#also the cameras were made to look like smoke detectors and it appears that he replaced every smoke detector in the house with cameras

[vicsuragi]

okay i finally watched an episode from the correct season of ordinary lies and i am so fucking confused that was such a 90 degree turn they took in the last 10 minutes.

[gaysonlyocean]

return to escape from mandelatech/mandelatech lockdown me and hannahs weird improv point and click escape room roleplay bit, hannah has:

immediately told dave hes her best friend and tried to do heart hands thign with him unsuccessfully

found a like 2023 gaming laptop in the middle of the computer aisle alongside all the 2009 era computers

sniffed the gaming laptop

smoked a imaginary cigarette

said "if i was dave.... what would i do with my keys"

said "i dont think the key would be in toilet, also i dont wanna see N right now"

found a fake credit card in daves office made out of steel

tried to guess daves password

gotten into prolonged eyecontact with N via security cameras

said "IS THERE A SAFE IN HERE???" and when i said no she said "ok yeah i dont think robbing my best friend would have him still be my best friend"

turned the tv in the storage room around so six cant look at her struggling to solve this

tried to make a offering for sixs help with the three pennies by taping them to the screen

pressed her face really close to the screen and just stared

started just turning the lights in the storage room on and off again

said "HEY UGLY- wait no he wont talk to me if i say that HEY SIR QUESTION MARK I NEED HLELP"

said ".....maybe if i start crying"

ate the bad old taffy and made a disgusted face

finally figured out what to do with the card and went "HOOIUGH" out loud

just started stimming

yelled "YIPPEE!! YOU! DO YOU KNOW WHERE KEY IS? TO DO? I NEED TO LEAVE?" at six

said "DID SIX FUCKING JOIN MY PARTY???? ARE YOU A METAL DETECTOR???"

said "i walk out, small man in tow, i beeline over to the bathroom, i slam open the door"

just started sticking her hand in the toilets as N and six watched on in horror

offered N the half eaten taffy, he did not want it

said "... i will light the blunt for you if you join my party" to N

taken the blunt from N, took a fat rip and blew the smoke in N's face to see if that makes him join the party

had a coughing fit

told six to tell N that she's "friendly and trustworthy"

gotten a job at mandelatech

is now just wearing a gross wet lanyard she got out of the toilet

licked floor edibles

started unplugging sinks

turned to everyone else and said outloud "i SWEAR ive played video games before"

had a violent and visceral reaction to me saying wall was sticky and wet

said "that would make sense in this hellhole of a city"

bribed N with the floor edibles

considered sticking the pennies to the wall

sniffed the sticky wall

used the power of friendship to lift a shelf out of the way aka made dave, six and N help her lift it

found a secret evelin

said "girlie what the fuck" to evelin and left her alone

said "IGNORE THEM, LOOK AT ME IN MY EYES" when evelin was very concerned about the two fuckign alternates in the group

tried to bribe evelin with the three pennies unsuccessful

refused to look through daves email

gave up and looked through daves email

said "the cop.... is he in on this?"

made fun of thatchers emails to dave

started highfiving everyone when she made progress

aged like 50 years when the sticky wall mysteriously disappeared

started asking the group who has the highest pain tolerance

forgot that dave would not have a smartphone

realised if this was realistic she would be 7

started sprinting with the gaming laptop to give it to evelin to recruit her to the team

became hysterical at jonny appearing for two seconds

somehow got thatchers lighter out of the wall hole

started yelling into the wall holes

said "his emails might have been a clue but i wasnt paying attention cause all of them were sad and boring"

said "arson might be the answer"

started interrogating everyone

gotten mad at point and click logic

grabbed daves shoulder and shook him

started interrogating six again

tore out a vhs tape with her teeth

grabbed six and shoved him back into a tv

made a high pitched noise in response to the lights going off

started going all lord of the flies

walked into like 7 different shelves

escaped mandelatech and just kinda put everyone in evelins car, this includes N

[stanskzseungmin]

Operation Miroh | Stray Kids Mafia! AU ~ Chapter 8

Sorry this one took a while. I was trying a different more disjointed writing style to try and create the imagery for this chapter. Took a while because I trashed and redid this chapter like 4 times lmao. Hope you enjoy it <3

~Masterlist~

Chapters:  0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9

1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7

The atmosphere was tense.

The heavy stench of death lingered.

There were so little activity yet it felt as if the dead were back with a vengeance.

~

Heavy panting can be heard as a pair of hands grab at the screen before them.

~

The pristine beach is now a mass grave.

The beautiful clean sand that almost seemed to glow and glisten breathtakingly under the hot sun on a clear yet cloudy day.

~

Somewhere else in the meantime.

It was dark and silent. There were barely any lights. The only lights presents were blinking and on the verge of dying.

The air that once permeated with mutual content and comfort that a family shared, was now tense as a chill traveled up all of the building’s inhabitants' spines. There was no loud yelling. No laughter. No pitter pattering of feet. Just a dark and silent home where ten lived in harmony. 

But of the ten, two were not present: one on the verge of death.

~

The sea sparkled a brilliant blue hue, The dark color perfectly complemented the clear blue sky.

~

The silence was distrubed by a loud metal clattering. There were loud exhales and gasps of disbelief. The medic/engineer collided with the metal cart of supplies behind him as his hands frantically grabbed at the cool metal to maintain balance. His eyes were blown out in shock as panic and fear wracked through his system as it got harder and harder to breathe.

~

The clean beachside front is now polluted and littered with rubble and residue, The tan grains of sand now dyed and stained a brilliant red. The pristine clean and clear water is now filled with lifeless corpses, the bodies floating and swaying with the waves as their faces remained frozen in a silent scream and dead eyes. 

An explosion can be heard in the distance. A demolitionist was in full sprint towards the so called “Paradise.” As he ran, he was pursued, but the pursuers were quickly disposed of by the demolitionist dropping homemade pocket C4 like breadcrumbs.

~

The medic/engineers stared at the third screen down on the left column in horror. The once vibrant green screen signifying excellent health now glowed a menacing red. A sharp contrast to the eight greens surrounding and a singular almost as worrisome orange. 

The red screen.

리노

The heartbeat monitor displayed with a brilliant flashing red orange light has a singular word displaying on the lower left corner of the screen. 

DANGER

With haste, the medic/engineer barrelled out the room and down the hallway. The name of his leader erupted from his throat repeatedly as the inhabitants of the rooms past sprung out of the rooms appearing in the doorways ready, alert and worried. 

~

The demolitionist stood before two unconscious bodies. A pool of blood surrounded the pair as his shoes stepped into the darkening pool staining the dirt beneath him. 

He delicately pried the smaller body off the toxin specialist and very carefully slung both bodies over either shoulders.

||

“Seungmin! Put me down!” You exclaimed lightly hitting his back lightly with your balled fists. 

The chemistry student merely smirked at your immature antics.

The two of you weren’t friends per se, but you wouldn’t go as far as to call the both of you enemies. You were a bit of a goody two shoes and always go out of your way to report all suspicious activity on the campus. You had caught Seungmin picking on Jisung again and went up to the chemist to write him up. As per usual, Seungmin wasn’t having it. He never would.

And here you are now, pathetically slung over his shoulder as he carried you away. You knew where he was taking you. He took you there every time.

Seungmin pulled open the door of one of the more deserted janitor’s closet. It was so out of the way that it’s hardly any janitor’s first choice and it most definitely have a lack of nearby students. Hardly any students passed by here due to the shady and creepy atmosphere.

Even though the walled in city was safe, the paranoia of the dangers outside still lingered. The deserted hallways felt as if it had a distorted reality. There was no present danger but any who walked by without the proper constitution would get so wracked by paranoia where the imagined dangers seemed real. 

In the dark dusty room with a singular hanging bulb, Seungmin would toss you onto the ground. Your bottom met the floor ungracefully as Seungmin closed the door behind him quite harshly. The impact sent vibrations through the walls that would unsettle the dust as vision would slightly get hindered by the particles. You let out a small whine from the stinging pain radiating from the impact. Before you can protest or chide him, Seungmin would kneel before you and pull you into a bone crushing embrace and nuzzled his face into the crook of your neck.

Your arms protest, grabbing and pushing at him and sometimes digging your nails into his shoulders in a dire attempt to make him let you go. Seungmin would let out a small puppy whine and pouted. You felt your defenses weaken at the sound and wanted nothing more but to let him in. Before you even had a chance to raise your arms to return the embrace, Seungmin would pull away with a shit-eating smirk as he brought his index finger to his lips ordering your silence. 

Seungmin was already out and gone with the door shut as he left before you could properly register what just happened, your mind still puddy from your lowered defenses. 

A soft click echoed through the silence.

Every time.

Seungmin got you every time.

And everytime you still lowered your defenses to let him in.

Only for him to leave you alone like a deer in headlights.

~

You swore Seungmin only existed to make your life a living hell. You always thought it was a waste of talent for a practically math genius Seungmin to pick on people. You knew blackmail when you see it.

Doesn’t mean you had immunity towards it. Not towards Seungmin at least.

You noticed how Seungmin and two others hanging around one of the campus’ empty buildings. You recognized the two being top students in their respective subjects.

They were definitely doing shady stuff.

Today however, looks as if it was only Seungmin that’s present. You never saw the other two from your not so discreet hiding spot under the shade of a tree with your nose pressed into a book. 

You rushed to follow Seungmin into the building once you see him disappear behind the closing door. 

You didn’t take that long to enter after the boy. You made it in before the door closed completely, but it seemed as if Seungmin vanished into midair.

Sighing to yourself, you began walking down the dimly lit hallway and peeked into every passing door’s window pane. You noticed how the hallways cameras were all facing down, the led next to the lens were off.

Why were the cameras off?

You also noticed the smoke detectors were also disabled. 

Your thoughts were cut off when you heard a loud explosion ripped through the silence. Your ears rang lightly as it seemed as if the world was moving.

“Seungmin?” You breathed out. Panic bubbled deep within your chest. “Seungmin? SEUNGMIN!”

“Wow, you can’t leave me alone, huh?”

You whipped around to see Seungmin himself in the flesh perfectly fine and uninjured just his attire and visage covered in dark soot. You let out a loud sigh of relief as you ran up to him wrapping your arms around his frame in a bone crushing embrace.

“Alright, dummy,” Seungmin chuckled patting your back lightly. “Did you really have that little faith in me that you genuinely thought I was hurt?”

Seungmin rubbed your back in circles as his other hand rested gently on your waist. You mumbled softly into his shoulders. “Absolutely not. Not at all. You’re totally bonkers, insane. You’re going to scale this building and I’m going to have to write you up. Or worse, writing an autopsy report.”

“Thank you,” Seungmin whispered into your ear resting his chin on your shoulder.

