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Final Moments of Himalayas Climbers Caught on GoPro
Recovered GoPro video shows final moments of Himalayas climbers
Indian authorities have released footage showing the final moments of the climbers who died in the Indian Himalayas in May.
The video was found on a "memory video device" near the Nanda Devi East, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) said Monday, which showed the group of climbers moving slowly near the summit on the unnamed peak.
The group of eight climbers -- four Britons, two Americans, an Australian and their Indian liaison officer -- went missing when they were attempting to scale a previously unclimbed peak on May 26.
The final final moments were not released.
Leaked Intel Lineup Shows 10 Cores at $409
(Wccftech incorrectly labels Intel Core i7-10700K as $339 instead of $389, so refer to this blurry table from the source article.)
Intel feeling the heat, or just a deepfake?
The AMD X570 Motherboard Overview: Over 35+ Motherboards Analyzed
Interesting comment:
Jansen - Tuesday, July 09, 2019
The ASUS Pro WS X570-Ace has officially validated ECC support. This is a really big deal, as Ryzen has usually only had unofficial ECC support. It opens up a whole other revenue steam for AMD that Intel has deliberately cut off in order to drive Xeon sales.
Micron is ramping up its 16GB 3200MHz DDR4 ECC modules MTA18ADF2G72AZ-3G2 specifically for this market.
X-37B Photographed in Orbit
Mysterious X-37B Military Space Plane Caught on Camera (Photo)
Rare image of US Air Force's secretive space plane in orbit
Related: USAF Secret Plane Makes Longevity Record
What is the X-37B Doing Up There?
Modified X-37B Spaceplane Could Act as "Astronaut Ambulance" for the ISS
As Hurricane Irma Looms, X-37B Poised for First Flight Atop SpaceX Falcon 9
Epstein Charged Again
Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein arrested and accused of sex trafficking minors, sources say
Florida-based billionaire Jeffrey Epstein has been indicted on new charges related to alleged sex crimes involving minors, law enforcement sources told CNN on Saturday.
Epstein was arrested Saturday and is expected to appear in federal court in New York on Monday. Epstein faces charges brought by US prosecutors in Manhattan, after previously evading similar charges when he secured a non-prosecution deal with federal prosecutors in Miami.
The charges, contained in a sealed indictment, involve alleged sex trafficking crimes committed between 2002 and 2005, according to law enforcement sources. The indictment alleged that the crimes occurred in both New York and Palm Beach, Florida.
[...] A team of federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, along with some in the public corruption unit, have been assigned to the case. Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, is one of the prosecutors, according to a source with knowledge of the case.
COMEY?
Jeffrey Epstein, Billionaire Long Accused of Molesting Minors, Is Charged
He is expected to appear before a federal magistrate on Monday, more than a decade after he first gained notoriety with lurid accusations that he had paid dozens of girls for sexual massages in Florida.
Mr. Epstein had avoided federal criminal charges in 2007 and 2008 in a widely criticized plea deal whose lenient terms continue to roil the Justice Department and are facing new scrutiny in the #MeToo era.
Before the plea deal, Mr. Epstein, a former hedge-fund manager, had been friendly with Donald J. Trump, former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.
[...] Women who said they were Mr. Epstein’s victims have repeatedly assailed federal prosecutors for agreeing to a nonprosecution deal with him more than a decade ago.
[...] The plea deal that protected Mr. Epstein from federal charges was signed by the top federal prosecutor in Miami at the time, Alexander Acosta, who is now President Trump’s labor secretary.
In February, a judge in Florida ruled that the prosecutors led by Mr. Acosta violated federal law when they failed to disclose Mr. Epstein’s nonprosecution agreement to his victims.
Check to see if "prince andrew epstein" is censored by GOOG autocomplete. Looks like it is.
Will the Epstein story have a... happy ending?
Previously: Jeffrey Epstein Settles Suit
Jeffrey Epstein Plea Deal Must Stand
Logic Wars
Over at a blog entitled The Sooty Empiric, the author The Last Positivist has an interesting explanation of the uses and abuses of logic, on the internet. It is interesting, first, because it is interesting ("But aristarchus", you might say, "that is a tautology!" To which I reply, "Yes, it is, and therefore logically true!"), and secondly because the misconception he adresses is rampant here on SoylentNews, as it is elsewhere on the Internets. And thirdly, because it highlights one of the essentials of philosophy: Humility; humility and Socratic ignorance. I'm sure many have noticed my humble attempts to exemplify philosophic humility right here on the pages of SN. But this is not about me. On to the Blog.
