Random Posts

[goldenvalley]

Wow the Mighty Mississippi is not so mighty anymore.  Drought is drying it up. The maps and photos in this article are amazing. I have family in St. Louis and remember many times of the river being at flood stage but never ever saw it like this...and I'm an old.

The nation’s mightiest, most mythic waterway has been strangled by months of dry conditions, which have sent water levels plummeting to historic lows. For weeks now, that slow-moving crisis has made it difficult, if not impossible, to move barges down a river that serves as a highway for about 60 percent of the nation’s foreign-bound corn and soybeans.

The result is a season of uncertainty for many up and down the river who depend on it for their livelihoods, from farmers growing crops to the tugboat pilots who steer barges toward the Gulf of Mexico and back. The deep worries over the crippled supply chain have mingled with the sheer curiosity of people who have flocked to the banks of the Mississippi to marvel at a sight few can ever recall.

[andydp]

WARNING !! Cuteness overload !!

[goldenvalley]

My sentiments exactly!  

Dear grocery store owners: Have you seen me in the break room? No? There’s a reason: I don’t work for you! I don’t want to work for you — I was bad at it as a middle-schooler and I’m worse now!

And it’s not just grocery stores. Apparently, I work at United Airlines, too, where I now book my own flight, tag my own bags and drop them on the belt. I also have part-time jobs at Target, CVS, Uniqlo and even McDonald’s. I’m checking myself out more often now than a seventh-grade girl on TikTok.

It’s not like I want to go to self-checkout. It’s that these giant chains are firing cashiers to save money. The last time I went to my local Safeway, there were nine self-checkout stands open but only two live cashiers. The lines for them went all the way back to the Milk-Bones. I had no choice but to do it myself. I have Christmas plans.

“But they’re faster!” I hear you saying. Doesn’t feel like it. About every other time at the supermarket, the self-checkout thinks my olive oil is liquor or mistakes my honeydew for a gourd or I do some tiny thing wrong and the machine barks: “Help is on the way.” But help is not on the way. Help is over there trying to get the old man’s checkbook out of the receipt slot.

Worse, a lot of stores position a “receipt checker” to see whether people actually paid for all the stuff they have. Wait a second. You set up this system. You made us do all this. So, now that we’ve slogged our way through our temp job with zero training, you’re going to audit us?

[andydp]

On a positive note:

Seton Hall Pirates vs Iowa State, 1930 EDT on FS1

GO PIRATES !

[LFC]

This is an interesting discovery about Alzheimer's that may open up a new path to treatment.

No gene variant is a bigger risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease than one called APOE4. But exactly how the gene spurs brain damage has been a mystery.

A study1 has now linked APOE4 with faulty cholesterol processing in the brain, which in turn leads to defects in the insulating sheaths that surround nerve fibres and facilitate their electrical activity. Preliminary results hint that these changes could cause memory and learning deficits. And the work suggests that drugs that restore the brain’s cholesterol processing could treat the disease.

“This fits in with the picture that cholesterol needs to be in the right place,” says Gregory Thatcher, a chemical biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Inheriting a single copy of APOE4 raises the risk of developing Alzheimer’s around 3-fold; having two copies boosts the chances 8- to 12-fold. Interactions between the protein encoded by APOE4 and sticky plaques of amyloid — a substance tied to brain cell death — in the brain partially explain the connection. But those interactions are not the whole story.

As neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge and her colleagues report today in Nature, APOE4 triggers insulation-making brain cells known as oligodendrocytes to accumulate the fatty molecule cholesterol — a type of lipid — in all the wrong places.

This interferes with the cells’ ability to cover nerve fibres in a protective wrapper made of a lipid-rich material called myelin. Electrical signalling in the brain then slows, and cognition usually suffers.

[LFC]

I don't follow football, or any sports, but the more I learn about Tom Brady the more I think he's a flaming shitbag. I can also understand his support for Trump.

Star NFL quarterback Tom Brady has had a rough year. The seven-time Super Bowl champ came out of retirement—reportedly wrecking his marriage to supermodel Gisele Bündchen—to play a rocky season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. And the player and his ex-wife could now lose their sizable investment in collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which filed for bankruptcy and is reportedly missing at least $1 billion in client funds. The couple took an equity stake in FTX last year as part of a deal that made them brand ambassadors. On Tuesday, investors filed a class-action lawsuit against Brady, Bündchen, and FTX’s other celebrity endorsers.

These may not be the 45-year-old’s only setbacks. Public records for Brady’s charity reviewed by The Daily Beast reveal that his sports therapy and wellness company TB12, Inc., was in the red as recently as 2020, with a negative balance of $7 million in net assets.

