Relevant section:

The final season of Vi and Jinx’s story will be divided into three acts, with the first debuting on November 9. The second act will be available on November 16, and the third will be available on November 23.

I believe she stated she is not going to make a response until after her tour finishes, to protect her fans.

Edit: Internet says the tour is set to conclude on December 8, 2024, in Vancouver (after the election).

My recollection is that the ruble is restricted (partially/mostly?) from being traded by the Russian government. So, most of the ruble currency exchange is on the black market, which wouldn't be what Google finance shows.

I semi recall reading something a year or so ago about the black market ruble value being half of the publicized value, so maybe what she is referencing is a recent significant drop in the black market ruble value.

I'm pretty sure the 3rd pre-war bridge was taken out (yesterday?). So, all Russia has left is the pontoon bridges (2?) and possibly one was taken out earlier today (1 left?).

To me, it seems Ukraine is trying to trap troops and equipment below the river and get a large personnel surrenders and equipment recovery.

Relevant text:

Ukrainian crews say the fundamental problem is that the Abrams were built for advances aided by air power and artillery, which Ukraine lacks.

Russia, meanwhile, continues to make heavy use of drones in its attacks, which the Abrams struggle to defend against.

Relevant Section on the genetics:

For the study, the researchers took blood from five of the cats, which had been adopted, and conducted a DNA test on four of the felines, which turned up no genetic mutations associated with white fur.

They then performed a whole genome sequencing for two of the cats, and this step turned up a deletion in what's called the KIT gene, which can encode whether white will turn up in a feline's coat (scientists have also connected variations in the KIT gene to piebald patterns in various animals like horses and mice.)

"In summary, comparative data from other species and genotype segregation analysis support the newly discovered KIT region deletion as potentially being a cause of salmiak coat color in cats," the researchers conclude.

Same with golfing, bowling, darts, etc. I think part of the enjoyment of these types of sports/games/competitions is to see how close to perfection you can get.

My understanding is that some of the benefits China would get from invading Taiwan is the control of Taiwan's world-leading semiconductor industry. So making it public knowledge that any invading force (i.e. China) would not be able to take over their production capabilities is a small deterrent.

Relevant section explaining the solution:

Let’s return to Hamlet, but this time your working memory — consisting of a whiteboard — has room for just 100 words. Once the play starts, you write down the first 100 words you hear, again skipping any repeats. When the space is full, press pause and flip a coin for each word. Heads, and the word stays on the list; tails, and you delete it. After this preliminary round, you’ll have about 50 distinct words left.

Now you move forward with what the team calls Round 1. Keep going through Hamlet, adding new words as you go. If you come to a word that’s already on your list, flip a coin again. If it’s tails, delete the word; heads, and the word stays on the list. Proceed in this fashion until you have 100 words on the whiteboard. Then randomly delete about half again, based on the outcome of 100 coin tosses. That concludes Round 1.

Next, move to Round 2. Continue as in Round 1, only now we’ll make it harder to keep a word. When you come to a repeated word, flip the coin again. Tails, and you delete it, as before. But if it comes up heads, you’ll flip the coin a second time. Only keep the word if you get a second heads. Once you fill up the board, the round ends with another purge of about half the words, based on 100 coin tosses.

In the third round, you’ll need three heads in a row to keep a word. In the fourth round you’ll need four heads in a row. And so on.

Eventually, in the kth round, you’ll reach the end of Hamlet. The point of the exercise has been to ensure that every word, by virtue of the random selections you’ve made, has the same probability of being there: 1/2^k. If, for instance, you have 61 words on your list at the conclusion of Hamlet, and the process took six rounds, you can divide 61 by the probability, 1/2^6, to estimate the number of distinct words — which comes out to 3,904 in this case. (It’s easy to see how this procedure works: Suppose you start with 100 coins and flip each one individually, keeping only those that come up heads. You’ll end up with close to 50 coins, and if someone divides that number by the probability, ½, they can guess that there were about 100 coins originally.)

Chakraborty, Variyam and Meel mathematically proved that the accuracy of this technique scales with the size of the memory. Hamlet has exactly 3,967 unique words. (They counted.) In experiments using a memory of 100 words, the average estimate after five runs was 3,955 words. With a memory of 1,000 words, the average improved to 3,964. “Of course,” Variyam said, “if the [memory] is so big that it fits all the words, then we can get 100% accuracy.”

A bit disappointing, was hoping for a bigger milestone but this is still a positive.

Relevant Text:

California has set a benchmark for renewable energy, with wind, solar, and hydro providing 100% of the state's energy demand for 25 out of the last 32 days (and counting).

Added context is that it isn't for the full day, only needs to be part of the day (ex. 15 minutes), where renewables provided all of the electricity needs for the state.

Besides the additional Norway airplanes, this was new information to me:

The primary bottleneck to the Ukrainian Air Force’s fielding F-16s in quantity is not limited numbers of airframes but how many combat pilots and ground crew Kyiv can spare from the actual war, to train on transition to the F-16, Cavoli said.

According to Ukrainian mil-bloggers, the first six F-16s with pilots and ground crew will reach Ukraine in June or July. Earlier deadlines had predicted the arrival in April or May.

Mods, perhaps a weekly post like this would be beneficial? Lowering the bar to entry with some available support and helping to keep converts.