Boundless Ocean of Unlimited Possibilities
Sometimes (e.g.) on the internet we angst about the kind of person who likes to DESTROY his enemies with FACTS AND LOGIC AND REASON. Ben Shapiro has become the iconic figurehead of this sort, and not without cause - but that is at least somewhat misleading. Shapiro is prominently a fairly traditional conservative in his politics, but that is not an essential property of the sort. It is not tied to any particular political position so much as a self-characterisation and an aesthetic. The self-characterisation is that of an unbiased objective person who calmly follows (to the best of their abilities, accepting human frailty etc) good principles of rationality to reach conclusions. The aesthetic is that of being very impressed by displays of logical acumen, and very persuaded that one's ideological opponents (whoever they may be) can be set aside with relative ease once the tools of reason are brought to bear against them. This post is my contribution to that genre.
The aesthetic of displays of logical acumen, and a faith in victory! I mean, if not for this, conservatives would avoid logic like they do climate science. But let's see where The Last Positivist is going with this.
Now, I am a fan of fairly orthodox notions of logical argumentation. I do in fact think it is a good thing to offer arguments which are perspicuously such that there is no way for their premises to be true while their conclusion is false. All the better if you begin from true premises! Just on this blog I have tried to clarify clarity all the better to achieve it, and put a name to an under-recognised fallacy.
Philosophy vs. Rhetoric
There is a long history of antagonism between reason and argumentation. Plato assigned his protege, Aristotle, to show how the teachers of rhetoric played tricks upon the rest of us. This led to the creation of the discipline of logic. Plato, through his character Socrates in the dialogue "The Symposium", held that "philosophers" were "lovers of wisdom", from the greek φιλος and της σοφίας for "love of" and " of wisdom". But the wise woman Diotima ("honored by the gods") taught Socrates about love, namely, that love is not having what you desire.
Thus, philosophers are "lovers of wisdom" precisely because they do not possess it. And wisdom minimally should contain the truth, and logic (correct reasoning) is a tool for arriving at the truth? Thus one ought to be able to use logic to compel one's misguided and erring opponents to agree with you, using what Jürgen Habermas calls "the forceless force of reason". Of course, if we "other direct" or weaponize logic in this way, we are using logic to win arguments, not to discover truth, and that is rhetoric and not philosophy. And so, our noble blogger's point:
So, after all that set up, and for all my sympathy and similarity to this group, what spurs this post is that I typically find myself totally opposed to the logic fans in aesthetic and self-presentation. Why should this be?
My guess is it comes from a very different idea of what it is that a general improvement in logical acumen would achieve. The internet logic fan imagines that it would often lead to us agreeing on what is true - by contrast, I imagine it would lead to us agreeing on how much we don't know. They imagine it would knock out possibilities, I imagine it would open them up. The rest of this post is just a quick explanation of what I mean here and why I think that.
If we possessed at least some truth, and were able to identify valid deductive arguments, no doubt we could, and indeed be forced to on pain of being irrational, agree on some things being true.
Logic is, among other things, the study of truth preservation. It gives us tools for discerning when it is that some premises being jointly accepted a conclusion cannot be consistently denied. When an argument has this property of its premises ensuring the truth of its conclusion we say it is valid.
But this is not sufficient.
I think the root of the logic fans' vision for logic DESTROYING their enemies is that with it they shall be making arguments that are valid in this sense. In fact there is usually two sides to this. First, their opponents are shown to be not in the business of arguing at all - what "arguments" they offer are little more than emotive pleas (on that contrast see here). And after that these people are sharply contrasted with the airtight reasoning of a scientifically informed and logically precise debater. They thus envision securing agreement by brushing aside their opponents own perspective, then trapping their enemies in the iron grip of a valid argument, and squeezing conclusions out of them whether they like it or not.
A bit more forceful use of reason, aimed not at laying bare the reasoning for our conclusions, but rather at seeking unilateral cause for dismissing our opponents. This is not agreement, it is "victory"!
But validity is only the beginning of wisdom, not its end. For evidently mere validity by itself is not very interesting - we should like to know not just this relationship between the premises and the conclusion, but also whether or not the premises are in fact true. (An argument which is valid and has true premises is known as a sound argument - by their nature, sound arguments must have true conclusions.) In fact, even that is not enough - for logic to really be dialectically effective in this sort of way, it must offer us not just sound arguments, but sound arguments with premises that are known or sufficiently well established to be true that one's opponents cannot very well reasonably deny them.
