The Junk Drawer

CCGNZ

Well-Known Member
For a second, I thought this was the War thread. This could be casus belli for some fans. Those folks are serious about their footy/Fußball/le foot.
I'm amazed at the constant singing the crowd does during these games in the Premier League and the Bundesliga, it goes on for virtually the whole 90 minutes, the game has grown on me over the yrs,the World Cup is my favorite,then the Euro. Championship,nation vs. nation is the ultimate stage where diff countries have vastly diff approaches Brazil(flair,tech.skill),Germany(organization),Italy(caution,counterattack),Spain(constant passing) etc.US soccer doesn't have appeal to me,lacks talent/tradition,though the national teams,I'll watch,esp. the Women.
 

Sativied

Well-Known Member
Spoiler alert... this is not a movie review and you won't feel better about the world by the end of this post.

Quote for reference later...
Reminds me of a dutch show host trying to stick up for his famous friend who made several blatant racist remarks “I cannot see inside him but I know him well and I don’t think he ‘is’ a racist in his heart”.

As if it’s a genetic trait. Black Peet discussion made that distinction so clear, people were like but it’s tradition, I have nothing against black people, I am not racist. Often leading to heated discussions over just the last part while that isn’t the real issue. The behavior is racist, the caricature is, and that’s really not up for debate, it just has to stop.

Roger Waters responding to rabbi in 2013:
”It is also extremely insulting to me personally in that you accuse me of being ‘Anti Semitic’, ‘A Jew Hater’ and ‘Nazi Sympathizer’”

It’s not about “being”, it’s how you behave in deeds and words. Especially with antisemitic tropes people often don’t even know or understand the history and how that contributed to millions of jews getting killed. Antisemitism works like a commercial, repeat it often enough and people will believe it to at least an extend on a subconscious level.

Perhaps for the sake of discussion some effort should be made to avoid assigning labels to a person rather than their behavior and messages. Preemptively avoid the standard defense.
Screen Shot 2024-04-03 at 23.19.09.png

At first I thought it was hilarious, these extraordinary low ratings that is. 16% liked this film... the imdb rating, the rotten tomatoes, this is worse than Bruce Willis', Steven Seagal' and other B movies. Worse than every Sharknado.

So must be a really terrible movie then. It's almost impossible to get that low rating. It literally can't be that bad given the actors involved. Even when IMDB and RT ratings are so low, at least 50% or more of Google users 'liked this film'.

So what's wrong with the movie you wonder. Well, it delivers in a way no other movie has ever done.

The movie is about a black guy navigating and overly adjusting to a the white men's world, in order to not make them uncomfortable cause he's black. He becomes a member of the American Society of Magical Negroes, who through magic and empathy help white people with their discomfort. Because, as Samuel Jackson said in the Hateful Eight: "The only time black folks are safe, is when white folks are disarmed [comfortable]."

Until he's fed up with it all and confronts a coworker on a stage during a live presentation with his behavior, who then responds with what I called the standard defense in my quote above. To which the protagonist responds:

"I don’t care if you’re racist on a skeletal level."

Exactly.

Aside from the overall message, the dialog, the great acting, the romance (it's above all a romantic movie but then that's true for the Godfather movies as well), a beautiful sweater, actually being funny throughout, it's not just that this isn't a bad movie that got a bad rating. No, this is one of the best movies in recent years. For what it is, it's a straight 10 out of 10. It's actually rather genius. Which makes the ratings in the image I posted rather unnerving.
 
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printer

Well-Known Member
But I thought we already had the lunar cycle.

NASA tasked with creating a time zone for the moon
The White House has asked NASA to create a new time zone for the moon.

Arati Prabhakar, the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), said in a letter Tuesday that the office wants NASA to establish a unified standard time for the moon and “celestial bodies other than Earth” to create a standard for timekeeping.

Coordinated Lunar Time, LTC, is intended to aid future space missions that require precise navigation and science. NASA must develop the time zone by the end of 2026, Prabhakar said in the letter.

Prabhakar said the U.S. will work with allies and partners to return humans to the moon “and develop capabilities to enable an enduring presence.” The U.S. anticipates that “many other actors,” including other governments and private companies, will be sending spacecraft to the moon.

The new time zone is “fundamental to the scientific discovery, economic development, and international collaboration.” Standardizing time for the moon would also make space flight operations safer, according to the letter.

Prabhakar acknowledged that there are “important implications” that rise from creating a standard time for the moon, since time moves differently on the moon. Because it has less gravity than Earth, time moves 58.7 microseconds quicker there.

