https://slashdot.org/submission/15967006/denisovan-find-in-laos

This was marked as spam. How and why? It's not a gratuitous quote from the article and is followed by what it implies.

If we look at a lot of the modern conspiracy theories (antivax, covid being fake, gun crime against schools being a hoax, global warming being a hoax, etc), they all seem to be things that people feel powerless about.

The four I listed are things individuals can't do much about. And modern society is all about the cult of the individual. It would require large scale collective action to deal with them, and if you reject outright the concept of collective action then the easiest way to cope is to pretend the issues don't exist.

Having vaccine anxiety is distinct here. There, some power does indeed rest with the individual. You can test for hyperactive immune systems and allergies, so can know if a given type of vaccine is safe. And yet people who are anxious aren't obviously getting tested.

Now, some who are aren't getting listened to by doctors, and that's a legitimate complaint. Some of that is because doctors are overworked, and that too is a perfectly legitimate complaint. And there has been (and still is) a lot of sexism and racism in the medical profession, leading to poorer outcomes and unnecessary injury/death.

These issues are verifiable, very real, urgently need to be fixed and should not be accepted by anyone. But that is precisely what makes them different from conspiracy theories. They're trivially verifiable. There are no aliens or crime syndicates hiding this information.

There are other conspiracy theories, such as the tendencies of politicians and the powerful, whether Lord Lucan is alive, a new world order, and so on.

These also look like a feeling of being powerless, and a way to "explain" why the person is powerless. After all, if politicians are alien lizards or part of an organized crime syndicate, then the public would obviously be powerless. That would be a natural conclusion.

The last category, what might be called traditional conspiracy theories, would be the flat Earth movement, the fake moon landings belief, and so on.

The idea here seems to be, again, powerlessness., this time based on the notion that the public isn't being told everything, that scientists are keeping secrets.

I can understand that to some extent. Governments are loathe to let scientists talk freely, it's natural to be suspicious about things you're not told and the paranoia over secrecy extends to things that the public already know.

(Strong encryption exports were only legalised in the US after one person had the RSA algorithm tattooed onto him.)

Extrapolating from this paranoia to the idea that the moon is a hologram is a stretch, but it's understandable that some people will react badly to this feeling of powerlessness and helplessness, and unelected scientists are easy, soft, targets.

All of the above also involve this idea of having secret inside knowlegde about "the truth" (which is also about control, since now you get to be the one who controls it).

Since the underlying issues revolve around the worship of the individual over all else (and thus making personal power sacrosanct and all that denies such power a heresy), maybe one step would be to have schools teach a more balanced approach rather than reinforcing this absolute ideal.

Extremes (be it a communal extreme, an individualist extreme, a hedonistic extreme or an ascetic extreme) are toxic but modern discourse doesn't leave any room for the middle ground any more.

And when that middle ground is claimed, it needs to be claimed by all sides. The extreme position, I suspect, is a reflex reaction of all the other extremes.

The second part is about control issues. Everyone wants to be the leader, nobody likes following, and in a world that respects status and glamour rather than people, there's an obvious reason for that. Control is also a mental health issue and in the whole strong, self-sufficient ideology, mental health issues are something only other people have.

Banish the extremes and the glorification of indvidualism and power. Science isn't the problem, nature is never a problem, and even politicians don't have to be a problem if they don't want to be.

Then we can finally start seeing rational debates and actual solutions to problems.

For many years now, the side bar on the front page has been linked to DustyM's account but to my account on all of the secondary pages. This has been annoying and I've given feedback on it a few times with no response.

Does anyone know of a way to fix that damn sidebar? If not, I have been using the workaround for a long time now, but it is exceedingly irritating.

My great great grandmother wrote a biography of her three brothers killed in WW1. I'm typing it all into a LaTeX editor and will be adding a family tree along with a sketched outline of their lives and newspaper clippings.

A best-seller it ain't, but it may interest a few here as these guys show autistic traits and are geeks from just over a century ago.

TL;DR version: 80s dystopian techno-horror geekfest with relatively accurate portrayal of cryptography and hacking.

Long version: Pretty much the same as above. It's a low budget BBC production that scores highly on accuracy of methods, exploits and technology of the era, insofar as TV ever gets.

The premise: a low-rank civil servant, tracking down bank fraud, discovers a trail of blackmail, corruption by intelligence services, deliberate weaknesses in security and criminal gangs operating with impunity.

By season 2, he's keeping himself alive the same way the Wikileaks journalists did, his wife has what we would call severe PTSD and the body count isn't slowing down.

Given trauma was barely understood in the 80s, the portrayal there and the bouts of temporary insanity are extremely close to what happens, again allowing for this being TV drama and not a psychological documentary.

