Headline of the week, 2021.02.25

A Capitol rioter texted his ex during the insurrection to call her a ‘moron,’ feds say. She turned him in.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/25/capitol-richard-michetti-girlfriend-moron/

Some of the comments are good, or at least amused me:

“Who’s the moron now?”
“Something something a woman scorned.”
“There should be additional charges of felony stupid.”
“He must be a graduate of the Trump school of wooing women.”
“Having worked in a District Attorney’s office (albeit as a secretary), I assure you that if there was a sentencing enhancement for utter stupidity, jails would never have an empty bed.”
“When I saw the forest of cell phones being used to document what they were doing, I said to myself, ‘Here’s your sign.’”
“That’s known as an ‘own goal’.”
“Nothing says I don’t love you anymore than the FBI showing up at your front door.”
“Not exactly a Mensa convention was it?”
“BRB. Experiencing schadenfreude.”

404 page not found

No no, you got here correctly!

“404” is the HTTP error code that a website sends to you (well, to your browser) if you try to read a page that doesn’t exist. Normally it means that you typed the link incorrectly, or that the page has been renamed or deleted. The website can, however, redirect you to a special page to explain the problem. Some of them are funny:

Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/sljdfsdfh (you can type any garbage at the end):

Why wasn’t this page found?
We asked some leading economists.
Stagflation: The cost of pages rose drastically, while the page production rate slowed down.
General economics: There was no market for it.
Liquidity traps: We injected some extra money into the technology team but there was little or no interest so they simply kept it, thus failing to stimulate the page economy. (etc)

Bernie Sanders: https://berniesanders.com/lajsdklajsdlas.

Analog Devices: https://www.analog.com/en/products/xyzad5423.html.

FloatHub: https://floathub.com/foobar.

And more, with some discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20489668.

Sight restored by turning back the epigenetic clock

In mice, but that’s where things start.

‘Reprogramming’ approach seems to make old cells young again…

An emerging model in the field of ageing is that, over time, cells accumulate epigenetic noise — molecular changes that alter patterns of gene expression, including transcriptional changes and shifts in the patterns of methyl groups on DNA. Collectively, these changes cause cells to lose their identity and so to lose the DNA-, RNA- and protein-expression patterns that once promoted their youthful resilience.

Articles (on the same day!): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03119-1 and https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03403-0.

Making DuckDuckGo your search engine

You can change your default search engine in a browser from one that follows you and records all your searches for sale to the highest bidder, to one that protects your privacy.

First, some articles on protecting your online privacy are at https://spreadprivacy.com/tag/privacy-newsletter. Articles include:

Privacy Mythbusting #4: I can’t be identified just by browsing a website. (If only!)
Privacy Mythbusting #5: I own my personal information. (Not as much as you think.)
Privacy Mythbusting #2: My password keeps me safe. (Not necessarily!)
Are Ads Costing You Money?
Are Ads Following You?

Instructions on changing your default search engine on a Mac:

Firefox: Firefox ➞ Preferences ➞ Search ➞ Default Search Engine and select DuckDuckGo.

Safari: ➞ Preferences ➞ Search ➞ Search engine and select DuckDuckGo.

Setting your default search engine in other browsers, or browsers under Windows, will be similar but probably a little more complicated. Click this: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=default+search+engine+windows to search for instructions.