December 15, 2017
Everyone loves a clumsy owl
Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2017 The winners & runners-up in this year’s competition. Treat it like a few minutes of well earned self care.
Bennelong by-election plunges Australia's government into danger
This evening, the Australian government's fate rests with the middle-class, multicultural voters of Bennelong, an electorate covering a handful of suburbs on Sydney's lower north shore [PDF]. If the government loses the seat, they will lose their majority in the House of Representatives and have to govern in minority. Fighting to retain the seat for the Coalition government is incumbent MP John Alexander, former tennis pro, who triggered the byelection by resigning when it was revealed he was a dual British citizen, against the provisions of the Australian Constitution (previously 1 2). Trying to wrest it out of government hands is the high-profile challenger from the main opposition party Labor: American native, Sky News Australia host and former NSW premier Kristina Keneally. There's been many gaffes, much mud thrown and a lot of time, money and effort poured into the campaigns—Labor is widely expected to secure a swing to them of some magnitude, but will it be enough? We'll find out when the polls close in 60 minutes... [more inside]
The Best Podcasts of 2017
Medium's picks for the year's top podcasts. Sarah Larson's shorter take on it over at the New Yorker. And here is Wired's list.
Adult coloring books, perceptual lattices, and Altair Designs
Where did adult coloring books come from? Well, The Little Folks Painting Book (1879) begat Buster’s Paint Book (1907) begat A Coloring Book: Drawings By Andy Warhol (1953) begat The Executive Coloring Book (1961) begat The Gay Coloring Book (1964)...and so on, right down to the amazing Altair Designs of the 1970s. And that's where close packing of circles, the tile makers of Morocco, and perceptual lattices come in, thanks to the authorial partnership between an aspiring mathematician and a practicing psychologist. Roger Burrows remembers the origin of Altair Designs. [more inside]
Your Reality Is Driven By Marketing
Yesterday, some people noticed that The Mozilla Foundation hijacked their own in-browser "Shield Studies" program to distribute "Looking Glass", an Alternate Reality Game based on the TV Show Mr. Robot for Firefox 57 users.
This was discovered as a fresh add-on with the entire description being "MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT FROM YOURS.", leading some to suspect their browser had been hacked.
Surprisingly, privacy-conscious users were not amused.
"The Book That Made Me a Feminist Was Written by an Abuser"
So, what to do with this once-beloved book? I’ve read it once since Greyland spoke out, and I don’t know if I will read it again. Probably not, I’m guessing. Discovering that powerful men are predators is disturbing, but not surprising. Learning that the author who introduced me to feminine spirituality and the hidden side of history abused children — girls and boys, her own daughter — was horrifying in an existential kind of way. I’m a writer and an editor and I know that characters can exceed their creators. I would go so far as to say that that’s the goal.So I can keep Morgaine — what she has meant to me, what she has become in my personal mythology — while I reject Bradley.
Your Favorite Restaurant Sucks
"The camera is always on..."
22. Facebook wants you to send it your nudes, so it can block other people from posting those nudes as revenge porn.35 Times Privacy Was A Lie In 2017 [Katie Notopoulos, BuzzFeed]
As a revenge-porn prevention measure, you can upload your nudes to Facebook through Messenger, then Facebook will digitally scan them using machine learning and block anyone else from uploading that exact same photo. Facebook says they're not storing the photos anywhere; they'll only store a digital "hash" of it (basically a 1s and 0s version). Buuuut...at least one employee has to see the photos to moderate it and verify it's actually a nude and not like, a photo of Trump.
Sin Luz
Sin Luz: A multimedia essay on the state of Puerto Rico from the Washington Post. Puerto Rico’s apagón, or “super blackout,” is the longest and largest major power outage in modern U.S. history. Without electricity, there is no reliable source of clean water. School is out, indefinitely. Health care is fraught. Small businesses are faltering. The tasks of daily life are both exhausting and dangerous. There is nothing to do but wait, and no one can say when the lights will come back on.
Charter & Voucher Schools & "Education"
A two-part investigation (by HuffPo) into the taxpayer-funded schools Betsy DeVos supports. Voucher Schools Championed By Betsy DeVos Can Teach Whatever They Want. Turns Out They Teach Lies. These schools teach creationism, racism and sexism. They’re also taking your tax dollars.
Part Two:
Inside The Voucher Schools That Teach L. Ron Hubbard, But Say They’re Not Scientologist. Betsy DeVos wants to expand school voucher programs throughout the U.S. Get ready for that list to include schools that promote Scientologist doctrine. [more inside]
“Wait...so how many of us are there?”
