Random Posts

[LFC]

Britney Spears got out from under her father's thumb. It sounds like his control of her conservatorship was pretty awful. I really don't understand how the court has this power to allow people to completely take over and run her life for well over a decade unless there's some kind of diagnosis of massive mental health issues, not just garden variety ones.

Britney Spears has finally been heard. After 13 years as conservator over the pop star's multi-million-dollar estate, a Los Angeles judge suspended her estranged father Jamie Spears during a hearing on Wednesday afternoon.

Judge Brenda J. Penny granted Spears’ request for certified public accountant John Zabel to be made temporary conservator over her estate. She also ordered Jamie Spears to hand over all assets pertaining to Spears’ estate as soon as possible.

Jodi Montgomery, who oversees Spears’ day-to-day care and medical decisions, will remain the temporary conservator over Spears’ person for the time being.

“This situation is not tenable... This situation is toxic,” Judge Penny remarked while making her ruling. Although the next court date is set for Nov. 12, the conservatorship could be terminated before then.

But as the hearing came to a close, Jamie Spears’ legal team made a last ditch attempt to keep their client in a position of power, telling Judge Penny they intended to appeal her ruling, which the judge quickly shut down by saying her order was not appealable.

While Spears is still shy of being completely freed, Wednesday’s ruling is a major step in the right direction. It comes three months after the 39-year-old detailed at length what she endured during her “traumatizing” and “abusive” ordeal and begged the judge to pave the way to end the legal arrangement and, at the very least, remove her father.

“I just want my life back. It's been 13 years and it's enough,” Spears told the judge in June.

[LFC]

Sept 30, 2021 6:07:01 GMT AnBr said:

I was being annoyed with Facebook's increasingly aggressive spamming.

In the old days I was never bothered by ads. I accepted that they were part of getting the "free" product. Then they went to auto-loading videos and rotating ads where they ate your bandwidth. Now they track your every move and eat up more bandwidth. RawStory used to be awful with that. If I went thru their homepage and opened up 10 articles in separate tabs my browser would pretty much grind to a halt. Now I've got multiple blockers on and if I can't read a page straight up or thru incognito mode then I just don't bother. Some ads are absolutely fine. Taking up 90% of the page download for ads and continuing to eat bandwidth while simply reading is not.

[goldenvalley]

Scientists with Saildrone and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration managed to drive a robotic surfboard into the core of Category 4 Hurricane Sam on Thursday, in a first-of-its-kind scientific mission as they try to better understand hurricanes.

The video, captured just northeast of Hurricane Sam’s monstrous eye, depicts eerily dark skies, screaming winds and a thick veil of sea spray and mist lofted into the air. Enormous waves can be seen swinging the probe like a pendulum.

Saildrone United 1045 happened to be in the best position to intercept Sam, which was a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 145 mph early Thursday afternoon. Wave heights were reported at more than 50 feet.

Look at the video embedded in this article...unless you get seasick easily....

[LFC]

A ninja with a sword assailed a U.S. Army special operations unit in California

[goldenvalley]

A 3D look at the Dixie Fire in NorCal. People don’t realize how a fire creates its own weather to grow explosively and exponentially. No amount of water or chemical fire retardants can stop this or even slow it much. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/19/climate/dixie-fire-storm-clouds-weather.html

ETA: More news about wildfire, the effect of wildfire smoke in the eastern parts of the country. Maybe folks won’t be so cavalier about wildfire in the West and more interested in spending taxpayer $$ to support preventative measures and fire fighting. Of course CA is stuck with at least one House member who doesn’t want to increase fire fighter pay because it’s a low skill job. www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/10/20/wildfire-smoke-deaths-eastern-us/

[LFC]

If this works out it could be a game changer for those waiting for a kidney.

Scientists look to be one major step closer to a long-awaited goal in medicine: successfully transplanting organs from another animal to a human. Researchers from New York University announced this week that they recently transplanted a kidney from a genetically modified pig that was then able to function as normal without rejection from the human body. Though there are possible ethical and safety concerns about the use of these nonhuman organs, experts hope that this technology will one day save the lives of many left languishing on backlogged transplant lists.

