Joe

@twitskeptic.sirvin.com

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Unprofessional data wrangler and Bluesky’s official fact checker. Older and crankier than you are.

From Nature, a headline about a "huge" GWAS study about borderline personality disorder is followed by an image from a Sanger sequencing run.
The government insists that aspect of the order can survive any possible legal challenge, too, because individuals can secure domicile in this country only if they do so in compliance with federal law. See ante, at 57–58, n. 10 (THOMAS, J., dissenting). About that, however, I harbor doubts. Perhaps Wong Kim Ark does not squarely foreclose the government’s posi- tion. After all, that case addressed a child born to parents who lawfully resided in this country. Still, I wonder: Is a child born here to parents who have long chosen to make this Nation their permanent home not a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment solely because his parents’ pres- ence violates statutory law? If those parents are not domi- ciled here, then where are they domiciled? And if the an- swer is nowhere, how can we reconcile that conclusion with this Court’s longstanding recognition that every person is domiciled somewhere? See Desmare v. United States, 93 U. S. 605, 610 (1877). Because the executive order is not facially invalid, these questions may not be properly before us. But their answers are undeniably important to a Nation committed to a view of citizenship open to all children born here to parents who can call this country their home.
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“He does set these really ambitious goals, because in his words, he wants quantum change, and you don’t get quantum change asking for incremental growth,” said Jon McNeill, Tesla’s president between 2015 and 2018.
Additionally, many of our initiatives described above under “Our Growth Strategies,” including those to develop orbital AI compute at scale, manufacture AI chips at scale, establish a lunar economy, transport humans and cargo to the Moon and Mars, and develop human augmentation systems, involve significant technical complexity, unproven technologies or technologies that do not exist, and such initiatives may not achieve commercial viability. Many of the innovative products and services described elsewhere in this prospectus may ultimately be unsuccessful and may require great expense, innovations not yet achieved or technologies not yet developed. As a result, the timeline for certain of our initiatives involving unproven or new innovations, including our goal of deploying 100 gigawatts of annual compute power to orbit, the establishment of a lunar economy and interplanetary industrialization, and the launch cadence required to achieve these goals may be difficult or impossible to determine. Our growth strategy may take longer to execute than anticipated, and you may not realize a return on your investment within the timeframe you anticipate, or at all.
To understand what was happening in participants’ brains, Schwabe and his colleagues used a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which provides a real-time view of brain activity. As a baseline, the researchers used fMRI to pin down which parts of the hippocampus ‘lit up’ when participants viewed images from the various categories. Animals lit up one location and 3D shapes another. Faces and scenes activated a third region. Chronic stress can inflame the gut — now scientists know why When participants in the high-stress group looked at the 3D shape, their brains did not show as much activity in the area that corresponded to faces and scenes. This suggests that their brain had not inferred the connection between the shape and the face or scene as strongly as had the people in the control group. “Normally when you encode something new, there’s this little flicker of the past experience coming to mind, and we think that’s what supports the integration,” says Kuhl. “That flicker is basically missing” in the stressed participants. Even so, the accuracy of the stressed participants when inferring which face or scene was linked to a specific 3D shape was the same as that of the control-group participants. The authors say this might be because the fMRI method of detecting memory linkage is more sensitive than the behavioural test.
Farm bankruptcies across the country had risen 55 percent in 2024, 46 percent in 2025, and another 70 percent so far in 2026 as nearly a third of the world’s fertilizer exports were impacted by conflicts in the Strait of Hormuz. Lately, Fraley had begun counseling farmers on how to emotionally endure the aftermath of an auction, suggesting potential hobbies or strategies for debt consolidation.
A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”
Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, said the lay-offs would take place on May 20 and those affected would receive “a generous severance package”, including healthcare coverage for 18 months for US employees. The uncertainty has prompted nervousness among staff, many of whom complain they have suffered through multiple rounds of bruising lay-offs, restructurings and executive shake-ups over the past two years as Zuckerberg pursued his AI bet. “I know this leaves everyone with nearly a month of ambiguity which is incredibly unsettling,” Gale wrote in the memo. Separately, staff have been unnerved by news that the company plans to install tracking software that would capture their mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes and screen content in order to train AI models.
