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Sunday’s date is a rare palindrome that hasn’t happened in over 900 years

While various forms of palindrome dates are fairly common, 02/02/2020 has the unique distinction of reading the same backward and forward when written out in eight digits in multiple date systems, according to University of Portland professor Aziz Inan.

“We are so lucky to have such a special palindrome date occurring in our lifetime because it’s so rare,” Inan told USA TODAY Saturday.

For starters, it’s an eight-digit palindrome: 02022020. Many palindrome dates are only symmetrical if you write the date with seven digits (1-10-2011) — or in some cases even fewer (9-10-19).

But even more rare, according to Inan, is that Sunday’s date is an international palindrome: It works whether you write the date as “Month/Day/Year” or “Day/Month/Year,” as many countries do.

Inan calls such dates “ubiquitous palindromes,” and there won’t be another one for 101 years. After that, you’ll have to wait until March 3, 3030.

According to Inan’s calculations, the last such palindrome date to occur was 11/11/1111 – more than 900 years ago.

For years, Inan has been crunching numbers using a basic calculator and a pad of paper to find unique patterns  in dates.

“I advocate for these things because they’re so valuable for STEM education,” he said.

It’s an accessible kind of puzzle that he has used to engage students and get people talking about math.

And Inan sees puzzle everywhere – dates that form square roots (3/3/9), dates that make sequential numbers (11/12/13) and even his own name (if you write it in all caps, switch the vowels in “AZIZ” and rotate the Z’s to make N’s – “AZIZ” becomes “INAN”).

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Sunday’s date is a rare palindrome that hasn’t happened in over 900 years

U.S. joins other nations in grounding 737 MAX jets after second crash

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States on Wednesday joined Europe, China and other countries in grounding Boeing Co’s 737 MAX jets, because of safety concerns after an Ethiopian Airlines plane crash that killed 157 people, the second disaster involving the 737 in less than five months.

The world’s biggest planemaker is facing its most serious crisis in years, as the decades-old 737 program, one of its most reliable sources of cash and profits, takes a severe blow to its prestige.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) cited new satellite data and evidence from the scene of Sunday’s crash near Addis Ababa for its decision to ground the planes.

It was the second time the FAA has halted flights of a Boeing plane in six years. It had grounded the 787 Dreamliner in 2013 because of problems with smoking batteries.

Shares of the Seattle-based company ended up 0.5 percent at $377.14, recovering from a more than 3 percent fall in the afternoon when the FAA announcement was made.

Tim Ghriskey, chief investment strategist at Inverness Counsel in New York, said the grounding gives Boeing time to address any problems and not face another potential disaster.

U.S. airlines that operate the 737 MAX, Southwest Airlines Co, American Airlines Group Inc and United Airlines, said they were working to re-book passengers.

Southwest is the world’s largest operator of the 737 MAX 8 with 34 jets, while American flies 24 MAX 8s and United 14 MAX 9s.

Shares of Southwest fell 0.4 percent.

“The agency made this decision as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analyzed today,” the FAA said in a statement, shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump announced the planes would be grounded.

“This evidence, together with newly refined satellite data available to FAA this morning, led

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/us-grounds-737-max-jets-boeing-shares-fall-again/ar-BBUI8SG?ocid=spartandhp

This Is Why You Aren’t Allowed to Use an In-Flight Bathroom Until Takeoff

If your plane is getting ready to take off when that water you downed earlier finally catches up with you, don’t even think about heading to the bathroom. Even if the plane is barely filled, the airline has a very good reason to keep you in your seat.

About 13 percent of fatal plane accidents and onboard deaths happen during takeoff and the initial climb, according to Boeing data from 2007 through 2016. To prevent injury, federal regulations require airlines to light up seatbelt signs before the plane starts to move. And lest you think that’s just the airline’s problem, another law requires passengers to sit down with their seatbelt fastened when the ‘Fasten Seat Belt’ light is on. The plane crew wants you to be safe, and starting to taxi while passengers are out of their seats—including on the toilet, which obviously doesn’t have a seatbelt—could pose a safety threat. In the interest of everyone on the flight’s well-being, here are 18 more things you should never do on a plane.

The law doesn’t require pilots to stop a plane if a passenger stands up during taxiing, but it does encourage it. Federal Aviation Administration rules cite one pilot whose airline pilot certificate was suspended for a week after he taxied to the runway while passengers were in the aisle. There are times when it would be safer to keep moving than to stop taxiing, the FAA clarifies, but it highlights that ‘historically most airlines ensured passengers were seated during movement on the surface.’ If you insist on going, there’s a good chance the plane will stop moving, putting the whole flight off schedule if it loses its place in line. That’s not something your flight crew will appreciate. Don’t miss these other 28 things your pilot wishes you knew.

