A multibillion-dollar radio telescope is moving into its construction phase while still working to raise funding and deal with satellite megaconstellations whose interference “change the game” for their plans.

In a June 29 talk at the annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society, Philip Diamond, director general of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Observatory, announced that the observatory’s council had formally approval plans to move into the construction phase of the radio telescope.

SKA is two separate facilities. SKA-Low, in Western Australia, will eventually be an array of more than 130,000 antennas performing observations at low frequencies. SKA-Mid will feature 197 dishes in South Africa for midrange radio frequencies, including 64 dishes of the existing MeerKAT array there.

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️
@realchrisrufo
BREAKING: The nation's largest teachers union has approved a plan to promote critical race theory in all 50 states and 14,000 local school districts.

The argument that "critical race theory isn't in K-12 schools" is officially dead. //

This vindicates every move made at the state level to fight this. //

Yet, any veteran of the culture wars can tell you that once CRT gets into schools, there will be no getting it out. Preemptively moving to quash this illiberal, racist ideology from infecting curriculums was the right call. That’s how you win these battles. Conversely, lose then by sitting back and waiting for CRT to become so pervasive that it can’t be pushed back on any longer. //

MabDab
an hour ago
Read the memo, the plan, that lumps capitalism in with other forms of oppression. Straight out of Marxist theology. You may not understand the terms in this document, such as anthropocentrism, cisheteropatriarchy and patriarchy, they are attacks on the traditional family unit, the authority and role of the father, the belief that "men need to be men" and act that way and so forth. CRT in this manner is being used to not only cover the topic of racism, but human sexuality and the acceptance of homosexuality and transgender, and that you should consider it too because if you are to believe what they are saying when covering these topics - men often feel like women and have female experiences, you are merely suppressing them.

CRT in this format, is not just about racism, but also indoctrinating males to act and feel like women.

A science YouTuber has won a five-figure bet from a physics professor after he proved a wind-powered car could move faster than the wind while driving downwind.

Derek Muller, who runs the YouTube channel Veritasium, made the bet with Alexander Kusenko, a physics professor at the University of California, after Kusenko messaged him saying that it was impossible for the car to travel faster than the wind propelling it, according to Vice.

So Muller proposed a $10,000 wager with the professor saying that he could prove it. The pair signed an agreement to the bet, which was witnessed by Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Google offers many desirable, easy-to-use, effective features. Going open source is trickier. //

Finding a solution to organizing and safely storing these precious memories is more important than ever, and it's becoming an increasingly large problem to solve. Photos depict a special moment in time, a memory or event that can't be recreated. They are irreplaceable and largely only exist digitally. Because of this, there are few categories of data that suit a free and open self-hosted solution better.

In a piece published by NPR last week, entitled, “Do I Need to Worry About the Delta Variant If I’m Vaccinated?” researchers, other scientists, and even the World Health Organization say that possibility is pretty unlikely. They wrote:

The COVID-19 vaccines are expected to be protective against the new virus variants, according to the World Health Organization.

And those variant (there are several: alpha, delta, but there’s also delta plus) are likely covered by all, current vaccines against the original virus. Here’s the data from the article about the three vaccines in use in the U.S: (emphasis added)

As for the vaccines, one study of the delta variant in Scotland from the University of Edinburgh found that while the variant was associated with a doubling in the risk of hospitalization in those infected in the region, the Pfizer …. vaccine offered a …. 60% protection…. against infection two weeks after the second dose. And a study from Public Health England showed that two doses of the Pfizer vaccine were 88% effective against symptomatic disease from the delta variant.

As for other vaccines, David Montefiori, director of the Laboratory for AIDS Vaccine Research and Development at Duke University Medical Center, is optimistic. Based on research he has conducted that has not yet been published, including the Moderna vaccine, he says that “delta does not look like it will be much of a threat to vaccines.”

Weatherhead has this to say about Johnson & Johnson’s effectiveness for the delta variant: “We just don’t have the data, but that doesn’t mean it’s not efficacious. We know it works against [other variants]. We’re going to have breakthrough infections, but the vaccines really prevent severe disease and death.” //

https://www.kqed.org/news/11879587/do-i-need-to-worry-about-the-delta-variant-if-im-vaccinated

This comes up far too often, so rather than continuing to explain it over and over again, I’m going to try to do a really good job of it once and link to it here.

Learn to get the most out of your ZFS filesystem in our new series on storage fundamentals.

A 3-2-1 strategy means having at least three total copies of your data, two of which are local but on different mediums (read: devices), and at least one copy off-site. //

There is no such thing as a perfect backup system, but the 3-2-1 approach is a great start for the majority of people and businesses. Even the United States government recommends this approach. In a 2012 paper for US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team), Carnegie Mellon recommended the 3-2-1 method in their publication titled: Data Backup Options.

The bottom line is that the objective of folks like Touré is to foster more racial division and to intimate that the U.S. is irredeemably racist. What they fail to acknowledge is the fact that the narrative they perpetuate is an affront to Americans – black and white – who have done the work to move America forward.

Yes, there is still more work to do in the quest for equality. I acknowledged as much in my earlier piece on Independence Day. But the notion that we cannot celebrate the legitimate advancements we have made, because some issues still exist, is not only absurd but counterproductive to what they claim they wish to achieve. Perhaps they are not as serious about their mission as they would have us believe.