Friday, December 18, 2020

The Federalist: Ring In Your Holidays By Buying All The Australian Wines The Chinese Won’t

No comments:
Ring In Your Holidays By Buying All The Australian Wines The Chinese Won’t
By Sumantra Maitra, December 18, 2020

In an escalating dispute, Australian Trade Minister Simon Birmingham is taking his nation’s quarrel with China to the World Trade Organization for its tariffs on Australian products.
...
Something else started it all. China, an imperial power throughout nearly its entire history, has finally realized that Australia is fit to be an outpost. The stubborn Aussie refusal to cave to China on all regional concerns eventually led to a crushing tariff over Australian wines.

I'm doing my part. My usual Shabbos wine is Teal Lake Shiraz.

Thursday, December 10, 2020

Upgrading A Mac System, part 3: Apps

1 comment:

In part 2 of this article series, I described the migration process to move all my stuff to the new computer. In this article, I want to share my experiences with application support. What just worked, what didn't work and what was easy and hard to make work.

As you probably know, the latest versions of macOS, starting from version 10.15 (Catalina), do not support 32-bit applications. No 32-bit application will work unless you run it on an older version of macOS (e.g. via a virtual machine). Apple has supported 64-bit applications for a very long time, and they have always been supported on Intel processors. Nevertheless, quite a lot of Mac apps in my possession were 32-bit. I'm not sure why, since 64-bit compilers were available on the Intel Mac platform since day-one.

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Krebs on Security: Ransomware Group Turns to Facebook Ads

No comments:
Ransomware Group Turns to Facebook Ads
Brian Krebs. November 10, 2020

It’s bad enough that many ransomware gangs now have blogs where they publish data stolen from companies that refuse to make an extortion payment. Now, one crime group has started using hacked Facebook accounts to run ads publicly pressuring their ransomware victims into paying up.

Just when you thought Facebook had hit rock bottom. Now their adware network is being used for criminal extortion. And they're not even refunding the money to the victims who had their accounts hijacked in the process.

So glad I drop-kicked them to the curb many years ago.

Monday, November 02, 2020

Upgrading A Mac System, part 2: Migration

No comments:

Photo credit: Derorgmas
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0


The Upgrading A Mac System series:

In part 1 of this article series, I explained why I needed to upgrade my old Mac, what I bought, and the shipping process.

Now that the computer had arrived, the next step was to move all of my data from the old computer to the new one. In the past, I did this the hard way - I manually created user accounts (an administrator, my personal account, and accounts for my wife and daughter). I then copied all of our documents over the LAN, manually installed all the software I require, ending up with a working system. The whole process usually takes a week or two, plus all the time needed to configure my preferences in everything.

This time, I decided to use Apple's Migration Assistant utility to speed up the process. This, as it turns out, was a mixed bag. Some parts of the migration worked flawlessly, and other parts made a mess I had to clean up after.

Saturday, October 31, 2020

Upgrading A Mac System, part 1: Hardware Purchase

No comments:

Photo credit: Derorgmas
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0


The Upgrading A Mac System series:

For the past 9 years, I have been using the same computer for my main home system, a Mid-2011 Mac mini server. Equipped with two 750 GB hard drives and 16 GB of RAM (upgraded from its original 4GB), it has served me very well. Originally shipped with macOS version 10.7 ("Lion"), it has been upgraded several times through macOS 10.12 ("Sierra"). Although still working great today, it has become increasingly obvious that it needs to be replaced.

The main reason is that its system software is no longer supported by Apple. Although I could theoretically get a bit more support by upgrading to macOS 10.13 ("High Sierra"), that's still an old version and it has many known problems that I don't want to have to deal with. More recent versions of macOS are not compatible with this hardware and therefore can't be installed.

Another bigger problem is that some of my applications can't be upgraded. In particular, Microsoft Office dropped support for macOS 10.12. In order to get any new updates, including security updates, I need to move on to a newer version of macOS.

Finally, it's a bit slow. Modern versions of macOS make heavy use of the file system and a SATA hard drive, no matter how well it performs, just can't keep up these days. An SSD is really required for good performance. I could replace the hard drives with SSDs, of course, but that wouldn't solve the other two problems, so it became time to shop for a new Mac.

Thursday, September 24, 2020

Using a Raspberry Pi for basic network services, Part 4: DNS server

No comments:

Photo credit: Michael Henzler
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0


The Raspberry Pi for basic Networking services series:

In previous articles, I described how to set up a Raspberry Pi computer to act as a DHCP server and how to configure it to serve static IP addresses. But this is only half of the solution.

If all your computers are only used to access Internet sites, then you may not need anything more, but if you run any services on your LAN, you will want to access them as well as Internet services. Some examples of services I run on my LAN include:

  • Printer. My printer has a built-in Ethernet interface and acts as a print server for the entire LAN.
  • Web server. Two of my computers are running web server software. I use these for documents that I want to make available to all the computers in my home. In the past, when I ran an Internet-accessible web site, I used my local web servers as a staging area for changes before uploading them to the main server.
  • File servers. Several of my computers have file sharing enabled so I can copy files between my computers.
  • Remote access. Several computers run different remote access tools including SSH, VNC, X2Go and others. This lets me access everything from anywhere in the house.

When accessing a remote service, you need to provide the machine's name or IP address. If you've got a small LAN, you can just type in the address. Or you can set up hosts files on your computers to assign names to the addresses. But once you get more than a trivial number of devices on your network, those two solutions quickly become unmanageable. As I wrote in part 1, I've got 26 active devices on my LAN and many more that are rarely used. Using hosts files really doesn't work because every computer needs to be updated whenever the content changes and some devices (especially embedded devices like set-top boxes and mobile phones) don't even have a hosts file that can be managed.

But there is a well-established solution to the problem. The solution is to use the DNS protocol.

Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Time for a new Mac

No comments:

After many many years of using a Mac I purchased in 2011, it's finally time to upgrade to a new one. I just placed an order with Apple and I expect to have it in a week or two. The new computer will be much faster than the old one, but it will be missing a few I/O ports and the new version of macOS it runs will be pretty different.

Tuesday, September 01, 2020

How to deal with a patent troll

No comments:
Lawsuit accusing entire computer industry of patent infringement fails on missed deadline
By Mike Peterson, Apple Insider. September 1, 2020

A lawsuit that accused essentially the entire computer industry of patent infringement has been dismissed because an opening brief wasn't filed by the deadline.

In September 2019, plaintiff Mers Kutt filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. It alleged $350 billion in damages against more than 40 technology companies, telecom providers, and financial firms, among others. Apple was included at the top of the list.

After a majority of those companies filed opposing orders, a judge in March 2020 dismissed the case with prejudice. Kutt appealed that decision, but apparently failed to file an opening brief by a July 2 deadline. The lawsuit was tossed on Sept. 1.

