It can't be our uniqueness that, on rare occasion, we have one of those mornings. Everyone has those. For instance, this morning....
5:45am - I emerge from my basement lair to find the upstairs bedroom hallway light on (above the hallway closets). That's a very unusual occurrence as Hunky Husband uses that light so seldom that he can not remember the location of the switch that controls that light. Do I check in his bedroom to assure that HH is alright, or do I leave to do the grocery shopping and let the light go? I decide to don shoes and hoodie to leave for the groceries.
6:04am - HH opens the doorway into the garage just as I am ready to punch the button on my sun visor to open my overhead door to start my car and back out. HH just wanted to check that everything was OK with me. He had arisen, read my note about my going to get groceries, and checked the garage - surprised that my car was still in. After assuring HH that all is well and opening the overhead door, I drive down the dark driveway noting that, although it has usually been delivered by this time, there is no Wichita Eagle newspaper in our driveway.
6:32am - I return home to find the newspaper still has not arrived, HH has returned to bed, and the hallway light is turned off. After unloading and putting away the groceries, I go back to bed.
8:30am - I arise to find HH in a stew because we still have not received a newspaper, for the second day in a row. He has called about the omission and received the same satisfaction as he had received yesterday - an imperceptible amount. It has been a few years since HH last had to fight this battle - a battle that lasted for two or three weeks at that time.
8:40am - Being a complete klutz, I knock my bottle of water over, spilling 1/2 cup of ice and water over my cluttered computer desk.
8:45am - HH comes up from his den in the basement, handing me his check book and two most recent statements from his credit union, and asking me to figure out whether his $538 check to the Wichita Eagle that he wrote on 10/10/2020 has cleared. (Unfortunately, it has been about 15 years since that particular credit union's online services have been available to me - partly because I tend to procrastinate and partly because they make it difficult to communicate with them.) It takes me a few minutes, but I finally find the appropriate entry that confirms that the check cleared on 10/16/2020.
8:55am - HH readies to visit the nearest convenience store in order to, again, spend over $2 for a replacement newspaper. HH cannot find his wallet. I spot it on the table next to his reading chair - in the spot on that table which is diagonally opposite to where I would have expected he might have laid it, regardless of the fact that he never puts his wallet on that table.
HH and I agree that the rest of the day can only be better.
Monday, 9/21/2020: Having decided to get down to the task of making more/better face coverings for Hunky Husband and me, I was disgusted with myself for having forgotten my lack of elastic for the ear pieces. Gah! I bought three yards of silk for the double inner layer of fabric, but failed to order the elastic. In case there is someone who missed the announcement: Walmart is trying to compete with Amazon as a "go to" online merchandise ordering website. However, there are items for which they have taken time to establish ordering capability. Such was the case with the elastic. It has, since, become available and I have ordered several yards of white and several of black. It is to be delivered during the first week ofOctober. [Added note: The wild bird seed that was ordered at the same time was delivered on the 22nd.]
I still seek a source of two types of light bulbs - and - sanitizing hand wipes.
Tuesday, 9/22/2020: The Wild Turkeys and I are having a contest. They try to see how much of the mulch around our new trees in back they can remove, and how quickly, while I attempt to rake the mulch back into place during my daily outdoor chores. The photo, below, was taken in July; but, it shows some of the turkeys and points out the mulch that they love to scatter.
Wednesday, 9/23/2020: As I stepped outside to gather in this morning's newspaper, there were a couple of bat-like flyers tumbling over our front yard. I could not imagine that we had bats as large as these two appeared to be and, by the time I had taken another step, I realized that there were a number of these tumbling flyers. Aha! It is September. The Common Nighthawks are migrating south with their more-or-less wheeling movement. As happened, it was early enough that it was nearly dark outside, and it was foggy; thus, the birds were flying a bit lower than normally they would have been observed to do. Their tumbling flight was to catch insects around the street light that is near our yard, fueling their long flight to South America. I did not/could not have captured their aerobatic flight; but, YouTube came to my rescue. I recommend full screen for viewing this video (under 2 minutes).
Several times since moving into this house, I've observed migrations of nighthawks - following the same track each year as far as I can tell. Otherwise, seeing nighthawks in our little town is so rare that I cannot, reliably, recall any instances. I do recall (1940s and early 1950s) watching nighthawks dart about in the even smaller town in which my great-grandparents lived. They lived on a relatively busy street, across from a small hotel. As I recall, some of the nighthawks nested atop that hotel - on its flat roof. Their in-flight squawks are unmistakable.
Did I mention it was foggy? Thirty minutes later, as I left for my walk, I found that the "perfectly dry" outdoor surfaces were then "perfectly wet". During my walk, within 0.4 mile of the house, I experienced a "Seattle rain". The rest of my walk was dry.
