If you want to view your data in different ways, this tutorial shows you how to use basic categories in Numbers on your Mac.

The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

Leading Off

● IN-AG: Indiana Republicans announced the results of their mail-in nominating convention on Friday, and former Rep. Todd Rokita defeated scandal-plagued incumbent Curtis Hill 52-48 in the contest for state attorney general. (Both parties in the Hoosier State select nominees for attorney general at conventions rather than in party primaries.)

Rokita will be the favorite in November against the Democratic nominee, former Evansville Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel, in this reliably Republican state. Still, Weinzapfel, who had $729,000 on-hand at the end of June, will have the resources to run a serious campaign. The Democratic Attorney General Association has also reserved $600,000 here in fall TV time to aid Weinzapfel.

If you enjoy this work, and if you can afford to do so, please consider helping me keep it sustainable in this no good, very bad year and beyond, by joining Sparky’s List!

The Week Ahead

Monday  Roger Stone supplements the tattoo of Richard Nixon's face on his back with one of Donald Trump's ass on his lips.

Experts agree that, of all the 182 consecutive Infrastructure Weeks declared by the White House, this is one of them.

Continued...

UPDATE: It's done. Here's the press release:

pic.twitter.com/wFvTxdUP9s

— Washington Redskins (@Redskins) July 13, 2020

Via the Washington Post, a change no one expected in Dan Snyder's lifetime:

The Washington Redskins plan to announce Monday morning that they will change their team name, three people with knowledge of the situation confirmed Sunday night. The team is not expected to reveal a new name until a later date.

Monday’s anticipated announcement comes after the organization released a statement July 3 saying it would be undertaking what it called a “thorough review” of the team’s name; multiple people familiar with the process have said that it would result in the name being changed. In an interview July 4, Coach Ron Rivera — who is working with owner Daniel Snyder to choose a name — said he hoped the new name would be in place by the start of the 2020 season. Others have said it will be revealed as soon as within two weeks.

read more

JAMA has published a short (and open access) research letter from a group of Italian physicians late last week.  The authors followed up on patients who had been hospitalized with COVID after they had been discharged and describe the ongoing symptoms.

This is the meat of the story:

Patients were assessed a mean of 60.3 (SD, 13.6) days after onset of the first COVID-19 symptom; at the time of the evaluation, only 18 (12.6%) were completely free of any COVID-19–related symptom, while 32% had 1 or 2 symptoms and 55% had 3 or more. None of the patients had fever or any signs or symptoms of acute illness. Worsened quality of life was observed among 44.1% of patients.

This population is a sick population. It was sick enough to require hospitalization with a significant number of individuals receiving assistance to breathe while in the hospital.

Two months after symptom onset, seven out of eight people were reporting at least a symptom from COVID.

One of the greatest known unknowns about COVID is what are the long term effects of the disease? How long will people need additional care? Does that incremental extra care vary in predictable ways and is it stratified by age or other demographic characteristics? Will there be long term COVID related mortality and morbidity effects?

We still don’t know as there is absolutely no way to gain a multi-year persepctive on a disease that we have been aware of for just over seven months now. This is one of the great challenges to actuaries who are trying to price 2021 insurance premiums. They are shooting into the dark on very little evidence and a lot of anecdotes and good guesses based on observation and analogy. But we just don’t know.

The post The biggest known unknown about pricing COVID for 2021 appeared first on Balloon Juice.

navindra (Slashdot reader #7,571) is a professional coder and an amateur musician. He writes: Music and technology have always been intertwined and this has never been truer with computer technology. I set out on a simple quest to find a better metronome, settled for a digital sample sequencer, but ended up fascinated by the Organelle music computer running Pure Data on a Raspberry Pi and Linux. "The entire system runs open source software and may be customized at every level," explains its web page. From navindra's article: [T]he Organelle is hard to define, but it is nothing less than a music computer, almost demanding that one ascend from mere musician to virtual instrument designer. Organelle patches are readily available for beat-making purposes, including sample sequencer or drum machine functions, multi-dimensional sequencers, and, yes, even a straight up metronome. Beyond the factory patches, the user community contribute their own creations... Pure Data code initially looks like low-level symbolic code — fortunately, it is easy to make something musical in short order, if one has a handle on sound synthesis and MIDI concepts. The Organelle runs Linux on a Raspberry Pi with everything that entails — it has a boot up time of 12 seconds, yields a 6 hour battery life on 4 AA batteries (roughly proportional to the volca power draw), and things like swapping samples is trivially done with a file manager, eliminating the need for special software. Similarly, adding or modifying patches is just as easy — modifying the existing Metronome patch with a new sound could be as easy as dropping in a new .wav file. Needless to say, the Organelle is constantly evolving and improving...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new jailbreak tweak called FastAppLS lets users add app shortcuts directly to the Lock Screen with a unique wheel-shaped interface.

