Category Archives: Science

Excellent news!!!

Technology is wonderful, I absolutely love it but one area that requires heavy regulation is the use of facial recognition software and Canadian privacy regulators have come to a damning conclusion against the police & private companies.

A joint investigation by Canadian privacy regulators has concluded that Clearview AI’s controversial facial recognition technology — a tool used by dozens of police services and private companies across the country — represented “the mass identification and surveillance of individuals by a private entity.”

“What Clearview does is mass surveillance and it is illegal,” said Daniel Therrien, Canada’s privacy commissioner.

“It is an affront to individuals’ privacy rights and inflicts broad-based harm on all members of society who find themselves continually in a police lineup. This is completely unacceptable.”

Source: The Star

Sigh it’s a bit late and pandora’s box has been opened, I’m sure Clearview has competitors that do pretty much the same thing and this definitely needs a close watch by regulators. Also shame on the police forces for using such technology, they should obtain a warrant to go through pictures of people and we’re all suppose to be given the presumption of innocence.

LOL I get it may be odd of me to have this stance since I post so much information online already but that’s by my choice, I do think it’s wrong for a company to scrape the internet and put everything together, it probably won’t be used for too nefarious purposes in Canada but in countries that are less free well it gets scary very quickly.

He must be seething…

So Twitter just announced that it suspended President Trump’s account and man he must be furious…  and I don’t feel bad at all that it gives me great joy lol!

Twitter permanently suspended President Trump’s account Friday after determining that his posts pose “the risk of further incitement of violence.”

The platform had previously handed the president a 12-hour suspension for posts made during Wednesday’s violent insurrection at the Capitol building.

“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Source: The Hill

With that said I do worry about the power the tech companies have and if they become the arbiter of what’s true and fake, it’ll just be another tool of the establishment.  Yes it’s the slippery slope argument but any outside candidate that goes against the political norms could have trouble gaining traction online.  Right now it makes me happy but what happens when it’s a candidate that I agree with?

The Great Conjunction of 2020

So Saturn & Jupiter have been in the skies dazzling us all year and will get to it’s closest point since 1623 on Dec 21st!  Unfortunately it looks like the weather will not cooperate that day as it’s scheduled to be raining but I guess we’ll see.  Tonight I decided to try my luck tonight and it worked out pretty well!

They’re not overlapping but it’s quite a feat getting them in the same frame.  A lot of fun, I can’t wait to try it again tomorrow and hopefully the opportunity presents itself again. 🙂

Mars

So last night Mars was at the closest point to Earth at 62.7 million km that it’ll be till 2035 so I decided to try and take a photo.

Haha at least it’s red. 🙂  How I wish I had more range, what would be really nice is to be able to hook my camera up to a telescope.  Throw in a picture of Saturn again for fun, at least I can resolve the rings.

Celestial bodies

A couple of photos from yesterday’s photography session in Niagara with Mario, Eddy & Alan.  From the Niagara parks parking lot, Jupiter & Saturn were visible and here’s my attempts with the Canon EOS R5, Canon EF 100-400 MKII lens & Canon’s 2x extender.

With Jupiter, you can see the planet and it’s 4 largest moons, with Saturn you can actually make out the planet and rings!!!  These two photos were shot handheld and man now I want even longer lenses!!!

2020 what else can there be?

So today the Pentagon confirmed the UFO videos released last year…

The Pentagon has officially released three short videos showing “unidentified aerial phenomena” that had previously been released by a private company.

The videos show what appear to be unidentified flying objects rapidly moving while recorded by infrared cameras. Two of the videos contain service members reacting in awe at how quickly the objects are moving. One voice speculates that it could be a drone.

The Navy previously acknowledged the veracity of the videos in September of last year. They are officially releasing them now, “in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos,” according to Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough.

Source: CNN

I’m more inclined to believe these videos because the people speaking in them are fighter pilots who understand how our technology works.  Does this mean aliens are or were here, I don’t know but man what a year 2020 has been so far.

Crystals!

We purchased a crystal making kit from Dollarama and tonight put it together as a family.

Getting dumber

So it looks like Canadians are getting dumber & like our Southern counterparts more and more people believe that we were created within the last 10k years…

A new poll has found a hefty minority (23 per cent) of Canadians reject the theory of evolution, and instead believe a god created humans within the last 10,000 years.

The survey, conducted by Research Co., found 61 per cent of Canadians believe humans “definitely” or “probably” evolved from less-advanced life forms over millions of years. That’s down five points from a similar Research Co. poll last year.

Seventeen per cent of people said they were unsure.

Source: Global News

Society is going backwards!  God is basically Santa for adults, it’s maddening that this is occurring at a time when we need science and reasoning to help us out of some of humanity’s greatest challenges.

Well that was fun

Last night my computer was having a problem powering up (it’d turn on for 2-3 seconds then turn off), after playing around with the hardware I decided to replace the power supply and that solved my problem but it got me thinking if it’s time to build a new system.  I built this thing I think 7 years ago so granted it’s pretty darn old but to be fair I no longer play video games on it so I don’t really need a power house for what I use it for.

Too bad December is such an expensive month, I’ll reassess in the new year and go from there, assuming that it makes it that long lol.

Absolutely amazing!

Scientists have talked about black holes for a long time and inferred its presence based on movement of visible matter but never before have we seen one, till now.

“We’ve now seen the unseeable,” said Avery Broderick, associate professor at the University of Waterloo’s physics and astronomy department, who was part of the international EHT research team. “Black holes are made real — they’re not just the scribblings on theorists’ chalkboards anymore, but they really are out there in the night.”

The image, which shows an orange ring around a round, black silhouette, is of the black hole at the centre of Messier 87 (M87), a galaxy 50 million light-years from Earth. This black hole is one of the most massive known: it’s six billion times more massive than our sun.

Black holes are so dense and have such strong gravity that anything that crosses their threshold — known as the event horizon — gets pulled into them, never to return. That includes both matter and light, making them black and invisible — and therefore very difficult to see and photograph.

Source: CBC

This is an amazing step and man the world of physics is so damn interesting, I love it!