SoylentNews

Tokolosh writes:

Blogger Daniel Lange takes a look at the Linux Foundation's 2020 annual report, and concludes that it was produced with Adobe, which is not available on Linux. Further sleuthing by a commentator reveals that the original was created on Microsoft Word. Stock images used for illustration mostly show Apple MacBooks. This is what you get for a $148 million annual budget.

No dog food today - the Linux Foundation annual report.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

The same vision for all primates: The world's smallest primate reveals the incredible preservation of our visual system through millions of years of evolution:

For more than a century, the visual system of primates has been intensely studied. These studies uncovered that unlike other mammals such as rodents, visual information is processed by small dedicated computing units located in the visual cortex. "As the different primate species cover a wide range of sizes, we were led to wonder whether this basic computing unit scales with body or brain size. Is it simplified or miniaturized, for example, in the world's smallest primate, the gray mouse lemur," asks Daniel Huber, professor in the Department of Fundamental Neurosciences at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine?

[...] To answer this question, the visual system of the mouse lemur was studied using an optical brain imaging technique. Geometrical shapes representing lines of various orientations were presented to the lemurs and the activity of the neurons responding to the visual stimuli was imaged. The repetition of such measurements gradually allowed them to determine the size of the minimal units processing form information. "We expected to see a unit of tiny size, proportional to the small size of the lemur, but our data revealed that they measure more than half a millimeter in diameter," says Daniel Huber.

In collaboration with the Max Planck Researchers, Huber compared hundreds of these units imaged in the tiny mouse lemur brain with the data obtained for the visual circuits of other, much larger primate species. The team made a surprising discovery: not only was the basic processing unit almost identical in size in the 60-gram mouse lemur, as in larger monkeys such as macaques weighing about seven kilograms, or even larger primates such as us humans.

They also found that the way the units are arranged across the brain was totally indistinguishable, following the same rules with mathematical precision. The researchers also found that the number of nerve cells per visual unit was almost identical in all primates studied so far.

Journal Reference:
Chun Lum Andy Ho, Robert Zimmermann. et. al.,Orientation Preference Maps in Microcebus murinus Reveal Size-Invariant Design Principles in Primate Visual Cortex, Current Biology (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.11.027)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Chinese Robotaxi Firm AutoX Starts Operation In Shenzen With No Human Driver:

Most self-driving car companies move to test vehicles put putting them into taxi service, to learn what it's like to carry passengers, but they always start by having a human safety driver on board who, ideally, never touches the wheel, though at first they need to intervene from time to time.

As progress is made, an important milestone is to have the confidence (and legal permission) to operate for actual passengers without the safety driver. On Dec 2, AutoX, a Chinese robocar developer, announced that their vehicles are now providing taxi rides in Shenzen to a group of staff and VIP guests.

Google DriveVideo - AutoX Puts Fully Driverless RoboTaxis on the Roads in China.mp4

The start of such operations presumes that the existing tests have shown an excellent safety record, good enough that the company is willing to take the necessary risk and liability of no-driver operation. Previously, Waymo was the only pioneer to do this, having begun in 2018. Since then it has expanded operations and temporarily is making all rides passenger-only due to Covid-19. AutoX is deploying its entire fleet of 25 cars passenger-only, and did not disclose what set of roads the vehicles operate on. (Waymo operates in the fairly easy region around Chandler, Arizona.)

[...] While AutoX indicated the vehicles do not have remote monitors or operators, the vehicles will come to a stop if they come to a confusing situation, and a remote operator can then give high level guidance on how to proceed.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Does Tor provide more benefit or harm? New paper says it depends:

Researchers on Monday unveiled new estimates that attempt to measure the potential harms and benefits of Tor. They found that, worldwide, almost 7 percent of Tor users connect to hidden services, which the researchers contend are disproportionately more likely to offer illicit services or content compared with normal Internet sites. Connections to hidden services were significantly higher in countries rated as more politically "free" relative to those that are "partially free" or "not free."

Specifically, the fraction of Tor users globally accessing hidden sites is 6.7, a relatively small proportion. Those users, however, aren't evenly distributed geographically. In countries with regimes rated "not free" by this scoring from an organization called Freedom House, access to hidden services was just 4.8 percent. In "free" countries, the proportion jumped to 7.8 percent.

