I boughtmy first tank of gas for the Road Glide. It doesnt get the mileage as the Shadow, but 750 cc isn't the same engine as 103 cu in.
Around town it's VERY hard to get out of second gear. This is new to me.
Riding two up, it seems easier for the passenger to get on while the kickstand is down, and then you stand the bike up. Any thoughts?
I 75 stinks. That road surface is torn up but good. I think I'll avoid that in the future.
Related: how do all y'all do riding back roads on longer trips? Atlanta to Savannah is around 2 to 3 hours on I 20. I expect it would be a lot longer on the back roads.
The Harley Owners Group app for Android seems pretty damned cool.
Next weekend I have a business trip, but after that I think a ride to the Georgia mountains is in order.
False positives and exaggerated results in peer-reviewed scientific
studies have reached epidemic proportions in recent years. The problem
is rampant in economics, the social sciences and even the natural
sciences, but it is particularly egregious in biomedicine.
Exaggerations and bogus results getting published. Now how could that possibly happen?
The problem begins with the public’s rising expectations of science.
Ah. It's all the public's fault. Got it.
Being human, scientists are tempted to show that they know more than
they do. The number of investigators—and the number of experiments,
observations and analyses they produce—has also increased exponentially
in many fields, but adequate safeguards against bias are lacking.
Research is fragmented, competition is fierce and emphasis is often
given to single studies instead of the big picture.
Now that's more like it. Scientists (like other people) are tempted to sometimes shade the truth in order to get their career ahead. And the scientific establishment is lousy about picking up on that.
Much research is conducted for reasons other than the pursuit of truth.
Conflicts of interest abound, and they influence outcomes. In health
care, research is often performed at the behest of companies that have a
large financial stake in the results.
In climate science there's pressure from politicians to get the right results. The more right results you get, the more grants you get.
Nah - that's crazy talk! The politicians are pure as the driven snow and absolutely have no ulterior motives! And the scientists [who hid the decline - ed] are noble pursuers of holy truth! Settled! It's all settled, I say!
Back to Scientific American:
The crisis should not shake confidence in the scientific method. The
ability to prove something false continues to be a hallmark of science.
But scientists need to improve the way they do their research and how
they disseminate evidence.
First, we must routinely demand robust and extensive external
validation—in the form of additional studies—for any report that claims
to have found something new. Many fields pay little attention to the
need for replication or do it sparingly and haphazardly.
And the SciAm article ends with this interesting tidbit:
Eventually findings that bear on treatment decisions and policies should
come with a disclosure of any uncertainty that surrounds them. It is
fully acceptable for patients and physicians to follow a treatment based
on information that has, say, only a 1 percent chance of being correct.
But we must be realistic about the odds.
A big complaint about climate science is the lack of discussion about uncertainties. Perhaps the best article on this is Judith Curry's Uncertainty Monster, but the climate science establishment won't discuss the subject. Rather, we keep hearing that the science is settled.
Work, kids, siblings, the house - everything is hitting all at the same time. got completely exhausted last week at work, then over the weekend, now looking at more of the same for work plus a family crisis.
Bah. I'm getting too old for all this. And I need to ride more, damn it.
More to follow, but scooting around the block led to going around town. It's much heavier but is very stable. The weight makes me ride differently but that's likely a good thing.
I need to keep upping the miles I ride, but this works nicely.
Memorial Day honors the fallen soldiers, and nothing quite brings a tone of reflection like the Missa Pro Defunctis, the Requiem Mass for the Dead. This version by Ockeghem is the oldest surviving Requiem that we know. It is an a capella performance in the newfangled (at his time in the 1400s) polyphonic style with multiple singers singing different notes at the same time (as opposed to the old Gregorian style where all singers sang the same note).
This Memorial Day weekend remember the fallen.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat aeis. Amen.
... it will file suit on June 1 for force an immediate end of the bulk collection of metadata from Americans. We'll see. IANAL, but this would seem an open and shut case, as it looks like the PATRIOT Act will expire then.
And we'd see if a Court would have the cojones to stop a program with no legal authorization.
A lot of people seem to think that Memorial Day is "thank a veteran" Day. I guess that could work, but only if you were at a cemetery. The roots of Memorial Day go deep, all the way back to the American War of Southern Independence, where "Decoration Day" was reserved to take flowers to the graves of the Fallen. Late May was chosen because flowers would be in bloom in every corner of the Republic.
Nowadays it's the long weekend that starts the summer season.Trips to the lake, grilling out, and cold beer push the original meaning aside. Few take flowers to the graves anymore, which is a damn shame. The Fallen deserve a day of remembrance.
As you'd expect, there's a country music song for that.
