Items for December 2022

I am not a supplier

Tags: programming, ethics

Pelé, Brazil’s mighty king of ‘beautiful game,’ has died

Tags: vintage, sports

Forced participation in religious activities to be classified as child abuse in Japan

Tags: japan, youth, religion, law

The dance of the naked emperors

About scientific article publishing and peer review in the internet era.

Tags: internet, science, publishing, ethics

La dure réalité de la « scalabilitée »

French language post about what it really takes to run a Mastodon instance and scale it as more people gather.

Tags: fandom, social media, computers

A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate

Make Sunsets is already attempting to earn revenue for geoengineering, a move likely to provoke widespread criticism.

Tags: climate, tech, ethics

Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

I bet you're wondering how we got here...

Tags: internet, business, ethics

Unearthing a Long Ignored African Writing System, One Researcher Finds African History, by Africans

BU anthropologist Fallou Ngom discovered Ajami, a modified Arabic script, in a box of his late father’s old papers

Tags: africa, language, history

Moving Fast and Breaking Things

Tags: business, ethics

Elon's stale playbook

At Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk was a jerk with a grand vision. At Twitter, he's just a jerk.

Tags: business, ethics

Elon Musk's team is seeking new investors for Twitter

Tags: social media, finance

Texas attorney general’s office sought state data on transgender Texans

The behind-the-scenes effort by Ken Paxton’s office to obtain data on how many Texans had changed their gender on their licenses came as he and other Republican leaders in the state have been publicly marshaling resources against transgender Texans.

Tags: america, gender, law

The rise and fall of peer review

Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing

Tags: science, publishing

Trooper, trucker, sailor, fishwife: What we swear like when we swear like a something

Tags: cool, language

'The Color Of Dreams': Museum Releases Photos Of A Vanished World

Stunning color images recently made available in high resolution by a French museum capture much of the world as it was transformed by technology and geopolitics 100 years ago.

Tags: cool, vintage, media

Your Annual Reminder to Stop Harmonizing the Nativity

Tags: religion, books, antiquity

A Case Study on Raspberry Pi’s Incident on the Fediverse

Tags: social media, business, culture

It’s Hard to Get a Driver’s License in Holland — And That’s One Reason Dutch Roads Are So Safe

Tags: cars, law

Credit cards as a legacy system

Tags: finance, tech

Multi-Use Public Spaces and Urban Design: Copenhagen and Social Integration

Tags: europe, cities