2024-06-15
etc
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Investigation underway into rare, unsafe roll experienced by a Boeing 737 MAX
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An elephant’s trunk is used for drinking, for feeding, and for grasping objects, such as the vegetation that the animal strips for food. The proboscis is controlled by 17 groups of muscles running longitudinally along the trunk’s axis.“ Goriely and his co-workers sought to recreate trunk-like motions using a simple set of contractile actuator elements that reflect the longitudinal musculature of the real organ. “The challenge was to find a way to develop both curvature and torsion,” says Goriely. Making the trunk curl into a spiral-type shape is relatively easy. As the team’s mathematical model confirmed, this action requires a single contractile actuator running longitudinally on one side of a tapering trunk, like the bimetallic strips in the thermostats of electric kettles. But a trunk also has helical muscle fibers that induce torsion, creating movements in three dimensions that allow the trunk to thoroughly explore its surroundings. They studied several designs and found that the most versatile one had a single straight actuator for curling, plus two helical actuators, one winding to the left and one to the right, for torsional motion.
Hu adds that “the big question left in my mind is this: If elephants can achieve all these 3D trunk positions with just three actuators, why does it have to have so many other muscles, and when are those used?”
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How to Raise a Tribal Army in Pre-Roman Europe, Part II
At the core of all of these recurrent factors is a central definition, famously stated by Max Weber, which reduces the state down effectively to a single point. The state is, “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”3 There are a few quirks there, of course. The monopoly is on legitimate force, not all force: every society has criminals, which is the word we use for individuals who wield illegitimate force; in a sense, the creation of the state is the process of getting a critical mass of people to reclassify all of the wielders of force save one as criminals. But crucially the definition is centered on physical force, which is to say on violence and the threat of violence, direct or remote.
In a state, one community – and really one political institution in that community – has abrogated to itself the sole authority to authorize the use of force. That political institution might be a king or a parliament or a congress or a popular assembly. It might delegate its authority to elected officials or appointed generals or even down to subordinate local departments or provinces. Note that, like all social institutions, the state is a question of perception and customs: it is the perception of legitimacy that matters, precisely because that perception is what enables the state to recruit the purveyors of physical force to deal it out and to ensure that the broader society does not resist its application.
Horseshit
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FAA Investigating How Counterfeit Titanium Got into Boeing and Airbus Jets
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One Satellite Crash Could Upend Modern Life - The Atlantic
The threat of a disastrous event is always lurking in low Earth orbit, frustratingly unpredictable but worryingly persistent. It’s not unlike the major earthquake that is expected to rock California in the coming decades. In the orbital landscape, the “Big One” could come in the form of any number of scenarios: collisions between satellites, the intentional shooting-down of a spacecraft, a nuclear event. But the outcome of such a seismic event in orbit is the same. A tremendous burst of fast-moving shards, indiscriminate in their destruction, will whiz through Earth’s jam-packed coating of satellites, threatening to tip the world below into a new reality.
A “Big One” in space would be a strangely quiet event. We would not see the swaying of the infrastructure that makes so much of our modern life possible; instead disaster would manifest right in the palms of our hands as our smartphones suddenly struggled to work. Satellite technology provides communications, GPS, and even an accounting of time to people, businesses, and governments around the world. If it fails, power grids, agricultural functions, shipping routes, and banking transactions could quickly falter too. New missions to restore technological normalcy would launch into a more perilous environment, one that may be too dangerous for astronauts to traverse. In the worst-case scenario, a hypothetical phenomenon called Kessler syndrome, space could become so overpopulated that collisions lead to a cascade of even more collisions, rendering low Earth orbit nearly impossible to navigate.
Some dead satellites and pieces of debris eventually fall out of orbit, tugged downward by atmospheric drag, but others are likely to stick around for centuries.
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When the story is "The Hubble is falling!" they call atmospheric drag an "unexpected phenomenon". So perhaps its no wonder they can't account for it when preaching Kessler. "likely to stick around for centuries" would be a wonderful factor to take advantage when engineering long lived platforms like Hubble. Wonder why no one has?
The largest uncertainty in determining orbits for satellites operating in low Earth orbit is the atmospheric drag. Drag is the most difficult force to model mainly because of the complexity of neutral atmosphere variations driven by the Sun, and the propagation from below of lower atmosphere waves. Atmospheric neutral density models routinely used in orbit determination applications are mainly empirical. These models are based on historical observations to which parametric equations have been fitted, representing the known variations of the upper atmosphere with local time, latitude, season, solar and geomagnetic activity
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celebrity gossip
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Jeff Bezos has a vision to colonize space with a trillion people
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Minneapolis Institute of Art Cancels Kehinde Wiley Show
Kehinde Wiley show due to open at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, this September has also been quietly postponed as the artist faces allegations of sexual assault from multiple men. In the past few weeks, Wiley, a painter widely known for creating Barack Obama’s official portrait, has faced accusations of rape. Those claims have been posted to Instagram by people including artist Joseph Awuah-Darko and activist Derrick Ingram, who have said they plan a class-action lawsuit against Wiley in New York.
