We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A consulting architect on UCSB’s Design Review Committee has quit his post in protest over the university’s proposed Munger Hall project, calling the massive, mostly-windowless dormitory plan “unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent, and a human being.” In his October 25 resignation letter to UCSB Campus Architect Julie Hendricks, Dennis McFadden ― a well-respected Southern California architect with 15 years on the committee ― goes scorched earth on the radical new building concept, which calls for an 11-story, 1.68-million-square-foot structure that would house up to 4,500 students, 94 percent of whom would not have windows in their small, single-occupancy bedrooms.
A crypt-keeper pal of vulture capitalist Warren Buffet came up with the plan, and the money to build it -- as long as you don't change his plan. From the photos, the rooms would be illegal as prison cells. A dorm room on the oceanfront with no windows. It's genius, I tells ya.
Despite the fact that Mitchum has been married to his wife, Dorothy, for 32 years, he has the reputation of running through women like a stray dog through tall cane, and sure enough, when Mitchum emerges from his two-room camper, he’s trailed by two pretty admirers—”Girl A and Girl B,” as Peter Boyle snickeringly dubs them. “Gahdamn, man,” Boyle mutters, ogling the two women in a parody of lust. “Ol’ Bob’s entourage is swelling. I had either one of those babies, I’d die of terminal euphoria. Zowie! You know what the 2001 theme is? That’s the sound of Mitchum waking up.”
The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a great movie, based on a book from a guy who knew Boston criminals inside and out. It's also the first place I heard this quote: "This life's hard man, but it's harder if you're stupid!"
Detectives are often portrayed as misanthropic masterminds. They seem to possess almost mythical personal gifts that the average person can only dream of. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this isn’t entirely true. Not all detectives are masterminds, and you actually don’t need to be a detective to think like one. A few tools and methods can improve your inner detective, help you find facts, and learn to better understand the relationship between them.
A four-year-old with a badge and gun would be the perfect detective. Just keep asking "Why?"
The fact is the threat from China is not really from China but from the pirates that run the economy who like doing business with China. The threat is the Western scientist who are willing to take Chinese money to perform forbidden research. It is the American tech companies willing to sellout the country for the opportunity to make money helping the Chinese communists. China is a symptom of a much graver problem, one that exists in the ruling class of the American empire.
The ZMan is a lively writer and an interesting thinker.
Organized crime groups are known to be behind trafficking in human beings for organ removal, drawn by the substantial profits that can be made. Information suggests a wide spectrum of actors are involved in organ trafficking in North and West Africa with connections to the medical sector in countries from Africa and beyond, notably in Asia and the Middle East.
See, that's why I drink plenty of whiskey. That way, no one will want my liver or kidneys.
Western Maryland lawmakers have periodically raised concerns in the Maryland General Assembly that their part of the state is different from the rest of the state, with a more conservative political outlook, unique economic drivers, a media market based in Pittsburgh and close borders with surrounding states.
Many states could use a reshuffle. Rhode Island shouldn't even be a state. Delaware shouldn't be a state. Vermont should be folded into New Hampshire and stapled to Maine. California should be -- sawn off and pushed out to sea.
Ms. Fain is old enough to remember when millennials determined what was in vogue: rompers, rose pink, craft beer, Netflix and chill. Now, she gets the foreboding sense from colleagues that her AARP card awaits. Subtly yet undeniably, as generational shifts tend to go, there’s a new crop of employees determining the norms and styles of the workplace. And they have no qualms about questioning not just emoji use but all the antiquated ways of their slightly older managers, from their views on politics in the office to their very obsession with work
We went over this yesterday. Zoomers don't like Millennials much. Never mind that. Try to wrap your head around this New Yoik Toims writer who thinks Millennials have an "obsession with work." That must be why they were all able to pay off their student loans early, huh?
Both direct and alternating current could light up a light bulb just fine. And both could be generated easily enough (although the AC generator was more elegant, omitting the brush contacts). DC’s advantage in electric motors was leveled when the brilliant engineer Nikola Tesla invented an AC motor (it depended on “polyphase” AC, that is, multiple alternating currents where the alternations were out of phase with each other). The real, insurmountable difference was in transmission, because here AC could do something that DC could never do, something that would solve the problem of long-distance power lines and establish it as the electrical standard.
The Current War is a terrific movie about this topic, despite being badly written and chaotically directed. Westinghouse was the shizzle.
In this context, however, PTSD should surely stand for “pre-traumatic stress disorder”; that is to say children are being trained up so that, when they really do suffer from something rather than merely imagine it at some time in the future, having hitherto lived privileged lives by the standards of all previously existing human beings, they will be nice and vulnerable, requiring an army of therapists, counselors, social and auxiliary support workers, etc., to get through the rest of their lives. This is necessary demand management for the professionally compassionate, who need a constant supply of the wretched upon whom to exercise their compassion.
I'm always worried I'll run out of things to worry about. Thank heavens for social media.
The shift has been on display in places such as Atlanta and Phoenix, two markets where home prices have been surging. Zillow’s roughly 250 active listings in Phoenix are currently priced at 6% less, on average, than what the company paid for the homes.
I remember when fixing dilapidated homes was a job for regular people and first time home buyers, not page thirteen on some arsehole's slidedeck pitch to venture capitalists for a javascript empire. I hope Zillow chokes on it.
This finding supports the authors' original hypothesis. Corrosion on the surface of the glass (due to the hot and caustic water circulating through it) plays a key role, since this releases silicon-dioxide molecules into the solution. This in turn acts as a catalyst to speed up the chemical reactions between the nitrogen, carbon, and hydrogen atoms that ultimately create organic molecules.
No, this finding supports my hypothesis that the glass was dirty. You know, with organic molecules. Scientists haven't been very scientific for a long time now.
A quick internet search turned up plenty of speculative results positing that dogs tilt their heads to hear better, to listen for specific words or tones, or to see past their snouts. Sommese found one poster hypothesizing that shelter dogs do it more often because they know on some level that humans find it irresistible.
Well, pit bulls tilt their heads to make them more irresistible to humans, and to make it easier to get the toddler's head in their mouths. Duh.
One possibility is that they can more easily focus on tasks than in an office, where the temptation to gossip with a co-worker looms large. Commuting, moreover, is tiring. Another factor relates to technology. Remote workers, by necessity, rely more on tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. This may allow bosses to co-ordinate teams more effectively, if the alternative in the office was word-of-mouth instructions that could easily be forgotten or misinterpreted.
So, "That meeting should have been an email" was right on the money, and at least fifteen years ago at that.
I get tired of error reporting services, like Rollbar, blowing up when a bot scans my websites for URLs like the infamous /wp-admin.php so why not rickroll them? It won’t do much except make website owners feel better, but I’d say that’s worth it.
A website error message that Rickrolls the bot. Like most coder things, it's almost clever, but not quite. It's also childish, kinda pointless, and the name of the object of the exercise (Rick Astley) is spelled wrong.
Located about 80 km off the west coast of Norway is Troll A, a colossal natural gas platform and the tallest structure ever moved by mankind. It’s construction is regarded as one of the largest and most complex engineering projects in history.
"It is construction"? Man, noone can spell anymore. They're's mispellings everywere.
Your computer can travel to the future even more easily than a DeLorean. The UI isn’t quite as cool, but it doesn’t require plutonium. Simply open your system control panel, turn off the “Set time automatically” option, and click the button to adjust the system date/time to your target.
Isn't that supposed to be spelled "Time Masheen"? Oh well. It's an interesting idea about checking software reliability. Of course a much more useful tool is to set your computer's clock backwards in time. You can use timestamped software trials forever that way. You didn't hear that from me.
"The left hemisphere's goal is to enable us to manipulate things, whereas the goal of the right hemisphere is to relate to things and understand them as a whole. Two ways of thinking that are both needed, but are fundamentally at the same time incompatible."
Nope. I've seen Twitter. The spleen has taken over our minds.
More than 1,000 archaeologists have worked at more than 60 sites along the HS2 route between London and the West Midlands over the past three years. At Saint James’s Garden near Euston station in central London, more than 50,000 skeletons were exhumed from a burial ground. In Birmingham, more than 6,500 skeletons were uncovered from an 18th-century cemetery.
A new railway built on bulldozed graveyards. I think I've seen that movie.
Tesla & SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has just posted on Twitter that he wants to start a new University in Texas. He wants to name it “Texas Institute of Technology & Science (TITS)”.
I've seen college bookstores. There aren't any books in there, so worrying about the college themed merchandise before founding the college isn't that dumb. Infantile, but not dumb, which is what Musk should have on his business card.
For that price, you will get a half assembled kit, which includes an aluminum space frame, motor controllers, propellers and motors, as well as an assembly guide. Weighing only 40 kilograms (88 pounds) when empty, Jetson One is categorized as an ultralight aircraft in the U.S., which doesn’t require a pilot license to fly.
At the same time, a rising crop of younger social networks has continued growing in popularity with young people — a phenomenon Facebook has closely tracked with its own research. In an internal presentation earlier this year, employees estimated that teens spend 2–3x more time on TikTok than on Instagram and that Snapchat is the preferred method of communicating with best friends for young people.
Zoomers ain't Boomers. Sorry to break it to dullard Millennials who think Zoomers are going to help them smother Boomers with a pillow, but Zoomers don't like Millennials much, either.
The attackers are believed to have found a vulnerability in the platform’s lending system —called flash loaning— and used it to steal all of Cream’s assets and tokens running on the Ethereum blockchain, according to blockchain security firm BlockSec, which also posted an explanation of the security flaw on Twitter earlier today.
People prepping for the end of the world love cryptocurrency. You know, money that only works if everything on the internet does. Good luck with that.
There was simply no conceivable supply chain in place to make the serial production of titanium even remotely cost-efficient. The Papa-class prototype cost an astonishing 1 percent of the Soviet Union’s entire 1968 GDP, and that doesn’t factor in titanium’s unique maintenance and component degradation costs.
Yeah, but titanium submarines sure helped the Russians beat the Afghan navy pretty quick. Anyway, the US Defense department also seems to be based solely on the "money is no object" procurement plan. Wait until we're totally soviet to find out what that really means. You won't have to wait long.
This guy literally makes a working miniature Airbus RC airplane right in front of you. It turns out that Hardy Kruger in the Flight of the Phoenix was right all along.
The original Flight of the Phoenix was a great movie. The remake, not so much.
The word people are most comfortable using to describe the current moment right now is “froth.” But some people are willing to go further in describing what, to a cynic, can seem like irrational exuberance. “The VCs are reacting rationally to the environment that they're in,” said Martin Kenney, a UC Davis professor who studies the venture capital industry. “But the environment could be irrational.”
The headline describes venture capital investment as "giving away money." That's the 21st century in a nutshell.
Metaverse is a collection of various virtual worlds, game worlds if you want, capable of possible cooperation. This means that these worlds and the games they are represented in them will be connected at some point in the future. But it doesn't stop with the games. In the metaverse, you can virtually check an NFT gallery of famous real-world artists, play a game on your mobile while your friends play the same game from XBOX or PS5, you can then check a new musical artist in his recent virtual streamed performance, and finally to perform almost every programmable simulation of a situation from our lives, such as learning to drive a car, plane, a rocketship, and so one.[sic]
I'm sure guaranteed basic income and phony empty box refund claims from Amazon will make this wonderful new world possible.
In tests, a laboratory prototype delivered 500 charge and discharge cycles with 80% capacity retention at room temperature. In contrast, previous studies with silicon anodes usually only achieved roughly 100 stable cycles.
Not really a battery per se. It's a (super)capacitor. Supercapacitors are the only thing that will make electric cars really viable. They'll figure it out eventually, and think of all the money you can make running a superfund recycling site for Tesla batteries when they do.
Some toxicologists and epidemiologists are now questioning whether even low doses of fluoride can have systemic effects, including causing a dip in IQ in children who were exposed to it in utero. The first indications of this came from studies that compared unfluoridated villages and communities with fluoridated ones (where fluoride is either naturally occurring or added to water), followed by better-controlled studies that measured fluoride in individuals.
I once heard someone whose medical coverage didn't cover dental work describe teeth as "luxury bones."
The average property tax bill for a single-family home rose from $3,561 in 2019 to $3,719 in 2020, according to ATTOM Data Solutions. All told, property taxes for single-family homes increased $323 billion last year, or 5.4%, from the year before.
I'm sure towns and cities will use this extra money wisely, by investing in the additional police officers needed to arrest all the citizens who attend school board meetings, for instance.
That's truly the Christmas spirit, isn't it? I suggest Germans follow Groucho Marx's advice in these matters: Don't join any group willing to have you as a member.
It's fun to press the random occupations button and see who's schtupping whom. Of course homemakers aren't on the list, because they don't exist and you're weird for asking why they're not.
"This law is necessary to regulate the distorted competition within online book sales and prevent the inevitable monopoly that will emerge if the status quo persists," the ministry told Reuters.
Wow. French people talking sense. Truly it must be the end times. Oh, they fix the problem by charging the customer more. Never mind.
Interns get paid? Who knew? According to the graphic, a social media intern makes about double what a healthcare intern makes. Legal interns make the most, probably because medical malpractice lawsuits caused by low wage healthcare interns pay great.
Pro Tip: Leaving your password on a Post-It note appended to the screen isn't good. It's especially not good if you're using the computer at the library.
He’s devised a “reformed version of capitalism” with Telosa he calls “equitism,” where anyone can build and sell homes, but the city retains ownership of the land underneath.
Hmm. That sort of arrangement isn't new. It's called a favela overseas, or an Indian Reservation around here. Good luck with that.
Planet 9 is a hypothesized large planet that would be located in the outer parts of our solar system, far beyond the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. The existence of planet 9 would explain the weird orbits of some transneptunian objects that are hard to be explained without it.
Women, minorities, Neil DeGrasse Tyson hardest hit.
Ostensibly a photobook on the small Macedonian town of Veles, which made international headlines in 2016 as the unlikely factory of pro-Trump fake news, The Book of Veles created a furore after Bendiksen revealed that the project’s images were synthetically generated using 3D software and the book’s text was written entirely by artificial intelligence. Fascinated with the story of Veles as well as with developments in synthetic imagery, Bendiksen set out to see just how “real” he could make his images. Although he left breadcrumbs throughout the text, to his surprise the book was published in April 2021 to “nice, positive echo-chamber feedback,” said Bendiksen. No one questioned the authenticity of the images or text.
So, every molecule of the story was fake, except the part that smears Trump. That was totally legit. Got it.
According to mobile phone data from over 14,000 people living their daily lives, humans are terrible at calculating the shortest route through city streets. And the reason is really simple: our brains want us to face the direction we are going in, even if that's not the most efficient way of getting to our destination.
Better headline: Cities are actually terrible at accommodating humans.
Microsoft is IBM now. Kinda staid, reliable, always makes money. No one gets fired for hiring Microsoft, as they say. IBM is now, oh, I don't know, Fotomat.
According to life-expectancy charts issued by the CDC, she can expect to lose me before she is 30. Then, after my wife dies — if she doesn’t precede me — my daughter will be all alone in the world.
That's why being a sugar daddy makes more sense. You can be a sugar daddy at any old age. And your protege won't mind if you die. She might even help.
Don't get all down in the mouth because it's Monday. Every day is a gift, remember? Of course Monday is a gift of socks under life's Christmas tree, but it's still a gift, isn't it?
Monday is useful if you're clever. I remember this one time, back when I was working at a jewelry store. This very elderly man came into the store one Saturday, with an amazing young woman on his arm. The guy had to be eighty, easy, and might have weighed ninety pounds. The woman probably caused four traffic accidents just crossing the street. That sort of arrangement is none of my business, so I just asked him what he wanted.
"She'd like to see a really nice ring."
I figured he wanted to impress the woman, so I trotted out a $4,000 diamond job. The girl put it on her finger, and held it up to the light to see the sparkle.
"How much is it," he asked. I told him.
"Look," he said, "I told you I wanted to see a really nice ring. Not this cheap trinket. Go back and get this girl a ring worthy of her finger."
I went out in the back and rummaged around and found the most expensive ring in the shop. We didn't even display it, it was so obscenely expensive and gaudy. It looked like a doorknob in Liberace's house.
"How much is it?"
"It's $63,000."
"Is a check OK? You can deposit it on Monday morning, and I'll be by on Monday afternoon to pick up the ring."
I closed the shop early and went out on a bender. I mean, I went to the barroom, the casino, the strip joint, the, the whole works. I blew the entire 20 percent commission in no time.
On Monday, I deposited the check, and the bank called me. I called the old man.
There's only $37 in your bank account! Do you know what kind of weekend I had? I blew $12,000 on a bender!"
"Don't brag," the old man replied, "Hell, I spent the weekend with the hottest woman in town and it only cost me $37."
So be smart, dear readers. Don't work for Monday. Make Monday work for you. On to the links:
Eruptions from volcanos in Japan’s Ogasawara Islands have caused movements in the earth’s crust, created a new island, and raised ships sunk during the Battle of Iwo Jima above the sea surface, according to Japan’s TV Asahi.
Funny that the Taiwan news is full of, well, Taiwan news. It's the American papers that are full of imminent Chicom invasions and WWIII . The number one story in this paper is a robbery at a convenience store.
Our mission is to fully recreate the entire Earth in Minecraft at a 1:1 scale. One block in Minecraft equates to roughly one meter in the real world, meaning this project will fully recreate the size of our planet.
I'd volunteer to help, but I finally touched a boob some years back, and have moved on with my life.
The product, Better Homes and Gardens Lavender and Chamomile Essential Oil Infused Aromatherapy Room Spray with Gemstones, was sold at 55 Walmart locations and on the company’s website from February to Oct. 21.
With gemstones? Do aromatherapy misters throw rocks at you, too, or just make you smell like a spinster aunt?
For example, a global study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found an average increase in the overall number of meetings people attended postpandemic lockdown compared to prepandemic levels, but the length of these meetings was shorter, netting an overall 11.5% decrease in time spent in meetings since the start of the pandemic
That little tidbit is kinda buried in there. Apparently, you can manage people more efficiently remotely than face-to-face. Burying the lede, there, research dweebs.
Therefore, at this time, I deem it necessary to formally claim for myself all land between 90 degrees west and 150 degrees west and south of 60 degrees south to include all seas and ice shelves. The area will henceforth be known as ‘The Achaean Territory of Antarctica.’ The purpose of this acquisition is to secure the territory for research and development and future colonization. Also, to protect it from those parties who would exploit the territory with misdeeds
I've similarly formally claimed the recliner to protect it from those parties who would exploit it, but the cat doesn't respect my authority, I guess.
McKinsey, a consultancy, thinks EVs may reduce spending on spare parts at American dealerships by as much as 40%. With no oil to change or spark plugs to replace, income from routine servicing will also be lower. Porsche’s Taycan, for one, is reckoned to need 30% less maintenance than if it was an ICE vehicle. And fewer items on the service sheet will require a trip to the dealership at all, as an increasing number of fixes are carried out with over-the-air software updates.
I am beset by doubts. I am looking forward to sitting by the side of the road in my bricked car while waiting on hold to talk to someone about my software update in pidgin English.
The Model X Long Range price has gone from $99,990 to $104,990. The Model X Plaid price has stayed the same at $119,990. The Model S long range price has moved from $89,990 to $94,990 for the cheapest version of the car. The Model S Plaid price remains $129,990.
But think of all the money you'll save on spark plugs!
Although most active exosuits support vertical lifts, rotating and twisting movements are also ubiquitous, especially in certain fields of manual labor like garbage collection and baggage handling. In many cases, these motions can be awkward and strenuous, leading to work-related injuries as well as back pain, according to Young. Back pain, in turn, is directly correlated with the strength of compressive forces and shear forces that are applied to the spine.
Back when I was doing heavy manual labor we already had a device on our backs that helped us lift more weight than we thought we could comfortably handle, and move it around faster than we ever dreamed possible. We called it the "Boss," and the technology that made it go was called "yelling."
What is Jedi Blue? Basically a quid-pro-quo scheme that starts with Google’s 2007 acquisition of Double Click, and ends with Facebook, in 2018, agreeing not to challenge Google’s advertising business in return for a very special treatment in Google’s ad auctions.
The knucklehead author posits that this calls for more regulations. There's mention in the court documents that Facebook and Google had a plan on how to hide the plan if they were investigated. That's jail time, not regulation time.
Using daily card consumption data from Affinity Solutions, I employ a two-way fixed effects estimator to measure the causal impact of COBOL-induced delays in UI benefits on aggregate consumption. The dela+++++\s caused a 4.4 percentage point relative decline in total card consumption in COBOL states relative to non-COBOL states. Performing a back-of-the-envelope calculation using 2019 data, I find that real GDP declined by $181 billion (in 2012 dollars).
I'll bet you the states still relying on COBOL and Madge in accounting had way more than $181 billion in savings because their old-fashioned methods didn't approve every fake claim immediately
For example, many on the left believe the lax prosecution of laws is compassionate. As a result, the city mostly does not enforce drug laws, even against dealers—at a mounting cost to addicts. Last year 713 people died of accidental drug overdoses, more than double the toll of covid-19. “What kind of city regulates ice-cream stores more strictly than drug-dealers who kill 713 of its citizens in a single year?”
The subheading on this article is a true example of begging the question. Who says urban policies have been "well-meaning"? It was criminals decriminalizing criminality. Film at eleven.
I got to thinking yesterday. That's always a mistake. I'm not a clear thinker, being human and all. But I had to look at the news media a bit, to find links for you fine folks, and it got me ruminating. Since there was nothing but bad news, I renamed the process "doominating."
There's nothing but impending doom in the news. Not actual doom in the regular news. The regular news has shifted 180 degrees since they pitched the mean tweeter out on his ear, and muzzled him. Everything's fine now. No matter how not fine the news is, it's fine to them. They still find doom, of course. It's over there behind the invisible 800-pound gorillas.
The purpose of aggregators like Maggie's Farm is to collate an alternative slate of information for people looking for interest or entertainment outside the usual bubble of daily life. It's a kind of magazine, not a newspaper. Magazines have themes. Everywhere I went yesterday, looking for stuff, it was nothing but doom, doom, doom. There are two alternate sets of doom, but it's all doom. My version of Maggie's theme gets harder and harder to cobble together, because I don't really like posting doom drivel and exclaiming harrumph.
It occurs to me that the doom fetish means the average American likes doom. They like being told the world will end, and yesterday to boot. They like movies about apocalypse and TV shows about the dead wandering the earth and munching on the straphangers. The average Joe is getting their jollies by wallowing in their own little doomworld. What is Twitter but an IV drip of doom?
So it's incumbent on me to apologize (again) if the articles I collate aren't depressing enough to make you happy. I'm being as dour as I can, but I can't seem to keep up.
I'm fairly certain the the substance described isn't technically "lumber." Lumber qua lumber is cut up timber. The stuff in the article is "manufactured lumber." Why yes, I'm lots of fun at parties, why do you ask?
Central banks everywhere seem to care little about missing cash. The total value of US dollars in circulation jumped by 16% in 2020 alone, passing $2trn for the first time, quadruple the value of notes 20 years ago. There is more than $7,000 in paper money out there for every American, and more than €4,000 for every resident of the euro zone. Yet in America and Europe, as in Britain, most people use cash for little more substantial than a cup of coffee.
Got that? To dweebs at the Economist, and the central banks, if regular people have any money, it's "missing."
Children raised at higher altitudes do worse on developmental tests. There is a fair amount of data supporting this, and some even attempt to control for things like familiar wealth, prematurity, etc. I’m not convinced. The effects are modest, I expect families living at very high altitudes (typically rural) to be different in many ways from lower altitudes (typically urban) in ways that cause their children to score differently on tests without it making a meaningful impact on their life
Yes, I've noticed that places like Switzerland keep churning out citizens who need a hockey helmet to ride the bus. It would explain a lot about Denver Bronco fans, though.
It has now been well over a century since Joel Benton’s poem “The Kodak Fiend” warned, in ominous verse, “Oh, de Kodak fiend, he’s sly an’ mean / An’ you can’t go out near his machine.”
I love listening to people clutching an iPhone, sitting next to an Alexa on their couch, complaining about privacy. I have weird hobbies, I guess. And shades on my windows.
"We propose that this decrease was due to increased reliance on collective intelligence, the idea that a group of people is smarter than the smartest person in the group, often called the 'wisdom of the crowds,'" added Traniello.
An elephant's brain weighs 10 pounds. An elephant can't even dial an iPhone, or plug in an Alexa, so you're going to ask the ants different questions, research guy.
The castmember, now identified as Baldwin, was unaware of the type of ammunition in the gun, we’re told. A rep from the production said that “Production has been halted for the time being” on Rust and that “the safety of our cast and crew remains our top priority.”
Remember, guns don't kill people -- gun control advocates kill people
Those new rules come on the heels of a swelling ethics controversy over whether central bank officials should be able to trade while their policies can, and often do, move markets.
I believe this problem has previously been solved, as the Fed owns everything already.
It is postulated that the voluminous emission of volcanic CO2, with consequent global warming and enhancement of a mega-monsoonal climate, was responsible for the CPE (9, 16), although the link is imprecise (2, 17) because the interval of Wrangellian eruptions have not yet been traced in the sedimentary records encompassing the CPE.
Oh, great. I'm no meteorologist, but I've been pluvial once, after an ill-advised trip to Chipotle, so I'm warning you: If you live in Pangea, you better be prepping for a tougher winter than usual.
His wind turbine wall consists of a grid of square panes spinning simultaneously along 25 axes. The exact size and format aren’t set in stone, so variations of that wall could be used anywhere with a decent span, like on the side of a highway or the fence around a building.
"Fauci’s public persona as a cautious, careful medical professional is contradicted by his central role in kickstarting exceptionally fraught gain-of-function research in the United States after the ban introduced in the Obama era, along with his role in funding coronavirus research in China in unsafe laboratories. Laboratories that intelligence agencies suspect may have sparked the pandemic"
To paraphrase the usual media headline: Wuhan chimera experiments proven; minorities, women, and Zachriel hardest hit.
Well, hello all. Roger here, the king of Sicily. Bird Dog is off getting his annual flea bath, and he's left me to guard the henhouse while he's away.
I apologize unreservedly, in advance. I'm really no use to you fine folks. I don't read newspapers and I don't watch TV. How am I going to discharge my duties as a blogger if I can't claim that I read the newspapers and watch TV harder than you, so my opinion trumps yours? I'm barely aware of what's what in the manufactured reality everyone lives in nowadays. I will shamefacedly admit that I sometimes go outside, during the daylight hours. How can anyone trust my judgment on anything?
For instance, I was barely aware that there are hearings or something being held somewhere, where panels of grim-faced blacklisting, witch-hunting martinets are interrogating people with questions like, "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Las Vegas Raiders coaching staff"?
So here's a smattering of random information you might find amusing or informative or silly or whatever. Also, did you know the Raiders moved to Las Vegas? I didn't. The Rams still play in Los Angeles, though, just like when I was a kid. They'll never move.
Alma Hernandez, the executive director of SEIU California, and her husband Jose Moscoso were charged on Thursday with allegedly underreporting some $1.4 million of income between the 2014 and 2018 tax years. Another complaint alleged that Hernandez, while working on a political action committee for a Democratic state senate candidate in 2014, approved a $11,700 payment to her husband for services he did not provide. Moscoso also allegedly did not disclose that his air duct-cleaning business had multiple employees, resulting in over $300,000 in unreported wages.
You know, if I ever run for state senate, the first thing I'm doing is getting my ducts cleaned. Because it's all about ducts, really. Since Katherine Helmond is speaker of the US house of representatives, it's all starting to make sense.
Our new date lays down a marker for European cognisance of the Americas, and represents the first known point at which humans encircled the globe.
I deal with Europeans from time to time. They don't seem to be cognizant of anything but America, now. We're villains to them, of course, but at least we're the main characters in their lack-of-passion plays, so we have that going for us.
The United States Government opposes the misuse of technology to abuse human rights or conduct other malicious cyber activities, and these new rules will help ensure that U.S. companies are not fueling authoritarian practices.
The United States Government opposes the misuse of technology to abuse human rights unless you're an American, they mean. Say, where did you get that $600 in your bank account, prole?
André Schwämmlein, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of FlixMobility, said, “Consumers across North America are increasingly seeking affordable, comfortable, smart and sustainable mobility solutions. A compelling offering will draw significantly more travelers away from private cars to shared intercity bus mobility.
There are those Europeans again (FlixMobility is German), getting all cognizant of the Americas again. I've never found Greyhound to be affordable, exactly, or egad, comfortable, or smart, no matter how you define the word. And if it was "sustainable," they wouldn't have been able to buy the company. But hey, I'm quibbling about sunny language used in a press release, and I can't help noticing that the press agent at FlixMobility is named Goebbels. Well, at least they're not buying railcars.
People with mild or moderate hearing loss could soon be able to buy hearing aids without a medical exam or special fitting, under a new rule being proposed by the Food and Drug Administration.
But not Ivermectin. With or without a prescription.
Research supports a role for cannabis in reducing sperm count and concentration, inducing abnormalities in sperm morphology, reducing sperm motility and viability, and inhibiting capacitation and fertilizing capacity.
Remember, correlation does not equal causation. How do we know it's not a Cheeto overdose causing the problem? Huh, science dudes? What was the question again?
Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) said in a statement that its mission was to “create a rival to the liberal media consortium and fight back against the ‘Big Tech’ companies of Silicon Valley, which have used their unilateral power to silence opposing voices in America.”
Dumb and tone-deaf, as usual. You might as well call it WalterSobchak.com, tagline, "we're not wrong, we're just ***holes. You should have advertised it as the "social media company for everyone, not just lunatic leftists." See, this is why the other side still hires people named Goebbels. They know how to play this game.
The rarely imagined character [Ahab] has been grievously spoiled, nay altogether ruined, by a vile overdaubing with a coat of book-learning and mysticism; there is no method in his madness; and we must needs pronounce the chief feature of the volume a perfect failure, and the work itself inartistic.
I've read that the really hard thing to do in fiction is to create memorable, believable characters. Captain Ahab is one of the most memorable characters every produced by a writer. Everyone knows who Captain Ahab is. No one knows who William Young, critic at the New York Albion was.
The department's civil rights division said the social network giant "routinely refused" to recruit, consider or hire U.S. workers, a group that includes U.S. citizens and nationals, people granted asylum, refugees and lawful permanent residents, for positions it had reserved for temporary visa holders.
Remember, it's only evil colonialism if you set up shop in sunny climes and lord it over the locals. If you import the benighted to do your scut work for a pittance, it's social media! Sanjay lives in the Amistad Arms apartments, barely scrapes by on what they pay him, and he can't quit or he immediately becomes a fugitive. That arrangement sounds familiar, but at least it's not colonialism.
Have a great day, everyone, and keep those ducts clean!
The distribution of significant community outbreaks along restricted latitude, temperature, and humidity are consistent with the behavior of a seasonal respiratory virus. Additionally, we have proposed a simplified model that shows a zone at increased risk for COVID-19 spread. Using weather modeling, it may be possible to predict the regions most likely to be at higher risk of significant community spread of COVID-19 in the upcoming weeks, allowing for concentration of public health efforts on surveillance and containment.
Our study found that the proportion of inpatients with COVID-19 who wear eyeglasses for extended daily periods was lower than that of the general population, suggesting that daily wear of eyeglasses is associated with less susceptibility to COVID-19 infection.
Can't wait for Fauci to tell us to wear two pairs of eyeglasses.
Even once inflation is factored in to produce the safe real interest rate, a steady decline after the Volcker era is clearly visible. This indicates that something fundamental is changing in the economy’s view of saving and investment. Bloomberg pundit Joe Weisenthal has glibly suggested, echoing views common on Wall Street, that sovereign bonds—indeed, a wide range of financial assets—are actually stores of value and that negative rates are fees for safehousing money.
Paul Volcker was either a god or a devil, depending on who you ask. But he was certainly nowhere in-between.
According to reports, Plummer died peacefully at his home in Connecticut with his wife Elaine Taylor at his side. Lou Pitt, his long-time friend and manager of 46 years, remembered him as "an extraordinary man who deeply loved and respected his profession".
He was Commodus before Joaquin was born, and better at it too. He was the definitive Rudyard Kipling, THE skinflint millionaire, Kaiser Wilhelm, more Rommel than James Mason, and more Barrymore than Barrymore. And still they hang the Sound of Mucus around his neck. Rest easy Sir Charles Litton. We'll remember you.
The collection has been purpose-built to reach a wide base of both public and academic library patrons, and to contain books that people want to read and access online—titles that are widely held by libraries, cited in Wikipedia and frequently assigned on syllabi and course reading lists.
When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes -Erasmus
West is the latest Republican to come out in support of declaring Texas an independent nation. Last month, thestate representative Kyle Biedermann confirmed that he will introduce the bill for a referendum as early as this week. “Texit,” named after the British referendum to leave the European Union, refers to the process of Texas exiting the United States to become an independent, self-governing nation.
Please keep in mind that secession is only cool when California threatens to do it.
Behind the scenes, a power struggle for control of r/wallstreebets erupted on Wednesday when the oldest moderators of the forum booted over a dozen newer mods from their duties. The banned moderators then accused the old guard of selling out, and conspiring to secure a lucrative movie deal about r/wallstreebet’s role in the meme stock craze. “They (the old mods) left for years and came back when they smelled money,” wrote “zjz," a banned moderator.
Like campus politics, the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small.
“I think if you have solid projections and a solid budget and you plan accordingly, you can certainly do all these things, but we didn’t have any of those,” brand director Kaelin says. Scott, who as head of production oversaw at least $1 million in expenditures, says in three years he was never asked for or given a budget, and never had to file an expense report for his company credit card. “I could put $8,000 worth of vanilla on a credit card and nobody would say a thing,” he says.
Huh. It turns out you have to know something about ice cream, and something about business, in order to run an ice cream business. Who knew?
VONNEGUT I would do the same thing with commencement speeches, I want them to be shapely and to be fun possibly for an actor to say. Where’d you go to college?
CARO Princeton.
VONNEGUT I’ve heard of it.
Kurt Vonnegut was funny. Robert Caro wrote four books about Lyndon Johnson, which is another kind of joke entirely.
Semiconductors are extremely important components of new vehicles for areas ranging from infotainment systems to more traditional parts such as power steering. They’re also used in consumer electronics.Ford’s confirmed plans come a day after General Motors said it would take down production next week at four assembly plants in Fairfax, Kansas; Ingersoll, Ontario, and San Luis Potosi, Mexico.
Ahem. A pickup truck has one bench seat, a metal dashboard, three on the tree, and an AM radio. I have no idea what exactly an F 150 is anymore, but it ain't a pickup truck.
Have a nice weekend, y'all. Or if you're Bird Dog, a nice weekend yawl.
The Proposal to Prevent the Feminisation of Male Adolescents called on schools to fully reform their offerings on physical education and strengthen their recruitment of teachers. The text advised recruiting retired athletes and people from sporting backgrounds - and "vigorously developing" particular sports like football with a view to "cultivating students' masculinity".
The American version is reminding the male students that they'll never be half the man their mother was.
Nationwide, the U.S. is averaging about 139,000 new cases per day — a 16% improvement over last week, which was a 16% improvement over the week before.
Flu season in the US runs from October to February. It's February. You're welcome
Threadneedle Street’s monetary policy committee (MPC) voted unanimously to keep the official interest rate at historically low levels while it agreed to set the deadline for banks to prepare themselves after policymakers said they were ready to make negative lending rates part of their toolkit.
Well, after giving away money doesn't work, there's nothing left to do but pay you to take it.
23andMe, founded in 2006 and led by co-founder Anne Wojcicki, has raised a total of just under $900 million to date, including an $85 million Series F round announced last December. The company was one of the first to debut at-home genetic testing for individual consumers, providing kits that people can use to find out more about their own DNA, and what it says about their potential health issue, ancestry and more.
If you're unfamiliar with 23andMe, they're like Facebook, but instead of spying on your browsing habits, they rifle through your medical waste if you're dumb enough to send it to them.
The blue verified badge on your house lets people outside know that you're an authentic public figure. To receive the blue check crest, there must be someone authentic and notable actively living in the house.
The iPhone maker plans to set up production with Kia and build Apple cars at the automaker’s facility in Georgia, U.S., DongA Ilbo reported, without citing anyone. The companies may sign a deal on Feb. 17 and aim to introduce Apple cars in 2024, according to the newspaper, which said they have an initial target to produce 100,000 autos a year.
You can get it in any color you want, as long as it's... white?
Researchers from SINTEF, the Norwegian Polar Institute and the University Centre in Svalbard have collected samples from Arctic crustaceans close to the settlement of Ny-Ålesund on the west coast of Spitsbergen. During the spring and summer, they discovered a number of drugs in a variety of different concentrations. “These included ibuprofen from Ibux, diclofenac from Voltaren, antibiotics and an antidepressant,” says SINTEF researcher Ida Beathe Øverjordet.
You know, I'd kinda noticed that my Svalbard mollusks seemed a tad taciturn recently. They've completely lost the urge to fetch sticks and dig in the garden, too.
Staff at Balthazar poured the two wines into identical decanters, but the one containing Mouton Rothschild 1989 was accidentally sent to the young couple’s table, said the New York restaurant’s owner, Keith McNally. Four Wall Street businessmen at another table had ordered the Bordeaux First Growth – the most expensive wine on the restaurant’s list at $2,000 (£1,528) – but were served the $18 Pinot, the restaurant’s cheapest, said McNally on his Instagram account.
I remember this one time I was at a boring convention, but they had an open bar with a half-decent wine selection. I guess I sorta took advantage of the open bar thing. After my eighth trip across the auditorium to get another glass, a guy handed me a big trophy, a pretty girl kissed me, and the master of ceremonies announced over the public address system that I'd won the dance contest.
The hardware and software will be supplied by Netradyne, a California company behind a platform called Driveri that uses cameras and artificial intelligence to analyze a driver as they operate the vehicle. The camera then gives real-time feedback — including automated suggestions like “distracted driving” and “please slow down” — while collecting analysis that is used to later evaluate drivers during their shifts.
Amazon should just install the driver's mother-in-law in a jump seat and get it over with.
“What these companies were doing was essentially fudging the numbers, lying to investors, other companies and the SEC,” said Schwartz. “Eventually, you have to make up for the money that was lost, that really never existed, so shareholders lose money, people lose retirement plans, people lose jobs. It’s very, very damaging.”
I was walking down the sidewalk in New York once, when I noticed a stockbroker I'd met at a party recently coming towards me. "Hello," he lied.
“Firms don’t allow employees to go out and make predictions on stock,” he said of employees who aren’t analysts. Many financial firms also require employees to disclose if they have brokerage accounts with other firms to monitor their trading activities, he added. Mr. Gill, as a securities broker, is registered with FINRA. His broker registration does not indicate he has any outside business activities. FINRA rules prohibit brokers from filing incomplete or misleading information about themselves.
This dude is in for an SEC enema with a Maxine Waters rubdown finish. He'll be used as a political football. If he's useful in their endless efforts to raise taxes, they'll call him a little guy and let him keep the vig. If he hurt the wrong hedgies, they'll stake him out on an anthill. But his real problem comes later. Some enterprising lawyer with a client who dumped their college money into GameStop and lost it all will sue him, and win. It's pit bull season, and he's wearing milk bone underwear.
Well, that's the links for today. Don't forget to shift your buttocks slightly on the couch at least once a day.
Ned Beatty explains how the world really works to a doe-eyed crank in Network. A wonderful parable for our times, and still spot on 45 years after it was made. The Wall Street Bets kids will be cozened into Janet Yellen's boardroom shortly, and get Citadel's version of this speech.
It was kind of wonderful to watch Peter Finch ramble and rave for two reels, lulling you into the false idea that this was as far out as a man could get. Then Ned Beatty goes intergalactic compared to Finch's low Earth orbit. They gave all the Oscars to everyone else in the movie, so there were none left for him. Well, real boardrooms are supposed to be filled with faceless men.
Television's mesmeric effect was very real, but it's nothing compared to the internet. No one was walking around all day, every day, with a running television in their hand in 1976. TV was an alternate reality, a reality more beguiling than real life was, surely, but not a replacement.
There is no life outside the internet. It's Arthur Jensen's wildest dream, fully realized.
Much of this is down to the idiosyncratic nature of the Reddit investment phenomenon, which is the key difference between this deleveraging episode and others spurred by economic anxieties or macro shocks such as the pandemic. While the retail crowd can whip up a trading frenzy in a few stocks through its message board, the targets tend to be concentrated and relatively small.
I'll explain the GameStop/Reddit/Wall Street Bets frenzy in the simplest terms possible. They've all joined a joint-stock Amway.
The agreement came at a cost. In a six-page statement of facts, Smith acknowledged evading more than $43 million in taxes over a decade and repeatedly filing false tax forms. He agreed to pay a penalty, forsake tax-deduction claims for $182 million of charitable contributions and cooperate for five years with prosecutors on investigations, including their case against Brockman, whose web of opaque Caribbean entities was allegedly used to hide $2 billion in income earned from Vista.
His company manages $73 billion in assets for public pension funds. Public pension funds are about to get maybe a third of a trillion or so in bailouts, masquerading as aid to state and local governments. He won't be eating ramen anytime soon.
IBM’s blockchain unit missed its revenue targets by a wide margin for two years in a row, said a second source. Expectations for enterprise blockchain were too high, they said, adding that IBM “didn’t really manage to execute, despite doing a lot of announcements.”
I guess IBM is being haunted by the ghost of Romettys past. You will be visited by three spirits. Listen to them, and do what they say, or your (block)chains will be heavier than mine.
Together, these hieroglyphics give archaeologists hints about where the workers came from, what their lives were like, and who they worked for. Nowhere have archaeologists found signs of slavery or foreign workers. Meanwhile, there is ample evidence of labor tax collection throughout ancient Egypt. That’s led some researchers to suggest workers might have rotated through tours of construction, like a form of national service. However, it’s also unclear if that means the workers were coerced.
Got that? "Researchers" say it wasn't slavery. It was "national service." Give them another couple years to research the topic, and they'll be able to explain it was just like playing Minecraft, only with real blocks. Loads of fun for the whole conscripted family!
Women in China's "re-education" camps for Uighurs have been systematically raped, sexually abused, and tortured, according to detailed new accounts obtained by the BBC.
No sweat. Xi will just get some researchers to rename it "national service."
The Justice Department withdrew a lawsuit that alleged Yale University violated federal civil-rights law by discriminating against white and Asian-American undergraduate applicants, the latest indication that the Biden administration is shifting the federal government’s stance on civil-rights enforcement from that of the Trump administration.
Pretty soon, we'll perfect bizarro world college admissions where the only way a white male can attend is to make the football team.
The character trait that typically accompanies fame is extreme narcissism. Many friends quickly went messianically deranged when their social media accounts exploded with followers. I remember being in the ‘backstage’ area of a Bernie rally thinking that it felt less like a protest and more like the greenroom at a pop concert. People chatted to each other distractedly, glancing every few seconds at their phones or over each other’s shoulders for someone more famous to talk to before going on stage to passionately expostulate on the evils of inequality. For all its supposed utopianism, this is a cynically competitive and rigidly hierarchical scene.
I've been accused of being a narcissist. But enough about me. What do you think about me?
“They're going to get rid of the infrastructure that allows individualized tracking and profiling on the web,” says Bennett Cyphers, a technologist at the civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They're going to replace it with something that still allows targeted advertising—just doing it a different way.”
Cookies for me, but not for thee, says Google, and every toddler's mother.
Last September, India was confirming nearly 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day. It was on track to overtake the United States to become the country with the highest reported COVID-19 caseload in the world. Hospitals were full. The Indian economy nosedived into an unprecedented recession. But four months later, India's coronavirus numbers have plummeted. Late last month, on Jan. 26, the country's Health Ministry confirmed a record low of about 9,100 new daily cases — in a country of nearly 1.4 billion people. It was India's lowest daily tally in eight months.
Flu season in India runs from October to February. It's February. You're welcome.
In new research published in Advanced Materials in December, the QUT team describes a design that uses a capacitor-style titanium carbide-based negative electrode and a battery-style graphene-hybrid positive electrode. The result, says the team, is a hybrid capacitor with a power density (and thus charging capability) "about 10 times that of lithium batteries", and an energy density "close to that of nickel metal hydride batteries."
People mistakenly believe that designing electric cars is an electric car problem. But electric cars are about as old as gasoline-powered designs. They didn't catch on because the batteries sucked, and gasoline rocked, and was damn near free. The batteries still suck, and only work on a boondoggle basis. Supercapacitors are the future of electric cars and solar storage.
Well, that's the links for this morning. I hope you found them enjoyable or informative or amusing. But remember: It's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being that's finished. It's every single one of you out there that's finished. Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It's a nation of some two hundred odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as piston rods.
I'm sorry. Did I say that out loud? I meant to say, "Have a nice day!"
It's not kind to find amusement in other people's distress. So I won't. I'll just casually mention that it's a tremendous waste of money to send some people to college. So it's not that big of a deal that this money was dumped into a meme stock at a stratospheric high, shortly to make its way to the Pink Sheets. According to modern monetary practice, it's a much better allocation of the same money to send a stockbroker's kids to college. In a Porsche.
As much as young people on the internet like to imagine this as an epic, David vs Goliath, Wall Street vs Main Street showdown for the history books, from a bird's eye view it's actually just a brief dumpster fire where a couple hedge funds lost their shirts betting on one little small cap stock. It has happened before, and it will happen again. In 6 months, nobody will remember or care, except that (maybe) it will become more difficult for retail investors to trade options.
Ah, GameStop remorse will become a thing now. Well, say what you want about the Tulip Mania, but at least you could grow some flowers with what was left of your investment. Experts suggested planting the bulbs point down in the smoking hole of your finances.
The reputation of Dante Alighieri needs little burnishing: his Divine Comedy, tracing the poet’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, is widely regarded as one of the greatest works ever written. But more than 700 years after Dante was accused of corruption and condemned to be burned to death, his descendant is looking to clear his name. Sperello di Serego Alighieri, an astrophysicist, and the law professor Alessandro Traversi are working to see if Dante’s 1302 sentencing for corruption in political office can be reversed.
They're also thinking of revising the book to be more topical. They're adding a tenth circle to hell. It has a bad internet connection.
It used to be a joke, but it’s not so funny anymore. Google is threatening to block searches in Australia if the country implements a compulsory profit-sharing deal that would force tech giants like Google and Facebook to pay media companies for their content. But Australia’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, isn’t sweating it. Morrison suggested Monday at the National Press Club of Australia that Australians can just use Microsoft’s search engine Bing if Google really wants to leave the country.
There are only two ways to look at this situation. If there is no adequate alternative to Google, then Google is a monopoly, and it can safely be regulated into the ground. If there are adequate alternatives, then Google can safely be regulated into the hereafter. Simple.
Amazon is paying nearly $62 million to settle charges that it took tips from its delivery drivers. The Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday that Amazon didn’t pass on tips to drivers for more than two years, even though it promised shoppers and drivers it would do so. The FTC said Amazon didn’t stop taking the tips until 2019, when the company found out about the FTC’s investigation.
I have no idea where the exact inflection point was, but somewhere along the way WalMart became a charming, plucky, mom and pop store compared to Amazon.
It has been announced that Andy Jassy will become the new CEO of Amazon at the time. Jassy currently oversees the company's booming Amazon Web Services (AWS) division. Bezos says that he will be leaving Amazon in good hands as Andy is "well known inside the company" and has been a part of the Amazon family for "almost as long as I have."
He's going to retire to spend more time with his family and his employee's tips.
This paper explores the consequences that language change might trigger in the languages of crew members during a long journey in space or interplanetary settlement. Languages drift apart as communities grow more isolated from each other, so the long isolation of a traveling community may lead to enough difference to render its language unintelligible to the original community it left.
I don't know what this dialect would sound like, but I know that no matter how far out into space they go, no one is ever going to be able to correctly spell loser, rein, definitely, compliment, it's, or their ever again.
Suspected Chinese hackers exploited a flaw in software made by SolarWinds Corp to help break into U.S. government computers last year, five people familiar with the matter told Reuters, marking a new twist in a sprawling cybersecurity breach that U.S. lawmakers have labeled a national security emergency.
Research leader Prof Chris Stringer, from London's Natural History Museum, said: "Given that modern humans overlapped with Neanderthals in some parts of Europe after 45,000 years ago, the unusual features of these La Cotte individuals suggest that they could have had a dual Neanderthal-modern human ancestry."
No word on modern New Jersey teeth, but after watching Jersey Shore, I have my suspicions.
The new code of conduct bans harassment on and off the site, barring behaviors like hate speech, the use of slurs, stereotypes or attacks based on personal characteristics, as well as threats of physical violence and ‘hounding,’ or following someone across different articles to critique their work. It also bans deliberately introducing false or biased information into content. Wikipedia is a relatively trusted site compared to major social media platforms which have struggled to curb misinformation.
I can't imagine from what political perspective information will be determined to be "false or biased." It's a deep mystery.
Leasing fell by nearly 47% from the same period last year. That came even as asking rents dipped for the seventh straight month to $73.65 a square foot on average, the lowest in almost three years.
It's going to be really hard to get the working wealthy back into pants.
Well, the whole country is shoveling today. The West Coast is shoveling mud, the Midwest is shoveling snow, the Northeast is shoveling slush, and you know what they're shoveling in Washington. Hint: It's not shinola. By the way, our first item is an entire rundown of how that offal gets shoveled. Pay attention.
These organisations constantly cite each other’s work, recycle the same personnel and fund, ‘support’ and ‘partner with’ each other’s projects on multiple different levels. Moreover, perhaps the most startling thing for me in conducting this impromptu investigation was how many people I knew who were on the boards, steering committees or staff of these organisations. And I don’t mean know of. I mean, personally, know. Because that’s how far-reaching and yet incestuous this sector is. It’s virtually impossible to be politically active without running into them, yet they stick together like a highly-funded clan.
I hate to break it to you, but deplatforming conservatives from any meaningful place online was the last step, not the first. Act accordingly.
The Inspiration4 crew will receive commercial astronaut training by SpaceX on the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft, orbital mechanics, operating in microgravity, zero gravity, and other forms of stress testing. They will go through emergency preparedness training, spacesuit and spacecraft ingress and egress exercises, as well as partial and full mission simulations.
It's impolitic to say so, but America's trips to the moon were just stunts. Yeah, yeah, we got Tang and Velcro, and showed up the Soviets, but the moon is just a really boring Disneyland with a very expensive ticket. Well, pretty soon, you can buy tickets, too.
During a routine compliance evaluation, the department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs identified pay disparities affecting female employees in software engineering positions at its facilities in Mountain View, and in Seattle and Kirkland, Washington. The agency also identified hiring rate differences that disadvantaged female and Asian applicants for software engineering positions at Google’s locations in San Francisco and Sunnyvale, and in Kirkland.
Recent attempts to unionize at Google are superfluous. Apparently everybody's got to be paid the same already. Or else.
Ford Motor Co. and Google on Monday said they have formed a six-year "strategic partnership" under which the automaker will introduce the Android operating system into millions of vehicles and use Google technology for everything from in-vehicle connected services to manufacturing processes.
Ford and Google Cloud? I don't know why, but I'm reminded that two drunks often lean on each other to keep upright. Have fun with your new Woke dashboard.
To recreate a meal that comes close to what may have been served here, one can begin by looking at the archaeological remains found inside. This includes the imagery in the frescoes painted on the service counter and the contents of the amphorae and the dolia. One dolium contained the bones of duck, swine, goat, and fish, as well as shells from land snails. The duck bones in particular correspond to the fresco of two mallards painted on the front of the counter, perhaps as a pictorial menu for the illiterate majority at the time.
Pretty interesting, but if you're prone to telling the truth, the counter of the excavated food joint in Pompeii looks exactly like a Subway sandwich shop.
The warrior interred with the ship is thought to have been an Anglo-Saxon king, perhaps Rædwald of East Anglia, who ruled a kingdom that included Suffolk between about 599 and 624. Dates on coins buried at the site coincide with his reign, and the quality and value of the grave goods suggest a person of extreme influence.
Two women meet at the mall. -Hello Gladys, it's nice to see you. I was sorry to hear that your husband passed away. -Yes, he was a good man, always looking out for me, even in death. -Really? What do you mean? -On his death bed, he told me not to spend more than $10,000 on the stone. The widow then holds out her hand with a giant diamond ring on it. -How did I do?
In a press release, the company said its contract, with the U.S. Defense Department, will help fund construction of Ellume's first manufacturing plant in the U.S. Once completed, it will produce more than 500,000 tests per day, according to the company. The test uses a relatively short nasal swab to collect a sample. The sample is put into a digital analyzer linked to a smartphone app. In December, the company told NPR that the test would be available for about $30.
It'll be fun to sneeze on your phone instead of just cursing at it.
Simpson is CEO of OTC bulletin board company Zann Corp, a provider of advanced technology products for niche markets, and has experienced an inexplicable excess shares situation over the past two-and-a-half years. Since November 2003, Zann's stock price has plummeted over 98%. This, Simpson claims, makes no sense since his company has performed relatively well. The reason for this extreme underperformance, Simpson believes, is that his company has been subject to severe naked short selling – where stocks are short sold without having been borrowed before the time of settlement, if at all.
Those crazy kids at Wall Street Bets have stumbled onto a real nest of snakes. They'll eventually be broken on the Wall Street wheel, of course, and blame the wrong people for their troubles, and the problem won't get fixed, but think of the demagoguery and additional taxes we can look forward to from all this!
The patent, which was filed in 2018 and granted on 12 January, would allow the streaming giant to "make observations" about a user's environment and emotions using speech recognition technology. Spotify could then play music reflecting their mood or even their social setting - "e.g. alone, small group, party," according to the patent.
Why does Spotify keep playing Rage Against the Machine songs over and over? I went as far as saying I liked disco and Wayne Newton, but it saw right through that ruse.
Bird Dog's at the vet, getting his teeth sharpened or something. Sorry, you're stuck with me again. I'm afraid I'm rather cranky this morning. On top of my general demeanor, I haven't read a newspaper or watched TV in over 20 years. That indicates that this isn't shaping up to be an informative session for you fine people. However, I'll do my best, because back in my day, we gave everything our best effort, even if it was doomed to failure. You know, like elections and public school.
“It won’t work on Internet Explorer; it only works in Chrome. The ‘Next’ button is all the way down and to the right, so if you’re on a cell phone, you literally can’t see it,” says Rowe. “In the first round, people using VAMS mostly had advanced degrees. If you’re 75 and someone asks you to log into VAMS, there is zero way it’ll happen without help.”
Back in my day, a woman with a beehive hairdo and more eyeshadow than Cleopatra wearing eyeglasses on a chain would make our doctor's appointments, and we were too terrified of her to miss one.
Well, I didn't browse 1990s television in the 1990s, and I'm not going to start now. And back in my day, we used a compliant toddler to change the channel, not a remote.
All but two US states — Montana and Wyoming— now have police or fire departments participating in Amazon’s Ring network, which lets law enforcement ask users for footage from their Ring security cameras to assist with investigations, the Financial Times reported.
Why, back in my day, we made the Stasi build their own system of totalitarian surveillance.
Silveti had paid his brother-in-law to send his workers on vacation and broke a hole in an exterior wall large enough for a truck to pass through. CIA station vehicles idled outside, their drivers studying their mirrors for agents of the KGB. Meanwhile, the farewell party was underway at the hotel. According to Silveti, the Soviet soldiers “let loose with the American prostitutes, and with the drinks.” Zambernardi’s son Paul told me that his father bought LSD to “put a Mickey on them all.” With every shot of tequila, thoughts of shipping manifests and cargo evaporated.
Why, back in my day, we had to pay for our own LSD and prostitutes.
Silver broke above $30 an ounce for the first time since 2013 on Monday as an army of retail traders stormed into the metal after betting billions of dollars on stocks last week, triggering risks of a multi-asset melt-up in global markets.
Why back in my day, we had to mine our own silver.
I loved building those crazy WWI biplanes and triplanes. The construction was unbelievably intricate. It was basically building the actual plane, just smaller. The wings and fuselage would get covered with some sort of flimsy paper stuff, and you’d paint it with some kind of toxic goo that gave you a headache for a month
Why, back in my day, our parents encouraged us to sniff glue.
Online retailers know a lot about how their customers are navigating their virtual stores. Offline retailers are not so lucky. Together with consumer behavior experts B:Clarity and a multinational home appliance brand we built a system to help understand customer movement and behavior.
Back in my day, you had to shoplift something to get followed around the store like that.
Policymakers are growing increasingly interested in the effects of vocational training on labour-market outcomes. This column uses a quasi-experimental design based on admissions cut-offs to secondary education in Finland to study the long-term effects of access to vocational education.
Why, back in my day, we'd greet research like this with a resounding, "Duh." And vocational training consisted of a very dirty plumber yelling at you to go get a Stilson wrench off the truck, and be back in two minutes or you're fired.
The New York-based hedge fund sustained a $4.5 billion fall in its assets from the end of last year to $8 billion, even after a $2.75 billion cash injection from Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management and Ken Griffin’s Citadel. Melvin became the target of retail traders who coordinated to drive up the share price of GameStop on online message boards such as Reddit, after the firm disclosed its bet against the company in regulatory filings.
Back in my day, you didn't have to hire an expert to lose half your money in the stock market. You could just buy ten shares of anything and vote democrat.
The coup follows a disputed election in November that Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party won by a landslide. The main opposition party, the army-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, claimed the vote was marred by fraud. Myanmar's election commission rejected the allegations but tensions between the two sides had been rising for weeks.
Back in my day, jokes about coups following stolen elections didn't just write themselves. And we called it Burma.
And of course, back in my day, we told everyone to have a nice day. I still do, and mean it.
A very weird list written by someone who's heard of older workers, but never met one, and who doesn't know that you don't put a period after each item in a bulleted list. I noticed "editor" isn't on your list.
You imagine no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you. You are mistaken in that, too. I am by no means such a mirthful person as you imagine, or as you may imagine; however, irritated by all this babble (and I feel that you are irritated) you think fit to ask me who I am--then my answer is, I'm Roger Bosso.
“The Agency for years has developed and operated IT mission systems outside the purview and governance of enterprise IT, citing the need for mission functionality and speed,” the CIA observed. “While often fulfilling a valid purpose, this ‘shadow IT’ exemplifies a broader cultural issue that separates enterprise IT from mission IT, has allowed mission system owners to determine how or if they will police themselves.”
It's almost like the security services didn't want any oversight. I wonder what they were doing. On second thought, no I don't.
In amateur photos given to authorities, she is seen wearing a T-shirt that says, "Keep the immigrants, deport the racists." They were able to trace the T-shirt back to an Etsy shop, where a review was left by a user that displayed a Philadelphia location. Investigators say open searches for the username led them to a Poshmark user by the name of lore-elisabeth. Open searches for a Lore Elisabeth in Philadelphia led investigators to a LinkedIn profile for a woman who was employed as a massage therapist.
Lore has since left a one-star review of the food served at the Philly police lockup on Yelp.
Wirecard AG delayed the publication of its annual financial results for the fourth time after auditors were unable to find about 1.9 billion euros ($2.1 billion) in cash, causing analysts to question liquidity at the German payments firm. The shares collapsed.
Everybody calm down. The cleaning crew probably just removed one of the Post-It notes from Karen's screen, and she can't remember where she put the two billion without it. She'll remember eventually.
Connecting your phone to a car’s infotainment system is very helpful. By connecting, you can take calls, respond to texts, and get GPS directions without touching your phone. All of these features would have seemed magical just a decade ago. Even though these conveniences help drivers stay safe while driving, a new problem arises. What happens to your data after you connect your phone to the rental car?
Never mind my data. Can someone help me refold this Rand McNally map? I've been trying since 1987, and I still can't get it back in the glove box.
A newly discovered spyware effort attacked users through 32 million downloads of extensions to Google’s market-leading Chrome web browser, researchers at Awake Security told Reuters, highlighting the tech industry’s failure to protect browsers as they are used more for email, payroll and other sensitive functions.
As is usual with modern news stories, this one doesn't have a list of the offending extensions, or a link to find one. You know, information you could use.
Kearns may not have realized that his negative cash balance displaying on his Robinhood home screen was only temporary and would be corrected once the underlying stock was credited to his account. Indeed it’s not uncommon for cash and buying power to display negative after the first half of options are processed but before the second options are exercised—even if the portfolio remains positive.
Suicide: The permanent solution to your temporary problems.
This kind of thinking leads people to 2 year cycles. On most modern software teams, it takes roughly one year to really feel like you have your feet under you. By that time the kind of learning novelty people are used to isn’t there. By 16 months they’re restless. By 24 months they’re gone. This is a problem. It’s a problem because the majority of durable and transferable knowledge comes after achieving basic competency. Mastery of a skillset, understanding and learning from the outcomes of decisions made years ago, architecture and design, leading projects - these all come well after basic competency.
If Twitter, Facebook and other tech companies shift toward everyone working from home, it will mean less reliance on esprit de corps and morale to ensure performance, and more management using direct financial incentives and project- and output-based monitoring.
That's funny. Normal people call "direct financial incentives" wages. We call "output-based monitoring" work. We call "esprit de corps" bullsh*t. You'll get used to it, poindexters.
Among the issues catalogued at Electrek, on Reddit, and on YouTube channels are excessive road noise and alignment issues, rear hatches that don't close properly, charge port doors that don't close, misaligned doors and exterior trim, scratched body panels, substandard paint, underfloor panels that weren't fully attached to the car, dirty or damaged interiors, broken seat belts, and even rear seats that aren't actually attached to the rest of the car.
I guess this means that Tesla is finally a real car company, because that sounds just like a Chevy to me.
Video has emerged online that shows the remains of three AGM-114R9X missiles used in a recent strike on Al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Syria, providing the best look yet at the innards of this mysterious version of the venerable Hellfire, which has six pop-out sword-like blades in lieu of a traditional explosive warhead.
Cool. Will sharks with fricken laser beams attached to their heads go into production soon?
Well, there's today raft of nonsense. I hope you all enjoy a Thursday filled with cheap happiness or lofty suffering, whichever you prefer.
There are now only two kinds of people extant in the US. Let's call them Goofus and Gallant.
Goofus is currently vandalizing cemeteries and demanding that policemen carry ice cream cones instead of batons. Goofus doesn't know how he got that way, but he's constitutionally incapable of voluntarily cooperating with Western Civilization in any way, at least if he's told not to by his peers. He has no idea where his peers get their ideas. He thinks everyone but his peers are sheeple and deserve any ignominy he can heap on them. He'll lie, cheat, or steal at the drop of the hat, but he won't call it that. He'll use any form of justification necessary to go along with his friends. The sophistry might come first, or after the fact, but he's striking a blow for freedom all day, every day, by illegally downloading movies or burning a nunnery or anything in between. It's his opponents who are lawbreakers, even though they're not breaking any laws. They're not cool, and that's that.
Gallant, on the other hand, is constitutionally incapable of openly breaking any law. Gallant is wearing a surgical mask while driving alone in his car because dems the rules. No matter how stupid the rules are, he'll queue up to follow them. He's angry all the time about the laws, because they're in complete opposition to how he wants the world to be ordered. But the rule of law is at the top of his totem pole, and that's that. Every once in a while a Gallant hairdresser opens up her shop during a Goofus shitshow lockdown, and is exalted for her bravery, but one toe in the pool is not swimming.
Gallant thinks Goofus is off the hook right now, because cities are being burned to the ground, but Goofus really isn't. Goofus is performing in a very calibrated political Kabuki play, planned for him by people unseen. If you really took all the Goofuses off the hook, you'd see an army of Lavrentia Berias right quick. They're timid by nature but they're the people who run death camps if they get the chance.
Goofus accuses Gallant of being off the hook all the time, but of course that's silly. Gallant might be a combat veteran or a biker or a lumberjack or something similar. If he was off the hook you'd get Carthage, not placards waved outside the state capitol. Gallant is armed to the teeth, but he never shoots anybody because there's rules against that. He mutters about it under his breath constantly, but the total tonnage of nonsense he'll endure before losing his cool is nearly infinite. Nearly. It would take more than some defaced statue dedicated to a general who lost to get him to stop sorting his recyclables, never mind take to the barricades. Conservative presidents keep putting Gallants on the Supreme Court who say dems the rules so we have to follow them, no matter how nutty the rules are, for instance.
No one's going to ring a bell and tell Gallant the rules don't matter any more so let it rip on Goofus. No one is going to ring a bell and tell Goofus to make a frontal assault on Gallant, which would look like a synchronized swimmer turned welterweight punching Mike Tyson at the weigh in. Goofus thinks he has the upper hand right now because no one's stopping him, but he's being humored, nothing more. His minders are using him to get the upper hand. That's a different thing entirely. They'll get as far as they can with this nonsense, but eventually things will strike a new Overton equilibrium. Gallant will put up with kneeling to see his football game, and maybe notice a decided lack of stars and bars on race cars next year. He'll try to follow the new, very weird rules as best he can. Goofus will go back to handing out flyers from card tables in the park while normal people avert their eyes and scurry past.
Let's examine today's news items through the Goofus and Gallant prism:
On Monday, Walmart said it will open its online marketplace, which reaches 120 million monthly visitors, to Shopify's more than 1 million business clients. That means Walmart shoppers will be able to find goods from some Shopify merchants.
Goofus would rather die than shop at Walmart. Goofus loves the proletariat. It's people he can't stand, and people shop at Walmart. Gallant's wife shops on Etsy and at Costco because have you seen the way the proletariat dresses?
After publication of this story, Google backtracked Tuesday, clarifying that The Federalist had been warned about policy violations but still had time to address them. It now has three days to remove the violations before a ban goes into effect.
This is what Goofus' handlers are up to. Zero Hedge is low hanging fruit. Gallant works at the Federalist and is busy doing whatever Google tells them to. How else could they afford season tickets to the kneeling sessions at the Washington Indigenous Downtrodden People football games?
The robot is meant to be a flexible platform: Boston Dynamics has spent many years refining the hardware and software that give the robot incredible mobility, but attachments will help qualify Spot for specific jobs. A software development kit allows operators to further customize how the robot behaves and senses its world, incorporating computer vision models, for instance, to detect certain landmarks around a job site.
Goofus will continue binge-watching Westworld and wait for a robot girlfriend. Gallant has a Belgian Malinois that cost half that.
The feature, which will start rolling out on Wednesday, allows users to turn off political, electoral and social issue adverts from candidates and other organisations that have the "Paid for" political disclaimer. The company said it plans to make the feature available to all US users over the next few weeks and will offer it in other countries this autumn.
Everyone who works at Facebook is a Goofus and will gleefully charge Gallant for Trump ads that never get shown to anyone.
Martin Landray, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, one of the Chief Investigators, said, ‘Since the appearance of COVID-19 six months ago, the search has been on for treatments that can improve survival, particularly in the sickest patients. These preliminary results from the RECOVERY trial are very clear – dexamethasone reduces the risk of death among patients with severe respiratory complications.
Goofus doesn't care as long as it's not quinine. Gallant doesn't care because he keeps his parents away from nursing homes run by Andrew Cuomo.
The foundry’s director of metallurgy, Elaine Thomas, 66, of Auburn, Washington, was charged criminally with one count of major fraud against the United States. Thomas, who worked in various capacities at the lab for 40 years, was due to make an initial appearance in federal court June 30. Her attorney, John Carpenter, declined to comment.
Goofus hopes the subs sink anyway. Gallant wants his money back. Submariners would like to take Elaine for a shakedown cruise. Strapped to the hull.
Biologist Kathy Niakan and her team at the Francis Crick Institute wanted to better understand the role of a particular gene in the earliest stages of human development. So, using CRISPR, they deleted that gene in human embryos that had been donated for research. When they analyzed the edited embryos and compared them to ones that hadn’t been edited, they found something troubling: Around half of the edited embryos contained major unintended edits.
As long as human embryos are destroyed, Goofus is happy. Gallant's ex-wife donated the embryos.
A few weeks ago I stumbled across a Youtube live stream that was clearly faked. It claimed Elon Musk was giving away 5000 BTC (roughly $47 million as of June 16, 2020). I flagged it as a Bitcoin scam and I assume the feed went down once a moderator saw the flag. Then the weird part happened. Youtube’s algorithm, knowing my interest in blockchain technology and my brush with a “giveaway” now recommends subsequent scams as they go live.
Goofus works at Google and is too busy policing Zero Hedge to police YouTube scams. All of Gallant's money is tied up in ammo bought at Cabela's with cash so he's safe.
In the study, the team found that replacing half of the blood plasma of old mice with a mixture of saline and albumin — where the albumin simply replaces protein that was lost when the original blood plasma was removed — has the same or stronger rejuvenation effects on the brain, liver and muscle than pairing with young mice or young blood exchange.
Goofus is thirty-three years old and dresses like a toddler. Old age never enters his mind, except to vote for Bernie so he can collect Social Security before he graduates college. Gallant loses so much blood at his construction job that this treatment would be superfluous.
The European Commission has opened formal antitrust investigations to assess whether Apple's rules for app developers on the distribution of apps via the App Store violate EU competition rules. The investigations concern in particular the mandatory use of Apple's own proprietary in-app purchase system and restrictions on the ability of developers to inform iPhone and iPad users of alternative cheaper purchasing possibilities outside of apps.
Goofus adores Apple and the EU in equal measure, so his head might explode. Gallant has heard of Europe, but isn't quite sure if it's a real place or not, so he doesn't care one way or the other.
Well, it's Tuesday. There's no "fresh week" feeling to Tuesday. You don't unwrap a Tuesday. The package is already broken open, and inexpertly taped back up, like most of the tools at Harbor Freight. In geologic terms, it's really not any closer to Friday than Monday was, so you can't even lie to yourself about being one day closer to the weekend with any gusto. Tuesday just is. Let's get on with it.
During the restoration, [Curtis] found residue and crystals stuck under one of the knobs of the Control Voltage Processing Module. Was it flux, conformal coating, or something else? [Eliot] hit the board with contact cleaner and wiped it down. Within 45 minutes, he was feeling a strange tingling. It was the beginning of a nine-hour LSD trip.
My car mechanic took LSD once. He said he had an auto body experience.
Researchers at the University of Oxford have begun enrolling subjects in a phase 2/3 clinical trial of AstraZeneca-partnered COVID-19 vaccine AZD1222. The next stage of the program, which follows a 1,000-subject phase 1, is set to enroll 10,260 people in the U.K. to generate results to support the first shipments to customers in September.
And just like all flu vaccines, there will be cardboard signs outside of every pharmacy and supermarket offering free flu shots, which no one will get.
Six former employees of eBay, Inc. have been charged with leading a cyberstalking campaign targeting the editor and publisher of a newsletter that eBay executives viewed as critical of the company. The alleged harassment included sending the couple anonymous, threatening messages, disturbing deliveries – including a box of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath and a bloody pig mask – and conducting covert surveillance of the victims.
It sounds like everyone involved works part time at Hardbodies
All this from my point of view. Perhaps you are right and I am all wrong. Your work is an extraordinary experiment and I would go out of my way to save it from destructive or restrictive interruption. It has its believers and its following. Let them rejoice in it. To me it is a dead end.
Once upon a time and a very good time it was H.G. Wells was coming down along the road and this Wells that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby Joyce and told him he was a jerk.
The EAT-Lancet report, published in 2019, was the result of the deliberation and collaboration of 37 experts. Unsurprisingly, 31 out of the 37 espoused vegetarian views before joining the project. The leader of this project, Walter Willet, has an extensive list of conflicts of interest, such as his personal vegetarian diet, having spent his entire career publishing epidemiology surrounding the benefits of plant-based diets, and is a member of at least 7 groups/enterprises that promote high grain/plant diets. Additionally, ‘in the last few years of Willett’s directorship of the Harvard T.S. Chan School of Public Health, the school received between $455,000 and $1,500,000 from companies or groups interested in promoting vegetarian products or the vegetarian diet generally.
Want to go vegan? Cut out the middleman and become a Seventh-Day Adventist
Indian government sources said no shots were fired but a physical fight broke out between the two sides with soldiers using batons and throwing stones, which resulted in the casualties.
Both sides have nuclear weapons, but they're bashing each other's heads in with sticks and stones. A parable for our times.
To test just how bad the problem is, Szathmari re-registered old domain names for several law firms that had merged, set up an email server, and without hacking anything, he says he received a steady stream of confidential information, including bank correspondence, invoices from other law firms, sensitive legal documents from clients, and updates from LinkedIn.
Domain names are like herpes. If you don't want to have it forever, don't get it in the first place.
According to a new study in The Astrophysical Journal, there could be dozens of intelligent alien civilizations hiding in our galaxy, all capable of communicating. “There should be at least a few dozen active civilizations in our Galaxy under the assumption that it takes 5 billion years for intelligent life to form on other planets, as on Earth,” Christopher Conselice, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Nottingham and lead author of the study, said in a statement.
And according to new research I just finished, Blake Lively could be trying to phone me right now.
Skateboarder Tony Hawk charges $1,000 for a Zoom call, and football player Brett Favre charges $5,000. Cameo says up to four additional friends or family can join the call, and people have up to 24 hours before the call to cancel. If the celebrity doesn’t show up, they’ll get a refund. Fifty stars have signed on to the feature for launch.
That's funny. I would pay five bucks to avoid a Zoom call with Tony Hawk or Brett Favre.
We’re all currently busy not sitting in the stands. Everything sport-like is closed down. I heartily approve, but not as a temporary measure. They’re thinking of having the NFL play in empty stadiums so you can watch it on TV and sneeze at home. But your couch is just the stands. We should refuse to go back to the stands, period.
Everyone already refuses to sit in the stands at their kids' Little League games. They're all on the field having fistfights with the umpires and the other parents.
Have a milquetoast, non-denominational, vibe-less, nondescript, average Tuesday everyone. It's the best you can hope for.
Hello all. Roger de Hauteville here, sitting in for Bird Dog. He's gone for his yearly sojourn to get a flea bath and his nails clipped. If he plays his cards right, maybe he'll even get a belly rub from Mrs. Bird Dog.
While it's true I'm "sitting in," there will be, thankfully, no sit-ins on my watch. I'm Sicilian, remember? Haven't you seen the Godfather movies? We don't do sit ins. We don't riot. We don't hold placards and march in a circle. We say nothing about our affairs to strangers, and precious little about them even to our friends. If any action is required, we visit you in the night, and whisper your transgressions in your ear. These remonstrations beat demonstrations every time. Act accordingly.
The Paper, citing Yangtse Evening Post, said she was able to receive relevant information beforehand that tells her if the flight was going to be delayed or cancelled. Thereafter, she would purchase the tickets to the flights that are likely to be delayed or cancelled, before checking if there is any extreme weather along the route the flight is going to take that day.
Wow. $589,000. That's almost enough money to take two extra bags on her next flight.
Those numbers underscore the appeal of ACH payments: they are often significantly cheaper than other methods. For example, a $5,000 transaction made with ACH could cost the originator anywhere from $0.25 - $5, whereas the same transaction would cost $90 if it were made with a credit card.
Remember Betteridge's Law of Headlines. If a headline ends in a question mark, the answer is always "No."
Teleconferencing company Zoom acknowledged it shut down the accounts of several activists and online commemorations of the Tiananmen Square massacre at China's request. The revelation followed media reports, citing Hong Kong and U.S.-based activists, who found their accounts suspended.
The current administration uses the wrong casus belli to address the problem with uniformly left wing online platforms. Don't break them up because they're monopolies. Jail Zoom execs because they're unregistered lobbyists. Don't break up Google. Jail them because it's fraud to call yourself a search engine while selling the top spots to advertisers. Twitter is a political action group that forgot to register. Jail time. See? Problem solved.
Our languages are incredibly diverse and it is highly unlikely to find a word or a handful of words that sound the same in all languages. Except that there is a word that is shared by all human languages, according to research. Surprise, surprise..the word is ‘huh’. Weird, huh! Well, it turns out that this is probably a universal word.
One notices that the word "probably" appears in the first paragraph, but not in the headline. Can't go admitting the truth right away, or people won't read it.
Today, stars fill the night sky. But when the universe was in its infancy, it contained no stars at all. And an international team of scientists is closer than ever to detecting, measuring and studying a signal from this era that has been traveling through the cosmos ever since that starless era ended some 13 billion years ago.
She was passionate about providing access and information to everyone, not just computer scientists. She also envisioned a world in which computers made people smarter and learned to think on their own.
Someone searching for “Game of Thrones torrent” was not going to find The Pirate Bay in the top results. Similarly, filters were set up for music-related queries as well.
As a result, pirate sites saw their search traffic decline drastically. This meant a drop in new visitors to these sites. However, people could still find these pirate sites by searching for their name. We use the past tense here because that has changed for many sites as well.
Kids these days. You're pirates! Look up the word in the dictionary. Banks don't have drive-up windows reserved for bank robbers. Have a little gumption. It's no fun stealing movies if they make it too easy, anyway.
Items found include fragments of ceramic vessels, including bowls and amphorae. There are human and animal bones in the pits, as well as coal. No finds of metal objects have been made at this stage.
I saw Thracian Pit Sanctuary open up for REO Speedwagon at the Providence Civic Center once. Great show.
The Crew Dragon astronauts said the ride on the Falcon 9 rocket was smoother than the space shuttle for the first couple of minutes. The space shuttle launched with two solid rocket boosters, which provided more than two-thirds of the shuttle’s total thrust at liftoff.
They didn't like parking overnight on the moon to recharge the batteries, but other than that, it was fine.
The researchers, who carried out their work in the Particles and Catalysis Research Laboratory led by Scientia Professor Rose Amal, show that by making zinc oxide at very high temperatures using a technique called flame spray pyrolysis (FSP), they can create nanoparticles which act as the catalyst for turning carbon dioxide into ‘syngas’ – a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide used in the manufacture of industrial products. The researchers say this method is cheaper and more scalable to the requirements of heavy industry than what is available today.
Waste carbon dioxide. Useful material. Farmers scratch their heads and say, "Huh?"
And yet somehow I can still buy a 50" television for $180. There seems to be a disconnect between the reporting and the reality on this topic. Can't imagine why.
Netflix thinks spending lots of cash will result in good entertainment. Disney thinks having good entertainment will result in lots of cash. I know which way I'd bet.
Internet wags make jokes about the NSA spying on everyone. There's a hint of whistling past the graveyard in the humor. If you sense a dreadful thing nearby, but can't quite see it, your mind runs a bit wild, and you resort to nervous laughter to break the spell. The average computer programmer is a mental patient about online tracking, for instance. They're constantly touting the privacy benefits of Linux, whenever they can get their computers to work enough to type a sentence. Microsoft is sending telemetry! I don't know what telemetry is, but it sounds bad! Then they load forty apps on a homing beacon, AKA a smartphone, and pay for everything with it. They follow it up with a demand to be anonymous on their Twitter account.
