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Schools should not be giving student grades and disciplinary records to police that use the information as a justification for harassment. It’s about time people pushed back against Pasco County’s targeted policing program.

eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/pasc

So for dinner I finally went with sardines, mackerel, and brown rice as the base, with equal weight fish to rice, so VERY dense in fish.. the sauce was lemon-soy-walnuts (blended to a paste), a little sesame oil and crushed red pepper.

It was amazing, no complains. Only thing is sardines have these hair like bones, you dont notice them when eating it but it makes them look "hairy".. so their kind of a cheap fish and makes the dish look a bit less appealing even though it doesnt effect texture or taste.

hmm what to make for dinner today.. i have soooo much fish to use so clearly a fish dish.

The fish I have to work with: Mackerel, sardines, octopus (4 lbs), squid, eel (canned and fresh).. i went through my veggies fast as hell so gonna have to work with basically peppers and broccolini...

I'm thinking I might wing it and do something with wasabi and lemon as a base for a white sauce, and maybe a bit of brown rice and the veggies as sides...

Interesting fact of the day: Sharks have existed on the planet longer than trees.

Faith in humanity lost... glitter bombing and exposing scammers, as well as hacking their SSTV. Love what this guy did but man the fact that these scammers are ok doing what they do is depressing.

youtu.be/VrKW58MS12g

@icedquinn

Lets take some specific samples of actual data to show why this is completely false.

Rabies is one of the most deadly non-novel viruses we know.. close to 100% of people who get this disease die without a vaccine. No virus compares in terms of percentage chance of death (in all cases we assume no vaccine of course).

Despite how deadly it is there are several diseases with as large or lower an R0.. in other words it spreads faster than many less deadly diseases. For example "swine flu" has almost the exact same rate of spread (R0) yet doesnt even have a morality rate of 1% at somewhere around 0.3%. Avian flu was about 63% deadly and yet had much lower R0 despite being less deadly at an R0 of 1 (it didnt really spread much at all).

To pick another example seasonal flu kills about 0.1% of people and has a R0 of about 2.6, yet there are tons of diseases that spread faster and are far more deadly such as: HIV (Mort: treated 2.5%, untreated: 80%, R0: 3.5), Lyme disease (mort: 0.25%, R0: 3.9), Dengue Fever (mort: 5%, R0 5), Tuberculosis (mort 66%, R0 5.5), Mumps (mort 2%, R0 12.3), and many many others.

Long story short, it may sound valid, but you cant just make things up and assume their true you have to look at the data. The fact is when you look at the data this assertion is a complete myth.

@djsumdog @giantbug

@Science

I was asked to explain the space-weather ticker I posted earlier (attached). This was my reply.

## ionosphere

First off the are two categories of radio operation that is relevant and effected in opposite ways..

1. space to earth
2. earth-to-earth.

Number 2 breaks down in two ways as well that is

2a. line of sight operation, vs
2b. skywave operation.

Skywave operation is really the most relevant here, line of sight might be effected somewhat by noise floor effects from sun but that is only relevant some of the time.

### Reflection Layers

There are two main factors from the sun that affect operation. One is radio interference, this would be caused by flares and ejections directed at earth. In extreme cases it can cause an EMP but thats very rare.

The other is ionizing radiation in the form of UV (a much shorter wavelength version of UV than what reaches the earth), ionized particles, solar wind and similar. This ionizes the ionosphere in a specific way that causes radio waves to be blocked and/or reflected. Basically there are two regions in the ionosphere both in whats called the F-region.. These are F1 which is at 200 km above sea level, and F2 which is at 300 km. The higher F2 layer allows for radio signals at a particular angle to be reflected, this allows radio operators to bounce their signals off this part of the sky and reach distant receivers. Since F2 is much closer to the ground this particular region actually blocks long range communication and thus significantly reduces the distance a radio signal can reach to mostly line of sight.

Usually, when the radiation is high enough, we see the F2 layer ionize first in the morning (basically when the sun is just coming up for people who live near your horizon), which makes the morning the best time to transmit. By afternoon the F1 layer is ionized by sun radiation and thus the signal is blocked again.. the reverse happens in the evening. So early and late day propagation is best. This is called gray-line propagation.

There is also E layer propagation which operates at much lower frequencies and at steeper angles. This is what is used for very short distance transmissions within the 100's of km. This is called NVIS (Near Vertical Incidents Skywave).

## Reading the screencap

Now with this said, it only works when the radiation from the sun is just right. Basically there needs to be enough radiation from the sun to actually fully ionize the layers.

### SFI

SFI on the chart stands for "solar flux index" this is a measure of the quantity of ionized particles and solar wind measured. This is usually in the range of 0 - 400 with 0 - 100 being poor for propagation, 0 - 200 being marginal, and 200+ being ideal/good.

### SN

SN stands for sunspot numbers, these effect different layers selectively. sunspots reflect the intensity of the sun's magnetic field. It ranges from about 0 to 400 as well.

Lower values here show a preference to ionize lower levels of our ionosphere. 0 to about 150 will preferentially ionize the E-region and be ideal for low frequency propagation (160m wavelength to 80M) in the NVIS configuration, so very short distance (100's of km) propagation only which is all these low frequencies can ever do.

Higher values, above 200 means the F-regions are preferentially ionized. That means low frequencies like 160m and 80m will not propagate at all and only work line of sight (10's of km), but higher frequencies ~20m and higher in frequency will propagate via skywave. These frequencies now can propagate 1000's of km around the world in these conditions (assuming SFI and other factors are good).

