• Look out, she's gonna blow!  (Ars Technica)
  
  Something is happening somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.  We just don't know exactly what.
  
  
  
• 10TB drives for $160.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I wish I could get storage that cheap locally.  The same drive is A$409 from my usual source.  But I checked around and I can get it elsewhere for A$300, which, given the terrible exchange rate and 10% sales tax included, is not too far off the mark.  In fact, I can get the 12TB model for from Amazon for A$360 delivered.
  
  I probably will.  My plan - now that I have decently fast internet access and unlimited bandwidth - is to shut down the backup archive server I've been running and just put all the old crap on a local drive here.  We'll still have daily online backups - we currently backup every day to two servers in two separate locations. I'll only need to hit the archive if we have to go back to an older version to fix database corruption or accidentally deleted data that doesn't get noticed for a few days.
  
  
  
• Twitter ran ads for, uh...  (Gizmodo)
  
  This apparently is real.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Littlewood's Law and the Global Media.  (Gwern.net)
  
  Or, why even when the media get the story right, it might not matter.

  If someone said, "I don’t really believe these anti-semitic hoaxes are real in the sense of a bunch of anti-Semites have been emboldened by Trump’s election, I think there’s something else going on, like maybe an employee made them up to drum up donations”, you would probably think that was excuse-making; if they had said, "I don’t believe them, maybe they’re actually fake because some schizophrenic or crazy Jew with a brain cancer & a flair for VoIP pranks did them all themselves”, you would definitely think they were desperately coming up with excuses & denying facts, and to not put too fine a point on it, that they should be ashamed of themselves for such a lack of intellectual honesty & flagrantly partisan bias.

  The problem is, in an increasingly interconnected world of nearly eight billion people, thousands of bizarrely improbable events happen every single day - and now, are not just perceived as miracles, but recorded and reported.
  
  That conspiracy theory in the example above?  Happened.  (Wikipedia)
  
  The old medical rule that when you hear hoofbeats, expect horses, not zebras never applied to House because the doctor who saw the patient before him would have already checked for horses.  And as science and technology and engineering advance, it eventually gets to the point that there are no more horses.
  
  Right now, if you get the sniffles, it's probably just a cold, because there are over 200 viruses that cause colds and we don't have a cure or a vaccine for any of them.
  
  But once we do find a cure for the cold, once we eradicate it as we did smallpox, if you get the sniffles, you'll have come down with zebras.  Not because zebras have become more common but because there aren't any horses.
  
  This also explains why almost everyone on Twitter is insane except for your own small group.  It's because you care about the minor everyday things involving your own small group, and the broader Twittersphere only impinges upon you when something really stupid happens.  Such as, oh, an ad from a human organ trafficking ring.
  
  Or something awesome, but it's simple mathematics that there are rather more stupid events than awesome ones.
  
  

Music Video of the Day

Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, February 16 2020 12:59 PM (cTMj+)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, February 16 2020 04:06 PM (cTMj+)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 16 2020 10:44 PM (PiXy!)

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