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silveradeptWe can begin with an exercise about whether a person is primarily a person who works things out by talking, or one who works things out primarily by reading and writing, but also the ways that many organizational structures prioritize and promote the people who are talkers and leave the people who are writers confused and trying to figure out what has happened or what will happen. A rather useful thing to take away from it, regardless of whether talker or writer, is the idea that "power obscures" and therefore the people who are at the top of the organizational structure often do not often come in contact with people who are of different methodologies or mindsets and experiences as themselves. Which can be a real problem when you're trying to communicate something to the entire organization, including the people who you are expecting to carry out your directives properly and appropriately.
Pay attention to the racism that you write, so that it is always clear that the problem are the racists, rather than anything else. (And then, as is the nature of commentary on many social media sites, the comments aren't necessarily helpful or adding to the discussion.)
Sir Michael Gambon can take on no more roles, at 82 years of age. While he may be best known in a certain generation as the substitute Dumbledore when the original actor died, his career was wide and varied and he's shown up in all kinds of places throughout, on stage and on screen.
David McCallum, known for roles in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., NCIS, and Sapphire and Steel, passed on at 90 years of age. I only encountered him as Dr. Mallard on NCIS, where he was a great foil to Pauly Perrette's Abby. Apparently, he also released a music album. One of the tracks, "The Edge," was sampled to become backing track for Dr. Dre's "The Next Episode," which I was much more familiar with. Connections everywhere, apparently.
K. Rupert Murdoch intends to exit his role as CEO of News Corp., Fox, and other companies that he has been at the head of seventy years and more. This does not mean he's leaving the whole thing in the hands of his son, Lachlan, because being "Emeritus" for him still means reading the papers and watching the shows and presumably giving his opinion about whether or not they're still working according to his standards or not. So now we will transition to the second generation of Murdochs choosing to platform the worst and the least connected to reality.
Having handed the power to recall him from his position for any reason, including the spurious and the stupid, to the unserious wing of the party in exchange for his ascension, we should probably marvel that it took until almost halfway into the House session before they turfed out Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
A meticulous look at the interlocking influencers and organizations that comprise the faction of professional and academic reactionaries looking to discard anything they think might help leftists and minorities in the United Kingdom. I'm sure any such study on the US would also be quite interesting to unravel, assuming that they weren't defeated by the darkness and obscurity of where the money comes from and goes, and who associates themselves both openly and covertly with those forces.
A promising development in the treatment of autoimmune diseases: the possibility of tagging the targets those autoimmune conditions as friendlies rather than allowing the mistaken enemy tag to persist. They're dubbing it an "inverse vaccine" because the mechanism is to quiet immune response, rather than give it a punching bag to practice on and gain memory of, but if it's possible to correct the IFF signals, that could make the autoimmune conditions no longer have targets to attack.
Katalin Karik and Drew Weissman, the scientists whose work enable mRNA vaccinations, like the ones we've been getting against SARS-CoV-2, have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It is a well-warranted and deserved prize for both of them, and I have seen at least a couple of takes around social media about how the institution that rejected the research because it was not producing a lot of funding, the research that eventually proved fruitful, is scrambling all over itself to accept the laurels of employing a Nobel winner.
A vaccine for malaria has received approval from the WHO, meeting the organization's target of 75% efficacy. And it's about half as costly as the other approved malaria vaccine, so it can be spread further on the same amount of monies. It's not perfect, nor a one and done solution, but that's going to make things a lot better for malaria-prone areas.
Las Vegas, recognizing that their major water supplier is not infinite, has been requiring new businesses and new spaces to justify and attempt to reduce their water usage before being allowed to set up shop in the city. Which is good for preservation. There will still need to be more done, of course, to try and ensure there are enough resources available for the generations to come, but other places suffering from droughts or desert conditions would do well to evaluate the same and make it an important part of their considerations.
A charity watchdog in the United Kingdom has said that charities are allowed to comment on issues that are relevant to their charitable aims, even if such things are socially or politically sensitive. Which is more speech allowed than U.S. libraries are often afforded, I say, grumbling, and even though the two things are nothing alike, even though the attacks against them are the same, about being too political for the tastes of the people who don't like having their beliefs questioned or jostled by others.
Frustration at the insistence on a single narrative as the sole and only important one in a game that allows for meaningful choices and branches of the world. It is also unsurprising that the coalescence toward a single "canon" often happens because one of the options gets sufficiently popular that the group starts turning outward and trying to make itself more popular and destroy the other options.
Flat Earth persons, much like others who espouse conspiracy theories, often do so because they lack trust in the world around them, and thus they "do their own research" on the matter and come to erroneous conclusions that can't be swayed by the introduction of new evidence. (And in some cases, understanding the new evidence would take a doctorate all by itself.)
