Hold on, this may take a moment to connect:
Mythbusters on Head-on Collisions
I’m sure you all have cable and/or satellite setups and thus see the Mythbusters
Here’s the Myth: Continue reading Mythbusters on Head-on Collisions
How to handle your out of control toddler
You need to get a copy of How to Discipline a Toddler: A Parent’s Essential Guide to Disciplining Toddlers, Dealing with Toddler Tantrums, and Addressing Other Toddler Behavior Problems
Things that work on toddlers: Continue reading How to handle your out of control toddler
The Best US Electricity Generation Graphic Ever, No Kidding
Carbon Brief has produced a US based (sorry, rest of the world) interactive graphic that accesses an extensive underlying database that shows everything about the electricity generation that there is to know. Each generation plant, each type of electricty, capacity, etc. and you can view the information by state, by type of energy, and with some other toggles.
Here is an example. Continue reading The Best US Electricity Generation Graphic Ever, No Kidding
The FL Park Service and the Coast Guard Fight Over Russian Bouy
Interesting, amusing, a story involving Russia that will probably not make you cringe.
It is presumed that the object in question was brought from Cuban waters to Florida by Irma, the Hurricane.
From here:
A 1,200-pound Soviet buoy that surfaced off Dania Beach looks like it belongs in a James Bond movie. Script — which the Library of Congress says is Russian for Hydrometrical Service of the USSR — is painted in black on its side.
Exactly where the rusty, Cold War-era relic came from, and what it was used for, remain a mystery.
Workers at Dr. Von D. Mizell-Eula Johnson State Park pulled it off the beach just days after Hurricane Irma swept through town. They think it floated 350 miles from Cuba, given Cuba’s historically close ties with the Soviet Union.
Bill Moore, the park’s maintenance mechanic, locked eyes on the 12-foot buoy at the same time Coast Guard members did. He marveled at it, thinking, “You don’t find that too often.”
The Coast Guard’s administrative offices are next to the park’s headquarters. “They came running down here with their dog,” he said. “They tried to confiscate it.”
But Moore retrieved it before the Coast Guard could, he said. The buoy was too heavy to budge, so Moore tied a rope around it and with a skid-steer loader dragged it up the embankment and then brought it to the park office’s parking lot.
New Book: Democracy in Chains
I’ve heard the story a half dozen times, and every time it is different. But only a little different, and most if not all of the versions I’ve heard are basically correct. Very wealthy individuals and corporations have a stranglehold over the government, and in many cases, call the shots. The only time they are not calling the shots is when a strong movement opposes them, and such movements inevitably weaken and die.
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
The enemy in this particular story is not Barry Goldwater, or the Koch Brothers, but rather economics James McGill Buchanan. Of course, Charles Koch ends up being a disciple of Buchannan’s approach, ad do others. And that is where the money comes from.
MacLean’s key point is that this is not Continue reading New Book: Democracy in Chains
Tragic and Unprecedented California Deadly Fire
The news is bad, and is being widely covered. Here I just want to make a remark or two about the link between big fires and global warming.
As of last report, there are 15 known dead and 150 or more missing. Hopefully they are only virtually and not actually missing; there is a lot of confusion and communication resources are in many cases down.
Wild fires are tricky in more ways then one. It is easy to get caught in one (I’ve manage that myself), and it is hard to predict or fully understand why some years have more than others. There has been a long term trend nationally towards fewer wild fires, for several reasons, most of which have to do with human activities. The most significant part of that trend is that humans caused many, huge, often deadly wild fires in the past. The worst wildfire ever in Minnesota, in terms of Death toll, was during World War I and had mainly to do with farming and railroads being a bad mix. Cutting lots of land to farm provides the fuel, and in those days, railroads were travelling tinderboxes sparking fires everywhere they went. Continue reading Tragic and Unprecedented California Deadly Fire
Is Facebook Covering Up Russian Hacking Of The 2016 Election?
