Bring back "Share all tabs" in Firefox for Android - Mozilla Connect - "In current stable version (Firefox 144 for Android) one can easily send all open tabs to other devices. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-share-tab-firefox-android#w_share-all-open-tabs I use it every day and love it; however, in recent Beta builds the tab menu has gotten a UI tweak and the menu item is gone. It made my tab life really worse and I'd love it come back. Please!"
When you have to downgrade to version 146
Meme - Rothmus: "We're not gonna make it are we"
@ratlimit: "apologies for my phrasing. instead of "my partner", which has connotations of ownership, I am trying to update my language to "a partner to me" (PTM). credit to my PTM for calling me out on this"
masha @MashaParty: "i love this! my lovemate calls me their PFN (Person For Now) to recognize that while i'm in their life today, they don't owe me a tomorrow. it really makes me grateful for every day i have with them"
@ratlimit: "You do not have my permission to distribute this unauthorized reproduction of my content. Delete this immediately. Failure to do so will result in my submission of a DMCA takedown request."
Meme - "Despite lying on camera, Pritam plays victim to the very end.
SCANDAL. WAS IT A CRIME? APOLOGISED? RESIGNED?
Tan Chuan Jin: Extramarital affair NO YES YES
Cheng Li Hu: Extramarital affair NO YES YES
Leon Perera: Extramarital affair NO YES YES
Nicole Seah: Extramarital affair NO YES YES
S. Iswaran: Corrupt behaviour YES YES YES
Pritam Singh: Lying under oath YES NO NO"
Mind over milkshakes: mindsets, not just nutrients, determine ghrelin response - "Objective: To test whether physiological satiation as measured by the gut peptide ghrelin may vary depending on the mindset in which one approaches consumption of food.
Methods: On 2 separate occasions, participants (n = 46) consumed a 380-calorie milkshake under the pretense that it was either a 620-calorie "indulgent" shake or a 140-calorie "sensible" shake. Ghrelin was measured via intravenous blood samples at 3 time points: baseline (20 min), anticipatory (60 min), and postconsumption (90 min). During the first interval (between 20 and 60 min) participants were asked to view and rate the (misleading) label of the shake. During the second interval (between 60 and 90 min) participants were asked to drink and rate the milkshake.
Results: The mindset of indulgence produced a dramatically steeper decline in ghrelin after consuming the shake, whereas the mindset of sensibility produced a relatively flat ghrelin response. Participants' satiety was consistent with what they believed they were consuming rather than the actual nutritional value of what they consumed.
Conclusions: The effect of food consumption on ghrelin may be psychologically mediated, and mindset meaningfully affects physiological responses to food."
A lot of hunger is psychological
@roach-works on Tumblr - "speculative fiction writers i am going to give you a really urgent piece of advice: don't say numbers. don't give your readers any numbers. how heavy is the sword? lots. how old is that city? plenty. how big is the fort? massive. how fast is the spaceship? not very, it's secondhand. the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don't let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD. you are lying to people for fun. if you let them do math at you the lie collapses and it's no fun anymore."
Charestiste🇨🇦🍁 on X - "Federal Vote Intention by Age 18-29 year old 🔵Conservative: 50% 🔴Liberal: 27% 🟠NDP: 14% 🟢Green: 4% 🔷Bloc: 2% 🟣People's: 1% ⚪Other: 0% 60 and over 🔴Liberal: 52% 🔵Conservative: 32% 🔷Bloc: 9% 🟠NDP: 5% 🟢Green: 1% 🟣PPC: 1% ⚪OTH: 0%"
Christian Heiens 🏛 on X - "Boomer Occupied Government Western nations are essentially liberal gerontocracies ruled by a bunch of selfish grandparents who refuse to pass the torch, hate their own offspring, and continue to insist on imposing their 60s era values on society despite the obvious and numerous civilization-rupturing flaws it produces."