The storyline deals with cryptography, surveillance society, backdoors and institutional corruption. All hot button issues of today. It even covers the inevitable issues of DIY security.

The conspiracy aspect is a trifle OTT bit, again, it's TV. It has to be to have a program.

It's geared to nerds, geeks and dystopia lovers, though, rather than the mainstream. I saw more reviews in computer journals than in TV guides.

It's the sort of show that would really need updating to be watchable by modern audiences, but fans of older shows would likely enjoy it.

It wasn't unusual for the time, which is the great thing

The 80s were a time for really bleak geek television - Codename Icarus (for the younger viewers), Edge of Darkness, Terry Nation's Survivors, Threads - all productions in this decade.

(Even late 70s had some dark stuff, Blake's 7, The Omega Factor, Day of the Triffids, and ABC/Central's Sapphire & Steel were not light watching. You have to go back to the start of the decade and Doomwatch to see a plausible contemporary dystopia.)

The stuff of a thousand bad dreams, these shows.

There were, at one point, quite a few historical wargames (Britannia, Decline and Fall, etc) but they were mostly about large-scale strategy rather than the history itself (which was mostly an excuse for blowing up other people's counters). History lessons via roleplaying games sounds quite an interesting approach and could be used to cover all kinds of events.

The expansion pack isn't out yet (it's still in kickstart) but there's enough information about it to get a good feel for how much depth there is in there. If it's done well, it could be very effective in the same way "...and then the Huns came and beat the sh*t out of the Romans before leaving again" isn't. Unless you're a Hun.

I'd like to get people's views on the use of roleplaying games and which system would be best for such gaming. Rolemaster? Call of Cthulhu? The ever-present Dungeons and Dragons? ("My 20th level mage casts a fireball at the fleeing Scots" sounds ahistorical.)

Ok, so let's start be defining a few terms, as it is obvious from Facebook genetic genealogy groups that people are truly ignorant on the subject. (Not that I believe this is common on Slashdot, where we're all much more knowledgeable.)

First off, most genetic testing is NOT carried out by sequencing all of your DNA, a widespread belief that resulted in outrage on one Facebook group when I pointed that out.

The vast majority of consumer testing is done by SNP genotyping. They look at very specific genetic markers and see if those markers have changed from one base pair to another. That's the only type of mutation looked for and they typically look at only a few.

So we've our first way to group companies: sequencing vs genotyping.

SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) are, as mentioned above, one type of mutation. Another is called STR (short tandem repeat), where a block of DNA is duplicated.

FamilyTreeDNA does both STR and SNP testing, STRs mostly for the Y chromosome. Both can be used for family history.

Most labs, though, use only SNP tests. It's quicker and cheaper than counting repeats but with many of the more interesting ones covered by patents or kept private by other means, there's a lot more secrecy involved.

(Note: This has doubtless led to a lot of unnecessary deaths, as genetic markers indicating a high probability of getting certain forms of cancer are being milked by private companies for profit. Few people get more than one test, so most people won't know if they carry such markers and can't take action in advance.)

So the second piece of jargon is SNP vs STR.

Finally, we come to the different areas of DNA. There are regions that are especially good for ancestrial reserch (mostly non-coding DNA), then there's the exome (which is where most of the protein coding takes place), you've telomeres (suicidal buffers between chromosomes, which have a function in longevity), and so on. I won't list them all.

The Y chromosome is particularly good for ancestry, but only has 9 coding genes left in it. It's possible it will vanish in time, but it seems to be fairly stable for right now.

Most companies test only DNA that is good for ancestral research in the autosomal regions (aDNA, the regions outside the sex chromosomes). This allows you to identify anyone who is genetically connected, but because you (on average) get just under 50% (remember, there's mutations in each generation and that DNA comes from neither parent) of your DNA from each parent, the distance you can track depends on how many markers are tested (very few). Reliability falls off sharply.

YDNA (Y chromosome DNA) tests only test for paternal ancestry, but if two people have a common paternal-line ancestor, it's a lot more precise once you're past about second cousins. It's popular with anthropologists as it's very good for tracking how men have migrated.

mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) is only inherited through the maternal line. Again, it's very popular, this time for tracking how women have migrated. There are certain forms of mtDNA that are linked to health benefits and others to genetic diseases, so this one tends to be the most controversial of the ancestral DNA tests. It also changes very slowly, so you don't get high resolution on population movements.

These two (YDNA and mtDNA) tests can tell you a lot about whether societies are open or closed, and whether it was men who travelled to find partners, women, or both. So we can know something of the culture of even long-extinct societies.

The data I have been able to find is for 2019. It shows: Myheritage tests for 702,442 autosomal SNPS, AncestryDNA for 637,639, FTDNA for 612,272 and 23andme for 630,132. This is out of a total of 3 billion base pairs. So the best test that year looked at 0.0023% of the genome.

ISOGG produced a chart as well, but it's far older. Their chart is dated around 2013.

Since you inherit a random 50% from each parent, the assumption that this is statistically meaningful for such a small fraction of the DNA is questionable. It seems to work adequately, but I'm not sure what the error bars are.

FTDNA also tests up to 111 STRs on regular tests and 600+ STRs for their "BigY" (it depends on the quality of the genetic sample).

Companies that do sequencing sometimes offer partial kits (in the order of tens of millions of SNPs) or full sequencing (which is what the same suggests). These are rarer and more expensive.

Most DNA companies allow you to access the raw data, some only allow it if you pay vast sums of money, and some don't allow you to at all. Always check in advance.

When you download your own data, you can use public databases to search for matches (either for relatives or genetic conditions). The quality of public databases is less controlled, both in terms of privacy and quality of data. However, corporate databases will usually be smaller for both types of data and will also usually not contain data from rivals. If you want broad data sets, public databases are the way to go.

I've only tested with 23&Me, FamilyTreeDNA, CRI Genetics and Nebula Genomics, so can't tell you anything much about the quality of the other companies.

(Ok, I also tested with uBiome, a microbiome testing company in the US, but they had their computers seized some time back due to fraud. I have no idea what happened to my data on there, or whether there's a way to access it.)

The quality seems to be reasonable for all four.

FTDNA is the most expensive for a lot of things, but has less of a sticker shock than Nebula and gets more data than 23&Me. It looks like there are a few companies that are better for ancestry but it's one of the best and the one the Genomics Project used. They're the only ancestral company that gives you STRs AFAIK and they give you a much more detailed evaluation of haplogroups than anyone else I've tested with.

Nebula does up to medical grade (100x oversampling) DNA testing, so if you want results a hospital will trust, that's where you part with a vast amount of money.

23&Me is good for a lot of medical stuff and if you want to help with research is probably the best.

CRI Genetics produces a lot of data with much higher reliability than most of the others, but you can't access the raw data and their databases won't be as extensive. However, because you can't access the raw data, you have to test with them to compare against their database.

I have now passed the total of 30 different black teas. Not fruit, not spice, not herbal, not even green, white or red tea. Just black teas. No, blends like PG Tips and Yorkshire Gold don't count either.

Why so many? Aside from being my current monomania, it's because I'm fascinated by how different they are.

I couldn't tell you the chemistry that makes that difference, nor could I tell you what difference it makes in terms of the various compounds affecting alertness or sedation. (It contains both), in terms of health benefits or even in the simplest term of how water is retained in the body.

But I'm determined to find out at least some of this. It'll have to be on my own, as essentially no research is being done on the subject, and I've no idea of what that'll require beyond a very good gas spectrometer (I'm going to have to count molecules, not atoms).

But I think it would be fun to find out, and definitely worth doing as long as I can figure out how to (a) control the parameters, and (b) afford said piece of gear.

She was a friend, I used to go to her house a few times a month.

She will be missed.

Now for the next two phases.

Yes, wire fraud indictments mean we get to use Interpol and bounties. It's going to be fun.

Look, if you're not a very wealthy person (and I mean raking in millions through trusts and LLCs each year), you need to know they are about to steal your money.

PAY YOUR PROPERTY AND SALES TAXES before Year End. Next year you have a total cap on Property Taxes, Mortgage Interest, Sales Tax or State Income Tax, and other fees of $10,000 TOTAL.

DO IT NOW!

See Have Bruce Perens Keynote Your Confference at perens.com

So, the Neo-Nazis are getting bolder in the U Dist. Was going to lunch with a friend and ran into one who yelled various threats and racist aspersions at me. Apparently he had been doing this for quite a while, and others had called 911 too. He was obviously trying to provoke a physical reaction (my friend is Filipino) from me but I was pretty calm, since I know what to do. This is why you have to have leaders who don't promote garbage like this, it encourages the loons.

Just after me, he did a similar thing to a young couple and the guy started brawling with the male of the couple.

I blame the President and his VP Trump.

Seriously, didn't even make it to 3 pm.

RUFKM?

Resign now. Take completely compromised Pence with you and tell President Bannon he's going back into cold storage in Argentina again.

So, for those of you don't realize it, I'm a catalyst. I've fought against my basic nature for years, but it's what I do.

and right now, my job is saving America.

No pay, hard work, it's connecting stuff, using some ancient protocol builds that are in everything to bypass security that never did work, and providing little pushes that get things done.

Expect more. Just starting.

It's immaterial if you know I used to have a four digit slashdot account and spaced my old password from my old account at one of the first ISPs, or that I used to hack things before the USE*NET wars, or was there at the start of the events that created EFF and all that.

I just do things. Never for personal gain.

This is one of those times.