Facebook apparently knew quite early on that Russian agents were manipulating Facebook feeds and Facebook users in order to influence the American election, favoring Trump and working against Clinton.
But they publicly denied that they had any of this information, and went so far as to delete information about this in a report. The report contained details about Russia that Facebook legal and marketing teams removed before the report’s release.
Then, as you may know, they eventually admitted it.
The result of this long and inexplicable delay may have set back by months our understanding of the whole Trump-Russian scandal.
Watch this for all the gory details:
Continue reading Is Facebook Covering Up Russian Hacking Of The 2016 Election?
Good deals on books
I usually focus on science books, but suddenly there are some deals on key classics that should still appeal.
A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy
Recounting the final year of the Civil War, this classic volume by Bruce Catton won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for excellence in non-fiction.
In this final volume of the Army of the Potomac Trilogy, Catton, America’s foremost Civil War historian, takes the reader through the battles of the Wilderness, the Bloody Angle, Cold Harbot, the Crater, and on through the horrible months to one moment at Appomattox. Grant, Meade, Sheridan, and Lee vividly come to life in all their failings and triumphs.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – 10th anniversary edition: A Year of Food Life
Hacking Voting Machines
In every area of life, but especially in the overlapping realms of technology, science, and health, misunderstanding how things work can be widespread, and that misunderstanding can lead to problems.
In the area of voting, the main problem seems to be the expenditure of great amounts of outrage and concern over things that are not real. At the same time this happens, things that are real matter a great deal.
I’ll give you one example. Remember the special election for the Congressional Representative for Georgia’s 6th district, earlier this year? Several media outlets reported “voting machines stolen,” which, in turn, caused great outrage and concern on The Internet because, well, voting machines had been stolen.
Now, pause for a moment and think what this means.
Hacking The American Election System: Getting It Right
In every area of life, but especially in the overlapping realms of technology, science, and health, misunderstanding how things work can be widespread, and that misunderstanding can lead to problems.
In the area of voting, the main problem seems to be the expenditure of great amounts of outrage and concern over things that are not real. At the same time this happens, things that are real matter a great deal.
I’ll give you one example. Remember the special election for the Congressional Representative for Georgia’s 6th district, earlier this year? Several media outlets reported “voting machines stolen,” which, in turn, caused great outrage and concern on The Internet because, well, voting machines had been stolen.
Now, pause for a moment and think what this means. What does it mean to have voting machines stolen? What is a voting machine? What would you do about voting machines being stolen? How might you try to solve the problem of voting machines being stolen just before an election was happening (like,the day before)? How might this affect the election? Who likely did it? How would you find them and what would you do to them?
I hope you did not spend a lot of time on those questions because if you did, you probably wasted it (unless you already know about the Cobb County Georgia story). Continue reading Hacking The American Election System: Getting It Right
Trump Ends Clean Power Plan
The Trump Administration has just ended the Clean Power Plan.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s move to start dismantling the Clean Power Plan rule intended to curb carbon emissions that contribute to global warming will not be a quick process.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s announcement Sunday to a group of coal miners in eastern Kentucky that he plans to sign a proposed rule Tuesday rolling back the Obama-era rule is simply the first of a number of steps the agency will have to take.
Proposing a rule to undo a regulation takes the same time-consuming, pain-staking, research-based, legally-defensible process used to adopt the very rule targeted for elimination.
“Today’s proposed repeal of the Clean Power Plan just begins the battle,” David Doniger, a climate change expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote in a blog Monday. “Pruitt’s EPA must hold hearings and take public comment, and issue a final repeal — with or without a possible replacement. He must respond to all legal, scientific, and economic objections raised, including the issues we lay out here.”
That Columbus Day is Evil: A truth and a falsehood
Update: Long after I penned this essay, Cambridge MA (which is not Boston but is near and different from Boston) renamed Columbus Day “Indigenous People’s Day.”
The photograph above is of the Columbus Statue in the North End, doused with red paint in 2006.
