2024-06-22
Horseshit
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How the two hearts might work in a Time Lord (Archive)
As an aspiring medical doctor and avid Doctor Who fan, I found myself wondering about the anatomy and physiology of the Time Lord cardiovascular system. How are the two hearts connected, and how are the heartbeats regulated? How does the Doctor survive centuries without developing age-related heart disease? How could a dual cardiac system have evolved? I had to find out. Unfortunately, Time Lords are difficult to study because of their small population and tendency to show up for appointments in the wrong century. So to answer these questions, I analyzed data on cardiac incidents from 13 seasons of Doctor Who (2005 to 2023), pored over the cardiovascular literature on humans and other species, and consulted various experts in these and related fields. Through my extensive studies, I have developed what I think are plausible answers to my questions about the Time Lord’s two hearts.
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Humanzee was grown in a lab before scientists euthanized it
Decades after the incident, Gallup told The Sun: “One of the most interesting cases involved an attempt which was made back in the 1920s in what was the first primate research centre established in the US in Orange Park, Florida. "They inseminated a female chimpanzee with human semen from an undisclosed donor and claimed not only that pregnancy occurred but the pregnancy went full term and resulted in a live birth.
Electric / Self Driving cars
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Many election-watching scientists are under pressure
When the 2020 race rolled around — this time pitting Trump against Joe Biden — Starbird was poised to track the viral spread of hundreds of fake stories on social-media platform Twitter (now X) in the lead-up to election day. More than 300 fabricated narratives, she found1, were designed to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the election. Not long after publicizing the work, she and her colleagues became the target of what she calls a “multi-pronged” strategy to discredit it. She has since been a defendant in several high-profile lawsuits, was subpoenaed to appear at congressional hearings and has defended accusations that she colluded with the government to censor free speech in the United States. She has also been deluged with public-information requests, sued for not responding to those requests promptly enough, and bombarded with disingenuous questions from hostile media outlets.
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Like a zillion other bright-eyed Stanford undergrads, I was drawn to work at a place that promised to “learn about the abuse of the internet in real time, to develop a novel curriculum on trust and safety that is a first in computer science, and to translate our research discoveries into training and policy innovations for the public good.” To me, that meant ending internet abuse like the glamorization of anorexia on social media or financial scams that steal billions every year. But mostly I worked on the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which SIO ran during the 2020 and 2022 elections. The purpose of that project was to identify so-called “fake news” spreading on social media.
In actuality, SIO hired a load of interns to scan social media for posts deemed to be mis- and disinformation. It turns out that the posts we students flagged were often sent along to moderators at Twitter (now X), Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, which took them down in order to quash dissenting viewpoints—viewpoints that sometimes ended up being right, as in the case of Covid likely being the result of a lab leak, or Hunter Biden’s hard drive being his actual hard drive—not Russian disinformation.
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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Trump Wants Foreign Born University Diploma Holders to Get Automatic Green Cards
Generally, Donald Trump’s rhetoric on immigration tends toward the hyperbolic and alarmist. Like many in his party, for example, he has taken to referring to those seeking to come to the United States as “military-aged males,” a pejorative ignoring that “military-aged” is also “prime working age” and overlooking the large percentage of immigrants who are women, children or men traveling with their families. More recently, he has suggested that an increase in people seeking to immigrate from China is a sign that the Chinese government is building an army (small and poorly equipped) within the United States — an easier admission than that the strong economy continues to be a draw for immigrants. And yet, in a podcast discussion on Thursday, Trump also proposed granting permanent residency to tens of thousands of military-age men from China.
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A Nevada state court judge dismissed a criminal indictment Friday against six Republicans accused of submitting certificates to Congress falsely declaring Donald Trump the winner of the state’s 2020 presidential election, potentially killing the case with a ruling that state prosecutors chose the wrong venue to file the case. Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford stood in a Las Vegas courtroom a moment after Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus delivered her ruling, declaring that he would take the case directly to the state Supreme Court. “The judge got it wrong and we’ll be appealing immediately,” Ford told reporters afterward. He declined any additional comment.
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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A deadly strain of avian influenza has breached the ecosystem of Antarctica
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The destruction of public health and the growing threat of an H5N1 pandemic
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most interestingly, Cochrane found no statistically significant evidence that the vaccines reduce all-cause mortality. Instead, Cochrane reports that slight increases in all-cause deaths were observed for both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in comparison to the control groups. These slight increases are nowhere near statistically significant, but they certainly don’t point toward the vaccines reducing deaths. Indeed, there appears to be more evidence that ivermectin reduces the chance of death in connection with Covid-19 than there is that the mRNA vaccines do. Yet the federal government spent a fortune on the latter and disingenuously suggested that the former was fit only for four-legged patients.
