2021-10-20

Cool

• Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved after 40 years? | AgWeb

• How to create an artificial magnetosphere for Mars

• Outsourced hearing in spiders by using their webs as auditory sensors

• (Oct 5 2021) Wave-riding and wave-passing by ducklings in formation swimming | Journal of Fluid Mechanics | Cambridge Core

  We observed two new and interesting findings: wave-riding and wave-passing. By riding the waves generated by a mother duck, a trailing duckling can obtain a significant wave-drag reduction. When a duckling swims at the ‘sweet point’ behind its mother, a destructive wave interference phenomenon occurs and the wave drag of the duckling turns positive, pushing the duckling forward. More interestingly, this wave-riding benefit could be sustained by the rest of the ducklings in a single-file line formation. Starting from the third one in a queue, the wave drag of individuals gradually tended towards zero, and a delicate dynamic equilibrium was achieved. Each individual under that equilibrium acted as a wave passer, passing the waves’ energy to its trailing one without any energy losses.

Worthy

• Chilling Effects: In what sense do 10% of people die of the cold?

  People are most likely to die of extreme cold in Sub-Saharan Africa, and most likely to die of extreme heat in Greenland, Norway, and various very high mountains. You’re reading that right - the cold deaths are centered in the warmest areas, and vice versa. This has got to all be wrong, right? 10% of Africans freezing to death, a substantial number of Greenlanders dying of the heat? The paper doesn’t have any answers. It just presents its mathematical model and runs away. So what’s going on?

• Where Stuff Comes From - by Doomberg - Doomberg

etc

• Delta-8 THC products illegal in Texas

• Kodak Brownie, the camera that changed privacy rights forever

• Tall el-Hammam; an airburst of gullibility; it gets worse

• Vikings were in North America in 1021, well before Columbus, researchers say

• (2019) The Egyptian Egg Ovens Considered More Wondrous Than the Pyramids - Gastro Obscura

  Most contemporary poultry experts believed that the ovens were long gone. But in 2006, a team of experts from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that Egyptian egg ovens are still hatching chicks today. Workers follow the same methods developed 2,000 years ago. “We were mapping rural farms to check for avian flu risks,” says Olaf Thieme, a livestock expert who co-led the FAO survey. “We found that locals in three governorates still use the ancient system.”

Horseshit

• LAPD declares 'ghost guns' an 'epidemic.’

• Imagine reading this headine 40 years ago: Sim Swapper Doxes and SWATs His Accomplice

• Police say hospital discharged seriously ill man, left him on the street – WSB-TV Channel 2 - Atlanta

  Freeman said the 68-year-old man was discharged from the hospital Thursday. A hospital employee told officers that the man had been at the hospital for 35 days and that Medicare would not continue to pay for his treatment. The employee said that security dressed the man and walked him out. Freeman said that when emergency responders arrived, the man had a fever, signs of sepsis, a urinary tract infection and an elevated heart rate. The man was loaded into an ambulance and taken straight back to the emergency room.

• A&W Turns its 'Worst Marketing Fail' Into a New Burger, Launches 3/9lb sandwich

celebrity gossip

• Why on Earth Did Shatner Go to Space?

COVID / VaxCult

• Monica Gandhi is SF's outlier Covid expert. 'I'm not saying anything crazy'

• Poll suggests tensions high between vaccinated and unvaccinated in Canada

• What We Know About Covid, the Flu and the Air We Breathe

• Chronic Weight Loss and Malnutrition Join Devastating List of Long COVID Symptoms

• Dozens of US nuclear lab workers sue over vaccine mandate

• Covid-19 conspiracy theories thrive on social media platforms, EXCEPT Twitter

• New York City to Require Covid-19 Vaccinations for All Public Employees

• White House Details Plan To "Quickly" Vaccinate 28M Children Age 5-11 | ZeroHedge

• DHS Secretary Mayorkas tests positive for COVID-19, days after event with Biden | Fox News

  "he is fully vaccinated"

• Covid Plummets in Florida: Florida’s per capita Covid rate is now second-lowest in the U.S.

