The Death of the Mind

Enlarge (credit: Jetta Productions)
If you went to high school in the US, you may recall early morning extracurriculars, sleeping through first period algebra, or bleary-eyed late-night study sessions (as opposed to other wide-awake “study sessions” we told our parents we were having). As an adult, you might wonder if there’s a better time to explore Shakespeare than at 8 am, or expand a Taylor series right after you collapsed into your chair, half-asleep from your sunrise bus ride.
As it turns out, early school start times for US high schools are built on a shaky scientific foundation, as journalist and parent Lisa Lewis lays out in her new book, The Sleep-Deprived Teen. She…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1884031

All eyes on you, and you, and you

San Francisco police are now set to use non-city-owned video cameras for real-time surveillance under a rule approved by the Board of Supervisors.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/09/21/san_francisco_private_cameras/

Enlarge / An artist’s conception of DART’s electronics in the last moments before they suffer catastrophic failure. (credit: NASA)
This coming Monday, NASA will broadcast its first attempt to modify the orbit of an asteroid, a capability that will be essential if we detect an asteroid that poses a threat of colliding with Earth. The planetary defense effort is focused on a craft called DART, for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which will target a small asteroid called Dimorphos that orbits the larger 65803 Didymos, forming a binary system. If all goes according to plan, DART will direct itself to a head-on collision that slows Dimorphos, altering its orbit around Didymos. NASA has repeatedly…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1883002

On September 19, over 200 U.S. political scientists published an open letter calling for Congress to pass a bill for multi-member U.S. House districts, combined with proportional representation. The group is organized under the name “Scholars for Redistricting Reform.” See the statement here.

A bill has been pending in Congress to make that change. It is HR 3863, by Congressman Don Beyer (D-Virginia). He has introduced it for several sessions of congress now.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/09/20/over-200-political-scientists-publish-statement-in-favor-of-multi-member-u-s-house-districts/

(satire) *Apple Announces New iPhones Will No Longer Be Compatible
With Human Hand.*

They have always been incompatible with natural human society.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2022-jul-oct.html#18_September_2022_((satire)_apple_new_iphone_human_hand)

Dear Lazyweb, how do I forward my employees’ email to their gmail accounts and have it get there?To recap, my domain hosts its own SMTP server running Postfix, and /etc/postfix/virtual contains a bunch of entries forwarding “employee_name@dnalounge.com” to whatever their actual email address is, usually gmail.This has been mostly working fine for a decade or so, but lately there have been more bounces due to “strict SPF”. For example, jksound.com’s SPF record includes “-all” (dash instead of tilde) which means that when example@jksound.com tries to mail example@dnalounge.com, we forward that along to example@gmail.com, and then Google rejects it with 550 “SPF hard fail”.So, I don’t know whether it has recently become more common for people to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/08/today-in-google-broke-email/

The pattern is pretty common: young companies innovate, older companies litigate. When you can’t keep up and you can’t succeed by beating the market, you turn to the courts to try to squeeze cash out of those more successful than you. Often this involves patent lawsuits or handing your unused patents off to patent trolls to “monetize” them for you.
Over the years there have been a bunch of “patent aggregation” firms that showed up, offering to buy up patents and then promising to bring in free money by “licensing” them. The most well known of these was probably Intellectual Ventures, which scooped up tons upon tons of unused (perhaps because they were useless) patents, many from…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/08/30/intel-who-coined-the-term-patent-troll-makes-deal-with-patent-troll-to-monetize-unused-patents/

The Federal Reserve plans to keep increasing interest rates until inflation goes down.

Low interest rates are not causing today’s inflation, so this tactic
is not going to achieve the goal until it creates lots of unemployment.

It strikes me that Powell’s real goal may be to undermine the wave
of unionization. His business cronies will surely appreciate that.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2022-may-aug.html#30_August_2022_(Federal_Reserve_plans_to_keep_increasing_interest_rates)