linkstream2 microblog

Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich
http://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich Holing up in New Zealand & the survival condo; a bit validating for normal worriers

QT:{{”
“The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”
…
You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”
…
Every year since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a magazine founded by members of the Manhattan Project, has gathered a group of Nobel laureates and other luminaries to update the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic gauge of our risk of wrecking civilization. In 1991, as the Cold War was ending, the scientists set the clock to its safest point ever—seventeen minutes to “midnight.”
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The Demon Voice That Can Control Your…phone
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/the-demon-voice-that-can-talk-to-your-smartphone/513743 Verbal malware: Yell into a crowd, “Hey #Siri, text mom, I’m pregnant”

QT:{{”

“Here’s a fun experiment: Next time you’re on a crowded bus, loudly announce, “Hey Siri! Text mom, ‘I’m pregnant.’” Chances are you’ll get some horrified looks as your voice awakens iPhones in nearby commuters’ pockets and bags. They’ll dive for their phones to cancel your command.

But what if there was a way to talk to phones with sounds other than words? Unless the phones’ owners were prompted for confirmation—and realized what was going on in time to intervene—they’d have no idea that”
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Neanderthals were people, too
http://www.NYTimes.com/2017/01/11/magazine/neanderthals-were-people-too.htm QT: Geneticists are much more powerful…& incomparably better funded than anyone else

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“It was staggering; even Paabo couldn’t bring himself to believe it at first. But the results were the results, and they carried a sort of empirical magnetism that archaeological evidence lacks. “Geneticists are much more powerful, numerous and incomparably better funded than anyone else dealing with this stuff,” Zilhão said. He joked: “Their aura is kind of miraculous. It’s a bit like receiving the Ten Commandments from God.” Paabo’s work, and a continuing wave of genomic research, has provided clarity but also complexity, recasting our oppositional, zero-sum relationship into something more communal and collaborative — and perhaps not just on the genetic level. The extent of the interbreeding supported previous speculation, by a minority of paleoanthropologists, that there might have been cases of Neanderthals and modern humans living alongside each other, intermeshed, for centuries, and that generations of their offspring had found places in those communities, too. Then again, it’s also possible that some of the interbreeding was forced.”
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The Demon Voice That Can Control Your…phone
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/the-demon-voice-that-can-talk-to-your-smartphone/513743 Verbal malware: Yell into a crowd, “Hey #Siri, text mom, I’m pregnant”

QT:{{”

“Here’s a fun experiment: Next time you’re on a crowded bus, loudly announce, “Hey Siri! Text mom, ‘I’m pregnant.’” Chances are you’ll get some horrified looks as your voice awakens iPhones in nearby commuters’ pockets and bags. They’ll dive for their phones to cancel your command.

But what if there was a way to talk to phones with sounds other than words? Unless the phones’ owners were prompted for confirmation—and realized what was going on in time to intervene—they’d have no idea that”
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QT:{{”
The second-generation Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide alarm is your best option.
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https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/20/the-best-smart-smoke-alarm/

Genome-wide…analysis implicates miRNA dysregulation in #ASD http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v19/n11/full/nn.4373.html 58 diff. expr. miRNAs incl 17 strongly down in cases

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v19/n11/full/nn.4373.html

QT:{{”
The miRNA expression profiles were very similar between the frontal and temporal cortex, but were distinct in the cerebellum
(Supplementary Fig. 2a–f), consistent with previous observations for mRNAs11, 12. We therefore combined 95 covariate-matched samples (47 samples from 28 ASD cases and 48 samples from 28 controls;
Supplementary Fig. 1c and Supplementary Table 1) from the FC and TC for differential gene expression (DGE) analysis, comparing ASD and CTL using a linear mixed-effects regression framework to control for potential confounders (Online Methods). We identified 58 miRNAs showing significant (false discovery rate (FDR) < 0.05) expression changes between ASD and CTL: 17 were downregulated and 41 were upregulated in ASD cortex (Fig. 1b and Supplementary Table 2). The fold changes for the differentially expressed miRNAs were highly concordant between the FC and TC (Pearson correlation coefficient R = 0.96, P < 2.2 × 10−16; Fig. 1c).
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chariots of fire & Downton Abbey in roughly same period

http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0787524/
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The story of the life and academic career of the pioneer Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and his friendship with his mentor, Professor G.H. Hardy.
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We still don’t really know how #bicycles work
http://www.NewStatesman.com/science/2013/08/we-still-don%E2%80%99t-really-know-how-bicycles-work Still rides upright with special wheels cancelling gyroscopic effect

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“The most definitive analysis came exactly a century later. It involved an experimental bicycle that had all its gyroscopic effects cancelled out by a system of counter-rotating wheels. The effort of building such a strange contraption was worth it: the resulting paper was published the prestigious journal Science.
The publication plunged bicycle dynamics back into chaos. It turns out that taking into account the angles of the headset and the forks, the distribution of weight and the handlebar turn, the gyroscopic effects are not enough to keep a bike upright after all. What does? We simply don’t know. Forget mysterious dark matter and the inexplicable accelerating expansion of the universe; the bicycle represents a far more embarrassing hole in the accomplishments of physics.”
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#WWIII, by Mistake
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/world-war-three-by-mistake Scary Cold War near misses (incl. ’80 defective-chip false alarm) & dangers of aging Minuteman

QT:{{”
“On June 3, 1980, at about two-thirty in the morning, computers at the National Military Command Center, beneath the Pentagon, at the headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), deep within Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, and at Site R, the Pentagon’s alternate command post center hidden inside Raven Rock Mountain, Pennsylvania, issued an urgent warning: the Soviet Union had just launched a nuclear attack on the United States. The Soviets had recently invaded Afghanistan, and the animosity between the two superpowers was greater than at any other time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

U.S. Air Force ballistic-missile crews removed their launch keys from the safes, bomber crews ran to their planes, fighter planes took off to search the skies, and the Federal Aviation Administration prepared to order every airborne commercial airliner to land.”
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Can You Tell if These…Are…Rendered?
https://www.Wired.com/2016/12/skrekkogle-still-life/ @Skrekkogle makes the real appear simulated. Implications for photo evidence

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“The Norwegian design studio Skrekkogle played this game with Still File, a series of photos that look like renderings but aren’t. Instead of manipulating pixels on a screen, studio founders Lars Marcus Vedeler and Theo Zamudio-Tveterås created and photographed sets that look like scenes made with 3-D rendering software. “It’s a weirdly elaborate process,” Vedeler says.

In particularly cool photo, they 3-D printed three wildly distorted teapots, gave them a flat finish, and glued them to the background before photographing them as a surrealist scene. In another, they placed a marble, a plastic cone, and a wood-lined cube atop checkered paper lacquered with acrylic. The camera’s flash reflected the checkerboard pattern onto the objects, creating a false sense of depth.”
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