The Statler Brothers are old school country from the 1960 to the 1980s, before the new pop-crossover sound got popular and pushed everything off the airwaves. Johnny Cash gave them their big break* and they ended winning a bunch of CMA awards as well as three Grammys. Now you hardly ever hear them except if the radio station plays Gospel on Sunday. They sang a lot of that.
This song came at the very end of their career, but shot up to the top of the charts. Timing no doubt had something to do with that - the song was released the month before Memorial Day in 1989.
I saw her from a distance as she walked up to the wall
In her hand she held some flowers as her tears began to fall
And she took out pen and paper as to trace her memories
And she looked up to heaven and the words she said were these
She said Lord my boy was special and he meant so much to me
And oh I'd love to see him just one more time you see
All I have are the memories and the moments to recall
So Lord could you tell him that he's more than a name on a wall
She said he really missed the family and being home on Christmas day
And he died for God and country in a place so far away
I remember just a little boy playing war since he was three
But Lord this time I know he's not comin' home to me
She said Lord my boy was special and he meant so much to me
And oh I'd love to see him but I know it just can't be
So I thank you for my memories and the moments to recall
So Lord could you tell him that he's more than a name on a wall
* They wrote a funny tribute to Cash, We Got Paid By Cash.
Hackers have struck one of the world's largest internet dating websites,
leaking the highly sensitive sexual information of almost four million
users onto the web.
The stolen data reveals the sexual preferences of users, whether
they're gay or straight, and even indicates which ones might be seeking
extramarital affairs. In addition, the hackers have revealed email
addresses, usernames, dates of birth, postal codes and unique internet
addresses of users' computers.
...
Within hours of the data being leaked, hackers on the forum said they
intended to hit victims with spam emails, and Mr Harper has been
targeted with virused emails since his information was made public.
Online crime experts believe the after the initial spam
email campaign, hackers will now begin trawling through the data for
potential blackmail targets.
Blackmail seems to be the big win here, although there's obviously more risk than your usual hacking situation. But organized crime has been a big player in the black hat community for ten years or more, so this is just a new source of data that they'll use the same way.
And I love this part:
Shaun Harper is one of those whose details have been published. "The
site seemed OK, but when I got into it I realised it wasn't really for
me, I was looking for something longer term. But by that time I'd
already given my information. You couldn't get into the site without
handing over information.
"I deleted my account, so I thought the information had gone. These sites are meant to be secure."
You keep using that word. I do not believe that it means what you think it means ...
Send me an email at borepatch at gmail if you are in the Atlanta area and want to meet up for a short ride. I'm just getting back in the saddle, so it will be short but could end at a pub.
It seems that encryption was deliberately broken by the NSA, and now everyone is getting hip to how to read all your data.
Tens of thousands of HTTPS-protected websites, mail servers, and
other widely used Internet services are vulnerable to a new attack that
lets eavesdroppers read and modify data passing through encrypted
connections, a team of computer scientists has found.
The vulnerability affects an estimated 8.4 percent of the top one
million websites and a slightly bigger percentage of mail servers
populating the IPv4 address space, the researchers said. The threat stems from a flaw in the transport layer security protocol
that websites and mail servers use to establish encrypted connections
with end users. The new attack, which its creators have dubbed Logjam,
can be exploited against a subset of servers that support the widely
used Diffie-Hellman key exchange,
which allows two parties that have never met before to negotiate a
secret key even though they're communicating over an unsecured, public
channel.
The weakness is the result of export restrictions the US government
mandated in the 1990s on US developers who wanted their software to be
used abroad. The regime was established by the Clinton administration so
the FBI and other agencies could break the encryption used by foreign
entities. Attackers with the ability to monitor the connection between
an end user and a Diffie-Hellman-enabled server that supports the export
cipher can inject a special payload into the traffic that downgrades
encrypted connections to use extremely weak 512-bit key material. Using
precomputed data prepared ahead of time, the attackers can then deduce
the encryption key negotiated between the two parties.
NSA was involved in all the discussions on export grade encryption in the 1990s. Their fingerprints are all over this.
This is still developing but looks like it is very bad indeed. This would let a Bad Guy get your online banking password, among other things. The idea that NSA could get a back door in important code and that the back door would remain secret was always pretty dumb.
Keep your eye out for a pop up from your browser saying there's an important security fix. You absolutely will want this one. As far as I can tell, Internet Explorer is the only one patched so far.
Lawrence is all over the Waco Biker Gang War like white on rice. And he brings this about the locale where the (ahem) dispute took place, the Twin Peaks restaurant:
Twin Peaks is a lot like Hooters, but without so much refinement and class.
I shouldn't laugh after this body count, but that's some top shelf snark right there.