Meanwhile, his TB12 Foundation—lately in the news for installing his “TB12 Method” for injury recovery and prevention in select Florida schools—has doubled its revenues in recent years with donations from just a handful of supporters, including multimillionaire YouTube personality Logan Thirtyacre, who shelled out $200,000. (The Brady superfan once paid $800,000 to a charity auction to dine with the GOAT and interviewed him over Zoom in at least one YouTube video.) Canadian billionaire Lino Saputo Jr., a Porsche-loving hockey fanatic who helms the Saputo cheese company, donated $250,000.

Other donations included $10,000 each from the NFL Foundation, Fox Sports (where Brady will reportedly star as a lead analyst post-career), and Federico Laurencich, a helicopter pilot in Costa Rica, where Brady and Bündchen owned a hilltop mansion.

Brady, who earned $350 million during his two decades with the New England Patriots, has given a small fraction of his riches to his own charity, with little over $200,000 in donations, according to the TB12 Foundation’s tax filings.

The quarterback’s for-profit company TB12, Inc. is the sole provider of “sports therapy” sessions for the TB12 Foundation. Since it launched in 2015, the foundation has paid Brady’s firm a total of more than $1.6 million for its services, and it’s the only company listed as an “independent contractor” for such treatments.

Some of the charity’s directors are paid employees of TB12, Inc., tax filings show.

Alex Guerrero, Brady’s longtime “body coach” and company co-founder, and TB12, Inc.’s then-CEO John Burns became directors of the nonprofit in July 2021, and the charity’s tax records indicate TB12, Inc. paid them $497,461 and $630,846 respectively. (Both Brady and Guerrero are each listed in the 2021 tax form as a “majority owner” of TB12, Inc.)

Laurie Styron, executive director of independent nonprofit monitor CharityWatch, told The Daily Beast that it isn’t common for a company to create a public charity, which then pays the company for its services. “I can say that I haven’t come across this type of arrangement too often in my 19 years of nonprofit financial analysis in a watchdog role,” Styron said.

“A charity’s board members have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of the charity at all times,” Styron added. “Doing so becomes more complicated when there are competing interests between nonprofit and for-profit legal entities, particularly when the two organizations share key staff who have to balance their fiduciary duties between the two. It has the potential to get tricky if there aren’t adequate safeguards in place.”

As part of its filings with the state of Massachusetts, the nonprofit has also presented a glimpse into the finances of TB12, Inc., which it lists as a related organization to the TB12 Foundation. The for-profit nutrition and wellness company sells things like a $160 vibrating “pliability” roller, $60 plant-based protein powder, and $200 sessions with its body coaches.

[indy]

Jan 4, 2022 15:38:28 GMT LFC said:

Theranos founder and top-level grifter Elizabeth Holmes found guilty on 4 counts.

Elizabeth Holmes was convicted today of three counts of criminal wire fraud and one count of criminal conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The jury delivered its verdict after six days of deliberation.

The government’s victory in the case is a rare rebuke for tech startups, which often pitch investors on their technological prowess and business acumen using wildly optimistic assumptions.

Theranos was, perhaps, an extreme example, raising over $900 million on the back of claims that its proprietary tests were better, cheaper, and less invasive than the competition. None of those claims was true, and unlike many other Silicon Valley startups, the health and safety of patients was on the line.

Holmes was found guilty of defrauding Lakeshore Capital Management (the family office of the DeVoses) of $100 million, PFM Healthcare (a hedge fund) of $38 million, and an LLC connected to Daniel Mosley (Henry Kissinger’s former estate attorney) of $6 million. She was also convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud against Theranos investors more generally. On three charges, all alleging wire fraud against investors, the jury returned no verdict. Holmes was acquitted of all other charges, including those that involved defrauding patients. She faces up to 20 years in prison.

With the guilty verdict, Holmes, the founder of the company, is the first Theranos executive to be held criminally responsible for her actions, though she may not be the last.

Sentenced to 11 years. Seems a bit on the heavy side to me.

[LFC]

Nov 19, 2022 1:41:00 GMT indy said:

Jan 4, 2022 15:38:28 GMT LFC said:

Theranos founder and top-level grifter Elizabeth Holmes found guilty on 4 counts.

Sentenced to 11 years. Seems a bit on the heavy side to me.

It's not like she was caught doing something serious, like selling weed.

[pnwguy]

Nov 19, 2022 16:10:36 GMT LFC said:

Nov 19, 2022 1:41:00 GMT indy said:

Sentenced to 11 years. Seems a bit on the heavy side to me.

