Kevin Williams writing for Heatmap:

with an adapter that allows its cord to be plugged into any NEMA 14-50 outlet, common at RV parks and campsites all across the country.

I had never used one before, but it was stupendously simple at a nearby campground. I didn’t need a cellphone to open an app to connect to the charger and start my session. I just plugged in the car like I would my iPhone.

Charging wasn’t blisteringly fast — but it wasn’t slow either. Since the car and the cord are both self-limited to avoid overheating the power source, it maxed out at 9.6kW per hour. That’s not the 19.2 kW speeds the car is capable of, but it’s still very good, and stronger than the 6.6 kW found at many level 2 public chargers. Even considering the Lucid Air’s large 118 kWh battery, the rate I was charging would have been enough to go from about 15% to more than 80% overnight. An EV with a smaller battery could no doubt recharge completely in a shorter amount of time – the 9.6 KW supplied by that Lucid cord surpasses the AC charging speeds of some modern EVs.

The plug is not unique to Lucid either. Many EVs come standard with mobile charging cords that are capable of matching (or getting pretty darn close to) the maximum AC charging speeds the vehicle is capable of. If they aren’t supplied, it’s not hard to find a portable EVSE that can do so, for a few hundred dollars.

The key thing is that NEMA 14-50 standard outlet.

Couldn’t agree more - charging should be as simple as plugging in your toaster.

ExxonMobil anti-EV ad signals an end to the partnership between oil companies & American carmakers. The oil companies were happy to play along and pretend they were on board with EV adoption as long as it helped their public image and EV car sales were a niche maket. With the major car makers now pushing EVs, consumers buying EVs and the federal government mandating EVs - they are back to climate denial and protecting their revenues.

Amy Westervelt reporting for The New Republic:

“This ad illustrates the regressive shift from excessive greenwash back to blatant climate denial,” Christine Arena, a former advertising executive, told me. In the 2010s, Arena helped the fossil fuel industry greenwash its product as a V.P. at Edelman; since then, she has been called upon to testify about oil companies’ advertising tactics in congressional hearings. “High on war profits, Exxon is done pretending to be advancing climate solutions. By celebrating oil as freedom and condemning clean energy as a kind of captivity, it demonstrates the classic propaganda tactic of warping the truth and cloaking its polluting product in a universally accepted ideal.”

Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe and former federal judge J. Michael Luttig explain their argument on the disqualification of Donald Trump for the presidency, citing Section 3, Article 14th of the Constitution.

Wake up, Mr. Trump. It’s not up to you. It’s upto to the Supreme Court of the United States reviewing what the secretaries of state determine and they take an oath uphold the Constitution. And the Constitution tells them that an insurrectionist who tried to overturn the country’s constitution cannot be entrusted with protecting it in the future. So stay tuned. This is going to to be a saga that lasts between now and the election.

Laurence H. Tribe and J. Michael Luttig in The Atlantic:

The historically unprecedented federal and state indictments of former President Donald Trump have prompted many to ask whether his conviction pursuant to any or all of these indictments would be either necessary or sufficient to deny him the office of the presidency in 2024.

Having thought long and deeply about the text, history, and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause for much of our professional careers, both of us concluded some years ago that, in fact, a conviction would be beside the point. The disqualification clause operates independently of any such criminal proceedings and, indeed, also independently of impeachment proceedings and of congressional legislation. The clause was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup.

The former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol, place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again. The most pressing constitutional question facing our country at this moment, then, is whether we will abide by this clear command of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause.

Indeed, there are only two outcomes here - Congress will enforce our Constitution or the United States will be exposed as just another banana republic.

Strap in, the next few months are going to be … interesting.

In a Gallup poll on the perceived safety of 16 US cities, Republicans were 29% less likely to rate cities as safe compared to Democrats. In 2006, the gap was only 2%. An entire generation of voters brainwashed by Fox News.

Guitar playing according to Jimmy Page:

Dynamics. Light and shade. Whisper to the thunder. Sort of invite you in, intoxicating. The thing that fascinates me about the six string is that everyone has a different approach. They all play in a different way. And you know, there personality comes through.

Here is how I like to think of Page’s ‘personality’:

1. Paint a picture of a forest in the mind of the listener
2. Fill that forest with woodland creatures
3. Burn it to the fucking ground

Wildfires, floods, record temperatures, record drought, “unprecedented”, “uncharted territory”. The effects of climate change are now impossible to miss. So now what?

Serge Schmemann’s opinion piece in The New York Times - ‘It Is No Longer Possible to Escape What We Have Done to Ourselves’.

