Wk 43 - Notes and Links
Wk 43 - Notes and Links
Happy Hallowe'en, everyone!
Ten things in the news
FCC kicks China Telecom Americas out of US, cites Chinese government control
This photojournalist faked an entire book to highlight how hard it is to spot misinformation.
The commentary at the end of this piece about China and Taiwan makes a fair bit of sense.
Gerrymandering in Texas distorts the state’s political reality.
They should have applied to the Miss It's What Is On The Inside That Truly Counts contest
50 years ago this month the Electric Company went on the air to teach children reading skills using comedy.
If you want to see a country that committed a self-inflicted wound, take a look at Britain. Theresa May’s gnomic insistence in 2016 that ‘Brexit means Brexit’—a tautological phrase designed to buy herself time to understand it ended up truer than she predicted.
A year ago as stock in his company Alibaba was hitting an all-time high, Jack Ma, aka "The Chinese Steve Bezos" gave a speech criticizing China's financial regulators. The Communist Party of China has given him their response. He also disappeared him for three months. I'll bet that concentrated his mind wonderfully.
The Inevitable Rivalry: America, China, and the Tragedy of Great-Power Politics
Amazing Obit
Montrealer Mort Sahl, 94. Funny how the city doesn’t laud him the way it does Leonard Cohen when he was possibly even more influential. Here are some of his bon mots.
This week in data
Oct 25 is the 20th anniversary of Windows XP, and although the operating system reached the end of support in 2014, way too many people continue to use the insecure version of Windows.
Canada’s food inflation figures are wrong, critics say — mainly because just three grocers supply the data
The world’s largest social network is internally grappling with an existential crisis: an aging user base.
Study: 87 per cent of excess lung cancer risk eliminated if smokers quit before 45.
2018-19 flu season (US): 34,000 deaths 2019-20: 22,000 2020-21: 700 deaths. Thus far, the state of Florida alone has had more OFFICIAL coronavirus deaths (58,608 - and that's almost certainly an undercount) in 18 months than America’s flu deaths since autumn 2018.
Why do ribbons curl when you scrape them over scissors? Glad you asked.
A newly obtained document written by the FBI lays out in unusually granular detail how it and other law enforcement agencies can obtain location information of phones from telecommunication companies. Ryan Shapiro, executive director of nonprofit organization Property of the People, shared the document with Motherboard after obtaining it through a public record act request. Property of the People focuses on obtaining and publishing government records. The document, a 139 page slide presentation dated 2019, is written by the FBI's Cellular Analysis Survey Team. CAST supports the FBI as well as state, local, and tribal law enforcement investigations through the analysis of call data and tower information, the presentation adds. That can include obtaining the data from telecommunications companies in the first place; analyzing tower dumps that can show which phones were in an approximate location at a given time; providing expert witness testimony; and performing drive tests to verify the actual coverage of a cell tower.
I though these things might be clues
Conservatives’ susceptibility to political misperceptions
Conservative media use predicted increasing acceptance of COVID-19 conspiracies over the course of 2020
Twitter is publicly sharing research findings today that show that the platform's algorithms amplify tweets from right-wing politicians and content from right-leaning news outlets more than people and content from the political left.
Conservatives have accused social media platforms of being biased against them, whereas a study finds that the reason conservative content was disproportionately removed is because they posted more content that was offensive or allegedly so, misinformation, Covid-related, adult, or hate speech.
This week in science and tech
Facebook unveiled a series of new moves in augmented and virtual reality on Thursday, as part of its longer-term effort to help build a "metaverse" that will bring physically distant people closer together and waste a pile of Facebook’s money before they go back to what they were doing. My guess: this has everything to do with shielding Zuckuckerberg from liability for the damage Facebook has done. Meta will be the parent company, and all of FB's current properties will become independent subsidiaries - or at least independent enough that the rest of the operation isn't crippled when the legal hammer inevitably drops on Facebook.
Maillard reaction or why you want to pan fry your stuff.
Fat cells found to play a central role in cognitive decline and neurodegeneration
American sperm quality on the decline. Good thing I’m Canadian.