The changes in social mores and attitudes toward clitoral or vaginal masturbation turned the practice from a possible clinical necessity into yet another sin. Which we put next to a reminder that the far right also has queer people, and queer people whose queerness is not at odds with their far-right beliefs, but has instead been integrated well into it, often in ways that might make a scholar of the ancient Greeks and Romans recognize some very familiar arguments about the role of, say, male-male relationships.
In the department of "water is wet, news at 11," using insurance claims data, researchers at Duke University determined that trans populations have higher mortality rates (and earlier mortality) than non-trans populations, and that persons they identified as trans masculine /nonbinary were the people least likely to suffer additional or early mortality compared to other trans cohorts. Which continues to give credence to the idea that the person you should center in "will this help or hlep people?" is a Black trans woman.
In a deeply power-imbalanced space such as medicine, it's not a surprise to see high rates of sexual assault, even if the numbers themselves are indications of great failures in the system. In other parts of the medical field, the intense pressure that accompanies the practice of medicine can lead to substance abuse, mental health issues, and suicide. While this article focuses on surgeons, I suspect that looking in all the other corners might produce similar kinds of issues.
Reasons why audiences of this era do not trust showrunners and creators, and how this is not a sudden phenomenon, but an entirely appropriate reaction to many of the properties of the last couple of decades. Much of which can be boiled down to "the suits decided it was supposed to be this way, in complete defiance of good storytelling and making a product that will be enjoyed, rather than merely consumed."
The ways in which climate change is exacerbating an already violent struggle for dominance among alpine marmots.
In technology, NFTs might finally be officially dead and worthless, rather than the rest of us knowing they've been dead an worthless and other people desperately trying to flog that they aren't and that blockchain of this nature and cryptocurrency is still a valid and viable thing.
The accounts of contemporaries of midwives of the 17th century CE suggest they were well-trained, competent, and generally considered to be of good moral character, as opposed to the complaints of their competitors of physicians and men who didn't particularly want to see women as competent and good at work they believed was their domain only.
Apple Computer Corporation has released iOS 17, with new features and updates and, most likely, several generations' worth of iProducts now no longer able to update their software to the newest version.
The Apple Corporation's flirtation with ostentatious and even-more-exorbitantly-priced Apple Watches finally comes to an end, with their "Edition" models moving to the obsolete category, with no more software support. And thus, Apple continues to put things out of business. Not that the person who was willing to spend more than $10,000 USD on these watches is probably bothered by it, having likely discarded it for some other fashionable and expensive timepiece long before the official end of the watch.
India's Chandrayaan-3 mission may have reached its endpoint, as ISRO was not able to contact either of the components of the mission after a planned sleep to try and survive the lunar night. They'll keep trying and hoping, but this may be the end of the first successful lunar rover for India.
A Disney visual effects unit has unionized with IATSE, following the successful unionization of Marvel VFX artists, also with IATSE. More power to you, laboring friends, and hopefully, a bigger piece of the pie.
Yet more reasons not to use Google for any kind of search, unless you have to use some method only they have options for: Google is alleged to be silently swapping your generic searches for specific results that will trigger ad keywords and placements from the people who have paid them money to appear on your results page. The search company part of Google is there to support the advertising part (as are most Google services, I suspect), and therefore I suppose we should expect even more of this kind of problem. Even as the LLMs continue to generate and then regenerate SEO spam.
One of the things that's great about Drewamwidth is that they take time out to explain changes that are happening, and that they take pains to try and not impact their users as much as they can while still running a functional site. Dispatches from the ongoing war against spam, for example, explaining the increased use of geoblocks from specific countries as a way of trying to cut down spam registrations, and the attempts at targeting that as narrowly as possible, so that the geoblocks only apply to the account signup page. (Also in the comments,![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise patiently explaining to someone who thinks they know better that the supposed solutions they're proposing have been ineffective since 2015 or earlier.) Which is a follow-up from dispatches regarding deploying more captchas and more difficulties for VPN users, because, regrettably, spammers use VPN services a lot.
Last for tonight, The guidelines for using the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, which is most definitely connected to L-Space, as all such libraries are, but which also contains several volumes and spaces where being familiar with literary tropes and specific stories will strongly increase your odds of being able to navigate the collections and return in the same state that you began.
And a story of a god who needs someone to look at a mantra and find the appropriate loophole so as to fulfill the command, but without doing the things that neither god nor human want to do.
But especially An Index of Aesthetics. For when you would like a lot of visual examples of a particular style during the period when it was prevalent, possibly even popular.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else 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.)
