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Man, third submission rejection in a row due to non-activity.

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Obituary: Paul Crutzen, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Ozone Layer Chemist and Anthropocene Advocate

The Max Planck Institute announced on 28 January the passing of Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen.

Paul J. Crutzen passed away on 28 January 2021 at the age of 87 following several years of illness. Born in the Netherlands, he was Director of the Atmospheric Chemistry Department at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz from 1980 to 2000. “Paul J. Crutzen was a pioneer in many ways," says Martin Stratmann, President of the Max Planck Society. "He was the first to show how human activities damage the ozone layer. For his scientific work on the Earth's atmosphere, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995, together with Mario J. Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland. This knowledge about the causes of ozone depletion was the basis for the worldwide ban on ozone-depleting substances - a hitherto unique example of how Nobel Prize-winning basic research can directly lead to a global political decision.

Incidentally, Mario Molina also passed fairly recently.

So, there's this: Oh my ... 64 PERCENT of Republican voters say they'd join a new Trump-led political party, according to a new poll.

You folks are welcome to weigh in on this but I don't have anything in particular to say on the matter. I owe neither Trump nor the Republicans any loyalty, nor do I hate their breathing guts. I really don't care except in the sense of would it be better or worse long-term for the country and I haven't decided which would be more likely yet. It is kind of interesting though.

Have fun.

Intel Fires Back at Apple's M1 Processors With Benchmarks

In November 2020, Apple announced M1. By the end of the year, it announced three devices — the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the Mac Mini — that ditched Intel's processors.

Those devices received largely positive reviews based on benchmark performance and battery life. But Intel has also released its 11th Gen "Tiger Lake" processors, and after several months of silence, now it's firing back at Apple. Slides from the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker shows how it tested, and why it thinks Windows 10 laptops can beat back Apple's ARM-based solution.

[...] For pure productivity performance, Intel’s testing eschews typical benchmarks. Sure, it used Principled Technologies' WebXPRT 3, but the Microsoft Office 365 tests appear to be based on Intel's internal RUG (real-world usage guideline) tests. Intel claims the 11th-Gen system, an internal whitebox with an Intel Core i7-1185G7 and 16GB of RAM, is 30% faster overall in Chrome and faster in every Office task. This largely goes against what we saw in our 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 review, where benchmarks showed M1 to be largely on the same level, if not better.

This is another submission that was rejected by not being acted upon:

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The fact that the human menstrual cycle occurs on a time scale that is close to that of the lunar cycle has led to a lot conjectures about the relationship. A new paper in Science Advances says this relationship can exist.

ABSTRACT:

Many species synchronize reproductive behavior with a particular phase of the lunar cycle to increase reproductive success. In humans, a lunar influence on reproductive behavior remains controversial, although the human menstrual cycle has a period close to that of the lunar cycle. Here, we analyzed long-term menstrual recordings of individual women with distinct methods for biological rhythm analysis. We show that women’s menstrual cycles with a period longer than 27 days were intermittently synchronous with the Moon’s luminance and/or gravimetric cycles. With age and upon exposure to artificial nocturnal light, menstrual cycles shortened and lost this synchrony. We hypothesize that in ancient times, human eproductive behavior was synchronous with the Moon but that our modern lifestyles have changed eproductive physiology and behavior.

Helfrich-Förster, Monecke, Spiousas, et al., "Women temporarily synchronize their menstrual cycles with the luminance and gravimetric cycles of the Moon," Science Advances, 7, 5.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe1358

Qualcomm Could Develop Its Own ARM Cores Instead of Just Licensing Finished Designs to Take on Apple

Qualcomm Working on an M1 Competitor With Internal Number ‘Snapdragon SC8280’ and Support for up to 32GB RAM

Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake-P Mobility CPU With 14 Cores & 20 Threads Spotted, Up To 4.70 GHz Clocks For Early Sample

Alder Lake (microprocessor)

This is a 6 big core, 8 small core laptop CPU. They might not do 8+8 cores for laptops, making this the flagship "mobility CPU".

I submitted this as a story back in December, but it was rejected (not acted upon in the allotted amount of time). I've tried to look around to see if there was any additional information on it since, but all I can turn up are a bunch of links to the initial story about it at the time. Though I think in one story I saw, they said it was blackberry wine.