It's safe to assume that few Pornhub visitors are looking for hour-long calculus videos (by a fully-clothed instructor), but Taiwanese math teacher Changhsu puts them there anyway. His channel is filled with over 200 decidedly unsexy chalkboard lessons about topics like differential equations. The 34-year-old math tutor found the YouTube market for math explainers to be saturated, so he decided to expand his reach into Pornhub. He told Mel Magazine that he wants to reach a new market of mathematics learners.
How Russia built its digital Iron Curtain
Google on Thursday warned some customers that antitrust bills targeting the tech giant could jeopardize the services small businesses rely on. Shame if anything happened to your data. Remember when this was Google’s mantra?
In a project that could unlock the world's research papers for easier computerized analysis, an American technologist has released online a gigantic index of the words and short phrases contained in more than 100 million journal articles -- including many paywalled papers. Nature reports: The catalogue, which was released on October 7 and is free to use, holds tables of more than 355 billion words and sentence fragments listed next to the articles in which they appear.
This week in listening pleasure
Denis Villeneuve has a new film out, part one of the overly long book series Dune. He chats with famed director Christopher Nolan who cannot direct an action scene to save his life.
War is more destructive now, argues Margaret MacMillan
A moment in time. Radio drama used to be as big as television drama. Here one radio actor recalls the moment when realizing the ground was shifting.
Hardcore History #59 - “(Blitz) The Destroyer of Worlds” This almost six hour episode covering the Cold War and how humanity grappled with the new reality of nuclear weapons will be over before you know it.
This Is Actually Happening #148 - “What if you killed someone?”
This week in viewing pleasure
The Spider’s Web: The UK’s second empire of hidden money transfers and laundering.
Ranking Canada’s provinces from worst to best.
Wisdom from the old private detective show Banacek.
The Secrets of Sugar - the Fifth Estate
The Most Popular Car Brands (2004-2021)
China - surveillance state or wave of the future, a DW documentary. I was surprised there was not a scene like this in the documentary given its origins.
How QAnon swept through America's evangelical churches like -- um -- a giant sweeping thing
This week in unintended consequences
In August 2020, the Boris Johnson government in the UK implemented the 'Eat-Out-to-Help-Out' scheme which subsidized 50% of the costs of meals and drinks at restaurants to encourage Brits to eat out. This caused an emergence of new COVID-19 infection clusters.
Scientists built an AI to give ethical `dvice, that turned out super racist
Texas GOP Lt.-Gov offered $25,000 to anyone who credibly reported election fraud. The first payment went to someone who got a Republican voter convicted.
This week's weird news
This week in idiocy
Hiker lost on mountain for 24 hours ignored calls from rescuers because he didn’t recognize phone number
A resident of a high-rise condominium in Thailand cut the support rope for two painters, apparently angry she wasn’t told they would be doing work, and left them hanging above the 26th floor until a couple rescued them, police said Wednesday.
An attempt to get a Texas home owner to cut his grass ended up in the most Texas way possible. By the way, de-escalation is apparently not a thing in Austin.
Strange Headlines
A Tepid Distopia
Should we close the road under a bridge we're trying to demolish? Why? What's the worst that could happen?
This is not the first time that Right-wing US nuts have targeted Australia for a 'freedom campaign'. They did it over our gun control laws. They are scared that Australia can become an example to show what can happen if a functioning Government enacts sensible policies that help people and protects them from harm. So they have to say that we're somehow missing out on something. They can't let Australia be an example of how things work, because then it shows that their beliefs and policies are wrong. Canada, they just ignore.
The international consortium of law enforcement is there to prevent people from escaping justice just because they've left the country where they've committed crimes. It's a worthy goal, but it's an easily abused mechanism. For instance, there's Turkey's government, which really wants to keep its top position on the "Most Journalists Jailed" list. It can't do this without the help of Interpol. In 2018, Turkey sent "red alert" notices to Interpol seeking journalists accused of whatever bullshit the government made up in hopes of having police forces in other nations round up the two self-exiled writers the government wanted to punish. The problem is ongoing. And it may be getting worse, according to this report.
People watching
This year’s social justice kitten calendar is ready
There’s no cow on the ice - Foreign idioms
Why we look for love in the winter.
What’s the weirdest fact you know?