This is an interesting point, that logic is not agonistic, it is not a battle for the truth. Instead it is a communal search for truth, for agreement, and that means for an argument to be effective, it must be agreed to at the beginning, with the agreement on premises. In other words, διαλεκτική, Dialectic But, then,
And here is where I think the rub lies - I think it is extremely difficult, vanishingly rare in fact, to have arguments which are (i) interesting, (ii) valid, and (iii) possessing premises that are true and established to be so. By (i) I just mean - on the sort of topics that actually concern us in political and social discussion, coming to contentious conclusions about how we should live or arrange our institutions etc. And by (iii) I mean - having premises that are not only true (hard and rare enough in itself in many cases), but are sufficiently well evidenced such that disputants cannot just as reasonably doubt this premise as accept the conclusion.
What, then, is our valiant blogger's alternative?
So to me the more salient tool in the logician's kit is the counter-model. This is the imaginative skill (also taught in intro logic) of coming up with ways the world could be that would satisfy all of the premises while rendering the conclusion false. This shows us possibilities left open by what is established in our premises, sometimes these are ways the world might be that we may not have been inclined to think about were we not set the task of generating a counter-model. When I envision the world wherein logic is better respected, it is a world wherein this skill is more often deployed.
American Philosopher John Rawls once wrote on the situation where there is no forceful argument in favor of liberal democracy and international law:
Some may find this fact hard to accept. That is because it is often thought that the task of philosophy is to uncover a form of argument that will always prove convincing against all other arguments. There is, however, no such argument.
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples", p. 123
The absence of such arguments is not cause for fear, or rampant relativism. It only means that the force of reason is not what the fanbois of logic on the internet imagine it to be. Logic is not a rhetorical weapon, it is not something that can be used without the consent, agreement, and cooperation of opponents. Which means, ultimately, that we can dismiss Ben Shapiro as a raving emo guy, right?
Amazon Sells "Tiny Home" Kits
Something like this is what comes to mind when I hear "tiny home/house", not necessarily a "mobile home". Although they can be even smaller than this $19k cabin kit.
220 Square Foot Tiny House (compare to $19k cabin which is 292 sq. ft. + the loft)
2 of 3 of the reviews on the $19k cabin are bad, pointing out that it is expensive and requires insulation and more stuff to make it liveable. There are better options out there.
"Needed" for no frills house: solar panels, battery, Starlink, camp cooking equipment or a grill, water source, outhouse or shit pit. DIY insulation probably won't cost a lot for something this size. Maybe you could swipe a couple hundred Tyvek envelopes from the post office to help waterproof it some more. You could use the wooden frame to set up brick/concrete/etc. walls if you want more protection.
Bass is easy
First off, at the most obvious and fundamental level, the statement is simply wrong. No instrument is easy.
But it's good to interpret the opposition as far in their favor as you can go. So I'll move down a level.
I think what most people actually mean to say, when they say this, is 'Bass is easier.' Easier than what? Easier than the little guitar with six strings.
So let's evaluate that interpretation instead.
It's not entirely untrue. There are senses in which it's easier. Almost all bass players (sorry Lemmy) play one note at a time, almost all the time. Six blades often play two or more notes at once.
But does that really make it easier? I would argue not necessarily. Depending on where the two notes are located, etc. But perhaps on a general statistical level it makes things a little easier, considered in isolation. And what about lead playing, supposedly the hardest part? That's single notes, like the bass, only with freer time, no?
A better argument, though, and one that I suspect many people with no musical experience actually rely on in making the judgement, is simply that there are fewer strings. And that's one case where the novice is right and the mid-level student often wrong - fewer strings is way easier, in one sense at least. Because every time you ring one string you need to mute all the others. Fewer strings to mute means easier, in isolation.
Another argument that the less musically experienced might rely on, but not such a strong one in my opinion - most songs you hear have simple bass lines. On the surface, that seems like it translates to easier, at least, if not actually easy. But that's a misunderstanding. Many bass lines are simple not because the instrument itself is easy, but because of ways that it's actually more demanding. It's easier to get away with something melodically complicated but loosely timed on virtually anything besides the Bass. It's much harder to express yourself while still holding down the rhythm section function, as opposed to doing so in free time over a solid rhythm section.
So while the Bass *can* expand beyond the rhythm section functions in the hands of an expert, it's much easier to do that with virtually any other instrument. Very much not easier.
Physicality comes into it too. Six blades are very finely tuned to the size of the folks that tend to buy guitars. And with six strings to worry about, often expecting several to ring at once, this is important. Relatively easy if your hands fit, relatively hard if your hands are larger.
