ReHacked #71: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse, A growing number of Americans are renouncing citizenship, The human ear detects half a millisecond delay in sound and more
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Airyx OS #software
Airyx™ is a new open-source desktop operating system that aims to provide a similar experience and compatibiilty with macOS® on x86-64 sytems. It builds on the solid foundations of FreeBSD, existing open source packages in the same space, and new code to fill the gaps. Airyx aims to feel sleek, stable, familiar and intuitive, handle your daily tasks, and provide as much compatibility as possible with the commercial OS that inspired it.
A growing number of Americans are renouncing their citizenship - Axios #politics
The number of Americans who renounced their citizenship in favor of a foreign country hit an all-time high in 2020: 6,707, a 237% increase over 2019.
Between the lines: While the numbers are down this year, that's probably because many U.S. embassies and consulates remain closed for COVID-19, and taking this grave step requires taking an oath in front of a State Department officer.
Climate crisis: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse | Climate change #nature
Climate scientists have detected warning signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream, one of the planet’s main potential tipping points.
The research found “an almost complete loss of stability over the last century” of the currents that researchers call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). The currents are already at their slowest point in at least 1,600 years, but the new analysis shows they may be nearing a shutdown.
The human ear detects half a millisecond delay in sound | Aalto University #science #nature
Millisecond latency matters
In the listening experiment, twelve subjects listened to processed and unprocessed sound, and the researchers studied whether participants were able to reliably distinguish between them. The sounds easiest to identify were a castanet, a percussion instrument, and short clicks.
‘The audibility of the level variation of a loudspeaker across frequencies is well known, but the audibility of the group delay variation has been less studied. Variation in the group delay results in certain frequency ranges moving forward or backward in time compared to other frequencies,’ says Aalto University Professor Vesa Välimäki.
The insides of pro bowling balls will make your head spin #science #interesting
No matter how hard you try to spin the house balls at your local bowling joint, they rarely curve. That’s because they are simple spheres built for durability, not fancy moves. But a small handful of companies—among them Storm Bowling—create gear that is surprisingly complex inside. Precisely shaped, meticulously balanced weight blocks leverage the laws of physics to help skilled alley jockeys throw a strike on most rolls.
Good Design is Imperfect Design Part 1: Honest Names - Domain Language #design #software #programming
Perfectionism is a pitfall. For those who, like me, love elegant design and see its utility, there is a slippery slope waiting when a satisfying design does not emerge in a reasonable time. It takes constant self-discipline to recognize this and accept, let go, ship and move on – or return in a later cycle, if it matters. It doesn’t always matter. For many parts of our systems, a good-enough design is good enough. And for those few strategically important parts, where an incisive model and a crisp design are actually likely to affect the outcome of the project, a great initial design doesn’t usually emerge immediately. We’ll need iteration and experimentation. None of our goals is furthered by grinding and dawdling, waiting for a design we can be proud of in version one.
Facebook exec helped Cuomo smear sex-harassment accuser: AG #crimes #socialnetworks #privacy
A top communications manager at Facebook helped Gov. Andrew Cuomo fight sexual misconduct allegations — including by helping leak confidential files about accuser Lindsey Boylan and by participating in regular discussions about Cuomo’s communications strategy, according to the New York attorney general’s bombshell investigation.
Dani Lever — who had worked in Cuomo’s press operation since 2014 but left in August 2020 to join Facebook as a communications manager — played a key role in Cuomo’s communications strategy even while working for Facebook, according to the investigation released Tuesday.
CalyxOS - deGooglified Android #software #privacy
CalyxOS is an Android mobile operating system that puts privacy and security into the hands of everyday users. Plus, proactive security recommendations and automatic updates take the guesswork out of keeping your personal data personal.
Sci-Hub is fundraising #copyrights #science
Sci-Hub is a controversial project
with an ambitious goal to make
scientific knowledge accessible to
everyone – free of charge, in any
place of the world.
Powering the Lunar Base – Casey Handmer's blog #space #technology #engineering
As a rough rule of thumb, conventional approaches to Lunar transportation put cargo costs at upwards of $100m/T, while Starship should be able to get as low as $1m/T without any miracles, and perhaps as low as $100k/T long term. 100-1000 times cheaper transport costs is the sort of logistics improvement that creates possibilities, and much of my Twitter feed recently has been full of die hard space nerds coming to terms with this fact.
When Encryption Was a Crime: The 1990s Battle for Free Speech in Software #privacy #security #copyrights
In 1977, a team of cryptographers at MIT made an astonishing discovery: a mathematical system for encrypting secret messages so powerful that it had the potential to make government spying effectively impossible.
Before the MIT team could publish a description of how this system worked, the National Security Agency (NSA) made it known that doing so could be considered a federal crime. The 1976 Arms Export Control Act (AECA) made it illegal to distribute munitions in other countries without a license, including cryptography. The penalty for violating AECA was up to 10 years in prison or a fine of up to one million dollars.
The woman who rifles through New York’s garbage – exposing the city’s excesses | Waste | The Guardian #economy #culture
On an ordinary street in the middle of Manhattan, Anna Sacks gets ready to rifle through the trash. But first, she takes out her phone and turns on the camera.
“You can see, they’ve ripped up the RXBars,” says Sacks in the resulting TikTok video, as she documents the depths of this particular bag of trash, plopped outside a CVS pharmacy. Her (puncture-proof) gloved hand maneuvers through the bag to reveal its contents: the aforementioned protein bars; tubes of toothpaste with the toothpaste squeezed out; a depleted makeup palette; a hairbrush that appears to covered in the aforementioned toothpaste. “Ugh,” Sacks manages at one point, before salvaging the hairbrush, noting it just needs to be washed. “It’s so gross that this is what they like to do, as a corporation, rather than help people.”
Squatting or Kneeling May Be Beneficial for Health - Press Room USC (2020) #health
Standing desks are so passé. It’s time for squatting desks.
A USC-led study shows that squatting and kneeling may be important resting positions in human evolution — and even for modern human health.
Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free to all | Science | AAAS #copyrights #science
The United Kingdom currently has one of the highest rates of open-access publication in the world, with many researchers posting their research papers on websites that make them publicly available for free. But the country’s leading funding agency today announced a new policy that will push open access even further by mandating that all research it funds must be freely available for anyone to read upon publication.
The policy by the funder, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will expand on existing rules covering all research papers produced from its £8 billion in annual funding. About three-quarters of papers recently published from U.K. universities are open access, and UKRI’s current policy gives scholars two routes to comply: Pay journals for “gold” open access, which makes a paper free to read on the publisher’s website, or choose the “green” route, which allows them to deposit a near-final version of the paper on a public repository, after a waiting period of up to 1 year. Publishers have insisted that an embargo period is necessary to prevent the free papers from peeling away their subscribers.
Space Station Incident Demands Independent Investigation - IEEE Spectrum #space
In an International Space Station major milestone more than fifteen years in the making, a long-delayed Russian science laboratory named Nauka automatically docked to the station on 29 July, prompting sighs of relief in the Mission Control Centers in Houston and Moscow. But within a few hours, it became shockingly obvious the celebrations were premature, and the ISS was coming closer to disaster than at anytime in its nearly 25 years in orbit.
While the proximate cause of the incident is still being unravelled, there are worrisome signs that NASA may be repeating some of the lapses that lead to the loss of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles and their crews. And because political pressures seem to be driving much of the problem, only an independent investigation with serious political heft can reverse any erosion in safety culture.
Glenfiddich uses own whisky waste to fuel trucks | E&T Magazine #economy #nature
Scotch whisky maker Glenfiddich has announced that it will convert its delivery trucks to run on low-emission biogas made from waste products from its own whisky distilling process.
The company said it has installed fuelling stations at its Dufftown distillery in north-eastern Scotland which use technology developed by its parent company William Grant and Sons. It will convert its production waste and residues into an Ultra-Low Carbon Fuel (ULCF) gas that produces minimal carbon dioxide and other harmful emissions.
'1984' by George Orwell - Berfrois The principles of Newspeak. #culture #history
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in ‘The Times’ were written in it, but this was a TOUR DE FORCE which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary, that we are concerned here.
The Economics of OnlyFans - xsrus.com #economy #internet
The revenue of content creators follows a classic power law distribution. The top accounts make something like $100,000 a month (these aren’t in my sample). The median account makes $180 a month.
The top 1% of accounts make 33% of all the money. The top 10% of accounts make 73% of all the money. This isn’t the 80:20 rule; it’s the 80:14 rule.
0 A.D. | A free, open-source game of ancient warfare #software #games #opensource
Wildfire Games proudly announces the release of 0AD Alpha 25: “Yaunā,” the twenty-fifth alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source real-time strategy game of ancient warfare. Yaunā is an old Persian word for Ionians (Greeks).
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