2024-07-09
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Black hole accretion discs dominated by magnetic fields, not thermal pressure
"Our theories told us the disks should be flat like crepes," Hopkins says. "But we knew this wasn't right because astronomical observations reveal that the disks are actually fluffy—more like an angel cake. Our simulation helped us understand that magnetic fields are propping up the disk material, making it fluffier."
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How South Carolina pepper farmer Ed Currie created two hottest peppers on Earth
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Treating Childhood Anxiety with a Mega-Dose of Independence
What we have learned is that you don’t need to make kids miserable with the treatment in order to help them become less miserable from anxiety. You can have the best of both worlds. The definition of an IA is an unstructured, developmentally challenging task that is performed without any help from adults. IAs often involve adventure and mild risk of discomfort or danger. These activities are typically chosen by the child and fall into four categories (outdoor, indoor, with other children, involving mild risk of injury). Examples of outdoor IAs include riding a bike to the park or taking the subway by oneself. Indoor IAs can be cooking a meal from beginning to end or painting a wall in your bedroom. IAs with other children can be going to a movie with friends or camping out in the backyard, and IAs that involve risk are whitling with a sharp knife or building a fire. These categories can be combined for extra powerful doses of independence. A great example is the so-called “junk playgrounds” like The Yard, on Governor’s Island in New York City. They are filled with construction materials, don’t allow parents inside, and are full of amazing opportunities for children to learn how to navigate risk. Children can interact in groups of various ages. Mixed-age groups provide younger children with more opportunities to learn and older children with opportunities to cultivate leadership skills.
So far, we have found that kids are enthusiastic about practicing independence. The biggest barriers have come in the form of adults. And I don’t mean the children’s parents, who often know that independence is good for their kids and, after some coaxing, are able to let go. We’ve had to plan for strangers messing things up, and not in the way you might think. So-called “stranger danger” has been flipped on its head in our work. We’ve never had a stranger try to harm a child practicing independence; on the other hand, plenty of anxious strangers stepped in to “protect” our kids by trying to stop the independence activity. Here’s where we have leaned on Let Grow’s expertise. They have handy “Kid Licenses” informing strangers that a child out and about in the world is nothing to be alarmed about. Kids sign them, as do their parents. Then the kids can flash them like a literal badge of honor if anyone questions what they are doing.
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New parents in Baltimore could get a $1k 'baby bonus' to fight child poverty
Horseshit
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Mass brawl breaks out 30k feet in the sky on Ryanair, prompting diversion
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Chinese scientists identify super moss able to 'survive' in Mars
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How to Get Rich From Peeping Inside People’s Fridges | WIRED
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Who Buys a $150,000 Pet? Why Svalinn Dogs Are So Expensive
Each dog is an undisclosed mix of Dutch shepherd, German shepherd, and Belgian Malinois. “They put the dogs through all these obstacle courses and things,” Haid recalled recently. “I was in the military, I had an Air Force scholarship to med school, and I’ve hunted. These dogs — they’re like humans.” Many high-dollar protection dogs are nothing but menace; Haid approached one of the Svalinn dogs, who nuzzled his hand. He and Mary Ellen now own two. Svalinn says that it sells no more than 20 dogs a year, and only about 350 exist around the world.
Electric / Self Driving cars
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
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College credit for working your job? Walmart and McDonald's are trying it
- In the 1980s, High School kids could sometimes get a class credit for a job with parental approval and special school permissions. It was never clear to me how a job became real enough for those programs.
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Cambridge considers new approach to saving local news: Having the city pay
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I'm Leaving the Intercept and Starting Drop Site News
I was blessed to work with two of the finest editors in journalism, Betsy Reed and Roger Hodge. There will be a time and place to tell the story of what happened at The Intercept, but right now my focus is on producing uncompromising journalism. I have no interest in engaging in toxic media battles or turf wars. I believe that we live in dire times and those of us in the media need to keep a laser focus on the battles that matter to real people’s lives. That is my priority.
Gaza is burning, authoritarianism is rising and, at least for the moment, the only man standing between Donald Trump and the White House has spent most of the past year facilitating a genocidal war in between naps. At the same time, across the globe, the struggles to build a just world are also intensifying and international solidarity with Palestine has inspired an unprecedented movement demanding an end to Israel’s apartheid rule and the Western support that enforces it. The world needs solid journalism to tell these stories.
