A television personality in Australia says that his four-year-old son has made a number of inexplicable and eerie statements which suggest that he was Princess Diana in a past life. The bizarre revelation reportedly came by way of a magazine article written by the boy's bewildered father David Campbell. He explained that the strangeness began two years ago when the youngster first pointed to a picture of Diana and declared "look, it's me when I was a princess."
According to Campbell, the boy continued to make spooky comments about what appears to be his past life, such as saying that he had two boys that he called his 'sons.' While the confounded dad initially dismissed these statements as fanciful talk from the toddler, he really took notice when they began to become more detailed. In particular, Campbell says that his son was able to name a site in Scotland where Diana frequently stayed and can describe the interior of the residence known as Balmoral.
Chillingly, the child has even allegedly made mention of Diana's tragic death, saying "one day the sirens came and I wasn't a princess anymore."
With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.This writer, Toby Young, then says that Boris argued all over the shop, appeared unprepared, and prompted laughter, but he (Toby) still seemed to find it all a cunning plan:
You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly effective speech if he’d wanted to, but was too clever and sophisticated—and honest—to enter into such a silly charade. To do what the other debaters were doing, and pretend he believed what was coming out of his mouth, would have been patronising. Everyone else was taking the audience for fools, but not him. He was openly insincere and, in being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else. To say I was impressed would be an understatement.Now, to be fair, Young makes it clear in the rest of the article that he has plenty of reservations about how Boris will perform as PM, but at the end of the day, it's the feelz:
The rational part of my brain is still full of doubts and uncertainties. What sensible person would look at Boris’s peripatetic career and rakish personality and conclude that he is the right man to lead Britain at this moment of maximum danger? But at a more primitive level, a level impervious to reason, I cannot help but believe. From the first moment I saw him, I felt I was in the presence of someone special, someone capable of achieving great things. And I’ve never quite been able to dispel that impression.Update: following Jason's assurances about how good the UK Spectator is, I see that it has a Nick Cohen anti Johnson/Brexit column which reads in part:
Brexit was won with an impossible promise that we could have wrenching economic and constitutional change without suffering. Now the men and women who sold the false prospectus have 100 days to try to make good on their word. They will either succeed and leave the little people to live with the consequences or be thrown out of power and freed to play the role of martyr that appeals as much to the Brexit right as the Corbynite left.As they chunter in their think tanks and newspapers and rage on the Web, they will say that they at least remained pure, they at least remained true to the lies they told to themselves as much as others. They were riding the unicorn to a glorious future until they were betrayed by the EU, by the remainers, by the elite. By anyone but them.
The link is here.The chief executive of the world's largest mining company has endorsed drastic action to combat global warming, which he calls "indisputable," and an emerging crisis."The planet will survive. Many species may not," BHP CEO Andrew Mackenzie told a business breakfast in London on Tuesday."This is a confronting conclusion but as a veteran geologist once said, 'you can't argue with a rock.'"
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told lawmakers Tuesday that the bureau has recorded about 100 arrests of domestic terrorism suspects in the past nine months and that most investigations of that kind involve some form of white supremacy — though an FBI spokeswoman later clarified the percentage is smaller. ......
At a congressional hearing in May, the head of the FBI’s counterterrorism division testified that the bureau was investigating 850 domestic terrorism cases and that of those, about 40 percent involved racially motivated violent extremists. Most in that group, he said, were white supremacists.That's from the Washington Post.
Top 2020 Dems would punish China over mass detentions of Uighurs
I don't think anyone can do much about it anyway.Context: Earlier this week, 37 countries — including North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Russia, among other mostly-authoritarian states — signed a letter defending China's policies in Xinjiang.
- This came shortly after 22 other countries formally condemned China's abuses in the region.
The bottom line: Most of the world has been largely silent on this issue due in large part to China’s economic clout and penchant for lashing out over criticisms of its internal affairs. Trump administration officials have repeatedly criticized China but not acted on concrete proposals to impose costs on Beijing.
The idea boils down to this: If a certain type of dark matter particle existed, it would occasionally kill people, passing through them like a bullet. Because no one has died from unexplained gunshotlike wounds, this type of dark matter does not exist, according to a new study....Good thing it doesn't exist, I guess.
A less mainstream dark matter candidate, known as macros, would form heavier particles. Although macros would be much rarer than WIMPs, any collisions with ordinary matter would be violent, leaving an obvious trace. The new study explores what those traces might look like if the macros hit people.
