Tag: The Breakfast Club

The Waters of Mars is an episode of the Doctor I rarely re-watch because it’s sad and painful.

The story is set on Mars in the year 2059 where the Doctor encounters the first human colony, Bowie Base One. This is commanded by Captain Adelaide Brooke who turns out to be a pivotal character in the history of humanity. The Doctor must decide whether to use his knowledge of her fate to change history.

The nuclear blast that destroys the base leaves no survivors, but it does galvinize humanity to explore the Universe.  Because the event is so pivotal it is considered a “fixed point” in time, unlike the life of Gillian Taylor who not only gets dumped by Kirk but who’s disappearance from the time stream makes no difference whatsoever.

Thus Galifreyan interlopers are expected not to interfere.  The Doctor, the last Time Lord of Galifrey, the Oncoming Storm who destroys his entire race as well as the Daleks in the holocaust of The Moment, decides he is no longer bound by petty rules of continuity and saves Adelaide and two others.

Time Lord Victorious!

Adelaide, shocked by the potential consequences of what he has done, kills herself.  The Cloister Bells ring.

So, is it better to be like Yuri, Mia, and Gillian- little noted nor long remembered?  Sacrifice yourself over the ravings of a lunatic in a blue box?  And what does this say about the hubris of absolute power, could you be trusted with the future?

Well, not me!  I like pushing buttons and I expect I’d push every last one.  This is why most realistic assessments of time travel that allow you to change events end up with a future in which that no longer works.  It’s the only way to be sure.

On the other hand perceptions are tricky things and perhaps the way we experience reality is not the only one there is.  In physics the rule is that your model is self consistent, that its internal rules not contradict themselves.  It is perfectly possible to imagine such systems, if they exist we will probably never know.

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

• George RR Martin: our long obsession with Mars, by George RR Martin, The Guardian
• Great Scott! Back to the Future turns 30 (and catches up with reality), by Catherine Shoard, The Guardian
• Water on Mars: Nasa faces contamination dilemma over future investigations, by Ian Sample, The Guardian
• South Carolina: Civil War Cannons Pulled From 150-Year Bath, Associated Press
• Why no Trident? The benefits of a nuclear apocalypse, by Dean Burnett, The Guardian
• A living thing in two places at once? This quantum quandary test is limited, by James Millen, The Guardian
• Half of Europe opts out of new GM crop scheme, by Arthur Neslen, The Guardian
• NASA Eyeing Venus, Asteroids for Next Low-Cost Robotic Mission, by Mike Wall, Space.com
• Hazing, #piggate and other secret rites: the psychology of extreme group rituals, by Joanna Walters, The Guardian
• New Maps of Ceres Highlight Mysterious Bright Spots, Giant Mountain, by Mike Wall, Space.com

Science Oriented Video

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Or not (sigh).

You know, whenever one of these warnings about the end of the Universe, or Earth, or even just the Tri-State area (were you aware that we got issued an erroneous Tsunami alert last week?), and I have a deadline, there is always a fair part of me that hopes it’s true just so I can avoid writing.

It’s a hateful, horrible task that sucks out your soul photon by photon and I do love it so.

The ‘Super’ Blood Moon Non-Apocalypse Is Upon Us

By Chas Danner, New York Magazine

September 27, 2015

(M)uch of the U.S. will be able to witness the rare convergence of a total lunar eclipse and a so-called “supermoon,” which is when the moon appears a whopping 7 percent larger because it’s at the closest point of its orbit of the Earth.

…

A lunar eclipse is also referred to as a “blood moon,” due to the reddish-brown color the eclipsed moon gets after the sun’s light is filtered through the particulates in our atmosphere. Put another way, as Plait adds, “If you were standing on the Moon, it’s like you’re seeing every sunrise and sunset on Earth all at once,” or put even another way, its like projecting all the crap in our atmosphere onto the surface of the moon. Bonus: Tonight is a harvest moon as well.

Tonight is thus a harvest-super-blood moon, as well as the possible end of the world if you’re a believer of fringe religious theories suggesting that. But while astrophysicists are certain the world will end some day, NASA insists that won’t be tonight.

