It is one of the most important aspects of our media system, and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.
The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.
A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles were based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews were in favor of a US and NATO intervention, while propaganda was attributed exclusively to the opposite side.
Swiss Policy Research
Before/After effect in Javascript using jQuery
Sometimes you need a simple tool to visually show the difference between two images and a basic jQuery plugin is quite suited for that (if you can stomach ~89KB just for jQuery, ~30KB if you gzip it but you probably already have it on your site, especially if you’re running Wordpress ). There are better ways to implement this, someone might suggest React or Vue or Angular or assembler or running it on the blockchain or in the bootloader but this is how I did it.
A jQuery-less version would be quite easy to implement too, perhaps in a future post.
How to waste your career, one comfortable year at a time
One common trait I’ve observed in all great engineers is their sense of adventure. People who pigeonhole themselves into a specialty and do the exact same job for years tend to grow complacent. The problem is that stability is an innate human instinct. So you need to deliberately counterbalance this tendency. Taking risks and being uncomfortable is a muscle you have to train.
A friend of mine told me this story about wild ducks — Wild ducks migrate in the winter not because of the cold but because of the food. If you feed them, they won’t migrate. Keep feeding them for a few years in a row, still won’t migrate. Then stop all of a sudden, they won’t migrate, and they’ll die. The moral is that you can tame wild ducks, but you can’t wildify tamed ducks (that’s why there isn’t even such a word as wildify). So you have to be careful not to lose that hustle.
Apoorva Govind
Erk Tha Jerk: Airplane Mode
QEMU and macOS Big Sur
If you try to run QEMU
under macOS Big Mac Sur with the -machine accel=hvf flag (basically with Apple’s Hypervisor Framework
) you’ll get one ugly error; every time hv_vm_create() runs it returns an HV_ERROR. The reason is that the com.apple.vm.hypervisor entitlement (used in macOS 10.15) has been deprecated and replaced by com.apple.security.hypervisor.
You need to sign your binary with the correct entitlement. Add the XML below to an entitlements.xml file.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>com.apple.security.hypervisor</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>
After that, sign the QEMU binary with the entitlements.xml file.
$ codesign -s - --entitlements entitlements.xml --force /usr/local/bin/qemu-system-x86_64
Starting QEMU with -machine accel=hvf will work now.
Why Do We Assume Extraterrestrials Might Want to Visit Us?
It is presumptuous to assume that we are worthy of special attention from advanced species in the Milky Way. We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path.
Our sun formed at the tail end of the star formation history of the universe. Most stars are billions of years older than ours. So much older, in fact that many sunlike stars have already consumed their nuclear fuel and cooled off to a compact Earth-size remnant known as a white dwarf. We also learned recently that of order half of all sunlike stars host an Earth-size planet in their habitable zone, allowing for liquid water and for the chemistry of life.
Avi Loeb