### K index

The next line is K-index just labeled K. This one is rather complicated.. it basically looks at the horizontal component of the earth's magnetic field and how it is disturbed (which is an indirect way of measuring the solar winds and its interaction of the earth).

This doesn't effect the ionosphere itself so much as the other measures since its only partly effected by solar winds. This is used as a measure of expected band noise and thus how high the noise floor will be. the max value is 9 and indicates significant noise. 5 is about the cutoff where geomagnetic storms are present.

The K-index is not linear and is calculated from the a-index (lowercase a, different from A-index below).

### A-index

is really just another way of measuring K-index. Or to be more precise both A-index and K-index are calculated from the underlying a-index (a-index is different from A-index). The A-index is the average of the last 8 a-index, and thus has a much simpler interpretation.

Think of A-index as a long-term rolling average of the K-index in a different scale.

Generally A-index is even less linear than K-index with 0-50 being low noise and 100 - 400 being high noise.. lower is better.

### 304A

304A stands for "304 Angstroms" which is the wavelength of UV light measures. Basically its the strength of UV radiation from the sun as measured from space (different than earth UV levels). the "@ SEM" part refers to the instrument on the satellite used to record it, called SEM, SOHO and EVE are other possible instruments used to get this measurement and it changes depending on the instrument available at the time.

In this case higher is better as it means more of that F-layer ionization I mentioned.below 80 is poor, 150 and up is good, 250 and up is amazing.

### Ptn/Elec Flux

This is Proton and Electron flux. These have a similar effect as UV except they ionize the E-layer more so than the F-layer. So they harm long distance short wavelength propagation but improve short distance long wave-length propagation.

### Aurora

This is just the predicted chance of aurora. Not directly relevant for radio.

### Aur Lat

This tells us the largest lattitude likely to see the aurora.

### Bz and SW

This is the interplanetary (in space) magnetic field vector (B-field means magnetic field). This is the magnetic field that is incoming and striking the earth from space.

The Bz part is the intensity, the SW part is the direction in degrees. When it lines up with the earths magnetic field it strengthens it, when it doesnt it weakens it. Positive values strengthen it, negative weaken it.

### other values

Everything else is self explanatory I suspect. "solar flare prob" is the percentage change of a solar flare, which we dont tend to know until just a few minutes before their ejections strike.

"MUF" stands for "Maximum Usable Frequency". It indicates the highest frequency (shortest wavelength) that is likely to be capable of bouncing off the ionosphere (f-layer or e-layer) and therefore the highest frequency capable of skywave propagation.

Just a reminder that the european and canadian healthcare systems have abysmal wait times, to the point that people can often expiernce permanent life injuries or even death due to the extreme wait times to be treated. While emergencies are usually treated quickly most things that cause long term injury aren't emergencies.

and the worst wait times, often resulting in harm

% of people waiting more than 2 months for a specialist.

Germany 2x vs USA, new zealand 4x, sweden 3x, australia, 3x, France 3x, canada 5x.. all % of people waiting more than 2 months for a specialist

worldpopulationreview.com/coun

Looks like a fucking safety hazard if thats what it is for..

Based on the fact that it has a cross bar on the top my guess would be that it ensures oversized vehicles do not drive on the road. By the looks of it the slow cars just barely make the limit which is why they go so slow, the fast ones are much smaller.

I think im going to order some squid and mackerel for my next round of cooking.

For any ruby :ruby: devs out there, wanted to share a neat little open-source :opensource: module I wrote to solve a common problem. Keep in mind ruby is not my main language so if there is a batter approach here I'm all ears.

Basically right now I have a game (text based mud) and in normal and expected fashion objects in the game are created when their objects get initialized, such as a new player being created. The system then periodically saves the universe by marshalling all the object into some serialized format and saves it to a file from time to time. As tends to be the case with serialization, however, when an object is restored, such as a previous player logging out and back in, then the class is created directly without the initialize method getting called , its class and instance variables are simply populated directly.

This is where problems can arise if you change the system and add new features (such as a new variable to an object). New objects that are created will populate the new variable correctly through the initialize method however already existing players will not have that variable set at all (it won't be nil, it simply wont be set, which is a distinctly different state). This is the problem I solved.

What I did was created a mix-in module that lets you set default values for variables, once a class is reinstated from storage it checked if any variables that have defaults are unset (nil variables are considered set) and then applies the default value to them. In this way legacy objects will be able to update to new code changes automatically when it loads. To prevent duplicating code you can even intentionally leave it out of the initialize method and rely on the defaults when it is appropriate to do so.

Moreover the defaults do not have to be static values but can be determined based on the existing state of the object, which makes them dynamic and flexible... a class that uses the mixin could look like this:

require 'defaults'

class Foo
include Defaults

# @bar defaults to @baz*2
default(:bar) { |this| this.baz * 2 }
# @faaboo defaults to 178
default(:faaboo) { 178 }

def initialize
@baz = 13

line can be ommited
@bar = 26
# if you add this line instead
load_defaults
work fine
end
end

Here is a link to the module:

git.qoto.org/aethyr/Aethyr/-/b

You can see a class that utilizes this new feature here:

git.qoto.org/aethyr/Aethyr/-/b

@Science

@Science

Hey everyone, a supernova just went off in Cassiopeia!!!! Right now it is in the early stage so only visible by telescope but after a few days it is likely to be visible to the naked eye. Supernovas are fairly rare so might want to make some time to see this one!

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