It is not clear how many clowns were inside the vehicle.

Well done

From the 2014 Cobham Tactical Communications and Surveillance catalog!

These are all video surveillance devices:

h/t

There's a fun website called NewsDiffs that logs and compares the revisions that on-line news stories go through during the day.

Here's a nice example of what it catches: New York Times' rather incredible revisions of a piece on Trump's Excellent Mexican Adventure:

NewsDiffs | Diffing: Trump Gambles on Immigration in Trip and Rally.

Why, it's almost as if they knew what they wanted to say about Trump's speech and trip before either happened, but found themselves having to (silently!) rewrite the story once it became obvious how wrong their predictions were. I wonder how far off they could've been and yet not bothered to rewrite it? Just how wrong do they have to be before they open up their text editor? Where's the "ah fuck it, close enough!" line?

These days, genuine factual reporting is a scarce thing indeed. A recent analysis by Politifact found that statements made by pundits, hosts, and paid contributors on the three major television news networks were “mostly false” or worse 60% of the time on Fox News, 44% of the time on MSNBC/NBC, and 21% of the time on CNN. There are variations on this data from different studies. Pew found that 85% of MSNBC’s programming was commentary or opinion rather than factual reporting, with Fox at 59% and CNN at 46%.

The Patterning

I've been wasting time today learning about the current state of cosmology.

You should do the same!

PBS: Space Time Videos

List of serial killers by number of victims

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Wikipedia

Christmas is over.

Everybody get back to August where you belong.

Turns out that the use of so-called “defeat devices” to cheat federal emissions standards isn’t just relegated to four-wheeled vehicles made by Volkswagen. Harley-Davidson today agreed to settle charges it violated the Clean Air Act by paying $15 million, as well as buying back and destroying nearly 340,000 “super tuners” that emit higher amounts of certain air pollutants than what the company certified to EPA.

A Brazilian police official is telling The Associated Press that American swimmer Ryan Lochte fabricated a story about being robbed at gunpoint in Rio de Janeiro.

The official, who has direct knowledge of the investigation, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about an ongoing probe.

He said that around 6 a.m. on Sunday, Lochte, along with fellow swimmers Jack Conger, Gunnar Bentz and Jimmy Feigen, stopped at a gas station in Barra da Tijuca, a suburb of Rio where many Olympic venues are located. One of the swimmers tried to open the door of an outside bathroom. It was locked.

A few of the swimmers then pushed on the door and broke it. A security guard appeared and confronted them, the official said.

The official says the guard was armed with a pistol, but he never took it out or pointed it at the swimmers.

According to the official, the gas station manager then arrived. Using a customer to translate, the manager asked the swimmers to pay for the broken door. After a discussion, they did pay him an unknown amount of money and then left.

Entitled idiots.