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$5K Will Give CP a Fighting Chance | Community Partners

Politicians like to talk nicely about it, but health care in MA is in bad shape right now. And it's outreach workers who keep it running.

If you get laid off and worry about losing your health insurance or affording COBRA, if you need insurance but are confused about how to get it, if you need to find a doctor immediately who will take your child’s insurance, or need help paying for fuel, housing or food, CP works to ensure that you will have a local person to turn to who can help you quickly. Outreach workers are the best way to connect you with needed doctors, medicines & other help.

Dear reader*, won't you please help out?

* yes i only have one reader

The Australian antivax movement takes its toll | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

In Australia, this movement is taking root as well. Calling the alarm to this, a TV program in Oz called "Sunday Night" aired an excellent exposé of what happens when parents don’t vaccinate their kids: they risk their children’s lives, and those of others. In the case shown on the TV show, a four-week-old baby, Dana McCaffery, died of whooping cough. This innocent infant wasn’t eligible for vaccination yet, but the lack of herd immunity — that region has lower-than-average vaccination rates — sealed her fate. The fact that other parents didn’t vaccinate their kids gave that little girl a death sentence.

Trying not to be completely irate towards the antivaxxer in this story.

I haven't had much time to really focus on anything, but I have spent more time playing with Processing. My latest sketch involves repeating patterns of Bezier curves in interesting fashions. I'm trying to make something along the line of Truchet tiles, but I'm a long ways from that.

Thumbs To The News: Public Turns To Twitter : NPR

That great bastion of Journalism, National Public Radio, jumps on the Twitter bandwagon.

The big question: Can you trust the news you get from social media? Maybe not, says Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute, a training center for journalists.

"You know, just because a person says it, and says it online or says it on a Twitter page, does not make it true — not even close," Tompkins says.

Professional reporters, says Tompkins, have an obligation to verify information before they publish or broadcast it. But the widespread use of cell phones, computers and digital cameras has turned that tradition on its head. For non-journalists, he says, it's often "report first, verify later — if at all."

Tompkins is right of course. I think we can all agree that traditional media never gets it wrong.

From McSweeney's - Unused Audio Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Recorded for the Return of the King

CHOMSKY: If that. It has all the characteristics of a classic fetish object. It's ludicrous to believe that this ring, or any ring, is indeed a "ring of power"—whatever that could mean—or that it, as an inanimate object, is "evil," or, indeed, that the fate of Middle Earth depends upon its destruction. We are supposed to accept this because Gandalf has recounted a couple of legends of dubious legitimacy. As we will discuss, the truthfulness of these legends is highly suspect, bound as they are in a conspiracy to keep the indigenous beings of Middle Earth under Elvish thrall. Hobbits, a race hopelessly addicted to pipe-weed, are, from Gandalf's perspective, the ideal example of a malleable native people. How fitting that they are selected as the "bearers" of this worthless bit of jewelry.

ZINN: Exactly. All Hobbits really do is abuse substances, sweep their porches, and march to the orders of their colonial overlords.

This video is totally awesome:

via kos

I'm feeling nerdish today... Here's a script to run mysqldump for a few tables on a remote server and load it into your local mysql db on the fly:

Here's what it does:

ssh -C: use compression when transmitting data over ssh - not sure this actually speeds things up or not.

mysqldump -u username --password='password' --skip-lock-tables $DB $TABLES > /tmp/load.sql && gzip -c /tmp/load.sql

$DB is the first parameter specified on the command-line. $TABLES is everything else, which should either be a list of the tables you want, or leave it blank to dump the whole db. Then we cat the output into /tmp/load.sql. You could actually dump it to STDOUT and save a step, but putting it into a file removes MySQL from the equation. If you have a lot of data, MySQL will block while it's being sent to your computer. A smarter person than I probably has another way of taking care of this problem.

gzip -c /tmp/load.sql compresses the file and dumps it to STDOUT, sending it down the pipe to your computer.

Meanwhile, back on your local computer...

The output is stored in /tmp/load.sql.gz. This is also technically not needed, you could be clever and put it straight into MySQL, but I find it handy to keep a copy of the SQL script around in case I want to run it more than once. gunzip -c /tmp/load.sql.gz decompresses the SQL file and prints it to STDOUT.

mysql -u user $DB loads it into the MySQL database named '$DB' And that's it!

Code on its own page here.

YouTube - Ode To Joy

I only caught the last 20 minutes or so, although I intend to listen to it later - this was a fascinating discussion.

Unmasking ‘GhostNet’ | WBUR and NPR - On Point with Tom Ashbrook

OK, the April Fool’s computer virus didn’t strike, didn’t rise up with its “botnet” and take over the world. But maybe it didn’t have to.

Just days before, a crack team of computer sleuths in Canada unveiled a global computer spying network, apparently run out of China, called “GhostNet.”

Jenny Mccarthy Body Count

Jenny McCarthy has a body count attached to her name. This website will publish the total number of vaccine preventable illnesses and vaccine preventable deaths that have happened since June 2007 when she began publicly speaking out against vaccines.