Interesting, Non Political News

So it seems we can see Venus right now. We noticed a bright dot in the sky and initially thought it was a star, but zooming in with camera showed something different.

Neat




Here's a NASA shot of Venus.

Perhaps not 'interesting' except to me, but my wife was on this flight. Hit my quota of cortisol for the day.

You put your wife on a Boeing!? Did you happen to just open a life insurance policy on her to?

The flare has been categorized as an X 1.8-class solar flare, which is the strongest type of flare the sun can emit.

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NOAA measures geomagnetic storms on a scale of 1 to 5, with G1 storms considered "mild" and G5 storms dubbed "extreme."

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An enormous mass of charged solar particles will slam into our planet Thursday (Oct. 10), likely triggering a "severe" G4-class geomagnetic storm, according to an alert from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center.

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OK so this thing is almost the top of the scale? 4 out of 5 geomagnetic storm from the strongest class of flare?

Based on the total nothingburgers of the last few "omg solar storm!" reports, it sounds to me like either (a) we need a new scale or (b) solare flares don't actually affect modern technology and we'll never get a carrington event

The closest thing to a modern Carrington type event in terms of technology impact was the flare/CME that knocked out power in Quebec in the late 80s. However, they’ve learned from that and I want to say around 2013 or so, there was an exec order to try to further strengthen our grid against that sort of event.

Not to say it can’t happen, but things are designed a bit better now in theory

However there is still a not insignificant risk to stuff in orbit - even just GPS satellites getting fucked up would have a massive global impact given how much transportation and the economy relies upon it now

Good read.

As usual though this writer correctly identifies the problem but the diagnosis is clown world. In fact I considered posting it there.

I think the fundamental problem is that our society has organized itself around a false narrative, which was sold to us as a narrative of science. In the early 1980s, we began to hear that psychiatric disorders were discrete brain illnesses, which were caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, and that a new generation of psychiatric drugs fixed those imbalances, like insulin for diabetes. But what can be seen clearly today is that this narrative was a marketing story, not a scientific one.

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The personal accounts, of course, do not change the bottom-line “evidence” that shows up in outcome studies of larger groups of patients. Unfortunately, that tells of medications that, on the whole, do more harm than good.

As a case in point, in regard to this “saving lives” theme, this benefit does not show up in public health data. The “standard mortality rate” for those with serious mental disorders, compared to the general public, has notably increased in the last 35 years.

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This is all good stuff. Then we get to the "what should we do about it? part.

Good “mental health care” starts with creating a society that is more equal and just.

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Sometimes I'm not even bothered so much by the dogmatic adherence to ideology as I am their complete lack of logic.

If mental illness is being caused by a lack of ""equality and justice"" in society, why then was mental illness so much less of a problem in the past (when society was even less ""equal and just""?)

Oh well, at least they got the problem right. In clown world thats quite a thing.

I'd like to see the same article written about therapy, next...

"Mental Illness" is such an extremely broad term. There is literally no "one size fits all" solution that works because they all fundamentally originate due to different reasons and in turn have different treatment options. There are even hypotheses that micro flora is causing or influencing some psychiatric disorders. There is also the issue that we still don't fully understand the brain. We can observe that things seem to work, but we may not fundamentally understand WHY they seem to work. Like TMS helps some types of depression, but they still don't fully understand why the magnetic treatment works (they have ideas). Likewise, they don't fully understand why some classes of psychiatric drugs work the way they do.

Aldarion said:

why then was mental illness so much less of a problem in the past

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It wasn't - the idea that mental illness is "new" or more wide spread is inaccurate, it just used to be viewed differently in the past. We have ancient Roman and Greek writings that talk about major depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, etc. It's been theorized that many religious rituals or requirements in their texts (including Abrahamic) may have been invented by people with OCD. Some mental illnesses were viewed as spirits/demons/etc effecting people or other supernatural reasons (I'm sure there were no shortage of shamans or priests or whatever that were mentally ill and just got people to buy into it). Even in semi recent times, people were put into asylums or kept hidden away by family or otherwise hidden/shunned by society.

Fucking told you


I hate the smell of cigarettes now too. Approaching 20 years since I quit. But after hundreds of millions of American smokers freedom was cancelled because a bunch of uptight Karens didnt like the smell, an apology is required, at the very least

Aldarion said:

Does passive smoking cause lung cancer?

In 2003, UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom and I published a study of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)—also called "secondhand smoke" or "passive

reason.com

Fucking told you


I hate the smell of cigarettes now too. Approaching 20 years since I quit. But after hundreds of millions of American smokers freedom was cancelled because a bunch of uptight Karens didnt like the smell, an apology is required, at the very least

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I don't particularly like the smell, but America was a better place when people smoked. Probably not a significant correlation, just an observation.

No one liked people smoking in restaurants or in malls except the smokers themselves, shit was fucking nasty. That shit destroys your electronics as well - ever look at the computer of a person who smokes constantly? There is a disgusting yellow residue/film that coats EVERYTHING. Bonus points if they own a male cat - for some reason the cigarette residue captures some fucking stench the cats produce and assimilates it like some type of bad odor Borg. To this day that smell combo makes me have literal gag reactions.

And now for your daily nightmare fuel

TLDR: The guy responsible for fucking up Google search got put out to pasture (probably).

Old and New News.

Back in April, after years of fucking it up, an (actual) tech reporter put out an article thrashing the head of Google search division and now he has a new job title (like the roof crew in Silicon Valley TV show). I tried to cut the story down to a cliff notes version (LINK):



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