2025-05-25

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• The Logistics of Road War in the Wasteland – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

  A motorcycle delivers a combat power of one human with small arms. By contrast, the pickup trucks have half the gas mileage, but if you are willing to load up the bed can deliver half a dozen or more combatants, making the fuel-to-combatant ratio actually very unfavorable for motorcycles. Indeed, given how light some of these motorcycles are, you could load the motorcycles and its drivers on the back of a truck (either a pickup or the heavier Deuce-and-a-Half) and gain operational range without losing mileage efficiency. Heck, putting ten Yamaha WR250R’s in the back of a Deuce-and-a-Half might appears to end up as significantly more fuel-efficient than driving the bikes, plus you also get a truck out of the arrangement.

Horseshit

• Just how fancy should a plate of pasta be?

• Are children better off when one parent has a job or when both do?

• The Last of Us science adviser: Covid changed our appetite for zombies

• Semicolons bring the drama; that's why I love them

• The Soviet People's Car: The Enduring Legacy of the Lada

• Auto Plants Are the Last Places Where Robots Will Steal Your Jobs

• Truck platooning could ease driver shortages, save fuel, boost safety

• The loudest mechanical keyboard features relays and firecrackers to make noise

• The genetic medicine of the future will be able to treat everything

• Why wealth rarely survives grandchildren

• 'Adulting 101' programs are helping Gen Z catch up on key life skills

celebrity gossip

• Alan Turing papers saved from shredder could fetch £150k

• Medical condition forces Billy Joel to cancel performances amid health concerns | Fox News

Musk

• Would You Use an AI Tool to Generate Twitter Threads and Rephrase Tweets?

• Expert calls Musk's 'Doge' involvement 'one of the greatest brand destructions'

• X Down for US Users

• X continues to suffer bugs following Thursday outage

• X outage disrupts logins and key features

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• What the failure of a superstar student reveals about economics

• They Were Every Student's Worst Nightmare. Now Blue Books Are Back

• Why Academic Freedom Matters - The Raven Magazine

  My biggest fear was not that some students would accuse me of racism for assigning it or think that I endorsed Cotton’s position, nor was it that they would get in heated, uncivil disputes over the op-ed. What I feared most was that they would uniformly agree that Cotton’s essay should not have been published because they deemed his conclusion racist, and that Cotton’s incendiary rhetoric would so turn them off that they wouldn’t actually examine his argument. In fact, that is more or less what happened. Although one or two students thought Cotton’s essay should have been published even though it was racist, none of them talked about the argument he actually gave.

• Adult Skills in Literacy and Numeracy Declining or Stagnating

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Google Translate Now Available as Default Translation App on iPhone and iPad

• Valve takes another step toward making SteamOS a true Windows competitor

• Tim Cook's Bad Year Keeps Getting Worse

• Video-Game Companies Have an AI Problem: Players Don't Want It

• Java Turns 30, a Retrospective

• What I discovered when I asked Amazon to tell me everything Alexa had heard

• Guardian journalists in revolt over 'miserable' website redesign

• Two disinformation experts have launched a DIY news outlet

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• DumPy: NumPy except it's OK if you're dum

  What I want from an array language is:

  • Don’t make me think.
  • Run fast on GPUs.
  • Really, do not make me think.
  • Do not.

  I say NumPy misses on three of these. So I’d like to propose a “fix” that—I claim—eliminates 90% of unnecessary thinking, with no loss of power. It would also fix all the things based on NumPy, for example every machine learning library.

• Dividing an array into fair sized chunks

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• OpenAI and Jony Ive are building a ChatGPT-powered super-gadget

• The great AI jobs disruption is under way

• Welcome to the AI Trough of Disillusionment

• Anthropic adds security measures to limit risk of users developing weapons

• AI race goes supersonic in milestone-packed week

• Oracle to buy $40B of Nvidia chips for OpenAI's new US data centre

• Anthropic's new AI model deceives and blackmails to avoid being shutdown

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• SpaceX reveals why Starship Flight 8 Ship exploded: 'flash' in engines

• The Space Economy to Reach $944B by 2033

Crypto con games

• Big Banks Explore Venturing into Crypto World Together with Joint Stablecoin

• Ken Rogoff on How Crypto Is Cutting into the Dollar's Hegemony

• Crypto Investor Charged with Kidnapping and Torturing Man for Weeks

• 'Crypto king' turned NYC townhouse into torture chamber to gain partner Bitcoin

• KYC Is the Crime

  This isn't hypothetical. There’s a growing wave of kidnappings and extortion targeting people with crypto exposure. Criminals are using leaked identity data to find victims and hold them hostage. Let’s be clear: KYC doesn’t just put your data at risk. It puts people at risk. Naturally, people are furious at any company that leaks their information. But here’s the bigger issue: No system is unhackable. Every major institution, from the IRS to the State Department, has suffered breaches. Protecting sensitive data at scale is nearly impossible. And Coinbase didn’t want to collect this data. Many companies don’t. It’s a massive liability. They’re forced to, by law.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• The Bargain of Working Hard and Getting a Job Simply Doesn't Hold Anymore

• Sales collapse forces 'woke' mega-brand to make humiliating U-turn and relist on Amazon

  After a five-year hiatus, Nike shoes, clothing, and accessories are returning to the e-commerce giant. The athletic brand swiped its products from the platform in 2019, as part of a push to sell more directly to consumers.