Television’s most terrifying dystopia isn't The Handmaid's Tale or Black Mirror. It's the society portrayed in the Charmin toilet paper commercials.
Post of the week
What this case did:
A) formulate a test for the conflict between personal dignity and freedom of expression in the QC Charter.
B) Determined that the plaintiff's claim was not actionable because
The tribunal did not originally rule that the plaintiff was targetted because of their disability (a protected ground)
The statements made by the defendant did not vilify the plaintiff or encourage people to treat him as sub-human, and
The comments would not lead a reasonable person to believe that the plaintiff would experience discrimination.
C) Determined that he could have affected his claim through a harrassment or defamation claim, the former of which would still have been under the QC Charter.
What this case did NOT do:
Determine that a comedian in Quebec cannot be sued for a comedy show. In fact based on the reasoning espoused from paras 46-79, not even including the dissent, it is quite clear that in Quebec this can happen, and that it will be allowed when it rises above a threshold determined by the court in future cases, which the majority did not delineate in this case. I'm seeing people in here commenting on how close the SCC got to proclaiming that someone could be sued over a comedy show. They didn't get close, they overtly stated that it was possible, just not in this particular case.
In other words, it was a fact-based decision that doesn't change the law other than the formulation if a test specifically in the Quebec Charter for the resolving a conflict between harm to dignity and freedom of speech, and expressly allows comedians in Quebec to be sued for certain denegrating things they say about members of a designated group. Moving further, based on the dissent and their views, it is quite possible in my opinion that in another 10 years we'll see decisions like this go the opposite way. In fact, based on the SCC's own ruling, it has opened the door to other understandings of incitement of treatment as less than human which may change depending on the panel of judges.
Quotes found on-line
He learned the word ’normalize’ and hasn’t shut up since.
"At the rally, Jackson baselessly claimed that the government "weaponized the FBI, the Capitol police, DC police, Antifa, BLM, and Democratic activists...." How about the tooth fairy? Your fairy godmother? The easter bunny? Protip: if EVERYONE is against you, your odds of being right decrease exponentially unless your name is Nikola Tesla.
Stop calling it assault because that makes us look like we were in the wrong!
The government probably can't believe their luck that the pandemic came around when it did, as it meant no matter how much of a fuck-up Brexit was going to be, they could just blame everything on Covid. It's the perfect and most enduring excuse anyone could have wished for. Covid basically gave the Tories a get out of jail free card.
Imagine making everything in your life political. Must be a miserable existence to be stressed out and angry all the time.
I bet an internet search for that turns up really disturbing porn.
I got tired of my mom asking me why I was so stupid, I finally just blurted out, "Genetics?" Totally worth the ass beating I got.
Jim Caviezel is the Randy Quaid of Kevin Sorbos.
I'm in no position to poke fun at how people talk as a New Englander, but man, that midwestern accent is grating. I wonder if my reaction is how other people feel when hearing a Boston accent.
Is it cultural appropriation to watch non-American TV shows?
While my understanding of social science jargon is just fine, my appetite for it is indeed greatly reduced.
There's a reason Christianity stopped being relevant the second they stopped being violent shitheads willing to execute people for heresy while Islam recruits unabated. This is one of the reasons why I think this vague neo-religion consisting of transtrenders, faux-environmentalists and pro-everything-that-is-good people who are legitimately willing to commit terrorist acts and get away with it will be the real religion of the future.
In their minds, they're the only real people. The rest of us are supporting characters, if we're even real to them at all. They're the protagonists, which is why they're so furious when society at large expects anything of them, even easy stuff that could save their lives. It's the perspective of a toddler who never developed; absolute absurd narcissism.
The Maple Leafs are like the Titanic: They look good until they hit the ice.
Ok, inexplicably was a bad word. Let's go with inexcusably instead.
Texas is nice. Texans on the other hand...
Armpits are the new feet
It’s hard to find an Old Testament map of America
Brian Blessed should be the next Bond
Don't you hate it when you get a brick of ramen and it's all broken up and emotionally unavailable? Ya you do
I think the UK's discussion is going to switch over the next couple of years from 'how do we attract lower skill workers to fill all these empty roles' to 'how the fuck do we stop anyone with any halfway decent qualifications from fleeing this absolute mess?'.