Joy Reid on Donald Trump’s arrest and mugshot:

This case, and I think Fani Willis is a hero. She is a national hero. Because she more than any prosecutor in this country, and and I respect Jack Smith, I respect all the prosecutors that are doing this - she is the only one who said these wealthy, powerful, privileged men and women are just American citizens. And when they break the law they will take that picture.

US presidential historian Michael Beschloss on the significance of Donald Trump’s booking at the Fulton county jail:

The moral of the story is in 1960, this great iconic champion of of human rights, of civil rights, of voting rights being stopped in this jail so he couldn’t keep on his work expanding those rights. Here we are in 2023, a guy who is about as far as close to the opposite of Dr. King as I can think of is Donal Trump. And Donald Trump is the oponent of those civil rights and human rights and voting rights. And he proved that in what he tried to do in Georgia. Thank God he’s brought to justice. And where is it happening? The Fulton County jail. You know, life has turned around, the cycle has turned. As Dr. King, I think, would say the arc of the moral universe maybe long, but tonight it seems to be, at least in Fulton county, bending toward justice.

Seems to be. I wouldn’t say it is complete until we see Donald J Trump in an orange jump suit and shackles being hauled into jail.

You don’t need to go digging for ancient fossils to see evolution in action. Vox posted a video demonstrating things that humans don’t need to survive anymore still hanging around on our bodies, including unnecessary arm muscles and vestigial tail bones.

The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office has released a mug shot of former President Donald Trump. Jail records show Trump was placed under arrest and booked as inmate No. P01135809.

Trump’s surrender in Georgia marks the fourth time this year the former president has turned himself in to local or federal officials after criminal charges were brought against him. No matter what happens in next years election, this is how Donald J. Trump will be remembered by history.

This mugshot will be his legacy.

Eric Seufert writing on Threads:

Twitter has seen a dramatic decrease in its Top Downloaded chart position across both platforms since the app was renamed to X. Why? The situation presents a fascinating case study at the intersection of brand equity and mobile platform dynamics.

The case is somewhat unprecedented: Twitter built a ubiquitous, household-name brand over the course of nearly 2 decades and then simply abandoned it, leaving it to be exploited by competitors, unopposed, through the mobile platforms’ branded search ads.

[…]

My hypothesis is that, while the terminally-online are entirely aware of Twitter’s rebrand to X, most consumers aren’t, and their searches for “Twitter” on platform stores surface ads and genuine search results that are in no way redolent of Twitter.

How do you throw away two decades of branding and expect no disruption to your product? I really don’t understand this trend (HBOMax just changed to Max), seems like the marketing departments are bored and need something to do.

From the BBC Computer Literacy Project:

In the 1980s, the BBC explored the world of computing in The Computer Literacy Project. They commissioned a home computer (the BBC Micro) and taught viewers how to program.

The Computer Literacy Project chronicled a decade of information technology and was a milestone in the history of computing in Britain, helping to inspire a generation of coders.

This site contains all 146 of the original Computer Literacy Project programmes plus 121 related programmes, broken down into 2,509 categorised, searchable clips.

This was a pretty amazing 10 year long show, we had nothing like it growing up in the US. The closest we had was the The Computer Chronicles on PBS, though that was more geared to the business side of things. This episode is a great run down on the different languages of the time and does a great explanation of the difference and basics of each.

Its amazing how most of those are still in use today - I have used C, FORTH, Pascal, BASIC in my professional career as a software developer. Never did get the point of Logo or why it was a default when teaching young children to code.

It is sad that kids do not have anything close to this available to them today.

The Computer History Museum, with the permission of Apple, has made available the original program source code of MacPaint and the underlying QuickDraw graphics library.

MacPaint is the drawing program application which interacts with the user, interprets mouse and keyboard requests, and decides what is to be drawn where. The high-level logic is written in Apple Pascal, packaged in a single file with 5,822 lines. There are an additional 3,583 lines of code in assembler language for the underlying Motorola 68000 microprocessor, which implement routines needing high performance and some interfaces to the operating system.

[…]

In writing MacPaint, Bill was as concerned with whether human readers would understand the code as he was with what the computer would do with it. He later said about software in general, “It’s an art form, like any other art form… I would spend time rewriting whole sections of code to make them more cleanly organized, more clear. I’m a firm believer that the best way to prevent bugs is to make it so that you can read through the code and understand exactly what it’s doing… And maybe that was a little bit counter to what I ran into when I first came to Apple… If you want to get it smooth, you’ve got to rewrite it from scratch at least five times.”¹

MacPaint was finished in October 1983. It coexisted in only 128K of memory with QuickDraw and portions of the operating system, and ran on an 8 Mhz processor that didn’t have floating-point operations. Even with those meager resources, MacPaint provided a level of performance and function that established a new standard for personal computers.

