The Soviet Union was a party to the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, a 1946 treaty that limited countries to a set quota of whales each year. The obvious answer Is wrong:

…the Soviet Union had little real demand for whale products. Homans summarizes:

The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them.

People who eat large amounts of heavily processed foods, from breakfast cereals and ready meals to muffins and ice-cream, have a greater risk of heart attack, stroke and early death, according to two major studies. When the amount of ultra-processed food in the diet rose 10 percentage points, for example from 10% to 20%, the risk of the diseases rose 12%. Maria Bes-Rastrollo, who led the Spanish study, said the fact that the death rate rose with increased consumption strongly suggested that ultra-processed foods were to blame.

I’m Jason Scott, adjunct archivist at archive.org, and I wanted to talk about the time I watched the Internet Archive scan in a Braille issue of Playboy magazine. Many people might not know there have even been Braille editions of Playboy, but they’ve been printed since 1970, a function of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) , which puts out a variety of transcribed versions of periodicals and books and other materials, in forms such as digital text, mp3/spoken, and of course Braille. There are lots of these scanning centers affiliated with or run by the Internet Archive worldwide, often in alliance with libraries or academic institutions, bringing in a whole range of materials – not just books.

Google launched the standalone YouTube gaming vertical almost four years ago as a response to Amazon’s purchase of Twitch, and on May 30, Google will shut down the standalone YouTube Gaming app and the standalone gaming.youtube.com website. Google kills its Twitch killer—the YouTube Gaming app shuts down this week Here lies Google Inbox, a radical rethink of how email should work Google Fiber’s biggest failure: ISP will turn service off in Louisville View more stories The plan to shut down the gaming portal was announced in September, with a report from The Verge saying the site was dying because it simply wasn’t popular. Google is directing former YouTube Gaming users to a gaming sub-page on YouTube.com, which has some of the YouTube Gaming features intact, like the top live games list.

Both Galen and Fracastoro used the term seeds or semina to describe epidemic agents; keeping with that horticultural metaphor, predisposed bodies provided fertile soil for invading particles to take root, while other bodies were less welcoming. Writing during the epidemic, Harvey answered that same perennial question—“Why are some bodies more exposed to the contagion than others?” Despite the constant presence of claims linking contagion to disorder or vice, threats about the pathogenic qualities of the plebeian body consistently crept beyond subgroups like criminals or vagrants to voice sweeping statements about the poor generally.

(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc is interested in buying prepaid cellphone wireless service Boost Mobile from U.S. carriers T-Mobile US Inc and Sprint Corp, two sources familiar with the matter said on Thursday. Amazon is considering buying Boost mainly because the deal would allow it to use T-Mobile’s wireless network for at least six years, one of the sources said. T-Mobile and Sprint have offered concessions, including selling Boost, to reduce their market share in the prepaid wireless business and gain regulatory approval for their planned $26 billion merger.

(Photo Illustration by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)

Getty

Google is planning to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users only, according to 9to5Google. And the software giant is not backing down: It says the only people that can use ad blockers following the change will be Google’s enterprise users. 9to5Google highlighted a single sentence buried in the text of Google’s response to the complaints, which clarified the changes: “Chrome is deprecating the blocking capabilities of the webRequest API in Manifest V3, not the entire webRequest API (though blocking will still be available to enterprise deployments).”

The answer is that, with in a room, there is a greater than 50% chance that at least two of the people will share the same birthday. If there are 365 people in a room, each with a distinct birthday, there is no way to add another person to the room without them colliding with the date of someone already in the room; every date is taken. When there were four or less people in the room, from my experiments, the non-uniformity of distribution resulted in a slight decrease in the chances of a birthday collision (but this could loss of precision from too small a sample size as the percentage of times, for instance that two people collide is just 0.274%).

(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc is interested in buying prepaid cellphone wireless service Boost Mobile from U.S. carriers T-Mobile US Inc and Sprint Corp, two sources familiar with the matter said on Thursday. Amazon is considering buying Boost mainly because the deal would allow it to use T-Mobile’s wireless network for at least six years, one of the sources said. T-Mobile and Sprint have offered concessions, including selling Boost, to reduce their market share in the prepaid wireless business and gain regulatory approval for their planned $26 billion merger.

Waiters and Changers
In part 1 of this series, we talked about the difference between:
Waiters — waiting for changes to the behavior of the system and
Changers — changing the behavior of the system but also affected by and affecting the structure of the system. This conflict between the desire of waiters for more behavior changes versus the desire of changers for more structure changes is the first human relationship that makes software design hard. That’s the foundation of a productive working relationship between waiters and changers — choosing to see that there are enough behavior changes even when structure changes sometimes take priority.