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Showing posts from October, 2020

Billionaire Bill Gross accused of blaring 'Gilligan's Island' theme song on loop at his neighbor

" New York (CNN Business) Bond billionaire Bill Gross is involved in a legal battle with his tech entrepreneur neighbor over a $1 million sculpture and allegations that Gross blasted the "Gilligan's Island" theme song on a loop from his house" Source .

Composer with dementia hears piece for first time

A piece of music improvised by a composer suffering from dementia has been recorded by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and is being released as a single. BBC Breakfast was there for the moment 80-year-old Paul Harvey heard the full version of his piece for the first time. Original source article.

The Psychology of Fact Checking

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The Scientific American just published an opinion piece claiming that "fact checkers aim to get closer to the truth, but their biases can shroud the very truth they seek." The article points out the main problem with the way fact checking is performed on social media platforms. Laboratory studies reveal that, when shown a video of a group of protesters, people see either a peaceful protest or an unruly mob blocking pedestrian access, depending on their sociopolitical beliefs. The world outside the lab shows similar biased perception: For example, 68 percent of Republicans consider the videotaped demonstrations in Portland, Ore., Kenosha, Wisc., and New York City to be riots, versus only 30 percent of Democrats, according to a Fox News poll released in September. Journalists and fact-checkers are human beings subject to the same psychological biases as everyone else—and their analyses of what constitute “facts” is affected by their own political and ideological values, res...

How Climate Change Affects Hurricanes

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This post reports on data analysis of NOAA hurricane data from 1851 (when we started tracking hurricanes) to 2017, all the data I could get from NOAA for my analysis. There are some key findings that show how specific indicators for hurricanes like ACE data ("ACE" - Accumulated Cyclone Energy, which is an index that combines the numbers of systems, how long they existed and how intense they became. It is calculated by squaring the maximum sustained surface wind in the system every six hours that the storm is a "named storm" and summing it up for the season. It is expressed in 10 to the 4th kt**2.) and Rapid Intensification (The National Hurricane Center (NHC) defines rapid intensification as, “an increase in the maximum sustained winds of a storm of at least 30 knots (35 mph) in a 24-hour period). Let's start with the ACE DATA Link to originl graph and data: https://chart-studio.plotly.com/~sonnyjitsu/22#plot There is a very slight uptick in A...

Fix for No Sound in Headphones on Fedora 32/33

Okay if anyone else has a Samsung Galaxy Book Flex ⍺ running Fedora 32/33 and runs into the issue of getting no sound in your headphones, I have a solution/workaround that is satisfying enough for me. First let's get the headphones working on boot. Create a service like so: [root@localhost ~]# cat /usr/lib/systemd/system/headphones.service [Unit] Description=Start headphones After=multi-user.target [Service] Type=oneshot ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/headphones [Install] WantedBy=basic.target As you can see it makes a call to /usr/local/bin/headphones, this file looks like so: [root@localhost ~]# cat /usr/local/bin/headphones #!/usr/bin/bash /usr/bin/hda-verb /dev/snd/hwC0D0 0x1a SET_PIN_WIDGET_CONTROL 0x5 Make sure to make the file executable: chmod +x /usr/local/bin/headphones We still need to install acpid: `sudo dnf install acpid` Now create the corresponding scripts to detect when headphones have been plugged/unplugged...