• A new Delta descendant is rising in the UK

• Moderna won't share vaccine recipe. WHO has hired African startup to crack it

Culture War / Re segregation / Identdoctrination

• Rachel Levine sworn in as first openly transgender four-star admiral | Fox News

  U.S. Assistant Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine became the first openly transgender four-star officer in the uniformed services on Tuesday after she was sworn in as the first female four-star admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.

• Book Review: ‘Woke Racism’ by John McWhorter

• Lavish wealth tolerated more for individuals than groups

• Dave Chappelle and the still-doomed politics of shunning

  My point here is that there are probably a lot of Dave Chappelles out there voting for Democratic Party candidates, and you need to think about the implications of that before you decide something is worth throwing people out of the coalition.

  I think that if you framed this in terms of some basic correlates, it would be uncontroversial to say that Black Democrats are more religiously observant and more working-class than white Democrats. But that means they have certain things in common with religiously observant, less-educated white people, including relatively conservative ideas about gender roles. The difference is that many Black people with those views vote for Democrats, which is good for LGBT causes.

Edumacationalizing

• Court upholds University of North Carolina’s use of race as factor in admissions

• Berkeley scientist resigns over refusal to invite ‘canceled’ geophysicist

  • UC Berkeley's Top Climate Director Resigns After Colleagues Reject Speaker Who Denounced Race-Based Admissions | ZeroHedge

• Email from Yale Law student sparks national discussion on racism and free speech

• Amherst College to End Legacy Preference

• Eliminating Gifted Programs Won’t Make Education Fair

Media / Many Ministries of Truths / Censorship

• Powerful German Newspaper Ousts Editor After Times Report on Workplace Behavior

• Bari Weiss accepts the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity

• (Aug 2021) On Afghanistan Withdrawal, NYT’s Peter Baker Turns to Raytheon Board Member for Independent ‘Analysis’ - by Adam Johnson - The Column

• What if Performance Advertising isn't Just an Analytics Scam?

• Netflix Co-CEO Says He ‘Screwed Up’ When Defending Dave Chappelle Special

• Obamacare Scams and the Need for a Public Search Engine

Facebook

• Life in the Facebook Metaverse

• Facebook Novi is here but where is Diem?

• Facebook settles with Justice Department in hiring discrimination suit

• Facebook is reportedly changing its name

  • Facebook is planning to change its name, report says

• Facebook fined £50.5m for breaching order in Giphy takeover investigation

• Facebook settles federal lawsuit over allegations it favored foreign applicants

• Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Named in Suit by Washington, D.C., Attorney General

• Facebook says it allowed users to request info about how to be smuggled into US

• Facebook to penalize rule-breaking Groups’ members by demoting them in News Feed

TechSuck

• Supply chain, shortages, and our first-ever price increase

• Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined

• The Teledildonics jokes make themselves. X-Rings: A Hand-Mounted 360 Degree Shape Display for Grasping in Virtual Reality

  Designed as a modular stack of motor-driven expandable rings (5.7-7.7 cm diameter), X-Rings renders radially-symmetric surfaces graspable by the user’s whole hand. The device is strapped to the palm, allowing the fingers to freely make and break contact with the device

• Polish Amazon warehouse employee dies of overworking at 49

• I found an Amazon folder with thousands of audio recordings from my home gadgets

• Acer launches bacteria-resistant PCs | Ars Technica

• Shipping times for Apple’s $19 Polishing Cloth slip to late November

• Intel slipped–and its future now depends on making everyone else’s chips

• Intel teases 'software-defined silicon'

• The Intel Pentium 4 is supported by Windows 11

Economicon

• Unhappy with prices, ranchers look to build own meat plants

• Hindenburg Research Announces $1M Bounty for Details on Tether’s Backing | Hacker News

• Tether Lawyer Admits Stablecoin Now 74% Backed by Cash and Equivalents

• Pope calls for Universal Basic Income and shorter working day

• Shipping Containers from Stranded Ships Dumped in L.A. Neighborhoods

• SEC says GameStop’s stock surge was more than just a simple short squeeze

• Inflation Is Approaching a Tipping Point at the Grocery Store

• $65,000 Bitcoin a New All Time High

• Pinterest shares soar following report PayPal may buy it

  + [PayPal Is Exploring a Purchase of
  Pinterest](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-20/paypal-said-to-explore-purchase-of-social-media-firm-pinterest)
  

  • PayPal Is in Talks to Buy Pinterest

• The Car Shortage Is About To Get A Whole Lot Worse

• Peter Thiel: Bitcoin at $60k a sure sign political system is about to implode

• "I Don't Remember A Time When So Many Extreme Events Were Happening In Shipping" | ZeroHedge

• Paintmakers Are Running Out of the Color Blue

• California ports among world’s least efficient, ranking shows

• Volkswagen's main plant producing fewest cars since 1958

Poilitcks

• White House has weighed tapping National Guard to address supply chain backlog

• Coming Into Focus: Hillary’s Secretive, Russiagate-Flogging Pair of Super-Lawyers

Law / Crime / Police

• The DHS Office That Found “No Major Incidents” on Jan. 6 Needs to Be Disbanded

• White House fence breached by two small boys who slid through bars, despite $64M security price tag

• Drone Whistleblower Thrown in Pen with Terrorists

Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The Technopolar Moment How Digital Powers Will Reshape the Global Order

• US Government bans sale of hacking tools to Russia and China

  • U.S. Tightens Export Controls on Items Used in Surveillance of Private Citizens

• Russian Jets Intercept US Bombers Over Black Sea Just As Lloyd Austin Visits Ukraine & Romania | ZeroHedge

  He additionally urged Moscow to "end its occupation of Crimea, to stop perpetuating the war in eastern Ukraine, to end its destabilizing activities in the Black Sea and along Ukraine's borders."

World

• Why America Should Hope the Regime in Iran Collapses

• Fugitive businessman close to Venezuela's Maduro extradited to US

• Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

• Freight operators dump electric trains for diesel due to Britain’s energy crisis

• China's housing market slid into a deep freeze

• Two German ex-soldiers detained over plot to fight in Yemen

Health / Medicine

• Pig kidney transplant successfully tested on deceased woman

  The kidney was tested on the patient for two days during which it worked properly, filtering waste and producing urine. Researchers kept the woman’s’ body on a ventilator during the experiment with her family’s consent.

• Worn-out nurses hit the road for better pay, stressing hospital budgets/morale

  • comment:

  people who see themselves as long term employees with skin in the game or as providing a service to their community will be resistant to implementing policies that screw the customer and will help customers ask for the things they need to ask for to not get screwed. Employees who see themselves as transient more readily implement whatever management asks without thinking.

• Gulf Coast welders dying from anthrax-like disease, researchers say.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Coal bucks 15-year decline in US with 22% increase as natural gas prices rise

• Carbon-neutrality is a fairy tale: the race for renewables is burning Europe's forests

• Giant carbon-sucking fans to clean our climate

• Boris Johnson strikes £400m deal with Bill Gates to boost green technology

• California governor declares drought emergency for entire state

• Climate change: Fossil fuel production set to soar over next decade

• Fossil fuel giant Total has known about climate threat since 1971 say scientists

• Planned fossil fuel output double that of Paris deal goals, says UN

• Climate plan urging plant-based diet shift deleted - BBC News

• Methane Gas Leaks in Central Asia Worsen Climate Change Crisis

• Cape seabirds dying in their thousands from Avian flu outbreak

• Covid’s lessons for climate, sustainability and more