literature.cafe

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/23281862

https://t.me/Kyivpost_official/27009

Today, St. Nicholases in Ukraine look like this❄️

On December 6, Ukraine marks St. Nicholas Day, but it is little more than a quiet reminder.

Celebrations and traditions have been overshadowed, as the war still ongoing, leaving no space for festivity.

Despite its name, The 1918 'Spanish' flu pandemic is thought to have first originated in the US. Now it seems history may be close to repeating itself. Throughout 2024 the H5N1 Bird Flu virus has been spreading among US cow herds and is now found in over 500 herds in 15 states. If it spreads to pig herds that is an even bigger problem. Historically, influenza in pigs has been much more likely to cause the genetic recombinations that create human-to-human transmissible diseases.

There's good news, and bad news.

The good news is that mRNA vaccines, in time, should be able to combat any human transmissible strain that arises - though it may take another global lockdown before they are developed and manufactured.

The bad news is that the human mortality rate could be much higher than Covid or Spanish flu. Some variants of H5N1 humans have picked up from animals seem to have near 50% mortality rates. We won't know if we get a milder version until/if it happens.

The worst news? Stopping this spreading to US pig herds will require extraordinary care and vigilance from numerous government public health agencies and everyone working on farms. Just at the moment the public have voted to put clowns in charge of those efforts, who are also talking about shutting them all down. Hubris like this almost begs to be punished by disaster.

Mirror

https://t.me/TCH_channel/162259

https://t.me/vitaliy_klitschko/3837

Today, according to tradition - on the day of St. Nicholas, lights on the country's main Christmas tree were lit on Sofia Square in the capital.

Our Christmas tree, like last year, is artificial and 15 meters tall (last year's was 12 meters). But this year it is snow-white. It was re-installed and decorated at the expense of patrons.

The pure white color of the Christmas tree symbolizes the beginning of a bright and clean path, reminding us of the renewal that Christmas and the New Year bring.

A light blue garland 2 km long enveloped the tree in a gentle glow. It is decorated with 2 thousand turquoise toys.

Such a symbolic design is combined with the majestic facade of Sophia of Kyiv, creating a magical atmosphere. 

Next to the Christmas tree there will be a beautiful and also symbolic photo zone - "Wings of the Phoenix".

Happy Saint Nicholas Day everyone! Strength, optimism and may miracles happen! 

We work, help, support our soldiers! All together!

Glory to Ukraine!

Archived

It's not just Microsoft and Crowdstrike: Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure giant, experienced a major outage on November 14th, resulting in the irreversible loss of over half of its log data. The outage, which lasted for 3.5 hours, stemmed from a faulty software update that crippled the company’s log service, preventing it from delivering crucial data to customers.

Log services are essential for network operations, allowing businesses to analyze traffic patterns, troubleshoot issues, and detect malicious activity. Cloudflare’s log service, which processes massive volumes of data, relies on a tool called Logpush to package and deliver this information to customers.

However, an update to Logpush on November 14th contained a critical error. As Cloudflare explained in their incident report, the update failed to instruct auxiliary tools to forward the collected logs, leading to a situation where logs were gathered but never delivered. This data was subsequently erased from the cache, resulting in permanent loss.

“A misconfiguration in one part of the system caused a cascading overload in another part of the system, which was itself misconfigured. Had it been properly configured, it could have prevented the loss of logs,” Cloudflare stated in their report.

While engineers quickly identified the flaw and rolled back the update, this triggered a cascading failure. The system was flooded with an overwhelming influx of log data, including data from users who hadn’t even configured Logpush, further exacerbating the issue.

Cloudflare has issued an apology for the incident and the permanent loss of user data.

In case you are wondering he has developed an allergy to something in his food and is currently brutally scratching his fur off. We are currently experimenting on which food works and which doesn't

If you could stand on Mars -- what might you see? You might look out over a vast orange landscape covered with rocks under a dusty orange sky, with a blue-tinted Sun over the horizon, and odd-shaped water clouds hovering high overhead. This was just the view captured last March by NASA's rolling explorer, Perseverance. The orange coloring is caused by rusted iron in the Martian dirt, some of which is small enough to be swept up by winds into the atmosphere. The blue tint near the rising Sun is caused by blue light being preferentially scattered out from the Sun by the floating dust. The light-colored clouds on the right are likely composed of water-ice and appear high in the Martian atmosphere. The shapes of some of these clouds are unusual for Earth and remain a topic of research.

Source

Summary

Nearly 100 former national security officials expressed alarm over Trump’s nomination of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence due to her past alignment with Russian and Syrian officials and lack of experience.

In a letter, they urged Senate committees to hold closed-door hearings to assess her qualifications and review any government-held information about her.

Critics highlighted her controversial 2017 trip to Syria to meet Bashar al-Assad and her questioning of U.S. intelligence.

Gabbard’s spokesperson dismissed the criticism as partisan attacks, while the Senate confirmation process is expected to be contentious.