"New research has found that previous ice loss events could have caused sea-level rise at rates of around 3.6 meters per century, offering vital clues as to what lies ahead should climate change continue unabated," reports Phys.org: A team of scientists, led by researchers from Durham University, used geological records of past sea levels to shed light on the ice sheets responsible for a rapid pulse of sea-level rise in Earth's recent past. Geological records tell us that, at the end of the last ice age around 14,600 years ago, sea levels rose at ten times the current rate due to Meltwater Pulse 1A (MWP-1A); a 500 year, ~18 meter sea-level rise event... The new study uses detailed geological sea-level data and state-of-the-art modelling techniques to reveal the sources... Interestingly, most of the meltwater appears to have originated from the former North American and Eurasian ice sheets, with minimal contribution from Antarctica, reconciling formerly disparate views... The results are important for our understanding of ice-ocean-climate interactions which play a significant role in shaping terrestrial weather patterns. The findings are particularly timely with the Greenland ice sheet rapidly melting, contributing to a rise in sea levels and changes to global ocean circulation... Lead author Yucheng Lin, in the Department of Geography at Durham University notes, "The next big question is to work out what triggered the ice melt, and what impact the massive influx of meltwater had on ocean currents in the North Atlantic. This is very much on our minds today — any disruption to the Gulf Stream, for example due to melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, will have significant consequences for the UK climate."

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Angel investor Balaji S. Srinivasan (also the former CTO of Coinbase) is now focused on 1729.com, which wants to give you money to do his bidding — or something like that. He's calling it "the first newsletter that pays you. "It has a regular feed of paid tasks and tutorials with $1000+ in crypto prizes per day, and doubles as a vehicle for distributing a new book I've been writing called The Network State." His latest post? "How to Start a New Country" (which envisions starting with a "cloud first" digital community): We recruit online for a group of people interested in founding a new virtual social network, a new city, and eventually a new country. We build the embryonic state as an open source project, we organize our internal economy around remote work, we cultivate in-person levels of civility, we simulate architecture in VR, and we create art and literature that reflects our values. Over time we eventually crowdfund territory in the real world, but not necessarily contiguous territory. Because an under-appreciated fact is that the internet allows us to network enclaves. Put another way, a cloud community need not acquire all its territory in one place at one time. It can connect a thousand apartments, a hundred houses, and a dozen cul-de-sacs in different cities into a new kind of fractal polity with its capital in the cloud. Over time, community members migrate between these enclaves and crowdfund territory nearby, with every individual dwelling and group house presenting an independent opportunity for expansion... [Cloud countries] are set up to be a scaled live action role-playing game (LARP), a feat of imagination practiced by large numbers of people at the same time. And the experience of cryptocurrencies over the last decade shows us just how powerful such a shared LARP can be... The cloud country concept "just" requires stacking together many existing technologies, rather than inventing new ones like Mars-capable rockets or permanent-habitation seasteads. Yet at the same time it avoids the obvious pathways of election, revolution, and war — all of which are ugly and none of which provide much venue for individual initiative... Could a sufficiently robust cloud country with, say, 1-10M committed digital citizens, provable cryptocurrency reserves, and physical holdings all over the earth similarly achieve societal recognition from the United Nations? For the "do his bidding" part, the post promises that up to ten $100 prizes will be awarded to people who share constructive reviews on their sites/social media pages (including proposals for extensions). Previously the site had offered $100 for the ten best hirelings "running a newsletter for technological progressives at your own domain, as a way to begin incentivizing the decentralization of media." (It cited a tweet that argues succinctly that "The NYT is telling anti-longevity stories for us. We must take control of our own story.") In general the site describes itself as "a newsletter for technological progressives. That means people who are into cryptocurrencies, startup cities, mathematics, transhumanism, space travel, reversing aging, and initially-crazy-seeming-but-technologically-feasible ideas." So the newsletter-creating task had envisioned them all "constantly pushing for technology in general and reversing aging in particular, writing like their lives depended on it. In other words, blog or die!" Other rewards went to the first 10 people to complete three Elixir problems, the 100 people who posted the best inspiring proof-of-exercising photos, and 40 people who helped identify people and places "where the ascending world is surpassing the declining world." For one of his latest "tasks," Srinivasan wants you to read a long essay on quantum computing (and answer questions), with an optional series of "review emails". $10 in bitcoin will be awarded only to the first and last 50 readers/question-answerers, while another $100 in bitcoin will be awarded to the first and last 5 review-email readers who "persist for a month."