“I wasn’t serious.”

“I was.”

You pulled back slightly in confusion to see a genuine smile on his face with his eyes show a loving and touched emotion. You felt your lips twitch upwards upon sight of him looking so vulnera-

“Now stop stalking me, dummy creeper.”

You would most definitely hear a pin drop from the silence that followed.

You fell for it again.

~

“Wow [by 3RACHA], you actually came,” you perked up from the bench you were sitting on.

“Of course I did, dummy,” Seungmin smiled, putting his hands into his black hoodie pocket.

“No fucking with Felix?” you jested with a smirk playing on your lips.

“Do you not realize who I am?” Seungmin scoffed. “Let’s just say Felix won’t be leaving detention without being griefed.”

“You customized an exit denial device didn’t you?”

“Ooooh yea,” Seungmin chuckled. 

“It’s not an ice bucket above the door is it?”

“Lame.”

“Oh dear,” you hand went up to your cheek in worry for the freckled Australian.

“So how am I going to get up there?” Seungmin pointed to the roof, his eyes never leaving yours wearing a face of disbelief.

“Uhh… parkour?”

Seungmin quirked an eyebrow.

“Sorry, I didn’t think that far ahead...” you looked off to the side rubbing the back of your neck nervously.

“You give me a boost and launched me up there?”

“Bad idea.”

“I stand on your shoulder and you stand up?” Seungmin suggested slinging his arm around your shoulders while pointing upwards with his index finger.

“Even worse,” you shrugged off his arm.

“So what do you suggest?” 

“Just get on my back, I’ll carry you up.”

“Your noodle arms can carry me?”

. . .

~

“I hate this place,” Seungmin mumbled. His arms were loosely wrapped around your shoulders with his legs finding purchase hooked onto your waist, his chest flush against your back. 

You let out a loud exhale as you gripped on the window sill. You looked back to see Seungmin gazing longingly at the wall. That damned wall.

“What do you want to do?” You whispered as you continued your climb.

“I want to destroy the wall.”

Your hand reached over the edge of the roof one after another as you pulled the both of you up.

“You do know what is out there, right?” you settled down on the cold roof, bringing your knees to your chest,

“Yea,” Seungmin sat next to you pulling you into his lap as you both gaze at the wall. At your vantage point, you can see beyond the tall concrete walls lined with barbed wire at the top. 

“The walls protect us from dangers outside. So many mafias and gangs. So much corruption. That doesn't include all the murders and kidnappings.”

“But what if the true dangers aren’t what is out there? But in here? Those mafias exist for a reason. What if they’re rebelling against something from inside? The people here are hardly people anymore. They’re sheeple that can be herded by the shepherd called the government.”

“I don’t want to become like them,” you whispered. “What if the schools existed only to turn us all into sheeple, brainwashing us into the same system. Schools only exist to condition people to work 8 hours a day. I don’t  want to be like them. I don’t want to lose my humanity.”

“You won’t. I promise,” Seungmin whispered into your hair. “You see past the wall, right?”

“It’s dark and empty.”

“I know. Dark, so we won’t be attracted to the government’s light like moths only to discover it’s a flame and empty, so we could be free without any restrictions.”

“Wait, we?” you whispered, shock evident in your voice and you broke free from his embrace to face him.

“Of course, dummy,” Seungmin smiled genuinely. “I promise.”

Seungmin thought to himself right then and there, ‘I’ll get you out of here, I promise.’

“This better not be one of your stupid blackmails again, Shit-min.”

. . .

[s-c-i-guy]

Neutron-Star Collision Shakes Space-Time and Lights Up the Sky

A neutron star collision led to a rumble of gravitational waves and a worldwide race to spot the resulting kilonova. The dozens of studies coming out of the effort will “go down in the history of astronomy.”

On Aug. 17, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected something new. Some 130 million light-years away, two super-dense neutron stars, each as small as a city but heavier than the sun, had crashed into each other, producing a colossal convulsion called a kilonova and sending a telltale ripple through space-time to Earth.

When LIGO picked up the signal, the astronomer Edo Berger was in his office at Harvard University suffering through a committee meeting. Berger leads an effort to search for the afterglow of collisions detected by LIGO. But when his office phone rang, he ignored it. Shortly afterward, his cellphone rang. He glanced at the display to discover a flurry of missed text messages:

Edo, check your email!

Pick up your phone!

“I kicked everybo­dy out that very moment and jumped into action,” Berger said. “I had not expected this.”

LIGO’s pair of ultrasensitive detectors in Louisiana and Washington state made history two years ago by recording the gravitational waves coming from the collision of two black holes — a discovery that earned the experiment’s architects the Nobel Prize in Physics this month. Three more signals from black hole collisions followed the initial discovery.

Yet black holes don’t give off light, so making any observations of these faraway cataclysms beyond the gravitational waves themselves was unlikely. Colliding neutron stars, on the other hand, produce fireworks. Astronomers had never seen such a show before, but now LIGO was telling them where to look, which sent teams of researchers like Berger’s scurrying to capture the immediate aftermath of the collision across the full range of electromagnetic signals. In total, more than 70 telescopes swiveled toward the same location in the sky.

They struck the motherlode. In the days after Aug. 17, astronomers made successful observations of the colliding neutron stars with optical, radio, X-ray, gamma-ray, infrared and ultraviolet telescopes. The enormous collaborative effort, detailed today in dozens of papers appearing simultaneously in Physical Review Letters, Nature, Science, Astrophysical Journal Letters and other journals, has not only allowed astrophysicists to piece together a coherent account of the event, but also to answer longstanding questions in astrophysics.

“In one fell swoop, gravitational wave measurements” have opened “a window onto nuclear astrophysics, neutron star demographics and physics and precise astronomical distances,” said Scott Hughes, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “I can’t describe in family-friendly words how exciting that is.”

Today, Berger said, “will go down in the history of astronomy.”

X Marks the Spot

When Berger got the calls, emails, and the automated official LIGO alert with the probable coordinates of what appeared to be a neutron-star merger, he knew that he and his team had to act quickly to see its aftermath using optical telescopes.

The timing was fortuitous. Virgo, a new gravitational-wave observatory similar to LIGO’s two detectors, had just come online in Europe. The three gravitational-wave detectors together were able to triangulate the signal. Had the neutron-star merger occurred a month or two earlier, before Virgo started taking data, the “error box,” or area in the sky that the signal could have come from, would have been so large that follow-up observers would have had little chance of finding anything.

The LIGO and Virgo scientists had another stroke of luck. Gravitational waves produced by merging neutron stars are fainter than those from black holes and harder to detect. According to Thomas Dent, an astrophysicist at the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover, Germany, and a member of LIGO, the experiment can only sense neutron-star mergers that occur within 300 million light-years. This event was far closer — at a comfortable distance for both LIGO and the full range of electromagnetic telescopes to observe it.

But at the time, Berger and his colleagues didn’t know any of that. They had an agonizing wait until sunset in Chile, when they could use an instrument called the Dark Energy Camera mounted on the Victor M. Blanco telescope there. The camera is great when you don’t know precisely where you’re looking, astronomers said, because it can quickly scan a very large area of the sky. Berger also secured use of the Very Large Array (VLA) in central New Mexico, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile and the space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory. (Other teams that received the LIGO alert asked to use VLA and ALMA as well.)

A few hours later, data from the Dark Energy Camera started coming in. It took Berger’s team 45 minutes to spot a new bright light source. The light appeared to come from a galaxy called NGC 4993 in the constellation Hydra that had been pointed out in the LIGO alert, and at approximately the distance where LIGO had suggested they look.

“That got us really excited, and I still have the email from a colleague saying ‘Holy [smokes], look at that bright source near this galaxy!’” Berger said. “All of us were kind of shocked,” since “we didn’t think we would succeed right away.” The team had expected a long slog, maybe having to wade through multiple searches after LIGO detections for a couple of years until eventually spotting something. “But this just stood out,” he said, “like when an X marks the spot.”

Meanwhile, at least five other teams discovered the new bright light source independently, and hundreds of researchers made various follow-up observations. David Coulter, an astronomer at University of California, Santa Cruz, and colleagues used the Swope telescope in Chile to pinpoint the event’s exact location, while Las Cumbres Observatory astronomers did so with the help of a robotic network of 20 telescopes around the globe.

For Berger and the rest of the Dark Energy Camera follow-up team, it was time to call in the Hubble Space Telescope. Securing time on the veteran instrument usually takes weeks, if not months. But for extraordinary circumstances, there’s a way to jump ahead in line, by using “director’s discretionary time.” Matt Nicholl, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, submitted a proposal on behalf of the team to take ultraviolet measurements with Hubble — possibly the shortest proposal ever written. “It was two paragraphs long — that’s all we could do in the middle of the night,” Berger said. “It just said that we’ve found the first counterpart of a binary neutron star merger, and we need to get UV spectra. And it got approved.”

As the data trickled in from the various instruments, the collected data set was becoming more and more astounding. In total, the original LIGO/Virgo discovery and the various follow-up observations by scientists have yielded dozens of papers, each describing astrophysical processes that occurred during and after the merger.

Mystery Bursts

Neutron stars are compact neutron-packed cores left over when massive stars die in supernova explosions. A teaspoon of neutron star would weigh as much as one billion tons. Their internal structure is not completely understood. Neither is their occasional aggregation into close-knit binary pairs of stars that orbit each other. The astronomers Joe Taylor and Russell Hulse found the first such pair in 1974, a discovery that earned them the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics. They concluded that those two neutron stars were destined to crash into each other in about 300 million years. The two stars newly discovered by LIGO took far longer to do so.

The analysis by Berger and his team suggests that the newly discovered pair was born 11 billion years ago, when two massive stars went supernova a few million years apart. Between these two explosions, something brought the stars closer together, and they went on circling each other for most of the history of the universe. The findings are “in excellent agreement with the models of binary-neutron-star formation,” Berger said.

The merger also solved another mystery that has vexed astrophysicists for the past five decades.

On July 2, 1967, two United States satellites, Vela 3 and 4, spotted a flash of gamma radiation. Researchers first suspected a secret nuclear test conducted by the Soviet Union. They soon realized this flash was something else: the first example of what is now known as a gamma ray burst (GRB), an event lasting anywhere from milliseconds to hours that “emits some of the most intense and violent radiation of any astrophysical object,” Dent said. The origin of GRBs has been an enigma, although some people have suggested that so-called “short” gamma-ray bursts (lasting less than two seconds) could be the result of neutron-star mergers. There was no way to directly check until now.

