EtherMesh

EtherMesh is a feature-rich Android application that transforms peer-to-peer file synchronization into a powerful decentralized communication platform. Built upon the robust Syncthing engine, EtherMesh introduces the LinkThing framework, enabling serverless, peer-to-peer applications through a unique "Everything is a File" philosophy.

Open Book Touch
A pocketable, front-lit, open source e-reader — for every book, in every language //

Open Book Touch
Open Book Touch e-book reader with included LiPo battery and MicroSD card

$149 Free US Shipping / $12 Worldwide
Orders placed now ship Apr 21, 2027.

The Trump administration on Monday barred US citizens in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from returning home amid an Ebola outbreak that continues to outpace response efforts.

Reuters first reported late Monday that Americans currently in the DRC or those who have recently traveled to the Ebola-stricken country have been put on a “do-not-board” list. They cannot travel back to the US until they have spent 21 days in a third country. The order, taken under a transportation authority known as Title 49, was independently confirmed by Politico on Tuesday.

Both outlets noted that roughly two dozen Americans who had been set to board flights home on Tuesday have already been blocked by the new rule. It remains unclear if the bar also applies to government workers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has at least two dozen employees working in the DRC.

The move adds to the already extremely stringent and controversial travel restrictions imposed by the Trump administration in an effort to wall itself off from the outbreak. Health experts continue to be critical of such restrictions, as they have historically been unsuccessful and harmful. Specifically, they discourage countries and people from being transparent about outbreaks and disease risks, hurt economies, and create stigma. There is also concern that such restrictions will limit humanitarian aid workers. //

The US has built an elite network of medical facilities that can safely isolate Ebola patients while offering high-quality care.

In past Ebola outbreaks, no such stringent travel restrictions were implemented, and the US repatriated eight cases for high-level care. None of the repatriated patients transmitted the virus.

New study confirms 2024 “momentum flux theory” on how angular momentum of water flows drives rotation.

A typical lawn sprinkler features various nozzles arranged at angles on a rotating wheel; when water is pumped in, they release jets that cause the wheel to rotate. But what would happen if the water were sucked into the sprinkler instead? In which direction would the wheel turn then, or would it even turn at all? That’s the essence of the “reverse sprinkler” problem that physicists like Richard Feynman, among others, have grappled with since the 1940s. Now, applied mathematicians at New York University think they’ve cracked the conundrum, per a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters—and the answer challenges conventional wisdom on the matter. //

Mach proposed that there would be no rotation with a reverse sprinkler: the reaction force on the nozzle as it sucks in water pulls the nozzle counter-clockwise, while the water flowing into the inside of the nozzle pushes it clockwise. The two forces cancel each other out in this steady-state scenario. Feynman’s own experiment showed a slight tremor when pressure was first applied to pump water through the nozzle, and then the sprinkler returned to its original position and remained still.

But others suggested that if the friction was low enough and the inflow rate high enough, a reverse sprinkler will start to turn in the opposite direction of an ordinary sprinkler, thanks to the formation of a vortex inside.

The Making of the Voyager Golden Record

The following is a listing of sounds electronically placed onboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft.

The following is a partial listing of pictures electronically placed on the golden records which are carried onboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft.

Why Johnny Can’t Read: Not Enough Phonics
Reading scores have been bad for thirty years.

Why? Because teachers stopped pushing phonics and replaced it with something called “Balanced Literacy.”

Greetings! We are husband and wife photographers and filmmakers, Darrin and Sharon Henry, from the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean, and more recently spending extended time in the wonderful City of Hull, in the north of England.

A grammar book walks into a bar

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intents and purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
• A question mark walks into a bar?
• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
• Courier New and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."
• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
• A synonym strolls into a tavern.
• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
• A dyslexic walks into a bra.
• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony .
  – Jill Thomas Doyle

Rocket Alerts in Israel 23-26

Now it’s an arms race between OEMs locking down chips and tuners trying to crack them.

