NOAA, working with private industry partners and the U.S. Navy, has confirmed the location and condition of the USS Independence, the lead ship of its class of light aircraft carriers that were critical during the American naval offensive in the Pacific during World War II. San Francisco is still grappling with the complex and messy task of cleaning up radioactive contamination at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, in no small part because of the massive (and massively unsuccessful) effort undertaken there to try and decontaminate USS Independence after the Operation Crossroads detonations. Here’s how Independence looked when it was moored near Hunter’s Point in 1944:

After the war, Independence was sent to Bikini, where it became a target for the Operation Crossroads nuclear detonation experiments:

A fleet of 95 target vessels was assembled in Bikini Lagoon.

But no, it’s true — back in 1984, Trillium/Telarium Software published
Amazon, an epic adventure game written by speculative fiction novelist Michael Crichton, creator of
Westworld and
Jurassic Park, among many others. The game’s setup bears significant plot resemblances to Crichton’s 1980 novel
Congo, with the intelligent great apes replaced by native Huni warriors, and communicative simian Amy replaced by a talking parrot named Paco. I was glad I had the parrot along at this point — fortunately the parser doesn’t actually recognize many WRONG gestures, but Paco helpfully told me to
SMILE, AMIGO:

The third act of the game becomes fairly challenging and/or frustrating, with lots of ways to die (but thankfully few dead ends requiring backtracking to address earlier mistakes.)

Police raided the home and office of a freelance journalist Friday morning as part of an ongoing investigation into a leaked confidential police report containing salacious details about the death of late Public Defender Jeff Adachi. Freelance journalist Bryan Carmody told the San Francisco Examiner that his home and office were raided by police and FBI agents because he had obtained a copy of the police report, and sold information from that report to the press following Adachi’s death on February 22. A San Francisco Police Department spokesperson defended their action in a statement Friday, saying that the warrant was granted by a judge and the raid was “part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the leak of the Adachi police report.”

In Indiana, a local hospital system, Parkview Health, charged private insurance companies about four times what the federal Medicare program paid for the same care, according to a study of hospital prices in 25 states released on Thursday by the nonprofit RAND Corp. Across the nation, hospitals treating patients with private health insurance were paid overall 2.4 times the Medicare rates in 2017, according to the RAND analysis. The difference was largest for outpatient care, where private prices were almost triple what Medicare would have paid.

Breaking a few of the plastic pegs allowed the “front” of the device to be seen:

Here we can see another MCUy type chip (in red); a third MCUy chip (in green), the camera with a quite reddy lens or filter on the outside (in blue) and two tssop8 chips (in purple). This will be done, but not until I’m happy to kill the device:

The interesting bit, from a hardware side is that there is not real central MCU – the Phison NAND controller has the most flexibility; but each chip is specific to a role. First a SCSI command:

Followed by a transferring of data from the host to the device:

That string in red, that’s the password I set on the device.

A USB stick dubbed eyeDisk that uses iris recognition to unlock the drive claims to be “unhackable” – only, it isn’t. After obtaining one of the gadgets, Lodge found that the device correctly paired to his eye, and he was able to unlock it using the biometric feature most of the time (two out of three attempts on average – there’s a backup password in case of failure). Using the popular network packet analyzer known as Wireshark, whose USBPcap function allows real-time packet-sniffing from a USB, Lodge was able to determine the that the device used Command Descriptor Blocks (CDB) to send commands to and from the device.

In 2018, a majority of South Koreans aged 20-44 were single and only 26% of the unmarried men and 32% of unmarried women in that age group were in relationships, according to the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHSA). While they struggle to find jobs, many young South Koreans say they lack the time, money or emotional capacity to go on dates. “The goal (of the class) is to understand differences among people, especially between men and women, and how to form good relationships and become good people by considering and respecting others,” she said “I think understanding each other is crucial as we work together to create a better and happier world.”

Under the streets of French Hanoi, rats multiplied exponentially—and then skittered to the surface. We only know about the rat hunt at all because in the ‘90s historian Michael Vann was in France, researching French colonialism, when he came upon a file labeled “Destruction of Animals: Rats.” In 1997, Vann went to Vietnam to do archival research on the rat massacre.

In reality, though, Bruegel had been an urban and urbane artist who, painting for a clientele of discerning collectors, worked in a consciously retrospective, deliberately un-Italian, Netherlandish style. Even when he does not paint monsters and demons, Bruegel draws deeply on Bosch for his bird’s-eye views, his huge, steep, perspectival ground planes teeming with strange figures, and his thin, translucent painting style. In 1559–1560, five years after his earliest engravings, Bruegel made his first monumental panel paintings, Netherlandish Proverbs, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, and Childrens’ Games, each of which contains (respectively) about a hundred sayings, customs, and games.

In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich insisted that it was too late to prevent a doomsday apocalypse resulting from overpopulation. Both men agreed that commodity prices were a fine proxy for the effects of population growth, and they set the stakes at $1,000 worth of Ehrlich’s five metals. If, 10 years hence, prices had gone down, Ehrlich would have to pay the difference in value to Simon.