Friends

Someone just used the email form on the Stop the War on Fun site to send this gem. I assume it's an attempt at spam? Well, if it's a legitimate question, I'm sure someone on the SF Board of Supervisors can help them. They seem like people who would be knowledgeable about cell phones.

From: addesee <jansuto+dikige@gmail.com>

To: Gavin.Newsom@sfgov.org, Mark.Leno@sen.ca.gov, Bob.Hartnagel@sen.ca.gov, Tom.Ammiano@asm.ca.gov, Tara.Mesick@asm.ca.gov, Heather.Fong@sfgov.org, sfpd.online@sfgov.org, George.Gascon@sfgov.org, sfpd.commission@sfgov.org, Eric.L.Mar@sfgov.org, Michela.Alioto-Pier@sfgov.org, David.Chiu@sfgov.org, Carmen.Chu@sfgov.org, Ross.Mirkarimi@sfgov.org, Chris.Daly@sfgov.org, Sean.Elsbernd@sfgov.org, Bevan.Dufty@sfgov.org, David.Campos@sfgov.org, Sophie.Maxwell@sfgov.org, John.Avalos@sfgov.org

Subject: Stop the War on Fun
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:34:12 -0800 (PST)

Zip code: 123456

I recently acquired an unlocked iphone 3G. I'm sort of new to cell phones, but i know the plan i want. It is a pay as you o rogers plan. How exactly do i activate my phone with pay as you go.

And this one that I received last night is equally puzzling. How does this spam turn into money? Needless to say, there is no such discount offer and we've never heard of these people, so how does trying to piss off my customers with a lie help them? Why would they send this? There were no links.

From: Mike <infoanswer@eadvertise1.com>
Date: November 30, 2009 12:39:01 AM PST
To: booking@dnalounge.com
Subject: DNA Lounge,
Reply-To: Support@eadvertise1.com

Save 10% on your next visit to DNA Lounge.

Located at 375 11th St, San Francisco.

Print this page and bring it with you for a 10% Savings.

(for details click on clientservices@ecouponsads.com and Send)

To Opt-out put Unsubscribe on the Subject line and return.

YOU ARE NOT COMPETENT ENOUGH TO BE A SPAMMER!
How does that make you feel?

They've killed the Coke sign! This is a tragedy! A travesty. A tragavesty.

Now normally I have a visceral, knee-jerk allergy to advertising in pretty much any form (and I don't even drink Coke, see sidebar), but I have to admit that I have some love for that Coke sign.

It was so old and janky and never worked right! Half of the lights seemed to run on Lucas three-position switch technology (off, dim and flicker) and it was a different half almost every night. I have long had this fantasy that the reason the sign always looked like that is that there is only one guy left in the world who knows how to fix the mechanical relays that drive its pattern logic, and that guy is 95 and has trouble getting up and down the ladder to sweep the birdshit out of the contacts with his vintage Nineteenth-century wire brush.

That's how it is in my head, anyway. If the reality is not actually like that, then I don't want to know.

But anyway, replacing it with a slick, modern LED facimile? Feh! I shake an angry fist.

"Energy Efficient" LED Sign to Be Unveiled in Late December.

The Coca-Cola Company announced today plans to replace the historic neon sign in San Francisco`s South of Market district. Coca-Cola has maintained a display alongside the southbound lanes on the I-80 freeway heading in to downtown San Francisco for more than 75 years. In its place will be a state-of-the-art LED display that is consistent in size and brightness with the existing sign but 80% more energy efficient and is to be powered by 100% sustainable and certified "green" energy. [...]

To begin preparations for installation, power will be shut off to the existing display starting today. Skilled display and lighting workers will begin carefully dismantling and removing the display faces. By December 11, it will be completely disassembled and the installation of the replacement faces will begin. [...] Coca-Cola also plans a `flip-the-switch` ceremony to celebrate relighting the new sign. More details will be forthcoming.

Fingerprints: Signal Processors for Touch

Debregeas et amis say it looks as if the ridges and whorls in fingerprints filter mechanical vibrations in a way that best allows nerve endings to sense them. The mechanoreceptors that do this job are called Pacinian corpuscles. They sit at the ends of nerves and are responsible for sensing pressure and pain. These devices can sense vibrations over a wide area of skin but are sensitive only to a limited range of vibrations. In fact biologists have known for some time that Pacinian corpuscles are most sensitive to vibrations at 250Hz.

Debregeas and co have investigated this problem using a "CYBER FINGER" that they built in their lab, complete with synthetic fingerprints on the same scale as human ones and a microelectromechanical sensor that measures force with a spatial resolution of millimetres. They say that fingerprints resonate at certain frequencies and so tend to filter mechanical vibrations. It turns out that their resonant frequency is around 250Hz.

That means that fingerprints act like signal processors, conditioning the mechanical vibrations so that the Pacinian corpuscles can best interpret them. It's this optimisation process that allows us to sense textures with a spatial resolution far smaller than the distance between Pacinian corpuscles in the skin.