Summer reading for everyone’s inner geek.

These classic movie posters from Michal Krasnopolski are all based on a simple grid of a circle, a square, and four intersecting lines:

Here are some of my some of my favorite movies:

On August 15th, 1998, Apple released its bet the company product, the iMac. In the 25 years since then, the iMac has been a core product in Apple’s lineup and influenced many other products, both inside and outside the company.

Umar Shakir runs through the history of Apple’s iconic desktop computer.

If you’re looking for the true renaissance of the all-in-one computer, it came in 1998 with the release of the colorful and fun-tastically transparent iMac.

Since then, the iMac has become one of the most popular desktop computer lines ever. The design has evolved from bulbous cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitor all-in-ones to versions that look like contemporary table lamps — and eventually toward the slim aluminum plaques on stands that adorn doctor offices everywhere today. Alongside that, the tech inside has gone from PowerPC chips to x86 Intel processors and, now, to the Arm-based Apple Silicon design.

In 2011, The Verge’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, wrote in a review for the 27-inch iMac, “Every year I review the iMac, and every year my conclusion is the same: the iMac remains the single best all-in-one computer available.”

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talks with Rachel Maddow about her feelings about the indictments and accusations Donald Trump is facing:

Think what you will about Hillary Clinton - but how she doesn’t go on air on every major news outlet and just scream “I told you so!” is beyond me.

Hillary Clinton deserved to be our first women POTUS.

Jason Morris, Marshall Cohen and Curt Merrill reporting for CNN:

Former President Donald Trump and 18 of his allies were indicted Monday on Georgia state charges in connection with their attempts to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State.

These state charges were brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, an elected Democrat who has been investigating Trump’s interference in the election since early 2021.

With this latest indictment in Fulton County - he now faces a whopping 91 criminal counts. To paraphrase his supporters:

Lock him up! Lock him up!

Michael A. Fletcher reporting for ESPN:

The 14-page petition, filed in Shelby County, Tennessee, probate court, alleges that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, who took Oher into their home as a high school student, never adopted him. Instead, less than three months after Oher turned 18 in 2004, the petition says, the couple tricked him into signing a document making them his conservators, which gave them legal authority to make business deals in his name.

The petition further alleges that the Tuohys used their power as conservators to strike a deal that paid them and their two birth children millions of dollars in royalties from an Oscar-winning film that earned more than $300 million, while Oher got nothing for a story “that would not have existed without him.” In the years since, the Tuohys have continued calling the 37-year-old Oher their adopted son and have used that assertion to promote their foundation as well as Leigh Anne Tuohy’s work as an author and motivational speaker.

“The lie of Michael’s adoption is one upon which Co-Conservators Leigh Anne Tuohy and Sean Tuohy have enriched themselves at the expense of their Ward, the undersigned Michael Oher,” the legal filing says. “Michael Oher discovered this lie to his chagrin and embarrassment in February of 2023, when he learned that the Conservatorship to which he consented on the basis that doing so would make him a member of the Tuohy family, in fact provided him no familial relationship with the Tuohys.”

If these allegations are true - the Tuohy family were ‘boosters’ as charged in the movie by the NCAA investigator. Still doesn’t change the fact that “The Blind Side” was a great movie.

A judge in Montana ruled with a group of young activists that the state violated their right to a “clean and healthful environment”. Corryn Wetzel in New Scientist:

Young people’s constitutional right in Montana to a “clean and healthful environment” was protected in a landmark decision Monday.

A court ruled that the state’s environmental policies have failed to protect children from climate change. The ruling pushes against a new Montana state law – the Montana Environmental Policy Act – that prohibits considering the climate impact of future energy projects, including those involving fossil fuels and mining.

“By prohibiting analysis of [greenhouse gas] emissions and corresponding impacts to the climate… the [Montana Environmental Policy Act] Limitation violates Youth Plaintiffs’ right to a clean and healthful environment and is unconstitutional on its face,” wrote District Judge Kathy Seeley, who ruled in favour of the plaintiffs.

It is crazy that there is a law prohibiting even looking into greenhouse emissions and their impacts on the environment is on the books. The activism of the younger generation gives me hope for the future.