Interesting Links for 20-08-2024

[andrewducker]

1. NASA Citizen Scientists Spot Object Moving 1 Million Miles Per Hour

(tags:space speed )

2. Why we should always be alert to the possibilities of miscarriages of justice

(tags:law uk history )

3. Labour incapable of tackling racism and Islamophobia amid far-right violence, member of party committee says

(tags:labour uk racism islam )

4. 53% of British school librarians asked to remove LGBTQ+ books

(tags:censorship LGBT UK school OhForFucksSake )

5. Investors Are Suddenly Getting Very Concerned That AI Isn't Making Any Serious Money

(tags:ai business )

6. Google's AI Search Gives Sites Dire Choice: Share Data or Die

(tags:Google ai doom OhForFucksSake )

7. Thirty six flights were cancelled and 201 delayed at a Japanese airport on the weekend after a pair of scissors went missing in a store near the boarding gates.

(tags:airplanes safety Japan )

Comments

[simont]

#7: I guess if you're a climate protestor, or indeed anyone else who doesn't like air travel, now you know what to do!

[simont]

... even more sneakily, don't actually steal any scissors, just fiddle with the store's inventory to add 1 to the number of pairs of scissors it thinks it's supposed to have :-)

[armiphlage]

If scissors are such a threat to safety, then why would the store in the secure area be allowed have them, without them being chained down? Presumably they were for opening packaging, not for sale. Restaurants past security apparently need to have their knives chained down.

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/cgttli/til_that_knives_used_in_airport_restaurant/

Of course, it's all security theatre anyway; as long as glass bottles or ceramic plates are allowed past security, anyone can make a weapon more threatening than a pair of scissors.

[andrewducker]

The knives in the restaurant in Edinburgh I went to recently were just very very very blunt.

And yes, it's nonsense.

[rhythmaning]

My thoughts exactly!

[mountainkiss]

I’m quite impressed that someone worked out that a pair of scissors went missing.

[andrewducker]

I don't think they would here!

[rhythmaning]

But they didn't really go missing! They just *thought* they were missing!

[nancylebov]

2. Part of the point was that the judge, the jury, and the lawyers apparently didn't understand statistics. What would a good STEM for Lawyers and Judges course look like?

[bens_dad]

6. ... so AI Overviews is morally owned by every site indexed in Google.

If a site uses it as a search engine for their content, Google cannot expect to charge them !
Or is that already a free Google product ?

[calimac]

2) Lord Denning's statement is utterly appalling. Not only would he prefer that innocent people rot in prison rather than admit prosecutors could be wrong, he'd prefer it to finding the actual criminals. The response to this was said 250 years ago by John Adams:

"It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever."

[bens_dad]

Thanks. I hadn't heard that before.