Glenn Starkman and Jagjit Singh Sidhu, theoretical physicists at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, were originally searching for traces of macros in granite slabs when a colleague made a suggestion. “Why can’t you just use humans as a detector?” they recall Robert Scherrer, a co-author and theoretical physicist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville saying. “The energies you’re talking about, these things would probably at best maim a person, at worst kill a person.”
The team forged ahead with the idea and modeled macros that would have a similar effect to a fatal shot from a .22 caliber rifle. Such particles would be minuscule, but very heavy, and thus release the same amount of energy as a bullet as it passes through a person. Their calculations focused on the millions of people living in Canada, the United States, and Western Europe over the past decade because researchers say these countries have more reliable data on how many people died and from what causes.
In this sample, scientists would expect to see a handful of reports of unexplained deaths from invisible dark matter “bullets.” But there were none, the researchers report this week on the preprint server arXiv. These deaths would not go unnoticed—they would leave victims dead or dying with a tubular wound where their flesh was vaporized.
Climate-related risks are dependent not only on the warming trend from GHGs, but also on the variability about the trend. However, assessment of the impacts of climate change tends to focus on the ultimate level of global warming1, only occasionally on the rate of global warming, and rarely on variability about the trend. Here we show that models that are more sensitive to GHGs emissions (that is, higher equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS)) also have higher temperature variability on timescales of several years to several decades2. Counter-intuitively, high-sensitivity climates, as well as having a higher chance of rapid decadal warming, are also more likely to have had historical ‘hiatus’ periods than lower-sensitivity climates. Cooling or hiatus decades over the historical period, which have been relatively uncommon, are more than twice as likely in a high-ECS world (ECS = 4.5 K) compared with a low-ECS world (ECS = 1.5 K). As ECS also affects the background warming rate under future scenarios with unmitigated anthropogenic forcing, the probability of a hyper-warming decade—over ten times the mean rate of global warming for the twentieth century—is even more sensitive to ECS.Here's a press release type report about the same study.
to optical:Charting the dark ages' 21-centimeter radiation “is essential. It has to be done at some point,” says radio astronomer Heino Falcke of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who works on the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a vast radio telescope spread across northern Europe. The problem is that after 13 billion years of cosmic expansion, photons from the dark ages arrive at Earth stretched to frequencies below 50 MHz, where they not only have to contend with the ionosphere, but also with confounding signals from ham radio, aviation, and long-distance communications. LOFAR, for example, has struggled to detect the 21-centimeter signal from that epoch (Science, 7 November 2014, p. 688). The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array, which Hewitt and others are building in South Africa, may have a better shot. But Falcke and others are looking to the Moon.Burns's 35-year campaign for a lunar radio telescope won him NASA funding in 2008 to form a team called LUNAR to work out how to build it. The researchers designed a lunar telescope array that would include hundreds of simple dipole antennas laid flat on the ground. They demonstrated how autonomous rovers could lay out strips of conducting film to act as antennas. In a 2013 experiment, astronauts on the International Space Station remotely guided a rover that laid out antenna strips on a simulated moonscape at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, to show how a future crew onboard NASA's proposed Moon-orbiting Lunar Gateway station could supervise construction.
One solution, proposed by a NASA-funded team last decade, is to build a liquid mirror. The idea is simple: Construct a large shallow circular dish, fill it with a liquid, and set it gently spinning. Centrifugal force will pull the surface into a parabolic shape. Liquid mirror telescopes on Earth use mercury, which is naturally reflective. The biggest so far was the 6-meter Large Zenith Telescope in British Columbia in Canada. That testbed telescope, built in 2003 and now decommissioned, paved the way for the 4-meter International Liquid Mirror Telescope, which will take its first view of the sky from the Devasthal Observatory in India later this year. Although a liquid mirror is limited to looking straight up, the rotation of Earth—or the Moon—scans it across the sky.Mercury won't work on the Moon—it would evaporate in the lunar vacuum and is too heavy to transport from Earth. In its place, the NASA team came up with a class of organic compounds called ionic liquids, essentially molten salts, that would remain liquid in the frigid lunar night. Ionic liquids are not reflective, but could be glazed with silver to make an ideal reflecting surface. Superconducting bearings could levitate the dish and keep it spinning frictionlessly. “In principle there is no limit on the size,” says team member Ermanno Borra of Laval University in Quebec City, Canada. “This would be totally impossible in space, but not that expensive on the Moon.”The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) followed up the NASA study by looking at the practicalities of building such a scope. “There were no showstoppers and the mechanical tolerances were more relaxed than for a space telescope,” says Paul Hickson of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. A 20-meter telescope, CSA concluded, would require no more than 3.5 tons of material to be transported to the surface. An even larger instrument, as big as 100 meters across, “would be in a class of its own,” Hickson says, able to study the very first stars that formed and coalesced into galaxies at the end of the dark ages.
