The extremes of human endurance

Austrian Herbert Nitsch is the current freediving world record holder and is a.k.a. "the deepest man on earth" (253.2m / 830.8ft) and the only freediver with 33 World Records across all freediving disciplines.

A part time pilot, Nitsch cemented his status as the Deepest Man on Earth in 2007 with a new world record. No one has yet surpassed 253meters, but there is no doubt that daring souls will continue to descend into the depths of the ocean, and the record won't stand for long. For an idea of what that will take, watch Nitsch set the current record

Fatal Interactions with Police

The American Police officers killed 1193 people in 2017, that is 3 people every day, during the year. In the majority of the incidents 631 officers were responding to non-violent offenses or when no crime had been reported at all. 87 people killed had been stopped for a traffic violation.

In the eyes of the US police anything you might have in your hand could be a gun, therefore they will possibly shoot you and probably kill you.

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A photographer was shot by deputy who mistook his tripod for a gun.

An Ohio photographer who was shot by Deputy Jake Shaw after he stopped to take pictures of a traffic stop and his tripod was mistaken for a gun. Grimm filed a lawsuit against the county, but lawyers say not only were the deputy's actions "reasonable," but Grimm's own "negligence... contributed to cause the injuries."

A man was shot in his grandmother's backyard because he was holding an iPhone in his hand.

The Sacramento officers believed the suspect was pointing a firearm at them. Fearing for their safety. The officers fired 20 times at Clark and he was hit multiple times, police told CNN affiliate KOVR. Officers then handcuffed Clark and began life-saving efforts, according to police. He was pronounced dead at the scene. After an exhaustive search, scene investigators did not locate any firearms. The only item found near the suspect was a cell phone.

In Chicago, 13-year-old Jakeem Booker was standing in the front doorway of his aunt’s house when he was mistakenly shot in the back with a stray bullet from the gun of a village police officer who was aiming for a fleeing tire rim thief.

Meanwhile, the number of police officers feloniously killed in the line of duty in 2017 stood at 46 according to the FBI.

This numbers comes from Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post. The Washington Post keeps a database of police killings for 2015 to 2017. Also the Fatal Interactions with Police Study (FIPS) database includes details on about 1,700 fatal interactions with police that occurred in jurisdictions across the United States during a 20-month time period from May 2013 to January 2015.

Darkness and Light

In this 1½ hour masterpiece, produced as part of the 1996 "American Masters Series." we are immersed in the world of legendary portrait photographer, Richard Avedon.

Richard Avedon was an American fashion and portrait photographer. An obituary published in The New York Times said that "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century"

From the 1996 American Masters Series

Larry Harvey

Larry Harvey and Jerry James burned the first Man on San Francisco's Baker Beach on the Summer Solstice, June 21, 1986.

Larry died Saturday in San Francisco after suffering a massive stroke on April 4. He was 70.

I went for the first time in 2013 and today pretty much everything in my life right now is a result of Burning Man.

“We don’t use the trademark to market anything. It’s our identity.”

— Larry Harvey

Black Rock City LLC Founders Will Roger Peterson, Crimson Rose, Michael Mikel, Larry Harvey, Harley K. Dubois, and Marian Goodell

Larry was born on Jan. 11, 1948, and adopted as an infant by Author Harvey and the former Katherine Langford. His parents were farmers near Portland, Ore., and his father also worked as a carpenter. In an article that Mr. Harvey wrote for The Independent in 2014, he said that he and his brother, Stewart, who was also adopted, “felt like exchange students: Everyone treated us well, but we didn’t quite fit.”

Rural life did not suit him, and his parents were not exactly spiritual adventurers. “The heart can really expire under those conditions,” Larry told Inc. magazine in 2012. “I always felt like I was looking at the world from the outside.”

This year’s theme is: I, Robot.

Burning Man 2017 with more than 70,000 people celebrating.

An Orwellian world

It is now clear that data has been taken from Facebook users without their consent and was then processed by a third party and used to support their campaigns. Facebook knew about this, and the involvement of Cambridge Analytica with it.

Christopher Wylie, who worked for data firm Cambridge Analytica, reveals how personal information was taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. At the time the company was owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Donald Trump’s key adviser, Steve Bannon.

Yes, it’s time for Mark Zuckerberg to stop hiding behind his Facebook page and fix the problem or his company will get prosecuted and maybe closed down, I guess.

Christopher Wylie is the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”. According to Christopher .

Meanwhile the number of cameras in China is at 176 million today, with a plan to have 450 million installed by 2020. One hundred percent of Beijing is now blanketed by surveillance cameras, according to the Beijing Public Safety Bureau. The Chinese government gathers an enormous collection of information through the video cameras placed on your street and all over your city.

While the Chinese government has long scrutinized individual citizens for evidence of disloyalty to the regime, only now is it beginning to develop comprehensive, constantly updated, and granular records on each citizen’s political persuasions, comments, associations, and even consumer habits. The new social credit system under development will consolidate reams of records from private companies and government bureaucracies into a single “citizen score” for each Chinese citizen.

However, a state-run, party-inspired, data-driven monitoring system poses profound questions for the West about the role of private companies in government surveillance. Is it ethical for private companies to assist in massive surveillance and turn over their data to the government? Alibaba (China’s Amazon) and Tencent (owner of the popular messaging platform WeChat) possess sweeping data on each Chinese citizen that the government would have to mine to calculate scores.

