Mike Gale @MikeGale@qoto.org

This is interesting.
A published paper suggests that our ancestors almost went extinct between 930 000 and 813 000 years ago. During this 117 000 years the population size is estimated at less than 1300 individuals.

Ice age, unfavourable hunting, and generally tough times are assumed the cause.

I’m not qualified to judge the techniques used to arrive at this estimate, but I find that very interesting.

Some details. Text on this diagram in the paper which is, DOI: 10.1126/science.abq7487.

Fig. 5. Schematic diagram of human population size history. Both African (light green) and nonAfrican (light blue) populations are presented. The width of the boxes represents the effective population size (i.e., the number of breeding individuals) with naturally occurred fluctuations. The occurrence time of the out-of-Africa dispersal and the divergence between African and non-African populations are indicated. The gray-shaded time duration indicates the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition between 1250 and 700 kyr BP. The red arrow indicates the peak of glaciation during the transition (i.e., the 0.9 Ma event). The ancient severe bottleneck inferred in this study is highlighted. The gap in the available African hominin fossil record and an indicative chronology for H. erectus, the LCA, and H. sapiens are shown. The estimated time period in which two ancestral chromosomes (chromosome, Chr.) fused to become one is also shown on the right.

I hope we soon have these in our emojis.

Governments are too often unfit to care for your data. A source of leaks and a source of evil. Not sure there’s any practical way, for an individual, to fix the incompetence, except by not participating in “government” things.

See: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/04/many-public-salesforce-sites-are-leaking-private-data/

The State of Vermont has been handing out things like:
🔓 full name
🔓 Social Security number
🔓 address
🔓 phone number
🔓 email
🔓 bank account number
in at least five places, to all comers. I presume, if you live in Vermont assume you’re toast already.

Not the first won’t be the last. (Sometimes its a whole nation betrayed by government bureaucracy.)

If you think its only government, you’re wrong. One US bank has been leaking:
🔓 name
🔓 address
🔓 full Social Security number
🔓 title
🔓 federal ID
🔓 IP address
🔓 average monthly payroll
🔓 loan amount,
to all comers.

Plus hundreds of organisations (in this one case alone), many of which don’t have a way to report this, let alone respond.

That’s close to my heart. I have tried to inform banks, tax offices, other government departments, and utility companies over the years of their security problems. They generally waste my time (plenty of time), and are sometimes openly hostile to being informed. There are some good ones though, once in a while you get real thanks.

Health services are often a special form of disaster. Not if they leak but how quickly.

Then we have so many web sites…

If you want your personal data for sale on cybercrime fora, some of them are a go to place. (The problem is knowing which ones!!)

Then all those deliberately difficult to read privacy statement, which often in a sneaky way, sort of, admit that they give out your information to a lot of people. If you read them and have doubts, you may be under-estimating how bad it is. These are not the mistakes, this is deliberate.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/04/misconfigured-servers-running-salesforce-software-are-leaking-sensitive-data/

Those who claim to protect you fail on and on and on, if you care you need to protect yourself.

It’s a wonderful world.

A bit exotic, but this wowed my mind, even though I don’t understand it well.

If it doesn’t make sense, just ignore it. I’m not even sure how to express it but here goes:

In the firmament a Christmas Present of Physics, was observed. WOW.

The temperature of the solar corona has been a mystery. It doesn’t fit in with the previously known physics. A serious issue as it means that we humans didn’t understand crucial things going on in stars. Now new physics has been “discovered” using a numerical simulation of stellar behaviour. I don’t yet grok it properly, but this is big news, in my view.

[Magnetohydrodynamics has always fascinated me. (I sometimes even wonder what Biomagnethydrodynamics will bring to understanding of our universe.)]

See https://phys.org/news/2022-12-world-largest-turbulence-simulation-unmasks.html

More information: Chuanfei Dong et al, Reconnection-driven energy cascade in magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abn7627 (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn7627)

Journal information: Physical Review Letters, Science Advances

The abstract says:
“Magnetohydrodynamic turbulence regulates the transfer of energy from large to small scales in many astrophysical systems, including the solar atmosphere. We perform three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations with unprecedentedly large magnetic Reynolds number to reveal how rapid reconnection of magnetic field lines changes the classical paradigm of the turbulent energy cascade. By breaking elongated current sheets into chains of small magnetic flux ropes (or plasmoids), magnetic reconnection leads to a previously undiscovered range of energy cascade, where the rate of energy transfer is controlled by the growth rate of the plasmoids. As a consequence, the turbulent energy spectra steepen and attain a spectral index of −2.2 that is accompanied by changes in the anisotropy of turbulence eddies. The omnipresence of plasmoids and their consequences on, for example, solar coronal heating, can be further explored with current and future spacecraft and telescopes.”

If I work at it I may grok some part of that!

This image might help you to grok this remarkable 3D application of the laws that drive our reality.

It’s unclear to me, but seems that LastPass users may have had their password store stolen, in a mostly encrypted form.

It might be possible for the criminals to break the “vaults” if they know the algorithm.

A LastPass user, who hasn’t already done so, might like to check the vulnerability of their master password.

One way would be using https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords

(Usual caveats and warnings apply, you decide whether you think this online check is safe!)

If you use online password managers it may be worth taking another look at the risks.

LastPass has been breeched:

Lost include:

🔓 personal information and related metadata (in the clear I think):

• company names
• end-user names
• billing addresses
• email addresses
• telephone numbers
• IP addresses customers used to access LastPass services.

🔓 Back ups of all data for some customers, “customer vault data”:

• website URLs
• encrypted website usernames
• encrypted passwords
• encrypted secure notes
• encrypted form-filled data.

Do you want to reconsider your password and security systems?

For more see: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/lastpass-says-hackers-have-obtained-vault-data-and-a-wealth-of-customer-info/

I’ve been following the food shipments from Ukraine to the rest of the world. The numbers are not what I would have guessed.

1. The major food by weight is Maize.
2. The biggest destination countries by total tonnage are: Spain > China > Turkey > Italy

(As published by the UN on the site that monitors the program.)

Christine Perfect, Christine McVie. Bluesy music hero of our times. Wow.

I didn’t realise, these tunes and that voice blend so smoothly and insinuate themselves effortlessly. Even for some of us who didn’t think that bluesy love songs would carve those deep blue ripples. Remarkable.

🌊 I’d Rather Go Blind
🌊 You Make Loving Fun
🌊 Don’t Stop
🌊 Songbird
🌊 Hold me
🌊 Tell me lies

She, Buckingham and the others musically intertwined into eternity.

Hamba Gahle.

#ChristineMcVie #ChristinePerfect #FleetwoodMac #LindseyBuckingham #TellMeLies #IdRatherGoBlind

Interesting. I have no idea whether this was all planned or it’s been just as much chaos as many assume, but it seems Musk has presented bird-site plans.

My view is that a part of what he’s after has always been recreating PayPal, but better.

Here’s the four items that caught my attention and a guess at what he’s after:

🐦 Video, I presume longer videos.
🐦 Encrypted Direct Messages, the right thing to do, I hope the individual gets to provide their own keys (not the system), if they want.
🐦 Longform tweets, they’ve been moving in this direction with the threaded tweets, for a while.
🐦 Payments, other than being his dream this has promise to make the company profitable, instead of losing 3 to 4 million a day.

#elonmusk #longPost #payments #e2ee #twitter

Greg Bear has passed away.

What a remarkable talent of a Sci Fi writer, an asset to all mankind and a fount of ideas to expand your consciousness.

I’m so glad I got to know his work and still can.

🧝‍♀🕮 Infinity Concerto
⚗️🕮 Blood Music
🧪🕮 Darwin’s Radio
🧬🕮 Psychlone
🧫🕮 City at the End of Time
🔬🕮 Hegira
🤖🕮 Foundation and Chaos
🔭🕮 Slant
📡🕮 Anvil of Stars
🌌🕮 Eon and the other tales about “The Way”
🌃🕮 Sleepside…

Jumping Jehoshaphat, I could go on. What a lot to leave behind.

He left the world better than he entered it.

Hamba Gahle, bud.