In yet another nod of good fortune, it so happened that on Aug. 17, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope and the International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (Integral) were pointing in the direction of the constellation Hydra. Just as LIGO and Virgo detected gravitational waves, the gamma-ray space telescopes picked up a weak GRB, and, like LIGO and Virgo, issued an alert.

A neutron star merger should trigger a very strong gamma-ray burst, with most of the energy released in a fairly narrow beam called a jet. The researchers believe that the GRB signal hitting Earth was weak only because the jet was pointing at an angle away from us. Proof arrived about two weeks later, when observatories detected the X-ray and radio emissions that accompany a GRB. “This provides smoking-gun proof that normal short gamma-ray bursts are produced by neutron-star mergers,” Berger said. “It’s really the first direct compelling connection between these two phenomena.”

Hughes said that the observations were the first in which “we have definitively associated any short gamma-ray burst with a progenitor.” The findings indicate that at least some GRBs come from colliding neutron stars, though it’s too soon to say whether they all do.

Striking Gold

Optical and infrared data captured after the neutron-star merger also help clarify the formation of the heaviest elements in the universe, like uranium, platinum and gold, in what’s called r-process nucleosynthesis. Scientists long believed that these rare, heavy elements, like most other elements, are made during high-energy events such as supernovas. A competing theory that has gained prominence in recent years argues that neutron-star mergers could forge the majority of these elements. According to that thinking, the crash of neutron stars ejects matter in what’s called a kilonova. “Once released from the neutron stars’ gravitational field,” the matter “would transmute into a cloud full of the heavy elements we see on rocky planets like Earth,” Dent explained.

Optical telescopes picked up the radioactive glow of these heavy elements — strong evidence, scientists say, that neutron-star collisions produce much of the universe’s supply of heavy elements like gold.

“With this merger,” Berger said, “we can see all the expected signatures of the formation of these elements, so we are solving this big open question in astrophysics of how these elements form. We had hints of this before, but here we have a really nearby object with exquisite data, and there is no ambiguity.” According to Daniel Holz, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, “back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that this single collision produced an amount of gold greater than the weight of the Earth.”

The scientists also inferred a sequence of events that may have followed the neutron-star collision, providing insight into the stars’ internal structure. Experts knew that the collision outcome “depends very much on how large the stars are and how ‘soft’ or ‘springy’ — in other words, how much they resist being deformed by super-strong gravitational forces,” Dent said. If the stars are extra soft, they may immediately be swallowed up inside a newly formed black hole, but this would not leave any matter outside to produce a gamma-ray burst. “At the other end of the scale, he said, “the two neutron stars would merge and form an unstable, rapidly spinning super-massive neutron star, which could produce a gamma-ray burst after a holdup of tens or hundreds of seconds.”

The most plausible case may lie somewhere in the middle: The two neutron stars may have merged into a doughnut-shaped unstable neutron star that launched a jet of super-energetic hot matter before finally collapsing as a black hole, Dent said.

Future observations of neutron-star mergers will settle these questions. And as the signals roll in, experts say the mergers will also serve as a precision tool for cosmologists. Comparing the gravitational-wave signal with the redshift, or stretching, of the electromagnetic signals offers a new way of measuring the so-called Hubble constant, which gives the age and expansion rate of the universe. Already, with this one merger, researchers were able to make an initial measurement of the Hubble constant “in a remarkably fundamental way, without requiring the multitude of assumptions” that go into estimating the constant by other methods, said Matthew Bailes, a member of the LIGO collaboration and a professor at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. Holz described the neutron star merger as a “standard siren” (in a nod to the term “standard candles” used for supernovas) and said that initial calculations suggest the universe is expanding at a rate of 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec, which puts LIGO’s Hubble constant “smack in the middle of [previous] estimates.”

To improve the measurement, scientists will have to spot many more neutron-star mergers. Given that LIGO and Virgo are still being fine-tuned to increase their sensitivity, Berger is optimistic. “It is clear that the rate of occurrence is somewhat higher than expected,” he said. “By 2020 I expect at least one to two of these every month. It will be tremendously exciting.”

[liliannorman]

Student scientists want to help all of us survive a warmer world

This has been a year full of the unexpected. COVID-19 has forced people indoors, closed schools and killed more than 220,000 Americans. Besides the pandemic, there have been hurricanes, wildfires, protests and more. Behind some of these upheavals, though, is an unfolding event that shows no sign of stopping: climate change.

Climate change is contributing to many of the disasters that have been changing lives around the world. Here we meet students who have been using science to help people better understand and deal with the effects of our changing climate.

Their research helped place them among 30 finalists at the 10th Broadcom MASTERS. MASTERS stands for Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering for Rising Stars. It’s a research program open to middle-school investigators. Society for Science & the Public (which publishes Science News for Students) created the event. Broadcom Foundation, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., sponsors it.

Some of the kids developed systems to help keep people safe as climate change makes life more unpredictable. Others developed ways to save precious resources, such as water and oil. And one student applied lessons from a study done in a cereal bowl to model melting glaciers.

Fighting fire and flood with science

Like many Californians, Ryan Honary, 12, has personal experience with wildfires. A student at Pegasus School in Huntington, he was with his father at an Arizona tennis tournament when he saw wildfires raging across his home state on TV. “The hills that were burning looked just like the hills behind my house,” Ryan recalls. “I called my mom and asked if she was okay.” Once he knew that she was, he asked his dad why wildfires got out of control so often. “We’re planning to send people to Mars but we can’t detect wildfires,” Ryan says.

That’s when Ryan decided to create a way to detect wildfires early — before they get out of control. He linked together a series of Raspberry Pi computers. Some of these tiny units were fitted to detect smoke, fire and humidity (how much water is in the air). Their sensors relayed data wirelessly to another Raspberry Pi. This slightly bigger computer served as a mini meteorological station. He estimates that each sensor would cost around $20, and the mini stations would cost $60 each.

Ryan Honary shows off his wildfire detectorH. Honary

Ryan brought his entire system to a park and tested it by holding the flame from a lighter in front of each sensor. When these sensed a fire, they informed the detector. It then alerted an app that Ryan built for his phone. While creating that app, Ryan talked with Mohammed Kachuee. He’s a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Kachuee helped Ryan use machine learning to train his app with data from the large 2018 Camp Fire. The app took lessons from how this fire had traveled over time. Using those data, the app “learned” to predict how flames at future events might spread.

Someday, Ryan hopes his sensors might be deployed throughout his state. “Five of the worst fires in California just happened in the last three months,” he notes. “So it’s pretty obvious that global warming and climate change is just making the fire problems worse.”

Stronger hurricanes are another symptom of a warming climate. Heavy rain and storms can produce sudden floods that appear and disappear locally within minutes. One such flash flood provided a memorable experience for Ishan Ahluwalia, 14.

Ishan Ashluwalia had a tire roll on a wet treadmill to create a warning system for when a car might slip. A. Ahluwalia

It was a rainy day in Portland, Ore. “My family was driving on a highway,” recalls the now ninth grader at Jesuit High School in the city. “We were driving at the speed limit.” But a sudden sheet of water on the road made the car swerve. It was hydroplaning. This occurs when water builds up beneath a tire, he explains. With no friction, the tire slips “and the car slips as well.” This can lead to accidents.

Ishan was surprised that there was no system in a car to sense when tires were about to slide. So he went to his garage and put a small tire on a treadmill. He hooked the wheel up to a computer with an accelerometer inside. As the treadmill moved and the wheel rolled, he ran water down the belt to make synthetic rain. The computer then measured the friction between the wheel and the belt as differing amounts of rain fell.

Then, like Ryan, Ishan used machine learning. “In middle school, my science teachers really helped me get the project off the ground,” he says. But the next step was to talk to an engineer who works at nearby Oregon Health and Science University. With that engineer’s guidance, Ishan trained the system he built to associate different types of weather with how much water was on the road. It could then link those water levels with a car’s ability to maneuver.

If installed in a car, Ishan says, this system might offer a notice in green, yellow or red to warn people when they faced a risk of losing control of steering or braking. It also could help people drive more safely as heavy rains and flooding become more common.

Saving water and stopping snails

Just as it’s possible to have way too much rain, it’s also possible to have far too little. Pauline Estrada’s home, in Fresno, Calif., is in one such drought-prone region. The eighth grader at Granite Ridge Intermediate School saw nearby farmers watering their fields. In dry regions like hers, no drop would be wasted. So she sought a way to help growers predict when their plants truly needed water. Right now, Pauline says, farmers measure soil moisture to see if their plants are thirsty. But, she notes, that doesn’t show if the plant itself is suffering.

Pauline Estrada made this rover seen in a farm field. Her so-called Infra-Rover scans plants to determine if they need water. P. Estrada

Luckily, this 13-year-old had a rover lying around. She had built the robot vehicle from a kit. The teen also built an infrared camera. It makes images at light wavelengths the human eye can’t see. Infrared light often is used to map heat. A hotter plant is a drier plant, Pauline explains. When a plant has enough water, she says, “it lets water go through its leaves.” This cools the air on the surface of the leaf. But if the plant is dry, it will hold in water, and the leaf surface will be hotter.

Pauline attached the camera to her rover and drove it around pepper plants that she grew in pots. Sure enough, her roving camera could spot when these plants needed water. Then, with the help of Dave Goorahoo, a plant scientist at Fresno State University, she ran her rover around pepper plants in a farm field.

Her Infra-Rover currently scans only one plant at a time. Pauline hopes to scale up her system to observe many at once. She also plans to work on a system to predict when hot plants will need water — before they get parched. “It’s important to not waste water during climate change,” she says. Water them when they need it, she says, not before.

Explainer: CO2 and other greenhouse gases

Once those crops are grown, they’ll need to be shipped to hungry people the world over. Many will travel on huge cargo ships powered by large amounts of fossil fuels. In fact, cargo ships account for three percent of all carbon dioxide emitted into the air each year.

Those ships would burn less fuel if they encountered less friction at sea, known as drag, reasoned Charlotte Michaluk. The 14-year-old is now a ninth grader at Hopewell Valley Central High School in Pennington, N.J. A scuba diver since sixth grade, Charlotte knew that one source of drag was stuff growing on the hulls of ships. Barnacles, snails and other organisms contribute to this biofouling. Their lumpy bodies increase drag, making ships work harder and burn more fuel.

Charlotte runs water down a ramp to determine how much drag it creates. She hopes that better materials will help ships use fewer climate-warming fuels to sail the seas. C. Michaluk

Charlotte opted to design a new, more slippery coating for a ship’s hull so that fewer creatures would be able to hitch a ride. She tested different materials in the aquatic version of a wind tunnel. Charlotte loves woodworking and crafting. “My family knows where I’ve been in the house based on my trail of crafting materials,” she says. She designed a ramp that she could coat with different materials. Then she measured the force of the water flowing off different metal and plastic coatings to calculate their drag.