Bass strings aren't really spread much wider. BUT you virtually never need to fret one while another rings further up the board, as is so common on six string. And the frets are more widely spaced, of course. Whether this makes one or another easier or harder though? Entirely dependent on your own dimensions and what you want to do. I can fret cleanly all the way up every Bass I've tried it on, I often can't do that with a six string, especially a 24 fret, at the 24th fret the distance between frets is much less than my finger takes up, it's not impossible to hit the note but it's virtually impossible to do so quickly and reliably. If I center my finger where it's supposed to go, I mute the note. If I press it down just right, behind the 23rd fret and rolling up, that works, but it's slow and awkward.
That's the main point, I think, it's not easier or harder, without context you can't tell. Context is always key.
But the consequences of giving generations of kids a hasty generalization as if it were absolute truth? Well that's another layer to this. There have been some incredible bassists, even as the trajectory has been for it to be where you find the least talented and least capable member of each band.
So I'll leave you with a positive example. Perhaps a slightly older one than you were expecting.
Perhaps one more topical in 2019 than you imagine as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CUeI9funsk [The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again - Studio/Recorded]
Nike Betsy Ross Backlash
Nike Drops ‘Betsy Ross Flag’ Sneaker After Kaepernick Criticizes It
But rather than including a flag with 50 stars as part of its design, the sneaker’s heel featured the 13-star model, a design associated with the Revolutionary War, the Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross and, for some people, a painful history of oppression and racism.
On Tuesday, Nike canceled the release of the sneaker, again plunging headlong into the nation’s culture wars.
The abrupt cancellation came after Colin Kaepernick, the former National Football League quarterback and social justice activist, privately criticized the design to Nike, according to a person with knowledge of the interaction.
Mr. Kaepernick, who signed a lucrative deal to serve as a Nike brand ambassador last year, expressed the concern to the company that the Betsy Ross flag had been co-opted by groups espousing racist ideologies, the person said.
Nike loses [Arizona] factory aid as 'racist trainer' row intensifies
The state's governor had condemned Nike's decision, which was prompted by complaints about its use of an old US flag embraced by white nationalists.
Nike-sponsored sportsman Colin Kaepernick had criticised the trainers, now selling on websites for $1,500.
But governor Doug Ducey said Nike had bowed to political correctness.
The special edition Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July trainer features the Betsy Ross flag.
With a circle of 13 stars representing the first US colonies, the flag was created during the American Revolution. Although opinion is divided over its origins, the flag was later adopted for use by the American Nazi Party.
Mitch McConnell says he will "make the first order" for Nike shoes featuring Betsy Ross flag
A veteran-owned company releases a Betsy Ross flag shirt after Nike controversy
First Female Dalai Lama Does Not Have to be Attractive
Dalai Lama 'deeply sorry' for remarks about women
The Dalai Lama has apologised for controversial comments about the possibility of a woman succeeding him.
Speaking to the BBC last month, the Tibetan spiritual leader said that any future female Dalai Lama should be "attractive".
But a statement from his office apologised for his words, suggesting he had been joking.
"He is deeply sorry that people have been hurt by what he said and offers his sincere apologies," it said.
Dalai Lama. 14th tidbits:
In 2014 and 2016, he stated that Tibet wants to be part of China but China should let Tibet preserve its culture and script.
In 2018, he stated that "Europe belongs to the Europeans" and that Europe has a moral obligation to aid refugees whose lives are in peril. Further he stated that Europe should receive, help and educate refugees but ultimately they should return to develop their home countries.
In March 2019, the Dalai Lama spoke out about his successor, saying that after his death he is likely to be reincarnated in India. He also warned that any Chinese interference in succession should not be considered valid.
California to Ban Natural Hair Discrimination
California set to be first US state to ban hair discrimination
California is set to become the first US state to ban discrimination against natural hair. The new bill, which the Senate passed in April, amends anti-discrimination laws to include "traits historically associated with race" and "blackness". It bars discrimination against black hairstyles in schools and workplaces. California's assembly voted unanimously in favour of the measure on Thursday, sending it to Governor Gavin Newsom's desk for signing into law.
The update to the law comes after years of nationwide reports of black students being sent home from school over braids or natural styles that violated dress code rules. In the workplace, black employees have often reported unfair policies that describe natural hair as unhygienic and unprofessional. The US military had a ban on dreadlocks for women until 2017.
"Professionalism was, and still is, closely linked to European features and mannerisms, which entails that those who do not naturally fall into Eurocentric norms must alter their appearances, sometimes drastically and permanently, in order to be deemed professional," the California bill states. "Hair remains a rampant source of racial discrimination with serious economic and health consequences, especially for black individuals."
