2021-02-16

Cool

• Had the paper the other day Blue Beads Could Be the Oldest Evidence of European Goods in North America

• Everything You Need to Know About NASA's Perseverance Rover Landing on Mars

Worthy

• NASA Invites Public to Share Thrill of Mars Perseverance Rover Landing | NASA

• What The New York Times‘ Hit Piece on Slate Star Codex Says About Media Gatekeeping – Reason.com

• An Uneasy Echo Between 'Post-Insurrection' America and the Political 'Rectifications' of Communist China | SinoInsider

• Computers Aren't Fun Anymore

• Herbert Marcuse - Wikipedia

  Kołakowski concluded that Marcuse's ideal society "is to be ruled despotically by an enlightened group [who] have realized in themselves the unity of Logos and Eros, and thrown off the vexatious authority of logic, mathematics, and the empirical sciences."

• Malware in open-source web extensions

etc

• Antarctic sponges discovered under the ice shelf perplex scientists - CNN

• (2019) Deep-Sea Snail Builds Its Own Ironclad Suit of Armor. But Even That Can't Protect It From Ocean Mining | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine

• China Turns On Its Artificial Sun: China's Nuclear Fusion Reactor

• Andrew Sullivan on the Opioid Epidemic in America

• SpaceX launches 60 new Starlink internet satellites into orbit, misses rocket landing | Space

• Precision Time Protocol - Wikipedia

  • Saw this mentioned the other day; interesting idea but not a wide need. "Sub-microsecond" isn't good-er enough for the effort, and "not backward compatible" for 3 iterations of the standard sounds bad.

• Deadly tornado tears through parts of North Carolina and traps people in homes - CBS News

• 'Revenge bedtime procrastination' could be ruining your sleep - CNN

Horseshit

• Why Did One Internet Subculture Spot Covid-19 So Early? - The Diff

  This puts the rationalists in a uniquely prosocial position. They're a sort of distributed, mostly open-source monastic order, spending a lot of time contemplating the world and passing down important observations, but less time directly interacting with it. The influence of people who read rationalist blogs, but don't self-identify as rationalists, is quite wide—the blogs are very widely followed in technology circles, and anecdotally have a large audience in the more quantitative branches of finance. Identifying as a rationalist is a losing move, because non-rationalists will think it's weird (objectively true!) and rationalists will be relatively indifferent to a personal label

• Lulu the border collie just inherited $5 million and is living her best life | Not the Bee

• How a Bay Area tech worker amassed $43,804.72 in rent debt

• This Black-Owned Breakfast Food Company Is Making ‘Cereal For The Culture' | HuffPost

• Home Security Worker Hacked into Surveillance Systems to Watch People Have Sex

• Higher education: free speech and academic freedom - GOV.UK

  This report details how the government proposes to strengthen freedom of speech and academic freedom in higher education in England by: (among other things) requiring the Office for Students to introduce a new registration condition on free speech and academic freedom

• Fauci wins $1M Israeli prize for 'defending science'

• We All Believe in Conspiracies a Little, But Here's When It Gets Out of Control

  "People who dislike equality and prefer hierarchy see themselves and their group as superior to others and believe more in conspiracy theories that are specifically about social out-groups," Dyrendal says.

  and

  In their model, the researchers found that high SDO was strongly associated with the conspiracy mentality, and more so in men than women. ... "When we look at a large number of different conspiracy theories, we find no reliable gender differences in the average scores," says Dyrendal.