Researchers at NYU Langone Health conducted the operation last month, as first reported by USA Today. For ethical reasons, they performed it on a brain-dead patient whose family agreed to help, since the patient was supposed to be taken off life support soon anyway. The group transplanted the porcine kidney to the patient, then watched the organ for two days before the study ended. During these days, the kidney seemed to work perfectly well as intended.

“It had absolutely normal function,” Robert Montgomery, lead of the NYU surgical team, told the AP. “It didn’t have this immediate rejection that we have worried about.”

Earlier last winter, the Food and Drug approved the use of the pig used in this research, developed by United Therapeutics Corp, as both a food and medical product. Beyond the organs they may provide, there’s hope that they could be used to help develop other biological products like blood thinners. But there are more regulatory hurdles that have to be climbed, including evidence of its continued safety, before pig organs will be seen as a viable alternative to human ones for transplantations. Importantly, the research conducted by the NYU team has yet to be published in a peer reviewed journal, which is a key part of the scientific process.

[andydp]

Just finished watching the GM Corvettte ZO6 "reveal".  Unbelievable car.  

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDFw1ndLhF8

Tried to get on the web site to do a "build" but its not reponding probably due to heavy traffic.  I may have to wait until midnight.

Meanwhile, I'm reminded by life reality sucks.  I have been trying to finish setting up the water softener.  Had to extend some connector hoses via non soldered fitting.  They are working great on three out of the four joints... I'm waiting 24 hours before I do anything just to be sure it is a leak and not leftover water from the install.

1600 update:  Just checked the last paper towel I wrapped on the pipe joint.  Bone dry.  Now for the last desperate chapter:  I have wrapped a towel on the joint and will leave it alone until tomorrow morning.  If it stays dry, it will fly.  After that I call Rheem customer service.  They have been very helpful so far. Some final tweaks and we get softer water again !!

0730 10/27 update:  Checked the paper towel: no runs, no drips no errors.  Good to go !!

[LFC]

This is horrible.

A recent baking trend of using "luster dusts" to give cake frostings and decorations a shimmery look has poisoned young children with heavy metals in at least two states, health researchers warn in a new report published Friday.

A toxic birthday cake for a 1-year-old left six children (ages 1 to 11) severely ill with vomiting and diarrhea after an October 2018 birthday party in Rhode Island. One child needed to be taken to the emergency room.

Investigators from the Rhode Island Department of Health traced the illnesses to the cake's thick layer of frosting laced with a rose gold "luster dust." The cake was produced in a commercial bakery, and the health investigators identified three possible sources of the bakery's luster dust. One was an importer who identified the dust as "fine copper powder" that was initially sold as "metallic pigment for consumer goods such as floor coverings." Though the dust was labeled "nontoxic," it was also labeled "nonedible."

Laboratory testing indicated that the birthday cake's frosting contained 22.1 milligrams of copper per gram of rose gold frosting, which would equate to nearly 900 mg of copper on each cake slice. That is 1,000-fold higher than the daily recommended intake of copper for adults, let alone children. According to the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, the recommended daily intake of copper is 0.9 mg for adults, 0.2 mg for infants up to 1 year old, and 0.3 mg for children ages 1 to 3. The NIH notes that copper can be toxic and recommends an upper limit of just 1 mg in children ages 1 to 3.

The health investigators in Rhode Island concluded that the children had copper metal poisoning, which can cause liver damage, abdominal pain, cramps, nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting.

It's not just copper.

But that wasn't the end of it. In May of 2019, investigators with the Missouri Department of Health found high levels of lead in a bright yellow primrose petal dust that was added to decorative flowers on a 1-year-old child's homemade birthday cake. The dust was sold by a Florida cake decorating company and was labeled as a "nontoxic" coloring for baked goods, candies, chocolate, and sugar art.

And seriously, you have to tell people who prepare food for a living to NOT to use ingredients unless labeled "edible?" What in the actual hell?

