2024-09-24

Flapping wings, forever wars, TV sells sugar to kids, Woke is dead, men go to church, data matters, banks go nukular, Wimyn and Routh hate Trump, furrin car tech banned, whipped cream for health,

etc

• Why violins are the biggest section in the orchestra

• The Ingenious F1 Wing Trick That Helped Oscar Piastri Win the Azerbaijan GP

  The biggest thing everyone wants to know, though, is whether or not that flexi-wing is actually, y’know, legal. Right now, the answer is a tentative “yes.” Blake Hinsey, a former Formula 1 performance engineer for Red Bull, stated that, “If the technical regulations have specifications for rear wing deflection and this passes the tests, then it’s legal. Every piece of bodywork moves in complex ways under aerodynamic load. If McLaren has found a way to reduce the drag on their rear wing differently, congratulations. They’ve done a brilliant job engineering this system.”

  • I feel vindicated now. My '77 Cutlass had a "speed sensitive spoiler." The trunk lid was held down with bungee cords, and would rise higher the faster the car went.

• Scientists Say They Have Created the First Electromagnetic Vortex Cannon.

• Hundreds of Mysterious Nazca Glyphs Have Just Been Revealed : ScienceAlert

Horseshit

• As do many businesses OceanGate's ill-fated Titan sub relied on a hand-typed Excel spreadsheet

• Why aren't humanoids in our homes yet?

• The war on remote work has nothing to do with productivity

  • HN comments

• The Shawshank Redemption at 30: is it the greatest film ever made?

• Only 3% of UK 12-year-olds don't have smartphone- How four of them feel about it

• The most controversial Olympics moment came down to four seconds

• From Gaza to Ukraine, why do so many modern wars last so long?

  The Ukraine-Russia war and the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza are both part of feuds with long histories. Ukraine declared independence from Russia in 1918, then lost a war in the years that followed. Ukraine didn't gain independence from Moscow until the 1991 Soviet Union breakup. Meanwhile, the Israel-Hamas battle is part of the larger Israeli-Palestinian dispute that also stretches back a century. In both current wars, a common question is "When will the fighting end?" But given the tortured history, it might be better to ask "Will it ever end?"

  • There's more people (who don't live there) interested in the fight than the people who do live there, interested in the end of fighting. Hosting someone else's war rarely works well for the locals.

• Nuclear blast could save Earth from large asteroid, scientists say

• Making Eggs Without Ovaries

• Honey, YouTubers Are Poisoning the Kids

  I remember when PRIME juice first came out. They were going fucking gaga over it. I asked them how they even knew about it, and of course, they had seen it on YouTube. Anytime they went by a shop window and saw the bottles with the ‘very obviously brightly colored packaging because it appeals to kids’ branding, they’d press their face up to the glass and say crazy things like “Omg, that’s the super rare flavor!” (a flavor that was in every other shop), and would demand to spend their own pocket money to buy one. It was one of the first holy shit moments I had of seeing how putting the Internet in the hands of the young was influencing them in ways they clearly didn’t understand.

  One of the biggest culprits — but by far not the only one — is Mr Beast. He might be the biggest YouTuber with over 316 million subscribers, but his channel is predatory, pure and simple. I’ve always had a hump with him. Perhaps the first-ever “I gave $5,000 to a homeless person” was genuine. It was at least novel. But the moment he realized this generosity could be manufactured to drive engagement, the game was up.

  • HN comments

  • MrBeast is YouTube's biggest star - now he faces 54-page lawsuit

celebrity gossip

• AI takes YouTuber's voice — alleged offending videos have now been unlisted: Updated | Tom's Hardware

  Geerling joins Scarlett Johansson on the AI impersonation list

• 88-year-old 'Skyrim Grandma' is retiring

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Telegram says it will share phone numbers and IPs of 'bad actors' to authorities

  • Telegram will now provide IP addresses and phone numbers in response to requests

  • Telegram will now hand over phone number and IP for criminal suspects

Musk

• Crypto scammers hack OpenAI's press account on X

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• America is becoming less “woke”