• 'New Car Smell' Is the Scent of Carcinogens. Even Short Trips May Overexpose Us

• (August 2020) Drew Magary: We are canceling the right people

• What Is the Orgasm Gap? Here’s How Sex-Tech Is Making Pleasure More Inclusive

Ice Weasel Armageddon

• Samsung's Chip Fabs in Texas Ordered to Shut Down Due to Power Shortage

• What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

• Texas's 'Nightmare' Energy Situation Is a Warning to the Rest of America by Leah Barkoukis

• At Least 12 Deaths Tied to Winter Storm Uri as Millions Remain Without Power in Texas and Some Lose Water, Too | The Weather Channel - Articles from The Weather Channel | weather.com

• How the largest energy-producing state in the US failed in freezing temperatures

• Severe weather causing cellular and internet outages in Austin area

• 4 Million Texans Without Power Amid Grid Collapse, As Second Storm Nears

• (Originally posted 2011) Why does Texas have its own power grid? | KXAN Austin

  • Trouble With The Texas Power Grid As Cold Weather Boosts Demand, Knocks Out Generators | Hackaday

TechSuck

• Parler Is Coming Back Online, but Its Users Have Already Moved On

• Supermicro Hack: China Exploited a US Tech Supplier over Years 2021 Follow-Up | Hacker News

  • (Archive link)[https://archive.is/xewlX]

  • Discussion of yesterday's story; the feeling seems to be "Bloomberg doubles down on utter horseshit"

  • Additionally, completely seperately and standing on it's own: There is no benefit to Bloomberg to fabricate a story like this that they know can't at least eventually be backed up, especially not twice. It has only cost them so far. Did they not know it would cost them?

  ... It's true because they wouldn't lie twice?

• Social media app Parler crawls back online on 'independent technology'

• Apple Launches Inaugural Entrepreneur Camp for Black Founders and Developers

• Chip Shortage Poses a Risk to the Global Economic Recovery

• Google now pays 450 sites to bring you free news

• After the failure of the Facebook Phone, get ready for a Facebook Watch

• Best explanation yet Python Pattern Matching

  We can add an if clause to a pattern, known as a "guard". If the guard is false, match goes on to try the next case block. Note that value capture happens before the guard is evaluated:

  match point:
    case Point(x, y) if x == y:
      print(f"Y=X at {x}")
    case Point(x, y):
      print(f"Not on the diagonal")
  

**hurk**

• Malware increasingly written in new(ish) languages to evade anti-virus scans

Economicon

• Dow closes at record highs as energy sector surges due to snowstorm

• Citibank can't get back $500 million it wired by mistake, judge rules

• Bitcoin vaults above $50k for first time ever

  • Bitcoin Hits $50k

• Apple Pay now supports Bitcoin payments for the first time

• NN Taleb: “I've been getting rid of my BTC.”

Politickles

• Biden on CNN: "We didn't have [the vaccine] when we came into office" tweet source

• Biden extends protections for homeowners. Here's what you need to know

• Former President Trump faces serious criminal, civil investigations after White House

  • Congressman, NAACP sue Trump and Giuliani over Capitol riot

• Deplatform Hate: The Undercover Anti-Fascists Who Expose the Far Right - Rolling Stone

  • No provocateurs here, no! All violence and bad just comes from nazis. See the "Time" article, these folks believe they've done no wrong and thus see no reason not to brag.

• State Dept Refuses to Explain Iran Envoy’s Talks with China

• Pelosi calls for a commission to investigate January 6 attack - CBS News

• (Jan 21) Zip-tie guy at Capitol riot took handcuffs from police: prosecutors

World

• Myanmar Shuts Internet Again as Protest Crackdown Continues

• North Korea accused of hacking Pfizer for Covid-19 vaccine data

• Tormented headline: Kidnap capital Mexico eyes biometric phone registry, sparking privacy fears

• In Athens, rare snow blankets Acropolis, halts vaccinations

Health / Medicine / COVID

• First FEMA Covid-19 mass vaccination sites open California amid supply shortage

• How to Beat the Pandemic by Summer

• Updated CDC guidance for mask wearing

  • Note: Do NOT wear cloth masks with exhalation valves or vents since they allow respiratory droplets containing the virus to escape.

  • Adding an extra layer or mask could block vision. Reduced vision could lead to trips, falls, or other injuries.

• xPrize founder’s annual indoor conference becomes Covid superspreader event

• Optimism as Cuba set to test its own Covid vaccine

Green Propaganda

• Corn belt farmland has lost a third of its carbon-rich soil

Obit

• Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson has died after pancreatic cancer fight - CNN