In the meantime, the authors and the FDA caution bakers to look carefully at labels. Most edible decorations usually include the word "edible" somewhere on the label and are required to include an ingredient list. If they don't, don't take chances.

"If the label simply says 'nontoxic' or 'for decorative purposes only' and does not include an ingredients list, the product should not be used directly on foods," the FDA advises.

[Bact PhD]

Ooookaayyy.

I’ve done my share of baking over the years. I think I can tell the difference between silver decors for decoration only versus the edible sugar ones; IIRC those are usually labeled accordingly either way. I just happen to have in my home pantry a spray bottle of “shimmering food color” from a well-known manufacturer of cake-decorating implements. This is the kind of thing you spray *on* items that are already frosted to give a surface shimmer, not fold in to the entire batch of frosting. The list of ingredients includes alcohol, propellants, “artificial colors,” and known food dyes. I used about half the small bottle on some cupcakes for the baseball team a few years ago. I had no idea this was an issue. Is the labeling the issue, or the end-user, or some of both?

[andydp]

Delegation is key.

We and I do mean "we" are in the process of making about 250 peanut butter cups for various parties we will be going to. 

These have to be poured into small cupcake cups in two steps: a layer of chocolate in the bottom, install the peanut butter ball/filler, then pour chocolate over everything.  We personally spent last evening making about 70 bags of two for the fraternity reunion.  Today we suckered the Corvette Club President to come over for one reason and we collared him into helping make the PB filling, wrapping the cups and putting them in bags.

I spent my day pouring the chocolate.  I am done.  I cleaned up the work areas, filled the dishwasher and am now sitting here watching my wife, the club VP, and the Club Pres assembling the cups.

Delegation has its benefits

[LFC]

What in the actual hell?

A Louisiana widow is left horrified at the news that her deceased husband was dissected in front of a live, paying audience after she donated his body to scientific research.

Elsie Saunders had carried out the wishes of her late husband, David Saunders, who wanted his body donated to help advance medical science, according to The Advocate. David Saunders, a World War II and Korean War veteran, died of COVID-19 on August 24 at the age of 98. Donating his body was his last act of patriotism, Elsie Saunders said.

But instead of being delivered to a research facility, David Saunders' body ended up in a Marriott Hotel ballroom in Portland, Oregon, where DeathScience.org held an "Oddities and Curiosities Expo." At the October 17 event, members of the public sat ringside from 9 am to 4 pm—with a break for lunch—to watch David Saunders' body be carefully dissected. Tickets for the dissection sold for up to $500 per person.

The Advocate noted that an online description of the event read: "From the external body exam to the removal of vital organs including the brain, we will find new perspectives on how the human body can tell a story… There will be several opportunities for attendees to get an up close and personal look at the cadaver."

Elsie Saunders explained that she had initially tried to donate the body to Louisiana State University. But LSU turned down the donation due to the COVID diagnosis. She then connected with a private company named Med Ed Labs in Las Vegas, which says it was "established to provide medical and surgical education and training for the advancement of medical and surgical innovation."

Med Ed Labs subsequently sold the body to Death Science. An administrator for Med Ed Labs, Obteen Nassiri, told KING 5 that DeathScience.org founder Jeremy Ciliberto was "beyond" dishonest about how the body would be used. Nassiri said he believed Ciliberto would use the body for a medical class. Meanwhile, Ciliberto said Med Ed was fully aware that the body would be used in an event attended by people who were "not exclusively medical students."

[LFC]

Whoa.

A Washington metallurgist has pleaded guilty to major fraud after she spent decades faking tests on steel used to build subs for the U.S. Navy. Federal prosecutors say that her behavior put sailors at greater risk in the event of an impact.

Elaine Thomas was employed by Kansas City-based Bradken Inc. as the director of metallurgy at a foundry in Tacoma, notes the U.S. Department of Justice. The company is the nation’s leading supplier of cast high-yield steel for Navy submarines. The Tacoma foundry supplied steel castings for Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding for use in building submarine hulls.

Back in 2017, Bradken learned that Thomas falsified the results of strength and toughness tests for at least 240 productions of steel. The Navy requires that steel meets certain strength and toughness standards to ensure it holds up to situations like impacts. These tests are supposed to show that the steel meets the grade.

