2021-08-27

Cool

• Draw with radial symmetry, tesselations and recursion

• A determined hacker has brought Google Maps to the NES

Worthy

• Overcoming Bias : Be The Emperor’s Kid

• Errata Security: Of course you can't trust scientists on politics

  The focus of science eduction in school is indoctrinating students into believing in "evolution" rather than teaching the mechanisms of "mutation" and "natural-selection". We see the conflict in things like describing the evolution of the eyeball, which Creationists "reasonably" believe is too complex to have evolved this way. I put "reasonable" in quotes here because it's just the "Gods in the gaps" argument, which credits God for everything that science can't explain, which isn't very smart. But at the same time, science textbooks go too far, refusing to admit their gaps in knowledge here. The fossil records shows a lot of complexity arising over time through steady change -- it just doesn't show anything about eyeballs.

• Highlights From The Comments On Missing School - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten

  If you are going to go around pretending that your toy horse is real, I feel like you owe it to other people to accept that their preferences might be valid too.

• The Semiconductor Heist Of The Century | Arm China Has Gone Completely Rogue, Operating As An Independent Company With Inhouse IP/R&D - by Dylan Patel - SemiAnalysis

etc

• All networking to NOAA in Boulder, CO is down due to 'multiple fiber cuts'

• How ESPN's Monopoly Power Is Consolidating College Football - by Matt Stoller - BIG by Matt Stoller

• Bear Nation - by Drew Schorno - Transmissions from the floor

  The squirrels needed about 8% of their calories to come from linoleic acid to be able to enter hibernation. The standard American diet meanwhile, passed the 8% linoleic acid threshold sometime between 1960–1990, right around the same time that the obesity epidemic began.

• Hurricane Ida could be close to Cat 4, dump up to 20“ of rain in S.E. Louisiana

• Visually impaired Paralympian hit by self-driving bus

  • Toyota suspends all self-driving vehicles at PG after collision with athlete

• Sad Little Men: Assessing the impact of an elite education

Horseshit

• Please stop adding more lanes to busy highways – it doesn’t help

• NFTs Supplant Rolexes and Lambos as the New Digital Savvy ‘Flex’

• Why Is the Gates Foundation Funding the UK’s Medicines Regulator?

• Delta Air Lines doesn’t want to call delta variant the ‘delta variant’

• For First Time, Half of Americans Favor Defending Taiwan If China Invades

celebrity gossip

• Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

• Musk: Bezos retired in order to pursue a job filing lawsuits against SpaceX

  • Amazon and SpaceX fight over Starlink plan for 30k more satellites

• Fraudulent data raise questions about superstar honesty researcher

Obit

• William G. Clotworthy, ‘Saturday Night Live’ Censor, Dies at 95

Culture War / Re segregation / Identdoctrination

• The original article is in COVID news; the HN thread on it belongs here. Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine | Hacker News

• Our attempts at empathy are backfiring. Here’s what to try instead

• Ryerson University to change its name amid reckoning with it's history

• Illinois will require masks indoors for everyone and educators must get shots or face testing.

• We’re told to ‘follow the science’ – yet some of it is just plain wrong

• A high school in Kentucky is having a "furry" problem and if you don't know what that means it's people who identify as animals 🙃 | Not the Bee

• Covid Anti-Vaxxers Aren’t a MAGA Death Cult – It’s Worse Than That

• New York’s Private Schools Tackle White Privilege. It Has Not Been Easy

Media / Many Ministries of Truths / Censorship

• Facebook's Ivermectin Groups Are Unhinged and Out of Control

  • More people are poisoning themselves with horse-deworming drug to thwart Covid

• Online disinformation is an industry that needs regulation, says boffin

  "They still rely too much on independent researchers in the field to expose these," said Tapsell. "It's not our job to do this – it's the job of the big companies in Silicon Valley."

• Reddit takes a teach-the-controversy approach to pandemic and vaccines

  • Reddit turns down moderators who want action on Covid misinformation

• TikTok reportedly bans milk crate challenge

TechSuck

• Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

• Western Digital confirms speed crippling SN550 SSD flash change

  • Samsung Is the Latest SSD Manufacturer Caught Cheating Its Customers

• Microsoft warns thousands of cloud customers of exposed databases

• Cops responding to ShotSpotter's AI alerts rarely find evidence of gun crime

• Apple agrees to settle potential class action suit by U.S. developers

• 21-year-old tells WSJ he was behind T-Mobile hack

• Why Is There a Chip Shortage

  Industry news site Semiconductor Engineering highlighted the risk of a chip shortage, partly due to a lack of 200mm manufacturing equipment, back in February 2020. More recently, bad luck has exacerbated the problem. An atrocious winter storm in Texas shutdown semiconductor factories, and a fire at a plant in Japan caused similar delays. The bottom line is: the pandemic accelerated an already precarious situation for chip makers - we're in the middle of a tech boom, supply can't quite keep up - and it won't get sorted out overnight.

