By Dainius Happy in Newsletter — Jul 30, 2024

ReHacked vol. 278: An Interview With Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut, Zurich, Bern Consider Billboard Advertising Bans, Physicists may now have a way to make element 120 – the heaviest ever and more

An Interview With Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut #literature #history #longread

One fine summer day, Barbara Stone and I arrived at the home of Kurt Vonnegut in Sagaponack. We had called Kurt, earlier; and asked to interview him, whereupon he said, “I’d rather interview Bob Caro.” Needless to say, we were extremely pleased when Caro agreed. Caro is the author of magisterial biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, and the interview promised to be most interesting.

Make a donation - support Ukraine. My favourite: Support the Armed Forces of Ukraine | via National Bank of Ukraine. More options if you want alternatives. Also, very important Come Back Alive Foundation - Charity Organization.

Щира подяка. Разом до перемоги!

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The Wolfram Physics Project: Finding the Fundamental Theory of Physics #science #resource

Switzerland: Zurich, Bern Consider Billboard Advertising Bans - Bloomberg #privacy #copyrights

An inconspicuous suburb close to Geneva became the first Swiss municipality to banish commercial advertising from its streets, in a policy that creates a blueprint for similar bans in larger cities across the country.

After opponents to the measure in Vernier, a town of 38,000 people, failed to collect enough signatures for a popular vote on the issue, their last attempt to stop the local government from removing billboards failed this month in Switzerland’s Supreme Court. The justices rejected an appeal to overturn the plan, ruling Vernier’s policy didn’t seek to influence free competition and instead aimed to “combat visual pollution” and gave citizens the “opportunity to opt out of unwanted advertising.”

Unique Japan Accommodation: Stay in a Converted Schoolhouse #architecture #design

About 450 schools shutter their doors every year in Japan, closures fueled by diminishing birthrates and residents moving to urban areas. Increasingly, communities are adapting to this new reality by transforming these abandoned schoolhouses, revitalizing their surroundings and breathing new life into these once-forgotten structures. The result is a unique opportunity for travelers to immerse themselves in a one-of-a-kind experience that seamlessly melds history, nostalgia and modern luxury.

Physicists may now have a way to make element 120 – the heaviest ever | New Scientist #nature #science

The researchers started with rare isotopes of titanium, which they vaporised in a special oven at 1650°C (around 3000°F). Next, they used microwaves to turn the hot titanium vapour into a charged beam, which could then be fed into a particle accelerator. When the beam reached roughly 10 per cent of the speed of light and collided with the plutonium target, the resulting debris hit a detector that revealed signatures of exactly two atoms of livermorium.

Each atom rapidly decayed into other elements, as was expected – the stability of atomic nuclei decreases as the mass of an atom increases. But the measurement was so precise that there is only about a one in a trillion chance that the finding was a statistical fluke, says Gates. The researchers presented their findings on 23 July at the Nuclear Structure 2024 conference at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

Google Is the Only Search Engine That Works on Reddit Now Thanks to AI Deal #internet

Google is now the only search engine that can surface results from Reddit, making one of the web’s most valuable repositories of user generated content exclusive to the internet’s already dominant search engine.

If you use Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Qwant or any other alternative search engine that doesn’t rely on Google’s indexing and search Reddit by using “site:reddit.com,” you will not see any results from the last week. DuckDuckGo is currently turning up seven links when searching Reddit, but provides no data on where the links go or why, instead only saying that “We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.” Older results will still show up, but these search engines are no longer able to “crawl” Reddit, meaning that Google is the only search engine that will turn up results from Reddit going forward. Searching for Reddit still works on Kagi, an independent, paid search engine that buys part of its search index from Google.

Phish-Friendly Domain Registry “.top” Put on Notice – Krebs on Security #security

The Chinese company in charge of handing out domain names ending in “.top” has been given until mid-August 2024 to show that it has put in place systems for managing phishing reports and suspending abusive domains, or else forfeit its license to sell domains. The warning comes amid the release of new findings that .top was the most common suffix in phishing websites over the past year, second only to domains ending in “.com.”

So you got a null result. Will anyone publish it? #science

A 2022 survey of scientists in France, for instance, found that 75% were willing to publish null results they had produced, but only 12.5% were able to do so. Over time, this bias in publications distorts the scientific record, and a focus on significant results can encourage researchers to selectively report their data or exaggerate the statistical importance of their findings. It also wastes time and money, because researchers might duplicate studies that had already been conducted but not published. Some evidence suggests that the problem is getting worse, with fewer negative results seeing the light of day over time.

Anyone can Access Deleted and Private Repository Data on GitHub ◆ Truffle Security Co. #software #privacy #security

You can access data from deleted forks, deleted repositories and even private repositories on GitHub. And it is available forever. This is known by GitHub, and intentionally designed that way.

This is such an enormous attack vector for all organizations that use GitHub that we’re introducing a new term: Cross Fork Object Reference (CFOR). A CFOR vulnerability occurs when one repository fork can access sensitive data from another fork (including data from private and deleted forks). Similar to an Insecure Direct Object Reference, in CFOR users supply commit hashes to directly access commit data that otherwise would not be visible to them.

The UNIX Pipe Card Game #software #fun

This is a card game for teaching kids how to combine unix commands through pipes. You can buy it (€5), or you can print it by yourself.

Listen to the oldest known recording of a human voice #history

Thomas Edison is often credited with being the first person to record sound. But it was in fact a Frenchman named Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville who invented sound recording via his phonautograph in 1857, 20 years before Edison invented his phonograph.

How Warsaw Came Close to Never Being Rebuilt | Article | Culture.pl #architecture #history

The reconstruction of Warsaw in 1945 was an attempt to rebuild not only the individual monuments, but also to restore the entire historical makeup of the city. Many years later, the revitalisation of its Old Town made it onto the UNESCO World Heritage List – but back then, in the wake of the wartime destruction, this was far from obvious.

Can you opt out of airport face scans? Yes! Here’s how. - Vox #privacy

It turns out that saying no is not only doable, but surprisingly easy — at least in theory. Everyone, regardless of citizenship, can opt out when it comes to domestic flights in the US. (For international flights, US citizens can opt out but foreign nationals have to participate in face scanning, with some exceptions.) Simply stand away from the camera or keep your face covered with a mask, present your ID, and say, “I opt out of biometrics. I want the standard verification process.”

In theory, an officer is then supposed to manually look over your ID and compare it to your face, as they used to do before facial recognition. But in practice, there have been reports of passengers — even a senator — facing resistance or intimidation when they try to go this route.

Copying is the way design works || Matthew Ström: designer & developer #design

“Great artists steal,” he said, quoting Pablo Picasso (or was it Stravinsky? T. S. Eliot. Jobs and Apple copied many designs in their early days, most notably from a Xerox research laboratory in Palo Alto. The story goes like this:

In the early 20th century, Xerox was a pioneer of office technology. By the middle of the century, computers were getting smaller and more affordable, and Xerox knew they’d have to work hard to keep their market dominance. In 1970, The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center — Xerox PARC — was founded to explore the future of the “paperless office.”

Unseen STL History Talks: All about Eads and his Bridge #history

Amanda Clark discussed the opening of the bridge and the elephant, explaining that people were wary of crossing the structure at first (but elephants, it was said, would never walk across anything unsafe.)

Ethiopia, the first country to ban gas cars, faces EV challenges - Rest of World #politics #economy

In February, the Ethiopian government banned the import of gas and diesel vehicles to boost EV adoption.
EV experts say the decision came too early and the country wasn’t prepared for it.
EV owners struggle with inadequate charging infrastructure and access to spare parts for their cars. Some say they are looking to go back to gas or diesel-powered cars.

Indonesia’s minority religious groups face online hatred - Rest of World #socialmedia #world #religion

Hard-line Muslim influencers have massive followings on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
Religious minorities in Indonesia are subject to hate speech and curbs on expression.
A new criminal code will further criminalize blasphemy, increasing scrutiny of social media activity of moderate Muslims and religious minorities.

For nearly two decades, hundreds of Ahmadiyya Muslims have lived in a cramped government shelter on the Indonesian island of Lombok, after they were attacked by a mob that accused them of being deviant. At the shelter, they are watched by local authorities, their movements curtailed, and their social media activity closely monitored. So when Sholeh, a community leader, posted a picture of a social gathering on Facebook earlier this year, a local official asked him to take it down almost immediately.

Human parasites in the Roman World: health consequences of conquering an empire | Parasitology | Cambridge Core #history #longread

The archaeological evidence for parasites in the Roman era is presented in order to demonstrate the species present at that time, and highlight the health consequences for people living under Roman rule. Despite their large multi-seat public latrines with washing facilities, sewer systems, sanitation legislation, fountains and piped drinking water from aqueducts, we see the widespread presence of whipworm (Trichuris trichiura), roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides) and Entamoeba histolytica that causes dysentery. This would suggest that the public sanitation measures were insufficient to protect the population from parasites spread by fecal contamination. Ectoparasites such as fleas, head lice, body lice, pubic lice and bed bugs were also present, and delousing combs have been found. The evidence fails to demonstrate that the Roman culture of regular bathing in the public baths reduced the prevalence of these parasites. Fish tapeworm was noted to be widely present, and was more common than in Bronze and Iron Age Europe. It is possible that the Roman enthusiasm for fermented, uncooked fish sauce (garum) may have facilitated the spread of this helminth. Roman medical practitioners such as Galen were aware of intestinal worms, explaining their existence and planning treatment using the humoural theory of the period.

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