How bad was it? According to the Justice Department, Thomas faked the tests from 1985 through 2017 and those 240 productions add up to a “substantial percentage” of the steel produced for the Navy from the foundry.

It gets worse from there, from the Associated Press:

When confronted with the doctored results, Thomas told investigators, “Yeah, that looks bad,” the Justice Department said. She suggested that in some cases she changed the tests to passing grades because she thought it was “stupid” that the Navy required the tests to be conducted at negative-100 degrees Fahrenheit.

According to the Navy Times, even her own attorney said that she took shortcuts.

She was only caught when another metallurgist noticed inconsistencies in Thomas’ records, including the doctored test cards. Bradken disclosed the discovery to the Navy but misled investigators by trying to make them believe the discrepancy wasn’t the result of fraud.

The Justice Department notes that Bradken still invoiced shipbuilders for parts that were supposed to meet standards when they did not.

[Bact PhD]

Sept 30, 2021 1:25:34 GMT LFC said:

Britney Spears got out from under her father's thumb. It sounds like his control of her conservatorship was pretty awful. I really don't understand how the court has this power to allow people to completely take over and run her life for well over a decade unless there's some kind of diagnosis of massive mental health issues, not just garden variety ones.

It’s official. The conservatorship is ended, but Britney may not be done.

www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-12/what-can-britney-spears-do-now-sue-the-people-who-conto

She now has control over her checkbook and her uterus. She can buy a house, get married in that Versace gown she posted about on Instagram, decide when — and when not — to work.

With Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Brenda J. Penny terminating the pop star’s high-profile, nearly 14-year conservatorship, Britney Spears can sue her parents. And there are indications she just might.

[snip]

“This is a monumental day for Britney Spears,” Mathew Rosengart, her attorney, said when the Friday afternoon hearing ended. “Many people have asked about whether we will continue to investigate Mr. [Jamie] Spears. The answer ultimately is up to my client, Britney.”

It was a point Rosengart made repeatedly Friday, talking to reporters outside the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles while surrounded by the star’s cheering fans: “What’s next for Britney — and this is the first time that this could be said for about a decade — is up to one person, Britney.”

Cardozo School of Law professor Leslie Salzman, who has extensively examined conservatorships and elder law, said it remains to be seen “whether Britney’s case makes long-term change to conservatorship. But this case raised the consciousness of the fundamental problems with this approach.”

[LFC]

Turns out that an enormous number of students who get into Harvard get in the old fashioned way: through connections and money rather than merit.

Ever wondered what it takes to get into Harvard? Stellar grades, impressive extracurriculars and based on a recently published study, having deep pockets and a parent who either works or went there. Those last two are pretty important for Harvard’s white students because only about 57% of them were admitted to the school based on merit.

In reality, 43% of Harvard’s white students are either recruited athletes, legacy students, on the dean’s interest list (meaning their parents have donated to the school) or children of faculty and staff (students admitted based on these criteria are referred to as ‘ALDCs’, which stands for ‘athletes’, ‘legacies’, ‘dean’s interest list’ and ‘children’ of Harvard employees). The kicker? Roughly three-quarters of these applicants would have been rejected if it weren’t for having rich or Harvard-connected parents or being an athlete.

Here’s the thing– Harvard is insanely competitive. The admittance rate for the class of 2025 was 3.43%, the lowest rate in the school’s history, in a year that saw an unprecedented surge in applications. But as more and more comes to light about Harvard’s admissions process, it’s clear that the school’s competitiveness is not just based on academic strength or great test scores, but also whether or not your parents or grandparents have donated significantly to the school.

This dynamic is inherently racialized, with almost 70% of all legacy applicants at Harvard being white. According to the study, a white person’s chances of being admitted increased seven times if they had family who donated to Harvard. Meanwhile in stark contrast, African American, Asian American and Hispanic students make up less than 16% of ALDC students.

This kind of systemic favoritism of the white, wealthy and connected is not new when it comes to elite academic institutions. It’s always been a bit of a rigged game, one that overwhelmingly favors rich white people.

