Lessons From a Renters’ Utopia by Francesca Mari

Toroidal propellers: A noise-killing game changer in air and water. Quiet and reduce fuel consumption by somewhere around 20%.

Insulin pump tear down: Omnipod teardown, video of Omnipod tear down

Unity game design platform, overview

The 26 women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct

Electric Vehicles Could Match Gasoline Cars on Price This Year. Includes subsidies for electric vehicles. I’ve also seen reports that electrics are thin on dealer lots. Definitely a year where the new car market is changing

Non-Disparagement Clauses Are Retroactively Voided, NLRB’s Top Cop Clarifies

Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl’s incurable cancer. CAR-T therapy for leukemia

More Women Are Holding Political Office — But Not Everywhere by Ella Koeze, Meredith Conroy and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
Women in State Legislatures 2023 from Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP)

Domino Train Blocks Set Building And Stacking Toy, $58.99

The 19 best bookstores in Chicago by Lindsay Eanet

Yes, masks reduce the risk of spreading COVID, despite a review saying they don’t

Book: “The Enceladus Mission” (2018) by Brandon Q. Morris

Columbia Journalism Review’s Big Fail: It Published 24,000 Words on Russiagate and Missed the Point. The magazine’s attempted takedown of the media’s coverage bolsters Trump’s phony narrative. by David Corn

The Case Against Dictatorship by Adam Gurri

Journalists (And Others) Should Leave Twitter. Here’s How They Can Get Started by Dan Gillmor

The Kavanaugh Cover-up by Jay Kuo. US Supreme Court Judge.

Intel: Just You Wait. Again. Intel trying to stage a comeback.

How the Banshees of Inisherin Sweaters were Knit

How did solar power get cheap part II by Brian Potter
Levelized Cost of Energy

Summary Report on EVs at Scale and the U.S. Electric Power System.November 2019
“12 GW of dispatchable generating capacity is equivalent to the aggregate demand of nearly 6 million new EVs”
“Assuming each EV travels 12,000 miles annually, consuming approximately 300 Wh/mi of AC energy [1], and assuming 4.9 % system losses [14] for transmission and distribution, then each EV will require 3.8 MWh/year of energy generation. For the 2030 low, medium, and high EV sales scenarios, this translates into 1, 8, and 26 TWh of incremental energy generation, respectively. These increases in energy generation are relatively small compared to the 100 TWh range shown in Figure 3. As the figure confirms, historically, there have been periods of time when the grid added in excess of 25 million vehicles-worth of generation per year, the equivalent of roughly 150% of annual new light-duty vehicles sales in the U.S. today [15]. “

When President Ulysses S. Grant Was Arrested for Speeding in a Horse-Drawn Carriage. The sitting commander in chief insisted the Black police officer who cited him not face punishment for doing his duty.

Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend Itby Mike Masnick
Matt Taibbi is a hack and a bullshitter, with receipts.

Using Firefox, go to the item page, open the Firefox Web Developer Tools (Menu -> More tools -> Web Developer Tools). Click on the Network tab in the Tools section, then on the web page click on the video and play it.

In the Network tab, requests for audio_128kb-0.m4s to audio_128kb-16.m4s appeared, and video_720p-0.m4s to video_720p-16.m4s. I copied the URL for the video and audio requests (all the same but with a different -0 to -16 segment), and used wget to download the files. Each was 1-2 MB:

wget https://video.ebaycdn.net/videos/v1/8f1e79501860a64d9e245434ffffec91/5/video_720p-0.m4s

After 32 wget commands, the entire video was present. I downloaded segments from 0 up until after number 16, I got a ‘not found’ message letting me know I had the last segment.

