Relevant section:
The final season of Vi and Jinx’s story will be divided into three acts, with the first debuting on November 9. The second act will be available on November 16, and the third will be available on November 23.
Relevant section:
The final season of Vi and Jinx’s story will be divided into three acts, with the first debuting on November 9. The second act will be available on November 16, and the third will be available on November 23.
Daily Octordle #947 8️⃣7️⃣ 6️⃣4️⃣ 🕚5️⃣ 9️⃣🕛 Score: 62
Looks like lower is better, but not sure how it’s calculated.
With ferries and heavy rail over the Kerch Strait Bridge unlikely, it seems Russia is left with the new rail line being built through lower Ukraine (don’t know if its finished yet) and/or trucks across the bridge (not sure the volume it can accommodate). Seems like Crimean logistics are going to be constrained in the short term.
My recollection is that the ruble is restricted (partially/mostly?) from being traded by the Russian government. So, most of the ruble currency exchange is on the black market, which wouldn’t be what Google finance shows.
I semi recall reading something a year or so ago about the black market ruble value being half of the publicized value, so maybe what she is referencing is a recent significant drop in the black market ruble value.
I’m pretty sure the 3rd pre-war bridge was taken out (yesterday?). So, all Russia has left is the pontoon bridges (2?) and possibly one was taken out earlier today (1 left?).
To me, it seems Ukraine is trying to trap troops and equipment below the river and get a large personnel surrenders and equipment recovery.
I would add that you can swallow air to create the need to burp.
Sounds like they plan to move local government into it, instead of renovating 33 of their buildings. The current 33 buildings could potentially be demolished (currently seismical unsafe) and rebuilt as housing though.
My recollection is you need to “talk” to each animal once a day, every day.
It was so bad that it made me realize I could be a screenwriter.
I think what happens is Zach Snyder gets together some good ideas for characters and stories (and some pretty mockup pictures), then he uses those to sell the project. Unfortunately from there, he doesn’t or isn’t able to flush those ideas into a compelling narrative with engaging characters. Everything stays very 1 dimensional.
I suggest a hard pass to everyone.
Relevant text:
According to the research, lab-grown P. album was observed to break down a given piece of UV-treated plastic at a rate of roughly 0.05 percent per day for every nine-day period. Which isn’t nothing, but it’d take a very long time for the bacteria to get through the entirety of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, let alone the millions of metric tons of plastics that enter the ocean every year.
Pay walled, but they did have this snippet on the page:
Global CO2 emissions for 2023 increased by only 0.1% relative to 2022 (following increases of 5.4% and 1.9% in 2021 and 2022, respectively), reaching 35.8 Gt CO2. These 2023 emissions consumed 10–66.7% of the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5°C, suggesting permissible emissions could be depleted within 0.5–6 years (67% likelihood).
So good that the increase was smaller, almost 0, but bad that we are likely to severely shoot past 1.5C.
Relevant text:
Ukrainian crews say the fundamental problem is that the Abrams were built for advances aided by air power and artillery, which Ukraine lacks.
Russia, meanwhile, continues to make heavy use of drones in its attacks, which the Abrams struggle to defend against.
Just finished V Rising. I really liked it. For those who don’t know and are curious, it’s one of those games where, if you can’t beat a boss, you just have to get better. There’s some small things that make a fight easier, but it basically comes down to you understanding the enemy and learning to play better.
Relevant Section on the genetics:
For the study, the researchers took blood from five of the cats, which had been adopted, and conducted a DNA test on four of the felines, which turned up no genetic mutations associated with white fur.
They then performed a whole genome sequencing for two of the cats, and this step turned up a deletion in what’s called the KIT gene, which can encode whether white will turn up in a feline’s coat (scientists have also connected variations in the KIT gene to piebald patterns in various animals like horses and mice.)
“In summary, comparative data from other species and genotype segregation analysis support the newly discovered KIT region deletion as potentially being a cause of salmiak coat color in cats,” the researchers conclude.