[LFC]

There's a new cell phone out by ... a Japanese toaster maker?

It's not every day you see a smartphone launch that truly looks like something new and different, but say hello to the "Balmuda Phone." This is a unique, compact little Android phone, totally out of left field, from a luxury Japanese toaster maker. You can't make this stuff up.

Usually, these "random company made a smartphone" stories are all the same and involve calling up a turnkey smartphone manufacturer and getting a generic phone made. These turnkey smartphone operations have brought us wonderful products, like the KFC phone or the Pepsi P1, but that's not what Balmuda is doing here. The company made a phone because it has a new idea for a phone, with a focus on a compact, rounded-over design rather than the huge slab rectangles that dominate smartphone design. It's a phone designed around human hands and not the rectangle-shaped components that make up a phone.

To quote the website (through Google Translate) the company says: "The Balmuda Phone was designed for a shape that fits naturally in your hand. To achieve this, not only is the back curved, but the shape when viewed from the front is actually wrapped in a gentle curve—even the display. In other words, the Balmuda Phone is the only smartphone whose proportions do not include any straight lines."

Being designed to be held means the Balmuda Phone is one of the rare compact smartphones out there. It has a 4.9-inch, 1920×1080 display, and a 69 mm body width. Tiny phones don't have a ton of room for a battery, and the spec sheet's 2500 mAh battery isn't making us optimistic. The phone is also pretty thick, at 13.7 mm, but it should still slide easily into a pocket, since the whole back of the phone is curved, with it coming to almost a point at the top and bottom.

I wonder if the toaster company figured out how to harness the power of those overheating batteries.

[goldenvalley]

Nov 18, 2021 21:03:26 GMT LFC said:

There's a new cell phone out by ... a Japanese toaster maker?

It's not every day you see a smartphone launch that truly looks like something new and different, but say hello to the "Balmuda Phone." This is a unique, compact little Android phone, totally out of left field, from a luxury Japanese toaster maker. You can't make this stuff up.

Usually, these "random company made a smartphone" stories are all the same and involve calling up a turnkey smartphone manufacturer and getting a generic phone made. These turnkey smartphone operations have brought us wonderful products, like the KFC phone or the Pepsi P1, but that's not what Balmuda is doing here. The company made a phone because it has a new idea for a phone, with a focus on a compact, rounded-over design rather than the huge slab rectangles that dominate smartphone design. It's a phone designed around human hands and not the rectangle-shaped components that make up a phone.

To quote the website (through Google Translate) the company says: "The Balmuda Phone was designed for a shape that fits naturally in your hand. To achieve this, not only is the back curved, but the shape when viewed from the front is actually wrapped in a gentle curve—even the display. In other words, the Balmuda Phone is the only smartphone whose proportions do not include any straight lines."

Being designed to be held means the Balmuda Phone is one of the rare compact smartphones out there. It has a 4.9-inch, 1920×1080 display, and a 69 mm body width. Tiny phones don't have a ton of room for a battery, and the spec sheet's 2500 mAh battery isn't making us optimistic. The phone is also pretty thick, at 13.7 mm, but it should still slide easily into a pocket, since the whole back of the phone is curved, with it coming to almost a point at the top and bottom.

I wonder if the toaster company figured out how to harness the power of those overheating batteries.

The design sounds great.  Current phones are shaped like tvs and for someone like me with smallish hands and a little arthritis, they are hard to handle sometimes.

[LFC]

Some scientific journals are now requiring that the data and details on any modeling or manipulation be submitted with any paper so that results can be reliably reproduced ... or not.

It is often said that the difference between science and superstition is that science is reproducible. Unfortunately, many scientific papers aren't, making them about as reliable as superstition.

Since the mid-1600s, the output from a typical scientific study has been an essay-style journal article describing the results. But today, in fields ranging from astronomy to microbiology, much of the technical work for a journal article involves writing code to manipulate data sets. If the data and code are not available, other researchers can't reproduce the original authors' work and, more importantly, may not be able to build upon the work to explore new methods and discoveries.

