June 19, 2020
Irish Women in Harmony
40 Irish women artists collaborate on Dreams by The Cranberries to raise funds for Safe Ireland. (SLYT)
Peter did not answer. Because, after all, it was a rhetorical question.
October 4, 1988 [the same year as Even Worse was released] saw the release of a basically lost project by "Weird Al" Yankovic and Wendy Carlos -- a recording/reimagining of Sergei Prokofiev's "Peter And The Wolf", and Camille Saint-Saëns' "Carnival Of The Animals - Part Two". YouTube Playlist [~55m] [more inside]
The ghost is the machine - simple cybernetics making things move
While engineering gets more complicated, more opaque and less complex/redundant (Complicated or complex – the difference is important), there's a strand of making where IT is used in system design, but not centrally present in the finished item a softer side of science - an engineering ideas rabbit hole. [more inside]
How to make Garum, the most famous of ancient Roman ingredients.
The Tasting History YouTube channel recreates the ancient Roman ingredient garum from ancient texts. Max Miller's Tasting History YouTube channel recreates the ancient Roman ingredient garum from ancient texts, byzantine and latin. And then he makes it at home, and shows you how, while keeping in mind how garum was used and viewed by its very famous contemporaries.
Do Black Lives Matter on Broadway?
What I Think About When I Hear That Broadway is Racist Writer and actor Heathcliff Saunders (Twitter) writes about his Black body in musical theater.
An Assemblage of Sandwiches
White Bears in Sugar Land: Juneteenth, Cages, and Afrofuturism
"That year, 1878, the 14-year-old boy, if he is not already serving time in a cell or on a plantation, will arrive at his destination and not last the year. Out comes confetti. Emancipation? Freedom? The whole thing was a hoax."
“We're not safe just because we play with LEGO.”
In the last few weeks, LEGO fan website The Brothers Brick has begun to engage with race and privilege, beginning by highlighting Dave Kaleta’s Black Lives Matter mosaic and asking readers “How has your privilege or heritage affected your participation in the LEGO hobby? And what are you doing to make our hobby a more open and inclusive space for people of all backgrounds?” [more inside]
Bandcamp's share of sales going to the NAACP today
Bandcamp's June 19th NAACP Legal Defense Fund Donations "Today, from midnight to midnight Pacific Time, we will be donating 100% of our share of sales to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (and we’re doing this every June 19th from here on out). Below you’ll find a list of artists and labels preparing special releases for today, including those donating their share to organizations in support of racial justice and change." [more inside]
"Being open right now is dangerous, miserable, and borderline abusive."
A librarian from a library that's opened up reports on how it's going. (Thread Reader App link.) "Library workers are suffering and afraid. Library patrons are in danger in a system where, no matter how hard we try and what measures we take, we can't truly keep them safe. This isn't working." [more inside]
We Shall Not Be Moved:collective ownership empowers Black farmers
The Police Are Rioting
On May 30th, days after the murder of George Floyd, Greg Doucette began collecting videos of the lawlessness and brutality of the police response to the protests.
That list passed 500 separate incidents earlier this week, averaging over 30 such incidents per day.
[content warning: violence]
Warren Ellis Accused of Grooming Young Women for Decades
Yesterday comic book and pop culture website Bleeding Cool released an article outlining some details of decades of interactions between the famed comic book writer with much younger women, where he deceived, used, and then dumped them. [more inside]
What Are These Enormous Blobs 1,800 Miles Beneath Our Feet?
What Are These Enormous Blobs 1,800 Miles Beneath Our Feet? (Popular Mechanics): Roughly 1,800 miles below Earth's surface, at the boundary between our planet's mantle and molten iron outer core, lurk strange, giant structures. So what are they? Scientists detect unexpected widespread structures near Earth's core (Phys Org): Scientists are unsure of the composition of these structures (image), and previous studies have provided only a limited view of them. [...] The new research provides the first comprehensive view (image) of the core-mantle boundary over a wide area with such detailed resolution. [more inside]
Sabotage is not just for Beastie Boys fans
We've talked about workplace sabotage before here on the blue, but back in 1992 somebody actually wrote a book about it. [more inside]
The Romanian Orphans are Adults Now.
Can Unloved Children Learn to Love? 30 years ago Romania deprived thousands of babies of human contact. What happened to them? Following the downfall of Ceausescu, Romanian orphans were adopted by Western families and scientists studied the impact of neglect upon neurological and emotional development. These are the two foci of the article. First, a moving portrait of Izidor who is adopted by a kind family but has trouble with the unfamiliar familial gift of affection; and second the Bucharest Early Intervention Program, the first-ever randomized controlled trial to measure the impact of early institutionalization on brain and behavioral development. [more inside]
Bias? In my machine learning model? It's more likely than you think.
This approachable blog post from Microsoft Research summarizes this research paper by Swinger, De-Arteaga, et al. [pdf], which demonstrated that commonly used machine learning models contain harmful and offensive racial, ethnic, gender, and religious biases (e.g. associating common Black names with harmful stereotypes while associating common white names with innocuous or positive terms). These biases are harmful in themselves and may also lead to insidious discriminatory effects in software built on these models. [more inside]
Sir Ian Holm, 1931-2020
Ian Holm, British actor known for an astonishing variety of roles in film and on stage, including Ash in Alien, Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings, and Father Cornelius in The Fifth Element, has died of complications related to Parkinson's. He was 88. [more inside]
UK Labour Party formally review their 2019 defeat
Labour Together Election Review - The UK Labour Party has just published a review, with data and analysis, of their disastrous 2019 defeat. [more inside]
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