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A software mistake caused a flight on Tui airlines "to take off heavier than expected," according to The Guardian, citing an investigation by the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch An update to the airline's reservation system while its planes were grounded due to the coronavirus pandemic led to 38 passengers on the flight being allocated a child's "standard weight" of 35kg [77 pounds] as opposed to the adult figure of 69kg [152 pounds]. This caused the load sheet — produced for the captain to calculate what inputs are needed for take-off — to state that the Boeing 737 was more than 1,200kg lighter [2,645 pounds] than it actually was. Investigators described the glitch as "a simple flaw" in an IT system. It was programmed in an unnamed foreign country where the title "Miss" is used for a child and "Ms" for an adult female. Despite the issue, the thrust used for the departure from Birmingham on 21 July 2020 was only "marginally less" than it should have been, and the "safe operation of the aircraft was not compromised", the AAIB said. They're still classifying it as a "serious incident" — and also note that because of the same software glitch, two more UK flights also took off on the same day with inaccurate load sheets.

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I don’t understand why CNN reports on what Fox says. Isn’t there a risk of too many mirrors reflecting only on each other. News about news about news about news, etc.

TimeShifter for vaccinators has a simple purpose. Instead of writing on someone's tag 30 Minutes or 15 minutes, you write the time at which they can leave if there are no complications from the vaccine.

"Scientists have demonstrated the first human use of a wireless brain-computer interface, a potential breakthrough for people with paralysis," reports The Next Web (in a story shared by Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm): While traditional BCIs are tethered to users via cables, the new system — called BrainGate — replaces the cords with a small transmitter affixed atop a users' head. The unit then connects to an electrode array implanted in the brain's motor cortex. In a clinical trial, two participants with paralysis used the system to point, click, and type on a standard tablet computer. They both achieved similar typing speeds and point-and-click accuracy as those attained with wired systems. The researchers say it's the first time a device has transmitted the full spectrum of signals recorded by a sensor in the brain's motor cortex.

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Procter & Gamble "helped develop a technique being tested in China to gather iPhone data for targeted ads, a step intended to give companies a way around Apple Inc.'s new privacy tools," reports the Wall Street Journal. (Citing "people familiar with the matter.") The move is part of a broader effort by the consumer-goods giant to prepare for an era in which new rules and consumer preferences limit the amount of data available to marketers. P&G — among the world's largest advertisers, with brands such as Gillette razors and Charmin toilet paper — is the biggest Western company involved in the effort, the people said. The company has joined forces with dozens of Chinese trade groups and tech firms working with the state-backed China Advertising Association to develop the new technique, which would use technology called device fingerprinting, the people said. Dubbed CAID, the advertising method is being tested through apps and gathers iPhone user data. Through the use of an algorithm, it can track users for purposes of targeting ads in a way that Apple is seeking to prevent. Apple's response? "We believe strongly that users should be asked for their permission before being tracked. Apps that are found to disregard the user's choice will be rejected."

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CBS News reports: The number of U.S. suicides fell nearly 6% last year amid the coronavirus pandemic — the largest annual decline in at least four decades, according to preliminary government data. Death certificates are still coming in and the count could rise. But officials expect a substantial decline will endure, despite worries that COVID-19 could lead to more suicides. It is hard to say exactly why suicide deaths dropped so much, but one factor may be a phenomenon seen in the early stages of wars and national disasters, some experts suggested. "There's a heroism phase in every disaster period, where we're banding together and expressing lots of messages of support that we're in this together," said Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. "You saw that, at least in the early months of the pandemic." An increase in the availability of telehealth services and other efforts to turn around the nation's suicide problem may have also contributed, she said. U.S. suicides steadily rose from the early 2000s until 2018, when the national suicide rate hit its highest level since 1941. The rate finally fell slightly in 2019. Experts credited increased mental health screenings and other suicide prevention efforts. The number fell further last year, to below 45,000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a recent report. It was the lowest number of U.S. suicide deaths since 2015. MarketWatch also points out that in the U.S. in 2020, "Total deaths increased by 17.7% year over year, the provisional estimates showed. "COVID-19 became the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer, while suicide dropped from the country's 10th leading cause of death to the 11th.