One material proved really good at reducing drag. Called PDMS, it’s a type of silicone — a material made of chains of silicon and oxygen atoms. Charlotte also tested some surfaces that had been based on mako shark skins. The sharklike drag-limiting scales, known as denticles, worked well at cutting the ramp’s drag.

But would they also prevent other creatures from latching on? To find out, Charlotte went hunting for small bladder snails in local streams. She put the snails in her water tunnel and observed how well they were able to cling to different surfaces. PDMS and the fake mako skin prevented snails from sticking.

“Biofouling is a really big problem,” she says. Affected ships will consume more fossil fuels. And that, she explains, “contributes to global warming.” She hopes her discoveries might someday help ships slip more easily through the water — and save fuel.

Eyes on ice

It might seem like a kid from Hawaii wouldn’t spend a lot of time thinking about glaciers. But Rylan Colbert, 13, sure does. It started when this eighth grader at Waiakea Intermediate School in Hilo first saw news of an experiment on how dams might collapse. Those tests had studied how piles of rice cereal collapsed in milk.

The cereal was puffed rice. But Rylan was soon thinking about ice. “I think I had shaved ice [a popular treat in Hawaii] the day before and I was thinking about it,” he says. “And that led me to thinking about glaciers” and how their collapse might affect polar regions.

Rylan decided to study if shaved ice would collapse into water as the rice cereal had in the study he had read about. For a little guidance, he emailed Itai Einav. He’s a coauthor of the rice cereal study at the University of Sydney in Australia. Einav emailed back and became “kind of my mentor,” Rylan says.

Rylan Colbert next to his tiny shaved ice “glacier.” To model a cold environment, he kept his science project in the refrigerator. S. Colbert

Using a refrigerator in his father’s lab at the University of Hawaii, Ryan filled beakers with a layer of gravel. Then he added a layer of shaved ice to serve as his model glacier. “The density of the shaved ice was about the density of freshly fallen show,” he says. That’s really important, he says; it simulates how glaciers develop. “That’s the start of the process.”

He set a microscope on its side in the fridge to monitor exactly what happened. “To simulate global warming, I pumped water under the shaved ice and it compacted,” Rylan notes. He tested water pumped in at -1° Celsius (30° Fahrenheit) and then again at 8 °C (46 °F). That warmer water simulated a warming ocean.

Ice with warmer water below it compacted seven percent faster than ice atop very cold water, Rylan showed. He hopes his research might help people understand how glaciers form (or don’t), as the world warms.

Doing more scientific research around climate change is key, he believes. Eventually, he says, “it’ll hit home with somebody and they’ll say, ‘Hey, let’s stop this.’”

Pauline hopes that more research also will prompt more action. “We should take all measures to prevent [climate change] as much as possible,” she says. “At the rate it’s going, it’s going to destroy the planet.”

Student scientists want to help all of us survive a warmer world published first on https://triviaqaweb.tumblr.com/

[ezatluba]

The tags are loaded with detectors that record the sounds of the orcas: their breathes, clicks, buzzes and calls. They can track the direction and speed of their movement in the dark to see how they dive, roll and sprint. They even film their social interactions as they swim, play and hunt, share food and touch.

Southern residents struggle

The northern and southern resident orcas are the same animal. But they differ in their primary foraging range. And that, it seems, has made a crucial difference. The northern residents live in cleaner, quieter water with access to a greater variety of fish. They are far more abundant than the southern residents, with 310 northern residents counted in 2019. The northerns also have been steadily increasing for decades, while the southern residents are battling extinction.

There are only 73 southern residents left, counting the newest baby, born to Tahlequah, or J35, on Sept. 4. That birth in particular was a ray of hope for a mother whale who raised worldwide concern when her last calf died after living only one half-hour in the summer of 2018. She refused to let the calf go, traveling for 17 days and more than 1,000 miles with the dead calf.

The new calf is healthy so far, and is the third born to the southern residents since 2019. The scientific consensus, however, is that the southern residents remain at acute risk of extinction due to at least three main threats: pollution, vessel noise and disturbance, and lack of readily available quality food.

That last bit is what Trites and the team want to test. They seek to learn if there are differences in the feeding efficiency of the two populations.

“Hostile Waters” exposes the plight of Puget Sound’s southern resident killer whales, among our region’s most enduring symbols and most endangered animals. The Seattle Times examines the role humans have played in their decline, what can be done about it and why it matters.

“We may find what people suspect, or we may find there is no difference (between the two populations), or that the southern residents have an easier time, which would be a real surprise,” Trites said. “But the point is to find out, by gathering data and not just assume that food, and in particular food at this time of year in this region, is the problem.”

The stakes are high, with extinction stalking the southern residents. “It would be tragic if we let them go extinct because we were blinded by our convictions, and were not looking for the problem in the right spot,” he said.

New research method: “Orca-cam”

Even these experienced killer whale observers have been astounded at the underwater world that has unfolded as the whales carry a camera on their skin for hours or even days. The tag is designed to pop off and float to the surface, where scientists retrieve it.

The team is posting their daily activity on Facebook, and has already shared remarkable videos and photos for the public to enjoy. They’ve dubbed the tag the “orca-cam.”

It’s tricky work. Finding the orcas is the first problem. Getting a tag on a wild orca is the next one. It takes strength and dexterity to extend a 25-foot-long carbon-fiber pole from a bouncing skiff to tap the 2-pound tag onto a swimming killer whale, aiming for the area right below the dorsal fin. So far the team has been able to tag two southern residents, L87 and L88, and nine northern residents.

Recording the whales on the high seas with a flying camera isn’t easy either — especially when it is time to catch the whizzing drone from the deck of a bouncing boat.

The tags allow researchers to come along for the kill, as orcas prowl the deep. “It is really quite exciting, they are in the deep, dark water, it sounds like a submarine, ping, ping, ping,” Trites said, describing the orcas’ echolocation clicks. “Faster and faster, it turns into a buzz and you know the kill moment is coming.” Then comes a satisfying crunch.

“It is quite thrilling, you feel like you are part of the hunt.”

The orcas are unrelenting predators.

“They are extremely efficient, they are eating on the run,” Trites said. “They don’t miss a beat. They catch a fish, rip it up, someone else gets a chunk, and they are moving all the time.”

Watching the orcas in action has dispelled any notion for the researchers that these are fragile animals.

“You see how tough these animals are, they are built to survive,” Trites said. “They are covered in battle scars, I feel like I am seeing them in a way I have never understood. They have been traveling together for decade after decade, it reframes a new impression of their lives, instead of just seeing them from the surface, from a boat.”

Scientists only have first impressions now from what they have seen while at sea. It will take analysis of the data they have gathered to begin to put the story together.

Another piece of the research involves tracking salmon along with the whales. The vessel is outfitted with sophisticated fish finders that depict the bottom to a depth of more than 1,600 feet, and show where the fish are, and even the species.

One surprise may turn out to be that even in summer the orcas are taking bottom-feeding halibut in their hunts. That would explain why the team saw an orca with its dorsal laid down on the sea floor where halibut are regularly caught by fishermen. Was it flushing and chasing the fish?

Also in the mix is tagging data gathered this summer by another team, which is catching chinook at Port Renfrew and releasing the salmon to determine where they go.

The Gikumi team has a new respect for the orcas built from basically trying to be a killer whale, following the pods and salmon constantly on the move. Southern residents in particular travel huge distances, researchers learned. Swimming more than 150 miles over the span of two days is nothing for them.

“They don’t park in one spot. They are constantly intercepting fish in different locations; it appears to be a much better strategy to run a trap line than to wait for the fish to come,” Trites said.

Yet even while on the move, the orcas are constantly touching: bumping into one another, sliding alongside one another, and the little ones snugging up to their mother’s flipper for a belly rub. It’s how they stay in touch in a vast ocean, and constantly renew their bonds.

The team got their first glimpses of the whales’ continual touching and play with drone footage last year; it took their breath away.

Imperiled pods in hostile waters

The team’s work coincided with massive fires all over the West Coast, and the smoke sometimes was so thick on the water, the researchers could only track the orcas by listening for their breath. They never did see Tahlequah and her calf.

They were saddened by the pall of smoke, and wondered how it affected the whales. They were also concerned by the amount of boat traffic in busy shipping lanes in the southern residents’ core habitat on the west side of San Juan Island, in addition to private recreation boats.

One day they counted at least 100 fishing boats off San Juan Island, more than one for every southern resident orca. They also, early in their cruise, were shocked to see a northern resident with a flasher used to catch salmon dangling from the gear embedded in its mouth.

As their vessel followed the whales off the coast of the city of Vancouver, B.C., the team also grappled with the realization of all that the southern residents deal with.

“What struck us was how much the world has changed for them, we almost felt suffocated, quite oppressed, when we came into the city again,” Trites said. “We felt shocked to know the southern residents come so close to Vancouver. People think this is a problem somewhere else. No. This is right off the beach, that is part of their range and an important feeding area for them. People have not appreciated that before.”

Trites hopes that what the team has seen and heard this summer will help not only answer scientific questions, but also show the public a little more of the remarkable lives of Orcinus orca, the top predator in every ocean of the world.

“They are supreme athletes, they have this incredible ability to survive, track down fish, surface, breach, leap, spy hop, stay in touch with each other constantly,” Trites said. “It is really remarkable to have this chance to follow them, although we do a lousy job of keeping up, I must say.”

He was struck by the similarities of orca and human society, in the strong family bonds he witnessed, at how no orca would ever let another in the family go without food. And struck, also, when observing the southern residents, that this is an animal far too tough to count out.

“They are battle hardened, and battle ready. And they have a will to survive. They are not going down without a fight,” he said.

“It is up to us to do our part to ensure we don’t get in the way.”

[2000daysprekindergarten]

Why’s The Cost Of Childcare in Calgary So Darn High?

  Written by Marlene Alcon Kepka

@AlconKepka

| 11 MIN READ |

    Daycare in Calgary can be some of the highest in the country. Our city ranks in the top 5 most expensive childcare fees. See for yourself.

There are 5 top reasons why your child care bill is so high. Let’s find out why.

#1 – Child Care Needs Bodies

via GIPHY

Ratios, ratios, ratios. The Alberta government mandates that a certain number of daycare workers need to be watching a certain number of little ones.

That number can vary from 1 to 3 all the way to 1 to 15. These are the minimum ratios and some daycare providers lower them even more. Like 2000 Days Pre-Kindergarten.

Here are the Alberta childcare ratios and group sizes.

Payroll is the largest expense in most businesses. Daycares in Calgary are no different. The more bodies you have in the building being paid the more your costs go up.

Parents must shoulder those costs. This is the largest reason why childcare is so expensive.