Thanks to cultural shifts and funding requirements, more researchers are warming up to open data and open code. Even 100-year-old journals like the Quarterly Journal of Economics or the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society now require authors to provide replication materials—including data and code—with any quantitative paper. Some researchers welcome the new paradigm and see the value in pushing science forward via deeper collaboration. But others feel the burden of learning to use distribution-related tools like Git, Docker, Jupyter, and other not-quite words.
“Data not available”

Daniella Lowenberg, principal investigator of the Make Data Count initiative, describes the ideals to which these data-sharing requirements aspire. "We want a world where data are routinely being used for discovery, to advance science, for evidence-based and data-driven policy," she says. In some places, the future is already here. "There are data sets that drive entire fields," she says, and "the field of research would not be where it is without these open data sets that are driving it." As an example, she points to this data set of the wood density of 16,468 trees, which has been downloaded over 17,000 times.

With that ideal in mind, journal editors increasingly make publication contingent upon open data and code. I checked about 2,700 journals published by Springer, one of the largest publishers of academic journals, for submission guidelines that state that authors must make all materials like data and code available.

The results suggest that open data and code is more of a custom in some fields than others. Among ecology journals, 37 percent have an availability requirement, while only 7 percent of surgery and 6 percent of education journals do. Other fields are between these extremes, with 16 to 19 percent of management, engineering, physics, economics, general medicine, and psychology journals stating such a requirement.

The use of voluntary "provide on demand" appears to be less than stellar.

These sharing requirements are often held to an "available upon request" standard. But requests can go unheeded.

From 2017 through 2019, Tsuyoshi Miyakawa, the editor-in-chief of the journal Molecular Brain, replied to 41 article submissions by requesting that the authors provide their complete source data for review, as per the stated policy of the journal. Only one author did so.

The journal Science has had a policy that data and materials like code must be available upon request. Victoria Stodden and her co-authors tested this system. Out of 204 papers they selected from the journal, Stodden's team successfully accessed materials for 89 articles; requests to the authors of the other 115 received no reply, unfulfilled promises, fruitless redirections, or a sometimes aggressive refusal.

[Bact PhD]

Nov 19, 2021 16:50:36 GMT LFC said:

Some scientific journals are now requiring that the data and details on any modeling or manipulation be submitted with any paper so that results can be reliably reproduced ... or not.

It is often said that the difference between science and superstition is that science is reproducible. Unfortunately, many scientific papers aren't, making them about as reliable as superstition.

Since the mid-1600s, the output from a typical scientific study has been an essay-style journal article describing the results. But today, in fields ranging from astronomy to microbiology, much of the technical work for a journal article involves writing code to manipulate data sets. If the data and code are not available, other researchers can't reproduce the original authors' work and, more importantly, may not be able to build upon the work to explore new methods and discoveries.

Thanks to cultural shifts and funding requirements, more researchers are warming up to open data and open code. Even 100-year-old journals like the Quarterly Journal of Economics or the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society now require authors to provide replication materials—including data and code—with any quantitative paper. Some researchers welcome the new paradigm and see the value in pushing science forward via deeper collaboration. But others feel the burden of learning to use distribution-related tools like Git, Docker, Jupyter, and other not-quite words.
“Data not available”

Daniella Lowenberg, principal investigator of the Make Data Count initiative, describes the ideals to which these data-sharing requirements aspire. "We want a world where data are routinely being used for discovery, to advance science, for evidence-based and data-driven policy," she says. In some places, the future is already here. "There are data sets that drive entire fields," she says, and "the field of research would not be where it is without these open data sets that are driving it." As an example, she points to this data set of the wood density of 16,468 trees, which has been downloaded over 17,000 times.

With that ideal in mind, journal editors increasingly make publication contingent upon open data and code. I checked about 2,700 journals published by Springer, one of the largest publishers of academic journals, for submission guidelines that state that authors must make all materials like data and code available.

The results suggest that open data and code is more of a custom in some fields than others. Among ecology journals, 37 percent have an availability requirement, while only 7 percent of surgery and 6 percent of education journals do. Other fields are between these extremes, with 16 to 19 percent of management, engineering, physics, economics, general medicine, and psychology journals stating such a requirement.

