2024-06-10
Cool
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Designing a Lego orrery | Marian's Blog
- Art is often enhanced by the constraints of the medium in which it is realized. wow this is cool.
etc
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US Declaration of Independence document bore arms of English king
It is a founding document of the United States and inspired the Declaration of Independence and the purge of British power from the American colonies. But, ironically, George Mason’s seminal Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 was written on paper watermarked with the arms of the king of Great Britain and Ireland, an expert has discovered. Dr Peter Thompson, associate professor of American history at Oxford University, said: “The paper may have had to be compliant with the Stamp Act – which deepens the irony.
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Come on feel the noise: I unplugged my headphones and reconnected with the world
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Gravity may exist without mass, mitigating need for hypothetical dark matter
Horseshit
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Bird Aren't Real: What one man learned when he made up a conspiracy theory
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Boba Fett Figure Is Now the Most Valuable Vintage Toy in the World
In 1979, American toy company Kenner made a Boba Fett action figure that could fire missiles from its backpack. The hand-painted bounty hunter was supposed to be a giveaway for fans who’d purchased at least four other Star Wars action figures. But before the product debuted, executives decided to remove the launching mechanism, which they realized could be a potential choking hazard. Kids never got to launch Boba Fett’s rocket. But a few savvy Kenner employees saved some of the prototypes and took them home. Now, one of those rare Boba Fett figurines has become the world’s most valuable vintage toy. Heritage Auctions announced the sale earlier this week.
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Did Spain's B-Mincome Experiment Prove Unconditional Basic Income Doesn't Work?
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Utilizing basic income to create a sustainable, poverty-free tomorrow
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With congestion pricing stop, New York City enters new era of economic gridlock
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CNN enjoying old movies:
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His Ex Is Getting His $1M Retirement Account. They Broke Up in 1989
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The Uber-wealthy families who control much of the food system
When he started investigating, he found that a handful of US families controlled most of the US's food production and distribution system, including meat, dairy, grains, fruit and groceries. While some have recognisable names, most are private individuals running private companies. All are worth billions of dollars. And while their influence is evident in the US, it stretches around the world
he history of American agriculture is rooted in slavery and genocide but it was in the 1980s that the pro-corporate framework really took hold , Frerick says. With the election of Republican president Ronald Reagan, Frerick says that "the guardrails came off and you see this massive consolidation of power in the hands of a few people".
Frerick says this meant his home state of Iowa, which had some of the best soil in North America, was transformed into an industrial wasteland. "It's empty, it's dead, it's barren — you don't see animals, you smell them," he says. For example, in Iowa, pigs currently outnumber people seven to one.
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Size Matters? Penis Dissatisfaction and Gun Ownership in America
The primary hypothesis, derived from the psychosexual theory of gun ownership, asserts that men who are more dissatisfied with the size of their penises will be more likely to personally own guns. To test this hypothesis, we used data collected from the 2023 Masculinity, Sexual Health, and Politics (MSHAP) survey, a national probability sample of 1,840 men, and regression analyses to model personal gun ownership as a function of penis size dissatisfaction, experiences with penis enlargement, social desirability, masculinity, body mass, mental health, and a range of sociodemographic characteristics. We find that men who are more dissatisfied with the size of their penises are less likely to personally own guns across outcomes, including any gun ownership, military-style rifle ownership, and total number of guns owned. The inverse association between penis size dissatisfaction and gun ownership is linear; however, the association is weakest among men ages 60 and older. With these findings in mind, we failed to observe any differences in personal gun ownership between men who have and have not attempted penis enlargement. To our knowledge, this is the first study to formally examine the association between penis size and personal gun ownership in America. Our findings fail to support the psychosexual theory of gun ownership.
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Woman set up a table to share her collection of washers. Nothing was for sale
Electric / Self Driving cars
celebrity gossip
Obit
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British TV Doctor Michael Mosley Found Dead in Greece
The 67-year-old went missing on Wednesday after setting off on a walk from Agios Nikolaos beach. Symi's mayor Eleftherios Papakalodouka said the body was found as teams were searching the coastline with cameras. A police source told BBC News the deceased had been dead "for a number of days". The body was found next to a fence, with an umbrella close by, around 30 minutes walk from the village of Pedi where Dr Mosley was last seen. It is a few metres away from where children are playing in the water at Agia Marina beach.
Musk
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To build a Starship rocket every day: With a successful suborbital test flight of Starship under his belt, Elon Musk is turning his attention to the Starfactory.
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So Many Unsold Teslas Are Piling Up That You Can See Them from Space
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It's 2024. Elon Musk Rules X. and the Political World Is Still Addicted
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Tesla Threatens Customer with $50K Fine If He Tries to Sell His Cybertruck
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Tesla shareholders to vote whether Elon Musk deserves billions judge struck down
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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A Lesson From Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust - The New York Times
Big chunks of the history of the Covid pandemic were rewritten over the last month or so in a way that will have terrible consequences for many years to come. Under questioning by a congressional subcommittee, top officials from the National Institutes of Health, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, acknowledged that some key parts of the public health guidance their agencies promoted during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic were not backed up by solid science. What’s more, inconvenient information was kept from the public — suppressed, denied or disparaged as crackpot nonsense.