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A thread from my Twitter account..

I was having a discussion with Taylor Lorenz about the difference between online media brought to us by the tech industry, and the world of the NYT and other journalism orgs. Here's a concise version.

• The NYT et al present packaged stories and opinion. The presenters are vetted, conform to standards that are understood, but not well documented. (This is all my opinion btw.)
• The online tech media presents largely unpackaged stories, with little or no vetting, and the standards are hard to implement because the systems are so vast.

They're opposites. Night and day. And in conflict, but imho they need not be.

I've long felt we need hybrids. Probably unknown to most people at the NYT, there was a time, between 2002 and 2005, or so -- when I personally worked with them on this stuff. So I had a strong opinion about what they should do. They did half of what I asked, and that was pretty bold, and very successful.

The other half they didn't do. It would have brought a lot more voices into the NYT, but they would have been vetted, by the reporters of the NYT, simply by quoting them in a NYT piece. So they couldn't avoid the vetting if their stories had sources. And the thought was that anyone who is a source for the NYT is worth listening to and could use a platform.

What would have come out of it is something like what Substack is today.

It's hard to know how that experiment would have turned out, but I believed in the idea. Unfortunately it was immediately turned down.

My main contact at the NYT at the time was Martin Nisenholtz, so you can confirm this with him if you like. The first half of the deal resulted in the RSS standard for distributing news. Another little-known fact, imho RSS would have failed without the support from the NYT. Their trust in my small company was amazing, and we took good care of their brand and rep in the wild world of the web. This was in 2002.

New submitter evaverdeazul shared this report from Japan Today: The Japanese government is poised to release treated radioactive water accumulated at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea despite opposition from fishermen, sources familiar with the matter said Friday. It will hold a meeting of related ministers as early as Tuesday to formally decide on the plan, a major development following over seven years of discussions on how to discharge the water used to cool down melted fuel at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The treated water containing radioactive tritium, a byproduct of nuclear reactors, is said to pose little risk to human health because even if one drinks the water, so long as the tritium concentration is low, the amounts of tritium would not accumulate in the body and would soon be excreted. There is also no risk of external exposure even if the water comes in contact with skin. Still, concerns remain among Japan's fisheries industry and consumers as well as neighboring countries such as South Korea and China. The government has said it cannot continue postponing a decision on the disposal issue, given that the storage capacity of water tanks at the Fukushima complex is expected to run out as early as fall next year. It asserts that space needs to be secured on the premises, such as for keeping melted fuel debris that will be extracted from the damaged reactors, to move forward with the decades-long process of scrapping the complex. Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc (TEPCO) says it will take around two years for the discharge to start.

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About a year ago I decided to cut the cord and turn off the TV service from my cable provider, Spectrum. I returned my settop box, which I had never actually installed, because I used their Roku app instead.

I subscribed to YouTube TV so I could watch news and some sports. It concerned me that they didn't have MSG or SNY for the Knicks and Mets, but there wasn't much sports last year anyway, with the pandemic and lockdowns.

I went without HBO because I was getting that from Spectrum, and I binged on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and a few other services from time to time, but those were the main ones.

Then the Knicks season started. I could see from the highlights and news that this seson they were actually an exciting team, very unusual, I wanted to watch, so I set out on a lengthy search, because the information out there is so poor, only to learn that there is literally no way to get MSG and SNY, the broadcasters of Knicks and Mets games, without Spectrum. The local sports teams are not available to cable-cutters, at least not where I live.

As I wrote about this on my blog, I got lots of emails saying that this service or that would give me what I wanted. I even tried using Spectrum's "streaming" service, which you can order online, but none of them had the Knicks.

So I decided to undo the grand cable-cutting experiment, called Spectrum and got back on board with the cable TV service, got a new settop box, which will never be unpacked and will stay in a closet, and happily watched the Knicks during this very interesting, exciting and fun season.

But this piece is about HBO, not the Knicks.