Everyone's mistaken, or lying, on the internet, sometimes both. There's only one real fear here. People are whistling past the graveyard of obscurity, not Warhollian panopticontroversy. The nameless dread they hold is the fear that the NSA, and every other two-bit news or data aggregator for that matter, doesn't care if they're alive or dead, never mind what they're doing online at 2 AM. Their life is like a children's game from the fifties: Look at me, look at me, look at me, DON'T LOOK AT ME! One, two, three, GREEN LIGHT!
Don't get me wrong. Someone, or more accurately, many someones are tracking your movements, purchases, and daily interests, no matter how trivial, ephemeral and chaotic they are. It goes into huge hadoop hoppers and gets sifted and sold hither and yon to anyone who will pay. It shouldn't happen, but no one ever asks me what should happen, so place the blame somewhere else. Yell your dissatisfaction with tracking into your Amazon Echo, or your Nest thermostat, or your doorbell, or I don't know, maybe your refrigerator.
And what good is all that info? Not much. I know absolutely everything about myself, for instance, but I have no idea what I'm going to do tomorrow. What chance does Acxiom have at figuring it out?
The photo at the top of this post is real, and the subject of the photo really wrote that on the margin, as nearly as I can tell. It's from a fairly notable book of photographs from a fellow named Jim Goldberg. You can find out all sorts of things about Jim Goldberg on the internet, and I think you can still buy this book of photos and captions, even though it was originally published 35 years ago. Look up Countess Viviana de Blonville. All you'll find is see Jim Goldberg.
Is dying alone, unmourned, and unloved made better if it's posted to Facebook? I am beset by doubts. On to today's news!
According to Die Wahrheit über Hänsel und Gretel (The Truth About Hansel and Gretel), the two siblings were, in fact, adult brother and sister bakers, living in Germany during the mid-17th century. They murdered the witch, an ingenious confectioner in her own right, to steal her secret recipe for lebkuchen, a gingerbread-like traditional treat. The book published a facsimile of the recipe in question, as well as sensational photos of archeological evidence.
People believe hoaxes because hoaxes are more interesting than real life. It's voluntary behavior, really. Just a smidgen of reality mixed in with the bosh is all you need to dupe most folks. I've seen fistfights over the last donut in the break room, so killing a crone for a gingerbread recipe wouldn't strike me as far fetched, either.
On Tuesday of this week, one of the more popular underground stores peddling credit and debit card data stolen from hacked merchants announced a blockbuster new sale: More than 5.3 million new accounts belonging to cardholders from 35 U.S. states. Multiple sources now tell KrebsOnSecurity that the card data came from compromised gas pumps, coffee shops and restaurants operated by Hy-Vee, an Iowa-based company that operates a chain of more than 245 supermarkets throughout the Midwestern United States.
If you collect and store sensitive info, you should be required to protect it. Make companies that hoard data take out bonds and insurance to cover all potential liabilities. You need to post bonds to undertake real world construction projects in many cases. Want to build a database instead of a strip mall? What's the difference? Can't wait to see what the number at the bottom of the policy would be for creepy stalkers like Facebook.
Mr. Byrne said in a separate interview that he had met Ms. Butina at a libertarian convention in Las Vegas in 2015. Over the course of their relationship, he said, Ms. Butina spoke increasingly about meeting or seeking to meet people involved in the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, President Trump and others. That, he said, had made him wary. He eventually began communicating with the F.B.I. about his interactions with her.
Remember when CEOs wore short-sleeve dress shirts under their polyester suits and did boring things like turning a profit? Now they're all android people on booster seats in congressional hearings, new-age gurus, and old short-bus James Bond here.
I think male human beings are required by both law and custom to watch the Bullitt car chase at least once in each calendar year, or risk revocation of their man card. Of course you don’t have to watch the whole movie. I can’t even remember what the movie’s about. For all I know, the guys in the Mopar jalopy are Jehovah’s Witnesses, trying to catch up to Bullitt to give him a pamphlet.
" Jalopy" is an entirely underused word. I'm going to go out of my way to say "jalopy" today. Go forth, brethren, and spread the word of jalopy! And watch Bullitt.
In every example, product designers thought they understood the demands of the older market, but underestimated how older consumers would flee any product giving off a whiff of “oldness.” After all, there can be no doubt that personal emergency response pendants are for “old people,” and as Pew has reported, only 35% of people 75 or older consider themselves “old.”
I bought a piece once as a birthday gift for a friend, the actor Paul Newman. Paul had been a 20-year-old rear gunner on a two-man Navy torpedo bomber, training for the invasion of Japan, when the second and third atomic bombs after Trinity exploded over Japan and did their part to end a war that killed more than 60 million human beings. “I was one of those who said thank god for the atomic bomb,” Paul told me ruefully.
Now that's some weapons-grade name dropping. BTW, Fat Man and Little Boy is a good movie, in the parts Paul Newman is in. The parts he isn't in are still technically a movie, I guess. Leslie Groves was the genius in that bunch. Except for Von Neumann, the rest were just really smart plumbers. And Von Neumann isn't in the movie.
An eastern suburbs couple have avoided jail after feeding their toddler a vegan diet that caused her to become so malnourished she didn't have any teeth. NSW District Court judge Sarah Huggett sentenced both of the parents, who also didn't vaccinate the now-three-year-old, to 18-month intensive corrections orders, saying full-time custody would deprive their three children of an "important bond".
The top image is from a 2018 wildfire in Sweden; the bottom is of a wildfire in Montana on August 6, 2000. The most heartbreaking photos being shared are the charred remains of animals, or animals attempting to escape wildfires. Blogger Nathalie Muñoz posted a series of photos about the Amazon rainforest fires. The photo of the monkey crying, holding a smaller monkey, isn't in the Amazon. It was taken in Jabalpur, India, by Avinash Lodhi sometime in April 2016. And the photo of the burned rabbit is from the 2018 wildfire in Malibu, California.
I expect a photo of the charred remains of Hansel and Gretel's victim to show up soon.
The jury’s still out on how the brain really works. But Sarkis Mazmanian, a medical microbiologist at Caltech, thinks the answers to many of the questions we still have about the brain may actually lie further south — in the gut, where trillions of bacteria live. There, these “good” bacteria live peacefully, helping us to break down fiber and absorb nutrients. They are referred to collectively as the gut microbiome. Despite the presence of the blood-brain-barrier (BBB), a tightly regulated border between the brain and circulating blood, the gut and the brain are in constant communication, either through incoming and outgoing nerves, or through small molecules that can pass through the BBB.
When my gut bacteria talks, my wife listens and leaves the room.
Apple updated its support webpage this week to warn customers that some fabrics, such as leather and denim, could cause permanent discoloration to the Apple Card. That damage won’t wash off. Apple also advises against placing the card in a wallet slot that already has a different credit card, so it doesn’t get scratched. And the company says customers should not store their Apple Card in a pocket or bag with loose change, keys or “other potentially abrasive objects.”
Attention Apple users: farting through silk is now mandatory to use their products, not just to afford them.
Starbucks has around $1.6 billion in stored value card liabilities outstanding. This represents the sum of all physical gift cards held in customer's wallets as well as the digital value of electronic balances held in the Starbucks Mobile App.* It amounts to ~6% of all of the company's liabilities. This is a pretty incredible number. Stored value card liabilities are the money that you, oh loyal Starbucks customer, use to buy coffee. What you might not realize is that these balances simultaneously function as a loan to Starbucks. Starbucks doesn't pay any interest on balances held in the Starbucks app or gift cards. You, the loyal customer, are providing the company with free debt.
Hansel and Gretel committed a murder over a coffee and crumble. They were pikers compared to Starbucks
When I was younger, I discovered stoicism. At first I was put off by their slogan, Amor fati, because hey, no fat chicks. Then I dug a little deeper. I got out my Rosetta stone, and translated from Latin into Greek, and then into Demotic, and back into Latin because my cuneiform is pretty rusty, and finally back into English. That's when I discovered Amor fati only tangentially refers to dating plus-size girls. A closer reading of the texts resulted in a truer meaning: "Sh*t happens." I decided right then and there that this was a worldview I could get behind, if not walk behind.
So I'm a stoic now. I'm in good company. Shakespeare said that there was nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Or maybe it was Rodney Dangerfield. In any case, there are a lot of us stoics out there. For instance, often I'll say something extremely stoic, if that's even possible, and people will remark that stoics are really out there.
To get you in the stoic swing, I've decided to invite the granddaddy of all the stoic scribblers, Marcus Aurelius, to weigh in on today's news items.
The film, which may represent Mr. Scorsese’s grandest statement yet on the intersection of organized crime and American politics, is expected to be a strong contender in the 2020 Oscar race. He took his $159 million movie, with Robert De Niro in the lead role, to Netflix after his home studio of recent years, Paramount Pictures, balked at the budget. The full extent of the theatrical rollout remains up in the air. Where, exactly, moviegoers will be able to see “The Irishman” won’t be clear until the discussions between Netflix and select major theater chains end.
"The man who has a house everywhere has a home nowhere"
This year so far, scientists have recorded more than 74,000 fires in Brazil. That's nearly double 2018's total of about 40,000 fires. The current surge marks an 83% increase in wildfires over the same period of 2018, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research reported. The largest state in Brazil, Amazonas, declared a state of emergency on Monday.
"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."
As of August 16, 2019, satellite observations indicated that total fire activity in the Amazon basin was slightly below average in comparison to the past 15 years. Though activity has been above average in Amazonas and to a lesser extent in Rondônia, it has been below average in Mato Grosso and Pará, according to the Global Fire Emissions Database.
"The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject."
A study published in the Journal of Affective Medicine showed that the placebo effect was twice as strong in clinical trials of antidepressants in 2005 when compared to those in 1985. And a similar trend has been spotted in anti-psychotics.
"If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it."
Musk’s greatest skill is in raising capital, but in the past five years that new capital—in excess of $20 billion—has led to greater losses and a much, much more levered balance sheet for Tesla. No value is being created for Tesla shareholders. It’s just a sea of red ink and constant dilution of shareholders and additions of new creditors.
"Never act without purpose and resolve, or without the means to finish the job."
The school, formally known as The Ohio State University, is seeking a trademark on the word "THE" for use on clothing and hats. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the filing was made Thursday. University spokesman Chris Davey confirmed the school had made a trademark submission, saying it was necessary to protect the brand.
"Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, THE ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial"
“It is important for elderly people, who might not be able to do much moderate-intensity activity, that just moving around and doing light-intensity [activity] [will have] strong effects and is beneficial,” said Ulf Ekelund, a professor and first author of the study at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences.
"A wrongdoer is often a man who has left something undone, not always one who has done something."
He has plenty of other problems with Darwinism. The last one he brings up is the (neo-)Darwinian belief that “gene mutations driv[e] macro-evolution.” These can explain changes in existing forms, but not the development of new forms. The mutations are fatal, and the organism dies before it can reproduce. There are no examples of mutations that are not fatal. This Georgia Tech geneticist John F. McDonald calls “the great Darwinian paradox.”
"Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life."
Brissette and Sullivan were found guilty of conspiracy; Brissette was also found guilty of extortion, for illegally pressuring a concert producer to hire members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees union, which supported Mayor Marty Walsh during his first mayoral run. The effort to get a city permit played out during the summer of 2014 — the first year of Walsh’s first term. The concert took place in September 2014. Three days before it took place, concert organizers hired eight union laborers and one foreman, and finally got the permit they needed.
In June, John Donovan, AT&T Communications CEO said their AT&T TV service would “radically reshape what your concept of television is.” This week, the company finally unveiled the service, which was thought to be a streaming version of their DIRECTV service — a fat bundle addressing the market of those who wanted DIRECTV, but couldn’t get the service because there was no line of site. What they unveiled though was everything that people hate about cable and satellite companies — hidden fees, contracts, teaser pricing, channels they don’t need — with the similar bundle that you would get with a $50 Live TV Streaming Service.
"...if a man comes to his fortieth year, and has any understanding at all, he has virtually seen - thanks to their similarity - all possible happenings, both past and to come."
It has more billionaires per capita than anywhere else in the world, but it also has a homeless problem so severe that it rivals some third-world nations. On any given day you can see souped-up Lamborghinis and blinged-out trophy wives in one part of the city, then walk over a few blocks and see piles of human feces, puddles of urine and vomit caked on the sidewalks. The misery of homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction hits deep in San Francisco and has turned parts of a beautiful city into a public toilet.
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Have a modestly successful Thursday, everyone, whether you want to or not. That's how stoics do it. I hope you enjoyed Ol' Mark's take on today's news. Remember, don't get down in the mouth about today's events. To quote the two most famous stoic philosophers:
"Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so." -Marcus Aurelius
"They don't think it be like it is but it do." - Oscar Gamble
The internet used to be sort of useful. I don't think it is anymore.
Maggie's Farm is like the old internet. I loved it. People bored with the usual tripe on TV and the radio could find all sorts of new and interesting viewpoints and useful information on the web. There were a lot of blogs, many of them superb. Politics was way in the back. It's weird, because at this point you can watch a livestream of a skanky girl getting her bumhole tattooed on the internet, but I am here to testify that no one reveals much of anything anymore. People are really guarded about saying anything about themselves. Well, pleasant, sane people are. If you look at an Instagram "influencer" account, there are pictures posted every few minutes, but they're all a put-on. The pictures are ads for a life that isn't being lived, i.e., fake. Everything is search engine optimized, not written. Social media is a list of what other people want you to think they think, like virtual coffee table books no one actually reads.
