tingilinde

a man without principles

Walt Mossberg on Mark Zuckerberg in an interview with Kara Swisher.

go for the transcript.

snip

...

Walt Mossberg
Well, I think the company is toxic. Let’s find another synonym for menace and cancer. They’re toxic. First of all, they don’t follow their own terms of service, which is the minimum. In other words, things they said would not be allowed, they don’t even enforce that. They’re basically lying. They’re doing stuff and denying they’re doing it. And then it comes out. One way or the other, somebody leaks it, or in the case of this whistleblower, she has all these documents. And it’s exhausting, and it’s terrible for the social media industry.

We do have an oligopoly of five giant tech companies. But I think all of the sins of Facebook and all of the controversy around Facebook is really mostly particular to Facebook. And I just think Facebook is the most poorly run of these big platform companies. A long time ago, I was very close to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. They both were happy to be bazillionaires. They both were megalomaniacs, in certain ways. They could be very unpleasant, but they had some principles. They had a red line. In my encounters with Mark Zuckerberg, I’ve never been able to discover any principles.

Kara Swisher
Oh, wow. That’s a big thing to say. Doesn’t have principles — it doesn’t have a red line, presumably, then. There is no red line.

...

 

 

facebook and the coup attempt

 

The Washington Post on what we suspected.

And The New York Times take.

Why do people still use Facebook?  

 

 

 

 

 

 

counting down to halloween

One person's list of the top fifty Halloween songs. 

I agree with her on number one for  a 20th century American Halloween but don't know about other times

 

the french dispatch

I'm a fan of Wes Anderson films.  I'll wait until I can watch The French Dispatch from home.  But it looks promising (based on The New Yorker)

and they made a music video

white supremacists in the military

By most accounts there are many in the military, police and fire departments.  Here's a particularly open one.

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

happy birthday steve!

 

 

Happy Birthday Steve!

 

I hear German chocolate cake pairs well with homemade ice cream.

and, of course Bach!  

 

 

audio processing

It appears the brain may process speech and sound in parallel and simultaneously.

snip

...

According to traditional models of neural processing, when we hear sounds, our auditory system extracts simple features from them that then get combined into increasingly complex and abstract representations. This process allows the brain to turn the sound of someone speaking, for instance, into phonemes, then syllables, and eventually words.

But in a paper published in Cell in August, a team of researchers challenged that model, reporting instead that the auditory system often processes sound and speech simultaneously and in parallel. The findings suggest that how the brain makes sense of speech diverges dramatically from scientists’ expectations, with the signals from the ear branching into distinct brain pathways at a surprisingly early stage in processing — sometimes even bypassing a brain region thought to be a crucial stepping-stone in building representations of complex sounds.

...

 

 

bbq lighters and vaccine delivery

A new design called ePatch with a number of advantages.  Very slick.

snip

...

The researchers, led by Georgia Tech's School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, have developed and tested an innovative method that greatly simplifies the complexity of delivering vaccines, including those for COVID-19, through a handheld electroporator.

While electroporation is commonly employed in the research lab using short electric pulses to drive molecules into cells, the technique currently requires large, complex, and costly equipment, severely limiting its use for vaccine delivery. Georgia Tech's approach does the job using a novel pen-size device that requires no batteries and can be mass produced at low cost

...

 

 

musical historical fiction

Trying to re-create the music of ancient Rome.

you can listen to samples here

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

cleaning up

 

Vaccine mandates are causing teachers who don't believe in science to quit, nurses who don't believe in medicine to quit, and cops who don't believe in public safety to quit. I'm failing to see the downside to this