The Trilateral Shitpost Fire that was the 1980 GOP convention, part 1: On the long history of thinly veiled antisemitic conspiracy theories on the GOP’s right edge by Seth Cotlar

An Exciting New Approach to Autoimmune Diseases by Eric Topol

Absent Gods, Absent Catastrophes : The Sharing Knife and The Lord of the Rings

Disaster Conservatism: There’s nothing worth saving from the Tory years. Nothing at allby Nick Cohen

Book rec: John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World books, first is Basin and Range

Sator Square. The Rotas-Sator Square is a two-dimensional acrostic class of word square containing a five-word Latin palindrome.
R O T A S S A T O R
O P E R A A R E P O
T E N E T T E N E T
A R E P O O P E R A
S A T O R R O T A S

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