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In the United States in the state of Alabama, the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office has busted an illegal winery that was found operating out of a municipal sewage plant in Rainsville. Officers seized a lot of illegal alcohol, and arrests are expected.

“I want to thank the mayor for his cooperation and willingness to allow law enforcement to do our job and shut something like this down,” Sheriff Nick Welden said in a statement. “This is definitely one of the biggest operations we’ve seen in our county and possibly our state.”

A paper accepted for an upcoming issue of the journal Earth's Future looks at the environmental implications of international sanctions imposed upon a country, and it does this by developing a generic causal model that explains how economic sanctions can impact the environment.

By targeting the economy of a sanctioned state, sanctions are used to force the sanctioned state’s policy makers to change their actions. But the impacts of economic sanctions on a country can go beyond its economic sector and can cause significant collateral damages to ordinary citizens and their economic welfare. Economic sanctions are also associated with significant unintended environmental impacts with major health, justice and human rights implications. This study explains how the current economic sanctioning schemes turn the environmental sector into an inevitable victim of the battle between the sanctioning states, seeking behavioral change through economic pressure, and the sanctioned state, determined to pursue its so-called “abnormal” plans at the expense of causing damages to its natural resources.

The author points out that exemptions to sanctions typically only cover humanitarian issues such as food and medicine and not environmental concerns, but resulting environmental damage can often long outlive the sanctions or extend beyond the borders of the nation being sanctioned. The author argues that attention should be given to what new schemes, mechanisms, reforms, and legal exemptions can be introduced to minimize the lasting environmental implications of economic sanctions.

DOI: 10.1029/2020EF001829

So, remember all those EOs some of you were yelling "Dictator!!!1!" over just a couple months ago? Biden's signed more in his first ten days than Cheeto Jesus did in his first six months. More than any president in the history of the nation. And, no, they're not all revoking Trump EOs. Take out every last Trump EO reversal and he still has more than any president in history.

I eagerly await your completely unhinged rants comparing Joe Biden and Joe Stalin.

Screw My-Pillow, let's talk about something really important that very few of you know a damned thing about. Let's talk about something genuinely, non-trivially relevant right now. Something that most of you almost certainly don't have clue one about. Let's talk about blankets.

Now I'm generally a lazyass and just wash all my bedclothes and put them right back on rather than rotating different combinations in and out. The past couple years I've had a comforter on top of a quilt and slept on top of another quilt. Fuck sheets. I'm not buying into Big Sheet's lies anymore.

But one of the days last week coincided with me feeling like my balls were going to freeze off even inside the house. Not sick, just hadn't been moving around enough to get my circulation in Drive that morning. So I did what any resourceful vet would, I threw my wool army blanket on the bottom of the stack and prepared for a nap.

Now what happened next should have been old hat to me but the last time I slept directly under a wool blanket was in boot camp. See, if you make your bunk with one blanket and stick the one you were supposed to make a pillow cover out of underneath the mattress, all you have to do in the morning is tighten everything back up and shove the blanket you slept under back under the bunk. But non-critical learning in boot camp ain't as automagical as it is in normal life on account of you being utterly exhausted both mentally and physically the entire time. So what happened came as a complete surprise to me.

Here's what happened: I got in my bed for a nap after putting the army blanket between the two quilts, slithered under it, and it was already warm. That's right, the instant I climbed underneath it, it wasn't even the slightest bit chilly like sheets and most anything else made of cotton or synthetics is. Nor did it ever reach overly warm like quilts and comforters can become after a while.

Apparently those are traits pretty much universally shared by all wool blankets and I just never noticed it. I may not have noticed regardless though since I went to boot camp in SC during the hottest, muggiest part of summer. SC does muggy really well.

So, yeah, find yourself a wool blanket and tell at least your non-fitted sheet to fuck right off. You have no idea the comfort it will bestow upon you unless you've experienced it. If you're an ass-pansy who currently sleeps under Pi-to-the-64th thread-count sheets, find a soft one; not all wool blankets can serve double duty as exfoliation devices.