It's only "okay, boomer" when it pushes the left wing agenda
Clerics, Baghdad bridal industry profit from child marriage - "Baghdad’s bridal industry has seen a massive boom since Iraq legalized child marriage, and human rights organizations have warned that young girls are being auctioned off in black market sales to older men... Even before the law passed, 28% of girls in Iraq were married before the age of 18, and a further 22% of unregistered marriages involve girls under 14, the United Nations reported in 2023... Dozens of businesses confirmed to the British outlet that since the Ja’fari law passed, they had increased sales. Baraa Macer, an influencer and bridal makeup artist, admitted that many of her clients are now under 10. A video allegedly displaying an 11-year-old girl cloaked in white shared on Macer’s page gained more than 250,000 views. Macer declined to confirm whether the content was monetized. Another Iraqi makeup artist, Zainab Saleem, also known as Makera Dobaa, claimed she disagreed with child marriage but shared her underage client’s videos because “younger brides get more views” and people ask for ages in the comments... Ruweida described a “10-year-old girl who cried throughout her hair and makeup, and still her family was proud to say she was marrying an older man. She was trying to resist, but I could see she had bruises all over her head … this is very common.”"
Damn colonialism!
World's oldest boomerang older than thought, but not Australian - "The tool, which was found in a cave in Poland in 1985, is now thought to be 40,000 years old. Archaeologists say it was fashioned from a mammoth's tusk with an astonishing level of skill. Researchers worked out from its shape that it would have flown when thrown, but would not have come back to the thrower."
NASA Stole the Rocket Countdown From a 1929 Fritz Lang Film - "Die Frau im Mond, happened to be written by Thea von Harbou, Lang’s longtime collaborator and then-wife (the two later separated, after von Harbou decided to throw her lot in with the Nazis). The book, which follows a group of backstabbing moon prospectors, is a rollercoaster ride of love triangles, business intrigue, and lunar gunfights, and Lang set out to turn it into a film. While writing the novel, von Harbou had researched spaceflight meticulously, and Lang, wanting his film to be equally grounded in scientific possibility, hired Hermann Oberth—the Transylvanian teacher who had started the whole space craze—as the film’s scientific advisor. Oberth hightailed it to Berlin."
Social Media Ruthlessly Mocks Influencer Who Screamed Her Lungs Out On Singapore Airlines Flight - "Mia was traveling on a Singapore Airlines flight in Business Class, and with her camera pointing right at her, we got to see exactly what her reaction was at the moment the plane started to experience turbulence... Despite Mia’s self-awareness and apology, the internet was not so kind to her, with other TikTok users making parody videos and commentators calling her out on her video. What those commentators and video posters didn’t know, however, was that Mia was seriously injured in a severe turbulence incident aboard Singapore Airlines flight SQ-321 from London Heathrow in May 2024 that claimed the life of one passenger who suffered a heart attack. Scores of passengers and cabin crew were seriously injured when the Boeing 777-300 experienced extreme G-forces, flinging anyone who wasn’t buckled up into the air and then throwing them back towards the cabin floor... “For those who are saying it’s impossible to have a meltdown while filming, it took me two years, babe.” “I edited the video and posted it because I thought it was funny, but I guess I cropped too much out and everyone thinks it’s fake.” Bizarrely, even with this explanation, and photos of Mia in the hospital recovering from her traumatic experience, people have still come for in the comments, claiming the whole thing was “performative” and claiming she can’t really have a fear of flying because she still got on a plane."
Public Attitudes In Iraq: Four Years On - "These are among the findings released today from the largest poll into Iraqi opinion ever to be published. Carried out by UK research firm ORB, which has been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005, the poll shows that despite the horrendous personal security problems only 26% of the country preferred life under the previous regime of Saddam Hussein, with almost half (49%) preferring life under the current political system. As one may expect, it is the Sunnis who are most likely to back the previous regime (51%) with the Shias (66%) preferring the current arrangements."
