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Dennis Rodman Has Secret Message From Kim Jong-un for Trump
Rolls Roil
Racial dispute at beloved bakery roils liberal college town in Ohio
The three students were arrested after punching and kicking the white shopkeeper. The 18- and 19-year-old students said that they were racially profiled and that their only crime was trying to buy alcohol with fake identification; the shopkeeper, Allyn Gibson, said the students attacked him after he caught them trying to steal bottles of wine.
The day after the arrests, hundreds of students protested outside the bakery. Members of Oberlin's student senate published a resolution saying Gibson's had "a history of racial profiling and discriminatory treatment."
Few colleges put the "liberal" into "liberal arts" more than Oberlin, which in the early 1800s became the first in the country to regularly admit women and minorities. But it also more recently has become, for conservatives, a symbol of political correctness gone awry and entitled youth.
News articles in 2015 quoted students decrying the school dining hall's sushi and Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches as cultural appropriation. The divisive, voice-of-a-generation actress Lena Dunham, famously a 2008 Oberlin alumna, was quoted in Food & Wine magazine as saying, "The press reported it as, 'How crazy are Oberlin kids?' But to me, it was actually, 'Right on.'"
"I study liars. I’ve never seen one like President Trump."
I spent the first two decades of my career as a social scientist studying liars and their lies. I thought I had developed a sense of what to expect from them. Then along came President Trump. His lies are both more frequent and more malicious than ordinary people’s.
...
The college students in our research told an average of two lies a day, and the community members told one. (A more recent study of the lies 1,000 U. S. adults told in the previous 24 hours found that people told an average of 1.65 lies per day; the authors noted that 60 percent of the participants said they told no lies at all, while the top 5 percent of liars told nearly half of all the falsehoods in the study.) The most prolific liar among the students told an average of 6.6 lies a day. The biggest liar in the community sample told 4.3 lies in an average day.
In Trump’s first 298 days in office, however, he made 1,628 false or misleading claims or flip-flops, by The Post’s tally. That’s about six per day, far higher than the average rate in our studies. And of course, reporters have access to only a subset of Trump’s false statements — the ones he makes publicly — so unless he never stretches the truth in private, his actual rate of lying is almost certainly higher.
Kepler Announcement on Dec. 14
NASA Hosts Media Teleconference to Announce Latest Kepler Discovery
NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EST Thursday, Dec. 14, to announce the latest discovery made by its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data.
NASA and Google are both users of the D-Wave "quantum annealer", ostensibly for machine learning purposes.
Mycroft AI instaaaaaallled!!
Welp, i got MycroftAI installed (should i say, FINALLY installed).
Had to jump through hoops and stand on my head holding the rabbit ears sideways, but yeah....
There are a lot of skills that aren't fully working, but so far it has a lot of things i need, like knowing the date and time, lol, and being able to set a quick alarm ("Mycroft, set an alarm for noon""Mycroft, set an alarm for 30 minutes").
Changed it from "Hey Mycroft" to just "Mycroft" cause saying Hey Mycroft EVERY SINGLE TIME is just a pain.
I think i'll suggest an 'interactive mode' where you can say "Hey Mycroft go active" and then it will just try to answer everything thrown its way until told to go out of 'interactive mode' so you don't have to say Mycroft so often.
Right now, it is telling me what pi is to 1000 decimal points, lol. Fun times!
Playah gotta keep playin'!
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Edit
Was able to open smplayer with Mycroft, but it sees/hears palemoon as two separate words and kaffs, lol.
Was happy to see it open smplayer, and tomorrow plan on trying other programs.
Wonder what happens if I ask Mycroft to open Mycroft? Duelling AI?
Will have to see about changing its default error message to "I can't do that, Dave" ;)
Porn Star May Have Been Cyberbullied Into Committing Suicide
What is August Ames Cause of Death? Porn Star Found Dead After Cyberbullying
Adult film star August Ames was found dead in her California home on Tuesday, according to BuzzFeed. The erotic actress, who appeared in over 270 films, was 23 years old.
The Canadian actress’s official cause of death has yet to be released by the Ventura County Medical Examiner’s office due to pending family notifications. However, some members of the porn industry believe Ames, whose birth name was Mercedes Grabowski, may have taken her own life.
Just two days before Ames’s death, the porn star was a victim of cyberbullying after she posted a tweet on Sunday saying she refused to perform with a male actor who did gay pornography.
Shortly after Ames’s comments about working with "crossover performers"—porn stars who appear in gay and heterosexual scenes—she was bombarded with angry tweets accusing her of discriminating against the LGBTQ community and being anti-gay.
Ames defended her stance, writing that she was not homophobic, but decided not to shoot with men who have done gay porn for health reasons. “I’m not putting my body at risk, I don’t know what they do in their private lives,” she wrote.