Then I concatenated the pieces together:

cat video_720p-0.m4s >> video_720p.m4s
cat video_720p-1.m4s >> video_720p.m4s
...
cat video_720p-16.m4s >> video_720p.m4s

And the same for the audio segments. I put the cat commands into a batch file “cat.txt” and ran them using “bash cat.txt”.
Then ffmpeg was used to combine them and convert to mp4 format:

ffmpeg -i video_720p.m4s -i audio_128kb.m4s -c copy ebay_720p.mp4

The Bluestocking, vol 259: Dahl and Fleming

Two Stories About Tacit Knowledge To build a nuke or (can) not build a nuke by Rohit.Krishnan

Book: The Gutenberg Parenthesis The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet by Jeff Jarvis (2023)
“The Gutenberg Parenthesis traces the epoch of print from its fateful beginnings to our digital present – and draws out lessons for the age to come.”

Book: Glass Art From the Kiln by Rene Culler (2010)

Marx generator This circuit generates a high-voltage pulse by charging a number of capacitors in parallel with DC, then suddenly connecting them in series.

Perimeter of an Ellipse. Estimate or infinite series.

This article by Kevin Drum argues that the Flint water lead poisoning episode was not that bad, there was little lasting damage, and the biggest issue today is people hyping the issue and scaring kids (link).

I have to disagree that “…little damage done. Lead levels never got all that high”. True, the attention the problem received led to a quick response that soon fixed the water, and the lead levels in children’s blood began to decline.

But when the lead issue was discovered, “Resident Zero”’s water had lead levels of 217–13,200 μg/L, 14X – 900X alarming levels (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b00791)!

In the initial study, in 7 of the 9 Flint wards, > 20% of households had water lead levels > 15 ppb, the action level. In the worst wards, child blood lead levels were elevated in 11%, 9%, and 6% of children (https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2015.303003). In a quick search, I don’t see how high blood lead levels rose in these kids.

There were 17 months between the water switch and the start of corrective measures. The water lead issue was first identified in Feb 2015, and testing over the spring and summer raised greater and greater alarm as it became clear this was a widespread water issue, and then in Oct 2015 corrective measures were taken.

Several thousand children <6 years old (of 9,000 in Flint) had significantly elevated blood lead levels for more than a year due to this poisoning.

With an announcement by the DOE, that they sorta think COVID-19 leaked from a lab, the discussion is back on. But there is no new evidence, just a mention of ‘intel’.

I am not an intelligence professional, but I have a few related
questions. US intel on this could come from phone intercepts, emails
collected in real time or hacked out more recently, or from chatting
up Chinese virologists at conferences, etc., but this will give the US
at best a more limited view than the Chinese govt has. No doubt there
were calls, emails, reports issued, panic and alarm as China became
aware of the outbreak and tried to contain it. But how likely is it
that the Chinese govt or scientific officials knew the origins of
COVID-19 early on, or worked it out later on? If Chinese officials
don’t know, an effective intelligence operation can’t extract an
answer.

How could China know? If one or more people at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology came down with COVID-19, passed it on to family and
acquaintances, and then COVID-19 spread more widely, they could track
these connections. Classic gumshoe epidemiology. But that did not
happen.

Chinese doctors only became aware of a new disease in Dec 2019, health
officials jumped in by the end of Dec, and samples were collected from
Jan 2019 – March 2020 in the Wuhan market. These samples and those
from early cases in the region have all been sequenced, published, and
shared. This was close to the origin of the pandemic, and it is
unlikely China has any better information on what happened than the
rest of us have. COVID-19 passing into humans much earlier and only
becoming pandemic in 2019 is ruled out by the analysis of COVID-19
sequences.

The best guess at the origin of COVID-19 remains a couple of papers looking at the evidence, the epidemiological evidence of when and where early cases arose, and how it was transmitted, and the genomic evidence from sequencing of COVID-19 in early patients, and comparing these to each other to make a tree of early -> later virus genomes, and to see how the early viral genomes in human patients differ from wild relatives and samples found in the Wuhan live animal market. This sort of analysis can also provide estimates of time–how long the virus has been circulating in human hosts. (ref1, ref2, ref3).

Meet Kevin Moeller, scientific glassblower

Why I am not an effective altruist Morality is not a market by Erik Hoel
Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend

Tabula Muris Senis. This project is a comprehensive analysis of the aging dynamics across the mouse lifespan.