In other words:

  • Patent troll sues everybody in the universe for a quarter of a trillion dollars
  • Everybody in the universe tells him to get bent and a judge agrees
  • Patent troll claims he will appeal, but instead slinks off to his cave, not even bothering to file the paperwork to continue his suit
This is the only way to handle a bully. Don't settle out of court. Don't pay a penny. Force him to defend his idiocy and watch him back down. The last thing a troll wants is an actual fight.

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Just The News: KFC to temporarily suspend use of slogan 'It's Finger Lickin' Good' amid pandemic

No comments:
KFC to temporarily suspend use of slogan 'It's Finger Lickin' Good' amid pandemic
By Alex Nitzberg. Updated: August 24, 2020 - 8:09pm

The Kentucky Fried Chicken fast food chain on Monday announced that it will temporarily stop using its decades-old slogan, "It's Finger Lickin' Good," in advertising because the slogan does not seem appropriate amid the ongoing public health crisis.

Ummmm.... Are people aware of the fact that you're only supposed to be licking your own fingers?

Friday, August 21, 2020

Just The News: Russian cosmonaut wonders if he saw UFO's while aboard International Space Station

No comments:
Russian cosmonaut wonders if he saw UFO's while aboard International Space Station
By Alex Nitzberg. Updated: August 20, 2020 - 6:37pm

Russian cosmonaut Ivan Vagner on Thursday posted a video from the International Space Showing showing a time-lapse of the aurora borealis, but he also highlighted the presence of other points of interest in the footage.

In the video, a row of what appears to be several small dots of light briefly appear and then vanish again.

Vagner asked people on Twitter what they thought it could be: "At 9-12 seconds, 5 objects appear flying alongside with the same distance. What do you think those are? Meteors, satellites or…?"

He definitely saw a UFO - whatever it was was flying and is (so far) unidentified. Probably not an alien spacecraft, but some kind of natural phenomenon, but definitely unidentified and flying.

Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Horowitz: Coronavirus hospitalizations down to lowest levels of pandemic. So where is our exit strategy?

No comments:
Coronavirus hospitalizations down to lowest levels of pandemic. So where is our exit strategy?
Daniel Horowitz, Conservative Review. August 18, 2020

It’s now becoming clear, from every state and country that has reached saturation levels of the virus, that the virus burns out roughly around the 20% seroprevalence benchmark, not at the 80% threshold the fearmongers predicted. Whether it’s Sweden, New York, or Arizona, the virus is going to do what it does – meaning it spreads for about six weeks in a given region and then moves on. The only question is whether we will continue to destroy our society, mental health, and economy or achieve herd immunity without adding the man-made death toll. Herd immunity is going to happen, whether we aim for it or not.

Please read the entire article. It's full of hard facts and statistics that the media has been actively suppressing in order to keep you panicked and afraid.

Friday, August 14, 2020

Using a Raspberry Pi for basic network services, Part 3: Static IP addresses

No comments:

Photo credit: Michael Henzler
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0


The Raspberry Pi for basic Networking services series:

In part 2 of this series, I described how to set up a DHCP server on a Raspberry Pi so it can allocate and serve dynamic IP addresses. But sometimes you need a static address, where a given device always gets the same well-known address.

One obvious solution is to just disable the DHCP client on the device and manually configure its IP address and other networking credentials. This works well for many devices, especially desktop and laptop computers, but it is not without problems.

Tuesday, August 11, 2020

Using a Raspberry Pi for basic network services, Part 2: DHCP Server

2 comments:

Photo credit: Michael Henzler
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0


The Raspberry Pi for basic Networking services series:

Every computer on a LAN needs an IP address in order to communicate with anything else. While you can manually configure each device with a hard-coded ("static") address, this can be inconvenient and sometimes difficult. Especially for small IoT devices like smart appliances.

A long time ago, in the 1980's, several different technologies were invented so devices could be configured from a centralized location, without needing explicit on-device configuration of IP addresses and related information. The DHCP protocol was invented in 1993 and remains the most common mechanism in use today.

Using a Raspberry Pi for basic network services, Part 1

No comments:

Photo credit: Michael Henzler
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0


The Raspberry Pi for basic Networking services series:

If you're like me, your home network is a bit more complicated than just providing Internet access to a laptop and a few mobile devices.

My network, for example, has two desktop computers, five laptops, three tablets, four phones, a Raspberry Pi, an iPod Touch, two Kindle book readers, a printer, a smart TV, a DVR, three game consoles, an Apple TV and an Internet-connected Hi-Fi amplifier. That's 26 devices and I haven't even mentioned the cable modem, the router or any of my older devices that are rarely turned on.

Additionally, although most devices access Internet services, many of these devices access each other. For instance, the two desktop computers are running servers for web pages, file sharing, music sharing and remote login.

When you've got a network this big, the factory default configuration that comes with your router, whether purchased or provided by your ISP, just isn't going to cut it.

Thursday, August 06, 2020

New York City: It will cost you $10,000 to visit our city

No comments:
NYC Mayor de Blasio sets up COVID-19 quarantine checkpoints at city's bridges and tunnels, threatens violators with $10,000 fines
Chris Field, The Blaze. August 05, 2020

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city would be seriously cracking down on anyone coming from the nearly three dozen states that Gov. Andrew Cuomo has placed on a must-quarantine list.

The mayor's crackdown includes randomized checks at bridges and tunnels into the city as well as fines of up to $10,000 for failing to follow quarantine orders.

The mayor declared during a press briefing Wednesday that New York would be immediately instituting a number of checkpoints at major city entry points, WINS-AM reported. The goal is to make sure that people traveling into the city from Cuomo's travel advisory list understand that they must quarantine themselves for 14 days.

Does anyone else think that this is the first step on the road permanently sealing off New York City from the rest of the world a-la that dumb 80's movie, Escape From new York?

Monday, August 03, 2020

IEEE Spectrum: High Performance Ornithopter Drone Is Quiet, Efficient, and Safe

No comments:
High Performance Ornithopter Drone Is Quiet, Efficient, and Safe
By Evan Ackerman. Posted 03 Aug 2020 | 19:50 GMT

In Science Robotics last week, a group of roboticists from Singapore, Australia, China, and Taiwan described a new design for a flapping-wing robot that offers enough thrust and control authority to make stable transitions between aggressive flight modes—like flipping and diving—while also being able to efficiently glide and gently land. While still more complex than a quadrotor in both hardware and software, this ornithopter’s advantages might make it worthwhile.

...
With the ability to take off, hover, glide, land softly, maneuver acrobatically, fly quietly, and interact with its environment in a way that’s not (immediately) catastrophic, flapping-wing drones easily offer enough advantages to keep them interesting. Now that ornithopters been shown to be even more efficient than rotorcraft, the researchers plan to focus on autonomy with the goal of moving their robot toward real-world usefulness.

The flight patterns of this ornithopter remind me a bit of what some pilots have described during UFO sightings. Which makes me wonder if the Air Force was experimenting with them back in the 50's and 60's.

