Items for November 2021

Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It)

There's just one problem with all those excuses: movies aren't real. That's kind of the whole point, the reason why we go in the first place. And as a director, you don't just make stuff for yourself, but for the audience too. Snotty brats.

Tags: movies, tech

Botswana Court of Appeals Upholds Decriminalization of Same-Sex Relations

Tags: africa, sexuality, law

The Internet is Held Together With Spit & Baling Wire

Tags: internet, security

The Magician and the Suffragette: The Strange History of Sawing a Woman in Half

Tags: gender, politics, culture, history

The Eternals – Marvel consulted me to help superheroes chit chat in Babylonian

Tags: movies, language

Ten Million a Year

If the pandemic so terrified us that billions of us retreated into panicked cocoons for months, what can explain or justify our blindness and indifference towards the ten million lives ended each year by the repeated inhalation of smog?

Like I said many times before: We chose to be terrified by the pandemic. It was a choice.

Tags: environment, pandemic, health

Five Centuries of Jerusalem Soup

Tags: islam, food, history

UN Human Rights Committee Criticizes Germany’s NetzDG for Letting Social Media Platforms Police Online Speech

Then again, this is Germany we're talking about. You know, where anyone who publishes one word online has to display their name and address for everyone to see. In other words, to self-doxx. Welcome to European democracy.

Tags: germany, internet, law

‘It was terrifying’: ancient book’s journey from Irish bog to museum treasure

A new book tells the story of the painstaking process to preserve the 1,200-year-old Faddan More Psalter

Tags: books, middle ages, science

Online anonymity: study found ‘stable pseudonyms’ created a more civil environment than real user names

Tags: internet, privacy, science

We Don’t Have the Right: A Decolonized Approach to Innovation

Tags: tech, politics

The UN responded to Elon Musk's challenge to prove how his wealth could tackle world hunger by revealing a $6.6 billion plan

Tags: food, economics

70 years since LEO, the ‘world’s first business computer’.

Tags: cool, vintage, computers

COP/out

Tags: climate, politics

Europe must ban Bitcoin mining to hit the 1.5C Paris climate goal, say Swedish regulators

Tags: climate, tech

A Forgotten Humanist Photographer of Paris

Tags: france, vintage, photos

Archaeologists Revealed Massive Intricate Mosaic Floor Made from 5 Million Pieces of Stone in the Hisham Palace in Jericho

Tags: art, middle ages, photos

Come to think of it, microformats are invisible metadata (exactly what they claim not to be), and putting them inline only makes them harder to extract, not to mention a mess.

Tags: internet, updates

Debate over daylight saving time drags on in Europe

Tags: europe, science, politics

This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later.

Tags: america, history

There Have to Be More Sides Than This

Balance doesn't exist in a lopsided world

Tags: media, politics

The Scientists Are Terrified

A survey of the world’s top climate researchers shows a stark finding: Most expect catastrophic levels of heating and damage soon—very soon.

Tags: climate, science