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Google's Nonconsensual Explicit Images Problem Is Getting Worse
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Walt Disney World Deserted For Fourth Of July Celebrations
Magic Kingdom used to be all decked out in red, white, and blue decor, with the Citizens of Main Street (a classic park-original character group that was sadly removed from the parks some time ago) wearing patriotic garb. This year, there was some bunting at the front of the park and on the Main Street Emporium, but that was it. The Dapper Dans were also decked out in some special Independence Day gear. “I remember when the horticultural department would have flowers out in red white and blue, but there was none of that,” La Reina said. “Once you got past Main Street USA, it looked like just any other day at the Walt Disney World resort.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Breaking the rules is in big tech's blood – now it's time to break the habit
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Artificial Intelligence Researchers Need More Information to Understand Risks
Those attempting to address AI’s potential harms through regulation only have information about how these models could be used in theory. But it doesn’t have to be this way: AI companies can and should share information with researchers and the public about how people use their products in practice. That way, policymakers can prioritize addressing the most urgent issues that AI raises, and public discourse can focus on the technology’s real risks rather than speculative ones. During the 2022 midterm election cycle in the United States, the most pressing information gap was not related to AI, but to social media. Researchers wanted access to data on what people were seeing and saying online to track a range of election risks, from misinformation to manipulative political advertising. However, many platforms—including TikTok and YouTube—shared almost no data with researchers. Platforms that did, such as Facebook and Instagram, only shared limited data on registered political ads and public posts, which researchers found to be too skewed or incomplete to understand the larger landscape.
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Nvidia (NVDA) Creating ‘Huge Bottleneck’ in AI Chip Supply, EU’s Vestager Warns - Bloomberg
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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A key part of America’s economy has shifted into reverse.
Consumer demand seems to have tapered off so far this summer, according to surveys of American businesses that sell any kind of service to make a profit, ranging from restaurants to dental clinics. That weakness is also evident in the latest spending figures — a far cry from last year’s lucrative summertime spending spree when Americans shelled out for films and high-profile concerts.
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The American Elevator Explains Why Housing Costs Have Skyrocketed
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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Matt Yglesias: I Was Wrong About Biden.
I was also aware that a large share of the video “evidence” of Biden’s incapacity was flagrantly clipped or cropped to give a dishonest impression. I was also aware that both Republicans and leftists had been insisting that Biden’s brain was cooked since 2019 and that he’d accomplished an awful lot — winning the primary and the general election, passing two big partisan bills plus two big bipartisan ones plus several smaller deals, adding Finland and Sweden to NATO — for a guy who was allegedly incapable of doing the job. I knew that I had talked to President Biden,2 and that the conversation gave me no doubts about his capabilities.
What makes this all so hard is that a lot of the relevant facts here are like the rabbit-duck illusion. There were tons of data points that, if you looked at them the way the majority of the public was looking at them even before the debate, point to the idea that Biden is too old. Most people have been seeing the duck all along. But I was seeing the rabbit.
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Opinion | Jim Clyburn Is Right About What Democrats Should Do Next - The New York Times
The debate didn’t change what voters believed about Biden. The debate made it impossible for the Democratic Party to continue ignoring what voters already believed about Biden. And make no mistake: They were ignoring it. After calling for Biden to step aside in February, I had a lot of conversations with top Democrats about Biden’s age. They universally knew it was a serious, perhaps lethal, political problem. So why didn’t they do anything? They thought the criticisms were unfair to Biden, who has been a good president; they thought the problem was unsolvable, because he would not step aside; they thought there were no other options; and above all, they thought Donald Trump’s malignancy would overwhelm fears of Biden’s infirmity.
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Joe Biden Goes on 'Morning Joe,' Appears to Read From a Script and Starts Screaming Incoherently
The comeback tour continued for Joe Biden on Monday morning with a brief stint on MSNBC. The president called into "Morning Joe," a show hosted by two of his biggest fans, in yet another attempt to soothe the souls of Democrats worried about his ability to win in November. It wasn't long before the president got angry, as he's prone to do. When pressed in even the slightest degree about his fitness for office, he lashed out multiple times, distorting the phone and calling Scarborough "pal" while screaming "watch!"
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Opinion | Joe Biden, in the Goodest Bunker Ever - The New York Times
We’re now dwelling in a murky area of what the president intended to say, or what he said that was incomprehensible, and whether we should take the White House interpretation. Journalists are going to be appropriately resistant to making corrections based on what the White House asserts Biden said, or its version of what Biden intended to say. It’s not our job to play Mad Libs with the president.
