Carlsen strikes back, evens the score

World chess champion Magnus Carlsen won game 10 of his match against challenger Sergey Karjakin, evening the score at 5-5 following a marathon game that lasted 75 moves and over six hours. It looks like the toll of the tournament is wearing down the players since they each made mistakes.

Karjakin had the option of creating a draw via perpetual check at the 20th move and since he was in the lead in the 12-match series observers expected him to go for it. But he said after the game that he did not see it.

Today is a rest day.

Oh, that’s just great

We already knew that people had the ability to convincingly alter photographs and video to get almost any effect they wanted. The software has become so easy to use that almost anyone who wants to can do so. Now Marcus Ranum links to an amazing video showing new audio technology that enables people to easily do the same thing to audio, so that using just a small sample of someone’s voice, it can make it look as if that person is saying something that they never did.

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When hysteria leads to injustice

The US periodically goes through phases of hysteria over this or that phenomenon and the public very often falls prey to the temptation to rush to judgment to combat what is falsely perceived as an epidemic of a particular type of crime. We saw this with the large number of pedophilia charges made against day care providers a couple of decades ago and the possible associated Satanic practices.
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Desperately trying to see the glass as half full

Many people like me who strongly opposed Donald Trump are desperately looking for silver linings that his presidency will not be the disaster for the US and the world that his campaign rhetoric suggested it would be. Those hopes seem increasingly desperate since Trump’s election has created major openings for a lot of people and groups who have all manner of regressive agendas, even while Trump himself has, as usual, been saying all manner of contradictory things, causing people to wonder what his agenda is and if he has even got a coherent one.
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When correlation can be used to infer causation

It is not uncommon to find correlations in the behavior of two or more phenomena and such correlations are sometimes used to imply causation. One of the most common objections posed to such arguments is that ‘correlation does not imply causation’, and is one of the first things that people learn about statistics. Even if they have not studied the subject, many people know enough to able to bring up this objection. But people may be sometimes too quick to pull that trigger.
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Murder by drone

There is a new book The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program by Jeremy Scahill and the investigative team at The Intercept and it has been very favorably reviewed by Scott Shackleford who says it describes a program that is far worse than president Obama and its supporters let on because the brutal facts are strongly suppressed. In order to reduce the risk of American casualties, the risks to civilians has been increased because, of course, the lives of foreigners, especially dirt poor ones in some distant land, are worth so much less than our own precious lives.
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