The Earth may not be that massive, but it still distorts space-time. //

Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that a rotating mass like the Earth pulls the fabric of space and time around with it in a perpetual swirl. This phenomenon is known as frame dragging or the Lense-Thirring effect, after the two physicists who modeled it back in 1918. Frame dragging becomes more significant with larger masses and faster rotation, so we’ve mainly observed it around huge black holes.

Measuring how much the Earth twists spacetime as it rotates has been much more challenging because our pale blue dot of a planet is millions of times lighter than a typical black hole and rotates rather slowly.

But now, a team of astronomers led by Ignazio Ciufolini, a physicist at the Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics in China, reports the most accurate measurement of the terrestrial Lense-Thirring effect to date. Their work brings our uncertainty down from a few percentage points to just 0.2 percent. And they did it with a satellite that looks like a cross between a golf ball and a disco globe. //

The disco globe satellite that Ciufolini and his colleagues use in their experiment is called LARES-2 (Laser Relativity Satellite 2) and has been developed by the Italian Space Agency. It’s a solid sphere of Inconel 718, a dense nickel-chromium alloy, covered with 303 corner-cube retroreflectors and measuring a bit over 40 centimeters across. It has no thrusters, no solar panels, and no electronics of any kind. It weighs 294.8 kilos. That combination of small size and large mass gives it the lowest area-to-mass ratio of any satellite in medium-Earth orbit.

This was exactly what the scientists needed, since it helped them minimize the impact of other forces.

“The idea is that we want to measure gravitation,” Ciufolini said. “We have non-gravitational effects like photons impinging on the satellite and pushing it. So, the mass must be very large and the cross-section of the satellite very small, so the acceleration induced by photons is very, very small.” In theoretical physics, satellites of this kind are called test particles, meaning an object whose motion is governed almost entirely by the gravitational field. LARES-2 was placed in orbit at an altitude of roughly 12,265 kilometers by a Vega-C rocket in July 2022. //

The measurement confirmed general relativity once more, but Ciufolini thinks its true value lies in what it rules out. General relativity is incompatible with quantum mechanics, despite our best efforts to reconcile the two, and does not explain dark energy. The Chern-Simons theory, one of the leading alternatives that emerged from quantum gravity frameworks, modifies Einstein’s equations and introduces mathematical corrections expected to make them work at ultra-small scales where quantum mechanics and gravity must coexist.

While it does not fully reconcile Einstein’s physics with quantum mechanics and does not offer a universally accepted solution to the dark energy issue, many physicists think Chern-Simons brings us one step closer to the complete Theory of Everything. The problem, though, is that it predicts a different magnitude for frame dragging. //

“These laser-ranged satellites have a peculiar characteristic: They last for hundreds of years,” Ciufolini said. “The more you wait, the more data you accumulate, and the better the results of frame dragging measurements will be. So, we can wait maybe 100 years, and they’ll become even more useful for theoretical physics.”

The state’s energy policy went off the rails last decade, when Albany set unreachable climate goals, then forced electric utilities to implement them. //

Mamdani has fiercely defended that 2019 climate law at every turn, even as the negative consequences have piled up.

When Mamdani entered the Assembly in early 2021, Con Edison and others were tearing up a century-old playbook that had successfully balanced reliability and cost.

Suddenly the utility companies had to pull double-duty as climate crusaders — and as Albany’s bagmen to pay for their multi-trillion-dollar boondoggle.

That distracted utilities from their near-term maintenance obligations on the geriatric grid, as they spent ratepayer cash and untold attention on an abstract push toward economy-wide electrification. //

Assemblyman Mamdani was among the most extreme voices pressing energy policy even further in the wrong direction, particularly when it came to the actual generation of electricity.

He fiercely opposed allowing private companies to upgrade their power plants — something that could have reduced greenhouse emissions and trimmed electricity costs, if Albany hadn’t blocked the way.

Instead, the air in New York City is dirtier, electricity prices are higher and the grid is more fragile because of green policies Mamdani himself championed.