Friday, July 31, 2020

IEEE Spectrum: Video Game Approved as Prescription Medicine

No comments:
Video Game Approved as Prescription Medicine
By Mark Anderson. 31 Jul 2020 | 15:00 GMT

U.S. Drug safety agency says EndeavorRx has proven therapeutic effect


On 15 June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced its approval of a first-person racing game called EndeavorRx. Boston-based Akili Interactive Labs, maker of the game, says its racer was originally licensed from the lab of Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. The company touts four peer-reviewed studies (in PLOS One, The Lancet Digital Health, The Journal of Autism, and Developmental Disorders) as well as one paper in process as support for its claims that EndeavorRx significantly improves clinical markers of attention in patients with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).

“EndeavorRx looks and feels like a traditional game, but it’s very different,” says Matt Omernick, Akili cofounder and the company’s chief creative officer. “EndeavorRx uses a video-game experience to present specific sensory stimuli and simultaneous motor challenges designed to target and activate the prefrontal cortex of the brain.... As a child progresses in game play, the technology is continuously measuring their performance and using adaptive algorithms to adjust the difficulty and personalize the treatment experience for each individual.”

But is it a fun game? And can you get it without a prescription?

I'm reminded of the early days of Sesame Street. The show was originally invented for the purpose of providing remedial education for those students that couldn't keep up in school. An unexpected bonus was that it also improved the education of students that were not having problems in school.

I wonder if this could end up being similar. While designed to help people with ADHD, I wonder if it could improve various mental/cognitive skills in people without ADHD. And if it's a fun game, then there's really no downside.

Thursday, July 30, 2020

CBS News: Vote-by-mail experiment reveals potential problems within postal voting system ahead of November election

No comments:
Vote-by-mail experiment reveals potential problems within postal voting system ahead of November election
CBS News. July 24, 2020, 8:58 AM

Many Americans are expected to vote by mail for the first time in November 2020 because of coronavirus concerns, so "CBS This Morning" sent out 100 mock ballots, simulating 100 voters in locations across Philadelphia, in an experiment to see how long one should give themselves to make sure their vote counts.
...
For the experiment, a P.O. box was set up to represent a local election office. A few days after the initial ballots were mailed, 100 more were sent.

The mock ballots used the same size envelope and same class of mail as real ballots, and even had mock votes folded in to approximate the weight. The biggest difference: real mail-in ballots have a logo that is meant to expedite them. "CBS This Morning" was unable to include [it in] the trial.

A week after initial ballots were sent, most ballots appeared to be missing from the P.O. box.
...
Out of the initial batch mailed a week earlier, 97 out of 100 votes had arrived. Three simulated persons, or 3% of voters, were effectively disenfranchised by mail by giving their ballots a week to arrive. In a close election, 3% could be pivotal.

Four days after mailing the second batch of mock ballots, 21% of the votes hadn't arrived.

Needless to say, I am not surprised by this. And neither are the Philadelphia residents CBS interviewed. In the video, everybody interviewed said that they wouldn't trust the post office with something as important as their vote. Election officials work very hard to make sure they count every vote they receive by the deadline, but they have no way to make sure the ballots are delivered to them on time.

I, myself, have had critical mail go missing. Not a vote, but one of my estimated tax payments went missing last year. I had to have my bank issue a stop-payment on the cheque and mail another. I'm just glad the government didn't force me to pay a penalty after that screw-up.

My advice to you:

  • If you have to mail something important, send it two weeks before it needs to arrive. Consider paying for a return receipt (as proof that it was delivered) and/or sending it priority mail in order to increase the odds of on-time delivery.
  • Vote in person. I know everybody is worried about getting the coronavirus, but unless you're in a high-risk category, the risk is going to be very low. Especially if you keep your distance from others. I don't know about all locations, but where I live, polling places enforce social distancing. It's less risky than going to the grocery store. If you're OK with going out shopping, then you should be OK with going to vote.

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Red State: The 1619 Project’s Creator Admits It’s Not Really History

No comments:
The 1619 Project’s Creator Admits It’s Not Really History
Posted at 11:45 am on July 27, 2020 by Joe Cunningham

The 1619 Project, an ideologically-driven revisionist history of the United States, has been getting a lot of attention over the last several days as Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton threatened legislation to defund any school that uses any curriculum based on it.
...
Nikole Hannah-Jones took to Twitter Monday morning to walk back the assertion that the 1619 Project was “a history,” insisting that it was a project of journalism:

"I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past."

That tweets here are part of a larger thread where Hannah-Jones tries to clarify the purpose of the project. However, the treatment of the 1619 Project has been pushed by her, the New York Times, and supporters as THE definitive history of the United States, arguing that the “true” history of the nation stemmed from the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619, rather than from the actual Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and the subject structuring of the United States Constitution.

Now that the author herself admits that this entire "project" is nothing but revisionist history propaganda, can we stop mandating that the public schools teach it our children?

Sunday, July 26, 2020

Red State: Mike Rowe Answers a Fan Letter About COVID-19 — It Probably Wasn’t the Answer They Expected

No comments:
Mike Rowe Answers a Fan Letter About COVID-19 — It Probably Wasn’t the Answer They Expected
by Becca Lower. 10:00 am on July 24, 2020

[A] fan asked Mike a question about the Wuhan coronavirus… and I’m not too sure she got the answer she expected.

She wrote:

“Mike. In a recent post, you said you’ve been to Tennessee and Georgia, giving speeches and filming for your new show. Before that, you were on the road shooting for Dirty Jobs. Is it really so important to film a television show in the midst of pandemic? Is it responsible of you to encourage this kind of behavior when infection rates are spiking? Don’t you watch the news? More and more cases every day – aren’t you concerned?

The answer is far too long to re-post here, but please go and read the entire article to see Mike's wonderfully well thought-out answer. You may not want to change anything you're doing after reading it, but hopefully it will help you replace media-hyped fear with facts and reasoned analysis.

Fox Business: FBI warns US companies about Chinese tax software embedded with hidden malware

No comments:
FBI warns US companies about Chinese tax software embedded with hidden malware
By Michael Ruiz. July 24, 2020

Weeks after a cybersecurity firm uncovered backdoor malware embedded in mandatory Chinese tax software, the FBI is reportedly warning U.S. companies doing business in China.

The software imposes a major security risk on victim companies – requiring them to use one of only two approved programs to pay their taxes – both of which have been found embedded with vulnerabilities, according to Trustwave, the cybersecurity firm.

Due to the comprimised security issues, the FBI sent out a warning Thursday to companies in the health care, chemical and finance industries, the technology news outlet ZDNet reported.

Quck summary. In order to do business in China, you are legally required to run certain specific software programs in order to pay Chinese taxes. This software is infected with malware, which installs backdoors into the computer, granting access to all of its files and all of its network connections. The data is being sent to unknown servers in China.

Tell me again, why companies continue to think it's a good idea to conduct business in China? You get cheap labor and the potential for Chinese sales in excahge for what? The Chinese government stealing all of your confidential data, including your trade secrets and financial information. Can anyone honestly claim that this is an acceptable cost?

Friday, July 24, 2020

IEEE Spectrum: How to Look People in the Eye While Videoconferencing

No comments:
How to Look People in the Eye While Videoconferencing
By David Schneider. 24 Jul 2020 | 19:00 GMT

Many of us are spending more time videoconferencing than we’ve ever done before. And that situation probably won’t be changing anytime soon.

One thing that’s become painfully obvious to me during the past few months is that some people are more conscientious than others about how they present themselves. The worst offenders position themselves in front of a window, forcing others to view them in silhouette and making me wonder whether I’m in a business meeting or watching “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”

I try to avoid such obvious videoconferencing faux pas. But there’s one fundamental awkwardness that no amount of strategic laptop positioning can solve: not being able to make eye contact with other participants because they, like me, are looking at their screens rather than their Web cameras. Everyone appears to be casting their gaze downward, as if bored or perhaps telling a lie. It’s nearly impossible to avoid that annoying tendency—not without some drastic action.

The action in my case was to construct something I’d seen featured on Hackaday, a gizmo designed by a video blogger that makes clever use of a semitransparent mirror—basically the same strategy used for teleprompters but at a fraction of the cost and with materials I could easily scavenge or order. With such a mirror, you can view the screen straight on while also looking directly at an external webcam. This contraption, which I’ve taken to calling my Zoom Box, allows me to look other people right in the eye while in a Zoom or Webex meeting with them.

Awesome bit of geekery. A must-have device for anyone that regularly uses video conferencing.

The Federalist: Segregated Denver Yoga Chain Shut Down For Insufficient Wokeness

No comments:
Segregated Denver Yoga Chain Shut Down For Insufficient Wokeness
By Tristan Justice. July 24, 2020

If one still needed more proof that there’s no pleasing our new woke overlords, look no further than the story of an exhaustively woke Denver-based yoga chain that just wasn’t woke enough despite its business being the wokest of the woke.

Last month, “Kindness Yoga,” which held person-of-color and LGBTQ-only nights where “white friends and allies” were not invited, was forced to shut down its nine studios and lay off 160 employees following online outrage from now-former teachers charging the franchise with “performative activism” and “tokenization of Black and brown bodies.”

Once again, reality proves that you can't win by surrendering to the mob. Eventually, the mob will chew you up and spit you out, leaving you to wonder how it is possible, since you gave in to all their demands.

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Big League Politics: Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler SHAMED By Leftist Mob After Appearing at Protest

No comments:
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler SHAMED By Leftist Mob After Appearing at Protest
By Richard Moorhead.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler made an appearance at one of the city’s nightly left-wing protests, which frequently devolve into violent riots, on Wednesday. It didn’t go well, with the crowd of leftists berating Wheeler, surrounding the Democratic mayor, cursing him out, and at one point dumping a bag of metal objects in front of him.

Let this be a lesson to elected leaders everywhere. Giving in to an anarchist mob will not work. They will hate you no matter what you do.

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

IEEE Spectrum: Handheld Vagus Nerve Stimulator Gets Emergency Approval for COVID-19 Use

No comments:
Handheld Vagus Nerve Stimulator Gets Emergency Approval for COVID-19 Use
By Samuel K. Moore. 22 Jul 2020 | 16:30 GMT

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted an emergency use authorization for treating suspected COVID-19 patients with a non-invasive vagus nerve stimulator. The handheld device, made by electroCore, in Basking Ridge, N.J., sends a train of electric pulses through the skin to a nerve in the neck. Research has shown this pulse train causes airways in the lungs to open and may also have a more general anti-inflammatory effect.

According to FDA’s authorization, the gammaCore Sapphire CV device can be used either at home or in a clinic or hospital to “acutely treat adult patients with known or suspected COVID-19 who are experiencing exacerbation of asthma-related [shortness of breath] and reduced airflow, and for whom approved drug therapies are not tolerated or provide insufficient symptom relief.”

This is a really cool piece of tech. Now I wonder how many different conditions this device might be able to treat using different frequencies and power levels.

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Jerusalem Post: Star of David deemed 'hateful imagery' by Twitter

No comments:
Star of David deemed 'hateful imagery' by Twitter
By Donna Rachel Edmunds. July 21, 2020 20:58

The Star of David has been deemed "hateful imagery" by Twitter, which is locking the accounts of users who display it in their profile pictures.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism has reported that several Twitter users have contacted them in recent days to report that their accounts had been locked by the social media platform. The reason given? According to messages they received from Twitter: "We have determined that this account violated the Twitter Rules. Specifically for: Violating our rules against posting hateful imagery. You may not use hateful images or symbols in your profile image or profile header. As a result, we have locked your account."

The images in question ranged from a white Star of David in a graffiti style, to a superimposition of the modern blue star on the flag of Israel spliced with the yellow star Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis, to a montage of yellow stars.

Does anyone still want to claim Twitter is not anti-semitic?

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Horowitz: New study: Millennials think their risk from COVID-19 is exponentially more than the true threat

No comments:
New study: Millennials think their risk from COVID-19 is exponentially more than the true threat
By Daniel Horowitz. July 14, 2020

Four researchers published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research studying people’s perceived personal health risks associated with COVID-19. The most striking result of their survey of 1,500 Americans from May 6 to May 13 is that the younger the age of the respondent, the more the individual seemed concerned about the virus being deadly to them – the exact inverse of the true threat assessment of the virus.
...
When asked by the four researchers, who hail from Harvard, Oxford, and Università Bocconi, out of “1,000 people very similar to you” how many would die from COVID-19 over the next nine weeks, the median estimated guess by respondents aged 18-34 was 20, or 2%. In other words, the average Millennial thought that 2% of everyone like them would die within nine weeks from the virus. In contrast, in contrast, the respondents aged 70 years or older, which is exponentially more at risk, asses their risk of dying at about 1%.

What is the infection fatality rate (IFR) for younger people? The CDC estimates a 0.05% IFR for everyone in the age cohort of 0-49. Other estimates based on Spain serology tests broken down by age suggest an even lower IFR for those 18-49.

The article goes on to point out that people in this age group routinely engage in behaviors that are stastically far more likely to result in death or injury. But they don't consider it a big deal, in large part because they don't have social media constantly hyping the dangers of these activities.

Which pretty much confirms what I've been saying for quite a while. The media and social media is massively exaggerating the deadliness of this disease and people are basing life-affecting decisions on these inflated figures.

Exaggerating a disease and demonizing those who disagree with the exaggeration may get you more viewers and it might even convince some people to change who they vote for in November, but it is ultimately destructive to the entire population that these articles claim to be trying to help.

Monday, July 13, 2020

Eclectic Light: Face masks, face screens, and breathing

No comments:
Face masks, face screens, and breathing
By hoakley.

