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silveradeptLet us begin with Nonstandard Candles, a story by Yoon Ha Lee, about understanding fully the nature of the universe around you before applying yourself to it. And then continue with The Dragon Project, which is about good ethical (and insurance-friendly) decisions and making sure that the creatures in your life have wonderful environments to thrive in, which pairs nicely with Clay, a story about the difference between mass production and taking your time, especially when there are lives on the line.
And go from there to a picture of a knitted brain hat and a pen whose body was milled out of paper stuck together with resin as proof of the dedication of the human to completing things that are really cool.
John M. Ford's work is coming back to us, including a now-released unfinished work, and that should make all of the sci-fi fans very happy that we'll get to read it.
The Science Fiction Writers of America have changed their eligibility requirements to become a member of the organization, broadening the ways that someone can qualify and lowering the sales minimums needed to qualify. Which is excellent and reflects the changing face of publication and how people get paid. Naomi Kritzer explains why the lowered qualifying minimums and expanded eligibility criteria is a good thing, as it gives access to very powerful tools for a much bigger swath of people.
After a twenty-two year absence, two original notebooks of Charles Darwin have retuned to the Cambridge University library.
The first woman to serve as Secretary of State of the United States, Madeline Albright, has lost her battle with cancer at 84 years of age.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed to the United States Supreme Court as an Associate Justice, the first Black woman (and the first to have worked as a public defender, providing legal representation to those who could not afford their own) to hold the job of Supreme Court Justics, with a final voting tally of 53 votes to confirm her and 47 votes to reject her. Three Republicans, Willard "Mitt" Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted with the Democratic caucus so as to not require a tiebreaking vote for the full Senate in the same way that the full Senate was required to break a deadlock in the Judiciary Committee to get the nomination discharged to the full floor.
It can be really disheartening to hear that people are stepping up attacks on you and yours and when you ask for help, you get a response that indicates the other people don't see what's changed. Or don't see that it's changed enough that they should have been involved in the fight a long time ago. Or worse, think that an essential and core part of you is changeable, and perhaps if you wanted to avoid the terrible things, you should stop being yourself.
A thread of threads about resources to help trans people find the resources they need.
A profile of the first out trans woman musher in the Iditarod sled race, Apayauq Reitan. (Guardian US, who are okay, compared to other offices of the Guardian) Who did finish the course, and then gave a self-deprecating tweet about the speed of her finishing and how much it failed to fit trans-exclusionary narratives about supposed inherent advantages.
To be mindful of intersectionality is to recognize that the narrative and the goals of white queer people is often different than that of Black queer people, because there's a certain amount of privilege that comes with whiteness whose lack is felt when that white person doesn't also conform to being het, cis, and/or of a particular religious background.
Author James Davis Nicoll on the various means and methods a publisher can use to disassociate the terrible things an author is accused of doing (like baby eating) from their work so that they can sell said work (in which baby eating might be a plot point) without feeling any concerns about conscience or ethics.
When trying to construct a history of STIs, the perceptions around them, and the activities of medical professionals about them, there are still several periods where not much is known, because significant parts of the record were either excised or never kept. Which then becomes an issue in trying to document the efforts in our current times, because many of those selfsame attitudes still persist, and there is still great fighting over whether children and teenagers should be given a full and clear accounting of sexuality and various methods for making safer sex or whether sexual information should be hidden away from children until they reach a mythic phase of adulthood (presumably after a religiously-approved marriage), and even then, some aspects should be hidden away from them on the assumption that neither they nor their married partner has ever experimented in some way that might introduce something impure into the relationship.
Examining vaginas and penises together gives a very different picture of the purposes of genitals than just copulation and reproduction, and of mating and courting as more complex acs that a war between wanting to spread genes as far and wide as possible versus wanting to strongly select for the best genes and only get those.