  Republicans love to blame everything they consider wrong with America on an epidemic of “wokeness”, by which they tend to mean anything that smacks of virtue-signalling or political correctness. Thus a bridge over Baltimore harbour collapsed earlier this year not, as it might have seemed, because it was hit by a wayward cargo ship, but because one of the nearby port’s six commissioners is a black woman whose human-resources firm helps companies assess how diverse their workforces are, among other things—or so a Republican candidate for governor of Utah asserted. Donald Trump, when accepting the Republican nomination for president in July, blamed “woke” leadership for the failings of America’s armed forces. The party’s official platform this year complains of “woke…government” spurring politically motivated prosecutions. The implication is that woke attitudes are proliferating, and that only Republicans can stem their rise.

  In fact, discussion and espousal of woke views peaked in America in the early 2020s and have declined markedly since. The Economist has attempted to quantify the prominence of woke ideas in four domains: public opinion, the media, higher education and business. Almost everywhere we looked a similar trend emerged: wokeness grew sharply in 2015, as Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, continued to spread during the subsequent efflorescence of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, peaked in 2021-22 and has been declining ever since (see charts). The only exception is corporate wokeness, which took off only after Mr Floyd’s murder, but has also retreated in the past year or two.

• With Gen Z, Men Are Now More Religious Than Women - The New York Times

  For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious. “We’ve never seen it before,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, said of the flip. Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip. The men and women of Gen Z are also on divergent trajectories in almost every facet of their lives, including education, sexuality and spirituality.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Arm the teachers: Bulletproofing America’s Classrooms - The New York Times

  “Arm us with books, counselors and resources, not bulletproof vests,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “It is infuriating that rather than having the courage to solve the gun violence problem, we now have to confront the monetizing of fear.”

• Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience

  neurons don’t take averages. All a neuron gets to work with is the moment-to-moment spikes sent by its inputs. Those inputs carry few, if any, spikes. Each input likely varies its response to the same significant event. Averaging over time hides what a neuron actually sees, what it actually gets to compute with.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• What do you mean 'You don't use Spotify'?

• iPhone 16 is much easier to repair

• How FIFA was outplayed by Electronic Arts

• Court orders Google to uninstall pirate IPTV app sideloaded on Android devices

• Ever wonder how crooks get the credentials to unlock stolen phones?

• Tumblr, Bluesky Numbers Surge as X Is Shut Down Again in Brazil

• Mozilla removes ad-tracking code from Firefox

• How Netflix won the streaming wars

  Since launching its password crackdown in May 2023, Netflix has added 45mn paying subscribers. Its share price has risen more than 300 per cent from its post-correction low, recently setting new all-time highs.

• Microsoft's largest ever security transformation detailed in new report

  • "No more oopsies that melt the internet!" ... they said that after Code Red, and Code Red 2, and ...

• Social media platforms are using what you create for AI - Here’s how to opt out

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Wikipedia Dataset on Hugging Face: Structured Content for AI/ML

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Jony Ive Confirms Involvement in AI Hardware Project with OpenAI

• California Lawmakers Think They Can Outsmart AI

• AI can generate recipes that can be deadly

• AI boom is driving a surprise resurgence of U.S. gas-fired power

• OpenAI CEO: We may have AI superintelligence in "a few thousand days"

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Adaptation to space conditions of novel bacterial species isolated from the ISS

• A Chinese rocket narrowly missed a landing on Sunday—the video is amazing | Ars Technica

  In addition to this statement, the company released images and video—including that from nearby drones—that included the fiery landing attempt and its aftermath. This is some of the most incredible rocket footage I've ever seen, and a welcome new trend toward transparency from Chinese space companies. Whereas SpaceX conducted its vertical landing tests after the Falcon 9 had begun launching customers into orbit, Deep Blue Aerospace is testing prior to orbital launches in an attempt to begin landing its first stages from the very beginning.

