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Journal Journal: Which side of the abortion debate is racist again?

My current job has me driving quite a bit; on the order of around 25,000 miles annually. I get a lot of time to myself to think while I'm driving, and I see a lot of billboards. I noticed something a while ago about all the anti-abortion billboards though, that I have yet to see an exception to.

Comment Re:That old idea again (Score 1) 83

Those "very special" use cases are actually fairly common. I routinely deal with data structures in software I write that are read-mostly: large data tables that are accessed in the inner loop (so need fast access) but whose data is updated infrequently (anywhere from minutes to days between changes, and often the changes are in batches so many changes can be applied in one operation). Being able to put them in compressed memory would free up a lot of normal memory for things that do actively change, which would speed up the application noticeably.

I don't think CRAM is a solution to the current memory price crunch, but it's certainly an interesting idea. The Redis cache software, for example, would probably benefit highly from higher capacity. And of course the same techniques can be adapted to flash/SSD drives where the memory itself isn't necessarily the speed bottleneck.

Submission + - Audacious space heist aims to bring home bits of mysterious martian moon (science.org)

sciencehabit writes: In 1543, Portuguese merchants caught in stormy winds ran aground on Tanegashima, a verdant island enveloped by crystal-blue waters just south of the Japanese mainland. To those living there, these sailors—the first Europeans known to set foot in Japan—were nothing short of aliens from a distant land, bringing with them strange customs, an unfamiliar language, and new technology.

Nearly 5 centuries later, the island is once again serving as a bridge to an alien world. On 20 October, a rocket will blast off from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA’s) Tanegashima Space Center, flinging a spacecraft the size of a car to Mars. When it arrives, it’ll swoop around the planet before landing on a lumpy island floating above it. And that’s when the real drama begins.

We live in an age of space heists. In recent years, the United States and Japan have retrieved material from several asteroids with smash-and-grab spacecraft. After reaching an asteroid this summer, China is set to return samples from it next year, and it recently conducted the first sample return from the far side of the Moon.

But Japan’s $350 million Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is going to do something even more audacious: Fly to Phobos (ancient Greek for “fear”), one of the two small, battered moons of Mars, and land on the roughly Manhattan-size body not once, but twice. Using two novel extractors, MMX will gather several tablespoons’ worth of material and return the treasure to Earth in 2031. “Phobos will be the second best known moon in the Solar System,” says Matija Cúk, a research scientist at the SETI Institute.

Those precious few grams of material could resolve the mystery of Phobos’s origin—and, potentially, that of its diminutive partner, Deimos (“dread”). Scientists are split on whether the moons are captured asteroids or the consolidated remnants of material thrown up by a long-ago martian impact. But regardless of their genesis, MMX researchers say it’s likely they have since picked up a dusting of material blasted off Mars itself. “This is not going to be just a Phobos sample return mission,” says Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, which built one of MMX’s sample extractors. “It’s going to be Phobos and Mars.”

Comment Re:This is the practice since 2019 (Score 1) 69

Pretty sure whatever he died from came from bats. Or hamsters

  1. 'She', not 'he', AIUI. I can assure you from personal experience that anatomically Russians are indistinguishable in all important respects from other humans.
  2. Or more likely marnosets. The commonest vector for plague in this region is the mamoset. I'm not even sure hamsters are found within several thousands km of this area.
  3. The disease has a long history in this area. A recent article : "Lethal plague outbreaks in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago" https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.1038%2Fs41586... Nature Vol654 697, 18 June 2026
      "Here we describe early plague strains that are associated with two phases of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, beginning from about 5,500 years ago. These outbreaks occur across four hunter-gatherer cemeteries, with a 39% detection rate for plague infection. By reconstructing kinship pedigrees, we show that small familial groups were affected, consistent with human-to-human spread of disease, and that the first outbreak occurred within a single generation. The infections appear to have resulted in acute mortality, especially among children (aged 8 to 11 years)."

Comment Re:We're all slightly resistent anyway (Score 1) 69

We're all the descendents of the people who for whatever genetic reason survived the plagues in the past and thats why plaque hasn't reoccured as an epidemic since the middle ages.

Except - that was our (mostly) ancestors acquiring a degree of immunity to a strain of the bacterium circulating 250 and more years ago.

It's fairly unlikely that current wild-type strains are the same strain.

Bacteria do evolve in the wild, you know. (Everything evolves in the wild.)

Comment Re:Wake me when they actually shift (Score 2) 90

The bigger you are, the harder it is to turn the ship in an emergency. See Titanic.

At some point the inertia of change isn't worth it, as you suggested. It is possible, but is it worth it?

The last way to look at this is a way to start the process of diversifying our Tech holdings. Windows, Office, Adobe, VMWare etc. But here is my take, STEAM is showing the way out. We're not there yet, but the tide appears to be turning (to keep the nautical terms going).

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