Tabula Muris Senis. This project is a comprehensive analysis of the aging dynamics across the mouse lifespan.

Chemically_strengthened_glass. Replace Na+ with K+ by immersion in hot salt bath. Rubidium can also be used, doesn’t appear to be especially different.
“Heliolite” glass, praseodymium and neodymium in a 1:1 ratio. It has color-changing properties between amber, reddish, and green depending on the light source.
“Alexandrite” glass. “Neodymium glass (also known as Alexandrite glass), changes colour according to different lighting conditions. The glass appears lilac (or sometimes pink) in natural sunlight or yellow artificial light, and smoky blue in fluorescent/white light. This is due to the presence of Neodymium oxide (Nd²O³) in the glass.”, link

How Russian intelligence hacked the encrypted emails of former MI6 boss Richard Dearlove. Hack by Russian-linked ColdRiver group exposed former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove’s contacts and email communications with government, military, intelligence and political official

Saw 12 Assumptions for Extraterrestrial Life by Kevin Kelly.

“1) Life is rampant and common throughout the universe.”

Agree

“2) This ubiquitous life is single-celled and elemental, and remains at this level for very long periods. Most planets with life never advance beyond the single cell.”

It starts out fine. Clearly it takes considerable time for complexity to evolve in single-celled life, for a suite of enzymes that allow a cell synthesize the chemicals it needs rather than rely on scavenging them, to develop efficient processes for replication, mechanisms that preserve homeostasis and let the cell live in less friendly environments, etc.

I think multicellular life in various forms will be ubiquitous–cells interact with other cells just as they interact with the environment, and coordination at various levels–from chains of cells, to swarms of cells, and things like slime molds are inevitable. And I think interactions between organisms–symbiosis and and complex stable interactions like those found in protists and lichens will be ubiquitous.

“3) While life on some planets is seeded from outside sources, most life spawns independently. The conditions to hatch elemental life are relatively common.”

Agree

“4) Most life is DNA-ish, that is a double helix-based on DNA or DNA-like molecules. DNA is the most remarkable molecule in the universe. There may be other life-supporting molecules that can be designed, but none (or few) other than can self-assemble and self-create.”

I don’t think chemistry is well enough understood to assert this limit or expectation of a RNA/DNA basis of life. And even with RNA/DNA-like biochemistry, there are likely many variations–different nucleotide pairs, organisms with two bps, or more than four.

“5) Any natural non-DNA-ish life follows the same patterns of distribution as DNA life.”

Mostly agree. There may be non-carbon based life, but given we have no examples or ability to design/create life, speculation is pointless. Other carbon based, especially RNA/DNA based life will have similar requirements and limitations that Earth life does, and will thus live in similar environments.

“6) Multicellular life is relatively rare. The evolution of higher organisms requires goldilocks conditions to be maintained for billions of years. The mild variability and persistence of favorable planetary conditions is relatively rare — compared to single cell life. But even “relatively rare” events in a vast universe will yield hundred of billions of examples.”

While I think multicellular life is ubiquitous, life originating in the sea can take lots of odd forms. I think bilateral life forms are useful enough to be commonly arise, but may not be the dominant form on other planets. I think bilateral, walking land organisms won’t occur everywhere, and will often appear late in a planet’s history. It took 4 billion years for insects to evolve on Earth after life appeared.

“7) Advanced civilizations are relatively rare compared to multicellular life (and to life), but are countless in number.”

Agree. There are several hurdles, a) mobile land animals, b) land animals with brains, c) intelligent land animals, d) technology creating animals, and each one takes time to evolve and may not evolve on any particular planet with life. Also, the planet has to have suitable conditions for large land animals for hundreds of millions of years.

“8) Since most life begins with DNA, the evolution of life on a planet converges onto a limited set of shared development sequences until it reaches the threshold of self-direction. Once evolution begins self-direction, including migrating to new material substrates, its evolutionary path diverges widely. Naturally evolved life tends to be similar across galaxies; consciously designed life tends to be unique.”