[...] The researchers—from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia; Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York; and Cyber Espion in Portsmouth, United Kingdom—acknowledged that the estimates aren't perfect, In part, that's because the estimates are based on the unprovable assumption that the overwhelming majority of Dark Web sites provide illicit content or services.

The paper, however, argues that the findings can be useful for policymakers who are trying to gauge the benefits of Tor relative to the harms it creates. The researchers view the results through the lenses of the 2015 paper titled The Dark Web Dilemma: Tor, Anonymity and Online Policing and On Liberty, the essay published by English philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1859.

The Tor Project points out in an email, presumably to ArsTrchnica, that the findings are flawed because they assume every .onion address is used for illicit purposes. Many sites offer a .onion address as an alternative way of reaching their content, including SoylentNews.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo_:

Divers discover Nazi WW2 enigma machine in Baltic Sea:

BERLIN (Reuters) - German divers searching the Baltic Sea for discarded fishing nets have stumbled upon a rare Enigma cipher machine used by the Nazi military during World War Two which they believe was thrown overboard from a scuttled submarine.

Thinking they had discovered a typewriter entangled in a net on the seabed of Gelting Bay, underwater archaeologist Florian Huber quickly realised the historical significance of the find.

"I've made many exciting and strange discoveries in the past 20 years. But I never dreamt that we would one day find one of the legendary Enigma machines," said Huber.

[...] The find, made by divers working on behalf of WWF aiming to find abandoned fishing nets that endanger marine life, will be given to the archaeology museum in Schleswig.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Black holes may not exist, but fuzzballs might, wild theory suggests:

[...] In string theory, black holes are neither black nor holes. Instead, the best metaphor to explain what a fuzzball is to look at another compact-and-weird object in the universe: neutron stars.

Neutron stars are what happens when an object doesn't quite have enough gravity to compress into what we call a black hole. Inside a neutron star, matter is compressed into its highest density state possible. Neutrons are one of the fundamental constituents of atoms, but they usually play along with other particles such as protons and electrons. But in a neutron star, that kind of atomic camaraderie breaks down and dissolves, leaving behind just neutrons crammed together as tightly as possible.

With fuzzballs, the fundamental strings stop working together and simply crowd together, becoming a large, well, ball of strings. A fuzzball.

Fuzzballs aren't fully fleshed out, even in theory, because as cool as string theory sounds, nobody has ever been able to come up with a complete mathematical solution for it — and so fuzzballs aren't just fuzzy in physical reality, but also fuzzy in mathematical possibility.

Still, we might be able to find fuzzballs with upcoming surveys, as described in a review article published Oct. 27 in the preprint journal arXiv. We are just now beginning to move past proving the existence of black holes and toward probing the details of how they behave, and our best way to do it is through gravitational waves.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

What makes the world's biggest surfable waves?:

On Feb. 11, 2020, Brazilian Maya Gabeira surfed a wave off the coast of Nazaré, Portugal, that was 73.5 feet tall. Not only was this the biggest wave ever surfed by a woman, but it also turned out to be the biggest wave surfed by anyone in the 2019-2020 winter surfing season—the first time a woman has ridden the biggest wave of the year.

As a female surfer myself—though of dubious abilities—this news made me really excited. I love it when female athletes accomplish things that typically garner headlines for men. But I am also a physical oceanographer and climate scientist at Brandeis University. Gabeira's feat got me thinking about the waves themselves in addition to the surfers who ride them.

[...] Just as light waves and sound waves will bend when they hit something or change speed—a process called refraction—so do ocean waves. When shallow bathymetry slows down a part of a wave, this causes the waves to refract. Similar to the way a magnifying glass can bend light to focus it into one bright spot, reefs, sand banks and canyons can focus wave energy toward a single point of the coast.

This is what happens at Nazaré to create giant waves. Extending out to sea from the shore is an underwater canyon that was etched out by an ancient river when past sea level was much lower than it is today. As waves propagate toward shore over this canyon, it acts like a magnifying glass and refracts the waves toward the center of the canyon. This focusing of waves by the Nazaré Canyon helps make the largest surfable waves on the planet.

