Wk 50 - Notes and Links
Wk 50 - Notes and Links
Ten things in the news
In the Canadian Navy, you can lose your USB! Meanwhile in the US Navy - lasers!
Putin may now be thinking that if Russia is going to benefit from its military strength, it had better flex its muscles now, before the country’s economic foundation erodes further.
Canada Has The Biggest Gap Between Real Estate Prices and Incomes In The G7
Toyota owners have to pay $8 per month to keep using their key fob for remote start. Feature requires subscription even though it doesn’t use internet services. It’s just … blackmail.
Signs the Ghislaine Maxwell defense team is in for a rough go: They've submitted a list of 35 defense witnesses they want to call, IF the judge lets them testify under fake names. Oh, and a lot of the witnesses aren't returning their calls.
Movie theatres will not come back in small towns.
According to the New York Times, China is recruiting YouTubers to report on the country in a positive light and counter the West's increasingly negative perceptions. "The videos have a casual, homespun feel. But on the other side of the camera often stands a large apparatus of government organizers, state-controlled news media and other official amplifiers -- all part of the Chinese government's widening attempts to spread pro-Beijing messages around the planet," the report says. "State-run news outlets and local governments have organized and funded pro-Beijing influencers' travel, according to government documents and the creators themselves. They have paid or offered to pay the creators. They have generated lucrative traffic for the influencers by sharing videos with millions of followers on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook." Tech Dirt summarises The Times' findings
Prisoners who improvise their own penile implants face health concerns.
This week in data
The last 30 days of sea surface temperatures.
Unmarried photographer spends six months shooting a 700 mb photo of a distant exploding star.
Leaked SoCal hospital records reveal huge, automated markups for healthcare
Studies of children’s stories shows differences in Russian, US approaches to emotion
Intense shortwave in the jet stream brings the tropopause and jet stream nearly to the surface in the lee of the Rockies. Translation: Denver got a lot of wind.
Decoding dog tail wagging.
This week in science and tech
Know the way birds have brightly coloured beaks and feet? Well, it’s possible they got this from dinosaurs.
The paper you didn't know you needed: "Entanglement between superconducting qubits and a tardigrade"
Here’s how to give an electric eel an MRI
A group of U.S. lawmakers is asking the Treasury Department and State Department to sanction Israeli spyware firm NSO Group and three other foreign surveillance companies
Why dogs tilt their heads when appearing to think?
In the past three weeks, two major outages at Amazon's cloud computing service "led to widespread disruptions at other online services," reports NBC News. And they also cite June's "service configuration" issue at cloud CDN Fastly, which took countless sites offline including PayPal, Reddit and GitHub, and an AWS outage in November of 2020 which affected clients like Apple. "The drumbeat of issues underscores that the internet, despite all it's capable of, is sometimes fragile...." Well, you could try owning your own infrastructure instead of cheeping out...
This week in listening pleasure
The world of health and dieting is full of snake oil. But what is snake oil?
Do You Know Mordechai? - “Mordechai" is the name used by a Toronto conman who duped more than a dozen women into relationships based on an elaborate set of lies and deceptions.
There is a statistically significant increase in deaths in a city on the day it hosts a marathon. And it isn’t from participants; it is thought to be because of road closures.
She was one of the most powerful women in the Middle Ages, queen of both England and France and mother of two kings. She dominated the political arena during their reigns and a ghastly mother in law.
This week in viewing pleasure
As beautiful as huskies are, I will never, ever own one.
A good summary of stock market index basics.
For the record, elastics you hang in the doorway to exercise seem like a bad idea.
Man claims to have debunked Einstein and Newton
YouTube has decided to become television. This has meant siding with industry over their independent content creators. There are periodic waves of channels being taken down as large companies use automated tools to file frivolous complaints. We may be in the midst of another such wave.
LeCarré Christmas Viewing
Finally, some thoughtful soul uploaded the 1979 miniseries of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy about a KGB mole at the top of the British secret service, probably inspired by the Cambridge Five. It really is a glorious trip back in time to that generation of RADA actors.
Also, the 1982 follow up series Smiley's People shows how the spymaster brings down the KGB officer who planted the mole. (You may notice a certain future captain of the Enterprise.) Lecarré recalls how he created his character of George Smiley. Here's a longer interview with the author that's also good.
