Manuel Maria Ponce - Sonata Mexicana

I don't think I've ever highlighted a Mexican composer here, but Cinco de Mayo is a great excuse.  Andres Segovia performs on guitar.

John Prine - My Old Kentucky Home

It is a tradition at the Kentucky Derby for the crowd to sing "My Old Kentucky Home".  It's also a tradition for the crowd not to know any of the lyrics except for weep no more my lady.   It's mumble mumble mumble WEEP NO MORE MY LADY.

So as a public service for this 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, here is the late John Prine with all the lyrics.

Dad Joke CCCXXI

How does a cucumber become a pickle?

It goes through a jarring experience.

First Herculaneum scroll decoded

Now this is cool:

Newly deciphered passages from a papyrus scroll that was buried beneath layers of volcanic ash after the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius may have shed light on the final hours of Plato, a key figure in the history of western philosophy.

In a groundbreaking discovery, the ancient scroll was found to contain a previously unknown narrative detailing how the Greek philosopher spent his last evening, describing how he listened to music played on a flute by a Thracian slave girl.

What's even cooler is that this is one of the carbonized scrolls that people tried to unroll decades ago, causing enormous damage to the scroll.  They were still able to scan it and put it back in order.

 

Happy "Punch A Commie In The Face" Day!

Well, it is.

Starlink grossing $3B a year

Starlink is the satellite Internet service from SpaceX.  You get high speed (200 Mbps) pretty much anywhere on Mother Earth.

Starlink costs $100/month.  They claim that they have 2.4 million subscribers.  The process of Higher Math tells us that they are taking in a quarter Billion dollars a month.

And they're only getting started.

First ships leave port of Baltimore

Still a lot of work to do and restrictions on size and weather conditions, but good news from Baltimore.  

Ring doorbell company fined millions of dollars for privacy violations

Well knock me over with a feather:

The FTC today announced it would be sending refunds totaling $5.6 million to Ring customers, paid from the Amazon subsidiary's coffers.

The windfall stems from allegations made by the US watchdog that folks could have been, and were, spied upon by cybercriminals and rogue Ring workers via their Ring home security cameras.

The regulator last year accused Ring of sloppy privacy protections that allowed the aforementioned spying to occur or potentially occur.

...
 

In the most egregious case, one employee went out of his way to view "thousands of video recordings belonging to at least 81 unique female users," according to the FTC. A coworker reported this behavior to her supervisor, who it's alleged initially said this snooping wasn't that strange until he realized the rogue employee was only reviewing videos of "pretty girls."

The fines work out to $50 per effected Ring customer.  Don't spend it all in one place.