A $300 Bil. Mistake in the Handwritten Tax Bill, shocking!
It appears that Senate Republicans managed to make a $289 billion or so mistake while furiously hand-scribbling edits onto the tax bill they passed in the wee hours of Saturday morning. The problem involves the corporate alternative minimum tax, which the GOP initially planned to repeal, but tossed back into their stew at the last second in order to raise some desperately needed revenue. The AMT is basically a parallel tax code meant to prevent companies from zeroing out their IRS bills. It doesn’t allow businesses to take as many tax breaks but, in theory, is also supposed to have a lower rate.
Except not under the Senate bill. When Mitch McConnell & co. revived the AMT, they absentmindedly left it at its current rate of 20 percent, the same as the new, lower rate of the corporate income tax that the bill included. As a result, many companies won’t be able to use tax breaks that were supposed to be preserved in the legislation, including the extremely popular credit for research and development costs. Corporate accountants started freaking out about this over the weekend, but the situation reached high farce when a group of lawyers from Davis Polk pointed out that, by leaving the AMT intact, Republicans had essentially undermined their bill’s most important changes to the international tax code.
Therese Dreaming
Cell phone in a microwave still works
Recently I'd decided to see how effective placing a cell phone in a microwave to block out the signal is and I got quite a surprise: the cell phone continued to operate as normally as I could test it while inside the microwave. Given the non-obvious result I did some more testing followed by some math and came to the conclusion that having a cell phone work in a microwave isn't that odd at all. Read on for how I conducted my tests and came to my conclusion. Also if you are so inclined I'd appreciate if you (the reader) could perform a test yourself and report back on the results. You know because of science and stuff.
First I'd like to say that it isn't a valid test to simply place a cell phone in the microwave, close the door, count the bars and see if they changed. The user facing signal strength meters (number of bars) are notoriously inaccurate themselves - at best they tend to be slow and at worst they are full of lies. Because of this tests have to be done that don't involve the use of this meter. If you are interested in seeing what happens with the meter then I suggest leaving the phone in the microwave for several minutes though I wouldn't use this information for anything. For the curious during my testing I never saw the cell phones go below 4 out of 4 bars.
Secondly it's important to note that replication is important. This has been tested by myself with 3 different phones in two different microwave models though I only have hard numbers for one phone in one microwave. It's possible the phones I tested just have exceptionally good radios in them (but I doubt it) or the microwaves are malfunctioning and letting too much RF leak out (I also doubt it). This is where I'd really like to see the results of others.
There are two tests I came up with: one that validates that the phone receives audio and one that gives a better reading of the received signal strength. The received audio test is easy. Simply call a cell phone with another phone and place the cell phone in speaker phone mode. Next place the cell phone in the microwave and close the door (try not to turn the microwave on) then speak or have someone else speak into the calling phone and see if you hear audio coming out of the phone in the microwave. The results I got was no difference in received audio with the phone inside or outside the microwave.
The second test uses the phones status information to extract the received signal strength in a value much better than "bars". On at least most Android phones, in the about phone sections of the settings menu, there is a wireless information section with something along the lines of "signal strength" with a value measured in dBm. This reading is the actual power being received and is what the phone uses when it goes through the magic that leads to translation for a number of bars. Two values are useful: the value outside of the microwave and inside the microwave. With both of these readings it is possible to calculate how effective the shielding of the microwave is at blocking the cell phone signals.
I had a received signal strength of -90dBm outside the microwave and -110dBm inside the microwave for a difference of 20dB. I was glad to see such a nice round number because that means the received signal strength inside the microwave was 2 orders of magnitude below the received signal strength outside the microwave. Two orders of magnitude reduction in power isn't that bad at all - this really goes to show how well the receiver in a cell phone works.
Because of the way that a Faraday cage works and the frequencies of the microwave (2.4 GHz) and cell phones (lower in frequency) we should be able to assume the shielding for the microwaves generated inside the oven itself is the same as for the cell phone. Does 20db of shielding pass the sanity test for the microwave shielding doing what it is supposed to?
My microwave is on the more powerful side at 1.2kw (1,200 watts) and a reduction in power of two orders of magnitude becomes 12 watts leaked out. I routinely put 5 watts of RF right into my face with hand held transmitters and so are a lot of other people - no one even thinks twice. It seems to me then that 12 watts of energy leaking out and the small fraction of that which would be absorbed by objects around the microwave is within reason.
Did anyone already know this? Who is as surprised as I am? Do you not believe it because this just seems completely wrong because everyone knows if you put a phone in a microwave it'll stop working?
I'm really looking forward to reading the comments on this one! Cheers.
