This critical law saves millions of birds' lives each year.
May 24, 2018 -- National Audubon Society has filed suit against the Department of the Interior, challenging its move to eliminate longstanding protections for waterfowl, raptors, and songbirds under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA). Read the press release here.
Read the full text of National Audubon Society v. U.S. Department of the Interior.
The Migratory Bird Treaty Act is America's most important bird protection law. Passed in 1918 with the support of Audubon advocates and other early conservationists, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) protects nearly all of our country's native birds. The law carries out the 1916 Migratory Bird Treaty with Canada, and later treaties signed with Mexico, Japan, and Russia, in order to protect our nation's shared bird species. The MBTA is credited with saving numerous species from extinction, such as the Snowy Egret, Wood Duck, and Sandhill Crane, and millions, if not billions of other birds.
Yet, even as we celebrate 100 years of the law in 2018—the Year of the Bird—the MBTA has come under attack. The Trump administration announced an interpretation of the MBTA that would give a free pass for all bird deaths from industrial activities, and similar legislative proposals have been advanced in Congress.
To help defend the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, read on below to find links with more information, read our one-pager on how the MBTA and industry can work together, or check out our fact sheet. Visit our action page to write to Congress and the administration, and consider writing a Letter to the Editor of your local paper.
Join us as we work to keep birds safe now, and for the future.


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Q: Can a virus scanner show there is virus but actually not? I saw a specific program has this explanation for some of the virus scans showing it is a virus:
Virus scanner results: All virus scanner detection's are a false-positive as long as the MD5 matches. Simply turn off your anti-virus while installing this program.
Does it make sense? what does it mean by "as long as md5 matches"?

A: Windows loaders are dodgy - they basically do the same kind of thing viruses do to convince windows its genuine. In this case it might be convincing the system it has some hardware it dosen't or even deeper, root-kit like behaviour.
In short, it could be a virus and the AV is working as is.
What they are telling you is "you can check to see the thing that may or may not be poison is exactly what we are saying it is" - an md5 sum is a unique-ish identifier of a file made by calculating a checksum, and is used to verify that a file isn't corrupted.
I'd also point out, a windows loader means you're pirating software, and there's an inherent legal and technical risk to it. Its your own fault if you get a virus since its the free candy van of software.

A: Virus scanners can in fact have false positives, and blindly deleting everything it brings up isn't necessarily a good idea. If a program explicitly says it will trip off your virus scanner but is perfectly legitimate, there are two possibilities:

*

*It is in fact an innocent program that just happens to clash with
your antivirus, which happens

*It's a trick to install a virus on your machine

"md5" refers to an md5 sum. It's something used to make sure a file was downloaded correctly or is actually the file it seems to be. There's probably an md5 sum wherever you downloaded the file that you can check against the program to verify it's valid. Basically the program is saying "This program is legitimate, unless somebody changed it to take advantage of the fact they knew people would need to shut off their virus scanners to use it, so check that this is the real deal". It's actually more commonly used just to make sure things didn't get corrupted during downloads.
EDIT: The first random guide to checking an MD5 sum I found in my search, if you're worried. If the sum you get from the application matches the one from the source and you're sure that the source is reputable, you're probably okay. Probably about 99% of the time this isn't actually necessary but it only takes a minute and it's a good practice.
EDIT: I'd just like to stress the "you're sure that the source is reputable" bit - if you got it off some shady site somewhere, it may well be a virus. Get it from the homepage or a link on the homepage if you can. If the group that created the file is shady, it may well be a virus.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


The Blended Blog ladies and all our linker-uppers knocked last week's graduation looks out of the park!!!! What a gorgeous bunch!!!
The shirt has navy stripes so that counts right?
I'd typically dress a little more casual than this and looking at the pics, the stripes on the shirt are making me dizzy lol. Not sure this will be going on repeat.


These Kendamas have been beautifully crafted from pale seasoned beech wood.
Beautifully created from pale seasoned beech wood, the Sunrise Kendama is almost identical to the popular TK-16 model with both sharing the same balance, weight and dimensions.
Height including ball (tama): 185mm approx.


Answer: No problem. But we'll need to make some assumptions (and do a little math).
Its a standard beeswax candle, similar to what you put inside pumpkins on Halloween.
The candle has been burning long enough to get the wax melting, and it's putting out maximum light.
It's totally dark, with no competing lights to affect your vision.
The air is very clear, with no suspended dust or water vapor.
Your eyes are dark-adapted, and your pupils are fully dilated.
Let's first get a handle on just how much light a candle puts out. A burning candle is converting chemical energy into heat and light at a rate of about 80 watts (80 joules/second). But it's obviously not as bright as an 80 watt bulb. This is because candles are very inefficient light sources. Most of that 80 watts is heat, with only about 5 watts of actual light. That amount of light is comparable to a typical Christmas tree bulb.
P is the power of the candle (5 watts), λ is the wavelength (5.7 × 10-7 m), h is Planck's constant (6.6 × 10-34 J·s), and c is the speed of light (3 × 108 m/s). When you run all those numbers through your calculator, you'll discover the candle emits an astonishing 1.4 × 1019 photons of light every second.
Is that enough to "see?" An experiment done at Columbia University in 1941 found that only 5-15 photons were required to experience the sensation of visible light in 50% of the subjects tested. But that was under ideal conditions: the light was aimed at the most sensitive part of the retina, it was blue-green light with λ = 510 nm (the color to which the human eye is most responsive), and the light was transmitted as a brief flash in a totally darkened room.
But even clear air will scatter some of the light before it reaches your eye. The greater the distance, the greater the loss. And we've made other simplifying assumptions. We ignored atmospheric refraction. We also assumed a candle only emits yellow light, but much of its light is in the orange-red wavelength range, to which the human eye is less responsive.
If we ignore these other factors, as we have done, we must temper our interpretation of the results. That's why working the calculation backward from "5-15 photons" (call it "10" for calculation purposes) to find the candle visibility distance yields an unbelievable result of R = 2.4 billion miles. What we did here is called a "first order" (i.e., "rough") calculation.
Still, the claim you heard in that ad is believable, but you won't need any natural supplements to see a candle 10 miles away (under good conditions). The human eye is amazingly sensitive to light, and can do just fine on its own.
By the way, the arrow in the graphic is not pointing to a "hot pixel" on your screen. That's just my 1-pixel "simulation" of a candle seen from a distance of 10 miles.
* I gratefully acknowledge Terry Toepker, Physics Dept., Xavier University. He noticed that I forgot to square the conversion factor between mm and km. Values marked with an asterisk have been corrected. Good eyes. Thank you sir.
Yes, it would be a linear relationship. This assumes the "rack" of candles are sufficiently distant and are perceived as one combined point of light. In that case, the light flux from all the candles will overlap before reaching your eye, and the number N in the first equation would scale directly with the number of candles. Good question!


