2021-03-14

Dayslight Savings Time; spring forward and so forth. Also; Pi Day!

Cool

• Virtual LEGO set LeoCAD - Virtual LEGO CAD Software

• No Huskies, No Problem: These Unexpected Sled Dogs Have Serious Pull - Atlas Obscura

• S3’s 15th Birthday – It is Still Day 1 after 5,475 Days and 100 Trillion Objects

• Early Web Datasets & Researcher Opportunities - Internet Archive Blogs

  GeoCities, Friendster, and a pre-1999 multilingual dataset.

• Fudan University team develops smart textile - SHINE News

  The brightness between electroluminescent units deviates by less than 8 per cent and remains stable even when the textile is bent, stretched or pressed. “Our display textile is flexible and breathable and withstands hundreds of times of machine washing, making it suitable for practical applications,” said Peng.

  • Large-area display textiles integrated with functional systems | Nature

• "Best Job ever" USAJOBS - Job Announcement

  You will establish and maintain the celestial reference frame and assist in the monitoring of the orientation of the earth in three dimensional space. You will plan, organize and analyze experiments in astrometry and/or astronomy and astrophysics to evaluate the accuracy limits of these reference frames.

• Al Jaffee turns 100, and Mad magazine salutes its legendary artist

Worthy

• Asteroid the size of the Golden Gate Bridge to zoom by Earth | WTOP

• Repealing Section 230 won’t do what anyone wants | Hacker News

  There's debate happening; i find it painful to read.

• Move Spaceship Earth!

etc

• Ask HN: Is Minix dead? No commits since 2018 | Hacker News

  Tanenbaum got a couple grants totalling several million Euro. He hired some of his grad students to work on making it a production system. They made a lot of improvements, research-wise, but they also sort of made a mess of things. What they didn't do is set up any reasonable project infrastructure (e.g., a bug tracker) that would allow Minix as a project to grow into a healthy, thriving project at a size beyond those who were being paid to work on it, and for it to outlive their interest in it. The userspace was largely replaced by NetBSD's, and that involved clang replacing ack, so builds went from ~10 minutes to 3+ hours. Lots of small stuff like this, adding up to a project where no one is willing to exercise ownership and few outsiders are equipped to deal with it in its current state (even if interested).

  . If Minix is "dead", it's because poor ownership + the bystander effect killed it.

  • "Coherent Unix" source code: Mark Williams Company sources

• Why in-person workers may be more likely to get promoted

• A Bit of Local History - The Rutherford Moniker

• USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning, 2015 revision | USDA Publications

Horseshit

• Pastors quit after watching churchgoers become radicalized by QAnon

• Minor League Baseball Reportedly Experimenting with Robot Umpires

• Chicago River dyed green in surprise move by city's mayor

• Values in America - Scott Galloway on recasting American individualism and institutions | By Invitation | The Economist

  To respond to the pandemic—and other societal challenges—America must rediscover its communal values and its capacity for sacrifice. There will always be a place for the rugged individual in the American landscape. But we must abandon the delusion that such a figure can stand alone and isn’t obligated to sacrifice in the service of others.

• Gen Z’s high-speed rail meme dream, explained

• The troubling implications of a 'human stock market'

• "But this time, in some way we dont like" Californians Are Weaponizing Environmental Law

• Male statutory rape victims legally-required to pay child support

Media / Ministry of Truthy

• Why we’re removing comments on most of Inquirer.com

• Are Telegram and Signal Havens for Right-Wing Extremists

• Pinterest fights misinformation, hate speech, and self-harm content with ML

• WaPo Media Critic Calls Out CNN to Its Face Over ‘Love-a-Thon’ Cuomo-on-Cuomo Chats

• Twitter Is Suspending People Who Tweet The Word 'Memphis'

  + [Twitter auto-banning people who tweet word
  “Memphis”](https://twitter.com/2600/status/1371164729805307905)
  

  • Tweeting “Memphis” autolocks your Twitter account | Hacker News

    Ugh...I have a HN Twitter bot that just tried to post this and it got locked.

