We talked about the Trump trial in the Senate. We knew that there would not be a two thirds vote in the Senate to convict him. We talked about the seven republicans who did vote to find Trump guilty. Some of them have been censured by their state Republican Parties. Mitch McConnell was a sniveling coward through the whole thing.
We talked about the space probes getting to Mars. Last week the United Arab Emirates got their probe into orbit around Mars. They'll be tweaking the orbit of that spacecraft over time. This past week NASA's Perseverance spacecraft, with the Ingenuity helicopter attached to it, landed in Jazero crater on Mars.
We talked about river deltas and how if life did exist on Mars it would probably not have lasted long enough to start growing things like bones. It took a long time for multicellular organisms to evolve on Earth, and the conditions conducive to life did not last that long on Mars. We also digressed a little bit to talk about the Oklo nuclear reactor that operated in west Africa a very long time ago.
We talked about climate change and how it's been impacting Texas lately. A lot of people in Texas seem to back politicians who say they don't believe that climate change is happening. We wondered how many Texans have changed their minds about that now.
In other climate change news we talked about something that had not been expected to happen with climate change: a small crab is starting to change the coastline of the eastern seaboard so much that the changes are already visible from space!
If you want to do something to protect your privacy while using regular browsers, like Firefox, you can check out NOSCRIPT which gives you more control over what Web sites can learn about you.
Search engines help us to find things on the World Wide Web. Most search engines exist not to help you find things but to allow the companies that provide the search service to data mine your searches and then sell your search history to clients so they can spam you. An alternative to getting your privacy compromised is to use the DuckDuckGo search engine.
If you'd like to keep your browsing history private you can get yourself the Tor Browser. Using the DuckDuckGo search engine is automatic with the Tor Browser, and by accessing the DuckDuckGo search engine from the Tor Browser you are pretty much guaranteed that no one can trace searches back to you.
Gnu Privacy Guard can help you to encrypt your data and preserve your privacy.
For those who need some help getting started with Gnu Privacy Guard there is Gentle GPG which does a lot of the work for you.
For the somewhat more advanced user who wants to protect his or her privacy there is the Tails OS. Tails is a live operating system that you can start on almost any computer from a USB flash drive or a DVD. It allows you to use any computer that will allow you to boot up off a USB flash drive or a DVD and it provides a lot of good security for your on-line activities. You can get it here.