The alleged Statement put out by CNN World News is a FRAUD, as CNN well knows. The false Statement was linked to a Fake News site (from Nigeria) and, of course, immediately picked up by CNN, and blared out as a “legitimate” headline. The Official Statement by Iran was just released, and posted on TRUTH, below. Authorities are looking to determine whether or not a crime was committed on the issuance of the Fake CNN World Statement, or was it a sick rogue player? CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw this Statement with full apologies for their, as usual, terrible “reporting.” Results of the investigation will be announced in the near future. President DONALD J. TRUMP
The United States first invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003. This operation, known as Operation Iraqi Freedom, began with a series of "shock and awe" airstrikes on Baghdad followed by a ground invasion launched from the Kuwaiti border. It is important to distinguish this from the 1991 Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm). While the U.S. led a massive military campaign against Iraq in 1991, that conflict was primarily focused on liberating Kuwait from Iraqi occupation and did not include a full-scale invasion or occupation of Iraq itself.
Unflattering photo of Pete Hegseth
“If Americans are being instructed to leave but are given no viable pathway, that suggests one of two things: The system is not being activated, or the system has atrophied,” said Shawn VanDiver, president of AfghanEvac, a group that supports Afghan nationals seeking to come to the United States after having served with U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He noted that during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the Biden administration had organized the evacuation of 121,000 people in a matter of days.
By FARNOUSH AMIRI, MATTHEW LEE and ELLEN KNICKMEYER Updated 2:01 PM PST, April 22, 2025 WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled a massive overhaul of the State Department on Tuesday, with plans to reduce staff in the U.S. by 15% while closing and consolidating more than 100 bureaus worldwide as part of the Trump administration’s “America First” mandate. The reorganization plan, announced by Rubio on social media and detailed in documents obtained by The Associated Press, is the latest effort by the White House to reimagine U.S. foreign policy and scale back the size of the federal government. The restructuring was driven in part by the need to find a new home for the remaining functions of the U.S. Agency for International Development, an agency that Trump administration officials and billionaire ally Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have dismantled. “We cannot win the battle for the 21st century with bloated bureaucracy that stifles innovation and misallocates scarce resources,” Rubio said in a department-wide email obtained by AP. He said the reorganization aimed to “meet the immense challenges of the 21st Century and put America First.”
Illicitly distilled models lack necessary safeguards, creating significant national security risks. Anthropic and other US companies build systems that prevent state and non-state actors from using AI to, for example, develop bioweapons or carry out malicious cyber activities. Models built through illicit distillation are unlikely to retain those safeguards, meaning that dangerous capabilities can proliferate with many protections stripped out entirely. Foreign labs that distill American models can then feed these unprotected capabilities into military, intelligence, and surveillance systems—enabling authoritarian governments to deploy frontier AI for offensive cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, and mass surveillance. If distilled models are open-sourced, this risk multiplies as these capabilities spread freely beyond any single government's control.
Anthropic We’ve identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax. These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models.
One of his gifts, said Pea, was a supernatural ability to actively listen and deeply engage with one’s ideas. “Everyone – professors and students alike–learned something important in every conversation we had with Roger because he was a lightning mind,” said Pea, the director of the Learning Sciences and Technology Design doctoral program at Stanford. “He would listen very carefully, think about what you were saying and seek to make a model or figure out the big picture. If he agreed with it, he would ask questions to expand on it.” And if he didn’t agree? “He would pop your balloons for things that you thought and give you evidence for why you should think otherwise,” Pea said.
Will Johnson, a pro-Trump podcaster and content creator in Texas, said Palmer is “leading people on who think they’re reporting a crime” and that he could go to prison for impersonating law enforcement. “He’s making people who are reporting people taking advantage of the system look like just bad human beings,” Johnson said in an interview. In cases like the kindergarten video, he added, it may “look bad, but at the same time we are a nation of laws.”