You might think to increase the ratios so costs go down. And you would be right. But the down side is that now you have more children and less supervision.

Accidents would go up. Quality would go down. Most daycares don’t want to go this route.

#2 –Gotta Put A Roof Over Their Heads

Yup, rent. Most childcare centres have to pay rent. Very few own their own building and have it paid off. As we know Calgary can be expensive to lease a building to have a daycare in it.

Rent is usually paid by the square foot. With prices in the $20-$45 dollar range you can see how that adds up.

Rent for some daycares in Calgary can be well over $15,000 a month. For larger child care centres it could be over $50,000 a month.

Daycare centres also have to have a minimum size. For outdoor space to play and for indoor space. The average is about 3 square meters per child. This varies on program and age.

The Alberta government made this mandatory so certain child care providers couldn’t jam as many children into a space as possible.

This is a great policy and has to be in place for our children to have the space they need to thrive.

But again it adds to the costs of childcare. The larger the space the more the daycare provider is paying for rent.

Since we’re on this subject we can also touch on utilities. Heat, air conditioning, electricity aren’t cheap.  Most daycare centers are open 12+ hours a day so all those costs add up.

#3 – Quality Child Care

via GIPHY

If you’ve been to a few daycare facilities you might have seen that quality can vary greatly. I noticed this too when I looked for childcare many years ago.

One center would have amazing security, teachers and building. The other is barely holding it together and the word sketchy could be used freely. 

Most parents want their child in a quality daycare program. I think you already know what I’m gonna write. This costs money. And it can be larger expense then most people think.

Daycare furniture is expensive. A child care table can be well over $300 dollars per table. A sleeping cot for one child could be over $110 dollars. That’s not even the really high end stuff.

Learning toys and equipment can also add up quickly. Buying a learning toy that is $25 dollars seems like a good deal and not too costly. But there are 15 children in that room that all want one. Now you are looking at $375 for one toy.

Children aren’t the most gentle with toys in the first place. In a childcare centre it’s even worse. Toys get damaged and cycled through a lot. Replacing these toys on a regular basis can drain the budget fast.

#4 – Yummy Yummy In My Tum Tum Tummy

via GIPHY

Some daycares feed your child. Some feed them home made food that is prepared by a chef on site. Some do this and use high quality, nutritional ingredients. That adds up.

Having food made by the child care facility is great for most parents. Not worrying about a healthy lunch and snack each and everyday. Wow. That is a stress saver. The downside is that it costs money to feed so many children.

A daycare can cater or have a chef on site. I prefer a chef on site as he gets to know the families and their eating preferences. The quality can be better with a chef and from my own experience the meals are tastier. But catering is fine too.

Both get expensive quickly. Thousands for equipment in the kitchen. Replacing items as they wear out can add up quickly.

Thousands for food on a monthly basis. Your little monkeys eat like lions. Especially if the chef is good and makes nutritional and delicious meals.

Studies have shown that providing healthy meals is essential to your child’s health. It’s great for parents to not have to worry about this. They have enough on their plate. Get it plate. HA.

5# – Can’t Wrap Them In Bubble Wrap

via GIPHY

Calgary Daycare centers have to be safe. That is something any parent can agree on. Safety means a lot of things.

There are standard safety measures that all businesses in Calgary need to abide by. Fire alarms, smoke detectors, building codes, etc.

Child care centers need to far beyond where most businesses stop. A retail store or plumbing shop need the bare minimum of safety.

Daycares in Calgary need to do a lot more. Here are a few things childcare facilities do to keep your child safe:

Safety gates, safety doors

Access control for the main door with key cards

Weekly fire and intruder drills

Dozens and dozens of cameras

Special child acre equipment like tables, chairs, sleeping cots, etc.

Quick access to emergency systems

Child tracking systems

Fenced and secure outdoor play area

These are some of the extra things daycares do to keep your child as safe as possible. There are also administrative costs to create procedures and policies for safety. These are constantly updated and changed to make sure that safety’s improved.

This should be top of mind for any parent that is looking for daycare. There are a lot of things to look for when touring a child care center.

Here are Alberta’s daycare safety guidelines. You can see for yourself what goes into keeping your child safe.

How Can We Make Daycare More Affordable?

via GIPHY

So those are the top 5 reasons why child care can be expensive. It’s also the reasons why it can vary so much from city to city and province to province.

Toronto has very expensive daycare because wages are higher and rent is much higher. Quebec has low child care costs because the province subsidies daycare heavily. Speaking of subsidy…

Alberta Childcare Subsidy

The government of Alberta has a child care subsidy in place. This can lower your daycare costs drastically but there are stipulations.

Who qualifies and for how much they get can be very complicated. Luckily the government made a great tool to find out if you qualify and for how much. Here it is. 

The subsidy can help families that need it but with a cap of $628 and costs being as high as $1600 a month this can fall short.

Also, the income amount for families can be pretty high to qualify for subsidy. Even a two income family making a decent amount will not qualify. Take a look at the subsidy amounts here. 

But again use the calculator mentioned above to see if you do. Any amount helps to keep the costs of daycare down.

Everyone’s situation, income and family are different so give it a try. It only takes a few minutes and gives you a number right away. You have nothing to lose. I get asked all the time if there’s a better way to afford quality daycare. Other countries have done it so why can’t Calgary and Canada as a whole?

Daycare Done Right?

  There is only one real way to make daycare more affordable for all Canadian parents. And that’s to have a federal universal childcare program.

Many other countries in the world have this already. Denmark is one of the highest rated. Sweden comes close. Norway,  South Korea, Slovenia, France and many more.

We should stop treating child care as an after thought and put it front and centre of our entire society. We were all children at some point… right?

We would all benefit from a high quality and universal day care program. Heck, our society would benefit.

We know that the first 2000 days of a child’s life is the most important. Those 2000 days make our children who they will be for the rest of their days.

Productive, happy member of society. A socially and emotionally developed child who can take on the stresses of the world.

Canada as a country should push forward to implement a universal child care program. Daycares that are private should be converted to public daycares. We should be following Denmark, Sweden, Norway and many others.

I know what some of you are thinking. Taxes! And you’re right. Our tax bill will probably have to go up to pay for this. But if you look at a place like Denmark where the highest taxes are 52.05% (cited here).

People are happy to pay it. With very inexpensive childcare and free university. The citizens of Denmark know their children, and future, is well taken care of.

Canada could do the same and we would feel the same. Do you think child care in Calgary is too darn high?

The post appeared first on A Calgary Daycare & Child Care School.

[dfnews]

Episode Recap of "A New Baby". Is "new" necessary? Rarely is an old baby born.

Season 4, Episode 4 - June 26, 2017

"Jessa's due date is nigh, so family and friends help the Seewalds prepare for the new baby. Meanwhile, Joy and Austin's house-flipping project continues; and Austin asks Jim Bob an important question."

Here we go again. The Tribe of Seewald expands. Hopefully they'll never make it out of Arkansas.

1. I'm gonna try and keep this long episode short due to me not wanting to sit at my computer for too long. My body has been rebelling after writing long recaps. Most of what the Duggars do has been done before so I'll focus on the new stuff if there is any.

2. Jessa, Jana and Jill hang out listening to baby heart beats on a home doppler. You would have thought they would have learned years ago that they shouldn't play doctor with each other. Nothing good comes from that. Izzy is going to be upset when Jill doesn't push out a basketball.

3. Unfocused Austin and Diligent Joy and chaperone Daddy Forsyth are still flipping that fifth house. Joy claims to love working with Austin on the house which I'm sure she does. It gets her out from under her parents' thumb. It sure gives Jana and Johannah a ton of work to do at home since Michelle was kidnapped by aliens and Jim Bob just sits sadly by a quiet phone waiting for Huckabee or Santorum to call. Joy gets all touchy touchy with Austin's dad which is unusual for a Duggar kid. Affection such as this is rarely displayed. The kids mess up a tile job but there is no blood shed so Austin passes another fundie test making him worthy of marrying a Duggar princess.  

4. Jessa and grifter Jill are looking for a new home. Jessa has been giving off major stink faces at Jill during this episode. Besides the tension with JinJer and DerJill is there also tension between Benessa and DerJill as well? Probably. Jinger and Jessa are pretty close. Jessa and Jill head out to look at the home of a family friend that Jim Bob stole, I mean bought. So Jill is going to move from the Jim Bob owned guest house to another Jim Bob owned home? Jessa too? Grandma Mary/Jim Bob own her home. I really wish these kids could support themselves. Family welfare is getting old.  The home they're looking at belonged to Peggy Bennett who was once Jim Bob's teacher back in high school. She also appeared on the first Duggar special.  I guess Mrs. Bennett neglected to teach Jim Bob and his kids manners because they make all kinds of rude and nasty comments about Peggy's house. I know my mom's house was in rough shape when we sold it but if anyone put down my childhood home you better have good life insurance. Some places are sacred no matter what. Neither of them like the house and they move on. I would LOVE an indoor pool. Peggy Bennett died in 2012 and was Episcopalian. I wonder how Jim Bob felt about that.

5. The sisters all video chat with Jinger. Jill rudely asks Jinger if she is pregnant. I'm glad Jessa was against them asking Jinger. At least one Duggar girl has a little sense. Jana helps Jessa get out her newborn stuff and Spuddy enjoys the baby swing. Repeat of Spud's birth where Jessa nearly died of blood loss. Of course they are going to try home birthing again. Baby shower for Jessa at the compound. Sierra's in charge. Jessa doesn't want gifts so all gifts will go to a fundie pregnancy center who I'm sure spread the same ole Duggar lies about birth control and abortion to young women. The Duggars have redone their soda fountain area and it looks like something Chip and Joanna Gaines would have created. Total shiplap. Laura DeMasie is still hanging around. It really does seem like she and Jana are really close if you know what I mean. Jackson is still hanging out with the girls while his brothers are elsewhere. Hopefully it's his choice and not his brothers rejecting him. Smoke fills the industrial kitchen which proves the Duggars don't have smoke detectors. It was just Sierra attempting to burn the house down. Actually, I'm not sure if a tin mansion can burn. It would probably just melt into one big shiny Christmas ornament. Michelle conveniently shows up when the guests arrive. They eat, stuff bags and chat. Nothing to see here. Let's move on.

6. Duggar kids set up pink and blue balloons for a gender reveal at the Duggar compound. I enjoyed watching James pull himself up onto the big cross beams and then jump off and land on the couch. That was new! I bet those kids swing from those beams often to burn off sexual energy. The producer embarrasses Jana about asking if she has a boyfriend. Maybe they need to ask about a girlfriend.

7. Austin invites Mr. Jim Bob to his flip house. Austin awkwardly asks the Godbobber if he can marry Joy. The Godbobber responds with his typical, "Wow. That's a big step. blah, blah, blah." All staged. Diligent Duggar is now going to be Diligent Forsyth. She's only 19 and has done nothing except work for her family. Benessa and Spud go out to lunch. Spud throws his sippy cup and is then seen with a bottle. It looks like we have a new Duggar addiction problem. Spud loves his baba.  That's okay. He'll grow up soon enough.

8. Henry Wilberforce Seewald time!  Accidentally named for a guy who converted to Catholicism but that's a long story. Jessa's water broke right after a Superbowl party the Seewald's attended. Why didn't the crew film them at the party? It would have made them look a lot more normal. Jessa is in hard labor. Her lame midwife is heard but kept off camera. I'm sure it's the same one who assisted with Spud and has a controversial history. Hank is born on the living room couch. That couch will never be the same. He's the fourth baby to be born in that house. Mackie and Spud were born in the bedroom. Mikey was born on the toilet and Hank on the couch. The next one has to be born in the kitchen to make it a well-rounded house. Jessa shows some real emotions after Hank is born which is refreshing. Ben shows real emotions too by trying not to puke on the newborn when they were delivering the placenta.

9. The Duggar kids attempt the balloon drop at the compound. Justin has been told the gender and was to pull the pink or blue balloon cord but it's a fail. The bag does not break but they all get the message anyway. In a talking head I notice Joe has a pretty severe eye twitch happening. Nerves or Tourettes, I wonder? Spud slept through the entire thing, thank God, and gets to meet Hank in the morning. Spud has no clue what is happening and wants to maul the baby which is probably a good indicator to spread pregnancies a little further apart. Jill is hoping for an easy birth as Jessa had and we should find out soon if that wish happens. Spud begins to warm up to the baby. He calls him cutie pie. Then the germ army arrives to view the second coming of Seewalds. All the little kids plus grandma Duggar get to  hold little Hankie pankie cutie pie.

10. Three days later they name the baby Henry Wilberforce which Ben says is Jessa's favorite name. Then Jessa says he can be called Wilber or Will so I guess her favorite name is Wilberforce not Henry. Then she says don't call him Hank! WHAT!!!!! In what universe is Wilber better than Hank? I'm still gonna call him Hank because since Jessa and Ben blocked and banned me from all their social medias I'm sure they will never find out. ;)

Well this still ended up being a pretty long recap but considering it was a 136 minute episode, it could have been a lot longer. Also, how can an episode where a baby is born be so dull? We need to see more of James parkouring around the house to liven up this series. A lot more!

[sigma7]

give him the stick DON’T give him the stick

The good news: the Fenslerfilms versions of the classic GI Joe PSAs have been converted to HD!

The bad news: some Wikipedia buzzkill has decided that the exhaustive description of the PSAs on the Fenslerfilm Wikipedia page is just not encyclopedic-enough to retain on the page itself.  It’s relegated to the history of the page, but just to insure the survival of these laser-precise summaries, I’m including them below.  Given a year for each, I could not write better summaries.

 #1: You're Not My Friend A young boy gets lost at a carnival while checking out a shooting tent. He bumps into Alpine, who confuses the boy with, "Mi mi mi mi," noises, in a send-up of the poor animation of characters' speaking mouths. Alpine quickly adds, "Naw, I'm just kiddin' with ya." The boy's friends return and ask, "Hey man, who's that weird dude you're talking to, bro?" The boy awkwardly says to Alpine, "My friends are here, oh cool, s-s-see you later." Alpine's face then strains as he appears to fart.

#2: Blanco Nino Some children are playing football. One of them is tackled roughly to the ground. He discovers that his nose is bleeding and asks for someone to take him to the hospital. Another kid turns to him and says "you sure about that?" Footloose shadows over the boys and says authoritatively, "Nice catch, blanco niño, but too bad your ass got saaaacked!" After which Footloose appears, through video editing techniques, to tackle the boy.

#3: Body Massage Two boys on bikes stop in front of a downed live wire on the road. One suggests that they "launch" over it. Roadblock approaches and asks, "Who wants a body massage?" He casts the wire away as he sings softly to himself in a Barry White-style baritone ("Mr. Body Massage Machine...GO!"). One of the boys then asks "Eeeeeh, what the hell?" Roadblock proudly responds, "Body massage!"

#4: Fire On Your Sleeve Two boys are camping. While putting more logs on the campfire, one says, "Speaking of logs, I'm going to take the Cosby Kids down to the river," then one of the boy's sleeves catches fire. Spirit runs in speaking in a Native Indian language (sampled from Brocket 99). He wraps the boy in a blanket and rolls him on the ground for an excessively long time. Spirit lectures the boy again in his strange language. The other boy asks, "You didn't take anything out of our tent, did ya?" Spirit gives an answer (once again in vernacular) and gives a slight nod.

#5: Ice Three boys race onto a frozen lake, the first one crying, "Last one there's a penis pump!", while the other two attempt to catch up, shouting, "That's not fair!" over each other (a theme which continues throughout this PSA). The first boy slides on the ice ("Holy cow, I'm totally going so fast. Aw, fuck!") and then slips, cracking the ice. While the other two attempt to walk out to rescue the boy, Snow Job approaches on skis. The two boys ask for help, but Snow Job launches a foul-mouthed tirade at them in a Cockney accent. When the children reach out with a stick, Snow Job approves ("Give him the stick."), then immediately contradicts himself ("Don't give him the stick!"). When they look at him and reply simultaneously ("We're sorry," and "Do you know my dad?"). Snow Job then sings a loud "Oh" to an A note in a bass-baritone voice.

#6: Kids Fry Two children are wakened by a smoke alarm. They approach the door, but Barbecue arrives at the window, letting out a series of vocoded noises. He opens his palm toward one of the kids and releases an energy pulse, disintegrating the child. The other boy looks at Barbecue in bewilderment, then succumbs to the same fate.

#7: Porkchop Sandwiches Two boys are in a kitchen. Their dubbed voices make them sound like they are mentally challenged. One of the boys turns on the stove and puts a frying pan on it. The other boy, who is standing in the doorway to the kitchen eating an apple, says to him, "You don't know how to cook anything." The boy standing in front of the stove says "Yeah I do." The flame from the burner ignites curtains which are hanging near the stove, causing the boy who turned it on to start stuttering in panic. Blowtorch runs in, shouting "porkchop sandwiches!" This line is one of the most frequently quoted by fans, and Fensler has until recently sold T-shirts sporting the phrase. He arrives at the kitchen door and in a panic-ridden voice orders the children: "Oh shit, get the fuck out of here! What are you doing? Go, get the fuck out of here, you stupid idiot! Fuck, we're all dead! Get the fuck out!" His panicked tone of voice contrasts oddly with his calm body language. Outside, he tells them, "My God, did that smell good!" prompting a stream of gibberish from one of the boys. One of the boys says something along the lines of, "Detector no go and you tell me, do things, I done runnin'..." This is met with Blowtorch's staring toward the camera, followed by a closeup of that same stare.

#8: Slip A boy is standing on the edge of a cliff, and his friend runs off toward the woods shouting, "Mom, Dad, come here! You gotta see this! This is so cool—" The cliff edge the boy is standing on then gives way, and the boy falls into the sea, screaming, "Shiiiiii-(t)" as the cliff crumbles beneath him. The PSA cuts off abruptly at this point, lasting only nine seconds in total.

#9: Belch Kids playing baseball get into a heated argument over whether a runner is safe or out. Cutter (apparently drunk) arrives and challenges one of the boys to what is apparently a belching contest (represented by the voice-actors as a lengthy vocal fry vocalization). The boy initially demurs, suggesting a different kid as an alternative participant. Cutter refuses, explaining: "Because I already had him. That's right, kids, I already had him." The boy reluctantly agrees to play, and after about 32 seconds of "uhhhhhh" belching-noises from both, the boy cannot do it anymore and concedes defeat, but Cutter continues in a trance-like state for another 40 seconds until the PSA ends, with an excessively long final note, lasting about 20 seconds, on the chorus of "G. I. Joooooooooooooe..."

#10: Bus Rider A boy and a girl high on medicine cabinet drugs and/or possibly alcohol go into the kitchen to get some more, with the boy saying, "Yeah, we should totally hit it again but I get first dibs on it." Doc appears in the window singing a dancehall song. The boy joins him in a bizarre high-pitched voice until it ends. Doc repeats an approximation of "Sunshine dey yah, a time fi di bus ride," in nearly indecipherable patois. Based on the song "Fun Time Deh Ya" by Night Rider.

#11: There's No Retard In Team Kids playing soccer accost their goalkeeper for failing to stop a shot ("There's no retard in team!"). Flint approaches and gives the kids a bewildering account of the day's international news. The news is as follows, "Damage to the base is said to be heavy and the Israeli jets are reported to have made it back to their headquarters." The team scores and while celebrating Flint returns and his news report continues: "A 49-year-old unidentified man went berserk last night, opening fire with a 12-gauge shotgun in a crowded downtown restaurant... Fighting broke out overnight between rival factions along the Israeli-Syrian border. Initial reports claim the Israeli fighters bombed a guerrilla base, kill—" with the "G.I. Joe" chorus ending, cutting Flint off in mid-sentence. The news announcements were sampled from "Segue (II)" off New Power Generation's 1995 album Exodus (Track 15). The same samples were also used on Megadeth's "The Scorpion" from the 2004 album The System Has Failed, the Spin Doctors' "What Time Is It," Chamillionaire's song "The Morning News," off his 2007 album, Ultimate Victory, and Jonathan Coulton's song "Shop Vac." The announcements can also be heard in Cowboy Bebop's "Session 5: Ballad of Fallen Angels", playing on a radio in the background during Annie's store scene; the video game Grand Theft Auto's in-game radio station "Head Radio"; the Sega Dreamcast game Shenmue 2, during the music track "Gifts"; in the background of episode 1 of Californication; and in the game Fahrenheit, where it can be faintly heard among static on a restaurant's radio. This also played in a radio news report in the movie "XIII".

#12: Car Accident While riding bikes without lights or reflectors, two boys narrowly avoid an accident with Dusty's jeep. He crashes and runs over to the boys with helicopter noises in the background, bellowing a butch version of the "Game Over" theme from Sega Rally Championship ("Game Over Yeaaahhhhhh!") to the boys.

