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The Nazis as occult masters? It's a good story but not history
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-nazis-as-occult-masters-its-a-good-story-but-not-history, posted 2021 by peter in history religion toread war
The problem with this alluring image is not just that it is false. The myth of Nazi occultism is more than an amusing curiosity, a testament to the power of cinematic suggestion. It actively detracts from a historical understanding of the very themes it highlights. It yields a distorted view of Nazism and a distorted view of occultism. But it also offers an occasion for critical reflection, a chance to see how we might make better sense of the tangled history of occultism in the Nazi era. It might even help us to understand Nazi evil and the not-so-hidden forces behind it.
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Australia is becoming a surveillance state
https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2021/australia-is-becoming-a-surveillance-state.html, posted 2021 by peter in fascism law opinion politics privacy terrorism toread
The government's approach to technological surveillance is leading us down a dark path, experts warn, as it prepares to give law enforcement agencies new hacking powers.
Currently before parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2020 is the government's latest attempt to gain a watchful eye over cyber space.
Once the bill passes, it will dish out extra power to the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), giving the agencies access to new warrants that will let them modify and delete data, collect intelligence from online communities, and even take over the online accounts of supposed criminals.
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Spreadsheet Formulas for Personal Finance
https://bou.ke/blog/formulas/, posted 2021 by peter in finance howto list math reference toread
I love spreadsheets. Spreadsheet programs like Microsoft's Excel, Apple's Numbers and Google Sheets are the secret heroes of our civilization.
I've also been interested in personal finance and the FIRE community for a while—not so much in the early retirement aspect but in the financial literacy it teaches its members. I have combined my passion for both into one mega-spreadsheet that I use to track my income, expenses, savings and investments in one overview. While creating this spreadsheet I got proficient in some new formulas, which I'll share here—and also write down for my own reference.
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Vehicles Are Still Firmly in Control of City Streets
https://www.governing.com/community/vehicles-still-firmly-in-control-of-city-streets, posted 2021 by peter in environment politics toread urbanism usa
In Boston they just did a poll where they asked "even though it means less space on the streets for cars, do you want to keep the parklets we've put in during COVID?" Eighty-one percent said keep the parklets. They asked about keeping the bike lanes and 79 percent said keep the bike lanes. This is a randomized poll, they're not stopping cyclists on the street. That's where public opinion is, but that's not necessarily what the leaders are hearing whenever the question comes up about keeping or eliminating an individual parklet or bike lane.
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Japanese Typewriters
https://blog.gatunka.com/2009/09/30/japanese-typewriters/, posted 2021 by peter in history japan language toread
With several thousand characters to contend with, how were the Japanese able to use typewriters before the advent of digital technology? The answer is the kanji typewriter (和文タイプライター or 邦文タイプライター), which was invented by Kyota Sugimoto in 1915. This invention was deemed so important that it was selected as one of the ten greatest Japanese inventions by the Japanese Patent Office during their 100th anniversary celebrations in 1985. Here are some photos of that first model. (Photos courtesy Canon Semiconductor Equipment.)
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How to calculate the alignment between BERT and spaCy tokens effectively and robustly
https://gist.github.com/tamuhey/af6cbb44a703423556c32798e1e1b704, posted 2021 by peter in development free language nlp opensource software toread
Suppose we want to combine a BERT-based named entity recognition (NER) model with a rule-based NER model built on top of spaCy. Although BERT's NER exhibits extremely high performance, it is usually combined with rule-based approaches for practical purposes. In such cases, what often bothers us is that tokens of spaCy and BERT are different, even if the input sentences are the same. For example, let's say the input sentence is "John Johanson 's house"; BERT tokenizes this sentence like
["john", "johan", "##son", "'", "s", "house"]
and spaCy tokenizes it like["John", "Johanson", "'s", "house"]
. To combine the outputs, we need to calculate the correspondence between the two different token sequences. This correspondence is the "alignment".
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Covid: Misleading stat claims more vaccinated people die
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57610998, posted 2021 by peter in conspiracy covid19 health science toread
One conspiracy site even claimed vaccinated people were dying at higher rates than those who had not received the jab, which is untrue.
This site and others use real figures in a misleading way, to arrive at a completely false conclusion - that the vaccine may not be working or even doing more harm than good.
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How to Handle Privacy Access Requests Under the GDPR - Privacy Policies
https://www.privacypolicies.com/blog/gdpr-privacy-access-requests/, posted 2021 by peter in business eu howto law reference toread
Are you prepared to receive and process privacy access requests in compliance with the GDPR? The following guide will help you understand your role in promoting access to data and how to create a system that saves you time and prevents damage to your reputation.
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Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors - Alexey Guzey
https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/, posted 2021 by peter in health science toread
Any book of Why We Sleep's length is bound to contain some factual errors. Therefore, to avoid potential concerns about cherry-picking the few inaccuracies scattered throughout, in this essay, I'm going to highlight the five most egregious scientific and factual errors Walker makes in Chapter 1 of the book. This chapter contains 10 pages and constitutes less than 4% of the book by the total word count.
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Making Sense of The Audio Stack On Unix
https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2021/02/07/audio-stack.html, posted 2021 by peter in audio hardware linux reference software toread
Audio on Unix is a little zoo, there are so many acronyms for projects and APIs that it's easy to get lost. Let's tackle that issue! Most articles are confusing because they either use audio technical jargon, or because they barely scratch the surface and leave people clueless. A little knowledge can be dangerous.
In this article I'll try to bridge the gap by not requiring any prerequisite knowledge while also giving a good overview of the whole Unix audio landscape. There's going to be enough details to remove mysticism (Oh so pernicious in web bubbles) and see how the pieces fit.
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