From 2007
Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council - "More businesses are shifting to cashless payment models. For many businesses, cash can be more costly, less secure, and inconvenient than electronic payments. While most businesses offer a choice in payments, the movement to cashless payments is being driven by security, efficiency and cost-savings... As the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) noted in an article titled “The Hidden Costs of Cash Management,” convenience stores pay employees 15-20 hours a week to count cash. NACS also reports full-time convenience store employees earn $14.33 an hour, meaning each store pays between $11,177 and $14,903 a year just to count cash. That is before calculating, according to NACS, other costs not present with card payments such as theft, safes or the cost associated with securely transporting cash from a store to the bank. The IHL Group, a global research and advisory firm for the retail and hospitality industry, issued a report that found the cost associated with handling cash payments can run from 4.7% on the low end to more than 15.5% for bars and restaurants. For electronic payments, the cost can range from $1.43 to $4.40 per $100 transaction depending on the credit/debit or payment processor (VISA, MC, American Express, PayPal, Amazon Pay, or Apple Pay). Cash costs can significantly outpace the costs associated with accepting and processing card payments, which also protects consumers from fraud and helps to lift “ticket spend” – the average amount spent by a consumer per transaction – for businesses. According to the 2023 NACS State of the Industry Report, the highest- performing convenience stores pay the highest amount of card fees, which demonstrates how accepting credit cards can generate more sales revenue and, ultimately, more profit. Brick-and-mortar businesses are not the only ones facing high cash costs. Death Valley National Park stopped accepting cash payments after finding the park spent $40,000 to process $22,000 in cash entrance fees. This was due to the park’s remote location and 45-minute armored car ride to a bank. Cash also creates security concerns. It can be risky to deal in cash because physical currency can be easily stolen. To prevent theft, businesses spend additional money on security measures such as on-location guards and armored cars for cash transport. Nevertheless, U.S. retailers lose $40 billion each year to cash theft."
Asked and Answered - "There are all sorts of consultants, pundits, and politicians who are claiming to have the golden answer for the question: “What is wrong with the Democrat Party?” The thing to understand about these people is that they have the same issue the Democrats do, they are not interested in solving anything because if the solved it, they would have to get off the gravy train at the next stop, so what they are telling you about are symptoms, not problems. You have lost a generation of young men – young people in general – but that is a symptom, not the problem. Here are three words I think about with I think about the Democrat Party and policies: 1) performative, 2) ephemeral, and 3) unsuccessful – and when those three combine, they form a political ideology that costs a lot of money and delivers no tangible results. Think about the Biden years – pretty much all of the GDP was due to government spending, more than two thirds of which was borrowed money, the messaging around it had nothing to do with the outcome because it was more about what was trendy than what was delivered and while the inflation it caused wasn’t “transitory” as we were told, the policies were. They had zero substance because the issues they were claimed to solve had no substance. They were just an excuse to spend billions upon billions of dollars because spending is how the Democrat Party measures “success”. The reason you are losing support and your party’s approval is in the teens, is that people, especially young people, see absolutely no positive impact from them. Your party told every parent and child that they had to go to college and get a degree, then you provided easy loan money the university system modified itself to soak up, and when the universities enrolled progressively dumb and ill-prepared students, to soak up tuition they dumbed down the degrees to the point of real-world worthlessness. Most kids should get a tee shirt when (if) they get a degree that says, “I graduated from college and all I got was a quarter million in debt and this tee shirt.” They resent having to pay taxes on literally everything they own and do, endure high interest rates, and face limited opportunities, all to cover the bill our government is running up – and Democrats are seen, more than ever, as the party of government... The middle class is the same. They intuitively calculate return on investment and I can tell you that trillions of dollars spent on a handful of EV charging stations, replacing racist roads, legalizing discrimination of whites through DEI policies everywhere, subsidizing electric vehicles they can’t afford to buy, and critical infrastructure that never gets built while their electric and water bills keep going up, is a price they are tired of paying. You are hanging by your fingernails to the 65+ demo – the only class you are hanging onto – and only because this is the class of people who are beginning to look to government benefits as a significant percentage of their future income and insurance, but even that group is moving to the right... The GOP would be the same if it weren’t for Trump. Trump is performative, but his policies are not. When he sees something that needs doing, he just does it and his core pushes are yielding measurable results – and he doesn’t give two shits about the fluff – and more people are noticing. Your party prioritizes fluff over everything. That’s the issue in a nutshell."
