Lou Katz @lou@entropyservice.com

Thank you for contacting the abyss; your scream is very important to us.

any diode can be a light-emitting diode, once

Mask bans are bad even if only targeted to law breakers because they:

- Stigmatize masks and increase harassment of mask wearers

- Let police (who aren't doctors) subjectively decide who can wear a mask for health reasons

- Increase profiling

- Violate first amendment rights

When I was a university student, I applied for unpaid internships to practice my interviewing skills. If I received an offer, I always declined. I did this to get back at exploitative companies by wasting their time while practicing my interviewing skills for free.

❝Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.❞ — Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)

OH WAIT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE

• Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge.

• Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because she was a woman, so she said to heck with that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard.

• Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

• Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is made of (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne — after telling her not to publish).

• Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work.

• Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard, and is often credited with breaking the glass ceiling for women in the Harvard science department and in astronomy, as well as inspiring entire generations of women to take up science.

• Cecilia Payne is awesome and everyone should know her.

(OP: Matthew Gardner)

The fake IRS scammers found my business number, so in case anyone needs to hear it: The IRS will not call you to tell you that you owe back taxes. The police will not call you and tell you that they have a warrant for your arrest. You cannot pay bail via gift cards over the phone.

Be safe out there 💜

A federal appellate court rules that California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code violates the First Amendment, a victory for free speech and privacy.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/court-california-try-privacy-law-not-online-censorship
#privacy #censorship

NYT continues to be heavy on pro-Trump BS, light on news

"In a video circulated to members of the #police protective association via email, Grammas said I’m sure if you’re like me, you don’t want to have #biometric data in the hands of people that you don’t know,” https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/nfl-facial-recognition-policy-upsets-las-vegas-police-union-3128202/

Ukrainian armed forces are capturing more than 100 or 150 Russian soldiers every day, citing sources in the Ukrainian government

80% of all prisoners of war captured during the Kursk operation are conscripts - 18 year old Russian kids drafted into the military.

They, along with the Ukrainians, should be in school or raising a family.

ALL BECAUSE OF ONE MAN!
#AureFreePress #News #press #headline #Ukraine #Russia

“For years, #CrowdTangle has represented an industry best practice for real-time platform transparency. It has become a lifeline for understanding how #disinformation, hate speech, and voter suppression spread on Facebook, undermining civic discourse and democracy,” https://apnews.com/article/meta-crowdtangle-research-misinformation-shutdown-facebook-977ece074b99adddb4887bf719f2112a

When the company calls their home appliances "smart", what I hear is:

- they spent money on features I don't care about
- those features will be worse than standalone devices but will drive them out of market (looking at you TVs)
- the appliance is more likely to break
- my data is likely being sold to advertisers
- when the company loses interest in it and cut support, I will need to buy a new device

So no, I don't want "smart" home appliances.

When CHP was originally confronted about their lack of compliance with #AB481, the state's #military equipment transparency law, they initially said they aren't subject to state law. Now they say they are "working on it". https://lapublicpress.org/2024/08/chp-violating-state-law-equipment-ab481/

The trend of building surveillance into all new smart TVs is "incredibly invasive and little understood,” EFF’s Jacob Hoffman-Andrews told @arstechnica. "Nobody wants a snooping and snitching television, but lately that's all you can buy.” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/tv-industrys-ads-tracking-obsession-is-turning-your-living-room-into-a-store/

Expecting data brokers to care about securing the data they so casually collect, buy, collate and otherwise acquire is pointless. None of them really do, and almost every breach involving a data broker shows this. By definition, their businesses largely rely on collecting records that they already view as public and that this entitles them to collect, resell, etc said data. If that is the fundamental organizing idea of your business model, how much are you going to care about protecting it from mass theft?

Fantastic! Now “putsch" will enter the far right lexicon and join other words they don't actually know the meaning of -- right along with "Marxist" and "commie.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/opinion/election-dnc-convention.html