Because it's ad rem, posters from the Cold War from the eavesdropping agency the NSA.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Smiley's People
This week in unintended
Unintended Consequences
A cancer treatment known as Dynamic Phototherapy has the side effect of giving humans a slight level of night vision.
We Mistake Information We’ve Googled For Our Own Knowledge
There are two ways to go about using the DMCA as a content provider in order to keep copyright infringement at bay: the right and good way, or the bad and lazy way. The right and good way is to use DMCA takedown requests sparingly, to be very targeted in their use, and to do some minor legwork to ensure that the target is in fact an infringing actor. The wrong way is how most large companies go about it instead, which is to go on a DMCA blitz on multiple targets all at once, often timed around some big event or product release, and in a way that nearly always results in at least some collateral damage like delisting television stations.
This right here is what economists call "a perverse incentive": Billionaire's company caused the largest and longest-running oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It's been an ecological disaster for the Gulf and a tax windfall for her
The higher the profits at an old age home, the higher the mortality.
Unintended correlations
Biases against singles are different for women and men.
In a development that can no way possibly go wrong, microbes across the planet are rapidly evolving to eat plastic
Why don’t all politicians resort to antidemocratic tactics to stay in power?
This week's weird news
Dumb Criminals
You know "A good friend will help you move. A true friend will help you move a body." Turns out that's not actually what the law says
UK Shotgun Expert claims he 'only wanted to scare' his daughter's partner by firing a shotgun at him. Seeing as he shot him twice, I'd guess the young man was scared.
Strange Headlines
Stop me when it gets too weird: Man drives through Vegas airport fence. In a limo. Wearing a clown mask. Then makes a bomb threat. To try to commandeer a jet. To fly to Area 51. To see the aliens
Idiot Texas teacher says holocaust needs to be taught with opposing views.
A Tepid Distopia
Banking while black is apparently a problem.
Many things labelled HDMI 2.1 are not. Be careful.
You have an Instagram handle that Mark Zuckerberg wants. Do you A) sell it to him for a few million dollars B) keep your account, which has your life's work on it, or C) Wonder why it magically disappeared?
French woman bought a fake vaccine certificate. Caught COVID and showed her fake cert when she was admitted to the hospital. Got treated is if she had antibodies and earned a genuine death certificate.
Gov't accountability office says FBI should probably just give up the use of force reporting it never bothered doing
The Q-Anon antivaxxers are not a death cult. It’s much worse.
US borders services targeting reporters is nobody’s fault and not an official policy just something that happens so… we’re good right?
This Green Party of Canada person says Canada needs to jettison the US as a friend. I remember my first beer.
People watching
Study outlines ways to help children learn forgiveness
Johnny Cash is a hero to the right and left but his music took a side.
What is it about the phrase it is what it is?
In the golden age of New Hollywood, creators were given huge sums to take big risks, and it paid off. But movies have come under the control of hedge funds that specialize in risk aversion which is why films are bland.
Post of the week
China hasn't been on the rise for a while now. They've stalled, and that's with their apocalyptic demographic issues approaching. If you want some steady growth then you want investment (broadly) in India. China has largely DONE the thing they were going to do, which is industrialize and mimic Western success, but they have also completely failed to imitate the diplomatic success.
Currently China is busy constructing some very powerful anti-China alliances against itself. Authoritarian nations get trapped by this problem because their domestic authority is self justified by being bullies, they HAVE to be bullies.
Africa largely isn't getting it's shit together, isn't returning on investments, and looks like its going to miss its opportunity to stumble into 2nd world status, AS it gets robbed forever (but for real this time because modern tech allows total strip mining).
Such a tightly managed society like China could transform a reduction in population into higher GDP per capita (Japan has managed its soft glide very well), but the political class and economic elite of China have always operated like robber barons in a stand off with one another.
As for America. I think its clear that it's on the early road to breaking up (even though the ACTUAL political divide is largely rural vs urban). None of the highly malicious and unsympathetic factions are ever going to 'win' over the others. Shit look at what happened to the capital, and they STILL haven't dialled back any rhetoric. Republicans are stuck in an insane memetic death spiral and it's really a question of how THAT plays out.
China's got a massive demographic problem. Unlike other countries that solve it by increasing immigration to ensure there's a good balance between the working age group and the non-working age groups, China doesn't really have that option, since no one wants to live an authoritarian country.