Astronauts must go without many popular foods and beverages on the International Space Station, including soda — the carbonation goes wacky in space and could wreak havoc on the digestive system; perishable items, because food poisoning would be pretty terrible in space; and alcohol, because it could damage water recovery equipment and impair astronauts' judgment.New Scientist once had an article on beer in space, and noted:
And some have been staples since the early missions. Tang, a beverage nearly synonymous with spaceflight, remains popular among astronauts today. What you won't hear about as often — shrimp cocktail. "Shrimp cocktail has almost forever been [one of] their favorite foods," Bourland says (and Kloeris agrees).
Unfortunately for thirsty astronauts, beer is poorly suited to space consumption because of the gas it includes. Without gravity to draw liquids to the bottoms of their stomachs, leaving gases at the top, astronauts tend to produce wet burps.Burping got coverage in another article, which explained:
“That’s one of the reasons why we don’t have carbonated beverages on the space menu,” NASA spokesperson William Jeffs told New Scientist.
You can't burp in space - at least not like you do here on Earth.
"You can't burp in space because the air, food and liquids in your stomach are all floating together like chunky bubbles," Hadfield replied on Twitter.
"If you burp, you throw up into your mouth. So guess where the trapped air goes?"
If you do end up going to space, there was one enterprising astronaut who found a way to belch without bomiting. According to the book What's it Like in Space? by Ariel Waldman, NASA astronaut and physicist Jim Newman, who has spent 43 days in space, developed what he called the "push and burp."
"He found that by pushing off a wall, he could create a force in lieu of gravity that kept his food down in his stomach, giving him a brief chance at expelling gas without consequence," Waldman wrote.
Incredibly, Asian Latham Jason seems to think this is the kind of flim flam person who will make a good Prime Minister.To grasp how Johnson’s akratic character has brought his country to a state approaching anarchy, it is necessary to return to the days immediately before February 21, 2016, when he announced to an expectant throng of journalists that he would support the Leave campaign. This was a crucial moment—polls have since shown that, in what turned out to be a very close-run referendum, Boris, as the mayor of London had branded himself,2 had a greater influence on voters than anyone else. “Character is destiny, said the Greeks, and I agree,” writes Johnson in The Churchill Factor, his 2014 book about Winston Churchill, which carries the telling subtitle “How One Man Made History.”3 While the book shows Johnson to be a true believer in the Great Man theory of history, his own moment of destiny plays it out as farce, the fate of a nation turning not on Churchillian resolution but on Johnsonian indecision. For Johnson was, in his own words, “veering all over the place like a shopping trolley.” On Saturday, February 20, he texted Prime Minister David Cameron to say he was going to advocate for Brexit. A few hours later, he texted again to say that he might change his mind and back Remain.Sometime between then and the following day, he wrote at least two different columns for the Daily Telegraph—his deadline was looming, so he wrote one passionately arguing for Leave and one arguing that the cost of Brexit would be too high. (Asked once if he had any convictions, Johnson replied, “Only one—for speeding…”) Then, early on Sunday evening, he texted Cameron to say that he was about to announce irrevocably that he was backing Leave. But, as Cameron told his communications director, Craig Oliver, at the time, Johnson added two remarkable things. One was that “he doesn’t expect to win, believing Brexit will be ‘crushed.’” The other was staggering: “‘He actually said he thought we could leave and still have a seat on the European Council—still making decisions.’”4
The expectation—perhaps the hope—of defeat is telling. Johnson’s anti-EU rhetoric was always a Punch and Judy show, and without the EU to play Judy, the show would be over. But the belief that Britain would keep its seat on the European Council (which consists of the leaders of each member state and makes most of the EU’s big political decisions), even if it left the EU, is mind-melting. Not only was Johnson unconvinced that he was taking the right side on one of the most important questions his country has faced since World War II, but he was unaware of the most basic consequence of Brexit. Britain had joined the Common Market, as it was then called, in 1973 precisely because it was being profoundly affected by decisions made in Brussels and was therefore better off having an equal say in those decisions. Johnson’s belief that Britain would continue to have a seat at the European table after Brexit suggested a profound ignorance not just of his country’s future but of its entire postwar past.
This ignorance is not stupidity—Johnson is genuinely clever and, as his fictional alter ego Barlow shows, quite self-aware. It is the studied carelessness affected by a large part of the English upper class whose manners and attitudes Johnson—in reality the product of a rather bohemian bourgeois background—thoroughly absorbed. Consequences are for the little people, seriousness for those who are paid to clean up the mess.