    • Twitter ‘Memphis’ bug sees accounts flagged

Identity Politics / Race Baiting

• Amazon Bans Some Anti-LGBTQ Titles from Its Platform

• The Confederacy was a con job on whites. And still is

• College defends its ‘White Citizenship as Terrorism’ event | The College Fix

  Berea College in Kentucky released a statement Friday defending an upcoming event it’s hosting titled “White Citizenship as Terrorism: Make America Great Again, Again.”

• Gun Sales Rise in Past Year, Especially Among Women and African Americans

• West Coast cities erupt in violence on Breonna Taylor anniversary

  • 'This is about justice': Events, rallies mark 1 year anniversary of Breonna Taylor's death

  • Hundreds Gather To Demand Justice For Breonna Taylor One Year After Her Death

  • US Demonstrators Call for Justice, Reforms a Year After Breonna Taylor's Death

• Republican Senator says he would’ve been afraid had Capitol rioters been BLM activists

• The Meritocracy to Feudalism Pipeline - Alex Kaschuta's Garden of Earthly Delights

  The most cogent, and to this day, the only real attempt at an answer comes from Silicon Valley, who from their rarefied cognitive heights can see the big picture and are autistic enough to bring it up - "Pay them off." Robot-powered UBI is how we'll keep them alive. Some pepper this bleak outlook with visions of poets and a renaissance of pottery & candle-making. Most intuit that it will simply be a more efficient and humane form of welfare, with all it has historically entailed.

  Nobody has a viable plan for these places, for these people, one that can offer even those who can't "learn to code" the chance at a dignified existence.

TechSuck

• Hit Japanese app Crabhouse forced to change name on iOS - Japan Today

• You wouldn’t know my new database, she goes to another school: Oracle boasts of earthshattering tech the outside world cannot see • The Register

  Larry Ellison did his best to distract from the results by claiming the world was about to witness staggering growth in the database market in Q4 because of some yet-to-be-revealed autonomous database technologies. “We expect it really to explode next year. And I really do mean very, very rapid growth next year. I'm not really ready to disclose our plans as to why I think it's going to suddenly spike but we expect very, very rapid database growth next year,” the ever-tanned septuagenarian said.

• Indicted CEO of Encrypted Phone Firm 'Sky' Says He Will Clear His Name

Economicon

• The Gig Economy Is Coming for Millions of American Jobs

• Stripe Raises $600M, Valuing Company at $95B

• From Crypto Art to Trading Cards, Investment Manias Abound

• Metakovan, the mystery Beeple art buyer, and his NFT/DeFi scheme – Amy Castor

  The distribution is something to pay attention to. Metakovan has 59% of all the B20 tokens. Why does he own the majority of tokens? As he explains it, that’s so that no one person can own 100% of all of the B20 tokens—and snatch up all this wonderful artwork for themselves. No, this is meant to be decentralized, if you can get your head past Metakovan controlling the token supply.

  What’s interesting is that Beeple, the creator of the artwork, is actually a business partner of MetaKovan’s. He owns 2% of all the B20 tokens. I’m sure there is no conflict of interest here.

  • Metakovan, the mystery Beeple art buyer, and his NFT/DeFi scheme | Hacker News

• How Non-fungible tokens became the latest tech speculation bubble

• Biden’s ‘Rescue Plan’ Will Sic the IRS on Anyone Who Earns $600 in the Gig Economy – Reason.com

  Buried inside the 600-page bill that's ostensibly meant to provide pandemic relief is a provision requiring gig economy platforms to report information to the IRS about all users who earn at least $600 in a year. Previously, platforms were only required to provide the IRS with information on users who made at least 200 transactions or earned at least $2,000.