Via the Hill, Rep. Ayanna Presley spoke for many of us when she clapped back at the impenetrable word salad dished up by Betsy DeVos, the incompetent secretary of education, as she danced around questions about her department's plans to reopen schools:

(D-Mass.) swiped at Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Sunday after the Trump administration official doubled down on her push for students to return to school.

In a tweet knocking DeVos on Sunday afternoon, the first-term lawmaker directly called her out, writing, “@BetsyDeVosED you have no plan. Teachers, kids and parents are fearing for their lives.”

“You point to a private sector that has put profits over people and claimed the lives of thousands of essential workers. I wouldn’t trust you to care for a house plant let alone my child,” she continued.

.@BetsyDeVosED you have no plan. Teachers, kids and parents are fearing for their lives. You point to a private sector that has put profits over people and claimed the lives of thousands of essential workers. I wouldn’t trust you to care for a house plant let alone my child. https://t.co/Qs0Z7gCnMo

read more

It's frustrating when you accidentally force-quit the Now Playing app from your App Switcher, and this tweak can help prevent you from doing that.

Listen to our archived episodes: RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash

Hey, welcome back! It’s Monday, and… well, whatever.

Roger Stone may or may not have had his sentence commuted by the guy he got sentenced to prison for lying for. But as always, nobody has seen the paperwork for it. So, you know, maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t. We’ll see!

Greg Dworkin is due to drop by for his Monday kick-off. He’s considerably more reliable than Trump, so that’ll probably happen. Good thing, too. Because the global pandemic is still a thing, and there are still some people who believe that sharing accurate information about it is a good idea.

I love it when we get all old timey!

Listen right here at 9:00 AM ET! Even more ways to listen, live or by podcast, below the fold.

Comet captured on camera streaking across night sky over Stonehenge ??https://t.co/m4oaqVw9Ha

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) July 12, 2020

It's hard to believe this has to be said, but unlike this president, I'll actually listen to the experts and heed their advice. Not silence them. https://t.co/AkLFevCI6b

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 12, 2020

Joe Biden is pledging to define his presidency with a sweeping economic agenda beyond anything Americans have seen since the Great Depression and the industrial mobilization for World War II. Biden also said his plan would address racism and inequalities. https://t.co/RzfYw6swhW

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 11, 2020

Trump’s drop in polls has confident Democrats sensing "a tsunami coming" in November https://t.co/MavUhtsjwX

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 13, 2020

Ignore the polls.

We’ve got work to do: https://t.co/GCxsKwFY4h https://t.co/fnJezEaAg5

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 12, 2020

Or…

larry that is our coronavirus graph https://t.co/AaRY42tPgq

— kilgore trout, suburban female understander (@KT_So_It_Goes) July 12, 2020

Seen some smart people speculate that Trump may have concluded he won’t win, so he’ll do whatever TF he wants even more than usual. Take it a step further: Trump may have been told Putin thinks he can’t win so Putin won’t do much to try to help Trump

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) July 13, 2020

It’s possible Putin is that bad at understanding US politics.

His KGB evaluation was that he was good at tactics but not at strategy.

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) July 13, 2020

The post Monday Morning Open Thread: Choose Your Champion appeared first on Balloon Juice.

WaPo:

Florida shatters single-day infection record with 15,300 new cases

The staggering number was the result of both increased testing and widespread community transmission that has affected the state’s population centers as well as its rural areas. It shattered previous highs of 11,694 reported by California last week and 11,571 reported by New York on April 15.

“With Florida largely open for business, I don’t expect this surge to slow,” wrote Natalie E. Dean, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida.

Managing a novel pandemic is hard.

You can be forgiven for making mistakes.

You won't be forgiven for not trying.

Only in Trump's America would three unserious buffoons try and force the Federal Drug Administration to grant another emergency authorization for an unproven and debunked anti-malaria drug for the coronavirus and actually get presidential approval to do so.