Now as a Spectrum user, I can use the HBO Max app. I've paid to access it. And at the same time, HBO appears in the Listings in the Spectrum app. So I added them to my favorites. So now when I have to choose between something to watch, HBO is one of the choices. And the big difference here is that they pick what to offer me, just like the old days. They have a schedule. And guess what, I watch a lot more HBO this way than I did when I have full choice over what to watch through the streaming app. This is the point of the story.

An example. Last night just before Ari Melber comes on at 6PM, I got bored with the usual stuff on CNN and MSNBC, so I looked around, and saw that The Godfather had just started. I switched to it, and there's Don Corleone sitting behind his desk with the cat in his lap, listening to Bonasera, the undertaker, completely blowing his pitch to the Don. It's a riveting scene. So much to watch. The performance of it. Comparing it to the boring plays they act out on CNN, for months, is ridiculous. One is a masterpiece, the other is completely lost, worthless, not even good for passing the time while playing games on my iPad.

BTW, I watched The Godfather all the way to the end. I didn't get up once. It was the best couple of hours I had spent on entertainment in years.

Browsing on HBO Max, I would never think to click on The Godfather as I'm bored looking for something to watch. I think other people have observed this too. Most of my time on these apps is spent looking for something to watch, as opposed to watching.

The idea of scheduled broadcasts is actually very appealing, to my surprise! I thought for sure the revolution was permanent, that we would always be programming our TV-watching experience for ourselves once we had the chance. But there are real problems with that approach.

• How do I know if something is good? I have no idea. And to find out, I have to search for the title on Metacritic, see the total score, and then skim the reviews. A lot of typing and waiting and reading, so I don't do it very often. Much faster just to go on to the next one.
• I might have heard of a show or movie I want to watch, but I have no idea if it's playing somewhere I can access. For example, I was looking for Howard's End, because the story was written by the author of a book I had just read and loved. Amazon has a big advantage here, you can get almost everything, but mostly they are not included in the video bundle, so you have to pay extra. I figure I'm already paying enough to all the streaming services, I should watch something that's included, and eventually Howard's End will show up.

On the other hand, I guess I'll pretty much always watch The Godfather, or Kill Bill 2 when given a chance to. There are actually a lot of movies like that. And now, unlike the past, there are no commercials, and they leave the sex and violence in. And the Knicks, which I watched instead of Maddow, oy! What a game. The ups and downs, tragedy and heroic play, the back-stories and history -- all in just an hour. MSNBC, comparitively, is transparently nothing. The best they have is a powerless Congressperson who is ridiculously corrupt and popular (maybe) on Fox who has been caught. They can't explain why anyone should care. They need a new purpose.

QAnon "was all but confirmed to be a hoax by the person who ran the hoax," writes Mashable, citing the finale of a six-episode documentary on HBO by Cullen Hoback. "All of it leads back to the same place — that there are very few other people who could have and would have made the Q drops other than the person who ran the place where they were posted," notes Newsweek: Ahead of the first episode, Ron Watkins posted on encrypted messaging service Telegram stating: "I am not Q. I've never spoken privately with Q. I don't know who Q is." However, during the final episode, Hoback suggests that Ron Watkins slips up and inadvertently reveals that he posted as Q on 8kun A BBC investigative reporter on disinformation tweeted that climactic moment from Cullens' documentary, adding "It was so good it made the whole six hours worth it." Or as Mashable puts it, "Ron Watkins seems to admit he's Q, in the dumbest possible ending to QAnon," calling it "so anticlimactic it bordered on absurd." The previously camera-shy Watkins — who runs 8kun [formerly 8chan] alongside his father, Jim — has long been the key suspect for the identity of Q... But his accidental reveal, the slip of the mask is huge, if anticlimactic, news... It's wild and so...dumb...that this is how we all find out — because Watkins slipped up for a second. It makes sense since Q had somewhat inexplicably tied its fortunes to posting only on 8chan/8kun. It's inexplicable unless, you know, the Watkins family was behind the ordeal. Insider notes that Fredrick Brennan, the software developer who created 8chan and has since become a vocal critic, also believes Q is one of the Watkins' — a theory investigated last June by the Atlantic. And in a September investigation, ABC News reported on the likelihood that Watkins is Q, finding that he and his son, Ron, were the "two Americans most clearly associated" with Q drops. The theory was also popularized by a September "Reply All" podcast episode... At the end of February 2020, Watkins registered the PAC, "Disarm the Deep State," with the Federal Elections Commission. They also note that after the documentary aired on HBO, "the community reacted as many experts suspected it would: denial and accusations of 'fake news.'" Watkins had apparently gone to great lengths to suggest to Cullen that Q was instead former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. And last week, the BBC reporter points out, Watkins' father began suggesting a new theory: that Q was actually....documentary maker Cullen Hoback. But the BBC reporter adds: Based on the finale of #QIntotheStorm Q drops are over for good. Both Jim and Ron told Cullen Hoback Q would end after the election, and that's exactly what happened. We already had proof of the end given there haven't been any drops since 8 December, but we can now be certain. Hoback's tweet specifically says that "Both Ron and Jim, but especially Ron, told me multiple times over the years that they believed Q would cease at the election." And Hoback adds: "Ron implied on more than one occasion it *might be* a marketing campaign."

