briandon

Rarely submit to HN, but I regularly enjoy content created by lots of interesting-but-virtually-unknown people and today seemed like the day to try to do my part to help at least one of them find a bigger audience.

Entertaining dive into hands-on-wrench, nitty-gritty tangible reality where this guy seems to have gone a bit out of his head over some flat washers. He starts out with a pair of calipers, progresses to 2 types of micrometer, and even tries his hand at probing them with an analog tool with dials.

At least one decades-old study that had purported to show that the herbicide glyphosate posed no health (esp cancer) risk to humans was retracted in late 2025 (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/climate/glyphosate-roundu...). Glyphosate may be applied multiple times in a season, both to control weeds but also onto the actual desired crop (i.e. the stuff that gets turned into food for humans and for other animals) as a desiccant a week or two pre-harvest. The official line is that glyphosate that isn't absorbed directly by leaves and other above-ground plant tissues "tightly binds" to soil and is quickly and completely broken down by soil bacteria, though it is also admitted that plant roots can absorb glyphosate and that it can subsequently be transmitted throughout plants. So I would not discount the possibility that some level of glyphosate accumulation in the soil and bioaccumulation in food crops could also be occurring alongside residues from spraying.

In other words, dietary fiber in general or specific forms (e.g. Metamucil aka Psyllium husk) could be effective in lowering CRC risk or could have been so in the past but consumption of real-world dietary fiber in the current era in which glyphosate-based herbicides are in increasingly wide use could now be increasing cancer risks.

Someone who writes up a listicle about dealing with foolish people is more likely than not a fool themselves.

Context, also from arstechnica:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/09/covid-anti-viral-drug...

And the MP in question (Caroline Dinenage) just so happens to reportedly be the spouse of "Major General John Mark Lancaster" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lancaster,_Baron_Lancaste...] who, from June 2018 to July 2020, was the deputy commander of 77th Brigade [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/77th_Brigade_(United_Kingdom)#...] a British military information warfare unit that among other activities played a reluctantly, likely only partially-acknowledged role in the UK's covid lockdowns (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/29/armys-informatio...).

Oatmeal (if unsweetened/unflavored) has about the same GI as orange juice or cake made from some Betty Crocker boxed cake mixes and is just slightly lower-GI than the American formulation of Coca-Cola (see #333 Oatmeal (Canada), GI value of 54 ± 4 in the table at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...).

I think oatmeal and other high-GI foods are promoted as low-GI in hopes of helping wean diabetics and pre-diabetics off of even worse foods (e.g. something really bad like powdered donuts), akin to how methadone is used to try to help heroin addicts. But genuine low-GI foods would be things like eggs, cheese, or chicken breast (all with nearly 0 GI) or some raw veggies like raw broccoli or the greens in a leafy salad (in the neighborhood, roughly, of 10-20 GI). Cooking low-GI vegetables like broccoli defeats the purpose and raises its GI to around the same value as oatmeal.

From TA:

  Jerath said the differences aren’t about technical skill, 
  but about listening to patients and choosing appropriate 
  care. Previous studies point to differences in the way 
  that female physicians communicate and engage with 
  patients.

  Overall, patients experienced complications 9% of the time 
  when treated by female surgeons and 10.2% of the time when 
  treated by male surgeons.

And:

  Another study published in JAMA Surgery on Wednesday 
  looked at more than 100,000 patients in Sweden who’d had 
  surgery to remove their gallbladders.  Female surgeons had 
  longer operation times, but their patients had shorter 
  hospital stays and less invasive surgeries.
  
  Male surgeons spent a mean of eight minutes less per 
  operation compared with women, even after matching similar 
  patients, surgeries and hospitals. Complications including 
  bleeding, perforations of the intestine or bowel, bile 
  duct lesions, leakage and abscesses occurred nearly 30% 
  more often for male surgeons.

The goal is to compel the use of biometrics and personal, always-on and always-online, devices (e.g. phones) that double as personal tracking devices.

To perform even mundane functions, you will need to provide biometrics (via scans) or check-in with a device tied to you. Facial recognition, gait recognition, etc. will catch anyone venturing about without a device or one genuinely powered down.

Once you're banned from a service or your access is reduced/restricted/modified in some undesirable way, for wrong-think or wrong-speech or stepping outside your house during a lockdown or straying beyond the borders of your designated ULEZ geofence or consuming too many meat calories over a certain period, there will be no way to create alt accounts and nobody else will dare to allow you to share their access or act on your behalf for fear of incurring the same penalties.

This is truly where we're heading unless enough people wake up and stop going with the 2 steps forward, 1 step back flow.

From TA:

  Historically, vultures were widespread in India. But 
  between the 1990s and early 2000s their numbers plummeted 
  by more than 90%, from around 40m. The cause was 
  diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug that farmers began 
  using to treat their cattle. Though the drug was harmless 
  to both cows and humans, birds that consumed animals 
  treated with diclofenac suffered from kidney failure and 
  died within weeks.