Sycophantic Peter Navarro, who was chosen by Jared Kushner from one Amazon book to be a trade advisor to the White House attacked Dr. Fauci's expertise in virology by describing himself as a "Social Scientist" instead of an economist.

Kushner simply went on Amazon, where he was struck by the title of one book, Death by China, co-authored by Peter Navarro. He cold-called Navarro, a well-known trade-deficit hawk, who agreed to join the team as an economic adviser.

Once again, he's trying to pressure the agency that's suppose to protect the health and welfare of the country

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Jenna Ellis, an attorney and spokesperson for Donald Trump, suggested that Roger Stone had received a "medical commutation" from the president because he was at risk for COVID-19.

While interviewing Ellis on Sunday, Fox News host Gillian Turner asked Ellis if Trump gave "serious thought" to his decision to commute Stone's sentence.

"Obviously, I'm not going to get into the internal deliberations," Ellis insisted. "But I think the timing does speak for itself, where this was just days before Roger Stone was supposed to report to federal prison."

"This was a political target that was designed to target President Trump's allies," she continued. "That was just absolutely absurd."

Ellis went on to argue, "The president is the last full guardian of genuine justice and Roger Stone absolutely deserved the justice."

Turner interrupted: "The question though was, was there an internal deliberation or was this a decision President Trump made on his own?"

Ellis refused to answer the question directly, citing attorney-client privilege. She then blasted former special counsel Robert Mueller as "irresponsible" for opposing the commutation.

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The Selling Puerto Rico Edition

Schadenfreude: A smarty-pants from Sri Lanka notes that a U.S. passport is not much use anymore.

Strangely Blogged on the Stone commutation & the Trump admin.'s competence.

Schadenfreude II: Trump's political agony to worsen every day, figures Martin Longman. Good.

Allan Coberly thinks the future has been buried.

Cartoon Bonus: Testing, testing, from Brains and Eggs.

Aggregated by M. Bouffant, of Web of Evil (& Ennui). Suggestions, tips, &c. may be sent to mbru@crooksandliars.com.

Tennessee is spiking really badly right now. An anti-mask governor and legislature have given the state 59,546 COVID cases-- including 1,955 new cases on Friday, 1,460 new cases on Saturday-- and a rapidly rising 8,933 cases per million Tennesseans. The governor, Bill Lee is a clueless Trump fanatic, still refuses to mandate masks and the Tennessee General Assembly... well, the state Senate has 5 Democrats and 28 Republicans and the state House has 26 Dems and 73 Republicans-- obviously a full-fledged chapter of the Trump Death Cult.

They're not worried about the pandemic overwhelming Tennessee hospitals; they're worried about maintaining a memorial to savage mass murderer and KKK first Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest in the state capitol where they can all admire it everyday and be infused with its Fort Pillow Massacre inspiration.

[embed eid="41266" /]

A friend of mine in the legislature tells me they're also plotting the next state gerrymander. With a very good chance that conservative Blue Dog (and proto-Republican) Jim Cooper is going to be defeated by Keeda Haynes, the Fort Pillow Massacre fans intend to eliminate TN-05 (basically the strongly blue city of Nashville and its suburbs) by dividing it up among several Republican districts, exactly what Tom DeLay did to Austin.

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The world's fastest computer is now part of "a vast supercomputer-powered search for new findings pertaining to the novel coronavirus' spread" and "how to effectively treat and mitigate it," according to an emerging tech journalist at Nextgov. It's part of a consortium currently facilitating over 65 active research projects, for which "Dozens of national and international members are volunteering free compute time...providing at least 485 petaflops of capacity and steadily growing, to more rapidly generate new solutions against COVID-19." "What started as a simple concept has grown to span three continents with over 40 supercomputer providers," Dario Gil, director of IBM Research and consortium co-chair, told Nextgov last week. "In the face of a global pandemic like COVID-19, hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime event, the speed at which researchers can drive discovery is a critical factor in the search for a cure and it is essential that we combine forces...." [I]ts resources have been used to sort through billions of molecules to identify promising compounds that can be manufactured quickly and tested for potency to target the novel coronavirus, produce large data sets to study variations in patient responses, perform airflow simulations on a new device that will allow doctors to use one ventilator to support multiple patients — and more. The complex systems are powering calculations, simulations and results in a matter of days that several scientists have noted would take a matter of months on traditional computers. The Undersecretary for Science at America's Energy Department said "What's really interesting about this from an organizational point of view is that it's basically a volunteer organization." The article identifies some of the notable participants: IBM was part of the joint launch with America's Office of Science and Technology Policy and its Energy Department.The chief of NASA's Advanced Supercomputing says they're "making the full reserve portion of NASA supercomputing resources available to researchers working on the COVID-19 response, along with providing our expertise and support to port and run their applications on NASA systems."Amazon Web Services "saw a clear opportunity to bring the benefits of cloud... to bear in the race for treatments and a vaccine," according to a company executive.Japan's Fugaku — "which surpassed leading U.S. machines on the Top 500 list of global supercomputers in late June" — also joined the consortium in June. Other consortium members: Google CloudMicrosoftMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyRensselaer Polytechnic InstituteThe National Science FoundationArgonne, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Sandia National laboratories.National Center for Atmospheric Research's Wyoming Supercomputing CenterAMDNVIDIADell Technologies. ("The company is now donating cycles from the Zenith supercomputer and other resources.")