YouTube video of Maya's record.

Journal References:
1.) Babanin, Alexander V., Rogers, W. Erick, de Camargo, Ricardo, et al. Waves and Swells in High Wind and Extreme Fetches, Measurements in the Southern Ocean, Frontiers in Marine Science (DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2019.00361)
2.) N. F. Barber and F. Ursell, The generation and propagation of ocean waves and swell. I. Wave periods and velocities, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences (DOI: 10.1098/rsta.1948.0005)
3.) L.S.Griffiths, R.Porter, Focusing of surface waves by variable bathymetry, Applied Ocean Research (DOI: 10.1016/j.apor.2011.08.004)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Justice Department accuses Facebook of discriminating against U.S. workers:

The Justice Department said that Facebook had "refused" to recruit, consider or hire qualified U.S. workers for more than 2,600 jobs that in many cases paid an average salary of $156,000 a year.

Instead, it opted to fill the positions using temporary visa holders, such as those with H-1B visas, the department added.

"Facebook intentionally created a hiring system in which it denied qualified U.S. workers a fair opportunity to learn about and apply for jobs," the Justice Department said. The social media company instead sought to channel such jobs to temporary visa holders it wanted to sponsor for green cards or permanent residency, it added.

Company spokesman Daniel Roberts said: "Facebook has been cooperating with the DOJ in its review of this issue and while we dispute the allegations in the complaint, we cannot comment further on pending litigation."

H-1B visas are often used by the technology sector to bring highly skilled foreign guest workers to the United States. But critics say the laws governing these visas are lax, and make it too easy to replace U.S. workers with cheaper, foreign labor.

Also at:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/03/facebook-h1b-visa-jobs-trump-department-of-justice
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/03/facebook-doj-immigration-lawsuit/
https://www.engadget.com/justice-department-sues-facebook-h1b-visas-205126525.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-doj-suing-facebook-hiring-foreign-workers-h1b-2020-12
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/doj-sues-facebook-discriminating-against-us-workers-reserving-jobs-h1-b-workers
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/12/3/trump-administration-accuses-facebook-of-exploiting-h1-b-visas
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-lawsuit-against-facebook-discriminating-against-us-workers

Original Submission

takyon writes:

US ends era of emotional support animals on planes

US airlines will no longer be required to transport emotional support animals after passengers insisted on bringing on board their horses, pigs, peacocks and turkeys for psychological reasons.

Wednesday's rule change by the US Department of Transportation now says only dogs qualify as service animals.

The agency said unusual animals on flights had "eroded the public trust in legitimate service animals".

Airlines say the old policy had been abused and was dangerous.

The new rule defines service dogs as "individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of a person with a disability", and says other animals should be treated by airlines as pets that can be placed in the cargo hold for a fee.

Previously: The Confusion About Pets (archive)
"Emotional Support Animals" Riding With Owners Aboard Commercial Airlines Flights

Original Submission

hubie wrote in with a story which became:

SOHO's Pioneering 25 years in Orbit:

The ESA-NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is celebrating its twenty-fifth launch anniversary.

Two and a half decades of scientific discovery is a major milestone for any space mission. But when the spacecraft at the heart of the celebration was only designed to last for two years, and operates from an area outside the Earth's protective magnetosphere, it's an unalloyed triumph in the history of space exploration.

SOHO launched on 2 December 1995. It is stationed 1.5 million kilometers closer to the Sun than the Earth, from where it enjoys uninterrupted views of our star. The mission was launched with three scientific objectives in mind. The first was to study the dynamics and structure of the solar interior. The second was to study why the Sun's outer atmosphere, known as the corona, is so much hotter than its surface, and the third was to study where and how the solar wind of particles is accelerated. Almost 6000 papers have now appeared in refereed journals based on SOHO data, many of them representing significant progress in our understanding of the original objectives. In addition to investigating how the Sun works, SOHO is the most prolific discoverer of comets in astronomical history, having spotted more than 4000 of these icy mini-worlds during the sunward leg of their journeys.

[*] SOHO.