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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The Morning After: How small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline
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Five Men Convicted of Running Massive Illegal Streaming Service 'Jetflix'
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AT&T forbidden from cutting landline services to large parts of California
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Amazon reportedly thinks people will pay up to $10 per month for next-gen Alexa
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What Game of Thrones did to the media
It felt like it was happening everywhere. Suddenly, The New York Times was doing the same thing as BuzzFeed; The Guardian, Time, and NPR were generating identical kinds of stories as sites called FanSided, Ranker, and Den of Geek. (The Verge’s series was called “Game of Game of Thrones.”) Publications are differentiated by their coverage areas, identity, and voice. What happens when they all start running the same kind of pieces?
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Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky denies it's a hazard after the US bans its software
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Supreme Court upholds bar on guns under domestic-violence restraining orders - SCOTUSblog
In 2020, a court in Texas entered a civil protective order against him after Rahimi dragged his then-girlfriend back to his car when she tried to leave after an argument. He pushed her into the car, causing her to hit her head on the dashboard. Rahimi also fired a gun at a bystander who witnessed the incident. The protective order specifically barred Rahimi from having a gun. A few months later, when Rahimi was a suspect in a series of shootings, police obtained a warrant to search his home. They found a rifle and a pistol, which prompted prosecutors to charge him with violating the federal law at the center of the case.
Rahimi argued that the law violates the Second Amendment, and in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit agreed. It explained that although the government was not required to identify a “historical twin” to the law, it had not provided the kind of “well-established and representative analogue” needed for the law to survive. On Friday, the court reversed the 5th Circuit’s decision. Roberts observed that “some courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases,” and he cautioned against taking too rigid a view of the historical tradition required by Bruen. He noted that if courts looked, for example, only at what weapons were in existence in early U.S. history to determine whether the Second Amendment protects a particular firearm, it would only protect “muskets and sabers” – which is not the case. “By that same logic,” Roberts continued, “the Second Amendment permits more than just those regulations identical to ones that could be found in 1791.”
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
World
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Small drones will soon lose combat advantage, French Army chief says
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The gardener who took a Canadian city to court for the right to not mow his lawn
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Second Canadian scientist alleges brain illness investigation was shut down
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Barcelona will eliminate ALL tourist apartments in 2028 following local backlash
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
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FDA, Industry Actions End Sales of PFAS Used in Food Packaging
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LSD use tied to increased distress in unemployed job-seekers.
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What good are whizzy new drugs if the world can’t afford them?
These treatments are very expensive to develop, and drug companies need a high price for a single-time therapy to make an adequate return on investment. Instead, the answer lies in creating insurance pools that are large enough to absorb unexpected high costs by spreading the risks across many millions of patients. There are two possible ways to get to these larger pools of patients. Private insurers may be able to create large enough pools through “subscription models”: for a set fee per covered individual, these would offer to cover all gene-therapy costs for many employers and smaller insurers. Alternatively, governments could mandate that all public and private insurers pay into large regional or national pools, offering a fully government-run insurance benefit for such therapies.
Gene-therapy makers have a role to play, too. They could help smooth out the budget impact of the new therapies by working with insurers to develop new payment plans structured to pay the full price for a gene therapy through instalments, with payments halted if the therapy stops working for the patient. Managing the costs of obesity drugs will require similar creativity and long-term thinking. Governments and insurers will need to become more comfortable with the idea that spending to reduce obesity is an investment in a healthier workforce. Nonetheless, given the large size of the eligible population, drugmakers will need to accept prices far lower than the formal “value” per patient that traditional health economics would assign to such treatments. Drugmakers may be more willing to accept lower prices if they are offered long-term partnerships with insurers guaranteeing minimum revenue levels and preferential terms compared to drugs from competitors.
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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If forests drive wind and water cycles, what does it mean for the climate?
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Amazon is getting rid of plastic air pillows in North America
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Google Blog: How governments can help deploy digital solutions for climate AC
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Climate engineering off US coast could increase heatwaves in Europe, study finds
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Fossil emissions hit record highs as world struggles with deadly heat
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Youth activists win 'unprecedented' climate settlement in Hawaii
Hawaii officials have announced a “groundbreaking” legal settlement with a group of young climate activists, which they said will force the state’s department of transportation to move more aggressively towards a zero-emission transportation system. “You have a constitutional right to fight for life-sustaining climate policy and you have mobilized our people in this case,” Josh Green, the Hawaii governor, told the 13 young plantiffs in the case, saying he hoped the settlement would inspire similar action across the country. Under what legal experts called a “historic” settlement, announced on Thursday, Hawaii officials will release a roadmap “to fully decarbonize the state’s transportation systems, taking all actions necessary to achieve zero emissions no later than 2045 for ground transportation, sea and inter-island air transportation”, Andrea Rodgers, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the case, said at a press conference with the governor.
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Mosquitoes released in Hawaii to save rare birds from extinction
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Canada's consumer watchdog has ideas about how to crack down on greenwashing
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Edwardian morals, Thatcher and bad design – why Britain's homes are so hot
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We now have even more evidence against the "ecocide" theory of Easter Island