Next time, try to leave time for a bathroom break before getting on a plane. Better yet, plan your toilet stop around the best time to use the bathroom on a plane. [Source: Southern Living]

First all-Black female flight crew commemorates ten years

ATLANTA, Ga. (CBS46)- On February 12, 2009, First Officer Stephanie Grant had not been scheduled to fly the Delta Connection flight from Atlanta to Nashville.  She was on call that day when she learned the original first officer for the flight became sick.

“Our scheduling department gave me a call and told me what gate to show up at, and that all the passengers were already boarded and the other flight members were already there,” Grant said.

When Grant stepped in the cockpit alongside pilot Rochelle Jones, she and flight attendants Diana Galloway and Robin Rogers quickly realized something was unique.

“It was not until we actually closed up the doors and Robin and I looked at each other like, it’s all female,” said retired flight attendant Diana Galloway. “We are used to flying with all women, but when we saw that we were ‘sistas’ you know. We were joking like this is the sister, the soul sister flight,” Galloway added.

Galloway says it wasn’t until they landed in Nashville that it began to set in how special the trip was. 

“We realized wow, this is was amazing. This was something special,” Galloway told CBS46 reporter Hayley Mason.

The women cleared the plane and took pictures together. That day, the four women became the first all-African-American female flight crew to fly a commercial plane in the United States. It’s a flight that would not have happened if not for a sick call.

“I believe that it was just God’s divine intervention at that time to place us together on that particular day in the month of February,” Galloway said.

Monday afternoon, the women received proclamations from the City of Atlanta commemorating ten years since that history-making flight. The women say neither of them have flown with an all-Black, all-female flight crew since that day.

She believes their flight has helped inspire other crews to create those firsts for their respective airlines.

“We’ve created some awareness because there’s less than 150 women that fly commercially and in the military in this country,” Grant told CBS46.

Grant who graduated Hampton University with a degree in psychology, grew up around an air field. “The bug hit me as a child, I just didn’t know how to navigate from point a to point b,” she said.

At a family reunion, she met an older cousin, Herman Samuels, who inspired her to pursue flight school. Grant says Samuels was a member of the first all-black male flight crew.

“He took out the time to say ‘hey, it doesn’t matter what you’ve been doing or how old you are, if this is a dream of yours, you can obtain it.’” Grant said.

She says she served in the military and subsequently used the GI Bill to help pay for flight school.

The woman who met as a fluke are now close friends who talk often and meet up for lunch each year.

“I’ve fallen in love with each one of these women, each one of their personalities individually,” said flight attendant Robin Rogers. “I love them like my sisters,” she added.

The women also work to inspire other young women toward careers in aviation. 

“There are some glass ceilings that are still needing to be broken,” Grant said. “We are excited about the work that we are doing. We are out and we are encouraging and mentoring other young girls of color that they too can become a pilot because we need more.”

The crew is hosting a 10th anniversary scholarship gala on February 16th at The Gathering Spot to benefit women of color who are in flight school.

For more information, visit:  https://www.sistersoftheskies.org/event

Want to live for ever? Flush out your zombie cells

As time passes, the number of damaged, ‘senescent’ cells in our bodies increases. These in turn are responsible for many effects of ageing. Now scientists are working to eliminate them

In a lab just south of San Francisco I am looking at two blown-up images of microscope slides on a computer screen, side by side. The slides are the same cross-sections of mouse knees from a six-month-old and an 18-month-old animal. The older mouse’s image has a splattering of little yellow dots, the younger barely any. That staining indicates the presence of so-called senescent cells – “zombie cells” that are damaged and that, as a defence against cancer, have ceased to divide but are also resistant to dying. They are known to accumulate with age, as the immune system can no longer clear them, and as a result of exposure to cell-damaging agents such as radiation and chemotherapy. And they have been identified as a cause of ageing in mice, at least partially responsible for most age-related diseases. Seeing the slides, it makes me worried about my own knees. “Tell us about it,” says Pedro Beltran who heads the biology team at Unity Biotechnology, a 90 person-strong company trying to halt, slow or reverse age-associated diseases in humans by killing senescent cells. “We think about it all the time… Wait until you see your brain.”

Developing therapies to kill senescent cells is a burgeoning part of the wider quest to defeat ageing and keep people healthier longer. Unity, which was founded in 2011, has received more than $385m in funding to date including investment from big tech names such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. It went public this May and is valued at more than $700m. Its first drug entered early clinical trials in June, aimed at treating osteoarthritis.

