perestroika

Study of the calls that bonobos use to communicate indicates that their vocal system shows both trivial and non-trivial compositionality, the latter previously thought to occur only in human languages.

(Note: since The Guardian messed up their link to the research paper, I'm providing it here: Extensive compositionality in the vocal system of bonobos.)

Summary: back in 2008, researchers found a big difference between the incidence and mortality of prostate cancer in Asian and "western" countries (even if situated in Asia). Incidence of the disease in "western" countries was several times higher. Additional data was pulled in to determine if the cause was genetic. People of Asian descent born in "western" countries had a comparably high risk, but people who had immigrated to "western" countries retained a lower risk. Thus, evidence pointed at society. The obvious candidate explanation was eating food that contains phytoestrogens from soy beans.

Finnish interview: over here.

Update: I'm a fool, they have an English version, it is here.

~~English translation: over here on Riseup Share.~~

(For ease of reading, one can click "View in browser", it should display as a plain text file.)

Summary: a Finnish-language anarchist website published an interview with Ksusha, a member in the Solidarity Collectives network in Ukraine.

I found the interview informative of the situation they have, and wanted to share. However, Finnish is as good as encryption to most people, so I translated it to English.

Since I think Lemmy does not support posting long texts in post summaries or comments, I uploaded the translation to RiseUp Share.

I hope authors forgive that I've not contacted them to ask for permission, because I don't have their contacts, although eventually I must find a way to contact Solidarity Collectives on another matter. The interview in Finnish was also published in the magazine "Kapinatyöläinen" ("rebel worker"), issue 61.

A short summary: contrary to widespread opinion, the brain of a typical person is not sterile, but inhabited with microbes that have health effects.

They say that people who don't build battery banks while wearing a sweater will cry about the lack of battery banks in double fur coats. :)

Since today was possibly the last "sweater" weekend here, morning frost is a reality and snow has fallen 500 km northwards...

...I decided that I would be among the first and not the second group. :)

Coincidence has given me an almost unused (43 000 km driven) battery bank of a Mitsubishi i-MIEV (a crap car, don't buy unless you are an EV mechanic).

But in my house, there is already a 24V battery bank made of Nissan Leaf cells and I'm worried about lack of space and fire hazard (if lithium batteries burn, you typically need tons of water to make them do anything else - I have only one ton and pumping it requires that same battery bank).

So I decided that I'd build a new 48V battery bank outside my house, start it up with the MIEV cells and maybe migrate the Leaf cells there later too, after checking and reassembly.

However, winters are cold here and MIEV cells (as I mentioned, the car is crap) lose 30% of their capacity when cold. It thus follows that I must keep my battery warm in winter - and later on, cool in summer. This requires energy. Spending less energy on battery care allows using more energy for useful things. :)

Thus it follows that I need a battery enclosure. :) It must have wheels so construction bureaucrats can be waved away with an explanation (a generator on wheels doesn't need a building permit either). And it must have thermal insulation.

The insulation is PIR foam, 10 cm thick. Maybe I'll make some parts even thicker. The wheeled platform was salvaged from a bankrupt boat factory, I don't know its original purpose. The bottom plywood is 20 mm waterproof ply, and the top layer (PIR is very delicate, don't put batteries directly on PIR) is 9 mm waterproof ply.

The design I stole from an anarchist squat which existed in 2009, where styrofoam was used for a similar purpose, with the difference that squatters used lead acid batteries and their battery room was indoors (now it's advisable to imagine the sound of clattering teeth, it was cold there in winter).

Inside the box, there will be:

• balancers / equalizers
• some DC heating ribbon
• a thermostat or a microcontroller-driven thermometer + relay
• a circulation fan (thermal stratification is bad)
• battery monitors with an alarm function
• a smoke alarm

Since PIR aborsbs sound, the piezo buzzers of the alarm devices will have to be unsoldered and brought to a plastic box on the surface of the enclosure. :)

The arrangement of cells has been chosen to provide access from outside, get a reasonable ratio between volume and surface (avoid flat shape) and to minimize the cutting of materials (several sides are made of PIR sheet cut to length only).

