Dark Journalist X-Series: Pine Gap
April 28th, 2018Dark Journalist is slowly and carefully weaving many strange threads together with his outstanding X-Series. I usually post this sort of material on the Cryptogon Backchannel, but I’m posting this to the main page because Pine Gap is a standard Cryptogon topic, in terms of the surveillance and communications aspects of the facility that we’re all aware of.
I think there’s more to the place than that.
I’ve had a very weird feeling about Pine Gap since I first started researching the ECHELON system back in the early 1990s. Look into Pine Gap, even a little, and you’re going to encounter the woowoo. Is it PSYOP to distract from the communications mission? Or, is something genuinely weird happening there?
Via: Dark Journalist YouTube Channel:
Two Koreas Agree to End War This Year, Pursue Denuclearization
April 27th, 2018Via: Bloomberg:
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in agreed Friday to finally end a seven-decade war this year, and pursue the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula.
…
Kim and Moon embraced after signing the deal during a historic meeting on their militarized border, the first time a North Korean leader set foot on the southern side. They announced plans to replace the 1953 armistice that ended hostilities with a peace treaty by year’s end.
High-Paying Trade Jobs Sit Empty, While High School Grads Line Up For University
April 27th, 2018Via: NPR:
Like most other American high school students, Garret Morgan had it drummed into him constantly: Go to college. Get a bachelor’s degree.
“All through my life it was, ‘if you don’t go to college you’re going to end up on the streets,’ ” Morgan said. “Everybody’s so gung-ho about going to college.”
So he tried it for a while. Then he quit and started training as an ironworker, which is what he is doing on a weekday morning in a nondescript high-ceilinged building with a concrete floor in an industrial park near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Morgan and several other men and women are dressed in work boots, hard hats and Carhartt’s, clipped to safety harnesses with heavy wrenches hanging from their belts. They’re being timed as they wrestle 600-pound I-beams into place.
Seattle is a forest of construction cranes, and employers are clamoring for skilled ironworkers. Morgan, who is 20, is already working on a job site when he isn’t at the Pacific Northwest Ironworkers shop. He gets benefits, including a pension, from employers at the job sites where he is training. And he is earning $28.36 an hour, or more than $50,000 a year, which is almost certain to steadily increase.
As for his friends from high school, “they’re still in college,” he said with a wry grin. “Someday maybe they’ll make as much as me.”
Latin America: ‘Breathtaking Homicidal Violence’
April 26th, 2018Via: Guardian:
Latin America has suffered more than 2.5m murders since the start of this century and is facing an acute public security crisis that demands urgent and innovative solutions, a new report warns.
“The sheer dimensions of homicidal violence are breathtaking,” says the report by the Igarapé Institute, a Brazil-based thinktank focused on security and development issues.
The publication, released on Thursday, paints a bleak portrait of what it calls the world’s most homicidal continent.
Latin America suffers 33% of the world’s homicides despite having only 8% of its population. One-quarter of all global homicides are concentrated in four countries – Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela – all of which are gearing up for presidential elections in which security is a dominant theme.
“The overall trend right now in Latin America is one of increasing homicides and deteriorating security,” said Robert Muggah, one of the report’s authors.
Pig Brains Kept Alive After Decapitation
April 26th, 2018Via: MIT Technology Review:
In a step that could change the definition of death, researchers have restored circulation to the brains of decapitated pigs and kept the reanimated organs alive for as long as 36 hours.
The feat offers scientists a new way to study intact brains in the lab in stunning detail. But it also inaugurates a bizarre new possibility in life extension, should human brains ever be kept on life support outside the body.
The work was described on March 28 at a meeting held at the National Institutes of Health to investigate ethical issues arising as US neuroscience centers explore the limits of brain science.
During the event, Yale University neuroscientist Nenad Sestan disclosed that a team he leads had experimented on between 100 and 200 pig brains obtained from a slaughterhouse, restoring their circulation using a system of pumps, heaters, and bags of artificial blood warmed to body temperature.
There was no evidence that the disembodied pig brains regained consciousness. However, in what Sestan termed a “mind-boggling” and “unexpected” result, billions of individual cells in the brains were found to be healthy and capable of normal activity.
Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry
April 24th, 2018Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
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Where’s the electricity coming from to charge up those buses?
A lot of it is still coming from coal, but China’s coal use has peaked:
The real game changer is clean energy. The price of solar photovoltaic is at an all-time low, enough to compete against coal for power generation. Additionally, wind power is well positioned to play an even bigger role.
Nevertheless, China is still the single largest coal user in the world, and coal represents more than 60 percent of its energy mix. But in the long run, coal consumption will continue declining – with current policies and the structural transformation of the economy from being a heavy industry-led, export-driven model to one sustained by services and domestic consumption – despite the annual and seasonal fluctuations.
We have no doubt that China’s coal consumption has peaked and coal-fired economic growth has come to an end.
Via: Bloomberg:
Electric buses were seen as a joke at an industry conference in Belgium seven years ago when the Chinese manufacturer BYD Co. showed an early model.
“Everyone was laughing at BYD for making a toy,” recalled Isbrand Ho, the Shenzhen-based company’s managing director in Europe. “And look now. Everyone has one.”
Suddenly, buses with battery-powered motors are a serious matter with the potential to revolutionize city transport—and add to the forces reshaping the energy industry. With China leading the way, making the traditional smog-belching diesel behemoth run on electricity is starting to eat away at fossil fuel demand.