Dear Southern Ontario. North Bay and Thunder Bay are not the same place. They are over 1000km apart. That is all.
I'm eating with a titanium spork, unquestionably the finest dining implement ever crafted. Let the peasants fear and envy me
I utterly LOATHE the "pull panties or bikini straps up over hips" thing. Why? Just why is this even a thing? Whats the appeal to uncovering hip bones and pulling them up? Everything looked fine before you started hiking them up like vagina suspenders.
How come motherf**ker is an insult when MILF is a compliment?
Yeah they love citing Covid rates for Jan to Mar 2020, then comparing them to annual flu rates. They also love citing the total of Covid deaths while ignoring all the counter-measures we've taken to mitigate this. These people are not Statistical Analysis majors, that's for sure.
Well Dubai presents an image of opulence and wealth plastered over a slew of glaring human rights violations.I've lived there. It's an upholstered toilet.
The Merriam-Webster word of the day for October 25 is 'hector' as in: In the Iliad, Helen of Troy's abduction by Paris began the Trojan War, after which the gods damned her to Heck. It's true, they hector.
I have a 21 yr old Honda CR-V. ( basically a civic with a wagon body lol). It does 100 mph no problem. Although it takes a couple of songs on the radio to get there.
Can we put cardboard cut outs in the House of Commons? I'm sure they can do a much better job
We really got to a point where being called a made up Twitter word is enough to get you fired?
A firearm is the same as a fire extinguisher; you have it in the hope that the emergency it's designed for never happens, but if you need that tool, you need it right damn now.
I'm going to give each of them enough floorspace to not liquefy myself.
My therapist started smoking weed during our session
Now that they’ve killed Skywalker, Solo and Bond, the next hero to get killed off will be Indiana Jones
I just installed a bidet on the toilet - a high end model - and I think I just took the paint off my asshole. Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo stick, playing a flaming bagpipe - I was NOT ready for that. I think I've got water behind my eyeballs.
I’d be that mad too if I was that stupid.
The sweetest sound on the Internet is that of a sovereign citizen getting tazed.
I am never searching to cognitive behaviour therapy on the internet by the acronym CBT ever again.
He claimed that his damaging of the lavatory was not vandalism, but an art project and protected by the first amendment.
I feel like people who say "common sense" haven't been paying attention to history much. There's a reason we have a lot of safety rules and advanced medicine. I slowly learned over time that most rules are usually put in place because someone did something stupid
I think it's a warning that the malignant cancer that is Facebook is about to Metastasize
Ask Blackwater how well rebranding a toxic name goes. Pretty well considering Erik Prince is one of the richest people in the world and walks around a free man despite being responsible for war crimes in a shit ton of countries. The Facebook rebrand will happen just fine.
I model all my child rearing techniques on a tough-on-crime mentality.
I do enjoy a good chuckle while masturbating.
Some dude my brother in law knew got killed when a gun safe fell on him. he was trying to move it to make room for a bigger one, and well, rednecks do as rednecks do. I mean on one hand he was trying to be a responsible gun owner. On the other if he wasn't obsessed with guns, he wouldn't have had a giant safe fall on him, or would have had the spare cash to have someone do it correctly.
Are you every washing your bits and think, hmm. Will anyone ever touch these again?
My father has 2 braincells and they're both competing for 3rd place.
Oh, yeah, Western civilization took a wrong turn at Descartes and hasn't corrected course yet. Don't even get me started on liberals.
The great thing about being narrow minded
I want to go outside and throw rocks at god till my arm breaks off.
All soap products in the mens section smell like my teenage son’s bottom sheet. I’ve tried them all, Lynx and old spice are the worst, but dove, nivea, adidas, and all the others are right there too.
Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting. - Joyce Meyer
I've been peeing on my feet in the shower for probably around 15 years to help combat athlete's foot. I was today years old when I found out that was an old wives tale.
Those things are bad when they become moral cudgels used to bludgeon folks whose choice sets are often limited. Cramming that bootstrappy stuff down folks' throats falsely reduces structural problems to individual behaviour.
Images
Infographics
Bon Mots
Funny
Cartoons
