There’s little Western research on the risks and efficacy of the oil, but an article published in 2020 in an Azerbaijani science journal reported that the oil has been found to work as an antiseptic and to have a “peculiar hormone-like effect on the function of sex hormones.”
Maybe, if you put it that way. But…ick.
A sale of Chrome “will permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet,” Justice Department lawyers argued in their filing.Or…crazy idea here…a person could google the best alternatives to Google search and find stuff like this.
Whatever the future, the decentralized nature of some clean energies, in particular wind and solar, has allowed Ukraine to quickly restore power in ways that would be impossible with Ukraine’s more traditional energy sources, such as coal-fired power plants.
…and that wind turbine on the back 40 turn out to be a national security asset in more ways than one.
“This sort of information sharing capacity on this scale across all these agencies. tapping into everything from local utility records and DMV records to school records has the potential to be deployed in any number of chilling scenarios.”
From Wired, an explanation of how fusion centers, established by the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11 to counter terrorism, already give ICE access to local data from schools and abortion clinics, license plate location data, databases of photos, and a lot more.
Ben Franklin famously said “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
And here we go. Again.
“It’s a complicated picture,” said Lauren Fry, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.
One complication (not suggested in the photo here) is that Lake Michigan's not just Chicago — it's also a whole lot of Wisconsin and Michigan. Another is, it's a Great Lake that actually has sandy beaches, unlike some others I could name.
A bigger beach is good.
He likes to talk about vitamins and has been known to post videos of himself lifting weights, shirtless. He has also been linked to a lot of dead animals, so the question seems like fair game, so to speak.NYTimes ("All the News That's Fit to Print,' even just barely) fearlessly investigates ("conversations with people familiar with his eating habits") Kennedy's plate.
Also from this morning's Times…
How Do I Decide What Socks to Wear?Germans have long sat comfortably atop the world of competitive forklift driving, a point of national pride. There are songs, tattoos and fully functioning kid’s models dedicated to the humble industrial vehicle. The best drivers are treated like rockstars.
The scammers have found a particularly American security hole: our reliance on paper checks. On average, there were some 30 checks per person written in the U.S. in 2021, nearly twice as many as the French, the world’s second-biggest check users, according to the Federal Reserve. In many European countries, electronic payment networks have completely replaced paper checks.
Among the suspects: volatile organic compounds and substances not removed by wastewater treatment plants, such as pharmaceuticals.
Maybe there really is a silver lining in everything — unless you're a silver carp.
“I’m so flipping excited,” said Paul Preston, founder of New California State, which has declared all the counties outside of Los Angeles, the Bay Area and Sacramento as independent and named him governor pro tempore.
And welcome to "New Illinois."
“The idea that someplace in Illinois wants to kick out another place in Illinois should not be on the ballot,” said Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker in a news briefing before the election.History and, well, the Constitution seem to agree.
“What you buy when you buy Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’ is not the banana itself, but a certificate of authenticity that grants the owner the permission and authority to reproduce this banana and duct tape on their wall as an original artwork by Maurizio Cattelan,” Galperin said.
Wait. Let's review.
You provide your own wall, your own tape, and your own banana, and then you pay $1 million for permission to tape the banana to the wall and call it art.
Of course after not-many-days the banana will turn to mush and then do you have to pay another million to tape another banana to the wall? Do you have to use the same tape? Can you use the same wall?
Can you still call it art?
What about, say, a grapefruit?
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden’s administration unveiled plans to triple the nation’s nuclear power supply by midcentury. While support for most clean energy projects is threatened by Republican control of Washington, this one might stick. A Pew Research poll from August shows Republicans are more likely than Democrats to favor expanding nuclear power generation.
Burgeoning demand for electricity to power computer centers, the automotive fleet, other endeavors make nuclear power a "green" necessity.
Currently, Illinois produces substantially more nuclear power than any other U.S. state.
Soon it will be impossible for anyone to escape. Amazon is programming its Alexa devices to answer queries in the voice of Elphaba or Glinda. The film’s costume designer created a line of cardigans, skirts and other apparel for Target, which has already seen increased foot traffic in stores since some merchandise hit shelves. The Green Elixir, a combination of cold brew, peppermint syrup, matcha cream cold foam and candy sprinkles, is one of two new Starbucks drinks themed to the movie’s release—a first for the chain.As the definition of "just short" becomes vanishing small.
