible because those projects and others like them require reliability of the flow of tweets.
An unfiltered stream is a core feature: This might seem like a small thing, similar to Twitter’s move to insert tweets that other people have favorited into a user’s stream if there aren’t any recent tweets to show them. But as the controversy over that feature shows, the Twitter chronological-order model is at the core of what the service offers for many users — and a number of them have specifically said it is the thing they like most about Twitter when compared to Facebook.
Flying Dinosaurs: How Fearsome Reptiles Became Birds by science writer John Pickrell is coming out in December. As you know I’ve written a lot about the bird-dinosaur thing (most recently, this: “Honey I Shrunk the Dinosaurs“) so of course this sounded very interesting to me. In a way, Pickrell’s book is a missing link, in that he writes a lot about the history of paleontology associated with the discovery, undiscovery, and rediscovery of the early bird record and the dinosaur link.
Birds have rewritten dinosaurs. Not all dinosaurs are directly related to birds, but a large number of them are, and the features we reconstruct for them were once based on lizards, because it was thought dinosaurs were big scary lizards. Now we know many dinosaurs were big scary birds. Feathers are today a bird thing, but back in olden times — very olden times — they were probably just the normal covering for this entire category of dinosaurs (though they may have been very different). Dinosaurs were once thought of as greyish lumbering terrifying beasts. We now see them as highly active, aerobically efficient, socially dynamic, sexy (as in they had a lot of secondary sexual characteristics such as bright colors) terrifying beasts.
Pickrell covers the history of changing thought on dinosaurs and the bird-dinosaur link. In a way , this book is about dinosaurs, focusing primarily on the bird kind. Or, it is a book about birds, focusing on their dinosaur-osity. Pickrell also goes into detail on the behavioral biology of dinosaurs reinterpreted in the context of birds.
Pickrell’s book is well written and accessible, and thus is an excellent companion to the more scholarly literature that I know you all follow.
John Pickrell is an award-winning science writer and the editor of Australian Geographic magazine. He has written for New Scientist, Science, Science News, and Cosmos, and won man awards.
WHO has put out very few updates in the last several days. The most current update is August 28th, and it pertains to information from August 26th and before. Based on that update, the total number of cases (confirmed, suspected, etc.) is ow 3069 with 1552 deaths. The number of new cases per day may be increasing, may be decreasing; hard to say at this point. Here’s the new cases per day since the second week of July:
Senegal now has one case, a person who traveled there from Guinea. He had contact with a lot of people including health workers and family before it was figured he may have Ebola. There is no word from the Congo since I last wrote about it, at least from WHO.
I’m sure Murphy’s Law will apply and WHO will issue new information soon after this post goes up, so expect an update very soon.
In order to install a new operating system on a computer, you can make a bootable DVD that includes the software to install the new system, put it in the DVD/CD reader, and reboot your computer. If all goes well your computer will boot off the DVD/CD reader and then you follow the install process and there you go.
But sometimes this doesn’t work. The most common reason is that your computer is not configured to boot from the DVD/CD reader first (if it has a bootable disk in it). You have to go into bios and change the “boot order” so “boot from DVD” is on top of the list, above “hard drive.” A less common problem is that your motherboard is old and not configured properly at a deeper level, which may require installing a new bios. Another, probably common, reason is that the DVD you made is messed up somehow. The “.iso” image you downloaded is corrupted or something went wrong during the burning process. One way to check that is to use the checksum hashtag to verify the image. Never heard of that? Just look it up. It involves obtaining and comparing two numbers which are constructed from the image. One number is provided by the maker of the image using specific software that does this, the other number is obtained on your final version of the image (or downloaded version) using similar software. If the numbers are different, the data are corrupted. This might be more likely if your computer was doing wonky things while downloading or burning, or if the drive you did the burning with is messed up. (Yet another possibility is that the disk is dirty or damaged, but if you just made it, that seems unlikely.) A typical run down of the problems, in the context of installing Ubuntu Linux, is here.