And here we all are still, fixed in our orbits like the Moon.  This is what I did for entertainment last night-

Yup.  Four hours doing squats behind a camera in the dark only it wasn’t so dark because I was in a parking lot behind a school that was brightly lit and under 24 hour a day surveillance as the helpful sign informed me.  I only got busted by the cops twice.

The first time they came by it was me and my camera and the Officer very helpfully suggested I must be out to watch the Blood Moon.

Why yes.  Yes I am.  Pay no attention to my home made digital clock (I’m not the tidiest of solderers).

I got there early, but right on time the SUVs with the kidlings arrived to see the show.  They paid very little attention, preferring to play flashlight tag (very distracting) and throw balls (even more distracting if you weren’t ready to think quick).

I admit it’s a rather slow moving event for a child, I on the other hand was quite busy, especially during those times when it was too dark for the viewfinder and you had to take Aperture Priority shots just to line up the camera.

I took over 300 photos of which I’ve identified 5 that are almost acceptable.  In addition to the pointing problem focus is also an issue, as far as I know my camera decides what it likes.

10:45 was peak eclipsish and everyone packed up the rug rats and headed home.  I bitter ended because I was (correctly) not confident in the quality of any of my shots.  The cops rolled around again when everything was as desolate as it was when I arrived.

How did it go?

Ok I guess.  Don’t believe them when they say that this is it until 2033.  There will be other Eclipses and other Super Moons, just not the two together.

Sports AND Entertainment

My family reads my blogs (yes, I have one) and my cousin’s kids as I think I’ve mentioned are big Nationals fans.  Therefore I will just quietly mention that The New York City Metropolitans are National League East Champions and link to this.  

It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.  Then it’s just fun.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. –Aristotle

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

It’s been a while so let’s review-

The Rules of Opera

1. It must be long, boring, and in an incomprehesible foreign language (even if that language is English).
2. The characters, especially the main ones, must be thoroughly unsympathetic and their activities horrid and callous.
3. Everyone must die, hopefully in an ironic and gruesome way.

Ballet is the same, but with more men in tights and without the superfluous singing.

The case in point is Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.  It’s sometimes called the first English Opera but while it is very early indeed (1689) that honor probably belongs to his teacher John Blow’s Venus and Adonis.

Aeneas you may recognize as the “hero” of Virgil’s Odyssey rip off The Aeneid.  The Roman source is actually kind of a great screaming neurotic rant of self justification about why exactly Romans were such bloodthirsty assholes.

First of all let’s talk about the psychological depravity and inferiority complex that would lead you to rewrite the seminal national text of your cultural superiors who’s land you had violently conquered and whom you were still dependent on for intellectual talent because you’re basically a bunch of frat boy barbarians so that the bad guys were the good guys and the founders of your own state.

Then let’s add the seduction and abandonment of the Queen of the nation that was your chief rival.

I think we’re in Operatown Jake.

So Aeneas, noble warrior of Troy cruelly cheated and defeated by those perfidious Greeks, especially Odysseus who’s story he’s stealing, is sailing with a boatload of refugees to find someplace new to settle down when they are blown off course and shipwrecked due to internecine disputes among the Gods related to the Judgement of Paris.

Oddly enough for this ancestor of the founders of Rome (who were raised by wolves in a sterling example of good parenting) he ended up at the gates of Rome’s great future rival- Carthage.

Dido Queen of Carthage, a widow, falls in love with him and fixes up his ships.  Witches plotting against Dido conjure up a storm and when the couple is temporarily separated one of them, impersonating Hermes, tells Aeneas that he simply must hit the road and found that New Troy in Italy he’s been planning.  Aeneas, being a cad in addition to a credulous dope, promptly shoves off.

Dido, despondent, kills herself.  The End.

Now there were in fact heavy political subtexts to both The Aeneid and Dido and Aeneas.  Virgil was not just stroking the Roman sense of entitlement and righteous justification but, because of Ceasar’s reputed descent from Aeneas, sucking up to the Julio-Claudian Emperors (it was written between 29 and 19 BCE).

With Dido and Aeneas Purcell is alluding to the (for him) recent events of the English Civil War.  Aeneas is said to represent James II and the Witches Roman Catholicism while Dido represents Britain, abandoned due to deception.