There is a growing awareness that the processing power of the nervous system, including the brain, simply cannot handle the volume of number crunching that has to be done to keep a living body on the road. Instead, it looks increasingly clear that the brain outsources much of this work to the body itself: to the joints, ligaments, muscles, skin etc. Understanding how these materials do all this processing is turning materials science into a branch of computer science. It's even got a name: morphological computing.

People Hear With Skin as Well as Their Ears

The researchers had subjects listen to spoken syllables while hooked up to a device that would simultaneously blow a tiny puff of air onto the skin of their hand or neck. The syllables included "pa" and "ta," which produce a brief puff from the mouth when spoken, and "da" and "ba," which do not produce puffs. They found that when listeners heard "da" or "ba" while a puff of air was blown onto their skin, they perceived the sound as "ta" or "pa."

Dr. Gick said the findings were similar to those from the 1976 study, in which visual cues trumped auditory ones -- subjects listened to one syllable but perceived another because they were watching video of mouth movements corresponding to the second syllable. In his study, he said, cues from sensory receptors on the skin trumped the ears as well. "Our skin is doing the hearing for us," he said.

"What's so persuasive about this particular effect," he added, "is that people are picking up on this information that they don't know they are using." That supports the idea that integrating different sensory cues is innate.

http://blog.johnath.com/2009/11/29/nsid-2009/

http://blog.johnath.com/?p=376

This is not a drill.

For 11 months of every year, we all live our lives integrated– embedded, if you will– with our fellow citizens, hewing to their customs; blending in. For 11 months of the year we rarely even speak of the movement. But not this month.

It’s time for NSID operatives to go live.

First, remember our history. In 2007 I first spoke publicly of the cause, and in 2008 our numbers exploded. No Shaving In December has participants on at least 4 continents, participants of both sexes, and participants of all ages and stations in life. In fact, a recent survey I just made up confirms that every LinkedIn user is, at most, 3 hops away from an NSID participant.

Second, remember our cause. NSID’s not a political movement. It’s a silly, awesome getting-together of people who sort of like to see how they look when they stop shaving for a month. It’s permission to try something different and in that sense, our cause is freedom. Look at the flickr pool; it’s incredible. I love looking at these people I know to be cleanshaven getting all rustic and funky. How could you not want to be a part of this?

Third, remember your strength. Your job too important or high-visibility to stop shaving for a month? Bullshit – John Lilly did interviews with the LA Times mid-NSID like a champ. Your face doesn’t grow a proper beard? Hogwash – Claire’s been doing NSID 3 years running, and Gavin soldiers through “patchiness issues” because his follicles don’t tell him how to live his life, he tells them how to live theirs.

No shaving. 31 days. We tweet using the #nsid hashtag, we document our progress in the flickr pool, and we aggregate it on noshavingindecember.org. I’m proud of all of you – I love this time of year. Are you in?

Epilogue: The Charity Angle

[Everything below is optional. NSID is about freedom, and fun, and if you don't want to be bogged down by deeper sentiment there is no need to do any of this. For some people, this part may actually make it easier to enjoy NSID, though. If that's you, read on.]

NSID is a scruffy, scratchy time in the first few weeks, and that can be hard on pair-bonds. Over the years, the #1 NSID request I’ve gotten is to find a way to make NSID participation a charitable act, to make the suffering of our significant others more noble.

Choosing a charity to pair with NSID isn’t easy, but I think the Michael J Fox Foundation is a good fit. To me, Parkinson’s disease is insidious for the way it steals your independence by stealing your ability to perform simple tasks. Shaving, holding a razor to your face, is something I have the luxury of doing or not doing basically for fun; I like the idea that NSID could help a research foundation trying to cure people of a disease that takes that away. MJFF’s open approach, using ~90% of donations to directly fund Parkinson’s researchers, seems like a solid one to me and, I’ll be honest, it doesn’t hurt either that they will cut both US and Canadian tax receipts.

So here’s how it works. If you want in on this aspect, start your NSID participation with a donation (US/CDN). When conversations come up about the scruff, tell them you’re doing it for charity, get those people to donate, too. And if, at some point, your wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/cat can’t take it any more and insists that you shave, the price of that shave is a matching donation. The more your friends donate to defend your cause, the bigger the matching donation will have to be. And in the worst case, you make it through the month, and MJFF still gets a donation or two they might not otherwise have had. Make sense?

The only catch in all this is that I don’t have a centralized way to track MJFF donations. Let’s use the comments area on this post for that, shall we?

(Previously.)

I think I've almost managed to get the DNA Lounge popup webcast window to resize the video when you resize the window. (Unsurprisingly, the only way that worked portably was to use tables.) Does it work for you? This seems to resize properly in both Firefox and Safari. It mostly works in Opera: it resizes properly, but there's a scrollbar and the bottom text is off the bottom of the screen. I'm not sure how to fix that.

What does it do in IE? Does the video resize, and is there a green box around it?

Previously.

DNA Lounge update, wherein the War on Fun gets some more press.