Hmm. I don’t have strong feeling that either part of this is true, but it could be.

“9) Sufficiently advanced civilizations can synthesize, manufacture, or create any resources found naturally anywhere else in the universe. There is no material, or energy source that cannot be synthesized at home if you have the know-how.”

While the possibilities are the same everywhere, I think there are some big barriers, and life will mostly be limited to the resources available in one or a few nearby solar systems. It seems likely that the ability to create or change stars is mostly too difficult. Are technological civilizations likely to converge on similar end-point technologies, or are there too many possibilities, or some tech just very hard to execute, or unpromising at early stages, so rarely developed? For example, is a mastery of nanotech possible, and if so will it be ubiquitous?

“10) The only reason for an advanced civilization to visit another planet is to see if there is another civilization which has invented things it has not, and perhaps could not invent. Invented resources are thus unlimited in scale and scope, and can be discovered only in unique places in the cosmos. Interstellar travel is essentially not travel through cosmic space but travel through possibility space. You visit another planet to visit other possible minds to see if they have thought of fabulous technologies your collective minds cannot reach.”

Growth and expansion are natural characteristics of life, so I think the desire for exploration is common, as is curiosity. A planet with complex life or intelligent life will attract the attention of every alien nearby. There are enough possibilities for life, and the organization of ecosystems, not to mention things intelligent organisms can do, that other planets will life will always be a novel and a draw.

Only sub-light speed travel is possible. It may turn out that travel between stars is too difficult, that it takes too much energy and effort to be common, so interstellar exploration is rare, or rarely successful.

“11) Every day a few probes of these billions of interstellar civilizations visit our planet scoping out our technological state. These technological probes appear briefly in order to see us, and disappear once they have inspected our inventory. So far we have little to offer; nothing that can’t be found on millions of other planets.”

Strongly disagree. The universe is large, and it takes a long time to travel to other stars. The best average speed of travel may be 1% of light speed, or a tenth of that. Earth hasn’t been interesting for very long, and even ‘close’ aliens only 1000 light years away haven’t had time to travel to Earth. The only way for it to be likely for there to be aliens in the solar system is to assume that intelligent aliens have spread probes to every likely solar system to wait for intelligent life to arise (as Brin postulates in the novel Existence). This isn’t the case.

“12) Most life capable of meaningful interstellar travel is indistinguishable from technology.”

Huh? Kelly can’t mean that aliens would look and sound like a cell phone, so I can’t imagine what he means. That aliens are likely to be a ‘created organism’, with mastery of technology, and could look or sound like anything? That an alien could (and would?) successfully hide? This seems like one possibility, but it stands on a chain of assumptions, most of which seem unlikely.

An interesting question is, what is the limit of the telescope? What can be observed from our solar system? A ‘best telescope’ would be located in space, far from the sun, and could be large and precisely made. If there is life on neighboring or distant planets, can we detect it and learn any details about them from observations made from our solar system?

In the Marvel movie, where Thanos snaps half the universe to dust. Incredibly, inexcusably stupid. Let’s take Earth as representative, the population doubles in ~50 years. So Thanos worked for decades, centuries (longer?), with heroic effort, developed an army that destroyed planets, and his big effort bought the universe 50 years?! Do these people not know basic math? Can’t think at all about population dynamics?

If Thanos had dusted 99% of people, it would have bought the universe 400 years. If he dusted 99.999% of people, he would have bought the universe 1000 years, maybe more if too few people survived to keep tech civilization humming along. So it’s all marginal, hardly changes anything.

So maybe Thanos doesn’t dust people, he dusts entire civilizations. If Thanos destroys 99.999% of civilizations, they again bounce back in 1000 years, but takes potentially more time to spread from planet to planet, say 100,000 years. Not nothing, but not that many years, 1 part in 100,000 of the age of the universe.

Thanos really needs to give his ‘less crowded universe’ plan more thought than the two seconds the scriptwriters / comic writer gave this.