Like many early compositions it’s not entirely complete and for performance various arrangers fill in the gaps in a variety of ways.  This particular version is from the San Francisco School of the Arts.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

It’s kind of a parody of the Nobel Prize, the stated goal is to make you laugh, then think.

We’re brought up with this concept of the Scientist as a sort of Warrior/Priest battling space alien buggy things (or making them) and inventing wizzy bang death rays and such, clad in their mystic lab coat ($21 in any Work Clothing/Uniform catalog).  Well, maybe not personally, usually there’s a whole puddle of corpses before the climax of the story when the Scientist is destroyed by his creation (or nemisis) so the hero can get the girl who’s been emotionally conflicted (or mind controlled) up to his timely demise.  The End.

Science is nothing at all like that and is in fact mostly about measuring things and writing down numbers.

Let’s say you’re a swashbuckling Archeologist.  You’ll be stuck in a jungle or desert sure, but you’ll spend all day every day digging, measuring, writing and for every hour in the field you’ll have to work 20 or more to figure out what exactly you found.

Let alone what it means, about which you’re almost sure to be totally, completely wrong.

And that’s if you’re a Lion Tamer, if you’re an Accountant you’ll work your entire lifetime on some quirky subject that nobody understands or appreciates.  Better love it, you’ll be spending a looong time with it.

The thing about the Ig Nobels is that they are, for the most part, genuine typical science.  The subjects may seem odd and funny (see 4 penised Echidnas below.  Relax, only 2 ejaculate at a time) but like the Golden Fleece the projects generally relate to larger and more important goals of which the named research is only a small part.

For instance unboiling eggs, that is so silly.

The chemistry prize went to American and Australian researchers who managed to partially unboil an egg with a vortex fluid device, a high speed machine that converts unfolded proteins into folded proteins.

Their results, published in ChemBioChem, show that the team was able to refold proteins thousands of times faster than previous methods. In theory, the device has far greater application than resetting eggs: it could do everything from revolutionize the manufacturing of cancer treatments to overhaul the industrial production of cheese.

Yup.  So remember that as you consider the 2015 winners.

2015 Ig Nobel prizes: dinosaur-like chickens and bee-stings to the penis

by Alan Yuhas, The Guardian

Thursday 17 September 2015 23.31 EDT

Entomologist Justin Schmidt and Cornell researcher Michael Smith jointly won for their painstaking experiments charting how painful insect stings are, and where the stings hurt worst. Smith pressed bees up against different parts of his body until the insects stung him, five stings a day, a total of 25 different locations, for 38 days. He rated the pain one to 10, and published.

The most painful parts: the nostril, the upper lip, the shaft of the penis.

Smith was joined onstage by Schmidt, who has also sacrificed various parts of his body for science in his decades specializing in stinging insects. Schmidt’s “sting pain index” rates only on a scale of one to four, but also features the entomologist’s descriptions of 78 sorts of stings, written with the flair of a sommelier in a wine cellar with something to prove.

The bald-faced hornet, for instance, is in Schmidt’s estimation: “rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.” Yellowjackets, on the other hand, sting “hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine WC Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.” Both rate a two.

The four-plus-rated bullet ant, in contrast, punishes a victim with “pure, intense, brilliant pain, like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch rusty nail grinding into your heel”.

Science Oriented Video

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

• Coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish can be killed with vinegar, scientists find, by Oliver Milman, The Guardian
• Meteorite from birth of solar system to go on display, by Ian Sample, The Guardian
• Google charges advertisers for fake YouTube video views, say researchers, by Ben Quinn, The Guardian
• Enceladus Is Home To A World-Wide Ocean, by Andrew Liptak, io9
• Human evolution hasn’t been a process of gradual fine-tuning – as finds like Homo naledi in South Africa make plain, by Ian Tattersall, Salon
• How to Not Get Attacked by a Bear, By Christine Dell’Amore and Todd Wilkinson, National Geographic
• The sisters who spoke to spirits: How two mischievous girls gave birth to a religion, by Ada Calhoun, Narratively
• Scientists just smashed the distance record for quantum teleportation, By Rachel Feltman, Wasington Post
• Echidnas’ ‘bizarre’ mating no longer obstacle to successful breeding program, Australian Associated Press
• Edward Snowden: we may never spot space aliens thanks to encryption, by Nicky Woolf, The Guardian
• How the Higgs boson is born and how it dies: the most precise picture so far, by Jon Butterworth, The Guardian
• How different are your online and offline personalities?, by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, The Guardian
• The secret to being a convincing liar? Tell your fibs on a full bladder, by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian
• The nudge theory and beyond: how people can play with your mind, by Nick Chater, The Guardian
• Linking brains: UW scientists say they’ve done it, By Katherine Long, Seattle Times
• We’ve Discovered a Lost World of Snow Dinosaurs, by Maddie Stone, Gizmodo
• Bizarre Giant Hexagon on Saturn May Finally Be Explained, by Charles Q. Choi, Space.com

