Link round-up for 9 June 2024
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Irony happens.
Why did the
Life is going to the dogs.
If you can't afford a Tesla Cybertruck, build your own.
He's following the instructions -- why isn't it working?
Star Wars would have been rather different if the stormtroopers were able to shoot accurately.
Two pink Russian fighter planes have recently been spotted in Crimea. Something to do with Pride Month, maybe?
French cartoonists lampoon their government's frenetic, intricate preparations for the Paris Olympics.
What does Satan actually look like?
The best matches are made not in heaven, but in evolution.
This is opalized wood.
We must preserve the horse.
The mother-child bond has much in common whatever the species (NSFW blog; requires Blogspot log-in). Here's a closer relative of ours.
See Shackleton's hut at Cape Royds, unchanged after more than a century.
What are the most reliable ways to tell men and women apart on sight?
Being overweight causes substantial brain deterioration.
Heat waves seriously increase the risk of pre-term births, yet another danger of rising temperatures in tropical countries that already have hot climates.
Maybe "dark matter" doesn't really exist (found via Earth-Bound Misfit).
Windows 11's new "Recall" feature is a "security disaster".
Oh, for fuck's sake. If this abomination is ever actually invented, everyone who uses it will get migraines within an hour.
Adobe Photoshop requires you to let them steal your stuff. The post includes other programs you can use instead, as well as a universal uninstaller program that looks worth checking out for a lot of reasons.
Ask stupid questions, get stupid answers.
Is it possible to create Islamic "AI"?
No paycheck is worth this kind of shit.
This year's movie line-up looks like more of the same-old same-old -- franchises, sequels, superheroes, audiences staying away. The industry seems to have learned nothing from Barbie and Oppenheimer and Super Mario Bros.
Jenny Watson is starting a lesbian dating site which will actually be for, you know, lesbians (link from commenter NickM).
The goofy way this country funds unemployment insurance is making it harder for young men to get jobs.
Maybe Christianity would be more popular if it was less mean-spirited.
A lesbian explains why she's sick of Pride Month.
Treat ambition with suspicion -- it can doom you to overwork and burnout.
The president warns of dangerous criminal gangs lurking just across the border (please note -- this is satire).
It's not enough that he cheats -- he demands to be cheered on while doing so. More here on this surreal absurdity.
I'm not alone -- 62% of Americans say they're feeling worn out by the inundation of media coverage of the still-distant election.
An Indonesian artist sneaked coded Islamist messages into the latest X-Men comic.
Republicans boo and jeer at hero police officers and call them names.
The typical pay of CEOs at major companies rose 13% last year, while that of the workers who do the actual producing rose only 4%.
All but two Senate Republicans voted against a bill to protect access to birth control. Cornyn dismissed it as "a show vote", but if so, then they walked right into the trap, showing their true colors. At the state level, too, they're attacking the right to contraception.
66% of Americans oppose letting men and boys play on women's and girls' sports teams. The figure would probably have been higher had it not been for the dishonest wording of the survey.
Blogger Annie finds three manifestations of American ideals. I suspect few readers know about #3, though it seems like a fairly major story.
Porn is dangerously warping and perverting even teenagers.
A Tennessee newspaper claims to have obtained dozens of pages of the 2023 Nashville mass shooter's manifesto, which has been kept secret by the authorities since the mass murder. I haven't been able to find the actual unedited pages posted anywhere yet.
There's a case to be made that Gary Hart was responsible for ruining the Democratic party and making the rise of Trumpism possible.
One of the most disgustingly cruel men in America is finally facing some consequences, and he's not happy about it.
Mainline Protestant clergy are increasingly anti-Israel, in line with the centuries-old traditional role of Christianity in promoting pogroms and blood libels. But most of their congregations disagree.
Who the hell is Scott Ritter?
Republicans are trying to destroy state-level efforts to make factory farming less cruel (when you look at these pictures, remember that pigs are roughly as intelligent and sensitive as dogs).
68% of Americans consider the Supreme Court ruling against the use of race as a factor in college admissions to be a good thing.
Until recently, the gay movement had remarkable success in winning popular acceptance, with two-thirds of Americans even supporting same-sex marriage, which seemed unthinkable just a quarter-century ago. That acceptance is now collapsing, fast, even though religion still continues to decline. And the reasons aren't difficult to see.
Republican Senate candidates are now frantically trying to dissociate themselves from forced-birthism, having realized that it's ballot-box poison. Don't be fooled.
In California, yet another male inmate in a women's prison has ("allegedly") committed yet another rape. At least in this case they finally moved him back to a men's prison. More here.
From Galileo to Fauci, human progress has been obstructed and slowed because of all the scuttling little popes and kings and politicians who never learned proper respect for their betters. That problem is still very much with us, but nowadays it's easier to see who has the brains and has the facts on their side.
Many companies are scaling back their recognition of Pride Month in the face of public backlash.
Forty-six House Republicans voted for Marjoreene's amendment to defund basic NATO infrastructure.
What Pride Month really needs is some introspection.
Elon Musk reportedly hosted a meeting of top members of the parasite class to conspire to defeat Biden in November.
Today's Republicans betray the legacy of the heroes of D-Day.
Only eight weeks in jail for death threats -- and suspended at that.
Religious courts have no place in a secular democracy.
You can't deal with a problem if you can't even honestly describe it.
In Germany, a women's gym was fined €1,000 for not letting a man use the women's showers.
Ukraine is winning by ignoring American advice and targeting Russia's oil industry.
