I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
And so the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're goin' through

Monday, December 10, 2018

Linkee-poo is it Monday again

"What does Martian wind sound like? Now we know." There is no microphone, this is inferred sound picked up by other pressure and vibration detectors (and sped up a little). But still cool.

"NASA's Lincoln penny on Mars shows how hard the wind blows… The Curiosity rover's 1909 penny looks very different than it did at the end of a massive dust storm." (Grokked from Dan)

"The Annals of Internal Medicine this week retracted a study that said the book's recipes changed with updated editions to include more calories and bigger portions. It said a reanalysis by co-author Brian Wansink resulted in numbers that differed — 'many substantially so' — from the published versions." Highly processed food and high-fructose corn syrup in every damn thing (ie. "cheap" calories) is behind the obesity epidemic, but we're going to have to be drug to that conclusion.

"Rick Thoman is a climatologist for the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He says Utqiaġvik is warming, along with the rest of the Arctic, about twice as fast as the rest of the globe. If you want to see some of the most dramatic change on the ground, the Utqiaġvik coastline in the fall is a good place to look." We're boned.

Tell me again about how wonderful our healthcare system is. "Last year, Lautner noticed other people with Type 1 diabetes tweeting similar stories under the hashtag #Insulin4All. She read the stories of Shane Patrick Boyle and Alec Raeshawn Smith, two men who died because they could not afford their insulin. It was an epiphany." For profit healthcare is junk. But here is how that will be solved, companies will continue to screw the low-level employees when the real problem is executive pay, too many executives (good people giving other good people jobs), and too many people with their hands in the pot (middle men who were set up to help control costs but in actual practice increase costs as they add their "needed" profits to the chain).

"We know we need to exercise for our health, but a lifelong exercise habit may also help us feel younger and stay stronger well into our senior years. In fact, people in their 70s who have been exercising regularly for decades seem to have put a brake on the aging process, maintaining the heart, lung, and muscle fitness of healthy people at least 30 years younger." This is an interesting study, not for it's findings (you'd expect for how it was set up to find these results), but because of it's glaring omissions. This study merely proved a tautology, those who exercise who survive to older age show results from that exercise. A real study would have followed a randomly selected group and control groups and watch how exercise affected the body all throughout their lives. This study misses all those who stopped exercising (for whatever reason), died before samples could be taken and if these effects are actually benefits or meaningless statistics. Hell, when I exercised on the Wii Fit I regularly was rated as in my early 30s for heath. It's meaningless except to say, "I'm still young." This is just boomers wanting to claim they're still young and not old farts. But in general exercise is important to the human body and has been shown to affect body and mind, even if it's only an hour a week of "low impact" exercise (like walking over flat surfaces).

"On display now at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is a special exhibit centered on a rare Bible from the 1800s that was used by British missionaries to convert and educate slaves… What's notable about this Bible is not just its rarity, but its content, or rather the lack of content. It excludes any portion of text that might inspire rebellion or liberation." Just note the Museum of the Bible is the one founded by the family that controls Hobby Lobby and has already been caught out on displaying fake Dead Sea Scrolls and for illegally looting archeological site or buying items looted from sites (including from ISIS). "'One of the points of the exhibit is that time and place really shape how people encounter the Bible,' (Anthony Schmidt, associate curator of Bible and Religion in America at the museum) says. 'What I mean by that is people don't look at the Bible or approach the Bible or read the Bible in a vacuum. They're shaped by their social and economic context.'" That a nice spin on how the Bible and the proselytization of Christianity has been used to keep people subjugated and how it is a product of human origin, not God's infallible transcription. This is not meant as a criticism of the stories behind the Bible, but how the Bible has been promoted within the culture. Also note the King James version was also selectively edited to enforce the Divine Right of Kings and consciously used outmoded linguistic forms to denote authority and respect for tradition (I could go through the history of the Bible back to the Council of Nicaea, but man is that boring stuff).