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

A set of unrelated and usually short instrumental pieces, movements or sections played as a group, and usually in a specific order.

Key Igor Stravinsky work found after 100 years

by Stephen Walsh, The Guardian

Saturday 5 September 2015 19.05 EDT

Igor Stravinsky composed his Pogrebal’naya Pesnya (Funeral Song) in memory of his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, shortly after Rimsky’s death in June 1908. The 12-minute work was performed only once, in a Russian symphony concert conducted by Felix Blumenfeld in the Conservatoire in January 1909, but was always thought to have been destroyed in the 1917 revolutions or the civil war that followed.

Stravinsky recalled it as one of his best early works, but could not remember the actual music.

…

Stravinsky was 26 when The Funeral Song was performed and was by no means advanced as a composer. He was completely unknown outside Russia – and barely known even there. Yet in the next four years he would compose The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, transforming himself into the most notorious modernist of them all.

…

There is a touching postscript to the story. Stravinsky was desperate to have his composition included in one or other of the memorial concerts being planned, and his surviving letters to Rimsky’s widow, to their son, Vladimir, and to the conductor Alexander Ziloti, positively cry out with the insecurity of a young composer who had never quite been accepted at the heart of musical St Petersburg and feared its judgment. They are the first hint of a split that would rapidly widen after Stravinsky’s dramatic successes in Paris. But by then of course, it hardly mattered.

The lost genius of Mozart’s sister

by Sylvia Milo, The Guardian

Tuesday 8 September 2015 09.54 EDT

“I am writing to you with an erection on my head and I am very much afraid of burning my hair”, wrote Nannerl Mozart to her brother Wolfgang Amadeus. What was being erected was a large hairdo on top of Nannerl’s head, as she prepared to pose for the Mozart family portrait.

…

Maria Anna (called Marianne and nicknamed Nannerl) was – like her younger brother – a child prodigy. The children toured most of Europe (including an 18-month stay in London in 1764-5) performing together as “wunderkinder”. There are contemporaneous reviews praising Nannerl, and she was even billed first. Until she turned 18. A little girl could perform and tour, but a woman doing so risked her reputation. And so she was left behind in Salzburg, and her father only took Wolfgang on their next journeys around the courts of Europe. Nannerl never toured again.

But the woman I found did not give up. She wrote music and sent at least one composition to Wolfgang and Papa – Wolfgang praised it as “beautiful” and encouraged her to write more. Her father didn’t, as far as we know, say anything about it.

Did she stop? None of her music has survived. Perhaps she never showed it to anybody again, perhaps she destroyed it, maybe we will find it one day, maybe we already did but it’s wrongly attributed to her brother’s hand. Composing or performing music was not encouraged for women of her time. Wolfgang repeatedly wrote that nobody played his keyboard music as well as she could, and Leopold described her as “one of the most skilful players in Europe”, with “perfect insight into harmony and modulations” and that she improvises “so successfully that you would be astounded”.

Like Virginia Woolf’s imagined Shakespeare’s sister, Nannerl was not given the opportunity to thrive. And what she did create was not valued or preserved – most female composers from the past have been forgotten, their music lost or gathering dust in libraries. We will never know what could have been, and this is our loss.