Pay attention to the racism that you write, so that it is always clear that the problem are the racists, rather than anything else. (And then, as is the nature of commentary on many social media sites, the comments aren't necessarily helpful or adding to the discussion.)
Sir Michael Gambon can take on no more roles, at 82 years of age. While he may be best known in a certain generation as the substitute Dumbledore when the original actor died, his career was wide and varied and he's shown up in all kinds of places throughout, on stage and on screen.
David McCallum, known for roles in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., NCIS, and Sapphire and Steel, passed on at 90 years of age. I only encountered him as Dr. Mallard on NCIS, where he was a great foil to Pauly Perrette's Abby. Apparently, he also released a music album. One of the tracks, "The Edge," was sampled to become backing track for Dr. Dre's "The Next Episode," which I was much more familiar with. Connections everywhere, apparently.
K. Rupert Murdoch intends to exit his role as CEO of News Corp., Fox, and other companies that he has been at the head of seventy years and more. This does not mean he's leaving the whole thing in the hands of his son, Lachlan, because being "Emeritus" for him still means reading the papers and watching the shows and presumably giving his opinion about whether or not they're still working according to his standards or not. So now we will transition to the second generation of Murdochs choosing to platform the worst and the least connected to reality.
Having handed the power to recall him from his position for any reason, including the spurious and the stupid, to the unserious wing of the party in exchange for his ascension, we should probably marvel that it took until almost halfway into the House session before they turfed out Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
A meticulous look at the interlocking influencers and organizations that comprise the faction of professional and academic reactionaries looking to discard anything they think might help leftists and minorities in the United Kingdom. I'm sure any such study on the US would also be quite interesting to unravel, assuming that they weren't defeated by the darkness and obscurity of where the money comes from and goes, and who associates themselves both openly and covertly with those forces.
A promising development in the treatment of autoimmune diseases: the possibility of tagging the targets those autoimmune conditions as friendlies rather than allowing the mistaken enemy tag to persist. They're dubbing it an "inverse vaccine" because the mechanism is to quiet immune response, rather than give it a punching bag to practice on and gain memory of, but if it's possible to correct the IFF signals, that could make the autoimmune conditions no longer have targets to attack.
Katalin Karik and Drew Weissman, the scientists whose work enable mRNA vaccinations, like the ones we've been getting against SARS-CoV-2, have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It is a well-warranted and deserved prize for both of them, and I have seen at least a couple of takes around social media about how the institution that rejected the research because it was not producing a lot of funding, the research that eventually proved fruitful, is scrambling all over itself to accept the laurels of employing a Nobel winner.
A vaccine for malaria has received approval from the WHO, meeting the organization's target of 75% efficacy. And it's about half as costly as the other approved malaria vaccine, so it can be spread further on the same amount of monies. It's not perfect, nor a one and done solution, but that's going to make things a lot better for malaria-prone areas.
Las Vegas, recognizing that their major water supplier is not infinite, has been requiring new businesses and new spaces to justify and attempt to reduce their water usage before being allowed to set up shop in the city. Which is good for preservation. There will still need to be more done, of course, to try and ensure there are enough resources available for the generations to come, but other places suffering from droughts or desert conditions would do well to evaluate the same and make it an important part of their considerations.
A charity watchdog in the United Kingdom has said that charities are allowed to comment on issues that are relevant to their charitable aims, even if such things are socially or politically sensitive. Which is more speech allowed than U.S. libraries are often afforded, I say, grumbling, and even though the two things are nothing alike, even though the attacks against them are the same, about being too political for the tastes of the people who don't like having their beliefs questioned or jostled by others.
Frustration at the insistence on a single narrative as the sole and only important one in a game that allows for meaningful choices and branches of the world. It is also unsurprising that the coalescence toward a single "canon" often happens because one of the options gets sufficiently popular that the group starts turning outward and trying to make itself more popular and destroy the other options.
Flat Earth persons, much like others who espouse conspiracy theories, often do so because they lack trust in the world around them, and thus they "do their own research" on the matter and come to erroneous conclusions that can't be swayed by the introduction of new evidence. (And in some cases, understanding the new evidence would take a doctorate all by itself.)
The changes in social mores and attitudes toward clitoral or vaginal masturbation turned the practice from a possible clinical necessity into yet another sin. Which we put next to a reminder that the far right also has queer people, and queer people whose queerness is not at odds with their far-right beliefs, but has instead been integrated well into it, often in ways that might make a scholar of the ancient Greeks and Romans recognize some very familiar arguments about the role of, say, male-male relationships.
