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| https://futurism.com/the-byte/new-artificial-sun-china |
Just some of the news today. Still in holiday mode but working ahead on the blog and doing some fiction writing, which was mostly making notes.
Originally, I had this entry put together just to share about the impeachment, though I like some of the other stories about missing stars and alien civilization, technology holding students back, and the artificial sun fusion reactor created by the Chinese.
But then, this FOX NEWS story came out.
I love this story.
Suck it FOX NEWS.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/12/26/0222209/fox-news-is-now-a-threat-to-national-security
'Fox News Is Now a Threat to National Security' (wired.com)
Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.The network's furthering of lies from foreign adversaries and flagrant disregard for the truth have gotten downright dangerous. Garrett M. Graff, writing for Wired earlier this month:Monday's split-screen drama, as the House Judiciary Committee weighed impeachment charges against President Trump and as the Justice Department's inspector general released a 476-page report on the FBI's handling of its 2016 investigation into Trump's campaign, made one truth of the modern world inescapable: The lies and obfuscations forwarded ad infinitum on Fox News pose a dangerous threat to the national security of the United States. The facts of both dramas were clear to objective viewers: In the one instance, there's conclusive and surprisingly consistent evidence that President Trump pushed Ukraine to concoct dirt on a domestic political rival to affect the 2020 presidential election, and in the other, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the FBI was proper to investigate Trump's dealings with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign.
But that set of facts is not what anyone who was watching Fox News heard. Instead, Fox spent the night describing an upside-down world where the president's enemies had spun a web of lies about Trump and Ukraine, even as Horowitz blew open the base corruption that has driven every attack on the president since 2016. Sean Hannity, who had long trumpeted the forthcoming inspector general report and expected a thorough indictment of the behavior of former FBI director James Comey and other members of the "deep state," had a simple message for his viewers during Fox's Monday night prime time: "Everything we said, everything we reported, everything we told you was dead-on-center accurate," he said. "It is all there in black and white, it's all there." Except they weren't right and it wasn't there. But Fox News' viewers evidently were not to be told those hard truths -- they were to be kept thinking that everything in their self-selected filter bubble was just peachy keen.
Over on Fox Business, Lou Dobbs said the mere fact that the IG found no political bias in the FBI's investigation of Trump and Russia in 2016 was de facto proof of the power of the deep state. John Harwood, long one of Washington's most respected conservative voices in journalism, summed up Fox's approach Monday night simply: "Lunacy." It's worse than lunacy, though. Fox's bubble reality creates a situation where it's impossible to have the conversations and debate necessary to function as a democracy. Facts that are inconvenient to President Trump simply disappear down Fox News' "memory hole," as thoroughly as George Orwell could have imagined in 1984. The idea that Fox News represents a literal threat to our national security, on par with Russia's Internet Research Agency or China's Ministry of State Security, may seem like a dramatic overstatement of its own but this week has made clear that, as we get deeper into the impeachment process and as the 2020 election approaches, Fox News is prepared to destroy America's democratic traditions if it will help its most important and most dedicated daily viewer. The threat posed to our democracy by Fox News is multifaceted: First and most simply, it's clearly advancing and giving voice to narratives and smears backed and imagined by our foreign adversaries. Second, its overheated and bombastic rhetoric is undermining America's foundational ideals and the sense of fair play in politics. Third, its unique combination of lies and half-truths has built a virtual reality so complete that it leaves its viewers too misinformed to fulfill their most basic responsibilities as citizens to make informed choices about the direction of the country.
House Impeaches President Trump For Abuse of Power, Obstruction of Congress
Missing Stars Could Point To Alien Civilizations, Scientists Say
Missing Stars Could Point To Alien Civilizations, Scientists Say (cnet.com)
Posted by BeauHD from the something-is-missing dept
Astronomers compared old views of the sky with what we see today and found that at least 100 stars appear to have vanished, or were perhaps covered up. While they've seen no signs of aliens just yet, they say parts of space where multiple stars seem to disappear could be the best places to look for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). CNET reports:On March 16, 1950, astronomers at the U.S. Naval Observatory pointed a telescope roughly in the direction of the constellation Lupus the wolf and took a picture. When scientists look at that same patch of sky today, something is missing, and it could be evidence of something else lurking out there. Back in 2016, researchers in Sweden reported that a star had been lost. One of the roiling distant suns visible in that USNO image from the previous century could no longer be seen, even with the more advanced and sensitive digital sky surveys in use today.
The team published a paper on the discovery, but called it "very uncertain" at the time, resolving to do more follow-up work and to continue scouring old USNO observations for other celestial objects that seem to have gone missing. Three years later, it's still unclear what happened to that star spotted in 1950, but the team behind the "Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations" (Vasco) project now says they've found a hundred more missing stars like it by comparing old and new observations."Unless a star directly collapses into a black hole, there is no known physical process by which it could physically vanish," explains a new study published in the Astronomical Journal and led by Beatriz Villarroel of Stockholm University and Spain's Instituto de AstrofÃsica de Canarias. "The implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations."