“Due to general and special relativity, the length of a second defined on Earth will appear distorted to an observer under different gravitational conditions, or to an observer moving at a high relative velocity,” Prabhakar wrote in the letter.

For safe navigation, cislunar space — the area within the moon’s orbit — must have a “consistent definition of time among users,” according to the letter.

Travel to the moon is expected to increase, so docking or landing a spacecraft on the moon will require “greater accuracy than current methods allow,” Prabhakar said.

The Odysseus lunar lander made a historic moon landing in February, becoming the first private spacecraft to do so and marking the first U.S. moon landing in more than 50 years. It cut its mission short after toppling over, but the launch was still met with excitement for what the future of space travel could hold.

NASA has plans to send astronauts around the moon in September 2025, and astronauts are expected to touch down on the moon’s South Pole in September 2026.

“Exploration of Cislunar space opens a new sphere of human activity and offers opportunities to advance scientific understanding, exploration, and economic growth,” Prabhakar said in the letter, later adding “we are grateful to those across the community who have contributed to date, and to those who continue to share their valuable knowledge to shape our collective understanding of this topic as we move forward.
 

Bad Karma

Well-Known Member
But I thought we already had the lunar cycle.

NASA tasked with creating a time zone for the moon
The White House has asked NASA to create a new time zone for the moon.

Arati Prabhakar, the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), said in a letter Tuesday that the office wants NASA to establish a unified standard time for the moon and “celestial bodies other than Earth” to create a standard for timekeeping.

Coordinated Lunar Time, LTC, is intended to aid future space missions that require precise navigation and science. NASA must develop the time zone by the end of 2026, Prabhakar said in the letter.

Prabhakar said the U.S. will work with allies and partners to return humans to the moon “and develop capabilities to enable an enduring presence.” The U.S. anticipates that “many other actors,” including other governments and private companies, will be sending spacecraft to the moon.

The new time zone is “fundamental to the scientific discovery, economic development, and international collaboration.” Standardizing time for the moon would also make space flight operations safer, according to the letter.

Prabhakar acknowledged that there are “important implications” that rise from creating a standard time for the moon, since time moves differently on the moon. Because it has less gravity than Earth, time moves 58.7 microseconds quicker there.

“Due to general and special relativity, the length of a second defined on Earth will appear distorted to an observer under different gravitational conditions, or to an observer moving at a high relative velocity,” Prabhakar wrote in the letter.

For safe navigation, cislunar space — the area within the moon’s orbit — must have a “consistent definition of time among users,” according to the letter.

Travel to the moon is expected to increase, so docking or landing a spacecraft on the moon will require “greater accuracy than current methods allow,” Prabhakar said.

The Odysseus lunar lander made a historic moon landing in February, becoming the first private spacecraft to do so and marking the first U.S. moon landing in more than 50 years. It cut its mission short after toppling over, but the launch was still met with excitement for what the future of space travel could hold.

NASA has plans to send astronauts around the moon in September 2025, and astronauts are expected to touch down on the moon’s South Pole in September 2026.

“Exploration of Cislunar space opens a new sphere of human activity and offers opportunities to advance scientific understanding, exploration, and economic growth,” Prabhakar said in the letter, later adding “we are grateful to those across the community who have contributed to date, and to those who continue to share their valuable knowledge to shape our collective understanding of this topic as we move forward.
Greenwich Moon Time.
 

printer

Well-Known Member
Now that bird flu is spreading among cows, scientists worry where H5N1 will jump next
On March 25, American officials published an urgent announcement: Dairy cows in Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico were falling sick.

The cows had low appetites, and produced less milk than normal. Some farms also discovered wild bird carcasses on their grounds. Tests on a cow throat swab and raw milk samples all confirmed an unusual finding: for the first time, cattle were catching a dangerous form of bird flu.

Within days, highly pathogenic avian flu — a type of influenza A known as H5N1 — was identified in at least a dozen herds across six states, from Texas in the south, up to Michigan and Idaho on the Canadian border.

Louise Moncla, an avian influenza researcher and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was stunned.

"The overwhelming feeling that all of us have is that this is mostly just incredibly strange," she said. "To our knowledge, I've never seen a cow be infected with any influenza A viruses."