Andy's notes
as long as China's building highways that end up like, this, we don't need to worry. Also, that they still don't want people abroad talking about a 30-year-old protest speaks volumes.
Also the Wikimedia Foundation banned seven high-level users in September and temporarily demoted a dozen others for abuses "unprecedented in scope and nature. a month long investigation found that the veteran editors were "coordinating to bias the encyclopedia and bias positions of authority" around a pro-Beijing viewpoint, in part by meddling in administrator elections and threatening, and even physically assaulting, other volunteers.
Wikipedians in China have it especially hard, because the government blocks the site and makes accessing it a crime.
Quotes found on-line
I hung up a Zoom meeting with about 20 colleagues by saying “Thanks. I love you". We’re soldiers.
I tested positive for COVID so I did what any responsible citizen would do: I attended an anti-mask/anti-vaccine rally
Maybe the real inflation is the friends we made along the way.
At the nudist community I attend to a very naked and very wise old lady said to me once: don't marry for the sex, marry for the talks. Because after a while neither of you want to have sex, but you want to talk even at 99 years old.
Urinals are a haven for us terrified of what's behind the hellish bathroom stall doors.
As a former medic, nobody “dies” in transport. Wink wink if you get my drift. Too much paperwork involved. You do compressions and push drugs until you pass them off to the nurse at the hospital. Then they die
I told my therapist I was suicidal. She told me to pay in advance.
Too bad irony can't be used as energy, we would have enough to travel to Jupiter.
Dogs lick you because they know bones are inside!
My great grandmother died of a brain aneurysm one night, watching her favourite TV show, eating cake. I always say that's exactly how I want to go. Was probably horrific for my great grandfather sitting next to her though.
I don't have to argue with anti-vaxxers. I just have to wait.
Most average people do not want criminal records. It inhibits your ability to get jobs, loans, etc. To average people, it is a bad thing. But to rich people, it absolutely doesn't matter if they have a criminal record and it is preferable to answering questions in court. Bannon and Meadows will be slightly inconvenienced with a few hours of jail time, court costs and fines, and criminal records. And that's okay to them. It will not effect their lives in any way.
Always entertaining to see completely innocent people work so hard to conceal any proof of their innocence.
One time in college, I dropped some acid and God told me exactly how matter and energy worked. When I sobered up, I explained what I’d “learned” to a friend who went onto take a double first in physics. He patiently explained the flaws in my understanding, before asking me “was it definitely God?” To which I replied “yes”. He just shook his head gently and said “God’s wrong then”.
Commercial fishing is killing our oceans at a faster rate than any other pollution combined. Fish today are only 10% by volume of what they were in the 1950s. And back then, they were already reduced to 10% of the amount in the 1800s.
People would rather sound right than be right
Lol, this whole movement brings the ignorance of the middle ages back in style!
Wife and I were camping all around eastern Ontario last summer and the number of thin blue line flags we saw was disconcerting. We were also wondering why so many country folk want to have sex with Trudeau.
No plan survives first contact with the enemy or a station wagon full of toddlers.
Cannibalism is his solution to most everything.
This is exactly what power does to people. And, we don't regularly check on people to see if they have become corrupt. We refuse to acknowledge that it is a work hazard, that we need to seek out and help people with
Nostalgia was so much better back in the day
Beach sex was always a huge fantasy of mine... until it happened. I never feel the need to do that again.
This assumes most of the population is made up of people. It isn't.
Similar thing happened to my roommate, but he was drunk and had lost his phone and wallet at a party before walking to the girl's house. When he got "mugged" down the street from her house, the guy actually felt bad for him and drove him back across the city to our apartment. When he dropped him off, he said, "You're lucky you lost your shit, I was mugging you but then felt like I needed to do my good deed for the day."
Congrats on the engagement, sorry your mom is crazy
It is amazing how many people have developed psychic powers in the past 20 years. They can tell a person's motives, and thoughts, with absolute certainty... Not accuracy, but certainty.
Ignorant people do not understand that science is not knowing it all, but that science is the way of how to orderly go from a state where you don't know anything to a state where we know a little bit more.
7 Days In May lied to me. Instead of arresting the coup plotters immediately as in the movie, in real life the government just dawdles over contempt charges for small fry until the fascists take over.
Why is a Hitler moustache taboo while a Hitler pube shave is acceptable?