It's not like she was caught doing something serious, like selling weed.

Or totally dangerous to society like Driving While Black.

[indy]

Sorry, it was naive of me not to understand that 3 wrongs make a right.

[LFC]

Nov 20, 2022 13:24:03 GMT indy said:

Sorry, it was naive of me not to understand that 3 wrongs make a right.

Two wrongs don’t make a right but 3 lefts do.

[AnBr]

Today's Google Doodle is about a childhood friend of my mother, Marie Tharp.

www.newsweek.com/google-doodle-celebrates-american-geologist-marie-tharp-1760957

[andydp]

National Lampoon Christmas decorations for the mundane.

A weather snapshot:  temps are 46, feel like 39 with a West wind at 18mph.  This is why I put the outside icicle lights up in early November when it was 60ish. (Only took me about 10 years to figure it out)

All outside lights are plugged in and ready to come alive at dusk.  (Photosensing timer).  Tree is decorated and will be manually lit up via my cordless remote, when the outside lights come on. The wreath is on a separate timer (easier this way).

[goldenvalley]

Here's the latest from DrDre.  He's got a new project going.

I try not to criticize without offering solutions, so I’m proud to say that I cofounded an organization that uses some clever custom technology to make reliable journalism viewable by people in autocracies that have banned it. And we’ve done it without the people living in said autocracies needing any additional tech, like VPN or TOR or whatnot.

The product is called Samizdat Online and our goal is to make it impossible for any dictator to ever censor the press again. We believe that it is precisely such censorship that leads to things like the invasion of Ukraine with the bewildered and halting support of a thoroughly confused and “programmed” Russian populace.

[goldenvalley]

Take a look at this WaPo article about housing designs in England, built to hold heat but not to withstand hot summer temperatures.  The graphics are really well done as is the history of how coal burning changed housing styles. 

[andydp]

Asking for a friend:

What type of adult beverages should one serve and partake of at an early World Cup match ?

[pnwguy]

Dec 3, 2022 15:36:02 GMT andydp said:

Asking for a friend:

What type of adult beverages should one serve and partake of at an early World Cup match ?

It would depend on IF you were actually in Qatar watching it...

[goldenvalley]

Maybe I'm grumpy because it is Monday morning but every day I realize I am old.  Or maybe just a cantankerous get off my lawn type.  Do young people not realize that slang does not belong in work related communications?  That it is reserved for informal friend groups?  My youngest is 26; he seems to get it.

Given that many zoomers grew up communicating digitally and through text, they’ve had to develop ways to incorporate tone and intention, said Verheijen. That means adding visual elements like memes and emojis and often using them ironically. And with their prolific use of social media, Gen Z workers are able to spread new trends to their peers much faster, leading to widespread adoption. To be sure, some of these slang were adopted from other communities.

Alyssa Velez, a 23-year-old media relations specialist in Chicago, said she had to adjust to seeing periods at the end of a sentence in Slack and email messages from her colleagues. Once she received a comment from a colleague saying “good job.” But the period made her second guess whether she was actually being praised.

“I’m like, ‘Is it a good job?’” she said. “It just makes me nervous. I even had to ask, and then I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m overthinking it.’”
Janvi Kalra, a 23-year-old software engineer at San Francisco-based start-up Coda, agrees, noting that sometimes zoomers interpret periods as passive aggressive or cold because it’s so formal. But older colleagues prefer to use full sentences, complete with periods.

and there is this:

Enough questions arise from the generational divide that Coda has a Slack channel dedicated to helping colleagues understand Gen Z’s emoji use at work. Kalra said some zoomers interpret the emoji with open eyes and puckered lips (😗) as a face expressing judgment vs. a kissing face — an important distinction at the workplace. She and her peers also often use the skull emoji (💀) or open-mouth emoji with streaming tears to convey exaggerated laughter (😭) — as in dead from or crying of laughter.
But what about the generic smiley face that often appears in some apps after typing a colon and a closed parenthesis (🙂)? Some zoomers say this can come off as passive aggressive or cold.

“It looks dead in the eyes,” Kalra said. “It doesn’t seem warm.”

For some zoomers, the immediacy of text messaging has also altered how quickly they expect to receive communication responses. Layla Wellington, a 22-year-old graduate assistant for the University of Illinois Springfield, said she had to acclimate to a delay in receiving responses to emails.

“With that gap, we can build emotion about why they aren’t responding,” she said, adding that she didn’t use email much before college. “I had to realize that it takes time and a lot of people like to reply in business hours.”