But the curveball wasn't entirely unexpected. And it may be a harbinger of more species-jumps to come, including the rising possibility of H5N1 appearing in pigs — which could offer it a new route to better adapt to infect humans, inching the world closer to a bird flu pandemic.
Various species getting infected
Over the last two decades, this deadly form of bird flu began striking more and more wild and farmed bird species. The threat exploded in 2022 with tens of millions of global bird deaths. And a rising number of mammals are also getting infected, from mink to seals to domestic dogs and cats.

This March, prior to the discovery of cases among cattle, Minnesota reported an H5N1 infection in a young goat, marking the first known U.S. case of bird flu in a ruminant. (Cows are also ruminants, a group of herbivores known for their four-chambered stomachs.)

Sporadic human cases — and deaths — are also occurring around the world. The second-ever human infection in the U.S. was reported just days ago in Texas, in an individual with mild symptoms who'd had direct exposure to cattle.

A somewhat reassuring genomic sequencing analysis from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found only "minor changes" between viral sequences from cattle and the virus sequence from the human patient. And in both cases, the sequences largely lacked any changes suggesting the virus had better adapted to infect mammals.

"There is no evidence at this time that this virus is some sort of new, adapted strain that's transmitting really efficiently in cows," Moncla said.

The genome for the human case did feature one genetic tweak that signals adaptation to mammals — but the CDC stressed there wasn't evidence the virus had transmitted onward to other people.

Still, such rapid spread among dairy cattle herds, alongside other recent infections reported in U.S. farm cats, poultry, and the country's latest human case, all has scientists and health officials on high alert.

"Dairy cows have not been affected before in the United States, or anywhere else in the world to my knowledge, , and we've never before seen such clear evidence of mammal-to-mammal transmission," said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore.

That possibility of spread between cows "does take us, maybe, a half-step closer to a scenario where the virus would be better adapted for humans," she told CBC News.

What's even more concerning, several researchers agreed, is the growing potential for bird flu to spread to another species of livestock: Pigs.

A person in Texas who had close contact with infected dairy cattle has been diagnosed with bird flu. It's the country's second known human case after the virus was discovered circulating among dairy cows across at least four U.S. states for the first time.
Pigs considered viral mixing vessels
While cattle aren't known for being an ideal host for many flu viruses, pigs are potent viral mixing vessels. That's because swine have both human-adapted receptors and avian-adapted receptors in their respiratory tracts, Moncla said, meaning they can be infected with either type of pathogen.

If a pig catches both a human influenza A virus and an avian influenza A virus at the same time, it can spark a process known as viral reassortment — a genetic exchange in which flu viruses swap gene segments.

Those swaps can introduce dramatic changes, producing a new virus with certain properties of a non-human strain coupled with the capacity to infect and spread between people.

That sort of shift hasn't been documented yet with H5N1. But it did happen with a new form of H1N1 — a virus resulting from a mashup of genes between various pig, bird, and human flu viruses — which began infecting people for the first time in 2009, sparking a pandemic.

Death rates from H1N1 were higher than typical flu seasons, but it eventually began circulating alongside other seasonal flu viruses and is now included in annual flu shots.

Moncla said her "worst fear" is something similar happening with highly pathogenic avian flu, given its health impacts.

The death rate in humans may be upwards of 50 per cent, World Health Organization data suggests, though it's possible that milder infections are getting missed, skewing the case fatality ratio. Still, in a population that's never been exposed, the global impacts could be dire.

"Absolutely nobody wants to go through another pandemic — and it would be terrible," Moncla said.
'It might not ever leave'
There are no signals that H5N1 has spread to pigs, at least for now. It also hasn't appeared yet in Canadian livestock, including dairy cattle, according to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

But scientists on both sides of the border worry it's just a matter of time if swift action isn't taken to contain outbreaks and heighten surveillance.
more that we can be doing to prepare now, just in case, the faster our reaction will be, and the more likely we will be to get ahead of the virus," said Rivers.

That includes dusting off pandemic plans and updating emergency flu vaccine stockpiles, she said, since the time between the first human cluster of cases and widespread transmission could be a "very short window."

Increased surveillance is also essential, along with serology studies to find out if other cattle herds have been unknowingly impacted, said Dr. Joe Armstrong, a veterinarian with the University of Minnesota who regularly travels the state to educate dairy and beef producers.

Armstrong warned the outbreaks may already be bigger — and tougher to track — than they initially appeared.
ucers, scared for their livelihoods, can be wary of reporting sick cattle, given poultry producers are often forced to cull entire flocks experiencing H5N1 outbreaks, Armstrong said.

