I’m not mathematically minded, so I solved this instantly.

I can’t fathom why it’d be hard for anyone? Of course I’m not mathematically minded, so that’s I assume why it was easy.

If it had been mathematical, I would’ve never solved it. Not in a thousand years.

It seems most people’s attitudes to prostitution and sex work stem from if they have any visceral distaste for the work and/or sex. (Usually sex, I’d guess.)

It never seems to have a bit to do with the evidence, what the women (and some men) involved say, or what would actually help or even harm them.

I know, people hate anecdotes, but a close friend of mine when I was in the army had been a sex worker about a decade before I met her, and she was not the least regretful about what she’d done and in fact missed a lot of it – most specifically not having a 9-5 job.

She’d used the money she made to attend the University of Florida and to become a nurse practitioner. The last time I heard from her, she was making somewhere north of 100,000 a year, and that was back in the late 1990s.

She told me that she’d never been able to afford that degree without the work she did stripping and occasionally escorting.

So even though it shouldn’t be necessary, knowing someone pretty closely who had been a sex worker really served to make me re-evaluate a lot of the propaganda I’d heard about how evil it all was.

I know, most people who hate sex work and sex workers will talk about how all that’s just anecdotal, these women who like the work don’t exist because no one actually likes sex work, blah blah blah, but no one likes working at fucking McDonald’s either, or Wal-Mart, so why the obsession with shaming and belittling sex workers alone? Why not go ahead with your bad selves and shame Wal-Mart workers, too?

Oh yeah, it’s sex phobia. That’s all it is.

I can assure you that this person did exist. Her name was Mary and because I was getting into photography in a big way then (and I was training to be a photojournalist) I have hundreds of photos of her – because she was a willing and enthusiastic subject and also very lovely.

Thanks, Mary, wherever you are now for making me appear to be a better photographer than I was! You got me an A on many assignments in those classes.

For my next certification, I’m getting the Red Hat Certified Engineer.

Since I don’t routinely work in the Red Hat world unlike the other exams I took, it is going to take a lot more studying and time than it did for the others. Don’t get me wrong,  I’ve used Linux and even RHEL, Fedora and other Red Hat-derived Linuxes over the years, but only rarely have I used it at work.

I’ve thus been learning about the latest Linux technologies, and especially systemd.

Jesus Christ, what a fucking mess.

These ignoramuses – typical of modern developers and UX/UI people – have destroyed all usefulness, all sense and just made a worthless system for little gain other than the things they are interested in.

Systemd, in other words, is terrible.

It’s vastly more complicated and fiddly to do everything. It’s a nightmare to configure a runlevel, it’s difficult to add a new service, and in general it’s just insecure. It is awesomely terrible and utterly foul. Only (as I’ve started to call them lately) a typical tech “genius moron” could have come up with something so cretinous.

Typical developer arrogance, in other words.

It kind of reminds me of Microsoft’s PowerShell philosophy, which seems to be, “Why do in 50 characters what you could do in 500 characters?”

The Debian maintainer of systemd recently resigned from the systemd project because he was getting death threats. While I obviously don’t condone death threats, I must admit that learning about systemd sent me into a blind rage of fury at such abysmal technology being grafted into Linux.

While I can learn systemd just like I did PowerShell, it’s an awful trade-off that makes Linux less Linux-like and will end up wasting millions and millions of developer and system admin person-hours on its utter crappiness.

What the hell is this?

I don’t get it when people act tough, I don’t understand it. To me, when you act tough you’re just saying, “Hey! I’ve been though a lot of horrible stuff in my life. And I survived it, and now I’m ready to attack anybody, like a Pit Bull.” — I want a demeanor that says, “I’ve never been through anything at all, and I’m just a Pug, riding a decorative pillow. Where will I go today, who knows? But, I shall be carried.”

That’s great. That’s great that you want that. The real world doesn’t work like that. Some people experience trauma. Are raped. Are beaten. Are in a war. Or, like me, are bullied for years.

I don’t talk about it much because I don’t really like the pervasive whining about trigger warnings and all that on the Left. It mostly seems like a way to show off and and to punish other people, rather than something intended to actually help anyone. Ninety percent of the “trigger warning” BS is signaling and nothing else.

