(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Good News Digest for Saturday February 25, 2021. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-25 Spring is coming! Scamp, Buster, and daffodils Many of the Illuminati who write Good News Roundup are mysteriously missing. For the third time this week a substitute steps in provide a diary. Many questions come to mind. What is the significance of these unprecedented absences? Will they continue? Perhaps they have gathered to prepare a diary documenting the indictment of a former high ranking official? Unlike the forewoman of the Atlanta jury I know better than to lift the veil of secrecy. Feel free to speculate in the comments at your own risk. Sciencey Stories REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT: Modernizing Wildland Firefighting to Protect Our Firefighters Hence, in this report we have intentionally trained our focus on critical aspects of wildfire response that are stuck—technologically and organizationally—in the last century. Several actions recommended in this report can be taken immediately to support the needs of today’s wildland firefighters and vulnerable communities nationwide, as we also pursue the longer-term actions recommended here that can ensure an enduring focus on wildland firefighting science and technology development for decades to come… Recommendation 1: Given the vulnerabilities and shortfalls in wildland firefighter communications, connectivity, and technology interoperability, immediately assess, adapt, and field currently available technologies. Recommendation 2: Reverse the current trend of rapidly growing wildfire suppression costs by establishing a joint-agency executive office (hereafter Joint Office) that can accelerate enterprise-level development and deployment of new technologies that enhance situational awareness and initial attack capabilities. Recommendation 3: Strengthen the full operational sequence of wildland firefighting— detection, alert, response, and suppression—by assessing existing technologies available within the federal arena, the private sector, and allied nations that could be integrated at each stage. Recommendation 4: Accelerate improvement of predictive wildfire modeling tools by expanding research community access to archived satellite data from defense and other government sources. Recommendation 5: Expand our nation’s wildfire response capacity by encouraging development and field demonstration of prototype autonomous detection, assessment, and containment systems for wildland fire. Here is a slicker (if self-serving) summary of the panel’s work. Caltech Faculty Lead Presidential Report on Modernizing Wildland Firefighting "The technologies that they're using today are not that different from what their grandparents would've used to put out fires 50 years ago," says John Dabiri, Centennial Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering at Caltech and a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). I spent the first half of my life in the West and saw many wildfires. Many members of my mother’s family worked on fire crews in Washington. It is hard, dangerous work. Humpback whales wail less as population grows Scientists who tracked humpback whales in Australia noticed that fewer whales wailed to find mates as their population grew. x YouTube Video Thankfully Eric Bogle was wrong. Flotsam Found Off New York 'Very Well Could Be' From 1821 Shipwreck A chunk of weather-beaten flotsam that washed up on a New York shoreline after Tropical Storm Ian last fall has piqued the interest of experts who say it is likely part of the SS Savannah, which ran aground and broke apart in 1821, two years after it became the first vessel to cross the Atlantic Ocean partly under steam power… [Ira] Breskin, author of “The Business of Shipping,” noted that the Savannah’s use of steam power was so advanced for its time that the May 24, 1819, start of its transatlantic voyage is commemorated as National Maritime Day. Children of the Ice Age [T]his hunter-gatherer family stops to collect the small, thin branches of a pine tree. Bundled together, covered with resin and set alight, these branches will become simple torches to illuminate the cave’s darkened galleries. The group is barefoot and the path into the cave is marked by footprints in the soft earth and mud. There are traces of two adults, a male and female, with three children: a three-year-old toddler, a six-year-old child, and an adolescent no older than 11. Canine paw prints nearby suggest they may be accompanied by pets... For more than 200 years, children have been neglected by archaeologists. It was part of a disciplinary bias towards adult men in archaeological interpretations. This began to change in the 1970s and ’80s with the rise of feminist archaeology and the archaeology of gender, led by archaeologists from the University of California at Berkeley such as Margaret Conkey, Ruth Tringham and Rosemary Joyce. The approaches advocated by these female scholars critically examined the roles of women in the past and, by extension, children started to become ‘visible’ too. But it is only in recent years that youngsters have truly emerged from the shadows. This emergence is part of a growing movement within archaeology to diversify voices in the past by exploring cultural constructs of age, gender, sexuality, and identity (although it should be noted that the elderly remain understudied). Two Lessons from Professional Sports (Brock Purdy was “Mr. Irrelevant”, the last player taken in the NFL draft last year. After injuries to the other two San Francisco quarterbacks he stepped in and played very well, surprising everyone.) Was Brock Purdy’s emergence predictable? S2 Cognition test has pointed to NFL success The exam lasts 40 to 45 minutes. It’s performed on a specially designed gaming laptop and response pad that can record reactions in two milliseconds. To put that in perspective, an eye blink lasts 100 to 150 milliseconds. In one section of the exam, a series of diamonds flash on the screen for 16 milliseconds each. Every diamond is missing a point, and the test taker must determine — using left, right, up or down keys — which part is missing… “We’re talking about things they have to perceive on the screen within 16/1,000th of a second, which is essentially subliminal and which scientific literature says you shouldn’t be able to process,” Ally said. “And I’ll be honest with you, we’re seeing pro baseball players see something way faster than 16 milliseconds, which has never been reported in literature, all the way to some athletes who may take 150 milliseconds. So our eyes may see the same thing. But for some, it takes longer to process than others.” Professional sports teams have a big financial incentive to find ways of measuring cognitive functions. These sorts of tests could also help identify cognitive decline so the research on athletes should eventually filter over to the general public. I have been taking part in several research projects that annually have me take various sorts of online cognitive tests. Buster is scheduled to take a cognitive test for the Dog Aging Project. The five-day workweek is dead [T]here’s nothing inevitable about working eight hours a day, five days a week (or more). This schedule only became a part of American labor law in the 1930s, after decades of striking by labor activists who were tired of working the 14-hour days demanded by some employers… [O]ne of the largest and most high-profile recent experiments took place in Iceland, where local and federal authorities working with trade unions launched two trials of a shortened workweek, one in 2015 and one in 2017. In the trials, workers shifted from a 40-hour work week to 35 or 36 hours, with no cut to their pay… And perhaps counterintuitively, worker productivity generally stayed the same or actually increased during the trials.. Just having more rest may have helped people be more productive — as the Autonomy researchers note, overwork can lead to fatigue, which actually lowers productivity. It has never made sense to me that employers would want to overwork their employees if adding more employees and distributing the workload leads to greater productivity. There are some fixed costs associated with each employee but a big boost in productivity would outweigh that. Professional sports teams (sorry to bring this up again) are figuring this out. In the past they would have their best players play the entire game. Now they are realizing that a backup may play better than an exhausted star. It also reduces the risk of their best players being broken down from overwork in the playoffs. Schadenfreude Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly will never get out of prison. USA Today list of all of tfg's lawsuits and Wikipedia list. So far he hasn’t been indicted (as far as I know) but there are a bunch of civil lawsuits going after his money that moving along. He is going to lose most of those. Meanwhile Jack Smith, Fani Willis, and Alvin Bragg are preparing criminal cases. At least one of them is going to nail him. DOJ and the Case of the Fake Electors. It’s not just tfg. Smith is coming for the whole crew. China Calls For Russia-Ukraine Cease-Fire, Peace Talks. Translation: China thinks Russia is losing and should try to salvage something from the mess. Slava Ukraini: A Republican vote to defund Ukraine would come at their own peril. Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans settled mostly in the Rust Belt. Their descendants make up a significant voting block from New England to the Great Lakes states. The Putin caucus won’t hurt their own election chances but they may drag down Republicans in these swing states. Religion, Good and Bad This was the theme of the week on DK. Everyone uses stories- fact, fiction, and myth- to make sense of life. There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. Personally, I don’t care what stories people do or do not believe are factual. I care about what they do as a result of the lessons they draw from those stories. For instance: Illinois churches forgive almost $6 million in medical debt statewide. RIP Medical Debt has a program where anyone can create a campaign to eliminate medical debt in a particular state or community. The Mormon Church was fined $3 M for violating SEC rules. Same set of stories, different lessons drawn. Serbia and Kosovo They flirted with open conflict last year. The last thing Europe needs right now is another war. France and Germany put together a normalization plan and have met with the leaders of both countries to urge them to sign it. Rane reports that the signing will take place in Brussels on Monday. Comics Section The Mysteries By Bill Watterson From Bill Watterson, bestselling creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and John Kascht, one of America’s most renowned caricaturists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding. I have already pre-ordered my copy. Gary Larson occasionally puts new comics on The Far Side web site. If Berke Breathed put out new content I would be in ecstasy. That’s it for now. 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