Bits: Revising history; Detecting alien intelligence; Breaking the rule of law down

The Daily Beast writes: 

Middle school students in Florida will soon be taught that slavery gave Black people a “personal benefit” because they “developed skills.”

After the Florida Board of Education approved new standards for African American history on Wednesday, high school students will be taught an equally distorted message: that a deadly white mob attack against Black residents of Ocoee, Florida, in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

Dozens of Black residents were killed in the massacre, which was perpetrated to stop them from voting.

Apparently fighting back in self-defense when being physically attacked is equivalent to the attackers attacking for no good reason other than racism. The revisionists say that Blacks did commit violence in the incident. Notice the blatant bad faith in the reasoning the radical right racists rely on to defend the indefensible? If the attacked Black people had not tried to defend themselves, there would be no need to revise history by equating the unjustifiable violence of the White attackers with justified violence of the Black defenders.

This exemplifies just how mendacious, bigoted and cynical America's radical right elites have become.

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The ongoing SETI project reports an improved method to detect alien intelligence in the Milky Way galaxy (the original research paper is here). Before this, if a suspected radio signal looked like it was from an an alien source, a radio telescope in Earth would need to go back and listen to the same spot several times to confirm the signal was not from Earth. By looking at radio sources at least 10,000 light years away from Earth, radio signals travelling through space itself are affected in a detectable way. This phenomenon is akin to stars appearing to twinkle due to starlight passing through the atmosphere. Stars viewed from space do not twinkle. Radio waves passing through enough space do twinkle or "scintillate".

In a significant advancement for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have devised a new technique for detecting potential alien radio signals. This technique involves analyzing signals for signs of having traversed interstellar space, thereby ruling out Earth-based radio interference.

Today’s SETI searches largely rely on Earth-based radio telescopes, which are susceptible to terrestrial and satellite radio interference. False signals, which mimic technosignatures from extraterrestrial civilizations, could come from a variety of sources, including Starlink satellites, cellphones, microwaves, and even car engines. This kind of interference has created false hopes since the inception of the first dedicated SETI program in 1960.

Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia

The new method scrutinizes signals for signs of having traversed through interstellar space, hence eliminating the possibility of the signal being mere Earth-based radio interference.

Graduate student Brian Brzycki developed a computer algorithm, available as a Python script, that analyzes the scintillation of narrowband signals and plucks out those that dim and brighten over periods of less than a minute, indicating they’ve passed through the interstellar medium [ISM]. [Earth-based radio signals dim and brighten over periods of more than a minute]

64-meter Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia

The technique will be useful only for signals that originate more than about 10,000 light years from Earth, since a signal must travel through enough of the ISM to exhibit detectable scintillation. Anything originating nearby — the BLC-1 signal, for example, seemed to be coming from our nearest star, Proxima Centauri — would not exhibit this effect.

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 The WaPo writes:

Alabama legislature passes redistricting maps 

that Democrats say defy court order

The Republican-led House and Senate in Alabama approved dueling congressional maps Wednesday that would increase the percentage of Black voters in the state’s 2nd District — but not by enough, Democrats argued, to comply with a federal court order to create two districts in the state with at least close to a majority-Black population.

The legislature is in special session this week following a Supreme Court opinion in June that found lawmakers previously drew districts that unlawfully dilute the political power of its Black residents in violation of the Voting Rights Act. While Black people make up about 27 percent of Alabama’s population, only one of the state’s seven districts is currently majority-Black.

The unanimous three-judge panel of the federal court, which includes two appointees of former president Donald Trump, has given the legislature until Friday to come up with a new map. The two chambers will need to reconcile their plans to meet that deadline.

No matter how many times the courts slap the radical racists down, they refuse to comply with court orders in good faith.

This exemplifies just how authoritarian and brutally cynical toward the rule of law and free and fair elections that America's bigoted radical right elites have become.