Other startups with zombie cells in their sights include Seattle-based Oisín Biotechnologies which was founded in 2016 and has raised around $4m; Senolytic Therapeutics whose scientific development is based in Spain and which was established last September (it won’t disclose its financing other than to say it has a first round, which will allow it to reach clinical trials); and Cleara Biotech, formed this June backed by $3m in funding and based in the Netherlands. In addition, Scottish company CellAge, also founded in 2016, has raised about $100,000 to date, partly through a crowdfunding campaign.

 

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Yahoo & AOL Are Reading Your Emails To Get Advertising Data

If you have a Yahoo or AOL email account, beware — those companies are reading your emails to gain data for potential advertisers.

According to the Wall Street Journal the parent company of both email providers Oath, which is a subsidiary of Verizon, has been working on a service for advertisers that would give them data from over 200 million emails accounts. The data collected would help advertisers determine which people are best to target based on the product being sold.

If you think Facebook is bad, Verizon under its stealth brand of “Oath” just rolled out a new privacy policies on a Friday hoping you wouldn’t notice. This says Verizon’s subsidiary Oath can scan your email to help advertisers micro-target you. Greed. Pay attention to the public. https://t.co/clhMg9kOTt

— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) April 13, 2018

So far, only Yahoo Inbox data has been used to test the service, which if used correctly, could help advertisers save a significant amount of money by not wasting time on users who will never buy the product. Although only Yahoo emails have been tested, Oath’s pitch to potential advertisers who would use the service includes AOL emails.

What does this email scan mean for people currently using AOL and Yahoo email accounts? Sadly, nothing. In this day in age, almost all email accounts are used for advertising information. Google has been doing it since 2004 with Gmail users accounts. Even Yahoo has been doing it long before Verizon bought the company. Think about how you purchase something online with your email address and the next thing you know, an advertisement for the same company or product shows up on your social media account.

“The U.S. tech industry has largely declared it is off limits to scan emails for information to sell to advertisers. Yahoo still sees the practice as a potential gold mine.” https://t.co/V2cmvnJG1T

— BBB Western Michigan (@BBBwmi) August 28, 2018

However, as privacy concerns become a hot topic the fact these companies are scanning emails for advertising data is becoming more of an issue. Google revealed last year the company has stopped scanning emails for advertising data, but it has not stopped scanning for improvement as well as product personalization.

The fact of the matter is these large email companies are not going to stop scanning our emails until law requires it. In all honesty, it is free service we as customers don’t pay for, so we can’t be all that surprised when our information is used for advertising purposes. Now, if it becomes something more serious such as leaked credit card information, social security number listed or any other personal data, then that is a serious problem.

Report: AOL, Yahoo scan user emails, sell data to advertisers. @SimonettiLauren has the story. https://t.co/BLmIHUfsWk pic.twitter.com/FxUvYYiWFw

— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) August 29, 2018

Yahoo and AOL emails are being used for advertising data, but it should not be surprising to anyone who has had an email account in the past 20 years. It is not right, but it is the nature of living in a technologically advanced world. What do you think?

SOURCE

Google Plus Will Be Shut Down After User Information Was Exposed

Google said on Monday that it would shut down Google Plus, the company’s long-struggling answer to Facebook’s giant social network, after it discovered a security vulnerability that exposed the private data of up to 500,000 users.

Google did not tell its users about the security issue when it was found in March because it didn’t appear that anyone had gained access to user information, and the company’s “Privacy & Data Protection Office” decided it was not legally required to report it, the search giant said in a blog post.

The decision to stay quiet, which raised eyebrows in the cybersecurity community, comes against the backdrop of relatively new rules in California and Europe that govern when a company must disclose a security episode.

Up to 438 applications made by other companies may have had access to the vulnerability through coding links called application programming interfaces. Those outside developers could have seen user names, email addresses, occupation, gender and age. They did not have access to phone numbers, messages, Google Plus posts or data from other Google accounts, the company said.

Google said it had found no evidence that outside developers were aware of the security flaw and no indication that any user profiles were touched. The flaw was fixed in an update made in March.

Google looked at the “type of data involved, whether we could accurately identify the users to inform, whether there was any evidence of misuse, and whether there were any actions a developer or user could take in response. None of these thresholds were met in this instance,” Ben Smith, a Google vice president for engineering, wrote in the blog post.

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The Internet’s keepers? “Some call us hoarders—I like to say we’re archivists”

AUSTIN, Texas—As much as subscription services want you to believe it, not everything can be found on Amazon or Netflix. Want to read Brett Kavanaugh buddy Mark Judge’s old book, for instance (or their now infamous yearbook even)? Curious to watch a bunch of vintage smoking ads? How about perusing the largest collection of Tibetan Buddhist literature in the world? There’s one place to turn today, and it’s not Google or any pirate sites you may or may not frequent.

“I’ve got government video of how to wash your hands or prep for nuclear war,” says Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. “We could easily make a list of .ppt files in all the websites from .mil, the Military Industrial PowerPoint Complex.”

Graham recently talked with several small groups of attendees at the 2018 Online News Association conference, and Ars was lucky enough to be part of one. He later made a full presentation to the conference, which is now available in audio form. And the immediate takeaway is that the scale of the Internet Archive today may be as hard to fathom as the scale of the Internet itself.

The longtime non-profit’s physical space remains easy to comprehend, at least, so Graham starts there. The main operation now runs out of an old church (pews still intact) in San Francisco, with the Internet Archive today employing nearly 200 staffers. The archive also maintains a nearby warehouse for storing physical media—not just books, but things like vinyl records, too. That’s where Graham jokes the main unit of measurement is “shipping container.” The archive gets that much material every two weeks.

The company currently stands as the second-largest scanner of books in the world, next to Google. Graham put the current total above four million. The archive even has a wishlist for its next 1.5 million scans, including anything cited on Wikipedia. Yes, the Wayback Machine is in the process of making sure you’re not finding 404s during any Wiki rabbithole (Graham recently told the BBC that Wayback bots have restored nearly six million pages lost to link rot as part of that effort). Today, books published prior to 1923 are free to download through the Internet Archive, and a lot of the stuff from afterwards can be borrowed as a digital copy.

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A philosopher explains how our addiction to stories keeps us from understanding history

“I myself am a victim to narrative,” says Alex Rosenberg, a Duke University philosophy professor whose new book hopes to convince readers that narratives — and especially narrative history — are flawed as tools of knowledge.

Rosenberg is a philosopher of science and a writer of historical fiction. How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories, out this week from MIT Press, does not deny that stories can be wonderful as art and effective at eliciting emotions that then push action. But, Rosenberg tells The Verge, stories also lull us into a false sense of knowledge and fundamentally limit our understanding of the world.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

You’re a professor of philosophy with appointments in biology and political science, and you’re also a novelist, but you’re not a neuroscientist or a historian. So how did you come to write this book?

I’ve always been besotted by history, but it’s not part of my academic credentials in any way. I am a philosopher of science, and, at one point, I went back to graduate school to study molecular biology, anatomy and physiology, and evolutionary biology. These are fields that have the tools and data and theories that have burgeoned over the last 30 years and which have begun to be able to finally shed light on the brain and human cognitive capacities and abilities. My interests have been carried along by developments of sciences that have been increasingly employed in areas like neuroscience to address some very traditional questions that philosophers have been interested in.

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Elon Musk resigns as Tesla chairman to settle SEC fraud case

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Saturday that it reached a proposed settlement of securities fraud charges against Tesla Chairman Elon Musk that would force him to resign his position from the board and levy $40 million in penalties.

Tesla’s stock has been in a free fall since Musk teased, via Twitter, that he was taking the company private—statements the government said were false and damaging to shareholders. Musk, who will remain CEO, has insisted he had a gentleman’s agreement with the Saudis that fell through.

“As a result of the settlement, Elon Musk will no longer be Chairman of Tesla, Tesla’s board will adopt important reforms—including an obligation to oversee Musk’s communications with investors—and both will pay financial penalties,” said Steven Peikin, co-director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division, in a statement. “The resolution is intended to prevent further market disruption and harm to Tesla’s shareholders.”

From the SEC statement:

    • Musk will step down as Tesla’s Chairman and be replaced by an independent Chairman. Musk will be ineligible to be re-elected Chairman for three years;
    • Tesla will appoint a total of two new independent directors to its board;
    • Tesla will establish a new committee of independent directors and put in place additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk’s communications;
    • Musk and Tesla will each pay a separate $20 million penalty. The $40 million in penalties will be distributed to harmed investors under a court-approved process.

“The total package of remedies and relief announced today are specifically designed to address the misconduct at issue by strengthening Tesla’s corporate governance and oversight in order to protect investors,” said Stephanie Avakian, co-director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division.

The settlement is subject to court approval, which is expected.

Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/90244366/elon-musk-resigns-as-tesla-chairman-to-settle-sec-fraud-case