tingilinde

a good rally

Long rallies are common in indoor high school volleyball where players haven't learned to be clever.  With skill they become less frequent, but are much more dramatic when they happen.  They're even rarer in the sand.  Elite players are very good at "reading" the intention of their opponents and the best have good court sense.  These combine to make long rallies rare.  

Last night a match had one of them.  It's the first video in this piece - full screen.

The world beach tour is split into three skill levels beginning this year.  The Elite 16 is just that - the 16 top ranked players in the world.  Even the early matches have semifinal level play and teams that don't perform are demented to the next lower level while the top teams in the next lower professional level can rise.  There's a third lowest level for beginning professionals. 

 

 

 

the growth of renewables

Renewables grow in the US at the exoense of coal (yay!), but unfortunately natural gas is growing quickly and it's not a solution.

I had hoped the new tension with Russia would accelerate the move to renewables and encourage conservation, but that isn't quite as likely now - not on a meaningful time schedule.

 

 

 

pigs and music

There are some, Stephen Pinker for example,  who claim the ability to make sense of and enjoy music is a uniquely human trait.  Some neurology suggests it's more common.  Here's a piece on pigs.

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When you cringe at shrieking violins in a horror movie or feel your spirit lifted by a buoyant pop song, you’re doing something scientists have rarely observed in the animal kingdom: having different emotional responses to different types of music. Now, pigs are providing compelling new evidence that animals may respond emotionally to music as well. The find may lead to ways to improve their welfare on farms.

“It’s a really neat study” that shows animals are more emotionally attuned to music than people think, says Charles Snowdon, a psychologist and animal behavior expert at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who wasn’t involved with the work. “We’ve been trying to argue this for a decade, so it’s nice to see this empirical work support that.”

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a conversation with margaret atwood

Erza Klein and Margaret Atwood.

transcript here

 

 

trying to rewrite history and destroy democracy

Historian Heather Cox Richardson on today's Republicans..

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hese rights, which previous Supreme Courts said are guaranteed by our Constitution, are enormously popular. Seventy percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. Eighty-nine percent of Americans in 2012 thought birth control was morally acceptable, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that as of 2008, 99% of sexually active American women use birth control in their lifetimes. Even the right to abortion remains popular. According to a 2021 Pew poll, 59% of Americans believe it should be legal in most or all cases.

So how do today’s Republicans square overturning these established rights with the fact that we live in a democracy, in which the majority should rule, so long as it does not crush a minority?

A 2019 speech by then–attorney general William Barr at the University of Notre Dame offers an explanation.

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photogenic streets

The most filmed streets in the US.

 

friendship, blood and genes

How vampire bats manage to live on blood

the stress test

Much of America seems to think Covid is behind us and Republicans have halted funding for testing, vaccines and treatments as well as some long term work.

Meanwhile new variants will appear and we'll be tested.  

And then there's this issue of long Covid..

 

 

deeply corrupt

Clarence Thomas must resign.

Of course he won't because that's who he is.

 

 

facial recognition in war

It's questionable on its own.. now it's being used in a war.  I like the end-use here, but it can be misused and it often works poorly.  A technology that shouldn't; exist imho. 

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Find a photo of a dead Russian soldier on social media. Upload it to facial recognition software. Get an identity match from a database of billions of social media images. Identify the deceased’s family and friends. Show them what happened to the victim of Putin’s war and Ukraine’s defense.

This is one of Ukraine’s strategies in trying to inform Russians, who have limited access to non-state-controlled media and information, about the death being wrought by their president’s invasion. On Wednesday, deputy prime minister and head of the Digital Transformation Ministry in Ukraine, Mykhailo Fedorov, confirmed on his Telegram profile that surveillance technology was being used in this way, a matter of weeks after Clearview AI, the New York-based facial recognition provider, started offering its services to Ukraine for those same purposes. Fedorov didn’t say what brand of artificial intelligence was being used in this way, but his department later confirmed to Forbes that it was Clearview AI, which is providing its software for free. They’ll have a good chance of getting some matches: In an interview with Reuters earlier this month, Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That said the company had a store of 10 billion users’ faces scraped from social media, including 2 billion from Russian Facebook alternative Vkontakte. Fedorov wrote in a Telegram post that the ultimate aim was to “dispel the myth of a ‘special operation’ in which there are ‘no conscripts’ and ‘no one dies.’”

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