Here's how the Putin regime is treating Ukrainian prisoners of war.
Here's the deal with that mass grave found near a Gaza hospital.
India's recent election results show the strength and resilience of its democracy. Note also that Modi accepted the (to him) disappointing results "with honesty and humility", quite a contrast to Trump.
After weeks of failed negotiations with the government for a higher minimum wage, unions in Nigeria have launched a national strike.
More links at Fair and Unbalanced, WAHF, and Angry Bear.
My own posts this week: some truths and inspirations, the elections in Mexico and India, and some more music worth keeping.
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I'm getting so burned-out from the inundation of internet stuff about an election that is still months away that I'm starting to actively avoid it, especially anything that focuses on Trump, whom I'm even more sick to death of hearing about. So there probably won't be much on that topic in these round-ups for a while. It's one of the few things I can do to protect what remains of my sanity.
posted by Infidel753 at 3:27 AM
6 Comments:
"Oh, for fuck's sake. If this abomination is ever actually invented, everyone who uses it will get migraines within an hour."
Yes, and no. It depends on the where the images seems to be projected to. I don't know if this is even physically possible with spectacles - note the fiasco that was "Google Glass". This is the reason VR headsets are still as big and clunky now as they were thity years ago. You can't miniaturize optics. This is why people still buy cameras with big lenses rather than use a phone. It's this pesky thing called physics.
But if, something like that could be produced which produces something like an image at infinity (which is anything greater than 15m) then it could be useful. Interestingly the guy is using a physical keyboard. Apple have been trying a virtual keyboard using VR stuff and it's not getting anywhere because (a) it has no tactile feedback and (b) you look a bit of twat because you look like someone trying to play "The Imagination Piano". The physical keyboard is probably one of the most doggerdly persistent technologies we have and for good reason.
As to dark matter/energy... I have long suspected they are this age's "luminiferous aether". Tell ya what! I predict that within 10 years cosmology will have a serious re-jigging. I could go on about this at length but won't. We got a bet? Say, a Coke (or whatever equivalent beverage of your liking).
Within my erstwhile astrophysics community there was a saying about cosmologists, "Frequently in error but never in doubt!" Cosmology is increasingly looking like a busker making it up as he goes along because he lost his sheet music.
The "Dark Stuff" is so much more "Unseen University" than "MIT" that it's a fucking embarrasment. Yeah, I was merely a curate in astrophysical fluid dynamics (my abandoned PhD was on the transition from deflagration to detonation in type Ia supernovae*). But if I was a creationist... I'd quit ragging on the geologists and biologists and turn my guns on cosmologists. Because that field is - to use technical terms - "An omnishambles of a spherical** clusterfuck".
I suspect they don't because that would require complex math. But then so does the the accounting of their ministeries. Fortunately, in astrophysics, it is only the spacetime that is completely bent.
*Short version: some properties of type Ia supernovae can potentially be described if they don't just explode but burn, then explode.
**"Spherical" in the sencse of spherical co-ordinates meaning it's a clusterfuck from every angle.
I use photoshop and it always tells me I need to register but I ignore it, close that page and happily use the editing soft ware I paid for.
I admit to pondering a little on turning my little Toyota into an eagle for my daily commute. It might be a fun craft project for my kids.
Oh my god I hear you on the politics.
I'm more than tired of the political stuff.
My ultra religious and sanctimonious 'mother' *still* thinks 'poor trump' is being persecuted.
I read a David Sedaris piece in the New Yorker recently.
It contained this quote, "To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked."
NickM: The brain is not geared to interact with something that looks to be fifteen meters away the same way it interacts with text on a printed page or computer screen. And when we look at information in a "wide" format, like on a modern large computer monitor, we tend to move our heads a bit to focus on different parts of it. If the "screen" is being generated by something attached to your head, it will move with your head as you try to look at different parts of it. Finally, if you can see your real surroundings through the display at all, you'll be trying to process two completely different images superimposed on each other. The brain's visual system isn't evolved for that and can't deal with it for long. This concept is a guaranteed headache-and-nausea generator
Like half the bold new whiz-bang high-tech consumer-gadgetry ideas being pushed these days, this is complete garbage. Nobody wants it, nobody asked for it. No normal person ever even thought of such a thing. It's just being pushed because the tech-bro types think it's so cool.
As best I can tell, "dark matter" was always considered just a hypothesis, with a long way to go before being elevated to the robust status of a theory. If it's observed that in many ways the universe behaves as if something unseen is generating more gravity than visible matter can account for, and the hypothesis offered is that there's a type of matter out there which has normal gravity but doesn't interact with anything else in any way that would enable our instruments to detect it, I'm not sure that's even a hypothesis -- it's just a re-statement of the problem.
Lady M: I'm glad there's apparently a work-around for their bullshit. Almost all my computer stuff is pretty old, not because I object to newer programs or devices as such (in most cases), but because I don't want the spying and control-freakery that comes with them these days.
Ami: You'd probably run afoul of a zillion obscure regulations if you tried to do that with a car, unfortunately.
I need some time off from political/electoral stuff, regardless of which "side" it comes from. I already know Trump is a terrible person. I don't need it constantly blasted at me. This stuff is starting to make me feel physically ill when I run into it. If Trump's name is so much as mentioned, I generally just click away and go read something else. Once we get close to the election, I'll have no choice but to deal with it, but that's a very long way off yet.
Infidel,
I am a "tech-bro" type. With limits.
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