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From an article in the Guardian about French bean plants:

“We see these signatures of complex behaviour, the one and only difference being is that it’s not neural-based, as it is in humans,” Calvo said. “This isn’t just adaptive behaviour, it’s anticipatory, goal-directed, flexible behaviour.”

Should we start running now?

That Antifa guy the facial recognition supposedly caught false-flagging the Capitol yesterday turns out to be a well known QAnon douche from AZ.

Longtime Arizona QAnon supporter in horned helmet joins storming of U.S. Capitol

Among the supporters of President Donald Trump who mobbed their way into the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, one – unmistakable in his fur, horned hat and painted face – was Jake Angeli, a QAnon supporter who has been a fixture at Arizona right-wing political rallies over the past year.

Angeli was seen in photographs from Washington, D.C., amid protesters who turned violent and stormed the building, causing both chambers to suspend their intended action of the day: certifying the results of the presidential election for former vice president Joe Biden.

This dopey photo is making the rounds as if it offers some kind of proof.

The three people in that photo:
    - Jake Angeli, the QAnon douche from AZ
    - Jason Tankersley, founder of the Maryland Skinheads
    - Matthew Heimbach, National Socialist Movement

Summarized from a post elsewhere.

I was shocked to be alerted by my wife that the Capitol building was being evacuated and being stormed by a mob of Trump supporters.

I watched live video of congress critters evacuating.

I watched live video from outside as police surrounded the building and fought off Trump supporters. They are carrying Trump signs and shouting loudly that Trump Won This Election! And Stop The Steal.

Riot police arrived.

Later, the Trump supporters have now broken in to the building.

National Guard now requested.

They will have to re-take the building.

Fighting between the terrorists and police inside the building right underneath the rotunda.

Thanks Republicans and Trump for turning our government into a 3rd world banana republic.

Live video of the terrorists now inside the house and senate chambers going through things. Standing at the podium. Etc.

Now a man hanging from walls in senate chamber.

6 PM curfew in Washington DC.

I remember people on SN saying that Trump isn't dangerous. He's probably laughing right this moment.

Seems like the whole "fuck democracy" campaign has backfired and the historically red state of Georgia has sent their two Republican senators packing. With Kamala Harris getting the tie vote in the Senate the Democratic party has a narrow, single vote, majority.

A few outlets have not yet called the Ossof race however there is only one very blue county with outstanding ballots yet to be counted and he's up by 15k.

Jon Ossoff (D) and David Perdue (R) are locked in a tight race with the Senate majority hinging on the outcome.

When the church doors open, only white people will be allowed inside.

That’s the message the Asatru Folk Assembly in Murdock, Minnesota, is sending after being granted a conditional use permit to open a church there and practice its pre-Christian religion that originated in northern Europe.

Murdock council members said they do not support the church but were legally obligated to approve the permit, which they did in a 3-1 decision.

“We were highly advised by our attorney to pass this permit for legal reasons to protect the First Amendment rights," Mayor Craig Kavanagh said. "We knew that if this was going to be denied, we were going to have a legal battle on our hands that could be pretty expensive.”

City Attorney Don Wilcox said it came down to free speech and freedom of religion.

“I think there’s a great deal of sentiment in the town that they don’t want that group there," he said. "You can’t just bar people from practicing whatever religion they want or saying anything they want as long as it doesn’t incite violence.”

After permit approved for whites-only church, small Minnesota town insists it isn't racist

Have yourself a COVID-19 Christmas
Let your heart beat light
From now on
Our face masks will be out of sight

Have yourself a COVID-19 Christmas
Make the droplets spray
From now on
Our safety will be miles away

Here we are as in olden days
Like contagion days of yore
Flu sick friends get too near to us
Giving fear to us once more

Through the years we'll all be sick together
If red states allow
Hang an unused mask upon the highest bough
And have yourself a Covid little Christmas now

I have a telescope and I haven't used it for years due to lack of space. It's been neatly away in its box. I thought I would get it out for looking at this Jupiter-Saturn conjunction.

On Sunday I decided to get the telescope built and do a test run. I was trying to cook a roast chicken dinner and put up the telescope at the same time. By the time I got it outside, the planets were getting very low on the horizon but after a few minutes I managed to get Jupiter and Saturn just as they went behind a tree, so I had to look at them in between the branches.

The next day it rained all day and the sky was completely overcast so I missed the real event.

Years ago I thought it would be fun to do some 3D graphics completely from scratch in C, using SDL for output. I wrote some code to do basic vector and matrix functions (single- and double-precision). I wrote functions to draw lines and so on, to project vertices from 3D to 2D, to scale them and to render them on the screen.

I got a 64-bit computer and it still worked.

A couple of years ago I bought an AMD Ryzen 7 2700U laptop which is running Slackware. I had all sorts of trouble with it, particularly with the integrated graphics which was causing it to hang.

I tried my old code on it, though, and was pleased to see it run. The second time I ran it, it didn't work. My code checks for pixels that are off screen and doesn't try to plot them, and outputs an error message to the console. I was getting thousands of them. So I figured that there was something wrong with the machine. Computers are supposed to be deterministic. You should get exactly the same results each time you run a program.

This summer I built a new PC with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU and an nVidia GTX 1650 graphics card, running Slackware. Today I thought I'd try my old code. It ran perfectly first time. The second time, I got thousands of error messages about the pixels being out of range.

What's going on? What subtle bug has it revealed in my (very simple) code? On other machines it didn't have this problem.

Could it be that the ancient version of SDL that I'm using does something weird to the state of the hardware?

Update: Fixed it. It was an uninitialised local variable which just happened to be zero when it was supposed to some of the time.

I had a line of code at the end of the loop which updated the camera (view point) position so that I could have it "flying forward" each frame, but I had decided to stop the flying at one point many years ago. I forgot to assign (0,0,0) to the increment vector. Sometimes it was getting random garbage in it and when the vertices were getting translated, they were getting ludicrous values.

It wasn't my multi-threading (I commented that out).

It's funny how a change of CPU revealed that bug.

I have a Roku -- the ads on youtube are getting unbearable -- every 10 minutes or so two ads. On my android phone, the ads are insufferable as well. But when I watch youtube on my linux desktop, I never see any ads at all. Zero.

This has me thinking I want to buy a fanless mini-pc and use that with my TV instead of the Roku, at least for youtube. Before I do that though, I'd like to know if my experience is unique and whether others have noted the same phenomenon, i.e., no youtube ads with Linux.

Report: Trump Floated Not Leaving White House on January 20

Trump Has Reportedly Considered Just Not Leaving The White House On January 20, And People Are Okay With Him Getting Dragged Out

Trump is telling advisers he'll REFUSE to leave the White House on January 20, is 'throwing a tantrum' and is plotting revenge on Republicans who turned on him, report claims

I also just love that temper tantrum picture.

I'm going to hold my breath until I get my way! So there!

Oh please, God, please let Trump refuse to leave the white house.

That would be the best thing ever. It would go down in history. There could be no denying it. No calling it "fake news" or "liberal bias" or like all of science: "a vast left wing conspiracy". It would be the crowning achievement of his reign.

I can't wait to hear the Trumpers try to defend this. Fascism. Tyranny. But then I've seen both of those defended on SN already.

(Also: the lie of falsely claiming he won the election at the end of his reign is the perfect bookend and perfect symmetry to the lies at the start of his reign that he had won the popular vote and had won the electoral college by the biggest margin evar!)