Lubec, Maine

The story that goes with this picture is about Hopley Yeaton, the first officer commissioned (March 21, 1791) under the Constitution of the United States by George Washington into the Revenue Marines.  By most Coast Guarders (of whom Alex Haley is one and I am not but… New London) he is considered the first Commandant.

So in a friendly gesture the Coast Guard dug him up and planted him in New London where you can lie on his grave and think about death.

Now even though his grave was threatened by development, that of his family were not and they remain six feet (more or less, it’s pretty rocky) under the sod in North Lubec, once a bustling industrial center and now a wasteland of corrugated metal strapped around concrete slabs that machines and production lines used to be anchored on.

The libertarian impulse would be to point out the decline in commerce stems from an EPA ruling that it was no longer cool to dump buckets of blood, fish guts, and chicken beaks and feet straight into the water until the bay was red with it.

Scavanger species went into a predictable decline.  Yes, I like lobster and I know what they eat.  Do you like Pollack, Haddock, and Cod?

Seagulls I can do without even if they are agreeable to a close up.

So Lubec North, South, East, and West is available for about a dime and it is a bustling hub of International commerce.

I still don’t think grave robbing is an acceptable practice but when in Rome…  It certainly made things easier when I injured myself and had to exchange body parts after the beach amputation with shell edged tools.

What?  I had seaweed to grind my teeth on.  You guys are so effete.

Which brings us to Valhalla, New York and not by way of Wagner (Pfui!).

Family Balks at Talk by Russia to Move Rachmaninoff’s Remains

By JAMES BARRON, The New York Times

SEPT. 6, 2015

Resolutely nationalistic Russians want his body back. His great-great-granddaughter, Susan Sophia Rachmaninoff Volkonskaya Wanamaker, says “nyet.” Or she might, if she spoke Russian, but probably not. In a conversation about where his remains belong, she repeatedly used words like “dignity” and “respect.”

…

The dispute over his burial place started last month, when Russia’s culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, said that Rachmaninoff’s remains should be exhumed and sent to Russia. “The composer dreamed of being buried in Russia, that’s why returning his remains to his motherland would be a great deed,” he said, according to a report on the ministry’s website.

Ms. Wanamaker said Rachmaninoff had no such dream.

…

(W)hile he died in Beverly Hills, Calif., on March 28, 1943, “the family’s roots in New York were deeper than their roots in Beverly Hills,” Ms. Wanamaker said. Rachmaninoff, who left his homeland to escape the Russian Revolution in 1917, had rented a house on Riverside Drive when he arrived in Manhattan in the 1920s. He became an American citizen eight weeks before he died.

Mr. Medinsky accused the United States of laying claim to Rachmaninoff’s legacy. “If you look at American sources, you’ll see that Sergei Rachmaninoff is a great American composer of Russian descent,” he said. “Americans are presumptuously privatizing the name of Rachmaninoff.”

That idea was echoed by Valery Poliansky, the president of the Rachmaninov Society in Moscow (the group spells his last name with a V). Mr. Poliansky told the Govorit Moskva radio station that “nobody in America needs him,” referring to Rachmaninoff, or his remains. “America doesn’t need anyone, except itself,” he said.

Ms. Wanamaker disputed that. “It’s not possible to privatize a name that’s well known,” she said, also noting that her great-great-grandfather “was always proud to be a Russian, even while he was living in exile in America.”

“There is no separating Sergei Rachmaninoff from Russia,” Ms. Wanamaker said. “His music is the embodiment of the Russian romantic spirit. It’s the embodiment of the Russian soul.”

She added, “I believe the name Rachmaninoff, because it’s recognized and respected, gives Medinsky a platform to spout his nationalism.” She suggested that Mr. Medinsky was “trying to politicize a personal choice” – Rachmaninoff’s decision to leave Russia and never return.

…

Ms. Wanamaker said that Rachmaninoff, great as he was, was not the only one to think about.

“He rests next to his wife and his daughter,” she said, “and there’s no mention of moving them. So they want to separate his family, one that he fought to keep together through the Russian Revolution, through World War II? It’s simply unconscionable.”

My wishes?  I want to go like El Cid.  Shove a stick up my butt, light me on fire, and give my horse a slap on the ass.

It’s kind of unfair to the horse.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Windows 10 is primarily spyware.  Chrome never pretended to be anything but.  Once virtuous Ubuntu is now as bad as any ‘commercial’ software (not the way things were supposed to devolve) with incomprehensible interfaces, swaths of proprietary code, and intrusive default monitoring.

This disqualifies a whole lot of derivatives including my favorite, Mint with Mate, that use the Ubuntu code base.

I’ve always liked the standard GNOME2 interface and think it’s highly similar, other than positioning, to your Windows Classic Desktop which has been basically the same in business IT since ’95.  If you learn it, and don’t screw it up by personalizing too much, the learning curve is not that steep.

The Gnome people didn’t think that was good enough and screwed it to the point of unusability.

So KDE right?

Sure, if you want to be wacky and customize your machine to look like IOSX or Windows 8.1 however why are you wasting that time?  But getting any kind of usable Desktop is a chore unless you favor the ‘why do you need more than a spreadsheet and a word processor peon’ approach to IT.  Besides you can just grab any program you like from the k library and install it.  Yup, point and click.  Free.

So my favored interface is now Mate which is a GNOME2 variant done by some South American programmers who liked GNOME2 a lot and thought that the Gnome people were certifiable idiots.  It works like I would expect.

Which brings us to distributions.

Almost everything is based on Debian.  There are 2 code bases, the development track and the stable track.  The stable track can stay stable for a really long time because the rules about what is acceptable are very strict.  While this is attractive on paper, in practice it means that many pieces of hardware either don’t function at all or only partially.

So your video and network cards don’t work very well, get new ones!  Easy on a desktop, not so much on your lap.

The development track is developmental.  The truth is that it deosn’t change very much either.  The rules are not as strict, but there are still rules.  What makes it look like things are changing all the time is that each piece of software is on its own schedule.

You should be able to safely install and operate either track directly from the source, what then adds value to a distribution?

They break some rules.  Most times they will install proprietary drivers for maximum performance.  Sometimes these are entirely written by the manufacturers, others simply comply with the published standards.  In neither case is the code usually public which breaks a rule.  Many times they will add their own code for features they think have been poorly implemented and hardly anyone can resist screwing with the wallpaper, icons, and taskbar.  Almost all add programs technically still in development.

I insist on 3 things from my environment- hardware control including drives and network, environment control of the look and feel, and software control of all the programs on my system.  It should operate off a menu.  I’ve gotten fairly good results with these distributions that are available in Mate.

Fedora is a non-Debian that has been separate since the late 90’s.

Sabayon is a Gentoo base.  Gentoo and Arch have the reputation of being the most difficult distributions to install, Saboyon, provided it supports your hardware, goes in like a champ.

Mageia is a non-commercial spin-off of Mandriva.

openSUSE gets a mention as another independent code base, but they don’t have a Mate interface.

Windows 10 – Spyware Disguised as an Operating System

by Gaius Publius, Hullabaloo

8/31/2015 07:30:00 AM

(I)t didn’t take long to discover that Windows 10 is not only worse than Windows 8, it is worse in a worse way. It’s one thing to install an application that spies on you. It’s another when that spyware application you just installed is the operating system, and controls the whole machine.

Is Windows 10 Worth Installing?

The answer is No, if you’re asking me. In fact, it’s worth never installing. I’d avoid it until the final minute you’re forced to change, and even then, you should hesitate to upgrade. Reason? Under its default settings, Windows 10 is widely reported to be spyware, an operating system that watches you work, even offline, and reports back to Microsoft anything it feels like reporting. If you approve the licensing agreement – and how can you use any software without clicking “I Agree”? – you’re giving Microsoft permission to collect any data they can get (based on your settings) and share it in any way they want.

Windows 10 is the ultimate privacy violator – an operating system that wants to watch everything you do and send back whatever it finds or figures out about you.

Microsoft slips user-tracking tools into Windows 7, 8 amidst Windows 10 privacy storm

by Brad Chacos, PCWorld

Aug 31, 2015 12:59 PM

No, the company’s not walking back its privacy-encroaching features. Instead, Microsoft’s quietly rolling out updates that bake new tracking tools into Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Yes, really.

