Join Readup to read with jbuchana.

But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95% noise, 5% signal.

This is the crux of the issue. An example of this is when losing weight. If you look at the scale every day, the daily ups and downs totally hide the trend in weight. If you weigh a few pounds more than a day or two ago, you worry. But if you only check my weight once a month (which is approximately what I do) the actual trend is obvious, the noise is masked by the real data.

avoidance of too much hormonal rushes that come with the ingestion of food.

Interesting tie-in with my weight example. But total garbage. Nutrients are not information and this inclusion in the article seems sort of random to me. It does not invalidate the real point though, too many information points do indeed hamper the ability to analyze the actual data.

Evidence of fire being used about 2 million years ago.

Not surprising.

I was reading this and came to this about autonomous cars:

Full autonomy will take longer but is probably not more than 5 years away.

Then I looked at the publication date and saw that the article was 4 years old. From the more recent articles I've read, self-driving cars seem to have been a little tougher than originally expected. Still, the article has some good points.

Russia is meddling in US elections again. Hopefully our voters have learned their lesson, but I doubt it.

In reality, it is not a scandal about Biden at all. It’s a scandal about Republican cooperation with a Russian propaganda campaign.

At my job I'm supposed to collect email addresses from any customer willing to provide one. That has led to quite a few discussions about use of modern digital/online technologies in everyday life. I'm surprised every day by how many people do not use email, and in many cases, don't have any internet access at all. Of course, a lot of these people are older, but surprisingly, some would appear to be in their 40s or perhaps even a little younger. They have various reasons for their lack of participation, the two biggest ones are that they survive just fine without the complication of being online, and those who want to avoid interaction with the big tech companies listed in this article. Of course, some of the older people just don't understand computers and the internet, but that's less common nowadays. A lot of older people do have email and are quite happy for us to send catalogs, coupons, and receipts to their email. A lot of them say they buy on Amazon and spend a lot of time, usually with their kids and grandkids on social media.

This reminds me of one of my daughter's ex boyfriends. He's trouble, fortunately he's long gone.

no doubt many are just as frustrated as I am that you simply can't buy a sensibly proportioned truck that doesn't look like a 14-year-old's gaming rig anymore.

Yes! I'd never considered the lack of pedestrian safety due to modern truck designs, but I've hated what's become of modern trucks. I just want something to haul supplies, furniture, etc. around, I don't want to have some misshapen macho-looking front end and ridiculously high sides on a truck that's mostly built to make an impression rather than haul things. When I have to replace my 15 year oild truck, I'm not sure what I'll do. To find something reasonably proportioned, I think I'm going to have to travel to an area that doesn't use road salt so i can buy another 15 year old or older truck that's not rusted out. Most older trucks are starting to rust around here, and the newer ones are so poorly designed. A lot heavier too, as if I wasn't already paying too much for gas.

If all we are when we die is how we exist in other people’s memories, then it is the duty of the living to properly remember our dead, to cautiously draw the contours of their nuanced and many-edged existence.

I had a phone that could charge wirelessly once. Not only did it have the alignment problems mentioned, some mornings I'd wake up and find it totally not on the charger. I blame the cats.

I've noticed some of these Dark Patterns, but not all of them.

Sorry about the formatting on the last post, line got run together, here it is with extra spaces hopefully easier to read:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

use warnings;

$|++;

my ($ktr);

for ($ktr = 1; $ktr <= 100; $ktr++)

{

if ($ktr % 3 == 0)

   {

   print "Fizz";

   }

if ($ktr % 5 == 0)

   {

   print "Buzz";

   }

if (($ktr % 3) && ($ktr % 5))

   {

   print $ktr;

   }

   print "\n";

}

Sorry about the totally messed up formatting, it looks good until I save it, then...

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict; use warnings;

$|++;

my ($ktr);

for ($ktr = 1; $ktr <= 100; $ktr++) { if ($ktr % 3 == 0) { print "Fizz"; } if ($ktr % 5 == 0) { print "Buzz"; } if (($ktr % 3) && ($ktr % 5)) { print $ktr; } print "\n"; }

Almost as fast as typing it in. Not the fewest possible lines, nor the most elegant, but super fast and easy.

At my past job there were only of us who coded, so we didn't need to hire anyone else to do so, but finding people with even the most trivial Unix admin skills was just as hard as finding a real programmer is for the author of the article.

I regularly get cussed at and insulted when I ask people to put on a mask at the store I work at. Some walk out, some just triumphantly walk into the store without a mask. All I'm allowed to do is yell after them to stay at least six feet from everyone else. We've had a statewide mask mandate for two weeks now, it's helped a bit, but not totally.

I haven't watched TV news regularly for about 20 years. Not doing so has helped my moods and anxiety a lot.

I do sometimes wonder about the bias in the online and print news I read. I tend to the more liberal/progressive sources, but I sometimes wonder if there isn't bias in the articles that makes the average conservative look worse than most of them are. I have no doubt the really nasty conservatives are really nasty, I meet enough of them in daily life, and they are outspoken. But are they a really representative sampling? I've wondered that before, and I'm not sure that most news sources can be trusted to be balanced.