To manage the overwhelming number of tourists visiting the fountain, Rome City officials are devising a plan to block off the area around the fountain. Visitors will be required to book online and then pay a fee of 2 euros ($2.20) to get in. Once inside, they will have 30 minutes to enjoy the fountain.In normal times, when the wishes are presumably real, the fountain nets an estimated 1.5 million euros ($1.6 million) per year.
Thirty years ago, Americans with a college degree accounted for roughly 20% of the population and held the same percentage of household wealth as those without a degree, according to the census and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Today, Americans with a college degree account for 38% of the population and 73% of household wealth.Everywhere: What went wrong?
"For the purposes of the record, a paper rocket is defined as a toy made entirely of paper that fits onto a straw, and when the straw is blown through, the rocket flies into the air," the science center said in a news release.
It's Saturday the 16th. Hustle on down to Orlando. Don't forget the straw.
Gaetz’s appointment has raised concerns among conservative legal scholars and former White House officials.
Didn't take much I for that.
By the way, DNI (Director of National Intelligence) oversees the activities of 18 US intelligence agencies. Here they are.
Over the past four years, illegal miners have built an underground network so vast that Zijin engineers said the mountain has started to resemble Swiss cheese, crisscrossed with makeshift passageways and tunnels leading from an estimated 380 aboveground entryways. The Gulf Clan provides bunks, kitchens, bathrooms and security
…until your kid goes to Harvard ($50,000+/yr) to start shelling out in Massachusetts.
A child care center in Massachusetts costs an average of $19,961 annually for a toddler, and family- or home-based care costs $13,344, according to a 2023 report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Both were the highest of any state in the US.Sez this story in the Boston Globe.
There are now more deer in England than at any other time in the last 1,000 years, according to the Forestry Commission, the government department looking after England’s public woodland.[The outlaw Robin Hood and his men lived in Sherwood Forest. They had no other means of getting food, and so they illegally poached the king’s deer. The hunting skill of Robin Hood and his band, however, enabled them to poach deer without being apprehended. – encyclopedia.com]
"When we kept seeing social media posts about the similarity between frying chicken and rain, we decided to make the absolute best version of that audio" said Eric Pallotta, CMO at Hatch.
And so the idea was hatched (get it?)
Hatch is the company that makes the fairly pricey gadget that plays the sound, and if you play it all night you will wake up starving in the morning. At least I would.
[H/T Lynn C Dot]
Apparently, the problem was that certain packages listed cream as an ingredient but did not also have the required allergy statement "contains milk" visible on the label.
[Emphasis mine.]
Butter is made from cream is made from…
Come to think of it, I just bought some milk from Walgreens and it doesn't say "contains milk" either.
[The recall was ordered by the FDA. Let's just hope those guys who want to disband federal agencies don't find out.]
Many sites favor Vice President-elect JD Vance—Bookies.com oddsmaker Adam Thompson gives Vance a 40 percent chance of being elected in four years. According to SportsBettingDime's William Hill, Vance has a 25 percent chance.
No odds posted on never having to have another one.
Otherwise, of course, the state is still reliably blue — although a bit unsettled this morning, it seems:
A new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta has found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare's plays, sonnets and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe.
Not to mention all the monkeys are working for AI startups now. (Wait, you thought it was computers writing all that stuff?)
“Moo Deng? Who deng?” the Scottish zoo playfully posted Monday on the social media platform X as it introduced its infant hippo to the world.
For the past two years, battle lines have been drawn in this coastal town of some 13,000 people. In one camp is a family-owned business—Wiggly Bridge Distillery—which wants to age its whiskey for longer in hopes of improving its flavor. In the other are hundreds of residents worried about the implications of whiskey fungus, in which ethanol vapors turbocharge a species of fungus called Baudoinia, leaving black stains on buildings and plants.
Wiggly Bridge. Really.
Why is this concerning? Generation Z are AI power users, with up to 75 percent using the technology to plan meals, create workouts, and assist with job applications. They already use AI daily to help them make decisions, so it is not difficult to assume they could use these platforms to decide how to voteSeventy-five percent? Planning meals?
Ahead of the 1948 election, Democratic president Truman, who had stepped up from vice-president after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945, was not expected to remain in office. Opinion polls unanimously favored New York governor Dewey, the Republican nominee, to beat his less charismatic opponent. Per the Associated Press, indeed, Dewey was forecast to prevail over Truman by a margin of between five and 15 percentage points.
Truman, of course, won.