In order to comply with a recently enacted Chinese law, Apple will begin migrating China-based iCloud accounts to its new Chinese data center next month. The facility is operated by Guizhou-Cloud BIg Data, which is supervised by Guizhou State government.

Although Chinese companies now are required to assist in government spying while U.S. companies are "not", it is possible to imagine Amazon in Alibaba’s position, or Facebook in place of Tencent?

Meanwhile check out this recent movie, it’s a little bit melodramatic but has some serious people telling some scary stuff...

First precision medicine

New drug that is first to treat cancer based on genetics, not location.

Last May, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it had approved Keytruda, an immunotherapy, for patients who have genetic glitches in so-called “mismatch repair” genes. Mutations in these genes mean their cells don’t fully repair errors in DNA. That can trigger cancer, but it also makes their tumors particularly susceptible to drugs like Keytruda, which is marketed by Merck.

Precision medicine is the idea that medical treatments should be personalized to an individual’s genetic makeup, or other information about them. But up until now, cancer therapies have all been approved to treat cancer based on where it is located, such as in the breast or lung.

Keytruda itself costs around $150,000 a year.

We don't even realize something is broken until we are hit by one

It’s hard to believe how far we’ve come. Killer drone & articial intelligence brings us to future. Autonomous weapon bans (previously) are currently being debated, but in the meantime, the US Department of Defense continues work with its Perdix Micro-Drone project. Ostensibly for surveillance, it's clear these could easily be modded with lethal weaponry.

But this what we might have in some years; AI-powered tactics facial recognition, smart swarms of drones:

Back to today... Due to the complex nature of combat, Perdix are not pre-programmed synchronized individuals, they are a collective organism, sharing one distributed brain for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in nature,” said SCO Director William Roper. “Because every Perdix communicates and collaborates with every other Perdix, the swarm has no leader and can gracefully adapt to drones entering or exiting the team.”

The demonstration is one of the first examples of the Pentagon using teams of small, inexpensive, autonomous systems to perform missions once achieved only by large, expensive ones. Roper stressed the department’s conception of the future battle network is one where humans will always be in the loop. Machines and the autonomous systems being developed by the DoD, such as the micro-drones, will empower humans to make better decisions faster.

F/A-18 Super Hornets deploy the drones, which can then perform a series of tactical maneuvers based on post-launch commands.

This shows a tests of autonomous systems under development by the Department of Defense, the Strategic Capabilities Office, partnering with Naval Air Systems Command, successfully demonstrated one of the world’s largest micro-drone swarms at China Lake, California.

The Wild Horses of the American West

The wild horses of the American west are able to survive because of this idea of public land.

There are seventy-three thousand wild horses roaming the American West. Their federally designated territory, which is overseen by the Bureau of Land Management (B.L.M.), extends across ten states, although most of it, nearly sixteen million acres, is concentrated in Nevada.

Last July, the House Appropriations Committee authorized an amendment to the Interior Department’s 2018 budget that would allow the B.L.M. to kill many of the animals in its care. At the time, the amendment’s author, a Utah Republican named Chris Stewart, wrote that the “alternative for these horses is starving in the wild.” Four months later, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a competing proposal that would give the B.L.M. additional funding to explore “a range of humane and politically viable options,” including contraception, to “drastically reduce” horse populations. President Trump’s proposed 2018 budget, meanwhile, calls for cuts to the B.L.M.’s existing program; it would allow the horses to be sold to any buyer, including those who would ship the animals to abattoirs in Mexico and Canada.

The earliest known ancestor to modern horses, Hyracotherium, emerged in North America some fifty million years ago. Today the United States is home to 9.2 million wild and domesticated horses. Upwards of 50,000 of these horses are Mustangs – wild horses descended from domesticated breeds brought to North America by Spanish settlers in the 1500s. These wild horses have since become a symbol for freedom and independence in the American West. 

“To see a multigenerational herd gallop across the high-desert hinterland is to understand, in an instant, why all that open space exists”

— Laura Leigh

If yo're a globetrotter challenging Mother Nature, this is worth reading.

Travel insurance is affordable for a few weeks, but stretched out over a month or more, begins to cost a fortune. Memberships are not cheap either, but an annual Global Rescue or Ripcord plan is well worth the cost if you travel far, or participate in higher risk pursuits. The added expense of a two-way communication device is another factor to consider.

Read the excellent article by Christophe Noel here this could save your life. And get a inReach satellite communicator from Garmin,

I Stopped Using Google - I Was Tired of Google Tracking Me

I consciously made the decision to stop using Google, partly as an experiment and partly because I thought (and still think) it’s a good idea. Google is an awesome tool for answer many questions, I knew there were more private, more reliable, and simply better resources on the internet.

I was tired of Google tracking me, awhile ago I checked my Google activity, only to be slightly disturbed at the amount of information I found in there.

I found private search engines that still find what I was looking for, without the tracking:

• DuckDuckGo  -  This is the most popular and well-known of the privacy focused search engines.

• Search Encrypt — This search engine use excellent “encryption” features and expiring search history but it is a browser extension for Chrome and I was leaving Google.

Bing and Search Encrypt’s in-line video viewers are much better alternatives to Google’s list view. Bing’s filter and search refinement is also more user-friendly than Google’s video feed.

Google Is Everywhere

Log out of your Google account on all your devices, if possible, and start using search engines that protect your privacy. You will soon notice how many ways you’ve been interacting with Google and not even noticing. The ads you see on websites won’t show the exact thing you just searched for. Your phone will stop suggesting directions to the specific place you were about to go.

Yeah, I haven't decided for Facebook yet, what to do...