Some more pictures:

• Main tools for working with PIR
• Test fitting
• Closing up
• Securing with fiber tape (you can tow a car with a roll of it)

End result of today's work:

Originally found here. It seems that cops in California entered a still unexplored abyss of incompetence. Fortunately nobody was hurt, so it can be considered comic relief - except by the medical company whose MRI machine they cooked.

Officer Kenneth Franco drew on his "twelve hours of narcotics training" and discovered the facility was using more electricity than nearby stores, the lawsuit said.

"Officer Franco, therefore, concluded (the facility) was cultivating cannabis, disregarding the fact that it is a diagnostic facility utilizing an MRI machine, X-ray machine and other heavy medical equipment -- unlike the surrounding businesses selling flowers, chocolates and children's merchandise," the suit said.

After bursting into the diagnostics center in October last year, the SWAT team found only offices, a single employee and medical devices, including a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine, a diagnostic tool that uses high-powered magnets to create detailed scans of a patient's body.

Disregarding a sign warning that metal objects should be kept well away, one officer wandered near the machine "dangling a rifle in his right hand," the lawsuit said.

"Expectedly, the magnetic force of the MRI machine attracted the LAPD officer's loose rifle, securing it to the machine," the suit said.

Instead of seeking expert advice on how to retrieve the weapon, one officer decided to activate the emergency shutdown button.

"This action caused the MRI's magnet to rapidly lose superconductivity, leading to the evaporation of approximately 2,000 liters of helium gas and resulting in extensive damage to the MRI machine," the suit said.

The officer then retrieved his gun, but left a magazine full of bullets on the floor of the MRI office, the suit says.

The suit, which was filed in California last week, seeks unspecified damages and costs.

This is not just a "happy birthday" post for Linux, but also a reminder that despite it becoming big and professional, the freedom to tinker with Linux remains accessible.

I had to use this freedom recently when I discovered that V4L video pipelines could buffer up to 32 frames both on the encoder and decoder (unacceptable, we demand minimum latency!) so it was again time to recompile the kernel. :)

My previous time to recompile parts of Linux had been a week ago. Some hacker had discovered a way of tricking their WiFi card beyond the legally permitted power - with what I understand as thermal compensation settings. Wanting to taste the sweet extra milliwatts, I noticed that nobody was packaging that driver as a binary, so the only way to get it was to patch and recompile its kernel module.

Finally of course, thanks to Linux we have countless open-source drivers and if you want to venture onto the path that Linus Torvalds took - of building an operating system - congratulations, you have less obstacles in your way. :) Some people have taken this path with the Circle project and you can compile your homebrew and bare-metal kernel for a Raspberry Pi with reasonable effort, and it can even draw on the screen, write to serial ports and flip GPIO lines without reverse-engineering anyone's trade secrets. :)

In the article, researchers modeled the passage of the solar system through the galactic interstellar medium, components of which move at differing velocities and orbits.

They found that approximately 2-3 megayears ago, the solar system most likely entered a cloud of mainly cold hydrogen, and the density of the cloud was such that it should have considerably compressed the heliosphere (Sun's bubble of radiation and fields). Earth would have been outside the heliosphere either permanently or periodically. Currently the heliosphere ends far beyond the most distant planet, at approximately 130 Earth-Sun distances (astronomical units).

This would have greatly subdued the influence of solar wind on Earth, at the same time exposing the planet to interstellar cosmic rays. It is further speculated that studies which analyze Earth climate during the aforementioned period may benefit from accounting for this possibility.

Researchers sought confirmation for their model from geological records and found some, in the isotope content of iron and plutonium in sediments: iron 60 and plutonium 244 aren't produced by processes on Earth, so an influx would mean that solar wind no longer sufficed to beat back interstellar gas and dust (the latter containing radioisotopes from supernova explosions).

