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Archive for August, 2018

The 2000 election and voting systems

Friday, August 10th, 2018

After the 2000 ‘hanging chad’ election, the Election Commission report concluded that about 10% of votes are never counted or miss-counted. The Republican President and House didn’t much care, threw a few billion at the states some counties replaced the punch card machines w/ electronic voting machines. It made things worse. The election results are still untrustworthy, but in many places there’s no paper record to check but there is a poorly designed and poorly secured software program counting the votes. And yet worse, these voting machine companies are all private, and keep their software a secret, so there is no way to audit the software or check the election results. In the *rare* cases where security researchers have inspected the software and computerized voting machines, they have always proved easy to break into and subvert. Same with the centralized websites counting and recording the votes. Complete failure of democracy.

XKCD comic

Links for Aug 2018

Monday, August 6th, 2018

LED bulbs are as cheap as incandescents
Goodbye To Harlan Ellison
Very Short Stories
Sundown Towns history
Wimshurst machine, kit
Fabricating Reflectors for Displaying Multiple Images, pdf
Climate change and China–too hot, flooded
Sanders Medicare for all proposal would save $2T over first 10 years.
Media portray these tales of perseverance as uplifting and inspirational. They’re actually horror stories.
Write in PDFs in Linux
My ancestry test revealed a genetic bombshell
Better command line tools
The end of the oceans
Colliding stars will light up the night sky in 2022
NAD precursor as anti-aging drug (Basis from Elysium Health)

Is Iron Man made of Lego?

Solving the Autism Puzzle

Elevian: daily injections of a protein called GDF11 can promote “the body’s ability to restore itself”

The company builds on research findings several years ago that if the bloodstreams of young and old mice are connected together, it seems to rejuvenate the older ones. … In a 2015 study, for example, scientists at Novartis found that GDF11 levels do not fall with age and that the protein actually inhibits rather than promotes muscle regeneration.

The alt-right is drunk on bad readings of Nietzsche. They don’t understand him. By Sean Illing
Cactus seeds supplier