07/29 OT: Bits and Pieces

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Project 365 #195: 140709 Let's Get Jiggy With It

Jigsaw Puzzle

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Health and Nutrition

I recall a court case not too horribly long ago involving some purveyor of chicken "nuggets" wherein the judge, in dicta, iirc, said something to the effect of "I don't see how you can call this "chicken"". Then there was the great pink slime ruckus which came to nothing much. Meanwhile we have developed not only a vast variety of veggie "meats" but even lab or vat grown "meats" which are not particularly seen as at all that scary anymore. So time marches and it was virtually certain that somebody would develop bio-printed meat, or, at least bio-printed chicken nuggets. Yep, printed, and the prize goes to Putin, no wait, The Colonel, or, well would you believe a Kaintucky-Russia, Russia, Russia joint venture? No, this is not a joke, fraud, farce or hoax, Well, maybe a farce, but what isn't. So did KFC pick Russia Russia Russia because they are ahead of us or because they're behind us, or is this just part of Putin's unending war on our way of life. Well, actually, this pretty much IS our way of life, so scratch that last one.
So, steel yourself and peek behind that veil at https://global.kfc.com/press-release/meat-of-the-future-kfc-and-3d-biopr... where you will behold the online press release to beat all online press releases:

>Strong>MEAT OF THE FUTURE: KFC AND 3D BIOPRINTING SOLUTIONS TO USE A BIOPRINTER TO PRODUCE KFC NUGGETS

But really, I ask you, Isn't soylent green only good or bad depending upon what is in the bio-reactor, and even so, isn't recycling a good thing? Well?

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Homeland Insecurity

Ok, get ready for it, ok ---- “Disturbing And Demoralizing”: DHS Employees Are Worried The Portland Protest Response Is Destroying Their Agency’s Reputation (https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hamedaleaziz/dhs-employee-anger-ove...) Ok, ok, stop it with the "As if", this is a real issue for real people, so I decided to address it. Dear DHSniks, you need to start with an objective appraisal of the situation. It's not like the populace ranks you up there with Bankers, Realtors, Attorneys, or even Telemarketers, for FSM's sake. I did a round of word associations locally and got "luggage thieves, child abusers, kidnappers, terrorists, spies and eavesdroppers, those who try to frame suspected dopers, wannabe censors, Storm-Troopers, thugs, and more (or would that be less?). Now, of course, you cannot all be all, or even any of those things. You have many departments, like a Hydra, so one would be unlikely to find a single individual who is both a luggage thief and a Storm-Trooper. Beyond that, many of you never get to stand in the spotlight and share the glory, but you can still be proud to be the enablers and perhaps co-conspirators. After all, somebody has to keep track of the overtime and travel pay. Probably only 25% at most would be willing to put in long hours clubbing people and caging children purely for the fun and glory of it. Whatever may come, just remember that you've got the name: Homeland from Geheimstadt, intended from day one to instill fear and terror and the aura of unquestionable power and authority, so sit back and enjoy it, after all, no other agency has Storm-Troopers, right? You' da boss!

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Second Best

The US might not be the only country to shoot down a commercial passenget liner flying out of a commercial airport on a normal commercial route, transmitting the IFF signal for a commercial passenger airline, but It's the only one I know of. That would be Iran Air 655 which we initially tried to allege to have been attacking one of our warships. Team Trump only scared the shit out of the crew of an Iranian passenger aircraft in Syrian Airspace on a flight from Tehran to Beirut. Several passengers were injured during the abrupt manuvers the airline had to made to avoid collision with a US F-15 that harassed it. Of course, the US has a different version, but they start their narrative with preposterous lies, so how can one believe any of it.

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( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/24/iranian-passenger-plane-fo... )

US Central Command said the US F-15 was on a routine mission in Syria and conducted “a standard visual inspection of a Mahan Air passenger airliner at a safe distance of approximately 1,000 metres”.