#13: Pink Purse A boy talking in ebonics jumps a gap at a building site and a sound effect plays, presumably because the pit shown is far too wide for a child to jump across without supernatural assistance. Before completing the gap, he tells his companion "It's just eee threasy (three easy) steps, just flip it, stick it, and see you later bye!" The young girl is hesitant to do the same. He exhorts her to try, telling her "You better bring it." Lady Jaye approaches and asks them, "Kids? Did you happen to see a pink... um, I wanna say, vinyl purse around here somewhere? ...I'm just dying to get my cigarettes." The boy reels back, protesting that he hasn't seen any purse, but the scene slows down in the middle of his sentence in order to poke fun at the low quality of inbetweening in the spot, showing a loss of volume in the boy's head in different frames. The girl responds in a peculiar manner; she appears to slow down time to the point where her animation frames (four in total) are played for several seconds each. On the last frame, she lets out a surprising "Bah!" sound. The film ends with a shot of Lady Jaye smiling nervously.

#14: Motorcycle A boy named Eric is being talked to by a stranger off-screen, who is attempting to give important life advice to the boy. He talks at breakneck speed, and when Eric fails to pay attention, the man drives off, annoyed. The monologue is as follows: "Now you listen to me, Eric. You don't blow your money on those comic books, you understand? They don't do you a damned bit of good, and the nude mags, you're gonna be inheriting mine when you're 16 anyway. Now look, the junk food and the candy just rots your teeth, gives you bad breath, and the girls run like hell. Stay the hell away from buying any rock TV shirts, or hip hop gear, or anything like that. Arcade games—pick out one that you can do, okay? ONE that you can do as opposed to a whole bunch of them that you don't know what the hell you're doing. Techno music just puts a hole in your brain an... are, are you listening to me? Look at me when I'm talking to you!" At this point, the man drives away and Wild Bill approaches on a motorcycle. He treats Eric and Eric's friend to a confusing, tone-deaf and completely non sequitur rendition of Arlo Guthrie's Motorcycle Song. Perhaps the most confusing aspect is that Eric's friend appears to morph after the stranger drives away. He was clearly an Eric clone, but takes on a much darker complexion and different clothes by the time Wild Bill arrives. This friend later attests that he's "about to putdapressabutdawutdawiddaman." Wild Bill continues to sing when Eric shrugs his shoulders saying that he doesn't know what he's doing, but gets cut off by him singing "I just wanna ride my motorcy..." then pauses for a second to say the remaining "...cle."

#15: Help Computer A boy approaches a dog to pet it saying, "Aw, hell no, what's up, dog?", but the dog reacts violently, causing the boy to back away. Mutt arrives and says, "Hey kid, I'm a computer! Stop all the downloadin'!" as the boy steps back from the dog. The dog leaves. Mutt puts his hands on the boy's shoulders and asks him to, "Help computer." The boy explains, "I don't know much about computers, other than, other than the one we got at my house, and my mom put a couple of games on there and I play 'em." Mutt, either annoyed by this or so angered that his software malfunctions, replies with a garbled robotic message from the NBC series NewsRadio.[19] The sound byte is specifically from season 3, episode 24 entitled "Space". It is the sound that Dave's artificially intelligent chair makes when it is being shut down against its will.

#16: Swimming Two kids are swimming in a lake (one splashing the other shouting "You like it, you love it, you need it!") but a thunderstorm develops. One kid gets out but the other stays in. Deep Six rises from the water, surprising the boy who's still in the water (shouting an exaggerated "Oh yosh!") and shepherds him onto land. The boys are terrified as Deep Six's protection suit gives him muffled speech so it is impossible to understand what he is saying. One of the boys asks, "Are you in the Army?" Lightning strikes the water and the second boy says, "If I had been in that water... dead." Deep Six continues to lecture the boys in his muffled tone, and one boy responds with some lightning fast dialogue which sounds something like "It's really cold out here...bye!"

#17: Australian Kids who are playing truant hang around an abandoned refrigerator. Recondo (with an Australian accent) is keeping tabs on them. He says, "I'm glad you guys... skipped the class today. We're havin' fun, aren't we?" One of the kids replies, "I wanna play videogames." He responds, "We had a good conversation, heh heh heh. You, you're the ringleader," followed by a burst of maniacal gibberish. As he puts one of the children in the refrigerator he exclaims, "Go'n, get in that fridge there, boy!" and "They don't understand! We gotta sneak back in the school." One other kid expresses a desire to get in the fridge, too. Recondo's chuckling ends the PSA.

#18: Pimp A blind boy and his friends are out walking in the country. The blind boy (with the help of his white cane) is acting like a stereotypical pimp to the annoyance of his friends, who tell him, "Brian, you ain't no pimp, dude!" The blind boy, looking for his money, says "Where's mah money?" A blonde girl speaks up and says "That's my money." Brian then replies; "Man you're just a Jealous motherfucker!", possibly since he is a pimp. Spirit approaches them, speaking in the same Native American language used in PSA04, also sampled from Brocket 99. The blind boy finds a cat in a hollow log. The girl then says that "it's such a wonderful experience here with the Indian."

#19: Fire Alarm Starts with the scene of a house on fire. A boy challenges a boy to push a fire alarm saying, "Bet you won't touch that button, bitch." He tries to do so, but Barbecue approaches them, making the same noises he makes in "Kids Fry," stops the boy from pushing the button, and pops off his helmet. He says (with a slight Upper-Midwestern accent) "Hey guys. Ah, you know it's funny, these people, they go to sleep, they think everything's fine, everything's good... They wake up the next day and they're on fire."

#20: Dockside Bars Two boys have a race through a park. One takes a nearby bicycle to cheat, while the other catches up, saying, "Hey, what the fuck? No way! Suck my dust, bitch!" Shipwreck stops them both, says, "I believe I knew your mother, son," and asks if his name happens to be Johnny. He then asks a series of questions implying that he is the boy's long-lost father. In the end, he asks "Does your mother still hang out at dockside bars?" The boy is bewildered, but Shipwreck follows up with his next question; "Johnny, do you play baseball?" The line of questioning used by Shipwreck is reminiscent of Captain Oveur's questioning of a child passenger in the comedy film Airplane!.

#21: Water Skiing A child is waterskiing. She quickly falls off. Scarlett approaches and the child enthusiastically says, "My turn! My turn! My turn!". She then takes off on the water skis. Scarlett watches on and hums a tune, which develops into a scat singing improvisation session.

#22: Mr. LaFitte Some kids are skateboarding in a roller park with sound effects from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Gung-Ho approaches with a girl he calls Susie. He acts with a flamboyant homosexual stereotype telling the girl, "Susie, don't forget your sandwiches!" The boys approach him and he says "Oh, you boys look so lovely in your little outfits." The Yellow Helmeted kid says "Hey! Whats up Miss, uhh..Mister LaFitte?" The Red Helmeted Kid says "Hey.. Watch me Ollie!", referring to a skating move. GungHo then says "I just want to eat you up!" Yellow Helmet Kid then says "Love the tattoo, Mr.LaFitte." GungHo places his hands onto his hips and says "Look at all your different colored hats!" (The Gung Ho character's name is Ettienne R. LaFitte)

#23: Anime This PSA is entirely in Japanese. Kids are making a treehouse. One of them falls but Quick Kick arrives just in time to catch him. A nonsensical conversation in Japanese takes place, which consists mainly of stereotypical phrases from a Japanese-language learning course ("What time is it?", "Please wait while I change my clothes", "Nice to meet you", "How are you?", "Please call me in two or three days.") and has no relevance (when translated) to the incidents in the PSA. The closing chorus is sung in Japanese ("Jii waratashi fuzukuru!"). The timing, music, and ending are all parodies of classic anime.

#24: Buzz Lightyear Three boys are on a boat. One makes an insult about the other's mother ("I fuckin' haxxord your mom's ass last night"). The insulted boy replies with "You might want to put a vest on", and then proceeds to knock the insultee (who is not wearing a lifejacket) off the boat with the sail. The third boy then says "Orange vests are for pussies", clearly in a tone mocking a previous (unheard) conversation with the drowning boy, while wearing an orange vest himself. Deep Six arrives in a submersible boat and drags the boy to safety. Deep Six, still speaking in an unintelligible muffled falsetto through his diving mask, tries to lecture the boys. One of them asks, "Hey, aren't you Buzz Lightyear?", and another whispers "I love your movies." Deep Six gets noticeably angry about this comparison and shouts in his muffled voice.

#25: Fuckin' Old School A girl turns to a boy and says "fuckin' old school". The boy in turn faints but it is edited to appear as if he is break dancing within a large group of children. A chiptunes instrumental plays throughout alongside sporadic crowd reactions. Airtight appears in an extreme close-up, and says (over the music) "Damn... these beats are so fresh... sssssssnap!"

[cathrynstreich]

Smart Homes Offer Convenience but Can Also Compromise Privacy

(TNS)—You walk into your house and the lights automatically dim, your favorite song begins to play and the air gets slightly cooler. Upstairs, your steam bath is already prepared and your blinds are closing.

This is not a far-off fantasy, but rather the high-end of high-tech homes, also known as smart homes. An all-inclusive system like this, where face recognition sets off a chain of events via embedded sensors and the internet to create the optimal home experience for each household dweller, can cost up to $300,000, says Emil Hartoonian, real estate agent at The Agency in Los Angeles. This type of hardware and internet connectivity is known as the Internet of Things, or IoT.

These futuristic bells and whistles are practically essential for today’s upscale real estate buyer. Along the way, smart-home technology has transformed the way people view their homes: instead of a static entity that’s manually operated, it’s a personalized, automated unit. Customized systems like this usually come with their own server, located in the house, and require professional installers to set it up.

“From the lighting to the sound, to the fireplace and window treatments, you can do all of this on your phone before you arrive,” Hartoonian says. “Once you get used to it, it’s hard to live without it. Buyers most certainly look for it in their next home.”

Millionaires aren’t the only ones benefiting from today’s tech.

Up Your Home’s IQ Game on a Smaller Budget The off-the-shelf version of customized smart-home technology is budget-friendly and can typically be installed yourself. You can still do things like automate lights and the thermostat with plug-and-play devices that you can buy at Target, Home Depot or online.

Products like the Amazon Echo, Google Assistant and Siri are basically smart speakers that are controlled by virtual assistants. They only require a power source and a Wi-Fi connection. They can do everything from answer questions and provide information (sports scores, traffic updates and the closest pizza delivery) to make calls, send and receive messages and play music. For less than $100, you can essentially go hands-free with tasks you would normally rely on your computer or cell phone for.

Devices like Nest offer comprehensive home-security solutions, which connect home cameras, keyless entries and carbon monoxide and smoke detectors to your smartphone interface. You can set up Nest to unlock your doors from anywhere in the world. Couple that ability with other features like outdoor cameras, and this connected tech can solve real-life problems.

For example, imagine hiring a plumber to fix a leaky pipe. With technology like Nest, you can identify the plumber on your doorbell camera and let them in remotely—and then lock the door once they leave, all from your phone.