It’s strange to me they tested mice. My understanding is that Porcine (pigs) models are usually utilized to evaluate potential GI/intestinal effects on humans. As human and Porcine GI tracts are similar (why you really need to cook pork or you can get diseases or worms from the meat).
The article mentioned cats, so the current list of know susceptible species seems to be bird, cow, mice, and cats. Not a great sign.
Relevant section of the article where it lays out what has been changing and what still needs to change:
… graft has been all but exterminated in some of the worst affected areas - for instance, government services such as issuing passports, permits and licences.
He also tells the BBC that significant progress had been made in reforming education and police.
Problem areas
Mr Kalmykov admits, however, that the government has been less successful in eradicating corruption in using natural resources (e.g. in mining and forestry), regulating monopolies and in large infrastructure projects.
“Progress has been slowest where big interests and big players meet,” he says.
According to him, “in the next five-ten years the government should focus on cleansing the judiciary, which will make the general system of public administration healthier”.
Relevant sections of the article:
The EU Council finalized the agreement earlier on May 21, which would provide Ukraine with between 2.5 billion and 3 billion euros ($2.7-3.26 billion) annually, with most of it allocated to Kyiv’s military needs.
The European Commission then announced later in the day that the “resources will be available to support Ukraine starting from July 2024, with bi-annual payments.”
The distribution will be reviewed on an annual basis.
My understanding is that some of the benefits China would get from invading Taiwan is the control of Taiwan’s world-leading semiconductor industry. So making it public knowledge that any invading force (i.e. China) would not be able to take over their production capabilities is a small deterrent.
Relevant section explaining the solution:
Let’s return to Hamlet, but this time your working memory — consisting of a whiteboard — has room for just 100 words. Once the play starts, you write down the first 100 words you hear, again skipping any repeats. When the space is full, press pause and flip a coin for each word. Heads, and the word stays on the list; tails, and you delete it. After this preliminary round, you’ll have about 50 distinct words left.
Now you move forward with what the team calls Round 1. Keep going through Hamlet, adding new words as you go. If you come to a word that’s already on your list, flip a coin again. If it’s tails, delete the word; heads, and the word stays on the list. Proceed in this fashion until you have 100 words on the whiteboard. Then randomly delete about half again, based on the outcome of 100 coin tosses. That concludes Round 1.
Next, move to Round 2. Continue as in Round 1, only now we’ll make it harder to keep a word. When you come to a repeated word, flip the coin again. Tails, and you delete it, as before. But if it comes up heads, you’ll flip the coin a second time. Only keep the word if you get a second heads. Once you fill up the board, the round ends with another purge of about half the words, based on 100 coin tosses.
In the third round, you’ll need three heads in a row to keep a word. In the fourth round you’ll need four heads in a row. And so on.
Eventually, in the kth round, you’ll reach the end of Hamlet. The point of the exercise has been to ensure that every word, by virtue of the random selections you’ve made, has the same probability of being there: 1/2^k. If, for instance, you have 61 words on your list at the conclusion of Hamlet, and the process took six rounds, you can divide 61 by the probability, 1/2^6, to estimate the number of distinct words — which comes out to 3,904 in this case. (It’s easy to see how this procedure works: Suppose you start with 100 coins and flip each one individually, keeping only those that come up heads. You’ll end up with close to 50 coins, and if someone divides that number by the probability, ½, they can guess that there were about 100 coins originally.)
Chakraborty, Variyam and Meel mathematically proved that the accuracy of this technique scales with the size of the memory. Hamlet has exactly 3,967 unique words. (They counted.) In experiments using a memory of 100 words, the average estimate after five runs was 3,955 words. With a memory of 1,000 words, the average improved to 3,964. “Of course,” Variyam said, “if the [memory] is so big that it fits all the words, then we can get 100% accuracy.”
I think they probably ment to put special equipment’s “99” under vehicles and fuel tanks. Otherwise, they would have destroyed 3% of the total destroyed special equipment.