Pretty: A mysterious squid-like cosmic cloud, this nebula is very faint, but also very large in planet Earth’s sky. In the image, composed with 30 hours of narrowband image data, it spans nearly three full moons toward the royal constellation Cepheus. Discovered in 2011 by French astro-imager Nicolas Outters, the Squid Nebula’s bipolar shape is … Read More “Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Nebula” »
Month: July 2023
For four decades, Alaskans have opened their mailboxes to find checks waiting for them, their cut of the black gold beneath their feet. This is Alaska’s Permanent Fund, funded by the state’s oil revenues and paid to every Alaskan each year. We’re now in a different sort of resource rush, with companies peddling bits instead … Read More “The AI Dividend” »
Here’s a fascinating tax hack from Belgium (listen to the details here, episode #484 of “No Such Thing as a Fish,” at 28:00). Basically, it’s about a music festival on the border between Belgium and Holland. The stage was in Holland, but the crowd was in Belgium. When the copyright collector came around, they argued … Read More “Belgian Tax Hack” »
I have mixed feelings about this class-action lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that it “scraped 300 billion words from the internet” without either registering as a data broker or obtaining consent. On the one hand, I want this to be a protected fair use of public data. On the other hand, I want us … Read More “Class-Action Lawsuit for Scraping Data without Permission” »
Amusing parody of password rules. BoingBoing: For example, at a certain level, your password must include today’s Wordle answer. And then there’s rule #27: “At least 50% of your password must be in the Wingdings font.” Powered by WPeMatico
Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence: While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars capture a wider swath of footage. And … Read More “Self-Driving Cars Are Surveillance Cameras on Wheels” »