More human cases could also be happening under the radar among farm workers who've moved to the U.S. from abroad, don't speak English as their first language, and may be hesitant to seek medical help, he added.

"So I think there's probably underreporting on both sides," Armstrong said.

"If [H5N1] gets into a population where there's constantly animals going in and out … it might not ever leave."
 

CCGNZ

Well-Known Member
A random,passing thought(lightbulb moment) came over me yesterday w/the news of OJ Simpson's passing,Since 2016 til now I've been miffed at how people are so blind to Trump and what/who he is and could not find a comparable phenomenon to my utter inability to comprehend how so many Americans don't see/get it.Then news of OJ's passing broke yesterday and it took me back to my inability to comprehend how that jury declared him innocent in less than 3 hrs. of deliberation for a trial that lasted 6 months(I think)and that day w/all the damning evidence I was probably the closest to where I am presently concerning Trump,I'm not dumping on that jury for being suspect of LAPD,It's just all the spin and disinformation that the defense used to paint a picture that blinded/dismissed so much evidence is the most similar thing in terms of shock value to how Trump has/continues to posture himself w/so much buy in despite so much evidence to the contrary. I know these 2 things are separated by 30 yrs. and have nothing to do w/each other.but the spin/disinfo/flip the narrative tactics struck me for their similarities.
 

Sativied

Well-Known Member
Turns out shrimp don't like their eyes being cut off. It upsets them.

shrimpcllip.jpg

"Research shows that shrimp recoil during handling and are upset afterwards. Normally they sit quietly on the bottom, but after clipping they swim around disoriented and frequently bump into the walls of the basin," says Wakker Dier [Woke Animal]

"In 2021, the animal welfare organization Wakker Dier already raised the alarm about the practice. Behind the eye of a shrimp, which is more or less on a stalk, lies a gland that produces hormones. These hormones influence when a shrimp can lay eggs. Without an eye, and thus without those hormones, the female shrimp is ready to do so sooner.

The practice of clipping the eyes is particularly prevalent among suppliers from Vietnam, Ecuador, Honduras, Indonesia, and Venezuela.
"

One of the tools used is glowing hot tweezers. You can't tell by looking at the shrimp in your cocktail or on the grill, they do it to the mothers only.
 

Sativied

Well-Known Member
@Sativied

Quoting this here as to not go too far off-topic in that thread. Thanks for sharing that article, good and fun read.

"It's a wonderful spectacle to watch, especially if you're not morally and legally responsible for the outcome. Open Source is quite like Mardi Gras in that way, because if the whole town turns out, and if everybody's building it, and also everybody's using it, you're just another boisterous drunk guy in the huge happy crowd."

Obviously a writer who said that, and said that well.

At some point last year there was this awesome trend where people would generate eating contests, but usually not with food. Like a chainsaw eating contest, or a glass eating contest, or one of my favorites, fireworks eating contests. The lava eating contest was great too. Bing (image create, uses DALL-E) would oblige and fill in the logical result of eating those items, quite gruesome. I can honestly say I've become completely numb to anything that would shock most people. The goal was not to make nasty shocking stuff, but to 'hack' the limitations imposed by the AIs creators and publishers, avoid the censors. It got better at verifying and describing to itself the image generated so it can double check before making it available and visible to the user. Principally, it quite bothers me that globally available AIs have builtin American prudishness. That's another monstrous trait. Same for social media, women blurring out nipples not cause of their own yet still often christian imposed shame but rules. As a result quite a few people became very proficient in generating oval meat slaps oozing a milky white substance. As if no lessons where learned from pixelated Japanese and octopus tentacles.

"This may seem like a truly weird monster-joke, but it's also philosophy: a determined effort to strip a complex problem down to basic logic. Programmers love doing that, it's in computer-science training. That's why the Paperclip Maximizer touches their heart, as it rips them to bits right down to the molecules."

It's initially the other way around, analytical minded people able to strip complex problems down to basic logic generally make good programmers. Common misconception that fuels other misconceptions like how Biden suggested coal miners to learn how to code. Just like in particular schizos enjoy some cannabis, cannabis doesn't make people schizos. The authors point remains valid nonetheless, but it's not 'training', it's more like indulging.

Fun read but let's his professional fiction imagination go wild a few times in that article. The 'craze' as he refers it to is not a trend though, it's only the start. What I want to know is what comes after. I'm not talking about AIs or robots taking over, scifi action stuff, but what will please the senses.

(the AI stuff start at around 3 min in but it's all great anyway, love John Stewart)
 
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