And I know enough has been written about the whole “trigger warning” insanity, but I am going to write some more in the context of the above asinine post.

The main problem with the concept is that everyone has really different perceptions and experiences and thus really different triggers.

I wouldn’t quite call what I am about to write about a trigger (in psychology, it is called “hypervigilance to threat”), but I was bullied a lot as a kid. I didn’t take it well and was a pretty fearless fighter so I used my fists a lot out of necessity.

As a result of this I was also ambushed a lot from behind by the kids I wouldn’t surrender to, or by those who wanted to get revenge on me. In the worst instance some little monster crept up behind me with a tree branch and bashed me in the back of the head with it.

To this day, I don’t like people being behind me. It’s taken me years to train myself not to reflexively punch someone if they sneak up where I can’t see them.

Relatedly, people notice that I don’t jump or startle when something that causes most people to jump happens. I am nearly impossible to scare. Since I was six or seven, I don’t think it has ever occurred.

It’s not that I am some hardass – this is also a result of bullying, and a bit of natural personality too I’d guess.

Reacting to bullies meant that they just tried to hurt you worse. I learned not to react, but to be ready to fight and wade in and get it done. Or lose, which I often did too. I don’t have a “fight or flight” response. I have a “fight and fight more” response.

This is not something I’m proud of. It’s just the result of how and where I grew up, being an utter misfit (in every sense of that word) where I was raised.

For years – years – I experienced and meted out violence daily. No exaggeration, from 4th to 9th grade I got into a fistfight at least once a week, sometimes in those periods as often as once every single day for months.

As I said, I am very stubborn.

Most of my reaction to having anyone sneak up behind me is due to the one aforementioned incident where a kid named Wayne who had bullied me for years finally got tired of me fighting back and not ceding power to him and slinked up behind me and struck me over the back of the head with a large tree branch.

It nearly knocked me out but I did manage to turn around and fight him to a draw before we were separated.

Nothing was done to him. I got in trouble for it, though, and experienced headaches for weeks afterward.

A large part of my utter mistrust of authority comes from how little my teachers or other authority figures did about this behavior. In fact, bullies are often lionized or coddled because they are seen as dominant and even adults are attracted to that power.

And by the way, I am not acting tough. I am tough. I had to be. I grew up in a shithole, and I survived it and made it out and am now a successful adult. That takes toughness among other things.

My upbringing in part at least made me what I am. But I had no choice about any of that. It all just happened.

I won’t apologize for what I had to do to survive.

So fuck you, Ron Fuches and anyone else who posts that. I wish we could have all had the pleasant life of gamboling about on foofy clouds, never experiencing anything harmful or traumatic.

But that just ain’t what happened. And I’m not about to apologize for it.

I had to learn a little bit of vi to do something the other day. (Edit a Python file to install CentOS 7 on a MacBook Pro, specifically.)

What a terrible turd of a text editor. I already hate that part of my brain that knows anything about vi now.

I can’t wait to forget it all.

Yeah, I know it’s Facebook and I had to unblock their domain to even read this, but this is interesting.

It’s really just an extension of a standard sort of design that I’ve been reading a lot about lately, but amped up to 11.

We were able to build our fabric using standard BGP4 as the only routing protocol. To keep things simple, we used only the minimum necessary protocol features.

It’s actually a really simple network design though I know it looks byzantine and complicated. It’s awesomely scalable; I’m impressed. I’ll likely never need something like that, or even to design something 1/100 that powerful, but it does give me some ideas that I can use in networks that I’ll likely build.

I agree – this bothers me as well. It’s so much easier to punch down, and though unattractive men in society have done themselves no favors (GamerGate, etc.) they don’t really hold that much power. And since unattractive people are easy to hate, they make targets that are irresistible to just about anyone (the same is true of unattractive women, before anyone gets upset) including the Left, which really should know better.

But people are afraid of punching up, so they punch down. If you punch up – at the real people with power in society – they can and do punch back. Very hard. Sometimes hard enough to ruin your life forever, so I understand the fear. But there’s no victory to be had, or even any satisfaction, in punching down.