Notion, a Denver-based tech company, offers wireless home protection which allows people to monitor water leaks, gun and liquor cabinets, temperature changes and doors opening and closing.

“We realized people wanted to protect their entire home, so we made a device that can monitor eight different things,” says Brett Jurgens, co-founder and CEO of Notion.

Notion offers solutions that can help curb major damage to your home. For instance, there’s a water-leak detection feature. By getting an early warning, a homeowner can react quickly and prevent a flooded basement or first-story ceiling disaster.

Notion leveraged their ability to detect leaks via monitors and notify homeowners to partner with insurance companies, Jurgens explains. The insurance companies Notion teamed up with will give users a discount if they install Notion in their homes. This benefits both the insurance company and the homeowner, Jurgens points out.

Smart, Yes, but What About Private? The convenience of Siri reminding you about your coffee date or settling a debate about who won the Grammy for best album in 2009 are balanced with security and privacy issues, says David Mazieres, a computer science professor at Stanford University.

He explains that most of the off-the-shelf solutions, like Google Assistant and Echo, mean going through the cloud, which puts users at risk of getting hacked. This can be especially dangerous if you have multiple devices hooked up to one system. If a hacker can gain access to that system, then they can ostensibly control your doors and cameras while collecting private information.

There’s also the risk of mining the data to sell or use it to sell you things. These companies might or might not have privacy policies and they might or might not abide by them, Mazieres says, citing Facebook’s infamous problems with privacy over the past decade as one example of how companies can benefit from and even abuse your private data.

“These companies might reveal things about you that you don’t want revealed. I think a lot of people think they don’t have anything to hide and that works fine until something changes,” he says.

One way people can find out if their connected devices are sharing data is through spy apps, like the one created by Princeton University called IoT inspector. This is an open-source tool that analyzes network traffic to show users whether their Wi-Fi cameras, doorbells, thermostats or any other connected device are sharing information with a third party.

According to their blog, the IoT Inspector has revealed third-party sharing activity from companies like Chromecast and Geeni (a smart light bulb), even when the devices were not actively being used. Chromecast was sending data to Google, while Geeni was constantly sharing data with China-based IoT company TuYa Inc.

Mazieres recommends that consumers weigh the risks and rewards of the technology they’re bringing into their home. For example, an outdoor camera is fairly innocuous as it basically just records street noise; however, indoor cameras and devices that are made to listen to everything that’s said inside your house (even when not in use)—including private conversations—could compromise your privacy with relatively little benefit.

© 2019 Bankrate.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

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[sueboohscorner]

#ThisisUs - "Clooney" S2/Ep 12 Recap & Review

Just as I sat down to watch last night’s TIU episode, “Clooney,” a meteor hit in Michigan!  From my spot on the couch, I saw a big flash of light, heard a loud boom and then the earth shook! It was all very dramatic but the last scene of last night's TIU was much more impactful!  But we’re not going to talk about that yet.   We have too much too much to cover first.  

So, lets begin...

The first scene is that of a stray cat wandering through the streets dodging cars and people. Turns out that this was William’s cat, Clooney.  William didn’t bring him when he moved in with Randall but William went back home at least once a week to check on him.  

It looks like Kevin is leaving rehab and his therapist is concerned about his return to his life in Hollywood so soon.  Flippant, “actor” Kevin is back. He tries to charm Dr. Barbara by calling her ? but she knows that he’s just trying to hide the fact that he’s worried about returning to his old life too.  So, Kevin will be staying with Rebecca and Miguel for a time.  Considering all the things that he said to his mom during the infamous therapy session and his animosity towards Miguel, oh boy, this is going to be interesting.

In this week’s flashback, Jack is building an entertainment center for Rebecca.  As they talk about it in the kitchen, Kate comes in and asks Rebecca to take her to the mall for a dress for the school dance.  Rebecca is thrilled!  Jack needs a new suit for work and they need batteries for the smoke detector. Randall wants to go too.  

Kevin is camped out on the sofa and in no hurry to leave it but Jack wins and the all of the Pearson’s head to the mall.  Once there, Kate and Rebecca head to the dress shop, Randall heads off on his own mission, Jack and Kevin shop for suits.  

Kate finds a dress and heads off to the fitting room with the same dress in several sizes. As Rebecca waits, Kate leaves the fitting room empty handed and bolts from the store without her mom.

Kevin and Jack run into Miguel at the mall.  Miguel tells them that his ex-wife is engaged. Miguel isn’t too happy about it.  Jack starts his usual, when God closes a door speech, Kevin speaks up and says that sometimes people just need a moment to feel bad.  Miguel agrees. Jack smiles and lets them have their moment.  As Jack, Kevin and Miguel have lunch at the Food Court, the conversation leads to Miguel’s revelation that Jack wanted to open his own construction business but didn’t because of his growing family, it wasn’t the right time.

Randall’s mall mission is revealed and it’s about asking a girl out.  First attempt was a fail. Second attempt seems to work.  It doesn’t look good at first but then he charms her when he says to let the 8 Ball decide.  She does and though she doesn’t actually say yes, it looks like mission accomplished.

As Jack and Kevin admire their choice of suits, they have a really good bonding moment. Kevin is pleased when Jack exuberantly tells him how great he looks.  You can see in Kevin’s face how much his father’s praise means to him.

Later, Rebecca finds Kate after looking everywhere. Kate tells her mom that none of the dresses fit.  Rebecca wants to try a different store but Kate refuses.  

Present day Kate is back at her group meeting and is telling them about her miscarriage and the junk food she’s been sneaking.  She also tells the group about the wedding and how stressed she is about finding a dress. Later, Madison tells her about a dress designer she knows that would create a dress for her.  Kate agrees to check it out and her and Madison head to the store.  Inside the store, Madison spies cookies and starts eating them.  As Kate talks to the assistant about a dress, Madison seems distracted and abruptly excuses herself to go to the bathroom.  Kate knows why and when they leave the dress store and Kate confronts Madison about her eating disorder.  Madison tells Kate to find her own way home and storms off.  

Later that evening, Kate gets a call from Madison and rushes to her apartment.  There she finds Madison on the floor of her bathroom with a cut on her forehead.  She tells Kate that when she came home, she started eating and then went to the bathroom.  She got dizzy and must have fallen.  This scared her enough to call Kate.  Kate shares her own story about how she once did lose all the weight and got really skinny.  But, Kate says, she wasn’t happy that way.  Madison tells Kate she’s her best friend.  Awkward.

Randall is helping the girls with a diorama for school.  Beth comes in to the kitchen and is upset about a failed business deal.  She is also feeling the stress of Randall not working and needs him to promise her that he will go to a job interview he has scheduled later that day. He won’t miss the interview but first, there is a box of William’s belongings that he is going to pick up at his old apartment.  At William’s old building, he picks up the box from a neighbor. Randall asks about Clooney the Catt and finds out that the cat took off a couple of weeks ago. Never fear, the man says, a stray always seems to end up just where he needs to be.  

In the car, Randall looks through his father’s things.  He finds a book of poems that William wrote and is surprised to find that there is a love poem that seems to be talking about a woman in the building that he was in love with.  Randall sets off on another mission – to find this woman!  He leaves a note on the bulletin board requesting info about this woman.

Randall heads to the interview but stops by Beth’s workplace first.  He’s going on and on about this woman and Beth is clearly irritated because she is slammed with work.  She scolds Randall a bit, telling him that lately he seems to be walking above the clouds and she needs him to come back down to earth.  During the interview, Randall gets a phone call and excuses himself to take it.  It’s William’s friend and he thinks the mystery woman may be the building super and Randall heads back to find this woman.  He knocks on the woman’s door, identifies himself as William’s son and the woman says that William was a pain in her ass.  She cracks up when asked if they were romantic and she tells Randall that William took it upon himself to let her know when building repairs needed to be made.  He was relentless.  Randall shows the woman William’s poem. She takes Randall back to his father’s apartment and Randall sees that the woman in the poem is Billy Holliday, whose poster is on the wall.  

We haven’t talked about Kevin yet!  Kevin arrives at Rebecca and Miquel’s home.  It’s a little awkward at first and Kevin is looking forward to the opportunity to have some mother/son time to rebuild their relationship after the therapy session.  So when Rebecca and Kevin plan a trip to the grocery store, Kevin is irritated when Miguel says he’s going too.  At the grocery store, Kevin confronts Miguel and asks him why he had to tag along when he knew that he wanted alone time with his mom.  Miguel tells Kevin that after what happened at rehab, Miguel came with them to protect his wife, should she be hurt again by Kevin.  I’m not sure but I think Miguel standing up to him earned Miguel a little bit of respect from Kevin.  

Back at home, Kevin walks into the room and finds Rebecca and Miguel sitting on the couch cuddling.  They pull apart when Kevin walks in.  Kevin is feeling restless so Rebecca goes to make Kevin some tea.  He uses this time alone with Miguel to apologize and asks him if he was in love with Rebecca even when Jack was alive.  Miguel says NO!  There was never any feelings other than friendship.  The thought of that would have never crossed his mind.  

Kevin has a moment to Rebecca alone and asks her about her and Miguel.  Rebecca tells him that after Jack died, there were things she knew she had to give up.  Happiness was one of them.  Getting from one day to the next was the most important thing for her and the kids. But one day, she and Miguel found each other and he makes her happy – truly happy.  Kevin finally seems to accept that.  

Clooney, the cat is being chased through the streets by children in an attempt to catch him. One little boy does and Clooney finds a new home.  

Randall has found his new purpose and is excited to share it with Beth.  Beth is not quite so enthusiastic but is there to support Randall.  They pull up outside of William's apartment building where Randall has spent most of his day. Confused, Beth gets out of the car as Randall announces that he wants them to buy this building and fix it up so the people that live there can have the home they deserve. 

We end the show with Rebecca and Jack on the couch after the day at the mall.  Rebecca asks Jack to talk to Kate.  She knows that there’s something going on with her but Rebecca also knows that Kate won’t confide in her.  Moments later, Jack drops a bombshell announcement! He wants to quit his job and start the construction company he has always dreamed about. Rebecca is shocked but after a moment, she seems to be all in!  

This brings us to the final moment of the episode.  As the final scene fades out, we get a close up shot of the smoke detector with NO BATTERIES!  With so much going on at the mall that day, neither Jack nor Rebecca thought about batteries!  The camera hovers there for a moment to give us all the chance to realize what we’re looking at.  OMG! We don’t know the exact cause of the fire yet but now it appears that if the smoke detector had been operational, Jack might have survived!  The suspense is maddening. Slowly, TIU writers are giving us clues about Jack’s death, but the biggest mystery on television right now is still that – a mystery.