But I think there is yet another explanation that occasionally happens. It is possible that your DVD/CD reader will only participate in the boot under certain circumstances. This would be the case either with older DVD/CD readers, or possibly, a matter of a broken or dirty DVD/CD reader. I’m pretty sure this is the case because I have an old computer with a DVD/CD drive into which I can put known functioning bootable CD’s and get results, but that will not boot off a known functioning bootable DVD.
I could have cleaned the DVD drive, or I could have replaced it (they are cheap). I did not do the former for no particularly good reason, and I did not do the latter because a long time ago I learned it was better, when buying a new DVD/CD drive, to get a nice external drive so it can be moved between computers.
What I did do in this case was to burn a regular CD rather than DVD with a system. This is a problem if you want to install Ubuntu because, apparently, there are no longer such images available for current versions of the operating system. But, Debian sill has an image that does this. Since I was giving serious thought to installing Debian rather than Ubuntu (which is based on Debian but with a lot of changes that I don’t like), this was a good move. Someday I’ll clean the DVD.
I am not certain that I’ve isolated an actual problem, but when I search around for explanations for what I observe, I tend to find the same thing over and over; the usual explanations are repeated and the user with the problem is left wondering. So, I’m putting this on the Internet for people to run into while searching for answers.
UPDATE (January 2, 2016): The makers of Scrivener have decided to abandon their Linux project. Kudos for them for giving it a try. The Scrivener on Linux users were not many, and almost nobody donated to the project, and as far as I can tell, the project was not OpenSource and thus could not have attracted much of an interest among a community of mostly OpenSourceHeads.
So, I’m no longer recommending that you mess around with Scrivener on Linux, as it is no longer maintained. Back to emacs, everybody!
Scrivener is a program used by authors to write and manage complex documents, with numerous parts, chapters, and scenes. It allows the text to be easily reorganized, and it has numerous ways in which the smallest portion of the text, the “scene,” and larger collections of text can be associated with notes and various kinds of meta-data. It is mainly a Mac program but a somewhat stripped down beta version is available for Linux.
In some ways, Scrivener is the very embodiment of anti-Linux, philosophically. In Linux, one strings together well developed and intensely tested tools on data streams to produce a result. So, to author a complex project, create files and edit them in a simple text editor, using some markdown. Keep the files organized in the file system and use file names carefully chosen to keep them in order in their respective directories. when it comes time to make project-wide modifications, use grep and sed to process all of the files at once or selected files. Eventually, run the files through LaTeX to produce beautiful output. Then, put the final product in a directory where people can find it on Gopher.
Gopher? Anyway …
On the other hand, emacs is the ultimate linux program. Emacs is a text editor that is so powerful and has so many community-contributed “modes” (like add-ins) that it can be used as a word processor, an email client, a calendar, a PIM, a web browser, an operating system, to make coffee, or to stop that table with the short leg from rocking back and forth. So, in this sense, a piece of software that does everything is also linux, philosophically.
And so, Scrivener, despite what I said above, is in a way the very embodiment of Linux, philosophically.
I’ve been using Scrivener on a Mac for some time now, and a while back I tried it on Linux. Scrivener for the Mac is a commercial product you must pay money for, though it is not expensive, but the Linux version, being highly experimental and probably unsafe, is free. But then again, this is Linux. We eat unsafe experimental free software for breakfast. So much that we usually skip lunch. Because we’re still fixing breakfast. As it were. When you create a Scrivener project, you can chose among a number of templates. The Scrivener community has created a modest number of alternatives, and you can create your own. The templates produce binders with specific helpful layouts.
Anyway, here’s what Scrivener does. It does everything. The full blown Mac version has more features than the Linux version, but both are feature rich. To me, the most important things are:
A document is organised in “scenes” which can be willy nilly moved around in relation to each other in a linear or hierarchical system. The documents are recursive, so a document can hold other documents, and the default is to have only the text in the lower level document as part of the final product (though this is entirely optional). A document can be defined as a “folder” which is really just a document that has a file folder icon representing it to make you feel like it is a folder.