Prepare to be befuddled and bamboozled – and probably bewitched //

There are no fewer than 22 winning entries this year, including a hat-trick of hat-tricks: three entrants, Yusuke Endoh, Nick Craig-Wood, and Don Yang, all had three winning entries each. We have room for only a few of our personal highlights, but we highly recommend reading all the winners – they are well worth your time.

Reinventing Nixie tubes through design, research, and craftsmanship.

We are a small team dedicated to restoring historical nixie tube-making techniques and crafting modern timepieces —by hand, in our Czech workshop.

What is a nixie tube, and how do nixie tubes work inside the glowing displays people still collect, restore, and build with today? These vintage electronic display tubes have a distinctive look, but their appeal is not only visual. Below, we explain what they are, how they operate, where they were used historically, and why they still matter in modern electronics projects.

Fatesrider Ars Legatus Legionis
13y
25,622
Subscriptor
KilenWoods said:
“We cannot choose to become idiots.”

Anecdotally, I've noticed that people can indeed choose to become idiots, and prefer being comfortably wrong to uncomfortable curiosity. GenAI just makes this choice easier.
Can't upvote this enough.

One thing stands out in this, though not at all mentioned in the article: The average college student is still physiologically immature.

The human animal does not fully mature until between 23 and 27 years old. That's when the part of the brain - the higher reasoning and critical thinking part - finishes maturing.

If society would acknowledge this fact instead of using that immaturity to exploit younger "adults", or attempting to teach them how to be mature humans when they are physiologically incapable of grasping the nuances of that state, then things might be different, because they'd then have the reasoning skills necessary to UNDERSTAND why cheating on exams and not actually learning the subject matter is important.

In college, it's all about GPA's and that's also the wrong metric to evaluate someone on, mostly because it's easy to game that with a lot of fluff classes to bolster the GPA when the core classes are bringing it down. After all, It's one thing to graduate with a GPA of say 3.4 in Engineering, but only a 2.1 in the core classes with the electives being what brought it up. But few employers ever see the core class grades.

If you ever wondered why you started thinking you were getting "old" when you were in your mid-20's, it's because your brain was finally in an adult configuration for the first time, and you realize that a lot of the "fun" things you used to do were actually pretty stupid to be doing at all.

In college, that would be cheating on exams, of course. Just do the fucking work. I was in my 40's running a business when I went to college and graduated with a degree in computer science and a 3.8 GPA (calculus and an exam on 9/11/01 kicked my ass or it'd have been higher).

AND if they understood that what your GPA was in college means jack shit (unless you're heading for post-grad) to an employer, and that they only care that you graduated, cheating becomes even more of a stupid thing to be doing. //

clewis Ars Tribunus Militum
10y
1,903
Subscriptor++
Aurich said:
<snip>

Why do people pick the jewels when it takes away from playing the game? I think because it's human nature to take the advantage, the shortcut, the skip to the goal. We're wired to find it hard to resist.

These students are facing the same kind of choice. Yes, the shortcuts are ultimately taking away from their experience. But it's so optimal, it makes things so much easier, they can't pass it up.

I honestly believe any solution that relies on pitting long-term self interest vs short-term gain is on the whole going to lose to the short-term option. It's human to choose that.
Click to expand...

Conversely, most people hate to exercise, but do it anyway. And it's got the same downsides that doing assignments have. It consumes limited time and energy.

I don't know why exercise seems to be winning. If I had to guess, I'd guess it's because exercise has a really good advertising team: Nike, the NBA, MLB, the Olympics, etc. Learning doesn't have a good ad team. I'm kind of the opinion that Not Learning has a better ad team than Learning does.

A suspicious Serrano decided that he would make the final exam in-person; he would see if students did similarly well on it. He emailed his class, telling them, “I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong. That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”

Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, El País noted, “22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”

Among those who took the test, the average score plunged—from 96 all the way down to 48.

The professor was horrified by what appeared to be massive cheating in his course—cheating that was preventing most of the students from learning the material. //

“We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is okay,” he told Inside Higher Ed. “That leads to a declining society, to a failed society.

“We cannot choose to become idiots.”