Biden’s word salad and sudden drops in volume to pianissimo are relevant for reporters to cover because they’re a microcosm of the questions at the heart of the 2024 Democratic campaign: Is the president’s mental state strong enough to beat Donald Trump and can he serve for four more years? The desperate Biden team is ready to go to war over every syllable.
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"I have heard the concerns that people have ... I am not blind to them," the letter continues, adding "I wouldn't be running again if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024."
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Joe Biden fundraising signs of weakness appear post debate
Some of Biden’s campaign bundlers have stopped making calls to potential donors since the June 27 debate, according to people familiar with the matter. “No one is picking up the phone,” said a well-connected Democratic fundraiser, who raises money for Biden and the Democratic Party. This person and others were granted anonymity in order to speak openly about private conversations on a sensitive topic. A few of his bundlers are limiting their outreach to people in their personal fundraising networks, after they either received no response at all to asks, or else they received furious replies from people who questioned why they should give money to Biden after his substandard debate performance, according to people familiar with the matter.
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Details On the Proposed "Blitz Primary" - by Matt Taibbi
ABC initially put “the goodest job” in the transcript, but as the New York Times reported, the White House pushed back and insisted what the president really said was the not-much-better “I did the good as job…” This led to ABC updating the transcript “for clarity,” not the same as a correction. It all seemed aggressive compared to prior treatment, but the Shakespearean moment came when Stephanopoulos confronted Biden with news from the Post about Warner assembling a group to “convince you to stand down.”
If Biden insists on staying in the race, as he seems determined to do, he’ll be automatically in conflict with a growing roster of elected Democrats who’ve called for his ouster. If he does change his mind, insiders seem set on fashioning a nomination process that would only include Democratic voters in an ominously indirect way. A “blitz primary” in which celebrities like Taylor Swift and Stephen Colbert engage in “positive only” banter with candidates chosen by Biden delegates could permanently saddle Democrats with an entertainingly hideous celebrity-and-insider template for a voterless nomination process. Either that, or such a gambit could be a brilliant means of gobbling enough public attention to turn disaster into PR triumph just in time for the Republican convention.
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refusing to credit a clear scoop - as the Times did today - is an upscale form of plagiarism and a violation of journalism ethics. When someone else breaks news you didn’t have, and you follow it, you credit them. (As I did in Saturday’s piece, noting that the New York Post had reported one of the visits; it was that piece that led me to check the logs myself.) Worse, though, by refusing to mention me, the Times has misled its readers. And in this case, that omission does not just damage me. It changes the article.
Why? Well, as you know, I have sued the President and that many mainstream media outlets despise me for my mRNA reporting. Those facts do NOT change the truth of what I wrote Saturday. But some readers might be more likely to look skeptically at this reporting if they knew it had begun with me. In failing to report that fact, the Times has denied readers information some might find important. So the real damage is not just to me, but to everyone who reads the article.
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
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Boeing to plead guilty to fraud in US probe of fatal 737 MAX crashes
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The editor-in-chief and publisher of The Tennessee Star was ordered to appear in court last week and threatened with charges of contempt after his newspaper reported on an anonymously leaked collection of documents authored by Nashville mass shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale. Michael Patrick Leahy was joined by his attorneys in court on Monday for a “show-cause hearing,” where the journalist was asked by Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea Myles to demonstrate why his outlet’s reporting does not subject him to contempt proceedings and sanctions.
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Instapundit thread on Patriot Front in Nashville
- An actual "Right wing" or Constitutionalist group not reaching out to that crowd is missing a market, at the very least.
World
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Europe seeks industry views on China's older generation chips
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Largest UK public sector trial of four-day week sees benefits
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6,500 Samsung workers walk off assembly lines over pay, vacation time
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Japanese urban area hunting rifle ban to be adjusted after bear attacks increase
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French elections: Riots erupt after left-wing coalition projected to win plurality of seats.
On Sunday, French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced his intent to resign after a far-left political coalition was poised to win a plurality of French parliamentary seats. The coalition had unexpectedly assembled before the snap elections began. Tens of thousands of left-wing demonstrators gathered in Paris's Place de la République on Sunday night to celebrate the news. President Emmanuel Macron's centrist coalition is projected to take second place. The results were a huge upset for conservatives in France, who had hoped that Marine Le Pen's National Rally would take power.