• Perseverance rover spots unusual striped rock on Mars

Crypto con games

• Deutsche Bank Poll Reveals Widespread Public Skepticism Toward CBDCs

Economicon / Business / Finance

• SEC Slip-Up Hints at Fresh Financial Fears - The Daily Reckoning

  Last week the SEC accidentally published internal commentary along with a speech by Chair Gary Gensler. Here’s one of the comments which was mistakenly included.

  I strongly recommend that a sentence be placed here (or somewhere [sic] in the first part of the speech) to reassure markets that you are not making the speech because you think there is an imminent crisis.

• World’s biggest banks pledge support for nuclear power

  At an event on Monday in New York with White House climate policy adviser John Podesta, institutions including Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citi, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will say they support a goal first set out at the COP28 climate negotiations last year to triple the world’s nuclear energy capacity by 2050. They will not spell out exactly what they would do, but nuclear experts said the public show of support was a long-awaited recognition that the sector had a critical role to play in the transition to low-carbon energy.

• It will take more than just a drop in interest rates to save the housing market

• Pat Gelsinger's grand plan to reinvent Intel is in jeopardy

• The last full-size Kmart in the mainland United States is closing

  The store, in Bridgehampton, New York, on Long Island, is due to close October 20, according to an employee who answered the phone at the store Monday morning who did not want to give her name. The chain still has a small convenience store version of itself in Miami, but not the full line of offerings that Kmart was once known for. Still, the Long Island store closing will close one more chapter in the disastrous 2005 merger of Sears and Kmart, one of numerous iconic retailers killed after purchases by hedge funds and private equity firms. The $11 billion merger was engineered by hedge fund operator Eddie Lampert. At the time of the 2005 merger Kmart had about 1,400 stores and Sears nearly 900 full-line US stores. Lampert appeared more focused on selling off real estate the two companies had along with other assets such as the Craftsman brand of tools previously sold only at Sears, rather than in investing in either chain, leading to a bankruptcy filing in 2018.

• The 30-Year Mortgage Was Bad. The 40-Year Mortgage Will Be Even Worse

• Gen Z just overtook Baby Boomers in U.S. full-time workforce, by generation

• Washington Post cuts 25% of it's tech arm, Arc XP

• Failed Deals Climb as Antitrust Enforcers Push Aggressive Agenda

• Two in three shoppers won't buy products in locked display cases

• US Companies Are Ready to Borrow Billions Following Fed Rate Cut

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• California fails to track its homelessness spending or results, a new audit says

  • California Must Do More to Assess the Cost‑Effectiveness of Homeless Programs

• Congress is wholly unprepared for a mass casualty event

  the institution is wholly unprepared for a catastrophic event that kills or incapacitates multiple members — even if that hypothetical tragedy results in a major power shift: changing which party holds the majority in the House or Senate.

Harris / Democrats

• Kamala Harris has vowed to foster investments in the crypto industry

• Kamala Harris to skip traditional Al Smith dinner, first time presidential candidate has ducked charity event since 1984.

• 'White Allies May Attend Other Circle Trainings': As Minnesota Governor, Tim Walz Held Racially Segregated Programs for Teachers and Vets

• Democrats Abroad foreign voting effort tech "coincidences"

Biden Inc

• It's time public school teachers got a raise.

Trump / Right / Jan6

• 'I hate Trump, she likes him – we both think he staged assassination attempts'

  Wild Mother - the online alias of a woman called Desirée - lives in the mountains of Colorado, where she posts videos to 80,000 followers about holistic wellness and bringing up her little girl. She wants Donald Trump to win the presidential election. About 70 miles north in the suburbs of Denver is Camille, a passionate supporter of racial and gender equality who lives with a gaggle of rescue dogs and has voted Democrat for the past 15 years. The two women are poles apart politically - but they both believe assassination attempts against Mr Trump were staged.

• Would-be Trump assassin left letter saying, “This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump"

• They didn't release the Covenant shooter manifesto

  They didn't release the Covenant shooter manifesto because they were allegedly afraid it would inspire more shootings. And yet within a week they release a letter from Trump's would-be assassin where he openly encourages more shootings and offers to pay for them.

