Gravel Road
How Does This End? – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Even in the better case where both sides take their fingers off the triggers, the nuclear taboo has been broken, and we are in an entirely new era: two nuclear superpowers have used their nuclear weapons in a war. The proliferation consequences alone would be far-reaching, as other countries accelerate their nuclear weapons programs. The very fact that the nuclear
How liberty-infringing facial recognition threatens you every day — RT World News
On February 15, Amnesty International published a report exposing how the New York Police Department has constructed a vast metropolis-spanning surveillance network heavily reliant on highly controversial facial recognition technology (FRT), which serves to “reinforce discriminatory policing against minority communities.”
Once a science fiction staple, the Orwellian technology is quickly becoming normalized, wholeheartedly embraced by police forces up and down the nation. FRT allows police to compare CCTV imagery and other sources with traditional photographic records, as well as databases of billions of headshots, some of which are crudely pulled from individuals’ social media profiles without their knowledge or consent. The NYPD is a particularly enthusiastic user – or, perhaps, abuser – of FRT, with 25,500 cameras spanning the city today.
There is also a clear racial component to FRT deployment in New York – Amnesty found that in areas where the proportion of non-white residents is higher, so too is the concentration of FRT-equipped CCTV cameras. As such, the organization argues it has supplanted traditional ‘stop-and-frisk’ operations by law enforcement.
Hottest Summer of Albany, 1959
The summer of 1959 was the hottest summer ever in the history of Albany. There were 996 cooling degree days during the summer of 1959, compared to the normal of 550 cooling degree days. Cooling degrees are the number of degrees an air conditioning must lower the air temperature in a month to make the indoors a comfortable 65 degrees.
May 1959 – 150
May Normal – 15
June 1959 – 293
June Normal – 97
July 1959 – 293
July Normal – 219
August 1959 – 281
August Normal – 183
September 1959 – 171
September Normal – 33
October 1959 – 12
October Normal – 3
If you aren’t convinced that Albany was hot during the summer 1959, consider the fact that the average high for September 1959 was 82 degrees in Albany. That’s ten degrees above the September average of 72 degrees most years.
North Lake
White Birch Pond