"The Education Department is releasing a plan Sunday to help these teachers who have been wrongly hit with debts, sometimes totaling tens of thousands of dollars, because of a troubled federal grant program." Unfortunately many lives have already been ruined (even if they actually get their loans converted to grants). And this story was posted late Sunday, and there were no actual details of the plan. The problem is one of outsourcing government functions and giving that company a reverse incentive to deny claims (because then they make money from administering the grant program and then from processing the loan). "But Federal Student Aid Communications Director April Jordan says the burden is still on teachers to speak up. To get their money back, 'they need to raise their hand and tell us that they want us to take a look at their certification again,' she says." Yeah, that's a crap way to do business.

Brexit? "U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May is calling off a crucial vote in Parliament on whether to approve her Brexit deal, according to a person familiar with the situation."

"Major oil producers have reached a deal to cut oil production and boost the market, following two days of grueling negotiations and despite opposition from U.S. President Donald Trump." And now everyone cheats to profit from the temporary spike in price and then the price of oil sinks back to the same level.

"President Trump continues to rail against special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into Russian interference… Trump has, for example, used the words 'witch hunt' in tweets nearly a dozen times in the month since Election Day… The phrase appears to have stuck with his base, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll, but not with others beyond that. Seven in 10 Republicans agree with him, while a majority of independents and 4 in 5 Democrats see the investigation as 'fair.'" No, really, this is my shocked face.

"'Until recently, no party has tried to hamstring their opponents' future power to the way the Republicans are doing it now,' John Chamberlin, professor emeritus of political science and public policy at the University of Michigan, told NBC News, adding, 'They are a bad sign that state politics is being infected by the toxic national political environment.'" It's only toxic because of the actions of one party. So let us start calling it what it is. The GOP is a rogue criminal organization.

Hey, how are our friends in N Korea doing? "North Korea appears to be expanding a missile base in a remote, mountainous part of the country, according to new commercial satellite imagery studied by independent researchers." Again? (Yes, this is a different base than the one reported on in November) Why, it's almost like the Shanghai summit was a sham.

"The suit says that while Falwell Jr. and his wife were guests at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach in 2012, they developed a “friendly relationship” with the pool attendant, Giancarlo Granda; flew Granda in a private jet; and eventually backed him in a business venture, setting up a hostel that offers low-cost dorm-style nightly accommodations to visitors. The pool attendant, according to public records databases, was 21 when he met the Falwells." (Grokked from Kathryn Cramer)

"White House chief of staff John Kelly will leave 'toward the end of the year,' President Trump said Saturday. It is the latest administration shake-up as Trump makes adjustments following the recent midterm elections."

"Nick Ayers, the leading candidate to replace John Kelly as President Donald Trump's chief of staff, announced Sunday he will not be taking the job, reviving discussions about who will succeed the retired Marine general when he leaves at the end of the month." He's also leaving at the end of the year. Seems to be a pattern (yes, yes, end of second year always sees staff "moving on").

Almost lost in the whirlwind about Friday's sentencing memos, "President Trump denounced his first secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, as 'dumb as a rock' and 'lazy as hell' on Friday after Mr. Tillerson said that the president had regularly pushed him to take actions that were illegal." And as it relates to John Kelly, Rex Tillerson was also called "the adult in the room" by early analysts.

So, about that document drop on Friday. "In fact, what’s remarkable about the once-unthinkable conclusions emerging from the special counsel’s investigation thus far is how, well, normal Russia’s intelligence operation appears to have been as it targeted Trump’s campaign and the 2016 presidential election. What intelligence professionals would call the assessment and recruitment phases seems to have unfolded with almost textbook precision, with few stumbling blocks and plenty of encouragement from the Trump side." Two which everybody and anybody with a modicum of experience in this area says, "Thank you. We've been saying that for years now." I think it was Michelle Obama who is quotes as saying, "These aren't the brightest of people." They openly asked to install a secure back channel from the White House to Russia which couldn't be monitored by our security services. (Grokked from Xeni Jardin)

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