Jack William Bell @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com

And, yes, commentary about the tone of the article is there on the talk page.

Why in the fuck is Northrop Grumman paying Twitter to show me videos about military drones?

[confused]

I'll admit I've been making an effort to mess with Twitter's data collection and targeting algorithms, but I have absolutely no idea how it could have manifested like this. Clearly:

1. Twitters ad-targeting algorithms are seriously buggy

2. Northrop Grumman is wasting money

Today I took my dog 'down below' (as we say here in the mountains) to one of those giant box pet stores, to get washed, toenails clipped, and more immunizations. Made a long day for me and not a happy one for the dog.

While waiting on a bench in the store I looked around at the endless isles of pet products and suddenly felt disconnected from it all. In a world where children starve, we have stores like this.

Why?

Pentagon Concerned Russia Cultivating Sympathy Among US Troops. https://www.voanews.com/usa/pentagon-concerned-russia-cultivating-sympathy-among-us-troops

"Russian efforts to weaken the West through a relentless campaign of information warfare may be starting to pay off, cracking a key bastion of the U.S. line of defense: the military."

Speaking as an ex cold warrior and survivor of the 80's, I have no clue how people could get from there to here.

There are alternative file browsers for OSX, some with really cool features, but the only one I could find that allowed arbitrary text tags is Leap. http://ironicsoftware.com/leap/

I know nothing about Leap or it's developer, Ironic Software. Does anyone have any experience with it?

Separately OSX Finder allows me to associate 'tags' with files fairly easily, but these tags are actually just colored dots, not arbitrary text values, and I can't search on them.

The underlying functionality is there and, on OSX, it is even used in a rudimentary way. But not in a useful way, so no one uses it.

What I want is a file browser that supports plugins for editing, displaying, and searching arbitrary data associated with files, with easy to access menu/toolbar support.

On Mac OSX you can right-click a file in the Finder and chose 'Get Info'. That brings up a dialog box that shows you the file attributes and lets you change selected attributes. It also has a section for 'comments', which sort of allows annotation.

But it is crap to use. I can add a comments column to the Finder window, but it isn't editable there. In order to add or edit a comment it's a minimum of three clicks.

If you follow the poll aggregates on Five Thirty Eight you might already have noticed this, but the aggregate polls on impeachment did something interesting lately. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/impeachment-polls/

Up until three days ago the 'do support' and 'don't support' numbers were converging towards 45%; leaving 10% as fence sitters.

In the last three days the numbers have diverged again, bigly. Fence sitters are down to 8% and a number of 'don'ts' have clearly become 'dos'.

The Impeachment Hearings Have Shown the Policy Costs of Trump’s Narcissism. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/11/impeachment-hearings-underscored-cost-of-trumps-narcissism.html

So, basically, if we've learned nothing else this past week we have learned the GOP is backing the idea that what is good for Trump is good for the country. This is very bad. Very dangerous.

Sometimes you've seen something a couple of times, but you don't know the name of it. That can make searching for that thing on the Internet rather difficult when all you have is, 'arch-roofed shed with board frame often used for sailboats but also for regular sheds and greenhouses'.

Fortunately, my google-fu is strong! It's called a 'Bow-Roof Shed' and you can buy plans and a construction manual from Stimson Marine. https://www.by-the-sea.com/stimsonmarine/bowroof.html

#relevanttomyinterests #projects

My desk foot warmer works great!

Currently running the last load of pellets through my pellet stove to empty it out before I disconnect it. I have a new(er) stove to put in.

There's nothing wrong with my current Austroflamm stove, in fact it's built like a tank. The only downsides are (a) it's huge (it could heat a 2500 sq foot house) and (b) it doesn't auto-ignite; you have to light it manually.

If anyone in the #Seattle area sees this and wants to buy it, please let me know.

I just realized that I think re-fried beans fill the same role in Mexican cuisine as mashed potatoes do in Anglo. But I have no idea if that's actually right.

Here's a poll from two years ago showing Trump Voters more likely to support Neo Nazis and White Supremacists and more likely to believe white people are discriminated against. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/08/trumps-bigoted-base-by-the-numbers.html

None of this was a surprise, really. But I'm curious as to the results were they to conduct the same poll today.

I suspect the results would be much the same. It seems clear to me the strongest and most important binding force among Trumpistas is racism.

NASA’s X-59 QueSST Airplane Takes Shape at Lockheed Skunkworks. https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/nasa-s-x-59-quesst-airplane-takes-shape-at-lockheed-skunkworks

"NASA’s X-59 QueSST (short for Quiet SuperSonic Technology) is an experimental piloted aircraft designed to fly faster than sound without producing the annoying – if not alarming – sonic booms of previous supersonic aircraft."

#Aerospace

Here's an even older one of mine: Asphalt Blues (take 2) #MyMusic

Also Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licesed ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ) with a 'No Nazis' clause.

Bonehead Blues (take 1) #MyMusic

Trying out the new audio feature of Mastodon. This is an old recording of mine where I was playing around with a new set up. Just kind of jamming on a warmup I liked to do at the time, which I have since expanded on.

So there I am reading an article about archeology on megastructures in eastern Europe, as you do, and I come across the quote in the attached picture. https://www.livescience.com/mysterious-megastructures-tripolye-culture.html

This is supposition on the part of the scientists, of course, but I find it incredibly interesting. Instructive, in fact, when we look at the political struggles going on in our Democracies today.

And I am asking: does the human tendency towards centralization of power carry the seeds of its own destruction?

The National #Weather Service is predicting early snow here in the Cascades this weekend. However, they are saying it will happen above 4000 feet, so not a concern for me.

The Moderate Middle Is A Myth. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-moderate-middle-is-a-myth/

Statistics show 'undecided' and 'independent' voters are ideologically all over the map; not 'moderates'. There are moderates, but they aren't necessarily either undecided or independent.

"The takeaway is simple: As they must with independents, any pundit who talks about 'moderates' as a key voting bloc begs that second follow-up question: Which moderates?"