text:
Deir ez-Zor (Syrien)
Prof. em. Hartmut Kühne
Johannes Greger
Digitizing the Inventory of the Museum of Deir ez-Zor (Syria)
In a world of conflict, war, looting, and total destruction inventories of immovable, movable, and intangible cultural heritage are indispensable. Over centuries these inventories were written by hand on perishable materials – and often destroyed even if deposited apart of the objects they listed.
Obviously modern digital and illustrated inventories have the advantage that they may be kept at several independent localities and thus be protected from destruction. Furthermore, they can be disseminated quickly to involved authorities and institutions; they are useful identifying and tracing destroyed, looted, or robbed items; and they are an indispensable tool for restoration and reconstruction after the end of any given conflict.
During the past six decades the "Direction Générale des Antiquités et des Musées" (DGAM) of Syria has created an impressive decentralized landscape of Museums. 36 in total number, the National Museums of Damascus, Aleppo, and Palmyra are known worldwide. Unfortunately, numerous Museums have been and still are threatened by destruction and/or looting during the recent years of conflict in Syria. In spite of all adversities the DGAM has done an excellent job protecting the country's cultural heritage. Nevertheless, without digital inventories, efforts to manage, protect and prioritize Syria's heritage, and to deal effectively with future developments are held back. Consequently, DGAM has built up a database of inventories of all Syrian Museums during the past three years.
The National Museum of Deir ez-Zor
One of the decentralized new museums was the one in Deir ez-Zor. Founded in 1974 on the bases of a donation of a private collector it became the focal point of Syrian and international excavations conducted in eastern Syria once the newly constructed building was completed in 1992. In a joint venture of the DGAM and the Freie Universitaet Berlin the permanent exhibition was created, and in May of 1996 the Museum was inaugurated for the public.
When the war in Syria started in 2011 the Museum was closed and the objects displayed in the permanent exhibition were stored in the basement. Since 2013 parts of the city of Deir ez-Zor are controlled by ISIL fighters; the demarcation line between them and the Syrian military forces extends only 200 m of the Museum. In two spectacular actions in 2014 and 2015 DGAM has evacuated thousands of objects from the threatened Museum.
The project and its partners
In 2014 DGAM and Freie Universitaet Berlin agreed to conduct a pilot project digitizing the inventory of the National Museum of Deir ez-Zor. DGAM will digitize the Museum registration book and recently acquired information; the FU-part is based on file cards and other documents saved in Berlin since the cooperation on the permanent exhibition. The German part of this joint venture is sponsored by the Foreign Ministry of Germany. It has been accepted by the "UNESCO-Emergency Safeguarding of the Syrian Cultural Heritage Project"; it cooperates with the "Syrian Heritage Archive Project" (SHA) of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), the ICOM-Comité International pour la Documentation (CIDOC), and with shirin (Syrian Heritage in Danger: an International Research Initiative & Network).
Aims of the project
During the past decades the collection of the National Museum of Deir ez-Zor has been increased massively by items from national and international excavation missions. Essentially the inventory consists of objects which have received a Museum ID and those which have not.
In a first step the data of the 21.867 officially registered objects, that is those which have a Museum ID, are transferred into a database. The denomination of the data fields follows the Object-ID-standard. The aim is to produce an illustrated list with diagnostic data in English and Arabic.
In a second step the database will be complemented by those objects that are kept in the Museum but have not received a Museum ID.
Starting in July 2015
Some of the problems that have to be solved along this way are the compatibility of the used data systems. Therefore, in August and November 2015 two meetings on IT procedures, workflow, and improvement of cooperation were conducted in Berlin. It was decided to apply the Object-ID-standard for international compatibility. Furthermore, the transfer of data will be managed via the XML harvesting schema LIDO for which tools will have to be developed. In the end the target system will be based at the DGAM.
By the end of 2015 the Berlin database contained about 2500 entries; all the available documents, especially photographs had been scanned and digitized.
Program for 2016
It is hoped to produce the illustrated list of the officially registered items in the Museum, that is those objects with a Museum ID. Pioneering the recording of the objects without Museum ID a separate database will be started featuring at first the delivered objects of the excavation of Tell Sheikh Hamad. Last but not least work will start on the development of an export tool for the XML harvesting schema LIDO.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl