Link. The telescope sounds exciting.
Monthly Archives: December 2022
A Winter Biking Gear and Tips
Link. The zip tie thing is wild. I’d not seen bar mitts for road bars before, that’s neat. Doesn’t address really cold gear though.
Who Are the ‘Never-Coviders’?
Link. Emily is one. Somewhat careful but not especially. Lots of exposures. Nothing.
“The Keystone Pipeline ruptured Wednesday night near a creek in northern Kansas, spilling what its operator, TC Energy, says is about 14,000 barrels of oil”
Link. Cheaper to pay cleanup than to stop leaks.
“Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 49”
Link. More than accidents?
“September 2021 poll showed support for interracial marriage at 94%.”
Link. I’d like to know the race/gender/culture background of the 6%.
On wokeness: “To focus on the scholarly contributions of some European leftists is to ignore the much richer veins of Black thought that have been in America for centuries.”
Link. Be woke to own the cons.
Net derived neural networks reflect net biases including female sexualization, esp Asian.
Link. Current approach is to characterize bias the adjust for it in post-processing.
“The Sinaloa cartel has risen to become the world’s premier fentanyl producer. The group manufactures fentanyl and meth throughout northwestern Mexico”
Link. Mexico is kind of a train wreck.
mRNA vaccine with Keytruda cut melanoma recurrence 44% compared to Keytruda alone
Link. “The companies hailed the results as spectacular.”
Fusion – maybe in 40 years.
Link. Might be progress, but very far from useful.
Mastodon Autopost – WordPress plugin.
Link. Post from a WP based micro blog to Mastodon.
Xi interpreted: “We can open up, because I went around the world and I met with all these leaders around the world without a mask already. And I’m fine.”
Link. The best China experts know Xi is very good at getting and using power and otherwise dumb as a rock.
Mastodon user guide: Dealing with unwanted content.
Link. Many options. Flag to instance admin/moderator only if truly necessary.
Fedifinder: recreate Twitter follower graph on a Mastodon instance
Link. It scanned 664 Twitter profiles and found 120 on Mastodon fediverse domains.
A beginner’s guide to Mastodon.
Link. “you can only search by hashtag, not by words that appear in a toot. So if you want your post to be discoverable, you can tag it”. No quote tweets, I will miss those.
China paid a high price for its 2018 hostage taking: “The loss of untold billions in trade, and of a diplomatic relationship in which Chinese leaders had invested years of work, was probably more than they had expected to pay for Ms. Wanzhou’s release,”
Link. Review of hostage taking. “It’s like putting up your house as collateral on a $100 bet.”
“If Eufy can ignore security researchers and the press without there being any repercussions in the market, others will follow suit”
Link. Most consumers don’t care about privacy or security. It’s considered hopeless and far too complex.
E. Fuller Torrey, rebel psychiatrist advocating for mandatory treatment of psychosis and group home care.
Link. Driven by memory of his sister and stories of horror. Very expensive to do this ethically.
US high school military recruiting program mandatory in some urban Black schools: “military subsidizes instructors’ salaries while requiring schools to maintain a certain level of enrollment”
Link. The funding of US primary education is a crime.
Steven Seagal became Russian citizen in 2016. (Just learned this)
Link. ” … Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Seagal called Putin “one of the great living world leaders” and even performed with his blues band in the annexed Black Sea peninsula.”
“29 American and Canadian hockey players who are signed to premier Russian teams this season, with some joining after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Link. Can we not do hostage swaps for them? There’s another American on Griner’s basketball team. Lots of basketball players.
Decent bandwidth: “1.84 Pbit/s with a new chip that uses just a single laser”
Link. A single image @ 2040.
Explainer: Rosetta 2. “the whole of the app’s Intel executable is loaded into memory, passed to OAH, which translates its executable code into Arm instructions, and hands that back to be run”
Link. Eclectic Light is the best.
NEPA article review: regulatory barriers to CO2 emission control.
Link. Manchin was right.
Browsing the Fediverse: queried against Mastodon API.
