Danny Ray Thomas, an unarmed black man, shot to death by deputy in Houston - The Washington Post

“According to witnesses, Thomas was walking in the middle of the intersection of Imperial Valley and Greens Rd. with his pants around his ankles, talking to himself and hitting vehicles as they passed by,” the Houston Police Department said in a statement. Thomas struck a white vehicle, and a physical altercation ensued. A passing deputy stopped to disrupt the disturbance, the police said.

“The deputy gave Thomas verbal commands to stop, which he ignored and continued to advance toward the deputy. Fearing for his safety, the deputy discharged his duty weapon, striking Thomas once in the chest,” the department stated.

There used to be a great deal of paperwork and penalty for even discharging your weapon let alone killing an unarmed person. Now just say "I feared for my safety" and you get a medal.

Police shoot, kill man in backyard of south Sacramento home - SFGate

During that pursuit the subject turned toward our officers with both arms out and had an object pointed at our officers and our officers believed it was a firearm and they feared for their safety,” Chandler said. “And they fired their weapons to basically protect themselves.”

Family members told KCRA the home belonged to the man’s grandparents and he frequently stays there.

Family said the man was trying to get inside of the home, but they didn’t know why he didn’t have a key to the house Sunday night.

The man died on the scene.

Investigators did not find a firearm at the scene. The only item found near the man was a cellphone.

This is what happens when you train policemen as if they are combatants in a guerrilla war. And it is getting worse.

I, Cringely Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and our personal data - I, Cringely

Much like Nigerian spammers purposely including spelling errors in their emails to trap “dumb” people —the quizzes on Facebook about “Which Star Wars character are you?” are there just to get you to authorize them. Then they go harvest your data. The authorization is built into the terms of service when you take the test.

So don’t take any Facebook quizzes, surveys, or tests — EVER.

The aspect of this story that ought to be of most concern to Facebook members is that once I have authorized someone to use my Facebook data I have authorized them to use not only my data but also that of all my Facebook friends!

As of this morning I have 2,980 Facebook friends. If I was stupid enough to authorize the release of my data I’d be authorizing the release of all the data on 2,980 other people, too. Now maybe I have more Facebook connections than most people, but you can see how getting only a few thousand survey responses can yield hundreds of thousands of records.

I’m told the average active Facebook member has 250 friends, so one person signing up is like getting 250 full and complete profiles. It’s such a broken system with no way to ever opt out.

Behind the Lens: Isabelle Huppert on "Claire's Camera" | Interviews | Roger Ebert

I love the naturalistic simplicity and ease of “Claire’s Camera,” which is also true for other Hong Sang-soo films. That was perhaps a nice change of pace for you too after “Elle."

It’s always wonderful to make films with Hong Sang-soo, because he has such an unusual way of making movies that doesn’t resemble anyone in any manner. There is no script [to start with]; he’d give you the scenes one after another each morning. But on the other hand, nothing is improvised. He doesn’t change the dialogue, and there is no improvisation. What’s really fascinating is, (this is my second film with Hong Sang-soo, I did “In Another Country” with him in 2012); he has quite an amazing way of doing things in such a short amount of time. Nothing is fast; we have time to do things, but there is a very slow pace within a very short amount of time. Very interesting.


Does he pull his actors in to craft the story as part of his process?

No, he just says, “this is what we’re doing” and we do it. But it creates a certain atmosphere [among actors]. He’s like a magician actually. Even though there is no script and we don’t know the story, we know enough day-by-day, scene-by-scene and line-by-line. It’s enough for us; we don’t need to know the general storyline. The scenes between all actors are so strong and defined. The way he combines lightness and depth … Sometimes it’s very funny, and sometimes it’s very moving. You feel that in the texture of the film, one scene after the other. It’s very nice on the surface, but underneath, there is always something very emotional and moving. You feel that very strongly and that’s very exciting for the actors. You can stay on several levels, [mixing comedy and drama].

The Salesman (2016) **

Interesting look at contemporary Tehran life, but could have used some editing. Well acted morality play.

Mute (2018) **

The actors are top-notch but the film, a future-noir about an Amish mute searching for his missing girlfriend (believe it or not), is over plotted and over long.

What I'm Working On: Why you didn't do that thing you're sure you did | Duke Today

You mean, what you want to be true?

Not necessarily. You almost never have control over the process of filling up or reconstructing your memories. Unbeknownst to you, the process operates probabilistically. Given your past experiences and knowledge, your memory system gives you the most likely thing that could have happened to help you fill any gaps at the time of retrieval. Most of the time the final product coincides with what actually happened, so it is true. But sometimes it does not, in which case we talk about false memories. I think most of our memories are reconstructed in this way, and many of them are false, we just don’t notice.

Stephen Hawking, modern cosmology's brightest star, dies aged 76 | Science | The Guardian

Hawking was driven to Wagner, but not the bottle, when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 1963 at the age of 21. Doctors expected him to live for only two more years. But Hawking had a form of the disease that progressed more slowly than usual. He survived for more than half a century and long enough for his disability to define him. His popularity would surely have been diminished without it.

David Foster Wallace and the Horror of Neuroscience - The Millions

By the end of the story the strong impression is that Neal’s condition is but a particularly acute version of a basic human predicament. As he puts it, it’s “not as if this is an incredibly rare or obscure type of personality.” In the modern neuroscientific paradigm, Neal’s suspicion that “in reality I actually seemed to have no true inner self” is absolutely correct. There is really nothing outlandish about Neal’s fears; within Oblivion’s neuropessimism, they are simple truisms. We do experience time poorly; language is in many ways a weak tool. The same goes for his fear that he is “unable to love:” from a hard Darwinian viewpoint, we are all unable to love, really—or more accurately, what we think we are doing when we love is actually not loving at all as we understand that word. Neal recognizes this himself: “we are all basically just instruments or expressions of our evolutionary drives, which are themselves the expressions of forces that are infinitely larger and more important than we are.”

Saturated fat does not clog the arteries: coronary heart disease is a chronic inflammatory condition, the risk of which can be effectively reduced from healthy lifestyle interventions | British Journal of Sports Medicine

Preventing the development of atherosclerosis is important but it is atherothrombosis that is the real killer
The inflammatory processes that contribute to cholesterol deposition within the artery wall and subsequent plaque formation (atherosclerosis), more closely resembles a ‘pimple’ (figure 1). Most cardiac events occur at sites with <70% coronary artery obstruction and these do not generate ischaemia on stress testing.4 When plaques rupture (analogous to a pimple bursting), coronary thrombosis and myocardial infarction can occur within minutes. The limitation of the current plumbing approach (‘unclogging a pipe’) to the management of coronary disease is revealed by a series of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) which prove that stenting significantly obstructive stable lesions fail to prevent myocardial infarction or to reduce mortality.

I would wager the decrease in sugar/refined carb consumption is the most significant factor in the results.

Broadway Danny Rose (1984) ****

Certainly one of if not THE best Allen feature. Hilarious, superbly cast, and features perhaps Ms. Farrow's finest performance, way against type. Allen's direction is imaginative and original and never better.

Wind River (2017) **

Well acted procedural involving reservation life vividly creates an uncompromising Wyoming wilderness. A bit over written in parts but overall well done.