In the department of "water is wet, news at 11," using insurance claims data, researchers at Duke University determined that trans populations have higher mortality rates (and earlier mortality) than non-trans populations, and that persons they identified as trans masculine /nonbinary were the people least likely to suffer additional or early mortality compared to other trans cohorts. Which continues to give credence to the idea that the person you should center in "will this help or hlep people?" is a Black trans woman.
In a deeply power-imbalanced space such as medicine, it's not a surprise to see high rates of sexual assault, even if the numbers themselves are indications of great failures in the system. In other parts of the medical field, the intense pressure that accompanies the practice of medicine can lead to substance abuse, mental health issues, and suicide. While this article focuses on surgeons, I suspect that looking in all the other corners might produce similar kinds of issues.
Reasons why audiences of this era do not trust showrunners and creators, and how this is not a sudden phenomenon, but an entirely appropriate reaction to many of the properties of the last couple of decades. Much of which can be boiled down to "the suits decided it was supposed to be this way, in complete defiance of good storytelling and making a product that will be enjoyed, rather than merely consumed."
The ways in which climate change is exacerbating an already violent struggle for dominance among alpine marmots.
In technology, NFTs might finally be officially dead and worthless, rather than the rest of us knowing they've been dead an worthless and other people desperately trying to flog that they aren't and that blockchain of this nature and cryptocurrency is still a valid and viable thing.
The accounts of contemporaries of midwives of the 17th century CE suggest they were well-trained, competent, and generally considered to be of good moral character, as opposed to the complaints of their competitors of physicians and men who didn't particularly want to see women as competent and good at work they believed was their domain only.
Apple Computer Corporation has released iOS 17, with new features and updates and, most likely, several generations' worth of iProducts now no longer able to update their software to the newest version.
The Apple Corporation's flirtation with ostentatious and even-more-exorbitantly-priced Apple Watches finally comes to an end, with their "Edition" models moving to the obsolete category, with no more software support. And thus, Apple continues to put things out of business. Not that the person who was willing to spend more than $10,000 USD on these watches is probably bothered by it, having likely discarded it for some other fashionable and expensive timepiece long before the official end of the watch.
India's Chandrayaan-3 mission may have reached its endpoint, as ISRO was not able to contact either of the components of the mission after a planned sleep to try and survive the lunar night. They'll keep trying and hoping, but this may be the end of the first successful lunar rover for India.
A Disney visual effects unit has unionized with IATSE, following the successful unionization of Marvel VFX artists, also with IATSE. More power to you, laboring friends, and hopefully, a bigger piece of the pie.
Yet more reasons not to use Google for any kind of search, unless you have to use some method only they have options for: Google is alleged to be silently swapping your generic searches for specific results that will trigger ad keywords and placements from the people who have paid them money to appear on your results page. The search company part of Google is there to support the advertising part (as are most Google services, I suspect), and therefore I suppose we should expect even more of this kind of problem. Even as the LLMs continue to generate and then regenerate SEO spam.
One of the things that's great about Drewamwidth is that they take time out to explain changes that are happening, and that they take pains to try and not impact their users as much as they can while still running a functional site. Dispatches from the ongoing war against spam, for example, explaining the increased use of geoblocks from specific countries as a way of trying to cut down spam registrations, and the attempts at targeting that as narrowly as possible, so that the geoblocks only apply to the account signup page. (Also in the comments,
denise patiently explaining to someone who thinks they know better that the supposed solutions they're proposing have been ineffective since 2015 or earlier.) Which is a follow-up from dispatches regarding deploying more captchas and more difficulties for VPN users, because, regrettably, spammers use VPN services a lot.Last for tonight, The guidelines for using the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, which is most definitely connected to L-Space, as all such libraries are, but which also contains several volumes and spaces where being familiar with literary tropes and specific stories will strongly increase your odds of being able to navigate the collections and return in the same state that you began.
And a story of a god who needs someone to look at a mantra and find the appropriate loophole so as to fulfill the command, but without doing the things that neither god nor human want to do.
But especially An Index of Aesthetics. For when you would like a lot of visual examples of a particular style during the period when it was prevalent, possibly even popular.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else 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: 2023-10-06 07:12 pm (UTC)The thing about Widener is that you don't need to know how to navigate it, because the incantations for entering it are so fiendishly difficult that many employees of the Harvard library system are only allowed to check out a single-digit number of books a year. Fairyland's restrictions are less strict. Also they like to be utter cocks about interlibrary loan and researcher access. And absolutely no public access.
Seriously if they're magical then at least they have an excuse. But they're not magical, they're just Harvard.
/me spits three times in the greater cambridge charm against annoyance
no subject
Date: 2023-10-06 07:27 pm (UTC)