13 May 2020
12 May 2020
It's called a "Tapeworm shot"
Something to drink while reading the post below this one. Ingredients: vodka, mayonnaise, black pepper, and dash of tabasco.
If you want to worry about something other than coronavirus...
A longread at Politico lists other threats that intelligence experts are concerned about.
You might feel blindsided by the coronavirus, but warnings about a looming pandemic have been there for decades... What other catastrophes are coming that we aren’t planning for, but that could disrupt our lives, homes, jobs or our broader society in the next few years or decades?... What follows is POLITICO Magazine’s “Domestic Threat Assessment”— a list of the most significant events that might impact the United States over the next 30 to 50 years. These are threats that seem rare, but that over a given period are almost guaranteed to occur...1) The Globalization of White Supremacy
... if you ask national security officials about the top near-term terrorism threat on their radar, they almost universally point to the rising problem of white nationalist violence and the insidious way that groups that formerly existed locally have been knitting themselves together into a global web of white supremacism... While white supremacist violence has a centuries-old history in the U.S. and overseas, the current moment particularly worries intelligence and law enforcement officials because they see violence erupting globally, empowered by social media, and lone actors referencing each other...2) Attacks on Trust and Truth: Deepfakes, Manufactured Election Results or Other Data Manipulation Attacks
... cyber experts are warning that the next new threat online will almost certainly involve attempts by adversaries to manipulate or delete data or otherwise raise public doubts about whether reported reality is real reality... For example, changing Wall Street trading records to make brokers unsure of the real price of a stock or whether they’d actually purchased it at all. Or manipulating bank records so consumers wonder whether their deposits are safe...
Security experts have been warning of all manner of data manipulation attacks that could lead to ongoing or permanent questions about the accuracy of election results. While actually altering votes at scale would prove challenging, it could be comparatively easy to alter the reported vote totals...
... "deepfakes,” doctored audio or video driven by artificial intelligence that could literally put words in people’s mouths or place them in physical locations where they never were. Simpler “dumbfakes” or “cheap fakes” have proven effective... [imagine] grainy fake video or audio of Joe Biden admitting to assaulting Tara Reade; grainy video of Trump saying he plans to nuke Iran in one hour; or even Anthony Fauci saying that he’s doctoring the Covid death tolls...3) Biosecurity: Terrorists, Mad Scientists, Lab Accidents and Biological Warfare
[This is getting too depressing. Go to Politico and read the details for yourselves]4) Massive Technological Disruption: Downed Power Grids, GPS Outages and Solar Flares
5) Nukes
6) Climate change
7) Covid-19's next-level impact
8) Catastrophic Earthquakes
9) The Unknown Unknowns
"Vintage" salt
"It was my grandma's 95th birthday so I cooked for her. I asked her where she kept the salt and she said "I barely use salt, but if it's there, it's way in the back of the cabinet." It turns out the only container of salt she has is dated from 1965!!! It worked, and salt doesn't really expire!"The discussion thread at Reddit has a range of opinions on the use of salt in cooking.
Addendum, with a hat tip to reader Dragonmamma:
People made of pebbles
The artist is Szilajka Erzsebet. A tip of the blogging pebble cap to reader Drabkikker for locating her.
The tragedy of payday loans
One of the tragedies of the pandemic is that cash-strapped people are turning to payday loans. Readers of this blog won't need to be educated about the crippling cost to the borrower, but here's a good summary from the Federal Reserve Bank:
Payday loans are marketed as a convenient, short-term solution when a borrower needs cash in a hurry. Storefront payday loan businesses began to spring up across the country in the 1980s and quickly became commonplace. In 2017, there were 14,348 payday loan storefronts in the United States. By comparison, this was about the same number of Starbucks locations and slightly more than the14,027 McDonald's locations in that same year. The 1990s brought expansion to the industry when the internet added the convenience of online payday lending...
Collectively, borrowers spend as much as $9 billion each year on payday loan fees. On average, the fee for a payday loan is $55 for a two-week loan, and the typical $375 loan will incur $520 in fees because of repeat borrowing...
Historically, payday lending has been regulated by individual state law; each state has its own specific regulations. It gets complicated trying to understand payday lending with so many differences. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia either prohibit payday lending entirely or have set interest rate caps that force lenders out of business because of unprofitability. The remaining 33 states permit payday lending. These states have either exempted payday loans from usury laws or chosen to not regulate the interest rates on the loans...Lots of details at the link.
How a plastic oxygen tube burns
There are way too many people who think that oxygen is a flammable or even an explosive gas. This video dispels that notion, and I'd like to give The Action Lab credit for taking the time to demonstrate that the results of combustion depend in part on the flow rate of gas in the tubing.
The burn rate and pattern would also depend on the diameter and thickness of the tubing. He's demonstrating mostly with laboratory-grade Tygon tubing, which is substantially heavier than the vinyl tubing typically used for home oxygen administration.
10 May 2020
Impress your friends with a rotary-dial cellphone
"... it's not just a show-and-tell piece... My intent is to use it as my primary phone. It fits in a pocket; It's reasonably compact; calling the people I most often call is faster than with my old phone, and the battery lasts almost 24 hours."Details at Justine Haupt, via Dark Roasted Blend.
Cleaning nurdles and plastic debris from beaches
Here are his results from 35 bags of beachcombing (in Cornwall):
Another video that I can't embed is at this BBC link.
09 May 2020
Hadrian's Wall
Posted as a reminder to me of a delightful cloudy windy day about forty years ago when I walked the wall at Housesteads.
Photo credit to Robert White Photography, via the EarthPorn subReddit.
Reposted from 2014 to add this awesome photo:
- credit Swiss photographer Roger Eberhard, from his new book (not about the wall per se).
Where the Poles are
The white outlier county in northern Wisconsin is Menominee County, (site of the reservation).
Map via the DataIsBeautiful subreddit.
"Ugly makeup"
I'll defer personal commentary and just offer some excerpts from The Guardian:
... So she decided to try something totally different. One day, she created “a mess”. For an assignment, she painted her model with black, aggressive scribbles, green cartoonish snakes, blurry orange lips and spiky, Twiggy-esque lashes. “I was under the impression my look was awful,” she says. But on Instagram, it took off.
Meikle didn’t realize it at the time, but she was joining a movement that has been slowly gaining momentum – the ugly makeup revolution, a term coined by the Berlin-based makeup artist and activist Eszter Magyar, who began working on the project in 2018. “Ugly makeup revolution is a community,” she says, as is her other hashtag, makeup brutalism...
The work of these artists is frequently derided – for being both too ugly and not ugly enough. “It’s not about ugliness,” Magyar says. “It’s about irregularity. Ugly is just a word, which makes you pay attention.”..
While strangeness can be very sexy, the purpose isn’t to be sexy (which, paradoxically, is why it’s can be so sexy, I think). The purpose is to please the wearer...
It’s a compliment – a word that makes people sit up and pay attention. Ugly exists for ugly’s sake. It’s an underrated aesthetic, one that more people should embrace.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
