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Or at least someone smarter than me does:
http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com/

Job opening to work on actual science instead of hand-wavy, platform nine and three quarters, oompa-loompa dark matter magic.

There's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going
There's no knowing where we're rowing
Or which way the river's flowing
Is it raining, is it snowing
Is a hurricane a-blowing
Not a speck of light is showing
So the danger must be growing
Are the fires of Hell a-glowing
Is the grisly reaper mowing
Yes, the danger must be growing
For the rowers keep on rowing
And they're certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing

Pocahontas is no Indian! She doesn't look like Indian to me and she doesn't look like Indian to Indians. cherokee.org/News/Stories/20181015_Cherokee-Nation-responds-to-Senator-Warrens-DNA-test

Russian Orthodox Church severs links with Constantinople

In a major religious split, the Russian Orthodox Church has cut ties with the body seen as the spiritual authority of the world's Orthodox Christians.

The break came after the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople recognised the independence of the Ukrainian Church from Moscow.

The row is being described as the greatest Orthodox split since the schism with Catholicism in 1054.

Relations soured after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

Many Ukrainians accuse the Russian Church of siding with Russia-backed separatists in the east.

Russia sees Kiev as the historic cradle of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Church now fears losing many of its 12,000 parishes in Ukraine.

Constantinople holds sway over more than 300 million Orthodox Christians across the world. The Russian Orthodox Church is by far the biggest.

Also at Reuters and The Guardian.

See also: Archbishop’s defiance threatens Putin’s vision of Russian greatness

A Suicidal Nanny, an Underground Industry and 3 Babies Stabbed

The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail

China’s Media Crackdown Spreads to Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s expulsion of a British journalist after he led a foreign correspondents’ meeting with a pro-independence activist is, first and foremost, an attempt by Beijing to tamp down any dissent in the former British colony.

Hong Kong officials have not given a reason for rejecting a journalist visa for Victor Mallet, the Asia news editor for The Financial Times. China’s only comment has been that Hong Kong authorities are within their right to do so. But that’s the typical legalistic evasiveness of authoritarian regimes when they do something they know is hard and embarrassing to defend.

The authorities have never criticized Mr. Mallet’s reporting. But he was the main spokesman for the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club in August when it hosted a talk by Andy Chan, head of a political party that called for Hong Kong’s independence from China. Hong Kong and Beijing officials blasted the event in advance and subsequently banned the party.

Beijing took back control of Hong Kong from the British in 1997 after nearly a century of colonial rule, and agitation toward independence has never pleased China’s leadership. Hong Kong as an “inalienable” part of China is written into the territory’s Basic Law.

UK says Hong Kong rejection of FT journalist visa politically motivated

Vote.GOP twitter.com/EricTrump/status/1049696454292500480

And by the way, that includes our beautiful Blacks. If African-American unemployment is now at the lowest number in history, median income the highest, and you then add all of the other things I have done, how do Democrats, who have done NOTHING for African-Americans but TALK, win the Black Vote? And it will only get better!

Tennessee death row inmate wants electric chair as 'lesser of two evils'

A condemned Tennessee inmate wants to die in the electric chair, rather than by lethal injection, calling electrocution the “lesser of two evils,” his lawyer said.

Edmund George Zagorski, 63, is set to pay the ultimate price on Thursday for the 1983 slayings of John Dotson and Jimmy Porter — 35-year-old victims who were planning to buy 100 pounds of marijuana from Zagorski.

Lethal injection is the primary form of execution in Tennessee, but inmates whose offenses happened before January 1999 may opt for the electric chair.

The Volunteer State is one of nine that still includes the electric chair as a form of execution.

Kelley Henry, Zagorki's defense lawyer, said lethal injection is a long, brutal process that can take up to 18 minutes.

“Faced with the choice of two unconstitutional methods of execution, Mr. Zagorski has indicated that if his execution is to move forward, he believes that the electric chair is the lesser of two evils,” Henry said. “Ten to 18 minutes of drowning, suffocation and chemical burning is unspeakable.”

Use of the electric chair is rare, with just 14 of the 871 executions happening via electrocution since 2000, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The last electrocution was in Virginia in January 2013.

After serving me well these past five years, my good old Nexus 7 is finally going to retire. I've gotten a new tablet, a Xiaomi Mi Pad 4, which is more or less the same form factor, just slightly bigger, and the hardware specs are really sweet. But I should have been a tad more careful reading of both the place I bought it from and the stuff on XDA about it. First off I'd bought a version that has a Chinese ROM. This shouldn't be such a big deal, except that the damn thing doesn't have Google Play or any sane app market. There's the Mi App Store, and while it has some of my essential tablet apps, some omissions are rather notable, not even including including something as basic as a workable FTP client. Since one of the main uses of my tablet is to play video files I download from a network storage server at home, this is essential. Maybe there is something there that could do that... if only I could read Chinese. F-Droid seems to help somewhat, except that there still isn't a simple FTP client that will let me download several files in a batch. The closest thing there seems to be Ghost Commander, but it downloads all the files in parallel and can't display progress for all of them. This is ridiculous. Even the web browsers like Firefox are in Chinese! The keyboard is also the Google Chinese keyboard, and there's something of a dearth of alternative keyboard apps, at least no keyboard that will let me type numbers on a password screen lock without pressing a modifier key. I fucking hate that. There is a lot of space on a 1920×1200 screen that is 8" across, I could use a row of number keys at the top thank you very much! There certainly seems to be nothing like the Hacker's Keyboard on Google Play, which you can actually use vi on a remote shell with because it gives you that all-important Esc key. :P

The other thing is that locked bootloader. I could have flashed a custom ROM to remove the useless Chinese cruft. While Xiaomi will allow me to unlock it if I want to (after giving them something like $250 for it I expect no less), they have an irksome requirement. They are making me wait 720 hours (yes a whole fucking month) before they will permit me to unlock. The fact that they impose this delay on you for your "protection" is extremely irritating and paternalistic. Sure, if the device is stolen it becomes essentially unusable if the bootloader is locked but there are better ways to make that happen I think. Given the lack of GPS or LTE circuitry in this version of the Mi Pad 4 I have, if that happens I don't think it's going to help. So do I own my device or not? Seems they want to hang onto it for a month longer before they'll actually give it to me.

In the meantime I've managed to sideload a few of the essentials after using Titanium Backup on my Nexus 7 to convert them into APKs. They largely seem to work.

My daughter was telling me about an app that day-cares and schools use to send photos of kids to 'helicopter' and panic parents and I tried explaining why that was a security issue:

How do you explain to people who don't realise the problem that there IS a problem.

I've tried using the Jewish registration at the Nazi police stations (what, 1939ish?).
I've tried hacker data stealing.
Data collection of kids through adulthood.....

What is a good argument to use against "App! Facebook! Wow! If you don't do anything wrong you have nothing to worry about"?

Anyone got a good speal?

We're Making America Great Again. And part of that is honoring the guy who made America great in the first place. By discovering it. Naming it. And opening it for BUSINESS! So I've proclaimed today as a VERY SPECIAL day to honor the fantastic Christopher Columbus. He was a very smart businessman. But he had a big heart. So inspiring! For too long, people forgot how our Country started -- Columbus. I didn't forget. He's forgotten no more. Because I did a Proclamation. We are finally going to open the history books on the Columbus family, their lives, their schemes, their adventures. CELEBRATE!!! whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/presidential-proclamation-columbus-day-2018