Remember the rule that we should all stay at least six feet apart? “It sort of just appeared,” Fauci said during a preliminary interview for the subcommittee hearing, adding that he “was not aware of any studies” that supported it. Remember the insistence that the virus was primarily spread by droplets that quickly fell to the floor? During his recent public hearing, he acknowledged that to the contrary, the virus is airborne. As for the repeated assertion that Covid originated in a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, not in an infectious diseases laboratory there, N.I.H. officials were privately expressing alarm over that lab’s lax biosafety practices and risky research. In his public testimony, Fauci conceded that even now there “has not been definitive proof one way or the other” of Covid-19’s origins.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs - by Ruxandra Teslo
there is a trend wherein Weird Nerds are being driven out of academia by the so-called Failed Corporatist phenotype. Katalin Karikó is a perfect example of a Weird Nerd. I recently argued that many Weird Nerds (I called them autistics, but people really hated that2), have found a refuge on the Internet, where their strengths are amplified and their weaknesses are less important. There, I make the case for why these people are uniquely suited for creative intellectual endeavours and why they might slip through the cracks in a lot of normal jobs. Judging from a (short) lifetime of personal observations as well as the vitriol launched at Kariko for daring to not be “normal”, I suspect some explicit pro-Weird Nerd norms have to exist in an institution that seeks to properly utilize these people, for the benefit of us all. To formalize this: “Any system that is not explicitly pro-Weird Nerd will turn anti-Weird Nerd pretty quickly.”
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Nintendo and Sega Raid ROM Sanctuary to Remove Tons of Classic Games
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Wikimedia Foundation publishes its Form 990 for fiscal year 2022–2023
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OralB Takes Alexa Feature Away from Its Toothbrush 4 Years After Selling Them
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Windows won't take screenshots of everything you do after all, unless you opt in
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The Baffling Disaster Unfolding at the Washington Post
While Lewis has challenged the Times’ characterization of his meeting with Buzbee, it is still pretty embarrassing for the Post to have its publisher and CEO accused of attempting to interfere with a story that reflected poorly on him. (He reportedly also tried to quash a story at NPR.) I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether that saga is more embarrassing than Lewis’ recently announced turnaround plan for the beleaguered newspaper. It’s called the “ ‘Build It’ plan,” and the “it” that Lewis hopes to build is a forward-looking “third newsroom” at the Post: an entity focused on service journalism and social media, meant to appeal to people “who feel traditional news is not for them but still want to be kept informed.” (Lewis reportedly wanted to change Buzbee’s role and put her in charge of this third newsroom—a move that Buzbee reasonably saw as a demotion.) According to a Post press release, the Build It plan will incorporate “video storytelling” and “flexible payment methods.” As you might guess, the plan will also make use of A.I.
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That Much-Despised Apple Ad Could Be More Disturbing Than It Looks - The New York Times
A team of experienced, well-paid professionals spent months refining a strategy. Ideas were pitched, culled, refined, mocked up. Eventually, after countless steps, a winner emerged, and somehow it was this. They could have depicted all that gear being cheerfully shrunken and squeezed into one iPad, awaiting creative fun. Instead, they went with just demolishing it all. Did no one point out that people are increasingly wary of tech companies’ impact on the creative professions? That people have soured on Silicon Valley’s apparent desire to monetize human creativity in as many ways as possible, from extractive streaming arrangements to harvesting human-made art as A.I.-training material? Did no one sense how bad this would look? It’s not just that the ad is a car crash — it’s that the people who poured so much work and money into something so off-putting appear to have thought they were orchestrating a parade.
we may come to see the harsh repulsiveness of “Crush!” as a useful gift — a reminder of the sort of rot to look out for as ad makers learn from their mistakes. We’re used to distrusting ads because of their tendency to deceive. “Crush!” might be something different: an unintentional artifact of the truth, not yet compressed beyond recognition by the machine.
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Always worthy: absorptions: Ultrasonic investigations in shopping centres
Whatever the case, I learned that they are called pilot tones. Many multi-loudspeaker PA systems (like the Zenitel VPA) employ these roughly 20-kilohertz tones to continuously measure the system's health status: no pilot tone means no connection to a loudspeaker. It's usually set to a very high frequency, inaudible to humans, to avoid disturbing customers.
However, these tones are powerful and some people will still hear them, especially if the frequency gets below 20 kHz. There is one such system at 19.595 kHz in my city; it's marked green in the graph above. I've heard of several other people that also hear the sound. I don't believe it to be a sonic weapon like The Mosquito; those use even lower frequencies, down to 17 kHz. It's probably just a misconfiguration that was never fixed because the people working on it couldn't experientially confirm any issue with it.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Economic Termites Are Everywhere: stats hide the experience of being cheated
Today, Verisign is the single most profitable company in the stock market, a great example of an economic termite. In 2013, its operating margins were 54.7%, by 2023 they grew to a crazy 67.1%. Verisign doesn’t invest this money; in 2023, it spent $882 million of it on stock buybacks. Its expenses are basically running a simple database, its strategy is to hike prices just below what will be noticed, and its method is to have politically connected people like Clinton Justice Department official Jamie Gorelick - who is one of Merrick Garland’s good friends - on its board.
