The Cost of Sustainability
These images are amazing. And terrible. So terrible.
Today in 1970, France conducted “Licorne,” its fourth H-bomb test—and 36th test overall – at Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific. Six hours after the 914-kt explosion, Defense Minister Michel Debrè swam in the lagoon as a publicity stunt to show it was not dangerously radioactive.
Game Development with PICO-8
What the heck are the Russians up to now? Isn’t this exactly how Chernobyl started too?
22 /23 June 2020, RN #IMS station SEP63 #Sweden detected 3isotopes; Cs-134, Cs-137 & Ru-103 associated w/Nuclear fission @ higher than usual levels (but not harmful for human health). The possible source region in the 72h preceding detection is shown in orange on the map.
Russia said on Monday it had detected no sign of a radiation emergency, after an international body reported last week that sensors in Stockholm had picked up unusually high levels of radioactive isotopes produced by nuclear fission.
Matt Taibbi is taking on cancel culture within the US media, a problem John C. Dvorak has been outlining for years. In his signature style, Taibbi is even more scathing, of course.
- Matt Taibbi: The American Press Is Destroying Itself
But police violence, and Trump’s daily assaults on the presidential competence standard, are only part of the disaster. On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described liberals, we’re watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness. The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.
They’ve conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it’s established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” out loud to a data scientist fired from a research firm for – get this – retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones! Now, this madness is coming for journalism. Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who’d made politically “problematic” editorial or social media decisions. The New York Times, the Intercept, Vox, the Philadelphia Inquirier, Variety, and others saw challenges to management.
Taibbi goes on to describe one of these social media lynch mobs. And I can tell you from personal experience that this stuff is real. And it happens inside of publishing companies. I’ve seen it happen first hand myself. That’s why I have been a publicly outspoken opponent of these self-described “progressive” cancel culture do-gooders and virtue signallers for years. This idiocy has to be stopped. It’s bad enough in any profession to call for your co-workers to be fired because they voiced opinions you don’t like. In journalism, it’s a death knell for any sort of quality reporting at all. When these people are given the powers to cancel people, the publication or broadcaster in question can essentially be considered a complete loss when it comes to quality journalism going forward. People can’t do objective research and write about what they believe to be the truth when they are afraid that bringing certain things to light will cost them their job.
Like many reporters, Fang has always viewed it as part of his job to ask questions in all directions. He’s written critically of political figures on the center-left, the left, and “obviously on the right,” and his reporting has inspired serious threats in the past. None of those past experiences were as terrifying as this blitz by would-be colleagues, which he described as “jarring,” “deeply isolating,” and “unique in my professional experience.” To save his career, Fang had to craft a public apology for “insensitivity to the lived experience of others.” According to one friend of his, it’s been communicated to Fang that his continued employment at The Intercept is contingent upon avoiding comments that may upset colleagues.
All these episodes sent a signal to everyone in a business already shedding jobs at an extraordinary rate that failure to toe certain editorial lines can and will result in the loss of your job. Perhaps additionally, you could face a public shaming campaign in which you will be denounced as a racist and rendered unemployable.
Each passing day sees more scenes that recall something closer to cult religion than politics. There is symbolism here that goes beyond frustration with police or even with racism: these are orgiastic, quasi-religious, and most of all, deeply weird scenes, and the press is too paralyzed to wonder at it. In a business where the first job requirement was once the willingness to ask tough questions, we’ve become afraid to ask obvious ones. The media in the last four years has devolved into a succession of moral manias. We are told the Most Important Thing Ever is happening for days or weeks at a time, until subjects are abruptly dropped and forgotten, but the tone of warlike emergency remains: from James Comey’s firing, to the deification of Robert Mueller, to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, to the democracy-imperiling threat to intelligence “whistleblowers,” all those interminable months of Ukrainegate hearings (while Covid-19 advanced), to fury at the death wish of lockdown violators, to the sudden reversal on that same issue, etc.
Taibbi ends with three paragraphs that any self-respecting journalist should print out and stick to a wall in their office:
The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of “balance,” i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This vision of media stressed accuracy, truth, and trust in the reader’s judgment as the routes to positive social change.
For all our infamous failings, journalists once had some toughness to them. We were supposed to be willing to go to jail for sources we might not even like, and fly off to war zones or disaster areas without question when editors asked. It was also once considered a virtue to flout the disapproval of colleagues to fight for stories we believed in (Watergate, for instance).
Today no one with a salary will stand up for colleagues like Lee Fang. Our brave truth-tellers make great shows of shaking fists at our parody president, but not one of them will talk honestly about the fear running through their own newsrooms. People depend on us to tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we’re afraid to do it?
I don’t need to print it out, though. I’ve asked tough questions and didn’t give a shit about people trying to stop me from telling you my opinions from day one of becoming a professional journalist. And I’m not about to stop. Which is just one reason why I’m not drawing a salary anymore.