There’s no more controversial issue in the prevention of Covid-19 than face masks. Unfortunately, as is so often the case now, a great deal of nonsense and non-science has been spread, and has been passed around as dogma. This article looks at one often-neglected area: face masks, screens, and the mechanics of breathing. Can a face mask cause difficulty breathing? Do masks result in the build-up of carbon dioxide? And why isn’t there good research into face masks?
...
It’s incredibly frustrating that the type of face mask most commonly worn by the public has been the subject of such little research. There are good and careful studies of the potential benefits of clinical masks, including ‘regular’ and N95 types, but next to nothing on cloth masks.
...
Until people understand face masks, screens, breathing and protection this will just remain a mess of disinformation and misunderstanding. It’s also an invaluable surrogate for politicians: maintaining isolation and distancing has high economic costs; shifting responsibility onto people to choose and use protective masks instead costs the state almost nothing, and puts the blame onto the wearer if they still get or spread Covid-19. The moral is surely that, outside of care settings, you should maintain full distancing and hygiene regardless, and that a mask can then only augment your protection. The moment that you rely on your mask as sole protection you have lost control of the risk.

You should definitely read the complete article. There's a lot of very good information about the nature of breathing, and what clinical masks can and can not do.

It also shows that recent laws and executive orders mandating masks in public (and in stores, and restaurants, and everywhere else) are simply "security theater". They look good on camera for the press, but don't actually accomplish anything.

The fact that all of these state orders demand that clinical masks be reserved for health-care professionals and first responders, and that everybody else is required to use cloth masks, including home-made masks and bandannas, means that large percentages of the population, while complying with orders, are not accomplishing anything and are at just as much risk as they would be by not wearing a mask at all.

But it is a really good excuse to punish people who choose to refuse to obey these (frequently illegal and unconstitutional) orders. The mask may not do a thing to protect your health, but if you can be arrested and subject to a $500 fine for non-compliance, then you're probably going to wear them anyway.

Thursday, July 09, 2020

Richard Moorhead: Endangered California Condor Seen in Sequoia National Park for the First Time in 50 Years

No comments:
Endangered California Condor Seen in Sequoia National Park for the First Time in 50 Years
Richard Moorhead, Big League Politics.

One of the most endangered animals in the United States has been observed in a national park that is part of its historical range. The National Park and U.S. Fish and Wildlife services confirmed in a joint statement that six California Condors have been seeing flying above the Sequoia National Park in Eastern California.

The birds were also photographed by park personnel.

Awesome. Still not many of them in the wild, but a lot more than in the not-too-distant past.

Monday, July 06, 2020

Daniel Payne: Fauci omits context, feeds alarm with warning of 100,000 coronavirus infections a day

No comments:
Fauci omits context, feeds alarm with warning of 100,000 coronavirus infections a day
By Daniel Payne, Just The News. July 5, 2020 - 10:29pm

Dr. Anthony Fauci testified before the Senate this week that the United States could soon see as many as 100,000 new coronavirus cases per day, feeding alarmist narratives that have spread rapidly through the media: Surging COVID-19 infections, hospital systems under strain, and the prospect of a "second wave" of the virus potentially throwing much of the nation back into open-ended lockdowns.

Yet estimates cited by other U.S. public health authorities and academic researchers indicate we may have already far surpassed 100,000 new infections per day, the vast majority of them mild and/or asymptomatic. If so, the U.S. would now be significantly closer to herd immunity — and the end of the pandemic — than widely assumed.
...
Serology tests across the globe have pointed to infection rates anywhere from 16 to 80 times higher than confirmed numbers. Even the lower end of those projections would again point to daily infection rates vastly higher than what health officials are recording now.

The exact extent of the coronavirus pandemic will almost certainly never be known: Even viral outbreaks as regular and predictable as seasonal influenza, for example, are indexed primarily through estimates rather than actual observed cases. But it is increasingly clear that the disease is nowhere near as deadly as feared several months ago, and that it may have infected tens of millions of people with only a small percentage of them even noticing.

In other words, figures don't lie, but liars can figure.

Or, never let facts get in the way of a scary political narrative.

Thursday, July 02, 2020

Daniel Horowitz: More evidence that most coronavirus cases are now weaker than the flu

No comments:
More evidence that most coronavirus cases are now weaker than the flu
Daniel Horowitz, Conservative Review. July 1, 2020

Evidence continues to mount that the new infections throughout much of the country are extremely mild, with the exception of some serious cases coming over the border from Mexico. Those two facts continue to be obscured from our policy debate over containing the virus in the southern states. The governors of California, Arizona, and Texas refuse to recognize that the mild nature of these cases is good news going forward, and they continue to ignore the threat of serious cases from the border.
...
As I pointed out regarding Florida, cases have been spiking for weeks, yet the deaths and numbers of serious cases are not rising. ... Also, much of the increase is superficial and illusory because of mass testing, multiple tests to return to work, and people coming back to the hospitals for normal care that was previously suspended. Such patients are automatically tested for the virus, regardless of their reason for admission. It appears that the virus has now spread to younger people but is also milder than it was when it first hit in earnest in March and April.
...
what we are seeing in Texas and elsewhere is actually a fulfillment of what we all hoped for – a flattened curve of mild cases and hospitals that are able to handle severe cases, but ultimately few deaths. “Overall, based upon what we are seeing at our facilities, the above information is really more of a positive story,” wrote the emergency clinic executive to Berenson. “You have more people who are testing positive with minimal symptoms. This means that the fatality rate is less than commonly reported.”

This article is far too big to properly summarize in a few paragraphs. Please go and read the full article to get the whole story.

This is great news. What we are seeing (outside of the New York metropolitan area) is exactly what we were hoping for. A flattened curve where the hospitals are able to handle the severe cases and everybody else is able to recover on their own. Most of the rest you're hearing in the news is just political grandstanding for the November election and has nothing at all to do with public safety.

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

The Federalist: Dutch Doctor Exonerated After Euthanizing An Unwilling Patient

No comments:
Dutch Doctor Exonerated After Euthanizing An Unwilling Patient
By Georgi Boorman. June 23, 2020

The Dutch doctor who euthanized a 74-year old dementia patient against her will and was exonerated of all charges gave a televised interview recently, in which she defended her actions as “for the best.”

The 2016 incident caused an uproar, in no small part because the doctor began the euthanization process by secretly drugging her patient’s coffee. The horror didn’t end there. When the patient woke up and resisted the lethal injection, now-retired geriatric specialist Marinou Arends asked a relative to hold her down so she could administer the fatal dose.

The patient had two previous directives stating she wanted to be euthanized “when the time was ripe,” but had explicitly declined to be euthanized three times leading up to her death. To Arends, however, ending the patient’s suffering was more important than doing what the patient said she wanted.
...
The Dutch Supreme Court ruled on this case that patients with advanced dementia, who are legally incompetent, can be euthanized according to advanced directives. Whether this cautions people against giving advanced consent ahead of dementia, knowing they are the mercy of their physician, remains to be seen.

But if being unhappy is “unbearable suffering,” then the expectation for people who’ve written advance directives, particularly the elderly and sick, is clear: Smile and don’t complain, or risk lethal injection.

In other words, if you make it in any way legal for the medical system to kill you or "pull the plug", then doctors can literally get away with murder. After all, once she's dead, nobody can know what was the actual desire of an old woman with dementia, so the doctors can make up whatever they want and the courts will uphold it.

Yes, I know this is in Denmark, but can anyone seriously believe that the same sitation couldn't possibly happen anywhere else, including the United States? I know I wouldn't trust a US court (including the Supreme Court) to uphold my right to life if doing so should be politically incorrect.

Monday, June 22, 2020

The Federalist: Shootings, Violence Jump In Cities Where Mayors Have Restrained Police

No comments:
Shootings, Violence Jump In Cities Where Mayors Have Restrained Police
June 21, 2020 By Jordan Davidson

Activist campaigns against police to have accelerated in the wake of a violent altercation between police and George Floyd that prefaced his death. In response, mayors of several cities have reduced police presence. This has led in several cases to dramatic increases in violent crime.

Does this come as a surprise to anybody?

Friday, June 19, 2020

Thursday, June 18, 2020

Townhall: Fauci Admits Why Americans Were Initially Misled About Wearing Masks

No comments:
Fauci Admits Why Americans Were Initially Misled About Wearing Masks
Leah Barkoukis. Posted: Jun 17, 2020 8:40 AM

At the start of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., federal officials told the public they did not need to wear face masks. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said they only made people feel better but were pretty much pointless.
...
As time went on, the tone changed, and Americans were encouraged to wear face masks, with many places requiring them.

Now Fauci has admitted that the reason Americans were initially discouraged from using them is because there was a shortage, as Adams acknowledged in the second part of his February tweet.

In other words, the US government deliberately lied to the people.

How many other things have they lied about? And, knowing this, how can we trust anything they say?

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Naked Security: eBay staff charged with cyberstalking, sending fetal pig and spiders

No comments:
eBay staff charged with cyberstalking, sending fetal pig and spiders
By Lisa Vaas.

This is a Halloween mask depicting the face of a bloody pig:

It’s not pretty, but at least it doesn’t scurry. You can’t say the same for the other packages sent in a cyberstalking campaign allegedly orchestrated by eBay management and targeted at a Natick, Massachusetts couple who run an online e-commerce newsletter that’s sometimes critical of eBay.

According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), the mask was one of multiple threatening packages sent by the e-behemoth’s (now former) employees as part of a cyberstalking campaign to bully the couple into closing down their newsletter, the name of which was redacted in court documents. Other packages included a preserved fetal pig, live spiders, fly larvae, a funeral wreath, a book on surviving the loss of a spouse, a box of live cockroaches, and a copy of the porn magazine Hustler: Barely Legal that was addressed to the Natick couple but sent to their neighbors’ homes.

On Monday, the office of Massachusetts US Attorney Andrew Lelling announced that six former eBay employees have been charged with “aggressive” cyberstalking of the couple, including some of them coming up with an excuse to fly in to Boston in order to rent a van and drive out to Natick to conduct covert surveillance.

I have never liked eBay corporation very much, but this is a new low even for them.

What's next? Maybe they'll decide to start SWATting people critical of their business practices?

How is any of this different from the acts of hardened criminals? Are they running a legitimate business or are they petty thugs with million-dollar paychecks? I hope lots of people do lots of jail time for this.

Monday, June 15, 2020

Jerusalem Post: Cabinet OKs next step towards ‘Trump Heights’ town

No comments:
Cabinet OKs next step towards ‘Trump Heights’ town
By LAHAV HARKOV, JUNE 15, 2020

The cabinet voted in favor of the initial budget for establishing a new town in the Golan Heights named for US President Donald Trump on Sunday, which is his 74th birthday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted the steps towards establishing “Trump Heights” at the start of the meeting, noting that the current US administration recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

I think this is a textbook definition of poking your finger in the eye of liberals worldwide. They hate Israel, hate Jews and hate Trump. So they're going to really lose their collective minds over this.

Way to go, Netanyahu!

Thursday, May 28, 2020

Conservative Review: Could half the uninfected population already be partially immune?

No comments:
Horowitz: Bombshell study: Could half the uninfected population already be partially immune?
Daniel Horowitz, May 27, 2020

Could nearly half the population not already infected with SARS-CoV-2 be immune to it from having already contracted other forms of coronavirus in recent years?

That is one implication of a major study conducted by over a dozen researchers from several microbiology and immunology institutions in the U.S.

The purveyors of panic are warning of a second wave of the virus and that even if we are correct in asserting that the general fatality rate is extremely low for most people, it will still result in millions of deaths worldwide if we need 70 percent of the population to get the virus in order to achieve herd immunity. Putting aside the fact that their strategy of lockdown doesn’t provide a solution to this hypothetical problem either, even as it kills more people from the collateral damage, there is now promising evidence that more people might already be immune to the virus.

The study is built upon the principle that T cells play a central role in destroying viruses and providing immunity. Not only were these cells discovered in all the blood samples of confirmed recovered COVID-19 patients, but they were also found in 6 of the 11 blood samples from 2015-2018, before those individual donors could possibly have contracted the virus.

It's still too early to be sure, but if further studies come to the same conclusion, this will be great news.

Daily Caller: Andrew Cuomo’s Nursing Home Order Deleted From New York Health Department Website

No comments:
Andrew Cuomo’s Nursing Home Order Deleted From New York Health Department Website
Peter Hasson, May 27, 2020

Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s March 25 order requiring nursing homes and other long-term care facilities to accept recovering coronavirus patients has disappeared from the New York State Department of Health’s website.

The webpage for Cuomo’s order says the document is “not found,” though it can still be seen on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It took the governor roughly six weeks to reverse the order, which has been blamed for the high death rate among New York’s elderly.

The order’s disappearance, which was first reported by Fox News on Tuesday, comes as Cuomo has faced increasing levels of criticism for his handling of coronavirus. A Cuomo spokesperson told Fox News the order’s disappearance was part of a routine website update.

Revisionist history all the way down. Make a horrible decision that kills thousands of people. Then blame other people. Then delete the evidence.

Next up, we should expect Democrats to deny that the order ever existed and accuse the rest of us of making it up.

Too bad all those nursing home administrators have signed paper copies of their orders. It won't be nearly as easy to delete all of them.

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Washington Free Beacon: YouTube Censors Criticism of China

No comments:
YouTube Censors Criticism of China
Yuichiro Kakutani -

YouTube is deleting comments that contain two terms Chinese dissidents use to criticize the government, raising concerns about the tech industry's willingness to censor content to gain favor with the communist regime.

Comments on YouTube videos containing the terms 共匪 (Gòngfěi), meaning "communist bandit," and 五毛党 (wǔmáodǎng), meaning "fifty-cent party," are automatically deleted from the site shortly after they are posted. The latter is a derogatory term referring to Chinese internet censors who are allegedly paid 50 cents for every internet post that they erase.

A YouTube spokeswoman acknowledged to the Washington Free Beacon that the website's algorithm has been deleting any comments containing either of the two terms within seconds of their submission. She blamed "an error in our enforcement mechanism" for the deletions, rather than an effort to stymie criticism of the authoritarian government. The deletions have raised eyebrows among Republican lawmakers, one of whom is calling on the Department of Justice to investigate.

Does this come as a surprise to anyone?

I wonder if Google will allow me to post this or if they'll delete it too.

Friday, May 22, 2020

SiliconAngle: GitLab runs phishing test against employees – and 20% handed over credentials

No comments:
GitLab runs phishing test against employees – and 20% handed over credentials
by Duncan Riley. UPDATED 22:26 EDT / MAY 21 2020

There’s always a lot of talk in cybersecurity about the importance of training employees to be aware of phishing attempts. Training does work but it’s not a panacea, the reality being is that there will always be employees who get tricked even with training.

Although there are various industry estimates, code repository management firm GitLab Inc. decided to phish their own employees to see what would happen. The result was not good: One in five employees fell for the fake emails.

Sadly, this is why cybersecurity research can only go so far. When 20% of employees working for a technology site can be phished like this, no technology product can solve the problem.

I am reminded of the Beagle/Bagle worm. In 2004, this worm was spreading rapidly throughout the Internet via e-mail. When virus scanners got definitions to identify and delete it, the authors created a variation (described in the linked article) which wrote itself to an encrypted zip file, putting the password in the mail message's body. This variation continued to spread despite requiring the recipient to manually save and decrypt an attached zip file, and then run the application contained within.

If people will blindly do whatever they're told in e-mail, then they're doomed no matter what security experts say and do.

Update May 26, 2020: I updated the article to include a link to an article about the Beagle/Bagel worm. At the time I originally wrote the article, I couldn't remember its name, but I was able to do some searching and found it (in one of my own blog posts from 2005: Encryption and security: an overview).

Thursday, May 14, 2020

Washington Free Beacon: DOJ Dropping Criminal Case Against Ex-Trump Adviser Flynn

No comments:
DOJ Dropping Criminal Case Against Ex-Trump Adviser Flynn
Reuters - May 7, 2020 3:08 PM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday abruptly sought to drop the criminal charges against President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, following mounting pressure from Trump’s political allies on the right.

Reposted because I accidentally clicked the "Delete" button and Blogger has no mechanism to undo that. Shame on you, Google.

- - -

And now Flynn needs to sue everybody involved in this bogus prosecution. We now know that not only is there no evidence of any crime, there never was any evidence and the FBI knew it from day one. We also know that the FBI agents investigating the case wanted to drop it right from the start, but they were pressured by their politically-appointed bosses to try and invent a crime. We even have a hand-written memo stating that the interview at which Flynn supposedly lied was conducted for the express purpose of trying to trip him up in order to create an excuse for a prosecution. And even then, the agents conducting the interview said that Flynn didn't lie - an opinion that was only changed several months later when the top brass was demanding an excuse for a prosecution.

The people responsible for this need to lose their jobs and their pensions. They need to reimburse Flynn for the millions of dollars he spent defending himself against these bogus charges, plus punitive damages to make sure nobody ever tries a stunt like this again.

And no, I don't care that he plead guilty in 2017. He went bankrupt paying lawyers and the government had started threatening his family. I guarantee that you (whoever you are) would have confessed under far less pressure. A confession given under duress is no confession under any concept of justice.

Monday, May 04, 2020

Comparison: New 13" Mac Book Pro vs Air

3 comments:
Today, Apple announced a new version of their 13" MacBook Pro. You can read a pretty good summary of it at MacRumors or on Apple's product page. But the real important question (at least to me) is whether it is worth getting this computer or the 13" MacBook Air. Both are very lightweight and relatively inexpensive so it's not necessarily a clear-cut decision.

Friday, May 01, 2020

IEEE Spectrum: ‘Hydrogen-On-Tap’ Device Turns Trucks Into Fuel-Efficient Vehicles

No comments:
‘Hydrogen-On-Tap’ Device Turns Trucks Into Fuel-Efficient Vehicles
Maria Gallucci. 01 May 2020 | 14:16 GMT

The city of Carmel, Ind., has trucks for plowing snow, salting streets, and carrying landscaping equipment. But one cherry-red pickup can do something no other vehicle can: produce its own hydrogen.

A 45-kilogram metal box sits in the bed of the work truck. When a driver starts the engine, the device automatically begins concocting the colorless, odorless gas, which feeds into the engine’s intake manifold. This prevents the truck from guzzling gasoline until the hydrogen supply runs out. The pickup has no fuel cell module, a standard component in most hydrogen vehicles. No high-pressure storage tanks or refueling pumps are needed, either.

Instead, the “hydrogen-on-tap” device contains six stainless steel canisters. Each contains a 113-gram button of an aluminum and gallium alloy. A small amount of water drips onto the buttons, causing a chemical reaction that splits the oxygen and hydrogen contained in the water. The hydrogen releases, and the rest turns into aluminum oxide, a waste product that can be recycled to create more buttons. Back in the garage, the driver can replace spent canisters with news ones to replenish the hydrogen supply.

It's not the fictional dream of running on water, but it's the closest I've seen. I wonder how many miles you get per canister and how much replacements cost.

Telecoms: Huawei and China Mobile bring 5G connectivity to Everest’s summit

No comments:
Huawei and China Mobile bring 5G connectivity to Everest’s summit
By Ryan Daws. . TechForge Media

Huawei and China Mobile have partnered up to bring 5G connectivity to the summit of the world’s highest mountain.

The partners set up a 5G base station 6,500 metres above ground which provides access to China Mobile’s dual-gigabit network. Other base stations were built at the Base Camp (5,300 metres) and the Transition Camp (5,800 metres).

So, if you're planning to climb Mt. Everest, be sure to bring along a 5G cell phone.

Monday, April 27, 2020

Heraclitean River: The Chicago Manual of Style and a single space after periods

No comments:
Back in 2015, I blogged about the history of sentence spacing, citing a 2011 article as my source.

More recently, this subject arose on another forum in response to news that Microsoft Word will start treating two spaces after a period as an error and will flag text as such.

As a part of participating in this discussion, I cited that article. I also started looking over other articles on the archived Heraclitean River site and I ran across a followup article that I hadn't noticed back in 2015. This article responds directly to many of the modern-day justifications for single-space sentence separation pointing out that they are either logically incorrect or are inconclusive.

The Chicago Manual of Style and a single space after periods

In a previous post, I explored the history of spacing after sentences, where we saw that the common practice for centuries was to include a much wider space after a period (or other mark that ended a sentence).  Since a double space nowadays imitates that practice—which comes from the era where the forms of many of our modern fonts were created—a double space should at least be considered an acceptable choice when typing or typesetting text.  Others will prefer the single space, but it is merely a preference.  I submit that there is room for both, and there is actually room for better typography in general, which could return to a more detailed distinction between different types of spaces with different widths.

I also summarized the history of the Chicago Manual of Style, which demonstrates the shift in preferences and values from 1900–1950, leading up to their current judgmental position where they only include information on sentence spacing to condemn anyone who would try to make such a distinction.  In a Q&A post, one editor explains this position and offers a number of rationales in favor of it:

Friday, April 24, 2020

ARS Technica: How Homeworld Almost Got Lost in 3D Space

4 comments:
How Homeworld Almost Got Lost in 3D Space

On this episode of War Stories, Ars Technica sits down with Rob Cunningham to revisit the groundbreaking 1999 3D real-time strategy game, Homeworld. When Rob and a group of friends founded Relic Entertainment, they set out to marry the gameplay of Command & Conquer with the feel of Battlestar Galactica - all in a full 3D environment. On top of the everpresent memory limitations of the day, the team needed to get creative in figuring out how to orient players when, in space, no direction is up.

Back when it was a new game, I loved Homeworld, although like most such games it was too difficult for me to have ever completed even once.

And after having watched this video, I want to play it again. I wonder if there's a way I can play my old disc. Unfortunately, it's PowerPC Mac software and my modern Intel Mac doesn't have an emulator. But maybe there's a way. If you know of a solution, please let me know.

Friday, April 17, 2020

Why a 5G phone is not important (at least not today)

No comments:
On the MacInTouch community forums, I recently wrote an article about why I don't think Apple's lack of a 5G iPhone matters to most people. For your benefit, I'm sharing the content (edited slightly) here as well.

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

FiveThirtyEight: A Comic Strip Tour Of The Wild World Of Pandemic Modeling

No comments:
A Comic Strip Tour Of The Wild World Of Pandemic Modeling
By Zach Weinersmith, Maggie Koerth, Laura Bronner and Jasmine Mithani. Published Apr. 13, 2020

Here we are... In the middle of a pandemic... Staring out our living room windows like aquarium fish. The questions on everybody's minds: "How bad will this really get?". "How long am I going to have to live cooped up like this?"

We all want answers. And given the volume of research and data being collected about the novel coronavirus, it seems like answers ought to exist. And numbers are certainly out there. Trouble is, they're kind of all over the place.

A great comic-narrative explaining why we have no straight answers and are not likely to get any for quite some time. It's nobody's fault, but the result of lots of people trying to draw meaningful conclusions based on data that is inconsistent and highly uncertain.

h/t Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Wednesday, April 01, 2020

Daily Caller: World Health Organization Spends Twice As Much On Travel As On Medical Supplies

No comments:
World Health Organization Spends Twice As Much On Travel As On Medical Supplies
Peter Hasson, Editor. March 31, 2020, 7:36 PM ET

The World Health Organization (WHO) spends twice as much on travel as it does on medical supplies, according to its most recent financial report.

Eight percent of the WHO’s budget in 2018 went to travel expenses, while just 4% went to medical supplies and materials, the report shows.

“Of total travel expenditure, only 45% was for staff travel, the rest was incurred for non-staff travel, mainly for meeting participants nominated by Member States,” the report states.

I've never been a big fan of anything the UN does, but good Lord, do they do anything other than flush money down the toilet? Any private charity that acted this way would be called a scam.

Thursday, March 26, 2020

The Federalist: Inaccurate Virus Models Are Panicking Officials Into Ill-Advised Lockdowns

No comments:
Inaccurate Virus Models Are Panicking Officials Into Ill-Advised Lockdowns
By Madeline Osburn March 25, 2020

How a handful of Democratic activists created alarming, but bogus data sets to scare local and state officials into making rash, economy-killing mandates.

As U.S. state and local officials halt the economy and quarantine their communities over the Wuhan virus crisis, one would hope our leaders were making such major decisions based on well-sourced data and statistical analysis. That is not the case.

A scan of statements made by media, state governors, local leaders, county judges, and more show many relying on the same source, an online mapping tool called COVID Act Now. The website says it is “built to enable political leaders to quickly make decisions in their Coronavirus response informed by best available data and modeling.”

An interactive map provides users a catastrophic forecast for each state, should they wait to implement COVID Act Now’s suggested strict measures to “flatten the curve.” But a closer look at how many of COVID Act Now’s predictions have already fallen short, and how they became a ubiquitous resource across the country overnight, suggests something more sinister.

Just like global warming ('scuze me, climate change) alarmism is based on inaccurate facts and bogus simulations, so is this. Only this time their exaggerations are intended to convince the country to impose martial law, nationalize all businesses and put the entire population on welfare.

Stalin himself, couldn't want more.

Friday, March 20, 2020

Gateway Pundit: Now 3 International Studies Find Chloroquine with Azithromycin Shows 100% Success Rate in Treating Coronavirus in 6 Days! (VIDEO)

No comments:
Now 3 International Studies Find Chloroquine with Azithromycin Shows 100% Success Rate in Treating Coronavirus in 6 Days! (VIDEO)
by Jim Hoft, March 19, 2020

There are now THREE international studies — China, Australia and France — that found that Chloroquine with Azithromycin Shows 100% Success Rate in Treating Coronavirus in 6 Days!

We have reported on the success of Chloroquine earlier today and this week.

President Trump announced on Thursday morning that the CDC had approved use of the drug in treating coronavirus patients.

But tonight we heard more from Rep. Mark Green, a former Army Flight Surgeon, that the combination of Chloroquine with Azithromycin cleared the virus in 3 days in 100% of the patients in the study.

Great news! Now, can we start treating people and get society up and running again?

Thursday, March 19, 2020

Georgia Tech: Shimon: Now a Singing, Songwriting Robot

No comments:
Shimon: Now a Singing, Songwriting Robot
February 25, 2020

Marimba-Playing Robot Composes Lyrics and Melodies With Human Collaborators


Marimba-playing robot Shimon has learned some new skills, thanks to a class of machine learning known as deep learning. Working with human collaborators, Shimon writes lyrics and melodies — and soon, he's going on tour.

He has moves like Jagger (almost). And he’s coming to a music venue near you.

But he’s not like any performer you’ve ever seen. He’s not even human.

Shimon, the marimba-playing robot, has learned some new skills: He sings, he dances a little, he writes lyrics, he can even compose some melodies. Now he’s taking them on the road in a concert tour to support a new album — just like any other musician.

The new album will have eight to 10 songs Shimon wrote with his creator, Georgia Tech Professor Gil Weinberg. It will drop on Spotify later this spring.

“Shimon has been reborn as a singer-songwriter,” Weinberg said. “Now we collaborate between humans and robots to make songs together.”

[Listen to Shimon's first single, "Into Your Mind]

Way cool.

h/t IEEE Spectrum magazine

R Street: Small Regulatory Reforms That Can Help People During the COVID Pandemic

No comments:
Small Regulatory Reforms That Can Help People During the COVID Pandemic
Mar 18, 2020

While the federal and state governments figure out the appropriate way to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, there are plenty of narrow regulatory reforms they can implement to help people deal with the fallout. This is not to say that regulatory reform is the only solution, but it can be helpful as people struggle to access medical care and food.

All of these are common-sense proposals. While we definitely need government action in some areas to help fight this virus, there are many areas where we would be best served if government would get out of the way and let those with critical skills and jobs do what they do best without getting bogged down in red tape.