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- Yeah, in a Minute... is the personal dumping grounds of Paul Landry:
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News Gathering vs. Confirmation Bias
- Remember, if you do not have at least one source of news that you turn to regularly, with which you routinely disagree, then you are not practicing news gathering! You are practicing [confirmation bias].
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Science
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[S]cience is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996) at p.32.
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[S]cience is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
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[S]cience is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996) at p.32.
I would like to extend to everyone my warmest wishes for a Happy Festivus and a Happy Holiday season.
Vincent Laforet writing at his blog:
Whether you’re editing 8K RED video, H.264 4K Drone footage, 6K 3D VR content or 50 Megapixel RAW stills – you can expect a 200-300% increase in performance in almost every industry leading software with the iMac Pro.
I’ve seldom seen a jump this dramatic before on any new generation of Macs – 20%-30% speed increases are the norm … NOT 200%-300% increases. That’s SIGNIFICANT.
Keith Collins at Quartz:
Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card?
Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet, a Quartz investigation has revealed.
There’s just no two-ways about it: That sucks.
Wow. Just wow. I’ve been wearing an original WATCH Sport (series 0?) since May of 2015 and have been quite pleased with it all this time, but having recently upgraded to an WATCH series 3 GPS + Cellular, I’m just blown away at how much better the battery life is. I’ve gone from “topping off” the battery twice a day to only having to charge my WATCH once a day—and I sleep with mine on so as to track my sleep. I seriously get 24 hours of use with plenty of battery remaining! Wow.
The Trump administration plans to kill the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s main initiative to fight climate change by lowering emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, said Monday.
[…]
Pruitt has reportedly spent much of his term meeting with executives and lobbyists from companies and industries regulated by the EPA. Many reports also suggest that Pruitt’s primary aim is to eliminate environmental protections and dismantle much of the regulatory agency.
[…]
If Pruitt succeeds in rolling back a significant portion of the rules meant to protect air and water quality, we’d return to the state the US was in before these things were regulated.
These photos are startling—take a look. And this wasn’t that many years ago, after all, the EPA was only founded in 1970…
Six years ago today, The Onion:
CUPERTINO, CA—Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computers and the only American in the country who had any clue what the fuck he was doing, died Wednesday at the age of 56.
Usually people say, “it doesn’t seem like __x__ years,” but in this case, I have to say that it seems like forever since Steve Jobs was on stage at an Apple Keynote, or even being interviewed by the press. For me, at least, it seems like it’s been a lot longer than 6 years…
The Vietnam War, Episode 7: The Veneer of Civilization (June 1968 – May 1969) at 51:55-55:42, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (2017):
NARRATOR: But on October 31st [1968], just five days before the election, the president himself made a surprise announcement. He was stopping all bombing of North Vietnam. There had been real progress in Paris, he said. Hanoi had agreed for the first time to talk with Saigon, and the United States had agreed to include the Viet Cong. It suddenly looked as if peace were possible.
Humphrey was jubilant. His poll number rose overnight. He was confident he would now be able to overtake Nixon.
But then, on November 2nd, with just three days to go until Americans went to the polls, President Thieu suddenly announced that the South Vietnamese government would not attend the proposed talks after all. A representative of the Nixon campaign, at the candidate’s personal direction, had secretly contacted the Saigon government, urging Thieu to stay away from the talks, promising that once Nixon was elected, he would drive a harder bargain with Hanoi than Humphrey would.
Thanks to a CIA bug planted in Thieu’s Saigon office and an FBI wiretap on the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington, [Lyndon] Johnson got wind of what had happened and called his friend Everett Dirksen, the Republican Senate minority leader, to warn him that the Nixon people were committing treason.
[via LBJ tape recordings]
LBJ: I’m reading their hand, Everett. I don’t want to get this in the campaign.
DIRKSEN: That’s right.
LBJ: And they oughtn’t to be doing this. This is treason.
DIRKSEN: I know.
LBJ: And I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter this important.
DIRKSEN: Yeah.
LBJ: I know this—that they’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war.
DIRKSEN: That’s a mistake.
LBJ: And its a damn bad mistake.
[end of phone conversation]
[via LBJ tape recordings]
NIXON: Uh, Mr. President?
LBJ: Yes.
NIXON: This is Dick Nixon.
LBJ: Yes Dick.
NIXON: I, uh, just went on Meet the Press and said that, uh, I had given you my personal assurance that, uh, I would do everything possible to cooperate both before the election and if elected, after the election. I just wanted you to know that, uh, I feel very, very strongly about this and, uh, any, uh, rumblings around about, uh, somebody, uh, trying to, uh, sabotage the Saigon government’s attitude certainly has no, absolutely no credibility as far as I’m concerned.
LBJ: That’s, that’s—I’m very happy to hear that Dick because that is taking place.
NIXON: My God, I would never do anything to encourage Saigon not to come to the table because basically, that was what you got.
LBJ: Well that’s good Dick.
NIXON: We’ve got to get this goddamned war off the plate, the quicker the better, and the hell with the political credit. Believe me.
LBJ: Thank you Dick.
[end of phone conversation]
NARRATOR: Nixon was lying and Johnson knew it. But to go public with the information, the president would have to reveal the methods by which he had learned of the Republican candidate’s duplicity. He was unwilling to do so. Nixon’s secret was safe. The American public was never told that the regime for which 35,000 Americans had died, had been willing to boycott peace talks to help elect Richard Nixon or that he had been willing to delay an end to the bloodshed in order to get elected.