Link. Room for creativity.
“quantum computers will be most useful for learning about quantum systems themselves, not for analyzing classical data.”
Link. Says the woman known for killing quantum computing optimism. (Tang). It ain’t gonna work guys. Your cryptography is safe.
The guy the Russians wanted: “Mr. Krasikov is an assassin who murdered a Chechen fighter in a park in Berlin in broad daylight in 2019”
Link. Held by Germany.
Most SEAL elite recruits: “hurried off into a vast military system that often had no obvious place for them, and plugged them into whatever low-level job needed filling at the moment”
Link. The US Navy is FUBAR and the SEAL program should be shutdown.
“detentions in Iran, China, Venezuela, Syria, and Russia account for three-quarters of U.S. nationals currently wrongfully detained.”
Link. Travel advisories matter. China also.
Windows: “if you bring your laptop in to be repaired, you should expect the technician to snoop through your hard drive, taking what they want.”
Link. Presumably Apple techs are lower risk?
“a viable and powerful exploit strategy on x86 Linux”
Link. Impossibly complex and hard to mitigate.
DeepMind’s AlphaCode: “corresponds to a “novice programmer” with a few months to a year of training”
Link. Less than expected.
Carbon tariffs arrive – for metals.
Link. The only way to get China to reduce CO2 emissions.
“employees at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, joined a virtual brainstorming session to discuss how to build the next Twitter.”
Link. Remember when we thought Facebook was evil? That was pre-Musk.
“The lager yeast appears to be the result of a chance mating in a chilly brewery, where low temperatures allowed the hybrid to thrive.”
Link. Genetics and voyages of beer yeast. “The Tibetan one is a slightly closer relative of the lager yeast than the Irish ones are”
“systemically correct energy imbalance and restore cellular metabolism to improve cartilage homeostasis and protect against pathological progression of osteoarthritis”
Link. OA as energy balance failure in chondrocytes. Wild stuff.
When traffic light sensors miss bikes.
Link. I used to see this but much less now. Induction coils don’t work on alloy or carbon bikes but they are going away. (I press the ped button)
Simplenote introduces “expensive” subscription plan without a price.
Link. If they go subscription I’ll switch to iOS Notes. (I think blog post was published prematurely, the internal links to the plan don’t work.)
“In state after state, the final turnout data shows that registered Republicans turned out at a higher rate — and in some places a much higher rate — than registered Democrats”
Link. Great turnout, but many voted for Dems. Biden wins for a reason.
China: COVID? What COVID?
Link. Totalitarian states can turn on a dime.
“It was unclear whether Mr. Bout’s return would further encourage Russia to arrest Westerners who can be traded”
Link. By unclear they mean absolutely clear.
“sheep herding breeds were characterized by genetic variants associated with a neurodevelopmental process known as axon guidance”
Link. Genetics of behavior in a social animal with diverse populations.
Romney on Trump: “the kiss of death for somebody who wants to win a general election”
Link. Not a fan.
Georgia GOP frustrated by failure of their election gaming.
Link. Some genuine improvements possible. GOP charmingly honest that intent of rules was to suppress Black votes.
“after Kushner discussed isolating Qatar with them without informing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—Qatar suddenly threw in the necessary cash”
Link. The Trump administration was a criminal enterprise.
The pharmacology of body building (free access).
Link. Some amazing physiology here. The results at the “top” level are repulsive to most people.
MacOS Spotlight: a view of the ever burning tire pile.
Link. “Use the command
mdimport -L
to list all mdimporter plugins currently installed, with their paths.”
New MN federal judge: “Blackwell said he grew up in a house with no running water and an outhouse in the back. He was the first in his family to attend college, the University of North Carolina,”
Link. Watch this guy.
“that between 2019 and the summer of 2022, the unnamed refinery paid Khanna and his brother, Tinu “Gagan” Khanna, more than a half-billion dollars.”
Link. Catalytic converter metals go “overseas” to be used in …. Catalytic converters. (China?)