"By studying geological radioisotopes on Earth, we can learn about the past of the heliosphere. 60Fe is predominantly produced in supernova explosions and becomes trapped in interstellar dust grains. 60Fe has a half-life of 2.6 Myr, and 244Pu has a half-life of 80.7 Myr. 60Fe is not naturally produced on Earth, and so its presence is an indicator of supernova explosions within the last few (~10) million years. 244Pu is produced through the r-process that is thought to occur in neutron star mergers22. Evidence for the deposition of extraterrestrial 60Fe onto Earth has been found in deep-sea sediments and ferromanganese crusts between 1.7 and 3.2 Ma (refs. 23,24,25,26,27), in Antarctic snow [28] and in lunar samples [29]. The abundances were derived from new high-precision accelerator mass spectrometry measurements. The 244Pu/60Fe influx ratios are similar at ~2 Ma, and there is evidence of a second peak at ~7 Ma (refs. 23,24)."

This article is about fixing, but with a twist - it's about fixing trains that their manufacturer sabotaged. :D

In Poland, it took the hacker crew "Dragon Sector" months of work to find a software "time bomb" that was sabotaging "Impuls" trains manufactured by Newag, once their maintenance was handed over to another company.

Let this be a reminder to everyone about closed source technology and critical infrastructure.

Living off grid often correlates with poorly accessible locations - because that's where the infrastructure is not.

On certain latitudes, especially near bodies of water, especially in remote locations - do not ask who the snow comes for - it always comes for you (and with a grudge). So, what ya gonna do?

Over here, a tractor being incomplete (it is great folly to go into winter with an incomplete tractor), snow is handled by an electric microcar. Since the microcar is made of thin sheet metal and plastic, it cannot carry a plow... but the rear axle being solid steel, it can pull one.

The plow is one year old, and was previously pulled by a gasoline car. It is made of construction steel: 8 mm L-profiles shaped like a letter A with double horizontal bars. The point of connection on top ensures it doesn't lift too much while plowing. It's currently fixed with an unprofessional and temporary C-clamp (there will be an U-bolt soon). It is pulled with a chain.

If snow is heavy, the L-profiles lift the plow on top of snow, and you have to plow the same road many times. Sometimes it veers off sideways. Generally, you have to catch the snow early with this system - if you're late, you're stuck. :)

Not many advantages, but dirt cheap. Don't go plowing public roads with such devices - it is nearly invisible to fellow drivers, and cops would get a seizure.

Some Chinese researchers have found a new catalyst for electrochemically reducing CO2. Multiple such catalysts are known, but so far, only copper favours reaction products with a carbon chain of at least 2 carbons (e.g. ethanol).

The new catalyst requires a specific arrangement of tin atoms on tin disulphate substrate, seems to work in a solution of potassium hydrogen carbonate (read: low temperature) and is 80% specific to producing ethanol - a very practical chemical feedstock and fuel.

The new catalyst seems stable enough (97% activity after 100 hours). Reaction rates that I can interpret into "good" or "bad" aren't found - it could be slow to work. The original is paywalled, a more detailed article can be found at:

Carbon-Carbon Coupling on a Metal Non-metal Catalytic Pair

Overall, it's nice to see some research into breaking down CO2 for energy storage, but there is nothing practical (industrial) on that front yet, only lab work.

To make no excessive claims, I have to admit I burnt a fair bit of wood during the night. In the morning however, around 9 o'clock, the solar fence (nominal power 2400 W) was giving 600 W and steaming vigorously. By 10 o'clock, it had thawed and gave 940 W. Later, other panel arrays took over and wattage decreased. The energy was used to run a heat pump.

P.S. Knowing that server resources aren't infinite, I hosted the image externally, I hope that hosting on "postimages.org" works smoothly.