Meme - Klara @klara_sjo: ""What if the ship of Theseus was sentient" is not a question I was prepared to grapple with today."
"Thomas didn't enjoy his time at the Works. "It's nice to feel mended again," he said afterwards,"but they took so many of my old parts away and put new ones in, that I'm not sure whether I'm really me or another engine.""
@snugglesquiggle on Tumblr - "in an interesting case of linguistic convergent evolution, the english words scale, scale, and scale are all false cognates of each other
scale as in „to climb“ comes from the latin scala, for ladder.
scale as in the measuring device comes from the old norse skal, for a drinking vessel sometimes used as a weighing device
scale as in the dermal plating on the skin of some fish and reptiles comes from the old french escale, for shell or husk."
"Three languages enter, one language leaves. "
Andre Pagliarini on X - "a first: in rejecting an article I submitted to a journal, reviewer 2 noted I failed to engage the work of one Andre Pagliarini"
Tom Nichols on X - "Years ago I submitted an article to a journal whose reviewer objected to a quote in the paper, saying that the language in the quote was inappropriate for a journal of such prestige. The quote came from an earlier edition of the same journal (which was noted in the footnote)"
Ben Landau-Taylor on X - "If you invented the concept of the zoo today, you'd obviously have cows. At the time they didn't include farm animals because everyone saw farm animals all the time. Today we don't. But, we inherited the idea of which animals are Zoo Animals. Everything works like this."
Middle aged man, where do you buy your clothes? : r/AskUK - "RJR John Rocha was my go to for shirts. He's a fat man and his shirts were always well cut for the egg shaped gentleman. I used to buy them in Debenhams so it's now a case of working out where they're sold. Not terribly expensive and decent quality material. Uniqlo for chinos. My logic was seven shirts and three trousers worn in an ordered 1:3 rotation means you never have the issue of "Oh look, Geoff has his Tuesday outfit on". I got the idea from the cicadas which have a breeding cycle based on prime numbers."
Inside an SS officer’s Auschwitz photo album - "In 2007, Dr Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, was sent an album of old photographs, apparently taken in 1940s Europe. Nothing strange about that: her role at the museum saw her receive donations of wartime memorabilia – letters, diaries, keepsakes, snapshots – almost every day of the year. In this case, though, the donor, an 87-year-old retired US lieutenant colonel, claimed the photos, discovered in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt while he was on US government business back in 1946, had been taken at Auschwitz, the largest and deadliest Nazi concentration camp of all... Strikingly, of all the photographs in Höcker’s album, not one shows an inmate of the camp. “They really are the selfies of an SS officer,” says Amanda Gronich, an American writer who specialises in adapting true stories for stage and screen. “And I don’t mean that glibly. I mean that [taking selfies] was precisely what they were doing.” As artless as holiday snaps, the photos are shocking in their blithe depiction of apparently carefree life going on alongside one of the most notorious killing machines in history. These images and the mysterious story of their discovery form the backbone of Here There Are Blueberries – a Pulitzer-nominated play, conceived and co-written by Gronich with playwright Moisés Kaufman – which has its UK premiere in east London this month. Combining large-scale projections with a script embroidered from real-life testimonies, it is both a provocative piece of immersive theatre and a gripping detective story... “The guards know that the Soviets are coming, yet there is a picture of them going on a hunting trip. And instead of destroying the photographs, which is what he should have done, Höcker carefully pastes them into an album. It’s delusional. It suggests that to some extent, the Nazi command really believed that the Germans were still going to win.” The album overturns several widely held misconceptions about the running of the Nazi death camps, not least the assumption that the staff were all male. In fact, “apple-cheeked young women” were regularly employed as Helferinnen at Auschwitz, a position in which, the play argues, they would have had intimate knowledge of the horrors being perpetrated. “For some of these young women, getting to serve in the Third Reich was a chance to leave home,” says Gronich. “It was an adventure. They were teenagers who got to go off and maybe even find a husband.” Perhaps more significantly, both the photographs and the play are radically unconventional in foregrounding a Nazi’s-eye view of Auschwitz, rather than that of their victims. An early scene in the play reconstructs a conversation between Erbelding and her boss about the ethics of promoting such a view in the context of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, with the latter insisting, “We don’t want to elevate Nazis, to give them any kind of platform,” before agreeing that visitors to the museum should be free to draw their own conclusions... "There is a long history of human beings trying to distance themselves from the Nazis, to declare that the Nazis are monsters. By putting photographs such as this in a play, it forces the audience to walk in the Nazis’ shoes.”... Erbelding remembers seeing pretty patterns on the walls of the secretarial office, presumably stencilled there by the women to “cheer up” their daily environment."
