(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Evening-Shade-Resistance-Rising-Sunday April 13 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-13
WELCOME TO THE EVENING SHADE A SANCTUARY OF SANITY AFTER A LONG HARD DAY OF FIGHTING FASCISM YOU WILL FIND in the DIARIES a LOT of POLITICS (Or NOT As the CASE MAY BE) AND EVEN MORE CRITTERS THE PERSON who MAKES the FIRST COMMENT WILL GET TWO CRITTERS EVERY PERSON WHO COMMENTS WILL GET A CRITTER RULES IN THE DIARY WHEN YOU FIND SOMETHING in the DIARY that you LIKE YOU CAN REPOST IT AS COMMENT in the DIARY
In the NYT, David Brooks discusses the decline in reading scores in schools and what poor reading skills do to students in adulthood. As an example he uses Trump’s tariffs.
I have never seen a policy as stupid as this one. It is based on false assumptions. It rests on no coherent argument in its favor. It relies on no empirical evidence. It has almost no experts on its side —from left, right or center. It is jumble-headedness exemplified. Trump himself personifies stupidity’s essential feature —self-satisfaction, an inability to recognize the flaws in your thinking. And of course when the approach led to absolutely predictable mayhem, Trump, lacking any coherent plan, backtracked,flip-flopped, responding impulsively to the pressures of the moment as his team struggled to keep up. Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence. (NYT — bolding mine)
Which is actually the optimistic way of looking at it, compared to this.
===
Sunday Science
My 12th grade physics teacher had us read and report on Scientific American articles regularly. We didn’t have to understand everything, just report on what we could understand. This is one of those “I kinda get it” articles: a new twist on black holes called “fuzzballs,” made of the strings of where dimensions (all 11 of them) intersect.
Fuzzballs and string theory are just one way that physicists are trying to bridge the gap between Einstein’s general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, which don’t get along. Scientists would like an ultimate theory that can describe both the very tiny machinations of particles and the grand movements of galaxies. The insides of black holes, which are extremely small and extremely massive, are the ideal testing grounds for trying out such a theory. More specifically, fuzzballs and stringy supermazes have emerged as a way to solve a puzzle called the black hole information paradox. This quandary arose when physicists realized black holes seem to break a sacred law of physics: that information can never be destroyed. In 1974 Stephen Hawking realized that black holes must slowly evaporate by emitting particles that eventually deplete the black hole down to nothing. In the traditional picture of a black hole, this process destroys all the information contained in it. Fuzzballs, however, would be able to transmit some of this information through the evaporating particles. “The supermaze has a huge capacity to store information,” Warner says. “That solves the information paradox.”
===
As someone who’s had the rare accident of being caught inside Carlsbad Cavern during bat flight, this interested me: solving the riddle of bat navigation with tiny microphones. Bats’ accuracy is amazing. With millions of bats flying around us, none of us was so much as bumped. The temperature does rise noticeably as a result of all those tiny bat bodies in limited space. And we learned quickly not to look up because that gentle rain … it isn’t rain.
x YouTube Video
===
Scientists have mapped brain activity. Specifically, the activity of one cubic millimeter of a mouse’s brain.
“It is no use asking for the impossible,” Dr. Crick wrote. Forty-six years later, a team of more than 100 scientists has achieved that impossible, by recording the cellular activity and mapping the structure in a cubic millimeter of a mouse’s brain — less than one percent of its full volume. In accomplishing this feat, they amassed 1.6 petabytes of data — the equivalent of 22 years of nonstop high-definition video. “This is a milestone,” said Davi Bock, a neuroscientist at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Dr. Bock said that the advances that made it possible to chart a cubic millimeter of brain boded well for a new goal: mapping the wiring of the entire brain of a mouse.
Think a millimeter isn’t much? Here’s a section of the map:
===
It’s National Borinqueneers Day, celebrating the bravery of the Puerto Rican 65th Infantry in battle in WWI, WWII, and the Korean War.
x YouTube Video
===
It’s National Peach Cobbler Day! Make a really fast peach cobbler this way, unless you believe that cobbler must have biscuit and never cake on top, in which case this method is cobbler heresy.
x YouTube Video
===
And it’s National Scrabble Day!
x YouTube Video
Happy Sunday! And seriously, what do you put on a protest sign?
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/13/2313628/-Evening-Shade-Resistance-Rising-Sunday-April-13?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
