Category Archives: Links

href weekly | April 28 – May 4 2024

Bits

But the most common errors that make are the ones we don’t notice, because they’re perfectly camouflaged as the truth. https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

She stares back at the viewer, one eyebrow slightly raised. https://thewalrus.ca/me-my-selfies-and-i/

Sound & Music

You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die -that’s a lie!

Humor

No one has ever gotten pregnant while listening to the music of Rush. Clinical studies show that when combined with watching a male sexual partner play air bass along to the extended solo in “Freewill,” the contraceptive efficacy of Rush approaches 100 percent. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-faq-about-your-new-birth-control-the-music-of-rush

Politics & Economics

In 1945 and 1946, immediately following the end of World War II, Encyclopedia Britannica’s films division produced two educational short films, one on democracy and one on despotism, exploring how societies and nations rank on the spectrum from democracy to despotism by measuring the degree to which power is concentrated and respect for individuals restricted. More than half a century later, these analyses remain a compelling metric of social harmony and discord, in an era when we’re still struggling to understand the psychology of riots in a global political climate where the tension between despotism and democracy is in sharper focus than ever. https://archive.org/details/youtube-sP-c4ST_PVQ

href weekly | April 21 – April 27 2024

Bits

An education in public interest technology that cuts across established fields like law, sociology, journalism, public policy and more allows students to better understand the challenges technology can either worsen or address — providing young people with pathways to pursue careers in technology for purpose across many established fields. https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/challenging-inequality/technology-and-society/public-interest-technology-and-its-origins/strategy/

.. if we want a true we must be prepared to fight for it. Hope is not enough. https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/

If you really want put them in a password manager you control. But don’t use a platform controlled passkey store, and be very careful with security keys. https://fy.blackhats.net.au/blog/2024-04-26-passkeys-a-shattered-dream/

Music & Sound

research on the depletion of coral reefs due to Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease and the impact of Harmful Algae Blooms on coastal economies was converted and performed as a piece of music by the university’s Symphonic Band & Wind Ensemble https://www.stpetersburg.usf.edu/news/2024/music-data-crescendo-concert.aspx

Hold the Line is a piece of sound art generated by data from Canada’s 2023 wildfire season. Every single fire that was reported by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fires Centre between 1 April and 30 November is represented by a click sound, with each real-world day playing out over 2.5 seconds of sound. A bass note drops at the start of each new day. https://www.loudnumbers.net/hold-the-line

Politics & Economics

Over 87 percent of farm capital in Canada is land and buildings, and many farmers don’t own anything—they rent. https://thewalrus.ca/inside-farmings-tech-boom/

a small team of researchers analyzed how local economies have responded to the last 40 years of warming and projected those effects forward to 2050. They find that we’re already committed to warming that will see the growth of the global economy undercut by 20 percent. That places the cost of even a limited period of at roughly six times the estimated price of putting the world on a path to limit the warming to 2° C https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07219-0

is notorious for nurturing oligopolistic tendencies—there are several variations of the joke that the country is three companies in a trench coat. https://thewalrus.ca/loblaw-has-become-an-everything-company/