Articles from THE BLOT REPORT
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When you thought it couldn’t get more stupid, it is
In 2009, NASA launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a satellite designed to take precise measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to help guide the response to climate change. Unfortunately, the satellite did not make it into its planned orbit. So, in 2014, NASA launched the replacement OCO-2, which has been collecting a huge number of high-resolution measurements, which provides greater spatial distribution of carbon dioxide over the entire planet.
Spam
I have been posting stuff on the Blotreport for over eight years now, and I receive an enormous amount of spam, sometimes up to 60 a day, which my wonderful spam filter invariably catches. When I started back in early 2017, a fair proportion of the spam was porn, both gay and straight. That eventually faded away and was replaced, strangely, by several other themes, including a spate of “buy a house in Bali” spam.
Denisovans and others
Just over a year ago, I wrote a piece about the 2012 discovery of a group of early hominins, the Denisovans, from a cave in Siberia. All that was initially found was a finger bone, from which was extracted some DNA, which showed the owner as not belonging to the Neanderthals. This finger bone belonged to the first group of archaic humans to be revealed solely by their DNA and associated proteins, rather than the morphology of their fossilised bones.
Whose terrorists?
There has been a spate of vandalism and arson of synagogues, cars, a child-care centre, and sundry other sites in the last year or so. Politicians have labelled these attacks as antisemitic and at least some of them may be politically motivated, while the motivation of others is not so clear.
Facebook alternatives
As anyone who reads my stuff knows, I have been kicked off Facebook permanently, and while initially confused as to why it happened, I came to the conclusion that it was because of my posts about the genocide under way in Gaza and the running of the community standards system by zionists1. At the time, I said I’d look around for alternatives.
Murder by stupidity
The first attempt to isolate a pancreatic extract by means of which the levels of blood glucose could be normalised in dogs was described by a Romanian researcher called Nicolae Paulescu1, but his experiments were interrupted by the First World War and were never acknowledged appropriately. However, after the war, in 1921, a young surgeon named Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best, from the University of Toronto, worked out how to remove insulin from a dog’s pancreas.
Do they think we are stupid?
The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II is an American single-seat, single-engine, supersonic stealth strike fighter. It is a multirole combat aircraft designed for both air superiority and strike missions, it also has electronic warfare and intelligence gathering capability1.