• Why Did The Biden DoJ Release Trump Assassin's $150,000 Reward To "Complete The Job" Letter To The Public? | ZeroHedge

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Man dies after being knocked down by woman on scooter

• Defense Lawyers Scramble to Halt Marcellus Williams's Execution in Missouri

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• At the Largest Shipyard, U.S. Courts an Ally to Face Up to China

• Electronic Warfare Spooks Airlines, Pilots and Air-Safety Officials

• Protecting America from Connected Vehicle Technology from Countries of Concern

  • US to propose ban on Chinese software, hardware in connected vehicles

  • Biden Administration Proposes Ban on Chinese Software in Vehicles

  • U.S. proposes ban on Chinese auto parts so cars 'can't be used against us'

  • U.S. pitches ban on Chinese tech in driverless and connected vehicles

  • US moves to block all Chinese auto imports through software crackdown

  • US proposes ban on Chinese, Russian connected car tech

• Oops! Army training mislabeled nonprofits as terror groups for years

  Nonprofits that were incorrectly labeled as terrorist groups included People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, known as PETA, as well as the anti-abortion groups Operation Rescue and National Right to Life. The advocacy groups Earth First, Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front were also listed. “Incorrectly labeling legitimate organizations as terrorist groups not only undermines the credibility of the training, but also puts service members at risk of being unfairly scrutinized or penalized based on their associations or memberships,” said Rep. Andy Kim, D-NJ. “We must be cautious and purposeful in how we define and identify threats to our national security.”

• U.S. Research Aided Chinese Military Technology, House Republicans Say - The New York Times

  The report argues that Chinese partnerships with U.S.-funded researchers and joint collaborations between Chinese and American universities have helped to propel Beijing’s advancements in fields like hypersonic and nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and advanced semiconductors. The report concludes that these developments may one day influence how the two nations perform on the battlefield. The report — put out by the Republican members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce — also recommends stricter guidelines around federally funded research, including significantly curtailing the ability of researchers who receive U.S. grants to work with Chinese universities and companies that have military ties.

World

• Crypto Wars: Hungarian Presidency continues fight against encryption

• Teenager jailed for 18 months still in prison 18 years later

  • HN comments

• India's Supreme Court clarifies that not reporting child porn content is a crime

• Germany's botched data revamp leaves economists 'flying blind'

Israel

• Israeli military shuts down Al Jazeera bureau in West Bank raid

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Checkmate for Russia as global chess ban upheld

• Satellite footage suggests Russia ICBM launch test was a disaster

  • Satellite images suggest test of Russian "super weapon" failed spectacularly

• India plans to keep buying cheap Russian oil, oil minister says

Health / Medicine

• FTC Sues Prescription Drug Middlemen for Artificially Inflating Insulin Prices

• Nearly 40 percent of Gen Z men don't have a primary care provider

• The microbiome people are full of shit

  Minimizing fiber and drinking heavy cream gives you an amazing microbiome

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Can our stockpiles of Tamiflu protect against a bird flu pandemic?

• Deadly Fungal Infections Causing a 'Silent Pandemic', Scientists Warn

• Bird flu is spreading rapidly in California; infected herds double over weekend

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• An unusual shift in the weather has turned the Sahara green

• California governor signs law banning plastic shopping bags at grocery stores

• IBM and NASA Release OS Model for Weather and Climate Applications

• They Have a Plan to Fight Global Warming, It Could Alter the Oceans

• Biomethane produced from maize grown on peat emits more CO2 than natural gas

• A record of the Earth's temperature covering half a billion years

• The Arctic Seed Vault Shows the Flawed Logic of Climate Adaptation

• Global carbon capture and storage potential way overblown, study finds

• America's Ambitious Climate Plan Is Faltering

• What if polluters footed the climate bill?

• Green Ammonia Could Become Top Side Bet for Oil Majors

• A possible rat sighting on an Alaska island prompts a monthslong search

• California sues ExxonMobil over its handling of plastics recycling

  • Cal. sues ExxonMobil for alleged decades of deception around plastic recycling

  • California sues ExxonMobil for misleading public on plastic recycling

• Octopuses seen hunting together with fish, punching those that don't cooperate