Polish journalist arguing with "Stalin-Verstehers" in 1931:
"Western societies widely believe that Red Army only has defensive potential. They basically believe that 'if Red Army soldiers were ordered by Moscow to invade a foreign country country, they would mutiny'. I believe they are wrong."
And he was right π€·
Some media in Russia and Ukraine are distributing statements from Polish former minister of defence Antoni Macierewicz about alleged explosion on the Polish π΅π± presidential Tu-154 in April 2010.
The only problem is that Macierewicz has been making these statements since 2010 and *never* produced any actual evidence.
He has been promising a "final report" to be published "very soon"... for the last three years.
Stanford professor Jacobson, who is very vocal advocate of 100% renewable energy just published a paper with this graph ("correlation between wind energy output and building heat load in Texas").
There's actually an XKCD strip about this kind of statistics π
Bypassing anti-tracking defences in web browsers using CNAME cloaking - already used by some tracking companies, blocked by Firefox, Brave, uBlock and to some extent Safari
A #cryptocurrency paper "How to issue a central bank digital currency" published by Swiss National Bank , interestingly proposes GNU Taler rather than blockchain-based ones
Brezhnev's talks with Giscard d'Estaing (1977), complaining that people who criticise #ussr are "well paid".
Technically, Brezhnev is right: in 80's Poland average salary was like $20 per month, which was probably 1/100-1/10 of what people in the West earned at the time, so literally anyone there was indeed "well paid", including those few who talked badly about USSR.
π€·
Origin of life: Did Darwinian evolution begin before life itself?
As I've just set up @Liberapay donation for @k9mail and I had a look at the top projects there, this is really heart-warming.
I rely on some of these projects on daily basis, and what they raise is massive moral and material support for devs, and gives assurance to users they won't disappear due to lack of funding.
Liberapay itself is the most telling: each patron only pays 0.38 EUR on average per week, yet with almost 1000 people this makes decent 360 EUR.
Energy and Climate: "63 years ago, Shell geologist M. K. Hubbert projected a benign vision of our energy future using a simple diagram. Within a few years, however, the antinuclear "green" lobby was born, and thanks to it we remain barreling toward a complete and utter energy/climate trainwreck."
http://web.archive.org/web/20190622114940if_/http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/1956/1956.pdf
An interesting analysis from ERCOT Texas for 15 February - how different energy sources performed. What is the most important piece is the Avg Capacity Factor column.
For example, nuclear has 5 GW max power and operated at this power for 80% of time (including all cold related issues).
Even coal and gas ("dirty but reliable") operated at their maximum power for ~60% of time.
PV and wind operated at their maximum power for 11-16% respectively.
Let's not forget about #Belarus Prosecution in Minsk just requested that journalists Katerina Andreeva and Darya Chulcova are jailed for two years for... live streaming of street protests from a 14-th floor flat.
https://www.currenttime.tv/a/belsat-journalists-2-years-prison-for-stream/31107333.html
Polish expat into UK. Information security engineer. Caver & cave rescuer (thus the bat). NHS volunteer & blood donor.