The piece doesn't mention why those farmers were frequently administering diclofenac to their cows, how the vultures had been able to access dead cow flesh in large volumes up to that point, or anything about the structure of cow ownership in India. The piece is a monocle-wearing version of a "Banish Chin Wrinkles Forever Using This Weird Trick!" clickbait junk article linked via a photo of a woman holding a bell pepper against one ear and is emblematic of why I personally dislike glorified content mills like The Economist.

From what I can ascertain via a quick look around the Internet, in broad strokes, the people using diclofenac on their cows are/were small-holder (as in owning one or two or a handful of cows) dairy farmers who rely on their cows to produce milk that is consumed or used to produce other dairy products largely for their own households and maybe selling or trading a little surplus. They are/were using it treat mastitis. There are alternative NSAIDs (e.g. meloxicam) that are reportedly effective for the same purposes but less toxic to the vultures. I do not know whether alternative NSAIDs are as readily available as diclofenac, which is still available from pharmacies for human use after veterinary use was banned.

Cattle in the region could be dosed up to the gills with diclofenac or one of the other toxic-to-vultures NSAIDs without crashing the vulture population, however, if vultures didn't have access to large amounts of dead cow flesh. The slaughter of cows and the operation of slaughterhouses in that part of the world is tied up with religious and political issues unique to the region. You can find articles about the problem if you don't care for this one (from 2016): https://www.thedairysite.com/articles/4310/how-does-indias-s...

TLDR: Many sick/dying/knackered cows are abandoned by subsistence/small-scale dairy farmers rather than being slaughtered and processed for meat, leather, etc. and that's how they end up getting consumed by vultures. Larger dairy operations exist and are more able to make arrangements for their animals to be slaughtered, though political opposition and interference was (at least according to thedairysite.com, in 2016) increasing.

Sidebar recs are there, but YouTube injected a plea to turn watch history back on, an oversized block with the header "Recommendations not quite right?", followed by "When you turn on watch history you'll get more personalized recommendations." and two buttons: "Leave history off" and "Turn on history". That notification had an "X" at the top right corner to close/hide it, but the "Got it, we won't show you this hint again." message that showed when I opted not to enable watch history had no way to close or hide it.

Yes. This just began today, even though I've had watch history off for a long time, such a long time that I don't recall turning it off.

Out of curiosity, I briefly turned watch history back on and "Home" (the YouTube page that shows a mix of content you've viewed and content YT hopes you will view) returned to normal. Then I switched it back off, reloaded "Home" and got a blank page with a plea to enable watch history.

It seems as though YouTube tracks and records users' activity on the site regardless of whether or not they assent to having their watch history recorded, but wants users to explicitly assent to being tracked and having their activity recorded before YT will provide their (marginally useful in my experience) 'personalized recommendations'.

I've re-read the comment to which you're replying a couple of times to make sure I didn't missing something myself. AFAICT, they weren't questioning the existence of people who cannot afford PCs or gaming consoles (the thrust of your reply). They were expressing surprise at the idea, possibly widespread, that merely owning a PC or a gaming console constituted some sort of surefire path to generating income for their owner.

Stephanie Chin and her husband should tag themselves as well. The AirTags (two apiece, as with their child) can be hung from strings worn around their necks or on bands around their waists, under their clothing. Then, the adults could track each other and their child could track each of them.

And easily physically removable batteries, which used to be the norm and are still available for some devices (like the Nokia C30).

It isn't mere coincidence that device manufacturers have made it impossible to power off mobile phones (short of refusing to charge a device) and impossible to positively disconnect ripe-for-abuse subsystems like the microphone(s) or cameras at the same time that governments and other entities are using them as tracking devices.

Her deep involvement in the WEF (multiple roles, one as head of a WEF "Future of Work" project and another as a member of a media/entertainment/etc. WEF steering committee) is starkly at odds with Elon's own recent rhetoric against globalism, ESG, etc.

Anyone interested in Fusus, which appears to be aggregating and orchestrating sharing of live surveillance cam video feeds, may also be interested in Flock (nationwide coordination of automated license plate reader aka ALPR systems): https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/how-to-pump-the...

CO2, whether from fossil fuel combustion or respiration (e.g. part of your and my exhaled breath, day and night) becomes plant tissue. Land plants, algae in the oceans, the herbivorous content of your salad, the flowers in your garden, etc.

"Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds" https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...

The first episode of a new season of Tim Hunkin's fantastic Secret Life of Components series is debuting on YouTube this Thursday, March 30th!

In addition to concerns relating to carbon dioxide levels, when I contemplate the push for ever-more-tightly-sealed homes and particularly smaller homes with lower ratios of internal air volume to internal surface area (of walls, built-ins like cabinetry, and furniture), the issues stemming from outgassing of volatile organics from the adhesives and sealants as well as from the materials (solid wood became plywood with wood veneering, became sawdust-and-binder with plastic faux-wood veneer, etc.) now composites made of multiple substances and multiple binders and glues.

Some years back, "sick building syndrome" was a prominent topic of discussion and there was a push for fresh air, windows that opened, etc. but this seems to have largely dropped off the radar, afaict.