There are no routine missions in Syria. The US forces are there illegally, committing an endless series of acta of war because their very presence is an act of war. This was an act of aggression against both Syria, whose airspace we were invading with hostile intent and Iran, whose craft we harassed.

US Central Command said a single F-15 had made a visual inspection of the Iranian airliner “in accordance with international standards” to ensure the safety of coalition personnel at the military base in Al Tanf.

No international standards cover the operations of military aircraft of a belligerent country illegally and without provocation waging undeclared war against a country and invading its airspace with respect to civilian aircraft belonging to neither country operating in the airspace of the non-aggressor party. There is no need to protect the personnel or an aggressor war criminal base from a civilian passenger craft loaded with passengers on a commercial flight. Random countries don't harass our commercial flights to "protect" their nearby military bases. US based airlines flying routine commercial flights in the Caribbean aren't harassed by Cuban and Venezuelan forces to insure the safety of their bases, that is a total crock of shit.

So whatever, a few injuries, no fatalities, Trump is still waaaay second best to Rancid Ronnie Raygun.Tsk, tsk.

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Economics

The savants at The Economist must've been working overtime, they finally more-or-less realized something. In a 3 part title, with a prefatory line saying Nature Depreciation they assert that The world’s wealth is looking increasingly unnatural
As natural wealth is used up, economies will rely more on human capital Finally, in 2020, they begin to realize that the earth's resources are finite and cannot be infinitely exploited forever. Instead, they, naturally enough, propose that economies will have to exploit human capital, because Gaia forbid that an economy exist somewhere that isn't based on the exploitation of something. I mean, without exploitation, how do the oligarch-rentiers amass ever more wealth for doing evermore less and less?

But, they did get something right. I can't help but wonder how they'll try to monetize that hugely belated bit of awareness.

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Covid-19

It is killing people, many and possibly most of whom would probably not be dying quite so soon otherwise. Some people think that this is a bad thing. Some not so much. More will die. One place in Texas is resorting to triage because its medical facilities are so overwhelmed. Funny revelations about a great many things have occurred. Though any hippie could've told everybody that barbershops were non-essential, that fact has surprised, dismayed, and disappointed vast numbers. Ditto hair and nail salons. Ages ago I worked for the federal government during a budget driven shut-down. All non-essential persons were to stay home. Those of us who showed up looked around knowingly and said uh huh, thought so, many, many times. Now we have a great opportunity to look around and say uh huh, but we won't, we won't really learn anything from this experience. We have vast numbers of unemployed, who could've been cranking out PPE, and tests, administering and processing tests, building out certain kinds of infrastructure, and many other things that would've helped both those employed doing such things and the populace as a whole, and the real economy and the nation, but that isn't the American way. Instead we gave billions to the parasites who we (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) call job creators and sat on our hands and whined about the lack of baseball. The Marlins thank you, y'all..

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It's an open thread, so have at it. The floor is yours
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We have to run up to Vacaville (a real cow town) on business early this am and have no idea when we'll get home. As a result I'm not too likely to be about much.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation

In logic, equivocation ('calling two different things by the same name') is an informal fallacy resulting from the use of a particular word/expression in multiple senses within an argument.[1][2]

huh? oh never mind
out logic
Equivocation II
Equivocation II
Springbok Puzzle
Ben Cunningham, 1965

My copy of that puzzle is underneath what wasn't left of Santa Rosa after the Tubbs wildfire, I miss having it. Oh well ancient history regrets. Resolve to acquire no more stuff through inheritance. easy now
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From Hacker News today: Welcome the new AI overlords, welcome! AI yi yi
Show HN: Humans vs AI – A/B testing GPT-3

paraschopra 4 hours ago

Hello HN,

As an A/B testing company (VWO), it's exciting to see how much effective is GPT-3 generated copy against human copywriters on live websites.

I like to think of this as the Turing test on the web Smile

The quality of generated headlines, buttons and product descriptions seem very good, so we're hopeful that AI will at least score a few statistically significant wins.

