Archive for May, 2018
Europe: Plastic Trash Piling Up, China No Longer Wants It
May 11th, 2018Via: Reuters: Europe has sent just over half the plastic waste it used to ship to China to other parts of Asia since Beijing’s environmental crackdown closed the world’s biggest recycling market in January. The knotty problem is what to do with the rest. … In an overcrowded continent where landfills are much more restricted […]
FDA Glyphosate Testing Fraud
May 10th, 2018Via: Modern Farmer: Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests were quickly filed, and the newest set, this one by the non-profit food industry research group US Right to Know and published this past weekend by the Guardian, turned up some interesting emails from within the FDA showing that their chemists have been busy doing some […]
Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely
May 10th, 2018Via: Food Tank: A recent study by researchers at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, has found a certain type of Australian red algae can significantly inhibit methane emissions from cows. Led by Professor of Aquaculture Rocky De Nys, researchers found an addition of less than 2 percent dried seaweed to a cow’s diet can […]
Iran Targets Israeli Bases Across Syrian Frontier, Israel Pounds Syria
May 9th, 2018Via: Reuters: Iranian forces in Syria launched a rocket attack on Israeli army bases in the Golan Heights early on Thursday, Israel said, prompting one of the heaviest Israeli barrages in Syria since the conflict there began in 2011. The attack on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, just past midnight, marked the first time Iranian forces […]
California: Starting in 2020, Most New Homes Must Include a Solar Power System
May 9th, 2018Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand. — I’m such strident solar power advocate that, when the topic comes up, people in the room who know me roll their eyes and think, “Oh god, here we go again…” My wife and I have had 5kW of panels on our roof since 2014 and […]
The Strange Case of Christopher Snyder
May 9th, 2018Via: Heavy: A 41-year-old man who claimed to have a classified military past killed three people inside his neighbor’s house after a domestic dispute with his wife and then fatally shot himself during a standoff with police, authorities say. Christopher Wilson Snyder, of Brookeville, Maryland, was found dead inside his home Monday night, more than […]
Plans Moving Forward for Miami-Dade Mega Mall: The American Dream
May 9th, 2018Ski slopes in gator country… I wish Hunter S. Thompson was here to tackle this one. Via: CBS: A mega mall and entertainment complex in Northwest Miami-Dade that would dwarf any other appears to be on course for approval, but not without controversy. It’s called the American Dream. It would be the largest mall in […]
Google Demonstrates New AI Having Phone Conversations with Humans
May 9th, 2018Via: Guardian: Google’s virtual assistant can now make phone calls on your behalf to schedule appointments, make reservations in restaurants and get holiday hours. The robotic assistant uses a very natural speech pattern that includes hesitations and affirmations such as “er” and “mmm-hmm” so that it is extremely difficult to distinguish from an actual human […]
How Silicon Valley Elite Store Billions of Dollars Worth of Bitcoin
May 9th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: Behind the guards, the blast doors and down corridors of reinforced concrete, sit the encrypted computer servers — connected to nothing — that hold keys to a vast digital fortune. Argentine entrepreneur Wences Casares has spent the past several years persuading Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires that Bitcoin is the global currency of […]
South Wales Police Facial Recognition System Generated 92% False Positives at Soccer Match
May 7th, 2018Via: Engadget: Ask critics of police face recognition why they’re so skeptical and they’ll likely cite unreliability as one factor. What if the technology flags an innocent person? Unfortunately, that caution appears to have been warranted to some degree. South Wales Police are facing a backlash after they released data showing that their face recognition […]
