2024-06-11

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• A possible direct exposure of the Earth to the cold dense interstellar medium 2–3 Myr ago

  the Solar System may have passed through the LRCC in the constellation Lynx 2–3 million years ago. Using a state-of-the-art simulation of the heliosphere, we show that during the passage, the heliosphere shrinks to a scale of 0.22 au, smaller than the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. This would have put the Earth in direct contact with the dense interstellar medium for a period of time and exposed it to a neutral hydrogen density above 3,000 cm−3. Such a scenario agrees with geological evidence from 60Fe and 244Pu isotopes.

Horseshit

• Passenger tracks missing luggage to home of airport store worker

• Coffee Powered the Industrious Revolution and Modern Consumerism

celebrity gossip

• Bay Area prodigy made headlines at 17. Today, he’s a star in math

  “We see a fair number of these prodigies come through Harvard and it doesn’t always work out,” said Harvard University math professor Joe Harris. “Outliers who come to Harvard and find out they’re not alone — not everybody embraces that.” The fate of this year’s prodigies remains to be seen. Evan won the spelling bee 17 years ago. He is now 30. He is, as he predicted, a mathematician at a university, teaching and solving previously unsolved math problems. “So yeah, I’m a postdoc at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) right now,” he said.

Musk

• Why Elon Musk’s Delaware fight will rage on even after the Tesla shareholder vote

• Elon Musk threatens to ban Apple devices from his companies over OpenAI deal

• Musk warns that he will ban Apple devices if OpenAI is integrated at OS level

• Elon Teases Tesla Telephone After Apple AI Announcement

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• The Silent Insurrection: General Milley’s Hand on January 6

  The January 5 memo, carefully crafted by Milley and McCarthy, authorized 340 D.C. National Guard personnel to assist law enforcement with traffic control points and metro station support, and stationed 40 personnel at Joint Base Andrews to serve as the Guard’s Quick Reaction Force (QRF) in case of an emergency. However, this memo restricted General Walker from employing the QRF without explicit personal approval from Army Secretary McCarthy—a condition previously not imposed.

• The Myth That Biden Had Nothing To Do with the Prosecutions of Trump | RealClearPolitics

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• From Long COVID Odds to Lost IQ Points: Ongoing Threats You Don’t Know About | Institute for New Economic Thinking

  it’s quietly causing havoc in ways you likely aren’t even aware of. Getting COVID repeatedly – including asymptomatic infections you never knew you had — can damage your health for years to come and dramatically increase your chances of Long COVID. Low vaccination rates, waning immunity, and ditching precautions have left us wide open to a host of serious problems that are entirely avoidable. Did you know that COVID is nothing like the flu, and yearly vaccines can’t keep up with its rapid mutations? Or that even mild infections have been shown to cause a drop in IQ points? How about the fact that 90% of Long COVID cases come from mild or asymptomatic infections? Or that repeat infections can make you susceptible to heart attacks, strokes, and diseases like measles, Polio, or Diabetes? Did you know that, at the current rate of infections, most Americans may end up with some form of Long COVID? Probably not, because nobody’s telling you.

• The chicken and egg problem of fighting another flu pandemic

• Increased self-immolation frequency and severity during the Covid-19 pandemic

• Moderna says combination Covid and flu vaccine tested better than separate shots

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• DOJ Indicts Doctor Who Exposed the Barbarism of “Gender-Affirming Care”

  Then the tone shifted. In the face of public pressure, CEO Mark Wallace announced that he was shutting down the child gender clinic. But doctors at the hospital, including Richard Ogden Roberts, David Paul, and Kristy Rialon, never stopped. The public would not have known if not for a courageous surgeon, Eithan Haim, who felt morally obligated to expose the subterfuge. He contacted me about how the hospital had lied about terminating the transgender medicine program, and that doctors were, in fact, continuing to perform sex-change procedures on children as young as 11.

  On the morning in June 2023 that Haim was to graduate from Texas Children Hospital’s residency program, federal agents knocked on his door. They had identified him as a potential “leaker,” presumably through forensic examination of the hospital’s computer systems. Shortly thereafter, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari began threatening Haim with prosecution. Now, Ansari has made good on those threats. Earlier this week, U.S. marshals appeared at Haim’s home and summoned him to court to face an indictment on four felony counts of violating HIPAA. His initial appearance is next Monday, where he will learn more about the charges against him.

