tingilinde

inside out and children's mental health

It turns out the films provide a good common language.

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The movies “treated those uncomfortable emotions as factory settings that are necessary to overall health,” said Lisa Damour, a leading adolescent psychologist, author and speaker who served as a consultant on the second film, and who has written for The New York Times.

That Anxiety can be protective — that she’s useful and means well, even if she’s occasionally on overdrive — is a key lesson imparted by the sequel. And it runs counter to the prevalent idea that we should lead fret-free lives, Damour said, adding, “I cannot tell you how common it is for kids or parents to come to me saying, in a fearful voice, ‘I think I have anxiety,’ and how frequently I need to say, well, of course you do. It’s how you’ve survived to this point.”

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"green" bitcoin mining

It's a scam, of course.

Note they're pivoting to AI training..  yet another scam in the making.

 

 

siege culture

White supremacists intent on burning things down so they can take power.

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The new wave of violent, far-right plots often stem from the writings of James Mason, a neo-Nazi leader who produced a newsletter called “SIEGE” in the 1980s. Mr. Mason, who joined the American Nazi Party as a teenager, pushed for more underground and lethal approaches to achieve white supremacist goals in the United States.

Rather than using the existing political process to implement racist policy, which white supremacist groups, like the Ku Klux Klan, worked to do in the 20th century, Mr. Mason wrote about wanting a “total war” against the system, a tenet of an ideology called “accelerationism.” Mr. Mason and his followers believed that a full collapse of American society was necessary to rebuild it with their extremist platform and “make way for the creation of a white ethnostate,” Mr. Lewis said.

Extremist experts found that today’s interpretation of these writings have manifested in a determination to destroy the energy sector.

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the cornerstone of democracy

I've known Dan Gillmor for about 20 years.  He's been a serious defender of good journalism and democracy and has worn many hats in the journalism world.  He just opened a daily summary covering signal of what's going on.  I've been a beta user and his taste is good.  Highest recommendation and it's free.

Here's the link to the above page.

 

 

a look at the printer used on the space shuttle

Ken Shirriff does another dig.   And it's really heavy..

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The motivation for the teleprinter goes back to the Apollo program. During Apollo missions, the only way to send information to the astronauts was by talking to them over the radio and having the astronauts write down the data. NASA decided that the Space Shuttle should include a mechanism to send text and images to the astronauts, a 78-pound, high-tech fax machine called the Uplink Text & Graphics System (TAGS). A high-resolution grayscale image was sent to the Shuttle as a digital data stream. Onboard the Shuttle, a squat CRT displayed the image one line at a time and a fiber-optic faceplate transferred each line to light-sensitive silver emulsion paper. The paper was developed by passing it over a hot roller at 260ºF for 25 seconds, creating a permanent image.

The one flaw in this plan was that sending the digital image to the Shuttle required the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRS), which due to delays wouldn't be ready until the sixth Shuttle flight. (The TDRS was a space-based replacement for the worldwide network of ground stations that was used during Apollo.) As a result, NASA decided just seven months before the first Shuttle launch that they needed an interim system "for transmission of real-time, flight-plan changes and other operational data to the crew."2

The Shuttle teleprinter is the result of this rushed effort to create a printer that could work over the existing audio channel rather than the digital TDRS satellite. Due to the time pressure, the Shuttle teleprinter needed to be based on an off-the-shelf printer. Thermal and electrostatic printers were rejected due to toxicity and flammability problems. (The Shuttle teleprinter used a roll of yellowish paper, which required a NASA waiver due to its flammability, a concern ever since the Apollo-1 disaster).

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passive solar cooling

There's some work in the area - Greg notes two nice YouTube projects.  Both would have application.  The first strikes me as a nice undergrad engineering project - how do you refine the design (or come up with something better) for low cost manufacturability..

 

trump and covid - a failed response

a tip of the hat to Karrie

 

book banning in utah

State-wide bans now. 

The rightwing loves to instill fear and hate in service of a supposed morality. It should be pointed out that Utah often leads the nation in online pornography consumption.    

Know them by their actions.

 

 

 

an essay on the use of weird

Katy Waldman writing in the New Yorker

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There’s even a hint of caregiving in the left’s language. Weird is the sort of word a parent might use to wave away a child’s anxiety—“A monster in the closet would be pretty weird, huh?” It’s a way of acknowledging a fear without assigning it too much power. And it’s a form of containment. There’s a sense of quarantining this baffling political weirdness away from the rest of the country, not in anything so crazy as a physical structure—no need for that—but simply in a word, a gust of air, some sound attached. The wager of “weird” is that Americans of all stripes have been longing for de-escalation, a cooling hand on their brow, and that they’ll welcome a chance to distance themselves from the perceived fringe. Biden’s Presidency may have offered a measure of stability and sanity to those reeling from the unreality of the Trump years, but his reëlection campaign did not. The country seemed to be sleepwalking toward November as Trump’s rhetoric darkened and the Democratic establishment dismissed clear evidence of their candidate’s decline. As in a nightmare, we all had rigor mortis and couldn’t open our mouths to protest when we were told that these two men represented the best our political system had to offer. Harris, when she moved to the top of the ticket, jolted many people back to life. The fear and confusion aren’t gone, but her candidacy diminishes those feelings, makes them seem silly and insignificant. By running Harris, Democrats are signalling that they refuse to dwell in denial; and, therefore, that they refuse to fight maga on its own fantastical turf. If she wins, the country has a shot at waking up from an extremely weird dream.

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on the terrible mercedes ev fire in korea

In a parking garage for a few days and not charging - the fire did serious damage and has people in the hospitral