#WorldIsWatching

@amnestyusa

I feel like the guy working for Bernie Madoff who thought they were actually beating the market.

From a former Republican.

More QAnon craziness.

ruined families, split apart by one member’s conviction that Hillary Clinton eats children

They actually believe in famous people being "pedo-vores."

Another man tried to burn down Comet Ping Pong, the Washington pizzeria QAnon believers are convinced is the hub of a global pedophile cabal

If I owned Comet Ping Pong, I think I'd have given up by now and shut the place down. It seems that the nuts will never let "Pizzagate" be forgotten. It's supposedly run out of Comet Ping Pong's (a pizza shop) basement. The store doesn't even have a basement, let alone a pedophilia ring...

Some schools and businesses want customers/students to sign COVID-19 waivers.

We've come to expect legal waivers at places like ski resorts and bungee-jumping facilities, but colleges and all sorts of typically safe businesses — from hair salons to dentists' offices — are using them to try to escape legal accountability for injuries and deaths as they reopen during the pandemic. In the age of COVID-19, every reopened institution is now a bungee-jumping facility.

One Nation, Indivisible, Under Waiver. But is it a good idea?

Corporate America thinks so.

Of course they do. The article explains that such waivers are not really needed because even with the current laws, you couldn’t sue a business for catching any disease at one of their locations without having to prove severe negligence on their part. Extremely severe. Waivers are not needed unless you’re planning to ignore all reasonable safeguards at a business of school that you own.

Police officers, sometimes in an attempt to provide mentally ill people with treatment, have said things to me: "We know if we take them to jail, they will at least get 'three hots and a cot.' They will at least get their psychiatric medications." And so taking them to jail feels like an act of compassion.

We would never arrest someone to make sure that they received treatment for their cancer. We only do that in this situation of the mentally ill, and that, to me, seems like a travesty.

My son has mental health and addiction problems that have landed him in jail. Instead of help, they've humiliated and punished him. He did NOT get his meds either. When they discovered he was suicidal, they put him in a brightly lit padded room with a hole in the floor for waste and left him there with the lights on all day and night and no interaction other than disgusting food and water for four days.

Nutraloaf:

ingredients that tick off a checklist of nutritional needs but are then combined and prepared in a way that is absolutely disgusting when you hear people describe the experience of eating it.

It's intended to be disgusting. And so the reason that I wrote about it was really to get at the urge that I see so much in our nation's [incarceration] practices, which is to make people suffer.

My son has described this to me. Food as a punishment. Disgusting.

the foremost thing that I saw over and over again is how much we want people to suffer once they're held within our jails and prisons

Norway faced similar problems. To fix them:

So they decided to do a needs assessment of everyone who came into prison immediately and when they arrived to see, "Do you have a substance use problem? Well, then we will use the time that you're incarcerated to get you mental health treatment for your addiction. Do you need job training? Do you need education? Do you need language assistance? Do you need anger management classes or parenting classes? What are the root causes of the behaviors that are getting you arrested that we can try to address so that we'll use this time in prison constructively, so that when you leave prison, you don't come back?" And that fundamental shift in philosophy was really fascinating to me.

Why can't we do the same?

It's somewhat chilling that a piece of software could be banned. OTOH, I saw a partial analysis of the then current version of the TikTok binary by a software developer on Reddit. It snoops a lot deeper than just reading the clipboard. Of course, Apple, Google, and your phone carrier can do the same thing, and, for the sake of advertising, do. That doesn't bother anyone, so perhaps the actions of the app could be exposed and people could decide for themselves. I don't think people who are handling really sensitive data for commercial, governmental, or military reasons should have it on their personal phones in any case...

New IP, a new internet standard proposed by China would have many differences.

mandatory authentication of users on the network, while useful for security advantages like tracing attacks, also runs counter to the internet's openness

That (and greater centeralization) doesn’t sound good, however it also sounds like there is no real route between what we have today and the New IP China proposes. China could switch, which would cause a “splinternet”

a "splinternet," where today's global network fragments into incompatible national networks

New IP would be a dramatic break from today's internet, which is part of the reason it faces such challenges winning allies. But the real splinternet could arrive instead by countless small steps away from today's internet norms

"The danger is the internet can die from a thousand cuts," Robachevsky said. "That's the path for this splinternet."

Qanon is getting to be a real problem.

QAnon as a group seems to have mastered the ways of manipulating and tapping into people’s anxieties as a means of indoctrination

It Feels Like Losing a Loved One to Drug Abuse

As much as I tried to be there for her, she seems to have found her purpose in saving fetuses from being eaten by Hillary.

My heart has been breaking as I’ve watched her mental health rapidly decline. She is so quick to throw away all of the real-life goodness in our relationship [for] some rando Instagram follower who confirms her biases.

