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silveradeptLet's begin with material that finally made it into the public domain in the United States in the year 2024. While much attention has been given to Steamboat Willie, as the thought of finally getting something from the Disney juggernaut, there's plenty of other material that is now freely usable as well. If you're interested in using Mickey, there's a handy primer on how to use Mickey successfully and avoid getting walloped with trademark issues. There are still some Mickeys that are under copyright (like the Sorcerer's Apprentice Mickey), but Mickey Mouse, in at least some form, is now finally making it to the public domain. (As are some more Winnie-the-Pooh characters, like Tigger.)
The "Golden Rod" illustration used for C-3PO that made the robot look he'd been designed by a species with a baculum. And pair that with an oral history of a Folgers holiday ad where the shipping goggles suggested a brother and sister were going to engage in incest even if no such thing were ever intended.
Queer ships were very popular on AO3 during 2023, which should be no surprise to anyone who knows that AO3 is very much a place where the queer ships go (FFN, I think, is where many of the het ships go?) The BBC got 144 complaints and 7.6 million viewers for an episode of Doctor Who that has an openly trans character, and both the Beeb and the showrunner said "tough shit" as their response to the complaints.
The Texas Library Association invited Dr. Chuck Tingle, World's Greatest Author and Two-Time Hugo Award Finalist, to one of their conferences, and then disinvited Dr. Tingle, supposedly because the part where Chuck Tingle wears a mask in the form of a pink bag was potentially disturbing to others and Chuck wasn't taking off the bag. It's unlikely this is the real reason, since the people who are going to the panel hopefully know Dr. Tingle, or if they don't, they probably have dealt with stranger people in their libraries. Having been caught doing something really not good, the Texas Library Association non-apologized for the issue and invited Dr. Tingle to speak at a different event than the original one. Appropriately, Dr. Tingle turned them down, because the Texas Library Association had already demonstrated they weren't safe to be around. Or, possibly, that they coudn't or didn't want to stand up to the bigots in their organization or the Texas legislature that had demanded the removal of Dr. Tingle from the program. We love Chuck, we love his message of love being real, and we like the Tinglers, too, so good for Chuck to have told the people who weren't going to treat him well that he isn't interested in coming to their event.
A review of a book about someone who opened their marraige that finds what is on the page to be more a product of the social and economic class of the writer, rather than being much about the practice of polyamory, which, fair, it's a lot easier to conduct multiple relationships when you all have the means to do so. But it also suggests that rather than being something about recognizing the potential for people to get their needs and wants met by multiple people, it's much more about potentially staving off the divorce, which can be expensive, sometimes prohibitively so, for people who married.
And, of course, some of the things that come with time, and possibly having gone through with either opening the relationship or getting the divorce is older women deciding they're more interested in exploring their own fantasy lives, rather than having had their sexuality dictated to them by men who were uninterested in learning what worked for the women they were married to (or promised to).
An Alaska Airlines-operated Boeing 737 Max plane suffered an exit plug blowout, necessitating an emergency landing of the plane and an immediate grounding of the entire fleet of those planes. The sought-after door plug has been found and is being analyzed, while inspections of other 737 Max planes have found loose bolts and other hardware issues. The good news is that the emergency happened while the passengers and flight crew were still seated and buckled in, so while some technology and other items were lost out the hole, no passenger or crew lives were lost. The bad news is that the emergency happened in the first place, and that we are seeing signs that other planes could have had the same issues. I doubt, somehow, that the Federal Aviation Administration will be in any way pleased with these revelations.
The logo of Transport for London was nearly a rabbit, and would have been a much different familiar design for all of us. An investigation into the reason why a particular footbridge exists in Minneapolis, which does have a satisfactory result, as well as a small lesson that involving the experts early on in the search is sometimes the fastest way to get to a result. But what gets found out along the way is also pretty cool. (And some of the pictures required FAA approval to get.)
The city of Seattle, acting under the cover of darkness to ensure they would not be stymied or interrupted on their latest attempt, destroyed a community garden in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, started as part of the Movement for Black Lives protests in 2020. The City said they offered assistance to relocate the garden, which is not in dispute, but the city had made their decision about whether such a thing should be allowed to continue in the location it had been started in, and tied it into the idea that such a green space was a regular place for the unhoused and the drug-using community to visit, therefore it had to go. Even if the city will still help build another garden, their interest in shutting this one down seems to have been related to a lot of things they're less interested in helping with or that would move toward helping the problems they want to curtail, without having to destroy a community garden in the process.