The internet died when it shifted from desktop computers to phones. Well, that put it on life support. Google killed it dead when they said the only search engine that matters wouldn't rank anything but the mobile version of a website. So the internet became a television broadcast with innumerable bad cable stations, projected on the same porthole-sized screen my grandmother had to watch Uncle Miltie. Ads took the place of all the entertainment, and cradle to grave stalking of the users took the place of ads. And since everyone brings their phone in the bathroom with them, you're even being spied on in there now. Even Nielson families didn't put up with that.
Bird Dog is away at doggie daycare, getting his nails clipped, so you're stuck with me. I hope you all appreciate him when he returns, because he's guarded this friendly little oasis of the old web from all comers, and that is quite an undertaking.
Everything taken together hints at a completely unaccountable executive looting a company that is running as quickly as it can from massive losses that may very well be fatal whenever the next recession hits.
That quote is from a very detailed and incisive analysis of the possible upside of the WeWork IPO. Newsgathering outlets suck at this sort of reporting and analysis now, if they were ever good at it. The linked blog is like the old internet. Filled with useful information and savvy analysis.
In the three months I have had this magical little robot, I’ve collected dozens of videos of underwater wonders… most of which were filmed right off my stern here in the marina, though I use a friend’s dinghy as well as the little Nomadling trimaran to dive in a few other places near Friday Harbor. I’ve gotten to know some of the critters who populate these waters, including the festive Alabaster Nudibranch (“garden slug in drag”), Giant White-Plumed Anemones, and of course Dungeness crabs and shrimp.
My friends and I had an underwater exploration kit. We went out on a skiff, and we shined a high intensity light on the ocean floor as we puttered along. I've heard rumors that you can find lobsters that way, and net them. Of course they would be undersized for the catch regulations, so you would never do such a thing, and then boil them on the beach and eat them. Say, what is the statute of limitations on fishery infractions? I'm asking for a friend.
Software developers, physical therapists and physician assistants crop up frequently among the highest-paid and fastest-growing jobs in every U.S. state, according to a new analysis by CareerBuilder. The site analyzed government data to project the careers most likely to be lucrative and in demand. Most of these jobs require some level of college education.
Scroll down the list. Keep scrolling. Software, nurses, physical therapists, software, nurses, physical therapists. Keep scrolling. Keep scrolling. Ah, Oklahoma. Rotary drill operators. Then back at it; software, nurses, physical therapists, software, nurses, physical therapists...
Gallup’s State of the American Workplace Report found that 43% of employees work remotely at least some of the time. And among those who work remotely at least part of the time, the percent of employees who work remotely 100% of the time is now 20%, up from 15% four years prior. People are increasingly attracted to remote jobs, with 37% saying they would switch to a job that gave them the ability to work off-site at least part of the time.
I was surveyed for this report, but my answer was misconstrued. They asked me if I liked working remotely, and I told them I wasn't remotely working. English is hard.
The NFL and Pluto TV have reached a deal to launch the NFL Channel, a curated library offering, on the ad-supported streaming service. Because Pluto is available free for consumers, much of the programming on its 150-plus networks approximates but does not duplicate what pay-TV subscribers get via the traditional bundle. That means the NFL Channel will not mirror the NFL Network, which has evolved into a well-distributed staple in the league’s media portfolio. Instead, according to the official launch release, the new initiative will be dedicated to “celebrating the NFL’s iconic and classic moments spanning over a decade of past seasons.”
I'd rather watch old football games than new ones anyway. Football players have gotten tiresome.
According to local Hong Kong media reports, Beijing authorities asked Hogg to hand over a list of Cathay Pacific employees who had taken part in the recent anti-extradition bill protests in Hong Kong. Instead of betraying his employees and endangering their safety, he only provided a list of one name -- his own.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is leadership. He lost his job, by the way. Bet he finds another one.
But while some members of MI5, Britain’s counter-espionage service, were whiling away their spare moments in May 1944 by doing the Telegraph Crossword, they noticed that vital code-names that had been adopted to hide the mightiest sea-borne assault of all time, appeared in the crossword. They noticed that the answer to one clue, ‘One of the USA’, turned out to be Utah, and another answer to a clue was Omaha. These were the names given by the Allies to the beaches in Normandy where the American Forces were to land on D-Day. Another answer that appeared in that month’s crossword was Mulberry. This was the name of the floating harbour that was to be towed across the Channel to accommodate the supply ships of the invasion force.
Minorly fascinating story about the perils of coincidence. I'm trying to picture what would happen to the crossword author nowadays. What's a ten-letter word for a detention camp, starting with "G" ?
By now, accumulating evidence suggests that in many mammals, Lyme bacteria can persist after treatment with antibiotics—leading more scientists to wonder if the bacteria can do the same in humans. In 2012, a team led by the microbiologist Monica Embers of the Tulane National Primate Research Center found intact B. burgdorferi lingering for months in rhesus macaques after treatment. Embers also reported that the macaques had varying immune responses to the infection, possibly explaining why active bacteria remained in some. The study drew criticism from figures in the IDSA establishment; in their view it failed to prove that the bacteria remained biologically active.
You know, if keep writing articles about persistent Lyme disease, it might eventually be more popular with internet hypochondriacs than Morgellons, vaccine-induced autism, and fibromyalgia put together.
Tesla has installed solar panels at more than 240 Walmart locations, but lawyers for the retailer write in the complaint that “the occurrence of multiple fires involving Tesla’s solar systems is but one unmistakable sign of negligence.” Walmart alleges in the suit that Tesla didn’t ground its systems properly, that the solar panels installed at Walmart sites were defective, and that Tesla didn’t keep proper documentation of the systems.
Tesla builds cars in a tent. You bought solar panels from them. Negligence? A pointed finger often identifies two malefactors.
Capitalizing on the zigzagged signals from those decades-old nuclear explosions, John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Southern California, now has the latest estimate for this rate. In a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters, he reports that the inner core likely inches along just faster than Earth’s surface. If his rate’s right, it means that if you stood on a spot at the Equator for one year, the part of the inner core that was previously beneath you would wind up under a spot 4.8 miles away.
If you stand on a spot on the Equator for one year, you're the one doing something weird. Leave the Earth out of it
King has been married eight times to seven different women, including Alene Akins, whom he married and divorced twice. In addition to his sons with Shawn, the veteran TV and radio host has three other children.
With this many people involved, under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988, I believe Larry needs to provide a 60 calendar-day notice of any layoffs.
An outbreak of coffee leaf rust, caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix, hit the celebrated coffee-producing region in 2012, and by 2014 it had infected the entire farm. That year El Valle harvested a meager 28,000 pounds of coffee, an 80 percent drop. The next harvests were even smaller. With the lowest coffee prices in a dozen years, reviving the farm has been deeply challenging.
So, prices are too low, because there's a coffee glut. But coffee rust will ruin harvests, which will lower supply, so prices will rise. Well, I've solved that problem. I'm going to use my great big invisible hand to make a pot of joe now.
Sometimes I think that the impression the newspaper is trying to give you is the opposite of reality. There's all this stuff right out front in the news, but the shadow of reality is visible if you squint really hard. The newspaper is what they want you to think. Well, it's Tuesday, and I don't feel like thinking much at all, which is fine. All the bad news that they don't want you to talk about is released on Friday afternoon, late-ish, and all the made up news they wanted to gull you with is released on Monday in the AM, so we're all clear today. We can talk about trivial stuff, like popular music or vice-presidents. The Guardian is cooperating nicely with our Tuesday timetable with their listicle The 30 best films about music, chosen by musicians.
Hmm. The Guardian isn't shy about putting scare quotes on regular nouns used by their political opponents, but they missed an opportunity to put them around the word "musicians." I assume their longer, first-draft title, Crabby Opinions About Pop Culture from the Only "Musicians" Who Were Awake Before 4 PM and Replied To My Last-Minute HARO Bleg, was too long for proper search engine optimization. The author of this list seems to think we've entered "an uncommonly busy period, if not a flat-out golden age" of "movies about musicians, whether biopics, fictions or documentaries." I don't think so, and their list backs up my opinion, not theirs. It's a bad list, and they should feel bad.
The good news: This Is Spinal Tap is on the list. The bad news: So is a documentary about Wham! I guess even a blind squirrel finds a nut from time to time. The rest of the list is awful, and incoherent, in a very particular, modern way. Any pop culture list is bound to linger on recent things, but the list isn't limited to the last decade. If you say "best," you should know a little history. To the target audience, history began when they were in Pampers. Everything before that was a dark time, when everyone's behavior was suitable only for apologies and reparations. One hardy soul takes a stab at history by mentioning the Woodstock movie, but that's likely because they've heard there's a Woodstock movie, not because they've seen it. Sha Na Na played at Woodstock. That's all you need to know about the event.
Right off the top of my head, why wouldn't someone mention:
A Hard Day's Night
Coal Miner's Daughter
The Harder They Come
Standing in the Shadows of Motown
Muscle Shoals
The Blues Brothers
Love and Mercy
Gimme Shelter
Bah, I'm arguing with fools. Feel free to add any I've forgotten to comments section. On to the news!
“What makes a solid tech stock?” may be one of the most important questions an investor can answer. Over the last decade, tech companies started to penetrate the top ten list of global companies by market cap. Today, tech dominates this list with Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Alibaba. Not all tech stocks are winners, of course, with IBM and Yahoo flatlining over the past decade and Cisco unable to reclaim its valuation from nearly twenty years ago.
IBM and Yahoo had something in common besides dismal performance. We're not allowed to notice it, however, so we won't.
Between 1975 and 1995, the National Liberation Front of Corsica struck Corsica’s electrical system on multiple occasions, according to a report issued by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. In the Philippines, the Communist New People’s Army, the Moro National Liberation Front, and the Abu Sayyaf group all attacked the electrical grid. And in South Africa, a military wing of the African National Congress carried out multiple attacks on electrical stations during the apartheid regime.
The National Liberation Front of Corsica? Corsica had terrorists? Corsica has electricity?
Carmakers are now hoping to use the same subscription service model that tech firms use. They supply you with access to a new car, and take care of insurance, maintenance, and mileage. Some services will let you swap one car for another on a regular basis. These subscription deals may appeal to a new generation of drivers who aren’t used to owning much of anything. They’re accustomed to paying for lots of things like housing, transportation, communication, and entertainment on a subscription basis. Why not cars?
Seem more like the subscription service model used by Rent-a-Center for crack house couches than SaaS for useless chat apps. Anyway, for some reason, I'm reminded of Johnny Cash's song One Piece at a Time.
WeWork, which says in the offering document that its corporate mission is no less than to "to elevate the world's consciousness," is on track to lose $2.7 billion this year from its operations, up from nearly $1.7 billion last year. The company's revenue in the first six months of the year nearly doubled from last year's first half, to $1.5 billion. The company said its losses rose just 10% from a year ago, but that includes a $470 million non-operating, and likely non-recurring, gain. Exclude that, and losses from the We Company, which says it will trade under the ticker symbol "WE," rose 60%.
All tech IPOs are now Ponzi schemes being palmed off on the stock market before the music stops. This one is especially silly. And stop comparing them to Amazon, article writers. Amazon made a profit right away, but dumped the money back into expansion continually, mostly to avoid taxation. Borrowing money over and over isn't the same thing.
Washington University paleoanthropologist Erik Trinkaus and his colleagues studied fossils, digital scans, photographs, and other archaeologists' reports from 77 Neanderthals and Homo sapiens who lived in Europe and Asia during the Pleistocene. Based on this sampling of remains with preserved inner ear bones, a surprising number of Neanderthals were running around Pleistocene Eurasia with swimmer's ear.
This is a question that's been on my mind for a long time, said no one ever.
Le Mans is one of those races that people who have never seen an auto race know about. It’s been immortalized in a bunch of movies. It’s always nifty to see the cars pass through the Dunlop rubber rainbow, and dodge the regular traffic and bicycles on the road on a non-race day. Driver Mike Hawthorne strapped on about a hundred pounds of microphone to give us some idea of what it’s like to buzz around the track.
It was my first time living in America, and like many people who move to a new country, I found that my perception of the United States didn't exactly line up with reality. As it turned out, several aspects of US culture, from food to transportation to nightlife, were different than I had imagined. And in some cases, those differences left me disappointed.
Oh dear, we've disappointed an aesthete from an prisoner-organ-harvesting paradise. A more even-handed appraisal than the headline sounds. And of course even patriotic souls like me have to acknowledge that the United States is the worst country in the world, except for all the others.
Few men in America are as popular among American men as Joe Rogan. It’s a massive group congregating in plain sight, and it’s made up of people you know from high school, guys who work three cubicles down, who are still paying off student loans, who forward jealous-girlfriend memes, who spot you at the gym. Single guys. Married guys. White guys, black guys, Dominican guys. Two South Asian friends of mine swear by him. My college roommate. My little brother. Normal guys. American guys.
I can explain it. He's just a Rush Limbaugh who votes straight Democrat on the way home from the Crossfit gym.
The Bugatti Centodieci goes from 0 to 62 mph in 2.4 seconds. It can reach 186 mph in 13.1 seconds. That’s thanks to a W16 engine (basically two V8s) that produces a chest-thumping, spine-bruising 1,600 horsepower. Bugatti electronically limits its top speed to 236 mph, because it doesn’t want you going too crazy. After all, this car costs $8.9 million—before taxes.