Trump

• At Trump's $148M meme coin dinner, 'the food sucked', attendee says

• Trump Signs Executive Orders for Faster Build-Out of Nuclear Power Plant

Democrats

• NEW: Biden Administration Labeled Opponents Of Covid Mandates As “Domestic Violent Extremists,” Newly Released Documents Show

Left Angst

• How Can the Government Stop Harvard from Enrolling International Students?

  • Opinion: Harvard Derangement Syndrome

  • Is Trump Trying to Destroy Harvard?

• HHS Finds Columbia University in Violation of Federal Civil Rights Law

  Columbia University violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI) by acting with deliberate indifference towards student-on-student harassment of Jewish students from October 7, 2023, through the present.

• How A Canadian Ostrich Farm Sparked a Far-Right Crusade

  A B.C. ostrich farm fighting an order to kill its 400 birds has become a flashpoint for the far right and people skeptical of both mainstream science and the regulatory powers of governments. The cull at Universal Ostrich in Edgewood, about 100 kilometres southeast of Vernon, was ordered to prevent the spread of avian flu after birds were infected. A volunteer researcher with a grassroots group called Unmask the Right says he’s concerned about the involvement of high-profile convoy protesters and people who have threatened violence. Even U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has attacked the cull.

• Musk's DOGE expanding his Grok AI in US Government, raising conflict concerns

• 'Hidden' Provision in Trump's Big Bill Could Disarm US Supreme Court

• 'Which is it?' RFK Jr. waffles on cuts to lead poisoning prevention efforts

• Apple Better Off Taking 25% Tariff Hit Than Move iPhone Production to US

• U.S. clean energy boom could go bust if the 'big, beautiful bill' becomes law

• Record number of Americans seeking UK residency, says Home Office

• FEMA faces backlog of emergency aid requests as hurricane season nears

• Opinion | Trump Is Immensely Vulnerable - The New York Times

  Trump is deeply corrupt. All presidents are accused of shady practices: Remember that President Barack Obama was said to have diminished the presidency by wearing a tan suit. But Trump is a felon who is using his office to enrich himself as no president has in history. The Times reported that more than $2 billion has flowed to Trump companies in just a month, and some of his ventures look alarmingly like opportunities for influence-peddling.

  Trump looks down on you and thinks he can manipulate you. Several studies have found that warning teenagers that smoking may kill them is often not effective. What does work is showing them how tobacco companies are trying to deceive and manipulate them. That outrages them — and in the same way, MAGA voters may shrug at Trump’s defiance of the courts but be offended by evidence that he thinks they are dummies.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• FBI Visits Me over Manifesto

  For the second time in a year, the FBI came to my home yesterday after I published the so-called manifesto of the man charged with killing two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington. The visit didn’t surprise me, but its tone did: it was aggressive and threatening. “You’re not in trouble,” the two special agents kept saying, good-cop style, to get me to answer the questions they would later ask: Where had I gotten the manifesto? Had I had pre-knowledge of the attack? Did I receive instructions about how to disseminate the statement? Not a single mainstream media outlet has published the text because, as they claim, the FBI hasn’t confirmed its authenticity. But the real reason is simple. The media just doesn’t want to publish it. And the FBI doesn’t want the media to think it can.

  But there’s a Trump administration dimension to all of this. The administration has many times publicly warned about shadowy, unseen forces that it believes are bankrolling everything from Tesla vandalism to the college protests. That tone from the top, labeling seemingly everything terrorism, tells personnel that the gloves are off and more aggressive work in the field is now permissible.

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• 'Golden Dome' plan has a major obstacle: Physics

• Tariffs or not, China's infiltration of US systems needs new attention

• F-35 fighter flying in Texas sent data to an air base 5K miles away in Denmark

• Mexican drug cartels use 100s of 1000s of guns bought from licensed US gun shops

  • remember this one? ATF gunwalking scandal - Wikipedia

  between 2006 and 2011 in the Tucson and Phoenix area where the ATF "purposely allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers, hoping to track the guns to Mexican drug cartel leaders and arrest them" - however as of October 2011, none of the targeted high-level cartel figures had been arrested.

  • Sources less fond of Obama than Wikipedia go into more details.

World

• Cows get GPS collars to stop them falling in river

• Only one country in the world produces all the food it needs

  Out of 186 countries, only Guyana produces enough food to self-sufficiently feed all its citizens without foreign imports, according to new research. Worldwide, the study found that 65 per cent of countries were overproducing meat and dairy, compared to their own population’s dietary needs.

• Hong Kong's Famous Bamboo Scaffolding Hangs on (For Now)

• The prime minister with a crush for Hitler:The day Mackenzie King met the Fuhrer

• Telegram 'surprised' as Vietnam orders messaging app to be blocked

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russian fiber optic drones changing battlefield

• The Soviet plan to reverse Siberia's rivers with 'peaceful nuclear explosions'

China

• 'Alarming' rise in regional internet censorship in China, study finds

• China makes first 5G satellite-to-phone video call

Health / Medicine

• All the ways Ozempic will change our world, from alcohol to airlines

• How the Non-Essential Spleen Could Regenerate Vital Organs Inside the Body

• A boy who came back: the near-death, and changed life, of my son Max

• FDA issues norovirus warning on frozen oysters from South Korea.

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• U.S. reports cases of new Covid variant NB.1.8.1 behind surge in China

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Vintner making wine in Catalonia since 1870 may have to move to higher altitudes

• Should Portland Ban Backyard Beekeeping?

• A hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully

• Hummingbird Feeders Drive Evolutionary Change

• The ferocious wind wars being fought in the middle of the North Sea