Columbus Day has become a holiday of disdain, and there are many people who feel it should be taken off the books. It is a little like the Martin Luther King Jr. day maneno in reverse. If you were a progressive and thoughtful American you’d have supported having a state-wide Martin Luther King Jr. day, and probably also a street named after the highly influential slain civil rights leader. If, on the other hand, you were a Republican and/or racist white supremacist type (and there are a lot more of those than gentile people like to admit) than you’d have come up with some lame excuse for not having a Martin Luther King Jr. day or a Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in your state or town. When the Federal version of MLK day was being debated in the US Congress, it was the likes of Jesse Helms who opposed it. Numerous states resisted adding MLK day, and it was not until the year 2000 that all states in the US celebrated the only US holiday for the birth of a famous person who was not white, by actually taking the day off.
Continue reading That Columbus Day is Evil: A truth and a falsehood
It Takes a Village by Hillary Clinton
Did you know that Hillary Clinton wrote a children’s book? Illustrated by the amazing Maria Frazee.
It Takes a Village: Picture Book
Former Secretary of State and Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton’s first book for young readers, inspired by the themes of her classic New York Times bestselling book It Takes a Village, and illustrated by two-time Caldecott Honor recipient Marla Frazee, asks readers what can they do to make the world a better place?
It Takes a Village tells the heartwarming and universal story of a diverse community coming together to make a difference. All kinds of people working together, playing together, and living together in harmony makes a better village and many villages coming together can make a better world. Together we can build a better life for one another. Together we can change our world.
The book will resonate with children and families and through the generations as it encourages readers to look for a way they can make a difference. It is a book that you will surely want to read again and again, a book you will want to share and a book that will inspire.
Does Apple intentionally slow down your phone to make you want to buy a new one? YES it turns out!
ADDED: Sort of. Let me explain.
Apple does slow down the clock speed on the main processors of your phone as the battery wears down. I assume there is a good technical reason to do this, and it kind of makes sense. So, yes, they slow down your phone but not to sell you a new one, but rather, to help your phone be a better phone.
But, the slowdown can be reversed by replacing the battery. And, Apple has never made even the slightest move to inform people that this is a thing. So, it is like the time Homer Simpson was told by Marge to not eat a pie she had just made. Homer found himself walking across the kitchen with his mouth making an up and down scarfing motion in an arbitrary direction that happened to lead directly to the pie. “If that pie doesn’t get out of the way, I’m going to accidentally eat it” he proclaimed. Sure enough, the pie remained still and Homer ate it.
Similarly, people will buy a new phone because performance is way down, when all they had to do was to replace the battery. Apple is Homer pretending to innocently happen to eat a pie. The phone is homer walking along. You are the pie. Not a pretty picture.
So, really, the slowdown is a) engineered into the phone, b) causes people to buy a new phone, not a new battery, and c) the fix that would be so much cheaper is kept out of the available information from Apple.
So, yes, Apple intentionally slows down your phone to make you want to buy a new one, it turns out. Effectively.
How do I know this? From this excellent and well documented source.
And now, back to my original post in which I argue that something suspicious is going on but I don’t quite know what it is:
ORIGINAL POST:
It is a widespread belief that Apple, as well as other computer manufacturers, do things that make your device, be it a desktop computer, a notebook, a smart phone, or anything, slow down as they lead up to and release, and begin to sell, a new version of their product.
I want to point to a study done that concludes that they don’t do this. The study is by FutureMark which is basically a benchmarking software producer. They to not explain in their methodology where they get their data from, but I will guess that it is from the phones of people who install their benchmarking app.
If so, then right there we have a problem with the study. Without describing the sampling design, the study is useless right out of the gate. But if it includes the sorts of users that will install a benchmarking app on their phone, the that’s a bias (and uncontrolled mysterious one at that).
The study has other problems. Continue reading Does Apple intentionally slow down your phone to make you want to buy a new one? YES it turns out!