I continued my fall cleanup in the yard by yanking out another tomato vine (this is the 5th one, so far, this year.) You can see how huge the plant was in the photo, below. It was late producing ripe tomatoes and sparse in production. It's fruit were tasty, however.
The fall yard cleanup continued with my raking cottonwood tree leaves and sticks - for the ninth day in a row. It has been only a couple of hours since I raked and, in the next photo, it is obvious that tomorrow will be another raking day. Unfortunately, I failed to snap a photo "before". The splice of two photos to provide a wide-angle look isn't perfect; but, close enough for government work!
Thursday, 9/24/2020:
On this, my late mother's 106th birthday, News for Nerds led me to a report at The Guardian, concerning the effectivity of impermeable face shields in protecting against aerosol distribution of the novel coronavirus.
Simulation using world’s fastest supercomputer casts doubt on effectiveness in preventing spread of coronavirus
Obviously, my dentist is ahead of the curve since she insists that all staff working on patients wear a surgical mask under the transparent face shield. I would also point out that dentists have used the transparent face shields "forever". I had always understood it to guard them against droplets of spray.
A large garden spideris having her last fling of summer. It's to be in the low 90s (as high temperature of the day) over the weekend, then into the 60s during next week. It was in the mid 60s when I spotted this beauty, below. I never had the opportunity to show her back in a photo - only her front and side.
Friday, 9/25/2020: One of the items at News for Nerds, this morning, concerns helping people become addicted to Facebook. I understand that, just because one uses FB does not imply that they are addicted; but, there are frequently reports in the traditional media that might lead one to conclude that a non-trivial number of users are, indeed, addicted.
Posted by BeauHD from the engaging-analogies dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Speaking to Congress today, the former Facebook manager first tasked with making the company make money did not mince words about his role. He told lawmakers that the company "took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset" and arguing that his former employer has been hugely detrimental to society. His analogy continued: "Tobacco companies initially just sought to make nicotine more potent. But eventually that wasn't enough to grow the business as fast as they wanted. And so they added sugar and menthol to cigarettes so you could hold the smoke in your lungs for longer periods. At Facebook, we added status updates, photo tagging, and likes, which made status and reputation primary and laid the groundwork for a teenage mental health crisis. Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco's bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs. But that incendiary content alone wasn't enough. To continue to grow the user base and in particular, the amount of time and attention users would surrender to Facebook, they needed more."
Tim Kendall, who served as director of monetization for Facebook from 2006 through 2010, spoke to Congress today as part of a House Commerce subcommittee hearing examining how social media platforms contribute to the mainstreaming of extremist and radicalizing content. "The social media services that I and others have built over the past 15 years have served to tear people apart with alarming speed and intensity," Kendall said in his opening testimony (PDF). "At the very least, we have eroded our collective understanding -- at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war." As director of monetization, he added, "We sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible... We took a page form Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset."
This item is no longer as timely as usually are my postings from News for Nerds. It got postponed/lost when overcome by other happenings; but, I still think that spying activities in Germany and the US are of interest.
Yeo "would end up using the professional networking website LinkedIn, a fake consulting company and cover as a curious academic to lure in American targets." Some of the targets that Yeo found by trawling through LinkedIn were commissioned to write reports for his "consultancy", which had the same name as an already prominent firm. These were then sent to his Chinese contacts. One of the individuals he contacted worked on the U.S. Air Force's F-35 fighter jet programme and admitted he had money problems. Another was a U.S. army officer assigned to the Pentagon, who was paid at least $2,000 (£1,500) to write a report on how the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan would impact China... According to the court documents, his handlers advised him to ask targets if they "were dissatisfied with work" or "were having financial troubles"...
In 2018, Yeo also posted fake online job ads for his consulting company. He told investigators he received more than 400 CVs with 90% of them coming from "US military and government personnel with security clearances". Some were passed to his Chinese handlers... Dickson Yeo does not appear to have got as far with his contacts as his handlers would have liked. But in November 2019, he travelled to the U.S. with instructions to turn the army officer into a "permanent conduit of information", his signed statement says.
He was arrested before he could ask. The 39-year-old now faces up to 10 years in prison for being an "illegal agent of a foreign power" — but the article notes he was "aided by an invisible ally — the LinkedIn algorithm.
"Each time Yeo looked at someone's profile it would suggest a new slate of contacts with similar experience that he might be interested in..."
Posted by EditorDavid from the we-can-rebuild-him dept.
The Telegraph reports: Peter Scott-Morgan stands, wide-eyed and tearful. "Good. Grief." he says quietly. "I was unprepared for the emotion... It's quite extraordinary. It really is." Using an exoskeleton, Scott-Morgan is experiencing what it is like to stand for the first time in months after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2017, the same incurable condition that killed scientist Stephen Hawking.
The remarkable step, however, is just the first in the 62-year-old's bold journey to control his disease by becoming the world's first, full-fledged cyborg. "Think of it as a science experiment," he laughs. "This is cyborg territory, and I intend to be a human guinea pig to see just how far we can turn science fiction into reality." Eventually, Scott-Morgan wants the exoskeleton to encase his upper body, giving him superhuman strength and the ability to tower above "flesh and blood" humans. A mind-reading computer will be plugged directly into his brain, expressing his thoughts almost instantly. Meanwhile, his paralyzed face will be replaced by a hyper-realistic avatar that will move in time with a speech synthesizer...
Scott-Morgan says he isn't deteriorating but becoming a new version of himself — one that will eventually pave the way for a breed of humans that can augment their capabilities using technology... Instead of answering a question by laboriously typing out individual letters using a gaze tracker, in a similar way to Hawking, he will rely on the AI to provide a full and instant response. Eventually, the machine will speak for itself using phrases it has learned from Scott-Morgan — crossing a controversial line in what it means to be human....
Someday, the scientist hopes he can exist completely outside his physical body, with his personality, traits and knowledge downloaded on to a machine.
A commenter at Julie Zickefoose's blog sent her readers to FaceBook to see how a few hundred Amish men moved a barn. Not being on FB, I went to YouTube where I found the above video.
There is an Amish community about an hour's drive north of Wichita (which puts them 1.5 hours' drive from us) where we occasionally (read that as "every several years") dine at their Carriage Crossing Restaurant & Bakery (with gift shop) and/or go to Yoder Furniture Company. Amish are known for their workmanship and the wares at the gift and furniture shops never fail to measure up.
An anonymous reader writes: You really can't make this stuff up, but Americans across the country, out of fear of "murder hornets," have begun killing all kinds of bees en masse. According to Doug Yanega, senior museum scientist for the Department of Entomology at UC Riverside, a national panic has led to the needless slaughter of native wasps and bees, beneficial insects whose populations are already threatened...
"Folks in China, Korea and Japan have lived side by side with these hornets for hundreds of years, and it has not caused the collapse of human society there. My colleagues in Japan, China and Korea are just rolling their eyes in disbelief at what kind of snowflakes we are..."
"I don't want to downplay this — they are logistically dangerous insects. But having people in Tennessee worry about this is just ridiculous. The only people who should be bothering experts with concerns about wasp IDs are living in the northwest quadrant of Washington (state). And really, right now, nobody else in the country should even be thinking about this stuff," he continued. "The facts are, experts said, two dead hornets were found in Washington last December, a lone Canadian live nest was found and wiped out last September and no live hornets have yet been seen this year," reports the Associated Press.
And when they spoke to the Washington Agriculture Department entomologist working on the state's response, he issued an additional correction for all the journalists covering this story. "They are not 'murder hornets.' "They are just hornets."
It is a given, to me, that I am not the only one to wonder how beneficial is the decrease in air pollution brought on by restrictions due to CORVID-19. Slashdot.org has one person's preliminary evaluation. I don't know François Gemenne, but I find the reported thoughts interesting, to say the least.
But will this year be different? Forbes reports: The global lockdown inspired by the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, has shuttered factories and reduced travel, slashing lethal pollution including the greenhouse gases that are heating the climate. The lockdown may save more lives from pollution reduction than are threatened by the virus itself, said François Gemenne, director of The Hugo Observatory, which studies the interactions between environmental changes, human migration, and politics.
"Strangely enough, I think the death toll of the coronavirus at the end of the day might be positive, if you consider the deaths from atmospheric pollution," said Gemenne, citing, for example, the 48,000 people who die annually in France because of atmospheric pollution and the more than one million in China... "More than likely the number of lives that would be spared because of these confinement measures would be higher than the number of lives that would be lost because of the pandemic," Gemenne said in an appearance on France 24's The Debate.
The discrepancy in how we react to these divergent threats should give us pause, Gemenne said, to consider why it is that we respond so strongly to one with less lethality and so weakly to one with more.
Gemenne has a chance of being correct IFF (if, and only if) production and travel do not, as I expect to happen, go into overdrive when the COVID-19 outbreak is over.
It's Liz's fault. She inspired me to do it. She was brazen enough to wish us a happy International Women's Day...and she even mentioned other days that are celebrated. How dare she! (That's the pointy finger being wagged, below.)
At any rate, Liz inspired me to check into other "International Days". It turns out that there are a bunch. This file (Download International Days) is from a UN website.
The International Days that occur in March are listed as being the following:
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