Roman gladiators were ‘quite fat’, says historian - "Roman gladiators were not physically fit but rather were “quite fat”, a historian has said. Gladiators have gained a reputation for having chiselled bodies from the Hollywood actors who portray them, like Russell Crowe and Paul Mescal. But Harry Sidebottom, a historian, has said the real gladiators that fought in ancient Rome had bodies that were very different. They would eat barley and bean stew in order to put on weight in the hope that this would protect their vital organs and enable them to take a sword jab, Sidebottom said... While gladiators were often seen as “sex symbols” in Roman society, they were not “conventionally pretty” and worked hard to build up a “thick layer of subcutaneous fat”. Their bodies were also scarred, deformed, and lop-sided from the amount of training they endured. Sidebottom told History Extra Magazine: “A Roman gladiator was very much not the ripped Hollywood star. They were fed sagina – barley and bean stew. “It was carbohydrate-rich and designed to build up a thick layer of subcutaneous fat, the idea being that the gladiators could take a wound and bleed in an almost cinematic, visual way without the blade reaching any vital organs. “So they were quite fat. They might have looked almost deformed because of the heavy and relentless training. “They actually became attractive almost because of the fact that they were not conventionally pretty.”"
The surprising cause of balance issues in the elderly - "Brief, if alarming, episodes of acute dizziness or vertigo are common enough. An innocent movement – rolling over in bed, getting up in the morning, reaching up to retrieve an object from a shelf – can precipitate an overwhelming spinning sensation, as when getting off a rapidly moving roundabout, accompanied by unsteadiness and nausea. Then, after a minute or so, it subsides until the next time. This is the rather long-windedly named Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV). It is caused by the presence of miniscule calcium crystals in the semicircular canals of the balance mechanism of the inner ear. The (highly effective) remedy is analogous to those frustrating glass box games, where the challenge is to shift small beads from one compartment to another. Back in 1980, Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) specialist Dr John Epley proposed three movements of the head (difficult to explain but well-illustrated online) that would nudge the crystals out of the semicircular canals into their roomier common chamber where they no longer cause trouble. The ingenious Epley manoeuvre (as it is known) is remarkable for being one of the few instances where acute distressing symptoms are readily curable. This is all relatively straightforward, but it turns out the significance of Dr Epley and his manoeuvre is considerably greater (importantly so) than previously appreciated. Dr Hilary Cox of Newcastle University reports that those calcium crystals may also account for a much wider range of balance problems and predisposition to falls (with all their attendant hazards) in the older age group, even in the absence of those classic symptoms of acute positional change induced vertigo...
4,200 [A&E] attendances for hiccups would certainly suggest the need for a greater appreciation of the diverse range of simple remedies. The most familiar – holding one’s breath and counting to 40 – is presumed to splint the diaphragm (stop it moving), countering the spontaneous muscular contractions responsible for the hiccup. If that does not work, several methods of sipping water can be tried... The erstwhile world authority on hiccups, Dr Janet Travell, advised the rather different approach of stimulating the uvula, the fleshy protuberance at the back of the throat. This can be accomplished by, for example, pulling forcefully on the tongue or stroking with a cotton bud. Swallowing dry granulated sugar or sucking on a lemon wedge soaked in Angostura Bitters may be effective for similar impact on the area. Lastly, there is the option of activating the autonomic nervous system that controls the rhythmic contractions of the muscles of the diaphragm. This is most readily accomplished by pressing on the eyeballs or massaging the carotid artery on the side of the neck. In 1988, emergency physician Dr Francis Fesmire reported the impressive benefits of a more intrusive method in a 27-year-old man afflicted with hiccupping up to 30 times a minute for 72 hours. “When pulling on the tongue and eyeball compression proved unsuccessful, slow circumferential rectal massage was attempted. The frequency of the hiccups slowed immediately and ceased soon after.”"
Young men are so confused by modern porn they need lessons in real life sex - "I never set out to sleep with much younger men – like most things in my life, it just happened by accident. But what a happy accident it’s been... I love living in New York. I hope to work until I drop, and I can assure you my libido is far from fading away, thank you. I hugely enjoy sex. While I recognise me boldly saying this may make some people squirm, I’m proud of the fact that I regularly and recreationally sleep with younger men. Much younger men in fact, usually in their 20s... At university I discovered sex for the first time. “This is wonderful,” I thought, and wondered “why are we all so uptight about it”? I could never have predicted how big a role sex would later play in my life and work. I barely dated in my 20s and 30s, being more consumed with climbing the career ladder than any ticking biological clock. In fact, the longest relationship I’ve ever had was merely two and a half years long, and frankly I view that as an aberration. Single life suits me. In my late 30s, I landed my dream job in advertising in New York. I began dating younger men 23 years ago, when I was and running an ad agency. We were invited to pitch for an online dating brand (back when nobody online-dated). We were asked to try the experience for ourselves, and while everyone else created fake profiles, as I was single, I thought: why not do it properly? I was completely honest, put my real age of 42 and, to my astonishment, about 75 per cent of the responses I received were from younger men. I realised I was a fantasy: older, confident, financially independent, not looking to marry or have children. I was very clear that I wanted to have fun. I met lovely men whose paths would never normally cross mine (that remains the biggest benefit of online dating in my opinion). That worked extremely well for me then, and it’s worked ever since. I always ask younger men why they seek out older women. The answer I hear most often is brutally honest: women their own age are deeply insecure – just as I was in my 20s. Insecurity makes everything in a relationship (even in just sex) about reassurance. Older women don’t need that. We know who we are. We’re confident. We’re present. I always tell my younger lovers how “beautiful” they are – deliberately using that word. We don’t tell men they’re beautiful nearly enough. Porn teaches men that sex is entirely centred around their pleasure, but it’s not all about the penis! I tell them their forearms are gorgeous, their shoulders, or their backs. One young man once said to me, shyly, “You make me feel so sexy.” That had never happened to him before... Yes, the sex is fantastic – younger men have stamina and short recovery times, that’s just biology. But more importantly, they aren’t threatened by me. We’re at different life stages, they value my experience, they ask for advice, there’s no power struggle. They also match my energy and optimism. I have far more in common – mentally and emotionally – with younger men, than with many men my age. I do think boys and men are being tarred with a brush that is completely unwarranted. I constantly meet kind, thoughtful, emotionally intelligent boys and men who want exactly what we all want: love, intimacy, and human connection. They’re not monsters. They’re confused. And they are struggling to work out how to connect in a world where porn, shame, silence, and now AI are doing enormous damage. Sexbots are a bigger threat than traditional porn now. The biggest problem isn’t porn alone. I believe it’s the total absence of open, healthy conversations about sex. Because we don’t talk about sex, people feel vulnerable and insecure in bed and too awkward and embarrassed to speak openly about what they do and don’t like. Many young men I’ve slept with had never talked about sex during sex. Never. One young man, despite many previous partners, had no idea communication during the act was even an option. I coached him in real time. He said it changed everything."