The Republican Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly threatened the University of Wisconsin regents to withhold funding already appropriated to them if they didn't also get rid of many positions intended to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and starve the DEI programs of funding. The Regents knuckled under to the threat, and in doing so, got their money. Remember, friends don't let friends elect Republicans. And then do their best to get districts that can't do anything but elect Republicans redrawn to be fair. (Having signaled they can be bullied, I'm sure we'll find the Regents being told they have to do even more cutting away of any programs intended to help the campus be something more than white men if they want next year's funding.)
How Papua New Guinea was able to retain archives pertaining to it during colonial periods, rather than having their records spirited away as happened to many other colonial territories before they achieved full self-governance as independent countries.
The story of a play written and performed in the backyard of a woman, intended to bring shame upon her neighbor for an allegation that was not proven out in the courts.
The Feline Grimace Scale, a method for determining the likely amount of pain or discomfort a cat is in by examining their facial expression and head line compared to the rest of the body. Given that cats are not very vocal about their pain, and are also the kinds of entities that tend to hide when they are in pain or suffering until it has become too much for them to hide, being able to read a cat's facial expression might be useful toward knowing when it is time for pain relief for kitty.
Don't pet the fluffy cows, a message from the U.S. National Park Service, a paper about the behavior of wild animals turning running wheels, even without any reward to do so, women naturalists and their illustrations of moths and plants, which sometimes meant raising the insects so they could be painted, as well as raising children and managing households as well, and a research project conducted by a Year 3 student, with LEGO visualizations and a conclusion about what kind of person an Australian magpie is most likely to swoop upon that went intensely viral and produced a data set that with a likely 1 percent margin of error and a professional scientist combing the results to see what else might be gathered from it.
The consequences of infection from SARS-CoV-2 are the kind of thing where other infectious agents might have greater success. In the same way that HIV makes it possible for other infectious agents to have greater success against a body infected with it. Not getting it is still the best option, but making sure that you get it the least is the other better option.
In technology, the training data sets scraped from the Internet for image generators contain(ed) actual images of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), with LAION-5B, the targeted set, having potentially more than three thousand such images in its data set. That'll tell you something about how the scrapers were indiscriminate and that the humans supposedly overseeing the data set creation did not do it. And this is only the child sexual abuse material - it doesn't count any adult images that are there, or revenge porn, or illegally-obtained nudes, or anything else in the data set that probably shouldn't be there or whose presence would indicate security breaches or other such acts.
3500 persons were arrested and about $300 million USD seized in an operation designed to combat cybercrime. While several of the persons arrested were in connection with more "traditional" cybercrime like ransomware or trying to use generated materials and/or voice cloning as a way to attack their targets, several of the persons were arrested for schemes involving cryptocurrency startups where the entire operation was fly-by-night and folded up with the creators taking the investor cash once the levels of investment reached sufficient heights to make the operation profitable. Unregulated spaces will do that to you, and that it's dressed up in a lot of technobabble makes it harder for a layperson to spot the scam.
Microsoft admits their Copilot AI is doomed and will go the way of the dustbin by requiring OEM PC manufacturers running Windows 11 to include a dedicated key to launch it. If it were something that were useful and widespread in adoption, they wouldn't need to mandate a key dedicated to its use, but instead enjoy having a good product that people choose to use. So, yet another reason to delay upgrading to Windows 11 until it's forced upon me in the next year. Maybe by that point, Proton and Linux gaming will have gotten good enough that I won't have to maintain a Windows install for Steam?
A theater chain had to temporarily close because their projectors didn't work with the DRM and decryption needed to screen the digital movies, but it looks like a fix was applied pretty quickly and the outage was temporary. Even so, it seems like there's a lot of paranoia involved even in getting movies to theaters. And, as usual, it's probably the DRM at fault for the problem.
Finding ways of using decommissioned wind turbine blades to create functional spaces or as feed for makig other materials. Because having a good recycling program for things made of fiberglass is a good thing.
The flourishing of repair cafes, where people can bring their broken items and with the assistance of volunteers, bring them back into working order. Which would be a great thing to have as a partnership with a Tool Library, or other spaces that are interested in keeping things going and repairing them rather than having them end up in the waste, or having a beloved family artifact be unable to go on to the next generation.
Tracking the ways in which things that were advantages in earlier times to fight older pathogens and things trying to jump from animal to human now produce situations like autoimmune disorders, and trying to find a balance between allowing the immune system to do its job while preventing it from attacking its own.
The methods by which humans poisoned themselves are numerous and many, and arsenic was a popular one in many a product, until it was finally outlawed from all the things, including the wallpaper.
Last for tonight, a map of the Indigenous Nations of North America, approximately the 16th century CE, and where possible, the name of the nation in the language of its residents.
(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.)
The "Golden Rod" illustration used for C-3PO that made the robot look he'd been designed by a species with a baculum. And pair that with an oral history of a Folgers holiday ad where the shipping goggles suggested a brother and sister were going to engage in incest even if no such thing were ever intended.
Queer ships were very popular on AO3 during 2023, which should be no surprise to anyone who knows that AO3 is very much a place where the queer ships go (FFN, I think, is where many of the het ships go?) The BBC got 144 complaints and 7.6 million viewers for an episode of Doctor Who that has an openly trans character, and both the Beeb and the showrunner said "tough shit" as their response to the complaints.
The Texas Library Association invited Dr. Chuck Tingle, World's Greatest Author and Two-Time Hugo Award Finalist, to one of their conferences, and then disinvited Dr. Tingle, supposedly because the part where Chuck Tingle wears a mask in the form of a pink bag was potentially disturbing to others and Chuck wasn't taking off the bag. It's unlikely this is the real reason, since the people who are going to the panel hopefully know Dr. Tingle, or if they don't, they probably have dealt with stranger people in their libraries. Having been caught doing something really not good, the Texas Library Association non-apologized for the issue and invited Dr. Tingle to speak at a different event than the original one. Appropriately, Dr. Tingle turned them down, because the Texas Library Association had already demonstrated they weren't safe to be around. Or, possibly, that they coudn't or didn't want to stand up to the bigots in their organization or the Texas legislature that had demanded the removal of Dr. Tingle from the program. We love Chuck, we love his message of love being real, and we like the Tinglers, too, so good for Chuck to have told the people who weren't going to treat him well that he isn't interested in coming to their event.
A review of a book about someone who opened their marraige that finds what is on the page to be more a product of the social and economic class of the writer, rather than being much about the practice of polyamory, which, fair, it's a lot easier to conduct multiple relationships when you all have the means to do so. But it also suggests that rather than being something about recognizing the potential for people to get their needs and wants met by multiple people, it's much more about potentially staving off the divorce, which can be expensive, sometimes prohibitively so, for people who married.
And, of course, some of the things that come with time, and possibly having gone through with either opening the relationship or getting the divorce is older women deciding they're more interested in exploring their own fantasy lives, rather than having had their sexuality dictated to them by men who were uninterested in learning what worked for the women they were married to (or promised to).
An Alaska Airlines-operated Boeing 737 Max plane suffered an exit plug blowout, necessitating an emergency landing of the plane and an immediate grounding of the entire fleet of those planes. The sought-after door plug has been found and is being analyzed, while inspections of other 737 Max planes have found loose bolts and other hardware issues. The good news is that the emergency happened while the passengers and flight crew were still seated and buckled in, so while some technology and other items were lost out the hole, no passenger or crew lives were lost. The bad news is that the emergency happened in the first place, and that we are seeing signs that other planes could have had the same issues. I doubt, somehow, that the Federal Aviation Administration will be in any way pleased with these revelations.
The logo of Transport for London was nearly a rabbit, and would have been a much different familiar design for all of us. An investigation into the reason why a particular footbridge exists in Minneapolis, which does have a satisfactory result, as well as a small lesson that involving the experts early on in the search is sometimes the fastest way to get to a result. But what gets found out along the way is also pretty cool. (And some of the pictures required FAA approval to get.)
The city of Seattle, acting under the cover of darkness to ensure they would not be stymied or interrupted on their latest attempt, destroyed a community garden in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, started as part of the Movement for Black Lives protests in 2020. The City said they offered assistance to relocate the garden, which is not in dispute, but the city had made their decision about whether such a thing should be allowed to continue in the location it had been started in, and tied it into the idea that such a green space was a regular place for the unhoused and the drug-using community to visit, therefore it had to go. Even if the city will still help build another garden, their interest in shutting this one down seems to have been related to a lot of things they're less interested in helping with or that would move toward helping the problems they want to curtail, without having to destroy a community garden in the process.
The Republican Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly threatened the University of Wisconsin regents to withhold funding already appropriated to them if they didn't also get rid of many positions intended to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and starve the DEI programs of funding. The Regents knuckled under to the threat, and in doing so, got their money. Remember, friends don't let friends elect Republicans. And then do their best to get districts that can't do anything but elect Republicans redrawn to be fair. (Having signaled they can be bullied, I'm sure we'll find the Regents being told they have to do even more cutting away of any programs intended to help the campus be something more than white men if they want next year's funding.)
