21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: New chlamydia test offers results within 30 minutes.
Archive for 2018
December 6, 2018
ALL HE HAD TO DO WAS SELF-IDENTIFY AS A WOMAN FIRST, AND THIS WOULDN’T BE AN ISSUE, RIGHT? Democrat accused of repeated use of women’s restroom will resign in January.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Waymo One, the groundbreaking self-driving taxi service, explained. “Waymo’s self-driving technology is innovative, but its business model is completely conventional. Waymo One will be a ride hailing service a lot like Uber or Lyft.”
JOE PAPPALARDO: This Is The Golden Age Of Space Exploration.
Although our robotic explorers are working millions of miles apart, together they’re pursuing the same central mystery: how did the solar system form? Each probe is providing new hard, forensic evidence for planetary scientists, geologists, and astronomers to form a unified view of Earth’s origins, and how other planets could be home to its abundance of life.
“We’ve had missions all across the solar system…it’s been pretty spectacular,” says Tim Linn, senior space engineer at Lockheed Martin who’s division is running seven missions from its facilities in Colorado.
Talk to the NASA scientists and contractors who built these spacecraft and it becomes clear that it’s a great time to be in the space exploration game.
“If you look back through the history of planetary science, there were a few big missions every so often that did spectacular things, but there were long gaps in between the missions,” says Linn. “There was a pretty big push for the early Mars missions and some Venus missions, and then there was the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, but there was not a lot happening in the late 60’s and through the 70’s. Not very much happened in the 80’s, and then not too much happened in the 90’s either.”
But concentrating scientific minds (and government budgets) toward Mars changed everything.
Unexpectedly!
NEVER BRING A KNIFE TO A GUN FIGHT — EVEN WITH YOUR MOTHER: Mother shoots son who pulled out samurai sword during argument, Fort Worth police say.
Didn’t we learn anything from Raiders of the Lost Ark?
(Found via Iowahawk, who tweets, “This deserves to be a Christmas movie classic.”)
SENATOR MAZIE HIRONO: Dems Struggle Appealing to Voters’ Hearts Because ‘We Have to Tell Everyone How Smart We Are.’
Please show some sympathy. It’s hard for Democrats because they’re just so much better than you deplorably irredeemable bitter clingers.
LARGE, LONG-TERM STUDY OF LOW-DOSE ASPIRIN CONCLUDES: “Aspirin use in healthy elderly persons did not prolong disability-free survival over a period of 5 years but led to a higher rate of major hemorrhage than placebo.”
HOW (NOT) TO BEAT THE HIGH COST OF LIVING: California gives final approval to code requiring solar on new homes.
This is going to go over well on the North Coast. When I was living there, longtime San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen came up for a visit behind The Redwood Curtain, and quoted one of the locals saying, “It’s not so much that we want to see the sun, but someday we’d sure like our kids to.”
COLD WAR II: Russia Threatens ‘Retaliation’ for U.S. Pullout of INF Treaty. “Putin is denying that Russia is violating the 1987 accord, but U.S. intel has ironclad proof that says otherwise.”
SOMEBODY’S AUDITIONING FOR A SWEET GIG AT MSNBC. Judicial Nightmare: Jeff Flake Has Pretty Much Destroyed His Party’s Agenda On Judges This Year.
ROBERT SPENCER: A Book That Changes the Counterterror Paradigm. “Jamie Glazov revolutionizes the field with a novel diagnosis of the problem.”
This one just went to the top of my never-shrinking Kindle list.
MAX BOOT IS JUST AS GRATING as a former conservative as he was as a leading necon. In today’s example, he writes about an Israeli-based company that sells spy software to dubious governments. The headline blames this on “Israel,” not the company. Rather than correcting this, Max sends out a tweet itself suggesting that “Israel” is responsible for “enabling foreign oppression.” Meanwhile, it turns out that the company is actually owned by a San Francisco-based private equity fund, and has been since 2013, making it all the more opaque why “Israel” is the focus of the op-ed.
ROGER SIMON: The American Presidency is in Xi’s Hands.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Today’s Social Science Courses—More Feelings, Less Facts.
PROCUREMENT: Flawed Bomb Elevators Leave Inhofe Leery of Buying Two Carriers.
Navy Secretary Richard Spencer told reporters in August that the elevators are “our open Achilles Heel.”
The Navy plans to complete installation and testing of the 11 elevators before the Ford completes its post-delivery shakedown phase in July, Captain Danny Hernandez, a Navy spokesman, said in an email. Six will also be certified for use by then, but five won’t be completed until after July, he said. “A dedicated team is engaged on these efforts and will accelerate this certification work and schedule where feasible,” he said.
Huntington spokeswoman Beci Brenton said via email that company officials had a “very productive meeting” with Inhofe that included both the elevators and benefits of a two-carrier contract.
The elevator’s completion “has been delayed due to a number of first-in-class issues associated with the first-time installation, integration and test of this new technology,” she said. “However, we are making substantial substantial progress in resolving the remaining technical challenges.”
“Mere” elevators seem like a simple thing, but they really aren’t. The big selling point of the Ford-class ships is their ability to generate higher sortie rates, thus sustaining higher optempos. A big part of that equation is the electronic launch system replacing the traditional steam catapults. The other major part is the high-capacity/high-speed weapons elevators.
They’ll get the kinks worked out, but it’s going to take time and money — and some understandable aggravation on the part of lawmakers and taxpayers.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Tumblr’s anti-porn algorithm is flagging basically everything as NSFW.
This porn ban is already being implemented, with Tumblr flagging everything it deems to be explicit material. On a purely conceptual level, this was already bad news for many Tumblr users. An NSFW content ban will hurt the livelihoods of artists and sex workers on the site, and potentially lead to a mass exodus of bloggers who want to retain their creative freedom. However, it looks like the problems go even further because Tumblr’s content flagging algorithm is hopelessly incompetent. As soon as Tumblr started highlighting “explicit” content on Dec. 3, users reported having totally innocuous posts flagged on their accounts.
Tumblr and Twitter are already full of screencaps showing random posts mislabeled as explicit material. In some cases, you can kind of see how the mistake happened (for instance, art with partial but non-sexual nudity, or images that a bot might mistake for a human body), but there’s also a ton of content that appears to have been flagged at random.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
