2024-04-29

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• United Passengers Pray as Flight from Denver Waits on Tarmac During Tornado

• The World’s Most Modest Technology - The Atlantic

  stamps serve a purpose that is not merely functional. If you look back far enough, they also tell a story about national identity, and the technological and cultural trajectory of America. Stamps “are both miniature art works and pieces of government propaganda,” Dennis Altman wrote in his 1991 book, Paper Ambassadors: The Politics of Stamps. “They can be used to promote sovereignty, celebrate achievement, define national, racial, religious, or linguistic identity, portray messages or exhort certain behaviour.”

• E-bike users warned of indoor charging dangers

• Crows Are Self-Aware Just Like Humans, and They May Be as Smart as Gorillas

Horseshit

• Mini ponds are 'tiny universes' of biodiversity for gardens and windowsills

  in just a few days, the waters cleared again. In week two, we were somewhat surprised to find aquatic life – water fleas and mosquito larvae darting about under the surface.

• Does the world want a Titanic II? This billionaire thinks so

• formerly known as "parenting" A Simple Act of Defiance Can Improve Science for Women

  When my son was barely 3 weeks old, I flew nine hours to a conference with him strapped to my chest. Before delivering my talk, I made a lame joke that the audience should forgive any “brain fog.” Afterward, an older woman pulled me aside and told me that being self-deprecating in public was a disservice to women scientists. It felt like an impossible choice: to be a bad scientist or a bad mother.

  How have I addressed the problem? Through an act of academic defiance: I bring my kids with me on my scientific expeditions. It’s a form of rebellion that is available to mothers not just in the sciences but also in other disciplines that require site visits and field work, such as architecture and journalism. Bringing your kids to work with you doesn’t have to be something you do only once a year.

• This Is A Snout House, The Mid-Size Crossover Of Homes

  some comments that boiled down to, “Look, I made an aesthetic compromise here and I’m generally happy with the house overall.” That’s very hard to argue with. If it’s a question of utility vs style, a lot of people are going to do the math and figure out that they’re OK driving the same crossover the neighbors have or buying a snout house. It’s also, I think a sort of a question of ego — does your house need to express something special and interesting about you — the protagonist of reality — or is it just a place to watch TV at night?

• Liquid Death became a billion-dollar beverage brand

• How Sci-Fi Inspired Conspiracy Theory - The Atlantic

  Linebarger, who died of a heart attack in 1966 at age 53, could not have predicted that tropes from his sci-fi stories about mind control and techno-authoritarianism would shape 21st-century American political rhetoric. But the persistence of his ideas is far from accidental, because Linebarger wasn’t just a writer and soldier. He was an anti-communist intelligence operative who helped define U.S. psychological operations, or psyops, during World War II and the Cold War. His essential insight was that the most effective psychological warfare is storytelling. Linebarger saw psyops as an emotionally intense, persuasive form of fiction—and, to him, no genre engaged people’s imagination better than science fiction.

• The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population - POLITICO

  Behind the scenes at the first Natal Conference, where a motley alliance is throwing out the idea of winning converts to their cause and trying to make their own instead.

  Broadly speaking, the people who have paid as much as $1,000 to attend the conference are members of the New Right, a conglomeration of people in the populist wing of the conservative movement who believe we need seismic changes to the way we live now — and who often see the past as the best model for the future they’d like to build. Their ideology, such as it exists, is far from cohesive, and factions of the New Right are frequently in disagreement. But this weekend, these roughly aligned groups, from the libertarian-adjacent tech types to the Heritage Foundation staffers, along with some who likely have no connection with traditionally conservative or far-right causes at all, have found a unifying cause in natalism.

  over the course of the conference, the seemingly novel arguments for having children fade and give way to a different set of concerns. Throughout the day, speakers and participants hint at the other aspects of modern life that worried them about future generations in the U.S. and other parts of the West: divorce, gender integration, “wokeness,” declining genetic “quality.”

• What's the plural of Succubus? Sexsomnia: An embarrassing sleep disorder no one wants to talk about

  A 38-year-old man repeatedly tries to force his wife to have sex in the middle of the night but has no memory of his actions when he wakes up. A married woman in her mid-20s often tears off her clothing and masturbates but remembers nothing when her partner rouses her. For a dozen years, a 31-year-old man masturbates while asleep, at times injuring his groin. Embarrassed due to his unconscious behavior, he avoids relationships for eight years. These are all clinically documented cases of sleep sex, or sexsomnia, part of a family of sleep disorders called parasomnias that include sleepwalking, sleep talking, sleep eating and sleep terrors.

Musk

• Lawsuits test Tesla claim that drivers are solely responsible for crashes

• Elon Musk in China to discuss enabling full self driving

• Elon Musk praises Chinese workers for 'burning the 3am oil

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• The Trumpification of the Supreme Court - The Atlantic

  Trump’s legal argument is a path to dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration: His legal theory is that presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for official acts. Under this theory, a sitting president could violate the law with impunity, whether that is serving unlimited terms or assassinating any potential political opponents, unless the Senate impeaches and convicts the president. Yet a legislature would be strongly disinclined to impeach, much less convict, a president who could murder all of them with total immunity because he did so as an official act. The same scenario applies to the Supreme Court, which would probably not rule against a chief executive who could assassinate them and get away with it.

  The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• 'Eugenics on steroids': the toxic and contested legacy of Oxford's FHI

• Opinion | What Students Read Before They Protest - The New York Times

  Climate change looms over everything, but climate activism is expected be merged somehow with anticolonial and antiracist action. Yet it’s actually quite difficult to make anti-colonialist preoccupations map onto a world where Western Europe is aging and declining and once-colonized populations now fill its major cities, where the locus of world power has shifted into Asia, where the world’s most tyrannical and imperialist regimes are non-Western and nonwhite. You inevitably have to mystify things a bit, perpetually discovering the hidden key to the 21st century in the power relations of the distant past.

• NYU professor says anti-Israel students need to have more sex

  NYU professor Scott Galloway said that college campuses were increasingly becoming reminiscent of Nazi Germany — and attributed the reason partly to young people not having enough sex. “We need to enjoy sex,” Galloway offered to some initial confusion during an appearance on “Real Time” with Bill Maher Friday. “I think part of the problem is young people aren’t having enough sex so they go on the hunt for fake threats and the most popular threat through history is [antisemitism].”

• Free med school tuition won't solve the shortage of primary care physicians

• Judge dismisses superconductivity physicist's lawsuit against university

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Xbox Console Sales Are Tanking

• Stunt Rally – a free rally racing game with editor

• 'The science isn't there': do dating apps help us find our soulmate?

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Talking to memory: Inside the Intel 8088 processor's bus interface state machine

  Although a four-step bus cycle may sound straightforward, its implementation uses a complicated state machine making it one of the most difficult parts of the 8088 to explain. First, the 8088 has many special cases that complicate the bus cycle. Moreover, the bus cycle is really six steps, with two undocumented "extra" steps to make bus operations more efficient. Finally, the complexity of the bus cycle is largely arbitrary, a consequence of Intel's attempts to make the 8088's bus backward-compatible with the earlier 8080 and 8085 processors. However, investigating the bus cycle circuitry in detail provides insight into the timing of the processor's instructions.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Fewer Truncations Improve Language Modeling

• Meta's 'set it and forget it' AI ad tools are misfiring and blowing through cash

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Should the stock market never close?

• New "T+1" Settlement Cycle – What Investors Need to Know

  The compliance date for the rule amendments is May 28, 2024, at which point the standard settlement cycle will be T+1. The SEC’s Office of Investor Education and Advocacy (OIEA) is issuing this Investor Bulletin to explain the new “T+1” settlement cycle and how it will affect certain transactions you place with your brokerage firm.

• FDIC says Republic First Bank is closed by Pennsylvania regulators

• WEF president: 'We haven't seen this kind of debt since the Napoleonic Wars'

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Even Portland now is banning camping, part of the West Coast retreat

• Fund manager: Jim Biden was in business with Qatari officials

• Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Williams-Sonoma fined$3.18M for falsely labeling products as Made in USA

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The tech wars are about to enter a fiery new phase

  Whether China or America controls energy and information technologies is an “ethno-civilisational question”, says Evan Ellis of the Army War College. The temperature of the confrontation is likely to rise over the coming years. Neither Mr Biden nor Mr Trump will shrink from challenging China, perhaps the issue which enjoys the highest level of bipartisan support in Washington. And for China to back down from what it sees as its rightful place in the global order is unthinkable for Mr Xi.

  The next stage of the tech wars will play out in two major arenas. One is chipmaking, which creates the world’s information-processing infrastructure, including the one that trains and runs artificially intelligent software. Any degree of Chinese control over the production of chips is intolerable to America. The other is green technology, as its components may become the backbone of the entire global economy. For China the strength of its companies in this arena is not just a natural consequence of two decades of focused industrial policy, but a confirmation of its important role as a global leader.

World

• How TfL’s simple pop-up message led to a significant drop in paper ticket sales

  • HN comments

• America plunders Britain's tech economy

• Latin America's Shifting Demographics Could Undercut Growth

• Humza Yousaf set to resign as survival hopes fade

  Humza Yousaf is preparing to quit as Scotland’s first minister after coming to the conclusion that his position is no longer tenable. Senior SNP figures have been told the nationalist leader decided over the weekend that there is no way for him to survive this week’s vote of no confidence and he may stand down on Monday.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• US intelligence believes Putin probably didn't order his rival Navalny's killing

• Ukraine Appears to Be Using Light Planes Converted into Reusable Bomber Drones

• Russian central bank warns of slower drop in inflation as it holds rates at 16%

China

• Americans See China Increasingly Negative

• Mexico Is China's Backdoor to the US Market

• Why China Keeps Making More Cars Than It Needs

Health / Medicine

• Most people on weight loss drugs are spending less on restaurants and takeout

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Changing Arctic fjord hints at climate future as it warms at an alarming pace

• How did a GMO purple tomato get mixed up for an organic variety?

  The Purple Galaxy Tomato splashed across the cover of this season's Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog: a closeup of a blackish-purple tomato speckled with tiny pink dots. Next to it, sits a sliced open fruit, revealing deep fuchsia seeds and flesh. Only problem? The seeds actually may have been a GMO variety, the recently released Purple Tomato, created using genes from a snapdragon flower by Norfolk Healthy Produce. The mix-up has caused consternation for the heirloom seed company that prides itself on offering rare and organic varieties and takes a firm stance against GMO crops. And it's triggered debate about biodiversity and what can happen with GMO seeds when they begin to spread.

• Existing wetland conservation programs miss nutrient reduction targets

• Greens Engaged in Fraud to Deceive Ministers and Push German Nuclear Phase-Out

• 'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas solar/wind/battery storage