The story behind the story: Privacy concerns have marred an otherwise sterling launch for Windows 10, which is already installed on 75 million PCs. Rolling out this Windows 7 and 8 updates amidst the controversy smacks of insensitivity-and it’s just plain poor timing, to boot.

Ghacks discovered four recent KB updates for Windows 7 and 8, all designed to send Microsoft regular reports on your machine’s activities.

KB3068708 – “This update introduces the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to existing devices. By applying this service, you can add benefits from the latest version of Windows to systems that have not yet upgraded. The update also supports applications that are subscribed to Visual Studio Application Insights.” This update replaced KB3022345.

KB3075249 – “This update adds telemetry points to the User Account Control (UAC) feature to collect information on elevations that come from low integrity levels.”

KB3080149 – “This package updates the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to existing devices. This service provides benefits from the latest version of Windows to systems that have not yet upgraded. The update also supports applications that are subscribed to Visual Studio Application Insights.”

The latter two updates are flagged as Optional, but KB3068708 holds Recommended status, which means it would be downloaded and installed if you have Windows Updates set to automatic. It’s only functional in PCs that participate in Microsoft’s Customer Experience Improvement Program, which already sends Microsoft information on how you use your computer.

…

If you don’t want these new tracking tools on your PC, the best thing to do seems to be simply uninstalling the offending updates, then blocking them from being reinstalled.

To do so, head to Control Panel > Programs > Uninstall or change a program. Here, click View installed updates in the left-hand navigation pane. In the search box in the upper-right corner, search for the KB3068708, KB3022345, KB3075249, and KB3080149 updates by name. If they’re installed, they’ll pop right up. If you find one, right-click on it and select Uninstall to wipe it from your system.

To block the updates from being downloaded again, dive back into the Control Panel and head to System and Security > Windows Update > Check for updates. The system will look for updates, then say you have a certain number of updates available, separated by status (Optional, Recommended, Critical). Simply click the recommended updates link, find the KB3068708 and KB3022345 updates, then right-click them and select Hide update. Boom! Done.

Now dive into the optional updates and hide KB3075249 and KB3080149 as well.

Microsoft Retrofitting Windows 7, 8.1 With Windows 10’s Privacy-Invading ‘Features’

by Karl Bode, Tech Dirt

Wed, Sep 2nd 2015

Microsoft now seems intent on retro-fitting its older operating systems (specifically Windows 7 and Windows 8.1) with many of the annoying, chatty aspects of Windows 10. GHacks has noticed that four updates to the older operating systems, described as an “update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry,” connect to vortex-win.data.microsoft.com and settings-win.data.microsoft.com. These addresses are hard-coded to bypass the hosts file, and ferry all manner of personal information back to Microsoft.

…

(I)t’s annoying that Microsoft continues to insist on expanding this kind of OS behavior, without making opting out simple and comprehensive. And it certainly doesn’t exactly deflate arguments by folks like Richard Stallman, who consistently argue that Windows is effectively malware. More than anything though, it’s a continued advertisement for Linux and operating systems that the end user actually has some degree of control over.

Science Oriented Video

Science and Technology News and Blogs

• How y’all doin’?, by Tom Sullivan, Hullabaloo
• Russian artifact is estimated to be 11,000 years old, say scientists – 6,000 yrs older than Stonehenge, by David Ferguson, Raw Story
• Carbon dating suggests ‘world’s oldest’ Koran could be older than the Prophet Muhammad, by Travis Gettys, Raw Story
• The Really Big One, By Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker
• Thomas Edison Was Right About Solar Power, by Thom Hartmann, Truthout
• Wikipedia Editors Uncover Extortion Scam And Extensive Cybercrime Syndicate, by Lauren C. Williams, Think Progress
• New Species of Human Ancestor, Homo Naledi, Is Found in a South African Cave, By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times
• Homo naledi: New species of ancient human discovered, claim scientists, by Ian Sample, The Guardian
• ‘Archaeology on steroids’: huge ritual arena discovered near Stonehenge, by Ian Sample, The Guardian
• Could Physics’ Reigning Model Finally Be Dethroned?, by Tia Ghose, Live Science
• Hackers Can Trick Driverless Cars With A Handheld Laser, By Dave Gershgorn, Popular Science

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

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