Asus Transformer?

I often travel with just my phone and transformer tablet - but it doesn't work as a development platform, so if I think I might be cutting any code I need the real box. (It depends on the trip. This time I broght it along because I'm playing with some new simulations, and spending a couple of weeks away from home... and am really glad because I've been exposed to influenza a, and am quarantining myself for the day. But if I know I'm going to be doing martial arts 9.5 hours a day, usually the transformer and my phone are plenty.)

If you're going to be technical, the consensus seems to be that the use of the term pagan to mean someone who wasn't Christian post-dates the use to mean country-dweller (or civilian) - "hick" might be a reasonably colloquial rendering. ...which only underlies the point that a meaning of a word isn't absolute, but exists in a particular context. And in our current context, as "pagan" has been adopted by a group of religions as an identity term, and the intermediate sense of pagan meaning non Christians* is increasingly only used by a minority of Christians, it seems a poor choice for the general population.

* Or alternatively non-Abrahamic religions, and there is certainly a history of legal distinctions made between treatment of members of all Abrahamic religions and everyone else.

Well, I did in fact come of age in the Seattle area Pagan community, but I assure being a Chan Buddhist and being Pagan are not equivalent.

Unless you subscribe to that special version of paganism that means anyone not part of your own sect. *eyeroll*

I guess is all depends on interpretation. I put "moderately"... I live in a zendo, and change the decorations on the altar as the seasons change. So, no more in the winter than any other time.* The closest thing we have to a winter holiday is Bodhi day, the celebration of Buddha's enlightenment, on which day many of us still on pillows and stare at the wall... a little more than usual. And that was weeks ago. (Well, in our tradition. Like we really know the actual day.)

* Well, okay, often sometime in late January it becomes all asian lilies and oranges because I just can't take the winter any more.

I'm sure if you pull out a standard text on world religions you can find something to fit the bill.

The not I'm not seeing mentioned is how soon this is after they rejected shellfish from the entire US west coast - again, a not entirely uncalled for, but unusual move.

I'm not sure if this is more in response to internal unease about their own food quality problems, or a more general snub of the US - admittedly, these things are hardly exclusive.

I'm surprisingly fond of Thinkpad clit mice. Er, trackpoints? Damn, what is the polite name?

(Okay, surprisingly? Heh.)

And now I'm ear-wormed.

I am also NAL, but ownership of pictures is a little more involved than that, I'm pretty sure. Mugshots are already public, hence the mugshot photo sites remaining up. Ownership of pictures depends on the history of the picture. If you take, say, a dick shot of yourself, and send it to your girlfriend, she now legally owns the picture. At least in many states. Which is why the revenge porn laws, aimed at the people posting the photos, were passed, because otherwise posting pictures of your ex that you have legal ownership of is not against the law.

If, for instance, you take a topless photo of yourself, store it on your own computer, which is then hacked into, that's already illegal because of the hacking.

And apparently a lot of the pictures on these sites have been obtained through email hacking, and are therefore not revenge porn as such.

(On the Media covered this all in last week's show, and has an update on their site: http://www.onthemedia.org/

Oh, and as a side issue, on the media has decided to become a civil liberties clearing house, and currently has a little war on with DHS. Worth following.)

Heart rate, respiration, O2 blood saturation, skin conduction (okay, I'm not saying I know what I use it for, but it would be fun to play with - back in my teens this is one of the things we used for a biofeedback mouse...) I wonder if you could pull out a good proxy for hydration? You'd probably have to tune it to the individual... Blood pressure would be neat, but difficult, I think. (At least compared to how it is conventionally taken.)

I'd be tempted to build an MP3 player into while I was at it. Always a bit of a pain to haul tunes around while running. (Of course, really, I want data connectivity and maybe a little more brains, but that might be superfluous. Some of my sports bras already have a pocket for my phone.)

On a purely personal level, I have no lack of cup space - there were some weird hormone fluctuations during the whole spine injury thing, and at the end of things I lost the weight I'd gained, but not the extra cup sizes, and while they're kind of annoying not so much so that I've had them reduced, yet. (There are a lot of active women with larger breasts. And we spend a fortune on bras. Gods, you do not want to do spinning flying jump kicks without having your breasts constrained. Running is also especially fun, and it's pretty common to wear a compression style sports bra over an encapsulation style one.) But I don't think we're talking particularly high power consumption, and I don't think putting a battery in the cups would be my first choice. Give the bra a nice wide strap in the back - which will make it more comfortable anyway, and put a pocket for the battery there. Something along the lines of a cell phone battery should to it, and you have fewer nerve endings on your back and spines curve less backwards than forwards, so you're less likely to end up with it pinching. And you could easily fit two - and smaller separate batteries will be more comfortable than larger single ones.

Of course, there still is the question of whether we've talking about multiple bras that can take the sensors, or sensors in some kind of framework that easily and comfortably inserts or attaches to bras. The latter might be more difficult to do well, but I'd tend to prefer it.

There's a lot of variability in terms of what is expanding during breathing - I think one strain gauge, and figure you're not going to get a lot of data, or go to the other extreme and outfit a close fitting tank. I find myself with mixed feelings about an accelerometer - I do soft body biomechanics as part of my academic research, and while I'm not doing motion capture as such, a lot is done in my field, so I have an immediate response of - oh yeah, we'll find something to do with it! But then, I also do soft body modelling, and use community tools when I can (OMG, trying to model slug mouths in bullet blows up so very badly...) which means, of course, that I'm well aware of the vast amount of time and effort that has gone into beter modelling of breasts for the gaming market and... yeah, no. (I think, on the whole, the opportunity for movement analysis is worthwhile, and you'd have to include quite a few for breast modelling. But then, these days accelerometers are cheap.)

There is pressure for women to stay thin to please men. That's not the only source of pressure, and it is more complicated, especially since women now have other career options than marrying well (in which case women competed with eachother a lot, but with an end goal in large part of attracting the right kind of male attention). But it persists. Certainly it is generally assumed that a woman's primary source of attraction for a mate is her appearance in a way that is not nearly so true for men. And women's appearance tends to be randomly discussed even when not really relevant to the subject at hand. ...and in my experience, men are not a monolithic entity who all like the same thing, though, yes, the combination of being fairly fit but still having significant breasts and a higher hip to waist ratio seems to be a popular type.

(To be fair, my personal experience is that the more conventionally feminine I look, the more I get attention from random strangers who are often jerks. In that sense, when I was dealing with a spine injury and carrying some extra weight I enjoyed a measure of invisibility, and the people who were interested in me were usually pretty cool - and I've never been one to sit around passively and wait for someone to express interest, for that matter. I vastly prefer my leaner fitter self now, but dear gods, it appears that some men just see me and something in the back of their minds says "This one wil bear healthy children... who will never go hungry!" I've tried to adjust my presentation to deflect that kind of response, but the whole thing is pretty irritating.)

Fashion... is special. I don't think the majority of women who are trying to be thin are trying to take it to that extreme... but really, I don't get it. (And this despite having friends involved in the fashion industry as photographers.)

*laughs*

Do you know many women? I haven't noticed that we spend a particularly small amount of time with our minds in the gutter.

I was a software engineer at Microsoft from 1995-2002. So while my comments are indeed biased (and really, the first four years were an awful lot of fun, even if I did have to work with windows, but it is not a work experience I would want to return to) they also reflect a fair bit of personal experience.

But more the point, the potential product, as presented, isn't useful to me. Might be to other people, can't speak for them. I find the idea of an instrumented bra interesting. (Or, rather, instruments that would attach to an existing bra. I'm picky about my bras, and they have to hold up to running and martial arts.) The app they're using it for? Not so much.

For me to be interested in it, I would want access to the raw data, and to be able to hack it. I don't pretend my case is likely to be that common. But without those features, meh. There are hackable heartrate monitors available, and that'll do more of what I care about.

The being assholes bit is presenting this in a way exclusively aimed at women when women already face a great deal more scrutiny over their physical appearances (and much higher rates of eating disorders and the like). The sensor suite isn't the problem. I can even see the bra-mount as being useful, because hey, men aren't already wearing a strap around their chests. (And as I said, it has struck me as kind of annoying that a heart rate monitor is an additional strap around my chest when I am already wearing at least one.)

But the presentation is hugely tone deaf, in that it plays into existing stereotypes in harmful ways. You remember being told that computers could be for women too - hey, I bet you could keep recipes on one, right? (Or perhaps that was before your time.) If you're going to make a product aimed at helping people not stress eat, for heaven's sake don't make it only for women. Especially considering all the pressure for women to stay thin specifically so they look good for men (as opposed to for reasons of health.) It might be assholery through cluelessness, but it's still assholery.

I'm actually pretty amused by the sensor rigged bra - heck, I wear a bra to run in anyway, way better than a separate heart rate monitor. Though no proprietary MS crap for me ;-) (Can't imagine they provide decent support, y'know?)

But it seems horribly tone deaf to decide to put their sensors in a bra, and then make the whole thing be about dieting. Please folks, try not to be assholes.