In celebration, NASA posted a really cool video from the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment (LASCO) instrument showing a movie of its observations of the Sun over the whole mission.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/feb/28/why-do-video-game-players-invert-the-controls

Imagine you are playing a video game where you're looking out over an explorable world. You have a controller in your hand and you want your character to look or move upwards: in what direction do you push the joystick?

If the answer is "up", you're in the majority – most players push up on a stick, or slide a mouse upwards, to instigate upward motion in a game. Most, but not all. A significant minority of players start every new game they play by going into the options and selecting "Invert Y axis", which means when they push up on the stick, their onscreen avatar looks or moves downwards. To both sets of players, their own choice is logical and natural, and discussions about the subject can get quite fraught – as I found when I tweeted about it a few weeks ago. But why the perceptual difference? Is there anything definite that neuroscientists or psychologists can tell us about this schism?

[...] "From a cognitive perspective, players who don't invert are 'acting as' the avatar, with movement/steering originating from between the avatar's eyes, controlling the camera," says Dr Jennifer Corbett, a lecturer in psychology at Brunel University London's Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience. "Players who invert are 'acting on' the avatar, with the controls either behind or on top of the head controlling the avatar."

[...] Corbett suggests we could also look at other areas of our technology use for comparisons. "There could be a relationship with other screen interaction biases, like whether or not people invert when scrolling through the pages of a document on a laptop – do they perceive they are moving the page or the viewing window? There could also be a link to more global environmental or contextual predispositions, such as those that influence whether people perceive the now-famous dress as blue and black or white and gold, largely depending on what colour they perceive the illuminating light (eg, outside daylight versus inside a shop) to be."

One thing is clear: players who were introduced to inverted controls by 1980s flight sims, by 1990s Star Wars X-Wing games or by Nintendo shooters are likely to stick with inverted controls through their lives – players who weren't, don't tend to start. Both groups are adamant that theirs is the correct perspective and cannot countenance the alternative. However, as with all the most important things in life, what at first appears binary, is actually more complicated. Some players only invert Y with joypads and not with mouse controls, some also invert Z, a small number start in one group then later swap over, some constantly switch between control methods at will depending on the game. Inversion is a spectrum.

So, fellow Soylentils, which way is it? Push to go up, or pull?

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

New study shows how methan breaks through icy barriers on the sea floor:

In particular, scientists have been faced with a puzzle. Observations at sites around the world have shown vigorous columns of methane gas bubbling up from these formations in some places, yet the high pressure and low temperature of these deep-sea environments should create a solid frozen layer that would be expected to act as a kind of capstone, preventing gas from escaping. So how does the gas get out?

[...] Seismic studies of the subsurface of the seafloor in these vent regions show a series of relatively narrow conduits, or chimneys, through which the gas escapes. But the presence of chunks of gas hydrate from these same formations made it clear that the solid hydrate and the gaseous methane could co-exist, Fu explains. To simulate the conditions in the lab, the researchers used a small two-dimensional setup, sandwiching a gas bubble in a layer of water between two plates of glass under high pressure.

As a gas tries to rise through the seafloor, Fu says, if it's forming a hydrate layer when it hits the cold seawater, that should block its progress: "It's running into a wall. So how would that wall not be preventing it from continuous migration?" Using the microfluidic experiments, they found a previously unknown phenomenon at work, which they dubbed crustal fingering.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Half a million fewer children? The coming COVID baby bust:

The COVID-19 episode will likely lead to a large, lasting baby bust. The pandemic has thrust the country into an economic recession. Economic reasoning and past evidence suggest that this will lead people to have fewer children. The decline in births could be on the order of 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births next year. We base this expectation on lessons drawn from economic studies of fertility behavior, along with data presented here from the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and the 1918 Spanish Flu.

[...] When the public health crisis first took hold, some people playfully speculated that there would be a spike in births in nine months, as people were "stuck home" with their romantic partners. Such speculation is based on persistent myths about birth spikes occurring nine months after blizzards or major electricity blackouts. As it turns out, those stories tend not to hold up to statistical examination (Udry, 1970). But the COVID-19 crisis is amounting to much more than a temporary stay-at-home order. It is leading to tremendous economic loss, uncertainty, and insecurity. That is why birth rates will tumble.