The main scrivener work area with text editor (center), binder and inspector.Associated with the project, and with each separate document, is a note taking area. So, you can jot notes project-wide as you work, like “Don’t forget to write the chapter where everyone dies at the end,” or you can write notes on a given document like “Is this where I should use the joke about the slushy in the bathroom at Target?”
Each scene also has a number of attributes such as a “label” and a “status” and keywords. I think keywords may not be implemented in the Linux version yet.
Typically a project has one major folder that has all the actual writing distributed among scenes in it, and one or more additional folders in which you put stuff that is not in the product you are working on, but could be, or was but you pulled it out, or that includes research material.
You can work on one scene at a time. Scenes have meta-data and document notes.The scenes, folders, and everything are all held together with a binder typically displayed on the left side of the Scrivener application window, showing the hierarchy. A number of templates come with the program to create pre-organized binder paradigms, or you can just create one from scratch. You can change the icons on the folders/scenes to remind you of what they are. When a scene is active in the central editing window, you can display an “inspector” on the right side, showing the card (I’ll get to that later) on top the meta data, and the document or project notes. In the Mac version you can create additional meta-data categories.
Scrivenings ModeAn individual scene can be displayed in the editing window. Or, scenes can be shown as a collection of scenes in what is known as “Scrivenings mode.” Scrivenings mode is more or less standard word processing mode where all the text is simply there to scroll through, though scene titles may or may not be shown (optional).
A lot of people love the corkboard option. I remember when PZ Myers discovered Scrivener he raved about it. The corkboard is a corkboard (as you may have guessed) with 3 x 5 inch virtual index cards, one per scene, that you can move around and organize as though that was going to help you get your thoughts together. The corkboard has the scene title and some notes on what the scene is, which is yet another form of meta-data. I like the corkboard mode, but really, I don’t think it is the most useful features. Come for the corkboard, stay for the binder and the document and project notes!
Corkboard ModeWhen you are ready to do something outside of scrivener with your project, you compile it. You can compile it into an ebook, a file compatible with most word processors, a PDF file, a number of different predefined manuscript or script formats, etc. Scrivener does all sorts of magic for writing scripts, though I know nothing about that. There is also an outline mode which, in the Mac version, is very complex and powerful. In the Linux Version it is not. So I won’t mention it.
The compile process is cumbersome, esoteric, complicated, and requires training, so it is PERFECT for the average Linux user! But seriously, yes, you can compile your document into a pre-defined format in one or two clicks, but why would you ever do something so simple? Instead, change every possible option affecting formatting and layout to get it just the way you want it, then save that particular layout for later use as “My layout in February” or “This one worked mostly.”
The Powerful Compile Dialog Box.One might say that one writes in Scrivener but then eventually uses a word processor for putting the final touches on a document. But it is also possible that you can compile directly to a final format with adequate or even excellent results and, while you may end up with a .docx file or a .pdf file, you are keeping all the work flow in Scrivener.
You have to go HERE to find the unsupported and dangerous Linux version of Scrivener. Then, after you’ve installed it, install libaspell-dev so the in-line spell checking works.
A scrivener project file is a folder with a lot of files inside it. On the mac, this is a special kind of folder that is treated as a file, so that is what you see there, but in Linux you see a folder, inside of which is a file with the .scriv extension; that’s the file you run to open the software directly from a directory.
Do not mess with the contents of this folder. But if you want to mess with it you can find that inside a folder inside the folder are files that are the scenes you were working on. If you mess with these when Scrivener is using the project folder you may ruin the project, but if Scrivener is not looking you can probably mess around with the contents of the scene files. In fact, the Mac version gives you the option of “syncing” projects in such a way that you work on these scenes with an external editor of some kind while you are away from your Scrivener base station, i.e., on your hand held device.
