Guns are now leading cause of death for US kids

By the numbers: Nearly two-thirds of the 4,368 U.S. children up to age 19 who were killed by guns in 2020 were homicide victims, per the CDC. Motor vehicle crashes, formerly the leading cause of death for kids one and older, killed nearly 4,000 children.

• Another 30% of firearm-related child fatalities were suicides, 3% were accidental and 2% were of undetermined intent.

• Male youths were significantly more likely to be killed by guns, while vehicle crashes claimed more females.

• There were also stark racial disparities. The firearm death rate for Black children was more than four times that of white children, and white children were still more likely to be killed by motor vehicles than guns.

• D.C. had the highest firearm death rate, followed by Louisiana, Alaska and Mississippi.

https://www.axios.com/2022/05/26/gun-deaths-children-america

How not to launch

The preliminary report of the investigation indicated that three of the first stage angular velocity sensors, responsible for yaw control, were installed in an incorrect orientation. As the error affected the redundant sensors as well as the primary ones, the rocket was left with no yaw control, which resulted in the failure. Telemetry data also indicated that a pad umbilical had detached prematurely, suggesting that the Proton may have launched several tenths of a second early, before the engines reached full thrust.

Realtime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUhK5vnSigo (1 minute)

Slo-mo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqW0LEcTAYg (2 minutes)

Eight rules to do everything better

These are not new brilliance, but it’s good to see useful advice in one place.

  • Stress + rest = growth
  • Focus on the process, not results
  • Stay humble
  • Build your tribe
  • Take small, consistent steps to achieve big gains
  • Be a minimalist to be a maximalist
  • Make the hard thing easier
  • Remember to experience joy

More at https://medium.com/personal-growth/8-rules-to-do-everything-better-22184251a406.

Bellingcat: Why Ukraine is winning the information war

Partly due to “open-source intelligence (OSINT)”:

In 2014 (Eliot) Higgins used Kickstarter to found Bellingcat (the name refers to resourceful mice tying a bell to a cat), a nonprofit, online collective dedicated to “a new field, one that connects journalism and rights advocacy and crime investigation.” Three days after its launch, a Malaysian passenger jet was shot down over the part of Ukraine held by Russian troops. Bellingcat proved the culprit was a Russian surface-to-air missile, by using largely the same array of tools—including Google Earth, the social media posts of Russian soldiers, and the passion of Eastern European drivers for posting dashcam videos—that hundreds of volunteer sleuths are now using to document the Russian invasion of Ukraine in granular detail….

In Ukraine, Russia has been outflanked. Its attempts to establish a pretext for invasion by circulating video evidence of purported “atrocities” by Ukraine were exposed as frauds within hours by Bellingcat, fellow OSINT volunteers, and legacy news media outlets that have picked up reporting tools the open-source crowd hands around.

https://time.com/6155869/bellingcat-eliot-higgins-ukraine-open-source-intelligence/. About 3,500 words.

Cure for leukemia?

From February 2022:

Two people with leukemia achieved remission over a decade after being infused with CAR-T cells, immune cells that had been modified in a lab, according to a new study. The findings suggest that this approach could be a long-term therapy for leukemia — and some researchers describe it as a possible cure.

Chimeric antigen receptor or CAR-T cell therapy may be a “curative regimen” for chronic lymphocytic leukemia, according to the researchers, who announced their findings in a news briefing this week. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia accounts for about a quarter of new cases of leukemia.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/02/health/cancer-t-cell-therapy-remission-study/index.html

and discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30192209.

Obituary of Renay Mandel Corren

Obituary:

Hers was a bawdy, rowdy life lived large, broke and loud. We thought Renay could not be killed. God knows, people tried. A lot. Renay has been toying with death for a decades, but always beating it and running off in her silver Chevy Nova. Covid couldn’t kill Renay. Neither could pneumonia twice, infections, blood clots, bad feet, breast cancer twice, two mastectomies, two recessions, multiple bankruptcies, marriage to a philandering Sergeant Major, divorce in the 70’s, six kids, one cesarean, a few abortions from the Quietly Famous Abortionist of Spring Lake, NC or an affair with Larry King in the 60’s.

See the whole thing at https://www.fayobserver.com/obituaries/m0028451. Some story behind it from The Guardian:

The obituary describes abortions and an affair with Larry King, but he (Andy Corren, Renay’s son) said that he actually toned down some of Renay’s life – for the protection of those living and dead, and because not all statutes of limitations have expired.

How to reduce Facebook tracking

Let’s face it. You’re not paying for Facebook, right? Therefore you are not the customer. You are the product.

Facebook even tracks you when you are on non-Facebook sites so they can sell your information to advertisers.

Here are seven steps to stop Facebook tracking, starting with the nuclear option. ((Each step has details in the article.))

1. Quit Facebook and Instagram

2. Change these Facebook privacy settings

3. Limit app tracking on your phone

4. Bolster your Web browser

5. Block more app trackers

6. Obscure your email

7. Tell companies to stop selling your data

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/29/stop-facebook-tracking/. About 1,400 words.

Deepfakes

Artificial intelligence programs can modify video to show actors speaking a fluent foreign language…

This AI makes Robert De Niro perform lines in flawless German

…The technology has been used to create fake celebrity porn and damaging revenge-porn clips targeting women. Experts worry that deepfakes showing a famous person in a compromising situation might spread misinformation and sway an election.

Article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/robert-de-niro-speaks-fluent-german-in-taxi-driver-thanks-to-ai/.

Tweets about cats and dogs

Some of these are pretty funny. Click a “pic.twitter.com” link to see the Twitter entry, and clicking a picture shows you a somewhat larger and more complete image. Here’s HuffPost’s 2021 list:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/funniest-tweets-cats-dogs-2021_n_61ccf5f9e4b0bb04a6362061

For example, from https://twitter.com/the_shb/status/1443740333041328128: “Today seems as good a day as any to share these pics of the cat done as a Zen garden with the world.”