Photographs on the short list to win Sony's Photograph of the Year award, many of which are monochromal or grayscale, the art and artistry involve in making a realistic-looking penis for an actor to wear on camera, especially if you need one that can be manipulated like a puppet or an animatronic, making hats for sea urchins to wear, capybaras prefering their environment in the gated community that had been built on top of their habitat, the ways that plants remember the conditions they've experienced, so they then flower or change themselves in ways that help them survive in their environment, and beginning to try and understand and classify the electrical spike signals sent by fungi into a language.
On the matter of rapid insistence that things go back to the terrible before of the pandemic, The Food and Drug Administration reminds us to read the directions on our testing kits and not to put the testing chemicals on our skin or in our sensitive spaces.
Related to technology, as well as being a human, Sumana Harihareswara talks about how we model trust hierarchies in our ordinary lives, and, to some degree, the need to trust others even in an environment where there will be untrustworthy actors. Also, the fact that some people have high trust in certain areas and very low trust in others, which, by implication, makes modeling those kinds of trust differentials more difficult in software, which much prefers to work in absolutes and binaries rather than a complex web of conditionals. (And also, makes the trust web that much more complex when entities who are not individuals are involved in trust calculations.)
I tend to baffle a lot about how the public library, as an institution, consistently ranks high on the list of trustworthy places, but I also have, you know, insider knowledge of how libraries work and what they do. There's a lot of things I'm thinking about where the library might have gathered that trust by doing, for decades on end, things that we should have always considered to be wrong and immoral. By both hewing tightly to white supreacy and being an institution that taught white supremacy in the name of "Americanizing" the other, the library may have gained an unwarranted degree of trust. Which might explain why everyone is suddenly very interested in libraries, their policies, and especially their collections - it's no longer possible to simply assume that the library will unquestioningly replicate white supremacy and insist that white supremacy is the best of all possible worlds to others. Plus, we're seeing a lot more situations where the social and soft power of the white supremacists is no longer sufficient to maintain control, and so they're resorting to the harder power, of violence, of elected control, of abusing their positions of power to enforce their vision, rather than reflecting the vision and desires of their communities.
Accessibility that's framed toward exacting accuracy of the abled world often works against being accessible, because what the disabled person wants is not exacting accuracy to describe it as someone who is abled might experience it, but the things that will make the disabled person able to participate in the experience on their own, in the way that works best for them. (There's much talk in this article about a communication method for the DeafBlind called Protactile, which seems to be as much about communicating intents and emotions and nuances that more accurate descriptions might strip out.) The same author, John Lee Clark, has written poetry about what it's like to interact with art while DeafBlind, including the clear differences between those who want to represent the visual in the tactile and those who are designing for tactile experiences from the start.
The Federal Police of Germany seized and shut down the server infrastructure of a darknet market known as Hydra, which seemed to primarily have its market in and around the Russian Federation.
Students in New South Wales schools will be able to formally study Auslan (Australian Sign Language) as part of their language curricula. Which is excellent to bring more people into the fold of being able to communicate.
A dentist was convicted of deliberately breaking his patients teeth to bill them and their insurance for replacement crown operations, weakening his patients' teeth while strengthening his own profits, to the tune of millions of dollars.
If you are handling archival materials, sometimes the best practice is not to wear gloves, as some of the materials available in archives and special collecitons is actually best handled by clean bare hands. Other parts, generally where the oils and chemicals of the hand will react with the material and tarnish or damage it (or those cases where the book will damage the hand), then gloves are more likely to be recommended.
As technology advances, the technology used to fool it advances as well. Using HTML and CSS, it is possible to create a phish that looks like the standard OAuth protocol page, including the graphics and designs. Defeating the browser in a browser-style attack requires being suspicious and seeing if the window itself can be dragged over the address bar of another window (true OAuth can, the Browser in the Browser attack can't), which is a non-intuitive way of checking something, and doesn't follow in the usual ways that we guard against phishing.
Which reminds me. Y'know how security against phishing involves "mouse over the link, see where the URL goes?" If your organization (or something that you've signed up to receive) uses click tracking to determine your engagement with their product, then all of the blasted links have been replaced with pass-through links so that your click is recorded in a marketing database and then you get forwarded on to whatever the legitimate site is. Most newsletters, including the ones that my organization sends out, don't incude direct URIs to the resources they're promoting for people to copy and paste into their browsers, beecause they want the marketing clicks as well to know whether their newsletters are worth anything. I Have Opinions about how marketing collects their data, but this is seems like one of those situations where there's no way of defending against the phish, should one of those intermeidate sites ever get compromised and their advertisement services get repurposed to serve malware as well as record clicks. So, as a plea, please include your URIs. even if you have to purchase a shorter domain name that you can use as a short link resolver that will go to the bigger ones. Or mention prominently where on the web you're storing your newsletters with a plain URI that someone can go to and then read the newsletter and click, without all of the intermediary marketing and advertising servers.
Google is accused of abusing attorney-client privilege by claiming that the mere mention of adding a lawyer or legal, or carbon-copying them in an e-mail or e-mail thread, is sufficient to indicate a privileged communication that does not have to be produced for regulators or invesigators what are trying to keep tabs on Google and its business practices. I suspect there's always the possibility the Crime/Fraud exception could be deployed, but that would probably require the allegation of specific crimes, and if you can't get enough from the company through regular powers and investigations, then you'll never be able to allege specific charges. (It's also possible that the inclusion of someone other than the lawyer and the communicator would waive the privilege anyway.) "Don't be evil" has long been a meaningless phrase for Google and its parent company, but like so many other things in our era, any thought about whether you've touched the bottom only means you haven't seen how far there is left to go.
Last for tonight, The first half of the major arcana, in haiku, upright and reversed, and the second half of the major arcana, in haiku, upright and reversed. Likely a helpful guide for those who are trying to remember their major trumps.
And a dad joke about a dog, straight from ancient Sumerian. Which involves a long thread about why trying to translate from a dead language comes wth significant headaches before the punchline.
Finally, the fact that bookshelves and their books are being treated as design accessories rather than reflections of reading preference or the accumulation of materials for scholarly pursuits.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
And go from there to a picture of a knitted brain hat and a pen whose body was milled out of paper stuck together with resin as proof of the dedication of the human to completing things that are really cool.
John M. Ford's work is coming back to us, including a now-released unfinished work, and that should make all of the sci-fi fans very happy that we'll get to read it.
The Science Fiction Writers of America have changed their eligibility requirements to become a member of the organization, broadening the ways that someone can qualify and lowering the sales minimums needed to qualify. Which is excellent and reflects the changing face of publication and how people get paid. Naomi Kritzer explains why the lowered qualifying minimums and expanded eligibility criteria is a good thing, as it gives access to very powerful tools for a much bigger swath of people.
After a twenty-two year absence, two original notebooks of Charles Darwin have retuned to the Cambridge University library.
The first woman to serve as Secretary of State of the United States, Madeline Albright, has lost her battle with cancer at 84 years of age.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed to the United States Supreme Court as an Associate Justice, the first Black woman (and the first to have worked as a public defender, providing legal representation to those who could not afford their own) to hold the job of Supreme Court Justics, with a final voting tally of 53 votes to confirm her and 47 votes to reject her. Three Republicans, Willard "Mitt" Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted with the Democratic caucus so as to not require a tiebreaking vote for the full Senate in the same way that the full Senate was required to break a deadlock in the Judiciary Committee to get the nomination discharged to the full floor.
It can be really disheartening to hear that people are stepping up attacks on you and yours and when you ask for help, you get a response that indicates the other people don't see what's changed. Or don't see that it's changed enough that they should have been involved in the fight a long time ago. Or worse, think that an essential and core part of you is changeable, and perhaps if you wanted to avoid the terrible things, you should stop being yourself.
A thread of threads about resources to help trans people find the resources they need.
A profile of the first out trans woman musher in the Iditarod sled race, Apayauq Reitan. (Guardian US, who are okay, compared to other offices of the Guardian) Who did finish the course, and then gave a self-deprecating tweet about the speed of her finishing and how much it failed to fit trans-exclusionary narratives about supposed inherent advantages.