The numbers are staggering. China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the country’s entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transporters—the equivalent of London’s entire working fleet, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
All this is starting to make an observable reduction in fuel demand. And because they consume 30 times more fuel than average sized cars, their impact on energy use so far has become much greater than the than the passenger sedans produced companies from Tesla Inc. to Toyota Motor Corp.
“INTERROGATING ZUCKERBERG” – A Bad Lip Reading
April 24th, 2018Via: Bad Lip Reading:
Scientists Plan Huge European AI Hub to Compete with U.S.
April 24th, 2018Via: Guardian:
Leading scientists have drawn up plans for a vast multinational European institute devoted to world-class artificial intelligence (AI) research in a desperate bid to nurture and retain top talent in Europe.
The new institute would be set up for similar reasons as Cern, the particle physics lab near Geneva, which was created after the second world war to rebuild European physics and reverse the brain drain of the brightest and best scientists to the US.
Named the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems, or Ellis, the proposed AI institute would have major centres in a handful of countries, the UK included, with each employing hundreds of computer engineers, mathematicians and other scientists with the express aim of keeping Europe at the forefront of AI research.
World Wine Output Falls to 60-Year Low
April 24th, 2018DOOOOOOOM!
Via: Reuters:
Global wine output fell to its lowest level in 60 years in 2017 due to poor weather conditions in the European Union that slashed production in the bloc, international wine organization OIV said.
Wine production totaled 250 million hectoliters last year, down 8.6 percent from 2016, data from the Paris-based International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) released on Tuesday showed.
It is the lowest level since 1957, when it had fallen to 173.8 million hectoliters, the OIV told Reuters.
Headphones?
April 24th, 2018VERY OFF TOPIC!
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I’m going to give my Audio-Technica ATH-M50s to my wife to replace her 17 year old, nearly-dead-and-not-good-to-start-with ATH-M20s.
I was pretty amazed with the sound of the M50s when I got them back in 2010—at least for the first few minutes. After that, I went through multiple phases of modifying the M50s to make them work for me.
First, I had no idea headphones could produce bass like that! It was actually too much bass for my taste. I wound up EQing the lows down a bit. Ahh. Now I could settle in and really enjoy listening…
Ouch.
The strong clamping force and the hard pads made the M50s very uncomfortable for me to wear for more than fifteen minutes.
I bent the hell out of the headband. I mean, I went past the point where I thought I was going to break the headband, and then I kept bending.
It worked!
But now that the cans weren’t stuck to the side of my skull, the headband started to feel pretty bad on the top of my head. I reached for the first aid kit, grabbed a gauze bandage roll and wrapped that headband up. Looks lame, feels good.
I actually lived with it like that for a couple of years—until my sweat and nerd grease disintegrated the stock ear pads. I replaced the stock pads with some softer and more comfortable velour pads.
Finally, bent to hell and fitted with a new set of pads and a gauze bandage wrap, my M50s felt great!
And sounded like shit.
Yep, the secret to the M50s sound was the hard ear pads that Audio-Technica supplied with the cans. Comfortable pads produce a hollow, tinny treble murder experience. I was feeling the highs in my eyes and teeth with the new pads. Cymbals were like a stun grenades going off in my room. Flinching, cringing, synesthesia inducing highs.
I went from EQing the bass down with the original pads, to boosting bass up, boosting mids more and then taking down the highs. I run a full system EQ in Windows with these levels to make the M50s with the soft pads sound good (to me).
Trying to figure out which headphones to get to replace the M50s has turned out to be a pretty daunting experience.
I want large, comfortable, over-ear, closed-back headphones with flat to slightly elevated bass, flat to slightly elevated mids and darker highs.
Under $200??? Possible? Not possible?
Look at the frequency response for the Sennheiser HD650:
Ahhhh. Look at those highs rolling away… Lots of people say that those Sennheisers are great, but even if I got the $200 Massdrop version, I don’t think I can do the open-back thing in my tiny house. And they would need an amp for sure.
I really liked the look of the Beyerdynamic DT 770, but there are a disturbing number of people complaining about sibilance with those cans. From all the ridiculous amounts of reading and YouTube viewing I’ve done to try to get to the bottom of this, it seems that, for every person complaining about sibilance/treble murder on the DT 770s, there’s someone else saying they’re fine, they’re just bright, any sibilance is the result of poor mastering or low bitrate source files, etc.
There are also stories of people stuffing them with paper towels, foam, etc. to try to cut down the highs. My hair stands on end thinking of my effed M50s after I put the soft pads on them to make them wearable on my fat head.
So, there it is.
I’m stumped on this one.
Does anyone out there in Cryptogon-land have the Beyerdynamic DT 770s (I’m thinking 80ohm)? How do you find they handle the highs? Are you EQing down the highs?
Actually, I’d be OK with EQing the highs down a bit. If I can make my modded M50s sound good with the EQ after what I did to them, I’m fine with using the EQ on whatever headphones I wind up going with.
I wish I hadn’t seen that Sennheiser HD650 chart, though…
The Massdrop version is $200 for the next several days.
For anyone who owns Sennheiser HD650/Sennheiser HD 6XX:
Could you watch, say, Apocalypse Now at a satisfying volume in small room with children sleeping on the other side of a wall in the next room over?
I’ve never owned open-back headphones before, so I don’t have any sense of how much that leaking sound will carry to another room.
Apologies to the non-audio nerds for this off topic indulgence, but there are many people reading this who make their livings while wearing headphones and/or people who have very nice taste it headphones. (I see what some of you are buying on Amazon!) Almost certainly, someone out there will be able to give me some good advice.