The above woman has now realized she needs to "code switch."  Quite the revelation!  I figured that out as a child when talking to my grandparents.  Why should we not code switch depending on the setting.  I suppose it isn't "authentic." 

[LFC]

This puts a good dose of "random" in this thread.

Walking like John Cleese's character, Mr. Teabag, in Monty Python's famous "Ministry of Silly Walks" skit requires considerably more energy expenditure than a normal walking gait because the movement is so inefficient, according to a new paper published in the annual Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal. In fact, just 11 minutes a day of walking like Mr. Teabag was equivalent to 75 minutes of vigorously intense physical activity per week, presenting a novel means of boosting cardiovascular fitness.

"Half a century ago, the [Ministry of Silly Walks] skit might have unwittingly touched on a powerful way to enhance cardiovascular fitness in adults," the authors wrote. "Had an initiative to promote inefficient movement been adopted in the early 1970s, we might now be living among a healthier society."

The BMJ's Christmas issue is typically more lighthearted, though the journal maintains that the papers published therein still "adhere to the same high standards of novelty, methodological rigor, reporting transparency, and readability as apply in the regular issue." Past years have included papers on such topics as why 27 is not a dangerous age for musicians, the side effects of sword swallowing, and measuring the toxicity of the concoction brewed in Roald Dahl's 1981 book George's Marvelous Medicine. (It's very toxic indeed.) The most widely read was 1999’s infamous “Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal.” (We wrote about the paper in 2019 to mark the 20th anniversary of its publication.)

[LFC]

Bill Maher's 2010 message on the true meaning of Xmas in America; getting material stuff. I can't make the case that he's wrong. America does consume an heckuva' lot per capita.

[LFC]

Aaaaahhhh, for the days when conservatives were actually willing to acknowledge reality and solve problems. Now it's all alternative facts and culture wars all the time.

The ozone layer may be recovered within a few decades thanks to human intervention, a report from the United Nations reveals.

The report shows that the 1987 international agreement to ban the use of harmful chemicals damaging the ozone layer has been a success, according to the BBC.

[snip]

The report outlines the predictions that the ozone layer will be fully restored in the worst affected area of the Antarctic by 2066. By 2045, depletion is expected to have recovered over the Arctic. Anywhere else affected is likely to recover in only two decades fully.

All of this is, of course, dependent on policies drawn up for the Montreal Protocol being maintained.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 11, 2023 22:28:22 GMT LFC said:

Aaaaahhhh, for the days when conservatives were actually willing to acknowledge reality and solve problems. Now it's all alternative facts and culture wars all the time.

The ozone layer may be recovered within a few decades thanks to human intervention, a report from the United Nations reveals.

The report shows that the 1987 international agreement to ban the use of harmful chemicals damaging the ozone layer has been a success, according to the BBC.

[snip]

The report outlines the predictions that the ozone layer will be fully restored in the worst affected area of the Antarctic by 2066. By 2045, depletion is expected to have recovered over the Arctic. Anywhere else affected is likely to recover in only two decades fully.

All of this is, of course, dependent on policies drawn up for the Montreal Protocol being maintained.

Whadda' ya know.  We can fix a problem by stopping the use of harmful chemicals.

[AnBr]

Jan 11, 2023 22:28:22 GMT LFC said:

Aaaaahhhh, for the days when conservatives were actually willing to acknowledge reality and solve problems. Now it's all alternative facts and culture wars all the time.

The ozone layer may be recovered within a few decades thanks to human intervention, a report from the United Nations reveals.

The report shows that the 1987 international agreement to ban the use of harmful chemicals damaging the ozone layer has been a success, according to the BBC.

[snip]

The report outlines the predictions that the ozone layer will be fully restored in the worst affected area of the Antarctic by 2066. By 2045, depletion is expected to have recovered over the Arctic. Anywhere else affected is likely to recover in only two decades fully.

All of this is, of course, dependent on policies drawn up for the Montreal Protocol being maintained.

Sigh, what we are capable of when we are not subverted by a whiny bunch of know-nothings with a disproportionate share of power.

[pnwguy]

Jan 12, 2023 2:09:01 GMT AnBr said:

Sigh, what we are capable of when we are not subverted by a whiny bunch of know-nothings with a disproportionate share of power.

Aviation, victory in WW2, exploration of space and the lunar surface, vaccines for fatal diseases, cinema and television, a revolution in agriculture, computing and the Internet, etc.....

Now we are the greatest country on the planet for grievance, conspiracy theories, and the exportation of chaos culture.

Always a good reminder: 

[AnBr]

I have always like that scene. And it is so true.