To be mindful of intersectionality is to recognize that the narrative and the goals of white queer people is often different than that of Black queer people, because there's a certain amount of privilege that comes with whiteness whose lack is felt when that white person doesn't also conform to being het, cis, and/or of a particular religious background.
Author James Davis Nicoll on the various means and methods a publisher can use to disassociate the terrible things an author is accused of doing (like baby eating) from their work so that they can sell said work (in which baby eating might be a plot point) without feeling any concerns about conscience or ethics.
When trying to construct a history of STIs, the perceptions around them, and the activities of medical professionals about them, there are still several periods where not much is known, because significant parts of the record were either excised or never kept. Which then becomes an issue in trying to document the efforts in our current times, because many of those selfsame attitudes still persist, and there is still great fighting over whether children and teenagers should be given a full and clear accounting of sexuality and various methods for making safer sex or whether sexual information should be hidden away from children until they reach a mythic phase of adulthood (presumably after a religiously-approved marriage), and even then, some aspects should be hidden away from them on the assumption that neither they nor their married partner has ever experimented in some way that might introduce something impure into the relationship.
Examining vaginas and penises together gives a very different picture of the purposes of genitals than just copulation and reproduction, and of mating and courting as more complex acs that a war between wanting to spread genes as far and wide as possible versus wanting to strongly select for the best genes and only get those.
Photographs on the short list to win Sony's Photograph of the Year award, many of which are monochromal or grayscale, the art and artistry involve in making a realistic-looking penis for an actor to wear on camera, especially if you need one that can be manipulated like a puppet or an animatronic, making hats for sea urchins to wear, capybaras prefering their environment in the gated community that had been built on top of their habitat, the ways that plants remember the conditions they've experienced, so they then flower or change themselves in ways that help them survive in their environment, and beginning to try and understand and classify the electrical spike signals sent by fungi into a language.
On the matter of rapid insistence that things go back to the terrible before of the pandemic, The Food and Drug Administration reminds us to read the directions on our testing kits and not to put the testing chemicals on our skin or in our sensitive spaces.
Related to technology, as well as being a human, Sumana Harihareswara talks about how we model trust hierarchies in our ordinary lives, and, to some degree, the need to trust others even in an environment where there will be untrustworthy actors. Also, the fact that some people have high trust in certain areas and very low trust in others, which, by implication, makes modeling those kinds of trust differentials more difficult in software, which much prefers to work in absolutes and binaries rather than a complex web of conditionals. (And also, makes the trust web that much more complex when entities who are not individuals are involved in trust calculations.)
I tend to baffle a lot about how the public library, as an institution, consistently ranks high on the list of trustworthy places, but I also have, you know, insider knowledge of how libraries work and what they do. There's a lot of things I'm thinking about where the library might have gathered that trust by doing, for decades on end, things that we should have always considered to be wrong and immoral. By both hewing tightly to white supreacy and being an institution that taught white supremacy in the name of "Americanizing" the other, the library may have gained an unwarranted degree of trust. Which might explain why everyone is suddenly very interested in libraries, their policies, and especially their collections - it's no longer possible to simply assume that the library will unquestioningly replicate white supremacy and insist that white supremacy is the best of all possible worlds to others. Plus, we're seeing a lot more situations where the social and soft power of the white supremacists is no longer sufficient to maintain control, and so they're resorting to the harder power, of violence, of elected control, of abusing their positions of power to enforce their vision, rather than reflecting the vision and desires of their communities.
Accessibility that's framed toward exacting accuracy of the abled world often works against being accessible, because what the disabled person wants is not exacting accuracy to describe it as someone who is abled might experience it, but the things that will make the disabled person able to participate in the experience on their own, in the way that works best for them. (There's much talk in this article about a communication method for the DeafBlind called Protactile, which seems to be as much about communicating intents and emotions and nuances that more accurate descriptions might strip out.) The same author, John Lee Clark, has written poetry about what it's like to interact with art while DeafBlind, including the clear differences between those who want to represent the visual in the tactile and those who are designing for tactile experiences from the start.