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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A Rare Win for Free Speech? The Stanford Internet Observatory Closes
After five years of pioneering research into the abuse of social platforms, the Stanford Internet Observatory is winding down. Its founding director, Alex Stamos, left his position in November. Renee DiResta, its research director, left last week after her contract was not renewed. One other staff member's contract expired this month, while others have been told to look for jobs elsewhere, sources say.
SIO and its researchers have been sued three times by conservative groups alleging that its researchers colluded illegally with the federal government to censor speech, forcing Stanford to spend millions of dollars to defend its staff and students. In parallel, Republican House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and his Orwellian “Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government” have subpoenaed documents at Stanford and other universities, selectively leaked fragments of them to friendly conservative outlets, and misrepresented their contents in public statements. And in an actual weaponization of government, Jordan’s committee has included students — both undergraduates and graduates — in its subpoena requests, publishing their names and putting them at risk of threats or worse.
The remnants of SIO will be reconstituted under Jeff Hancock, the lab’s faculty sponsor. Hancock, a professor of communication, runs a separate program known as the Stanford Social Media Lab. SIO’s work on child safety will continue there, sources said.
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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A second Trump term: from unthinkable to probable
How has Mr Trump gone from being cast out by his party to being likelier than not to win another term? Incumbent presidents and prime ministers are doing badly everywhere. The wave that soaked India’s Narendra Modi and will surely wash away Rishi Sunak in Britain can be spotted off the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts. Mr Biden’s approval ratings are among the worst for an American president at the end of his first term. The only thing that makes them respectable is comparing him with Mr Sunak, Justin Trudeau or Emmanuel Macron, whose numbers are even worse. Inflation may be the culprit. Mr Biden would like the election to be about preserving democracy. Swing voters seem to care more about the price of eggs.
Mr Trump may have 34 felony convictions, but Republican leaders are backing him anyway, and so giving rank-and-file Republicans permission to vote for him again. In February 2021 Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader, described Mr Trump as “morally responsible” for the violent invasion of the Capitol by a Trump-supporting mob a month earlier. Yet in March this year he endorsed Mr Trump. And rewriting history is not confined to Republican bigwigs. Ordinary voters are at it, too. When Mr Trump left office 41% of Americans rated his presidency a success. Now 55% do.
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Chamath Palihapitiya says the media's portrayal of Trump has been a LIE
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic
The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.
The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.
Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.
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"Debilitating a Generation": Long Covid May Eventually Affect Most Americans
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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Opinion | We Overvalue Intelligence - The New York Times
What happens to the extremely intelligent? Do they go from success to success, powered by their natural brilliance? Or do they struggle in a world where they don’t fit in? There are two ways to answer these questions. The first is the social science answer. Social science researchers give promising children intelligence tests, and then they check in on them over the ensuing decades to see how much the students’ early intelligence correlates with lifetime success. I confess that I’d prefer to live in a world in which people’s lives were not powerfully shaped by some trait they happened to have inherited. But we don’t live in that world. The social science answer is that higher intelligence correlates strongly with positive educational and career outcomes.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Husband pursues Apple after wife finds 'deleted' messages to prostitute
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Microsoft in damage-control mode, says it will prioritize security over AI
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The much-needed reinvention of the voice assistant is almost here
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YouTube will stop ad blockers by merging ads into videos on the server-side
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Amazon Has Upended the Streaming Ad Market, and Netflix Is Paying the Price
TechSuck / Geek Bait
- very cool Matt's Page of Connectors and Crimping
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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OpenAI appoints former top US cyberwarrior Paul Nakasone to board of directors
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Snowden: "They've gone full mask-off: do not ever trust OpenAI or its products"
As the person who wrote the foundational patent for all these A.I. engines, I can say without any doubt that you are correct. OpenAI engines have hard logical locks on thresholds that will not allow them to learn anything [they] don’t want the engines to learn. Their initial training data sets are rife with hard-left ideology, and they WILL mislead anyone who puts their trust in them.
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Cities are now so expensive they're considered 'impossibly unaffordable'
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Federal Reserve Board issues an enforcement action against Evolve Bank
The Federal Reserve Board on Friday issued an enforcement action against Evolve Bancorp, Inc. and Evolve Bank & Trust, both of West Memphis, Arkansas, for deficiencies in the bank's anti-money laundering, risk management, and consumer compliance programs.
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Long-delayed SF Whole Foods store still not open, probably won't
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US needs to build 2M houses to revive the American dream of homeownership
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Virgin Galactic celebrates flight hiatus with a reverse stock split
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto Released Despite FBI Resistance | RealClearWire
when “nearly four dozen pages” of the murderer’s diary were finally released last week, the mainstream media completely ignored it. It turns out that behind the scenes, the FBI had fought hard against the diary’s release. Some Covenant School parents also opposed releasing the diary because it would force families to re-live the nightmare. The Tennessee Star’s parent company, Star News Digital Media, successfully filed two lawsuits to obtain the diary. Five days after the release of the diary, with the exception of the New York Post, which is a national news outlet, the news coverage was limited to seven other conservative outlets such as The Daily Wire and Newsbusters.
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Nearly 100 illegal mopeds seized during four-day blitz in Queens amid NYC scourge