Except in Chicago, where the Trib famously jumped the gun and got it wrong.
When butter cooks long enough for its dairy solids to separate and darken from gold to copper, it develops a savory nuttiness. …The scent is as warming as a wood fire and lingers nearly as long.
Me, I could settle for something a little less rhapsodic (I know where I can pick up some leftover Halloween stuff, cheap) but baking cookies does sound like a good way to ease the pain of it all.
“I think every witch in the world has done magic against Donald Trump, but you cannot fight something if you don’t know what it is,” she said. “When I think of him, I think of that scene in ‘Men in Black’ where this robot human dies and they find a tiny alien inside controlling him.
I've heard some pretty scary stuff about Halloween but this…
“If the polls are off this year, chances are they’re going to be off in a similar direction, at least that’s what we saw in 2016 and 2020. Polls really had the same weakness. So we shouldn’t have a false hope that averaging is going to miraculously fix it"…
…“But it’s not the case that like, ‘Oh, we’ve figured out the silver bullet. Everybody’s fixed it, and we’re good to go.’ Instead, you have pollsters trying an array of different fixes, and we’re hopeful that in the aggregate, that will result in greater accuracy.”
Here's an idea: Let's just count the votes and find out.
Since the war between Hamas and Israel began last year, U.S. ships have launched more than $1.8 billion worth of interceptors to stop Iran and its proxies from attacking Israel and ships traveling through the Red Sea, according to the Navy.
And when does a bunch of little wars become a big one?
{"Little Wars," by the way, is the title of a book by H.G. Wells that set forth the rules for war games still widely played today. The author described it as being "for Boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books." The book is available from gutenberg.org.]
Tensions are rising in society over how some prominent figures, including state prosecutors, evade the draft through medical exemptions, leading President Volodymyr Zelensky’s attorney general to resign last week.
Russia has about four times the population of Ukraine, this WSJ article notes, and is known to be deploying troops from North Korea as well. That's a distinct advantage in a war of attrition.
There's a limit to how far this can go. Or should.
“If the deal seems too gouda to be true, it probably is! Let’s find these cheese stealers,” Oliver wrote.
For more cheese news, courtesy of jasperfforde.com, click here.
You likely have never heard of Babel Street or Location X, but chances are good that they know a lot about you and anyone else you know who keeps a phone nearby around the clock.
Sometimes its useful for you — like when making a 911 call, for example, or plotting a route on a map.
Other times it's just useful for them,
"If you think you’re going to open a witch shop in Salem and sell only to witches, you’ll be out of business quickly.”…when tourists, mostly muggles, mob Salem, MA.
Financial-technology firms…tend to have in-depth data on your transactions and shopping habits. Banks typically don’t, though they can piece together your financial life across products like credit cards, checking accounts and mortgages. Federal law allows all of them to share vast amounts of customer data with outside parties for marketing, as long as they disclose the practice and give customers the ability to opt out.*
According to Forbes magazine, 17 of the 20 highest paying occupations in the U.S. are medical.
The three exceptions are athletes (9), chief executives (15), and airline pilots (17).
“We think there’s $30 billion in remodeling spending just sitting on the sidelines today, waiting to be spent,” said Matthew Saunders, senior vice president of building products research at John Burns.
Or sell construction supplies?
[Someone once said a successful society needs both good philosophers and good plumbers, or neither their theories nor their pipes will hold water.]
Mr. Gates’s donation went specifically to Future Forward’s nonprofit arm, Future Forward USA Action, which as a 501(c)(4) “dark money” organization does not disclose its donors, according to the people briefed. So any contribution by Mr. Gates will never appear on any public filing.“I support candidates who demonstrate a clear commitment to improving health care, reducing poverty and fighting climate change in the U.S. and around the world,” [Gates] told The New York Times.
A CBP spokesperson acknowledged that the Remote Video Surveillance Systems used along the border are outdated, requiring significant maintenance and upgrades after more than 15 years of use. The systems, which the agency is working to replace, are also expensive to operate because they require manpower to monitor the images.
Ooops.
Ukraine drones bombed four different distilleries in Russia early Tuesday, in what has been reported by a Telegram outlet as the largest attack on alcohol production lines that are now potentially being used to fuel Moscow's war effort."Alcohol factories in Russia are being used to make fuel for military needs…as well as for the production of alcohol," Newsweek redundantly reports.
It's about spltting them up into ever more specific groups.