Driving through a park is already prohibited. The initiative is describing paved roadways.

In Oxford, the ability to drive on particular existing streets (streets, not parkland) is to be turned into a privilege, allegedly at certain times on certain days, and those who use those existing roadways without having new, specific permits will be automatically fined.

From the article:

Officials in Oxford approved a plan last year to install “traffic filters,” which would limit access on six roads in the city during certain times of day. The filters are cameras, not physical barriers, that take photos of vehicles’ license plates. Fines are then issued to those without a permit.

In the most-detailed example of such initiatives described in the article, the steps taken in Oxford include ALPR-camera-triggered automated fines for driving on certain roadways at certain times of certain days to those "without a permit" (who is eligible for the special permits, how eligibility is determined, etc. is not discussed) and actual blocking of other streets using bollards (and heavy planters and other obstacles).

Pointing out that the authorities implementing such schemes are attempting to reduce individual freedom of movement and action is factual, not a conspiracy theory.

https://archive.is/eShDu

Thank you.

This post, a link to a peer-reviewed paper published in mid-January 2023 ("SARS-CoV-2 spike mRNA vaccine sequences circulate in blood up to 28 days after COVID-19 vaccination"), has been flagged.

This action is typical of the efforts, top-down and bottom-up, to suppress open discussion of the risks and the harm and suffering caused by many aspects of the responses to covid-19.

To the flaggers: you are abusing this site's flagging functionality, most probably in an attempt to prevent the dissemination of valid scientific research that has a real bearing on public health decision-making. Your behavior is disgraceful.

Making cells in your body produce an antigen that stays rooted within those cells and causes them to be destroyed is risky business. There are reasonable applications, like products selectively taken up by cancer cells that cause them to be targeted for elimination by the patient's immune system, for these techniques. And wider applications for products that cause a patient's cells to produce non-antigenic materials. I'm a proponent of mRNA therapies.

The mRNA (and adenovirus-vector) covid shots, however, indiscriminately cause (healthy) cells to produce and display antigens (the transmembrane-anchored modified covid spike) and, intentionally, kick off an immune response that gets those cells killed. I'm not a proponent of this specific type of pharmaceutical product.

The mRNA-based covid shots (and the adenovirus-vector covid shots) are a wee bit different in how they operate than pre-covid vaccines.

Modified covid spike proteins are produced by host (i.e. a vaccinee's) cells. The spike proteins are anchored within the cells but "poke out" through the cellular membranes so they're able to elicit an immune system response.

The cells expressing the mod-spike are ultimately destroyed. If you review pop-sci / marketing materials produced by Pfizer and Moderna and government agencies and non-profits who promoted the shots, the fate of these cells will be glossed over, but that's what happens.

This is why it was important that the contents of the jabs stayed in the muscle tissue near the injection site and the process of translating all of the vax mRNA into mod-spike be rapid. If vax mRNA travelled around via the circulatory system and was taken up by cells in, say, the walls of blood vessels throughout the body or cells in the heart or pericardium or in other tissues, then some cells in those locales would be destroyed and, if enough cells in the wrong place at the wrong time were destroyed this way, bad things could happen. Observing vax mRNA persisting or existing weeks and weeks post-administration is not good for this (and additional) reasons.

As Campbell asked, why has it been left to Danish researchers (who were doing Hepatitis C testing and decided to tack on an assay for covid jab mod-spike mRNA) to look into these questions? Why haven't Moderna or Pfizer undertaken large-scale studies of this type? Why haven't they been mandated by large regulatory agencies in the USA, UK, et al.; Japan; etc.? Why haven't well-funded researchers in those nations done similar work?

We're so far downstream from the initial rollout that nobody seems to recall the blanket assurances that all of the mRNA in the shots would be taken up and translated into modified spike proteins in a very short period given by health authorities and putative experts during the height of the coercion campaigns.

It's much the same as with the issue of biodistribution. Most have forgotten why we were promised the contents of one of these shots remained at the injection site and how the practice of aspiration of the needle (done in Denmark, after concerns were raised, but rarely done elsewhere) was pooh-poohed. The same individuals and entities preached the stays-in-the-arm gospel and derided anyone who raised concern or produced research results indicating wider distribution, via the vasculature, throughout recipients' bodies.

The same people who promulgate the idea that VAERS and the Yellow Card system and analogous institutions are now honeypots for fake reports from Russian bots or the "Science Truster' bogeyman du jour.

Oh well. Spilled milk at this point. The revelations will continue to trickle out for the foreseeable future. Turnover in the upper echelons of regulatory and funding bodies and in academic biomed research will gradually loosen more tongues. Eventually, there may be large lawsuits and settlements. We will see.

Was that blog post written by GPT?

It reads like SEO chaff constructed by a nonhuman to tick a box and have something, however inane, on a recent 'hot' topic.

I think that this is the paper mentioned in the linked article:

An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeolog...

The lead author is Bennett Bacon, corresponding to the "Ben Bacon" named in the BBC piece.