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I find the resurgence of outliners inspiring, I wonder about all the addons, and I’d like to see them support import and export standards, and most importantly, APIs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Its adorableness aside, the Mexican axolotl is a salamander of particular interest to scientists. On the molecular level, the animal seems to have a cheat code for life: It can regenerate its limbs and vital organs, an ability researchers are desperate to better understand for medical applications. Now, geneticists have gotten a clearer view of the smiling salamander's genome, rendering it on the chromosomal scale. The research was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Understanding a genetic structure in complete detail takes a lot of time, far longer than it takes to first report the mapping of a genome, as we did with humans in 2003 and the duck-billed platypus in 2008. Secrets remain shrouded in those purportedly finished genetic codes, so geneticists keep tinkering. Decrypting the axolotl's genome in particular was a tall order; where bits of a human genome charged with making a protein may span hundreds to thousands of base pairs, in an axolotl, it takes hundreds of thousands of base pairs. Nevertheless, the complete axolotl genome was announced in 2019 by the same team who published the recent research. The recent paper specifically looked at how the genome is folded away inside the animal on the molecular level and where the DNA sequences that regulate genes are located in relation to the places where gene transcription starts. That's remarkable when you consider the scale and extreme compactness of the folding; a human DNA strand is about 6 feet when stretched out, but an axolotl's would be over 30 feet. All that genetic material is being sequestered in the cells of an animal 200 times smaller than the average human -- it's a mind-boggling example of efficiency in packing, all on a microscopic scale. Why it matters: The research will be important for seeing if the ability to regenerate could ever be activated in humans. "The work has ordered the sequenced pieces of axolotl genomic DNA sequence in the correct order, as it is on the chromosome," Elly Tanaka, a biochemist at the Vienna BioCenter's Institute of Molecular Pathology, said in an email. "This is important because, in all animals with vertebrae, genes are turned on and off by control sequences that are actually lying pretty far away from the gene itself."

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Joe_Dragon shares a report from The Register: A power outage kicked off a fire in web hosting biz WebNX's Ogden data center in Utah on Sunday, knocking the facility offline temporarily and leaving several servers in need of a rebuild. Kevin Brown, Fire Marshal for the US city's Fire Department told The Register in a phone interview that firefighters responded to a call on Sunday evening. The fire, he said, "originated in a generator in the building and spread to several servers." Brown said the facility's fire suppression system contained the blaze and that fire department personnel assisted with the cleanup. He said power was cut to the building until an electrical engineer could inspect the facility to make sure current could be restored safely, which he added is standard procedure. He also confirmed that some of Ogden City's IT services were down on Sunday and Monday as a result of the data center fire. "Sunday afternoon the city power was disrupted and, as designed, our backup generators automatically switched on," the company said in a Facebook post. "However, during that transition, one of our backup generators that had been recently tested and benchmarked specifically for this situation experienced a catastrophic failure, caught fire, and as a result initiated the fire suppression protocol." "Some servers will have an extended outage as they may require rebuilds due to some water damage. Those builds have a high probability that data is intact." They added: "Customer's servers in one of our main bays were exposed to water and possible damage may have occurred. No fire damage was inflicted on customer servers."

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