Where did Verisign’s monopoly come from? Well, it was due to the last four administrations choosing to ‘privatize’ domain registration to a ‘multi-stakeholder group,’ the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which has a deal with Verisign to allow it to maintain the monopoly. ICAAN could at any point put the contract out on domain management for bid, and you’d see corporations come in at $2/year, certainly much less than $10.26. But they haven’t ever done that. Their contract strikes me as unlawful, a straightforward agreement in ‘restraint of trade.’ Yet, Verisign has a weird agreement with U.S. government’s National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA), which is widely perceived to provide the firm with legal cover for its clearly monopolistic behavior.
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Byju's was valued at $22B. Now, HSBC and BlackRock say it's worth nothing
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San Francisco Is Growing Again, Fueled by AI, Corporate Investment
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Pro-Palestinian protesters surround White House, clash with police
It gets boring to play these “what if?” games, but that they are boring does not mean that they aren’t necessary or true. What if the people who did this had been right-wingers? What if they’d been wearing MAGA hats? What if, instead of describing leftists, this paragraph described figures who could be ideologically associated with the other team?
We all know the answers to these questions. There would have been mass arrests — and mass hysteria to go along with it. We’d have had wall-to-wall coverage in the press, an endless supply of furrowed opinion pieces in the newspapers, and the delivery of hundreds of new “expert” theories confirming the intrinsic link between right-of-center views and murderous hyperbole. As it is, I’ve had to search quite hard to find out what happened yesterday, and most of the photographs and videos I’ve seen were taken not by TV stations or newspapers but by amateurs on Twitter. There is a reason that I’ve used NBC’s report twice in this post: I couldn’t find an equivalent on the homepages of CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, or the supposedly D.C.-oriented Washington Post.
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IRS Launches Last-Minute Audits Aimed at Puerto Rico Tax Abuses
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
World
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South Korea to resume propaganda broadcasts after North sends rubbish balloons
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Billionaires Mittal and Ambani take on Musk in India's internet space race
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2024 European Elections Results
According to preliminary results from five countries, right-wing parties are estimated to have won at least 33 of the 174 seats available in Austria, Cyprus, Germany, Greece and the Netherlands, according to official exit polls from those countries, up from 19 seats at the last election in 2019. And - as the ultraliberal FT admits - "the surge, at the expense of liberal and Green parties, would complicate European commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s bid for a second term as head of the EU’s executive."
Israel
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Gaza health ministry says Israeli hostage rescue killed 274 Palestinians
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Ramy Abdu, a Europe-based Hamas operative designated by Israel who heads the Euro-Med Human Rights monitor, may have unintentionally revealed that one of those related or in charge of keeping Israeli hostages on behalf of Hamas had worked for a US-based 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization. In two tweets on his personal X account, Abdu named Abdallah Aljamal, a 36-year-old “journalist,” and his wife Fatima, as some of those killed by the IDF forces during their incursion into houses in Nuseirat where the hostages were held. However, further research has shown that Aljamal worked for the Palestine Chronicle, a pro-Hamas outlet led by ex-Al-Jazeera official Ramzi Baroud, operating under the auspices of the People Media Project, a 501(c)3 organization registered since 2012 in Olympia, Washington State, whose IRS filings were not found online.
On Sunday morning, Al Jazeera denied that Aljamal had been employed by the organization. It stated the rumors were untrue and baseless.
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Champions of Degrowth Want to Shrink the Economy to Save the World. - The New York Times
n 1972, the French theorist André Gorz coined the word décroissance to ask whether “no-growth — or even degrowth” in material production was necessary for “the earth’s balance,” even if it ran counter to “the survival of the capitalist system.” Gorz was writing the same year that “The Limits to Growth” was published, a report by a group of scientists warning that surges in population and economic activity would eventually outstrip the carrying capacity of the planet. “The Limits to Growth” was initially met with skepticism and even ridicule. Critics pointed to humanity’s undeniably impressive record of technological innovation. As one representative economist put it, “Our predictions are firmly based on a study of the way these problems have been overcome in the past.” And so degrowth remained on the fringes of the fringe for decades, until increasing awareness about global warming percolated into public debates in the early aughts. The realization that we hadn’t innovated our way out of our ecological predicament, along with inequalities laid bare by the 2008 financial crisis, fueled a more widespread distrust of the conventional capitalist wisdom. Maybe relentless economic growth was more poison than panacea.
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Alameda City Council unanimously blocks climate change project from resuming
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What is 'nature-based carbon removal' and is it any better than carbon offsets?
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Did a sudden reduction in shipping pollution inadvertently stoke global warming?
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A physicist runs the math on direct air capture and warns it's a distraction
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Rising seas force Panama Indigenous families to leave island homes