• Lime Scooters Will Now Shut Down If Driven Over Pride Flag Crosswalk In Spokane, WA

  Lime, a popular electric scooter and bike rental service, has announced it will be implementing a “no-go zone” around a crosswalk painted with a large Pride flag mural in Spokane, Washington. The crosswalk has become the center of much discussion after the arrest of multiple teens for making skid marks on the painted pavement.

• Majority of Black Americans believe US institutions are conspiring against them

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Elsevier embeds a hash in the PDF metadata that is unique for each download

  • HN comments

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• HP shipped a bad BIOS update that bricked many of its ProBook laptops.

• Google "Profits from Pirated Textbooks" Publishers' Lawsuit Claims

• The rise and fall of Koo, India's once-thriving Twitter alternative

• The Wonders of Maxis

• Gainax, known for 'Evangelion' anime production, goes bankrupt

• Google cuts part of team that vets police requests for user data

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI Tools Are Training on Real Images of Children

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Who owns the Moon? A new space race means it could be up for grabs

• Stealth gas contracts awarded amid high-profile crewed Starliner mission - UPI.com

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Want to pay cash? That'll cost you extra

• Homeownership Costs in the US Jumped 26% Since Pandemic Began

• Study finds a quarter of bosses hoped RTO would make employees quit

• Larry Kudlow: 'Look under the hood' of Biden's May jobs report | Fox Business

  The shiny, new paint job was a significant 272,000 increase. Although nearly half of that was government and government-related jobs, that's what the nonfarm payrolls showed. However, when you lift up the hood, what you see is an incredible 408,000 job loss from the household survey.

  if you call through the numbers over the past 12 months, the combination of average hourly earnings — that's wages — for production people — working folks — that times, hours worked, you get a proxy for their income, and that income number comes to only 3.4% increase, which is about the same as the consumer price index, which means they're not getting ahead of the ongoing inflation.

• Colorado’s Weed Market Is Coming Down Hard and It’s Making Other States Nervous - POLITICO

  What once was a success story has now left a trail of failed businesses and cash-strapped entrepreneurs in its wake. Regulatory burdens, an oversaturated market and increasing competition from nearby states have all landed major blows, leaving other states with newer marijuana markets scrambling to avoid the same mistakes.

• New report shows the importance of foreign-born talent to the US STEM workforce

• The U.S. Economy Reaches Superstar Status (Archive)

  If the United States’ economy were an athlete, right now it would be peak LeBron James. If it were a pop star, it would be peak Taylor Swift. Four years ago, the pandemic temporarily brought much of the world economy to a halt. Since then, America’s economic performance has left other countries in the dust and even broken some of its own records. The growth rate is high, the unemployment rate is at historic lows, household wealth is surging, and wages are rising faster than costs, especially for the working class. There are many ways to define a good economy. America is in tremendous shape according to just about any of them. The American public doesn’t feel that way—a dynamic that many people, including me, have recently tried to explain. But if, instead of asking how people feel about the economy, we ask how it’s objectively performing, we get a very different answer.

  the U.S. economy has had a remarkable four-year run, judged against both its own history or the international competition. A few years of good news isn’t enough to make up for 40 years of rising inequality and stagnant wages. But it’s a whole lot better than the alternative.

• Private capital has raised more money than it has returned

  Earlier this week MainFT reported that hedge funds are griping that their fundraising efforts have been hurt by how much money investors have locked up in private capital funds — that aren’t distributing any returns.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• How Joe Biden’s personal aides got involved in his relatives’ business dealings - POLITICO

  For years, Joe Biden shared a bookkeeper with his son, Hunter. He also shared a personal lawyer with his brother, Jim. And when Jim Biden wanted to know more about one of Hunter Biden’s associates, he hired the former head of Joe Biden’s Secret Service detail to investigate. Since 2019, Joe Biden has repeatedly distanced himself from his family’s business dealings, saying that he has never so much as discussed them with his relatives or with anyone else. But House impeachment inquiry interviews, public records and emails reviewed by POLITICO show that members of his inner circle were regularly enmeshed in those dealings: Many of the president’s closest staffers and advisers have doubled as his relatives’ business associates, both during and after their stints working for the man at the center of the Biden family orbit.