I encourage you to participate in the competition (you don't have to use VWO for A/B testing - you can use your existing stack).

If you have any feedback or comments, happy to discuss.

open source and
el is not already some posting bot, right?
lol
acronym overload

The same is true for A.I. — in this case, GPT-3, a recently released natural language processing neural network created by OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research lab that was once (but no longer) sponsored by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

GPT-3 is the latest in a series of text-generating neural networks. The name GPT stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer, referencing a 2017 Google innovation called a Transformer which can figure out the likelihood that a particular word will appear with surrounding words. Fed with a few sentences, such as the beginning of a news story, the GPT pre-trained language model can generate convincingly accurate continuations, even including the formulation of fabricated quotes.

This is why some worried that it could prove itself to be dangerous, by helping to generate false text that, like deepfakes, could help spread fake news online. Now, with GPT-3 it’s bigger and smarter than ever.

In the wild, bigger and smarter than ever. Good luck.

peace and love
gas and plastic

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@eyo

Brings back long forgotten memories.
Had that puzzle as a youth.
Almost went blind solving it.
Very challenging.

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enhydra lutris's picture

@QMS

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

enhydra lutris's picture

@eyo

it but I have seen the graphic and loved it. Sorry you lost it.

In the wild, bigger and smarter than ever.

They should clone a copy and train it on rap, good get rich quick scheme.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

enhydra lutris's picture

@eyo
rush, I was, sorry.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

enhydra lutris's picture

equivocation, which is but sesquipedalian for "pun", which is a sentence no bot will ever write. In the words of the great Hudie Ledbetter, "I got to roll, roll in a hurry", so, hoping to post a better reply later, I'm off.

Be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Lookout's picture

the barber since the pandemic. Haven't had hair this long since the 70's. Still another month till I can get it out of the way with a ponytail.

Why aren't people/journalist explaining the Romney amendment in the HEALS act?

Rising host Saagar Enjeti was the first to report that the TRUST Act could be folded into the relief bill. The New York Times included it in their roundup last night. (UPDATE: Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has confirmed that the TRUST Act will be part of the base bill he introduces.)

This would be appalling. No federal trust fund, by definition, can reach bankruptcy; Congress can always replenish it. What Romney wants to do here is create a process to force a resolution to earned benefit programs on his terms. While it doesn’t fully eliminate the filibuster for Social Security cuts, it builds a process to invite those cuts to be made. Just a decade ago, Barack Obama favored some cuts, remember.

Moreover, it’s designed to trap Democrats. Mitch McConnell wants nothing more than to kill social insurance spending while keeping his fingerprints off it. Passing the TRUST Act would set in motion a runaway train that has to move inexorably toward chipping away at Social Security and Medicare. It would restart the fiscal mania in Washington, and pressure Democrats to be “serious” by degrading the most popular programs the party ever created. Fierce grassroots pushback stopped this cold during Bowles-Simpson, but the deficit hawks only have to be right once. It would also conveniently be an enormous distraction during what’s expected to be an extended economic downturn.

https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-mitt-romney-wants-to-use-th...

The compromise is to wait till after the election to set up the so called trust committee...yeah right.

As we suspected, trade a one time $1200 for your social security and medicare and the dims are complicit and silent as they were with the CARES act that was the largest transfer of wealth to the elite in our history.

Someone here has the sig line "we are so screwed" How true!

Been busy this AM. Harvested, cleaned, and have cooking the last of the collards and broccoli (till fall). Also manured and mulched the bed they came out of, now ready for fall crops. Time to get those flats started for fall...cabbage, broccoli, collards, lettuce, onions, and so on seed can be planted. I direct seed some things into the garden, too. Spinach, carrots, radish can all be planted now in my zone.

So far we've had a mild summer with regular showers. I've only irrigated twice. Very unusual.