Ben Nowack Founder & CEO Ben founded Reflect Orbital after years of hands-on technical work across hundreds of projects. In high school, he ran the “BenNbuilds” science channel and built systems ranging from an X-ray device, superconductors, and a fusion reactor to airborne and underwater vehicles, including live-stream underwater cameras in Hawaii to deter poaching. In college and early career, he led Crew Dragon propulsion validation work at SpaceX, appeared on MythBusters: The Search, and held engineering leadership roles at Park & Diamond and Tri-D Dynamics, later joining Zipline as the RE of the launcher system. Reflect Orbital began as a sunlight transportation thought experiment that solidified into a compelling business opportunity, prompting Ben to leave his job and partner with Tristan to build the company
Sabey Directed by Values, Enriched by Community "Do the Right Thing" tops the list of our core values at Sabey, and that ethos directs every project and every decision we make as an organization and individuals within the organization. As such, we’re dedicated to lifting up our communities, supporting our team members and building a better world.
want to do the following experiment: Place a brick in the xy plane. Place a needle perpendicular to that plane pointing the z direction. Balance a pillow on that needle. Place a needle on top of the pillow in the z direction. Balance a place mat on top of that needle.What happens if I drop a glass onto the place mat? Almost certainly the stack collapses, and the glass falls (often breaking). Here’s why, in plain mechanics terms: You’ve built a “series” of point contacts. The placemat is supported at essentially one point (the top needle tip), and the pillow is supported at essentially one point (the bottom needle tip). That means almost no resistance to sideways motion or rotation. It can be balanced when nothing disturbs it, but it’s extremely unstable. Dropping a glass adds a big, fast impulse. On impact, the placemat is suddenly pushed downward. Any tiny off-center hit (or even a perfectly centered hit with slight tilt) creates a torque, so the placemat starts to tip. Once it tips even a little, the top needle is no longer purely in compression—it gets a sideways component and tends to slip or buckle. The pillow makes it worse for stability (even though it absorbs energy). A pillow compresses and squishes locally under a point load. That means the needle tip can sink in, and the “support point” can move sideways as the pillow deforms. That moving support point is basically a recipe for the whole stack to walk out from under itself.
Citadel founder and Chief Executive Ken Griffin says other CEOs are afraid of speaking out on social and political issues right now because they fear a social-media-fueled product boycott related to their stances. “The power of social media to persuade millions or tens of millions of consumers to make a product choice is really terrifying to corporate executives, and I think it’s put them in a very, just, intrinsically withdrawn position,” Griffin said at the WSJ Invest Live event in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Tuesday. Griffin, a Republican megadonor, emerged last year as President Trump’s most vocal critic on Wall Street. The Citadel CEO added on Tuesday: “Is it really good that the people that create the jobs that we all need in our lives, do we really want to have their voices completely extinguished?
@NateSchlomann · 1h Choices like this are why egalitarianism is such a problem. We need masculine leadership.
Keystone Cops at work.
ancestry showed that polygenic scores for height could capture up to a 2.5 centimeter difference across five embryos, while scores for intelligence could capture 2.5 IQ points (16).
No, SNAP error rates are not fraud rates; payment accuracy errors in SNAP are largely unintentional and can happen in one of two ways: An applicant is determined eligible when they are not. An eligible participant is certified to receive either more or less benefits than they are entitled to. SNAP error rates reflect program waste. USDA takes payment errors very seriously and will continue to work with states to address the root causes of these mistakes.
Among the library’s frequent users has been Santiago Gassó, an atmospheric scientist. When he wanted to learn about chaos theory, he went to the Goddard library, plucked old textbooks and sat down to read. Dr. Gassó, said liked the library’s quiet spaces and floor-to-ceiling windows. “I get very creative when I go there,” he said. “There’s nothing like going to the bookshelf, picking out a book, and then seeing the one next to it. You start to browse.
Across the essay he mentions some more: Ninety-five percent of the past century’s Nobel Prize-winning physicists believed in God. If no one is watching, a photon behaves as a wave, but if someone is watching, it behaves as a particle. When scientists in the Canary Islands shot one entangled photon, it behaved as a wave. Then they went to a different island and shot another entangled photon, and it behaved as a particle. When they returned to check on the first photon, they found it had gone back in time and acted as a particle.
When it comes to understanding the overall effect of genetics on any given disease or trait, we have an important upper bound in the form of broad-sense heritability (H²). H² can be calculated for any trait or disease. It is a percentage that indicates how much of the variation in any given disease or trait can theoretically be explained by DNA. Broad-sense heritability is included within each disease report. The goal is to reiterate the point that DNA is an essential tool when studying health and well-being, and has a strong influence on someone’s life. However, it is not a deterministic crystal ball — even if one day we know everything about how genomics affects diseases and traits.
Opinion Editorial Board Swiss wealth tax wisdom Voters overwhelmingly reject populism in defense of their country’s economic interests.