I first heard of Q about a year ago. It sounds like the whole thing is getting really out of hand since the COVID lock downs. As someone who’s dealt with losing loved ones to drugs, I feel for these families. The Q conspiricists seem like they might be, or become, more dangerous than lone addicts ruining their own and their family's lives.

What they call “freedom” is actually absence of responsibility.

That pretty much sums up the problem.

Contemporary researchers have shown they can use a brain-scanning technique known as functional MRI to detect consciousness by indirectly measuring blood flow in the brain,

That doesn’t explain consciousness any better than knowing that the engine makes a car go explains how the engine actually functions.

humans are unique in having a highly developed frontal pole cortex, a part of the brain that researchers have connected with the ability to know what's on one's mind.

All higher animals at least, have an FPC, not as well developed perhaps, but still present. I feel that dogs, cats, horses, other primates, etc. have consciousness, maybe not at the same level, but they do have it. I can’t imagine the cat who just came up to me and requested attention not having any consciousness at all.

Some researchers take things a step further, holding that consciousness is a property of matter so fundamental that even an electron is conscious to a certain extent, a position known as panpsychism

OTOH, it is perhaps going a little too far to say that an electron or a rock is conscious. It’s sort of new-agey, which feels good, but there is rarely much substance to anything new-agey.

Schellenberg said she thinks that a lot of animals have consciousness because "anything that feels pain ... is conscious,

This might be a good point to think about. It might not define consciousness, but it might point to it.

Ways the world might not end...

Such a sad part of history.

This is something else to think about, as if the main theme of the article isn’t “interesting” enough....

As a child Superman may never have known that things had surfaces, until he learned to suppress his X-ray vision.

Several snippets that I liked:

A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.

we unfailingly overestimate how much influence presidents have over the economy and stock market.

Read enough books, and it becomes apparent that many books didn't need to be books. They could have been articles, even short articles.

as Edward O. Wilson so succinctly put it, “we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”

This is the first time I’ve seen this quote. It describes things so well.

Science fiction is so often prescient.

The digital revolution fulfilled so many of our hopes and dreams

It’s interesting that, while science fiction did often include computers and information technology, the predictions were often stunted and sometime, actually more often than not, computers played little part in the imagination of future life’s daily activities. I remember reading a novel where a starship was steered by huge room sized dials so that the markings would be fine enough for proper “aim” and the math for this navigation was done on giant slide rules. Most stories totally lacked anything like modern data science and communication, it wasn’t until the digital revolution was well underway that we started seeing it permeate life in most stories of the future. What grand ideas are we failing to predict in today’s science fiction? That’s interesting to think about.

Dedication.

Let's hope that it doesn't come to this...

Our family dog as a child was a pug. He was a great dog, and far more active than they describe modern pugs. He loved to swim in the pool. But then again, that was nearly 58 years ago and as the article said:

bulldog and pug to resemble what they used to look like even 60 years ago.

WHen they retired, my parents got another pug. This one was a great dog, but, like those described in the article, was indeed less athletic. I do love pugs, but as an adult, every dog and cat I've gotten has been a rescue, only three of them a recognizable breed, a Manx cat and a two labs, a black and a chocolate lab. They've all, fortunately been very healthy, the Chocolate Lab is over 15 years old now and is still active with no hip problems, unusual for labs. We're dreading the future though, Phoebe is very old for such a big dog, she might go from athletic to really bad shape pretty fast.

We have signs at my store that ask customers to, if possible, pay with exact change or a card. The signs are creating a lot of hostility even though we have enough coins (as of Monday, I've been off a few days) to make change normally. I had one person who paid with a card rant about how we'd better not round his purchase up. Uh, you're playing with a card? He was sure that rounding up would apply to cards as well as cash and we're not even rounding up on cash. I had one start ranting about how the coin shortage wasn't real and it was a conspiracy to control the sheeple of the US. One of our managers agreed after he left. I couldn't believe that. I'm dreading when we can only take exact change. They'll be upset about that, and then when they see that my drawer isn't totally devoid of coins (I'l be taking in exact change...) they'll start thinking conspiracy. Retail can be very unpleasant, and my store is actually more sane than say, a grocery store where people really come from all segments of the population...

I came across this article just a few days after I read a novel about an EMP attack on the US (and China and Korea). The book is One Second After by William R. Forstchen. The first thing I thought of when reading the description of the book was Starfish Prime, the nuclear test that caused an EMP that took out a lot of electrical equipment (even streetlights) in Hawaii in the early '60s, then the Carrington Event, which was mentioned in this article. Before Starfish Prime, the concept of a nuclear EMP was known, but the magnitude turned out to be surprising. Back in the '70s and '80s when I was into ham radio, a lot of operators made a point to have hardened transceivers and power sources in case of EMP.

Curiosity killed the cat...

This reminds me of older superman comics when they would enter the "bizzaro world."

Lately I've been seeing claims that it's not enough to not be a racists anymore, you must be "anti-racist." Is that what this is all about?