• We're In A Bubble That's Too Big To Fail | ZeroHedge

• The 'American Dream' of upward mobility is broken. Look at the numbers

Poilitcks

• The growing number of children in custody on the US-Mexico border, explained

• Lawmakers blame opposing parties over border surge

• DHS Directs FEMA To Help With Surge Of Migrant Children At Southern Border

• Fauci: it's 'disturbing' that Trump voters say they won't get vaccinated for ...

• US details troops to CIA, declares them “classified” & refuses to admit presence

  So last year, as former President Donald J. Trump pushed for rapid troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, the Defense Department and other national security agencies used familiar methods to move numbers around, which made troop levels seem to be dropping faster than they really were. It was comparable to what happened in 2019, when Mr. Trump wanted to pull forces from Syria, U.S. officials said.

  The Obama administration used similar sleights of hand under the bland, bureaucratic term “force management levels,” which resulted in more troops in war zones with little public oversight.

  That's just lovely. If the DoD had hidden troops from Obama, we'd still be hearing about it. Keeping Troops in countries Trump said to pull out of, becomes completely unobjectionable tho because its just business as usual, see?

• American Special Ops Forces Are Everywhere

• New York’s vaccine czar called county officials to gauge their loyalty to Cuomo amid sexual harassment investigation - The Washington Post

• Navy investigators found contractor in Capitol riot was known as a white supremacist - POLITICO

• FAUCI: Trump endorsing COVID-19 vaccine would be ‘game-changer.’

World

• 'Defend Yourselves': Myanmar Civilian Leader Urges Armed Uprising Against Junta

• If you thought the right to protest was inalienable, then think again | Kenan Malik | Opinion | The Guardian

• London police break up vigil for murdered Sarah Everard

• The Biden administration has been quietly trying to reach out to North Korea, but keeps ...

  • North Korea 'not responding' to US contact efforts

• Sri Lanka to ban burqa, close Islamic schools

• Israel's first new bank since 1978

• When police don't knock | CBC News

  Commando-style no-knock police raids on homes are supposed to be rare. But an investigation by CBC's The Fifth Estate has found they happen daily in Canada, leaving a trail of trauma and, in the worst cases, death.

• A Green Wave? Mexico’s Marijuana Market May Be Middling

• Russia deploys giant space telescope in Lake Baikal

• 34,000 Earthquakes Rock Iceland In Weeks As Volcano Threat Elevated

• Oman Bans “Clubhouse”

Health / Medicine / COVID

• Coronavirus Infection Leads to Immunity That’s Comparable to a Covid-19 Vaccine.

• Researchers: Backyard chickens pose ‘viral spillover’ threat.

• Netherlands joins Ireland in vaccine suspension over blood clot concerns

  • It's the latest country to partially or fully suspend the vaccine after reports of blood ...

• 'Vaccine passports': Will they be available in the U.S. in time for summer?

  • ‘A can of worms’: Experts weigh in on the vaccine passport debate

  • British Airways to launch own 'vaccine passport'

• Duke University Suddenly Imposes Week-Long Stay-At-Home Order on All Undergraduates

• UK We must create the conditions to ensure Medieval-style lockdown never used again

• Covid-19 tests on migrants dropped in Texas town find 25% infected

Climate / Green Propaganda

• Tasmanian Tigers Are Extinct. Why Do People Keep Seeing Them?

• An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

• Saving one of the world’s rarest toads from extinction

• Countries Tried to Curb Trade in Plastic Waste. The U.S. Is Shipping More

• Why are Climate models written in programming languages from 1950?

  In my opinion, Climate scientists did not lose the software sweepstakes, Fortran + MPI is actually very good at what it does: massive distributed numerical computation. However, more innovation is needed to make languages like Chapel and Julia the go-to alternative climate modeling so that, as these languages continue to mature and develop stable ecosystems, the climate modeling community can benefit from their enhancements over Fortran.

• Tiny Town, Big Decision: What Are We Willing to Pay to Fight the Rising Sea?

• Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns (2019)

• Fish Farming Is Feeding the Globe. What’s the Cost for Locals?

• Farm-level study shows rising temperatures hurt rice yields