[...] There is ample evidence that birth rates are, in fact, pro-cyclical. This is shown, for instance, in the work by Dettling and Kearney (2014) described above. Their analysis of birth rates in metropolitan areas finds that all else equal, a one percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate is associated with a 1.4 percent decrease in birth rates. Schaller (2016) analyzes the relationship between state-level unemployment rates and birth rates, and finds that a one percentage-point increase in state-year unemployment rates is associated with a 0.9 to 2.2 percent decrease in birth rates. Other evidence shows that women whose husbands lose their jobs at some point during their marriage ultimately have fewer children (Lindo, 2010). This suggests that transitory changes in economic conditions lead to changes in birth rates.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

High-energy X-rays reveal the secrets of ancient Egyptian inks:

For this latest study, the team was interested in analyzing the mineral compounds of the red and black inks from the temple papyri fragments, especially the specific iron and lead compounds. They used numerous synchrotron radiation techniques to probe the chemical composition, including micro X-ray fluorescence, micro X-ray diffraction, and micro-infrared spectroscopy. They found a complex mix of lead phosphates, potassium lead sulphates, lead carboxylates, and lead chlorides.

"The iron-based compounds in the red inks are most likely ocher—a natural earth pigment—because the iron was found together with aluminium and the mineral hematite, which occur in ocher," said co-author Sine Larsen, also of the University of Copenhagen, of the results. "The lead compounds appear in both the red and black inks, but since we did not identify any of the typical lead-based pigments used to color the ink, we suggest that this particular lead compound was used by the scribes to dry the ink rather than as a pigment."

[...] The team also noted an unusual "coffee ring effect" in the red ink markings. The coffee ring effect occurs when a single liquid evaporates and the solids that had been dissolved in the liquid, like coffee grounds, form a telltale ring. It happens because the evaporation occurs faster at the edge than at the center. Any remaining liquid flows outward to the edge to fill in the gaps, dragging those solids with it. In this case, the red ocher pigment is present in coarse particles, which stayed in place while the more finely ground soluble lead compounds diffused into the papyrus cells to create a ring effect, making it appear (at the micrometer scale) as if the letters had been outlined.

"The advanced synchrotron-based microanalyses have provided us with invaluable knowledge of the preparation and composition of red and black inks in ancient Egypt and Rome 2,000 years ago," said Christiansen.

Journal Reference:
Thomas Christiansen, Marine Cotte, Wout de Nolf, et al. Insights into the composition of ancient Egyptian red and black inks on papyri achieved by synchrotron-based microanalyses [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2004534117)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for aristarchus_:

Boeing's upgraded 737 MAX completes first flight with media onboard:

DALLAS (Reuters) - Boeing Co's 737 MAX staged its first post-grounding flight with media on board on Wednesday, as carriers seek to demonstrate to passengers that the redesigned jet is safe after a 20-month safety ban.

[...] Wednesday's American Airlines 737 MAX flight was a 45-minute hop from Dallas, Texas, to Tulsa, Oklahoma. It comes weeks before the first commercial passenger flight on Dec. 29, and is part of a public relations effort to allay any concerns about the aircraft.

Boeing's best-selling jet was grounded in March 2019 after two crashes in five months killed a combined 346 people, marking the industry's worst safety crisis in decades and undermining U.S. aviation regulatory leadership.

Wednesday's flight marked the first time anyone besides regulators and industry personnel flew on the MAX since the grounding, which ignited investigations focusing on software that overwhelmed pilots.

The mood on Wednesday's flight, which included a Reuters reporter, was subdued. Some passengers mingled and chatted before landing, when applause broke out.

[...] Boeing is bracing for intense publicity from even routine glitches by manning a 24-hour "situation room" to monitor every MAX flight globally, and has briefed some industry commentators on details on the return to service, industry sources said.

"We are continuing to work closely with global regulators and our customers to safely return the fleet to commercial service," a Boeing spokesman said.

[...] In an example of how airlines have begun to soft-pedal references to the MAX brand, the safety cards on Wednesday's flight omitted the "MAX" name and just said "737."

Original Submission