• US Supreme Court to hear Facebook bid to scuttle shareholder lawsuit

• Solar panel import tariffs increase US module prices by up to 286%

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• DARPA Spent $1B Trying to Build a Real-Life Skynet in the 1980s

• The U.S. military plans a 'Hellscape' to deter China from attacking Taiwan

• Three holes in the U.S.' economic strategy against China

World

• Patrick Breyer and Pirate Party Lose EU Parliament Seats

  • Far-right gains in EU election deal stunning defeats to France’s Macron and Germany’s Scholz.

• UK's Right-Wing Reform Party Floats Overhaul of BOE's QE Program

• Bishop's plea over Sudan civil war media coverage

• Councils move homeless families out of London with 24-hour ultimatum

• Mandatory tethered caps on plastic bottles from July

  From 3 July, all bottle caps on containers under 3 litres must be attached, according to a new EU directive. However, this could prove an issue for some charities.

• David Cameron falls victim to hoax call from 'former Ukraine president'

• Largest Camera for Astronomy Reaches Chilean Mountaintop

• Canada's Parliament Rocked by Allegations of Treason and Foreign Interference

• A military plane carrying Malawi's vice president has gone missing and a search is underway | AP News

Israel

• How Israel Saved a Hostage Rescue Mission That Nearly Failed

• 'Journalist' Killed by IDF Held 3 Israeli Hostages in His Home, Wrote for US-Based Nonprofit

  As we noted in numerous stories about Israel's rescue mission, the four hostages rescued were not held in tunnels or prisons; they were held in the homes of alleged civilians in residential areas in Nuseirat. I say "alleged civilians" because if these people were holding Israeli hostages for eight months they're absolutely part of Hamas and are combatants, not civilians.

  One of those alleged civilians, it's now confirmed, was Abdullah Al Jamal, who bills himself as a journalist and who most recently wrote for a United States-based 501(c)(3) NGO, The Palestine Chronicle. He also wrote at least one piece for Al Jazeera. The Israeli government confirmed Sunday that Al Jamal, who was neutralized by IDF rescuers, held three hostages captive in his family home

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• How Many Western ICs Are There in Russia's Weapons?

China

• European companies step up efforts to decouple from China

• Teacher Li: The hunt for the cartoon cat vexing China's censors

  Mr Li has since become a vital chronicler of information deemed politically sensitive by Beijing. His X account is a window into Xi Jinping’s China where authorities’ vice-like grip on information keeps tightening. From major protests to small acts of dissent, corruption to crime, it is zealously scrubbed off the Chinese internet, only to turn up on Mr Li’s account. He says this has earned him the wrath of the authorities and, in an interview with the BBC, he painted a clear picture of how Beijing pressures dissidents overseas. He alleged the Chinese government is not only harassing him but also his friends, family and X followers in a coordinated campaign of intimidation.

  The Chinese government has not responded to our questions and we are unable to independently verify all of Mr Li’s claims. But the tactics he detailed have been documented by activists, rights groups and other governments.

Health / Medicine

• "How people fall apart": The Neuroscience of Burnout

• It is time for more holistic practices in mental health

• O-type blood donors needed after London cyber-attack

  NHS Blood and Transplant is appealing for O blood-type donors to book appointments to donate as this is safe to use for all patients. The IT attack means the affected hospitals cannot currently match patients' blood at the same frequency as usual. Several London hospitals declared a critical incident, cancelled operations and tests, and were unable to carry out blood transfusions last week after the attack on the pathology firm Synnovis, which Qilin, a Russian group of cyber criminals, is understood to have been behind.

• Daycares in Finland Grew Forests, and It Changed Kids' Immune Systems

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Creating a throw-away culture: How companies ingrained plastics in modern life

• What Is the Opposite of Oil Drilling?

• Counting the cost of fashion's carbon footprint

• Toxic Biosolids Threaten U.S. Farmland and Livestock