I once saw a label on a chainsaw that read 'Do not use near extremities or genitalia'. I've always wondered about the exact circumstances that led to the last two words being included. Because you know that's there because some idiot castrated himself and then tried to sue the manufacturer.
One of my friends is pregnant. And I’m really excited. Not for the baby but because she’s one of my skinniest friends.
Funny from a man who is probably Narcan’s number one customer
The house is like a shadow. It's like a cavern. It's a gaping hole in the heart of what used to be a family.
Green eggs and ham by Dr. Seuss, shit changed my life
Most of Spielberg's instincts are fantastic. Some are horrible. People love Schindler's List. I think it plays out as Little Adventures in Misery. Not too deep in Spielberg's psyche is a Hallmark Card writer waiting to get out.
Is a blowjob considered junk food?
If anyone has any good fish puns, could you let minnow?
Can people stop telling us that we can self love ourselves out of wanting companionship! Eros & self love are two very different things, a person can love himself and still want romance, it doesn't make you less of person for desiring to be loved!
Any idea how to get the smell of fox piss out of the house?
Sorry everyone, that’s all I could look up in the allotted time sitting on the “I do my own research throne” (toilet)
Better then the Norwegians I suppose. Who needs spices when you can just chuck it in a barrel, bury the barrel, then dig up whatever fermented monstrosity you've created a decade later.
I'm waiting for the stats to drop and it turns out women used to be the perpetrators in like 2% of sexual assault cases and now they're 30% or whatever and I can write a thing about how we need to talk about how Toxic Femininity has led to this sharp increase.
When a dog has a nightmare put your hand in front of its nose. Your scent will make the dog think of you, which may turn the nightmare into something better and make your dog stop whining.
I am from a rural area of Scotland. I moved to London a decade ago and can hear the accents on everyone. Then one day I went into Starbucks and the barista there asked for my order and... The words just arrived in my brain. Like there was no carrier signal. I could detect no accent at all. I asked where he was from, and it turned out to be the wee village next to mine.
This is an awful, money-grubbing, lowest common denominator idea completely lacking in creative integrity. Which means it will definitely happen.
When I read this in Jane's and not the Daily Mail, I may care.
I was visiting a friend’s farm and tried petting the dog. Turns out that wasn’t the dog, it was a coyote. The coyote that mauled me. I have just had my first rabies shot. If someone could bring a charger and wire to the hospital that’d be great.
Missionary is like your go-to meal. Might not be the thing you tell people is your favorite when they ask, but you’re always real happy to have it.
Non runners have spotless running shoes.
Do not use cursive for log book entries!
If your life's work is best described as an Instagram handle, it's time to re-evaluate life.
An appeal isn't a do-over. It has to be based on actual misconduct of some sort during the trial. The defense can't really pursue an appeal based on the notion that, "Hey, we're complete, incompetent, bone-headed idiots so the trial's no good!"
In middle age my body seems able to extract four pints of urine from two pints of beer.
Sweden is the Canada of Europe
"Feisty" seems to be the new obituary codeword for saying someone was insufferable. "Center of every family gathering" = ruined many Thanksgivings.
Pretty sure Heaven is a gated community, but good luck, lady. Maybe Jesus loves cruel jokes about all those other people you hated.
I know the location of every free public toilet in any part of central London and my home town I might possibly need to use, and precisely how much coffee I can get away with to reduce the risk of needing them.
I'm a tiny woman with the grip strength of a gorilla
Monkees star Michael Nesmith died. I guess that leaves only Ringo.
I’d rather put myself through hell than God forbid, eat a carrot.
I wouldn’t trust these people to research a recipe for water.
I saw a man in the street interview about what the Dutch though of Canadians and while they are forever thankful of liberation they find we're fake nice too often, the Dutch have no filter they just tell you what they think matter of fact. They also get rather upset at us being a non-punctual culture. I had a Dutch friend and I had to talk her into not showing up for a party at the time the party officially started on the dot. Trying to explain to a Dutch person how she had to show up late for everything was as if I was explaining to her that we sacrificed babies on new year. I did manage to find her Chocolate Letters, stroopwafel, and kruidnoten for sinterklaas so that helped with the homesickness a bit.
I recently decided to sell my vacuum cleaner as all it was doing was gathering dust.
Luke Skywalker is my favorite hero that looks 100 percent prepared to figure skate at all times.
Every Scooby-Doo episode would literally be two minutes long if the gang went to the mask store first and asked a few questions.
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