Well have a good one. Put those headlights on bright and think about what's coming and how to best cope.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Anja Geitz's picture

@Lookout

Usually by the time August rolls around we’ve had several weeks of earth scorching heat. Hasn’t happened yet. We haven’t even hit past 95 degrees all summer. And most days we hover in the eighties where I can even feel a cool breeze in the shady parts of the garden. Delightful.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

enhydra lutris's picture

@Lookout

and the graftiest, griftiest politicians in living memory are all assembled to feast. Sounds like you've been busy and will be busy. Good wishes for your next set of crops.

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Anja Geitz's picture

Are a big thing at Trader Joe’s. Expensive too. Almost $8 for a package that might make 3 small burgers. People swear they taste “just like beef”. Haven’t put that to the test myself but I’m highly doubtful that anything could taste as good as a beef burger. A friend of mine who went vegan several months ago (and gained a lot of weight from all the breads and pastas she’s now eating) is sure I will eventually give up meat as well. Why is she so sure I will be doing this? Because I’m a Buddhist and as far as she’s concerned, the two go together. Which they may theoretically. But I still believe I can be a meat eating Buddhist who is perfectly capable of bringing value, compassion, and love to my family, friends and community. Not to mention I’ve known a lot vegans in my life who were selfish narcissists I wouldn’t care to break bread with under any circumstances. Life is never just black and white. It’s often in the gray areas where we tend to our souls.

Thank for this morning’s OT. Still laughing about the flambé joke you made yesterday. Lol.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

enhydra lutris's picture

@Anja Geitz

fast food joint.

Buddha was captured. He trod a certain path and arrived at certain precepts. To be a Buddhist should not be to blindly follow those precepts by rote, but to follow that path and see what precepts you yourself find along the way.

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

I once read that modern jet liners have automatically collusion controls which will automatically put the airliner into a quick dissent. But this type of harassment not uncommon. An Russian airliner for the Defense Minister was flying back to Russia when an American fighter jet approached it. From behind the American fighter looks like two Russian fighters approached and one of them did a banking maneuver to force the American fighter away. I think the other one stayed behind probably aiming a missile.

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enhydra lutris's picture

@MrWebster

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

magiamma's picture

et al

Sunny here in the afternoons. Garden is doing well with it. But there is powdery mildew appearing. Yuk. What to do?

This crossed my path in my climate readings.

Newer PFAS contaminant detected for first time in Arctic seawater
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200729114838.htm

After studies indicated that two PFAS -- PFOA and PFOS -- can cause cancer, a compromised immune response and other health problems in lab animals, the two compounds were voluntarily phased out by industry. However, these legacy compounds are still widely detected in the environment. Intended as a safer replacement for PFOA, HFPO-DA (sold under the trade name GenX) is now thought to pose similar health and persistence concerns. Hanna Joerss and colleagues wanted to investigate the long-range, oceanic transport of legacy and replacement PFAS to the Arctic Ocean -- a remote body of water connected to the Atlantic Ocean by the Fram Strait, which is located between Svalbard and Greenland.

Aboard an icebreaker research ship, the team collected water samples along two Fram Strait currents entering and exiting the Arctic Ocean and along a path from Europe's North Sea to the Arctic Ocean. Using mass spectrometry, the researchers detected 11 PFAS in the ocean water, including PFOA, HFPO-DA and other long- and short-chain PFAS. This was the first time that HFPO-DA had been detected in seawater from a remote region, indicating that the compound can be transported long distances.

Well, well, well, how are we gonna turn this ship around? Be here now and love the ones your with.

Take good care and have a good one, all.

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Stop Climate Change Silence - Start the Conversation

Hot Air Website, Twitter, Facebook

enhydra lutris's picture

@magiamma

heard that Neem Oil works on powdery mildew, have no personal experience. Horrible, but not completely a surprise about the new PFAs. You mentioned the Fram straight as the context for this which made me think of Fram Oil Filters. Coincidence or happenstance?

be well and have a good one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --