This is a story about vultures, feral dogs, rabies -- and piles of rotting animal carcasses. Buckle up. But in the end, it's about the power of conservation to keep ecosystems, even urban ecosystems, in balance, benefiting the people who live there.
Dramatic spread of native plants over past decade is evidence of accelerating shifts in fragile polar ecosystem, study finds
Antarctica’s two native flowering plants are spreading rapidly as temperatures warm, according to the first study to show changes in fragile polar ecosystems have accelerated in the past decade.
The increase in plants since 2009 has been greater than the previous 50 years combined, coinciding with rapidly rising air temperatures and a reduction in the number of fur seals, according to researchers working on Signy Island in the South Orkney Islands.
If you're looking for a reason to care about tree loss, the nation's latest heat wave might be it. Trees can lower summer daytime temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a recent study.
Based on data from autonomous sensors floating in the oceans, researchers are able to model the flows and characteristics of ocean currents in more detail than ever before. For The New York Times, Henry Fountain and Jeremy White show how the shifts have unwelled centuries-old water deep in the ocean, which releases carbon into the air.
The scrollytelling format of this piece works well to show sensor estimates over time. You get a sense of the currents without needing to see animated lines.
The population of botos, river dolphins found in the Brazilian Amazon, is declining due to fishing with gill nets and is predicted to fall by at least 95 per cent in less than 50 years
Before making his name directing The Hitcher for HBO and They with Wes Craven,
Robert Harmon created this shocking short film called China Lake in 1983.
In the short film, a police officer on vacation travels around on his motorcycle targeting nearby occupants of and travelers through China Lake.
If you are interested in watching more debut films from famous directors, be sure to subscribe to Fam [Continued ...]
When CIA Director Bill Burns traveled to India earlier this month a member of his team reported symptoms consistent with Havana syndrome and had to receive medical attention, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
Has always been a problem and will continue to be a problem.
Enlarge / More and more these days, your ability to play new games depends on the quality of your Internet connection. (credit: Sean MacEntee / Flickr)
For many players these days, the video game industry’s increasing reliance on online connections is an afterthought. But for the significant portion of the world without a quality Internet connection, it can sometimes feel like the game industry at large is leaving them behind.
Pointing out the frustration of large day-one updates has been a feature of the gaming industry for more than a decade now. The topic perhaps reached its global breakthrough with the November 13 announcement that the Xbox One would require a day-one update to function. More recently, the Xbox Series X requires a one-time online check-in before some disc-based games will work.
Both Sony and Microsoft also introduced disc-drive-free options for their latest consoles, perhaps presaging the day when those drives are gone from consoles for good. And that’s not even mentioning the many multiplayer games that require a strong online connection for a reasonable play experience or the offline games that require not only day-one updates, but sometimes months of patching and downloadable fixes before they begin to resemble the product consumers had hoped for.
… is from page 149 of F.A. Hayek’s profound 1952 book The Counter-Revolution of Science, as this book appears as part of volume 13 (Studies on the Abuse & Decline of Reason, Bruce Caldwell, ed. [2010]) of the Collected Works of F.A. Hayek (footnotes deleted; link added):
The belief that processes which are consciously directed are necessarily superior to any spontaneous process is an unfounded superstition. It would be truer to say, as A.N. Whitehead has argued in another connection, that on the contrary “civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.” If it is true that the spontaneous interplay of social forces sometimes solves problems no individual mind could consciously solve, or perhaps even perceives, and if they thereby create an ordered structure which increases the power of the individuals without having been designed by any one of them, they are superior to conscious action. Indeed, and social processes which deserve to be called ‘social’ in distinction from the action of individuals are almost ex definitione not conscious. Insofar as such processes are capable of producing a useful order which could not have been produced by conscious direction, any attempt to make them subject to such direction would necessarily mean that we restrict what social activity can achieve to the inferior capacity of the individual mind.
COVID LATEST
• There are 21 new cases of Covid-19 in the community, taking the total to 72.
• Several are linked to a church service which is emerging as a cluster within the outbreak.
• ...
T-Mobile apparently lied to government regulators about its 3G shutdown plans in order to win approval of its merger with Sprint, according to a ruling in a proceeding in front of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). The ruling issued Friday ordered T-Mobile "to show cause why it should not be sanctioned by the commission for violating" a CPUC rule with "false, misleading, or omitted statements."
T-Mobile won approval for its 2020 acquisition of Sprint in part by agreeing to sell Sprint's Boost Mobile prepaid business and other assets to Dish, which is building its own 5G network and reselling capacity from other networks. T-Mobile agreed to make its 4G LTE and 3G CDMA networks available to Dish customers during a three-year transition period from 2020 to 2023, the CPUC ruling said. But T-Mobile now plans to stop providing CDMA network services nationwide on January 1, 2022, and Dish has urged government regulators to force T-Mobile to live up to its commitments.
T-Mobile's false and misleading statements under oath indicated, among other things, that T-Mobile would make its CDMA network "available to Boost customers until they were migrated to Dish Network Corporation's LTE or 5G services" and that Dish would have up to three years to complete the migration, the ruling said.
I was struggling with my mental health tonight and sometimes doing a kindness for someone helps me feel a bit better.
Dick DeBartolo was MAD Magazine’s most prolific comedy writer, appearing in 445 consecutive issues. He also wrote jokes for a bunch of classic game shows like Match Game.
Also, he was also openly gay during a time when that was not an easy choice. He got to marry his 32 year partner in 2012.
Sometimes being kind starts a chain reaction of kindness. And that is kinda cool.
Originally Hartjesdag (Day of Hearts) was a festival celebrated on the third Monday in August in the Dutch areas of Haarlem and Bloemendaal and in various parts of Amsterdam, particularly around the Haarlemmerplein, in the Jordaan, and in the Dapperbuurt. On Hartjesdag fires were kindled and children collected money. Later it developed itself into a type of cross-dressing carnival, where men dressed as women, and women dressed as men.
Where the name Hartjesdag comes from is not clear. Probably it has arisen in the Middle Ages. It is suspected that the name is a bastardisation of ‘hertjesdag’ (Deer Day). This was a festival where in the forests around Haarlem deer (herten) hunting could be done by the ordinary people, which was normally reserved for nobility. The deer were then taken to Amsterdam and roasted in the streets.
During the German occupation in 1943 the Hartjesdag became prohibited, and after the war it eventually became obsolete.
In 1997 a local committee in the Zeedijk, Amsterdam, decided to see if they could revive the tradition. Each year since then, the festival has flourished into a two-day event on the 3rd weekend in August.
Welcome To Arizona, Manitoba. Enjoy those kids on ventilators like we do!
The province’s promise of a “near normal” 2021-22 school year was welcomed this week by many Manitobans who have long missed seeing children's smiles during a year of strict rules ...
Before making his name directing The Hitcher for HBO and They with Wes Craven,
The belief that processes which are consciously directed are necessarily superior to any spontaneous process is an unfounded superstition. It would be truer to say, as A.N. Whitehead has argued in another connection, that on the contrary “civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.” If it is true that the spontaneous interplay of social forces sometimes solves problems no individual mind could consciously solve, or perhaps even perceives, and if they thereby create an ordered structure which increases the power of the individuals without having been designed by any one of them, they are superior to conscious action. Indeed, and social processes which deserve to be called ‘social’ in distinction from the action of individuals are almost ex definitione not conscious. Insofar as such processes are capable of producing a useful order which could not have been produced by conscious direction, any attempt to make them subject to such direction would necessarily mean that we restrict what social activity can achieve to the inferior capacity of the individual mind.