The use of voluntary "provide on demand" appears to be less than stellar.

These sharing requirements are often held to an "available upon request" standard. But requests can go unheeded.

From 2017 through 2019, Tsuyoshi Miyakawa, the editor-in-chief of the journal Molecular Brain, replied to 41 article submissions by requesting that the authors provide their complete source data for review, as per the stated policy of the journal. Only one author did so.

The journal Science has had a policy that data and materials like code must be available upon request. Victoria Stodden and her co-authors tested this system. Out of 204 papers they selected from the journal, Stodden's team successfully accessed materials for 89 articles; requests to the authors of the other 115 received no reply, unfulfilled promises, fruitless redirections, or a sometimes aggressive refusal.

In both realms where I’m published (microbiology and drug discovery), it’s been SOP for decades for the journals to request, and article authors to provide, language indicating that specific things (novel bacterial/viral strains, new chemical entities) either have accurate “recipes” provided in the text or be available upon request. However, believe me when I say that sometimes getting those materials is easier said than done. Sometimes, the paperwork can be oh-so-conveniently held up for months on end, or the reagent you do get somehow doesn’t work the same way in “your hands” as it did in those of the authors of the article.

So no, that finding doesn’t surprise me.

[goldenvalley]

Remember that ship that ran aground in the Suez Canal?  It was stuck there for over 100 days.  Vanity Fair ran a long form article about the why's and how's of navigating through the canal and how the Egyptian government essentially grounded it after it was unstuck, demanding almost $1 billion for the damages to the Canal.

[LFC]

A man drove an SUV into a Christmas parade in Wisconsin, killing 5 and injuring 40 including kids. He has a history of violence and sounds like a real whackjob.

The full scope of tragedy in Waukesha continued to unfold Monday morning, as authorities confirmed five people had been killed and more than 40 others injured after a driver sped through the annual holiday parade Sunday evening.

A 39-year-old Milwaukee man with an open court case related to domestic violence has been taken into custody, according to a law enforcement source with firsthand knowledge of the situation. The Associated Press also confirmed the man's identity Monday morning.

Darrell Brooks Jr., the man suspected of being the driver, has been charged three times in less than two years with recklessly endangering the safety of others, most recently on Nov. 5 as part of a domestic abuse incident for which he was also charged with resisting or obstructing an officer.

In the most recent case, a woman told police Brooks purposefully ran her "over with his vehicle" while she was walking through a gas station parking lot after he had followed her there after a fight, according to the criminal complaint. The woman was hospitalized for her injuries, court records show.

Brooks was released from jail on Friday after posting $1,000 bond in the recent incident, according to court records. He also was charged in July 2020 with two felony counts of second-degree recklessly endangering the safety of others using a dangerous weapon. Both cases are ongoing.

[LFC]

I haven't verified if this is truly accurate but if it is then it's a great example of how technology has moved forward in a relatively short period of time.

[AnBr]

Of course the first would have been by a telescope and the second by nearby probe.

[LFC]

Nov 25, 2021 18:13:15 GMT AnBr said:

... nearby probe.

A term that strikes fear into the very souls of UFO believers.

[Bact PhD]

For those with an interest in materials science:

...even after nearly two months of being shelled with cannonballs and gunfire, the fort’s walls wouldn’t give. In fact, they appeared to be “swallowing” the British cannonballs, which then became embedded within the stone. Precisely how the walls did this remained a mystery for the next three centuries.

[goldenvalley]

Dec 4, 2021 19:25:48 GMT Bact PhD said:

For those with an interest in materials science:

...even after nearly two months of being shelled with cannonballs and gunfire, the fort’s walls wouldn’t give. In fact, they appeared to be “swallowing” the British cannonballs, which then became embedded within the stone. Precisely how the walls did this remained a mystery for the next three centuries.

That's so cool.  I remember visiting the fort when I was 10 or 11.  The park rangers talked about the "swallowing" but they didn't have this information.