Since this data storage system is complicated and delicate, it is potentially vulnerable to alteration while being used by the software, with potentially bad results. This puts your data at risk with cloud syncing services. Dropbox apparently place nice with Scrivener. I’ve been trying to figure out if Copy does, and I’ve been in touch with both Scrivener developers and Copy developers but I’m not sure yet. I use Copy for the masses of data on my computer because it is cheaper, and I use a free version of Dropbox for Scrivener files, just in case.
I would love to see more people who use Linux try out Scrivener, and maybe some day there will be a full Linux version of it. As I understand it, the Linux version is a compiled subset of the Windows version code base (yes, there is a Windows version) and the Windows version is a derivative of the Mac version.
I should also add that there are numerous books and web sites on how to use Scrivener, and Literature and Latte, the company that produces it, has developed an excellent and useful manual and a number of useful tutorials. Literature and Latte also has an excellent user community forum which is remarkably helpful and respectful. So be nice if you go over there.
I’ve designed an outline, which can be used as a table of contents, for a computer book about anything. In this case, about foo bar.
Preface
Forward
Introduction
Overview
What is foo bar?
Before you start
A brief history of foo bar
A longer history of foo bar
Why you want to use foo bar
Why you might not want to use foo bar
Alternatives to foo bar
Obtaining foo bar
Installing foo bar
Getting help on foo bar
Getting help on reading this book about foo bar
Alliterative methods of installing foo bar
Installing foo bar from source code
Installing foo bar from alternate binaries
Installing foo bar on dead badger
Why we wrote this book about foo bar
About the authors
About the reviewers
About the publishers
About the concept of “about”
How to download the code for foo bar
Typographical conventions used in this book
How to read this book in black and white
The plan of the book
What each chapter will tell you
How the chapters in this book are organized
A history of prior revisions and printings of this book
A word about this book’s font
foo bar basics
Advanced foo bar
Futher Reading about foo bar
Index
We can now be pretty sure that the Ebola outbreak in the DR Congo is not an extension of the West African outbreak. The index case seems to have gotten the disease from a mammal she butchered, and the numerous other cases seem to stem from contact with her primary as health care workers and family members. I don’t think we have enough information yet to assess this outbreak vis-a-vis the genetics of the Ebola itself.
On 26 August 2014, the Ministry of Health, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) notified the World Health Organization (WHO) of an outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in Equateur Province.
The index case was a pregnant woman from Ikanamongo Village who butchered a bush animal that had been killed and given to her by her husband. She became ill with symptoms of EVD and reported to a private clinic in Isaka Village. On 11 August 2014, she died of a then-unidentified haemorrhagic fever. Local customs and rituals associated with death meant that several health-care workers were exposed and presented with similar symptoms in the following week.
Between 28 July and 18 August 2014, a total of 24 suspected cases of haemorrhagic fever, including 13 deaths, have been identified. Human-to-human transmission has been established and includes the health-care personnel who were exposed to the deceased pregnant woman during surgery (one doctor and two nurses) in addition to the hygienist and a ward boy, all of whom developed symptoms and died. Other deaths have been recorded among the relatives who attended the index case, individuals who were in contact with the clinic staff, and those who handled the bodies of the deceased during funerals. The other 11 cases are currently being treated in isolation centres.
The Keeling Curve is the measurement of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. As we burn fossil fuel or damage “Carbon sinks” we increase that number. The Keeling curve is at the root of much of the science of global warming. It goes up over time because of the release of fossil Carbon, and it wiggles up and down at shorter time scales for other reasons. For example, the curve drops during the Northern Hemisphere summer because the plants on the north side of the globe take in some of the CO2 and make it temporarily into plant tissue. During the northern winter the reverse happens. (There is a lot more land in the Northern Hemisphere).
Anyway, the Keeling Curve is now a movie! And you can watch it for free here:
The number of people known or suspected to be infected with Ebola in the West African outbreak is increasing, and the rate at which it is increasing is increasing. About 40 new cases are being reported per day on average, but the number of new cases has been going up by a few a day.