Both campaigns are digging through troves of data to find these crucial Americans. They both think many are younger, Black or Latino. The Harris team is also eyeing white, college-educated women.
(Meanwhile, at least as far as race is concerned, real people are becoming more "mixed".)
If a Waffle House stays open in town, even in a limited capacity, neighbors are reassured that the coming storm is unlikely to cause devastation. A closed location of the dependable diner chain has come to indicate impending disaster.
The rookies’ device was developed in the backyard of one of the student’s parents, using an old car speaker.
Apparently the device works in the parents' living room but maybe not so well in the field…yet.
Still, the invention was worth a $270,000 prize, which Boeing will probably not miss…yet.
A couple of other big defense industry players were also runners-up.
"It was a normal day, just like any other. I was picking up groceries at Jewel and on my way out the door, I decided to buy a lottery ticket," the man said.
For those not conversant in Illinoisan, Jewel is the grocery store.
"Today marks a significant step on the path towards returning humans to the surface of the moon," Russell Ralston, executive vice president of extravehicular activity at Axiom, told reporters.…I guess it's not. All they need now is one of those rocket things.
The agents searched her heavy duffle bag and found 29 live eastern box turtles individually wrapped in socks.
No word on what kind of socks.
(Eastern box turtles apparently sell for up to $1,000 each in China.)
When I ask whether we should be afraid that AIs will soon grow so powerful that they pose a hazard to us, he quips: “You’re going to have to pardon my French, but that’s complete B.S.”
…the sci-fi is still fi.
Way back in the 1970s there was a flurry of excitement for something called expert systems. It was an attempt to make a database of questions and answers so that, for example, a washing machine repairman who encountered a problem on the job could describe that problem to a computer and get advice on fixing it.
I was doing some work for an office machine manufacturer at the time. They thought it would revolutionize their repair service. It didn't. They gave up. Everybody else gave up too.
Today's AI is basically the same thing but with an order of magnitude more answers. And not all of them, by any measure, from experts. It seems to work a little better. But take over the world?
Bet on the cat.
The drones headed south, across Chesapeake Bay, toward Norfolk, Va., and over an area that includes the home base for the Navy’s SEAL Team Six and Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval port.
And more.
Maybe just some crazy hobbyist, ya think?Last month alone, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said a Chinese state-linked firm hacked 260,000 internet-connected devices, including cameras and routers, in the U.S., Britain, France, Romania and elsewhere. A Congressional probe said Chinese cargo cranes used at U.S. seaports had embedded technology that could allow Beijing to secretly control them. The U.S. government alleged that a former top aide to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul was a Chinese agent.
But maybe it shouldn't. Happen. Or seem.
The sport’s origin story isn’t exactly politically correct.
The outcome of the election could have profound consequences for both conflicts given the broad disagreements between Trump and Harris on how they should be resolved.
CBS said the need to make the “60 Minutes” interview segment concise prompted the editing. The full interview with Harris took 45 minutes, and it was fit into a 20-minute slot on the broadcast.
OK so far, if "concise" means "short." But neither of Harris's two answers presented by CBS was especially concise if concise means, well, concise, in my redoubtable opinion. They kinda blew this one.
But.
We all know that newspaper stories are edited, right? Edited for clarity, edited for available space, blah blah. TV news stores are edited too, for much the same reasons. I've participated in doing that myself from both sides of the camera.
There's something about TV and actually seeing people talking that makes a story seem more real than the same story in print. But it's not. Unless it's live. And live means televised directly as it happens. (And there's still some wizardry to contend with, but it's managable.)
If it's live, it's real. If it's not, it's Memorex.*
If wind can be owned, it can also be stolen. Wind theft occurs when one entity, typically a nation, builds a wind farm close to and upwind of an existing wind farm. Those new turbines, especially when built offshore, can slow wind speeds and decrease power generation at the old turbines.Also if wind can be owned…I'm just wondering here…can the owner of such wind be sued for damages if the wind gets out of hand?
Two decades, hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of cameras later, an Illinois Answers Project and Chicago Tribune investigation has found that reality has fallen far short of those early promises. While installing thousands of police surveillance cameras has undoubtedly helped catch criminals and solve crimes, Chicago’s ever-growing system has yet to become the crime-fighting panacea Daley predicted.
Increasingly it appears surveillance technologies employed by law enforcement are not worth the price of the privacy they invade and the mistrust they breed.
…we really need to be doing something about this rickety electric grid.