• Microsoft will no longer stop you from installing Windows 11 on older PCs

Economicon

• The World Economy’s Supply Chain Problem Keeps Getting Worse

• As office returns postponed, workers say they’d take pay cut to work from home

• 100 Salesforce employees work in its 61-story HQ

• 12-year-old coder is set to earn over $400k after about 2 months selling NFTs

• White House More Than Doubles Its Inflation Forecast in New Update

Poilitcks

• Supreme Court Strikes Down Biden Eviction Moratorium

  • The Supreme Court Blocks The Biden Administration's Latest Ban On Evictions

• The Era of Easier Voting for Disabled People Is Over

• Arizona attorney general to Maricopa: Give up election information or lose state's $700M | Washington Examiner

• Jen Psaki Says Probably the Worst Thing She Could After Biden's Afghanistan Presser – RedState

• Battenfeld: Seth Moulton’s ‘moronic’ trip to Afghanistan backfires

• How America’s response to 9/11 contributed to our national decline

• Biden bugs out | Power Line

• The feds want to break up Facebook. Good luck with that

Crime / Police

• House Select Committee Demands Social Media Records Related to January 6th

• Man robbed of 16 Bitcoin hunts down suspects, sues their parents

• South Dakota attorney general takes plea deal and won't serve jail time for fatal crash

Security / Militaria

• US Intel Agency Has "Moderate" Confidence Covid Escaped From Wuhan Lab: Origins Report | ZeroHedge

Afghanistan

• Watch: Taliban Take Joyride In US Black Hawk Helicopter  | ZeroHedge

• The War in Afghanistan Is What Happens When McKinsey Types Run Everything - by Matt Stoller - BIG by Matt Stoller

  It’s just remarkable that contractors removed software and weapons systems from the Afghan army as they left. Remember, U.S. generals constantly talked about the strength of the Afghan forces, but analysts knew that its air force - on which it depended - would fall apart without contractors. The generals probably hadn’t really thought about the logistical problems of what dependence on contracting means. It’s just stunning that NATO forces would be trying to stand up an independent Afghan army, even as NATO contractors disarmed that army due to contracting arrangements.

• Taliban Fighters Reportedly Seize Military Side Of Kabul Airport Using American Weapons | ZeroHedge

  Taliban will be in full control of Kabul Airport including military part by tomorrow, sources at the airport tell me. Still needs official confirmation. — Nafiseh Kohnavard (@nafisehkBBC) August 27, 2021

• Pentagon Confirms American Troops Have Been Blowing Equipment Up At Kabul Airport

• Amid Afghan Chaos, a CIA Mission That Will Persist for Years

• Afghan All-Girls Robotics Team Tells US Woman to Stop Taking Credit for Rescue

• Watch: Crowds Still Throng Kabul Airport Entrances Despite Continued 'High Terror Threat' | ZeroHedge

  Just days away from the Aug.31 deadline for the full US troop pullout, it's further being reported that the "window has all but closed" on civilian evacuations, especially for the tens of thousands of Afghans still hoping to get out. Likely the US is poised to begin rapidly getting the troops themselves out, also as the White House confirmed late Thursday it will continue coordinating security with Taliban members guarding the airport perimeter.

• Canada races to beat US deadline in Afghanistan - BBC News

  Canada is racing to wind down its Afghanistan evacuation effort ahead of America's 31 August deadline, as officials warn some may be left behind.

• The worst-case scenario takes hold in Afghanistan with terror attack

• What Happens After the Kabul Attacks? - The Atlantic

  Others are looking outside the White House. When I spoke with Representative Adam Schiff of California on Tuesday, he pointed to the Pentagon. “With all the contingency planning that the Pentagon does, it seems inexplicable that we didn’t have a better plan for how this ends,” Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, told me. Then there are those blaming the intelligence community, specifically whoever drew the erroneous conclusion that the Afghan military could keep the Taliban at bay for months. “If I were in his [Biden’s] shoes, I would examine all the folks dealing with this intelligence—I’d be pretty pissed off,” Representative Bill Pascrell of New Jersey told me.

• Joe Biden Begins the Bid to Rewrite the History of His Bloody Botched Afghan Exit – RedState

• Top US general says ISIS-K is shooting at American military jets in Kabul without success, but warned other evacuation planes are ...

• The Afghan minister who became a bicycle courier in Germany

• ISIS Afghanistan airport attacks: 60 civilians and 12 US service members killed

World

• Fire Rips Through Massive Chinese Residential Skyscraper

• Denmark To Scrap All Covid-19 Restrictions

• Why Hollywood Movies Are Being Squeezed Out in China, and What Happens Next

• The EU is considering barring American tourists–again

• Analysis: Xi's leftward shift to a socialist China is for real

• Cambodian professor sentenced 18months for criticizing P. Minister on Facebook

• Chinese regulators to exercise more control over algorithms

• Government of Cuba Says It Will Recognize, Regulate Cryptocurrencies

Health / Medicine / COVID

• Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine

• "Nothing Has Changed" - White House Flip-Flops Again On Timeline For Booster Jabs | ZeroHedge

• (July 2021) Does it make sense to vaccinate those who have had covid? - Sebastian Rushworth M.D.

• What it’s like to die from Covid-19

• A Covid-19 Patient Lost Vision in One Eye. Here's How They Could Be Connected

• Russia’s Sputnik V protects against severe Covid-19 from Delta variant, study

• Researchers Ready Lab-Grown Delta for Human Trials

• 'This Ends The Debate' - Israeli Study Shows Natural Immunity 13x More Effective Than Vaccines At Stopping Delta | ZeroHedge

• Only equitable vaccine distribution, not booster shots, can end the pandemic

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Global warming begets more warming, new paleoclimate study finds

• Is There a Nuclear Option for Stopping Climate Change?

• More than 34,000 Californians are under evacuation orders

• Nest of Asian giant hornets found and destroyed in WA State

• The Well Fixer’s Warning The lesson that California never learns

• EPA is falsifying risk assessments for dangerous chemicals, say whistleblowers

• So much ice is melting that Earth’s crust is moving

• 40M People Rely on the Colorado River. It’s Drying Up Fast