How Papua New Guinea was able to retain archives pertaining to it during colonial periods, rather than having their records spirited away as happened to many other colonial territories before they achieved full self-governance as independent countries.
The story of a play written and performed in the backyard of a woman, intended to bring shame upon her neighbor for an allegation that was not proven out in the courts.
The Feline Grimace Scale, a method for determining the likely amount of pain or discomfort a cat is in by examining their facial expression and head line compared to the rest of the body. Given that cats are not very vocal about their pain, and are also the kinds of entities that tend to hide when they are in pain or suffering until it has become too much for them to hide, being able to read a cat's facial expression might be useful toward knowing when it is time for pain relief for kitty.
Don't pet the fluffy cows, a message from the U.S. National Park Service, a paper about the behavior of wild animals turning running wheels, even without any reward to do so, women naturalists and their illustrations of moths and plants, which sometimes meant raising the insects so they could be painted, as well as raising children and managing households as well, and a research project conducted by a Year 3 student, with LEGO visualizations and a conclusion about what kind of person an Australian magpie is most likely to swoop upon that went intensely viral and produced a data set that with a likely 1 percent margin of error and a professional scientist combing the results to see what else might be gathered from it.
The consequences of infection from SARS-CoV-2 are the kind of thing where other infectious agents might have greater success. In the same way that HIV makes it possible for other infectious agents to have greater success against a body infected with it. Not getting it is still the best option, but making sure that you get it the least is the other better option.
In technology, the training data sets scraped from the Internet for image generators contain(ed) actual images of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), with LAION-5B, the targeted set, having potentially more than three thousand such images in its data set. That'll tell you something about how the scrapers were indiscriminate and that the humans supposedly overseeing the data set creation did not do it. And this is only the child sexual abuse material - it doesn't count any adult images that are there, or revenge porn, or illegally-obtained nudes, or anything else in the data set that probably shouldn't be there or whose presence would indicate security breaches or other such acts.
3500 persons were arrested and about $300 million USD seized in an operation designed to combat cybercrime. While several of the persons arrested were in connection with more "traditional" cybercrime like ransomware or trying to use generated materials and/or voice cloning as a way to attack their targets, several of the persons were arrested for schemes involving cryptocurrency startups where the entire operation was fly-by-night and folded up with the creators taking the investor cash once the levels of investment reached sufficient heights to make the operation profitable. Unregulated spaces will do that to you, and that it's dressed up in a lot of technobabble makes it harder for a layperson to spot the scam.
Microsoft admits their Copilot AI is doomed and will go the way of the dustbin by requiring OEM PC manufacturers running Windows 11 to include a dedicated key to launch it. If it were something that were useful and widespread in adoption, they wouldn't need to mandate a key dedicated to its use, but instead enjoy having a good product that people choose to use. So, yet another reason to delay upgrading to Windows 11 until it's forced upon me in the next year. Maybe by that point, Proton and Linux gaming will have gotten good enough that I won't have to maintain a Windows install for Steam?
A theater chain had to temporarily close because their projectors didn't work with the DRM and decryption needed to screen the digital movies, but it looks like a fix was applied pretty quickly and the outage was temporary. Even so, it seems like there's a lot of paranoia involved even in getting movies to theaters. And, as usual, it's probably the DRM at fault for the problem.
Finding ways of using decommissioned wind turbine blades to create functional spaces or as feed for makig other materials. Because having a good recycling program for things made of fiberglass is a good thing.
The flourishing of repair cafes, where people can bring their broken items and with the assistance of volunteers, bring them back into working order. Which would be a great thing to have as a partnership with a Tool Library, or other spaces that are interested in keeping things going and repairing them rather than having them end up in the waste, or having a beloved family artifact be unable to go on to the next generation.
Tracking the ways in which things that were advantages in earlier times to fight older pathogens and things trying to jump from animal to human now produce situations like autoimmune disorders, and trying to find a balance between allowing the immune system to do its job while preventing it from attacking its own.
The methods by which humans poisoned themselves are numerous and many, and arsenic was a popular one in many a product, until it was finally outlawed from all the things, including the wallpaper.
Last for tonight, a map of the Indigenous Nations of North America, approximately the 16th century CE, and where possible, the name of the nation in the language of its residents.
(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: 2024-01-18 12:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-18 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-18 01:49 pm (UTC)It's fair to say FAA isn't happy, as they're raised the possibility of taking away Boeing's ability to QA/QC check its own work. This isn't the first problem like this Boeing had on 737 Max in 2023, it's not even the second, I'd have to check whether it's not even the third. Airlines were already busy checking for loose bolts in the rudder assemblies, and there was a big problem earlier in the year with missing shims* in the aft pressure bulkheads. And all this is of course on top of the problems with 737 MAX controls that saw two aircraft lost with everyone aboard killed in 2018/19 and saw all 737 Max's grounded between March 2019 and the end of 2020 (and longer in places like China).
It's potentially not initially a Boeing problem as Spirit Aerosystems** build the fuselages for them in Wichita, Kansas and then ships them to Boeing in Seattle, but Spirit should have caught the problem, and then so should Boeing when checking the fuselage on delivery. It probably comes down to Spirit laying-off (why can't we just call it sacking?) thousands of their experienced staff during the grounding and then Covid and then finding they'd gone out and got new jobs when they tried to rehire them, so there's been a massive drop in experience levels on the production lines, and apparently in the safety culture at both firms.
Boeing were slightly lucky in this as it's a failure that clearly doesn't affect all Max 9s, only those which don't use all the doors - above 179 passengers you need an extra pair of doors and an extra flight attendant to meet cabin evacuation rules, below it, you can do without them and permanently blank off the holes for the doors to cut costs. Configuring Max 9s for less than 179 passengers is almost exclusively an American thing, so this only affected a handful of Max 9s outside of the US. (But if they find bolts missing elsewhere...).
Boeing are bringing in a retired Navy Admiral to review their QA/QC processes, increasing their numbers of QC engineers, and asking airlines if they can add extra QC engineers of their own - they do acceptance checks before they accept an aircraft from Boeing - Ryanair have said they're doubling the number.
One big risk for Boeing is the Max _7_, a shorter version of the Max, and the Max _10_, a longer version, are currently going through the certification process, and FAA are being a lot less trusting of Boeing since finding out they were deliberately misled during the original Max certification over the MCAS system that then caused the two crashes. No 737 entirely meets current certification standards, they rely on the fact the 737 was originally certified under the rules in place in 1967 and certain things that don't meet 2020s certification rules are 'grandfathered in', and even where current rules are in place Boeing is relying on some exemptions (literally 'we'll get this fixed by 2026'). If FAA suddenly insist on full compliance with current rules, Boeing are in big trouble.
It probably is fair to say FAA supervision of manufacturers is looser than other people's. I've worked on two aircraft during certification; on the Eurofighter Typhoon I regularly had auditors from the national military airworthiness authorities of UK/Germany/Italy/Spain leaning over my shoulder and saying 'show me your evidence that this has been done'. I did exactly the same job on the Boeing 777, I've never even met anyone from FAA, let alone had them demand evidence.
* With a structure as big as a 737 fuselage there's some minor variation in size due to the tolerances on every part adding up, so any gaps between the fuselage cylinder and the bulkhead - which closes it off at the back, are filled with varying thickness flat pieces of metal - aka 'shims'. And Spirit were delivering fuselages with missing or incorrect shims, and getting in to fix that after all the cabin innards were in place was apparently a bit of a bugger. Of course Boeing, and Spirit, should have spotted this before putting all the cabin innards in place in the first place.
** Spirit was originally a Boeing division, but was hived off to some venture capitalists in 2005.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-18 06:17 pm (UTC)It would be nice for a wholesale review and a demand to get everything up to current standards, though.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-18 11:20 pm (UTC)Also of why letting small-government idealogues gut your regulatory bodies of their enforcement capability is also inevitably a bad thing.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-19 01:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-19 02:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-18 03:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-18 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-18 09:55 pm (UTC)Very much so. I try to maintain faith in humanity, but when twits do shit like this, you just throw your hands up and shout WHY?!
no subject
Date: 2024-01-18 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-18 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-18 04:45 pm (UTC)I really enjoyed the article with samples of Merian's botanical and insect illlustrations. What a great deal of work she put in to make those so immediately comprehensible.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-18 06:12 pm (UTC)There's a lot of skill and drawing that goes into those illustrations to make them anatomically useful. I can imagine easily why such books were never profitable. They must have been expensive to print with all the necessary details.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-19 12:27 am (UTC)One of our usual party games was to plot, costume, and rehearse a semi-improv play while the adults were partying, and then just before departure time we'd perform it. (Romantic Roosters was only one of them, but a lot of the characters and plot elements were Ripped From The
HeadlinesHenhouse!)no subject
Date: 2024-01-19 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-19 12:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-19 01:55 am (UTC)