Facebook is Building an Operating System So it Can Ditch Android
Harvard CS50 Team: We 'Feel More Comfortable' About Harshly Punishing Cheaters
Tesla Is Nerfing Autopilot In Europe To Comply With New Regulations
Judge Rules Edward Snowden Can't Profit From His Book
Worried About 5G's Health Effects? Don't Be
How Classroom Technology is Holding Students Back
How Classroom Technology is Holding Students Back (technologyreview.com)
Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Schools are increasingly adopting a "one-to-one" policy of giving each child a digital device -- often an iPad -- and most students in the U.S. now use digital learning tools in school. There's near-universal enthusiasm for technology on the part of educators. Unfortunately, the evidence is equivocal at best. Some studies have found positive effects, at least from moderate amounts of computer use, especially in math. But much of the data shows a negative impact. It looks like the most vulnerable students can be harmed the most by a heavy dose of technology -- or, at best, not helped. Why are these devices so unhelpful for learning? Various explanations have been offered. When students read text from a screen, they absorb less information than when they read it on paper, for example. But there are deeper reasons, too. Unless we pay attention to these, we risk embedding a deeper digital divide.
Playing With Weapons Was a 'Normal' Part of Prehistoric Childhood, Study Finds
Vivaldi To Change User-Agent String To Chrome Due To Unfair Blocking
President Trump Officially Adds a New Branch to the U.S. Military: Space ForcePresident Trump Officially Adds a New Branch to the U.S. Military: Space Force (bbc.com)
The BBC reports:President Donald Trump has officially funded a Pentagon force focused on warfare in space -- the U.S. Space Force.
The new military service, the first in more than 70 years, falls under the U.S. Air Force. The funding allocation was confirmed on Friday when the president signed the $738bn (£567bn) annual U.S. military budget. The launch of the Space Force will be funded by an initial $40m for its first year. Those figures indicate that Space Force will now receive $1 out of every $18,450 in the U.S. military budget -- or .0054 percent. Here's what that looks like as a pie chart. Newsweek's report includes the president's remarks at the signing ceremony:"That is something really incredible. It's a big moment. That's a big moment, and we're all here for it. Space. Going to be a lot of things happening in space." The president added: "Because space is the world's newest warfighting domain. Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital. And we're leading, but we're not leading by enough. But very shortly, we'll be leading by a lot." As noted by the BBC, the department's mission is not intended to blast troops into space, but will focus on protecting American assets like satellites from hostile attacks. The creation of the Space Force comes as China and Russia are increasingly focusing on the skies above, it noted. The Space Force website says responsibilities include "developing military space professionals, acquiring military space systems, maturing the military doctrine for space power." In response to the news, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted "Starfleet begins." Good News For Climate Change: India Gets Out of Coal and Into Renewable Energy GM Car Executive Says Self-Driving Cars Are the Only Way Forward IBM Research Created a New Battery That May Outperform Lithium-Ion, Doesn't Use Conflict Minerals Vox Media Fires Hundreds of Freelance Writers, Blaming California's 'Gig Economy' Law Vaping-Related Lung Injuries Declining, As CDC Confirms Vitamin E Acetate As Main Culprit Earth's Magnetic North Pole Changes Time Zones, Just Keeps Drifting Atari's Home Computers Turn 40 Many Security-Critical Military Systems Are Now Using Linux 'We Tested Ring's Security. It's Awful' https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/12/21/2155244/china-could-be-turning-on-its-artificial-sun-fusion-reactor-soon China Could Be Turning On Its 'Artificial Sun' Fusion Reactor Soon (newsweek.com)
"China is about to start operation on its 'artificial sun' -- a nuclear fusion device that produces energy by replicating the reactions that take place at the center of the sun," writes Newsweek.
schwit1 shared their report:If successful, the device could edge scientists closer to achieving the ultimate goal of nuclear fusion: near limitless, cheap clean energy. The device, called HL-2M Tokamak, is part of the nation's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak project, which has been running since 2006. In March, an official from the China National Nuclear Corporation announced it would complete building HL-2M by the end of the year. The coil system was installed in June and since then, work on HL-2M has gone "smoothly," the Xinhua News Agency reported in November. Duan Xuru, head of the Southwestern Institute of Physics, which is part of the corporation, announced the device will become operational in 2020 at the 2019 China Fusion Energy Conference, the state news agency said. He told attendees how the new device will achieve temperatures of over 200 million degrees Celsius. That's about 13 times hotter than the center of the sun. Previous devices developed for the artificial sun experiment reached 100 million degrees Celsius, a breakthrough that was announced in November last year. |
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1912.27 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1637 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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