Daily Shaarli
February 10, 2022
Samuel Sorie Sesay, one of a dwindling group of West Africans who fought in the British army in World War Two, died last month in Sierra Leone at the age of 101. Ahead of his funeral on Friday, Umaru Fofana looks back at his life.
Some Mazda owners in the Seattle area are stuck with bricked infotainment systems after listening to a particular radio station.
According to the Seattle Times, the problem began on January 30 and afflicted Mazdas from model years 2014 to 2017 when the cars were tuned to the local NPR station, KUOW 94.9. At some point during the day's broadcast, a signal from KUOW caused the Mazdas' infotainment systems to crash—the screens died and the radios were stuck on 94.9 FM.
From there, the infotainment systems became trapped in a rebooting loop, never successfully completing the task. When afflicted owners took their cars to be checked at local Mazda dealers, they were told that the "connectivity master unit" was dead and needed to be replaced.
The snag? A new CMU costs $1,500—if you can find one, which you can't, because of supply chain problems.
The problem, according to Mazda, was that the radio station sent out image files in its HD radio stream that did not have extensions, and it seems that Mazda's infotainment system of that generation needs an extension (and not a header) to tell what a file is. No extension, no idea, and the system gets corrupted.
Emily Jashinsky @emilyjashinsky
"The current surplus of exposed flesh in the public realm has led to a devaluation of women and, paradoxically, to sexual ennui." -Camille Paglia
adidas @adidas
Replying to @goldilocksrocks
We want to celebrate bodies in all their glory and proudly showcase how different we all are 🙌
4:14 PM · Feb 9, 2022
Excess nudity has erased the beauty in modesty, desensitizing sexual desires of a public to whom the naked body has lost its fascination. There’s a distinct difference between being a prude and acknowledging the pendulum has swung too far.
Parents’ bills of rights could still turn out to be gimmicks, but at least it’s an attempt to put parents back in charge of education.
From this article at extremetech.com:
"The problem is, today’s Mars bears little resemblance to the primordial planet it must have been. Mars’ atmosphere is a fraction the density of Earth’s — air pressure at the summit of Mount Everest (the highest point on Earth) is 4.89 PSI, while the air pressure at the bottom of Mars’ Hellas Planitia (a 23,465-foot deep crater) is just 0.168 PSI. In other words, the air pressure at the highest point on our planet is 29x higher than the air pressure at the lowest point on Mars."
IOW, Mars' highest atmospheric pressure is almost 30 times lower than the air pressure at the top of Everest. Just think of how much gas you'd need to bring the surface of the entire planet up to just half the air pressure of Everest's peak - about 2.9PSI.
The left is rolling back the progress we have made in making discrimination unacceptable in our culture and society. //
They are the ones who have implemented a discriminatory racial-spoils system in government and academic institutions throughout the country. Democrats’ racial preferences have much more in common with Jim Crow than what Biden likes to call “Jim Crow 2.0,” referring to benign Republican efforts to ensure election integrity.
Let’s start with President Joe Biden’s announcement that he will consider only a black woman for the U.S. Supreme Court. This is something no private employer is allowed to do: disregard all other qualified job candidates to make a hiring decision based solely on race and sex.
In virtually every other context, such odious behavior would violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans racial and sex discrimination in employment and many other facets of everyday life, including education. That law not only made racial and sex discrimination unlawful, it helped change American society to make such discrimination morally unacceptable, as it should be. //
Many universities — American, Stanford, and Cornell among them — are now establishing segregated “black student-only” housing. Most of us thought the detestable separate-but-equal doctrine was discarded in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. Apparently, we were wrong. Judging from its total inaction, the Biden Justice Department sees nothing wrong in reviving this aspect of a foregone era that we had successfully discarded. //
Modern “progressives” are rolling back the progress we have made in making discrimination unacceptable in our culture and society. They are teaching our young people that discrimination is not only acceptable, but laudable as long as the “right” sex and races benefit.
The next generation is learning that no matter how hard they work, no matter their qualifications, no matter their circumstances, they may be denied a college education, medical treatment, a job, and a host of other benefits based on the color of their skin or how many X chromosomes they have.
So, who is really closer to imposing “Jim Crow 2.0,” one of Biden’s favorite phrases? To answer that question, he and his cohorts need only look in the mirror.
Spinal cord injuries are life-altering, as they prevent the transmission of nerve impulses past the point of injury. That means no sensory inputs make it to the brain, and no signals from the brain make it to the muscles normally controlled by the brain. But improvements in our understanding of neurobiology have raised the hope that we can eventually restore some control over paralyzed limbs.
Some of these efforts focus purely on nerve cells, attempting to get them to grow through the damage at the site of injury and restore a functional spinal cord. Others attempt to use electronics to bypass the injury entirely. Today, there was very good news for the electronics-focused effort: researchers have designed a spinal implant that can control the leg muscles of paralyzed individuals, allowing those individuals to walk with assistance within hours of the implant being activated. //
An alternative to that type of biological repair is what you might consider an electronic bypass. In its most sophisticated form, a bypass would involve an implant that registers neural activity, located either in the brain or in the spinal cord closer to the brain than the injury. This is then paired with some sort of hardware—potentially another implant—on the far side of the injury that stimulates the nerves based on the information read by the other implant.
A less sophisticated version of this is to simply have preprogrammed behaviors you want to control, such as the leg movements involved in walking. That is the approach used in the recent work. But, as will become very clear, "less sophisticated" leaves a wide-open space for some very sophisticated work. //
The results were astonishing. Prior to activating the implant, none of the three participants could initiate any sort of muscle activity when attempting to take a step. The same day that the model was trained, all of the subjects could take steps on a treadmill if they were supported. The model was able to generate the right series of currents to stimulate the leg muscles appropriately.
Out for a walk and more
With three days of fine-tuning, the participants were able to walk around a room if given sufficient support. Eventually, they were able to stand unaided and walk supported only by a walker—their legs were controlled via an implant in their abdomen, which responded to triggers on the handles of the walker. One volunteer was even able to go up stairs.
Separate programs were also developed that allowed the subjects to ride recumbent bicycles or to paddle a kayak.
One striking thing is that two of the subjects actually regained the ability to exert a bit of voluntary muscle control in their formerly paralyzed limbs. Apparently, a bit of weak connectivity was still present but unable to provide a signal strong enough to trigger muscle activity. With extended activity, those weak connections were gradually strengthened, providing a complete pathway from brain to muscle.