PowerOutage.us reports, at the moment, 63,000 customers still without power in North Carolina due to Hurricane Helene and more than 3,000,000 in Florida due to Milton.
And wait…NOAA reports a strong solar radiation storm in progress now which may disrupt communications and the power grid. (Also possibly produce Northern Lights as far south as Alabama.)
By combining AI with smart eyeglasses and commonly used online databases, Harvard juniors AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio developed a fast, simple tool called I-XRAY that could potentially allow law enforcement agents, cyber criminals, or just a guy at the bar to obtain anybody’s vital information in just over a minute by capturing an image of their face.
…no privacy any more.
Or…packing a gun is OK but leave your glasses at the door.
Policies in hurricane-prone areas are now more likely to have higher deductibles for wind damage, reduced payouts for older roofs, limits on interior water damage and exclusions for damage from wind-driven rain, according to insurance agents.
…or…wait.
Shock, alright. But this has been happening to hurricane insurance for a long time. It's just that hurricanes haven't been happening where this one happened.
And, by the way…where do you live?
(I've never been much of a prepper myself. I'm more of an I'll-get-througher. But sometimes…)
Also "the Tasmanian tiger, which went extinct in the early 1980s, would take “just weeks” to revive, and the dodo bird, last seen in the 1600s, would require about one month, according to the bio boss.
“Not everybody gets 100 years on this earth, and when somebody does, and when they use that time to do so much good for so many people, it’s worth celebrating,” Jason Carter, the former president’s grandson and chair of The Carter Center governing board, said in an interview.
Trade groups representing hundreds of retailers and manufacturers from Walmart and Target to Caterpillar and General Motors have appealed to the Biden administration to intervene, warning a shutdown could hobble businesses and trigger renewed inflation during the busy holiday shopping season.
Also, it goes (apparently) without saying, a busy election season.
International Longshoremen’s Association wants a 77% pay increase.[Meta Platforms] announced deals with actors Awkwafina, John Cena, Judi Dench, Kristen Bell and Keegan-Michael Key on Wednesday that will allow it to use their voices in a new AI assistant. Meta is paying stars millions of dollars for use of their likeness, people familiar with the negotiations said.
Tech companies are already the biggest purchasers of wind and solar power, but it isn’t enough to meet the round-the-clock needs of data centers. A search on a generative AI platform like ChatGPT uses at least 10 times the energy as a standard one on Google. Emissions from the global build-out of data centers between now and 2030 could equal about 40% of the entire U.S. economy’s annual emissions, Morgan Stanley estimates.
Mr. Adams has exacted a high price from New York, in reputation and morale, for what seem to be petty acts of greed and disregard for democratic principles. It raises questions of how America’s largest, wealthiest city, with its reservoir of talent in everything from the arts to finance, ended up with someone accused of being an incessant petty grifter as mayor.
The same way the entire country, with its reservoir of talent…
Well, you can take it from there.
[Emphasis mine]
This flow of students to Southern colleges promises to impact the region’s economy for years. About two-thirds of college graduates go on to work in the same state where they graduate, according to a recent study from researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and others. The transplants are well-educated, motivated young workers at the least expensive points in their careers.
And it's warmer, too.
Officials have repeatedly said that what the private sector and government agencies know about Chinese intrusions into critical infrastructure is likely the “tip of the iceberg” because of how stealthy and sophisticated the hackers have been.
Somehow Sun Tzu comes to mind.
"Use tactics to overpower opponents by dispiriting them rather than by battling with them; take their cities by strategy. Destroy their countries artfully, do not die in protracted warfare."
Snudge
Definition: a miser; a sneaking fellow
Useful for describing: anyone you don’t like
Snudge is a lovely little word: it’s obscure, yet readily understood (few people will think you are complimenting them if you say ‘stop being such a snudge!’). It can also be used as a verb, with a further variety of uncomplimentary meanings: “to be stingy,” “to cheat, especially in competition,” and “to go about hunched over or as if in deep thought.”
Chris Chmiel, who owns and operates a small farm in Albany, Ohio, about 90 minutes southeast of Columbus, said he used to have several hundred pawpaw trees but is down to about 100 this year thanks to erratic weather patterns, including extremely wet weather some years followed by severe drought.
Can't say I've ever tasted one — North America's largest native fruit — although I do remember my mother talking about them. She spent a lot of her growing-up years in Indiana. I have, however, eaten mangos and bananas — haven't we all? — so I doubt I'm missing much.
“In extreme situations, a foreign adversary could shut down or take control of all their vehicles operating in the United States, all at the same time, causing crashes (or) blocking roads,” she said.
In the wake of the pagers and the walkie-talkies…as we were saying the other day…
Around San Francisco, where Ms. Guilfoyle has lingered as a distant memory since her divorce from Mr. Newsom, those close to Ms. Harris are generally disinclined to revisit this chapter.
I won't say weird because weird has descended into politics (and malarky bit the dust a long time ago). But just plain strange is not enough for this election cycle.
Renewable energy is growing faster than expected. But surging demand for power is sucking up much of that additional capacity and forcing utilities to burn fossil fuels, including coal, for longer than expected.
Back to the real world.
(Here, summer seems to have ended right on cue.)
I'm reading an AP article about a game company in Chicago suing Elon Musk for trespassing in Texas.
It seems said game company, some time in the past, collected $15 from each of 150,000 people and used it to purchase land in the path of Donald Trump's proposed border wall. The land was sitting there undisturbed ever since, preserving nature, the company says, until a construction company working for SpaceX used part of it to store building materials without permission.
That's trespass, the game company says, and it wants $15 million in compensation, 15 seeming to be a winning number here.
Which reminds me.
Sometime near the middle of a previous century I spent $1 and a boxtop to purchase one square inch of the moon. I own land on the moon.
It's been sitting there undisturbed, preserving nature. And if one of those guys — any one — landed a rocket on it or even stepped on my land without my permission that's trespass.
And as soon as I find the deed, which has been temporarily misplaced, I'm calling a lawyer. And I mean it.
I'll be wanting my dollar back. And the boxtop.
Eric Maskin, a Harvard economist and a 2007 Nobel laureate, said: “I…blame politicians who know better for not trying harder.” Maskin said he can’t recall an election cycle that reeked so badly of rotten policy. “I think this may be a new low,” he said.
Not partisan, says WSJ.
The search for who was behind the manufacturing, sale and distribution of the pagers has pointed to some companies that were created in recent years, with little to no paper trail of their activities and run by mysterious business people with a vague online footprint and little experience in the telecommunications industry.
Supply-chain attacks (which are not "hacks" in the conventional sense but might involve some hacking in the execution) have been an established threat in the software world for some time now.
This current attack on Hezbollah's pagers, widely assumed to have been conducted by Israeli operatives, breaks new ground. Dramatically.
And, clearly, underlines new concerns. Intricate international supply chains have become commonplace and the global enterprise is honeycombed with shell companies and ambiguities both legal and political. A lot hinges on just plain trust — which may not be so just plain anymore. And the amount of tweaking it would take to modify, say, a microchip is literally microscopic.
O brave new world.
The week of their debate, Kamala Harris outspent Donald Trump by 20 to 1 on Facebook and Instagram. It was just one sign of how uneven their online advertising battle has become.
The more things change…
Endowment for the Humanities grant last year to research liberal gun owners, found that gay and transgender gun owners worried about rising hate crimes and Jewish people feared potential violence from pro-Palestinian groups or individuals. Black gun owners shared similar anxieties, along with mistrust of police in some areas and concerns about crime.
On this side we have…
The lawsuit asserts that the companies’ actions leading up to the catastrophe were “outrageous, grossly negligent, willful, wanton, and reckless.”
Wow.
The U.S. Government hopped on that bridge collision when it happened, six months ago, promising to front the money for rebuilding it to avoid delay, get it back up right away, toot sweet [I know, I know].
I met somebody last week who had just flown over Baltimore harbor the day before, took a picture from the airplane window. There is, of course, no bridge there, nor any sign of construction.
Imagine.
The easy answer is that it is our fundamental power infrastructure, which supplies electricity for everything from household lights and refrigerators to the internet, data centers, and hospitals. But go deeper, and one ends up quickly in a jumble of regulatory authorities, utilities, wires, power plants, early-20th-century technologies, and cutting-edge science – as well as big questions about what power and life should look like in the 21st century.
I guess "early-20th-century technologies" are not "cutting-edge science" to these guys. Here, in New England, I'm pretty sure we're still using the same wires the Pilgrims hung on poles.
Lutheranism came to the Upper Midwest with 19th-century Scandinavian and German settlers, and it remains the dominant faith together with Catholicism. Potlucks and that staple of Midwestern lore, lutefisk — dried cod cured in lye — remain part of rural church life.