However, it is still unclear that these numbers represent what is actually happening on the ground. There is little confidence that the WHO has a good idea of who is currently stricken with the disease, and efforts to contain those who are have had mixed results.
A second outbreak is now occurring in the DR Congo (formerly Zaire). This is a second separate outbreak. So, it is NOT correct to say that Ebola has spread into the Congo. It didn’t. It emerged there independently.
What are the chances of that happening? I have long maintained that the conditions for Ebola spreading into human populations include factors that make the overall chance of that happening, for a large region, go up enough for multiple simultaneous epidemics to be more likely than chance might suggest. Perhaps I’ll discuss my reasoning for that another time. In any event, the DR Congo outbreak, about which we know very little so far, appears to be a different strain of Ebola, so this is not the Wester African Ebola spreading to Central Africa.
There are reports of a third outbreak of an unknown disease that might be Ebola also in the DR Congo. But that could be a lot of things. Including Ebola… so we shall see.
Also, there is one new case in Nigeria, after a period of several days with no new cases.
First, “maths” looks plural and is preferred by some because “mathematics” is plural. The problem with that is “mathematics” is no more plural than “physics” or any other compound noun. It is a rational sounding utterly incorrect argument. If we said “mathematics are cool” then there might be a case. But we say “mathematics is cool.”
Second, some people say maths and some people say math, and that’s how language works. That is a valid argument, but if you are walking around in the US saying “maths” instead of “math” be aware that you are demonstrating an anglophile affection, which is fine, as long as you know you are doing it. Please remember to demonstrate other anglophile affections such as referring to “English Muffins” and “Crumpets” and telling your friend “I’ll knock you up in the morning” when you merely intend to come by to walk to work together. Most importantly, if you have switched to “maths” from “math” because of some rational argument you once heard, just know there isn’t a rational argument. It is just a matter of usage. It is arbitrary. There is no readon. And if you are in the US you are using the non-standard usage. If you are in England or somewhere fine, talk funny all you want!
ADDED:
The conversation about “knocking up” has developed here, on Facebook and on Twitter. Interestingly a lot of Brits claim this is simply not a thing Brits say, yet it is. It may simply be patchy in its use, but it really is a British saying. More so than an English Muffin being a Crumpet (I know it is not, but I do love the reaction to the comparison among the Crumpet Sympathizers). Anyway, “I’ll Knock You Up” is defined in many places, and used by many Brits, to mean to rouse, wake up, call on, etc. another person. In American English, it means to make pregnant. In at least some forms of British, when does not “get pregnant” but one “fall’s pregnant” and if one chooses one might have the baby in the hospital, in America, or in hospital, in British-English areas.
Anyway, here’s the Google Ngram for various uses of “knocked”:
There is a fantastic paper just out in Science: “Sustained miniaturization and anatomoical innovation in the dinosaurian anceestors of birds” by Michael Lee, Andrea Cau, Darren Naishe and Gareth Dyke.
I want to talk about this research but if you really want to know more about it, don’t rely on me; one of the co-authors of this important paper is Darren Naish, who happens to be a stupendous blogger, and he has written the research up here. So go read that for sure, and revel in the excellent graphics. Meanwhile I have a few random thoughts….
The climate change documentary, “Years of Living Dangerously” was nominated for two Emmy Awards. That was well deserved and fantastic news. But, frankly, with Cosmos also nominated for the same categories, no one really expected more than the nomination.
But, while Cosmos dis win in the “Outstanding Writing For Nonfiction Programming” category, and good on them for doing that, “Years of Living Dangerously” took the award for “Outstanding Documentary or NonFiction Series.
This is of course because it is a great, well done documentary. But I like to think part of this outcome has to do with people realizing the importance of climate change as an existential issue.
You can watch the first episode here:
You have to have Showtime to watch the rest of it, but it will be available on iTunes and as a DVD next month.