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse [YouTube][Trailer] “Into the Spider Verse will be in theaters Christmas 2018, and will star Miles Morales in what the promo material is calling a “fresh vision of a different Spider-Man universe.” The elegant visual design of the trailer, with its realistic CGI environments and wiry, acrobatic Miles Morales, certainly feels fresh. The trailer doesn’t contain much except for a showcase of Miles being an excellent young Spider-Man, though it continues Black Panther’s fine tradition of soundtracking Marvel trailers with Vince Staples. The film will star Shameik Moore as the voice of Miles Morales, with Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali (Moonlight) voicing his father, Jefferson Davis, and actor Brian Tyree Henry (Atlanta) voicing Miles’s uncle, Aaron Davis, aka The Prowler.” [via: io9]
“You’re not being too paranoid.“
For the blissfully unaware, Anglin is a neo-Nazi troll and propagandist who runs The Daily Stormer, one of the more prominent sites of the white supremacist web. The passages selected by Vox Day in his blog post suggested that Anglin is persnickety about detail and presentation ― except on the subject of the Jews, who are to be blamed “for everything.”
HuffPost has acquired the 17-page document in its entirety, as well as transcripts from an IRC channel where the document was shared in an effort to recruit new writers. It’s more than a style guide for writing internet-friendly neo-Nazi prose; it’s a playbook for the alt-right.
HuffPost has acquired the 17-page document in its entirety, as well as transcripts from an IRC channel where the document was shared in an effort to recruit new writers. It’s more than a style guide for writing internet-friendly neo-Nazi prose; it’s a playbook for the alt-right.
Are there no workhouses?
The World Inequality Report published [pdf] on Thursday by French economist Thomas Piketty, warned that inequality had ballooned to “extreme levels” in some countries and said the problem would only get worse unless governments took coordinated action to increase taxes and prevent tax avoidance.
The economists said wealth inequality had become “extreme” in Russia and the US. The US’s richest 1% accounted for 39% of the nation’s wealth in 2014 [the latest year available], up from 22% in 1980.
desegregation never happened
The legal battle for segregation is won but the community battle goes on
African-American mayor in Georgia can't get the keys to get into his own office [auto-playing video] [more inside]
The analogue upgrade
We’re living in a digital world, but analog is making a comeback. "Digital isn’t always better. Sure, there are enormous benefits to working with media, files and devices in the digital domain, but we are, after all, still living in an analog world. As human beings, we still touch things with our hands, hear things with our ears and see things with our eyes — all of which are decidedly (and beautifully) analog reception devices." [more inside]
“That was live, 7. Not taped”
52 years ago today, the joint NASA mission of Gemini 6A and Gemini 7 marked a milestone: the first time that two orbiting objects successfully rendezvoused with one another in space. The Gemini 6 command pilot and Mercury Seven astronaut Wally Schirra (and onboard computers) brought the capsule within 1 foot of Gemini 7 and the two spaceships stayed in close orbit for four-and-a-half hours.
Shortly after their separation, they gleefully marked another milestone: the first song transmitted from space. [more inside]
Two-spirited
Same-Sex Native American Couple Hopes to Break Barriers Through Dance A same-sex couple who fell in love while performing on the pow wow dance circuit is hoping they can bring confidence to other young Native Americans grappling with their sexual identities.
The Mesopotamian Pantheon
Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses is an overview of the pantheon originating among the Sumerians which was then taken up by various later cultures, including Babylonians and Assyrians. The site has entries on the fifty most important deities, from the obscure (Papsukkal, Geshtinanna, Tashmetu) to the well-known (Tiamat, Enki, Ishtar). The site also includes a glossary and a timeline of Mesopotamian history.
When We Fight, We Have Our Children With Us
Friends ask me about being a parent who also remains politically involved. They ask me what it’s like to bring my kids with me to demonstrations, meetings and trainings, to breastfeed while facing a cop in riot gear, to be peed on by my baby at a direct-action training, to carry my toddler piggyback while marching through the streets. They want to know what it was like to bring my two young children to Standing Rock.
China’s big brother: artificial intelligence
China’s big brother: how artificial intelligence is catching criminals and advancing health care Zhu Long, co-founder of pioneering Yitu Technologies, whose facial-recognition algorithms have logged 1.8 billion faces and caught criminals across China, says AI will change the world more than the industrial revolution. [more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »