Len Sassaman, RIP 1980-2011

Leonard Harris Sassaman will be laid to rest on Saturday, July 9th, 2011 at 12 noon at De Jacht cemetery in Heverlee, Belgium. A short graveside ceremony will be held. The public is invited to attend.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 7,500 times in 2010. That’s about 18 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 69 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 424 posts. There were 10 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 64mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was February 17th with 92 views. The most popular post that day was The great pacific garbage dump.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, creativedestruction.com, robbwolf.com, twitter.com, and crossfitbrooklyn.typepad.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for trash in the ocean, the north pacific gyre, north pacific gyre, stacey kroon, and ocean trash.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

The great pacific garbage dump September 2009
3 comments

The Difference May 2009
2 comments

Fit clothing for fit people January 2009
1 comment

Hippie Shoes August 2008
2 comments

“liberty dollars are stupid” August 2008
7 comments

Hug Me Pillow

For the man in your life:

Real Doll (NSFW)

What a world we live in, where people choose the company of inanimate objects over real people.

The Official Stronghold Guide

People loved my book:

To see if this book will be useful to you, mark the following statements as (choose one): A. Defintely true; B. Plausible; C. I have no idea; D. Seems unlikely; or E. Definitely false.

1) You need a good, solid introductory text on knotwork and restraint devices for your upcoming dungeon party.

2) You’re afraid your dom friends will laugh at you when you start tying your partner up they way you learned to tie boats up at the yacht club.

3) You know what those double-clip hooks and cross-bar spreaders look like, but–gosh, what are they for?

4) Your partner wiggles out of your restraints faster than you can get your strap-on buckled.

If you answered A or B to any of the above, this is the book for you! Sameer Parekh details the intricacies of being the official restrainer in any BDSM setting. With fabulous scene negotiation skills and the hands of a master, Parekh’s directions and examples are clear, to the point, and right up any novice dom’s alley. This book is as good as “Screw the Roses, Send Me The Thorns” and “SM101″ *without* all the usual Northern Cali sexpert pretension–Parekh has an unparalleled sense of humor. Get it now!

Ah, good times.

UPDATE: Hm, looks like the reviews disappeared from that link. Here is the old Amazon link, for everyone’s enjoyment. Thanks again to everyone who “bought” my book and made it the bestseller that it was!

The Official Stronghold Guide

A blast from the past…

Words are inadequate.

Tonight I just learned through the grapevine that Hal Finney has ALS. He is approaching the disease with a very courageous and powerful outlook:

The second relates to survival. Although ALS is generally described as a fatal disease, this is not quite true. It is only mostly fatal. When breathing begins to fail, ALS patients must make a choice. They have the option to either go onto invasive mechanical respiration, which involves a tracheotomy and breathing machine, or they can die in comfort. I was very surprised to learn that over 90% of ALS patients choose to die. And even among those who choose life, for the great majority this is an emergency decision made in the hospital during a medical respiratory crisis. In a few cases the patient will have made his wishes known in advance, but most of the time the procedure is done as part of the medical management of the situation, and then the ALS patient either lives with it or asks to have the machine disconnected so he can die. Probably fewer than 1% of ALS patients arrange to go onto ventilation when they are still in relatively good health, even though this provides the best odds for a successful transition.

With mechanical respiration, survival with ALS can be indefinitely extended. And the great majority of people living on respirators say that their quality of life is good and they are happy with their decision. (There may be a selection effect here.) It seems, then, that calling ALS a fatal disease is an oversimplification. ALS takes away your body, but it does not take away your mind, and if you are determined and fortunate, it does not have to take away your life.

[. . .]

I hope that when the time comes, I will choose life. ALS kills only motor neurons, which carry signals to the muscles. The senses are intact. And most patients retain at least some vestige of control over a few muscles, which with modern technology can offer a surprisingly effective mode of communication. Stephen Hawking, the world’s longest surviving ALS patient at over 40 years since diagnosis, is said to be able to type at ten words per minute by twitching a cheek muscle. I hope to be able to read, browse the net, and even participate in conversations by email and messaging. Voice synthesizers allow local communications, and I am making use of a free service for ALS patients which will create a synthetic model of my own natural voice, for future use. I may even still be able to write code, and my dream is to contribute to open source software projects even from within an immobile body. That will be a life very much worth living.

Hal was one of the people who inspired me in the early days of cypherpunks to get out there and write code and implement it, and get it running. He was a remailer pioneer, which inspired me to start my privacy-enhanced Internet service. Words cannot express the debt I owe to Hal Finney.

Hal continues to be an inspiration, as he chooses life. His brain will continue to function, and I expect he’ll continue to add value to the world, even as his body ceases to operate.

Where are the cops folks?

Have we descended into such a sea of lawlessness in this nation with all the bankster bailouts and hiding of “white collar” scams and frauds through the use of taxpayer funds that the apparent suborning of not only felony tax evasion but trafficking in underage girls as prostitutes – one of the most heinous and outrageous acts of exploitation of children and a bona-fide worldwide problem – is overlooked by our Federal Prosecutorial apparatus because the organization involved has strong ties to our President and his administration?

AGAIN: IS THE GOVERNMENT A FELON?

My answer: Yes.

The actual mechanism of the placebo effect is a field of great interest and potentially great importance. See here, here, here, and here. News like this makes a person wonder, though: if large parts of the public become convinced that antidepressant drugs don’t work, will they? And the question remains: do the SSRI drugs do anything at all through their supposed chemical mechanisms? It’s not like we know. One way to find out would be to run a placebo versus placebo trial. You could blind things at the start, even though everyone was getting the same sugar pills, and you’d presumably see the same response in each group. Then you unblind and cross everyone over, telling people that they’d been in one group and were now headed to the other. Careful work would give you four study arms: 1 people who responded to placebo, and who were then told they’d been taking sugar but were now getting the real drug, 2 people who responded and were told that they were taking a real drug but were now being switched off of it, 3 people who didn’t respond, but were told that this was because they’d been taking sugar, but help was now on the way, and 4 people who didn’t respond, and were told that they’d been getting apparently ineffective drug, but were now coming off even that. Fascinating stuff, but we’re going to have to wait for the North Koreans to set it up for us, because no other regulatory agency would let it through.

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/27/antidepressants_depressing_news_or_not.php

The final sentence seems odd to me. I would think that since this proposed study involves no actual drugs, no regulatory agency would be involved. You’re just giving people sugar pills!

City of Rocks New Mexico CoR Bouldering Comp – Annual Climbing Event.