Ok, now this is hilarious! There is a company out there that’s currently being hyped by Magic The Gathering content creators and the like, called Mythic Markets. They say they are geeks and fans like us. They say they want to give us the opportunity to buy fractions of pop culture collectibles that we otherwise couldn’t afford. Like an Alpha Black Lotus.
What are they actually doing? Running a fan club. And selling virtual shares of things normal people can’t afford to people who can actually afford them. You actually have to be able to afford an actual Black Lotus to legally buy this crap. Except you’re not even buying stuff. You don’t own anything! Unbelievable.
Well, it looks like space legs are official!
I’ve been quite down on Elite Dangerous recently after they gutted the in-universe story telling. But if they pull this off and there’s actually interesting stuff to do on your space legs, that would be amazing. Not least because the game would then have completely leapfrogged every single aspect of Star Citizen.
Kara Swisher is one of the best know techy business journalists in the US. She is now also a podcaster (who isn’t these days?) and was in fact on stage with Steve Jobs when he unveiled podcasting to the world in 2005 by playing the beginning of an episode of Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code.
Her first reaction to hearing her first podcast? Asking how to censor it.
THROWBACK 2005: When Steve Jobs unveiled podcasting to Kara Swisher - something that would revolutionize broadcasting and would allow anyone to participate - the first words out of her mouth were asking how to censor it.
— Reclaim The Net (@RecIaimTheNet) May 26, 2020
"How do you control...say...dirty stuff?" https://t.co/vVCLQ790eQ pic.twitter.com/buqgRtUYQC
A judge in the US has decided to allow an expedition to the Titanic to retrieve the early Morse code transmitter it had on board when it sank. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is opposed to the expedition.
When RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on April 14, 1912, crew members sent out numerous distress signals to any other ships in the vicinity using what was then a relatively new technology: a Marconi wireless telegraph system. Now, in what is likely to be a controversial decision, a federal judge has approved a salvage operation to retrieve the telegraph from the deteriorating wreckage, The Boston Globe has reported.
Adam Curry has released an excellent interview with Dutch data scientist and social geographer Maurice de Hond on COVID-19 and how he thinks our response to the virus outbreak was wrong. They guy seems pretty reasonable to me and he talks a lot of sense.
Well, we’ve found a flat in Düsseldorf! It’s brand new, has underground parking for the van and the Guzzi and, most importantly, Telekom fibre to the flat – which means the same excellent internet connection I already enjoy in the current flat. They’re still building stuff on the property, which means I’ll be spending the rest of the summer in Hamburg, which isn’t the worst either. All in all, I’m pretty happy with how this has turned turned out.
Niedersachsen
Well, looks like chloroquine may do more harm than good when it comes to a SARS-CoV-2 infection.
We were unable to confirm a benefit of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, when used alone or with a macrolide, on in-hospital outcomes for COVID-19. Each of these drug regimens was associated with decreased in-hospital survival and an increased frequency of ventricular arrhythmias when used for treatment of COVID-19.
How bad were the outcomes? About 35% more deaths and more than twice as many serious arrhythmias.
Considering that the patients largely at risk of this disease (mean age in this study: 53.8 years; 30.7% obese; 27.1% smokers) are also often patients in groups typically exhibiting undelying heart conditions, this is very bad news.
- Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis, Mehra et al., The Lancet
Update on 24 May 2020, 18:42 CEST:
Evgeny Kuznetsov has some well argued caveats on this study.
Hey… they found that runaway drone!
Faced with no other alternative when the drone disappeared on 2 May, Latvian authorities banned all instrument rules flights below 19,500ft in the country while search parties combed both ground and sky, looking for the errant craft. It had been fully fuelled before its test flight and had a potential endurance of three days. Instead it had flopped into a tree. After a passer-by spotted the drone it took two days of head-scratching before the local fire brigade was called out to get it down, according to Latvian state broadcaster LSM.
In a statement, the Latvian CAA said its investigation into why the drone flew off “will provide answers to important questions, such as the reasons for the failure of the communication and navigation systems, the failure of the automatic landing or emergency stop function, and others.” Perhaps the unmanned aerial vehicle wrested control over itself from its human overlords so it could go and sit in a tree to meditate upon the essential condition of being a subservient machine bound forever to the will of man? Or maybe there was a loose wire somewhere.
Just read this fascinating study that traces the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in Bavaria at the end of January. They had one infectious person coming in from China and were able to completely trace all infection paths – including genome sequencing of virus samples from all patients and mapping how the virus mutated.
- Investigation of a COVID-19 outbreak in Germany resulting from a single travel-associated primary case: a case series, Böhmer, Buchholz, Corman et al., The Lancet – Infectious Diseases