The Federal Police of Germany seized and shut down the server infrastructure of a darknet market known as Hydra, which seemed to primarily have its market in and around the Russian Federation.
Students in New South Wales schools will be able to formally study Auslan (Australian Sign Language) as part of their language curricula. Which is excellent to bring more people into the fold of being able to communicate.
A dentist was convicted of deliberately breaking his patients teeth to bill them and their insurance for replacement crown operations, weakening his patients' teeth while strengthening his own profits, to the tune of millions of dollars.
If you are handling archival materials, sometimes the best practice is not to wear gloves, as some of the materials available in archives and special collecitons is actually best handled by clean bare hands. Other parts, generally where the oils and chemicals of the hand will react with the material and tarnish or damage it (or those cases where the book will damage the hand), then gloves are more likely to be recommended.
As technology advances, the technology used to fool it advances as well. Using HTML and CSS, it is possible to create a phish that looks like the standard OAuth protocol page, including the graphics and designs. Defeating the browser in a browser-style attack requires being suspicious and seeing if the window itself can be dragged over the address bar of another window (true OAuth can, the Browser in the Browser attack can't), which is a non-intuitive way of checking something, and doesn't follow in the usual ways that we guard against phishing.
Which reminds me. Y'know how security against phishing involves "mouse over the link, see where the URL goes?" If your organization (or something that you've signed up to receive) uses click tracking to determine your engagement with their product, then all of the blasted links have been replaced with pass-through links so that your click is recorded in a marketing database and then you get forwarded on to whatever the legitimate site is. Most newsletters, including the ones that my organization sends out, don't incude direct URIs to the resources they're promoting for people to copy and paste into their browsers, beecause they want the marketing clicks as well to know whether their newsletters are worth anything. I Have Opinions about how marketing collects their data, but this is seems like one of those situations where there's no way of defending against the phish, should one of those intermeidate sites ever get compromised and their advertisement services get repurposed to serve malware as well as record clicks. So, as a plea, please include your URIs. even if you have to purchase a shorter domain name that you can use as a short link resolver that will go to the bigger ones. Or mention prominently where on the web you're storing your newsletters with a plain URI that someone can go to and then read the newsletter and click, without all of the intermediary marketing and advertising servers.
Google is accused of abusing attorney-client privilege by claiming that the mere mention of adding a lawyer or legal, or carbon-copying them in an e-mail or e-mail thread, is sufficient to indicate a privileged communication that does not have to be produced for regulators or invesigators what are trying to keep tabs on Google and its business practices. I suspect there's always the possibility the Crime/Fraud exception could be deployed, but that would probably require the allegation of specific crimes, and if you can't get enough from the company through regular powers and investigations, then you'll never be able to allege specific charges. (It's also possible that the inclusion of someone other than the lawyer and the communicator would waive the privilege anyway.) "Don't be evil" has long been a meaningless phrase for Google and its parent company, but like so many other things in our era, any thought about whether you've touched the bottom only means you haven't seen how far there is left to go.
Last for tonight, The first half of the major arcana, in haiku, upright and reversed, and the second half of the major arcana, in haiku, upright and reversed. Likely a helpful guide for those who are trying to remember their major trumps.
And a dad joke about a dog, straight from ancient Sumerian. Which involves a long thread about why trying to translate from a dead language comes wth significant headaches before the punchline.
Finally, the fact that bookshelves and their books are being treated as design accessories rather than reflections of reading preference or the accumulation of materials for scholarly pursuits.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
no subject
Date: 2022-04-11 09:24 am (UTC)I agree with you. I hate it so much.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-11 02:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-11 03:17 pm (UTC)I thought that it was great that the Darwin diaries were returned in such great condition. I wonder if we will ever know what the story was behind their disappearance.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-11 03:25 pm (UTC)I don't know if we'll never get the story behind the disappearance. Possibly after the statute of limitations runs out on the theft, even more so if it was accidental.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-11 09:23 pm (UTC)I hadn't considered the statute of limitations, I have no idea what they are in the UK.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-14 05:12 am (UTC)