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"One of the main reasons we're not all driving electric vehicles is the price," argues a transportation writer in Forbes — explaining how Tesla hopes to finally change that: The company is placing a huge bet on rechargeable battery technology that doesn't use cobalt. This is one of the main elements making lithium ion batteries so expensive. It's also fraught with political issues, since the mining can be in conflict areas like the Congo, and its production is considered quite polluting of the environment. But cobalt is used because it enables the energy density required in batteries intended to last for hundreds of miles per charge. A couple of months ago, it was revealed that Tesla was working with CATL on lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, and these could be the real gamechanger. LFP batteries don't use cobalt and have a roadmap to push well past the magical $100 per kWh (wholesale) that is considered the threshold for EVs being cheaper than Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles... Tesla has also recently patented technology for cathodes that significantly improves the number of charge cycles... The new Tesla technology, patented by the company's battery team led by Jeff Dahn, can increase charge cycles to nearly 4,000, which would be more like 75 years if charged once a week — hence the talk of million-mile batteries. More recently, the Tesla team headed by Jeff Dahn patented some new technology for lithium metal/anode free batteries, which could drastically improve energy density and thereby considerably reduce costs. These technologies, if they become commercially viable, could revolutionize battery durability and price, and there's another technology called all-polymer batteries on the horizon that is being developed by a former Nissan senior researcher, which he claims could cut 90% off the current price. But these are improvements for the future that may not happen, and cobalt-free lithium iron phosphate batteries are here now. Tesla will be using LFP for the batteries in its Chinese Model 3, after receiving government approval to do so. It is estimated that using LFP batteries will allow a 15-20% reduction in manufacturing cost. Taking calculations regarding how much of a car's cost is batteries into account, this could make EVs a mere 10% more expensive than ICE instead of 30%, which will be easy to regain in cheaper running costs over a year or two of ownership. It will also give EVs an even greater lead over fuel-cell technology, making it even less likely that hydrogen will be the future of electric cars. The time is fast approaching when EVs are not just more ecological and cheaper to run than ICE cars, but cheaper to buy too, and batteries free of cobalt are a key step in that direction. That's why Tesla's shift to LFP is so significant — it could be the final nail in the coffin for fossil fuel vehicles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A sheriff comes under fire when two S.B.I. agents question his involvement in an unsolved murder case that shares distinct similarities with a recent homicide.

Best Short Film Beaufort International Film Festival 2020
Featured Weekly Pick Film Shortage
Official Selection Cucalorus Film Festival 2019

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10701072/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Website: https://www.bennettpellington.com/

Want higher quality? Watch on Vimeo.

©Go DW Productions
In Association with Lighthouse Films

Credits:
Written, Produced and Directed by: Bennett Pellington
Executive Producer: Bobby Siegworth
Director of Photography: Eli Wallace-Johansson
Production Designer: Tripp Allen
Edited by: Jesse Andrus and Bennett Pellington

Starring:
Henry Bazemore, Jr. - SHERIFF JEFFERIES
Anthony Reynolds - AGENT WYTHE
Myke Holmes - AGENT HOLDEN
Eli Walker - YOUNG OFFICER JEFFERIES
Julie Ivey - ROSEANNE BARNES
Fidias Reyes - VIVICA

Shot on the Alexa EV in 2014 and the Alexa Mini in 2017. Lensed with Arri Ultra Primes, Cooke S4 and Hollywood Black Magic filtration for the night exteriors.

#ShortFilm #Horror #Thriller #Drama