Seriously, AP, you should know better. Potlucks come before everything in Minnesota. In most of the Midwest, in fact. Although lutefisk is, well, not so much.
(I worked in a butcher shop for a while when I was in high school. One of my once-a-week jobs was to change the brine on the lutefisk in the very smelly pan at the back of the cooler. And until this very moment I have managed to not even think of it for three quarters of a century.)
You can be in the worst mood, and when you get in a Rocket Car, you’re happy.
Domestic ducks in the wild become easy targets for predators; they are literally sitting ducks [sigh]. Being bred and reared for the meat industry means most domestic ducks can’t fly because their bodies are oversized and their wings are too small. And Chicago has no shortage of possible predators, including coyotes, foxes, raccoons, hawks and great horned owls. As pets, ducks also learn to depend on humans for food so they aren’t prepared to forage.
Building a family around a sleeper agent comes with a heavy price—presenting ethical quandaries so profound that Western intelligence services rarely go that route.
Spying is an ethical quandary entire. Adding fake identities and phoney nationalities may muddy the water, but doesn't make it any wetter than it was.
We've come a long way from "gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail." There's likely no way back.
Still, commanders have long cautioned that their biggest recruiting challenge may be more about basic fitness. Some three-quarters of 17-to-24-year-olds don’t qualify for military service in the first place because of physical fitness levels, mental health challenges, or drug use, both recreational and prescribed.
Military aside, this level of fitness among young people seems concerning. It's not just about pushups; it's about the ability to thrive — or even survive — in a world that is.
Last night, somewhere in Kansas, the Arizona Wildcats played the Kansas State Wildcats in a game of football. Kansas State won handily.
This evening Georgia will play the Kentucky Wildcats while the Northwestern Wildcats play Eastern Illinois.
Abilene Christian, Bethune-Cookman, Davidson, New Hampshire, Villanova, and Weber State teams are also named Wildcats.Walking around with something in your ear has become so completely normalized—even cool!—that medical professionals believe people who might not wear a hearing aid will feel perfectly comfortable popping in AirPods.
Being the worst at something is not what we strive for, but it happens. As Chicagoans, we at least should be used to it by now. We like to think of ourselves as the greatest city in the world while acknowledging in hushed tones we also are the worst in many categories, including the following…
Cohen was so successful and motivated…that he sold his debt collection business and in 2016 opened Boston Dog Lawyers, a firm devoted primarily to his new clientele. (He’s also represented cats, horses, pigs, chickens, turkeys, turtles, snakes, an iguana, and a parrot.)
From the New York Times.
…(I have a little cart for that)…run it through a washer and a dryer…lug it back home…hoist it up a flight of stairs to my apartment…sit down to take off my shoes and socks…and throw my socks in…
Oh no!
The one-bedroom, one-bathroom bungalow in suburban Monrovia, northeast of Los Angeles, was crushed by a tree in May with two renters and two dogs inside. There were no injuries, but a fence and most of the roof were mangled.
…the asking price does not include the tree.
New York Fed’s process to move Baghdad’s oil earnings lacked key money-laundering safeguards, resulting in illicit transfers that financed terrorist groups for years
…the people who run things always know what they're doing, but they don't.
This from the Wall Street Journal, this morning:
Harris and Trump will have a similar goal in today’s debate: to knock their opponent off balance and define themselves as the best candidate
Imagine.
“If a potato could talk,” [one emailer] wrote, “it would sound like Tom Brady.”
OK, can win…at some things.
Since drawing parallels to Brady’s playing career are obviously irresistible, here’s one more. His debut was akin to his 86-yard passing performance in his second career start, a 30-10 loss to the Dolphins in Week 4, 2001.
[That season ended with Brady — and the Pats — in the Super Bowl.]
Porter County hunters may face fewer prey this deer season as a hemorrhagic disease has been striking the animals here in elevated numbers…
We don't know when first frost is likely to occur but AI (somewhat) reliable informs us that archery deer season begins in Illinois this year on October 1 and youth firearm deer season on October 12. First firearm deer season begins November 22 and second firearm season on December 6. And for the old guys, there's a muzzleloader-only (no kidding) deer season that begins December 13.
[For definitive and up-to-date info on Illinois deer seasons, check here.]
"Mother Nature has a way of mitigating the damage. Fewer deer after a die-off means more food for those that remain," we are assured.Long before Trump hit Beijing with tariffs, an American company making wire hangers won numerous trade cases involving Chinese hangers.
…trying to get rid of these things and now I find out somebody's making more?
Even worse, importing more?
It's exhausting.
Northeastern Minnesota is home to one of the world’s largest undeveloped mineral deposits, including what is estimated to be the third-largest nickel deposit and second-largest copper deposit in the world, according to labor-union figures. Humans will need to mine more copper by 2050 than was mined in all of human history up to 2018 to keep up with current growth trends, one study found, and converting to electric vehicles will only further strain that demand.
I spent the most formative years of my young life in this part of Minnesota. I've seen the vast open-pit iron mines of the Missabe range…
It'll be a loss of indescribable proportions, digging that up. But there'll be disasters of other sorts if it's not dug up — and of course there's a lot of money to be had — and so the digging will happen as sure as the world turns. (And warms.)
More companies and government agencies out in the wild want to read our body parts. The Transportation Security Administration, for example, started scanning passengers’ faces instead of checking IDs. These groups say the biometric processes are meant to eliminate friction, save time and reduce lines.
— the U.S. Presidential election, which begins traditionally (meaning, in our imaginations only) on Labor Day (meaning, right about now), it might be wise to note this thought from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.:
You know, that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way — and the fools know it.
We might, of course, in our enlightened age, phrase it a little differently, but it's the thought that counts.
Be careful out there.
And, if it's any help, here's what Bing has to say about fact-checking services on the internet.
The FDA’s struggles overseeing the global pharmaceutical supply have been documented by the Government Accountability Office, which has flagged the area as a “high risk” issue every year since 2009.
"Regular deliveries of multipurpose layered cellulose fibres."
From its beginnings as a campus newspaper in the late 1980s, The Onion has become America's most reliable (-ly funny) newspaper online. Now it returns to print,
"Americans demand new form of media to bridge entertainment gap while looking from laptop to phone." it reports.
The United States ranks 90th in plastic pollution with more than 52,500 tons…according to the study.
Two thirds of plastic pollution comes from south of the equator, 10.2 million tons per year from India alone.
“I didn’t catch a single fish and I’m pissed off that I wasn’t arrested,” Hill said.
Or, for that matter, any river?
Intelligence and national security officials have said that Russia, China and Iran have all mounted online influence operations targeting U.S. voters ahead of the November election. Russia remains the top threat, intelligence officials say, even as Iran has become more aggressive in recent months, covertly supporting U.S. protests against the war in Gaza and attempting to hack into the email systems of the two presidential candidates.
And the beauty of it all is that due to the way social media algorithms work, much of this activity is being funded by American advertisers.
The Justice Department proposed reclassifying it in May, saying the change would recognize marijuana’s medical uses and acknowledge it has less potential for abuse than some of the nation’s most dangerous drugs. The proposal, which would not legalize marijuana for recreational use, came after a call for review from Biden, who has called the change “monumental.”
And, always alert…
Some misinformation researchers are worried that the new spate of left-leaning conspiracy theories could further polarize political discourse before the November election.
OK, buzz phrase then. "Misinformation researchers" are fact checkers who arrived too late. Sort of like fire fighters who arrive after the house has burned to the ground are fire researchers.
The Times story (link above) makes clear, however, left-wing misinformation is not as toxic as the right-wing variety. As, for example, what appeared on Trump's ear after somebody took a shot at him in Pennsylvania was not blood, but ketchup.
Silly, huh?
In Old English the word meant, believe it or not, “what the future holds,” as in what we now refer to as fate. The sisters in “Macbeth” were the “weird sisters,” in the meaning of “fate sisters,” telling the future. But they were also portrayed as ghoulish in appearance and attire. With the prominence of this play and similar fate-sister figures in other ones, the sense set in that “weird” meant frighteningly odd.
“For those not from Minnesota, just to be clear, there’s a lot of great state fairs in the country, this is the best one,” Walz said. “I can say that having tried pork chops in Iowa.”
And, not having to run in a primary, he can probably get away with dissing Iowa. In a Midwestern Folksy™ kind of way.
Both campaigns consider Georgia to be a key battleground state this election, with the Harris campaign hoping to recreate President Joe Biden's success there in 2020. By contrast, former President Donald Trump is hoping to reclaim the Peach State after his win there in 2016.
It all happens in Georgia, of course — a state so important they couldn't wait for the state fair. State fairs are the traditional place for politicians to show off eating stuff.
The Georgia State Fair this year is from September 27 to October 6.