So punch up. This is why.

i really need people to stop talking about mras only in terms of fedoras/being bronys/how unkempt they are, etc. because there are dudes out here looking like hollister models who need to be held just as accountable for their creepy/misogynistic behavior

Some 27-year-old unemployed overweight dude in his mom’s basement yelling racial slurs in Halo v-chat and threatening Anita Sarkeesian on Twitter while certainly an asshole and while also certainly supportive of and contributory to patriarchy has scarcely more power than the people he rails against (which goes together, actually). He’s already been abandoned by society and knows it. That’ s part of the reason he’s so angry.

To end the Halo-screaming dude, you should really be working on dismantling capitalism and the entire system of patriarchy and similar tasks like that, not making fun of some dude who while vile became that way for a reason. And definitely not descending further into the identity politics hellhole, because that’s what the elite wants you to do as it assures them– absolutely fucking guarantees – that nothing useful will ever get accomplished.

I have sympathy I guess for people like the apocryphal basement dweller because I could’ve easily been him, if not for a few lucky breaks and my absolute ridiculous stubbornness.

In the Left, it’s only cool to body-shame, fat-shame and otherwise police using tactics you’d otherwise never countenance as long as it’s directed towards people you hate. I can’t get on board with that. I don’t like being a hypocrite, and that’d make me one.

I don’t punch much these days (metaphorically or literally) but when I do, I always try to punch up.

I know it’s terrible to hear, but I would put absolutely no stock in any eyewitness reports about the Michael Brown shooting – either by bystanders (friendly or otherwise) or Darren Wilson himself.

I know supporters of both sides will crucify me for this, but eyewitness testimony is utterly unreliable, and not because people are lying.

Did Michael Brown have his hands up? Was he turned away from the cop or towards the cop? What did he actually do?

Without video, we don’t know. We’ll never know. No matter how many eyewitnesses you think you have, it doesn’t matter.

In reality, eyewitness testimony is about as reliable as what your cat thinks about quantum mechanics. I would put more stock in astrology than in eyewitness testimony, especially since evidence shows the more traumatic the event or unexpected, the less accurate the memory.

I have a keyboard that I like pretty well, but I tend to type in the dark and my present one lacks backlighting. Its caps lock indicator LED has also failed. Though I am a touch typist, I sometimes like to have a look at the symbols as I don’t have those memorized as well. (How often do you really use the angle brackets?)

So as a reward for passing nine tech exams in a row all on the first try, I bought myself this keyboard, except the version with blue LEDs.

I won’t use 90% of the features there that she reviews, of course. I mainly care about the backlighting, build quality and having mechanical (but non-clicky) key switches, not making my LEDs behave like a snake. But the quality is supposed to be high so that’s why I ended up with the Ducky.

I’ll share my opinions about it when it arrives.

It’s always seemed really onerous the idea that you are only a “good” person if you get up early.

Though I don’t have a strong circadian rhythm and prefer to sleep in 2-3 hour cycles throughout the day (yes, I know I am weird), I am by very far the most productive between midnight and 4 am.

Always have been. Always will be. It’s why most of the posts here are written about that time.

From an early age, we’re taught that getting up early is good for us. Sayings like The early bird catches the worm and Early to bed and early to rise makes and man healthy, wealthy and wise are part of the culture and have a certain moralizing force. People who go to bed early and get up early are upstanding and productive. People who go to bed later and wake up later are degenerate and lazy.

Nowadays, however, there’s a growing body of thought to say this is not only wrong, but also counterproductive.

Most jobs that I have, if possible, while I do work at work, I am most productive at night in the hours I mentioned above.

So in one hour between say 1 am and 2 am, I tend to get as much done as I do in 3-4 hours during the official workday. That’s why I usually work at night even when I have a “day” job.

Of course, no company (usually run by Type A early-rise extroverts) ever sees it that way, so I can never work a sane (to me) schedule – so I have to work extra, but it also means that I tend to be far more productive than other people if I do this.

One of the reasons I don’t really care about elections – other than their irrelevance – is that there are only two issues that really matter right now, medium and long term.

Those two are:

1) Climate change and our response (or lack thereof) to it.

2) Access to information and who controls that information.

Since it’s not too likely that we’ll do very much about climate change, I don’t think about it very much.

But it’s still possible that we might fight and win a little bit for control of information, and that’s better than nothing.

That’s why I post long screeds here from time to time about how the internet and routing really work and things like that.

All the other issues hotly debated today – and even most that I complain and quibble about – are very tiny in comparison to those big two. Every other problem (or solution) will stem from the unfolding and ramifications of the paths we take on those two Big Problems.

The rest while I understand that they matter and are worth fighting for, really won’t change the course of history. The two above will.

So much for the idea that I’ve seen many Western feminists promulgate that Islam and Islamic countries with their restrictions on women’s behaviors “protects” women from rape. This is used as some sort of absurd kumbaya bullshit excuse for oppression in another ridiculous version of white liberal guilt, but it’s just not true.

Note that just as rape is underreported in most Western countries, it is also probably very severely underreported – by any measure used – in Islamic countries.

When so-called “literary” authors attempt to write fantasy of sf, all they tend to do is to make it boring rather than to improve it.

I expect more. Often lit authors are more facile with language and have greater skill at crafting a good sentence.

If they used this for good rather than evil it would actually better both genres.

But that’s usually not what happens. Instead, what results is an inept bricolage of clichés and utter dullness.

Like Hank Hill said of Christian rock, “Can’t you see you’re not making Christianity any better, you’re just making rock ‘n roll worse,” lit authors delving into fantasy and sf often enter those fields without knowing any of the conventions, stereotypes or failed premises and then make fools of themselves.

Not really offering a solution, just wishing for better because I think it could be better.

This bothers me a lot, too.

This is something I’ve written about before– people dramatically overestimate the sample size needed to make responsible statistical conclusions.

It depends on what and how you are studying it how large your sample size needs to be – simplifying things greatly, when reading papers confidence interval, confidence level and standard of deviation are what matters.

To simplify things even more, you don’t need a very large sample size to determine with 99% confidence that decapitating a human will result in death because the effect size has little randomness.

What would that need, a sample size of five?

Anyway, more seriously, most people woefully overestimate the actual sample size needed for 95% confidence.

For instance, for determining with 95% confidence something with a variance of 0.5 and a confidence interval of +-5, you’d only need ~384 subjects. (Of course variance in many cases can only be determined after the study is done.)

So when someone claims, Oh, that can’t be right, they only interviewed 500 people! Well, no. For most purposes, 500 people is a whole fucking lot. It’s a huge sample size in almost all common cases.

Where studies and people often run into problems is that if the effect size is tiny, then even very, very large sample sizes do not produce valid results. (And beyond a certain point increasing sample size does very little.)

But that is a post for another time.

Note that I am not an expert in any of this, but I do read a lot of scientific papers and like to understand what I am reading well enough to have some sort of thoughts about it.

I don’t really care that women and girls (mostly) do the “duckface” thing in photos, but I’m curious about the sociological reasons for it and the origins.

Since I was as mentioned curious about it tonight, I looked through old pre-internet photos and I couldn’t really find any examples of true “duckface” as exemplified by nearly any casual photo (especially a selfie) of a woman between 15-28.

My pet theory is that it is a way of acknowledging and negating the absurdity of constant observation – even self-observation – and stating wordlessly that the viewer has no critique of the image that the image-taker has not already considered, and in fact that any such critique is itself just as absurd as the act of taking such a photo.

By the way, though duckface looks ridiculous it is no more absurd than the factitious practice of smiling in photos where no smiling is or would be natural. Smiling looks more volitional, in other words, but it is absolutely just as contrived as duckface.

Duckface then is a way of acknowledging the artificiality of the construct of modern communication as mediated by Facebook, Instagram and others, and of implicitly commenting on the the omnipresent performative nature of existing in a constantly-surveilled society, especially one where much of the surveillance is self-administered and strangers are able to judge the validity and quality (on various axes) of your self-surveillance.

The pursed lips and deliberate nullification of attractiveness is a way of submitting to and rejecting these values and norms all at once.